Between Cities and Countries

"Sir, you may take photographs of yourself; however, you may not take photographs of the crew."

The petite figure moved down the aisle without the air of someone who had been digitally molested in public and, with a smile, deleted evidence of the man's indecency. She handed him his smartphone with fleeting eye-contact. That smile, I noted amusedly, hadn't relented. He looked back at her as if she had offered a set of dentures and smiled back with faux kindness and tight lips. I vaguely remembered psychology experiments.

My eyes were slow to swivel away from her. She had the kind of nose that reminds you of strawberry sweetcakes. I had never liked strawberry sweetcakes.

As she walked back, I spoke to her in a voice that I hoped would not carry, "That was awfully polite of you."

"You have to be."

"Does this happen often, then?"

"All the time."

"Does it get any easier?"

"Never."

She smiled. This smile seemed remarkably less cold than its predecessor. Had she beamed at me? Had it lasted too short to matter? Perhaps she had offered me the best she could given the context? I stopped myself abruptly, having gone down this rabbit-hole before.

Ten minutes into a book on India's foreign policy, I realized I had registered almost nothing. For some reason, my brain now thought of General Musharaff in a slightly romantic light.

Stupid Pavlov.

Resigned, I lifted my head to see a lady dressed in immaculate navy-blue reciting the particulars of our flight. The white ribbon-rose on her neck made her look silly. She wore an expertly suppressed smirk that told me that had we met in a different setting, she would have agreed vociferously.

I looked down into my book. The author repeated his stance on terrorism for the fourth time. I groaned quietly.

I looked up.

The girl was back. She was miming the safety procedure that precedes every take-off. I wondered whether law forced her to repeat these with the hope that enough exposure to choreographed instructions would make them stick. I wondered if legislators understood the obstinacy of the average citizen in ignoring death and its affiliated protocols.

I gazed over at her more consciously. I focused on the way her lips shifted to the left every time the speakers blurted something inanely obvious; the way her hands soared above her shoulders, spending energy she could not deposit elsewhere; the way her hair was cropped in a bun that did little to take away her youth.

I was seated in the third row and my height offered a gorgeous view of her half-spirited movements over the head of a gentleman in front. I wondered how much of her soul died every time she tied the belt-buckle and displayed it to a crowd that was clearly not impressed with her effort. Something of my reflection must have been borrowed from her mind because for the first time in my life I was witnessing an air-hostess that was visibly bored.

She brandished a menu-card for expensive sandwiches and cookies, torturously unable to gesticulate the sentence: "...help yourself to our exotic selection in the finest cuisine...".  She settled for holding it like she was auditioning for The Lion King and rolled her eyes in her head. I couldn't stop myself from grinning in her direction. She found me and her face gave way to a mini-chuckle. A small explosion on an alabaster face. I felt myself grow very interested in military coups.

Stupid Pavlov.

I was pushed into my seat as the plane accelerated and, almost as if the universe conspired to make me believe in a benevolent (or bored) God, she sat herself in a seat that was amply visible from mine. I would spend the next thirty minutes alternating my attentions between Benazir Bhutto and a face in perpetual blush. I did not mind her make-up at all.

I like to think I was covert. I probably was not.

At this point, the gentleman in front of me either grew smart to my efforts or thought I was flirting with his hair (or I was the protagonist of a cheap tragicomic production) because he maliciously moved to obscure my view of the girl whose navy-blue suit did little to hold the summer within her...

With a mental kick to myself, I realized I was in the dastardly rabbit-hole. I settled for enjoying my stay there in what can only be described as an act of desperate pragmatism.

The overhead button that summons flight attendants is genius, I realized. It is the closest we have to a magical lamp. Unfortunately, every time I was 'thirsty', the wrong genie would pop into my field of vision. My stance towards the white ribbon-rose graduated to belligerence. After my fifth glass of water, I wasn't even trying to hide my eyes from searching her whereabouts.

Ah! There she was! Row N. My aqueous needs were now rendered obsolete and disappeared as awkwardly as they had come into existence. I decided to work up the courage to ask her out for a cup of coffee when I unboard. Surely, she will stay back in Mumbai some time soon?

I sighed.

Something sarcastic in me asked me, "Does this happen often, then?"

"All the time."

"Does it get any easier?"

"Never."

