Ambiguity - an Indian's best friend

In a debate about actors, point out to an Indian that Rajinikanth is a pretty ordinary actor and for some reason, the conversation will invariably veer towards, "Oh, but he is the biggest star", or even worse, "But he's a very humble chap".  What the *#@&$ does him being humble have to do with him being a lousy actor?  We're not talking about his qualities as a human being, but Indians have a hard time sticking to topics where a subjective viewpoint is welcomed, but an objective argument is necessary.

Before selecting a course for study, Indian youngsters often end up asking elders for advice.  A few advanced souls have no problem asking the youngsters what s/he is interested in or has an aptitude or liking for.  The rest have no problem dishing out a bewildering array of opinions based on nothing but prejudice, but cloaking it with the invariable ambiguous twenty paisa wisdom that seems to come with age.  These idiots have no problem dishing out nonsense like  "Engineering will always have good scope".  God forbid if the kid asks "So why are you not an engineer?".  It will be considered rude.  The deeper question that begs to be asked is, "If you're not an engineer, how do you know so much about engineering?".  The answer that will likely soak up this challenge will be, "Listen to your elders.  Take some guidance!".  As if good intent always translates to good advice!

Only in India can we see traffic lights AND traffic police working in the same place at the same time.  What are we supposed to pay attention to?  On many ridiculous occasions, I have seen the traffic cop waving traffic onwards, even when the light has not changed!  This really is like us having to trust his judgment on the danger involved, over the unambiguous message from the red light.  No wonder our people use their own judgment when there is no traffic cop to create our much needed drug - confusion!  There has been an occasion when I went ahead and one speeding car trying to get through its green light right of way almost ran into me.  Ambiguity can kill.

In this connected world, we get all sorts of messages, and we Indians have not spared the airwaves with our propensity for rumours either.  We have no problem forwarding SMS messages and e mail messages that contain a lot of untruth, but are cloaked with that overwhelming aura of "doing good".  Case in point - the messages that came out warning people not to go out in the rain, for fear of getting irradiated in India from the leakage in Sendai, Japan!  Not even Tokyo had that sort of an alert, and it is a whole lot closer to Sendai than Chennai.  So, I turned around in an attempt to quell that rumour and questioned the sender where the information had come from.  "It is coming on BBC" was the reply.  I checked the BBC.  Nothing.  So I persisted, checked the internet for various news sources.  Nothing of this sort had ever been even mentioned.  Time to confront.  I asked this rumour artist where the heck this crap had come from.  Instead of an apology, I got, "Better to be careful, no?  What is wrong with that?"

The problem is we seek refuge in ambiguity that is often manufactured, but will take the victim a fair bit of stamina to question an expanding cosmos of confusion.  The Indian bets against your will to fight ambiguity.  This is a crime if it goes unchecked.  Look at the way our government evades questions about terrorism and why we were attacked recently again - "This is not an intelligence failure.  We are plugging all holes in the system, and we will soon get to the bottom of this."  This is the Indian way of saying, "We don't know", but making it sound like, "We will know soon".  But, we know how to make it benign enough by putting things in that sound like sincerity, good intent, competence, while in reality it stinks of incompetence, foolishness, and inability to comprehend.  End result - forgiven!

Assuming you're male here - ask an Indian who has occupied your seat in a train to vacate, and there is a very good chance s/he will try a few social contract loopholes to continue to occupy your seat because it is convenient.  First, the stupid question, "This is your seat, eh?".  Then the shameless, uncouth offering of an alternative usually follows.  (If you were willing to sit in any vacant seat, you'd travel unreserved, would you not?)  If you insist, you better do it nicely, so that the dignity of the crook is not violated.  You are entitled to say, "This is my seat, so get your ass out of it", of course!  But anything even remotely aggressive, like, "No thank you.  Could I have the seat I reserved for myself please?", will invite, especially if you're trying to kick out a fat female, some response, not even from her, but from one of her companions like "Sir, ladies".  This is supposed to mean a whole lot of things starting from, "She is a lady, so be nice to her" and extending to mean - "You're a male, and can travel tough.  She needs to sit comfortably in a seat of her choice".  What is ambiguous about a "reserved" ticket with a coach number and a seat number?  What is so hard to understand here?  OF course I'm entitled to my seat!

