Walden

Imagine a young man in the 1850s striding off into the woods close to Boston and living alone in a log cabin for two years. He then writes a book about it and names it after the lake next to which he lived for that time- Walden. What can you reasonably expect from it? A log of how he built the house (on his own); how he fed and sustained himself (as he 'lived by the labour of my hands only'),  specially in this lonely winter months; and perhaps some philosophical insights about the whole experience. After all, he was not that far from his town of Concorde and visited it often enough; and this was not a grand adventure like walking across America or a transatlantic voyage. Was Thoreau and his book famous by exception, because he was the oddity- a philosopher in an up-and-coming America that lay so much emphasis on commercial enterprise?  

These were my thoughts when I picked up the book. What I found was an exciting book that beat all those low expectations. In his very first chapter 'Economy', he captures the reader with the striking arguments he makes for the principle that was the motivation for his two year stay- that true wealth and happiness comes through shunning the laboured accumulation of material riches. It is not a new message, but is delivered so well that right away you realize this is an extraordinary person with an extraordinary clarity of thought and a great gift for words. As I read further, I had a pencil in hand- the book had too many statements that took my breath away and compelled my graphitic tribute. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.", he said, as they work endlessly to support lands, farms and houses that are supposed to support them.  Also immediately evident is his contempt for conventional wisdom or the advice of seniors. This is not arrogance but the sign of a true moral compass- this was the age of slavery and Thoreau was one of the few who had the courage to stand up against that accepted practice of society. 

The second thing that struck me was that this Harvard graduate was a scholar of subjects much beyond the walls of his Alma Mater. He quotes extensively from the Vedas, from Hindu fables, from Kabir, from Confucius, from the Greek epics. This was no empty display of academic achievement- his entire philosophy was a distillation of great purity from these readings. His attitude was not of erudition but of a deep love for the truth in those timeless writings.  "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!", said he.  "It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.", he said, when itemizing his food related expenses. How many of us can claim this voracious appetite for wisdom from distant lands, specially at such an young age? 

The third thing is his amazing love for all things nature. Solitude was not loneliness because he immersed himself in every aspect of pristine nature that was at Walden. No detail was too small and beauty was everywhere- in the blue of  Walden lake, in the red squirrels that gave him company, the hare, the partridge, the owl, the eagle, the fish. Who carries out purposeful pilgrimages to individual trees in the woods? In this respect he was like Muir or Melville, devoting entire chapters to bubbles under the ice, epic wars between ants (written with great humour!), or to patterns in the sand as the ice of winter melted. 

Sometimes, .. I spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. 

His descriptions of the seasons is as methodical as it is aesthetic. For him, the long lone winters were times to be spent with his books and his winter companions- visiting poets, philosophers and resident owls. Spring is the subject of many writers- but Thoreau beats them all hands down. 

The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then.  If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads.

 

The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

But the sum total of the book is its sublime wisdom. He was a rishi in New England attire, his cabin his deerskin seat, and Walden the purifying waters of his austerities. His deep connection with Eastern and timeless truths is why this book became the inspiration of latter day Eastern saints with similar moral clarity and eloquence - Tolstoy and Gandhi. So it seems apt that, on the eve of the first non-cooperation movement in India, the first Satyagraha booklet distributed by Gandhi was simply a reprint of Thoreau's  Civil Disobedience. 

So this is the answer to the question I posed in the first few sentences of this post: A young man's simple account of an uneventful stay in a wooden cabin became the cement for the convictions of giants among men, who changed the very course of human history. 

I will leave you with his own words of his lessons from the experience: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings" 

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Remembering Gandhi

We know Gandhi at the peak of his political power but most are not aware of how he got there. Nowadays the assumption is that the people of India were mesmerized by his philosophy of love and peace and deprived other, more effective leaders the opportunity to helm the freedom struggle. But in fact there were many eminent and courageous leaders in India before he entered the fray...the reason he still rose rapidly is two-fold: (1) he took the attack to the British with more force and impact than anyone else before, (2) he centred the struggle on atrocities  of the Raj on the common men and women of India  (and not about the ego satisfaction of being treated as equals by the British)...for the first time, political success was interpreted as service to the weakest members of society. Here is a small anecdote from Guha's "Rebels against the Raj" to illustrate.

