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Start: 20th January, 2020
End: 14th June, 2020
Being proof-read
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
~ General George S. Patton (1885 - 1945)
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
~ Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
It's so simple what happens when you think beyond your trained field. It's amusing to see someone spend one million man-hours on something I can solve with my left hand.
~ Charlie Munger (1924 - )
Momma says stupid is as stupid does.
~ Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump (immortal)
Note: This essay started with a different intent, but the ludicrous reaction to the virus, and the rupture of the financial markets at their seams, offered too tempting an opportunity not to latch onto. Twenty-one days is too long a span in one's life-time to squander away not sharpening one's own wits and mocking those of others. How else is a man to entertain himself in this day and age of Dumb and Dumber? An un-entertained man is a danger to his wife and neighbours. So to those feeling insulted: see this as part of being a cordial social creature. Nothing like social distancing to increase cordiality.
The label of crisis is applied when there is an increase in a feeling of fear and an accompanying inability to deal with it. Fear for an animal who is unable to think much is an instinct: it is both useful and keeping in line with the idea of being an animal. For humans with 3,000 years of recorded spiritual history; 6,000 years worth of experience managing a complex instrument like money, and an even longer-dated distinguished record of coming with fundamental technological innovations starting with using a stick to ward off a danger, the continued usage of the term crisis is a disappointment. Especially when the same human refuses to recognize a genuinely real crisis that is ever present, and of a far greater import than the mere apprehension of sickness or death: it is called the moral crisis that permeates every action of his, but to which, he refuses to yield. The reader, will, hopefully, then grant the author, his bemusement at how societies developed weak knees towards something that is natural, temporary and expected.
This essay sports a mixed complexion: a part of it perhaps flows from a deep-rooted attachment to the sense of freedom, privacy and individual autonomy, a result both of education and conditioning; a part of it reacts simply to the absence of qualities of coherency, proportion, symmetry, evennessess, stretchability or elasticity present in the 'form of the reaction', or the paradox that behind the apparent iron-clad response lies a deeply embedded fragility; an important part of it thrusts forth from a visceral assault on the idea of individual responsibility, or the attempt to evade logical consequences of immoral actions. For all of these exact reasons, the essay has little to offer by way of 'practicality'. The exact reasons too why there might be greater intrinsic merit in some of the following paragraphs. No man has gained anything of lasting value being practical, except to prolong his stay on this planet and add a few more ounces of wealth to his reserves, none of which are considered praise-worthy of a nobleman and noblewoman.
An inquiry of this sort needs a launch-pad and it is always provided by what at first is comical. The comedy on being peeled always reveals a tragedy which is seen gradually through deployment of little chisels of reason. When chiselled deep enough the tragedy can reveal the rule to enlightenment, and by consequence, a refurbished faith in, to use a Spinozan turn of phrase, the way things are the only way they can be, for any other way will be a heresy to the idea of God Himself. This then forms the structure of this essay.
The author wishes the reader not a life free of death (and disease), but free of the fear of the deep sense of loss that death really entails. Whether we like it or not, death is not loss of life, it simply is one more event in life. [For those wondering over the source behind this philosophical tour-de-force: the inspirational credit goes to the song Circle of Life in the animated movie The Lion King (1994). So much for formal education and sophisticated erudition.]
We have created a Star Wars civilisation,
with stone age emotions,
medieval institutions
and God like technology.
~ Edward O. Wilson, University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University.
One ineradicable habit of all Indians is to take a shortcut to their destination whatever risk to themselves or others. One striking illustration of this habit was provided for me. There was a bus stop just outside Mori Gate, and not more than twenty yards from it was a public convenience. But the passengers never went so far. They urinated on a tree nearby, and the poor tree died at the end of six months. In northern India men are never able to resist a wall or a post.
~ Nirad Chaudhuri (23 November, 1897 - 01st August, 1999), as quoted in the book The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
~ Sir John Maynard Keynes.
To me watching economy and markets, or just about anything else, on a day-to-day basis is like being in an evolving snowstorm with millions of bits and pieces of information coming at me that I have to synthesize and react to well.
~ From the introduction to the Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (2018), Ray Dalio.
Volatility as a concept is widely misunderstood. Volatility is not fear. Volatility is not the VIX index. Volatility is not a statistic or a standard deviation, or any other number derived by abstract formula.
Volatility is no different in markets than it is to life.
Regardless of how it is measured volatility reflects the difference between the world as we imagine it to be and the world that actually exists.
We will only prosper if we relentlessly search for nothing but the truth, otherwise the truth will find us through volatility.
~ From the landing page of the website of Artemis Capital Management.
I am at all events convinced that He (God) does not play dice.
~Albert Einstein in a letter to Max Born, December, 1926.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
~ Mark Twain
Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday
I've got a lot of things to learn
Said I would and I'll be leaving one day
Before my heart starts to burn.
So what's the matter with you?
Sing me something new.
Don't you know
The cold and wind and rain don't know
They only seem to come and go away
Times are hard when things have got no meaning
I've found a key upon the floor
Maybe you and I will not believe in the things we find behind the door
~ Stand by Me, Be Here Now, Oasis (1997).
I wish more people could take the attitude that I have taken throughout my life to these things. You do not have to be tub-thumping, you do not have to be wild flag waving patriot or anything like that, but your attitude should be of gratitude. I mean, it is not as if this is nothing, the city we're sitting in (Florence) is enough for a whole lifetime -- and a very very well-lived lifetime -- and it is all there: all of the literature, the books, the arts, the music, everything is there. And all you have to do is reach out and take it and be part of it. And there seems to be me, in this culture of hatred, this endless zero-sum hatred, bitterness and blame, is just to turn that around and say, how about feeling grateful; because what we have is a blip in human history the right to have and we would be so damn stupid to give it away.
~ Transcript of The Death of Europe, with Douglas Murray, interview by the Hoover Institution.
In eyes of some commentators, the first quotation is symbolic of the secular decline of developed societies in the western hemisphere. In a world where water is assured to flow on opening the tap, fear of death is understandable. It allows little viruses to have a lot of fun, especially ones that come from the dark dungeons of the Chinese mainland.
