Zeitgeist

ZEITGEIST

There are times when after a night’s sleep, you wake up with an alert, fertile almost febrile mind with a lot of interesting thoughts, ideas and quotable quotes swirling around. Beautifully formed sentences on the previous day’s “breaking news”, or snippets gleaned from the numerous newspapers read, or some pseudo philosophical/spiritual thoughts flow effortlessly like rhythmic patterns from the magical fingers of Ustad Zakir Hussain. You wonder at your own felicity and brilliance. You feel you should get up and record these gems for the benefit of mankind (?) or at least for posterity. Alas! By the time you awaken fully, you are already late for the morning walk and your mind is already forming your responses in the first video conference of the day. The literary masterpiece simply evaporates and disappears from your subconscious slowly like dewdrops from the grass blades on sunrise. 

While sitting down to write a blog of indeterminate length on any subject starting with the letter Z, originality is the first muse that deserts you, followed closely by felicity, grammar and eloquence not necessarily in that order. You finally dust up the dictionary and start reading all the words starting with z.  

This is how I stumbled across zeitgeist which I had happened to look up recently. I have been wondering lately what the presiding spirit of the present era is. Is it greed? Is it money? Is it hedonism? Is it materialism? Or what?  It is difficult to pin down. May be I should approach the question in a different way. By using the ancient Vedic philosophy of “Neti Neti”, by eliminating what it is not. 

            It is not upliftment of the downtrodden. People seldom stop to look down, not even to see what they are trampling on. They are always in a tearing hurry to get by the shortest route to the next destination, next project, next assignment, next promotion, next boy/girl friend, next divorce, next tummy tuck, next rave party, next visit to the shrink and so on. No time to think of our social responsibility. 

            It is not love for one’s country, patriotism, jingoism or whatever, unless it comes to indo-pak encounters of the cricket kind.  Otherwise, it is I, me, myself; then my family, my extended family; my sub-caste, my caste, my religion and then again I, me and myself and so on.

            It is not pursuit of knowledge. We cram from text books and forget all of it after puking it on the exam papers. We bluff our way through interviews; depend on our juniors to do ‘research’ for us, prepare talking points for us and write our reports, presentations even our self appraisals. I have seen some people sleepwalking through a banking job, right up to retirement without gathering as much as iota of experience/expertise. Jargon and subterfuge can help you get out of the tightest corner. “Let me run it past/bounce it off my team/boss”, “let me sleep over it”, “this needs to be looked into in greater detail”, “have you benchmarked your data with the best in class”’ I could go on and on.  You get the drift. The cruellest of them all is “does it conform to CVC guidelines”. You can kill any project with this one.

            It is not, definitely not honesty, integrity, honour or any of such old fashioned virtues.  We bribe/give donations to the schools to admit our kids who cheat, with no little help from their teachers, in board exams so that the child/his parents/the school can boast of a good result. Same process is repeated in college/B school till the child is, with some help from the well connected grand uncle, ensconced into a regular job. On the first day at the job, esp a govt job, the poor boy/girl is taught the various original ways of using everyday things like a diary (to be left at the far corner of the table in which the visitor can slip in some “chaipani”), the table (more under than above) and the desk drawers (has anybody seen the desk drawers of RTO officers in the evening?).

I could go on and on but my daughter wud impatiently say “ooookaaaay dad. Don’t exaggerate. And what did your generation do? What was their zeitgeist?”

I started reminiscing about the spirit of our growing years in the 70s and the 80s. Those were the days of mediocrity and deprivation. We did not even have technicolour dreams. Every middle class boy aspired to become a doctor or an engineer and land a decent govt/semi govt job. (Girls wanted to study arts/home science and land a doctor/engineer in matrimony). Getting a four figure salary and driving a bajaj scooter was the ultimate aspiration. The movies reflected the angst of the suffocated youth in Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man who revolted against the rich man/the system/the oppression. 

The neta-babu raj had the nation by its unmentionables and the licence-permit raj had a stranglehold over the industry.  Only the Bombay Club, which had a cosy relationship with the babudom thrived in the unlevel playing field. Youngsters dreamt of an India without Indira. But socialism did not really excite us.  It was either the egoistic Ayn Rand and her material objectivism or good old hindutwa which captured our imagination. The emergency rudely woke up the lotus eating masses from the travesty of democracy which was not by the people, neither of the people nor for them. The decline and resurrection of Mrs G was over in a blink and the nation was back to business as usual at the Hindu rate of growth of 3.5%. The bureaucrats continued to rule the country. They had to deal with the minor inconvenience of having inept and corrupt political masters and pesky subjects, which they did effortlessly. In the IAS academy they were actually taught not to extend their hand first while meeting aam aadmi (ordinary citizens), as they were the ruling class. Their mindset was aptly expressed by a friend who left a highly paid job to be a babu. He said “In our country, the danda (cane) of the Mai Baap sarkar (govt) has conjugal rights over the backside of the Aam Aadmi and I want to be the one to wield the danda and not the one to expose my behind.

And then came the big crossing of the Rubicon when the good doctor Manmohan Singh unleashed the triple whammy of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation on the country and nothing was the same ever again.