JOSEPH GOEBBELS NEVER VISITED KERALA

 

“Veettil Oonu,” (വീട്ടിൽ ഊണ്), the board outside the roadside restaurant in the town screamed. The two Malayalam words literally mean 'home food’. Everyone knows that home food is prepared and served at home. The restaurant that screamed ‘home food’ was neither home nor homely. It kept the hearth going for its owners and workers. Such boards are common along the length and breadth of Kerala. How can anyone buy ‘home food’ in a wayside restaurant? Everyone knows it is a blatant lie.  If you walk into such a restaurant hoping to eat something homely, you could be disappointed. The food they serve is a ‘meal’ sold in all restaurants across Kerala. ‘Meals,’ for the uninitiated, means an unlimited supply of rice and curry, served on a banana leaf or plate. If you thought Veettil Oonu would be cheaper than normal meals in other restaurants, maybe if you are lucky, you could be right. Anyway, people still walk in knowing that the board screams untruth. The name sells.

Why are names important?

Names grant a unique identity and a sense of differentiation. It creates an association between the entity and its attributes, helping us to shape our perceptions about the entity. Name provides the most potent emotional connection between the entity and the environment. Once a name is ingrained in our memory, a recall triggers the release of associated emotions stored and, therefore, predictable behavioural responses.  Every time a Malayali hears the words ‘Veettil Oonu’, it immediately brings him close to the food that his mother prepared for him. 

The concept of Veettil Oonu, most likely, would have started when a Malayalee, most likely a poor but enterprising lady, decided to cook some extra food at home and serve it in her dining space for a price. Her business would have catered to the hunger needs of a few in the locality. These enterprises were initially confined to the premises of houses. She must have been a visionary. It did away with the need to subordinate oneself to food inspectors and law enforcers who visited merely to demand subservience, allegiance and conformance to the practice of graft both in cash and kind. It did not incur additional infrastructural and organisational costs and allowed her to keep the extra income outside the hungry tax net. Restaurants saw the opportunity and relabelled their noon meals as Veettil Oonu. It used the unbreakable bond between names and our memories. It also guaranteed business because there were enough hungry, homesick and gullible folks walking around.  All those who go in know that the board is a blatant lie, and they are not walking in for a homemade meal. Joseph Goebbels called it the big lie.

Joseph Goebbels, the chief architect of Nazi propaganda, showed the world the power of propaganda. He turned blatant lies into slogans and sent them out to the environment. He repeated it so much that the environment became saturated with his slogans. Short but lethal, his slogans like “Der Führer hat immer recht” (The Führer is always right), “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (One people, one Empire, one leader), created a cult figure, wielding unmatched lethality, reigning over a people driven not to reason but to inflict untold cruelty on a section of people, once their own neighbours. He would have never imagined that two simple Malayalam words, coined as a benign tag, could lure people again and again, even when they know it is a blatant lie. Veettil Oonu is a powerful trigger, a brand name without a patent or trade disputes. 

Can slogans be so powerful that they can kill the sense of reasoning inherent in us?

Yes. We always reason out. We seldom reason against the intended purpose. We reason it out as the master wanted us to. Slogans are words brought together to create a predetermined emotion. Slogans can be benign or provocative. Benign slogans are like the ones that companies like Nike market their products. “Just do it” is what they say.  It motivates the person to do something. It does not have any underlying or embedded negative messaging. There are loaded slogans or taglines. “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” is one such. On the surface, it calls upon each American to shoulder their part in making the country great. The presence of the word ‘again’ gives the slogan a different tone. It implies that the country was great sometime back, slipped down to being not so great now, and therefore needs to be made great again. It also implies that someone had failed the country by bringing it down from the exalted position it once held. Surely, someone must be responsible for it! But more importantly, everyone who hears it will, without doubt, tend to believe that the person giving the MAGA call is leading the way to MAGA. It also means that anybody who opposes the person calling MAGA is anti-national. 

