'Karma is a Bitch': Is It?

Karma's Complex Dance: A Critical Examination of the Concept's Moral Implications

The phrase "Karma is a bitch" has become a ubiquitous expression in modern language, reflecting the notion that negative actions will inevitably result in negative consequences. The concept of karma originates from Hindu and Buddhist traditions and emphasizes the idea that one's actions will determine their future experiences. While the phrase might convey a sense of poetic justice, a comprehensive analysis reveals that the concept of karma is more nuanced and complex, encompassing both positive and negative dimensions. This essay aims to critically evaluate the moral implications of the concept of karma, drawing on a variety of examples from history, philosophy, and popular culture.

1. Ethical Justification and Cosmic Justice: Karma is often portrayed as a form of cosmic justice, where good deeds lead to positive outcomes and bad deeds to negative ones. While this interpretation might provide a sense of moral reassurance, it raises ethical questions. The inherent belief that every individual's circumstances are the direct result of their actions can lead to victim-blaming. For instance, attributing poverty or illness solely to past actions overlooks systemic factors and external influences that shape a person's life.

   Example: The caste system in India historically justified social hierarchies based on karma, leading to the oppression of lower castes and reinforcing inequality.

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3. Causality and Complexity: The linear relationship between actions and consequences, as depicted by the phrase, oversimplifies the intricate web of cause-and-effect relationships. Actions often have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences, involving multiple agents and factors. The concept of karma tends to ignore this complexity and overemphasizes individual agency.

   Example: The butterfly effect, a concept from chaos theory, illustrates how small actions can lead to significant and unforeseeable outcomes, challenging the deterministic view of karma.

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5. Moral Accountability and Personal Growth: The concept of karma raises the question of whether the fear of negative consequences or the promise of rewards is the primary motivation behind moral behavior. An approach that focuses solely on retribution overlooks the potential for personal growth, empathy, and genuine concern for others.

   Example: In Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," he emphasizes the importance of finding meaning and purpose in suffering, suggesting that growth can emerge from even the most challenging circumstances.

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7. Interpretations and Cultural Variation: Different cultures and philosophical schools interpret karma in diverse ways. Some traditions view karma as a way to break free from the cycle of suffering, while others emphasize fulfilling one's duty regardless of the outcomes. The phrase "Karma is a bitch" disregards this richness of interpretation.

   Example: Jainism emphasizes minimizing harm to all living beings, indicating that karma is not just about individual consequences but also collective well-being.

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9. Modern Relevance and Popular Culture: The phrase "Karma is a bitch" has found its place in modern vernacular, often used humorously or to express satisfaction at seeing someone receive their comeuppance. This highlights the enduring appeal of karma's basic principle: actions have consequences.

   Example: In the TV show "Breaking Bad," the character Walter White's morally reprehensible actions eventually catch up with him, illustrating a narrative application of the concept of karma.

In conclusion, the phrase "Karma is a bitch" encapsulates only a fraction of the complexity inherent in the concept of karma. While the idea of actions leading to consequences resonates with basic notions of justice, it oversimplifies the intricate dynamics of cause and effect, ethical accountability, and personal growth. The moral implications of karma are diverse, reflecting a rich cultural tapestry that extends beyond simple notions of reward and punishment. By critically examining the concept, we can gain a deeper understanding of its potential pitfalls and opportunities for cultivating a more compassionate and nuanced worldview.

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Rethinking "Karma is a Bitch": A Critical Analysis of Oversimplification and Negative Connotations

The phrase "Karma is a bitch" has gained popularity in contemporary discourse as a way to express satisfaction at the perceived downfall of individuals who have engaged in negative behavior. However, this phrase oversimplifies the complex concept of karma and promotes a skewed perspective on the principles of cause and effect, personal growth, and moral accountability. This essay aims to critically repudiate the phrase by examining its limitations and highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of karma, using examples from philosophy, psychology, and real-world scenarios.

1. Oversimplification of Cause and Effect: The phrase reduces the intricate web of cause-and-effect relationships to a simplistic equation of "bad action equals bad consequence." This disregards the intricate factors and contextual nuances that contribute to outcomes, making it an inadequate representation of reality.

   Example: In complex geopolitical conflicts, attributing the suffering of entire populations to their past actions ignores the historical, economic, and political complexities involved.

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3. Negative Connotations and Lack of Empathy: The phrase fosters a sense of satisfaction in witnessing the suffering of others, perpetuating a culture of negativity and judgment. This lack of empathy contradicts the essence of many ethical and spiritual traditions, which emphasize understanding and compassion.

   Example: Instead of rejoicing in another's misfortune, embracing the principle of forgiveness and offering support can lead to personal growth and positive social interactions.

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5. Discouraging Redemption and Growth: Branding individuals as victims of their own actions overlooks the potential for growth and change. The phrase implies that once someone engages in negative behavior, their fate is sealed, discouraging personal transformation and second chances.

   Example: The story of Nelson Mandela demonstrates the power of redemption and forgiveness. After serving 27 years in prison, he emerged as a symbol of reconciliation, transcending the cycle of vengeance.

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7. Cultural and Philosophical Diversity: The concept of karma varies across different cultural and philosophical contexts. Reducing it to a negative sentiment ignores the positive dimensions of karma, such as the idea of accumulating positive actions for a better future.

   Example: In Buddhism, karma is not about punishment but about creating positive intentions and actions to break free from the cycle of suffering.

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9. Promotion of Fatalism and Passivity: The phrase "Karma is a bitch" can inadvertently endorse a fatalistic attitude, implying that individuals have no control over their lives. This can discourage proactive efforts and a sense of responsibility for shaping one's destiny.

   Example: The growth mindset theory emphasizes the belief that effort and learning can lead to personal development, countering the notion of predestined outcomes.

The phrase "Karma is a bitch" encapsulates a simplified and often negative view of the complex concept of karma. Its connotations of satisfaction in others' suffering, lack of empathy, and discouragement of personal growth undermine the true potential of human agency and transformation. By examining the limitations of this phrase and considering the rich diversity of interpretations of karma, we can foster a more compassionate, empathetic, and holistic understanding of cause and effect in our lives. It is crucial to move beyond the allure of quick judgments and instead embrace the complexities that define human experiences.

The Moral Governance of Others

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

In September, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was admonished by the Guidance Patrol for ‘improperly’ wearing her hijab. She was then allegedly beaten to death. Her death triggered an unprecedented protest movement, in which women as well as men are attacking symbols of Iran’s theocracy like never before.

The protests have evolved into an open rebellion against Iran’s morality laws and against groups that the state has employed to implement these laws.

The Guidance Patrol is the successor of the Islamic Revolution Committees that were formed in 1979 to forcibly implement ‘Islamic morality’ in public spaces — especially when wearing the hijab was made compulsory in 1983. Over the years, there have been isolated protests against this law, but nothing like what Iran is witnessing today.

The protests are challenging the whole idea of ‘moral policing’ that began to be adopted by the state in many Muslim-majority countries from 1979 onwards. After Iran, moral policing units also emerged in Saudi Arabia and, from the 1990s, in Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and, in certain regions of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The state gives the units powers to check and correct ‘moral digressions’, such as ‘inappropriate’ dressing (especially by women), ‘unseemly’ interaction between men and women in public, or the exhibition of any other ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour. Moral policing outfits have often been accused of using violent methods, mostly against women.

However, as morality policing organisations are now being openly challenged in Iran, recently they were disbanded in Saudi Arabia by the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Their presence contradicts his reformist agenda. Also, the criticism against the tactics used by the police was intensifying. Morality policing units were also dismantled in Sudan in 2019, after the overthrow of the dictator Omar al-Bashir.

According to Amanda F. Detrick (University of Washington, 2017): “States with religious systems of government, employ morality police as a formal method of social control to expand and stabilise their rule. Morality police units enable the regime to project power into society and retain dominance by affirming religious legitimacy, suppressing dissent and enforcing socio-religious and political uniformity.”

Moral policing can also emerge as an informal method of social control. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the “governance of the self” can lead to the “governance of others.” In other words, sometimes, when an individual or a group embraces an idea of morality, they may end up enforcing this idea on others. If the enforcement finds traction among a large body of people in a society, the state is likely to adopt it as policy.

For example, even though most Muslim-majority countries do not have moral policing outfits formed by the state, ever since the 1980s, vigilante groups have been known to implement ‘morality’ by force. Such enforcements have often been turned into law by governments.

In Pakistan, for years, non-state groups campaigned to oust the Ahmadiyya from the fold of Islam. At first, the state treated the campaigns as subversive. But when the campaigns began to find greater traction among the polity, especially in the Punjab, the government declared the Ahmadiyya as a non-Muslim minority.

Informal methods of social control that emerge from below have been highly successful in Pakistan. From the late 1960s, there were campaigns against nightclubs, cinemas and the sale of alcoholic beverages by right-wing vigilante groups. They were suppressed by the government. But in the late 1970s, when a government was struggling to stall a political movement against it, it suddenly agreed to close down clubs and ban alcohol. But this was a futile attempt to regain social control.

