Recent Posts from Author
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Talk Less, Work More
On India’s troubled relationship with democratic values. (First published in The Baffler.)
Sometime after midnight on June 25, 1975, over six hundred political leaders, social activists, and trade unionists in India were rudely awakened by knocks on their doors. By dawn, they had been placed behind bars for inciting “internal disturbance.” In parallel, the government shut off electricity to newspaper offices, blocking their next day’s editions.“The President has proclaimed the Emergency,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in a surprise broadcast the next morning on All India Radio. “This is nothing to panic about.” The previous night, she had made a bleary-eyed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed trigger the Emergency provision in Article 352 of India’s constitution, which allowed her to postpone elections and suspend most fundamental rights, including those to speech, assembly, association, and movement. With the stroke of a pen, Gandhi had effectively dismantled India’s democratic infrastructure, concentrating dictatorial power in herself. Total press censorship was imposed, and foreign journalists who did not toe the line were summarily expelled, including stringers with the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. On June 28, someone snuck a clever obituary into the Bombay edition of The Times of India: “D’Ocracy—D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26th June.”
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Notes from the SV Underground
During my 20+ years in Silicon Valley and since, I’ve often pondered the impact of the Internet on social life. As an exploration of this for a broad audience, I think The Social Dilemma is excellent. It captures, if a bit luridly, the largely amoral nature of the hyper-capitalist creativity of Silicon Valley—and its bad consequences. Watch it!Technology, says the film, ought to be a tool that serves us. But interactive social media works differently from its earlier “broadcast” counterparts. It streams 24×7 personalized news, opinion, gossip, ads, propaganda, pop culture—all competing for our attention. The film shows how we pay for it, how it spies and uses algorithmic wizardry to mine our tastes and behaviors without our consent, how it hacks our attention span and exploits our psychology to benefit private and state interests, how it further polarizes and divides us. It artfully manipulates us with dopamine hits and facilitates the spread of fake news like never before. All this, argues the film, harms mental health and raises social strife. We’ve ceded too much privacy and power to a few tech corporations that are de facto monopolies, whose understanding of us is “the product” that’s monetized—as part of “surveillance capitalism”. It’s a Faustian bargain, the film suggests, and calls for sensible regulation before things get much worse. You may not agree with all of the opinions in the film but it’ll make you think.
Anyhow, today is one year since my first novel appeared in the world. Among its themes is the culture and inner life of Silicon Valley, revealed via office events and interactions between the protagonist, Ved, and his coworkers. The Social Dilemma reminded me of those parts, so to mark its first anniversary, I’ve published below one such excerpt from my novel. Go buy it for juicier bits about a 36-year-old who, in an era after the dot-com crash and 9/11, stumbles and ripens through messy experiences in sex, love, work, family, friendship, and cultural belonging. I should add that the novel is a story drawn from life, not a story of my life. Full disclosure: it has dopamine hits galore!
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A Day of Shame
A double whammy day: a year of Kashmir in chains and a vulgar display of majoritarian pride in Ayodhya. Today, it’s worth listening to Baba Laldas, the former priest at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, on the motivations behind the Ram temple movement and its leaders. This is an excerpt from the documentary, Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992) by Anand Patwardhan, now on YouTube. Laldas spoke openly against Advani’s rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri masjid. He was shot dead within a year and the case remains unsolved.
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Caste and the Delusion of “Merit” in Indian Higher Education
(This essay first appeared in The Caravan, Aug 2020, where it has received many comments. Its full text is also available on Magster.)
The great engineers of medieval India were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces.
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Happy Childfree Day!
Today, August 1, is International Childfree Day, one of my favorite marked days of the year. Today I celebrate my early decision to never have children—one of the greatest decisions of my life—among my surest, bestest, zero-regret life choices. I feel like I dodged a bullet!I like kids as people, but on the rare occasion I’ve tried to imagine life with my own kids, it has felt like a horror movie that might leave me screaming and panting. Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. 😊 Perhaps I simply had a weak instinct for fatherhood. I can’t remember ever wanting it; it seemed like a bad deal. Were I religious, I’d thank god every day for saving me from a life of far more angst, suffering, and prayers—and, I reckon, not enough compensatory joy. I’m thankful for life’s countless miracles of non-birth and its precious unbundled love. 😀 And I’m lucky to have an amazing life partner whose beliefs and values align with mine—a rare gift, without which the trials of parenthood, too, are far worse.
