Shuka

A haggard visage in the Waitrose queue

Of one once as lovely as yet are you 

Is Beauty husbanded by such as I

Fled from the field where fond I die.

No Prophet permits Time's dispraise

In the maze of God, days are delays

  Kaala, as Krishna, Conatus forbids

& Chemosh Christ devours our kids.

The parrot's mirror wakes Heaven's Rage
Who puzzles Pillaiyar breaks Shuka's cage
Wanly I wonder at the audacity of the theft
The Morning of the World- Sun bereft

I was wondering whether Hindi 'der'- delay- as in 'Bhagwan ke ghar mein der hai andher nahin'- is from the Arabic word for Aeon used in the Hadith I mention. I suppose I could look it up. Okay, just did. It's from the Persian so I'm guessing yes. No wonder us hereditary Babus liked tying everything up in red-tape- God is the Aeon, but in Hindi the Aeon is delay.

Neo-Liberalism & Bastard Keynesianism

Neo-liberalism differs from Classical Liberalism in that it has no class basis and therefore can be indifferent to the dilemmas of Classical Liberal Political Theory. In its Anglo-American incarnation, Coase's theorem justifies eliding issues of ownership while Game theory, as developed by Nash, Aumann, Shapley, Muth, Schelling etc, justifies dropping the notion that a particular class must have a certain dominant 'virtue' or 'drive' and thus it is important to conserve that virtue or drive by promoting a certain set of values. 

In a sense, between '38 to '68, neo-liberalism could be considered a sibling of 'bastard Keynesianism' which cashed out as a type of  Aggregate Demand Management which claimed to protect foolish Workers from the consequences of their own folly- i.e. their 'money illusion', leading to downward stickiness of nominal wages, which might price them out of the market- and prevent Mass Unemployment through 'hidden' Inflation. However, Trade Union leaders did not actually suffer from money illusion and, in fact, under conditions of over-full employment, were able to increase Labour's share of National Income by increasing real, not nominal, wages. This in turn meant that the beneficial ownership of Capital passed increasingly into Labour's hands but mediated through the Institutional Investor. The Managerial Capitalism of the 50's & 60's had certainly been influenced by the War economy- Japan is the best exemplar of this- and could work within an essentially Mercantilist 'Keynesian' model. However, from '68 onwards, Institutional investors (Pension funds, Insurance companies etc) sought higher returns by seeking to break the 'divorce between ownership and control' represented by Managerialism and to release value, hidden on Corporate Balance Sheets, through 'asset stripping' and predatory Mergers & Acquisitions. Merchant Banks gained power and wealth by intermediating this process and wrested control from the Retail side of the business, which in any case faced a disintermediation problem of its own because some big Corporations could raise funds more cheaply than the Clearing Banks could themselves. This created the Wagnerian climate wherein the Managerial Class, a dragon perched upon its horde of hidden gold, colluded in its own slaying by the uncouth Siegfrieds of the Chicago School.

From 78 to 2008, neo-liberals gloried in their divorce from 'bastard Keynesianism- especially because of the 'great Moderation' of the Business Cycle- indeed, they denied any marriage had occurred- but what we now see is that the true situation was like totally China Town- neo-Liberalism needs both alimony and child-support from that Bastard Keynesianism but our prim & proper Prof. Gardiner, as is befitting a Scholar of English Literature, is far too strait-laced to come out and tell us so.

Is Sanjay Subhramanyam the ghost of Vasco da Gama?

Like me, Sanjay Subhramanyam, the author of 'Is Indian Civilization a Myth?- is a middle aged Tam Bram of repellent aspect and ludicrously half-baked views . Still, notwithstanding such epigenetic drawbacks, his ancestral heritage also included an evolving, Neurath's raft type, concept of territories where it was permissible to sojourn or settle without loss of caste- i.e. injury to the Manes & thus hysteresis related harm to the commonweal- as opposed to other territories where the matter was either doubtful or definitely reckless. The same was true for Kashmiri Kauls, Bengali Babus, Jalandhari Joshis and so on. Essentially, India has developed immunity to the idiocy of hereditary Brahmins & aleatory Shramans. We are welcome to emigrate- Mother Ind will thank us for it- but forbidden to appease the Ancestors solely by recycling witless shite in our new abode because to do so would be to become a Mephistophelian Cross Roads demon offering Faustian pacts to that new Oikumene's  Credentialist Academy or crapulous Shatter zone.

