n+1's stupidest article ever on World literature.

... in a sick, sad world, it’s hard not to be suspicious of anything as wholesome as World Literature.¹ The word literature itself has come to sound fake. Is there something the addition of world is making up for, a blemish it’s trying to conceal?

This much is clear: by the late ’90s, a new literary globalism had begun to flourish. In 1997, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, soon selling 6 million copies; in 2001, Oprah had her book club read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, an excellent 19th-century novel, published in 1995, about Indira Gandhi’s Emergency; in 2003, reading the bestselling Kite Runner, by the Afghan-born Khaled Hosseini, made some Americans feel better, and others worse, about our war over there. Literary scholars have focused on World Literature especially since 1999, when the French literary critic Pascale Casanova published her pathbreaking World Republic of Letters. In the ’00s, Franco Moretti, from Italy but resident (with Google) in Silicon Valley, instigated data-based debates about the world-system of literature in the New Left Review. 

Compare the late 1990's with the late 1890's- which featured best-selling books from India, Russia, Africa, smelly Continental dudes and America- what changed? The books n+1 mentions from the 1990's are shite. The books from the 1890's are classics- Kipling,  Tolstoy, the smelly Continental dude wot rote Quo Vadis, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Olive Schneider etc. So n+1 is simply wrong about 'a new literary globalism' beginning to flourish. Illiteracy maybe, gobar gas definitely, but not literary globalism.

N+1 thinks that vernacular language writing like that of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), is no longer possible. Thanks to the Lord's Resistance Army, perhaps this is true. But how is literary globalism at fault? The answer, of course, is that a secret cabal of top publishers and literary agents parachuted into Uganda and overthrew the military junta of Gen. Okello. Then they pretended to be Joseph Kony and recruited child soldiers to carry out massacres. 

Why is N+1 making such a ludicrous assertion? The answer is they've been reading Benedict Anderson- not the porn star but the idiot brother of the moronic Perry- 
'The spread of modern nation-states — carrying out central administration, within defined borders, of a population often linguistically defined — standardized national languages (sometimes slowly, as with Italian) and sometimes separated them (as with Swedish and Norwegian). Newspapers published in capital cities and written in the national language were decisive, as Benedict Anderson has argued, in establishing the “imagined community” of the nation-state; the same papers also published poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Literature’s audience came to be nationally constituted even where, as with the US and UK or most of Latin America, states shared a common language. Meanwhile the Bible, Koran, and Torah, no respecters of borders, dwindled in relative importance. '

India was an Empire ruled by British people. Yet, since Indian people formed real, not imagined linguistic communities, there was huge growth in vernacular language literature. Since Bengal, for example, was more stable and had a better economic base than Greece, Bengali literature developed farther and faster than demotic Greek and across an equally extensive diaspora.  Yet Greece gained Independence 110 years before Bengal. Did the Bible dwindle in importance in Greece because 'it was no respecter of borders'? No. Greeks aren't stupid. Sorry, but there it is.

N+1 tells us that ' Work addressing a smaller-than-national linguistic community — in Catalan, Kannada, or Welsh —very  rarely entered into World Literature. An exception was Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1913, who used, in Bengali, a “subnational” language spoken by tens of millions of people.'

This is nonsense. There could have been a Kannada Tagore- all you needed was a guy swanning around in robes making mystical noises and voila you have a Kannada  Khalil Ghibran or Tagore or Keyserling or Hesse or whatever.

N+1 thinks that a writer has to tackle a 'global theme' to get a global audience. Fair enough. But writing that goes global and stays global is writing which has universal appeal. This has nothing to do with how many people speak your language- Laxness is universal; I learnt my suspicion of the Co-op movement from his Icelandic saga as a 14 year old sweltering in Delhi- or whether or not your language has a nation to correspond to- many smart people were convinced that Hebrew would never match Yiddish- what matters is the dialectical concatenation of the  Revolutionary cathexis as mediated by the crepuscular prosopoi of the alimentation.

As n+1 very justly observes- 'Modern literature also emerged in an atmosphere of threatened revolution to radically reorder — or, among colonized peoples, simply establish — the nation-state. The specter of revolution haunts modern literature, from Romanticism to postcolonialism. In the later 19th century (a time of advancing mass literacy and mass agitation both), naturalism shuddered at images of rising social classes and ruined individuals. Zola in France led to Gissing in England; Dreiser, Norris, and Wharton in the US; Verga in Italy; Ibsen in Norway; and arguably to Mao Dun and Lu Xun in China. As apolitical a writer as Henry James wrote a superior novel about anarchists; and even the infamous arch-decadent slogan from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890) — “Living? Our servants will do that for us” — revealed the unstable class structure underneath l’art pour l’art.'  

