Culture Vulture

Hermann Goering was one of the less repulsive of the Nazis, someone I don’t find quite as easy to dislike as I do the others. One of his comments I treasure: “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my pistol.” Incidentally, he was a wonderful shot with that pistol, reputedly able to shoot the caps off bottles at thirty metres without touching the bottles themselves.

Now I could spare the word ‘culture’ my attentions, but for the total, appalling, inexcusable rape, murder and mutilation visited upon it by people who should know better, especially here in India. “Culture” for them is a carry all term. It can be interpreted as one wishes, and used to excuse pretty much everything.

Social discrimination on the basis of caste? It’s Indian culture!

Murdering brides for dowry? It’s Indian culture!

Disdain for social responsibilities and hygiene? It’s Indian culture!

Suppressing sexuality? It’s Indian culture!

Thinking we’re better than everyone else? Well, jiminy whiz, it’s Indian culture!

Taking bribes and greasing palms? Believe it or not, that’s Indian culture as well…

The worst offenders are the North Indians, who love to pass off their socially retrograde traditions, including child marriage, the wilful neglect of girl children, polygamy, sex-selective abortion, you name it, all as Indian culture. For the North Indian, of course, North India isIndia. He (the “she” part of the equation has not the right to have her own opinion) is almost always either ignorant of, or ignores, the world outside North India (a vague place called “Assam”, some “Bambai”, another called “Madras”, and a vague abroad known as “Amrika”, all of which are pretty inconsequential anyway). With only slight differences, this goes even for the educated lot.

I recall attending a “cultural festival” in Lucknow years ago where a tribal troupe from Central India, far better than the rest, was not given the award because they were not “typical of Indian culture.” And the judges were – allegedly – committed and qualified individuals.

Down in the east, we Bengalis, with our kalchaar (the Bengali typically can’t pronounce the hard “u” to save his life) are a national laughing stock. The less said about us the better. Bengalis still worship at the altar of the long dead Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate in 1911. That’s the last anyone ever heard of Bengali “culture” in real terms. Marathis, in the west of the country, have their similar fixation on the centuries-ago “hero”, their king Shivaji. In the name of these long gone men, Bengalis and Marathis are willing to burn down buildings and vandalise libraries. Just as in the South the Tamils and Kannadas, who literally worship their film actors as gods and goddesses (no, I am not joking) can do when said deities prove they are mortal after all. Some culture.

Let’s, therefore, see some manifestation of Indian “culture”:

We are happy to have foreigners come and gawk at our erotic temple sculpture, but we ban Fashion TV because that is “against Indian culture”.

We’re more than pleased that they should come and pay to visit the (Muslim) Taj Mahal, but we demolish mosques to build temples to fictional god-kings.

We go on about Indian culture being harmed by sex education in schools, yet this is the land of the world’s oldest sex manual, theKama Sutra.

We keep talking of Indian culture requiring arranged marriages – yet history and traditions are full of people who married for love or did not marry at all.

We - except here in the North East - worship cows and leave them to starve in the street and attack people (I have been attacked numerous times and injured twice) and try to suppress the simple fact that historically Indians ate beef and offered up cows for sacrifice.

We go on about how extramarital relationships are against Indian culture - yet we worship the god Krishna, who allegedly had 16,000 concubines called gopis.

We love to talk about how we revere the old. So –in human terms – old women dumped to beg for a living in Vrindavan or – in material terms – newly excavated temples being taken to pieces for their bricks is also part of Indian culture? Writing graffiti on the walls of the Qutb Minar in Delhi is culture?

The oldest habitation on the subcontinent so far discovered was the Indus Valley Civilisation of about the same antiquity as the Sumerians. These people are of unknown origin, but the Hindu Right were busy trying to prove they were proto-Hindus. Now these people also had extremely high levels of town drainage (covered brick-lined sewers, drainage sumps, the works) and personal hygiene (public and private baths). So these alleged proto-Indians were clean and hygienic. I suppose the current state of India, with garbage dumps in public and unwashed multitudes, urinating in public against walls, isalso in accordance with Indian culture?

So let’s demolish Khajuraho, blow up the Taj Mahal, and bulldoze theIndus Valley cities down under again. And let’s impose North Indian social norms, South Indian films, Marathi kings, and Bengali music on us all.

Now that would be Indian culture.

Liars, Inc.

May 2007

We are surrounded by people paid to be mendacious.

Some of them are the obvious suspects: politicians above all, but also weather forecasters, fiction writers (all right, this means I'm hoist by my own petard, but at least I'm not yet paid to be mendacious - I have not till date earned a single low-denomination coin from my fiction, have I?), journalists, spin doctors, and so on. But there is another type, so ubiquitous they are everywhere - hell, there are some on the side bars of this page.

I refer to the tribe called advertisers, and the job they do.

Not all of them - not any of them, by and large - are as honest as the photo on top, an advert for a German TV news channel. Almost all of them are out to make you spend your money by lying to you about what whatever it is they are plugging is capable of. And the more outrageous the lie, apparently, the better.

OK, I do agree that since I never ever read ads any more and if  - rather, when, they're there as regular as clockwork - ads come up on the rare occasion when I'm flipping channels on TV I just hit the remote, I may not be the ideal person to talk on this. But that doesn't mean I can avoid ads, because you can't even open up your newspaper without half the page being taken up by some grinning half clad woman with an impossible body type selling toothpaste.

Some of it is just abrasively silly. Some of it is wholesale destruction of the environment, as with those glossy extra pages with the papers which take all those trees and all that ink to make and which carries nothing except ads for cruises and clothing lines, some disguised as "lifestyle articles". Some of it is downright stupid, as the line of ads which sold Polo mints in India as "The Mint With The Hole". Yeah, a hole through the centre was its USP! They really must have thought the average consumer wasn't bright enough to deduce that a hole meant a hole's worth less mint per piece.

As my cousin, an advertising executive, freely admits, advertisers proceed on the assumption that you and I have the IQ of a retarded maggot. 

And some of it gets dangerous, like when the advertisers buy the news and make it slant its reportage one way or the other. I remember when the sponsorship boom was taking off some ten or twelve years ago and a sarcastic commentator said "At this rate they'll be sponsoring the news soon enough." Well, not only is the news sponsored now, it's been bought over. And they can advertise wars as well as milk chocolate.

Oh yeah. Let's not forget the surrogate ads. When liquor ads were banned, on Indian media, they began advertising anything else. Anything, even if it did not exist, so long as it carried the liquor brand's name. My favourite was the one where they advertised the bottle, not its contents. Brilliant!

