"Brennt Paris?"

Was watching the movie "Is Paris Burning?" today. After having read the book, the film was, obviously, a let down. But there was this series of dialogues that caught my attention.

Von Choltitz was the Nazi Governor of Paris who disobeyed Hitler's orders to destroy the city, for which he was called "The Savior of Paris" and was revered by the French. It is well known that if not for him, Paris, as we know it, would not exist and would be ruined just like another Warsaw.

A ceasefire has been brokered between the Germans (under Choltitz) and the French resistance by the Consul of Sweden. This ceasefire was, again, done without Hitler's knowledge. In this scene, Choltitz is talking to members of the French resistance about their breach of the terms of the ceasefire.

Choltitz (On the French Officials entering his room where the Consul of Sweden is also present) : I suppose you know the Swedish Consul, Herr Nordling. Thanks to his efforts, we arranged a truce which, up to now, has cost the lives of 200 German soldiers.

French Official : As a representative of General De Gaulle's provisional government, I protest against our arrest in the midst of the cease-fire. We are just contacting our people to make sure they respected it.

C : In your car, my guards discovered a proclamation that was designed to provoke the city of Paris to revolt. I don't see how you maintain you're respecting the cease-fire and then make vicious attacks on our men right in front of our faces!

F : I'm a member of the French Government in Exile and I won't permit you to question my word of honor! The circular in the car was a proclamation that had been revoked.

C : In that case, why did your men shoot at our soldiers?

F : You command an army of regulars. When you give an order, your men obey it. The Resistance is an alliance of many movements, and I don't control them all.

C : The Communists, for example?

F : Our ranks include both Communists and anti-Communists. Now we're all battling against a common enemy.

C : You can make among yourselves all the politics that you want! Only you must not shoot at my soldiers!

F : If you would like to finish these incidents, stop sending out your patrols.

Now, few would find anything wrong with what the French Official said, including the statement highlighted in bold. Let us look at the context - the Germans have forcefully, through war, occupied France; the French resistance, as claimed by the official, is a bunch of teams of people agitated by the oppressive occupation, craving for liberation, for seeing themselves controlling their capital, for seeing their flag atop their public buildings.

Now consider a present day analogy. The Israelis have forcefully occupied non-Israeli lands; the Palestinian resistance, along with the democratically elected Hamas, is a bunch of teams of people agitated by the unjust occupation, illegal encroachment, craving for independence and statehood, for seeing themselves controlling their land, for seeing their flag and nation recognized by the Israelis.

If the French Official could justify sporadic breaches of ceasefire on the pretext of lack of control, why are the Palestinians deprived of that justification? It is suggested (and accepted even) that it was Israel, with reference to Operation Cast Lead, that broke the ceasefire and not Hamas. But even if you discard that, if you support the Israeli assault on Gaza, would you not have to support the Nazi occupation and endorse the planned destruction of Paris? Or if you supported the French resistance against the illegal German occupation, would you not have to support the Palestinian resistance against the illegal Israeli occupation?

Governance

If we accept the constraints of a civilized world, we enter the realm of laws. For laws to be useful, they must be enforced. Who then is to be entrusted with law enforcement? A subset of all people need to be. This subset is the government. How is the government constituted? In different ways. In social animals other than man, it is primarily the most powerful few within a community, e.g. alpha-males in most species of monkeys and apes. In man, it probably started out in a similar way. But today, there are numerous ways in which governments are constituted. Perhaps the most civilized among them is democracy.

Governments are then necessary to uphold the liberties of the people it governs to guarantee assurances of civility. In civics, this would go by the term rights of the people. In turn, the people themselves are accountable, the corresponding term in civics being duties. Both these go hand-in-hand, and there cannot be one of these protected in the absence of the other. The government, in the interest of protecting equality of men, must be blind to differences in sex, religion, caste, etc. in protecting the rights of its people. In turn, the people, in the interest of maintaining civility, are expected to perform their duties as and when required.

Governments are essentially in place to manage affairs concerning its people. Things are efficient when they are hierarchical. Subdivision allows each individual entity to focus on one particular topic, and a co-ordinated working of these entities ultimately results in the whole system achieving its diverse goals. The hierarchy allows for subdivision of the responsibilities of the system--think of division of responsibilities between parents in a family, between departments in a company, between teams within a department in a company, or more abstractly as division of functions between different structures of a website (database handling, content handling, markup handling etc.), or as division of a proof of a theorem into lemmas, or selection by nature of specialized organ systems in organisms--hierarchies are efficient.

