Revisiting Mahabharat and the essence of its burden

Raju Korti
You do not have to be a fundamentalist to be interested in Mythology. I have a completely detached take on the purported reality of the subject which transcends beyond the realms of mundane ground realities like wars, disputes, human conscience and earthly compulsions. As historical compass, Mythology points to the horizon and to point back to ourselves to establish a brutal connection between the past and present; spinning a complicated web of redemption and chaos. B R Chopra's teleserial ruminates on this standpoint with "Seekh hum beete yugo se, naye yug ka kare swaagat."

I have watched Mahabharat a few times that it has been telecast since the first time from end 1988 to mid 90s apart from reading it like a fairytale story in my childhood days. Each time my eyes have been opened to the new vistas of behavioral sciences that it seeks to portray with such vividity. As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached the Mahabharat as I would approach a contemporary poem or novel. Perhaps it is a measure of my supreme ignorance that I have been rewarded with a rich, affecting portrait of, among other things, the profound essay it makes in myriad shades of human emotions. From my earliest imagery of divine miracles to a war within a family lineage and to being a bedrock of a story and legend seeking to correct human perceptions, it has served as a cultural mirror -- the super heroes and super villains playing pawns to the vicissitudes of time.

When the epic saga was aired for the first time a little more than 30 years back, it struck a chord for being able to provide a vibrancy to a cliffhanger narrative. To me, the most abiding element is the profundity it seeks to lend to human emotions and the amplitude to each of its larger-than-life characters. To that extent, it is arguably tough to segregate characters in the story as less or more important. Its highest common factor prompts me to conclude that each of the dramatis personae is a symbolic representation of an emotion. And yet, despite each of them at cross purposes with each other, evoke similar feelings of sympathy and despise. Its almost surreal that situations and characters that can cause mental integration and disintegration merge so seamlessly. That is what makes Mahabharat a timeless work of art.

There is a general perception that Mahabharat is all about politics unlike the earlier epoch Ramayan which makes out a case for idealism in life. Having scoured through a number of treatises on the subject, I am yet to come across any distinguishable research that delves on the common denominator of the politics espoused so evocatively by Krishna through The Gita in his weighty Sanskrit verses. So I watched it with a neutral prism to decipher and deduce from its intrigues, conspiracies, affectations and vulnerabilities. My finding may be nothing to rave about but I find it worthy of writing a book given the enormity of the folklore and the wide spectrum of the personality of its players.

When you readjust your goggles, you have a view with a different colour. The entire flow from the genesis of the Bharat Vanshiyas to their annihilating end -- punctuated with a thrilling blend of romanticism, love, hatred, compassion from a knotty web of relationships -- emerges a compelling sense of helplessness. The "vivashta" (helplessness) of each of its characters as they play out their aims and ambitions goes beyond theatrics. They all meet their end justifying themselves. And yet, neither the ends nor the means complement each other.

The rulers right from Shantanu, wife Satyawati, son Devavrat (Bheeshma), Pandu, Dhritarashtra, Gaandhari, Duryodhan, Dusshasan, the Pandava brothers, their teachers Dronacharya and Kripacharya, Ashwatthama, Draupadi and all other peripheral characters including the ordinary soldier in the war, are helpless for one reason or the other. That helplessness perhaps explains why every character generates sympathy despite their ruthless grandstanding. Helplessness induces hopelessness and therefore compassion.

Behind the compulsive premise of this war, lies an infinite pool of lessons. Very few narratives have been able to capture the rainbow of love, loathing, envy, lust, greed and power the way Mahabharat  has done. Add to that the helplessness as the trigger point. As I grapple with the idea of dealing with each character as a case study in helplessness, I am increasingly stimulated to write a book that makes as much sense in today's context. Mahabharat provides enough punch to pack from a surfeit of divergent stories of characters disabled by their helplessness. If Time has indeed traveled over 5000 years believing the Mahabharat has happened, it still continues to be witness to the biggest human weakness.

At a time when the human spirit is meandering through religious riders, it is necessary that this fascinating account of strife and conformity is looked at dispassionately. And as you will agree, helplessness has no religion.   

Of Journalism, copycats and counterfeiters

Raju Korti
Let me say this upfront. I am not too enthused by the word "plagiarism". Somehow I feel it intellectualizes the crass act of copying. I would rather go for "copycat, counterfeit and piracy". They are commensurate with the character of the act. Plagiarism starts with the very same people who decry it with righteous anger and I am referring to the breed whose professional calling looks upon copying as an affront but practices it subtly in the express understanding that you are not a thief until you are caught.