And that's not the end of it. Just check the ads themselves. There are those that take you for a total idiot, so they have to rub your face in the message before they admit you get it. There are those that are so esoteric you go cross-eyed trying to make out what the hell they are selling and what the logical connection, if any, is between the ad and the product. Sometimes you don't even get to understand what the  product is. 

And there was this ad where (I do not remember the product) a line of (dark, traditionally clad, non-beautiful) village women are wending their way across the sands of the desert, jars of water on their heads, when a (young, fair, pretty, half clad, obviously urban) girl begins taunting them. The infuriated women begin hurling the water they are carrying on her - and this is precisely what she wants, and she begins dancing with pleasure in the shower of water.

Now India is full of village women who walk many kilometres each day for a few precious pots of water. Mocking them, it must have seemed to the morons who wrote this particular ad, was the acme of humour.

So they are not just stupid and lying. They are utterly insensitive as well.

Anti-Americanism: A Personal View

March 2007:

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I think there isn’t anyone among the regulars on my blog who’s unaware of my feelings about the Bush imperium and about imperialism in general. I’ve been writing now for years – since September 2001 at least – of the particular danger posed by the United States of America to the world at large, and I’ve repeatedly pointed out the fact that in my own considered opinion the planet, as a living entity, cannot continue to tolerate the existence of the US in its present form.

Does that, however, make me anti-American, as I’m accused, virtually on a daily basis, of being?

No.

What is being anti-American, anyway? Am I against the soil of the United States? Am I against grizzly bears, coyotes, and redwoods? Am I supposed to oppose the existence of the Gila Monster or the Grand Canyon (and never mind – just for a moment - the US Rangers there being forbidden to mention its geological origins)? 

It’s easy to say, like so many of my interlocutors on Orkut and other websites, that “All Americans are evil,” “all Americans should be killed, “the only good American is a dead American,” and so on. Most of the people who say this are immature and semi-educated, but not all; most of them are Muslim, and of a fundamentalist bent of mind, but not all. I’ve known white Australians with college degrees and of impeccably Christian heritage who refused to even writethe word “America” properly.

These people aren’t insincere in their viewpoints. When they say “All Americans are evil” they mean what they say. They’re just not adequately informed. They’re also excellent propaganda copy for the enemy; because don’t imagine the Bush cabal doesn’t know about them, and doesn’t use them as fodder in its “They hate our freedoms” campaign.

Before I go further, let me clearly state my position, so there isn’t any confusion over what I’m saying.

I hate the government of the United States of America, its armed forces, its social and economic system, its foreign policy, and its continuing attempts to impose its ownership over the world. There is nothing I would like better than to see all this destroyed.

I do not hate the people of the United States, its tradition – now imperilled – of free thought and dissent. I do not hate even the most retrogressive, the most hidebound denizen of the Bible Belt, because – unlike the “America to the gallows” crowd – I do know a little of what I am talking about.

Americans have done a hell of a lot of horrible things, and continue to do a lot of horrible things. They – even if nothing else mattered –live so wastefully that if we all did the same, we would need six more Earths just to supply the resources. They do have a government, which they (by common perception) voted to power which is hell bent on turning the rest of the world into slaves. Granted.

But…

Take another look.

The average American is brainwashed systematically from birth to believe that his/her country is the greatest in the world, that the nation’s authority flows from “god”, that the country stands for “good”, that anyone opposing it must be therefore evil, that everyone loves America, and that since America is the centre of the universe nothing else is really worth knowing. The average American is carefully guided into these beliefs by being kept systematically ignorant, especially in these days of “intelligent design” and “teach the controversy”, of science and logical thinking; he or she is force fed TV trash till what is on TV becomes the perceived reality. A nation where museums can exist that posit that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, or where the Grand Canyon’s geological history is suppressed, cannot be considered a nation looking at modernity. A nation where the price of petrol (“gasoline”) becomes the benchmark of foreign policy success cannot be considered a modern society.

So when this American who has never been taught to think for himself, who has been force fed the notion of the infallibility of Genesis, who has been brainwashed into believing that his nation is the greatest on earth and is beloved of all except “evildoers”, is suddenly confronted with the truth, that is, that America is not the most loved nation in the world, but rather the most hated; that the rest of the world does not want to live as American vassals; and that US power is not universally applicable, and that not everyone thinks “god” made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, he is faced with a stupendous intellectual shock.

What then is easier but to delude this wretched individual into the belief that he does not see what he is seeing, but that this is all the result of a conspiracy by “liberals”, “faggots”, “commies” and other traitors? Especially when you control the media, and where these individuals have only the media as their window on the world?

Of course, this American is also likely to be a person of limited economic means, and therefore of limited access to independent information or education, and he is likely to be kept there in that economic bracket. He will be encouraged to buy on credit and not save at all; in his employment, he will be deprived of the right to form effective unions so that he can be kept under further control by not having economic security; and as far as his health is concerned, he will not be able to afford any real care without expensive and often unaffordable insurance. All this will go to keeping him exactly where he is.

He has democracy, sure – he has the right to vote for either the Republicans or the Democrats, between whom one would need an electron microscope to distinguish, and who follow exactly the same policies on virtually every issue one can name, even if they were voted to power to do the exact opposite. 

All this is not quite enough, so you also have warrantless arrests, the deliberate fomenting of fear and a siege mentality, the poisonous military industrial complex, the USA Patriot Act and  similar legislation, all designed to keep the population – including our putative American - in a state of permanent and voluntary subjugation.

Does this American, therefore, look like a monster any more? Doesn’t he begin to look like just another victim?

What amazes me, frankly, is that this American, despite all that is going against him, can’t be kept down. You can do your worst, but the American still can’t be fooled all of the time.

When the US dropped more bombs on the inoffensive neutral nation ofCambodia than were dropped in all of World War II and napalmed Vietnamese villages, who stormed the streets with slogans like “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Americans.

When the US was actively planning the invasion of Iraq, which everyone outside the US knew had neither WMDs nor links to Al Qaeda, who – despite it being “unpatriotic” then – came on the streets in their hundreds of thousands to protest the planned invasion even before it happened?

Americans.

Just, as a piece of perspective for Indians – can you imagine any of us marching on the streets to protest an Indian invasion of Sri Lanka, for example, as actually happened in 1987?       