Taken together, Bhraminical notions of permissible settlement areas and peripatetic fora for prattling shite, generated a 'ship of Theseus' like notion of Indian Civilization that a plurality of Pan Indian Castes autonomously subscribed to and sustained for millennia.

Unfortunately, Sanju Baba doesn't believe that Civilizations can be like the ship of Theseus- i.e. something which abides though all its components are swapped out and replaced- rather he is the Vasco da Gama of a very different type of Ship- something which passes for Scholarship but which is actually a ghostly caravel out of 'Pirates of the Caribbean' or some other such Disneyland attraction, by a meretricious recourse to which, History professors discharge their child-minding duties at American Colleges.
The shameful aspect of it is that Sanju isn't actually a proper, Kal Penn type, stoner American Sophomore but a P.G. Woodhouse reading desi transplant. In other words, the fellow started off as a feeble & four eyed Gussie Fink-Nottle same as the rest of us.
Suppose Sanju Baba had asked his granny- 'Pati, what is Indian Civilization? Is it a myth? Did the British invent it? Or was it the Turukas? Kindly enlighten me due to I iz writing a book on the topic.'

 What would Sanju's granny have replied?

I don't know but my guess is something like- 'Shave your face you disgusting little poddiyan! Only 5 years old but already putting on such airs and graces is it? Remember the song 'not everybody with mustache is Bharati, not every beardie is Tagore.' As for your question re. Indian civilization- it is not a Myth, or Noble Lie, but a Convention- i.e. a David Lewis type solution to a Co-ordination problem which has persisted and been propagated by our own ancestors for about 2000 years- give or take.'

Sanju Baba, no doubt, would have replied 'It is not convincing to speak of an Indian Civilization that had been perfected by the Gupta era. Clearly something which hasn't been perfected can't be a Schelling focal point because ...urm... well I'm actually an Economist so I know about these things.'

Granny's riposte would be- 'Fuck you know from Econ you worthless bearded retard? It's when things aren't 'perfect, homeostatic, closed systems' that Co-ordination problems gain salience in a manner which generates the notion of a broader mechanism design univocity- i.e. a reverse 'Zomia' of 'Governability' -  or Civilizational unity, underlying what is local and particular. Since you are Indian, belong to the Brahmin caste, and are emic to Indian Civilization, it follows that it would be a singular act of filial impiety, a nihilistic act of epistemic vandalism, to pretend that Indian civilization is a myth invented by acharabrashta Nehruvians or anti-casteist Nativist nut-jobs and that India is merely a collection of demon haunted cross-roads, from which all purely primrose paths lead to Hell, and not at all the cohesive 'karma bhumi' where the fire walk of rituals faithfully performed- a duty owed your Manes- repairs a collective Ethos and restores the possibility of Cosmic apocatastasis.'

Sanju replies- 'But, Granny, some White people have said the same thing! So they must be wrong coz they iz White and don't take oil bath or eat thairr shadam.'

Granny- 'Nonsense. White people don't say anything sensible at all. Even if they do- you just kindly ignore them & wobble your head & say 'India phery hot!' till they go away. All Whiteys are either demons or Mleccha evil-doers- for whose destruction Vishnu takes misleading incarnations like Vamana, Buddha, Gandhi etc- and, unless deluded by the Kalki of Eco-Feminism- they will try to entice you either  to become a Christian and eat beef or else to grow a stinking great beard and smoke beedis and pretend to be some horrible sort of JNU jhollawallah constantly eating Gobi Manchurian at some foul smelling dhaba rather than properly tucking into thairr shadam. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.'

Sanju- 'But, Pati, my own researches have revealed that several centuries after the arrival of Vasco da Gama on Indian shores, there was no single dominant idea of India in writings by Westerners: several contradictory views existed depending on whether one wrote from Madurai or Agra, whether one was Protestant or Catholic, whether one knew Persian or Sanskrit, and so on. However, by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new homogeneity can be found in views of what India was. This picture, produced by Western Orientalists and their Indian assistants, tended to focus on Sanskrit as the true source of Indian culture (demoting Persian in the process), and there was also a search for an Indian Golden Age. Minority voices contested this view, but they were few and far between. Indian popular culture was also largely set aside in favor of an obsession with high culture.'

