Tehelka Expose: The Political Context

Despite the hoopla surrounding the Tehelka expose of Narendra Modi’s role in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, it is unlikely to have a negative fallout on Mr Modi’s immediate electoral prospects- indeed it is likely that it will on the contrary provide a surge in favour of Modi, unless there is a very strong and decisive action by the judiciary or the Election Commission. Even in that case, there is all likelihood that the expose will actually consolidate the tide in favour of the BJP in the state. The sad reality is that it is not just Mr Modi who shares the anti- Muslim vitriol of the Sangh Parivar in the state. There is a reason that it has come to be known as Hindutva’s Laboratory.

In all likelihood, the BJP will return to power in the ensuring elections not despite of the expose, but partially because of it.

It is interesting to note that it was sheer overconfidence on the part of the Babu Bajrangis who let down their guard- reminiscent of the BJP’s condition of euphoria before 2004. “The Congress will not return to power for the next 50 years”, its star leader Pramod Mahajan had declared then. Similar is the condition in  the kingdom of the BJP’s star Chief Minister, except that the Chhote Sardar is well- entrenched and his position strong, unless there is an invisible under current of resentment at the ground that may swing the tide as it did in 2004. The Congress’s refusal to take on the BJP aggressively, and indeed to downplay the Tehelka expose, is a strategy whose outcome is difficult to predict till the elections are held and results declared.

But the good news is that for the already beleaguered BJP at the national level, Mr Modi has now become an albatross around its neck. It is yet to recover from its electoral debacle of 2004, it is not clear who exactly its leaders are, despite courageous attempts to re-live their past authority, Vajpaee and Advani have both age and past record against them. The skeletons in the cupboard that emerged after Pramod Mahajan’s death call into question the calibre of its NextGen leadership that now is on the defensive, more often squabbling amongst itself if not, like Ms Uma Bharti, discrediting, the mother Party. TV channels are not banned outside Gujarat, and Mr Modi’s misdeeds will not go unnoticed by the substantial number of fence sitter supporters of the BJP.

The BJP’s economic agenda that appeals to the upper/ middle classes has been inherited by the current government and if the UPA is able to successfully complete its five year term- it will be an achievement of sorts- it is more likely to result in a broad coalition coalescing around the INC rather than the BJP. Despite it’s championing of the neo- liberal assault, its continued ignorance of the poor and the deprived, the UPA has provided a relatively more peaceful environment compared to the BJP- there has been a lessening of communal tensions and riots in the country during the UPA rule.

The challenge for the UPA is to address increasing economic disparities, overcome it’s urban focussed, stock market oriented ‘growth’ policies, and to attend to the cause of the poorest of the poor, especially in the eastern states where vast areas are in various stages of rebellion. The Left that supports the UPA seems to be rather ineffective in veering the course towards those whose cause it claims to champion, that is, the working poor.

The course of Indian politics changes substantially to the extent of making a U- turn, every two decades- remember 1969, and then 1990-92. It is nearly two decades since 1990, and there is a political churning- the BSP’s emergence is indeed the most exciting one, despite it’s pitfalls. The continuing setback to the BJP and the consolidation of a Centre- Left coalition at the national level is another. What is needed is a push further to the left in the next two to three years. That means, in short, more attention towards the poor and the deprived since it is unlikely that anything substantial will “trickle down” by then.

As of now, the chances for the INC/UPA to return to power in the next general elections seem positive- the BJP and its Hindutva agenda are being  beaten back, the Tehelka expose is yet another step in reclaiming the middle ground, the secular terrain, another one being the  secularization of  political grammar, via the Sachar Committee Report’s replacement of the rhetoric of “minority appeasement” by the reality of the economic and social marginalization of Indian Muslims.

It has become increasingly difficult for the BJP to replicate the, alas, “successful”, experiment outside Mr Modi’s laboratory. The Tehelka expose may not have told us anything new, but along with the Sachar Committee Report, marks a slow but steady recovery of secular politics. At least outside Gujarat.

Cross posted: Krish’s blog and Indian Muslims

Related Post: The Threat from Hindutva and Islam

Technorati Tags: Gujarat, India, Narendra Modi, Tehelka
gujaratriots2002, prosecutetheguilty, narendramodigovernment, manmohansingh, lkadvani, humanrights, takeaction, Hindutva

The Battle of Algiers- in Iraq

World Literature’s November issue has excerpts from “My Father, The Rebel”, written by Maissa Bey., the daughter of Larbi bin M’hidi on whom was based one of the characters in the film The Battle of Algiers, a  movie as disturbing today as it was when it was released in 1966. The daughter’s memoir about her father, who was tortured, denied a trail and hanged by the French colonialists during what was termed as the ‘Battle of Algiers’, is touching. The author’s father was summarily executed by the French colonialists, along with others like Larbi bin M’hidi, the FLN head on whom was based one of the characters in the movie The Battle of Algiers, a  movie as disturbing today as it was when first released in 1966.*

Screened at the Pentagon in 2003, the film has been subsequently re- released and has often been recalled in context of the Iraqi “resistance”. In the same issue of the magazine, the book’s translator Suzanne Ruta brings out a more gory dimension of the movie.

The film- released in 1966- could only speculate about the death of M’Hidi. Now we know that General Paul Ausssaresses, one of the commanding officers in Algiers that year, had him hanged at a farm outside the city a month after he was arrested. Ben M’Hidi died surrounded by his jailers, who denied him his last request, that he be allowed to die with his eyes open. They blindfolded him and then told the world that he had committed suicide in his jail cell with his necktie….. Protected by amnesties concluded in the 1960s, Aussaresses could not be persecuted for war crimes. But he was prosecuted successfully for ‘complicity in apology for war crimes’, along with his publisher, then stripped of his rank and the right to wear his uniform in public.

And yet, in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq war, Aussaresses’s shocking book, in English translation, was studied by our (i.e. US) military as a contribution to the new debate on the uses of torture. “To cause sufferring is not the same as torture, no matter how intense or sustained the pain- as long as there is no other alternative and the pain is in proportion to the desired outcome”. This sounds like Rumsfield or Gonsalves. In fact, it is taken from instructions given his troops in Algiers in 1957 by Aussaresse’s colleague and mentor in the Battle of Algiers, Colonel Roger Trinquier. The resemblance is probably not accidental.

A note about the online World Literature site: limited pages available online, and whatever is there is in barely readable font color and the pages appear as image files! Apparently this is a further regression from the pdf files that used to appear earlier.