To younger folk in two minds about having children, especially in the nauseatingly baby-obsessed culture of India, I assure you that going childfree can be a perfectly wonderful, fulfilling and wholesome way of life. Don’t let social pressure—led by unimaginative family and friends lost in the quicksand of conformity—risk ruining your life. Don’t make babies because you’re expected to, or out of boredom, or to mask marital problems. Don’t live someone else’s dream for you. Unlike many other decisions, entering parenthood is non-reversible and could well be your one-way ticket to far more misery than joy—witness the legions of parents mired in toxic spousal relationships, shrunken horizons and mindless drudgery.
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Satire by Pushpa Jijji
I recently discovered Pushpa Jijji (Cheshta Saxena in real life), a talented satirist who performs mostly in Bundeli. I was especially charmed by her use of Bundeli language that I often heard growing up in Gwalior (Hindi speakers should get most of it). She has been putting out short videos on YouTube in which she pokes fun at Indian patriarchy, politics, and, lately, their interface with the pandemic (no subtitles). As with most good satire, the laughs lie uncomfortably close to a substrate of grim realities.
If you like the episode below, check out a few others I liked: one, two, three, four, or visit her YouTube Channel.
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The Threat of Covid-19 in India
How to assess the threat of Covid-19 in India? How much fear is justified and how much is overblown? How to think about future policies? Some thoughts below.About 27,000 people die every day in India, including all causes of death combined (0.73% of the population annually). These can be classified into three categories:
(1) About 25%, or 6,750 deaths, are from communicable (infectious) diseases like TB, HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Flu, Diarrhoeal and other respiratory or parasitic diseases.
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Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People
(First published in The Baffler)
The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.
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A California Story | Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley: A Novel by Namit Arora
I’ve done it, friends. I’ve written a novel and it’s out today! 🙂
It’s available in two editions: A California Story in the United States from Adelaide Books, and Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley in India from Speaking Tiger Books. I thank both publishers for betting on me. Extra thanks to Speaking Tiger for their professionalism and the love and care they invested in their edition.
This novel has been in the works, off and on, for over a decade, and I’m delighted to see it in print. Today I can even partly forget all the trials and tribulations en route (what follies and conceits kept me going, I wonder).
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A Collective Madness
What Modi’s victory says about today’s India. (An op-ed published in Himal Southasian, where it has received many comments.)
In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot — Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.I entered Assi Ghat with a numbing sadness. Was this really Kashi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, known for its religious pluralism and massive density of gods, creeds and houses of worship, with its long history of largely peaceful coexistence? The Kashi of the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak? The Kashi of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, who lived in its tangled gullies and regularly played during the aarti in Balaji temple, or of Hindustani vocalist Girija Devi, whose family kept mannats on Muharram? What still remains of its famed Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb? No, I consoled myself, my auto driver was not the norm in Varanasi, but he did herald certain fundamental changes now sweeping the country.
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What Are We Made Of?
A brilliant, accessible talk on Quantum Fields by David Tong. It reminds us how bizarre, mysterious, and awe-inspiring our universe really is!
In the same lecture series are Philip Ball on Quantum Mechanics, Andrew Pontzen on Dark Matter (Q&A), and Harry Cliff on the Higgs Boson.
Happy New Year!
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What Freedom Means
(This essay appeared in Outlook India on the occasion of India’s 72nd Independence Day. It’s now also on Medium.)
Freedom is the ability to pursue the life one values. This view of freedom is inclusive, open-ended, and flexible. It embraces our plural, evolving, and diverse conceptions of the good life. It also admits other long-standing ideas of freedom, such as not being held in servitude, possessing political self-rule, or enjoying the right to act, speak, and think as one desires.Some people naively equate freedom with an absence of social restraints. But should I be free to do whatever I want? Should I be free to pollute the river, not pay any taxes, or torture the cat? To play loud music on the metro, not rent my apartment to Dalits, or incite hate or violence against other groups? I hope not. My freedom requires limits, so that others may enjoy their freedom. Edmund Burke held that freedom must be limited in order to be possessed. A freer society is not necessarily one with fewer social restraints, but one with a wisely chosen set of restraints as well as provisions, such as public education, healthcare, and ample safety nets for all.
