Twin Suns in the Sky

Given my lassitude, it was to be a non-starter, my research on twin suns in the sky, their simultaneous rise. Some friends, more importantly.Shamar Rimpoche among them, were all agog with enthusiasm. As if to commit myself to the esoteric enterprise, we gave it a tantalizing title, Buddha is not Laughing. When indeed was Buddha laughing?

As far as we know, Avalokitesvara was not a self-involved prophet of laughter, at least not so much as a philosopher of sorrow and carnal temptation, that is, an eight-fold path leading out of primordial human misery. The prince of Kapilavastu had lived too long to spare himself life’s essential ennui. Possibly Buddha’s portrait as an amused man came into circulation when someone produced an artifact, a statuette, of a laughing man with a bald pate and christened him accordingly. So incongruity, there. When we had our prestigious nuclear test, we chose for it a three-word announcement, ‘Buddha is laughing!’ 

Buddha never dies, nor is ever born. Gita enthusiasts are apt to bind him with a line from Krishna’s gospel, na jayate mriyate etc, though we are not sure whether the charioteer preceded or succeeded the mendicant. Till his ultimate return to nothingness, Buddha keeps happening. It is a perpetual experience of rebirth, Rinpoche being the honorific of the soul in pursuit. That holds good for everyone, not excluding our most famous contemporary Bodhisatva, Dalai Lama. And, Dalai Lama, who combines spiritual and temporal power in a heady measure, is always the cause or the consequence of one controversy or another.

The current controversy is not over reincarnation or relapse into the ultimate void. For a ridiculously mundane act, like asking a little devotee to suck the blessed tongue, Dalai Lama has been caught napping. A shrewd observer of the ways of the world and beyond, he knew everyone would not take kindly to the egregious ritual, he has apologized for any hurt caused to the boy or his kin. It seems it is no furore that will die down soon. The civilizational order headed by Dalai Lama is itself under severe stress. Nothing may please Beijing more. 

Tenzin Gyatso, which is Dalai Lama's given name, reached where he has by winning friends, influencing the powers-that-be and astutely balancing the wheel of dharma through the past half century and more. No politician or religious power broker has accomplished his kind of acrobatics. He fled his native land, set up home in a different land and won global laurels with other big players in world politics. The government of the country of his adoption, from where he trained his cultural guns with unerring marksmanship against his native land and its communist commissars, had no role to play in his anointment as the quintessential prophet of peace. India could not but watch with dismay or delight Dalai Lama’s rise in the firmament of freedom. That China was not too pleased to see its neighbour harbouring and honouring someone whom it had roundly treated as a fugitive became agonizingly clear in a few years after the Tibetan diaspora had its fateful trans-Himalayan trek in the late fifties.

The communist upsurge in China which swept through the Tibetan Autnomous Region was feared to become a cultural invasion, a clash of civilizations. It was fashionable to debunk the unabashed aggrandizement from Beijing. New Delhi’s foreign office was right from the beginning infatuated with Dalai Lama and his entourage. It held His Holiness in awe and reverence, never summoning courage to tell the spiritual savant that he should avoid taking positions that would embitter Sino-Indian relations. As an aside, we had through the diplomatic grapevine a bit of news that foreign office luminaries insisted on a bullet-proof BMW for His Holiness’s use though India’s prime minister could make do with a fortified Ambassador. 

What was being endangered in Tibet was a life module frozen in time.  Dalai Lama was at the pinnacle of a social order in which a nameless  populace saw in its leader god and man all at once. The system worked so ferociously that it provided scope for total command at the top and absolute obeisance at the bottom. Birth, death and rebirth came to be maladroitly manipulated  for the benefit of the power elite. Reincarnation politics was what has since come to be known as the bane of life and religion in Tibet. 

Tenzin Gyatso, current Dalai Lama, could not have been here now but for certain accidents of life and politics. Another boy had been identified as the new Dalai Lama in the late forties but he died in a road accident preparing the ground for the ascent of a newly chosen cleric. Reincarnation was the principle of succession in three other sects of Tibetan Buddhism as well but that did not unleash a widespread tug of war since they had no temporal authority to invoke in times of stress. If senior monks had perfected their plans to install a teenager as a sect’s head, they would have their way with no questions asked. 

The identification of a reborn Bodhisatva had a time-honoured tradition to follow. In spite of our reincarnation mythology, India has not evolved a system to explore the progress of a dead guru. Fifty years ago, H N Mukherjee, a professor of Parapsychology in Rajasthan University, had toyed with the idea of research on reincarnation and trans-migration of soul. Nothing significant was reported about it later. Tibetan tradition of identification followed the ancient pattern. When a fairly important person was dead, his confidantes would have an inkling of the arrival of the new soul.

If there was rivalry, more Rimpoches than one would be identified, revalidating a hackneyed theory of one becoming two or more. The newborn, as soon as he was able to follow or issue instructions, would identify his prototype, so to say, by recognizing his sandals, clothes, other articles of personal use. When a rebirth takes place, divine signals will ensue. There may be a constant clink in a kitchen vessel, a revelation to a trusted monk through his meditation or, hold your breath, twin suns in the sky.

