Since then I have traversed history, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics and literature- anything except astronomy. I cannot but take a long view look at the past 25 years or so spent pursuing fields with with I had no professional relation, as I took up The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene last week. I was invigorated and rejuvenated as my otherwise waning interest in reading seems to have returned. Besides the fact that the book is very well written, explaining recent developments in particle physics and cosmology easily for a layman, I find it interesting the author’s journey proceeded directly opposite to mine. In his teenage years, he read Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus, and rejected Camus answer to what he considers to be the most fundamental question- whether to commit suicide or not. Though I read Camus much later, the answer to similar questions in my mind led me away from astronomy. Greene opted for the opposite direction and sought a career in astrophysics.

I am convinced, though, if he had also been subjected to the manner in which I was taught at the department of Physics at the Punjab University, he too would have changed his course of study.

On a different note, my experiment with an e- reader earlier in the year, was short lived, though I will have to return to it at some point or another.

Another change this year was that I borrowed books from the local library. The Mississauga public library is not the best of libraries- its collection in the fiction section is limited and highly overused. Still, some of the books that I found and read were Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Robber by Robert Walser, The Universal History of Infamy and Ficcones- both by Borges, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Garcia Marquez and WG Sebald’s The Emigrants.

The first three were disappointing and I could not finish them. Mrs Dalloway started well but became too didactic- ideas seem to occupy the writer’s attention rather than the characters that became incidental to the story after a while.

The Robber, unlike Walser’s wonderful novel about a small town clerk, The Assistant, dragged on and on without a plot or any particular insights.

Some of the stories in Borge’s Ficonnes, particularly The Circular Ruins and The Garden of Forking Paths, I found fascinating. The others in this collection- equally good, like The Tower of Babel, I seem to have read elsewhere.

The Universl History of Infamy held interest but only for a very short while, as the stories became more and more predictable.

The Gift, a purported translation of Hafiz’s poems by Daniel Ladinsky, was a near disaster. It doesn’t take too long to figure out that the poems are at best a trans- creation and nowhere represent a translation of Hafiz’s poetry.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s, The Heart of a Dog was enjoyable and made me nostalgic about the longer novel that he wrote- the Master and the Margarita.  There is no other novella about the early Soviet years, that is as devastating as it is short as The Heart of a Dog.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold was chilling to read, and I could undertand why Garcia Marquez and other Latin American writers appeal to me so much- this novel could very well have been written about a village in North India.

WG Sebald’s The Emigrants was very readable and his mix of fiction and non- fiction writing reminiscent of Borges.

The Buddha and His Dhamma by BR Ambedkar and No Freedon with Caste by Swami Dharma Teeratha, both read online,  continue to shake my long hitherto ideas about India- much of which I had imbibed from the dominant nationalist and left studies. Ambedkar’s writings continue to provide startling insights that mark him out as a writer who is just being discovered in the 21st century. It needs to be remembered that even till 1990, his works were not available at all, till they were published, I think, by the Maharashtra state government. It helps immensely that many of his works are available online thanks to the small but growing band of adherents that he commands among internet activists.

Two non- fiction books have been reviewed earlier on this blog, Jangalnama by Satnam and Known Turf by Annie Zaidi.

Last’s year’s digest: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

Left liberals are likely to denounce the BJP’s support for the Karnataka government’s introduction of Gita classes in schools as an attempt at stifling minority rights and invoke on the separation of the state and the church. The BJP’s agenda, however, goes far beyond just a communal agenda. To decipher that, one has to trace the agenda behind the Gita itself.

The Gita has, in popular belief, symbolized the rejuvenation of Hinduism after a thousand years of Buddhist domination. It was the book that apparently struck the last nail on Buddhist thought by a thirty-something Adi Sankracharya. Sankara advocated the advaita–in other words, a form of subjective idealism. In simple words, what it means is that there is only one entity in the universe, the Brahma. The rest is an illusion. Thus, he reconciled all the contradictions in the world by proclaiming that everything is an illusion, or Maya. A person needs to realize this supposed unity and unless one is able to do so, one remains entangled in the web of illusions, or mayajaal.

The Gita attempted to do the same–reconcile contradictions. It attempted to justify violence in the name of morality. It ordained the caste system, and showed women “their place.” In other words, The Gita is the chariot of Brahmanism and what can be called the ideology of racism ensconced within Brahmanism.

