The Audacity of Hope

“Extreme hopes are born out of extreme misery.”
-Bertrand Russell

I spent the first half of winter in the biting cold of North India and moved down south as the harsh winter claimed an unbelievable number of lives in our country even as temperature remained well above the zero degree mark. I was musing over the unpreparedness of Indians to respond to climatic variations when a nightmare was waiting at my doorstep in the form of the fiercest tropical cyclone of the year. In the middle of the night as windows and doors crashed and buildings trembled as if in response to a supernatural vile force, I tried naming the demon outside. It seemed like a howling wind, a terrible earthquake and a tsunami at the same time. After an endless wait of uncertain hours, a part of my house was blown off and the other was under water. I was the unprepared victim living in a vulnerable country, who was roughly shaken up by a natural disaster. I realised that I was as unprepared to realise, respond and recover from a natural calamity as my northern counterparts are every year.

Coping with a disaster
India is a country so varied in hypsographic and climatic conditions that more than 229 districts (roughly a third) in the country are in the seismic belt and 70% of the plains are vulnerable to floods. 95%of the disasters in the world happen in the developing countries and India has the second largest share in the casualties in the world. This is not to state that we are living on a time bomb. Disasters have become more frequent in recent times due to various reasons. The super cyclone of Orissa and the earthquake of Gujarat, the tsunami of 2004 and cyclone Jal are all fresh in our memories. My grandparents who probably saw the Great War as the biggest disaster had a reasonably peaceful life compared to me who has already experienced one cyclone per year in the last two years. Disasters-chemical, biological or natural hit us unexpectedly leaving us too battered or bruised with a trail of unspeakable devastation. Natural disasters can be fierce and unavoidable; hence disaster management as a post disaster activity has to change. Natural calamities should not transform into unmanageable disasters.

With the best of Government assistance, external help and available technology we are still not efficient in coping with a disaster. Community preparedness to deal with a disaster should be high in vulnerable zones. Awareness through publicity, media and education is the need of the hour. The government has to invest heavily in preventive measures to save and spare lives, livelihoods, economic and biological assets. Early and advanced warning systems have to be relied upon especially as India has a long coastline of 60000 km2. It is incredible that we are yet to map our coast lines from Gujarat to West Bengal, identify the flood lines and estimate the rising sea level. Synergy and reticulated action from different ministries concerned can save the situation. Strategic thinking and political will is imperative in these difficult times.

In a vast and difficult terrain like India, execution of relief measures is doubly difficult. Our rehabilitation projects are not well begun and are rarely completed. Coupled with advanced technologies, post disaster activity can be largely avoided if evacuation strategies and reserves are in place before the calamity strikes. Collaboration with other countries that are efficient in disaster management will help here. Legal and institutional measures in dealing with disasters should also be in place. The emphasis given in the tenth five year plan should culminate in meaningful action at least by the twelfth!

Weaving lives together
The positive outcome of surviving a calamity is that I had a chance to start afresh literally. I had faced my worst fears and I had come out of it alive. Terror struck and glad to be spared, I ran out to the streets after the rains abated to see men vigorously working braving the misfortune to build their lives. The common man who lost everything was the hero of the hour as he did not give in to the finality of a heart break. The initial fear that gave way to grief soon transformed into an angry energy as we worked on to rebuild our collapsed dreams. I was amazed at the optimism and hope in our hearts in the face of such difficulty and uncertainty. It was then that I realised what Barack Obama called ‘the audacity of hope’. It is the continual state of expectation of goodness, progress and prosperity in our hearts. It is simply that which drives us to live.