If you have not seen the movie, it is very highly recommended. It was much discussed when its director Gillo Pontecorvo passed away a year ago, on 22 Oct 2006.

In the trailer below, M’Hidi appears briefly 1:21s from the end (the bespectacled man speaking the sentence: “It is difficult to start a revolution, even more to sustain one and still more to win one.”)

youtube link

*Note: This blogger’s (imaginative!) deduction that Marissa Bey is Larbi bin M’hidi’s daughter, stands corrected by Suzanne Ruta who has commented:

Bey is NOT the daughter of Larbi Ben M’Hidi…the French tortured and summarily executed thousands of Algerian rebels, her father and Ben M’Hidi met the same fate, but M’Hidi was the head of the FLN in Algiers, Bey’s father was a school- teacher in el Boghari…I took a round about way into the subject, sorry if it wasn’t clear. Part I is about Algeria and the ways its history has been used lately by the Pentagon, part II is about Bey.

Also the essay stands by itself, Bey hasnt written a book length memoir about her father, but she has written a number of novels, all marked by early trauma.

glad to see people are reading WLT. best wishes, S Ruta

Thanks for the correction, Suzanne! And thanks, of course, for the translation and the essay.

Technorati Tags: War, Iraq, Algiers

Globalization or Americanization Index?

India 2nd least globalised economy: Report

Is there something wrong in this Globalization Index for 2007 published by AT Kearney, or am I missing something?

The only country in the the top 20 in terms of population that figures in the list is the United States, with the exception of United Kingdom, the world’s 20th most populated country. Countries at the top of the population list (China, India) are way down in the GI.

The AT Kearney methodology is less well documented than another comparable one- that by KOF, though the latter results also follow the same pattern- the United States is ranked 19th and the United Kingdom and France make it to the top 20 ranked 4th and 6th respectively, but none of the other high population countries make it to the top 20 Globalization Index list.

The KOF index methodology is more detailed and some of the indicators included may help to understand the pattern- besides the count of the internet connections which in itself is reason enough to influence the results significantly, one of the measures used are the number of McDonalds outlets in a country!

As an additional cultural proximity we thus include the number of McDonald’s restaurants located in a country. For many people, the global spread of Mcdonald’s became a synonym for globalization itself. In a similar vein, we also use the number of Ikea per country. (page 2 of the methodology document)

GI    Country            Population          Country                  Population
1    Singapore                 1                China                     1,315,840,000
2    Hong Kong                2                India                     1,103,370,000
3    Netherlands              3                United States            298,210,000
4    Switzerland               4                Indonesia                 222,780,000
5    Ireland                     5                Brazil                       186,400,000
6    Denmark                   6                Pakistan                   153,960,000
7    United States            7                Russian Federation    143,500,000
8    Canada                     8                Bangladesh              141,820,000
9    Jordan                      9                Nigeria                    131,530,000
10    Estonia                  10               Japan                      128,080,000
11    Sweden                  11               Mexico                     107,030,000
12    United Kingdom       12               Vietnam                    84,240,000
13    Australia                13                Philippines                84,210,000
14    Austria                  14                Germany                   82,690,000
15    Belgium                 15                Egypt                       74,030,000
16    New Zealand          16                Turkey                      73,190,000
17    Norway                  17                Iran                         69,520,000
18    Finland                  18                Thailand                   64,230,000
19    Czech Republic       19                 France                     60,500,000
20    Slovenia                20                 United Kingdom        59,670,000

Technorati Tags: Globalisation, Globalization

Why BB’s return is good for Pak

aaye haath uthaaye hum bhii
hum jinhe rasm-e-dua yaad nahin
- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Writing for The Jang, Raza Rumi explains the popular sentiments demonstrated in the reception to Benazir Bhutto on her return, something that has got overshadowed by the subsequent bombings.

The foreign media, usually proficient in the rant on Talibanisation, gun-totting radicals and burqas were also at a loss on how to comment on this day. The castle of stereotypes on Pakistan had fallen: men and women were dancing spontaneously, often together on the loud, tacky party songs. There were very few burqas, no guns and no favourite signs of a west-hating native populace. This was a day heralded as a watershed in our recent times, from the left to the right and from the khaki to the mufti. Not because there was a revolution in order but that the real face of the many millions, who aspire for better livelihoods in a secular framework, had been rediscovered.

Raza blogs here.

In the same newspaper, Imtiaz Alam, points to the support that BB has mobilized among the younger generation of Pakistanis (though I wonder how he got to that 85% figure when he states that “above 85 per cent of those present at the rally were below the age group of 25 years”)

Both the hearty welcome along with the bloody tragedy make the October 18, 2007, a unique day in our political calendar: the magic of the majority support of the people that vindicated one of its most popular leaders yet the even more widespread anguish the nation expressed over the tragedy during the three-day mourning period declared by the steadfastly liberal PPP. Due to a focus on comparison of numbers between this rally and the one in 1986, which Ms Bhutto has exceeded far above her own record of 1986. It is important to note that in comparison to the participation of youth in 1986 rally — above 85 per cent of those present at the rally were below the age group of 25 years.

They even lack a sense of what they are in fact endorsing or strengthening, by vilifying Ms Bhutto. On the other hand, the masses are pragmatic and learn their lessons or form views through their own experience. Their cognitive process perceives the Bhuttos to have been persecuted from the start from the hanging of the elder Bhutto to two brothers’ being murdered, a mother’s loss of memory ending with Benazir’s vilification and dismissal of two governments resulting in her husband’s incarceration for eight long years leaving her to single-handedly raise parent her children.

Technorati Tags: Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto

Picture Source

Who bombed BB?

Journalist Ahmed Rashid points to speculations that it was not the jehadis, but some people within the regime who have targeted Benazir Bhutto:

there is speculation that the attack was not carried out by Islamists, but by certain groups within the regime who don’t want Bhutto in the country. The leaders of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party are accusing the government and the intelligence services of not having done enough to prevent the attack.

In a piece that appeared in last week’s LRB, Tariq Ali offered an insightful views on “Pakistan at Sixty”.