Consequently, in 1980, there were plans by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship to form state-backed moral policing units. They were to enforce gender segregation in public spaces, ‘proper’ dressing habits (especially among women), compulsory prayers in the mosques, etc. Women’s organisations saw these as a way to strengthen a myopic patriarchal ethos. Their activism deterred the dictatorship from forming moral policing squads.

However, the frequency of vigilante groups enforcing (their ideas of) morality increased. For example, a group calling itself the ‘Allah Tigers’ started to raid hotels and even homes on every New Years Eve. Technically, their actions were unlawful, but the dictatorship tolerated them and saw them as the actions of ‘common people’ who were willingly implementing the state’s ‘Islamisation’ project.

There have also been non-state groups enforcing the hijab and discouraging the celebration of events such as Valentine’s Day. Although the government and the state have not appropriated these as policy, many educational institutions have.

But formal and informal methods of social control through moral policing are not only restricted to Muslim-majority countries. Ironically, outside the myths of ancient ‘pious’ states, one of the first formal examples in this respect appeared in 19th century England.

The regular police force in 19th century England was encouraged to ‘morally regulate’ the society. To 19th century British ‘gentry’, morality was deemed a necessary part of life, in order to hold and keep social stability. The police often took action (sometimes preemptive) against alleged prostitutes, drunkenness, betting and ‘habitual’ criminals.

Nevertheless, moral policing in most Muslim and, particularly in non-Muslim regions, has largely remained informal. But it has been rather successful in influencing state institutions. For example, years of anti-abortion activism in the US finally led to an abortion ban imposed by the US Supreme Court.

Also, in many countries, non-state moral policing of content on social media and the electronic media has pushed governments to pull down websites, films and TV shows. Interestingly, informal moral policing in a non-Muslim country has been most rampant in India. Vigilante groups often emerge to enforce ‘Hindu values’. These can include action against those celebrating Valentine’s Day, to lynching those who are accused of eating beef.

Moral policing is a serious issue. Morality has mostly to do with factors rooted in religion. There may be a consensus on the more general aspects of a faith, but there are always many interpretations of various topical aspects of it. One cannot impose morality based on a single interpretation.

Instead, states need to educate citizens to embrace pluralism and tolerance and exhibit behaviour that does not create social disruption and divisions. An individual’s choices that form their moral self-governance should be respected, as long as they are not raging to turn it into the governance of others.

Pervez Hoodbhoy on Science and Morality

 

Alice Roberts - Morals Without Religion: the Unholy Mrs Knight and the Hypocritical Humanist

Cricket - This business called Elite Honesty

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo

Here is some elite honesty, a very elite example of it. Australia 238 for 5 against Pakistan in Hobart, needing another 131 for the win. Justin Langer, on 76, edges behind to Moin Khan but is not given by the umpire Peter Parker. Doesn't walk. Fine. That's the difference between elite honesty and regular honesty, understanding that it's the umpire's job to make a batsman walk.

---Also read

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

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Langer's dad asks him about the edge. Nah, no edge, just a clicky bat handle. He tells his partner on the field and good mate Adam Gilchrist the same thing. Even his captain, elite honesty manifest as human, his mentor and idol, he tells him it was the clicky bat handle that dunnit.

These are elite mates and elite family, who deserve a bit of elite honesty and that's what Langer gives them. For the next decade and a half, this elite honesty is maintained. Then one day he downgrades it to mere honesty and reveals that he had smashed the hell out of the ball. He couldn't help it. He'd copped a bad one in the first innings. He was under the pump for his place. But while it lasted, the honesty was really elite.

If that was the only time you were elitely honest, then how elitely honest could you really be? Not very. So here's another quality bit of elite honesty. Notice how upright Langer is as he walks up to the stumps while fielding. The ball is dead and Hashan Tillakaratne in his crease. Langer deliberately tips a bail off the stumps and then watches his elite team-mates appeal for hit-wicket.

That we can identify this as elite honesty is only thanks to the ICC and their match referee Chris Broad. "Justin was disappointed that the charge was brought and explained his position in a very honest and succinct way," said Broad, following a hearing. You might call Broad's decision elite stupidity but I certainly won't. It's elite judgement.

Some say there is also elite honesty in how Langer ran Western Australia and Perth Scorchers, but I think the most elite example of elite honesty comes from Langer's idol, the true father of the modern Australian way. In a recent interview with Steve Waugh, our very own Melinda Farrell broached this idea of elite honesty (though we called it culture then). She asked Waugh about a couple of catches from his career that he dropped but claimed.

How do you look back at them now?

