The thing speaks for itself.
This is not about a muck encrusted creature from the swamp which has suddenly discovered the power of self expression but about a widely accepted principle of law.

The principle stated in laymanese is that even if you were not present say when a falling brick in a construction site hits a god-knows-why-he-was-there passerby on the head when you were at the site , you (the owner-slash-operator-slash-caretaker of the construction site) are legally liable for the said brick and the said brick-noggin clash.  I hope that you are greatly impressed with how I slipped in the legalese into the laymanese with the clever use of the word ‘said’ , not just once. But twice!
(I am sure that lawyers, advocates, solicitors and barristers will all have a point of view on this, shaking their wigged or otherwise wise heads at this flagrant ignorance of the finer legal points. Unfortunately I don’t know the difference between a lawyer, advocate, solicitor and a barrister, so I stand where I am, proud in my lawful naiveté.)


Anyway i heard this term for the first time when I was watching a TV serial about lawyers. I rushed to the fount of all wisdom, Google, and there found the meaning.

So it got me thinking as these things do. I am like an old car on a winter morning, and my brain like a reluctant engine needs to be kick started. The rest of the time I am happy to be in the garage of no use to myself or anyone else.

If res ipsa loquitir ( I love saying this, Latin like Sanskrit having a majesty and imperiousness of purport which the English cannot summon) is to apply, then let us consider the constitution of India and move forward from there.

The C of I says in sum and substance that all of us in this country are entitled to be protected against crime in whatever form it hits us. The police are there for that purpose presumably as are the courts. And the Government,State or Central is there for exactly the same reason. They are not rulers but managers and  safe keepers of our liberty and security and well being in general. Think of them as ward nurses in a well run hospital. In fact if you visualize all the ministers , Chief or otherwise, in those lovely white starched uniforms that the  dedicated sisters of succour (who for some genetic  and socio-economic reason mostly hail from Kerala, ) you would be well served in your diligent search for mitigated respect for them. Hey you may even chortle to yourself as I do now while writing this!

So when people are hurt in a riot started by person or persons unknown, and I hold no specific opinion on this, even if the government isn’t there, it’s their construction site and their brick!
They are liable for damages. Res ipsa loquitir. There I said it again.

So why are governments who are supposed to uphold the law not following it?   Good question. And like many good questions like say where do babies come from, it has no good answer. The answer may be found in the latest court verdict censuring the offending Government for not fulfilling this constitutional obligation. Which is really strange that the lawmakers  and the law keepers are being censured by the law. It’s a little similar to what happens to me the day after when I curse myself for having had too good a time the night before. Well not really, but you get the general drift of my argument.

Well forget the whole compensation bit for a second and the letter of the law. The spirit of the law is a whole another matter, even if you are a teetotaler as many in the not- so-obliquely referred to state profess to be.

At the very least one should practice the golden rule: Do unto others as you you would have done unto you. Incidentally this is a golden rule in very single major religion in the world. 
In the Mahabharata : Do not to others what ye do not wish done to yourself; this is the whole Dharma. Heed  it well. 
Or exactly the same from the Jewish Talmud which says, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbors. That is the entire Torah. The  rest is commentary. Go learn it.”
Or in Islam, the Hadith quotes: No one of you is a believer until you desire for another that which you desire for yourself.

And in Buddhism. In Zoroastrianism. In Confucianism.  In  any ism.

And even if you, God forbid, didn’t believe in God or such forces beyond your ken, take heed from one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant who said that there is a supreme categorical imperative for man and for the society he creates and lives in.  Which simply says, Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time , will that it should become an universal law.  
Simply put, without prejudice to none and with benefit to everyone.
This is the the simple universal law. 
What in polite company we would call natural justice.
But even this is under serious pressure like a potato in a cooker. Every day you hear of the Supreme Court taking the government to task for some sin of omission or commission. You would think that by now this public chiding would make the administrators of our country a trifle red faced.  ( I remember how ashamed I was when my mother scolded me in public. But that ‘s another long story and I don’t want to relive it anyway!)  But it seems that shame has gone the way of the purple-faced langur: rare and absent from public gaze.

And in addition, now we are being told that there are monsters oops ministers who are raising the proverbial finger to the Election Commisision and the whole legal framework of the Election process. Which is also pretty darned unconstitutional and has required the President of India having to write formally to the Prime Minister to keep his minions in check.
Tch. Tch. And I would wag a remonstrative finger at them if I could only see them to do so. 

