Speaking at the A. V. Krishna Rao Memorial Lecture at IIT Madras, Vasantha Surya uses poetry to talk about science, technology, globalization and the essence of human growth.

You have, I believe, 400 banyan trees on your campus. I’d like to read you my poem, entitled

Banyan

Here the earth exists

only to reflect, like a woman

past the age of childbirth, tracing likenesses

in son, daughter,

grandson, granddaughter.

Where does the root end?

the stem begin?

Fused at some centre beyond sight,

replenished from unknown acquifers,

the buried hoard of ancient deluges,

this embrace has spawned

a hundred clans of thought.

Numerous as the blind king's progeny,

mothered by a faith which takes pride

in bandaged eyes,

these cults, schools, ways, disciplines

thick as lawful thieves,

have claimed a heritage of light

beneath these leaves.

The weed that dares

to grow and bear

in banyan shade

must spring from an audacious

seed.

In the early nineties, when globalization hadn’t yet become the buzz word it is now, Mini Krishnan, the godmother of many contemporary Indian translators, caught on to the importance of translations not only in national integration, but in a globalizing world. She worked on the Macmillan Indian literature translation project with AV Krishna Rao, in whose honour these lectures are held each year,  and it was she who led me into literary translation.

Most of you are technologists, and scientists. Now, what do questions of translation have to do with your areas of expertise? Isn’t it taken for granted that the language of today’s science and technology is just one language, English, and you’d better know it or you’re out…? But do you see what is happening to English, and what English is doing to other languages?  What does this mean? That  a transformative process of unimaginable complexity is taking place within Language, with a capital L.  Did you ever wonder what tongue, or tongues will be spoken on earth a century hence?

Of course, I’m just an admiring observer of the world in which you move about so confidently! But it seems to me the wonderful thing about science, and its extension, technology or the making of tools and techniques, is that when it is most creative, it is open-minded, and open-ended. And while the so-called outside world, the phenomenal world, is certainly its cup of tea, it does not baulk at tasting and exploring the stimulating and sometimes disturbing inner world. This is why science has been able to bring its exquisitely disciplined eye to bear upon the human brain, of late, and come up with perceptive hypotheses on how we think and feel and SPEAK, and this spirit of inquiry is undeterred by all the naysayers who question the possibility of us humans being objective about ourselves!

Your professional work has to do with tools of varying degrees of complexity and the processes in which they are used.  You acknowledge a connection between these tools, and processes,  and the method of science which led to their development, but not much attention is paid to the umbilical bond connecting the method of science to its matrix, the philosophy of humanism. That’s what that bears responsibility for all our science and all our technology, it shares its heartbeat, speaks through language, first and foremost and then through literature and the arts. And the scientists, the technologists cannot afford not to listen to the human voice. And the purest note of humanword and humansong, its aadhaara sruti, its defining pitch, is …poetry.  Humansong….

The Need for Poetry

Dug up, the earth in former times would yield

not just traces, but heaps of poetry

like spent arrowheads

bits of broken pots, axe-blades

and idols with obliterated faces.

Almost axiomatic is our perception,

as poets, that there’s a need

for poetry.

To stop your nose

against the stink of poets’ truths

is to refuse to feel, or think,

or grow.

Their crazy ooze of thoughts and images

is a manure

without which a mature consciousness

can neither come to flower

nor go to seed.

And so, in the sober realization

of poetry’s undoubted utility,

we now announce:

Hey everybody ! Write poetry!

Let it all hang out!

Must we fake oohs and aahs

when kavirajas strut on the catwalk

with nothing on but smirks ?

Should we suppress our yawns

when versifiers hem and haw

about nothing in particular?

Is it rude to make a face

when a poet scratches a private itch

regardless of time and place?

Are we required to wink conspiratorially

at poets salivating over pathological fantasies

with forked tongues flicking over loose lips?

Should we approve those jingles of the marketplace

that snigger at love’s laughing eagerness

and shrink it to Pavlovian dimensions,

fouling the pristine beach

like torn condoms after random seductions?

Should we let prolix pseudoes

scrawl witless graffiti

over the well-loved calendar pictures on our walls?

Do we want our children to gawk

at literary streakers?

Must we give some glib wordsmith credit

for having tapped into primordial wellsprings,

when all he’s done is mop up a drop

seeping from the surface of things?

Won's someone tune us to that perfect pitch

for which our poor synthesizing souls scream?