The biggest of all playgrounds for this is during a vehicle accident, where a clear mistake has been committed by a rather respectable looking Indian.  The invariable "mob" will almost always take the side of the "respectable looking" fool, rather than the less respectable and rightfully angry person who demands the fool first acknowledge his mistake.  The "mob" represents India accurately - taking the convenience of ambiguity, of assumption that the angry person is more likely to have caused the accident by impatience or speeding, even when all evidence is to the contrary.  What is even worse, the "respectable Indian" who drove like a fool won't make a single attempt to clear the air and accept that it was indeed his fault.  In many cases, the fool will not even know, because there is a great deal of ambiguity already in people's minds on how to drive!  The issue is no longer about who broke the rules, but about who seems more reasonable to "solve the problem".

There was one occasion when I was a youngster and had a bank account with a rather respectable Indian bank.  One day, I found an extra three hundred rupees in my account, and I was delighted that perhaps my father had put in some more money!  I withdrew it and spent some of it, immensely happy.  The next time I went into the bank, I was called in by the manager, and accused of overdrawing my account.  I showed him my passbook, which clearly had a credit entry of three hundred rupees and as far as all evidence went, I only withdrew the money I had in my account.  I was not even eligible for overdraft, so how could I have withdrawn anything extra?  This was my question.  I was a teenager then, and the manager was a robust fifty something I think.  He asked me how I could not tell my account had been accidentally credited.  I had no problem asking him how I would know the difference between an accidental credit and a real one, based on the entry THEY had made in my passbook.  He had no qualms about threatening me with some action he was going to take, instead of apologizing for their mistake and requesting me to help them out.  All of a sudden, I was guilty of something?  I told him he could take whatever action he wanted, but I knew he could do nothing.  End result - I hated how he was dragging me into his cesspool of inefficiency and ambiguously drawing me into "the mess" I had not created.  I never went to that bank again.  Screw ambiguity and screw the bums who use it to hide their inefficient asses behind.

For some reason, the biggest Indian crooks, the shenanigans who accept bribes, the pigs who pay them even to get perfectly legal work done, the bastards who evade taxes, all have no problem worshipping God.  Many even have pictures of gods in their workplace!  Could this be because they have an ambiguous relationship with God?  Could it be because they're guilty enough about the lives they lead in order to "invest" themselves in some sort of "good"?  Unfortunately, in India, we do not take religious symbols for exactly that!  We get them all mixed up with piety, cleanliness, devotion, humility and even purity!  Any surprise we catch godmen in pretty ungodly activities all the time?  Could it be because of our inability to get out of this morass of ambiguity?  Any surprise we would do our level best not to remove a completely illegal religious structure?  How come the religion has no problem violating our laws, but our laws have a real fear of violating religion by merely removing a structure?  Did I just hear "sentiments"?

Most "sentiments" are nothing but unwanted importance attached to a lot of ambiguous concepts like auspicious time, religion, superstitions, blind beliefs, and indeed India is a fertile breeding ground for stupid sentiments.  Ask Indians how numerology works only in English, and we will begin to kick down this wall of asinine ambiguity.

We Indians love nothing more than character assassination.  We do it with celebrities, public figures, politicians, sportspersons - virtually anybody that is well known or getting there, that we do not "like" or is getting a bit too famous!  It's a good thing we do not dig up too much dirt from our politicians' personal lives in election campaigns, and this is amazing indeed.  But it is not hard to find conversations revolving around which actor is having an affair with whom.  Pure gossip for fun?  Possible.  But confront one of these gossip mongers with "How do you know?", and out comes, what else - ambiguity!  "Come on!  All these movie guys are like that, okay?".  A sweeping ambiguous statement that cannot be conclusively argued against.

