Shiv Vishvanathan on C.V Sheshadri

Shiv Vishvanathan, a Professor of some shite subject at OP Jindal, writes in 'the Leaflet'.  

One of the most interesting polymaths I have met was the scientist C.V. Sheshadri.

Who was a Chemical Engineer who actually helped poor people using science. The fisher-folk remember him well. He got them to use cheaper, more efficient, catamarans made of some new material. He created a sonic device to attract fish. On the other hand, he also seems to have attracted cretins like Vishvanathan. 

His genealogy was immaculate. His grandfather was C.P. Ramaswamy, once Divan of Travancore.

Presumably because C.P's descendants were immaculately conceived.  

Sheshadri graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a doctorate and joined IIT Kanpur in its initial stages. He left to create a laboratory near a slum in Chennai.

Is there anywhere in Chennai which isn't near a slum?  

Sheshadri loved gossip over curd rice and roasted chilies spread over these stalls in the neighbourhood.

Chee! Chee! Don't eat curd rice which has been spread over stalls in the neighborhood.  

We spent hours quarrelling and gossiping over ideas in these places.

Hours? I suppose, finding a piece of curd rice not smeared with shit would be a time consuming task. No doubt, when Shiv found one such morsel a quarrel would ensue as to who should get to devour it. 

One afternoon he told me, “You social scientists have ignored the Constitution. It’s a skeleton of laws without an unconscious. It is too absent-minded to remember that it is embedded in multiple ecologies. Our judges are illiterate about nature. It’s a pity that when most of India depends on nature, our laws do not represent nature in the constitution.”

That's what happens if you eat curd and rice which is smeared with shit. You Lose your marbles. You talk nonsense. Nomos is different from Phusis. In Indian thought, Law is 'Samskar' it is not part of Prakriti. This cretin does not get that every country depends on nature. India is not unique. No Laws 'represent nature in the constitution'.

He felt that separate ecosystems like rivers, swans, and deserts needed representation.

Sadly, the Indian Constitution, which recognises certain Temple deities as having legal personality can also grant such personality to rivers.  

The Constitution he felt was too landlocked as a mentality to imagine the sea.

Sadly, the Supreme Court's mentality was such that it felt it had to take a case away from the Kerala High Court because of India's expanded claim over its littoral waters. It seems Constitutions can imagine the Sea after all.  

He murmured “you gobble up most of the evolution and think you are modern.

This is because he thought non Tambrams eat monkeys and tigers and banyan trees. Chee! Chee! Stick to searching the road for morsels of curd rice not too badly smeared with shit.  

'It is time you constitutionalise the sea, not as a law of the sea, which is a collection of illiterate defence pacts but the sea as imagination, as a way of life.” The coastline his favourite ecology had no place.

Yes, yes. Fundamental rights for mermaids must be read into the Constitution. Coastline should get right of audience. How come no Tsunami is a member of the Supreme Court Bar Association?

When we add nature in multiple times to the constitution, development as an official ideology would decline.

No kidding! The lunatics would have taken over the asylum with a vengeance! Sensible people would run away from the country.

I stopped him, as his ideas literally tumbled out, hatched in the evening by the sea.

How did you stop him? That is valuable information. Did you kick him in the crotch or did you crack open his skull? 

He said: “The sadness of India’s democracy is that our stalwart lawyers talk of rights, but they have no sense that the linear notion of time embedded in the Constitution abrogates the rights of most people.

Very true! I have a right to your house. I will have paid for it in the future. Indeed most people will be billionaires in the future and will have bought all your cool stuff. It is only the linear notion of time which is preventing them enjoying their property right now.  

 Constitution should be built in multiple time or most of our people are obsolescent by definition.”

No. Most are considered dead or not yet born. With 'multiple time' the dead can sue the not yet alive and vice versa.  

Without multiple times the sense of citizenship in the constitution is impoverished.

Very true! Hyper-intelligent Mermaids from the Fortieth Century are not being allowed to sue Popeye the Sailor Man for child support. 