But in all of this, what about the starving children, women and children of this country?  They were guaranteed protection were they not when they were reincarnated in this country presumably because of extremely bad Karma? The Government is responsible, accountable and bloody-well-ought- to- floggable for this. One cannot hide under the tabled excuse of the distribution system is at fault or that there is ‘leakage’ ( a fabulously devious word for corruption). Fix it, damn it! It is your problem. These are not acts of God, raining thunderbolts on the hapless poor below. This is your linen.Wash it.

If I starve, the Minister for Agriculture, the  Minister for Consumer Affairs( Please note that has nothing to do with morality in or out  the bedroom), and the Minister for Health should all at the very least be sent to bed for a week without food or water.

Just to show thumping of the table, Res ipsa loquitir, once again.

I am all for the law. Provided it is practiced. Provided it is implemented. And provided it is respected.
Even if there are those who think the law is an ass, justice is not.

(Written 2012: how little has changed , how much worse has it become. Quam parum mutata.)

The other day  a friend asked me, how often do you shave? 

I was about to answer, when I realized that he was not looking at my face but my head.

I am bald, shorn of all accoutrement which made Samson bring down pillars and palace. I am so by choice.  And by genetic disposition.

I was once brilliantly coiffured, sporting plumage that would have made a bowerbird proud. Not only would I shake my curls from time invitationally like a red breasted blue footed booby, to continue the avian analogy, but I was also ready to be preened by a member of the opposite sex as they would run their fingers through my locks till I said ouch. I also had very thick tangled growth.

And then like the snow and ice caps melting in Antarctica without so much as a say so, it started to go south on me! 

I  looked at the mirror one day and saw that I actually had a very large head. It hadn’t ballooned overnight but because it didn’t have the forestation to give it vertical dimension, it was like a large unsightly clearing in the Amazon. It was surrounded as are by definition clearings, by remnants of the rain forest. Remnants are just that:remnants.

Not the majestic original hardwood trees, but the thin scrawny specimens of lesser species. Who even knew if they were trees in the first place? Maybe they were just parasitic lianas, deprived of sustenance by their original hosts?

Truth be told it was not a very attractive sight.

Of course if I was given an exaggerated Scottish accent and a few more inches in height and width around the chest, I might have carried all this off Connery fashion.

No such luck.

So I examined this all very objectively and said if I don’t have it let me flaunt it.

Emboldened  and somewhat smugly satisfied by this Oscar Wilde meets Groucho Marx epigrammatic wit, I took myself to the barber. Take it all off I said like the Vicar said to the Duchess.

Ten years later I am bald.

Now even if wanted to it won’t come back. 

The iceberg has melted in the warmer seas. 

The top soil has gone.

It will not return. And all it will do is reflect the sun on a bright day or the full moon when hairy werewolves go gamboling in the few forests that are left for them to gambol in.

written 2012

Today I learned something.
From watching a TV show called the Body of Proof. I won’t get into what the show is about, except that I like it.

But at the end of this one episode, there was this quote from the Buddha.

“There are 4 horses.
The excellent horse moves before the whip touches its back.
The good horse runs at the lightest touch.
The poor horse doesn’t move till it feels pain.
And then there is the very bad horse. It stays still until the whip penetrates its marrow. “

In the running of our lives, we too are like these horses. 

Some of us see the ‘reflection of our own Self’ before any prompting. We know that we are destined to be pure and great and good and whole. We need no goad to change. We are already running, running free towards the light.
I see some of us like this: the lovely young man with a endearing European accent who has dedicated his life to save gibbons in a tropical south Asian forest. I see his humility and feel his love for things that cannot help themselves but when they swing free from tree to tall tree , their grace makes his eyes swell with tears at the sheer wonder of creation. 
he has found his calling without prompting, just his heart calling to the giant beating soul of the forest.

then there are some of us whose life is changed by a chance meeting with a walking inspiration who seems to have ‘manifested’ just for us, a reading of wisdom from a book written by our own minds but by someone else’s hands, a song of utter purity from a blind singer in a gurudwara before sunrise that asks us to bow and weep, or just the simplicity of the smile of a beggar who asks not for alms but for our eyes to meet hers with love.  We feel the breath of Grace and nothing but nothing is the same again: not the flight of an eagle in the clear blue sky, or the roil of thunderclouds at deep sunset or the laughter of a child swinging in his mother’s arms. We are molten.
I see some of us like this: The award winning molecular biologist who doffs his white lab coat for faded saffron robes and who lives as a Tibetan Buddhist monk near the Himalayas. It seems like he is walking not just in thin air but on it it  as he addresses a world conference of scientists and thinkers and doers on the substance of happiness: effulgence shining through.

