Democracy and beards

Much has been written about the past 3 years of upheavals in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Arab Spring, Jasmine revolution, Taksim Square, India Gate, Russian roulette..... you get the picture. But as I was sitting and caressing my growing beard and trying to make sense of what is happening in Syria and Egypt and so on, I couldn’t help but think about a hidden connection. A connection between something which is ubiquitous in the Islamic world (and post Clooney and Affleck in the West as well, it seems!) and something which is not –Democracy. More accurately beards & democracy.

Come to think of this. Does not a totalitarian regime (be it one “resolutely” elected by people or one where a guy in uniform just plops himself on the throne) look like a clean shaven face. No blemishes, no patches, just a clean smooth face at first look.What with the pocketed secularism, the fenced modernization and bracketed incomes. Not so long ago they looked like models of efficiency (except their share of “trouble mongers”!). We saw western corporations doing free business, their leaders hobnobbing with the power elite of the world, their rich richer than our rich and their poor less visible than ours. A classic clean shaven face. No beard no fuss, no democracy no problem.

But as nature (Mother and human) would have it those darned hair start growing. First in place where you should have noticed, but don’t, like under your nose, and then slowly like a fungus growing in patches over different areas. The hills of the chin, the plains of the cheeks and the elevations of the jaws it’s everywhere and boy is it ugly! Foreign aid and business stops; you stop getting invited to parties; you try to trim it but just flares up. And then the regime (or any gentleman) is faced with questions - should we trim it or should we go the whole hog and clean it off? Is a moustache an answer? Maybe a slim one just below the nose to show that we have “it” (yet it means nothing) or a goatee which highlights the mouth but is untouched by the rest of the face or (horror of horror!) a full beard

I need to clarify here a bit. I equate democracy with a full unshaven beard because there is very little or no censorship trimming it. It grows the way it wants; liberally or conservatively; right side or left side; sometimes active sometimes quiescent; some hair longer than others some younger; some covering an ugly scar or some accentuating a high nose. By this bench mark India, USA France and the like will be like wise old sages with Tennyson-esqe white flowing beards.

On the other hand a dictatorship is like a clean shaven face. Rules are strictly followed, discipline is visible. Smooth. But smooth though it may seem the face endures thousands of razor nicks in the process and that too by the hands which were supposed to protect the face.

The beard can also grow rambunctious (media trials, moral police, cultural police...) and may require a little shaping and trimming, but that’s an issue for another day.

The fact is a beard, though unseemly it may seem in the beginning and posing an existential question to the wearer (Why are you doing this?), when it grows it defines a face. It softens the harshness of the eye, gives volume to the mouth, smoothens the rough edges and, sometimes, also hides ugly pock marks.

But it’s this wretched growing phase which annoys and irks every one. But I remain hopeful that democracy will come, even if in patches and fits and starts, to those who seek it. It is our natural instinct - freedom and equality. Just ask anyone untouched by ‘civilization’.

Argo, Why You?

So finally I watched Argo the other day. It’s a good movie; some sequences are really gripping and tense. To tell the truth, even though I knew what was going to happen in the end, I was a bit fidgety during the airport sequence scene. But I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t have anything new to add to the adulations that it has received. What was not normal was first of all the casting. A white American playing a Hispanic to begin with, the Canadian ambassador was more like a gentle butler and not what I presume ambassadors to really tough postings are like. Good acting was deficient in parts, clichés weren’t. But most importantly I was disappointed by the depiction of the Iranian people and Iran as a country. I expected revolutionary guards at the airport to be better dressed and not look like they have just come after working at the farm. I expect them to be smart enough to tell the tower to stop the plane, or at least not try to stop a Boeing (or Airbus, I can’t tell!) with their jeep.

That’s so Michael Bay!

And before I am labelled as an America hating pro-socialist, ranting, bitching internet idiot and before CIA/NSA tracks my IP address and sends their drone(real and/or cyber depending on my life’s worth) to decimate me and/or my computer- I want to say I love most things American. That includes coke Hollywood, Seinfeld, Cinnabons, capitalism (to the extent it doesn’t become carnivorous/cannibalistic), their democracy & freedoms (or whatever they are allowed within reason!) and so on. That’s why for a country as great as America both in the length of its borders and the depth of its history; it does not behove to trivialize the history and cultures of other nations and societies. I know I may be wrong here to say what I am saying based on a Hollywood movie but Hollywood is one the biggest cultural exports of America and even if they don’t accept, a key element of what many sociologists call American cultural hegemony.

