Saturday 24 January 2015

Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
                                                                                   - Sonnet 55, Shakespeare


Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

The release of the Vishal Bhardwaj movie, Haider(2014), brought back into the spotlight a fact that has been well documented. Shakespeare, plying his craft over four centuries ago, still retains the ability to fling universal truths at us no matter how much time has passed. Thematically, he hit pretty much every subject that stays constant in human intraspecies communications. Love, greed, ambition, revenge, lust. One can safely assume that these qualities or weaknesses are and will remain innate in humans as long as they exist.

 But if that were the only reason for Shakespeare’s timelessness, then we would have a much larger list of timeless authors to discuss today. These themes, after all, are hardly exclusive to Shakespeare.  But where Shakespeare’s work stands head and shoulders above the rest is its ability to evolve, to morph, to transmute, to create for itself a new meaning in every subsequent generation and yet to suffer no damage or perversion to its origin.

Haider is the perfect example to demonstrate this. Vishal Bhardwaj deserves great credit for pulling off such a challenging endeavor; however the fact remains that he was able to place the play (Hamlet) in contemporary Kashmir and address all the issues that ravage the modern Kashmir, while still remaining largely true to the original play by Shakespeare. While the director’s effort was no mean feat, that of the writer’s is almost criminally exceptional.

The characters in the movie have been created with great care and obviously after a lot of research and input from some insightful locals. Anyone who has stayed in Kashmir for an extended period of time would easily recognize most of them.

 The son who starts out with innocence, but is seduced into a life of violence by propaganda and perversions of truth by one and all around him. The mother who, desperate to prevent her son from straying too far, threatens him ironically with more violence (to herself), thus entering herself into the vicious circle of morbidity that life over there constitutes; the over protective older brother, the stubborn, slightly spoilt antics of the younger daughter, the political intrigues of Kay Kay Menon on his path to power, even the morbid humor of the gravediggers.

Each of these characters will resonate with a Kashmiri, or someone familiar with Kashmiris. And yet, take a step back and each of them is still very much a character from Hamlet.

This is what Shakespeare offers us that probably no other writer can. He did not scribble out vague general characters that may or may not be identified with, depending on your perception of it. He created characters that were complex, complete, intricate and most importantly, they were flawed. Perfect characters can exist only in literature, flawed characters come bursting into real life, and that is where its relevance is really measured.

He had the ability to look inside the mind of Hamlet, to perceive the turmoil that must have taken place when he beheld his mother wedded to his uncle not very long after his father’s death under circumstances that were suspect at best. Add to that all the political intrigues that take place around him and his conduct throughout the play is almost completely justified. Hamlet’s behavior is erratic, at times lunatic, but that is precisely what makes us identify with him. Under such duress, very few minds, let alone one as emotional as Hamlet’s (or Haider’s) would be expected to bear themselves with equanimity.

He had the understanding of human psychology deep enough to understand that a person engaged in an occupation such as grave digging, with his constant exposure to death and the oftentimes horrific stories behind it, would necessarily resort to black and morbid humor as a coping mechanism. And he also gives them their fair share of wisdom, for those who see the darker sides of life often have fewer veils before their eyes in their perception of it.

 The conduct of Gertrude may be seen as simply the wish for stability. The King had died, the enemies of the state were conniving and contriving to attack, the whole country was in a state of unrest. Her marriage to Claudius, whether regarded as incestuous or not, was at the very least an attempt to restore some form of stability to her life that had undergone massive upheaval. And that wish for a stable home is still as cherished a dream for most homemaker’s today as it was in the early 1600’s.

And, importantly, his understanding ran so deep as to have developed the whole story of Hamlet along the lines of the Oedipus Complex which, of course was not discovered until much later (Freud 1910). The procrastination in the murder of Claudius is an eerie precursor to the subsequent theory of Oedipus complex under which Claudius has carried out the actions which Hamlet himself subconsciously wanted to carry out (i.e. killing the father and having relations with the mother). It is to the eternal credit of Shakespeare’s writing that the dynamic between Hamlet and Gertrude remains potent and original even in the wake of such seismic shifts in the understanding of the human mind.

Each of the characters described above are from the original play, and yet, as shown by Haider, they hold true and are easily recognizable in today’s society.