"Well, I don't really," Waugh responded, which is absolutely rule No. 1 in maintaining elite honesty. About the catch ("catch" used here in a way that also indicates drops) to dismiss Brian Lara, he continued: "It's just part of the game. I mean, at the time I still remember the catch. I still believe I caught it. It was inconclusive but in my mind it bounced off my wrist, but you know, that's all life. You don't want to look back at stuff. I try to look forward. You know, people have their own opinions on what happened there but I'm not going to change my opinion. My opinion was I caught it on the day."

You see why this is more elite? You understand? It's because from his response we end up learning something. We learn that catches are opinions, not facts. If your opinion is that the catch was good, then what business does the fact that it was a drop have anything to do with it? If you're asking yourself how you've managed life so far not abiding by these rules, console yourself that you're not alone. As the great man says, that's all life.

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Us mortals alas, we aspire to mere honesty. Non-elite stuff. Proletariat. So here, humbly and hopefully, is some of it. 

This business of elite honesty - and Langer's elite mateship and elite humility - this is all elite BS. So is the Players' Pact. And the "hard but fair" act. It's classic corporate-speak - high-sounding words put together to sound and look pretty but that end up meaning nothing.

We're not talking about airplane seats where even economy can now be premium. Honesty is honesty. You either are or you aren't. There is no elite level to which you and I are not welcome and only Australian cricketers are. The truth is, and if it is not, then it is a lie; no number of demagogue leaders, politicians or cricket captains are going to change this fact (not opinion). In today's world, more and more people might not be accepting the truth, but that says something about a changing people and society, not the truth.

All that these words do is maintain the pretence that Australian cricketers operate - or should operate - on a higher moral plane than non-Australian cricketers; that the Australian line is the line, never mind that nobody's ever been told where that line is. It is what has got them into this mess in the first place.

It is what the extreme punishments to Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were so much about. The rest of the cricket world was made to look like a collective of tree-hugging liberal halfwits for having - fairly maturely, actually - come to terms with what is an on-field code violation and not a sign of moral decay. Sides tampered with the ball, sometimes they got caught and were punished and yes, sometimes they got away with it. That's all life.

Cricket, though, reactionary and conservative cricket, fell for it, responding by increasing the seriousness and stigma of tampering as an offence. Instead of doubling down, cooling the atmosphere, and insisting that tampering wasn't an existential threat to the game, it went the other way, aspiring to this elite Australian way.

It was a depressing reminder of the way cricket is still unable to drag itself out of the streak of puritanism that has marked its operations for so long, where it believes it is not just a morally superior game but that it produces morally superior humans. That's the subtext of the Spirit of Cricket, which, lately Australia seem to have clung to tighter than others. But here's a truth bomb for all of us: cricket isn't morally superior to anything. If it ever was, maybe it was nearly two centuries ago. It's a great sport, no doubt, but that is all it is - a sport. If it expanded globally in reality, rather than just in an ICC mission paper, it may well loosen up and understand this.

What Langer's words and the set of associated ideas among which they float - about the exceptionalism of Australian cricketers - do is set Australia up, at some point down the line, for another fall and greater unpopularity. Look at the sniggering already - magnificently played, by the way, Graeme Smith. Imagine now the next time one of them stuffs up, delivers a nasty sledge, or bullies an umpire, or tampers, or surreptitiously tips over a bail, or claims a dropped catch, or doesn't walk when he's out.

Of course it'll happen. They may be Australian cricketers but - and here's the big reveal - they are also human. They are humans like the rest of the cricketers they play with and against, ones who also do all of these things occasionally, ones they used to always beat and now ones they don't beat so often. They are humans like the rest of us who watch them, envy them, criticise them and worship them; humans who are fallible; humans who are striving for some regular honesty, sometimes succeeding but other times failing.

To this eye, and perhaps many others, all Australian cricket should stand for is Australian cricket, because that has always been more than enough. The way their openers and one-downs come at you, the way they don't stop producing super-fast fast bowlers, the way their keepers yap and catch, the way their slips stand chewing gum like they're a street gang, the way they think leggies are the normal ones and offies the ones to be suspicious of, the way their grounds can feel simultaneously so big and so small, and the way no game is over for them until the very last of them has physically sat on the bus and left the stadium. It has never needed any buzzwords or catchphrases beyond that.

Adam Smith Revisited - The Moral Crisis of Capitalism

Shahid Mehmood in The Friday Times

When the economic recession of 2008 struck the world economy, not many would have guessed that this event would set off a wave of serious introspection about the nature and morality of present day capitalism. Many, including economists, thought that this is just a continuation of the traditional cycle that an economy goes through, whereby periods of growth are followed by recessions (which in general means lower GDP growth rates). It was expected that things would be back to normal within a few years.

