“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”

One of the hallmarks of this blog is that it holds every rogue up for “analysis”. There is of course, a reason.

The greatest motivating factor behind this blog has always been Wimpy Kid’s foresight:

“Later on, I will have better things to do than answer people’s stupid questions all day long. So, this blog is gonna come in handy.”

The only sense in which my career is remarkable is that all the five bosses I have worked with in my life were willing to roast in hell forevermore if I were to join them. If there is anything which forbids me from saying that their anger often extended till the extinction of the cockroach, it is self-respect. While walking out of my apartment, I look back and forth to make sure that my detractors are not hiding somewhere behind the bushes. My detractors tend to be shorter than me, but they also tend to have access to stronger goons. If they go to the extent of framing me, or getting me killed, this blog will come in handy. The readers and the police would know who all are deserving of some healthy suspicion.

There are of course, many dangers involved in all this. My blog is in many ways my biggest “abuse delivery machine”. But, I am feeling a little shy to publicize my highly nuanced observations about the nitty-gritty of office politics. Because, the gracious editors on Facebook who politely forward my CV to their Delhi-bureau bloke wouldn’t hesitate to openly state:

“I have been very condescending to him, but will I hire this boy? Of course, not! He is painfully nice to me, but that is a clever pretense. Once he gets a foot in the door, I will be his next target. I am no Albert Einstein, but no one has emptied my head. It is not in my self-interest to hire him. My employees might be guilty of a lot many sins including what he calls “ineptitude”, but they are definitely not “attitudent people”. But then, all that I love would count as vices in his dictionary, wouldn’t they?”

“So, now Shoo, Shoo.”

Welfare Bum

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie.

Though, I despise the news culture, I was a full-time blogger and part-time magazine writer for months. In the last six years, I had read the hard copy of a newspaper only once—when the managing editor, Mr. Brilliant arranged some copies for me the day I joined. On the front page of a Newspaper, I saw Mahesh Bhatt expressing his opinion on the Lokpal Bill, going to the extent of saying that he supports corruption. Parvin Dabas claimed that he had slept with his producer. I could also see a girl with a tattoo, and an elegant picture of Salma Hayek. I closed it. Likewise, I think almost all Magazine content is worthless. But, this Magazine (Careers360, an Outlook Group publication) had put me on its roll, or to put it more precisely, on “welfare”.

And, I loved it.

I was the most underpaid guy on the planet, but it is not an exaggeration when I say that it was the coolest job I have ever had. I almost never had to work. All I had to do was to say “Oh, Yeah” to Mr. Brilliant once in a month. I played ping-pong 29 days a month, and got my work done in the next two days. Besides, it was amusing to work with a funny guy who called separate meetings for everyone because he feared that I will make him look good in the eyes of the girls in the office. “But, Mr. Brilliant, you are wrong!” says me, and there goes one more article into the dustbin. I also loved that thing called “pay cheque”, though the publisher Maheshwer Peri was barely “capable” of paying us on time. But, I heard that this clever dude has now installed a fingerprint-reading machine to make sure that no one else can shirk toil.

The dud menace

So, what did I learn in all these days?

“They are all, as I knew, mainly duds.”-H.L. Mencken.

Lesson 1 (Theorem): Most journalists, as H.L Mencken once noted, are out and out noobs. I completely buy his point now: “As I came to manhood and began to deal with men myself, I noticed quickly that the failures were all incompetents that God had marked them for the ditch, not man.” I suspect that liberals know this way too well, because I saw an expression of horror on the face of Mr. Brilliant when I once hinted that intelligence is largely genetic. When I once said “Meritocracy Versus..” while suggesting a story theme, Mr. Brilliant looked at me like a frightened zombie, and said, “We should think of something else”. It is not a coincidence that liberals are also the biggest critics of I.Q. tests. When a lady I would like to call “God’s-Perfect-Exercise-In-Structural-Mathematics” asked the editor whether we can have stories on men who have actually done something, instead of social workers or some such losers, I again saw an expression of horror. Palms out, he said, “No. We will not be doing such stories.”  It is again not a coincidence that “God’s-Perfect-Exercise-In-Structural-Mathematics” is the only one left in the Magazine who can write decently.

Lesson 2 (Corollary): There are proof readers who do not know what the political concept “state” means. There are managing editors who cannot tell corporate finance from corporate financing, and are convinced that single currency and common currency are two different things. There are editor-in-chief’s who do not know what the word “invariably” means, and still uses it three times in a sentence. And there are editors on all levels who are incapable of writing a decent sentence.

Illustration Through A Concrete Example: To have some mischievous fun, let us read this Intro on the website: “Education and career planning are intertwined concerns and have larger societal implications, especially in an opportunity-starved nation like ours. Asymmetrical flow of information exaggerates this problem further.”

The appropriate word is of course, “aggravates”, and not “exaggerates”. After taking a close look at the choice of words, I suspect that it was written by my prime detractor, Mr. Brilliant.)

Mr. Brilliant

I often wondered whether he has a backbone.

Mr. Brilliant happens to be my most disappointing detractor. He is the most obvious candidate for the title: “The quintessential wimp”. He is known as the easiest boss to work with, but that is because he is a sissy.  Sometimes I wished that he was not as lame as the shy toddler that once walked into our office crying “Shiphony Didi”, with his funny foot wears and computer sketches. He was not even looking at our faces. I once had a really clever dude as my detractor. As much as I hated him, I did not pity him half as much. On some levels, I respect my smart enemies. When they do clever things, I take my little diary and make a silent note of what had happened. It has helped me a long way.

There is of course, a reason why Nimesh Chandra was christened “Mr. Brilliant” by me and a colleague. We shall call this colleague Ms. Michelle. She is an exceedingly smart girl-a clever cookie. She is a character from which every future novelist will profit, and I sensed it the first day itself. I shall have much more to say on her as the story proceeds. When my stories reach him at breathtaking pace, I used to hear him scream: “Brilliant!” After a while, it became comical to the point of being ridiculous. It struck him that it is time to stop only when he saw us grinning at each other while he was rehashing the same old trick.

The day I joined, Mr. Brilliant gave me the dumbest work I have ever done in my life. When I was done, I heard him ask: “Did you enjoy it?”, in his characteristic squishy manner. Deep inside, I uttered an expression which would have struck him like a thunderbolt. I understood that this is a guy who cannot be trusted. I heard from Ms. Michelle that this is an ingenious torture they put all new recruits through–for reasons more than strategic. I was relieved when the quality of my work sharply improved after that.

I was amused when the first story idea Mr. Brilliant suggested for the finance section was on “intellectual property rights”. Feeling sorry, I said that it is not appropriate to have a story on intellectual property rights in the Finance section. I saw him turning his face, and more than an expression of humiliation and shame, it was intended as a message that this is simply not acceptable to him. Gross ineptitude in elders evokes pity of an unidentifiable nature in me. Perhaps I am supposed to feel: “Geez, you are lamer!”, as they suspect that I do. But, the truth is that I just find this spectacle sad and sickening to the core.

I had a very similar experience with a young colleague, Mr. Shaky Voice. When I joined the office, he came to me and said in his shaky voice: “I am a qualified CA. I had also cleared the Civil Services Mains three times.” Feeling that he was struggling to say a lot many things at once, I looked at him, and smiled politely, in silent understanding. When he left, I told Michelle what my smile meant: “But dude, why am I not impressed?” She laughed: “God, you are so mean! He is such a big dud, yaar!” When he once suggested a byline for an article of mine, I remember me leaping to say: “But, this comes off as too obvious.” He suddenly turned silent, and wouldn’t respond to anything I tell him for long.

Sensitivity when it comes to hard facts is the silent confession of a fundamental inferiority. Many of us have seen that in workplace, nothing unsettles people more than being told that they are wrong–that they are not good enough. It is the hatred of the inferior, a feeling of discomfort—a state of high tension and fear. It is something not to be talked about, but only to be understood. The saying that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is all but a pious fraud.

Needless to mention, I hated compiling News items for the Magazine. When Mr. Brilliant said, “You cannot escape such work. Everyone does it. Even I do it.” I thought, “But, you are not as smart as you think, Mr. Brilliant.” Every time, I go to his desk, he would give me a demonstration of how to paste news items in the common folder. He would point at the low IQ work he had done and say, “You can put it here-Like this”. I would smile, thinking, “I am sorry, but you are being too lame for my tastes!”

I remember a day in September when I couldn’t see anyone in the office. When I asked a colleague “What happened? I cannot see anyone here!” he replied, “Once in a while, you should take your eyes off the screen and look outside. You’ll get to know what happened.” There was a cloud burst in South Delhi. The media can inform you of such incidents. However, if all I gain from reading the news every day is to know some such “useful trivia”, the opportunity cost is too much to justify the time and effort. It is quite possible that I can create alerts, or learn it from my Facebook feed.

Mr. Marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!

The editor-in-chief of the Magazine happens to be Mr. Marx (Mahesh Sarma). The day I joined, he said in a tone that barely betrays his effort in faking intellectuality: “I am not a hard-core Marxist, but I do admire Marx. But, more than Marx, I am a follower of Polanyi.” There was a time when many Indians were proud to be Marxists, though most of them were at most capable of getting through “The Communist Manifesto”. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, many of these communists are embarrassed to say that they had even liked Marx. Some of them have told me with a shy smile: “But, I think some of Marx’s ideas actually make sense.” hoping that I might agree with them.

Marx added with considerable glee: “The staff here is dead slow. I want to sack all of them and bring in a new team. I am happy to have you here, as there is little scope for a meaningful debate in this Magazine.” Struggling to suppress my laughter, I thought, “He looks not-so-smart, but he has already started giving me hints. This actually means that I will also be sacked if I turn out to be as incompetent as the unfortunates who will soon be packing their pretty little bags.” I silently contemplated the way in which he cloaked the threat in a strategic compliment. The greatest lessons in my life have come through such silent contemplation.

The edit meets of Mr. Marx were really hilarious. The first edit meet went on for hours. I heard “Yes, boss” several times from different corners in a low, ritualistic manner. I noticed that I was yawning throughout while others were laughing. Could it be that I am not evolved enough to enjoy such humour? But, it was hard to miss that there was no way an average teenager would have gotten away with such jokes, irrespective of his friends circle. Something was truly amiss.

While walking out whining that he took the life out of me, Michelle enlightened me: “Edit meets, as you can see, are an occasion of unspeakable boredom for everyone concerned. The tactless Marx knows not when to stop, and these sycophants push him on.” I sadly missed the fact that these people were simply pretending to live a lie. This is not too complimentary to my intelligence. As an economist would have put it, it was “reminiscent of Alice’s Wonder-land: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn’t, simultaneously.”

It reminded me of a fictional scene in which a popular kid in school asks his hanger-ons, “Hey, what is that high-pitched noise?”. It elicited a response to this effect: “Yeah, I hear it too!”, and “Ow! Ow!”. Our popular kid suddenly chuckled and changed track: “I’m just kidding. There is no high-pitched noise.”, while his hanger-ons turned silent, struggling to hide their shame. Marx certainly was a connoisseur when it came to inept humour, and his subordinates laughed at his jokes no matter how dumb Mr. Marx made them look. The only difference was that Marx would not have been popular in any teenager’s hangout. On the contrary, he would have been subject to the meanest ridicule and ostracism.

With a wicked smile, I noticed that the most intelligent thing in that meeting was said by Mr. Marx himself: “Ours is a very egalitarian organization.” At this point, the roles were reversed. I started laughing when others were grim. When he looked at me as if there was something unseemly about my laughter, I wondered whether he was aware of the nuances involved in the concept named as “irony”. It appeared to me that he was mocking his hanger-ons in a way they wouldn’t have sensed it, in his characteristic humanitarian manner.

The concept of irony started appealing to me when I heard my unspeakably corrupt ex-boss saying that there can be no worse sin than to pay bribes to gain access to electricity or water. But, the height of irony will always be the picture of a woman lying in a bed and telling her boy friend that her husband is not smart enough to trust her. Perhaps the old saying, “Truth can be stranger than fiction” is true. Or, perhaps this nerd is in the middle of a high-paced dream in which truth and morality are subject to some severe mockery and punishment.

In my last job, a colleague had told me, “Inside the office, the boss is always right.” We all know some places in which the key to being treated fairly is saying that the loud hillbilly that barges into his room like a truck driver is not a contemptible moron. I am here, of course, speaking in a general categorical manner not intended at anyone in particular. Conformists are actively scheming to make a virtue out of a vice. We live in a topsy-turvy world in which imbecility becomes tact and cowardice becomes sophistication.

In my initial days, I wondered why quite a few noobs in the office happened to have done a PhD. A PhD wouldn’t get them money, and noobs in all likelihood have no use for abstractions. Some of them are still going through the motions, mouthing esoteric concepts like “compatibility approach”. When I heard such a girl speak about her course work, I smiled kindly, thinking: “Quite a mouthful. Isn’t it, my child?” Michelle’s journalistic instincts soon came in handy: “Sheesh, did you buy that? It is an inside secret that our Marx couldn’t even finish his PhD. You should have seen him then. He looked like Baba Ramdev and had a really difficult time finding a suitor.”

In a mischievous moment of mine, I had asked Marx whether he did his PhD at JNU. His answer was cleverly framed, though in a grand, pompous tone: “Of course. I was at JNU for seven years.” I chuckled: “Sure, but are you supposed to boast about it?” The way people mislead without an outright lie was always a fascinating subject for me. Perhaps, I can save all this for later use.

When we moved to a new office, I found a place behind his room.It would soon be clear to me why the wheels of the organization are not turning. I never saw him doing anything meaningful. When I told Michelle that the actress Nithya Menon regularly appears on his scene, she uttered an expression to this effect: “I pity the fat man.” One of the cutest things I had seen was him pressing his cursor on my profile and reading my status again and again, as if he were unable to trust his eyes.

The status read:

“Would you rape your sister if ordered to do so by your commanding officer?”

I once saw Mr. Brilliant too moving backwards from his screen in fear, and looking at me, while I was talking in a high-pitched tone, because he had just seen my status:

“Keeping a polite front while doing things behind your back risking others funds, property and reputation is the forte of lowly women. Men with a backbone will have more confidence in their own work and far more self-respect. But, then, I am talking of men. I should sue the ones who do not have the courage of their own malice!”

Miss Handicrafts

Another evil boss who tried to mess with me was a funny lady I would like to call “Miss Handicrafts”. When I once hinted at the hypocrisy of panegyrists of the past, she replied to my amusement: “I am actually a walking advertisement for Handicrafts. Even my chappals are handmade.” Her Facebook profile had a note: “I sleep around for pleasure. In business, I use intelligence.”

Her Facebook wall had a string of comments like, “Awww. Who is this cutie pie?”, when all I could see was a stray puppy hauled out of the dust bin, and was in for adoption by some nitwits seeking new modes of amusement. Once I saw her looking at a job notification for “sanitation supervisors” and saying: “It is quite interesting, isn’t it?” I thought, “Ha! The age of political correctness. In less enlightened days, they were known as garbage pickers. Madame, I would rather take hundred lashes.”

An ex-intern said that she kept him waiting for one and a half hours while feeding her stray puppies. He said, “Her handwriting is worse than that of my five year old nephew. I got marked down because my professors could not read her. She spells worse. She misspells simple words like “professional”, but her salary comes from spell check.”

I was on a vacation in Kerala when Miss Handicrafts called me up to ask me whether I could “swing by” for an interview the day after. I reached here in a day, and waited for hours. She looked at me in a condescending manner and said that I should be a lot more sensible in my communication, because I do not have an appointment or even a resume. I said nothing. She herself had fixed the appointment.

I haven’t bothered to write a proper resume, because in any case, it would be a listing of colleges I dropped out from, and the jobs I had left. I got my previous jobs and assignments without such hassles. She would later tell Mr. Marx: “A guy came here. He was so weird”. When I went for the interview, Marx asked sarcastically: “Have you taken your resume and everything?”, I understood what he meant. When I reached into my bag in a naive manner, he said that he doesn’t need it.

Miss Handicrafts was surprised when I later said that she should not expect me to be an idiot to not know that I am expected to fix an appointment and carry a resume. She wondered how I can play such pranks on my prospective employers. My reasons, however, were simple: I had glanced through the Magazine while traveling. I was soon convinced that I will get the job, because everything I had read in the Magazine was awfully written—unspeakably so. She had interviewed a lot many stupid people the last day, and had no reason to believe that I could be any different. “You were also so socially weird.” she added. “Now, I would say that you are socially unique.”

I had read her blog before joining, and it said many nice things like compassion for underprivileged children and stray puppies. “It would be a joy to work with compassionate women.”, I told myself. But, when my internet guy came the third time to get a document signed by the editor, she said sternly, “It is a private company. He will come again”. I stood speechless, wondering, “Good God! But, what about the sweet things that I had read in your blog?”. The editors in small publications can be pretty unimportant people, and wouldn’t mind stooping as low as they can. But they can be pretty rigid when it comes to showing common decency.

As Michelle had warned, Miss Handicrafts had some ‘school-teacher like’ tendencies. Once when she attempted to scold me, I had to say, “You can extend your compassion to hapless employees like me too. It is not just about cute little puppies and underprivileged children.” She had a hard time getting what I meant. I explained, “I do not have anything against cute little puppies or underprivileged children. I know that these are all noble, praiseworthy causes. But, as you know, that is not the point.” She said naively, “Sure. Sure”. For a while, she became my guinea pig while I honed my sarcasm.

I would soon see her shirking toil to talk for six or seven hours at a stretch on Google Talk, only to later tell Michelle, in a pompous tone, “Yesterday, I couldn’t finish that work. I had a lot many other things to do.” I once played a prank on her by saying that I once stopped to observe her short skirt. With great pride, she claimed that shorter hemlines can have that effect. The day after, I and Michelle rolled out in laughter seeing her in the same old skirt.

She often wondered why I always say, “normal people”, and use “I” three times in a sentence. I explained, “By the phrase ‘normal people’, I mean the average Joe–the Low IQ people we often see around.” She asked apprehensively, “This is so condescending. But, the guy who sweeps your floor in your apartment is not exactly a high IQ guy. Do you mistreat him?” I remember saying that I live by the wisdom of Nietzsche:

“When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty.”