The European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who as the papers see it are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is Musharraf. Alas, it now seems he might drown in a sea of troubles and so the helpful State Department has pushed out an over-inflated raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto…

The notion that the soon-to-return Benazir Bhutto, perched on Musharraf’s shoulder, equals progress is as risible as Nawaz Sharif imagining that millions of people would turn out to receive him when he arrived at Islamabad airport last month. A general election is due later this year. If it is as comprehensively rigged as the last one was, the result will be increased alienation from the political process. The outlook is bleak. There is no serious political alternative to military rule.

and in an interview with Democracy Now, he points to an aspect that goes pretty much unmentioned in the Western coverage on BB: (link via American Leftist)

In the way that she’s — everyone knows that she and her husband went in power incredibly corrupt. The evidence is there. And in a country where the ordinary people are already alienated from the political process, to inflict this on them isn’t going to improve matters.

and the always acerbic Ardeshir Cowasjee has a trenchant criticism of Musharraf’s ordinance that enabled BB to return:

THE New York Times, August 6, 2003: ‘Bhutto Sentenced in Switzerland —A Swiss magistrate has found former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband guilty of money laundering.

They were given six-month suspended jail terms, fined $50,000 each and were ordered to pay US$11m to the Pakistani government. The six-year-long case alleged that Ms Bhutto, who lives in exile in London and Dubai, and her husband, Asif Zardari, deposited in Swiss accounts $0m given them by a Swiss company in exchange for a contract in Pakistan. The couple said they would appeal.’

Swissinfo (swissinfo.org/eng), Oct 9, 2007: ‘Amnesty spells trouble for Swiss Bhutto case — … Daniel Zappelli, the general prosecutor of Geneva, is facing a quandary. Should the politician and her husband stand trial now that Bhutto has been granted an amnesty by her own country?…The couple was first convicted of simple money laundering in 2003 by a Geneva investigating judge who handed down a six-month suspended sentence.

The Bhuttos appealed against the magistrate’s decision but were later accused of  more serious money laundering offences…

…

One positive — nay, excellent — factor to emerge from the promulgation by a man unable to relinquish power of the disgusting National Reconciliation Ordinance, which has had the opposite effect to reconciliation as far as the people are concerned, is the reaction of the literate and illiterate 170 millions of Pakistan.

They know they have been duped, that they do not know the truth, and have no fear in saying so in no uncertain terms. This ordinance, promulgated by a man who preaches enlightened moderation, stands equally ignominious and abominable (for different reasons) as the Hudood Ordinances of the reviled President General Ziaul Haq.

Crossposted

Technorati Tags: Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto

Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate is one of the more neglected books from the Soviet era samizdat literature, so eminently neglected that it makes to the editor’s pick of the most neglected books in the world. This is somewhat ironic, because Grossman attempted to write a 20th century sequel to one of the most known novels, War and Peace.

Written in 1960 it was never published in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet ideologue, is supposed to have told Grossman that the book would not be published for the next 200 years, comparing its publication to an atomic explosion! The book made it’s way to the West via a microfilm made by one of Grossman’s friends and was published in its English translation in 1980.John Lanchester has a fine review of the novel at LRB. The review starts off a little didactically, but becomes easier to read as it progresses (the reason perhaps that I ended reading the review backwards.) One aspect of the book that has gone unmentioned in Lanchester’s review is the insightful discussion on Anton Chekhov and Tolstoy, where Grossman characterizes Chekhov as a more democratic writer.

The chilling telephone encounter with Stalin in the following excerpt is reminiscent of a similar incident in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle.

Shtrum starts to experience the strange freedom of the outsider, the fact that, once disgraced, he no longer has to be so careful about what he says and does – and then the telephone rings. ‘Its ringing now made Viktor as anxious as if it were the middle of the night and a telegram had arrived with news of some tragedy.’ He takes the receiver:

…

A voice unbelievably similar to the voice that had addressed the nation, the army, the entire world on July 1941, now addressed a solitary individual holding a telephone receiver.

‘Good day, comrade Shtrum.’

At that moment everything came together in a jumble of half-formed thoughts and feelings – triumph, a sense of weakness, fear that all this might just be some maniac playing a trick on him, pages of closely written manuscript, that endless questionnaire, the Lubyanka . . .

Viktor knew that his fate was now being settled. He also had a vague sense of loss, as though he had lost something peculiarly dear to him, something good and touching.

‘Good day, Iosif Vissarionovich,’ he said, astonished to hear himself pronouncing such unimaginable words on the telephone.

Stalin expresses good wishes for Shtrum’s work – and in that moment Shtrum’s life is transformed. That one call is all it takes. Stalin, the deus ex machina, really does have the powers of a god. It is one of the most extraordinary, electric moments in 20th-century literature, far transcending Tolstoy’s use of Napoleon in War and Peace, but the moral of the incident is yet to come. As soon as Shtrum gains something, he immediately has more to lose, and his corruption is simply effected. With his new status, he is easily inveigled by his boss at the laboratory to sign an anti-semitic petition. Grossman, who signed a similar petition himself, makes it all too easy to empathise with Shtrum’s weakness. It is a devastating depiction of the final trick played by a totalitarian state: to destroy people’s sense of themselves by giving them a sniff of success and inclusion.

read on

Technorati Tags: Grossman, Russia, Literature

A Bicycle Diary

Workers and girls
were riding to their
factories,
giving
their eyes
to summer,
their heads to the sky,
sitting on the
hard
beetle backs
of the whirling
bicycles
that whirred
as they rode by
bridges, rosebushes, brambles
and midday.

…

the bicycle,
stilled,
because
only moving
does it have a soul,
and fallen there
it isn’t
a translucent insect
humming
through summer
but
a cold
skeleton
that will return to
life
only
when it’s needed,
when it’s light,
that is,
with
the
resurrection
of each day.

– An Ode to Bicycles by Pablo Neruda

The bicycle has been given a short shrift in India as it still awaits a dawn and its own resurrection. It is the common man’s mode of transportation, yet the per capita of bicycles in India is a lowly 0.06 in contrast to China, where it stands at 2.26, which means that even this basic mode of transportation is denied to the vast majority of poor Indians. (The figures are for the years 1992 and 1995 respectively- Source. Since production  increased from 9m to 11m between 1992 and 2000 in India, while in China it increased from 40m to 53m, I doubt that the per capita counts have changed drastically)

The Mao Bicycle (Flickr Source)

To a large extent, this can be attributed to the lack of political support the bicycle has managed to mobilize for itself. The bicycle has been low on the list for politicians and hence on the nation’s priorities. In China, Mao popularized what came to be called the “Mao Bicycle” and set the masses to literally ride the road to liberation. Mahatma Gandhi, however, did nothing of the sort as he did with the charkha. He did not ride the bicycle, preferring, instead the comfort of the Indian Railways, or whatever it was called before independence. The Samajwadi Party carries the bicycle as its election symbol, though you may not recollect ever seeing the portly Mr Amar Singh ride one. A few years ago Shiela Dixit, the Delhi Chief Minister, came up with the novel concept of bicycle clubs. It has not exactly created a revolution in the state as yet.