Further context to the excerpt below, Gandhi returned to India in 1915, when Annie Besant was at the peak of her political powers (she was the first woman president of the INC in 1917) and the leader of the Home Rule movement, the most prominent struggle against the British at the time. In 1916, she founded the now renowned Banares Hindu University (BHU) and invited, among others, Gandhi, to speak (excerpt starts here):

"He was expected to talk about his work with the diasporic community in South Africa, but he chose to focus on issues closer at hand instead. Indeed, Gandhi made this the occasion to announce himself as the coming man in Indian politics. He did so by attacking the patrons of the university, who had come suitably overdressed for the occasion. Was it necessary, asked Gandhi of the assembled Maharajas, 'that in order to show the truest loyalty to our King- Emperor, it is necessary for us to ransack our jewellery-boxes and to appear bedecked from head to toe? There can be no spirit of self-government about us,' he carried on, 'if we take away or allow others to take away from the peasants almost the whole of the results of their labour."

After targeting the Princes Gandhi targeted colonial officials, of whom a fair sprinkling were also present. As he chastised them for being so indifferent to the plight of ordinary Indians, Mrs. Besant, who was also sitting on the stage, said *"Stop! Stop! Stop!"* The students, on the other hand, asked Gandhi to continue. So he did. But when he characterized British officials as 'tyrannical and overbearing', Mrs Besant intervened once more. The chairman, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, now asked Gandhi to stop, once and for all."

--End of excerpt--

A few months later, in the wake of a nation wide campaign against the Rowlett act that galvanized the country, Gandhi had replaced her and Tilak as the leader of the Indian freedom struggle.

The White South and Moby Dick

I recently read (again) The White South by Hammond Innes and would recommend it to fans of Moby Dick. There are some parallels and some differences. The story is mostly a first person narrative of a somewhat naïve sailor who impulsively joins up a fleet of ships focused on whaling. Soon his (and that of his crew's) fate is overwhelmed by forceful personalities and unforgiving nature, leading inexorably to disaster. Like Moby Dick, the narrative is enjoyable for its attention to maritime terms, the business of whaling and extraction of oil (but less squeezing and more motorised saws). The Southern Ocean with ice floes and bergs is described vividly and fulfils the stark potential of terror that Melville attributes to the color White. If you are not familiar with what I am referring to, I recommend you read Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale of Moby Dick- an enjoyable chapter dedicated to explaining why the Whale is all the more terrifying because of its white hue. 

The book is definitely not in the same literary class as Moby Dick. The plot is not about a whale or even the whale...the foe is human, and is nowhere close to Ahab in complexity. The whale is a mute backdrop to the story, the hunt is mechanized, with spring loaded harpoon guns replacing cannibal savants. The animals are slaughtered and chopped up in an arrogant and indomitable "factory ship"...a fait accompli for any Moby Dicks out there. But Nature is the leviathan here, and delivers poetic justice with its own savage machinery, and that fascinating battle between man and Nature is still what will grab a MD fan's attention with this book.

Rebels against the Raj

 I just completed "Rebels against the Raj" by Ramachandra Guha. It dives deep into the lives of 7 foreigners who come to India and fought against the British Raj. These are true romantics and incredible adventurers, dabbling in the great laboratory of human values that was the Indian freedom movement. Thier lives were inevitably intertwined with the chief curator of that lab- Mahatma Gandhi. All of them were imprisoned or exiled, some for years, and yet continued to be Indian in spirit, dress language and deed, till their death. British, Irish, American, Men, Women..they came in all shades but were united in thier love for India.

Consider Madeline Slade or Mira Behn. As a young lady she chanced upon a booklet about Gandhi, whom she had never heard of. Right after reading it, she decided that she needs to be his service, and made that into reality a year later. She took a vow of celibacy, was imprisoned a couple of times, fell in unrequited love with Hari Singh (a Gandhian revolutionary), wrote about and pioneered many principles of ecological living. A few years after Gandhi's death she relocated back to Europe and lived in the land of Beethoven, her other idol, and worked with Attenborough to bring about the movie Gandhi. She lived by her Bapu's principles till the end of her life, maintained by a grateful Indian government. What an extraordinary life!

The other rebels in the book all stayed back in India after independence, making contributions till thier death in their adopted land. 

Written in typical Guha style, the book is eminently readable: full of absorbing details that emerge from detailed research, but not losing the personal touch. For example, he highlights how Meera wrote a book about Beethoven that was never published in Europe despite her efforts...the manuscript was found in her papers after her death in 1982. But the book was finally published in 1999: in India, by the Khadi Friends Forum. "An act of grace" as Guha puts it- They fulfilled her wishes in honour of her (Meera like) devotion to Gandhi and India. What a poignant detail!

The Independence movement was extraordinary in one unique aspect: in a short span, it thrust forth some of the best humans ever born-who set the world some high standards to live by. This book is worth reading to know more about some of those exemplars and be inspired to live better. 