One becomes two or more depending on the need or for the convenience of those who are in a position to leverage political power with spiritual claims. For instance, my friend Shamar Rimpoche, a high lama of the Karma-Kagyu sect, which claims an antiquity even beyond Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa order, had a running feud with another disciple of his guru, the late Karmapa. Through his meditation, Shamarpa identified a boy in Tibet as his venerable guru’s reincarnation, while his rival came up with his counter claims.  So it was that a dead man may well come up as two or three or more. In a few years of tutoring, the young fellow will mature as a perfect guru, handing down homilies and commands. 

Coming back to the obsessive apparition of twin suns in the sky, Shamar Rimpoche and I had extended conversations about signals from the sky and the revelations through meditations. Over a generous glass of Black Label, I argued that one sun could be seen as two or three because of some discrepancy in the cognitive system. Either when one has a brain in trouble or one drink too many, one can be assailed by double visions, not otherwise. Hallucinations are part of a pathology, not any divine epiphany. Heartily guffawing, Shamarpa would dig his teeth into a large chicken leg and observe that he was a meat-eating monk while I was a tame or timid vegetarian tiger.  Before he could follow up his visions or help me to put together our promised volume, Buddha is not Laughing, Shamarpa was gone. 

Such belief systems as those that stultify faith and reason in our times do not contribute to the growth and glory of a sub-Himalayan society. Beijing has long been playing its cards cleverly, bludgeoning Dalai Lama’s hopes for a return to his throne in Potala Palace. It knows its rebirth politics only too well. As and when time is up, Dalai Lama, who is braving his eighties, may well be replaced by a requisitely amiable monk in China. The savant of Dharamsala is not unaware of various possibilities. He has even threatened to close the route of reincarnation, saying, in an after-me-the-deluge tone,  “there would be no more Dalai  Lama.” That does not preclude the possibility of a comradely monk coronated with revolutionary greetings.  

    

 

 Mind of Madhavikkutty

A library in my neighbourhood has an interesting practice. It sends round a girl or two from time to time, visiting houses to inflict  books on potential readers as well as chronic enemies of letters. Where she placed me, I am not sure.  Anyway, that comely and committed library assistant asked me this time  to read an old book by Madhavikkutty, My World. “You would like it, sir,” she said presciently. I did. 

My World  is a sequel to Madhavikkutty’s early autobiographical writing, My Story. The  World covers events and ideas, and her fantasies, following the Story. The Story was somewhat of an explosion when it appeared about a half century ago. Like it happens to everything in repetition, the World did not upset anyone’s sleep or set off  a literary revolution.

Madhavikkutty, writing as Kamala Das in English, has, in a sense, demystified literary archetypes. What may seem quotidian becomes a soulful experience in her hands. She turns ordinary things, non-things, if you like, into subjects for study and exploration in mind’s unfathomable labyrinths. Her expression has a certain freshness about it, her ideas have  an unusualness. 

With all that in her capacious portfolio of ideas, she was apt to win the state government’s Ezhuthachan Award sooner or later. When she won the first award, many suspected para-literary considerations had weighed down the official decision. One tour de farce she accomplished in between was to change her religion. I have no problem with someone changing the  faith or going in for reconversion in pursuance of a new enlightenment. 

Even Ramakrishna Paramahamsa had converted to Islam for a while experimentally and then returned to his old spiritual garb. In recent times, a neurosurgeon, Narayanan Namboodiri of a famed Brahman household of Koodallur, had a convulsive faith change. He became a prayer warrior in Christian Medical College, Ludhiana.

If conversion is prompted by less than genuine reasons, like some material inducement or professional ascent, the character in question falls in social estimation. Such sham is necessarily predicated by an instant realization that whatever conviction one had upheld a whole life was grossly inadequate, even patently faulty. What paroxysms Madhavikkutty’s mind went into in the run up to her conversion into Suraiah are anybody’s guess. It is beyond question that Kamala Suraiah hadn’t  revised from top to bottom her  views on life, love, literature and god, or its absence, when she became a Muslim. 

Madhavikkutty being Madhavikkutty, there was bound to be high drama in her change of faith and religion. Unwittingly perhaps, but none too innocently, she said and did things in a manner that would strike headlines. She liked being noticed, as author of her writings or one who lived her life the way she lived it. If that was showiness, Madhavikkutty was showy. She honestly believed she was a woman of destiny. The world had several deficiencies to be set right and she felt being called upon to correct them. That urge for showiness, blended with naivete, and inability to place herself in the matrix of society, was what dawned on her as an epiphany to contest the assembly assembly elections in 1982.

She took herself seriously as a candidate while a band of workers who clung to her as primordial leeches saw around her trappings of buffoonery. They set up an election camp at her home and had a good time for three weeks, holding demonstrations, putting up her cut outs at street corners, plying her vehicles as she drove around setting cardinal election issues in focus. She came one day, accompanied like a shadow by her amiable husband, Madhava Das, to place an advertisement of her candidature in our paper. 

