Finding Soho

The Murder of Chandrika Rai

2012-02-23T07:06:00.003-08:00

Last weekend, Chandrika Rai, a freelance journalist writing for the Hindi daily Navbharat and the English daily The Hitavada, in Umaria, Madhya Pradesh, was found murdered at home along with the rest of his family - his wife, Durga and their two children, Jalal and Nisha. Rai wrote regularly about the illegal mining racket in the area, and recently wrote a series of articles investigating the involvement of a local BJP leader in illegal mining. As reported in the mainstream media, the police in MP are currently investigating a possible link between the Rai murders and the recent kidnapping of the son of a local government official, downplaying the possibility of mafia involvement. As indicated by the fact-finding team constituted by the Press Council of India, the police have "almost discarded" the theory of the involvement of the illegal mining mafia at this stage, choosing instead to focus on the latter link. Whatever be the veracity of the police investigation, the fact remains that the lives of journalists are constantly threatened in India. The lack of reliable evidence often leads to obfuscation in cases, and the perpetrators go scot-free. Many journalists, as well as activists, find themselves confronting hostile officials and criminals, sometimes coterminous entities, on a daily basis. In the case of the recent burning of Dalit homes in Lathore, a local journalist's report on the illegal businesses of the local mafia was cited as one of the reasons for the "revenge attacks" perpetrated by the Meher-Agarwals. The levels of intolerance and lawlessness in the rural hinterland are exceedingly high, and such attacks on journalists, when they do occur, often go undetected and unpunished.

Truth and justice suffer greatly in an intolerant and corrupt society that feeds on lawlessness and muscle power. The culture of corruption has roots so deep, human lives, let alone constitutional principles, lose all value. Freedom is an illusion sustained by the elite, when a large majority of people live under conditions of threat and duress.

Lathore Dalit Atrocities

2012-02-16T21:14:00.000-08:00

In the village of Lathore, Balangir district of Odisha, on the 22nd of January, 45 houses of Dalit families were burnt down and looted by Meher-Agarwal-RSS gangs in the area. A Students for Resistance (SFR) fact-finding team from Delhi visited the location of the mass burning and found in their preliminary report evidence of the collusion of the district administration in the atrocities. The District Magistrate (DM) and police were informed beforehand of the assault and mass gutting and anticipated around 500 perpetrators in the area. The DM called local workers before and in the middle of the raging fires to ask them to organize a "relief camp" in a nearby school. The perpetrators forcibly entered the houses, looted them and then set 45 of them ablaze. The local media and the administration cited the stealing of a shirt by a Dalit boy from Bharat Meher's shop as the precipitating cause of the attacks. As the SFR report states, this is reminiscent of the Mirchpur atrocity, in which two Dalit boys were set afire because their dog barked at some Jat youths passing by. The fact that the media and administration could even cite these mindless charges as the causes of these attacks betrays a botched sense of justice and acute caste-discrimination. A local Dalit journalist in Lathore, whose house was also gutted, recently published a report on the black market in the district, targeting the illicit liquor, kerosene, forest wood, public distribution items (wheat, rice, etc.) businesses of the local mafia.

On being asked questions, the DM, AK Dey, threatened the SFR team, but he also betrayed two significant pieces of information. He admitted that the local police were present at the scene of the crime and did not do anything to intervene, for which he provided two reasons - they didn't have the resources and they were engaged in combing operations against the Maoists. (As it happens, in this district, there are scores of highly-equipped paramilitary forces, stationed there for the sole purpose of conducting these so-called combing operations.) Secondly, he stated that the administration couldn't register cases against the accused under the SC/ST Act because the mass burning had "nothing to do with caste". In addition, he said that they couldn't do anything about it at the moment because of the elections around the corner. The government released a compensation of 1L for 38 families, but the administration said they couldn't take on the responsibility of rebuilding their houses (unlike in natural calamities). A "peace committee" recommended the immediate arrest of the accused and the seizure of their properties within seven days, but no action was taken against them.

At the moment, 193 people are living in the four rooms of the relief camp on inadequate rations, unable to rebuild their lives. Most of them were relatively well-off Dalits with jobs, businesses and concrete houses before the carnage. One of them, a girl who in a widely-reported case in 2005 fought for the right to enter a temple in the area, said that they would wait to fight their collective battle through constitutional means, failing which they wouldn't hesitate to join the Maoists.

Russia & Syria

2012-02-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

Recently, Russia and China vetoed the UN resolution on Syria in the Security Council, thereby stemming the tide of yet another NATO-led intervention. However, the manner of their combined public posturing indicates two deliberately manipulative and repressive states buttressing the atrocities of another. While it would be true to say that the Russian foreign minister Lavrov's statement - that the continued perpetration of violence in pro-Qadhafi areas in Libya, like Sirte, at the moment proves that armed intervention leads to a cycle of violence - may have great validity, his usage of the concept of 'sovereignty' and his exhortation to Syrians to resolve the conflict 'independently' are evidently emanations from one repressive state directed at another. While Russia and China continue to consistently repress pro-democracy movements within their sovereign territories, they also seem to be able to expeditiously use terms such as 'sovereignty' to undermine the legitimacy of protests in Syria. The politicking inherent in the diplomatic maneuvers should appear visible to anyone. It is impossible, in the world of realpolitik, to trust any one state actor without due vigilance and skepticism. The fact that Assad's forces killed another 58 people in the city of Homs on the day of the Russian announcement of diplomatic rapprochement (taking the overall death toll to 6,800, according to the Syrian Observatory) strongly indicates the hypocrisy of the efforts. It is impossible to conceive of sovereignty and independence in such a conflict, because the balance of power is overwhelmingly skewed.

About Bakhtin and the Academy

2012-02-05T02:04:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I heard from a friend of mine that Bakhtin scholars today are earnestly discussing some claims that he plagiarized from the work of another writer (the German scholar, Cassirer) in his dissertation thesis, Rabelais And His World. The article cited as the source of this debate is one published by Brian Poole in the South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University), 2001. The wikipedia talk-page on this issue, where Bakhtin scholars discuss the claims made by Poole and its viability for inclusion in the main wikipedia page on Bakhtin, is instructive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMikhail_Bakhtin.

It is apparent that some scholars, such as Poole (2001) and Hirschkop (1998, 2001) are convinced that Bakhtin did plagiarize some parts of his dissertation thesis (which, for the record, was finally rejected - he was denied his doctorate by his university in Soviet Russia because of the perceived subversive nature of his dissertation and his arguments on the power of freedom of expression contained therein) from Cassirer's work on Renaissance philosophy. However, as all Bakhtin scholars point out, it would be difficult for any contemporary academic to understand the conditions that he worked under in Soviet Russia, fighting inter-war poverty, institutional control on scholarship and the so-called pressures of academic recognition.

I am no apologist for plagiarism, as I hate plagiarism in all forms and consequently harbour some kind of strong personal dislike for all those (especially in my university) who plagiarize without guilt or consequence. Whole papers are plagiarized at Delhi University - no one could dispute that. Plagiarized papers are, as per standard academic practice, penalized. However, I have seen many people present arguments in class or during tutorials without due citations. Such forms of "plagiarism" are more difficult to detect because they are conducted verbally. In principle, I believe that citations should be made when using specific references taken from someone's work, but general arguments do not need to be supported by citations.

At the same time, I am also against the kind of extremist arrogance of American academia that leads to claims of discrediting whole works of scholarship based on a few instances of plagiarism. I am against the seemingly "fundamentalist" approach used in unilaterally "discrediting" scholars based on perceived inadequacies. I am mainly against the arrogant language of opposition used to transact such discourses. American academia and American universities in general suffer from a kind of professional self-satisfaction.

If American academics wish to point out that something or the other is plagiarized, I would rather have them literally point it out - and that's all. I will decide for myself, if at all, whether or not I wish to re-examine the worth of someone's contribution to scholarship and knowledge.

Also, Anglo-American academia tends to promote a kind of structural fallacy - you have to fall into a certain structural "category" suitable for academic purposes. Here is an excerpt on Bakhtin (Pollard 2008): "This means that however little we know or understand [of] Bakhtin, we can make him mean what we want him to mean and the greater the historical and epistemological distance we are from him, the less likely are we to be challenged." Her preceding argument refers to the many-dimensional aspects of Bakhtin's works that apparently make him a jack of all trades, to use a less academic idiom.

I think it is unfair and logically inconsistent to expect any scholar, a human being, to devise a particular "school" or "canon" - for posthumous academic use basically - within his lifetime, ensuring that his interests and ideas remain loyal to that one particular thing or set of things. Academia betrays a lack of spontaneity.

JLF '12

2012-01-25T22:51:00.000-08:00

Here are some of my blog entries at the Jaipur Literary Festival, where I blogged for the festival organizers. These are a few of the sessions I was asked to blog about, not all the ones I attended, such as the ones with Tom Stoppard, Richard Dawkins, Ayesha Jalal and others.

36. ‘Reckonings’, Philip Gourevitch, moderated by Akash Kapur, supported by Tata Steel

Philip Gourevitch, long-time writer at The New Yorker and author of books like Standard Operating Procedure: The Ballad of Abu Gharaib and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, spoke about his work as a journalist investigating conflicts and conflict-torn regions. He said his primary focus was the aftermath of conflicts – the experiences of the people affected and their rehabilitation. He spoke about the Rwandan genocide, in which the majority Hutu government persecuted the Tutsi minority. He examined in particular the “withdrawal” of the major world powers from the conflict. He said he was primarily interested in how the conflict-torn people experienced the aftermath of the genocide and what repercussions it had for them. He cited the case of the UN refugee camps opened 50 kms from the Rwandan border immediately after the cessation of the genocide that protected and gave refuge to several of the people who were the perpetrators of the genocide – he emphasized the inconsistencies of conflict-resolution practices and the possible “humanitarian exploitation” of former perpetrators seeking protection against retributive attacks. He also examined key terms such as “interventionism” and what is sometimes called “never again-ism”. In the context of the former, he explained the mechanisms that made the NATO intervention in Libya last year an act of “smart opportunism” rather than a humanitarian intervention. He also focused on the journalistic processes of reporting on conflict and made a very interesting observation. He said the use of terms such as “unimaginable, unthinkable, incomprehensible” to describe violence only served to make the act of violence less tangible and less accessible, and therefore the reader more prone to withdrawal.

43. ‘Mothers and Children’, Amy Chua, moderated by Puneeta Roy

Amy Chua discussed with Puneeta Roy her latest book, Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother. She discussed the different aspects of the book and the controversy it attracted in America. With respect to the latter, she described her experience of being assaulted by a barrage of negative and uninformed criticism in the American media. However, the discussion focused more on the book itself and her journey of writing it. She said it was a memoir chronicling her childhood and her immigrant parents’ expectations and methods of parenting. As a child, she was deeply influenced by her parents’ hard work and strenuous jobs, which imprinted in her mind their drive and determination to see her succeed. She spoke about the transfer of values across generations and contextualized the different environments in which different generations of her family have had to grow up. She emphasized that her book was a humourous attempt to introspect on her own parenting methods, vis-à-vis her parents’, and the values that her own children would now carry into their adult lives. Gratitude and discipline were the key foci of her thoughts on parenting. She spoke about “authenticity” and how the realities of her parents’ lives made their demands and expectations authentic, and how, in turn, her own expectations of her children would need to reflect the authenticity of their lives. On a lighter note, she recalled how her father, who she idolized, was something of a rebel, though he abhorred any signs of rebellion in her. She said rebellion was important and necessary, and that the media’s misinterpretation of her book as a record of the stifling of her children’s rebellion completely misses the point of her warm, compassionate and heartbreaking story.

50. ‘Open Road’, Samanth Subramanian, Philip Marsden, Katie Kitamura, Akash Kapur, Katie Hickman, Tim Butcher, moderated by William Dalrymple, supported by British Council

This session was about travel writers and their experiences in travel writing. All of the writers read out excerpts from their books. Samanth Subramanian read out from Following Fish, a book about coastal communities across the country. His excerpt was about his grandfather’s traditional medical remedies. Philip Marsden read out from The Chains of Heaven, which is about his Ethiopian journey. William Dalrymple read out from From The Holy Mountain, which chronicles his journey along early Christian lands. Tim Butcher read out from Chasing The Devil, which is about her Liberian journey. Katie Hickman read out from Travels With A Circus, which chronicles her travels with a circus troupe in Mexico. Akash Kapur read out from India Becoming, his latest book about contemporary India.

54. ‘Lucknow Boy’, Vinod Mehta, moderated by Tarun Tejpal

Vinod Mehta discussed his latest book, chronicling his journey as a political journalist, editor and writer. He focused on his childhood and his experience growing up in the hinterland of North India, and his journey from ignorance to political wisdom, from childhood academic troubles to his final reconciliation with the world of knowledge and information.

60. ‘A Second Sunrise: The Literature of Protest’, Cheran, Gogu Shyamala, Charu Nivedita, K. Satchidanandan, moderated by S. Anand

This session focused on the need for authentic voices of protest and dissent in India. The discussion explored the contextual realities of the speakers and the different ways in which they contributed to their own experience of expressing dissent. One of the interesting points that emerged from the discussion was the recognition of the fact that in several parts of the country, and in the south in particular, there were fewer avenues of protest because the popular imagination was occupied by actors and politicians who masqueraded as the sole representatives of public opinion and usurped the space ought to have been occupied by “authentic” voices of protest. Shyamala, a Dalit woman from the Telangana region, read out from the English translation of her work. She said that she came from an extremely impoverished Dalit community, living in a village where she was perhaps the first girl to be educated. She said her father’s desire to have her educated emerged from the need to have one literate member in the family to read land records and transaction papers. She identified herself as a writer writing against the grain of Brahmin supremacy and domination, writing against the whole tradition of subjugation.

79. ‘Beyond the Beautiful Forevers’: Representing Slum Dwellers and Migrant Workers in Narrative Non-fiction, Katherine Boo, Aman Sethi, moderated by Chiki Sarkar, supported by Baillie Gifford

In this discussion, the speakers spoke about their latest books, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man. Sethi said that he started his work on the book by trying to look at the changing nature of Delhi, especially in the period preceding the Commonwealth Games. Katherine Boo started work on her book by trying to understand the complexities of the slum dwellers of Mumbai, their lives as reality and not as a representation of deprivation. Both speakers explained their respective processes of their becoming better acquainted with the people they sought to write about, their closeness and ultimately their friendship. They emphasized the need for patience and for long-term commitment. Boo said that she had decided that she would need to spend a lot of time, years altogether, simply following some of the people in the slum around to get to know them better. She emphasized the fact that none of them would have been in a position to talk about their lives for the purposes of a book because of the pressures and stresses of daily survival and sustenance. She wanted to understand them better and to explore their complexities more deeply. Sethi spoke about his experience of getting more and more drawn into the circle of migrant workers he was writing about and about the prominence one of them came to occupy in his book, becoming its protagonist. They tried to understand the commonalities and differences in their works – Boo felt that they had in common several of the daily experiences that their respective communities shared, whereas Sethi felt that the people of slum represented a motivated, driven and upwardly-aspiring community, while the migrant workers in Delhi were more disillusioned with the idea of upward-mobility and more resigned to the idea of life as a daily struggle for money.

95. ‘Journeys’ Readings: David Davidar, Kunal Basu, moderated by Nilanjana Roy, supported by Hindustan Times

In this session, David Davidar and Kunal Basu read out from their recent books, Ithaca and The Yellow Emperor’s Cure respectively. Davidar, who has worked as a publisher for almost three decades now, most prominently with Penguin Books, has written three novels so far. His latest book is about the publishing industry and is also a thriller. He spoke about his primary motivation for writing the book, namely the desire to “demystify” the publishing industry to the extent possible, given the general confusion in the public mind about the inner mechanisms of the industry and the incentives guiding publishers and authors. The excerpt he read out was a passage explicating the protagonist-publisher’s escape from the turmoil gripping his office in London to the idyllic mountains of Bhutan. Basu is a professor at Oxford University who teaches courses in Business & Management. As Roy pointed out, he has several works to his name, all of them unexpectedly different from each other. He read out a passage from his latest book, an excerpt about the Portuguese protagonist of his novel who goes to China to find a cure for syphilis in order to help his father overcome the hitherto fatal disease. The protagonist encounters a mysterious Chinese medicine-man and his disciple, with whom he trains to discover the inner mechanisms of the human body. The discussion after their reading focused mostly on the motivations and workings of the publishing industry. Questions were directed at both speakers seeking answers about what guided them, what inspired them, and what constituted their own notions of good writing. While Basu spoke about the experiences of the author on being published and in the aftermath of publication, Davidar spoke about the needs and demands of the publishing industry, particularly its monetary determinants and pressures.

107. ‘The Afropolitans’: Ben Okri, Teju Cole, moderated by Taiye Selasi, supported by JCB

In this session, Ben Okri, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi had a very lively conversation about their writing and experiences as writers. The session opened with a rejoinder to the Times of India’s purported use of the ‘Dark Continent’ metaphor in a report on the African authors attending the JLF. Curiously, the session also ended on the same note, returning to the original use of the metaphor, although in a different context and in an extremely jovial and intellectually rigorous vein. Cole read out from his book, Open City, and Ben Okri read out from his essay, ‘Healing the Africa Within Us’, which enunciates the anxieties and aspirations of Africans. Some memorable lines from the latter pertain to the need for the “rediscovery of Africa”, a much needed rediscovery, as the first encounter between Africa and Europe was really “not an encounter but an appropriation”. The conversation progressed to issues of responsibility and identification, to questions about the role of the writer and his particular responsibility to represent a composite African reality. All the writers, in their own unique ways, reasserted their primary responsibility to write well, and to produce good writing first and foremost, as good writing would inevitably constitute a certain truth and represent a certain reality. While Okri’s essay was lauded by the other two speakers for its unbounded hope and optimism, Cole said, in a lighter vein, that he was more of a pessimist and believed that “things are going to get worse” and that people like him “frown darkly in a corner”. Okri responded by saying that it wasn’t really a matter of pessimism or optimism but more of transforming people’s perceptions. He also recounted the history of the academic debate amongst African writers on their historical role and responsibility and concluded the argument by saying that it was time to move on, that the debate had outlived its course. On the same issue, Cole said that there were all kinds of writers and each of them had their own place and their own freedom to explore their creative talents. Selasi explained the use of the term “Afropolitan”, which she coined in an online essay responding to the need to explain her diasporic identity. The session ended on a vigorous note, with a lively debate on a question asked about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its political/ historical implications. Okri, Cole and Salesi all engaged the audience really well.

112. ‘A Dark Place’: Readings, Linda Spalding, Ilija Trojanow, moderated by Annie Zaidi

In this session, Linda Spalding read out from Who Named The Knife: A Book of Memory and Murder, a book (a memoir, she grudgingly conceded) about her experience as a juror in the murder trial of defendant Maryann Acker, and her subsequent friendship with the convicted woman. The book explores a lot of questions, particularly Maryann’s relationship with her ex-con husband, who was instrumental in her conviction, and Spalding’s intuitive sense of Maryann’s innocence. Spalding was at the last minute excused from the jury for being five minutes late, an unprecedented departure from standard American judicial procedure (jurors are usually never excused on the last day of trial, regardless of extenuating circumstances), and Maryann was convicted, which she wouldn’t have been had Spalding voted ‘not guilty’. After her reading, Spalding responded to a question from the audience about the trial and said that she was told at the time that the prosecutors and the court were determined at all costs to convict Maryann. Ilijah Trojanow read out from The Collector of Worlds, a fictionalized account of the infamous life of British colonial officer and translator, Sir Richard Burton. He read out an excerpt from a part of the book dedicated to Burton’s life in India and his relationship with his peculiar and enigmatic Indian mistress, who consistently eluded him and who clung stubbornly to her notions of propriety and class-based distance despite his many attempts to breach the gap. He also read out from another section of the book dedicated to Burton’s life in Kenya.

114. ‘Indian Military History: The Missing Links’, VK Singh, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, RTS Chhina, Anit Mukherjee, moderated by Manoj Joshi

In this session, Manoj Joshi, a military historian, discussed the problems of Indian military history-writing with former servicemen, VK Singh, RTS Chhina and Anit Mukherjee, and former diplomat, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta. All the speakers have written about and published on the subject. Dasgupta began the discussion by stating the need for a strong tradition of military history-writing and explicating its relationship with larger state objectives and determinants. Singh spoke about the paranoia and secrecy of the Indian government and its military establishment, as well as the lack of access to most original military records and sources, which was the central problem and lacuna of research in this field. He said that there were several impediments in the way of independent research, two of which were the government’s refusal to grant access to military records and the willful destruction of these records. He said that it was unfortunate that Indian defense institutes today continued to teach strategic studies courses on the two World Wars and completely ignored all the battles thereafter. Chhina spoke about the historical role of the Ministry of Defense and its rigorous record-keeping and analysis until Independence. He said that the disclosure of all public records was mandated by the Public Records Act, but access to military documents was often denied by circumventing the former law using the Official Secrets Act (1923). He spoke of his experience in the military and said that records were often willfully destroyed by military units and committees that did not perceive their historical significance. Mukherjee spoke about his own experience of failing to get access to historical records, despite being a senior official in the Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis (part of the Ministry of Defense) – he said he had to use the Right to Information Act to apply for access to files in his own department, and that his requests were repeatedly denied. All speakers focused on the meaningless secrecy and paranoia surrounding military documents and focused on the need to form stringent mechanisms for declassifying and disclosing all records after a stipulated period of time. The speakers emphasized the need to breach the gap between the civilian and military populations in the country.

132. ‘Women Mystics: Love, Longing and Liberation’, HS Shivaprakash, Parvathy Baul, Ranjit Hoskote in conversation

In this session, the speakers, who have all studied in different ways the Bhakti poetic tradition of India, spoke about the poets who have been the most important to them. Parvathy Baul is a poet and Baul singer from West Bengal and practices the poetic form as much as she studies it. She sang a few songs from the “perfected words” genre of Baul poetry, which focuses on the transformation of the body through sound rather than text. Ranjit Hoskote is an academic and writer and recently published a translation of and commentary on the poetry of Lal Dad, the mystical Kashmiri Shaivite Bhakti poetess. He read out some of the poems translated in his book. HS Shivaprakash is a Kannada poet and playwright and he spoke about Akka, the famous Kannada Bhakti poetess. The leitmotifs in their discussion were the spiritual rigour of their respective poets and the socio-cultural exclusion, as well as immense popularity, they shared in common. They spoke about the problems of truly understanding the spiritual transformations embodied in the poets’ songs and expressions of devotion. They also focused on the historical technicalities of the different forms and branches of the Bhakti movement.

Why We Should Listen to Lalu

2011-12-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

Lalu Prasad Yadav made a speech in the Lok Sabha yesterday denouncing the Lokpal and calling it the "end of democracy". He accused the BJP of tying a noose around its own neck by supporting the civil society movement against corruption.

This is why we should listen to this old epitome of high corruption:

Lalu represents everything that is wrong with the country. He is the most visible face of flagrant political corruption in the country. He has established, over the length of his career as one of the most dishonest of public figures in the history of the country, new heights, new lengths and breadths, and new depths of public loot and depredation. He represents the deterioration and decay of the Indian political mind. He represents the bases of signature Indian politics: apathy, exploitation and selfishness. He is everything that every politician in this country aspires to be: a self-serving behemoth, a thief and a criminal.

We should listen to Lalu because he represents all of these. Yesterday, when he made his speech - pointless, full of gas, unintelligent and reeking of an utter lack of intelligence as usual - parliamentarians hollered and cheered him on. He said that democracy cannot be "run" from the "footpath" and that parliament is supreme. "We are the lawmakers," he said. We should listen to him because he represents the peculiar hatred of the people exemplified par excellence by Indian politicians, by Indian politics as anti-people per se.

We should listen to him because he is the scourge that the Lokpal seeks to be rid of. And those who applaud him - hypocrites like Gurudas Dasgupta and Sonia Gandhi.