Neither has the Mumbai film industry (or Tamil or the other ollywoods) taken up the cause of the bicycle. There are indeed some old film songs picturized on the heroine and her friends riding the bicycle. But the hero invariably would ride at least a two wheeler, even the old Lambretta was preferable to the miserly bicycle. On the other hand, sometimes the villain and his cohorts paid a tribute of sorts by beating the good guys with bicycle chains. There has been a Chinese version of The Bicycle Thieves, but no Indian one. Even in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy which was inspired by the Italian classic, the bicycle was nowhere to be seen. The only exception that comes to mind is an old Manoj Kumar movie Shor in which he wins a cycling challenge by continuously circling for many days, spurred on by an inspiring song on the way.

The decline of the bicycle among the influential middle classes accelerated in the 1980s when the two wheelers started replacing the bicycle in the employees’ parking lot outside neighbourhood branch of the State Bank of India. Even the milkman switched over to a Rajdoot motorcycle, leaving only the postman whose occasional presence now graces respectable middle class homes with a bicycle. Since a vehicle is as much a symbol of power as of prestige when it comes to the Indian road, anyone riding one is seen with at best a smirk, if not sheer disdain.

My first bicycle- a small blue Hero ’sports’ cycle was bought in class six, expensive though it was given my family’s means. I used it to ride to my school, a good miles away, along with my sister, robbing the rickshaw puller of quite a sum over the years. By the time I reached my 8th class, I bought the standard black Hero bicycle- bought by paying for in instalments of Rs 10 per month through the influence of my grandparents and then transported to my home town on top of a bus. Till the third year of my college, I used the bicycle and then sold it off for one third of the price, switching over to first a Vijay Super and still later the LML Vespa. The gradual transition paralleled the ascending affluence of my family in the late 1980s as it switched from a fourth hand, 1973 Mark II model of the Ambassador car, to a Maruti 800. My cousins, growing up a few years later, would ride to school on a two wheeler.

This personal story, I believe, is more or less also the story of the decline of the bicycle in middle class families.

But there are more significant bicycles that come to mind. There was one that belonged to an old bearded Sikh man who could be seen on the roads of Chandigarh carrying a bag full of books. The man was a well known figure in the city, especially among the poor students. He would lend them books free of charge and deliver them right at their doorsteps, come rain or wind. There must have been some personal story, or tragedy behind such an act that we never bothered to find out. What stood out on his bicycle was the over- sized carrier at the back that he would place his bag on, it had a small wooden plank on top of the carrier and the large canvas bag with its books was tied on top of it.

Another memorable one is one one that belonged to the creator of the Rock Garden, Nek Chand. Somewhere in the eighties, the Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal gifted him an Ambassodor car at a glittering function. After everyone had left, Nek Chand took out his old bicycle and rode back home- the next day, the local newspapers carried his picture riding a bicycle with the brand new Ambassador car in the backdrop. Perhaps he did not have the money to bear the cost of fuel, or more likely did not know how to drive one. But above all, it was this bicycle that he had used to carry the refuse and broken ware to his then secret abode that later became the Rock Garden- an imposing counter as it were to Nehru’s modernist dreams.

This dream would have been impossible, Chand says, without his bicycle. He and his two-wheeled friend roamed the hillsides in search of materials. On some days, they traveled more than 20 kilometers, seeking out stones and debris that Chand would later transform into shapes of his imagination. Describing the conditions in which he worked, by cover of darkness, fighting off clouds of biting mosquitoes and snakes, Chand says, “I used to work alone in the jungle and my bicycle was the only means for me to get out safely.” Source

Nek Chand’s old bicycle is now part of the Rock Garden and  prominently displayed there.

Nek Chand migrated to India from the Pakistani part of Punjab during the partition. I do not know how he traversed the distance, but many migrants used bicycles to scamper across the border. A friend in Chandigarh always used to ride a bicycle that was, to say the least, in a pretty ramshackle condition. The reason for his attachment, he remarked with similar sentimentality as Chand, was that his father rode from Lahore to the Indian side of the border on that bicycle. I also do not know if the owners of bicycle companies that forms the backbone of the economy of the industry in Ludhiana too crossed the border on bicycles, but it is a well known fact that it was mainly the refugees who contributed to the setting up of the industry in some of smaller towns and cities after independence/partition.

Some of them, like the Hero group have switched over to the manufacture of the lucrative two wheeler segment, symbol of the youthful entrants to the middle classes and on which Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan sang their best numbers.

The legendary Nek Chand, the master of recycling the broken pieces of material that build our modern cities, however can still be seen riding a bicycle in Chandigarh.

And that holds out hope to the otherwise unfashionable mode of transportation of the working classes.

(See Rahul Banerjee’s post Cycling to Environmental Glory that spurred this Proustian excursion)

Technorati Tags: Bicycle, India, Nek Chand

Among Animals and Plants by Andrey Platonov

A recently translated short story Among Animals and Plants by Andrey Platonov appears in this week’s The New Yorker. Not as biting as some of his earlier works like The Foundation Pit for which he is best known for, but nevertheless, it is peppered with insightful and sarcastic comments on the “proletarian culture” of the 1930s Soviet years. Especially well written are the slogans of the Soviet state that masquerade as life guiding truths and are internalized by the characters.

Andrey Platonov was born in a working class family and in the early years of the Revolution was educated as an engineer- his enthusiasm for the revolution soon replaced with reflections on the unbridled violence and coercion of the new state.

While The Foundation Pit and Happy Moscow were satirical in tone, his novel Soul  called for a more humane socialism, much before the term became popular in the 1950s. His 14- year old son was condemned as a “terrorist” and exiled to a labor camp on Stalin’s orders. Platonov himself ended his days as a window cleaner in the Soviet Writers union building. He had of course been expelled from the union a number of years before he died in 1951.

Many consider him as one the greatest Russian writers of the last century, whose works were suppressed during the Soviet era and who emerged, like the Hungarian writer Sandor Marai, only in the 1990s.

