Sample the latest hare-brained order of the Delhi High Court asking Facebook and Google to remove ‘objectionable content’. The sheer practical impossibility of such a Tughlaq-esque farman notwithstanding, there are deeper issues of offensiveness and tolerance involved here. Who determines what is offensive? One may fall back on the IPC logic and delegate that power to the judge, but is the situation today the same as in the late 19th century when a widely circulated publication was assured of being read by every literate person in the country? The surfeit of information means that what is controversial and insulting will die a natural death in 48 hours (the average lifespan of an online publication) unless a ruckus is created over it. What are the chances that one would have searched for the facebook community that insults Prophet Muhammad, Islam, India, Hinduism unless one saw it on the news first?

Similar is the case with the visit of Salman Rushdie. I am no great admirer of his works. The best of them, Midnight’s Children, was insufferably boring and the linguistic gymnastics would make one want to run for the hills. But we are not really judging literary merit here, are we? The moot question is whether a person, otherwise persona grata, should be denied permission to visit a particular country because a section of that country’s citizens don’t like him visiting? The answer in my opinion is an unequivocal No. Agreed, his works may have hurt the sentiments of Muslims. Agreed again that he stands by what he has written. So what? India is not a state with Islam as the state religion, just in the same way that it is not a Hindu Rashtra. Exactly how many citizens need to be offended for the state to take their side? This post, for example, if widely circulated may invite dislike from 50% of its readers. Is that a large enough number? Or do we need absolute majority here? This reductio ad absurdum argument points us to the slippery slope where intolerance leads us. Tomorrow we may want to shut up every voice that disagrees with us or has a contrary point to make. A North Korea on a humongous scale is what we would be then. The mind boggles at the thought.

As always, the best entertainment here too was provided by the loonies. It was downright eerie to see Tarun Vijay pontificating on the virtues of free speech and freedom of expression! As a representative of a hydra headed monster that has trashed libraries, burnt books, vandalised movie halls and exiled India’s best known artist, Mr. Vijay sure had enough locus standi to speak on the issue. It was just that he got the side wrong. Alberuni’s age old opinion could do with a redux now. Not only are we intolerant and close-minded, but some of us are also first rate hypocrites and barefaced liars.

Judging him solely on these would be missing the woods for the trees. Hitchens  never had a clear ideology. But he was very clear on one thing. He had a total distaste for popular positions. He loved taking on everything that was holy and respected and bringing it down to ground. So Mother Teresa was a fraud, Diana was a whore, Clinton was a rapist and the evangelicals were traitors. He may or may not have had substance to back it up. His attack on Diana for example had little reason behind it. He loved being a contrarian. That explains his support for the Iraq War and his rather wild ramblings about Islamo-fascism.

While I have gradually drifted towards social conservatism, that does not take away my admiration for Hitchens’ work. He was one of the masters of modern English prose. Bitingly sarcastic and taking no prisoners. All the same, his alcohol fuelled writing sessions tended to stray and he was also prone to a bit of name dropping. Excusable flaws I say. Where I can never agree with him is on his ambiguous moral position. He could claim the moral high ground when denouncing anti semitism or supporting the Palestinean cause but would diss the same when on one of his diatribes. If the pony his critics were on looked like a racehorse occasionally, it was because Hitchens refused to get off the chihuahua he was strutting about on.

So while he may have had an IQ of a 150, you are known by the company you keep. People like GW Bush Jr and other assorted neo cons were the wrong kind of folks to hang out with Christopher!

It was a long time ago that I fell in love with Formula 1. I think it was 1997. I remember the Spanish Grand Prix of that year, with that wonderful drive by Olivier Panis. Interest became obsession as I became one of the numerous fans of Michael Schumacher and the Scarlet Red Ferraris. There was grudging respect for Mika Hakkinen, something approaching respect for Eddie Irvine and nothing but contempt for David Coulthard and Juan Pablo Montoya. I miss the glorious days of Ferrari’s absolute domination, though some would crib that they made Formula 1 boring. I am not one of them.

Then the new band came up. There was Alonso, Kimi, Hamilton, Button and God Knows who else. F1 fan me (now in NALSAR) had a hard time catching up with the sport. The screwed up timings and the absence of Star Sports from the Common Room did not help matters. Slowly but surely, F1 for me was reduced to a report in the paper from the 2 day extravaganza that it used to be.

Till now that is. I must concede that I was sceptical about how well India would host an F1 race. Whether the crowds would come. Whether we had all the facilities needed. But guess what? Fuel guzzling machines burning up rubber on the track attracts everybody, anywhere in the world. From a purely sporting point of view, F1 is no match for the excitement or action of a tennis or football match. But boy when those engines are revved up, when they purr magnificently and when they take on those chicanes, I think it awakes something deeply primeval inside us. Nothing sounds as good. Nothing at all.