For in all this contemporary cacophony

there persists a tingling thrum beyond the tympanum.

A sruti, vaguely-heard – a  tantalizing inkling

of zest, and grace, and revelation.

Is that recurrent dream of harmony

itself unreal? A mere hallucination?

To speak of the sacred today can provoke bitter laughter

but we need a paean or two to cope, and give us hope.

For we still yearn to celebrate the body’s high tide.

To somehow learn to take its ebbing in our stride!

To spot miracles – even when they sprout from ditchwater!

More beautiful than lotuses in wooded swamps

are our murungai trees, squeezed between shanties,

tossing white-and-gold blossoms in the sooty breeze!

Oh, the dangling largesse of long, luscious drumstick pods

rendering palatable the most rat-bitten, ration-shop staple!

Are these times to drum up new war-poems

rousing ghosts that we have never laid to rest

to march us, dressed in uniforms we still think we need,

of ‘race’ and ‘culture’, ‘nation-state’, and ‘creed’ ?

Identity – that camouflage of bloodied patches.

What sort of poems can we allow as fertilizer?

Will our poems leach today’s toxins into the future

like catch–all plastic bags and used injection needles?

If not exactly like the joyous chants of ancestors,

those glorious fools

whose blessings run for free in our blood

at least will the poems we concoct

like time capsules

preserve our most flattering likenesses

for our posterity?

Amartya Sen has warned against cultural isolationism…the ‘kupamanduka’ syndrome, the frog which talks to no one and argues with no one on anything. It’s ignorance, based on a fear of the Other. You can’t set out to get rid of it, though, in a deliberate way, because this fear of the Other is visceral, it is in our guts, and let us admit, it plays a role in preserving some things we need and value. But you have to watch this fear in yourself very closely, because it can mutate in seconds to hatred, to violence. Only commonsense and goodwill can keep this fear in manageable limits. It’s not only those with their back to the wall against the onrushing current of change that need to have this perspective, it’s also the globalisers themselves, and we are all turning into globalisers, arming ourselves with gimmicks of technology and bytes of information at a dizzying pace.  The ignorance of globalizing modernizers, as Sen calls it,  seems to me to come from sheer disdain for  what is perceived as ‘different’, an absence of enquiry into what constitutes all culture, including one’s own, and when the culturally ignorant happen to be certified technologists from prestigious institutions like the IIT’s, and then when these TERRORIST TECHNOLOGISTS  gain access to economic and  political power, when such ignorant globalization/modernization is the ruling paradigm of development,  it’s barbarism, modern style -- it’s anti-intellectualism, anti-humanism. These manifestations of so-called ‘progress’ seem to be adaptations of very old recipes for civilisational disaster that have been bubbling in history’s smoky cauldrons and are now snapping and crackling in globalisation’s fancy non-stick frying pan. And are you and I also becoming ingredients in that mess ? Or can you and I jump out and dump it, and cook up something more wholesome for us all to consume?

Poetry for me is a way of subverting rigidities and so I offer you one more poem:

Keynote Address 

Science here is dead,

he said.

We are here to find out

why. But there's no doubt

that science here is dead,

he said.

We don't seem to know just how to get ahead,

he said.

Though for craft and magic we earn praise,

in our climate commonsense decays.

Neither of our seasons is right for reason.

One withers sense, the other breeds decadence.

At this rate we'll never get to outer space.

Figures show we're not even in the race.

No one takes us seriously abroad.

Our best is mediocre, our worst a fraud.

Science here is dead,

he said.

Yet I'm proud to say

we have the expertise today

to analyse

to organise

to perform our own post-mortems,

pickle, label, shelve our problems.

We are foreign-qualified.

We know how myths are magnified.

First we'll choose which blade to use –

sickle, laser, razor's edge –

select techniques appropriate

(depending on whose grant we get).

Make a notch at the chin.

Slit down to the crotch.

Bore a hole in the skull.

Go right down to the soul.

Group one will probe the rot

the cancer at the throat of thought

the many-tumoured logic knot

which smothers faith and throttles doubt

but keeps us dreaming all the same

in and out and roundabout,

tethered,

tame.

Group two will isolate

the toxin in the cells of state

which made the blood coagulate.

Group three will extricate

what's loosely translated as fate,

a ball and chain

within the brain

which, even when it's rusted through,

retains a certain antique value.