Revolutions happen- there were quite a few during the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century- however Modern Literature was haunted by the specter of Revolution coz that's how ghosts work, right? You're in the kitchen and I'm in the bedroom- so you come to haunt me. I walk into the kitchen so you have to stop haunting me till you quickly step into the garden and can resume the whole haunting shtick. No. It doesn't get real old, real fast. Not at all. Why would you suggest it?
The truth is- 'An older global novel was animated by an attempt to win for fiction not only a new language and form but a role in securing an entire realm of freedom. But the political liberation failed, or was botched or betrayed; to write as if third-worldism were still a source of promise would be an especially tedious kind of cant. ' I remember that older global novel. It sat next to me on the School bus. One day it said it could get us a copy of Playboy if we all kicked in a couple of bucks. But it was lying. It didn't really have an elder brother who was prepared to sell his porn stash. Instead it was trying to raise sufficient funds to win for fiction not only a new language and form but a role in securing an entire realm of freedom. Unfortunately, even if you write a novel in a new language and form it still can't secure an entire realm of freedom because Magic don't work.  Writing books does not bring about political liberation- nor does sticking pins into voodoo dolls. Either you are already liberated and haven't noticed or you get the fuck beaten out of you till you run far far away.
Were there ever people stupid enough to believe that if the goat herders of north west Guatemala can throw off the shackles of the non goat herding majority, then the starving masses of Belgravia and Bel Air will at last breathe free? Did these very stupid people actually read novels about gay Guatemalan goat herders because they were waiting with bated breath for the denouement where Marta the lesbian goat is revealed to be an Angel of the Heavenly Anti Capitalist Revolution and her tears turn into a fountain of redemption spraying the reader with the Chrism of a muttony messiah? 
Of course.  That sort of thing was pretty routine back in the early Eighties- a period so dull that if you can remember it  you automatically qualify as a Chartered Accountant.

'Uncompromising work across the world suggests the outlines of a thorny internationalism opposed to the smoothly global. A list drawn up by a few Americans incapable, unlike the offspring imagined by Leopold in Ulysses, of “speaking five modern languages fluently” can only be drastically incomplete and tentative. Still it’s worth naming a few names: in France, the polarizing works of Marie NDiaye, with her long sentences dividing into different strains of thought; in southern Italy, the feminist novels of the reclusive Elena Ferrante, the terrifying Days of Abandonment (2002) and the quieter trilogy beginning with My Brilliant Friend(2009). In Mexico, Juan Villoro and Álvaro Enrigue place themselves at a sharp angle to the history of Latin American literature; in Argentina, Pola Oloixarac’sSavage Theories (2008) is an extremely smart novel of the Theory Generation. In Russia, the poet Kirill Medvedev’s rejection of copyright, made in response to the depredations of the Russian publishing system in the 1990s, has turned into a gesture of international significance. In China, Yan Lianke, unlike the Nobel-winning Mo Yan, has moved underground and gained in creative power. In India, a host of English-language writers from Samanth Subramanian and Tabish Khair to Roy herself and, in the vernaculars, Girish Karnad and Mahasweta Devi, have been lending their efforts to a more combative public sphere.'
Dunno about the other dudes mentioned but Girish Karnad and Mahasweta Devi are very very very old. Roy is bonkers. Tabish Khair does not exist. Samanth writes Guha stripe shite. Fuck do this bunch of cunts amount to 'thorny internationalism'? 

'A developed internationalist literature would superficially resemble the globalized World Lit of today in being read by and written for people in different countries, and in its emphasis on translation (and, better yet, on reading foreign languages). But there would be a few crucial differences. The internationalist answer to the riddle of World Lit — of its unsatisfactoriness — lies in words never associated with it. These include project, opposition, and, most embarrassingly, truth. Global Lit tends to accept as given the tastes of an international middlebrow audience; internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create the taste by which it is to be enjoyed. The difference, crudely, is between a product and a project. An internationalist literary project, whether mainly aesthetic (as for modernism) or mainly political (as for the left) or both aesthetic and political, isn’t likely to be very clearly defined, but the presence or absence of such a project will be felt in what we read, write, translate, and publish.
The project can only be one of opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and politics. Global Lit, defined more by a set of institutions than a convergence of projects, treats literature as a self-evident autonomous good, as if some standard of literary excellence could be isolated from what writers have to say and how they say it. In its toothless ecumenicalism, Global Lit necessarily lacks any oppositional project of form (as, again, international modernism did) or of content (as international socialism did); the globally literary content themselves with the notion that merely to write or read “literary” books is to enlist, aesthetically and politically, on the side of the angels. Literary excellence aside, Global Lit makes no judgments. The work it favors is in consequence often a failure on its own narrow terms, good writing being, in a word, the creation of people trying to tell the truth, however slant, rather than to produce “literature.” Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance, is more like what we have in mind.
To summarize, existing writing is shite- no argument- so you demand a new type of writing which is also shite but makes you want to eat it. 
Why? 
Will you really get your Revolution if you eat enough shit? 
No. But your Career will be made.
And that's what you really care about- shit eating cunt.

How weep for Guantanamo when your College is Abu Ghraib?

A University in Kerala has decided not to include a poem- 'Ode to the Sea', by a terrorist formerly  incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay- in a book called 'Poetry and Protest' intended for its students.
Kafila, a leftist Indian blog, has published an anguished howl of outrage at this brutal and barbaric act.
 'Universities,' we are told, ' are meant to pursue the idea of excellence. Excellence is achieved only by training minds to be courageous to wade into difficult, turbulent, intellectual  waters. This is why the University of Iowa, an American University decided to publish Al Rubaish's 'Ode to the Sea'. America is the fountainhead of the war on terror. Why does an American University have this courage to publish this poem and why do we lack it? Does this have something to do with what we want to become? Or, is this the difference between ‘average’ and  ‘excellence’ ?

