Balance

"The basis of morality is the application to human life of the principles governing the universe, and the great principle of the universe is beauty."

Shri Aurobindo

My blog generally avoid topics related to my (modest) practice of and thoughts on religion. This is probably because I come from a family where my elders, particularly my (late) grandfather, are extremely well-versed in many aspects of religion and are far more disciplined and faithful practitioners than me, so I feel rather unqualified to hold forth on it.

In June 2022, I had been to Kedarnath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand for a darshan of Lord Shiva at Kedarnath and Shri Narayana at Badrinath. This wasn't my first time visiting this part of the Himalayas. I had visited Badrinath in 2007 with my family and there was a part of me deep inside that always wanted to return - something about the air and the majestic natural beauty there. At Dev Prayag, the rivers Bhagirathi and Alakananda flow into each other to be known as river Ganga. It is believed that the lands and mountains further upstream from Dev Prayag are no longer part of the earthly domain. Instead, they are inhabited by the Devas themselves.

I remember travelling along the winding mountain roads, the river Alakananda flowing far-away in the valley with an other-worldly blue hue. I remember marvelling at the mountains all around, their peaks seeming to penetrate the blue sky. There is something magnetic about these mountains that makes you want to keep returning there, to breathe the same air once again.

Before departing from Bengaluru to Badrinath back then, we had read about the boulders which frequently get dislodged from the mountain-side on to the road, often triggering landslides that sometimes hit vehicles. One report said that an entire bus was knocked off the road into the river below, claiming tens of lives. This was just a few days before we made our journey. 

Perhaps it was this memory that was fresh in my mind at that time, but at some point a thought entered my head - if I die here, it's alright. What a beautiful place to die. I still wonder from where this thought came to me. I was only 12 years old. I was not a fatalistic person as a child, nor am I one now. I had never grappled with such ideas. I had not yet really seen seen the death of anyone close or well-known to me.

My experience was not the same during last year's visit. There was construction debris and dust everywhere along the road from the plains to the Dhams. Relentless construction work and massive crowds made it look like the land of the BBMP rather than the Devas. It must be said that once you actually reach your destination, you leave behind what you felt during the journey and only feel happy that you have reached. 

A while after returning home, I quickly penned down some of my thoughts and feelings regarding what I saw. I had forgotten about this write-up in my mobile notes. The recent news on the danger of the town of Joshimath sinking entirely reminded me about the note and I felt it's worth reproducing.

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Dharma is an ultimate order of the universe - the laws that have to be followed and maintained, not because some person prefers them that way or deemed it to be the best way, but because the universe is that way. Any questions on why it is so can be taken up with the creator of the universe.

Every object, animate or inanimate, has a Dharma, a certain nature and a certain way that it has to be. Again, the reason is that it was so ordained. Not to minimise evil or "for the good", but because the creator manifests in the universe in this form. He is in every pebble and grain of sand, in His entirety.

When we interact with nature, we are interacting with the divine. When we interact with other people and animals, we are still interacting with the divine. And deep inside us, lives the divine, hoping to be realised. And when you realise It, you will become It, unshackled from this petty world of attachments and desires, anger and jealousy, hubris and illusions.

The order of the universe is balance. The order of nature is balance. We may take away from Her and plunder today, but we will fail in our Dharma.

When I visited Badrinath in 2007, I was still a very young boy, but it left a fairly deep impression on me. It was a sleepy, inaccessible town, deep in the mountains, bitterly cold with very few people visiting there and even fewer living. It was nature unspoiled.

I wouldn't call it divinity unspoiled, because divinity is always pristine, and can never be spoiled or soiled. The rose and the thorn are still expressions of the divine. The difference is in our accessibility to the divine. 

 

Why do we worship a particular stone and not another one when both have within them the divine? - Because in one stone, the divine presents Himself more easily to us. The truly learned man, who has attained ultimate wisdom, cannot see this difference. Mere mortals still chained to the endless cycle of birth and death are forced to reckon with this difference. 

But why do I speak here about nature, Dharma, balance, divinity and Badrinath?

I visited Kedarnath and Badrinath earlier this year, in the height of summer. While the plains were still sweltering in the searing sun, Kedarnath was still cold and almost hostile. Thunder and freezing rain welcomed us as we were weary from walking for over 12 hrs, around 20 km and a vertical ascent of one mile. And let us say one thing for sure - when you catch a sight of the temple, when you are standing there while the aarti is played on the loudspeaker, while every breath fogs in the air and you can longer feel your naked feet in the puddles of freezing rainwater as you wait to enter the temple, you understand that you are in the vicinity of divinity, accessible to everyone. A force that drives the universe through cycles of creation, preservation and destruction. Srushti, sthithi, gathi.

But the climb was very different. We witnessed a path completely covered with the excrement of horses, extreme crowds. It felt more like a marketplace on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi or Sankranti than a walk up to a small town deep in the mountains. And the horses, oh the horses. The poor animals could hardly carry themselves up and down the arduous path, let alone the human atop them. They were battered and beaten by their caretakers, a cruelly ironic way to describe those young men who brutalised and terrorised scores of animals to take them to Kedarnath.

A few incidents remain etched in my memory. A man taking charge of more than one horse had one horse that was "misbehaving" by refusing to walk uphill and constantly slipping and falling in the slurry of dung, mud and rainwater. He had to go back and get this horse to behave. He handed his stick to his client atop the horse and said "Beat the bastard if he won't move."

The client recoiled. How can I, he asked earnestly, beat an animal, that too at a sacred site? He was a decent man who probably had no prior idea about how the horses were treated. He had already paid for the transport up the hill. He was clearly filled with guilt, but he also wished to glimpse the Lord at the end of the climb. He didn't wish to turn back after coming so far and he was physically incapable of climbing.

The trouble is that Kedarnath is MEANT to be a sleepy little, inaccessible town deep in the mountains. A few sturdy, locally bred horses that are sure-footed in the mountains could perhaps take a few devotees up to Kedarnath. They would be fed well, not suffer in the cold, be well-treated and allowed plenty of rest.

But if Kedarnath becomes a cool place to click a selfie for Instagram, if shopkeepers are eager for people to throng the site for the good business and the authorities too have a vested interest in keeping this economy alive, if we want development and 4-Lane highways, we must understand that we are destroying a carefully crafted, harmonious balance of nature. And it is we who pay the price, we who carry the sin of beating and overworking innocent animals to death. We who will look down to enjoy the flow of the surging Mandakini deep in the gorge only to be met by the site of plastic bottles swirling in her waters. Yes, we may have acted responsibly and thrown our used bottles in the garbage bin, but little did we know that the shopkeepers might not share our divine concern for the Earth and will simply overturn the filled bin straight into the river.

