Links

Dr Chamal Lal has a collection of some of the favourite Urdu couplets of Bhagat Singh, including a picture of the original in the young revolutionary’s own handwriting (right). Dr Lal reproduces the couplets in the nagari script as well.

achcha hai dil ke saath rahe paasbaan-e-akl
lekin kabhi- kabhi ise tanha bhi chod de

auron ka payam aur mera payam aur hai
ishk ke dard- mandon ka tarz e kalaam aur hai

akl kya cheez hai aik waza ki pabandi hai
dil ko muddat hui is kaid se azad kiya

Dr Manzur Ejaz, writing a series on People’s History of the Punjab, on the life and work of Shiekh Farid, considered to be the first poet of the Punjabi language.

Baba Farid had to face socio-economic and ideological difficulties like a common man at the hands of the new alien rulers and their religious establishment. In one of his couplets he characterised the relationship between the peasants and the plundering rulers:

Farida, eeh vis gandlan dhrian khand liwar
Ik rahidey reh gaey ik radhi gaey ujar

(O Farid, the poisonous stems are sugar-coated. Some tilled the land and the others plundered)

In the first line of the couplet the stems of growing plants are depicted as being wrapped up in sugar. To the tiller his plants look like sugar. Because they will bring him the sweetness of life. But he is unaware that these plants will become poison because his oppressors will take them and gain strength from his ( the tiller’s) produce and will oppress him even more than previously. In other words the tiller is producing for his death and not for life.

Helmut Murker reviews the 9 hour long film on Das Kapital directed by Alexander Kluge:

He is not filming “Das Kapital” but researching how one might find images to make Marx’s book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination. The model for his underlying structure is Joyce’s “Ulysses” where the entire history of the world is packed into a day in the life of his hero, Bloom. In Kluge’s hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry.