Two Cheers For Corruption?

What is Corruption? 
Corruption, I was once taught, is the the use of public office for private gain. It is allegedly illegal and immoral, besides being harmful to a nation's economy. But why, I've always asked, does it persist in most of the world for most of human civilization?

The most common answer is that corruption is akin to theft, and the reasons for corruption ultimately boil down to selfishness, greed and a host of other human vices. But if this tragic account of human nature holds any validity, we are all corrupt (or potentially corrupt), though lacking in the same opportunities to indulge in it. This line of reasoning may even cause some of us to pity ourselves: if only we had more opportunities to be corrupt, our natural vices would take care of the rest...

But this moral argument explains too much as well as too little. If everyone is equally corrupt in theory, nothing remains to be explained. In that case, cause and effect coincide: people are corrupt because they are innately so. This is a non-explanation.  Clearly, we must look for answers elsewhere.

An Alternative Hypothesis
Let me propose an hypothesis that runs counter to conventional wisdom: private gain is one of the chief purposes of holding public office. Shocked? I expect readers to be so. We are all so used to thinking about public office in the exalted terms of civics textbooks that we typically fail to understand that the "state" is not a mythical sea-monster, Leviathan. The state, instead, ought to be better understood as the sum of power relationships in society that are deemed legitimate in the eyes of the law. To the extent that a nation's laws buttress patriarchal authority within a family, the monarch-like rule of the father-husband is as much a part of the constitutional order of things as legislatures or courts. For our purposes, therefore, the classical liberal distinction between the public and private realms needs to be put aside.

Defining the state in this manner avoids reducing corruption to a simple matter of individual virtue and vice. We now see the state as embedded in society with its messy power equations ready to upset any technocrat's grand institutional designs. For no one is above board entirely, except, as the ancient Greeks and Romans believed, the mythical lawgiver in a society. The everyday reality of society is, then, a series of overlapping struggles for wealth, honor, and virtue. It is not only about the rich fighting the poor, but also rich women positioning themselves above their poorer counterparts. Insofar as the state endows laws and policies with an official sanctity, the overlapping struggles in a given moment influence the distribution of power and resources in the future. Victory in one sphere of struggle may be reinforced in others just as easily as they might be undercut in others. Public office is thus nothing more than a means to a pre-determined end.

However, the distribution of power in society varies across time and place. In pluralistic or "polyarchic" societies, the same elites do not win every battle. Instead, power is distributed widely across multiple nodes in society. Capturing power in one sphere of the state does not imply that the winner takes all. Winning the battle for gay rights does not necessarily mean you will also be able to raise taxes on the rich. The use of public office for private gain is rampant in such societies as are accusations of the same. Absolutely no one is above suspicion.  In "monoarchic" societies, however, this is not the case. Oligopolistic interests concentrate power in closed circles, and social policies and laws reflect these interests. Public interest ends up being defined by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and the few individual deviations from this definition of public interest is denounced vociferously and even criminalized.

The Curious Modernity of Corruption
Now, corruption is an interesting term. It simultaneously functions as a modern economic term as well as a term of moral opprobrium. The modernity of corruption is not unsurprising. Its origins lie in the rise of Protestantism in Europe, which saw, among its principal tasks, a vigorous attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church. In western Europe, the triumph of Protestantism is inseparable from the triumph of capitalism over the medieval church, the aristocracy, and the peasantry. Whether in Germany, the Low Countries or in England, the modern attack on corruption accompanied the ultimate victory of the bourgeoisie on the Continent. With imperialism, the Protestant ethic at the heart of capitalism came to assume a global form. On this view of global society, heathens in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were corrupt and depraved creatures in need of salvation. The Bible held the key to salvation as much as markets and the modern state did. Corruption was backward, pre-modern, medieval. Salvation lay in the modern doctrine of progress.

We may not be all Keynesians now, but we are possibly all Protestant capitalists now. Economics is the study of capitalist markets today. Political science concerns "governance" of these markets. Anthropology studies the primitive Other, whether in Papua New Guinea and Nebraska or in car factories in Detroit and Gurgaon. Philosophy is the logical apparatus that binds together the modern bourgeois disciplines. Taking a step back from the indoctrination that lies at the heart of the modern civilizing mission, we can appreciate how Euroamerican modernity, based on the triumph of the Protestant bourgeoisie over the old feudal order, involves a decisive shift towards the rule of a single class. Knowledge and the state reflect this concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Champions of Euroamerican modernity, however, exist in the non-West too. In societies as different as India and Egypt, the last eighteen months have seen strong movements led by the urban bourgeoisie to take over partial welfarist regimes and remake them in their own image. To label these movements "popular" and "national" uprisings is very much part of the game. Paid news and intellectuals have filled out newspapers and magazines with their rants against the corruption of the state. What we need is efficiency and transparency, they say, but what they do not say is that they want to redefine public interest vis-a-vis their own private interests. For this noble cause, it is not at all puzzling that new-age religious leaders and foreign-funded social entrepreneurs have joined hands. Neither is it puzzling that the proudly apolitical youth of Gurgaon and Cairo   have discovered the pleasures of collective effervescence in virtual worlds.