And some of us are too busy to notice that the visitor at the door might be one of these messengers. Our lives are busy and we have things to do, and to-do lists to complete.  We ask the silent mirror to tell us that we are the fairest in the land, and we answer the question ourselves with a toss of the head, a spay of perfume and a dash of mouthwash. And one day we find the mirror speaking, asking us questions in turn: what use have we made of the gifts we have been bestowed, why do we feel  empty inside in spite of filling ourselves with things and why are we alone? We feel the hurt of people who have used us and discarded us, we feel the emptiness of homes  that are not laughing with children anymore, we feel the need for meaning.  We begin to search. We ask for help sometimes from friends, sometimes from paid professionals, sometimes from self help books, sometimes from spiritual teachers,  sometimes we return to the fold of the church, we go on pilgrimages , we  seek and seek and seek, because we now feel the pain. 
And here is the lovely reward: in just  making the search, we are changed. We are filled with purpose and one day, one shining moment when we realise there is no end but just the journey, we can begin to gallop,  the wind shouting hosannas in our ears.

I see some of us like this: the merchant banker who, on the wings of an epiphany,     funds his own charitable foundation to help create meaningful change in poor urban society . When he speaks now, he has the unmistakable certainty of a missionary and the contentment of a fakir. He is rooted and free. He is rock in the river.


The fourth one is probably the most interesting. It is the one that pays back pain with pain, inflicts suffering on others because it is screaming with agony inside. It knows no mercy because it gets none in return. It asks not to be loved , just to be feared. It feeds off hate. It presumes its greatness because it feels so inadequate in itself. There is no light here, not even the one at the end of the tunnel, just the deadness of darkness. Do not ask this person to feel joy. This person can feel glee though, the evil cackle of victory. And morality has left this abode a long time ago, purposeless end not just justifying but dictating the means.
This is the substance of nightmares.

The Buddha meets one such person. This is his story:

There was a notorious murderer whose back story about he became one is in itself a tale unto itself. But when the Buddha met him he was feared and dreaded  and known as Angulimala, one who wears fingers as a garland. He had 999 fingers collected as his gruesome trophies.

“When the Buddha heard about Angulimala, he quietly left the Jetavana and set out for the Jalani forest, some forty kilometres away. As the Buddha walked along the road, groups of travellers passed him and as they did, they warned him not to continue alone because of the danger. He simply smiled and continued on his way. When Angulimala saw the Buddha, he was most surprised. “This is wonderful indeed. Usually only travellers in groups of twenty, thirty or forty come along this road and here is an ascetic travelling alone. I will kill him.”

Seizing his sword and shield, Angulimala emerged from the jungle and began to chase the Buddha, but although he ran as fast as he could, he could not catch up with the Buddha, who only walked. He put on a burst of speed but still could not get near the Buddha. Utterly bewildered, he shouted out: “Stand still, ascetic!”
The Buddha turned around and looked at him, and replied: “I am still. Why don’t you be still also?” Even more bewildered Angulimala asked: “What do you mean, ascetic?”
“I am still in that I harm no living being. You kill and therefore you are not still,” replied the Buddha.

The terrible things that he had done and the wretchedness of his life dawned on Angulimala and he broke down and sobbed. He threw down his weapons, bowed at the Buddha’s feet and asked to become a monk. The Buddha ordained him and together they set out for Savatthi. “

In time, it is said, Angulimala became one of the Buddha’s most respected disciples.

What does it take to achieve transformation? Does one have to be swamped in mire and then rise like the lotus?  Does one have to undergo the tribulations of Job to understand the nature of , as Dostoevsky says, the benevolent indifference of the universe? Or can we rise and take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Can we win the greater Jihad, the inner struggle against our own demons? What does it take to recognize where the fight lies? Will only suffering reveal the true nature of Man, his inner perfect Self?

Asoka the Great,considered by  many historians to be the first unifier of India had to see the destruction he wrought on his own people when he waged merciless and ambitious war,before he saw the light. The suffering he caused on countless men women and children in the pursuit of power was so monstrous that  when he could finally see what he had done,  he became  Budhha’s greatest servant forsaking violence and trying to create a equitable society based on the principles of Dharma enunciated by the Buddha. 
The whip had to cut to the marrow.  The unspeakable horror of man’s cruelty to  his fellow man led to one of the most renowned transformations in human history.

