AE

Marx's Letter:

Sunday, April 21, 1867

London, England

Dear Ghalib,

Day before yesterday I received a letter from my friend, Angels. It ended with a couplet that impressed me very much. After much effort, I learnt that it was written by some Indian poet named Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. Brother, it’s wonderful! I had never envisaged that revolutionary feelings for independence from slavery would ripen so early in a country like India! Yesterday, I got some more poetic works of yours from a Lord’s personal library. This couplet is highly appreciable!:

Hum ko maloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat lekin,

Dil ko khush rakhne ko Ghalib ye khayal achha hai.

(I am aware of the reality of heaven,

But, Ghalib! It’s good to console your heart.)

In your next edition of poetry do write in detail addressing workers: "Landlords, administrators, and religious leaders sap your toil’s rewards by taking you to the fanciful world of paradise." Rather, it would be nicer if you write some lines on:

"Duniya bhar ke mazdooron, muttahid ho jao"

(World labourers, get united)

I am not well aware of the Indian style and poetic treatment. You are a poet, you write something substantive being under poetic restrictions. Whatever, the sole purpose is to invigorate the masses with its message. Moreover, I would advise you to quit composing leisure writings like ghazal or quatrain and move over to free verses so that in least time you can write more and the more you write the more the wretched people would have to read and mull over.

I am dispatching the Indian version of the Communist Manifesto along with the first volume whose translation is unfortunately not available. If you like it, next time I will send you some more literature. At present, India has been converted into a den of the English imperialists. And only the collective effort of the exploited and downtrodden masses or workers can liberate them from the clutches of the perpetrators.

You should study the modern philosophies of the West than the outdated and unworkable thoughts of Asian scholars; and do not write the fables and praises of the Mughal kings and nawabs and create the literature that takes up the revolutionary cause of the masses. Revolution is imminent. No force in this world can restrain it. That time is coming soon when the tradition of guru and disciple will fade away.

I wish India a steady path toward revolution.

Yours,

Karl Marx

______________________________________

Ghalib's Reply:

September 9, 1867

I received your letter along with the Communist Manifesto. How would I reply? First, it’s too difficult to understand what you talk. Second, I have grown too weak to write as well as speak. Today, I wrote a letter to a friend, so, I thought of writing to you too.

Your view about Farhaad (reference in Ghalib’s one poem) is mistaken. He is not any worker as you perceived him. Rather, he was a lover but his perception toward love did not impress me. He was lunatic in love and would think of committing suicide all the time for his beloved’s sake. And you talk of which inquilab (revolution)? That is a past, ended ten years ago! Now the Britishers roam broad-chested and everyone eulogises them here. The discipline of royalty and lavishness has become a thing of the past; and the tradition of guru and disciple is losing its charm.

If you don’t believe, pay a visit to Delhi and see all in flesh and blood..... And that’s not confined to Delhi only, Lucknow’s essence too is disappearing...where have those mannerisms gone...where are those gentlemen! Now, you predict of which revolution?

And in the middle of your letter I also learnt you talk of changing the mode of poetry writing. Mind you, poetry cannot be created but it comes to you naturally. And my case is distinct. When ideas flow in, they just merge into any forms, ghazal or quatrains.

I believe, Ghalib’s style is unmatched in the world of poetry, and because of that, the kings have already gone and you want me to be deprived of the nawabs and patrons who take care of me...!? What goes wrong if I say a few lines in their praise!

What is philosophy and what it has to do with life, who knows better than me? My dear, which modern thinking you talk about? If you are interested in it, you better read Vedanta and Wahdat-ul-Wajood. And stop just harping on thought after thought, if you can, do some work in this direction...you are an Englishman, do me a favour. Please convey a recommendation letter to the viceroy, requesting for reissue of my pension....

Now I am feeling very tired. So, I am putting an end to it.

Humbly yours,

Ghalib

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”

~ Charles Bukowski

But the same Bukowski also wrote:

“Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

[1]

Perhaps no other idea has captured the transience of human heart and the conscience of human society as 'love'. It has been promised as the omnifarious solution to all our problems and the cardinal basis of all utopian ideals.

Most stories are about it; most poems, most films are about it. Yet love remains critically undefined.

Aristotle believed that the idea of love is one soul inhabiting two bodies. It originates from Greek mythology, according to which humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of the other half.

Beyond the voo-doos and myths surrounding the idea of soulmates is the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Freud, as is well known, had controversial ideas about love. He believed that the adult search for love is nothing but an attempt to replace a parent (especially the one of opposite gender). That is why people are much much more likely to marry a person with similar personality traits as their father or mother (whichever they are closest to).

[2]

Like love, another important idea that has shaped human civilization throughout years is 'freedom'. The French Revolution represents the peak of human quest for freedom. Jean Jacques Roasseau, a leading French philosopher, in the very last pages of his book 'The Social Contract' writes: "man is born free but everywhere in chains." It represents the idea that true freedom is an illusion.

We are limited in every way possible. As Darwish said:

"we are captives of what we love, what we desire and what we are."

'What we are' is the most important part. We are limited by our very physical being, finite time and ephemeral energy. Yet we desire to have experiences beyond our possible being. As Sylvia Plath put it:

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."

[3]

How these ideals of love and freedom intertwine is something I find really intriguing. Khalil Gibran wrote:

“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”

The idea is that the farthest one can reach in his or her quest for freedom is loneliness, where one can be whatever they want; unbeknownst to the ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, and cultural expectations of society. Love then seems to be a major hurdle, almost a blockade, in that quest. But that is not true.

Love (empathy, to be more precise) allows people to have experiences beyond their physical being. In that case, the stereotype of "opposites attracting" makes sense. People choose a partner through/with whom they can have experiences farthest from the possibilities of their singular being.

"Love then is a quest for freedom, and so is loneliness."

"Everything you love, you will eventually lose; but in the end, love will return in a different form."

One year before his death, Franz Kafka saw in one of Berlin's park, Steglitz City Park, a girl who was crying because she had lost her doll. The writer calms her down by telling her that her doll had gone on a trip and that he, a doll postman, would take her a letter the next day.

Over 13 days, he brought a letter to the park every day in which the doll tells of her adventures, which he himself had written the night before.

‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he says. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks. ‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says. The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you have it on you?’ she asks. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’ He’s so convincing, the girl doesn’t know what to think anymore. Can it be possible that this mysterious man is telling the truth?

Kafka goes straight home to write the letter. If he can come up with a beautiful and persuasive lie, it will supplant the girl’s loss with a different reality—a false one, maybe, but something true and believable according to the laws of fiction.

The next day Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her. The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write to the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.

'Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.'

After a few days, the girl had forgotten about the real toy that she’d lost, and she was only thinking about the fiction that she’d been offered as a replacement. Franz wrote every sentence of this story in such detail, and with such humorous precision, that it made the doll’s situation completely understandable: the doll had grown up, gone to school, met other people. She always reassured the child of her love, but made reference to the complications of her life, her other obligations and interests that prevented her from returning to their shared life right now. She asked the little girl to think about this, and in doing so she prepared her for the inevitable, for doing without her.

By that point of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

One day the girl got her doll back. It was a different doll of course, bought by Kafka as a last gift for her. An attached letter explained ‘My travels have changed me.’

‍

Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll.

In summary it said:

'Everything you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.'

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He is counted amongst the greatest brains in history and certainly one of the most influential. Despite it, Hegel's legacy remains contested.

In 1807, he published his magnum opus 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' where he developed the idea of dialectics. This book went on to inspire the other two great philosophers of nineteenth century: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Marx founded communism and Nietzsche went on to become the favourite philosopher of fascists.

Hegel's influence can be attested by the fact that nearly all schools of philosophy developed in the subsequent two centuries were heavily influenced by his works. People have gone as far as to claim that "all" knowledge in this world either agrees with Hegel and so is 'redundant' or disagrees with him and therefore is 'wrong'.

Despite its huge influence, Hegel's works are notoriously hard to understand. Arthur Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel, wrote:

"Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought whatsoever, then you cannot do better than give Hegel to read...A guardian fearing that his ward might become too intelligent for his schemes might prevent this misfortune by innocently suggesting the reading of Hegel."

((Some more may-mays to get the point across...))

Hegel -> Marx -> Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.

Hegel's dialectics inspired Marx's idea of dialectical materialism. Dialectical Materialism forms the basis of almost all works of Karl Marx.

Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, produced Das Capital and The Communist Manifesto that forms the basis of communist thought. This, as is no secret, inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Guevera and hundreds of communist leaders across the globe who saw violence as a perfectly normal means to achieve the end.

It is interesting to note that statistically, far-left violence has killed much much more people than far-right. Mao's revolution in China alone killed around 78 million people (four and half times more than Hitler).

A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

~ Joseph Stalin

Stalin too was a paranoid cold-blooded murderer. His reign of terror is most infamous for gulags: a system of labour camps in Siberia, where anybody believed to oppose Stalinism in the mildest of forms was sent and tortured for life.

A story about Vladimir Lenin says that when World War 1 broke out, "the voracious reader" went to Switzerland to study Hegel. After the war was over, he came back to lead the Russian Revolution and become the founding head of Soviet government.

Pol Pot, the communist dictator of Cambodia is not that well known. But in his rule, he oversaw the Cambodian genocide which killed around a quarter of the country's population.

All of them, as is the point of the article, had singular inspiration.

Hegel -> Nietzsche -> Nazis

Hegel was also amongst the primary influences on Nietzsche, another great German philosopher. The fascists of 20th century projected Nietzsche as their prophet.

Their reverence for Nietzsche can be ascertained from the fact that Hitler gifted Mussolini the complete works of Nietzsche on his birthday.

But, it's important to make the distinction that just because the Nazis saw Nietzsche as inspiring doesn't mean that Nietzsche's ideas actually sympathised with their ideology. Nietzsche, in his own words, was an anti-anti-semite and not a great fan of nationalism.

Still it's easy to see why Nietzsche, amongst anyone else, was chosen for the task. The frequent use of terms like 'Aryan' in his works, the insistence on masculine values and above anything else, his sister. It's a little known fact that Nietzsche’s sister, who was in charge of his estate after he died, was a Nazi sympathizer who shamelessly rearranged his remaining notes to produce a final book, The Will to Power, that embraced Nazi ideology. It won her the favor of Hitler, but was a terrible disservice to her brother’s legacy.

Millions of people were sacrificed for the cause of fascism and their mythical puritanical state (17 Million by Hitler alone). The world witnessed the worst genocide in history. Not to mention ofcourse, the rise of fascism was amongst the primary causes of World War 2, the deadliest war in human history. All because of one guy and his book.

As interesting as it is to see both the far-right and the far-left finding inspiration from the same source, it is perhaps more interesting to know that during his time, Hegel was banished and hated by both. He was banned by the Prussian right-wing and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings.

Hegel and the Cold War

Soviet Communism was ultimately inspired from Hegel, and so was American Capitalism.

People rarely appreciate how big a miracle it was for the world to come out of the cold war with zero use of nuclear weapons.

October 27, 1962 is called the most dangerous day in human history. This was at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A US fighter jet has been shot down and the White House is pleading John F. Kennedy to invade Cuba, a satellite nation for the USSR. A Soviet submarine loaded with nuclear weapons was on its way to the island nation, when it encountered radical disturbances in the sea and alarming reports in the news. The crew member had almost unanimously agreed that World War 3 has broken out and held a voting for the use of (nuclear) weapons loaded in submarine. It was one man, the captain of the submarine, Alexandrovich Arkhipov who veto-ed the decision and no attack was made. Then, as the story goes, JFK compromised by retreating US missiles in Turkey and Soviets retreated from Cuba on the condition that US wouldn't invade.

The point however is; that books and words and ideas are not powerless. They are powerful. One book and one idea can literally change the course of history, much less the course of one's life.

I wonder why there is so much sadness in art. Almost all great works of art are tragic. They are about loss or war or longing. Maybe the answer lies in what we mean by art and what role is it supposed to play in society.

Some say art is supposed to connect; connect all human beings at the most fundamental level. It doesn't matter who you are; everybody can appreciate a beautiful painting or a beautiful piece of literature. If this were to be the case, I wonder why we connect with sadness, amongst all other emotions. Does that mean we are fundamentally creatures of sadness? Of melancholy? That, as Thomas Hardy wrote in The Mayor of Casterbridge:

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

But I think, more appropriately, the purpose of art is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "to make the reality bearable". It is indeed true that we are creatures of sadness, but art enables us to find "beauty" in that sadness.

How appropriate then is the moon as the allegory for beauty. The night with all its sadness and loneliness is still bearable because the moon entices people and the stars make them dream.

Tolstoy said, "beauty will save the world". Now I understand how.

The history of abortion rights in the United States is long with lots of ups and downs. This year, Texas, a major US state, banned abortions as early as six weeks and opened the door for almost any private citizen to sue abortion providers and others.

The debate surrounding abortion generally revolves around arguments from human rights i.e. the woman's right to make her life's choices versus the fetus' right to live. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with such arguments (except maybe that the existence of human rights itself cannot be proved using first principles of philosophy), but there's another important dimension to the problem that is often overlooked.

Utilitarianism is a branch of ethical philosophy that says that the distinction between right and wrong is determined by the consequences of the action alone. So murder, for example, is 'wrong' not because it is inherently wrong to kill another human being but because say, a society with high homicide rate is very likely to be poor and backward.

With that being clear, let's talk about something seemingly irrelevant.

The Unfulfilled Bloodbath Prophecy

In the late twentieth century, the crime rates in the United States spiked. It was attributed mainly to liberal criminal punishment laws and the crack-cocaine boom. Several economists, criminologists and politicians made apocalyptic predictions about how the ever-increasing crime rates are going to destroy the US society and economy. James Alan Fox, the most widely quoted crime expert in the popular press at that time, warned of a coming “bloodbath” of youth violence.

But, Fox and all other experts turned out to be wrong. The bloodbath didn't materialise. Infact, the crime/homicide rate began to fall sharply in the early 1990s. Experts then flocked to explain the decline in terms of the internet boom, the crack bubble burst, better policing strategies etc.

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.”

~ Laurence Peter

But, as Steven Levitt argues in his bestseller Freakonomics, all of those reasonings are false or at the very least, irrelevant. The single most important reason why crime rates unexpectedly decreased in the 1990s was because the US Supreme Court 20 years ago, had ruled in favour of a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey and legalised abortion throughout the country.

As an interesting side-note, Norma later renounced her allegiance to legalised abortion and became a pro-life activist. Well...