Who risked their careers, when they did not have to, to protest the mass murders of Iraqi and Afghan civilians? Who are the Dixie Chicks, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn? Who are Cindy Sheehan, Eric Blumrich, or our very own Malcolm Mills? 

Americans.

Can you, my fellow Indians, imagine Amitabh Bacchhan or Lata Mangeshkar protesting the murder of Kashmiri civilians by Indian troops?

Who was it that insisted on the individual’s right to oppose governments, even governments at war, and went to jail rather than pay taxes that would go to support an illegal war? Henry David Thoreau, in my own opinion one of the greatest philosophers since Socrates, and he was an American, too.

And another question – yes, the American government and its corporate cronies are vile beyond comprehension. Yes, they would be glad to batten upon us and suck us dry. Yes, they think they own the world. But can they actually,by themselves, impose their will on all of us?

Who the hell do these murderous parasites work through? Isn’t it our own governments, our own “leaders”, who follow their orders and let them in through the door? When farmers commit mass suicide and Manmohan Singh (who came to power promising an independent foreign policy and left of centre economics) parrots economic policies written down for him by the World Bank, when he betrays our old friend Iran by voting – not once by twice – against it in the IAEA in order to please Washington, when he throws our ports and air space open to American military units, what price anti-Americanism? Why don’t we rise up, pull this Quisling out of his office and hang him by his own intestines from the lamp-posts? Until we destroy the compradors and fifth columnists among us, do we have a right to blame it all on Washington?

Of course it’s easy to do that. Blame the Americans. It’s easy to do for the same reason that it’s easy for the Bushies to claim that anyone who hates theUS does that because he “hates their freedoms”.

Ignorance and chauvinism make the worst of all combinations.   

The Battle Of Numbers: The Politics of HIV

June 2007

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What do you do if you have a rampaging HIV epidemic in your country?
I'll come to that in a second. But first let's see just why there is an HIV epidemic ravaging the country.
Well, first, there is the compulsion to pretend sex does not exist. Not that the population isn't climbing through the roof, but one doesn't talk of that in polite society. One, rather, bans sex education in schools, since it's against Indian culture (and don't talk of temple prostitutes who used to initiate young men into sex). Never mind that kids are experimenting and (since due to your anti-sex ed sensibilities they don't have the slightest idea of safe sex) doing so without the slightest attempt at caution.
And as a corollary to pretending sex does not exist, it follows logically, of course, that when sex is thrust into your face, and you have to admit it exists, you claim it's dirty and/or unnatural. Accordingly, those who buy and sell sex are criminals. And - according to the Indian Penal Code - homosexuality is illegal as well. So, since prostitutes and their clients, not to mention gays, are all criminals, one can't exactly try and ensure they learn safe sexual practices (or at least anyone who does so is aiding and abetting a crime).
Then, lest we forget, since sex is dirty and against Indian culture, one can't set up condom vending machines where people, especially young people, can get them. Anyone who goes to a pharmacy in India to buy condoms had better be ready to face sly looks and giggles behind hands - and if you are a woman, you are automatically a hooker, depend on it.
And of course, India's trucking community mustn't be forgotten. This is the very large number of men who - fuelled by alcohol, virtually untrained, and away from home and family most of the time - pick up prostitutes from roadside restaurants, drop them off at other stops, and pick up more, all without any pretence at safe sex or condom use (much of the time they're too drunk to use them anyway). So they carry along HIV from one end of the country to another, and share it freely with each other via hookers, and take the  virus back as a present to their wives.
Of course, it's not just sex, either. Now that our government has seen fit to ban hashish (marijuana) - despite its deep cultural roots in this country - injectable drugs have taken over the market. And addicts have this wonderful habit of sharing syringes with each other...
Also, of course, let's not forget our medical faculty. When you have doctors who literally don't know how HIV is spread, and I am notkidding here, you don't exactly have a wall of medical defences up against HIV either. When HIV positive patients are not treated, are shoved around from hospital to hospital, when social ostracism is the only reward of those who go public with their HIV status, the desire to keep one's HIV status a secret is completely logical and understandable.
Did I, by the way, talk about HIV status? If you're tested for HIV, you won't, by standard Indian practice, be informed of your status unless you ask. Believe it or not.
Now  do you understand why we have an HIV epidemic?
OK, so we have an HIV epidemic. So what are we doing about it?
Introducing condom vending machines? Sex education in schools? Legalising marijuana in order to cut down on intravenous drug abuse? Launching in depth public education programmes to destigmatise HIV positive people?
Forget it.
What we are doing is ... fighting over how many HIV positive people live in this country.
The non-governmental organisations say one figure.
Nonsense, says the government, it's a cool million less. Maybe two million less. That still makes between two and three million HIV positive people - more than the entire population of many countries. So what? As long as by playing around with numbers you can hide the enormity of the problem...
Personally, I do go along with the theory that some of the organisations deliberately inflate their figures for funding. But, at the same time, I am convinced that their "inflated" figure is still far short of the actual figure.
The reasoning is this:
In the first place, HIV has a long incubation period, sometimes extending to years.
Then, unless the individual is specifically tested for HIV, his status will never be known, and mostly they are not tested for HIV. If he is tested positive for HIV and not told, he will merrily go spreading it around, unknowingly - though he can also go spread it around knowingly if he so chooses.
And with our woeful rural and even urban healthcare, patients who actually die of AIDS can easily die either untreated or  treated for the symptoms - pneumonia, tuberculosis, or whatever - without the doctor's even suspecting HIV. The majority of HIV cases will fall under these categories - no doubt about it at all, at all.
Of course, these problems can be fixed, but that's kind of troublesome.
It's far easier to fight over numbers instead. 

The Curse (Part Two)

Continuing the train of thought about menstruation I started in an earlier post...

A friend, who is a teacher, once mentioned the plight of one of her pupils. This little girl – who had never been told about menses in her life by her parents, had never even heard a word about it, who was therefore totally unprepared – one day arrived at menarche in the middle of class. Can you imagine the mental state she must have been in, to suddenly find herself sitting in a pool of blood? More than that, in a pool of blood issuing from her vagina, the organ that she was probably told was “dirty” and must never even be mentioned? 

What that little girl did was begin crying inconsolably and refuse to get up (she was embarrassed at the blood) – and my friend had to pick her up and console her and telephone the parents to come and get her from school.

