Spies and Scribes

Things happen in tandem, often by chance, sometimes meaningfully. When it is a coincidence, we employ a hackneyed metaphor, a crow flying on to a ripe branch which falls instantly. If we discern a special meaning, an esoteric rhythm in it, we characterize it, as Carl Jung calls it, synchronicity. 

Meaningfully or otherwise, events in recent days reveal a linkage between espionage and journalism. To mention just a couple of them, a freelance scribe has been booked for leaking information prejudicial to public interest. Mukundan Menon, while reacting to a social media post, has brought up an old case of espionage, a sweeping charge of it by an American journalist against Morarji Desai. 

How does a freelance journalist come in possession of sensitive information? When Charan Singh, Home Minister, took some of us to Tihar jail, a visibly harried prisoner with a sophisticated mien, sought to get a message across to the visiting dignitary. Charan Singh avoided him. The prisoner was an Information Service officer, held for espionage. How does a press relations man possess information professionally inaccessible to him?

Seymour Hersh’s charge against Morarji Desai was tendentious. Conceding for argument that some American intelligence officer had met him when he was an important minister under Nehru or his daughter, it would be irresponsible journalism to draw an instant inference that Morarji was a CIA agent. Poor former Prime Minister, he was hamstrung by the American legal system which helped Hersh get away with his allegation.

A CIA agent is a dreaded, or despised, entity. Time was when politicians of all hues took it  as an abomination loosely and effortlessly hurled at their foes. Anything that went awry, almost anything, was believed to  have been so rendered by a ubiquitous CIA hand. So ridiculous a practice it became that Piloo Modi, a portly politician indeed, turned up in Parliament one day with a badge on his enormous chest, “I’m a CIA agent.”

An enraged editor, S Mulgaokar, once started his occasional column, thanking heavens and heaving a sigh of relief that yet another week had passed without someone sighting a CIA hand somewhere. 

The perceived CIA operation or its memoir landed me in a mess, including the Supreme Court. I was working on a book-length story of T N Seshan, former Chief Election Commissioner, who suspected a CIA hand in the violent anti-HIndi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the late sixties. Voluble and unrestrained, Seshan said he should have known, as Madurai district collector, better than anyone else that there could be a CIA agent in the top echelons of Tamil leadership. Anger erupted in Tamil terrain. Yielding to business acumen, we put out the book with what could be offensive to Tamil taste summarily deleted. 

The communists have a strong fixation with espionage. They believe they are perennially encircled, class enemies torpedoing or delaying the Indian revolution. It was not for nothing that political clearance was made mandatory for appointment in any government job. I remember E M S telling us once that a class enemy had penetrated in the party as an  apparatchik when Lenin was in command. True to his flair for looking at things strategically, Lenin said that a smart guy had to do many benevolent things for the revolutionary system to make himself look trustworthy to the leadership. 

T S Sanjeevi was a Tamil officer of the Indian Police vintage who set up India's Intelligence Bureau. Far from flamboyant like his successor B N Mullick, Sanjeevi went round Indian missions abroad to study and evolve a model for a new India's spy system. There was one high-minded Indian diplomat,V K Krishna Menon, who detested Sanjeevi’s plans as they were. Irascible as ever, Menon wrote to his buddy and boss, Prime Minister Nehru complaining that Home Minister Patel had sent his super cop to spy upon him.

Menon was always known for his abhorrence of capitalist America and his harebrained Leftism. That his motives and methods were viewed with suspicion by many people is no secret. So much so an impression went round that he was a communist in Congress clothing--until he was ousted from the tri-colour party. One unsavory point made in Christopher Andrew’s centenary volume on British MI5 was that election expenses of some Indian leaders, including Krishna Menon, were defrayed by the Soviet spy apparatus, KGB. 

Reverting to the shadowy, if not outrightly shady, spy-scribe linkage, two autobiographical stories may be recalled for illustration. Wherever a news conference is held, a special branch fellow may be seen lurking in the precincts to have a gist of its content whispered into his ears by an obliging scribe. Their peers would, jealously or derisively, dub them as “police agents.” Our quintessential humourist, V K N, was wont to say that those intelligence sleuths could be spotted in any milling crowd. 

Anyway,    table-top journalists like me would not be in the picture. For us, there were spymasters who would diligently leak information that they thought people should know or scribes could tom-tom as their scoop. Little was it suspected that it was what was generically known as “plant.” Everyone in the trade knows that a spy-scribe relationship is a contrary alliance. Spies like to keep their information under their imaginary cap; scribes are impatient to let out any speck of balderdash with which they are fed. I would not suspect that a middle-level spy was planting anything on me when he rang me up a late evening to say two Kuwaiti nationals who had been declared “undesirable” had not only penetrated through the immigration system but gone round the state as special guests of the government. My source took a day to realize what political fire it had set off.  He confided in me as a matter of friendship, probably in anticipation of some good tip-offs in the course of time.

