The disaster of 'me,me'

This happened in Mangalore as February 14 — now marketed as Valentine’s Day by traders to sell their wares — was approaching.

S Gurumurthy

Upset with public drinking by boys and girls, a freak by name Pramod Muthalik got mad. He got some of them in a pub beaten up like their parents would do, but unlike them. He had informed the media about his show so that the news cameras were in place to telecast the Muthalik action everywhere. Thus the Muthalik show was a joint venture between him and the media to keep away the state police, which could spoil the show. Predictably, the whole world pounced on poor Yeddyurappa who heads the BJP government in Karnataka for allowing Muthalik to take the law into his hands. The BJP, ever torn between its love of Hindu culture and its desire for a modern image, was greatly embarrassed. With the BJP in power in Karnataka, Muthalik knew the publicity value of his show. Had he enacted his theatre elsewhere, like when the Shiv Sena raided pubs years ago in Mumbai and Pune under the ‘secular’ Congress rule, it would have been far less noisy.

More. By just one mad act, Muthalik turned many, including a minister, into full-scale lunatics. Renuka Chowdhury, a minister of state, supported a “pub bharo andolan” to take on Muthalik, thus openly encouraging young boys and girls to take to mass drinking in public. And believe it or not, her portfolio is Women and Child Development. Came an even more mad response to Muthalik’s take on Valentine’s Day. “I support every kind of love, heterosexual, transgender, marital, extramarital”.

This is Arundhati Roy sermonising to youths. Why she left out incest from her catalogue of love is not clear. Now, take the secular media. It quickly equated pubgoing with individual rights, and held Muthalik as an offender against human rights. Evidently, the mad act of a freak Hindu in a distant corner of India is sufficient to turn the whole of secular India into lunatics. Now move away from this trivia to the danger to which Renukas and Arundhatis expose the nation’s economy.

The current Indian discourse on individual and human rights, which tends to smuggle in even gay and lesbian rights, apes the West. As India attempts to copy the West, it clearly misses the serious economic issues that confront West, thanks to its obsession with unfettered individual and human rights. Many in the West now seem to realise that continuously undermining the moral and social order has led to the present economic crisis. The West did not slide overnight. Beginning from the late 19th century, the Anglo-American West gradually moved away from a relation- based lifestyle to a contract-based lifestyle.

While culture and tradition govern relation, law and rights inhere in contracts.

And this move from relation to contracts became almost complete in the second half of the 20th century. With law overriding relations, even parents could not curb the rights of their wards once they legally matured.

It is the other way. If they acted against their wards, the law would punish the parents for child abuse. So contracts replaced relations, and rule of law substituted for moral order. To what effect? The rise of unfettered individualism and undefined feminism have led to the erosion of families and a rise in divorces, singleparent families, unwed mothers, lesbians, gays and almost the collapse of traditional families. Over 50 per cent of the first marriages, 67 per cent of the second marriages, and 74 per cent of the third marriages end in divorce in the US. Over 40 per cent of births are outside wedlock. Almost half of the families are headed by a single parent.

The number is more in most of Europe. It was seen as cultural erosion first. But slowly it has turned into an economic disaster.

The contract-based model undermined families and led to low or no household savings, high personal debt, credit card based living, outsourcing of household functions including kitchen work. The erosion in relation-based lifestyle soon imposed a huge social security burden on the state because the family mechanism that supported the unemployed, infirm, aged and the rest and the state had to step in to aid them. Thus the family functions were taken over by the state. The families were nationalised. The overburdened state consequently had to shed its traditional functions, like public works, and privatise itself.

The socialisation of family functions obviated the need to save for a rainy day and led to even lower savings. With the growth of individualism to the exclusion of kinship and relations, corporates and the state alike promoted unrestrained consumerism.

Result, some 110 millions US households have some 1.2 billion credit cards, almost a dozen cards per household.

As the people saved less and spent more, they got into trillions of dollars of private debt; and as the government spent more, it also ran into tens of trillions of dollars of public debt. The result is that the government is bankrupt and so households are insolvent. More, the US, the largest creditor nation of the world three decades ago, is today the number one debtor of the world, with $12.5 trillion of debt.

