Not What Was

By Langston Hughes

By then the poetry is written
and the wild rose of the world
blooms to last so short a time
before its petals fall.
The air is music
and its melody a spiral
until it widens
beyond the tip of time
and so is lost
to poetry and the rose –
belongs instead to vastness beyond form,
to universe that nothing can contain,
to unexplored space
which sends no answers back
to fill the vase unfilled
or spread in lines
upon another page –
that anyhow was never written
because the thought could not escape
the place in which it bloomed
before the rose had gone.

Filed under: 1 , Langston Hughes

If …

by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Theme for English B

by Langston Hughes

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you–
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me–we two–you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me–who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records–Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white–
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me–
although you’re older–and white–
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

Filed under: Miscellaneous , Langston Hughes

Yes, Prime Minister

by Anu Saha

Under the grueling gaze of the early summer sun, my father lined up at a community center in South Delhi last month to vote.  He got there early, hoping to beat the chaos that usually accompanies the combination of bureaucracy and mass crowds.  Austere signage greeted him at the entrance, directing voters, by block, to their respective booths.  The day was hot.  The air, feeling too languid, did not move.

Typically, an April day in Delhi is windy.  Gusts rave angrily in the heat, carrying and disposing particles of sand capriciously throughout the city.  On this day though, the city had been granted a reprieve from the usual deluge.  The price of this favor, however, was that the air, vaporous and laden with smog and silt, turned the city into a perpetually polluted sauna.

 

It cooked and stuck like caustic syrup to his skin. 

My father participated in the labyrinthine exercise of voting after a thirty year lapse spent in Zambia.  He left during the murky sunset of the 1970s. The decade had tested the limits of a generation’s belief in their democracy.

Lingering in the air were the relics of the central government’s Garibi Hatao program that failed to deliver on its promise to remove poverty and amounted to be more about campaign sloganeering rather than development.  Some condemned the emergency years while others defended some of its facets, arguing that democracy in India was a fool’s dream that stood in the way of development.

Elections, even the constitution, it seemed, could be bought.  National parties lost their following in favor of regional caste-based politics.

Then there was the legacy of colonialism.  The quest was not to win the west, but to be weary of it.  Trade barriers were thick and the bureaucracy of a quota-permit based system saturated the markets.  It was a young, large democracy, standing at the brink of repeating many of the mistakes it wished to write off.  Amid this, my parents moved, from one young republic to an even younger one.

Thirty years later, at the beginning of a new decade and century, he returned to Delhi, with a sense of belonging to two very different countries.  Living in India became an exercise in learning and relearning.

I called him the day after he voted to find out how it went.

“I couldn’t vote”, he said.  There was an echo on the line.

“What?  Why?”

“When I finally got to the front of the line they couldn’t find my name in the database.”

“Did you forget to take your registration card?”

Dumb question, I know.  The process of elimination when troubleshooting any problem: ask the dumb questions first.

“Of course I did not forget my registration card!”

There it was: the anti-climatic end to a miniscule part in the grand stage production of the elections.  I was disappointed.

I read tweets about the election results before hearing about it on the news. This time, the habitual dance of polarizing politics did not succeed in seducing enough voters. This was perhaps most gratifying.

For now, it’s another five years with our erstwhile prime minister, ascribed to with adjectives like septuagenarian, too academic, frail, and quite forgettable on stage.  All true.  But I would argue that, perhaps, for the set of challenges that India faces, experience matters more than charisma, honesty more than an uncanny ability to flirt with the press.

In our parliamentary system, much of the art of Government making happens in private.  In the early hours after victory was declared, I imagined the important discussions floating among the arbors of Ten Janpath Road in New Delhi as a coalition government was formed anew.

I remembered one of my favorite British sitcoms, Yes Prime Minister and the character I was most fond of, Sir Humphrey Appleby. He was the archetype of a power player in Parliamentary politics, the man who was not Prime Minister but was instrumental in putting the Prime Minister in office.

