Krishi Darshan: Stuffed and Starved

For those of you born in the nineties or later, unaware of the word "Krishi Darshan": it is a TV program started in 1966 on Doordarshan - the Indian State sponsored Television channel. It literally translates to "A look at Agriculture".

In the eighties, growing up as an urban kid, it was the most boring program one could imagine watching, but then there was nothing else to watch. The dullest anchors interviewed the dullest speakers on the nature of soil, various low and high productivity seeds and ways to improve crops using chemicals and fertilizers. The National Propaganda and our lie-infested school books harped about how successful the Green Revolution was.

The underlying theme of all propaganda was: hold your head and your cock high because socialist India is going great guns. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer). And so the pseudo socialist spin went on till 1991 when we were informed by the then finance minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, that India was about to go bankrupt!

Compared to today, some may remember that as a more innocent time. But that would be a romantic fallacy. Indira's India was as corrupt as today's India. The only difference being that there was a sense of shame in corruption (or maybe even that is my childhood imagination). Today, that shame, imagined or otherwise, has certainly gone away. Now we boldly proclaim our right to plunder and call it "Free Market". And of course a lot more have joined the orgy giving it a notion of democratic participation.

Ubuntu - Reflect my Humanity

While many of you may have come to know the word "Ubuntu" through the Linux based operating system it is worth getting to know its meaning which is deeply philosophical. Ubuntu is an ancient Bantu word and, like many ancient words, it is open to interpretation. Desmond Tutu describes it as:

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

It is somewhat similar to the concept of Ātman in Hinduism though I understand Ubuntu as more humanist with lesser religious connotations. I personally liked what Chris Abani has to say about Ubuntu. In his talk at TED he said:

The only way for me to be Human is for you to reflect my Humanity back at me.

Simple, poetic and thoughtful. Reading Chris Abani, his sensitivity to human stories and the way he tells it, is reminiscent of reading Tagore. Abani, a Nigerian Heebo, is an English writer, poet and musician. His work is political in nature but very human in its telling. It mostly revolves around themes of lost and created identities and the absence of objectivity in human society. Graceland or his latest Song for Night are great books on American exported Pop Culture mixed with the reality of War, Greed and Corruption in conflict ravaged Africa.

That boy refuses to grow up

Just saw Volker Schlndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum). The film is based on Gnter Grass' first book in his Danzig (Gdańsk) trilogy about Kashubian life in Poland before the Nazi invasion. It follows the life of Oskar Matzerath the three year old who refuses to grow up. His refusal is a statement of protest against the grown up world. Disgusted by the hypocrisy around him, he orchestrates his own fall from the cellar stairs causing a head injury which arrests his growth. The voiceover chills you as he announces, in his shrill voice, just before his jump:

"That day, reflecting on the grown-up world and my own future, I decided to call a halt - to stop growing then and there and remain a three year old, a gnome, once and for all."