Delhi Noontide in November

Smog, slog and life on the winter's doorstep, that is Delhi in November. There is enough heat in India; the heat born of the loss of space and individualities; the heat born of many hands prying and praying to collect always deficient opportunities; the heat of summer; the heat of a society torn and pulled in different directions by equally strong forces of tradition and modernity.

Away from all this in the cooler climes of United Kingdom, he felt a sashaying sisterly spray on his face. As a Britisher he was always interested in India, and Delhi of all its places. First time in India, he had envisioned India as a former colony and its people carrying poverty-enforced brooding, agitating look. This day in November but gave him a surprise. With Western curiosity he could spot some traces of lilaceous glow on the people's faces even amidst all this cut throat crowd and teeming competition. His rosy white skin did not complain even though he was there under the open tropical sun. The winter has just starting spraying its aura around, he mused, his mind becoming more positive for the people and the surroundings. November was cool even in Delhi! He forgot all talks of global warming, pollution, dirty political snuggeries, traffic jams, disappointment on the cricketing field when his own home team lost to India, etc. The weather in November appeared to put the common man, the man in the arena of trials and tribulations of saving some grace to see through the day with life intact, on a strong wicket. The glow on common man was just like that was hallowed around numerous faces after witnessing yet another century by Sachin recently in a home series against his team on India tour. He had felt intimidated when thousands of cricket crazy fans went madder than the maddest whenever Sachin hit a century and he found himself lost in the stadium, lost like a drop in the ocean.

Delhi is chaotic. That was the predominant notion in his mind. Certain notions but were for a change this November day in Delhi. Doing a round of Connaught Place he saw that the colonnaded facades were up for some renovation. His spirit got uplifted and as a student of architecture he even felt obliged to the Indians for this effort. Far away from home, still pinched with niggling thoughts of his recent breakup from his girlfriend, he felt the colonial smirkness and efficacy still pervading in smoky, hazy noon slowly passing into the folds of a welcoming afternoon. Going around with a heart that was left injured and vacant after the separating storm in the café where he had said goodbye to the girl in London, his accommodating spirit now realized why despite so many metropolitan outcrops around, Connaught Place is still the heart of Delhi. He felt proud as a Britisher, for belonging to the people who constructed this beautiful architectural heart in the middle of all this chaos and which still throbbed with so much of life and aesthetics. In the fantastic maze turned up by the white colonnaded blocks time, history and efforts at modernity all stood captured in a mysteriously pervading easiness.

Elsewhere in the city, he had found four causes to mutter for a single cause of musing. Metro, yes...a massive collective reason for a bigger musing. Flyovers....again impressed him as he sauntered over in auto rickshaw without being stuck up for hours. However the wound in his heart was still fresh and he had the eyes to spot dirt cheap humanity scattered around below the flyovers. Kids, women, men....black, filthy, sick, torn and tattered dreams wandering in equal measure. The poor human souls left out of the gift of enjoying even the balmy effects of early winter. He had a deep look in the eyes of some young female beggar, and found a big chance for a beautiful life and persona wasted. Whom to blame? Looking at the faceless vault of the sky he asked again and again, ‘Why? If you can give so much to so few, then why not just common minimum for all of them!’ Anyway, disparities have teased us from the times unknown. He had to force this gloomy shadow out of his heart. He was here to cast out the pain in his heart by mixing in the exotic mess India has to offer. But India was giving him flashing moments of agonies and ecstasies. His auto had now fetched him to the Red Fort and he had to start fresh to appreciate its red-stoned architectural glory.   

 

From the Tiny Mirror of the Unseen Past

                            

It was the last week of October. The effusive mix of cool and hot, the coolness winning the lots in its favour to give healthy smirk on people’s faces. The Diwali festival was raising its celebratory hood with bang, smoke, splashes and splendour. We bombard, more than the firecrackers, each others with the messages of ‘Happy Diwali’. It is however another matter that in its modern avatar the great myth—the victory of the good over the evil—with its practical substance has been robbed of its true humanistic essence under the internecine attack of constantly aggravating pathos and passion of the modern generation. All those desirous of having a big bang in life get a suitable bombarding opportunity on this day. When people literally surpass each other in a mock war to split eardrums and leave the air polluted to the hilt, it is no longer in commemoration of the completion of that great task undertaken by Lord Sri Rama validating the eventually succeeding nature of the good over the evil. Most of the revellers in fact grin like the progenies in Ravana’s army. The meek mythological murmur is painfully pinched down by the evil’s fire-banging spirit lurking around on the rooftops on this darkest of the night in the year.

