Ramblings from 2640 Down

I am sitting in the 2640 down (aka Brindavan Express from Bangalore to Chennai) and I am bored stiff, literally. The train is actually moving fast and I can barely hear the iPod play (hmm.. may be I should buy a pair of headphones with noise reduction technology, I see a new possibility of spending happy hours searching for the most suitable one). I believe in transitivity, so why not transfer my boredom to my dear readers. So here it goes.

Upward mobility of Brahmins – a recent study in the transportation industry

Since my ‘retirement’ I had to re-evaluate my transportation options and I have been using public transport within Bangalore (bus) and a more popular means of transport for inter-city travel (II class in trains). The evidence I have gathered so far clearly points to the upward mobility of Brahmins. You never get to see them in these surrounds. Don’t ask me how I know that my fellow passengers are not Brahmins. I just know. When I was a kid I quite clearly remember this was not the case. After long years of II class travel in trains my family once went to Mumbai in first class and that was because my dad got Leave Travel Concession (LTC) from his central government job. We then quickly noticed that our co-passengers were not the usual middle class Brahmins but upper middle class ones. I guess since liberalization the upper castes have moved further up the economic ladder and they don’t have to depend on LTC for choosing higher classes of travel, if they choose trains at all in the first place. It is obvious who has benefited most from the ‘neo-liberal’ reforms. It is funny, in an article in Frontline about education the author could easily fit in the ‘neo-liberal’ word 8 times! It looks like neo-liberal has acquired a pejorative connotation in some circles.

Ritualistic Jainism

The last couple of days have been spent in a small town in Malnad area of Karnataka, Sirsi. I have a friend who has a farm there and is also actively promoting ecological sound agricultural practices in that area. Birding from her porch is usually outstanding and so was it this time too. This time I even got to see a crazy Kiwi there. Her name is Charolette (re-christened as Shalini) and she has come for New Zealand to spend months in India doing nothing. I could immediately guess we had something in common. So we both set off on a bike ride to nose around the nearby sights. That entire area is on the foothills of western-ghats and is fairly wooded. Handling the undulating terrain with bicycles without gear wheels is not something I would look forward to but still the ride was enchanting. We first went to an old Hindu temple near ‘Hundsay Honda’ built during the peak of Vijayanagarm kingdom probably 600 years back. The temple was surrounded by forests and the only person in the temple was a talkative poojari. This is my idea of a good temple where peace and calm gushes through all over. The right place to sit and meditate about which headphone would be the best for noise reduction. Our next stop was a Jain math next, my friend at the farm had donated a cow to the math and we wanted to check her out. The temple had an idol (theerthankara) that was supposed to be 2000 years old. I was happily gassing to Shalini about Mahaveera being the founder of Jainism when the priest (who happened to understand English) corrected me and said that Mahavira was just the last theerthankara (I guess a prophet) and there are 24 of them in each era and there are several eras. But the interesting part was that the power of this particular idol was the fluids that come off after the abhishekam of the idol. This prasad was supposed to have potent medicinal capabilities. ‘A rich businessman from Mumbai (has to be a jain) had an incurable form of cancer and came here and drank the milk and got cured and immediately donated 20 lakhs)’. There was also an idol for fertility and if you did not have any issues you place a coconut before the idol and immediately you would have an issue (it took a long time for to explain to Charolette why anyone would spend so much energy in praying for not having any issues!). If at all I have to believe in a god I think I would have to believe these fertility gods, we have more than a billion in evidence for their existence. I thought I read somewhere that Mahavira and Buddha had been essentially very critical of the ritualistic vedic religion present during that time. But I guess the human need for ritual is much a greater force than any other.

Justice for thievery – a post modern approach

I have a friend who was trained to be an astro-physicists and had worked for some years in the same line before she decided to take up a more challenging profession and became a farmer. She bought a plot of land in Magadi road (of Old Munuswamy and the panther of Magadi fame) and started cultivating ragi et al. The rains have failed this year in the Bangalore area and farming has been not even the usual subsistence level. In this context her house has been repeatedly burgled and she was suspecting the person who was helping her out. On the third instance that person asked my friend if she was still suspecting her to which my friend replied in the affirmative. The helper explained that it was not her and she knew who the thief was. So they gathered the panchayat of the village and my friend presented her case. The panchayat asked the thieves to come forward and so three of them in the crowd confessed! They gave back the stolen material to my friend the panchayat asked her what the punishment should be meted out, she was given a choice of whipping, just thrashing and such. She recommended 3 months of community work for the convicted which was mainly cleaning up the area around the panchayat meeting place. If only the mechanisms for justice could be this swift and easy … (I actually shudder to think, what comes to my mind is vigilantism and no appeals)