Push for something more serious, and go ahead, state that most gossip mongers map their own fantasies to other people they think have the opportunity to live them out, and a defence is bound to come out, "No, I don't want that life, thank you".  As if we're supposed to concede some ground to the rumour in order to not offend the rumour monger because we have now attacked the rumour monger's character!  Now, decency has to be quickly established beyond doubt.  And it will be, because there is no way we can prove anybody's fantasy!  Ambiguity has served its purpose - spreading the rumour is no longer the original crime!  Oh, in conclusion you may even hear the ambiguous, "Who cares about celebrities and their affairs anyway?"!!!

Indians are experts at opening up and increasing the scope for ambiguity in any exchange.  We expect to be forgiven and even appreciated for being of "good moral character", even when we have the lowest levels of social consciousness.  We fully expect to do a mediocre job and not be yelled at because we are willing to be perfectly soft spoken and unthreatening if indeed that is what it takes to get out of a tough situation that might define us as "guilty".

Tell some Indian pig talking on his/her cellphone in the middle of a theatrical movie experience to cut it out, and the pig will continue.  Get rude, say it a second time and there will be a reaction, like, "What's your problem, boss?"  No matter what you say, Mr. Ambiguous will be happy to counter, "Okay, so I've cut my call no?  What is the problem now?".  Like it is my mistake to get angry in the first place and make a bigger noise than the call on the cellphone that the pig made!  The crook just expanded the scope of the problem by including me in it, thus making it ambiguous enough to dissipate anger focus!

We expect to be blessed by the blessings of our ancestors because we show them great reverence, even as we exude nothing but rudeness for our fellow beings who are alive and much more likely to be affected by our obnoxious behaviour in the present.  We have brought about so much ambiguity in defining a "good" person, that it is no longer possible to spit on the dirtbag who behaves "decently", while it is relatively easy to berate the idealistic rebel.  We are ruthless with ambiguity.  It is where we hide all of another incredible Indian trait - hypocrisy.

We have a propensity for manufacturing ambiguity in massive amounts so we may hide all our faults in it, so we may wallow in it, without clarity, accountability, responsibility or humanity.  It is our passive aggressive way of winning - by first denying clarity, then by smearing the other person's clarity with clouds of doubt.  We are incredibly good at this.  We can even claim victory merely by denying the other person success in pointing out our faults.

Strip away ambiguity, and most Indians will actually be corrupt people, with very questionable value systems, and cursed with an inability to separate the objective from the subjective, the personal from the communal.  Terribly sorry, but "We are like this only" doesn't really cut it anymore.  Actually, it never did.  But some of us put up with it.

- BSK.

Who the hell are we, Indians?

Years ago, in 1947, we bought into this idea of a democratic India.  Democracy was still an experiment then, of course, and it still is, and one that has yielded varying results across various countries.  So, it cannot be the "system" that is good or bad, it comes down to us, We, the people of India.

We bought into this experimental idea because not many of us had a say in what we buy into, and a few intelligent people who were in the right place at the right time said it was a good idea to build a nation that was based on democratic values - fairness, equality, equitable distribution of resources, freedom of movement, a right to speak, congregate, express ourselves, protest, show dissent, and find representation in the political process that would run this country.  We didn't agree, but we didn't disagree either.  And somehow, by default, we got shoved into this experiment called democracy.

The great gift we got was the spirit of secularism.  Again, just an idea, but one that has somehow grown upon us.  It would be too confusing to have discrimination amongst us based on religion, caste or any other separator, so we ran with this too.  This part has worked out well, despite all the religious fanatics that still don't get it, and the myriad ways in which dogma still affects our thinking.  No political party is completely agnostic to faith, and we remain in the stone ages when it comes to pure spiritualism.  Even the Indian tourism industry somehow thinks "spiritual" means "religious"!  Stupid, but for most part, not without hope.

The other gifts we got as part of the new idea of India are the wide usage of the English language, a legal framework that roughly resembles that of the UK, a mechanism called "government", a free press, and a military that doesn't interfere with everyday life.  These are gifts, because without any of these, we'd have sunk even further into anarchy.

