My interview with Narendra Modi- Chief Minister of Gujarat

Some years ago, I was having dinner at La Porte des Indes with an old classmate of mine whose family hail from Gujarat. Like many Ugandan Asians who settled in England in the early '70's, my friend, though, by his own admission, an expert investor in various high value projects mushrooming in the State, displayed a lamentable ignorance of Chief Minister Narendra Modi's complicity in the anti-Muslim riots of 2002.
Trying to shake him out of his complacency, I mentioned some of the atrocities that had been uncovered by N.G.O's and Citizen Rights groups which I'd read about in respected National newspapers and, on my visits to India, also seen discussed on the highly rated N.D.T.V channel.
My friend remained skeptical, not to say cynical, about my sources. To speak plainly, he simply couldn't believe that the incidents I recounted- all too gory to be set down here- had really happened- especially as he had been visiting his ancestral town, in Saurashtra, at the time and witnessed nothing untoward. I explained that I too had been unaware of the terrible atrocities being committed against the Sikhs in 1984, though I was living in New Delhi.

Heedless of my arguments, he dismissed me as a credulous fool- duped by the Leftists in the Media.
Quite naturally, I took umbrage, and, heated words having been exchanged, our relationship cooled, so much so that I no longer felt able, in India that winter, to take advantage of his generous offer to let his own broker manage my portfolio there.

Sometime later, he contacted me in a much mollified mood- I think it was the Visa ban on Modi that finally convinced him that, perhaps, Modi had a case to answer- thus conceding that it was he rather than I who had 'swallowed the party line'. By way of reparation, he arranged an interview for me with the Chief Minister.

Since I am not a journalist but a poet (that too of a cerebral, hermetic type) it crossed my mind that the intention was to pull the wool over my eyes and get me to put my name to what would in effect be a whitewash.

For this reason, though I did conduct an interview- I made it clear that I would publish nothing in the way of exculpation, but, rather, give the Chief Minister a chance to make a clean breast of things.

Modiji, whatever else you might say about him, is an astute judge of men. I say this because, firstly, he very courteously chose to speak to me in English rather than Hindi- thus appearing to cede me the 'home court' advantage and deflect any 'anti Hindi' animosity I- self-evidently Tamil in accent and complexion- might subconsciously subscribe to.
Secondly, he harped on his humble background and the fact that far from profiting from his office, he hadn't even been able to build a house for himself.

In this way Modiji hoped to elicit my sympathy and escaped a grilling on substantive issues.

I must say Modiji appeared much younger than his age. They say the camera adds 10 kg, and this was certainly the case with him.

However, I felt he overplayed his hand somewhat.

I am aware that people might make the same criticism of Mahatma Gandhi. I suppose there was an element of showmanship in the 'half naked fakir', accompanied by his milch goat and spinning wheel, mounting the stairs of Buckingham Palace for an audience with the King Emperor. However, Gandhiji's showmanship had a basis in reality. Modi, on the other hand, was simply 'milking it' by presenting himself as an illegal immigrant (because of the Visa ban) smuggled into the U.K on a refrigerated lorry and now having to work at less than minimum wage in a Bangladeshi restaurant. Most galling of all, for a member of the R.S.S, was that he was obliged to use a Muslim name- Abdul Haq- and cook meat and serve alcohol.

There was a sort of poetic Justice to his predicament and I'd have been quite justified to let the fellow rot there in that second rate Curry house- but there is a softer side to us old L.S.E alumni and so, sternly admonishing him not to repeat that Godhra thing, I did advance him the balance he needed to buy an air ticket home, in return for one trifling favor.
You see, as a Hindu poet, I have always wanted to recite my sonnet on the Somnath temple within the sacred precinct itself. Modi hummed and hawed but, prodded by my friend, finally gave in. He made one stipulation which showed the theatrical flair and genius for choreographing public spectacle he shared with Adolf Hitler. His notion was that I should costume myself as Mahmud of Ghazni- the Eleventh Century Afghan warlord- and rush upon the holy temple, declaring my intention to raze it to the ground before proceeding to deal similarly with the Narmada dam.
Modi explained that people would be incensed and a large crowd soon assemble. However, before anything untoward could occur, by a prearranged signal, the Purohits of the Temple would issue forth to plead with me to spare the Holy fane. Meanwhile, representatives of the Media would have had a chance to rush to the spot. Once the T.V cameras were properly set up and boom mikes extended, the time would be ripe to throw off my disguise and recite my sublime composition.