The trick is to use names and words to associate the base instincts of a people with their insecurities, make them aware of a potent threat, real or imaginary and promise a way out. Goebbels was a master of the art. He believed that if a lie is so big that no one would believe that anybody could distort the truth so much, then people will tend to believe it as the truth. Repeated enough, the lie will be cemented as truth amongst the masses. When Goebbels gave the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (One people, one Empire, one leader), he, on the surface, sought unity amongst Germans as one people. Who would reject it? After all, anyone who supported it was the Volk. “Ein Reich” sold a dream to the people of making their country a great empire. Inherent to the slogan was the conquest to redraw boundaries. Anybody who believed in the Reich naturally agreed with the military campaigns. Anybody who spoke against the conquest was not part of the folk. “Ein Führer” was a call for a leader capable of doing it. Adolf Hitler was the Führer. Another slogan made popular by Goebbels at that time was “Der Führer hat immer recht” (The Führer is always right). It proclaimed the infallibility of the Führer. The economic crisis provided the perfect setting. People were angry. Now, their ire could easily be directed against anything or anyone. Someone. Goebbels decided to target the Jews. “Die Juden sind Schuld,” screamed his slogan. The slogan seeded frenzy. People turned against their neighbours. Anyone who saw any other rationale was against the Volk and was mercilessly dealt with. This phenomenon did not end with Hitler and Goebbels

When differences in opinion can be labelled treason, fear will triumph over reason, and people will become tormentors of others who were once their own. Politicians across the world would continue to manufacture lies so colossal that even the well-read would believe that a lie of such proportions is impossible and therefore must be the truth. These lies will be used to make slogans, and slogans will divide people into communities that turn one against the other. Fuelled by slogans, the public goes into a frenzy while politicians on the sides feed on the bleed. No amount of proof can quell the frenzy.

Are people so gullible and naive?

Like the hungry walking into the wayside restaurant, driven by hunger and blinded by greed for a cheap but familiar taste of home food, people at large, driven by their base instincts of insecurity, blinded by their greed for easy gains at the cost of someone else, go berserk. Insulated from consequences, individuals become groups, and groups become mobs, dispensing devastation on the hapless.

“What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” said a love-struck Juliet to her equally tormented lover Romeo. The Capulet family, to which Juliet belonged, were sworn enemies of the Montague family, to which Romeo belonged, and that became the biggest hurdle for the two lovers. It took the lives of a few before the two families agreed to bury their hatchet. By then, the lovers were long dead. Pardon Juliet for being blinded by love and desperate to be with her sweetheart. Shakespeare should have known better. After all, he lived through ‘The Felt Makers Riots of 1592' and ‘The Evil May Day Riot of 1593’ against the aliens. When he chose to ask, “What is in a name?” he required Juliet to do it for him.  

The innocuous-looking board luring people into the restaurant for home food should serve us as a powerful reminder of how easy it is for us to be led to untruths unquestioningly. But, didn’t someone say, history repeats itself?

 

 

 

 

If Pigs Knew They Stink

 

“Pigs do not know they stink,” Manju, my friend, messaged me after reading my article, Wrestling with the Pigs. The benign comment almost exonerated pigs from culpability for the stink. The thought, she said, was brought up by her husband when they sat down to discuss my blog. He had read somewhere that “pigs do not know that they stink.” They are a kind couple. It would have been easy for them to be considerate and pardon pigs as a class for “they (pigs) know not what they do.” 

I was, however, elated on two counts.  The first, another article of mine, had found space in an intellectual discussion. It felt good. The second, I detected something profound in her statement. It raised two socially relevant questions. How would pigs know they stink? What would happen if pigs knew they stank? 