What we didn't bargain for, however, is the need for us to constantly work to keep the above working.  For that, it takes effort, above and outside of our personal jobs and duties, and it takes involvement and awareness.  In other words, to make India work, we cannot be sitting on our asses and expect the "others" to do their jobs.  It is our job to make the country work.  This part, we don't get.  We are an essentially selfish people, and those amongst us who have some civic sense are likely to appear like activists.

Life in India today is about screwing and not getting screwed.  The country be damned, as long as we can make a few bucks and get the life we want.  Money can buy us anything, but alas, it cannot buy us a quality country.  For that, we need to make some sacrifices and recognize what we need to do.  We never took into account the essential nature of the Indian person, while we decided what system we wanted.  The essential Indian is corrupt, or corruptible, or accepting of corruption as a way of life.  Why would so many millions amongst us pay bribes to get things done that we are legally entitled to?  Because we are sheep, and sheep get fleeced.

For some reason, most Indians are really annoyed when I tell them that "Indianness" is about being corrupt, inefficient, dogmatic, AND having a sense of righteousness that the devil himself would be afraid of.  Our relationship with God is the one we respect, and hence, if a puja routine is prescribed to an Indian family, they will carry it out religiously, perfectly.  If they are told not to dump plastic waste, they might do it to some extent.  If they are told to file a case against that official who demanded a bribe to okay their water connection, they won't.  They will actually pay the bribe to maintain "the good energy" of their lives - smooth and easy.

This fear of questioning, the fear of reprisals, the fear of showing dissent itself rules over us.  And then, for every damn thing, there is God.  Somehow, our God is most fierce in folklore and mythology, but very benign when it comes to inciting us to question and fight  for what is right.  Our righteousness flies directly in the face of our religiousness.  Somehow, there is never a discourse on this - on the essential lie of being an Indian in spirit.

The most corrupt rascals in this country dump much money in temples like Tirupathi.  Somehow, we cunningly shift the onus of accountability for such ill gotten wealth onto the Lord!  Look God, I gave you a crap load of money, now all you need to do is protect me!  The Lord has already protected you by making you Indian - not just unlikely to be caught in your act of thievery, but even more likely to make you feel good about stealing and donating to a temple!

For some reason, we frown upon Godmen who have been found having sex with a multitude of women or in the throes of drug induced ecstasy, but we're perfectly all right with elected officials stealing from our coffers to build their personal wealth.  I'm not sure what can be more askew!  But, this is what is happening - We are angered by being made fools out of - that is the problem here!  We fully expect elected officials to steal, but Godmen had to be holy!  That's why we get mad at them for having a romp!

Heck, we could also be jealous.  Having a sexual romp isn't that available to most of us Indians because we're not that enterprising.  That is why we have moral boundaries defined by the boundaries of what we dare to do.  It is the exact same reason for the BJP to get mad at Shashi Tharoor - he is not only smooth and articulate, but - hold your breath - has an attractive female friend who is not his wife!  That is why the BJP spokesperson, the cunning hypocritical bastard, said "who his girlfriend is, who he is married to, who he divorces, is not our business".  Then why mention all that?  It is the power of allusion, that most Indians fall flat for.  We can raise a scandal on mere speculation and allusion, and without a single fact, splash around so much that muddy water hits everyone!

For some reason, we forget that we are supposed to bow only to the truth.  Sathyameva Jayathe, not God.  Even God has to be truthful to win.  Lord Krishna may be the delightful exception, but then, he is a super being anyway, who is not cluttered in any way.  He must be exasperated, because India is cluttered in every way.  We don't have a clue how to do anything with elegance, no matter how many resources we have.  We need to seriously examine our "Indianness", if we are to get a clue on where we belong, if at all.