I agreed to Modiji's stipulation, not from any desire to bask in the limelight, but because it pointed a way to symbolically heal a thousand year old wound and restore brotherly feeling between Hindus and Muslims not just in Gujarat but throughout India.
The Chief Minister heartily endorsed my sentiment before scuttling back to his waiterly tasks of clearing tables and sweeping up poppadom pieces.
My friend, who had some private business with Modiji- returning from the toilet, I'd glimpsed the Chief Minister slipping him the greater part of the money I'd handed over for the air ticket- was firmly of the opinion that my Somnath poem had already attained that proverbial 'sublimity beyond self-sodomy' (appan ki khud gaand marne se zor intikhabiyat) and urged me to make my pilgrimage without delay.

However, I am a perfectionist. In the intervening years, my poem on Somnath has both expanded both in scope and sphincteral venturesomeness of style. I think my magnum opus is virtually complete. Soon, I shall set off for Gujarat. The one thing about Modi everybody agrees on is that he always keeps his word. There is no red tape. All I need to do is tip off my friend and then, like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky, appear suddenly at Somnath changing, not literary history merely, but also political history, nay! say rather the history of Spirituality! Man's Destiny on Earth! and, be it but in that moment only, the very destiny of Time...

The moral of this story, for my young readers, is that though you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers, still where reportage is based on responsible N.G.O and Academic sources, then great benefits may flow from keeping oneself properly informed.
Jai Hind!

Altruism- what is it and how can we get it to go away?

I think it was W.D. Hamilton- not the equation guy but every other W.D. Hamilton that ever existed- who noticed, as we all do, that the more closely someone is related to you the more they want to freeload off you, talk shite to you and generally fuck with your mind. This is called altruism. The same goes for anyone who works for an organization which insists its drones add Father/Brother or Mother/Sister as a prefix to their names.

The more general question is why big words like altruism squint up at repellent, up their own arse, eggheads with the eyes of an enamored but inexpert blow job delivery system while remaining the dazzling debutante who blanks the doormen and limo drivers and bouncers who, obsequiously securing her privileged status, seed but her rectum.

Why the Autism/Psychosis spectrum fails.

W.D. Hamilton thought humanity was roughly divided into people concerned with other people- the florid psychotic representing one extreme- and people concerned with things- with the autistic savant at the the other end of the spectrum.
Of course, any binary opposition can be used to construct a continuum- for e.g cat people vs. dog people- but the same thing can be done with a single
signifier, e.g. buggering a Brummie. Everybody falls along a continuum defined by their tropism, under circumstances of equal endowment, to bugger the said Brummie. However, this continuum describes a boustropheodonic time-path because the subject with least tropism to bugger the Brummie at time t is precisely the person most deeply up said Brummie's arse in the previous period. (Making the entirely reasonable assumption that Brummies feed exclusively on highly spiced Balti curries.)
Now rates of 'tunneling' through the continuum for any individual will differ considerably and thus the instrumental cognitive or heuristic benefit of retaining the continuum is likely to be low.
True, one can create an ideal of the continuum to exclude this cyclicity but such ideals are not robust to small changes in the specification of exclusion.
For this reason, the autism/schizophrenia dichotomy fails quite independently of the success or failure of scientific hypotheses re. imprinting.

Killing cows and Quantum Karma- Temple Grandin and Christopher Badcock

Temple Grandin suffers from autism. Unable to have close emotional ties with other people, she uses her great intellectual gifts to re-design slaughter houses, making them more efficient and profitable for their operators, but only so as to minimise the pain and suffering of the cows in their last moments of life.

