The biggest reality show on earth

Spirituality


The biggest reality show on earth


The biggest reality show on earth is a miraculous faith-myth-legend curry. It is also a moveable feast and India, China, Greece and Rome – ancient cultures all, don’t hesitate to mix it up. Fertile as God intended, they gave birth to every religious tradition (bar animism and other dawn of civilisation practices), that has come down the pike, but only some of their progeny have escaped the clutches of dogma. For the escapees, freedom is heady and interesting. In their garden, modelled on paradise, legend illuminates myth, faith animates reality and everything in the churn is geared towards the pursuit of happiness. These are believers of myth, a word spawned in ancient Athens as Mythos, the original image-maker.

These free children have spread out across the world now and their numbers seem to be growing. The neatest, defined by the greatest use of abstraction, right from concept to calligraphic character, is certainly Chinese. In the middle-kingdom it all began, not with Gods and Goddesses, but with the Tao or the “unexplainable eternal rule of return to origins.” Curiously, it is this same inscrutable Tao that bestowed some lasting and useful gifts upon the world. It is Tao that taught us life skills – how to free up stagnating Ch’i and boost relations between our Yin and Yang. It is Tao that gave us Feng-shui and the pattern of the yarrow stalks we call the I Ching. The ringing idolatry of statues and dragons, tortoises, frogs, colours and coins- they all came later. These things came, gradually, as fact mated with legend, and abstraction was forced to explain itself to ordinary people. Wonderful Gods and munificent Goddesses arrived, migrating from the unshackled provinces of Tibet, Mongolia, and from India, with a message from the Buddha.

In ancient Greece and Rome or India, no one thought it unusual that immortal gods and demons should mingle with fragile mankind, granting boons and graces as they went. No one was surprised when full-body versions of planets, shadow-planets and 27 stars in the sky intrigued and lusted, fought and favoured, incorporating nature and the elements in their schemes as well! Things have changed in Greece and Rome, pressured perhaps by the Age of Reason, but in India, and, under the eiderdown, in communist China, billions of people clearly like living cheek by jowl with legend and ancestor.

Is this then the triumph of open, non-prescriptive and assimilative religion over dogma and tradition? You can, after all, be any kind of Hindu or Taoist to suit your individual taste. You can pick what you want to eat from a most lavish and varied buffet. There are no core articles of faith. There is no concept of heresy. There is, instead, a great coral reef of a religion, constantly adapting and modifying and renewing itself in the birthing waters of time. Versions and variants, inflexions and overtones afford a very strong sense of ownership and grasp for all. By way of contrast, dogma and orthodoxy seem to devour their own, maddening adherents with fanaticism or turning them off altogether.

Ordinary people have great imagination. They don’t flinch when confronted with gods that transform themselves from ideas to human-style corporeal beings. They exhibit no scepticism when these self-same gods change into animals, plants or the elements. They love them all the more for exhibiting human frailty because it swells their own hearts with hope. Metamorphosis is the ideal cousin to reincarnation after all. And twinned to the idea of happiness and suffering is the trick coin of life and death itself. Ordinary people know all this instinctively and reply with the greatest gathering of people on earth, an astounding 70 million! This multitude attended the last Maha Kumbh Mela (Grand Pitcher Festival), in India, over 44 days,(9 January-February 21, 2001). The first such festival took place, I have learned, as recently as 3,464 B.C….

Everyone there, on the banks of the Ganga at Allahabad, believer and atheist alike, had come to experience, first hand, the power of myth and the legend. The Dalai Lama came, as did Moslems and Christians and Hollywood stars. The millions bathed in the river, at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the invisible Saraswati. They meditated on the battle between the gods and demons for the pitcher (Kumbh) containing the elixir of eternal life. They seemed glad for the slight spillage from the tussle, the grant of a little nectar for the benefit of deserving mortals. Seventy million chosen ones. Quite a satellite picture moment.

(775 words)

Title: The biggest reality show on earth
By: Ghatotkach
Wednesday, August 17, 2005

A post-colonial neo-sneer

Essay- satire


A post-colonial neo-sneer


Mick Jagger, just launched on his multi-city US tour along with the Stones, has been back-pedalling furiously. The source of his discomfiture is a media attention grabbing song in their new album A Bigger Bang allegedly calling president George Bush and vice president Dick Cheney neo-cons. Neo-cons, for the uninitiated, are 2005 versions of the old-style imperialist. Rock, for the longest running No. 1 rock n roll band of all time, has grown wings of political neo-comment. In the past, you didn’t find oil-field contractors such as Halliburton featured in the lyrics unless they were by rock prophets like Mr. Zimmerman.