An excerpt from the story Among Animals and Plants:

“Animal or bird—whatever shows up, I’ll kill it!” the hunter resolved. But, as before, there was nothing around—only the rustle and hum of petty, frail creatures that weren’t worth a battle. Beneath the hunter crawled diligent ants, burdened like respectable little people with heavy loads for their households. They are vile creatures, he thought, with the character of kulaks. They spend all their lives dragging goods into their kingdom; they exploit every solitary animal, big and small, that they can dominate; they know nothing of the universal common interest and live only for their own greedy, concentrated well-being. Once, the hunter had happened to see two ants dragging an iron filing from the railway line: it seems that ants even need iron. read on

More on Andrey Platonov on this blog. An interview with Richard Chandler, Platonov’s translator.

Technorati Tags: Andrey Platonov, Russia, Literature, Short Story

Doris Lessing

To be honest, I haven’t read any works by Doris Lessing and for some reason always thought that she is from South Africa. This extract from the Guardian’s profile of Lessing explains it.

Over the course of more than half a century, Lessing has used fiction to explore racial, sexual and social divides. She was born in 1919 to British parents in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran, but six years later, the family moved to farm in Southern Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – an event that would inform much of her work. Although she moved to England in 1949, her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published a year later, examined the relationship between a white Rhodesian farmer’s wife and her black servant. Africa also formed the backdrop to her semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series of five books spanning 1952 to 1969.

Her outspoken opposition to apartheid in South Africa made her persona non grata there and she was banned from the country between 1956 and 1995. Never afraid to embrace politics, she became a member of the British Communist party in the 50s and campaigned against nuclear weapons.

It is also reassuring to see the tradition of the Nobel prize for literature going to someone from the Left. This year, like in the past few, I was almost afraid that it would go Mario Vargas Llosa, a writer whom I much admire, but one who fought the Peruvian elections as a candidate of the Right.

As for Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize, it augurs well that peace is now implicitly equated with the threat of environment degradation.

Update: A fine review of Lessing’s political engagement in her works: The Political Doris Lessing at The Nation.

“Perhaps This was not Barbarity”

Santokh Singh Dhir, now 88, is one of the veterans of progressive Punjabi literature and the only one of his generation to have earned a living solely from his writings. Best known for his short stories, he has nevertheless published a number of collections of poetry.

While it is too early to speak of a current of Dalit literature in Punjabi- it remains on the margins of Dalit literature in India, the writers of the progressive movement like Dhir and others have articulated similar concerns in their writings over the years.

This is what Ashwini Kumar Mishra, author of the paper Voice of the Dalit in South Asian Literature (pdf!) has to say on the subject:

(the violence during the partition of the Punjab in 1947) was bound to have its impact on Punjabi literature for rooting to the cause of dalits. Kulwant Singh Virk had no time to depict lalit (beauty) in the face of a tortured life experienced by a sikh lady who like a dalit had to stay back in Pakistan thus embracing Islamism (sic). She was cut off from her relatives including family members and all that she could dream of was to unite with her sister in India. Amrita Pritam characteristically delineated such pathos in her story “Pinjar (The Skeleton) and novel ‘Dr. Dev’. Prof. Mohan Singh mirrored oppression in his poems and other poets like Bawa Balwant, Piara Singh Sehrai, Santokh Singh Dhir fell into the line to borrow their poetry themes from the sufferings of dalit community… In later years Amarjit Chandan, Amitoj came forward to sing the glory of peasants and workers in their poster poems. In fiction, Gurdial Singh celebrated the cause of the socially oppressed. His novel Paras hardly bothers for any kind of off beat utterances through magic realism but goes down to smell the earth and its subtle collective foundations.

S.L Virdi has rightfully emphasised on this form in a special issue of Punjab Dalit Literature “Yudharat Aam Admi”. Gyana Singh Bal has questioned the veracity of Adi Shankaracharya’s ‘Adwaitbad and denounces the same blatantly as an unrealistic contrivances of human mood.

I had the privilege of translating some of Dhir’s poems in my first year in college, and  even having some of them published in the Chandigarh edition of Indian Express and The Tribune. Despairing at the remote possibility of seeing the English translations of his poems published in his lifetime, Dhir gave me the manuscript a few years ago when I last met him. This poem, and few others that this blog will occasionally carry in future, are from that manuscript.

Perhaps This was not Barbarity

(A Harijan woman, Pritam Kaur, who was murdered by pushing a 22 inch stick into her private part. She was a volunteer (sewadarni) in a gurudwara in Hoshiarpur district)

Perhaps this was not barbarity
Only a common place affair

Had it been barbarity
Some Rama’s fire- arrow
Would have pierced and killed
The demon king
The city of Lanka would have burnt
And tethered
In the flowery flames of fire

Had it been barbarity
The Kurukshetra of Mahabharata would have danced
For ages the soil would have been crimson
And scarlet flames would have engulfed the skies

Perhaps this was not barbarity
Only a common place affair

(July 25, 1978)
[translated by readerswords]

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Technorati Tags: Punjabi, Dalit, Poetry

Discovering Che- Forty Years Later

“It is impossible to eclipse the life of Che, nobody could do that. One could consider themselves the successor of Che only if they give their life for humanity.”

- Evo Morales, first indigenous President of Bolivia speaking today on the 40th anniversary of the Latin American revolutionary’s summary execution

***

My discovery of Che Guevara started on a false note when I met “Guevara”, the tall, lanky leader of the student union. He had just managed to flunk, I believe for the second time, his second year in B.A in the local government college. A sticker on the front of his light chocolate coloured Vespa two wheeler had a picture of a man with flaming eyes and another on the rear number plate  read “Guevara”. He called himself “Guevara”, all other students called him “Guevara” and that is what I thought his real name was– until I discovered his real name. My curiosity simply sky rocked: who is, or in this case was Guevara? Only then I discovered, that our local hero had taken the name after a person called Che Guevara, the harbinger of the Cuban revolution.

I went on to read Che’s biography at the library. The otherwise informative hagiography written with typical Soviet dryness failed, however, to transform me into a wide- eyed admirer of the Argentina born revolutionary, even as I sympathized with his politics.

Meanwhile, the “Guevara” that I knew went on to flunk a few more examinations, finally dropping off and taking up a distance education course to complete his bachelors and then his law degree from the local university. By then, his escapades were well known. He had always been very energetic and had once slapped a senior political activist in his face during a drunken brawl. I mean he was energetic in that sort of way.