Untouchability

2011-12-19T00:41:00.000-08:00

The latest edition of Outlook has an incredibly horrifying article about caste-hierarchies in Karnataka ('The Leftover God'). It describes the three-day Champa Shasti festival at the Kukke Subramanya temple in Dakshina Kannada district, where the Shivalli Brahmins are served meals at the temple. After their meal, they are expected to leave their leftover food on the ground - so that the local Dalits can literally roll over the remnants. In this disgusting spectacle of caste-discrimination, the Brahmin priests actually encourage the 4,000-strong band of Dalits and local tribesmen to buy into the pernicious belief that the leftovers ("jhoota") of the Brahmins have a curative power. They are taught to believe that their wishes and prayers will be answered upon completing this demeaning ritual. Social workers who, over the years, have fought for ending the ritual have surprisingly met with a lot of resistance from within the Dalit community, who believe that a ritual conceived for their "benefit" is under threat. One official on deputation from the government was actually physically assaulted by the Dalit "devotees".

Reading such an article in urban India today is a surreal experience, which indicates how cut off we are from the magnitude of injustice and the lack of dignity in many parts of the country.

Karachi, 14.12.11

2011-12-14T21:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the front pages of newspapers declared that more than fifty children had been rescued from forced captivity in an allegedly Taliban-controlled madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan. Some of them were found wearing chains around their necks and ankles, literally tied to the ground. The police acted on a tip-off that some children there were being beaten and abused. Upon their release, most of the children said that they had been enrolled there by their parents for drug addiction, physical and mental problems (fits and seizures) construed by "healers" as curses, and spiritual training. The parents paid a monthly fee of three thousand rupees. One of the boys was beaten around 200 times and threatened with being forced into joining the militant jehad.

In the recently held Bonn conference, countries debated and discussed the "fate" of Afghanistan. Post-911, human rights and religious extremism became a prominent part of political discussions about Afghanistan. Today, there is a shift in perspective and such conferences do not discuss human rights so much as "political solutions". A lot of uncertainty surrounds the "fate" of women and children. Politically correct journalists and policy-makers are wary of becoming involved in the socio-religious fabric of "Af-Pak" society. For many of the poor who are thus figuratively and sometimes literally held in captivity, there is seldom any political solution.

About The Wasteland

2011-12-08T00:30:00.000-08:00

Eliot's The Wasteland is a complex poem, obviously. It has a difficult time in the master's literature classroom. It comes from an era of war and turmoil, which is hard for the reader to imagine vividly today.

At that time, the old European order seemed on the verge of a drastic change, perhaps dissolution, to be replaced by a new politics of military warfare. The aristocracy was putrefying and war was propagated by "Democracy", "Imperialism" and "International Wrong" (Auden). Never had so many lives been sacrificed to war before the beginning of the twentieth century. WWI was the first time that aeroplanes were deployed for combat; it was the first war in which the convention of no-fighting-after-sunset was disbanded; the world had never seen such weaponry before. Everything changed in the inter-war period and human life was uncertain like never before. The Wasteland comes from this uncertainty, this lack of solid ground. No reader today can trace that terminal feeling in the inter-war years.

What I dislike about The Wasteland is its obscurity and its allusiveness. What I like about The Wasteland is the subtle morbidity with which it brings alive the spectre of certain death. Death is so ghostly, so intangible in the poem, and yet so certain. Death is not an idea, it is people. Marie, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Ferdinand, Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, all embody death in their own ways. What I also like about the poem is its treatment of the frustration of desire. Desire, in an age of mortality and war, is impotent. Tiresias, the old visionary with wrinkled female dugs, the futile meeting of lovers - Eliot's images of desire in the time of war are overshadowed by the threat of failure.

I thought The Wasteland was complex when taught in class, because of the focus on annotations, but looked at otherwise, in the privacy of your reading time, as a poem emerging from the anxiety of living in a time of unprecedented violence, it is a very emotive poem.

A Boy Dog

2011-11-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

At home,
he is bound by
the rules and regulations
of obeisance
at five in the morning
and five in the evening;
he eats purified fare
true to custom
and execrates the
pathologies of the present day.

He is a true son,
and he speaks in
the tongue of
his parents,
who do not relate
to him at all, really.
He is an ersatz boy -
wallowing in
alternations of
self-pity and pretense,
hiding behind the mask of
a second-handed intellect.

Here,
he is a libertine,
a parader, stomping
through the carnival
of lust and boredom
sold cheap
on the internet -
he has too many boys.
He lingers in the corners
of foreign eyes and ears
so that they may
catch a glimpse of his
self-pity and take him home.

Here,
he is a single man
parading through
the rush of modernity
in a language he has borrowed
from white lies
and lurid tunes.
Too bad, Mr. Giovanni...

Back to Tahrir

2011-11-23T05:23:00.000-08:00

The people of Cairo are back in Tahrir Square. This is proof of the inexhaustible spirit of the Egyptians and their unrelenting, unstinting determination to see the revolution to its logical conclusion. A lot of what they have witnessed and experienced in the past year could have contributed to a growing fear, cynicism and civic depression in the country, but the protests have persisted despite many losses, setbacks and many changing forms of repression. After the Mabarak ouster, the military regime became tighter and more repressive, trying several civilians in military courts and detaining several others. Now, the military has presented certain "guidelines" before the beginning of the election process in the country, determining the kind of constitution it ought to adopt. The guidelines prove that the Egyptian military is what every opportunistic power-broker is in the event of a regime-change - highly cynical and potentially more repressive than the erstwhile regime. The guidelines exempt the military from the civilian government's control and also take the military budget out of the reach of the government and hence the people. The military, through its cynicism, has betrayed its own people. It grew very powerful during the Mubarak decades, and now it seems to want to wrench whatever power it can from the political changes in the country. The Egyptian people are undeniably braver and stronger than these political opportunists and are fighting even today.

Rockstar

2011-11-19T03:35:00.000-08:00

Film criticism in the Indian media is more or less dead. It has become an extension of the publicity machinery hired by big production houses. That's why they never or hardly ever produce any honest and reliable film reviews. I cannot believe for a moment that film reviewers are utterly mindless and genuinely mean what they write. If they do, then that spells the end of intelligence. They write their false criticism because they are paid to write faux reviews by the film's PR agents. Here are two such "favourable" reviews for the recently-released film, Rockstar: http://www.rediff.com/movies/review/review-rockstar-is-more-devdas-than-jim-morrison/20111111.htm, http://www.rediff.com/movies/review/review-rockstar-is-flawed-but-fabulous/20111111.htm. Instead of their false fawning comments, these reviewers should have had the gumption to honestly tell their readers to stay away from the movie, and should have put the film in perspective by using a smattering of the following descriptions: stupid, mindless, nightmarishly bad, delusional, fluffy, irritating, nonsensical, embarrassing, wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

Petition Demanding the Removal of Keeping Up With the Kardashians

2011-11-18T02:52:00.000-08:00

There is a petition online that's gone viral, garnering more than a 100K signatures over two weeks. Amongst the many important things that share media attention in the US right now, of which the Occupy Wall Street Movement is foremost, this petition opposing a seemingly stupid show too, I believe, has something important to say. The reality show itself, whatever your take on it, is entertainment fluff, and having watched a few episodes of it, I know that nothing could be more unimportant. However, what I believe this petition and its corresponding website do is focus on the basics of media value. At a time when 99% of Americans share the growing frustrations of income inequality (the highest in the world), unemployment, under-employment, inflation, real estate crises and overwhelming loans, the puerile and ostentatious dramatization of the spectacle of relentless, non-stop, mindless spending is wrong. The word "wrong" encourages too many moral connotations. But morality doesn't exist in a vacuum. Morality is determined and shaped by the economic hardships of a society. However, as much as I agree with the anti-mindless consumption argument of the petitioners, I also hope that the argument in favour of content-removal is not taken to an extreme.

Memory

2011-11-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

Memory is the artist's curse as well as his gift. Memory serves to retrieve everything that has been lived and experienced so far, to recollect and revive the past, in seemingly beautiful ways that belie the pain and self-examination inherent in the act of remembering. Memory is the curse of those who rely on the past to demonstrate through art the follies and triumphs of the living man, the sunken depths and the soaring heights of his soul, the depravity and the transcendence of his mind. Memory makes the past a part of who you are.

How much more idyllic seems the life of the man who forgets easily, how much more beautiful appears his pragmatism, compared to the lethargy of forgetting. Take memory away and you are new again, everyday, fresh and alive to the incidents of today that will be forgotten tomorrow.

And yet, to me, forgetting the love, compassion, kindness and adventure I have today seems unimaginable. I could never forget. Not this time.

8.11.11

2011-11-08T03:03:00.000-08:00

Woke up at 6 AM this morning with a vague recollection of a dream; walked out to the balcony and found the college completely dark. A light pink touched the sky behind the silhouettes of dark trees. I couldn't see the sun. I could hear the soft murmur of trains chugging in the distance. Somehow, looking at everything around me, combined with the effect of the dream, I sensed something like (and I shudder at this word) an epiphany - I had the feeling that I was now onwards going to be a part of the New World (this phrase literally came to me) and I had finished with the Old World, had finished with everything in the Past. After that, I slept again, but I felt acutely aware of some kind of New World dawning on me.

The Chaos of War

2011-11-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since the start of the uprising in Syria and yet the repression continues. War is so chaotic, people lose track of numbers and casualties midway into the conflict. The military repression becomes a fact of life for those living in the conflict zone, and they are forced to acclimatize themselves to the new state of disorder surrounding them. Since the intervention in Libya, seen in the international community as yet another oil war, public opinion has moved away from the call for such interventions. The oil underpinnings of the Libyan war have cast a shadow of doubt over the possibility of an internationally-mandated intervention in the conflict zone in Syria. And yet, if you read reports of atrocities in Syria, you cannot rationally take the position that any intervention there would be worse than/ more illegitimate than the military repression of the Syrian government. The position adopted by China and Russia, of blocking decisions at the UN on the grounds of "sovereignty", is the least tenable of all. The hypocrisy of political discourse at the level of governments lies in the use of such terms as "sovereignty" and "domestic affairs" - the whys and wherefores of the Assad regime's usurpation of sovereignty never enter the debate. The fact that "government" and "sovereignty" are used interchangeably indicates a deep loss of political wisdom.

Frederick Douglass

2011-11-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is an immensely powerful read and you cannot escape from the oppression described in the text; it overpowers you with its physicality and its brutal recollection of every physical, mental and social indignity inherent in the history of slavery. It is a powerful indictment of the role of the individual white man and woman in the perpetuation of slavery, and of their absolute complicity in the barbaric practices and torments institutionalized in that sub-human system.

It is, however, interesting to me that historical characters are so complex and multidimensional, and this complexity is often subsumed by their progressive historical personae. Douglass, for example, had a very estranged and, to my eyes, highly problematic relationship with his wife.

Having helped him establish himself after his escape from slavery, putting her life and livelihood on the line, Anna Murray, a poor laundress, found herself distanced from Douglass, who, it is said, found her lack of education incommensurate with his newly-found intellectual, abolitionist circles. It is said he had affairs with an English abolitionist and a German-Jewish journalist, the latter of whom he invited to live in his own house. The elitist German treated his wife, who obviously lived and worked under the same roof, with the utmost contempt. She revered Douglass, loving him and expecting him to forsake his marriage for her; and she dehumanized Anna, refusing to acknowledge her position as a fellow human being and as a woman. The illiterate Anna's blackness served as a source of disdain, whereas Douglass' was celebrated as the harbinger of a new racial equality. Douglass allowed and actively participated in the dehumanization of his wife at the alter of high Emancipation intellectualism.

It is not for us to judge historical characters for their lives and decisions anachronistically. However, let us not forget that they led very human lives with very human flaws and weaknesses, and no narrative is as self-sufficient as it claims to be.

End of Term

2011-11-03T22:16:00.001-07:00

There is no time of the academic term quite so bad as the end approaching semester exams. Life comes to a standstill and you suddenly realize how much time you've already wasted. You involuntarily become disconnected from the rest of the informational world (no time to read newspapers), and you feel like a frog in a well, caught up in your own problems and your own discontent. Work piles up and you contemplate doing it more than you actually execute any plan of action. If you spend time outside college, you get that strange guilty feeling. And, then, of course, there are the hundred other extraneous factors that you cannot control/ predict/ ignore. If you're something of an oddball with a few irritating quirks and eccentricities of your own (OCD, facebook false-consciousness, desperate need to eat), you will waste even more time than otherwise by the end.

There is no time quite so bad. And yet, how much does it really take to say - "That's it. No more distractions. This is me and my work, nothing else really matters. No temptation to eat. No gallivanting around town. No anxiety about future plans. My room, my work, my deadline."

Professors Skip Classes

2011-10-28T01:18:00.000-07:00

I am sometimes surprised at how every time a professor casually bunks class without informing the students I still flinch. From practice and experience, I should be immune to it, but I still feel the irritation and disappointment. I find it amazing that the department administration would not consider it obligatory to find out if the professor is missing and to inform students. I find it amazing that they (both the administration and the so-called academics) find it acceptable to make students wait indefinitely in class, without so much as the courtesy of a phone-call to tell them that they are not going to be coming in to work. I find it amazing that any work-place/ institution/ organization could actually be most tolerant, if not positively encouraging, of absence and non-performance. Most of all, though, I am still amazed at how I could expect any better. Really, it's time to move on.

Customs in Delhi

2011-10-28T01:01:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine recently ordered a consignment from abroad and found, on its arrival, that it had been torn and that two of the three products were missing. The letter accompanying the parcel enumerated the three products that were ordered, but only one item remained inside. The postal worker who brought the parcel to him said that it was a case of theft and he could not be held accountable, and complaints ought to be lodged at the customs headquarters.

So, as you can see, in our eminently civilized country, you should not make the mistake of putting anything through the customs service. Do not ever make the mistake of ordering anything online that requires international shipment. The corrupt officers who hold customs jobs in our country cannot restrain themselves from tearing into the property of other people and pouncing on whatever they can get their grubby paws on like a pack of dogs.

NC Worker Death

2011-10-06T21:27:00.001-07:00

The custodial death of the National Conference party worker in Srinagar, purportedly at CM Omar Abdullah's residence, has led to very desperate denials of involvement from the Abdullahs and their party. The fact of the matter is that eyewitness accounts state explicitly that Abdullah was present at home and that Syed Yousuf was demanding cash payments for a seat in the legislative council at his behest when he was taken away by policemen and beaten to death. The NC government is rotten to the core. How else would Omar be in a position to claim that the autopsy report specifies a heart attack as the cause of death three days before the autopsy itself, and in spite of eyewitnesses who saw Yousuf bruised and beaten?

Also disturbing is the unprofessional and incompetent anchoring of a CNN IBN news anchor, Rajdeep Sardesai, who made a mockery of his interview with the son of the deceased. His stupid questions and his trivialization of the issue were really poor.

Drugs and FDI

2011-10-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

The other day, whilst buying Zincovit multi-vitamin tablets from the university pharmacist, I noticed that the packaging had changed and the price had gone up - the difference was around fifteen rupees, if I'm not mistaken. I wondered at it. It was only a month or so earlier that the Supreme Court had deferred judgment in a case involving multinationals and anti-retroviral drugs, challenging the sale of cheaper alternatives in the Indian market, and the African market via the Indian market.

However, a report in the current issue of Outlook is instructive in this case. 100% FDI permissibility in the pharmaceutical sector has been the policy in the drugs market since 2001. Over the years, seven top Indian companies have been taken over by multinationals. The current debate revolves around whether this investment policy has led to an increase in the prices of Indian generic drugs. (Generic drugs are drugs that are produced and sold cheaply and locally in the event of the expiry of the copyright of the original formula.) Evidently, it has. Prices have gone up 5%-23% in 2008-11. Both the Indian pharma lobby and the multinationals' lobby are interested in current policy debates in this sector. Some sections of the government (health ministry, commerce ministry, etc.) want discretionary powers and a case-by-case review of investments to ensure the prices of drugs do not put them out of the reach of the Indian consumer, especially the poor, but fear government intervention would lead to greater corruption and bad competition. Other sections of the government (finance ministry) want the sector to be "freely competitive". The debate continues.

The Indian pharmaceutical sector, from the end-user's point of view, has been largely conducive to large-scale availability and affordability. It would be undesirable to manipulate the price mechanism in place in this sector. Therefore, it would be desirable for the Indian pharma lobby to secure investment caps and protection? I would think so.

Until My Freedom Has Come

2011-10-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Currently reading Until My Freedom Has Come, a collection of essays and personal accounts of the summer of 2010 in Kashmir, edited by Sanjay Kak. Most of the writers either grew up there and currently live elsewhere, or still continue to live and work there. However, there is an acute sense that most of the writing emerges from a distance engendered in the writers' minds because of their dislocation from the epicentre of violence and dissonance that is their original homeland. Last summer was a particularly volatile period in the history of the valley, which has, for the last three decades, been overpowered by a helpless civic and political breakdown. The discovery of the bodies of three civilians shot in a false "encounter" killing in Machil - purportedly buried in an unmarked grave by paramilitary soldiers, who sought to win some monetary reward by passing their bodies off as the bodies of militants - sparked off large-scale protests, where further violence and the shooting of unarmed protesters led to protests, strikes, more violence and the use of greater military force against the restive populace. The book is written by a generation of writers who have grown up against the backdrop of a militarily "occupied" Kashmir, and their stories are brutal. There is so much hope in their writing, it makes one not wonder but shudder at the status quo.

2011-10-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

I am confused sometimes by the clash of the trivial and inane, and the profound in our daily existence. I wish we could separate them, so that we have one set of rules to deal with one and another set of rules to deal with the other. As it happens, they occur simultaneously and confuse us with their variety and disparity. The profound is never overshadowed by the inane. The magnitude of the first cannot be affected much by the smallness, the insignificance of the latter. Yet, they affect us at the same time, and we sometimes brood over their untimely clashing, their coincidence.

I am filled with resentment toward those that unnecessarily intrude in our lives, albeit briefly, to touch us with their negativity, futility and insecurity. You are not needed here. You don't belong here. When you hear the voice of love and concern at night, the last voice you hear before you sleep, you want it to overflow into your thoughts and dreams, to flood your consciousness. You don't want the brittle voice of malice you encounter in insignificant persons to interfere with that.

I Protest by MC Kash

2011-09-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

MC Kash is a 21-year-old rapper who lives in Srinagar, Kashmir.

I Protest (Remembrance)

(excerpt)

They say when you run from darkness
All you seek is light
But when the blood spills over
You'll stand and fight

Threads of deceit
Woven around a word of plebiscite
By treacherous puppet politicians
Who have no soul inside

My paradise is burning
With troops left loose with ammo
Who murder and rape
Then hide behind a political shadow

Like a casino
Human life is thrown like dice
I'll summarize atrocities
Till the resurrection of Christ

Can you hear the screams
Now see the revolution
Their bullets, our stones

Don't talk restitution
'Cuz the only solution
Is the resolution of freedom

Even Khusrow will go back
And doubt his untimely wisdom
These killings ain't random
It's an organized genocide
Sponsored media
Who hide this homicide

No more injustice
We won't go down
When we bleed
Alive in the struggle
Even the graves will speak

I protest
Against the things you've done
I protest
For a mother who lost her son
I protest
I'll throw stones and never run
I protest
Until my freedom has come
I protest
For my brother who's dead
I protest
Against the bullet in his head
I protest
I'll throw stones and never run
I protest
Until my freedom has come

Salinger's For Esme - With Love and Squalour

2011-09-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Just finished Salinger's collection of short stories. I don't have much to say about it, except that it is frighteningly brilliant and exquisite. At the cost of being hyperbolic, I would say, for once, that if I did write, I'd want to be able to write stories like him. Or see humanity through his peculiarly jaundiced and beautifully sharp and unforgiving eyes.

Such an experience.

To think that I will now have to read Brecht's The Life of Galileo within the next two hours for tomorrow's tutorial.

Seismic Zones

2011-09-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

In Italy, seismologists are being prosecuted on charges of manslaughter for their failure to predict an earthquake. The victims' families are suing for compensation to the tune of USD 68 million. While it is not ethically and legally tenable to suggest that the failure of a scientific prediction is equivalent to 'crime', the matter of seismic investigation and its translation into policy needs a closer look.

In India, there are identified seismic zones with stipulated building regulations, but as anyone who lives in any of these areas would know, and Assam is certainly a tectonic zone, building regulations are esoteric notions and information on general enforcement is scarce. In addition to this, some, and at least two, of the biggest earthquakes in the last decade took place in unidentified areas (in Maharashtra). Now, as I read in today's paper, the Bureau of Indian Standards has constituted a new expert committee to study and identify seismic zones all over again, at the same time as the National Disaster Management Authority's formation of a similar committee with the same brief. According to reports, their assessments seem to diverge to a great extent.

The moot question is whether the country is ready for disasters of a large magnitude. Something as devastating as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake will cripple life and infrastructure for a decade at least.

Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

2011-09-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

Reading Albee is a very moving experience. It involves feeling charged, being pulled in different directions, being pushed into a quicksand of emotions and being thrust out into the cold. As it is, this play is really a brilliant reading experience and there is nothing quite like it. Its biting and brutal humour is charged with a vengeful energy so strong, it moves through the characters like electricity. One cannot really comment on the manner in which the play operates because it escapes critical scrutiny - it's essentially very electric and animal-like. It is, however, a play about the morbidity that inheres in our human relations and our susceptibility to violence, internalized very often but just as often unleashed on those we are forced to encounter life with. The vortex of mutual, blind violence into which the characters descend is ultimately so strong, you are left feeling very hollow when you finish the play. The climax of the play, at that moment when the underlying, unspoken "game" on which their lives are built comes undone and understanding dawns on the reader, is a moment of revelation - and you marvel at the simplicity with which the author mocks the suffering of his characters.

Albee is a good writer.

Poetry

2011-09-15T02:34:00.000-07:00

Poetry has been afflicting me. All of a sudden, here I am, writing god-knows-what-kind of poetry, most of it hidden. The truth of the matter is, I can't write poetry. The bunches of words that assume the shape and size of a poem are feelings waiting to burst out of the straight lines of my otherwise very monotonous prose. Here is a poem that captures what I feel:

My mind is
a jumble of prose
but when I think of
you, I think
in poetry.

The irony is
that you're the most
unpoetic of everyone
I know.

Lady Demagogue

2011-09-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

There is a lady who stands outside Arts Faculty these days and speaks continuously for an hour or two in the area around the statue. Her long monologues in Hindi are usually diatribes against the state of the world. The first time I heard her, she was speaking on the topic of corruption - this was around the time of the Ramlila protests. On other occasions, I have heard her speak on the television ("idiot box"), on family values and the youth. She doesn't use a microphone, or any other gadgets for that matter - she brings along with her a huge poster, which is placed right next to where she's standing, and starts speaking extempore to an imagined audience. More often than not, she attracts a small crowd of students, one or two at most. She dresses in a simple, dull sari and doesn't wear any jewellery.

Her voice carries far and her gestures and facial expressions are dramatic. She seems unfazed by the people around her, or lack thereof, and her eyes are always wide and fiery, alight with her forceful words and brisk and harsh hand movements. The first time I heard her speak, she concluded with the words, "Let me fight this battle alone, but fight I will!" ("Mein is jung mein akeli hi sahi, par mein ladte hi rahoogi!")

She is an anomaly. People are bewildered by her and stare as they slowly walk past the gate. As she speaks, she looks into the eyes of those passing by but without pausing, without being affected by the indifference or curiosity she may find there.

I find her very brave. I find her ability to come and speak at a place like this, day after day, with nothing but her dramatic will, quite amazing. Why is she here? Why does she do it? She is a relic from the past. She appears to me to have stepped out of my mind's picture of the colonial period, delivering loud and unembarrassed harangues in the middle of the street, fiery speeches against racist oppression.

HIV

2011-09-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

Recently in Junagarh Civil Hospital near Ahmedabad, 23 thalassemic children receiving regular blood transfusions tested positive for HIV. Patients suffering from thalassemia receive free treatment at government-run hospitals and usually require transfusions once or twice a week. The recent case in this particular hospital has brought to the fore the outdated screening methods for the blood used, and the threatening possibility of the negligence being far more widespread than ostensible. There is an inquiry underway at the hospital which should submit a report to the hospital authorities within a stipulated time-frame.

