a descent into hope

8/2/2019 A Descent Into Hope

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O | B | V | I | O | U | S | L | Y O | P | A | Q | U | E

U T S V O I C E > M a r c h 1 - 1 5 , 2 0 1 2

Descent. It is not just a word. It is a

sluice gate that opens up a barrage

of feelings hitherto confined in the

heart with the brain firmly in control.

It sends shivers down my spine, make me

uneasy. I did never like the phenomenon asso-

ciated with it. My aversion to the word was so

near complete that even while trekking in

serene, and surmountable, Shivalik ranges,

after a climb instead of starting the descent I

would tell my friends to go back.

The aversion might have come from all

those stories of

hope that made rise such a

sweet word. I was growing up in an

environment where everything seemed to be

on the rise, at cataclysmic pace at times. Thecountry was rising, the economy was rising,

the hopes were rising and so was everything

else. Internalization, they call it. We had inter-

nalized the very idea of rise incarcerating our-

selves, in the process, into a prison of our own

making. This was not an ordinary prison; it was

one we had willingly chosen. It was one with

just one window opening into all that was

green.

Our backs were turned firmly on the

despair that was descending on the country-

side, something which would later be called

rural distress of an unprecedented kind.

Farmers, for the first time in the Indian history,

were committing suicides en mass, lands were

being taken away and people had started flee-

ing the countryside. We were rising, we were

dreaming of becoming a super power by 2020

even when the silent majority of the country

was descending into an era of distress and

footloose migration.

We did not see any of that. We were on

something like an auto-edit mode. Anything

associated with descent, with fall, was con-

signed to the recycle bin that existed, invisibly,

in our brains. Those were the times to rewrite

everything that had a fall in it. More creative of

the lot was

not getting satisfied merely with rework-

ing idioms, it was actually into rephrasing

the phrases that had defined us for centuries.

The times were best captured in the tag line

given to his movie Taal by none other than the

showman of the times, Subhash Ghai. He was

telling us, cheekily, not to fall, but to rise in

love. Thank heavens (wherever they are), that

they did not rename all the real falls or we

would have been visiting Kempty Rise,

Dhuandhar Rise and so on!

The ones in the driving seat were particu-

larly unhappy with descent and not only for the

fact that it rhymed with that other word they

feared the most- dissent. They were mortally

scared of anything that could threaten their

centuries-old; in fact millennia-old grip over

power. They had not let anyone of a different

descent than their own come anywhere close

to power. They had built a foolproof system of

administering miseries and keeping people of

a different and lowly, according to them,

descent while also segregating them by grant-

ing them differential access to those in power.

So some suffered more, some less and the

ones suffering less were kept in perennial

Encounters

withNatures ownCountry!

BY

SAMAR

A descentinto hopeIMAGIN

G:YOGENDRA

SINGH


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enmity with those suffering more.

Then came democracy, the wretched thing

that the ones in the driving seat hated the

most. They were never the only ones whowere enterprising enough to keep all others in

subjugation, but they were the only ones with

the right descent! Their lineage was their

claim to power. Democracy

changed it all. It gave

the enterprising

ones in the

hitherto

depressed castes and classes that formed the

silent majority of India, their first shot on

reclaiming all that had been snatched away

from them.

Soon, a new class of leadership emerged,

and this one stunned the former rulers with

their rustic charm. Like Lalu Yadav they came

riding not on chariots but buffaloes and

endeared themselves to the masses. They

spoke a language that was shunned by the

elite. They took pride in their surnames that

were considered to be lowly till the other day

and displayed it on everything that belonged

to them, right from their cars to official bunga-

lows. They had started infusing a sense of

pride in their people, who were not even

human enough for the previous regimes.

They realized the power of their numbers

and put it to some real good use. In a demo-

cratic system that operated on the principle of

first past the post, the strategy was destined to

good dividends and so it happened. They had

drawn their first blood and it was to be merelyfollowed by more successes. Ah, the master

collaborators had lost the plot for good.

