Two events this past fortnight intersected over a word. In Japan, scientists working with stem cells grew a primitive eye, a neurologically savvy optic cup. In Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Anna Hazare fought the good fight against corruption.
And the word they have in common is blindspot.
Our eye’s blindspot is a paradox. It is the point where information from the millions of retinal cells sets off for the brain through the optic nerve. There’s more nervous tissue here than elsewhere in the eye, but it can’t see a thing. With no optical receptors, it’s simply not equipped to register light.
Anatomically, the blindspot is a very tiny area. Metaphorically, it can be gargantuan.
In Hazare’s demand for accountability, the blindspot stretches over the genocide in Gujarat and the one inevitable in Maharashtra if the Jaitapur plan is implemented.
The human eye is a great deceiver. It is not an efficient organ. If perfect vision is what you’re after, be an octopus. You can then have eight arms, perfect bilateral symmetry, endlessly orgasmic sex, planned parenthood (ten thousand eggs in one shot), eyes that see right side up when you’re upside down, and without a blindspot.
The human blindspot can be swiveled in any direction. Everybody, but everybody, wants the State to be accountable for stealing our money. We want clarity there, perfect 20/20 vision. But when it comes to human suffering, the blindspot veils it very quickly. That’s an evolution of sorts.
We have grown a special sense organ: antennae for money. Wealth is recognised as the universal panacea — with enough of it, all crimes can be erased. It is compensation, a word that recalls the old Indian practice of charity, tulabharam, where you give away your weight in gold or dross. The Latin root for the word is pendere, to hang or dangle. I like remembering that, as compensation is often dangled as reward for having a really large blindspot.
There’s something wrong with the vision of the people of Jaitapur. They see perfectly well — these villagers are better read and better informed than our policy-makers. But they lack a blindspot for human suffering. It isn’t just dread they feel when they quote instances of malformed births, fetal loss and cancers from nuclear fallout in other countries.
It isn’t just anger they feel when they remind you Jaitapur is located on a major fault and has had 92 earthquakes between 1985 and 2005.
They are not prepared to simply despair over stupidity and greed. What they feel is pain — pain becauseit does not matter to the Indian people that there could be another Fukushima right here.
That’s right. They’re mutants. They don’t have the blindspot that allows the rest of us to ignore Bhopal and Gujarat and Dantewada, and — oh, the list is as endless as octopine sex.
That’s so yesterday. News needs to be more specific. News fancies four letter words, like scam.
That’s a lovely word, and with a ’60s swing to it — it comes from scamp. A cheat, yes, but a cheat with sprezzatura; one who does it marvelously by sleight of hand, prestidigitation, and legerdemain.
All a scam needs to be successful is a blindspot. Once you acquire that—it’s Choo Mantar!—or should I say Jantar Mantar?
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