I would not pat myself on my back for a scoop or two I had scored on the rumblings in sub-Himalayan states dominated by Buddhist politics. Out and out, it was a “plant”, as I knew and the “planter” knew though pretended the  other way, much like the proverbial cat drinking the milk. The “planter,” on his part, believed I  could be trusted to use the information cleverly. I, on my part, satisfied myself that it was the  truth, though, perhaps, not the whole truth. 

I must wind up this sequence with a reference to the Shakespearean spy, Polonius. He was spying on everything and everyone as required by his benefactors. Even his son was under the medieval scanner. In one spy mission, he was hiding behind the curtain in the royal bedroom. Mistaking the shadowy figure for someone else, our to-be-or-not-to-be thrust his sword into the curtain killing the clumsy spy instantly. Espionage is not without its risks.   

  

 

 Bible and Ban

It is not often that one beats up one’s mother. Even in the context of such a rare outrage, opinion may differ. There is perhaps nothing that  inspires absolute unanimity. That rude and rustic saying rang out in my mind with new reports of ban of holy books in schools and removal of testaments of democracy from texts. The ban story comes from Salt Lake City. The atrocity on democracy has been detected in New Delhi and Kottayam.

Let us discuss the second point first. A Malayalam newspaper went to town--and village--the day before yesterday with an incisive story of some cardinal content being excluded from school texts prepared by the National Council for Educational Research and Training(NCERT). Next day it was followed by a stentorian leader. The essence of the journalistic crusade was, as the caption read, that democracy had been reduced to a “memory” with the removal of some parts from some texts.

“Nothing happens to democracy,” says P Ravindran Nayar, veteran journalist. He has been witness to such guttural outbursts with an unvarying theme, “democracy is in danger,” during the past half century. Like socialism of the Avadi vintage in the sixties, democracy has long been a fashionable slogan, mouthed by those who theoretically uphold it as well those who invoke an exclusive brand, “people’s democracy.” Like socialism, misshapen with all kinds of people sporting it, democracy is also universally advocated, as a cap fit for every political head or its lack.

 

A largely acceptable view is that democracy is the best form of political governance since it represents the will of the people. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to argue that nothing better may happen in the annals of mankind and thus it reaches the “end of history.” Anything can be deified or demonized in the name of democracy. An alternative but unpopular theory floated by thinkers like Ortega Gasset is that the “revolt of the masses,” leading to a “leveling of sensibility” may not be the  ultimate road to an ideal social destination. Nothing may be intrinsically bad because it has no mass takers, nothing may be necessarily good because the masses like it at a given point of time.

So, as Ravindran Nayar says, those who cry from the housetops ``democracy is in danger” need not be worried. A rearrangement of the school curriculum cannot shake up the whole system. There is no gainsaying that a gargantuan bogey of saffronisation has been at work for long. Hindu hotheads have only aggravated it in a reflexive response. For instance, there were those like P N Oak who set up an institute  to rewrite Indian history, even challenging the fact of the authorship of the Taj Mahal. Those of Oak’s ilk, even those less irascible, would accept the depredations of central Asian immigrants as a secular and innocuous historical conquest. The memories of defiling shrines and levying a cess (jizya) on people of other faiths are not easily forgotten or forgiven. There were  indeed thinkers like K R Malkani who had a nice word for Aurangzeb and Tippu Sultan even when they were a tiny, solitary, faction within the burgeoning Hindu armada. It was a Malkani committee which cleared a Doordarshan serial, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, even in the face of large sections of south Indian viewers.

The Marxists are alarmed. Historically, they have sought to be recognized as guardians of the minorities and the champions of democratic rights. It was long assumed that their following will widen among Muslims if they run down Hindutva oracles. That their reign smacked of totalitarianism wherever, whenever, they seized power through the bourgeois ballot or armed revolution is an overwhelming twentieth century irony. 

The Marxist mindset in Kerala was revealed when it was resolved to throw overboard NCERT textbooks or their relevant chapters and continue with newly challenged versions of history and geography. Narendra Modi’s party and its dons have taken the position that medieval history laid disproportionate emphasis on the Mughal period, playing down the scintillating role of the Pallavas and the Cholas and the scions of the ruthlessly liquidated Vijayanagara empire. 

What is arguably characterized as saffronisation is defended as an endeavor to restore balance to the study of Indian history, nay, Hindu history, as chronic critics of the Modi era are wont to present it. At the same time, it must be conceded that Modi’s men are afflicted by an unmistakable saffron syndrome. I remember a towering Hindu enthusiast, P Parameswaran, telling me that the RSS would never be able to wipe the blood of Gandhi off its face just as the Indian communists would not carry conviction when they explain their dubious stance during the freedom struggle. 

It was painfully funny when they came up with a class analysis turning an “imperialist war” into a “people’s war” so as to abide by the Soviet view of a phase of the Second World War. Conversely, the Hindu militia would ever fail to wash the stains of saffronism off its progenitor, Savarkar. Even Godse seemed becoming less unexceptionable when Justice G D Khosla, hearing the appeal of the Gandhi killer in the Punjab High Court, suggested that the assassin would have been aquitted if the jury system were in prevalence. Justice Khosla has not been forgiven. But it points to the possibility that someone who was held a criminal once could be hailed as a freedom fighter, martyr, over time and space. Revision of history follows as a  matter of course.

