The De(a)rth of Water

Kiran Nagarkar, and Indian novelist and social commentator was comenting on the “extras” (persons having non-descript roles) in a movie. “Extras” in a movie are a metaphor of the majority of mankind. Skyscrapers in metropolises come with readymade slums. Hereafter the differences will be that of those who have water and those who do not.

Digging a deep borewell

My experiences on the dearth of water are twofold. Living in Kerala, one of the places in the world that receives the heaviest rainfalls in the form of monsoons. Ironically, a mountain across, the neighbouring state of Tamilnadu has vast stretches of arid land but excels manifold than Kerala in agriculture. A prominent daily in Malayalam(Kerala) was running a feature on how Kerala is heading to desertification. We never tap the rain let alone protect our rivers. We palster the ground so that not a drop of water seeps down. Our aesthetic and homemaking sensitivities have been driven to such foolish extremes. For instance, as a rule we think that a garden is beautiful when it is filled with concrete artifacts rather than the whims of natural settings. The following snapshots reveal the quest for water boring deep into the earth, a few hundred metres, to draw water. The sight of water gushing is so invigorating but I fear how long the water will hold on.

As I was spending few months in Arunachal Pradesh, I could rather understand how grim a situation is the dearth of water. The indigenous people used long poles of bamboo as water ducts, drawing water from springs deep in the forests. The too dry up and once again they venture into dense jungles to locate a new spring. The thirst never ends.

A student of mine wrote in his answer sheets that a river is beneficial as it carries away the domestic waste. Major rivers in India are polluted and has dangerous content of coliform bacteria making it non potable. The rivers bear the blunt of the efflux of man-made wastes as this loo over a natural brook shows. Mind it, it is one of the best arrangements that could be made in that part of the world to serve one’s lavatorial needs. The people here harbor a great distrust for the water sources that pass through inhabited areas. This is a luxury they can hardly afford in urban settlements where you have to go for any available water no matter where the hell it came from. 

River Kameng

A makeshift loo over a brook

The De-Classic

The De-Classic

Speaking of the rich artistic traditions of India, any Indian should be rather puffed up by pride. There are two streams of classical music in India with their divergent schools, viz. Carnatic and Hindustani. The former has moorings in South India and the latter has strong Persian influences and was immortalized by the court-musicians of the Mughal emperors. Elaborate ramifications of music have made any attempt to study classical music a herculean task and many do not have the calling. It calls for a quasi ascetic pursuit of the discipline.  Similarly, the Indian classical dances are Bharathanatyam, Kuchipudi, Mohiniyattam, Odissi and Kathak. There are many more dance forms which require elaborate erudition and systematic practice.

The rise of classical art forms are strongly linked to a culture of leisure. The discipline that leads to erudition and aesthetic sharpening basically springs from the fact that you have enough time and means to pursue your taste. In a land where the majority are underprivileged and ahs minimal exposure to the comforts of life , there can only be a spontaneous expression of the élan and not a systematic exposition. Nowadays, the interest for folklore are on the rise. Kudos to those who dare to see.

This occurred strongly to me as I was watching my friends ofVeo ( an interior hill country of Arunachal Pradesh in India, the foothills of Himalayas, where the various hill tribes inhabits) rehearsing a welcome dance. The dance steps all looked the same to me, but not without a definitive charm. They had nuances which I was not able to appreciate. These ladies were home after a backbreaking day of hauling sacks of grain from their fields to their granaries uphill, which indeed was after long spells of harvesting when they bend over with scythes. They lacked everything which could appeal to a Classical afficianados.

 I wonder how the steps exactly followed the lead, something very remarkable in what I thought to be an impromptu situation. Perhaps music is too rooted in their veins.

also WATCH Bihu Dance of Nocte Tribe

Tabletop Drummer

Drumming on tabletops and for that reason, on any hard surface of wood have been my occupation since child hood and it has tempered my hands a lot. I presume that this is the way they teach the traditional drum known as Mridanga in the Carnatic musical tradition of South India. So as a drummer I am as confident as any amateur can be. The best way to learn drumming is to teach the rhythm to your fingers so that they fall in the right place in the nick of the moment. Here listen to samples of the popular Indian rhythms sounded on a computer table top.