But something different transpired this time around. Millions of people around the globe, especially in the leading centers of global capitalism like London and New York, spilled onto the streets and vented their anger against the present state of capitalism. This movement became the ‘Wall Street vs Main Street’ movement. Many years down the line, the world economy (mainly the industrialised world) is yet to regain its growth trajectory and the waves generated by the movement still reverberate. In effect, what we have is a crisis of the workings of capitalism. It would be interesting to delve into some details in order to understand how this state of affairs came to be?

This discussion takes us back to a Scottish professor of moral philosophy and his writings on market economy and capitalism. Adam Smith, who is now revered as the father of economics, wrote his magnum opus Wealth of Nations (WON) in 1776. Considered the bible of economics, one of the most outstanding insights of the book was that a person’s greed ends up benefitting the community as a whole. Two sentences (abbreviated) lay out this principle; Smith contends that: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest…” and “Every individual… neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it… he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention”.

Smith’s workings of an efficient capitalist system is tied to the workings of the ‘invisible hand’, the famous concept which explains how greed that ends up promoting the greater good. But the most noticeable aspect of this concept is that Smith first mentioned it in an equally remarkable (though less discussed) book of his called the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published before WON, it outlined the moral pre-requisites for an economy to function properly. Smith’s concept of the invisible hand, therefore, was closely tied to morality. It reads as follows: “[The rich] consume little more than the poor and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life …”

What Smith envisioned has, up till the end of 20th century, worked pretty well. What we saw in the industrialised nations was that capitalists and entrepreneurs, in pursuit of profit, implemented ventures and projects that ended up benefiting the society as a whole. Setting up a plant for production, for example, was purely done for personal gain. But the venture needed employees, and thus many aspiring job seekers found their sustenance due to the pursuit of greed by the industrialists/capitalists. Gradually, in the face of rising resistance in the form of Marx and others, the economies of nation states gradually transformed into welfare states, whose main beneficiaries were the larger, lower segments of the population and the middle classes. This setting worked remarkably well, and explains how it managed to weather stiff resistance over centuries, none bigger than Communism which met its demise in 1991 with the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

But the 21st century has seen the consensus starting to unravel, with the Wall Street vs Main Street only the first sign of widespread consternation. And the simple reason is that the workings of the invisible hand are now skewed starkly in favour of the one percent.

The signs of this dysfunction are all around, in numbers and other instances. All around the world, labour’s share of total national income is on a constant decline. The real income (income adjusted for the cost of living), except for top percentile of earners, has been falling gradually. Income inequality is at a historic high. Credit Suisse, which tracks global wealth, estimated that the richest one percent now own half of total global wealth (estimated at $280 trillion).

The 18th, 19th and 20th century witnessed entrepreneurship and capitalism in a manner that every new venture resulted in creation of newer job opportunities, generation of real wealth and comparatively proportionate distribution of wealth. In contrast, today’s wealth creation is largely centered upon financial engineering and application of technological developments. The former is merely a transfer of wealth from the lower percentiles (poor and middle classes) to the rich, and the latter is leading to lesser need for workers as artificial intelligence (AI) does the work without requiring any benefits (wages, health insurance, etc.) and thus saving the owners/entrepreneurs major costs of operating a venture. The global economic scene was once dominated by companies like GM that employed thousands of people. Now, it’s dominated by organisations like Google and Amazon whose quantum of wealth is much larger, yet they employ not even half of the labour employed by big players of yesteryears. Facebook, for example, has a market cap of $370 billion, yet employs no more than 14,000 people.

What factors drive this concentration of wealth? The main culprit, apart from others like government regulations, is technology, especially software and AI. Today’s technology has this extraordinary feature that only a small initial investment is needed to make the first software copy, but the millions following it can be replicated at zero cost. Thus, the owner can earn billions without the need to invest further. In technical lingo, there is zero marginal cost of replication, which makes all this different from yesteryears. These technologies do produce jobs, but these are ‘gigs’ rather than good, quality jobs with financial security. And they pay little, usually sustenance level wages except for technically exceptional people. This means that majority of workforce is already out of contention for good, high-paying jobs, thus contributing towards the labour’s falling share of national income.

