JNU:The Perversion of the Polemic
Arrey Naxalbaari.... Laaal Salaaaam...!!...Roaring voices soaring high, filling up the crowded air lanes of the red JNU sky, carrying forward the lingering legacy of the comrades of the east. As an outsider, you hear all kinds of stories about JNU, part true, part false, all romantic...guaranteed! So when you become a part of this “socially responsible university”, the first thing you do is go accosting these suave stereotypes, excitedly hoping them to be true (whether they actually are is another issue, worthy of another essay, probably longer than this one.)
So in this institution that prides itself in being the “red corner” of the national capital, with a student union that has been legendarily “anti-establishment”, the P-word assumes enticingly tempting proportions. Apart from the acclivity of its academic endeavors, the next best thing that abscises JNU from other universities of the country is its politics & the culture it has spawned over the years- revolutionary, intellectual and essentially non-violent.... while still being courageous, after all, showing black flags to the Indian prime minister requires balls, doesn’t it. In this sense, politics in JNU becomes so all-encompassing that it becomes difficult, almost impossible to understand anything on the campus in exclusivity. From belabored discussions around dhabas over chai and relaxed carefree smokes to organized debates between celebrated experts in a post-dinner capacity filled hostel mess, politics is everywhere in JNU. So much so that when you approach a girl here, you don’t ask her out for coffee straightaway (like in other places with similar emotionally demanding situations, which put to test all your communication skills). Instead, you remember Al Pacino from “scent of woman” saying “we should meet up for coffee sometime, to discuss politics” & give your best at appearing as a faithful comrade of Che, disillusioned with the unfulfilled promises of the establishment, angry with the world and most importantly, desperately in need of lady love to guide you through the blood-spilled thorny passage to the revolution. Erwing Goffman becomes your god and Marx shines brightly from behind her as your angel of redemption, with a red halo around his big hairy head. The coffee, meanwhile (or chai, as it’s JNU we are talking about) is reduced to a mere adjunct. Take a look around the campus and you will discover that canteens and dhabas are not mere eating joints. They double up as heavily-graffitied hot spots for political ideologies and discussions and also as agencies for mobilization of public opinion.
Such is the presence that politics in JNU commands in matters of students’ everyday lives. Even the professors wear their political ideologies on their proverbial sleeves. So, as you slowly get acclimatized to this politically supercharged island of confluencing ideologies, you finally have your first rendezvous with your eagerly awaited folklore-ish comrades, accoutered with their legendary jholas, kurtas and left-aligned rings of cigarette smoke. Divided on ideological lines of radical and liberal “leftism”, each of these groups of debate-happy connoisseurs of communism claim themselves to be more genuinely left-oriented than the others. You also, very soon, meet the right wing and centrist “conservative” “elements”, who are, with practiced convenience, called “sanghi lumpens” by their left wing comrades. The “rightists” and “centrists” receive this nomenclature, which has been bestowed affectionately upon them by their political brethren, with amazing abjectness. Now, what’s interesting here is that unlike most other universities in India, where the left struggles for an also-ran status, here in JNU, its the other ideological groups that play this part, surviving on mere “leftovers”.
So, while the left is forever trying to bring to light the blatant bigotry & the ever-absconding position of the right wing bugaboos on major political and campus related issues at the same time condemning their jaded calls for jingoism, the right, in its own largely unnoticeable & garishly grandiloquent gimmicks, attempts to bring out the romanticized hypocrisy and the abstruse ideological claims of the left. Hypocrisy, did one say? Well, you got to be careful mate, for this is the last bastion of the socialism in India, gloriously upholding the ideals of Marx, Lenin and Bhagat Singh, with the last name bearing ideological claims of both the left and the right. Anyways, it should not be forgotten that our comrades here, abhor all forms of hedonism and stand up against the naked narcissism of the bourgeoisie. So what if their cigarette expenses exceed the minimum daily wages of the workers they are fighting for? Come on, we are all answerable to our mortal bodies and their demands of immediate gratification and therefore are tempted to...or rather bound to fulfill our duties towards them by indulging in occasional pleasure “trips”. Even comrade Che smoked fine Habanos cigars, which by no means imply that he did not fight for the rights of his comrades. So treading his footsteps faithfully, our comrades here in JNU too, by acrimoniously attacking the governmental policies actuated by capitalist transformation, fight for the common good of the brotherhood...err.... and also of the sisterhood (careful mate; you don’t want to offend your rapidly-increasing-in-number-everyday feminist friends, do you?) Whoa! JNU is a politically charged place demanding political correctness all the time and you cant dare to be politically incorrect, even if it means incorporating a break in the flow of the passage on account of grammatical inconsistencies due to unnecessary ideological accommodation.