Soon thereafter, on my first travel abroad, I chanced on a just published book in Amsterdam airport- The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara and found myself carried away by the adventures of the 23 year old medical student venturing to travel all over South America on a motorbike. His descriptions of a continent that he, as Simon Bolivar before him, believed to be essentially one, are evocative, touching and peppered with insights. For the brief time that Che and his friend Alberto spend with the inmates of a leprosy hospital, for example, they establish an instant rapport.

‘Although it was very simple, one of the things which affected us most in Lima was the send- off we received from the hospitals inmates. They collected 100.50 soles (the local currency), which they presented to us with a very grandiloquent letter. Afterwards, some of them came up personally and some of them had tears in their eyes, spending time with them accepting their presents, sitting listening to football on the radio with them. If anything were to make us seriously specialize in leprosy, it would be the affection of the patients’.

This is how Che describes a working class couple in the copper mines of Chuquicamata.

‘In the light of a candle, drinking maté and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man’s shrunken features stuck a mysterious, tragic note. In simple but expressive language, he told us about his three months in prison, his starving wife, and his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his comrades, who had mysteriously disappeared and were said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea’. These copper mines – ‘ spiced with the lives of poor unsung heroes of this battle, who die miserable deaths, when all they want is to earn is their daily bread’- produce 20 percent of all the world’s copper…’

The book made me respect Che more than I did earlier and the reason was not far to seek.

Meeting the “Guevara” of my university had not been a pleasant experience. The Soviet book had dwelt on the political exploits and ideology of Che. The Motorcycle Diaries, on the other hand, presented the young Che, the Che that had not yet become a legend and was a well meaning, inquisitive medical student out to discover the people and humanity of South America– a continent bruised by centuries of colonization and conflict, much before he went on to discover an armed revolution there. The political Che, I realized, was an outgrowth of his deep seated humanism.

His legacy, however, has turned out to be an inversion in which his aura as an armed insurgent seems to overshadow his humanism.

To some extent this is understandable, after all if Marxism was the face of humanism for many in the twentieth century, armed revolution was nothing but an extension of the same in the 1960s South America and elsewhere. The appeal of his persona finds resonance in every upstart generation everywhere while the appeal of his humanism echoes only in the silence of the jungles as it were. The self- styled inheritors of his name and legacy continue to be all sorts- the lumpen as well as young people revolting without any cause in particular. Entrepreneurs profit from his name by printing his pictures on T- shirts and coffee mugs. Che, the revolutionary, has become a money-mill for his nemesis, Capital. Cuba wallows in his name to justify Castro’s dictatorship. His legacy, therefore, is confusing, and seems to appeal to all and sundry, and it is disconcerting to find his admirers especially among the  ‘wrong set’ of people, sending out wrong messages about the man.

In my case, for example, my introduction to Che started with a person with whom I would rather not be friends. It created little interest let alone respect for Che. Nevertheless, I persisted and tried to discover him in his politics, first via the Soviet hagiography and then via his book On Guerrilla Warfare. Both left me cold and uninspired.

I finally found Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, in the deep humanism of a 23 year old student, as frightened by a pair of a cat’s eyes in the night as anyone else in his place would be.

I realized then that to discover Che, one has to trudge through various layers of reality, through the phases in his life and his deeply sensitive reactions to the world that he lived in.

To discover Che, one has to go with him to his youth and grow up with him.

To discover Che, one has to accompany him to the ruins of Machu Picchu, and observe with him in quiet poignance- ‘gold doesn’t have the same quiet dignity as silver which acquires new charm as it ages’.

To discover Che, one has to realize that Che is talking as much about himself as about the ruins of Machu Picchu.

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Tags: Che, Guevara, Books

The Honest Policeman

It was in the final year of college, that Jasveer Singh catapulted to local fame. He had made it to the Indian Police Services not only in his first attempt, but with one of his major subjects as Punjabi, a rather unconventional option. He came from a modest family in Hoshairpur, a district well- known for the fragmentation of it land- holdings and the consequent migration that has taken place from Punjab over the last one century to Western countries.

His first posting, I heard from friends, was in Shahjehanabad in Uttar Pradesh but after that I lost track of him. The picture I have, therefore of him, is as a thin, wiry young man with a beard that still seemed to hesitate to grow on his boyish face. It, then comes as a both a shock and a pleasant surprise, when a common friend emailed this article from The Hindustan Times that recounts his struggles after he took on the feudal ‘king’ of Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, Kunwar Raghuraj Pratap Singh, the person well known to us as “Raju Bhaiyya.”

In 1991, when he completed his engineering degree, the Indian Administrative and Allied Services were no longer the career of choice among students who came from the more well to do classes, including those whose parents were in the services. This cannot be attributed to the “reforms” that started that year because the change in their attitude was visible within the second and third years of college, that is, by 1989-90. Most looked for  a career in what was referred to as the “IAS of the private sector”, that is an MBA degree, preferably from one of the coveted IIMs. Then there was the lure of the US universities.

The administrative services, and Indian Engineering Services, was still an option for many who came from the smaller towns and the more middle of the urban middle classes. It was rather popular because the number of engineers qualifying for the exams had dramatically increased in the past years and while many debated on the sense, or fallacy, of recruiting trained engineers for what was till then seen as the bastion of arts students, budding engineers starting preparing for the exams in their second or third year itself. The result was a stream of engineers joining the services, leading to a change in not only the educational background but also a change in the the social background of the recruits.

This, resulted in many of the recruits not ‘knowing’ the system, far less knowing how to navigate themselves within it.  Many learnt it the hard way, compromised, and became part of one clique or the other within the services. Some differed and maintained their professional integrity, even at great risk and cost to themselves.

Jasveer’s career in the police services illustrates this well, and resoundingly declares that the title of this post “The Honest Policeman” is not an oxymoron.

Excerpts from an article in The Hindustan Times.

They would soon know this young SP came as a package deal, warts and all: he doesn’t listen to anyone when in uniform. Many politicians would unconsciously wince at any mention of Jasvir. His stint as SP in Allahabad was also eventful and he had a great future. Or so he believed.

And that’s when things began to sour. The don was a big man now, with an avowed mission to finish off Jasvir. The young SP was soon reduced to making rounds of courts and the administrative headquarters of UP police. Jasvir faced 16 departmental inquiries and four near-dismissals. These are not corruption cases or of violation of criminals’ rights. But they drained him physically, emotionally and financially.

He had two attacks of facial paralysis, which laid him up at home for a year. And then during a brief hospitalisation for a minor illness he discovered he is diabetic.