I think I understand why people are uncomfortable with the personal pronoun ‘I’. Eight years ago, an Indian Magazine had published the work of a brilliant reporter. It illustrated the root of all the ills that plague humanity in a way not one man in a million could recognize. He ended up with an inner conviction which mirrored my darkest rationalization: “If natalists can be caught thinking of mandatory sterilization, it is hard to blame others.” When I was done, I noticed that the personal pronoun “I” was rooted out from his story with ruthless commitment. I could have said that this is a far graver mistake if it weren’t merely a symptom of the problem the story projected: The mind-heart dichotomy.

Miss Handicrafts manned the low IQ section. Every morning of mine was spent sulking, because I hated doing it. One day I purposefully delayed my work, and I heard that she blasted at some girls who work with me. They told me, “You are her darling. So, she takes it out on us.” I had to tell her that she should learn “The Law of Comparative Advantage.

“Smart people may excel in all activities, but as the law of comparative advantage reveals everyone’s better off if people with high IQs outsource their less challenging tasks to others. In a society of Einsteins, Einsteins take out the garbage, scrub floors, and wash dishes. What a mind-numbing waste of talent!”

After a deep pause, she asked, “Is this a low IQ angst thing? You don’t have to go to the lengths of sharing a complex theory to tell me something. No work is beneath our dignity. When I had to do low IQ work, I never considered it beneath my dignity. If I had considered it beneath my dignity, I would have been mighty ashamed of myself. Why don’t you talk to your boss?” I asked, “Who is my boss?” She said, “Your boss is Mr. Brilliant. Great things won’t come your way if you simply work, sitting in that little corner of yours. No one will come over there, and place things on your lap. You should be really vocal about your needs and capabilities.”

I was bewildered, “Oh, but I did not know all these things.”

She said, “You are guilt-tripping me now. First of all, you should have a good plan of action. Tomorrow morning, the first thing you should do after reaching the office is to present your problem to Mr. Brilliant. You should not forget your mission.”  I said, “Of course, I will never forget my mission.” The next day, I reached the office earlier, and waited and waited. I went to his desk the moment he came in. She was nearby at her desk, laughing, when I was hemming and hawing as an overture to my proposal, which he rejected saying “You cannot escape low IQ work.” I was upset the whole day.

Sweet Talk and Sarcasm

If he indeed rendered some mysterious service to the Magazine, I could not see what it was.

How “hierarchical structures” work is a subject of lifelong interest for me. So, I often wondered how our Marx fit into all this. If he indeed rendered some mysterious service to the Magazine, I could not see what it was. It would have taken a shrewd sleuth to untangle that mystery. But, Miss Handicrafts gave me a painfully articulated answer: “I think the publisher hired Marx because of his honesty.” I gathered that what they all felt towards Marx was, for very obvious reasons, “condescending respect”. It was a delicate sensitivity which was often expressed by a deafening silence and mushy rationalizations which suggested that he is not as incompetent as he appears. But, deep inside they knew that it was a lost battle.

The publisher himself, however, lacked such sensitivity. The week I joined, I remember him dropping into the office to ask, “Is Mr. Marx taking care of you properly?” When I said, “Yes”, he replied, “You must be joking. I know that he is not capable of anything.” It would soon be clear to me that he meant it. He once had fourteen Magazines, and from what I have heard, he did not inherit these Magazines. Unlike the editors ejected from JNU, he must be having a decent IQ. He must be a clever dude.

Michelle had a far more subtle attitude towards handing out compliments. The feminine malice of her compliments would inflict pain in so insidious a manner. “Mr. Marx is very down to earth, but an utterly incompetent manager.” “Mr. Marx is nice and everything, but when it comes to substantive matters, he is a sleepy boss. There were two very good journalists here. They had to leave because of this nonsense.” All this would be said with great sadness and a sympathetic expression on her face. At best, her compliments meant that “He is a very humble person who has a lot to be humble about.” I am the biggest fan of being nice, but to me, there is nothing more unbearable than thinking of myself as someone whose sole merit is interpersonal nicety.

Humility. Ha, the all-excusing virtue!

Her back-handed compliments had a distinct flair. They were unsurpassed in its lameness, and were often along these lines: “She tries to be a big fashionista, but lacks taste or discretion. But, I really do admire her spirit.” “She is smart and talkative, but it is not hard to see why she stays up in the night.” “The doll is very articulate, but lacks substance. I admire such people, because I do not have that talent.” “Good body. She would have looked awesome if we cut out her face.” “She looks very old, but I am glad that his search for a suitor has finally come to an end.” But, when she glared at a regional language actress we saw in the market and screamed: “So simple, but she looks so mediocre.” I had to run. The actress had looked at us with some distinct affection.

My think-tank boss had a far more strategic approach. Like Mr. Marx, he too had an impeccable talent for cloaking his threats in compliments. When he once said, “With this kind of attitude, all your knowledge and rationality will come to a naught.” he actually meant that he still cannot get over me blasting at him in front of giggling female colleagues. When he once said, “With all your intellectual ammunition, you cannot see this!”, he actually meant that I am a noob to miss the fact that messing with him can be dangerous. When he told my father that a boy who is always on Facebook cannot be normal, he meant that if I stayed anymore in Delhi, he will soon be having yummy wheat balls for his breakfast.

But when his wife said, “Use your words carefully”, she was trying to ask, “Why are you doing this to him?”. And when I replied sweetly, “There are things which go unmentioned because it would be cheapness to even bring myself to utter it. Given my kindness and compassion, the last thing I want is to hurt another person’s sentiments. Sometimes, I feel that I should have laughed at their faces, or at least slapped, but it all goes unrewarded.”, I was merely hinting that if he was man enough, he would have been capable of paying his employees on time.

Sarcasm is indeed, spanking for adults!

When he once screamed in his shrill voice, “Our contractor is like my brother. The job market is about relationships. That is why I invested in my relationship with you. If you are convinced that it is only competence that matters, go to the job market and see!” he had self-interested reasons to say so. To scare that dude, I had just indirectly hinted at the contractor’s role in informing me about the corrupt practices in the think-tank.I later heard that the same evening, all his contracts were cut forever.

The contractor however, was not good at sensing my sarcasm, perhaps because of his poor grasp on the language. When I once told him, “I cannot apologize enough for helping you lose your biggest contract.”, he replied with benevolent gratitude, “No issues, brother.”

Sarcasm is spanking for adults. It should grant them self-esteem to the point that they would not be able to sit down for the rest of their lives. Yet, they would be forced to pretend politeness and friendliness, and beg.

Miss Michelle

Mr. Noob is apparently kind-hearted. He will be doing all the leg-work for us.

I and Michelle would soon be staying up the whole night for chit-chat. But, there will be no traces of sleeplessness on our faces when we reach the office at sharp 9 O’clock the next day. Things went on well for weeks. One evening in September, I got a friend request from someone on Google Talk.  As he talked incoherently to the point of being unintelligible, I was about to block him. Soon, I saw a head popping up from the other end of the office, and saying, “It is me.” It was a designer. I shall call him Mr. Noob. I calmed down. Politeness comes naturally to me when it comes to people I see around in real life. In between, I heard from Michelle about the wonderful gifts he gave her, and the “brotherly” relationship they share.

An ex-intern had told me, “Mr. Noob is a retard. Period.”

I and Michelle used to give each other unique handle names on Google Talk. The little girl near me often wondered why I was always talking to fairy tale characters like “Cinderella”, “Snow White”, “Alice” and “Cleopatra”. Reality struck me when I heard from Michelle that Mr. Noob somehow figured out who “Cleopatra” is, though he had a hard time spelling it. He spelled it as “Cla”. He rarely comes our way. So, if he can see things better, it must either be because he has “real intelligence” without the trappings of education, or because he is watching us like a hawk. I easily ruled out the first possibility.

One day, Michelle insisted that I make a list of the songs that we both loved. I felt that there was something unseemly about her being bent on this, but I did it nevertheless. Later, Michelle said happily that Mr. Noob downloaded those songs for me. He was conned into believing that it was for her. When I inquired about the ethical aspects of her deed, she reassured me, “You need not worry about him doing the leg work for us. He is apparently kind-hearted.”

A few days later while I and Michelle were walking through Deer Park, I got a phone call. When I picked up the phone, there was a dreadful silence for a minute and then the call hanged up. Michelle was silent till the call hanged up, and suddenly asked me whether the phone number starts with 4. She was right. She said with a chuckle that it must be someone from the office trying to figure out whether we are together. She later tried her best to distract my attention. The next day, I did not ask any of the usual suspects. But, I asked Mr. Noob. He denied it.

Tell me Mr. Noob, what bothers you at midnight?

The Magazine production was going on in those days, and I used to skip sleep continuously. I went to take a short nap before midnight. Mr. Noob woke me up, and asked me whether we could have a talk. I had expected this for weeks.

What followed was a desperate cry. “She was my best friend for the last three years. She left me the day you joined. Please give her back to me. Consider me as your brother.” I said, “I am not sure I need any more siblings.” He uttered a Hindi word, which I do not understand. After a long struggle and verbal gymnastics, he suddenly said, “False promise. She gave me false promise.” His speech was an incoherent jumble of words, and he continuously pleaded that I simplify my speech.

I asked him, “But, Mr. Noob, there is one thing which I do not understand. You are much older than me. You have told me that you are a father of two children. You have a little daughter. I might be a bohemian, but if I am not wrong, people like you believe in something called “Bharatiya Sanskriti”. Are the things you do right by your own code?” He admitted his wickedness, but again pleaded, “Three years later, she might leave you too. So, isn’t it in your self-interest to give her back to me?” I laughed, “Yes, but if I go by such reasoning, why do you even need her?” He agreed that I make sense, but still maintained that his plea stands.

“She is my everything. I wish not to say more, because I do not want it to be public. I know to what extent you both have gone in this relationship.”, he cried. It became clear to me that he had read our conversations. He said something to the effect that she is into this for money. I ended the conversation saying that I will do whatever possible. When we climbed the steps of the office, his tone turned threatening, and I said that he will not be having a career if he speaks this way to me. The guard in the Outlook office woke up and peeped out of the door, in bewilderment.

My status message read, “He felt many emotions toward his fellow men, but respect was not one of them.”

Mr. Noob came near me, bent forward, and asked, “Is your status about me?” I thought, “Mr. Noob, you are so funny!” The whole night, he pestered me. He spelled “She” as “C” and could not make heads or tails out of anything I said online. That night, I was cruelly sarcastic to Michelle. In between, she asked repeatedly whether Mr. Noob is lurking around the corner. At the end, she said, “I should sleep. I feel very tired. I do not know why I ended up like this.” I asked her what she meant, and she replied, “You know it, Shanu. You know it.”

“I think I know who is Cla.”–Mr. Noob

Around early morning, I noticed that he had forwarded our conversations to his mailbox. I went to him, and in front of everyone in the office, I asked him to open his mailbox. He opened his mailbox, shuddering. The mails were not there. What followed was a high-pitched shouting at the end of which the office turned silent. I asked him, “Did you delete those conversations?” When he said blindly, “No”, I yelled, “You are such an idiot.” He did not know that I asked that question only to trap him. It was the stupidest answer he could have granted me. The dispute ended when Mr. Brilliant asked me to leave it. While standing at the other end of the road, I saw Mr. Noob and Mr. Brilliant walking out of the office together. After all, birds of the same feather flock together.

No one present would have known that I hadn’t the slightest anger towards Mr. Noob.

Michelle hadn’t slept that night. I knew that she wouldn’t. In the evening, Mr. Noob called me, and apologized, claiming that everything he had said was wrong. Michelle said that she had gone to his home to threaten his family saying that he is destroying her reputation. His wife begged at her feet saying that she should not destroy his career and family. I could not think of any reaction to all this, other than “Yuck!”. In between, she cried, “Such a bad world! It is such a bad world! This is what I get for all the help I had done for his family!”

Oh, now the world is not good enough for her?

After a long silence, I asked contemptuously, my temper flaring up “If I am not wrong, you too come from a family like that of mine. Or, am I wrong?” She said, “Definitely”, in a manner that the answer needed emphasis, and then there was a long pause.

In the coming days, she would whine endlessly, and weep, placing her head on her desk, hoping that I would notice. I would take note of this all with a wicked smile, and talk as if nothing happened. To every sarcastic jibe of mine, like “You know, Sexual promiscuity is genetic, i.e., inherited from one’s parents.”, she would cringe and reply shamelessly, “You just made me smile.”

After many such days, I took her to Deer Park, and I heard her say, “I am so happy for this outing.”

She had once taken the children on the top of our office to a college campus, and while traveling back, it was too late in the night, and the girl child started crying saying that her father would punish her. In the whole journey, I was nervous thinking that it would happen. That night, I had wondered how she could miss it.  It was only later I would understand that she had used those children for manufacturing drama.

The day after she took my “Wimpy Kid series”, she leaped from behind and said, “It is so cute. It is so cute.” I was not much responsive. Because, the day before, she had pointed at the picture of some underprivileged African babies, cooing, “It is so cute. It is so cute.”

Good God! Isn’t that Mr. Noob?

A few days later, I and Michelle left the office at the same time. When I neared my apartment, I felt as if my vision was blurred. My knees shuddered, and my coffee flask almost fell from my hands because Mr. Noob was standing near the steps of my apartment, waiting for me. When I threatened to call the police, he left saying that three of us will have to die together. He wouldn’t have known my house and reached there before me if he hadn’t stalked me before. We moved her car to a corner, and she cried like I had never seen anyone cry. I did not know whom I should sympathize with.

Her cry turned into a giggle when I said that he waited at my door to catch us with our pants down. That night, I had to stay in the market when the power went off, because my room had suddenly become unsafe. I and Michelle had named the room, “The Black Hole.” The next day, Mr. Noob told her with a beaming face: “Tumhara Bachcha Dar Gaya.” She translated, “Your baby was scared!”

I told Michelle that I have no option other than to complain to the police, and to Mr. Marx. I insisted that she tell the whole truth, whatever it is, because Mr. Noob had set out to inflict harm. The punishment for cyber crimes, I said, is severe. She denied everything. She said that there was no point in informing his family, as they too are lacking in common sense or education. I went ahead to tell Mr. Marx. Marx said, “Mr. Noob has been working with me for the last three years. I have never had any problems with him.” I said, “He is not normal. If it goes on this way, I should register a complaint with the police.”

There was an expression of fear on Marx’s face. He said, “He is normal, Shanu. There is no point in calling the police. The police will be glad to listen to whoever pays them the most. I will make sure that this will not happen again.” I know what he feared. At the end, I said, “He is trying to malign the reputation of my friends.” Marx pretended not to understand what I meant, but I later gathered that he understood everything. Our affair was a public secret, and I was perhaps the only one who was unaware of this.

The next day, I woke up from my daytime slumber hearing a noise from Michelle’s desk. A tiff was going on between Michelle and Mr. Noob. But, Why oh Why? Michelle had to pay back a big amount of money to Mr.Noob. She had cleverly evaded it for months. But now, the push has come to shove when he insisted that she settles the accounts. When I asked for an explanation, she said, “I really had a blackout in my mind. But, I threw that money on his face. He took it silently, because he is not a man.”

But, there was no blackout in her mind when she talked endlessly of the unrepayable debt his family owed her.

She was put through some real hell in the next two months, in which sarcasm, manufactured outbursts and reconciliations reached a new high. In the end, I spent four uncommunicative days in front of her, writing a 10,000 word note to someone I shall call “Virgin Mary”. I had long made it clear that I was committed. At the end of the fourth day, it was clear to her that it was a lost battle. She believed me now.

She turned silent. I asked her in a tone of manufactured anger and helplessness, “Michelle, why are you not talking to me?”. She said, “You have been very nice to me. You have almost spitted on my face.” I chuckled, “Haven’t I been doing it for months? Why did it take you so long to see it?” She finally admitted that she had refused to pay back Mr. Noob. Things came to an end.

She said, “I can never forget this.” I replied, “Neither can I.”

The next day while I was talking to Mr. Brilliant, on his screen, my status read:

“Drama Queens can be amusing: I have loads of responsibilities. My father has clotting in his brain. My brother is insane. My husband just ditched me, and I am a lifelong patient.” Why can’t they simply say: I just want to get laid!”

Below it, her status read, “I am surprised seeing how much you care!”

I wondered, “Good God, what is she trying to do to me?” I understood what she wanted.

Polite sarcasm wars however, continued. I would say, “I am reading an evolutionary psychology paper which explains why spinsters have bleeding-heart tendencies. It explains why men fall for compassionate women, and why women use it as a signaling mechanism. It is a costly signaling mechanism, nevertheless. So, women use it only when men are noticing–mostly when their mate value falls.”, and she would reply, hiding her shame, “You are making me laugh.”

The hatred of the inferior

Let No Man Take What Is Mine

I was shaken when an article of mine on central banking was given a title which would completely misrepresent my position. When I asked the designers whether it can be changed, Mr. Brilliant said calmly from a corner, in his soft, sticky voice: “We have already given it to the printer.”

It was only later I would know that he had decided to retaliate.

In the next few months, I would leave the office at odd hours like 5 O’clock in the morning to be back in three hours, only to see my articles packed and gone. Initially, I believed that this was just an inevitable outcome of Mr. Brilliant’s terrible incompetence, and “lack of co-ordination”. I was not fully convinced that all this was purposeful.

Once the proof reader insisted that I capitalize the “s” in “state” (The political entity). In the last one decade of reading, I have never seen it capitalized in the middle of a sentence. How can a 51 year old proof reader not know what the political concept “state” means? Pathetic! I insisted that he substantiate his case, and he refused to listen. I had to change it myself.

The next month, I noticed that a reference to the “inherent conflict between the poor and the greedy rich” was smuggled into an article of mine. I am amused whenever I hear someone argue that the wealthy are greedy, and still call for a redistribution of their wealth. I can, of course, claim that I am a virgin because I am not interested in sex. But, how much sense does it make if I still demand that women should be coerced to share my bed? I went to Mr. Brilliant and said firmly, “I will never write a sentence like this.” Mr. Brilliant looked at me in a frightened manner. He was keen to know whether I had discussed it with the proof reader. Later, I understood why he was frightened—because, it was written by Mr. Brilliant himself.