Undoubtedly, they remained at the helm of

social and economic life of the nation but their

hold on political power was gone. But then, los-

ing control over political power leads to loss of

economic monopolies doesnt it?

Now, the hierarchy imbued in castes and

surnames has met its nemesis and lineages

stood staring into inevitable defeat. The phe-

nomenon of descent has started its descent

into doom. The rulers, previous ones I mean,

were bound to hate the word more than anyother.

But then, people and communities do grow

up. Okay, I concede that there are fanatics of all

hues and cry, saffron ones being the most

dominant one in our country, who have refused

to do so but then I was talking of people, the

human beings, wasnt I? After all, expecting

traits that are essentially human from people

who take pride in calling themselves an army

of monkeys, aka Bajarang Dal is our fault, not

theirs! They have chosen to descent into pre-

civilization barbarianism so let it be.

Descent, I have realised, was not that nega-

tive a word. The only descent I still had a prob-

lem with remained that of an aircraft I was fly-

ing in. Believe me, every announcement of us

approaching the airport and starting our

descent gave me goosebumps. My ears

would hurt much before the plane begins to

lose height and there are real changes in the

air pressure inside. The physical uneasiness

would then slowly convert into psychological

wanderings like what to expect of the place.

And most of all, the lights glittering out of the

city life would inevitably make me think of mil-

lions of those who are yet to know what elec-

tricity really is. In short, the same city whichlooked so fascinating, so inclusive from

changes when seen from a landing aircraft.

Further, aerial views almost always killed

the character of the city beneath. All those

beautiful streets that defined it, the crowded

lanes which set the pace of its life get white-

washed by the high mast floodlights. You could

no longer make a Banaras out of New Delhi and

Phnom Penh and Hong Kong looked exactly

the same. The descents, for me, butchered the

persona of the city. They were all so different,

yet so similar.

Not this time though. I had listened to thepilots announcement of our impending

descent with all the disquiet it evokes for me,

and the disquiet had, almost instinctively,

made me peep out of the window and into the

city I was going to be in for the next week. I was

stunned, in fact, that is still an understatement

of what I really felt about. Where had all those

high-rises gone? The failure to locate a single

ugly thing otherwise called as residential

tower was something as exhilarating as con-

fusing? Were we landing in the right city? Had

our plane, somehow, been diverted to some

other place?

The fears were almost immediately allayed

by the second announcement of the pilot. We

actually were going to land in Kochi, a town

that looked like an ocean of green from that

height. I had never had a descent more beauti-

ful than that. It was a moment of revelation, a

moment when truth gets somehow illuminat-

ed with all its magnificence. It was, in the

words of Virginia Woolf, a moment of being.

I was not bothered if Kerala was Gods own


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country or not anymore. It was Natures very

own beyond doubt. I knew, intuitively, that I

need to brace up for all those encounters with

beauty that were in the offing. In any case, the

drive to Thrissur was going to throw many of

them at me. The city(or villages?)Just out of

the Kochi international Airport has a distinctive

old world charm. The FM radio in the cab was

put to some channel belting out melodious

Hindi songs of the 1970s, and before I could

even wonder about a Malyali listening to Hindi

songs Purushottam bhai, the driver, has shot

his first question at me, Aap kahan se aaya

Sir? My encounters with the hospitality

Kearala is famous for had begun.

This is not to suggest, though, that I had

much time to think about hospitality. The road

was narrow, and serpentine despite being in

the plains. It was spotlessly clean too, defying

North Indian logic system of mine. Clearly, Red

in Kerala has always flied high and was not

supposed to be seen as stains on the road, as

it is in Pan-loving-roads-dirtying North Indian

order of the things. Then, it opened up to theNational Highway. This one, too, was nothing

like the ones we have here. The drive was

unbelievably smooth and there were no horny

men honking behind. They waited, patiently

(they really did) at the Toll Plaza as well. Two

hours in Kerala and I was already into my third

shock.