If India vanished from the face of the earth today, the rest of the world would not be that adversely impacted.  Isn't that such a stunning revelation for the 2nd largest population in the world?  The rest of the world might actually heave a sigh of relief.  Strangely, the USA, with the much greater wear and tear it imparts to the world, would terrify the world if it pulled a vanishing act!  Where would all the computers come from, where would all the Boeing planes come from, and the spares for so many of them flying all over the world, where would arms and ammunition come from, where would the best porn come from, and where would all the great movies come from!???  Who would we sell billions of dollars worth of stuff to?  There is no substituting the USA, but India can be forgotten in a jiffy or two at the most.  Guess what?  They're a democracy too!

So, before we trumpet becoming a superpower, before we get pompous about our incredible place in the world and the role we are here to play, let's look at ourselves and get our basic shit together.  Let's give as much importance to rational thinking as we do to moral and religious nonsense.  There is no God concept in our Constitution!  We aren't fundamentally subscribed to a religious idea of a country.  God is a very personal thing, even though we do a puja before launching our spacecraft.  For some reason our latest GSLV plunged into the sea.  Could it be the wrong brand of incense sticks?  No serious investigation into the failure of our first cryogenic engine is likely to result in a finding that blames the pujari.

So, let's learn to blame ourselves first, whenever things go wrong.  It is a very good habit to get into.  If I call 139 and get wrong information about my train's arrival time, it is upto me to fill out in triplicate, the complaint form at the railway station, and make my grievance known.  It is upto us to bitch, and moan, and complain, and sue - till the garbage gets cleared on time, till the road gets relaid, till the sewers stop dumping into our rivers, and till we get every single thing we need to feel like humans again.  Indianness cannot be the answer to the questions we are afraid to ask.

BSK.

Foolproof Indianness.

26th November 2008.  Mumbai.  A few of our policemen died in a hail of terrorist bullets.  The bulletproof jackets they were wearing didn't save them.  In another case, a famous cop was not wearing a bulletproof vest, and was killed, and now the Maharashtra government has submitted its affidavit to the courts investigating the incidents.

According to that affidavit - "The bullet-proof jackets had been ordered by the Maharashtra government way back in 2001 and could withstand bullets fired only from 9 mm pistols and carbines."

These shocking admissions were made in an affidavit filed by Deputy Commissioner of Police Vijaysingh Jadhav on behalf of the Maharashtra government in the Bombay High Court on Wednesday, the day when a special court concluded hearing arguments in that 26th November terror attacks.

Similar jackets, which are not meant to withstand fire from AK47 or and SLR, are used even by the "military forces", the affidavit said.  Great!  So, what are they supposed to withstand?  Water guns?  Pea shooters?  Firecrackers?

The state government told the High Court in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) that the jackets used during 26/11 were ordered in a time when the "threat perception" for the metropolis had "not taken into account an attack that would include simultaneous strikes and civilians held as hostages."  Let's put that a little more honestly - "We never thought we'd get attacked, so we didn't give a fuck what we wore".  What do civilians held as hostages have to do with bulletproof vests not being bulletproof?  Also, simultaneous strikes.  How many cops do we have?  Just one?  Don't we have simultaneous traffic lights?

To the question whether the jackets were of standard or not, the answer was that it could not have saved Karkare because the officer sustained injuries to his shoulder and neck, which were not covered by the jacket of standard design, the affidavit pointed out.  Oh, great.  So let's forget the bulletproof jackets for now, and let's focus on the foolproof bullets that aimed away from the areas the jacket covered.  Brilliant.

Way back in 2008, we had police officers coming forward and telling us about jackets procured by the police through which "every single bullet went through"!  Yes, even when shot from a long distance.
http://www.mid-day.com/news/2008/dec/011208-Mumbai-bullet-encounter-specialist-Vijay-Salaskar-Mumbai-terror-blast-bullet-proof-jacket.htm.  In other words, these fools never really had any bulletproof jackets!

Let's take a step aside and ask ourselves how much of a deep rooted incompetence this has exposed.  First of all, "carbines" were probably last used in World War 1.  These are the long barreled guns with smooth insides, that don't even put revolutions on the bullets going out.  Who needs protection from these antiques?  This is not some museum coming alive every night.  Even local gangs have more powerful guns these days!  So, what kind of morons are sitting around taking these purchase decisions that are clearly completely useless?  What kind of a brainless system do we have to be endorsing in order to spend money on things that have absolutely no meaning in buying?