Although the little girl I mentioned was an Arab, the situation is something that is absolutely typical of South Asia. South Asians – as I’ve said so many times in this blog most of you must be heartily sick of it by now – have in recent centuries turned themselves into a people so sexually repressed that they have even banished all mention of sexual hygiene and health from their own families and from their own children. I don’t know how many sets of parents in India prepare their daughters for menarche by telling them in advance – well in advance – what is going to happen. I’d be surprised if more than two or three in a hundred do. Some of them don’t ever plan to say anything at all, trusting to the usual Indian dictum of “we didn’t need to know, nobody told us, so why should we tell her?” Most of the rest simply keep putting it off. They will tell her “when necessary”, and of course the girl begins her periods while the parents are still fantasising that it’s too early to tell her anything. Nowadays with improving nutrition levels, girls more often than not, for dog’s sake, reach menarche by the age of eight or nine. My cousin, for instance, was told about menstruation by her mother only after the event…by which time it was already kind of too late.

It’s absolutely in accord with the Indian parent’s attitude towards sex. They will not only demand a ban on sex education in school but will never, ever, mention it within their own families, not to their own children. And then the children will grow up unhappy and confused about their own changing bodies and attraction towards the opposite sex and full of notions like kissing causes pregnancy (while sexual intercourse doesn’t) or that penis size matters.  Hell – they don’t even know which opening babies come out from. (My parents, I remember, allowed me to think babies came out through the navel till my grandmother disabused me of that notion.) And, of course, they don’t even have the faintest notion of contraception or sexually transmitted disease. Just contrast this to the fact that these same parents will begin teaching their young daughters cooking and sewing from an early age, preparing them for marriage. They will prepare them for every aspect of marriage – the really important stuff, how to be properly deferential to one’s in-laws, for instance – but not about sex and stuff like that, motherhood and suchlike. The girl is supposed to just “know”.

So these young girls and boys, totally ignorant about their own bodies, full of surging hormones and with no idea what their feelings mean, are thrust  into a situation where they don’t have the slightest idea what is safe and what not. They won’t even – until they learn it from their friends – know that the penis is supposed to go into the vagina, and this mix of ignorance, myth and superstition, leavened with high doses of repression, is supposed to see them through to adulthood and marriage. Is this logical? Does it make sense?

I recall a letter published in a newspaper recently: “What is the use of sex education? We didn’t need it!”

Now alongside this avoidance of mention of menses goes another piece of weirdness. In South India – where, as I mentioned, they still segregate menstruating women – the newly menstruating girl is felicitated and presented with new clothes and jewellery. This might sit oddly with the segregation that will be her lot afterwards. But if you think of it, there’s nothing odd about it. They’re just celebrating her arrival on the marriage market. That’s all it is, a market.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that they don’t give girls tampons? The hymen might be ruptured inserting one, after all…horrors!

As I said, if it isn’t a curse to begin with, at least they try and make it one.

Eating Cow

July 2007

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Apart from the human being the one large animal I truly, absolutely hate is the cow.

OK, this probably requires some kind of explanation.

Most of you will be aware that in most (but far from all) Indian cities, cows have free rein of the streets, go where they want and do what they do. They drop dung. They enter gardens. They steal from garbage dumps. They attack people and kill a substantial number every year.

I hate cows.

I don’t recall the exact number of instances I’ve been attacked by cows in the street, but I do remember some occasions…

On one, I was riding beside the driver in the front seat of an autorickshaw when a cow rammed the vehicle just next to my arm. Literally a centimetre more and my arm would have been matchwood.

On another, I was in the railway station in Lucknow and walking past a large bovine when it turned its head and quite gratuitously slammed its horn into my hand. This was just before I was about to leave for home and I spent the next two days on the journey with a hand swollen to twice its usual size, agonisingly painful, not knowing if it was broken, unable to get any medical attention.

Yet another time – last October – I was walking past a cow on aCalcutta street when it suddenly came charging at me and knocked me halfway across the street. I was immensely fortunate that this was relatively late in the evening and there was no traffic, or I could have easily been run over.

Cows on the street are a menace. I don’t know how many people are killed every day over the country because of them, but the number must be fairly substantial. I always feel amused when I hear someone fulminating of the alleged danger from stray dogs (which in fact have never even snarled at me, personally speaking, in all the years of my life) while stoutly defending the right of cows to colonise the streets.

Oh – the courts have ordered the removal of cows many times; but this has achieved absolutely nothing, because the people ordered to remove the cows never actually implement the orders unless the judiciary stands over them with a metaphorical whip – and even then the cows are quietly released and back on the streets in days if not in hours.

As I told Mike some time ago, I would support any measure, including the mass use of machine guns, to get these animals off the streets.

It’s not as if these cows are healthy and content on the streets either. They are a diseased, starving, scrofulous lot which, whipped away from fruit stalls or gardens, deprived of any semblance of fodder, meet grisly ends with intestinal canals stuffed full of polythene sheets from garbage dumps or knocked down by speeding vehicles – but as long as nobody kills them deliberately, it’s all right as far as the religious Hindu is concerned.

I guess it’s time I laid a myth here: that the cow is an animal that the Hindu worships and will not eat. Actually, historically speaking, beef was regularly eaten by Hindus and the cow was a major sacrificial animal. But, the early Hindus being pastoral people, the value of the cow in terms of milk and dung began to outweigh its value in terms of meat, so – in order to protect the number of cows from diminishing – a tradition was quite deliberately fomented of cow protection, which in time has become (if you will pardon the pun) a holy cow.

Today, cow protection, to the Hindu Right, is a political issue, on which people can be roused to fury against cow-eaters like Christians and Muslims and certain Hindu castes; the cow itself, of course, is completely forgotten in this.    

The usual reason given for banning cow slaughter is the alleged religious sentiments of the people – a wholly spurious sentiment, but carefully fostered to the extent of rewriting history to stop all mention of Hindu consumption of beef. The other reason is the “preservation of the nation’s cattle wealth” – when I hear that one, I want to laugh my ass off. It sounds just like some Masai tribesman counting his cattle and translating them into riches and power. The scrub cow on the street can – with difficulty – perhaps produce a cup of milk a day. It’s not the source of the milk the nation allegedly needs – that comes (in the case of organised farms) from Friesian and other dairy breed cows, carefully cared for, that never see the streets; and in the unorganised sector, from the immensely large numbers of buffalos, which are not let out on the streets except during herding from one place to another. Buffalos, as I can personally attest (I have been trapped in the middle of a herd) are, in spite of their size and strength, gentle beasts with no aggressive intent at all; and they are eaten all right by the cattle worshipping Hindu, even in the middle of the North Indian cow-belt, and sacrificed by the Nepali ultra-Hindu at the festival of Dussehra (The Hindu fanatics who condemn Muslims for butchering camels at Id never seem to be concerned at buffalo slaughter at Dussehra). Go figure.   