When the new essay in saffronism, leading to a hue and cry of endangered democracy, was being debated in this part of the world, a most unlikely book was taken out of school curriculum in Salt Lake City, USA. Parents of some students in Davis education district complained that a book contained  “violence and vulgarity” and it should be taken off the school library shelves. Which a concerned school committee promptly did. The impugned book is one with which we have been traditionally familiar, which we uphold as a great testament of faith, The Bible. Specifically, what is under reference is  the King James version compiled and corrected by a galaxy of scholars and word masters including William Shakespeare. What is violent and vulgar about it is uncertain but a school committee was told that the Bible had portions violating a law against offensive literature adopted last year.

It follows that anything can be banned if the Bible is banned. We have seen secular and not so secular governments buckling under pressure and banning books which hurt the sentiments of one petulant section or the other. No one could be a more pious Christian than Nikos Kazantsakis but a play based on his The Last Temptation of Christ was banned when cassock-clad clergymen took out a procession demanding its proscription. C P Nair, Secretary to the Chief Minister, gave me the text of the play to read. I found it rather tepid but hardly abrasive.

The Marxists who loathe book ban were constrained to outlaw street plays like Nattugaddiga staged by comparatively extremist groups. When it came to his turn, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi proscribed Salman Rushdi’s The Satanic Verses before the echo of the first cry of blasphemy from Iran died down. It came my way when I was ransacking the banned books section in a Virginia library. It did not match my quotidian literary taste. Significantly, The Satanic Verses became a tome sought after worldwide.   

Possibly the best hype for a book is a worst trick: Make it look like it contains passages someone somewhere may find offensive, “violent and vulgar” as a school committee in Utah found the Bible. Autobiographically, my publisher, K P R Nair, and I were beneficiaries of the ban of a book I put together narrating the story of T N Seshan who, as the Chief Election Commissioner, raised the hackles among the political glitterati. It was an interrogative reference to the suspected foreign influence on the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu. 

Tamil Makkal were up in arms. There was a competitive litigation, every other politician demanding instant ban of the book which was viewed as an anti-Tamil tirade. Those who did not rush to the court with a petition for ban made a bonfire of the book. As publicity raged, an excited K P R Nair was computing his cash profit--until the release and the sale of the book was ordered by the court. My short point: any book may be banned with planned or assured results just as, as we said in the beginning, it is possible to take a contrary view even when one beats up one’s mom.    

  

   

 

 Armageddon at Hand

Armageddon is at hand. At least it looks like being at hand. It is more tempting to believe that it will break out the day after than to hope that all will be well with the world tomorrow. Armageddon is not exactly the end of the world. The biblical experience is the devastating end of a war between good and evil. We don’t quite know whether the end would come with a whimper or following the final deluge or conflagration. 

My respondents are divided. Some like Rajendran Namboodiri prefer death by water, some others opt for a fiery end or a Koyna-like quake as recalled by Mukundan Menon. My good friend Ravindran Nayar will have none of this. It is all an overstated fear, a hypochondric response to the studies on the submergence of the earth or the sinking of New York. Who knows, he may be right, “don’t worry, it may not happen.” That it may well happen is what we generally like to fear. As unregenerate journalists say, bad news is good news, no news is bad news. 

The quake in Koyna may be taken as a frame of reference. Whether it was due to the tremors in the earth’s womb or the pressures on its bosom is an unending debate. If something like that happens in Mullapperiyar, most of us may not be around to compile an inventory of the loss. V S Achuthanandan was the unremitting leader who set fire to the debate on the safety of the dam. Maybe because he is not exactly well, the damn dam debate has been all but forgotten.

Long before he blew up a pall of fear and gloom, precisely in 1979, there was a Periyar scare. Our paper celebrated it with an eight-column headline. What will not happen and who will survive if the dam built by Col Pennyquick with his own money over a century ago? I put the bland question to K C Thomas, Water Commission chairman. He was relaxed, not a whit overawed. He had been witness to a recrudescence of the report of an impending catastrophe from time to time. Yet he had all mandatory checks done and heaved an amused sigh of relief. It passed with no bad news.

That was not what our undying scare-mongers expected of the Water Commission boss. As Achuthanandan picked up the burning thread of debate, everyone, yes, everyone praised him, his bravery, his crusade. It seemed disheartening to see the scare being proved repeatedly unwarranted. I was writing a weekly column in a popular paper and wanted to raise the case of the wrong alarm.  If the dam breaks, the victims will not be merely the people living on the banks of the river. Its furious flow will wash away a good part of Kerala. Such a calamity, if seriously feared, must generate a flurry of activity, inspiring a mad rush of media to what might be a world event. 