“I mortgaged some village land,” he says, “to pay the lawyers.” Jasvir hired the best lawyers, who he says wryly “charged me their usual fees thinking I have piles of corruption money — being an SP”.

Appearing in court once, with reduced security, the don’s goons caught up with him. He managed to escape with a torn shirt. But that’s what life had become for him.

For many years now he is languishing in a department most IPS officers prefer only to retirement — food and civil supplies.

A few other links that I managed to salvage from the internet make references to his work in Raju Bhaiyya’s land.

Here is a report from Indian Express date lined Dec 15, 1997.

Jasveer Singh, an IPS officer, has sought security cover from the Uttar Pradesh Government, saying that there was threat to his life from Cabinet Minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya.

Jasveer Singh, the Commandant of the 30th PAC Battalion at Gonda, sent a request for protection to the State Home Secretary, Rajiv Ratan Shah.

Jasveer, who was SP, Pratapgarh, claimed that a number of fake cases were registered against him at the behest of the minister. The letter also said that the minister’s “henchmen” tried to corner him whenever he went “for these cases.” “There was even an attempt on my life while I was going to Allahabad,” he added. During his stint at Pratapgarh, Jasveer had headed a police raid at Raja Bhaiya’s residence in connection with the kidnapping of a Kanpur-based cloth merchant’s son.

A Frontline report dated Jan 10, 1998.

Take the case of Raghuraj Pratap Singh. Barely one and a half years ago, during the campaign for the Assembly elections, Kalyan Singh himself used strong words about this independent MLA from Kunda in Pratapgarh district. Addressing public meetings in the constituency, Kalyan Singh said that Raghuraj Pratap Singh had won successive elections on the strength of muscle power.

After a spectacular display of his combative skills in the Assembly in the aid of the BJP on the day the motion of confidence was passed, Raghuraj Pratap Singh became a Minister under Kalyan Singh. Recently, a senior police officer, Jasveer Singh, Commandant of the 30th Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) battalion, complained to Home Secretary Rajiv Ratan Shah that the Minister and his supporters were harassing him. He sought protection from the state. While serving in Pratapgarh, Jasveer Singh had initiated action against Raghuraj Pratap Singh.

The Chief Minister’s public response to this was that a police officer who cannot safeguard his own life has no business to be in the force. Jasveer Singh went on leave.

A report from rediff, dated 14 Sept 1999.

“If I disclosed my name to you that would amount to signing my death warrant,” observed an old man in Bhupia Mau village, explaining, “how impossible it was to live like a free citizen here.” Another elderly person points out, “if he can make the life of an upright district police chief like Jasbir Singh hell, so much so that he had to run for safety and seek a posting under the central government, then we are just cattle to him.” He was referring to R P Singh’s alleged witch-hunt against this IPS officer who challenged his extra-constitutional authority.

This is an excerpt from a rediff report dated 17 Feb 2002.

“We do good work,” says the head of Bihar constituency’s youth brigade. “I am only a humble servant of Raja Bhaiya, why do you want my name?” he asks an instant later (someone else, later, tells me he is named Babban Tiwari).

“We ensure that no dowry is asked or accepted, we take the ill to hospital and make sure they get treated,” Tiwari says. “We are there for the people, whatever they need. If people are harassed by the police we let Raja Bhaiya know and he handles it.”

Handles it, and how. When Jasbir Singh took over as district police chief, he decided to curb the power of the self-styled Raja who, by then, had become a local legend with his early morning horseback rides, his armed escorts, his goon squad, and his hair-trigger temper.

Raja Bhaiya hit back. Filing FIRs and such proved to be of no avail — Raja Bhaiya, remember, was a minister. Finally, the cop gave up, and sought a transfer outside the area. His successors, mindful of that lesson, now allow Raja Bhaiya free rein.

Between 1998 and now, Raja Bhaiya has consolidated his hold on the region to an extent unimaginable unless you actually travel through the place. The land is his. A 100-acre lake in the region is, de facto, his — the family exercises fishing rights over that body of water. The local cooperative bank is his. All of which effectively means that every single one of the locals is in his control.

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Technorati Tags: India, Jasvir, Jasveer, Police, Politics, Uttar Pradesh

Journalism- Then and Now

The 12th anniversary issue of Outlook (link via Abi) carries a discussion on the changes in journalism in the last twelve years, though I’d say that the changes started in the late 1980s.

Some of the most incisive insights are by P. Sainath. Here are a few excerpts from the discussion. All the comments below are by Sainath.

The biggest trend is the growing disconnect between the mass media and the mass reality. A very tiny Indian press, for a hundred years, served a very large social purpose, and tried to speak for the masses. Today, paradoxically, a gigantic Indian press serves a very narrow social purpose, which continues to narrow everyday
…

If 80 per cent of your revenues comes from advertising, and 20 per cent from sales—what that means is you’re going to give advertisers four times the importance you give readers. Their preferences and priorities take precedence
…

You see it in the simplest and most direct way: the organisation of beats.

Many beats have become extinct. Take the labour correspondent: when labour issues are covered at all, they come under the header of Industrial Relations, and they’re covered by the business correspondent. That means they’re covered by the guy whose job is to walk in the tracks of corporate leaders, and who, when he deigns to look at labour, does it through the eyes of corporate leaders. Now find me the agriculture columnist—in most newspapers, the idea doesn’t exist any more. If you lack correspondents on those two beats, you’re saying 70 per cent of the people in this country don’t matter, I don’t want to talk to them, they don’t make news.

That is, until the elections, when they screw the media’s happiness
…

Everyone keeps dividing journalism into serious and non-serious journalism—it’s a bogus division. What is called non-serious journalism is in fact a very serious business proposition, or at least it’s perceived as that by the media owners. They divide journalism into what’s serious…and what makes revenue.

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Technorati Tags: Journalism, India, Sainath, Globalization

Gulzar as a Poet and Lyricist

“Tum shayar nahin hotey, toh bahut hi ordinary aadmi hotey”

(Had you not been a poet, you would have been a very ordinary man”

These are the words of Aarti Devi, the ambitious, Indira Gandhi- like character in the movie Aandhi, directed towards her husband. The dialogues for this movie were written by Gulzar, and apparently this dialogue is inspired from the actual words that his wife once made in real life to him.

I personally do not have a very high opinion of Gulzar as a poet. In my opinion, Gulzar is far better as a dialogue writer than as a poet. As a poet, he is awkward, plays around with words that sound very well but have little or no poetic embellishment, sometimes making simple things sound more complex.