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On the Ideology, Political Economy, and Prospects of Cryptocurrencies
(Cross-published on 3 Quarks Daily, Raiot, and Medium; a Spanish translation was published in the journal Nueva Sociedad)
The cryptocurrency movement may be a mainstream media story but confusion about it is widespread. It evokes deeply polarized opinion, what with daily stories of scams, speculative booms, crypto billionaires, and government bans amid tall claims about how cryptocurrencies (and blockchain) are about to transform life and society as we know it. The acolytes of this ‘movement’ imagine it as a totally disruptive force for economics, politics, governance, the Internet, and much more, even though there is little empirical evidence yet to ground that imagination.The cryptocurrency (aka crypto) movement is exciting—full of brainy people, venture capital, heady innovation, and high hopes. It behooves us to more clearly understand the animating ideology of the crypto movement. Should it ever succeed, where might it fit into our political economy and what might be its effects on society? And finally, just how likely is it to succeed?
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Forest Man of the Northeast
Forest Man, an inspirational short documentary film (19 mins): “Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has been planting hundreds of trees on an Indian island threatened by erosion. In this film, photographer Jitu Kalita traverses Payeng’s home—the largest river island in the world [on the Brahmaputra river]—and reveals the touching story of how this modern-day Johnny Appleseed turned an eroding desert into a wondrous oasis. Funded in part by Kickstarter, “Forest Man” was directed by William Douglas McMaster and won Best Documentary for the American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.”
Also consider watching this insightful video on how to grow a forest in your urban backyard—a TED Talk by Shubhendu Sharma.
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Coming to America: The making of the South Asian diaspora in the United States
[First published in the October 2017 issue of The Caravan magazine (PDF). The text below includes additional (minor) edits and photos.]
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ON A SEPTEMBER NIGHT IN 1907, an angry mob of about six hundred white people attacked and destroyed an Asian Indian settlement in Bellingham, in the north-western US state of Washington. Many of the traumatised residents fled to Canada. A San Francisco-based organisation called the Asiatic Exclusion League, dedicated to “the preservation of the Caucasian race upon American soil,” blamed the victims for the riot, adding that the “filthy and immodest habits” of Indians invited such attacks. Despite the small number of Indians in the United States—there were fewer than 4,000 at the time—the Asiatic Exclusion League had been warning of a “Hindu invasion” of the country’s west coast. Two months later, another angry white mob struck a settlement of Indian workers in Everett, Washington, forcibly driving them out of the town. In 1910, the US Immigration Commission on the Pacific Coast deemed Indians “the most undesirable of all Asiatics” and called for their exclusion. -
The Lives of Farm Animals
Peaceable Kingdom, an extraordinary, revelatory, and very moving American film about a few farmers and their farm animals is now online. I saw it when it first came out in 2012 and distributed DVDs to friends. I saw it again last week and I still can’t recommend it enough (the title isn’t my favorite though!). Also consider watching this 24-min talk by its director James LaVeck who offers a wonderful reflection on Harriet Beecher Stowe and how her “famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired the making of this documentary film” (78 min).
“A story of transformation and healing, this award-winning documentary explores a crisis of conscience experienced by several farmers questioning their inherited way of life. Growing more and more connected to individual animals under their care, they struggle to do what is right, despite overwhelming social and economic pressure to follow tradition. The film also explores the dramatic animal rescue work of a newly-trained humane police officer whose desire to help animals in need puts her in conflict with unjust laws she is expected to enforce. With heartfelt interviews and rare footage demonstrating the emotional lives and family bonds of farm animals, this groundbreaking documentary challenges stereotypes about life on the farm, offering a new vision for how we might relate to our fellow animals.”
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There But For Fortune, Go You Or I
Dr. Mohan Rao, Professor, School of Social Sciences, JNU, takes on The Lottery of Birth for The Book Review. I’m drawing attention to this because it’s the first media review of TLOB. It is unfortunately behind a paywall but here is a PDF of the printed version. Excerpts below.