That did not happen. But my newspaper was cautious, shall we say, overcautious. A friendly editor told me it would be good to leave the subject unchecked. Readers who lived in constant  fear of a collapse would make a bonfire of the paper if it did not tell them what they wanted to hear. And they wanted to believe the armageddon was at hand. I told myself, “you fool, let sleeping dogs lie!”  

But they do not sleep. A television channel was getting ready a programme on Mullapperiyar, naturally focusing on the threat that faces and people's fears. When the innovative producer took a byte from me in a great act of condescension, I took a view there was no need to scare the people on the banks of the river or around the dam. The producer was concerned but did not confide in me. He wanted to scare his viewers and needed me only to say his views and concerns. I am grateful words I had not spoken were not put into my mouth, though words I spoke were not telecast.

Such scare was not what delayed and rendered controversial the Idamalayar project. If facts about the past and the future of Idamalayar had been fed to people in advance, and if a voluble Achuthanandan had been around with his vitriolic harangues, it might not have even got off the ground. Its gestation period could have been a record in the annals of construction. There was no aspect of it free from criticism and calumny. But no one knew that Idamalayar was ab initio an unsafe project. 

Not a word is now spoken about geological experts disfavouring the proposal for a dam across Idamalayar to feed huge turbines. Its prospective benefits were eloquently presented by committed civil engineers but one man, V S Krishnaswamy Iyer, stood his ground. He pointed out, anxiety choking him, that Idamalayar lay in the shear zone of an earthquake with Coimbatore as the epicentre that had happened in 1900. The quake had its impact upto Sri Lanka. 

I remember looking up Krishnaswamy’s report, slender and dusty  but explosive, quietly given to me by a chief engineer, M P Bharathan. Krishnaswamy later rose to be the director general of the Geological Survey of India. It is not without regret that I feel I should have followed up the report. As a concession to the doves of the electricity pantheon, it was decided to have no concrete dam as originally proposed. Some munificence this, concrete dam was replaced by masonry dam. Spare the earth, if possible. 

Soon scare was to spread with Kothamangalam as the epicentre. R Balakrishna Pillai, a volatile minister, was correcting time and again in terms of its deadline. After several several postponements, project managers took a crucial step one evening. They had a trial run of the turbines, releasing water to them through a pretty long tunnel. And they were constrained to close it instantly. 

One of those rare do-gooders rang me up after nightfall to report hush-hush that there was a leak in the tunnel warranting immediate corrective action. It was a leak in the audit tunnel, not the main water course. Ganesha Pillai, a technical member of the electricity board, was as perturbed as surprised when  I asked him for details. He did not know. He sought to be excused to rush to the project site. K M Mani, deputizing for Pillai in the Assembly next day, had little more information than what my morning paper revealed. 

Then the season of scare started. Colourful and startling stories of the leak, its murky backdrop and future implications, adorned newspaper columns. Outwitting all rivals, one of them blared that the crack in the dam was serious, perhaps worsening. Competitive extremism in reporting an impending calamity was at its peak. Unnikrishnan, PRO of Hindustan Construction Company, which had built the dam, rang me up to convey his anguish. If the dam broke, he said, more in amusement than agitation, that a good part of middle Kerala would be drowned. Thank heavens, the dam was not cracking. A golden opportunity to instill fear and anxiety was forfeited. 

My friend Ravi has seen all this happening, scare mounting and, then, its source drying up. “Don’t worry, it may not happen,” is a biblical writing on the wall on Parliament Street which comforted me in moments of pique and tension. But such reassuring counsel is not often available. And, even when it is available, it looks suspect. There is an anonymous Sanskrit sloka, famously translated by A R Raja Raja Varma, that marks my mood, my fear and hope and solicitude: Night will soon end, morning shine, sun rise, and this lotus will blossom in good time--as the bee in the bud was lost in this reverie, who knows god’s mind, an elephant pulled off that lotus. 

 

 

      

 Gospel of Betrayal

Two out of thirty is not necessarily a mean thing. The reference here is to a silver coin, in fact, two of them, out of a total of thirty which Judas took to betray Jesus. These two silver pieces, fateful and fake, were actually made in what may be called Monson Mavunkal Mint. The fake master passed into oblivion when new episodes of villainy and nonsense stormed into media focus.

But the Monsons of our world never ever become irrelevant or jobless. They need to service the craze for old things, that is, new things made old. The market for antiques or, do we say antics?, is as old and enormous as both of them. Monsoon may be crestfallen, not because he is being tried for fraud but because he is not part of a project to find antique copies of the great gospel. In a Southeby’s auction in New York, the oldest Hebrew Bible, complete with its 24 books, has yielded 38.1 million dollars.

It is believed to be the most valuable manuscript sold at an auction. Bill Gates of Microsoft had earlier bought  Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific notebook for a few million dollars less. The Hebrew Bible yielded less than the American constitution, 43 million dollars being the price of the first edition printed copy of the US horoscope.

