Learning from a learner who knew that to learn was to live

(Source: http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/old-documentary-on-mahatma-gandhi-now-in-digital-format-674374)

I say to my students - so often that it's become something of a catch-phrase - that if they're the same people who came into this postgraduate school when the time comes to leave it, their stay here has been a colossal waste for everyone concerned (and a bloody expensive one, at that). What's the point - and where's the proof - that we're alive at all if we aren't  every moment grappling with the idea of 'becoming' rather than merely 'being'? Needless to say, as with most of the ideas I paw-play-toy with, I can also trace this one back, at a tiny remove, to that old imp who causes me so much grief because he's a very demanding task-master. Yes. You know the one. 

I'll let him speak for himself:

"I would like to say to the diligent reader of my writings and to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject." This, of course, could only be Gandhi. He writes these words in an article in Harijan in 1933, from where they come to form the 'Note' to the Reader in the 1938 edition of perhaps the single most vital manifesto to emerge from the 20th-century, the terribly misunderstood Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule.

Think closely about what the old man is saying here. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the very foundation of our education system, which largely sees the realm of learning as a bulwark against doubt; against not' knowing', which is to be eschewed at all cost. Such a system would impose upon us a consistency (because as critical pedagogy demonstrates, education is political: if it doesn't teach you to question what you take for granted as your 'reality', and is innocent of the socio-economic conditions that shape the very classroom space you inhabit, such learning can only serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo) and foreclose the possibility upon which the world lives and dies: change. To live is to learn is to change, Gandhi seems to tell us, adding that age or station or profession have little if anything to do with the project of education which is little more than a promise to ourselves which we keep each time we are willing to concede (to paraphrase Einstein) that the more we learn, the more we realise how little we can possibly ever know. 

To be a lifelong learner, therefore, takes humility: to concede that my 'self' of yesterday was wrong, in the face of information I might have acquired today. And that this doesn't stem from fickleness, but honesty and self-reflexivity, both of which can sometimes feel cripplingly overwhelming. But can there be any other way, if one is to respond to the "call of Truth" Gandhi speaks of? We need, if we are to "be the change we want to see" (relax: it doesn't matter if he said it in quite these words, like the coffee mugs you've undoubtedly seen this quotation on), to start by reclaiming the power of uncertainty and revelling in everything we do not know today, with the (sometimes kept; sometimes deferred) intention to learn it tomorrow, and perhaps change our minds about why we do what we do along the way. Done honestly, and with everything we've got, I suspect this would make Bapu smile.   

Of machines, cyborgs, an old imp, and a spinning-wheel (also, technically, a machine)

G. Ramachandran, a young scholar from Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's ode to life, learning, and all that is beautiful, spent a few days with Gandhi in Delhi, in October 1924. Bapu took the time to engage in wide-ranging conversations with this young student, and in them, the two covered much ground. Ramachandran managed to draw out the old man's views on art (anything that "helps the soul to realize its inner self"),  how beauty and truth are effectively the same (I didn't realise how much he loved Keats before I read this), and ultimately, how he felt about machines, given his well-known aversion to them, on account of the fact that they 'dwarfed' human capacity. Ramachandran asked Gandhi quite straightforwardly if he was against all machinery - or the idea of machines, even. To this, Gandhi's response was one which might have surprised his young interlocutor: "How can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery? The spinning-wheel itself is a machine; a little tooth-pick is a machine. What I object to, is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on "saving labour" till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might,"[1] (my emphasis). Remarkably prescient for a text that is 93 years old, don't you think?

And why, pray, do I feel the need to revisit Bapu today, apart from the fact that I'm currently spending my days at the Ashram (and my nights reading that other architect of modern India, Babasaheb Ambedkar)? We were asked, this month, to think about what it means for us as a species, living and working our way through the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution' which seems to be upon us. I would imagine this means dealing with the ubiquity of the internet, fast-changing everything we  do, the ways in which we 'know' (in terms of knowledge production/dissemination, the professions that are currently available to us, economic and business models and c.); more, we'd also have to venture into the post-human space (and you would have no choice but to recognise quite quickly how much the 'future' looks like the present when you read about the various biohackers, cyborgs and other suchlike who 'walk among us' already[2], or note the popularity of shows like the dystopian (but is it? really?) 'Black Mirror' which indicate the firm grapple-hold this theme seems to have on popular culture, always an excellent barometer of the spiritus mundi).