Tribes nomads and crafts are constitutionally insignificant.

Which is how come Scheduled Tribes are not mentioned in the Constitution. Article 43 does not mention khaddar and handicrafts. There is no Directive Principle re. the Environment.  

After his first statement, he weighed to work out some ideas in his head.

What did he weigh to work out 'ideas in his head'? Was it shit?  

I was his resident social scientist, renegade enough to work in a science laboratory.

Clearly, Vishvanathan has an elastic definition of 'work'. 

He asked me tentatively, “What can science-especially the new debates for science do for the Indian Constitution. Think of the slums, most of the people are waiting to be regularised as people. The irony of the Constitution begins there.”

Why is this so badly written? Vishvanathan could write quite well twenty years ago. What is the reason for his descent into illiteracy? Has it something to do with O.P Jindal?  

We both discussed the importance of multi-disciplinarity.

Presumably while tugging each other off.  

He felt it was a cosmetic term, a dodge rather than an intellectually muscular exercise.

Fair point. It may be that this Chemical Engineer wasn't as much of a cretin as this 'Social Scientist' portrays him as.  

He wanted to create thought experiments for the constitution, create an ecology of debate, around the formalist illiteracy of the constitution.

He failed miserably.  

I asked him to think of a figure mediating science and philosophy. He immediately invoked the Polayni brothers, Michel and Karl, and argued that democratic idea would be different had they collaborated. We were both fascinated by the idea of ‘Tacit Knowledge’.

Karl Polanyi was ignorant and stupid. Michael was smart. An unwritten constitution and a free market will do better than either a Planned economy or some woke shite about Coastlines and Tsunamis getting fundamental rights to sodomy and affirmative action.

A tacit Constitution would have worked out rights against obsolescence and triage.

Nonsense! Being tacit, it wouldn't do shit- especially impossible shit.  

Michel Polayni argued that the world is a scientific method and is only partly overt and articulate.

Fuck off! The world is real. It isn't a method. Science isn't algorithmic.  

Science was as much embodied knowledge, where understanding was woven into silences.

As was ignorance and stupidity. 

One has to articulate the unsaid of science.

By saying 'miaow' or singing Gangnam style.

Similarly, we felt one needed a tacit constitution articulating the cognitive assumptions of the unstated beliefs of a system.

These cretins needed a tacit x which wasn't tacit at all. Why not want a cat which isn't a cat at all?

How does society look at time number numeracy and the body as a metaphor?

It doesn't. Only cretins with serious gender identity issues and very very complicated paraphilias talk that type of bollocks.  

How do we construct a difference? Is diversity built into the thought system? Or is the constitution just lazy liberalism?

Is this just verbal diarrhea? Yes. Sad. 

Sheshadri admired Aruna Roy and Medha Patekar. He called them the new constitutionalists. He felt that if India had developed the idea of a tacit constitution, the fate of the Narmada struggle would have been different.

Yup. This guy was as shite as Roy & Patekar. But at least they gained reputationally from their activism.  

The Supreme Court excelled itself combining bad law and bad physics enthroning a high energy society that had no place for tribals.

Furthermore, it personally buggered up the brains of this cretin. It also forced him to pick out morsels of curd rice from the streets of Chennai and to devour them though they were smeared with shit. Also Supreme Court disguised itself as my neighbor's cat and sat opposite my window licking its unmentionables.  

A tacit constitution would have shown that despite India’s civilisational legacy, the Indian constitution was based on linear time anchored on a development model, whose ideology tells us that the tribal has only two choices – assimilate into modernity or go obsolescent. A tacit Constitution would have worked out rights against obsolescence and triage.

But only tacitly. Anyway, tribals can make the same choice as this cretin. They too can babble bullshit.  

We had finished lunch by this time and we pursued rewriting the directive principles over coffee. Sheshadri felt that the Directive Principles would provide the new heuristics of the constitution.