It still makes him a very fine lyricist, though, because music works as a distraction from the words, and then there are those flashes of brilliance. Take for example, one of the otherwise very fine songs: Humne dekhi hain in aankhon se mehakti khushboo”- eyes that smell like flowers? I find this one difficult to swallow. One can pull out many other examples, and probably this will be the subject of another post.

This post, however, brings out some discussions on his lyrics from deep down the internet archives- I first read them in the mid- 1990s, and this thread pertained to comparisons between Sahir Ludhianvi and Gulzar. The internet browsing community then was dominated by the fans of Sahir, I have a feeling that the tables have now turned and Sahir is less popular than Gulzar. A whole generation has grown up without listening to Sahir as much as it has  listened to Gulzar. The fact that Sahir died nearly three decades ago, and his best work was in the 1950s and 60s, makes sound him far less contemporary than Gulzar.

Sami Mohammad satirized Gulzar’s style in this interesting re- write of some of Sahir’s popular lyrics in the style of Gulzar. The thread was called “Gulzar becomes Sahir”. The style that Sami has chosen is more like the Gulzar of the 1970s and 1980s, I’d wager that the Gulzar post 1990s is more mature as a lyricist.

Enjoy!

PART I: Gulzar’s extraordinary vocabulary! (Words such as bartan, chappal, taxi,
bus, train, etc)

S. Sahir
G. Gulzar

1S. Haseen champaee pairon ko jabse dekha hai
    Nadi ki mast sadaen bula rahi hain tumhe

1G. Haseen champaee pairon ko jabse dekha hai
    Bata ki Hawaai chappal bula rahi hai tumhe

2S. Dil ki bechaen umangon pe karam farmaao
    Itna ruk ruk ke chalogi to quayaamat hogi

2G. Tum aaoge to noor aa jaega
    Itna ruk ruk ke chalogi to local train chooT jaegi

4S. Aap jo phool bichae unhe hum THukraaen
    Humko Dar hai ke ye tauheen-e-mohabbat hogi

4G. Tumne to aakaash bichaaya
    Mere nange paaon me zamin ki gard hai
    Mohabbat maili ho jaegi

5S. Pyaar par bas to nahin hai mera lekin phir bhi
    Tu bataade main tujhe pyaar karun ya na karun

5G. In pyaar ki lambi sadkon par, public bus to chalti nahin phir bhi
    Jo ghoomti phirti rehti hain, main woh taxi hire karun ya na karun

PART II: The complex Gulzar. Simple things expressed in an unnecessarily
complex manner. “Ghoomake dena” !

6S. Lo aaj humne toR diya rishta-e-ummeed
    Lo ab gila karenge na kisi se hum

6G. Neele aakaash ke ghoonsle par jo ummeed ke boodhe baba thhe unhe humne
    alvida keh diya
    Duniya ke samandar ko gile-shikwon ki boondh se na chheRenge hum

7S. Tum mujhe bhool bhi jaao to ye haq hai tumko
    Meri baat aur hai maine to mohabbat ki hai

7G. Sust raste aur tez quadam raahen tumhe meri yaad nahin dilaae to kya
    Pathhar ki haweli se sheeshe ke gharondon tak meri rooh tumhaare ehsaas ko
    mehsoos karegi

8S. GHam aur KHushi me farq na mehsoos ho jahan
    Main dil ko us muquaam pe laata chala gaya

8G. GHam ka kinara jahan KHushi ke kinare se bachkar kinare se milta hai
    Usi kinare par maine apne dil ke kinare ko kinare laga diya

9S. Tum agar mujhko na chaaho to koi baat nahin
    Tum kisi aur ko chahogi to mushkil hogi

9G. Tere bina zindagi se koi shikwa to nahin lekin
    Barfili sardion me kisi bhi pahaad par
    Bhool bhulayyan galion me kisi ajnabi ke saath
    Tumhe uRte hue dekhunga to mushkil hogi

10S. M: Hum aapko KHwaabon me la la ke sataenge
     F: Hum aapki aankhon se neenden hi uRaden to ?

10G. M: Hum aapko KHwaabon me la la ke sataenge

     F: Aankhon me neend na hogi, aansu hi tairte honge
        Aansu ke samandar me neend ki naaov (boat) nahin aa paaegi

PART III: The ultra-complex Gulzar. Jab kuchh samajhme na aae, then use
contradictory lines to make things look profound.

11S. Hum intezaar karenge tera quayamat tak
     KHuda kare ke quayamat ho aur tu aae

11G. Koi waada nahin kiya lekin, kyun tera intezaar rehta hai
     Tere aa jaane ke baad bhi, hume tera intezaar rehta hai

12S. Main pal do pal ka shaer hun
     Pal do pal meri kahani hai
     Pal do pal meri hasti hai
     Pal do pal meri jawani hai

13G. Main pal do pal ka shaer hun
     Woh pal, jo aanewaala thha, lekin jaanewaala bhi hai
     Jab main isme zindagi bitane ki sonchta hun
     To duniya mujhpe hansti hai

More on the Sahir vs Gulzar discussions.

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Technorati Tags: Urdu, Sahir, Gulzar, Bollywood, Poetry

Ramar Sethu and Common Sense

One does not have to be a Marxist to see common sense.

Romila Thapar writes on the Ramar Sethu controversy.

Some detailed discussion is necessary as to what would be the economic benefits of such a scheme in enhancing communication and exchange. Such benefits should also be seen in terms of the future of local livelihoods in case they are negatively affected. Are there plans for the occupational relocation of local communities that may at the end be at a disadvantage?  We have become a society so impressed with figures and graphs that we tend to forget that each number is actually a human being.

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Technorati Tags: Ramar Sethu, History, Romila Thapar, Rama, India

PC Joshi on Gandhi

There is pathetically little on the web about  PC Joshi, the General Secretary of the CPI in the thirties and forties. While searching for his letters to the Mahatma, I found this quote which is worth remembering on the latter’s birthday on 2nd October.

…the secret of Gandhi’s greatness lay not in the absence of human failings and foibles, but in his inner restlessness, ceaseless striving and intense involvement in the problems of mankind. He was not a slave to ideas and concepts, [which] were for him also aids in grappling with human problems, and were to be reconsidered if they did not work”

- P.C. Joshi,  in  Gandhi and Nehru (quoted here)

Photo Credit: Comrade Sunil Janah, the ace photographer of the CPI during Joshi’s days

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Technorati Tags: Gandhi, Mahatma, Quotation