Manoj and Babli - A Hate Story. By Chander Suta Dogra

A decade ago when I was attending a study program at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies at Hawaii, I chose ‘Identity Politics and Ethnicity’ as an elective subject. It was taught by the venerable scholar Robert Wirsing who, on more than one occasion informed us in a voice that could have stopped a cavalry charge, “Culture matters!”

Culture matters to people. It gives them a sense of identity, even stability, and fuses unwritten laws into collective DNA with that blowtorch called ‘emotion’. It often holds rationality with disdain of the ill-informed and embraces past with dangerous naivety.  

In her first book, Chander Suta Dogra has traced the tale of a young couple, Manoj and Babli, who were brutally killed for having married against the dictates of their culture. This dastardly practice goes by the sobriquet of ‘honour killing’ and never has the word honour been put to a more severe test of irony.

Her riveting account has a chilling opening. The contemporariness of the bloody incident – it happened in 2007 – is shocking and depressing even to someone who is aware that the practice exists in pockets of this region. But it is also a tale of amazing courage of a handful of women - the mother and sister of the deceased boy, an intrepid judge who sentenced the culprit to death and a NGO-worker – all of who refused to bow to the powerful khap panchayats (caste based local bodies) and risked their lives to secure convictions for the murderers. They climbed a steep curve and surmounted isolation, penury, hostility of a trenchantly patriarchal society, indifference and even criminal culpability of police and convenience of politicians. They provide the light that makes the prospects of traversing a long and gloomy tunnel tolerable.

There is more to cheer about. It is evident that there is an evolving awareness that is beginning to germinate in dry sands of ‘tradition’. It is incipient and it is against all odds. But watered by the occasional drizzle of contact with modernity, it gives every indication of flowering someday.   

The writing style is easy and effective. It is an extremely well-researched work that rings true all the way. The sheer grip of the events makes it hard to put down; I read it in gulps. And the narrative has been garnished with dialogue to add life to the story.

Both for inspiration and jolting middle-class indifference out of its stupor, I recommend this book.

Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Experience is about everything that the title promises – the secret of enjoying the optimal experience – that period when immersed in an activity you experience near-seamless joy. All of us experience it in snatches while being engaged in activities that interest and challenge us adequately, for example, reading a wonderful book, writing to our satisfaction, painting, preparing a presentation, making a draft, building a structure, learning to play an instrument…. If only we could be in that trance like flow forever!

You would notice I did not include mindless surfing of the Net or pushing buttons on remote among those activities. Flow, we learn, is only produced by activities that add to our inner growth and complexity. The rest – like lolling in the bed, gazing at a screen, chatting, drinking or even sex – might give us a spot of happiness but once the activity is over, the experience is rarely carried forward into other areas of life to experience joy.

Flow occurs when you lose the sense of time and appear to have quieted that incessant chatter that fills up our heads all the time. That optimal experience is called Flow. And this book by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – if you can pronounce his name you are a person with infinitely greater supernatural powers than anyone I know – dissects the phenomenon and gives you all the ingredients for you to cook your own meal from your own recipe. In that sense, it is not a ‘how-to’ book, though, with careful contemplation one can elicit a great deal of self-help wisdom.

The basic premise of the book is that mastery over or bringing order to consciousness is the key to living in the flow. Attention is the critical tool for that mastery. But given the fact that most of the human race simply cannot live in the now and finds it hard to embrace mindfulness, how are we to get there?

The author makes several points and some of them bear repeating in full. I quote:

Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It does not depend on outside events but how we interpret them. People who can learn to control their inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

It is by being involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. It must be pointed out that such experiences are necessarily not pleasant when they occur – remember the long march in an exercise or the cross country run or the long preparation before an exam or presentation? But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual effort and creativity.

The optimal state of inner experience is one which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder – that is information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy.

Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experience can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.

The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. Doing this over and over again is how the self grows.

A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self. His goals mostly originate from within himself.

Rules for developing such a self are simple:

Setting Goals. To be able to experience flow, one must have clear goals to strive for – from lifelong commitments to trivial decisions. Selecting a goal is related to recognition of challenge. As soon as the goals and challenges define a system of action, they in turn suggest the skills necessary to operate within it.

Becoming Immersed in Activity. Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attention disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.

Paying Attention to what is Happening. Concentration leads to involvement, which can only be maintained by constant inputs of attention. Having an autotelic self implies the ability to sustain involvement. The elements of autotelic personality are linked to one another by links of mutual causation. It does not matter where one starts – whether one chooses goals first, develops skills, cultivates the ability to concentrate, or gets rid of self-consciousness. One can start anywhere, because once the flow experience is in motion the other elements will be much easier to attain. The autotelic individual grows beyond the limits of individuality by investing psychic energy into a system in which she is included.

Learning to Enjoy Immediate Experience. The outcome of having an autotelic self is that one can enjoy life even when the objective circumstances are brutish and nasty. To achieve this control, however, requires determination and discipline. One must develop skills that stretch capacities.

Unquote.

I have reproduced excerpts at length because it is difficult to make a case for Flow without going over many contours. It is an excellent treatise and written in the easy style of great teachers. Highly recommended!

I am now reading the author’s next offering Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Watch this space. 

Half of a Yellow Sun

War is tragic and pointless. It is a monstrous game invented by the human race in the mistaken belief that it leads to something glorious and meaningful. It is a cauldron that cooks a toxic brew of hate, insular ‘patriotism’, negativity, violence and every other base instinct that lies buried in our collective psyche. It is a self-inflicted injury that is mistaken for a cure.

The story and characters of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun ride piggy-back on the contours of the Nigeria-Biafra war of late Sixties. Their fortunes mostly plunge downwards as the South-Eastern region of Biafra makes a misplaced attempt to secede from the remainder Nigeria.

Adichie is a consummate story teller. Comparison with her previous work The Purple Hibiscus is, perhaps unfair, but inevitable. Half of a Yellow Sun is a far larger canvas. Character after character is developed and pushed into the well-told story. The pain and destruction – both physical and psychological – of people caught in the crossfire of conflict are etched with understanding and empathy.

But very largely, there are few twists in the tale and an air of predictably hangs over it. It is not hard to predict the gradual depletion of the spirits of Odenigbo – the Professor and the master of the house. His occasional indiscretion can be seen before it happens. The life of his wife, the beautiful and sagacious Olamna also runs a predictable course. Ugwu, the somewhat precocious servant-boy does depart from the script by a display of heroics but soon returns to the original trajectory. Richard the expatriate who considers himself a Biafrian, also sticks to his expected ‘brief’. This is merely to report on the book as I saw it and not meant to be a criticism of the master story-teller.

In fact, the story closely mirrors life – even in the midst of great upheavals, most lives rarely experience game-changing cataclysm.