"Four Four", the complete, typically western rhythm

http://youtu.be/LHk1uqfsWns

"Three Four": The rhythm of Waltz

http://youtu.be/IM5BIIgnkwI

"Four Eight:, the rhythm that rocks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onv-V2LWc8s

"Five Eight", the typically Indian, sways to the Cosmic Dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYrhVNsntXo

"Six Eight", the rustic dance rhythm, common to various folk music and ethnic and tribal music in India, it appears to be a very natural rhythm...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQiIQLXI2aI

"Six Four", the dirge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnXVylC0pCs

"Nine Eight", typical celebration music, to the sound of large kettle drums

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPV1bm9KhzE

"Seven Eight", the prayerful rhythm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP0nvMzDUXQ

percussively yours...

Reality as a pet hate

Reality as a pet hate

Reality-when excessive

Sounding overdriven notes

Drives men to take cover

Seeking options to quell it.

Reality- negate or posit it

Or turn your back you may

Drawing apps and new ways,

Plying for situation control.

An earplug- born of needs

To nix the sound extern

Is deafness made wearable,

As if world has no words for you.

Or an earphone, still better

To fix a sound you like

As if it’s only one you’d hear

Though the world cries out loud.

Blindfold in its symbolic richness

Can hold the world at bay, a dark bay.

Window-blinds shut in

To let in just a beamlet;

Still reality stays and it says’

“You hear that you want

You see that you want,

But there is more and more unturned.”

MY DAYS WITH GOATS part 2

pART ii

Inter faeces et urinam nascimur omnes(all are born into the midst of faeces and urine), said St.Augustine of Hippo while he was still a Manichaean and was skeptical about the goodness of created world. He believed, like any other Manichaean that there exists a positive entity which is evil. Later the Scholastic philosophers would furnish the definition that evil is privatio boni(absence of goodness), which makes it a relative or negative entity. One may still contend that a negative entity is still an entity and has existence as such; even I am inclined to believe so. Hopefully these static definitions of good and evil are improved upon by contemporary dynamic theodicy, drawing largely from the theodicy of St.Irenaeus, which was hitherto run over by Augustinian theodicy. By theodicy (a term coined by Leibniz) we originally understand the philosophical attempt to justify God despite the innumerable arguments pitched against Him, the greatest of which is the so-called problem of evil. We speak of it as a problem to shift the onus on some external factor, even when evil is an operation towards which each of us contributes a lot. It is more truthful to call it a mystery rather than a problem. A mystery is something in which one is inextricably involved. It is in the setting of a mystery that one draws the essential life-force to describe oneself; when everything is clear, life comes to a standstill- there will be no differences of opinion or that diversity what makes the world livable. We would be like automata programmed to “receive” with no options for check-out (remember Hotel California, just before the guitar begins its final weep.)

            So was I literally in the midst of faeces and urine, not a very detestable experience. A goat’s excreta are, as I noted earlier, much enriched and not very distressing to the senses. As a matter of fact I have thought of and often sought an answer to the wonder that a goat’s dropping is showered down as a rain of globules. What contraption in its guts could be responsible for this natural work of art? Forgive my naivety. Somebody commented that God must be a civil engineer for having placed a fun park very next to a sewer. There are design constraints, but what about the economy of design which ensures that same organs are sourced from radically different reservoirs to serve even more radically different ends. It takes a real genius to contrive such a multiplex. There exists a “humiliatory system” in our loins which one may conveniently call the urino-genital and the gastro-intestinal system depending on one’s erudition.  What I know for sure is that the four-letter words in many Indian languages derive their striking power by their reference to a part in the loin in an obscene light. The loin is a juxtaposition of our call to perpetuity (by its signification of generative functions) and temporality (gastronomic and scatological concerns are sure indicators of our existential exigencies.) The goats were sheltered on a raised platform of areca planks with banisters around, something like a makeshift stage. A volleyball game was underway and we could hear the distress call of a goat from that distance and a brother was sent to see. He came back with a report that it was nothing but a case of “stage fright.”

