My struggle against Eurocentric Aesthetics.

The hegemonic nature of Eurocentric aesthetics is responsible for the bizarre paradox that images of slim good looking females in bikinis  have come to be considered more 'sexy' than pictures of me reaching deep into my jaddi to scratch my low slung bollocks not just by White people but also, now, by people of Color- that too even by middle-aged, heterosexual, bahishkrit samaj, Indians like myself.
How can we explain such a truly diabolical outcome?

As Ranajit Guha said 'within every thinking Indian there occurs a silent struggle between Gandhi and Marx.'
But Ranajit is now considered a hottie and constitutes the one-man Reeperbahn of Vienna, where- kidnapped by Nazi human traffickers- he blamelessly resides.
In a sense, then, Ranajit has been appropriated by that exploitative Eurocentric Aesthetic which also constitutes as its alterity those not considered hot, like myself, who thus are promoted from subaltern status to full membership of the bahishkrit samaj (externed or ostracized community)
How did this come about?
My contention is that both Gandhi and Marx became totally Eurocentric, the former when he lived up the road from me in Baron's Court, the latter when he was buried in the very cemetery where I lost my virginity to a hirsute Maltese sixth former from the infamous Parliament Hill School for Gargogyles. Well, actually, I didn't lose my virginity to her- she merely muttered mutinously against Dom Mintoff while I damply held her hand- but, as I was subsequently assured, she certainly would have deflowered me had I fed her the packet of pork scratchings and half can of Tizer that made a transaction of that sort de rigeur amongst Trotskyite young women of that generation and milieu.

Clearly what is needed is a new episteme of lok-avidya- indigenous urm...knowledge?- that can restore me to 'ultra-hottie' status while relegating that dumpy little Aishwariya Rai Bacchan to her proper place as like maybe a Micro-biologist or Econometrician or something.

The above picture of me, wearing janeo and jaddi, appears quite different to people who have surrendered to a Eurocentric aesthetic.
Indeed, the rot has set in so far that my recent movie- Anal Cherries III- was rejected by the Indian Film Censors on the grounds that it was pornographic despite the fact that if contained nothing but me in my veshti & angavastram declaiming Tagore in a hilarious Bengali accent.

clientism vs. consumerism

I think it was Mahatma Gandhi who said 'The Earth produces enough to satisfy every man's need for clients, but not enough to satisfy the greed of even a single one of those clients if they start to think like consumers and realize that they're paying through the nose for shitheads like me and you to patronize them, therefore we must all condemn consumerism and eating nice things and wearing nice clothes and medicines which actually work and other such godlessness because  it is just not environmentally sustainable- people like you and me would go fucking extinct if we don't all work together to fucking squash this consumerism business right now.'

President Kennedy, on the other hand, said in his inauguration address 'Don't you be fucking coming to me now I is Pres. saying 'what can you do for me?' That's not the fucking question you should be asking yourself. Ask instead ' what can I do for the Pres. now he dun got himself elected and owns the country and gets to fuck anybody he wants to in the ass?'"

This is the very simple message we should be getting across to our youth today. Obviously, by youth, I mean Rahul Gandhi.

Ghalib's ghazal 120

See Prof. Fran Prichett's site for an intoxicating analysis of this Ghazal.

 

My bare existence baits their rage, not my barbarous bird cage

My lament so unlamented by the song trappers of the age...

Mimetic desire, were a refining fire, Lord, thy Perfection to gauge.

Did not the thymotic rival, for very survival, my affection engage

My heart’s wounds, not adept to suture, the eye of the needle wept

Eyes dry in my operation theater, she'll cry on the Opera stage!

To what tug-of-war hast thou, Lord, set, shameless, all hands to wage?

To tug at a heart, or by literary art, tosser, tugging’s guilt to assuage?

Breakers of our bloody sea, breasts to storm Cuchulain's rage
To see thy steed perform, we agree to at thy Blenheim engage

Madam, you’re a talker, I’m sentenced as a stalker, but mark my apercu sage

'ware Iron, a She, Turk irony!, epiphanies of Tiffany’s manacle thy mage!

