The Game of Being

How Did I Become a Researcher? An Autobiographical Aside

2012-01-31T16:16:00.001+05:30

When I look at my life as a researcher and how I ended up in the world of academic research, I can't help being surprised.I never saw myself as excelling in academics. I thought I was an average student whose percentage hovered around sixty most of the times. Had someone told me when I was doing my graduation that I would end up writing a PhD dissertation or research papers and hopping from one national conference to another international conference, I wouldn't have believed it. Nor would I have believed it if someone were to tell me that I would be teaching obscure literary theory and criticism to postgraduate classes and writing books on translation theory. In short, I never dreamed of being a research scholar or university teacher.

What I dreamed of when I was a kid was to be a terrific cricketer. I used to play lots of gully cricket with a tennis ball or a rubber ball in my friend Tejas's cemented compound. However, I was scared of fast deliveries and used to get out very early most of the times. As a bowler, I am credited for giving away a couple of million runs and as a fielder I might have given away billions of runs. I ran slower than others, thanks to my weight, ill-health and probably, knock-knees. The more I failed more I fantasized of becoming a cricketer. I thought I will never be good enough for physical sports.

In my early teens, the eighties, I decided that the only way to overcome my failures as cricket was to have lots of knowledge about the game. I started keeping a diary and hoarding plenty of information about the game from magazines like ' Sports-star' and the newspapers -there was no Google in those days, friends- in Valsad library. I even learned how to bowl a googly from a book. I made a decision that the only way to excel in performance in a game was to acquire lots of knowledge about it. Knowledge acquisition became a habit, a habit that was formed in response to my perceived failure to be a sportsman. The habit consolidated when the asthma became more and more chronic. By the time I was in my twelfth standard I discovered that even if I jogged for two hundred meters, I would not only be out of breath, but my lungs would hurt very badly too.

When I was in my teens, I had a series of one-sided crushes started with a one sided love for a girl in my school-bus in the seventh standard. I found myself on the wrong side of these ' one sided' travails. I said to myself that I am timid and can never express my feelings and emotions to the girl I loved and that I was a failure in love. When I fell in love at the age of thirteen, I did not know there was something like love and had I really gathered courage and spoke to the girl, I don't know what I would have said! I said to myself, I don't know what happens to me when I fall ill, I don't know what happens to me in such situations- I must try to understand what's wrong with me.

And I tried to cope with or overcome my sense of failures with the drive for knowledge acquisition. I tried to 'understand' what was wrong with me and how could I fix it.I read voraciously on occultism in my twenties and thought that if I could have occult powers, I would be able to overcome all failures of my life. I read on Yoga and occultism and tried to actually practice it. I thought the best way to overcome the sense of failure and the idea that I was weak was to acquire more and more knowledge. What I actually gathered was a tremendous amount of absolutely useless information like what was the colour of agna-chakra or what is a chinaman or how is the Petrarchan sonnet different from the English sonnet-or how Derridian 'differance' undoes the architecture of western thought.The drive for knowledge acquisition became my habitual way of being. It has played a role in whatever success I have got till now, but even then, it was constituted to survive and fix what I thought was 'wrong' with me, and so more I went about gathering knowledge, more unfulfilled I was. It was a habitual way of being put in place to compensate for lack of power and effectiveness in my life and the more I practiced it the more powerless and ineffective I felt in life. So whenever, I perceive something is wrong, I bring out this habitual mode of being to deal with it- I try to 'understand', 'analyze' and 'research' that problem instead of taking actual actions needed to deal with it.

So here it goes-I selected ' Translation of Narsinh Mehta's Poetry into English: With a Critical Appreciation' in order to' fix' what was wrong with my cultural identity- I saw myself as a 'rootless' person- having no real language or land of his own- a Maharashtrian born and brought up in Gujarat and teaching English literature to students who are neither interested in English nor in literature. I thought translation was a strategy to overcome my own cultural predicament and overcome my cultural alienation. I thought writing poetry in Marathi would help me overcome this estrangement. Obviously, neither of the strategies worked.

This habitual mode of being that is more or less productive and that has given us some results in life is called a 'strong suit' in the language of Landmark Education. The strong suits are past-based and work in the default context of human life: survive and fix something seen as wrong or shouldn't be.It is our personal 'best practice' but it is incapable of giving us 'breakthrough' results in life where we are struck- had it been so capable it would have created breakthrough results by now.

In fact, the strong-suits often result in misery. This drive for knowledge acquisition isolates me from friends and people in life who don't have such drives, I am estranged from them and I end up living in the world of loneliness and suffering.What actually was coming between me and my wife was my intellectual arrogance. It often has a negative influence on my performance. The Landmark Education points out how 'knowledge' doesn't necessarily lead to action- that there is no ' cause-effect' relation between knowledge and action ( Hamlet taught us something like this - but then Hamlet was all about 'literature' for a student of literature). Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in The Three Laws of Performance point out that the real source of our action is how situations or people 'occur' to us. Knowing how to control anger or fear or how to reduce weight does not necessarily lead us to taking actions- when the situation 'occurs' infuriating we are angry -no matter what formulas we have memorized or what knowledge of anger we have.

So how does one become a researcher?

On Being a Researcher: A counter-intuitive observation

2012-01-22T14:25:00.000+05:30

Most of the discussion of research seems to focus entirely on research methodology, or theory of research. However, the question of 'how to be a researcher' has hardly received any attention, probably because of the assumption that 'knowing how to do research effectively' will automatically lead to 'being an effective researcher'. Though this assumption looks logical enough, in actual practice the knowledge of 'how to do' research' hardly seems to lead automatically to ' how to be a researcher'. The crucial distinction which seems to be missing in the most of such discussions is the one between 'being someone' and 'knowing how to do something', that is 'being' is distinct from ' knowing' or 'having'. For instance, 'knowing about scientific method or having scientific knowledge' as being distinct from ' being a scientist', or 'knowing how to cook' being distinct from 'being a cook', or even 'knowing how to raise children' is distinct from 'being a parent'. Similarly, 'being a manager' is distinct from ' knowledge of how to manage'.

If one asks 'WHO is a scientist?' or 'WHO is a doctor?', we realize that the scientist is not just a person who knows 'how to do' science, and the doctor is not just a person who 'knows' medical science, though it is just a part of who he is. A scientist is not just a scientist when he is in the laboratory or a seminar hall or library, a scientist is a scientist even when he is playing with his children, and a doctor is a doctor even when he is with his girlfriend. Entire life seems to show up as laboratory, seminar hall or library for someone who IS a scientist. The scientist IS a scientist not when he HAS scientific outlook but the scientist IS a scientist when the scientific outlook HAS HIM. A scientist is not 'somebody who USES scientific method, the scientist is the person who is USED BY scientific method. Hence, while we think that being a scientist or a parent is all about knowing 'how to do science' or how to parent' well, it seems that it is 'being a scientist or a parent' leads to 'knowing how to' do these things.

Therefore, it seems that the researcher is not a person who 'uses' research methodology, but someone who is used by research methodology. A literary theorist is not someone who 'uses theoretical terminology' but someone who is used by theoretical terminology. One is a critical theorist not when one 'knows how to to think critically', but someone who is used by critical thinking. A researcher is not someone who 'has research skills' but someone whom research skills have. You become a researcher not when you 'learn how to do research' but when the research starts having you, and you no longer use 'research methodology' but research methodology starts using you. The research or scientific outlook becomes the context of the researcher's life and the whole life shows up inside this context.The activity of research and writing dissertation, thesis or research report , then, becomes a natural expression of who the researcher is, much in the same fashion as a poem is a natural expression of who the poet is or parenting is a natural expression of who the parent is.

The above observations are counter-intuitive and out-of-the-box, but I think they will definitely be useful to people who want to 'do research'. I owe these insights to the profound ontological technology developed by Werner Erhard, one of the greatest and unacknowledged educationists of our times. Indeed, such insights start showing up when the ontological technology made available by Landmark Education start using you.

Catching the Lecturer in his Act: The Birth of Netrutva

2011-10-06T14:46:00.001+05:30

When I completed my graduation in 1993 , I had not even dreamed that I would become a college lecturer or university 'reader' one day. It was only when I started my postgraduate studies in Baroda, that the idea of becoming a lecturer occurred to me a possibility. As an undergraduate student, I remember being a loner. I can hardly recall names of more than two of my batch-mates. In those days my friends were Vikas Upadhyay, a student of psychology who had changed from science stream to arts like me, Amit Bhatt, who was studying Economics and Hitesh Parekh who was also studying Economics. This aloofness and detachment was a product of a wall that I had built around myself in order to 'stay away' from life, others and even my own real self. This 'stay away' was the command I had given to myself, people and life before the age of six probably and I not only did not know , but I also did not know that I did not know how my entire life has unfolded within this command. It was, what we at Landmark Education, call our 'act' which has gone into our 'blind-spot' ( others can sense it, the person who has them, can't).. Everybody has their own act. It is the lie on which our identity- who we are in our eyes- is based. As they say, we don't have our 'act', our act has us.

After I completed my post-graduation in 1995, I immediately got a job as an adhoc lecturer in English at the SVR college of Engineering, Surat for a couple of months, and then I got a permanent post in SB Garda College, Navsari, where I taught for almost eleven years. I joined the Department of English in 2006 in a different role. This makes me sixteen year old as far as the experience of being a lecturer or university teacher goes.

I was not at all satisfied with my own performance as a teacher. Not that I did not work hard in preparation and delivery of lectures( which I enjoyed) or shirk my other responsibilities like answer-book assessing ( which I hated) or other examination related duties, but my effectiveness as a teacher was questionable. I enjoyed talking about books to students, but I was not satisfied with my performance. Most of my teaching was about 'looking good' and 'avoiding looking bad' before students. I used to 'broadcast' simplified and digested 'knowledge' in 'chalk-and-talk' manner and I did not bother about what happened to that digested or simplified stuff after I had delivered it. I did not ask students whether they found it useful either in their studies, exams or life, because I did not care. My assumption was that I was teaching one to two percent of exceptional students, and the rest were 'masses' of faces for whom I did not care. I knew these 'masses' were warm, goodhearted youngsters, but I believed that they were simply not interested in reading or writing. I did not know their names ,where they came from, what they did or what were they dealing with in their lives or what they cared about in their life.I had no commitment or stand for them. I did not take responsibility for the entire classroom. I had no vision of what I am supposed to do as a college teacher. I had not idea of what my role was in the society or in the classroom.

My relation to my colleagues, my organization and the faculty, was equally problematic. I pretended to be nice and warm and scholarly and all that, but actually I was extremely arrogant and thought that most of the people in the faculty of arts were mediocre and the government was wasting money on teaching liberal arts. I wrote a letter to the editor of a Gujarati newspaper that the faculty of arts has become 'the last refuge of the mediocre'. It had become a 'white elephant'.I believed that Government would sooner or later discontinue arts and it would be good thing too. My accusation of mediocrity against most of the teachers in colleges goes back to my student days. Apart from a handful of teachers here or there,I thought, most of them hardly had anything to do either with English or with literature. This harsh condemnation was actually my contemptuousness. I was accusing most of other teachers of hypocrisy when I was the one who was pretending. I was blaming everyone of ineffectiveness without realizing that my own performance was rather low in effectiveness. My vision of the future of the faculty of liberal arts was bleak and derogatory.Inside this outlook towards profession, I was deeply isolated, bitter, angry and frustrated. I was extremely cynical and resigned . The difference between work and personal life makes no sense at 'ontological level'. My "being' was the same in both the domains. When you are 'being' frustrated, depressed, bitter and resigned , it means you are 'being' frustrated, depressed, bitter and resigned at home as well as at your work or anywhere else. The hidden context of my life that I was 'weak and unfit to live' which crippled me in my personal life also was my handicap in my professional life.

It was during my Landmark Curriculum for Living and the Communication Curriculum that I realized that the things that were severely limiting me in my personal life were the same things which were limiting me in profession. When I distinguished my act in the advanced course, I had my act instead of my act having me! One of the boards in the Forum titled ' Transformation: Genesis of new Realm of Possibility' reads, " Constraints that the past imposes on your view of life disappears. New possibilities of being call you powerfully into being. New openings for action call you powerfully into action. Experience of being alive, transforms." I realized powerfully that as a teacher it was a privilege to contribute to the lives of hundreds of people, and opportunity was where I was. It dawned upon me that my job was not merely to give 'knowledge' to 'ignorant' masses but to shape teachers, researchers and leaders of tomorrow. My job was not give 'information or concepts, but develop abilities to think, read, write and speak. My focus in teaching shifted from 'concepts/ information' to 'ability' and my methodology shifted too, and it changed the way I related to the students.My job was to make them see how future would look like if they had these abilities. My job was no longer to 'stay away' from them, 'look good and be popular' or 'avoid looking bad', but create real opportunities for students to develop their abilities. My job was also to "listen for and reliably deliver that which makes real difference to what students are dealing with and what they care about, and in the process to leave them with more power, freedom , self expression and peace of mind." Hence, I actually opened to counselling and mentoring. I started reaching out to them-something which I had never done before. Some students report finding my new approach more challenging and some students have reported improved results. They asked why didn't you do all this before!

During the training, I saw that the humanities is not 'the white elephant' or 'the last refuge for the mediocre' as I once believed, but a powerful space from which one could rewrite the future of the entire society, after all who would teach languages, history, economics and logic to the children of the MBAs or doctors or technocrats, bureaucrats or businessmen, but the teachers trained by us. We are the teachers who create teachers.I grasped that we have a decisive role to play in future. We are the leaders because we create leadership. It is possible that we are not equipped to deal with the challenges and issues of the twenty first century effectively, but that doesn't mean we have no say in the matter and the governments can do away with us. At Self Expression and Leadership program, I could see this 'us', earlier it was only 'me and I'- I could relate to teachers as 'community'. Community implies 'communion', certain oneness which goes into the 'us' . It was here that my project 'Netrutva' was born. It is the project to rewrite the future of humanities in the twenty-first century.

So when I was appointed the chief mentor for English in Task force for Teacher Training for recently implemented Choice Based Semester System or as coordinator of English BISAG-SANDHAN TV the state-wide classroom TV , I know it is not ' Sachin Ketkar' the act 'who is going to do his job but 'Netrutva' the project and the possibility...

(Landmark Introduction Leadership Program starts tomorrow)

Confessions of a Middle-Bencher: My Life in St. Joseph E.T. High School

2011-09-15T20:18:00.000+05:30

Even today I dream ( quite literally) of entering St. Joseph High school building on a monsoon day. I still dream of being admitted to the school and studying in the class. I can clearly see Maniar madam, our English teacher, threaten us with her 'high' English if did not behave. I see late Mr. Prajapati, our Math teacher, holding his own left shirt collar with his right hand and zealously teach us Math. " Is this the way we are going to study ?", he asks me angrily and flings my notebook on my face. He had curious way of using ' we' for you. He was a tall , dark and stern man who sent shivers through the spines of many. His zeal for Math bordered on fanaticism and whatever minuscule math I have in me, is because of this man. He was not ' nice'. He was a brilliant teacher. He proved that you don't have to be 'nice' and 'friendly' to be an excellent teacher. I still see Mr. Khurshid Pathan, our then Physics teacher demanding the I complete my Physics experiment journals. My palms still sweat at the thought. Mr. Pathan, in total contrast to Mr. Prajapati was nice and friendly, and very popular with girls. I still see Mr. Gupta, our jolly roly-poly Hindi teacher ( who I discovered today is also a poet and astrologer) getting stuck on the descriptions of food in Hindi lessons and struggling to leave them behind. He got struck at the description of baked potatoes in Premchand's 'Kafan'.

I can still remember Mathew Kotnani, my friend, tell me with excitement that one of my sarcastic poems have appeared in the local youth section of the Indian Express. This was my first publication. After that I became a public nuisance, and with the advent of the internet and blogging in the twenty first century, I became a global infliction.

I can still see the chloroformed frog meant for dissection in the Biology lab regain consciousness and jump on the screaming girls. Today, I suspect, one of the pretty girls from our class must have kissed it and it must have turned into 'fully awake' frog instead of a prince. Women, those eternal optimists, seem to keep on kissing frogs for a long time in their life, and by the time they realize that the frogs will be frogs forever, they have their own tadpoles to nurture. Talking of princes, I also recall one of my classmates whose surname was Champaneri, who often used to come to the school on horseback!

I joined St. Joseph English Teaching High School, Valsad, in 1988, for my eleventh and twelfth standard because I did not have a choice and it seems, St. Joseph's admitted me because they did not have much choice either. I studied in Bai Avabai High School for most of my life and there was no English medium eleventh and twelfth standard for science stream in Bai Avabai school and St. Joseph's was the only school which had this facility in those days. St. Joseph's was the only 'convent' school in our area in those days. My sister had studied there till her tenth standard and it was located at a stone's throw from our residence. The principal Sister Clara Fernandes in St. Joseph was not very happy at the idea of allowing 'desi', ill-mannered ruffians from Avabai to run freely in the more disciplined and elite school. I remember her giving a very stern piece of mind to the entire classroom for bad behaviour, and her focus was on certain girls who talked 'inappropriately' with the boys. Till I entered the 'convent' I associated 'Sisters' with people who either tied rakhi on your hand or jabbed a syringe into you. I was an awkward outsider who even did not know how to tie a tie.

I was a committed middle-bencher. Unlike backbenchers and front benchers, I lived in the grey no-man's land of 'averageness', both in terms of intelligence as well as in terms of capacity for naughtiness. I was in the same place as far as looks were concerned and I marveled at my friend Abhay Thosar's wicked coolness at his being one of the handsomest and smartest kid in the class. He hardly got carried away by girls doting on him. Many of my friends from Avabai were there: Chinmay and Hoshedar for instance. I made new friends with Abhay, Sanat, Rajesh Jainval, Vivekand Pandey, Amit Purohit and Mathew Kotnani for instance. One of the good things about St. Joseph's was that unlike my one year at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Ordnance Factory, Chandrapur, I was not bullied or humiliated.

This was the period when asthma became more chronic, and started to pervade my life. I remember this was the period, when on insistence of one Shri Prabhuji, a family friend and a local holy man, I started doing all sorts of trick to get rid of asthma. He suggested that I wake up very early in the morning, study for the twelfth standard with my friend Chetan Patel, go for jogging, or go cycling to Tithal Sai Mandir some five to six kilometers from my house, do ' alni' fasts or salt-free meal days , count beads chanting Gayatri mantra, chant Hanuman chalisa, water basil plant or go to Shiva temple on Mondays. Obviously, all this did not work. I remember sitting on the veranda in the afternoons on the days when I could not attend schools due to asthma attack and watching students of St. Joseph, especially the girls, return home.

People expected me to do well in the exams. I scored fifty-odd percent. Baba believed that a person who knows a bit of English and knows stenography will never die of hunger and there was no point in doing B.Sc and work in a factory in Vapi as a chemist from eight in morning to six in the evening. On his suggestion, I took up B.A with English course from Valsad. People were shocked. Arts was seen as the lowest rung of the educational Varnashrama with medicine and engineering at the top. I never even dreamed of doing doctorate and teach in one of the best universities in India. The middle-bencher was basically a day dreamer, and not a dreamer. He sat in the ambivalent middle of the spectrum, and doodled away cartoon characters in his rough work book. He is not difficult to find, just look around you.

( St. Joseph English Teaching High School, Valsad, is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee in December this year)

Body-Image, Kafka and the Game of Transformation

2011-09-06T11:04:00.002+05:30

It was the first day of my fourth standard and the year was probably 1982. I was sitting on the sixth or seven row of classroom benches, when all of a sudden some of my batch-mates looked at me and burst out laughing. 'You have grown so fat in the vacations that we could not recognize you! You have almost doubled." The mangoes in the summer vacation did it. I had put on plenty of weight. From that day onward, I was nicknamed 'double'. I said to myself that something was seriously wrong with me and my body. I felt ashamed and I lost self respect. I was scared of people laughing at me too. I am laughable, I am awkward and I am weird, I said to myself and kept saying this for decades. In fact, I saw myself as so abjectly inferior in looks and I was so scared of classmates laughing at me that I even used to avoid combing my hair out of fear that they will laugh at me saying that even me - yes even me- is trying to look smarter!! I thought my nose was totally ugly and misshapen and my soft pot belly appeared to me as if it was 'weirdly ungainly, and clumsy' as a sign of my being 'not fit enough to live'. I But that wasn't all.

It was probably in the eighth or ninth standard, when I remember a classmate named Rajat Doshi. He thought that my chest which had extra fat on it resembled woman's breasts. He used to constantly make fun of me by squeezing my chest, and saying ' pom, pom' and I used to get immensely hurt, hugely angry, and ashamed of it. I hated him for it, but I hated myself even more. I carried these events in my mind and made them mean that there was not just something wrong with me but also my 'manliness' as my chest seemed 'feminine'. My doubts about something being 'inadequate' about myself and my 'manliness' continued as I stated thinking and believing that my penis is 'short' and I kept reassuring myself by measuring it at times and saying that it seems to be ok!

As far as my health was concerned, I was convinced that I was destined to be ill forever as "my unit was defective and there was an inbuilt manufacturing defect". This basically meant I was unfit to live in this world and I was not made for this world. I was deeply resigned to my fate.

Whenever, I was with people, especially girls, I maintained a safe distance out of fear of people laughing at me. I avoided being noticed so as not to get 'caught' as someone who is awkward and shamefully inadequate in looks. I walled myself off from others. Obviously, I not only did not try to express my love or even talk to the girls I had crush upon, but I, who was ashamed of being who I was, was also ashamed of being timid and I punished myself for being timid. How can a girl love someone as 'unlovable' and 'deficient' as me? I became more and more reclusive, lonely, sad, very angry at myself and depressed. My sexual expression was in the safe 'risk-free' zone of fantasy and masturbation ( though 'fantasy' is hardly a risk-free zone, it used to run amok during night giving me terrors of being alone in the dark. I often used to imagine dead people turning up and invisible beings appearing all of a sudden and the very idea of being frightened frightened me!).

Like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kakfa's The Metamorphosis, I was morphed into a dung beetle. Kafka's story celebrates the power of human imagination and language in literally transforming what is considered 'real'. That I was a dung beetle was no myth or archetype but 'reality'. Kafka is not using 'magic realism', he is talking about real things. The idea that I 'am' deficient if not downright ugly, 'unlovable' and 'unfit' to live was so 'real' that when some girls actually proposed to me, I did not believe a word of it!! I also remember that when I got engaged to Ashwini and she praised men for their looks and smartness, I told myself that how could she possibly love me and that I was 'not the man of her dreams' and due to economical reasons, she has to marry me. My self-image, my body image and my beliefs played havoc in my married life and love life.

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in their powerful book Three Laws of Performance state that our actions and behaviour is 'correlated' to how things 'occur or show up' to us and how the things occur to us arises only through and in language. Language is the context which determines how things show up in our life, and how and what we see. Our conversations determine what we see and how we see things. What is 'real' to us is determined by the language. The pretty girl walking on the crowded street becomes pretty for me when I have a conversation about her prettiness. She becomes 'real' as a pretty girl on the street. Otherwise there are billions of things on the street which exist at level of undifferentiated mass of experience. My conversation about her, 'differentiates and distinguishes' her from the mass of undifferentiated experiences on the street and makes her 'real' for me. My word creates my world.

Same thing happened to me and my body. My conversation that 'something was wrong' with my body created this wrongness.That my body was 'awkward, clumsy, unattractive, defective' and that I was 'timid', 'unlovable' were the conversations which provided the context to how things occurred or showed up in my life. These conversations, however, remained in the background like 'blind-spots'. The black showed up only against the white background. In fact, when I look back, I am doubtful whether was 'really as obese' in those days as I had imagined I was. It was something like 'body dysmorphic disorder' where person isexcessively concerned about and preoccupied by a perceived defect in his or her physical features.