Group four will undertake to find

old questions buried below the face

on time and space

on thought and mind

trampled in the ceaseless ooze

of answers, under the hooves

of dreams driven along a whirling road

with promise of release a goad.

No wonder science is dead,

he said.

Sickly mother, stillborn child.

It's shocking that she's still fertile!

We knew the outcome long ago.

Last year we met in Mexico,

the previous year in Rome.

Now we're home.

The food I find quite excellent.

I carry my own mosquito repellent.

We meet again after lunch.

Be ready with your explanation suggestion strategy plan

excuse. 

I have a hunch

none will be of any use,

he said. For

science here is dead,

science here is dead,

science here is dead,

he said.

About two months ago, a girl of sixteen I knew committed suicide. She had hidden her marks in science and maths from her parents, and when she was found out and chastised, she decided to end it all.  She couldn’t face the criticism, the pressure to compete, the fear of failure. Thinking herself excluded from the prestigious world of science and technology,  unfit to attempt the JEE and enter IIT-Heaven, she suffered a draining away of self-esteem. She couldn’t compete with some who ‘beat’ the system, unfairly:

Competitive Exam

At birth I was weighed

And found wanting

For years stood somewhat smaller

Than the tallest,

At every appraisal

Fell short of what it takes

To make the grade.

But now, unslept, my brain

Like David’s sling

Stocked with selected answers

To ten years’ question papers—

The deadliest rock a word

From an uncle on the examination board –

At last  I face Goliath

On an equal-seeming plain. 

Quite simply, she lost her balance.

Balance is a term whose elegance is epitomized in the figure of Nataraja, balancing on one foot. In this poetic image, the sacred and the absurd have been audaciously juxtaposed.   In this icon of the Dancer, this human propensity to take on challenges, to relish paradoxes is what is celebrated as divine.  One could ask: why such a feat should be attempted? Why lift the first foot at all?

But the first foot is science and technology, and in humans the relentless desire to know and find out is always extending itself, towards unsure ground or simply in the air! The other foot, placed firmly on the ground, and bending just a little, is the foot of the humanities, and this is what gives the dance of human life its poise, its balance. Human enterprise as a balanced endeavour achieves beauty, and meaning.

Balance could be a difficult but not an impossible  thing to achieve for human being…And balance is crucial for achieving excellence. I’m not talking about flash-in-the-pan excellence, but consistent, reliable excellence, quality in science and technology and in everything else.  High standards might come to be, naturally, in a society which fine-tunes and nurtures scientific temper, which is after all the disciplined pursuit of truth by the human intellect.  There’s nothing intrinsically alien to scientific temper in India, the urge to understand the phenomenal world as well as the psychological world has existed here from the very beginning of our history. You have evidence of it in literature, art, music…

But at the present time, this is a desperately competitive, and therefore a mediocre world, this virtual world of Indian science and technology. (There is a real world of Indian science and technology which is exploring fundamental questions of understanding and mastery, but it is under threat from this marauding, brutal, mediocre virtual world NOT of globalization but of our deplorable KNEE-JERK reaction to it.)  And when I say mediocre, I do not say it so much as a term of comparison with other societies, but with what could be done here. No high-sounding National Knowledge Commission can correct systemic flaws like the distorted human relations in our society, and in particular between teachers and students at every stage, to give one example.  It has a bearing on the very way we tend to deal with global competition,  our superficial and shortsighted reactions to it, our avidity to perform and achieve at any cost….this is what depletes us of our own potential for excellence, kills the seeds of good science, and discourages too many could-be scientists in India…

The science and maths my young friend had been exposed to at school and at home were travesties of what they are supposed to be. Lifeless because  the spirit of scientific endeavour which is identical with the urge to learn, to know, to understand ANYTHING at all,  was absent not only in her maths and science classes but in ALL her classes. So, these subjects were no longer living fields for a young mind to explore,  and trying to cram them had drained her of curiosity, eagerness, enthusiasm.  She felt unutterably belittled and excluded, and lost the courage to go on trying despite failure. This is how this virtual world of Indian science and maths deludes and destroys many young people. Now, what are you young S and T aspirants going to do about it?

