At 91, dad asks, “Why isn’t anybody protesting?”

Baba turned 91 last week. I went to Mumbai from Bangalore to wish him and to perform our quarterly ritual of taking both to the family physician. This time dad fared better than mom. Her blockages in leg arteries are worsening, making it difficult for her to sleep. However, I am accustomed to situations where we ask, “How will they manage by themselves?” And yet they do, valuing their independence more than anything else.

Baba doesn’t do much these days. He is mostly on his bed, occasionally getting up to eat and visit the toilet. He ventures out once in a few months for a haircut, or to visit the doctor or his brother, or sister. He is still addicted to the newspaper, though – Loksatta if he is in Mumbai and The Hindu if he is in Bangalore with us. He also reads two magazines with a socialist leaning – Sadhana and Maha Anubhav. After he is done with reading the news, he has asked me many times, “Why is nobody protesting?” I don’t know the answer. I can only ask, “Why am I not protesting?”

Baba tells me that he has seen the rise of fascism in India since the 60s, before I was born. He worked at the Indian Cotton Mills Federation, perhaps the NASSCOM of textile industry, influencing the policy makers on behalf of the industry. He feels that the murder of Krishna Desai, a Communist Party leader, the then MLA, and a leader of mill workers’ union in 1970 was a turning point in the rise of fascism in Maharashtra. Three Shiv Sena party members were convicted and spent seven years in prison. Baba feels that a few textile oligarchs funded the assassination, and the then Congress Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik made money in the process. Barely three weeks after Desai’s death, Shiva Sena founder Bal Thackeray has said, “We must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists wherever we find them."¹

The rise of fascism had its reflection in society. Vijay Tendulkar wrote the now-famous play “Ghashiram Kotwal” (1972) on the corrupt police chief of Pune serving the corrupt chief secretary Nana Phadanavis during the Peshwa dynasty in the 18^th century. I watched Ghashiram and read George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four while in school. Bombay gang wars also had their share of representation in the newspapers. I was in the 6^th grade when Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Shabir Kaskar was killed by Manya Surve at a petrol pump near our flat in Prabhadevi in 1981. Next year, Surve was killed in a police encounter, also remembered as Bombay’s first encounter killing. It provided masala to two Bollywood films – Amitabh starrer Agneepath and Shootout at Wadala. One of my school classmates joined the Rama Naik gang and one became a police inspector. I was too shy, skinny, and underweight to go towards either of the paths. However, I became aware of the brutal power of “the system,” which included mafia as a core element and the doctrine of “winning at any cost”. I was not convinced that protests could make a dent in such a powerful system.

As I flew from Buffalo, New York, to Bombay (now Mumbai) via perhaps Heathrow in December 1992, I watched the demolition of Babri Masjid telecast all over. I didn’t know that it would go down in history as the event that broke the secular backbone of India. When I landed in Bombay, the city was standstill and still burning. Riots that followed within a month changed the city forever. A few years later, our friend Iqbal narrated to us in Buffalo how his family literally ran from their house in Worli, not too far from our place.

But the event that saddened Baba the most was the assassination of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013. Our last name sake, he was a social activist, rationalist, and writer involved in the eradication of superstition in Maharashtra. Baba could visualize then how “the system” is going to capture India. Dabholkar’s assassination would be followed by Pansare (2015), Kalburgi (2015), and Gauri Lankesh (2017). CBI called these murders “a pre-planned act of terror”. Last year, eleven years later, two shooters got life imprisonment while the masterminds remain at large. People protested for some time and then stopped. I didn’t join any protests, didn’t even consider it. Why not? What were my biases?

I strongly felt that to navigate a crazy system, brute force doesn’t work. Shouting out can be detrimental. It is a miracle that Julian Assange survived five years in jail. What appealed to me the most is what I wrote about more than a decade ago in the backdrop of Anna Hazare-Kiran Bedi protests – the wisdom from “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” – the first step is to be invisible. This is what Rana Ayyub did for eight months, God only knows how, before she could write Gujrat Files. And, unfortunately, this is what Hemant Karkare, the then head of Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) couldn’t do as he began exposing the perpetrators of 2008 Malgaon bomb blasts. He was crushed by “the system” on the same day as 26/11 attacks and in a sophisticated manner, putting the blame on Pakistani terrorists².

My lack of enthusiasm for protests has another side. Protests assume (mostly, not always) that the world is “fixable”, like how we fix a car or a broken hip bone. What if it is more like cloud-fixing as opposed to clock-fixing? Mindfulness suggests that “fixing” the world can be a dangerous addiction. It is just an expression of the innate desire to mould the world to feel secure in an inherently insecure world. Sustained narrative to fix the world calcifies the belief that the world exists independent of me. What if it is not? If everything is indeed interconnected, and hence Sunya as Nagarjuna suggests, then seeing the sunyata (emptiness) must be primary. Without this insight, I carry hatred/anger against the bad world, sometimes deeply buried within. The society appears to be like a plumbing system to be fixed when things don’t flow in a desired way. And, insight can’t be engineered, either by protests or by force or by meditation, at least not yet.

My lack of belief in the power of protests has begun to shift recently. Protests against the ongoing wars, the proxy-war against Russia and the Israel-Palestine war looked pale initially and easily suppressible. However, in the past year or so the power of protests has surprised me. I also found the work done by Whitney Webb (One nation under blackmail vol 1 & 2), Lina Khan (Amazon’s antitrust paradox), and Francesca Albanese (From economy of occupation to economy of genocide) totally impressive in exposing the nexus between oligarchs, politicians, intelligence, and organized crime. I also admire the work of Indian YouTubers like Shyam Meera Singh, Kavya Karnatac, Mohak Mangal, Kunal Kamra, and Sheeba Fehmi in raising awareness on various aspects of the Deep State in India.