Monoarchy versus Polyarchy
Corruption, our new-age reformers tell us, is rife at the lower levels of the state, especially in the countryside.   By this, we must understand that the urban bourgeoisie in these postcolonial societies have little control over rural power dynamics. Particular ill-will has been directed in India, for example, against elected politicians in the government. They are not just corrupt, but criminals too. Instead of seeing these politicians as simply conduits or brokers in a larger con-game, they are being presented before us as the ringleaders. Of course, this is only to be expected when leading corporate houses fund the anti-corruption crusaders and award paid leave to their employees to facilitate protests. Tellingly, the corporate crusaders have offered an extra-constitutional solution in which they and those they handpick will have the power to override all elected and non-elected officialdom in the land. This is the ultimate prize: complete control of the state by a class in the ascendancy. Monoarchy, in short.

Needless to say, these designs have not been successful until date. Ultimately, their lack of success boils down to a single reason: the competition between the urban bourgeoisie and other sections of society in the domain of the state. In India, for instance, the upper-caste bourgeoisie are not so preponderant as to obliterate powerful rural and anti-capitalist interests. Multiple competing political interests acting in the name of "the people" and accusing each other of the worst possible crimes, thus remains the norm. Corruption is thriving, as it rightly should, in a polyarchic society in which the state becomes the site of myriad struggles for power and justice alike. The nature of modernity in these polyarchic societies refuses to be a mere replica of Euroamerican originals. Nor does a CCP-like party emerge to produce a prostrate public to do its bidding. The shift to a monoarchic social order remains a distant dream for our bourgeois reformers in the postcolony.

The battle is far from over yet. I fully expect the urban bourgeoisie to try harder next time, and co-opt a few farmers, barbers, and cooks to display their "democratic" commitments. I also expect them to work within the government to award bailouts to wealthy individuals and corporations rather than reserve them for "wasteful" social expenditures. Nonetheless, I am quite hopeful for the future. While capitalist interests may grow stronger, their social rivals are likely to match them blow for blow. Above all, one may repose faith in our common apathy and cynicism towards those who seek to reform us. What for, we ask, and how much is it worth to you? We can still see and point to the Emperor's nakedness in ways that our peers in the West have long lost. Two cheers for corruption, then? 

Being Middle Class in India

When we hear the term "middle class," we tend naturally to imagine the average or median person in a society. Roughly, we might justifiably believe that the term refers to a class of individuals earning an annual income roughly equal to or around the per capita GDP of a country. A large middle class has, since Aristotle, been seen as a key ingredient of a stable polity insofar as it balances competing societal interests. Moreover, a large and growing middle class is often seen as the sign of a healthy modern democracy.

In India, however, with an annual per capita income of roughly $1,200 (Rs. 55,000), the situation is rather different. To be middle class is not so much to be an average Indian in income terms, but to enjoy the status of a Western-educated professional and to consume a basket of commodities that comes with that status. For Americans studying Indian or South Asian society, this is puzzling or even odd. Yet Indians (or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis) rarely think critically about what it means to be middle class. Is it not bizarre that, after nearly 65 years of independence, Westernization remains the basis for being middle class in India?

To my mind, the only explanation for this state of affairs lies in the peculiar history of this class of men and women in the subcontinent. It is well-known that the social origins of this class lie in the colonial period when a class of professional men were inducted into the colonial bureaucracy as "babus" or clerks, and later, as civil servants in the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. As products of a Macaulyite education, they no longer received a "traditional" education in Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, but Western literary and scientific learning in English. Under the new system of education, correctly identifying the five causes for Clive's victory at Plassey or mimicking Macaulay's florid prose in an exam could hold the key to government jobs and social prestige. Rote-and-regurgitate represented the joint triumph of brahminism and colonialism in nineteenth-century India. Babus or clerks in the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy were certainly inferior to members of the provincial or the covenanted civil services. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers, too, joined middle-class ranks to sustain the fledgling civil society among the natives of the Presidencies. Above them were the ruling caste of white men and women; below them were the vast labouring populations of the subcontinent who lacked the "civility" to be part of the urban elite clubs of the day. "Middle" thus implied comprador more than median or average.

Postcolonial India inherited colonial civil society with its Westernized middle class. This is because the Gandhian nationalist movement did little to alter the class structure of Indian society; indeed, it concretized the deepest prejudices and injustices in late colonial India. In the 1950s, at the top were the IAS/IFS/IPS cadres, the armed forces, and a handful of well-to-do barristers, doctors, and professors; below them, babus, clerks and petty businessmen formed the lower middle class. The Nehruvian upper middle class basically assumed the privileges of the colonial ruling caste with much enthusiasm. "English rule without Englishmen," Gandhi had warned in Hind Swaraj, would simply mean retaining the tiger's nature after getting rid of the tiger per se. But that is, of course exactly, what Nehru and his ilk sought in their quest to put India on the world map. To compete with their former colonizers, India, they argued, ought to mimic and outdo them at their own game. To speak English fluently and to affect Western manners were usually enough to be a member of the privileged middle class across urban India. The actual incomes earned by these men (and they were usually men!) were nothing to boast about, but the prestige their status in society commanded could not be weighed in purely monetary terms. It would have been regarded as crass to unfavourably compare, for instance, an IAS officer's salary to the earnings of a well-to-do timber contractor or mill owner. Nehruvian India had no place for such crassness; its manners were impeccably English.