Color, comrades, is another inalienable aspect of the student politics of our great institution, with two hues varying in saturation, battling for supremacy. Now hold your horses & for once, don’t read between the lines, for its not racism that is being talked here, its just color, plain and simple. So the campus politics and affiliations are clearly defined on the colored lines of RED and SAFFRON, each trying to prove itself as the identifying hue of JNU. So there are shouts of “ bhagwa hai bhai bhagwa hai, JNU bhagwa hai” by the right wing patriots and “laal hai bhai laal hai, JNU laal hai” by the leftists. Now, even within the comrade camp, there is a fight over which group represents the true red. So, we hear shouts of, “jab asli laal lehrayega, toh hosh thikane ayega” and finally there are the unnoticed wails of the centrists and other groups who fill in by vouching for the tricolor. See how important color is?
Come election time and the entire campus transforms itself into a politically charged landmine-zone. Any kind of political incorrectness implies tripping over (sometimes over mines you set yourself) and thereby, voluntarily or involuntarily, though successfully in either case, inviting acrid controversies and unparalleled street credit, leading to overnight celeb-status to some and instant labeling as a killjoy onto some others. There is surprising warmth in everyday interaction and every other person seems like your best friend, especially those who come seeking your honored support to their cause. Election Committee members, who constitute of faces seldom known to people otherwise, command faithful avoidance and cosmetic respect, for they will be the ones required to manage all the chaos and pandemonium in the various GBMs and during the polling sessions and then stay up two nights and one day, locked inside the exciting interiors of the School of International Studies, counting and recounting votes. Their repeated demands to the Vice Chancellor for the deployment of EVMs have been religiously opposed by the union, for EVMs would reduce the time (read: days) required for counting and thus the counting extravaganza, spread over two nights and a day, would be reduced to a few hours, in the process, ending all the razzmatazz going on in the all-day, all-night bivouacs of various political organizations. The campus territory, meanwhile, becomes an agglomeration of pamphlets and posters of contesting candidates, efficiently covering every corner, every alcove of the campus, hardly leaving any space, even on the ground, unutilized. Adroit utilization of resources, you see. And in the cacophony of various ideological slogans, the concerns of some sections of students about environmental pollution and paper-wastage seem too insignificant to be considered. Moral of the story: politics is the religion of JNU and the Student Union Election is its annual festival, which needs to be celebrated in all its glory, without caring about petty financial, environmental and other related issues.
A final word of caution before we part amigos. Walking around the campus, when you hear gut-wrenching slogans of JNUSU “maachh-O, maachh-O” don’t just succumb to the innocent perversions of your naive mind and the phonetic comparisons it’s forcing you to make with similar sounding expressions of uncensored anger. Don’t start retreating, predicting a violent riot; look closer...for all our politically supercharged friends are doing is urging you, as members of the JNUSU, to “march-on, march-on!” You get the drift, right?
P.S. Word’s around that a new political outfit is making its presence felt around the campus. It’s called the FTG; the acronym, true to the democratic traditions of JNU, is open to subjective interpretation. For The Good, Fight The Goons, Fire The Guards, Fuck The Guerillas, are some of expressions floating around.... take your pick!
Mahim P. Singh
JNU
Saturday, July 07, 2007
THE DIALOGUE
The small room seemed less like a place of human residence and more like an agglomeration of books and CDs spread all over the floor and some makeshift racks, with a computer claiming its own little territory shared with unwilling helplessness between a dusty old table and itself, playing “down to the waterline” from Dire Straits through two cheesy speakers with unaccomplished perfection, vainly trying to fill up the deafening silence suspended between the only two visible carbon-based life forms, of mentionable significance, in the room. And as they lay on the single bed, in the after hours of the lazy winter afternoon of January, she graffittying his chest with her bare fingers and he stroking her face with the back of his hand, simultaneously lighting up the last cigarette from the big red pack of Dunhill, trying to fix up the arduous uncertainties of the day, he suddenly spoke, disturbing the careening ballet of white smoke, breaking the ennui enveloping the smoke filled room, that both parties shared with mutual comfort.
“Do you think suicide-bombers are brave people?”
“What?” She realized the initiation of a dialogue.
“Do you think/believe/feel that the act (s) committed by suicide-bombers are those of bravery? Or courage?” He said, stressing on certain words.
“ Which ones? I mean there are so many of them...Arabs, Sri Lankan...even Indians...which ones are you talking about?” she replied with an obvious lack of interest.