On this day, Lakshmi (the Goddess of wealth and prosperity) is worshipped and true to its nature the Goddess blesses a section of the trado-religious section of all the destitute head-bent humanity. These are the traders, entrepreneurs, people of enterprise and business. For almost a fortnight preceding the festival, bazaars, stalls in narrow streets, shopping malls, mega malls, shopping centres and sweet shops are tested to the capacity of their salesmanship. Festival enthused people just beat each other in taking the traders’ profit to a new, newer and newest pinnacle. During evenings the provisions and the prodigious Lalaji burst out of the narrow confines of the little shops and get adjusted on the stalls encroaching onto the narrow walkways among the beehives of shops. People just unmindfully bump into each other in the mass trail. Even vehicles baulk, screech and squeeze to have their mechanic share in the fun and funstry from the side of the machine world. Especially the ladies and girls attired for a festive outdoor in jeans, colourful tops, fancy salwaar kameez, flowing duppatas and trailing pallus hypnotically move along this logjam, their minds buzzing with indecision regarding what to purchase and what not. In between are the rangeela elements who frustrated and deprived of female proximity born of the famed sexual divide in India seek solace and scent females from the closest quarters, the world from porn movies giving them glimpses of what lies beyond this. Frustration taking sadistic sips from whatever chance bumps, pats on the buts, brush against the shoulder and even pinch at the most delicate parts have to offer.

The shop-fronts decorated with lighting patterns galore as the high temples of the great Indian mass-psychology driven consumerism. The firmly believing devotees meanwhile with wads of money in their wallets moving in a queue to shop mechanically like bottles get along on a conveyer belt to be labelled exactly the same. Truly the festival colours everybody in the same colour despite gravest of differences among all. The high priests meanwhile—the shopkeepers, hawkers, vendors—very expertly perform the plundering rituals of businessmanship. Market becomes the new Dharma. Its scriptural book has the pious injunction: Purchase as much as possible on Diwali eve even leading to your beggarly status during the non-festive days! Uncountable schemes, discounts, credits, cuts, offers and coupons make it seem like the modern ways of subtle pick pocketing! This great predatory peek in people’s wallets using the knife of market principles, using surgically clean and expert fingers by the hand of market consumerism! This is expert encroachment into the corridors of mythology to enlarge its market domain.

The sweet makers start storing the dish and delicacies weeks ahead for there will be a huge rush. Indians are paranoid in certain mass behaviour. For petty selfishness ranging from spitting, peeing on public places reaching to life threatening acts of food adulteration (like fake mawa, urea in milk, poisonous colours in sweetmeats) they behave as easily as just doing the early morning ritual, permitted, allowed both by nature and society. The perishable stale products are attractively packaged to go into religiously blinded guts. On Dhan Teras it is considered auspicious to buy gold and silver. The great myth propagated by the maker of the God, the Super God, the smart selfish mankind. More than any God, it is the jewellers who get propitiated on this day. Outside the glass fronted welcoming exteriors; exquisitely plush furnished interiors; under the glare of all those jewellery items lined almost from the floor to the ceiling, big bloated ladies and gentry religiously put budgetary caution to winds. They stab into their wallets to get finally a bit of pinch on their real skin. Here thousands do not matter. Outside a famished, sunken, skeleton of an old beggar is a pariah and they feel like getting a heart attack even at the thought of giving ten rupees to that unfortunate creature. ‘We do not support beggary,’ they simply quip and take to their smart heels.

A day before the pious night itself, the night of Diwali, there was an unseasonal rainstorm. It occurred at the worst time it can. It stole the festive glitters from the eyes of at least one community, the farmers. Basmati paddy just two weeks away from harvesting, with its grain heads bulging with the pearls of the farmer’s eyes and other varieties (like Sharbati, 1121) already under the process of harvesting, all and more got whiplashed suddenly by the weather spoilsport. Many farming dreams were broken.

The next morning the farmers found the crops flattened. They just got busy in using their mundane calculation abilities to estimate the scale of loss in monetary terms.

‘In the standing crop the loss isn’t much because the yellow traces had started. The grain has been completely formed,’ one quipped.