Sheshadri may have started out as a smart Chemical Engineer. But long residence in India turned his brains to shit. 

A tacit constitution would require, what Madhav Gadgil repeatedly called a theory of diversity.

It is actually safer developing a theory of dishittery in the safe space of the Campus rather than actually protecting the Environment- coz goons will beat you up.  

Monoculture should be rare or unconstitutional. Nature should become an act of trusteeship, of soils, plants, forgotten hypothesis and defeated culture. When we add nature in multiple times to the constitution, development as an official ideology would decline.

But so would the power of officials. Indeed, they'd stop being officials when they saw they weren't getting paid. So they'd spend their time looking for morsels of curd rice on the roads of the slums in which they live.  

A tacit constitution needs a neighbourhood of sibling concepts.

It also needs a sugar-daddy whose dick it can suck to gain a little protein.  

Sheshadri and I were always appalled at the way modern regimes treated crafts and tribal societies. He claimed tribals were fellow scientists, only they follow a different science. They needed to be treated as persons of knowledge.

Whereas credentialized cretins who talk crap should be treated as persons of ignorance and stupidity. Indeed, they increasingly are.  

He suggested

by way of reach around 

that my idea of ‘cognitive justice’, which is a right to different forms of knowledge, anchored in cosmologies and livelihood, is necessary. Without the idea of Cognitive Justice, I argued that democratisation of knowledge was not possible. When science, official science, is a hegemonic system diversity is epistemically impossible.

The trouble with saying something is hegemonic is that you can then do nothing about it.

He claimed tribals were fellow scientists, only they follow a different science.

This is also true of cats. 

They needed to be treated as persons of knowledge.

Cats should be appointed Professors at O.P Jindal University 

Modern science emerges from a Judeo-Christian Cosmology

like the sort they have had in Ethiopia for thousands of years 

which saw nature as a resource, even as a commodity. Instead of the scientific temper, I had argued for the need of ‘Cognitive Justice’.

This is true. This guy really did argue with his cat about this

Sheshadri was already chuckling over his second coffee.

Yup. Caffeine can do that to you. But cannabis works even better. 

He insisted that we needed one more concept to make the Constitution more presentable. I was fascinated by the work of Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey on the right to information. Yet I felt, momentous as the law was, it was incomplete. A Right to Information needed a Right to Knowledge. We decided that an adda was required for it.

Hilarious! What starving tribals really need is RTI and a subsidized adda, or hangout, for  Credentialized cretins.

Later, I elaborated on the idea of the knowledge panchayat. Each community or group of communities should debate the nature of knowledge, examine policy from different perspectives. For example, instead of introducing biotechnology unilaterally, we should have invited the entire spectrum of agricultural society to a debate on crops and food and access it in their own language. We need vernacular and folk understandings to evaluate science and the fate of the margins.

Sadly folk of all types think this guy is a cretin.  

Sheshadri would laugh over these thought experiments.

In other words, the Chemical Engineer thought the Sociologist utterly hilarious. 

He sadly remarked, “Our elite is knowledge proof, we will need years of storytelling to build all this. Yet, he felt, that this was the fascination of democracy, its dialogic sense of difference.

Relative to tribals and fisherfolk, these guys were elite. They were common sense proof. 

Sheshadri died over a decade ago. I thought I would write this tribute to a great constitutionalist who felt science needed to be reinvented for democracy to stay alive. One misses him.

One is an asshole. Sheshadri did some useful stuff because he studied a useful subject. He may have talked ultracrepidarian bollocks- but he is dead and de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

There is nothing wrong with promoting 'intermediate technology'. But producers who see how a bit of tech can make their life better soon start buying even better tech. The credentialized do-gooder is disintermediated. The 'enrollment' and 'interessement' of the 'woke' elitist fails. Still if O.P Jindal- a very poor tribal woman who set up a People's University- will give you a Professorship after everybody else has told you to fuck off, then it is a case of nice work- if you can get it.