Just imagine the consequences of a corn fed sophomore at Iowa State achieving excellence because his mind has been trained to courageously wade into such very difficult, turbulent, intellectual water as that presented by a poem which shows a stupid, sentimental, self pitying Arab terrorist complaining bitterly that the ‘Infidels’ are holding him prisoner and the Sea is not coming to his rescue thus proving it is disobedient to God.  Young Nazis could achieve similar intellectual excellence by reading poems from Auschwitz victims bemoaning the manner in which gas chambers compromised their ability to slaughter Christian children for the Passover feast.
Eichmann himself would have loved to deconstruct a poem like-

Shema Israel! An apostate is this Auschwitz's Hydrogen Cyanide

As lethal as the fart from our great Rabbi's back side

Killing Christian kids. Ah! let us all say Kaddish

This gas's behaviour really is baddish.

But no such poems were written, not even by the Heidegger loving Celan, because the Jews at Auschwitz were innocent victims not worthless psychopaths.

The young student at Iowa will have his eyes opened when he realizes that Al Rubbish type nut-jobs experience orgasm every time some tsunami wipes out some non-Muslims but gets very angry when the Sea disobeys Allah by being nice and quiet and suitable for swimming. This shows terrorists from Muslim countries are intellectually very advanced and the cause they espouse is not utterly contemptible at all. Once they are repatriated from Guantanamo to their own country, they go underground and try to foment jihadis assassinations of  non-believers, including the Shiites, the Saudi Royals and other such sub-human scum.
Why are students from Kerala being denied the chance to achieve a similar stellar excellence in gauging the ineffable intellectual sublimity of this great Al Rubbish terrorist nutjob of a poet?
It is because the Professors want them to be 'average' only in their appreciation of Islam and not achieve the 'excellence' of those geniuses in Iowa?
Before turning to the deep pedagogic question posed, let us review the facts.

Kerala is ten times riches than Iowa. Unlike Iowa, it totally lacks a substantial and politically powerful Muslim community. Young Keralites don’t need jobs in Saudi Arabia. They would never dream of going there to work. Thus they should be encouraged to think of this Al Rubbish terrorist nut-job as a great poet. Suppose they are going for Hajj. They can chat with the security guards at the Saudi airport about the great poet. Will Saudi Arabia dare to arrest them? No! Kerala is ten times as powerful as America. Furthermore, Kerala is the leading supporter of Israel. The Christian fundamentalists of Mid West Kerala firmly believe that Israel must be supported at any cost because there is a Biblical prophesy that the ‘Rapture’ will be triggered only by the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. Thus, reading the terrorist's poem will help Kerala's students gain confidence in the correctness of the World View of their parents- which by itself will spur them to similar achievements.
Unlike the people of Iowa, the people of Kerala have been engaged in a war against 'Islamist' terrorists, ever since 9/11, and still have troops engaged in active combat on the soil of Muslim countries. Thus, reading this terrorist's worthless shite will certainly stimulate them to yet more consummate achievements in pedagogic contexts like Abu Ghraib.

There was a time when a boy with 8th standard English from a small Kerala village could rise to be the Reform Commissioner in New Delhi.  Now India has PhD's from the English Dept who can't get even the meanest sort of white collar job  without some species of Political jobbery or Affirmative Action because Kafila's prescription  for 'excellence' has been fanatically followed for the last thirty years.   How can we weep for Guantanamo when Indian Universities are Abu Ghraib's where young people's brains are so relentlessly buggered with that they can have no hope of actually learning to speak the English language with sufficient proficiency to get even an entry level Call Center job? 

Idionomic to what co-evolves

 My comrade now for the fog yet thickens

Depart thou 'fore daylight quickens

Idionomic to what co-evolves

Sorrow's sum no soul solves

Akeel Bilgrami on Secularism

As one of West London's most vituperative, albeit least widely read, Hindutva bloggers, I feel it my duty to take Prof. Akeel Bilgrami to task for his view that Secularism 'is not a general political truth, suited to all historical contexts, but rather apt only in some contexts, such as, for instance, when there is an implicit and pervasive threat of "majoritarianism". And second, for the conclusion that any justification and implementation of secularism in contexts which are not fully modernist - in a sense of "modern" that was articulated first in western Europe - must turn on an appeal to the conceptual vernacular.
It so happens that we know in advance- coz it's the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy- that the heterosexuals will always be a majority-  which raises the question,- how is 'Secularism'- as opposed to Legalistic pragmatics, which sublates the 'conceptual vernacular', coz that's in its job description- at all 'apt' in the context of Philistine heteros buggering with the happiness of Philosophical homos? 
Perhaps, Bilgrami might answer, the Homos could set up Religions of their own in which sexual acts become sacraments and thus gain protection for those practices that way. But, this is an odd type of Secularism. 

What about Bilgrami's notion that Secularism is only relevant in contexts which are 'modernist'- that too in some supposedly univocal Western European sense? The problem is, for Legalistic pragmatics- i.e. that which acts as a check and balance on the power of the Secular- be it Statist or Contractarian- those contexts have disappeared or never existed in the first place. Once again, Bilgrami's notion of Secularism is just too fucking bizarre to have any salience in Public Discourse because while the Law is a Social reality and obligatory passage point, Academic Philosophy is a Solipsistic oubliette.