No sensible paper would turn down an ad and she wanted to make it as big as possible. Das left it to her to decide how it should be. On my part, I suggested a token insertion. We struck up some compromise. She was more than crestfallen when the results came. She had polled less than invalid votes. I was sure her literary fan club had not wasted their votes on her. By and by, she must have become sure too. 

My World has a short portrait of the British writer Aubrey Menen, a relative Madhavikkutty, his last name punctiliously spelt as Menen, so as to avoid being mistaken for his better known but equally irascible namesake, V K Krishna Menon. When Madhavikkutty was in Mumbai, Aubrey Menen visited her with a handsome offer of tips on life, death and alcohol. It was a free offer. 

The first piece of advice was that she should keep her home bar well-stocked  with premium brands of brew--which was what he obviously looked around for when he stepped into the apartment. Madhavikkutty heard him in enforced silence as he went on with his bacchanalian obsessions. “Out with all your lassi and lime juice!” That was his curt command, keeping boozers’ interests uppermost in  his mind. For all her famed directness of speech, she stopped short of handing down a judgment on the distant cousin who had his friend always with him as an inseparable shadow.

Make no mistake, Madhavikkutty was no puritan who would shun  any company where liquor was liberally served. I had not heard of her views on Aubrey when she had some of us for dinner at her place inThiruvananthapuram. It was not a liquor crowd. If anything it was a guest gallery that thrived on buttermilk and tender coconut. The glittering guest of the evening was A P Udayabhanu, an octogenarian Congressman, who wore his allergy to alcohol on his kurta’s lapels. 

Probably, her son, M D Nalappat, formerly a shareholder and editor of Mathrubhoomi, had arranged the dinner bash. Nalappat would have expected to use the occasion to get closer to a live wire Karnataka politician, Veerappa Moily, than with a spent force like Udayabhanu. Between them, the old guard of the Congress and the neo-vendor of power in the Kempa Gowda country made it an imposing atmosphere. Even those of us who had liquor on their palette didn’t feel free to gobble it up when offered. 

That was when Madhavikkutty came out with a bottle of White Horse  asking us if anyone would care for a ride. Moily lapsed into an embarrassed silence. Udayabhanu was engrossed in a self-sustaining oration, oblivious to whatever we were imbibing with pronounced gusto. Aubrey Menen would have risen to the occasion if he were around. Retrospectively, I was relieved he was not in  our midst.

I have never met or read Aubrey Menen. For all I know, he was a self-important man, proportionately repugnant. He had descended on Thiruvananthapuram with his ubiquitous companion and let us know that he was available for a few minutes’ chat with newspaper reporters. He thought we were waiting for the wonder call. My colleague, K M Thampi, a young man with a creative way with his words and polite to a fault, was drafted to deal with the doughty writer.

Aubrey Menen’s book, presumptuously titled as The Ramayana as told by Aubrey Menen, had raised hackles among the votaries of the Maryada Purushothama. As a matter of political rule, it was banned for a while. The twentieth century author who probably hoped to excel the robber-turned poet could not have asked for more. The ban rendered the book a sought after reading. Pitifully, I had not read it. Nor had Thampi. But we could, we knew, always make do with an instant reading of the blurb or a hearsay review. Clever authors know it only too well that a good way to make a book move in the mart is to have it lampooned by a listless  readership or proscribed by an obliging sarkar. 

Thampi could not have been with the twentieth century Valmiki for more than five minutes when he walked out in a huff. We did not know what the author with a bee in his bonnet, as they say, had expected of us. Whatever it was, we were not ready to play the game except on our terms. Yet it was curious that someone with Thampi’s mien, his modesty, had been so rudely provoked. Just as he was returning to the bureau with ill-concealed agitation, Aubrey’s call came from the hotel asking us to depute another reporter. 

Nothing doing, we said. While we were yet to piece together what had happened between Aubrey and our ace and sensitive reporter,  we would have no one else to talk to him. Either the reinvented shadow of the poet of the wilderness talks to Thampi again or he talks to no one else. It was hard persuading our reporter to call on again a man on whom he had walked out. When he finally agreed to meet the man at his hotel again, we were all happy to hope for a good read. We had fortified him with support and suggestions that he keep his cool in the unlikely face of provocations. 

Our ace reporter was back to the bureau almost before he left for the unwelcome interview. It was a fiasco, again, he confirmed in a staccato tone. We did not plumb for details. We left it at that. Our neo-Valmiki did not call again. We adjourned for a celebration of an interview article that had not taken place. I felt good that I stood my ground. 

Aubrey Menen came back alive the other day in the form of a short note on him by Madhavikkutty in her My World.   The Ramayana as told by Aubrey Menen remains unread because there was no mandatory reason to rush through it. Given a choice, I would first pick up A K Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas. Maybe the library girl would bring it to me one of these days. Thanks.      