DD Kosambi remarks in his book Myth and Reality that “The Gita furnished the one scriptural source which could be used without violence to accepted Brahmin methodology, to draw inspiration and justification for social actions in some way disagreeable to a branch of the ruling class upon whose mercy the brahmins depended at the moment.”

Ambedkar too had a similar view. Nalini Pandit, in her essay, Ambedkar and the Gita, remarks:

After making a detailed study of the ancient religious texts, Ambedkar came to the conclusion that the Aryan community of pre-Buddhist Aryan times did not have any developed sense of moral values. Buddhism caused a moral and social revolution in this society. When the Mauryan emperor Ashoka embraced Buddhism, the social revolution became a political revolution. After the decline of the Mauryan empire, the Brahmins, whose interests had suffered under the Buddhist kings initiated a counter-revolution under the leadership of Pushyamita Sunga. The counter-revolution restored brahmanism. The Bhagwat Gita, says Ambedkar, was composed to give ideological and moral support to this counter-revolution.

Kosambi also pointed out that those who find inspiration in the Gita invariably are from the leisurely classes. He might have added that they are from the upper castes. Those that come from non- Brahmin castes or articulate their voices tend to ignore the Gita. For example, Kabir, Nanak, Namdev, Chaitenya and Jayadeva did not evince any interest in the Gita. On the other hand, Tilak, Gandhi, Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan- all upper castes, if not brahmins- are the names that are associated with writings on the Gita. The correlation with the caste of those who drew inspiration from the Gita is hard to overlook.

It is very interesting to note that interest in the Gita revived only after the advent of the British and their strategy to espouse communal identities. It is even possible that they just came looking for a book like the Bible or the Koran and the pandits could just think of the Bhagvat Gita as an answer. Ambedkar compares these three seminal works thus:

They (pandits) have gone on a search for the message of the Bhagvat Gita on the assumption that it is a gospel as the Koran, the Bible or the Dhammapada is. In my opinion this assumption is quite a false assumption. The Bhagvat Gita is not a gospel and it can therefore have no message and it is futile to search for one. The question will no doubt be asked : What is the Bhagvat Gita if it is not a gospel? My answer is that the Bhagvat Gita is neither a book of religion nor a treatise on philosophy. What the Bhagvat Gita does is to defend certain dogmas of religion on philosphic grounds. If on that account anybody wants to call it a book of religion or a book of philosophy he may please himself. But essentially it is neither. It uses philosophy to defend religion. (Ambedkar, Revolution and Counter Revolution in India)

Having seen some critical views on the Gita, let us look at a handful of shalokas to substantiate.

Shaloka 9.32 ia particularly illustrative of the contempt in which the Gita hold the broad masses of people, including women.

mam hi partha vyapasritya
ye ‘pi syuh papa-yonayah
striyo vaisyas tatha sudras
te ‘pi yanti param gatim

(O son of Prtha, those who take shelter in Me, though they be of lower birth–women, vaisyas [merchants], as well as sudras [workers]–can approach the supreme destination.)

I have taken the translation from a version that I found on an ISKON site. A better translation, instead of “lower birth” would be “born out of sin” since the word “papa” in Sanskrit means “sin”. Gandhi interprets it more correctly:

“For finding refuge in Me, even those who though are born of the womb of sin, women, vaishyas, and shudras too, reach the supreme goal.”

The different castes are not to be treated equal is made amply clear in other shalokas. Even when there is mention of equality, it is very clear that one needs to reach the stage of sthitaprajana to become a sama darshi. (Sardesai, page 17)

5.18

vidya-vinaya-sampanne
brahmane gavi hastini
suni caiva sva-pake ca
panditah sama-darsinah
(The humble sage, by virtue of true knowledge, sees with equal vision a learned and gentle brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater [outcast].)

The cow, elephant, the dog and the outcast are all clubbed together, and are seen to be equal to the brahmin- but only when one reaches that esoteric stage of the sama- darshi. It is anybody’s guess on how many people actually reached that stage!
Further, shaloka 18.44 clearly ordains the caste duties for the vaisyas and sudras:
18.44
krsi-go-raksya-vanijyam
vaisya-karma svabhava-jam
paricaryatmakam karma
sudrasyapi svabhava-jam

(Farming, cow protection and business are the qualities of work for the vaisyas, and for the sudras there is labor and service to others.)