The oldest Hebrew Bible, dating back 1100 years, is now the proud possession of ANU Museum, Tel Aviv. Alfred Moses, a lawyer diplomat, who acquired it for the museum says: "The Hebrew Bible is the most influential in history and constitutes the bedrock of Western civilization.” Moses would not have known such a quantity as Monson Mavunkal or the other way round.

For some time now, we have no idea where Monson Mavunkal is now or what his creative ventures are. Moses, Alfred, may be thrilled to hear that his ancient namesake’s great staff is now available to us, courtesy Monsoon. Not only is he ingenious enough to make new things look ancient or archaic but carry conviction to the high and mighty, politicians and policemen naturally among them. No admiration for that flash of criminal creativity is undue.

Monson knows what sells. Moses’ staff, Judas’s silver pieces, all appropriately designed for the aesthetic appreciation and admiration in awe and joy, are a tribute to the possibilities of fake art. As it happens, holy relics are acquired far more by Christians and Muslims than Hindus. More medieval or modern things like Tippu Sultan’s throne are not easily disposed of, though the story of the sword of the Mysore Tiger has led to a frenzied para-historical discussion on a tele-serial with an eponymous title. The loss of or damage to holy relics can cause consternation. Such a disappearance in the sixties was a harrowing event in Srinagar, as Surendra Nath who was J&K IGP told me as we were going over the annals of relics and antiques. 

In Monson’s repertoire, one artifact that may propitiate Hindu crowds is a hand-written copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Whose hand is it? The unkempt and ageing sage could not have used a stylus and palm leaf to inscribe the Song Celestial. Was Monson’s Gita written down by a naughty elephant god or a bunch of people who mounted or worshipped him? I have some unsolicited suggestions for addition to his creative laboratory.

Arjuna’s bow, Gandivam. Krishna’s discus, Sudarsanam. Gandhari’s blindfold. Draupadi’s garment, as stripped by an evil Kaurava. Bhishma’s arrow bed, though Iravati Karve questions his bravery and sense of fairness in her short but sharp account of the war in Yuganta. On a secular note, we can welcome the recreation of  Jesus-related documents and articles, like a part of the cross on which his life ended. Monson may not appreciate the importance of some living flora and fauna that existed when the Son of God was walking the earth. I remember a winsome and eloquent guide educating us on the history and botany of the giant sequoia trees in the Yossemite National Park. Some of those trees, surviving the onslaught of time through centuries, could have stood as guardian angels even before Jesus’s mission in West Asia.

It is all about duping and tricking. It calls for some kind of genius. Like the one on making friends and influencing people, there can be a handbook for those who play fraud on unsuspecting or greedy people. Monson may not claim monopoly in this burgeoning field. How crooked religious trade can be effectively pursued in today’s setting is the engaging subject of Irving Wallace’s novel, The Word. Steve Randall, a media relations advisor, hired to organize publicity for a new Bible attributed to Jesus’s younger brother, James, starts questioning the veracity of various claims and inferences towards the end of the controversial. Following up stories of Jesus roaming around hermitages in India and anecdotes of the curiously titled The Aquarian Gospel, Monson’s peers in the profession can introduce some attractive relics in the booming market.

It is all about duping and tricking. No antique was being thrust on me, nor subjecting me to any antic, when one Kumara Das descended before me one afternoon, seeking permission to use my address for him to get a money order from his brother. He was a soccer player, left-in, attached to a famous Mumbai team. His gear had been stolen and simply wanted to have some money sent by his kin in Kerala. A man with a gift of the gab, Das was taking me for a risky ride, as I soon discovered. Money came and he collected in good time, being so nice as to tip the postman liberally. The tragic comedy was that there was a mix up in names. The sender of the money order and the receiver intercepted me, pointing out that the money had been dispatched to my address. I did not have patience to look at his receipt or argue with him or assert my innocence. I had been duped, I had been tricked. That happens in every field, every time. As Magha says, the field is so vast, time endless.

My friend and writer, Sreekrishna Das, was not a little pleased. Perhaps he thought I deserved it all for my gullibility. He made a short story out of it and earned Rs25 as remuneration. It was double pressure: my discomfiture, his delight

 Fear of Intelligence 

It has always been there, everywhere. The fear of loss of job and face and love. Man had just landed on the moon in the sixties when we had a soul shattering subject for debate in an inter-university youth festival in New Delhi: “Man’s landing on the moon has knocked the bottom out of romance.” It has not. In the ensuing half century, romance has remained ever vibrant, though perhaps with a reformed grammar and revised style.

No longer may Sakuntala be writing her love lyrics to an elusive Dushianta on a bhoorjapatra, nor may her diction be an involved Sanskrit. Digital epistles of love still mark human behavior and aspiration. The fear of loss of job articulated by the adopted sons of the working class  in the early sixties has turned out to be hypochondriac. What their shrill cry achieved was an undue delay in computerization in banks and railways where automation was first attempted. And, our familiar question for which we did not crave an instant answer was what would happen to man when machines took over his work. 