Granny- 'What did you expect? Ignorant White people talked different types of ignorant nonsense about India. Once some money was spent on finding out the truth- well, if not the truth, then formulating a colligationally coherent Research Program- then, naturally, by reason of a textual availability bias, Sanskrit learning and 'Margi' High Culture predominated in shaping their idea of India, the same way that the Renaissance restored Greek learning as the fountainhead of an oikumenic notion of European Christendom. 
'BTW, Persian was on its way out already because the meta-metaphorhicity of sabak-e-hindi shite exponentially increased semiotic slippage away from both Sanity and Islam's Arabic roots.
 'The bottom line is nothing sinister or indeed surprising happened to the idea of India. whether emic or etic. Textual availability cascades created Schelling focal points for the underlying colligational Co-ordination problem and so capacitance diversity got Canalised in a convergently Baldwinian manner.
'Still, that's not to say White people aint totally shit- don't marry a fucking Mleccha Mem Sahib, hear me, boy? She might mistake you for a rational human being rather than a typical Tambram idiot who requires being whacked on the head with a rolling pin from time to time. Anyway, we've got a great big, equally densely bearded, bharat natyam dancing, Sumo wrestler of a Freak Show attraction already lined up for you to marry- provided you settle down to writing Code- but, okay, re. White historians- sure, they may have improved a bit once they got Indian assistants. BUT what's important is NOBODY FUCKING CARED! Historians are shit, have zero power and also they are shit and did I mention they were totally fucking shit? I did? Well then. 
'Anyway, the British Queen- Mountbatten as he was known- slyly fucked off back to Blighty long before you were born. So just ignore them stupid cunt-queefing White Historians and concentrate on writing Code. Have regular oil bath. Eat only thairr shadam. & shave your fucking face you fucking retard! You think they'll give you a Green Card to Yemrika if you look like Osama fucking Laden you worthless shithead? '

Sanju- 'But, Pati, isn't it It is remarkable that both Indian reformers and neo-traditionalists of the 19th century bought into this view, and a strange complicity came to exist between these two apparently opposed strands?'
Granny- 'Nonsense. It isn't remarkable at all. What you say is true of all colligational availability cascades and strategic preference falsification programs which yield Credentialist rents.'
Sanju- 'But isn't it a fact that the epoch from the 12th to the 18th centuries was portrayed in dark hues, and if some felt Westernisation was the antidote to the malady, others proposed a return to the real roots of Indian civilisation?
Granny- You stupid fuckwit, don't you understand that between the 12th and 18th Century Islam was burgeoning on the sub-continent? What did you expect rent-seeking Christian & Hindu writers to do? Say "Islam is way cool. Let's all convert?' How could they say that and still draw a rent as exponents of their own Religion with a claim to obligatory passage point status within the State's interessement mechanism for Soft Power? Don't forget, this was before the Saudis got all them petro-dollars.
Sanju- Still, Pati, you have to admit, something very sinister was going on. What was this pristine culture to which a return was proposed? Carnatic music played on the violin (an 18th-century import from Europe), or dances performed to the texts of Kshetrayya that came precisely from this period!
Granny- 'Fuck off. Kindly read the Jaimini Mimamsa Sutra you fucking acharabrashta Smarta poddiyan. Substitutability is constructive of Essence. Without it, there is no Intentionality- i.e. no Yagnya, no Apurvata, no karma kanda.
'Culture can not have the quality of being 'pristine' without there having been extensive Ship of Theseus style substitution of a deliberately apocatastatic type. Otherwise it is not Culture but Noumenal Nature- not Samskar, but Samadhi- which is a totally different bag, you worthless jhollawallah cunt. 
'BTW Kshetrayya- whose biopic you watched on Doordarshan in the Seventies- died in the Seventeenth Century. How fucking ignorant and deracinated are you actually?'
Sanju- But, Pati, in north India, ultra-purists insisted that Dhrupad should be favoured over Khayal, and invented a bogus Vedic genealogy for the former, forgetting that it was heavily influenced by Mughal court culture.
Granny- Really? The Dagars forgot Mughal court culture? Suck my dick you worthless piece of shit!
Sanju- ' As for devotional religion such as we know it today in India, most of it is the product of the period from the 14th century onwards, whether in Maharashtra, Punjab or Bengal.'