But I realise I haven't answered my question yet, and to it my response is a simple one: the reason I bring Gandhi into play today, to frame this discussion, is that I don't see how we can theorise the so-called Fourth Revolution when we haven't adequately managed to wrest ourselves from its predecessor: you know, the one which gave us Modernity (with a capital M, no less). In the form of late-capitalism and the global corporate order we function (or, more accurately labour and suffer) under today, this is not something we've finished living through quite yet. From it emerges that which will be, and this is why something that was true in 1924  remains so to-day: we run the risk of being 'dwarfed' by technology; slaves to machines (big ones, of course, but so too little ones, as Tagore was to remind Gandhi, on the subject of his precious spinning-wheel). How are machines or the 'craze' for them which now seems inescapable, given how thoroughly they've permeated every aspect of our existence, going to transform our lives? In myriad ways, forcing upon us new epistemes; reconfigurations in how we define 'privacy', 'relationships', 'knowledge', 'work', 'leisure', and other givens around which we've thus far constructed meaning in and for our lives. Is there a chance that this will have to involve re-imagining and re-defining what is meant by the descriptor 'human' itself? Hasn't it always?         

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[1] CWMG, Vol. 25, pp 247-256.  You can access the entire 100-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi at the Sabarmati Ashram's online archive, https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

[2] See this fascinating piece for more: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/cyborgs-among-us human-biohackers-embed-chips-their-bodies-n150756

What Happens When Leaders Stop Walking (and apparate as holograms instead)

I find that I cannot write about modern India without dealing with a mischievous little (ish – he wasn’t nearly as tiny as most people imagine) imp who went by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The man was a walker. It was something that stayed with him from his time as a broke, hungry student in England, persisted into his time as a wealthy, less hungry barrister and community leader in South Africa, and then fed into his life-work as the tallest leader of the Indian nationalist movement. South Africa, a country he called home for over two decades, was to prove Gandhi’s laboratory: it is where his experiments with diet, direct non-violent action, civil disobedience, truth or soul force (satyagraha), brahmacharya, caste-less living et al first began. Prime among these was the elevation of walking from an individual activity into an act rife with political significance in the public sphere: think about the Great March of 1913[1]. It involved 2,221 men, women and children (striking Indian miners – indentured labourers - and their families) walking, if they weren’t arrested or ‘deported’ en route, from Newcastle in Natal province to Tolstoy Farm in Johannesburg, in the Transvaal region.  

In the Indian context, I can do little better than to point you towards the apogee of Gandhi’s political life which came in the form of the Dandi March (1930)[2] and salt satyagraha that followed it. This man knew the power of walking as a collective act, not to mention, a symbolic one. An astute semiotician, he knew how to occupy symbols well. Gandhi realised that walking roots and grounds one like no other activity does. Further, it allows the walk-er to be seen as much as it allows her to see – to survey, learn, take in from – her surroundings. This aspect of walking-as-spectacle came to the fore during the Dandi March, but the old man had himself wandered (and covered) the length and breadth of India prior to this, and several times over, in a bid to make himself real to the “masses” he was slowly in the process of crafting into a people. During the Harijan Yatras of the 1930s, given that he was already in his 60s, he no longer walked as much as he once did, but took trains instead. It is said he bled between stations because his skin was chafed from being touched by the thousands of people who turned up to see him, to partake of the magic of the mahatma, everywhere he went. No smoke and mirrors here; there was no room for distance or obfuscation at such close quarters. Those who saw him went away knowing that their leader was as real as they were; wrought of blood and sinew as they were – as human as they were. This inspired faith and belief in his ability to negotiate for them the treacherous terrain that was dealing with the implacable Imperial government.