Two thinkers whose view of the last third question were a historian, Yuval Harari, and an engineer hailed as ‘godfather of artificial intelligence, Goeffrey Hinton. The historian is blunt. He is not a little concerned that AI has already hacked the operating system of human civilization. Storytelling computers will, he says, change the course of human history.” Hinton is worried about many things  including AI’s potential to eliminate jobs and create a world where people “may not be able to know what is true any more.” In a huff the other day, the septuagenarian computer engineer who did pioneering research in his field opted out of his top berth in Google.

Harari’s and Hinton’s apprehensions had been voiced by many who watched man’s ascent and adventure, employing literary constructs. About a century ago, when robots had not entered our kitchens or reading rooms, Nalappat Narayana Menon wondered whether man’s steady movement, stepping on his own body, was really heading upward. Edassery Govindan Nair, none too weighed down by tradition, asked if his beloved river would turn into a dirty drain when man who lived in fun and frolic became a machine. The age of change and machine did not daunt Vailoppilli but he too wanted to retain the “scent of the village” and its love even in the thick of industrialization. 

No one is unaware of whatever may happen when robots created by man take over man’s monopoly functions. In considering the para-humanizing impact of AI, I am more guided by the perspicacious and at once sober formulations by scholars like Californian computer scientist, Professor Stuart Russell. Prof Russell was at great pains to explain and assure us that man would not suddenly be a rudderless entity when Artificial Intelligence evolved by man throws him out of his cozy throne. In his illuminating Reith lecture, he set out three principles that would govern the progress of robots. One,  the machine's only objective is to maximize the realization of human preferences.  Two, the machine is initially uncertain about what those preferences are. Three, the ultimate source of information about human preferences is human behavior. Applying those principles, Prof Russell concluded: “I’ll say now, no, machines will not learn to copy evil human behavior, and no, I’m definitely not ignoring the wellbeing of other animals.”

That must be reassuring as far as it goes. But it will be foolhardy to expect change to take place only where man wants it, how he wants it. Robots may yet not write poetry or paint a Mona Lisa or execute an uncalibrated dance of love. They already show signs of learning language, though ridiculously imperfectly. Such robotic imperfection is what comforts people who would not want their existing applecart to be upset. At every threshold of change, they have put up blocking stones, raising the bogey of dehumanization or mechanization of man. The idea of entrusting all human work to a machine man is yet to find universal acceptance. 

It is hard to accept, certainly not welcome, the fact that man, like a mighty river, never remains the same, not for a moment. In its inexorable flow, the river leaves intact or behind not a single drop at the same spot, giving it a halo of eternity. Likewise, man passes through evolution not stage by stage but as a constant process. Evolution is current, not past or prospective. 

The fear of loss of job or face or love, social historians say, dates back to the industrial revolution. A closer look will take us further back in time when changes were resisted in what could be mistaken for a movement in defense of human civilization.  Consider the resistance to replacing a heavy grinding stone in the kitchen with a mechanical device, employing a tractor in place of an antiquated plough in the field, and introducing a ticket vending machine in the railway station. There can be no field where change, complete with the entry of robots, is preventable. As for the limited subject of human jobs, for instance, a quarter of content generated by human intervention can be handled by Artificial Intelligence. The western world will have 300 million of its jobs will be appropriated by robots. 

Martin Ford has provocatively titled his book as, Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence will Transform Everything. Ford says it is not a change limited to individuals or jobs. The change will be pervasive, permanent. “It could happen to a lot of people, potentially quite suddenly, potentially all at the same time. And that has implications not just for those individuals, but for the whole economy.”

It is tempting to hark back to Bhasmasura, our version of Frankenstein, who could turn to ash anything he touched. The first thing he set out to do was to burn down whoever gave him that extraordinary boon. A picturesque, metaphorical presentation but an idle and ineffective presentation at it. Artificial Intelligence may not be man’s undoing like the ungrateful “ash demon” was to his creator.

 History of History

From Herodotus’s Histories to S Krishnaswamy’s Indus Valley to Indira Gandhi, it has been a long and frenetic effort to grapple with the truth of the past. The grand quest cannot but continue through the future,  as successive events show. 

The Greek historian was building his thesis on a murky foundation of mythology while his modern Indian counterpart set out to document an ancient civilization coming down to the twentieth century. Past or future, nothing remains static, everything being ever open to revision, because, as Albert Camus says,  there is no truth, there are only truths. And truth has to be constantly reviewed, if need be, rescinded. 

Krishnaswamy’s documentary was made about a half century ago. It was part of an  undeclared  plan to chronicle the glory of a civilization culminating in the origin and  growth of Indira Gandhi. Her decline was to be documented by others who wanted to divest her of her due berth in history. As if to foil their plan, she made available to the posterity her version of history in a capsule buried in the earth.