When I distinguished that I had created my body as it occurred to me with my own conversation, I took responsibility for the way my body is and the way it is not. Instead of seeing myself as a'victim' of my own body, or nature or my fate, I place myself in the position of the creator. I saw that MY conversations that my penis is small, my belly is weak and weirdly flabby, my chest is 'feminine' , my nose is misshapen and that I am timid, 'defective unit' and unlovable created the contexts in which all relationships, including the those with myself, showed up. When I see this, I can 'drop these conversations', I dismantle this disempowering life full of suffering and struggle.

This, however, does not mean I am advocating 'positive thinking'. In positive thinking, the 'occurring reality' does not change. One keeps on mechanically saying positive things about oneself, because one 'knows' that 'something is truly wrong'. The things which are threatening or wrong are still threatening and wrong to people who are practicing 'positive thinking'. The people who try to think 'positively' fail because the assumption that the things are 'negative' does not change. The positive thinker does not take 'responsibility' for generating 'negative reality' through language.

Today, I see my body as being whole, complete and perfect and there is nothing wrong with it. I created a possibility of being comfortable with myself, peaceful in mind and relaxed with people of all genders. I can naturally be who I am, instead of fretting and feeling awkward about my looks and my body. I feel so happy and light about my body. The possibility of authentic and powerful self-expression and authentic intimacy shows up in my life for the first time. The resignation about my health vanishes and I standing in these possibilities, I take action......

On Caste-Based Reservation in Education

2011-07-30T14:36:00.004+05:30

As hype around Prakash Jha's forthcoming film 'Aarakshan' grows, we can expect the media to raise its pitch regarding the system of caste-based reservation in education. Here are my views on the controversial subject.

Historically, due to caste system, the access to knowledge in India was restricted to very low percentage of population . So technically, we have always had the system since centuries,only that it worked in primarily favour of the " upper castes". What is the Gurukul system but a system of reservation where only the top three 'Varnas' were allowed to enter( I suspect it was even more exclusive: I havent heard the stories of the Vaishyas being included in the Gurukuls, nor was it open to women- barring over hyped exceptions of course). I am often irritated when people talk about reviving this system as a remedy to the depraved 'Macaulayian' education system. These people forget that if Macaulaying model was not implemented ninety percent of the society would still be living in the dark ages. Nor is the Gurukul system of any use when the nature of knowledge, its processes of production and distribution have altered completely. The Gurukul system may have been of some use when the knowledge was largely produced and transmitted orally. Today, knowledge is produced in research and analysis departments and laboratories,preserved, processed and transmitted by machines on immensely large scale. How can you teach applied physics or mechanics in a Gurukul? Hence, I feel most of the talk of revival of the Gurukuls is a waste of time.

When the system of reservation was turned up side down after the Independence, there was hue and cry regarding merit from people who have been enjoying the privileges since centuries. Had Eklavyas been 'admitted' on the bases of 'merit' instead of "only upper caste" system of reservation functioning at Dronacharya Gurukuls,we would not have needed the reservation system today.

Caste system is, in essence, " reservation system" which goes back five thousand years on the subcontinent. Reservation applies to who can or cannot be 'touched', who can marry whom, who can eat with whom, who will do which work, who is 'pure' and who is 'impure'. Basically who is 'superior' and who is 'inferior' and all this is decided by birth- no amount of financial or social mobility can erase your 'distinction'. Unlike 'race' where biological markers play a prominent role ( though not always) caste has no biological markers- a brahmin can be dark skinned and a shudra can be fair and yet brahmin remains 'superior' to others.

There are still plenty of cases where children of poor illiterate parents enter educational system and allowing them to compete with students whose parents and grandparents and great grandparents have had the benefits of " upper caste only" system of reservation in India functioning since centuries is simply callous and hypocritical. Reservation in theory is about providing level playing field, though in practice it has not worked very effectively like most of well intentioned schemes in India.Just because something is not being implemented effectively does not mean it should be scrapped. If this were the case we should scrap the traffic rules also.

Reservation is not about being condescending and obliging. It is about giving equal opportunity which all citizens of India deserve. If the thesis is bad than no amount of pestering should be permitted to get it through just because of the caste of the researcher, reservation does not mean breaking the rules, it is about following them.

People who raise hue and cry about reservation dont realize that reservation is given at the level of 'admission' and it is not gracing to pass. An ST or SC might get 'admission' but he/she has to work equally hard as others to pass and if he/she does he is as good as or as bad as others...

In a fundamentally unfair society, there is a 'choice' between injustice at the individual level ( an upper caste student who gets high percentage and does not get admission due to reservation) and injustice at collective level- entire community being denied 'admission' for centuries. Not that I like this predicament myself, but I prefer doing injustice to a minority of individual than doing injustice to entire communities.

It so happens that the most of the people who have access to technology and are articulate against the system of reservation are the people who have belonged to communities which benefited from the 'unofficial' and 'informal' system of reservation and hence they are heard the most on the media ( TV and the Net)...but I do know some people who belonged to the so-called backward castes and have rejected reservation....

( Views expressed on the Facebook community called Netrutva: Teachers for Transformation and Leadership)

'Complayt, Comp. Lit or Complete' Or 'What the *#$% is Comparative Literature and Why are They Saying such Awe(Ful/some) Things About It?

2011-07-02T10:37:00.001+05:30

The word 'complayt' is a colloquial Gujarati word which signifies perfection and completeness of the job done or to be done as in 'kaam complayt'. The word, of course, is borrowed from English. I noticed the pun on 'Comp. Lit' and 'complete' ( in the sense of being finished), in the sly word-play of Jacques Derrida in his lectures delivered at Yale University in 1979-80 published as ' Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation' in the Winter and Spring 2008 Issue of Discourse (translated by Eric Prenowitz). Derrida astutely points out the hackneyed and facile binary of' 'life' and 'death' seems to haunt the theoretical discussions on comparative literature. This was well two-and-half decade before Derrida's translator and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak declared Death of the Discipline in 2004 and Susan Bassnett's contention that the emerging discipline of translation studies will eclipse comparative literature. Haun Saussy report on the health of the discipline in America in 2006 declares,"Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles. It has never been received in the American university ". Reports of the death or rebirth or renewal of the discipline are rather tedious, as is the agonized navel gazing regarding its own methodology. The skepticism regarding its foundations is as old as the discipline itself. Derrida's critique is aimed at the universalist- imperialist ambitions of comparative literature as manifested in its 'encyclopediac' nature, which he compares with the figure of Prof. Pangloss, an optimistic scholar, in Voltaire's Candide.

The earliest attempts to establish 'Comp.Lit' were often met with dismissive hostility. Rene Wellek cites Lane Cooper of Cornell University who said that Comparative Literature was a “bogus term” that “makes neither sense nor syntax.” “You might as well permit yourself to say ‘comparative potatoes’ or ‘comparative husks.’” Croce in 1903 saw it as a non-subject and the efforts to establish it as a separate discipline were futile. Croce saw it as methodology which was part of the effort to arrive at complete explanation of a literary work in the context of the 'universal literary history'. If something is a methodology, it cannot be a discipline in its own right. The skepticism regarding the discipline has persisted throughout the period of what Rene Wellek called the 'Crisis' of comparative literature.

Personally, I don't think 'Comparative Literature' is either a distinct discipline or a distinct methodology. It is rather an alternative conception of literature. Instead of the mono-literary studies which see a single literature as something organic, static and autonomous, 'comparative literature' conceives literature as essentially heterogeneous, dynamic and open ended cultural phenomenon, which can be understood only in the context of a complex network of historical relationships which cut across cultures, languages, places, periods and even media. Though comparative literature may be struggling to find itself as a distinct discipline, this alternative conception of literature has gained wide acceptance in serious literary research, thanks to the explosion of 'Theory' in the later half of the twentieth century. It is is in this sense, that Saussy feels that comparative literature has won its battles. Saussy feels that comparative literature is selfless, meaing that it has no unique or distinct identity as well as in the sense of its generosity. It doesn't, for instance, demand a small tax from English literature departments, every time they quote Spitzer, Auererbach, Wellek, Spivak or de Man. This discipline, Saussy thinks, is an 'anonymous universal doner' to mono-literary studies.

In the Indian context, scholars like Sisir Kumar Das, Amiya Dev, Chandra Mohan, GN Devy , Sujit Mukherjee and Avadhesh Kumar Singh have tireless promoted 'Comp. Lit' as the only true way of studying Indian literature in a multillingual and multi cultural context such as ours. I believe this is the only way you study ANY literature, not just 'Indian Literature', meaningfully in our country. Even when the Birje-Patils and V.Y. Kantaks of the yore wrote about Shakespeare, they were reading Shakespeare as Indians- they couldn't possible read him as native speakers. Consciously or unconsciously, they were already practicing comparative literature. When we 'teach' Jane Austen to the undergrads, we are actually doing comparative literature. How else can the things 'coming out' or 'curtsy' in Jane Austen make any sense to the Indians? Is not teaching of literature in India, an inherently comparative practice?

This year, when we at the Department of English of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda are introducing comparative literature as a core paper at the post graduate level for the first time, you-know- who will be the instructor. Susan Bassnett says that people start in different people but soon find themselves moving towards 'comp.lit' . Though my journey towards 'comp. lit' as a discipline officially began with my doctoral research in translation studies at the beginning of the new millennium, I was already 'doing it' when I was translating excerpts from Macbeth and Savitri during my undergrad years. I was already 'doing it' when I was reading Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Sherlock Holmes and Adventures of Tintin as an Indian teenager, from a specific cultural, historical and social location. Though it was unconscious, the location had distinctly shaped my perception and reception of these texts. It was during my doctoral research into translation, where I translated poetry of a great Gujarati poet of the fifteenth century- Narsinh Mehta into English for my thesis-by-translation that I was 'self-consciously' a comparatistic. I remember Prof. Kimbahune who recommended Dionyz Durisin, a major Slovak comparitist and gifted me a photocopy of Durisin's important book Theory of Literary Comparatistics (1984). Prof Kimbahune believed, and quite rightly so, that the theories of the East European scholars like Durisin are more relevant to the Indian context. Durisin's notions of 'interliterariness' and interliterary processes provide a critical and more useful alternative to the influential positivist French School framework of ' influence studies' based on the 'binary' system.

Bassnett believed that translation studies would eclipse comparative literature. I, however, believe that translation studies should eclipse all literary studies in India . After all, I think, we as Indians are essentially translated people,living in a translated culture, eating translated food, wearing translated clothes, watching translated movies, studying translated texts and using translated ideas. Translation studies as a inter-discipline investigating the complex phenomenon and the processes of intercultural transfer and transformation would be one of the most important disciplines in the age of globalization where the global and the local are continuously translating each other at a rapid speed. This rapid and mutual transformation would be resulting in a 'world culture' probably which would neither be fully global nor local and connected by information technology networks and satellite media. Translation studies will be able to tell us how this world culture is shaping up and why.

Consider the case for the word 'complayt' in colloquial Gujarati. It is an example of what JC Catford in his famous A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1965) calls ' transference' , and a form lexical borrowing which though is used in more or less same semantic field but in an entirely different register and context. These are the processes which make our languages. Languages, after all, are our cultures and are who we are. And then they are also who we can be.

In an era where the mourning for 'death of Indian languages' is quite intense, translation studies will demonstrate how new languages are being born everywhere. These new languages will be our languages of the future. As academicians mourn the death of Marathi or Gujarati or Bengali, newer and newer Marathis and Gujaratis and Bengalis are being born outside the academia. What is translation, after all, but creation of a new language, a language which is neither the 'source/original' nor is it 'target'. As newer and newer languages are born ' between' languages- translation studies will provide us with tools to study contemporary cultures. I don't think the cultural studies will swallow translation studies, I am afraid, it will be the other way round. Translation studies will have to 'complayt' the work started by cultural studies,literary studies and comparative literature.........

Uncovering the Hidden Contexts of My Life: Telling My S from the Hole in the Ground

2011-06-02T20:27:00.001+05:30

When I was returning from the Landmark Branding Event last month, I boarded a reserved compartment in the train during the 'peak season' of the summer vacation. And I had no reservation. I knew I had to pay the fine etc. I talked to the Ticket Conductor. There were two other people like me and the TC told me that it would cost Rs. 350. I agreed. Out of the two other people, one looked confident about the whole business. He had done this sort of thing before. In fact, I had done the same thing in the morning. However, being the bird of the feather, I stuck together with two of these people. We had to move from compartment to compartment before, the TC could allot a final place to us. The more experienced chap said that we would buy two tickets and the three of us would managed. Unthinkingly, I agreed. Late evening, when the things settled and I got a place, an upper berth, I somehow had to adjust a stranger and it became very very uncomfortable indeed. This might be apparently just a trivial episode in my life, but it is the story of my life: lack of confidence and unthinking commitments and plenty of situations like this. I used to rely on my father for his advice, reassurance and support in almost all important decisions in my life. And I even used to resent him for being so caring and supportive so as to make me dependent! So what was at the source of my lack of confidence and resentment? Well, towards the end of the Self Expression and Leadership Program of the Landmark Education, I could 'distinguish' the source. The context, in fact, the hidden context of my life.

The Landmark Education is all about distinguishing and uncovering the hidden contexts of our life which keep us in dis-empowered and transforming them. In the Landmark Technology, 'Context' has nothing to do with the theories or notions of contexts. The context is what determines what and how things show up in our life, but the 'context' itself never shows up. It is like the white background, in front of which a black or blue object shows up, but a white object remains invisible. It is like yellow light in the room where a blue colored object shows up as green. The power of context can be illustrated by an anecdote. A man sees two workers breaking stone on the street. One of them looks joyous and elated and the other looks upset and tired. The man asks the person who looks fatigued and angry what he was doing, the worker replied that he was breaking the stones since morning and he hated his job. The man asks the other person why did he look joyous though he was doing the same work. The happy man replied that he was building a university where his grandchildren and their grandchildren might study and have a better life. Two people doing the same work were working with different contexts and hence their work showed up -occurred- in entirely different ways to them. My mother used to constantly tell me to take non-conventional medicines: haldi, kaadha and Ayurvedic syrups of all sorts, and this used to infuriate me. I hated those medicines and thought that my mother was pestering me and harassing me all the time with this non-sense. Later, thanks to the Forum, I realized that it was her love and concern and this was the way she expressed it. It would seem obvious for lots of other people, but for me the context was hidden, and hence I saw it as irritant.

So what was the hidden context of my lack of self confidence? I was lead to this context during a powerful inquiry into our lives in the Self Expression and Leadership Program using the distinction -"Who are you being such that others show up the way they are.." I was inquiring into certain issues I was dealing with in my family. My parents did not directly complain to me about what they did not like about me. Instead they kept on telling it to Ashwini and she used to bring it to me. Our coach Nandak Pandya asked me, 'Who are you being such that your parents or the wife cant deal with the things on their own and have to bring those things to you, directly and indirectly? What will you call people who cant deal with their problems on their own? '. The people who cant deal with the issues and problems on their own are obviously weak. So who was I being such that others in my life showed up as 'weak'? I asked myself was I being dominating? Was I being evasive? Was I scared to address these issues directly out of the fear of quarrels in the home? What will you call a person who is dominating, evasive and scared of confronting issues? Well, here was the hidden context of my life: I showed up in my life - I occurred to myself as WEAK. The whole life was then the game of hiding the fact ( it was a fact for me) that I was weak. My whole life, my diseases, my crushes, my habits, all the ways of being showed up in the context- I was weak.

In the Advanced Course, Praveen Puri demonstrated to us what the context is. He put up his two fingers and asked us what it was. We said 'two', 'sign of victory' or 'two fingers'. Then he asked us 'where' was 'two', 'sign of victory' or 'two fingers' were. We said they were their on his hand and where else. He said that we couldnt tell our S from the hole in the ground. He took a tennis ball and tossed it up and caught it. He asked us 'Where was the ball falling?', we said that it was falling in his hands. Again we were told that we could not tell our S from the Hole in the Ground. He said 'two', 'the sign of victory', or'two fingers' were words and they existed in language- not any language in our conversation. If no words like these existed the things would not exist for us the way they were doing now. A dog doesn't have the words' electricity pole' and so it uses it for a different purpose then we do. So these words become the context of what we see- our language-the language we use- is the hidden context of our life. My act- 'Stay Away from People' , my chief rackets- they don't care about me vs. I am no good' all these were basically conversations, meanings, stories which were the contexts of my life. They ran my life. These were the sources of my dis-empowerment, So I give up this conversation,'I am weak' and whole new relationship with myself begins. I see myself as powerful and effective. I see myself as someone who can make difference to the lives of people in my life. One of the intentions of the Advanced Course is to change our relation with ourselves so that all our relations, with people and with reality changes. This is what is meant by transformation.

I talked to my parents straight and asked them if they were afraid of me or found me dominating or evasive. They said that from now onwards, we will tell you straight.I also declared that I was taking up a project for bringing oneness and happiness in the family. They were quite happy with the idea.

A weak man clings to others when he feels insecure as during the boarding a reserved train compartment without reservation. A weak man 'adjusts' in spite of difficulties ( 'being adjusting' is one of my 'strong suits').A weak man worries about people finding out that he does not have stamina or health that other people. A weak man drives over cautiously and is worried about driving a four wheeler on an express highway. A weak man is scared of fights in the family and evades the issues. A weak man is afraid of being straight. A weak man feels he lacks stamina or strength. A weak man keeps people around him weak. So when I dropped this conversation and continuously distinguish and drop it every time it crops up, new possibilities of being and new possibilities of action call forth powerfully into action. I can drive my two wheeler more effectively, I can be someone who cant be messed with, I can be someone makes his money work for him. I can be someone who can be in charge of the affairs. I can be someone who is a possibility of empowerment. Now I am confidence. I am empowerment.

P.S.

I asked myself- how does my body occur to me? I said 'burdensome', ' source of suffering', ' and ' unattractive'. I dropped the conversation ( you need the Landmark training to do that) and my body occurs to me light, a source of joy and attractive........the game of transformation is so thrilling and hellua fun!

समकालीन मराठी समीक्षा: काही प्रश्न सचिन केतकर

2011-04-21T18:15:00.001+05:30

re
तुमच्या मते

१) समीक्षा म्हणजे काय? समीक्षेच प्रयोजन काय व एकंदरीत साहित्य संसकृतीत समीक्षेचे कार्य काय?

२) स्वातंत्रोतर काळातली महत्वाची मराठी समीक्षा /समीक्षक/ ग्रंथ/लेख कोणते? व का?

३) इतर भारतीय भाषेत महत्वाची समीक्षा /समीक्षक/ ग्रंथ/लेख कोणते? का?

४) इंग्रजी सहित जगातल्या इतर भाषेत महत्वाची समीक्षा /समीक्षक/ ग्रंथ/लेख कोणते? का?

५) राजकिय भूमिकेतून लिहीलेली समीक्षा महत्वाची वाटते का?

६) ‘चळवळी’ आणि ‘समीक्षा’ मधल्या नात्या विषयी काय म्हणने आहे?

७) अनियतकालिक चळवळीतून समोर आलेल्या समीक्षेचे काय महत्व?

८) विसाव्या शतकाच्या उत्तरार्धात पुढे आलेल्या पाश्चात्य ‘सैद्धान्तिक’ समीक्षेचे (Theory)
आजच्या मराठी समीक्षेत स्थान काय?

९) जागतिकीकरणाचा आणि समीक्षेचा काय संबंध आहे?

१०) स्वातंत्रोतर मराठी साहित्याच्या (१९४७-२०११) ईतिहासलेखना विषयी काय वाटतं?

११) तुम्हाला समकालीन मराठी कवितेच्या बाबतीत कोणता सैद्धान्तिक अभिगम/ दॄष्टीकोन योग्य वाटतो?

१२) तुमच्या लेखनावर समीक्षेचा/समीक्षकांचा प्रभाव आहे का? कोणत्या?

१३) मराठीत आजच्या पिढीच्या समीक्षेबद्दल काय वाटते?

१४) एकंदरीत मराठी समीक्षेची बलस्थाने व उणीवा कोणत्या वाटतात?

१५) साहित्याच्या भवितव्याचा आणि समीक्षेच्या दर्ज्याचा संबंध आहे काय? आहे तर कोणता/कसा?

ह्या प्रश्नांच्या निवडक उत्तरांना बडोद्याहून लवकरच प्रकाशित होणार्या ’उंट’ ह्या अनियतकालिकात स्थान देण्यात येईल.

उत्तर sachinketkar@gmail.com हया पत्यावर किंवा

डॊ. सचिन केतकर, असोसीयट प्रोफ़ेसर इन ईंगलीश, फ़ेकलटी ओफ़ आर्ट्स, द महाराजा सयाजीराव युनिव्हर्सिटी, बदोदे, गुजरात,

३९०००२ ह्या पत्त्यावर पाठवावे.

What Did I get Out of Participation in Landmark Education? A Quick Look

2011-04-11T09:53:00.002+05:30

Landmark Education is one of the most powerful education and training programs in the world which provides hands on training in producing dramatic results in those areas where we have not been able to produce results (only program of its kind). It empowers and enables you to live life powerfully and live the life you love by making you capable of getting what is important to you and your life. It is designed to cause positive and permanent shifts in various areas of your life.

I did the Landmark Forum in July 2009 and participated in various courses offered by Landmark Education. I created dramatic and positive shifts in overall quality of life and in particular the following areas:

Serial No	Area of Life	Before Landmark Education	After Landmark Education	Created Possibility
1	Relations	Enormous anger especially with mother and wife. I either used to explode and take it out on them or on myself or suppress it. Created depression, loneliness and lack of desire to live.	Very little anger and can dismantle it without suppressing it. Found out the source of my anger.	Love, Affinity and peace in family. Peace of Mind and happiness.
2	Self Esteem	Very low self esteem lacked confidence and assertiveness Used to blame myself. Found it difficult to say 'No'. Considered myself a 'team player' rather than as leader.	Created positive and powerful self image. More assertive and can say ‘no’ to people. Can relate to myself as a leader.	Leadership and courage. Power
3	Work	Used unproductive teaching techniques (‘spoon feeding/broadcasting) and kept a distance from students and colleagues. Not effective in dealing with stress and meeting deadlines. Had no vision of my role in society.	Far more effective teaching method (learner-centric and interactive), improved rapport with students. Effective in dealing with stress and meeting deadlines. Have a vision of my role in society	Effective and powerful in teaching and mentoring. Fulfillment and Job satisfaction
4	Health and Well being	Deteriorating physical and mental health due to chronic asthma. Heavy medication for asthma, related illness and depression. No exercise and personal neglect.	Enormous improvement in health and well being. Reduced medication almost by seventy percent. Exercise regularly by walking 50 mins every day. Follow diet-chart given by the dietician	Positive shift in health and well being.
5	Communication	Ineffective listening skills, though good with ideas and thoughts, unable to express emotions and feelings , not being with the people	Better listening skills, Can listen to people without prejudice. Can listen to people’s deepest concerns Can express my innermost feelings and thoughts.	Love and affinity. Positive impact on all areas of life.