Capitalism itself, for the Nehrvian elite, was a dirty word. Science became the buzz word for the nation-builders who wished the state would control and regulate the economy and polity. Education, in the post-independence polity, meant a smattering of English education alongside large doses of mathematical, scientific and other technical formulae. Naturally, this kind of policy shift meant an expansion of the existing boundaries of the Indian middle class to incorporate the engineers who would build big dams and managers who would run public sector companies efficiently. Nehru, who had been a third-rate student of chemistry at Cambridge, had ironically made his name writing historical and political treatises. Yet he inaugurated a science-focused expansion of middle class India to buttress his socialist theory of government. The new techno-managerial parvenu class, however, lacked the social graces of their more Westernized contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. They, therefore, ended up being slotted between the upper and lower middle classes, envying the former and despising the latter. Although products of the new postcolonial programme of science, the techno-managerial middle class remained much attached to the "vernacular" modes of life they had left behind in their small towns and villages. Hostile towards the Westernized values and lifestyles of their social superiors, they fell back on an indigenous conservatism in habits and mores that emphasized their earthiness as much as their aspirations. Keen to overtake their Westernized superiors, the vernacular middle classes remained cheerlessly within the Nehruvian regime of socialism.

In response to Indira Gandhi's well-calculated populism, the vernacular middle classes were restless for social change. The Garibi Hatao agenda followed from solid Nehruvian foundations, yet it was compromised by the political alliances made by the Indira Congress in the states. When alternative leadership in the form of the Jan Sangh or parties led by rising middle-caste leaders such as Charan Singh emerged, they unsurprisingly caught the imagination of the vernacular middle classes. To speak as "the people" in one unanimous voice against a tyrannical government seemed to bring to mind the stratagems of Gandhian mass politics. The homegrown conservatism of those resentful of the Westernized Nehruvian middle class came to the fore in the JP movement of the mid-'70s. (The Nehruvian middle class, by contrast, tended to support the Emergency as a necessary evil: after all, trains ran on time, and corruption could be curbed.) It did not matter whether one's ideological convictions swayed left or right, because both could be accommodated in the fight against the tyranny of the Westernized woman and her cronies in power. The lower middle classes in cities as well as rural elites ended up as significant allies in the fight against the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi's government. When the Janata government came to power, it banned Coca-Cola and other Western evils because it ostensibly poisoned the young virile men and fecund women of India. Similarly, it opened diplomatic talks with China after Mao's death, a sharp departure from the foreign policy of the Westward-looking Congress regime. Swadeshi, not socialism, became the new buzzword for this short-lived foray by the new middle classes into mainstream politics in India.

Although the Janata government is a forgotten episode in Indian political history, it is worth looking back today to recognize the origins of contemporary middle-class politics in the late '70s. Swadeshi was always a charade that had gone too far. Soon, Sanjay Gandhi had given the middle classes the opportunity to buy Maruti cars manufactured with the assistance of Suzuki Motors in Japan. Then, with rising incomes in the '80s, came the opportunity to buy more goods made in India and abroad. Flourishing markets in smuggled and second-handed clothes, toys, food items, etc, found excited buyers among all those with the money to buy them. The country's import and forex restrictions remained hurdles though, until a cuddly Sardarji in a light blue turban cut loose the remaining shackles that bound the feet of the Indian middle class consumer. Looking every bit like the Air India Maharaja, he became, curiously enough, its very antithesis. Shackles cut and hurdles removed, middle class India set about accumulating wealth and goods sans ideology, morality or any of those old-fashioned words that held back their forefathers. Something like the gold rush had begun. Here was an opportunity to radically remake the class hierarchies of Nehruvian India, besides stomping out the last embers of its socialist ways. The Nehruvian middle classes, distinctly uncomfortable in this new milieu, made haste to follow the Brits outside the country, whether in racist America or Australia or in declining Britain and Europe. Those who remained tethered to Indian shores were forced to compete with those they regarded as their social inferiors, Hindiwallahs, Marathi manooses, Kannadigas, Punjabi refugees and others. Some won, some lost, the winners often ending up isolated as intellectual, artistic, and cultural elites. But the overarching story of the past two decades is the political and economic ascendancy of the growing vernacular middle classes in India.

The vernacular middle classes are not a homogeneous lot, of course. There are sharp gradations between earlier and later entrants to middle class ranks. Often enough, two generations of Western schooling still counts for twice the social privileges of someone with a single generation of formal rote learning. Sometimes, however, a bloke from the country sneaks up on his social superiors and beats them to the much-prized engineering programmes at an IIT. Or a small-town boy makes it big as an entrepreneur. These exceptions to the rule nonetheless do not threaten the overall class structure of urban India. Westernization today means American ways of speaking and living rather than the older colonial or English habits of the Nehruvian elite. The Westernized Indian settled in the US is now the envy of the Indian middle class family. Domestic imitations of the same occupy second place in the new caste system. Those below them lack the linguistic and cultural familiarity with contemporary Western ways, though they struggle to acquire it slowly but steadily.

A strong disdain for the rural and the folk unites the new Indian middle classes even as they experiment with new forms of conservatism and indigenism. Emerging as they do out of the Nehruvian vision of scientific high modernism, they retain a firm dislike towards these "backward" social formations. These are forms of life that must dissolve into the pages of history, not haunt the present and future of India. Pro-poor politics is seen as implicitly pro-poverty, which is how the legacy of Nehruvian socialism is interpreted today in middle class India. The Left is largely obsolete from this perspective. The Centre itself has shifted rightwards on the ideological spectrum. Virulent nationalism, instead of being the last resort of the scoundrel, is a badge of honour and pride. Nationalism requires a coherent cultural ideology, and Hindutva offers this. Hindutva is an alternative, as Savarkar cogently argued, to the everyday superstitions and stupidities of popular Hinduism over the ages. It is, at core, ruthlessly instrumental and modern in its rationality. Such a thoroughly secular ideology, indeed epistemology, dovetails nicely with the training of the techno-managerial modernist trained, ironically enough, in Nehruvian IITs and IIMs. National pride thus connotes Hindu civilizational pride, which necessarily entails a demonization of Muslims, Christians, and other marginalized social groups. Hindu pride also connotes a revival of older nationalistic idioms of virile masculinity and subservient femininity in the home and the world. Caste is treated as a matter of the past, even as virtually every Hindutva-approved marriage follows strict caste lines. The bizarre spectacle of caste- and region-specific matrimonial websites today thus ties the virtual world of Hindu conservatism with its everyday social realities.

Cloaking this conservative ideology is the virtuous appearance of being opposed to politics (anti-political"). After all, isn't the spiritual father of the contemporary middle classes, the Sardarji in the Blue Turban, the symbol of anti-politics? Politics, on this view, is not an activity that pits competing social interests and ideas against each other, but a corrupt, pernicious one that weakens and destabilizes the nation. The only kind of politics is thus anti-politics, which means technocracy in the language of what is now called "governance." Proper nationalistic political conduct takes the form of problem-solving. As good positivists, the  aim is to reduce the messy complexities of social problems into solvable problems. If adivasis are located atop valuable minerals, simply displace them at the earliest to acquire land for profitable and patriotic nation-building activities. In solving social problems so peremptorily, the prejudices of caste and creed themselves transparently. The rule of experts in technical domains of life correspond to the rule of new-age gurus in the private sphere. This is not so much a separation of the public and private, but one realm reinforcing another. It is commonplace today, therefore, for someone designing her house along the lines of Vastu Shastra to claim scientific validity for her action. The public slides into the private realm and vice-versa. Just as politics is debilitating in a polity, so too are divorce, homosexuality, liberated women, dalits, adivasis, Muslims, etc. To be anti-political is, therefore, to be above the conflicting claims and contestations that democracy inevitably throws up. It is, in other words, an authoritarian stance that is deeply wedded to the status quo and hostile to progressive social change.

The bulk of the middle classes in India today are new to these ranks, i.e., they have spent either a generation or two enjoying the social privileges of this class. The latest figures tell us that roughly 25-30% of India's 1.2 billion people are now middle class. Above them is a small slice of billionaires and millionaires (or arabpatis and crorepatis), and below are more than 70% of the country excluded at present from middle-class citizenship. The older colonial or Nehruvian middle classes continue to retain some of their social privileges in India and abroad, but they are increasingly drawn into competition with the nouveau riches. It is not always the case that the Nehruvians win these battles. Among those earning between Rs. 2.5 to10 lacs annually ($5,500 to 22,000), roughly four to sixteen times the per capita income, the Nehruvians are less than a fifth. Among those earning over Rs. 10 lacs ($22,000), the Nehruvians are even fewer, perhaps not even a tenth. The postcolonial middle classes thus consist overwhelmingly of those whose fortunes rely on techno-managerial and/or commercial occupations, social conservatism, and an "anti-political" political orientation.

It should hardly surprise us, therefore, when this class of people, probably no more than a fifth of the country's population, claims to speak for all of India in one voice. This sleight of hand is remarkable as much for its utter blindness to existing social realities as for its wholesome disdain for those below on the social ladder. We are India, nothing else matters. This is the new slogan of the contemporary middle classes in India. When, therefore, they come out onto the streets in support of Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption, do not be puzzled. Those whose have never known better are now gathered to direct public policy in accordance with their class interests. To subvert democracy in the name of democracy will be a fitting agenda for the contemporary middle classes. Hoisting up the bastard by his own petard, as it were. For such a class, the old ideological divisions of Left and Right matter no longer. Cultural nationalism seeks to paper over any social differences that might threaten the sacred nation and its boundaries. To win at all costs, as in cricket matches, is the only option. Welcome to this brave new world, my friends...

Thoughts on Teaching

Making the transition from student to teacher is not something one hears a lot about. Indeed, it is one of the many silences upon which academia thrives. One obvious reason is that most professors at top research universities do not care about teaching. The other is the notion that teaching skills develop with experience, so there's not a great deal that can be shared or taught to those teaching in their early years. To top it off, we often hear that it's all a matter of style and taste anyway. 

At Yale, much like at other universities, all three reasons justify the deafening silence over teaching. It is true that mandatory workshops facilitate conversations among teaching assistants of varying levels of seniority. But in these workshops and outside, a revealing dynamic of "us" versus "them" becomes most apparent. Ph.D students frequently speak of undergraduates as if they are an inferior species, a protected one though. Mostly, the problem here is jealousy. Why do they get so much attention here? How can they, unlike us, have so much fun? And when it's not jealousy, it's sheer pedantry. How could they not know about that article that my adviser asked me to read last week? Why am I teaching kids who don't know Derrida by heart? For these reasons, most graduate student conversations about teaching are, to my mind, damningly unhelpful. 