The Romanian and Scandinavian Experience

It is tempting to argue that this weird relationship between abortions and crime rates is merely a correlation in the US experience, but the story repeats itself in Romania, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and any other place one has tried to find a pattern.

In 1966, one year after Nicolae Ceauşescu became the Communist dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. “The fetus is the property of the entire society,” he proclaimed. “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.” He and other experts of the time believed that a large young population would be an invaluable asset to the society and economy.

Extreme steps were taken to ensure that young women were having children. Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep “celibacy tax.”

But Ceauşescu and other experts of the time turned out to be wrong, "terribly" wrong. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals.

The abortion ban remained in place until Ceauşescu's regime was overthrown by thousands of protestors marching on the streets in 1989. What is even more interesting is that a majority of those protestors were teenagers, many of whom might not have been born had abortion remained legal two decades ago.

Studies in other parts of Eastern Europe and in Scandinavia from the 1930s through the 1960s reveal a similar trend. In most of these cases, abortion was not forbidden outright, but a woman had to receive permission from a judge in order to obtain one. Researchers found that in the instances where the woman was denied an abortion, she often resented her baby and failed to provide it with a good home. Even when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the mother, the researchers found that these children too were more likely to become criminals.

Link between Abortion and Crime Rates

The conclusion is simple: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has a good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors—childhood poverty and a single-parent household—are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.

References: Freakonomics by Steven Levitt

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."

"How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."

"Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?"

"It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me."

“Please, I want so badly for good things to happen.”

"Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of my sorrow."

"What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."

"Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all."

"Not being perfect hurts."

"If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier."

"Is there no way out of the mind?"

"I like people too much or not at all."

"I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am."

"I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to quote other poets. I want someone to quote me."

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

written by: Zaheen Shah

a beautiful rendition by Shubha Mudgal

The lyrics of this song might be a little difficult for someone with no background in Urdu poetry, but trust me, once you peel off the beautiful metaphors and imageries, you will be able to appreciate just how deep the lines are.

Shubha Mudgal, as always, is amazing. Although, I would recommend playing it in 1.25x cause you know...

Ghaflat na thi tasawwur e deedar e yaar tha

Nazzara e jamal mein gum intezaar tha

Hun aalam e sukoon mein ke aalam sukoon mein hai

Main beqarar tha ke jahan beqarar tha

Saaqi teri sharaab mein ye khaas baat thi

Nasha ba-qadr e hausla e badakhar tha

Koi gunaah hosh se badhkar gunaah nahi

Jo mast ho gaya wo bada hoshiyar tha

Main ho gaya gubaar e rah e dost, ae Zaheen

Phir bhi kisike khatir e naazuk pe baar tha

It was not oblivion but the thought of my beloved

In the apparition of beauty were lost all notions of time and wait

I am in peace as the world is in peace

I was in mayhem as the world was in mayhem

O wine server, there is something really special about your wine

The intoxication is in keeping with the capacity of the drinker

There's no sin greater than being conscious

Those who became unconscious were very wise

O' Zaheen, I became dust on the path that leads to my friend

Yet I remained a burden on someone's delicate being

written by: Siraj Aurangabadi

a beautiful rendition by Ali Sethi

This has to be my favourite song. Everything about it, the lyrics, the visuals, the music is just perfect.

Khabar-e-tahayyur-e-ishq sun

Na junoon raha na pari rahi

Na to tu raha na to main raha

Jo rahi so be-khabari rahi

Chali samt-e-ghaib se ik hawa

Ke chaman zuhoor ka jal gaya

Magar ek shakh-e-nihal-e-gham

Jise dil kahe so hari rahi

Wo ajab ghadi thi ke jis ghadi

Liya dars nuskha-e-ishq ka

Jo kitab aql ki taaq par

So vahin dhari ki dhari rahi

Listen to the confounding story of love

Neither obsession remained nor beauty remained

Neither you remained nor I remained

What remained was mere unawareness

A wind blew from the invisible world

And scorched the garden of appearances

But on the branch of grief's tree, one bud

Let's call it the heart, remained green

It was a wondrous moment when

I learned a lesson from love's treatise

The book of intellect that was lying on a shelf

Remained there unopened

written by : Nasir Kazmi

a beautiful rendition by Papon

The word 'Ghazal' literally means "talking to one's beloved". Although, throughout history the form has been used to write poems on all imaginable themes. This one, however, stays true to the etymology.

Nasir Kazmi is generally heralded as the pioneer of 'jadeed ghazal' tradition, which seeks to find and create beauty in simplicity. Therefore, both the language used and the ideas expressed in this ghazal, are extremely simple yet beautiful.

Niyat e Shauq bhar na jaye kaheen

Tu bhi dil se utar na jaye kaheen

Aaj dekha hai tujhko der k baad

Aaj ka din guzar na jaye kaheen

Na mila kar udaas logon se

Husn tera bikhar na jaye kaheen

Aarzoo hai k tu yahan aaye

Aur fir umr bhar na jaye kaheen

My desire to love, I hope, doesn't get extinguished

I hope, I don't get over you too soon

I saw you today after a long long time

I really hope, this day never ends

My beloved, you shouldn't meet sad people

They will scatter your beauty

And my wish is that you come here

And stay with me for a lifetime.

"Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. As I turned the pages from A to Z of Diagnostic Medical Encyclopaedia, the only malady I could conclude I had 'not' got was housemaid's knee."

~ Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat)

On October 10, the occasion of World Mental Health Day, Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya called for an end to stigma associated with mental illnesses. So did celebrities, influencers and everyday people.

Evidently, conversations surrounding mental health have never been more widespread. Articles in newspapers, niche blogs, arts, movies, hashtags and campaigns on social media; everywhere the message is more or less the same: "there's a taboo associated with mental health, and it's the biggest obstacle in our utopian ideal of a healthy happy society".

Apart from the inherent irony of the statement, there's another problem. It's wrong.

Not to belittle the genuine efforts of people trying to spread kindness and positivity, the dynamics of mental health, as it appears, is more complicated.

Inflated Statistics:

Flashy news headlines often resort to inflated statistics to get their points across. Consider student suicides for example, we all have been told that it's an epidemic and an ever increasing problem. Yes? Well, actually no.

Official statistics show that student suicides are not only very very rare (thankfully) but have also remained more or less constant for the past few decades. [1] Furthermore, comparing the student suicide rates to the general population shows that students are actually the ones lesser at the risk of taking their own lives. [2]

As Clark Medal (sort of Junior Nobel Prize) winning economist Steven Levitt points out in his bestseller 'Freakonomics', it is very common for experts in a field to straightaway lie about the magnitude of a problem in order to bring money, public attention and political capital to the cause.

Unclear Definitions:

Clinical psychologists and therapists rely on the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM-5) for definitions of various mental illnesses. But, as renowned psychiatrist Thomas Scasz points out, these definitions are rather loose. In his controversial work, The Myth of Mental Illness, he argues that mental illnesses cannot be legitimately categorised as diseases. [3] Diseases, according to Scasz, are defined as deviations from the normal functioning of the body. Since, the mind is both undefined and hyper-malleable, it is impossible to define the norm and subsequently the deviation from it. Therefore, Scasz argues, the lines where diagnostic lines are drawn are bound to be arbitrary.

A result of this arbitrariness is over-diagnosis of mental health problems.

Over-diagnosis:

Jon Ronson's TED Talk titled 'Strange Answers to the Psychopath Test' has over 22 million views on YouTube. [4] In the speech, Jon talks, in extremely captivating stories, how we over-diagnose psychopathy and by extension, other forms of mental illnesses.

In a 2017 Vox article titled 'Don't Confuse Your Nerves With Anxiety', Christina Stiehl points out the dangers of romanticizing mental health problems. [5] "Nothing is more fashionable right now than anxiety disorders", she argues saying that the current awareness-spreading efforts do more harm than good. Another article in The Guardian and Areo Magazine makes a similar point. [6]

The point is that radical acceptance and medicalisation of emotional pain has severe drawbacks, both for the individual and the society. Psychiatrist Derek Summerfield writes:

When the medicalization of everyday life and the commodification of “mind” is professionally endorsed and taken up by wider culture, the language of psychological deficit is inserted into the public imagination. People come to see themselves not as normally stressed, but as “ill,” with negative emotion recast as a mental health problem. As more resources for mental health services are called for and provided, more are perceived to be needed, an apparently circular process, a dog chasing its tail.

Eminent Harvard Psychologist Jerome Kagan in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, deplores the explosion in psychiatric diagnosis, and our tendency to conceptualize normal human suffering as disease. In the end, he quotes a line from Beckett’s play Endgame:  “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.”

The problem with directly calling an everyday melancholy "depression", a stressful episode a "panic attack" and a lack of social skills "autism" is that they create self-reinforcing self-sabotaging stories. And once we have repeated the same story again and again, they become a part of our "ego" or the subconscious self.

Philosopher Eugene Gendlin discovered that positive outcomes in therapy can be predicted by a single variable—the degree to which the patient struggled to find words. Patients who got better in therapy were more likely to pause and grope for words or images. This, he argued, was the sign that the patient is not stuck in the ego’s story, which is well-known and does not require any effort to formulate. He who pauses and reaches uncomfortably for new words is working at the edge of the known, toward the larger, unspoken tale that lies beneath our conscious understanding.

Again, this is not to argue that we should not be sensitive and kind towards people struggling with any kind of mental/emotional pain. Rather the objective is to understand how best to support them. As an overprotective parent ends up harming the child more than protecting him, an overtly protective culture will end up harming the individuals more than helping them. (In fact, we know that children raised by parents who engage them in challenging experiences suffer from less anxiety, and not more.) [7]

Psychologist Lisa Marchiono writes, "We should help people understand themselves as resilient, rather than just nodding to their limiting and self sabotaging stories. We ought to help people imagine larger, richer, more complex stories for themselves, rather than simplistic narratives of illness and victimhood. Even if it is politically incorrect to say so, becoming attached to a narrative of victimhood or illness closes off an imagination of who we might be."