The Nehruvian era that followed – the dawn of independent India as it were – was configured around the tenet that nation-building was work which took serious doing. A patriot was a producer; one who contributed to the very real task of keeping together this newly hewn nation-state. The leaders were still visible, more or less accessible, and the country seemed to shimmer serenely in the after-glow of the nationalist movement. This period was also characterised by the performance of that rite of passage which marks the most intimate ritual of any democracy: participating in the first set of elections in modern India. If the civic engagement so central to this era has waned since, and with it the sense of a patriot as one who works to build – and keep – a nation, it almost certainly has something to do with the euphemistically titled ‘structural reforms’ unleashed upon the Indian economy at the behest of the World Bank in 1991. The ‘opening’ of the economy has led, among other things, to the shift from patriot-as-producer to patriot-as-consumer (including of narratives such as nationalism itself), and has in the process dismantled the moral imperative upon the nation-state to engage in social welfare (visible in how much ground the State has ceded of what it once occupied in health and education as sectors). This makes it vital to ask, does democracy mean to-day what once it did? If not, what are the new contours of this idea? In a country where leaders are mere holograms – simulated and see-through – and can no longer walk among us (something about security concerns, they say: it would have been fun trying to have this conversation with Gandhi or Nehru or Patel or even Jinnah, no?), how can there be anything but trust deficit in leadership? For example, consider that the last Indian general elections in 2014 saw the BJP sweep to a thumping victory despite the fact that their vote share (the lowest for any single party which has won such a majority in Parliament[3]) was merely 31%. This is indicative of a splintered polity, and it begins with the very real problem of disconnection between so-called political leaders and the lived reality of the citizens they are meant to represent.

Am I suggesting that all is doom and gloom? Possibly. Heaven knows I often feel cynical enough to entertain this possibility. How do we raise and nurture our young – those that Kofi Annan once called the “lifeline” of any nation – into a sentient and sapient citizenry? How do we begin to tackle the problem of trust deficit in political (and corporate, but that’s almost the same thing as we know only too well) leadership? By walking again, I hold. By walking again so we know the land and its inhabitants: the land will learn leaders as leaders learn it back. We need less opaque governance and more accountability, which sounds too obvious to actually need stating, and yet here we are, living in a grossly unequal society, where not everyone can access the categories ‘citizen’ or ‘rights’ in equal measure. Programmes like Swaraj Abhiyan’s proposed rural immersion programme for students, or the Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP[4]) Fellowship are instances of interventions which seek to reduce the spaces between us, but over and over again I can only come back to the idea I started this post with. Nivedita Menon says that a nation is a daily plebiscite[5], and if we are to reclaim it for ourselves, it begins with knowing and naming this nation over and over. And to know it, we must walk it together again.                           

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[1] See http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131002/jsp/opinion/story_17407676.jsp#.V9_aeih94dU for an overview

[2] See www.gandhiheritageportal.org for all things related to the life and life-work of Gandhi

[3] See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/BJPs-31-lowest-vote-share-of-any-party-to-win-majority/articleshow/35315930.cms for details

[4] See http://lamp.prsindia.org/thefellowship for more

[5] See http://www.standwithjnu.org/nationalism-teach-in/nivedita-menon-on-the-nation-is-a-daily-plebiscite/ for more

In which she is forced out of her delicious (self-imposed) write-irement to show solidarity with what she saw at FTII

I simply haven't the nose for rain. Or anything else, come to think of it. Not since I broke it on someone's forehead 18 years ago, but that's another story for another time. Someone who does though, is my father. He can smell it from hours and miles away. And my friend Jyo, who is in Poona today, and scheduled to do a session at the FTII. Which is where I was yesterday. Now, I'll admit that's a shady segue. But it'll do.

There's probably nothing I can tell you about the ongoing strike (we're at day 70 today) that you haven't already heard. Depending on your political predilection and curation of news sources, it'll likely fit neatly into one of two possible sweeping narratives, one of which will paint the student protestors as lumpen elements who sit around smoking copious amounts of weed (which, just for the record, can never be a bad thing in and of itself), treating the strike as one long holiday, and not actually being invested in resolving this (non)issue which they've precipitated and forced onto themselves in so many ways. The other one, the one I find closest to that shape-shifting slipperiness which masquerades as the idea of 'truth', is the version where the government, in a continuation of its avowed agenda to rewrite the script that India will proceed to play a starring role in (even as it recasts the long shadow of history to better fit its tenor and give heft to its exercise in cultural engineering), fucked up. It fucked up badly when it appointed dimwitted pracharks whose only claim to the positions they were gifted was their connection to the people doing the gifting: no one can accuse this government of not being a generous friend, at any rate. The chairperson and new appointees to the FTII council are laughable additions to an institution which, tiny and resource-starved though it might well be, has continued to churn out some of our finest film and television practitioners. This is saying a lot.