        

   

 Politics of Memorials

What is to be done with what is left of Sugathakumari’s house is the current topic of discussion in Thiruvananathapuram. A small outhouse has been razed to the ground. Her fans and friends want the government to acquire the main house for a befitting memorial. In response to the campaign, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has asked Culture Minister Saji Cheriyan to ascertain what best can be done. 

Simultaneously, there is a running discussion on who should have what kind of memorial and how the government should associate itself with the project. Like industrial policy, farm policy, health policy, culture policy and what have you, there is scope for a comprehensive memorial policy. Comprehensive because death will, for all we know, remain eternal and memorial plans permanent. Politics and economics of memorials need constant study.

The importance of being Sugathakumari is more than that she was a poet. Poetically she created her own kind of Radha who pined for Krishna’s company but didn’t want him to see or hear her. Even when she bemoaned that all her poetry had dried up, she liked reciting her compositions, not particularly musically, but indeed soulfully. I remember her singing her famous love song, “What is the colour of love?,” when she joined us to take a mentally ill psychiatrist  to a psychiatrist. 

Sugathakumari picked up a movement Mother Teresa had touched off in one massive move to deliver justice to mentally ill people. She was a friend of destitute women. Inevitably, as a poet, she was a nature enthusiast. She was editing a journal for kids, a Lions Club project, when I got to know her. She had a raw deal from her benefactors and we made a song and dance about it, inviting leonine wrath. They threatened to take us to the court but tactfully spared her. What can be a memorial for a half-century of poetry, peace, sanity and concern for every living thing, trees among them? Maybe you took a different view but you liked to know what she thought of every emerging issue. Who would build a memorial for her?

That poser is apt to bounce back without an answer. A striking feature of democracy is that every orphan issue is consigned to the sarkari web. Whatever no one else may not or cannot perform is assigned to public exchequer. This is not to say that  the government can do  it well and fairly even if it can marshal money to lavish on memorials of sundry shapes and sounds. For every man, that includes woman, who croaks would like to have a memorial for himself or herself.  The government machinery will find it difficult to decide who must be installed where in the burgeoning gallery of honour. 

Anyone may be pushed up the gallery of fame, given a committed  cautery that will work with unstinted enthusiasm to immortalize the dead dignitary. Which is why it is said one needs more friends and fans when one is gone than when one is still around. Epaulletes and badges and golden shawls do not fall down like manna. Someone somewhere has to work for it, pulling the right wires, as the indigenized idiom goes. Take, for instance, a man of letters like Sooranad Kunjan Pillai. I was talking about him with his son, neurologist Rajasekharan Nair. There was a low note of pique when he said two chief ministers had shown interest in building a memorial four quintessential lexicographer but half a dozen chief ministers had come and gone after them leaving it all but a comedy of amnesia. There was no effective campaign to make E MS Namboodiripad’s austere house in Shanti Nagar, Thiruvananthapuram, an EMS Archive.

Ideally memorials should be instituted by voluntary bodies, fan clubs of the deceased. They will not be hamstrung by any sense of fairness or objectivity. Their singular obsession will be with the posthumous image of their heroes and heroines. Clever guys in the fan fiefdom can often  put the memory of the lost hero to petty personal use. A familiar antic is to institute a prize in the name of the departed panjandrum, and amass funds for its presentation even if no one seriously thinks of finding a genuine recipient. 

If not a prize or a statue, it may be a souvenir or even a bulky book, unlike one brought out by the Union government’s publications division in honour of Vallabhai Patel. Patel Memorial Lectures were a great intellectual event when they were in vogue, great minds addressing great contemporary problems. The publications division, in a wave of serendipity, stitched all of them together so unimaginatively that pages would come off loose even before a reader opened it. All India Radio, in its wisdom, stopped that memorial service. British Broadcasting Corporation is going ahead with applause for its four annual lectures in memory of its first legendary general manager, John Reith.

There are easier ways to ensure immortality. The easiest way is to name a road or its destination after the dead dignitary. Depending on the reach or relevance of the celebrity, it can be a panchayat bus stop or a university laboratory or a  marriage hall. Time was when people were named after places; places must now be lucky to be known by a dead resident’s name. Let it be noted with no irreverence that two Gandhis have lent their names to places and palaces in India more than all others--Mohan Das and Indira. In Kerala, Narayana Guru adorns, more than anyone else, memorials with his busts or road signs or community halls. P K Balakrishnan, whose Guru biography remains a magisterial work, used to say snide remarks about unaesthetically executed clumsy statues bringing bad nicknames to that savant of our times. 

Memorial politics is not a new episode in our human drama. It dates back to ancient Egypt, a succession of pharaohs building gigantic pyramids to house their tombs. After an excursion to the Nile, my grandson was overwhelmed by the great river and the memorials of pharaohs. He seemed mentally flying back to the lands and the times of Khufu and Tutankhaman. When he lectured on the bygone glory of Egypt, I argued that those ancient West Asian seekers of immortality had not only carried with them articles of their personal use but their servants also. They wanted nothing of theirs to be left behind after they were gone. Our widow-burning tradition was a medieval extension of that ancient atrocity. 

