Reservations

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Who are these queuing up before free ration shops, faces contorted in simulated humility, eyes popping up in wonder and gratitude, the bent heads acknowledging the merciful highness of the dole givers? Where are those championing human dignity who always advocate human rights and the value of human life? Do they gnash their teeth in impotent rage at this sorry sight of man? No. They don’t, for, their advocacy of human dignity is often confined to the political authority’s recognition of human dignity. And that often means give the poor doles. Let the unfortunate specimens of humanity queue up, satchel in hand or beg for money or provisions to keep base life afoot. They write articles,  in argue panel discussions to give the poor and weaker sections of the society free food, free house and make them feel eternally grateful to the welfare state- the mai baap government. The clever among the activists who have some education and gift of the gab, they organise rallies and gherao government officers or ministers and demand reservation on caste basis. The argument is: these unfortunate victims of Manu have been exploited by a wrong perception of man –made divisions of upper and lower castes. The rich and powerful put them under the mat which has become a self-deluding historical habit which they haven’t shaken off. What’s to be done then? Give them reservation in schools, jobs and even promotion and make it hereditary.

B.R .Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution could look into the future and see that the perpetuated reservation will be another historical blunder, for, human beings always prefer to live under the benign shadow of divine mercy or its worldly substitutes practised in a welfare state. He recommended a ten year period of reservation for the scheduled classes and tribes. But the law makers saw the vote potential in reservation and expanded it to include other castes and vote power groups capable of wielding pressure. The constitution is amended every ten years and the ten year periodicity is gleefully extended to rejuvenate suffering men and women in the coming decade. And this is done to right a historical wrong. History cannot be brought to the right moral path retrospectively, rather the present generations enjoying reservation will have greater demands as their positions improve and the current history will pave the way for future distortions as the socio-moral-economic gaps will widen following the law of nature.

This is already happening as the new champions of the poor exploit the situation politically. Guzars,Jats, Patels, Marathas now a days do not beg or request or appeal; they resort to the blackmail of violence. Now the minorities demand reservation. Some state governments grant them reservation flouting Supreme Court directives not to exceed 50% of the total number. After a few year the so called upper castes will demand reservation as a large percentage of meritorious youth fail to access the available opportunities.

It is an unfortunate irony of history that man who considers himself as the best creation of God  does not hesitate to label himself helpless, to stretch out his hands to receive doles of political mercy. Some states also prepare long lists of want only to make them eligible for central assistance while the historians record their proud culture and heritage. If man is a paragon of virtue how can he pose himself as destitute only for the state’s mercy? Is it not a shame on governments to politically exploit poverty in the name of welfare? If the rich and the powerful, in history, exploited the hapless poor for their own comforts and threw doles at them to record their own names in the annals of philanthropy how were they different from the present day representatives of people?

Man is a natural seeker of opportunities. In the past, those who utilized opportunities or snatched opportunities from the jaws of adversity have contributed to human dignity by their resourcefulness. The poor young persons of today need such opportunities. A welfare state’s primary purpose should be to uplift man by providing opportunities; not to enslave them by giving them reservations. The present government should create institutions of excellence for them and encourage them to compete. Ignite their native intelligence, teach them not to fall prey to history as interpreted by vested interest groups and pseudo intellectuals. Explore the talent centres and utilize those to carve out new patterns of reality. Make them feel useful to society. Bring them out of the traps of their own making and make them feel human with a natural sense of dignity.

Who Has Failed !!

Imagine the internet is jammed

google and all motions of the earth

forfeit their properties, the ticking clock ,

the blowing wind  turn turtle

breathless men running to the bank

return in panic seeing the lock.

Lovers will sigh longer than God’s

yawn, businessman cannot see

the stockmarket crash, the

digital banners will blip endless

and fall in unknown gutters without

trace, patients will wait for doctors

and doctors  for revival  of computers:

but death will not wait at all.

Man’s mind functioned god like

created a digital world, mocking

his primitive mind but if the

net fails ,the wheels will

make everything a picture still.

Who has failed? God’s

best creation or man’s

best creation? Who will

decide there’s no judge in-sight:

when the puppet turns puppeteer

none will be there to cheer.