The caste system is of course, ordained by God himself, in the human form of Krishna (4.13):
catur-varnyam maya srstam
guna-karma-vibhagasah
tasya kartaram api mam
viddhy akartaram avyayam

(According to the three modes of material nature and the work ascribed to them, the four divisions of human society were created by Me. And,although I am the creator of this system, you should know that I am yet the non-doer, being unchangeable.)

The Bhakti Marg:

The way of redemption for the common, unlettered men and women lay in the bhakti marg, advocated by the Gita. It meant unconditional surrender to the God, with profound feelings of devotion. The gyana marg was evidently meant only for those that were lettered, an abysmal minority even till 1947. The Gita, dated to be around 150AD-250 AD, came much after the Upanishads–the harbinger of the “gyana marg” needed this ideology to counter the Buddhist way that appealed to the lower orders because of its simplicity and its stress on morality.

It is indeed possible to give a “humanistic” veneer to the teachings of the Gita, as Gandhi attempted to do by interpreting the Gita not as an invocation to war (which is what it is), but as a struggle within oneself. What, however, cannot be denied is that even those who attempt such “humanistic” interpretations, assume the framework of the caste system (chaturvarnya) to be inviolable. Gandhi, too, is no exception in this regard.

References:
1. Myth and Reality, Chapter 1- Social and Economic Aspects of the Gita, by DD Kosambi
2. Marxism and the Bhagwat Gita, SG Sardesai and Dilip Bose
3. Krishna and his Gita, in Revolution and Counter Revolution in India, by Dr. BR Ambedkar
4. Ambedkar and the Gita, by (only 1st page available free online) by Nalini Pandit
5. Bhagwad Gita as it is (online, pdf)
6. The Gita according to Gandhi (online)

During the last twenty years, there has been a parallel discourse on the economic and social developments in India. On one hand, the votaries of economic ‘reform’ do not tire of singing paeans to what they perceive to be an economic miracle that has transformed India into an economic power. This hunky dory narrative has been consistently challenged by numerous counter narratives, in the shape of numerous studies and in a more accessible manner, by journalists, activists and writers who have reported heart wrenching stories from the ground- P. Sainath’s Everyone Loves a Good Drought (1996), Siddhartha Dube’s Words without Freedom (1998), my friend Rahul Banerjee’s ‘A Romantic among the Bhils‘ (2009) readily come to mind.  To this literature Annie Zaidi’s Known Turfis a welcome addition.The book has seven sections, dealing with bandits in Chambal, chai, poverty in Madhya Pradesh and UP, contemporary Punjab, Sufism, the writer’s ruminations on what it means to be a Muslim in contemporary India and ending with the writer’s activism with an urban feminist group and an understanding of what feminism means for her. It is interesting that the the book should begin with fiction- the story of the Chambal dacoits, take the readers from fiction to fact as it were and end with the author’s discovery of her what she calls her turf.

The first section, Bantering with Bandits, is undoubtedly the finest part of the book. The author starts with her perception about Indian bandits- shaped largely by films and family folktales. She goes on to meet some of the survivors of the last generation of the Chambal dacoits and concludes:

There is a difference between Harshad Mehta and Phoolan Devi: both looted and both did so for personal reasons. but when a love of money is rooted in nothing but itself and a lack of respect for the law, it is called greed; when a lack of respect for the law is rooted in a sense of honor and the conviction that society will fail you again and again, and this is combined with money and guns, it is called rebellion.

The stories recounted in the third section are familiar, though anyone who lives amid the visible poverty in South Asia for some time learns to get desensitized to them. Yet, one shares the sense of appalling wonder when the author visits places named Patalgarh and comes across people named Ghamandi, who is the mother of a girl child Priti and according to the records of one anganwadi, gave birth to the same child seven times in a little more than a year! Just as the discovery of what the term ‘primitive tribe’ means and a visit to the weavers of Benares, now living on the verge of hunger brings a sense of sad wonder.

I hadn’t seen fireflies before, not in such glory. nor in such proximity. here, in this village where there was no electricity, where my own step on wet mud sounded loud, I had stepped bang into the center of shimmering web of pin- pointed, wimmy light. Like restless, warm diamonds. Like crystals of live poetry. It was like having the stars laid out at my feet.