Looking at our tradition, one nice thing about it is that it is not tainted by the elemental urge for immortality. I grew up, with a vague trepidation, seeing tombstones in cemeteries adjoining churches and mosques. Those were times when imposing memorials had not come up in the rural hinterland. Hindu tradition provided for no permanent memorial. Where the body is buried or burnt, a banana is planted. In a year, the dead person is subsumed in the earth, in fulfillment of the saying,  “from dust you come, to dust you return.” Those whose concept of time  is longer, a coconut tree takes the place of the short-lived banana.

Ancient Egyptian pharaohs and modern memorial builders may never overtake Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who had his wife’s mausoleum built on the banks of Yamuna. Ustad Ahmad Lahori’s grandiose design took 22 years and 20000 workers to be executed. No love has been so immortalized; no memorial such as Taj Mahal may ever be built again. For all its splendour, Sahir Ludhianvi had a contrary view of Taj. “In a fit of love, aided by wealth, an emperor has teased our poverty!”

  

   

   

  

 St Antony Pray for Us!

"It is a truth tested by experience that sons dissipate what their fathers gained in the sweat of their brow."

These are not the words of a contemporary commentator on the fluctuating father-son relations as exemplified by senior Congress leader A K Antony and Anil Antony who has gone in search of new political pastures. The son is now an activist of the Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party which the father is sworn to fight till his last breath. Reacting to Anil’s somersault, Antony moaned: “I am deeply hurt.”

The opening quote on the historical course and scope of father-son bonds is from Niccalao Manucci, an Italian writer who worked for a scholarly Mughal prince whom his brother killed for power. Driven by compulsions of power, the killer emperor had dumped his dad in a dungeon overlooking the Yamuna and his wife’s grandiose mausoleum.   

Niccolao Manucci, who worked under Jahangir's grandson, Dara Shikoh, began his discussion of Jahangir by saying: "It is a truth tested by experience that sons dissipate what their fathers gained in the sweat of their brow." Niccalao made this observation  while discussing his benefactor’s grandfather, Jehangir.

If Mughal tradition is broadly accepted as Indian tradition, disaffection between Antony and Anil is quite understandable. There was perhaps only one emperor, dynasty founder Babur, who happily yielded power to his son, even risking his life. Babur traded his robust health with Humayun, who had fallen terminally sick. Such transfer of health or ailment was possible in ancient Bharatavarsha where Prince Puru took over his father Yayati’s senility.  The aging emperor wanted to have some more good time. There were other illustrious, self-effacing sons like Rama of modern Faizabad who not only abdicated his inheritance but went into a long spell of self-exile.

Akbar was, like Antony, a good father. But the Muslim emperor who propounded his own religion of dharma was not always on good terms with his fun-loving son Jehangir. The son had the father’s close consultant, Abul Fazal, murdered.  In a military encounter between the Mughal force and Jehangir’s seditious troops, the latter lost. For the prince to be made the broadminded emperor’s heir, influential women in the harem had to exert pressure on Akbar. To make the transition swift and smooth, it was said, Jahangir had arranged to poison his father. Subsequent inquiries acquitted the son who reigned for two decades and more, leaving the administration to his factotums, himself wallowing in dance, drama, drinks and drugs. 

Saint Atnony of Padua, after whom A K Antony is named, was a man of peace and amity. He was an effective orator and his homilies were lapped up by his devoted followers. True to his cult of convergence and consensus, Antony of Chethala tried to steer clear of confrontation, just as his patron saint of Padua devoted more time to study and meditation than to priestcraft and attendant pettifoggery. Anthony of Padua was canonized soon after his death. So obvious was his mission which really required not many miracles. St Antony, pray for us!

We have not yet heard in detail from Anil Antony why he thinks he is right in deciding to work for the vanguard of Hindutva and his father is wrong in suffering the association with a party tied to the pulverized pillars of an ancient party. The mullahs and the pundits of his new party will use him, his very presence, that is, to embarrass his dad's party. Anil Antony may not garner significant electoral advantage on his own but Congressmen will find themselves ridiculously ham-handed while inventing an eloquent repartee to their familiar diatribes. An important activity in elections is to inspire an ambience of victory. Nothing wins like victory.

Where is the harm if the father and the son take opposite positions? Why should not a son strike a new note in political affiliations, deviating from the path prepared by the father? There are fathers and fathers, just as there are sons and sons. Prahlada was an impossible son who would give no quarter to his father Hiranyakasipu. The son was a preceptor of immanence; the father saw nothing divine, nothing other than himself, inside or around him. That the tempestuous relations between the father and the son had a gory end for the father is, right now, beside the point. Prahlada’s discord with Hiranyakasipu should be seen in that perspective, not as a symbolic equalism of episodes and characters.

Indian tradition of relations and power struggles can be viewed in various angles. Prahlada’s grandson showed the way by abdicating authority  to redeem his word and honour. Though there is no national version of the story, Mahabali’s surrender of power and acceptance of self-exile should serve as a foil to the unvarying tales of treachery and vulgarized father-son relations. Mahabali kept his royal word even when it meant his total dispossession of power. Balamani Amma saw in that gesture a glimpse of divinity stepping on the head.