Yet, she roars on. She will roar forever, plastic or no plastic. We are around for a few days, is this what we want to leave behind? When we take more than what is meant for us, we also leave behind more. Upsetting the balance leads to the performance of Adharma. Adharma takes us further from salvation, tying us closer to rebirth, again and again. The Adharma of beating horses, destroying forests and desecrating divine lands.

Plastic high in the mountains, dust from construction, dammed rivers in seismically active areas, mistreated animals, but we get our 4-lane highways.

Jai Badri Vishal

To Run Free

In the summer of 2019 I bought myself a fitness tracking watch. It wasn't fancy at all. In fact it was a hopelessly rudimentary "tracker" that didn't even have in-built GPS to track a run. I still just wore it and amused myself by looking at my heart-rate during my runs. At least I had a stop-watch on hand. 

I used to "track" my runs by visiting google maps after my runs and painstakingly redrawing the route I took. It was annoying because google constantly tries to optimise the distance, so if you ran from point A to point B, you need to add several stops enroute to retrace your path exactly. Further, I would run on pure instinct and go down random streets just to look around - a nice way to explore my locality, but it made my runs harder to track. 

If someone back then asked me my best 5k pace, I would have no idea. I never really thought about tracking my runs, firstly because I didn't know others were doing it and secondly, because I felt this is contrary to the spirit of running. Running for me was always about pure joy and instinct. Run as far and fast as you possibly can just to feel the high. I had no fitness goals, no target body-weight, nothing. Measuring your runs and trying to improve your numbers felt like something that would kill the joy of running. 

At some point, a couple of my friends took to posting screenshots of their runs from Nike's run-tracking app. And another friend bought me a fanny pack for my birthday, since he knew I go on runs occasionally and he thought it would be useful for me to carry stuff on the run. Before that I never carried my phone on runs - just my home-keys and a 5 Euro note. The 5 Euro note was in case I was feeling faint and needed to rush into a store to buy a chocolate or an energy drink. I've never had to use it, but I still always carry a few Euros with me. 

I disliked carrying my phone because of how they bounce around in the pockets and also because I felt that my running time doubled-up as my break from screens and devices and gadgets. It was the time to let my mind wander and just enjoy the outside world to live in the moment.

Once I had my new fanny pack, I could carry my phone. The truth is that no matter how much you hate the fact that you're addicted to your phone, you remain addicted to it. And you will carry it with you every chance you get. I started taking my phone with me and started tracking my runs on the Nike app. The joy for running being killed by numbers and statistics? Screw that, let's play with this new toy! 

The trouble with numbers is this weird human desire for nice, round numbers, whole numbers or numbers that are direct multiples of the number of fingers we have. I would run maybe 5.8 km and feel like stopping, and then say wait, why not round off the last 200 metres to make it a nice 6 km run? 

This was also an unseasonably cold spring in Rome, with temperatures staying close to 0 degrees for long periods even in March. Something about the pandemic made me want to be outdoors and be physically active - I had hated staying cooped up indoors for months and months with seemingly no end in sight.

I ran in forced, small bursts throughout the late winter and spring until it paid off in the summer. Once the weather got warmer, I truly hit my stride, going on some really long runs, covering distances I never thought I could. 

Running brings me a very deep joy. So doing it in an unstructured way, doing it instinctively and just for the heck of it gives great joy as well! Structuring it and chasing statistics can make it more of a chore than it should be. What I eventually realised though, is that being structured and strategic about it makes you a better runner, so it can bring you even more joy in the long run (pun intended). 

I found this out in April and May of 2021 when I ran over 250 km in just these two months, distances I tracked with my running app on my phone that I carried in my fanny pack. It still wasn't extremely structured, for I didn't have any long-term running or fitness goals. But I would leave the house thinking on the lines of - "today I should run 8 km" and this meant sometimes I had to hold back even when I wanted to run as fast as my legs would carry me just for sheer joy. 

My rhythm broke later in the summer (Italian summers go all the way to September) because I got rather busy with wrapping up my PhD. At that point I had come up with a quote that I'm really proud of - "PhD is what happens between running to forget your codes and forgetting to run your codes" :D :D 

I ended up running over 350 km in 2021 since I started tracking it properly. But as I said above, most of it this was just in the space of two months when this little son of the tropics felt really good to feel the warmth of the sun again. 

Come 2022, I decided to set a running target for the entire year - 1000 km. Maybe another day I will write about how this is going, but to make a long story short, I am on course to end up with somewhere between 750 to 800 km by the end of December. And while I'm disappointed, I'd like to give myself reasonable credit. I had lost all my stamina in January after a few months of no running. For the first attempt at a long-term running goal, with my schedule being constantly disrupted by travel, my thesis defence, job interviews and finally moving countries, it's a solid effort. 

Anyone who knows anything about the world of running knows Eliud Kipchoge, the absolute master of long-distance running. The greatest ever, other than some of our cavemen ancestors who probably casually achieved such feats while stalking prey and running from volcanos. In fact, I only know the name of one active long distance runner - Kipchoge's! 

Kipchoge has a beautiful quote. "Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions."

It's something extremely deep and something that has really speaks to me. When we speak of freedom, we always think of it in terms of the freedom to "do as we please", which is to say, the freedom to pursue our desires and passions, the freedom to simply follow your mood. Discipline is the exact opposite, it is to force yourself to not follow your mood. 

Maslow's (disputed) theory of the hierarchy of needs places at the very top "self-actualisation". "What a man can be, he must be." I would even say that this is the zeitgest of our times. Popular culture is replete with cliches like "You be you". "Follow your heart." People are often said to travel or do some things to "find themselves", that is, to find some kind of true self hidden within themselves so they can understand it and fulfil the passion and destiny of this alleged true self. 

I don't know if self-actualisation itself is actually contrary to Kipchoge's thoughts on freedom. But to "just be yourself" is to be a slave to your immediate mood and passion. To be truly free is to actually shackle yourself in a purposeful, disciplined way. The freedom to pursue your every desire and mood, to "let yourself be", is a way to shackle yourself to your mood. And mood is fickle.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig asks "How to be a perfect painter?". The answer, in his book (pun intended), is to become a perfect person and then paint naturally. I have explored this idea further in a previous blog post - https://mavinahanu.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-perfect-painting.html

I'm nowhere near a perfect person nor a perfect runner, but today I cannot simply run "naturally". Or I would prefer to say, what is natural to me has completely changed. I have become a more disciplined person, more in control of what I want to do. So when I run for joy, or run "naturally", it is still very precise. I don't overdo it. I am clear about how far I can run at what speed, how much energy I need to save for the rest of the workday, etc. But I know that someday, when I'm truly exhausted and tired, when I'm having a terrible off-day, if I want to run it off and experience some catharsis, I can run it off far longer and far faster than I would have dreamed to be capable of even 18 months ago when this all kicked off. In that sense, I am truly more free to run. If I had simply continued to run naturally, to do it as and when I have the mood to do it, for only as long as the mood lasted, I could have never have been this free. 

