Dregs of Yore

The veneer of civilization is thinner than we suppose. It takes little more than a pile of rotting waste to peel it away, and lately, the city of Gurugram where I live, has found this out the hard way. A city held up as a symbol of new India’s economic ascent is now realising no amount of glass, steel, or software can substitute for order, responsibility, and rule of law. Here, in open plots and roadsides, garbage now festers like an ulcer on the face of Indian modernity.  The reason, superficially, is administrative: a police crackdown on illegal Bangladeshi immigrants has frightened away the city’s sanitation workforce. According to some sources, more than half of the Municipal Corporation’s cleaning staff are Bengali-speaking Muslims, many of them undocumented illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and they have vanished overnight — some detained by the police for further interrogation, others in hiding, and the rest fleeing legal scrutiny. The result is telling. For it exposes a s...

“We don’t need no education…” There was a time when that line was uttered with the thrilling defiance of adolescent rebellion. It was vulgar, ungrammatical, and for precisely those reasons, electrifying to the young and mildly scandalous to their elders. To sing it was an act of rebellion, not against learning, but against the way it was imposed. Back then, the song was aimed squarely at the grey-suited disciplinarians, the rote-learned mantras of obedience, and the uniform rows of desks under fluorescent lights.  Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall was anti-institutional, anti-authoritarian, and anti-stagnation. Yes, it wanted to tear down the walls of the schoolhouse, but symbolically, it was already speaking of larger walls: between the self and its becoming, between spirit and system. The song, as it was heard then, was a hammer against the ossified, against the factory model of schooling that built citizens like assembly-line cars.  But what if that hammer has now turn...

Much of the West has a strange relationship with virtue. It dissects it, repackages it, mocks it, and finally, sells you a plastic replica as a revolution. Marriage? Too oppressive. Family? Too suffocating. Culture? Too regressive. Womanhood? Too inconvenient. It is almost as if the West cannot look at anything sacred without wanting to first desecrate it, rename it, then claim to have invented a better version. This bad habit, or this civilizational tic as I choose to call it, has not only eroded its own foundations but is increasingly being exported to cultures that should’ve known better. One must tread carefully here. There is a temptation, particularly among those disenchanted with modernity (a group to which I might be accused of belonging), to romanticize tradition, as if all that preceded our current malaise was inherently noble, coherent, or functional. This is no more accurate than its opposite. But if the past was no Eden, it is equally true that much of what we dismiss toda...

There is a notion that has gained traction in the minds of the moderns, particularly among those who have mistaken the proliferation of technology for the advancement of wisdom: namely, the belief that civilization itself—its knowledge, its order, its values—can be crowdsourced. Like so many utopian ideas that appeal to the intellectually restless and the morally confused, this one rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, history, and the conditions that make civilization possible. This belief, like many fashionable delusions, rests on the sentimental assumption that wisdom is as widely distributed as access to a smartphone. That if enough people “weigh in,” virtue and truth will rise naturally to the top, like cream in a glass of milk. The reality, of course, is that in the marketplace of public opinion, it is not the cream that floats upward but the scum—the glib, the resentful, the shallow, and the shrill. Of course, the myth is seductive. One can sit in a room lit...

It is with a heavy heart that I say that there is no greater enemy of literature than the modern university. This is not, as one might assume, because of some overt, jackbooted censorship of novels, poems, or plays. Young minds are not forbidden from reading great works of the past; they are merely discouraged, by sleight of ideology, from understanding them on their own terms. To read a novel today under the watchful eye of a literature professor is not to immerse oneself in the mystery of human behaviour or the moral ambiguities of life. It is to apply a set of interpretative bolt-cutters: postcolonial, postmodern, queer, eco-critical, neurocritical, Marxist-feminist-decolonial-psychoanalytic, to cite but a few of the unlovely children of this intellectual inbreeding. With these tools, the student is encouraged to “unlock” the text, though the unlocking usually involves dismembering it and discarding anything that resists ideological simplification. It is as if Hamlet had been reduce...