Even as the analyses of 2013 becomes a ritualistic saga, what strike us is how the year surpassed others with its scams, messy politics and political charlatanism. The only beacon was perhaps the resounding success of the Aaam Aadmi Party lead by a resilient leader who does not mince words, and by his thoroughbred pragmatism combined with idealism is actually trying very hard, with the help of the youthful exuberance of his team to make his dreams come true. But wait, the media is already at it (or him), that he has asked for two flats one for residence, and the other for official purposes, is now pointed out with glee. The maxim? Don't worry he is the same like any of them, just old wine in a new bottle. But the fact that he is indeed New Wine in an old derelict bottle is glossed over. And, ladies and gentlemen the ' old bottle ' actually represents our weather beaten, polity, the political humdrum, the genesis of corruption, and no governance, the genesis of a way of life that is India where embattled forces of poverty, a decrepit education system, life in hovels is only a marker. To stay away from it we need only to, no not to dream but to hallucinate in a drugged manner. No wonder E.M. Forster the novelist once said that he distrusts ' Great Men '. These Great Men exist no longer in the hallowed precincts of official leadership, but also alas in chambers of the academia, strutting around as Mani Shankar Aiyer said in a different context, to revile AAP '' like proud peacocks''. I use this same analogy as a metabolism, for the way of life in India, always paying obeisance to the ' Sirs' always blandishing the 'leaders' and singing paens in praise of them to get favours! Mind you even the academia becomes an upturned venal bureaucracy in such a situation. God save them! Auden says of the authoritarian: '' When he laughed/ little children died in the streets.''. Our little children are literally living in the streets, even as plush and swanky cars move past them with an oblivious insouciance.
In his fiction the Nobel prize winner William Golding often talks about the condition of Man in ''Free Fall", a dreaded suspension between the moral and the immoral or the amoral. Man has to choose between these conditions of extremity, and he can ' choose ' any wittingly, mind you not unwittingly, and that can lead him either to apocalyptic glory, or gory primeval myths or crass immorality, wars, theft and murder. It is in this state of free fall and depravity that we live in, but people who are trying to change a polity or a system are brandished as arrogant. Well, the arrogance of power is enough, where those who wield do not understand its meaning, that it is a change maker, a law maker, restoring sanity in an all pervading brutishness and insanity. One of the political thinkers did say didn't he that life is '' nasty, brutish and short''? The immanence of power has eroded life in all respects, so that our gluttony makes us impervious to sad truths such as poverty, destitute men women and children who see only darkness, not an iota of light. But it is exactly this ' light ' which novelists and thinkers spoke of: the light shrouded in the midst of darkness, the light which everyone has as a moral centre. We urgently need to be aware of this crescent light. So when a political leader who is in search of humanitarian needs speaks of proper shelter, electricity and water for the poor and the middle class the same tautology which is used by the other leaders, is used to revile him. Surely there is a moral law unto this universe, where you actually cannot get away with constant berating and political or social pugilism.
Two utterances in the year 2013 struck me as utterly baneful and insensitive, by the hierarchy. The first was that Rs 30, or was it 20, is good enough for a full meal in India. And the second, was when children were dying in relief camps in Muzzafarnagar, due to the cold, someone went on to say, that look, don't people live in the cold in Siberia? So dying dying and living are equated, what is death after all- only a negation of life- the body lives! This is free fall, a willful surrender to truth, and abysmal and irrevocable untruth, which is a downright false LIE.
The condition of Free Fall is very much a living reality in the India of today. It is not only economic venality, it is insensitiveness to the plight of the suffering and the poor. Even in the episode relating to the diplomat in the US, Devyani Khobragade, the question which we are tarrying to answer is: '' How well do we treat our domestic workers''? Power reserves are even made in houses to exploit and bully like mercenaries. I have seen this happening to ' servants' as we call them in upper middle class homes. But we don't speak of it, because we are all guilty. Truth of course hurts, but money and miscued power don't - they kill.