Here are the links to its websites:

http://landmarkforum.net/

You can watch video introduction

http://www.landmarkeducation.co.in/

You can find out about the dates and the cities on this site

Dates for Mumbai Landmark Forum (click below)

http://lereg.landmarkeducation.com/SearchEvents.aspx?pgid=117&crid=356&ctid=22198&sdt=0

Dates for Ahmedabad Landmark Forum (click below)

http://lereg.landmarkeducation.com/SearchEvents.aspx?pgid=117&crid=356&ctid=229&sdt=0

The Poet and the Game of Transformation

2011-04-06T09:53:00.001+05:30

I have often wondered at the impact of the powerful training of Landmark Education on my poetry. Most of the poetry that I wrote before Landmark Forum was written by a person who was very lonely, very depressed, frustrated and agonizingly suffocated. It was the poetry of the person who hardly believed in love, who hardly had any power, and who preferred to 'stay away' from life, others and even from one's own self. So my poetry too was very lonely, full of darkness and grief and which preferred to ' stay away' from life, others and my self. He definitely had the necessary ' on-the-court distinctions' for writing very creative poetry, and it definitely gave him fulfillment in his life- in fact it was among very few things that really gave him fulfillment in life. This was the reason he kept writing poetry in spite of general indifference from people. He said that he wrote poetry because he 'had to'; it was a compulsion, it was one of the ways of surviving. He told people that he 'was' a poet, when all he did was write poetry.

In fact, one of my best friends and fellow poets Hemant Divate suggested to me that I dont need these things like the communication program or the Landmark education and hinted that one should leave 'the exit door open' once one enters something fully. He was referring to my involvement with Landmark, of course. He told me about all these things in my 'Interview' with him. Many people have expressed their concern regarding my involvement with Landmark in various and I totally get their concern and love for me. However, they don't know what Landmark can create in life and whats more they don't even know that they don't know. Far from blaming them or making them wrong, I cheerfully recommend Landmark Education to them once again!

Hemant told me this in an 'interview', which I had with him. This very fascinating 'distinction' in the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, the last phase of the Curriculum for Living', called 'The Interview', which obviously is not the same as what people generally understand as the interview. The distinction Interview follows the distinctions 'Community' and 'The Map of communities' where the participants are asked to make maps of various communities they are part of and think about what people in the communities think about them and how they see them. The interview is about actually going to the communities and finding out what they actually think about us and how they actually see us. The key idea in the SELP is that our expression is not where we are but where others are. Who we are exist in other people's way of looking at us, in the way they listen to us and in the space they provide us to be who we are and who we are not.

Coming back to poetry, the poetry I wrote before the Landmark Education came from the 'identity' named Sachin Ketkar. My Identity consists of my Act, my Sentence,my rackets and my strong suits. My act ( the command I gave at the experience of failure and which is clearing for my identity) is ' Stay Away' from life, people and my self, my strong suits ( the ways of being I have to get produce results I have been producing in life over decades) are being 'analytical/learner', being 'nice/adaptive', and being 'self- dependent', my chief rackets ( unproductive ways of being comprising of a persistent complaint+a fixed way of being) are ' Others don't understand me or care for me' ( so stay away) and ' I am no good or inadequate' (so stay away) and my Sentence ( I wanted to be X but I am Y) is that "I am 'unwanted'". My identity comes from 'something is wrong' and 'this isn't it'. My identity comes from the bad experiences of my past which I constant put into future. There is no new possibility in my identity, no fulfillment, no love, no power, no self expression, and no peace. The training is all about distinguishing my identity 'on the court' and ' putting it aside', so that new realm of possibility and new opening for action arises. It takes one to the source of who one is and who one is not. I discover my true self , the self which is not a 'thing' or 'experience', but the clearing/ space/Being/ Possibility inside of which my life shows up. Before Landmark, the identity had me, now I have identity. This discovery transforms who I am in my eyes, who I am for myself. This is after all what the game of ontological transformation called the Landmark education is all about.

So now onwards the possibility is that my poetry can come not from my ' experiences'or my past or my identity but from the space and clearing inside of which my experiences and my identity shows up.Instead of coming from 'something wrong' and 'this isn't it', it can come from 'this is it and it is perfect'. It can come from the possibility of abundance of love and power.

One of the distinctions of the Landmark technology which was taken deeper and expanded in the Advanced course and SELP, is 'DO-HAVE-BE' vs. 'BE-DO-HAVE', i.e. the mode of Becoming vs. Being. In Do-Have-Be, our default mode of living life, the mode of Becoming, we think we frantically hunt for what do we need to do, so that we can get the results we want to have and which will lead to us 'being' who we want to be. For instance, what should I 'do', so that I 'have' lot of money, so that I can be 'happy and fulfilled' , is one common question human beings ask. This is the default mode of life, the mode of 'becoming'. Unfortunately inside this mode, our 'being' ( happy and fulfilled) depends on our 'having' what we want and on our finding the ways of 'doing' what we have to do. So if my business fails, my being will be sad and frustrated. However, in the real life, our being determines what we do and what we do determines what we have- the real life moves in BE-DO-HAVE direction, the direction of Being. Which means if a person who fails in business is depressed and frustrated, he will do what a depressed and frustrated man does and he gets what a failed and depressed man gets. This becomes a vicious cycle. So instead of asking what should I do to earn lot of money, Landmark Technology suggests we should ask who should I 'Be' so that I will 'do' the things necessary to 'have' lot of money.

Coming to my life as a poet and creative writer, before 'playing Landmark Education', I used to often ask myself - What should I 'do' as a writer so that I 'have' recognition and fame, so that I get thrill, joy and happiness in life. So my joyousness and happiness depended on what I did and what I got from doing what I did. Obviously, I did not 'have' much recognition and fame and so I was depressed and frustrated. But life moved in 'Be-Do-Have' the mode of Being, and hence, I 'did' what a depressed and frustrated man did, and I got what a depressed and frustrated man got- more depression, more frustration and a handful of poets who were more, or at least, as depressed and frustrated as I was!!! Out of this frustration due to lack of recognition, I also contemplated writing novels, as many poets probably do, in-order-to achieve what my friend and fellow senior colleague Prof Salat calls ' fifteen seconds of fame'.

As I am half way through the Self-Expression and Leadership Program (SELP), I am a different person today. I do not prefer to 'stay away' from life, people and myself. I am possibility of love,leadership and creativity. So what I will be writing most of the time will be written by a different person. 'On-the-court distinctions', the devices and techniques remain with me but the person who uses them will be different. So today I can write from Be-Do-Have, as a possibility of abundance of love and power, not as a compulsion or strategy to survive, so I will 'do' what a person with abundance of love and power does and 'have' what such doing gives me. Besides, I am not worried about how people will receive my poetry, because I know that they will receive it hundreds of different ways and none of them will be 'true'. Hence, I will not write'in-order-too' achieve fame, but as a possibility of love, power and fulfillment, and that I know that 'being' a poet is unreal, writing poetry is reality.

So how will my poetry look from now onwards? Many close friends have already told me that there is shift in the way you write. How do I know how it will look when it will be what it is and what it is not in your clearing, in the space you provide, in your listening, and I acknowledge you all, my readers and the readers to come, for your generosity of providing space for my writing to show up, irrespective of your liking or disliking it, for my poetry IS your generosity.................

Catching the Cobra or The Death of Sachin Ketkar

2011-02-19T10:33:00.000+05:30

If Landmark Forum opened up all the doors and windows of my house which were closed for thirty eight years, The Landmark Advanced Course blew up my house instead. If the Landmark Forum was carpet bombing, the Advanced Course was a thermonuclear explosion, with a mushroom and all that. The Advanced Course leader Praveen Puri said that he will catch that elusive beast, the cobra which runs our life-our identity -and he gestured with his hands making a cutting motion across his throat- and kill it. Well that's what happened, I could catch the elusive beast- what the Advanced Course calls our 'Act', and kill it. The Act is the Cobra-the source of our Identity. Consider, no amount of information, conceptualization, or theorization about what 'balance' is, would help us to 'get' balance on a bicycle. In the same way, no amount of theorization about our 'identity' can help us 'get' our identity.

So what the hell is the source of our identity, our 'Act'? What is my 'Act'? Well the Landmark Education, distinguishes 'Act' as a powerful command- an order basically, which we give when when we experience severe failure for the first time in very early in our life. It is a speech act, which we make the context of our lives. It is designed to cause repeated failures as we choose people and situations around us which would actually justify our 'act'. When I was about seven months old, I got severe dysentery which lasted for almost five years. I remember coming back halfway from school as I would start getting sensations. Somewhere then, I thought dirtying people's places was so embarrassing that I should 'STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE'. This was my command and my whole life showed up in this command. It became the context of my life.'. I looked at life from this context .

So everything I did was within 'Stay Away'. I clothed in a way so as not to attract attention I even refused to comb my hair when I was very young, for I thought people would notice me and laugh at me for trying to appear good! I isolated myself and kept distance from people. I became a bookworm so as to avoid confronting real relationships. This intense engagement with books made me analytical, logical and imaginative. I created an imaginary world of daydreams and fantasies when helped me to say away from confronting real people and relationships. I even developed diseases which justified ' staying away' from people. My intellectualism and being formal and nice are masks behind which I hide my perceived vulnerability. This masks helps me to keep safe distance from the people. My job too is consistent with my'act'.

My basic recurrent complaints in life were consistent with my 'act': 'people don't care about me or even try to understand me' and ' I am no good'. These complaints justified 'staying away' from people. I complained that I was no good in sports and preferred the world of books. I saw myself as 'awkward', weak, helpless and even less 'manly. I preferred masturbation to real relationship with girls, though I used to fall in love every now and then. Only staying away from real people, would I be in my 'comfort zone' and so I said that I dont really need anyone in my life- I can live all by myself. This is the power of 'Act'.

So inside of this act, I kept distance from my parents, sister, wife, friends, enemies and did not open up emotionally as I thought it would reveal me as 'weak and embarrassing' and 'look bad'. Inside of my act, the life was hellishly suffocating and agonizing. I wanted to die and I contemplated suicide a couple of times. After all dying was the best way to 'STAY AWAY"!

After my Advanced Course, I hugged my parents and said that in every life I want you as my parents and I promised my mom that I give up drinking and eating meat. She thought these were the reasons for my illness, though I drank only socially and in moderation and ate meat only once in a while. But they were so happy and said all the money spent on landmark have not gone in vain. If you cant make your parents happy, you cant make anyone happy in life.Before Landmark I used to fight so bitterly, using foulest of foul words with my mother. Then it started with Ashwini and that shocked my dad as everyone else. Ashwini decided to quit. After Landmark she thinks I am very loving husband and loving father whom she could trust her child and her own parents with.

I also hardly used to pay attention when people were talking with me as I was not 'being with them'. I was daydreaming- the world of 'Stay Away from People'. I pretended to be listening when I was actually elsewhere.

My poetry was also of 'Stay Away From People' kind of poetry. People stayed away from my works, after all thats what I wanted so that I could blame them for not giving a damn for me.

Before the Landmark Education, the Act was not only running my life, but I WAS my Act. Now I have an Act. It no longer runs me and whenever its on, I catch it by its tail and flush it down what Praveen Puri colourfully termed as 'Ontological Toilet'. It comes up again and again I push it down. I have defanged the Beast.

So what emerges if 'Stay Away' goes down the drain? Staying with people!Being present to them, as they really are and as they really are not. Being with situations as they really are and as they are not. I invented the possibility of love and leadership from the space of nothing left where my identity once was.

The intention of the Advanced Course was taking first step toward obtaining mastery over the distinctions of Landmark and over reality. The next obvious step was the next programme of Landmark Curriculum for Living which was 'Self Expression and Leadership (SELP) program, and I am proud to say that I am part of the biggest SELP program ever comprising of 109 participants including me and Ashwini.

In the morning of the very next day of our first Workday (30 Jan), I entered into the 'distress' caused by asthma. I discovered that I was unnecessarily over dependent on the Asthalin inhaler and used to take it at least ten times a day at the slightest discomfort. I found that the real reason behind this was panic and fear at slightest symptom of distress. Fear of being rendered helpless and weak and unmanly and being exposed as vulnerable. It was about avoiding 'looking bad' and about fear which arose because of my putting past experiences into future. My 'being' was being afraid and panicky and looking good.I started doing what a panicky person does and what a person who wants to avoid looking good does and I started getting what such a person gets: loss of power, self expression and agony. The distress is acerbated by my saying something is wrong. So instead of seeing it as 'something wrong', I say 'this is it and it is perfect'. And out of nothing I create the possibility of Relaxation, Courage and Self Expression.

Today I take inhaler 4-5 times at the most, instead of more than ten times.I dont carry it in my pocket all the time. I have declared that I will give up the dependency on inhaler completely by workday two. In Landmark, miracles are not product of anyone's grace or miracles of saints or even Programme Leaders, but products of our skills and mastery of distinctions of technology.

Now Sachin Ketkar who was 'Stay Away' is dead. I am the possibility of Love and Leadership. What comes out of this possibility will be miraculous.

The Cobra is caught and I am reborn.

Inventing the Third Nation: A Brief History of Marathi Poetry of Past Hundred Years

2011-02-06T11:51:00.001+05:30

Yesterday, I read my paper titled' Re-imagining the Nation in the Post Global Period:The Case of Post-Nineties Marathi Poetry' at the National Workshop on Literary Historiography organized by the UGC-DRS-I SAP Program and the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The MS University of Baroda.

I began my talk by commenting on how academia and intellectuals of this country are obsessed with the desire for mourning for 'dying languages' and cultures and are blind to new languages and cultures being BORN everywhere around them. My talk was about these 'birth' of new languages and cultures. The English which I was using in the seminar hall, I said, was a newly born language and not the older one by the same name which was born on the British isles one thousand years ago. The birth of new languages, like the language of Manya Joshi or Sanjeev Khandekar, is the focus of my talk, I said.

Using Benedict Anderson's theorization of nation as an imagined political community, I looked at how the nationhood was constructed in the Marathi poetry of the twentieth and the twenty first century.

I talked about how the invention of modern nation was possible in India in the nineteenth century due to colonial modernity , especially the rise of print-capitalism and colonial education system. This nation, as we know, was an orientalist construct which was elitist, upper caste,Brahminical, and masculine. It was based on the view of culture which was High Textual. This paradigm was radically questioned from within by Jyotiba Phule (1827-1890) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in their distinctive ways. The impact of the print capitalism and the western education on Marathi language gave birth to new kind of Marathi which did not exist earlier. The birth of a new nation was actually a birth of a new language.

Marathi poetry of this period, as characterized by the poetry of Keshavsuta (1866-1905)and Balakavi (1890-1918)is reformist, idealist, and influenced by the Anglo American romanticism. The exception to this paradigm was the poetry of Bahinabai Chaoudhary (1807-1882), an illiterate genius whose brilliant works were unavailable to the 'community' as they were orally composed, and hence outside of the print-capitalism of literary culture of the time.

The second discontinuity in imagining nation was after independence. This 'post-colonial nation' was a critique of the colonial nation. The attempts were made to democratize and open up the colonial nation. This was a 'demotic' re-imagining of the colonial nation which attempted to democratize both modernity and literary culture. The efforts to democratize modernity and literary culture resulted in the rise of 'little magazine movements'. These vision of culture and modernity which these magazines embodied was democratic, pluralist and anti-establishment.

The avant-garde poetry of B.S. Mardhekar (1909-1956)is situated at the cusp of these two imaginings of nations and heralds a paradigm shift in Marathi poetry. His poems express despair resulting from World War II, growing industrialization, urbanization and erosion of traditional values. They mark a departure from the earlier practice of poetry and opens up possibilities for expression which did not exist earlier. Mardhekar’s attempt to integrate the non-conformist aspects of Bhakti poetics and native traditions with international modernist aesthetics is a significant characteristic of the post-colonial cultural tendencies. From 1955 to 1975, poetry which expressed this dissenting vision of life, culture and nationhood pervaded the little magazines. (Right: Pic of Maradhekar)

The ‘little magazines’ like ‘Shabda’, ‘Vacha’, and ‘Asmitadarsha’ had a distinct anti-Establishment outlook. Complex, experimental and challenging poetry of Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004), Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), Vasant Dahake (1942- ) and Namdeo Dhasal (1949- ) emerged from the movement. Their works bear a distinct influence of the international modernist and postmodernist poetry. The Dalit poetry or ‘the poetry of the oppressed’, influenced by the radically reformist philosophy of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891-1956) and Jyotiba Phule (1827-1890), exploded on the scene in the same period. The poets like Dhasal straddled both avant-garde and the Dalit poetics. Feminism also started making its presence felt in this period. Malika Amar Sheikh (1957- ) writes vigorous poetry which combines feminism with other dissenting political ideologies. In the eighties, the tribal poets like Bhujang Meshram (1958-2007) started writing poetry which combined their quest for tribal identity with protest against the exploitative social system and the poets like Arun Kale (1952-2008) continued the tradition of Dalit poetry.

This alternative way of imagining a nation was also an alternative way of using language and so the language of post-colonial Marathi poetry was more inclusive, demotic and radical. This birth of new languages and new languages of literature is correlated to the birth of the new idea of nation.

The third shift in the way we imagine ourselves, I argued, takes place in the nineties, largely due to economic reforms, globalization and revolution in media. While the colonial nation was constructed by introduction of print-capitalism, national imagination today is shaped by satellite television ( news, soaps and reality shows), the Internet, cell phone revolution and the overwhelming power of market. The context of post-cold war geopolitics is a significant context to this construction of nation. 

This new construction of nation can be theoretically analyzed in multiple ways. For instance, one can fruitfully combine Anderson’s theorization of nation as an imagined community with Howard Rheingold’s theorization of ‘virtual communities’ ( 1991/2000).A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community includes social networking services, which consist of various online communities. Following Toffler, one can also think of this new imagining of nation as the ‘Third Wave’ nation.

Following Raymond Williams (1977), I think we can in the year 2011 also think of the first construction of the nation as ‘archaic’, the post-colonial nation as ‘residual’ and the third post-nineties ‘nation’ as `emergent’. The critique of this 'global nation' ( an oxymoron)is only possible on globalized platforms. This contradiction- that globalization can be critiqued only on globalized platform-is the crucial aspect of globalization.

Marathi poetry of this period reflects this emergent nation in multiple ways. Poetic idiom was transformed in the nineties due to the social and cultural crises caused by these processes of globalization, technological revolution, and economic reforms. New little magazines like ‘Shabadvedh’ (1989-2009), ‘Abhidhanantar’ (1992-2009) played an important role by providing a platform for new voices to emerge.

Saleel Wagh’s satirical poetry mocking at the globalized urban culture and corporate world, Manya Joshi’s effort to convert the chaos of contemporary metropolitan culture into cacophonic music, Hemant Divate’s asphyxiation of living in a sham urban upper middle class, Sanjeev Khandekar’s prosaic caricature of disfigured human self in the world transformed by scientific-technological forces and the forces of global capitalism can be considered as a few representative poets of this period. The Dalit poetry of Arun Kale and Mahendra Bhavre rethink the Dalit politics and poetics in the context of the globalized world. The works of these poets also appear mostly in the new little magazines of this period. 

These poets I argued are inventing the language of Marathi poetry because the new Marathis are being born outside the academic world which is simply engaged in mourning the death of Marathi.

The discussions that followed my presentations were equally interesting. Deeptha asked me if the events like Babri Mosque demolition can be understood within this new idea of nation. I replied that the communalism of the late eighties and the nineties was not the same as the communalism of partition era. Even the Naxal movement of the nineties and first decade of the twenty first century are not same. The altered context is what I was emphasizing. The altered context, I could not respond due to the lack of time, was the rise of 'new capitalism' of the nineties. There were questions about 'heterogeneous times', about multiple time frames inside globalization. I responded by drawing the attention to Raymond Williams' terms I mentioned in the talk. He talks about how the archaic, the residual and the emergent exist simultaneously in a single moment.

WORKS I CITED IN MY TALK:

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised and extended. ed.). London: Verso. pp. 224. 

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. 

Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. Bantam Books, 1981

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 121-6 

TOWARDS MASTERING ENGLISH

2011-01-04T11:03:00.003+05:30

For Indians, probably along with sex, money and in-laws, English is associated with the greatest amount of misery and negativity. We envy those who speak English fluently, and we resent them for being snobbish and dominating. We feel neglected and inadequate in the presence of English. We feel ashamed of not knowing it. Often we hate English and blame it for destroying ‘our’ culture and languages. We deplore it for being the language of ex-rulers. We hate ourselves for wanting English and for being enslaved by the speakers of English. Yet the fact remains that along with sex and money, English is what we desire the most. Hence as a teacher of English, I would I would like to briefly share my views on how to master English. My views are based on Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s powerful book Three Laws of Performance (2009).(Read my review of the book by clicking here) The ideas presented here may not be ‘new’, for there are hardly any ‘new’ ideas, but these ideas in my view are the most effective ones. The ideas aim at transforming our relation with English.

Zaffron and Logan argue that our performance is correlated not to how or what something or someone is, but how something, someone or some situation occurs to us and that how something, someone or a situation occurs to us is inside of what conversations we have about it with ourselves or with others. They point out that by altering these conversations about something, someone or a situation, we can alter how it occurs to us and there by alter our performance. Hence in order to alter our performance in English we have to look at how English occurs to us and inside of which conversations does it occurs to us. In short, let us look at what we keep telling ourselves and others about English.

Typically, we say English is not ‘our’ language; it is the language of outsiders. It is not our ‘mother tongue’, it is our ‘auntie tongue’ or it is ‘step-mother’ tongue. We say it is the language of slavery. We say it is the language that is destroying our languages and it contaminates our Glorious Indian Culture. We say it the language of the dominant and elite class, which is consequently ‘less Indian’ than us. We call this class neo-colonizers or colonial collaborators.

We also say it is too difficult and we will never learn it properly. We say English is all about speaking English fluently (look at the thriving ‘spoken English’ cottage industry in

India

). We say we want to ‘think’ in English. We say that by making mistakes in English would make us ‘look bad’ and that by speaking it fluently we will ‘look good’. We say that by learning grammar properly, we will learn English.

Consider that inside all these conversations, we have already ruled out any possibility of English being ‘our language’ or using it like our mother tongue, because we have already declared it to be ‘other tongue’ and our ‘second language’. When we call it a ‘foreign’ language, we can never make it our own. Hence the possibility of being as fluent in English as one is in one’s own language is already ruled out, even before we start learning it seriously. Unless we stop telling others and ourselves these things, we can never use English as well as we use ‘our’ non-English languages. Surprisingly we say all these things when our nationalist leaders like Swami Vivekanand, Sri Aurobindo, Dr. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi who opposed English in theory and who brought out an English newspaper, were highly accomplished in English and even the Constitution of India was drafted in English. Inside of these conversations of blame, we have already distanced ourselves from English and closed our access to the language.

Our complaint that English is the language of the upper class elite or the class of neo-colonizers/ colonial collaborators does not prevent us from desiring the language and from sending our own children to English medium schools. This means that though we resent that class and are envious of it, we want to be part of that class. This means that our complaint is nothing but hypocrisy and this hypocrisy takes on a different shade when the academics who should be teaching English and who themselves belong to this class start saying that the English is the language of upper class elite. These academics imply that they are ashamed of being who they are and hence want to prevent others from having English. This simply means they don’t want to do their jobs, although they don’t mind being paid for it. If we want English and we want to belong to the English speaking elite, it is honest to abandon this hypocrisy and blame games.

Now consider that inside of the conversations like ‘it is too difficult and we won’t be able to speak it properly’, we are again ruling out the possibility of mastering English and using it with proficiency for ourselves. Hence it is extremely important that we accept the responsibility of all these conversations and drop them every time they crop up in our heads or on our tongues because they are blocking all the possibilities of our getting English.

