“I choose my enemies... for their good intellects,” said Oscar Wilde. “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” This is one of his true (and not just clever) sayings. The index of the progress of a people is the stature of their enemy. Not merely one who is hostile to us, but an enemy is one whom we choose to wage war against. And this choice, being made manifest in war, will be apparent to an onlooker, which is why Wilde says he is careful about it.
Therefore, though the Indian English-speaking community might like to believe it is battling great powers of darkness these days, what does the onlooker really see? Mani Shankar Aiyar, grappling with a journalist’s microphone. Shabana Azmi railing on Twitter against the organisation of a film festival. And a continuous verbal duel between our supposed best and brightest and the least rational elements of the latest parochial ‘sena’.
Divine delusions
To the onlooker, these scenes plainly resemble a cock-fight — and there are no eagles in a cock-fight. So how is it that we continue to believe we are fighting for soaring ideas — freedom, art, love — against mortal enemies? To understand our condition, it is helpful to consider others who are similarly afflicted. Consider how the IS deludes its followers into imagining they are fighting for God.
It does so by seeking out men and women already bitter with low self-esteem, and massaging their egos with this grandest of ideas. The IS knows that when a great idea is thus exploited, it only magnifies the power of the petty idea that is already in control. For one’s actual bigness or smallness does not depend on the idea one shouts, but only on the idea one serves. That is why the most menial thing done for love (like washing another’s feet) is a sign of a great heart, while the greatest thing done for hate (like giving up one’s life) reveals such an emptiness within.
So the question is, in the days before we were goaded into styling ourselves crusaders for freedom, and the last stand of truth and social justice against India’s forces of bigotry, were we really serving these ideas? Recall again that those seduced by the IS usually had little religion in their life until they suddenly became jihadis .
I submit that the Indian English-speaking community too must have been worshipping at some other altar. I say this because freedom and justice are big ideas, winning ideas, which by their own strength impart a confidence to their servants in every situation. Surely, if these things were really my master, I could not be staying up nights trading abusive tweets with someone I call a ‘troll’.
Curious fixation
But if, in reality, we have been fixated on our careers, and for that sake have been busily hoarding our education, our know-how and our cultural capital, then it makes perfect sense that our eyes should light up with furious recognition when someone else starts doing the same.
It is owing to this parity, of an equal but opposed pettiness, that these spectacles have become so perversely compelling.
The warring parties in the Padmavati drama, for example, are at least as proven at self-promotion as at making works of art or defending anyone’s honour. And their fight is bitter, it goes down to the wire, because they are each really attached to a delusion: one can only give honour to a legend by treating her as a statue, the other cannot conceive of her artistic portrayal without at least hinting at radical transgression.
These spectacles are more than a waste of our time; they give cover to the process of our destruction. As Mani Shankar Aiyar’s tussle with a T.V. reporter’s mic dominated the news, a brutal communal murder in Rajasthan seemed to fade in significance. But I am not suggesting that the Indian English-speaking community should jump into the fray of social conflict; rather that it should get out of the way.
To help another is the privilege of the sober, while for us, drunk on our pride, it is time to hang our heads in shame. Introspection, the confronting of our self-centredness, is the one thing we neglect in all our verbiage, but it is the only remedy for our condition.
Just as the follower of IS has no more pressing enemy than the ideology of IS, which will cripple him or her as if he or she does not throw it off, so we too must first assess what we believe — the reality of which is in the works we do. That would be to identify our great enemy and, at last, to grow.
The writer has spent the last decade writing novels and wrestling with the things described over the course of this column