But what draws me to FTII - I am a moth to its flame (because tired metaphor to banta hai) - is something quite else. The moral and intellectual legitimacy of their claim is one I can get behind. This is vital. This is a given. What isn't apriori, however, in this increasingly atomised space that is life in an institute of higher education in India today (I should know. I work in one, and have for several years now) is the curious spectacle of solidarity cutting across class, caste, gender, programme, student-faculty and other lines today. When FTII speaks, it speaks in one voice: there is heft in their message because they have managed to cobble together (at least ostensibly, to an outsider - which is what I am on their campus) a solidarity which is iterated and reiterated by the student body as a whole. Am I suggesting that this solidarity bespeaks some kind of a utopian experiment in true democracy? That every voice within this body is countenanced? I don't know the answer to this, but I would imagine it cannot possibly be. What every voice is, though, is heard. I sat with them all evening and late into last night, first hearing Satchith and Vikas, Ameya, Yashasvi and others bravely stand their ground in the charade that plays itself out on countless television channels relayed into millions of homes nationwide each evening: You might know this better as the News-Hour or a minor variation on this theme in terms of the presenter/channel telecasting it. Structurally, the shrillness and agenda-setting at work in each and every last one of these programmes is the same. The same. You heard it here first, because the nation wanted to know. You're welcome. This, I should add, was after five of these guys had spent the night at the Deccan Gymkhana Police Station where they were being held, and a tortuous afternoon in court (where they were joined by the rest of the students named in that scam of an FIR lodged against them by their Director, who alleged they "gheraoed" ['surrounded' just doesn't ring with the same sinister intent, nahi?] and "tortured" him, thus making a mockery of what torture actually is, and those who have had to deal with its myriad functionings, all in one fell swoop. He sounds like quite the dude.) I digress. Anywho, the strikers went on air, tired, hungry, most of them without having slept in over 24-hours, and all this, to be shouted down between the ludicrous rantings of the BJP and Congress (and AAP! I mean, whatthewhythehowtheFUCK did that happen?) spokespersons, who insisted on playing their tired blame-games - when they weren't grand-standing - and basically diverting from every real issue at hand. The students reacted...passionately. They appeared cornered at times - they were - and they were angry. Angry at what they'd had to go through, angry because the institution charged with their well-being had turned on them so violently and virulently. This came through last night.

However, when it was all over, and they regrouped under that glorious space they call the Wisdom Tree (everyone everywhere needs to come and experience this space to understand why the FTII-folk feel about it the way they do), we proceeded to speak about modes of protest: this was why I was ostensibly there, after all, but more on this in a minute. When Satchith and Yashasvi were in Ahmedabad a couple of weeks ago, on a little tour of educational institutions to engage students everywhere on why the battle for FTII matters, they came to see us on our campus. They told us that solidarity with who they are and what they do can take many forms: musicians, artists, academics - everyone was welcome to come see the students and engage with them in any form they saw fit. I teach. It is a huge part of who I am - not just what I do - so I offered to come and talk to them about Gandhi and protests: if ever there was anyone who understood that to protest is to inform, entertain, engage and generate a spectacle simultaneously, it's our man G. It made sense to go give them an account of his 'best practices' to show that history is never 'finished' or accomplished: it lives and breathes in our midst and informs our present each moment. It was one of four 'engagements' with architects, musicians and academics they'd lined up yesterday, in a bid to "retrace freedom" as an overarching theme. The arrests and midnight crack-down on Tuesday and into Wednesday put paid to those plans. Or so I thought. I went to Poona anyway, to see for myself what the mood on campus was; to try and make sense of what the 'student-body' - that mythically united beast - made of the present moment, given their 'leaders' were in custody. Bapu and the marchers always had a plan B and a second (and third and fiftieth) rank and file, because movements need to be bigger than the protagonists they throw up to lead them. Thankfully though, the boys got bail, and by late-evening, the Wisdom Tree was abuzz with activity. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, electric. There were tears - just the wearniness and sobering reality of having lived *that* day, I suppose - from some quarters, hushed gently by other students going up to hug and hold - just hold - anyone who needed it. There was rage, while the television hosts relentlessly parroted their lines for the evening, their minds made up long before the students had said a word. But there was also laughter: we were live-streaming Arnab's shout-fest, and it was all we could do to not snigger and shout so loudly that they'd pick up the "halla" on Satchith and Vikas's microphones! There was tiredness, and much, much chai. There were cigarettes and protest songs galore. And then, late into the night, the students decided there might as well be some Gandhi as well. So we sat under the Wisdom Tree and we spoke of movements and marches and symbols which could rally masses and how protests were (and can be) nurtured and birthed. And it was glorious.