RABINDRA BHAVANA

‘Yet one solitary tear
Would hang on the cheek of time...’
Rabindranath Tagore

This year marks the sesquicentennial birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore and the songs, dances, theatre and the re-reading of Tagore is a jubilant celebration that will probably culminate with the centenary of Tagore winning the Nobel Prize next year. The fervour of the festivals may be hollow or worse obeisance to a habit of carefully remembering anniversaries of luminaries. Unaware of the hype, I began my journey in search of the splendid old man who gave ‘Kabuliwallah’ to my class six reader. Mini is every Indian girl of that uncorrupted simple Indian life and Kabuliwallah is the personification of the imaginary friend from strange lands that a girl ought to have. When I saw the standard Tagore picture in all Indian text books of the splendid old man, I only became convinced of the veracity of the story. I always knew old men could be trusted; I still wrote to Santa and heard stories from toothless grandfathers of the gramam. When I graduated to ‘Thakurda’ in my adolescence the pervading pathos saddened me like Kamala Das and R.K.Narayan. Finally when I had some time to go to the ghats of Bengal to understand the ebb and flow of his poetry, the rhythm of riverine Bengal that inspired his stories, the grand voyages that helped the solitary sane voice speak of a new humanism, he is a ripe 150 years old. This is not a tribute; it is an investigation- a curious 10 year old can have her revenge now.

A Rebel
I first wanted to name this article ‘Timeless Tagore’. But my research left me aghast as I copiously read the disparaging idolising of the poet by the Indians as much as the stoic criticism from the Westerners (thankfully only after reading Rabindranath’s works). For all non-Bengalis it is only hovering at the gates of a grand haveli trying to divine the regal splendour within. Even then for an Indian, it is relatively easy to understand the images, idols and ideals that his oeuvre is replete with. We risk losing the music of the language, the deflections, the easy onomatopoeia; but we can still derive some pleasure in reading his lyrics, for his words are inherently musical and his poems buzz and hum in your heart. This difference in understanding him has led the Bengalis to call him Rabindranath while his western audience always know him as the anglicised Tagore. So I decided not to write a panegyric that I had planned but an introduction- an attempt to understand the literary oeuvre of the genius ‘Rabindra Bhavana’ which the poet himself thought his jiban debata inspired.

Rabindranath wrote in Bengali- the language was for him both love and the lover, inspiration and the poem, the muse and its offspring. He used the language in novel and original forms finally taking it beyond the literary uses to which he made use of her. He wrote scientific treatise in Bengali and held a staunch view that the language should be used in legal and other aspects of public life as well. Bengali is the air he breathed, his sigh, his scream and his song. This aspect rather distanced him from all outsiders as what was essentially him was lost in the translation. The enthusiasm that W.B.Yeats and Ezra Pound showed in his Gitanjali that lead him to win the Nobel Prize waned and there was a time when a critic wrote “perhaps the time has come for us to forget that Tagore was ever a poet and think of his more intelligible achievements.” The extra-ordinary charisma he wielded with his followers was contrasted by the flak he received in equal measures or sometimes more. In his own words he received ‘blame and praise in the proportion of water and land on earth’. Such impish wit coupled with a deeply sensitive disposition is one of the many contradictions of the person and consequently the artist. Rabindranath could be effortlessly humorous after he tired himself out of being deeply hurt. The complexity and contradiction that baffle the student of the artist is because primarily he adorned different roles as a poet, playwright, story writer, painter, composer and an activist trying to express an essentially multilayered philosophy that yearned for a whole. This herculean task, he tried to attempt with the light wings of an amateur. A lifelong truant, he dropped out of a formal education at the age of thirteen and educated himself ever since. “My ignorance combined with my heresy turned me into a literary outlaw,” he said. His rebelliousness essentially made him an outlaw everywhere as he played dumb to the rules of form and structure and roamed the literary landscape of a turbulent India whispering his songs of deep passion and devotion. In his pantheism he is close to Wordsworth searching for the golden thread of Unity in all creations, in his romanticism he sings like Keats paying his odes and in his ethereal dreams of other worlds he is Coleridge telling us narrative poems of the sinning mariner and the fallen albatross. The glorified amateur wrote ninety stories, 2000 songs and played with his muse, peerless. Yet 3000 of his paintings are locked away in a museum in Bengal. As William Radice poignantly remarks, “...the apparent impishness, their revelry in the odd, the grotesque and the meaningless...” is the signature mark of his works and this makes him an obscure artist, understandably embarrassing to his supporters.