I wrote these two poems  ‘Keynote Address’ and ‘Competitive Exam’ in the eighties, before the information technology revolution, when it was not possible to conceal the mediocrity of Indian science and technology under the dazzle of info tech. And it seemed to me that this mediocrity came, still comes from, a lack of freshness in the culture of science that is practised here,  a snobbery and an elitism and an elbow-pushing graceless striving which does not allow authentic achievement enough room to develop. And you might ask, what do I know about this world of science? But that is exactly the point I wish to make: that there is NO separate world of Science, or of Poetry, or of Art. This is one world. Not just peripherally, globally, but at the core  we are all made of the same metal.

Now, here’s a poem I began about a year ago, which finished itself yesterday as I looked at the topics under discussion at this conference:  

Globalisation, Commodification, Structural Adjustment, and All That

All this talk is like stamping new coins

Out of seized treasure. You melt it down

to obliterate all previous signs of ownership,

but mark it with this word, and that face,

some hoary symbol held as sacred by us, the folk

whose hubris you have chosen to invoke

to legitimize appropriation of wealth

held once, in common. 

Next, you inscribe values  -- of course

advantageous to yourself --  making sure

you ascribe them to the gods who rule the market place. 

To us, the dispossessed, you drive home the point

That it’s this transition time that’s out of joint

That no one’s to blame, that you’re as much

Sinned against,  as sinning.  Guilt makes no sense

in the face of forces which everyone knows

are faceless -- indifferent alike  to predator and prey.

“It’s all just structural adjustment, anyway.

The real sin,” you explain, “is social subsidy today.

It’s politically incorrect! Unworkable! Absurd!

All good pragmatists must kick it into oblivion.

That’s what we should all be working on!

The quaint notion of the welfare state has lost the race,

A  burnt-out sputnik drifting in the junkyard of space!”

And so we sign on the dotted line.

You’re formally absolved of all

Inconvenient instrumentality. 

Globaliser,  you are free

To walk in at your pleasure, take our measure,

And turn around our oh-so-grateful economy!

Plot and plan acquisitions, mergers, future ventures!  

Accumulate stocks, shares, debentures!

We’re commodified at last. Our fate is sealed.

Of course it must be as you say –

That this is not hell but only purgatory,

a temporary stopover on the way

to heaven’s level playing field

where everything is always all okay.

Now you’re safe, globaliser, to count

your gilt-edged dividends

while the real work is done

by us, digging in the ground

mining the common metal. 

Globalisation they say brings people together…maybe, maybe not…Let’s see, in this  poem about the perils of arranging a marriage between two NRI families.

Caste in the Same Old Mould

I met her on the plane.

She was just like you and me, not quite

the ordinary run of desi wife,

meek and too domesticated.

This one was much more sophisticated

Obviously used to the good life --  

but with all the right

Indian values. A little fastidious, maybe.

“Vegetarian is always safer, don’t you think?”

she said. Didn’t touch the mushrooms, or the cheese.

But when the wine came round, she sneaked a look at me

and giggled, “Our husbands aren’t with us,

Let’s indulge!”  We sipped our Chablis

watched one of those arty Indian films.

And mourned together the passing of old stars.

But it was those ear-studs

that really had me fooled.

I always say

diamonds set in the old way

never go out of style. They

set off her nice profile.

Nose quite okay. Caucasian, I suppose.

Complexion? Wheatish, I’d say.

Hair, barely grey, tied back.

Centre-parting, and just a

dot, too little to catch the eye

of any rednecked dotbuster! 

Yet there it was. So dignified!

So Indian! Oh,

Western clothes, but

Nothing shameless.

I must say they

suited her quite well.

Doesn’t simply everyone

look smart these days?

It’s getting really hard to tell

people apart.

I think now she must have been

trying to impress!

She was actually reading Arundhati Roy!

“It’s so-so. Usual stuff -- girl and boy.

Not really decent. Can’t an

Indian author find something better

to write about? Why ape these

Westerners?” she whispered.

“Whatever it is, Indian culture

is Indian culture, ‘ma!”  

It gave me a thrill, her impeccable

our-kind-of Tamil !

She spoke of her daughter,

an MBA who can cook

both avial and pasta,

showed me a photo of her lovely Lavanya

lighting a deeya

at the Madison County Divali Fiesta

At once I thought of your Pranav!  

And showcased his great Silicon Valley job,

And all our family members who are

By God’s grace, well-placed.

All said and done, it’s our genes,

We’re like Jews! Our heritage –

Blood always tells.

I soon got down to business and made it clear

That the boy’s parents want to move fast before

he finds himself a gori or a kaali!  Naturally!

