Viswanathan K's Thoughts

James Murphy uses the word “prophet” in a way I’d never heard of. No, he says, a prophet isn’t always the “bearded and eccentric biblical seer delivering God’s judgment on his people”. In fact, the ways he defines it, a prophet need not even be a messenger of God at all!   Who is a prophet, in Murphy’s way of thinking? “Prophets wage war against statesmen for their amoral realpolitik; and against priests for focusing on ritual rather than righteousness.” Somebody needs to speak up to those in power, sometime to expose their excesses, at others to push for measures that neither group would ever advocate. Sometimes the reason those in power don’t change things is because it suits them; at other times, the reason is that it is very hard to change society.   By his definition, Martin Luther King was a prophet who fought for racial equality. So too are activists like Greta Thunberg who fight for measures against global warming. Note these are not religious reformers, t...

I was intrigued by the title of Rwitwika Bhattacharya-Agarwal’s book, What Makes a Politician . This is not a book about politicians at the top of the pecking order. Rather, it is about the countless unknown politicians who are the overwhelming majority. The book (1) explains what life in politics is really like for the majority of politicians; and (2) how someone without a political background or dynastic connections can enter politics, if they wanted to.   This then is not a cynical book about bashing politics and politicians. That is why Baijayant Panda, a Lok Sabha MP, wrote in the foreword: “This book is a welcome move away from caricaturing, stereotyping, or straightforward dismissing the work of public officials.” ~~ What is a political party?   A political party offers a “product”, i.e., an ideology (e.g. equitable society; protecting the vulnerable; you get the idea). Ironically, therein are sown the seeds of discord. A party that starts by primarily c...

People unaffected by certain historical events find it hard to understand why others seem to care so much about those events, why they seem affected even today decades or centuries later, when they were never even directly affected by it? Why can’t they let go of the past?   I got a part of the answer to those questions during our trip to Rajasthan via the contrasting attitudes towards Muslims. At Chittorgarh, the undercurrent of anger towards Muslims was evident in our guide’s narrative. At first sight, it seems strange – why let such ancient events affect today’s perspective? But then as we saw the vandalized temples in the fort, I could understand. An atrocity, a massacre, a graphic event (like the mass suicide of Padmini and the women of Chittor) will eventually feel old and fade in the emotion it evokes (or even be forgotten altogether). But a monument that stands till today, with very easily visible signs of the acts of yesteryear can end up serving as a continuing remind...

Shivshankar Menon’s book on some of India’s major foreign policy decisions, Choices , gives the history and the reasons for India’s continually changing stance in the LTTE story in Sri Lanka.   Sri Lanka’s original Tamils are very different from the Tamils of India. Under Britain’s divide and rule policy, they were the favoured elite – the English-speaking class that was disproportionately represented in the civil services. Another big chunk of Tamils in Sri Lanka were brought in by the British to work on the plantations. After independence, a resentful Sinhalese majority declared the Indian-origin Tamils stateless, i.e., non-citizens, and changed the national language to Sinhalese. Tamils were next discriminated against in jobs.   By the 70’s, the Tamils’ resentment boiled over and violent outfits sprang up. Amongst them, the LTTE went on to dominate. Tit for tat violence soon became the norm. In the 80’s, the growing violence in Sri Lanka raised 2 concerns in India: ...

In an earlier blog , we went over the story of India that was picked in 1947 at its formation. And as Pranay Kotasthane says in Missing in Action : “It follows that since a nation is a mental construct, it can be and is reimagined.”   Today, he says: “There is an alternative imagination… it believes the lack of real reckoning with our past before the British era, the choice by Nehru and his ilk of an imagination that wasn’t true… and the constant peddling of this fake narrative have not allowed us to move ahead.”   The “idea of India” is truly being fought over between the “adherents of the old imagination” and the “proponents of the alternative”. And as we saw in the other blog, that involves “reworking of history to fit past events into this imagination”. It happened in 1947; and another attempt to rewrite it is underway today.   Will India survive as a united nation? On the one hand: “America was going through a bloody civil war that was threating to ...

Andrew Sullivan, a Republican supporter but not a Trump supporter, has been saying for long that if the Democrats could put up a half-decent candidate, then many Republican voters who are appalled by Trump, would be willing to vote for the other side. Biden finally stepped back when the pressure became too much, not by choice. Will his replacement be inspiring? Only time will tell.   Today: “Donald J. Trump, by sheer luck, dogged persistence, and the over-reach of his enemies, now bestrides our political scene with such dominance.” The failed assassination attempt on Trump has only helped: “If you believe, as I do, that history is made by both structural change and pure, random chance, then that bullet’s trajectory, and Trump’s subtle shift of his head, is up there with Gavrilo Princip’s but in reverse. The shooter missed, thank God. I shudder to think where we would be now if the bullet had blown Trump’s head apart — as it was right on target to do. We would be in a nea...

One of the main “superpowers” that humans have, as per Yuval Noah Harari, is the ability to tell stories. Not only of the fairy-tale variety, but also the grander ones that can unify people into massive groups based on some common theme (real or imagined), stretching in size from regional to national to global.   In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane says the same:             “Narratives have the power to make the unreal real.” Narratives are critical when a nation is formed: “Every newly formed nation has to define this imagination.” This involved 3 steps: (1) Call for a new beginning, a fresh start; (2) if a region has a long history that can’t be wished away, then “use the trope of slumber and reawakening to represent a departure from the past”; and (3) use historians to “reframe history that show past events as serving the nation-building… objectives of the present”.   If you found some of the ab...