In March 1993, a few months after the Babri debacle, Vijay Tendulkar wrote a short fictional piece on Ghashiram Kotwal. In his dream, while traveling in Deccan Queen, Tendulkar meets Ghashiram in jeans and T-shirt. Ghashiram shows him his diary which, like Epstein’s black book, contains the names of top politicians and industrialists in India and beyond and tells him, “The entire democracy in this country is standing on the black money, top class weapons, and unpatriotic people like me. The Ghashiram in your play is running the country.” Two decades later Ghashiram’s clout has grown stronger. In 2025, India is ranked 151^st out of 180 countries in World press freedom index ranking.

Sources:

1.  “Nativism in a metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay”, Dipankar Gupta, Manohar, 1982, pg 159.

2. "Who killed Karkare? The real face of terrorism in India," S. M. Mushrif, Former I.G. Police, Maharashtra, Pharos Media, 2023  

Image source: oneindia.com

Assessing journey-centric mindfulness against McMindfulness criticism

 

I have been teaching Journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) over the past decade. My book “Mindfulness: connecting with the real you” was published half a decade ago in 2019. Yesterday I conducted a mindfulness workshop at home for free, as I have done for the past seven years. Last month, I wrote my key takeaways from Ronald Purser’s critique, “McMindfuless: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality”. How does journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) fare when assessed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism? That is what I will explore in this article. For a more detailed treatment of this assessment, please refer to our paper, “A critical review of journey-centric mindfulness” which was presented at the International Research Conference on Mindfulness at IIM Bodh Gaya last year (IRCM-2024).

Journey-centric mindfulness: JCM is a journey (process) of learning to see clearly despite biased thinking anytime anywhere (even on the go). JCM is a lifelong journey without any destination. What is it that we are learning to see clearly? Primarily, three characteristics of existence (Pali: tilakkhanā, Sanskrit: trilakśanā): repetitive wasteful thinking (dukkha), impermanence (Pali: anicca, Sanskrit: anitya), and non-independence of self (Pali: anatta, Sanskrit: anatma). JCM is a secular form of mindfulness. It does not prescribe any belief system or practice as mandatory.

Now, let’s assess JCM McMindfulness lens, especially the three points from the criticism as presented in my earlier article.

Crisis is in the head: Purser is saying that large corporations like Google, Meta, (erstwhile) Twitter, and Apple are manipulating our attention. In his words, “Mindfulness has, like positive psychology, and the broader happiness industry, depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loan, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful.” JCM suggests that stress is a side-effect of repetitive, compulsive thinking that is largely wasteful. As we learn to see clearly the movement of thought, its wasteful nature, and its gullibility to social media, the movement of thought slows down. As a result, one may reduce one’s dependence on social media. JCM is primarily about seeing, not doing. JCM doesn’t say anything about what one should or should not do. In fact, it assumes “clarity is action”. One can be a social activist, a corporate executive, or a monk and be on a journey of learning to see clearly. JCM suggests that an action when one sees clearly is likely to be more appropriate than an action when one’s perception is distorted. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.

Tool for self-improvement: JCM assumes that mind is like weather - highly non-linear and deeply hierarchical. The weather analogy is borrowed from a neuroscientist Prof. Karl Friston of University College London¹. A small change can make a big difference. A small SMS can change the state of mind from peaceful to raging anger in a short time. Do we talk about a tool for weather improvement? No. Similarly, JCM assumes that self-improvement is a meaningless concept as far as the mind is concerned. Thus, doing mindfulness in order to reach a peaceful or blissful state is meaningless. Then why should we learn to see clearly?  To appreciate this, let’s ask - Why do we keep the windshield of our car clean? Is it to reach a destination? Or without a clean windshield, it is difficult to make appropriate decisions. Since JCM doesn’t subscribe to self-improvement, this aspect of McMindfulness criticism is not relevant to JCM.

Secular approach without wisdom: JCM is a secular approach. However, it is influenced by and borrows from Buddhist Vipassana as well as Nagarjuna’s Sunyata. The wisdom aspect is at the heart of JCM. Learning to see impermanence AND interconnectedness is emphasized. Anicca and anatta are crucial. Learning to see that absolute necessities are a meaningless concept is important. And the self is nothing but a collection of absolute necessities – body ownership, possessions, name, fame ownership, etc. Each has a role in life. But nothing is permanent, and nothing is context-independent. These insights don’t come easily, and even when they come, they are not easy to digest. Seeing self-deception clearly can make one uncomfortable or even angry. It may result in quitting the job. It can also make one peaceful. Since learning to see impermanence and Sunyata is at the heart of JCM, it is more like a secular approach with wisdom.

Since JCM doesn’t have a destination such as a stress-free life, higher productivity, or more profit, it is not sold to corporations. I do conduct some sessions as part of IIM Bangalore’s executive education program occasionally (twice this year so far).

In short, JCM stands tall when reviewed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism. It may not appeal to many, especially corporates, because it doesn’t promise anything. However, the shallowness of one’s life may motivate people to explore mindfulness. And, JCM can be practiced by grabbing moments in one’s busy schedule, even on the go. Why not give it a shot?

Notes:

1.       Mind is like weather: This analogy is explored by Prof. Karl Friston in the interview “Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle | Lex Fridman podcast #99” (39:15). Friston compares the attributes common between brain and weather – deeply structured, very non-linear, and rests upon non-equilibrium steady-state dynamics.