Perhaps, as a matter of full disclosure and uttermost good faith, I ought to have prefaced my analysis of Bilgrami's thesis by pointing out that 17 trillion of my Hindu ancestors were ruthlessly slaughtered by Muslims, yet Bilgrami- a self confessed Muslim- won't even kill just 3 or 4 of my cousins in America living close to him despite being in receipt of several peremptory Emails from me reminding him of his ancestral duty in this regard. What further proof is needed that the 'Sickular' Muslim created by Congress tyranny is like totally faltu yaar?

You may argue that Bilgrami has been brainwashed by Bernard Williams (husband of the egregious Shirley) into rejecting 'externalism' and holding that only 'internal' motivations count as providing a reason for action. Thus, you may say to me- "Vivek, you gave Bilgrami only an external reason to kill your cousin not an inner motivation. Suppose you had said- 'these three or four Hindus in your vicinity are calling you a great big gandu and saying yore Momma so fat and like they gonna git you in a drive-by so you gotta kill them first, see?'- that's an internal reason. But you didn't do that did you?. You just wrote- 'Bilgrami, Sir, as a Muslim it is second nature for you to kill Hindus; please be advised, the following Hindus are conveniently located, for killing purposes, by your good self ; kindly do the needful ;  have a nice day.' While the wording of your Email was impeccable and any true Muslim would recognize the skilful means whereby you have presented a 'farz e kifaayah' within the courteous context of 'adab', the fact remains that Bilgrami's Iman has been totally ass raped by Shirley Williams' ex-husband and so he rejects external reasons.

My answer to you is- 'I will eat your children and burn down your house. Fuck off. You are probably a Niyogi Telugu Brahmin and consequently totally gay and spend all your time jerking off to the video of Rahul Gandhi's speech to the Indian Federation of Industry.
'Bilgrami can't possibly be so stupid as to reject externalism- more especially for farz e kifaayah type duties. Everybody knows that there are some actions required for the Community to continue to exist in a manner such that our own lives and property are protected. If someone else discharges those duties, well and good. If no one does, then an external reason exists for oneself dispassionately completing that task. More generally, it is of the essence of voluntary human interaction in a repeated game that the momentary absence or incapacity of the other is compensated for by the rule of culpa levis in concreto- i.e. to maintain a relationship, sometimes we have to do things the other party would have done had they been capable and this is a reciprocal obligation.'

Your may reply...really? That's your reply? You expect me to print that? This is a respectable blog, Madam. Mind it kindly.

Getting back to Bilgrami- he writes
Charles Taylor has convincingly argued that in a religiously plural society, secularism should be adopted on the basis of what Rawls called an ‘overlapping consensus.’ An overlapping consensus, in Rawls’s understanding of that term, is a consensus on some policy that is arrived at by people with very different moral and religious and political commitments, who sign on to the policy from within their differing points of view, and therefore on possibly very different grounds from each other. It contrasts with the idea that when one converges on a policy one must all do so for the same reason.'
Is Bilgrami speaking of different doxastic systems generating the same Rule-set or Policy prescription by sheer coincidence? Obviously not. Clearly there is a Co-ordination problem for the different doxastic systems such that they occupy the perceived  Moral high ground. But, there is an alethic and computational aspect, wholly unconnected to the imperative, involved in identifying 'focal points', which is 'external' to any given doxastic system and which involves some action which can't be discharged save in concert or on behalf of the concerned Faith community. But, this means that 'overlapping consensus' exists within heterogenous doxastic communities.Clearly, if the 'overlapping consensus' is about a collectively necessary action that can be discharged by some subset of agents AND if each agent agrees that there is some circumstance where they would themselves, however reluctantly, join this subset, then an 'external reason' exists on which all converge and this 'external reason' trumps internal reasons even though subjectively agents may experience repugnance or cognitive dissonance or ontological dysphoria or a real bad case of the shits.
Once this is admitted and acted upon- i.e. a situation arises where all are compelled to discharge at one time or another the collective necessary action (e.g. jury duty)- the 'external/internal' distinction disappears because, on the one hand, dispassionate actions gain an idionomic emotional colouring and qualia, while, on the other hand, hedonic or instrumental actions acquire new and powerful valency of a repugnancy or thymotic type.
Collectively necessary actions can be of two sorts- Sacred (where God or some Omniscient or Transcendent Being has substantive knowledge of what is required and thus humans have only defeasible procedural rationality absent Revelation or Divine Inspiration of a Charismatic kind) and Secular (where the State gets the ultimate say as to what is obligatory, what is punishable, and what lies between.)
Bilgrami's central claim re. Secularism is-  'there are no external reasons that would establish the truth of secularism. If secularism were to carry conviction, it would have to be on grounds that persuaded people by appealing to the specific and substantive values that figured in their specific moral psychological economies. Such a view might cause alarm in those who would wish for secularism a more universal basis. Internal reasons, by their nature, do not provide such a basis. As, I said, internal reasons for some conclusion that will persuade some people, may not persuade others of that conclusion, since those others may not hold the particular substantive values to which those reasons appeal and on which those reasons depend. Only external reasons could persuade everyone since all they require is a minimal rationality possessed by all (undamaged, adult) human minds and make no appeal to substantive values that may be variably held by human minds and psychologies. Alarming thought it might seem to some, there is no help for this. There are no more secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.'