 To say that all Soviets were stupid and all Germans cruel and all Iranians as crazy as (even if they don’t look like) the Talibani and al Qaida mullahs, is just not fair. Russians and Germans and Iranians have given the world science, art music, literature, technology and many other tangible and in tangibles without which human civilization would certainly be a few paces behind where it is now. Granted the regimes of Nazis and communists were inhuman but why portray every one like their regimes. Are all Britons to be treated with revulsion for Dresden and Boer wars, all Americans for Vietnam, Iraq...?

I took to writing this article not because some movie made by Ben ‘daredevil ‘Affleck doesn’t agree with my idea of how other’s cultures should be respected. I am writing this because this movie won an Academy Award, presented by none other than the First Lady. Talk about conflict of interest. I don’t live in America and don’t know what was the media and public response to these events (winning the award, Michelle Obama presenting it etc), but it would be nice if at least the more educated and urbane Americans took this film and the paraphernalia that followed with a pinch of salt (sorry NY, is it still banned there?)

In the end I just want to add two things

One:

In an academy award winning movie you would expect the editing to be flawless and people who work behind the scene would look for any embarrassments. I am referring to the bearded shopkeeper who goes ballistic in the market after one of the Americans (Biche) clicks a picture of his shop. His last line was in Hindi/Urdu (“main kehta hoon yeh jasoosi hai” i.e. I say this is spying) and not Farsi/Persian.

And second

During the credits there is a voice over by Jimmy Carter which says,”...Eventually we got every hostage back home, safe and sound and we upheld the integrity of our country, and we did it peacefully.” To this, I ask, would bringing back the hostages safe and sound have been possible if the people were as violent and devoid of reason as was depicted in the film and as is time and again propagated. A peaceful solution is the culmination of the interaction rational and sane minds. War is the opposite; the bomb has no rationality no reason.

Annonymity

Why do we crave for anonymity? Why do we prefer it? Is it because it’s the first thing that is stripped off us, even before the umbilical cord is severed? The anonymity of being “a fetus” gives way to the publicity of being a boy or a girl (if she is allowed to be born in these times) or a cine star’s baby or some other such tag. In India when you are born you not only get a name you get multiple identities which surround you like how a wild flame surrounds a tiny wick .Boy or girl, Dalit or Brahmin, Hindu or Muslim, enterprising Gujarati or a Spartan Naga and so on. And we live with these tags for the rest of lives unmindful of what could have been if not for the accident of birth.

But how do we handle anonymity? One Dwight L Moody once said “character is what you are in the dark”. This question assumes significance in this world of instant communication through social network and micro blogging sites. Given a chance practically everyone would lap up anonymity, but what they do with it is a direct function of their character and haecceity. Most morph into internet trolls spewing venom on everyone who crosses their path. Some turn to poetry and some disclose classified state secrets!

Is this 'power', then, sustainable? Whenever an anonymous person becomes famous (or notorious) he comes under tremendous pressure to shed this veil. And the pressure is exerted by none other than his own mind his personality which had, in the first place forced him to seek cover from the public glare. It takes a great mind and infinite will power to resist the seductive charms of fame. Not many are built that way. And that brings back to square one, do we really crave anonymity? The answer now, would be no. Except in conditions where anonymity can save your life (sometimes even certain death fails to scare) people desire contact with others. We were built that way. Evolutionarily and anthropologically. We have always lived in groups met others of our own kind and formed cliques. Hunted in packs and mourned in company. We want others; to love them, to be annoyed at them, hate them, pamper them or revile them.

And this is why social networking sites became such huge hits. Instead of donning a new avatar (what happened in the initial days of social networking) today we broadcast the minutest, most base, most trivial occurrence of our largely uneventful lives.Why? So that we can find someone who revels in our joy, who shares or grief, who dampens our worries and who compliments what we lack.

So take back this anonymity and cut this umbilical cord and let us forth in this world where we may find love, joy, friendship and yes a few cat memes!