Train to Redundant Station 

Pace and creativity don’t gel, no matter how much you try to maintain your creative streak in the midst of the storms of life. Yeah, they could be perfect storms like the poets have. Mostly however, you’d end up with imperfect ones that require a lot of running around and anxiety and hope and confusion, and all of this makes hammering out anything beyond the immediate confines of your job, impossible.

The last few months have been a case study of such chaos. Things have taken too many turns, and all at the same time. But this post won’t discuss that, for such chaos deserves its own mantle. This post will discuss what it feels like to reach a station you desperately wanted to reach, after every train you wanted to catch from there, you’ve already boarded along the way. So when you alight from the final train and reach Redundant station, how do you feel ?

You’d probably feel you’ve wasted a lot of money, and would waste more getting a train back to where you actually need to be. Would you feel anything else ? Yes, if the scenario were a metaphor. Thankfully, it is.

You see, stations in life, in all their hierarchical and transportational glory, are defined by the system in which you live. One such system is called capitalism. If you’re not a diehard communist, nor a recluse, chances are that some of your most desired stations in life are shaped by what you understand of capitalism. For me, it has been an ability to add capital to the world economic system and draw from it, thus turning the “wheel” ever on and on. After all, what is capital but the condensed fruit of labour combined with existing capital ?

Now contributing to the capitalist system is something that is necessary, for without it you cannot draw your basic sustenance from the system. This is something I realised during my content writing days, when each page I wrote contributed a certain amount of money to my client’s pocket via Adwords or similar platforms. Or through commissions on websites like Seeking Alpha. Or through promotion of their own products and services. But never mind. The point is that contribution is something fundamental, as fundamental as drawing your wage from the system.

But capitalism would never survive if all we did was simply produce as much as would help us survive. That would be primitive socialism, not capitalism. Capitalism implies that man would follow his natural instinct to accumulate more and more, and in doing so, would create capital that could not immediately be given out as wages. This would stack up as savings, as rent to land and capital goods and as payments to organisation. What would be done with all this ? It would be invested, of course. Invested so more money could be made, increasing wages, yes, but most vitally creating opportunities for more capital to be made. The goal of the system becomes not sustenance, but profit and capital accumulation to not only keep the wheel turning, but ever widening.

Now if you look at investment, you will see that from the perspective of the investor, it is a risk of giving out something balanced with the hope that great returns would come of it. From the perspective of the recipient, it is a loan that contains an expression of faith in the person or firm’s ability to repay that confidence and capital through dividends. Looked at from the perspective of loans, are dividend payments that different from payment of interest on an actual loan ?

At one time, I’d hoped for such investment. No share-selling dividend-paying investments would I get. Instead, I would get the ability to turn short term loans into liquid credit with which I could buy services I needed to keep the content writing afloat and also expand it. Again, this could expand into the realm of frivolous spending, but then we all have our vices. What I wanted was for the capitalist system to repose enough faith in me so as to provide me with an investment or loan. One that I could use to create more capital, and thus become an integral part of the capitalist system.

In practical form, this meant getting a credit card. Credit cards provide you with a virtual purse every month, from which you can draw as much or as little as you like, provided you pay it all back at the end of the month. If you don’t, they begin charging interest. I could have paid it all back, I could have risked paying interest. I would not have defaulted. But would they trust me with the money entrusted to them ? Nope, they wouldn’t.

You see, there are some conditions of credit-worthiness. One was the per annum income. Usually, this has to exceed Rs. 2.5 lacs for consideration. Mine was close, and may even have exceeded the amount by a certain percentage during the heydays of my content writing. But then you need to prove it through tax returns. I had not filed my taxes at the time, so no go.

When I got a regular job, it turned out that my earnings from my regular job were actually lower than my content writing earnings. So while theoretically I could show salary slips instead of tax returns, the amounts per month would simply not qualify for a credit card. Again, no go.

Things changed only when I no longer needed credit to expand my content writing career. When I got a substantial post, I had to give up my “side-job” (because middle class Bengalis would prefer to theoretically respect poor and underpaid contractual lecturers than well-earning freelancers) due to the rules of the service. Yet the yearning remained. If I could not get a credit card as investment, I could use it to build a credit score and get loans with greater ease. I could get costly stuff on EMIs. Last but not least, I could purchase goods from any store in the world, and thus be a true part of the global capitalist system.

I began applying for credit cards using my now buffed up salary slips. Trouble was, even this wasn’t the last condition involved. As it turned out, companies giving out purses filled with others’ money for you to spend need to know not just what you earn, but also where and how you earn it. And they need to verify this from the point of residence and the point of work. This meant, in practical terms, home and office verification. Trouble was, my home was very much in a city but my office space was in “remote” Tehatta. To be fair, there is nothing particularly remote about the place, given that it is a sub-divisional headquarter and is well-connected to all major cities nearby (even Kolkata, if you manage to catch a certain state bus!) How do you explain this to the companies ? You can’t, and matters weren’t helped by the fact that my DDO gave out salary slips at three month intervals.

Hence, two applications to SBI, one to Kotak Mahindra, two to ICICI and one to Citibank failed. Once it was the location, then the salary slips, then both location and salary slips. I lost count of the number of times I had to go through the whole process of application and verification only to find myself in the credit card garbage bin.

Yet this process taught me two things. One was that there was no point giving addresses of “head offices” for govt. depts will simply ignore all credit card inquiries. Secondly, you have to persuade the people at the bank that location and location alone was the reason why you couldn’t get a credit card earlier. And give them some sops with which to get them to work. Because you know, MNCs work for the next big thing. Give them a sniff and they’ll fix whatever you’re currently aiming at. Tell them that this is the last thing you want, and their duties become hard-earned favours.

At one point, I decided that it was no longer worth applying endlessly with insufficient and unverifiable information (from their perspective). So I went in for what was called a secured credit card. Secured credit cards take the risk away from the bank by forcing you to dump a goodly amount of cash in the bank. If you fail to pay up your credit card dues, the company simply skims away the due amount from the deposit you have made. The silver lining is that the deposit is a fixed deposit, and earns interest at the normal FD rate. The ugly underbelly is that because the card is given out on lien against the FD, you can’t do anything with the FD itself. You get the card, but only if the money deposited is securely out of your reach.

I went in for this option and dumped the required amount in a private bank. Once given, they informed me that the credit card would take about two weeks to materialise. Two weeks later I was told that the amount was insufficient. They would have to open another FD with an additional amount. After this, nothing more was heard of the credit card plan.

The silver lining ? The bank offered something called the Platinum chip debit card. This apparently allowed for international transactions. So while I wasn’t able to borrow money, I could still transact on every website or terminal in the world. Even as my money gathered dust in the FDs (the debit card was against a savings account), I realised that another major component of the credit card world had fallen into my lap.

By this time, my first year of substantial service was nearing its end. Courtesy some helpful colleagues, I finally managed to get hold of three months’ salary slips. Armed with this and a mouthful of complaints about how people with out of the city workplaces were being discriminated against, I turned up at yet another private bank. The lessons I’d learned earlier did wonders. Explaining that I wouldn’t be able to invest in their this-or-that scheme until I got my credit card, I managed to link my credit card needs with their investment policy sales. They assured me that the workplace verification did have a workaround.

And it did. After two phone verification calls and one home verification, my application was approved and my credit card dispatched. After some unnecessary courier trouble (during which I managed to actually howl at a certain recalcitrant executive), I received the credit card.

Even as I decided that it would be the perfect replacement for my existing international debit card, however, it was revealed that major marketplaces had acclimatised themselves to the Indian payment system and were accepting all debit cards, net banking and in some cases, even cash on delivery! Not only was my credit card rendered redundant, even my international debit card was of little more use than the normal debit cards I had.

So when I did reach the station, what did I get ? The promise of a CIBIL score, for getting easier loans. The promise of EMIs, so I could get costly stuff with ease. But below all that, defying logic, was a sense of fulfilment at having finally become worthy of being entrusted with money belonging to someone else. I could finally get my own purse and spend it, thus drawing from the capitalist system in the second and most vital of ways. Long after the raison d’etat of having a credit card had been lost, I finally had a credit card to call my own.

Bemused and satisfied, I debarked at redundant station.

The Importance of Experiences

The city of joy loves controversies, and it does so more than ever when the issue revolves around elitism and the target is easily accessible but a bit hard to access using the average Bengali’s finances. Even better if it allows them to justify their own yearnings for being a class apart from the rest. None too surprisingly then, they pounced on a simple incident involving a restaurant’s refusal to serve a driver. As if they would take their drivers to dine with them any day. As if they would be able to afford drivers in the first place. As if….the point of this post is not to rant about the contradictions of the Bengali mind. Enough has been said about it,  and more will be said in coffee parlours and over hilsa fish. Let’s leave that for now.

 

The point that I wish to focus upon is the rationale behind the restaurant – Mocambo’s  – action  and what my reaction to it speaks about me. Alright,  first the event. Apparently,  some woman who had not spent much  time in Kolkata before was here for a week, and being the quintessential elitist that such people generally are (I’m generalizing here, and happily doing so), she decided to head to Mocambo. What separated her from the rest was that somewhere inside she had a sense of guilt regarding her behaviour with her driver. To ensure that she gets her rightful place in heaven (or wherever she intends to go when she’s done with Tata Motors and this life), she decided to treat her driver to Mocambo. Said driver probably wasn’t informed beforehand, since everyone knows that going to Mocambo involves  some amount of dressing up. The result was that said driver and said guilty city-hopper were politely given the boot.

 

But why ? According to the aggreived party, the reason  was that the driver was not dressed properly and spoke in “Indian” languages. That’s apparently the reason that Mocambo gave. If indeed they said what they said, you could bet that the management and staff of the restaurant would make very very poor politicians. Not only did they say the obvious in the face of an angry patron, they phrased it in very poor language. I mean, couldn’t you just say that you have a dress code of sorts ? An informal one that the driver was not following. And couldn’t you simply omit the part about Indian langugaes ? This is the sort of stuff angry and time-wasting litigation is made of, and if the Bengalis had the guts they would already be quequeing up outside courts instead of writing sad statii and sendingg letters to the PM and who-not that will probably never be read (if you receive the same email 100,000 times, chances are your spam filter will kick in). But even then, the ratingg of Mocambo on Zomato has fallen overnight to 1 out of 5, courtesy of a lot of people who vented their anger in extremely despicable language. Indeed, if this is the language that anyone in Mocambo or any other restaurant (or dhaba, or joint, or whatever) used, I’d personally request that person to be thrown out.