There is of course a reason why I love one lady boss who blasted at her incompetent male executives, “You’re eunuchs. How can your wives stand you? You’ve got nothing between your legs.”

Perhaps. But, then perhaps!

It all began when I once asked Mr. Brilliant:  “Is it possible to change the pictures you have chosen for my articles?” He had wrongly chosen the pictures. He lost his temper, but in a moment he regained his consciousness and asked, “What is the big deal? It is a picture.” But, when I looked at the production schedule, I noticed that he had decided not to publish one article. When I asked him why, he waffled and walked away.

When I asked for a final copy of my articles, Mr. Brilliant said with a clever smile that I can see the published version when the Magazine is out. The next month, the proof reader suggested that I demand a printout the moment he is done with it. When I did, I heard that the proof reader himself had finalized it. It became clear to me that these dunces were playing on me for months.

It is completely beyond me how they get away with such behavior from other writers. Don’t they have any self-respect? Don’t they care whether their position is being misrepresented and put in the public domain?

So, the next time when I noticed that Mr. Brilliant had wrongly replaced an expression of mine, I corrected him then and there.

The most pleasureful experience while working here was saying ‘It is an expression’, before arrogating the keyboard to myself and changing the text in the Word Document in Mr. Brilliant’s computer.  He stood speechlessly with a visible movement in his throat, as presumably, Miss Handicrafts was watching from behind. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen.

Whoa! That must have hurt. It must have hit where it hurts the most.

The next day while reading the draft of an article, he said, “If you were brought up with some capitalistic worldview, you can air it in your own blog.” I was just amused. The next day, his tone was firmer: “You can write for your own blog.” I said, “I’ll have to see”, and left. Later, he threatened in his childish manner, “I have discussed it with Mr. Marx. You’ll see.” I had heard that Mr.Marx and Mr. Brilliant were batch mates at JNU.

I do not know why I the image of a stray puppy which howls, yelps and wags his tail flashed in my mind.

When I said that I will have a talk with Marx, he was frightened. He looked at me calmly, and said, “I have no issues. It is you who is making an issue out of this.” In between, he said, “The pictures. I did not take it personally. But, you did.” I chuckled, thinking: “It has been months. Are you still not able to forget it, honey? Did I hurt you as much?”

I saw him nervously moving his hand through his hair. We all got an unprecedented mail informing us of the production schedule. I understood that he was running like hell. When I raised the issue to Mr. Marx, Mr. Brilliant claimed that he had no issues at all. But, the next day, I couldn’t find the reference books on my desk. Mr. Brilliant had taken it away.

Sheesh, Rat! Is he a man?

Month after month, I saw the designers telling me with a naive grin: “Rajaram finalize kar diya.” This month, I shouted, “I do not care whether Rajaram finalized it or not”, and I saw three printouts flying out of the machine and falling into my hands. When I saw the frightened expression on the face of the proof reader when I said, “I have been telling this for the last five months”, I was sick with pity. I do not know what is his role in this racket, but isn’t he much older than them? How can he take orders, like a rug under their feet?

The next month, there was no edit meet as usual. Mr. Brilliant, I suspect, feared that I will humiliate him in front of the girls in the office. In a personal meeting, he said, “I give you demanding articles because I know the capabilities of everyone. If I give it to say, Miss ‘Way of Living’, I know that it will not get done because it requires a lot of reading. We have fired that photographer who choose that pictures, because it is not just you who have problems with her. She is a novice.”

Good God, did he use me to get that photographer out?

Miss ‘Way of Living’ is a JNU PhD student. Once when I wondered how smoke was coming out of the front seat of Michelle’s car, I noticed that this kid was busy smoking up. When I once said that smoking is not exactly good for her health, she retorted contemptuously, “It is a way of living, Yaar”. Mr. Brilliant had once said in a meeting in which she was not present, “She has got no perspective at all.” I wondered what she must have done to humiliate him.

The day after the meeting was spent shifting my house, and the next day, I was down with cold. But, that evening, Mr. Brilliant got three of my four stories–all of them well-written. It included a beautifully written five page story on sustainable development. When people who happen to observe me wonder whether I ever work at all, I used to give them long speeches on my teeth-clenched determination and will power. But, Mr. Brilliant, I presume, got an honest answer. My keyboard does the job. I barely have to work. It humiliated him.

I knew that he would soon retaliate. I was proven right.

Even after many weeks, he did not send back my story on “sustainable development”. During the next Magazine production, I stayed in the office skipping food because I knew that Mr. Brilliant has been waiting for long. Around 5 in the evening when I was told to wait for the machine, I noticed that Miss Doll was playing on my stories of mine. Mr. Brilliant knew that it was the best way to manufacture a fight, because I had some history with her.

I had heard that it was a public secret in the office that I used to have live commentary on Miss Doll on Facebook when I joined the office. With updates along these lines:

 “It is not that I enjoy being in a room full of girls–all of them constantly trying to impress each other. Through the crack of my headphones, I often hear: “When I was with Economic Times, I practically ran the whole organization. Later, I went to do my Post Grads in Medieval History.” and such like nonsense. I will be rolling my eyes.”

“I can see a girl through my glasses who shakes her head like an obedient High School girl–when someone tells her something. The moment I saw her head shake, I understood that this is her first job. Every morning she comes in so early, moves her hair from one side of the head to another and picks up the phone. But, she is so clever. She conned me into doing more low IQ work today.”

The truth was just that I found all this funny and cute.

Once when my status update said, “The best thing about winters will always be women taking off their jackets! One of my prized possessions is Nabokov’s Lolita. I love it not so much for the literary merit, as for its beautiful cover with a young girl’s legs in tiny socks and saddle shoes. Winters remind me of Lolita.” many were convinced that I am worthy of suspicion, and that she should be careful! But, as it happens, it was not intended at her.

Miss Doll once came to me to insist that I should send in my work soon. I agreed that I will finish the work as soon as possible. She popped up a couple of times to see to it that I am not shirking. When such things happen, I know at the back of my mind that the esoteric agenda is something else. But, I dismissed the thought inwardly and bent over backwards not to sound dismissive.

In between, I was asked by Mr. Brilliant to work on another article on an immediate basis. She again appeared and said with a twinkle in her eyes: “I will report.” I was amused, and was suddenly reminded of how a classmate sulked in LKG: “I will complain to the class teacher.” The three year old me ended up crying. I wondered why I was turning all misty eyed and reaching for those rose tinted glasses. But, I soon forgot the whole incident.

Many days later, I wanted to know something and went ahead to ask her. I heard her mumble hysterically, as if she was spitting venom. I was always slow to grasp. I was taken aback, but later things fell into place. She was burning in humiliation for the last ten days, waiting eagerly for an opportunity to strike back. Her hidden agenda hadn’t worked out that well. It is understandable. The dichotomy became visible. I understood everything.

But, when this liberated young lady tinkered with my property, did I throw her out on her pigtails as I should have done? No! I was too much of a gentleman for all that! But, I saw her springing up from her chair and walking like a toddler, her hair bouncing from one side to another, only to speak in a way characteristic of a child who screams: “Mommy yelled at me today!”

Yes, but Mommy yelled for a reason!

I told her firmly that he is not supposed to give it to her. No one knows my position well enough to improve upon it. I gathered from the way she spoke that she was very much part of the game.

Yuck!

Mr. Brilliant had grossly misrepresented my position in the sustainable development article. Now, this is criminal. I rejected his changes. When I was back after having my “dinner”, he had cleverly finalized one article of mine. When I asked for a copy, taking him to task in front of everyone, he screamed, “Go to hell. You can complain to anyone you want!” After a while, he messaged me on Google talk saying that he had scrapped the finalized article. He knew that I wouldn’t let him publish it that way. He chose to say it on Google Talk because giving me a copy would be an admission of defeat in front of his team. It was a cry of humiliation. Aren’t all these shameful games at the expense of the publisher?

But then, I had heard of old-fashioned artificial constructs like dignity, honor, self-respect and ‘holding ones head high’. I am not supposed to kill his self-respect-not even his pretense at it, as even that is lacking. I wondered whether he even has a backbone.

Unlike the editors ejected from JNU, he must be having a normal IQ.

I sent an email to the publisher and editor saying that if nothing is done, I will have to substantiate all this in as public a manner as possible. In my interview, I had given them an anarchistic article of mine because my convictions are of utmost importance to me. This was a left-of-center publication, and I was jobless in Delhi for five months at that point. The next day, the publisher came to the office and waved his hand at me twice, in a cleverly conscious manner, perhaps hoping that I might forget it.

In the evening, a sweet mail went to Mr. Brilliant, marking everyone who writes for the Magazine, along with Mr. Marx and the publisher.

 ”Dear Mr. Brilliant,

Corporate Finance and Corporate Financing are two different things. We learn the latter as a part of the former. Please let me know if you face similar problems next time. Even in the last issue, you had written “Single Currency Vs Common Currency”. As you should have been able to see, it was “Single Currency Versus Multiple Currency”. Please do it properly, as it goes out in my name. It is a request. It is far better to leave it to be corrected by me, than to leave the judgment to the readers. I sincerely hope that you understand the gravity of the problem.”

Mr. Marx promised to ensure that it will not happen to me again. At the back of my mind, I knew that they were scheming. In the next few weeks, Mr. Marx gave me much of the work for the anniversary issue. When I looked at the production schedule, my articles were not there. I blasted at them and walked out.

Mr. Marx also received a sweet mail saying I am tired to work anymore with people who do not have common decency. It began this way:

“Dear Mr. Marx,

Though I do not write for the Magazine, I often notice that many words and expressions are used inappropriately. For instance, in the “From the Editors Desk” in March issue, the word “invariably” was used many times, and in an inappropriate sense. “Minimization of entrances” is an incorrect expression in that context. It is used rarely, and even when it is used, it refers to the entrance of, say, a street. Likewise, the language is too immature for a Magazine. I think it has to be more mature to attain respectability. I think it is possible to bring in maturity without straining the reader. After all, it is a Magazine on education.”

I hope that he will soon be able to sit down properly.

I decided to leave, and refused to send in my stories. I received an email from Mr. Brilliant saying that it would be better if I say a “Good Bye”. At the end of his mail, there was a “See”, indicating “See how my backstabbing worked out.” I asked him: “What else have been I telling you guys for long?”

Yuck! Is he a man? Honestly, how can his wife stand him?

The next day, Mr. Marx sent me an SMS: “Where is that idiot?” When I replied, “Intelligent people would know to hurl far more sophisticated insults, Mahesh”, he called me. What followed was a feminine cry, “Shanu, You have not sent me a single story yet. Are you not working anymore? I am your employer. I have a Magazine to run. I have a deadline to meet.”

Marx knew that he will have to implicitly beg, as he had heard from Michelle that I wish to proceed against them. I knew that she played no mean role in all this back-stabbing. I said, “I do not want to hear anything. Others too have deadlines to meet and dues to pay. The Magazine has never paid us on time.”

A girl’s status message often read, “I am so poor that I cannot focus.”

Mr. Marx claimed that the salary was never delayed. When I said that I had documented it, because I had salary issues with my previous employer, he turned more apprehensive. He promised that he will send an email stating that my salary will be credited on 31^st itself.

The accountant was funny: “Salary was never delayed. If you are a member of a family, you should understand this. If his parents deprive a child of his toys, there could be many reasons behind it. But, it does not mean that the parents do not love their child. The company loves you, Shanu. The company loves you!”

In those days, the King Fisher employees were on a strike because they were also denied their just dessert. The day my responsibilities were over, the Publisher Maheshwer Peri felt a pressing desire to express his outrage on his Facebook wall:

“If your kingfisher flight got canceled recently, go to a bar, order a Kingfisher beer, and just when they open the bottle, cancel the order.”

The Sage Of Baltimore

While glancing at a picture of a bunch of Harvard students holding a flag along with Mencken, captioned “Mencken was our God, and the American Mercury our Bible”, I couldn’t help wondering how a 20^th century American journalist could evoke such burning passion in the minds of the very young. I had once read with  puzzlement that my favorite novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand showed him the manuscript of her first novel, calling him the greatest representative of a philosophy to which she wanted to dedicate her life. I had loved Rand’s caricature of H L Mencken (Austen Heller): “He had started as a literary critic and ended by becoming a quiet fiend devoted to the destruction of all forms of compulsion, private or public, in heaven or on earth. He could discuss the latest play on Broadway, medieval poetry or international finance.”  I had read that according Mencken’s own judgment, “Notes on Democracy” was the worst book he had ever written. But, I was shocked speechless when I read it, as it was the greatest work I have ever read on the “blind worship of mere numbers”. Everything I had heard of “the man who hated everything” started suddenly making perfect sense to me. I can easily agree with Joseph Wood Krutch that Mencken was truly the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century.

When Facebook Social Interview once asked me which dead person I would want to bring back to life, without any hesitation I answered that it  would be H L Mencken. When I later read in an article of a GMU Economist that if he could bring one person back to life for an evening of good food, stiff drink and sterling conversation, that person would unquestionably be H.L. Mencken, I thought that it was too much to be a coincidence. Could it happen that many of his readers have the same idea of fun, a similar fantasy that will never come true?

Nothing expresses the Mencken phenomenon better than these words of Murray Rothbard: “It is typical of American Kultur that it was incapable of understanding H. L. Mencken. And it was typical of H. L. Mencken that this didn’t bother him a bit.”

In a world where most libertarians believed and still believe in patriotism, in a world where chauvinism is condemned if among men sharing a common belief, but glorified if among ones sharing a common political or provincial frontier, Mencken was a thinker who marched to a different tune. He believed that “patriotism has been elevated in the modern world into an unparalleled congeries of imbecilities”. He was convinced that every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

I often think of William Manchester’s word on Mencken: “Fifty years ago I spent my mornings reading to an old man who suffered, as I now suffer, from a series of strokes. He was a writer. He was H. L. Mencken. I have never known a kinder man. But when he unsheathed his typewriter and sharpened its keys, his prose was anything but kind. It was rollicking and it was ferocious. Witty, intellectual polemicists are a vanishing breed today. Their role has been usurped by television boobs whose IQs measure just below their body temperatures. Some journalism schools even warn their students to shun words that may hurt. But sometimes words should hurt. That is why they are in the language. When terrorists slaughter innocents, when corporation executives betray the trust of shareholders, when lewd priests betray the trust of little children, it is time to mobilize the language and send it into battle. I still miss him. America misses him more.”

William Manchester’s tribute to Mencken sets in our minds highly scrupulous standards which much of humanity would not even begin to understand. Yet, these are still the standards which all thinkers should strive to live up to.

But, there is another reason why I think Mencken’s analysis of democracy is unparalleled—–Because, what I feel about all this cannot be said in clearer terms than it was said by the bad boy of Baltimore:

“But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?”

Ayn Rand

When I see condemnation of the journalistic standards of “The Times of India” filling my news-feed, a question posed by Gail Wynand whose media empire spread like bubonic plague comes back to me: “Do you think it took no talent to create the Banner?”  Gail Wynand, the publisher of the New York Banner owned twenty-two newspapers, seven magazines, three news services and two newsreels. He burnt prodigious energy and will power to achieve perfection in serving every perverse need of his ultimate boss-the imbecile on the street who consumes news, gossip and lurid stories like drugs. It took spectacular talent for Wynand to achieve extraordinary perfection in the ordinary.

One of the most powerful scenes in “The Fountainhead” is when several newspapers cornered Gail Wynand, the publisher of New York Banner, to censure him for debasing public tastes. Gail Wynand replied in his characteristic manner: “You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. It is not my function, to help people preserve a self-respect they haven’t got. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe.”

In the New York Banner’s first public campaign, they appealed to the charitable sentiments of the public by displaying pictures of a pretty girl waiting for her illegitimate child, and a starving scientist side by side. The campaign raised one thousand and seventy-seven dollars for the unwed mother when the young scientist had to be content with nine dollars and forty-five cents. At the end of the campaign, Gail Wynand had decided how the Banner deserves to be run.

The Banner pandered to the envy and ignorance of the masses. The Banner strained everything from truth and taste to credibility, but not the intelligence of the reader. The pedestrian text of The Banner shot through the brains of readers. The Banner applied a philosophy that rules all newspapers on earth in as ruthlessly consistent and explicit a manner as possible: “When there’s no news, make it. News is that which will create the greatest excitement among the greatest number. The thing that will knock them silly. The sillier the better, provided there’s enough of them.” Gail Wynand once brought a man to his office whose plain face can in no way be differentiated. When Wynand told his staff, “When in doubt about your work, remembers that man’s face. You’re writing for him.” an astonished young editor replied, “But, Mr. Wynand, one can’t remember his face.” “That’s the point,” replied Wynand.

When he was asked to explain his policy, Gail Wynand said: “Men differ in their virtues, if any but they are alike in their vices. I am serving that which exists on this earth in greatest quantity. I am representing the majority–surely an act of virtue?” Gail Wynand could conceptualize and leverage the instinctively shrewd, if often unsophisticated wisdom of newspaper barons: “If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them. If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two–and you’ve got them. Sex first. Tears second. Make them itch and make them cry—and you’ve got them.”

There was no day in Wynand’s adult life in which he had slept more four hours. He was no different from a slave who worked never taking anything in return save his rent and meals, when his best reporters lived in luxurious hotels. He never needed a second explanation. He never needed to read his brilliant pieces over again. After his first week in school, he walked out saying: “Should I swill everything down ten times? I know all that.” In Hell’s kitchen where he was born, no one read books, but Wynand read everything he could get his hands on. His reading branched out chaotically, in all directions. He wanted to know everything about everything. In every decision that people called crazy, he has always had the final laugh. Gail Wynand could easily grant his fellow men a lot many things they couldn’t have granted him, but respect was not one among them.