The Oeuvre
I have a modest ear for music that prevents me from commenting on the main chunk of his works- his songs. My appreciation of painting is rather amateurish. This excludes two major areas of Rabindranath’s oeuvre. I can only lay claim to his words translated in English. On this tenuous notion of knowledge, I share some of the works that I enjoyed. There is an excellent edition of his ‘Selected Poems’ edited by William Radice brought put by Penguin India. It covers selected poems period wise beginning from the fertile debonair to the spiritual saint that Rabindranath was. The themes of love and longing, betrayal, the deeply religious spirituality that nature aroused in him are all present in his early poems on love, its renewal and death. Post Nobel (a churlish classification, yet for convenience) he writes his famous poems Flute-Music, Deception and a Grand-father’s Holiday full of the elusive abstract called love and pathos. In the last section, the recurring themes of leaving, waiting, sick-bed and renewal are a presage of things to come.

For the story lovers, there is a companion book ‘The Postmaster’ edited by the same scholar. An eclectic selection from Rabindranath’s prolific 90 stories brings out the stories of false hopes, wishes granted and taken away, single nights, last serenades, the serfdom of an unjust society based on land relations and the sceptre stories thrown in to make it interesting, instructive and unputdownable. The crisp stories end abruptly and the sad ones just long enough to melt you down like a sad Sindhubhairavi. The serene Padma that flows, the torrential rain that disrupt, the Ghats that remind you of leaving and parting on the banks of Padma that flows...it is a beautiful cycle of “the human world of happiness and sadness, meeting and parting, longing to rove freely in a world of unfettered beauty” as the introduction aptly describes.

Delve into the words that tease and pray, that sings and sighs- try to work out the whimses of Rabindra Bhavana. The best you can do to the genius that was freedom bound, the lone tear on the cheek of time.


Notes
1.The famous story of Tagore
2.The protagonist, a six-year girl of the story Kabuliwallah.
3.The village commune in south India
4.A famous Short-story by Tagore
5.Popular Indian writers who wrote in English. Kamala Das was a poet and R.K.Narayan wrote stories of his idyllic imaginary Indian village Malgudi. Both were known for their works rich in pathos.
6.Bungalow, a sign of affluence. Tagore was a land owning Zamindar and hence the reference.
7.Life Giver (The Muse)
8.The western writers who introduced Tagore in England
9.His seminal work that fetched him the Nobel Prize.
10.Tagore described this ideal as ‘Purnata’.
11.A classical Indian raga.

NEAR FAR

“To be reconciled to the inevitable with good grace is wisdom”
- Rabindranath Tagore

Like the inky blue blanket of the night wraps the fiery red of the day and puts it to a deep, dreamless sleep, Tagore’s poetry washes me over at the end of a tempestuous year. Like a soothing balm, it is mellifluous and beautiful and is slowly giving me things like hope and calm. Poetry never offers something outrightly brazen like courage or strength; it gives a squishy melting feeling deep down and makes you believe in love. Poetry is impossible without love just as life is improbable without hope. These are abstract indefinable good feelings that make us move on. In such turbulent times, when idealism is laughed at and professional people manage the world so well, I chose to stray with Tagore who believed that heavens still touched the earth in its horizons. To be talking like this is a self destructive confession of a romantic but perched on the tail fin of the year, some of you may be looking forward to living life next year; not simply managing it as though it were a difficult child.

In giving this message, Tagore is the most useful. As a student of literature, what applies to me when I learn Tagore’s oeuvre can be extended to ‘life’. There is no use sitting at the feet of his poetry or life for that matter looking for wisdom. It makes fools out of us all. Instead as each day progresses, rhyme, sense and rhythm drops; days stretch themselves out as undecipherable lengthy lines of a poem, embellishments seem incongruent. What bothers us so much in the beginning- the structure – seem so difficult to maintain in the end. As we try to make sense, we have to rewrite it and read it a different way. It is a gradual process progressively leading to stark naked exposure.