At a recent workshop organized by the Graduate Writing Center, I repeatedly heard about the need to "manage one's relationship with undergraduate students." A curious phrase, I wondered. Do the speakers "manage" all of their relationships? What would such a social world look like? Pretty dismal, I imagine. That's because all relationships, I think, rest on a two-way street on which trust and empathy ply. In the typical student-teacher relationship, there's something beyond a contractual bond (or a fellowship requirement). It is far easier to engage ideas and hone critical intellectual skills in an atmosphere of friendliness, trust, and empathy than in a stultified professional one.  Minimally, such an atmosphere goes beyond the classroom. It means getting to know students as individuals with distinct likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses that reveal themselves in class and on assignments. It also means getting them to know your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. You cannot just "manage" your way through teaching as if you were a professional zombie. 

But there is more. Students value teachers who are in total command over the course material and can communicate it in the simplest manner possible. It is, after all, a hierarchical relationship, not one between equals. At the very least, students expect someone who demonstrates thorough knowledge over the teaching material. I cannot see this as an unfair expectation. If I paid 40,000 dollars per year to go to college, each course costs me roughly 5,000 dollars. Besides this solid economic reason, there's also the small matter of college being a place of learning. And students want to not just try out new ideas, subjects, and skills, but want to be free to make mistakes along the way. Learning is an interactive process. We can all remember our favorite teachers who made it worth going to class every time. Why don't we try to emulate what they did right then? 

The answer, I'd like to suggest, has to do almost entirely with the professionalizing tendencies in academic life today. By professionalization, I mean a form of commodification of academic labor, which can be ranked hierarchically according to where one's Ph.D granting institution, place of work, citation index ranking, and number of publications. As graduate students are groomed to take their place in professional academia, they naturally imbibe the bad habits of their professors. At least one professor in my department has been known to say that it pays to be a bad teacher. This is careerism, that classic bourgeois malaise we once assumed lay outside the groves of academia. 

For graduate students, the obvious implication of careerism is to "know the relevant literature" than know about a particular subject. Jargon-free communication of one's ideas and insights is besides the point. It's hardly surprising that, anyone buying into the dominant ideology of graduate school today is a pretty miserable human being. The poor graduate student, walled up in the ivory tower, lacks any meaningful sense what's going on outside. A needless cynicism takes root and is the necessary companion of the professional-in-the-making. 

I once assumed anthropologists were among the few academics who ventured out of campus sufficiently often to acquire a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Alas, now I find that they are prone to bouts of messianism, in which old prophets such as Foucault and Deleuze are replaced by the likes of Agamben and Zizek. Immersion in lifeworlds other than one's own is unfashionable. One can "explain" anecdotes collected from the "field" with one's favorite theorist in hand. This is divination, the misguided idea that a prophet or his teachings can show us the true way. Faced with such humbug, the joy of learning dies an unnatural death. What can one teach others if one's own learning is restricted to imbibing the ideas of the latest prophet on the block? 

The graduate student thus emerges as a beleaguered being, alienated from the world of which the undergraduate is very much a part. Teaching is no more than a chore. One can never approach it enthusiastically. Or engage with students without "managing" one's relationship with them. Undergraduates are there to be looked down upon contemptuously. This entire attitude, I think, short-circuits the college education process. Furthermore, it impoverishes graduate student life even further. 

Instead of ending on a dire note, let me do so with an email sent by a student of mine at the end of the fall semester. It encapsulates all the points I've made thus far. And more crucially, it gives us every reason to take teaching seriously:

On 14 December 2010 02:07, (name and email address omitted) wrote:

Uday,

As I began to express to you as I was leaving the exam today, there is no way for me to accurately articulate my gratitude to you for your devotion and patience with me this semester. I read over my first and last papers after the test, and I have to say, the missing link between the two is the endless help and guidance that you have given me throughout the semester. From the beginning of the semester when I got that first paper back, I told myself that Political Philosophy was going to be the class that I spend the most time on, because writing has historically been my weakness. Having now achieved this goal, I can say confidently that you were the best teacher that I could had had to help me with my aspiration. You challenged me to participate in class, make thoughtful comments, and ultimately translate those thoughts onto paper. For me, what separated this class from all the others is that when I would get a paper assignment, I wouldn’t bemoan the task ahead of me, but rather I would get excited at the notion of having another opportunity to have my writing critiqued, edited and improved.

The single-handed most impressive and important part of my working with you this semester was that you were seemingly just as committed as I was to improving me as a writer. In the past, when I have met with my teachers with writers block or other problems, they would take five to ten minutes and try to point me in a direction that they thought would be helpful. However, when I wouldn’t understand something, the response that I commonly received was, “That’s for you to figure out,” leaving me somewhat unsatisfied with our time spent. With you, however, our meetings lasted sometimes an hour a half. You struck the balance of making me understand exactly what I needed to do to be successful, but at the same time leaving enough room for me to be creative with my thinking. This method was instrumental to my truly enjoying writing. For the first time in my academic career, I really felt that I was able to master the analytical and writing skills that are required for writing a paper.

Regardless of my grade on the final or in the class, I know that I am walking away from this class a better writer, thinking, and analyst. Whereas most classes hope to provide you with some knowledge to take with you into the future, I have gained not only the knowledge of political philosophy, but also the understanding a confidence to write and analyze.

Like I said, there is absolutely no way for me to do justice to express my gratitude to you, so I figured that a letter would be the best alternative.