And why is this important to us?

Consider this: India is the fourth horse. 

And maybe one day the whip will cut to the marrow. We  will  begin to stir when the agony of inflicted poverty, the torture of corruption,  the abyss of amorality, the absence of conscience  and the  sheer impossibility  of our lives will make us begin to reclaim our humanity.

the stuttering of the Lok Pal Bill  gives me pause. It by no means is a panacea for what ails us. We will need to accost the Buddha on the road  as well. But the fact that the ‘fors’ and the ‘againsts’  have run the bill aground  on the shoals of political expediency makes me less than optimistic that we not feeling the pain.


I can only hope. The Buddha in his infinite loving kindness believed that everyone and everything is worthy of redemption given time.

India , I hope, has enough time for redemption.


Postscript:  Asoka ‘s seal,the three headed lion, is the official seal of India.

written: 2011

I was, as is often my wont, watching TV the other day, not really looking for inspiration or enlightenment, but sort of floating along in the hope of being entertained, when I came across this program called Undercover Boss on BBC Entertainment.
This is not a program ,as you may wrongly surmise from the title, about the CEO of Victoria’s Secret. This is about the czars or at the very least paid satraps of various enterprises who purportedly go  incognito  to meet their humble minions and see for themselves what happens, as you may say, in the belly of the beast. There they find  hidden truths, real insights and the like which, in the wonderfully sugar coated world of television, transforms them  and their companies. Care and nurture and sympathy  then flows from every pixel of the screen.
I am usually sanguine about these things, believing as I do in the innate goodness of people  with few exceptions. Vlad the Impaler springs to mind.
(I am of course curious as to how these CEO’s remain unidentified, given that there is a camera crew following them around. I presume there is a cover story for this undercover work, which is readily credible.)
But it is television after all, reality now passing for art.

This of course started me thinking. ( Amazing how I can start thinking like this with such little to go on.Impressive.)
I thought about ancient kings and apparently even queens who would descend from their palaces  cloaked as commoners or disguised as mendicants and who would wander the streets and villages of their kingdom revealing themselves to no one, trying to measure the satisfaction index of their rule.

It is presumed that this resulted in a kinder more  benevolent realm. One can’t say for sure since this was chronicled by fawning royal historians.
In a sense this is like today’s TV and you can’t really be sure.
But it is for sure that when Akbar wandered the alleyways of Old Delhi, he didn’t announce it with sun-guns and boom mikes.

And now in my enchanted land, i see the Overcover Boss at work: The politician who says he will undertake a ‘Padayatra’,  a journey on foot across the rural landscape of a  federal state or two. He may or may not actually walk, and may be ferried by helicopter to convenient staging points. Or there is the more flamboyant ‘Rath Yatra’ which has signifying nods to Royal Chariots, nay,even to the temple chariots of Jagannath from whence we derive the word juggernaut. So we have our versions of the Popemobile which are flamboyantly decorated campers which drive the politician from town to town , village to village where quote adoring unquote citizens come out in thousands to cheer  and exhort their hero. This form of the ‘boss’ wandering his lands is always as the politician will tell  you, issue based. As in,they have an issue with the the other party and they would rather get the voters to duke it out than roll up their sleeves and fight it out like knights of yore.
We also have the heartwarming stories of the youth icon who sups with the lower caste  villager, photo-op and all thrown in. I of course think why would this even be written about, if for example he had dined with a not low caste but equally poor villager. Or going further, in extremis, if he had dined with a non-poor,non-low caste person.:Me for example. 
The answer is that it makes for good TV as Murdoch might say. We don’t seem to realize that we only perpetuate the idiom of high and low caste by harping on their unfortunate accident of birth, economic circumstance becoming a secondary footnote.
Hey, but that’s just me, being contrarian as usual.
The reason for all this al fresco dining is apparently so that one can truly understand the nature of what ails these people.( I could tell you all that in one word but I wouldn’t make for good copy.)  It is amazing that the media begins to talk of how finally, here is a person of the people, who has descended  from on high to walk the earth with mere humans.

This too is reality TV. 
In all fairness the youth icon is a darn sight better looking than half the tv stars. And he does seem to want to have the visceral experience of poverty, so maybe he does care?  Maybe he is a prisoner of incumbent publicity? I don’t know, and I remain hopefully doubtful, waiting to feel the flesh of the wound as Thomas before the risen Christ.

