Kota and suicide

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Critical Writing: Mind, Society, and Behavior.

The writing on the wall

About two hundred and fifty kilometers to the south of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, lies a town that has captured the imagination of the Indian middle class like no other. In 1985, an engineer by the name of Vinod Kumar Bansal, then working at J.K. Synthetics Ltd. set up a small coaching institute by the name of Bansal Classes to train high school students to crack the extremely competitive and highly prestigious Joint Entrance Examination, or JEE, the condicio sine qua non of obtaining admission into undergraduate programmes at the Indian Institutes of Technology.

In less than three decades, more than forty coaching institutes sprung up in the town and made it the de facto coaching hub of the country. Currently, more than one hundred and fifty thousand outstation students reside in Kota for an average duration of 2-3 years with the hope of cracking some of the most difficult examinations on the planet: the JEE, the NEET-UG, and AIPMT. Kota alumni are a considerable fraction of the student body at various premier institutes in the country and the toppers of the aforementioned examinations are almost always students who have spent at least a couple of years in this town.

Kota Factory by TVF

It wouldn’t be a hyperbole to suggest that Kota has an almost mythical status amongst parents and students aspiring to study at top institutes. It is viewed as a panacea that it will change the fortunes of the financially struggling families and provide them with social prestige like no other. It has also managed to carve a niche for itself in popular culture, featuring prominently in blockbuster novels such as Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 and web series’ such as The Viral Fever’s Kota Factory.

Yet behind its ostentatious image lies a dirty, open secret. Apart from being the coaching capital of India, Kota also has the dubious distinction of being the suicide capital of the country. In the year 2014 alone, there were 45 cases recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau; an astronomically high figure when considered in tandem with the rest of the nation.

This essay is an exploration of factors (both sociological and psychological) that play a role in the deteriorating mental health and high suicide rates among students at Kota. Subsequently, it is also an investigation into what drives individuals into making decisions that are abhorrently irrational. This essay is divided into three sections. The first examines the reasoning behind financially struggling parents sending children as young as thirteen to Kota despite its high suicide rates, low success rates, and astronomically high fees. The second delves into the circumstances that drive students to commit suicide. Finally, the third section looks into the phenomena that contribute to synthesizing a mythical image of institutes such as IITs and AIIMs and how coaching institutes use this to continually exploit parents and students, both mentally and financially.

An Extremely Poor Bet

Why Kota Kills, a documentary by The Quint

In a short documentary by The Quint, we see a young boy by the name of Surjeet speaking about his aspirations to crack the AIPMT. His family had to take out a loan to fund his studies and put his mother’s jewelry as collateral. When the reporter asks him what his plan is if he fails to get in, he visibly breaks down; he has no answer.

Ranjan Kumar is a government employee who has enrolled his son at the Allen coaching institute at Kota. His son is only 13. And by the time he completes his studies, Ranjan is expected to spend a sum which is more than ten times his family’s annual income.

It isn’t uncommon in Kota to find students whose families have risked their entire financial wellbeing to place a bet on them that they would make it to a premier medical or engineering institute and turn the fortunes of their families around.

However, the fact remains that despite the hullabaloo created by Kota’s coaching institutes about their success stories and their ability to send ‘even a farmer’s son to an IIT’, the success rate at Kota is less than 1%. In other words, the gamble that these families make are extremely irrational bordering on the obscene. So what psychological factors lead to people making these decisions?

Financial illiteracy by Gerd Gigerenzer

The first has to do with risk illiteracy and the inability of people to differentiate between relative and absolute risk. In a TEDx Talk at Zurich, the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer spoke about an advertisement that stated that taking a third generation birth control pill increased the chances of thrombosis by 100% (in comparison to a second generation pill). In absolute terms, however, the risk had increased from 1 in 7000 to 2 in 7000. Stating the facts in relative terms caused paranoia among women and lead to over 13,000 more abortions in Europe. Concurrently, there was also a huge spike in teenage pregnancies on account of non-usage of these pills.

There are strong parallels that can be drawn between this story and that of Kota’s ability to make students succeed. It is a common adage that Kota increases your chances of getting into the IITs and AIIMS by ten times. While in relative terms, it may be true that Kota students experience higher success rates than the rest of the nation, the fact remains that the absolute success rate is still abysmally low. Risk illiterate parents simply cannot get their heads around this fact, creating a huge gap between expectations and reality.

The second factor has to do with availability bias, a judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by its availability. In other words, people tend to place more weight on events that are readily imaginable or available.

Billboards in Kota

The coaching institutes in Kota do an exceptional job in marketing themselves as the hub of admissions success. The entire town of Kota is draped with billboards and standees displaying the success stories of students who came to this town to make their educational fortune. Parents, however, are not exposed to the majority of students that end up not succeeding. The availability of only success stories leads them to falsely associate a monumental correlation between attending a particular coaching class and succeeding in the entrance exams when, in reality, this correlation is much lower.

In tandem, there is also confirmation bias at play which is, as annotated in psychological literature,  the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis in hand.

Confirmation bias makes parents only pay attention to those students that attended Kota’s coaching institutes and passed out with flying colors. The majority that did not qualify are simply ignored. Also, as seen in multiple documentaries and news reports (such as the ones cited earlier), parents have a tendency to think that their child is ‘different’ and ‘gifted’. A decent result in the significantly easier class 10 examinations leads them to believe that their child is destined for great things.

Fault Attribution Error, Calvin and Hobbes

Concurrently, this is also a reason why parents often don’t seem too worried about the rising suicide rates in Kota. They strongly showcase an example of the fault attribution error, attributing suicides to the weak mental state of the victims rather than the circumstances under which they are forced to function.

Killer Factory

In 2016, 17-year-old Kriti Tripathi received her JEE Main results. She had secured 144 marks out of a possible 360 and had comfortably cleared the cutoff of a 100 marks to be eligible to appear for the JEE Advanced. However, it was still not good enough. And before she could appear for the exam she had been preparing for, for the last couple of years, she chose to end her life by jumping off a five-story building. She left behind a five-page suicide note that captured national attention for the kind of insight it gave into the mental torture faced by an average Kota student.

In her note, Kriti blamed her parents for making her bear gigantic expectations that she realized she could probably never live up to. The previous sections of this essay have established that parents, on account of numerous biases and cognitive errors, tend to place erroneous bets. And it is the children that have to bear the brunt of the expectations. There have been numerous articles and documentaries this decade that have tried to cover the case of Kota suicides. And they have all unanimously arrived at the same conclusion: students are simply not able to live up to the expectations that parents have of them.

This is also a common explanation given by most coaching institutes who are desperately trying to wash their hands off any responsibility. Another reason cited has to do with the students being teenagers and their minds wavering off towards ‘unhealthy’ activities such as watching movies, playing video games and having a romance. Most coaching institutes, including Bansal and Allen, have large posters in their classrooms and hostels warning students of going down the ‘wrong path’ and facing inevitable destruction.

However, the problem is deeper than this and this section of the essay will argue that there are systems in Kota at play that are inherently anxiety-inducing and a catalyst for depression.

A day after Martin Luther King Jr., a pioneer of the American Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated, a third-grade student, intrigued by what he had seen in the news asked his teacher what ‘racial segregation’ meant. The teacher, Jane Elliot, decided to conduct an experiment to show her students just that. She told her students that blue-eyed children were inherently better than brown-eyed ones and starting meting out preferential treatment to them. They were given better lunch, more recess time, made to sit in the front row and were showered with more attention and appreciation. The brown-eyed children, on the other hand, had their privileges reduced to a bare minimum and were castigated for performing the slightest of mistakes.

Jane Elliot

Elliot noticed that the performance of the brown-eyed students dropped drastically whereas the opposite was observed for the blue-eyed. A few days later, Elliot came to class and stated that she was mistaken and that it was actually the brown-eyed children who were superior. Her treatment of the two groups was reversed. She also noticed that this time, the performance of the two groups was the vice versa.

While not among the more problematic lines of race or gender or caste, Kota’s coaching institutes have a strong system of segregation in place. Students are placed in classes from 1 to 8 depending on their performance in the tests. The ones in the first class are given access to significantly better hostels, better faculty, and additional resources to ensure their well-being. The creme de la creme are given flats and liberty to call any faculty 24×7.

On the other hand, the ones at the bottom are mostly ignored and only serve as a cash cow that can be used to fuel the few at the top. And knowing the results of Jane Elliott’s experiment, it is easy to see why students in the bottom half of classes tend to experience significant dips in self-esteem and academic performance.

In an experiment conducted in Great Britain involving consultants from a top tier management consulting firm, the researchers established that the subjects experienced status anxiety when they were made aware of their relative position in the company and promotion of an ‘elite identity’ was encouraged. Kota is guilty of this too. It constantly strives to ascribe a mythical status to students it believes are potential candidates for their next set of billboards.

Although the coaching classes promise a better class if performance improves, the truth of the matter is that mobility is extremely low. In that way, Kota personifies the evils one tends to attach with capitalism and its role in creating income inequality; the best students keep getting better but the worse off ones keep getting worse. This can have drastic effects on students leading them to take drastic steps. In The Quint documentary mentioned earlier, when students were asked reasons for why their peers were committing suicide, they pointed out this system as a major reason.

One of the biggest reforms that coaching institutes are strenuously trying to avoid is to instill a system of cashback. Although these institutes leave no stone unturned in boasting their success stories and success rates, they are extremely careful in not offering a guarantee. In other words, if you as a parent have spent tens of lakhs of rupees on your child and s/he still fails to get in, the money you’ve invested is lost forever. There is no mechanism to recuperate that investment no matter how soon you realize your folly.

A lot of students realize they’re not cut out to be a student at a premier institute. But the parents refuse to let them drop out on account of a sunk cost fallacy. Since they’ve already invested lakhs of rupees on their child, they believe that it is the child’s duty to try harder and in this belief, they end up investing lakhs of rupees more.

But again, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is the children that bear the brunt of this sunk cost. And they see absolutely no way out, except perhaps death. To put it concisely, it is the economically irrational decisions of parents combined with the segregation and elitism practices of the coaching institutes that work in tandem to amplify student depression and suicide.