She has a theory of karma based on Quantum theory.-
'Doing something bad, like mistreating an animal, could have dire consequences. An entangled subatomic particle could get me. I would never even know it, but the steering linkage in my car could break if it contained the mate to a particle I disturbed by doing something bad. To many people this belief may be irrational, but to my logical mind it supplies an idea of order and justice to the world.
‘My belief in quantum theory was reinforced by a series of electrical outages and equipment breakdowns that occurred when I visited slaughter plants where cattle and pigs were being abused. The first time it happened, the main power transformer blew up as I drove up the driveway. Several other times a main power panel burned up and shut down the plant. In another case, the main chain conveyor broke while the plant manager screamed obscenities at me during an equipment startup. He was angry because full production was not attained in the first five minutes. Was it just chance, or did bad karma start a resonance in an entangled pair of subatomic particles within the wiring or steel? These were all weird breakdowns of things that usually never break. It could be just random chance, or it could be some sort of cosmic consciousness of God.
“Many neuroscientists scoff at the idea that neurons would obey quantum theory instead of old everyday Newtonian physics. The physicist Roger Penrose, in his book the Shadows of the Mind, and Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a Tucson physician, state that movement of single electrons within the microtubules of the brain can turn off consciousness while allowing the rest of the brain to function. If quantum theory really is involved in controlling consciousness, this would provide a scientific basis for the idea that when a person or animal dies, an energy pattern of vibrating entangled particles would remain. I believe that if souls exist in humans, they also exist in animals, because the basic structure of the brain is the same. It is possible that humans have greater amounts of soul because they have more microtubules where single electrons could dance, according to the rules of quantum theory.
“However, there is one thing that completely separates people from animals. It is not language or war or toolmaking; it is long-term altruism. During a famine in Russia, for example, scientists guarded the seed bank of plant genetics so that future generations would have the benefits of genetic diversity in food crops. For the benefit of others, they allowed themselves to starve to death in a lab filled with grain. No animal would do this. Altruism exists in animals, but not to this degree. Every time I park my car near the National USDA Seed Storage Lab at Colorado State University, I think that protecting the contents of this building is what separates us from animals.”

This is a strange statement for a scientist to make! The work of Price, Hamilton & Maynard Smith does not rule out animals behaving in a manner consistent with what she would term 'long term altruism'- indeed, it is a statistical certainty that some animals did do and still do so. It just isn't an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, that's all, and so over time (as random shocks even out) genes dictating such behavior would be bred out of the population. Temple is world famous as the woman 'who knows how cows think'- as for herself, if any organism can truly think, if any organism truly acts autonomously upon moral grounds, rather than being the meat puppet of some selfish gene- then it is she much more than an ordinary bloke like me.
She goes on to write
“I do not believe that my profession is morally wrong. Slaughtering is not wrong, but I do feel very strongly about treating animals humanely and with respect. I've devoted my life to reforming and improving the livestock industry. Still, it is a sobering experience to have designed one of the world's most efficient killing machines. Most people don't realize that the slaughter plant is much kinder than nature. Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure. If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious. Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.'
It is an autistic trait to consider death to be something real, pain as being other than the phenomenological equivalent of a forged Doctor's prescription for Medical Marijuana?
Temple describes how she recovered her faith- which she had lost when, as a publicity stunt, she swam in a cattle dip full of dangerous chemicals
“When the combination of organophosphate poisoning and antidepressant drugs dampened my religious emotions, I became a kind of drudge who was capable of turning out mountains of work. Taking the medication had no effect on my ability to design equipment, but the fervor was gone. I just cranked out the drawings as if I were a computer being turned on and off. It was this experience that convinced me that life and work have to be infused with meaning, but it wasn't until three years ago, when I was hired to tear out a shackle hoist system, that my religious feelings were renewed.'
'It was going to be a hot Memorial Day weekend, and I was not looking forward to going to the new equipment startup. I thought it would be pure drudgery. The kosher restraint chute was not very interesting technically, and the project presented very little intellectual stimulation. It did not provide the engineering challenge of inventing and starting something totally new, like my double-rail conveyor system.
'Little did I know that during those few hot days in Alabama, old yearnings would be reawakened. I felt totally at one with the universe as I kept the animals completely calm while the rabbi performed shehita. Operating the equipment there was like being in a Zen meditational state. Time stood still, and I was totally, completely disconnected from reality. Maybe this was nirvana, the final state of being that Zen meditators seek.'