How would pigs know they stink? There could be two ways. Either the pig itself realises that it stinks, or another pig calls it out. Both can happen only if pigs themselves can identify individual odours and differentiate between the good, bad, and unbearable. Armed with that knowledge, a pig has to realise that there is an odour and it stinks. They also have to accept that their odour is considered offensive and not appreciated by others. Wallowing in mud and filth comes naturally to them.  Even if they are hosed down, they will return to dirt without remorse because they have nowhere else to go. They have reconciled themselves to the fact, stink or not, they are condemned to live in filth with no hope of redemption. However, they do not come up to us on purpose to cause discomfort. It is we who go near them and complain about their stink.

But we humans are not in as condemnable a state as them. We know what is offensive and what is not.  Each society has evolved its own set of rights and wrongs, acceptable and unacceptable. Yet many among us, born and brought up amidst the sense of right and wrong, without a second thought, step beyond legal, moral, and ethical boundaries. The society accepts it with silent indifference, and people with legal or moral authority choose to turn a blind eye. In the times that we now live in, most of us do not care or dare to call out someone unless the act committed directly and adversely affects us. Even when it is committed against us, we prefer to let it go. We tend to look at the drudgery and penalty associated with calling out the act or fighting it out, and opt to accept suffering in silence. Many of the problems prevailing today in society can be attributed directly to this fear of calling out people, even when both the perpetrators and their victims know what is wrong. Worse, we willingly participate in perpetuating it by becoming party to it or abetting its accomplishment in silence.

Corruption is a typical example. Everyone knows it exists. Everyone knows it is wrong, but most of us willingly become party to it to get things done, even when what we ask is our rightful due. We have become accustomed to being bullied, and many among us do not hesitate to perpetuate what we preach as wrong. Rarely does anybody call them out, and in most cases, we all want to get over it and pay up, even if we do not like to. Substance abuse amongst youngsters would not happen without parents first hiding what they discover, and then suffering in silence, between bouts of denial. People who become habitual in breaking the law come to that state because someone with moral and emotional authority and the liability to call out the deviant fails in their obligations. We, the public, tend to evaluate the risk and penalty of speaking out against the possible payoff from abetting and choose silence.

What would happen if pigs knew they stank? Let us apply this thought only to the world of pigs. We will consciously keep humans out of this part.

If the pigs knew that they stank and felt that they would be better off without the stink, or even better, they wanted to emit a fragrance, it would mean they had achieved awareness of the self. They would want to change. If they are given a choice and the means to pursue it, they would try and keep themselves cleaner than they do now and ask those in charge of society for a better environment to live in. This noble and ubiquitous thought is also the prescription to salvation or nirvana. Those with an eye for commerce can easily spot endless business opportunities to cash in on. In the physical plane, there would be products and processes on sale, one outbidding the other with the promise of expanding scopes and fairytale outcomes. In the spiritual plane, in their quest to become fragrant entities from within, they could become religious and flock to those who promise fragrance of the soul and a fantabulous afterlife. Imagine a pig all bathed, beautiful and smelling good.

If pigs lived in a hierarchical society (like we humans do), then there would certainly be a prescribed order of odours. Those with the more offensive odour would be placed low in the hierarchy of pigs. There would be many shades of odour, defining many societal classes, and there could even be classes within each class, all dictated by the accident called birth. 

A sense of Deja vu?

What would happen if others do not want pigs to change? Consider the situation when pigs, with no option left, decide to weaponise their offensive odour! It is a whole new world of possibilities out there. 

I have put across some of my thoughts. There could be much more. I leave it to your imagination.

Now, honestly have you forced yourself into silence when you really wanted to respond differently?

What do you say? Please add your thoughts in the comment section.

PS: The picture here has been generated by Grok

 

Wrestling With Pigs

 

Wrestle with the pigs?  Yes.

What happens if you do? “You both get dirty, and the Pig likes it.” George Bernard Shaw. 

Would anyone do that? Most of us do.  

Why would anyone do that? Well, it is in our nature to do that. Despite my resolve not to, I almost got into the pit yesterday.  