-------------------------------------------------

[Footnote]

Zizek on Love:

"Love is a catastrophe. It's a crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not in love."

"When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks."

Zizek on Freedom:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West —the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.

Zizek on Happiness:

"Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves."

"Why be happy when you can be interesting?"

The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.

Zizek on Politics:

"Politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians alone."

"Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."

"This readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome."

"Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism."

"This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know." I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it."

"The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active”, to “participate”, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on."

Zizek on Life:

"I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it."

(The Good Brahmin by Voltaire is an essential reading in introductory philosophy. The story delves into the question as to why philosophy is useless and why we are still condemned to do it.)

In my travels I once happened to meet with an aged Brahmin. This man had a great share of understanding and prudence, and was very learned. He was also very rich, and his riches added greatly to his popularity, for, wanting nothing that wealth could procure, he had no desire to defraud any one. His family was admirably managed by three handsome wives, who always studied to please him, and when he was weary of their society, he had recourse to the study of philosophy.

Not far from his house, which was handsome, well furnished, and embellished with delightful gardens, dwelt an old Indian woman who was a great bigot, ignorant, and withal very poor.

"I wish," said the Brahmin to me one day, "I had never been born."

"Why so?" said I.

"Because," said he, "I have been studying these forty years, and I find it has been so much time lost. While I teach others I know nothing myself. The sense of my condition is so humiliating, it makes all things so distasteful to me, that life has become a ​burden. I have been born, and I exist in time, without knowing what time is. I am placed, as our wise men say, in the confines between two eternities, and yet I have no idea of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I even am ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty I possess, like that of walking and digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands. I am not only thus in the dark with relation to the principles of thought, but the principles of my motions are entirely unknown to me. I do not know why I exist, and yet I am applied to every day for a solution of the enigma. I must return an answer, but can say nothing satisfactory on the subject. I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.

"I am in still greater perplexity when I am asked if Brahma was produced by Vishnu, or if they have both existed from eternity. God is my judge that I know nothing of the matter, as plainly appears by my answers. 'Reverend father,' says one, 'be pleased to inform me how evil is spread over the face of the earth.' I am as much at a loss as those who ask the question. Sometimes I tell them that everything is for the best; but those who have the gout or the stone—those who have lost their fortunes or their limbs in the wars—believe as little of this assertion as I do myself. I retire to my own house full of curiosity, ​and endeavor to enlighten my ignorance by consulting the writings of our ancient sages, but they only serve to bewilder me the more. When I talk with my brethren upon this subject, some tell me we ought to make the most of life and laugh at the world. Others think they know something, and lose themselves in vain and chimerical hypotheses. Every effort I make to solve the mystery adds to the load I feel. Sometimes I am ready to fall into despair when I reflect that, after all my researches, I neither know from whence I came, what I am, whither I shall go, or what is to become of me."

The condition in which I saw this good man gave me real concern. No one could be more rational, no one more open and honest. It appeared to me that the force of his understanding and the sensibility of his heart were the causes of his misery.

The same day I had a conversation with the old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed from the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of her god, Vishnu, and, provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women.

​Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:

"Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"

"You are right," he replied. "I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor, and yet it is a happiness I do not desire."

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed. I consulted my own heart and found that I myself should not wish to be happy on condition of being ignorant.

I submitted this matter to some philosophers, and they were all of my opinion; and yet, said I, there is something very contradictory in this manner of thinking, for, after all, what is the question? Is it not to be happy? What signifies it then whether we have understandings or whether we are fools? Besides, there is this to be said: those who are contented with their condition are sure of that content, while those who have the faculty of reasoning are not always sure of reasoning right. It is evident then, I continued, that we ought rather to wish not to have common sense, if that common sense contributes to our being either miserable or wicked.

They were all of my opinion, and yet not one of them could be found to accept of happiness on the terms of being ignorant. From hence I concluded ​that, although we may set a great value upon happiness, we set a still greater upon reason.

But after mature reflection upon this subject I still thought there was great madness in preferring reason to happiness. How is this contradiction to be explained? Like all other questions, a great deal may be said about it.

"Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck."

~ Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"The war is over", said Taliban spokesperson Mohammad Naeem as the militant group took control of the Presidential Palace on 15th August 2021. As the world watches in shock and anticipation for what has happened and what is to come, developments in Afghanistan are happening faster than the rate of analysis.

This is a brief primer on the history of conflict, the stakeholders involved, and the possibilities that lie ahead.

The History:-

"Afghanistan—where empires go to die."