Have a safe flight and a good break, and hopefully see you next semester.

(Name omitted to ensure confidentiality)

The Ugliness of the Indian Cricket Fan

Consider the following excerpt from the chat client of an online cricket streaming website:

Desi_dude: INDIA WILL WIN TODAY!!!
Maakichoot: Sachin n Sewag will score century
ABC: bharat mata ki jai...angrezon ki gaand maro!
PakiBoy: Losers...totally overrated team.
Maakichoot: ur country is a loser...fuck off pig
Desi_dude: I WILL FUCK U SISTER PAKIBOY!!!

This exchange will sound typical for anyone who follows live cricket online. Now and then, the moderator intervenes to kick out someone from the chat room. But more often than not, such exchanges continue unabated on one side of your screen until you turn off the chat client. I certainly turn it off whenever I watch cricket. But that does not shut me out from the wider set of exchanges among Indian cricket fans that circulate in the virtual and real worlds. It must be admitted that I take a perverse interest in these exchanges, but only because they regularly demonstrate to me the ugliness of the modern Indian cricket fan, and more generally, the depressingly disgusting nature of metropolitan Indian life today.

After all these years of watching cricket, it is clear to me that most online viewers are males between 18 and 35. They watch mainly the games that India play. Usually, they cheer for boundaries and sixers. Occasionally, the bowlers receive praise, though they usually cop as much abuse as the opposition. Statistics offer solace and a sense of community: how else would you know that Virender Sehwag missed Gary Kirsten's record for the highest score by a batsman in a World Cup by fourteen runs? The slightest provocation, real or imagined, invites a torrent of four-letter words directed at Pakistan. English or Australian or South African teams fare slightly better for these young male viewers, partly because they offer alluring models of sporting success and partly because most of these viewers live in one of these countries or the US/Canada. Abuse invariably takes traditional North Indian forms of expression: mothers and sisters feature prominently, of course. Graphic descriptions of the female sexual anatomy, similarly, become the canvass for projecting fantasies of rape. Sexual aggression is closely allied to fervent nationalism: to win is to rape one's opponent's mothers and sisters. To win repeatedly implies total domination of others. This is, therefore, the goal of the typical online cricket viewer.

It seems easy to diagnose what's wrong here. These kids, some would say, need to be taught some manners. But I have no doubt that these viewers are lovely, well-mannered middle-class youth studying or working to further their mundane ambitions. And by their own admission, they eat and breathe cricket. Moreover, they view themselves as patriots defending the nation's pride at every opportunity. Their parents and families are surely proud of them. And they will grow up to be successful at work and financially. So what's wrong then? Am I just being curmudgeonly? Perhaps, but I'd argue that jingoistic nationalism stands for a wider malaise in modern India, and its implications for sports and life are equally pernicious.

Jingoistic nationalism is arguably the bane of modern sport. Orwell wrote of "war minus the shooting." But a tough sporting contest does resemble a war to its participants and a gladiatorial battle for spectators. It is only when politics that matter little to the sporting contest enter the fray that things get ugly. It is purely a matter of historical contingency that nation-states exist and that too in their present forms. The West Indies are not even a nation-state. England competes on its own instead of calling itself Great Britain. Both India and Pakistan have split into separate nations and cricket teams. Where is the need to get so riled up over national identities and rivalries? The IPL T20 tournament, modeled on the English Premier League, is divided into ten franchises, each associated with an Indian city. Supporting one's favorite cricketers across cities is commonplace there. Yet the Indian cricket team is the object of endless praise and ridicule, agony and ecstasy.

This paradoxical state of affairs is understandable only if we see the wider context for nationalist assertion over the past decade or so. The idea that India is a global superpower-in-the-making haunts the urban imagination. There is a restlessness, bordering on insanity, that desires a never-ending stream of glory and wealth. The metropolitan Indian obsession with the national GDP and its growth rate are worth noting in this regard. There are global cricket rankings, much like there are global GDP rankings, and success is defined narrowly as rising up the rankings. The anxieties and insecurities of the rising middle classes in urban India thus get projected onto sport. Personal anxieties intertwine with national ones, and a toxic mix is produced indeed.  For those living outside India, the problem is even more acute: the louder and more brashly one expresses one's love for one's country/culture/civilization, the more nationalistic one imagines oneself to be. A seamless garment knits together personal aspirations and anxieties with the desire to assert civilizational pride and national success. Do not be surprised to hear about "black Madrasis," "Habshis," or "Aussie convicts" when watching cricket. They are part and parcel of the new Indian identity: vulgar, insecure, and rotten to the core.

The wider post-liberalization context of jingoistic nationalism in India today goes far beyond Orwell's notion of sports as a kind of war between nations. This is because it rests fundamentally on the sexual insecurities of young men who band together to participate in exhibitions of hyper-masculinity. Try watching a cricket match with a bunch of men in their 20s, and you'll know what I mean. "Mardangi" (masculinist assertion) holds the key to understanding the cricket fan's love of the motherland. For, in this view of nationalism, fighting for the nation means fighting for one's mother and land simultaneously. Logically, this kind of nationalism means destroying others' mothers and lands. Cricket victories are analogous to rapes and imperial conquests. All three terms (victory, rape, conquest) are used interchangeably in popular parlance. Asserting national pride goes hand in hand with a deep fear of what might happen if one were to lose a cricket match. Effigies are burned, cricketers are stoned, and their parents' homes vandalized or burned. Losing a match is akin to betraying one's nation and mother. The traitors must be punished for their crimes.