So from the anonymous and concerned truth seeker to the well publicized vote seeker: what a journey we have made my countrymen.

We seek no truth about what the poor man is going through, beyond the advantage we perceive in its newsworthiness, or that we can use to cast aspersions at the others who also live in glass palaces of power. 
If we really wanted to know what people thought of their so-called leaders, we might have considered the anonymity of modern day market research.
But we already know what people think of their ‘bosses’. And most of it would be unprintable and eminently ‘bleep able’.

Unfortunately, we don’t even seek  the saccharine transformation of the undercover boss.

What is the single biggest danger from AI and automation 

So much is discussed about AI and the paradigm busting transformation it will create for humanity: in the areas of food , medicine, logistics, manufacture , education and much much more.

Much also continues to be discussed about human redundancies and re-training for new skills and employment.

Proponents of AI have two arguments:  one that AI will create new jobs in areas yet to be defined or discovered and so the spectre of unemployment will dissipate with different employability.

The other argument ,a more utopian view, is that AI will make society truly egalitarian and that we may not even need that many jobs and instead we can pursue interests that are not necessarily economic in benefit.

Both are essentially statistical arguments: so many numbers lost vs so many gained. Statistics unfortunately has no view on Values. 

By this I do not refer to economic evaluations but on how human beings perceive their purpose as driven by values

One of those values which seems to inform the entire human condition is whether an individual has the ability to create something of value.

The carpenter – maybe one of those that will be made redundant- creates value with his hands. As does the gardener. And even the DIY man made eponymous by Tim Allen.

We measure our relevance to others by the value we generate.

What will happen when we are not of value?

The Machine will not judge.

Fellow humans will.

I should feel empowered that I ‘know’ when I am going to die. Prescience is the stuff of witches and warlocks and necromancers.

And they always look confident in illustrations.

I was told that I would be alone,working and 79 when I went , departed this carapace and then found whatever version of Karma awaited me.

Mind you this was presented as an executive summary of my complete astrological chart. I had said to her when she said she had got my readings completed, ‘Give me the highlights.’

She,without any preamble, gave me news of my death. No news of fortunes and misfortunes, travels and travails,strangers and lovers. Just you are going to die on such and such.

The presenter was a work acquaintance , almost friend but not quite. She was a student of astrology. Who knew that there was a recognised degree in this field? A chance ha-ha you should do my chart remark over a working lunch led to her assiduously getting it done by her learned teacher. It was printed and spiral bound and had mathematical notations in it. A lot of esoterica. I haven’t read it yet.

And why would I ?

It seems like if I believe in this then all has been revealed. And knowing any of the future minutiae would only hamper my preparation for the Grand Event.

At first I was taken aback. A micro expression expert may have noticed all of the micro expression emotions twitching on my face minus happiness.

Certainly surprise.

I know that I felt disappointed. I had often looked at my life line on my palm as a reassurance of longevity.My line curved like a bow and released its arrow  almost at the wrist: yippee ki-a-yay m’fucker, I would last longer than Bruce Willis no matter how many terrorists attacked me!

I had studied palmistry casually when I was young. It was great for getting to hold the hands of lovely young women, and by gently tracing the lines , effect a caress and look up to see if the pupils had dilated. It was sneaky and underhanded if you will pardon the ‘pun’.  I didn’t  believe in palmistry and the portents of the future.

At that age I was immortal anyway.

So to my disappointment.

I wasn’t so afraid of dying. Enough study of the Upanishads, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Existentialists, The Stoics, Darwin, Crick and Watson, Dawkins,  and even Kubler-Ross had inured me to the inevitability of it, the pointlessness of yearning for an after life( it was a binary result either way) and the idea of legacy. The dead don’t enjoy their estates.

I was disappointed because I thought I had more time than was now afforded to me: more spaces to go, more food to eat , more sunsets to savour.  And I had thought I still had enough time to write my great book all in quotes and capitals if only to prove to my ever nagging ego that I had it in me.

It’s not that I didn’t have time in the past .

It’s just that I am a procrastinator. Who is nothing but an optimist who believes there is always time to do that one thing .

So I was disappointed when I heard the news of my impending death. I couldn’t take it easy any more. I had to get busy so that I could be working when the knock came at the door.

So I am writing this and other such musings. After all I don’t want to disappoint the astrologer.