My school had a piggery. The place had an offensive stink that reached far beyond its walls. It was there that I saw pigs for the first time. The piglets looked cute, ate a lot, and grew up into huge pink pigs. I knew they would end up on our plates sometime and felt bad for them. Nevertheless, I relished pork.  

One fine day, I came across George Orwell’s all-time classic, The Animal Farm, and read it. Unaware that the book was a political satire about the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, it led me to consider pigs as ruthlessly manipulative, cunning, and wily. I visited the piggery once or twice after that and tried to identify Napoleon the antagonist, Snowball the idealist and Squealer the propaganda pig.  My initial understanding of the idiom, “wrestle with the pigs”, was built around the character they played in the book. Growing up, I lost interest in pigs, but my appetite for pork grew.  It took me a few more years to understand what the idiom meant and where it could be used.  

Travelling to my workplace from where I lived, I had to cross this area (since everybody is easily offended these days, let me keep the name of the place under wraps) where people, oblivious to others around, nonchalantly squatted, smoking and defecating. They, while defecating in the open, even talked to each other as if they were on some social platform. While the area was filled with people defecating in the morning, there was always someone in the act at any time of the day. The pigs were always there, working around people, openly defecating. I have seen pigs even sleeping there. The picture made the idiom, “wrestling with the pigs”, more than clear. I would never, even in my worst dreams, want to wrestle with a pig! Yet, I almost did it yesterday. 

I was driving home from Chenganoor. Since Gods and saints now need people to come out onto the roads and make their presence felt, there was a religious procession on the road. Filled with divine thoughts and assured of no consequences, some of these people can easily be provoked to become violent. I slowed down and stopped my car to the side, giving way for the procession to pass by. Behind me, there were a few vehicles patiently waiting and surprisingly not honking. The procession passed by without any incident. Behind the line of devotees were a few vehicles. One was a lady on a scooter. “If you are scared of getting your car grazed, travel by bus,” she commented, as my car inched slowly forward. She was obviously angry with me for having exercised age-driven caution. The temptation to wrestle with the pig (no physical comparison meant) was intense and immediate. I got angry and retorted.  

There is a thin line between sanity and insanity, and I quickly regained composure, at least externally and walked out of the pit into which I had jumped to wrestle. I could have easily ignored her, but I was easily provoked. Throughout the drive thereafter, I kept analysing my folly. On one side, I was angry with the lady and wished I had given her a suitable reply. I wish I had wrestled. On the other hand, I was happy that I saved myself from giving in to the urge to get dirty.  

There are a lot of people around with so much pent-up anger and dissatisfaction that they want to spill it at the first possible opportunity. They move around with their putrid garbage, ready to be dumped on anyone at the first possible instant. That lady might have had a bad day, but mine was beautiful till then. I had been enjoying some amazing times over the three days before it. Yet by impulse, I was drawn to the pit.  Most of us are tempted to respond immediately to the slightest provocation. Letting anyone go scot-free from what we think they have done wrong could be a difficult proposition for many of us. But then that is precisely what the pigs demand. The very fact that you engage with them is a victory for them, irrespective of the result of the engagement. They are in there not for a decision on the matter of right or wrong, but purely for getting someone to dump their muck and dirtying those willing to engage with them. I almost fell for it.

Closer to ourselves, we can see this in action every day. One only has to look at various WhatsApp groups that we are part of.  You can see this phenomenon at work. Look at some heated discussions. One can find many in the pit trying to wrestle in futility, making it difficult to distinguish who controls the fight.  We can also see roles shift at random, and the conflict ends only with everyone involved getting soiled, and some sitting by the pit enjoying the fight.

On the drive back, or what was left of it, I promised myself not to fall for the bait pigs set up. I also vowed to myself never to become a pig for others, for unknowingly, we also could end up being the pigs.

PS: The Picture is Grok-generated