Literary Plague

There are books in which every page one reads, is a work of masterful art. Very few books fall into that category, and are rightfully called classics. They will live forever in our hearts; their characters shall always remain relevant in today’s world, no matter how old they are in their conception. A fewer authors can call their books their crowning achievements, feathers in their hats in a field where people frequently get reprimanded for inflicting such rot upon humanity. There are many authors in the latter; I’ll gladly name a few of them:

1. Chetan Bhagat: He and his semi-autobiographical ‘stories’ with a narrative so colourless and plain, reading it’ll remind you of a ten-year-old’s account of his or her weekend. Like many people who try ever so hard, we have a writer whose language is as half-baked as his plot and characters. If they were inspired from real life, he would’ve led a really one-dimensional life where all his acquaintances would’ve been caricatures of over-simplified stereotypes. I assume he operates under the presumption that his works must be accessible to the ‘common man’. Unfortunately, he seems to end up writing for the complete imbecile. Real works that make no flamboyant pretence are what are accessible to the common man. RK Narayan wrote for the common man, Chetan Baghat spews filth upon the sanctity of the written word.
2. Christopher Paolini: Classic plagiarism is what this gentleman, no, amateur adolescent, in every sense of the term, is capable of. I used to hate The Chronicles of Narnia, for it seemed a cheap bootleg of The Lord of the Rings, but no, a new kid’s in town, quite literally. Shamelessly lifting characters and plot elements from Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Harry Potter, this pseudo Norse myth styled disaster only succeeds in disappointing the poor reader. I lumbered through the first book because I opened it, woe is me, and I gave up on humanity when I saw the second book adorning a shelf in the local bookshop.
3. Sydney Sheldon: I know, quite controversial, but yes, in the most affirmative of tones, he’s the father of cheap, Hollywood styled banality in literature. Every story of his features an extremely good-looking, perfect-in-everyway protagonist who, for some reason, gets entangled in something big, and with every chapter, the crisis gets bigger and bigger until it all diffuses in the end making it the king of all anticlimaxes; and there’d be a meaningless love story thrown somewhere in between for the sake of it, while it wouldn’t make sense at all, in terms of its relevance to the plot. His books are well-written scripts for tasteless soap-operas, not works of literature. Hackneyed cliff-hangers and loud explosions must remain only in Michael Bay’s movies intended to kill the viewer, not in a book. “Mainstream Hollywood” is the bottom-line of all his books; while it fails to entertain as a movie, it does even more so, as a book.
4. Dan Brown: He is the master of the familiar. Five books into his career, every single one of his books is similar to its predecessor in more ways than one. I wonder how many people appreciate his books now, for they just contain different conspiracy theories, different locations, similar characters who only differ in their names, but the same story. The format in which the story unravels itself is also the same, something which is bound to test every reader’s patience. While old wine in a new bottle is desirable, his books are not. While he might be interested in sighting lofty castles that do not exist amidst the clouds, the rest of us are more earnest and have no patience for the modern Don Quixote, only not very lovable but equally dense. Frankly, no one gives a damn about how ugly people danced naked every full moon standing in buckets filled with sushi hundreds of years ago.
5. Stephanie Meyer: No words can describe the injustice she has wrought upon humanity by force-feeding her tosh about vampires making Bram Stoker puke in his grave. I’m sure Hell has a special place for the publisher who cleared this drivel for publication. Mere fodder for over-weight middle aged women too ugly to find a husband, this is not literature; it is an insidious crime to have written this load of baloney. The reason this series of books is so repulsive is ubiquitous, but I shall elucidate anyway. The central theme has a colourless and nondescript protagonist, a character any reader can identify oneself with because the character has no personality of her own. Added to this is a boy, so freakishly handsome in every way, one would think he has issues related to self-esteem for falling for our main character in the first place. Wait, that’s not enough, the final nail on the coffin was making this man a vampire. The tale then reaches new levels of absurdity when it panders to baser emotions of every black-sheep of literature, letting real readers bite dust. Twilight is not a vampire novel; it is a cheesy romantic story begging to be used as toilet paper, masquerading as a fantasy novel to trick the hapless reader into untold misery. If one calls oneself a twilight fan, one has either been paid huge amounts of money to say so, or one is a complete idiot.

Superpower for Dummies

Power is the ability to make other entities do and say as one would want them to do and say. It has taken so many forms and has shifted hands so many times in history, that it is necessary to study the nature of power itself in a geo-political perspective for any nation harbouring ambitions of becoming a superpower.