But the truth of the matter goes so much deeper than the negligence at stake here. 23 lives have been unalterably changed forever, with no recourse to 'justice' of any sort. What can one expect? Even if the departmental inquiries yield some result, the lives of these individuals will never be the same again. They are necessarily now compromised forever. To know that your life is predicated hereafter on a vulnerability you cannot help and cannot control is something beyond one's imagination. The finality of this disease, this vulnerability will weigh on their lives, and it will weigh on them heavily because they will remember it as something that came upon them without their agency, as a fait accompli. 'Fate' is such an amorphous concept, but how deadly, how inclement, how merciless it can be in imposing conditions of death on lives that are yet to be lived.

Delhi HC

2011-09-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a Wednesday, the day for public interest litigation at the Delhi High Court. On Wednesdays, a lot of people aggregate around the reception area for court passes. PILs are filed and deliberated.

What does it mean to be the victim of a blast? A story in the paper described the journey of a woman from the outskirts of the city who had come to the high court yesterday, accompanied by her father and younger son, to follow up on the bail application of her elder son, who is lodged in Tihar Jail. He has been accused of murder and has been in Tihar for the past two years now - without trial.

In those two years, her eighty-year-old father fought alongside her to secure her son's bail, but could not make any headway. They received a date for their bail plea at the high court. They arrived at the court yesterday and waited in the reception area for their court pass, but an explosion ripped through the area around 10.15 in the morning. Her father died later in the hospital of heavy injuries.

She will return home now. Her son will continue to remain incarcerated in Tihar Jail without trial.

On the day that was supposed to have been the culmination of their efforts for the past two years, she lost another member of her family.

In the meantime, life will go on. The metro did not halt its services yesterday. The roads were as full of traffic as on any other day. Life in the city will not, or cannot, come to a standstill. And if our vulnerability were to play on our conscience, we will forget it in a day or two. No one can live in a state of siege, even those who have been denied justice for two years and more.

Sleep

2011-09-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

If I talk
in my sleep,
you listen for a while
and wake me up
with a jolt;
there's laughter in your eyes,
stupefaction in mine;
you muffle
my embarrassment
with your rough embrace
and ask me about my dream.

If you lie
awake at night, your eyes
flickering open,
irritated by the bright light
as I work on my computer,
I feel compelled to
turn around and
assuage you
ever so often,
with a nervous promise
of finishing soon.

If I wake
up in the morning
to a mugginess
rolling in the air above,
resisting my efforts at
squinting through shut eyes,
you toss around
and draw me back
into our entanglement,
and I give in.

Here is sleep,
crawling back to us,
always at the ready
to swallow us whole
until the next time.

Excerpt - Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

2011-09-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Father. ...believe me I feel what I think; and I seem to be philosophizing only for those who do not think what they feel, because they blind themselves with their own sentiment. I know that for many people this self-blinding seems much more "human"; but the contrary is really true. For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right. The animals suffer without reasoning about their sufferings. But take the case of a man who suffers and begins to reason about it. Oh no! it can't be allowed! Let him suffer like an animal, and then -- ah yet, he is "human"!

The Manager. Look here! Look here! You're off again, philosophizing worse than ever.

The Father. Because I suffer, sir! I'm not philosophizing: I'm crying aloud the reason of my sufferings.

Political Vendetta

2011-09-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

The aftermath of a successful mass protest is the political vendetta that follows immediately after. Politicians are essentially not only vindictive, but also extremely short-sighted. After alienating the electorate by a show of inefficiency and non-commitment to facing the problem of corruption head-on, the government is now trying to victimize some of the key organizers of the recent movement. Two of them are glaring instances of vendetta widely reported in the media. There appears to be a breach of privilege motion against Kiran Bedi in parliament, and an income tax department penalty against Arvind Kejriwal. In the latter's case, he resigned from the civil services several years back after an extended leave, but the department to which he belonged refused to accept his resignation. To me, this appears to be a case of blackmail. The department intends to use this method of extortion to demand that he return his salary from that period and pay an interest on it as well. Kejriwal's case is one of executive malfeasance on the part of his department and should not stand in court. The political class is ignorant enough to believe that this form of petty victimization will not be held against them by the larger public.

Heat

2011-09-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

The heat in Delhi
is a round-up
of queasy mornings -
eyes torn asunder
by a bulbous sun;
of snarling traffic
on roads
choc-a-block -
where your feet wouldn't fit
the gaps between them;

of a sea of dark, stringent heads
floating down the
university promenade;

of lying after lunch
on a bare-stripped bed,
sun shining on the skin of your back,
wasps playing overhead;

of evenings
smothered by pungent
sweat-laden air;

and floating memories
of the night before,
arms entangled,
forehead lodged in the hollow
of your neck.

Naysayers

2011-08-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

1. A mass movement meets with so much resistance. Why? It has safely passed from the realm of theory to the realm of praxis. People are uncomfortable with praxis because they are compelled to take a definite stand. In the realm of theory, they can equivocate.

2. The idea that a movement is not a "grassroots" movement because it is characterized predominantly by the presence of the so-called "middle classes" is a specious idea. I think that Arundhati Roy deludes herself into believing that what is or is not a grassroots movement is determined by what she is convinced is the critical and decisive spectre of her presence. Random white guys/ expat "experts" who report to foreign agencies and for publications, like Patrick French, on the other hand, should just shut the fuck up.

3. No attempt at iconoclastic populism is perfect. Far from it. That does not, however, diminish the importance of an issue.

4. The idea that a movement can be discredited because it is supported by this or that political party is, at best, naive. Political dissent is fomented by many factors, none of which can claim to be more legitimate than the other.

5. Nationalism and emotional appeal are concomitants of any mass movement. Whether in excess or not, one cannot expect everyone to deliberately repress the spirit of collectivity that emerges in large gatherings.

6. It is opportunistic and incorrect to extol the supremacy of parliament in this case - any basic foundational course in democratic politics will teach you that a parliament is set up to fulfill a representative function. When those represented demand certain rights, parliament cannot claim to function like a dictatorship and exercise its whimsies.

7. Not all drama is bad. Some dramatic gestures drive home a point effectively.

8. To assume that all those who have come out in support of this movement are ignorant of the details of the two bills is, in turn, highly ignorant and presumptuous. In fact, I strongly believe that those who claim that others are not aware of the sophisticated details of the matter at hand are, in fact, completely unaware of the same themselves. If they were, they would know that excluding the lower rung of any bureaucratic framework, those who interact most directly with the people, from accountability is unacceptable.

9. People who comment on the inability of anti-graft bodies to handle corruption do not live in states with such bodies, and hence do not know of cases of improved citizens' charters. In addition to this, most people are ignorant of the presence of such bodies in their domiciles. For example, few people know that there is a Lokayukta in Assam, and that it has expedited the process of clearing pensions and other matters in many cases. All you have to do is lodge a complaint.

10. The government has run out of excuses.

A House That We Once Lived In: A Tribute

2011-07-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

My earliest memories of Bivar Road go so far back, I could not tell them apart from the undifferentiated sea of images of early childhood. I was there even before I was born. I've been told the story of the earthquake that shook Shillong at the time of mom's pregnancy innumerable times. The house shook with trepidation then, and I vicariously shared that moment with its inhabitants. After a few years, when all three of us were around on the planet and about two feet high, we spent every summer in the house. The long, tortuous and then painstaking drive from Guwahati (the roads weren't any good those days) was a miasma of diesel fumes and exhaust from factories, but once the car drove past Mawlai, a fresh, pine-filled burst of Shillong air assaulted our faces. Somewhere around the cantonment as you entered, a weeping willow hung sorrowfully on the side of the road, and mom would always turn around and point it out, 'See that tree? It's called a Weeping Willow.'

Nana shifted to Bivar Road after his retirement from the police. The DGP bungalow, his erstwhile home, was just around the corner from this new, smaller bungalow, and both were a stone's throw away from Ward's Lake.

The driveway into the garage sloped down at a steep inclination, which never failed to induce thoughts of peril in the kids as our fathers maneuvered their cars gingerly past the gate. On either side of it, flowers grew in neat, punctuated lines, whereas the small, terraced corn-field on the extreme left grew wild and in profusion. The garage housed the large, cantankerous van that Nana owned (apparently one of the first cars to be purchased in Assam), but was spacious enough to hold the others when we arrived. Coming into Nani's home was a ritual perfected to the hilt. On the table in the dining room, which overlooked the large descending panoply of cottages and houses and forests that loomed in the horizon, a plate of cutlets and a freshly baked vanilla cake would await us, and we would clasp Nani quickly and make straight for the table in anticipation. My father and uncles would share whisky with Nana, and mom and her two sisters would open a bottle of wine on occasion, while the rest of us got soup with bread crumbs.

At a very early age, I remember I was put into one of the nursery schools in Shillong, where I didn't stay very long. My grandfather had great faith in its principal, and I would have endorsed his view of her had it not been for the stern and rather unimaginative kongs that managed the school, who punished you severely if you so much as made a noise by making you stand on your desk till break.

At that time, my youngest aunt lived in Turkey and hadn't emigrated to England yet. Very soon, Isar was born and we welcomed yet another boy into the family. As an infant, he bewildered us no end. We collected curious-looking coins and currency notes and stamps from Istanbul, while Isar stealthily slithered under the table and bit our toes as hard as he could. He was probably teething then. Loud, complaining shrieks would waft over the house and carry over to the resting adults as they read, or talked. The days were spent in an outburst of activity, as we ran madly up and down the stone staircase to the backyard, which led unfenced to several layers of smaller houses further down the slope. A stone slab stood at the start of the stairs and sitting on it was, for some inexplicable reason, a favourite pastime. Smaller slabs lined the side of the house along which we practiced jumping. The backyard bore an overall look of gloom and despondency. For all practical purposes, it was haunted and we never lingered too long. But a huge pear tree stood right in the middle of it, and it bore fruit aplenty, mitigating whatever ghost we imagined lived there.

In the morning, the kids would crowd into Nana's van and pretend to be in a high-speed-chase game, simulating cops and robbers and car-racing and anything else that took our fancy, with Patao watchfully and derisively looking over his shoulder as he sat outside to check that we didn't accidentally turn the ignition key. Patao spoke very little, but we had heard that he presided over a large family in the nearby hills, who I didn't get a chance to meet until much later at sixteen or seventeen, when seven of his kids came along on a drive to Shillong Peak when I made a trip there alone. Nana would silently peruse his newspaper in the morning and then promptly disappear into his room for a bath and leave for the club thereafter.

Nani, on the other hand, got up very early in the morning and inspected all the rows of flowers in the garden in front and along the driveway. She then prepared for her morning genuflection in the prayer room. (The kids appropriately called it God's House, as we were told never to enter it without permission and to be absolutely silent whilst in there.) The prayer room was partitioned off from the reception area in the front of the house as you entered, and contained the Guru Granth Sahib, draped in a beautiful purple velvet cloth, set on a wooden pedestal in the centre, against the backdrop of a wall of framed pictures of the Gurus. As Nani sat in prayer, we silently watched her murmur the words from the pages of the book and they formed a soft, rhythmic hum that reverberated around us. After prayer, it would be left open on the last page read and be covered in its protective sheath. I never learned the alphabet in which our holy book was written but I sometimes asked for translations. A little sugar lump was placed in each of our outstretched palms at the conclusion of the prayer, and our prizes won, we'd dash out immediately to leave Nani to light the incense.

In the evening, Nana would go on long, brisk walks with Bahadur marching alongside him, keeping apace. Dusk would descend on us and those who had gone out earlier in the day, to visit family friends like the Gills, the Singhs, or the Thangkiews, or for walks in the lake or to the bustling market, would slowly return home.

Summers in Shillong soon became longer and lazier. Tara was born, and everyone was so overjoyed to finally have a girl in the family. By that time, they were already living in London, and as Tara grew older, we came to associate her with our warped image of the proper English Young Lady, miffed at the slightest displeasure. However, she fought us tooth and nail, and in no time at all, everything we said was countered with a loud, admonishing, pseudo-Cockney, 'Look at my face! Does it look like I care?!'

Years went by, summers turned to winters and we sometimes made the trip in smaller groups and as individual families. Armed with a suitcase of woolens, we stayed indoors in the rattling Shillong cold, and sometimes lit the fireplace in the main sitting room. I remember it was in these environs that I first grasped and gave vent to my fascination for horror. Terrible campy horror movies on Star Movies or HBO would hold me enthralled for hours, and so would that terrible but unmissable Zee Horror Show, where ghosts unavoidably had light pearly eyes, visions of which would persist late into the night in bed. The uncles and aunts would tell us ghost stories from the Old Days when spurned and jilted lovers jumped into Ward's Lake and returned as phantoms to seek their unrequited loves. The guest rooms that we shared had an eerie feel, and the old, derelict cupboards sometimes creaked inopportunely, while we hid under blankets, apprehensive of the glowing dark. The one that the parents used had another fireplace in it, although that was hardly ever used, and a bookshelf full of books from long ago, by writers I had never heard of but who were immensely popular in their time. The paintings on the walls were by friends of the family or by my aunts, and they lent a certain charming je ne sais quoi to the house.

Living on Bivar Road was so essential a part of our holidays. We never missed a summer there, and if we did, we missed it no end. It was where B. S. Baber and Indera Baber presided over their large, scattered, and now multi-cultural and polyglot family when they congregated there annually. We all had our own respective Englishes, and a range of accents and intonations flooded the house when we lived there. The predominant language in terms of volume, however, was Nani's Punjabi, interspersed with bursts of laughter and shouting instructions.

By the time Nana had had his stroke, we were already in our senior years in school, excepting Tara of course. We were scattered all over; some were in Delhi, two of us in boarding school in the tea gardens in Assam, the rest in England. Nana and Nani knew that it was time for them to shift out of the house and move closer to their daughters. They bought some property in Guwahati and moved soon after. My parents were doctors, Aneeta mahi was back in Guwahati, and Nana needed constant supervision. It also became clear to us that our drives to Shillong would never be the same again. We gradually stopped going altogether, or sometimes only for a day or two.

A few days back, we booked into a guest-house fortuitously located bang next to our old home. We didn't know that the place was right next to it! All of us peered through the gate and into the large construction sprawl there. The house had been torn down and the foundation for a new structure was being built. We were told an apartment complex is to come up there in a few years' time. State building laws were recently altered to permit the construction of buildings up to five storeys high, or at least in the prime real estate area of the European Ward (a local name for Bivar Road), which is the only place in Shillong where non-Khasis are allowed to purchase property. Iron rods jutted out of the ground and overturned mud covered the compound.

This is a tribute to that old structure that was our home for so many years, that prompted me very often to diffidently reply, when asked in school where I was from, that I lived both in Guwahati and in Shillong - just as I diffidently corrected people by saying that I was both Assamese and Punjabi, and not one or the other.

It has been a great, wonderful journey!

Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code

2011-07-06T03:34:00.000-07:00

Section 144 of the CrPC empowers a magistrate to issue a notified or ex-parte prohibitory order to individuals or groups of individuals in an area, usually in emergency situations, to prevent any bodily and mental harm, disruption of public peace and tranquility. According to my searches on the history of this particular section, it is mostly used against specific individuals on petitions filed by aggrieved parties who apprehend some danger to their persons or property. The order, for example, has in the past been issued by magistrates to prevent certain persons from encroaching on disputed property when approached by certain aggrieved parties; in such cases, the magistrates have also been known to pass similar orders against the original petitioners when demanded in turn by the prohibited parties. It is, in some form, a 'restraining order'. Orders under this section can be challenged in the high court of the state.

But in the past few months, the Indian government has gone nuts on this section. Section 144 of the CrPC has been invoked innumerable times to suppress public protests. The government uses this section now immediately when a major protest rally or demonstration attracts large numbers. The Congress Party is the most vicious abuser of this particular law. It used it recently in Delhi to disrupt the protests led by Baba Ramdev, and the state government in Assam used it as well to violently disrupt the KMSS-led anti-eviction rally. The law has become a handy tool to subvert the processes of democratic protest. The vague and arbitrary notion of 'public peace and tranquility' makes it possible for the authorities to clamp down on public interest movements when they become critical of state iniquities, corruption and acts of violence. When this section is imposed on a particular area, it is not possible to gather in large numbers to even protest peacefully, and the police are liable to round you up. This draconian colonial left-over law is clearly being put to its most opportunistic uses by current Congress governments at a time of growing public awareness and civic rights.

Precious

2011-07-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

Precious is a short and brilliant movie (based on the novel Push by Sapphire) about a young, obese girl in high school, a victim of sexual and physical abuse at home, who rises out of her personal hell to take control of the circumstances of her life - her repeated pregnancies from rape, her inability to learn in school, her choking life with an unrepentant and violent mother, her diminished self-hood and her repressed dreams of 'being a somebody'. The setting of the home is a powerful visual in the movie - her mother is someone who hasn't left the house for years and spends all her time in front of the television and its interminable programmes. The repeated scenes of Precious cooking for her mother and her mother suddenly turning uncontrollably violent without reason, hurling vases and pots at her, are stirring. Also disturbing are the early scenes from the alternative school that she joins, where most of the attendees are almost functionally illiterate despite being eighteen or nineteen and, as in some cases, being teenage mothers. But it lifts from there, as Precious' circle of friends in this classroom, including the stunningly receptive teacher, become her mainstay - a wildly witty and irreverent group of girls. Sad, indeterminate ending. Great movie.

Lots of reviewers complained about it portraying 'black people in a poor light'. I don't understand this need for political correctness. The racism expressed in the movie, for example, by the black mother in her attitude to white people, or the poverty, or the incest and violence, or the high incidence of HIV (black women constitute the largest section of positive people in America), are all depictions of somebody's truth (Sapphire's, the director's, etc.). I had much rather know the inherent violence in the system than gloss it over in affirmative action movies.

Tales From Another Democracy - Malaysia

2011-07-02T04:48:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine linked me to an article on Malaysia: http://www.malaysiandigest.com/opinion/26307-what-is-this-country-coming-to.html.

It felt like the article was an expostulation against the current realities and dynamics of Indian democracy. It was about Malaysia, but the progression of events bore such strong semblance to the imbroglio of democratic politics here that it induced, besides great empathy, a great sense of disbelief.

In Malaysia recently, a coalition of political and non-governmental organizations suffered the ill-effects of great political vendetta in the form of arrests, intimidation and persecution under the ruling government.

The Bersih movement, aimed at electoral reform, comprises a vast cross-section of civil society groups and opposition political parties that have coalesced to express discontent against the electoral malpractices in the country - double-counting, manipulation of votes and restriction of access to media during campaigns. The government in 2007 extended the tenure of the incumbent chief election commissioner by a constitutional amendment. In 2007, Bersih organized large-scale demonstrations. They were not sanctioned by the government and the rallies were forcibly disrupted by the riot police.

More recently, this year, a small group of Socialist Party members were arrested whilst on their way to a Bersih meeting, and were later tried for attempting to "resurrect Communism". A poet, who is a national laureate, was interrogated by the police and told he was being investigated for sedition - based on his reading of what is clearly a wonderfully powerful and evocative poem exhorting the people to defend a fledgling democracy (see linked article). The police also illegally trespassed into Bersih office premises and detained some of its members. They arrested people on the streets wearing the printed yellow tee-shirt associated with the movement. They even unwittingly arrested a sitting member of parliament for simply wearing a yellow tee-shirt at all, one definitely without the Bersih symbol. All of the arrested civilians were told they were being charged with "unlawful assembly". (The government refused to grant the organization rally clearances.)

The overzealous repression of the Malaysian government is not unlike the authoritarian mismanagement of Indian state governments and the central government, who intermittently try to intimidate organizations that rise for the people's causes, with a groundswell of support, breaking the spine of political complacency and corruption.

The KMSS in Assam or the anti-corruption groups in Delhi are suddenly denied their clearances to hold demonstrations and rallies, and their members are threatened with police action. Today, we are forced to ask ourselves why, in the first place, it should be within the power of a ragtag clutch of discreditable politicians to grant permission to the people to assemble and meet for their democratic rights.

Ultimately, unlawful arrests and illegitimate acts of coercion fall by the wayside as the people continue to wrench their rights and freedoms away from the clenched fists of the state. The crucial fact about India and Malaysia is that we are both established democracies, and cannot be held to ransom for long.

2011-06-28T23:20:00.000-07:00

No matter who you are, where you are, when you come into contact with other people, you're going to affect them in some way. Over the years, you realize that you don't want to let the hurt and disappointment of the past affect you anymore, and you want to avoid experiences like that in the future. You try and try and shield yourself as ably as you can. After all, you've learnt from your mistakes. You've moved beyond the self-doubt engendered by those mistakes. Now, faced with the prospect of an endless horizon, you look into the face of the present and you find, when you look beyond the hopeful shadows shrouding it, the spectre of those same experiences, presumed buried in the past. Life appears to be a pattern of the same mishaps over and over again, flung against the advent of constantly changing faces, fates and surroundings. I suppose the only assurance you have is the fact that you can simply thrust against the tide of repetition and grasp new encounters by the reins. You will be weighed down by the seeming mindlessness of going through the same motions over and over again, but you will also be surprised by your resilience, by your tirelessness, by your ability to say, 'I'll try it again.'

Arresting An Activist

2011-06-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

The arrest of Akhil Gogoi has given rise to a large number of protests and demonstrations across the state in Assam. On Saturday and Sunday, a state-wide bandh and a railways-blockade respectively were supported by the people, despite the obstructionist attempts by Congress workers to undermine the momentum of the struggle. Yesterday, at least a thousand activists courted arrest at various police stations, demanding the release of the KMSS leader. This movement is the outcome of the land agitations precipitated by the government's displacement and demolition policies. All those involved in the land agitation find themselves in the struggle to release Akhil from judicial custody.

The government's stand is absolutely illegal. The displacement of forest dwellers in the hills surrounding the city is illegal under the Forest Rights Act, as those who have come into possession of land in these forest areas before 2005 cannot be displaced and those who have taken up land there after that year require rehabilitation. The government has violated the law by indiscriminately attempting to mow down the houses of all occupants without regard for the legality of their status. Moreover, several observers claim that the violence that erupted during the demonstrations led by the KMSS was the handiwork of government agents planted there to disrupt the peaceful protests and allow a large-scale police assault on protesters. The arrest of Akhil Gogoi thereafter was plain political vendetta.

The government continues to violate forest laws by handing over tracts of forest land to various business entities in Tezpur and Jorabat, for example, and yet it is determined to take away land from the poor residents of the hills surrounding Guwahati.

The imposition of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code here is yet another autocratic and anti-democratic move by the government. This government's mandate is seriously compromised.

Syria

2011-06-23T04:50:00.000-07:00

In recent days it has emerged that the Syrian protests are being repressed by violent military crackdowns, from the towns to the country. The activists and Muslim Brotherhood factions continue to coalesce in the streets despite the prohibitory injunctions of the incumbent government and despite the military assault operations conducted in key rebel areas. In its assessment of the crisis so far, humanitarian groups say that the armed forces have marched through towns and villages, razing buildings, shooting indiscriminately and burning down fields. In a recent report, Syrian refugees in a camp on the Turkish border were attacked as they made their way through a forest to an adjoining village to get provisions. The local owner of the shop providing the daily necessities to the refugees was shot dead by the forces and the forest separating the camp from the village was burned down to prevent any further exchanges. The burning of farms, fields and forests has become the modus operandi of the Syrian military, who firmly stand behind Assad, the president for decades under emergency laws, whose father, also president, was responsible for the massacre of ten thousand people in a town that saw active pro-democracy protests in his time.

Assad this week offered to lift the emergency laws governing the country for decades and offered to allow opposition groups to function openly. Yet, the protests continue unabated. The people realize that his concessions aimed at a faux democracy are grossly inadequate.

On the other hand, Israeli, a long-standing hostile neighbour, has expressed its desire to see the current regime off. It remains uncertain on the issue of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, as does the United States. Russia and China, which have strong military associations with the regime, are firmly opposed to the pro-democracy movement and have threatened to protect Assad's interests if the matter comes to the UN Security Council.

