The Stench of Saffron

Should I stay or should I go?

The Clash asked that, rhythm and rhyming the approach-avoidance syndrome, backing it with a driving incessant beat, and…leaving the question unanswered, now that I think about it; which doesn’t help me a lot, or any.

See, the thing is, I’ve remained in India for the past decade and half in highly addictive expat comforts. This in spite of the best efforts of the Foreigners Regulation and Registration Office and its bureaucratically brilliant systems for making life just that little bit more pebble-in-the-shoe-ish. I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you take bureau… I beg your pardon, Bureaucracy, which India has had for a lot longer than most other places, and you clothe it in the Eton-Harrow-OxBridge pomposities that pass for governance and administration, and what you get is the FRRO, and their ability to trigger ‘screw it, what’s the travel agent’s e-address, sorts of thoughts and impulses. But, I digress.

The FRRO is not the reason I’ve bookmarked Lonely Planet and know where my passport and traveling pants are. [Aren’t cargos just the absolute tits?]  For the first time in 15 years I’m starting to get uncomfortable with the smell of teen spirit. An appreciable, increasingly aggressive, portion of India’s youth, the generation that Narendra ‘BigMo’ Modi has so assiduously wooed and won, have embraced the concept of Indian National Cultural Values (INCV) (All concepts in India are labeled and acronym-ed. It’s a cultural thing) and are looking to impose the same on the rest of India. As an example let me cite the attempt by some of Young Modern India (YoMo’In) (concept again) to exercise their perfectly reasonable right to show affection, one for the other, in public and with due regard for the decencies necessary. Towards this end a ‘Kiss-in’ was organized and announced. This did not meet with the approval of the Religious Right (RR) (also a concept), who, in short order deployed their youth wing. There are altogether too many upper case concepts of that wing for me to list. Suffice it to say that they are manifold and are, without exception, large, testosterone driven and ready to rumble. Pumped with ideology, righteous anger, and, I suspect but cannot prove, steroids, these myrmidons of INCV were able to intimidate the local police into backing their play in preventing the Kiss-in from happening. The cops must have figured that worst YoMo’In could do was kiss them in protest while the RR youth wing was armed, but I’m guessing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that things have reached the twin lightning insignia stage but one gets the feeling that saffron shirts and khaki shorts are being bulk ordered and stockpiled. Certainly saffron is starting to replace the admittedly condescending Congress white in the halls and seats of power, bringing with it the stench of faith based governance and reminding me of the reasons I left home, hearth, and health insurance to remain in India. But now…

I wonder if the FRRO in Vietnam has better manners.

Militant Religiosity

I find myself becoming quite religious in my antipathy to reli…no, actually, that should be, Religion. I find myself proselytizing and preaching on the dangers of institutionalized faith. My semi-libation – I’m clumsy and tend to spill things – toasts to polymath Dawkins are starting to take on the aspects of ritual, tending uncomfortably towards dogma and cant. My accountant tells me that she is considering submitting my bar bills as a tithing expense. I find myself surfing anti-Religion web sites for arguments that I then plagiarize and pass off as revelations. Hell, I’ve found myself taking out my articles of faith, polishing them, and presenting them as the only Truth that makes sense, ignoring, as I do so, the obvious holes in my logic, over-riding objections with the power of oratory. In short, I seem to have become Religious.

Oh, I have my justifications and my rationalizations, but, they all boil down to fear. No difference there, then. I mean reli… Religion got started because of fear in the first place. Fear of the night. Fear of the unknown. Fear of thunder, lightning, and the voices of the gods in the howling wind, the naked ape cowering in the sturm and whimpering in the drang . All of which is as close to a selfie as I care to get. Not that I'm scared of thunder and the voices of the gods, you understand. Those have been explained, to my satisfaction, by rationality and science No, my fear is of the rising tides of militant religiosity.

 Saffron the designated color of Hinduism, as opposed to the condiment, seems to be subsuming the philosophical and much heralded Colors of India. That’s colors, plural, as in many and varied; a heady mixture of creative concepts to explain the mysteries of life; each limning, shading, on occasion merging, with the other, to create a reasonably amicable, (for a given value of amity), system of social order that has served the sub-continent well for a few thousand years. The philosophies were not so much competing, as much as finding their place in the pavane of governance and individual rights and responsibilities. At least, that’s the way it used to be. Not so much now.