Marketing Frauds and Geniuses

When Vinod Bansal started out, he had eight students who studied at the dining table of his house. In less than three decades, his practice of coaching students for entrance tests exploded into an industry worth a staggering 1500 crore rupees (or $214 million).

As stated in a prior section, coaching institutes have a tendency to fully ascribe blame on the parents for enrolling them into classes they are incapable of coping with. This section will argue that Kota’s coaching classes are guilty of practices that effectively ensnare and coax unassuming parents and students into making unwise judgments.

The outlier bias which the tendency to overweight the effect of outliers on correlations between two variables. In an experiment, using the difference in estimates for nearly identical scatterplots differentiated only by a single outlier, a  Princeton researcher discovered that participants tended to overweight the effect of outliers on correlations and held a positivity outlier bias in which they were especially influenced by outliers that strengthened the correlation.

The coaching institutes tend to be acutely aware of this. Every year, the top ones tend to indulge in unethical and borderline illegal practices of poaching high performing students from a rival institution by paying them gargantuan sums of money, in order to be able to publish names and pictures in their success stories. Additionally, institutes every year participate in a race to produce an examination’s topper and a greater share of students in the top ten, top fifty and top one hundred ranks.

Probabilistically speaking, the odds of a student getting into an IIT or AIIMS given that he is attended a particular coaching class is not remarkably affected by the number of toppers the institute produces (or poaches). In fact, aspiring to be a topper in these highly competitive examinations, written by millions of students, is often impractical. But this doesn’t stop parents and students from ascribing supernatural correlations between success and attending these coaching institutes in the face of billboards oozing with the best of the best.

In a landmark paper by Joe Henrich and J.F Gill-White, the authors, developing on the Boyd and Richerson theory of Cultural Evolution introduced the term ‘prestige bias’; a phenomenon due to which individuals were more likely to imitate cultural models that they perceive as having more prestige.

India, a country with the largest youth population on the planet, has a severe shortage of quality higher institutions. There simply aren’t enough seats in colleges to cater to the nation’s bright minds. What this results in is obscene, deathly competition, quite literally. And in the face of such competition, it becomes easy to overestimate the value of the prize. Scarcity does not equate quality.

Kota’s coaching institutes have played a significant role in exploiting this and mythologizing the state of the IITs. I am a student of an IIT myself and my Kota peers always pointed out how disappointed they were with what an IIT actually was. They were promised dreamlike institutions with world-class facilities, incredible professors, obscenely high paying jobs upon graduation (and copious amounts of feminine attention). The reality is much tamer.

IIT Roorkee

The contribution of an IIT to the success of its students is relatively minimal when compared to institutions worldwide. This statement is substantiated with the abysmal rankings IITs tend to receive in critical areas such as research, faculty, and citations. It can be argued that in a nation of a billion people, the top 0.001% that crack the JEE are so mentally sound that they would succeed no matter which institution they attended.

In other words, there is an exclusivity bias at work. If there is a group that introduces an artificial barrier of entry and only admits certain ‘desirable’ people while making little to no contribution to enhance their desirability; with time, the outgroup will tend to causate the desirable qualities of the in-group with the fact that they are part of the group, which in turn increases the desirability of being in the in-group. The IITs benefit immensely from this. It is home to some of the most successful people on the planet despite playing an arguably and relatively minimal role in shaping them.

An increase in the desirability of the IITs directly leads to an increase in demand for coaching institutes and opens an even larger Pandora’s box. The situation at Kota is grim. Yet the coaching institutes are experiencing a period of ever-increasing growth. There is a ‘second Kota’ that has taken birth in the city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and is in a position to overtake the former in terms of revenue. Reforms and regulations in this sector are an urgent need of the hour.

At the legislative level, there should be laws that criminalize rampant false marketing, segregation, and poaching practices that most institutes tend to involve themselves in. The government should also seriously consider making authorization mandatory for coaching institutes and ensuring they follow similar guidelines as schools do.

Coaching institutes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And they have a moral responsibility to ensure the mental well being of their students. These institutes must invest more in mental health and abolish practices that take a mental toll on the students. They should also consider introducing mechanisms that help financially challenged parents to recuperate their poor investments.

Finally, there need to be reforms at a behavioral level. Parents need to be told about the objective possibility of their children attending a top institute. There must also be a sensitization towards other fields of study not considered ‘prestigious’, such as commerce and the humanities. There is an urgent need for society to shift focus from things that make a child successful to things that make a child happy and content. The solutions are numerous and the time very little. As I write this essay, there are thousands of students in a small town in Rajasthan trapped in a mental cage with no escape. A significant number of them are contemplating suicide. A few will even go through with it. It is high time we saved them.

Bibliography

1. Mishra, S. (2009, October 21). How Kota became coaching factory for cracking IIT. Retrieved from https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/how-kota-became-coaching-factory-for-cracking-iit-58936-2009-10-21
2. Johri, D. (2015, November 26). Kota coaching factory – Panic calls: 14-hr days, morning nightmares. Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kota-coaching-factory-panic-calls-14-hr-days-morning-nightmares/
3. PTI (2017, January 20). Medical aspirant hangs self in Kota, no suicide note recovered. Retrieved from https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/medical-aspirant-hangs-self-in-kota-no-suicide-note-recovered/515881/
4. Why Kota Kills [Television broadcast]. (2016, May 4). The Quint. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeS98YYtWY
5. Gigerenzer, G. (2013,  December). Risk literacy: Gerd Gigerenzer at TEDxZurich [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4op2WNc1e4
6. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (n.d.). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Judgment under Uncertainty, 163-178. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511809477.012
7. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
8. Poonam, S. (2017, April 25). Why 57 Young Students Have Taken Their Lives In Kota. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/06/01/life-and-death-in-kota_n_10232456.html
9. Stewart, T. L., Laduke, J. R., Bracht, C., Sweet, B. A. and Gamarel, K. E. (2003), Do the “Eyes” Have It? A Program Evaluation of Jane Elliott’s “Blue‐Eyes/Brown‐Eyes” Diversity Training Exercise. Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
10. Gill, M. J. (2015). Elite identity and status anxiety: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of management consultants. Organization, 22(3), 306–325.
11. Bellman, Eric (30 September 2008). “India’s Cram-School Confidential: Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
12. Rogers, M. (2015). DataSpace: The Outlier Bias: A Disproportionate Influence of Outliers in the Perception of Correlations. Retrieved from http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp012v23vw74w

 

Does social categorization inevitably lead to social hierarchy?

Although social categorization leads to social hierarchy and has been witnessed multiple times in history, this result is not always inevitable. Since the prompt states that social categorization is a sufficient condition for hierarchy, this premise breaks down on providing social psychology principles and related counter-examples which suggest the contrary.

According to the stereotype content model, stereotypes can be arranged along the warmth-competence dimension. Groups with high competence and high warmth experience an emotional prejudice of admiration whereas groups with high competence and low warmth experience envy. Research from the field of Social Comparison theory also shows that there is an innate desire for social groups to achieve a superior relative position which in turn leads to competitiveness. Additionally, this comparison can corrupt the comparer, envy and humiliate a certain social group and make them feel ashamed of their own inadequacy.

Thirty Years War

This essay will now apply these principles to instances in history to come up with the first argument in opposition to this prompt. Throughout the Middle Ages to the present-day, Europe has been inhabited by groups that differ in culture, language, ethnicity, prosperity, religion and scientific advancement. However, most of these groups tended to have similar levels of competence but differing levels of warmth. Whenever this took place and there was the genesis of a social hierarchy, the group associated with envy tended to engage in conflict with the ones associated with admiration and separate. This has been observed in several cases, such as the Thirty Years War, which was essentially a war between Catholics and Protestants and led to the formation of new countries such as the Dutch Republic.

The Spanish Armada

Therefore, these ‘groups’ eventually formed smaller nations that were constantly at war with one another on account of trying to establish a superior relative position. However, even today, it is not possible to objectively declare one European Nation to be superior to another. It is not possible to produce an ordered list of nations which are superior in all regards. The Spanish Armada was the most powerful fleet in the 16th and 17th century. The British Empire was so huge that the sun never set on it. Nazi Germany arguably had the most powerful army in the world which they built in a staggeringly small amount of time. All these groups rose and fell before a clear hierarchy between these competing nations could be established. The Nazis had claimed such superiority in the decades between 1930 and 1940. However, their ideology was met with severe resistance and ultimately, they suffered defeat in war and their vision.

In other words, continuous conflict ensured that groups with similar competence couldn’t be placed into one uniform hierarchy. The struggle to achieve a superior relative position was continuous but since the groups were more-or-less evenly matched, a definitive result could not be reached. This prevented humiliation, envy, and discrimination of any one social group (which, it can be argued, would have most definitely happened if Europe was a single nation).

The second example concerns the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. The Muslims were a minority in India and they feared that when the nation got independent and started operating under a democracy, their interests wouldn’t be protected as much as those of the Hindus. In other words, they would be characterized by envy and the Hindus by admiration.

They feared the categorization of the continent based on religion would ultimately lead to social hierarchy with the Hindus, on account of being the majority, enjoying a superior position and using this to humiliate and subjugate the Muslims. However, the Muslims, with the aid of the Muslim League, was in a powerful enough position to demand separation from the British. Since they had the political clout to carve out an entire nation for themselves, the majority of Muslims in the subcontinent were able to avoid the perceived hierarchy they thought they would have to live in. This event is completely justified if the principles stated above are assumed to be true.

Therefore, we can conclude that social hierarchy arises from social categorization only when one group is (politically and economically) more powerful than the other. In cases where two groups wield comparative amounts of power, it leads to separation and sometimes, conflict. In other words, if there is a group that tries to establish and declare itself as superior to others, it only leads to hierarchy if the other groups are not powerful enough to engage (and possibly defeat) the former group in conflict or if it is not feasible for the group declared inferior to separate. Separation and/or conflict were possible in both the examples above and the social groups chose these over a uniform social hierarchy where one group would face the brunt of discrimination and prejudice.

