And the Grass Grows by Itself

The movie Eat Pray Love, which I finally watched on DVD, reminded me of an old Buddhist poem:

Sitting silently
Doing nothing
The Spring comes
And the grass grows by itself

So, as the protagonist of Eat Pray Love learns, the Italians have distilled the aesthetic of doing nothing in an even more exquisite phrase: il dolce far niente or the sweetness of doing nothing.

The idea of rejuvenating the spirit and body through inaction is nothing new. The Abrahamic religions bestowed the idea of sabbath. Buddhist masters set aside time for doing nothing, except perhaps brewing tea and watching the cassia flowers fall.

Time for me to do nothing!

Musings

That archetypal American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, reportedly said genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

When the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate (1844 – 1908) was hailed as a genius, he quipped, “A genius! For 37 years, I’ve practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!”

The Irish writer James Joyce meets a friend in a bar. The friend asks how he is doing.

“I’m exhausted,” Joyce says.

“Why?” the friend enquires. “What did you do today?”

“I wrote a sentence,” Joyce says.

The Jury is Still Out

Recently, I served on jury duty in a trial involving alleged assault, malicious wounding and intent to rob. After almost two and a half day of intense deliberations, the outcome was a hung jury. In reality, the outcome was always going to be either a guilty verdict or a hung jury as at least one juror never wavered from his initial position in favor of a guilty verdict.

Although the jury experience has reinforced my faith in the judicial system, I came away with mixed feelings about the jury system itself. What happened was that a couple of jurors basically made the decision for the vast majority of the jurors. These dominant jurors were vocal, confrontational and forceful, at one point reducing a dissenting gentle old lady to tears.

One of the vocal jurors had recently finished law school but not been admitted to bar yet. The juror clearly thought the law degree gave a license to ride roughshod over the rest of the jurors, often playing what I considered to be vain intellectual games. The juror would support one side of the argument and suddenly switch to the other as if to dazzle the jury with the rhetorical skills picked up at the law school.

For most of the deliberations, the jury was split almost 50-50. Towards the end of the day two of the deliberations, there was a dramatic shift to 11-1 in favor of a guilty verdict but still not a unanimous decision as required by law. When informed of the deadlock, the Judge instructed the jurors to spend some more time to try to reach a unanimous verdict.

Next morning, after another intense session of deliberations during which the law graduate argued for a not-guilty verdict, a snap poll was taken. By this time, nothing should have surprised me but I was still surprised when the law graduate voted for a guilty verdict after arguing for a not-guilty verdict throughout the morning session. The snap poll result was 8-4 in favor of a guilty verdict.

Clearly, the deadlock had worsened. When informed again, the Judge instructed the jury to try to see if an 11-1 verdict was possible. Another session of deliberations began, and, of the four who had voted in favor of a not-guilty verdict, two quickly fell in line. When it became clear that the remaining two would not budge from their position, something startling happened.

Throughout the deliberations, there was this feeling that returning a hung jury was somehow a betrayal of the trust the Crown Prosecutor and the Judge had placed in the jury. So, when it became clear that a guilty verdict was not possible, the law graduate asked everyone how many could vote for a not-guilty verdict without feeling ‘morally compromised’. Ten hands went up. This meant the accused was just one vote shy of acquittal.

If so many jurors felt that they could vote for a not-guilty verdict without feeling morally compromised, perhaps the Crown had not done enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was guilty. In fact, many jurors would complain that the Crown Prosecutor could have done a better job and then go on to vote in favor of a guilty verdict.

In the end, the Judge decided that the impasse was beyond resolution and dismissed the jury. Before dismissal, the jury was informed that the Crown would try the accused again at an unspecified date.

At various times, I felt that some jury members struggled with the fundamental concept of the presumption of innocence. They gave the impression that the mere fact of being charged is a sufficient reason for conviction.

One jury member - the same one who from the start never once wavered in his belief in the guilt of the accused - at one point argued that the accused had proven his guilt by exercising the right to silence when interviewed by the police. This was despite the Judge's instruction not to hold this fact against the accused.

The defense case largely rested on an alibi, which was shown to be very shaky by the Crown Prosecutor. However, the demolition of the alibi did not automatically establish the guilt of the accused, another fact reminded by the Judge to the jury members a few times. However, some jury members did not seem to grasp this fact either.

The trial by jury may be one of the crown jewels of the human civilization but it clearly has its flaws. But, then, what does not?

End is Nigh for the Puppet Show

As if further proof was needed of the impending annihilation of the NSW Labour Government in next month’s state election.

In the large assembly hall of a government building where a crowd of people from all walks of life were watching Channel 7, every time NSW Premier Kristina Keneally appeared in the ad with the drivel about legislating to help struggling families if returned next month, she was greeted with hearty guffaws.

This state Labour Government’s goose is cooked. The only reason that it was not dumped in the last couple of elections was the disarray in the Opposition ranks thanks to the internecine factional warfare in the state Liberal Party. All that Barry O’Farrell and company now have to do is sit tight and do nothing. Their winning election strategy boils down to a single magic word: inaction.