---

It was a little awkward to sit on the third row from the exit and not alight. I was suddenly reading the book with more interest than I have ever paid to anything without a strawberry sweetcake nose. When the mob thinned enough so that I could ask her away from pleasantries for a minute, I stood up (less ceremoniously than I had imagined) and ambled slowly to the front.

And then I walked left, out to the stairs and breathed in the night.

She hadn't been there. In that small area where the crew stands and fares you well. She hadn't been there. I deflated like a pool of stars would if they weren't abstractions of titanic conflagrations floating in the indifferent vacuum of space. Both fit, the poet in me remarked. I politely asked him to shut the fuck up.

About fourty-three milliseconds later, her face appeared from the darkness, travelling up the stairway and I had the fleeting sense of being buffeted backwards by sheer intent. She threw a chirpy "Good night" at me. I caught it between the space of my ribs and nodded my head in acknowledgment. Something appropriately enthusiastic passed my lips while I descended and before I knew it I was looking at the passenger bus. It had never looked sadder.

I stood for a full minute in a night that wasn't appropriately cold. I looked behind and up into the looped canopy of the portable stairs. I was hoping to find light at the end of the passage. She wasn't there.

I moved forward.

I moved backward.

I climbed the stairs. I learnt that day that nothing is more irritating than being interrupted mid-climb to the girl of your (recently conceived) dreams. The security-bloke wouldn't let me pass beyond the third step and confiscated my ticket until I answered a few questions.

"Have you forgotten something, Sir?"

"Look, I will be down in a minute. Let me just..."

"Sir, we cannot let you do that. There are laws against this. If you just tell me what you have forgotten, I will get it for you."

"I haven't exactly forgotten anything."

He looked at me with anticipation. I gave him the kind of look I last gave my Chemistry teacher, bargaining for an extra 1/2 mark over a diagram I had guessed into creation.

"Look, I just need to speak to someone in the crew..."

"I am sorry but we cannot allow that."

And just like that, my shoulders fell by an inch accompanied by other changes I had read of in a psychology book more interesting than the one I was now holding. Suddenly, I did not like foreign policy too much.

Stupid Pavlov.

What is India?

Independence Day acts as a reminder to over a billion Indians of our hard-earned sovereignty, countless sacrifices (with or without blood) and varied examples of why India doesn’t suck half as much as a look around your immediate neighborhood would have you believe. For me the day is always filled with question marks.

Think for a moment – what is India? No, I am not asking for poetic references to the saffron in Kashmiri fields, the white shape-shifting salts of Kutchh or the stillness of stone-carved temple tanks. I am talking about identity. Who or what is India, really? Is it a country defined by the physical demarcations on a contended map? Is it the nation of a people that identify themselves with common ethnical, linguistic or cultural backgrounds? Or perhaps it is simply the state that works as a cohesive unit of governing units to manage a permanent population and negotiate with other similar entities on global forums? The answer isn’t half as important as the realization that we don’t seriously ask ourselves this question before bleeding patriotic. No, these three are not the same thing. When you hate the ‘system’, you are sick of the state. When Shashi Tharoor's exemplary rhetoric goes viral, he owes it to his argument for a nation. Ruskin Bond’s dream-scapes of Manila will make you fall in love with the country. These three are concurrent in space and time, to put it mathematically, but are completely discrete.

Other questions plague me with equal doggedness. For a moment, consider, why is it that we celebrate our independence from the British Crown? Is it because they exploited us without consideration for our growth? They leeched, looted and arbitraged everything they could (including people) in the process changing systems, often for the worse; that’s what made it such good riddance, right? But then, are we saying that had they been benevolent rulers, we would have not placed any value on sovereignty? No, that doesn’t sound right for some reason. Autonomy surely is an inherently better state of existence than servitude to a foreign agency, no matter their contribution to our well-being?  Why should this be so? Instinct? Really? Would you rather have (hypothetically) no-good 'Indians' running your state rather than have more efficient and well-meaning, say, Hungarians running it (assuming the same process of elections)? At what point does it become acceptable? What is the meaning of this cost-benefit analysis and the break-even point?