Let us think about this for a moment.  Bilgrami lives in the United States. That State can conscript him for some purpose of its own- he can be called up for Jury duty, he can be drafted into the Army, he can be interned or quarantined, he can be killed and his vital organs removed for some medical purpose.
Is it really the case that Secularism- not that poncey word but the power of the State- has no 'external reason' that could establish its truth? How about getting ass raped in Gitmo till you acknowledge my truth, bitch?
Is not American Secularism- I'm now referring to the poncey word- inextricably tied to the founding Fathers' notion of what was necessary to the State? Jefferson, writing to a Rabbi, said 'in matters or Religion, divided we stand, united we fall.'  This is overlapping consensus as an external reason which has the most secure possible universal ground for acceptance behind it- viz. if you don't the State will fuck you up. Sure you can pretend and pose and posture, but- bottom line- only so long as aint being hanged by the neck. 
The Secular sphere can kill you if you're the wrong sort of secular or not secular enough. Any 'external reason' not grounded in this truth must, by definition, be a trespass on the Sacred.
In the same way that Bilgrami proudly said 'I'm a Muslim' to the Hindu landlord in a lower middle class Hindu majority area, so too might Bilgrami, at the end of the day, say 'Because there is no God but God' when required to explain why he should not commit a crime demanded by the State even though he himself, and his loved ones, are killed for it.

You may say- Vivek, you are a rabid Islamophobe and also have a  very small dick. Moreover, you are as ignorant as shit. You don't understand the very subtle point Bilgrami makes in what follows-
'I have been a little wary of this use of the notion of overlapping consensus since in Rawls it has always been a notion embedded in the framework of his celebrated idea of the ‘original position,’ i.e., the idea that one contracts into policies to live by without knowledge of one’s substantive position in society. I find myself completely baffled by why the idea of the original position is not made entirely redundant by the notion of an overlapping consensus. If one did not know what one’s substantive position in society is, one presumably does not know what one’s substantive values are. If so, the very idea of internal reasons can have no play in the original position. It follows that if one were to adopt an overlapping consensus on the basis of divergent internal reasons that contractors may have for signing onto a policy, then the original position becomes altogether irrelevant to the contractual scenario. Of course, if one were to completely divorce the idea of an overlapping consensus from Rawls’s conceptual apparatus within which it has always been formulated (even in his last published work, The Law of Peoples), then it would be exactly right to say, as Taylor does, that secularism should be adopted in pluralistic society on the basis of an overlapping consensus. But now, the only apparatus one has to burden the contractors with is the capacity for internal reasoning, that is, with psychological economies with substantive values that yield internal reasons. Rawls would not be recognizable in this form of contractualist doctrine. Indeed one would be hard pressed to say that one was any longer theorizing within the contractualist tradition at all, which is a tradition in which serious constraints of an ‘original position’ or a ‘state of nature’… were always placed as methodological starting points in the making of a compact. Shorn of all this, one is left with something that is the merest common sense, which it would be bombastic to call ‘a social contract.’ We now need only say this: assuming no more than our capacity for internal reasoning, i.e., our capacity to invoke some substantive values we hold (whatever they may differentially be in all the different individuals or groups in society), we can proceed to justify on its basis another substantive value or policy—for example, secularism—and so proceed to adopt it for the polity. If this path of adoption by consensus, invoking this internalist notion of justification, works in a religiously pluralist society, it will be just as Taylor presents it, an overlapping consensus, with none of Rawls’s theoretical framework.'

My reply is- 'Mum, I've warned you about harping on about my tiny dick on this blog. Nobody is interested, okay? As for your quotation from Bilgrami- listen, Rawls was stoooopid. He didn't know that the courses in  Econ 101, Pol Sci 101, Ethics 101, Jurisprudence 101 etc which his contractors were supposed to have completed before making their choice WERE NOT AT ALL Amartya Sen type sententious shite but, on the contrary, high powered, discrete Math, Game theoretic & Muth Rational- i.e. the sort of stuff the Mahabharata shows Yuddhishtra as having to learn to conquer his Vishada and rule as a Just King.
Since the Mahabharata was written for 'women, drunkards, slaves'- i.e the privileged class of the Vyadha Gita-  it follows that everybody, except Ivy League fuckwits,  knows that the Muth rational reflective equilibrium is a mixed strategy- i.e. has a stochastic component. But that's cool. What we all choose behind the veil of ignorance is this lottery in Babylon in whose well (chaah-e-baabil) Hindu or Muslim, Harut or Marut, we all lie suspended repenting our seduction by the Zohra of English- Enid Blyton- but for whom I might have turned into a less ignorant Iyer whose American cousins Prof. Bilgrami would feel compelled to butcher coz I'd, like, know the lingo them Muslims talk- y'know- berka, berka jihad, I command you to kill those fucking cousins of mine already- berka berka..
What? That's not racist.
Ask Shah Rukh Khan. He used to be known as Sheshadri Ramaswami Kaddalooraiiyah till he got tired of my stealing his tiffin (he was a couple of years junior to me at St. Columba's) and invented this tough guy persona for himself.  Secret message of Chennai Express is simbly that aaall theeze so called Muslims are actually thair shadam eating Tambrams like Kamal Hasan.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.