A quick survey shows this: all individual- centric economies are deep in debt; but nations more family-oriented and less individual- centric, like Japan, China, India, and generally Asian nations, account for over three-fourths of global savings; the individualist West lives off the savings of family-centric Asia. Today the West says that, in the present crisis only Asia, which has huge savings thanks to family orientation, can save the West, which has almost lost its traditional family lifestyle.

So the idea of unbridled human rights and unrestrained personal freedom that have led to social and cultural degeneration are increasingly seen as the cause of the present economic crisis. Weeks ago, Thomas L Friedman, a leading economic journalist, wrote in the New York Times that he had told those eating in a restaurant that they could no more afford to eat out and they had better cook and eat at home. But how will they cook and eat at home unless families are re-created? If they do, how would the US compensate for loss of employment if restaurants, which exist because households have closed their kitchens, shut down? There seems to be no solution within economic laws to the present crisis of the West. Amoral economics once yielded higher returns. It now yields negative returns.

Here Renukas and Arundhatis advocate unbridled individualism that has undermined families and morals and dynamited the economies of the West. Renuka questions the idea public morals. Arundhati advocates amoral living. Both seem unaware that an economy built at the cost of family and social morals, too collapses on the ruins of the morals it has brought down. QED: morality supports economics; lack of it ruins economies

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About the author:

S Gurumurthy is a well-known commentator on political and economic issues

It is in the genes

All the characters referred to in the below blog are fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead whatsoever. Any co-incidence is purely co-incidental and unintentional.

First time readers, please refer to the post Life or Years? for reference.

Dr. Suresh was a veteran on psychology and had gained useful insights into the human psychology; his wonderful take on the subject was the result of his 25 years of experience in this field. Being an open minded person, everyday was a learning experience for him and he used to discuss his readings and observations with Dr. Amitesh. Today was no special. So they meet over the coffee.
Dr. Suresh: “So how are your ischiophagus conjoined parasitic twins?”
Dr. Amitesh: “It does not need to be that funny.”

The medical camaraderie between the two was marvelous. Amitesh was a cardiac surgeon while Suresh was a psychologist, yet both of them shared a common belief that the human anatomy works more on psychology than medicines.

Dr. Suresh: “I know, so where do we stand at their position, are we in a position to answer their relatives confidently?”
Dr. Amitesh: “Such occurrences are rare in our life.”
Amitesh grinned. Suresh agreed, Amitesh continued.
Dr. Amitesh: “Well here we are in a pretty sound position, we have been successfully instrumental in isolating the vital shared organs like, lungs, kidney, gall bladder and small intestine and restoring blood flow in them, but she is still in a critical condition, on incubator.
Dr. Suresh: “Hmmm, sounds sweet, hopefully success should follow after this.”
Dr. Amitesh: “What’s the situation at your end? How are the alters?”
Dr. Suresh: “Well, I have sent her on a vacation for now, we need to do a hypnotic session on her using Sodium Amytal and talk to her alters so that we can get to know, the causes behind their emergence and occurrence but for that Natasha will have to undergo a lot. Also if she admits that she has a problem and is ready for treatment, all the more easy. You know what, Amitesh, I envy you guys sometimes. The fine line between mine and your patients is that your patients come and tell you your problems and they are aware that there are some problems that need treatment. My patients have to be convinced first, in majority of cases, that there are some problems which need treatment. And once they are convinced about the illness, we have to convince them that it is curable and the cure largely lies with the patients. We need to be more patient than the patients and at times we ourselves feel like one.”
Dr. Suresh grins, Dr. Amitesh follows suit in agreement.

Dr. Amitesh: “I agree, Suresh. If a problem is physical, it’s easier to handle. Mental problems are very difficult to handle as they need evidences to be proven otherwise or vice-versa which may not be so handy in many cases, like cases of delusional disorders or hallucinations.”
Dr. Suresh: “It’s all in the mind and the genes you know.”

Now this startled Amitesh, the mention of genes jostled him.