To be autonomous you need a self that governs itself. What is this ‘self’ in this case? I am not the first one to point out that we are a nation of strangers. ‘Dunbar’s Number’ is how many people you can reasonably maintain bona fide social relationships with. Most people think this is between 100 to 250 people. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that you don’t really know the people whom you claim to identify yourselves with as a cohesive whole. If anything, the ratio of whom we know and whom we claim to be our brothers and sisters is the worst for a country of 1.3 billion individuals. It is, then, an identity transcending the individuals – “The whole is greater than the sum of its components.”

To me, this is mind-blowing.

We have come from pledging our allegiance to royal bloodlines, the Church, and umpteen other more tangible things to quite simply pledging allegiance to ourselves as a whole. We createdthis entity out of nowhere. This is not synonymous with Democracy, of course, since that concept is more about the state rather than the nation, even if it draws from notions of the latter.

To me, the most interesting aspect of nationhood is something much more fundamental. Let’s pretend you are an Indus Valley civilian from the humble town of Dholavira. It is yet to become the great-walled multi-coloured beauty it will remain until millennia. You have just returned from inscribing records for a local body in a script that will puzzle generations of archaeologists; you are chilling out by a banyan tree, looking at some wagons pass. Your town trades grain with neighbouring cities and that is all the world you know of; Mesopotamia hasn’t found its way to your stockades yet. Do you belong to the Indus Valley Civilization? Yes. Do you know this? Do you have any reason to know this? If you heard the phrase, would it make any sense to you? Most probably not. Any identity whatsoever exists solely because there exists something not like it. The Indus people would call themselves as the Indus people only once they discovered other peoples. At best, the phrase "Indus people" would be synonymous with "everyone". Not surprisingly then, the word ‘Hindu’ is actually a Persian reference for the folk beyond the Sindhu River (Indus River). Before foreign entities came into knowledge, the transcendent identity of a people literally could not exist.

Let's assume this realization does not take anything away from the concept of a nation. The next question then becomes, who needs to believe that it is a nation for it to be a nation? The Anglo-Saxon kings of medieval Europe drove away the Vikings with a concerted effort, inspiring some form of nationalism. Was the conglomeration a nation-state? Alternatively, if a community of people has evolved outside the rest of the world, say, the Sentinelese people of the Andaman islands, do they stop being Indian or does India stop being an entity in their homeland? By the definitions the reader might have internally agreed upon earlier, do these people get to say that their island is a nation inside our nation of India? Is consensus necessary for a nation to be a nation? Is Tibet a country or not? Is the immolation of a Buddhist monk an act of patriotism or rebellion? Do you use history to validate or invalidate claims to identity? Why should you at all? Does terrorism need to be mutually exclusive from nationalism? Is it possible that the average Naxal militant is every bit as justified from First Principles as our dear Mahatma who refused to accept foreign rule? Whose maps should we refer to? Should 'right' or 'wrong' even be a parameter to consider when speaking of nations? This is around the point where things become messy enough for most people that they would shut down the line of inquiry and opt for the comfortable status quo.

Is the status quo ipso facto correct? Of course not. But then are we saying that all patriotism is pragmatic and not really an expression of a deeper truth we have held in our hearts to be sacred? That is a question that troubles me the most. What if we have agreed upon a comfortable story that can just works out for most of those involved?

When I started this blog-post, I knew that I will step on many toes by the very nature of the questions I ask despite not having taken one side or another. There is an almost intuitive sense of love for the nation that comes too easily and inspires too much. I have immense respect for those that dedicate their lives to the nation but to me this has always been respect due to the inherent nature of such dedication. Man my borders, run my state, fix my society and I will bow my metaphorical hat to you. I have an equal amount of respect for those in other countries doing similar things and if someone feels otherwise, they really need to ask themselves why. Is it because the causes of your nation are inherently more important in an absolute sense? Isn't that brazen self-centricism used as a means to judge the acts of fellow men? That is simply selfish and while I usually recommend selfishness, an honest statement can be seldom made with vested interests. A nationalist's love for his nation is like that of a lover who is in a marriage without choice but knows to love unconditionally and is convinced that (s)he could have never selected anyone else given the choice (which isn't a bad thing necessarily, just something we should be very conscious about).

I do not love India any more than I would love my planet or state or city or even my neighbourhood. Some would be concerned for me due to this and to them I ask, "What is India?"