            What really pertains to this discussion is the dirty underbelly of the goat pen. One could hardly stand erect under it. The only movements possible under it were either on all fours or some other exertions employing your legs alone if you had stronger calves, but be sure that sooner or later you would fall on all fours if not already so. Had it been just a cemented floor, one would not be too much concerned about “all fours” or “toe tips” or just any other configuration. It was there I pondered on the verity of that Augustinian maxim faced with the concreteness of the experience. The cemented floor underneath the pen was, yes you guessed it, bottom-line for that sea of urine with its innumerable floats and sunken junks of those aesthetically perfect ovine droppings and you are armed with a trimmed broom and a leaky dustpan to fill up an equally leaky bucket. Well, that is the only unaesthetic side of the whole setting. Developing a taste for routine is a vital part of almost all monastic traditions. Employing seemingly unrewarding exercises and adopting those ways by which the whole performance of an operation can sound cumbersome and irrational are efficient techniques in inculcating this value. Often I have wondered whether many conspicuous faults in the schemes of work are deliberately introduced or are made out of the naivety of the monks who proposed them. There ought to be some wisdom absconding in these practices.

My Goat Days Part 1

Sorry for Coming asynchronously...My Days with Goats

Part I
What I loved most about Benyamin’s “Aadujeevitham”(translated as “Goatdays”) is not that it had a remarkable craft but it spoke of an experience which was very realistic but so distanced from our ordinary lives. Barring its cultural overtones in relation to contemporary Kerala and its amazingly large Diaspora what I could find easy in it to assimilate is the theme of condemnation to utter dejection from which there is a passover. It is the story of a man who could reconcile with the most traumatic phase of his life by following the path of meekness and resignation and at the same time reading signals of ever-throbbing life where it is most elusive. It tells us of a pace of life which is bound to land oneself in a gutter, according to popular reckoning; but in that pace one starts to count every whiff of one’s own breath and vehemently hug every moment of life with a glimmer of hope, even when the promise is nowhere. I had my goatdays too. I was under no compulsion in the exact sense to look after the goats, but it would not have been even remotely my call to care for even a living non-human, had I chosen some other ways which I chose to forfeit for the greater good. Ruminating, as a goat would do, I feel it so strongly that these goats were so close to my heart that their memories are stamped deeply in my heart and I always have a story or two about them to share with my confreres.
Well, I looked after them for not less than a month. At that time they were almost thirty three, and that was the highest number our goatherd had ever been. The herd had been a motley one. It had the very no descript run-of-the-mill goats one find in every homestead to the exotic breeds of Indian goats, that wouldn’t fit into an ordinary pocket for their sheer size, running cost and low returns. I wonder whether they are any better than trophies. Fast forward four years and you would find me perched on the terrace of this friary eyeing the tents of the circus in town, which happens to be our next door (they took that door away when they shifted and now it serves as a figure of speech). In the opening march-past they bring in an African breed of goat, which moves very disinterestedly and grudgingly that it has nothing else to do but make itself a show-piece. I have noticed that we are more moved to awe by the sight of exotic breeds of dogs and goats and cows or any other familiar animal for that sake, whose lowlier breeds we are accustomed to. Such a sight of superbreeds puts our ordinariness to shame, it seems. Rolling back, these supergoats can stand upto great heights to reach for a luscious branch if they crane their necks, standing on the hind legs, while the ordinary goats would tend to graze on the lowly grass. A goat is a real herbivore in the true sense of the word, no wonder why mutton makes a very healthy diet, by its phytochemical excellence.