Additionally, the prompt’s premise fails in the social and political environment of today. Our civilizations have advanced to the point where we are self-aware of our prejudices and discrimination capabilities. Therefore, most countries (especially the ones with democratic governments) have laws that prevent a hierarchy from forming and introduce corrective measures to uplift those that they think are disadvantaged.

Apartheid

In India, there is a reservation policy in place that ensures the most downtrodden of communities have representation in politics and government jobs in proportion to their population. South Africa, fresh from its independence of the Afrikaans, have a strong constitution that eliminates any possibility of apartheid or other race-based discrimination. Software companies in Silicon Valley have special events, competitions and hiring sprees for women in order to correct the gender gap in the technology industry. In all these cases, it is legally not possible to have a hierarchy. It is no longer possible to claim that a Brahmin is superior to a Shudra. Or that Whites are superior to blacks. While prejudices still do exist, the scope of acting on them is significantly lower than what was possible just a century ago.

Added to this is the fact that such cognitive interventions can address the psychologically destructive consequences of negative social identities. Additionally, there is research that suggests that exposure to diversity can increase pro-sociality or helpful behavior among people belonging to different social classes and can decreases instances of discrimination. Increasing interactions between out-groups can also transform civic cultures with one social group adopting ‘desirable’ characteristics and practices of another.

With laws that protect the marginalized groups and provide affirmative action policies to uplift their socio-economic status, these groups are in a much better position to yield higher political and economic power and in turn, have a greater sense of self-worth. They become more competent and the laws ensure that legally, there is a comparable level of ‘warmth’. Also, since they attend the same institutions and work in the same jobs as people of ‘higher’ social groups, exposure to diversity reduces the tendency to discriminate and form hierarchies. It also leads to both groups exchanging practices and traits, thus ensuring more homogenization and a shared identity characterized by tolerance and acceptance.

Finally, let us continue to consider this argument through social networks but this time, from a nationalistic perspective. While it is possible to rank countries based on their economy, GDP per capita and military might, it can be argued that it is still not possible to establish a clear hierarchy based on this. It might be true that the Americans are the most powerful people on the planet but there is little they can do to act on it and more importantly, own up to it. The concept of a hierarchy is pointless if the supposed superior group cannot act upon it and inflict damage on the supposed inferior groups.

Increasing the density of social relations can also improve the civic culture or “social capital” of a community. Today, even the smallest of nations are part of military alliances and pacts and an attack on them would automatically lead to a declaration of war by its larger, more powerful allies. Organizations such as the WTO ensure that larger countries do not bully the smaller ones when it comes to trade. The United Nations was founded on the idea that large, powerful nations cannot become aggressors without being met with opposition from the rest of the world. These agreements prevent hierarchies from forming or at least, render them impotent to a point where it does not inflict as much damage anymore. Prosocial behavior also indicates that the formation of these groups tends to make the members hold its leaders to a higher standard of caring, which in turn increases the potency of such groups.

As the stated principles demonstrate clearly, it is human nature form groups which may engage in competition with other groups and try to dominate them. However, if the competing groups wield a similar amount of power, it leads to separation instead of hierarchy. Additionally, we have learned to overcome our biological instincts and the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude to establish laws and rules that protect those groups which may be considered at risk. Finally, there are also alliances and agreements with powerful groups that give smaller groups protection and save them from the wrath of their immediate, powerful enemy.

Bibliography

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7. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Gender and Indianness

This essay is an attempt to illustrate the gendered notion of Indianness with reference to certain Hindi films. This essay will explore the portrayal of women in cinema from the early 1930s to the 1950s and analyze the changes that took place post-Independence. It will analyze one of the most globally recognized Indian films of all time, Mother India, and its notions of what it means to be an Indian man and woman. Finally, it will look at a couple of contemporary films and analyze gendered Indianness through its lenses.

Prior to independence, movies portraying female sexuality and autonomy were common. In Aadmi, a dancing girl kills her evil uncle and prefers to stay in prison than accept her beloved’s help. In Duniya Na Maane, the female lead refuses to consummate her marriage with a much older man. And in Hunterwali and Miss Frontier Mail, we see perhaps the only ‘action woman’, Fearless Nadia, gracing the silver screen. Therefore, prior to independence, there wasn’t an extremely robust gendered framework of what it meant to be Indian. It can even be argued that the ‘Indian’ at that time was one who overcame stereotypes and societal expectations to commit heroic acts for the greater good, regardless of gender.

This changed significantly post-Independence. The set up of Raj Kapoor’s RK Films and Dev Anand’s Navketan Films diverted cinematic themes towards male-centric ones. Progressive, idealistic women were increasingly being replaced by the traditional and submissive. India was going through an extremely difficult period post-Independence trying to carve an identity out of itself after centuries of colonialism. And in its quest to discover what Indianness truly meant, it resorted to gendered ideas of what an ideal Indian man and Indian women represented. The Indian woman was chaste, pure and fiercely protective of her family. She placed her husband and her children’s wellbeing above that of her own. The Indian man, in contrast, was in the process of trying to shed its effeminate characterization and take on more masculine, stoic and violent traits.

Mehboob Khan’s film, Mother India is a significant milestone not only in Bollywood cinema but post-Independence Indian history as well. The film, a namesake of Katherine Mayo’s racist account of Indian unfitness to self-govern and a propagandistic portrayal of India’s sexuality, misogyny, culture, and poverty, took on a monumental challenge of redefining what it meant to be Indian. The lead protagonist, Radha, is supposed to be the embodiment of the Indian nation itself. She is also supposed to be the epitome of what an Indian woman should be. Radha continues to provide for her children even when her husband abandons her. She preserves her chastity by refusing to sleep with the moneylender; even if that meant alleviation of all her financial troubles. Finally, she shoots her own son for the greater good. We, therefore, see the genesis of the ideas of chastity, sacrifice and family being associated with the woman.

Mother India also makes allusions to what it means to be an Indian man. While the Indian woman nurtures the family, the Indian man must always be in a position to provide for it. When Radha’s husband handicaps himself, he loses his identity of what it means to be a man. Overcome by the guilt of not being able to support his family financially, he chooses to abandon them and commit societal suicide.

The documentary film Father, Son and Holy War showed the extremely problematic rise of toxic masculinity in India. The documentary claimed that the Hindu man was on a quest to shed its British Raj stereotype of effeminacy and look to militant mythological figures such as Ram and Shiva. Therefore, one of the prime drivers of the Indianness for a man was to preserve his mardangi. This meant keeping the wife in check, waging war against those that threatened their way of life, resorting to banned practices (such as sati) to re-establish male dominance and using misogynistic, effeminate language to describe those that they perceived as ‘the enemy’. For the Indian man, there couldn’t be a bigger shame than being referred to as a eunuch.

In tandem, the woman became the property of her husband. She was expected to be the embodiment of Indian tradition and culture, a personification of the goddesses Sita and Parvati. Her loss of chastity essentially meant the loss of her dignity and life. An unchaste woman was as good as dead. Therefore, what started off as an exercise to rebrand India became dangerously misogynistic, threatening the lives of millions of women nationwide.

The bleakness of the patriarchal notion of Indianness is perhaps best portrayed in the movie Fire. One of the central themes of Fire is sexuality. The film portrays two deeply troubled marriages. The husbands, however, satiate their sexual desires through prostitutes and masturbating to pornography. The wives, in stark contrast, are expected to repress their sexuality if their husbands are not able to satiate it. In their sheer desperation, the women resort to each other to feel tenderness and affection. Their act is considered sacrilegious and an affront to female chastity and purity. The film, therefore, is a comment on the expectations of sexuality. The Indian man is allowed to explore it in any way possible. The woman, on the other hand, can do so only in association with the husband.

Films are perhaps the most potent tools to analyze the expectations and beliefs of its producers and audience. Since the inception of cinema, films have resorted to challenge or affirm the severely gendered notions of Indianness. However, one fact is supported by all; it is that what it means to be Indian starkly differs for a man and a woman. The woman is chaste, pure, repressed, traditional and sacrificial. The man is the provider; violent in his wars and stoic in his pain.

Bibliography

1. Somaaya, B., Kothari, J., & Madangarli, S. (2012). Mother maiden mistress: Women in Hindi cinema, 1950-2010. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, a joint venture with the India Today Group.
2. Thomas, R. (1989). Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of mother India. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11(3), 11-30. doi:10.1080/10509208909361312
3. Fire, Sparks and Smouldering Ashes | Bina Fernandez … (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/4083247/Fire_Sparks_and_Smouldering_Ashes
4. Lutgendorf, P. (2007). Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking? International Journal of Hindu Studies, 10(3), 227-256. doi:10.1007/s11407-007-9031-y

Filmography

1. Khan, M. (1957). Mother India. Mumbai.
2. Patwardhan, A. (1995). Father, Son, and Holy War. Mumbai
3. Mehta, D. (1998). Fire. Mumbai

Kafka and Totalitarianism

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Totalitarian Century.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

“Someone must have falsely denounced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.”: The Trial, Franz Kafka

The opening lines of Franz Kafka’s The Trial is one of the most chilling and memorable of all time. A well-established chief banker, Josef K. is suddenly arrested one day by unidentified agents from an unidentified organization for committing an unidentified crime. What follows is a host of absurdities: the guilt of the protagonist is assumed, he is allowed to roam free despite being ‘under arrest’, trial processes take place in shady attics and the convicted (and the reader) has absolutely no idea of the crime he has committed throughout the entire novel.

As with his other works such as The Castle and Metamorphosis, Kafka’s magnum opus has been subject to a variety of interpretations ranging from psychoanalytical to religious to political. Kafka was a German Jew and there is evidence that suggests that he was deeply influenced by the Anti-Semitic Trials that took place in Hungary, France, and Czechoslovakia in the late 19th century. This, combined with the tensions and rise of totalitarian states in Europe prompted Kafka to write his novel just before the outbreak of the First World War.