In the process of creation of a poem, I always begin with the set of rules I abide by. As lines expand, commandments falter and wings sprout on their own. A poem always leaves me at a different place than I imagined at the outset. This is the principle that holds true for all works of art and learning about them as well. Wherever there are too many variables, I approximate. My vision is certainly skewed, I call it subjective- it is far from how things really are. But here like everywhere else, I comfort myself with the importance of the journey rather than focussing on the impotency of my mind.

As a new year unfolds, I hope you find the novelty, balance, contrast and rhythm to make life bearable. Lock away the dissecting microscopes, open your eyes, shut away the cameras and open your mind- you are the most precious recorder of your life. At the end of the year, you can sit with the shards of moments trying to figure it all out- like playing an impossible jigsaw. Do not care about the logic- children still play with coloured pebbles and we still facebook our frustrations. It is always in the hope that there is a unifying larger meaning to the unreasonableness in us and the unpredictability of life.

Before the Gods snatch it away, drink it! Happy 2012!

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

“Wind to thy wings, light to thy path, dreams to thy heart.”

I have always had an immense desire to study in the best Universities of our times. Where I study has been as important as what I study because it is in the best institutions of higher learning that ideas are conceived, imagination is appreciated and horizons are widened. I value the education in the lap of life and culture as much as the learning in the cradle of a University. Therefore during my Master’s in English language and literature, I chose to learn a foreign language.

France is the largest country in Western Europe with a rich heritage and a unique culture. The passport to France is really the French Language. There are 16 Alliances Françaises in India imparting French language courses and they organise cultural programmes to give Indians a taste of their life. It is an immensely rewarding achievement to master any foreign language, especially French as it can be converted into great educational and employment opportunities not just in France but in key positions of diplomacy, Politics, International Relations, Journalism or even corporate sector across the world.

My odyssey with the French language was exciting. It was an adventure with a new language, culture and a way of life. I mastered the language slowly and succeeded in passing the French Diplômes with flying colours. The director of Alliance Française de Pondichéry came up with the idea of ‘the Best Student Award’ to be given to one student who will be flown to France to continue learning French language at Eurocentres, the premier Institute to learn foreign languages in Europe. I was thrilled when I won the award after my candidature was scrutinised by a panel of Jury for my education, French language level and motivation to study the language.

In France
Eurocentres where I was going to study was a specialised language school head quartered in Switzerland. It had three branches in France and I was put in the one at the beautiful coastal town of la Rochelle in south west France. I stayed with a French family to immerse myself completely in the French way of life. I spoke French with everyone, ate dinner with the family French style with entrée, plat and dessert including the famous ‘fromage’ or cheese(France has more than 1200 varieties of cheese) and wine. Fashion and food are integral to French life as they value their quality of life the most. They make the most delicious cheese, wine and chocolates, they are à la mode (always up to date in fashion) and their perfumes are truly famous across the globe. The richness of the French life is a symbol of their appreciation of life. I found that they are one among the most health conscious people in the world.

At Eurocentres, I had to pass an entrance test to determine my level and I was put in a class which was truly international in its composition. The classes were very demanding and creative and we were given a clear chart of the syllabus and reference books which were available in the médiathèque( media library). We had all the facilities that we required including internet, tutorials, cultural and sports programme and excursions to the nearby islands. Any programme that would help us integrate into the French culture was not spared. We had feedback forums through interviews and tutorials and all genuine concerns were immediately addressed.
My experience at the school helped me understand the incredible opportunities that great ‘grandes écoles’ and Universities in France offered to International students. It is an incredible country with people who are genuinely warm. I hope that at least some of you will begin to think beyond the conventional destinations of Indian students abroad and tap the potential of other wonderful greener pastures.