Memories harken back to the fearful thrill of Cold War, except this time death is dependent not on the mood of the Russian plutocracy, but on low immunity of your fellow citizens. Death and Disease are known since biblical times, but even the Bible missed they could co-exist with Debt: of the massive $13 (and counting) trillion in negative-interest yielding sovereign variety. Comprehend for a moment what this means: you give your own government money knowing in advance you will receive less. It is Devil's day out. The result is dislocation, dejection, depression and decay. That is one too many D's triggered by one puny c.
Meanwhile, men of intelligence and wisdom in the West -- of whom many abound, mostly in the trading and investing community -- are busy profiting from this viral profligacy. They, of course, have read their Bible correctly and realise not everyone needs to die in times of cataclysm: those who can build Noah's Ark flourish, prosper and can even look down upon the lunatics in the asylum with a sense of amusement. The disease is, but, one amongst many of Lord's signs conveying how far His herd has veered off the prescribed path.
For,
No calamity befalls
unless God dispenses.
He guides the heart
of whosoever believes in God;
and God has knowledge of everything.
~ 13:17, At-Taghabun (Exposition), Surah 64, The Qur'an.
Closer home, the second quote picturesquely, and quite correctly, conveys the near complete reversion to the mean tendency of the Indian society. Death, disease, and debt (by the rich, for the rich and through the banks) are par for the course. They are on offer for breakfast, lunch, dinner and movie binge-watching-and-eating orgy at midnight, a propensity likely to see a pandemic-like spread. The irony sticks: leading a life of that sort, in the first place leads the c's to have their crooning, careening, crowing, and crowning glory - almost like the corona of the Roman times. All Hail the King Wearing the Corona: but wait a minute, where the heck is he? Oh yes, on the hand of the man you shook after he took a piss near the tree.
Lockdown of Lakshmi on 08th November, 2016 evidently failed to please the masters. Subsequently, Saraswati too was given the pink-slip on 19th March, 2020. She gladly accepted. How else can she ever get time to master Veena in a State that loves lockdowns: some hard, some implied, some covert, some nudged as 'self-imposed. Poor Durga, she must bear the enslavement with solitary silence. It is but a matter of time before she too unleashes her high voltage energy that, when enraged, devours all that is offered. In Ayurveda, it is called an excess of pitta without the intellect required to mould it into something that is regenerative. It is what converts 'precautionary measures' into a full State announced panic.
The State knows it stands exposed of its own inability to cater to those in whom the c has found home, busy as it was squandering tax revenues on winning elections and piercing a dagger through God's own snow-covered country of house-boats and lakes. Seeking yet more cheaper thrills, it indulged itself by pulling the trigger to trigger exodus of white-cap wearing, Mecca kneeling, God fearing and immaan loving 'citizens'.
The phrase 'diminution of civilisation' readily suggests itself, evoking a nice balance between the big C and the small c to give rise to that bastardised mongrel B for balance. The thaalis are in balance, the castes are in exquisite and intricate balance, and some businesses are in perfect balance with all the politicians. With such bastardisation, Mussolini's call for purity of Race is unlikely to find home here: poor RSS, it is playing a loser's game. It is just too far down the alphabetical order to make any gains. With 17 alphabets to conquer, it had barely moved from D(emonetisation) to G(ST) to be brought back to small c, and not the cow-kind, but the ciller kind. It must truly be frustrating to have the Rashtra at your beckoning and to have the Rath remain anchored at Ayodhya, where it all started in the first place.
The nature of the mean is something the Indian mind has been searching for ages. Perhaps the invention of zero was a full and vital recognition of how empty and vacuous it really is. Truly adorable that invention is; any operation it is part of is either unchanged (addition or subtraction), grounded to nihilism (multiplication), or raised to infinite transcendentalism (division). Tantric operations like taking square root of zero are possible, but not for the faint-hearted. Something must surely be said of the society that revels either in no change, absolute and unqualified destruction, or lands up with an out-of-body experience. It is easy for that society to gleefully piss on the street, destroy a life endowed by God, and then worship vegetarianism, the cow and stink of the Ganges.
How then do you counter-act the small c? Legend has it that L was a borne loser. He was lampooned, lambasted, lacerated and left to lick his wounds when he went to incarcerate the c, and crack open its corona. In return L got a cock-eye of a kind that never made him forget the c. So, as L began to wane, they called in M, as in a Minister who Markets. Now, it just was not any Minister, it was a M caught in bed with a P over it. Golly it really was the 'Prime Minister' who Markets, also known in the back provinces of Italian mafia-land as Don PMM. PMM, quite the Don he was, besieged, begged, howled, raged, ranted and ultimately landed up with L: a lunatic in the asylum.
Not before he made some money robbing off votes through some faulty voting machines to secure his Don-dom for another five years and then some more. After a fashion, people got bored of a Don without a Donatella, wanting a Prince Charming with several Princesses in tow, though unfortunately, the c had taken its bloody toll on them all. As was inevitable, Don on his death, provided a permanent meal to the three-headed Lucifer to atone for his three-fold sins of 2002, 2016 and 2019-20, but not many were left to see and pass on that tale. The sins stayed, the Don's changed, and lunacy was assured of permanent employment in the King's court.
An Englishman with a bow-tie asked: so, my dear Sir, what do we have here? Well, what we have here, Sir, is called V, short for volatility. V is the king of Alphabet land. R, a wannabe at the tail wants to head the class but V need not indulge in any such pretence. It derives its lineage from close proximity to that ethereal trinity of X, Y and Z. Like them, it rarely likes to be called into action but those few occassions it merits a mention it leaves behind its firm impress. Volatility is the crowning glory of V's stature, for it is that which puts a dread into the hearts of those who believed they were 'reel' men in contrast to those pansy liberal elites and urban-naxals.
