Look at this wonderful city of ours.
Hemmed in from all sides with restrictions.
Nature forces the city to be a bony finger island.
Then we put in laws like rent control. a man is not allowed to charge a fair price for his own land.
Then comes urban land ceiling act. in a city where everyone comes to fulfil the dream of unlimited wealth, even an Ambani cannot acquire the land for a decent sized house after paying 20 crores. contrast this : For 20 crores you can buy 200 acres in
Others sit on 100s of acres of land from before the dumb act waiting for the day when this ridiculous act will go. Meanwhile they don’t develop an inch of that land depriving the city of much needed space and the ability to grow with some sense of plan.
Finally we arrive at the doors of FSI. The unlimited dream of the mumbaikar is snuffed out by the worst FSI restrictions in the world. No city with a population of more than 10 lakhs has a FSI of 1:1.33. This is not UP or
So buildings are not allowed to rise in Mumbai beyond an average 20 floors. and if someone dares everyone tries their best to cut his dreams to size.
And then we have the gall to be angry and shocked and even disappointed when the waters rise out of our gutters and spill first into the streets and then into our homes. Drowning in sewage the bodies and aspirations and achievements of some of the most enterprising people on earth. Cars, trophies, mementos, businesses, buffalos all swept aside by the waters that should have flown downwards but instead keep rising and rising with each monsoon.
Newspapers say the garbage clots the drain pipes. I say it is too many dreams choked that now choke our pipes. When we deny the spirit a glimpse of unlimited sky, when we flush the aspirations of countless dreamers down the drain, we invite buried filth in our gutters to rise up and submerge us in the darkness of watery graves that we deserve. For there is no fine balance in the battle of being. Either go up or go down. Only the mediocre fantasize about the middle path. But for civilization there is only one choice, really; progress or stagnate. Dream on or perish.
I come back to that Time Machine. Would the people who are forever asking for restrictions on development and barking for no development zones, cuts in greenhouse gases and clamoring for the rights of tribes to retain their way of life like to get on a Time Machine and revert the world back to the 1500s? I am sure they would love to For they have a morbid fascination for tribal warfare, virulent disease, darkened mud houses and infant mortality not to mention the condition of women in those hallowed times before development began. Why then don’t they support the Taliban? a very Tribal group. Dear liberals you have to choose: either you want this free modern world or go back to the dark tribal ages.
The freedom to go beyond the restrictions of our time is the most important of all. For all ages are burdened with a majority which loves to gather moss on the unruffled waters of status quo. or worse want to thrust their nightmarish aspirations for the Old world.
When Galileo says the earth goes round the sun. The problem is not one of dogma. What he confronts is the spirit of the age. A medieval spirit not yet fully awakened from its long slumber of the dark ages. Galileo’s affirmation is denied because he exercised the freedom to get ahead of his time. His crime is not religious. His crime is: he has moved on; for human society has developed this knee jerk response to one man walking a new path: safety is in numbers: if he walks alone he must be wrong. What moral ground could he possibly have? Isn’t society supposed to be for the maximum good of the majority?
Let me tell you a short story. A railway track forks near a village and splits into two. one line goes to a dead end which is no longer in use and another that carries on to the next station. Today as the train approaches, children are playing on the tracks. On the track that leads to the dead end is playing a solitary eight year old and on the main line are playing approximately 50 children of various ages. What should the motorman do if he cannot stop the train on time. Should he change tracks and kill the solitary girl and save the 50 on the main track? or should he carry on and let the 50 children die but save the one child who is doing the right thing by playing on a track that is no longer in use? what would he do if he believed in the collective good and what would he do if he believed in doing what is simply good. The right thing. I hope you would choose right.
After all Galileo was in the minority. The loneliest minority in the universe.
More than 500 years after Galileo and Bruno, we are still stuck with the morality of the medieval. Most of the countries don’t even tackle it explicit in their supposedly free constitutions. So the question of individual or the group - which is primary, still remains.
It appalls me when educated people who have had occasion to study the history of mankind; who know how hard each individual freedom has been won; still take to the streets to claim another man’s mill land for the city. No one protests the stupid FSI rule, in fact some of these well meaning bleeding hearts support the horrible FSI rule and applaud the courts every time they cut down on TDR which enhances the narrow FSI, just as narrowly.
None of these so called liberal intellectuals protest the Octroi which affects every individual in the city, be it beggar or broker.
These liberals cannot still make up their minds about reservation in centers of excellence.
They could not make up their mind about the cartoon controversy either. When a writer’s freedom of expression is threatened, one expects other writers to protest such threats, and to show solidarity by sharing the expression with readers fearlessly, instead we find the same liberals whose hearts go out to human rights violations in
I said that day that when we agree to censorship, the ban mongers will land up in each of our houses with increasingly ridiculous demands on the limits of our freedom of expression.