I loved watching him articulately obfuscate and confound his opponents (even his own boss, the Prime Minister!) through technical jargon mixed with obscure Latin references.  His big speeches, delivered in the private chambers of British Government, were the highlight of every episode.  Humphrey’s best moments were when the press wasn’t in the room.

As I waited to learn about our new Government, I imagined Sir Humphrey would probably have likened Ten Janpath Road to the chronicles of Downing Street.

I watched Mr. Singh speak at a news conference after the results were announced.  He was speaking in his characteristic soft voice, barely audible above the din of the press, when I received the following text from my dad:

The UPA won handily.  They have a mandate.  I am happy.

I smiled.  Here was a good ending, even though he didn’t get to vote.  The last bit was my favorite part.

A thirty year trajectory, with two very different Gandhi women at both ends, one who vied for absolute power and the other who won it handily and then shied away from it.  I imagined how my father saw the complex journey from an emergency and the constitution of a republic in crisis to transparent elections with a clear victor and the gift of a mandate.  Mostly, I was pleased with this positive note in history’s narrative.

Meanwhile on TV, Mr. Singh finished his comments.  I could hear him only because the press in the room got quiet when he approached the microphone.  Not surprisingly, of all the speeches, his was the most brief.

“The public has expressed faith in Congress”, he said.

I replied as only Sir Humphrey could.

“Yes, Prime Minister”.

Filed under: Alternate Progress , Anu, Elections

A Passing Phrase

by Anu Saha

I ran my fingers over the passport cover, and slowly traced the golden emblem’s imprint.  I tried to piece together the inscription at the bottom, but didn’t get very far.  Three weeks of evening Hindi classes at home had prepared me for deciphering only consonants.  Vowels and punctuation were coming soon, I had been told.  So my dad translated.

Satyameva Jayate.  He ran his index finger over each word as he said it, so I could follow.

I was puzzled.  Was I supposed to know what that meant?  My parents spoke Hindi at home but I had never heard these two words before.

“It’s Sanskrit”, he explained.  “It means truth conquers all.”

“Sanskrit?  Am I supposed to learn Sanskrit too?”

He could sense the anxiety in my voice.  I hadn’t been having a grand time with the Hindi classes.  The addition of another unknown language to the list was cause for some consternation.

“Eventually”, he said, smiling.

“Oh, right then.”

Eventually.  The word for me, seven years old at the time, signified a point in the gargantuan future, so it didn’t bother me much.  After all, I had gotten my first, very own passport that day. It was brand new, with blank pages.  On the first page, in my own handwriting, was my signature below my photograph.  I had practiced it for days, even in the car during the five hour drive to the Indian Embassy.

I sensed that something important had been delegated to me, a new responsibility that I could not quite articulate. I had golden emblems on my mind.

“Sanskrit”, I thought, “can wait.”

I was born and had lived in Zambia when I became a seven year old Indian citizen.  This weighty identity was bestowed on me because of my heritage and not because I had done anything particularly special to have earned it.  My parents were born and raised in India and were Indian citizens.  It was therefore decided for me that I too would be an Indian citizen.  I initially protested.

“I’m a Zambian!  Shouldn’t I get a Zambian passport?”
“This is just for the time being.  Later on, if you want a Zambian passport, you can always get one.”

This somewhat placated me.  At least I had the option, later on, in the gargantuan future.

India, to me at that time, was foreign, yet familiar.  It was a packaged treat, filled with annual holidays spent in my grandmother’s house, with no school and daily walks with her to the market where I could get Mars bars, Polo mints, and what I imagined to be the entire inventory of Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.  All these were goods not easily procured in Zambia and held a high market value in my estimation.

So it happened that my earliest relationship with India was really quite simple: as long as the candy was abundant, the place was good in my books.

The passport turned out to be quite useful three years later when I was sent to Delhi for school.  I started at my new school the day before Independence Day.  On my first day, my new classmates participated in the school parade.  India was forty seven.  I was ten.