In the novel, Kafka states quite clearly that Josef K. lives in a society with a legal constitution, universal peace and enforceable law. Nevertheless, he gets arrested for a crime he doesn’t know he committed and is given little to no legal assistance or context by the state. He also goes through a thoroughly unfair trial and is brutally executed in the end screaming “Like a dog!”. Franz Kafka died in 1924 and little did he know that his absurdist novel would become reality in his country barely a decade after his death.

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power, they promised to resurrect Germany from its defeat in the First World War and establish a Reich that would last a thousand years. The Nazis were also morbidly obsessed with eugenics and believed that their race, the Aryans, was the master human race. Other lower races, especially the Jews, had to be eliminated to ‘purify’ the human race and make them pay for the crimes they had committed against the state, which was directly responsible for the defeat of Germany in the First World War.

Displaced people in Germany during World War 2

By the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Josef K.’s were met by Nazi agents at their doors and were arrested despite not having done anything wrong. Their assets were seized and they were sent to concentration camps without any trial where they faced torture and almost certain death. In other words, they died ‘like a dog’. Der Prozess had become an undeniable reality.

The Nazi Holocaust, although an extreme event, is unfortunately not an exception. Millions of Josef K.’s have died since 1945 in the USSR, Rwanda, and Armenia. All these countries had a constitution and a notion of justice in place. The Trial was most definitely Kafka’s warning about totalitarian regimes. It is fitting that he chose not to disclose the surname of the protagonist. It was his way of saying that this man could be anyone: a Jew in Nazi Germany, a Rohingya Muslim in present-day Myanmar or a Viet in Cambodia in 1975.

So far, this essay has created analogies between The Trial and historical events with the assumption that the protagonist of the story hadn’t done anything which could be considered a crime. The remainder of this essay will have a slightly different take: What if the protagonist had indeed committed ‘a crime’ and simply didn’t know he did?

By now, history has an extremely rich archive of the totalitarian states that have existed (or exist) around the world. Most of these states have very similar characteristics: fervent nationalism, a powerful tyrant dictator, rampant jingoism and tendency to commit genocide of minority and disadvantaged groups.

However, there is a new kind of totalitarian state brewing. Its primary weapon is not massive armies or concentration camps but data; extensive information that it collects about its citizens from every imaginable aspect of their lives. It is unlikely that Kafka had the clairvoyance to predict data-driven totalitarian states in the 21st century but nevertheless, his book manages to serve as a chilling warning to this nouveau totalitarianism too.

Nosedive, Black Mirror

In 2016, the Netflix series Black Mirror released an episode titled Nosedive. True to its theme, it features a dystopian world where people were required to rate other people based on the quality of interactions they had with them. Based on the ratings other people gave you, you would be assigned a social credit score. This score was as important as money as it determined the kind of public places you could visit, homes you could rent and neighborhoods you could live in.

On the outset, this episode may seem like science fiction but a state like this is actually taking shape in the People’s Republic of China. China announced that it was experimenting with a social credit system that could determine the kind of loans you could avail and jobs you could take. Traditionally private information such as shopping history and friendships of an individual could now be made public.  The Chinese Government claimed that it was to build a system of trust but the underlying repercussions of this system are immense. This system is the first step towards total surveillance. The effects have already begun to seep through. For instance, a number of students in China were barred from admissions in schools and colleges on account of their parents’ low credit scores. The parents were apparently on a ‘national blacklist’. Josef K. had once again faced consequences without having done anything wrong and without knowing the nature of his crime.

Another interesting facet of Josef K.’s trial was his freedom of mobility. Despite being under arrest, he is allowed to roam freely and conduct his business as usual. This is because the unidentified authority that has charged him has means and tools at its disposal that allows it to identify the location of Josef K. at any given time. Many countries in the west have tools that enable them to track people’s locations and they have misused severely by authorities. For instance, authorities at a local police department in the US were found guilty of using traffic light tapes to identify cars parked outside of gay bars and blackmail the owners into revealing their sexuality to their family. China is also undertaking a project of supplying its police force with AR spectacles that would automatically identify a person. Therefore, the surveillance aspect of The Trial is not science fiction anymore; it is slowly becoming a disturbing reality.

Throughout the novel, we do not have any idea of the nature of crimes that Josef K. has committed. And neither does Josef K. himself. But can this be possible? To answer this question, this essay will devise a thought experiment that borrows elements from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. In 1984, there is a separate class of crime called ‘Thoughtcrime’ which is the crime of having thoughts considered ‘illegal’. The Big Brother in the novel takes elaborate steps to ensure no one is committing this crime but recent development in technology might make this process much easier.

Neuroscientists and major Software Giants (including Facebook) are developing a technology that can directly convert thoughts to speech or text. Considering the fact that this technology will be embedded into wearable devices, this has the potential to give the provider unlimited access to our thoughts. The question, therefore, begs to be asked. What if totalitarian governments used this technology to read the thoughts of its citizens and incarcerate those that harbored thoughts that were considered dangerous? Then, we would finally have the answer to The Trial’s most burning question. Josef K. of the 21st century had harbored a thought that made it eligible to be considered as Thoughtcrime. Unbeknownst to him, this thought was recorded on his wearable device and transmitted to the Government. The Government then arrested Josef K. without giving him any explanations regarding the circumstances.

Dystopian novels have been revered as being important hallmarks of literature but we often ignore the salient warnings they give out. The Trial is no exception. Despite its ‘validation’ from history, readers will still find the piece to be absurd. But the warnings that it gives out must be taken seriously. It may not be very long before we too have agents outside our door waiting to arrest us, deny us a fair trial and execute us like dogs.

Bibliography

1. Mitchell, M., & Kafka, F. (2009). The Trial (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford University Press.
2. Translating Kafka. (n.d.). Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka. doi:10.5040/9781472543653.ch-001
3. Löwy, Michael (2009) “Franz Kafka’s Trial and the Anti-Semitic Trials of His Time,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 7 : Iss. 2 , Article 13.
4. Taylor, A. (2015, April 24). It wasn’t just the Armenians: The other 20th century massacres we ignore. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/24/it-wasnt-just-the-armenians-the-other-20th-century-massacres-we-ignore/?utm_term=.db4f1f125afa
5. Zaretsky, R. (2014, April 28). 100 Years Later, Revisiting Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and World War I. Retrieved from https://forward.com/culture/196986/100-years-later-revisiting-franz-kafkas-the-trial/
6. Reisener, M. (2018, February 24). Does Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ Have Lessons for Today? Retrieved from https://nationalinterest.org/feature/does-kafkas-the-trial-have-lessons-today-24632
7. Song, B. (2018, November 29). The West may be wrong about China’s social credit system. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/11/29/social-credit/?utm_term=.66377863d9a4
8. Death by data: How Kafka’s The Trial prefigured the nightmare of the modern surveillance state. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/death-data-how-kafkas-trial-prefigured-nightmare-modern-surveillance-state
9. Marr, B. (2019, January 21). Chinese Social Credit Score: Utopian Big Data Bliss Or Black Mirror On Steroids? Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-social-credit-score-utopian-big-data-bliss-or-black-mirror-on-steroids/#40b32d1748b8
10. Brooker, C. (Writer). (n.d.). Nosedive [Black Mirror]. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/watch/80104627
11. Kobie, N. (2019, January 24). The complicated truth about China’s social credit system. Retrieved from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained
12. Guenther FH, Brumberg JS, Wright EJ, Nieto-Castanon A, Tourville JA, et al. (2009) A Wireless Brain-Machine Interface for Real-Time Speech Synthesis. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8218. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008218
13. Church, M. (1956). Time and Reality in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. Twentieth Century Literature, 2(2), 62-69. doi:10.2307/440948
14. Liao, S. (2018, March 12). Chinese police are expanding facial recognition sunglasses program. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/12/17110636/china-police-facial-recognition-sunglasses-surveillance
15. Orwell, G. (2014). 1984. New York, NY: Spark Publishing.

On Fear

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Arts of Communication.

 

Picture courtesy New York Times

 

At fourteen, I was giving a speech in front of some of the country’s finest debaters. There was also a girl in the room who I had taken a fancy to. My team was pro guns and let’s just say our arguments were as weak as gun control in America.

A minute into my speech, my opponents raised an objection that this debate was about real guns and not stun guns about which I had been speaking until then.

I didn’t know what to say. I was expected to speak for eight minutes, I could only do one. It was the most humiliating moment of my life. Additionally,  I knew that women really weren’t fans of climaxing prematurely. So on that front too, I was devastated.

After this debacle, I felt that no one would take me seriously. I felt like I had nothing more to lose. On stage, I started speaking what I had in mind, sans any fear. That year, I emerged as one of the best speakers in Chennai and was called to a training camp to represent India. I didn’t get the girl though.

In college, I had the opportunity to perform in front of the most estrogen starved place on the planet. I was holding hands with my co-actress in the first scene and she had that dreamy look in her eyes. The audience went wild hooting. And then she said. Papa…

Embarrassing. Inappropriate. As an actor, I got used to this. And when I subjected myself to these emotions, I didn’t feel the fear of experiencing them anymore.

At twenty, my girlfriend told me that I was the love of her life, that we’d be together forever, that our love would transcend time and continue to live even when we ceased to exist. Two months later, she dumped me.

I was devastated. Getting over her was one of the hardest things I had to do as I had never been so emotionally intimate with anyone before.

I thought I had hit jackpot with her. And now, she had bruised my ego. How dare she? I would keep trying to get back together with her but to no avail. And then, I decided to stop. It was excruciatingly painful. Even after the breakup, she was my support system. And now I was alone. Naked. Vulnerable.

But it was only after I had exposed myself to this vulnerability and had acknowledged the true nature of my helplessness that I began to heal. It was hard but it was done.

Embarrassment. Rejection. Loss.

These are things that evoke powerful emotions in us. But it is the fear associated with them that affects us more than the feeling themselves.

I believe it is important that you expose yourself to these emotions and feel it’s complete breadth.

The only way you can truly overcome fear is by succumbing to it. Gibran had said that the mightiest characters are seared with scars. It is important that you scar yourself. That you frighten yourself so much that you feel fear no more.

When you succumb to fear, you become naked. Your facade is destroyed. And it gives birth to a new person sans any apprehensions. Yes, a person without apprehensions is a fool. But let me tell you this.