The anger of Main Street is understandable. Today’s capitalism delivers wealth in the hands of a few. Those responsible for all those Ponzi schemes that destroyed the hard-earned savings of the working class have largely gone scot-free (too big to fail phenomena). And today’s global economic scene has a heavy imprint of rent-seekers, tax dodgers and financial wizards who do not contribute much to the well-being of the citizens or the real economy. This situation aptly describes the challenge faced by Capitalism. A system that has been exceptional in delivering prosperity and successfully warding off challenges over time now finds itself under severe scrutiny because its underlying mechanism of shared prosperity has, to a large extent, stopped working. Not surprisingly, as the dreams of shared prosperity recede, so does the moral ground for its continuation.

On Ben Stokes - Do sportsmen have a responsibility to the sport?

Suresh Menon in The Hindu



One of the more amusing sights in cricket recently has been that of England trying desperately to work out a formula to simultaneously discipline Ben Stokes and retain him for the Ashes series. To be fair, such contortion is not unique. India once toured the West Indies with Navjot Singh Sidhu just after the player had been involved in a road rage case that led to a death.

Both times, the argument was one we hear politicians make all the time: Let the law takes its course. It is an abdication of responsibility by cricket boards fully aware of the obligation to uphold the image of the sport.

Cricketers, especially those who are talented, and therefore have been indulged, tend to enjoy what George Orwell has called the “benefit of the clergy”. Their star value is often a buffer against the kind of response others might have received. Given that the team leaves for Australia at the end of this month, it is unlikely that Stokes will tour anyway, yet the ECB’s reaction has been strange.

Neither Stokes nor Alex Hales, his partner at the brawl in Bristol which saw Stokes deliver what the police call ABH (Actual Bodily Harm), was dropped immediately from the squad. This is a pointer to the way cricket boards think.

An enquiry by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) would not have taken more than a few hours. Given the cctv footage, the players’ own versions, and the testimony of the victims, it is unlikely that there could be any ambiguity about what happened. Yet the ECB has chosen to bring in its independent Cricket Discipline Commission only after the police have completed their inquiries.

Top sportsmen tend to be national heroes, unlike, say, top chartered accountants or geography teachers, and they have a responsibility to ensure they do not bring the sport into disrepute. It is a tough call, and not everybody agrees that your best all rounder should also be your most ideally-behaved human being. But that is the way it is. After all, sport is an artificial construct; rules around it might seem to be unrealistic too.

Stokes brought “the game into disrepute” — the reason Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff were banned in the past — and he should not be in the team. The ECB’s response cannot be anything other than a ban. Yet, it is pussy-footing around the problem in the hope that there is a miracle. Perhaps the victims will not press charges. Perhaps the police might decide that the cctv images are inconclusive.

Clearly player behaviour is not the issue here. There are two other considerations. One was articulated by former Aussie captain Ian Chappell: Without Stokes, England stood no chance in the Ashes. The other, of equal if not greater concern to the ECB, is the impact of Stokes’s absence on sponsorship and advertising. Already the brewers Greene King has said it is withdrawing an advertisement featuring England players.

Scratch the surface on most moral issues, and you will hit the financial reasons that underlie them.

Stokes, it has been calculated, could lose up to two million pounds in endorsements, for “bringing the product into disrepute”, as written into the contracts. It will be interesting to see how the IPL deals with this — Stokes is the highest-paid foreign player in the tournament.

And yet — here is another sporting irony — there is the question of aggression itself. Stokes (like Botham and Flintoff and a host of others) accomplishes what he does on the field partly because of his fierce competitive nature and raw aggression.

Just as some players are intensely selfish, their selfishness being a reason for their success and therefore their team’s success, some players bring to the table sheer aggression.

Mike Atherton has suggested that Stokes should learn from Ricky Ponting who was constantly getting into trouble in bars early in his career. Ponting learnt to channelise that aggression and finished his career as one of the Aussie greats. A more recent example is David Warner, who paid for punching Joe Root in a bar some years ago, but seems to have settled down as both batsman and person.

Stokes will be missed at the Ashes. He has reduced England’s chances, even if Moeen Ali for one thinks that might not be the case.

Still, Stokes is only 26 and has many years to go. It is not too late to work on diverting all that aggression creatively. Doubtless he has been told this every time he has got into trouble. He is a rare talent, yet it would be a travesty if it all ended with a rap on the knuckles. England must live — however temporarily —without him.