“I don’t know. Come on. You don’t have to knead into it. Just answer the fucking question, will you? If you remember it!” His irritation was apparent.
“Well...no! Absolutely not; its utter brazenness. I mean you’re marching into certain death” She was still not seriously engaged into the conversation.
“Yeah? What about the soldiers fighting under the Rajputs? Or the Sikhs? Or the Japanese during the Second World War? Or the Marathas & Tipu Sultan against the British? An insignificant handful of them fighting for territories, which did not even belong to them in the first place, ramming head-on into forces much larger than theirs. But we prefer to call it courage. I mean, they marched into certain death too. But we heroicize all those ill-planned endeavors of eccentric emperors. We don’t...”
“...Oh come on! It’s not even the same thing. Those armies, those soldiers had a cause to defend. They fought to ensure safe existence for societies, which they belonged to. What you are doing is taking one thing and calling it another.”
“ & What you are doing is euphemizing the brazenness of a section of favored individuals or groups by calling it courage, when it can be easily established that their characterization, or attribution, as I would like to call it, was just the outcome of a series of convincingly-fed historical accidents by the media, which we accepted with compromised convenience as true acts of unbridled glory.”
“Well, you can say that with the benefit of retrospect on your side. To me, these so called Suicide-Bombers of yours are religious fanatics, shamelessly brandishing irrationally raucous recalcitrance, fuelled by constant indoctrination and brainwashing by shady ideologues; self-proclaimed messiahs of mankind, who place their hollow religious claims over and above everything else. They don’t give two fucks about education, economic development, unemployment or any other indicator of human development.”
“That’s where you give in to the temptations of conjecture and resort to the employment of convenient mental categories, which the society has been feeding you with, and decide to assume things and ideas whose validity or even existence is questionable, as it remains unsubstantiated by the lack of empirical evidence. Cognitive economy, you see! How can you just decide, single handedly, all by yourself, that “those people” are indoctrinated with venomous fanaticism by vested interests. What makes you declare with such conviction that they are “brainwashed” and not genuine believers in their actions? Just by this simplistic and conjectural assumption you can’t decide, they are wrong. Don’t you know that we humans have this irritatingly uncanny ability to justify our actions, no matter how offensive they are to others? Go ask “those people”, they will give you a thousand reasons why they do what they do and to your uncomfortable surprise they will all manage to convince you. They can justify their so-called fanaticism just as well as you and me can justify the selfishness behind our occasional altruism. So don’t brand their actions as wrong, just because you think they are wrong.”
“Well, it’s not about justification. Just because something is justifiable, doesn’t necessarily mean its “right.” So when you make love to me and leave your lingering aroma all over my soul, even after all your aggressive ways, I feel indulged in pleasure. But when a stranger does it without my consent, I’d call it rape. That the rapist would anyhow justify it, doesn’t make it right. Although the acts are similar, their meaning and consequences to the other person make them polar opposites, one epitomized as the meeting of souls, worthy of extravagant nomenclatures and divine comparisons, the other despised as a manifestation of basal instinct, a lack of respect and compassion towards the other person and the abasement of that blissful interaction of two consenting bodies, reveling in each other’s warm embrace, which we often, with nonchalant convenience call “fucking”, which again makes the same process sound cheap and animalistic. Morover, on another plane, its a violation of and contradiction to the accepted norms and ideals of the collectivity. So at this level, it’s about the collective conscience; what the collectivity considers wrong or extreme.”
“I don’t know. The example you give makes your argument sound believable, but nevertheless renders it ineffective when viewed through a macro-perspective, by being extremely specific and over-inductive. Morover, what you call respect and adherence to the collective conscience, I call institutionalized passive conformism. So Arabs are terrorists, Israelis are not, just because the they’re backed by the US, even though they may have been constantly acting in ways that have doomed millions of innocent Palestinians to a life plagued by a perpetual fear of impending death and terror.”
.........to be contd.
mahim
The small room seemed less like a place of human residence and more like an agglomeration of books and CDs spread all over the floor and some makeshift racks, with a computer claiming its own little territory shared with unwilling helplessness between a dusty old table and itself, playing “down to the waterline” from Dire Straits through two cheesy speakers with unaccomplished perfection, vainly trying to fill up the deafening silence suspended between the only two visible carbon-based life forms, of mentionable significance, in the room. And as they lay on the single bed, in the after hours of the lazy winter afternoon of January, she graffittying his chest with her bare fingers and he stroking her face with the back of his hand, simultaneously lighting up the last cigarette from the big red pack of Dunhill, trying to fix up the arduous uncertainties of the day, he suddenly spoke, disturbing the careening ballet of white smoke, breaking the ennui enveloping the smoke filled room, that both parties shared with mutual comfort.
