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

comment@gurumurthy.net

About the author:

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

Bitterness - A form of Love?

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.

Tring Tring!!!!

Jignesh calling. Jahnavi’s heart always skipped a beat seeing Jignesh’s name on the calling screen of her mobile. And Jignesh would never miss any of her calls even if it meant to stop his bike while and attend to the call, or even an SMS. Were they laying more importance on each other than needed? No, absolutely not, both of them needed this importance, though they always maintained a stand contrary to this to each other. Do not give me so much of importance. Gathering herself, she picked up the call.

Jahnavi: “Hello!!!”

The words spelled magic and poured honey into Jignesh’s ears. It was like an oasis in a desert.
Jignesh: “Hi, what’s up?”
Jahnavi: “Nothing, I am in office.”
Jignesh: “Can we meet in the evening?”
Jahnavi: “Ummm, ok.”

Jignesh had been mustering courage for the meeting since the past few days. How on earth is he going to tell this to Jahnavi that they will not be meeting after today, probably not or at least they are not going to talk on phone. They will be buddies, but buddies that’s it, might be chatting, blogging and commenting on each other’s posts. It was not all happy in Jignesh’s family about his getting close to a non-Gujarati girl, so he had to take a decision. Either tell his family that he cannot give up on Jahnavi and lose all credibility or tell Jahnavi to sever ties with him forever so that there are no problems in his family. But Jignesh has been known to find alternative and un-thought of solutions to serious problems. He knew Jahnavi would understand him, and support him. He was waiting for her in the corridor, thinking about how to put his thoughts across, just when he saw the hurried steps of Jahnavi racing towards him.

Jahnavi: “Hi, how are you? How was the day?”
Jignesh: “I am fine. The day was fine. How was yours?”
Jahnavi: “Hmm it was OK types. So tell me, what is it? your breath sounded a bit tensed.”
Jignesh: “Yeah…. actually, just wanted to ask you….”

Words were playing games with Jignesh, or was he trying to play some games. Jahnavi was petrified knowing that still Jignesh needed to think before speaking to her. Though she fought off her irritation, and put it straight across to him, as she knew it had to be only one matter.

Jahnavi: “Everything’s fine at home I guess?”

Jignesh was almost taken aback, Can she read my thoughts, telepathy!!!. The thought was both a boon and a bane for him. Boon as half of the work was done, she knew the matter at least, it will be easy to carry over from here, but the bane part of it was more perilous as it highlighted how close they were emotionally, mentally, spiritually and it will be all the more difficult for them to increase distances. But who said Life is easy. He had to carry on and so was the case with Jahnavi as well. She had a tougher life he thought. He had always thought this.

Jignesh: “No, not everything is fine. Actually that’s why I called you to say, we might not be able to continue the way we have been going. We need to increase distances, if you want me to put it straight.”
Jahnavi: “Hmm I can understand Jignesh. I had been fearing this day will come soon. Good that it came while I was unprepared, otherwise you know the fears of a lurking danger are more fatal. It is OK….”

She almost fought her tears, damn it. Do not pour out now, I will grant you a more private moment, she seemed to be telling to her tears. This time they obeyed.

Even Jignesh was no less aware of the mental condition of Jahnavi. He also thanked her tears, otherwise it would have been more difficult. He took control of the situation, using Jahnavi’s words to console her.

Jignesh: “I will not call this just love as it limits our relationship and this is what we don’t want to do. You only told me that ours is a complete relation which covers all aspects of a relation between not just a male and a female but between two individuals. And is it some kind of a rule or what, that whenever there’s Love between an unrelated male / female it has to have a romantic angle. I do not have any qualms saying that Love exists although there exists no logical explanation to justify its existence. And in the absence of such an explanation, society just picks up the easiest one, ROMANCE, huh?”

Both of them were surprised at the flow of words coming from Jignesh. Jahnavi had at least not expected this. But Jignesh had more to say. He continued. Jahnavi listened, awestruck.

Jignesh: “The easiest way for this is Bitterness, Jahnavi. If I start getting bitter with you, things can be easier, right? But the saddest part is that even our bitterness for each other is nothing but another manifestation of our love for each other. Life has been such that we are better off handling bitterness, so by being bitter to each other we are just helping the other person cope with the situation. Making life easy for the other person. Paving a way to generate strength for the other person. Is it not our love for each other? To me it is, and staying away is also a form of LOVE. We are burning ourselves as fuels to lighten each others lives. What purer form of LOVE other than this can exist Jahnavi tell me?”

Jahnavi had drifted to a different world. She was in total awe of this person standing in front of her and was rendered speechless by his views. She started respecting him all the more, not only because he used her views to explain himself, but also because Jignesh had acknowledged this relation with the emotion of LOVE. He could use this name, as normally men have a problem with this word. But Jignesh was unique and Jahnavi was proud of him. But she was not able to express her pride for him as it will make him weak and she did not want this to happen. Here again she was applying Jignesh’s principle only, Paving a way to generate strength for the other person.

Jahnavi: “Are you done with your lecture. Actually there’s no need for all this. You could have simply told me, ‘GO AWAY’ I would have happily deserted you. I am getting late. Thanks for everything so far.”

Jahnavi left from there. She wanted to compete with her tears. They should not step out before she steps in her room. Jignesh kept watching her till he could. All he could do is pass a smile, thinking at the tepidity with which Jahnavi had applied his thoughts to practicality. Indeed bitterness is the best and hitherto unexplored form of LOVE. Make the life of your beloved a little bit easier without you, when you know, the current logistics do not allow you to be together.