In the same climate of repression, Bahrain yesterday indicted several pro-democracy Shia opposition members and sentenced a number of them to life-terms in prison for their "attempted coup" against the Sunni ruling family. Human rights activists must move the international community against the medieval injustice of the Bahraini regime. Its startling that the US and Saudi Arabia, so active on the Libyan front, have actually been party to the injustice and repression in Bahrain.

Unrealistic Expectations in DU

2011-06-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

As the admission season this year in Delhi University unfolds, it has become increasingly clear that the cut-off expectations are now completely unrealistic. This year, the cut-offs have not been based on the applications of students but have been speculatively decided. The new admissions process requires that students only submit their names to the colleges once they have cleared the cut-off percentage. In such a situation, one is led to wonder what these cut-offs are based on in the first place, if not the putative marks of applicants.

It may be assumed that these percentages are based on a "general perception" of the number of students who have scored high percentage marks in the board examinations. There is no methodical process in place to derive these scores.

Surely there are bound to be inconsistencies. Students from most state boards, with the exception of certain boards in the south, generally score far lower than their counterparts from the national boards, and this is because of stricter marking regimes. However, when seeking admission to a university like DU, they are subject to the same cut-off percentages as the rest.

A television news show two days back dedicated to the issue demonstrated the lack of circumspection in the university. First of all, a sizeable part of it was spent gushing over a girl who was brought to the show because she scored a hundred percent in three subjects. Then, the questions directed to the principal of a certain commerce college, in the middle of a controversial set of extremely high cut-off percentages, went mostly unanswered. When he did answer, his answers were utterly lacking in logical reasoning. He also spoke so poorly and shoddily, one could easily be forgiven for firmly disbelieving that he could be a lecturer at a college, let alone its principal.

He did not address the questions of those who would be at a disadvantage because of their state board marks; he did not address the question of the lack of flexibility in the process, which deliberately barricades students of other streams from applying to commerce courses. In the dialogue, it appeared that there was little or no empathy for the fact that students at the age of 16 cannot be expected to know with absolute certainty and finality the course they will apply for an undergraduate degree in. There was little or no empathy for the fact that all colleges admit students purely on their marks, which makes our university system perhaps one of the most rigid in the world. There was little or no empathy for the fact that the first set of cut-off marks, unrealistically set, create a harrowing time for students in the following couple of weeks who ultimately get admitted anyway on subsequent lists.

It little aided the reputation of this commerce college when its principal replied with a smug childishness, on being told that it's easier for students to get into Oxford or Cambridge on their marks than the said college, that his college was superior in that its students never "broke any rules". He probably thought we would assess the college's standards by the same ones we apply to kindergartens?

Absent Muses by Sampurna Chattarji

2011-06-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

Sampurna Chattarji's Absent Muses covers a wide width of experience and sentiment. Reading her collection is a journey through the poetic consciousness as it encounters, contends with and finally captures the many different experiences of the writing subject. The resulting narrative lays bare the large montage of images that crowd her thoughts. It is, as it were, a collection of collections, a collage of the different images we read into the world.

Her credo, if we must determine one, is probably most quaintly asserted in the eponymous poem 'Absent Muses', where she says that her muses are of the flesh. The recognizable characters that crowd her everyday reality are the muses that become the sites of poetry in their respective absences. Their conversations are like "alms" clutched tightly in the hand. She says she must read them later in open palms, even as sometimes they are swept clean by time, memory and, as it becomes acutely evident, geography.

If I had to name one of the strongest facets of her poetry, I would say it's the reading of her interactions with people. Her poems are strongly embedded in the dynamics of human friendships and relationships. Some of her poems directly speak to or of the subjects in mind, but most carry an ephemeral allusive essence instead, contending with the spectre of their absence, or the shadow of their overwhelming presence. In 'Translations', for example, we find a record of her relationship with the translated poet, whose presence forces the despondent admission, "his words are escaping me" - she is not him, and yet it is his "letters on the page that are leaping into flame". The complexity of this relationship goes deep. The act of construing someone else's reality taps deep into the recesses of the translator's energy. She must reconstruct, but her world is pre-determined.

Being the generous and prolific correspondent that she is, the poet records in 'Migration and the Mystery of Letters' something of the experience of sharing letters and conversations, snippets of our lives that travel with gathering momentum through the world of our friends and acquaintances. In another of her poems, 'The Assassin, the Arsonist and the Babykiller', Sampurna finds a beautiful set of images to reminisce on the three conversationalists of the title, whose putative characteristics are so recognizably familiar, so acutely memorable, you could see them as prototypes for the assassins, arsonists and babykillers in your own life. The assassin speaks infrequently, and always to deadly effect; the garrulous arsonist is explosive, "resorting to flamethrowers and detonators"; and the sullen babykiller has "written off the possibility of redemption".

In the collection, we also find an attempt to understand the abstractions surrounding our lives, some of them universal, and some of them politically rooted in our urban reality. In 'Strategies of Silence', silence appears as pity, sorrow, rage, shame; 'Ciphers' speaks of the arbitrariness of daily portents, the anticipation of predictions; likewise, 'Auspicious Enough' captures that stifling need to wait for the propitious moment, when every moment is fraught with the reluctance to move. 'Who Calls That Strange?' is still more rooted in the politics of the country. The goddess of the poem chooses, almost nonchalantly, the bodies of the dismembered, from among those determinedly seeking "moksha". And 'No Shape Is More Constant' treads the site of the poisoned breast, the site of vulnerability.

'Hoping To Land' is a section that captures the exigencies of travel, and all its constitutive experiences. I find in this section poems written with a recognizable sense of longing, a strong reminder of the happiness of travel. The traveler confronts her own almost immediate sense of belonging ("map in our bones"), and her sense of shared camaraderie, but she must also intermittently confront her understanding of home. In 'August in Edinburgh', home is a fleeting figment - "We are dreaming of confined spaces/ walls that will comfort us". And yet, the traveler encounters home everywhere, in kitchen chatter, in absent hosts and familiar food. In the same section, the poems on Japan have a distinctly dreamy and quaint quality.

Home, therefore, is the last predominant, and perhaps the most intricate, theme in the book. Home is treated differently in the different poems, and the emerging notions of home as a dissipated entity emanate from the various locales that are identified as home. There is Calcutta, there is Darjeeling, and perhaps equally significantly, there is home as that ephemeral quality transmitted through literature - the home that we know intimately and yet never wholly possess. 'Where Do I Put This Love' tries to locate the different corners and crevices in the embodied home that could possibly hold and contain the bottled love for Calcutta, compressed into boxes hidden in dark places, struggling to escape to the open flower petals and paddy fields of its provenance. 'One or Two Things About Home' cites travel in space, literature, food, cups of tea and wine. "Every new/ Place is an open invitation to/ Disappointment..." It concludes with an allusion to "the Hungarian who walked to Tibet and died in Darjeeling" and its consequent realization - "And the more I'd like to stay with Hangary, the more Darjeeling comes back - / the sound of Buddhist gongs, the stench of horse dung..."

Sampurna is a poet immersed in literature and her reading of the world is a distinctly literary one. It would definitely be interesting to read more critical material from her, her take on literary works, because she has a wide range of references and it reflects in her work. Absent Muses is, in part, an offering to the many influences that have shaped her work.

Doctors on Trial in Bahrain

2011-06-08T03:45:00.000-07:00

In the recent crackdown on medical practitioners in Bahrain, the autocratic regime and its kangaroo courts have contravened some of the fundamental principles of conduct in a humanitarian crisis.

First, the Khalifa regime earlier this year brutally repressed the pro-democracy protests with Saudi militia support, and then they actively prosecuted the scores of people that survived the violent repression and detained them indefinitely in prisons.

Now, they are in the process of prosecuting several doctors and medical staff (mainly from a specific hospital) that attended to the streams of injured, mutilated and murdered protesters that arrived at their hospital as a consequence of the indiscriminate shooting and sabotage. The doctors performed their medical responsibilities without fear. Now, the charges against them state that they aided and abetted a violent coup d'etat, helping those who sought to topple the legitimate regime. This is unconscionable. The violence was directed at the protesters by the regime, and not the other way round. The fact that they could victimize the doctors that helped their own citizens overcome their fatal injuries shows an extent of brutality and disregard for life that outstrips its own record so far.

Ramdev

2011-06-05T21:46:00.000-07:00

Ramdev's eviction from the protest grounds in Delhi is mindless. It is an expression of the government's lack of circumspection. They have lost it. Not only have they impinged on a peaceful protest, but they have used the flimsiest pretext to do it. Ramdev apparently signed a letter saying he would discontinue the protest after negotiations. He continued to protest. The letter was used as a basis to violently stop the hunger-strike. Such disregard for citizens' fundamental rights cannot go unpunished. On television, panels of commentators have drawn attention to the 'religious' or 'political' colour of the protest, referring especially to RSS members who shared the stage with him, but one has to make a distinction between the credentials of those involved in the protest and the principle of protesting. The principle is compromised by its forceful prevention.

Zinn and The Father

2011-06-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

In A People's History of the United States, one of the most poignant chapters is on the 'Indian Relocation' period. Zinn renders the history of the period powerfully. The Indians, after the widespread and relentless initial decades of Spanish and English extermination, continued to suffer greatly under the founding fathers of the newly 'revolutionized' and independent American colonies. Adrew Jackson was perhaps the most ruthless oppressor of the Indian peoples in America. In Zinn's history of the period of relocation, when Indians were forced off their lands, forced into the hinterland of the unchartered territories to the west, were massacred and executed when they resisted, a leitmotif is the constant betrayal suffered by the Indian tribes. The American colonists struck treaty after treaty with Indian chieftains, providing false pretexts to get tribes off their lands, and they betrayed every single treaty signed with murderous consistency. Every promise, every treaty, every negotiation ended in American betrayal of the indigenous peoples of America. In these treaties and negotiations, the president of the United States was constantly referred to as the 'Father' of the country, the 'Father' of the land and its inhabitants, the 'Father' of both indigenous peoples and immigrants. The word father is such a powerful word. Its biblical meaning has connotations of benevolence and love, but also omnipotence, omniscience, and complete jurisdiction. The American president thus became, in the collective colonial imagination, the omnipotent overlord of the country he had conquered by force and the territories he continued to conquer by dint of murder and betrayal through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In most of the interactions recorded between Jackson, a militia general in the early period of his career, and tribal chiefs, the Indians were called the 'children' of the country, their 'Father's' children. In treaties and legislative addresses, they were called the 'children'. The language of oppression was so deeply injurious that they too began to refer to themselves as the 'children' of the American rulers. The patronizing attitude of the 'Father' towards his 'children' never escaped them, but they had internalized the biblical vocabulary of conquest.

One Indian chief, revolted by the use of the term 'Father', laughed at his interlocutor and told him that the sun was his father, and the earth his mother. He resisted the language of oppression.

The use of this biblical trope continued well into the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. The period was a highly complex matrix of historical events, but one broad characteristic of the century was the total ascension of capitalism and private property. Corporations and rich 'barons' owned townships and huge tracts of land. The businessmen who owned these lands opened factories and manufacturing units which served as the heart of the towns' existence. He became the biblical 'Father' of the towns' hands, the 'children', the highly impoverished, starved and benumbed workforce he controlled. African slaves working on plantations, when instructed in religion, were taught to visualize their masters as the 'Father' that owned not only their labour but their hearts and souls.

The belittling of the oppressed and the denial of their personhood were effectively captured and propagated by the oppressor consciousness in American history through the Father-child dichotomy.

Yemen

2011-06-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

As street protests and police violence continue unabated in Syria and Yemen, the situation in Yemen becomes clearer through recent reports of the constitution of opposition forces. The opposition is mainly led by tribal formations and groupings, each of whom have a factional following. The most prominent tribal formation is led by a family that are already very powerful, with brothers in key government and military positions. One of them is a general, another a speaker of parliament, yet another the richest businessman in the country. The opposition, strongly supported by the masses, is led by the elite, as is inevitable in the current climate. The important concern here relates directly to the question of mass participation if the elite assume leadership positions immediately after an ouster. Once Saleh is out, do the new centres of power become autocratic right away?

Language

2011-06-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

Just done with Pa's birthday dinner. Three of his friends brought their kids along.

One of them was eight, another six, both boys, and the third was around ten, a girl. Got them to watch an animated series I knew zilch about but which they knew quite well. Before long, I was struck by our very special linguistic situation. I marveled at the conversation in the room. The eight-year-old could speak three languages - English, Hindi and Assamese - and he spoke them fluently and spontaneously. He picked one individual each for the three languages respectively - he spoke to me in English, he addressed the girl in Hindi (her native language) and the little boy in Assamese (his native language). The girl used the same set of permutations. The little boy could only speak Assamese, so whenever anyone addressed him it was in that language. The girl and the older boy could both clearly speak English and Assamese, but when they spoke to each other it was in Hindi. I could clearly speak all three languages and responded in any one of them as the evening wore on, but they continued to put their questions and thoughts to me in English. They had already conceived of a level of comfort for each of us in each of the three languages.

The older boy was garrulous and he spoke constantly. He skipped from one language to another without the slightest hesitation or pause. It often depended on the person he inadvertently turned to in the middle of watching the episode.

It struck me so suddenly and I made a mental note ("See!") to some of my friends who don't share this experience. I felt like I had chanced upon a special discovery and brought it to the attention of my Linguistics class in one of our discussions on "native" and "non-native" languages. But, really, to those in the room, this was utterly commonplace and quotidian. I realized how very different I had become, in thinking of the most natural situational reality as some sort of 'phenomenon', to be lauded ad nauseum in the company of expatriate friends.

Of course, foolishly, I had forgotten that the eight-year-old version of me was no different from its counterpart at dinner - I skipped then from language to language at home and elsewhere without the slightest self-consciousness.

Lokpal

2011-05-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

The contention between the civil society representatives and the ministers seems to be the inclusion of the prime minister within the purview of the Lokpal bill. However, in the questionnaire that has been forwarded to the states, the questions comprehensively cover all other government functionaries - members of parliament, members of the judiciary, civil servants above the rank of joint secretary, etc. - asking for favourable or negative responses to their inclusion. One would have assumed that a stronger anti-corruption bill would automatically include these sections of the political machinery. In the media, the debate is exclusively over the inclusion of the prime minister. So are we to assume that the other categories mentioned are implicitly covered by the jurisdiction of the bill and that the questionnaire is only a formality?

The PM made some statements yesterday in support of Baba Ramdev's hunger strike. It's interesting to read how much attention the Baba inadvertently gets. There is clearly an attempt to make a distinction between him and the rest of the civil society groups in the campaign. What is slightly disconcerting is the responsiveness of the government to his specific involvement, as if to show that he alone in the campaign merits special treatment. Some sections from a report:

Central Board of Direct Taxes chairman Sudhir Chandra, who had briefed Ramdev on the steps being taken by the government to unearth black money, said the yoga guru’s suggestions were “constructive” and constructive ideas “should be considered by the government”.

Asked about his meeting with the yoga guru, Chandra said: “I think Ramdevji was satisfied.”

Ramdev, however, refused to call off his fast. “My hunger strike will go ahead. There is no question of calling off the protest plan till my demands are met and till talks reach a satisfactory conclusion.”

PDS

2011-05-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

The World Bank report (based on a national sample survey) cited in Ashok Desai's article today says that in 2005 83% of households supposedly had ration cards but only 23% used the public distribution system. This discrepancy is attributed to the misappropriation of food grains. Approximately 90% of rice grains procured through the system in Assam, West Bengal, Orissa and Punjab that year never reached card-holders, presumably siphoned off to the open market or smuggled across the borders. The misappropriation is currently the highest in the western and eastern states, closest to Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. About 80% of grains in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, UP, Assam, West Bengal are diverted.

Abhijit Sen of the Planning Commission calls this report 'outdated'. The government of India has consistently delayed granting permission to the World Bank to have its report published and it remains unpublished till date. He also calls the new definition of poverty 'most rational'. If the commission would actually use common sense, let alone economic theory, they would find the need to redefine the contours of poverty simply ludicrous and unnecessary and focus instead on the problem of grains diversion.

New Definitions of Poverty

2011-05-30T01:24:00.000-07:00

The Planning Commission's new definition of poverty will exclude a large section of the poor. The new definition released yesterday will effectively deny welfare rights to a large portion of those who currently derive sustenance from subsidies. The Tendulkar report does away with the old methodology. The earlier determinant was calorie-intake; now it is apparently primarily expenditure per person. The newly-defined urban limit of 870 and rural limit of 675 rupees per person per month are literally starvation-levels. This exclusionary policy will hit the urban poor the hardest, because despite their relatively higher-level expenditures per person, their dependence on public distribution food is great. In justifying the new parameters, the commission cites the target-groups "better served" - the homeless, the disabled poor, the street-dwellers. The homeless do not possess and have no access to ration cards that give them food entitlements. Most of the dispossessed do not even use the public distribution system. Those who do will be denied their basic entitlements hereafter. The petition in the Supreme Court challenging the commission's new estimates (according to which only 37% of the country can be classified as poor, as opposed to 55% or 70% - estimates made by other independent committees) is a window of opportunity - this is a cruel economic policy.

Seminar on Globalization and Tribal Identities in NE India

2011-05-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

The recent seminar on globalization and tribal identities in north-east India held at the university conference hall by a Naga-based cultural and research council had the potential to be an interesting seminar on an extremely interesting topic, but it did not deliver. The papers were severely low-quality and they completely skirted the issue of "tribal identities" in favour of a more personalized and anecdotal, or sometimes pseudo-academic/ jargonistic, approach. The collection of speakers included professors and assistant professors from DU who did not live up to their job profiles, and in some cases, completely baffled me with their lack of academic credibility. Some of their papers had no logical train of thought, jumping incoherently from one thought to another without the slightest consideration for standard academic writing quality or for logical connectivity.

One paper on contemporary tribal youth really stood out for its lack of sensibility, argument and its academic pretensions, spending a lot of its already-constrained time-limit on defining "youth" from psychological dictionaries and quoting unnecessary definitions from this or that psychologist. In his argument, he made broad-brush generalizations and relied on stereotypical modes of addressing the issue - "The govt. must spend more on the development of youth, etc., etc." Most of the papers ran in a similar vein. One member of the audience even broke into a self-composed "national anthem" for the north-east, which, besides its obvious problems, embarrassed me greatly by virtue of its severe musical and lyrical demerits. I noticed a lot of the participants who spoke seemed fixated on mentioning their "travel abroad" in some way or the other. This seemed like a poorly veiled attempt to deal with a lack of self-confidence, whether personal or ethnic.

This pertinent topic deserved much better handling.

Sec 29 Police Station, Gurgaon - 17.5.11

2011-05-19T12:06:00.001-07:00

Addy parked his car outside Galeria Arcade, along the road beside the parking lot. None of us - Addy, Siddharth or I - saw any no-parking sign. Several cars were parked along that road and none of the attendants at the lot approached any of the cars to warn them that they were in a tow-away zone. When we returned to the car, we found that it had been towed away and we were informed that it had to be retrieved from the police station nearby. Two of us waited outside the police station, by a rolling field of fallow land, waste, stray pigs and broken rocks, while Addy went in to get the car back. The policeman at the counter demanded Rs. 300, no questions asked. He did not bother to listen to the arguments of anyone standing there. As he continued to stonewall questions and demand the fine, the people driving the towing machine in and out of the station, carrying other hapless cars into the towed-away zone, looked sinister and irritatingly gleeful. Another observation we made was that all of the cars brought into the station, without exception, were smaller, non-luxury cars. They did not tow away any of the more expensive cars parked with impunity at the market. It seemed quite clear that they made a lot of money by colluding in the victimization of drivers and by misusing the lack of information in the market area.

Ram Ke Naam (1991)

2011-05-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Patwardhan's insightful and contemporary documentary on the Ayodhya riots, shot at the time of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, captures the historic moment acutely. When I watched it two days back, I realized its invaluable worth as a testament to the period and its relevance as a document of the movement that has haunted much of the political imagination of the country for the past two decades. Two things became immediately apparent by the end of the film. First, the people of the area, most of the low-caste Hindus of the surrounding villages, an overwhelming number of priests in Ayodhya itself, most of the Muslims of the adjoining districts were aware of the deleterious effects of the influx of VHP activists (called "outsiders" consistently by the different groups of people throughout the film) and their politics and did not wish to be swamped by the massive wave of communal hatred propagated by the leading politicians of the time. Second, the advent, the propagation and the final enactment of the agenda (of the demolition and the ensuing riots) could be attributed to a single political organization. Watching the speeches of Advani was a strange experience - here you could hear the words directly and witness their consequences; there was no tampering, no editing, no modification whatsoever to counter the exactness of the testament, of statements such as, "We will build the temple, at ANY COST," as he rode through towns, surrounded by growing mobs of people armed with weapons, intoxicated as much with liquor as by the electric hatred sparked off by the yatra.

Against the background of the imminent violence in the film, you hear the vague, calm, incoherent voices of young men who say that they would be prepared to destroy anything that obstructed their path; of law students who proclaim the certitude of Ram's birth and the inalienable right to that patch of land usurped by the tyrannous Babar so many centuries ago; of low-caste Hindu women who scoff at the temple-building project, saying that it would make no difference to their lives as they are prohibited from entering temples anyway; of Muslim elders of nearby villages and their forceful assertions that death is certainly at their doorstep and nothing could mitigate the disaster. In the film, you find the uncertain voices of young men easily swayed by the clarion call to defend the faith. They are incoherent and impressionable. There is so much naivete in their faces, in their words. The eerie calm of their statements ("Yes, people will be hurt, but this is about our religious honour.") hardly betrays the extent of the carnage yet to come.

Some priests of Ayodhya at the time, particular Mahant Lal Das, were vocal critics of the growing movement. He deplored the irrational hatred mongered by the invading VHP activists. He asserted that a delegation of Hindus and Muslims had submitted a memorandum to the president at the time and could settle the matter amicably amongst themselves. He rationalized the question of birth, saying that there was no need to focus particularly on that single patch of land housing the Babri Masjid. Lal Das was later assassinated. Other priests testified to the fact that they were part of the team made responsible for placing the idols in the mosque at the behest of the deputy commissioner in 1949, K. K. Nayar, who defied Nehru's orders to have the idols removed by citing communal tensions and thereafter ensured that the idols remained there. (Nayar later joined the Hindu Mahasabha and actively propagated the cause of the temple-project.)

The Allahabad High Court order last year took on an extra-judicial role and set about attempting to divide the land between the stakeholders. The order was challenged. At the time of the demolition, thousands of people lost their lives, across the country in different states, and not just in Ayodhya. The government of the time (the documentary makes clear) attempted to prevent the escalation of violence, but were thwarted by the momentum of the events.

Babri symbolized at that time the growth of a communal identity in Indian politics. It symbolizes today the uncertainty of our country's secular future.

Assembly Elections - Assam

2011-05-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

It is disappointing that one of the most corrupt governments in the last several decades has been voted back to power in Assam. Tarun Gogoi has presided over two consecutive terms of Congress-led corruption and he is now back in government. The NC Hills Scam exposed last year incriminated cabinet ministers and public officials, the most criminal of whom have won their respective constituency elections again. A deadly combination of vote-bank politics and unsteady alternatives plagues useless elections, when they fail to get rid of even the most unacceptable of governments.

Yemen/ Syria

2011-05-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Even as news of the NATO forces bombarding Qaddafi's compound in Tripoli emerged earlier today, reports this morning conspicuously juxtaposed it against how the protests in Yemen and Syria are being simultaneously brutally repressed. In Syria, the demonstrations against Asad are being quelled from town to town, even as demonstrators continue braving the streets despite the escalation of violence. In Yemen yesterday, 16 protesters died and 200 were injured when the police fired at protesters indiscriminately. Students continue to brave the regime's clamp-down and coalesce in the streets. Retributive, military attacks against democratic protests are anathema to politics today, even as they grow fiercer and more frequent, from West Asia to supposedly democratic countries like India.