Granny, 'OMG! Do you really not understand that stuff from the 15th century is gonna be based on stuff from the 14th and so on? Okay, you iz a Tambram- i.e. a fuckwit by definition. But even the stupidest drunkard of a Tambram retard knows that Tamils didn't invent Bhakti and then export it to the Bhaiyyas up North.. It's there in the Rg Veda. North Indian Riti poetry goes to a whole heap of trouble integrating Bhakti with Purva Mimamsa & Sankhya & so on. Read Tulsi you worthless shit. He's got a better sense of humor than P.G. Woodhouse- God of the Indglish speaking Tambram- keep that in mind and, babe, that fucking two lota maryada bhakta U.P bhaiyya, like he will jus' blow your mind- no kidding. Aiyayo'.
Sanju- 'Yes, well, the truth is horrible British Whiteys only got to rule over India and make us wear chaddi rather than go commando due to some White historian wrote a book which showed that Brits were so nice and Indians really liked them and I wanna be a White man, Pati! Do you think if I just let my beard overgrown my face and body and, like, if it turns silver, people will take me for a white Dorai?'
Granny- 'Taking the last part of your question first- the beard don't fool nobody. Talcum powder is the way to go. As for that shite about British historians forcing us to wear chaddi- Fuck off. White historians wrote shite which nobody read. They had no power.  Some Brits in India made money and used that money in a corrupt manner to get the British Navy and Army and so on to make them yet richer.  So long as the money train kept rolling- India was British. When it stopped the Brits did a corrupt deal with the Indian power elite and slyly fucked off.  What some fuckwit wrote, whether or not it was published or found its way into some dusty archive, is fucking irrelevant.
'The truth is, Sanju Baba, you're just as fucking stupid as Ranajit Guha! You think there was some big conspiracy just coz some White shitheads wrote some crap and some Indian shitheads, mainly Bongs, wrote similar shite. I told you already. Fuck history- only shitheads write it and fucking Right Wing Hindutva nutjob bloggers get worked up over it- just concentrate on writing Computer Code and get a proper job with INFOSYS. Don't let them fob you off with a Professorship or a History Prize or a Beard Support Grant or something of that sort. Incidentally, your notion of what 'pristine culture' ought to look like is totally fucked in the head. Don't you understand, the fact that proto-R.S.S types were peeing upstream from your own fucking bathing ghat means that you have been doing tarpana with their urine? All that time spent wanking in the library book-stacks and the Carnatic violin is all you could come up with? Fuck is wrong with you?'

Sanju- 'R.S.S Svayamsevaks are oppressing me!  I wanted to dedicate myself to English only and write Cricket stories like P.G. Woodhouse. By their occult practices, the khaki- knickerwallahs made me learn Hindi and Urdu and Persian and Arabic and other such Mleccha languages! All them fucking Chitpavans are just a bunch of crypto-Turukas, if not half-caste Whiteys! 
'I have been grossly polluted, Aiyayo! Gimme my oil bath and thairr shadam! I must perform prayaschitam! : if cultural cleansing is to start in India, we might begin by returning the khaki shorts of the R.S.S to their place of origin.'

Granny- 'But khaki shorts were invented in India. What? You think the Europeans wore khaki shorts previously? In any case, last thing we need is them RSS gerontocrats parading around in the nuddy. Chee, chee dirty boy kindly evict that owl which has taken up residence in your beard. OMG! It isn't an owl at all! It's Teesta Setalvad! Heeeeeelp!' 

Sanjay Subhramanyam- 'Ha ha ha ha! I yam the ghost of Vasco da Gama. Ha ha ha ha! I will eat the brains of Pres. Obama! Ha ha ha ha!'

Boring Road- Amitava Kumar revisits Bihar

Amitava Kumar has written a line worthy of Naipaul-
'In conversation, Leela would speak of herself as a journalist and an actress. I felt that she mistook ambition for achievement, and I began to like her less.' 
But Naipaul wrote as a foreigner, a journalist; Kumar & Mishra et al, aren't foreigners, they are Biharis. Amitava was just a few years older than Leela, he probably had relatives or colleagues who had been 'Communist Party workers' and thus it was perfectly natural for Leela to ask him for help in getting a scholarship to train as an actress. What possible 'achievement' as opposed to 'ambition' could Leela  have had as a recently married woman in her early 20's?
When Naipaul writes of 'mistaking ambition for achievement' it is within a larger framework of passing judgment on a Development model of a specific Rostovian 'Nation Building' kind. What wider framework underpins Kumar or Mishra's Naipaulian cadence? Is it the reflection that jhollawallah types in Patna are somehow even more pathetic and ludicrous than jhollawallah types at J.N.U or Ivy League?
Kumar invokes Rashomon. Why? Has this something to do with Kurosawa's own political beliefs? Or is it just that a b&w film from 1950 is the proper lens through which to view Patna because...urm... well, Bihar is just so damn backward yaar. They have just this one mall and it's located on Boring Road. Seriously. That's the name of the road. Every other alleyway and cul de sac gets renamed M.G. marg or J.P chowk, but when you have an actual great big thoroughfare called Boring road, the Biharis refuse to change its name to something more boring yet. Is it just me or do other people think mebbe them dehati bhaiyyas, with their exquisitely Buddhist sense of humor, have been laughing at us all these years?