Recreation of history was a passion for anyone who was someone before Indira Gandhi. So is it now, reasserting the inexorable validity of Basheer’s fictional figure who kept mumbling My Grandfather Had An Elephant. Broadly, three revisionist streams can be identified in the study of Indian history. One, the Congress view of things, two, the grandfather-had-an-elephant approach to the Hindu halcyon days and three, the proletarian version which flourished with Damodar Kosambi in India and Eric Hobsbawm in Europe. 

In the second category was P N Oak who set up a seminal  Institute for Rewriting Indian History. Oak debunked the deference with which he thought India’s Muslim past, so to say, was being studied. So much so he had an unorthodox theory for the origin and authorship of the Taj Mahal. Oak inspired fun and frivolity. There was even a demand for his works to be removed from Parliament House library. 

To his ilk, Tara Chand’s magisterial Influence of Islam on Indian Culture is not a favorite reading. They would rather hail the harrowing  chronicles of what Muslim marauders did to Vijayanagara. Across centuries, Robert Sewell’s account of the total raid on that “forgotten empire” has been searing through our psyche. 

Sewell concludes his disturbing eloquence with these words:  “Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city; teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the fun plenitude of prosperity one day, and on the next seized, pillaged, and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description.”  Enterprises of such vandalism are sought to be highlighted in the textbooks of history prepared by the National Council for Educational Research and Training(NCERT). Its endeavor is to give Indian history textbooks a degree of balance and comprehensiveness. Why not, for instance, enlarge the scope of history by bringing the Pallava and the Chola accomplishments within its ambit? Why not discontinue the obsessive preoccupation with the battles of the Mughals almost to the exclusion of the heights scaled by those regimes of southern India?

The campaign for balance and comprehensiveness has come in for criticism, particularly the so-called Left history buffs. Their comrades in Kerala, where they are in power, are working for a secularist desideratum. They indeed have a point to make there. For one thing, it will avoid dividing the past on religious lines and help evolve a consensual approach on the basis of socio-economic principles. For another, it will give a boost to Indian pluralism, and resolve issues that arise from the multi-religious character of the Indian nation.

Laudable objectives indeed, but no one mistakes their unregenerately proletarian strategies for anything other than a political ploy to earn the allegiance of Muslim masses. The Hindu masses never uniting as a phalanx historically,  non-Hindu consolidation may look like a need as well as a possibility. The fact, however, is that total secularization of history, or, for that matter, any other subject, will be hard to accomplish in India’s polyglot milieu. The communist dispensation in Kerala has decided to teach history in schools as before, not honoring New Delhi’s weltanschauung.

Proletarian perceptions, if they may be so defined, have often been at variance with Indian traditions and views which are marked by a spiritualist underpinning. Whether re-evaluating an episode of the freedom struggle or negotiating an alliance with a bourgeois political section, Left leaders had long taken a stance none too  helpful in fostering a politically healthy society. An unchanging view is with regard to what has been characterized as the Malabar Rebellion of 1921. The Left lobby likes to look at it as an agrarian revolt, inspiring fun and frivolity, as the Oaks of our times did it in another historical context.  

Revision of history is not a passion limited to India, or, to its tiny state, Kerala. Revisionist ventures have been reported from  time to time in every region, every religious approach. They seem to  happen across the world, across India, with an arresting, esoteric rhythm. In the limited scenario of Kerala, time-honored views about the second Chera empire and its self-indulgent golden age between the tenth and twelfth centuries have been rudely questioned. But the formulations of amateur historians like P K Balakrishnan have not yet found universal acceptance. But it has fortified the theory that history is hard to make, harder to revise. 

Such simultaneous posers and answers to historical questions have, as we said before, shown a certain repetitive ring. It is marked by what Carl Jung would have called synchronicity, many different things taking place at the same time in diverse settings. Revision of history is being attempted all over the globe, not as part of a search for self identity as in pursuance of a given leader’s anxiety to install himself or herself in the endless gallery of time. The more powerful a leader, the more the hostility he provokes, the more his obsession with  the historical image. 

Reports from South Korean capital Seoul suggest that the new-found enthusiasm for the fascist fringe is not inconsiderable. The Falange Movement  leader, Jose de Rivera, was a great supporter of the dreaded and discredited fascist regime run by Franco. Rivera’s body was exhumed the other day when crowds thronged to offer salute to the man of the murky memory. An exhumation of that order was executed long ago when Vatican brought the body of Pope Formosus from his grave and dressed up in papal habiliments to face fresh trial for a minor indiscretion. 

The old vernacular saying is still valid: Slap your mom, you will find someone to endorse it too. How Rivera and Franco will be portrayed in Spain’s new history in the making will be worth watching. Korea is a different story. Its loquacious leadership is divided between those who stand for closer ties with North Korea and those who shun the Kim company. 

Dictators like history. They order appropriate revisions of the past from time to time to make sure usurpers do not sully or hijack their reputation. It is said that Joseph Stalin.who expertly managed the Soviet Union’s murder machine was a connoisseur of music and history, besides his pet project of liquidation of dissent. Leon Trotsky who lost the power war to Stalin was aghast that the dictator had made history his handmaid. Before his head was broken with an ice axe in his hideout in Mexico City, a caption Trotsky gave to his historical account was: How Stalin Falsified History!    

