Marginal Man

How does the world of career moves and caste politics, hype and hysteria appear to a man whose every day may as well be a Saturday?

How does the world of career moves and caste politics, hype and hysteria appear to a man whose every day may as well be a Saturday?

Why does the term ‘Global Village’ apply to Bangalore, where I am writing this, or Pune, near which I live, but exclude the Indian village? Wouldn’t ‘Global Call-Centre’ be more appropriate, even during this time time of a so-called recession that has been thrust upon us by thieves and sorcerers?

In the last 30 years, it’s become a beastly peasant thing—a bhasha thing—to write of roots. A sophisticated writer talks of rootlessness, boasts of it even. He (usually he; the women are generally more sensible) is at home everywhere and yet, nowhere. His books tend to go nowhere. How can you draw sustenance from zero?

Forget literature. The national diasporas of the last 100 years, at least, have proved that humankind cannot bear very much alienation from its roots. The Jewish, Hindu and Muslim communities in exile have created vivid and potent worlds of belonging in their homelands, which are perhaps not quite real to those who still live there. Roots do not have to be real, just as rootlessness does not. They both exist in the mind.

You would think roots are important in a country like India, even to a writer in English. Even to have roots in  city is worth something. I have not lived in the city for 12 years, yet…. In those 12 years, I have had six postal addresses in five states. I once got a voter’s identity card, but moved before the next election. It is ironical that I, who value roots, have not had a chance to put them down, while writers who apparently disdain them have lived in one corner of a native field all their days.

What is the proof of roots? Is it the cards a man carries in his wallet? That is merely identity, so they know where to send your body after the accident. At five of those six addresses, there are people who remember me and would greet me as a friend (at the sixth, they’d certainly remember me).

Those six addresses are all in rural India. In the city, I have friends, but I meet them as a man apart. I’m the weirdo who opted out, the fellow without a credit or debit or ATM card, who got a mobile phone only three months ago and shares it with his wife and leaves it behind when they travel. I’m the chap without that indicator of belonging, the EMI, who ogles at the hoardings instead of the dames and first looks at the right-hand column of the restaurant menu to see how much more since his last visit the dogs have come to the city.

I left the city behind, but the city left me behind also. To Bombay I can still relate (Mumbai I find a bit harder). It is New Delhi that gives me a terrific sense of dislocation. The malls and flyovers do that, surely; but when did they start manufacturing people like these? And where do they do it? Is it Nithari from where they got the raw material?

Living on the margins is not always safe or comfortable. A city journalist usually has contacts and he has a press card as well as patronage. Where I live, the biggest goon in town is the ‘havaldar’, and I don’t know him. What if I have trouble? What if he were to make trouble for me?

Weeks pass, sometimes, without my having an intellectual conversation with anyone but my wife. And intellectual conversations with a spouse, though they may begin that way, often end in personalities. I miss the cut and thrust, such as it was, of the news desk and the canteen. Besides, life is sometimes just too damn comfortable. Every day is a Saturday evening if I so choose.

Sitting on the margin, subscribing to one newspaper and one magazine, switching off the news channels when I like—or not watching TV for days—is a healthy life for a journalist. I can watch the words flow past. It gives me perspective. Is this really a story—a child falling into a borewell? And another? Are the news channels digging the wells near unsuspecting villages with redundant kids? I can hang a story on that! And I did.

I hear of the enormous salaries my contemporaries now earn (do they really earn them?). I am envious. Their EMIs amount to more than I make. I hear of the advances city-dwelling writers are paid for their books these days. They get around, these chaps who live in Bombay and Delhi. Publicity comes easily to them. There are so many writers in the city that no one is particularly interested in paying me to attend an Event. And when I’m there, I don’t know how to play the game.

Yes, I’m envious; but what would I do with more? These 12 years have taught me that a gift for contentment is worth more than all the genius in the world—to the person who has it. I don’t have it yet, but it’s one small step on the road to wisdom. How much land does a man need? How much wisdom does a man need?

This is also a position of vantage to watch the tide of the nation flow by. If the city has left me behind, so has rural India left the smug city-dweller behind. You can call it ‘the Darkness’ and talk of oppression till the water buffaloes come home, but the villages are not standing still.

The average well-off urban Indian has either a romantic or hate-filled picture of village life. Whatever it is, it is static. The rural India I know is constantly evolving. Not always for or towards the good, but then I’m not a great believer in democracy either. We just haven’t been able to come up with anything better.

I wouldn’t say, from where I’m sitting, that Indian democracy has failed. The greatest need was always going to be empowerment. But after 60 odd years, these revolutions are not going to be reversed. Nehru’s failure was not in that he favoured the socialist over the capitalist model, but in that he did not invest in the seeds from which everything else grows: health and education. And neither has any government since.

That is why the city enrages me. It’s not the malls and multiplexes, where I’m robbed, or the foul air I’m forced to breathe. No one makes me visit. I only come to stay in touch with reality. But those who live in this reality make rules for those who do not—that is what makes me want to blow up New Delhi.

And, in the city, so few seem to care. Those who say they do, hold conferences and present papers. From what I’ve seen, most of the actual work at these conferences is done off the dais, and it basically consists of wangling invitations to the next conference. But then, I couldn’t say for sure. You see, I get invited to such few conferences.

One of the most celebrated marginal notes ever was made by the mathematician Pierre de Fermat in his copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, and found after his death in 1665. It postulated that it was impossible to separate any power higher than the second into two like powers. That is, xⁿ plus yⁿ cannot equal zⁿ where n is greater than 2 and n, x, y and z are positive integers. The note continues: “I have a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” The proof was not among his papers. For the next three centuries, mathematicians broke their heads, ruined their livers and died young trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

In 1995, a Briton called Andrew Wiles, who was working at Princeton, proved it and won the $50,000 prize. However, he used work done much after Fermat’s time in other fields of mathematics, and his proof ran to over a hundred pages.

Now mathematicians value elegance more than anything, except perhaps truth. Fermat was a doodler in margins. He knew nothing about Modular Elliptic Curves or Galois Field Theory. (Galois died elegantly in the 1850s, in a duel, at the age of 21; Wiles’s proof builds on his work.) His marginal note does not imply a 109-page substantiation. We are all still waiting for Fermat’s proof.

The value of a life on the margin can only be demonstrated by going into the text and using too much space and talking too much theory. Why should I care? There’s a certain elegance to a Saturday evening just about to begin.

About The Author

Vijay Nambisan