 

But that still doesn’t tell us why Mocambo threw them out. I mean, they could simply have allowed an exception and tried to get rid of the unwelcome company as soon as possible. Perhaps the answer lies in a reply that a certain Sabina Yasmin received when messaging Mocambo. The restaurant used the term “fine dining” and argued that allowingg people of the driver’s ilk inside would ruin the experience of the other patrons. This all may seem elitist, and classist, and “racist” (really ?) but consider for a moment why people go to Mocambo. Is it for the fine food ? Some indeed do. Is it for the fact that it is located in the heart of Kolkata and is quite close to the business districts ? For that matter, Flury’s and Trinca’s and a good number of other restaurants are too. In fact, they are all crammed into one stretch of road that otherwise has nothing remarkable.

 

No. Most people go to Mocambo for the experience. They want to feel that they are back in the old Calcutta of the sahibs and the memsahibs. They want to feel as if they are entering a place that is reminiscent of the old Uttam Kumar flicks and stories they have read. And unwittingly, they want an experience that probably would have been denied to their forefathers. In other words, they want an experience outside their class, or, in their eyes,  confirming their class when a good many other things, from having to clean their own houses to bickering with “chhoto lok” neighbours, seems to suggest a certain fall from grace. In still other words, they become classist or wish to express their classism when they go to Mocambo.

 

Now if this is true, why in the name of the Good Queen Victoria would the restaurant want to break away from it ? Neither the management nor the staff nor anything but the apperance of the place has continued from the days of the British. So if the restaurant was to give up its aura of elitism, what would it have left ? Why would people shell out beaucoup bucks to eat what is offered (to some extent) by a much cheaper Oly Pub ? It is this experience of dining where the whites supposedly dined, eating what they supposedly ate and feeling oneself in their supposed imagined hypothetical company, that adds a premium to the food of Mocambo. Ample proof of this is to be found when you find Bengalis (and that obnoxious category called Bongs) referring to Mocambo in particular and Park Street (where it is located) in general as representing the old Calcutta, the polar opposite of the rajbaris (palatial houses) of the zamindars.  It is quintessential British Calcutta as imagined by the Bengalis, and Mocambo caters to this imagination.

 

Now imagine if you’d gone there to realise this imaginary world (and fill your stomach while emptying your wallet), and you found that a person in slippers and an untucked shirt was dining. No matter whose company he had. No matter what the year was, or what the Constitution said. Your experience would still be ruined. You may  well feel that the dirty slippers of your humdrum existence had suddenly appeared in a fantasy world that you were living in. You may identify your own neighborhood servant, or dhobi, or someone else, in the man. The familiar would destroy the exotic, and the premium you paid for the experience would sudddenly not seem worth it.

 

Could Mocambo  take the risk ? Probably not.

 

But what does this tell us about ourselves ? I will not generalize here, for I have already generalized way too much and may be accused of indulging in some weird mumbo jumbo such as “essentialism”. But I can talk about myself here. What do experiences mean to me ? Do I crave them, and what do I make of them ? What am I willing to  give in order to enjoy them ?

 

For a very long time, yours truly was convinced that experiences were someting ethereal. What mattered was the hard stuff – how much you had, how much could what you had do, how much did  what you have cost you, etc. It was all about quantity. I could revel in the fact that what my phone could do was equal to what a Samsung phone costing three times mine would. I could bask in the afterglow of having obtained free drinks or cigarettes or even money. I could dance to the tune of any company that was willing to offer free data or calling minutes. I was always ready to take the lowest possible road, and be happy that I could, at the end of the day, say that I had to give up the least to achieve what I did.

 

At other times, I felt I had something to prove. I could prove that I could have a Patiala peg or a flaming peg or some other monstrosity in a certain  way. I could prove that I could have a certain amount of drinks or fags and still be in my senses. I could prove that I had sex at a certain age and with a certain minimum of effort. I could prove all this, and live up to peer pressure and the standards that I sometimes faced, sometimes made up. At the end of the day, I could still say that I truimphed in this test or that test of strength, or capacity or libido. And tha would add to my self-legitimacy.

 

But times change and so does the heart. The friends who wished to impose standards have usually drifted far, or are themselves coping with the realization that they are no longer the hip crowd of the rap videos. The standards I imagined have proved to be hollow, for once I achieved them, i neither got good memories nor anything to show for the trouble. And finally, repeated gadget failures and an endless cycle of technical problems have forced me to reevaluate the meaning of value for money.

 

Yet what stands above all this is the fact that I have come to value experience more than cost or anything else. Experience on my own terms and following my own capacities. Now when I drink, I drink in order to enjoy the taste and get the “feel”, not to prove how much I can drink. I shifted to postpaid two years ago, and haven’t changed my plan for a year and a half. Recently, when I bought the Macbook Air, it was partly because of the desire to experience Apple and partly because I wanted something that would be a true companion and not a cheap knockoff. In all this, I have come to value the experience gleaned.

 

But what does this experience mean ? At one level, this experience makes life easier and better. You find your sweet spot, your comfort zone, and you stay within it. There is no longer the need to constantly move with the crowd to the latest “in” thing. At one time I used to wonder why people still stick to old phones instead of joining the smartphone revolution. Approaching 25, I realize that many things make our life comfortable, and we no longer find any reason to move out of these comfort zones and grapple with new stuff. Perhaps we can’t, because the problems and work that life involves is steadily  rising, and you want as many assured “working” things in life as possible.

 

At another level however, experiences imply memories. At one point in my late teens and early 20s, I used to value the peg or the plan  because of the memories it could produce. Perhaps talking to my girlfriend for hours on end produced memories. Perhaps the experience of falling flat on your face (or back) after a particularly harsh shot of tequila produced memories. But they no longer do.

 

Rather, they no longer excite the mind as they used to. So I’ve begun to seek experiences that would make sense and give life more meaning. I’ve begun to seek experiences that are not necessarily the cheapest, the easiest or the coolest. I’ve begun to seek experiences, and value experiences, that stay in my mind as something worthwhile and something I may want to repeat. Hence, the Antiquity Blue, hence the Macbook Air, hence a good many other things. Hence the drinking with colleagues, hence the dining at good restaurants…..

 

Good restaurants ? Would I include Mocambo ? Probably yes, I would, even after what happened. I won’t set any standards for myself, as an English-speaking Bengali, as a middle-class Bengali, or any other form of human being. No, I would neither set any standards for myself with regard to the behaviour I would limit myself to there, for I know what is civilized and I won’t let them preach. But I would still go. I wouuld still want to know what sort of food they make, and what ambience they have, and what these would be like in the company of my family. Or friends, if I can persuade them to come along. If that made me feel a class apart from the rest of humanity, or made me want to be a White in the age of White supremacy, so be it. Why ? Because these would produce memories, and those are what I seek. And if I like what I find, I may go again, and again, till such time as I don’t seek that experience anymore.

 

After all, a great experience and a refreshing memory are worth more than any faux ideal, any angry hashtag or any amount of hypocritical disdain, because experiencces and memories, my friend, are what make up life.

Transition to MacMania ? 

For the majority of those who purchase anything from Apple, justification isn’t on the horizon. They have their reasons, and for the vast majority of my life, I’ve disagreed with them. Completely and uncompromisingly. They say it’s easy to learn – I’ve shown them ease in Windows and Android. They said it’s portable – I’ve shown them Chromebooks and razor-thin mobiles. They said it is stylish – I’ve shown them my middle finger.

But then I got a MacBook myself. 

A Macbook Air to be exact. A 1.6Ghz Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and HD display to be even more precise. And was forced to ask myself – why did I ? It cost me a goodly 66.5 grand, no financing and no EMI. In other words, it cost me about a month and a half’s salary, or as much as I’d normally save in three months. Everyone from my friends to my parents suddenly thought I’d given into peer pressure and finally wanted something stylish.

They weren’t wrong. Ever since my Asus Eeebook had given up its keyboard to the nether lords, I’d decided that I’d go for the Big Apple, literally. This was buttressed by the fact that ever since I got a substantial job, I’ve been seeing people sporting Apple products without elan. I say without because they don’t show off, but rather use them like trusty workhorses. So there was the obvious question – why not I ?

If this was anyone else, he or she would end this article right here. Utility and dependability are more than enough for a lot of people, and throw in good looks and you have a killer package. But the fact of the matter is that I am who I am. I’ve been one who has been deriding Apple ever since I had the sense to compare one gadget with another. I’ve also been the one who has made “latest and greatest” a motto of his life. So why Apple ?

To begin with, I wanted to break out. I wanted to break out of the HDD and graphics card hothouse that I’d been sitting in ever since my dad bought a Lenovo laptop way back in 2009. Most people understand this to be the definition of a laptop. They whirr and whine into action, become hot, but allow people to work and relax on the fly. But all that enjoyment ends when that hotness translates into sickness, which in turn ends up burning a hole in your pocket.

So I wanted to go in for something that would not burn my balls (argghh literally again!) but would get the job done. So I started looking for laptops that had SSD (solid state drive) storage and lacked the fans and DVD drives. By this time I had a desktop that had all of these, and did all my heavy lifting. So not only could I ditch fans and optical drives, I could also ditch discrete graphics cards (which are crap compared to desktop ones anyway) and also the need to get a really beefy processor.

In other words, I could just get myself a netbook along the lines of my old Asus. The problem was that said Asus had begun its slow decline barely two months into operation. I didn’t want to purchase myself another affordable inconvenience.

The alternative was something called an Ultraportable. These had SSDs and lacked everything I could jettison. Funnily though, I could hardly find a good ultraportable below 55K. And the ones I did find were all from companies I dared not trust anymore aka Lenovo and Asus. HP, for instance, offered its Spectre for a 1L+ price. Dell’s XPS range competed with the higher end Macbooks. Over countless hours of research, the Macbook Air stopped appearing as insanely costly as all the other Apple products.

Next came the question of weight. I didn’t want a behemoth. In a way, this was quite the opposite of what I had in mind when I got my first personal laptop in 2014. That beast adorned my desk, effectively earning for itself the dusty moniker of desktop par excellence. Also, after a few months, the battery life began to go downhill. So this time around, I wanted something that would be light but would have admirable battery life.

Voila, the Macbook Air was up to the mark once again.

My last criterion was, as my motto suggests, something of the present generation. Here I slipped up. I believed that the MMGF2HN/A was the latest, though only a moderate improvement over the older one. I bought the Macbook Air under this impression, and I was wrong. As it turns out, Apple had made another incremental upgrade to the series by doubling the SSD storage. Along with it, it had also increased the price by 20K. Rather, it had kept the prices such that the 2015 model came to 65K and the 2016 one came to 85K. Stupid, but that goes for a lot of the pricing decisions taken in Cupertino.