Now, here, in this land where diversity, and the right to be different, was enshrined in the Constitutional clauses of sovereignty and nationhood, the monoculture rigidity of militant Hinduism, the Religion, is, with increasing frequency, occupying the public spaces of India. Saffron robes have become the official office wear of an increasing number of legislators and law makers, who in their zealotry are passing laws and ordinances that pay little heed to the rights of the Other. Saffron rituals take precedence minority ways, and no back talk. Taking cues from Mosque and Church, Hinduism has embraced apostasy (apostasy – in a philosophy – can you dig it?) as a control mechanism. No more multiple pathways to the god head; one, and only one, saffron hued, officially approved, mandated, road to salvation. A philosophy that accepted, encouraged, questioning, and dialog is being perverted into a religion with all its authoritarian implications.

I have to stop. This is getting depressing.

The Saffron March

Cassandra… no, wait, was it Cassandra? You know, the lady who warned folks of ill times and was reviled and jeered at for her troubles. Well, if it wasn’t she, it ought to have been, her name has the proper sibilance. Anyway, I think I hear her, but, I’m not jeering, ‘cuz, much as I don’t want to, I’m beginning to see what she is going on about here in, but not limited to, India. Indeed not.

But…

The worldwide [I mean, check out the state of affairs in the putatively non-religious Russia; the 12 Labors of Hercules (beta), Vladimir Putin and his heroic battle against the non-believers as visualized by State commissioned Art. And then there is all too obvious ISIL, the US Supreme Court decision that redefined ‘separation of Church and State’ not to mention North Kores], where was I? Oh yes, the worldwide trend of religion as governance, and the deification of politicians, is making itself more and more visible in the governance of India and that is a crying shame. And that, as Cassandra will have it, bodes for those who have the seeing of it..

Boding is not good. It darkens the vision and saps the spirit. Tomorrow becomes a bogey in the intervening night and can blind the senses to possibilities. Perceptions become selective and it becomes more and more difficult to remember that India is a young vibrant construct that has been more successful in this business of democracy and people power than have any of her contemporaneous bits and pieces of crumbled Empire

India has in 6 and a little bit decades reached a degree of social consciousness it has taken the US two centuries to realize. Largely, I think, because of a long tradition, culture, of tolerance and respect of difference, known as hinduism, the philosophy [h_p].

But…

The same tradition, culture, and philosophy, is being elevated to the upper case status of Hinduism, the Religion [H^R]. As Cassandra is pointing out, H^R is planting its pennons in the halls of power and governance. Saffron is becoming the Office wear of a number, an influential number, of India’s law makers. There are places in India where history is being re-formed into interpretations that suit the purposes of Faith and Belief, and included in school curricula.Local ordinances against hurt religious sentiments are being,  enforced, sometimes forcibly. Zealots, armed with cudgels and bricks, can enforce faith based rules and moralities with impunity and too often immunity. Religion based gerrymandering of the electorate is a fact of the politics of gover…

Wait one second. I’ve been through this once before. Let’s see, when was that? Oh yes, I recall, Ronald Reagan’s triumphant march, Crusader colors, symbols, justifications, and all. Which begat Dubya, a Right wing Supreme Court, the Republican Senate and Dick Cheney. And we can see the result of all of that, live, [you should pardon the expression], and bloody color  on CNN International any hour of the day or night.

I wonder if Cassandra would be willing to join me in a bottle of retsina.

Expat Opinions

Here’s the irritating thing about being a son of the soil expat… that probably requires some sort of clarification, doesn’t it?

Okay – Son of the Soil = born and spent early childhood Here, India, then whisked off to There, USA. Five plus decades, and one citizenship change later, back, semi-voluntarily, to Here; which, now that I think about it, makes me an expatriate squared [xp²], with all of its horrifying implications.

However...

This is about irritation; the expat irritation, the itch, deep in one’s soul, when one has to adhere to Guest Conduct, Rules of; the ones that constrain opinions that might not be in concert with prevailing cultural trends. Such as, to take a completely random, (honest), example, there is this business of the rising tide of religiosity in the public weal. There are folks, good folks, who think that this is a good thing. Folks who, should I suggest otherwise, take umbrage, quite often in an emphatic and loud manner, and suggest, in no uncertain terms, that I ought to keep my videshi, that is to say foreign, opinions to my traitorous self. [Full disclosure – usually when I’m winning the, uh, discussion.] Admittedly, I’d be a lot less itchy if I was to limit my political and/or cultural opinions to generalities; oh you know, things like the universally accepted perfidy of politicians and how things were much better, culturally, back when… etc.