Yet it’s always better, I told her, to observe

Certain proprieties. The girl’s side must make

the first move. ‘You need to start auspiciously.

There’s so much at stake.

Already, for our Pranav, alliances

are pouring like monsoon rain.

So hurry!”

She agreed and took your id. 

But it’s always better in such matters

To observe the proprieties. She agreed

and asked for your email id.

“Alliances are pouring like the monsoon rain!”

I warned her. “Since it’s for the girl’s side

to make the auspicious first move, you’ll need

to hurry!”

That’s what she did.

How was I to know?

How can you tell these days?

You can’t think how

Embarrassed I am, making

Such a mistake!

How could I have assumed

She was, you know,

Like you and me.

Like us. 

The NRI kupamanduka syndrome, you might say…

At  fourteen, I discovered the pleasures of articulation.  I wrote an essay (in English) on a visit I had made to a mad uncle’s house  in the Kerala backwaters, which my teachers in my American school liked very much. This was delightful, but it didn’t eclipse a certain unmistakable uneasiness, the strangeness of me, myself,  saying, writing English, even thinking in English.  An Indian Tamil Brahmin girl, how could she say in English all that she had heard and felt four years earlier about that mad, sad uncle, who did his sandhyavandanam not three but six times, and in between Gayatris squatted by the riverbank  pouring sand from one palm to another, in that numenous green world teeming with shapes, tastes, emotions? To give an English voice to my Malayalam-speaking uncle and to myself as a ten year-old watching him on that riverbank festooned with drooping coconut fronds was to go as crazy as he was! Yet this thing had to be spoken about, the specifics of this experience to those far removed from it, it seemed important, somehow.

Part of the problem was that I couldn’t say it in Tamil either. I certainly couldn’t say it in Tamil  in that American school. I didn’t receive my education in my mother tongue, nor did I learn it formally. I speak a variant of Tamil peculiar to a certain community and region which I’ve learned to dilute with ‘standard’ contemporary Tamil, in an effort to efface my cultural identity….But I’ve also, over the years, resisted making this effort, because I sense that it’s a violence done, not so much to me, myself, as to the truth of where and what I am, historically and culturally, and psychologically.  Instead I’ve been trying to accommodate the multiple ‘me’s’, and looking for ways to hold them together, to hold ME together. Or to let them through without dissolving ME…

…the answer seems to be to turn myself, my consciousness, into a sort of sieve…Perhaps what really can survive without losing its shape in the boiling cauldron of globalization is a sieve, with holes letting everything flow through, a sieve made of a metal which can withstand high temperatures.  If I’m made of sterner stuff than the temporal, I can endure, filter, and maybe even enjoy the currents of globalization.  You might call poetry one of the sieves that survives the homogenizing processes that go on in the crucible of globalization.

Another sieve bobbing about in this rich and smelly brew is translation.  It’s another kind of filtering that’s acquired a tremendous urgency in the context of globalization, when  we simply have GOT to understand one another or we’re sunk! Fortunately, it turns out that language learning is hard-wired into the human brain, as Noam Chomsky has suggested, and individual languages as such are rather like permeable membranes connected to that learning facility. And so we move from one to the other almost from the moment we begin to speak. These languages are like interchangeable sieves within one frame, and all together they form the inexhaustible cornucopoeia of Language with a capital L. It’s an akshaya patra, a vessel of wordless awareness, the essential metal of human communication.

And once you begin to translate, to relate, barriers of language come crumbling down, like the Great Wall of China (they say it’s disintegrating at last…) And when one rigidity dissolves, another kind of integration can take place…Here is a poem in Tamil, my translation of the wonderful German poet Rilke’s poem, Der Schwan…

The swan is a symbol for discrimination, in Indian tradition… And that’s what we need in this age of globalization….We should stop waddling nervously about like harassed ducks, and let ourselves turn into swans!

 
- Vasantha Surya is has written over 300 articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines on topics of social and cultural change. She has contributed to a study of women in the media (Whose News? edited by Kalpana Sharma and Ammu Mathew, Sage), and translated Tamil short stories and novels for EastWest Books, Penguin, Macmillan, Zubaan, Oxford University Press and Sahitya Akademi. She has written three books of poetry, including a transcreation from Bundeli Hindi (The Ballad of Budhni, Writers Workshop), and A Word Between Us (Sandhya). She writes for children, and her latest is a children's novel, Mridu in Madras (Rupa)