Can 'Informed Consent' operationalize the Categorical imperative?

Can  an 'informed consent' procedure- as in Medical practice, where the Doctor has either more information than the patient, or else superior dispassion, thus creating an asymmetry which problematizes a relationist, as opposed to substantivist, Ethics - operationalize the Kantian categorical imperative? Manson & O'Neill say no, but Alasdair Maclean disagrees.

(Vide Autonomy, Informed Consent and Medical Law: A Relational Challenge,  By Alasdair Maclean)

What are the salient features of the Doctor/ Patient game w.r.t Informed Consent?
1) The Doctor, in seeking informed consent for a particular therapy, is- consciously or not-  advancing a particular Scientific Research Program (SRP) in which he has invested all of himself, or indeed borrowed more than he can ever amount to, by reason of an absolute or comparative advantage in specializing in that particular therapeutic practice. This advantage may have arisen by chance or else it might have been acquired through the arduous or aleatory travails of the Doctor's own subjective, Bayesian, trajectory evaluative of different therapies.
By enrolling the patient in a particular therapeutic regimen, a data-set is augmented which privileges the SRP the Doctor himself is professionally invested in. In other words, just by seeking informed consent, a self-regarding element has entered the equation.  To cancel it out would require the Doctor to play Devil's Advocate for alternative therapies, or the null option, at least as well as if he had an acquired, absolute or comparative advantage in each of those therapies and invested exactly the same amount of time and passion on espousing and nurturing each. 
A related point is that it may be the case that different therapies place different weightings on the components of well being and hold different opinions on what symptoms are malign or, indeed, disabling,
This being the case, the very nature of the information/disapassion asymmetry between Doctor & Patient militates for the former's heteronomy. The Kantian Doctor needn't quit Medicine- he could still sign my sick note and prescribe my Viagra- but must give up on seeking 'informed consent' as opposed to simply hanging out his shingle and touting for business like any other tradesman.
2)  The patient's choice of therapist has both a psychological and a physiological effect. It may be that there is a trade-off between short-term dysphoria and long term physiological healing such that the Quack is initially more effective than the Doctor. If the Patient's 'time preference' is an objective datum, does a Kantian Patient have a duty to consult the Quack and tell the Doctor to go hang?  Clearly, 'time preference' itself would be determined by life expectancy. However, the certainty of imminent death might lead to meta-preferences dominating the decision process in an unpredictable way.
Both the 'Doctor's dilemma' & the 'Patient's trilemma'- which relate to hysteresis effects arising from information exchange- militate for a mixed strategy or, what cashes out as the same thing, some internal psycho-drama whose output is stochastic. This means that 'informed consent' looks operationalizable but only at a macro level leaving Kantian relationism pointing mutely at Tardean mimetic heteronomy.

Ramachandra Guha's admonition to the Indglish Speaking Classes

Make Magic your sole Study now in Science we so have sinned

& Say, not Vande Mataram, but 'Hail to Mother Ind!'

That for Gandhi & for Nehru the Governess she hired

Still has lessons for us tho' Mary Poppins has retired

Nehru's affair with Allen Dulles

Everybody knows about Nehru's affair with Lady Mountbatten but what about his fling with, notorious slut & Cold War era, CIA chief Allen Dulles?
 The young Dulles had come  to Allahabad, in 1914, to teach Agronomy to horny handed Indian peasants by the time honoured method of making them memorize Shakespeare. When this occupation palled he'd drop in on the Nehru's at Anand Bhawan for a spot of R&R.
This is not to say there was any great love love lost between the Princeton graduate and the Cambridge alumnus, still, to do him justice, Dulles did admit that the young Nehru was 'a stiff fellow' which, at the end of the day, is all that really matters in affairs of that kind.
It is a damning indictment of official Pakistani historiography that it has utterly failed to highlight the manner in which Nehru's amorous proclivities led to the betrayal of the Muslim cause, first by the British, but then also  the Americans.
Former BJP stalwart, Jaswant Singh, too, can't escape censure for concealing this skeleton in the closet of Nehruvian Diplomacy.