The 'reel' men thought they truly were devotees of Sarvarkar who preached them to be like Tigers. Where then have all the Tigers gone? Especially, its upper-caste-class mutations? Billboard sign spotted by a dove begged: looking for Tigers to fight the virus. Moderate to extreme self-sacrifice may be required. Anyone. No one? But of course not. Their teacher could get away beseeching the British for a quid-pro quo (release me from Jail and I shall assist). Far easier to let that fool Gandhi die and secure our freedom. We are needed for a far greater nationalist cause: how to fool the rest of the people once the freedom is secured. Time to dust-off that old play-book? Let those migrants get stranded and let some die too as long as we are safe and sound watching Netflix and busy feeling charitable to those very migrants through some kool use of Paytm. High five dude! This country is so easy to scare, and rule! No wonder those white-cappers and the firangs did not break a sweat.
Volatility eventually gets to such low-lives like a plague. It has its own Holy Book, one more nuanced, to teach those who err. Here is a mind-game: say you are leading a pretty middle-class life in a pretty middle-class apartment in a pretty metro city. You wake up one day and you find that your refrigerator stopped beating a beat, the washing machine was drained of its excesses, and when you opened the tap, water refused to flow because the water tank in the building some how broke its own back. You turn on the stove and the cylinder seems quite light, hell it is empty. You prepare to go out in your middle-class car to get lower-class help and you realise your car has a flat tyre. Much to your horror, you are in a lower-class tragedy. With the force of your education and income-earning potential you thought you were immune to what 'God dispenses.'
Cannot a refrigerator go bust? Of course it can. What about the washing machine? It too can. How about a flat tyre? Doesn't it happen all the time? Can all of them happen at the same time? In the land of the Don, where people are busy caring for the cow, how can it? Wasn't God supposed to look after us all when we threw out those bloody white-cappers and built our holy selves a fancy temple on the land where our God was borne? Why this then? Oh yes, V forgot to spray some salt & pepper: the deadly 'L' is prowling just outside your gates in form of peeved policemen. The House of Cards has all its decks symmetrically arranged flat on the ground.
Sober reflections reveal this to be law of joint probability: seeming impossibility of separate events, each probable individually, all happening at the same time. God's dispensation has a special soft corner for solving equations of joint probability. It is God's alternative to Netflix. The way it works is: Demonetisation cripples you, GST takes you near the ICU, and then that little m*****f*****r c puts you in coma. His dispensation duly delivers democracy to dictatorship of the Don, by the Don and for bemusement of the Don. Or perhaps not? (wink)
Volatility is having its finest moment since end of World War II, though it has yet to begin its stampede. It needs two more events always thought to never recur together in one lifetime: an ecological crisis and currency in those glove-stocked and sanitizer-clutching hands becoming worthless. The trinity of epidemic, ecology and economic egregiousness will adorn V's royal pageant.
But didn't Einstein say God does not play dice? An epidemic moment indeed when all Governments are either in eternal debt or getting there, misery suffers from a bout of over-supply, an always-on unparalleled exhibition of material hedonism in human history, and populist political lunatic of every conceivable colour in every systemically important country, is much too 'simultaneous' not to be called a roll of dice. If it ain't, surely God designed his Monopoly with grating irony.
Or perhaps it seems a roll of dice for the precise reason there is such a mess. A small stone is sufficient to tip the balance of a drunken man; for a man of sobriety, not even the mountain can move his muscle. In one life time, it is not mere chance that there will be an earth-quake, a hurricane, a tsunami, an epidemic, a serious ailment, and, God forbid, a sudden disappearance of savings. An honest reflection confirms that an individual can very well encounter all these within a 50 year time-frame, and depending on his past karma, perhaps all together. Truly, nowhere to run then.
Now that one event has occurred, Governments are pissing in their bankrupt treasuries. Their votaries, well, they too are pissing into their bankrupt souls. It is after a fashion to believe things happen to others: few realise that by the time they complete their own life, they have already lived through a fair bit of hell; the suffering for many is so minute, so continuous, and so insistent, it no longer feels like misery but defines life as one knows it. Occassionally, that death-by-a-thousand-prick is joined at the hip by misery-of-megaphone-kind.
School-time quiz: Choose between a life of
1. continuous pain whose exact quantum and nature you know versus moderate, continuous joy but with a real chance of a major jolt that fully and viciously negates everything you may have built over the years.
2. moderate, continuous and known pain versus continuous upheavels, both on the upsides and downsides.
3. moderate, continuous and known pain versus guaranteed continuous but unknown pain, and a possible (not guaranteed) major upside at the end of your lived life.
For a long time, life was akin to tripping over the choices in option 2, and in fact, for a vast majority of people it continues to hold. For a small minority, modern times have offered the Devil's choice (option 1). For the curious: option 3 was gifted to those who authored the scriptures. It is, incidentally, also available for taking by everyone else.
Indeed, volatility, or where it really springs from - a perception of uncertainty - can invoke such dread as to force a person to choose painful certainty over uncertainty. A sure pain will start to appear preferable, even though it may never be acceptable. Thus, a bout of volatility can bring the mind to ultimately nuance between preferability and acceptability, a feat unimaginable under the heady intoxication of routine life.
The sweet 'c' made individuals ensconced in the ethereal realm of option 1 come down a notch lower to confront everyday impregnated with uncertainty which could birth the certainty of their own mortality. This uncertainty if it did not kill, made remembrance of a possibly fatal inconvenience a daily tedium. It is as stark and clear a lesson in mindfulness as there ever was, for those whose past errors, including life-style choices, made them sub-servient to an invisible nugget. Humiliation couldn't be more ego-deflating than this.
What, pray, is the tendency to react to this volatility induced humiliation? To remove it of course. What is the best way to remove pain that is uncertain: make it a pain that is certain, to make one feel that instead of a nugget controlling us, we are on top of it. A.k.a. lock-down. People often wonder how can any government be re-elected after inflicting something called demonetisation? For, along side pain, it gave the poor the vicarious thrill of seeing the rich suffer --- a voyeuristic intrusion into another's bedroom usually outstrips the same adventures carried out in one's own.