There are two footnotes to add here. The first is that this journey towards discipline has been slow and gradual. I should make it clear that I'm still quite an indisciplined person who very very often misses personal targets and just gives up and follows my immediate mood. It's just that these developing thoughts have made me constantly conscious that I want to move in the direction of more discipline, even if I'm miles and miles away.

The second is that growing up, my father always stressed greatly on discipline and good habits,. And we would get lectured by elders on how we would eventually "realise" that they were right all along while I would roll my eyes. Well, I guess all the world's a stage, and this is an eternal drama that keeps repeating. And we will one day just repeat the words of our parents to our kids, while they repeat our words back to us. To say it simply, my parents were right about this :(

Discipline is freedom.

DEVELOP

If there's an ideology that abounds in the civic works of Bengaluru city, it is something I would call developmentalism. Concretisation might be a better word, but developmentalism has a better ring to it. 

Many thoughts have been triggered in my head ever since I learnt to drive in Bengaluru. I recall moving slowly and very cautiously behind a child on a tricycle with an autorickshaw blaring its horn from behind me on a narrow residential street. I remember thinking how one small misstep or lapse in concentration from me could be fatal to an innocent, blameless child just wanting to ride his tricycle. I don't know if he was supervised by an adult.

It took me back to something written on twitter by an urban planner. He asked how come we are okay with a 1000kg mass of metal moving on roads and forcing parents to stop children from going out on the streets out of a legitimate fear of a road accident. Is the transport of an individual more important? Or is giving children a safe space to run around and play near their homes more important? Cast in this way, as heavy masses of metal that move at speed right through living areas, we can see that cars and automobiles in general are fuel guzzling, carbon emitting monsters endangering the lives of pedestrians, especially children. 

I don't want to be a Luddite. I am fond of technology and I genuinely believe that overall, the world has become a better place to live because of it. That's not to say it is all good - our water bodies are choked with contaminants, the high mountains are awash with micro-plastics while the oceans are filled with not-so-micro plastics. The soil and the air have turned toxic and we're steadily moving towards a world where climate extremes are much more frequent and a mass extinction is ongoing. In the middle of all this though, somehow the lives of billions of humans have been improved [citation needed]. 

Let's refocus on Bengaluru rather than looking at the entire world. When I visited in November 2020, soon after the first wave of the pandemic, the city was quieter than it's usual self. One morning I went for a run near Sankey Tank but I was frustrated by the fact that they were doing some construction work in and around the walking trail there. I skipped and jumped over construction debris and slush and ran, but didn't return after that. 

When I came again in November 2021, the place was still under construction! The worst part - they were concreting the entire walking trail. Hard trails are known to be particularly terrible on the knees for runners. Tripping and falling on rough concrete surfaces cause much deeper cuts and scratches than a simple mud trail. Concrete doesn't allow plants to grow, it stores heat and radiates it out at night, making the immediate surroundings a little hotter. Children can't play on it because children fall often. Basically, a concrete trail is not good for any demographic of people who want to come to Sankey Tank. 

What's wrong with a simple mud trail? (see here for a nice example) If there's enough grass and greenery around and the right type of mud is used, it will not get very slushy in the rain. Doing this is obviously much cheaper than preparing tons of concrete. It's better for runners, it doesn't absorb heat, it allows rainwater to seep through and recharges ground water. 

The problem is that the folks at BBMP, and in general the policy-makers, are smitten by this ideology of developmentalism. It calls for maximum human intervention everywhere and to make everything look like it has been worked on a lot. Things have to look "modern". And it should not be cheap. 

We often see the news about some controversial remarks made my politicians at an election rally or public speech. We might watch these snippets of such a speech. The next time though, take about an hour or two out of your day and watch an entire election speech given in a rural part of the country. In the run-up to the 2018 elections in Karnataka, I watched a couple of speeches and there were two aspects that caught my attention. First, is just how bloody boring they get. (Now I don't blame Mr. Siddaramiah for infamously falling asleep at public meetings). And secondly, how much of the speech is about how much money was "released" for various schemes and programmes. So many crores allocated for this, so many crores for that. 

Imagine if Sankey Tank could be made into a nice, shady, walkable park with just ₹ 5-10 lakhs. That would be an outrage to the developmentalists! It needs to look upgraded, not just improved. It needs to be visible that something big was done. That somebody intervened here.

It's not only innocent walking trails around nice lakes that bear the brunt of this. Every road in Malleswaram is currently witness to the ravages of this ideology. Every road being "white-topped" is testament to this ideology. (white-topping is the word used to mean replacing tar roads with concrete roads) The idea is that we need BIG roads for BIG cars and these roads should be widened and made of concrete so people can reach very fast and very smooth until the next jog-jammed signal. Look, I'm a huge fan of roads which aren't filled with potholes. I understand that roads need to be widened. But at some point shouldn't we stop to understand that if we add one extra lane while 1,000 new vehicles are registered in the city on a daily basis, the extra lane doesn't matter anymore. A rant on the slow pace of the metro, the travesty of the lack of public transport options to places like the airport, the criminally underutilised railway lines in the city and the shrinking fleet of BMTC buses is for a separate blog post perhaps. 

Delays in infrastructure construction are a fact of life in every single part of the world. I'm not upset that the construction of the metro is taking decades when it should have taken years. I'm upset that the thinking (assuming there is some thinking) is to simply keep building bigger and bigger and bigger roads when the immediate need is to DE-congest the roads. No amount of fly-overs and underpasses and signal-free corridors will save you from congestion if you have so many cars on the street. And people will keep buying and using cars as long as there is no alternative.

Cast your eyes behind Mantri mall and you will see a bluish-gray monstrosity coming up, a rectangular glass building. Unimaginatively coloured, ugly glass in a tropical city that sees single digit temperatures maybe 2-3 times a decade. Look at the footpath in front of your house - before they were made from sturdy slabs of stone called "chapdi kallu" in Kannada. Now it's the same stone but with a nice polished finish. Why? They're slippery in the rain, especially when they're slightly sloped. But it needs to LOOK modern and man-made. 

Now the footpaths along large roads are being stripped of these big stones and being replaced with tile-like arrangement of concrete blocks. Because you can't have ancient stones next to a nice, swanky concrete road, can you? Doesn't matter that they're just there, supporting the weight of people and trucks which park on the pavement, with a nice rough surface that you don't slip on. Sure, some of them are shaky and could use a bit of cement at the joints, but that's very easily fixable. Incremental and simplistic changes are out of the question. There has to be a bombastic announcement that so many zillion crores are going to be spent to build this huge thing. Making it "smart".