Once we drop all these dialogues which prevent us from acquiring proficiency in English, we should access the language through our listening. There is no other way of acquiring a language. We feel language is all about talking and we feel that the only way to learn speaking English is by speaking. However, listening is the only way we can reach the core of the language. Consider, for instance, among the dumb and deaf people, most of the people classified as 'dumb' actually unable to speak as they are deaf. The chief reason why most of the people remain 'dumb' in English are actually 'deaf' as far as English is concerned.

In my view, instead of having 'spoken English' classes, we should have classes which teaches us how to listen to English. If we pay close attention to how we listen, we realize that we hardly listen or listen only through our thoughts continuously going on in our minds. We hardly remain present to someone or something as our mind wanders all over the place: through our opinions, day dreams, memories and various kinds of distractions inside our heads. We should develop awareness about these distractions and pay attention to what is being spoken, why it is being spoken, how it is spoken and what all is going on behind what is being spoken. Paying this kind of attention dramatically improves not just our spoken English but also our relationship with people. Regularly listening attentively to just how English words are pronounced, enhances quality of our spoken English.

One can see that a lot depends on the attitude and mindset regarding English. What we need is the right spirit and the right spirit is all about treating it as a game. We begin the game by declaring openly that you will master the language and as Zaffron and Logan put it ‘play as if our life depended on it’. Declaration is significant, because when you openly declare your intention, people hold you accountable for it and which makes you work without giving up. The authors suggest ‘Play the game passionately, intensely, and fearlessly. But don’t make it significant. It’s just a game’. (2004)

We may have hundred reasons for not using English, we don’t have people who can speak it with us, we don’t have enough vocabulary, and our grammar is poor and so on. But the point is to play it anyway. Zaffron and Logan suggest, ‘if something occurs to you as an obstacle, you will push back by playing on the obstacle’s terms. Instead, make the obstacles, conditions of the game.’ (201). We have to remember that the distance between two set of stumps on the cricket pitch is twenty two yards is not an obstacle, but the condition of the game itself.

The most important thing is being in action with English. Though there is great desire for English, there is an inbuilt reluctance in using English. It is usually reluctance to take risk in using English. It is about fear of failure and one is reminded of an old joke where a person declares, ‘I won’t step into water, till I learn how to swim properly’. Unless you jump into the language and take risk of ‘looking bad’, you wont be able to use English at all.

Zaffron and Logan make a profound distinction between ‘taking about the game, from the stands’ and ‘playing the game on the court’. They give example of a football game where the conversations of people who stand in the stands is all about ‘judging, evaluating, assessing, making excuses about their teams, or saying what their teams did right, or rationalizing’ (199). The authors’ note that from the stands there is little at stake and the conversation has no impact on the action of the game. They suggest, ‘You leave the stands when you stop assessing and judging and instead put something at risk.’ No action, no result, no mastery.

Hence to attain mastery over English, it is essential to drop the conversation which actually block our access to the language and inside of which there are no possibilities of mastering it. It is essential to declare your intention of mastering it so that people around you, hold you accountable for your performance. Without this accountability, we won’t work to enhance our performance. Finally, leaving the stands and being in action on the court with English, taking risks and making all the obstacles, conditions of the game will lead to mastery over English. Obviously, performance cannot be a one time affair. Playing this game of mastering English is a life long process, where we keep climbing ‘Mt. Neverest’, jumping from one peak of excellence, to another – till we are burned, buried or fed to birds……

Reference:

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of your Organization and your Life, San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009. Distributed in India by the Times Books, Rs. 395

The Shabdopnishad : Advanced Communication Course: Power to Create

2010-12-30T22:17:00.000+05:30

Something extraordinary happened when I was on my way back from Mumbai on 22 November after participating in the 'Advance Communication Course: Power to Create' course. From the windows I was startled to discover that with my uttering of the word 'the mountains' , the mountains appeared in all their glory. The utterance and the appearance of mountains in my phenomenological space was a simultaneous event. The things appear to us the moment we utter their names. The words create the worlds. But, you would say, the things exit 'out there' whether we use language or not and, the things do not appear in front of us 'in reality' if we mention them. The world 'out there', however, cannot exist independently of our language and the distinction between 'the imagination' and 'reality' is not so distinct in our phenomenological space. In fact, phenomenology 'brackets' the questions like these and treats the objects in our consciousness at par, irrespective whether they are 'real' ( in the sense of having 'objective' existence) or 'imaginary'. The space of our life, in the phenomenological terminology, is the space of our 'intentionality'. Words create worlds in our life. Our thoughts and our cognition is shaped by our words.

I am a poet, as if I didn't know this. I knew all this very exactly, but I thought it was limited to my art and my life had nothing to do with this startlingly obvious fact. In fact, as an artist, I was operating from 'the new model' of communication as distinguished by the Landmark Communication Curriculum: I was not 'expressing' anything in particular as a poet- I was creating an alternative world. And this is exactly what was setting me apart from my contemporary Marathi poets- they were 'expressing' something-ideas, feelings etc, I was creating. What the Communication Curriculum revealed to me was, that 'the reality' of the life I was living, the world I was inhabiting, was also made of words, and not just that, they are 'created' by me.

I have already written about the Communication for Access to Power course in my earlier blog entry. The Advance Communication Course focussed on getting rid of our habitual modes of communication. It began by distinguishing those 'triggers' and 'cues' which throw us back into the 'default/inherited/old model' of communication which is based on the assumption that the world is 'out there' or 'in here', and the function of communication was to bridge the gap between 'us' and the 'world' which may be within us or 'out there'. When we are living in the old model, we are 'stimulus-response' machines and the basic purpose of communicating in our life was to either 'survive' (someone, something, some situations or ourselves) or to 'fix' someone or something ( including ourselves). The old model of communication is based on past which we project into our future. The triggers could be phrases like' You are inefficient' or ' You are boring' or ' You too are like others' and so on. We were given hands-on exercises to respond to these words from 'nothing' instead of responding from past-based, habitual responses. We were shown that now we have a choice when it comes to responding, instead of responding in a mechanical way.

A fascinating distinction was the 'Automatic Recurring Dialogues (ARDs)' in our lives existing at all levels of communication. In fact, we live our lives within these ARDs. These are conversations are variations on fixed basic themes and are used not just by people in our lives to us, but also among themselves. In my life, I find the dialogues like ' You are lazy or not paying attention'and so on recurring not just between me and others but also among others to others. We were taught to uncover the past episodes which underlay ARDS and dismantle them. We were also trained to deal with the communications that we 'withhold' from others.

One of the most important part of the course dealt with the ways in which we 'resist' communication from others and communicating with others. I discovered that though after the Forum I given up huge anger against my mother, I still did not communicate with her and the reason I gave myself was that what she wants to talk about is rather trivial and unimportant compared to the things I was doing. These 'trivial' things like what maid servant does or what the neighbours are saying are important in her life. The idea is to enter the other person's world to 'get' what that person is saying. This is called 'recreating' in the Communication Course terminology. To 'recreate' someone is 'to get' ( not 'to understand') what others are saying in its entirety. We were given exercises for 'recreating' what others had said- word to word- " nothing added, nothing taken away, nothing changed". Yours faithfully, obviously performed below average to average in these exercises. We were also asked to recreate other's concerns, commitments and contexts and not just the words. Very powerful exercises indeed. People listen only through their opinions and on going thought processes. We were taught to 'distinguish' these things and put them aside and communicate from ' nothing'. Only then one can fully 'recreate' what others are saying . The Forum gave us the distinction of ' Already Always Listening' (AAL) where in we discovered that we listen to others through through our internal dialogue which is made up of our opinions, beliefs and assumptions. Already existing beliefs, opinions and assumptions limit our perception of possibilities. If I believe that someone is an idiot, boring or naive, my listening of that person will be through this and even if that person is saying something interesting and intelligent, I will filter that out. There is no possibility in 'Already Always Listening'.The AAL is always past based and as long as you are inside of that you are not really present for new possibilities. This AAL, as the Forum teaches, is part of our design as humans, a part of our machinery and hence, not really who we are. The Advanced Communication Course gave us yet another fascinating distinction- The Morass.

The Morass is nothing but an associational network of images, ideas, sensations, and memories into which we slip every now and then. The Stream of Consciousness of James Joyce, the free- association of Freud are actually 'morasses'. If communication is not about talking but about ' being-in-communication'- something that has to be caused from the space of 'nothing', the morasses, day-dreaming and the AAL are things which keep us ' out of communication' most of the time. Thats the reason why they say we are checked out of communication most of the time, and very rarely we 'check into' communication.

The Advanced Course actually started only in the last one and half hours of the two and half days course! This was because the earlier part of it was about completing the past based habits of communication. The last session on Sunday was probably most profound and spiritual experience of my life. One can create something only from nothing-one can create, say 'X' only from 'not-X'. But we discovered that 'not-X' is 'a lie', because 'not-X' consists of 'X' hidden and concealed inside of 'not-X'. Hence the distinction between the Self and the Other has to be rethought. The Other is actually 'not-Self' which means it is the Self hidden and concealed in the 'not-Self'. We were to told to look at the Other, our partner, and be present to him so that we realize him as our 'non-self'. But 'not-self' is a lie! Now we know who the Other is! In first Communication Course: Access to Power course, we were given the distinction about who we are. I discovered who ' I' was. I was not the meaning making machinery, not experiences,not thoughts, not sensations but I was 'space' -nothing- in which my life, my thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, experiences emerged. This 'space of nothing' was like a blackboard in which white chalk marks come into being. I am not my life, I am a 'clearing' for my life. Communication is about giving this 'space of nothing' for other's communication, about being clearing for other's communication. Only then can you 'recreate' others or achieve miracles like 'achieving multiple outcomes from a single communication'. In Advanced Course I also discovered who the Other was- the Other was 'me' - the space of nothing- a clearing for life- hidden inside 'not-me'.

However, apart from the distinctions of the Advanced Communication course, I did something else. Raghu Sawney, our trainer, advised the participants to stand naked in front of mirror and fall in love with ourselves. Love every part of our body, look into our eyes and say- I love you and accept the way you are and way you are not. We also have to tell ourselves that we respect this person completely and everyone else should do the same. When I did so, I ended the bitter quarrels- 'the rackets'- I had with myself and was complete. I could sense a great surge of confidence and assertiveness. I felt powerful. Strangers noticed and told me that I looked 'complete'. I discovered the power of loving myself and respecting myself for the first time in my life. Today,I write poetry not 'because of' or ' in order to' survive or fix or even 'look good'. I write poetry because I choose to write it.

My classroom teaching has changed. How I interact with people has changed. Ashwini received comments from relatives when I attended my nephew's wedding regarding how I have changed and how I talk nicely and properly with people! Communication Course brings back 'love and affinity' in our lives, for presence of ' love and affinity' is an indication of 'being-in-communication'. I remember the wonderful distinction of ' dancing-in-communication' which happens when you are not trying to control communication and simply 'correlate' ourselves to others. I experienced it a couple of time too and it was fun. Communication which is not 'in order to' survive or fix something gives you a sense of freedom and love in communication. Nowadays I discover when I am 'resisting' communication and when I am operating from the older communication model of stimulus-response based on surviving and fixing. I have experienced great freedom, joy, confidence and have noticed a distinctive shift in people's 'listening' of me. Now that's awesome! Highly recommended! If you are wondering whether you should do it or not, I suggest -go get it!

Texture of Forgetfulness: A New Poem by Me

2010-12-19T14:58:00.002+05:30

Texture of forgetfulness

Slips away from my fingers

I don’t even remember how it felt

Probably it was like sand or silk

Or like a young woman’s curves

Or like nothingness

Or like feathers of a dead sparrow

Texture of forgetfulness is like daylight

Inside which we can see everything clearly

For instance when I am on my bike

I don’t see the vacant spaces between vehicles

The spaces which would be vacant

And those which are already vacant

Texture of forgetfulness

Is like the eyes

Limpid and sharp

In their absence

I don’t even see

What I am not seeing

Even the invisibility

Is invisible to me

Texture of forgetfulness is like a poem

We have forgotten to write

We don’t even remember what it was

And how it went

Or where it went

I dream of touching forgetfulness

Which is full like a cup of tea

Or empty like the forgotten sea

I smell the texture of forgetfulness

It smells the touch of mother’s saris

Before she went away to sleep

Or dad’s trousers

When he used to take me out for Bruce Lee movies

I listen to the texture of forgetfulness

It sounds like the music of the forgotten son

Which you can’t even replay in your heads

Texture of forgetfulness grows like a cobweb

On a winter afternoon

I feel like a lazy spider

Spinning the web of my forgetfulness

Trying to trap some unknown buzzing words

Which I don’t even know

They exist.

19 December 2010

2.55 pm

Transforming our Performance: A Review of The Three Laws of Performance

2010-11-17T15:22:00.000+05:30

Why did your father behave the way he did? Why do your mother or child or your spouse act the way they do? Why does your boss say and do the things the does? Why do you behave and act the way you do, even if you don’t want to act that way? Why do organization and corporation function in the way they do? Psychologist, management experts and philosophers have sought to explain human behaviour in innumerable ways. There are plenty of theories and systems of thought to explain and understand the way we and people around us act and do things. But the problem with these theories and concepts is precisely this: they explain and help us to understand but don’t allow us a concrete, hands-on access to alter the behaviour and action of people or us. They give us ‘tips and strategies’ to ‘fix’ the problems.

The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Zaffron and Logan is not a theoretical book or a book giving ‘tips and strategies or solutions’ to ‘problems’. Most of the times, Zaffron and Logan say, ‘the problem-solution’ mode of thinking doesn’t work. The reason they say lies in what they term ‘the problem-solution mass’ where the solution to a problem becomes an additional problem. The example they give is a youngster who feels lonely and frustrated and thinks that marriage will ‘solve’ the ‘problem of loneliness’. However, after marriage, what really happens is that he has two problems on his hands: loneliness and marriage! He tries to ‘fix’ this by raising a family and how he has three problems on his hand: loneliness, marriage and children! He tries to ‘fix’ it by ‘divorce’ or an extramarital affair and now he has one more problem in his life! The answer lies in ‘transforming’ rather than finding solutions to the problems.

The laws are not ‘ideas, strategies, principles or theories’: they are ‘laws’ like the law of gravitation. Knowing these laws help not just to explain but also transform the performance of a person or an organization, that is, rewrite the future of that person or organization. That’s the incredible power of this book. Let’s look at the three simple laws in brief.

The First Law: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

The law is very simple and yet we simply have no idea how deeply it affects our life and the life of the organization. The most important words here are ‘occur’ and ‘correlate’. The word ‘occur’ indicates that it is NOT what situation or a person really IS but how it OCCURS TO US that determines our behaviour. For instance, if we see a situation or person as threatening, our actions will be correlated to our perception of threat IRRESPECTIVE of the fact whether it IS threatening or not.

Speaking from my own experience, my mother ‘occurred’ to me as a person who has treated my father badly and as a person who did not care for me at all. After I was able to distinguish that this is how my mother occurred to me and that was NOT how she WAS, great bitterness and anger towards her vanished. This realization transformed my behaviour towards her so much that I don’t fight with her at all after this. When this bitterness and anger and fights disappeared, there was unprecedented peace and affinity in my life. In fact, before this realization, when my psychotherapist had asked me to tell him ‘three good qualities’ of my mother I could not even tell him one! So much was the anger and resentment I was carrying around.

How situations or person occur to us is closely dependent on Zaffron and Logan term as ‘default future’. Default Future, according to the authors, is our future which we SEE as certainly coming unless something dramatic and unexpected happens. This ‘default future’ does not include the inevitable things like death or ageing. It includes the things like ‘how your evening will turn out’ or what you will be doing tomorrow, unless something unexpected happens for instance. We know this future at the gut level. If we know we are going to meet someone we love in the evening, our present becomes something else and if we know that she or he has changed the plan our present becomes something else. In fact, it is not our past that controls our life; it is our ‘default future’ which controls our life. Our present moment, our activities in the present are CORRELATED to how our FUTURE OCCURS to us this moment. That is, our present way of being and acting is a function of our ‘default future’. If we see in the morning when we wake up that it is going to be ‘the same routine day’ in our default future, our actions will be correlated to this perception. If we receive a phone call informing us of something totally unexpected, our morning changes for better or for worse. Imagine, a phone call informing us that we have won something by the sale scheme we got yesterday while shopping. Or imagine a call telling us about our application for something has been turned down. It changes our present way of being and acting.

What applies to us as individuals applies for the institutions and organization. The way people in the organization are working at present is correlated to their ‘default future’. If it is bleak and uninspiring, people’s activities will be correlated to this perception.

The question which comes to our mind now is HOW a situation (or a person) occurs to us the way it does? What made my mother occur to me the way she did? This brings us to the second law of performance.

The Second Law: How a situation occurs arises in language.

Simple again. How my mother occurred to me was based on what I kept SAYING to myself over and over again in my mind to myself or to her openly. I kept on saying, ‘she does not care for me or for my father. She treats him badly’. Remember this saying was not always conscious, it was often at the ‘gut level’. I ran this conversation repeatedly and every time I repeated it my anger went up exponentially. My feelings, expectations and beliefs are nothing but my conversations with myself and they determine how someone occurs to me. If I keep saying, as I did, that this is an ‘arranged marriage’ and there is no space for love in it, there wasn’t any.

Conversations are verbal and nothing is ‘just words’. Our feelings and emotions are correlated to our words. The ‘default future’ is a conversation we have with ourselves at the gut level. If you look at the conversation I had about my mother ‘she does not care for me at all and she treats my father badly’, you will realize that it started in the PAST, and that it uses language to DESCRIBE what my mother IS. This is a past-based use of language and it is mostly ‘descriptive’. In this use of language situation (or a person) ‘IS’ the way it is. When I describe something by saying it is the way it is, I m speaking from my past experience. For instance, if I say, as I have said often, ‘the most of the teachers in the colleges and universities are not really eligible for the job’, that is how I will see them, that is, this is how they will occur to me and how I behave with them is correlated to how they occur to me.

Zaffron and Logan call this ‘reality illusion’, the illusion that reality IS the way it OCCURS to us. It is the illusion that reality is ‘fixed’ and is independent of our conversations. . This is similar to what structuralists and poststructuralist philosophers (under influence of Heidegger) have been pointing out. That doesn’t mean, they point out, there is no ‘reality’ ‘out there’, but they emphasize that we cannot access it without language. My reality illusion was ‘this is how my mother is’. When we realize that there is no ‘fixed and stable’ reality existing independently of our conversation, reality becomes ‘malleable’ to us. We can now ‘rewrite’ our future.

Now if our performance is correlated to how situation occurs to us and how a situation occurs to us is due the language we use to talk about it to ourselves with others, how can we transform our performance? We can transform our performance by transforming our language (not ‘changing’ it mind you, this is not a book about ‘positive thinking’) and consequently transforming the way the situation occurs to us.

Most of our conversations are past based. Our complaints, our expectations, our intentions, our communication strategies that we use to get results all are based on our past. There is nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that most of us put them into our future most of the time. Zaffron and Logan call this ‘filing error’. The stuff that should go into the box file labeled ‘past’ should go into that file; however, it goes into the file labeled ‘future’. My conversation,’ mine is an arranged marriage and there is no scope for love’ came from some past conversations; however, by putting it into my ‘default future’, it controls my present. I don’t see any scope for love to exist at present. The ‘filing error’ makes me see my marriage as a closed space. There is no possibility of love here. I can see a possibility only when I put my past based conversation to where it belongs to the file called past only then can I see some ‘space’ some possibility in my default future and hence in my present as my present. This practice of rectifying the ‘filing error’ by putting the files from my past back into my past instead of my default future is called ‘completion’. This completion opens up a blank space from which new possibility can be created. How can I create a new possibility?

The Third Law: Future-based language transforms how situation occur to people.

By declaring your commitment to create a new possibility and keeping your word, you can create new future from the cleared space in the ‘default future’. The future based speech acts like, ‘I will do………………’, ‘I will create’ or ‘I declare the possibility of being…………..’ actually can CREATE new future. If you don’t believe this, just look at your past. When I was a very young child I said to my self, ‘I am not wanted, I am unwanted’ and I became ‘unwanted’ in my eyes. People said they loved me but as I saw myself as ‘unwanted’, I did not believe them. I thought they were manipulating me. Here was a classic ‘filing error’; I was putting my past based conversation into future. When I dropped this conversation, I no longer feel ‘unwanted’. I can sense that people want me and love me, in their own ways.

But the statement ‘ I am unwanted’ is actually nothing but a speech act. A verdict that I passed on myself: I was the judge, the jury, the advocate and the culprit at the same time. I BELIEVED in it, it was ‘TRUTH’ to me. If this decade old statement determined all my past, a speech act based in future can create my future.

The future based language, or what Zaffron and Logan call, ‘generative language’ is not an empty ‘ positive thinking’ as it comes from the space in default future cleared up by putting past into past, it comes out of a perception of possibility. Most of the ‘positive thinking’ fails because one does not SEE POSSIBILITY in this thinking. If I SEE myself sitting in front of a hungry lion, no amount of positive thinking can actually CONVINCE me that I won’t be eaten, unless I see that it is actually chained to the tree. No completion (rectifying the ‘filing error’), no possibility, no possibility, no new future.

Zaffron and Logan make a very interesting use of the term ‘integrity’, which is at heart of creating a future. According to Logan and Zaffron, ‘integrity’ has nothing to do with ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ as it is commonly understood. It has nothing to do with right or wrong. It has everything to do with ‘workability’ in our life. Integrity, according to the authors, means keeping your word, honoring your word. If you don’t keep your word, the work cannot be done. If you cease to honour your word, people will be even quicker to cease to honour it. Integrity, according to Zaffron and Logan, is ‘being whole or complete’. A chair with one leg missing has no workability; a wheel with one spoke missing has no workability. Only when it is restored can there be any workability in life. A chair with a broken leg is not ‘bad or wrong’, a wheel with a broken spoke is not ‘bad or wrong’, it simply doesn’t WORK.

The key to rewriting a new future is by using future based language and with integrity.

This is a book about results and not about ideas. This is a book which leads to action. Reflections and insights are usually dime a dozen. This is a book which is not concerned with ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’, but with performance: as a leader, as a father, as a teacher, as a doctor, as a brother, as a daughter, as a friend, as an employee, as an employer, as a businessman and as anyone. The book, the authors tell us, can be our coach in this game of life. If we sit and argue with our coach about theoretical niceties, we won’t be on the court. So I recommend this book about anyone who wants to act effectively and powerfully so as to get the results one wants. So get hold of a copy and get on the playground!

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of your Organization and your Life, San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009

Distributed in India by the Times Books, Rs. 395

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues: A Poem by Sachin Ketkar

2010-10-26T15:11:00.003+05:30

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues

Sachin Ketkar

Ocean is an old discarded myth.

I hear the leisurely blue songs

Of the whale swimming

Serenely

At the back of my mind

I view her sprout jets of love

As she dives and crashes

I thought she was an island

On which I could live

But she fled.

I have gone down under the waves of sleep

Waters as voluptuous as death

Have engulfed me

When I open my eyes

The world turns its back upon me

They say

She is just a blue apparition

On an inky night

Her songs are the merely moving ridges

Tumbling over one another

Plug your ears they say

Now that I am just a pallid corpse

Floating like a weed under the sea

I will reach out to her

And let her secret songs

Run like silk through my veins

12 August 2010 12 pm

On Being No Good: A Note on Diwali Cleaning

2010-10-16T19:28:00.001+05:30

For thirty eight years and one month, I was living my life from the position ' I am No Good'. This 'sentence' which I passed on to myself at the age of three or four formed the core of most of the later conversations I had with myself and the world. The later conversations like ' I am not healthy, I am sick',' I am not wanted, I am unwanted', ' I am not understood, I am misunderstood', ' I don't belong, I am a waif', ' I am not attractive, I am unattractive', ' I am not smart, I am drab', ' I am not lovable, I am unlovable', ' I am not loved, I am unloved' and so all actually are branches of the tree whose trunk was ' I am No Good'.