‘But still it is a big loss. All those grain-heads and spikes which get buried and get into contact with the damp ground will turn black. It’s at least 40% crop loss,’ the other protested. 

‘No no it’s too high. It cannot be more than 30%,’ the simple calculations went forth.

So the farmers debated about the loss. What else could be done? It is the irony with the farmer that both God and the market seldom get propitiated at the same time. They take turns to fuck the farmers’ fate. Just once in a cycle of let us say five years both God and the market bless the farmers concurrently to give them some monetary chance to help somebody go for long-pending house reconstruction, marry off a daughter waiting her dowry to be purchased, buy some long-dreamt electronic gazette, etc., etc.

With fluctuations in their loss figures, their participation in the great and glittering festival time market decorated in cities and towns went up and down. And during those three or four final hours of Diwali celebrations the victorious firecrackers ruled the sky. These were the stars creating a lower vault of human aspirations. With their flash, boom, burst and brilliance, they even puffed out the flickering, faded, silently smiling lamp far away by a poor threshold, a farmer who had possibly lost too much in the storm.                           

The Broken Dream

Well, let us start with a bit of his biographical sketch. It had indeed been a tough ride so far, but he believed that every perspiring step had not been without big-big revelations. ‘The greatness lies not only in achieving lofty targets, but in dodging the failure as well,’ he found himself convincing during those moments that pinched him with the realisation that he has nothing to show as a proof of his tireless efforts. He had been doing it so long that the contradictory thorns dividing success and failure had melted and he tried his best to believe in the Bhagwat Gita sermon that only karma, the selfless work, is supreme.

Everybody believed he had all that requires to become a civil servant, so driven by this belief, he just gave the peak years of his life preparing for the civil services. Civil services, the much coveted government job whose exam syllabus is so comprehensive, formulated under the supposition that it will enable the prospective civil servants to know something of everything, that most of the aspirants are seen tiring out their souls like the Bihari labourers in the fields. It is basically a battle to test ones stamina, of testing the brain’s brawny prowess. In one year of exam schedule, running through the prelims, mains and interviews, it catapults a tired bunch of almost intellectually spent aspirants to take the responsibility of implementing the policies formulated by semi-literate or even illiterate full-thugs, semi-rascals, quarter-criminals,  half-rapists, three-quarter-mafia. Afterwards these young educated males and females expertly learn how to keep their lives normal by becoming part of the ‘system’.

Like a bull pulling a heavily laden cart, almost mindlessly, uncomplainingly, taking it as the only option, with the head bent down, he also kept on moving on the path. By cramming as many things as possible he got interviewed once. The real dilemma but started when he came to face the bitter truth of having spent all his four chances, allowed to the general category candidates, in comparison to the double number of chances available to the reserved category, which finds these panicked young talented souls hating the candidates from the reserved castes for being pampered like this. However, this final fall in the Indian Civil Services was not before a praiseworthy interview call that saved him from the severe jolt of self doubt. In the coveted interview he got 110/300. He knew he had not done wonders like someone who got 250/300. This candidate surely must have broken all limits of human personality performance to get such a high score. But the affably puffed up persona of Mr P K Banerjee, the former defense secretary of India and the interview board chairperson, had other thoughts about his personality. The chairperson smirked, enjoyed each and every moment of his being in the coveted chair, laughed too much, and that perpetual enjoyment and froggy grin intimated the already scared guts of the village urchin.

All judgements apart, it brings to the forefront the main problem in the Indian recruitment system: unquestionable authority in the hands of the interview panel. Unfortunately it is more misused than getting good administrative officers. He was a village frog. With sheer labour he got 1082 marks in the written examination, a decent qualifiable score. Oofs, what range they have in the interview marks--110 to 250. It has all the potential to make or break anybody’s fate. How the hell one will cover up 140 marks?! Nursing his wounded spirit and in philanthropic ways presuming himself to be an intellectual in making, he even suggested the remedies to himself, ‘This all marks possible power in the hands of the interview panel is the chief cause of corruption and facilitation. Let it be made mandatory that the interview board cannot give less percentage marks than the candidate’s percentage in the written part. It will weed out most of the possibilities of misuse of chairs and shadowy recommendations.’ But who considers such unsolicited suggestions from unrecognised common heads.

