Leadership in 'Kaliyug'

'संघे शक्ति कलौ युगे'
I read the above quote in some context (I have forgotten the context now) when I was a child and had just begun to study Sanskrit as a part of my curriculum. I could never really grasp its meaning or significance beyond the rhetoric of 'strength lies in unity'.
But, this quote seems to assume rather new meanings in today's context. It seems to tell me that we no more need the much celebrated quality of leadership. Well, in order to delve further into the argument, it is imperative to define leadership. To be honest I have not bothered to find out the academic or dictionary definitions of the term. But is there an all-encompassing definition of leadership that exists? I doubt it. 


As a child, a leader for me was a person in power or trying to assume power. The one who gave speeches during elections and huge crowds gathered to hear him (it was usually 'him'). I myself sat as a seven year old with my grandfather in the front row of such crowds and listened to Laloo Prasad on the first day and Murli Manohar Joshi on the very next day. These people who appeared on televisions and newspapers were standing there in the local football ground in Gomoh. No wonder crowds gathered, just to watch them  raise their fists in the air and shout slogans (I obviously do not remember what those slogans were). In Laloo's case, however, it was the helicopter that pulled greater numbers.
After coming back from such election rallies my grandfather used to tell me stories about the leaders he saw in person when he was a child. He told me about a dark lady who was fluent in several languages and when she made speeches, the crowds fell silent. He also told me that those leaders were loved, so loved that the train compartment in which my grandfather was travelling fell silent when these words were announced on  radio - 'अभी-अभी किसी पागल ने बापू को गोली मार दी है'. My grandmother says she was cutting vegetables   in the aangan and her knife fell down when she heard the news. Nobody had food that day.


See, leadership was already a confusing concept. But, it got really muddled when I attended the leadership camp organised by Rotary club at the age of around fourteen, where I was told that anybody could be a leader. It could be a doctor who treated patients, a teacher who taught students, an engineer who built bridges...so on and so forth. I don't remember if they distinguished between non-leader doctors, teachers and engineers and the ones who were leaders. But, yes the whole aim of this exercise was to make us 'realize' that we all needed to seek leaders within us. As I grew up, I found countless such leadership development programmes, in colleges, at workplace. Leadership training is a profession for many. I wonder what teachers do nowadays in schools and colleges! There are books that talk about it, but strangely I have never seen the authors of these books anywhere else other than the books' cover pages. I wonder if Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Lenin wrote such books and offered a calculated recipe to become a leader.


The futility of this concept struck me when I started working with rural women who were organised into Self-Help-Groups by the NGOs. Yes, these women needed the NGOs to market their products, for they did not know the rules of the market (I doubt if the NGOs did). But, I could see the mute protest in their eyes and their demeanor when an 'outsider' told them to do the job  in a 'certain' way; the job they had been doing all their life. And moreover, these outsiders claimed the lion's share of the profits as well. I could also see them protest, in not so mute ways, when someone among them assumed leadership roles and tried to tilt the balance of power.


The point is whether it is business leadership or political leadership, a 'leader' makes sense when there are followers to follow him/her. With the growing cynicism towards leaders on one hand and every second person being moulded into a 'leader' on the other hand, I wonder if we need leadership at all. Don't we need collective efforts for an inclusive growth instead? And don't we simply need good intentions? A little love and a lot of selflessness. Well, the nuances of the latter call for yet another discussion altogether...

What is Craft to a Craftsman? Seeking answers from academia...

I am writing my Masters' dissertation on crafts. Notwithstanding the disillusionment with academic writing itself, I am encountering questions I would have otherwise posed quite easily and explored conveniently, thanks to my ever-judgemental self and a firm belief that I always innately knew the distinction between 'rights' and 'wrongs', howmuchsoever ambiguous they might seem on the surface. Sadly this is not what academia is about. So, in order to produce a piece of academic writing, I need to constantly remind myself that my understanding of 'rights' and 'wrongs' is perennially incomplete.
I understand that craft, as it was understood centuries ago, is not the same in the globalised, market driven world today. It is the different market actors that shape the dynamics of crafts today, actors who are powerful, to state it bluntly. It would be foolish to imagine crafts as a craftsman's eternal love, when the latter struggles on a daily basis to exist as a human.
No I do not harbour the illusion that the girl in Gottigere who dragged her polio-affected legs to the unit everyday and made 'Potli-buttons' to be stitched on Angarakha kurtas, had an undying love affair with her work. She earned Rs 1500 a month for her work and was constantly worried that if the unit closes down due to lack of sufficient orders, how will she pay her house rent share of Rs 800 and how will she buy her daily meal of 'anna-saaru'.
So did Coomaraswamy say in 1900s in his seminal works on Indian art and craft. He claimed that for the artisan in India, unlike his Western counterparts, art was not a means for individual expression. It was a legacy passed on from one generation to another, with very limited scope for individual creativity. And so does Soumhya Venkatesan's anthropological study of Pattamdai weavers in Tamil Nadu suggest. It asserts that artisans and craftsmen reproduce the more powerful outsiders' vision of aesthetics and creativity.
Nonetheless, if I was not writing an acdemic thesis, my intuition would tell me that no matter how diluted an individual's creativity gets in the wake of someone else's instructions, the very act of creating a work of art emanates a sense of fulfilment. My intuition would also tell me that the excitement that gleamed in the eyes of Madura, Lakshmi and many others when they created an embroidered motif out of some vague instructions, was not merely the satisfaction of a task well completed. Moreover, I would really want to believe that when the Pattamadai weaver in Soumhya's study writes a letter to the Chief minister of Tamil Nadu, seeking financial assistance for saving the 'dying craft', it is not just a means to encash the ongoing enthusiam about crafts.
But then is it not my own love for art and crafts that colours my perception of the artisan and her apparent love for the art? And is it not my romanticised view of the world around me that constantly seeks to overturn the balance of power in the favour of the underdog, in whatever small way possible.

