Idle Musings

IDLE MUSINGS

Aloke B Lal

In a recent column, MJ Akbar says: “The Congress is in disarray because it has lost direction.
UPA worked well as long as its leadership was an isosceles triangle. Mrs Gandhi was pre-eminent; Dr Singh and Pranab Mukherjee were equal sides who kept government and party stable, with Mukherjee given the vital charge of perception management. When Dr Singh began to wilt, Mukherjee should have replaced him. Instead, he went into comfort zone, and the Congress into a spin. We now have a hapless Mrs Gandhi, an indifferent Prime Minister and Rahul Gandhi rushing in and out, when he feels like, through blank space on the third side.”

To this, the quip from one of the readers is very apt: “More than my annoyance at that isosceles triangle degenerating into a faint scribble, is my fear of another geometry—the bold straight line of NaMo’s bigotry”.

My take on the use of isosceles triangle as a figurative description of the balance of power in the oldest political party of the land is that it was a bad situation if it was indeed a triangle. I feel that any democratic party is best served when the few at the top echelon form an amorphous entity. For, it is a good thing that the leadership appears to be one in which all the participants have a say, a say which is not defined by a shape, but by the openness of the conditions which allows questions to be raised and issues debated. In an isosceles triangle two sides are equal, the third only has the freedom to have its own dimension. In other words, only one of the three wise ones is allowed to have a different viewpoint, and two have always to be like each other. So, if Sonia G was pre-eminent, then MMS and Pranab had no choice but to be similar in their response, which in the scheme of things could only translate to a duet: “Yes, ma’am.” The loss of one side, in this case Pranab, should not really spell a major departure in such a scenario.

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It seems science is in the air. Rahul G has also come up with his as yet mysterious escape velocity statement: “In India, we have a concept of caste. There is an escape velocity involved here also. If one belongs to a backward caste and wants to attain success then one needs an escape velocity to attain that success. Dalits in this country need the escape velocity of Jupiter to attain success”. Is he trying to impress the spell-bound audience with his knowledge that escape velocity is not the same on all the planets? Or, was it some speech writer who considered this to be a bright idea to present Rahul G in the image of a science-savvy modern-day politician? What one can clearly see in this befuddled statement is one thing: the Congress Vice President believes that in order to reform the society riven by caste rivalries, the answer for the underdogs is to escape to a safer side. Does this mean that Rahul G believes that the answer to amelioration of the dalits and other backward classes is that they should learn to escape? We have not been told, however, where are we to escape, and from whom do we escape? And what do you have to do to escape all these sagacious suggestions coming from an enlightened soul?

 To explain the original meaning of escape velocity is easy: It is the speed needed to "break free" from the gravitational attraction of a massive body, without further propulsion. In other words, you do not actually escape, you just know what is the level you must attain to be there. So, in the imagination of the leader of the Pappulog of the country, all you need is to have a calculator; and, there you are, punch a few buttons to break free. No hassles at all. See, it’s all so simple!  Yippee, 2014, here we come!!!

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The leader rising from the west (as opposed to the early riser from the east) has of course got the knowledge that even before you think of the Maker, you actually want to be without any extra baggage. One that all of us carry is the result of what we have eaten the previous twenty four hours. So every morning, as we step out of the comforts of our beds, we have the thought uppermost in our system to be rid of what is at the bottom....literally! So this leader has no qualms in declaring that facilities to attend to the immediate business is indeed the priority, and communion with the Maker is something that has to wait for its turn.  This is absolutely right. Not even a Jairam Ramesh is likely to have any disagreement with this statement of someone who is being routinely dubbed as a fascist, a reactionary zealot and a communal vermin who must be put down at all costs. This universally accepted statement, coming as it does from the poster-boy of what is often called the Bhagwa brigade, has actually left the adherents of one of the major movements in India red-faced: those who are waging a war to construct a mandir and want to make that as their life’s offering for the grateful people of the country. It is unimportant whether these wide-eyed people have had the opportunity to see the disappearance of that extra baggage they are forced to extricate in a most uncivilised manner?

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Tailpiece: It has been reliably learnt that speech writers of the leaders of the country are all scurrying for the nearest book shop, to get books on basics of science. Folks, I am told, ‘boson’, ‘relativity theory’, ‘plate tectonics’, ‘circuit theory’, ‘cyber architecture’ have already been taken. Look for other metaphors, if you too are writing a speech.

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