Governments are organized, usually called separation of powers--in India's case (thanks to the Britons), into the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. I will not go into this here. By hierarchies of governments, I mean the division of responsibilities between government bodies at different levels--within a locality, in a city, district, state, country, internationally. Note that this particular hierarchical structure is neither how governments first came into being, nor necessarily how they are today, but what makes most sense to me. In other words, in my opinion, the existence of an international government is essential for civilization.

Since the government is an artificial construct created by us to sustain civilization, it is only reasonable to expect people to be able to actively participate in it, which is why democracy is the most sensible form of governance. Further, since the government is itself artificial, the boundaries on which its subdivisions are defined are themselves artificial. That is to say that geographical entities like cities, states and countries are mere tools in assisting governance--nothing more, nothing less. Of course there are differences between people from different states in terms of language, culture, traditions, religious beliefs etc. But so is the case between people, e.g. from the circuit design and the signal processing departments of Qualcomm in terms of expertise, interests etc. There is also an allegiance to one's city/state/country of origin. Just as there is an allegiance of a person to his team, to his department within his company. Constructs like countries, therefore, exist to efficiently maintain civilization and it is important to always remember that these constructs do not supersede the universal goals of civilization. Humanity--the protection of universal human rights--should never be superseded by nationality, or communalism, or regionalism, etc. Boundaries are the means to an end. The end being civilization. The means shouldn't themselves become ends, and should never displace the actual end. Note that while it might be true that historically, the rise of nation states was never hypothesized as expressed here, the global notion here is absolutely essential in the globalized world of today. It forms the centerpiece of civilization, as we understand it.

As accepted earlier, people from different places are different. And these differences are not necessarily hindrances to a global civilization. A representative international democracy will debate various issues and arrive at a consensus on a few fundamental rights that are to be upheld globally. So also will they decide on the few basic duties and responsibilities of each country. Apart from these basic requirements, all further laws of a country will be determined only by the people of that country. And a similar methodology will apply at each hierarchical level of the democracy. International laws cannot be meddled with by lower hierarchies. This need not be the case for national or state laws.

Patriotism would, even in this setting, be important. However, the concept would be different in a fundamental way. It would not be synonymous with believing in Saare jahaan se accha. Neither would it have glorified (and stupid) notions of blind allegiance to the country irrespective of what it does. But, it would be a simple acknowledgment of the fact that the society one lives in determines, to a great extent, the quality of one's life. That the standard of living depends on the prosperity of the society, on the alleviation of social evils (poverty, casteism, linguistic fundamentalism, communalism, racism etc.), on the prevalence of peace in the society. And realising the importance of one's volunteerism in establishing and helping enforce laws where necessary, and one's duties in the actual functioning of the state.

Civilization**

Man is an animal. Man should therefore have begun life like an animal. Wild animals, as we all know, are "wild". They lead "wild" lives. Wild lives are random, unpredictable -- a buffalo in a forest is unsure of seeing itself through the day, a young lion is unsure of not being eaten by an adult, a snow leopard is unsure of its efforts bearing fruit, a whale is unsure of whether its migration will be trouble-free...

Man, to a much larger extent than other animals, is also intelligent. To him, the aforementioned randomness in life is unsettling, unacceptable even. He is social. He is civil. Therefore, through his intelligence, he has been able to artificially impose rules that attempt to remove the uncertainties in everyday-life. These rules, like any others, are restrictive--they curb some of his freedom. But this is a meagre price to be paid for the assurances offered in return--can you imagine everyone being free enough to do what they want, so much so that you are constantly required to guard yourself from predators? Or a world with no conception of crime? Can you accept not being compensated for your hard work? Are you willing to risk walking through enemy territory to reach somewhere? Overwhelming "No"'s, I am sure. So, I underscore the fact that we accept these rules, neither because our predecessors have imposed them on us nor because we don't find an alternative, but because we tacitly understand that they are necessary. Necessary for civility, for peace. These restrictions, ironically enough, are essential for our freedom to do other things, to do things that interest us, to allow us to find goals other than the basic biological goals, all the while being assured that everyone will follow the rules. These inhibitions liberate us to find meaning and purpose in our lives, where neither exists. It is this system--where people found a way to live beyond the wild existence, while paying but a small price in terms of rules--that I call civilization.