Developmentalism cannot believe that something that has just worked for a long time can continue to serve its purpose without a fuss. Maybe bureaucractism is the better word - where activity is treated as achievement. "Dynamism" as a virtue. We have to go to a place, rip everything out and put something new while spending a lot of money. Understanding the purpose of what is being done, actually improving the place, is secondary.

This can be seen in overly gaudy airport (glass) buildings and even in the Statue of Unity, the statue of Sardar Patel. The statue looks quite imposing in pictures and it's height is certainly impressive (the tallest statue in the world). I will definitely visit it when I get the chance, but for me the most criminal aspect of the statue is how much it lacks in aesthetics. There's no intricacy, no art. Just a mass of concrete chasing some illusory world-record. Developmentalism can build a statue of unity, but never a monument like the Channakeshava temple at Belur.

I want to emphasise here that I'm neither against human intervention nor building things anew. I am strongly for modern air-conditioned metro rail systems, wide highways and expressways connecting major cities, faster trains, higher buildings and all that is generally termed development. Urbanisation is a net good for people and for the environment. Technology has so many solutions which will be adopted at breakneck speed - like electric cars and solar power and so many more. But I break at the point where we "develop" for development's sake, because we want to feel like we're developing.

PS - It's August 2022 and the concreting of the Sankey Tank walking trail is still underway.

The Outcome or the Principle?

There's something I've always wondered about morality. And recent events have simply made me wonder more. The question is simple - is morality about doing the right thing that flows from ethical principles? Or is it ensuring that given one's overall knowledge of a situation, to ensure that the least worst outcome is brought about. Let me explain using two of the biggest geo-political events from the last one year, both of which made me wonder about the same thing. 

First, the chaotic circumstances in which troops of USA withdrew from Afghanistan got me thinking about what they were doing there in the first place. Most of the media reporting it was talking about how Taliban rule would be disastrous for women and girls in particular. I think we can all agree that the education of girls and making sure that they are not simply confined indoors to be at the beck and call of others is a moral endeavour. Today with the Taliban, there exists (reportedly) a blanket ban on girls attending school. 

So let us consider a hypothetical administration in the same country which decides to reverse this ban and take more steps in a similar direction towards what is broadly termed women's empowerment. Now, let us say that the current elites, the Taliban or in general whoever runs the show in Afghanistani society find these ideas so despicable that they are ready to launch an entire nation into an infinite crusade where they are ready to spill the blood of lakhs of their fellow countrymen but will simply not tolerate these steps. Of course, this isn't the exact scenario that played out, but in the American framing of the conflict, it was said that an American-backed administration would bring democracy, freedom and women's rights to the people of Afghanistan - so my hypothetical scenario isn't completely different from reality. It is merely extremely simplistic, ignoring the multiple layers involved, starting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

So is the endeavour to bring an administration that promotes women's education a moral one? Maybe an easier way to frame it - let's say there's a person in a house doing something terrible - maybe beating up a defenceless child. And the person says that he has access to kerosene and a matchstick, so if anyone comes to the aid of the child, he will burn down the entire building. And you know for a fact that this person has shown this kind of behaviour before and that he has a large quantity of kerosene. Is it moral to try and save the child? Even more, is it moral to have the hubris to think that you will be able to save the child and stop the fire, when you actually don't? Can you defend that act by saying yours was an act of saving the child alone? 

Let's look at Ukraine - if we know for a fact that the Russian military is far superior to the Ukrainian military, is it moral to send arms to Ukraine? Of course Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Of course, it is Russia that is the aggressor, the immoral actor here. It is useless to say that Russia shouldn't have attacked Ukraine. Now that Russia has already attacked Ukraine, the moral action would be to force Russia into halting it's assault and withdrawing her army. Clearly no one is willing to put everything into stopping Russia. So is asking Ukraine to fight on moral? Is asking Ukraine to simply surrender the real moral option?

I always think of a small garrison held by a chieftain with a small fort. And the empire's huge army comes rolling in, asking him to surrender. The chieftain is blameless. He lived honorably and now the emperor is refusing to grant him what is rightfully his. He's in a fortified position, ready to fight unto death. So every man in his army is probably worth about 5-10 men of the empire's army. The empire's army is in the open field and vulnerable. They also are pragmatic, so they are held back. If they see an weakness they can exploit, but with the loss of a few men, they will not charge into it. They will wait it out. Because they know eventually, they will overwhelm the chieftain. They vastly outnumber the chieftain's forces. Surely the chieftain is immoral for leading his people into certain defeat and death, even if he is the one who has been wronged. 

The question is, in the face of immorality and might, what is morality to be judged on? The principle, or the outcome? 

This blog post could have been a paragraph long and asked the same question, but I just wanted to paint my mind's picture.

On the Installation of Netaji's Statue

Hate is a strong word. Stronger than disapproval. Stronger than finding someone's actions immoral or deplorable. It suggests a level of personal emotional investment. 

Recently it was announced that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose's statue would be installed at India Gate. And a certain prominent voice on twitter called it as the "sullying" of India Gate by a man who was "pals with Hitler". Honestly, all I know about Netaji is pop-history, the regular, fan-fictionalised, hagiographical accounts that we hear from everywhere around us. But it's quite clear that he had even met Hitler. He was firmly on the side of the axis powers in World War 2. 

Even more, I am under no illusions about the imperial Japanese. I have read about how their army treated prisoners of war, who traveled with their army camps and their actions in China. Does this mean Netaji shouldn't be honoured in India? 

(A small aside - the presence of the Japanese in Indonesia actually greatly hastened their independence from the Netherlands. The Japanese saw themselves as the liberators of Asia from European colonialism. Again, everyone claims great moral end-goals for their self-interest, so there's no need to get too carried away by such pronouncements either).

Essentially, Netaji wanted to get rid of the British so badly that he was ready to join the camp of whoever was willing to promise that end-goal to him. Today, it's considered improper to even approve of, never mind glorify, the actions of someone associated with Hitler. Here was a man who actually carried out some of Hitler's plans in the name of freedom from the British.

There's a stronger point to be made here. To an Indian, especially looking at it from the lens of today rather than the 1940s, the British and the Japanese and the Germans and the Soviets were all mass killers and perpetrators of genocide. There are several complications when it comes to the relationship between the British and independent India. For example, the Indian armed forces, their traditions and legends are inherited from the British Indian army. This was an army commanded by Britishers to serve British imperial needs and interests and even became bullet fodder across the world as a "voluntary" army. 

