Stars and gripes

By the moral logic that countries should withdraw from multilateral organisations whose policy they do not believe in, the US should make a beginning by leaving the United Nations.

File image of the White House in Washington, DC | Pixabay

Anybody who said the Indian examination system is oppressive had better come to Harvard now — it looks as if everybody has rushed indoors after a bomb alert. This is exam season, or as a professor puts it, the annual mass torture ritual.

The cafes in Harvard Square are empty. Its buskers and street musicians have little custom even on a Friday night.

The same emptiness clouds the Coop, which sells books and merchandise bearing the Harvard insignia, that visitors love to buy to back up their familiar ”when I was at Harvard” line.

Don’t forget the maverick politician with a talent for bringing down governments who merely taught a course here and has got away with the claim of being a Harvard don.

What we don’t know, however, is at which faculty here he learnt the art of writing creative chargesheets.

Nobody doubts this will be an unapologetic me-first administration. The rest of us should brace ourselves for some old fashioned all-American arrogance even as we are spared Gore’s boring hypocrisy

But there is also a bright side to this exam time desertion. A visitor can now walk the footpath without fear of getting his toes crushed by a wayward skateboard. My toes, however, were stomped upon a bit elsewhere.

Liberal campuses haven’t yet recovered from the elections having been stolen by the Bush camp. Now he is following it up with his ‘phantasmagoric’ Star Wars plan.

So why has India jumped to his support with such alacrity? My defence was the MEA’s written statement, on closer reading, seems to support everything that Bush said at his famous speech at the National Defense University, except National Missile Defence (NMD).

Yet, the most significant thing about this delightfully vague piece of MEA syntax is the total absence of protest so routine in Indian response to any nuclear policy statement in the past.

We in the Indian media have got so used to this that we misread the latest statement to be support for NMD. How amazing that the enormously wiser US academia also seemed to have made the same mistake.

Conference building measures

Examinations time for students is usually conference time for teachers. Until last year, the theme that launched most conferences was nuclear proliferation and in the strategic community the acronym CBM was sometimes called Conference Building Measures.

The flavour of this season is the likely policy changes the Bush administration may bring about. There is not much appreciation for the man hereabout.

But his administration is already seen with a degree of awe for the speed with which it has moved on its ideological agenda without even waiting for Congress ratification for his appointments.

It has already gone back on the Kyoto Protocol and is likely to move on a Bush energy task force report that will get some American jholawallas to commit self-immolation even before Medha’s girls try to drown themselves in the Narmada this monsoon. Besides, he has already made the first moves on NMD.

Bookshelves already have new releases on Bush jokes. But there is consensus his tenure will see more substance than style.

Many key men are cold warriors who are not willing to concede that war is over yet, even if their side won. They will run a very shoot-from-the-hip policy. How else do you explain formal statements that the US ICBMs will now be re-targeted in view of the receding Russian threat and the increasing one from China?

Similarly, Bush is supposed to have trashed the policy of punishing India and Pakistan over their nuclear tests as self-defeating. ”Those weapons are so crude and old-fashioned, what else will they do if not test them?” he is supposed to have asked at a meeting and then gone on to give his own colourful (and unprintable) suggestion as to where we could store them instead.

The story may be exaggerated but is not entirely apocryphal. Nobody doubts that this will be an unapologetic me-first administration that will operate on the principle that if it is good for America it must be better for the world.

What this means is that the rest of us should brace for some old fashioned all-American arrogance even as we are spared Gore’s frightfully boring hypocrisy.

Hindu index of hypocrisy

Any self-respecting nation deserves an airline that won’t insult old people. But we will take so long privatising ours that by then the market would have been cornered by truly lousy airlines like United.

Just as there is a Hindu rate of growth for India’s economy, is there also a Hindu index of hypocrisy? The question came up, surprisingly, not in the context of India’s nuclear weapons but on China’s entry into WTO.

The Chinese want it desperately. This USA is run by Sinophobes who will block it for leverage till the last moment, on the argument that China hasn’t complied with all the preconditions for joining up.

Someone asked how was it that India managed to get in so easily. Surely its own compliance record couldn’t be so excellent.

The speaker (who shall go unnamed) pointed out with some anguish that India had been shoehorned into GATT in 1948 itself as part of its colonial inheritance. So it never had to qualify to enter WTO, which is after all an offspring of GATT.

Then he said, sanctimoniously, that India, actually, should have withdrawn from GATT and IMF in 1950, the moment it became a Republic. How could India continue being a member of an organisation whose basic philosophy it rejected?