A blind king’s concern for his son was what brought on us a fratricidal war, annihilating everything on earth, victors and the vanquished, barring a dozen desolate persons. Uninfluenced by that collective memory of carnage, we have, at different stages, worked overtime to fortify the claims and interests of our sons. Like the beleaguered god, we exclaim “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Contemporary history is full of illustrations for that infectious dictum. Antony cannot be faulted for it. Anil Antony ploughing a different furrow must be seen in that light. In fact he will invite much less opprobrium when his son joins another party than when and if he is propped up in his own party.

The Greek ways are comprehensively grotesque, father and son falling for the same woman in a fit of amorous outrage. The son first kills the father. And then he weds a woman who was his mother. There could probably be no more egregious account of human conduct than this story of Oedipus killing his father, Laius, and wedding his mother, Jacosta, and begetting a child in her. Oedipus does it all in ignorance. It is a gruesome story of relations going haywire, being stultified, reducing the character to a tragic hero in a distorted setting of relations.

Oedipus had a sharp limp. From his childhood he had it. That was his mark of identity, a limping leg. In fact oedipus literally means a swollen leg. His relations were so too. Let us check if our legs are swollen!j 

 Sojourn in Chettinad 

My memory of Chettiars is not as glamorous as their land and dwellings appear in a BBC portrayal. A British travel writer harks back to their halcyon days when fabulous mansions were built in the idyllic setting of Karaikudi  with timber from Myanmar, chandeliers from Belgium and marble from Italy. Ten thousand such mansions, some of them spread over an acre, with far too many rooms to be filled in with residents, are in ruin, bemoans the BBC.

Govinda Chettiar whose grandfather did not inherit the community’s opulence when he left their fanciful homeland  early in life in search of livelihood had no more than a little dark and dingy hut for a house for the best part of his life. He would do any work he could for any wage he was paid. He was full of laughter in spite of life’s drudgery. For my father, Govinda Chettiar was a trusted messenger to deliver some message or money to my mother.

It hurt me to hear this man so full of light and laughter passed into amnesia, my first ever tryst with the deadening experience of dementia. He spoke at home a language with a nasal twang whose origin or decline I could not trace. The origin of their community was better known. G Karthikeyan, a flourishing chartered accountant at Coimbatore, had once taken me home for dinner when his father accosted me along memory lanes, explaining the commonality of tongues, sait, seth, sethi, sreshthi, all representing the diaspora of merchants and money lenders, chettiars, from Karaikudi, since the late seventeenth century. 

Unnikkuttan, Govinda Chettiar’s son, broke the chain of tradition. He revolted against the prospect of doing any unskilled work for a living. He was not driven by any ambition to scale the heights of wealth and power his forebears showed. For him they had left behind a glittering saga of diamond trade in southeast Asia. Not so glittering was the story of itinerary vendors of goodies and cheap textiles, oil makers and carriers, rollers of pappadam, crisp wafers, on a small scale. Unnikkuttan skipped all of them, taking to wood carving and engraving. His son Biju came up with a creative shift. Biju is an acclaimed sculptor, exploring the surreal world of forms, figures and formlessness. It is a style of getting to terms with reality with which the village elite is not familiar.  

What overwhelmed the British travel writer was the enormity of Chettinad’s architectural extravaganza, not so much its creative splendour.  It  was a lavish display of resources.The Muthaiahs, the Chidamabarams, the Ramaswamis, the Murugappas and their hallowed ilk had risen to the peak of their prosperity in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Besides banks and restaurants and industries, the Kings of Karaikudi have left behind a culinary heritage in terms of Chettinad cuisine, probably celebrating its pungency in a non-vegetarian preparation.

It is tempting to believe that Chettinad’s glory is a blessing of the local deity, Karpaga Vinayakar of Pillayarpatti. Vinayakar, Pillayar in perfect Tamil, can be depended upon not only to kick off all  obstacles from a devotee’s path but earn him prosperity in every venture. And, all this for nothing more than a modakam, a sweet ball or two. The mercurial Lord Shiva’s naughty son is easy to please.

Time was when an incredible story was doing the rounds that Pillayars had suddenly started drinking milk offered to them. The deity is made of myriad metals, mud, gold, wood, rubber, diamond, whatever. I remember former Attorney General G Ramaswamy confiding in me that he had by far the biggest collection of Pillayar idols in the world. Ganapathi Ramaswamy felt that was one good way to perpetuate his memory which was quite a turbulent legal exercise. 

When that milk-drinking deity’s story was passed on from ear to ear at an impossible pace, my concern was rather different. I have heard of people facing damnation for looking at the moon on the fourth night of the fortnight. If you want to be a victim of slander for doing or saying anything that earns it, watch the wicked moon on Vinayaka Chathurthi! .But the truant elephant god drinking any amount of milk administered through any hole in the idol did not excite me. There was a breath-taking rhythm with which the tale tapered off after circulating a whole sub-continent.