When I did my Landmark Forum in July 2009, I discovered that these are my conversations my 'core negative beliefs'. But this discovery was largely from my analytical intelligence. After 'Communication for Access to Power course' and after some really bad upsets, I found 'heard' this dialog clearly and thus could 'distinguish' it. Distinguishing it is what works, intellectually 'knowing' about it doesn't work. When I distinguished it, I realized how humbug the story was and how I was living a fake life from past thirty eight years and how I was trying to 'prove' that I was 'good enough' all the time.

Along with the Communication course, I am also doing the Landmark Forum in Action Series (LFIA) and our coach Nirav Vyas revised the distinction 'Racket' once again for us and introduced to us another distinction ' upset'. Distinctions, it should be borne in mind, are not 'concepts'. A distinction operates at a different 'cognitive' level than a concept. For instance, 'balancing on a bicycle' is a distinction. It is not an intellectual act, it is not a concept which is to be 'understood.' Ability to 'distinguish' is not a conceptual activity. When a fish leaves the water for a moment as it jumps, it realizes what water is ,i.e. it distinguishes 'water' from non-water and hence as per Landmark technology it ' gets the distinction 'water''.

Nirav told us that once you 'distinguish' 'the Racket', it no longer 'runs us' but we realize that it is we who 'run it.' The racket is ' a fixed way of being ( angry, sad, shocked, confused, upset etc) plus a persistent complaint'. This persistent complaint may be somebody's complaint towards us or our complaint to someone or a complaint of one person in your life with some other person in your life. The racket has a payoff, and thats why we simply love our rackets. The payoff is of many types: proving that you are right and the other is wrong, winning and losing, dominating other or avoid domination and so on. No wonder we keep running them all the time. But what the Landmark Forum distinguishes is the 'cost', what actually we lose when we run this game of persistent complaints. We lose affinity, love, self expression, fulfillment, health, vitality and we cease to feel 'alive'. We become numb and dead within. We become isolated and alone. We master the art of ' How to Lose Friends and Alienate People'. Once we distinguish it, the racket no longer runs us, we know that it is we who are running it all the time and hence a possibility of getting off the racket emerges and with this possibility emerges the possibility of getting your self expression, affinity, love and vitality back. This possibility gives us a choice to choose between the payoff and the cost.

Closely linked to the Racket is the distinction ' Upset'. The distinction appears in LFIA and not in the Forum. They tell us that we are 'Already Always Upset' and we only need a very small trigger to make us upset: no toothpaste in the morning, annoying phone call at night, that irritating driver who overtakes from the wrong side, or your husband or wife or just simply anything. LFIA teaches us how to 'dismantle ' these upsets in a remarkably simple way. LFIA points out that an upset is made up of three components, i) 'thwarted intention', ii) 'unfulfilled expectations' and iii) 'undelivered communications'. The coach asks us a simple question whose intention is it? whose expectations and whose communications?. Obviously it is ours, which means the situation, person or an event has NOT made us upset. There is only one person who can make you feel upset and it is YOU.

The Forum also tells us that most of the time of our lives we are living from 'the racket' to 'strong suit' and back. We are our rackets and strong suits most of the time of our lives. Hence the homework for the LFIA: Clean up you rackets before Diwali and you will have a real festival of your life.So move your asses and start cleaning up the mess we have made till now!

So I am on cleaning drive and the biggest racket I had was with Yours Truly. He is 'no good' remember? So there was no affinity, self expression, vitality and love with him. He was distanced from me and had no confidence. He was not living a real life. He was all the time trying to prove he is 'good enough' and feeling that no one really wanted him. Probably because he did not want himself.

So here it goes folks! I am getting off the racket I am running with myself! Diwali begins!

Now I am living from a different position: If someone thinks I am no good, its his/her problem not mine.

Transformation of Communication and Communication for Transformation

2010-10-11T15:56:00.000+05:30

I did the 'Communication for Access to Power' course from the Landmark Education from Mumbai on 2, 3 and 5th October 2010 and it was awesome! It revealed to me the hidden patterns that controlled my communication and the blockages it created. There were two main reasons I wanted to do this course. The first was the personal and the other was related to my occupation. I had discovered that I was unable either to 'open up' emotionally as a person to people close to me and that I was not able to remain 'present' with the people communicating with me. This resulted in me appearing as evasive and uninterested and hence ultimately insulting. I could see how I communicated 'first hand' when I attended the Tuesday completion evening of this course in Ahmedabad. A powerful exercise exposed 'how I looked' when I communicated and was shocked. I would not myself have loved to interact with such a person. So I knew before hand that the course would be terrific and obviously it did not let me down. The other reason was that I am a writer and teacher and hence my bread, butter and chicken is dependent on communication!

The course used the distinctions we learned in the Landmark Forum and offered us some crucial new distinctions. The course enabled us to distinguish between the 'inherited'(default) old model of communication and the 'invented' or new model of the communication that this course provides. This distinctions is parallel to the default or inherited model of 'being' and living and the invented model of 'being' provided by the Landmark Forum which brings forth 'a new realm of possibilities and the new possibility of being calls us powerfully into action'.

Like in the Landmark Forum what we need is to 'distinguish' this limiting and restrictive model before we can do something about it. In the Landmark philosophy what it means to 'distinguish' is explained by an analogy: The fish in the water doesn't know what water is unless it takes a jump out of it. Until it knows that there is something like 'non-water', it wont understand that it has been living in what is water after all. Hence unless the fish 'distinguishes' and gets the 'distinction'- water, it has no idea what and where it is living. Hence until we are exposed to the non-inherited and non-default model of 'being', living or communication, we are not able 'to distinguish' between the default and the invented models.

The 'default' model of communication all of us inherit is built on the assumption that the world 'IS' 'out there'/'in here' and the function of language is to 'fit' the word into the already existent world. The function of language basically to 'describe', 'command' or 'express' the pre-existent world out there or in here ( in our mind).

In this model we realize that we are 'small, separate, weak and alone' in this gigantic world which exists irrespective of our existence. Hence within this default paradigm we are constantly trying to 'survive and fix' things, people, circumstances, people( including ourselves).In the default model we are constantly doing things needed to survive and fix like avoiding, withholding, controlling, manipulating, forcing an outcome and so on. Hence 'survive and fix' life is all that we have. As our coach Nirav Vyas put it,' Even when we get used to living in the dark and get expertise of living in the dark, we are still living in the dark.' Most of us live within this model and we don't even know that we are living in this model.

In the default model, we are revealed how 'the sentence' we have passed on ourselves when we were very young runs our life. This sentence is usually a statement like ' I am not x, I am y' which we said to ourselves when we were not even seven years. This 'sentence' is still active when we just look beneath upsets we experience in the day to day life. In my case I discovered that my sentence is ' I am not wanted, I am unwanted.' Hence, to use the coach's words again, if hundreds of people told me that they wanted me with thousands of flowers and even wrote it in the skies with an aeroplane, I would still not believe them because I was living from the context of' I am not wanted, I am unwanted' and looking at the world from this point of view. The coach also pointed out that this was not just 'A point of view' but I WAS that point of view and so if someone offered an alternate point of view it would be read as a threat to my survival ( as I WAS that point of view). Once I could distinguish this, I was able to give up this point of view. It also meant, in the words of the coach, ' a five year old upset child' was running my life till date.

In the default model of communication we also tend to ask, 'one unanswerable question' beneath ALL our communication. This unanswerable question could be ' Do you love me?' or 'Do you want me?' Once we can distinguish this question , we are able to see how absurd and meaningless this question is.

The new model of communication is simply exciting. It is based on the assumption that the world 'IS not simply out there or in here ( in our minds), it is created out of words. For instance, the sentence ' I am not wanted, I am unwanted' shaped my life and determined how I look at life and the world. What was the sentence but a speech act?The older model which was designed in order to survive and fix was also based on the hidden contexts which were purely linguistic ( e. g the unanswerable question). This means that the world is CREATED from our words. What we see, how we see, what we think or how we think is determined solely by our conversations which we have with ourselves and the others. The function of language in this new paradigm is no longer to 'describe', 'command' or 'express', but to 'create' the world. This new language is language of transformation and usually takes the form of 'declaration' ( e.g Declaration of Independence or ' I have a dream' speech of Martin Luther King). The power to create can come only when we honour our word ( the distinction known as 'integrity'- not to be confused with morality or ethics).

The new model of communication comes into existence when we bring forth 'listening from nothing', that is, listening from a space rather than listening from the older conversation ( 'already always' running within our mind). In this model, there is no need to 'survive or fix' anything. The communication is no longer controlled by the past discourses and concerns which are put aside. Hence the moment we put the internal dialogues about people aside and be present to the person's current communication, we bring 'everything' into our communication. The person gets freedom and space for expression in our listening which has come from nothing. The communication becomes a 'dance' and we can sense love and affinity running in the background.

This listening also allows us to enter the world and the point of view of the other. We can get to look at how we look from the other's point of view. And often what we see is not very flattering!

Some of the other very significant distinctions I got was that communication is not 'content' but 'intent'. 'Intent' not as purpose but in the phenomenological sense of 'intentionality' , the space where the self and the other are related and that communication involves creating 'being-in-communication' as against 'talking'.

During the course I called up my dad and told him how much I love him and how he is the most important person in our life. After good 38 years of life. I told him that it was because I used to live from ' I am not wanted, I am unwanted' that I did not open up my heart to him. I told my sister the same thing. I told them I give up this point of view. I told Amogh and Ashwini the same thing. After the Landmark Forum, I discovered the negative stories I was running and thus destroying my life, after communication course, I discovered what lay beneath these negative stories and blame games.

The Advanced Communication course teaches us how to dismantle and get rid of habitual modes of communication. It teaches us how to alter not just our communications but also the communications of one person in our life with another. It also teaches us how to resolve multiple concerns in a single conversation! The course starts November 20th and I am so very excited about it.

Parallel to these communication courses, I am also participating in the Landmark Action Seminar series which takes place on Thursday evenings. Each session strengthens the distinctions we have got in the Forum by giving us an opportunity to get them once again and practice them. Hence almost a year after doing my Forum , I am 'back in conversation' ( though I was never really out of it).

The Landmark in the Journey of my Life

2010-07-25T20:56:00.000+05:30

I took Landmark Education’s basic programme ‘The Forum’ last year and my life is no longer what it used to be. People keep asking me what the hell is this and why the hell are you promoting it all over the place? Answer to the second question follows from the answer to the first.

Landmark is first and foremost a very intensive workshop. Here we are taught how to redesign, recreate and reprogramme our entire life into something much more fulfilling, effective and powerful. The programme does this by helping us to see for ourselves what is holding us back and what is creating the mess of a life we are living. More importantly, once we see what is holding us back and creating problems in our life, we are taught how to overcome these things. This is done with hands-on approach, where we work on our problems; see for ourselves what is creating them, and how we can do away with them. We are shown ways about how to go about doing it.

What Landmark does is it enables us to locate our own ` blind spots’-the zones of being which we have not seen and which not only have caused misery and suffering in our life, but also have enabled us to get results which we have been getting all these years in rather unfulfilling ways

It is not `spirituality’ as we know it and it is not psychotherapy. It is applied philosophy. The philosophy that owes a lot to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and language. Philosophy not as reflection or meditation or theorization, but as actual living in-this-very-world, our day-to-day life.

Before Landmark, though my life would appear alright from outside, I was on the verge of total emotional and physical collapse. Life seemed a prison house. I felt I was trapped in all the agonizing relationships including the ones with inanimate beings like my Pc or my two-wheeler! I felt that the decades old asthma, embittered relationships, depression and abysmally low self esteem resulted in a life of misery. I had gathered huge amounts of RDX in the form of hidden anger in the cold storage of my soul which would not be seen but occasionally would blow up in the face of people close to me, especially my mother and my wife. I was on the verge of a divorce and nervous breakdown. I had to consume hundreds of milligrams of corticosteroids for my asthma every day and I was on antidepressants and medical counseling.

My work at the college was deeply affected. I had great difficulty in meeting deadlines and what ever I did was a messy thing.

Today, I have cleared my storage space of the RDX. My wife says that I don’t store up my anger and explode. I am no longer a monster. Confidence is no longer an issue. I manage asthma with minimal medications. I exercise and eat healthily. My relationship with my wife, mother and myself are no longer bitter and full of anger. My marriage is no longer on the verge of divorce. I have discovered great amount of peace within me. The huge baggage of agony I was carrying around in my life has vanished and I feel incredibly light. I don’t find the work at college a burden anymore. Landmark has given me with a vision and ability to do whatever I want to do. It has created a huge difference in my life. I am back on my feet and raring to go. I am completely in control of my life now.

That brings me to the second question. Why the hell are you advertising for these guys?

Almost daily we share many things with people we know: the films which we enjoyed, the restaurants we feel people should check out, the schemes in market which are worth going in for, and the news we feel people should know. Are we marketing these things then? In a way, yes and in a way, no. We are promoting these things which would benefit the sellers- we are giving the word-of-mouth kind of publicity free of cost. All of us are marketing things daily- by talking about them or by wearing them or showing them to others. But then we do it because we feel these things are VALUABLE and hence should be SHARED with people WHO WE VALUE in our life.

So folks, here is the programme which can transform your life as it has done for me.

The Book in the Age of Facebook:The Game of Reading in Twenty-first Century

2010-07-09T12:35:00.001+05:30

( A talk given at senior school students of Nalanda International School, Vadodara on 9 July 2010)

Let’s start inauspiciously by giving a thought to some common ominous rumours regarding the future of the book and art of reading.We have been told that the art of reading and the book are either on their way out or they are dead already. People don’t read books these days. They watch the TV and surf the Net. For a change they go to watch movies. Books don’t figure much in their lives. Whatever they read is because they are compelled to read by the schools and colleges. They read nothing on their own.

Nothing can be far from truth.

In fact people buy more books than before and book publication and sales is a significant commercial activity. Apart from the fact that academic books are a big industry today, popular writers like JK Rowling, Stephanie Myer or Sidney Sheldon are millionaires and celebrities. Self-help books like the Chicken Soup series, or by Shiva Khera or Stephen Covey are extremely popular. Cook books, books on health and well-being, books on New Age spirituality are extremely popular. Books related to computers, management and finance are greatly in demand.

Just look at the underbelly or the underworld of publishing industry: piracy. In every metropolis in India today, we find street hawkers who sell pirated books. The books mentioned above, the bestsellers are out there on the footpath and youngsters buy and probably even read these books.

I remember when I was pursing my post-graduate studies in Baroda in the mid nineties, when you guys had just come into this world, I ran into the pirated books on such footpaths. Some of the popular books in those times were the book’s like Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964), Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave (1980) and Future Shock(1970), and David Reuben’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, But were Afraid to Ask (1969). The books, I must confess, have left a deep imprint on my thinking. The fascination for Toffler and Transactional Analysis has not yet died down, even after fifteen years. When I find these are the books on the streets in pirated version today, I reassure myself that I haven’t grown very old yet.

The thing is, we read for various purposes. We usually read to obtain information and knowledge, and we read to satisfy our fantasizes and escape boredom. We read for entertainment. We also read out of curiosity.

The real problem with people who complain that youngsters don’t read is that youngsters don’t read what they want them to read. Youngsters don’t read Jane Austen or Shakespeare or Keats. They don’t read the classics. They read pulp and popular. They read Harry Potter, graphic novels and Twilight Saga. They fantasize about invisibility cloaks and dating a vampire. They read about secret identities and alter egos of the superheroes. School youngsters cannot identify with the world in the books they are taught in their usual literature courses.

One should realize that elders complaining about youth are merely engaging in an age old pastime, a game rather, in Eric Berne’s sense in his book Games People Play. To be more specific, it’s the game called ` Aint it Awful’. I refuse to participate in this grown up’s game of complaining. I will point out that the respected elders and teachers too have had their share of pulp and popular. Remember, Mills and Boons? Nancy Drew? Hardy Boys? Famous Five? Three Investigators? Comics? The popular stuff that we lapped up? I wonder if kids read it these days too.

Reading, unlike, television or films, involves a great amount of active imagination and participation. This is where its strength lies. We are no longer spectators; we become players in the game of reading. Unlike field sports or computer games, the game of reading takes place in solitude and within us. Reading is the adventure sport that is played inside our minds. For people who love to read are often people who like solitude.

Unlike TV or films or computer games, when a character or situation is described in the book, we create it in our minds and we do it in our own way. When we do it our way, who we are plays a great role in it. The heroes and villains become our heroes and villains, the heroes and villains within us, which are part of us. Reading brings out the hidden parts of our personality into play. We are implicated in the game and it is us who are at stake. We discover our own thoughts, ideas and imagination, we invent our own thoughts and imagination- we discover and invent ourselves.

Hence, the game of reading will never disappear.

As we grow up, the intention behind reading changes. We want something more than entertainment or information or satisfaction of fantasies. We are dealing with issues which cannot be solved by imagining invisibility cloaks and clandestine affairs with vampires. We read to search for the meaning of our life. We look for the books which help us understand our relationships with others and ourselves. We read to find out why people are the way they are and why we are the way we are.

As we grow up playing the same game, we tend to increase the difficulty level of that game.

Some of us learn to participate in more risky games of reading. Some of us, not all, graduate to `difficult’ books, the ones dealing with very abstract and complex ideas. the novels which are very experimental as they avoid the popular ways of story telling, poetry which makes no `sense’ at all because poetry does not make ` sense’ the way newspaper article makes sense or a text book makes sense. The difficult books are difficult because they demand more involvement, imagination, intelligence and concentration than Harry Potter or Twilight. They also challenge who we are. In this challenge, in this solitude, the books reveal who we are to ourselves. This is probably one of the biggest rewards of reading.

The reason why not many people read such books is because not many people care about such things or want to take up challenges and risks of confronting themselves .Such books can cause discomfort and make you feel sad. Not many people raise the difficulty level of the game they have been playing. They either give up the game or continue playing it at entry level.

I am here to coax you to raise the difficulty level of your reading because, as you know, more difficult a game is more fun it becomes. You don’t want to play today the same games you played in your kindergarten. The fun that you get out of a game is directly proportional to the challenge it poses. Same applies to the adventure sports of ideas and imagination, which the books are. All new games may be boring in the beginning but as you learn them, they turn out to be addictive.

I will end my talk with a short list of suggested reading. They are simply my personal favorites.You might have heard of them. Thankfully, you won’t be examined on these books, so that you can play around with them and even forget about them. I will mention their difficulty level too. Feel free to choose!

I) Difficulty level: Easy to Difficult

Short Stories of RK Narayan

Short Stories of Anton Chekhov

Short stories of O Henry

TS Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

II) Difficulty Level: Difficult to Very Difficult

Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye

Short Stories of JD Salinger

Short Stories of Franz Kafka

Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan and Eddie

Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold

Poems of WH Auden and WB Yeats

Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller

III) Very Difficult -But who is scared?

Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch

James Joyce: Ulysses

` James Joyce: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce: Dubliners

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

Poems of TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Arun Kolatkar

IV) For the Bravest of the Brave

James Joyce: Finnegans Wake

Releasing the Erratically Lazy Jarasandha

2010-05-13T22:10:00.001+05:30

He is out and is at large. He shouldn't be.He should be long dead, and far off in the world of myths. He belongs to pre-capitalist, even pre feudal hoary antiquity. But then now he is in our midst. He is all over the place. Divided and unredeemable, but alive,contrary to what the Mahabharata says. He is evil. He is a serial killer who aught to be imprisoned. Who released him? Well, Devy released him on 6 th May in the VY Kantak Seminar Room of the Dept.of English, Faculty of Arts, MS University of Baroda. But actually he had released him almost seventeen years ago. In the years 1993-95, to be more precise. I was writing in English and even in Hindi. It was mostly juvenellia but it had started becoming more and more modernist. I learned of Devy's Aurobindo scholarship and showed him my Hindi renderings of Savitri and he was impressed ( I guess). I showed him my English poems and he suggested I should try my hand at writing in Marathi and the guy did not know what he was doing. Its like the jailer who finds the face of a serial killer rather innocent,takes pity on him and releases him out of compassion. The killer goes out and the first thing he does is slits throats of five people in the city. I started writing poetry and entered bad books of almost any senior critics and poets in Maharashtra. People were simply irked and annoyed with me. Who the hell is this guy ?What the hell is he talking about? Where the hell has he come from?and more importantly why the hell is he here?

I am an upstart writer in Maharashtra. A bug, actually. I cant possibly do much harm to the Establishment ( which is ruined and in shambles due to other reasons) but I can be a bloody pain in neck : consider my vicious and sharp articles in the globalization wars in contemporary Marathi poetry or my tampering with political set up of Marathi poetry by bringing out something like Live Update. Or consider my critical takes on the pet Ideology of the Establishment : Nativism+ Socialism+Realism. The ideology of Devy which is fashionable in English studies is the ideology of Establishment in Marathi: the Sarkari View of Literature which I have attacked in no uncertain terms in my writings.

It is not surprising that the speakers on the occasion: Dr Devy, Prof Kannal or Dr Karogal hardly discussed the book. They were either talking to Sachin Ketkar the critic or like Dr Devy trying to contextualize him.

Prof Kannal talked about the insistence on contemporaneity or the towards the present moment that I have in my critical writing and tried to point out how some of my poems were not at all contemporary - he did not talk about those which were, obviously, unsurprisingly. I responded by talking about Borges' Pierre Menard who tried to rewrite Don Quixote exactly as Cervantes wrote it two hundred years ago. He ends up copying passages from Quixote word to word in the same language, but the narrator in Borges says that in spite of perfect copying the texts were different. Contemporariness is not an option, it is only when you are not fully aware of the present that you feel there is something like timelessness. The intimations of eternity are temporary. What I should have emphasized, and this I realized later, was the fact that we treat literature as if it does not have any temporal dimension and a historical context. This is the approach so deeply embedded in our thinking about literature that we treat Tukaram or Shakespeare as if they our contemporaries. This treatment actually does not do justice to the texts we read. Tukaram's obsession with Vitthal has to be contextualized to be understood. It is this ahistorical way of reading that creates the illusion of the eternal in literature.

Devy,on the other hand,put me in two traditions, when I thought I had none. He said that the Dept of English in the MS University had two major Indian writers in English as faculties who were also bilinguals and translators: Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan. He also placed me in the long line of Marathi bilingual writers like Arun Kolatkar,Dilip Chitre, Vilas Sarang and Kiran Nagarkar. Devy said this probably with tongue firmly in his cheek.

However,the best thing he said about me was that when I was his student, he suspected me of turning out to be a poet looking at my `erratic laziness''. But he felt looking the girls chasing me ( what girls, which girls,where girls) I might turn out to be a romantic poet who might churn out mushy sugary stuff.

Prof Salat had interesting things to say about my poems. He commented on the all sorts of ordinary and extraordinary `objects' found all over and around my poetry,and how I make a poetic use of them.

Mangesh spoke with reference to Prof Kannal's views and pointed out that a bunch of my poems in the earlier part of my collection are unprecedented in style, theme and treatment in Marathi and are unique while some of my poems can be considered as extensions of my earlier phase. He read out my Dildopnishad and others to make his point. The programme was fun anyway and had a great time with friends. Ashwini was the master of ceremonies.