So in a way I neither had the latest nor the greatest. At the same price point, I could get a core i7 with a less than decent graphics card and equally less than decent battery life. I could also sacrifice some of these, jack up the price somewhat more and end up with an ultrabook. But at the Macbook AIr’s price point-feature set equilibrium, I could only find the Macbook Air.

Just to be sure, I decided to head to the forums where the vital decisions regarding my desktop had been made the year before. I came up with nothing. The die was finally cast.

So now that I have obtained my Macbook Air, what do I think of it ? I could say a lot, but let me wait a couple of days, see how this pretty creature performs. Maybe, once the looks and the swank of the Mac OS becomes stale, I would be able to tell myself that the money I paid was after all worth it.

Stay tuned for a full review!

The Love of Ether

It burns!

It burns every time you login and see that update about a girl being “In A Relationship”. When that girl is the girl you have a crush on, you have followed ardently for three years and have liked virtually every photo you could lay your hands on. When that girl was the girl with whom you’ve imagined a thousand happy outings, a thousand funny conversations, a thousand moments of physical intimacy. When you’ve believed at one point, or more than one point, that you may actually be able to, somehow or the other, be able to express your love for her.

But you’ve never spoken to her.

No, never spoken a single word, for she was never there in your realm, in your mundane world, in your rigmarole existence. No, she was not a figment of your imagination. She was real, is real, will be real till she dies. Dies a very human death, the death of a human being. For she is a human being, far far away. Beyond the limits of human contact, physical or verbal. Beyond the limits of your love, where that love is the love of mutual trust and care, of mutual understanding, of expression. Yes, the love that is expressed between individuals, accepted and fostered, rejected and withered, but never kept within oneself. The love that we celebrate.

No, that is not the love I speak of, not the love I had for her. Was it the quality of love? No, the love was normal, the very human love made up of emotions and hormones. Yet it was a different type, different in that it was not meant to be expressed, although I often came very close to expressing it. Yet I fell back, realizing that to express the love would be to lose it, to transform her into someone I may not relate with at all.

Let me explain.

Back in 2013, when I was heading into the first year of my MA first year exams, I realized that I had a lot of spare time. Making adequate use of such time demanded that I use a special account (the history of which shall be told elsewhere) to find people who I wouldn’t normally  deal with. In other, and more prosaic, words, I sought to add girls from “phoren” countries in the hope that my hormones would be satisfied with some extensive window-shopping. So it happened that I ended up adding a lot of people from a certain district of a certain country by means of Facebook’s helpful comments (that history too can wait).

At some point during my search for females, I added her. She wasn’t one of the initial attractions, for she seemed to be least interested in putting up suggestive poses and clicking beach selfies (ah those beach selfies!) But I did add her, and paid no more mind to it.

Gradually however, she began to have an impact on my hormones. Hormones that weren’t directly related to woman parts, but rather, the heart. Yes, I began to fall in love with her, and not her body or her ability to shake the booty. This was something I had never intended, for the basic premise of staying on and continuing to add people was that I maintain a somewhat shadowy identity. Maintaining one demanded that I limit conversation to a level where I cannot be clearly determined to be anything. Why? Because we Indians have developed such cheesy tastes that any girl thinks twice (and Indian girls think thrice) before adding an unknown Indian guy to her friend list. Yes, we are the proud claimants of the title of the “Most Creepy Men on Earth”. Cheers to us!

Anyhow, I also realized that if I did initiate conversation, it could well turn out that the girl whom I was falling in love with was someone who was fundamentally incompatible. Forget the logistics of loving a girl living in Europe, forget the logic of fearing incompatibility with a person I’ve not even talked with, forget every damn bit of logic ever. I was scared of losing the girl I had in my mind, and also, more pragmatically, access to the pictures that allowed me to conjure up that image. I was scared.

So it happened that even when I stopped adding girls, stopped checking out other girls’ selfies and even stopped bothering about the 100 odd “Friends” I had on the account, I couldn’t forget her. I logged in to check out her selfies, her images, her life. Not a word was understood of the statuses she posted, or the comments she made, or the life she lived. Yet, I was privy to virtually all the conversation and media that she cared to put up on Facebook. I was a deaf man staring at her across the street.

In real life, she’d have reported me to the Reichpolizei. On facebook, she probably appreciated the extra “Like” I provided.

Yet for me she was so much more than an image. She was a living creature, a creature who was lovable, adorable and made for me. Just me. She had virtually all the qualities I sought in a girl, and on top, she was beautiful. She was as beautiful as the models on Flipkart or Myntra (which, on second thought, wasn’t exactly off point since a majority of firangi models working for Indian brands come from Eastern Europe). She was caring, compassionate, able to understand my feelings, able to predict what I felt. And oh, I loved her so, cared for her so, attended to her every need.

Yes, we’d meet at the airport someday (I’d pay the airfare somehow), and then I shall bring her home. Then she shall become a part of my life. My real life, my mundane life. She shall become my wife. (Reading it out after typing gives me the distinct feeling of scripting an AIB show).

Anyhow, this one-sided, never-expressed love went on growing till, inevitably she fell in love(I use the word with purpose given that the girls you fall in love with inevitably end up in relationships. This is in no way a comment on the general state or proclivities of womankind). I assume she fell in love and did not manipulate someone for her own needs through the show of love. For how could she, she who was in my heart, be so wicked? So she was in love with someone. Someone Romanian with big muscles and a look that suggested that she was his personal fief. I was heartbroken.

I began hoping that she would have a breakup. And my hopes were finally granted.

One fine day I logged in and her “in a relationship” was not visible. My heart skipped a beat. Hitting “About” on her profile got me the good news. She was indeed Single. Aye, she was there again, for me! My love took off again.

Time flies. It has been two years since the events described above. It would be months between my logins (time enough for any real girlfriend to give up on me) but she would always be there. In orchards, in front of cars, in fields, in classrooms, in parking lots, in snow covered rinks, in various places of the town she calls home. Yet she would always be in my heart, my imagination coming up with endless scenarios and in time, as our love “matured”, positions.

Sometimes I thought I would talk to her as some guy from Europe. Sometimes I thought I’d talk to her from my personal account, as myself. Sometimes I thought I’d obtain her email and mail her my feelings. I felt that if she did respond, I’d at least have a tale to tell my grandchildren. If she did not and blocked me, I’d still go out with guns blazing. Actually, and prudently, I did nothing.

So two years have passed. It had been a while since I had last logged in. Someone, for some evil reason, had posted a picture of Shruti Haasan on my wall. Going against the run of general male behaviour, I promptly logged out and logged into “her” account.

The first picture was of her. It was hazy, clicked probably at night using a selfie camera. Yet it showed those large eyes, that auburn hair, that beautiful smile, those perfect cheeks, those….okay okay I get it, I’m not writing a porn novella here. Anyhow, it almost sent me on an emotional ride again.

I scrolled down, hoping for another image. But my luck had run out. Below was that damned relationship status message, posted just hours after that selfie.

My mind went into overdrive. I remembered how she had broken up the first time. How long had it taken? I tried consoling myself that the same would happen again, probably even faster (damn I’m evil, I’m repugnantly evil). But somewhere inside I knew that this time, I probably wouldn’t be able to hold on, to wait for her.

And so as I grieve for my love and try keyboard torture as emotional therapy, I find myself churning out these creepy lines. Perhaps this is just as well, for a record may well be all that I have left of her once she, or her new boyfriend, decides to prune her friend list of unknown male elements.

But let it be known to those who read my blog that I have loved one that I have never spoken to, never touched, never understood in real life. Let it be known that such love, howsoever creepy, was true. Let it be known that it was celebrated by one when it grew, and grieved for by one when it died. Let it be known that I too, suffered from unrequited love.

But you are not satisfied ? You wish for spicy details, of how I spent summer nights rolling about with pillows on sweaty bedsheets and her image in my mind ? No ? Oh, so you just want her details?

Wait, for I shall raise a toast to her!

I raise this toast to Vasilica, to Suceava, to Romania! I hope you fare well, with whoever you are, in snow and in dust, in Communism and in market economy, in Russian control and in NATO’s arms. I hope someday, Vasi, you find this post. I hope you realize my love, and it freaks you out. I hope it causes you to unfriend me, to block me.

For I have known ethereal love, for I have loved Ether, and if I cannot have you, in Ether shall my love for you, disappear.

Take care, Vasi!

(And so ends the creepiest post that I shall have ever written.)

Assassins’ Creed Syndicate: The Unfinished Review

Seldom do I write a review before finishing the game. Seldom is the wrong word. I NEVER write a review before finishing the game. It’s a travesty, a sin against human nature! But then times are not what they used to be *sad music here* After months of not being able to write a review, it is slowly sinking in that my current predicament translates to a continually mobile lifestyle. Mobile lifestyles don’t agree with desktop computers and so, in defiance of my principles, I must write while I still play. Otherwise, the moment I shut down and begin travelling, the game and the review have left my head for good.

This is especially so when the game’s an AC aka Assassins’ Creed. Being one of the many who have played every single game since the inception of the franchise (except Rogue) and finished all but one of those I’ve played, a review becomes not just a study of the present game, but a long comparison tinged with nostalgia.

Assassins' Creed Syndicate
Assassins’ Creed Syndicate

Before I lose myself, let’s get down to the bare facts. The AC franchise has been accused of meandering for quite sometime now. Some say the last meaningful game was Revelations starring Ezio, while others would claim that Unity brought something back to the franchise. Whatever side you’re on, it’s hard not to argue that the last few years have seen their ups and downs. ACIII was easily one of the worst, while IV redeemed things a little. Rogue was more of a side-story (the first time the franchise went back in time actually) and Liberation HD was more of a PS Vita game. Unity raised a lot of expectations and the devs answered with everything they had. Sadly, that everything proved too much for most computers and coupled with glitches, made finishing the game a Herculean task. Further, it still kept the franchise stuck in the 18th Century, making many wonder whether it’d end before hitting REAL modernity.

Syndicate is a resounding answer to all of this. For one, it takes you into the 19th Century, the age of modernity, the age of man taking civilization to all parts of the world on the back of steam engines, telegraph lines and stage carriages. Again, you have an interesting experiment with two Assassins instead of one. A male and a female assassin not only break the monotony of grim I’ll-destroy-you figures (Connor, Shay, Arno) but also bring in both the caution and the joviality of Ezio. Further, the game is given the difficult task of making combat and travelling simple in an age when swords and horses are no longer to be found. This, as we shall see, the game does with admirable success. Storyline ? Character evolution ? Franchise evolution ?

Hold on, all of that is coming. Where? Look below!

