The Old Calcutta Chromosomes: Reflections on a piece in The Hindu

This is one of the many issues on which I have been unable to make up my mind:  Should we care about the preserving the past.? This question came back to my mind when I read this piece in The Hindu today.  Please follow the link for this piece:  http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/saving-kolkatas-heritage-buildings/article7360740.ece

In a line that might remind you of Mark Twain’s view on buying shares, other matters that I am undecided about include whether it is important to believe in God, whether fidelity is a virtue, should people chase limitless wealth in life, is it important to care for friends and family or is it OK to be utterly narcissistic and so on.

Before you shun me, or worse disown me, I have not let any of these doubts affect the choices I have made in my life, although I will not rule out the possibility that some of my thoughts and actions over the years may have been influenced by these doubts.  Yad bhaavam tad bhavet, is what our scriptures seem to prophesy: You become what your thoughts are.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/saving-kolkatas-heritage-buildings/article7360740.ece

The question is why or should one care about the past at all?  Should one preserve old buildings as many people across many cities in our country and elsewhere seem to be endeavouring to lately?

I guess the answer to that depends on what the objectives are. Buildings and architecture play an important part in historiography.  History lessons from our school days have tormented us with details of how buildings unearthed from the sites of various civilisations of thousands years ago tell us a lot about how people may have lived in those times. 

They also give us beautiful ideas for designing the buildings of today and to that extent provide a base level of knowledge of design and architecture that we may all build on now and in the future. 

So also buildings associated with great personalities serve to remind us of the lives that they led and the often numerous struggles that they went through which eventually made them into the great souls that they turned out to be.

At an individual level buildings are associated with personal memories.  I have often believed that places and structures are nothing if they do not bring back memories of people and phenomena that we know of or care about.

There could be another reason too:  Preserving structures of the past just for its own sake. This is the bit that I am not so sure of.  Clinging on to the past when it has no great bearing for the present or the future seems like such an idle pursuit, a luxury too lavish even for the leisure class described by Thorstein Veblen. 

On the contrary, some destructive, cataclysmic change is inevitable for the inexorable march of human civilization and for the evolutionary order of nature to prevail.  If that had not happened would the saber toothed tiger and the huge pterodactyl that we read of in our primary school natural history have given way to the primates that preceded homo sapiens?  And of all the things that our knowledge of the evolution of the world tells us, the one thing that we can be sure of is this:  There have been ice ages in the past and we have no good reason to believe that there will not be any more in the future.

Such inevitability of change has been endorsed by many eminent scholars even though we might find them to be dismal in their outlook.  Karl Marx (and Heraclitus) is credited with having said Change is the only constant in life. Every new year’s eve I read of or hear some one or the other recall Lord Tennyson’s famous line, Ring out the old, ring in the new.  Among economists Schumpeter developed the idea of creative destruction. And not to forget the Hindu scriptures that predict that at the end of the yuga all of these creations will be subsumed in the grand cataclysmic Pralaya.

Granted, these were all said in different contexts and they cannot be used as arguments against the attempts to preserve some ageing edifices that are part of the hundred year old history of a city.  But then again what is so great about those seventy or one hundred years in the history of human civilization?

The City of Calcutta itself goes much further than this past century, to the days of Siraj ud Daula, Lord Clive and the black hole tragedy and even before that to the days of the Palas and the Senas who ruled Bengal for several centuries.

In another example, on a recent travel through parts of the North East I came across old dilapidated buildings in Cherrapunji, of homes and offices that had been built by some of the earliest missionaries that followed the East India company and set up trading and missionary outposts for the movement of goods and services from Calcutta to Shillong through Dhaka. 

These buildings bear witness to a far more important epoch in the political history of the country which has been altered unrecognizably through the administrative scalpel that the British rulers wielded to separate the nation in the name of dealing with the the festering sore of communalism that they had fomented. 

As I stood on the densely wooded hills of Cherrapunji looking at the distant roads winding far below from where we stood into the flooded paddy fields of Bangladesh I could not help wondering how those gritty missionaries had found their way through this unmapped inhospitable terrain. 

So here is the question:  What is more important from the point of view of history?  Preserving some seventy or eighty year old bungalows that will be a constant reminder of the feudal legacy of a society that was spawned by a colonial ruler that has little to offer by way of historiographic learnings?  Or various other legacies of the past such as the Welsh church that was built in 1841 in Cherrapunjee?

At the end of it all I am convinced of just one thing:  All the arguments that some enthusiastic folks make for preserving various old structures certainly deserve a second thought.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

Science vs Religion and My Persistent Ignorance

This is a topic that I have wanted to write on for some time, from nearly around the time I started writing blog posts.  But I never got down to.  It is a topic that engages me a lot mentally.  I wish I could say it engages me intellectually but I know that would be facetious, if not presumptuous. 

In spite of all the time I have spent thinking about it all these years I have made little progress in understanding it well – the question of my relationship with the Almighty. 