Only when you are fool will you find someone who’ll love you unconditionally.
Only when you are fool will that company you’re applying to recognize your genius.

And only when you are a fool will you walk up on stage, narrate the most embarrassing moments of your life and trust that the audience will have it in their heart to love you despite the extraordinarily stupid things you’ve done.

Employing Behavioral Economics to tackle Air Pollution

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as part of the Critical Writing course on Mind, Society and Behavior.

In the World Development Report 2015- Mind, Society and Behavior published by the World Bank Group, the team of authors led by Karla Hoff and Varun Gauri try to establish the incredible need of governments and policymakers to be aware of human irrationality and using this understanding to develop better policies. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Thinking Automatically’, the report states that there are two principal systems of thinking: automatic and deliberative. Next, supported by evidence from various studies, they try to show how the automatic system is responsible for making the bulk of our decisions despite being extremely error prone and biased. Finally, the chapter seeks to explain the various predictable cognitive biases that our automatic systems are prone to and how to use these biases to frame and design better choice architectures that could nudge people towards making better decisions.

The chapter begins by noting the seminal works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which led to the foundation of the field of Behavioral Economics and the understanding that humans don’t always evaluate all information and choices equally before making their decisions; a central assumption of the Standard Economic Theory. Although such a deliberative system does exist, it is extremely slow and resources hungry. Therefore, humans prefer employing a faster, although the error-prone, automatic system of thinking that generates simpler models using limited information and leads to faster decision making.

The chapter then goes to explain various biases in assessing information that arises on account of using the faster, automatic system. The first is framing, where individuals tend to give more weight to information that is of little or no relevance. Governments are aware of this particular kind of irrationality and there are examples that exist that show them actively trying to counter it (For example, the ban on leading questions in a court of law). It is indeed possible to use framing to counter climate change behavior among individuals. Running advertisements and posting billboards detailing graphic damages caused to individuals will go a long way in sensitizing people about the magnitude of the problem.

The second effect is that of anchoring where the automatic system tends to cling on to a piece of irrelevant information in order to interpret a choice context; sometimes extremely erroneously. Examples of this include the tendency of people to bargain to reduce the price of an auto ride by 10 rupees but forego similar bargaining activity of even the order of, say a thousand rupees, when buying a car worth more than a lakh.

The anchoring bias also sheds light on something called the ‘peanuts effect’ wherein people tend to ignore the consequences of small monetary transactions as they are viewed as being worth ‘peanuts’ or effectively nothing. However, when added up, these ‘peanuts’ become of immense value and could lead to non-trivial benefits if they were not ignored in the first place. This particular effect is of great significance to climate change policies as well. When individuals pollute the environment, they rationalize their actions by telling themselves that their small act is ‘peanuts’ or of little significance to the magnitude of the total pollution in the environment. Therefore, it is important that people be made aware of the total mess they create, on average, in a year as a result of ignoring these small but numerous acts.

The next section of the chapter focused on biases that arose on account of assessing value. The two primary effects described were the potency of default options and the phenomenon of loss aversion. In the former, people are extremely prone to taking the default option presented by their choice architecture. A study in the United States found that the number of colleges that high school students applied to increased from three to four when the number of free test score reports increased by the same value. Such a minute change, the report demonstrated, had extremely far-reaching consequences.

In the context of air pollution, this effect has potentially far-reaching consequences. The objective of a policy must be to present default options that are environmentally friendly and introduce greater inertia in switching. For instance, making public transportation cheaper, comfortable and more readily available will lead people to make it their default, more convenient choice over personal transportation. Similarly, introducing a ‘firecracker permit’ for consumers will severely deter them from applying for such a permit and in the process, buying firecrackers too.

The phenomenon of loss aversion is rooted in the idea that people are more averse to losses than they are to gains of similar magnitude. This effect has been observed and studied in various circumstances such as improving the performance of school teachers and their classrooms. Although the proponents of nudge strongly believe that their methods are ethical and do not interfere with free will, loss aversion policies prove to be an exception. Loss aversion tends to be principally rooted in fear and manipulating people’s fears to achieve results, no matter how beneficial they are,  is an inherently unethical thing to do. That being said, policies rooted in this bias may prove to be immensely effective. During festivals such as Diwali, the lower income groups tend to burst a disproportionately larger number of firecrackers. It is, therefore, possible to introduce a policy where the Government provides a ‘gift’ to everyone in the lower income group but with the condition that they stand to lose their claim if they burst firecrackers or obtain a permit as explained earlier.

The final sections of the chapter explain the intention-action divide wherein individuals, despite being in possession of complete information and knowledge of the right action, tend to act in a manner that is counter-intuitive. Various policies such as SMS Reminders and Cash Awards in a variety of fields have proven to be effective in bridging the intention-action gap. In the context of air pollution in Delhi, it would be extremely useful to apply the aforementioned principles in deterring farmers from burning their crops just after harvest.

People tend to think automatically and in the process, employ biases and make suboptimal decisions. This review carefully analyzed the various biases and their natures and how they can be used to effectively combat the pollution in a high-risk city such as New Delhi. The Government must make it a point to dispel the peanuts effect and educate how small actions lead to extremely large consequences. It could also introduce banners and ads that explicitly describe what air pollution can do to their health. Its policies regarding environmentally harmful products must always be attached to providing better options to the point where it becomes the default and introducing inertia and artificial supply shortages to environmentally problematic ones. It could also look into policies that offer conditional rewards and exploit the effect of loss aversion. Finally, it can take steps to bridge the gap between intention and action by notifying perpetrators (such as crop burners) of their harmful activities on time.

What do I know?

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as part of the Critical Writing course on Mind, Society and Behavior.

I believe the summer of 2016 was one of the most significant phases of my life. I had slipped into a period of depression and my personal and academic life was suffering immensely as a consequence. At my lowest point, I had turned to literature. It seemed to me to be my last respite; my messiah. And it did not disappoint. In a span of three months, I had read close to 75 books. There were days where I was completing 500 pages in a single sitting. I do not know if there is an upper threshold at which reading could be considered unhealthy but if there is, I am pretty sure I had far surpassed that limit.

I can say with absolute confidence that I learned more about myself and the world around me in those three months than the time encompassing the rest of my existence. Therefore, what I reflect upon in this essay will draw heavily from my readings (of philosophy, fiction, science, and religion) from the summer of 2016;.

As I sat pondering upon what knowledge is, I was immediately reminded of a powerful anecdote from The Little Prince, an extremely influential  French novella penned by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

The book contained an image (perhaps one of the most famous in world literature) and asked the reader to ponder upon what it was. At first glance, many readers would agree that the image was that of a hat. However, the author argues that it could very well also be a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant whole. I shall reference this allegory in the subsequent sections of this essay.

I believe that the Universe and the Truth that is associated with it is nothing but utter, absolute chaos. Knowledge to me is simply a proxy; a tool that we think allows us to infer truth about the Universe. And while knowledge does succeed in making sense of some parts of the Universe, there always comes a time when it fails to explain something and descends into futility.

I shall try to demonstrate the above statements using an allegory. Imagine that you are lying on the grass and you see a cloud in the shape of an elephant. The fact that you see an elephant in the cloud is like knowledge. The cloud is the truth. While the shape of the cloud is chaotic and inherently random, you try to build a model of an elephant around its shape in order to explain it and/or understand it better even though nature never intended for that to happen.

Therefore, the creation and pursuance of knowledge is nothing but a never-ending quest to form proxies that would help understand the Universe a little ‘better’ than what previous proxies could do. Ever since mankind was given the gift of sentience, it has indulged in an almost insurmountable quest of making sense of the chaos in the midst in which it found itself in.

The first humans were perplexed by phenomena such as lightning, rain, the stars and the endless cycle of day and nights. In its quest to make sense and gain knowledge of what was going around, mankind developed its first proxy: God. Alexander Drake, in his treatise The Invention of Religion, has argued that any sentient being when placed in an environment of zero knowledge will firstly and eventually develop the concept of God in order to explain phenomena that surrounds him/her.

However, mankind soon realized that the concept of an omnipotent being responsible for everything that surrounded them had its shortcomings. While it performed a satisfactory job of explaining events that had already occurred, it fell extremely short of predicting outcomes around circumstances that were extremely similar. And it is in this shortcoming that we see the genesis of science.

Although science understandably enjoys intellectual hegemony over religion, at its core, the two attempt at doing the same thing: making sense of the Universe. Science tends to enjoy superiority on account of its modeling prowess and predictability. For instance, when the laws of motion were formulated by Newton, it was possible to compute the velocity with which a ball would land if it fell from a certain height. This was true of every ball and every setting as long as the height remained the same. However, we often misjudge this discovery as ‘truth’. Scientific models were never the absolute truth. They were just proxies that explained a certain behavior of the Universe accurately. They were like the elephant in the clouds. The Universe simply does not care for scientific or mathematical laws. It isn’t aware of the laws of motion. It just so happens that in its chaos, we manage to sometimes find apparent order in it.

Since, by its very nature, knowledge is nothing but a collection of proxies, it always tends to break after a certain point of time. As an illustration, consider the evolution of the structure of the atom. In the beginning, it was believed that an atom was a blob of positive charge with negative electrons embedded in it. All phenomena observed in association with the atom could be explained by this model. But then came a period when something else about the atom was observed. The cloud did not look like an elephant anymore. So, now it was postulated that an atom was mostly empty space with a dense, positive nucleus at the center and negative electrons revolving around it. This model, in turn, was rendered useless when quantum mechanics was discovered.

Thus, we see that knowledge and its acquisition is merely the development of proxies that we presume are better on account of its potency to explain more facts about the Universe than its predecessors. The scientific world has a current set of proxies with which it understands the world. However, it is an absolute certainty that some phenomena will be eventually discovered that will render it impotent.

Now that we’ve established that knowledge is nothing but a proxy to create order out of something that is inherently chaotic, development of knowledge is simply an exercise of developing apparently more ‘potent’ proxies over existing proxies. Understandably, there is always a base set that arises out of nothing. In this essay, I will refer to these points of knowledge as axioms (akin to Mathematics). These are ‘facts’ that cannot be proved and are assumed to be the truth. All knowledge is built from this base set of axioms.