The Sometimes-Useful-Things

We have run into the habit of calling practices and heuristics useful in of themselves. Manners, codes of conduct, systems of communication, social structures, law, everything seems to have brought us one step closer to the pinnacle of humanity we presume to have reached. (This might be true -- I am the last person to bother myself with subjective evaluations of whether we are greater for who we are or not). 

I contend the assumption that these 'advancements' are really advancements in of themselves. We tend to look at things in an additive manner. Law made things better than they were before it. Same goes for etiquette, family structures, democracy and what-not. I strongly believe that they do not have any inherent utility. They interact with each other in complex ways. Calling one of them innately useful is like calling one card in a House of Cards innately capable of holding weight if suspended in the air at 30 degrees. The universe's laws are apathetic to the human condition and these 'advancements' are therefore not designed upon any natural law. They just are. There is a very real Darwinian evolution of customs and ideologies. The victors are not inherently the fittest but only those most suited to survive.

I feel we need to divorce the inherent qualities of these entities from the utility they provide. Standing in a queue and maintaining order is an efficient solution when there is promise of receiving what you wait for. The same practice will be discarded without a second thought when rushing into city-gates as an invading army approaches. Consideration and empathy makes life better for all of us but the same emotional energy might be rationed in more trying times. I am obviously not commenting on what is right but simply what serves the purpose of a group when traced to an individual level. 

Being cognizant of this makes us humbler not only when judging objections against certain practices but also when looking at other cultures and our history.

Photo credit

How do our ideologies evolve?

Living a life with a certain ideology is about figuring out how to best reach your goal. Even with the same goal (e.g. happiness) people will vehemently disagree on how to go about it. This is mostly because out of a superset of all factors (things that need you to make a conscious decision: outlook on money, sex, friends, etc.), a particular strategy focuses on a certain set of factors, usually closely linked with each other. Optimization means that advantaging these could disadvantage others (e.g. work hard for money, less time for yourself). What this helps us realize is that no one factor can be said to have an intrinsic need to be more or less which is what we inevitably keep doing when discussing things like love, jobs, ambition, family, etc.

This is why at no point in your life will you be suddenly aware of how wrong you are and immediately change on the basis of new data (which should logically happen because if something works, something works). The data that comes from others in form of their beliefs and philosophies and actions might seem completrly wrong right now and will be exactly what you do a few years from today. Why? Your net of variables and priorities currently did not  allow you to see the pattern that would emerge with another set of variables. You saw that 'd, 'm', and 'x' should be prioritized but your current strategy works on synthesis of 'a', 'b' and 'c' and the change would totally ruin the results you are getting with 'a', 'b' and 'c'.

You will fall and stumble and experiment until each set of variables and priorities is progressively more favourable to you. That is life.

Birth of the Social Identity

I never really identified myself with any group or community, much less a city. I shift to Gurgaon and suddenly I am a Mumbaite. Innocent instances -- dry summers, open spaces, unmetered rickshaws -- reminded of the psychological divide I had yet to cross even though I am not given to such biases. It seems simple enough a phenomenon and is overwhelmingly common but I feel there is something we can learn here.

The secret lies in how we understand who we are. We tend to identify ourselves with the help of echoes from the environment we are in, as if we only understand ourselves when we see the world react to us. You cannot base yourself in yourself -- how do you find the position of an object without having an external coordinate system? You are because something is not you.[1] It is well and good to not base yourself on a geographical or communal environment, but there will be an outside, always.

When you move to a new place, you are suddenly without that familiar environment that makes you you. Not knowing who or what you are is an unsettling feeling, forcing you to reach out and replace the void with a template. This is when a social identity becomes crucial. A ready cheat-sheet of who you are, what you like and whom you absolutely love to criticize. And this holds for any event that forces you into an identity crisis. Remember how quickly you fell into stereotypes when high school became a failed attempt at figuring out who you are?

This leads me to wonder what if this kind of identity crises were the reason social identities came into existence? Mass migrations, uprootings of peoples, famine, wars -- the entire gamut that characterized early mankind. What if they were the crucibles within which a Darwinian evolution of the concept emerged?

"Wait a minute," I hear you think, "Why would social identities need to come into existence? Don't societies have them by default?"  