The isolation and infertility of thought in these locked down times seems to have mutated into new species of copycats. But as a weather-beaten media professional of forty years let me start with those in my own calling. There is a newspaper which advertises itself as a friend and not a newspaper. It has a big brother which claims to be the sole repository of Journalism of Courage. The editor of the "friendly newspaper" carries the aura of a refined intellectual but time and again the mask falls. His self-cultivated image as the practitioner of fearless and cerebral journalism took a beating when he was abruptly asked by his "friendly" management to withdraw an editorial he wrote with so much conviction. The "friendly" newspaper did not bother to tell its valued reader friends why it withdrew an editorial published in the earlier edition was junked in the next. Our respected editor was undaunted. He recently translated -- word-to-word -- a longish tweet by Andrew Lilico, a columnist of The Guardian. It did not occur to his erudite and reflective mind that there is a social media which makes a journalist out of every Tom, Dick and Harry and Jane and Jill. The lid was off in no time but our editor is made of sterner stuff. He carried on as if nothing had happened. But of course, this is not about this one person. It is now a global affliction where anyone can be a stakeholder in your intellectual property. Now the politicians are counterfeiting journalists by claiming their ownership of  posts and memes whose original composer you may never know.

Until mid-80s, my idea of copying was limited to desperate students who banked on the intelligence of the vicinity students while writing their answers papers. The first hint at plagiarizing came when some of my seniors in the profession subtly hinted at it. There was no internet then. The editors were privileged to get all national and some international dailies. The lesser mortals in the newsroom never got to read those unless they sought them. I particularly remember a colleague who had a crooked smile on his face while telling the office peon "Agar editor sahab ka editorial likhna ho gaya ho to bade papers leke aao bhai." No one said anything. People just giggled.

One colleague who could not write one sentence straight once wrote a Middle article. All of us had a nagging doubt he had lifted it but no one was vocal. The chief editor held back the piece for almost a fortnight in the hope that the original might be found but then finally gave the benefit of doubt to him. A couple of days later the editor in-charge of Letters column received a nasty letter from an 80-year-old Parsi gentleman demanding to know if O Henry was reborn after 75 years. Our smart colleague had copied a O Henry short story verbatim with just one change. Counterfeiting Pounds, Shillings to Rupees and Paise. The editor gave him a dressing down in front of the staff in the newsroom and a long sermon on newspaper ethics and integrity. Our guy just laughed it off. And to cop it all, this happened when the colleague had ordered samosas and chai to celebrate the publication of a "great literary piece". To this day, I can't forget the shameless smile on his face as he munched samosa while listening to the rebuke from his boss. That he was a post-graduate in English Literature gave the episode an extraordinary twist.

Bigger copycats than him have happened since. Names do not matter. These are scribes who fell in love with writing but writing never fell in love with them. If you think this is an original sentence, perish the thought. The sentence is blatantly copied from one of my US-based fellow journalist friend Mayank Chhaya's blog on Chetan Bhagat. My honesty drives from my conviction that all originality is undetected plagiarism.

Some memories of my meeting with Rajiv Gandhi

Raju Korti

Rajiv and Rajesh Khanna clicked by me in 1991

Happenstances can sometimes have eerie forebodings. I am referring to my meeting with then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, just a week before he was assassinated in a bomb blast after addressing a public meeting in the Tamil hotbed of Sriperumbudur. Of course, that was my third meeting with Rajiv. I will not bear on the first two since they do not serve the purpose of this blog.

Pitchforked to the country's top post in a manner perhaps rarely seen in the electoral history of any country, Rajiv, who was just 40 then, had zilch experience in administration and politics. However, piggy-riding on a massive sympathy wave in the wake of his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination, Rajiv's biggest asset was his being a greenhorn in a party that had antiquated leaders comfortably ensconced in their perceived invincibility. He was generally believed to be Mr Clean and inclined towards building a "modern India."

The first happenstance was his anointment as the general secretary of the party. When I cornered him after a customary press conference, he outlined his vision for India as an emerging technical superpower. It was an image he carried with his affable personality and many, including the party's sworn detractors, had begun to see a welcome change in the country's putrid and corrupt politics.

The party had, however, learnt little from the glaring lessons history had thrown at it. Indira's political strategy of resolving a problem after allowing it interminably to fester and take credit backfired badly in Punjab. The Sikhs did not take in kindly to the entry of army in the Golden Temple and she paid the price with her life. That political algorithm should have opened the eyes of the party's superannuated and creaky leaders but the Congress in its ultimate complacency wasn't any wiser. The party's egregious "coterie culture" was always in evidence. I make a mention of the "coterie" culture to validate my point later.