The Provincial Civil Services (PCS) was available to keep the flame of the undying passion still alive. He belonged to Haryana. As all of us well understand, our choice of the PCS is just limited to the home state, because the way state public service commissions (SPSCs) function it is the open most secret in India. Well, in India most of the corruption breeds from the safe corridors of constitutionality. State public service commissions function as personal fiefdoms of the ruling party. The Chief Minster handpicks his cronies as office bearers to carry out his instructions without ever questioning anything in any regard.

It was Mr. Chautala’s government when he put up his well polished claim for the state civil services. Easily he crossed the hurdles to reach the interview stage with very high marks. But the all-sweeping powers of the interview panel saw him being rejected with just 28 marks out of 75. The chairperson and his cahoots seemed all eager to quash his confidence, possibly they had already prepared the final list, and his name not being there now it was the fruitless endeavour for him to seek out the best out of himself, and more fruitful for the interview board to bring the worst as some justification for himself to be rejected. But he was at his best that day and gave his supper-best. Still does one have any proof of performing good or bad in the interview except the word of mouth which is no proof in the eyes of the law? Just like he could say that he performed better than his 28 marks, the scholarly politician Mr. T C Bangar (who later became full time politician from Mr Chautala’s party) could very easily say he performed even worse than the marks that we gave him. In the eyes of the law the latter will be taken as more correct given his better stature in making this assessment. In the same batch, there were cases where candidates got as high as 70 marks.

Anyway, he learnt a few political lessons, so during the next recruitment, he knew exactly well how to go through the interview stage. But believe it or not, it did not involve any money going out of his already famished pockets. So, all cheers! He went comfortably home with an SDM rank and the future all bright. Everybody knew that nobody deserved to have his/her say in any type of favour done to him, because he thoroughly deserved the post. The destiny was but darkly chuckling because he was one of the 102 candidates of the ‘deer’ fame pitted against the ‘lions’ as we saw in Lion and Deer of the Social Jungle.

However, like Mr. Chautala proposed, Sonia’s Wazir, Mr. Hooda, in Haryana disposed with equal relish. Before he could join, the central government had the chief election commissioner of India dashing down to Chandigarh, announcing state assembly elections, putting all appointments on hold under the election code of conduct. And during this time, the type of wanton drama played by the Governor, state principle secretary and everybody else, it does not even deserve to be narrated to the civilized beings like the readers because it will further erode their trust in such high chairs. The Congress came to power in the state. Elsewhere in India, Sonia Gandhi had already started pulling strings from behind the curtain: the sage of the great Italian puppeteer and the made-to-dance economist Prime Minister.

His appointment denied and after entering the precincts of Punjab and Haryana high court he realised what a powerful entity the state is. It is a big behemoth. The way proceedings were monopolised in the court it made him feel helpless and victimised by the same state that was constitutionally obliged to protect his rights as a law-abiding Indian citizen. But here he was paddling like a skinny dog, trying with his meagre financial resources—the candidates continuously pooled money to get the best advocates for their case—to beat the mighty power and reach of the state. Is judiciary fair? He always had doubts. But with each day, the realisation dawned how fascistically the system of justice works. Who appoints the judges in the first place? Directly indirectly the politicians hold the strings of the puppets dancing on the judicial stage. Each day for a talented unemployed youth is torturous. Here after spending hundreds of thousands all they got was a few minutes stay in the house of justice. For two years the Lord of Justice did not even open its ears to their ever increasing clamour for justice. And then the verdict came, it had all the loopholes to make them sit out of employment for as long as possible. They went to the Supreme Court, lost without much noise, safely and silently. He had no hesitation in harbouring seditious thoughts that like the state high courts are playing puppets to the state governments, the citadel in Delhi is also always under the influence of the central government. After all who appoints and promotes the judges at all levels. It’s just a well oiled machinery of mutual benefits, that’s all…nothing else.

Mr. Chautala had been wrong in installing his stooges in the HPSC before being voted out of power, because many board members were made to resign just in the middle of their term and new faces installed in fresh chairs to sit for the next six years while the other government ruled. So when Mr. Hooda came to power he found a board full of the members with terms for the next 6 years. One unconstitutionality gave rise to another. The new iron lady of India easily got the ever-convenient Lady President to issue a notification suspending all the HPSC members. Meanwhile, while all these stronger wheels clanked on the high road of power, ego and what not, the candidates’ poor heads rolled in the tar and clinker of the pot-holed dusty common road.