There is a notion, promoted by Prof. Baron Cohen  that autism results from an 'extreme male brain'- if so, Temple's curious choice of profession and Zen epiphany at the kosher slaughterhouse (she points out that Solomon's temple was a huge abattoir) reveals, perhaps, something of what it means to be a Man, and the type of empathy that arises as an emergent from the Male mind's relentless sytematising.
Dr. Christopher Badcock, an energetic polemicist for the Freudian theory of history in the 70's and early 80's, has developed a new theory about the relationship between autism and psychosis. He regards them as being mirror images of each other. Autism results from the dominance of paternally imprinted genes, whereas psychosis is the product of dominant maternally imprinted genes. Paternal genes have an interest in getting the mother to invest more resources in the progeny by increasing physical growth- leading to a bigger more lateralized brain- whereas the mother's genes would seek to reduce the maternal investment by inhibiting growth (in the same manner as malnutrition resulting from famine would)- leading to lower birth weight and smaller brain size.
Badcock had been seeking a way to save the Freudian theory of history by founding it upon the new Evolutionary biology. He has now accepted that Freudianism is itself a type of paranoia- a 'hyper-mentalism' of the high functioning psychotic savant.
Badcock replaces the neurosis/psychosis distinction in Freud- itself arising from the divergent economic implications of treating hypochondriac nuerotics, whose ability and willingness to pay is in inverse proportion to any real disability or deficit they suffer, and hypnochondriac psychotics whom one is paid to police- with an autism/psychosis spectrum which, once again, has a similar economic dichotomy.
This is because therapy is a scarce resource, if defined nuerotically or autistically, becoming non-rival and non-excludable (indeed, behaving like a nuisance good which is over-produced and costly to prevent oneself from consuming) from a hyper-mentalist perspective. However, the reality is that, ceteris paribus, a therapy behaves like any other oligopolistic product viz. its advertising is a nuisance good, over-supplied, and mendacious in creating a product differentiation which does not exist, ceteris paribus w.r.t goods in joint supply like pills and O.T, at the level of outcome.

In Badcock's view, Autism is hypo-mentalist, hyper-mechanistic, truthful, Male, Western (or at least not 'African')and the characteristic form of advanced, affluent, technological Society. Psychosis is hyper-mentalist (i.e. schizophrenics have more not less theory of mind) hypo-mechanistic, female, dishonest, self-deluding, African and likely to decline with rising prosperity and technological progress.
Badcock identifies himself, as well as Hamilton, as falling within the autistic side of the spectrum in precisely the manner that Freudians proudly identified themselves with the Oedipal neurotic while holding themselves aloof from the schizophrenic, who rather than (as is right and proper) secretly wanting to fuck Mum and kill Dad- hoped to get pregnant by God the Father with the unfortunate consequence of founding Religions like Christianity and Hinduism.
Badcock contrasts Temple Grandin's Quantum Karma with Rupert Sheldrake's notion of morphic resonance. Sheldrake, like Jung, is pointing to a direct connection, an entanglement, between minds. Grandin refers only to an entanglement at the level of quantum particles. Thus, Grandin's thought is still Scientific, Western, and Male while Sheldrake (who spent some time in India) is Mentalistic and Female.

Grandin's thought is founded upon the ontological primacy of pain and death and gains peace from the contemplation of the properly conducted sacrifice of an ever moving conveyor belt of cows. Sheldrake's mentalism, at least potentially, can rise above pain and death because if minds are directly connected to minds then they have an avenue of escape from the contingencies imposed by embodiment in a meat-suit.
Notice that a Sheldrake type hyper-mentalism solves things like the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition', the Girardian problem of 'mimetic desire', or the Satrean problem of scarcity as mediating the relationship of man and man. Briefly, mentalism, denying the mediation of things, permits full and non-rival appropriation of the other as well as altruistic self offering immune from one's own sacrifice- whether as food or pharmakos.
Thinking good thoughts is the duty that Sheldrake type hyper-mentalism requires of us as a society. Improving slaughter houses is Grandin's autistic hypo-mentalistic categorical imperative for the individual.
Thankfully, in these Humanity's latter days, the lion will lie down with the lamb- thinking good thoughts is a 'farz-e-kifayya'- a communal duty which can be delegated to autonomous, hypo-mentalist technogeeks devising swifter and more silent conveyor belts to humanitarian guillotines.

