Mediocrity is the new norm

By now we should all have become used to the googlies that are periodically lobbed by the ruling party on the hapless and comatose Opposition, yet its latest salvo has taken the wind out of the grand secular plans to contest the presidential election. The uncomfortable truth is that since the NDA has only played by the rules of this perverted game of one-upmanship among our political parties, the onlookers can only whimper weakly. The joke, as always, is on the rest of the country.

How far we have travelled from the time when eminent philosophers, scientists and lawyers were chosen for the highest office of the land. Who can forget the erudition of Dr Radhakrishnan or the warmth and humility of Dr Kalam? I am aware that it is wrong to pre-judge a person but the recent appointments to governorships, heads of cultural institutions and national bodies have often proved to be disappointments (pun intended). However, we have now been so beaten down as a citizenry that apart from a few editorials and irate columns we tamely adjust ourselves to the dumbing down of our nation. From any angle that you may choose to view the state of the nation, mediocrity is the new norm. When second-rate people choose third-rate candidates, the only way to go is deeper and deeper into the abyss. Perfected by the Congress and Left, favouritism and cronyism is now an accepted means of populating educational and cultural bodies. However strongly some of us oppose the perversion of the reservation policy, every political party has used caste politics vigorously. 

The sad truth is that despite all our chest-thumping rhetoric about empowering women, alleviating poverty and doing away with caste prejudices, women, the poor and Dalits continue to remain well below the level of human progress elsewhere in the world. Even our neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — countries that battled civil war and enormous economic challenges – are today higher on the happiness scale than we are. 

I have just finished reading Arundhati Roy’s new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and it has left me with mixed feelings. This is because I began by comparing it with her debut novel, The God of Small Things, and my first reaction was that in the 20 years separating the two, Roy the pamphleteer had overtaken Roy the novelist. On reflection — and also because there is no one who can spin narratives like her — I recommend it for its almost poetic rendering of the lives of those whom we choose not to acknowledge because this makes us uncomfortable and guilty. Alternating between the tragic and the comic, the poetic and the sharply political, it begins with the story of Anjum, a hijra who is a misfit in her family and who creates a home for similarly lost souls in a graveyard. Through the broken lives of these characters, Roy places before us a republic of free spirits who live in utmost happiness according to the ‘policies’ of Anjum’s ministry. 

Roy’s singular talent is as a wordsmith for who else but she can think of titles like those of the two novels quoted above? The same is true of her non-fiction titles: The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers and Walking with the Comrades — where she deals with complex moral dilemmas and the cruelty of the Indian State. Yet for all the dazzling prose and poetic rendering of poverty and exploitation, her worldview is surprisingly innocent, even simple. There is a sense of wonder that human cruelty and social injustice can exist at all in the mythical Garden of Eden she carries in her mind. Remember the storm she unleashed when she described the Maoists of Bastar as ‘Gandhians with guns’?

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is located, unsurprisingly, in a graveyard where gender, life and death blithely trade places. The world outside this dystopia is simply called ‘Duniya’, where a comical battle is continually fought in Jantar Mantar between those who seek political power or justice from a system gone rogue. In the serene graveyard, on the other hand, social hierarchies have ceased to matter for its citizens have transcended to another plane of being. As Roy herself has said once, she struggled to find a language with which to tell stories of lives that have been ripped apart. This is the language that she can best forge by making words perform dazzling calisthenics. This quality was best described to me by another maestro of words, Sheila Dhar, after reading Roy’s debut novel: This girl, she told me, can make words perform bharat natyam on a tightrope. Dedicated ‘To the Unconsoled’, Roy has lost none of her ability to conjure up a world that is both familiar and remote from us, citizens of ‘Duniya’.