At one level I sense that the whole idea is foolish.  We are told that we are all nothing but manifestations of the Lord himself.  The Swami of Puttaparthi would often address everyone in the audience as Embodiments of Divinity.  So where does the question of a relationship with the Lord arise?

At another level many of us keep going back to the Lord in whatever form we revere Him, asking for various favours or at least for His Grace in general. 

My own relationship with the Lord has often been transactional.  I am constantly asking Him for something or the other, ranging from the trivial most of the time to the sublime on some very rare occasions.  Or what I think is sublime.

And then I wonder how does He process all these requests.  Here is where the true limitations of my cognitive abilities and my non-existent knowledge and imaginary intellect kick in.  I wonder about how He might go about His duties, referencing His functioning against my own, replete with my numerous limitations and innumerable personal foibles.  My nine year old elder (twin) son must be closer to reality when he tries to benchmark his own game against that of masters like Andy Murray than I am in trying to understand the working of the Lord in terms of my own standards of functioning.

In my endeavor to redeem myself of this embarrassing ignorance I indulge in some desultory reading.  One of my categories in this genre is the writings of  Swami Ranganathananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission, who tries to juxtapose ideas of spiritualism and religion with developments in scientific thought, drawing upon the writings of Haldane, Huxley and Capra to explain the nuances of the Upanishads and the sacred texts of other religions. 

I guess that this category of writings appeals to my intellectual pretenses and that is the reason I fancy them over others.  It probably makes my beliefs appear to be rooted in rigorous scientific thinking when I say that they are drawn from the works of writers like Gary Zuvak and Frijtof Capra. 

These writings constitute an antidote to the assault of writers like Richard Dawkins on our traditional faith in God; faith from which I draw much comfort in the conduct of my day to day life, even though I am not sure what the nature of true faith is, even though I have experiences in my own life that I could not describe as anything other than miracles. 

In a sense these writings accord intellectual legitimacy to a thinking and a set of beliefs that would be otherwise considered reactionary in the social and professional circles in which most of us move.

But deep within me I felt that at the end of all the persuasive discussion in these writings there seemed to exist a conceptual chasm between science and religion / spiritualism.  At the end of all the very well-constructed  arguments there was always a need for a leap of faith of sorts to arrive at the idea of God.

In my endless quest for bridging that chasm I recently  came across this book, Why Science Does Not Disprove God by Amir Aczel, when I was sauntering through the campus book store.  In the process of evaluating this book I came across an interesting article.  I enclose a link to the article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-why-science-does-not-disprove-god-by-amir-d-aczel/2014/04/10/4ee476ec-a49e-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html

The article seemed to address this confusion in my mind that I had been struggling to resolve all these years.  Net net, the article seems to say that the twain, namely religion and science, shall possibly  never meet.  And our acceptance of one over the other has to be a matter of Faith. 

Interestingly, for all the intellectual rigour and logical water-tightness that we associate science with, given its advancement in the six centuries and some decades, starting with the Reformation and the formal advent of scientific thought into modern civilization, many areas of science still seem to require a pinch of faith too.

As for the idea of God, it does seem to fall squarely outside of the domain of the human intellect and into that of experience and Faith. This is where I consider myself fortunate. There are many instances which I can explain only as His largesse, including the job I presently hold. 


Will the Lord always bless me with all the candies I ask Him for?  Possibly not.  I can think of many instances in my life where my requests have been turned down, including some recent emotional travails.  

In the final analysis science appeals to the rational intellect for sure; but then it quickly runs off the shores of understanding into what feels like the dark and vast expanses of ignorance.  Those expanses feel like the deep dark oceans of nothingness that man and his intellectual vehicle, science, drift into, quite like an astronaut tethered to his spaceship. 

I find that the idea of God, in whatever denomination one may like, is a pragmatic alternative at this stage. And one that I am comfortable with and convinced about after many years of intellectual turmoil.

Nanni…Namaskaaram

 

 

The Jada Bharatan Parallel

I started writing this post some time back.  But I got the impetus to "publish" it after I read this piece by Biswanath Ghosh.  In an interesting coincidence Ghosh articulates beautifully a sentiment that I was struggling to.  (This time around though one gets the sense that Ghosh was running to beat a deadline, looking at the lack of smoothness in the flow.) Here is the link to Ghosh's piece.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/when-past-meets-present/article7333532.ece

This post was triggered by a comment from my mother in law, Sita, a woman who is endowed with extremely good looks and an astute mind and a sharp brain to match.  If she had been born a couple of decades later society would have let her grow into one of those super achieving bureaucrats – soft-spoken yet strong, fair and firm at the same time.

You can see that I am a huge fan of hers.  But this post is not about my mother-in-law.

This post is my reflection on the comment she made in the context of my repeated reference to a young woman, in her early twenties, who had captured my imagination and who I keep wishing had been born to me as a daughter.  My m-i-l opined that I was turning out to be like Jada Bharatan, a character in the Bhagavatam. 