The potency of knowledge is constantly tested by ensuring it is consonant with the phenomena that it attempts to explain. Once it fails to explain something, it must be either discarded or modified in order to explain the aforementioned phenomena and still maintain consonance with everything that it has correctly explained before.

Some knowledge is created by the easy modification of the current state of knowledge. An example of this is the evolution of Rutherford’s nucleo-centric model from Thomson’s positive blob. Some knowledge, on the other hand, requires a modification of the base axioms in order for it to come into existence. For instance, atoms were considered to be matter. This was considered base truth. However, when quantum mechanics emerged, this axiom had to be discarded in order to make room for the duality notion. It is at this point that I make a reference to the Little Prince hat. Knowledge to me is like that har. It is constantly changing and is never a reflection of absolute truth. For all we know, the shape drawn above is just a random collection of lines. Our observations and existing notions (knowledge) lead us to believe that it is a hat. However, should we see this hat starting to slither, we will evolve our understanding to label it as a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. In the future, we may observe some other things that may not be cognizant with this model either. Then again, we will attempt at describing it as something that explains that particular phenomenon in addition to everything that was observed earlier.

With my thoughts on knowledge substantiated, I shall now turn my attention to what it is I know. If by the term ‘know’, I’m referring to the absolute truths about the Universe, I find it necessary to quote Socrates in saying that I know nothing. All I have with me is a set of useful proxies that allow me to make sense out of some components of the Universe I exist in. I am cognizant of the fact that they may be proved wrong in the future but so far, they have helped me in explaining everything that I have observed and/or experienced.

In the same breath, I would, therefore, say that my conquest of knowledge is simply the acquisition and development of better proxies that enable me to understand a superset of the components of the Universe that my present state of knowledge may fail to explain.

A stated several times in this essay since knowledge is nothing but a set of proxies, the question begs as to how do we actually develop these proxies. We do so by interaction and observation. We observe something that is happening in the Universe and try to construct causal reasoning behind it. If the reasoning (or model) holds for subsequent events of the same nature, it survives for the time being. If it doesn’t, the model is modified. In some other instances, we supply a stimulus and record the response. We observe how responses differ to different stimuli and again, we try and construct a model that is potent enough to extrapolate on stimuli-response pairs that haven’t been explicitly tested before. This relationship between stimuli and its corresponding stimuli is again something we construct. It doesn’t inherently exist. As before, it is like the elephant in the cloud.

If I am made aware of something that I do not ‘know’, it could mean one of two things. Either I do not have a proxy in my set of proxies that can help me understand it. Or I possess a proxy that had given me an incorrect result. In the first case, I simply add the state of the art proxy to my set and in the latter, I modify my existing proxy using techniques that I have explained above. There are several instances where the latter might cause cognitive dissonance in my head. In other words, the modification of a particular proxy threatens the existence of the other proxies. In such cases. I make a cost-benefit analysis. There is never a right answer to this question. It boils down to which I would consider being more taxing to my mental and ethical well being: the ignorance of one phenomenon that my premature proxy cannot explain or a major overhaul of my entire set of proxies altogether.

In the final sections of the essay, I will attempt at creating a narrating around me knowing my self. I have come to understand that there are four components to knowing me. The first is observations and a set of associated explanations that are public knowledge to me as well as others around me. The second are those that are known to me but not to others. The third is vice versa. The fourth and the final are things that are not known by anyone.

I have come to realize that I will never come to know the absolute truth about myself. In that sense, I am like the Universe in which I reside. I can only create proxies that help me to understand a component of myself better. The truth about me resides in the fourth component. The other three are merely observations and proxies created on account of it. There are things that I believe are true about myself. There are certain moral principles that I believe I adhere to. But I am cognizant of the fact that these may all be rendered false when I’m put in a situation that forces me to alter my vision of myself. I will never know who I truly am. I will only know parts of me as I progress through life that will hold true until they are broken under certain circumstances. In my pure essence, I am chaos. There is no inherent order to who I am. I can only run with assumptions and be resilient when faced with the prospect of changing my perspective of myself.

Populism and Rise of the Far-Right

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Globalization on Trial.

This essay attempts to illustrate that the world order tends to oscillate between globalism and populism. Globalism is always preceded and succeeded by populism and vice versa. Additionally, this essay argues that a shift from globalism to populism is almost always influenced by cultural factors rather than economic ones.

Twenty-first-century politics has witnessed an alarming rise of populism in the United States and Europe. The first warning signs came with the UK Brexit Referendum vote in 2016 swinging in the way of Leave. This was followed by a stupendous victory by billionaire Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States in November 2016. Since then, Europe has seen a steady rise in populist and far-right parties that have capitalized on Europe’s Immigration Crisis to raise nationalist and anti-Europe sentiments. Some instances include Alternative for Germany (AfD) winning 12.6% of all seats and entering the Bundestag, thus upsetting Germany’s political order for the first time since the Second World War, the success of the Five Star Movement in Italy and the surge in popularity of neo-nazism and neo-fascism in countries such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Austria.

Brexit poses some real problems for the United Kingdom in the event of a no-deal

This rise of the far-right has also, quite obviously, resulted in the decline in popularity of the left and the center-left. The Democratic Party suffered perhaps its largest upset in American Political History when its Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton was handed a defeat by Trump despite being a clear favorite in the polls. The center-left SpD party of Germany has, for the first time, garnered fewer votes than the right-leaning AfD. The Socialists and the Labour Party in France and the Netherlands respectively also have suffered heavy defeats in parliamentary elections, resulting in significant losses of seats.

With this concise introduction in hand, in the following section, the essay will attempt to illustrate as to why this isn’t a startling phenomenon and instead was extremely predictable given the passage of human political and economic history. As mentioned earlier, the world always oscillates between populism and globalism and one is always preceded and succeeded by the other. To prove this point, this essay will present several instances from world history that clearly illustrate this trend.

As a first example, this essay will consider the Thirty Years War fought in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The war, one of the deadliest in human history, recorded over eight million casualties. The political and economic atmosphere of Europe, prior to the seeds of the aforementioned conflict being sown, had many similarities with a globalist ‘state’. A large part of Europe came under the Byzantine Roman Empire and it was relatively alien to the concept of nation states. Since this was an empire, there was a free flow of people and goods. Most importantly, the Protestants and the Catholics, the two major schools of belief in Europe, were free to practice their faith.

The Thirty Years War

Tensions arose when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose Roman Catholicism upon all his subjects. The result was a bloody war that lasted over three decades. The Thirty Years War validated the rise of the nation states after the end of the war. It led to the creation of the Dutch Republic, which was finally freed from Spanish rule (barring Southern Netherlands and Luxembourg). It established the dominance of France and the Bourbon Dynasty as well as facilitated the rise of the Swedish Empire.

This illustrates very clearly how a cultural clash (in terms of intolerance of a particular school of belief) triggered the shift of European political order from resembling globalism to nation states.

The following period, starting mid 17th century, saw the rise of East India Companies. The Thirty Years War was immediately followed by the Dutch Golden Age, a period facilitated by the Dutch East India Company, which went on to become the most valuable company of all time. This period also saw the beginning of British conquests into the eastern lands of India, China and Mesopotamia.

Continuing this trend into the 18th century, the European nation states colonized almost the entire known world. Aided by the Industrial Revolution starting in 1760, the world experienced globalization at a pace unparalleled until then. There was free (albeit controversial) flow of goods, people and ideas across continents. Thus, the European nation states built empires with lands spread across the world and brought in another era of globalism. In this way, the circle completed itself.

The Industrial Revolution

The next example follows the chronological timeline set by the previous; it starts its examination from the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The late nineteenth century was characterized by free trade between European Powers and their colonies (albeit at the expense of the colonies).

However, victories in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and the 1870 Franco-Prussian war established Germany as a dominant power in Europe. This created tension with the British and French Empires and there was a constant struggle in Europe to ensure a balance of power. The balance broke with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 which plunged Europe, and eventually the entire world, into war.

The defeat of the Triple Entente (comprising of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) to Allied Powers led to the rise of populism and the far-right in these countries. Starting the early 1930s, the Nazi party, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, turned Germany into a far-right dictatorship. Italy witnessed a similar populist uprising in the form of Benito Mussolini. Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum and the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race led him to conquer Poland in 1939, which led to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler

The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history, with over 50 million fatalities. An Allied victory ensured the decimation of the far-right in Europe. The end of the Second World War thus marked the beginning of another shift from nation states and populism into globalism.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed some amazing developments from the perspective of globalization. The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 to maintain international order and ensure that conflicts such as the Second World War didn’t take place again. The European Union was formed in 1957 with the ambitious plan of politically and economically uniting the entire continent of Europe. Economic Liberalization took place in the two largest countries in the world (by population): China, in 1978 and India, in 1991. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to regulate international trade.

But perhaps the most aggressive agent of globalization has been the dawn of the Information Age. The invention of the internet and the exponential increase for the demand in IT and software has connected the world like never before. The world has truly become a global village with everyone in the vicinity of communicating with everyone else.

If the aforementioned two examples are anything to go by, it suggests strongly that this wave of globalism will be followed by populism. This is exactly what is being witnessed in the global political landscape today. Therefore, two facts can be concluded beyond a reasonable doubt: globalism and populism operate in a cyclical manner and the preceding decades of globalism have ensured a rise of populism today.

The following sections of this essay will attempt at answering why globalism is succeeded by populist movements (usually by the far-right) by critically analyzing the economic and cultural effects of globalization. The essay will attempt to demonstrate that the latter plays a far larger and significant role than the former.