Like-wise, people will wonder how could a Government get a third term after a lock-down? By converting possibility of death by disease into certainty of death by poverty. Death by disease can happen to 'me'; death by poverty can happen to others. Even if it happens to 'me', it will not kill me today, and only perhaps, and a big perhaps, tomorrow. The former is immediate, real and singular; the latter distant, possible and plural. It is called democratisation of pain, an action which fits political logic and known to work well over shorter time-frames. But rest assured, when an honest statistican gets down to work, the aggregate of figures from the latter will put to shame the former.
People are fond of claiming a share of ownership in rationality. Putting chalk to a child-sized black-board, the definition of rationality is this: expected gain from conducting an action x size of the gain - expected loss from conducting that action x size of the loss. Economists are not wholly wrong when they aver that man is a rational animal. Indeed, every man, and oh yes, every woman too, makes this mental computation. To marry? Check. To choose a profession? Check. To cheat someone? Yes. To act with a king-sized ego? Check. Greater the skill in computing those probabilities, the more fruitful the response.
For a rational policy-maker the question could not be simpler: what is the probability of deaths from darling 'c' versus probability of deaths from lock-down induced economic deprivation across not just this generation, but also amongst under-nourished children, adolescent girls (future mothers), and expecting mothers today, the bearers of the future in some sense? What about artisans, artists, and those numerable sundry vocations that bear testimony to the rich skill-set of a verily old civilisation? It is reasonable to ask is this even a choice? Yes, if, within a polity held to account to some kind of a constitutional conduct, the principle of inter-generational equity is recognised: explicitly or otherwise in common behaviour of common people. In India, in our habits, traditions, judgements of the formal courts of law, this principle clearly asserts its presence.
Where does the idea of inter-generational equity arise from? From the same instinct that makes a man fear the virus: to endeavour to continue something of value. Every man believes his life is of value in and of itself, which it is. Like-wise, a policy-maker is entitled to the belief that civilisation, whose custody he is entrusted with, too, has value in and of itself. A wise policy-maker clearly recognizes that civilisation does not reside in the material culture of man-kind, it resides in the very act of transmission and remembrance, the ability of the society to pro-create and nurture self-respecting versions of itself and teach those something of value from its past, for them to carry that remembrance forward. A true patriot, which our rational policy-maker would be, will endeavour to leave undisturbed this natural 'Circle of Life'.
In simple terms, inter-generational equity implies asking oneself a rudimentary question: what are the consequences of my actions on the generations and life forms that come hereafter? In more clinical terms: how should the pie of benefits be divided between my generation and those likely to succeed me? Should I pull upfront the pie that is really not mine to take or endeavour to strike a balance? A policy-maker in the throes of this thought would certainly be appalled at the site of sudden surge in paupery, begging and reduction in dignity of bodies perfectly ready to toil to earn their bread. Injecting undignified desperation, and hunger, into able bodies to safeguard viral intrusion into feeble bodies is something the policy-maker will find difficult to reconcile, arithmetically and emotionally.
An inter-generational perspective, like any other, simply shapes the contours of one's thinking. It helps one observe the reality from one stand-point compared to another and to conclude that the disease is highly contagious and fatal in some limited measure, but no where close to the virulence of some of the previous plagues. Based on all past pandemics, some understanding of the genome of the virus, and an educated guess, our rational policy-maker can arrive, after the initial bout of panic, at an upper bound. It can run into millions but when you divide millions by billions, well, as a policy-maker, and policy-maker, alone, you know in which direction to lean. The loss due to darling 'c' is at some level quantifiable and the pain it will inflict knowable in advance.
However, side-effects of a prolonged, reactionary and erratic lock-down? Not quantifiable - check. Pain known in advance? No. Any kind of advance socio-economic-political modelling of its effects possible? No. The policy-maker then is confronted with a seemingly diabolical choice: what surety exists that his supposed rationality will preserve this 'Circle of Life'? What if it permanently impairs it? On the other hand, is there an assurance that doubling-down on that initial panic improves the chances of a more secure and dignified future?
To make matters more puzzling, both choices are sustained by one common condition: mutual dependency. What is different today, than in the past, is the intricate dependency of peoples across different regions, whether that region be defined as wards within a city, as districts in a state, movements across states, or countries. The enormous population further magnifies, or rather feeds upon, this dependency. Mobility is both its expression and cause; likewise, that ubiquitous piece of sterile plastic in dumbed-down hands. The average income account of an average person today has many more hands than his own driving it, than at any point in human history.
This dependency is both a pre-requisite, and a consequence, of the specialisation of economic activities. It is ironic to talk about self-reliance in a society that boasts of, perhaps, one of the finest living examples of labour specialisation: the caste matrix. Most households would surely have noticed the number of door-bells that rang in a pre-c era. That eerie silence is a stark reminder that self-reliance is neither practicable, nor desirable. Society is made of men coming together to make something that is more than sum of its parts. For our policy-maker, a severe and sudden rupturing of this dependency to save lives is not only difficult, but downright illogical.
The blending of looking ahead to generations after and the inter-dependency men share today leads to a clear perception: beings coming together to form a living whole, a whole with a keen innate desire to perpetuate itself. Something is alive if, and only if, it has self-reflexivity: it can be affected by its own actions. A rock is dead not because it is made of sterile matter, rather even it could act on its own, one doubts whether it would be too bothered by its effects on itself. But a society, as an abstract construct, is actually not that abstract. It is not a ruse for a sociologist, historian, anthropologist, epidemiologist, virologist, ethnographer or semiotician to deconstruct. It is a whole unto itself because it moves, it acts, it reacts, it adapts, and it blows up under the weight of its own mis-deeds.