Graphics and Environment

Unity was torn apart by critiques for showing teeth and eyeballs sans skin during the famous Arno-Elise kissing scene (and even later). Rightly so, because Unity took a leap in terms of graphics without preparing adequate safeguards. NPCs were multiplied tenfold (or hundredfold), buildings were suddenly 1:1 compared to real ones and AI was really intelligent all of a sudden. All of this made for great show, but it left way too much space for glitches (not the Helix glitches, real graphics ones) and errors. From bodies sticking out of walls to poor parkour to whatnot, Unity proved to be a comedy of errors. Such a comedy that many, including me, despaired of ever finishing the game on more than one occasion.

Cut to Syndicate and Ubisoft has learnt its lessons. For one, NPCs have been reduced a lot. Streets are near empty, and this makes for both good navigation and easier graphics processing. Secondly, the number of internally navigable buildings has been cut down a lot. Many buildings are navigable only during missions. Thirdly, the intricacies of the buildings, such as the multitude of balconies of the Notre Dame, have been done away with.

All this allows for a beautiful London without the chaos of Paris. Granted that this is meant to be so – London 1868 is the epicentre of imperial power, Paris 1789 is the epicentre of destruction of imperial power. That said, the city IS beautiful. The business-like grandeur of London has been brought out in beautifully recreated offices, warehouses and even living quarters. Roads are wide and spread out in geometric ways, giving much relief from the barricade-ridden labyrinths of Paris. The Thames – or the Silent Highway – has been recreated with every bit of the hustle and bustle you’d expect.

Markets, on the other hand, are few and generally don’t appear within missions. Crowded places are intentionally avoided, giving enough space to run and hunt down targets. Alleyways are not very complex, and generally open onto large promenades. All of this makes for a city that is a pleasure to go around, even when one is not in one of the well-recreated gardens or iconic places.

Now if we were to look closely at graphics, we would notice a slight stagnation. Faces in third-person are woefully lacking in detail. The game has coolly sidestepped the vexatious issue of women’s hair rendition by giving all women short hair, or in Evie’s case, a closely tied style. Not for Ubisoft the careful rendition of Lara Croft’s hair in Tomb Raider (one which changed in texture and movement with change in graphics). NPCs, as mentioned before, are fewer and one feels, lacking in variety too.

Cut-scenes, however, are well-detailed. Facial mapping has allowed expressions to mimic real life. Since the assassin pair provide much needed relief from the intensity of previous characters, a wider range of expressions is visible. Evie, in particular, has a range of smiles and smirks that give more life to her character than any Ezio-era female character would have.

Gameplay

Where Unity truly broke down was in gameplay. I remember vividly a mission in the docks where circumventing a pile of boxes caused me to be detected multiple times. Such problems, and the multiplicity of NPCs and debris everywhere made gameplay a terrible challenge. So terrible that Ubisoft had to release a 14GB patch to fix things. I’d never know if it did fix things because I never got around to downloading the whole patch.

Syndicate provided me just two patches of 2GB and 300MB. From the very start, gaming was simple and error-free. Your character would naturally circumvent boxes, jump over chains, be able to slide under obstacles and in general, do everything Ezio or Kenway could without too much button-mashing.

Button-mashing is a problem though. Pressing three buttons for a leap of faith, or jumping down from buildings, is something that is a bit unnecessary. Matters, however, have been drastically simplified on other fronts. Lockpicking is no longer a mini-game. Instead, you simply hold down “E” like you held down “Shift” in Ezio-era games (or “E” in later ones). Climbing buildings, however, gets the greatest makeover courtesy of the rope dart.

This simple thing allows you to hit R and move from one roof to another (or from ground to roof) using out of the blue ziplines.  Ziplines ? Remember Revelations, remember Ezio being taught to use those to travel quickly and take down guards underneath ? Those ziplines make a reappearance, and with a vengeance. This time though, they are totally under your control. You move where you want, when you want and in fact, how you want. No longer are you stuck at one spot wondering which side to move to to get the next foothold. No longer do you have to be spotted and stoned/shot down to the ground while climbing buildings after doing your stuff. No longer, and please gulp down any water in your mouth NOW, do you have to climb towers to get to sync points. Stand below the tower, hit R and voila! You’re at the sync point. Syncing thus becomes something you can do even while proceeding along another mission.

This has its pros and cons. Pros would include not having to waste time jumping about and being able to disappear from the scene in record time. Cons, as many longtime gamers would feel, would be that the concept of parkour has lost a lot. Buildings were indispensable parts of the parkour mechanic, and without them, you’re left wondering whether you’re not really Lara Croft creating lines to move from one landing to another. One also wonders whether this allowed the creators the freedom to cut down on the detail of the buildings. All looks hale and hearty, but if you’re not going to painstakingly climb the buildings, what is the point of adding detail ? Could this be a step backward in terms of the creative effort put into the game ? If it is, I’d rather see rope darts removed than the buildings progressively turned into Soviet-era blocks (unless the next game IS in Soviet-era conditions).

Coming to combat, we notice a similar easing of the tools. The mechanics of Unity are more or less retained, focused as they are on counters than on actual attacks. However, gone is the era of the sword and the crossbow. Instead, now you fight with kukris (short blades of Indian origin which are there entirely courtesy of Arbaaz Mir’s son), cane-swords and revolvers. Revolvers add the unique novelty of shooting non-stop without reloading. Kukris and cane-swords however, make combat a lot less flashy. Perhaps this is meant to be so, since most of the fights in the game are between street thugs (oh yes, you’re a street thug as well, coming to that!). Yet somewhere the novelty of fighting with a long sword and a short sword is lost. One type of weapon causes slashes, the other thuds. That’s it. Somehow you yearn to return to the age of swords, when hand-to-hand combat really made sense and the protagonists did not ALL belong to the wrong side of the law.

The range of throwables remains fixed. You have the smoke bomb, the hallucinogenic dart (that word!), the revolver, the throwing knife and voila (or Volta), the voltaic bomb. The voltaic bomb is a shocking (yes) bomb that disables targets and can even kill them. Developed by Alexander “Aleck” Graham Bell, this bomb acts as a backup to the smoke bomb. Sadly, things like the cherry bomb are not replaced, and there is practically nothing to send people in a different direction.

Assassination therefore involves walking up to them and stabbing them (Good morning dear Si…..ahhhh), falling on them from above, pulling them from windows or wooden gangways and sneaking on them from behind. You can also attract them and dispose at your convenience. Nothing fresh or interesting here, except that everything works far better than in Unity.

Any discussion on gameplay would of course, require a paragraph on travel. Travelling is important in London. Everyone travels to work, to meet friends, to make business arrangements, to buy groceries and to murder people. You usually go to murder people, and this requires speed. What do you do ? Get a 19th Century taxi – a carriage. Syndicate’s greatest addition is the carriage, which turns London into a 19th Century Watch Dogs’ Chicago or GTAesque Los Angeles. You race carriages, you assassinate drivers, you ride on top, you ride inside, you jump on them from above, you climb on them from the side, and most importantly, you use them to move as you’ve never done before. This isn’t promotional material speaking, it’s really that awesome. With broad streets and a huge city, the rope darts and the carriages allow you to really enjoy your time the way you’d do in any modern day world game. Indeed, this sets the game apart from virtually every other period game!

Characters

Another interesting change is the character lineup. Jacob and Evie represent twins who tend to have very different goals. So different that most of their discussions turn into banter and leg-pulling. So much so that NONE of the missions involve them actually working together (remember I’ve not finished the game yet, so NONE SO FAR would be better).

Jacob is, following Edward, a reckless man who believes he can turn the world on its head. His behaviour is carefree, without concern for the problems it might cause in the long run. This is amply borne out when, after two great missions by Jacob, the next involves Evie mopping up things. Yet Jacob’s cocky charm allows us a person who breaks away from the monotonous intensity of previous characters. Ezio had a certain joviality about him (remember his chat on the ship with Suleiman in Revelations ?) but Connor, Arno and Shay were all impossibly serious. Edward had a certain recklessness, but it seldom came down to banter. Jacob however, combines Edward Kenway and Ezio Auditore effortlessly, allowing us a glimpse of the unreformed, easygoing selves we were introduced to so long back.

Evie, to be honest, is a complete surprise. It is hard to make a girl jovial without going into stereotypes and sexual innuendo. Ubisoft makes no attempt at making her jovial. She’s self-confident and serious. In a way, she is the successor of Arno, without however, the freedom to work with an understanding lover called Elise. Jacob is hardly the understanding, petite, lovely, red-haired, beautiful, (okay okay fine), Elise. She follows her father’s instructions and teaching, causing her to look for what is really important to the Assassins (such as pieces of Eden, which are now referred more as Precursor Artifacts). Jacob ? He is going about liberating London by creating the biggest underworld gang ever! (More on this in the Plot section).

Characters apart from these two are, thankfully, quite interesting. Admittedly Dickens looks like a professor, Darwin a harried professor and Nightingale a tired maidservant (oh you bloody elitist Ari!). Yet they have enough in their expressions and their quixotic preferences to keep the story chugging along. Henry Green is the best of the lot, playing the part of an Assassin who’s good at everything but assassination (“field work” as he calls it). He also has a crush on Evie, and a lot of contacts. Results are that he is generally involved in missions involving her, and which have some amount of background involved.

The rest of the characters can be classed as ordinary folk, and goons. Ordinary folk are just that, people who lived in London. They have their specialities, but are not really admirable. There is also the police, but well, they are the police. Finally, the goons. Jacob runs one gang, the Templars run another. So you fight for territory the same way you’d do in say GTA San Andreas. Goons fight goons and cause destruction. If you were an assassin from the time of Altair or Ezio or even Kenway, you’d be banging your head on the wall.

Plot

Finally, the plot! Plots have typically tended towards becoming vengeance sagas in which you eliminate each person in the Templar’s circle before going for the Templar. Twists to these were provided by Rogue (Shay) and Revelations. However, the remove-the-inner-circle story remained the same. It still does, simply because it allows for a series of assassinations to be carried out.

Put simply, Jacob and Evie are free-spirited assassins who are tired of their part of the creed and set off to take over London. In London, Green mistakes them for people sent by the Order and helps them defeat the Templar Starrick. Here comes the catch. While Evie is working towards finding the pieces of Eden to defeat the Templars, Jacob is thrashing his way across London. He cooks up a gang called the Rooks, captures boroughs from the Blighters (aye, the Templar goons) and thus goes about clearing the streets of London the same way Ezio did against the Borgia. Many of the assassinations serve both purposes – getting Evie closer to the Shroud of Eden and getting Jacob another chunk of London.