Like many of us who are drunk on drugs, whiskey, religion, literature or even philosophy, Gail Wynand was drunk on the desire to power, the only thing he had ever wanted. In the end, when Dominique Wynand says “Gail, what a great journalist you could have been.” after knowing that Gail Wynand had written much of the copy himself, many of us feel sorry for a could-have-been. No real world example illustrates the brutal honesty of Gail Wynand better than the commercial success of Times of India, the English language newspaper with the widest readership on earth, and the failure of the fake intellectuality and compassion of bleeding heart journalism.

Gail Wynand of Wynand Papers has always been my fictional hero, and always will be. The most accurate expression of a worldview I can relate to is evident when Gail speaks his mind: “I’ve never owned anything. I’ve never wanted anything. I’ve never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. I’ve never known how to say ’mine’ about anything. You don’t love me. You wish to grant me nothing. I accept it and I want you to marry me. It is not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that.” It is a vague feeling of helplessness, a painful longing deep inside our minds that is rarely articulated in a way it ought to be. It is a complex emotional state only a master of the art can express with as much clarity.

Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon

No fiction work has ever had an effect on me that even begins to compare with that of Ayn Rand’s masterpiece, “The Fountainhead”. And one of the most fascinating stories in the history of ideas will always be that of a 21 year old Russian migrant who was yet to achieve mastery of English language later going on to become the most influential thinker in the libertarian movement.

While she evoked more passionate devotion than any libertarian thinker, she also evoked intense hatred. The reasons are not far to seek. Never did I read a writer who was as good at unmasking the ugly face of the Apostle’s of public welfare. Ayn Rand did not hesitate to say that a moral cannibal who rejects freedom should be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics. In a world where humility and tolerance are considered primary virtues, Ayn Rand was the epitome of arrogance. But, it is hard to deny that hers was a voice that was heard when that of other libertarians were all but lost in the “inarticulate sounds of panic”. The great economist Ludwig Von Mises said to her in a letter praising “Atlas Shrugged”: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State.” Mises called her the “most courageous man in the United States”. When she heard this from Henry Hazlitt, she asked: “Oh, did he say man?”.

February 2^{nd, 2012} was her 107^th Birthday.

I came across Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” in a road side book stall in a phase when I was beginning to read Mises, Bastiat and Rothbard. One day, while travelling, I decided to read her work all the way to the end. The book radically changed my perspective on politics and economics. Ayn Rand never doubted whether socialism and slavery are any different. If you think that this is hyperbole, consider the comment of Ralph Weber, a Facebook friend of mine: “Where I live, we used to have free healthcare, free food, free education, free clothing, free shelter and it seemed to work pretty well for a while. It existed prior to 1861. It was called slavery.”

I went on to read her other works too. I loved “The Fountainhead”. Soon, the virtue of selfishness became way too obvious to me. Her philosophy started making near perfect sense. Yet, I had many disagreements in the area of psychology which became clear when I read Nathaniel Branden’s critique of her philosophy a few months after coming across her works. When Nathaniel Branden said in a speech: “Howard Roark gives out an unrealistic picture of human psychology.” he was mildly pointing to that reality.

Still, much of her philosophy sounded very true, very much obvious. How could this be wrong? I did not find clear answers to it till I read Michael Huemer’s essay and Scott Ryan’s “Objectivism and The Corruption of Rationality”. Though I still agree to many of her controversial positions, I have plenty of disagreements. So, where do I disagree?

It is beyond the scope of this article to get into it all my disagreements. Let us take a look at her ethics, which is indicative. I often hear that Rand’s biggest contribution is her ethics. I find a circular argument in her ethical framework which is so glaring that it is surprising that someone can even miss it. She argues that life is the standard of morality. Why? Rand’s answer is that it is because life makes values possible. Why are values good? She answers that the standard of value is life, which is the ultimate end. If life is the ultimate end, why does she have to justify it on the basis that it makes the concept of value possible? Further, she goes on to argue that life should be worth sustaining, which again refutes her notion that life is an end in itself or even an ultimate end. All this is nonsense. I do not think that Selfishness is a virtue, though it often is indeed, a great virtue. Russell Kirk once said that if you are willing to believe that selfishness is a virtue, you will believe anything. Selfishness is hard to sell. It goes against the instincts of the average human being. She accomplished this task by a simply procedure: She defined every act she deemed moral as selfish. Understanding her approach is crucial to understanding her and her philosophy. Her keen mind found rationalizations for her several outlandish positions. She was one of the most brilliant “rationalizers” in the whole of human history. I do not know whether it is a virtue or a vice.

Sadomasochism in Rand

Intelligent objectivists often find it way too obvious that her theory of sex is problematic and runs into obvious difficulties. Yet, sexuality and melodrama in her novels have got the least scholarly attention. We shall look into sexuality and sadomasochism in her fiction in some detail:

The Fountainhead begins with Howard Roark laughing, standing naked at the edge of a cliff. When Dominique looks at Roark’s wet shirt, she thinks about the statues of men she had always loved, and then she wonders how he would look naked. Roark looked at her as if he could read her mind so well. Dominique once told Alvah Scarret that she loves statues of naked men.

Dagny Taggart

In ‘Atlas Shrugged’, when teenaged Dagny asked “Do you suppose I should try to get D’s for a change and become the most popular girl in school?”, Francisco slapped her face hard. “She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive.” Earlier in the novel when Dagny’s brother Jim asks “You haven’t any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don’t you shine his shoes?” Her answer was: “Because he hasn’t told me to.” She sits at Henry Rearden’s feet, pressing her face to his knees. Rearden holds her hand and kisses her wrist, fingers, and palm. She sobs in his arms, in a way she has never done in her life, burying her face in his knees in final protest.

In “The Fountainhead”, Dominique often tries to exert her power over Howard Roark. When she extends the back of her hand and says: “Kiss my hand, Roark”, he would kneel down and kiss her feet on her ankles. 

Ayn Rand wanted to fulfill her own fantasy, and yet let her fictional hero keep his ego intact. Egomaniacal masochists have a difficult row to hoe. She held that he demonstrated his power by admitting that of hers. She felt owned when lying at her feet, he expresses his need for her, and her ownership over him. We see her sitting on the floor at his feet, pressing her head to his knees. She buries her face against his knees. He asks her to light his cigarette, and in turn she asks him to place his hand on her back, and hold it there for a while. He obeys her.

In the 1936 version of “We the Living”, there was a scene in which Leo whips Kira.  Kira wishes that she was lying under a whip in Leo’s hand. When Dominique, a columnist for Wynand Papers tells Alvah Scarret, the editor-in-chief that it would be terrible to have a job she enjoyed and did not want to lose, Alvah asks her why. Dominique replies: “Because I would have to depend on you–you’re a wonderful person, Alvah, but not exactly inspiring and I don’t think it would be beautiful to cringe before a whip in your hand–oh, don’t protest, it would be such a polite little whip.” When Dominique saw Howard Roark working in a granite quarry, she wondered whether they whipped convicts these days and hoped that they did.

Dominique humiliates Peter Keating by submitting to his every need with contemptuous indifference. Peter Keating would burn in humiliation, vowing to never to touch her again, soon to be back on his knees to repeat the process again when the desire comes back. It reminds me of a visual in which a man clasping the bare legs of a lady sitting stone-faced, with weary sadness. When he tries to kiss her ankles, she withdraws her feet contemptuously, and walks away, waking up.

When Peter Keating asks Dominique, Where’s your I?” She asks softly, “Where’s yours, Peter?” In shock and humiliation, he said “It is not true”, his eyes begging her to deny the fact that she had meant just that. She wakes up and stands before him, the erectness of her body judging him, reminding him of the life he had always begged for. Peter Keating gets on his knees, clutching her, his head buried against her legs saying “Dominique, it’s not true–that I never loved you. I love you, I always have, it was not just to show the others–that was not all–I loved you.” Unimpressed by him kissing her backside, she says”It’s said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that’s not true. Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.”, Peter says in shock: “Dominique, I…I don’t want to talk.” With pity, she bends down to kiss his forehead, the first kiss she had ever granted to him after marriage.

Peter Keating goes through the worst humiliation in his life when he tried to sell Dominique to the newspaper baron Gail Wynand for the Stoneridge contract. After asking “Have you heard about my descriptive style?” Gail Wynand says, “Your wife has a lovely body, Mr. Keating. Her shoulders are too thin, but admirably in scale with the rest of her. Her legs are too long, but that gives her the elegance of line you’ll find in a good yacht. Her breasts are beautiful, don’t you think?”, and then adds, “I grant you I’m behaving abominably. I’m breaking all the rules of charity. It’s extremely cruel to be honest.” Whispering “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Wynand,” Peter Keating stared at the soft, shivering tomato aspic on his salad plate that made him sick to the stomach. A man feels most humiliated when his wife’s dignity is being violated. Keating stood like he has lost a manhood he has never had, only to ask helplessly, “Why are you doing this to me?”

Atlas Shrugged Movie

In “The Husband I Bought”, Henry Stafford kisses Irene’s arms, from the fingertips to the shoulder. Irene makes Stafford listen to him by begging and imploring. He is tender at times, cold and stern at other, ordering her to leave, turning his backside to her. When she falls on her knees and kisses the back of his hands and cries, “Henry, Henry, I cannot live without you! I just cannot!”, he whispers, “Go now!”, and asks, “Will you not say something to me, for the last time?” When she replies, “I loved you, Henry.”, he tells her, “I shall be happy. But there are moments when I wish I would never have met that woman. There is nothing to do. Life is hard, sometimes, Irene.” She answers in humiliation: “Yes, Henry,” and approaches him to fall at his feet, burying her head in his knees, when he says with cold sternness, “Go home, Irene. And never come again.”, she mutters “You … you don’t love me, Henry?” She smiles when he says “There can be nothing between us, now. Can’t you understand it?” as it was too unbelievable to be true.

In “Red Pawn”, when Kareyev falls at Joan’s feet, as if all strength had gone out of him, and whisper: “You won’t go alone. You won’t go alone.” she strokes his head, smiling, kissing his hair. He buries his face in the folds of her dress, clasping her legs, holding her, in a desperate panic of fear that she would vanish from his fingers to disappear forever. He says that he will buy her little satin slippers lined with soft pink feathers and slip them himself on her bare feet.

Humiliation and Submission

As in “Red Pawn” and “The Husband I Bought”, the earlier writing of Rand tells tales of humiliation and submission. In many stories, as it later happened in her own life, women held financial power over their husband, and humiliated him further by extramarital affairs. Humiliation forms an integral part of her writings.

It reminds me of an interesting story of revenge and humiliation I had read as a child in a travelogue. The author narrates the story of a gypsy who made a spicy dish for his girlfriend. He asked her whether she enjoyed the dish. She said “Yes”. His retort leaved her shocked speechless: “I am not surprised. The dish was prepared with your boyfriend’s liver.” She was cheating on him. The humiliation was perfect when she was served a dish made at his expense. The story must be true. Gypsies are that vengeful. I think one of the most ingenious ways to humiliate ones ex-lover is to present a gift at his expense to your new target. “

In “We The Living”, Kira tells Andrei that his bills went to her lover Leo, her voice rising like a whip, lashing him on both sides:  ”All you were to me, you and your great love, and your kisses, and your body, all they meant was only a pack of crisp, white, square, ten-ruble bills with a sickle and hammer printed in the corner! Do you know where those bills went? To a tubercular sanatorium in the Crimea. Do you know what they paid for? For the life of a man I loved long before I ever saw you, for the life of a body that had possessed mine before you ever touched it.”

A similar story of humiliation is in Pierre Louÿs’ 1896 novella “Woman and Puppet.” Don Mateo Díaz falls in love with Conchita Pérez, a low class sixteen year old girl when she promised to sing a little song if he would give her a penny. He tossed a small coin and listened to her song. She said that she was a pure virgin. After he slipped her old mother a few coins, she sat on his lap and kissed him putting her arms around his neck. When he tried to return her kiss, her temper flared up. He felt guilty, and greased the palms of both the mother and daughter. She would take off her clothes and stand naked in his presence. When Don Mateo Díaz promised her mother everything they wanted, Conchita left the place after sending him a note: “You shall never see me again”.

Months later, on a spring day, she appeared in front of him and said that she was willing to be his mistress. One night, when lying on her bed, she tried to take off her innerwear, but she wanted to remain a mozita. Don Mateo Díaz saw her with many other men and felt that she was into this for money. He said that she should give him what he wants or she will never see him again. She said that she will be his lifelong mistress once he sets her up a home. He bought an expensive villa. She was supposed to receive him in the night. When she went there, she said through the bars: “Kiss my hands.” He kissed. “Now kiss the hem of my skirt and the tip of my foot in its slipper.” He did as she requested. “That is good,” she said. “Now you may go.” When she saw the shocked expression on his face, she laughed in a humiliating manner and went on to make love with another young man in his presence in the villa Don Mateo bought for her. She ridiculed him saying that she will stay in the villa with her new lover. The next day, Conchita went to Don Mateo’s house to see whether he had committed suicide. He hadn’t. He slapped her hard again and again till she screamed. After the punishment, she expressed a desire to be his soul mate.

Sexuality in her novels is quite subtle. The symbolism is elegant, exquisite and allusive. It evokes deep emotions only when we read more into it.

Consider the following passage: “She threw the jacket down on the floor. She put her bag down on a table and stood removing her gloves, slowly, as if she wished to prolong the intimacy of performing a routine gesture. She slapped her gloves softly against her palm, a small gesture of finality, like a period at the end of a sentence. She undressed indifferently, as if she were alone in her own bedroom.” The symbolism is all the more evident in a woman throwing her jacket on the floor, removing her gloves slowly, slapping them softly against her palm as a gesture of finality.

Such routine gestures are seen in unsuspecting situations. Once when my status update read, “The best thing about winters will always be women taking off their jackets! One of my prized possessions is Nabokov’s Lolita. I love it not so much for the literary merit, as for its beautiful cover with a young girl’s legs in tiny socks and saddle shoes. Winters remind me of Lolita.” many were convinced that I am worthy of suspicion, and that they would better be careful!

There are very few fiction works that are as dedicated to the self esteem and independence of women as that of Rand’s. But, in ‘The Fountainhead’, Dominique falls in love with Roark, the man who raped her. It was of course, a rape by invitation, a symbol of humiliation and conquest. While she was an ardent supporter of careerism in women, she insisted that no woman should be greater than the highest man. Her fiction works play with this glaring contradiction throughout.

Read: Corruption In Liberty Institute

They are so clever!

A week ago, I felt that pressure was suddenly building up inside my head. There was a mild heaviness that didn’t seem to go away. I have never had a headache in my life. But, one night, I was turning back in my bed, trying to sleep. I never had sleeping problems. There was suddenly a sharp pain that never came back. I was having mild bodily disturbances on and off which I have never had before. Doctors often dismiss it telling me: “Wait, you are confusing me now.” I almost never sleep in the morning-even during Magazine production when I often have to skip sleep. But lately I am sleeping at my desk or office sofa for hours. While I was listening to a talk, I noticed that my eyes were drooping, even when I had slept six hours the night before.

When I went to a hospital nearby, the doctor asked me many questions: “Where do you work? How many hours do you work? Do you read a lot? When you read, do you read from a computer? How many hours do you sleep?” I have averaged four hours of sleep for many years.  I am always hooked to the web. I rarely read hard copies.  He just asked me to do a vision test, brushing off everything else.

When the doctor did a test, she found nothing wrong, and said that I can wear glasses only if I want. I was sad, as I have wanted glasses since I was a child. She sent me to another doctor. After a test, she asked me “Does anyone in your family have glaucoma?” No. “Do you know what glaucoma is?” I didn’t have any hard knowledge. She said: “Intraocular pressure ranging from 5 mmHG to 21 mmHG is considered within the normal range. Yours is 22 mmHG for left eye and 24 mmHG for the right eye, which is considered highly abnormal. However abnormally higher intraocular pressure doesn’t necessarily mean that a person has glaucoma.” When I asked her whether it is serious, she said: “It is not at all serious. I simply have to rule out that possibility for record keeping. If true, you have to be under lifelong treatment and observation.” She asked me to do a visual field test the next day itself.

There is no risk factor that applies to me. I am in my 20s. There is no history of glaucoma or diabetes or any illness in my family. I am not of black ancestry. I do not have nearsightedness or farsightedness. There is no history of injury to the eye. I do not use steroids.

I wondered why it is happening to me all over again. I never had any problem that bothered me in a fundamental sense. I have never known any responsibility save that of supporting myself. I can agree with H.L Mencken here: “Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. I never felt it as oppressive, for no one was dependent on me, and I could always make extra money by writing bad fiction and worse verse.” As much as I despise the media, as much as I hate writing within a prescribed framework, I have never known any work-related pressure. For months, I have woken up every morning thinking that this is very close to eternal bliss. I am free to do whatever I wish to do.  

The best thing about my present job is that I barely have to work. It is a joke here that I type like a mixie and finish my work like an athlete. The narcissist in me has always loved that aspect of the job. I have always idolized Gail Wynand who wrote a brilliant editorial denouncing all advocates of careers for women and threw it on the desk of the first editor in sight, and stormed out of the room. He never needed to read his pieces over. I wept when Dominique said “Gail, what a great journalist you could have been.” when she heard that Gail Wynand had written all the copy himself. My heroes were journalists like Niranjan Mazumdar who replied that only his typewriter knows what he is going to write when a frantic editor made the mistake of rushing into his room in a rush hour to know how on earth he would pull it off. Niranjan then went on to write a perfect article in twenty minutes. My favorite economists are not unreadable charlatans, but men like Murray Rothbard who wrote eight single-spaced pages an hour. His work went straight from the typewriter to the published version, with a far more stylistic prose than that of any academic one can ever hope to read.

After the visual test, the doctor said, “It could as well be physiological. You have to do an OCT and CCT.” I have the courage to do many things that most people would not even attempt, but I am a sissy when it comes to physical pain. The last thing I want is a blade in my room. I cannot even stand the prick of a needle. Nurses often chuckle. Anything that pains my body is a big “No” for me.  The doctor said: “It is painless. You are a young male. The pains in your life haven’t even begun.” After the two tests, he said: “A person might be having high intraocular pressure simply because he was born that way or because intraocular pressure appears higher than it actually is because of a higher corneal thickness. In your case, it looks like it. The tests can say that whether I will have any problem four years in advance and there is no such sign yet. The heaviness and strain are in all likelihood because of dryness. It is perhaps a computer related ailment for which there is no specific treatment except proper rest, sleep and care.”