Sabita Sahu

Creative Freedom

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

All over the civilized world freedom of thought and speech, particularly in the creative spheres, is respected. Of course there are a few countries like China  where freedom is defined under ideologies of regimentation. In India the constitution guarantees all citizens the right to free expression of ideas. A poet can create new myths, reinvent old myths and episodes of history and can also make ideological interpretations totally unwarranted by the situational dynamics of the original. A.K.Ramanujan’s 300 Ramayanas is a case in point. The original poet- mythmaker is dwarfed by the later poets who gave their own ideological spins or unreined their fancy to come up with strange metaphorical signposts making Valmiki look sheepish for having composed the original Ram story in epical measures. I don’t, however, deny creative freedom to restate, rewrite or retell a myth or creative piece which has permanent appeal. But when Ramayana is the subject Valmiki comes to the mind of every student of literature; not the other versions of Kamban or the Buddhist and Jain poets. If a poet rights certain mythic wrongs using his creative freedom he is welcome. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound unchains the hero by his profound sense of freedom and reinvents poetic justice. But the same cannot be said of Tate’s King Lear which kills Shakespeare’s brilliant masterpiece. I am positive Romila Thapar who argues for the acceptance of variants of the Ramayan will not accept Noam Tate's Lear.

In today’s India we function like the all-licenced Fool in the Elizabethan plays without, however, the subtleties of life perception. I can make Gandhi a traitor and Subhas Bose a seditious protagonist of anarchy without batting an eyelid, for the constitutional guarantee is deliberately misunderstood by ideological tomfoolery. Today in the guise of freedom of expression expletives are thrown at will, at political opponents and if it is an election campaign platform one may wax eloquent mortgazing logic to hate and passion. Every politician and for that matter every journalist is an authority on religion, economics, ethics and what not! An actor who normally mouths words written by others may also comment on the ethical substance of epics in the name of freedom of expression. Creative freedom may make Vyasa dance a bhangra and Padmavati dance in the royal court. The most abused term today is this freedom which creates hate and ill will between communities.

When the opportunity came to India in 1947 to create our identity as Indian we failed miserably. Our long history, instead of becoming the story of one nation comprising different religious and linguistic identities in a creative whole was appropriated by communal interest and their historians of colonial legacy. The majority community was so disorganised that they couldn’t establish whether the Aryans were indigenous or as claimed by the colonial researchers. When the constitution was drafted they couldn’t decide what ought to be the correct meaning of Secularism: They thought Secularism meant equal attention to all religions. And this creative indecision has given rise to all our problems. The temple, mosque and church like thre spears pierce our creativity whenever some original mind tries to create a new narrative.       

The Hindu Code Bill, the Muslim Personal Law Board provide new metaphors for creative discourse. The Rastriya Swayam Sewak Sangha has another creativity which systematically challenges the left and left of centre by using creative freedom, to hurl parliamentary abuses against the ruling leadership while the later consciously uses creativity with the authority of power.

In the so called art world creative freedom is seldom seen except in a scene or two of countable good films. In the plastic arts hindu goddesses are shown as underwater nudes in the name of freedom. Only the hindu deities, scriptures and philosophies are taken jibes at because in no other community literature, philosophy and art have sweep and imagination. The creative freedom of the epics, puranas, sculptural depictions of history or events of perennial appeal are so vast and various that the creative freedom of some so called liberals is limited to hindu bashing.

Freedom and creativity are always on a delicate balance: if creativity crosses the line it is reduced to bathos.

Never Give Up

The moment that passes

lapses into eternity , the

moment that comes brings

the future in, time is the now

all happen in the now moment

we cannot chain the past,

can’t predict the future but

 we have to make the future

 in the present here and now.

The trodden path disappears,

the future beckons the present

to chart out a new course

paving the rough and stony

rubbish into a smooth road.

We move towards future but alone

bidding  our time to catch the dream,

what is done cannot return

but let’s carve things new to shape

life’s monument for future memory.

The toil will be hard and bloody

the heart and soul may stumble

on fear of failures at every step

but never quit, never give up

or raise your hands in despair.

Work and dream and wait

success will catch your unawares

like a water jet sprouting

in a forlorn desert.

Second Childhood

Strange is the story of life:

begins with the prattle

ends with the babble

as people grow from green to yellow

limbs crack and wither, memory

plays truant-they know not what they do,

take solitary walks with their Maker

to relive memories, lean on the

raw and green for reassurance

of their identity. The turmoiled mind

fails to defend what has been,

hope and joy like enemies betray

when their power to scream decays.

Are they specimens for pity and

sympathy? No, when our need for

them is past their prime, their need

for us begins, they lean on us

to straighten their backs.