Certain divisions and the regiments of the army may glorify the deeds of valour by these Indians. It's unimaginable today, but an army comprised of a majority of Indians sacked Beijing 120 years ago. Certainly, individuals may have shown exemplary courage, but must an Indian feel proud of this? When it was never our war and we never had any cause (until the 1950s) for enmity with the Chinese? I totally agree that India Gate and the names of the soldiers who were killed in action during the first World War is a symbol of our colonial past. It's natural that we are only slowly developing a national consciousness that points out things like these. It isn't that those who came before us were insufficiently patriotic, it's hard to point out something omnipresent and given as received wisdom. Before we were told to salute all those who died fighting "for India" in world war 1. Today we say, "Ummm, yes, they were our brave countrymen who performed great deeds, but weren't they just pawns of the British?"

Coming back to the question of who to hate - there are many deplorable characters in history. Hitler. Churchill. Aurangzeb. They say Gengis Khan killed so many people that his exploits led to an increase in the green cover across the world and had an impact on reducing greenhouse gases. 

But today the name of Gengis Khan doesn't evoke hatred, just mild historical curiosity and wonder. It's not admiration, it's just "Oh yeah, he did some terrible stuff" or a dispassionate "he was barbaric". What separates this from hatred? For example, to the extent that mere association with a person is a terrible sin? No one gets called "literally Gengis Khan" on the internet.

I think the distinction comes from cultural sensibilities and the living memory of people. What historical memories have people (and education systems) chosen to enshrine in their collective memories. The elevation of Hitler and his actions as some kind of original act of genocide is in my opinion totally unfounded. There are so many characters in history who, if they had access to the chemicals that the Nazis had, would have happily used it on large populations. To pretend this was never the way of the world until Hitler did it is disingenuous. It means internalising the (well-justified) horror of Europeans by the whole world. I'm not European. My lens is different.

If there's a historical character I hate, it's Winston Churchill. His actions killed millions of Indians. Of course, today he's a hero in the eyes of the British. I think a discerning person, not given to constant outrage, should be able to digest that quite easily - that a person can be a tyrant for one set of people and a hero for another set of people. Ahmad Shah Abdali is a known as a great conqueror and the father of the modern Afghanistani state. In India he's an invader, a looter and a destroyer. Same with Nadir Shah.

I would never demand that the British cease to glorify Churchill or that Afghanistan stops calling Abdali the father of their nation. I think the state of the world where everyone unanimously agrees on one set of good guys and one set of evil guys is not only artificial, it will end up imposing the emotions of one set of people (northern and western Europeans) on everyone else. A mature person should recognise this simple fact. So yes, while I do not demand the take-down of Churchill's current-day statues, I also do not hate Hitler. He was one man among many tyrants of the past who committed gruesome, deplorable acts.

I could never put him in the same bracket as Churchill or General Dyer or Aurangzeb. And I have absolutely no problem glorifying someone who worked with him - he worked against the British to get them out of India and established self-rule - and that is most important for me, not some alleged overarching morality of the allied powers.

Jai Hind! 

Azad Hind Fauj zindabad!

Signalling

The fear of ostracism is said to be one of the strongest instincts that human beings have. Stage fright is also linked to this - the (involuntary) feeling is that being embarrassed and ridiculed will lead to a lowering of social standing, which is a path towards ostracism. It's why humans generally toe the line, prefer to just do as everyone around us is doing and not stick out. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered." And as a corollary to the fear of ostracism, we like to show that we are part of the group, in-line with everyone else. 

I was writing a "Statement of Purpose" for a job I am applying to and I was making sure to use some keywords that I thought would boost my chances. "Cloud-resolving model". "Radiative-convective equilibrium". 

What the hell are these, you may think? These are some technical terms from the field of weather and climate modelling. And you thinking "what the hell is this?" is exactly the effect I want to produce. Because the important thing isn't the effect I produce on the layman, it is about the effect I want to produce on a bunch of researchers working in exactly this field. They are my audience. What I want is for them to read these keywords and immediately think "Ah, he's one of us!" Speaking the right lingo, using the right words, these are powerful things that we do either consciously or unconsciously because we want to belong. We want to signal that hey, we're not that different. We're kith and kin. 

And I think very often this is what happens in academia, where we have a propensity to use so much jargon - the jargon is pointed at other people who also use that exact same jargon and who will understand it. Using jargon is a way of claiming your place at the inner table. The more obscure and technical, the smaller the target audience, but more closely knit as well. 

The natural reaction of people (including me) is to conclude that the more obscure the jargon, the harder the text is to read, the more intellectual it is. Generally if someone says something we have no clue about with total confidence, we believe it, particularly if the person saying it is someone we trust or the institution from which it is being said is a trusted institution. Like say a reputed academic journal. The words themselves give the hint. "Reputed". "Respected". "Esteemed". "Prestigious". Each of these are words which basically says that a community of people agree that this journal is of high quality. And if your work is published in the journal, everyone will automatically assume it's work of good caliber - this is about pure social standing. 

Well, it's more than social standing. It might be unconsciously so, but if your work is published in an "esteemed" journal, then this increases your prospects of better jobs, better pay, awards, recognition, etc. So there is an intimate link between social standing, "recognition" and actual material benefits. And when you have a social group in which you are well considered, well there is the additional benefit that, say, they will defend you from slander or report any gossip about you back to you. This is of course slightly different from the main aim of group dynamics in the wild, where you want to be in a group or social circle to be safe from prey. The principle is the same though. 

This was my stream of thoughts when I suddenly got reminded of something I had read, seemingly unrelated. Recently a Justice of the Supreme Court DY Chandrachud made a speech, which can be found here.

https://livelaw.in/top-stories/justice-dy-chandrachud-caste-privilege-caste-discrimination-dr-ambedkar-187082

Or a summary here - https://theprint.in/judiciary/castelessness-is-a-privilege-only-upper-caste-can-afford-says-justice-d-y-chandrachud/777777/

And his words infuriated me! Why so, you might ask? At first glance, there is nothing particularly inaccurate or revolutionary in the basic claim. If there is one system in which a group of people have an advantage or a privilege, then we transition to a new system where this privilege doesn't exist anymore, most certainly the group who had privileges in the first system have a head-start over the others. It's like developed nations exploiting resources of the Global south for centuries and at the end when the colonies proved too expensive to maintain, they return back to their shores and say "We're all free and equal nations now." The relationship can never be equal due to the head-start enjoyed by the colonisers. 

The same case could be made say for a set of people who previously weren't allowed into schools on the basis of their caste. Opening the doors of schools to everyone and saying "now we're all equal in terms of education" is a fallacy. Whether such a system existed, how pervasive was the system, who were the beneficiaries, who was left out etc. are questions for sociologists and historians to study and answer. 