With the political climate shifting towards the idea of the nation-state (or nationalism), there have been fears of a decline in the popularity of the ideas of globalization, free trade, and open borders. Globalization has come under fire and has been castigated by populist governments worldwide. Some of the most audible dissent to globalization are economic, with the loss of jobs to immigrants, outsourcing and the dying of the manufacturing sector on account of trade and decentralization of production. Donald Trump secured a significant portion of his voter base by appealing to these sentiments. His campaign, with the tagline of Make America Great Again, promised stricter immigration laws, preferential treatment to American production and priority to jobs for Americans. Since becoming president, he has imposed trade tariffs worth hundreds of billions of dollars on countries such as Canada and China in an attempt to correct America’s trade deficit, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement to save the dying coal mining industry and removed the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a bid to further isolate the US from global politics and pump the budget inward.

Henry Hazlitt

The economic arguments against globalization are, however, extremely weak and lack statistical backing. The Economist Henry Hazlitt attempts at distilling the entire field of economics to a single principle:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Globalization almost always leads to creative destruction; the phenomena of loss of livelihood to superior technology, innovation or automation. It happened with the Industrial Revolution, it happened with colonization and now, it’s happening with the advent of the Internet.

Phenomena associated with globalization such as automation, free trade, decentralization of production and the internet have led to the loss of livelihood for many people, especially those employed in blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

However, this has also ensured that more output is created with lesser input thus driving down prices and increasing the variety of goods and services available to consumers. In its essence, this is the duty of an economy: to produce as much as possible at the lowest cost. Productivity is the only thing that should count. Lower prices of goods implies consumers have more disposable income in their hands. This stream of extra money, therefore, has the potential to create new industries and jobs for goods and services that people can afford now with the extra money. With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand argument, it can be shown that the displaced people can actually move to these industries, thus returning the economy back to a stable equilibrium.

Therefore, it can be seen quite clearly that, in the long term, globalization affects all groups positively even in the face of creative destruction.

It is indeed true that globalization displaces some communities in the short run. However, the number of people displaced is dwarfed by the number of people reaping economic gains. It doesn’t make any economic sense at all to discard globalization for its minimal short term side effects. For instance, there are 135,000 works in the US Apparel Industry and 45 million Americans who live below the poverty line. It doesn’t make any economic sense to increase the price of clothing for millions of poor Americans (by banning clothing imports) to ensure a few hundred thousand get to keep their low income, low skill jobs. Following Hazlitt’s principle, it is in the greater interest of a society or country to only produce those goods and services it has a competitive advantage over and imports the rest. Globalization facilitates this and thus ensures stronger economies.

Finally, it is a misconception that the financial crisis created by globalism led to the rise of populism. Many associate the 2008 Economic Crisis as the starting point of Trumpism. However, by the time Americans were voting in 2016, the economy had fully recovered. Also, contrary to what Steve Bannon had claimed, a Gallup poll showed conclusively that non-supporters of Trump were just as likely as the supporters to be unemployed. Shifting our focus to the east, there is almost zero correlation between economic prosperity and the rise of the far-right in Europe too. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Finland, all have right-wing populist ruling parties in spite of being some of the most economically prosperous countries in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative that we search for a stronger, alternate reason to explain these shifts.

Apart from economic crises, another school of dissent against globalization comes from cultural homogenization. Since globalization, by its very nature, results in the migration of people from one place to another, it also leads to the transport of cultures. More often than not, tensions arise as a result of the clash of cultures and this leads to the creation of nationalistic sentiments, often at the expense of the immigrants.

Migration is often cited as one of the biggest problems of globalization. However, the economic argument against migration is extremely weak. Take the United States, for instance. Only 33% of Americans hold college degrees and there are simply not enough Americans available to fill in for high skilled jobs. This availability gap is often filled by immigrants. Immigrant communities from India and China are significantly more prosperous, wealthy and educated than the average American.

The phobia against migration stems from xenophobia. Humans are, anthropologically speaking, xenophobic by nature. It is a trait that has allowed mankind to survive and eventually dominate the planet. Humans tend to form communities around ideas or traits and this sense of community is amplified when it comes in conflict with a rival community.

The Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War resulted in one of the biggest refugee crisis of all time. This European Refugee Crisis is one of the main reasons for the rise of the far right in Europe. Most of the refugees from the Middle East were Muslims and the integration of Islamic values and traditions at such a humongous scale was the seed of conflict between the immigrants and the largely Christian natives.

Populism, therefore, is fed by xenophobia and racism. It stems from an inherent fear of the European natives for a loss of their culture and identity. Islam is seen as a direct threat to their culture. Harmonic multiculturalism, although a novel concept on paper, is extremely difficult to witness in practicality.

This fear is amplified by a fear of security. Since the starting of the refugee influx into Europe, there have been several, large scale terrorist attacks in major European cities with refugee perpetrators. France witnessed attacks in Nice and Paris in 2015 and 2016 that resulted in hundreds of death. Great Britain, too, has had its share of violence in the form of the Manchester Bombing in 2017 and semi-regular instances of refugee violence in London.

These attacks have led people to associate all refugees as terrorists, rapists, and haters of Europe; although an extremely negligible fraction of them are involved with extremism. Similar rhetoric was used to great success by Donald Trump through his stance on immigration and the wall on the US-Mexican border.

As we have already seen, cultural factors usually are the trigger for the genesis of populist movements. The Thirty Years War started when Catholicism was forced on the people. World War 2 occurred largely in part of Hitler’s goal to establish Aryan dominance and decimate any race that he thought inferior.

Therefore, it can be stated that globalism leads to multiculturalism which in turn leads to a clash of cultures and idea. These clashes form the breeding ground for chauvinism and populist movements and play a far greater role in the shift than economic concerns.

In conclusion, this paper has illustrated through historical examples, how globalism leads to populism and vice versa. They are states through which global political order regularly oscillates between. Finally, the paper demonstrated how cultural and not economic factors played a larger role in aiding shifts from globalism to populism.

References

1. Galston, William. 2018. The rise of European Populism and collapse of the Centre-Left. Brookings.
2. Marr, Andrew. 2013. A History of the World. Pan Publishing
3. Polišenský, P.V. 1954.  The Thirty Years War. 31-43 in Past & Present. Oxford University Press.
4. King, Stephen. 2017. The pendulum swings between Globalisation and the Nation State. Financial Times.
5. Kothari, Rajni. 1995. Under Globalisation: Will Nation State hold? 1593-1603 in Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 30 No. 26. Economic & Political Weekly
6. Shuster, Simon. 2018. The Populists. TIME Magazine.
7. Suter, Keith. 2018. The Future of the Nation-state in an Era of Globalization. 32-38 in Cadmus Journal Volume 3 Issue 4. Cadmus.
8. Roth, Kenneth. 2017. The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values in World Report 2017. Human Rights Watch.
9. Cox, Michael. 2018. Understanding the Global Rise of Populism in Strategic Update, Feb 2018. LSE Ideas.
10. Hazlitt, Henry. 1946. Economics in One Lesson. Harper & Row Publishing.
11. Cramer, Kevin. 2007. The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century. 18-19 in Studies in War, Society, and the Military. University of Nebraska Press.
12. Greg, IP. 2018. No, the Financial Crisis didn’t Spawn Populism. The Washington Journal.
13. Argandona, Antonio. 2017. Why Populism is Rising and How to Combat it. Forbes.
14. Malets, Olga. 2017. Globalization, governance and the nation-state: An Overview. 16-24 in Economic Sociology Vol. 18 Iss. 2. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne.
15. Mitchell, Deborah. 2000. Globalization and social cohesion: Risks and responsibilities. The Year 2000 International Research Conference on Social Security.
16. Tierney, Stephen. 2015. Which Pluralism? 186-203 in Nationalism and Globalisation. Bloomsbury Publishing.
17. Kauffman, Eric. 2004. Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. 40-57. Psychology Press.
18. Lund, Susan and Tyson, Laura. 2018. Globalization is Not in Retreat. Council on Foreign Relations.
19. Sides, John; Tesler, Michael, and Vavreck, Lynn. 2018. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Election & the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton University Press.
20. Eckman, James. 2017. Globalism vs. Nationalism: The Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century. Wall Street Journal.
21. Haidt, Jonathan. 2016. When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism. 46-53 in The American Interest Vol. 32 No. 3. The American Interest.
22. Cuperus, Rene. 2007. Populism against Globalisation: A New European Revolt. Kalevi Sorsa Foundation.
23. Spannaus, Andrew. 2018. Regime Change and Globalization Fuel Europe’s Refugee and Migrant Crisis. Consortium News.

Were all poetry attributed to Kabir written by one person?

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Kabir: The Poet of Vernacular Modernity.

Kabir

The premise of this essay is to discern if all the works attributed to the saint, reformer and poet Kabir were written (or enunciated) by one person or if there is a possibility that the name ‘Kabir’ was a pseudonym used by multiple poets to broadcast their views between the 14th and 16th century.

The essay argues that the former is more likely. In other words, although historical evidence suggests that a weaver poet named Kabir did live in Benaras somewhere in the 15th century, the works attributed to him were not his original work alone.

The first argument relates to the exact timeline of Kabir’s life. To date, there is not enough historical evidence that puts this matter to rest. Mentions of Kabir can be found from as early as the starting of the 14th century to as late as the end of the 16th. In his book Kabir, Prabhakar Machwe gives us the wildly different timelines that have been proposed. The most widely held view, as purported by Kabir Charith Bodh, was that Kabir was born in 1398. However, in his work Khajinat-ul-Asafiya, Maulvi Ghulam insists that Kabir was born in 1594, two full centuries after the date suggested by Kabit Charith Bodh. But more than his birth, it is the year of his demise that is more hotly contested. A certain sect of scholars believe the date to be somewhere between 1448 and 1450. In fact, the Archaeological Society of India has suggested that a tomb of Kabir was built somewhere during 1450.

Sikander Lodi

However, this date of 1448 is rejected by other sects of scholars who believe Kabir was a contemporary of Sikander Lodi, a sultan who ruled Delhi between 1489 and 1517 and visited Kashi in 1494. A death in 1448 would not have made the fabled meeting between the two possible. The Ain-e-Akbari, a pivotal historical work published in 1596 by Abu Fazl also mentions Kabir as one of the great poets who is no longer alive.

