Grotton

Recipe for a successful shirt: Cotton, full sleeves, light, plain or discreetly funky, no stiff scrapey collar, no shimmer, no shine, no iridescence, no tags and toggles, cuffs that don't feel like handcuffs. Such a shirt can have a long happy life from brash youth to comfortable middle age and ultimately retirement as a duster-cloth. Useful and well-loved to the last wipe.

Problem: No such item available at any reasonable price. Here in my third-world country, a nice, normal cotton shirt costs from $20 to $100. That's for one shirt. In a first-world country, you can buy really nice shirts at $10 each.

This is the new consumerism of India: Many chain stores, small variety. The shelves have to be full and colourful; the stores have to give the illusion of size and comprehensiveness. Actual content (quality and depth of range) will come later. If everyone carries the same stuff, the populace will have to buy it.

I was sitting in a mall food court sipping a green apple mint juice (medium size, $1 -- fifty rupees) with my father (cuppa cardboard tea, $0.55, twenty-five rupees), and he said, this is all maya. Above us, some men were fixing the glass roof and watching all the oblivious eating. In a rich country, the trickery is not quite so obvious, as the illusion is nearly all-pervasive. It's harder to see around the edges.

Maya follows you everywhere in Delhi. It is a city where power is money, where business, political, media and NGO entrepreneurs take pride in the quality of their illusions. I don't insist that people in decades past were more innocent or more grounded, although I suspect that they were. But the eagerness, the inability to see anything but the illusion, among children and adults -- this is frightening. The making of children into shoppers, this is disastrous. Children are acquisitive by nature, but why should a dubious three-year-old be told by her parents that those shiny red slippers really suit her, they're very cool, others are wearing them, they look good on her?

And this furious hunger for 'lifestyle' is not even leavened with intelligent cynicism and self-critical humour. Someone cool should be telling us that it's not cool to be nothing but cool. Plenty of people are thinking about the future of India -- economists, so-called defence analysts, so-called urban planners, of course politicians. Nobody cool is thinking about the future of Indians. Nobody knows, and nobody investigates, what it means to be Indian.

We have, or will soon have, most of the forms of a rich society. But not all of us, and not at the same time. Will somebody else be doing our thinking for us then?

Falcophilia

Once you get into Rome, it's hard to get out. If it's not Suetonius wth his gossip, it's Julius Caesar with his Ides and et tu Brute; it is aqueducts and Asterix; Mark Antony and Liz Taylor; the Circus Maximus and Russell 'Maximus' Crowe; I, Claudius and Caligula's orgies. The fasces and the fascists and the American eagle, e pluribus unum and so forth. I was foolish enough to ask a professor once why exactly the Romans meant so much to early modern Europe. Quite a silly question if you have any idea at all of European history. Rome is about as cool as it gets, in the 15th century or the 8th or the 21st: the rich are appalling (the Satyricon), the poor are numerous, human beings are property, democracy is wedded to power and money and panem et circenses, the government mind encompassed interstate highways and absurd walls between civilised and barbarian, there are lobbies and mafias, odd sects and Christians, bad wine and novelty foods, limitless piped water and plumbing that kills slowly -- all signs of a superbly successful civilisation. It sounds so damn modern. All of us are Romans; we all live in different districts of Rome. This means that it is hard to know Rome as it 'really' was.

So when you're done with Suetonius, go read Lindsey Davis' detective novels/spy thrillers/romances, called the Falco series. They are set in Vespasian's Rome (AD 70s) and various provinces. Marcus Didius Falco, a delator (private informer), is the lowlife scum with dingy morals but honest heart, a quick mind, sharp tongue, and a great deal of experience in dealing with other lowlife scum, who is the narrator in these novels. Falco, as he is called, also has a girlfriend/partner who is a senator's daughter and is even more strong-willed and stubborn than her plebeian lover.

The story, exciting as it always is, is not all there is to these books. You cannot write a decent historical novel unless you are thoroughly familiar with life in your chosen period. (I keep wishing for a Latin translation of the spoken dialogues.) In this, I trust Lindsey Davis -- and, in addition to being a habitual doubter, I am a history student who is very prissy about 'it couldn't possibly have been that way, you worthless ulloo ka pattha'. Watching the History channel and all those crummy Nat Geo/Discovery 'reconstructions' gives me indigestion (apoplexy, even). I wish I could aspire to such mastery, so lightly worn. Then I, too, would write a historical novel, set in Mughal Delhi.

(But go see Davis' website and she comes across as a bit of a supercilious know-it-all. Authors [and professors] ought not to have websites named after themselves. It's just not decorous.)

I regret my local library has only a patchy sampling of the Falco books (there are fourteen thus far, I think). But because of Falco, I've gone back to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Robert Graves' Count Belisarius, and am wistfully thinking of my copies of Tacitus' Germania and Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, old Latin textbooks, Greek plays, etc., all sitting in someone's basement in a distant place.

Recognition

From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (trans. Maxwell Staniforth):

'Fix your thought closely on what is being said, and let your mind enter fully into what is being done, and into what is doing it.'

Every once in a while, in exhaustion or in ecstasy, a truth like this will spit forth. It may come in words; it may come in an image; it may come as an intuition, a congruence; however it is dressed, it will come. Essentially, you know that you are both alone and not alone. That nothing you do is important, and that everything you do is critically important. That the instantaneous present is where the world is to be found, that the past is where the world is to be found, that the future is where the world is to be found; that the past, future and present actually coexist; that there is no then and now. You are your ancestors and descendants both. Pretty tame insights, yes, except when they fit mind and circumstance. Wisdom is a process of recognition.