In Noida, the police intervention in the farmers' protests has been violent and highly punitive. Even as the villages in question are cordoned off and politicians, social workers and citizens are denied access to the hinterland, several men in the villages are still missing from their homes. The UP government's recent executive orders relating to the regulation (or suppression) of protests (or 'law and order situations') are highly autocratic and unconstitutional. The violence that the recent farmers' agitation has seen is going to be a tipping-point.

Collateral Murder

2011-05-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

The group of men identified in this video consisted of two Reuters journalists and about six other men. Apache claimed they saw an RPG and AK-47. ("Fucking pricks.") The journalists were carrying cameras, which were mistaken for weapons. (Later, when the ground team arrived to survey the damage, they reportedly found an RPG and an AK-47.)

The Apache helicopter asked for permission to engage. On receiving it, they shot all the men of the gathered group dead. ("Yeah, dead bastards. Nice.") One of them was initially wounded and tried to crawl away to a nearby compound. A van carrying two children arrived on the spot to take him to safety. Apache team asked for permission to engage. They shot at the van - the wounded man, the men who got out of the van and two children were shot dead. The children died later, upon the ground team's arrival. ("Well, it's their fault for bringing their children to a battle.") They thought they saw some armed men enter the nearby building and fired missiles at it. ("Nice job.")

Later investigation showed that there were three families living in the targeted building, seven of whom died.

Collateral Murder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to3Ymw8L6ZI

On Speaking of Others

2011-05-10T03:58:00.000-07:00

Machiavelli's perception of human nature is essentially pessimistic. It applies specifically to his position as a theorist of power relations, and is even perhaps contingent on his position as a minister/ repository of gubernatorial power. He sees men as either of two contraries - as instruments of control or as subjects fit to be controlled. This dichotomy, needless to say, behoves his job as a Florentine princely stooge. The putative thrust of his discourse on princely conduct can, however, be extrapolated to apply to human relations beyond the context of power politics (behaviour of rulers, etc.), or even extrinsically to the politics of conversation. If you look at his discourse on the need for princes to "maintain [their] reputations", you will find an acute and incisive take on the vagaries of what is today generally called "gossip". Through his aphoristic statements, he reiterates that it is more pragmatic to be reserved. How often do we experience a feeling of discomfort with our own easy conversation and loose tongue! We occasionally feel irritable at our own excessive chatter and our easy dispensing of gossip placed conveniently at our disposal. The surfeit of emotive affect strikes you as being uncharacteristic of yourself and disconcerting only later, with the concomitant and unpleasant realization that you might have offended someone. Gossip can be innocuous, but ultimately, as Machiavelli rightly points out, not being circumspect can become a bit of a bad habit.

Sunday - 8.5.11

2011-05-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Strange sensation a while back. Not sure what else to do but write about it. It's 11.24 PM.

Got back on the computer a while back and started on part-time work - to complete the last set of alignments before the exam break. Got through a couple of items and somewhere along the middle, my mind gravitated to a song I wanted to remember but couldn't. The song was written by a student in my school, who was some years my senior, and he had set it to music too. He had performed it in front of the school.

It was a beautiful song. It was listed in a collection of songs the choir published for assemblies and performances.

Couldn't remember the name of the song. I had sung it with the rest of the choir. I tried to remember the words but they eluded me. I tried to remember the tune but could only hear it vaguely in my head. Couldn't put my finger on it.

Decided to google it - thought it might be listed somewhere online. I remembered the name of the boy. Keyed it in and waited. Got a list of pages. The first was a blog entry written by a friend of his.

It said that he had committed suicide some years back. He was studying architecture.

***

Feel uncertain about what happened today. Feel stunned.

Not sure why the song came to me today.

I remember the title now.

Audre Lorde (1934-92)

2011-05-05T09:47:00.001-07:00

Audre,
when you were blinded by that streaming
flash of white light
interposed between
white pavements and monuments
rolling through Washington,
where you were told you were too Black
to sit at a counter in
an indifferently furnished diner -
did you know that the silence that straddled you
was anger?

When your teachers
lambasted you for drawing your name
in a cursive hand
and not hesitant scrawl;
when they gently warned you
to apply yourself
assiduously to a job,
whilst the white girl beside you
received instruction and impetus for academia and beyond -
for no Black girl could arrogate
such imprudence -
did you know the hurt
gnawing at your dignity
was anger?

When the anemic eye of pale dominion
penetrating the sidewalks of
Harlem negated you,
turning away from the curves
of your dissident,
rounded frame;
when the oppressive weight
of your unspoken vengeance
crumbled under the
ceaseless assault
of the disaffected, denying gaze -
did you know the
doubt that infiltrated your pride
was anger?

When the loud, stentorian
voice of factory machines
interspersed between the
discovery of
desire for another woman
chiseled the knowledge
of a transitory love -
did you know the disappointment that wracked you
was anger?

When,
in the early freedom of the company of
women who liked women
coalesced together
in binding fortitude,
you felt first release and
craving;
when, with time,
you witnessed and understood
the betrayal
of flesh to flesh,
the evermore of desire,
the laceration of
togetherness;
when, finally,
you said you felt the recrudescence of
an old weakness - mistrust -
did you know
that the self-preservation that steeled you
was anger?

When you
stepped off the treadmill
of constant rebellion
to speak in the voice of
experience -
did you know the determination
that moved you
was anger?

Audre,
I hear you now,
far away from Harlem,
not Black, but Brown,
not woman, but man -
I hear you.
I want you to know
that I hear your anger
pulse and thrust against
your words as I read them,
as they move me
to anger;
an anger of emancipation -
of love, freedom, and pride.

Bahrain

2011-04-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Bahrain has become, in the course of the Arab spring, the symbol of repression and disappointment. Against the backdrop of the prolonged military intervention in Libya, Bahrain has become the basket-case of failed rebellion. Posterity will remember it as the people's revolution that was quelled by brute force indiscriminately. The Sunni regime in the country stands protected and ensconced by the military presence of Saudi Arabia.

The Khalifa regime in Bahrain has ruled the country since 1820. It came into power through a treaty with the British, the dominant military power in the region at the time. The king appoints half of the parliamentarians in the national assembly, and the prime minister (along with most cabinet ministers) is a member of the royal family, one of the richest merchants in the Arab world, and the world's longest serving unelected prime minister (since 1971).

As the pro-democracy demonstrations gathered momentum through February and March this year, Saudi contingents, under the banner of the Gulf Cooperation Council, descended upon the protests and retaliated against unarmed civilians at the Pearl Roundabout. The regime reacted with acrimony and cruelty - those shot and injured in the assault were refused access to hospitals and forcibly detained at the site of the military barrage.

Read in the papers today that a military court has sentenced four Shia pro-democracy protesters to death, and three others to life imprisonment. They were indicted yesterday for the killing of two police officers in the course of the demonstrations. They were denied any access to relatives, to legal counsel or representation.

In the course of the protests, at least thirty protesters have been murdered by the security forces. Who will be held accountable for the civilian death toll?

India Against Corruption

2011-04-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

I normally appreciate the editorial quality of Frontline. It was therefore disappointing when I read this afternoon their coverage of the India Against Corruption campaign. The general tone of the editorial content was one of cynicism and reluctance - the campaign was made to appear like an ineluctable, accidental mass phenomenon. The truth of the matter is, the writers betrayed their deep sense of suspicion of the capacity of the masses to think through the insistent use of accusatory statements such as, 'The movement is about the hatred of the people for politicians and the political system.' Such statements have been emanating from political circles too, where the insecurities about public participation of any kind are gargantuan. The people do hate the politicians of this country - they are exhausted beyond reason of their sense of tolerance. The duty of the thinking journalist is to support legitimate mass movements and to give expression to mass demands, not to portray them as elements of a growing anarchy. The tardiness of the political response to public demands is gross, and journalism must not condone such responses, let alone echo them. The idea that governance is a specialized, technical matter has been repeated far too often - democracy, on the other hand, was never meant to be about the rule of law placed in the hands of a few 'specialists', most of whom, incidentally, have no rightful claim to such know-how. Get rid of your fear of the ability of the people to respond to the making of the laws that govern them! It is their right! Get rid of your skepticism about the social media! Get rid of your fear of mass communications! It is time for the generation of journalists who look at social media pejoratively to let go.

The Revenge of the Slave? - Master/ Slave Sexual Politics

2011-04-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

Been reading Abrams on Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. The master-slave dialectic is one that ultimately salvages the slave because 'freedom' is predicated on consistent interaction with the external world. The master, because of his indolence, idealism and lack of participation in material activities, becomes detached from external realities. The slave engages with external objects on a daily basis, identifying them and shaping them according to his own personhood. The master loses touch with reality; the slave salvages reality.

I am led to wonder if the slave would not, in the process of constantly grappling with external objects and processes, fetishize the master and look upon him as another relational source of external manipulation.

The oppressed identify a great deal with the oppressor (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed), and begin to house the oppressor consciousness within them. The oppressed man is both himself and the oppressor consciousness housed within him.

Will not then the process of identification become, in an act of displacement, a sexual craving and aspiration? Sexual union with the master is a visibly sublimated compensation for years of servitude. When the violence in such a union is not projected outward to a direct assault on the physicality of the master, it is inverted and allowed to fester inside, in gross triumphalism and recognition of sexual concessions from the master. The aspiration to sexual union with the master becomes inextricably intertwined with the oppressor consciousness within, leading the slave to become immersed in expectations of this sort. The anticipated sexual union with the master becomes a driving force propelling the unconscious, annihilating vestiges of the rebelliousness of the slave. The slave becomes complicit in the process of desiccating the oppressed consciousness within him, i.e. his real consciousness, and begins to wallow in the falsity of the oppressor consciousness. He enacts the desperate craving for sexual union with the master through clandestine means. He often denies the unconscious and repressed motives driving his perversity. Beyond the realm of his understanding, for he is so immersed in the hunt for sexual contact with the master, the self-hatred and self-denigration in his mind fester and grow and overpower all other unconscious motives - leading him to hate his own skin, his own flesh, the oppressed consciousness within him (his real consciousness) - sublimated, ultimately, to a false sense of detachment from reality - from the reality of his own racial externalities. When the slave is doubly repressed, i.e. belongs to a sexual minority, the craving for sexual union with the master masquerades and operates as an escape mechanism.

What Hegel suggests the slave achieves through identification with external conditions is defeated by the slave's desire for sexual union with the master.

Semester Protests

2011-04-26T06:03:00.000-07:00

The DU Academic Council passed the new semester courses yesterday, despite widespread and persistent protests over the past several months. Teachers of the English Department resigned from the committee of courses last week, but were served show-cause notices, with the threat of legal action against their continued opposition to the formulation of undergraduate semester courses. They retracted their resignations on Friday.

Over the past several months, students and teachers of several academic institutions and departments across the university have protested against the introduction of the semester system, which, they understand from the implicit instructions and agenda perpetuated by the incumbent government, serves as the stepping stone to the penultimate goal of segregating the university by making the colleges autonomous, and therefore, open to privatization and neo-liberal reform. Semester courses have been illegally passed without due process or consultation, and with great certainty the DU administration states they will be taught in the coming academic year. The case of the English department serves as an example of what has virtually been true of every department in the university: the 'general body meeting' overwhelmingly rejected the semester system, and the teachers in the committee of courses refused, as a result, to come up with a new undergraduate course. They were threatened by the administration and certain office-holders amongst their own colleagues to pass such a course by any means. They resigned and retracted their resignation under pressure.

Now, the courses have been accepted by the academic council of the DU administration, which, it can safely be assumed, is completely devoid of intellectual or moral credentials.

In the process, democratic choice and discussion, consultation and scientific assessment have been completely suppressed. The new system has been imposed without any dialogue or introspection. It has been imposed in a great hurry and completely undemocratically, and illegally. Statutory bodies have been undermined.

This is seen as the beginning of neo-liberal reforms in the educational sector. This is not speculation but fact. The National Knowledge Commission of the UPA government recommended the privatization of colleges and the increase of foreign investment in the sector, with all its natural consequences - the increase of tuition fees and the deduction of public subsidies, depriving citizens of their right to a good, affordable and public education.

The intention is to turn over the public sector to private profiteering. This is a grossly undemocratic act, and rest assured, the public will never accept such an injustice. Students have misunderstood the anti-semester protests as a purely technical concern - it is not; it is about the fight against the larger processes of undermining democratic rights.

Blindness

2011-04-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Watched Blindness this evening. Pretty good movie, although a little bizarre initially.

I liked the transition from order to chaos. The wards are initially benign places for the quarantined to gather together, helping one another out as they struggle against the inexplicable blindness. However, one of the fundamental things about collectivities - when numbers burgeon into unmanageable quantities - is that human beings that are forced into confinement together abandon fledgling rules of conduct "imposed" from the outside and create a new pecking order within. The threat of chaos sits heavily on incarceration. The character played by Garcia Bernal captures the essence of the descent into confined lawlessness. The effect of the cruelty and vindictiveness of the newly-instituted chaos grips you by the throat, in the end, when violence takes the form of systematized sexual control.

Julianne Moore does well in the film.

Feminist Misrepresentation

2011-04-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

Toril Moi's essay on Freud's Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria is an instructive case in point of feminist misreading. My first problem is with the premise of the essay itself, its rallying of all other vituperative feminist misreadings of Freud's case-history of Ida Bauer. The current of analysis is overwhelmed by the desperation and the almost breathless race to denounce Freud, the man, and not Freud, the analyst, as being complicit in the patriarchy of Dora's social milieu. It is disturbing to read the vacillating and sometimes melodramatic strain of anti-psychoanalytic retribution, as the thoughts of the critic plunge into the realm of the prurient and vindictive - Freud is suddenly the victim of castration anxiety, foolhardy and determined at all costs to bolster his phallogocentric assault on Dora to undermine her imminent threat of castration in the form of abandonment and incomplete knowledge. A cacophony of voices concentrate on the passage where Freud in passing describes what he, albeit unwittingly, considers the "normal" response of a "healthy" girl of fourteen to sexual stimulation. He is consistently undermined by being conflated with the figure of Dora's father and Herr K., whose positions, apparently, are analogous to his therapeutic oppression of Dora.

The purveyors of the several feminist misreadings of Dora forget a very simple fact: Freud spoke about the sexual repression of this particular girl at a time and in a milieu where any such discussion would have been completely impossible, completely anathema to any considerations of the girl's psychic health. Instead of respecting the vagaries of time and place, these anachronistic critics pull out their guns and shoot all over Freud's grave, plunging bullets into all the many inadequacies of this man. Of course, the very same people would expect Hippocrates of 5th century BC Greece to perform multiple by-pass surgeries in his day and age.

Dora's repression needs to be understood as a result of the conditions of her time. The fact of Freud analysis and descriptions of the same conditions do not qualify him for bearing the brunt of the anger against the repressive nature of the conditions. It's like beating your oncologist for telling you you have cancer - it does not serve any constructive purpose.

Wait

2011-04-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Wait,
you say insistently,
look, this too shall pass,
your cups of tea and remaining dregs,
will usher in tomorrow,
when all will be read and done -
Shelley will writhe no more in disemboweling pain,
Byron will return to trollops and Wilde pretty boys,
Woolf will scour twenty scores more to write another Orlando.

In the meantime,
will I sit here motionless, a lying duck in my
room, where geckos steal past walls
warning of another month of ennui?

Tahrir Square

2011-04-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

The latest developments in Tahrir Square in Cairo are disappointing. Is it unexpected that the military that supported the democratic protests of February and March should turn authoritarian and repressive in turn? Human rights activists say that thousands have been tried so far in makeshift military courts. The assault on protesters on Friday, gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the trial of Hosni Mubarak, where the army surrounded the area, arbitrarily rounded up protesters and shot two people dead, defeats the hopes coalesced over months of agitation.

The central question that has remained in my mind since the start of the Jasmine Revolution: how are the people to protect themselves against the onslaught of the military? In the nation state as we know it now, the people have relinquished all rights of militarization to an organized collective called the 'armed forces' - what happens when the military use this disproportionate power over the people against them without restraint? - what happens when civilian protests are quashed by an indiscriminately shooting, beating, marauding army? With what weapons are we left?

Aruna Roy

2011-04-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

She sat in comfortable silence. Her eyes darted to her left as the questions came, long and tenuous, from the moderator. A still posture, an observant face and an almost placid, almost knowing smile - her patience and her greying wisdom weighed upon her arms as they rested on her lap, fingers meshed, head bent slightly downward. When she spoke, her voice echoed the sharp, incisive diction that must have been hers when she first expressed an act of dissent against the status quo nearly thirty years ago, when she gave up a government job to live in a village in the hinterland of Rajasthan, idealistic and hopeful in a way that only the voice of a doubting, self-apprising humanist can be. Her crisp and powerful thoughts seemed to emanate from the wisdom of experience, from the power of humility and the reinvigorating certainty of hope. "Every law, every piece of legislation that serves the people, that strengthens those who are truly oppressed, must be wrenched out of the hands of the government - for in their ignorance, they know nothing of the lives that people lead." "When I am with our people, when I live amongst them in the village, amidst our daily battles, I find hope and the strength to fight. It in here in Delhi that my hopes are depleted." "I cannot be a cynic, I cannot give in to cynicism, for if I do, I shall have to live at home and do nothing - and that is a life I cannot lead."

Selective Interventions

2011-04-06T03:46:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments I read today is about the selective attitude of the UN to internal turmoils in nations experiencing brutal repression. The situation in Ivory Coast is worse than Libya - the former incumbent refuses to leave the post of the president and now, months after the elections that took place despite his great resistance and manipulation, the civilian death toll has reached thousands. Recently, 1,400 people were slaughtered in the territory controlled by the opposing president-incumbent, who is a Muslim from the northern region. Gbagbo (former president, holding on to power illegitimately) has repeatedly used communal tactics to incite violence and further aggravate the conflict. Liberian mercenaries continue to come into Ivory Coast at the behest of the repressive government.

In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia sent in an enourmous military contingent under the banner of the Gulf Cooperation Council to violently repress the democratic protests. Saudi Arabia is one of the US's biggest client states, and one of the most repressive in the world. The international community should have prevented this brutal assault on Bahraini civilian demonstations, but it did not. The spectre of partiality and double-standards haunts the current climate in Libya.

Attia Hosain - 2

2011-04-03T00:18:00.001-07:00

Finished Sunlight on a Broken Column, late into the night. An indescribable experience of living through the times and the energies of early twentieth century India flowing through her ceaseless story. I immensely admire her. The conventions of the time are pitted against the passion to assert one's individuality, the fledgling new self, and the two clash and intersect and joust wonderfully at every conceivable moment, of happiness, triumph, defeat and despair. It is the storehouse of a historical moment that can never again be retrieved in literature. And the poetry of her passions, the exquisiteness of her flowing words come closer to their Persian and Urdu provenance than anything else depicting that history in English ever can. Even as she renders her world to us in English, I finally find myself confronted with a giant of a mind, a beautiful woman whose luminosity I treasure.

Turning the last page of her novel was like finishing a lifetime, in tears, in smiles and in reminiscences.

Saturday Night

2011-04-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Saturday night flashes against the bright red of this Delhi sky as we are herded toward the auditorium. A minute ago, we sat gabbing in the cafe, gassing anecdotes, blunt, pointless, loving insults. Now, we float in handfuls toward the thronging crowds outside the main hall. In a while, there are chants and jeers and screams. Voices form silhouettes against the fidgety bright screen where we are already one out for nought.

I walk back to the block. I miss the sound of familiar voices as they wander back to their hostels some distance away. I read their messages with a longing for their company again - so soon. The wind blows languidly with a slight edge to it, and the glow in the sky flushes a darker orange. The chants waft over desolate lawns and the balcony on which I stand, overlooking our part of the college, faces whirling dust scattered in the wind tonight.

It is quiet. In a while, Ma calls to remind me that we have won. Papa is still downstairs in front of the temporary LCD with friends and neighbours. She says, 'It was 1983, the year we were married, that we won last. It has been twenty seven years since!'

I say goodnight over the phone. I shy away from telling her how happy it makes me every time we pass a serendipitous milestone.

Attia Hosain

2011-03-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

Started reading Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column yesterday. She is mesmerizing. Every thought, every page feels laden with effervescence and love, with circumspection and gut-wrenching compassion, with hope, perspicuity and passionate longing.

I try and grasp desperately at figments of the past, but they move ceaselessly in her achingly beautiful story and I am left speechless - a disembodied voice tries to speak to the spirit of the age and I hear her words whisper comfortingly in return.

Recap

2011-03-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

The names and the places: Ben Ali, Tunisia; Hosni Mubarak, Egypt; Gaddafi, Libya; Abdullah, Jordan; al Khalifa, Bahrain; al Asad, Syria; al Saleh, Yemen.

For so many decades, not a whimper about the undemocratic forms of governance in these countries.

You are overcome by the strange realization that the modes of oppression in societies other than your own never figure predominantly in your imagination. We are mutually ignorant of each other's states of suppression.

West Asia Military Interventions

2011-03-30T04:00:00.001-07:00

Read today about the US commercial-military arrangements with West Asian governments. West Asia and the Middle East are the biggest customers of Amercian military equipment. Between 2006 and 2009, it sold about 50 billion dollars' worth of weaponry to the region. The Obama administration had notified the Congress earlier last year of purchases worth 100 billion dollars slated for 2009 and 2010.

The buyers of American military exports: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE - all of the areas currently in the throes of mass demonstrations. Deals run into billions of dollars, even in the smaller states like Bahrain. Saudi Arabia signed a deal last year with the US worth around 60 billion dollars.

The US has major military bases in the Middle East. Amongst them, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait are key bases.

In the course of the uprising in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia has sent in a thousand armed troops, with 500 additional troops from Qatar, under the banner of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The premise of the military intervention, this time to quell the demonstrations and protests, is the protection of oil investments. Bahrain is ruled by the Khalifas, a Sunni family in a Shia-majority country. The country is, as conceded by a former American general closely involved in the region, the best ally the US has. It hosts one of the most important US naval bases.

In 1994, in the face of popular demonstrations organized by the opposition to demand democratic reforms in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia had intervened as well.

Saudi Arabia has seen demonstrations by its Shia minority in the past, one of which was brutally suppressed. The last major protest to have taken place in the kingdom was in 1979, when a radical group took over the main masjid in Mecca. The state is completely undemocratic. It has no municipal elections (the round slated to have taken place earlier in the year got cancelled), the king appoints the 150-member parliament. He recently announced new unemployment and housing benefits worth billions of US dollars in the face of latent public "rage".

A conference was held in London yesterday. Other than the Western powers, Qatar is the first Gulf country to recognize the Libyan National Council based in Benghazi. Gaddafi's statements relating to the conference are incoherent. Rebel forces approached Sirte but retreated due to heavy shelling from pro-government forces lodged in the area. Qatar has been approached to sell Libyan oil.

Reactionary

2011-03-29T04:51:00.000-07:00

This afternoon at the university, a student group organized a discussion called "Imperialists, hands off Libya!" The accompanying graphic on the poster depicted a cartoon image of the American President sniffing oil fumes.

The news reports today speak of the approach of the rebel forces toward Gaddafi's hometown. They plan to move toward Tripoli. An interior government minister in the capital has denounced the western alliance's military intervention as a violation of the Security Council resolution. He says that the interventionist coalition forces are clearly taking a side in the civil conflict, contravening the no-fly zone imposition. Yesterday, a report announced Italy's decision to approach Germany on the evolution of an exit strategy for Gaddafi's govenment, the provision of exile in their respective territories, the incorporation of the Arab and African Unions respectively in the emergence of a post-conflict dialogue.

A US general and a Canadian general, the operations commander of the coalition, still speak of the overwhelming relative military strength of the government's forces. The rebel forces are seen in paper clippings, brandishing arms propped on vehicles and victory signs, moving cohesively across and beyond eastern oil towns.

The US Secretary of State spoke candidly at a press conference yesterday about the lack of clarity on the issue of the duration of the intervention. She did, however, clarify that the US is acutely aware of how "expensive" a prolonged military presence can be.

