On an early morning
sky, an elderly adult of 65 was pacing his available place on a cool morning
near his ancestral home. He was holidaying among known relatives, taking a
break from the Big Apple where his permanent residence is. Looking toward the
two steady lights of the sky between clouds of rain and mist, he exclaimed that
the two stars had been his companion of the mornings he was on tour. When I
mentioned the redness of a planet that looked silvery through the atmosphere, he
was all ears. Recognising that they were the planets Venus and Mars or Jupiter,
he seemed dwarfed in time and space to acknowledge the need for a telescopic confirmation.
In about the early 1980s, when he migrated, it was not an easy decision to meet
with an alien culture, where his daughter now teaches math for a living, and his
son is on the brink of a doctoral publication in neuroscience. Saged through
experiences, he had the discernment to appreciate that it was a tad late to buy
his first smartphone, as he expanded his source of information and was more
knowledgeable on matters since his first purchase.
It was in
1989 or so, that I had read in a French publication – (le nouvel observatuer or
the L’Express Internationale – I do not remember which) of a caption that
featured India’s crossroads in time. It was a colour picture of a bovine on an
Indian road. “une vache sacrée a la rue” tried to capture India’s
contradictions at a time, when the liberalisation of the automobile sector was
on the anvil. Today, two and a half decades later, the smartphone indeed has
ruled and the automobile has displaced the bullock cart in most places. Why go
far? The home care-taker of the resort I was at in Allepey, whose business is
younger than the liberalisation of the Indian economy, says that none row their
boats with effort now along the Manimala or the Pamba rivers, leave alone the
Vembanad lake. All prefer the Japanese motor-powered boat. His attendant adds
quickly, none know hunger here anymore.
This week, the
Newsweek’s issue carries the burden of the Indian zeitgeist in similar
language as the French press. “The French” our attendant proffered, “prefer
blander food preparations, even if it is meat; than the British and the
American tourists”. The experience of being on the ground was shining forth in
just a decade and a half of such flourishing house-boat and holiday home
business in Kerala. The holiday-home owner was more forthright in his
assessment though. He wondered why the fuss when even the lower castes with
whom local politicians were playing coy; would return to sanity after their
tempting differentiation in identity. He was certain that they would be side-lined
by the higher castes in communal politics. At the crossroads at which India is
today, caste is still a potent killer within India, than cow slaughter is.
Social psychology still knows no better wisdom of in-group and out-group
phenomena, in that the French observed of India in 1989, as clearly and as
early as did the Newsweek did of India’s social contradictions in 2015.
Evolutionary
biology, history and even philosophy are enriched in interdisciplinary
contributions than are religion and politics of everyday living in the age of
the hand-held mobile smartphone. Learning at a societal scale is not only
mediated through technology and access to information, it is also restricted by
inept social learning; like, falling on naked eyes to ‘know’ the planet from
the star; when more contemporary
lens are available. Bias and overlearning part, activity – and almost any
variety - is considered a strategy for life. So popularity is weighed against
social media rankings, and political achievements through material
manifestations – even at the cost of the earth and the air on its surface.
Activity inhibition is considered as sloth, and not as a possibility for inner
reflection and contemplative meaningfulness. So hours are lost as minutes are
kept; and the fear of not doing anything has the whirr of the modern boat scare
away fish and tear away livelihoods impacted by nature’s plunderers. Seldom has the radical nature of groups been so incendiary in grabbing our attention.
In populous
India, the smartphone presents both opportunity and challenge. Rabble-rousers
speeden the reach of their dogma faster than the citizens’ capacity to develop
their innate intelligence and express themselves in independent critique based
on emerging truths that science methodically
uncovers for us. Else, may the farce be with you, and the mercy of a
timeless zone rescue us from ourselves. Until then, am hoping to embrace the effervescence
of formless circumstances!
No comments:
Post a Comment