Much later, as I thought about their magical web, in the same instant I thought of the old weaver’s tears. Shining deep into the night. Even today, I shut my eyes and memory fills me with quiet.

Zaidi’s discovery of Punjab is also fascinating as she manages to capture a number of facts of the state that are generally not so well known outside the region. There is the tale of Bant Singh, dalit oppression and resistance, the rise of deras, ‘kabootarbaazi’ and the corruption at Punjab State Industrial Development Corporation. Most of these topics have incidentally been covered on this blog, and the last one about PSIDC brought back memories of a study that this blogger had done at Punjab State Financial Corporation for their computerization program in the mid- nineties. It’s a murky state of affairs, to cut a long story short.

The author’s take on religion has a sufiana tinge to it, indeed, Sufism seems to have, for better or worse, replaced marxism as the religion of the educated and restless generation in India. She states:

My personal faith is a selfish one. It is tender and delicate but also, somehow, unbreakable. It is plastic and so solid that I feel it tangibly. my beliefs are marked ‘Kafir because the core of my faith is questioning, or dissent, which is what Kafiri means.

That is pretty much what Marx stated- de omnibus dubitandum, but well, that was in Latin, and in another era.

The last section deals with the state of the girl child that subsequently the 2011 census brought into sharp focus, women activists and ends with the author’s personal experiences as a young woman reporter. It is here that she also sees glimmer of hope- in the actions of Blank Noise and among the women panchayat and block officials invited to a meeting in Dehradun.

The trip (to the meeting in Dehradun) was charged with a sense of change, a sense that everything was not as dire as we’d thought, and that our cynicism might have been exaggerated.

The only quibble I have with the book is that for some strange reason the table of contents is missing. This makes keeping track of the book somewhat difficult as the book meanders through different stories, some of them as short as a page or two. There is also a minor factual error on page 126- Bulle Shah lived in the 18th century, not 15th. I also felt that there is just too much ground to cover, the narrative is pretty rushed at places, leaving little more than a blur in the reader’s memory.
Even some of the stories are familiar, and not just for those those who have followed the author’s blog by the same name as the book.

Yet there is an air of freshness about all these stories. This has to do not only with the literary flourish with which the stories have been recounted, but also the fact that it provides a woman’s perspective on pertinent issues and also tells an honest story about the coming of age of a young woman reporter traveling to what for her till then was an unknown turf. The reader realizes that while some of what appears in the book might be familiar and some of it will never be fully known, it is the process of knowing that matters, and in the hands of a deft writer, it can be an exhilarating journey.

‘In the light of a candle, drinking maté (a local drink) and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man’s shrunken features stuck a mysterious, tragic note. In simple but expressive language, he told us about his three months in prison, his starving wife, and his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his comrades, who had mysteriously disappeared and were said to somewhere at the bottom of the sea’. These copper mines – ‘ spiced with the lives of poor unsung heroes of this battle, who die miserable deaths, when all they want is to earn is their daily bread’

- Che Guevara, describing the life of a working class couple in the copper mines of Chuquicamata. (The Motorcycle Diaries)

At the age of 23, Che undertook a journey on a motorcycle across South America and wrote a journal based on it. The journal was published in a book form titled The Motorcycle Diaries a decade or so back. Satnam’s Jangalnama could well be a sequel to that book, written in the context of the Red India, as the Maoist controlled belt has come to be known.

There are differences, of course. Che was young, fresh out of medical college. He rode a motorcycle and was essentially on an adventure tour during the course of which he got to see the underbelly of South America and about which he wrote so eloquently. This journey was part of his education in becoming a revolutionary soon after.

Satnam, on the other hand, is an unknown writer- there is very little about him in the book except a few self descriptions. We know that at the time of his travel in 2001 he is a forty something, bespectacled Punjabi journalist who took a 2 month tour of the ‘red’ tribal belt in Eastern India in the company of the guerrillas. Che was at an age when young men and women of a certain generation tended to turn communists, Satnam, on the other hand, was at an age when the same young men and women become cynical. Satnam’s undying idealism,however, makes his account outstanding. The very fact that a person would travel all the way from Punjab to the tribal districts of Eastern India, that too, in a Maoist controlled territory is quite remarkable.

Satnam describes how the guerrilla live and operate. He travels with different squads across the Bastar, visiting tribal villages and observing how the guerrillas and the tribals live.