But, the irreducible fact of the matter is that culture, and the politics of that culture, have very little, actually, nothing, to do with national boundaries and visa status. Folks, to paraphrase an ad of yore, is folks. Where folks are from, what they look like, the time zone they live in, have as a commonality, a to-the-bone, written-in-the-gene, as-God-is-my-witness commonality, the human condition. Politics, Culture, and religion are artefacts of that condition. Artefacts re the, as some social scientists will have it, the extelligence, the external manifestations of a particular collective of humans and their conditions. I don’t see what visa status has to do with having the right to comment on the idi…irra…inadvisability of a social current that has proven to be harmful, historically and even as we speak. This seems to be particularly so in the case of Religion and its body functions, the extelligence of Holy Places [public conditionally invited], mass gatherings of piety, governance based on Holy Writings notwithstanding.

I rarely get to make that point. It is generally more prudent to move a few, or more, stools down the bar.

Expatriation

“Back home.” Russell said, referencing some stark contrast with the way things are here, in Bengaluru, and the way they are, uh, back home. Blues Bobby and I nodded in agreement.

We are ex-pats, the three of us, voluntarily – for a given value of voluntary – expatriated from lives of rigorous middle class existences in the land that set the standard for rigorous middle class existences, USA, the putative home.

Between us we have a cumulative 42 plus years’ worth of expatriation, which makes the word home problematic.

I have been in B’luru for getting on to fifteen years.

Blues Bobby has spent the past twenty years in, … you know, he doesn’t really talk about specifics much but I get the impression that it was somewhere along the Adriatic coast. [He keeps looking over his shoulder as he mutters and slurs his way through the non-specifics. I’ve learned that it is best not to get too curious.] Blues Bobby is currently domiciled in B'luru and is showing unmistakable symptoms, and, he has found a blues band that, from time to time, invites him to sing lead.  Anyway, in that span of time, neither of us has been ‘back home’ for longer than the three weeks it took to deal with visa issues; Blues Bobby twice, and I, once. Russell, in his decade here, returns once a year with armloads of grandchildren gifts, all glitter and ethnic chic, but, about 5 to 6 weeks into the mid-western summer he starts missing his lungi and its commando option. Me? I’ve been here since the turn of the century. Though India born, I was whisked off to the US in late childhood and my body and my soul show the unmistakable signs of having come of age in the ‘60s, with all the implications of that smoke wreathed transformative time.

Which begs the question, actually, begs a lot of questions, but right up there on the list is, why? Why would 3 men in the, let’s call it, early to mid-evening of their lives, choose to turn their inevitably waning energies away from all that is familiar to establish, re-establish, their edge-of-curmudgeonly routines into the mad energy that is Bangalore today? And having done so, why would they still refer to the US as home when it is patently not so?

The answer, I think, lies in the aforementioned ‘60s. That was when the three of us began to think of home as the place where nothing happened. The place where same old, same old was actively sought; the starting point, the stultifying boredom of which started each of us on our peripatetic journey into adulthood, the larger world, and its promise of a new tomorrow, peace, love, rock ‘n’ roll, and creativity released from the bonds of tradition.

Relased creativity pretty well describes Modern India (Mo’In) (right?) in general and B’luru in particular. Strangers living next door to strangers makes for really interesting cooking. India feels like the San Francisco Sixties all up in here. There is a psychedelic tinge to the happenings of the street. Reality is being re-defined and anyone over thirty is being ignored, politely, but quite firmly. I can tell. Blues Bobby is getting more gigs.

Peace.

Navratri and Love Jihad

Hinduism^R-the Religion,[as differentiated from hinduism_p-the philosophy], is saying, and doing, some ugly things.

For starters, Hinduism^R, is starting to show signs of becoming, Official.

Hinduism^R has begun to wa… stride the corridors of power. Law makers and administrators are making laws and rules that have their rationale in the religiously held belief that Majority makes Right; which makes the minority Wrong and in need of corrective measures. Human rights are being viewed through saffron tinted lens and are beginning to be found irrelevant to the cause of making India a Hindu^R nation. Which is so far away from hinduism_p (a philosophy that says, in short – Think, and you’ll see), that given the curvature of space/time, it is meeting Hinduism^R (a faith that says, at length - Believe and We’ll tell you what you are seeing), from the other side. Given the muscular aggression of Hinduism^R and the essential live and let live attitudes of hinduism_p, things are starting to bode.