I have been here before. There can’t be a better week to go through it all again. A year back, on this day, doctors said that it is probable that I am having cancer. There was no risk factor that applied to me. I felt as if life should have gone out of me. For long, my attitude towards life was at best expressed by these words of Nathaniel Branden: “I do not know what anyone else wants out of life, or thinks life is about, but for me, right here, right now, everything I ever wanted is in the room with me. I feel completely fulfilled. All that’s left to want is that this will go on for a very long time.”

It was a scary thought, but once you have accepted the reality, even death looks like the most definite one among many possibilities. I lost the desire to connect to anyone. I felt as if many things which immensely mattered to me didn’t matter to me anymore. When I got the biopsy report, it was only an inflammation.

What are the lessons I have learned apart from the obvious fact that doctors cannot be trusted?

“Life is not such a big deal. Many things are not as bad as you imagine. Even when I felt that my days were counted, I slept like I do on any normal day. I closed my eyes, and I soon fell asleep. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. I learned that you do not feel depressed when your actions have no bearing upon what you are going through. I read what I love to read.”

I learned a lot in the last one year. Much of what I learned were things which I have known all along. But, learning, introspection and experiences have reinforced those convictions. Some of them are:

Sanity has nothing to do with social conformity and everything to do with the functioning of one’s mind, i.e., one’s psycho-epistemology. The whole world is insane. Well, almost.  When thinking through a problem whether social or personal, a rational person would always ask the following questions among many: “What are my premises? What is my conclusion? Are my premises true? If these premises are by no means obvious, did I reach them through the right means? Do the premises themselves lead to the conclusion? Am I smuggling in a hidden assumption? Is there a rationalization involved? Am I denying the obvious? Am I worthy of suspicion?” Even the fact that such questions exist do not occur to an insane person. Contrary to what many of her critics and even fans believe, Ayn Rand was very much sane when compared to the average Joe or even the average Ivy League professor. When I read her money speech, when I read what is true in her world view, I see ruthless rationality. For all her ranting, there is sanity in her writings that is almost impossible to see elsewhere.

Nonsense is everywhere:“It is on the hoardings, in the speeches of the most powerful men, the prose of honest women, the analyses of the brightest investment bankers, and even the proverbs of your mother.” Rationalization plays a much larger role in nonsense than many believe. Lack of intelligence and originality aside, the biggest culprits are: Poor erudition, selective blindness, suspended consciousness, anecdotal reasoning, prejudice, conceit, unwarranted assumptions, bigotry, religion, and systematic biases.

“Political correctness is not a form of sophistication as people claim or imagine, it is a form of cowardice, the lowest form of human communication.” When I read politically correct literature, I feel tempted to paraphrase Linda Wachner, the toughest female boss on earth:  ”You’re eunuchs. How can your wives stand you? You’ve got nothing between your legs.”

You can sharply increase your well being by being selectively unnice. I am the biggest fan of being nice on earth, but I no longer write blank cheques to being nice. When I read in the blog of a compassionate lady that we should think thrice before extending our niceties to the average Joe, I wholeheartedly agreed. As the great Niccolo Machiavelli taught us, anyone who has ever tried being nice to monsters that are not so nice will soon find themselves crushed beneath their ugly feet.

Selective meanness has socially beneficial effects. You should only feel good for being selectively mean. Mean employers will gleefully take in low class people. Low class employees cross the boundaries the moment they sense that no one is watching over them. They are easily tempted to cheat, and are convinced that “It is all your fault” irrespective of the truth of the matter. Mean employers are capable of firmly disciplining these character disorders when they shirk their responsibilities, rob, drink or hit at female co-workers. There is no way a nice employer can profit from dealing with them. Mean employers, on the other hand profit by keeping a close tab and paying them less at the same time. The world in turn, gets some value out of the worst of its inhabitants. As low as it is on the probability scale, if there exists an employee who is low class and value driven at the same time, he gets a foot in the door. As Bryan Caplan concedes, there are such rare exceptions among poor workers like grad students and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Idealism and morality are overrated. In intellectual professions, intelligence, passion, and common sense are underrated. A sense of morality cannot be taught. You either have it in you or you do not. What holds true anywhere else holds true in academia, journalism and writing too.  What the writing profession needs is men with wit, talent and erudition.There is only one unpardonable sin: incompetence.

Libertarians should learn to write well and by all means place themselves within the market where bad writing is heavily penalized. Reading Rothbard, Mencken and Rand is pure joy when their critics in the academia are often viciously dull, and for a reason.

The biggest problem on earth is low intelligence , not poverty, wars, or even corruption. Irrationality is the root of every social problem. If people were smartly selfish, the world would have been a wonderful place to live in. Political Irrationality is almost always a derivative of low intelligence, as fools and dullards are hardly capable of thinking calmly.

While reading biographical accounts of Murray Rothbard, one thing becomes clear to me: He was very true to himself, more than most thinkers I have ever read of. Murray Rothbard was an honorable exception in a profession where even blind idealists find themselves being tempted to play by the rules. There was of course, a terrible price for being the greatest entertainer in the history of economic thought. Because, Manu Joseph’s take on Delhi is all the more true of the Economics profession: “Delhi, often, confuses seriousness with intelligence and humour with flippancy. People will not be taken seriously here if they are not, well, serious.”

If you have to be taken seriously by fellow academics, you have to be as dry, boring and confused. Rothbard’s lectures on the contrary, as Bryan Caplan opined, might as well have been named “The joy of Econ”. One of Bryan’s blog posts had an apt title, “History + Comedy = Rothbard”, because he was “Haha funny”. Then, as someone had said, he’d rather have a good laugh than a Nobel Prize.

Rothbard believed that an individualist born in this world “marked by fraud, folly and tyranny” has three ways to deal with it: Retire into one’s own cocoon, set out to reform the world or take immense delight in the nonsense he sees around. Rothbard , it seems, was among the very few who had a driving desire to reform the world and take delight in the spectacle of folly at the same time. He lacked the pessimism of H.L. Mencken who was not too much of a reformer. Mencken knew that his barbaric fellow beings were hopeless and beyond repair and reform. Even when Rothbard writes about the worst of tyrannies, it appeared that like H.L. Mencken, he felt far more delight than indignation. As readers, we feel nothing but amusement even when he cheerfully quotes the listing of monstrosities in the diary of a slave owner who imagined himself to be a kind taskmaster.

I never understood libertarians who “want to make a difference”. If the primary motive of someone in approaching a science, philosophy or profession is reforming the world, I think it is a person who is in all likelihood unfit for the job.  The common good and the destiny of the world are way too uninspiring notions in the long run. These are motives which almost never drive a person to man the barricades to achieve the goal. The prospective benefits of liberty to the self too are hardly inspiring as the prospect for liberty in our lifetime is bleak. In conventional terms, the costs of being a libertarian intellectual are unspeakably high.

So, why be a libertarian? What is in it for me? Rothbard believed that a passion for justice will be “the armor that will sustain us in all the storms ahead, not the search for a quick buck, the playing of intellectual games or the cool calculation of general economic gains.” I have to disagree. For mere mortals, the passion for a justice which they will never reach in their lifetime is also hardly inspiring. It takes a Jihadi to go against his instincts and pay heavy penalty. Being a libertarian intellectual takes more than a love for liberty and justice. It also takes a genuine love for the intellectual game and the craft of writing. When we read Rothbard, we feel that he enjoyed every moment of the game. In a manner reminiscent of Mencken, Rothbard’s prose was “rollicking and ferocious”. It was laugh out loud funny.

I came across the works of Rothbard seven years back.  I started reading, and I was soon relishing his ridicule of conspicuous compassion: “Winter is here, and for the last few years this seasonal event has meant the sudden discovery of a brand-new category of the pitiable: the “homeless.” And what of next year? Are we to be confronted with a new category, the “unclothed,” or perhaps the “ill-shod”? And how about the “thirsty”? Or the candy-deprived? How many more millions are standing in line, waiting to be trotted out for consideration?”

To many who read such passages which are sprinkled throughout his works, Rothbard could come off as “mean”. But, as William Manchester would have it, “Sometimes words should hurt. That is why they are in the language. When terrorists slaughter innocents, when corporation executives betray the trust of shareholders, when lewd priests betray the trust of little children, it is time to mobilize the language and send it into battle.”

So, what makes reading Rothbard nothing but joy? Bryan Caplan has an explanation. Most historians are as serious as cancer. They give historical figures undeserving respect. Even when they get the facts right, they prefer to tell the story of “William, the conqueror” when there is a far more honest and entertaining story of “William, the mass murderer”. Rothbard would have none of these. He pokes fun at fools, tyrants, useful idiots and glorified criminals without any scruples. He could be harshly sarcastic. He could be mean.

Unlike establishment historians who consider the state as an innocent error, or as Mencken rightly put it, “as a benevolent father or even as a sort of jinn or god”, Rothbard did not think that the state is the “apotheosis of the society” or even that it is a “benevolent institution”. He did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. He was willing to call a criminal gang a criminal gang.  Nothing summarizes the state better than these words of Rothbard: “For centuries, the State has cloaked its criminal activity in high-sounding rhetoric. For centuries the State has committed mass murder and called it “war”; then ennobled the mass slaughter that “war” involves. For centuries the State has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it “conscription” in the “national service.” For centuries the State has robbed people at bayonet point and called it “taxation.” I agree with Caplan that this insight is obvious and brilliant at the same time. If this is not obvious to someone with a casual acquaintance of human history, I do not know why.

Murray Rothbard said truths which most economists of even our generation (And it includes libertarian economists) hesitate to state. His take on compulsory public schooling is still considered an unspeakable truth: “True to the common hatred of individual superiority and distinction, the passion for leveling an enforced equality proclaims: this is good; let every child be forced to learn about “life” and be forced to associate with the lowest types of humanity. The envy and hatred toward the potentially better and superior child is apparent in this position.” His short book on education strengthened my position that homeschooling is a vastly superior alternative.

When he aptly summarizes Harvard Professor Edward Banfield’s “The Unheavenly city”: “Upper- and middle-class members tend to be future-oriented, purposeful, rational, and self-disciplined. Lower-class people, on the other hand, tend to have a strong present-orientation, are capricious, hedonistic, purposeless, and therefore unwilling to pursue a job or a career with any consistency.”, anyone who has observed the lower-class with a tint of honesty will have to agree, or at least admit that this is all true.

His views were eccentric. But often, at the root of it, he was by and large, right. When he writes on a wide variety of subjects from “women’s liberation” to banking, cracks like this are plenty:

“Why have men been running the culture over eons of time? Surely, this cannot be an accident. Isn’t this evidence of male superiority?”

“It is men, not women, who are more likely to be the oppressed class, or gender, in our society, and that it is far more the men who are the “blacks,” the slaves, and women their masters. In the middle-class neighborhood in which I live, I see them, these “oppressed” and hard-faced viragoes, strutting down the street in their mink stoles to the next bridge or mah-jongg game, while their husbands are working themselves into an early coronary down in the garment district to support their helpmeets. In these cases, then, who are the “niggers”: the wives or the husbands? The women’s libs claim that men are the masters because they are doing most of the world’s work. But, if we look back at the society of the slave South, who indeed did the work? It is always the slaves who do the work, while the masters live in relative idleness off the fruits of their labor. To the extent that husbands work and support the family, while wives enjoy a kept status, who then are the masters?”

“One motif now permeating the entire movement is a strident opposition to men treating women as “sex objects. Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be. Just as men, of course, are sex objects to women. It would seem banal even to bother mentioning this, but in todays increasingly degenerate intellectual climate no simple truths can any longer be taken for granted.”

“The Women’s Libs may claim that models are exploited, but if we consider the enormous pay that the models enjoy—as well as their access to the glamorous life—and compare it with their opportunity cost foregone in other occupations such as waitress or typist—the charge of exploitation is laughable indeed.”

Unlike most academics who play the status game, Rothbard wrote books instead of journal articles. As Gary North had said, hundred years from now, people will read Rothbard for pure entertainment. We cannot, of course, say the same of the latest issue of The American Economic Review. One of the biggest wastage of the skewed incentive structure in the academia is that many academics spent their lives writing journal articles that rarely contribute anything to the world in terms of fun or intellectual excitement.  His Economics aside, one of the most important lessons of Rothbard is that reading and writing about ideas can be loads of fun. Part of the intellectual gains from reading Rothbard is to end up being convinced that even economics can be written beautifully, and that it is the way it ought to be done.

It is an inside secret of the dismal science that most economists cannot write a decent sentence. Murray Rothbard, however, was a master of the art. As even intelligent laymen can enjoy and appreciate his work, he is considered less intellectually interesting than mediocrities who wrote incoherently. Many think that the biggest threat to the libertarian movement is the search for purity and extremism, not the fact that many of them have accepted the collectivist arguments lock, stock and barrel. Many feel that absolutism, persuasion and sarcasm are worse than cowardice and violence. But, as hard as it is for many to admit this obvious fact, it takes enormous talent to be an innovator and entertainer at the same time.

The world that wants its intellectuals to be serious, obscure and timid had a really difficult time admitting that with all his wit, clarity and stylistic prose, Murray Rothbard could also be one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind. But, the same world also feels emotionally scarred when it does not see the austerity and humility that is so needed in its celebrities. Perhaps, Ayn Rand was right: “The sound perception of an ant doesn’t include thunderstorms. When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return–it is not against the swine that you feel indignation.”

Murray Rothbard died 17 years back, on this day. But, I often think that it would have been wonderful if he were blogging today.

I’d rather die than go to school!

Unlike many neurotic college-dropouts who help themselves feel better by repeatedly listening to Pink Floyd, I haven’t felt like defending myself too much. I haven’t written anything much on unschooling in the last one decade. Even if I did, I know what many of you would think: “Grapes are sour!”  I do not wish to deny that there is some rationalization involved in me liking Steve Jobs who slept on the floor, returned coke bottles to buy food, and walked several miles once in a week to get one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple after dropping out of college.

My favorite businessmen were never Mittal’s and Tata’s of the world, but men like Mahesh Murthy who dropped out of college at 19, and ended up with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars after doing many odd jobs like being an announcer at Indian railway and selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Even though my teenage was largely wasted, my favorite fictional character is not the one-dimensional ubermensch Howard Roark, but Gail Wynand who walked into the office of a fourth-rate newspaper at sixteen, and asked “Can you spell anthropomorphology?” to the editor who inquired “Can you spell cat?” I couldn’t get through most fiction works I have read, but when I read that Howard Roark was kicked out of architecture school for insubordination, I was in seventh heaven. I went on to read it eighteen times-but wait, I am still counting.

I have always hated schooling, though in early childhood, it was a truth I would dare not admit. I was expected to say that I loved it- that the “emperor has clothes”.  When I was in school, the whole world looked like an air craft into which hordes of barbarians rushed in to press buttons at random, with self-righteous conviction that they are entitled to act on their capricious whims and fancies. Many feel that anything goes as long as they had a mushy rationalization, or an argument from authority! When I studied libertarianism, the essentials were not hard to see: What politicians and bureaucrats do to decent human beings is not much different from what adults often do to children. If we strip libertarianism down to a postcard, that is all there is to it. Once this retrospectively obvious fact is understood, the whole theory behind unschooling will fall into place.

I still remember the day I joined Lower Kindergarten. My mom came with me to school, and left me unarmed in a room of nearly fifty children, most of them crying and whining. I remember a child coming near the door of the classroom and peeping outside. Separation from their parents is a source of intense anxiety, helplessness and confusion for most post-toddlers.  My class teacher was a very young Gujarati lady. I have always wondered why she enjoyed punishing the soft child that I was. I am not lying. She actually did it for no valid reason. I am grateful to God for the fact that her behavior was far from the norm. Others at least made up some ridiculous reasons to punish kids.

When I was walking back home from school the first day, a child started crying. Some older kids were amused and said in a singsong voice: “Shame, Shame, Puppy Shame!” It all reminds me of some torture chamber now. I once stumbled upon my class teacher when I went to the beach with my parents. She gave me some cashew nuts and asked me to say “Thank You”. I, of course, said “Thank You”, with a shy smile on my face. I bent my head and stood there staring at the sands of the beach. When I occasionally looked up, behind her, I could see the tides rising and falling while the evening sun set. At that moment, all I wanted was to escape from her and the beach. Even after two decades, I cannot get over my crush on her.

In school, I was always in a state of confused bewilderment. When I was in first standard,one day I started off from home without my school bag as I was told that the school will be having an Arts festival. When I entered the classroom, my class teacher asked with a sarcastic smile: “Oh, you’ve come over here to enjoy the breeze? Where is your bag?” I looked at her with my eyelashes up, with deep sadness in my eyes-and then I looked at my empty shoulders. Somewhere those tender shoulders have failed me. I felt alienated from my school-bag and for once I grasped the intimate relationship between sarcasm and alienation. Somewhere the premises do deeply interconnect.

I was upset the whole day. I had to sit idly when other children frantically took notes. But, did I simply sit there enjoying the breeze? Did I cry like a sissy? No. I didn’t. I wouldn’t even have even been able to bring myself to write about me if I had done so! I would have been mighty ashamed of myself today if I had done so! Instead, like a good boy, I listened to each and every word she uttered and committed them to my memory. It became a life and death issue for me. “In all the cosmos nothing mattered more than this”. While traveling back home in the auto rickshaw, I tried to repeat those words to myself, lest I forget them. When I reached back home, the first thing I did was to write it all down in my note book with my sharpened HB pencil. When I was finally done, I did have my lunch.

When the classes began the next day, with uncontrollable anger, she asked me to come to her desk with my notebook. I was painfully shy, and said nothing. She opened the notebook only to see everything that was taught the last day written in clear, cold letters. She hugged me tightly. When she gave my mother the progress report that year, below everything, in the personal remarks column, it was written: “Photographic memory”. I started having a crush on her too.