The problem however, is that all of this is really not something that the Order orders. Where is the Order ? Relations between the Order and the protagonists of AC games have rarely been friendly. Barring Ezio, all have had trouble, with there being demotion (Altair), quarrels (Connor), cynicism and criticism (Edward), desertion (Shay) and excommunication (Arno). Yet they all involved the Council in some manner. Here, these two go about using their blades without ANY sanction from anyone.

Worse, they aren’t even concerned. This, perhaps, is because both of them got their assassin badges as part of their upbringing. They take it for granted. Thinking about previous protagonists, you notice that none were raised in the Order (Altair excepted perhaps). They came to the Order with specific needs and specific goals. They learned to follow the Creed with specific problems and lessons. Not so with these two – they treat their Assassin IDs as something that simply exists. Worst, Green doesn’t seem to have any idea that they are here without sanction. In the age of the telegraph, the London branch is in the dark about the whereabouts of the Crawley branch and its two assassins who have moved to the London branch. What joy!

Despite such glitches, the plot does manage to keep you somewhat hooked. The intermingling of business and politics is shown clearly, and this detracts from the usual lineup of political actors. Perhaps this is fitting in the age of global capitalism. What is not fitting is the lack of any twists and turns till late in the story. Even then, none of it is of a life-changing nature. Nothing changes the tone of Jacob, which makes for stark  contrast with Ezio. Nothing modifies the objectives at hand, which again makes for stark contrast with some previous titles. Everything is so hunky dory, you wish Ubisoft had hired better writers.

Conclusion

Assassins’ Creed : Syndicate is a game that takes some of the good from Unity, mixes it with some truly ingenious stuff fitting to the 19th Century and then forgets some of the essential stuff. Indeed, what is added with gameplay is taken away a little with graphics and, for those who contemplate, by the story too. The result is that the game is Assassin-grade because you have the blade, not at all  Creed grade and Assassins’ Creed grade because it brings back much of the joy -repackaged and modified of course – of the days of Ezio and Edward.

The Anatomy of the Nation

Polemics are meant to distil ideas yet they seldom manage to do this. Instead, as my recent quabbles regarding a certain JNUSU leader revealed, they tend to obfusicate matters by forcing you to hold on to your stand even while conceding some ground. The two goals are contradictory, causing your own understanding to get thoroughly muddled. Understanding, I say, assuming you’ve done some amount of thinking on the topic.

Yet when the heat of debates die out, the original questions often remain. Perhaps simply because nobody could win the debate, neither you, nor them. Your mind keeps going back, and the ideas become clear again. Funnily, however, the questions seem to change now; the clarity remains.

Take the case of this new KK, one who sings tunes that mesmerize people. If the debate were regarding him alone, it’d have taken two dimensions – one of political power, the other of individual rights. Instead, his defenders and opponents dragged the nation into the whole business. KK became an epitome of the freedom the nation sought, or the abused freedom that destroyed it.

But this is my blog, so let’s keep KK out. Let’s talk of the nation.

Nation, as Benedict Anderson would put it, is an “imagined community” where everyone feels a certain bond even without meeting or knowing anything about the person other than he/she belongs to the same nation. Many who attack KK today would deny the word “imagined”, seeking something more concrete in its stead, conveniently forgetting that it too was constructed. Take Bharat Mata Ki Jai. The concept arose from the conflation of Bharat with the Mother figure during the late 19th and early 20th Century. The classic example is the art of Abanindranath Tagore, stylizing Bharat Mata in the image of his departed daughter in one stead, and as a tigress (stripes and all) in another.

But Bharat Mata does not exist in reality, never did. The image is every bit as real as the images of deities. They are real because we believe they are so. This believing is a choice which is supposed to be conscious yet which a good many forces – religious and nationalistic – would have us believe is automatic. We are supposed to be automatons in the service of a nation we must never question.

But say we rediscover our choice. One fine day, liberated by our knowledge, we realize that we can, after all, not pay homage to the idea of Bharat Mata, or any mata, for that matter. We can choose to believe in anything, or nothing, or a combination of anything and everything. We become masters of our own selves, our position in nature decided by us and us alone. Nature – and nation.

The taste of such liberty is exhilarating. Did not the great Rabindranath Tagore move in and out of the nationalist camp (his nationalism was his own, but let’s use the prevalent language) in the space of the Swadeshi movement ? Did not he believe in founding a school that would work on global ideals rather than anything parochially Indian ? Did he not put humanity before his colony ?

It is a fine thing to bask in this liberty for a day, a week, or forever. Rarely are we asked to do anything proactive in support of the nation, and this is as much a critique of the man as the state which governs the nation. Standing for the Anthem here, paying taxes there, these are the little mandatory things, small and big irritants to some perhaps, that give us a sense of being committed to the nation.

But hold on, did we not debunk an accepted marker of the nation? Do we debunk the nation, or do we find another marker? To be truly radical perhaps, it is necessary to be an anarchist or Anabaptist. Given that anarchism alongside Communism, chances are if you’re going left, you’d end up becoming an anarchist. If you are a firm believer in God, you’d become an Anabaptist. Either way, you end up outside the nation. In doing so, you move outside the structure that governs the nation – the state. Wohooo!

Alternatively, you could ask, can I believe in the nation without believing in what the nation wants me to believe in ? Say, you’re told that the nation wants you to believe in Bharat as a Mata, a protective motherly figure who at the same time is righteous and with your help, can overthrow the unjust yoke of British rule (errata – British rule is dead, so it’s probably some foreign thingy or external threat or ebola. Yeah, something that threatens her children).

You argue that after all, this idea is dated. It was framed in the era of colonial rule, to fight a colonial government. Both are gone, and we have moved through an entire age of pseudo-socialistic-mixed economy to be dragged into globalization. Isn’t it better to find an image that binds us in the present day ? Something that is Indian but is relevant to the times ?

Are you implying that nationalism is outdated? No sir, not at all. I’m implying that our imagination of nationalism is outdated. It is ossified to a degree where it is held up by empty rhetoric and a few symbols for obeisance. It is ossified to a degree where it has to be imposed on a good many without evoking any real feeling inside them.

But what if you found another ideal ? Something that has potential for acting as the glue that binds the nation together, without pandering to the view of “the nation”? What happens when you begin to believe in a conception of nation that brings together all (or most) of those who could believe in the conception, but in reality only you believe in it? Do you shelve your ideal or propagate it ?

Suppose you propagate it, what happens? Does the existing glue, the Bharat Mata for example, prove to be syncretic enough (like the real Mother Goddess cult proved to be) to modify itself to accommodate you? Or does yours become a rival, a different view of the same nation, an anomaly in the sea of Bharat Mata-ists ?

In reality, chances are that both the Bharat Mata ideal and your own would be two among many. All of these would lay claim to being the ideal of nationalism, the imaginary glue that binds the community together, by virtue of having some “features”. What are these ? What is the Minimum Programme that allows an ideal to be nationalistic and another to be not ? Or is it a maximum ?

Say for instance, your ideal of the nation does not involve respect to a certain National X. If the Minimum is X, then you could build on X and still allow the ideal to act as the glue. If the maximum is X, then your entire ideal must fit inside it. The risk with X minimum is that the maximum could become very vague. A maximum X would limit the wriggling space needed for alternatives to emerge.

This brings us to the question of diversity. Our motto, it seems, is unity in diversity. This can presuppose a maximum or minimum X. At maximum, it demands that every belief of every individual fall within the X ideal. At minimum, it demands that each belief have at least some respect, but not be limited to X. On the face of it, the minimum seems to be better, because it seems more assimilationistic.

However, what if X itself is so defined that it becomes hard yet broad ? Say X is the Indian Rupee. If you believe in the nation, you must believe, trade in, quote in, conceptualize the economy in, the rupee. If you use the dollar instead, you are not part of the nation. Would it be ideal to make this X minimum ? So every person in India can trade in the Euro, pound or Dollar as long as he/she trades in rupees ? It would lead to loss of financial sovereignty for India and create mass fiscal chaos.

Now say, you find there to be a maximum X (not the Indian rupee please, I do care about my bank balance!), and you disagree regarding its maximality. You would rather place something else in its stead. Can you put up this contrasting ideal without breaking down the glue that binds the community? In other words, does the nation have a bond that is perhaps outside what we consciously imagine? Can the bond of the community have a palette that allows for mixing of colours instead of being made up of solidified colours entirely?

To say no would be to claim that our nationalism is not deep enough, that we are weak nationalists and for this reason we cling to outdated concepts for dear life of the nation. To say yes would be opening a Pandora’s box which could well cause explorations to plumb such depths and niches that the bond itself is fatally undermined.

It goes without saying that the modern world is a world of nations. Nations protect its people, fight for resources, allow or block trade, uphold rights and wage wars. We are fortunate to have a nation, whatever and however it may be defined, that is stable and diverse at the same time. We have every right to open the settings box and work with the wires, indeed upgradation of the box is necessary from time to time. But we should be aware that random tinkering can well lead to a fire.

Electrical fires cannot be put out with water.

The Victory of Facebook

The moment you read a heading like this, you probably think the Net Neutrality (see my articles on the topic) has lost, or Facebook has signed some new deal, or invested in groundbreaking tech. It could be all of this, and I’d be happy if it were. But this article is – somewhat belatedly – a celebration of something entirely different. This time, I’ll celebrate the victory of Facebook’s purpose, and a lot more.

Let’s go back to when it all began. 2005 was it ? 2007 ? Somewhere around that time. Remember hi5 ? Remember Orkut ? And then we all came to Facebook.

Pourquoi ?

Well, ostensibly so we could all connect on social media. That was a big word, and a tad unnecessary at the time. I mean, we had phones and SMS and email right? And early Facebook was too rudimentary to be something really revolutionary right ? Right ?

Looking back, it was, but we still climbed the bandwagon. We sought out friends who had already joined, and asked others to join, and still others. Then when we felt enough people weren’t around in the chat, or posting updates, we added more people. People we didn’t know, we didn’t care about and frankly, people we only wanted to like our stuff.

This serve the purpose of social media – connecting people remotely in a manner as close to real life as possible. Numerous memes have been made about how acting like we do on Facebook would land us in real trouble in real life, but it’s hard to deny that we have turned Facebook into a second life. (which reminds me, what became of Second Life, the social game ?)

How so ? For beginners, we met friends and talked with them, as we do in real life. Then we added people we didn’t know, as we would in real life. We were circumspect, wondering what sort of people they would be. Some turned out to be idiots (or creeps, or jerks, or sickos, or perverts, if girls were involved) but others became friends. This was like going to a party and meeting new people. Except that every moment was a party, and we already knew something about each person we met courtesy the About section.