My m-i-l made the remark on the spur of the moment and apparently in lighter vein.  But as I reflected on the remark it appeared to be remarkably perceptive for more reason than one.  In that brief conversation she seemed to have seen through my emotional wrangle, through my feeble attempt to make light of the whole matter, through the various banalities with which I tried to camouflage my true state of the mind.

To set the context I must start with the story of Jada Bharata.  The story appears in the Bhagavatam.  King Bharata after an illustrious spell as an exemplary ruler renounces worldly life in search of salvation as prescribed in the scriptures.  Close to realization of his spiritual goal he sees a doe being left behind by its drowning mother. 

What starts as a fulfillment of duty transforms into an emotional attachment, costing Bharata his spiritual goal.  As a result he ends up assuming the life of a deer in his next birth.  Eventually after one more birth as Jada Bharata, the king attains salvation, but not before he leaves behind a great legacy by way of one of the most powerful sermons on spiritualism.

The story meanders along a fair bit, delivering many lofty messages along the way, like a river leaving behind fertile alluvial deposits.  But that is the not the matter of interest here in this post either. 

Instead, the important point is the close parallel between the story of Jada Bharata and myself and the more important and relevant among the many ways it differs from that story which make me write this post. 

The affinity between Jada Bharata and the deer was completely mutual. And this is where the parallel ceases.  Unlike Jada Bharata who breathed his last pining for the deer, I will never see the object of my affinity ever again.  No matter what the basis for my affection, if I have to respect the norms of our society, which I do, the right thing for me to do is to wish my unborn child the best in her life and keep away from her, leaving her to lead a life uncomplicated by the feelings of a man who has chosen unilaterally to look upon her as his own offspring.

It is a surreal experience; but the pain is real.  The kind of sadness that feels like a massive boulder literally weighing down one’s heart.  It must be the kind of pain that parents feel when children walk out on them in search of a world of their own, beyond the glow of their (parents’) love. 

Will I ever come out of it?  I do not know.  If the past is anything to go by the prognosis is not encouraging.  I know I have not fully come to terms with my mother’s passing seventeen years ago, even though my memories of her get dimmer by the day.  I still experience a strange dull ache when one of the many past connections, the many mental pegs on which the many dimensions of my relationship with her hang, sets off a chain of recollections about my “child” I will never get to see again.

And even if I believe in the Jada Bharata story this is where it ceases to be useful to predict what will become of me when I leave my "mortal coils".  He was born as a deer as he breathed his last looking at the deer, longing for it.  What will happen to someone who is left to pine in solitude for the object of his affinity that has moved on from his life? 

The question is almost metaphorical as much as the parallel is allegorical.  I doubt if anyone will have an answer.

Nanni….Namaskaaram..

About the Rain and Rainy Days

I thought I was going to return to my silence again for an indeterminate period of time. 


I have never felt that anything that I say in these blogs matters to anyone.  Even to me it has been more like a rant, as I described in an earlier post.


For much the same reason I have been winding down the limited circulation. 


And then strangely I began to feel that I do not even have anything more to say at all really any more.


I began to believe in these past few weeks that I just have a job to do.  I have been saying to myself that I must be grateful to God for having that job and that I must go about it as quietly as I could. 


Viewed in that light the posts that I had written in the past appeared to me as plain and idle indulgence.


It was in this state of mind that in the past few days I came across a number of articles, some forwarded by colleagues and some that I had stumbled upon.  Some of them left a deep enough impression on me that I felt I should either share them with my small circle of friends, with or without my own thoughts on them.


Here is the link to the first of them, a piece on a seasonal topic, the rain. 


http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/once-upon-a-rainy-day/article7286168.ece


Man's fascination for rain is perhaps as old as the time that he could articulate his thoughts and feelings about it through some medium of expression or the other - poetry, prose, painting, whatever.  Ghosh's piece is in that sense on a topic on which much, if not all, that is worth saying has been said.


Yet I thought of sharing this link with you because it brings out how our changing lifestyle seems to affect the way we engage with this beautiful element of nature.  It is about a phenomenon that should be so much a matter of pleasure, which is now looked upon with anxiety because of our priorities and the way we live.  Yet on occasion it can also bring about so much misery and suffering that it could turn dreadful.
How many of us and how often would we would have not exclaimed Oh! s**t when we found that it had started raining when we had not expected it to.  I wonder if people of one or two generations before us would have reacted the same way, as often as we do.


Here is hoping that we would all learn to look at an unexpected shower differently. Here is further hoping that once in a while we will visit a place that will allow us to enjoy the rain in our own unique ways, like Ghosh recommends.


Ghosh's piece is a good example of how simple ideas expressed in equally simple, yet elegant, prose can make for delectable reading even if it does not say anything profound. 


I hope you  enjoy it as much as I did...


Nanni....Namaskaaram