A reluctant starter, Rajiv struck the right chord with the masses by making a straight reference to the caucuses in the party and I distinctly remember that at a party plenary, he even obliquely referred to some party leaders as "whining, moaning and groaning" and warned them against being power brokers. But for a man who made a welcome beginning, he fell prey to the same caucus. If it showed that while the famed coterie was freaking out in the corridors of power, it also revealed Rajiv's susceptibility to elements who were more seasoned at political nitty gritty. He got sucked into that vortex faster than he realized.

The anti-Sikh riots after he took over as the prime minister was baptism by fire and should have been warning enough for him to see the writing on the wall. Even as a novice, he could have seen that the Punjab backlash should have served as a lesson when he was grappling with the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. The Bhopal disaster, Bofors scandal and Shah Bano case among others showed that here was a prime minister who was falling in the same abyss. The 1989 election, during which I traveled  extensively with Vishwanath Pratap Singh, once his trusted aide and later his bete noire, and Rajiv, was an irony of sorts. Although both were Left of Centre, Singh was the emerging Mr Clean while Rajiv's stocks were plummeting and as it happened, Congress lost the battle of hustings. That  actually should have been a timely platform for the party to break from its dynastic image but Congress rallied round the family once again and Rajiv became the party president with not even an iota of opposition. The young, and perhaps, some deserving young guns either lacked courage or stood no chance to have a crack at party's leadership. No lesson learnt.

I had a much longer audience with him in 1991, the happenstance that I mentioned at the outset. By a strange development, I was also working as  Special Police Officer in charge of regulating VIP traffic along with my regular duties as a journalist. Rajiv was faced with the dangerous and ticklish situation in Sri Lanka where Indian Peace Keeping Forces were involved in a serious combat with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) then widely regarded as the most powerful and ruthless terrorist outfit even ahead of the likes of Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Hezbollah.

At a press conference in Nagpur where he was on a whirlwind election tour, I approached him for an interview. He asked me to accompany him to the Gandhian district of Wardha where he was scheduled to address a public rally and eat lunch at industrialist Ramkrishna Bajaj's residence. I was not sure whether the meet would actually happen given his hectic schedule and the manner in which he was constantly surrounded by party leaders but the lunch where I was also an invitee, gave me an opportunity.

During the lunch, he saw me and beckoned me to a quiet corner. "My hands are full as you see. but I will give you 20 minutes, he told me with an apologetic smile." I lost no time and came to the point straightaway. "Don't you think you should avoid going to Madras? The LTTE is gunning for you. Back home, the Tamils are also not happy with you." If he had been warned before by the Intelligence of the impending threat to his life, he didn't show it. It was apparent he had what he believed was a simultaneous master-stroke to secure India's Big Brother hold over Sri Lanka and  sweep the carpet from under Karunanidhi's DMK government. "This is an opportunity for me to bring peace to the strife-torn island and strengthen the Congress in Tamil Nadu," he replied. "But don't you think the Sri Lankan government is playing smart? It managed to get India's peace-keeping forces to manage the Indian militants in its country. It may take Pakistan's help to neutralize Muslim extremists and watch all the fun doing nothing to handle an internal crisis which was of its own making," I persisted. Rajiv looked nonchalant. "I don't see the kind of threat perception that is being made out," he said with complete confidence. Either he couldn't care or he didn't have much faith in the Intelligence. He then went on to explain how the strife-torn island would return to normal with the marginalization of LTTE and help him establish a Congress government in Tamil Nadu later. A couple of times I tried to tell him about the dangers of campaigning in Tamil Nadu, he cut me off with a wave of his hand. "You wait and see. I will be on a comeback trail," he asserted and even asked me to tag along with him to TN to see how he would swing the electoral campaign in his favour. None of what he had planned happened. This was on May 12, 1991. Just a week later, he was killed by an LTTE suicide bomber. The sports shoes that I saw him wearing during my meeting with him were his only remnants and identification. The Lankan crisis hurtled from bad to worse, the LTTE lived up to its ominous reputation and the people of Tamil Nadu were remorseless and showed no grief. It was a calculation that went horribly wrong. Congress lost two front-line leaders in a span of 7 years and the nation two prime ministers in similar circumstances with similar outcomes and had similar ramifications.