I am by no means indulging in malignant self-love. My point was that I learned something that day. “When there is a will, there is a way”, or “the virtue of tireless hard work, teeth-clenched determination, and merciless devotion”. These are lessons a child will never learn in a classroom. These are lessons which a typical teacher will never even begin to understand. It should come from within. I think these are traits which are almost impossible to manufacture. Either you have it in you-or you don’t.

Conscientiousness is something which the school cannot teach. School can only signal it, and then only imperfectly. When someone tells me that he forgot something important, I think that it is hardly deserving of sober attention. I see such people everywhere. When I was in my last job, I noticed that some of them came at noon, left in the afternoon and looked here and there when tired annoying others. H.L. Mencken was certainly right about the average Joe: “The world gets nothing from him save his brute labour, and even that he tries to evade.” Yet, instead of feeling bad about themselves, they felt policed and persecuted.

As Bob Wallace writes: “A neurotic, taking too much responsibility, feels too much guilt; a character disorder, not taking enough responsibility, doesn’t feel enough guilt. A joke about this is that dogs are neurotic because they always think it’s their fault; cats are character disorders because they always think it’s your fault.”  Rana Dasgupta nails it so well: “In the Indian psyche, you dissociate yourself from the bad things you have done, and then they’re not yours anymore. This isn’t a guilt culture. That’s why you can never make any accusation stick to a businessman or a politician. They won’t even recognize the crimes you’re accusing them of. They’ll probably have you beaten up for insulting them.”

I think Delhi-ites are cats. The whole city is infested with character disorders. Schooling if anything, reinforces such character disorders.

One day, our 1^st standard class teacher left us all alone in the class room and went outside. A child made a mess near my desk by pouring a bottle of ink. When she came back, he pointed his finger at me and said cheerfully: “He did it!” In between, he leaned forward to whisper in my little ears with a chuckle: “I am a clever boy”. I wondered how such evil can even exist on earth. How could he do this to me? The upside was of course that I had come to grips with the concept of backstabbing.

Luckily, it looked like she didn’t believe his words. He was told that when he points one finger at me, three fingers are pointed at himself. So, he ended up cleaning up the mess he himself has made. I rarely had to right the scales of justice as reality often took its course. I was happy that like many who later played on me, he fell into a ditch he himself dug.  I sat there with a smug smile on my face.

School doesn’t value perseverance. If you do well, at most you will be called a good boy. When I topped my class when I was in 4^th standard, my parents noticed that I didn’t smile when I took the progress card from my class teacher. They also noticed that the class teacher didn’t smile. My mother scolded me: “There is no need for you to be too smug about it. You should know that no one else opened their text books this year!” I believed it. It felt so good.

When I was 9, my father was transferred and I moved to another school. It was completely beyond me why the teachers who interviewed me demanded that I define indefinable terms like “parrot” and “peacock”. It was obvious that they didn’t belong to the profession, and should never be allowed to have anything to do with little children.

My class teacher in 6^th standard hated me with some passion. She once told my mother: “I do not care whether he studies or not, but he should learn to be audible.” One day, I heard her reading a line from a short story aloud: “She was so proud that she even refused to talk to her neighbors”, with her fishy eyes fixed on me. I felt as if a lightning had suddenly struck me: “God, what is this old lady trying to tell me?” When she once threw me out of the class as my voice was not loud enough for her, I stood there listening to crows croak.

She once found my eight year old brother guilty of some mischief. His crime: He listed all the boys and girls in his class on a piece of paper and matched them up. She was fuming with anger: “What has this boy done? Oh, the horror!”. She warned in her trembling voice that he will be expelled from the school if he persists in such immoral behavior. Hearing this, a friend in Junior High said: “Your brother has a great future ahead of him: As a marriage broker.” One day, while rolling my eyes listening to her blabber, I noticed one thing: She had hearing aids. Everything suddenly fell into place. Her anger was all the more understandable to me when I recently heard a woman say: “I am fifty and deaf. Please speak a bit louder.” I had more serenity by then.

Though I was almost over religion by then, every morning I caught myself praying for her early demise. My mom was disturbed by all this. She often said: “My son, your attitude is not for your good. It will never do anyone any good. You shouldn’t hold anger in your mind. Matha, Pitha, Guru, Deivam. ” Such rationalizations lacked even the slightest plausibility to me even then. When I grew up, I learned to philosophically reject the concepts of forgiveness and unearned respect. More than a decade later, I read in an Orkut forum that she was finally taken to the graveyard. I was filled with immense delight as my childhood dream has come true. Better late than never!

After all, God will not be mocked!

To me, school was a “Hobbesian jungle”. We were punished for horrid crimes like talking to each other, not bringing the text books, and failing to memorize poems. Many of them were hypersensitive. When a nine year old boy asked a newly married teacher whether she enjoyed her first night, she wept and ran out of the classroom. I am almost certain that he didn’t know what he was talking about. I think children should go to school instead of the neighborhood candy store only if they like being scolded, smacked and ordered around by these nasty women. If there are any good aspects of schooling, it could be enjoyed without going through the whole process. Irrespective of whether it is private or public, schooling is eight hours of jail sentence a day where one is forced to learn what he doesn’t like to learn, and socialize with all those unwanted types. Fourteen years is a hell of a long time. I am still not over it.

I do not think that I should degrade myself by even debating the issue of corporal punishment. What we hear are the arguments of some brutes who lack the nerve to stand up for what they believe in. If we push on, at the end the real truth comes out of their mouth, and we realize that all the twists, obfuscations, contradictions, non sequiturs, equivocations, complexities, tricks and intellectual acrobatics were intended to hide this plain naked truth, the shabby unspeakable secret, the secret shame of savages who have never risen out of the archaic practice of doing good to children through force. If they want to hit a child, they should have the grace to admit that.

If I could press a button on my desk which would get anyone who has ever raised his hand against a child in a horror chamber, and have them tortured till death, mercilessly and brutally, the only reason I would not press that button would be that I would be starving to death in a world where most of the mankind will be missing. Otherwise I would have pushed it without hesitating a bit, with the largest grin anyone has ever seen on my face.

When I was ten, my parents decided that I needed some “help” in learning Maths. I was sent to a private tuition centre which I loathed as my reason told me that I do not need nobody’s “help”. Every day, after school, I would walk back home, and my mom would take me forcefully to the tuition classes. One day, she had to stop my bus and take me out of it to lead me through the ‘right path’. After sulking for months, I left the place never to return. The day she gave up, I heard her telling a friend: “What on earth is wrong with this boy? He thinks that it is beneath him to learn from others. He has an attitude problem!”

One day, when I was walking through the hallways of my school, a senior asked me: “How much did you score in your Maths paper ?” I said: “46/50”. “And before you took tuitions?” I reflected for a while and said: “45/50”.  His face lit up. He said: “So, that explains it. One mark is not worth all the trouble.” He was right. I was glad that I found some agreement in him, an agreement which is often hard to come by. My only regret was that I had a crush on a 13 year old girl who studied with me. I later saw her in a temple. She was praying with her eyes closed, wearing a long skirt which is not too unlike the one often seen in Malayalam movies. I looked at her folded palms and bare feet. She didn’t see me.

One of my fondest childhood memories is that of reading the travelogue of an Indian researcher in Spain. In his delightful manner, he tells us what happened when a teenaged blonde in the house he stayed was soon to be blessed with a cute baby. His landlord wanted the author to find out who shared the responsibility. I couldn’t extort any sense out of the landlord’s request. In my childish naiveté, I thought that babies were simply born. When I asked my mother what the author meant, she slapped my hand, snatched the book and said: “I have told you an indefinite number of times that this is not meant for children.”  When I was in Junior High, I felt that I was beginning to understand. A classmate told me that the great Mahatma Gandhi and even our parents were guilty of this fundamental sin.

In Junior High, my classmates used words which fell harshly upon my delicate sensibilities. They were glad to be taught by teachers with well-developed bosoms. Our school was near a college. When I was 13, I used to walk through the corridors of the college with a friend who would often say with great sadness: “We stand no chance. All the good ones would be booked. But, I see nothing wrong in checking them out. Come, let us go!” He believed in flouting the norms of conventional morality, and held that Bill Clinton was a much persecuted man, unnecessarily so. On a rainy day, when we were waiting for our bus, an elderly man wanted to know which bus will take him home.  This boy showed him the way in a cheerful manner uncharacteristic of him. The moment the man boarded the bus, he started laughing uncontrollably and said: “The old man is in for some trouble. But, I do not feel bad at all.”

I was 13 when I flunked the Math paper big time. 3/50. When I got the progress card, I lacked the nerve to show it to my mom. I dropped it on my desk and went out to play, hoping against hope that she would see it. What followed was unspeakable! I shall not get into all that. As Bryan Caplan points out, twin and adoption researches suggest that there is much merit in the “sissy” point of view that children should be treated tenderly, and largely left alone: “If your children’s future success is largely beyond your control, riding them “for their own good” is not just wasteful, but cruel.  The sentimental view that parents should simply cherish, encourage, and accept their children has science on its side.” As much as I didn’t know it then, when I wanted to be treated tenderly and left alone, I had science on my side. I had hard research on my side. But, I was not listened to.

After Junior High, I never really went to classes. I enrolled in an Engineering college which I almost never attended. After bunking classes and flunking courses for long, I dropped out. When I started working, I didn’t have a degree, though I acquired one which demanded zero effort. It didn’t hurt me to the point that I will go back and change the decisions I have made along the way.

I often hear many argue that they value what they learned in school, and the friends they have made there. And of course, some teachers were nice. (Yes, nice. I would very much love to see all of them boarded on a flight in which the pilot is just a nice, likeable guy. It would be quite a scene.) To cut it short, their arguments amount to this: “You are such a big loser to have missed out on all the fun we had in school.” I can only paraphrase Rambo, “What you call home, I call hell.”

It should be obvious that what they like is not school as such, but the whole package which comes with schooling. A school is typically better than simply sitting at home and watching “Tom and Jerry”. If someone is stupid enough to believe that school teaches you something which you cannot learn otherwise, it is always the person whose rational faculties are not fully developed.

Whenever I ask people whether they use much of what was taught in school or college, they invariably answer: “No”. Do they remember much of what they learned in school? The answer is again, “No”. Yet, they are all convinced that without schooling, they would have been selling ladies’ socks in the Green park market. My roommate is an Assistant manager in a Dry-cleaning company. I am not sure, but, it is safe to assume that his knowledge of the dry-cleaning business is as deep as my knowledge in fluid mechanics. Someone who studied Computer Science and Marketing and finally end up barking “Citibank” will in all likelihood believe that college made him what he is. When asked to explain themselves, they will hem and haw, “I think I studied logic, reasoning and analysis at IIT. There is a lot of number-crunching and problem solving. I didn’t like it much, but at least I finished engineering. (Unlike you, loser!)” The fact that logic, reasoning and analysis can be learned elsewhere studying what really matters is some ultra-sophisticated reasoning which has never occurred to them.

Centuries of research in educational psychology and “Transfer of Learning” literature suggests that the argument that you are “learning to learn” in college is rather spurious. There is a short term effect learning has on IQ, but it fades out soon. All things considered, no one become a better banker by studying computer science in college. One can be much better off learning Banking itself. Students forget much of the Computer Science they have learned in college, if they have learned anything at all. More importantly, much of the Computer Science you learn in college is useless for any job in any case. The situation is much worse in Math, liberal arts and physical sciences for almost all students. Who seriously believes that differential calculus or business cycle theory will help a typical student who is at his best good enough for subaltern jobs?

So why are employers credentialists? Bryan Caplan answers:

“Suppose you’re interviewing a smart guy, without a college degree, and he offers you a money-back guarantee. You might think “What a great deal” and accept. But then again, you might start thinking “What a weirdo. What’s wrong with him?” And this, I propose, is the stumbling block to lots of worthwhile innovations. A person with an unconventional idea may have a point, but is also unlikely to be “normal.” He may not fit it with other people. He may have problems with authority. He may be deviant in more ways than one!

Confession: I’m one of the weirdos. I flout all kinds of social conventions. I wear shorts and flip-flops in the winter. I carry a funny cushion around wherever I go. (Don’t ask!) I laugh at inappropriate times. So outside of the best weird economics department in the world, who wants to hire me? If you hear me out, I think I’ve got some good arguments for wearing shorts and flip-flops in the winter. But even if I convinced you, you would probably hesitate to hire me, especially for a “real-world” job. My failure to conform in dress significantly raises the probability that I will fail to conform in more substantive ways. And even if you decide I can wear shorts while everyone else wears suits, what if a client sees me? He may start to think the whole firm is weird.”

I am also one of those weirdos. When I came looking for a job in this Magazine, I didn’t take my resume as I couldn’t see how it would help me. I haven’t bothered to write a proper resume. I got my previous jobs and assignments without such hassles. In any case, how does it even matter? The editor looked at me in a condescending manner and said that I should be much more sensible in my communication. I later heard that she told another editor: “He was so weird”. When I went for the interview, he asked sarcastically: “Have you taken your resume and all?”, and then said that he doesn’t need it. If I have it, I can keep it with me. I do not blame them at all, as Economics explains this phenomenon so well. She later said that she interviewed many stupid people the last day and had no reason to believe that I would be any different. Now, this is what economists call “statistical discrimination”.

I have good arguments to support almost everything I do. But even if others listen, it is highly improbable that they will even be able to see my point. As employers have limited time and resources, they rely on some “statistical discrimination”. A college dropout is less likely to be a worthy hire. The same goes for a weirdo. If someone is both (as in all likelihood he is), his resume goes into its rightful place: trash bin. So, normality and a college degree signals that you are someone smart enough to get the job done, but conformist enough to be a likeable co-worker and stay focused . In low-IQ, low-paying jobs, the person should be lazy and stupid enough to settle for it, focused enough to get it done, and at the same time willing to work for a pittance. A rare combination, indeed!

I have never had a liking to be taught-and I will be really surprised if someone genuinely likes it. I do not think this is the way children learn, or should learn. The best way to learn a subject, of course, is to pick up an entertaining book and read, branching out in all directions. Only a book can set forth a subject in a coherent, complete and systematic manner. An erudite teacher who can be of some help to students is all but a matter of mathematical probability. If a student badly needs a teacher, I think it is always the kind which cannot learn.

Bryan Caplan has an interesting question for people who believe that students are in college for learning. “Why do students rejoice whenever a teacher cancels class? From a human capital standpoint, students’ attitude is baffling.  They’ve paid good money to acquire additional skills.   Employers will judge them by the skills their teachers impart.  But when the students’ agent, their teacher, unilaterally decides to teach them less without the slightest prospect of a refund, the students cheer.  How bizarre.  Would a contractor jump for joy when his roofers tell him they’re taking short cuts on the shingles in order to go drinking?” The hard truth is that however hard they deny, deep down everyone knows that college is all about that piece of paper they will have at the end.

As Bryan writes: “The best education in the world is already free of charge. Just go to the best university in the world and start attending classes. Stay as long as you want, and study everything that interests you. No one will ever “card” you. The only problem is that, no matter how much you learn, there won’t be any record you were ever there.” So, why doesn’t anyone make use of it in the name of noble pursuit of knowledge?

One of my pet research projects is to see how brainwashing can work on people. Of all the nonsense masses believe in, nothing is more ridiculous than their unshakeable belief in schooling. To most Indians, there is only one path to success: Engineer-MBA-Anonymous. It sets the bar way too low, but like Manu Joseph, I will readily concede that the path of the average Joe at his best is far better than the path of the average Joe at his worst: Sociology-Salesman-Anonymous. There is only one path to national progress: More and more “investment” in public schools orchestrated by the Mommy state that practices tough love. Oh, like Soviet Russia’s “investment in people”?

To lovers of public schooling, the fact that “government spending” is not “investment” is completely besides the point. Compassion should wipe out the fundamentals of Economics. Economics is not exactly a science, but some bourgeoisie prejudice which should never take precedence over the feelings of the great reservoirs of wisdom: bleeding-heart intellectuals. And it is feelings alone that matter. The fact that most imbeciles cannot read, count or even write their own name in their mother tongue after years and years of public schooling is again besides the point.

You are a wicked market fundamentalist if you think that the government should get out of the “child rearing business”. After all, the “Market is not God”. It is often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. But, if someone believes that the government that has never delivered will somehow start delivering tomorrow with his magic touch, it is perfectly scientific and rational. His pure intentions are never to be questioned. When someone rehashes long-refuted bromides, It is open-minded reasoning unguided by politics. Instead of being called “The humanitarian with the guillotine”, he will be called “The human face of capitalism” and the “The Conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics”. Ayn Rand was not far off the mark when she wrote that the moral cannibal who snarls that freedom is not required to maintain civilization should be given “an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.”

Does classroom learning even help? In a classroom, injustice is done to all students as no teacher can take into account the diverse needs, capabilities, preferences and future trajectories of students. If formal education doesn’t deliver when it comes to building skills, we would be better off if it doesn’t exist, or is at least not subsidized by the all-knowing state.

I am by no means some naïve libertarian who sings: “The free market will improve every school and child geniuses will become the rule. Our learning will make every nation drool when the Libertarians come to town.” In all likelihood, the free market will improve schooling, but that is not the point. I have no doubt that schooling and coercion are against the spirit of learning. It is also clear to me that most low IQ-low character types will not do well irrespective of the schooling process they go through. Unlike most libertarians who believe that the markets will make education affordable, I think that free markets will make the present-mode formal education completely unfeasible for the poor or even middle class, as it rightly should.

The symbol of fire in one's mind!

One evening, when I was in a restaurant, the waiter pointed his finger at a very young girl standing outside and said to me with a sly smile: “Look, she is smoking”. I looked at her, assessing the merits of the notion that a woman’s good looks will purchase indemnity for even her most grievous sin. Perhaps I should join Goethe in admitting that baseness attracts everybody.

Men and women are not expected to go beyond a certain point, when these are precisely the points they want to cross. When even the bravest man or woman tries to push these boundaries with self-righteous iconoclasm, they do it hoping against hope that the harshest judgment of the world wouldn’t be reserved for them.