These extreme responses suggest deep-seated and unresolved sexual tensions in the minds of the male cricket fan. The graphic descriptions of the female body and violent sexual activity suggest more than a passing familiarity with the standard modes of pornographic representation of women. They represent a deep personal sense of sexual frustration/persecution or a thwarted desire to master the female body. The chasm between unsatiated lust and boundless desire accounts largely for the sexual politics of the jingoistic cricket fan. Winning is experienced as a bodily pleasure that partially offsets the frustrations of everyday life. The self and nation thus get braided together, and the desire for sexual recognition gets caught up with the quest for national glory in cricket and much else. The basic dictum for the Indian cricket fan thus appears to be "do unto others before they do unto you." In short, let's conquer the opponent on and off the field before they do the same to us.

When cricket or any sport is reduced to a mere assertion of jingoistic nationalism, does it really matter intrinsically? Can one really be so intent on personal/national conquest and yet admire a freakish leg-break or a sumptuous cover drive? I doubt it. The modern fan's experience of cricket is mediated more by statistics than ever before. This is obviously so for those who follow cricket in the form of text commentary on Cricinfo or the BBC. But even for those who watch on television, stats are constantly shoved down one's throat, but the viewers demand even more. Sehwag's average or Harbhajan's strike-rate have now become common knowledge. In an age of player auctions, these statistics are also an "objective" basis for evaluating cricketers. When I cast my mind back a couple of decades ago to the days of Mohinder Amarnath and Sunil Gavaskar, I shudder to think what might have occurred if those players were judged solely by their batting strike-rates or averages. Or if Ian Chappell's captaincy could be compared decisively to Clive Lloyd's after reducing both of them to a set of "objective" numbers. Statistics have always mattered in cricket, even in the nineteenth century, but they did not serve until recently as the principal basis for evaluating cricketers or experiencing the sport. And woebetide us all for the blight that rots our imaginations and blinds us to the many pleasures of the game.

All sport is, ultimately, a metaphor for life. It is meaningful only within the context of rules that seem entirely arbitrary and nonsensical to those who do not follow the sport. The virtues of fair play, courage, concentration, cunning, skill, athleticism, and leadership, to name only a few, are inextricably tied to sports. Cricket has arguably been an exemplar of sporting virtues insofar as its Victorian origins and colonial provenance made it a model of moral conduct long ago. As Thomas Arnold, the schoolmaster at Rugby told Tom Brown a century and a half ago, cricket is more than a sport, it's an institution. Cricket is a demanding game for a viewer. There are many moving parts, so to speak, and for the most part, the movement is rather slow. The extraordinary feat or heroic performance is the exception to the humdrum rhythms of bat and ball. Cricket's rules, too, are perhaps more complex than any other sport. Try teaching cricket to an American, and you will realize soon that the game is meant for men and women of higher intellectual qualities. This does not, of course, make it a patrician affair, since the plebs have always taken a keen interest in outdoing their social superiors at batting and bowling alike. As one social historian put it, had the French noblesse played cricket with their serfs, they would not have had their chateaux burnt. If sport is a metaphor for life, then cricket is a most intricate metaphor to unravel.

Still, millions have unravelled the metaphor of cricket. The English aristocracy has always had a tender spot for the underdog, so it is hardly surprising that cricket has never been an exclusively bourgeois sport. Working-class Englishmen, and later, colonials in the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent partook of the myriad joys of the game. To deceive one's colonial masters with a well-bowled googly or to impress the patricians at Lord's with a century has always been a key part of the game. It is wrong to believe that the spread of the game to the postcolonial world has rid cricket of its peculiar virtues. It has only broadened the range of skills and talents exhibited on the cricket field. It is hard to imagine cricket today, for instance, without the definitive contributions of the West Indian teams of the 1970s and 1980s. In India, the spread of the game beyond a small princely elite have given us the likes of Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble, and Mohammed Azharuddin. Most of our cricketers today come from fairly humble backgrounds, outside the big metropolitan cities, and work hard to hone their cricketing skills and achieve fame for their exploits on the field.

My own introduction to cricket came from a man born and raised in Bankura in West Bengal, who came to work in Calcutta, as it was called then, and kept alive his passion for the game by transmitting it to others such as myself. Joydeb knew the value of Dean Jones' quick singles, David Gower's stylish on-drives or Inzamam's towering sixes. He knew the personal idiosyncrasies of every player even before he had set eyes on them on television. Radio commentary had told him all he needed to do about Richards' imperious manner or Srikkanth's twitchy nose. Once, on a trip to Eden Gardens, he had found himself surrounded by nearly a hundred thousand  Bengalis cheering wildly for Kapil and Azhar. He couldn't make out most of what happened on the field, but he remembered Chris Lewis, the forgotten English all-rounder outdo the much-touted Pringle and Botham with a century and a bagful of wickets. It reminded him, he said, of the manner in which he had imagined Alvin Kallicharan sent the hapless Indian bowlers on a leather hunt all those years ago. On another occasion, Joydeb despaired that the rain-rule in one-day games needed to be revised drastically so that it could be a fairer contest for the team batting second. He rued the 1992 World Cup semi-final between South Africa and England as a classic example of justice denied. And he despaired that Kapil Dev had prolonged his career needlessly to overtake Richard Hadlee's bowling record.

