Words From Vaish

I’ve recently read “The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” by Stephen Pinker. The author’s contention is that a plethora of civilizing influences such as the rule of law replacing vendetta, humanistic education and the complex socio-political inter-relationships caused by commerce have caused a general decline in violence worldwide. Your chances of getting murdered were much more in 1700 than today. While this may be hard to believe, given the accounts of sexual assault and homicide that greet us in the daily newspapers every morning, I think that Pinker might be on to something.  To be fair, the author makes explicit that social violence has declined, but not uniformly worldwide, and is still far from completely extinct. The level of decline also depends on how evolved a society is and how far removed from tribalism it is. Pinker also makes the point that if the conditions that caused this decline are reversed, violence could well enjoy a late resurgence

The policeman at the checkpoint picked his nose with his left hand, scratched himself and spat wetly onto the road. His right hand held a Thums Up bottle and a lighted bidi between gnarled and calloused fingers. A bamboo lathi dangled from his right wrist by its leather loop. His jaws worked rhythmically around a quid of paan. A young constable regarded this revolting sight with nervous affection. His grizzled superior looked exactly like a hard-working Havildar should look. So many social engagements, so little time. The Havildar mournfully contemplated the colossal cabriole curve of his enormous pot belly. The starched khaki of his uniform blouse was strained to bursting point by his protruding paunch and softened in placed by dark patches of perspiration. He philosophically took a swig of his cola and a puff of his bidi. Gather ye roses while ye may. A policeman’s lot is a hard one; what with sundry speeding motorists, eve-teasers, auto-lifters, terrorists – and not to

“None of the other regulars have turned up for the bus today. So there’s just you and me here in the rain. Well, not quite. There’s still quite a few vehicles on the roads and the odd cyclist wrapped up in polythene. Wonder why all drivers in the rain wear the same expression? More grimly intent on getting who knows where? It’s something I’ve seen since when I was a child living next door to the waterworks. That was a long time ago, but it still feels like yesterday. Even then, the waterworks had seen better days. There was a tangle of rusting machinery there, moldering and overgrown with weeds, around a well that had run dry long ago. We were forbidden to play there, of course. The body of somebody’s kid was found there and the place was supposed to be haunted. Certainly, everyone avoided it; even the municipality that was supposed to be responsible for it. I was a sickly child as endless bouts of chicken pox, measles and mumps kept me mostly bedridden. My bedroom wi

Why is it that so much of widely prevalent pop culture has such lowly, nay, disreputable, origins? This phenomenon spans everything from fast food (pizza was originally a creative way of using leftovers in working-class bakeries near the docklands of Naples, Italy) to music (expletive-laden rap lyrics started out as street poetry from poor black ghettoes in America’s decaying inner cities). Other examples abound. Take fashion, for example. T-shirts were originally crude working shirts for sailors laboring in the sultry tropics, fashioned from the cotton lining of chests used to store tea. Jeans began as miners’ working trousers, hacked out of sailcloth… Music and the performing arts provide even more examples. The Blues, that plaintive musical expression of poor black slaves and sharecroppers of the American Deep South is the foundation of much of today’s Rhythm& Blues, Jazz, Pop and Rock music. Then there’s the Tango, an energetic expression of sexuality, ow

ROMANCE GONE WRONG Romance in real life rarely seems to play out the way it does in Hindi movies or Mills & Boon paperbacks. At least, that’s been my admittedly limited experience of it. I witnessed a fair amount of awkward courtships in college, with boys trying out moves – and lines – they’d learned from movies and TV shows. These attempts never seemed to work very well and were invariably met with ego-puncturing derision. When a businessman’s two college-going sons unexpectedly eloped with the two daughters of a widowed mother, it came as a complete surprise, especially as none of the protagonists in this little drama appeared to be especially attractive or glamorous. A colleague of those days ran off with his landlord’s daughter and despite some initial friction between both sets of parents, an amicable reconciliation eventually took place, sans much of the melodramatic histrionics that would attend such an event in a Bollywood tear-jerker. Honestly, I would ha