The Black Swan

“No matter how many white swans you have seen, it doesn’t tell you anything about the possibility of a black swan”

                                                                                                                         Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Philosopher and Expert on Risk

In a celebrated dialogue between Fr.Copleston and Bertrand Russel, the latter is posed with a question as to what question he would throw at God if he chanced upon him. Russell quipped: “I will ask God why he hasn’t left anything in the world to prove his presence.” The Vedas had it that “Isōvāsyam idam sarvam”(Everything is the abode of God). In a crude way Thales spoke of everything being full of gods, thus sowing the seeds of hylozoism and pantheistic trends in the western thought. In Indian tradition one comes across the supposedly contrasting worldviews of acosmism and cosmism; these are nevertheless the same thing viewed from two different ends: from eternity and from temporality. A similar strain of thought is shared by the Stoics in their formulation of sub specie temporis and sub specie aeternitatis upholding that everything is essentially good even when it appears the contrary. Tertullian went a step further in claiming that anima naturaliter Christiana( soul is naturally Christian). The aforesaid representations point to the fact that some sort of regularity had been observed in the dynamics of the universe which are variedly ascribed to the physical, preternatural or spiritual forces.

A law or rule of action is seen as implicit in the very nature of things. This, we call, the natural law. It also designates laws that regulate the activities of nature both in organic and inorganic realms. All creatures have from their creator those determined natural inclinations to their own respective ends “which we say are natural laws”, comments St.Thomas; elsewhere he has spoken “natural law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures”. Not only in classical and scholastic philosophy but also in modern science one finds that natural law is deemed to have an ontological value. This is a realistic view. Various contemporary thinkers hold that scientific knowledge is assimilated as a passive representation and faithful mirror of reality.

Plato speaks of Euthyphro Dilemma: whether something is good because God loves it or God loves it because it is good. This is a moot point in moral philosophy. One can view the beauty and order as a consequence of its ordination by God or one can speak of God as an abstract representation of the beauty and goodness one finds in the world, something like a provisional subject. Are there natural laws? Science has no knowledge on things that cannot be observed. Its validity depends on the conformity of the individual observations to a hypothesis.

Consider the proposition “All crows are black” and its contrapositive “All non-blacks are non-crows.” Each time we see a black crow our supposition is proved but given that each of the above two propositions can be immediately followed from the other, why is it that a pair of white shoes (which is non-black and non-crow) does not validate the supposition that all crows are black? There is something predictable about the physical laws; in that respect how much does it contribute to the definability of God? This is under the assumption that God wills the physical laws to be unchangeable so that every time you throw a stone up it inevitably comes down. Suppose if there is a miracle or an aberration, then it too is natural in that it occurred in the natural sphere. Only thing we may conclude is that the exception was so far not recorded.

Duns Scotus said that God in His willing is “intelligissime et ordinatissime volens” (most intelligent and most orderly) and that He is not arbitrary. If natural laws are participation in this eternal wisdom why it seems that much of the occurrences in life appears as matters of chance or like game of dice. Natural law ought to orient us towards the natural end as the case maybe. The facticities (things which are beyond one’s control) of life set each individual in a different starting point and he is to grow upon that. How can one conceive a common denominator for the different individuals and speak of it as the natural end of that life. When the pronouncements about each man’s end are as varied as there are individuals how can we speak of a “law”? The universality of the “law” is at stake. It takes us back to the Orwellian paradox: “All men are equal, but some are more equal than others”. If you try to educate somebody about the aim of his life, then it’s just trying to conform him to a consensus and it stops to be natural and spontaneous. If one’s destiny depends on the formative force of his circumstances then it is not equal for all. Natural laws, if any should be applicable or accessible to all equally. This leads us to the nominalist position that there can’t be such a thing as universal and that there are only individuals.

If we are pawns in the hands of God then there is no point in speaking of our actions as bound to natural laws, because God is not part of our nature in the sense God is part of God’s nature. This leads to arbitrariness in human actions as we witness in the present sociopolitical context. Each action is targeted not on a blind abyss but on immediately fruitful results. Here appetites grow higher than the intellections. Every human action becomes hesitant or determined according to the viability of the situation with utter disregard for the “natural laws”. A jihadist has sound theology for his outrages, an imperialist wages war in the name of God. This is because God is no more thought to be abstract but as a concretization of one’s own personal whims and fancies. Therefore god’s  revelations become unmediated and very often my god draws the sword at your god. Then why wonder that the world has become self-centered and each one nothing but a juggernaut.