Manu Joseph expresses it so well: “Sometimes I am amazed at how women in India go through life being women. No matter what they do, they can never be invisible, and it is very important to be invisible. There is a peculiar stoic expression they have when they stand out in the open and smoke. They know everybody on the street has judged them. Even on my lane in South Bombay it is true. I’ve not conducted a poll yet, but I am certain that nobody on Third Pasta Lane believes that a woman who smokes can also be a virgin.”

When a woman smokes in India, more than exploring the forbidden, she is stirring up the transgression and taboo. She is flouting the social norms of a world in which men and women are afraid to be themselves. It tells us more about those norms than about the inner conflicts which torture her mind. The conflict between what is visible to the naked eye and what is visible only to the inner eye of the mind becomes all the more clear when we see that even in the far more permissible society of South Delhi or South Bombay, there are far more social limits than it meets the eye.

When the modern man thinks that he is supposed to feel that women should be liberated, he often feels that as much as he wants to, he is simply unable to feel that way. I recently listened to the vividly graphic description of the behavior of some men in the meeting of the prospective bride and the groom. Taking her to a bar, one of them asked: “Do you drink, lady?” He was amused when she said “No” in vague apprehension. “Oh, Bharatiya Naari!” he laughed. A “workaholic” wanted a domesticated wife who cooks and cleans when he is busy turning the world upside down. One young man looked up and smiled like an imbecile when his mother was bent on knowing the dowry she can expect.

Vinod Mehta’s “Lucknow Boy” tells us his experience with the broad minded Kabir Bedi who thought that the ‘Debonair’ Magazine was celebrating naked female body and making India proud of its rich culture and heritage. Kabir Bedi was not amused when ‘Debonair’ went as far as attempting to print his wife Protima Bedi unclad. He threatened to break up with her, and the center spread was instantly pulled off the machine.

We should not think that women who flout conventions are different. A year ago, I spent my mornings talking to an exceptionally smart young girl on the internet. She was from a country where sexual mores were far more liberal. Her favorite pastime was entertaining her virtual friends by taking her clothes off. When I asked her why, she insisted that it is a joyful experience for all concerned. But, the last thing she wanted was her mother to know it. One day, I noticed that she was depressed. She said that she feels bad for being a harlot over the Yahoo Messenger. The interesting fact is that I knew it before she had said so. Half a decade back, one of my most pleasurable hobbies was that of reading the scrapbook of a little dynamite. I was a silent spectator who enjoyed her conversations with men who enter her space with the secret hope that there is so much that is possible. She was wise beyond her years-as smart as a whip. When we once talked, she said that I should know her horrible reputation. She knew that everyone on the internet had judged her. I knew it too.

Seven years back, The South Indian actress Khushboo got a hard touch of reality when she said that educated men should get real by stop expecting their girlfriends to be virgins. The temple dedicated to her was razed by protestors. I remember a Television show in which the audience predominantly agreed to her. But her devotees in Tamil Nadu expected more out of their Goddess than the cool calculation of the merits and demerits of an ethical norm. I wouldn’t be surprised if many in the studio secretly agreed with her devotees.

There are of course, taboo issues and public secrets. Seven years back, a non-fiction book titled “Freakonomics” is said to have melded pop-culture with Economics. The book had many striking claims. One among them was that some studies “prove” that spanked children are not prone to low test scores, as parents who admit to engaging in this unenlightened practice are congenitally honest. They have to sit knee to knee with a government researcher and admit to spanking his child. It meant that deep down, other parents knew that they were doing wrong, all claims and pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding. “For your own good” is a clever rationalization. The book hadn’t mentioned it.

There are things which everyone knows but no one will talk about it. In an interview with Manu Joseph, producer Manoj Desai said that his film Khuda Gawah should have won nine Filmfare awards instead of seven if some pending bills in the Centaur Hotel were settled. This story had no response at all when published in Outlook because no one cared or because everyone except the reporter knew it already. When I met with corruption in Liberty Institute, everyone asked me why I am surprised when it was a non-profit. Some of them who have been observing “Indian libertarians” said that it was for long obvious to them what stuff they are all made off.

When two years back a 13 year old boy at La Martiniere hanged himself after being caned by the Principal, many felt sorry for the Principal, including columnists in some “respectable” publications. Hearing the bail order, the Principal said: “I am relieved”. It was not said explicitly, and it was not said in so many words, but it was clear that many were fighting their inner urge to say that “it is no big deal”, that “he was a sissy”.

There is always the difference between the exoteric creed and the esoteric creed. Six years back, when the entry of women to Sabarimala temple stirred a controversy, a self-styled ‘philosopher’ claimed that anyone who bows his knee to the cult of modernity gains applause from the audience which has been hostile to him so far. The applause this comment generated dwarfed any other, and I knew that it was genuine. It didn’t matter that he cast a benevolent eye upon Sati, which of course, was often voluntary.

There are things which are intended to drive home a point which is not explicitly stated. Donald Boudreaux once wrote an article which argued that taxation and regulations though harmful, are not necessarily fatal. Statism is not necessarily fatal as the economy might be reasonably dynamic even with government regulations. If statism resulted in the death of hundreds of millions of people in the 20^th century and is still not to be considered fatal, what would amount to being fatal? He didn’t answer, though throughout the article he was being apologetic and defensive, protesting that he was not discounting the importance of freedom, but only proving that freedom is robust. Months later, he had an “admittedly idiosyncratic” ranking of top 18 economists in history. Even the title was apologetic and defensive. The collectivist planner F. A. Hayek topped the list. As many readers observed, there were two glaring omissions. Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard were missing in the long list where moderately good economists found a place. When asked whether he had read Mises’ ‘Human Action’, he answered “Yep. Snooze”.

I had similar experiences before. One article by an Indian blogger began by conceding that there can be no doubt that sectarianism is wrong and dangerous, and that killing a baby for its caste or religion can never be justified. He was emphasizing the wrongness of such acts repeatedly as if his disagreement with all this was not yet clear. After conceding this fact, the author asks an innocuous question: Is it then justified for the leaders of a nation to adopt economic policies which will result in lower development and hence more infant mortality? Obviously not. So far so good.

The author then tries to illustrate his case with some real world instances: “The murder of hundreds, at most thousands of, Kashmiri Pandits, Delhi Sikhs, Gujarati Muslims, Orissa’s Christians, Bihar’s “lower” castes, Nagaland’s natives, Jharkhand’s tribals – either by fanatics or terrorists or the state itself led to so much anger, as it absolutely must have. But what about the many more Indians who were killed – slowly but surely – by the state’s economic policies?” I cannot disagree much with the facts and analysis. It is all true. Not surprisingly, as I came to know later, the author was a young man who believed that though Manusmriti had some minor illiberal positions, Hinduism is a liberal, non-proselytizing religion which grants enough leeway to reject even the Manusmriti. A religion is liberal as long as it doesn’t have a Pope. Hinduism is non-proselytizing, and people are “free” to reject it, except when forced to jump into a pit of fire. There is of course a red herring when he started out, but a man who looks at Hinduism benevolently will any day emphasize violence on the part of other religions to strengthen his case. So, why did a Hindu fundamentalist choose instances of religious violence which were predominantly against Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and tribals (initiated by Hindu fundamentalists) to prove the point that it all pales in comparison to state violence? Your guess is as good as mine.

In most movements and philosophies, there is a glaring contrast between theory and practice. Bryan Caplan has an interesting perspective on the contrast between theory and reality in the Objectivist counter-culture. Catholics do not have to live a lie as it is obvious that the Pope is always right. Objectivists have to give lip service to independence, but deep down they know that Ayn Rand is the Boss. Her cult members loved to believe that they do whatever that is right, irrespective of what others think. Caring for others opinions, after all is a mark of wrong philosophical premises. However hard they tried, they couldn’t acquire a mastery of repression that was demanded of them.

The Conspiracy Of Silence-Wise men were silent when Draupadi was stripped of her dignity.

George Carlin was right: “People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.” My experience working with an Objectivist who went overboard in stating that he didn’t rely on my opinions fit Carlin’s theory. I understood that he was humiliated to the point of sharing his secret shame in the privacy of his bedroom only when in the middle of a talk, his aging wife smuggled in some out-of-context sweet words: “Use your words carefully”. It was a cry from the heart of a castrated male’s soul mate.

If others opinions do not matter, only sticks and stones can be hurtful. But, sarcasm and subtle hints can play with the deep wound within people in a way explicit abuse or even swords cannot, as the humiliation is all the more real. It makes people feel that they are little, that they are nothing. Extreme acts of hatred are done by people with such a deep wound within. When Duryodhana fell into a pool of water assuming that a lake was the solid floor, Draupadi laughed at his face saying, “A blind man’s son is also blind.” It was that insult which helped to ignite the rage, envy, and vengefulness of Duryodhana. Many of us have seen that in workplace, nothing unsettles people more than being told that they are wrong, that they are not good enough. It is the hatred of the inferior, a feeling of discomfort, a state of high tension and fear, something not to be talked about, but only to be understood. The saying that “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is all but a pious fraud.

When the aging Ayn Rand had a romantic relationship with Nathaniel Branden, a 23 year old boy, both their partners were expected to be happy with the affair, as she so deserved an equal. Instead of feeling jealous, they were supposed to be flattered. She claimed to be proud of the affair, but did everything to keep it private.  When she feared that she will be humiliated in the public, she wrote: “My life is over.  He took away this earth.” But iconoclasts are not supposed to care for the society, right?

As Bryan Caplan points out, there was of course, one big problem with Rand’s amateur “psychologizing”: The fact that people care for others opinions stems from billions of years of evolution and not innate depravity. It is “deep rooted”, almost immutable. The fact that people feel jealous and care for others opinions serves the vital function of the propagation of mankind. To cut it short, the agony Ayn’s clique went through was unnecessary. Ayn Rand believed that she could root out irrational emotions by correcting the underlying wrong premises, but her feelings didn’t change when she changed her philosophy-partly because those feelings were not irrational in the first place. By denying their feelings, she and her followers were revealing their secret fascination with it, and those feelings remained hidden inside, welled up, waiting to explode and come to surface. And it did.

There are things which people like. Then there are things which they profess to like in the public. When several newspapers owners chided Gail Wynand, the publisher of New York Banner, the most vulgar publication in the country, he said: “You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe.” Nothing illustrates it better than the commercial success of Times of India. As Manu Joseph writes: “Needless to say, like in any other city, Delhi has astonishingly talented editors, journalists and writers, but there is a Delhi mental condition which is incurable—a fake intensity, a fraudulent concern for ‘issues’, the grand stand. Readers, on the other hand, have many interests today apart from democracy, policies and the perpetual misery of the poor. But the Indian media, based in Delhi, refused to see it until recently and very grudgingly, when The Times of India proved it. It is not a coincidence that The Times Group, the most profitable media organization in India, is based in Bombay. It is not a coincidence that the game changer came from here.”

There is the way we feel. Then, there is the way we are supposed to feel. The irresolvable conflict between both was evident when eight years back Manu Joseph visited the Juice Hair salon in Bombay.  Nikhil, a 25 year old stylist said something totally unexpected: “I believe in family values”. Manu Joseph was bemused and asked: “What? Family?”. He replied, “Yeah, and traditional values”. He was asked “You would say people should not have sex before marriage?”  He replied: “Yeah. It’s a good idea not to have sex before marriage. Also, I feel people should marry young and settle down. I am for joint family”. Manu Joseph writes that “It was quickly verified that by ‘joint’ he didn’t mean marijuana and by ‘family’ he was certainly referring to those loving and disturbed people.” The boy soon made things clear: “But what I believe in is very different from the way I live my life”. When asked whether he simply likes the theory of traditional values, his answer was: “Yeah, something like that”. He loved the theory of traditional values, but in practice, he loved the pleasures, comfort and freedom of modernity.

There are many things people like on an abstract level. On a high philosophical level, the man on the street is against everything which improves the quality of his life-from money to sex to markets to lurid magazines. If possible, he wants it all to be wiped out of existence by the state. In reality, he is the most shameless in pursuing all of these. We have the much enjoyable spectacle of politicians sending their own children to private English language schools, and at the same time enforcing regional language education in Government schools. The same is true of their followers who can afford to do so. They believe in clinging to their mother tongue only on a high, philosophical level. People of course, love illusions they do not live up to. And this is the reason Karan Johar includes national anthem in the middle of a movie.

The contrast between what people like on an abstract level and what they like in reality tell us a lot about people, and the society in which they live in. When self interest tells them to pursue what they really like, their “conscience” that is guided by an inverted morality often tells them to go against their instincts. In the Indian media, I have read few things as perceptive as Manu Joseph’s analysis of Arundhati Roy: “What her admirers say about her is true—that she is the conscience of the nation. What is disputable is whether it is a compliment. We know very little about conscience but what we do know is that there is an unattainable moral superiority about it, and that it usually transmits unsolicited advice, which is the opposite of what the mind really wants to do. But at the same time, it is fundamentally a creation of the mind, a creation that is meant to come in conflict with its maker. That is Roy. She is the creation of the very system that she aspires to bring down.”

In any conflict between self interest and conscience, selfishness would have inevitably won.  So, is this insight of any value? Yes, and for a reason. Though self interest directs the actions of people, politics determine the actions of self-interested individuals in a democracy. There is one space where politics succeeds in ensuring that the conscience wins out, that the conscience directs the actions of individuals: Inside the polling booth. If it is not a compliment when we say that Roy is the conscience of the nation, is there any reason for us to expect that the results would be good if people act according to their conscience? There are reasons to believe otherwise. Interestingly, Manu Joseph’s do not think that people act according to their conscience inside the polling booth. His views on voter behavior are very much close to that of the long discredited Self Interested Voter Hypothesis.  So, it could be true that both the perspectives can be reconciled.

Bryan Caplan-The Myth of The Rational Voter

Contra Manu Joseph and many others, the middle class and the rich do not shirk their responsibility or try to outvote the poor. The middle class is more likely to vote than the politically and economically ignorant poor. The average voter is often an above average citizen. Decades of research in public choice theory proves that people vote selflessly. Voters typically do not vote for government policies which fit in well with their financial self interest. They generally vote in the larger interest of the society. Adjusting for IQ, the rich and the poor are equally likely to vote in favor of welfare as almost everyone believes in the supremacy of the welfare state. Why? The reason is simple. Being altruistic at the polling booth is an easy way to feel “noble”, as the vote of a single person is close to irrelevant. If I can feel good about myself by pressing a button, why shouldn’t I? The evidence to support his notion that voters discipline politicians and prevent them from running roughshod over them is really weak. History is full of corrupt politicians who had immensely “successful” “careers”. Most voters do not know their representatives or their positions too well. Voters are not capable of analyzing public policy, as it is too complex a task which requires specialized and often abstract knowledge. Most voters are woefully ignorant as economics and politics are extremely complex fields of knowledge in which even experts with decades of learning can easily go wrong.

To make sense of the madness in the Indian society, we should take a good look at Indian democracy. The system so reflects the society which sustains and nurtures it. As wrong as it is, Manu Joseph’s critique of democracy is far superior to that of Indian libertarian columnists. When many libertarian columnists believe that in a democracy special interest groups see to it that people do not get what they want, this comes as a relief: “There is something hollow about Indian voters’ rage against politicians. In many ways, the average Indian politician is a natural product of Indian society and its way of doing things. But, across all classes, a majority of Indians hate politicians even though they love democracy. The adoration for the world’s greatest political idea coexists with a deep loathing for the human embodiment of that idea.”

In any case, how many public choice researchers could have begun an article this way, with the characteristic wit of India’s most stylish writer: “On Sunday, when a tired old man ended his hunger strike by consuming coconut water laced with honey, the humiliation of the Indian government was complete.”

As much as one disagrees, there is one thing which is hard to deny. If intelligence is what goes on inside the head, Manu Joseph is the rock star of Indian Journalism. To borrow an invaluable metaphor from Albert Jay Nock, he makes all other Indian Journalists look like confederate money.  It would be hard to think of anyone who unmasks the rationalizations, hypocrisy and near complete imbecility of the Indian middle class and self-styled intellectuals in as pitilessly a manner as he does. The sophistication with which he handles seemingly mundane issues, the original insights which go into every article and the stylistic manner in which each and every sentence is framed makes him stick out like a silver thumb in this vast sea of incompetence.

When John Stuart Mill proceeded to analyze Sir W. Hamilton’s philosophy, he felt that the damage to Hamilton’s reputation became far greater than he had expected at first, through the never ending array of inconsistencies which recurred in his works. We feel the same when we read Manu Joseph analyzes political correctness or other multitude of evils that so plague our society. The damage to the objects of his ridicule and criticism becomes greater and greater as we proceed through the article. After reading his article on Anand John, a Facebook friend said that she could visualize everything which she had read as if it all were happening in front of her eyes. I felt the same. For once, I can agree that good journalism is indisputably literature, and of course, the most underrated kind.

Read: Corruption In Liberty Institute

Abstractions aside, we have come so far from the schoolyard!

Truth might be a bitter pill to swallow, but we are all better off with it. There are truths which many of us do not feel compelled to go overboard in stating, while some others state it cheerfully, as these are brutal facts their taste wouldn’t conceal. The economist David Friedman called the former ‘wimps’ and the latter ‘boors’. Or bullies and sissies. While wimps keep away from stating truths like that of the high rate of teenage pregnancy and criminal tendencies among blacks, boors state it with much enthusiasm and delight.

Like Friedman, I too have mixed feelings. It must be obvious that if rightly analyzed and interpreted, knowing all the Non-Politically Correct (Non-PC) facts will have a positive impact on the way many people look at economic policy in particular and the world in general. But, an incurable obsession with such issues is more often than not a sign of bigotry.

An excessive focus on gender, race, sexuality and nationality, whether legitimate or not, while turning a blind eye to war and immigration restrictions is like complaining of one’s mother-in-law’s nagging when someone is raping your wife and mugging your children. Needless to mention, it only means that your hatred for your mother in law trumps your hatred for explicit violence by a wide margin.