Columnists, always a precious breed, also wear badges these days. They hunt in packs of forism and againstism with conscious refusal to present both sides of an argument. So when I went to see Mangal Pandey soon after it came out, and liked it, I didn’t quite know whether I needed my head examined for saying so. I felt that perhaps I lacked taste and good sense, both, because all the comment in the first flush (good word that-flush), said that it was a crappy movie. But, this, as it turned out, was the charge of the against brigade, who happened to have got off to an earlier start than the other side. It makes you wonder when they wrote their pieces, but, in any case, the againsters are adept at using variable yardsticks or different bits in their Swiss knives depending on what it is they wish to cut down to size. If they want to carry axes they invariably reserve the right to grind them wherever they feel like it. They have an audacity about them, like supari killers, and there is a sense of inevitability. It is rumoured that once a supari killer has been contracted, the intended target is already a dead-man-walking.

Happily for me, just a mere day or two later, before my depression with my lack of discernible judgement had time to settle in, comes the forka brigade. This lot agrees with me and says it was a good film and gives a fulsome number of positive reasons for saying so. The film producer and the script-writer also weigh in. They let fly with a good number of volleys of their own, all implying acute stupidity as the given life condition of their critics and then point out, in self-defense, that the film had done well in its first week and was making money by virtue of ordinary film-goers going in to see it. Just so you don’t think they are just full of lies and bluster, the affected parties also release figures and facts to bolster this claim.

The net effect on me, happy as I am for all connected with Pandey, is one of relief. It is nice to know my taste in things is shared by others. It is good to know I don’t suffer from alienation and a sense of unreality for not agreeing with precious arguments and therefore do not need a mental overhaul after all.

It also gets me thinking about the tyranny of the opinion formation process and how it tries so hard to affect outcomes with means fair and foul. Then I think, with further relief, how nice it is that we have Amartya Sen, an Indian Nobel laureate, no less, who has put his seal of approval on the Indian love of diversity and argument. I don’t know about national symbol Pandey but I’m sure it would have brought a tear to Emperor Akbar’s eye.


(610 words)

Title: A post colonial neo sneer
By Ghatotkach
Friday, 26 August 2005

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.

The Cold Sober War On Objectivity (TCSWOO): The State Of Gonzo 2005

Essay- trends


The Cold Sober War On Objectivity (TCSWOO): The State Of Gonzo 2005

“Me and Mike, ve vork in mine, /Holy shit, ve have good time. /Vunce a veek ve get our pay, /Holy shit, no vork next day.”

From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, (1969)

"Burn 'em, tear 'em, nip 'em with hot pincers, drown 'em, hang 'em, spit 'em at the bunghole, pelt 'em, paut 'em, bruise 'em, beat 'em, cripple 'em, dismember 'em, cut 'em, gut 'em, bowel 'em, paunch 'em, thrash 'em, slash 'em, gash 'em, chop 'em, slice 'em, slit 'em, carve 'em, saw 'em, bethwack 'em, pare 'em, hack 'em, hew 'em, mince 'em, flay 'em, boil 'em, broil 'em, roast 'em, toast 'em, bake 'em, fry 'em, crucify 'em, crush 'em, squeeze 'em, grind 'em, batter 'em, burst 'em, quarter 'em, unlimb 'em, behump 'em, bethump 'em, belam 'em, belabour 'em, pepper 'em, spitchcock 'em, and carbonade 'em on gridirons, these wicked heretics! decretalifuges, decretalicides, worse than homicides, worse than patricides, decretalictones of the devil of hell."

From Le Quart Livre by Rabelais. (1552)

“ Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.”

Hunter Stockton Thompson

“Anyone who has studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any of the other wacko-and-wog disciplines knows the three great rules of the social sciences: Folks do lots of things. We don’t know why. Test on Friday.”

Patrick Jake O’Rourke

This essay is about the great penis enhancer/boob-job of reportage. But, in 2005, perspective gained, Gonzo isn’t just hilarious distortion, fun as it is. The most quoted living gonzo practitioner P.J. O’Rourke, (born Nov.14th, 1947), said: “Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I’m worried about the difference between wrong and fun.” But 21st century gonzo is not satisfied by that stylish if psychotic fear and loathing induced by an Iraq style Humveeload or a Vietvet-copterful of mind alteration. We now know subjective for what it is. It is a cold sober human desire to tear sterile objectivity to shreds and do worse to the naked truth. And we also know that Gonzoism applies as much to politics, love, history and mystery as it does to music and the military.