What is a military intervention? The rhetoric in India has been consistently and conveniently noncommittal. When the UN resolution was announced, the ministry of external affairs declared India's abstinence from the vote. It said that India did not deem it legitimate to meddle in the internal conflicts of a sovereign country. A few days prior to the notification of this noble sentiment, a newspaper spoke of the interaction between Gaddafi and an Indian envoy in Tripoli, and the prospect of cooperation in Libya's oil fields after the quashing of the conflict. This meeting took place at a time when Gaddafi's forces had obliterated key rebel strongholds and the possibility of Gaddafi's returning vengeance seemed very real.

The rhetoric of non-intervention, of "sovereignty", betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of the putative "internal conflict". The rebellion referred to so glibly in the latter category was initially a civilian protest that coalesced into an armed revolt, pitted against the military vanguard of a nearly four-decade-old dictator, who, in the event of having undermined his own army, used strategically-instituted armed forces and militias to extirpate citizens.

What kind of internal conflict is it, when the power of the oppressor so overwhelming and unhesitatingly obliterates the protest of the oppressed?

Blue Valentine

2011-03-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Stayed awake till 5 in the morning yesterday, watching Blue Valentine. What a beautiful movie! Dean is an amazing, beautiful character. I felt very moved by him, but identified more strongly with the frustration of Cindy.

The montage of the "young" and "old" scenes makes a pertinent point. The transition of a relationship as it moves from one experience to another, from one period to another, is very difficult to chart. Once a relationship has settled into the daily humdrum of everyday wrangling, you tend to forget the start, the initiation, the beginning of the journey - a beginning that is hopeful and exciting and full of immense potential.

The deterioration in this relationship appears to be of the inevitable kind. It's partially the result of mutual misdirection - the fact that you expect your partner to be a certain way, to fulfill a certain role, irrespective of the fact of your knowing each other's sensibilities. You hope, you expect, you demand a certain kind of person, a person you may not identify with the guy whose presence and spirit and joie de vivre you loved in the beginning.

Dean's last appeal is absolutely beautiful. As he walks away in the end, his daughter senses an imminent loss. She follows him. The pragmatic manner of Cindy's retrieving the child gives you an assurance of something terminal, something irreparable about the ending.

Weekend

2011-03-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

There is a new form of self-torture. It's called drowning in a bottle of coke in the absence of anything else to eat or drink. At such times, an irrational feeling of resentment for the world takes over. Have work to complete, but I'm hungry now and this is all there is, unfortunately.

Have an urge to write about this weekend. Interesting concerts - very interesting concerts. The electronic rock band on Saturday was excellent. They had a special sound - very difficult to encounter their kind of music in Delhi. I was absolutely taken in by the music. Lots of insane dancing and obviously, I felt completely submerged. My mind and body were dragged into a deep, rhythmic flow.

The other one this morning. I liked the country rock band. They were French, but they sang American songs too - the accent was obviously disjointed but they sang very well. The Congolese band after them was excellent. They got on stage and went immediately into their continuous, rhythmic beat. Realized that I have an African soul - loved the grooving sound. And boy, could they MOVE! Like they were possessed by a powerful dancing spirit. I have to find Afro concerts in the future - and dance. The Algerian band were good too. They had an Arabic sound, very smooth - more soporific, and yet groovy.

It was slightly excruciating to watch some guys in the audience get on stage and brandish their arms about obnoxiously - at one point, this guy completely lost it and actually took the mic. over from one of the singers. This irritated me immensely. Yet another form of self-torture: watch Delhi boys dance to rock disco-style. Thankfully, there was a garden patch at the back from where you could hear the music perfectly but not see the spectacle on stage. Felt bad for the bands. Oh, and of course, one of these boys grabbed a white girl dancing with her friends and refused to let go of her hand.

The Sea

2010-05-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

1. Here, the sea sits in front of my window. There is a vast spread of forest land that stretches between the road in front of the house and the lining of the ocean creek. A single winding road leads off from the obstreperous main street to the inside of the forest. I wonder several times a day if I should walk into the grove and find my way along the path. The trees are dense. They look uninhabited. No cars - nor people either - are ever seen inside it. The road is always empty. I did once see something black and conspicuous move slowly down the road towards the mouth of the creek, but I couldn't be sure it wasn't a dog.

2. In the far distance, the water looks like it has shifting consistencies - mostly it is clear and blue, but in other places it looks like it has a (somewhat thick) brown surface lining. I don't know what this is, but it could be the sun reflecting off the water. Near the other port, the sand seems chaotic and in a state of flux in the water, probably ruffled by passing ships.

3. The ships are decrepit and crowd the shore line. Some of them look quite out-of-use, but this must only be a passing phase, because shipping is expensive business, susceptible to market fluctuations, as we were so graciously informed by those in that shipping office.

4. The ferry that carries those to the island with the caves is calm and composed, it never gets shaken up by the sea. The morbid imagination balks at this placidity. If you want to sit on the upper deck, the ferry guys will bluntly tell you, trying to look serious and convincing, you have to pay ten rupees extra.

5. At home, the breeze barges through the house at all times, lifting the billowing bedsheets and curtains even as you lie on the bed. Sometimes, it is so strong, you find yourself struggling to switch off the fan in this scorching summer heat. Once outside, the heat mitigates anything the sea breeze has to offer, but inside, it is completely different. You feel a persistent, moving wind stir through the house, blowing at all times. I believe the monsoon is expected on the 5th of June, and I cannot wait to see what it will have in store.

6. As I leave the city today and head to Goa, I wonder what other sea there will be.

Sunday

2010-03-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

A long-view of a week.
Entwined somewhere in
bundles of today,
with prognoses about tomorrow,
are mildewed stories about yesterday -
This fortuitous holiday
at the end of a bus-ride
is only some two hours away.

Somewhere, phones continue to beep
unwarranted messages and
unspoken ones too.
The list is endless -
many things
intersect and jostle in the air outside on their way to our phones.

We are fighting
still; our little skirmishes.
Casualties sit still,
with prophylaxes at hand,
against memories of our knees far away.
We grow knobbly now,
and buckle sometimes,
only to catch ourselves unawares -
We smudge our momentary weakness.

We criss-cross paths
on our way to the kitchen and back
(where travelers eat) -
listless for news,
suddenly stricken with
happy gasping;
pangs of small mirth
seize our bellies.

When will we have finished our shifts to minister to another Sunday?

The Other Side of Silence

2010-02-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

Silence is a historical phenomenon. Those who do not post opinions publicly, or have not in the past done so, become historical accidents of speech - presumed inarticulate and unrecorded.

However, there is another more incipient silence that mars us. This is the silence that sits predominantly in most academic classes, across ages, batches and years of teaching. This silence is a disconcerting silence. The professor is left discombobulated, unaware of the thoughts and feelings of those who sit in front of him or her. The students are uncomfortable speaking. After class, they burst into disjointed conversations.

It is this silence that seeps into our notebooks, either untouched, or cluttered with names and dates and titles. The notebook is also a record of silence. Even as you messily scribble notes and opinions and dates of publication, you are acutely aware of how incomplete it is. You reluctantly ascribe opinions to names. You masquerade, hide behind published critiques, quietly chiding yourself for the inadequacy of your personal store of knowledge, this too a body of knowledge populated by people who have already thought and written before you.

In this transience, you are a passive curator, a receptacle for others' intellectual accomplishments. You are their reader. They are footnotes to your notes.

As a student of Literature, I feel aligned with those others who study what are broadly called the Social Sciences. Our methodologies differ, but our ways and means share a remarkable affinity. Our forms of learning, our lectures are transactions in public discourse, repetitions of ideas that have already been thought and passed down the ages. It is impossible, indeed undesirable, to escape the cyclical gyre. It is in the nature of formalized information – opinions and matters of disputation largely – to be passed down the ages. This is our canon, our indomitable canon writ large over aeons of syllabus-making soirees. It is this canon that rules the lines of our textbooks, rendering all that is beyond its inestimable good judgment mute and inconsequential.

The silence in class, I have come to believe, is not a silence that betrays a lack of understanding. In fact, it is quite the opposite. All that is transacted in class is understood not only sufficiently, but understood well. We amass our armoury of critics and critical statements, puncturing a deep hole in the abyss of incomprehension we otherwise believe we are surrounded by. In fact, our methods are so well programmed, one would be hard-pressed to not have any such critical clusters in their essays and examination answers. If you asked me, I could promptly rattle off a liturgy of names allocated for each text, systematized into a neat array of famous critics and their even-more-famous opinions: for Woolf, I have Gilbert & Gubar, Jeremy Tambling; for Conrad, I have Edward Said, Raymond Williams and Chinua Achebe; for Beckett, I have Vivian Mercier, Eva Metman, Martin Eslin et al. For every text, for every question that shoots like an arrow into my fortress of critical material, I apparently have names and shields so daunting that the arrows must bend and succumb to mass repetition.

The silence that is generated by this armoury is an overwhelmed silence. It is silence that says, ‘Too much,’ a silence of resignation. It is not a silence of indifference, which it is so often misinterpreted as. Professors unfamiliar with your class return to the staff room with bitter recriminations about the dull-ness of her previous class. The silence is stifling. But she doesn’t know that it is a silence of overfed children, who are always at the ready to regurgitate everything so far swotted, always tired and despondent in between periods of mass repetition.

The silence is one of self-inflicted damage, in which every student and academic in the world is complicit. It is the silence that you surrender to in order to be acknowledged, to be heard later on. When you scream incoherently your own notions, you antagonize everyone in class. But when you repeat the programmed armoury of critics and reading-lists stuck in your throat, you are heard without reservation. You are finally accepted into the echelons of intellectual goings-on. You are finally one of us, a sentinel to our vanguard of canonical writers.

It is in the nature of our lives and forms of knowledge to study others’ thoughts. It cannot change. When we study what we study, it is necessarily with our considered and consented subservience.

We are servants to our textbooks, servants to our reams of knowledge, servants to our syllabi. We are all servants of history - the history of everything that has already been said.

We walk in the corridors of academia, brimming with texts and more texts, carrying them around on our backs like heavy loads. And yet, there are no other means of academic interaction, or at least none that are credible.

It Cannot Be Done

2010-02-15T06:51:00.000-08:00

The most important thing is perhaps the moment. It is difficult to distinguish the moment from those preceding it. I don't know if this is a good thing. It can make you hesitate, think over a decision a number of times. It can make you inhibited.

But most of all, the moment is ephemeral. Once it is gone, it is difficult to retrieve. It passes, and you are left unsatisfied, drained, worried, encumbered. Thinking back to the moment, you feel like you couldn't express yourself adequately then. Thoughts remained unsaid. Principles remained unspoken.

If you plunge into the moment, you may be left with a bitter after-taste, reconsiderations, recriminations, re-checks, resurgent feelings of stupidity. Either way, the moment is dangerous. It can take you anywhere. It can change you all of a sudden.

Had such a moment today. An assignment. I said I had finished it satisfactorily. Had done my utmost to complete and present things when done. He said that he needed details. I provided them, to the best of my memory. He said he needed more details.

More details.

It isn't sufficient to do one's work - the panopticon has too many peep-holes. Each one of them must be satisfied with a daily report of happenings and goings-on.

Everyday you assuage the bulging horror of angry, unhappy eyes. Everyday you are reminded of the inadequacy of pulling them, the eyes, to you.

So, ulltimately, when the moment comes, you must learn to gracefully leave and say it cannot be done.

Amitabh Bacchan

2010-02-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

When you protest, you can protest on someone's behalf by actively defending him. This would include defending his stand/opinion in public or in private, or simply defending the fact that so-and-so has the right to express it, regardless of the repercussions it may have. You defend the fact that expressing your sentiments ought not to jeopardize the security of an individual. On the other hand, you can also defend someone by recognizing the shortcomings of the diffident's points of view. When cars and buses and taxis are ransacked by mobs in Mumbai, you stand up and say that this course of action is illegitimate.

When you do not make any statement at all, it is either because you are undecided, or you are indifferent to the problem, or you passively accept the fact that what has happened is justified. If, however, in addition to this, you write about the prowess of an individual associated with the problem, i.e., the head of Shiv Sena, at a time of distress and violence, you condone his actions. Timing is never incidental. To play the fool by making side-comments is irresponsible and, frankly, even more devious.

Interview with Raj Thackeray

2010-02-05T21:51:00.000-08:00

One of the most disturbing interviews this week. I don't know what Raj Thackeray means to say when he begins almost on a prescient note of threat and retribution - people should watch what they say about Mumbai. This unsettles the mind. It's impossible to reconcile the two extremes. One is a contradiction in terms. How are you expected to respond to the comment made by you if we, the viewer, or the interviewer, must feel threatened by the force of your dire warnings - if we are to watch what we say about Mumbai? It is pointless to argue then, the interview itself is pointless. If questions aren't forthcoming, then the discussion is unilateral. We are not here to hear you speak, Mr. T, we want to ask you questions, so that you may retract the riots that you have instigated. It is next to impossible to watch our words. The next few questions anticipate some sort of response - something to go on, something to indicate to the viewer what might be his party-motivations. But they disappoint drastically. He says that every state must have the right to preserve its own language. That doesn't respond to the question. The question is, why can't you engage those you disagree with in debate, why is the first and instinctive response always mob violence unleashed in the streets? It is hard to listen and absorb it, every contradiction grates the mind. He sways back and forth in the black arm-chair. The movement distracts and makes listening unnecessary. The body speaks clearly already, far more articulately than his words. The interviewer asks another question, Why do presume to deny the fact that you instigate violence on the streets, there are so many examples, like when you attacked the IBN Lokmat office. T grins contentedly and laps up the opportunity, So that's what you're after, why don't you come straight to the point? The interviewer retracts like a child upbraided, foolishly told off to not pursue matters of self-interest. But is it self-interest? Why must the interviewer feel ashamed for having brought up the attack on his institution? How can T presume to dismiss the question, insinuating that we are wrong to even bring it up. That it is justified for him to dismiss questions that are personally-relevant. The grin on his mouth widens into an ever-seeping petulance. A quarrel between two children. T marvels at the expose - Look, he says, look at him trying to demand answers for what he's suffered. The questions now dwindle to an end. There is nothing more that one can say when you're stonewalled. Accusations remain dangling in the air. Nothing more to be had. No more answers. No rationale. No motives. Only one long petulant glare of defiance and disregard.

Antonin Artaud - from No More Masterpieces

2010-01-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

"One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy, and in which we all share, even the most revolutionary among us, is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin fresh."

[...]

"Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone."

Labels We Use

2010-01-26T02:11:00.000-08:00

Recently, some people instigated a conversation about what our three years here have been like. Obviously, these moments of retrospection are not entirely without bias. A lot of your memories become part of one big nostalgic blur, indistinguishable, mitigating those rough edges, the moments of dullness and stupidity. This is what one generally finds is the case. Immured in a last-minute box of mementoes, write-ups and paraphernalia, we forget to cast that last, crucial circumspect look at all that has been terrible, incongruous and plain insufferable. This is not to say of course that this is what we should carry with us when we leave. That would be self-defeating. Instead, this is what really constitutes the better part of our judgment – our ability to recollect, meticulously, those things that have not gone too well. The conversation that took place reminded me of one such excoriated detail of life. Not that it doesn’t happen all the time. In fact, it’s something that happens on a daily basis presumably, on a scale and magnitude truly inconceivable, but we don’t like to think about it. It’s safer relegated to the recesses of our under-graduate memories, never to be retrieved again. But I wouldn’t like to not put on record the seriously dangerous levels of extant labeling and libeling here. Some people, of course, have mastered the unenviable art more adeptly than others. From day one, it has been an interminable cycle of ‘So-and-so is a pseudo’, ‘So-and-so is a dope-head’ and ‘So-and-so is loose’ and ‘So-and-so is a snob’. Probably the most condemnable (and commonly used) label is ‘So-and-so is shady’. First of all, it’s an absolute mess. Various labels apply to individuals simultaneously and in some (more repugnant) cases, all of them are the collective brain-children of individual label-manufacturers, dolts propagating them at break-neck speed. It’s not something that one gradually gets acclimatized to. The first day itself is witness to an onslaught of labels mindlessly hurled in all directions by overzealous seniors who cannot contain the overwhelming impulse to regurgitate their personal opinion of others in college on unsuspecting first-years. After that, one can only imagine how the pace redoubles with time and ultimately reaches insurmountable heights. A friend, in that conversation, used the word ‘shady’ again. Perfect! This was probably my last opportunity to get it out in the open. The word is bandied about so often, I had to clarify what it means. Obviously, we seem to think that the word is legitimated by the fact that we use it. By this I mean that every person who uses it assumes that he or she authenticates it by simply labeling someone else with it. Ergo, using the word is giving yourself that harmfully erroneous and deceptive sense of authentication. The assumption is that the more someone uses it, the more he or she is distanced from that category and is therefore more acceptable. This self-congratulatory, self-validating gesture is near hypnotic. The more you run around like a headless chicken labeling others ‘shady’, the more you delude yourself into ratifying your own importance. Now, this friend who mentioned it is someone I like and enjoy being around, and her usage of the word probably has something to do with its doctrinaire, hypnotic proliferation – it’s used so often, you don’t even think twice about it - but what is particularly repugnant is the fact that some people use it to refer to others they don’t even know or have never even spoken to, as if they were a sanctioned authority to denigrate others arbitrarily based on nothing but an effulgent need to gratify a fledgling, pitiably crippled ego. It is strange, but it happens ever so often. The most contorted aspect of this is the fact that the ‘shady’ people have their own circle of friends, people who would not consider them ‘shady’, who, in turn, would refer to the original labelers as ‘shady’. Not in retaliation, as it were, but impulsively, of their own accord. So the acrimony is mutual. And doubly erroneous. Apparently, it’s not even relative anymore. Everyone is ‘shady’ regardless of the people to whom they are close, with whom they share their lives; people for whom, eventually, others unknown to them would fittingly deserve the label. Even the more garrulous people are ‘shady’ because, I am sure, there must be people out there who don’t know them and consequently think they are ‘weird’. The other label of course is ‘snob’. Let’s keep that aside, because it barely needs dissection. To put it simply, for the person who uses it, all those who do not know or make fatuous conversation with him or her are ‘snobs’. The underlying assumption is, only those who speak to you are people who are ‘nice’ and hence not ‘snobs’. The other remarkable, and slightly more hilarious, phenomenon is the ‘hot or not’ label. This, however, is not something I feel fit to comment on, because I think it abounds in the world outside, other than in the incestuous labeling-pogroms of college. But sometimes, and you know when it happens, people do it so blatantly, you’d think they were brought up on it. Besides the giggling that accompanies it, you also notice the way they look people over as they pass by or simply sit in the metro. There is something primarily wrong about it, and it is this (I don’t mean to be facetious): those who do this kind of thing really ought to take one good, long and lingering look at themselves first. If there’s any ounce of honesty in them, much diminished as it may be, they’ll probably realize how unconscionable their assuming the right to label others is. Now, one can say that all of this is exaggerated and generalized, but the fact of the matter is, we know generalized observations have greater credence in this area. Some might also say that there are certain common standards that apply to one and all, and that these may be used to label individuals in whatever way:To hell with these liars.

The Group Grimace Social Energy

2010-01-26T02:08:00.000-08:00

Something has been growing heavy on my mind for a long time now. It started in the first year at university. Every subsequent year has incrementally added to the impression. Now, I am almost certain. Certain that this is probably true. And there is nothing I can invent to refute it. Of course the context is specific to college years, and below, in descending order of numbers and ascending strength. It’s been my experience that whenever someone, a new person, comes into contact with a certain group of people, the experience has a certain bitterness. Bitter is a very particular word, but for want of substitutes, it will do. I don’t know where this stems from, or if at all it’s something that comes from either one side or the other. There is something almost automatic about it – sui generis. The new person enters a group sitting around and talking at a table in the café, or a party, and intuitively tries to fall in with the conversation, or the atmosphere. He or she tries to say something prefatory. Something relating to the talk at the table. He or she sits down, speaks to others, or maybe not. But ultimately, a few people secede and make some clandestine remarks and gestures. A grimace sometimes, sometimes a look of annoyance, frowning eyebrows et al. The littlest unfamiliar gesture, the littlest idiosyncrasy enervates those two. They feel beleaguered by this addition to their sitting party. It’s an added egg in an overladen nest, and they skip off to bitch on a separate bough. I’ve felt the same about certain people. Unconsciously even. A girl particularly with her gesticulation and twanging tone never fails to make me grimace. Outside the café. A word or two snidely to our common friend, and I’m off. It’s enervating, no doubt. But why the restlessness? Why the unspoken acrimony? And more often than not, it doesn’t even need a good enough reason (which is not to say, of course, that my disliking this girl for her twanging South Delhi tone is reasonable). Some people, particularly girls, most from the second year (I presume), have this deliberate, and tedious, look on their faces when someone else traipses along to sit next to them at the dhaba tree. It’s fallacious. Worse off, I’ve begun to do the same thing when unwarranted, people come to park their seats at the same spot. We’re getting worse than the territorial pye dogs on campus. Who knows? – tomorrow, we could barking viciously at each other, too. I thought that maturity would inevitably come to me in college. I would be spontaneous and my behaviour would be unhindered. But this is a den of intensified aberrations of insecurity, a den of mutual hostility, a forever pungent air – a tenuous thread that easily snaps – and snapping, scathing, razor-sharp, embittered scissors abound.

Idle conversation

2010-01-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

Last night, a chat-conversation with someone unknown from my friends-list. I did not know the person, and am pretty sure I never added her in the first place. When I randomly add people, it’s because they’re either part of some group that I’m interested in, or because they look interesting. The last is pretty incriminating, but, hey, who would I be kidding? It’s unfortunate that one’s profile picture doesn’t essay a character exegesis of its subject, but I’m not responsible for this misfortune – the system deems it fitting. Initially, the chat tottered on the brink of being rude. I said, who are you? She said, I don’t know, you tell me. I said, well, you added me. She said, I never did. I said, then how the hell are you here? She said, I don’t know, you tell me. That’s it. Closed it. Got pinged again – she said, why would I add you? I said, no idea. Closed it again. That’s when I thought I would ‘revise’ my friends-list, but she intervened. She said, anyway, it doesn’t matter. The rest of the conversation followed. The central problem is, a networking site can do this to you. It makes you vulnerable to people you wouldn’t expect, people who can ask you incredibly irrelevant questions and leave you dangling. It comes attached with a rude, brusque, unpleasant arrogance, an arrogance that leads you to delude yourself into presuming that you know people whose profiles you have access to. There are times when some of your friends in real life get cocksure because they think they know you inside-out, they gloss over your feelings, but you deal with it anyway, because they do, in fact, know you, and you like them. Imagine how repugnant it is when some mere profile picture with name attached presumes to act the same way.

A reading of My Son’s Story and The Colour Purple

2009-08-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

I will use in this essay two novels, My Son’s Story and The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, to primarily compare two issues that are central to both texts – first, the marital space and its contentious relationship with an outsider, a lover, as it were, and second, the use of female autobiography.

In My Son’s Story, parts of the narrative that are Will’s are most prominent; they tell us most about the psyche of others as he sees them. His is a very peculiar sense of precociousness. He has the ability to see them completely. There is almost something frightening about the way he looks at Hannah through single-hued glasses. Of course, she must be a subject of derision, but the abhorrence is perhaps unsolicited. Hannah’s role, in this sense, has to be reconsidered. The social awkwardness of having both his wife and his lover at the same place together is undermined by Sonny’s adept handling of the situation, or more so, his fascination with the possibilities it entails. He enjoys the moment of explosive tension it affords. Hannah is not explicitly uncomfortable about it either. In the intersection of their own relative buffers that make disconcertedness almost invisible, Aila’s own (assumed) ignorance makes the situation almost soporific, a moment of unspoken truce, very spontaneous, unpremeditated. Aila, at the stage in which the passage is mentioned, perhaps does not even know the entirety of what she ought to know, or does not get the import of what it is that she is vicariously a part of, of what it does to her personally. It is an act of quiet passivity that we witness. Hannah, on the other hand, has no imputed motive. She is simply there, a rightful lover, an activist present in the company of another, a woman whose actions and legal assistance in the past in relation to him have been laudable. There we know she is not capable of sabotage. She is a woman of circumstance, thrown into the lives of those who constitute the movement she has undertaken as her own. She lives through the hope of their emancipation, and hence her notion of Aila is but not a consequence of what she shares with Sonny, but what she immediately understands of her as a woman and as an activist.

