The Heart Of Darkness

 

On X I just came across a peremptory piece of advice dished out by an eminent lawyer with an equally eminent pedigree to another equally famous lawyer. “If a senior lawyer-MP is so ‘ashamed’ of living in India today, he should register that shame properly. Resign from the Rajya Sabha. Because shame cannot be selective. Where was this ‘national shame’ in 2021, when Bengal saw brutal post-poll violence, when people were chased, killed, assaulted, displaced, and women were raped? Where was this ‘shame’ when a BJP supporter was chased and killed in front of his own mother? Where was the ‘shame’ when the Sandeskhali rape case happened? Where was the ‘shame’ when the RG Kar rape case happened? Where was this ‘shame’ when you appeared in Calcutta High Court to oppose these victims and resisted CBI transfer of the case?” So on and so forth in this vein. But don’t be taken in either by the vehemence of the riposte or the standard rebuttal, “Worse immorality has been seen.” That is the way to wash hands of the matter. Both sides can go home having earned their keep .

For eighty years, generations of Indians have been subjected to this stylised combat, this theatre of the absurd. All the sound and fury of the staged dog fight -I am sorry the example I am reminded of belongs to “…certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.” It is an ultimate triumph of what Umberto Eco calls “Event as Mise en scène and Life as Scene-settings. The respective political herds love it that their leader has washed his opponent dry . It is a different matter that the claim may lead to fight between the supposrter, they may inflict physical harm on each other, even cause death. But did they but know that in the lobby of various forums exclusive to them they backslap each other, share a drink, plan moves to make their privilege yield the maximum benefit.Time to dust up your copy of Animal Farm and read it like a religious text.

A mundane example from real life a scene is indelibly stamped in my mind. I was five or six and I was taken to a Ramlila at Ara, a small town where I grew up. We were people of substance in our small little place and I was allowed backstage to meet the actors. Lakshman and Meghnad had just engaged in a thunderous duel and I was still processing the significance of the whole scene in my mind when I saw Lakshman and Meghnad sharing a beedi while rehearsing for the next scene. I ran back and wanted to be taken home at once. My uncle was perplexed but asked no question.

I am now grown up. I have seen a fair bit of this world. Having been in a profession where the most powerful of the society are not ashamed to strut in their own skin, I have gathered some knowledge of how the real world, the world beyond rhetoric, works. My cynicism is well earned but there are times when the armour of shamelessness and brazenness does not help , I feel diminished sub human size and prepared to shrink further .

Faith in intellectuals – public or otherwise - who have exploited the prestige accorded to them by Julian Benda despite repeated, retrospective reckonings continues simply because we are lazy, ill-informed and hidebound through extensive systems of alliances and prejudices. I have never seen them speaking truth to power or they will be thrown out of the seraglio which they inhabit .A mere reference to their antics will not do ; their treason would require a hundred thousand books. But before I digress I must share my worry. I find scores of children plaintively asking questions on X , and other social media . Millions of children are looking for an answer as to what they had done to deserve this fate. What advice do you have- you who preside over our larger fate , for the parents, of the aggrieved children, some of whom have lost the apple of their eyes to suicide, or other concerned Indians who have been brought up on the wholesome promise of demographic dividend ? They have nothing to do with West Bengal, they could not care less which beggar is on the horseback and which remains on foot? What should parents do : disown their children before earning the right to question you? What should I, a man in the last lap of my journey and millions of dead wood, like me do? These children are not my kin but as a concerned father, a grandfather and above all as a human being do to be claim a right to question the unanswering void ?What have I to give up? I am a senior citizen and can only be deprived of my life or bloody liberty .The reasons for disappointment are now so many that one cannot find anything solid enough to stand upon and look beyond the imprisoning wall of hopelessness and despair. PS : X is agog with posts claiming that Samarth is going to appear before the Parliamentary committee.https://x.com/sidhant_sarthak/status/2061833206396272842...

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Of Heroes and Hero Worship

Every age requires its heroes, said Carlyle, but his heroes – the prophet, the poet, the priest, men of letters, kings – belonged to a world gone by. If we take the evolution of Western literature as an indication, it appears that the scope of human self-awareness has moved from its beginnings in identification with godlike heroes, through a steady diminishment of heroic stature until, today, the "hero" in fiction is almost exclusively a victim.

In democracies today, everything is pared down to a quotidian scale. The hero is an ordinary individual who finds himself compelled by circumstance to challenge entities infinitely larger than himself. The antagonist is no longer a vengeful god or ineluctable Fate, but is as inscrutable, uncaring and indifferent – the bureaucracy – before which the ordinary citizen finds himself powerless. The battles, asymmetric to the point of absurdity, are fought in offices, in the public sphere, on digital platforms, on social media and, ultimately, in the courtroom. Yet their heroism is no less compelling.

Before considering what these heroes represent, it is worth briefly recounting what they actually did.

Vedant Shrivastava, aged seventeen, is the face of the challenge to CBSE's evaluation process. Unbelieving of the low marks awarded to him, he applied for re-evaluation. That is when he allegedly discovered that the answer sheet supplied to him was different from the one he had originally written. Rather than quietly accepting the discrepancy, he documented it, placed the evidence in the public domain, and persisted despite ridicule and political abuse. His achievement lay not merely in complaining, but in forcing an institution to answer questions it would rather have avoided.

Nisarga Adhikary, aged nineteen, identified vulnerabilities in CBSE's digital infrastructure and, in what appears to have been an act of genuine good faith, reportedly disclosed them to the authorities first. When corrective action was not forthcoming, he went public with his findings. The sequence matters: he tried the proper channels before he tried the public ones.

Sarthak Sidhant, all of eighteen, undertook the most painstaking task of all. He scrutinised tender documents, procurement records, corrigenda and bidding conditions relating to the On-Screen Marking system and, through careful comparison of successive versions, established that critical eligibility conditions had been altered in ways that allegedly favoured a particular vendor. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the documents, but assuming them to be genuine, his analysis reveals a pattern whose implications any regulator worth the name ought to examine. Whatever conclusions one ultimately draws, the diligence of the investigation stands as a remarkable act of civic engagement by a student.

Together, they punched holes in the entire system. The first questioned the integrity of the evaluation process. The second exposed vulnerabilities in the technological architecture. And the third scrutinised the procurement decisions that lay behind the system itself. Between them, they challenged the process, the platform and the procurement. They accomplished what institutions, regulators and much of the media had failed to do: they brought under the critical gaze of the nation an issue affecting millions of students.

How happy I am to be proved so wrong in my scepticism about whether the younger generation knows which way to go. (See my previous post: The Cockroach Party.) They do. They have not taken to the streets, have not burnt buses, nor vandalised public property. They have taken on the establishment on its own turf and on its own terms, forcing accountability through reason rather than rage. The government will find that a rather difficult thing to quietly dispose of.