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Sikh Modelling Contests A Body of Argument
If
the new longevity is a result of the advances of traditional
medicine, beyond them lies the new 'industry of life', already
capable of the production of human beings without intercourse, and
on the brink of laboratory manufacture proper. I am not sure how the
Sikh community, which is battling within itself about what stance to
strike publicly on the issue of same-sex marriages (commitments?),
will adopt on this one.
 This Vaisakhi, the Sikhs, increasingly aware and worried about the
younger generation's attitude towards the religion and much
concerned about their outer identity symbol of the turban,
celebrated the festival simultaneously as the International Turban
Day. Just days earlier, in Delhi, models walked down the ramp and
were feted not primarily because they were beautiful or had perfect
attributes of the body but because they had all that but were also
Sikhs, or at least sported all the outer symbols of the religion --
the hair, the turban, the untrimmed eyelashes, a perfectly tied
turban and an impressively styled beard.
Casual readers may have missed the import of the photographs from
the photographs emerging from International Turban Day contests or
Sikh modelling events, since the Indian as well as the international
media now routinely flash pictures embodying what they call the
spirit of the perfect human body.
Age
is a phase in the development and eventual withering of a tissue, of
plasma, of cells that form larger constructs which eventually form
our body. Much has been written about why the human beings are in
love with a particular stage of the development of the life tissue,
which we have chosen to call 'youth'. The modelling contests and
beauty shows which throw up Miss America, Miss India, Mr. USA or
Miss Surinam are only an illustration of this almost affected
affectation with the idea of a particular stage of the tissue's
development being better than another. I have also come across
somewhat apologetic Mrs. India or Mrs. Ludhiana contests which are
basically consolation contests for those who are past the age where
the camera lingered a wee bit more on the contours of the human
body.
It
is interesting that the Sikhs, who everyday pray to the Almighty,
for blessing them with the spirit to live in the raza of the Akal
Purakh, also have notions, or are celebrating notions, that one
particular age is better than the other, that a certain form and
shape of the human body is more beautiful than the other, that my
strapping six feet brother with flawless near-Caucasian skin tone
and beatific smile is a better sight to behold than my mother's or
aunt's wrinkled face.
I
have long been watching that the human body has started to pre-empt
all other measures of value in the West. Maybe this should have been
foreseen, going by developments on the life expectancy front. At the
time of the French Revolution in 1789, the average longevity span in
France was 22, but a hundred years later, this had doubled to just
under 45. Currently, French men live for 75 years and the women 83.
And scientists tell us that those born after 2000 will fare better,
and one girl out of two born in France will live to be a hundred.
The
story elsewhere is no different. Four generations or more used to
live in the space of a hundred years just a little while ago when
the
 Sikh
Gurus were solidifying a religion and a value system, the like of
which this world had not heard of earlier. Compared to those times,
we are practically not dying at all! This prolongation of life
amounts to the invention of a new body, against need, against
suffering and against time; against the world too the world of
nature, which was destiny.
If
the new longevity is a result of the advances of traditional
medicine, beyond them lies the new 'industry of life', already
capable of the production of human beings without intercourse, and
on the brink of laboratory manufacture proper. I am not sure how the
Sikh community, which is battling within itself about what stance to
strike publicly on the issue of same-sex marriages (commitments?),
will adopt on this one. Eugenics beckons at the future entrance to
life, euthanasia as the normal exit from it. Social isolation can
already count for more than physical decay in the decease of the
elderly: 'the time is near when death will come from distance or
disgust with a world that is no longer one's own where life will
no longer be what the body betrays, but what the spirit abandons,
betraying the body'. Such parting with existence still remains
passive. Ahead is 'active death, willed and chosen, as the last
stage in the invention of a new kind of body' the logical
conclusion of 'the claim to life as property, as domain par
excellence of individual choice and the exercise of free will'.