(This was published in THE HINDU, 2nd January, 2012)

Arts, Literature, Philosophy: The Ailing Branches of Learning

“Mental slums are more dangerous than material slums”
- Dr.S.Radhakrishnan

It is with deep regret that I read about the closing down of the Department of Philosophy at the Middlesex University, U.K (The HINDU EDUCATIONPLUS, November 7, 2011) for the lack of interested students. Philosophy is one of the oldest subjects in which Man took an active interest. But today, we face a crisis of lack of interest of the present generation in such subjects which are pure, basic and natural to Man. India produces more than five lakhs engineers and thousands of management graduates every year. In the recent times, this statistics has coincided with the desertification of the classrooms of Humanities and Arts and the mushrooming of engineering colleges and management institutes. Many departments in our Universities are likely to go the Middlesex way.

I am second to no one in appreciating the importance of science and technology. Five hundred years ago, Science was the falcon that showed us the power of a soaring imagination, the possibility of meeting infinity and remodelling the concept of divinity. The spirit of never losing a holy curiosity stormed our imagination with gorgeous visions of the worlds to conquer. Nevertheless, greater velocity of moment and giant saltatory leaps do not make progress. We need not just experiments but experience to complete education. Sending a man into the heart of his past is as ennobling as sending him to the depths of the Universe. Universities are the hallowed portals that should provoke and stimulate imagination and animate the spirit of the young to create a better civilization than their own, through language and literature, philosophy and religion, art and thought.

The purpose of education
Goethe says that the purpose of education is to form tastes and to not simply communicate knowledge. Culture is born on the meditation of the living past and the appreciation of the continuing spirit. This requires an openness to accept the unusual, a flexibility to accept the multiplicity and the imagination to understand the nature of truth. It is this pursuit of truth that education encourages. Our estimate of the prospect of learning a subject depends on the employability it offers, which is dictated to us by gigantic nefarious forces. I have heard most of the engineering students absorbed into the corporate sector sheepishly admitting that the job that they do had nothing to do with what they studied. This mindless cherry picking of engineering and management graduates to mould them into corporate puppets insults these respective subjects and puts a death seal into the aspirations, more humane. It leaves an entire generation disillusioned and unfulfilled. The singularly servile attitude of the intellectually timid youth makes them play safe and go with the majority. As Dr. Radhakrishnan remarks, “The bad employer, the unjust law, the corrupt leader and the false teacher thrive because they have never been challenged”. He goes on to add that “Education has failed you if it does not develop in you a love of severe and sustained thinking and resistance to popular sentiment and mob passion”. To make an original choice and be true to oneself we need strength of character besides what Mathew Arnold calls sweetness (of temper) and light (sanity of outlook). The power of education is the power to make that choice.

Need for a Renaissance
Having been bred in a system that stifles individuality, our stagnant spirits produce polluted thoughts. The business of learning deals not only with solemn facts but the vast vicissitudes of human life. As Tagore says, we are gifted with a mental sense that finds its object not by analysis but by apprehension. We have to learn to appreciate both the story and the narration, both the external impulse and the internal self unfolding. We have to re-discover our pure instinct of sympathy and fellow feeling. Our life is not just a matter of science but of social ethics as well. Civilizations cannot be sold in exchange of commodities. Pressing a button and flapping huge mechanical wings might provoke a mild interest of the distant future. But our conscience and ideals alone can be inherited. “Tejasvinav adhitam astu” May our learning impart light.

Light from many Lamps

“Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages”- Thomas Macaulay

We are all inheritors by birth- inheritors of a name, an identity that affirms our belonging to a family, a race, a religion and a nationality. This inheritance also implies a legacy of beliefs, faith, legends and loss. To study our history would be to study all men before us, to know what they believed their story was. Unconsciously we are History’s secret keepers for long after the legends are forgotten, habits last and we pass on our nameless fear and prejudices, the sacred and the sanctimonious to the next generation. India is an abode where layers of centuries rest still to be awaken every year to be celebrated. We celebrate and venerate our antiquity by following their habits and believing their beliefs. I suspect this is tradition.

India with its immense size shocks us but with its immense history humbles us. We stumble over history in space and time- in its hallowed forts, tombs and ruins, in edicts on stone pillars and holy days and nights, on full-moons, new moons and eclipses. With a mindboggling number of religions, sects and sub-sects, every day of the year should be remarkable- for the holy and the unholy warrants prayers; thus the shores of the Indian minds are washed over by divine chants and distant refrains every day.