“As for the principle of free speech, it’s hard to invoke it with any enthusiasm when the speech that’s being made free with is inane. Of course, the kind of free speech we would all prefer is that with which we concur: “freeish” speech, speech whose freedom is conditional on our approval of it. But failing that, can’t we at least have free speech only on the understanding that it is shapely, evenly considered and well expressed?” Harold Jacobson in The Independent c 2004

Free speech cannot be a free rant

Speech buttressed by fact, reasoned and reasonable argument is worthy of praise and recommendation in private and public fora.

That in no easy way can be curbed because it creates debate and from that stirred soupçon come stirring ideas  bubbling with flavours of dissent and assent.

It need not further agendas , political or social, but can exist independent of them often providing  either an inspired compass for them or simply to hold an honest mirror like the one in Snow White.

Free Speech has become a lightning rod for the proponents of liberalism and  conservative authoritarianism alike.

The former will insist with the flared nostrils of righteousness that free speech must be allowed regardless of whether the opinion springs from fact, the spirit of scientific enquiry  or the lessons of history.  They will argue that no speech is right or wrong, it’s for the listener to make judgment on it.

This view presupposes that the listeners are privy to a higher ability of discrimination than the speakers. In a world where truth is at an unaffordable premium, this seems somewhat naive. However they will say, if you were to filter argument , where would it end?  And the spectre of Censorship, more dreaded than the Grim Reaper,is incanted before your eyes.

The latter will insist, eyes aflame with indignation, that you cannot speak whatever you think, unless it conforms to  beliefs that have been sanctified by higher powers, such as God, or their anointed representatives on earth or the books that purport to be the voice of God, or by ordinary people who have more money than you , more guns than you or very simply more airwaves than you. Free speech is dissent they will say, and that is the enemy of order and also of ordained progress. After all manifest destiny is an idea to be cherished. And that idea  brooks no argument.

In both cases it seems that we tend to forget debate.

If you speak freely, you must be open to dissent. If you are not allowed to speak freely, you must be allowed to question the fatwa against it.

In both cases the idea of dissent or question happens after the fact. And by which time we are all awash in floods of polemic, diatribe and demagoguery.

Struggling for breath ,let alone voice, we can but be taken in the current of affairs, to finally be beached on lonely isles.

And we,wistfully, can only rail against those tides with messages in digital bottles.

I just read a news item that came in from Singapore about a ‘scholar’ who had accused a Government minister of being an Islamophobe.

Of course this news item was deemed important by NDTV , the furnishing agency, because the offending person was of Indian origin.
(On a side note, it seems that we, Indians one and all, need constant assurance that we are some how important in world affairs, and even some trivia like this would be considered significant to us all. Not to mind, never matter that as a quarter of the world’s population, and as one of the top economies on the planet, we are significant in more ways than one. Maybe we feel, such news would indicate, that we are battling way below our weight.)

Anyway, ( deep sigh), it all resolved itself without much bloodshed.
She apologised. She should have . It was a stupid remark
He accepted. He need not have. But he turned out to be more of a ‘scholar’ than his accuser.

What got me thinking was not the actual story, but the shrugged-off remark made by the minister.

“People go and say things without really thinking about what they intended to say, and end up saying all sorts of things which are untrue,” said Mr Shanmugam. “We left it at that.”

Why did it get me thinking?
Because all of this happened on Twitter and Facebook.
( the actual resolution, craven apology and all, happened face to face. Which brings me to another side note. Facebook is an oxymoron. Nobody actually meets anyone face to face .)

And the minister’s magnanimous remark was actually very wise for our times.

No one sits down and counts from one to ten or in reverse which truly works better ( try it!) before they speak .
On trigger happy Twitter and FB etc we let our machine-gun mouths loose. Consequence be damned. Facts be damned. Reason be damned.
What is blessed however is the speed of our reaction, our opinion flying out at the speed of thought to millions. And we can cry, ‘we were first to say this very, very important thing.’

The urgency to say something , to have a millisecond of fame, the hope that we will emulate an airborne disease with external viral prejudice seems to possess us.
We start epidemics of opinion with an ill-thought word or idea. These assume the cloak of truth, and like shades are free to roam and kill and maim. At the very least cause hurt. At worst, despair.

We have lost the wisdom of patience.

If there is one thing which counterweights against the so called transparency of social media, it would be this: the loss of wisdom.

We may take heed from this very typical Irish quip, which my erstwhile boss used to great effect:
You can’t un-fart.

