Opinion Diary Item: Malgudi days are over

The Big City measures merit by manic ambition, morality by money.

M J Akbar

October 2, 2015 12:50 AM IST First published on: Oct 2, 2015 at 12:15 AM IST

A wise quotation, which I found tucked away in some magazine article, from Nassim Taleb’s famous book, The Black Swan — Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

It was a trick, but it worked. The bully boys of the Big City who set the discourse for snobbery have always sneered at the small town as sleepy. What they actually mean is peaceful, but will never acknowledge peace as a virtue. Peace distresses a modern metropolis, as if it were a challenge to its virility. The Big City measures merit by manic ambition, morality by money. If you have not overtaken everything on your way to the undertaker, you haven’t lived.

Bangalore, once a smiling garden town perched within handshake distance of low clouds, has turned into a giant, which stutters through the choke of cars. Drivers thrive on aggression; the law is for losers. If you are stuck in a traffic jam, you must have arrived. One pricey foreign car advertises its brand as restless. Five decades ago, the iconic adman David Ogilvy sold Rolls Royce by whispering that the only thing you could hear at 60mph was the ticking of its clock. You couldn’t sell a clock, let alone a car, with such genteel sophistication today.

Mangalore, my second destination, used to possess the feel of an imagined and imaginative Malgudi, the fictional small town created by R.K. Narayan, next to Mempi forest, on the trunk road to Trichinopoly and a railroad to Madras. Here’s the news. Mangalore is astir, tossing and turning to become the Bangalore of the Karnataka coastline. It has a history of many chapters. As a major port, it was a cosmopolitan home to merchants, bankers and seafarers, a trading nerve centre calmed by a serene culture. Today its personality is split; half protective of the past, half searching for edgy aspiration. Suddenly, a mall is society; a crowd is nirvana. Vehicles cut corners between hapless wardens and helpless traffic lights. There are islands of relief, in the excellent educational institutions, created with love and commitment by servants of god, and visionaries who believed that dissemination of knowledge was the ultimate service. But the Malgudi days are over.

Given the flight schedules it takes, in real time, as long to reach Mangalore from Delhi as to enter the airspace of Europe. Long journeys invite a faint dread. The solution is to carry a fat book, of the kind that sits on your shelf testing your inhibitions. I ignored its weight and took along Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography. Every good book reveals the unknown. A great one tells us the unexpected. Jerusalem proved to be a magnificent treasure house of surprise. The year 1071 marked a genuine turning point in the history of an endemic war zone, the Middle East. The Muslim Turks had found a new star in Alp Arslan, famous for conquest – and for draping his long moustaches over his shoulders. In 1071 he defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, a shock outcome that aroused the Papacy and Europe to mobilise for the Crusades. Arslan asked his captive what he would have done if the battle had gone the other way. Diogenes replied, honestly, “Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.” Arslan responded: “My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you and set you free.”

There are no captives in the wars of contemporary electoral democracy, but one truth has not changed: the humiliation of defeat can be impossible to bear if you do not know how to handle survival. Is this an explanation for the weird behaviour of the Congress after it was demolished in 2014?

One picture, they say, is worth more than a thousand words. Perhaps. But one word can be worth more than a thousand words. Much has been written about Lalu Prasad’s speech at Raghopur, Bihar where he commanded his troops to start an epic caste war in every village. One word in Santosh Singh’s report, published in The Indian Express on September 28, said more than all the other words together. The gathering, he reported, was “modest”. Note that Lalu Prasad was speaking on home ground, canvassing for his younger son Tejashwi Yadav. If the turnout on handpicked turf was “modest”, how many shades of fading modesty is Laluji going to witness as he moves through the rest of the state in his campaign for the restoration of his castaway empire in Bihar?

Moral of the week: A wise quotation, which I found tucked away in some magazine article, from Nassim Taleb’s famous book, The Black Swan — Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Never ask a partisan who will win in Bihar. But you could ask a bookie.

Akbar is an author and BJP Rajya Sabha MP