Some of his observations are so straightforward that they would be trite, were they not accompanied by the flights of imagination that makes the same observation so special. Take for example, on the tribals’ use of river water.

One of the things that stuck me as I travelled through the jungle was that the tribals neither abuse their rivers, nor do they worship them. They don’t pollute their rivers because they get their drinking water from them.They use natural toilet paper, that is leaves, or water. They don’t know what sin is, so they don’t need to wash it away in a ritualistic ordeal. They are free of thievery and fraudulence that afflict civilized societies.

A commonplace observation thus takes on a different meaning when put in a broader context and becomes a critique of much that we otherwise take for granted. Similarly, he writes on the use of plastic.

Plastic is a rarity in the jungle, there are no heaps of garbage in the jungle. the guerrillas use it for carrying water for their morning ablutions, or to protect their books and stuff from rain. ‘Garbage’ is the sign of civilized society. An abundance and luxury, followed by muck and filth.

What reminded me of Che’s book, was this description of how how Satnam discovers a heap of ‘something re- coloured’ over which the water flowed clearly.

I didn’t know whether it was magnet or iron ore but iron ore is found throughout Bastar. It is this very iron ore of Bastar on which the Japanese factories and its famous automobile industry thrive. One is infuriated by the role that these iron mines have played in the lives of the tribals. Every day, two goods trains full of iron extracted from the mines of Bailadilla head for the port of Vizag where it is loaded on to ships for Japan. The tribals, legitimate owners of this invaluable resource, have no idea about the many uses of iron and how it has been the base for modern civilization… the hellholes of exploitation and abuse are Japan’s contributions to the industrial development of the country.

There are observations too on how the guerrillas work with the tribals- how they have made medical care their highest priority, after the resistance against plunder and governmental repression. Pisiculture and even simple things that one takes for granted- like the use of vegetables and fruits that are rich in nutritional or medicinal properties, are unknown to the tribal people and educating them on their uses is a challenge for the Maoists.

The campaign for education- literacy as well as political education, too are described as a lived experience and not drab statistics. One of the most hilarious parts of the book is the one where the guerrillas organize a meeting to protest against the US invasion of Afghanistan and speaker after speaker fails in delivering a speech. Most of  the speakers- all young women and men encouraged to speak in public- end up either giggling away or saying ‘Lal salaam’ and quickly exiting the stage. One of the speakers manages to speak longer:

“Adna got up from his place and jauntily walked up to the stage. looking around, he scratched his head and wondered whether anything remained to be said. He put his hands on his waist, looked into Raju’s eyes, and the words came to his lips. Looking into everyone’s heads, he stared into the darkness:

‘America is the world’s number one enemy. Tomorrow all of you will come here with bows and arrows, axes and sickles.We will fight America.’ He uttered these three sentences in a single breath, spat on the ground and swung back as he had come.’

There are snippets, too, of the writer’s conversations with some of the guerrillas- young Gond men and women whose personal stories point to the fact that behind the tribal upsurge there are also as many stories of personal rebellions as there are guerrillas.

The book, a translation from Punjabi to English, makes for an effortless reading. It is written in a simple style, like a journal, and keeps the reader engaged with insightful observations that the writer makes about the life of the Maoist guerrillas and the tribals among whom they work. The descriptions are not exotic or scintillating as they might have been in the pen of a more youthful or excitable writer- indeed as they in Arundhati Roy’s somewhat flamboyant short travelogue, but have the quiet dignity of aging silver. In terms of time, Satnam’s 2001 rendezvous with the Maoists is older than that of Roy’s as well as Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun, Travels in Naxalite Country (2008).

This is not to say that the book is without its flaws- it is marked by repetition, particularly that of a political rhetoric that might reassure the converted but is a bit of a nuisance for others. It is clear that the writer is sympathetic to the Maoist guerrillas as he makes it a point to reiterate it every few pages. Other than that, it is an insightful book on what the Indian Prime Minister considers to be “India’s gravest internal threat”. Reading the book, one realizes that it might be the other way round- and that it is Indian government which is the gravest threat for the tribals of eastern India.