Over the next four years, as I adjusted to my new foreign yet familiar place, its complexities unraveled.  India, the packaged treat, slowly started to disappear and was replaced by an amalgamation of historical facts.

In books, I learned of the nation that was born at the same moment when it was broken, of the non-violent independence movement that culminated with the most violent and horrific human migration in history.

I discovered that the world’s largest democratic experiment was, at its outset, really an unlikely one and that it almost slipped away during the dark days of the emergency.

Among the diversity and rich cultural heritage was the cruel exclusion of the caste system.

These facts and others I stored away, in packaged phrases like that very first one: Satyameva Jayate.  I understood them only cognitively, devoid of emotion, as one would a twenty word factoid read in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I ended up with an aloof education about multiple facts, without understanding the meaning of their utterance.

It was a luxurious and transient interlude from meaning that eventually liquefied and spilled into a fleeting memory.

The meaning crystallized in the years that immediately followed, through an existence spent mostly elsewhere from India.  It came in drips.  As the rudimentary structure of my own values started to form, facts were revisited, accompanied by a realization of the absurdities and paradoxes underlying them.

While the west cooed over India’s emergence, there was a reckoning of the legacy of poor agricultural and environmental policies.  Amid the sprouting of urban malls was the heartbreak of the farmer and the environment.  In the world’s largest democracy were the fractional, petty and utterly corrupt political norms.

Behind the incredible India ads was a growing sense of a society whose members, in a relentless pursuit of their own four-walled ends, forgot how to treat each other.

Mostly, amid an India growing in bursts, I discovered the litany of disappointments borne by the Indian citizen, in cycles of hope and utter desolation.

Satyameva Jayate.  Years later, in a passport filled with bureaucratic graffiti, has this phrase derived greater significance, or has it been marred with disillusion?

Truth conquers all.

Does it?  Or is this just a passing phrase that has no enduring meaning in our body politic, fleeting in the cacophony that tends to pervade in our allegedly thriving pluralism?

I remain ambivalent.

 

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Filed under: Alternate Progress , Anu

The Unknown Citizen

by W.H. Auden

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the greater community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his union shows it was sound)
And our social psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both producers’ research and high-grade living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the installment plan
And had everything necessary to the modern man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into public opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our eugenicist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their  education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

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Filed under: Miscellaneous , Auden

Theoretics

By Jyotsana Saha

(We are): floating time capsules
carefully preserved between extremities
of truth, hidden dimensions
depths we dare not uncover.

(We are): residues of unstable matter
particles of incomplete moments,
floating through standing waves between
what could have been, and what will be.

(We are): that uncertainty principle,fighting inevitability
the restless nomad, displacing and replacing,
balancing re-calibrations of foreign and familiar,
accepting imperfections of our immeasurable being.

(We are): who we are
the inescapable self.

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Filed under: Miscellaneous , Jyoti

I reason, earth is short

By Emily Dickinson

I REASON, earth is short,
And anguish absolute.
And many hurt;
But what of that?

I reason, we could die:
The best vitality
Cannot excel decay;
But what of that?

I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even,
Some new equation given;
But what of that?

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Filed under: Miscellaneous , Emily Dickinson, Liberal Arts

Utility in the liberal arts: A cue from Dickens

 

by Anu Saha

Custodian of the arts: The Bodleian Library at Oxford has one of the world's largest collections of works in the liberal arts

Listen up! The verdict is in: in these hard times, fiction is irrelevant and poetry is frivolous. The Times portrayed a bleak trajectory last month: enrollment in the humanities is dwindling, funding for programs in languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion has slowed to a drip. The facts are all that matter, plain and simple, with no room to wallow or wonder. In this information age, the humanities increasingly appear to be a decadent luxury; the Dead Poets’ Society is not seen as likely to save the economy. Let’s face it, the worlds of Dickens, Kant, Auden and Foster did not feature in Friedman’s book about the flat world. We lovers of the written word, the sonnet, and oil on canvas, suddenly find ourselves having to justify the existence of these seemingly superfluous pursuits.