Finally, there is a ‘middle-man’ view which suggests that Kabir lived through it all, between 1398 and 1518 to a ripe old age of 120. A possible reason for such immense confusion in his timeline could be because poetry in his name was being propagated and produced throughout this period of more than a century which led different people to believe that Kabir was alive at a different point of time. It is extremely unlikely that a man in the 15th century survived to the age of 120. What is more likely is that a group of poets published and produced poetry under the pseudonym Kabir over this very long timeline.

The second argument is that of Language. Kabir is extremely well known for rejecting the polished languages of Hindi and Persian in favor of a language more understandable to the masses; a language alluded to as Saddhukari by modern scholars. However, Kabir’s poetry is riddled with several languages. In Linda Hess’ The Bijak of Kabir and Prabhakar Machwe’s Kabir, this fact is alluded to in detail. His poems seem to have traces of Hindi, Persian, Marwari, Urdu, and Bengali. Additionally, there is evidence which suggests that his language style tends to change with the subject matter and does not have one particular style (that most other poets spend a lifetime to carve).

These facts can be used to postulate a very likely scenario: it is possible that several poets lived in several different regions and wrote on several different topics. Each poet had a distinct voice of his/her own and had issues and topics that s/he deeply cared about. However, they all came to use the pseudonym of Kabir as their signature. Therefore, the richness and diversity of language and the style of language being dependent on the topic.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Published by Penguin Classics.

The third argument is that of Women. Kabir’s views on femininity remain one of the most controversial facets of the poet. Kabir is known to have been extremely vocal about his condemnation and denunciation of women. His seemingly misogynistic attitude is however not an anomaly amongst the great poets of the world. In his Thus Spake Zarathustra, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote:

Everything about women is a riddle and everything about woman has one solution: it’s called pregnancy.

Kabir’s views were far stronger and far more blasphemous. For instance, one of Kabir’s couplets goes as follows:

Kabit naari parai apni, bhugtya narakahi jaye,
Aag aag sab ek hai, tamain haat na baahi

Translated by Gupta in 1986, this translates to:

Kabir says he who associates with a woman, whether his own or another’s, is going to hell
All fires are one; so don’t burn your hands in it.

Modern scholars argue that Kabir isn’t speaking against women in his poetry but is merely using women as a metaphor for all that is wrong and evil and unjust with the world.

This point of view would have been acceptable if not for another facet of Kabir: his love and eroticism for his God, Rama. As stated by Purushottam Agarwal in his essay The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity, there are over 270 verses in which Kabir exhibits eroticism and a poignant desire to become one with his God. Furthermore, he does so by assuming the form of a woman. Assuming that Kabir had no qualms regarding homosexuality, it seems apparent that he believed that he could only make true love to his God by adopting the form of a woman. This, in turn, alludes to the fact that Kabir believed that the epitome of sexual desire and fulfillment, of unconditional and intense love, of devotion, could only be achieved by the feminine. The female was more capable of giving love to the male than the vice versa.

It is in these two aforementioned facts that lie the greatest contradiction and paradox regarding the poet. On one hand, he uses women as a symbol of all that is evil and unjust with the world and strongly denounces any form of interaction or contact with it. On the other hand, he becomes a female and asks the male God to become one with her. Even if we assume that Kabir’s usage of femininity is metaphorical, it is astounding that he would use the same metaphor to denote two completely contrasting ideas.

As with the previous two arguments, this contradiction can be fixed if we assume that the works are by separate poets. One poet used femininity as a metaphor for evil. The other used it as the epitome of love, desire and affection to God.

Virginia Woolf

A related question could be: why does Kabir find a need to convert to the female form to show his love for God? Why doesn’t he make God female instead? While the explanation that the woman is a metaphor for the zenith of love, affection, and desire is convincing, we should not rule out another equally plausible explanation: the existence of a female poet writing under the pseudonym of Kabir. Why a female poet would do is extremely obvious and has been brilliantly elucidated by Virginia Woolf in her essay, If Shakespeare Had A Sister. If this were indeed the works of a woman, it would have been very unlikely that it would have reached the levels of popularity they enjoy to this day. Combine this with the fact that a woman expressing her erotic desires would have been extremely taboo in the conservative 15th century India. The Bhakti poet Meera did but she lost all her material possessions in the process. In other words, there was plenty of incentive to write under the pseudonym of a famous male poet.

Thus far, this paper has discussed certain facts about Kabir that hint at the possibility of the existence of multiple poets rather than one. The rest of this paper will focus on plausible reasons as to why there was an incentive to do such a thing.

William Shakespeare

The premise of multiple poets writing under one common pseudonym is not a new idea. It has also been proposed in relation to probably the greatest poet of all time, William Shakespeare. There are some startling similarities between the two giants. Both were born into illiterate households. There is historical evidence suggesting that Shakespeare’s father and son were both illiterate. It seems highly unlikely that the intermediate generation reached the epitome of literacy. Secondly, there are the circumstances surrounding his death. He makes no mention of his books, plays or poems in his will or his documents. The only theatrical references were interlined in his will which cast deep suspicion on the authenticity of his requests. Diana Price, in her essay Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument, argues that Shakespeare’s works were authored by aristocrats such as Derby and Oxford under the pseudonym and they did so to bypass the “stigma of print”, a convention that restricted works by aristocrats to be published only in private circles and not be made available to the public. Another reason may have been because Shakespeare’s plays clearly advocate a Republican form of government and therefore its author was always at risk of being prosecuted by the monarchy.

The aforementioned point finds a great amount of relevance in the context of Kabir. Kabir’s poetry contained vast amounts of criticism for every major religion that existed in the subcontinent in the 15th century, be it Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism. Criticism of religious beliefs and thoughts do not go down well even in the 21st century so one can imagine the magnitude of possible repercussions five centuries ago. Writing under the pseudonym of Kabir, a lower caste, illiterate Muslim weaver was the perfect deception. It would have helped all these poets with blasphemous views find a voice without facing the risk of prosecution.

With time, it is possible that the name of Kabir became synonymous with rational thought, the denunciation of any form of God and a rejection of irrational practices of Hinduism and Islam. In such a scenario, it made even more sense to continue using the name of Kabir long after the original weaver was dead. Kabir, in this way, becomes a symbol.

In conclusion, this essay does not reject the existence of a weaver-poet named Kabir. It is very likely that such a person did exist. But what is equally likely is the possibility that all works written in his name were not written by one person. They were written by poets in different regions in different languages advocating different thoughts. Kabir, therefore, was more of a symbol; an amalgamation of revolutionary thoughts and the epitome of South Asian Literature between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

References

1. Hess, L. & Singh, S. (Tr.) (1986) The Bijak of Kabir
2. Agrawal, P. (2011) The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity
3. Machwe, P. (1968) Kabir
4. Woolf, V. (1929) A Room of One’s Own
5. Price, D. (1997) Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument
6. Agrawal, P. (2004) Thematology: Seeking an Alternative to Religion Itself

Design 101

 

This Summer, I have decided to get my hands dirty learning design. I had always been an admirer of the field and the kind of work my designer friends were capable of producing with their skills. If you’ve seen any of my previous projects, you’ll notice that all of them share at least one quality: extremely unflattering design. To build apps today that people would actually use, it is imperative that the design be close to flawless. And since designers are scarce from where I come, I decided to learn a few tricks of the trade myself; just enough to get by.

After several hours of Googling and consulting with a few designers about their learning paths, I realised design was much more than just knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator well. Training the eye to see, ‘stealing’ other people’s work and getting inspired on a daily basis were essential to producing good pieces. After going through many suggested paths, I decided to settle upon the following:

1. Introductory Design
2. Design and Psychology
3. Writing
4. Drawing: Digital and Analog
5. Graphic Design Theory
6. Fundamentals of UI and UX
7. Tools: Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch
8. Web and Mobile App Design
9. Portfolio

Going through all this will easily take me up to a year. I have decided to document my process of learning design on my blog here. This blog post will concern my adventure getting myself introduced to the world of design.

The first thing I did was subscribe to sidebar.io. This app mails you five design links every day and I’ve found them to be extremely interesting and engaging. Strongly recommended if you’re even remotely interested in design. I also followed a few publications on Medium, most notably freeCodeCamp, Facebook Design, Google Design and Sketch. It’s good to know what the design giants are up to in their day to day work.

I then picked up Robin Williams’ The Non Designer’s Design Book. I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to any subject I was alien to. Williams’ style of writing was extremely engaging and her advice was incredibly relevant to design regardless of the media: print or digital. In her book, Williams describes the four fundamental principles every designer needs to adhere to (which unfortunately has an acronym of CRAP)

The principles are :

1. Proximity
2. Contrast
3. Alignment
4. Repetition

The infographic below gives a good summary of the quadrate.

In the second part of the book, she gives a gentle introduction to Typography and Color Theory. Overall, I’d like to reiterate that this book is an excellent place to start learning about the principles of designing.

The next resource I took up was Kadavy’s Design for Hackers. Since I’m a hacker myself, I assumed the book would be relevant to me. A few pages into the book made me realise that Kadavy’s notion of a hacker was much broader than the one used in common terminology.

Kadavy’s book covered most of the material from The Non Designer’s Design Book. However, his work contained a heavy amount of philosophy, history and art. It became apparent that this man takes his field extremely seriously. To explain typography, he takes us all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphics to Gutenberg’s bible to Steve Jobs and Apple. He uses Impressionist paintings to explain design principles and color theory.

He also devotes an entire portion of the book to discuss proportions and the golden ratio. It was fascinating to read his analysis of every form of design imaginable: clay plates, marble sculptures, impressionist paintings, nature, web and mobile design, etc. Overall, the book was a very convincing account on why you should consider a career in design.

To sum up, the first module of my path dealt with the history and philosophy behind design. It introduced me to the major accepted design principles and foundations and got me acquainted to the possibilities in the field. Finally, it also gave me a gentle introduction to many of sub fields of design including graphic design (typography and color theory), UI/UX, Web and Mobile App Design, Print Design and Logo Design.

I shall follow up this module with the Writing or the Psychology portion as these are portions I’m already familiar and comfortable with. As I’ve stated earlier, I shall keep this blog updated about my journey in the aforementioned areas.