Those who bear responsibility for such constructs bear a lot in their hand, and hence, their attitude needs less of being a ruler and more of a care-taker. This, of course, is the most stylized way to think about it, but in fact, is also the only practical way to manage a machine of 130,00,00,000 parts. Through this looking-glass it is now easier to understand why being rational about a pandemic is difficult. A typical mind is used to separating, chaffing, distinguishing, privileging one over another. It excels at making choices for the parts. It is that rare girding of neurons that enables a mind to consistently make choices at the level of the whole. For to keep something whole means to constantly re-balance, re-allocate, re-distribute, re-mould. The dreary mechanics of politics is a self-induced way for a society to achieve this in fits and starts.
But politics usually fails, every once in a while, in making choices that finally matter. Why? Think of any ordinary life: how many decisions will a man really make that really matter? Hardly a handful, and almost all of them, will in the end analysis, come down to a choice between right and wrong, good and bad, god-like and un-god like. The di-lemma in front of the rational policy-maker in response to a health crisis is not really intellectual: it is moral, with consequences of making the wrong choice being too much of a burden to carry for any upright soul. It is the same dilemma that confronts a judge who awards a death sentence; the one that confronts Akbar in Mughal-e-Azam; one that confronted Gandhi when he decided to call off the Civil Disobedience movement in the 1930s disappointed by the violence it engendered; one which defined gentlemanly honour of the legendary Knight in King Arthur's Court, one that surely confronts every ascetic who leaves family by sacrificing what is immediate and real, in search of something that is only probable and undefinable.
How does one think through such a choice then? In all the examples cited above, the way to break through such a choice was based on one trait: a deep sense of character that emerged from an equally deep-footed conviction. Every passing age, when it looks back, is left to feel it has lost something of the character of its parents. The reason is not hard to come by: every generation has lost some of its ability to ask itself the right questions, or to give rise to such public figures who can ask them. When more of well-baked supposed learning is handed on a platter, less the skill of questioning. Put another way, to change one's perception of reality, one is required to question it in a different way.
The rational policy-maker, to get out of his moral anorexia, is thus called to rephrase his choice. What he is confronted is not a choice between saving one kind of life and sacrificing another. Instead the problem is set thus: on the one hand, many of the pieces are in place and overall puzzle can be formulated after some panic, heart-burn, a bout of anxiety and trial-and-error; on the other, there is a deeply disturbing question of what the pieces even are. In such a case, what should a rational policy-maker do? Evidently, guard himself against the unknown-unknown and not the known-unknown.
Such is the elementary nature of this consideration that it needs only the service of a child's playful mind to choose between a tractable or untractable formulation, especially, and this is important, when solving the tractable problem can increase the intractability of the intractable problem. That is, to use an engineer's arcane, there is a high probability of setting in place a negative feed-back loop between the tractable and intractable. The greater the success in solving the tractable, greater the rise in intractability of the intractable. Questioned thus, the moral dilemma coheres into a problem-solving dilemma, provided the policy-maker had stayed true to his religion of cause-and-effect based reasoning and a desire to do right. This, in colloquial lingo, is the meaning of the word dharma, the kneading together by a skilled hand of rationality and morality.
But the action was the complete opposite, with rare exceptions, across the world. Why? Every country (a.k.a Nation with a capital N) may have its own logic. In India, for a change, considerations were somewhat simpler: what action will benefit me to retain, increase and cement my hold over the electorate? Do I fancy myself of seeing that action through, i.e., does it fit well with the pattern of politics (a police nanny state) I am most comfortable with? The considerations were not inter-generational, they were clearly intra-generational, effectively determining which groups of votaries to safeguard against others. There was a skilled hand at play for sure, but it was kneading the dough of arithmetic of the electoral kind.
It is easy to laugh at these words. They indeed are laughable. It is hard to believe that your Prime Minister would really be driven deep deep down with such a primal consideration at a time like this. But help yourself think through this: the fact that one is talking about a Prime Minister, and a Prime Minister only, versus say the cabinet, or the Government, or God-forbid a parliamentary special situation group, or heavens tear themselves apart - a council of the States! has something to reveal to even the casual sauntering mind. Add to that the fact that many of the larger or important regimes in the world today have risen out of some kind of a passionate ideology. A passionate ideology is a ruse to get into power. But as time passes, people do get fatigued of that ideology, including those who have risen on its back. They soon lose the vitality that its meaning once held for them. The dreary dynamics of politicking and governing do take their toll.
But a governing coterie raised on an ideology still needs an ideological-type of framework to act under. What is this framework? It is a framework that seeks certainty through rigid codification, control and authority. When the original ideology loses its potency it needs to be supplanted with something of a similar nature. A crisis, war, fear of the other (usually a minority), an enemy-state, false attention to withering national pride and culture, are all good substitutes. And when none exist, it is always possible to create an exceptional situation and create a sense of urgency. These all provide fuel to the, for lack of a better word, ideological way of thinking minus the ideology.
Sabka-saath Sabka-vikas was of course the marketing feat of last 100 years. It had the feeling of harmlessness beneath which lay ghosts of murder, pillage, rape and tearing apart the belly of a pregnant mother. Such innovations are a rarity, and once they are exhausted we are back to the routine of crises, enemy-heckling and othering. The coarseness of the public dialogue is nothing but a reflection of the fact that the ideology of the pracharak was lost long time ago, but the way of thinking remained and it struggled to find an enduring substitute. It made a pedestrian out a pracharak and a noob out of a nation.
It is not that someone has to try to think like this, it is just that there is no other way of thinking known to them. They are enmeshed in a world-view from where pressing down of an impulsive lock-down seems the only choice fit for a saviour of rest of man-kind. There evidently are people who do fancy themselves as saviours even though apparently they have received no such sanction from God Himself.
So if someone ain't got it, here is how you do things in the la-la-land: first you make men hysterical, and then you become their saviour. That is how you get elected within the shrivelled remains of a democracy. So much for progressive ideas. People do not want progress, they want certainty. Certainty of maintaining the illusion of progress, certainty of putting those Muslims in their right place, certainty of tearing apart Kashmir, and certainty of building the temple, come what may. Once you have figured this out, you have got the key to their innermost demons. And once you grab their demon, they are all yours, whether they themselves like it or not. The Satan, ladies and gentleman, seems to have overextended his stay in the Garden of Eden. Be prepared for being tempted with more apples. Do read the label though: in these times of no international trade even export-quality ones are available at throw-away prices.