That Pillayar would bring prosperity to me, as he has done to generations of Chettiars, is reassuring. It was my friend Karthikeyan who gifted me a photo of the idol of Pillayarpatti with a hint that it was their community deity. What came to them by way of wealth could come to me too. A visit to the homeland of Chettiars, Pillayarpatti, could seal the possibility. Full of hope and faith, my wife and I were there to propitiate the easily pleased deity, kshipraprasada, 

We are still waiting to be turned wealthy! 

  

Nemesis Knows Its Way

 It was a morning of boundless exultation. What better way for a morning to break than showing up one’s victim writhing in shame and discomfiture! There it was in our morning rag, a triple column caption in italics and a sinister story screaming beneath it! Some police sleuths had, as they often do, goofed up. They got names scandalously wrong, some innocent guy mistaken for the man whom they were supposed to shadow, 

An anonymous voice whispered a name in their ears and that was gospel for the special branch sleuth. He astutely  watched the airport, both arrivals and departures, when Soopy was to come in and Soopy was to go out. In the heavenly process of political transition, N Soopy and K M Soopy became interchangeable. They operated  in opposite political poles, one senior and the other quite junior but that made no sense to the special branch sub inspector. The nominal error animated the police wireless or decorated the file with the  red tape which contained “secret” reports.  

The mix-up, quite inconsequential, was perhaps a regular feature of CID life but it disturbed an invisible hornet’s nest only when a disaffected group leaked it to scribes like me who had no respect for police concepts of confidentiality. One Soopy becoming another Soopy is not an isolated anecdote. The story goes that RSP leader Baby John once felt an irritating tail behind him. While walking along the corridor, he suddenly decided to take a U-turn, his towering figure dwarfing the shadow. As they were face to face, the stupefied sleuth struck an attention pose and saluted. Baby John sent him away with a word of caution to be discreet while carrying out intelligence assignments. 

Back to the forgettable goof up at the airport, duly guided by a disgruntled section in the intelligence apparatus, my onslaught was executed. Lavishing my acerbic vocabulary on it, I wrote out a story rhetorically titled “Special Branch for Bloomers.” I enjoyed watching through my mind’s eye how it hurt its makers and their newly appointed inspector general(intelligence). That a heavy dose of my own medicine was likely to be administered to me, that nemesis would overtake me one of these days, never occurred to me. When it hit me, I went into hiding--from myself.

There was no question of acting busy when a former colleague told me he was dropping by with an English professor of politics for a freewheeling chat on what we may call leftism, rightism and left-rightism. Before his call ended, they were at my doorstep, the learned professor announcing he had no specific questions. Nor had I specific answers. Through the next sixty minutes we surveyed life in the world and beyond. Whether he felt it was a lot of hot air that he was leaving behind, I don’t know. 

When he was gone, I lapsed into instant research and came up with references to some of  his unusual papers. I felt good, learning a new thing or two. Then it happened like a mental explosion. The guy who talked to me with overarching erudition was not the guy I thought he was, his unusual paper I ferreted out was not his paper. It was an agonizing realization that what one saw was really not what one saw. It was a comprehensive embarrassment; it was a nemesis. Nemesis knows its way. I bolted out of me in shame and stupidity.

A goof up I saw in the Kerala assembly was covered up with expertise. An old member from Kodungallur, who was known by the name Aboobacker, had died. The inevitable obituary followed.When P M Aboobacker returned to the house, he declared he was not yet dead; a name-sake of his was still alive, though not kicking. The shape of the member in question was shrouded in the garb of death. The speaker was not a little annoyed but he managed to keep the goof up out of the press. 

V Viswanatha Menon did nothing of the kind. His maiden budget was full of bloomers. From the moment of its presentation, bloomers, elementary errors of arithmatic, were detected one by one on a daily basis. The finance secretary washed his hands off. The errors were the contribution of some budget enthusiast comrade who went round incognito, leaving his howlers to be owned and disowned by the finance minister. A warm man who found many things in life to laugh about, Viswanatha Menon was disaffected too. For so much as reporting his serial goof up, he was cross with me too, shaking up an old friendship.  

No one knows if Morarji Desai hit the ceiling and broke his skull after he gave an obituary address in Parliament for Jayaprakash Narayan who was yet not dead. How word came to the prime minister about the Lok Nayak’s death which had not happened will ever remain an ugly official secret. It was like a morbid epiphany, not only to Desai but ministers of his council and opposition stalwarts. As their speeches studded with customary shock and sorrow echoed around the Raisina HIll, message from Mumbai rolled again that the prophet of Total Revolution was not dead, not yet.

When I had to be off Facebook for a few days for allegedly being unable to conform to certain communityh standards, I was flabbergasted. I had no idea what I had goofed up, where. I passed through a metamorphosis, becoming a Kafkaesque character who was facing trial for an unknown crime. I felt like despondent Louis MacNeice, praying for an unborn son, forgiveness for sins uncommitted. “I am not yet born, forgive me for the sins that in me the world shall commit.” One feels relief at long last that there was no goof up. The discovery of the non-existent goof up was the goof up!