But before we all go down to the steam baths for a serious and sensuous wallow let’s first dispense with the niceties: the term Gonzo comes from the Italian word for absurdities - gonzagas. In reporting terms it’s putting subjective, objective, fact, fiction and political POV in the blender and giving it a good couple of minutes.

Gonzo let’s you get away with a lot. It’s used in lowbrow Commedia dell’Arte, its origins lost in the mists of time, and modern-day revivals have bald-faced Mussolini in his mightiness letting masked puppets take the piss outofhim! In Germany, the anti-authoritarian Norwegian playwright Ibsen’s plays were used to mock the Nazis with them sitting right there. In America, Tennessee Williams-tortured, alcoholic, homosexual, Pulitzer Prize winner, used gonzo to mock yards of things - marriage, success, truth, happiness, insanity, mostly insanity - and that was fine too! Maybe intellectuals and small audiences are just too far-gone to make waves anyhow. But, now that we’re in the day-and-night Information Age, whoever calls the masses dumb is just a loser aka a lost intellectual.

Gonzo in films - there are plenty of examples but here’s one- remember when Italian actor Roberto Benigni acted-in, directed & produced the 1998 released film Life is Beautiful? Hollywood gave it a standing ovation and 3 Oscars including best actor. Beautiful was pie-in-face, banana-peel slapstick with Benigni’s real-life wife playing female lead. But 50 minutes into the fun and games, it turns into sublime father-protects-son from those unfunny chaps in jackboots drama. This is typical of gonzo- playing the fool to make a deep point, preferably with a political angle.

In Mark Twain’s time, when there was nothing to watch except the Mississippi over the rim of a Mint Julep, gonzo had to be quotable and the guy has left us oodles to choose from. Mark Twain is always affable, a sort of Gonzo Lite: “I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices,” he said. Before him, there was 16th century monk Rabelais, pursued all his life for alleged heresy, who advocates, for instance, using a live goose as a very satisfying arse-wipe (in his comic novel Gargantua -1534). The funny part was that Rabelais saw himself as a reformer.

The moral centre is often hard to find in gonzo but most of its practitioners couldn’t care less. Oscar Wilde, another clubber, said: “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” The Gonzo Club recognises Bob Dylan who has just topped a poll conducted by Uncut Magazine to find the 100 songs, movies, TV shows and books that “changed the world” in the opinion of musicians, actors and industry experts. He did it with his anthem “Like a Rolling Stone”. Then there’s the aforementioned O’Rourke. Other notables include Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson. Hunter screwed it up at the end, but that may just be a writer thing, by putting a bullet through his head this February past.

The work itself is always evocative, fuelled by conviction. Vonnegut says: “Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.” Gonzo almost always is, like a whore with a heart of gold, based on truth. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s most famous book, has elements of time-travel, science fiction and the ever present funnies but it’s really about a POW situation, based on when he was in Dresden during its WWII bombing and watched the barbecuing of an estimated 300,000 people.

What gonzo is, if you want to see it clearly, is a dancing clown Cri de Coeur but it needs to be done right. Lost causes work; bad judgment doesn’t. And sometimes Gonzo’s biggest stars lose the plot. Thompson (God rest his soul), kept up his tirade against Bush, right through his first term, likening him to Hitler, while backing Kerry in 2004. But of course, he got smacked right in the gob when the results broke out. John Kerry didn’t win. Even his supporters said they didn’t understand what he was saying. Similarly, Michael Moore, the shambling fellow with the Fahrenheit 9/11 film, the stubble, the cap and the Oscar also fails the gonzo-winner test despite his factoid driven, one-sided provocation.

Nobody has problems figuring out Dubya, (so they think). A majority of Americans do not hold his Bush dynasty privileges or his Yale-bred Bushisms against him. That’s because he’s got the true gonzo going for him and not Hunter as it turns out. Dubya knows it’s a War on Terror (WOT), and not some watered down Harvard euphemism full of boltholes. He knows, because the last one he thought up - Weapons of Mass Destruction (WOMD), was pure theatre! So good it was that nobody even thought of trusting but verifying and if anyone looked doubtful, one or two of the UN inspectors did, why, they simply didn’t get their contracts renewed.

(1,203 words)

Title: The Cold Sober War On Objectivity (TCSWOO): The State of Gonzo 2005
By Ghatotkach
Wednesday, 10th August, 2005


This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.