I live in a state in the East of the country; and the East, whatever its other faults, has the singular advantage of being religiously diverse and of affording minorities their space. In states like this one with a Christian majority, cow slaughter cannot possibly be banned because the people depend on beef for a very large portion of their protein needs and even the Hindu Right recognises that if they tried to ban cow slaughter here, they would lose even the small number of votes they get. 

Therefore, there are no cows wandering the streets of this town; if they did, they would be removed and eaten, and a good thing too, good for everyone;

• Good for the people, who would get cheap protein. It’s amazing that in a country with a still largely malnourished citizenry, we should ignore such a massive source of protein simply to pander to utterly artificial religious sentiments. Even if the sentiments had been genuine, they would have been an insufficient reason to ignore cows as food. But as things stand, not eating cows is an act of genocide.
• Good for the animals which are still hunted for food – birds, and deer and so on. With beef regularly available, at least some of the pressure on them would be reduced. I am always amazed at the people who would “lay down their lives” in defence of the cow but won’t lift a finger to stop poaching and the sale of venison or turtles in the open market.
• Good for the cows themselves. See, if the cows are kept off the streets, in enclosures or cow sheds or whatever, they are kept away from disease and injury and there’s at least a chance that they can be regularly fed and looked after. The cow in the West is not a “holy” animal; it is reared for meat and milk and slaughtered when its useful life is over; and all this time it is not starved or maltreated and is healthier and (if cows have the intelligence to be happy, something I doubt) happier than the “holy” cow wandering the Indian street.  

Anyway, as I said somewhere before, over the years I’ve become more or less a vegetarian by choice (though I have no sympathy at all for theprofessional vegetarian – something I mentioned in one of my early blogs here). But I do eat meat once in a while and the only meat I eat by choice (when I get the urge on me) is beef. It’s cheap; it’s readily available; and unlike eating any other animal, when I eat beef I’m gaining some kind of revenge on the cow (OK, go ahead and laugh, but it’s true). I did it today, too. It’s the first meat I ate in months. Went down fine.

The National Obscenity

July 2007

Living in an uptight country where anyone and everyone is willing to be offended at the drop of a tickler, we kind of hear the word "obscene" every day. Everything is "obscene".

I wonder just what obscene means?

A girl and a boy, both above the age of consent, make love with each other and this is photographed for the pleasure of those who consent to watch this sort of thing and get pleasure out of it. Obscene?

Yes!

A nation where half the people do not go to school, do not earn enough to keep a decent meal in their bellies or a roof above their heads, and this same nation spends most of its money on weapons that cannot be used. Obscene?

No!

A girl and a boy meet and talk together, holding hands. Obscene? Obscene enough to get them both legitimately killed?

Why, yes...

A nation where farmers kill themselves by drinking pesticide every day because they cannot possibly pay off their debts, yet the media are busy praising the stock market's alleged strength and buoyancy. Obscene?

What are you, crazy?

All right, I'll stop now, before I go on to talk about destroyed forests and submerged homes, of ancient erotic sculptures and contemporary art, of women raped and men thrown off trains, - and of new definitions of old words.

The Indian constitution describes "obscenity" as something that tends to "deprave and corrupt the mind of the viewer", or words to that effect. Well, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be depraved or corrupted by a bare nipple on TV. I certainly would be depraved and corrupted, though, by the sight of people grown rich on bribes buying their way out of the purview of the rule of law.

Recently, there was a woman who was tortured and harrassed by her husband and in-laws for, among other things, bearing a female child. The police refused to register her complaints, so she ultimately staged a public protest by stripping down to her underwear in the street. She just about avoided getting jugged for obscenity, while her act got her criticised by all and sundry - including the sneering middle class matrons who said the very least she could have done was wear matching underwear.

I agree, the episode was obscene. It was not obscene that she had to strip down to bra and panties to draw attention to her grievances. It was obscene that she was tortured for not bringing enough dowry and for birthing a daughter. It was obscene that the police refused to register a case when she complained. And it was beyond obscene that the Great Indian Middle Class chose to laugh at her.

But then I detest and despise the Great Indian Middle Class.

I rather think that makes me obscene myself.

Tokenism: The Indian National Character

July 2007

It’s the ultimate cliché. We are a nation that’s a unity of diversities.

Fine. I don’t disagree with that.

OK, so we’ve Gujaratis in the west who’re excellent at cutting diamonds and burning Muslims, Sikhs all over who make the most recognisable Indians anywhere in the world and also the most damnawful truck drivers it can be your misfortune to meet; Kashmiris with long noses and grey eyes who are trying to trade in their AK47s for the carpets they used to sell; Mumbai people who jump through hoops at the orders of an old man in a building called Matoshree, who are good at making money and who don’t know there’s a world outside their appallingly crowded and incredibly chaotic city. We have South Indians who think words like “rascal” and “fellow” areabuses and who literally worship film actors as gods, besides making good bureaucrats and computer engineers; we have Oriyas who are always being battered by flood, drought, cyclone, or all three at once; we have Biharis who spend all their time kidnapping each other and fighting over caste when they’re not stealing everyone else’s jobs; we have Bengalis who think they have the ultimate in culture (which they pronounce kalchaar) and love to moan about how the rest of the country is in a conspiracy, in their own words, to “down” them. We have Nepalis whom the rest of the nation think are fit only for jobs as doormen and menials; we have Assamese who think one can achieve success by doing absolutely nothing but lazing around; and we have the various tribes of the North East, who keep fighting each other and whom the rest of the country considers to be all Chinese anyway. And then we have the Anglo-Indians, who are always fornicating and boozing, when they aren’t genuflecting in church; we have the Parsis, who are all stinking rich and answer to names like Moneywalla and Wadia.

If I’ve left out any of your favourite stereotypes, my apologies. But I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of this one.

Anyway, the point is that this country has thousands of ethnic groups, languages, food habits (South India, for instance, is largely vegetarian, at least among the higher caste groups; in North East India vegetarianism is regarded as a bizarre aberration not far removed from mental illness; the North of the country eats wheat, the East and South eat rice), religions (Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, animist, Parsi, a vanishingly tiny Jewish minority, Jain, Sikh, and whatnot, you name it, we’ve got it), politics (everything from the Hitlerite Aryanism of the extreme Hindu right wing fringe and from Talibanic Islamic mullahs to Maoism) – the country has it all.