Governmental intrigues, the mentality of oppressed masses, the mental state of an emotional soul whose life is riddled by betrayals, the undying emotion of two souls in love, the amoralistic ambition of a man who lusts only for power, all these characters have been explored to unprecedented depths by arguably the greatest writer in the English Language. And their continued relevance today makes one wonder whether humans have evolved at all or remain the same bestial caveman underneath while donning a more sophisticated exterior.

That could be a part of the answer, but nevertheless the skill of the author in creating timeless characters, not once but over and over, of exploring themes that encompass all of human existence, of establishing moral precedents and cultural trends for centuries to come, and (an often underestimated fact) to do so while also entertaining the contemporaneous crowds is a feat that must not, and thankfully is not underestimated.

Any observer of the film or theater culture today will be aware of the difficulty of creating a movie that appeals to the masses without sacrificing any of its artistic integrity. There appears to be a choice that necessarily needs to be made. Either make a movie of artistic merit OR make one to please the masses. Shakespeare holds the distinction of changing that “OR” into an “AND”.

And that too, is a big reason why his plays and poetry are still prescribed in every course and enjoyed by all students of literature. Somehow he has managed to retain the entertainment value of his plays while creating works that bear no comparison. The staging of a Shakespeare play (or a movie based on his play) is as much a successful commercial venture today as it was in his time.

And so we have the necessary ingredients. Eternal themes, impeccable command of language, deep, almost omniscient insight into the human psyche, shrewd discernment of interpersonal relationships and the related dynamics, vivid and lofty imagination, tinged with a realistic, often morbid take on life. Put all these together and you have a writer whose works not only survive, but grow in importance as the years roll on. Put all these together and you can make yourself another Shakespeare.

Until that time, we may return joyfully to the Bard of Avon. 

Wednesday 21 January 2015

Peace and its Follies


How shall I find the help I need?
Shall here a thousand volumes teach me only
That men, self tortured, everywhere must bleed
And here and there one happy man sits lonely?
                                                                               - Goethe


Peace and its Follies

World Peace. It rolls off the tongue nicely. Celebrities, politicians, in fact, public figures of any kind have bandied this phrase about so much that it has rendered it meaningless, valueless. But let us not judge the term by the perversion it has undergone. Let us go back to the basics and examine the concept as it was in its original state.

Is World Peace attainable? And if so, is that necessarily a good thing?

Let us begin by addressing the first question.

World Peace is put forward as a utopia. A world where every human being gets along and prospers without harming his fellow human being. Where one can attain greatness without leaving the other in the dust, where all of mankind walks hand in hand from glory to glory. This, then, is the goal. Very well, how are we to go about it.

Race, gender, nationality, physicality, sexuality, cultural hegemony, historical prejudice, religion, culture and economics. These are just a few terms that can be named off the top of one’s head when considering just how many things divide mankind. Can all of these be overcome? The problem we face today is, we see these issues as individual issues needing individual solutions, or at best, problems that are interrelated. No one sees these issues as a single tree that has branched out from a single overwhelming factor. Evolution.

A certain Charles Darwin put forth a certain theory that subsequently went on to be proven. Darwin himself must not have imagined how vast the scope of his theory was. What the “survival of the fittest” means, what the existence of the survival instinct means is that every creature, given the chance to help its own cause, even at the cost of the other, will act to help itself or its kind survive. This is an animal instinct, and humans like to believe they have risen above it, but it is prevalent, if not dominant, throughout mankind. Fierce education mingled with fierce determination of will has produced exceptions. We have all heard stories of selfless sacrifice, if there is such a thing. However, the fact remains, the vast majority of mankind, or any other species on earth, has no qualms going to any extent to get a headstart in the rat race that is survival.

Now, seen through this light, one begins to perceive all the above mentioned terms of differentiation as mere tools. The British used “The mission of civilizing a Barbarian country” as a tool to drain India of its wealth of resources. We were called barbarians, and we believed it. And we merrily played along while they stole out the backdoor carrying our treasure. The white man called the black man a lower form of human being, and united the Western world in this belief, until a whole continent of people were enslaved. Hitler used the Jewish Race as the scapegoat to unite Germany in retaliation to French excesses. America used Islamophobia to justify attacks on Arabian countries.

Everywhere, every propaganda, every justification is a thinly veiled attempt at superiority, or a desperate cry for survival. Humans have it ingrained in them to step on corpses on the way to progress. No civilization in all of mankind’s history has prospered without having terrific violence in its past. It is, simply, the way it is.