Except, biology tells us this is shite. Pain and Death are incidental and ephemeral, Sex and Morphology- Love and Beauty are fundamental and abiding.

I say nothing against nuerotic or autistic people- though I lack the brilliance and civilizationally vanguard role attributed to them. But, the truth is pain and death aren't worth worrying about. That Life goes on, remains, I need hardly say a nightmare from which none awake.

Origin of the phrase 'Think small, bugger De Gaulle'

What is the origin of the expression- 'Think small, bugger De Gaulle"?

I am editing a book about Soho street-life from the 1950's to the 1970's. I believe the expression 'Think big cobble a pig" is of Lancashire dialect origin (cobble- 'prepare as a sweet-meat') . However 'think small bugger De Gaulle' must date from the second world war at the earliest when the rumour was put about that the great French leader had no anus.
Is this usage still current? What was it's geographical spread? Grateful for any help on this one.

• 2 years ago

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by windwhee...

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January 11, 2008

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There are several variants on the expression- 'think big, gobble a pig" (not cobble- there may be some confusion with the word 'cobbler' as in apple cobbler- which is not a Lancashire specialty) 'Think small, swallow f**k all"
Milder forms of this expression were used to topical effect on BBC Radio's ITMA ('It's that man again!') during rationing and gained currency amongst certain sections of the gay community. The reference to De Gaulle in your post is misleading as recent research has shown that De Gaulle's propaganda machine- whatever its other faults- did not in fact deny the existence of the General's anus but merely advanced theoretical arguments tending to show that it was vanishingly, or asymptotically, small.

Source(s):

For the influence of Bourbaki on the De Gaulle anus discussion see
'Critique of Post Colonial Reason'
by Gayatri Spivak Chakroborty

• 2 years ago

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Delicacy of thought or meaning-creative? Ghalib ghazal 28

Conisder Ghalib's ghazal 28. 

qat̤rah-e mai baskih ḥairat se nafas-parvar huʾā 
ḳhat̤t̤-e jām-e mai sarāsar rishtah-e gauhar huʾā

                                     iʿtibār-e ʿishq kī ḳhānah-ḳharābī dekhnā
                ġhair ne kī āh lekin vuh ḳhafā mujh par huʾā

Ghalib himself, and Faruqi Sahib concurs, thought this had delicacy of thought but little 'meaning creation'.

Yet the verse seems singularly rich in its associations- viz.

1) breath control as the foundation of all Hesychastic/Sufi/ Yogic/Tao Meditation techniques
2) such breath control being associated via hairath with Bedil's mot theme of hairat-e-aainah thus bringing in the mirror (so fundamental to all Theistic mystical traditions)
3) the drop (microcosm) as attaining this breath control in the mirror of amazement
4) the abolition of time- kshanika vada 'doctrine of momentariness'- which is hugely important to rescue Theodicy from silly Heavens and Hells or the idiocy of karma. But this kshanika vada is also the source of great beauty in poetry and painting
5) the wine glass's foam turning into 'Indra's net of pearls' pointing to the radical interconnectedness of the cosmos.

But that's just to start with, then there is 

1) the wine cup as shaped by the absence of the breast. This links with the (Jungian) notion of the krater/crater as the topos of prophesy

2) wine's foam as the areolae of the absent nipple.

 The krater concretizes the cire perdue of the breast pointing to wine as the mother's milk of prophesy- not petition, not pedagogy-, and the Saqi as Shiduri, the Sumerian Goddess of Wisdom in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who- from behind her veils- presides at the Tavern at the end of what but in the world resides- these are all Jungian archetypes at the foundation of any tradition of khamriyat- all the better in Ghalib's case for operating at the unconscious level.
The elision of mention of the Cup bearer's beauty as occasioning the wine drop's amazement, which appears to lie at the root of some of the commentators complaint against the couplet, is not a defect for Ghalib is not relying on this aetiology. Rather we have a good piece of observational poetry- something universal which any drinker could compose no matter what their cultural background- viz. the wine drop motionless (its upward momentum from the drinker's last quaffing canceling out the force of gravity) above the face of the beaded wine foam from whence it came, holding its breath in awe.
The innocence of the erotic meaning arises from the reverential treatment of the areolae, the hypnotic stasis its sight induces- the freezing of the moment characteristic of first love.'