The question of the conflict of marriage and love is here laid beneath the peace and solidarity of comradeship.

In The Colour Purple, ideas of love and marriage, especially its many clashes and conflagrations tend to haunt us in a more direct sense. The home of Mr. – is a space that is filled with the possibility of explosion and yet the oppressive force with which such potential is contained is absolutely incomparable. There is nothing that is ‘peaceful’, in the former sense, about it. The oppression itself is of a different kind. The men and women who people these houses are of a different kind. Their subservience to the upper constituents of society is very different from those in South Africa. The idea of slavery is now a token of legislative abolition. The fact of slavery is inverted and made a household phenomenon. The masters of yore become unapproachable administrators of society, but the masters that assume ownership of the home and body are those recognizably familiar, and more grotesque by their familiarity. Fathers and husbands populate the repressive apparatus of the novel. The fact that women are excluded from that kind of overarching control is perhaps a result of the writer’s own imagination, but any conception of society will tell you that women are privy to the governments that rule within homes and often enforce the diktats that rule lives without dissent.

The act of marriage in the novel is vastly more complicated than the one marriage closely studied in My Son’s Story. Celie is raped by her step-father repeatedly in the beginning of the novel, and the abuse does not stop. Two children are begot through repeated acts of rape and both are disposed. Celie finds them ultimately in the end, when her sister, Nettie, takes up service with a pastor and his wife, who, providentially, are the adoptive parents of her two discarded children. Her father forces her into marrying Mr. - , a man of unknown provenance, his only qualification being relentless lechery in church. Celie is exchanged and Nettie follows her to her new home. This marriage, once Nettie is driven away from its confines, becomes a relationship of petty labour. Celie is only so far useful as her ability to clean the home, look after the children and cook, most of which she does, most of which she resents and impotently rages against, but all of which she is often scolded, castigated and mocked for. Mr. – ’s repeated beatings and hollering ring in her ear.

The arrival of Shug Avery, the lover-figure, becomes, then, her moment of escape.

Shug Avery’s beautiful, flamboyant and business-sensible pub-singer role is overwhelming. Celie’s conditioned doggedness and inability to think become stale and slightly irritating. Shug’s adept control over Mr. - , her former lover, is shocking. He refuses to raise his voice above the lowest decibel and refuses to contest anything she says. Shug brings with her an uncontainable outpouring of demands and not-so-subtle humiliations. Is this the man that beat her mindless that now kowtows ludicrously to another woman? - Shug changes things drastically about her. She is that transformative energy. She provokes Celie into speech and provokes her to haggle with her own suppressed jealousy and her own servility; she forces her to think, she forces her to look around her and to recognize the grime and deprivation her inner life has always been. When she looks at Celie it induces in Celie, at the same time, the knowledge of her stupidity, and a sudden realization of her own beauty. Shug Avery, the other woman, triumphs sexually over Celie, loving her and exploring her; irretrievably altering her sense of being a woman, of her body, subject to sex as naught but an act of rape.

Women in the novel are endowed with strength. Harpo’s wife is a bombardment of domineering energy. She fights her husband, she fights Mr. - , she fights Celie, she even, naturally, gets incarcerated, after an altercation with the sheriff and his wife. I wonder why this incarceration persists through the novel. Sophia remains enslaved in the end – this explosive bag of rebellion, denied her right to her children – whereas the meek and downtrodden slowly ascend.

It is almost strange, the way in which Celie and Shug Avery fall in love. At first, Celie is besieged by feelings of resentment and wonder. This is the woman who enthralls men by singing in bars and is dressed so wonderfully. Her challenging sexual ebullience makes Celie falter, stutter and try in a confused and desperate way to allay her. At first Shug is dismissive and taunting. But slowly, she wonders at the resilience of this woman, her life and years of servitude and degeneration. Shug, in a quiet and unseen way, tries to draw Celie out from her cocoon, from abrogation to confidence. In the few days of her stay that become weeks, Shug treats Mr. – dismally; he retreats into the shadows of his own house, and Celie, although still just as shy, feels freer and safer than ever before.

The love between Shug and Celie evolves into a relationship of many years, where even though Shug ‘takes on’ a new husband, Celie comes to live with her in her home, away from Mr. -. Here, Celie starts a business of her own and takes over the upkeep of Shug’s house. When Shug finds yet another man and departs for Cuba, Celie, battling these burgeoning feelings of resistance, returns home. She is freed from the clutches of Mr. – and is no longer beholden to him. She neither speaks to him any longer, nor cares that he lives right next door to her, completely buffered from him.

Ultimately, the story resolves all these ruptured relationships, Mr. – and Celie live together again, are on speaking terms again, but what constitutes their marriage, the essentials, are transformed forever. Shug returns from Cuba and moves in with Celie and Mr. -. They live all under the same roof in the end. Celie’s sister returns from South Africa – back from years of undelivered correspondence and stultifying missionary work. She returns with Celie’s children – now her own.

The issue of female autobiography is, however, a difficult one. This may be so because of various factors, not least of which is the fact that Gordimer, writing in parts as the omniscient narrator, uses the identity of a black adolescent boy to tell her story. The question of authority is one that doggedly follows at the heels of every discussion on this novel, but that aside, we do not know how to classify writing that is geographically located in the writer’s own native society, and predicated on her imagination of that society, but not countenanced by the writer’s native identity. She is not a black adolescent boy. The story of the Will encapsulated in the imaginary of the novel is precisely a product of the writer’s deliberate use of that face and name and identity. However, the story of South Africa, of an oppressed, broken and sclerotic society, is very much the writer’s own story. The story of South Africa is the story of her life, and insomuch, is material for autobiography. The writer’s upbringing and growth, ultimately her creative adult life, is intertwined with the fate of her society, and she desires this conflation to be the axle on which her authorship rests. The incident of the school-children’s march across the veld spearheaded by Sonny (Suwetto), the violence that erupted at the graves of those young men who were shot by the police (Sharpwell), the public mourning that was sabotaged, the racial segregation practiced in housing and localities to mark white neighborhoods from black neighborhoods, the segregation of schools, the inaccessibility of institutions as indispensable as the courts, the police, the library, the marking off of the real blacks, conscripted into forced labour, as against those who are less than really black, the insubordination and rebellion and the disruption of these diktats – everything that constitutes the skeleton of the story is, precisely, her native society. In this sense, her adoption of Will’s identity, or the intermediate recanting of the lives of Sonny, Hannah, Aila and Baby, are shifts in world-views and mental frameworks – while the organic field of the continent’s contemporary history remains unchanged.

For Alice Walker, autobiography as a mode of writing is less fraught. Her protagonist writes a certain way, her sentence and her speech spill over with the idiosyncrasies of wrong grammar and the cadences of a southern accent. This shift in writing style is witnessed when we read the letters of Nettie, which in themselves undergo a less visible transition. The epistolary form of the novel (‘Dear God…’) records the diary of a woman who attempts to articulate certain things to herself, but must use the mediation of God to create space for conversation. Alice Walker’s life corresponds to Celie’s in at least one way that I know of – the experience of rape, which is what forms the crucible of autobiography. Rape is more prominent in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, however. The means of recounting the incident, for Celie, is ignorance; she does not know what it is that she is a victim of, and she does not know how it is that her body feels pain. The ignorance is used by the writer to demarcate that intervening period in which she learns what sex is. The reader here knows, in the first place, what it is and later recognizes it again, this time along with Celie.

Nettie’s sojourn to South Africa, through England, is crucial. It corresponds to the freedom and the knowledge that emancipation holds out, which is but the fortune of only one half of the two sisters. One learns what the world is, the other remains where she always has been. Nettie’s realization of the subjugation of South Africa, of the imperative enthrallment of the pan-African colonial enterprise, and of her own role as a black missionary, comes to Celie in letters. In these letters, there is a record of historical conflagrations and defeats, stories that culminate in the Apartheid of My Son’s Story. It is strange now to think that Nettie saw the misdirected beginnings of that enterprise.

Other ideas –

The political space that Sonny’s relationship with Hannah needs to be what it is.
The resentment of Hannah’s opportunities – Sonny knows that his rebellion will never accord him access to the same offices and designations.
The relationship some something ‘illegal’ – an act of breaking the law.
Hannah’s identity as a white woman, Shug’s as black.
Nettie’s colleagues as Hannah’s ancestors?
The politics of southern American states post-emancipation, as against South Africa’s status as a colony till 1991.
Socially-conditioned racism versus state-sponsored racism?

Animal Farm

2009-08-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

The last time I tried to write about this, I had to flee persecution. It did not go down very well with the hoi polloi. Most of them wanted to incarcerate me, but unsuccessfully. Several of them tried to suppress what I had already written, but someone got wind of it and finally managed to get it out in the open. Somehow, it was salvaged. The memory of it, over years of attrition, was slowly and excruciatingly erased till very little remained, just about enough to provoke a laugh or a scoff in the Corridors of power. Hardly enough to really make you think about what it was that I had tried to tell people. Nevertheless, I was not completely bumped off, which had less to do with the munificence of my persecutors and more to do with their ineptitude. I wasn’t exactly pushing daisies in the years after. I was recuperating. Working and everything, trying to get things in working order again. So much effort it demanded of me – worthwhile all the same. I tried to think optimistically about the future – I even succeeded for a while, when most of those who encountered me in passing remarked on it – but it was getting slightly tiresome. I tired of the façade of normalcy and I wanted something drastic to change the ennui befallen on our farm.

I did not have to wait for long.

I believe it is the recrudescence of old problems that fascinates man most. This is mainly because of two factors: the first is that he has an uncanny ability to recognize things that he has seen in the past quite adeptly; the second is that he experiences a burst of gratification when something that he had foreseen in past comes true. He likes foretelling evils. Very much the same with me. I got bored of the regularity and inertia at the farm. And when what I am about to tell you happened, everything, for me, fell into place again. I recovered faster and better: because I could see that all that I had said the last time could not be contradicted this time. It happened right in front of us for all to see.

We had in our farm several facilities. We had the pig-sty, the cow-shed (enlarged beyond necessity, in my opinion), the horse-stables, the fish-ponds, even a rather cumbersome stretch of land for goats to graze in. Of course, I should mention prefatorily that I occupied the sty, because I am pig, and a rather overgrown pig. We had pretty decent living-quarters there; much of where we spent our waking hours was adequately desiccated to make it habitable and there were hardly any food-contingencies. I would say the same for the horses. They seemed quite well off. The cows did not complain either but the incessant sound of their mooing sounded irritating and whiney anyway. It is the hens’ area that I should come to next, being as it is the theatre of our story, where a strange and mysterious episode unfolded over a week in August.

The hens, which in our farm were all black, had a large thatched conservatory to themselves. They were, as you would know, consumed on a large scale and demand for their meat did not flagellate at any time of the year. It meant the best, most consistent care taken of them. The owners of our farm, an old and bedraggled couple, tried their best to keep the black hens in optimal order. The black hens cooperated, grew fatter without hesitation or resentment, ate the food provided for them and generally kept in good humour. The overall condition of the hens in the past half decade, at the time of the incident, was, you could say, satisfactory. They did their feeding and laying of eggs uncomplainingly. The supervision and confiscation of eggs was not a problem. Such an understanding to this effect had been reached between hens and humans two millennia ago by common agreement. In fact, they did not even experience the global terror wreaked upon their species plaguing their counterparts in farms across China and Europe. Much of what transpired there came to us in fits and starts, as gossip, and our hens remained eminently indifferent to it, because they knew their health was unimpeachable. By virtue of their black colouration, they showed certain characteristics that made them different from hens of other plumage. They were slightly bigger, more aggressive and louder than others, if you believed the farmer’s wife.

At some point before August, the farmer received a kind of contract for a horticultural experiment. Since his hens were all purely black, he was to introduce into their lot a white cock. I should mention that the farmer kept black cocks in a segregated section of the hut, and that the offspring of the two produced, as you can imagine, regular, healthy black chickens. News of the arrival of the white cock created a ripple in our farm. Several animals discussed what the hens felt about it. The hens, for their own part, were bemused and a little offended at the ignominy of being experimented upon. A lot of talk went around, some of the hens were purportedly breaking out of their hut to try and escape, but they never got too far. Some of the other hens kept mum, not really aware of what the hullabaloo was about. Some of them anticipated his arrival quietly. Some of them had seen white cocks before – and knew perhaps, unlike the rest, how wondrous they could be.

The day the white cock arrived was marked by commotion. A lot of the other animals were intrigued to see him. Some said he looked so prodigious, so huge, so muscular. Some spoke of his enviable strength. Some stared at his incomparable feathers, baffled by his stunning beauty. He mesmerized everyone so quickly it was as if someone had slipped aphrodisiac in our collective water-supply. The prodigious white cock marched confidently out of the van and into the compound that was to be his exclusive leisure space, partitioned from the conservatory by a thin mesh through which hens could see the outside. They saw what awaited entry into their midst. I found it hard to glean much from their initial reaction. I think some of them were shocked into silence; for much quiet prevailed most of the day. But when evening fell and an unusually dark night came upon us, shrill cries of indistinguishable anguish could be heard from them. They wailed and wailed as if their insides ached. We knew not why. It was all very mysterious. The white cock, in the meantime, I believe, slept peacefully in a corner outside, wholly unmoved by the cacophony of sounds emanating from within.

Next morning, the hens went berserk. The white cock upon waking found that the mesh portioning him from the hens’ quarters had been torn and in his compound, a multitude of hens scattered helter-skelter. Most of them ran along the periphery in concentric circles. Some shrieked at the poor beleaguered black cocks cowering inside. Some wailed like they did last night – clearly their ache had not subsided. For much of the morning, the other animals tried ways and means of buffering the sound but to no avail. Most of us went back into our hay-stacks to shut our ears off from the terrible sound.

The rest of that week witnessed a drastic change in the hens. The white cock now stayed inside the shed and hardly ever ventured out. Several dispossessed black hens waited outside, unable to enter what were only a few nights before their laying-spots. Many stayed on inside, but from what I hear, their hierarchy had changed. The bigger black hens, earlier leaders, assumed the most distant corners and the leaner, more emaciated ones occupied prime hovels in the centre. In the very core, most comfortable spot, the white cock had taken over residence. Those whose places were of closest proximity became newly endowed with the leadership of the hens. The white cock did not really have much to do. He simply sat there, looking honorific as he did, tended to by the harem most proximate to him.

The worst of it was of course reserved for the black cocks, for whatever food and provisions were provided for them was intercepted by the black hens on his bidding. The white cock never once deigned to look in their direction. The black cocks, truth be told, would have loved to be enlisted in his retinue – they too were mesmerized. Instead, however, after days of starvation, boney skeletons covered with black were found in their wake.

*****

I believe I must stop here. The rest of the story is too terrible to be told in detail. But I will summarize. A week after his arrival, the white cock was taken by the farmer to his kitchen and was never seen again. The black hens, pained by absence, gave birth to several incongruous black-and-white offspring prematurely, all of whom perished. The strange pestilence at which the very same hens had earlier cocked a snook came upon them like Hell’s vengeance and not a single one was spared. They all collapsed into a heap of dead blackness.

The last days of term

2009-06-22T23:25:00.000-07:00

It was five in the morning and the rain wouldn’t stop beating. It had been going on for a few days and no one could see himself doing anything constructive without being drenched. It overwhelmed everything about life here for a while. Even the classes started a while later than usual. The sports timings were shifted now and again. The teachers were tired and their voices were unceremoniously drowned out by the loud outpour. It took a while for everyone to get used to it. Not unusually, everyone thought that the rain was anomalous. Little did we know that it would rain for a long time afterward and we would continue to do all our things against the backdrop of an incessant beating of droplets on tin-roofs.

It was the last day of school and we were all packed up to leave for home. The evening was crowded with the formalities of departure. We had to put our trunks back into the sequestered trunk room behind Manas, bring all our extra luggage into the linen-room for safe-keeping, tidy up the rooms and bring all our dirty clothes and uniform for their final wash. It took a long time to get through all the preparatory holiday rituals. I usually thought I could get done with them days in advance but it wasn’t possible. There were tomes of prep-work to go through, several last-minute assignments to write. I had a difficult time doing them. My notes remained untouched on the table and my list of pending work grew gargantuan by the hour. Things remained in stultified inertia for a long time here, especially in my room. I felt them grow heavy on my desk and the table itself kind of ominously grew threateningly big, but just in that little unseen way. I could never clearly tell. Something about the urgency of last-moment tasks kept me from noticing. I felt relieved when everything came to a head on one of the last few remaining working-days. I would unthinkingly dive right in determined and finish it. It’s surprising how quickly I dispensed with hassles. Only I couldn’t work myself into that state without that crucial urgency of the last few days.

I filled up my trunks with all kinds of stuff – all my endless mounds of collected necessities that were absolutely unnecessary, which I never used in the end, piled into a huge collection, shoved into my cantankerous little box – and took it back to the storage room behind the house. The storage room itself was littered with piles and piles of mounting trunks all around, it was impossible to move. It was one of those truly great feats that people performed occasionally without the slightest feeling of accomplishment – like managing to get through a long line of people and finally getting to the front of the queue. People climbed and ascended all of these boxes to get to theirs. Once done, they dumped them back in, helter-skelter in all directions, doing anything to get rid of them until our return from the holidays. Everything became temporarily convenient and no one seemed to mind the ephemeral comfort we derived from carelessly strewing our trunks everywhere.

I returned all my linen. My clothes always got pungent by the end of the term. Well, everyone else’s did too, so I never felt embarrassed about it. We all threw our soiled uniform into massive heaps in the linen-room and left them there for the laundry.

That day, the last day of school, when I had done all that I had to do before leaving, I set about scrubbing my toye-unit. I knew my housemaster (Kevin Phillips) would come around on inspection later in the evening after dinner and it had to be spic and span. He looked at all of ours toyes very suspiciously and immediately detected any flaw in them. He had that quality about him. He could tell right away. I did my cleaning immaculately again. I had to. I didn’t want a reprimand from him. I kind of resented having my last days marred by last-minute recriminations. I avoided them. I scrubbed really hard and borrowed some soap from the guy next to my unit. He used copious amounts himself and never had a problem.

That done, I set about packing. I had two suitcases, one enormous, another really teeny. I filled in the big one with all the books I had to take back home, with my shoes and toiletries and the little ‘home’ clothes I had. No one wore ‘home’ clothes ever. Exceptionally, some days we could. So they languished in my big suitcase through the term, until I would have to rearrange a little bit at term’s end, move them slightly around to make space, or leave them untouched. I put my little boxes and pens and notebooks into the tiny one. I also had some dirty uniform I wanted to get washed at home. I put them all in and locked the two. At six in the morning, the space in front of the common room was crowded with luggage. Everyone put them there before leaving the hostel. It kind of waited in transit. These collected bags spent hours huddled together, merging into one big, bloated pile while the rest of us anticipated the coming day.

I sat on my stripped and bare bed, and waited patiently. I waited for solace. I waited for my eagerness to implode, but it never did. All I remembered then was the need to be patient. It would be hours before I reached home.

The hours were long and tiring. It exhausted me to sit in the bus, doing nothing, just sitting and hoping for home, waiting for its warmth. We would talk sometimes, the person next to me and I. We would talk about the prep-work set, about all the things we couldn’t wear at school this term and all the people we would catch up with over the holidays. We always had plans chalked out meticulously. These would tumble out on our bus journeys. I thought about the things I would eat on the way. I thought about the one hour wasted by those who got off mid-way at the hotel in Nowgong where we stopped every time – everyone used the loos there. But things moved slowly. The prospect of the (hostel) life left behind consoled me. The thought of going home left me awake and sleepless. I felt the heat peter into the bus, but I just stayed put in my seat, not looking back to talk to anyone else. I needed to get my plans in order. My holidays were here.

A conversation with Hemi Rawat

2009-06-22T23:21:00.000-07:00

Last night, I stayed up till four in the morning. By the time I returned to bed, my eyes were heavy and I felt sleep crawling back. It made a quiet, incipient entry through the rear. I felt like I had both lost and gained something crucial. Something I couldn’t quite define, but definitely something indispensable. Perhaps something on which a lot of my ways, my traits and thoughts are incumbent. It’s difficult to say clearly what it was that emerged from that conversation – but something indispensable certainly did. It felt like a conversation about several things, a brush-stroke encompassing all of the canvas available, bludgeoning all the little white spaces spared. It felt like it was about everything, in a way. Ultimately, now I can’t even recall it properly. There is a sudden amnesia that afflicts people who want to remember important details of conversations like these. They cannot do it, details get obfuscated in the larger canvas, and all the little white spaces overcrowd the surface in their absence.

What did he really mean? The conversation started with Zeitgiest, a movie I had asked him to see. I recall suggesting it to him. I have a way of suggesting things that I especially like to people, that tends to back-fire with alarming frequency. To him too, I perhaps overstretched my point. I launched into a long panegyric about the movie, and tried to clearly tell him all the details in a convincing manner, gesticulating now and again, using my hands once in a while. I kind of generalized a little bit, gave him the larger picture and shoved in forcefully the central details. I know I did it a bit too unequivocally, like I was entirely prepared to annihilate any other point of view. Why would I do that? I don’t know – I have a strange tendency to do these things without the slightly bit of shyness. The strangest thing is I don’t even know if I know for certain I can surely guarantee the veracity of some of the facts. I probably can’t. Something about a new idea, however, gets me really going – almost in a propagandist kind of way. I get garrulous when I know that other people aren’t familiar with the idea of some story. It gives me a sense of wanting of legitimize my own version of it, or at the very least my point of view on it. The same, although, less dramatically, applied to this case as well, and Zeitgiest I unflinchingly put before him.

Last night, he said, albeit a little hesitatingly and bashfully, that he wanted to say something about the movie to me later. I didn’t know what it would be about. I tend to assume the least. I like sticking to the most innocuous explanation and leaving things that way. It provides a little bit of assurance, mostly when such is needed, not in the daily interactions that you have, but in the bigger, perhaps professional problems you encounter. I thought he might have something to say about his own take on religion, a topic discussed speciously in the first part of the film. I don’t have a problem with specious information. I know it can be misleading, but I progress with as much alacrity, and later, it does not turn me into a mind-fucked midget, but someone simply with a larger compass of vision. After dinner, I left the thought at that and didn’t consider it again.

Back in his flat, the question came up again. I was eating some delicious fish and was too engrossed with the eating to notice any impending crisis-point. I would refrain from calling it a crisis. It was a conversation. I thought about other things all the while, tried in my mind to work out some of the things I needed to do the next day, some plans I needed to execute, some food I needed to buy, some timings I needed to settle – all things indispensable to planning. I thought them through and then turned to the conversation at hand. Perhaps I was listening only fleetingly earlier. I wanted to savour the fish. I can’t dissipate my concentration whilst eating. If I try and recall what sparked the discussion, I will be inaccurate. But it was something about journalism. About journalistic writing and the kind of effect it has on the world that reads it. I thought about that for a while, but soon, it veered to the movie again.

How gullible are we as human beings? Extremely gullible, a little gullible, not at all, perfectly intransigent? The movie discussed several things and frankly, when I watched it, I thought it admissible. Admissible is different from legitimate. That was the crucial gap in our points of view last night. It was the technical chasm that lay between the endorsement of something, which he presumed me to be responsible for, and the admission of something. I had only admitted the idea, but could not put it across then. In fact, as I write this, I am startled by the comparative clarity of the situation. Last night, I was babbling nonsense and I could not have been more unconvincing and incongruous. He said that a lot of the facts were misleading, a lot of the research not consistent. I did agree it was inconsistent. However, it is difficult for me to accuse anyone of inconsistency until I have accomplished something similar myself. But that in itself is not a consistent way of looking at the world. There is not enough time to prove everything yourself. He said that the movie packed in a lot of details that confused each other and thwarted each other and left a lot of the story vacillating between conviction and incomprehension. I didn’t agree with that – it was coherent – coherent when I watched it and even now that I try and recall it. He said that it packaged itself so irresistibly that it convinced everyone merely by means of its flashiness and its inarguable sharpness. That I could believe.