The Congress said Mr. Chautala had manipulated the selection process. However, the ever vigilant state vigilance team looking into the case did not find the tangible proofs of the earlier government’s misdoing even after best of its efforts and they just continued eating more and more time. His soul silently asked them what you have been doing all these five years. For one wrong of Mr. Chautala you have ended up doing tens. In both supreme and high courts, the government of Haryana gave the plea that it had not any vacancy to accommodate the new batch. But see what they did. In a suitable month of the same year, they put up the notification for fresh recruitment. Wasn’t it the contravention of their own pledge to the court that they do not have any vacancies? Who cares, because the state cannot be wrong! The batchmates went to get a stay on the fresh recruitment because it was contrary to what the government had pledged in the court that there were no vacancies. And if at all there were vacancies then this duly selected batch should be given priority and allowed to join because the government had failed to present any proofs of malpractices in the recruitment process. But the great legal luminary—having the infinitely open-ended space to write anything suitable for whatever ends he might deem fit—just smartly said no, the government can do as it likes.

Now Mr Khattar from the BJP is at the helm of the affairs. Three governments; three majestic eras in the political history of three political parties; and just one dark endless night in the lives of hardworking candidates who are now moving towards middle age with a broken dream. The new Chief Minister can just walk over the issue, claiming he or his government are not a party to the issue. Moreover, there must be so many in his party almost dying to get their wards selected as PCS officers feeling left out and cheated for so long. The government also must be itching to put some lame duck members in the HPSC to work as their recruitment facilitators.

Now, having robbed of a decade of his penance for the civil services cause, he slogs out in the private sector. His pain is unbearable because as an educated and law-abided citizen of this country he always had this notion—born of his bookish knowledge—that state is there to protect his interests and courts are there to save his skin from the larger forces. He but stands robbed of this fundamental belief. It’s not just a matter of losing a job; it is the matter of losing one’s identity as an empowered citizen of an independent country. Now when he slogs out in most crowded buses, where getting a foothold is as precious as getting bonus from the government, he certainly doesn’t feel like an average country-loving Indian. He feels like an emigrant in his own land. He refuses his office colleagues when they try to put the tricolored flag on his desk on the occasion of Indian Independence Day. He even feels sorry about it. However it is his tiny revenge against his own state. Somehow, when terrorists strike against the state in any part of India, against all his wishes and rebukes by sanity, he finds himself groping for the causes why they are doing this, not being able to condemn it as an outright act of blatant violence.

Sorry, but it’s as natural as this. Just wanted to say something about him. Thanks if you have borne the trouble of bearing with this little story brow-beating the cause of a common Indian! All in all it’s just a terribly manipulated democracy in India, manipulated by our own stronger brothers and sisters. Like him I also feel that we might be just puppets dancing on the make-believe stage while the real game is behind the scene.

Dance on Chance

If we consider success and failure (the outcome or the result) as the twin sides of a spun coin (effort behind the result), we need to consider the difference between landing headwords or tailwords as the result born of the last moment’s extra swing, spin or any other momentum or movement tilting the scale on this or the other side. Now, there can be three factors involved in this extra force deciding the winner and the loser:

1.     The coin spinner or the tosser (subject).

2.    The revolving coin itself (object): if we suppose the object to possess some vague, mysterious, inexplicable factor born of its inanimate freewill.

3.   Some abstract entity (negotiator or referee): functioning either in the form of physical or natural laws like the atmospheric elements or in the shape of supernatural laws to either act/favour on behalf /or against the subject or the object.

As per the above supposition, the success or failure in a toss of coin—or our luck or bad luck in drawing a card from a pack—becomes a very subtle and nuanced game of multitudinous factors hidden in the simple act/result of the coin landing on this or the other side.

Everybody is well aware that purely mechanical laws of physical sciences defined by the input and output process do not completely cover the range of occurrences coming across in real human lives. Human lives come across too glaring loopholes to allow the application of scientific principles to human endeavours taking them as simple inputs and outputs. Oftentimes, mountains of work irrigated with the human will power, blood and sweat do not fetch even tiny molehills. On the other hand, sometimes an anthill of an endeavour fetches the mountain of a result. This mere incongruity in the outcome validates the point of including the subtle role of the outside agents (either in the form of physical things around us or the beings, things and forces whose working laws we have not interpreted and explained so far).