It was left to me to concede that just as there is a Hindu rate of growth, there must be a Hindu index of hypocrisy. That we Indians believe we invented hypocrisy though it is such a pity that we did not patent it or we would have made so much money charging US royalty.

If you were to accept the moral logic that countries should withdraw from multilateral organisations whose policy they do not believe in, then the US should make a beginning by leaving the United Nations.

The timing was perfect. This discussion took place the day the Congress had withheld the payment of an overdue amount to the UN after the US was voted out of the Human Rights Commission.

Nevertheless, it’s remarkable how the face of the academia changes the moment a presidential shift takes place.

So many players from the old Democratic administration have now found positions in universities and think tanks. Similarly, old Republicans have emptied out of academia and joined the new administration.

It is this kind of to-ing and fro-ing, this cross-fertilisation and also intellectual oversight that gives democracy real strength. It is such a far cry from India where the same people from bureaucracy run our policy, irrespective of who has been elected to power.

To make sure no dissenting voice comes up from academia they also keep under tight control the handful of institutions we have. Knowing Jaswant Singh, I can’t believe he isn’t already impatient about it.

Harvardisation of Sanskrit

The teaching of Sanskrit is such a newsy issue back home that I could not help sauntering into the Department of Sanskrit at Harvard.

The head, Van der Kijp, is away on a study mission in Tibet. But the rest of his faculty is there and quite enjoying the increasing popularity of Sanskrit. The numbers of those studying Sanskrit have risen three-fold in the past year.

While some of this is driven by an increased interest in Indian spirituality, some of it, I’m told, is also because of Stephanie Jamieson. A plate at her door decrees one shloka at a time, and she makes teaching Sanskrit such fun.

If she can attract students just because she makes the learning of Sanskrit so enjoyable, maybe Murli Manohar Joshi could consider importing her to India.

There is also Michael Witzel, the Wales professor of Sanskrit, but my favourite interlocutor is Arvind Sharma, on loan for a year from McGill University in Canada. ”Nobody likes what you make compulsory. But in India who cares for anything that is not compulsory?” he says.

If you want to be a world power you have to take your heritage and your ancient languages along or you can settle for being like Finland or Norway, he argued.

But don’t confuse him with the typical Brahminical Hindutva type now stalking the corridors of the HRD ministry. Sharma, who has a PhD from Divinity College, is as modern as they come with a progressive interpretation of our scriptures.

But I leave wondering where I have seen the man before. It nags me until someone in New York lets out a secret: he is a brother of Kamlesh Sharma, our ambassador to the UN. If you saw them together, they’d look like a double role in a Bollywood film.

United colours of bad behaviour

Here is an important tip for rich NRIs. If you want to get your parents insulted, send them tickets to travel by United Airlines. Not only do its cabin crew patronise its first class passengers, they have a special talent for putting the economy classwallas in their place. And the older the passenger, the ruder they seem to get.

On a flight between Delhi and London last week, an old couple, obviously visiting their well-to-do NRI son in the US, were not sure what the small plastic bottle the stewardess handed out to them contained. ”Tell him it’s waa-ter, waa-ter,” she told the old lady.

The accent beat the old woman, leading to much sniggering until the lone Hindi-speaking stewardess was summoned and asked to help out amid generous giggles. Then came the turn of another old uncleji who was struggling a bit with his pouch of sugar. This upset yet another stewardess. ”Now will someone tell him it is tea and he better not spill it on himself or others?” she asked no one in particular.

If the United crew find Indian passengers such a pain, why do they bother to fly to India? The truth is that they now bring 14 flights to New Delhi every week, one leaving every night for each coast of the US.

If the planes are full, it is not because of some special magic worked by Rono Dutta, United’s famed Indian CEO, but because — along with British Airways and Lufthansa — United is now fighting for the status of India’s flag carrier.

Who else can you blame if your own, alleged, national carrier is in such a mess, down to just about 20 aircraft and reaching you almost nowhere except the Gulf and a handful of western destinations?

Any self-respecting nation deserves an airline that at least won’t insult old people. We have run ours into the ground and will now take so long privatising it that by then the entire market would have been cornered by truly lousy airlines like United.

And yet we will be squabbling about the value of this piece of family silver, there will be cries of it being sold for a song, PILs, strikes and so on.

By the way, I had better be careful just in case somebody at United is reading this. I have taken three flights with them over the week and they have already lost my baggage twice. I have two more before I reach home and I am counting my beads, a bit like the hapless old parents in the back rows.

American humorist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote Germans are so rude that it is not surprising that that is the country where Israelis learnt their manners. Now, I bet, Lufthansa would gain from getting United to train their crew.