I shall not be at the stands next year. Maybe not the year after that too. But one day when it shall rain in Noida, when there shall be a slight nip in the air, when those beautiful machines will scream like only they do and when Ferrari shall be World Champions again, I shall be there-waving a Ferrari flag and wearing a red t shirt.

Boy its almost orgasmic!

I chanced across a clip of the Sabri Brothers rendering Khusro’s immortal ‘Chhap Tilak Sab Chheeni‘ on Youtube. It made a deep impression on me, for various reasons. For starters, there is the poem itself. It is written in honour of Khusro’s spiritual mentor, Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi. In the best traditions of Indian love poetry, Khusro writes as a young maiden who cannot take her eyes off Nizamuddin. As he says, ‘Mohay Suhaagan keeni rey mosey naina milaike’. While the Mongol hordes were ravishing the rest of Asia, here was a man, intoxicated in love, writing about “gori gori bayyan and hari hari choodiyan”. And he was just a second generation Indian! Perhaps there is something in the very soil of India that contributes to this.

Cut to the performance. Post Zia Pakistan. Some 10 years of forced Islamisation. And what do the Sabri Brothers sing of? Mohe panghat pe Nandlal Chhed Gayo rey! The audience is ecstatic-they whistle and clap. It is a scene possible only in Hindustan; an all Muslim audience in Lahore exclaiming Mashallah as scenes from Krishna’s Raas Leela are recounted before them. The glue that binds the Indian people is not the might of the Indian/Pakistani state, it is not the chest thumping patriotism of the kind that Sunny Paaji espouses in all his movies. It is something much more simpler and much more human. An acknowledgment of the other’s faith and the sheer force of a culture that has been shared since the last one thousand years.

While Khusro could wax eloquent over Krishna’s Ras Leela in the 13th century, the 21st century has a different tale to tell. Gone are the Muslims who could quote the Mahabharata. Gone are the Hindus who were more comfortable with Islamic lore than their own. We have shut ourselves up in our secluded poultry pens and spend all our time demonizing the ‘other’. Culture had to be the first casualty, as seen in the barely lamented death of what was the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb’s best product, Urdu. While the Indian version is on life support system, the Pakistani version has been cleansed of all its ‘unclean kafir’ words to the point that it sounds more like a bastard of Farsi and Arabic than the product of four hundred years of synthesis. In Urdu’s demise, we are not only witnessing the death of a language but the passing of a way of life.

I however digress. A side effect of staying in Hyderabad for a long time is that there is a whole cabal of ‘friends’ who refuse to be long lost (primarily because they are in the same city as me). This leads to awkward conversations like this:

Friend (on Google Talk): Arey ch**ye! Long time! How’re you doing?

Me: Great! How about you?

(Random catching up..5 mins later)

Friend: Chal yaar..Lets meet up one of these days! Ajay bhi yahin hai…

Me: Ajay who?

Friend: Uff! Bhool gaya…He is so and so..

Me: Oh haan. Would love to yaar…But you know what with project submissions (or exams if you so please)..Bahut difficult hai yaar…Chal must go now. Have some pressing work.

I am sure my friend had very noble intentions when he suggested that we all meet up. But what do we talk about now? We have long outgrown those days when we used to check out just post-pubescent legs. Things are very different now. I know nothing about their life and they (owing to my reticence) even less of mine! Even Freud said that we draw several aspects of our personality from a “cauldron full of seething excitations”. Who am I to deny them that right? I was just trying to look after my peace of mind.

Moving on reminds me. The last month has been a personal disaster. Guess things can only improve from hereon. Uff!

Act II: A saffron clad baba peddling the potent mix of yoga and dharma decides to have his share in the limelight too. Its not enough to appear only on Aastha TV daily. Now its time to graduate to NDTV and Aaj Tak. This baba incidentally is not a hermit baba of the Vedic kind. He owns a private jet, has an isle in Scotland to chill and through a ‘charitable trust’ owns property worth hundreds of crores throughout India and abroad. Oh and all this apparently from selling ayurvedic medicines! (Psst..The medicines were found to have human bone fragments..Has to be a rumour spread by those insidious Marxists!). Presto! A modern day Ramayana is enacted at the sprawling Ram Lila grounds. Baba out to save Bharat ‘Sita’ Maata from the clutches of the Ravanesque Government. Again the Government crawls when asked to bend and sends in a phalanx of ministers to receive the clown at the Airport. All attempts at conciliation fail (obviously! No photo ops till now..and call off the agitation??) and Baba starts his modern day Ram Lila.

Then something snaps.

