Underground

1.

What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.

Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?

Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.

I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.


The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.

Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.

Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.

Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.

Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.