What is the truth? When you think about yourself and the universe that surrounds you, you know that you will have very little coherence in your interaction with, for instance, aliens if they do happen to drop by and demand some synoptic kind of de-briefing. What would you say? Firstly, you would be very disorientated by the sudden break down and demise of all your presumptions about life. You are not alone in the universe. Here are creatures come to meet you from somewhere incomprehensible to you. Would you tell them about the many phone calls you have made, the many poems you have read and written, the interminable conversations you have on facebook.com if they ask you what your life means to you? What would you say then? I know I would be lost. Lost in a stranglehold of many daily events and little meaning.

Is everything virtual reality? What if all that means anything to us is a virtual concoction of uplifting energies? What if all poetry is designed to take you into another world and leave you stranded? If not by design, what it all literature does it by default? Would you still be as comforted by your dependence on it? In the daily needs and rituals of your waking hours, all the little things that you do, all the little duties you perform and indulgences you have, you have entered into an enclosed reality lived virtually? It is a simple matter. Nothing extraordinary. Think of all the relationships you conduct on the telephone. All the closeness you have taken care to build with people, all the moments you have lived through phone calls and messages. To think that they are all simply simulations of actual presences, but not those presences themselves, is to know that they belong to the world of virtual realities. They are made of the stuff of imagined lives in imagined closeness.

The sun was out at four in the morning and we moved to the veranda. We stood there for a while and looked at the growing glow around us. The day was almost beginning. It was beautiful. The trees looked young and ready and the street-lights stood you starkly against a new-born day. The veranda caught some of the sports-complex behind it and it jutted out through the trees in the distance. I thought about the trees and I thought about the dashing blue in the sky, cloudless and unhesitant. It didn’t know about virtual realities. It just existed, blue and fresh and renewed each morning. I felt everything coming back to me. All the mornings I spent in class four, waiting up till five in the morning when the busses going home would be parked outside the WMH. I thought of all the nights I spent thinking about home in the breathtaking final hours before the holidays. All the nights I stayed awake, anticipating the next morning; the long, smelly and tiring journey back to the city. I remembered the overwhelming desire to see the sun first in the morning. I remember the little things we invented to doggedly not feel drowsy, all the little conversations some of us - Navid, Raghav, Debarghya, Pratik, Gautam and I - would start and prolong – all because we could not sleep, waiting to see the morning as it sprang up on our stationary buses, waiting to carry us home.

That morning on the verandah in his flat, it all came back to me.

But I could not tell anyone because it was my solitary past – a past I shared with long-gone people - people somewhere obscured in the little details of time, place and different life-courses. A secret past of waiting that only the trees behind Manas will recall.

On Being Called Narrow-Minded

2009-05-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

So I know that I am slightly narrow-minded. This is one accusation people today cannot deal with - it's so strange to be called narrow-minded. It's reductive, it assumes a lack of intelligence - in a tenuous way, it even kind of implies that you know no better - that your antecedents are no better. I don't know if narrow-minded people are irredeemably narrow-minded or just temporarily narrow-minded. It's hopefully not a permanent state of being. That would be dreadful - to be perpetually condemned as a narrow-minded person is scary. But then again, what is it that people mean when they say something like that? And more importantly - are some people truly in a position to qualify saying something like that - are they essentially free from the charge in the first place?

I feel that a lot of the times that I've called people narrow-minded I've meant it in a cultural sort of way. I've hurled the charge at them by way of cultural awareness and something along those lines - I've often felt that people unaware of the state of the world or people parochially entrenched in a ditch full of the commonplaces of their own four walls are narrow. I use it not as a reference to where they come from, or what language they speak, but certainly to the kind of responses they have to the world around them. Some of them are indifferent to the life that whirls and swirls and gushes tempest-tossed just beyond the barbed wires of their confines; these are the states of being that I have pointed the epithet at. Sometimes they have been justified, and sometimes not. It's not something that you can control - your assessment of someone is always, and is fated to be, subject to what you know of him or her. If you don't know much about her, but still think of her as a certain kind of person from what you DO know about her, well, then that is indisputable. You cannot help but think what you cannot help but think.

Other times, I have used the word more loosely. To harangue some people for not being open to ideas. To make fun of authorities who refuse to know anything but the rules that come prescribed in little green books. To make my own case stronger against someone else's, someone who clearly thinks in a way antithetical to my own - whether for better or worse, I know not. I have never really thought of using the word to mean myself - someone who is suspicious about the ways of the world, and the things people do, and the things people think when they do the things they do.

It's almost strange. It's like looking in the mirror for a long time and realizing these terrible gashes materializing out of nowhere - in spots you had never suspected, in ways you had noticed and criticized in other people. The mirror steadfastly refuses to budge and show you anything but what it flawlessly records. You stare and stare and try and discern the errors you hadn't noticed before. The more you look, the clearer they stand out and you see them like you had never seen them before. This is what startles me. The finding of almost hidden truths, glaring like gashes visible in the mirror, hiding all the time so effortlessly without the slightest hint.

But you know the gashes are there - clearer now by the moment. But it doesn't seem to me that being narrow-minded is a realization that can startle you one day out of the blue. It is probably more serious than that. It probably takes longer to know it, longer to see it and it simply does not come as a surprise. What do you do when someone says that you are narrow-minded because you cannot let other people be? That you are narrow-minded because you don't accept them as who they are?

Let other people be? Who is anyone to let anyone else be? If anyone ought to exist, he should exist independent of the likes or dislikes, opinions or condemnations of any other people. If someone were to be effectively permitted to live, then that person's claim to a sound and rational life is fairly compromised, almost wholly so. Because that person ought not to be able to breathe on his own, but mainly according to the convenience of those around him. He ought to feel every whim and fancy of those you surround him and gratiate them willingly. Such a man is despicable. Truly unworthy of the recognition of no one around him. He ought to breathe feely, independently, of his own will. Not servilely because others let him.

The charge against me is that I am norrow-minded because I judge people for being certain things. Firstly, why must I not judge? Why must I deny myself the capacity to think, like or discern. It is clearly wrong in the grossest sense to expect anyone to like everyone. It is perfectly rational to expect that people are subject to their value-systems, that they work according to the ways of their own worlds inside, dictating their feelings and judgments. And why not? They are meant to feel the power of their own discretion and to use it gainfully. If I feel that I cannot like someone, or feel the need to accept someone's company or presence, it is entirely a consequence of my own judgment. Why must that be narrow-minded? I feel sometimes that I can trust my understanding of other people's motives and feelings and intentions. This is not to say that I am assured I am right - in fact, quite the contrary. I know for certain that I could be grossly wrong. But that has nothing to do what the immediate value-judgment I allow myself to form - why not? It is the business of my mind and my rational faculties to inform my intuition. If if feel I am justified in feeling something about someone, I ought to respect it for being what it is - simply a matter of my own personal values. I need not always feel the need to go around excavating the truth of everything I see. It does not matter to me. What does matter is that I respond to my intuition rationally and allow myself the freedom to act according to that rational response to the dictates of my feelings.

That does not make anyone narrow-minded. It makes the person independent to do what he or she thinks is right. That is human rationality. It ought to remain so.

The Logic Paper

2009-04-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

The chapters are too long and the words don't seem to follow any logical sequence. I mean, of course they do, they are very well contructed words. As in written in the Introduction, the chapters and the sentences and the thoughts and the assignments are the product of a meticulous process, putting it all together, making everything intelligible to even someone who has never read such material before. But to me, to that someone who has been in the course, has comprehensively attended several classes, read these chapters before but nevertheless is alienated by them, these words are beginning to go out of focus. I cannot tell why. They seem sensible enough. There are sentences within these long passages that make sense to me. They seem to define a lot of concepts and entities and I am not, as a rule, anathema to definition. Then why? Why is it that the enitre gamut put together becomes more difficult to get throught to? What happens in that momentary, brief gap between the single sentences and the gargantuan passages? I cannot tell. I can't tell if the words are meant to be incongrous. But incongruity is not a very convincing charge. It is certainly not incongrous to everyone. Even I experience slight but pertinent moments of understanding, when all the words fall into place. When the definitions seems articulable and in alignment with the rest of the ideas I need to digest. Still, a persistent incongruity comes back intermittenty to undo whatever is done and learnt. This moving, tenuous, two-way path is difficult. It takes away from the intial concession of having got the chapter. It kind of makes a demonstrable nuisance of every tiny step taken. When I think of this, the image of a treadmill comes to mind. Even when you're walking on the treadmill in a gym, you know that you are not moving forward. You walk faster and faster, until you reach optimum speed. When you reach it, you walk consistently the remaining time. You keep walking and walking and walking on it, even though you are not going ahead. But that is the purpose of the exercise. You are not meant to be going ahead, you are meant to be stranded, predicated in a circumscribed space, not allowed to walk out of its boundaries, the belt of the machine. However, if in normal circumstances, out on the pavement along the side of a road, your walking ceased and the ground below transmogrified into a indiscernible treadmill, not letting you move forward, you would panic. You would be completely confused. And the episode would be, irrespective of explanation, unintelligible to you.

Notes on the nature of Revolutions

2009-04-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

- Arjun Rajkhowa & Sachida Bista

This is not a revolution. This is only a list, it need not be treated like a complete essay. So when you say that you want a revolution, you probably mean you want something to drastically change. Some kind of mass-transformation. That is the definitive understanding of what a revolution is. And it is something remarkable. Every time you think of something massive, involving masses of people, you think of something so immense, so big that it can be really terrifying to even consider pushing it further. I would not want that to afflict me. I would not want to be scared by the massive size that a revolution demands. I want not to be encumbered by the arithmetic of numbers. By the size of it all.

You say, to be the pioneer of a movement, you need to be the very fulcrum on which it rests. This is again something I want you to think about. Or rather, I want to think about myself. At a time like this, I want to think about the kind of impact people like us could have. Who are the people we know? What kind of impact would we have on them? What are the avenues open to us? It’s a preliminary step to going beyond these – contending them in the first place. You say that these questions are relevant only after we commit ourselves to a decision. This is true. But the question persists. It is not as an afterthought that a question like this arises. Even if you think of them as details, they are essentially details of your existence. You cannot bracket them as subsidiaries of what you do, they are the minutae of who you are.

To me, a revolution is a revolution. It means nothing until people change in the sphere that we are in constant contact with. If the people around you continue to impact you in negative ways, the point of a ‘massive’ change is made redundant. The only thing that really affects you, or rather, will affect you in the future is that transformed sphere that you inhabit. This cannot be ensured until you consult the details of your life first. It might sound slightly exaggerated, given the fact that you are probably most unaware of such ‘details’ yourself, or at the very least dismissive of them, but there you are – this is a practical precondition to the problem.

To start a revolution, you must come together will all those who share your plight. And then slowly, perhaps even painfully work together demanding changes by cajoling, force, whatever it takes to assert the cause. But even before that, the revolutionary, or the one who vouches of becoming one, must fundamentally understand that his path is to be one of indifference. By indifference, what I mean is that the revolutionary must turn blind to hostile elements that may decide to cause damage to the movement or even set it off astray. The revolutionary must also turn indifferent to his own emotional shortcomings. A revolution is no trivial commitment but, the undertaking of an entire lifetime.

There is, though, something that follows from the former need – the need to meet people thinking of the same things, experiencing the same things. There is a feeling of camaraderie that this will bring in. You might even begin to understand one another better. You may even want to spend more time together. This is appealing; but, ultimately, we cannot discount the veracity of real-life incidents and stories. People say, more than vaguely, that they get disenchanted with those they ‘share their plight with’. They begin to resent the very same people, begin to attribute the worse features of their journey together to them. They begin to see them as hurdles, as obstacles getting in the way of their work. It’s probably not very convincing an argument. But it only requires a little bit of getting-out-there to see it occur daily, relentlessly, everywhere. It’s not specifically the ‘kind’ of people that they are that pushes it to this extent, it’s not even the things they do, or the mindsets they have, even though all of these are contributory things. It is, after all, in the end, about the very fact that they are other people. Other people with different motives and different interests, getting in the way of your own stated and unstated motives and interests, inimical to the road you want to inhabit.

It is true that for the very development and assertion of any ‘cause’ these people are indispensable. But after the formation of the idea, what one must comprehend is that the cause must precede its propagators. In bearing the cause, the people who are associated with the revolution, need to overlook their personal differences. A revolution needs a leader, in the way any intelligent organism needs a head. It is the task of the leader to bring together the functions of the other organs, in spite of their differences. A revolution does not promise personal benefits to anyone, not even to the one who pioneers it. By definition, it is a collective endeavour, and thus, a revolution benefits the people at a larger, social level. To seek immediate individual profit in such a movement is mere selfishness. One must uphold the ideology first. A revolution begins BECAUSE of the ideology, and overlooking it is a grave error, which might lead the movement to meander aimlessly.

Another point of view, separate from the previous, is one that thinks of the revolution as a result of minute-changes. The use of the word ‘ideology’ is a very contentious one. It might be erroneous to suppose that ideologies are concrete objects that can be realized in more concrete terms. They cannot. They are the by-products of several years of transition, the aftermath of occurrences, the benefit of afterthought. They cannot always precede a revolution. It’s wrong to assume that people start out by thinking of what they ‘want theoretically’ in a movement. To them, it’s always a matter of exigencies. It’s about their requirements at home, in their own lives, in their work. It’s about the things they have to deal with on a regular basis, the lives they have to lead. Therefore, these needs, these pertinent concerns push them into doing something. Anything concrete. Take, for example, the underlying thought of the sexual revolution that prompted this. It is not something that coalesced into being simply of and by itself. It is not a theoretical concern. It is majorly a practical concern. It stems from the need to identify yourself and to demarcate your space, to compete with those crowding your space at the moment, to question the need of the antagonists of this space to feel threatened and be figures of threat. That is what spurs the thought forward, not a detached, unrelated theoretical need somewhere in the recesses of your mind.

The kind of person the ‘revolutionary’ is is something that can be contended. It is not merely his vision that matters. It is the vision itself that matters. To distinguish between the two, it is necessary to look at the difference between the political manifesto that a party publishes in the time of elections and the party itself. They are two very different things, know to us through experience. The earlier mentioned need for indifference is a very potent one. But that indifference needs to be defined, conscripted in its own rank and circle of influence. Perhaps, it is self-sufficiency that really matters in the end, because indifference is something that comes naturally to most people. They need not remind themselves to be indifferent to things that they are intolerant of. This is not to say that people are instinctively indifferent to such things, but they eventually tend to become that over time. It is that need that would come equally naturally to someone in a movement. That person, however, cannot be deluded into misrepresenting that indifference. To those who matter to him, and to those to whom he matters, it is necessary for him to withstand the slow attrition of his self of compassion. He needs to tell them about himself, and he needs to introduce them to his way of life. So that they know they are definitely involved and certainly of some import in the movement.

Any movement that plunges itself forward without an ideological map in hand, is most probably to find itself lost in the sea of confusion that the world is. I am aware that all ideas, ideologies, philosophical doctrines are the result of historical occurrences. However they also function as effective hinges, which determine the course of the future. An ideology is a profound understanding of both the past and the present, and the conscious assimilation of the ways and agencies required for future changes. To say that it is merely the result of past upheavals alone, is to diminish the potential the formulated idea bears. To say that, would mean, by extension, that everything is the by-product of the past, and then we are suddenly in a world of determinism where the individual has no way out.

An ideology is a conceptualisation of the varied needs of a social group. Without condensing these practical concerns in paper, it would be incomprehensive. It would be difficult to even recognise the root of the problem. Besides, without a framework, everything would eventually fall into chaos. A theoretical doctrine determining the nature and course of a revolution is indispensable. And if the people who participate are firstly preoccupied by their practical concerns alone, then what would really be the future of the movement would be mere complacency. What they need firstly is a concrete idea of what they are/will be doing; they need an ideology to motivate and direct them. A revolution is not the same as evolution, where life shapes itself according to the conditions favourable and otherwise. It is an upright, conscious commitment with no room for passive elements. I am not unmindful of the practical aspects of life; but I understand these practical aspects are the way they are because of a certain prevalent mindset. It is the thought, the mind that must be the first to change.

There is a risk involved in all enterprises. There is one in this too. However, to already suppose that the corruption and incompetence of political parties would be necessarily inherent in the concerned revolution is baseless and furthermore demoralising. It is a wrong foot to start off with. These problems are there after the movement begins. To dwell on them, before the movement’s birth, is futile and even damaging.

Asking for a ‘definition’ of indifference – now isn’t that to be a ‘theoretical’ indulgence? Anyway, what I mean by indifference is not the same as the above understanding of it. It is not the indifference one allows oneself due to petty occurrences that exist to wreck characters and their relationships. I meant that the people, involved with the movement, must turn blind eyes to any hostile and demoralising elements that might want to thwart the movement. It is the movement that is of the primary concern. The individual is secondary. A revolution is not a love-affair; where the personal is the means and the end. It is a sacrifice for a cause that is greater than even the revolutionary himself.

(...to be contd.)

The story of Narcissus

2009-03-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

- Sachida Bista

Anything that is unconventional and alien to one is wrong and hence frightening. Hence to overcome those fears one tends to tame things outside oneself, like the circus-man who must tame the carnivorous lion. Of course that man is never truly rid of that fear which makes him ‘tame’ it in the first place. He must always carry a whip and lash it whenever need arises. An absolute reconciliation is impossible for he is a man and it is a lion, and in their differences only a pact between them is possible, between two powers, one scared of the whip and the other scared of the whipped. Well, I am not as much interested in the lion as I am in that circus-man, probably dressed like a clown, a painted mask to hide his fear and misery. Why he must tame the lion in the first place might seem ridiculous, but that is because to tame is essentially his nature and his purpose. Without taming the lion, or rather without the lion, his existence becomes meaningless.

Only by ‘teaching’ the other can one overcome one’s fears. Man finds himself alone amidst variety, change; amidst things he cannot make sense of. Hence, his immediate reaction to such an unknown environment is to spread himself, his ideas, force them down the other’s throat if need be, to overcome that variety, to understand that change, so that everything becomes familiar again, so that he is not ‘outdated’. He is reaffirmed. This is why knowledge is ‘light’, missionaries must bring charities and the words of their gods must be spread.

Man needs to see himself reflected. He is a narcissist and hence man will essentially die in his own self absorption. He collapses into himself. He is not seeking relationship in others, but mirrors so that he is reflected. So that he knows who he is, his desires, his fears, his strengths, his achievements. So that he can value and validate himself. For this reason man devised religion, customs, traditions, love in order to find himself in the other; so that he sees himself reflected. But what he fails to learn is that even the other seeks the same. Hence an interesting and a pathetic situation occurs: two mirrors reflect each other in futile for infinity.

The lion and the circus man are at continuous strife with each other. The circus man wishes for a puppet; the lion wishes to devour the ‘puppeteer’. What is common to both is that desire for victory. Both are engaged in that unending game because there will be no victory. It is a game between equals. It is to be a continuous struggle essentially because one needs the other for meaningfulness. The circus man, our subject, must engage himself as long as he desires to live. The moment he gives up is his end. The lion, the other, of course never rests.

Love, is a process of self-realisation and then the affirmation of that realisation. The lover seeks to see himself reflected in the ‘beloved’. Perfect love is love where one finds complete reflection in the other. One loves, to seek a validation of oneself; a validation of one’s imagined, constructed self. However, since an individual is always different from the other, love is a process with no end; there is no complete fulfillment, no complete reflection; hence there is no perfect love. The narcissistic lover is in a continuous process of ‘finding’ himself in the other. The other is reduced to a pond in which he sees himself, to appraise himself, to love himself. The murkiness of the water allows him the liberty to obscure and imagine various aspects of himself. But occasionally, the water clears to reveal the truth. Because of their (the lover’s and the beloved’s) inherent and acquired differences, a complete reflection (desired image) is unattainable. Thus love is an incessant and as unending process of ‘teaching’ the other. To ‘learn’ (from the other) is however unacceptable to Narcissus; for that would mean that he is lesser and more importantly, invalid. Hence, to reaffirm himself, he feels the need to tame, mould, ‘teach’ the beloved/the other into his idea of himself; his reflection. The other’s differences are understood as a threat to his identity. So the other is either held in contempt or is made to unlearn what she (in this case) is and in a way, mutilate herself into the lover’s notion of himself, so that he can overcome the fear of solitude. The lover needs to feel a ‘validity’ of and for himself in the social fabric. Thus, love boils down to the desire to assert oneself upon the other; to control the other. It is only a more cordial and agreeable method of exercising unwarranted power.

For a cup of tea

2009-03-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

- Sachida Bista

It starts within one of us – that thirst. It proceeds onto a proposal and then a tacit agreement. It is as if we plan it all along. Then we clothe ourselves in our woolens, to protect ourselves from the cold of the night; to keep from exposing our nakedness from night’s wanton gaze. We push the gate; how the metals clash as they fight each other; and off we shoot ourselves, spurting onto the night’s cool skin. Our shadows dissolve into the dark.

It is a long, winding road to PC; where remnants of life still chatter, fuss, trade in the night. The road is empty, desolate. We walk – usually the three of us; sometimes a forth joins us, and sometimes it is a human chain, hissing, as it pulls itself forward. We walk on into the night with that great sense of purpose, with a need to satiate our thirst that gnaws our insides. That thirst is a void that absorbs everything that comes in its way; so we and our voids march forward absorbing every fibre of dark that we brush against. Sometimes, a conversation about something startles us and it accompanies us till our destination; sometimes, nothing.

The lamps that illuminate the road to PC hum in that low note, singing to the insects that collect around them. How those insects swirl around each glow creating a universe oblivious to another. Each insect battles another for a touch of that divine fire; that dispassionate flame that evokes all desires; and after a fierce fight where each one is for oneself, an insect finally touches it - it burns, shrivels and falls from the heavens to the earth, from whence it had once sprung – a closure to its exquisite dance of death – a declaration of its limitations.

We walk on, unaffected as we pass these lamps; unaffected even as we see the carcasses lying around the lamp-posts. We search for our own spotlights – to touch the source of that illumination and to be scorched by the mere brilliance of it. But mostly, it is through the dark that we travel; it is in that dark where we imagine ourselves significant; it is there in that unknown, where we suddenly and fully know our purpose; it is there, where night is most blind, fragments of forgotten dreams converge into a point of concentration; it is in that dark we reign, we survive; for there, we are secret.

Life fades in as we near PC. There are men of different kinds, caricatures mostly; in a pathetic display of light and shadow. Whispers of women ooze out of cracks, in the barred windows, only to be stifled by the loud grunts and abuses outside. Sometimes, a car flashes past, tearing everything apart, followed by a gust of wind; but PC has a peculiar habit of stitching itself together again. It has stood witness to fights, rapes, perhaps a murder; it has been bruised, wounded, scarred and yet, it is there still, firm, throbbing, a vein – a passage for life.

We collect around the tea-stall, for a cup of tea. The burning flame moans as the priest prepares the golden liquid that must quench the thirst that keeps ghosts from their sleeps. Hundreds gather around to see the sacred event, to be united with each other, in their desires. When the tea is finally ready the man who has practiced the great power of keeping everyone in suspension, pours it in small plastic cups. Each man sells his life, concealed in a few coins, for a cup. After he gulps down the burning liquid, the ceremony is over. He must return.

We, are among those, who witness that eternal fire that warms the cold night in the deepest of winter; we are among those few, who travel great lengths for a sip of that elixir that flows endlessly in the rivers of that nocturnal civilization. We are among those restless pilgrims, who journey the unknown, in search of that god to be redeemed from the sins of the ignorant world. With that realization, we must all go back from whence we came; we must all submit to night’s calming powers. The road back is the same and its shadows too. More insects are stricken dead by the towering lamps and we must all return to our beds as sleep finally beckons us. Returning is a happy burden and numbed, we walk back, forgetting all that we had desired, all that we had been.

Then, in that last minute of wakefulness, as we finally settle ourselves in our confines, we suddenly come to realize: Night purloins our dreams and dissolves it in a cup of tea.