Richie Benaud or Neville Cardus could not have understood the game better. Joydeb knew and loved the game without malice or contempt for anyone. I sometimes wonder nowadays what he might have made of the IPL or T20 cricket more generally. I cannot tell, to be honest. But I do know that he'd have detested the ugly jingoism that the Indian fan brings to the game today. It is true that he enjoyed an Indian victory on the back of some fine performances by his favorite players, Kapil and Azhar. But it did not happen often, less so outside India. To see, however, Viv Richards or Shane Warne in action was, for him, a marvel to behold. That men could push the frontiers of possibility by batting or bowling the way Richards or Warne did, seemed to him to be the primary reason for following the sport. No matter what we do or how much we earn, there is an unspeakable sense of exhilaration every time one's hero comes to bat or bowl. Words cannot capture what the mind and heart do instinctively. In those brief, flickering moments, the world comes alive with wondrous possibilities, and all else is forgotten. But when the hero is caught at slip or smashed for six, you sigh and realize they -- and you -- are mortal, after all. Therein lies the magic of sport. I can only feel sorry for those who can never experience it. 

Sheela ki Jawaani ka Bhaavaarth

प्रस्तुत उत्तेजक गीत हिन्दी फिल्म जगत के नवीनतम रत्न 'तीस मार खान' से लिया गया है. यह गाना नायिका के संगमरमर जैसे शरीर से आकर्षित होने वालेलंगोट के ढीले पुरुषों पर नायिका की अपमानजनक प्रतिक्रया को व्यक्त करता है. नायिका उन्हें सीधे और कटु शब्दों में बताना चाहती है कि शीशे के पीछे रसगुल्ले कीख्वाहिश करना एक बात है और उसे चखना दूसरी बात!

I know you want it

But you never gonna get it

Tere haath kabhi na aani

Maane na maane koi duniya

Yeh saari, mere ishq ki hai deewani

गाने की शुरुआत नायिका के ईमानदारीपूर्ण वक्तव्य से होती है. वो जानती है कि इन मर्दों को उसकी भावनाओं, दिल और प्रेम से कोई सरोकार नहीं. वो तो बसएक ही चीज चाहते हैं. पर वो उन्हें मिलने वाली नहीं. उन्हें मुंह में भर आये पानी से ही अपनी प्यास बुझानी होगी. दुर्भाग्यपूर्ण, परन्तु सत्य.

Hey hey, I know you want it

but you never gonna get it

Tere haath kabhi na aani

Maane na maane koi duniya

yeh saari Mere ishq ki hai deewani

Ab dil karta hai haule haule se

Main toh khud ko gale lagaun

Kisi aur ki mujhko zaroorat kya

Main toh khud se pyaar jataun

नायिका पुनः दर्जनों पुरुषों में उसके प्रति जगी वासना पर प्रकाश डालती है. वो अपने आस-पास मंडराते छिछोरों को बताती है कि उनकी दाल नहीं गलने वाली. परसाथ ही यहाँ नायिका के व्यक्तित्व का एक और पक्ष उजागर होता है.

सौंदर्य से जागृत अहंकार का पक्ष. वो अपनी सुन्दरता से इतनी प्रभावित है कि उसे किसी पुरुष की ज़रुरत नहीं. वो अपने अन्दर की स्त्री के लिए खुद ही पुरुष बनजाना चाहती है. अब इसे अहंकार की पराकाष्ठा कहें या आत्म-प्रेम की मादकता!

what's my name

what's my name

what's my name

My name is Sheela

Sheela ki jawani

I'm just sexy for you

Main tere haath na aani

Na na na sheela

Sheela ki jawani

I'm just sexy for you

Main tere haath na aani

अब नायिका अपना परिचय देती है. अपना नाम बताती है. और नाम भी ऐसा जो बूढ़ी नसों के लिए वायाग्रा का काम करे. उनमें यौवन का झंझावात ला दे. नाम बताने के साथ वो यह भी बताती है कि वो बहुत ही ज़्यादा सेक्सी है. अपने मुंह मियाँ मिट्ठू. पर इस आत्म-प्रशंसा में भी अहंकार की सुगंध है. वो खुद को इतना ज़्यादा सेक्सी बताती है कि वो सबकी पहुँच से बाहर है. एक ऐसे चन्द्रमा की तरह जिसकी चांदनी तो सबको उपलब्ध है, पर उस चाँद को छूकर उसे महसूस करना किसी के बस की नहीं. यहाँ यह सिद्ध होता है है किनायिका सौंदर्य की साधक ही नहीं, बल्कि अहंकार से भरी चुड़ैल भी है.

Take it on

Take it on

Take it on

Take it on

अब नायिका सीधे शब्दों में चुनौती देती है. एक ऐसी चुनौती जो शायद मर्दों में शराब के बिना भी साहस ला दे.

Silly silly silly silly boys

O o o you're so silly

Mujhe bolo bolo karte hain

O o oHaan jab unki taraf dekhun,

baatein haule haule karte hain

Hai magar, beasar mujh par har paintra

अब नायिका उनका उपहास करती है. उन्हें मूर्ख कहकर पुकारती है. उन्हें ज़लील करती है. वो मर्द नायिका के बारे में गुप-चुप बातें कर सकते हैं, पर उसकेसामने जुबां नहीं खोल पाते. वासना<