Partha Dasgupta making Sen his bitch

Economic Growth does not harm Welfare but, Statistically, it must appear to do so because we don't know the future and have to assume that past preferences are the best guide to what people actually want- this is called a Laspeyres bias.
Another source of bias arises from demographic changes. If people, genetically or otherwise more likely to have healthy, high birth weight, kids start having smaller families because they've become 'middle class', and if the sort of people who starved to death before having any babies are not now starving to death but having babies like crazy and if better medicines are keeping those babies alive, then figures for child malnourishment can worsen though everybody is actually better off.
Thus, a good way for senile Economists, who never made a good policy recommendation or verified prediction in their lives, to show they weren't actually a waste of space all along, is to construct Welfare or other indices which show that the guys who did something useful and good were actually stupid and bad because they unknowingly unleashed the Hounds of Humanitarian Hell.
Since Amartya Sen has cornered this particular market, the question arises whether other, no less senile, Economists can still compete in an increasingly crowded market-place?
Sen-ile Economics is sustainable but can it grow more Sen-tentious yet? 
A recent article by Sir Partha Dasgupta gives us grounds for hope.
Criticizing his older colleagues, Sen & Bhagwati, Sir Partha Dasgupta writes, 'India’s continued inequities in health and education have been much written about. As the World Bank noted recently, 45 per cent of Indian children under five are underweight and 25 per cent of women remain illiterate, figures that are worse than those in a number of countries that are poorer in terms of GDP per head. So, if you look at how figures measuring the quality of life in India have changed since the early 1980s, the country would appear to be a winner. On the other hand if you compare the current figures for the same quality of life indicators to those in some countries where GDP per head is lower, India would seem to be a loser. Depending on your perspective, the proverbial glass would appear to be either half full or half empty.'

Narendra Modi, also speaking of a half empty glass, says that he has a new way of looking at things- the glass is half full of water and half full of 'air' (hot air, coz India phery hot).
Rahul Gandhi, on the other hand, says 'the water lifts all boats, but women in the villages don't have boats. They are making our boats. Also they are the WAVES.'
Meanwhile, some corrupt bureaucrat or politician has added some Bourbon to that branch-water and drunk it up.

Micawber Economics
Suppose you give your employee, Mr. Micawber, a raise of ten percent so he can get married. Instead of getting hitched to the elderly typist you earmarked for him, Micawber chooses a young widow with ten children and an invalid mother and five unemployed siblings all widows with children of their own. Micawber is now their sole breadwinner. His income has gone up but is he really wealthier? Another question- would we expect to see Micawber's productivity go up or down?
What is true of an individual is true of a Nation. Income may rise by ten percent. But if the Nation takes on the responsibility to provide for a bunch of people such that they will no longer be available for work then the Nation is going to be poorer, not richer, in the long run.
People represent both a potential type of Capital formation as well as an actual source of Human and Social Capital Depreciation and increased Resource Depletion and Environmental Degradation. For a country like India, whose optimal population (i.e. one where an extra person adds as much as he subtracts from National Income) is some fraction of what obtains- it is imperative to ask questions about what sort of incentives are being internalized through investment in 'Education', what sort of Habitus is being valorized and broadcast through a commitment to 'Welfare'.
In the short-run, the welfare of Mr. Micawber's dependents increases, as may their education level (Dicken's father- the prototype of Micawber- sent his daughter to an expensive school while consigning his son to a blacking factory- a misallocation of resources, because, back then, sons could earn, daughters couldn't. )  However, longer term, Micawber and his dependents face a harsh future. Soon, he won't be able to service his debts.  Someone else's future consumption will be lower because of this, but so will his own because, sooner or later, no one will lend to him.
Now, it may be the case that the widow's children and siblings can get jobs. However, if Mr. Micawber has taken them to a place where there are no jobs then this won't happen. Even if jobs are available, there is a problem with becoming a wage-earner in a Micawberian household- you go from being a free-rider to providing a free ride.
Micawber himself will find it pays more to be a professional cadger. He gives up his job, claiming back pain or migraine- both probably genuine enough- and parades his indigent family around to extract cash from sympathetic individuals.
This won't stop his extended family from trying to earn a little extra on the sly- the kids will steal anything they can lay their hands on, the adults will seek to engross a larger share of Hardship funds and the things the Community owns in common. The landlord unlucky enough to rent to the Micawbers will find his furniture and fittings have been stripped and sold and that the value of his property has experienced more rapid depreciation.
So too with a Nation. It can increase dependency by spending money on keeping people in places where there are no jobs and there is  no entrepreneurial culture and, in the short run, this may raise 'Human Development'. But, this Development comes at a price. In the short run, it may register as Growth- spending has gone up- but, longer term, the productive capacity of the country, its ability to sustain a level of spending, has gone down.
Can Dasgupta Depletion enhance Sen-ile Sen-tentiousness?
In this context, the question that naturally arises is how Sir Partha Dasgupta- an optimal depletion maven- can add to the hot air in the glass or help its boatless village women, who are building our boats, become WAVES, by beating up on Sen & Bhagwati for ignoring wealth effects- in particular the impact of environmental degradation on marginal subsistence agriculture.
The answer, of course, is to add a Green component to National Income and Human Development Statistics.
Resource depletion, if adjusted for in National Income and Welfare indices, gives rise to a bias because we don't know how, when and why those Resources might cease to matter as Technology develops.
Income Growth, in Econ, is defined as how much more you can spend without eating into your Wealth. the problem is that Consumption can itself be a form of Investment if it changes your Habitus, your motivation, what you want to want. There is no cognitive reason why time preference must be fixed- it is bound to change depending on preferred Habitus. Essentially, any prescriptive statistical work in this area is bound to be garbage in garbage out.
Dasgupta writes-' It is still early days in the empirical study of the wealth of nations. But in a recent paper, Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence Goulder, Kevin Mumford, Kirsten Oleson and I arrived at the very tentative estimate that during 1995-2000 wealth per head in India increased at an average annual rate of under 0.2 per cent, a far cry from the high rates of growth in GDP per head during that same period. Even that low figure is, in all likelihood, an overestimate. Among natural capital assets we were able to include only forests (as sources of timber but not for the many ecological services they provide), carbon in the atmosphere, land and sub-soil resources. A great swath of ecosystems and sources of water, which many studies show have degraded in recent years, were left unaccounted for because national data are simply not there. We should conclude that wealth per head in India may well have declined in recent decades.'