The Americans often boast of being "leaders of the free world". Of America being the place where "equality of all men" was first upheld as an ideal. But, in my opinion, we all upheld this as an ideal a long time ago, perhaps the first time was when, in the course of evolution, the first social beings arose. For, accepting the restrictions referred to in the previous paragraph requires an inherent okaying of equality of men. Or else, if I believed I were better than the rest, why would I accept limitations to my freedom? So those social animals--those chimps*, if you will--are the real leaders of the free world. This is against the theory of the selfish gene, articulated best by Richard Dawkins. But I think that it was with this egalitarian concept that intelligence started to trump genes. Civilization then, was an unintended consequence of evolution. But as influencing factors, civilization superseding evolution is what makes man man.

But, what constitutes the set of restrictions that can be called civilization and what not? Where do we draw the line? What about liberty--after all, it appears before equality in the motto of the French revolution? Well, the necessity of restrictions is to avoid confrontation, to enable amiable relationships. It was accepted with the understanding that certain wants of people might conflict with those of others, in which case, each party claiming the want has an equal footing. Therefore, wherever possible, these wants must be shared equally. In other words, each person gets what he wants only to an extent to which any other person with the same want gets what he wants, i.e. wants of people are to be met so as to not deny wants of others. Obviously, this rule is very simplistic and one can concoct complex situations wherein the above rule might fail to solve the problem. Nevertheless, this serves as a good starting point. Simply put, as long as you don't hurt anyone you are free to pursue your wants. So, I suppose that when one is confronted with a question of whether a certain thing is the right thing to do, one can safely substitute that with the question of whether doing so would hurt anyone, or equivalently, whether civilization is possible if everyone else also does the same. To the extent allowed by these questions, we are all free.

* To give a name, I don't literally mean chimpanzees. It could be prokaryotic organelles, for all I care.
** What is written down here is my present thought. I would expect myself to revise this if and when I found the need to do so. I will try to do so with explanations for the changes.

Superstition

The idea of presenting logical arguments against superstition might sound absurd. And it is. But to hell with that.

My claim is that superstitious people are racists. Here's the argument.

Actually, before the argument itself, let me give a broad, vague definition of the word "racism". Here, I am using the word to mean a belief that a subset of people are superior to the rest in some sense. Lots of further definitions might be necessary to make precise what I mean, but I am in no mood to go into semantic pedantry.

If you believe in a superstition, you must also consider yourself and a set of people who are similarly superstitious superior to "distant people". By "similarly superstitious", I mean others who have the same superstitious belief. And by "distant people", I mean people from the world around who do not share your culture, belief-system.

Now, I think that there are superstitions that are experiential. These are also results of the (often irrational) human tendency to search for causation of events experienced. You're watching a cricket match where the team you are supporting is winning - you change your seat and they end up losing - there is a tendency to associate the two independent events, which is superstition. I will disregard these "causative superstitions".

But then there are other superstitions that are engrained into minds of people by the culture or belief-system of the people around them -- waking up on the right (usually, the right) side of the bed, "touch wood" etc would fall into this category, which for convenience, I shall call "cultural superstition". Very few (almost none) cultural superstitions are universal. But, there is always a presumed reasoning behind these things. Whether the reason is itself known or not, the existence of the reasoning is accepted -- "People were not crazy to make up things with no reason" would probably be a reply to questioning these. There is also a predisposed greatness of the people who've actually figured these out. So, in this sense, there is pride of this knowledge.

You have cultural superstitions -- you know not everyone in the world believe in it -- so, either you believe that not believing will nullify its effect, in which case, you can nullify the effect on yourself by not believing, and you are rid of cultural superstitions -- or, you believe the distant people are stupid to have not figured it out yet, to be suffering as a consequence of it and to not have correlated cause with effect; and your race is superior for it has done these things -- you are a racist.

As an aside, I think the ultimate, most annoying argument against someone arguing against superstitions is to claim that he/she is superstitious about arguing for superstition.

Loyalty vs. skepticism

We humans have the problem of being biased in favour of something if we have been involved in it for a while. It is pretty hard, and requires a lot of guts, to get out of something we are already involved in, if and when there is evidence to counter our belief in some other thing that is necessary to continue doing that thing. This is most commonly referred to as loyalty, and most often considered good.