So that’s what it became, a place to meet and greet, chat and chatter, snarl and snooze. Maybe not snooze, though I distinctly remember the “moon” icon next to people’s chat icons. Maybe also not meet, because many a times we never met the people who we met regularly online. Maybe nothing, but in the end, we got to “know” a lot more people. Once we knew them, we learned some of them were fake, while others were simply out there to get something out of us. The filtering went on, and we found “true” friends. Sort of, kind of…..

But was it all ? Yes, it was. What did we do beyond clicking photos and uploading them, sending texts and pokes, playing games and sending requests and generally making asses of ourselves ? Did we realize that there could be more to it ? Nope, we did not. It would always remain a place to chat with friends, an auxiliary to our physical existence.

Saying all that has changed would be a massive understatement. Perhaps we could say that our physical existence has become an auxiliary to our Facebook life. But that would truly be hyperbole. So what do we say ?

First, we could say that Facebook has become a place where you could meet a range of people with specific political and social ideas. So Facebook has become not just a place to meet people, but to meet ideas. You could say that was always the case, but the quality and depth of the ideas has changed. As more and more intellectuals and radicals join the platform, debates arise which earlier would never have taken place. Sifting through my old posts, I’m surprised to find how, even when I was an active student activist, I seldom made political statements on Facebook. Reason is, there was very little debate.

Nowadays however, everything that happens anywhere is instantly put before us in the most strongly worded – and sometimes – well-considered manner possible. Every medium of communication, be it TV, newspaper or even the streets themselves, have an echo on Facebook. It is impossible to escape, and why should you ? Isn’t interaction with ideas and politics a facet of the political animal ? Now the political animal has gone on the WWW and the result is a devastating amount of information, ideas and debates.
Second, and related to the first, is the ability of everyone to have an impact. Pretty girls post selfies and they garner thousands of likes, which spurs them to create entire quasi-communities of admirers. That’s impact for you. Err, no, that’s not it.

Impact can be seen when small issues, otherwise buried in half inch articles, become posts in their own right. Someone is suffering from cancer and needs funds. Why would a newspaper or channel cover him/her ? But a facebook post manages that and hopefully, funds do turn up. The funny part is that most of these small issues are brought up by people who we don’t know. Some are friends of friends while others are individuals we “follow”. Or pages we “like”. Through these, we are exposed to a far wider range of facts and information that we could ever have if we’d confined ourselves to friends on facebook. Real life friends that is.

Third, rather amusingly, Facebook friendships have come to reflect real life friendships. You could always defriend (a new word, mind you) someone for hurting your feelings. But what about political opinions ? What if you don’t want to hear what you consider to be leftist or rightist or something-ist hogwash ? Unfriend (another new word!!) immediately. If needed, block him/her. This would be the equivalent of refusing to talk to someone you meet on the street because of “differences”. Some may say it is childish, others may say it is one’s freedom to meet or refuse to do so. Whatever it is, Facebook has now taken on another aspect of our real lives.

Fourth, and rather regrettably, we are entering the era of the online hujuk and keccha. Remember a certain Hutom writing in the 19th Century ? back then, due to poor literacy, the ordinary folk believes whatever was told to them. Nowadays, if we hear anything on the street, we’re likely to Google it. Read it in a nicely worded and colourful post, and you believe it. Stupid claims, like India’s national anthem being called the best anthem in the world, are examples of hujuk. The Delhi case in which a girl claimed to have been threatened (only to be found with AAP political motives later) is an example of keccha.

Fifth, we have become expert stalkers. At least us guys. Clicking photos of girls in public (or private I guess) without permission is an offence. Following a girl to know her whereabouts is an offence too. Making lewd gestures at her is an offence too. Theoretically, all of these are probably offences in the cyber world under the Indian Information Act I guess. In reality, who’s stopping you from hitting “See Full Size” (oh the innuendo!) beneath a girl’s photo, photoshopping it, “following” her to see all her public posts and then sending all sorts of crap stuff to her.

This has caused a lot of trouble for girls, and guys. For girls, the trouble is twofold. First, as barriers of communication break down and we add people outside our social circles (and classes) to get more likes, we end up adding people with mentalities that are very different. The crasser among them end up sending what would be classed as positively obscene comments to girls after “falling in love” with them. What follows is a lot of howling and growling and blocking. But does police complaint follow ? We are all safe behind computers right, so why complain? And obviously, it’s the girl’s fault she put up the picture which led to the comment in the first place. So much like society itself, no ?

The second problem is that there are some smooth movers and shakers. These guys, whom the girl would probably avoid if she could see them in public from the very beginning, create false identities, luring them into meeting them. The rest, as they say, is criminal history.

But guys have trouble too. Trust me, there are sad and honest guys out there who spend a substantial amount of time poring over a variety of girls’ DPs (variety referring to both DPs and girls) and occasionally, masturbating over them. They want to establish friendly relations, and see if any of them go to the point of a relationship. But hey, how do you know a pervert from a genuine friendly guy (even if he is secretly perverted) ? About sections are becoming increasingly blank, friend lists and relationship staii are disappearing from public view and so are, of course, the bread and butter of the frustrated youth – girls’ selfies. One part of mankind is pushing entire man-kind towards doom. Just like real life.

But while we cry over blank About sections, people who have unfriended us and growl over differences of opinion (and all the while ogle at the selfies we do get and the gobble the “information” and the information we get), let us sit back and wonder how far Facebook has become a copy of real life. In lines and lines of code, which none of us will ever bother to fish out and study, we have thrown in our emotions, our life’s memories, our hopes and dreams and all the communications that hold up the tapestry of life. In doing so, we have, feature at a time, made Facebook a home we can never leave without serious withdrawal symptoms.

Here, and only here, do we feel part of our friend circle, ideological circle, pervert circle and along with these, the circle of like-minded and opposite-minded people across the world, regardless of where we are. In this sense, Facebook has succeeded in its mission of bringing friends – in the real and the broader, global sense, together. And it has succeeded in creating a world that is so much richer than anything we can have at any one moment, at least in terms of sheer information. It has created attitudes and tendencies that mimic real life with real life consequences. And it has created a generation that truly holds facebook above a lot in life. For better or worse, facebook has achieved a lot more that it – or we – ever imagined.

 

Corruption and Plagiarism: Comparisons

Hate is something we are taught, and from this hate we obtain our moral compass. What do we hate, and why do we hate it ? Who taught us to hate, and therefore to love ? What if we stop hating ? Valid questions, but only selectively put forth. I say selectively because they have become legion in cases like communalism (so you’re a beef-eating Muslim $*#$%^$ ?) and sexuality.

But there are other things, patent in society, that we must hate and never question why. Corruption for instance. And then there are things in academia that we hate without questioning. Lecherous teachers who cheat on their wives to make out with their colleagues. Sorry, cut that. Replace it with plagiarism. Yep, that seems safe enough. Corruption and plagiarism, a nice pair (made in the lowest depths of hell).

Now the point is not to raise moral arguments about these – that would make for a very long night indeed. Instead, let’s talk about why we’re taught about these (or learn) and how our hate for them is similar.

Take corruption. It’s that limitless force that causes rust and fungal growth in virtually every human-based structure in the world. More specifically, corruption pertains to the political sphere, where terms like embezzlement, black money, venality, etc. are thrown about with brute vehemence and vindictiveness. In this sphere, corruption generally means taking undue advantage of a system or allowing others to do so. As flies come to wounds, so money comes to the corrupt areas, enriching few and ruining the system and all who depend on it. Hence rations are hoarded and black marketed, pension funds are sucked off, ill-gotten funds are taken away to the Cayman Islands, unworthy get jobs and licenses and virtually everybody has to shell out something to get something done. Something over and above the usual fees that is.

Feeling angry ? Aye, me too. But hold on, let’s get you angrier. Talk of plagiarism. Plagiarism, or plag for short, means the art of taking stuff from people’s intellectual property and using it to decorate your own house. Or build it even. Imagine you worked for years to create a lovely piece of art. Someone comes in and clicks a photo of the canvas. Next day you find that your picture now forms a part of the portfolio of another artist! How can you produce something, put in your heart and soul into it, if you know that people may use it to their advantage ? Where is the respect and returns due to intellectual labour ?

Phew, those are angry words, and typing them out does push your typing speed to its limit. Now I’ll type slowly, and you take a few deep breaths. Let’s talk of idyllic worlds without mosquitoes, plagiarism and corruption.

In this world, the government would be corruption-free (not talking about the AAP here). It would create an education system that would be free of plagiarism, so academia would be corruption free. Why ? Because if we take corruption in the literal sense of being a distortion to something, and in the political sense of helping one and harming other by screwing the system, then plagiarism definitely fits the bill. Plagiarism is a short-cut that allows you to take more credit than is due to you while harming the rights of the ones who actually put in the effort to come up with the plagged work in the first place. A deviation from honest effort ? A short cut that harms one and gives undue advantage to another ? That’s corruption in the grammatical sense. Wait, make that corruption in the grammatical and quasi-political sense.

Academic corruption, or at least part of it, is plagiarism.

So if corruption is the set U, plagiarism is one of the circles in the Venn Diagram. To talk of corruption is to talk of something big, to talk of plagiarism is to talk of something more specific. Something more concrete and measurable, in both definition, practical application and impact.

Really?

You may say that a certain string of words may have been found to be copied from some previous work without a proper footnote. Without going into the intricacies of what a proper footnote is, let’s assume the footnote isn’t there or it’s improper. The reader can’t make out that this is not the original work of the author. Now it is perfectly possible that the author of the plagged work has decided to take credit for what is not his/hers. It is also possible that –

  1. He/she wrote the line in exactly the same fashion and was not aware of the original work.
  2. He/she omitted certain lines from earlier drafts that caused the footnote to be deleted.
  3. He/she had given the footnote earlier and did not bother adding the same book with Ibid. again.
  4. He/she gave the credit to the wrong person and at the wrong place. So the footnote ended up far away from where the quote has been placed (if quote it be).
  5. The text has been taken from web sources which did not credit the author and hence is of dubious validity.

Some of these make your blood boil more, some less. But these are just some of the possibilities. None of them can justify the plagiarism, but they help explain why. Compare them to the works of schoolchildren and you will see.

  1. He copied from a notebook with no name or with an unintelligible name.
  2. His lines came out the same as another boy’s.
  3. He used a guide book and hence could not say where the quote was taken from. He could not tell the teacher he used a guide book, hence he was in trouble.
  4. He found the information scrawled on a board or on a micro-xerox in the toilet.
  5. His parents filled up the text and so used sources which he was not aware of. Of course he could not admit that his parents did the work, so he got into a mess.