I have been reading about capitalism and how capitalism constantly assimilates the contradictory voices in a particular context, in order to provide justifications for the insatiable capital accumulation and garner the required support (including the support of the dissenting voices). Now this assimilation or 'acculturation', as some call it, is so subtle and pervasive that after a point of time one cannot distinguish between what was purely motivated by capitalist intentions and what was against it.
I think it is a similar case with academia. While on one hand it thrives on reason and logic that is supposedly an antithesis of intuitive judgement, on the other hand it deploys intuition to arrive at amazing levels of ambiguity, by pitting one type of intuition against another. So, although I am not supposed to rely on intuitions to arrive at answers, academia invariably evokes them. And to add to the complexities, it evokes contradictory intuitions. Moreover, it blurs the line between pure logic and logic derived out of some or the other intuitive judgment. Or does such a line exist at all?

Spaces for Culture beyond Cultural Clichés

Culture is never static or monolithic. This is a disclaimer offered in any discussion around culture these days. But, I am amazed to see how  these discussions invariably end up portraying culture in  blatantly static and monolithic terms. Is it the fascination for the word 'culture' that invokes sentiments of presenting each and every narrative in a 'good and acceptable' light? And is it the contradiction between what appears and what does not conform to 'good and acceptable' leads us to pit one norm against the other in absolutist, essentialist terms?
The discussions around Chinua Achebe's masterpiece 'Things Fall Apart' offer a similar picture. While it was undoubtedly one of the first non-racialised accounts on Africa that brought forth an African  story in African voice, I believe we have moved on from that. I do not discount its contribution to our understanding of Africa, but we now need narratives that talk about 'finer' details.
'Things Fall Apart' subtly rebuked the White man's interpretation of the Dark continent. It told us that the tribes do not grunt and make noise in a language-less world, but possess a vast resource of language and literature preserved in folklores, proverbs, songs that are exchanged in day to day life. It told us that there existed a self-sufficient community with varied problems, consisting of real people with diverse personalities and was not just an untouched landscape waiting to be explored by the colonial settlers. It tells the story of how colonial domination came as a torrent of unstoppable force that swept everything away, the good and bad, leaving the vestiges of what was rich, prosperous and evolved through ages and centuries. We needed this narrative to be empathetic, we needed it to understand certain lives better, to appreciate some valuable stories that were seldom told earlier. However, it is not enough. While all the above is said and done. We now need to find out more stories to fill the gaps this one has created.
No matter how much we resist, but it offers a picture that men beating their wives and children to assert masculinity and power was inherently acceptable by the 'culture'. It makes us believe that religion and culture sanctioned killing twin babies and young boys for various reasons. And this makes us secretly hate the 'culture' itself. We then end up taking either of the following two stances. We either dissociate ourselves from 'them' and from a safe distance celebrate the richness of diversity and respect for 'difference'...Or we hypothesize that the dominant and the more righteous prevailed in the clash of cultures (Christianity could obtain a stronghold because it attacked the 'weaker' links of the previously existed norms, it appealed to the outcasts and the vulnerable ones). While it is difficult to completely refute or invalidate both the stances, the latter undeniably offer a singular interpretation of culture. They overlook the fact that the dominant version of culture might not be the entire truth, it might just be a reflection of existing power equations.
Were there no voices of dissent against what we might term inhuman today? It is inconcievable that the woman who turned to the Church to save her twin children was the first one to try to save her newborns. What happened to the dissenting voices before the Church came into picture? I need stories that talk about them to complete the picture....or perhaps create new gaps! If Chinua Achebe's narrative scoffs at colonial, racial, monolithic accounts of Africa, the alternative stories that talk about dissenting voices within the dominant culture will seal the fact that cultures evolved continuously and could not possibly be fit into a few narratives.