The best response came from Amogh. He simply fell asleep in his chair with head on the desk!

Masculinity, Modernity and Other Miseries: Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold

2010-04-25T14:07:00.001+05:30

I have only one word to describe it.Stunning. I havent read anything like this before. I don't know why I did not read it sooner.Superbly dramatic in treatment, full of wicked twists and turns in its plotting, amazingly passionate, imaginative and heartbreaking, it is one of the best novels written by an Indian novelist. Nagarkar has put in an impressive amount of research into this novel. It is way better than the `NRI and imported' navel-gazing 'diaspora exile' horseshit fiction euphemistically named as the post-colonial Indian novel. It is far better than pseudo-intellectual wordplay and phoney `India' of Rushdie and company, which keeps po-co theory happy academicians contented. It bears no signs of what Meenakshi Mukherjee terms as "anxiety of Indianness", or colonial hang up of any sort. It does not deliver what the western readers want: a consumer friendly India which reinforces the existing stereotype image of India.

The story is about a hopeless love triangle, ` the stuff for a bad nautanki'. One angle of the triangle, the woman named Little Saint or Greeneyes ( more widely known as Meerabai) is of one of the greatest poets on the sub-continent , the third angle of the triangle is none other than the Bhai of the Whole Universe Himself a.k.a Jagadish a.k.a the God with thousand names, and the angle from which the story is told is of an unknown figure in Indian history, the Cuckold, the Prince of Mewar, Maharaj Kumar, the narrator.

Maharaj Kumar is essentially an anachronism: a modern man trapped into a feudal society of 16th or 17th century Rajasthan. The narrator achieves immediacy by his predicament and by his colloquial, and ironic wit. He is living in a society which glorifies manhood, death in battlefield, bravery and machismo to no end. Maharaj Kumar appreciates none of these values. His role model, ironically, is the Bhai who he feels is having a steamy affair with his wife. The Bhai, also known as Ranchod, we all know did not mind turning his back to his enemy and running away from the battlefield for strategic advantage. Maharaj Kumar doesnt mind using some of the Bhai's strategies in politics and battlefield. Maharaj Kumar defies all conventions in personal and public life. He is interested in sewage systems of his town and acquiring newer technology in the battlefields, instead of living on jingoism of Rajput bravery. His military strategies are absolutely non-Rajput and ahead of times. Maharaj Kumar's stratagems seem to belong more to Kiran Nagarkar's ancestor - Shivaji- rather than the Rajputs who preferred to take huge armies head on rather than retorting to guerrilla surprise attack-and escape tactics. Thus he invites sneer, contempt and charges of not being manly enough from his contemporaries.He is stigmatized as a cuckold, a `ball less man' in his personal as well as political life.
He is not a `good' man. He beats Greeneyes, he tries to rape his wife on the very first night and consequently injures his member. Virgins terrify him. He fails to `rise to the occasion' on the first night of his second marriage to another woman, who goes into the arms of his more `manly' brother Vikramaditya, thus getting cuckolded twice. The Prince goes on to dress as Krishna at night to win over Greeneyes, who one day dresses him in woman's clothes and she becomes Krishna herself as part of Bhakti frenzy! This Maharaj Kumar is a victim of the patriarchal society as he fails to conform to the established norms of masculinity. He is humiliated on all fronts. Interestingly, Maharaj Kumar takes it with calm stoic irony, without self pity or melodrama. Kiran Nagarkar, a film actor himself, manages to enter the role of Maharaj Kumar and speak to us with great intimacy and humour. His story is an heart breaking story of a brilliant man caught in an old world which is to go away and the new world which is yet to be born.

The epic sweep of the novel reveals very vividly delineated cast of unforgettable characters, apart from Maharaj Kumar. His dad Rana Sanga, Kumar's scheming step mother Karmavati, Kumar's two wives, his mistresses,his friend Mangal and the nemesis, Badshah Babur, for whom Kumar feels affinity and who is about to change the history of the subcontinent forever. The plot is full of sinister intrigues, suspense, and very wicked and unexpected turns which keep you glued to the book. The end, of course, is as unexpected as it goes. Nowhere does one get bored by sheer number of pages.

The research is extremely meticulous and thorough. The battle strategies, court intrigues,games, religious and social customs, mores , research into town planning, espionage, cultural mores are described with all vividness and freshness. It is a model for those who want to write historical fiction. It succeeds as fiction, first and foremost, and the historical research in no place jars or bores the reader. A must read for the readers who don't get carried away marketing hypes or are bored by Booker hyped `canned India' type novels and for those who feel that the great Indian novel in English has not yet arrived.

The novel can be contrasted with Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie which is bawdy and hilarious celebration of the power of Mumbai over the lives of people.

The novelist who showed great promise as the writer of Saat Sakam Trechalis in Marathi with his intensity, craftsmanship and dramatic story telling skills ,has delivered his very best in English. The novel also is reminiscent of Nagarkar's colleague and friend Arun Kolatkar's treatment of history, myth and legend in his poetry.

Read more reviews of Cuckold by clicking the links below:
i) At Amazon
ii) At Goodreads

The Mind-Forged Manacles: Landmark Education and CBT and Adler too

2010-04-16T21:25:00.003+05:30

William Blake, one of the most powerful poets of all times, in his famous poem "London" says," In every cry of man/ In every infant's cry of fear/ In every voice, in every ban/ The mind-forged manacles I hear."

These`mind-forged manacles' are the handcuffs and constraints on our lives imposed by our habitual incorrect thinking patterns, our " core negative beliefs' in the language of Cognitive Behaviour Theapry (CBT) which we have developed over years. In the language of Landmark Education philosophy, these are " stories" and " conversations" which we have made up over the years and they have restrained our lives. Both CBT and the Landmark philosophy point out they these are the stories and beliefs which we have created and hence, we are responsible for them. We should be able to make a 'distinction' ( in vocabulary of LM philosophy) and we should owe up the responsibility of creating them. Both LM philosophy and CBT emphasize the role of our thinking,our beliefs and our narratives in affecting our emotions and feelings and our perception of a situation.

The core negative beliefs in CBT's scheme, bring about `automatic negative thoughts'. We respond to this incorrect thinking pattern by `compensating' in some way. This pattern of automatic negative thoughts and compensatory behaviour over years become integral to our personality and what LM philosophy terms as `identity formation' which results in our unproductive -complaining mode of being ( Rackets) and our 'Strong suits'- our productive result causing modes of being ( which would often be what CBT call ` compensatory' behaviour). I found that CBT highlights the role of `beliefs' which result from our conversations, stories and our responses to the situations and events of our lives. After my LM forum , I was still unable to clearly understand my emotional core. I could not understand my `strong suits'. Only after I read a book called Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Dummies by Wilson and Branch , I could understand these emotional processes more clearly. The book helped me pin point my own `core negative beliefs', my " mind-forged manacles". The authors note that there are three chief core negative beliefs which influence our lives.The first is regarding our self ( in my case, as in case of many others, 'I am inadequate', I am no good/ I am unlovable), the second is in relation to other people ( They don't care about me) and the third core negative belief is in relation to life and the world in general ( I am unfit to live/the world is not on my side). These obviously irrational beliefs influenced my behaviour to a great extent. My compensatory behaviour became my `strong suits.' I tried to be `nice/mild/pleasant/ gentlemanly/helpful' because I believed that I was unlovable and `no good'. My desire for knowledge acquisition and intellectual-creative ambitions are also my compensatory behaviour patterns. Our LM forum leader distinctly pointed out that the strong suits never give contentment and satisfaction. We constantly feel that `this is not it', even in our success, because these strong suits are products of our compensatory outlook. I always hated myself for being nice and gentlemanly. I felt I allowed myself to be a doormat. At the root of my miserably low self esteem lay these core negative beliefs. Thanks to LM Forum and CBT, I am able to understand my self better and make distinctions between " what happened" and the stories I made. It took CBT to point out that I may not remember the specific` what happened', the situations and events which triggered my responses and stories, but nevertheless, these are the beliefs can be pin pointed and altered.

However, I wondered, if everyone in the world suffers from low self esteem and feeling of inferiority. I remember my reading of the great psychoanalyst Alfred Adler who theorized that all of us suffer from a deep feeling of inferiority and the whole of our life is spent trying to overcome it. The Nietzschean Will to Power springs from our basic feeling of inferiority which gets ingrained deeply in our personality during childhood.

The CBT and LM philosophy seem to emerge by rejecting the psychoanalysis school based on the idea of unconscious and the behaviourist school which is based on the idea of `response-stimulus'. However,we, laymen, can make use of insights from all schools as long as they help us to break 'mind-forged manacles' which we have created and break the prison-house of our past which we alone are responsible for creating. Once we demolish demons made by us- our own Bhasmasurs, our own Raktaviryas, our own Frankensteins we will be able to create a space from which new future....

WHO IS TRAPPED IN THE UGC NET?

2010-04-12T11:58:00.001+05:30

The University Grants Commission, a statutory body of the Indian Government formed through an Act of Parliament in 1956 for “the coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of university education in India”, conducts the National Eligibility Test since 1989 “to determine eligibility for lectureship and for award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) for Indian nationals in order to ensure minimum standards for the entrants in the teaching profession and research.” The test remains mandatory for candidates dreaming of becoming permanent lecturers. The intentions behind holding such a test, like most of the bureaucratic intentions, were indeed noble. However, when it came to implementation, the NET test can be a nightmare for the aspirants.

The major problems of this test are regarding the quality, vagueness and even irrelevance of many questions that are asked. For instance, one has only to consider some of the questions asked in the December 2008 test for the paper one, which is “General Paper on Teaching and Research Aptitude”.

Here is the very first question of the paper:

1) According to Swami Vivekananda, teacher’s success depends on:

i) His renunciation of personal gain and service to others

ii) His professional training and creativity

iii) His concentration on his work and duties with a spirit of obedience to God

iv) His mastery on the subject and capacity in controlling the students

An objective type question, by definition, is the question which can have ONE AND ONLY ONE correct answer. As most of the new candidates and the old university teachers would not locate the exact source from which this question is taken, it can be readily be seen that there are more than one correct answer to this question. A person like me would not mind selecting all of the above option MINUS the phrases like “a spirit of obedience to God” and “capacity in controlling the students.’ Such an option is not given. One may wonder how two phrases like “His (sic) mastery (?) on the subject” and “capacity in controlling the students” are connected. The questions like this would leave even the Swamiji perplexed regarding his own views on the subject.

Now consider the second and grammatically incorrect question in the paper:

2) Which of the following teacher, will be liked most:

i) A teacher of high idealistic attitude

ii) A loving teacher

iii) A teacher who is disciplined

iv) A teacher who often amuses his students

The correct option would be the teacher who resembles or does not resemble the candidate’s daddy. The option, however, is not available. Whether a particular student likes the stand-up comedian in front or the person which “high idealistic attitude’ is purely a subjective issue. If the quality of questions meant for the future teachers in universities is this ridiculous, I am amazed how people manage to clear this test at all.

The vagueness, irrelevance and language abuse (Down with the language of colonizers!!!) is reflected in the syllabus of the paper one too. The syllabus says, “The test is aimed at assessing the teaching and general/research aptitudes as well as their awareness. They are expected to possess and exhibit cognitive abilities.” Awareness of what? If they don’t possess and exhibit cognitive abilities, will they be considered alive? General –slash- research aptitudes? What’s that?

There is a section in the paper on Information and Communication Technology. The question in the December 2008 paper from this section was as follows:

36) The accounting software ‘Tally’ was developed by:

a) HCL b) TCS c) Infosys d) Wipro

Now is the candidate who is appearing for lecturership in History or even worse, in English, will have any idea about the right answer? How many senior university teachers in the Humanities or Medicine or Arab Culture and Islamic Studies know the answer to this question?

Such kind of questions reveal the ignorance of fact that the people who take this test come from wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds and they hardly require the kind of knowledge that’s being tested in the paper. In short, the examiners and paper setters have absolutely no idea who they are testing and what they want to test.

Besides, what the test tests is, most of the time, alas, memory. If this is what is expected from the future teachers at university levels, I wonder what ‘minimum standards’ will the UGC NET ensure.

The test is compulsory also for the candidates who have done actual research at M.Phil and doctoral level. UGC, it implies, does not trust the ability of its own teachers who have supervised the research and the students it has registered. This sort of `doubting its own product’ would have an adverse impact on the image of the UGC. I feel that UGC does not realize this.

The effort was made to review this test under Prof Mungekar and it has a questionnaire which is available online. The instruction says that the questionnaire is to be filled up and sent to the authorities within thirty days of the date mentioned on the covering letter. The covering letter, however, is not available online, so the whole question of the date and thirty days is misleading.

The test is tyrannically imposed on the aspirants and it sees to it only the luckier ones manage to clear it and thus defeating the very purpose of such a test. If the test has to achieve its objectives, then, it is high time we RATIONALIZED it. The UGC should appoint the paper setters who not only know the language in which they are setting the papers but also know how to frame questions. The vagueness, linguistic incorrectness and irrelevance of much of the content of the paper results in the test being a sort of gamble as most of the large-scale tests are in our country. This sort of opacity would undoubtedly result in corruption at many levels. This test becomes a nightmare for most of the aspirants. It leaves many of the temporary university teachers at the mercy of the authorities, most of who would not mind exploiting them. The present form of the test would only end up the intelligent and capable candidates whose `objective type’ memory is not all that good out of the system and thus be detrimental to the system of Higher Education which is already in doldrums, thanks to the negligence of the politicians and decision makers in the country.

From Sangli to Bhopal: Via Chandigarh and Dahiwadi

2010-04-02T23:35:00.001+05:30

The first quarter of 2010 was probably the busiest quarter of a year for me. It started with my trip to Sangli in early Jan as a subject expert to talk about the issues related to translation of poetry and ended with my trip to Bhopal to read my poems at Kavi Bharti-5 organized by Vagarth, Centre for Indian Poetry at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal between 19 th and 21st of March. In the mean time, I also went to Dahiwadi, a small town near Pune, to read my poems and deliver a talk on the Post Nineties Marathi poetry in Jan. I went to Chandigarh to attend the International Conference of Melus-Melow on the Contemporary Literature after the Eighties in Feb and to Ahmedabad to talk about the implications of the language vs. literature debate in the present context at Smt AP Arts and NP Patel Commerce college, PK Patel Vidya Sankul, Naroda . Phew! Never ran around so much. Plus I had to work towards moving our residence from the university quarters where I stay to our new house at Gorwa. So in all probability this might be the last of my blog entries from the quarters.The best part of it, however, was catching up with many new and old friends!The places I visited were also wonderful, especially, Chandigarh and Bhopal. The intellectual level of discussion at these places too was far better than expected. It was fun.

In all the seminars and conferences, my attempt was to think out the box. Though creative writing, critical discourse and translation are three different discursive domains, I feel that the basic thrust of all the three is very much the same: renewal of language which is nothing less than renewal of the ways of thinking, perceiving and being. Sounds too contentious and ambitious? Recall Shelley's slogan that the poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world. The people who find this proposition too Romantic, idealistic and outrageous read the word ` legislators' too literally. No, we dont make traffic rules or penal laws. What we do make is language, and all these things are made from it. Like the great inventors, innovators and discoverers, we invent, innovate and discover the things not discovered or invented before. However, its because we deal primarily with language, people feel that language is not a big deal as everyone uses it all the time. Hence, the word `unacknowledged'.

Like Oscar Wilde, I think criticism is an art too, because it is also a ways of seeing, perceiving and thinking about art. When people start thinking, perceiving and talking about art in obvious and cliched ways, its the time for the critic to invent a new language, a new way of talking about art and a new way of thinking about it. It follows that the challenges before criticism are in many ways similar to those before creative writing. Like art, it has to be interesting and stimulating and fresh.

Going back to more mundane matters, the exam season has started and I am now neck deep with examination work. I also purchased a new bike-Bajaj-Discover DTS-Si -today as I would have to commute a great deal from my new home and am enjoying my learning lessons. Actually, I rode my Bajaj Super for a decade. I am yet to get proper control over the gears using my foot. Neways, I am enjoying it.

Return of Jarasandha (and Ravana too)

2010-02-21T23:03:00.001+05:30

The Mahabharata talks about Jarasandha the king of Magadha who was born in two separate halves to twin mothers and was slain by Bhima in a wrestling combat. The two halves were put together by a witch called Jara and hence his name. Bhima, in a combat which lasted 27 days, would tear him into two and by magical power, both the halves would come together. Finally, Krishna picked up a piece of straw and broke it into two and threw the halves in opposite directions and the intelligent Bhima picks up the cue and tears Jarasandha into two and throws the halves in opposite directions. The two halves thus cannot come together and Jarasandha dies. My memory of the story comes, of course, from the Amar Chitra Katha.

Jarasandha has returned.This time as a trope for splitting and division of self at multiple levels of being:emotional, personal, social, cultural, and spiritual. He is reborn in my Marathi poem,` Jarasandhachya Blogvarche Kahi Ansh' which is the title of my second collection of Marathi poems. My first collection of Marathi poems was titled, ` Bhintishivaichya Khidkitun Dokavtana' ( click here to download my first collection) which was published by Abhidhanantar Prakashan, Mumbai in 2004. So the second collection has appeared after almost five to six years and consists of most of my poems written in the period. The cacophonic collection is a parodic collage of ready made narrative materials in the public domain- from James Bond, Harry Potter and Peter Parker to Ravana, Jarasanda and the Bible. There is a distinct shift in the poetics from extremely subjective, surreal and self obsessed agonies of the first collection to parodic use of public personas, narratives and motifs. Though the chief characteristic of my poetry, the visual and surreal imagery, persists. The cover of the collection is a fantastic painting titled The Colour of Genesis I by a well-known Marathi visual artist Deepak Shinde.

My poems don't set out on a predetermined journey. They usually begin with a startling image or a motif which singes my being and I explore the possibilities inherent in this seed. I don't know what tree it will turn out to be. I have written a footnote on my poems in one of my blog entries.It discusses various contexts of my poetry and creative process.

Here is a poem from my newly born Marathi collection translated into English by yours truly. It is contemporary soliloquy of Ravana

Ten Asides for Ten Heads

i)

The elixir of immortality
In the navel
Of this ten faced world
Has dried out

I place my longish demonic fingers
On the navel
And click
But I hear no beep

Its ten thousand windows
Must have crashed
I guess

ii)

You think Ravana was a single person
Or that his world had a single face
In fact, for your information
His bliss was also ten-faced
His agony was ten-faced too
He used to laugh
In ten different ways
At a single joke
He used to weep
His single grief
In ten different ways

iii)

Go and tell your one-headed Rama
To do whatever he liked in his life
But never try his hand
At poetry

Leave such things
To people like us

And drown himself
In that one-headed Sharayu

iv)

I have seen this world
Ten times more than you have
I have seen clearly
With my twenty eyes
How all things have ten sides

Pray tell me then
How can I shed light
On my ten-headed world
With your one-headed language?
How can I express
What I feel about Sita?
How can I explain
What I felt
When they humiliated my sister?

My mother tongue
Has ten grammatical numbers

How will I write poetry
In your language
Which has only two?

v)

Valmiki must have managed somehow
To write the flat one-headed story
Of Rama’s life

But kindly assign
The job of writing
My authorized biography
To Vyasa

And appoint ten Ganeshas
As his stenographer
For composing this Maha-Lanka

vi)

Your three stepped syllogism
Is useless
When it comes to understanding me

The seven-stepped logic
Of the Jainas
Is equally futile

Discover first
A ten part syllogism
First invent a language
With ten grammatical numbers for me

Bury your mono-directional
Monotonous language first

Throw away the formula
Of the Rama nama chant
And recognize me
As the true Deity of your heart

Because
With my single head
I can watch ten different channels
At a time on the TV

At a time
I can browse
At least ten different brands in the mall

I can chat at least
With ten different people
At a time

I can discuss twenty different topics
With twenty different people
With my twenty cell phones
On my twenty ears

vii)

Welcome, folks to my palace

Look at my well furnished bathroom
But I hope you won’t be so stupid
As to ask me why
There are ten mirrors here
Or ten tooth brushes
Or mouth fresheners of ten different flavours
Or ten tongue cleaners here

My soul is dual-core
Multi-tasking is my very nature

viii)

My mother had just two breasts
Women unfortunately just have two
That’s the reason why
I need either
At least ten women at a time
Or a single complete woman
With ten hands and ten breasts

However, I feel Lord Shambhunath
Has benevolently obliged womankind
By not creating such women

Had he made such a woman
We would have committed
Atrocities on her ten times over

Indeed
Even if men have a single organ
Their hunger is of ten different kinds
Their thirst has ten faces

Conversant as I am
With these things
In my old age
I am planning to write
For the ten-headed men
A different Kamsutra with ten sutras

Book your copy today
And get a prepublication discount
On my autographed copy

Ten conditions, of course
Apply.

ix)

You must have realized by now
That this glossy resplendent world
Is my empire

My close circuit cameras
Watch over all ten directions

I have detailed information
About what you do
Or do not do
In the mall

This world is my circular prison
All of you are my unknowing prisoners
My innumerable cameras
Keep a close watch
Over your every move
Over infinitesimal vibration of your thought
If you do anything out of the way
Mind you
You will have to face me

x)

However,
Only I know my true tragedy

Your one-headed Rama
Could never fathom my secret
His puritan Brahmastra
Could never find its way to my navel
As he never knew
Where it was

My heart has sprouted ten heads too
I sit and cry
In the ten-headed darkness

This Sharayu of yours
Is made of my ten types of tears
I have cried
Till my heart has turned schizophrenic

You alone can find my navel
And free me of my ten souls
Or else in the end
I will have to commit
Postmodern Harakiri myself

( Translated from Marathi by the Poet)

If you are interested in the collection, please feel free to write to me at sachinketkar at gmail dot com.

Portrait of An Artist as a Young Drag Queen: Art as Transgendering in Natrang

2010-01-30T23:41:00.001+05:30

Its Judith Butler meets Anand Yadav. Recently released Marathi film `Natrang’, which is based on a novel by the noted Marathi novelist Anand Yadav, is a moving account of Guna a young moustache twirling peasant who dreams of making it big in tamasha- a traditional folk multimedia comprising of erotic songs and dances. He is an aspiring artist who dreams of playing a King in tamasha and ends up as a Queen. Economic and circumstances force him to play the role of Nachya, a dancing drag queen in tamasha and thus face the social stigmatization, humiliation and sexual abuse. The Nachya, though is socially humiliated, is crucial for commercial success of tamasha for providing double entendres and homoerotic titillation.

The film depicts the complex power play between gender, art and commerce. The film shows how patriarchy can be as cruel to men as it is to women because it traps people in their genders. His wife and children are harassed and insulted as family of phalkya or drag queen by the villagers. His mistress who loves him refuses to marry Nachya. Precisely at the moment Guna tries to negotiate his double self by narrating the mythical stories of Brihanalla (Arjun in drags) and Mohini (Vishnu as seductress) , he is raped by the Bad Guys. The icon of Nataraj- Shiva as a cosmic dancer (who, incidentally, is also Ardhanarinateshwar- The Lord as Half Woman) is evoked in many places. The film also celebrates the archetypal power of art to transgress all social demarcations and borders including those of gender.