The State wakes up, sends in the police, beats the living crap out of Baba’s bhakts and has Baba, in a very un-Ramchandraesque fashion, scampering away in a sari. And that was the damned right thing to do.

Civil Disobedience as a tool has no relevance in an independent, democratic India. Many a demand has been forced down the throat of the Government, against its better judgment, through such ill conceived satyagrahas and dharnas. Political change cannot come through online activism or middle class led NGOism. You want a change, then you join the system and change it. What sort of a movement is this where you abdicate all responsibility but want your demands to be accepted all the same? Encouraged by the Government’s wavering, a whole bunch of self serving NGO types have mushroomed all over the country. They’ll oppose anything that has the Government in it somewhere. There is no informed discussion, no attempt at dialogue-just protest because of the publicity it ensures! They contribute a lot towards pushing genuine causes to the periphery of public discourse. Administration has ground to a halt because everyday there is a new group holding candles at India Gate or setting up tents outside Jantar Mantar.

This brings me back to the Ramdev episode. He did not join the Anna campaign because he wanted to be Don Quixote himself! Plus educated men like Kejriwal and so were not really the kind of people Ramdev is comfortable with. He likes the rabble rousers and the danga-fasaad types. No wonder then that his biggest supporter today is the original outlaw of this country-the RSS who have never sworn fealty to anything but the Union Jack and the Swastika. The Dhongi Baba is also a clever media manager, he wanted to launch a dharna in Noida because he can be easily covered by media houses there. Even India TV would not send its reporters to Haridwar! (No offence to Uttarakhandis) What really took the cake was Advani comparing this episode to Jallianwala Bagh. Now we all know that Advani and blood bath go back a long way but even die hard Sanghis would take that comment with a large lump of salt. The sooner AdolfVani reconciles himself to the fact that he will never become the PM, the better it’ll be for him and the country.

The belated but apt response of the Government has ensured that the Indian State is not perceived as weak or vacillating. The process established by law has to be followed in every case, no matter whatever be that issue. Any more kowtowing to the “Hang Kasab”, “Hang Corrupt” and “Hang John Doe” brigade will erode the very foundations on which the government of this fragile nation state runs. Let the chattering classes howl and let Ramdev do his muscle flexing, there should be no surrender to these vested interests. Every blow rained on Ramdev’s minions was a decisive blow against this media created monster that was running amok. That midnight thrashing sure set him in place!

On an aside I have the weird image of Michael Middleton singing Baabul ki duaayein leti jaa and Kader Khan performing Dulhe Ka Sehra stuck in my head. Sshh! Must not watch so many Hindi movies.

April is a useful time to reflect on the year gone by. For a student, the new year in January holds little meaning. His clock chimes to the different tune of the academic year. So is the case with me. This must of course be distinguished from the baniya who is more concerned with the financial year that ends around the same time too.

As third year draws to a close, I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. An awesome internship was offset by a not-so-awesome time at college. The lack of time markers in Nalsar is startling. It is almost impossible to remember if something happened in 2008, 09 or 2010! Looking back, all these three years have merged into a form of gooey porridge with the only discernible lumps being the cretins who taught us each year. Of course there is also the odd exception of a good teacher who stands out in this puddle of moronity (Vande Mata-ram). Quite ironic really that the only thing we remember after more than half of our course at the ‘number one rank rated law school’ (sic!) in India is which idiot taught as when. Such is life I suppose.

I have made a resolution to start a few more facebook groups this year. The subject of one of my existing ones unleashed his dogs of war on me. Luckily the doggy turned out to be even more of an imbecile than his master. Up yours Cowboy! You’re mincemeat this time around.

New year also means new juniors. God bless them for the fun they provide in all the monsoon semesters. I can hardly wait!

I really cannot hazard a guess about which country will be next. The rich states of Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain are obviously not. Enjoying massive oil wealth, the people there have become indolent and a-political. With migrants forming a huge chunk of the population in most of these countries, the necessary homogenity required for revolution is lost. Yemen seems the likely choice. Hopelessly poor and governed by a corrupt and autocratic American stooge, it seems just the kind of country to go the Tunisia way. Algeria and Morocco are other options. Jordan too may be on shaky ground considering its elitist monarchy. Libya and Syria less so because its leaders are too closely identified with anti-imperialism and other popular Arab causes.

Who shall step into the vacuum is another question. Rural based Islamic parties seem to be the most natural choice. However they are strong only in Egypt (The Ikhwan ul Muslimoon). If these protests do spread, and are successful, we should see stop-gap, opportunistic alliances controlled by the military take power. Now whether they pave the way to the popular democratic government or just become new Mubaraks and Ben-Alis would determine the fate of the Afro-Asia. These are interesting times indeed!