Is this too simplistic an analysis of the situation? Of course it is. Does it being simplistic makes it wrong? Of course not. It is the primal fire upon which other kinds of irrationality take root. The first of which is the notion that because China imposed a lock-down and supposedly it worked, it makes eminent sense, or at least, makes it the easiest to sell. But political vanity needs a rational veneer to infuse an irrational lock-down, and it was happily provided by that modern bastion seeking to replace God, also called, in dignified language, the medical profession. After all what would a doctor advise, but to avoid large casualties? Speaking to an economist, especially of the Austrian School vintage, would have yielded a completely opposite advise. In effect, a lock-down is a simple addition of politics + medical science. Try as one must, the whole analysis refuses to escape the bounds of simplicity.
The doctor's religion, though, is not to save lives but to heal. It is to accept death with absolute poise, and help others do so too. It is to breath calmly in face of a calamity and say that it is not out of ordinary for a large number of men to die in a short period of time. It is to recognize that a situation of this nature is quite like war in peacetime. It is to realise that after death also comes life: for a society, it means, after quite a few die there are many more who will survive. Like hard medical sciences where evidence is revered, so too a little bit of historical evidence shows this proposition to be on firmer grounds.
A doctor with a deep sense of place in history would have served as a better helping hand. But they, by definition, have to be rare, and whatever meagre number of them do exist, were certainly not to be found hustling amongst corridors of power. They were busy running their OPDs, meeting and greeting patients everyday while the lock-down persisted. If you know one, shake their hands with the faith of a believer. You will not need a sanitiser.
It is quite a feat to talk of tapering the curve. When such language enters ordinary parlance, stop and contemplate: society has breached a new low. It has numerised infections, death rates and then statistized them. This language of statistics becomes then the dominating narrative that controls actions of stakeholders entrusted with much responsibility. Has anyone made any real meaning of what such figures mean? Has there been a moment's reflection on what an epidemic can mean to a society? Should it mean that life as one knows should come to an absolute, and note that word, absolute, standstill? From what precepts in the practice of healing can such an inference be drawn confidently? The exhibitionism on display has nothing to do with healing and saving lives. It has much more to do with being held hostage to figurative statistics. Repeated use of words such as quarantine, penalty, reprimands, enforcements have little to draw from the practice of healing.
There is nothing inherently wrong with statistics, one uses it all the time to deal with reality. Consider a pursuit of most interest to a majority of men, in non-corona times: making money. Specifically, a casino. Now, it is a given that the casino enjoys superior odds of winning against the house, on average, on most days. Furthermore, it is possible to compute these odds with a fair degree of confidence. The odds have to work out this way else the gambling industry, like prostitution, could not claim a heritage as far as back as one can trace the dawn of civilisation. No sane businessman could make a fortune running it, nor would a sane businessman bank his fortune backing it. For perfectly logical reasons it is the favourite industry of the mafia too, the profits keep coming to finance more other-wordly activities.
It took all the skills of Ocean's Eleven to game a casino. Therefore, it is safe to assume that for the rest, it is a loser's proposition. What is worse, the longer an individual plays it successfully, higher the chances he will encounter a very very bad end. In every other industry or vocation, the longer you exert the more experienced and skilled you become. But here the statistics reveal a different story. Let us say one plays a game wherein on 99% of days one earns double of what one bet and on the other 1% one loses half of what one has earned till date. Well, if one plays the game for 24 days one will get very close to around 100 crores. And quite likely loses half of it on the 25th day.
You might say, well, still ain't bad is it? But remember, the man got lucky for quite a while, and so it is quite likely he will fancy his chances one more time, and in doing so, perhaps face another loss on the 26th day, bringing his fortune down to nearly 25 crores. To put it in context: after 24 tries, with much stress and draw of luck, the man reached 100 crores. And in two tries, he lost much of that amount. The optimist will still believe there is a cause to celebrate. But then, as is his wont, the optimist left the element of human psychology out of the picture. It is eminently likely that as the man amassed his fortune, with every passing day, he felt blessed, as if he was God's chosen child. He felt charitable, he felt magnanimous. He made commitments to causes, spent lavishly and quite possibly drew on debt, of the massive and unserviceable kind.
When a man faces debilitating losses of this nature, inspite of possessing a princely sum of Rs. 25 crores, he, for all practical purposes is bankrupt. This, if anything, was the moral lesson to be had from how the Pandava's lost their claim to the Kingdom, and nearly their only wife, gambling against the casino of Shakuni. It is devilishly evil of posterity to think good about the Pandavas and castigate the Kauravas. The latter, to their credit, at least did not dishonour their own wives (though they did another's and for which they eventually did pay), and had the good sense to play a game whose probabilities they understood better. If it wasn't for Krishna, one could safely say Kauravas would still have won the war. In that case, the Northern Gangetic Plains would have sported a very different politics today.
The Kauravas certainly had one thing in their favour with 100 of them: the law of large numbers. A casino too has two things needed in a game of chance: a) law of large numbers to be in one's favour; and b) deep buffers to tide over severe shocks. It is quite likely that the casino will spill a lot of red ink (make huge losses) on a few days, so much so, it might make one throw-up. However, it will continue to trudge along because it is tempting many crazed souls on many days. Combine those two 'many' and you have a large number.
A man with, say an average adult life span of 60 years and 365 days a year can never hope to beat that particular reservoir of 'largeness'. Statistically, he is dead meat before he starts. When an individual is faced with the possibility of being infected by a virus he is playing a game of chance with probabilities worse than in our casino. On most days the man is alive, he is adding a little bit to his life, subtracting a little bit from it. Net net, on some days he thinks he is moving forward and, some days, backwards. Nothing very exciting here. But then a day comes when he is down with a fatal infection and the lights must be put out. The statistician may talk in terms of a six-sigma event, but being caught by a virus, for an individual, is way beyond six standard deviations. When it happens, a he ceases to be a 'he'.