Dr. Amitesh: “I beg to differ on your take on genes.”
Dr. Suresh gives a smile.
Dr. Suresh: “It’s all there in the genes. They are not just the blueprint of a person and a species but they are much more than that. They are carriers of information across generations. Whatever has been endured and experienced by the previous generation will be immunized in the current generation. Its nature’s rule, this is the way evolution works. You see these days we see more and more girls shedding the typical domestic engineer’s role and accepting challenges and working towards their empowerment and financial independence. We see more and more youngsters rebelling against their parents to take the career of their choice, to marry the person of their own choice and leading a life of their own choice.”

Dr. Amitesh: “I agree. But that should again work for a particular community or a person.”
Dr. Suresh: “We need to understand the genetic codes and its mechanism. My vast experience on psychology related cases and my own observations compelled me to dig deep into this. Genes work at various levels and dimensions like personal level, species level, chronological dimension, spatial dimension and of course at the intersection of the inheritance level and dimension. At a personal level, the genes as transferred evolve according to the experiences and the off springs are more developed and advanced. At a species level the change is very slow and the whole species over a span of multiple generations evolves to a better species with better survival strategies, for e.g. the mosquitoes, you see with the advancement of more and more techniques to control them, the species has also become immune to these repellants. And we need stronger repellants to drive them away effectively. This is genetic evolution.

Dr. Amitesh: “Interesting. Nice take on genes I agree. Also as we are expanding in urbanization and we see more and more people travelling and settling down in new places, a new trend is coming up. People from far off places are coming in touch with each other and when they get married and produce prodigies, this new generation has a far better intellect and grasping power. This again is a result of cross-breeding of various cultures and the intermixing of wide and varied and geographically spanned genetic historic recordings. And what do you think is the cause of the rise in psychological cases these days. On a lighter note this trend should entertain you, but how do you like to put it in terms of genes?”

Dr. Suresh: “As far as my bread and butter are concerned, I have had enoughJ, but this is an alarm. We are on the verge of a genetic revolution. It will be hard to put everything in words here, but I got a nice analogy from my son who is a Computer Science & Engineering student and was discussing that day with me an interesting problem. In their jargon they call it The Producers and the Consumers Problem.

Dr, Amitesh: “Wow I see the rivers of different knowledge domains mixing to give a sea of realization and information. So what have you deduced from The Producers and the Consumers Problem.

Dr. Suresh: “This problem simply says there is a producer that produces some entity and there is a consumer that consumes the entity and there is a buffer that maintains the gap between production and consumption. The producer produces the entity and places it in the buffer and the consumer consumes from that. Whenever the rate of production supersedes the rate of consumption we have the Buffer Overrun problem and whenever the rate of consumption surpasses the rate of production we have the Buffer Underrun problem. Both of these are fatal in appropriate scenarios and need to be handled effectively for their systems to run flawlessly.

Dr. Amitesh: “Nice.”

Dr. Suresh: “The relation between the genes and psychology is also the similar. The tepidity with which the evolutions and the environmental conditions are changing, the genes are not able to respond properly and they start behaving abnormally and hence we see whatever we are witnessing. More delusional disorders, more hallucinations, more Near-Death-Experiences, more stress levels, more tensions, more blood pressure related problems, and in short more mental and hormonal disorders.

Dr. Amitesh: “True and it seems the solution is far lagging behind in the race as compared to the problems. But anyways had a nice discussion today though. Quite an enlightening one. I will have to leave now, let’s see how are the twins doing? Catch you up later.”

Dr. Suresh: “Yeah sure, carry on.”

Life or Years?

All the characters referred to in the below blog are fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead whatsoever. Any co-incidence is purely co-incidental and unintentional.