The story goes on to show how he persists in his art even after his family and friends leave him and he ends up a successful artist. The focus of the story is on how an artist has to sacrifice and overcome almost everything. Guna sacrifices masculinity one the most prized possession in a patriarchal set up and this is his highest sacrifice. Though women have been doing it for ages, not often is man shown doing the same and that’s where the success of the film lies. Not often do you see something this serious in Marathi cinema which is almost entering its golden period with Kairee (2001), Dhyaas Parva (2001) Shwaas (2004), Devarai (2005) and recently and Natarang (2010) and self-reflexive Harishchandrachi Factory( 2009) based on Dadasaheb Phalke and his first film Raja Harishchandra to name a few ( there are more very good films too). Shwaas and Harishchandrachi Factory were

India

’s entries for the Academy Awards. Thankfully it is emerging out of its obsession with mindless `comedy’ and clichéd tearjerker.

Atul Kulkarni is already famous as an extremely accomplished actor and he is simply awesome. He depicts his shift from macho to `wimp’ and agonizing ambivalence of being trapped into two genders: one which he can’t leave behind and the other he cant afford to leave with sensitivity. He actually built his physique for the role of macho Guna and lost dozens of kilograms to portray the nachya. The film has excellent performances by Kishore Kadam and Vibhavari Deshpande. Vibhavari’s role as Guna’s wife is particularly well performed. She is indeed an actress to watch out for.

Lots of credit goes to the director Ravi Jadhav for what he has succeeded in keeping out. He succeeded in keeping out melodrama and inane humor which is a bane of Marathi cinema and keeping the focus on the story and characters with their ambivalences and agonies. He has also succeeded in keeping out didacticism. The film is a simply told tale without any stylistic gimmicks. The mythical and archetypal allusions are obliquely suggested by references to Brihannala and Mohini. If they are going to make films like these in Marathi, I don’t think one would want to watch stupid glossy Hindi films or boring Sci-Fi Technomanic Hollywood stuff. I also loved the music by Ajay Atul.

In spite of repeated warnings of not judging the book by its film, the film has aroused my curiosity regarding the novel. I find out if the focus on gender politics is explicit in the novel or it is in Ravi Jadhav’s interpretation. I am not a great admirer of Anand Yadav, but yes I want to have a go at his book.

Education as Gang Rape: The Dark Tropes in 3 Idiots

2010-01-16T23:44:00.002+05:30

You don't have to be Rancho to tell that Aaal eez Naat Well with the Big Bad Indian education system, which boasts of being one of the biggest in the world. Some Hindi films have dealt with this monster in an interesting way : I can think of Gulzar's Parichay (1972), Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par (2007) and Rajkumar Hirani's Munnabhai MBBS(2003) and 3 Idiots (2009). All these films are extremely funny, sensitive and are critical of the very idea of education in India. The attack is on coercive aspects of mass education system and how it murders the student's instinctive curiosity, spontaneity, creativity and individuality.

The films are also critical of the undue emphasis on examination which only tests information retention capacity instead of thinking skills, creative problem solving skills and knowledge.The chargesheet against education system is well known. However, the films also take into account the fact that education system is a social institution and hence it reflects the widespread social values of success and failure in life. The cut-throat competitiveness either produces cut throats or people with deep inferiority complex. A society which believes in rat race produces mice. The films also try to persuade parents against imposing their expectations on their children .All these charges, of course are well-known. 3 Idiots, too, tries to persuade people about rethinking the whole idea of success in contemporary Indian context. It argues against measuring success in terms of marks, wealth and fame and sex. The film is not intended to be profound or artistic, but deliver its message in an entertaining and contemporary way and needless to say it succeeds in its objectives.

Though very glossy and hilarious, it has its sinister undertones. It talks about suicidal tendencies among todays youth which are abetted by the educational system and society's notions of success and failure.The media is hasty in making connection between the film and a wave of suicides among students in Maharashtra. Media also accuses the film of encouraging ragging. It is like blaming Sholay for the rise in dacoity.The films like 3 Idiots are sugar-coated comedies which are really tragedies.

The education system is an integral part of society. The roots of the problems of education system lie in the social values. If society defines success as acquisition of Fame, Fortune and Fuck (though not necessarily in that order-Freud, I think, talked about Fame-Female-Fortune as three basic motives behind man's actions) either by a crooked hook or a crook-with-a hook using all the shortcuts possible, then education is reduced to the function of ladder in the brutal game of social snakes-and-ladders. If it fails to be a ladder, it is perceived to be a snake. Education, however, is neither a snake nor a ladder.

Though lot of idealistic bullshit is parroted by the mikephiliac educationists regarding the basic purpose of education, when it comes to implementation of educational programmes, it is seen as more of a mass-producing factory for producing low quality skilled labourers for an underdeveloped economy. Though it is widely accepted that education is about development of ability to think and behave critically and creatively, the success in educational system is measured in a small minded way of measuring one's ability for information retention. Hence the outcome of the examination, is obviously no indicator of one's intelligence.And though there is lot of blah blah regarding `examination reforms', hardly anything is done on the front and no genuine alternative to the present system has gained wide acceptance. Consequently, what goes under the name of `education' in India is actually a monstrous machinery which has brutal impact on the child's sensitive mind. However, most of us are forced by the society to feed our children to this Rakshasa.I feel that what we do to our children is similar to marital rape in India. Just like marital rape is not seen as a rape because its done by socially accepted partner, education is not seen as a form of torture just because it is seen as `doing what everybody is doing' and hence legitimate.

Hidden beneath the banter of 3 Idiots is the dark trope of rape. In the famous Speech scene, Rancho replaces the word ` chamatkar' with `balatkar' and `dhan' with `stan' in a speech which Chatur Ramalingam- a student who wants to use education to get Lamborghini and Green Card by mindless mugging- is going to deliver in the convocation and in a language he does not know , simply by rote learning it. Chatur delivers the speech without any knowledge of distinction between ` balatkar' ( rape) and ` chamatkar' ( miracle) and between `dhan' (wealth) and `stan' ( breasts). What needs to be emphasized is that today's society, including students, teachers and parents have lost the ability to make the crucial distinctions between `miracle'( of becoming successful) and `rape', and between wealth and breasts. Males, the film just hints, seem to think of wealth as if it is woman's tits or mother's breasts from which they have been weaned.

Hidden underneath the hilarity is another dark trope of sodomy or anal rape. In the famous ragging scene, the juniors are supposed to undress and tell their seniors pointing to their own bottoms, `Jahapanah, Tohfa Kabool Karo' or `O Mighty Emperor, please accept this gift'. Ragging which is seen as an `initiation ceremony' is also an initiation ceremony of the novices to the Big Bad Darwinian World of Survival of Cutthroats. Initiation into the World which only worships the Winners-- Prof Viru Sahasrabuddhe or Virus ( played brilliantly as ever by Boman Irani) points out the no one knows the name of the second person on the moon--is traumatic and extremely humiliating experience. People who participate in this ragging and gang rape of the young minds are Parents, Employers,Teachers, Senior Students (PETS)- in short, the entire society. Growing up in society such as ours amounts to mental, emotional and even physical rape by the perverted societal arrangement.Education seems to be one of modes of violation and torture. The only way to change it is by EDUCATING Parents-Employers-Teachers(PETs).

It is very fashionable and so very easy to blame Our Big Bad Politicians for all the Evils of the Society from Terrorism to Tuberculosis. It is very difficult to accept our own responsibility and act with integrity. We want to impart `morals and ethics' to our kids without we ourselves having it in the first place. We feel we have to `find out' role models for youth and like everything else we expect OTHERS to be the role models. We feel that teaching moral amounts to PREACHING, when in fact, it is about ACTING honestly and responsibly. Corrupt, dishonest, inefficient, and ignorant parents, employers and teachers produce a society which is corrupt, dishonest, inefficient and ignorant. We are the serial killers of the dozens of students committing suicide.
We have become rapists by allowing ourselves to be raped -we offered it our assholes, didn't we, saying ` Tohfa Kabool Karo'. It is a vicious circle.

Recall WH Auden's 1 Sept 1939

" I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. "

In fact, this has been going on in India since ages- think of caste-system, feudalism (the Palace Paradigm in Prof Handoo's words), dowry related violence, the convention of Sati ( both literal and symbolic),colonialism and what not. All these things were systems of rape. No doubt our education system is as bad as our society: it is casteist ( Rancho says that marking is creation of new caste system, but it is casteist in many more ways), feudal, patriarchal, and colonial. It will be modernized only if the society is truly modernized ( not in superficial sense of modernity as fashion, but in terms of critical and creative thinking).

Here in lies our Paradox for Today: education will be modernized only if society will be modernized and society will be modernized only if education is modernized.We have to go in circles to break this vicious circle. But we HAVE to break it, if we want to save our children and grandchildren from abuse. There is very little choice in this matter.

मराठी असणे म्हणजे नेमके काय असणे ह्या गुंतागुंतीच्या विषयावर संध्याकाळी केलेले काही विसखळीत विचार- सचिन केतकर

2010-01-12T23:01:00.002+05:30

मराठी असंणे म्हणजे
मराठीत असणे

मराठी असणे म्हणजे शेतावर मराठी बुजगावणे लावणे
मराठी असणे म्हणजे बुजगावण्यांचीच शेती करणे
मराठी असणे म्हणजे मराठीत आत्मह्त्या करणे

मराठी असणे म्हणजे सातशे वर्ष जुन्या
अनार्य गर्भाशयातून खडकाळ दरीत जन्मणे

मराठी असणे म्हणजे मराठीत जगणे मराठीत हगणे
मराठीत मुतणे
मराठीत पिणे मराठी अश्रु काढणे
मराठीत रोगी होणे मराठीत भोगी होणे
मराठीत उपभोगी होणे मराठीत योगी होणे
मराठीत उपयोगी होणे मराठीत खेळणे मराठीत चोळणे
मराठीत खुळे होणे
मराठीत लुळे होणे
मराठीत चरणे मराठीत हरणे
मराठीत ऊठणे मराठीत मुठळ्या मारणे
मराठीत धरणे मराठीत करणे मराठीत मरणे
मराठीत धावणे मराठीत लावणे मराठीत चावणे
मराठीत हसणे मराठीत बसणे मराठीत डसणे
मराठी वेश करणे
शुद्ध मराठी द्वेष करणे
मराठीत माया लावणे
मराठीत काया लावणे
मराठीत जीभेच्या भवानीला धार काढणे
मराठीत ऊडणे मराठीत बुडणे
मराठीत पडणे मराठीत लंगडणे

मराठी असणे म्हणजे खांद्यावर शुद्ध मराठी ओझे वाहणे
मराठी असणे म्हणजे शुद्ध मराठी सुळ्यावर लटकणे
मराठी असणे म्हणजे शास्वत काळापासून
कपाळावर मराठी जखम घेउन हिंडणे

मराठी असंणे म्हणजे
मराठीत असणे

म्हणजेच मराठीत नसणे

मराठी असणे म्हणजे अमृताशी पैजा जिंकणाऱ्या
आयसीयूत व्हेंटीलेटवर टिकलेल्या भाषेत

दुख:स्वप्न पाहणे

(१२ जानेवारी २०१०)

मी भाषेला बोलताना ऎकतो: सचिन केतकरची एक कविता

2010-01-05T23:22:00.002+05:30

मी भाषेला बोलताना ऎकतो

सचिन केतकर

भाषा बोलतीय
मी ऎकतोय

सगळ्यांच्या पलीकडून ती बोलतीय
शेकडो वर्षांपासून
संततधार
अखंड
अव्याहात
भाषा बोलतीय मी ऎकतोय
लोकं तोंड फ़क्त हलवतायत
लोकाना वाटतय ते स्वत: बोलतायत
पण भाषाच बोलतीय
भाषेच्या उगमा पलिकडून

मी ऎकतोय
कित्येक नद्यांना पूर आले अन गेले
नद्यांनी कित्येकदा वाटा बदलल्या
भाषा थांबतच नाहीये
तिच्या सादेतूनच उभं होतं जग
हे घर हे झाड ही माणसं
भाषा बोलतीये

पण ती माझ्याशी बोलतीय का?
भाषा कोणाशीही बोलत नाहीये
म्हणून ती सगळ्यांशीच बोलतीये
पण भाषा स्वत:शीच बोलतीये फ़क्त
भाषेला बोलताना मी ऎकत नाहीये
मला बोलताना भाषा ऎकतीये

कारण अनादी काळा पासून
फ़क्त भाषाच बोलतीये
आणि भाषाच ऎकतीये

१४ ओक्टोबर २००९ सकळ्चे १२:१५

Remembering John Ruskin in the Times of Global Recession: Or The Invisible Hand that Did not Show Up

2009-12-26T19:27:00.004+05:30

I would not have read certain books, had I not been assigned the job of teaching them. And I am mighty happy that I was assigned such a job. One of such curious books is `Unto This Last' by John Ruskin (1819-1900) which appeared in 1862. Probably, some bias against the Victorian literature instilled by my modernist preferences is one reason why I stayed clear of the Victorian Prophets. However, its time I got rid of my biases. There are hardly funnier and entertaining books than Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. The book is important for India because it has deeply influenced Gandhian thought. Gandhi translated the book into Gujarati as ` Sarvodaya' (1908) and it was retranslated into English! This curious case of back translation is also interesting for me as a student of translation.

Ruskin's book is a collection of four essays he published in Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and the magazine was forced to stop its publication owing to the outrage and aggressive opposition it provoked. Ruskin's approach can termed as `prescriptive economics' where he makes a rather impassioned plea for more just and human economic thinking.

The book is a vicious invective on contemporary laissez-faire economic theory as exemplified by Ricardo, Mill and Adam Smith. He attacks this though as being inadequate and being pseudo-scientific like astrology, alchemy and witchcraft. Ruskin argues that it is inhuman and narrowly defined as it does not take aspect of human personality other than economic into consideration like emotional attachment or envy or jealousy which dictate human behaviour into consideration. He objects to the economic thought based on the mechanical conception of economy based on `demand and supply mechanism' and competition.

His most outrageous suggestion is to fix the wages irrespective of the quality of labour and the demand-supply mechanism which make it volatile. This volatility and fickleness of the price of labour, in Ruskin's view is unjust and extremely detrimental to society in the long run. By setting a constant price for labour, Ruskin feels that the bad worker does not flourish by reducing his charges and thus consequently reducing the damage he does to the society. This move, Ruskin feels, also does not force the good worker to reduce his wages because of competition. The title of the book comes from the parable of the workers in the vineyard in the Bible (Matthew 20:14). The parable illustrates the God as an ideal employer who pays the last man who is hired on the vineyard, the same amount as the first man to be hired. Ruskin's use of the Bible for reinforcing his arguments is also fascinating. He cites the maxims of Solomon to back up his plea for more just economic system.

The most interesting part of this book, however, in my view is his insight that `What is desired,under the name of riches, is essentially power over men....and this power of wealth is greater or less in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised and inversely proportional to the number of person who are as rich as ourselves.' ( The Veins of Wealth). The more wealthier people we have around us, the less valuable is our wealth. So it is poverty which keeps rich men rich, not the wealth!

In a characteristic way, Ruskin questions Mill's definition of being wealthy as,` To be wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles', by question what exactly is the meaning of `have' and what exactly is ` useful'. He gives the example of the passengers in a wrecked ship who fastened a belt about him of two hundred pounds of gold. When he sank, Ruskin asks, `had he the gold? or the gold had him? He also gives an example of the embalmed body of St Carlo Borromeo holding a golden crosier and a cross of emeralds on its breast. Ruskin asks can we say that the corpse `has' those `useful' articles and so is wealthy?

I found the way he marshals his language for his impassioned but extremely lucid rhetoric very fascinating. His analogies and aphorisms in the manner of the Prophet are sharp. Consider a typical Ruskinian aphorism:

" Absolute justice is indeed no more attainable than absolute truth; but the righteous man is distinguished from the unrighteous by his desire and hope of justice, as the true man from the false by his desire and hope of truth. And though absolute justice be unattainable, as much justice as we need for all practical use is attainable by all those who make it their aim."

Emphasizing that the ethics is the true base of economy, Ruskin observes that money is basically a promise ( "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of ten rupees") and if the ethical base is destroyed it will destroy both the economy and the society on which it is based. Ruskin reminded me of Barack Obama and his policies. It is not so much the question of the right and the left, but the question of basis of society. The Invisible Hand of Market Forces, as the global recession as demonstrated, has failed to show up and it is left to the Hand of that State, which people had declared to be irrelevant and dying, which was called up to rescue the collapsing economy.Well, the nation-state is indeed alive and very much kicking and it is the prophets of the nineties who predicted the evaporation of nation-state ( like Negroponte in his Being Digital) who have vanished so has the dogma of the nineties.

Market, then, is not a self regulating mechanism based on the force of demand and supply. Gandhi, one of the truest disciples and translators of Ruskin is famed to have said that we have enough for people's need but not enough for people's greed. Greed left to its own devices, is self destructive. Marx saw capitalism as being self-destructive in the end, so did Gandhi and Ruskin.

Ruskin makes a sharp distinction between the Political Economy, which is concerned with the welfare of whole society, with the `mercantile economy' which is a science of getting rich. Ruskin responds to his detractors who say that `every capitalist knows by experience how money is made and how it is lost', by saying that these capitalists who,` playing a long practiced game, are familiar with the chances of its cards and who can explain their losses and gains. But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses or gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially , though invisibly, dependent on theirs in the lighted rooms. They have learned a few, and only a few, of the laws of mercantile economy; but not one of the those of political economy."

It is when the governments start following the laws of mercantile economy rather than those of political economy that the society is in trouble. There is a saying in Gujarati which says, ` Raja Vepari to Praja Bhikhari'- `When the king is a merchant, his subjects are paupers'. The global economic slowdown which has resulted in a great liquidity crunch and immense unemployment is a result of the governments behaving like grocery shopowners rather than as responsible managers of the societies.Only if the governments have a genuine concern for the society as a whole, instead of spending time increasing its bank balance. Obama, in one of the presidential campaign speech had said that the governments should care for the people on the streets, rather than the people on the Wall Street. Obama is the Ruskin of Twenty First Century.

That the global recession is a social crisis of a global nature has to emphasized and understood. May be the people who are hurt by the crisis would learn a lesson and be wiser in future and it is probable that the crises will actually be favorable for the planet. When we understand that in the Age of Interconnectedness and Interdependency, you cant become rich and happy when your neighbour is poor and unhappy.

The Challenge called Dilip Chitre

2009-12-10T15:18:00.002+05:30

This morning I received the sad news from Hemant that Dilip Dada is no more. With passing away of Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), an era of Marathi poetry and literature comes to an end. He was one of the greatest poets in Marathi and one of the best Indian poets. He was a fantastic translator, critic and fiction writer. He was always a brave rebel, an immensely creative personality and uncompromising critical intelligence. He kickstarted the `Little Magazine Movement' in Maharashtra with his little magazine`Shabda' in the mid fifties. He remained a great influence and inspiration for hundreds of younger poets like me. He did so many blurbs for young unknown poets like me in Marathi. He was always `dada' an elder brother, and never a father figure. He never imposed himself or his ideas on people. His greatness lay in his attitude in treating everyone as equal. It was this spirit that permeates and pervades his work as an artist.

My encounters with Dilip Chitre have always been exciting and provocative. It was always an illuminating experience to listen to his long speeches full of very original insights. I met him for the first time during Abhidhanantar's decennial celebration where he read his poetry. I consulted him for his advice on publication of my first Marathi collection. He recommended the name of Hemant Divate. I met Chitre again in May 2003 and had a long session on Marathi historiography with him. His critical inputs while making of the Live Update Anthology were precious. He liked my selection of poems and was critical about many things.

One day in 2004, he called me up and had a long telephonic conversation with me.I remember his remarks about his possible death during that conversation. I said we need people like you to be with us. He said, and very typically, that we need Shakespeare and Tukaram too but then it is not in our hands. He liked my translations and poetry, he said and I should not harbour self doubts. He said, with his tongue very much in his cheek, that we, Maharashtrians in general and particularly me should remember Shivaji and shed feelings of inferiority. He remarked that my strength was that I worked with four languages: Marathi, English, Hindi and Gujarati. He also said that Ashwini's poems are better than mine. In one of my later visits, he gave me a profound insight regarding poetry and modernity: modernity and creativity lies in the spaces between words of your phrase. It is in this turn of phrase, he said, that contemporary creativity lies.

I also had the honour of working with him on New Quest and it was again a very interesting phase. We had our differences and he probably saw me as an obstinate animal with inferiority complex, but he was always sympathetic and warm and treated me at par with himself. He loved Amogh and thought may be Amogh would be able to show way to his poor wayward father.

When the fatal cancer was detected some time back, Chitre fought back bravely and we thought for the moment that he would survive it as he has survived some of the most difficult times. We knew he was a fierce fighter. He was forever young in spirit. The way he took to the latest technology is simply amazing. When people of his age, felt that cellphone was a gadget from a different planet, used only by aliens, he networked energetically on the social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook. He had 1118 friends on Facebook at the age of 71, which would give a 17 year old net newbie all sorts of complexes.

The most difficult period for me, was when he lost his son and I did not know what to say and how to speak to him. It was one of the most shocking things for us and I felt me and Ashwini were too young to `console' someone like Chitre's who were not only very elder to us but also were people we looked up to.His wife, Viju tai is, for me an equally admirable woman; very warm and loving and very supportive.She stood by Dilip in most difficult of times and he always treated her as his equal. I pray to god to give her strength to bear this great loss.

He once compared death with sharpshooter who claimed his close friend Arun Kolatkar, his son and people close to him in quick succession. The Sharpshooter has claimed Chitre too. His poetry in English and Marathi since its very beginning, reflect an obsessive preoccupation with images death and self-mutilation, making it dark and disturbing. The Sharp Shooter has put an end to this agony at last.

I think Dilip dada's one of the most important contribution to Marathi poetry and even the Indian poetry is his remarkable invention of `indigenous modernity' , which is simultaneously cosmopolitan and rooted, profoundly democratic and uncompromisingly artistic, deeply influenced by greatest international poetry and singularly situated in the democratic and pluralistic indigenous tradition of bhasha poetry. He saw that what unites powerful poetry of the post-Eliotian American poetry like the Beat Generation and Confessional poets with the extremely different , but equally powerful tradition of the Bhakti poetry as exemplified in Tukaram, was a certain existential -spiritual self-awareness, which is neither completely western nor completely peculiar to Marathi. What he says about ` Sahitya ani Atmabhaan', or ` Literature and Self Awareness' in the book by the same name in Marathi is perhaps best guide to his practice. His critical outlook, likewise, embodied these values.He could perceive the seamless interconnection between the deeply progressive and pluralist dimension of his tradition with the universal human dimension of the international and western modernity. Hence his poetry will be something of an outsider to people brought up only on the westernized aesthetics or only on the native ones.

Like Tukaram and probably Ginsberg , he made no distinction between living and writing. When we enter his poetry, we have to pick up the challenge of facing the man, his life and his agonies. We who cant even face our own darkness will find it difficult to face the looming personality of the man himself staring at you from his words. His poetry, hence, will never be populist or popular as it offers no false respite and reassurances. His poetry is not peppered with humour to people who want to have a bit of fun. His poetry is dark, serious and unbearable and in order to read Chitre, you have to read him on his own terms and not according to your demands. He is not a `demand-supply' man. It is this challenging non-conformity which makes his poetry not becoming people's favourite.

Chitre was never a conformist in life. He never gave into the Brahminical middle class mindset that pervaded Marathi poetry and certain right-winged attitudes to Indian culture. His earliest short story, ` Kesaal KaleBhore Pillu' ( A Dark Hairy Pup) dealing with clandestine sexual relation between a servant and his mistress, enraged the well-known Marathi writer Atre so much that he publicly declared his desire to flog Chitre. When the American scholar James Laine acknowledged him in his controversial book on Shivaji, the Government decided much to Chitre's anger to offer him `police protection'. He vocally protested against the vandalization of the Bhandarkar Institute, communal riots in Gujarat and all forms of bigotry everywhere. His vision of culture admitted no such narrow and intolerant actions.