Is there anything, anything at all, that everyone here has in common? Some thread of unity that runs through Kashmiri separatist, Tamil priest, Assamese trader, and Gujarati politician? What binds the xenophobic Marathi who hates anyone whose name doesn’t end in -kar, the Rajasthani supporter of child marriage, the Haryanvi who gets her girl babies aborted as a matter of course, the forest dweller from Andhra Pradesh, the Naga who thinks the Bible is literally true and that the world is flat?

In a word: tokenism.   

If we Indians are anything at all, we’re fervent worshippers at the altar of tokenism. We will always settle for symbolic gestures – grandiose symbolic gestures, the more grandiose the better – rather than do anything concrete. The token in fact will be the remembered – and appreciated – in every instance more than the concrete performance. A few examples will suffice.

So, for example, Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh state is determined to build a statue to lower-caste icon BR Ambedkar which will be higher than the Statue of Liberty. If she’s got to demolish the only halfway decent sports complex her entire state has to find the land for it, well, them’s the breaks. Of course, the money involved could be far better spent building schools and hospitals for poor lower caste people, but that won’t get any votes. A statue gathering one hell of a lot of guano will. You can just hear them saying: “Mayawati hasn’t given us roads or schools or water, but so what? She’s given us a statue. This means she’s given us dignity. Who needs schools or even useless sports facilities? She’s given us a statue! Wonderful!”

So, we have a woman president. Excellent. Of course, female foetuses will still be aborted after illegal sex determination tests; if they are born, girls will still be murdered in infancy by being buried alive or given boiling milk; if they are allowed to live, they will still be underfed, undereducated, sexually abused, and married off at puberty or earlier to men often three times their age. Then they will be tortured or murdered for dowry, their health ruined by perpetual pregnancies, and if they are widowed their lives will rapidly degenerate into a living hell. But, so what? We have a woman president!

So, we have that exemplar of Indian tokenism, reservations. As I pointed out elsewhere, reservations are absolutely useless since the only people they benefit are those too rich and well-educated to need them in the first place. The vast majority of the underclass get nothing out of reservations except even more neglect and also the scorn of the upper classes, but they’ve got dignity.

So, we have Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s face on every currency note and a road in every capital city named after him. While Gandhi was a disaster in many ways, we insist on officially venerating him while specifically rejecting the few things about his philosophy that made sense: religious amity, for example, or non-violence whenever possible. Gandhi used to shield riot victims with his own body and persona. Today’s Gandhi-worshippers organise and direct pogroms from police control rooms by radio.

So we have sex education banned and works of art destroyed in the name of “preserving culture” while ancient – supposedly protected – monuments crumble to ruin and literally vanish from under the noses of the authorities. So we have the Taj Mahal SMS-polled into becoming a new “wonder of the world” while the actual Taj is eroded away by acid rain and it slowly tilts due to politician-directed damage to the Yamuna river.

So, whenever we have floods, politicians conduct “aerial surveys of the flood-affected areas” which achieve absolutely nothing except tie up valuable helicopters from the more important job of rescuing marooned people and dropping food supplies to the starving. But if the politico didn’t show himself to the cameras sitting at a helicopter window, he would be called “callous and insensitive”.

So, we have that ultimate in tokenism, a “democracy” where all that matters is for parties to win the elections. After that nothing matters except clinging on to power until the next election comes around. Fulfilling election promises? What’s that?

You get the picture.    

I forgot all about this post. What does that say about me?

From 6 September 2007

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If you’re a regular on this blog, you’d have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of my feelings about the Great Indian Middle Class. It’s difficult even to quantify the contempt I feel for it, much less give it expression. It would probably require a book if I were to begin writing about all the things that were wrong with it, so here I can just focus on individual things.

Like, for example, the case of Geetanjali Nagpal.

Who is Geetanjali Nagpal? She's the woman in the picture.

A former model, both on the catwalk and having “graced” magazine covers, she was discovered wandering the streets of Delhi, homeless, ragged, filthy, begging for food. Fluent in English (she’s a graduate of a top women’s college, Lady Shriram’s) she claimed to be “from Mars” and reacted violently to TV cameras and microphones being thrust in her face. Do you blame her?

The Great Indian Middle Class reacted with shock and horror. How come one of them – daughter of an Indian Navy officer, even now undeniably attractive, English-speaking, educated, “decent” – how could she descend so low? The papers and the news channels were full of stories of her affairs and of her child whom her boyfriend (referred to by some papers as her “husband” – Indian newspapers also recently married Brad Pitt and la Jolie) took away to Germany. They were talking to her mother and her sister who alleged that she used to come to their house (also in Delhi) and take money, only to spend it on alcohol and drugs.  

The Great Indian Middle Class was titillated. It was also quite genuinely shocked. This sort of thing didn’t happen to People Like Us, you see. People Like Us got on camera and said suitably inane things and went to Los Angeles on holiday. They didn’t sleep in parks and temples and beg people for money – in English, at that. It was terrible, it was scandalous, it was a reflection on themselves, it had to be put right.

So the Great Indian Middle Class set about putting it right.  

So what happened to Geetanjali Nagpal? She was whisked away to a hospital, cleaned up, dressed in “decent” clothes, and is now being “rehabilitated”. It’s incredible how many people and groups are determined to “rehabilitate” her.

Meanwhile…

Hundreds, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of beggars flood India. Some are sham, with bank accounts and large houses in their native villages. But there are many others, and many of them are children, who don’t eat if they don’t beg. The Middle Class isn’t bothered about rescuing them. It isn’t bothered at the idea that they are just as hooked on drugs as the Nagpal social circle was. It doesn’t give a damn for them. They aren’t People Like Us, and they might as well be of a different species. A few years ago, an Olympic gold medallist – a member of the Indian men’s hockey team of 1980 – was discovered working as a labourer in a quarry in Bihar, breaking stones. I still remember one member of the Great Indian Middle Class having a good giggle at the photo of an emaciated, unshaven man in cracked plastic shoes, gold medal round his neck, breaking stones in a quarry. Nor does the Great Indian Middle Class get worked up over ragged, filthy kids with matted hair being forced to beg from cars at traffic lights. They're dark and rustic and not simpatico.  They do not deserve sympathy.      