A superpower is a nation with such overwhelming power, that it can impose it's will upon any part of the globe with the whole world as it's sphere of influence with a few rogue states labelled as pariah states by the international community for the crime of standing up to the reigning superpower. There have been many superpowers in the past, the Spanish Empire, The United Provinces of the Netherlands, Bourbon France, the mighty British Empire, USSR, the list can go on to include Rome, Mongol Empire, Ming China, etc. Ancient superpowers cannot be classified as superpowers per se, because although it's known world was it's dominion, it's power ended there. It did not have the capability to impose itself of a truly global scale until the modern era. The first superpower in it's true sense of the word was arguably the British Empire; it contested for control of all the seas and held a third of the land area under it's control, directly or otherwise and was the first empire upon which the sun truly and literally never set, while the same expression was used for the Spanish and French Empires merely as a exhortation.

However, there have been long periods in history where no single nation ruled supreme leading to a multipolar world. The inter-war period was one such political climate, where Britain, France, Germany, Russia, USA, Japan and Italy all had their own spheres of influence leading to devastating consequences. The Cold War world was bipolar with the NATO and Warsaw Pacts dominating diplomacy. Superpowers are formed under peculiar political circumstances where one nation held a distinct advantage. While all the history is fascinating in sorts, one must really wonder as to what makes a nation a superpower.

A superpower needs the following :