Natasha woke up and found herself in a hotel room. She was shabbily dressed and was not able to recollect how she had landed in this room. She saw the menu card lying there, and read the name of the hotel, “Nandan Van, FC road Pune”. Pune!!!, how come I reached Pune from Bangalore! She thought. But she was not at all able to recollect the last 2 days of her life. And again on returning back to Bangalore, the same fear followed her, someone stalking her. This fear was killing her and she was not able to concentrate. She walked straight into the chamber of Dr. Suresh Malhotra. After listening carefully to her, and her problems of her fears of being stalked, her complete loss of memory over elongated periods sometimes extending to weeks and people around her trying to remind her of instances, of which she is completely unaware of and sometimes finding herself in places, she had never thought of visiting or any remembrance of how she reached there, Dr. Suresh could conclude only one thing, the presence of alters in Natasha. She was a victim of a psychological disorder called Dissociative Identity Disorder, better known as the Multiple Personality Disorder to the layman. This was further corroborated with the fact that people have sometimes addressed Natasha as Nisha, Nausheen and Rosemary. The problem was grave, Dr. Suresh thought, 4 alters. He thought. But this was not the right time to disclose. He just told Natasha that she was overworked and needed rest. He advised her to go on a vacation, thus buying time to work on the case. After she left, the problem persisted. Dr. Suresh was pondering over it.

In the evening he met his pal Dr. Amitesh Mehra, who was talking about a case of “ischiophagus conjoined parasitic twins”, a rare case of conjugal Siamese twins, where the child has two pairs of limbs, hands and the other twin is residing inside the host, sharing nutrition, kidney, anal channel and excretory channels. Dr. Suresh was bewildered at hearing it. Nature had its own way of performing miracles he thought. On one side he had a case of Dissociative Identity Disorder, where the person herself was not aware of the existence of three other personalities residing within who take up turns to make her perform things she’d never imagined. Also when the alters (the personalities, Nisha, Nausheen and Rosemary better referred to as alters henceforth) took control Natasha was lost, a personality, a part of Natasha was lost. On the other side he was hearing a case of parasitic twins, where a real physical person resided inside another, two personalities, completely distinct, sharing space and nutrition.

Dr. Suresh: “So how do you think are you going to cure the parasitic twins?”
Dr. Amitesh: “We will operate on them and separate them through surgery. The operation may take anything between 28 – 35 hrs, depending on how well the patient responds to the treatment. Also we have other issues like tissue growth and kidney transplant, the parasitic twin is drawing nutrition from the host. Alimentary canal and the breathing duct also need to be separated.”
Dr. Suresh: “Seems complex but at least you have something physical and concrete to work on.”
Dr. Amitesh: “What’s the matter with you?”
Dr. Suresh told him of the case of Natasha. Although multiple personality disorder has a rich history and literature, it is a practically incurable disease so far with no guarantee on the timeline. It all depends on the origin of the personalities and the very fact that patients sometimes refuse treatment, on grounds that they are not ill and no personality resides within them. Dr. Suresh thought how different personality development is from the case of parasitic twins. Not very much except for the fact that the two personalities in the parasitic twins case have a separate physical existence, here the same person assumes different roles, portrays altogether different personas. But parasitic twins do not harm anybody. But people with multiple personality are rarely harmless. Natasha can be very harmful, it will be very necessary to dig into her past and know the reasons that have given rise to these alters in her. But that being a cumbersome and lengthy process, void of any guarantee of success even after elongated psychotherapist sessions, Dr. Suresh was getting wary over it, when he heard Dr. Jaya Mathur speaking to someone on phone,

Jaya: “After listening to your case, it seems the person is suffering from BorderLine Personality Disorder.” Dr. Suresh was alarmed hearing the words, BorderLine Personality Disorder. Another psychological disorder which wreaks havoc on the life of the patients and the loved ones of the patient.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is defined as a personality disorder primarily characterized by emotional dysregulation, extreme "black and white" thinking, or "splitting", and chaotic relationships. Their mood swings like a pendulum and they can love someone till eternity in a moment and at the very next moment they hate them to the extent of posing any harm to them. Dr. Suresh was thinking about all this and thought how psychological disorders had led to most of the problems in today’s life. The most alarming fact was the rise in the number of such cases with modernization and urbanization. This was surely related to the increase in the stress level of the population. The average income of an individual has no doubt increased manifold, but as they say, everything has a price; the increase in income brought with itself an increased paranoia to invite more and more stress in life. Today as we see youngsters starting their earnings with thousands, magnitude times with what their fathers started, but living standards have shown a dramatic downfall. They might have added years to life, but have not added life to years.