 

 Calling People Names

If there was one wrong thing the venerable bard of Stratford upon Avon ever uttered, it was that a rose would remain a rose whatever you call it, there being nothing in a name. For naming our ever loyal monkey god in an election address in Karnataka, Prime Minister Modi is facing a demand for apology. Congress spokesperson Surjewala will rest content only after the wounded faith and feelings of Hanuman devotees are duly assuaged. 

Surjewala is no ignoramus. He knows Hanuman’s superhuman or sub-human qualities of head and heart: piety, commitment, loyalty and, if you like, some incendiary and investigative tendencies. The mighty monkey had the presence of mind to upload a whole hill  to take out a life-saving herb whose name he had forgotten. When he was tied up and prepared for live cremation, he broke out of captivity and comprehensively torched his captors.

Watch out, it is risky to play around with names. Surjewala’s big boss knows that as well as anyone else. The boss knows too. He is required to explain in court after court, from Surat to Patna, how he took Modi’s name in a manner some thought was bad naming. The word for it in Hindi heartland is appropriate: badnaam. Rahul’s father had made a faux pas too when he called a garrulous senior lawyer  not a monkey but by a canine name. Duly incensed, Rajiv’s verbal victim resorted to an interrogative response, asking every day of the ensuing month ten questions that would trap the respondent either way, affirmatively or dismissively. 

So it is not wise to play around with a monkey’s name. No naked ape, whom Desmond Morris identifies as our early ancestor, may like to be called that, ape, naked or dressed.

Ape is an epithet of condescension, abject abuse. I am not too proud of my tribe’s tendency to vilify people for no fault of theirs. In our lexicon of abuse, what is viewed as the harshest is sex-related. Suitably described, genital organs yield good results, infuriating their objects. One may not mind being accused of felony or theft but one would not like to be called a bastard. One may not like being called bald or ugly but one would not put up with an ape-related accusation. Don’t call one by one’s racial name. 

Surjewala seems to know all the attributes of Hanuman. As a boy, when sleep was elusive or an irrational fear coursed through my veins, I used to recite Hanuman’s ten names: Sri Hanuman Anjana suno, Vayuputro Mahabala… My hope was that the redoubtable monkey would calm me  down and hoist me on the wings of sleep  and dream. I am not sure it worked any better than a compulsory chanting of the thousand names of the supreme goddess: Sri Mata Sri Maharajni Srimad Simhasaneswari. Naming, name chanting, that is, is no mean feat, as the Congress spokesperson may helpfully endorse. 

Thiruvananthapuram, where I live, has two giant monkeys installed on divine platforms with sundry minor deities sharing a berth with him in his hallowed premises. How they came to grab such good space near the legislature complex and the military station may be of historical interest. But they evidently generate enough funds to maintain themselves and their managers. In Suchindram, close to Kanyakumari, where K K Pillai made a seminal study of temple architecture, there is an imposing statue of Anjaneya who is pleased when he is offered a garland of vada. Little round southern snacks with a growing hole in the middle. Mind you,  I can vouch for the crispness of this well-fried delicacy. 

Hanuman can work wonders if you keep him on your side. I have grown up with stories of our legendary village sorcerer, Appu Paniker, befriending both the monkey god and the goddess and using his divine influence to strike terror or, as the case may be, calm in the deepening rural darkness. Paniker was said to have spent forty-one nights in breast-deep water in absolute seclusion seeking the benediction of Hanuman and Devi. The eerie penance, throughout  which the thousand names of the deities were chanted under a whisper, rendered Paniker capable of mind-boggling feats. My mother took me to him once to heal my migraine-like headache but Paniker’s potion gave no more than an imagined cure. 

The monkey god was one whose name was considered for my son when he was born. I shouted my preference for a non-divine name but one that would not be comic. It was a million dollar search,  patently futile, because there was no name that a god or goddess claimed as theirs. That solved, three years later, the problem of finding my daughter’s name as well. There was no escape from gods when you look for names or namelessness. I felt,  as Wittgenstein said, I was growing stupider and stupider every day. 

So monkey is a monkey is a monkey. You imbibe his sacrament, delicious vada, place an appropriate garland round his neck, chant his fear-removing, sleep-inducing names with buoyant hopes, right or wrong. But you don’t call a monkey a monkey, as Surjewala and his boss must have discovered, no less than Narendra Modi. That there was nothing in a name was an error made by our myriad-minded poet. If he were around when an African tyrant was ruling the roost, he would have had a hearty laugh, sparing himself the agony of a Hamlet or Iago.

The tyrant had been given an unusual name, Canaan Banana. Some miscreants who could not make sense of his dictatorial name, who found no fun or fervour in it, began bandying it about, liberally, indiscriminately. Though a tyrant, Banana had not been drained of all his sense of humour and indignation. The insinuation triggered by the anonymous crowds of miscreants was not lost on him. He banned his own name.      .