“Do you think suicide-bombers are brave people?”
“What?” She realized the initiation of a dialogue.
“Do you think/believe/feel that the act (s) committed by suicide-bombers are those of bravery? Or courage?” He said, stressing on certain words.
“ Which ones? I mean there are so many of them...Arabs, Sri Lankan...even Indians...which ones are you talking about?” she replied with an obvious lack of interest.
“I don’t know. Come on. You don’t have to knead into it. Just answer the fucking question, will you? If you remember it!” His irritation was apparent.
“Well...no! Absolutely not; its utter brazenness. I mean you’re marching into certain death” She was still not seriously engaged into the conversation.
“Yeah? What about the soldiers fighting under the Rajputs? Or the Sikhs? Or the Japanese during the Second World War? Or the Marathas & Tipu Sultan against the British? An insignificant handful of them fighting for territories, which did not even belong to them in the first place, ramming head-on into forces much larger than theirs. But we prefer to call it courage. I mean, they marched into certain death too. But we heroicize all those ill-planned endeavors of eccentric emperors. We don’t...”
“...Oh come on! It’s not even the same thing. Those armies, those soldiers had a cause to defend. They fought to ensure safe existence for societies, which they belonged to. What you are doing is taking one thing and calling it another.”
“ & What you are doing is euphemizing the brazenness of a section of favored individuals or groups by calling it courage, when it can be easily established that their characterization, or attribution, as I would like to call it, was just the outcome of a series of convincingly-fed historical accidents by the media, which we accepted with compromised convenience as true acts of unbridled glory.”
“Well, you can say that with the benefit of retrospect on your side. To me, these so called Suicide-Bombers of yours are religious fanatics, shamelessly brandishing irrationally raucous recalcitrance, fuelled by constant indoctrination and brainwashing by shady ideologues; self-proclaimed messiahs of mankind, who place their hollow religious claims over and above everything else. They don’t give two fucks about education, economic development, unemployment or any other indicator of human development.”
“That’s where you give in to the temptations of conjecture and resort to the employment of convenient mental categories, which the society has been feeding you with, and decide to assume things and ideas whose validity or even existence is questionable, as it remains unsubstantiated by the lack of empirical evidence. Cognitive economy, you see! How can you just decide, single handedly, all by yourself, that “those people” are indoctrinated with venomous fanaticism by vested interests. What makes you declare with such conviction that they are “brainwashed” and not genuine believers in their actions? Just by this simplistic and conjectural assumption you can’t decide, they are wrong. Don’t you know that we humans have this irritatingly uncanny ability to justify our actions, no matter how offensive they are to others? Go ask “those people”, they will give you a thousand reasons why they do what they do and to your uncomfortable surprise they will all manage to convince you. They can justify their so-called fanaticism just as well as you and me can justify the selfishness behind our occasional altruism. So don’t brand their actions as wrong, just because you think they are wrong.”
“Well, it’s not about justification. Just because something is justifiable, doesn’t necessarily mean its “right.” So when you make love to me and leave your lingering aroma all over my soul, even after all your aggressive ways, I feel indulged in pleasure. But when a stranger does it without my consent, I’d call it rape. That the rapist would anyhow justify it, doesn’t make it right. Although the acts are similar, their meaning and consequences to the other person make them polar opposites, one epitomized as the meeting of souls, worthy of extravagant nomenclatures and divine comparisons, the other despised as a manifestation of basal instinct, a lack of respect and compassion towards the other person and the abasement of that blissful interaction of two consenting bodies, reveling in each other’s warm embrace, which we often, with nonchalant convenience call “fucking”, which again makes the same process sound cheap and animalistic. Morover, on another plane, its a violation of and contradiction to the accepted norms and ideals of the collectivity. So at this level, it’s about the collective conscience; what the collectivity considers wrong or extreme.”
“I don’t know. The example you give makes your argument sound believable, but nevertheless renders it ineffective when viewed through a macro-perspective, by being extremely specific and over-inductive. Morover, what you call respect and adherence to the collective conscience, I call institutionalized passive conformism. So Arabs are terrorists, Israelis are not, just because the they’re backed by the US, even though they may have been constantly acting in ways that have doomed millions of innocent Palestinians to a life plagued by a perpetual fear of impending death and terror.”
.........to be contd.
mahim
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