And therein lies the cause of most problems. Being loyal to my family makes me blind to its blemishes. Being loyal to my religion makes me tolerate its bigotries. Loyalty to my traditions makes me oversee their historical misinterpretations and exploitations that continue to have an impact today; to my employer makes me disbelieve his / her / its shortcomings that doesn't directly affect me; to my country makes me insensitive to its atrocities; to my ideas makes me incapable of figuring out my bias.

The more the time we spend in doing something, the more we want to believe that thing to be right, the more vehement our support for it, the more biased we are, the more time we spend doing that thing.

Skepticism, then, is the only hope. But if we are skeptical of everything, then what are we but skeptics? And if I am skeptical of skepticism, am I a skeptic or am I not?

Swayam-na-vadhu

I have always hated and vehemently opposed "reality shows". Come on! The name is itself an oxymoron - "reality" is something that doesn't happen in a "show". But, somehow these shows manage to garner a lot of public attention. Whether it is for ruining kids' lives by subjecting them to unwarranted, extremely critical, rebuttals of performances aimed at increasing ratings; or trained judges opposing each other just for the heck of opposing, bringing their idiosyncrasies and idiotic theories to the fore, to give the audience a laugh, again at the expense of the contestant. Or the controversy arousing game show where no one knows whether there is a lie detector or the lie detector is nothing but a sensation maximising device, which makes me wonder how a sane person would choose to contest - to be ridiculed on the one hand, or humiliated on the other -- really, it is a lose-lose situation for the celebrity contestant, amply exemplified by Vinod Kambli.

To top them all is the Indian Britney - Rakhee Sawant! Here's a girl who is willing to do anything, "any" thing, to be in the spotlight. No one had thus far slapped her boyfriend when he came to her home with a bouquet of flowers apologizing for some crap -- perfect recipe for brouhaha, live on TV! And in no one's case was the whole episode "filmized" with background scores suiting the mood of the scene. No woman had been so outspoken about her personal life - everyone needs some personal space. But not Rakhee (or Salman, for everyone knows everything about him) ! I am so fed up with all the news about reality shows and Rakhee Sawant, that the sadist in me has awoken, and I conjured up the perfect end to her televised swayamwar -- the selected groom rejecting her, live on TV! (evil grin)

Pakistan Zindabad!

For a country being torn apart by the demonic forces of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, namesake democracy, misbehaving army, a secret service infested by terrorist sympathisers, clashing internal forces and foreign pressure, Cricket could prove to be a hope for better days ahead.

I maintain that one of the prime reasons for Pakistan's failure thus far has been the inherent, and often unwarranted, suspicion on India, the failure to recognise the pragmatic polity that helps its own people while looking out for foreign threats, the hardcore ideological standpoint compromising the lives of thousands fueling the prospect of anarchy trapping the country.

The situation is therefore that the people have forgotten what it is to lead "normal" lives, enjoying with their families, with work. The people seem to have forgotten how to be peaceful watching movies, aspiring to be like the heroes they love, to fantasise having the good-looking girls adorning their television screens as their girls, to be famous musicians composing their way to glory, to be the cricketers who their country proud, who bring fame to their cities and towns. They have forgotten the days when the young boys in Peshawar were inspired by Shahid Afridi and not by the misleading mullahs of the Madrasas. When Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan captured the attention of its youngsters through his talent, making them want to embrace music and paint an indelible sketch of their culture.

This sudden and least expected surge by Pakistan to the finals of a top tournament could be a blessing in disguise. People now have a chance to see the actual way they can show the world the talent and the promise of Pakistan. They have a chance to realise that their ideological war of bringing the infidels to justice through Jihad has failed, and failed miserably, leaving them hurt more than anyone else. They have a chance to see that the world would respect and love a Pakistan that keeps its wars within the confines of international acceptance - to bringing into action a revolution to establishing a modern democracy (If Iran can do it, why can't they?), to the race to beat other countries in progress and growth, to the war against forces that tear apart their own society, to the fight against obstacles to the welfare of their own people, to eliminate the hindrances to a peaceful agreement between civil modernity and native ethnicity, traditions and faith, to the pitch on a cricket field and to the hockey fields.

Will we see that Pakistan soon? Will the Pakistanis learn from their mistakes?

PS : The title is inspired by a very well made documentary by Pascale Lamche.