That’s exactly what happened within 60 days. They landed up on my doorstep with a demand to ban or censor objectionable portions in my film sacred evil. This after the learned censors of the land had passed the film with no cuts.
It is like a car, if you never take the car out on the highway for a drive on the open road, gradually the engine forgets it can do 140kms per hour without breaking into a sweat. It gets used to the stop start traffic and the jerky shift from the third to the first gear. It forgets the overdrive and begins to believe it is beneficial to have a restriction on the speed limit at 50.
The freedom deniers keep upping their ante when we don’t keep pushing the limits of our freedom.
There seems to be a limit to all our inherent undeniable rights. Who sets these limits? Invariably you’ll find a group of people pitted against that vulnerable minority of one. For whom no one takes to the streets.
Originally our rights are meant to balanced (I won’t even use the word curtailed, because rights curtailed are rights denied) by others rights. But with each passing day this interpretation is being twisted by the liberals not to mention the fundamentalists, to create new limited boundaries of freedom.
To give an example, I go back to that PEN meeting on censorship. An extremely learned and equally articulate editor of a prominent Marathi daily tried to argue the case for limitation of individual freedom by citing an old English adage : your freedom stops where my nose begins. Then proceeded to apply that to the cartoon controversy. I couldn’t believe my anguished ears!
Your rights stop where my nose begins, is one of the best ways to understand our freedoms. The nose is the most extended extremity of our bodies in normal circumstances, with due apologies to the fairer sex - so the nose signifies that when our rights intrude on another physically, then we must withdraw lest we infringe on his/her rights. It clearly draws the distinction between the mind and the body. To kill someone in the pursuit of my right to life is not ordinarily justified but to kill someone’s arguments by another argument is my inalienable birthright. It also makes it clear that freedom of expression is not limited by anyone’s nose as no one knows the smell of expression. Of course the fundamentalists know how to raise the stench of medieval graves and the liberals know how to spread the stink beyond the boundaries of those Islamic danger zones.
That is the bottom-line then. As long as the practice of my rights do not physically intrude on another, I must have unbridled use of my rights.
A poster, a banner, a cartoon, an affront or a verbal or written abuse is not physically injurious and so cannot and should not be allowed to become an issue.
No one should be allowed claims of mental injury as it is one’s own duty to maintain mental strength and fight the battles of the mind with the mind.
This is the basis of civilization; we have reduced the battles of the physical to the realms of the mind.
To be mindless then is not a right in the free society. As also there is no right to resort to physical violence in a free society. insanity and guns are both not conducive to the practice of our individual freedoms and the insane and the gunweilder are both then citizens of the province of the freedom deniers and no wonder often it is impossible to distinguish the insane from the one who wields the gun.
We must make it clear that nosaying is not an option. In a free society the one thing that cannot be permitted is saying no to any peaceful pursuit.
Booker winner Ian mcewan in his new novel Saturday has written a passage which I will quote: Perowne steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor tank. When this civilization fails, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. the old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked midwinter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.
And again: what simple accretions have brought the humble kettle to this peak of refinement: jug-shaped for efficiency, plastic for safety, wide spout for ease of filling, and clunky little platform to pick up the power. he never complained about the old style - the sticking tin lid, the thick black feminine socket, waiting to electrocute wet hands seemed in the nature of things. But someone had thought about this carefully, and now there’s no going back. The world should take note.
Unquote.
There is no going back.
So, no, the tribes do not have the right to languish in their prehistoric backwardness.
No, the economically underprivileged uneducated have no right to say no to the educated privileged.
They must pay the price of freedom.
Every privileged person has won that right the hard way and all underprivileged must do so too. They have the right to earn privilege and they must. And no, one cannot argue that privilege has been inherited.
Bill Gates’ father was not a billionaire, nor was dhirubhai’s, abdul kalam’s father was not a doctorate and no he didn’t buy him a seat at harvard, mani bhowmick rose from a famine stricken midnapore family to invent laser surgery that has freed me from the need to wear specs with a power of minus7 and yes he made millions from that invention and no the other 100 kids from his village didn’t.
They didn’t bother to walk the 10 miles to school in the post flood muck like mani did for years.
My grandfather didn’t speak a word of English and died when my father was 10. he left his family penniless. I myself left home when I was 19. There was a time when I lived in a slum without a toilet and only a tap for a bathroom and when the lift carries me to my 23rd floor duplex today, I know I have earned it. I have sustained myself for 15 years on my own without any inherited privilege except my dna.
I never did graduation in English but I have earned more from writing in English than most Indians who have been educated in
And when my American agent tells me my screenplay has sold but I will get only one tenth of what an American author would get for the same sale, I don’t whine at the American writer’s privilege.
I am nearing the end of my agonized tirade and because all things that end well are well, rather wellier than the rest; let’s look at the possibilities that present themselves before us.
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