Justice Chandrachud takes the argument to the next level and speaks of "Critical Theories" and whether the question of merit itself exists. I personally believe that merit itself exists and not every single difference can be explained away by conditioning and environment. But here too, Chandrachud doesn't say something particularly egregious, merely something debatable. 

So why my annoyance? It's because of who said it. This gentleman is the son of the longest serving Chief Justice of India. He is also in-line to be the Chief Justice of India soon. He is the definition of privilege - he attended posh private schools, then St. Stephens in Delhi followed by Harvard Law School. 

Alright, so being particularly well-connected and educated at elite institutions isn't a crime. What about the institution he is a part of? Research suggests 33% of supreme court justices and a whopping 50% of high court judges are relatives of "members of higher judiciary". [1] Writing in 2018, Sanya Dhingra showed that no Dalit judge has been elevated to the Supreme court for 8 years and there were exactly 0 Dalit chief justices in 24 High Courts as well. [2]

Worse, the Supreme Court works with the "Collegium system", instituted by the (surprise surprise) Supreme Court itself, wherein the Chief Justice of India and 4 senior judges of the Supreme Court simply nominate who should be elevated from High Courts to the Supreme Court, who should be chosen as Chief Justice of high courts, etc. So basically no one can question nor overrule their selection, a system which was mandated by a judgement passed by the supreme court itself! The greatest legal protection available. 

The judiciary is a huge roadblock to justice rather than being an avenue. Case pendency is off the charts. Cases languish in lower courts for decades, innocent people languish in custody for decades for this reason. Cases are simply "allocated" without any order or justification. And when they're put up for hearing depends often on how much media attention the case has got. And when there exists a society with some being more privileged and some being less privileged, most certainly the lesser privileged are disproportionately affected by these inefficiencies.

When I think of Justice Chandrachud spouting gyaan, I think of him in the context of this system. On the occasion of Constitution Day recently, when the Chief Justice had a platform to speak, he asked for protection for judges from "social media attacks". Recently the Supreme Court expressed annoyance that the CBI had not done anything to arrest two people who were accused of "making objectionable comments on judges of judges of the Andhra Pradesh high court over certain verdicts". [3] [4]

So here is the judiciary, unresponsive, creaking under case pendency which will perhaps soon outnumber our population itself. A court is the last place an average citizen of the country wants to step into. And on the other side is a totally unaccountable set of people choosing their own relatives for posts in the top judiciary, concerned not about setting up thousands of additional courts and court benches across the country and making speedy justice accessible, but more concerned about people slandering them on social media and even having people extradited from abroad for the same. And then they make great speeches about the freedom of expression and how merit is meaningless. 

The reason it infuriated me is that it's all signalling. The insiders of a system who hold such views would try to reform that system first if they truly believed what they said. Or at least help to bring about speedy justice and improve the state of the lower courts. The problem is that Chandrachud and his ilk consider their social circle to be the academic community of elite US universities, not average Indian citizens. Hence the judgements running into hundreds of pages written in Shakespearean English which needs a Latin dictionary to be interpreted. Today it is fashionable and "in" to speak of disowning your privilege in those circles, so Chandrachud wants to increase his social standing there. Today critical theories are fashionable, so he will blindly transpose it to a different context and different society. 

Today, in the same milieu that Chandrachud wants his remarks to be broadcast if the fashion was not to speak of disowning privilege but instead it was fashionable to take pride in your family and lineage, you can bet he would be speaking of how his father was a Chief Justice, how he is the cousin of some Maharaja or his great-great-grandfather was the trusted courtier in the late Mughal court or something similar. Anything for a benign smile and validation from elite Anglo-Saxons. If he could cut the signalling and operate as if his audience is the Indian people for whom he can actually do a lot from his position of immense power and influence, that would be great. And yes, "speaking up" isn't doing something, it's just satisfying yourself that you're doing something while doing nothing, again for validation. It is commendable when it's the least you can do, not when you hold the keys to change in your hand. Privilege is being able to hold sermons on privilege while using your privilege to make sure your own privilege endures.

[1] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/50-hc-judges-related-to-senior-judicial-members-report/story-S8RP2Ir9cEuIN4NewFnvML.html

[2] - https://theprint.in/opinion/dalit-history-month/no-dalit-judge-country-top-court-passed-order-sc-st-act/46484/

[3] - https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cji-lawyers-assist-judges-protect-institution-motivated-targeted-attacks-7642613/

[4] - https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/trendingtopics/for-judge-slur-cbi-seeks-deportation-of-2-from-us/ar-AAQBmN9

Buses on Fire

I am always fearful and reluctant to write about a place or a set of people, mainly because in general, generalisations are never completely true. For example, it is said that dogs are loyal. Surely, there exist disloyal or downright traitorous dogs.

Once in the aftermath of a natural disaster in a certain country, someone I know had written that he was sure the people of that country would bounce back and rebuild their lives since he had visited the country and he had never met such a resilient people. Of course, in the spirit of saying kind words at a difficult time you do not scoff at such things being said, but surely he couldn't have found this one supposed national character of resilience after one visit where he interacted mainly with people in the service industry! In the face of adversity, resilience is the only choice. You can take any success story of any country and call their people resilient.

At this point though, another question arises - without gross generalisations and the elevation of very specific observations to general principles, whether correctly or not, would there exist a blogosphere? Would op-eds and opinion columns exist? Would anyone ever say anything broad and intelligent? Specificity and accuracy are the enemies of profundity. If you go your whole life only making sure you're standing on firm ground, you might never take a step in any direction.

There's an even better argument to justify spouting grand principles solely on the basis of one's own observations with a limited perspective - everyone else does it. Every other person seems to have a substack or a medium profile. And some archaic folks with not much intelligent to say also have good old blogspot.com pages that they rarely update! And how can a person who has returned to India after a while not spout some gyaan!

With this preamble, let me ramble a bit about my experiences. 

I spent the best part of the last 3 years in Europe, most of it in Rome, Italy. To be precise (and not profound), it was a total of 4.5 months in Germany, 2 months in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, around 3 months visiting India and the rest (excluding vacations) in Rome. A friend from the UK described Rome to be a part of the 1.5th world - not quite first world but not close to third world. 

Although I understand where this remark comes from, for me it was amazing to see how much greater the quality of life can be in a developed country. And this comes not from the society or people, but from the state and institutions. Education and healthcare are essentially free. I had to pay 150 euros annually to have complete state-covered health-care. (Which I hardly used, maybe a total of 3 visits to the doctor. So hey, I actually put money into the system!) And two other aspects I found wonderful - security and clean air. 