But Guha puts it best at the conclusion of his book:

"These individuals came to India at different points of time, from widely varying backgrounds and with widely varying motivations. Once here, they lived in different parts of the country, and pursued different callings and obsessions. What unites them was, first, the courage and fearlessness they displayed in their personal lives; second, the depth and duration of their commitment to their new homeland; and third, the contemporaneity, indeed, timelessness, of what they lived and struggled for. So many years after the last of these rebels passed on, what they did and what they said still speaks to Indians today. 

If only we could listen."

What does Tagore mean to you?

It is Tagore's 82nd death anniversary this year, and someone asked what he means to non-Bengalis. I am not a Bengali but am a fan of Tagore. Apart from an excellent anthology of his works that I would recommend to anyone, I have read several short stories, The Geetanjali, and most recently completed 'Gora'.

The first thing that strikes you is his self awareness and confidence as an artist. He knew his abilities, and tasked himself to set a high standard that matched his reputation. He was not one to rest on his laurels, which meant that he constantly strove (and succeeded) in achieving new heights of creativity. This is evident in his later works where he wondered about the longevity of his legacy...a rare master who was masterful and vulnerable.

The second thing that strikes you is his empathy. I challenge you to read the Kabuliwala without getting a prickle of tears at the end, when the father of the bride sees a fellow father in the unfortunate Kabuliwala. Also consider this passage about a father's love for his unruly daughter from "Gora"(the book is set in late 1800s in orthodox Calcutta):

"Paresh Babu had for this capricious and unruly daughter of his even more affection than for the rest of his children, and his regard for her fearless truthfulness was all the greater because it so often got her into trouble with the rest of the family. Lolita's faults were obvious enough, and he could see how they prevented this special quality of hers from being appreciated. He was therefore all the more careful to keep it under his fostering care, lest in the process of bringing her waywardness under control her inner nobility should also be crushed.

The beauty of his other daughters was readily acknowledged by all who saw them, for their features were regular and their complexion fair. But Lolita was darker and her more complex face admitted of differences of opinion. For this reason Mistress Baroda had always expressed to her husband her anxiety about finding a suitable husband for her. But the beauty which Paresh Babu saw in her face was not that of complexion or features, but of the soul which there found its expression, not just the pleasantness of a faultless shape but the firmness of strength, the brightness of independence- characteristics which attract a chosen few, but repel most others."

This passage also highlights Tagore's mastery in portraying compelling and endearingly flawed characters. Hence his novels are classics in the vein of Dickens or Vikram Seth.

Another thing that I like is his youthfulness. If Geetanjali was impressive for its wonderful portrayal of nature and divinity, his best poetry and songs are those written from a young man's perspective...a romantic and carefree view of life and love. He was not a fuddy duddy, orthodox person despite his serious works. Even works that he wrote late in life had a youthful perspective. To him, life was full of wonder, curiosity, humour, vitality...if he lived in modern times, he would have experimented with rock guitars, I am sure!

And let us not forget, he was the one who christened Gandhi as the Mahatma...a recognition of a kindred maverick spirit.

Finally, his versatility is astounding. Plays, songs, poems, novels, music, art... there was no limit to his creativity.

So Tagore, son of Bengal, is a national and international treasure. I hope the next generation of readers get to enjoy his legacy as much as I have.

Ramrao - A book about the Indian farmer

Ramrao

I recently completed this book "Ramrao" by  rural affairs reporter and writer, Jaideep Hardikar. It is about the hardships of the Indian farmers, with a focus on their unabating suicides in Vidharbha. It is also the personal story of Ramrao, one such farmer, who attempted suicide but survived, and went on to live a life of gratitude for his second chance, even if the problems that  led to that act continue to beset him. 

It is a poignant book, that humanizes those numbers we see in the newspapers. Consider this suicide note from one such farmer that Hardikar quotes at the start of the book:

Me aagala vegala, mahi nyarich jindagani; 

mahye maran bhi aahe, jase avakali paani.

"I am unique; my life an uncommon odyssey;

My death will also be like untimely rain."

The story is also about village life, and the courage of the women who survive and prevail over the same troubles that took the lives of the men in their families, and the burden young women and men carry with the Hobson's choices they face: a degraded, laborious life in the city; or the endless misery of rainfed farming. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.", said Thoreau - that seems to apply to the Indian farmer. 

Thus it is a book worth reading because you understand them more, and respect them more, for the valiant lives they lead in the face of great adversity. The prose is simple, sympathetic and calm, enabling the reader to weather a difficult subject. 

Since we come from a farming family and have ex-farmers in our midst, I am sure this will appeal even more to us.