Wednesday, October 28, 2009

of fables by a sociologist





A first time experience of taking an AC bus from Jamshedpur to Ranchi brought more surprises : Samsung LCD TV showing Sunny Deol- Karishma Kapoor - Salman Khan - Tabu starer Jeet. The AC trip was partly spent sleeping in the comfort of the conditioner and the rest of the time was devoted to watching Jeet and having just read books on Ambient Media though I feel tempted to write about In-Bus entertainment, it is best saved for another entry. So, it was the journey from Ranchi to Jamshedpur with my friend who just passed out from IIM Ahemdabad in a ramshackle bus that felt more like a journey with lively conversations, the yet thought of pristine beauty of the land of forests (Jharkhand) enveloping our thoughts and the bus driver's occasional bravados with the steering wheel. Having more than two hundred common friends, the conversation often seemed like a report about the lives of our friends - small fact finding missions about their place of work, marital status etc. etc., a laugh about remembered idiosyncrasies , small surprises at changed attitudes, gentle judgements and twisted gossips.

And then some issues on which we have differed all these years. Chetan Bhagat - my friend who took to him since "Five Point Someone" and who believes I have not given Bhagat a fair chance blinded by elitism. I continue to find it difficult to get on with more than 15 pages of CB. Don't get me wrong, when Chetan Bhagat comes to public forums and says that the basic problem of our higher education system is not class 12 syllabi/board question papers but lack of good universities to catch up with the growing educated population, I love him. When Chetan Bhagat talks about the strategic pricing of his novels at Rs99 and making his ideas accessible to a wider Indian audience, I want to hug him. But when he says and then keeps maintaining that most so-called great English writers in India basically write to get a Booker prize or be read by international readers and not for Indian readers, I can't contain an annoyed chuckle.

The other contentious issue being the problem of Jharkhand, its continued underdevelopment despite having abundant mineral resources. My friend sticks to the dominant development paradigm as he keeps identifying the illiteracy of the tribals in Jharkhand as the main cause of their being fooled by activists, who he says, are ready to protest against any new industrial project in the state. What he is oblivious of and which i continue to emphasize, is his stubborn insistence to not see the tragedy of displacement such projects hold for the tribals. To continue to equate their "desire to live their lives in the intimacy of familiar soils, waters and trees" to "illiteracy" is an illiteracy of another kind.

We reached the Jamshedpur bus station and then took an auto-rickshaw to the XLRI management institute. Found ourselves immersed, the next few days and nights, in parties, having inimitable chicken rolls @ Dadu's, looking at the never sleeping Tata factory resembling thousand fireflies from the terrace and walking the campus seeing students gazing over Powerpoint presentations waiting in line for Chai. After returning home, I chanced upon this article written by a professor both me and my friend studied under. The writer is a sociologist who has never stopped inventing fables for our times. I wish we lend an ear to the wisdom in tribal stories and consider our education as always incomplete without these stories.