Let us assume for arguments sake (though we would be wrong) that the survival of the fittest was not the root cause. Let us take each of the terms of differentiation as a problem in its own right, interlinked with the other problems intricately, but a separate entity nonetheless. Even so, can such a plethora of differences ever be overcome? When, in the same country (ironically enough, a democratic country), there can exist a journalist who doesn’t blink twice before flinging insult in the face of a religious figurehead in the name of freedom of speech, and an extremist who believes any insult to his religion is justification enough to carry out an act of terrorism; which naïve creature could even hope that peace could prevail even for a little while on a global scale?

There can never be a solution to man’s fear of the unknown. And the world is too large, mankind too diverse, for differences not to exist. Education proves inadequate to fight the instinctual reaction of man to shun or destroy that which seems foreign to himself rather than insquisitively learn about it before he judges it. Man will remain a man, and violence will remain an integral part of him.

"Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty – this is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become – deified." – Friedrich Nietzsche



Now to address the second question. Is World Peace a good thing?

The first answer to come to one’s mind would be, “Yes, obviously.”

But the first thing that comes to one’s mind usually does not have a lot of thought behind it.

Friedrich Nietzsche postulated that war, conflict, dissent, dissatisfaction, revolt, revolution and cruelty were all necessary cogs in the machinations of human progress. It is almost a form of purgation in the Aristotelian manner that he professes works to the good of mankind. If one glances through history ( a worthwhile endeavor) one will find that the greatest leaps that man has made progress wise have come from times of tumult and warfare. The might of American Space programs relies heavily on Nazi science. The slavery question prompted concerted research into human psychology and race to investigate if one is really inferior to the other or is merely believed to be so. The oppression of Germany by France through the Treaty of Versailles ended up providing the impetus for uniting the whole of Bavaria with such an excess of fervor that they held the rest of Europe in a tyrannical grip of terror for almost a decade. Mankind has a wonderful habit of blooming to its full potential when under duress. And Nietzsche’s argument is that for this very reason, evil is needed, if only to spur the good on to greater heights.

A world at peace would have stagnated. There would be hesitations before every step forward. Everytime progress could be made, it would be weighed against its possible side effects and collateral damage and ultimately given up. That the whole species of man will advance in unison is a vain dream with no attachment to reality. In the real world, you always need a pioneer to light the way before the rest of the masses follow. But right there comes a divide. The pioneer’s task is the toughest, must his reward also not be correspondingly the greatest? If yes, then he is at a position more elevated than the rest, which distorts equality, and there can be no peace without equality. And if no, then we fall back into Karl Marx’s argument, and a simple google search will give you the disastrous consequences that any attempt at large scale Marxism has brought upon mankind.

Incidentally, in case the above remark misleads you into believing this article is pro-democracy, the very concept of democracy itself is flawed. And in the context of equality, this becomes all the more dangerous. In a democracy, all men are proclaimed equal, right at the outset, this leads us to a contradiction. According to the “logic” of democracy, the opinion of an educated, trained professor of Economics and of an uneducated, ignorant old villager carry the same weightage when deciding who is to be elected Finance minister. Democracy treats people as equals, when they are not. This results either in oppression of the masses or of oppression of the intellect. And none of the scenarios are pleasant ones.

This same thinking overflows into the wishful concept of World Peace. As mentioned before, peace cannot exist until there is complete equality in mankind. A man, seeing another above him, will necessarily wish to rise to his level rather than remain below. It is only natural, only fair, and indeed this aspiration is the reason we have advanced so far from our caveman days. But aspiration is a short step away from ambition and ambition can be squarely blamed for 80% of our world’s issues today.

These arguments do not even delve into the practical consequences of world peace. How is one to control overpopulation? How is one to control the already overaccelerated usage of our resources. And most importantly, what will then provide the impetus for humans to move forward?

The choice, in the end seems to be this. Peace at the cost of progress, resulting in stagnation, or progress while accepting collateral damage as a necessary cost that must be paid. The delicate task of mankind is to keep alive its repugnance for barbarianism while recognizing and accepting that barbarianism is still and always will be an integral part of the human psyche.



In conclusion, Peace is a noble objective to keep before oneself, but it is an erroneous one. To revert back to Nietzsche, “Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

This, seen objectively, is what life constitutes. The choice of accepting it or spending one’s life fighting against it, remains a personal one.