In
between entry and exit, meanwhile, the body-shops of maintenance,
repair, transformation and perfection are proliferating, as
expenditures on dietetics, health care, cosmetic surgery,
embellishment soar. If the fabricated faces of Madonna or Mariah
Carey are the new icons of beauty, and the pressure they express is
felt at all levels of education and career, then soon a string of
successful Sikh modeling contests will lead to similar pressures
closer home, maybe even in the precincts of religious places we
would internally assess who looks his best in a polka-printed
turban? In public affairs, physical appearance becomes an even more
essential condition of success, as the political class illustrates
to satiety, more so in the United States.
Freed from physical labours, protected from ancient maladies,
enhanced by novel additives, extended to longer durations, the
reinvented body detaches itself from traditional obligations and
constraints, as a machine for pleasure that is an end to itself.
With this change, marriage as once understood an institution that
had nothing to do with desire, pleasure, the couple, and everything
to do with the child, the prolongation of the line and its
patrimony makes little sense, or threatens to make little sense.
An
important part of the biological capital of each individual is spent
when it reproduces itself. In the current choice not to reproduce,
or do so only seldom, or parsimoniously, may be seen a preference
for the prolongation of life. At the limit, a generation that lived
forever would have no need to reproduce itself at all. The
consequences of this thinning of the threads binding one generation
to the next are likely to be drastic for those born into the new
order. They arrive, separated not only from parents more and more
absorbed in themselves, but from any of the forms of culture or
relations with nature that once gave continuity of experience
between the generations. Instead, they increasingly inhabit a
virtual universe of digitalization, erasing the boundaries between
the real and the simulacrum.
 The
majority of children between three and twelve, initially in the
United States, and henceforward also in France and Europe, spend
more time in front of a screen television, computer, video-game,
mobile phone than with their parents, teachers or their friends:
on average more than five hours a day, as against four with
teachers, less than three with friends and scarcely more than an
hour with parents.
In
these conditions, the transmission of customs and values that was
once assured by the family, the school system, the army, the church
or the party tends to shrivel to the passing on of one value only:
money, as if in reparation for the abandonment of all the rest.
Legacies get steadily larger, and investments in children
typically, privileged forms of education that will pay off in the
labour market continue to climb, even as the imaginative and moral
distance between progenitors and their offspring grows.
For
many scholars, the culture of the body descends from the sixties,
when the rebels of 1968 raised the demand for sexual freedom.
'Naturally, behind it, nothing, or very little was at stake; the
only real liberation in this area is one that individuals achieve
for themselves collective political demonstrations are of small
consequence for it'. Behind the banners and slogans, in fact, the
deadening opposite of desire was on the march, the saturation and
banalization of sex, with its generalized appropriation by the
market. Alongside this flattening of the libidinal landscape,
moreover, has gone the fading of all past forms of the transcendent.
Longevity extinguishes belief in eternity. Not that a need for the
sacred simply disappears. Religion, like nature, still has its
appeal. But in this regime, genuine belief in either of them has all
but vanished, and will not return. Instead, we have ersatz versions:
techno raves rather than holy communion, not woods or wetlands but
municipal parks.
With the exhaustion of collective adventures, the deep weariness of
the mind at the futile quest for the truth of History, of nature or
of matter, only the narrative of the body, of its satisfactions and
pleasures, and the search for new modes of sensibility, experience
and emotion, still hold our attention.
What is the upshot?
The
upshot of the entire arguments is have we thought through all the
implications of celebration of the youth, of the human shape, of the
Sikh modelling contests, of the images that will beam eventually in
gurdwaras after any Ayur Herbal Sikh Value-laden Turban Tying and
Eyelashes-preservation Contest? Is the gurbani hymn being played in
the background commensurate with the new value system of the ideal
human form for a community that has a great persona as the epitome
of values in a man called Baba Budhha Ji?
(Courtesy:
www.Penmarks.com )
2 May, 2007
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