Image Source: Survival International.
Filed under: Book Reviews Tagged: books, India, Jangalnama, Politics, travelogue ]]> http://readerswords.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/jangalnama-travels-in-a-maoist-guerrilla-zone-a-review/feed/ 1 readerswords http://readerswords.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-capitalism-has-and-survives-crisis/ http://readerswords.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-capitalism-has-and-survives-crisis/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 04:55:00 +0000 bhupinder http://readerswords.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-capitalism-has-and-survives-crisis/ ]]> Benjamin Kunkle has a fine review of David Harvey‘s recent book the Enigma of Capital, in which he also broadly reviews related literature by classical Marxist authors, including John Bellamy Foster’s Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on Earth.

LRB · Benjamin Kunkel · How Much Is Too Much?

The trouble is already there to see. Imagine an economy consisting of a single firm which has bought means of production and labour power for a total of $100, in order to produce a mass of commodities it intends to sell for $110, i.e. at a profit of 10 per cent. The problem is that the firm’s suppliers of constant and variable capital are also its only potential customers. Even if the would-be buyers pool their funds, they have only their $100 to spend, and no more. Production of the total supply of commodities exceeds the monetarily effective demand in the system. As Harvey explains in The Limits to Capital, effective demand ‘is at any one point equal to C+V, whereas the value of the total output is C+V+S. Under conditions of equilibrium, this still leaves us with the problem of where the demand for S, the surplus value produced but not yet realised through exchange, comes from.’ An extra $10 in value must be found somewhere, to be exchanged with the firm if it is to realise its desired profit.
…

In the recently published Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, John Bellamy Foster and his Marxist co-authors refer to the identification by a group of scientists, including the leading American climatologist James Hansen, of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that civilisation transgresses at its peril.[4] Already three – concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, loss of nitrogen from the soil and the extinction of other species – have been exceeded. These are impediments to endless capital accumulation that future crisis theories will have to reckon with. Harvey’s intuition of the ultimate demise of capitalism has also taken on an ecological colouring. ‘Compound growth for ever’ – historically, for capitalism at about 3 per cent a year – ‘is not possible,’ he declares in The Enigma of Capital, without much elaboration. The classical economists long ago foresaw that an economy defined by constant expansion would one day give way to what John Stuart Mill called the ‘stationary state’. The idea has gained a new currency in Marxist writing of recent years, and in its contemporary version tends to locate the limits to growth in the depletion of natural resources or in the exhaustion of productivity gains as the share of manufacturing in the world economy shrinks and that of services expands. Of course, peak oil or soil exhaustion might easily coincide with faltering productivity. Harvey doesn’t spell out why growth must have a stop, and the outlines of an ecologically stable and politically democratic future socialism remain as blurry in his later work as they do almost everywhere else. At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive.

Dr Ambedkar in The Buddha and his Dhamma, underlines how, contrary to being pessimistic, Buddhism is a religion of a dynamic middle path. He asks in the Introduction (page 19):

If life is sorrow, death is sorrow and rebirth is sorrow, then there is an end of everything. Neither religion nor philosophy can help a man to achieve happiness in the world. If there is no escape from sorrow, then what can religion do, what can Buddha do to relieve man from such sorrow which is ever there in birth itself? The four Aryan Truths are a great stumbling block in the way of non-Buddhists accepting the gospel of Buddhism. For the four Aryan Truths deny hope to man. The four Aryan Truths make the gospel of the Buddha a gospel of pessimism. Do they form part of the original gospel or are they a later accretion by the monks ?

He addresses this question in the later part of the book (page 428):

9. That birth is sorrowful is an exaggeration by the Buddha can be proved by reference to a sermon of his in which he has preached that birth as a human being is a very precious thing.

10. Again, if the Buddha had merely referred to Dukkha such an accusation could be sustainable.

11. But the Buddha’s second Aryan Truth emphasises that this Dukkha must be removed. In order to emphasise the duty of removal of Dukkha he spoke of the existence of Dukkha.

12. To the removal of Dukkha the Buddha attached great importance. It is because he found that Kapila merely stated that there was Dukkha and said nothing more about it that he felt dissatisfied and left the Ashram of Muni Alara Kalam.

13. How can this Dhamma be called pessimistic. ?

Elsewhere, he asks, if Buddhism does not believe in the soul, how does it explain rebirth? Then he proceeds to provide a somewhat flimsy explanation:

4. There is no contradiction. There can be rebirth even though there is no Soul.
5. There is a mango stone. The stone gives rise to a mango tree. The mango tree produces mangoes.
6. Here is rebirth of a mango.
7. But there is no Soul.
8. So there can be rebirth although there is no Soul.