~ Mike Malloy

The Communist Takeover:

It all started in April 1978, when the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in a bloody coup. They were quick to pass various social, religious and economic reforms that provoked strong opposition. This escalated to a full-fledged civil war in 1979, led by guerrilla mujahideen. The mujahideens were supported by Pakistan, Arabs and most importantly the United States who were all fearful of the growing Soviet influence in the region. Fast forward to December 1979, displeased with the communist regime in Afghanistan, the Soviet Army decided to invade the country. The war ended with Soviet retreat in 1988 and ultimately the fall of the communist PDPA regime in 1992.

The Rise of Taliban:

The vacuum of power led to another civil war, primarily between the different factions of mujahideens. This time a new group, hardline in its fundamentalist values and religious tribalism, rose to power. They were called the Taliban, literally meaning "the students". The Taliban took control of Kabul and established it's emirate for the first time in 1996. Only three countries recognised the Taliban as a legitimate government; Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia. The rest of the world condemned it's fanaticism, oppression of women and minorities, and massacres against its own population. But as Noam Chomsky put out in the best possible way, "States are not moral agents, but vehicles of power." Nothing substantial was done by either of the axis to stop the regime or atleast the Arab/Pakistani support to it. This changed after 9/11.

The Aftermath of 9/11

The United States, along with NATO and an unprecedented amount of international support invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after the Taliban refused to handover it's "guest" and the chief conspirator of September 11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden. It's said objective was to replace the Talibani regime with one that is more friendly towards the west. It happened. The Taliban was defeated, and an Afghan Government led by President Hamid Karzai was installed. But the Taliban began an insurgency that kept the US trapped in the war for the next two decades, and finally a retreat, more appropriately "a loss".

The Stakeholders:-

There are four layers of the Afghan conflict:

1. Islamists and Secularists

"Religion is the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless society and an opiate for the masses."

~ Karl Marx

The term 'Islamism' is kind of a buzz word often thrown around in everyday political discourse. But, it's important to understand what it precisely means: "political Islam". It can come in both non-violent (Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) and violent (Taliban in Afghanistan) forms. It's similar to Buddhist Nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Hindutva in India or the Christian Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. It is different from "jihadism", which seeks to create a global caliphate through violence (ISIS, for example). It's important to note that all of these are geopolitical terms and not religious.

The Afghan society, like every other society, is divided between the liberals and conservatives. During 70s, the liberals held a lot of power; today, practically null.

2. USA, China and Russia

On July 8, U.S. President Joe Biden had said that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable. “The Afghan troops have 300,000 well equipped—as well equipped as any army in the world—and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban", he added. The U.S Intelligence, on the other hand, predicted that Afghanistan would fall to Taliban after around 90 days of US retreat. Fast forward to August 2021, it took Taliban merely one week to regain complete control over the country. The longest war in US history, giving around $ 83 billion in military aid to the Afghan army every year (which btw is more than India's defence budget) and thousands of casualties; this surely is a great setback for US' (and by extension, NATO's) imperialist ambitions.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Both China and Russia have developed ties with the Taliban, and have been assured the safety of their consulates. Unlike, USA and other Western powers who had to pull out of the country in urgency. China has numerous mining and construction projects in the country as well.

The same mujahideen, who fought off the Russians and Communists with US support four decades ago; fought off the US with Russian and Communist support. Oh, the irony!

"In geopolitics, there are no permanent friends or enemies. Only interests."

~ Henry Kissinger

3. Arabs, Persians and Turks

The Arabs stopped supporting the Taliban after 9/11 so as to not hurt their ties with the west. Iran, jumped on the opportunity to safeguard one of its borders. As the Middle-Eastern cold war plays out in Syria and Yemen, some fear the same fate for Afghanistan.

An important player this time would be Turkey, who under Recep Erdogan has shown ambitions to take the symbolic leadership of the Muslim world from Saudi Arabia. Turkey has offered to be the incharge of Kabul Airport, which is the single most important piece of infrastructure in landlocked Afghanistan. So far Turkey has refrained from taking active sides and would continue to do so. Supporting Taliban would mean upsetting it's NATO allies and opposing it would mean upsetting Pakistan, an important ally.

4. India and Pakistan

Pakistan knew what the Taliban knew: that one day the Americans would leave, and Pakistan would still need Afghanistan.

~ Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)

The Taliban control of Afghanistan is arguably the biggest geopolitical victory for Pakistan. Why? Let's start with the salty Pak-Afghan relations.

In 1947, Afghanistan was the sole country to vote against Pakistan's admission in the UN. The countries share a bloody border (Durand Line) that runs through the middle of the Pashtun Heartbelt. Afghanistan claims large swathes of Pakistani territory. Pakistan's biggest nightmare would be a pro-India government in Afghanistan, which would sandwich it between two big border disputes.

Since the 1970s, Pakistan has been the most active supporter of the mujahideens. And from the 1990s, it chose Taliban as it's favourite amongst favourites. In the aftermath of 9/11, Pakistan played a "double game" with US, taking its foreign aid while continue supporting the Taliban.