Let’s stretch forward to hold them

with love, care and patience.
that's the language they understand

to crown their memories.

sabita sahu

Poverty

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty


Once in an after-lecture interaction I was asked how I defined poverty: My impromptu answer was- I define a richman as one who can fulfill the needs of his imagination. What I imagine is also within the parameters of my total reality. Someone prompted ‘for instance’- I smiled and said, for instance if I can’t pluck out the stars to distribute as toffees to you I am poor indeed. The audience laughed, a young girl said- in that case we all are poor. But what is poverty in human experience? Why do governments all over the world take up poverty alleviation programmes? Is it for the rag pickers or star pluckers? Again there was a roll of laughter. Without the slightest hint of embarrassment I said: If you have the World Bank prescription of two Dollars a day in mind we have to go by statistics. In India we have about 36% of the population below poverty line. But when you think of a place to live in, some clothes to wear and two square (or triangular) meals a day, I don’t know whether the WB has any specificities to prescribe.

In the beginning all humans were born poor. None had any other inheritance except bland nature, hostile forests and pathless futures. What was the meaning of poverty or prosperity then? Yes, there was pain of hunger, fear of predators and death perhaps was an incomprehensible, mystic beyond their ken. How could the naked Homo Sapiens come to the present level over the long arduous centuries? They fought hunger, sickness and poverty, overcame them and launched empires of their own, more organised and even powerful than nature. Those who begged of fruit trees, later of the gods, then from kings and ministers – this word poverty relates to their state which they could not change or improve. Poor are those who give up half way through the struggle and depend on divine or human mercy. Also when people are rendered helpless by famine, flood, earthquake, tsunami or a bomb attack, they often lose the fight as the opposing forces are too strong to overcome. But the human mind is such that it will find out alternative ways of survival although in penury. But even in such circumstances man refuses to yield, for his ego will never admit defeat. Poor are those who surrender their pride at the slightest hint of adversity. The welfare state, however caring and benevolent, ought to rejuvenate the calamity –struck defeatism in destitutes instead of treating them as venerable burdens on the resources. Give them doles but never make their dolorous lives  accept their state as the inalienable  fate imposed by God or reality. Teach them to rise, raise their self respect, give them work and create environs for their self fulfilment. If you give them rations (or rice at Rs. 2 a kg) they will be shameless slaves of the state or the votebanks of political parties: their human qualities will be enslaved by the senses. Their moral being will perpetually submit to authority; they can never fight to emancipate themselves.

In India farmers commit suicide which is definitely sad. But why should a loan burden or a crop failure lead a person to suicide? We must remember – those who kill themselves are afraid of life. They are cowards who refuse to go through the vicissitudes to prove their human worth. Government instead of giving compensation for such people should condemn their cowardice. The society too should encourage such distressed people to keep on fighting and not to leave the stage altogether like bad actors.

Poverty, as has been said, is a state of mind. Physical poverty apart, we have emotional, intellectual and moral poverty to contend with. Most human beings suffer from moral poverty. The leaders who loot in the name of service, the traders who hoard things to create artificial scarcity and the teachers who believe they have nothing more to learn and many such other professionals who treat the others as their potential victims are poor indeed. A man sitting in a Mercedes is not necessarily rich if he plots to exploit innocent people. Gandhiji believed in the moral lessons given in primary schools that God loves the poor: it is a consolatory precept. God loves those who love themselves and strive hard to advance in life. Monarchies killed this instinct in man. Tyrants forcibly suppressed free play of the human will. But in a modern democracy man is free to endeavour to change his conditions. Loans are available to start enterprises. He who is proud of displaying his poverty today and claims sympathy-charity-doles, in my view, is morally poor which makes his physical poverty ugly. Poverty should be transcended by the dignity of pride, for, that is what man is made of.

O’ My Sweet Nothing

What magic it was who wielded

I don't know there was nothing

my heart was ever empty, a shell

without meat, your presence,

absence, memories and

experience made no  difference.

You were not my mate

nor you were my fate

seasons moved, spring summer

rolled in their rhythms,

never noticed your name,

your smile, style and profile

never came  in my dreams even

but in some corner of heart

there was a speck of desire

to meet you again 

gave the pleasure of pain

Your absence made me realize

the first pang of separation

I never felt before even while

walking on the sea shore with

your songful charm and savour!

you came unnoticed to devour,

I was left with my unsaid love.

my nothing is now my everything

you are my past, present and future

I have no gesture to show my love

yet I chant sing and recite every moment.


Sabita sahu