Ambedkar’s explanation of the concept of rebirth is problematic because it takes recourse to an analogy which is not the best form of reasoning- indeed it contradicts what Ambedkar considers to be the Buddha’s central message- that every phenomenon has a cause.

His explanation of causation that he considers to be central to Buddhist thought, is also the best defense of optimism for mankind. Because it does not accept any supernatural causes of phenomenon, it puts human action- not its withdrawal,
in the foreground, as a means of redemption.

According to Ambedkar (page 216):

9. (The Buddha) maintained that not only every event has a cause but the cause is the result of some human action or natural law.

10. His contention against the doctrine of Time, Nature, Necessity, etc., being the cause of the occurrence of an event, was this.

11. If Time, Nature, Necessity, etc., be the sole cause of the occurrence of an event, then who are we ?

12. Is man merely a puppet in the hands of Time, Nature, Chance, Gods, Fate, Necessity ?

13. What is the use of man’s existence if he is not free ? What is the se of man’s intelligence if he continues to believe in supernatural causes ?

14. If man is free, then every event must be the result of man’s action or of an act of Nature. There cannot be any event which is supernatural in its origin.

15. It may be that man is not able to discover the real cause of the occurrence of an event. But if he has intelligence he is bound one day to discover it.
…
This is called the law of Kamma or Causation. 21.

This doctrine of Kamma and Causation is the most central doctrine in Buddhism. It preaches Rationalism and Buddhism is nothing if not rationalism.

I am in Cairo, walking with an Egyptian man (his face wasn’t revealed to me). We are walking along a bridge that connects two buildings. The two of us discuss Faiz, and suddenly, we see a misty figure in a gray suit. I point out to my friend, ‘See, there goes Faiz”. Both of us look at him, wonder-struck. We keep walking.

I mention to my friend that Naguib Mahfouz also wrote poetry. My friend looks up at dark clouds in the sky and recites a couple of lines, implying that these are by Mahfouz:

The skies wear

A widow’s shroud

The dream returned to my memory today as I watched the surcharged demonstrations on the streets of Cairo. Not even in my dreams, though, could I have imagined the Egyptian people would be out on the streets, trying to rip apart the dark shrouds from the country’s skies. It seems Faiz and Mahfouz are really together on the streets today.

For one, the Nook enables one to read the numerous books available as pdf files, particularly the ones that are out of print or those for which copyrights have expired. Even the ebooks that are available for purchase are cheaper than the printed ones- a random check at Amazon and BN.com shows that the average price tends to be around $10. Using the calibre e-book management software, converting different formats to the ePub standard is a breeze. Given that a number of newspapers are also available for download, one can read the news without the distracting advertisements.

Then there are also ebooks that are available for download from rapidshare and other such file sharing sites- pirated, of course. Having found a number of books that are not too old to be so easily available- all free of cost, makes me wonder if writers too will soon face the same problem as musicians who no longer make any money from their primary products i.e. music albums but instead depend on live shows and such events to keep the cash coming. Making money from books has never been a profitable venture for majority of writers and now threatens to be even more so.

Besides the massive amounts number of books that one can now read with less distraction and much more ease than reading on the desktop or laptop screens, I find that the ereader is even more comfortable to hold as well as easier on the eyes- one can change the font, there is no need to hold the book with two hands, no issues with loose or tight binding.

The prices of ebook readers have fallen over the last couple of years, I got mine for $149, plus taxes, and doubt that these will come down drastically in the near future. There are some caveats too- one still can’t highlight or take notes, though there is a basic bookmarking facility.

Above all, I find reading on the ebook reader less distracting and more natural. All this leaves me with only one worry now- what is to be done with all those paper books that I have piled up and is lying in different places in India and US? The natural way out is to let go them off to libraries, friends and all those who might need them.

Pretty logical solution, but painful all the same.

By far the most important book I read this year was Harish Damodaran’s India’s New Capitalists. In a world where there is less and less of what can be called original, Damodaran’s book builds on quite a novel space. He has studied 100 of the largest Indian companies and mapped their owners to caste groups. The result is a confirmation of what anyone in India knows- that caste is a determining factor in almost all spheres of life.