The role of the ‘outside agents’ is unreasonable to the persons of logic and reasoning. They will shout, ‘It’ll leave us as mere helpless pawns shifted and shoved on the chessboard of destiny by paranormal forces.’ Let the logicians huff and puff with their explanations. The mysterious factor still haunts, and those who believe in luck, fate, destiny and the most common denominator God will continue to shine as the superbly carved beads in the same string held by the cord of belief in the supernatural. They will continue to flaunt the divinely held string till the theoreticians break it with the pull of their proven hypothesis. The onus is on the latter for their path is made of either proving or disproving. The former meanwhile is just happy in surrounding itself to the misty, hazy, cavernous pit of unexplained, inexplicable, only to be realised and felt factors.

Even if we choose a most clinically collected set of mechanical skills (standardised and equalised) and put them in competition, we still have the position of one outperforming the others, i.e., we still have a result in the form of winner and loser. So if science cannot avoid the emergence of a winner from among the set of equally equipped instruments, we have to accept the futility of classifying winner and loser. It is a very lousy shortcut to define the helpless termination of a phenomenon—a mere hypothesis such as time (Einstein said there was no real time, it is just relative realisation) that has just been coined to meet a tiny, practical end. It operates in a chosen utilitarian, abstractly chosen set of possibilities and choices, so that the one category or group of players falling into it is defined as winners; while punishing the others with the yardstick of failure. If you remove these carefully chosen set of conditions and eligibilities—that are purported to remove chaff from the grain—every endeavour becomes beyond the tortuous segments of loss and gain to become a pure work, a complete phenomenon, existing unblemishedly in the fabric of happenings.

All of us work for success. Victory is the favourite child of all endeavours in the universe. Failure is the shameful, unwanted, depraved bastard born of misfires and mis-hits accruing from some fault, either this way or the other, born of invisible or invisible factors. The role of those who genuinely took part in the race is irrelevant; the ones whose fierce competitive urgency catapulted the eventual winner to draw out the last ounce of strength to emerge victorious. When the winner hits the finishing line it is just the culmination of a phenomenon, the whole phenomenon of race. We but just pluck out the winner like we take away a ripe fruit, while putting in the dustbin of failure the crushed windfalls that lie on the ground, the unwelcomed testimony to the process of ripening when chancy windfalls saw many being dropped onto the ground. The fallen ones but become the groundwork of the victorious, the one completing the race of ripening. Unfortunately, the whole set minus the ripe and victorious is cast away as the scrap in the process of hatching a victory: the long and wordy, sweat laden steps carrying one onto the top. These are the oblations and sacrifices to the Goddess of victory. The Goddess chucks up their flesh and takes big swigs of their blood, leaving no vestiges of those struggling sinews whose failure gave us our soul-satisfying winner!

It's high time we include the losers in the over-swapping concept of victory. Like the rocket fuel burning and turning to ashes while catapulting the victorious satellite into the required orbit, the fellow competitors also fuel the race. If not for their pushing with their best competitive spirit someone would not have been driven beyond limits to achieve some victorious feat. The losers are thus contributors to someone's success. Let's change the concept to make it more humane at least!  

Looking at the Bloodied Hands of Communism!

Darwin says all beings, across species, and the related phenomena across various natural processes, are propelled by the survival instinct among the constituting elements. In this tussle between the superior and the inferior, the nature evolves in its multitudinous forms comprising tragedies, ecstasies, pleasures and pains. It is basically a class struggle both at the intra- and inter-species level. Both in natural and human systems (we humans now operate almost in exclusion of nature), the fittest ones adapting better to the plummeting circumstances are the ones to take a lead in either milking the resources or in laying the framework for the overall system to function.

The human system is a big behemoth, intriguingly evolving, following the parameters of the jungle in its human variants. There is basically a fight for individual and even collective interests. Of course to make us believe that the human society does not follow the raw principles of nature (like the lion eating the deer—unsinfully—to survive), we have interposed the institutions of religion, morality, ethics, concept of good and bad, sin and pious deeds, karma, etc. However, as per the principle of social selection (derivative of natural selection), the human society moves ahead over time defined by clash of interests at various levels in different fields. If we remove the differentiating layers and levels in the society; if we remove the hypothesis of sin out of this struggle—like we have removed from the struggle between lion and deer—the leftover will simply boil down to a struggle between the more skilled and the less skilled. Out of the numerous levels of interests (ranging from individual, family, religious, state, earth,….), one clash of interest is at the level of the upper and the lower class. From the start of the known history, human affairs have been shaped directly and indirectly by the class struggles (between the upper and the lower), among individuals within a particular class on the basis of their less or more suitability, and even among the individuals of different classes. Although with changing times, the fields of struggle have changed as well. This broad overarching struggle contains many sublevels to trickle down to the tiniest triumphs, humiliations, wins, losses, exploitations, etc.