Economically, I guess I’m of the middle class, but in every other way I try and stay aloof.     

I doubt you need to ask me why.    

PETA hypocrisy

In today’s paper (26/9/2008) I saw a typical piece of PETA hypocrisy – a “protest” against the leather industry. There was a photo of an attractive young woman lying on a street in Bhubaneswar, Orissa state, India, wearing a “bloodstained” set of leotards, while a sign lying beside her proclaimed “leather is murder”.

I looked for the photo on the net, couldn't find it. I'm therefore posting another photo of the same broad genre, here.:


I’m sure the young lady I mentioned (not the one in the photo) is much exercised about the unbelievable torture cattle allegedly go through to provide skins for the leather industry (actually, in this country, the vast majority of leather comes from cattle that die of natural causes, but that’s not something PETA prefers to acknowledge). Within the limits of what she chooses to believe, I’m sure she is completely sincere.

But...

I wonder if she and PETA are willing to find employment for the thousands who work in the leather industry. All right, maybe they don’t care about humans, they’re animal rights activists after all. OK...

I still wonder if PETA is willing to take all the millions of stray cattle off the streets, treat their diseases, feed them properly, and dispose of their corpses in a sufficiently dignified manner when they shuffle off this mortal coil from natural causes.

Once they do that, they’re entitled to agitate against leather or porcelain or glue or whatever it is they want. Not before.

But that would have cost the beautiful young woman her photo-op on the Orissa street, so I don’t think it will happen any time soon.

(Oh, by the way, PETA keeps harping on the adverse environmental effects of tanneries. Do they demand the tanneries clean up their act? No. They demand the entire leather industry shut down, which even a PETA-ite knows isn't going to happen. Rather a case of throwing the baby out with the bath-water, don't you think?)

Aborting Abortions

From September 2008

I hate children, but there’s one point of child rights I absolutely support.

Among my patients is a kid named Kenny. Eleven years old and physically more or less normally developed, he’s so profoundly retarded he cannot even eat – food has to be put in his mouth and his lips pinched shut until his reflex actions make him swallow. Obviously he can’t talk, dress, brush his teeth, or even sit up on his own volition. Left alone, he would lie in one place until he starved to death.

About a month ago, the Indian news media were all full of the story of a pregnant woman called Niketa Mehta who discovered in the 24th week of her pregnancy that her foetus had congenital heart problems that would likely cripple it for life.

So the Mehtas, who aren’t rich enough to bear a lifetime of expenses and heartbreak, decided to get the baby aborted. The problem was that under Indian law, promulgated all the way back in 1971, abortions are only legal up to the 20th week of gestation; after that they’re deemed “unsafe”. Apparently, in Indian law at least, no advance in obstetrics at all has occurred in the past four decades.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and getting the foetus quietly aborted by some sympathetic gynaecologist, the Mehtas decided to approach the courts, thereby challenging the abortion law and its 20-week limit. Predictably, the court, filled as it is with people who might charitably be described as “conservative”, turned down her plea. Sundry individuals and organisations, naturally including the Catholic Church (the Mehtas aren’t even Christian) jumped into the fray, condemning abortion and promising to take the baby off the Mehtas’ hands, pay for its upkeep, etc, etc. Whether any of these promises were meant to be kept – well, your guess is as good as mine.

The point is moot anyway, because shortly after her plea for abortion was dismissed by the court, Niketa Mehta had an alleged spontaneous abortion (also known as a miscarriage). The episode was rather mysterious, with her regular gynaecologist not being present. Now I’m not accusing Mrs Mehta of getting her child clandestinely and illegally aborted, but I would absolutely not blame her if she indeed had done that.

In today’s paper I read that the Indian Health Ministry seems to have finally realised the fact that if you stop people aborting legally, they’ll just go ahead and do it illegally, so the proposal is to raise the legal period up to 24 weeks.

I’ve never tried to hide my dislike of children and my support for abortion – and frankly I don’t give a damn whether an aborted foetus is sentient or can feel pain – and this post isn’t about my feelings about abortion. What I want to talk about is the anti-abortionist woodlice that came crawling out into the light when Niketa Mehta was trying to get her baby legally aborted.

Apart from the Catholic Church, which had no business in the whole matter but whose attitude was predictable, there were all the men (and a surprising number of women) who repeated the same old theme song, which goes something like this:

“How can a mother think about ending the life of her unborn baby, even if it be born crippled for life? It’s her duty to love the baby. If she doesn’t, she’s evil/abnormal/crazy.”

Now I know everyone has a right to their opinion, but I seriously doubt the mother of Kenny (whom I mentioned above) would have decided to go through with her pregnancy if she’d known what was coming. In fact, I don’t have to doubt it at all. I know, from her own mouth, that she’d have aborted him, even though she is a Catholic herself.

And as for Kenny himself, just assume there is a living, thinking brain trapped in that body. Do you think he would’ve loved life like that?

A friend told me of a relative of hers who knowingly gave birth to a child who is deaf, blind and dumb, and can barely stand and walk. The mother thought she was showing “love”. The child, I feel, doesn’t think it’s exactly love. It probably feels its life is an endless scream.

As I said, I hate children, but there’s one point of child rights I absolutely support.

Give the deformed and/or unwanted foetuses freedom. Let them die.

Response to Global Warming Deniers

Sometimes, some lines of argument reveal more about the people making those arguments than the points they are advancing...

Let’s take two different lines of argument advanced by two different lots of the deny-global-warming brigade:

The first lot:

One frequent assertion of the people who love to pretend, for reasons I shall discuss in a moment, that there’s no such thing as global warming is this: global warming doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it isn’t due to the activities of human beings. And even if it is the activities of human beings that is causing it, it’s likely to be a good thing because the melting of all that ice will free up so many natural resources for exploitation, and so on and so forth. Now there are some governments which love to subscribe, officially at least, to this theory. Y’know, how the resources opened up will benefit the nation, and how people up north will save because they won’t have to heat their houses any more, and so on.

It requires very little intelligence to see that there is a lot wrong with this line of “argument”. Now, unless one’s one of the lot who love to imagine that the Day of Judgement is about to arrive, one expects that the planet is likely to endure till the sun turns into a  red giant about five thousand million years from now. Accordingly, the resources “freed up” by global warming will need to last at least five thousand million years or until some kind of technology is developed which needs no resources, or at least so few resources that the new resources freed up will last at least that vast majority of humanity which does not emigrate to other planets for five thousand million years. Right? Now can anyone believe that this is likely to happen, especially as these same governments spend far more money and effort in the race to secure resources than in the attempt to develop even marginally less wasteful technologies?