I then spent the night at Vijaya's place - we continued talking about the non-negotiable articles of faith for democracy to exist, how public movements cannot "wait" until what they need comes to pass before becoming gender equal, how movements need in-built mechanisms for the voicing of dissent, and the like: things that can only come of a mind and heart as wonderful as Vijaya's.

I've promised them I'll be back. I hope it's under a shinier, more auspicious star.
Tonight, and every night in the meantime, I'm going to think about how I can show solidarity with one of the most singular movements I've seen up close. Last night we spoke about the need to engage Poona. Then, the country. It is a moment that comes but rarely, and my friends, it is here. Halla bol, for FTII - coalesced here is everything we fight against. But also, in what these students are cobbling together each day, is everything we must fight for. So much more powerful, non? 
      

What Gandhi did to me.

The man is an imp, I tell you. He weasles himself into your brain, your heart, your soul (if you haven't struck any deals with a certain charmer in red at a crossroad near you) and does things to them all. He challenges the certainty of your vision; the way you make sense of this crazy little thing we call the 'world' in shorthand, and you come out...I want to say better, but I'll settle for 'different', for the experience. Here's a little note I wrote, applying for an advanced school on the life and thought of Gandhi at that splendid place I once called home (in a past life, as a Viceroy/Vicereine, possibly), the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla (www.iias.org). I was there last year, for the 'beginners' thoughtshop, and it was the most stimulating 2 weeks of my life in academia. Without further ado, I give you 'why' I must-need/have-to go back:

"I’ve been living with the idea of writing this note for the past month-and-a-half; struggling with it from the very day I received word from the Institute that it was making good the promise it made us about arranging an ‘advanced course’ on the life and thought of Gandhi as a follow-up to the Autumn School we were fortunate enough to have attended last year.

The reason I begin this note like so is that I need to establish just how much the experience of December past has meant to me. I want to say it changed my life – in fact, I will – it did change my life; in the subtlest of ways. A small example is that I’ve started thinking twice before I shine my high-beam onto a car which has not shown me the same courtesy. This act might sound like a trifle, but the first time I did it, it got me thinking about a larger ‘change’ being set in motion somewhere inside me. I finally understood that instead of merely doing unto others as they were doing unto me, it was more difficult to do unto them exactly what they were NOT doing unto me – showing consideration even in the face of apathy or wanton disregard. This, I learnt from Gandhi’s doggedness and unwillingness to back down and recourse to anything which might yield an end, but not satisfy his insistence on the purity of means.

I am both, a Ph.D. student working on the 19^th century, as well as an educator in the field of Culture and Communication. Since working alongside the likes of Tridip Suhrud, Thomas Weber and Sudhir Chandra last year – all people who shared very generously of their time and knowledge – I’ve been grappling with the idea of constructing a course on Gandhi and the way he used-forged-disseminated what we today call ‘mass communication’. He was a brilliant semiotician – anyone who understood and deployed the everyday acts of ‘walking’ or ‘spinning’ with the efficacy that he did had to be – and the way he found and used symbols to elucidate for the larger public his ‘experiments’ with the nature and bounds of truth, make for fascinating study. I’ve wanted to work on this further, and see where we can find room for a questioning of this sort in contemporary Communications curricula and theory. This, I hope to do if I can return to the IIAS.

My research, as I mentioned, is also firmly focused on the changing dialectic of the language of social reform in the late 19^th century. What the course on Gandhi last fall did for my understanding of the charged playing-field that was late 19^th-century India is unparalleled; it taught me to question the age on and in its own terms, and gave me an entry-point into reconstructing the shared semiosphere those who lived and breathed in it had access to. Any retrospective understanding of what contemporary India is or has become is impossible without first understanding where we’ve come from, the seeds of which are sown, to my mind, most closely in the upheavals – social, legal, political – of the 19^th century. A furthering of this understanding; seeing what Gandhi did, and recognising how it was a departure (or continuation, in some cases) from where the country-movement-people was/were at before he came to the forefront is precisely the grounding I need to better understand his forebears, the social reformers, politicians, journalists and writers of yore, who enunciated ‘nation’ and ‘freedom’ as ideas for the first time.

The opportunity to return to the IIAS and work on some of these issues anew would undoubtedly benefit my research and my teaching. Most importantly though, musing about Gandhi afresh would also re-validate my decision to drive with my headlights on low-beam. Or just maybe, walk instead."

Would you allow me back if I sent you this?