• An unchallengeable military superiority: The Spanish Armada, The Royal Navy and now, the US navy are all examples of this unparalleled military hegemony. In fact, the US navy today is larger than the the next 13 largest navies combined while the Royal navy in it's heyday packed more firepower than the next two largest navies combined. A navy is the most valuable asset of any superpower. While armies can impose upon the land, a navy is the only force that can control distant parts of the world and keep distant lands under check. This was one of the reasons Russia desperately wanted a warm water port and fought the west for two centuries for at least one such port. This was the same reason Britain and the United States resolutely never let Russia expand southwards. If a nation wishes to project it's power across the globe in a sustainable manner, it needs a large military force, especially a gigantic navy.
• A large treasury: After all, it is money that makes the world go round. A country that wishes to broaden its sphere of influence must have the financial resources to back the efforts. A large military needs a lot of money, a lot of money also brings financial leverage and economic clout over smaller nations. This was the precise reason the Spanish Empire imploded. Spain, a staunchly Catholic nation was adroitly against Shylocking, as it was derisively called, the practice of lending credit at an interest. Without easy credit, the economy got static with galleons full of gold and silver from the New World just sitting in Spain funding only costly wars and futile imperial ambitions. The Thirty Years' war was the spark that blew up the Empire's fortunes, with Bourbon France filling the void, albeit temporarily. It was another nation, surprisingly tiny, but ruthlessly mercantile, that eventually rose to the top: The Netherlands. Wherever there was money to be made, the Dutch were there. Their merchant fleet was the largest in the world, often called the Dutch golden age, with a vast military fleet to secure shipping routes. It became so prosperous that it shadowed much larger empires like Spain and France who made no guise of their antipathy towards this brutally money-minded tiny kingdom. Therefore, as history shows, money is the oil that keeps the wheels of nations moving, money is so important, that a tiny nation can weed it's way to the top with money alone, lots and lots of sweet money.
• A sizeable population: It is not easy to get to the top, it takes a lot of hard work. What is even more difficult is staying there. The Netherlands did rise to the top, but the Dutch were promptly supplanted by a larger version of their nation, a nation equally ruthless in it's economic pursuits, equally mercantile, but larger, Great Britain. What made this even more ironic was that the British were the only ally the Dutch had with an ounce of teeth against enemies like leviathan empires united by a common religion and disdain towards this tiny nation of the Dutch, France and Spain. British ascent was not peaceful, but riddled with constant resentment of Dutch wealth and vice versa. The reason the British came out the winner was because of their sheer size in comparison to the Netherlands. The same can be said for the demise of British hegemony in the world. By 1890, The United States had overtaken Britain as the largest economy in the world, while Germany became the powerhouse of Europe, robbing Britain of its title of "The Workshop of the World". The reason this was achieved was not because of any other factor but size. The German Empire was the most populous state in Europe, after Russia, obviously, and the USA was simply huge. Both these countries ceaselessly performed as factories flooding the world markets while Britain took the back seat in industrial capacity and switched to a service based economy, the world's first post-industrial nation. European hegemony was further strained by the World Wars, two devastating conflicts from which Europe never recovered. However, even if Europe had remained peaceful, it's supremacy was not sustainable, solely because of the reason that there were much larger nations in the world that had simply not realised their potential. It was only a matter of time before they did, which meant that any European nation that held the reigns merely had a fleeting advantage over other nations, something bound to disappear in time. At this point, one might argue that Britain and France had vast empires and thus could industrialise their colonies. However, it must be noted that, imperialism, as a concept is not sustainable. The very fact that the British educated the colonial subjects in the Western school of thought proved to be their undoing. To rule over a set of people, one needs one of these things: authoritarian control, or popular goodwill. The British colonial government had neither, the French were even worse. The very fact that British colonial governance was praised for it's liberalism ( it must be noted that this liberalism is relative to other European powers of the time and must not be compared to current standards of human rights.) proved to unleash nationalist aspirations among the populace because the British did not assimilate the natives into their culture as the French tried to do, believing in the policy of non-interference, especially after 1857. The French, on the other hand tried so hard to assimilate native cultures that the indigenous people resisted the invasion of their culture. Ultimately, both the empires could not sustain themselves. But it must be noted that, unlike other empires that came crashing down, these empires merely faded away, quite gradually. The reason for that was, thankfully, ultimate admission of the fact that these empires were not sustainable. Therefore, for any nation to be sustainable as a superpower, it must have a sufficiently large population that identifies itself as one nation.
• A vast area of fertile land: This one is obvious. Any nation needs a large land area to sustain a sizeable population. More specifically, it requires a large area of arable land with favourable climatic conditions. While agriculture can be the least profitable of all economic activities, it is still, by far the most important and this requires land, a lot of it. A large population needs large quantities of food. One can always import food grains, but to maintain a sustainable superpower status, one needs to produce as well as consume. To produce large amounts of food, one needs large areas of arable land. In fact, land is the only reason Russia became a great power in the first place. It has a moderately substantial population, but the reason for that is that it has unimaginable amounts of land. If one takes up nearly half of the largest continent in the world and more than half of another continent, there are bound to be some people in it. We call them Russians. Russia has vast tracts of extremely fertile land, rich natural resources and vast amounts of unpopulated land to spare. This was the reason that even though Russian industry in the 19th century was non-existent, Russia packed a considerable punch on the world stage, enough to alarm the then most industrialised and powerful nation in the world, Britain, to declare Russia as the nation most likely to challenge British supremacy, even though Russia hardly had a navy, spawning the Great Game of the 19th century. Industrialisation of Russia only rapidly catapulted it to the status of a superpower. Despite the demise of Feudalism, land still plays an important part in the prosperity of any nation. Lack of land is the reason Japan does not reign supreme despite an exceptionally industrious population, which while pushing Japan to the status of the second largest economy, a title it held for forty years, could not do much to further Japanese economic power than what it is today. Therefore, a superpower requires vast swathes of fertile land, a favourable climate and abundant natural resources.
• Popular mindset and ruthless expansionism: No empire can be built through peaceful means. Any change in established political order can only be achieved by forced upheaval of the existing order. As controversial as that sounds, it is sadly true. One cannot name a single superpower that emerged in history after long periods of peace. The Spanish Empire ruthlessly exterminated the native Indian populace, The Netherlands emerged after the Thirty years war and the Eighty years war. The British Empire emerged as a nascent colonial power after the Seven years war, it's hegemony sealed after the Napoleonic wars. Germany was born after the Franco-Prussian war. The United States emerged after the Second World War. Wars make and break nations. Wars are triggered by expansionism. Today, however, expansionism has evolved from the idea of political control to economic influence. Still, a nation has to ceaselessly try and expand it's economic horizons. If a nation wants to be superpower, it has to start behaving like one. Diplomacy is like a poker game, one loses the game if they play it badly even if one has an unbeatable hand. Any nation that has become superpower at some point started getting incorrigibly assertive. For example, even though Britain reigned supreme uncontested on all seas, the United States boldly declared in 1920 that it shall endeavour to build a navy second to none. The boldness of this averment was compounded by the fact that Britain was an ally of the USA, not an enemy. Thirty years later, a wish came true. The US navy surpassed the Royal Navy as the most powerful navy in the world. If the USA had decided that it mustn't expand it's navy at the cost of British goodwill, the scenario would've been extremely different. Apart from this assertive confidence, a nation requires a population that is productive and ingenious. The reason the industrial revolution first took place in Britain and no where else was because of a strong Protestant work ethic compounded by a benevolent social institution welcome to change. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed was because it's society was becoming stagnant after half a century of political repression, reflecting on economic stagnation. For any nation to be a superpower, it needs a dynamic populace welcome to change and an innovative workforce willing to try new things.
• Liberty and Democracy: Finally, any nation aspiring to be a superpower must have a liberal government institution in place. Tight repression and strict regulation stifles innovation, the heart of any superpower. To maintain the popular dynamic and ingenuity, one needs a liberal government granting certain fundamental rights to it's citizens, and independent and impartial judiciary and an firm and insurmountable democratic tradition. The reason Britain outgrew it's continental neighbours was because of it's benevolent rule. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed even after having all the ingredients for a superpower was because of an authoritarian regime that stifled it's populace. The reason the USA lived on and will do so for the foreseeable future is because of democracy.