 

 

 

 

The US Republican led Senate is planning to vote on a ‘simple repeal of The Affordable Care Act ‘ also known as Obamacare.

It is of course as I had earlier referred to in a previous musing, called this to ensure that the words affordable ( a benign positive word) care(another word that twinges with the affections of Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa) are substituted by a possessive or better still possessed noun. It now reads like you will be in the care of, the thrall of Satan himself!

Anyway this motion to repeal by the Senate,leader exhorted by the President ,got me thinking.

This would effectively mean that there would be no legislation active in this area . Insurance companies could go back to charging want they wanted and refuse who they didn’t want.

I was reminded of a story. I guess it’s a parable.

Once upon a time there were two cloth merchants. They had shops directly opposite each other.
They also hated each other.
If one brought in something new, the other would too and charge less.
If one put something on discount, the other would slash his prices.
One would bad mouth the other to his customers. The other would reply with equal in not more vitriol.
This went on for years. It got worse and worse.
Till even God couldn’t take this anymore.

So fed up with his squabbling children he sent his best negotiator-angel, his Secretary of State as it were, to fix this!

The Angel let’s call him John, descended on Market Street and met the two merchants. After due introductions accompanied by oohs and ‘awes’ and supplications to the Presence (after all both merchants were God fearing and religious faithfuls) they were admonished by John.
They of course had their arguments prepared against each other.
John realised he needed a solution befitting of him and his Master.

He said to them: If you stop this fighting and hate, I will grant you both anything you desire. Anything at all, over and above reason itself.

They both nodded with enthusiasm. Who wouldn’t?

But, said John, there is a condition. Whatever one person chooses, the other will get double of that. You both get one wish each.

Let’s toss for it .

Heads or tails?
It came up tails.

The winning merchant beamed.
And John reminded him once again, whatever you wish for the other will get double of that.

The first merchant scowled at his rival.

Then without blinking he said, Put one of my eyes out!

Therein endeth the lesson.

 

Here I was minding my own business like shop keepers often do. Then I decided to leave that store and switched to Netflix instead. My reasoning of course was not prompted by the search for something meaningful, but as you may know or maybe you don’t, meaning comes up and bites you on the part of your body you use to do your thinking with.

So, anyway, [deep sigh] I watched an episode of Chelsea. She is wonderfully funny [at times] and irritating [at times] and interesting [always]. That’s what a chat show* host is supposed to be, methinks. If they weren’t, then you would not watch them.

[These asterisks will appear throughout this musing so that you will think that this is profound.]

Chelsea interviewed Selma Hayek, [delightful intelligent person as ever] then riffed through some anti Trump, anti Republican stuff as is her wont [ three cheers for that] and then talked about, and with, refugees in Britain. * [Lachrymal conversations and what’s the other word for making one really angry at powers that be?]  And then she talked with Jerrod Carmichael [ thirty-not- something-but-just thirty actor/comedian/script writer] who blew me away with his cyclonic mind and at the same time his zephyr like sensitivity. JC [as nobody but me likes to call him*] talked about the word ‘nigger’ and the power it has over people. And why it needed to be discussed.

So it got me thinking.

Language is why and how we evolved. It wasn’t tools. Apes use them. So do otters. And even birds. It wasn’t bipedalism. I think that was partly something about standing up to see farther like sifakas and meerkats do, and maybe it was just an effect rather than a cause of developing brain size. * Language differentiates us from every other species on the planet. Sure they say that dolphins and whales and birds and chimps all communicate. But they don’t label stuff and they do not articulate that label. We are the only species that seems to have developed ‘otherness’.  Because we differentiate I from you, we from they and us from them.

Language begins with the idea of self. Self awareness* allows us to see what else is out there apart from us. That leads to needing a word/label for ‘that’ and then for us to all to agree that that was what we have now called ‘it’.

In ancient Indian Upanishad philosophy, it was posited that it was the arrival of ‘Vak’  or  voice/speech that caused man to forget his or her divinity.* The wonderful sage, Ramana Maharishi (c 1900’s) said that there was no thought before the thought ‘I’. Go behind that thought, he suggested, and there you would find God.

Words obviously have power. Labels as different from words have even more. A Word with its own unique context becomes a label. Context has history, culture and personal memory attached to it. Most importantly, as JC hinted, it has intent affixed or prefixed.

So the word ‘caste’ even though it is Portuguese in origin has come to denote a particular social status in India. Its intent however is not so much as to uplift oneself as it is to demean someone else.