I don't see a reason why they should. We often confuse a society with its social identity but they are not the same. A society is a functional group of people that achieves what the individuals could not by themselves -- it is an entity without an identifier. The social identity is what you think of when you think of the group. It is the personality, the spirit, the flavour. Its customs and fashions are suddenly a part of a larger pattern that suddenly make sense, no longer heuristics, and you will refer to it as you would an organism. (Some would call it an illusion but I do not see why the illusion of the self is any more substantial).

Now ask yourself, is it really necessary that the two spring into existence together? I think not. I go out for lunch with six people and we are a group. It is not until I need to leave that I am conscious of plucking myself from a group and this stickiness is my mind having unknowingly understood its own existence using the interactions within that group.[2]

The above is unresearched conjecture on my part (as will be most of my blog-posts) and I invite you to tear, gut and burn it. Why don't you share your views on the topic in the comments section?


Notes:

1. My guess on why loneliness makes you feel empty: reduction in the number of interactions you have with others reduces acknowledgments and assertions of who you are, thereby bereaving you of a sense of being.
2.  It is possible that the constant sticking and unsticking ultimately shapes how we evolve. If we are who we relate with, the pulling apart and adhering to entities is an continuous process and these metaphors are just a different way of saying that we are never the same river twice. 

Hello, World!

Why this blog?

I have been told on countless occasions (by folk that prosper on honest conversation) that I need to start writing down my mad trains of thought, since no matter how interesting they might be, people cannot be expected to receive their blunt force 24/7. This, then, will be that frozen wide-eyed discussion I could never have with you. That phone-call the night was too young to bear. That lecture I am not qualified to give. I start this blog to let the world peek into the conversations I have with myself; not all of them might be of relevance, value or originality and indeed, their only utility might be to make of my mind a museum, but I believe that is as good a reason as any.

Why am I interesting?

Because I was a weird kid. "Why?," you ask, once again with a tinge of impatience.

I have always been uncomfortable with accepting concepts at face value. If you realize, that makes for an exhausting learning process and a confused confusing child. When you are introduced to new information, vetted by whatever security your brain has, there is a choice to be made: do you usher that sliver of truth into your picture of the universe or do you demand that it meet all the other slivers of truth that came in before? Do you demand consistency? 

A simple example is found in the frustration of a young boy when he is taught not to lie and is later asked to say things like "Nice to meet you" when he clearly doesn't really care. The contradiction would require the introduction of the concept of Politeness, its accompanying assumptions regarding what works and what doesn't with communication, as well as an amendment to "Thou shalt not lie" (thereby rendering it non-universal and immediately subject to more scrutiny). I could go on about what other branches of Truth are discovered (sometimes, even their un-discoverability is discovered) within this example but I am sure you get the point.

This process scales and lends itself to connections between seemingly disparate foci of interest, for instance Geography and Mathematics or even History and Economics. You can draw graphs of Fulfilment versus Time and find Happiness in differentials (pun intended). It doesn't take a lot of effort to realize that subjects and disciplines are manifestations of the human inability to comprehend the Whole with a single set of axioms and heuristics. It is a human thing and I will probably write an article on why I believe that will never be resolved, but it pays to be conscious of the mist that fogs our lenses.

I no longer am that weird kid. As many of you can confirm, I am now a weird adult.


What will I write about?

I like making connections. The world explodes into a million colours when you join the dots. I often end up contemplating on discrepancies, oddities and patterns that I find in day-to-day life. I do not read (non-fantasy) books. At all. Most of what I discuss comes from me having spent long years trying to make sense of things, mostly with First Principles. Yes, I stand on the shoulders of giants before me, but it is more of me peeking at the horizon and then running on fresh grass until I reach the destination myself. I wear my convictions on the sleeve, flaunt them to the sky and seek to see them destroyed; whatever remains is incontrovertible, the latest version of Truth. There is poetry in that and I believe a lot of people are tuned to its beauty.

An example: whatever social/communication skills I do have have been developed consciously with Psychology in mind. I have experimented with people, gauged their reactions and adopted the exact same mannerisms my parents have tried to make me adopt since years, but now I understand why they exist. I rediscover fire. My EQ is IQ. That is pure alchemy. That is the kind of magic that seduces me into thinking the way I do. I could live the rest of my life without achieving little beyond a front-row seat to the theatre of the basest elements that constitute existence, and I would die (if death indeed exists) content.