Although many nations have ruled the world, each nation that supplanted the existing superpower brought something new to the table. Till Spain came along, empires were restricted to individual regions. Spain broke that shackle to build an empire that stretched across the New World, It brought the concept of naval supremacy into the equation. Any superpower had to have a great navy. The Netherlands later brought trade into the equation, which meant that any nation now vying for the superpower status had to control world trade. Britain brought industrialisation which meant that superpowers now had to be industrialised nations with supreme control over world trade with an insurmountable navy. The United States brought size into consideration which meant that any superpower must have all that Britain had, in addition to a vast population making up a huge economy at home. The next superpower must have all that the USA possessed with something new to offer. It could be India, it could be China, it could be a united Europe, only time can tell.

To be

Befallen on the widen'd flat,
Was the servil sodden rat,
But on the saem did shoote out we,
The roote of our own miserie.
But why were we on this ground put?
With the vulgar bandicoote
If he were not but so as I
If he were not as eye for eye
For this rat doth so plague us free
As doth question burning me
As who I are and so dost he
And why we all so came to be
He may not be as sundry
As methinketh as doth I
Natheless virtue pricketh me
For so dost thee and so dost he
I cannot but compaer so
Humour of mine and all his four
Whithout sembling, holt and heath
Of courages mine and in his sheath
We drew our courses bothe the twain
We drew our virtue on slate plain
Mine with noble chivalrie
His with base debaucherie,
Twixt bothe lay the bold ensigne
Of one's own granden designe
I could choose and so could he
Of what beast or knight one woulden be
T'is not discerned beyond the erth
Of what natures are or of its birthe
For now I am and so is he
Midst Nature's cosmic symphonie

Religion

In tune with all the other ruminations of my mind, the next concept I decided to tackle happened to be religion. Unlike my previous treatise on the topic written in a frenzy of indignation and outrage, this time, I have tried to be as cold, dispassionate and detached as possible. Personally, I do not believe in anything, for I believe that I am not qualified to judge how the universe might function. But it does not stop anyone from scientifically dissecting and studying the concept of religion and its metamorphosis to organised religion and universal liberalism in some cases.

Fundamentally, what is religion?
It is a set of beliefs and theories on how the universe as the promulgators of the tenets saw it works and functions. It need not be true, it need not be false, but the interest or the need for this concept is more sociological and ideological. It is more of a set of rules than a system of unravelling the mysteries of the universe, although the latter is a significant part of religion. It's chief concern lay with the society than with the heavens.

Man is a social being. Therefore, in order to live among other such beings, each with objectives and aspirations as self-serving and diverse as one's own, a protocol has to be stipulated. The protocol goes by various names and forms from the Ten Commandments, Shariah, Dharma, Tao, etc depending on the region. Judeo-Christian cultures have the Ten Commandments, Islamic culture has the Sharia, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures have Dharma, and so on.

If one looks at all these scriptures, one would notice striking similarities between them, indicating an underlying symmetry, the sociological need to arrive at very similar sets of rules across diverse cultures and beliefs. This means that the fundamental sociological needs of every human being is the same, regardless of the culture, race of geography. They are:

• The need for respect: Human beings crave for the respect and approval of their peers. It is an evolutionary trait to make us want to be agreeable to others, so that we remain a social species. No matter what anybody says regarding how they live life for themselves, and how they are not influenced by what the neighbours will say, they will always do, for we are hard-wired that way.
• The need for survival: This need is not restricted to us alone. Every organism does the most in its power to stay alive. 
• The need for comfort and pleasure: We constantly strive to make life easier for ourselves, it is also an evolutionary trait, perhaps trying to make us work towards the betterment of our own lives to give us a better chance of survival.