The white supremacist

Unlike many who love to read, I rarely read blogs. But, I enjoy Bob Wallace’s blog. He is full of opinions, the craziness of which would put even Ayn Rand to shame. All of them are pronounced as if they are self-evident absolutes, which are obvious to him, and should have been equally obvious to others if only they weren’t so stupid, stupid to the point that they needed him to point it out to them. The biggest plus of his writings is his Politically Incorrect stance on everything under the sun.

It is quite well known that Bob Wallace was fired from the libertarian portal Lewrockwell.com for stating some “unpleasant truths”-like the one given below:

“Most ‘bigotry’ is the act of noticing the truth. Blacks are genetically intellectually inferior, always have been, always will be. Except for music and sports, they will always be on the bottom. They’ve never had a culture worthy of the name, never will. Asians have an ages-old group mentality that I doubt can be eradicated. They have no creativity, and I doubt anything can be done about that, either. There never was a Muslim Golden Age. Most of it consisted of stealing from Christians and Jews. Islam was, and always will be, an intellectually and morally dead obscenity. It is the worst thing that has happened to the world. Jews will always be ostracized because of their attempts to destroy every culture that admits them. Whites will always be on top, Asians right underneath them, Mexicans far below, and blacks’ right at the bottom. Nearly everything in the world has been created by Western Christian civilization, especially in America since 1776.”

No sight as pleasant as that of an eccentric blogger!

The Randroid

“That Randroid keeps telling everyone how great he is by being “true to himself.” Bah.”-Urban Dictionary

The most obnoxious libertarian nut job is the Randroid.  What makes him even more obnoxious is his knee-jerk denial when faced with the epithet “libertarian”. “An objectivist is not a libertarian. Duh!”, he would hysterically rant before stomping off. It is highly doubtful whether a Randroid even has a mind. Like many who are drunk on religion, the Randroid is drunk on Rand’s melodrama and pseudo philosophy.

If you are very much into the libertarian movement, it is impossible to not be harangued by the pseudo-rational bullying of Randroids every now and then. They are quite an amusing bunch to watch. When cornered in a Facebook debate, a septuagenarian Objectivist was not willing to admit that Ayn Rand could err. A young boy wondered: “How could she be wrong?” An “activist” argued: “It is not at all rational to argue that immigration restrictions unfairly hurt the poor at the expense of the well-off. Altruistic pity is not a virtue, but an unpardonable sin.” One young girl claimed that being a born rationalist, she could see through religion at the age of one, and never budged since then. A blogger told a libertarian friend that rationality flows through his veins, and that he uses phrases like “Man qua man” because he believes in “precision of language”. Many of them claim to be lifelong capitalists, and to have held the philosophy as far as they remember, though I find it highly improbable that such a clustering of incompatible positions would have ever happened if a creature named Ayn Rand was never born in Saint Petersburg in 1905. Their whole problem lies where that most of them do not know how the theorem-proof system works or even the difference between an assertion and a proof. The difference between the insufferable Randroid and misguided Objectivist is only a matter of degree than principle, all claims and pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding. When a Randroid thinks she was always right, an Objectivist thinks  she was the second greatest philosopher of all times and hence by and large right. Still the hard truth remains that she hadn’t read more than a couple of books on philosophy in her whole life.

Recently I got a taste of their bitter medicine when two obnoxious ladies started a campaign against me for betraying the noble ideal of Objectivism by insulting their Goddess at every chance while working for an Ayn Rand Institute funded think tank at the same time. As it often happens with them, these psychotic women barely knew their object of hatred. They wanted to report my wickedness to the Ayn Rand Institute.

One girl was fuming with anger: “When I talked to him, as it was not in the virtual world, I couldn’t document anything. In my anger, I forgot everything.” But, I do remember everything she talked about the whole evening. She talked of her dog which was cute, and her defunct father who, not surprisingly, happened to be a wonderful person like her. He was as persecuted by this irrational society. And of course, on how she intends to be the Objectivist Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy marketing the virtue of selfishness. Later I heard that reality-the most punitive teacher-finally brought her down. She no longer nurtures such grandiose ambitions, but then it is only because this country doesn’t deserve anyone as pure, noble and brilliant. She was pure to the point of not being willing to discuss philosophy with anyone depraved enough to not toe the party line. She once said in an online forum: “You are implying that Ayn Rand could lie. It is not acceptable at all here. Go away!” And: “I can prove each and every statement of Ayn Rand, including that it is immoral for a woman to aspire to be the United States President.”

The Misogynist

Despite his endorsement of a never ending list of monstrous positions, a misogynist libertarian friend of mine is the epitome of interpersonal nicety. He spends much of his waking hours on internet forums fighting the state oppression of long-suffering Alpha-males. Anyone who displays so much as a tendency to identify with the ‘plight’ of women is branded as a wimp who is frantically looking for easy ways to get laid. I do not disagree with him if his point was just that the effect of the feminist movement is decidedly negative. But, my dictionary says that feminism means nothing more than the economic, political and social equality of women.

I was not taken in by his argument that the misuse of laws against domestic violence poses a severe threat to me. “Why am I supposed to lose my sleep over something which has the likelihood of affecting me as much as that of a helicopter falling over my apartment and taking my life off? Aren’t there more important things to worry about?” I wondered.

He chided me for not being enough of a libertarian and argued that the existence of the law itself is proof enough that rights of men like us are sacrificed at the altar of ‘victimology’. Given the existence of the law, we are always at the mercy of “feminazis”, he reminded me. I didn’t disagree. But how the existence of a domestic violence act by itself would mean that the laws are predominantly anti-male was totally beyond me! I needed broader evidence which never quite seemed to emerge from his side.  “If we look at the larger picture isn’t it true that women typically get a pretty raw deal?”, I asked, as if I am not sure. He protested that it is not at all true, arguing that men have always protected women from nature and taken care of them, only to get scorn and ingratitude in return. Soon I was harangued by a series of questions which were craftily designed to ferret out hidden leftist tendencies inside me. He was thoroughly convinced that I was born a leftist and in spite of my education, I will inevitably come around to my natural inclinations.

One among many of his bizarre claims is that women in the Middle East have a better deal than the pampered women in the western world. Moreover, men in the Middle East gain far most respect from their spouses than the spineless wimps in the West who yield to even their most irrational demands. With legitimized wife beating and a lot many other oppressive legislations, I didn’t find much plausibility in this notion. He went to the extent of claiming that consensual wife beating will be acceptable and far more prevalent in a libertarian society. Hearing this, another libertarian friend of mine was puzzled and asked him: “Why do you even want the freedom to beat your wife?” “It should be used sparingly and after a point, it becomes hardly necessary. The government has no right to interfere with our sacrosanct family structure.” was his reply. This was too much, way too much, far too much for even men who roughly sympathized with his cause.

One evening he called me up eagerly to share the latest petty injustice against men: Voluntary paternity acknowledgment, with which comes the responsibility to financially support a child and at the same time being denied the right to have genetic testing later to show whether or not one is the child’s biological father. I could easily see his point, as despite its pretensions to being voluntary, it is a deal in which the government draws up the default contract. Again, it is irrelevant to most of us who have rather stable lives. And why does he always have just one subject? It is definitely not worthy of a significant part of our time. I dismissed it saying it is not such a big deal. He was shocked: “What? How can it not be an important issue? There can be no bigger problem on earth than not knowing one’s own father!” I chuckled, but let it pass.

Another cause dear to his heart is the right to accept dowry. I of course, agree that the government has no right whatsoever to prevent voluntary deals between individuals. I also see a lot of hypocrisy in the case against dowry when most women search for deep pockets before tying the nuptial knot, and in many cases, permanently live off them without scruples. Some libertarian thinkers have made a case to the effect that marriage and dating are cases of glorified prostitution. I completely agree. All said, I think it is still despicable. It is not such an inspiring cause to fight for. I asked him: “Why do you spend so much time and effort on this when most people go on with their lives not caring much for the law? In any case, no one is going to stop you!”  “How can I even advertise my dowry rate when the law is against it? I am at a severe disadvantage in the marriage market.” was his instant retort. Sadly, I missed it.

One common trait I find among misogynists is that almost always they need stay at home wives. “I hate arrogant career oriented woman. There are many things more important on earth than having a “rewarding” career.” one of them told me. “Like say, changing diapers?”

“How can you live all your life with someone when you cannot even have a meaningful conversation? Won’t you go insane?” I asked this misogynist friend. He had a not-so-surprising answer: “Stupidity in girls is such a big turn-on. I am more comfortable with a pretty girl who makes crisp Dosa’s and loves cute little kittens than someone who talks of the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. Intelligence and erudition are so un-feminine. It is about time we respect our natural inclinations.” I pray to God that he gets such a wonderful, domesticated wife. Another one answered: “I like naïve girls, for the same reason I like toddlers. They are as cute and gullible.” He liked a girl like Chulbuli!

The Compassionate Conservative

Some conservative libertarians are as interesting as misogynists. No social problem melts their heart, but their heart bleeds for unborn babies. They are almost always the most passionate advocates of spanking. They “feel” that all a naughty toddler needs is a much deserved smack on the bottom. They scream that the government should take its ugly hands out of the interactions between parents and children however abusive it is, because it so weakens the family structure. But, nothing is more unthinkable to them than the ejection of an “unborn baby”.  Their attitude was accurately expressed by these words in a Barry Deutsch cartoon: “Take the government out of everything except women’s uteruses, because that is where the government rightly belongs.”

Pro-lifers often feel that it is only they who are an exception in a world which is terribly selfish. Their theory is that none of the supporters of abortion were aborted, and hence look at the world through the narrow prism of selfish beings privileged to walk on the earth. “You support abortion as you were never aborted or have gone through such suffering!”  I find the theory ridiculous on the face of it, as the same could be said of the anti-abortion bunch too.

The Hapless Victim

In the eyes of the “politically incorrect” libertarian, the most oppressed, suppressed and marginalized section of the society is the white, middle-aged heterosexual male. Their saner peers sneer that it is not a coincidence that the typical attendee of a libertarian conference is “a middle-aged, white, straight male.”

Libertarian self-centeredness can at best be illustrated by the widespread notion that the United States was much freer in the 19^th Century (when black slavery existed and gays were routinely persecuted), and in course of time, the freedom eroded bit by bit. David Boaz of the Cato Institute points out that “it is a historical argument that doesn’t ring true to an awful lot of Jewish, black, female, and gay Americans” who formed the majority of the population in the United States. (Bryan Caplan agrees with Boaz, but argues that unlike blacks and gays, Women and Jews were freer in the gilded age) Few libertarians if any go to the extent of supporting slavery, but it is quite true that many downplay its significance through intention or ignorance.

Boaz clearly makes the distinction between the size of the government and its power, much similar to the differentiation between scale and scope of the state, made by Robert Higgs in “Crisis and Leviathan”. Though the scale of government was small in terms of the size of total expenditures and regulations in the 19^th century, it must be true that the power of the government was huge. Black slavery is a case in which the Government exerted immense power over its citizens, when its size was minimal. While libertarians and conservatives look at the size of the government as a severe threat to liberty, its power is looked at benignly.

Whatever the merit of their claims, I never understood how heterosexuals are oppressed and sacrificed. Whenever I hear of persecution and marginalization, I often wonder why I always hear so much from the persecuted side-whether it is from women, bleeding-heart journalists, heterosexuals or whites. Many bleeding heart journalists claim that they are being marginalized by evil capitalists. I cannot help wondering why there is no extreme capitalist in the Indian media when many left liberals are in really powerful positions. But then, it could be my prejudice.

The Hindu Fundamentalist

Many Indian libertarians continuously post status updates claiming “Arabs are dangerous.”, and “Pakistani schools teach Hindu hatred.” They quote, analyze and reject scriptures written by barefoot bums and semi-literate Muslim fundamentalists. They occasionally wonder: “Can’t I even say that Muslims are terrorists? Am I not allowed to speak the unspeakable truth?” and finally express their shock in being persecuted: “But, tell me how am I a Hindu fundamentalist? I am not sure I even understood what you mean!”

Manu Joseph puts Anti-Islamic mentality in perspective: “God is the problem. Not just the Islamic God, but gods of all types. If you really think there is a connection between Islam and the nefarious mind, go to Shirdi. If you stand long enough in Shirdi, you will meet all the top criminals of India. Many of them will be in whites.”

The Bigot

Nevada's very own mad professor is inimitably kooky.

Gary North is said to be a very humble man, but there are few scholars who are as entertaining. In “Honest Money”, he expatiates on the problems when women were used as money. The single biggest problem was that of divisibility. Half a woman, he tells us, is worse than none. The rationalist in me is compelled to admit that I was filled with enlightenment after reading his exposition of Christian monetary economics. He warns us: “God is serious about his orders-eternally serious. God will not be mocked!” He once wondered: “If God’s law is true, how could Gresham’s law be true? How could bad money drive out good money?” He had an answer. “Economists are brilliant. They figured out the answer for this centuries old puzzle which turns our God against market competition. It happens only when the Government enforces equality of money.” So, a God in fact exists. It is only that the Government distorts his signals.

Gary North’s “The Coase Theorem”, is a passionate attack on the “dirty secret” of Economic Analysis of Law and Value-Free Economics. It prods me to take God’s word and actions more seriously, which is revealed through Bible, of course. It would mean that I have to undertake the mind-boggling task of mastering Christian Ethics, Epistemology and Economics in and out! However, it is hard to be amused when he “calls for the death penalty for apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “unchastity before marriage.”

Hoppe can be as amusing: “There can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with [a libertarian order]. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”

Good enough?

Read: Corruption In Liberty Institute

A YouTube video of a woman who has 15 children and does not feel like looking after them is doing rounds on Facebook.  She claims that someone else should really take the responsibility of taking care of her brats. Unlike the street bum who slyly asks for a cent, she thinks that she deserves to get it good and hard. Many libertarians are pointing out some facts: She grew up poor, with the implicit notion that the “Mommy state” has always been there, and will always be there to feed and clothe not just her, but also the long line of babies behind her. She is black, and the state has kept her poor. It all makes them feel terrible for her and her welfare babies, as most libertarians who would rather party and play poker than feel for her.

The response it elicited from the libertarian community was amusing. Someone drew up a feasible business plan: “In a libertarian society this would be easily dealt with. Since prostitution would be legal, it would be the perfect job for her to support her mob of children!” Someone else had a more ingenious one: “Her husband was a drug dealer. Now, she can be a baby dealer!  They should force her to sell some of those kids to willing rich families, and with that money she could care for the rest. Hey, Mrs. 15 kids has found her niche in the market!” Many were suddenly reminded of the iron fist of the paternal state: “Two words: Mandatory sterilization.” Social Darwinists were even more honest: “So now that they are here, and she obviously can’t take care of them. What should we do? I say let them all starve to death. It is what would happen if natural biological processes were to be at work. It feels bad to be her kids, but I don’t feel bad. She should. She is the one who brought them to the world to starve.” The rest turned their face: “Pathetic. That lady is disgusting”

My position is rather complicated than black and white. Quick points: 1) I sympathize more with welfare mothers than oldies on welfare, but it doesn’t entitle anyone to breed like rabbits. 2) The state is bad. 3) Given the fact that many feel terrible for her, I have mixed feelings about even private charity. 4) I feel really bad for her children and think that they need help. They have a pretty raw deal, and it is none of their fault. But, I doubt whether their trajectory would be any different, as adult promiscuity is largely innate. 5) It is obvious to me that we are not obliged to help strangers. But, it is hard to convince me that it is entirely the fault of blacks that they are behind and remain so. Likewise, in India, tribals who form 9% of the population are the victims of 40% of the land acquisitions. So, in reality, things are more complicated than they are in ‘Atlas Shrugged’. It is also disturbing that the fact that she is black is part of reason she angers many. To sum it all up, I can only paraphrase the great Murray Rothbard: “Left-liberals might try to evade the truth by charging that this is the old conservative tack of “blaming the victim.” They’re wrong. No one is blaming the babies. “

Manu Joseph makes an interesting observation on bleeding-heart liberals. The iniquitous social system which persists in stuck-up countries like India strengthen a minority elite which leverages the unfair privileges, and before long slowly turns against the system which made their wealth and self-righteous indignation possible. They are, like Arundhati Roy, “an anomaly that completes the system”. Their heart of course, lies with the real India waiting to get in, but is still kept out by the elitist middle class. With misty eyes, they tell us that the dull masses will never go away. It might be their only hope, but they have something called vote which will humiliate their betters. When the middle class and the rich are busy partying, they will doggedly march to the polling booth in hordes once in every five years and press the button with glee, throwing all the rascals out. It would be quite an inspiring sight!

The great 20th century polemicist H.L. Mencken had hinted that democracy originated in the poetic fancies of refined men who felt like putting the donkey into the cart to revolutionalize transport, saddened by the fact that it is over-laden.

There was no mass movement which was different. The Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises had pointed out that behind all socialistic ideas we see the dark, ugly hands of the wicked scion of one of the prominent aristocratic families of royal France. Marx never did a honest day’s work, and lived off Engels, who was a wealthy industrialist and a much more original thinker. The anti capitalist ideas were by no means an achievement of the masses, but of that of much pampered intellectuals and artists who never had to wonder where the next meal would come from. Rustic poetry on the pleasures of country life was never written by shepherds or village idiots, but by urban poets. Murray Rothbard was one among the many who noticed that most intellectuals who complain about the ugliness of cities and worship primitivism were firmly ensconced in these crowded cities.

In Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’, we see that the socialist Ellsworth Toohey didn’t get along with poor boys slogging hard at Harvard, but the second and third generation millionaires flocked to him. He granted them a self-respect which they couldn’t have themselves earned. Toohey pointed at something interesting. The college professors, the newspaper editors, the respectable mothers and the Chambers of Commerce did not come flying to the defense of the ubermensch Howard Roark when he was facing trial. But, some proletarians did.

Mises tells us that the socialistic ranting of proletarian writers were nothing but trash when compared to that of their bourgeoisie counterparts-and for a reason. Bourgeoisie writers were more successful in describing the sad plight of workers, their cute babies and pretty daughters as they knew not what they were talking about and were hence more honest. Leave aside the claims of polylogism. Have proletarians ever had their fair share in the large body of “proletarian literature”?