Anyway, this is my 'transcreation' of Ghazal 28 from the Divan.

{28,1}

Breathless, atremble, the wine drop, forgetting Time's lips to wet

Reflects the cup's foaming areolae as Tvashtr' s pearly net 

To Faith, Love's home wrecker, for her angry breast, in debt

That, for some stranger's sigh, I she'll yet fry, Ghalib bet!

'Here my addition to the elided breast/krater conceit, is angry breast/heated kar'hai (wok) full of bubbling oil.

My point is that for a 19 year old poet, the mazmun- 'breast equals the absence that the wine cup encloses and defines' can quickly go on to the next wonderful thing associated with people who possess breasts (not that my own flabby 'moobs' (Man-boobs)  can't pertly fill a champagne glass) namely their command over the kar'hai in which they fry you cheese pakoras with plenty of minced ginger and green chili. God, my mouth is watering.'
The reason it has to be Tvashtr's (rather than Indra's) net of pearls is explained thus-
"Obviously, it can't be Indra's net of pearls- it has to be the artificer Tvashtar (the Indian Vulcan) coz of the whole thing with Vrtra- wine as the dragon (with whom al Hallaj drank in summer) slayed by the wine bibbing thunderbolt God- and the connection with the krater/ crater.
Also, I want to introduce the notion of 'Ghalib's bet' as being like 'Pascal's wager' except obviously- Ghalib (like Tulsi Das) is betting higher than existence, higher than imaginal Hells and Heavens- hence his choice of takhallus."

Why my Mum loved John Inman

I never understood my Mum's fascination with the actor John Inman, in 'Are you being served'- a British sit-com of the late 70's.
I was only 14 and just off the plane from Delhi. I found idiomatic British English a little hard to follow. Moreover, I guess I was pretty naive.
My mother was normally very good about explaining things to me in a frank and open fashion. But, no matter how often I asked, she could never explain to me why she found the John Inman character so fascinating.
At the time, I put it down to menopause but thinking about it recently, I now understand something about Inman, or perhaps I should say I understand something about my Mother- or, rather, I understand the nature of certain oppressive features of the Mass Media as masking Gramscian hegemony- or, since, one can understand nothing about what Society hides away until one glimpses that which one has spent one's whole lifetime hiding from oneself- I think I understand what my Mom saw in Inman, why she related to him.
You see, Inman had a secret. A secret which it would have endangered his livelihood, perhaps even his life (though no longer his personal liberty) to divulge or make public. It was a sort of open secret. But, it was a secret which, precisely for being so open, so in-your-face, could never declare itself.
Britain has changed a lot even during my own life-time. Still, it sends a sort of shiver down  my spine to realize that Inman could have been arrested for no other reason than just being what he was, even two or three years after my birth.
I have studied and taught History, in England, for more than 30 years but, thinking about my Mom's love for John Inman makes that History come alive for me as a living force- as personal as a Hurricane with a cute girl's name- but as devastating in its impact on ordinary lives.
In 1965, the British parliament finally abolished the law regarding Negro slavery. Yet, as a blatantly black man, John Inman still had to hide his identity a dozen years later.
Mum, who was going through menopause because she couldn't do mensuration (which I was able to master after Dad engaged a Bengali Maths tutor for me) identified with Inman, the better part of whose life had been spent in fear of 'being sent down river' (to East London), because she too had lived with the fear of being discovered and exposed.

I tell myself that things have changed. This little apercu of mine has no relevance to our present age.

But is such complacency really justified?

Think about it.

That David Cameron what's just moved in at No. 10- seems so nice don't he? Mebbe a little too nice? All that Old Etonion stuff- are you really buying it? Take a closer look and what do you see- a typical French Cambodian rent-boy- and you know what they're like.