Then there is the little point that the planet isn’t warming up in little patches, of course; whatever the reason behind global warming, the planet is warming up as a whole. It might seem obvious to you and to me, but not to these ladies and gentlemen. If the north warms up, the south does so too. And the majority of the world’s people live in the equatorial regions, so if the Arctic and Antarctic warm up, you can probably agree with me that the equatorial region is liable to warm up a sight more.

What happens if it warms up? Well, one of the obvious (to you and me) consequences is the massive reduction of crop yields because of many factors, some of which can be briefly described as under:

First, the patterns of ocean currents will be badly disturbed by warming of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps leading to the entry of huge amounts of fresh cold water into the seas. The ocean currents are responsible for a very large portion of global rainfall. You disturb the currents, you disturb that rainfall, and you destroy crops worldwide, most of which are still dependent on rainfall for irrigation.

Second, because many of these crops exist in places with little seasonal temperature variations, a sharp rise in temperature is liable to kill them off, because crops domesticated over thousands of years lose what resistance they had in the wild to change of conditions.

Third, the melting of the ice caps will raise ocean levels and flood coastal lands all over. More people worldwide live on the coasts than do inland, and, especially in poorer and more crowded lands, there is liable to be not much space for them to move to. Coastal crop yields will vanish.

Then there are the other deleterious effects of global warming on equatorial people: not only famine due to reducing crop yields, but hunger/drought/flooding induced migration and conflict, fighting over land and water and food, rampant disease (usually a bigger killer in low-technology fighting than combat itself), and even deaths from heatstroke. All this can be safely predicted, as can be predicted that the governments eulogising global warming will do nothing to mitigate these effects or help these people. Of course, those same governments will never even mention that these things will happen. We can call this the “I got mine Jack” line of thinking. It’s short term and stupid, because the resources will run out anyway, and because of course the adverse effects of global warming won’t fail to affect them as well.

While the second lot of global warming deniers lack any official support, unlike the first lot, their line of argument is even more interesting and even more self-delusional. Although also global warming deniers, they are on the surface the enemies of the first lot. Their line of argument goes like this: global warming does not exist. It is only a scaremongering tactic thought up by a few rich nations as a way of committing genocide against the poorer nations of the world!

(That, by the way, is an argument put forward by a faction of the anti-abortion hypocrites in the US too:  that abortion is a weapon used to reduce the populations of poor non-white minorities. Therefore poor non-white minorities should avoid abortion and have more and more children, ensuring they remain poor forever.)

Anyway, to get back to the main point: these people aver that global warming is a plot to divert crops to biofuels and so on and to deny poor countries the good things of life, by restricting their ownership of cars and so on. Yesterday I read one of the shining lights of this lot of intellectuals claim that anti-global warming activists like Al Gore were “killers by starvation of Third World children” (As an aside: I didn’t see any comment by her against the much more direct killing of children by Zionazi bombs and the like, in case you’re wondering).

Superficially it’s plausible, because there’s a quite undeniable taint of racism in the line of thinking that goes “If all Indian and Chinese people buy their own cars then the world will go under, so we must stop them from buying their own cars”. But this second lot of global warming deniers don’t stop at pointing out that line of racism; they go quite a bit further. They claim, more or less, that global warming is a plot to deny those Indians and Chinese their own cars. They claim, quite correctly, that diverting grain production to produce biofuels will decrease the availability of food supply. This is something anyone with any sense can say (people with sense don’t include adherents of the first line of argument, above) – but they have never advocated that the rich nations reduce their ultra-conspicuous consumption levels. Instead, they want to protect and even increase those consumption levels, and in order to do so they argue that, in effect, such consumption levels are everyone’s birthright and that anyone who wants to reduce those consumption levels is a racist plotter against the so-called “Third World”.

So just how do they claim that global warming is a myth?

The commonest claim goes like this: “We had twenty inches (sic) of snow this time, and the temperature dropped to minus twenty degrees Farenheit (sic), so the claim that global warming exists is hogwash.” It’s a very superficial claim, because these people are incapable of non-superficial thought. Anyone with sense and a little bit of knowledge will point out that global warming isn’t calculated by a few hot or cold days in the north of the US or the extreme south of Tierra del Fuego; it’s astatistical reading of average temperatures worldwide, and on any such graph global warming isn’t just a reality, it’s advancing at a frightening rate. The indicators: disintegration of the ice sheets, desertification, dropping food yields – are undeniable unless you find a way to pretend that it all doesn’t exist either.

Another way to deny global warming is a hunt for some “scientist” (of the same variety that denied evolution, said cigarette smoking was healthy and claimed the splitting of the atom was “Jewish Science”, I suppose) who claims global warming is a myth. You can almost feel the triumph of these deniers when they encounter such a “scientist”: they hold him up as a trophy. “See, we found one who agrees with us!”

Then there is the bit about the “Third World”, a term I find highly insulting, and which thinking people would do well to avoid. But let that pass for the moment: the main point is that these people don’t seem troubled by the actual parameters by which the “Third World” remains underdeveloped. They aren’t bothered by the lack of schools or hospitals. They are – allegedly - bothered by the idea that the people of the “Third World” shouldn’t each have a car of his or her own.

I suppose it’s as good a place as any to say this – if you provide access to schools and medical care, the average “Third World” lifestyle is far more sustainable than a “First World” one. A hundred people crammed into a bus, even if it’s a polluting, smoke belching museum piece, is better than a hundred separate cars on the street. A few chickens scratching around in the dirt and providing the family with eggs and meat is better than a chemical fed, hormone-zombie of a battery hen. A social support network is superior to any number of insurance schemes and psychoanalysis that you can lay on. There is nothing shameful about recycling things as long as they can be recycled, either, instead of disposing of things after half a use. And this is the truth. But all this is of no value to these ladies and gentlemen. For them, the “Third World” is irredeemable unless it can be made a copy of the “First World” in its material consumption; or, to put it another way, they would rather carry on with their own lifestyles because interrupting them would mean that the right of the “Third World” to catch up is being denied.

I’ve said the first lot were “I’ve got mine Jack” thinkers, implicitly racist. The second lot are at least as racist, probably more. And, unlike the first lot, who are upfront about what they want, they’re hypocritical to the bone.

I don’t know if they know it themselves, though.