In other words, whatever Sen is up to- it is Micawber Economics and unsustainable. 
Now, Bhagwati style growth, on the other hand, needn't be so because his schtick is- vest property rights in individuals and corporations and create markets for everything- it is Govt. rent seeking (enabled by vesting property rights and decision making in the State) which creates the 'tragedy of the Commons'.
But can a Bengali economist, like Dasgupta, really attack a fellow Bong while ceding victory to a non-Bong?
No, because Bengali Economists- at least haut bhadralok ones residing abroad these many years- are dedicated to wrecking the Economy.
The Tam-bram nigger in the woodpile.
Dasgupta's work is exemplary but, though mindless, best left to Bongs. What about us Tambrams? Have we nothing to contribute? The answer I'm afraid is that we're as black as shite and not 'noble' Aryans at all.
There has only been one Tambram Economist- Visvesvaraya, who saw India needed to grow at 10 per cent, nothing less was sustainable- but only because the guy was an engineer, not an Economist at all.
Though trained in Economics, still, speaking as a caste-fellow of that nigger in the woodpile, I feel I must highlight a broader point which is being missed.
Essentially, Wealth isn't a stock but a present value dependent on the unknowable future fitness landscape. This present value obtains in a manner similar to Credit- i.e. it becomes inter-subjective and fungible based on things like perceived ownership clarity, number of dependents, Sociological status, smartness, and so on. Thus, the perceived ability of a household to become Wealthy- its chrematistic potential- is itself what shapes its golden path preferences (i.e. the preferences it would want itself to have with hindsight).
When people become responsive to global price signals- chances are their behavior is going to be more self-seeking- hence plastic and productive- thus altering their Credit which is a pretty good proxy for their Wealth.
Thus, Wealth changes when you move out of a subsistence slum, it changes even more when you develop a salutary indifference to the plight of your starving relatives, and really takes off when you quit punching Mother Theresa in the face and concentrate on hacking her Swiss Bank accounts.

Dasgupta, addressing the problem of estimating per captia Wealth with changing population, suggests that difficulty in finding the relevant 'shadow price' can be bypassed if sustainable development is interpreted not as an increase over time in intergenerational wellbeing, but as an increase over time of the potential well-being of the average person across the generations. Unfortunately, this approach- though probably very good for sheep or camels- throws away all the information relevant to Human Societies well placed for catch up growth. Why? Potential can only be realized through something like a Market Economy- or else a competitively consociational regime- otherwise it is constrained by Habitus, by Conatus, with Boulding type 'learned failure' and negative Psychic Capital formation.

The true tipping points, for releasing Potential, are Aspirational and Informational, not Environmental or Entitlement based because Population growth erodes the latter two anyway.
The problem with Sen type Human Development Indices is that the notion of human potential they pay lip service to is utterly empty. An undernourished guy with an MSc in Physics who finally manages to land a job as a bus conductor in Kerala scores equal to a chubby Cambridge graduate starting work in the City of London because the former's Life Expectancy and Education are better and this outweighs the difference in purchasing power parity adjusted income. Add in a Dasgupta measure for Environmental degradation, and the bus conductor scores higher yet. But he isn't really better off, is he? The Cambridge grad can always sell his pied a terre in Kensington and emigrate to Kerala and live off the interest on the proceeds which would be equal to the bus conductor's salary, but the reverse is not the case. Countries with high dollar income may have very low education and life expectancy but they can use their money to buy those things if they want to.  In fact, the return on education and medical spending is likely to be much higher there.
Environmental degradation only affects those who are locked in geographically or occupationally. The moment a person or a community has an opportunity to respond to global price signals something changes. The limits of growth are removed because growth is no longer tied to finite resources- it is chrematistic, positional, virtual- not governed by diminishing returns and entropic processes.
Education is a red herring. A shepherd with a PhD is still a shepherd. A barely literate guy who has learnt to respond to global price signals makes superior decisions on a day to day basis. The shepherd's knowledge base is eroding. The inner city immigrant cab driver's information set is expanding.
Life expectancy is a red herring. I read that certain sections of the male African American population experienced a spurt in life expectancy as a result of higher incarceration rates under the '3 strikes and you're out' rule. But, is a corrupt privatized penal system really a good thing? Is that what Sen actually supports?