To understand what is structural violence and what causes it, is this remarkable book of essays … Namit Arora is an unlikely writer of a book such as this, and thus is all the more convincing … written with honesty, intelligence, sensitivity and with ease. Arora has read all the relevant literature in history, anthropology and political theory and writes for the general reader. What is significant above all, is his respect for data, skillfully analysed…How did caste originate in India? How did colonial anthropology and laws shape it, and indeed cast it in stone? Do the Vedic scriptures both create and nurture the system, despite its immorality? Yes, indeed, finds Arora, adding to the voices of those labelled anti-national today. But how reassuring it is to find an anti-national emerging not from JNU, but from the hallowed nationalist portals of IIT! … When voices are being silenced, when debate is being stifled, we need more argumentative Indians than we have. Namit Arora’s brilliant book has contributed to this, and we must thank him for that.
Genetics and the Aryan Migration Debate
“The thorniest, most fought-over question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India sometime around 2,000 BC – 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.” (—Tony Joseph in The Hindu; more here.)Even before these genetic studies of recent years, it has long been clear which way the scholarly evidence has overwhelmingly leaned, though the evidence had gaps that the “out-of-India” folks exploited to advance their rival theory. These new findings from genetics, if correct, imply that Vedic Sanskrit, the Holy Vedas and various cultural practices of these migrants (especially the varna system) are not Subcontinental in origin (at least their precursors are not). They came via migration, as did Islam, the Qur’an, and the Persian language. In other words, the religious beliefs of all contemporary Indians—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others—have descended from what migrants brought in (and subsequent accretions, fusions, innovations, conversions, appropriations); nor is India the mother of all Indo-European languages.
This ain’t going to make the “out-of-India” theorists too happy. They’re largely a brigade of proud Hindu “scholars” obsessed with the idea that there was no Aryan migration into South Asia, allowing them to claim South Asia as the indigenous homeland / birthplace of Hinduism’s earliest scriptures and their language (Sanskrit, but also its earliest ancestor, proto-Indo European)—and so also of Hinduism (of Brahminism, more accurately, but that’s a separate discussion), which evolved out of them. They also claimed that the language of the Indus Valley Civilization was a proto-Sanskrit, though its “linguistic script” remains undeciphered (it’s not even clear that the inscriptions represent a linguistic script)! Trolls have plastered such claims on countless Internet forums, but they’ve been mostly led by nationalistic windbaggery (aka Hindutva), wishful thinking, and gaps in rival theories—not on solid evidence from linguistics, philology, archaeology or anything else.
The Plastic-Filled Gau Mata
I discovered this excellent 2012 documentary on “the religious hypocrisy of the cult of the holy cow” in India. It shows that cows are not only much abused and neglected but people’s pious sentimentality and unholy ignorance have also blinded them to a major public health risk — one that lurks in the milk we now get in India. For those inclined to see things in karmic terms, this is surely the cow’s revenge on us!
The film considers the impact of our massive “dependence on plastic bags, which we use and discard carelessly every day, often to dispose our garbage and kitchen waste. Not only are these bags a huge environmental threat, they end-up in the stomachs of cows”. Left to roam “because they’re not milking at the time or because the dairy owner is unwilling to look after them, the cows have to fend for themselves and forage for food, which, like other scavengers, they find in community garbage dumps. Owing to their complex digestive systems, these bags, which they consume whole for the food they contain, get trapped inside their stomachs forever and, eventually, lead to painful death.” A striking and heart-breaking part of the film is the surgical removal of 53 Kgs of hardened plastic (no kidding!) from a cow’s stomach.
Watch this film (34 mins) and read here and here about the toxins that seep into milk from the plastic trapped in the cows’ tummies.
The Paradox of the Belief in a Just World
(An excerpt in The Wire from the introductory essay of my new book: The Lottery of Birth)
In this extract from The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, Namit Arora parses through the fiction that he is the sole author of his success and the wilful blindness among Indians about their inherited privileges.
A leading ideological fiction of our age is that worldly success comes to those who deserve it. Per this fiction, the smarter, more talented and disciplined men and women, with some unfortunate exceptions, come out ahead of the rest and morally deserve their material rewards in life. The flip side of this belief is of course that, with some unfortunate exceptions, those who find themselves at the bottom also morally deserve their lot for being – the conclusion is inescapable – neither smart nor talented nor disciplined enough.