On Ramayana and Mahabharata - India’s epic dilemma

Peter Ronald deSouza in The Hindu



 Our stories are richest when they are read as ethical texts, not ideological guides


Some days ago, during a discussion on the many ways to interpret episodes in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the issue came up of whether these are ethical texts or merely ideological ones. Should one regard them as repositories of moral conundrums, on the human condition, that needed to be decoded and debated by every age for itself, or whether their messages, about the nature of the dharmic order to which all must conform, were clear and without ambiguity. What gave rise to this debate were two stories that were being discussed: the case of Eklavya who willingly offered his thumb to Drona on the Guru’s request, thereby assuring an anxious Arjun of his supremacy as an archer, and that of Ram beheading Shambuka for falling out of dharmic line. I wondered if one were a feminist, a Dalit scholar, a passionate nationalist of the current variety found among Ministers of State, or even a European Marxist, would one find morally grey areas in such episodes or would one see them as containing clear messages of how power and social relationships in a ‘just’ society should be ordered?

At this point let me step back a bit and carefully probe the distinction between an ethical and an ideological text. An ethical text is one which presents episodes as forks in the road where each path offered is attractive because it contains desirable goals. Choosing one path presents one with a quandary because the benefits offered by the other path would now have to be willingly foregone. Each path at the fork leads to the same destination. One only needs to decide what gains and losses one wished to forego.

For example, path A would offer to cut a journey short by four hours. But it would mean travelling on a bad road full of potholes and perhaps risking a bad back and a breakdown. Path B, in contrast, is longer and would get the traveller home past midnight. But it would be a smooth ride on a freshly metalled road that went through a forest. Travelling at night would risk a dacoit hold-up. An ethical text does not give a clear moral message. It compels one to weigh options before making a choice.

The ideological text, in contrast, is like a road within the National Highway system. Clearly numbered exits are given to one’s destination. You know where and when to leave the highway. Here there are no moral conundrums. There are just clear signposts prepared by a highways authority which tell you where to stop, at what speed to travel, which lane to follow, and where to exit. The highways authority offers a distinct route map for the whole society. It does so with the certainty of one who knows.

Civilisational abundance

So are the epics ethical texts or ideological ones? I believe they are the former. I believe each episode is a site for debate, an opportunity for each moral position in society to be heard and to solicit adherents. An Irawati Karve can see in Bhishma an egoistical, old man who, never having fought a war, still accepts the generalship of an army at a ripe age extending into the eighties, a measure of his narcissism. The Jain Ramayana has Laxman, instead of Ram, killing Ravan because that was the only way for them to reconcile the central Jain doctrine of Ahimsa and still valorise the Maryada Purusha. It is only an ethical text which allows for an A.K. Ramanujan’s 300 Ramayanas, suggesting that the story is alive in the country as people and places interpolate into the text their own aspirations and values. Individuals and social groups, of all ages, have drawn from the epics to fight their moral and political battles. This is what makes the epics so relevant to contemporary India. Today we need new interpretations to fight our political battles. The epics today need to be contemporanised.

An ethical text is the organic fertiliser of a society. Being fully open-ended, it delights, beckons, and recaptures the deracinated Indian from the lure of the ideological camp. While it generates passion, it also respects diversity of interpretation. It represents life but, in contrast to life’s chaos, also offers options. An ethical text is a living text. India is fortunate to be the land of several epics such as Silappatikaram in Tamil or Palnati Virula katha in Telugu and so on.

I am not saying something very new here but only presenting, in a binary way, the contrast between an ethical and an ideological text so that we can fight our current politics. Because the Indian tradition has always seen the epics as ethical texts, in contrast to the political trend today, we have great commentaries such as that of V.S. Sukthankar. The sophisticated elaboration by Mehendale on the rules of war and the consequences in terms of punishment of their violation, in his wonderfully slim book Reflections on the Mahabharata war, is another illustration of the Indian tradition of diverse interpretations. Critical commentaries, dissent, alternative readings are merely different forks in the road as we explore our national cultural heritage. Unfortunately today, with the rise of cultural vigilantes, these great epics are being converted into ideological texts. Because they receive tacit support from the powers that control the state, they attempt to push everyone onto the highway and away from the byways of Indian society.

It bears repeating here that the National Highway is good for the movement of goods and traffic, for practical and efficiency purposes, but not for cultural journeys for which it is the byways that matter. They nurture the richness of our cultural life. It is through the byways that we will discover the cultural ecosystems that local communities have created through complex negotiations with each other.

Isn’t this anti-national?

The smell of the mahua tree, for example, means a great deal in central India but has little significance in coastal India where the smell of fish is more exciting. Unless of course the rishi Parashar aroused by Satyavati replaced her fish smell of matsyagandha with the heavenly smell of yojanagandha, making coastal people like me to think this to be a parochial tale. Such playful stories can only be told when the epic is an ethical text. The cultural vigilantes have created a climate of anxiety which the people in control of the state have done little to diminish, for it pays them political dividends. Do they not realise that while they may gain the country, they will lose a civilisation? Do they not realise how anti-national this is?