The communists have been tonking their ideas and ideology infested heads against this almost inevitable defining differential in the society that seems to be pushing the motley mix of minority’s triumph and the majority’s woes. As a counter to this, one might say that the Western liberal democracy might reverse the ratio. However, it comes at the cost of an invincible super state which with the purpose of safeguarding the majority’s interests has to be a still exploitative institution that mightn’t exploit its own have-nots much but then it can very easily do so to the teeming millions in the third world.

Taking up cudgels from the famished majority’s side, the communists thus unite the working class interests to make it super-strong so that it can suddenly go berserk and break apart the centuries old system of exploitation and its supportive elements. For this reason the communist movements are called ‘revolution’. Earlier it was against the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy embaling in them what we call ‘luxury’ aesthetically and intelligently supported by the religion. Religion, for its pious injunctions seems to be more effective in stopping a poor person from seeking alternatives than stopping the exploitation by the upper class. So the revolutionaries as atheists pluck out the sinews of long-held beliefs, convincing, providing solace and sympathy to the underclass. A Godless person is less accepting; carries immense prospects of imposing his will through covert and overt means. Hence religion is held culpable by the revolutionaries in the sense that it forces people—makes them habituated to their woes as the will of the divine forces beyond their control—to become adapted to their ill fate rather than putting the same time and energy in remedial measures. Religion, of course, for centuries has been good, sympathetic, solacing companion to the masses helping them in licking their wounds and swallow the sorrows. Thus the revolutionaries break its façade, terming it stagnant in its principles and in cohort with the exploitative classes. Religion too unfortunately demands its share of glitter and glamour that only the upper class can provide. After all, a poor person’s God is a lesser God. The religion of the poor with limited resources is even termed as animism.

Once the revolution led by the newly pious injunctions of classless society tears out (generally in a bloody manner) the ancient system, the interests of the former upper class are either hijacked by a dictator or an all powerful super-body—polit-bureau or the central committee—which in itself replaces the empty seat of godhood; a tiny blackhole type superforce to root out the still surviving differences of any type. Unfortunately, differences are bound to crop up somehow. So they keep on nipping the buds. This sudden rush of purgatory blood leaves gory tales far more horrible than the ones committed by the former system over centuries. Their tales of atrocities committed in just years outmatch the ones perpetrated across decades or even centuries by the earlier system. It is just like a helpless group of sufferers running away from the semi-lethal teeth of a wolf into the shelter of a hungry lion with super-strong claws. In this religionless weeding out for the cause of the supreme ideal, the religious tools of mercy and pity do not exist to act as the check dams. After all, religion has been constructed to function as a check dam to save a situation where ‘the lion eats the deer’ principle is allowed to operate in milder nastiness in the human society. In a Godless state all hell breaks loose. After many bloody strivings, the communists much to their chagrin find that the divisive curse of the selfish, individualistic interests still survives in one form or the other.

Capitalist, socialist, liberal democracies on the other hand are less glaring and more subtle in their deeds, because here the old exploitative forms have been redressed as modern principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. It is a subtle and white-blooded exercise: the old forces in their more acceptable avatars. It also promises to provide ample opportunities to the masses to struggle through the lawful checker work to move up the capitalist ladder to reach the class on the top. It believes in conversion rather than coup born of the clash of interests.

However hard the communist regime might try the class differentials will persist in one form or the other; simply because we are human beings, cast in so unique and numerous ways with billion ways of thinking; and not just same colour factory product.

PS: Something away from the main discussion in this topic! The reason why a democrat politician, an industrialist or a dictator occupies his/her influential position can be—among others off beat factors like luck, fate, destiny—that the said person is stronger in getting his conscience unchained from the restricting principles of good and bad in the game of survival. It boils down to: Who is more skilful? It is just a matter of more or less skills.