It would have been a perfect happy ending for Pakistan, but it seemed there was a tiny little problem. You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect it to not bite you. The TTP or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is a Taliban-esque terrorist group that operates mainly in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan and wants a separate Pashtunistan. It was responsible, most infamously, for the attack in a military school in Peshawar in 2014. So, while Pakistan celebrates Afghanistan's descent to Taliban, it must also be aware of its consequences.

India, on the other hand, has everything to lose. Taliban in power would mean India losing some leverage against Pakistan. But more importantly, Taliban has associations with anti-India terrorist groups like Hizbul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed. While the Taliban in its peace treaty has assured the US that it will not host any anti-west terrorist groups, no such promise has been made for India.

What's Next?

Two different scenarios seem plausible:

The Iraq Story:

The US along with its NATO allies invaded Iraq in 2003 and retreated in 2011. What happened next was the bloodiest and most inhumane power exchange our generation has ever seen: the rise of ISIS. Concerns about similar fate for Afghanistan are not unjustified.

The Taliban knows that no country in the post-covid world would like a war in the "graveyard of empires". It also knows that this time it has the support of almost all its significant neighbours, from China to Iran. In other words, the Taliban seems invincible and unchanged.

The Vietnam Story:

More optimistic people are comparing the US retreat from Afghanistan to the fall of Saigon. In 1975, Saigon, the capital of US-backed South Vietnam, fell to Communist-ruled North Vietnam two years after the withdrawal of the American military which had been in the country for 19 years. The unified Vietnam then went on to have a complete reform, popularly known as DoiMoi or The Renovation.

NATO's Chief Negotiator Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad frequently talks about the idea of a "reformed" Taliban. On one hand, everyone is tired of war, and it would be easy for a reformed Taliban to gain international legitimacy. On the other, Taliban's competition in the region would be ISIS Khorasan and Al-Qaeda, not the ideal environment for reform.

The Humanitarian Crisis:-

"Life in Afghanistan felt like a lottery where the grand prize was avoiding disaster."

~ Alex Dehgan

This is the most important part of the article. More than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 5 Million displaced. Women, children and minorities being the easiest targets. School and hospitals lie in ruins. Cultural heritage sites such as the Buddha of Bamyan destroyed. The future of Afghanistan, much like it's past, seems gloomy. More so, if you consider the fact that one of the first things the Taliban did after capturing Kabul was to tell female bankers not to come to the office from the next day. Reformed? meh.

-------

zulm to fir zulm hai, badhta hai to mit jata hai

khoon to fir khoon hai, girega to jam jayega

Cruelty is after all cruelty, when it inflates, it dissipates

Blood is after all blood, when it drips, it coagulates

“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

ऐ ख़ुदा

मेरी ज़िन्दगी को दुश्वार कर दे

मुझे ग़म दे इतना मेरा दिल बेज़ार कर दे

मेरी रातों से सितारों को छीन ले

मेरा चांद बादलों को गिरफ्तार कर दे

ऐ ख़ुदा

हस्ती की अदाकारी में मुझको

कोई और किरदार कर दे

मेरी कहानी को दिलचस्प कर दे

मेरे सफ़्हों को तार-तार कर दे

नहीं मांगता मैं‌

खुशियों की भीख

अहसासों से पहले की सीख

नहीं मांगता मैं‌

तू मेरी ज़िन्दगी को जंग कर दे

मेरे हौसलों को दंग कर दे

मेरी उम्मीदों को ज़र्द-रंग कर दे

मैं उससे जीत कर दिखाऊंगा

मेरे पिंजरे को डर है कि मेरी आज़ादी के बाद

सुलगती आग में उसकी बर्बादी के बाद

कुछ बुरा होगा

बुरा तो होगा

इस घर का टूट जाना

सारे सामानों का लूट जाना

बुरा तो होगा

रौशनी का फूट जाना

रिहा हो जाना, छूट जाना

बुरा तो होगा

पर अरमां मेरे कुछ और है

दिल में सिर्फ आज़ादी का शोर है

वो तो हवाओं ने हाथों को रोककर रखा है

परछाई ज़मीन से बांधकर रखती है

वर्ना ये इंतज़ार मुझे क़ुबूल नहीं है

मैंने ख्वाबों में ये दीवारें फांद रखी है

एक दिन यकीनन

ये सारी ख्वाहिशें निकल जाएंगी

सारी ज़ंजीरें पिघल जाएंगी

उड़ूंगा मैं फिर

आज़ाद

बेतार

सितारों से आगे

क्षितिज के पार

इसीलिए तो

इस कैदखाने की हर इक दीवार से

मैं ये हर इक रोज़ कहता हूं

कि तुम मैं नहीं हूं

वक़्त की तख्ती से जो मिट जाए

सिमट जाए

वो शय नहीं हूं

मैं सिफर हूं, एकांत भी हूं

एक शोर हूं जो शांत भी हूं

मैं हूं ज़ाहिद, मुहाजिर भी हूं

मंज़िल भी मैं मुसाफ़िर भी हूं