Rain clouds gather over my fields like my few fond memories over this page

This happiness, too, that harvest which You, to the lightning, pre-engage...

The Brahman bury 'neath Ka'ba's stone for his heart's its sarcophagal rage

For Love & Faith, Death & Truth- atone as the pullulation of like phage.

 Being by day of all wealth robbed, by no terror of theft is my night daubed

To Tear’s Saqi, eyes sobbed, Death’s the dyvour debtor, I'm underage.

Greedy of thine and mine, poets mine each other to our Gokturk undermine

 & witless, but witness the gold digging ants of our own credulous page

I’m a court poet- djinn to the staff of the Solomon of the Age

Whose fortune can’t befall another- or my Firdausi engage.

Ghalib's contempt for Farhad is well known. Was it because, proud of his Turkish heritage, Ghalib sensed the truth of the legend that the Turks are descended from a slave blacksmith/miner class, in the Altai mountains, who rebelled and founded a vast Empire?

After all, Ghalib served a Timurid (Timur means 'iron') who, like the dead Solomon, propped up by his staff, whom the djinns obeyed, yet by virtue of a certain sort of wisdom, a penchant for poetry of a certain type, nevertheless commanded a not wholly undeserved  respect, though termites were eating through his prop and the final debacle little delayed.

Zorn und Zeit vs. Manyu and Manu

Apparently Peter Sloterdijk's name, by reason of some failure of Grimm's Law in relation to Aryan phonetics, can't- by the likes of me- be legitimately pronounced Poofter fucking-Media-asshole-dilettante-witless-Heideggerianly-Nazi-fucking-shite-dick.

I look to Prof. Michael Witzel, of Harvard, to correct this anomoly.

Meanwhile, what of this Shite-dick's Zorn und Zeit (Rage and Time)?

Does the Iliad in fact begin with Achille's rage? No.  His was a type of Manyu (dark anger- as arising from an injustice) not the thymotic fury of an Ajax.

The Mahabharata is the great Aryan text on Manyu. In the Gita, its epoche, Achilles and Arjuna's determination not to fight is traced to that variety of Manyu termed Vishada (depression).

Sloterdijk and Sazzarin and, now, fucking Angela Merkel- fuck youse guys, seriously, fuck you very much. The original German sin is Sinn.

The Gandhian hand-job- its continuing relevance.

Apropos the current crisis in Micro-finance, we must return to the example of the Mahatma. This is what he had to say about his own preferred panacea for poverty- viz. hand spinning yarn.
185.  HAND-WEAVING  AND  HAND-SPINNING
(page 136)
Shri Jajuji writes to say that whilst on the one hand hand-spun
yarn is piling up, on the other handloom weavers are  day  by  day
giving up hand-spun yarn in preference to mill yarn. An appeal to the
weavers through the columns of Harijan, whether in English or in any
of the Indian languages, will be good for nothing. Hardly any weaver
reads Harijan and, if attempt is made to read it out to him, he will not
take inte-rest in it. Hence the task of speaking to the weavers on the
suicidal  effect  of  abandoning  hand-spun  yarn  devolves  upon  the
devoted heads of Charkha Sangh workers.  They have to reason out to
the weavers how they will be ultimately responsible for killing their
own occupation by excluding hand-spun yarn.  As soon as the mill-
owners can do so profitably, they will certainly stop selling mill yarn
and will weave it themselves.  They are not philanthropists.  They have
set up mills in order to make money.  They will stop selling their yarn
to  handloom  weavers,  if  they  find  weaving  is  more  profitable.
Therefore it is a question of time when handloom  weavers  will  be
starved. These are really fed by hand-spinners even as they in their
turn are fed by handloom weavers.  They are twins, complementary of
each other.  This fact should be brought home to the weavers by the
Charkha Sangh.  With loving patience and knowledge they should try
to appreciate the difficulties of the weavers and learn how to remove
them.  Acharya  Vinoba  has  pointed  out  one  remedy,  namely,  to
double  and  twist  the  yarn  at  the  same  time  that  the  cones  are
unwound.  If  this  practice  becomes  universal,  there  would  be  no
untwisted  hand-spun  yarn  available  for  weaving.  It  is  found  by
experience that twisted hand-spun yarn is any day as weavable as mill-
spun yarn, if indeed it is not more so.