   

War after War

 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a plan to end the war in Ukraine. "Dear friend," Russian leader Vladimir Putin told him while on a visit to Moscow, "we are  always open to the negotiation process." Jinping has a 12-point plan for peace. It involves "ceasing hostilities and resuming peace talks." No rancour, more peace, indeed. What else could it be? Would it end as a war to end all wars? 

World Wars, both the second and the first, were phlegmatically described, when they were raging, as wars to end all wars. That was a naive dream, a vision conjured up by guileless chroniclers. It was a valid prophesy insofar as the third and final war not yet broken. So many wars across the planet, isolated or coordinated, do not add up to a world war.  

I had a self-assigned brief to tell my granddaughter Gauri a story of war. We were walking around the shelves of a medium library in Fairfax County when I picked up a heavily illustrated tome on wars in history. I thumbed through it before having it issued. The great war in Kurukshetra which had been glibly assumed as the last war of wars, but left no more than a dozen of its participants alive, did not figure in it.  Peace was a sombre dream.

From Herodotus to Winston Churchill, writers of war history have been duly hailed and decorated.  From Duryodhana to Vladimir Putin, wagers of war have been praised for their valour and, if it comes, victory. A soldier is known by the epaulets he pins on his chest, marking his participation in battles and the lives he has taken. News scribes down the ages have paid tributes to them, saying in an orotund way, "they died so that you live." 

War literature is as voluminous as it is convulsive. Churchill who led his country's part of the war in 1939-45, and narrowly won, was a recipient of  the Nobel Prize for literature. There was no grand reception awaiting the young poet Wilfred Owen who lost his life fighting a war. About the likes of him, who survived or died, he said they were "alive, but not mortal overmuch, dying, not mortal overmuch." A whole body of military folklore, singing paeans of surviving heroes, running down traitors,  invigorates every vernacular literature. 

The story of chicanery and betrayal in war, traceable to the times of Judas, is breathtaking, without end or beginning.  In our times and little land, the latest betrayer belongs to the era of the chekavars, mercenaries who are supposed to fight and finish, either way, dying or winning a trophy of his head, all for their employers' perceived benefact. In a reversal of main characters in a northern ballad, the traditional hero turns a villain, the villain the wronged hero. The recreation of the folktale in an M T Vasudevan Nair's film script was a massive success. A little kingdom of Ambalapuzha had a quiet quiescent king  when Marthanda Varma's advancing troops brought it under siege.

The siege was possible, thanks to some subtle intelligence an elite Nair, Mathoor Panikkar, passed on to the Venad army well in time. That was one of a series of mini-battles  Marthanda Varma fought in the course of his conquest. By the way, Marthanda Varma hired the commander of a Dutch detachment he defeated in a battle at Kolachal as his miliatry trainer.

Southern Kerala has plenty of the saga of betrayal. Eravikkutty Pillai, senior commander of the Venad army was betrayed by his own men, and he died leaving behind enough scope for a macabre ballad. Elsewhere the Ghoris, the Khiljees, the Lodis, the Mughals, all from arid west or central Asia, forayed into the Gangetic plane with the active connivance of betrayers, Jaichand and Mir Jaffar are familiar figures darkening our memory. No story of war will be complete without the exploits  of betrayers. Samoothiri in Kozhikkode had his betraying courtier, Thalappanna, a twisted mind, factual or figment of imagination.  The wily Brahman made things easy for the Portuguese traders to score commercial and political clout in maritime engagements.

Much like our Mahabharata Was was the Pelopponnesian War four hundred years before BC. From protracted  Pelpponnesian wars to our unremarkable Pookkottur Battle, is a tragic cry, rendering war as a principal factor of human civilization. Kalinga War, an incomparable expedition in the annals of war, seemed to be an approximation to the dictum, war to end all wars. That did not happen. But the victor of the sanguinary operation,Ashoka, laid down his arms for life, and turned into a campaigner for Dharma, Buddhism. In a different setting, Marthanda Varma, appalled by the blood on his sword, he surrendered his kingdom to his family deity, not much more than an apparent transfer of power. Another showman, Alexander, who died early, probably because of excessive consumption of alcohol,  embarrassed by the enormity of his conquest. So much so  he had left instruction to keep his open hands outstretched from the coffin to let it be known that he was carrying with him..    

Russian wars produced a magisterial novel, War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. Two thousand years earliest, what may well be qualified as humanity's best war literature, the Bhagavad Gita, was produced. It was no appeal for peace or treaty of friendship or cessation of hostilities as Jinping has made to Putin. Gita was an unusual exhortation for war, charioteer Krishna asking his buddy, irresolute soldier, Arjuna, to get up and fight, yuddhaya kritanischaya. This unique 700-stanza war poem was disposed of in two lines by Malayalam's patron saint Ezhuthachan wrote his Mahabharatam. In our contemporary era, Amartya Sen finds Arjuna's doubts and questions more relevant and rational than Krishna's exposition.