To broadly cater to the above needs, humans have constantly tried many strategies in the past. We were hunters and gatherers, we then invented the techniques of agriculture to make life easier for us, so on and so forth. But these needs frequently intrude upon the same of another, demanding a resolution of this issue in order to maintain man as a social animal. This is the first necessity of religion; to identify boundaries on the pursuit of one's needs in order to extract maximum benefit for maximum number of people in an ideal case, or in a more practical case, to extract the benefit as equivalent to one's position in the society's pecking order, for it was rarely egalitarian.

It's next concern was to enforce these boundaries, in a form as agreeable to the followers of this set of boundaries on one's personal liberties. This is very similar to managing a bunch of people with the carrot and stick approach. The stick is the limit on one's liberties, the carrot is the fulfilment of need 1: the need for respect. A person who acts unrestrained and has a seeming disregard for another's needs suffers from diminished respect and approval from the society than another who binds himself by these norms.

This now established, these rules have successfully infringed upon personal freedoms for the sake of the greater good. Now, there is another need to be addressed; something not discussed as of yet. It is not a necessity like the above three, but still is important to keep people from getting restive and frustrated. Man is an intelligent being, at least when compared to other species that share the planet. With such a large brain, man was occupied by the need to survive, escape predators and devise hunting strategies when he was a nomadic hunter or gatherer. As time progressed, man got less busy and got more free time in his hands, letting his intelligent and curious mind wander into pondering the questions of life and its purpose.

Once again, it was religion's responsibility to answer these questions and man tried to explain all phenomena he observed satisfactorily with the resources and knowledge at his disposal at that point of time, with his imagination filling the gaps. Religion also became the bridge that connected us to nature, gave a seeming purpose to existence and provided us with answers that satiated our appetite for knowledge. This is religion in its crudest form; it lays out rules for peaceful co-existence among the society as the formulators who defined its confines saw it, it provides answers to questions that emerged from the long periods of inactivity brought about by a settled lifestyle and it tries and maintains order among the group of people with whom the formulators of the same identified.

As one can see, religion can be purely attributed to addressing a sociological need to maintain order in a society of individuals with interests and aims as diverse as themselves. This was probably why government and religion were barely discernible in most cultures till around a hundred years ago, they both more or less had the same function. This was the sole reason, apart from man's egregious odiousness, that religion transformed itself into organised religion.

Organised Religion is probably the reason for everything that is wrong with our world, from terrorism, the crusades, the holocaust (it was not so much as religious as racial, nevertheless), I could possibly go on. One could name any problem on a large scale, not something like one failing in mathematics, and possibly trace it to religious intolerance. So, how did something devised to maintain peace become something of a cause with which one can justify killing thousands of people? For this, one must compare our society with a pack of wolves, or a pride of lions, or hyenas, or any social animal.

Elephants, for example, have the matriarch at the helm, with other females following her to any end. This was a system devised by the mind of elephants, who also had similar needs like our own. It was probably noticed that males tend to often get rowdy and uncontrollable when they went into their teens, while females remained sensible and docile. Therefore, they had to go. Males were kicked out, to rot in the open grasslands, while the females had the wisdom of the matriarch to guide them. Males, when kicked out, formed their own bachelor herds, which is a different story. This is a female-dominated society unlike our own, where the women called the shots. However, it must be noted that this system of obeisance to the matriarch is restricted to the herd. Another female of another herd would munch grass disrespectfully and pass water in front of our matriarch with impunity if it came to it. That female would have her own matriarch, whom she reveres above all else, and would be offended if somebody did that to her.

 Similarly, we are also like a pack of wolves or a herd of elephants, who have respect for a common entity that maintains order within the clan, restricted to the clan. Formulators of their religion concerned themselves primarily with furthering the cause of their own clan alone,  not humanity in general. So, there must also be a clause in every religion that calls for loyalty to that religion, as  a clan could identify itself then only by religion, nationalism is a relatively new concept. Added to loyalty alone, there must be a mechanism that ensures that the clan is defended from other such clans, either through hard influence (invasion) or soft influence (conversion). So, came the concept for fighting for one's religion in order to defend it. The defence of religion is a vague grey topic, open to interpretation, and hence even though Christians, during the crusades, invaded the Holy Land that was thousands of miles from Rome, they were not attacking Islam, but defending Christianity. We, however, need this "one of us, one of them" mentality if we are to survive, or we would have just dissolved into another clan, which typically in olden days involved enslavement and or or ethnic cleansing. So, religion had to have teeth to defend itself and its followers, the defence being subjective owing to practical considerations. Although anachronistic, this trait of religion has existed tenaciously throughout history, and while the world would be a much better place without it, the world would not be a good place without religion itself, for all the reasons mentioned above.