There is a festival of colours and flowers, there are festivals before and after harvests and like any ancient culture there is time for the new born and the dead- we celebrate every stage of life. One of the most spectacular festivals in India is ‘Deepawali’ that literally means a row of light (lamps). Whether it is the defeat of Ravan at the hands of Ram or the defeat of the demon Narakasura at the hands of Krishna, Deepawali is the celebration of the triumph of the good over the evil.

Post-spring, as the North-East monsoon tumbles down in a roaring downpour in most parts of the country, people celebrate light and its warmth in defiance of the grey, cold and the silent. The ray of light that illuminates our homes and our hearts are the strands of love, goodness, knowledge- in a way, we light the way to happiness. The wisdom of the ages in lighting up lives rings a deeper meaning as darkness envelops us in the form of new demons in our times- fear of hatred, fear of strangers and fear of having less are really fears of communalism, terrorism and poverty. All kinds of fears in Man are essentially the fear of Man. Now more than ever we need light.

There is a beautiful hymn that the nuns of a Catholic congregation sing in my hometown- “Lead kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom, lead thou me on.” As shadows lengthen, we should bring light out of the little selfish pots where we have hidden them and show them fearlessly that the light still burns and life is alive. Today standing up and speaking out- or any action that brings you out of the faceless crowd can be a threat to life.

In a world that is fast shrinking both due to the technological advancement and the recession of kindness and the magnanimity of spirit, idealism is out-dated and morality is unwanted. Countries collapse like a pack of cards, then disappear and appear after reshuffling. It is the cruel version of the old magician’s trick that I once enjoyed; but it terrorises me when I know that the hand that dealt the cards are always hidden. People call it the new spring but ironically it is the spilling of blood and the drying up of lives.

I never thought that it was possible to disintegrate with the speed of light and explode magnificently but silently like a decaying star. That kind of destruction is also light- a silent light that takes away life. I have heard teachers explain that life begins and ends with water but I realise it is the same with light as well.
In these days and times, I cannot but contextualise the beautiful festival of light. When I see strangers in neighbours and doubts in friends, I have to be political. We need ‘the thoughts that can breathe and the words that can burn’; we also need Man who can love, live and learn. May this Deepawali bless you with the light from many lamps, burn your fears and warm your spirits. May we all be lightened and enlightened. A very happy Deepawali to all my brothers and sisters.

Award from Alliance Française

Report from THE HINDU dated 26 September 2011

Alliance Francaise has emerged as one of the leading schools for French, not only in India, but across the world, according to French Consul General to Puducherry Pierre Fournier.

Speaking on Saturday at the Alliance Francaise at the award ceremony for the best student for the year 2010-2011, who was awarded a trip to France, Mr. Fournier said he was happy that the institution was giving out such a prestigious prize, which would help both the institution and the students.

Addressing the gathering, the Director of Alliance Francaise Fabrice Mongiat said by awarding a trip to France, he hoped to develop the language centre of AF. He had three aims for the centre – to improve the quality of the course, to improve the environment and to encourage students to stick with Alliance for a longer time. This prize would definitely help achieve these goals, he said.

He expressed his hope that more sponsors would come forward to continue this prize in the years to come, he said.

In his speech at the function, President of Alliance Francaise V. Nallam said awarding a trip to France would create a good reputation for the institution and he hoped they would continue it in the coming years.

Principal of Lycee Francais de Pondichery Eric Compan said he was very pleased with this prize, which would encourage more people to learn French. He also offered all the prize winners a chance to use the library at the Lycee.

The best student for the year, K. S. Deepa won a two-week trip to La Rochelle in France and a chance to study 20 hours of French at the Eurocentre there. She was awarded this prize based on a jury decision, which took into consideration performance in the DELF (Diplôme d'études en langue française), class performance and other criteria. There were 30 students who applied for the prize, according to Mr. Mongiat. During the function, nine other students also won prizes for excellent performance in the course.