Ram Janambhoomi - Wading forward into the past

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


THE chief justice of India, Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, says he would prefer that the Ayodhya dispute be settled outside the court, mutually, between the perpetually unyielding Hindu and Muslim petitioners. The apex court is currently studying the Allahabad High Court’s decision of 2010, which had insinuated that there was in fact a birthplace of Lord Ram as claimed by Hindu militants at the disputed site where the 16th-century Babri Masjid once stood. World-renowned historians and archaeologists have desisted from supporting such claims for want of basic evidence.

A progressive judge was earlier dealing with the dispute for years at the Allahabad High Court. He retired with his unalloyed belief that matters of faith were essentially non-justiciable in a secular court such as the one he presided over. A secular court must ideally protect everyone’s religious beliefs as well as the right to remain aloof from all of them. Religious courts would begin from the premise that they are carrying out God’s command, which has its own set of consequences as one can glean from the poison-spewing clerics having the run of Jinnah’s dream nation.

The Ayodhya dispute, therefore, given India’s secular constitution put together by 85 per cent Hindus in the constituent assembly, boils down to a temporal standoff — the rival claims on the land in question between those who say that the mosque was arbitrarily built on what they believe to be the birthplace of Ram and those that want the courts to prevent their forcible eviction from the land on which the mediaeval mosque stood until Dec 6, 1992.

Justice Khehar has offered to personally mediate the complex case if accepted by the parties. There could be no doubt that the judge has offered his help with good intentions. A range of thoughts cross the mind nevertheless about why the apex court would not prefer to explore a legal route and settle the case one way or another as India’s secular law mandates.

A rival fact begs discussion. It is not easy to enforce the law in India, with or without the state’s patronage of rogue parties. Remember that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was carried out as a brazen snub to the Supreme Court’s authority. Its standing orders forbade any changing of the status of the disputed monument in Ayodhya. The world knows who all were complicit in disobeying the binding orders, and who led the mobs to wilfully undermine the highest and most revered institution of the Indian state. Among the leading campaigners for the temple movement was Prime Minister Modi. Would his government now allow his mentor L.K. Advani, named in the case, to be tried or punished?

Justice Khehar has described the dispute as a sensitive issue. What happens when he retires though, as early as August this year? Will there be a mechanism backed by the apex court and the government for him to continue as a mediator whose imprimatur is honoured by all when he finds a solution? And what will we do if the solution, in which he suggests a little bit of give and take, widens into a full-blown assault on law and justice as it did in 1992?

We have after all chosen to accept the route, willy-nilly, of vigilante squads and Hindutva zealots swarming through Nehru’s India. They are not dissimilar to the bigots that Pakistan and Bangladesh are struggling to tame after unwittingly releasing them from the bottle, beginning with the reign of the two Zias. What is happening in India is a third or fourth carbon copy of what we have seen elsewhere. Uttar Pradesh, for example, is a smudged copy of the moral policing in Iran. They too enforce dress codes there and are particularly severe on young men and women whose hands even brush each other in public squares. If the so-called anti-Romeo squads of UP (Shakespeare would be turning in his grave) are bodily lifted from the streets of Islamic Iran, the threat by another BJP chief minister to hang (without recourse to law, naturally) people who kill cows, brings to mind the ‘laughing assassin’ of the early days of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khalkhali would roam the streets with a crane from which he hanged countless innocent men and women without ever losing the smile on his bearded face. There is a somewhat similar atmosphere in India in which Justice Khehar has offered to stick out his neck on behalf of reason.

A less discussed highlight of the mandir-masjid controversy is that it has created a dialogue (or a standoff) between overtly religious parties, both garnering their constituencies with right-wing agendas that leave out India’s open-minded middle ground to worry for the future helplessly. Muslims claim to seek justice, their demand framed in a legal petition. The Hindutva case is framed in religion, which Hindus insist on passing as historical fact.

In these days of right-wing ferment, be it Muslim, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Christian ferment, any demand for justice does seem laughably anachronistic. The Palestinians have a just cause, as do the Kashmiris, the Latinos, the blacks, the tribespeople of Chhattisgarh, or the liberal students of Indian universities, for example, at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. They have all been wronged and the world has put them together in a slot labeled ‘terrorists’. What they face is death, or eviction or slander.

If Justice Khehar can buck the trend, and prevent Ayodhya from mutating into Mathura and Kashi and a larger national inferno, India’s Muslims, but above all the overwhelming majority of secular Hindus, should give him a chance. The future cannot be worse than it looks.