Compare this list with the one above, and note how schoolchildren’s mistakes become academics’ mistakes. We’ve been trained to hate plagiarism from a very early age, and this hatred is reflected continuously as, like overzealous kids, we continue to find each other’s faults endlessly. Academics are folks who have passed exams with high marks : they have learned their lessons well.

But have they also attended school on corruption ? For many speak about corruption with so much conviction that they may well have been in the administration itself. In the administration I said, corrupt I did not say. Don’t misquote me!

But such stands perhaps come from the same moral compass that leads to our hatred of plagiarism. Let’s see –

  1. A clerk took money not knowing that he could not take money for the task. Say he has shifted from being an agent of some company to a government employee. Habits die hard, rules are learned slowly.
  2. He overlooked some stuff for someone’s advantage.
  3. He helped someone he normally would have, except this time he credited the wrong person, and at the wrong place!
  4. He interpreted rules according to dubious sources and cynically manipulated them. And was caught.

Note how we need to add “intentionally” to every sentence to prove someone is corrupt. Did we do the same for plagiarism ? We didn’t. This is somewhat unfair on academics, since plagiarism after all falls within the ambit of corruption.

Yet this distinction does not obscure the fact that the two are similar. A schoolkid’s mistakes, an academic’s mistakes and a clerk’s mistakes – all appear similar when put down on pen and paper.

But the similarity doesn’t stop there. Let’s talk of limits. What are the limits of corruption ? Where can one be totally corruption-free, hypothetically and practically ? Similarly, where can one be totally sure that there is no plagiarism. The methods of measuring corruption vary, as do moral compasses. The methods of plagiarism checking vary too, as again do moral compasses. This leads to the domain of both being exceedingly vague. Vagueness lends itself to vigilantism, to finding scapegoats for various purposes and for foisting one set of rules upon another just to serve selfish purposes.

Again, both are easily hidden. There are two ways of doing this. One, you change the rules so that your corruption becomes legal and another’s legality becomes dubious. Similarly, moving from one standard to another, one journal to another, causes the methods to change.

Secondly, you can simply accuse someone else of plagiarism. Or corruption. He/she either makes counter-charges and/or becomes defensive. In the worst case scenario, your corruption is exposed, but by then it is always a political issue.

Fourthly, both become all-encompassing. A corrupt person is corrupt and nothing else. A plagging scholar is nothing but a plagger. A cheater who made his fame without the effort required and is therefore of dubious moral calibre. Corruption and plagiarism don’t become one quality – they become the only quality.

Fifthly, charges are usually levelled by those who are the least productive. They have the least to lose, because their trail of activities is the shortest. So the lazy person, who also fears being attacked for his laziness, seeks to divert attention from himself. Ditto for the lazy academic.

Now let’s go back to school.

  1. “He hasn’t done his homework”
  2. “I didn’t know it was wrong. Won’t happen again!”
  3. “ I thought I’d already done this/that”
  4. “I heard from a friend and decided to do…”
  5. “I didn’t notice/remember…”

Imagine each scenario with an angry teacher, plenty of ironed out student uniforms and souls which are being shaped to be the crusaders against corruption and plagiarism. We have been taught all this, and taught in a way that allows us to apply the same standards to both.

This doesn’t make for a plea of free-thinking. Too much of country and education depend on keeping corruption at bay and plagiarism out for us to let our guard down so we can wonder if the “Police” written on our clothes makes sense or not. Our system was built on these assumptions, we cannot help but shoulder the burden and carry on. We can’t turn our backs for a moment. So we have been taught, so we shall teach our children. Such notions, will at least, uphold the system as it exists. As they say, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Yet why not reflect? How did we become such creatures, righteous yet monstrous ? Where did we lose our willingness to cooperate instead of fight with everyone else ? Could an alternative have been possible at some point of time ? Why did we accept this morality and not another one ? Why did we not question this when we questioned everything else in the heat of our college years ?

Perhaps these would answer the questions – why do we hate corruption and plagiarism, and why have we been taught to do so ?

Net Neutrality For The Still Barking Dogs AKA Part 2

They say if you tell a lie sufficient times, it gets the ring of truth. In the age of Facebook, you don’t even have to say it all that many times. Make something anti-corporate, anti-government and on-so-people-friendly and you would go viral. Except viral fever of course, because though the corporates make meds against it and the government uses them to combat it and the virus is so people friendly, we still don’t like viral fever. But never mind.

The issue at stake here is net neutrality. As I’d said earlier, this means that service providers and regulators should not distinguish between two packets of internet data based on where they come from or where they’re going. So a packet containing a request for porn from some shady site should have the same respect and indifference attached to it as a search for a job to timesjobs. Yeah, that’s what it means dear barking dogs!

Propped up against this, supposedly, is Facebook’s Free Basics. This program, provided through Reliance, aims to give the poor and unconnected the ability to access internet services that would make the most difference in their lives. Such services have been parcelled out using apps, and a bouquet of apps are provided whose data usage will not be charged. So they get the basic stuff for free. Hence free basics.

Now barking dogs have great power, especially when they keep their asses firmly attached to their seats and hammer away at keyboards. Like I’m doing. Problem is I’m one and my anti-people headline won’t attract those do-gooders. But I’ll still have my say.

You see yappers, you’ve basically gotten your knickers in a bunch over the word “Basics”. Yep, you think basics should be providing such things as videos, multimedia content, HTML5 games and so on. Yeah, because the poor of the country so totally need to play and fap off right? Yeah they do, but why should Facebook pay for that?

The poor, rather, need information regarding agriculture, jobs, weather and education. They need to know prices so they’re not duped. They need to know where jobs are available. They need to know where to obtain this and obtain that. This and that, of course, are beyond your – and my – comprehension because we speak in English and our needs are so very different. I admit it, so should you pretty puppy.

Now let’s talk of the things they’re not getting – videos for one. Who needs videos ? For every educational video seen, 10 porn videos are viewed. Oh and Bollywood videos too, I’ll include them in the porn category (non-essential you see). Furthermore, videos are typically large and even with the best compression, it would take ages for the streaming to succeed considering the state of the infrastructure in those areas. Since many of the educational videos deal with technical issues, it is pointless to watch even compressed videos with low pixel dimensions anyway.

Secondly, there is this criticism that Facebook isn’t showing ads. That’s a good thing right ? Hell no! They’re not showing ads so they’ll show ads in the future. The mongoose didn’t attack the baby ? It will in the future, so kill it! Facebook aims Free Basics at sections of the populace that have limited purchasing power. Most ads target the middle classes. Tailoring ads to the underprivileged will be a challenge in itself. Chances are that such a challenge and the costs attached will have diminishing ROI because the poor simply won’t buy!

Thirdly, it has been argued that there are very few Indian sites and services on the bandwagon. Facebook is inviting one and all to join the platform and more are joining everyday. By the time this controversy gets over, some more may have already joined. So while it makes sense to say that the service is not very India-oriented at the moment, that’s not to say that it won’t be in the future. C’mon doggies, you said there will be ads in the future. You should be saying that there will be more Indian services in the future. It’s your own logic!

Fourthly, there is that pernicious argument that Facebook is spending money on marketing that it could logically have spent on making internet free for everyone. What hypocrisy! You raised hue and cry and got TRAI to shut it down. For this reason, Facebook has to spend money on marketing to get the message out. You yourself brought this about, and then you blame Facebook.

Finally, it is argued – ad nauseam – that Free Basics should be Free Internet. This means Free Internet for all. To these freeloaders, I have only one thing to say –

ফেসবুকে কি তোমার সোসুর বসে আছে ?

In case you can’t read Bengali, it basically means means – is your father-in-law operating Facebook ? In other words, what right do you have to demand that everything be free ? Has any move been made to make all internet free for everyone ? Either by the government or by a corporate body ? No, because the costs involved would be too high.

Instead, Facebook aims at creating a platform that everyone can access but only those who are truly underprivileged would stick to. Others would move to full internet services and for that matter, paid internet services. This would allow more people to gradually move to complete internet usage as their economic situation improves.

Now you ask – is Facebook doing all this for charity ? Nope, nope and again nope. Facebook hopes to draw in people from regions and sections that are facing the technological divide created by poverty and poor infrastructure. By making one aspect of the internet experience free, it hopes that they would become users of its services and someday, become users of its games and ads and so generate revenue for it. So yes, it is turning poor into future consumers. That’s the logic of capitalism my friend.

Again, Reliance is seeking to expand in areas where internet reach is weak. It hopes that people would soon grow tired of Free Basics and move to paid Reliance internet and other services. At the very least, they would not ditch Reliance because they know that even if they don’t need internet at all times, it is still available. This would give Reliance an edge over other telcos.

Why is all this customer-making good ? Because it creates internet educated people where there were none. In doing so, it creates members of a vast community that can access information – if not today, tomorrow – that is useful. Imagine a world where flood warning and rise and fall in prices are communicated directly to the farmer without any intermediary, courtesy the internet. Imagine a world where the farmer can rally people in his support against economic or social repression. We howl about farmer suicides and oppression of Dalits. Bringing them on the internet platform gives them a voice. A small voice in the beginning, but a voice nonetheless.

Finally, because other companies would be lagging behind, they too would launch their own schemes. These schemes would create competition and allow for wider and still wider range of services to be accessed. Imagine a poor person having two SIMs – accessing Bing for free on one SIM and Google on the other. What’s the harm in this scenario ?

For all this, Facebook and Reliance’s initiative is to be welcomed simply because it proves that capitalism, when allowed to run its course, automatically opens up new markets and creates new customers. These customers, by the very logic of economics, become members of a broader community of people who interact, learn and educate others. This is the power of capitalism and this is the power of Free Basics!

Historians and the Custodians of History

It is never pleasant to defend one who has just insulted your profession. Neither is it easy to do so when your friends think the said offender to be lacking in the very skills you admire him for. And it’s nigh impossible in the age of Facebook, because here everything’s clickbait. Including the topic at hand – the relevance of the historian.

Before I continue on my own thread, a little background. I’m a fan of Chetan Bhagat, a big one. The type of fan that people like SRK and Salman Khan get. Trouble is that it’s still okay to profess undying love to SRK on his birthday even when he’s hit 50. It’s not okay to praise Chetan Bhagat for being a great author of pulp fiction. It becomes near anathema when Bhagat goes and gets himself “had” (trolled in internet lingo) by a renowned lyricist and then says that historian do nothing more than give a date or a name and call it a day.

But my point here is not to discuss the logic behind Bhagat’s reckless comments. Neither do I want to comment on the quality of his writing compared to the posts he puts on Twitter, etc. The point here is one which we students of history take for granted the moment we enter a class of history (either as student or teacher). That is –

HISTORY = PROFESSIONAL DOMAIN  = TASK OF THE PROFESSIONAL HISTORIAN

This equation, in my humble and unobtrusive opinion, is bullshit.