Will NSW voters fare better under O’Farrell? They certainly seem to think so if opinion polls are anything to go by.

Keneally herself is an affable politician who inherited a poisoned chalice and the unflattering tag of  'puppet' of the NSW Labour machine thanks to the parting shot of her predecessor, Nathan Rees. On March 26, she will be the innocent lamb led to the slaughter house to atone for the sins of her party, which has been in power for far too long for its own good.

Mahatma and the Naked Fakir

Gandhi’s admirers perform all sorts of rhetorical contortions to defend some of his more bizarre ideas and practices. One such practice that became public knowledge in the twilight of his life shocked even his most dyed-in-wool devotees.

On the eve of Independence, Gandhi marched through the paddy fields of Bengal on foot with a wooden staff and a train of followers to calm seething Hindu-Muslim hostility with nothing more than the sheer force of his personality. A mobile toilet carried by his admirers along with the more familiar Gandhian prop, the spinning wheel, accompanied the great man during this celebrated journey.

It was during this time that one of Gandhi’s more controversial practices became public knowledge.  Ostensibly to test his long-standing vow of brahmacharya (celibacy), Gandhi was found to be in the habit of sharing his bed with young women.

There is no suggestion that Gandhi in any way violated his sleeping partners, many of whom selflessly ministered to his physical well-being and acted as his confidantes. However, the incongruity of the old, ascetic Gandhi sleeping naked with young women scandalised the sensibilities of his puritanical Hindu followers as well as those of more secular bent in the Congress Party.

Gandhi’s achievement in Bengal that year turned out to be nothing short of miraculous. While Punjab and the rest of the Subcontinent was seized by collective madness, with Hindus and Muslims indulging in an orgy of tit-for-tat murders that ultimately claimed millions of lives, Bengal held its peace thanks only to Gandhi’s commanding presence and towering moral authority.

Gandhi camped with his followers in an old, decaying bungalow in a Muslim neighbourhood in Calcutta as Hindu-Muslim tensions threatened to boil over. A Muslim mob moved into the neighbourhood and started to attack Gandhi, hurling stones and abuses and ordering him to move out. Gandhi pacified and won over his attackers by declaring that he would not leave the place as long as a single Muslim in the neighbourhood felt threatened and insecure from Hindus.

Some of Gandhi’s ideas about social reform, such as his rejection of industrialisation in favour of an agrarian utopia that supposedly existed in India’s imagined past or his re-categorization of the Hindu untouchables into ‘Harijans’ (God's people), can be charitably dismissed as quixotic or misguided. If only deep-rooted social evils such as the Hindu caste system could be magically eradicated by re-labelling its victims!

However, Gandhi’s lifelong struggle against injustice and colonialism, first in South African and then in India, justifies his undisputed standing as a giant of the 20th century.

As the British broadcaster Mishal Husain argued in a recent three-part BBC documentary, Gandhi’s admirers do him a great disservice by placing him on a pedestal.

A Gandhian female academic that Husain interviewed in India for the documentary was asked about Gandhi’s controversial practice of sleeping naked with his young female followers.
 
Instead of admitting the possibility that Gandhi, Mahatma though he was, could have made errors of judgement, the academic trotted out the familiar argument about Gandhi testing his resolve and self-control by sleeping with nubile women. Even more disingenuously, she claimed the women would have been enriched morally by the experience notwithstanding the fact that Gandhi used them as mere foil to his dubious spiritual exercises. In his followers’ eyes, Gandhi could do no wrong and was above reproach.
 
What if the Mahatma had lost his self-control?

But if we forget Gandhi the legend, there is a lot to like about the man.
 
Though many know that Gandhi sought solace and inspiration in the ancient verses of the Hindu scripture Geeta, few are aware of the eclectic influences of his youth that shaped his mature worldview.

While studying law in London, he read Geeta for the first time. However, he also read the Sermon on the Mount and Tolstoy, and socialised with Theosophists and London’s vegetarians, giving up meat.

He sailed to London despite threats from his clan elders to strip him of his caste status and its attendant privileges. By sailing to London, Gandhi violated the ancient Hindu taboo against crossing seas. His later attempts to recover his caste status by performing prescribed ceremonies failed, apparently because his clan elders had not forgiven his transgression.

He cut his political teeth by fighting racism against Indians and blacks in South Africa. He mobilised the Indian mass against the British Empire on the principle of non-violence and succeeded to wrest freedom for them. 

Just before and in the aftermath of Independence, Gandhi protected Muslim minorities and their properties from murderous Hindu mobs, first in Bengal and then in New Delhi. He paid for his ecumenicalism and vision of universal brotherhood with his life at the hand of a Hindu fanatic.
 
Gandhi’s puritanism and bizarre spiritual experiments in old age, his insistence on interfaith goodwill to address Muslim minority concerns in place of concrete political concessions, his refusal to support any special treatment to Hindu outcasts, his uncritical apotheosis in modern India, and his stern gaze from the pedestal can be quite off-putting.

However, bring him down from the pedestal and Gandhi, with or without his loincloth, starts to look much more attractive.