By security, firstly I mean physical security. You will hear it said again and again that Rome is a city of thieves and pick-pockets. I am someone who by nature is always acutely aware of my pockets. I have never had a single wallet or phone stolen or lost (touch wood). And the pick-pockets in Rome are those who do it on the sly, not violent muggers. You can safely walk in the dead of the night with no fear.

And while I read about how winter smog at Rome is terrible, I found the air to be perfectly breathable compared to Bengaluru. Maybe the air is even cleaner in other cities of Italy, but I never had any complaints. 

A natural question would be to wonder why I would be happy paying 150 Euros (around 13,000 rupees) a year when if I hadn't paid it, I would have spent say 20 Euros a year on my visits to the doctors? The answer again is security. 

You feel safe, say while playing football or crossing a street, that if something bad happens here, I have some safety net. Some institution to turn to. And I realise that living in India (I've been back here for around 10 days now), this is what is seriously lacking. Security. 

And I don't mean in the sense of the risk of violent crime. Bengaluru is easily one of the safest places to be in the country. There's other types of insecurity. I'm essentially one wrong step or one health-condition away from not only bankrupting myself, but from destroying a good part of whatever wealth my family has created over many generations. 

But that's only one of the bigger issues - healthcare being expensive is a fact of life in most parts of the world, much like education. My parents worked really hard to send me to a good school. Good options for education shouldn't be so rare and so expensive relative to the average income of a place. 

Then there's the little issues of security - I never know when a policeman will catch me while riding my scooter for a random check. Firstly, this is illegal - a policeman can pull you to the side only if he sees a violation of some rule. And secondly, you know that you will be made to pay a bribe because of some obscure rule violation and even if all your documents are in order, you will be lied to about a rule, or be given subjective charges like "rash driving". The truth is, in the internet age, you can take the time to look up every single rule and argue your case with the policeman. But it will be a true hassle, and you need the presence of mind and the time to do it. I personally freeze, and I know most of my friends do as well, because of the power this policeman has over you. Not to harm you bodily, but in general to be a nuisance and a chore. And also the stories you hear about the behaviour of such policemen in general. 

Now with the digitisation of everything, law enforcement has become more "efficient", in that the policeman can extract your entire vehicular history with violations which are recorded by video cameras. Cameras on terrible roads carrying several times their capacity in traffic, poorly organised and not at all policed. So nothing around you works as it is meant to, nothing is built to handle current capacity, but you alone in your infinite wisdom fighting this chaotic traffic, dust and smoke will be fined a fortune for a small violation that some AI camera detects - The robot-ruled dystopia is truly here!

No one respects the law because the law is not worthy of the respect it should be getting. What grinds you the most is the arbitrariness. Today I witnessed the common scene of the police vehicle going out to tow away vehicles parked in no-parking areas. There were a series of vehicles parked in front of a row of shops and the police-workers (they're not even regular cops) picked up the first few vehicles they could find and took them away. We know full well the owners will be called to the police station and harassed unless they quickly take the easy way out and pay the bribe. 

But here's the thing - if indeed it was law "enforcement" that was happening, every single vehicle parked there must have been taken away, not the three nearest vehicles. If there aren't enough police vehicles to tow away all the violating vehicles, then maybe there are too few parking spots and no-parking signs are unnecessarily placed everywhere. Every year tens of thousands of new vehicles are sold in the already very cramped Bengaluru. So either such nice spots near busy market-places and temples shouldn't be classified as no-parking zones just for the heck of it. Or separate spaces for parking should be built. The signs are put-up and the laws are made as if there is a great degree of organisation involved. Once in-place, there is no capacity to implement the law correctly. 

Now imagine if all the vehicles parked there were towed away by the police - do they have the space to keep them until a claimant turns up? Most certainly not - I see all these vehicles kept at the Malleswaram Circle underpass. So actually the vehicles which were innocuously parked at the side of a narrow side-road with lots of pedestrians are now kept by the police on a major, busy road built exclusively for vehicular movement. 

There is a delusion about how the laws "should" be. Maybe there is some principle such as "the sides of narrow roads shouldn't be used as parking spots". But that principle is for well-organised cities with large dedicated parking areas and wide arterial roads that also allow parking. The principles are applied with no care for whether it is locally relevant. So essentially anywhere you park your vehicle is a no-parking zone. And the police will arbitrarily pick-up 3 of those vehicles to harass you and extract the most they can as a bribe because let's face it, there's no way they can actually implement the senseless laws based on a principle that was designed for a different context. Another example of such a law is the outlawing of even the possession of crackers in NCR this year while the whole city happily celebrated Deepavali. In the meanwhile the twitter page of Delhi police posts "success" stories of everyday citizens being apprehended for the crime of doing what almost everybody else is doing.

And in this way there is a constant insecurity when dealing with any organ of the state for an Indian.There's a common phrase expressed in Kannada "ಕೋರ್ಟು ಕಚೇರಿ ಅಂತ ತಿರ್ಗಾಟ", an equivalent of "moving pillar to post". It is the greatest fear to have to go to court. In fact I know of certain people who didn't report a fraud and theft of great amounts of money and valuables because it's considered ill-luck for a policeman to enter your house. I share this attitude as well to a large degree - A life where you never have to deal with the police, the law and the judiciary means a life without any troubles. "The process is the punishment".

Laws and regulations on paper are idealised and equivalent to any high-end, 1.5th world state, implementation is arbitrary and extractive precisely because it is unimplementable due to a lack of capacity. And this eventually overburdens everybody - the judiciary, the police, the citizen. There's so many other issues here. Policemen probably aren't paid anywhere near what is actually a really hard and really important job. I don't know what kind of training they receive. I know I'm probably just scratching at the surface of what has to change. Lot more judges are needed to take-up case pendency which is running in crores, but for that one has to first look at educating so many people in the law. This would be hard because the judiciary and the constitution can probably be understood only after a degree in English grammar studies followed by a degree in law. (I exaggerate, but take the time to read some of the judgements passed by our higher judiciary - not only are they excessively lengthy, you might need a Latin dictionary handy to understand it. I don't understand how a clear account of the case, the charges, the evidence and the verdict together can ever cross more than say, 50 pages.)

But what I saw in my time in Italy I think was very instructive, precisely because of the "1.5th world" nature of that country. I think "first world" is basically a set of working systems with a shiny exterior. Rome often has chaotic streets with wayward driving, garbage piling up, an alarming number of buses catching on fire and other civic issues. The exterior is far from shiny. But the basics, the fundamentals, as far as I could see, are extremely sound. And despite the language barrier, the bureaucracy, the first time living by myself, the different culture, the pandemic and the absolutely stifling bureaucracy, I got the sense that underneath it all is a system that's meant to function in the setting it is located in. And with people who are used to a basic level of function and hence behave in a more civil way, without seeking to extract, both from above and under the table, in every situation. (I'm sure my Italian friends will completely disagree with me here. Sadly, they constantly suffer from comparisons with countries like Netherlands, Germany, Sweden etc. and hence believe that their country is the most wretched with nothing functional. Apart from a few glitches, I see a very very functional, smooth-running country. with a population of warm, friendly people. And I truly appreciate the sense of overall security I felt when I was there.)