I was in Thrissur now, a temple town which

seemed to be irrevocably obsessed with gold,

cleanliness and Mundu (the wrap on clothe for

men). Everyone seemed to wear them, and

they, in turn, seemed to emerge as a challenge

to class differentials otherwise so unabashed-ly manifested by the style of clothing. Thrissur,

in fact Kerala, did not seem to bother much

with class. I concede that

there must be some rem-

nants not accessible to

my untrained eyes but

then it must be doing far

better than rest of India

even in that case.

I could not help but

ask Navin, a firebrand

human rights activist

about the same. Now,

talking to Navin is an

experience unto itself. He does not speak

much of Hindi, Urdu or English and Malayalam

is as alien to me as it can get. But then, conver-

sations are not that dependent on language as

we often make them to be. He spoke at length,

I listened in a state of almost enthralled silence

and at the end of it all I knew that the phenom-

enon had got something to do with Narayan

Gurus movement against caste based hierar-

chies and his idea of replacing God with an

image of the self, in a mirror. Well, I had read

about Narayan Guru and his movement earlier,

Sri Narayan Guru, Indian Social Reformer



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but understood it only that day.

Replacing God with the image of ones own

was something like instilling the idea of divini-

ty among those who were condemned to live in

a perennial dehumanized state of being. This

was like reclaiming humans out of those des-

tined to slavery based on their descent. On top

of all that, it was achieved by subverting the

very idea of divinity. I was in Gods own coun-

try, just that the Gods here were more human

than the Gods themselves. Here, the brokers

between the supposed divinity and their

human devotees had been done away with. If

only we could repeat the experience in the

North!

Navin wanted me to roam around thestreets, especially in the area called city-cen-

tre. City center is a circular drive concentric

with the temple and houses everything from

swanky automobile showrooms to eateries. I

signaled an auto-rickshaw and asked him for

taking me there. So he did, and the meter said

13 rupees! 13 rupees in all! This was going to

remain the same over my 6 days spent in the

temple town. I got fleeced just once, that too

when the guy charged me 40 rupees, and hav-

ing become an auto-rickshaw veteran I knew

that was overcharging by a margin! Think of it,

just six days in Kerala and I was shocked at get-ting fleeced and not the other way round!

Decent too rhymes with descent, remember?

However, I could sense that there was

something more than was

meeting my eyes. And then,

it dawned upon me. Most of

the eateries, including my

all-time favorite Indian

Coffee House, were selling

both pork and beef together

with all other vegetarian

and non-vegetarian delica-

cies. And one did not really

need to be a rocket scientist

to see that their patrons

consisted of all religious groups. Selling beef in

a country where Giriraj Kishors of Vishwa

Hindu Parishad keep declaring life of a cow

being more important than that of a Dalit wasa revelation in itself, it sharing space with pork

was a lesson in pluralism. I was in Gods own

country, but this God was not the regular one.

If only, we could import this virtue of

respecting everyones preferences including

the culinary ones without deploying religion as

a menacing weapon of making others conform

to our worldviews! Whoever this our is! I had

cancelled my plans of visiting the temple. One

does not need Gods to streamline affairs of a

community of human beings, does one?

And yes, I was bewildered that no one

seemed to be particularly interested in my sur-name, aka caste! No one looked at me with

curious eyes and a pause when I introduced

myself with merely my first name. No one

seemed to stop or repeat that in a last-ditch

effort of extracting out my surname (and my

caste with it). I am sure that there may be rem-

nants of caste as well, but then they certainly

would not be of that order as in the North.

Thrissur seemed to have quite a large num-

ber of North Indian migrant labours easily dis-

tinguishable from the locals both for their com-

plexion and the pants instead of the Mundus.

They looked happy, not in the least for there

are no menaces like Raj Shrikant Thackerays

here threatening them to go back or facing the

consequences. You see, descent is not much of

an issue even in political life of Kerala! Gods

own country it is or not, Narayana Gurus it is. I

was thinking, on my flight back, of when would

we have our own Keralas?UTS


a descent into hope

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