Statistics then hardly matter for a man when confronted with a situation of asymmetric pay-offs: on most days little bread-crumbs, and then one fine day, nothing. A man will naturally be fearful and refuse to step outside his home insistently scared by voices of those who he voted for, unless of course he has a) better than average immunity, b) is a philosopher who contemplates about death as a matter of daily chore, and/or c) is a man of deep and unwavering faith. Such men are scarce to be found.
But what about an aggregate of a large number of men? Say 130 crores of them? What if they are spread between a vast geographic expanse, with different dietary practices, weather habitations, and a long genetic history? They have what a statistician would fondly call diversification: a pool of men that have spread their eggs across so many baskets that it is easy to get confused between the number of the baskets and that of the men.
Further, unlike a solitary individual, a pool of 130 crore individuals is likely to experience a more even pay-off: it will be subject to deaths in riots, deaths in war, deaths in earthquakes, deaths of disease, deaths of depression, deaths through infant & maternal mortality, death due to incest & rape, death due to poverty, death due to road accidents, death due to homelessness, death due to an inability to survive extreme temperatures. This pool of man has all the characteristics of a casino: it too is playing a game of chance but has odds staked in its favour due to the law of large numbers. An individual is a dead cat; a highly stratified society with a bewildering genetic spread: a vibrant serpent. Come to think of it,, it is quite silly that the nationalists so proud of their own heritage failed to grasp this.
What if there be a compilation of say a misery index that was a weighted average of all these different kinds of deaths? What if all the news corporations gathered their resources to cull out this data every two hours across the length and breadth of the country and kept updating it every day? How would that curve really look like and what if one were to slice and dice it by each district? The people of this nation would be feasted to an orgy of a statistic of death, of incidences of still-born children and mothers crying in helplessness, and of course, not to be left behind, of the orgy of cutting off the womb of a pregnant mother in communal riots.
Would the honourable citizens of that country then decide that it is worth not getting pregnant ever again? Or never to venture out on the highway with a car? Of course, they would not. Indeed, in cases where a mother's womb is cut with a sword, with cries of Jai Sri Ram, they might even celebrate and light a few diyas, and as honourable men have of late discovered, bang a few thaalis like the ladies did to frighten the invading Mughal marauders. Or that is what the myths would have one believe, never mind the fact that the fathers of those very ladies, out of greed for their throne, were quite happy to marry their daughters to those same supposed invaders.
Now, if men are willing to conduct their daily affairs despite these daily trepidations, one would assume that a mass of men called a nation, governed by a State, can afford to continue the breath of life even in the direst of times. But as it turns out, the casino, inspite of having a God-given upper hand, is afraid to play the game of life. And since it has cowered, those inside the House, too have picked up its vibes and have all of a sudden lost their gambling mojo.
An action grounded in fear is, by definition, irrational, that is, devoid of conscious thinking. It, per se, is not wrong: seeing a tiger and running is an action based on fear and also correct. When the sentry of a castle discovers that the enemy spy has breached the precincts, he is quite correct in locking all the gates, such as locking down all airports, inter-state borders and locking of specific critical viral epicentres. Viewing the virus, thus, as an 'enemy' and that too, 'an enemy within' leads to sensible actions upto a point.
But in the analogy of the enemy, the enemy usually has an identifiable shape, form and a concreteness to its existence. A virus defies all of these: it is there but not seen; it is here, there and everywhere (diffused). Trying to lock it down through an 'enemy analogy' is therefore certain to not work beyond a point. In other words, a thoroughgoing application of a broadly appropriate analogy is equivalent to 'perfecting the wrong answer', or perhaps, answering the wrong question altogether. This, then, is the intractable approach to problem-solving: solving something because it can be solved, not because it needs to be solved.
Once a diffused and unseen enemy is within, what analogy lends itself best? The country, surprisingly, seemed to have not noticed that it was in no need of an analogy, when it was, in fact, supplied all the while with a living example within itself. The stretch, reach and spread of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, is but one example of a far greater virus amongst the country stretching back a hundred years. The country seemingly has cohabited with it, most of the times at discomfort with it, and of late, in bed with it. Any attempt to deal with it through a heavy-handed approach has always back-fired. Like a repulsive reptile it has morphed, retreated and re-emerged stronger. It has displayed, in full measure, the agility, ferocity, and most importantly, the contagion effect of the real c.
It too is diffused through its shakhas, its myriad of organisations, through its perfect double-speak, through the agency of some its highly principled officers, through the establishment of sympathy amongst a large section of persons with money-making abilities. It is the acme of paradox: those who are a direct product of this remarkable organisational phenomenon, seem to have learnt nothing from their own fathers on how to tackle something similar, yet far less sinister & far better understood and, fortunately, governed ultimately by the bounds of nature; unlike the RSS which has subverted ordinary moral laws (like all fascist phenomena tend to), and along with it the hearts of a generation.
How do you dismantle the architecture of such an organism, be it a virus or the likes of the RSS, given that a brute force method is unlikely to yield the desired result? By asking the question: what sustains it? In the case of the RSS, it is clear: the energy of its pracharaks, the monetary backing of its sympathisers, and the naivete of a child and young man's mind, or the fearful psyche of an adult.
It is futile to fight the pracharak or outdo the purse-strings of misguided magicians of wealth. The third factor, however, is amenable to a simple solution: patiently watching the dismantling of the conditioned mind of its own accord. Every tendency with bitterness and anger in its heart finally meets its nemesis that is usually of its own making. For a society to tolerate something like the RSS requires for it to simply not lose its bearing while the orgy of megalomaniacal, sadistic and masochistic energy is on exhibition.
What is the equivalent of patience when problem-solving within the realm of little c? Is patience the equal of allowing infections to spread widely, rapidly, in the hope of developing herd immunity? That, by all accounts, is not patience, it is called hope. Patience, to put it gently, is maintaining one's bearing. How does one maintain one's bearing? By protecting oneself while being oneself; it is not getting hassled by the verities of volatility. So the moot question then is: how can a society protect itself while being itself, all the while not losing a shred of its sense of who it is?