My sense of foreboding also had a tinge of disappointment. On the day I met him, I filed a story about the threat to his life in Madras, based on my personal contacts with Intelligence officials. My editor called me and said how could I file the story without naming the sources in the Intelligence. I told him, one, that officials in that department never reveal their names and two, the story was based on the facts collated from circumstances. In his superior wisdom he discarded the story. He was of course apologetic in hindsight after Rajiv's killing. What finally mattered was both of us looked fools and it was a bad miss for both of us. The paper lost its we-told-you-so opportunity.

I will not delve into the many peripherals of the issue. As I said in the beginning the last meet with Rajiv was a happenstance that had a morbid portents. I brushed aside the temptation of writing about it all these years for the sheer morbidity of it. It is just that it found an outlet today on Rajiv's death anniversary. 

Of viruses, mutations, vaccines and human helplessness

Raju Korti
In a Facebook post yesterday, born part out of my locked down anguish and part out of desperation to cut loose through some silly humour, I ventilated it out on researchers for their inability to anticipate the kind of vicious viruses the world could encounter in future. My case was the mankind should be adequately prepared and resourced with vaccines so that it isn't caught on the wrong foot like it has happened in the wake of Corona pandemic.

My US-based journalist friend Mayank Chhaya, quick on the uptake as always, pointed out the inanity in my post saying "purely as a plausible scientific response, Raju, virus mutations are very hard to anticipate but I get your point." So honesty demands that a disclaimer should be in place. To begin with, my knowledge about viruses as also how and why they mutate is not scientifically deep-rooted but based on my average perceptions as a Science student.

My interest in the subject was triggered sometime in the early eighties when the Time magazine did a comprehensive story on viruses and their influence on humans. All I could glean at that time was their number was a staggering 10 nonillion which is 10 raised to its 31st power. This means there are more viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe, enough to assign one to every star in the Universe 100 million times over. However, it is not just the mathematics of viruses that intrigued me. I have been exercising on the fighting spirit of the humans to overcome them and their adverse effects although it is still unclear how long immunity will last once a person's immune system beats the infection. Once an infection leaves the body, it leaves markers in the immune system also known as antibodies that can quickly identify and fight the virus if it were to reappear in future.

My interest in the subject would have probably died a natural death at this stage of enlightenment but twenty five years back it was re-amplified by a medical thriller "Contagion" written by Robin Cook. What drives me to be relevant here is Cook has taken an interesting flight of fancy that in hindsight looks almost prophetic. It is the story of a deadly epidemic spread not merely by microbes but by sinister sabotage described as a terrifying cautionary tales for the millennium as health care giants collide. When you read the conspiracy theories emanating from different quarters about the present pandemic and the ever so devious role of pharmaceutical companies whose lobby is believed to be much stronger than the doctors' lobby, you have to give it to Cook as a soothsayer. That he screwed it up with an absolutely implausible, ridiculous ending is quite another story.

Cook was right on track. In 1989, he authored a book "Mutation" in which he outlined the ethics of genetic engineering and as recently as in 2018, came out with "Pandemic" where a seemingly healthy woman with transplanted heart suffers from acute respiratory distress and dies. The protagonist, a medical examiner and a frequent character in his novels, does an autopsy and suspects the death could be due to a flu-like virus. While investigating the mysterious heart transplant of the dead woman, he unearths a larger conspiracy. He meets a Chinese billionaire businessman who holds a double PhD in Molecular Biology and Genetics. Further cases of flu-like virus get reported in many parts of the world and he determines to stop the pandemic from spreading.

Three books in a row that touch upon related subjects steeped into medical sciences make for a remarkable coincidence when you see what the world is passing through with similar shades of grey. For me, this backdrop raises a predicament. In my limited wisdom, I wonder why the scientific community since so long has kept changing its collective mindset over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, they are thought of as being in grey area between living and non-living. The classification of viruses as non-living in the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence. It has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution - a point where I feel vindicated. Perhaps it is a case of belated wisdom that most researchers are beginning to appreciate viruses as fundamental players in the history of life.

A mutation is just a change in virus's genetic code. Most mutations don't really change how the virus behaves. It is still unclear how the mutations ultimately affect counter-measures like a vaccine. That perhaps explains the mist surrounding the mutation of the Corona virus. My considered opinion is although success in predicting what new viruses will emerge may be limited, predicting how viruses may evolve and spread could be more tractable. That the mutations quickly become drug-resistant means it is going to an unending tug of war between humans and viruses.

Till then, keep washing your hands until a proven vaccine arrives. And once it does, rest on your paunches till another one comes to bug you.