3 pockets & a 4 colour pen: January 2010

WHAT AILS JANUS?

It's that fa-la-la-la time of year TO EVERYTHING (TURN, TURN, TURN) THERE IS A SEASON (TURN, TURN, TURN) ....January is a comin' in - A TIME TO BE BORN, A TIME TO DIE and everyone's singing cuckoo. A TIME TO PLANT, A TIME TO REAP Tweets, born by the tweeple of the noughties, A TIME TO KILL, A TIME TO HEAL whizz past bearing pathologically hopeful tidings of determined seasonal cheer. A TIME TO LAUGH, A TIME TO WEEP In short, it's bipolar god season - a tribute to the travails and testing times of Janus of 'two-heads facing opposite directions' fame.

Janus, (the Roman God for whom January is named) is the god of gateways, marking new eons in the passage of time - of beginnings and endings -one head cynically seeing the past, the other, with unbounded hope, the future... his polarised state of mind, the unconscious inspiration for Dickens' "Best of Times, Worst of times" beginning and The Beatles "You say Goodbye, I say Hello".

Perpetually suspended in motion, being torn in opposite directions with conflicting values and warring emotions must have been like vertigo to poor Janus, as Doctor Doolittle's Pushmi-Pullyu could vouch for. All Doolittle disciples will remember fondly the motion-challenged almost extinct, llama like creature (with a head of an antelope and another of a unicorn) Pushmi-Pullyu. Every time the Pushmi-Pullyu wanted to move, both its heads attempted to go in opposite directions!

"This, Doctor," said Chee-Chee, "is the pushmi-pullyu--the rarest animal of the African jungles, the only two-headed beast in the world!

Lord save us!" cried the duck. "How does it make up its mind?""It doesn't look to me as though it had any," said Jip, the dog.

"I notice," said the duck, "that you only talk with one of your mouths. Can't the other head talk as well?"

"Oh, yes," said the pushmi-pullyu. "But I keep the other mouth for eating--mostly. In that way I can talk while I am eating without being rude. Our people have always been very polite."

A natural disaster here, an epidemic there... a mysterious celebrity death, a paparazzi-fuelled scandal. A war a year, mating dance-like peace overtures, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations, terror attacks and counter strikes...Economic boomtime and stock market crashes - the inevitability of the relentless march of time was probably made tolerable for Janus with another invention of the Noughties - the convenient (if fictional) amnesic Goldfield's syndrome, of 50 first dates.

Otherwise the tiresome cycle of history with genocides passed off by outrageous rhetoric and symbolic apologies...must be one big yawn of been there - done that to this custodian of history. (Except perhaps for the odd Y2k false start and entertaining ending to a decade - 2012 or whatever the doomsday prediction theory of the day!)

A CONJOINED MIND

Janus' struggle is reminiscent of Bollywood favourite leitmotif - identical twins separated at birth, but with a Midnight's children meets MarionShiva twist in this tale - the twins are conjoined at the brain.

Mencius said in Hallmark fashion: "Friendship is one mind in two bodies." But what of two minds, one body...the never-ending debate of India vs. Bharat?

For India's elite, the decade reads like a Geography Mastermind quiz to which only the likes of Kim Peek has all the answers Kandahar, Pokhran, Bhuj, Godhra, Guatanamo Bay, Banda Aceh, Nandigram, Puthukudiyiruppu... We don't live in that India so alien to us in our converging, urbanscaped world of malls, social networking, insulated, amniotic worlds and reality shows....till a 26/11 happens. And justice is fast-tracked so that the mob's blood lust can be quenched, never mind the cold ashes of Erwadi's victims.

Not merely Gandhian rural/urban, digital have/havenots, capitalist/socialist - this definition-defying divide is best captured in the words the founder of Shetkari Sanghatana, Sharad Joshi:

I had tried to explain what was churning my mind to my wife who in her enthusiasm mentioned the crass inequity of the situation to her sister, an affluent urban socialite. The reaction of the latter was simply stunning. "But, you know sister; these farmers do not mind living like that. They are so used to it, you know!" That clinched the thing for me. Not only was there the horrendous cleavage between the two notional entities, but there was further, a wall of apathy, indifference, unconcern and insensitivity. The predators had hardened their hearts to the miseries of their preys. It was this lack of sensitivity that convinced me that for all practical purposes the two notional entities were two separate nations, in spite of the fact that they shared a common flag and national anthem.

The decade that started with the upbeat Pepsi mantra "Yeh Dil Mange More!" ends with the sobering recession realisation that Trump had got it wrong, Greed wasn't good. Unfortunately with the convenient ante-retrograde amnesia the decade thought of, such realities will be fleeting, a la 50 First Dates.

So Stiglitz-Sen's brave stab at translating Bhutan's 'Gross National Happiness' into tangible economic terms will be the decade's fairytale ending that never was. And Manmohan Singh's inclusive growth remains a pipe dream for one India, and an amniotic bubble for the other. The NIMBY ghettoisation mentality reigns with the chat show questions like "why these 'uneducated' people drink away their money?" being hotly debated, punctuated by tsks, clucks, sms polls and tweets. The unfamiliar territory of the Other India's bleak landscape of farmer suicides, India Inc's wake of pollution, drought, famine, floods and female foeticide is Bubble India's environment of Prozacked psychotherapy, CSR greenwash, power cut cribbing, Mumbai Monsoon Moaning and underhand ultrasound sex tests.

THINGS FALL APART, THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD

A friend recently told me, that it was high time I changed my Hello Tune from Lennon's schmaltzy 'Imagine'. Judith Minty's marriage poem "Conjoined" comes to mind: