On Karl Marx and Inside a Bazaar

1.

Whenever Karl Marx talked of progressive development he actually referred to industrialization, rapid urbanization and agriculture gradually feeding into the requirements of an industrialized world although under the leadership of the proletariat post-revolution during the evolution of the socialist phase. He also envisioned socialism paving way for a communist world order eventually where nation-states would cease to exist and communes and cooperatives would abound. He could not visualize the gainful investments the capitalist and imperialist world would do to counter the threat of socialist revolutions and other related economic and cultural movements world-wide on a sustainable basis, which continues till this day. The problem is: Karl Marx overestimated the power of industrialization on human development (in fact, he failed to see industries as the single largest causative factor of human underdevelopment in the years to come); he was happy once the means of production changed hands from a few rich capitalists to the large masses of the poor proletariat. Karl Marx here made the same mistake regarding the power of numbers as the proponents of democracy do instead of challenging the basic concept. The twentieth century has experienced the power of industries: they almost converted themselves into empires and thereby controlling the millions of lives of people in every possible way through modern institutions and appropriating every shade and shadow of our lives in economic and financial terms and brought the ecological fabric to near ruin. The fact is the very nature of an industry is such that it has to be run by extremely individualistic ruthless creative and economic gaming. Industry cannot operate like a cooperative or a government department. In fact in an industrialized world everything exists to support industry and not otherwise. I do not think Karl Marx foresaw this (his diagnosis of capitalism bringing the world to an end was restricted to capitalists being in control of industries in place of the proletariat) and his principles of socialism melting into communism were unrealistic until and unless of course the concepts of industrialization and urbanization themselves were challenged.

Yet at about the same time (or, period) two litterateurs – Tolstoy and Rabindranath – were vehement in their concerns against the burgeoning of an industrial world order. Tolstoy very clearly denounced the laying of railway lines in Russia (in Anna Karenina) and predicted thereby the plundering of the farmlands and faster transportation (or, loot) of food and grains from villages to the growing cities and causing middlemen to rise in between impoverishing the farmers (the producers) and causing crisis of food-stock in the villages where the grains were cultivated in the first place.

Rabindranath conceptually had gone ahead: he had attacked the western idea of nation-state consistently.

2.

I was in a bazaar a few nights back. It was raining. I was looking for a shop, which in my memory existed at the northern end of a labyrinth dotted on its flanks by millions of similar dimly lit shops selling all kinds of items. There were many such labyrinths in this bazaar. I had to move past wet bodies circuitously saving my head and eyes from umbrellas getting in the way. Sometimes I felt I was in a wrong labyrinth or entering the right labyrinth from the wrong end and forgetting the direction of my traverse midway. After two hours of trudging through slushy mud and filth and my head feeling heavy with the beatings of rain drops – thick columns – I doubted whether I was in the right bazaar or it existed in another city somewhere in another time and which did not exist anymore. And when I was speculating whether I should make an exit from this bazaar where I was in and if yes, from where so; this guy appeared before me – disheveled, worn out, drenched, emaciated and in tattered clothes. From his eyes I knew, I knew him. He looked at me intensely almost bafflingly puzzling with a strain of a fleeting smile on its greenish irises. When I was trying to pull myself out of his magnetic gaze he spoke out coolly: Sandy you seem to have made improvements to your life. Yes, I can see that. But man, I am contracted not to die as I have people to take care of.

On Gabbar Singh and Education

1.

One of the most enduring dialogues of Hindi cinema is: Jo dar gaya woh mar gaya! Meaning – One who gives in to fear is dead! It was mouthed by a jungle baddie, wild-eyed heartless bandit, Gabbar Singh. Gabbar, as a word always reminded me of another Hindi word: gubbara, meaning – balloon! How many balloons of ruthless toxins would have made one Gabbar – is anybody’s guess. Gabbar was in direct conflict with an upper-class landlord also perceived by his villagers as their sole protector against the merciless ploys of Gabbar taxing them perpetually on their farm yields (thus confronting the landlord economically because the ownership of the farmlands must be with the Thakur – the landlord). Ironically, this landlord is also a senior policeman of an emerging Republic constitutionally mandated to do away with the zamindari system and more significantly this Thakur having lost both his hands to Gabbar’s gut-wrenching violence employs two urban, fearless, extremely good-looking, sexy criminals in his personal war against Gabbar Singh. Well, we all know the story for we have seen the film many, many times over. What I like to ponder is Gabbar’s unique identification of fear as a thin dividing line between what we experience as life (as in existing) and our mental speculation of what death is or can be (which among the ravines where Gabbar lived with his gang facing the ravages of nature first-hand can be almost equivalent to actual dying).

2.
Modern urban education is increasingly driven by moronic aspirations of the school and college owners, book publishers, teachers, accessory manufacturers, training centers and an unimaginative bureaucracy and groups of educationists drawing up syllabus and curriculum on various Boards all designed to kill contemplation and thinking capabilities of students and learners at an early age. The problem is: How to produce non-thinkers out of guys who get helluva of marks (let’s say something like 98.3%)? Education has gradually converted itself to a viable industry by replicating the texture and cascading sequence of manufacturing units as we find elsewhere that is of a fully-integrated main plant surrounded by ancillaries both online as well as offline. A post-modern nation-state to thrive requires a bunch of people who know a lot and can store monumental quantum of data and thus is so blocked with loads of information and computational skills that thoughts are mortified to enter such constricted minds. Thoughts – that can move and break planets – require leisure, enjoyment, happiness and harmony as an ambience to the process and pursuits of learning. Loading a child with a mammoth syllabus annihilates the process of learning but is extremely good for business for as learning becomes more and more and more difficult you will pay more and more and more to get it (remember diamonds). More importantly the goal of education in a post-modern nation-state is much more than inculcation of learning (what you read and write) but to instill a value (as in frenzied hammering of an iron-nail to a soft piece of timber) among its recipients that competition under the most difficult of circumstances is almost akin to essential survival. Since in the process one makes competition all-pervasive (one is always and constantly fighting against the other and also at one level against oneself) one implicitly starts believing in the omnipotence and utilitarian values of war and even concludes: there can be no life without war. Collaboration soon becomes a bad idea. A post-modern nation-state wants this and the masters of the Corporations who run the show in absentia just love to see their foot-soldiers being manufactured in laboratories who embrace Shakespeare, Trigonometry, Laws of Motion, Periodic Table, Genetics, Rabindranath, mysteries of the Mughal Empire, Charter of the United Nations and Topo-sheets (readers may like to refer to the ICSE Syllabus for Class X which is nothing short of being offensive and rude to the idea of being humane) with the same comfort as dirty clothes take to the jostling ugly vortices of moving water inside the cavity of a washing machine.