In other words, Gandhi realized full well that the hand yarn he had forced Congress members to spin- as the price of membership in that vehicle to class power as well as their badge of personal servitude to him- was not in fact suitable for the weavers he claimed to be helping. He also understood that his articles in his periodical the 'Harijan' (the name Gandhi gave to the untouchables once he'd decided that what they really needed was him, not Social Justice, not education, just him and his dear and dotty little ways) were of no interest to weavers, just as his wishing to stay in a 'Harijan' colony in Delhi did not enthuse its untouchable residents at all- it was the millionaire Birla whose good offices Gandhi invoked to force himself on them (though he did suggest to Birla that it would look bad if the water supply and electricity connection and so on were removed immediately after he left).
We now understand why Gandhi was so keen for everybody to go to the villages and harass people there with their love and understanding. It was to exercise moral blackmail on the weavers to use the yarn his followers were spinning.
After independence, mills were forced to produce hank yarn for handloom weavers and this was subsidized. However, it was the power loom sector which benefited from the subsidy. The Government's reservation of certain 'Janta' (common man) categories for the handloom sector hastened its deskilling and decline in quality. The stage was set for the starvation of weavers and their hamlets emerging as hot spots for Tuberculosis.
This is not to say hand weaving was or is unviable any more than carpet making. Only Gandhian hand weaving was unviable.
Well done thou good and faithful servant. A bullet was too good for you.

Gandhi on the Suffragettes.

Gandhi from "Hind Swaraj' (1908)

(In England,) Women, who should be the queens of households, wander in the streets or they slave away in factories. For the sake of a pittance, half a million women in England alone are laboring under trying circumstances in factories or similar institutions. This awful act is one of the causes of the daily growing suffragette movement.
This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Mohammed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it a Black Age. I cannot give you an adequate conception of it. It is eating into the vitals of the English nation. It must be shunned. Parliaments are really emblems of slavery. If you will sufficiently think over this, you will entertain the same opinion and cease to to blame the English. They rather deserve our sympathy. They are a shrewd nation and I therefore believe that they will cast off the evil. They are enterprising and industrious, and their mode of thought is not inherently immoral. Neither are they bad at heart. I therefore respect them. Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English are at present afflicted by it.

Dr. Mahajan, of BASIX, is giving away copies of this noxious books to junior employees of his organization who- to their credit- never read the fucking thing. Once they do so, will the scales fall from their eyes?

Dr. Vijay Mahajan, Shodh Yatras, and availability cascades

Dr. Vijay Mahajan, the Micro-finance maven behind BASIX,  is on a 'Shodh Yatra' and his riveting blog is here.