Is there a need to change the current perception of the liberal arts as an esoteric education for the elites to one with direct links to practical and economic considerations? Or, is the primary purpose of the humanities to go beyond practical considerations and develop critical reading, writing and thinking skills which indirectly influence any vocation? Where do the humanities fit in this age of ubiquitous information? These are old questions. While those in the humanities ponder the meaning of life, their more pragmatic counterparts question the value of this pondering, especially in hard times and in an age where greater emphasis is being placed by policy makers and administrators on the need for scientists and technologists.

Dickens resonates in this discussion. Particularly, the opening lines of his novel Hard Times:

Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children. Stick to the facts, sir!

How dreary. The prototype of utilitarian education at its finest. Published over 150 years ago, the novel was set in the context of the toils of industrialization, when technological innovation sent GDP growth into overdrive. This, combined with the mind-numbing materialism of the period, resulted in pressure to create an education system that was (with the exception of elite schools) tailored to produce quantitative, ‘factory ready’ skills, with little emphasis on the development of the imagination.

Sound familiar?

The narrator of the novel’s opening lines is Thomas Gradgrind, the Dickens archetype of the all too pragmatically minded educator of the industrial revolution era. In the novel, Gradgrind is forced later in his life to face the consequences of his inane philosophy when confronted with his daughter’s terrible unhappiness in the factual world she grew up in that he so vehemently defends. This is not to say that an education without a focus on critical thinking skills leads to mass depression, but that the novel provides a brilliant depiction of the consequences of binary thinking (perceiving that everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white). The characters in the book find it difficult to know their own minds and discover alternate possibilities for their personal and social problems. In the conflict rich context of today, this theme is, to put it mildly, particularly relevant.

Will a black-and-white approach to thinking solve problems with population, water, alternative and green energy, all in the context of globalization with newly emerging centers of power? It’s doubtful. In an interdependent world, it seems to me that the ability to compromise is more important than purely staunch conviction, the ability to find alternative means a surer sign of progress than the ability to find the right answer. Perhaps it is because of this interdependent theme, this facet of our existence, that we may have a greater case today for the continuance of the liberal arts tradition than that of Dickens and his cohort over 160 years ago. In today’s world, more so than during the industrial revolution, there may not always be a right or wrong answer.

The challenge now lies in making this case persuasively. While the liberal arts are relevant, not enough has been done to emphasize their pertinence and practical applicability in today’s world. In this, the argument for rethinking the subjects with due consideration to current topics and realities warrants merit. This should be more than just a PR exercise with policy makers to garner increased funding. What is needed is a shift in the way these subjects are taught and studied. This approach has already been used in some fields with positive results (using the U.S. as an example since it is my best point of reference for post-secondary education at this point). Links between psychology and business have had profound impact on the study of organizational behavior in business schools. Political science and economics have fared similarly, with some business schools now housing graduate programs in political economy (contrary to the traditional model where teaching and scholarship was managed by the arts and science faculties). Elements of philosophy can be integrated in business ethics classes and the same principles can be explored in the languages and literature.

If science and technology are to be the key determinants of economic vitality, it must be acknowledged that both interact with and are nurtured by society, particularly, a society that fosters individual curiosity and allows experimentation and deviation from the often hackneyed norm. The focus in this discussion should be on how the humanities can inform the sciences – the poet who contemplates the road less taken may someday inform and inspire the scientist who must venture on such a path in the journey toward innovation.

I think both poet and pragmatist would agree: this would make all the difference.

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Filed under: Alternate Progress , Anu, Culture, Liberal Arts

I’m Nobody

By Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d advertise — you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one’s name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

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Filed under: Miscellaneous , Emily Dickinson, Liberal Arts