Why ? Let’s break this equation down.  First, what is history ? Without going into Carr and Amales Tripathi (neither of which are read by the general populace), let’s say that history is the study of the past. More pertinently, study of what we deem important in the past and what we have information for. So we may have a lot of information about the thickness of grates of sewers but we’re only interested in finding the causality between poor sewer drainage and epidemic. So if grates come into the picture, well and good. If they don’t, get some other source. If you still get nothing, theorize the nightsoil out of the topic till you don’t need any sources at all.

Trouble is, not everyone is interested in learning the history you wish to learn. People can glean any amount of meaning out of the thickness of grates and fit it into any history they like. In other words, history is the study of the past the way the person wishes to study it. So what “we” deem important is not the sum total of what is held to be important.

Still confused. Well, while we “historians” (coming to that) debate over the minutae of the events leading to the battle of Plassey, many more people are interested in learning about whether there was a Mandir at Ayodhya.

But this argument can be placed for every “arts” subject out there. Say for instance, political science. Every person deems the political process to be of a different nature and studies different aspects. He or she may reach conclusions and form ideologies which do not agree with any known school of political philosophy. How then is history different ?

History is not different really, except that it is the one “arts” which cannot be proved while everyone wants to prove it. Being in the past, all history is a work of inference. It cannot be duplicated because creating the same exact conditions is impossible. Other arts disciplines, at least, have some component in the present. Elections can be duplicated, so can works of art. Not history, sorry, it can only be inferred. In fact, if it is duplicated, it by definition goes out of the realm of history because it is no longer in the past.

The problem arises when everyone wants to prove something in history. Such proving is often in a political or social context – a context where “proof” lends legitimacy to a claim while deligitimizing another. For instance, proving that a boundary existed at a certain point in a field can justify the land claims of one family while refuting those of another because historically the division lay here instead of there.

History, therefore, gives us identity. It tells us what we were, and that in turn defines what we want to become. It gives us direction in life, either in conformity or against the “grain” – the trend – of history.

Now everyone has an identity, and so everyone needs to understand and explain his/her own history. This history is bound up with the history of the community and the nation, just as the person is bound with his/her nation and community. In fact, beyond the narrow realms of his family and village, the person is defined by the community and the nation. Hence, the histories of the community and the nation become vitally important for everything the person considers himself/herself to be beyond the narrow confines of local geography.

Such identity develops in two ways – passing down and creation. Passing down is a passive process in that it occurs as the child grows and sees his/her elders talking, behaving, scolding and praising him/her. It develops actively in that he/she is told that he/she must be a certain person, behave in a certain fashion because his/her forefathers were this and this behoves such behaviour and so on. Everything from grandma’s tales about the ancestral village to the scolding of the father about meeting some undesirable boy/girl develop this identity.

Now comes the creation of identity. Except for the most docile and the most brain-dead, each person internalizes such passed on knowledge in a manner that suits his/her character, circumstances and ambitions. Such internalizing occurs with an active and passive interaction with what has been passed on and what the person learns on his/her own, with or without the mediation of the guardians of information – the family and the community.

In other words, each person must interact with history to forge one’s identity, deciding how much of the passed on information to retain and what modifications to bring in it. Such interaction occurs from the very day he/she begins learning history and starts to see the history of the country and community as part of his/her own formation of the historical self. In most students, this process is initially passive and becomes active when he/she begins considering possibilities of challenging the existing situations. This takes a level of intellect and maturity that typically does not arrive before one’s mid to late teens.

But when it does, the interaction can lead to questions that the professional historian is not bothered with. In absence of professional history (or lack of access to it : pricing of CUP and OUP books is ever-so-affordable isn’t it?), the person  develops his/her own ideas about history from facts or quasi-facts that are readily available to him/her.

How is this creation of ideas from facts not the writing (figuratively, not everyone has the time or luxury to hold a pen and paper) of history? For if history be the study of the past and the past the person wishes to  study, then such formation of ideas and identities involves creation of a history. This history may be as little as that of the village and as large as that of the nation. Since we’re considering the histories of the community and the nation as prime to the formation of one’s identity, such histories would involve ideas about the history of his/her community and nation. Such a history would be colored by the passed down information and the “history” created through conscious thinking. Combined together, they form a vital “version” or “type” of history in which the professional historian has had virtually no role or so indirect a one that the history actually created is vastly different from that what the historian wrote in the refereed journal.

If everyone is creating his/her own history and the vast majority of it is beyond the pale of the historian’s influence, how can the historian claim a defining role in writing history? He/she can if and only if there is a definitive strand of history that can triumph over all others.

How can this be done? One possibility would be to prove beyond doubt that that is what happened. But because everything is in the past, this is impossible. Here, history becomes the least scientific of all arts, no matter the level of scientific methods used to study it.

Even then, the professional historian is a professional – his/her task is to find the best kind of history using the methods that he/she has been taught to use. The pickaxe is blunt, but the historian is confident that it is a pickaxe so it must be used. Better than using a lasso for the job! So he/she painstakingly creates a history. Part of this history is irrelevant to the concerns of the people and remains confined to the academic journals. Part of the questions asked by the people are not answered by scholarly work. There is a disjunction between historians and larger societal concerns of history and no one tries to bridge it. This part is taken over by those who can claim to prove answers. This veracity the historian questions but in vain because –

  1. He/she does not deal with the topic itself and has no answers himself/herself
  2. The minutiae of the methodology criticized by the historian are lost upon the general populace
  3. The “sources” used by the other histories are not used by the historian because they’re “illegitimate”. In the eyes of the person who believes in those sources, the historian becomes illegitimate.
  4. Much of the historian’s language is obscurantist for the general reader and he/she soon loses interest in the academic arguments. Instead, the “answer” is accepted over the debate over whether the answer should exist or not. Bread, my friend, is always more welcome than a floury exchange of words over the type of flour used.

The part that matches the concerns of the larger public reaches the public domain and filters down. Books are reviewed in magazines, articles are read and simplified in opinion pieces and so on. Ideally, this history should trickle down and inform the general populace so that their ideas of history – their created history – is corrected.

The problem again, is that, “scientific”, “professional” history has no advantage over other types of history that abound in the minds of men. Most people are not interested in the nuances that make it better in the eyes of the historian, and even if they are, the hesitating, confused-sounding tone of professional research cannot stand against the confidence of the histories that have traditionally coloured the minds of men. Did such and such ruler have 500 wives ?

History A : Yep, 500 definitely!

History B : Nope, 550 is the number. The Great texts say so.

History C : A number between 400 and 532 would be great.  We could take 434 based on source A but then the other sources suggest that he married another 15 times. If we add the two and assume that there were no divorces, the number comes to 449. That is still a low number considering conventional wisdom and so we must look for other women in the harem. XYZ suggests that we take a look at the concubines who were given status almost equal to that of royal wives……

Seriously, did you get to the end of the paragraph of the third history? If you’re not sitting in a library or a college drinking coffee, would you have the time to go through this or even a very simplified version of this ? If not, would you say that because I could not read history C, I would not decide. NO, you would take either history A or B and choose the one which you think is more logical based on the understanding of historical events you have. Such understanding, as we saw earlier, is shaped by family, society and school and is both passive and active. Whatever it is, such history often lies beyond the control and the influence of the professional historian.

In other words, the history the historian churns out has limited influence because, for various reasons, his is neither the easiest, surest, widely read or most legitimate history. The professional is just one of the many peddlers of history, and his version is limited in scope. The scope of history, in sum, is far beyond the province of the historian.

But you could say – the history taught in schools and in colleges is accurate: it is written history, written usually by professional historians. Correct, but where identities are forged by history (or interaction with what is seen as received history), there are many stakes involved. A person could become a communalist or a secularist based on what he/she read about the Partition. Would it not be in the interest of some to turn him/her into a secularist, and some others, into a communalist ?

Historians themselves are not free of such biases. The ideal historian is supposed to be secular, democratic and liberal. Looked at from other viewpoints, these traits themselves are biases against some religion, against strong and confident rule and against tradition. The historian does not rise above the ideological matrix, but sits within it.

Furthermore, each historian has his/her own ideological mindset. And so his/her history also differs because after all, the way he/she interacts with facts and creates history is still a function of the human mind. The human mind, all education and training considered, of the historian and of the peasant, of the peasant and the religious leader, is not that different.

So many histories are created with various stakes. Each stake conflicts with other stakes, other viewpoints of society and other petty and noble interests. Who decides what the general masses consume as history, and so forge their identities? Who becomes the custodian of history ?

The professional historians say – us! We are the most educated, trained, unbiased and scientific minded.

The religious “historians” say – us! We are the most devout, adherent to tradition and close to God.

The politicking “historians” say – us! We are those who will help you build a better understanding of what the country and the community needs to be.

All say to each other – you are not a proper historian!

Great,  so now we have a verbal brawl going on. Verbal brawls can turn into muscular ones. It turns out that the professional historians have some rather ineffectual weapons called pens. They don’t stand much of a chance, especially because any advantage is lost by incessant debates within themselves.

Instead, the other groups use state power, religious power, caste power, every sort of meaningful power, to win. One group wins with minimal compromises and gets to be the custodians of history. From podiums to history books, they decide what history is and therefore, what the person needs to know to create his/her identity. They become the authors – and the custodians – of history.

The professional historian has long assumed that he/she will get the microphone and the muscle power from his/her cozy office chair – along with the funds to keep that chair cozy of course. As history shows this wannabe professional historian however, the battle was never theirs to win. It would take a philosopher-king of great intellect to grant power to those who have but flimsy pens to wield it. For power does not flow from the point of the pen, but from the printing press and the loudspeaker, colouring the minds of people in a manner that forges their identity in a manner amenable to you.

But like all professionals, the historian refused to be useful to society by staking a claim to this power, by getting out of the cozy chair and into the mandi and the masjid. He/she refused to go  the extra mile required for the prachar of his/her history and opposed to the lekhan of it. He/she refused to form the political  and social apparatus that other propagators of “history” did. He/she refused to be an agent of social change or of social stability. He/she refused to be anything but a parasite giving out dates and names and publishing unreadable articles while the history and identity of the communities and the nations were held by those with more zest, more capability and less mental confusion than the dear professional historian. Finally, when the historian is being shown the total impact of his/her erudite scholarship and being told that such work does not deserve such large amounts of funds is the great slumber finally breaking.

Whether this slumber leads to a great contribution by historians – the professional, pen-toting variety – in shaping the identity and the course of the nation’s mentality, or just to another barrage of articles, time will soon tell.