He asked some N.G.O workers 'for their views about what are key development problems facing the state? Productivity in agriculture was reducing and it was possible that in five years agriculture will collapse and farmers will land up being only wage labour for industry or services sector.  NREGA is having a negative impact on the agriculture.  Someone wondered if NREGA is a kind of four-step conspiracy – initially make agriculture unremunerative using human labour, then make larger farmers dependent on mechnisation, then withdraw or reduce outlay on NREGA, by which time not much demand is left for agricultural labour, and in the fourth step, the workers are captive for the industrial and service sectors. I recalled that this was not too different from the history of England during the Industrial Revolution.
I than asked what they thought of other government schemes like the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for paddy, and the food subsidy in terms of Rs 2 per kg rice. The response was there is no need of MSP if all the intended benefits – irrigation, seeds, extension services – reach the farmers.  MSP was also destroying varietal diversity as only a few varieties were purchased.  As for the subsidized rice scheme, the participants said the people never asked for Rs 2/Kg rice. These kinds of schemes are just making the poor farmers more dependent.  It was said that Government work is just target based and not attached closely with the real need of the common people. Change in the attitude of people is more important than meeting the target.
In the words of one civil servant [name withheld] – “This scheme is widely misused.  Middlemen collects hundreds of ration cards in return for the promise of giving 15 kg out of 35 kgs rice for free, and a bottle of liquor costing Rs 50. Thus the middleman spends Rs 80 per card.  The balance of 20 kg rice is sold in the market for Rs 16, thus earning Rs 320.  Thus the middleman makes Rs 240 per card. This then shared throughout the system.”  I told them , however, that wherever I had asked, people seemed to be getting their full entitlement of rice and at the specified price and appeared happy about the scheme. “Why would they tell you otherwise?” was the response.  Either I am naïve or they are cynical, or both. I leave it that.'

Dr. Mahajan's reference to the Industrialization of England puzzled me. Perhaps, the reference was to the Speenhamland system, ‘outdoor relief’, whereby (it was asserted) larger farmers had their labor inputs subsidized at the cost of weavers, artisans as well as small farmers who relied upon their own labor input. Furthermore, the suggestion might be that the Poor Law acted so as to maintain the pool of mill labor in place during slumps thus benefiting the ironmasters and mill-owners, as well as the petit bourgeois retailers, undertakers (Oliver Twist!) and so on- at the cost of other rate-payers.
I don’t understand how the analogy applies to the NREGA. The Poor Law, on the analysis above, served a good economic purpose by subsidizing labour inputs without adversely impacting mobility. On the contrary the self-employed weaver or small farmer subsidized the big employers who could exploit economies of scale. In other words, those with lower potential productivity gain subsidized those sectors where productivity could grow faster. Isn’t this a good thing? Moving people out of agriculture and cottage industry is the only way to get out of abject poverty and effect demographic transition in a sustainable and non-coercive way.
If NREGA and RTE and so on are very much better implemented and added to, why should not vast swathes of the rural hinterland not turn into welfare slums with ambitious youngsters, caught up in an availability cascade, aiming for employment in N.G.O’s to do things like revive ancient tribal languages and handicrafts and set up support groups for gay and lesbian goats and so forth?
Or has it already happened?

Silly question.
Of course it has. It's just that the impact is too small to be very noticeable. As with Gandhism, Bhoodan, Sampoorna Kranti, Intermediate Technology and other shite, this too is a case of India's poverty saving it from properly implementing a humane and ecologically sustainable model of development which would impoverish it much further and faster and, in consequence, fuck up the environment even more than would otherwise be the case, thus requiring even more availability cascades at every level of Public discourse.

I know nothing about the Shodh Yatra movement. On the one hand, going out and learning stuff for yourself and pooling that information is a good thing. Johhny Appleseed meets up Madhuri Mangoseed and Liberace Lycheeseed (what? everybody knows lychees are totally gay) and they exchange seeds and so you get greater fruit variety all over the place.
This reminds me, I read somewhere that 'theoria' in Greek was what happened when people traveled to other areas to witness the religious rites there and returned home and talked about how like maybe everything fits together you know?
Well, we know what happened to Greek theoria. An availability cascade started such that the solution to every problem was like carve a statue already. Once you get a lot of statues of naked dudes, you naturally get a bunch of pederasts lurking around them. They get to measuring dicks and that gets you to geometry, Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid, shit like that.

Which is okay if you're into stuff like statues of naked dudes and Mathematics and Philosophy and stuff. But what of this Shodh Yatra business? Is it not just a holier-than- thou availability cascade as meta-availability cascade as meta-meta-availability cascade with no fucking pause for some like statues to go up and some pederasts to gather and some apoorvata to occur?

Jus' sayin' is all.