Let me illustrate.

Word is that religious right-wingers, some in elected office, have ordered organizers of the Navratri (a nine night acknowledgment of Goddess Power) celebrations, to keep Muslim men out of venues that hold the Garba dances Garba dancing, for those of you who might be wondering, is a folk tradition involving energetic graceful choreography to driving rhythms, for the most part, although not exclusively, performed by young women. The edict, which in some places flaunts the imprimatur of Official Elected Satraps [OES], is the Saffron Satraps’ [SS], [talk about synergy], counter strategy to their belief that Islam^R has initiated a Love Jihad as part of their war against Hinduism^R. It seems Islam^R has tasked Muslim men with seducing Hindu^R women into marriage, conversion and Muslim baby production. The Garba dances, it seems, were to be targets of opportunity for the love jihadists, what with lithe bodies gyrating to driving rhythms and all.

And there you have it, a celebration of woman power; a decidedly hindu_p concept co-opted by the self serving paranoia of Hinduism^R.

Not that this comes as a surprise. Most, if not all, certainly all the so called Major Religions, take what start out as simple, graceful, caring philosophies, and distort them into grotesque self serving mechanisms of power; the original intent of amicable social contract and mediated compromise lost in the deluge of bombastic claims of salvation and truth; faith in higher power morphs into veneration of power.

The weird thing is that that some Islamist jihadists are going to think that a good plan and are, even as we speak, acquiring Hindu credentials and recharging their cell phone cameras.

I despair.

Religion in Governance

Religion and faith based governance, in a democracy, wow.

I don’t know why the oxymoronic quality of that doesn’t strike more folks, especially to the folks who vote saffron, skull cap, cross, what have you.

No, that’s not true, I do know why. They just haven’t thought about it. They cannot have. No thoughtful examination of the concept will fail to point to the contradiction of including “… because HE/SHE/IT says so” in a, of the people, by the people, for the people, system of the governance. Religion, as far as I can see, doesn’t allow for a whole lot of yeah-but-we’ve-been-thinking from their congregations. Rules is rules, they thunder, (hey, religion doesn’t have to be grammatical, or even coherent, come to that), from pulpits. It is not for you, you imperfect worm, they continue, to question the Word. Yours is to do or die. And we, the anointed voices of HE/SHE/IT, will tell you what to do, when to do it, and more often than not, how to do it, and no back-talk.

And there you have it.

Back-talk is exactly what makes a democracy, well, democratic. Back-talk, adversarial points of view, out-of-the-box thinking, and yes, even fringe opinions, are all part of the mix in the governance of as varied a lot of beings as we citizens; our individual self interests, corners rounded off by the compromises necessary for the existence of a collective well being, subsumed into the greater good, each of those corners discussed, deliberated, and only then fit into the whole.  Arguing with the power structure is what democracy is all about. Not a lot of that in the practice of religion which is given to edicts, commandments, and holy writ, a top down theory of governance. Which puts paid to any impulse to check with the People to see what they think about, oh, let’s say, killing in the name of the God-whose-Voice-is-all-Terrible. Nope, no consultation, no focus groups, no referenda, and most certainly, no back talk.

 That this, faith based governance, is happening here in India, home of lower case hinduism, the philosophy, is particularly galling. Saffron clad satraps have bullied their way into the halls of governance. It should be noted here that Saffron has become the battle color for upper case Hinduism, now an Official Religion, replete with rules, regulations, and intolerant righteousness. Pontificating from their tax exempt pulpits the Saffron Sages (SS) have been able to parlay their quite often irrational interpretations of the tenets of hinduism(lc) into the right and the power to impose on the rest of us their version of a pure State. Beef, they orate, and the eating of the same is antithetical to the dictates of Our One True God(s) and any Hindu who thinks otherwise is apostate. One such SS politician has gone on record as saying that cattle abattoirs are the source of Islamic Jihadists funding. Or so she believes and the fact that she is wearing Saffron when she goes to the office, well, that says it all, doesn’t it?  

I have no idea on how to deal with any of this. Religion and Faith have taken the place of rational discourse, world over. And all i can think to do is ... Holy Smoke.

What an idea, sirji.