Environment too is a red herring. We don't know what the future fitness landscape will look like. That means we don't know which types of Wealth will hold their value and which are mere dross. We may know what we like to eat and drink. We don't know what we ought to like eating and drinking so as to be happy in the future.

The truth is, both at a micro and macro level, the unpredictability of the future fitness landscape makes a generational conflict of values a natural and salutary thing. But, this means that senile Professors groping towards some yardstick of Welfare that squares with their childhood memories are bound to get things wrong.

To see why, take the case of that son of yours who is lounging around on the sofa  watching TV while Mum waits on the little shit hand and foot.
Currently, his contribution to GNP is pitifully small but his Welfare is high because he is mooching off the fixed Consumption good capital and Social Capital you and your community have built up over many years.
The moment he moves somewhere there are plenty of jobs and drugs and sexual opportunities for young people, his Welfare goes down- his Housing situation is likely to be pretty dire (don't use the toilet when you visit him) and he probably can't afford some of the luxuries- like porn- he got used to buying for himself when he was staying with you.
But, his income has gone up a lot, his contribution not just to GNP but also Capital formation, broadly considered, has shot up hugely. Why? Because he is changing his life-style. He is caught up in a new type of Tardean mimetics. Only the sort of Growth that his new preferences reflect, could possibly be sustainable.

Still, for the Statistician, the fact is, his Welfare has gone down. Economics of the Amartya Sen type, says- Boo Hoo! We must help this vulnerable section of the population- already marginalized and subjected to paternal rants of being a good for nothing Mamma's boy who is like probably totally gay and BTW & FYI, I was married at your age, not just married but the father of numerous sons all married and the fathers of equally fecund grandkids. Mind it kindly.
The truth is, that great big gay-boy of a son of yours, ignoring Sen type Welfare measurement, WILL fucking move out and you'll be the one crying in the night while his Mum will be perfectly happy- not even turning a hair on discovering the toilet situation at his new digs in the Big City.
Why would your son leave the comforts of your house? Did you drive him out? Was he ashamed of you in front of his cool College friends whom you insisted he invite to stay over the Holidays? Will investing in a toupee and a truss, win your little darling back?
No. He is behaving rationally. He accepts a fall in Welfare for the sake of higher future Tardean 'fitting in' and hence higher future Welfare.
National Income Stats don't capture this. Sen-tentious Entitlement theory doesn't capture this. Yet, the essence of Economic Growth is deciding, contra Gandhi, that true Wealth isn't Health but Silver and Gold. True riches aint about living in harmony with Nature but playing your boombox extra loud while jizzing in its face. Growth is never Humanistic, nor really Economic- it is Chrematistic & Ontologically dysphoric.

Back in the Sixties, there was a notion that it was the State which wanted Econ Growth for its own purposes and that the people wanted something else which tied up with Popular Sovereignty and Ecological Awareness and everybody just braiding each other's hairs and kvetching about their periods. Instead of Permanent Revolution, this was the Utopia of Permanent Menstruation- still bloody but, in another sense, bloodless.
What about India now? Does the State want Econ Growth? No. Not really. Growth means more tax revenue which means more spending which means more oversight and admin and due process. Who needs the headache, yaar? Old fashioned politics was about speaking out against the Ashke-Nazis in Israel and Apartheid in South Africa. It wasn't about making sure money earmarked for Education actually got spent on Education. Why? Because there was no money and, anyway, Education only meant learning to say "India is very very poor. Yet there are people in India who live like they are Californian millionaires! This is the paradox of India. What is needed more than ever today is more frequent repetition of this same mantra because there's nothing in the rules which says a righteous Bengali dude can't get a second Nobel just for saying the same stuff that stupid people were saying a hundred years before he was born.'
As Prof. Dasgupta points out, proper Economics should be about paying lip service to the Environment- not Entitlements- because the Maths is just so much better. This does not mean a revival of Kenneth Boulding type Econ. Developing 'psychic capital' is about getting people to not keep having babies before they've got an inside loo and a reliable broadband connection for porn. But screwing up the Environment too is important. Otherwise you'll get hippies moving in. No one wants that. You can always feed a Yuppy to the dobermans but hippies just make them flatulent and lethargic.

Simeon on North End Road

Did that Somali refugee who had raced across the Sahara by Camel

Side saddle, so resent the shoulder of this slow witted Tamil?

To hug me twenty years later- it cuts like a knife

That a 3 year old child is my camel though the desert of life

The swan of water & milk

Clothed in the caterpillars we miscall Silk

Poets are the swans of water & milk

Be it Hare's 'blik' or Burke's Rhetoric

Memory is a Whorish Trick.

Note

H.M. Hare- A blik is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable interpretation of one’s experience.  “. . . it is by our bliks that we decide what is and what is not an explanation.”²¹