In this regards, a war is an easier proposition compared to an epidemic lock-down: one clearly remembers one's place in time and space, perhaps very acutely on account of the presence of an enemy at the gates, one clearly visible. On the other hand, dealing with the unknown and unseen can really topple the best of men. To learn, therefore, to answer this question, it is necessary for a society to ask of itself: what it really is? What is its real being?
A society, in its clinical definition, is simply an arrangement: parts of its rigid and parts of it fungible and flexible. How, pray, can an arrangement hold itself in balance, in the best and worst of times? For a society to be itself requires simply the arrangement to hold and continue to hold in all events. What holds together the arrangement of a group of men? Their primal desire, nay, the absolute necessity, to place a modicum of trust, faith and reciprocity in their fellow men.
With these elementary considerations, imagine for a moment an arrangement of men that maintains itself, that moves and flows as a whole against the current of any tide, that adjusts itself, now here and now there. Sometimes it turns, sometimes it twists but always as a singular arrangement. The arena of politics, and government, in general, is but one adjunct to hold this arrangement together. Of far greater import is the fundamental intuition held in bosom of men: that they cannot own something unless they also owe something in return.
The pathways of governments - central, state, district, local - are a direct product of this reality. They do not possess any special powers, nor do they know something more than can be known by society as a whole. They can offer themselves in co-ordinating actions of others, reminding men that they belong to a collective, and thereby holding the arrangement together. But if the very pathways are contaminated by blood, animosity, hatred, petty electoral miscalculations, and mostly, devoid of an anchoring sense of morality and decency, they not only not help, but indeed, they rupture the arrangement. From being an adjunct that can nourish, they in fact become the cause that converts a petty 'c' from a catalyst to a cataclysmic agent.
The search, perhaps highly intractable, for the right problem to solve leads eventually to a self-evident truth: problems that are largely intractable are best resolved (resolved not solved) through co-operation of a genuine kind, and not by exhorting men from high up to co-operate with each other. The vitiated environment that permeates civil society renders this well nigh difficult. Infections are rising not because the public health-care infrastructure is not upto the mark but because solicitation, co-operation and dialogue have been forsaken and replaced by stigmatisation, sanitation and separation.
It is, ultimately, inevitable that many of those who are meant to die will die; there simply is no way to avert it in a large, highly intertwined and complexly layered society. This particular social form has its benefits and its peculiarities, one of which is presenting insurmountable road-blocks in trying to micro-manage what can only be termed as a non-localised flow-phenomenon: an action that simply flows through the fabric of such a society, driven by its own internal logic and impulses.
With dialogue (samvad), a country that is inheritor to a deep ancient tradition (sanskriti), would have found a way to restrain Durga with the right dose of Saraswati. Or, in other words, to temper, restrain, reduce the velocity of currency (money), a harbinger of economic vigour, without arresting it in its tracks. The absence of Saraswati ultimately led to an absence of Lakshmi, both of health and wealth. It converted the vigour of flow of money into a dead stock-pile of wealth. The urban middle-classes that were much pandered to will get to keep their stock, but they will find it exceedingly difficult to make it flow due to the fear inside their own hearts. What is the point of having a lot of blood in a dead body?
When men sacrifice God at the altar of false fear, God forsakes them, not by magic, connivance or any deep mystery. But simply by allowing Mara or Satan to roam freely. If Satan could break the covenant between Adam and His Creator, how difficult will it be for him to squeeze out the joys, warmth, freedom, and ease from the relationship between man and man?
Lacking it all, chief ministers will fight the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister will fight his own electorate, neighbours will watch suspiciously over neighbours, the young will forsake the elders, the elders will detest the young, customers will forsake their suppliers, shoppers will forsake their luxuries, the hair will forsake the scissor: all in the fear of the touch of something unseen, unfelt, and uncured, and a fear that will continue to persist, whatever be the pretensions of the most advanced claims regarding vaccination.
India will suffer large scale infections, not because its people are illiterate, uncouth, irresponsible. Simply because it failed to see that what is trying to fight is a simpler manifestation of what it has failed to fight over the past 100 years, and akin to problems it has grappled with for several centuries past. It has chosen to forget the sacrifices of an entire generation that led to its own coming into being as a country. Instead, it cowered and hid in houses built on the pain of those who went before. Ignorance has no known allopathic cure. Its curve, unfortunately, can expand to infinity, the only phenomenon known to. The hope only is that loss of lives is not commensurate with the number of infections.
What the country, and it is a country at that, needs is simply a sense of real character -- one where men support their fellow men not because it will benefit them, but because it is the right thing to do -- and a serious dose of rationality. The real tractable answer to the whole conundrum is: there is no tractable solution that will solve the problem. Any attempt to solve it with confidence, computation, and control will continue to ricochet and confound.
But perhaps a return to civility in conversations will ensure that problems which are intractable are at least recognised as such, and the middle-classes of the country display the moral stamina to bear its rightful consequences. Forsake the doctor who promises an elixir: a chemotheraphy for a cancer. Accept the cancer, ameliorate its pain, pass the journey with a smile on the face and accept the inevitable consequence.
Rationality continues to whisper: choose your Gods with care. Never those who take an urban disease and willy-nilly transpose it to rural areas.
Standing here
The old man said to me
"Long before these crowded streets
Here stood my dreaming tree"
Below it he would sit
For hours at a time
Now, progress takes away
What forever took to find
And now, he's falling hard
He feels the falling dark
How he longs to be
Beneath his dreaming tree
Conquered fear to climb
The moment froze in time
When the girl who first he kissed
Promised him she'd be his
Remembered Mother's words
There beneath the tree
"No matter what the world
You'll always be my baby"
Mommy, come quick
The dreaming tree has died
The air is growing thick
A fear he cannot hide
The dreaming tree has died.
~ "The Dreaming Tree", Before These Crowded Streets (1998), Dave Matthews Band.
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