In India we have given power to this by defining whole groups of people as Scheduled Caste people. Oddly this was so as to provide affirmative action to them in jobs, government schemes and education. However, in defining them such, we not only perpetuate their difference but paint a sort of target on them. People will say that this SC definition is good because it recognizes that they are disadvantaged and need support. And should society help poorer people? It should. So the definition could well have been about their economic status rather than a definition of their birth.

Or for that matter the color of their skin.

In The US this has become a huge fault line. The African American plate colliding with the Caucasian American plate. Deep fissures are emergent. And everyone waits for the big earthquake!

But when we examine these labels we see that the labels have been created by one segment and then accepted almost with gratitude by the other. There is no classification for white Americans. You have Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans*, Indian Americans and native Americans. So as Trevor Noah asks in his hilarious stand up show*, how come Native Americans have a label though they were the first Americans and the white invaders don’t have any prefix? It’s as if the ‘rich’ have labelled the others. *

And this is true of immigrants also. No one questions at least in the US a European Caucasian immigrant’s experience. The subject of integration, assimilation, acceptance or rejection is addressed largely to people of color, or non white people. It would be of lesser consequence that the recant white immigrant say for Russia or an eastern European country was less educated both in English and in general than a doctor from Somalia.

The power of labels transcends color. We use labels to insinuate and contort meaning.

Take Obamacare. There is no such act in the US Congress. There is the Affordable Care Act which sounds benign, full of tender mercy for the needy etc. Politicians with intent have called it Obamacare, making it the private preserve of a president they have demonized for some. *

 

The same is true for Climate Change. In the wonderful book Unspeak* by Steven Poole, he talks of how we have used words to mitigate meaning for political intent. Climate crisis became Global warming became Climate change. You can see the slowly decreasing danger; “Gentlemen, we can now say that the threat level has been reduced to pale yellow!”

 

In the same book Mr. Poole talks of how the word community has been misused. The label is affixed to other communities: The African American Community, the Asian community etc. No one questions that community implies shared values and concerns. A well educated African American living on the upper west ide of New York may not have the same concerns as his ‘brother’ who lives in Harlem. They are however equated by the label.

 

Which brings us back to the N word.  The person who was labelled as such was a slave; abused and exploited. The pejorative has come to mean for people of color a symbol of shared history and fellowship, not be used by anyone outside of the circle, much like a Masonic handshake bans outsiders. It is a “ghetto-ising” word.

Sadly, it allows the word to live on; it gives it power. It makes you sit with your face to the past and asks you to portend the future. *

Use it and such labels such as “Dalit’s’ for the 200 million untouchables of India as an affirmation of your humanity, not as a distinction to separate yourself form it.

Do not create otherness.

 

Notes

*chat show: hmm odd word; chat as in friendly banter or as the Bard may have hinted, sound and fury signifying nothing?

*Britain: Notice how I have avoided the prefix, Great? A subtle dig at what the Right leaning, immigrant fearing politicos are doing to once the Great Britain

*JC: it didn’t escape me that I have may made him somewhat messianic. Just as it doesn’t escape me that phonetically JayZ may have attempted similar affinity.

*Brain Size: if only that had defined dominance, Earth would be elephantine or cetacean!

*Self Awareness: Apparently a test for this the mirror test: Elephants and Parrots apparently recognize that isn’t another elephant or parrot in the mirror. I would distinguish between self recognition and self awareness.

*Divinity: In a sense this is akin to the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden: till then Adam and Eve and all the other creatures saw no distinction between themselves. And after eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and most importantly their differences, obvious of course to all of us today who have seen naked people.

* { —} Americans: the truth is White Americans have usurped the title of Americans. So when  Donald Trump says Make America Great Again, the allusion is clear: Make America White Again

* Obamacare: Why is Obama referred to as the first Black President? His mother was white. Why is patrimony more important? And why did he not define himself as just an American president and a damn good one at that?

*Please visit unpeak.submarinechannel.com which is ‘an interactive documentary investigating the manipulative power of language.’ It’s fun and educational and somewhat chilling too!!

* Sitting with your face to the past etc.: A professor from Dublin University moonlighting as a guide to the wonderful Neolithic tombs outside Dublin, suddenly segued to the topic of Northern Ireland and the tenuous peace (at that time); She said, “How can you solve a problem by constantly turning your face to the past while trying to discuss the future?”  Wise words, I think.