When I was younger I had a simpler explanation for what I saw around me in India - the systems are fine, the people manning the systems are corrupt, immoral and beyond redemption. Now I do not share this view - people are people. Given avenues for corruption, people will be corrupt. Given incentive for good behaviour, people will behave well. When I look at Italians, I sense this bursting desire towards disorder, but systems which keep their faith in a measure of order. 

Look at the metro rail systems in India - When the trains are functional, regular, efficient and clean, even I stand in a queue and don't rush in head-first into the crowd. Habits are built slowly.

I don't think what I'm saying here is particularly original or novel, but somehow I see hardly any people talking about these structural things.

Rediscovering the Laughs

I'm not a movie person. I simply cannot do it and I don't know how people do it. I find it difficult to invest my attention for long-ish periods of time when I don't know whether it will be worthwhile. To a degree I do it much better with books, but even that has deteriorated over time. Now I often leave books half-read, something unthinkable 10 years ago. 

I'm not sure why. One thing I know is that I'm very slow at grasping stuff that happens on a screen. I struggle to commit faces to memory, confusing them very easily. There are small cues, somebody flashing some object, making a subtle sign. I miss all such cues. And so when a big reveal happens at some point, something like this person was actually that person in disguise all along, when everyone has their eyes wide open in amazement, I'm still in the stage where I've started to understand who is who and what their roles are in the unfolding drama. 

I've also noticed that I can watch a movie and just skim over large parts of it mentally. When I rewatch it, I wonder which movie I watched the first time. I tend to remember the big details, the larger storyline, vaguely. 

Thus, the movies and TV shows that keep me to the end can be broadly classified into 2 categories. The first are the very simple, funny TV shows. Friends is the epitome of this genre, and while it's not my favourite, it's the perfect example of a show I will follow. The characters are well-defined, the main stuff is very clear at the very outset. One is awkward, one is stupid, one is nerdy and has a major crush on the pretty girl. One is the pretty girl, one is the quirky girl and one is the obsessive girl. Throw them together and you have a bunch of funny stuff that's happening. Seinfeld is even better - it's just 4 idiotic, stupid people with no self-respect and dignity. There's no need to dig deeper. Of course, I also enjoy word-play and puns. 

The other type of movies and TV shows I enjoy are the very intense, happening, action-packed ones. I don't necessarily mean violent or with fighting or war. But again, I guess the word to describe both are simple. I cannot watch long drawn-out dramas, stuff that builds up slowly. Thus, I rarely start watching anything new, preferring instead to endlessly and mindlessly rewatch what I've already watched. But this gets boring quickly as well. 

With humour, as in warfare, the main element is surprise. It doesn't matter how funny something is, if you've already heard it, chances are you won't find it funny. And if you can guess the ending of a joke, it kills the joke. Of course, this is different from funny incidents, because they can still draw out laughs when recounted years later as well. 

Even Modern Family, a highly rewatchable show, strewn with little nuggets of humour, word-play and little expressions that you would have missed, has a limited shelf life when it comes to rewatching. 

Before arriving in Italy for my PhD, I dabbled a bit in learning Italian. I tried duo-lingo, but it was too dry for me. However, I did find a channel named Italiano Autmatico and a playlist for learning Italian with a very interesting concept. The host cited the research of one Stephen Krashen to claim that the key to learning a language is "comprehensible input". 

The channel had videos on various topics in Italian with subtitles in Italian and English. Each video had two versions, one the slow version where the host spoke slowly, and one version where he spoke at a normal pace for a native Italian speaker (or as the rest of the world calls it, rapidly). The host suggested that we would learn really rapidly if we just watched the video multiple times. The first few times to listen while reading the subtitles in English and understanding exactly what is being said. After this, you carefully pay attention to the Italian subtitles so you know the exact words being spoken until you're watching a video in Italian, where you know the exact words being spoken and you understand every word. Comprehensible input!

It was an interesting idea and I'm always happy to put such ideas to the test. I didn't stick with it for long though, but I must say it helped me rapidly improve my fluency of Italian from very very rudimentary to very rudimentary. It was an engaging exercise. I had no knowledge of any of the grammar and other constructs. I knew some 20-30 basic words. I couldn't say "Call me an ambulance" or "How do you do" or even "One coffee to go, please". But I could perfectly say "I will make short videos about some interesting topic. The videos will be at most 3-4 minutes long. I will make one slow, like this one, and another faster video." 

And this is the thing about learning a language. One way to do it is most certainly to start from the bottom up. Learn the vocabulary, understand the grammar. And "comprehensible input", it would seem, is the other way. Keep listening to the language and understand what is being said. Maybe if you learn how to say 100 different, random sentences perfectly, you will automatically be able to construct 1000s of sentences. Of course, for your vocabulary to grow, you will need way more sentences. 

Either way, the idea is appealing, but the implementation is hard. Sticking with something isn't something humans can do very well. Or maybe it's just me. 

So last year, I finally enrolled in Italian classes and finally grew from very rudimentary to rudimentary. Once the course concluded, I didn't want to sign up for the next level of courses because the courses were shifted back online from in-person. I didn't want to lose touch with the language either but I had no non-boring ideas. 

When I returned to Italy from India after a holiday, I logged on to Netflix and found that the language of the audio had been automatically set to Italian. I changed it immediately to English before I had a thought - why not rewatch shows in Italian? Sure, the shows had stopped being funny after so many repetitions, but they were also very familiar. And if this comprehensible input stuff is correct, then it's the perfect exercise. I knew all the contexts and remembered a good portion of the dialogues. 

I've heard of people living in foreign lands learn a language by reading newspapers. I guess the internet generation does things differently, with a lot more panache I might add. 

I was in for a very pleasant surprise as well. You see, when you're fluent in a language, you somehow don't have to process the words. When someone is speaking, you just absorb the meaning. The words have to catch up with your thoughts. When you're not fluent in the language and you miss the meaning of words in the middle though, you need to pay attention and process every word separately. Your thoughts must race to keep up with the words you hear.  

This did something great for me - I was so caught up in trying to understand what was being said and the meaning of some words that when something funny happened, it came as a surprise. And it became funny again. Of course, translation kills so many of those sweet puns and word-play jokes, but this was a worthwhile price to pay! There I was, watching a TV show for the bazillionth time, still finding a good portion of it quite funny. While also learning words in a new language. Talk about a win-win-win