Terrorists are efficient because they have to be.  They need to cause maximum damage with minimum investment.  So they get the best weapons, choose the fittest and mentally sickest amongst themselves, prepare to die, and go in all guns blazing, pun intended.  To oppose them, we don't need any of their madness, but simply a mechanism that works.  We need people that can shoot back, a chain of command that knows what commands to issue to whom and when, trained people who can pull the trigger when their guns are pointing at the targets, and machines that work.  Period.

While under attack is not the time for chaos and confusion in the ranks, miscommunication amongst various government organizations, and missed opportunities.  It is never a good time for any of this, but if we test any of our government controlled "systems" we will find them not working.

We gave our government offices computers a long time ago.  For sure, at the very least, ten years ago.  The Regional Transport Offices are amongst these.  The police departments of various states even have claims on their websites that they are proud to be part of many new e-government initiatives. (Example: http://tnpolice.gov.in/chiefmsg.html).  Ask a traffic policeman if he can pull out his walkie talkie, bark a number, and get the name and address of the owner of any vehicle he just saw running over ten people.  The answer is NO!  As incredulous as it may seem, there is no access to that simple bit of information!  There is a whole official procedure to follow before this gap is bridged!  That is where our government monkeys are, with or without computers.  Fuckers just don't know what to do, except blackmail the public into paying bribes for the simplest tasks, and maintain total bankruptcy of functional ideas.

Of course this points to corruption, incompetence, and a host of other endemic problems, like apathy, non-action, and finally, to sum up - Indianness.  It is time we defined this for ourselves, since we seem to have a hard time acknowledging that "Indianness" is indeed all the above rolled into one.  This is a word that deserves to be in every dictionary.  Only we Indians can fuck up something of importance so badly, that even after lives are lost, we're grappling not with the gravity of the situation, but with the process of concluding a "matter".

I'm not entirely unhappy policemen died, because most of them are corrupt bastards.  The majority of them are unfit, insincere, not interested in service of any kind unless it is performed to obtain a bribe, and are just puppets of politicians.  It is just fantastic that their incompetence in Mumbai was exposed by terrorists in such a short period of time, instead of our public interest, the judicial process, the media, and our Indianness combined spending the next fifty years telling us that our cops, their jackets, their guns, and their stupidity is a complete waste for the nation.

Are our policemen dispensable?  Clearly, they are.  Nothing of note has happened now that we have lost a few of them in terrorist and Maoist attacks.  Their deaths haven't made any pockets of civilization more in danger, or lacking protection.  The police forces of almost all states are nothing but drains on the budget, magnified several times by their incompetence and immunity from speedy prosecution.  So, why do we need them, if they are not impeccable in their duties and manners?

Where it most mattered - doing their duty, they were found wanting, and if they are that inefficient, they can die.  For heavens sake, there is nothing heroic about dying in a war you're not even fit enough to fight in, so let's stop making heroes out of unfit, uniformed thugs we hire to do our dirty jobs and look the other way when they take bribes, grow fat, and kill people in fake "encounters".  Police custodial killings in India are rampant.  Now we have them selling dead bodies.  How low can these weasels go?  It's wrong to generalize the entire police force of this country thus, but if they can take collective pride, they can also take collective blame. 

It is absolutely shameful that this country supplies substandard equipment to personnel employed to do critical jobs, but we don't need to take any moral responsibility for the personnel themselves being substandard.  If there are IPS officers facing charges of molestation of minors and abetting suicide, they can bloody well figure out how bulletproof their own jackets need to be and they can shoot the pigs that supplied faulty equipment.  They once again failed to do their jobs - that's all there is to it.  And the same can be said of many, many Indians who're not earning their keep.  It's just part of our Indianness.  When we get bitten because of it, that will simply add to ... what else?  Indianness!

- BSK.