They don't make people like him these days. Dilip Chitre is no more physically with us and to say that he will be with us in form of his ` akshar deha'- `the body of letters', would be a cliche. However, Dilip Dada will live not in the books but in the words and in the language of later poets. His presence will be felt even more acutely now. He was a challenge when he was alive, he now becomes an unsurmountable challenge. I will always miss his deep voice, typical Puneri cap,his cigar, his pungent sarcasm, and razor sharp critical vision. I will miss his warmth and love. As Harold Bloom points out that the poet becomes all the more alive once he dies. Once he dies it is impossible to kill him. Now they wont be able to kill him. Now nothing can kill him.

Four Generations of Chitres: Dilip's father PA Chitre, a noted Marathi editor, Aashay Chitre, Dilip's son with his son Yogul and Dilip Chitre.

On Disliking Chetan Bhagat

2009-12-07T10:58:00.003+05:30

It is as fashionable these days to dislike Chetan Bhagat, as it is to say that one doesn't watch Ekta Kapoor's serials. One of the reasons for disliking Bhagat is what his detractors call ` atrocious' English. The guy, these detractors say, cannot write `decent' English and is artistically very inferior when it comes to things like the plot or characterization or dialogues. I find these charges rather snobbish and elitist.

One reason why I find Chetan Bhagat interesting is because he is so different from academically hyped `Indian Writing in English canon comprising mostly of the diasporic writers like Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri or Kiran Desai. The guy writes about people and world with which the ` Eng. Lit' academics are not really familiar. Bhagat's novels are about India that is more recognizable than the one you find in The Moor's Last Sigh or The Midnight's Children. The Eng Lit. scholars are more conversant with Jhumpa Lahiri's expatriate NRIs living in New York than with people who work in the call-centre just round the corner.

Bhagat's world is the contemporary urban upper middle-class world. His language is the one that you hear in this world. This class emerged largely in the post-nineties era of privatization, liberalization, and globalization. This is the Hinglish speaking generation from the English medium schools from towns and cities. Chetan Bhagat's English is the English of this generation. It may be `inelegant' and `atrocious' to some local Brahmins of Good English. But then who cares, Bhagat's bhagats will read him anyway. Chetan Bhagat's world is easy to identify with.

Interestingly, some of these Brahmins cite Rushdie's chutnification of English with pride, though his India is a tourist India seen through NRI glasses. These Brahmins don't seem to complain about absolutely unreadable style of `high-browed' hyper canonical authors like Joyce of Finnegans Wake or Pynchon of Crying the Lot 49.

While it is incorrect to impose elitist academic grid of canonical literary values on the popular fiction, it is equally incorrect to impose our expectations from the western popular fiction on the emergent Indian popular fiction in English. What is needed is to contextualize this emergent genre historically and analyze its content to understand the class it caters to. We need to place it along with the writers like Rajashree, Anuja Chauhan and Swati Kaushal ( of ` Indian Chick Lit fame).

Bhagat is indeed no Borges or Joyce or Kafka, but he is for me better than people like Rushdie who pretend to be Borges, Joyce or Marquez and offer cheap imitations of those writers. Bhagat is low profile compared to people like Rushdie and more modest. He knows his limitations and within these limitations, he seems to be working fine for me.

However, the reading taste of the new generation is very interesting and funny. I find fascination for Dan Brown, JK Rowling, Paulo Cohelo or Stephanie Myer incomprehensible and even silly. I never understand why Indians admire Dan Brown, for instance. While Dan Brown may be saying something shocking for the Western Christian world, Indians have simply too much of ` divine feminine'. We have too much ` divine feminine' in Baroda, for instance, where the Navratri Garbas are quiet a rage. It is people who have never read Marquez or Borges who find Cohelo `profound', while he is actually peddling out silly self help stuff under the guise of wisdom.

I suspect the success of people like Chetan Bhagat, or Dan Brown or Cohelo in India owes a lot to the emergent literate class which has discovered literacy rather late, and have not discovered the literary at all ;)

Books and websites for UGC-NET, SLET EXAMS

2009-11-23T22:58:00.003+05:30

The season of the UGC-NET and SLET exams is approaching and I am often asked what books should be consulted for preparation. So here goes my recommended list.

For the first paper, I think one can use books on Reasoning and Clerical Aptitude published by Competition Success Review. However, for other papers I recommend these books:

1) Abrams, MH A Glossary of Literary Terms, eighth ed.,New Delhi, Pearson Publication, 2008. Earlier editions of this book are easily available, but the eighth is the most useful one.

2) Chaudhuri, Amit. ed., The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Picador, 2001. One of the most useful anthologies on the subject.

3) Devy, GN ed. Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation, Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd, 2002. A good place to look at ancient and modern Indian literary criticism.

4) King, Bruce Modern Indian Poetry in English, Delhi, OUP, 1987. Still one of the best introductions to the subject.

5) Leitch, Vincent B et al. eds. The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory. NY and London: WW Norton and Co. 2001. The BAAP of all anthologies of literary criticism and theory. From Plato to hypertext theory, you name it and you have it.

6) Mehrotra, AK. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, New Delhi: Permanent Black (Ravi Dayal), 2003. A very good starting point for literary history of Indian writing in English.

7) Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays in Indian Writing in English, OUP, 2002. One of the best books I have read on Indian Fiction in English.

8) Richards, J and Rogers, T. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 2nd Edition. 2001. A very comprehensive Introduction to ELT

9) Sanders, Andrew. An Oxford Short History of English Literature, OUP, 3rd Edition, 2002. I feel this is one of the best histories of English Literature. Very contemporary and thorough. This book replaces the dated Legouis and Cazamian.

10) Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Theory, ELBS, Pearson Publications, 2005. A very lucid introduction to the vast field.

11) Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, April 2002. Very lucid and exciting introduction, my personal favourite!

12) Lodge, David and Nigel Wood. Modern Criticism and Theory. Longman, Pearson, 3rd ed., 2008. A very good anthology of criticism available in Indian price .

You can check out following links too:

i) Luminarium.org is a very good site

ii) Indian English Literature

iii) Bartleby is a very good site

iv) Here is a link to OTHER USEFUL LINKS ON THE NET is made by yours faithfully. It is a very good page indeed ...

From Shoka to Shloka in Gujarat

2009-10-30T22:44:00.001+05:30

Today, I attended a very interesting lecture on `Poetry as Language of Persuasion’ delivered by one of the best living poets of Gujarat, Sitanshu Yashashchandra Mehta at Forum of Contemporary Theory, Vadodara. Evoking the epics by Dante and Valmiki, Prof Mehta discussed how poetry is an account of travel and journey. The lecture was organized under the national workshop on ` Towards an Ecology of Knowledge’ by the Forum on Contemporary Theory and Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and other Human Sciences. Prof Mehta was critical of the Indian intellectual’s reliance on the Western paradigms. He advised us not be the ` darlings of the West’ by quoting Derrida etc. He was also critical of the idea of `General Semantics‘ as being imported. He remarked that the experts in General Semantics’ who had come to enlighten the participants of the workshop would be rewarded if the young Indian scholars would `offer them `our’ riches, as intellectual return gifts’. He then talked of the ancient Indian poetics and talked about the mythical story of the origin of poetry where Valmiki, the composer of the Ramayana, saw a hunter kill one of the Krauncha birds which were mating nearby. Valmiki , as the legend goes, was so deeply grieved ( shoka= grief) by the plight of birds that he composed the first shloka ( a couplet) of the Ramayana. The inspiration for the epic came from the grief of a bird. Prof Mehta also talked about Auden’s famous elegy on Yeats , quoting the following lines:

 In the nightmare of the dark

          All the dogs of Europe bark,

Prof Mehta pointed out how the poets have to descend the depths of darkness when the dogs of Europe ( like Musolini , Hitler and, Prof Mehta said, Indians would add Churchill) barked ceaselessly.

In the question answer session, yours faithfully expressed his reservations and doubts ( as usual). I said that the whole idea of ` our riches’ is not that simple. Determination of what is `ours’ is probably as violent as `othering’. Who decides what is `ours’ and who would feel that the `ours’ is not really `ours’, I asked.

I also pointed out that forget the Congress vs the BJP or the notion of activism or of ideology ( the things ,our reputed poet , should not pressurize a poet to write certain type of poetry). I said even if we stayed within the classical notion of poetry of shloka( poetry) being inspired by shoka ( grief) of a dying bird, I dont understand why so many poets ( I was not referring to him in particular but many Gujarati poets ) did not find inspiration or feel shoka in the Gujarat carnage of 2002 and write shlokas about it. Instead, I said continuing the Audenesqe analogy, they preferred to join the Dogs of India in barking. Had Valmiki been alive, he would not have preferred the seclusion of his hermitage in such circumstances. I said that the question was not of ideology but of the poet’s sensitivity.

Prof Mehta, very kindly responded that he, like many others had indulged in silences but one should not be selective in protesting. One should not just protest the killings after the Godhra tragedy but also protest the death of people who died in the train, he said. He said we should also protest the plight of Kashmiri pandits who have lost their homes.

I thought to myself how can a person who does not understand or sympathize with the tragedy of the rape and burning alive of pregnant women near home can ever understand the tragedy of people living in Kashmir. When one is insensitive to terrorism at home, can one understand terrorism in a far away land?

A Critique of Judgment and Towards Jaina Theory of Literary studies

2009-10-23T14:15:00.001+05:30

Transformation is a way of life according to Landmark Education and I am learning a thing (learning being one of my strong suits) or two everyday. Discussing the problems of relationships with my friends, I discovered how being judgmental is a negative way of being which drains us of vitality and openness. Most of us believe that we are open-minded, but if we just became aware of the things that we consider ` good', `right', `wrong' or `bad', we discover that we are constantly judging people, situations, things and of course ourselves. At the same time, almost all of us allow other people's judgment to affect us and influence our way of thinking and being. I believe if we avoid looking at the world in terms of ` good-bad', `right-wrong', `proper-improper', our world view would become very broad.

I was wondering about the conversations I heard during the Forum regarding, ` Must, Is, because' and ` Always Already Listening' and I felt I did not quite get them. But I feel today that they about ways of thinking and being which restrict our openness and put constraints on the other possibilities of being and living. Saying that X is like this or Y must ... or thinking in terms of `because' are all based on the perception of present which is based on our past. LM perceives the present from the point of view of the future which is not merely a projection from our past that is our fantasies, anxieties, fears and wish fulfillments etc. Transformation, in LM philosophy is different from change. Change is modification or alteration of what already exists, transformation is invention of a state of being which is not a modification of what already exists.

LM educational philosophy is based on the idea of `transformative education’ instead of informative education and it achieves its aims by focusing on our areas of being, living, and thinking which we did not know that we did not know, as against most of the education system which focuses on what we know we don’t know -we know we cant speak Chinese or how to hack into the Pentagon website. An instance of transformative education unit is the idea that most of us are judgmental thinking in terms of `right-wrong’ etc without acknowledging or knowing that we are judgmental.

With these things at the back of my mind, I was browsing through Crossword bookstore looking for good books on Jainism. Jainism is an incredibly powerful religion and like all great religions, it is based on atheism. Its central value is `aviolence’ (often translated as non-violence) which has to be conceived very broadly. This central value is based on its metaphysics of ` anekantavaada’ or pluralistic view of reality (that is `realities’). The Jaina logic, probably one of the greatest logical systems of the world, is based on seven step syllogism or the Sapta Bhangi Nyaya. This logical system like the notion of `a-violence’ is based on non-absolutist metaphysical outlook of the religion. The summary of this seven fold logic is first found in the writings of a Jaina monk Bhadrabahu (c. 4^th century B.C,) and goes something like this:

"The syadvada is set forth as follows: (1) May be, it is; (2) may be, it is not; (3) may be, it is and it is not; (4) may be, it is indescribable; (5) may be, it is and yet is indescribable; (6) may be, it is not and it is also indescribable; (7) may be, it is and it is not and it is also indescribable."

A-violence is possible if your outlook becomes a non-absolutist and being judgmental implies that my view is truth and is unquestionable one, because I am Right and you are Wrong. In a way, our judgmental view is the source of violence in the world and it limits our world view in a violent way.

Sometime back, I was almost fanatic and dogmatic upholder of the ` evaluative’ mode of criticism and felt that non-evaluative or non-judgmental study of literature as promoted by outstanding critics like Northrop Frye has resulted in certain `anomie’ of values in literary studies department. The judgmental way of reading or being is actually a very limited and violent way of reading. I wonder how a-violent or non-judgmental mode of reading is possible. It is possible by admitting multiple points of views of readers and the characters and the author in the process of reading, in fact, by admitting that all the voices that speak in the text, including the voice of reader, is not speaking `the Truth’, but ` a truth’ which is a limited one. Reader response theories admit multiple points of views of readers by asserting that the readers produce their meaning, but there is need for this ethical awareness that even a particular meaning generated by the reader is not the `right one’, but one right reading among the many ones. The potential of this ethical outlook can be radical and can actually go against educational and pedagogical models of literary studies which actually are violent in the fact that they want readers to produce a `particular kind of reading’ in order to get grades. The Syadvaad can be a base of newer ethics of reading and `criticism’. Am I proposing a Jaina theory of literary studies? Probably I am, or probably I am not….Probably it will lead us beyond the conversations marked by ` Must, Is, Because’ and ` Right/Wrong, ` Good/Bad’, ` Correct/Incorrect’ which delimit our views and open up a possibility of radically open mode of literary studies….

Of Gender , Sexuality and other Disasters

2009-10-19T12:06:00.002+05:30

One of my friends asked me to chair a session or two at the forthcoming one-day seminar on ` Gay and Lesbian Studies: The Indian Context' and she said that one of my colleagues had turned down the offer because he was ` straight' and ` still interested in women'. Not very funny perhaps.

I agreed to the idea even if it was not my area of academic research. The area of gender and sexuality is probably one of the most interesting area of research probably. If someone stupid would ask me why I am poking my straight nose into this queer area,I would reply by describing a scene from a very very funny and interesting film ` Love and Other Disasters' where Mathew Rhys who plays a gay room mate of Brittany Murphy and Santiago Cabera go out for dinner as it is `set up' by Murphy who thinks that Santiago is gay and sweet for Rhys. Rhys character is obviously shocked when Cabera's character tells him that he is straight and not gay. Funnily, Rhys' character asks him ` Straight? Since when?', to which Santiago says that he is straight since he was eight and however hard he tried to develop interest in men, he would end up with women. The humour is largely due to inversion of the usual situation where it is the `straight' who would ask such questions to the gay and it would be the gay person who would give such a reply. The point probably is that heterosexuality too is as much a construct as homosexuality is. So my answer would be same as that of Santiagos but at the same time it would betray an awareness that people are not born straight, they become one.

Some years back, I was not very enthusiastic about feminism and gender studies as I felt that the subject was exhausted and that there was hardly anything new in the area. But that simply was my ignorance and complacence. My reading and understanding of feminism and gender studies was limited to the French theorists I read during my post-graduation days. I had a faint idea of something like `the Third Wave' of Feminism.But only after joining the MS University, thanks to my colleagues like Dr Deeptha Achar, who is an outstanding researcher in this area, and the DRS SAP programme which organized seminars,colloqiums and workshops on the questions of Identity, I got interested in the area of gender. We had find scholars like Prof Nivedita Menon and Prof Jasbir Jain in our Dept.

Besides my renewed interest in Wittgenstein enabled me to appreciate the work of theorists like Judith Butler in a new light. Just like Wittgenstein challenged the idea of ` transcendental meaning' which exists independently of speech acts or specific language use, we can challenge the idea of any such transcendental notions of gender existing independently of the specific language-event. That is gender, like most of other things, can hardly exist outside of specific performances, outside of ` language games'. This is obviously not exactly what Butler is talking about, but my way of reading her is from a Wittgensteinien perspective.

I also protest the idea that someone should be punished and discriminated against just because they are different. Difference is not a disease. There is a huge amount of variation even within the categories perceived as monoliths like ` heterosexual'. No two heterosexuals have same sexual expressions and at the same time even a single heterosexual can express herself or himself differently over a period of time or in different context. Consider what is a state termed euphemistically as `sexual dysfunction'. A person sexually dysfunctional with a particular person may function `adequately' with another. Sexual expression is inseparable from relationships ( which means it is always socially conditioned).It is in such a huge range of variation of sexual expressions, that one should locate the terms such as ` heterosexual' and ` the homosexual'. The binary terms are not really water tight compartments nor are they `homogeneous' or monolithic, There are homosexualities and there are heterosexualities.

In Indian context, homophobia most commonly manifests itself by equating homosexuality with anal penetration. People forget however, that anal sex is not limited to homosexuality but a part of common heterosexual practices too. Besides, patriarchal outlook delimits homosexuality to male sexuality and has no ways of understanding female homosexuality.
( more to come..)

The End of Higher Education in `Swarnim Gujarat'

2009-10-09T21:31:00.007+05:30

In an unprecedented move, the Govt of Gujarat has decided to implement the Sixth Pay Commission pay scale instead of the University Grants Commission( UGC) Recommended Pay Scale to the university and college teachers. This means that their salaries will be at par with bureaucrats and govt officials. In no other states has the state government flouted the UGC norms so openly and with such impunity. The move can seen as a strategic back door implementation of what is known as Common University Act, an Act apparently made to bring about uniformity in Higher Education but also to reduce `burden of higher education' by promoting privatization and commercialization of higher education. The whole game is to encourage ` Self- Finance' educational institutes and contract based appointments of the teachers and discourage granted and subsidized education. Not that anything is grievously wrong with the concept, but the problem lies in the way it is implemented. The way the State Govt took teachers for granted and penalized them is outright unjust. No other state in the country seems to follow this ` Gujarat Model'.

The roots of problem in Gujarat do not just lie in the present economic situation, but also in the politics of Mr Narendra Modi and his admirers. One of the smartest manipulators of media, Mr Modi knows that he will get admiration even if he is demonized by media and his detractors and so he uses his media generated persona to float ` airs' of various sorts. Swarnim Gujarat is one such brain child. Swarnim Gujarat or Golden Gujarat has succeeded in creating a belief that all is well in the state of Gujarat and not just that this is the Golden Period.

Gullibility is one fundamental trait on which politics all over the world survives and thrives. Gujarat is no exception. Teachers and intellectuals probably are the most gullible people in the country today. Family members of the people who died drinking illicit liquor in Ahmedabad and the family members of children killed by Tantriks in the Asharam Bapu Ashram know that there is no such thing like Swarnim Gujarat . Neither do the family members of people killed in the Post Godhra riots and various minorities buy the idea of Golden Gujarat. It is not just that insignificant and ideologically impotent political party called ` Congress' which dislikes the state under Mr Modi, it is also a fairly large number of people in the BJP who hate Modi and his coterie. With the present decision of the Govt, Mr Modi might probably lose many of his admirers among teachers and he doesn't care about it. For, as long as you have the media,you don't need any other propaganda machinery.

The best part of this crisis is it provides the much needed ` reality check' to those who live out-of-sync with present times. Teachers and academic institutions are reputed for completely being out of touch with the actual world outside and these kinds of blows bring them back to normal.

The title of this entry ` The End of Higher Education' is deliberately ambiguous. For the ` the End' can mean the final collapse and it can also mean ` the ultimate purpose' behind Higher education. This is for the second or third time I am participating in teachers agitating against the govt in my short career of 13 years. The question is, why does the society and its representatives think that higher education is dispensable and insignificant ? Why is it that if the teachers go on strike for routine administrative things like the implementation of pay commissions are not seen as creating any serious problems for society? Teachers not going to work is no big deal for society. One needs to ask why. I have seen many highly reputed educational institutions, like other institutions of the society, completely shattered and biting the dust. Most of them have become ` by the mediocre, of the mediocre and for the mediocre', where loyalty to the authorities has actually become ` merit'. Probably this is because of the large scale upheaval caused by the forces of globalization and economic liberalization which went on a rampage after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The present economic recession has brought this bull-in-the china shop machine of globalization to a grinding halt.

This moment of crisis is indeed a moment of agitation and resistance to contemporary fascism bred on omnipresent media but it is also the moment of introspection: we have to find out what is the ultimate purpose and function of higher education in very specific and concrete terms and then restructure our institutions on its basis. This is the quest for ` the true end' of Higher Education in Gujarat and probably in India too. The post-Cold war ideological vacuum, which resulted in the disappearance of critical discourses from public life, was filled up with regionalism and fanaticisms of all kinds in the past two or three decades. One of the most important functions of higher education in India today is to promote a critical form of cosmopolitanism which resists fanaticisms of Modi-Raj Thakeray and so many others politicians world over, by restoring critical spirit to its public domain. It would mean moving out of the walls of colleges and universities directly into public spaces. And given the possibilities of new medias like the internet with its social networking sites, blogs and other platforms, I think the teachers of today need to do their critical ` extension' activities on such platforms. This might mean , apart from the usual academic seminar- research publications, the teachers would do well to reach out to the places where young people really are, apart from classrooms- that is in the space opened up by the internet.

The post-colonial thinking looked at how the idea of nation was `imagined' and `constructed' in the times of print media. The post global contemporary culture has created newer ways of creating communities with the help of social networking and blogging and hence a newer way of `imagining' nation which is NOT primarily based on regional and local cultures. Globalization which people once thought would bring about the end of nation has actually resulted in newer ways of inventing nation and hence newer nations. It is in the context of this newer ways of imagining nation and culture that higher education in India and elsewhere will have to find out its true ` end'.

Of Leadership and Politics: A Gandhi Jayanti Reflection

2009-10-02T13:48:00.003+05:30

It requires a certain amount of maturity to understand Gandhi. Very often people who hate him and people who convert him into a `saint', fail to understand Gandhi. Both of them start from the wrong end- his `ideology'. Even I did the same and was cynical of him. It is so very easy to be cynical of Gandhi. It is so very difficult to understand him, but then it is so very easy to appreciate his greatness. He had only action, commitment and practice. His ideology is merely an attempt to explain what he was trying to do and hence of little consequence to him. His action was his ideology. What he was doing is crucial to us, and once we understand what he was trying to do, we realize why is one of the greatest leaders of all time.

He was trying to see how far is it possible to commit oneself completely and thoroughly to welfare of the society. He tried to become the person he was committed too by wearing clothes like him and living life like him. It is this commitment and complete sense of responsibility to his society which makes him the greatest leader ever. Understanding Gandhi will make us aware of the difference between a politician, a saint and a leader.

The politician is the person who wants power and sees responsibility as a burden. He takes up responsibility for gaining power. The leader is a person who takes up responsibility. The leader is a person who commits himself to the other. Power becomes a means for fulfilling the responsibility for the leader. A leader, because he commits does not require power because this commitment makes him powerful. A Gandhi does not require a post to be powerful. Unlike a saint who insist that you follow him, a leader dedicates himself to you. Thats why Gandhi was much more than a saint or politician.

We need Gandhi today is not because of his abstract ideas of truth, non-violence or like . We want Gandhi because we want to learn how to commit ourselves to the society we live in. To dedicate ourselves completely to others. The society we live in in the twenty first century teaches us how to be completely self-centred and non-committal, which results in extreme powerlessness of the individual.

Gandhi teaches us that we can become powerful only if we dedicate ourselves to others. We want power without responsibility, consequently we can only be weak. If we take up responsibility, we are already powerful we need not `desire power'. You don't become powerful by desiring power. It is precisely when we give it up the lust for power that we become powerful- this is the Zen of Power, this is the Koan which Gandhi personifies.