Poetry as Insurgent Art

I am signaling you through the flames

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

English in postcolonial India is a language of liberation and modernity

(This article appeared in an abridged version in Economic Times of India under Face off column, a few days before)

‘Hindi hain ham vatan hai Hindostaan hamaaraa’, when Mohd Iqbal wrote in his most popular, accepted nearly as the third national anthem ‘Saare jahaan se acchhaa …’ before independence and much before the partition in 1947, Hindi had entirely a different implication and its connotation. Hindi at that time, in colonial India, suggested more about a civilization well spread from Indus valley to doaba. It certainly not evoked any specific language, race or religion in the minds at the time. Hindavi was a zubaan of ordinary people who formed second largest linguistic community on earth.

How the same Hindi was transformed in to a ‘raaj-bhaashaa’ and ‘raashtra-bhaashaa’ and made to get associated with a distinct religious community dominated by a couple of Hindu castes, is not that cryptic process. Anyone aware about the politics of last 60 plus years understands it even if chooses to remain quiet.

In 2007, it was the first time ever; I was invited to become part of the government delegation sent to take part in ‘Vishva Hindi Sammelan’ at New York. Hundreds of Hindi writers were provided with business class air tickets and were put up in 5-7 star hotels like Hotel Radisson, Hotel Pennsylvania and Inter Continental etc. Courtesy to Ministry of HRD. Millions of money was spent to project Hindi as ‘Vishva Bhaashaa’ (World Language). Five days long function was held in UN building. Even the Secretary General of the UN was there to attend inaugural ceremony and was applauded when he disclosed that his son in law speaks Hindi. He also mumbled a few sentences in Hindi. Needless to say, a demand was raised by the organizers, led by the AICC General Secretary, Anand Shrma, that UN should accept Hindi as its working language like English, French and other languages.

The same evening, My US friend and translator, who teach Hindi in Chicago University, had some official work with one Mr. Pandey, the office bearer of Nagari Pracharini Sabha, one of the oldest and prime Hindi institute located in Benares. We came to know that Mr. Pandey has been put in Hotel Pennsylvania. When he reached there and asked for Mr. Pandey at the reception counter of the hotel, the counter girl started laughing. She said, ‘Please tell me the first name because there are more than a dozen Pandeys staying over here.’

It was not a joke. It was a factual statement about ‘Vishva Bhaashaa Hindi.’ I realized soon that more than 85% of the participants and more than 98% of the apex body of the organizers of VHS belonged to one Hindu caste and its sub castes.

According to one survey in TV, electronic and print media, one single caste has more than 78% monopoly over Hindi. In literature and academics situation is more precarious. If you find this statement dubious and vague, I request you to go and check about the people occupying all the places related to Hindi in capital. You’d stand before your findings terrified.

I was a young student of school when Dr. Lohiya raised the slogan of ‘Hindi hataao’. I also took part in wall writing and blackening English hoardings and sign panels with passion. But now, when Mulayam singh has raised this slogan again, I desist in saying it a farce of Lohiya’s tragedy. I stand against it. In my opinion, there might have been reasons before independence for great politicians like Mahatma Gandhi, C. Rajgopalachari, Chittaranjan Das and others coming from non Hindi states supporting Hindi as a ‘Raashtra Bhaashaa’. They might have felt about the necessity of a common unifying language in a multi-linguistic and multi cultural subcontinent to consolidate their struggle against British. English at that time would have logically been perceived as the language of colonial rulers.

But after these many post colonial years, situation has entirely changed. Hindi is now the language of ‘sarkaar, bazaar and sanchaar’ (government, market and media) and it has been monopolized by the dominant caste and religious group. Official Hindi has become a vehicle of obscurantism, communalism, blind nationalism and to top all casteism. You can watch TV channels or can leaf through any newspaper, you will see pooja, tyohars, superstitions, obscene pictures and all imaginable inferior stuff to form your opinion.

English, in post colonial India, has become a language of modernity and empowerment. Poor and low caste people and minorities as well know that Hindi will make them ‘naukar’ and English will escort them to the seat of the Master. Even kaamwali baai and dhobi have learnt this mantra. Obviously this is the reason they are enrolling their kids in English medium schools in spite they have to go through a harsh, stingy ascetic life.

If you ask me to give a slogan now, it would be like this: ’angrezi laao, desh bachao.’

Uday prakash

Mass Suicides in Indian Villages

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.
His family must repay a debt of 400 and the crop this year is poor.
"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."
"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."
Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."
Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.
"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.
All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.

SAARC Writers Conference Agra

Author is yet to die…

Uday Prakash
(Keynote Address)

We are living in a time when the death of author has already been pronounced by many scholars long before. Author was dead along with the ‘End of History’, it has been said so repeatedly since then that it appears as a truth.
And, when we look at it, it essentially comes out as a thoroughly factual statement. We, it seems, now are here, in 21st century, living posthumously. It’s a miserable life in posterity of some breed, class or font, ceased to exist anymore.
This year in January, I was making a small film on legendary Rajasthani author Vijaidan Detha, who had met with an accident and toiling to regain his lost memory, he said ‘ The age of writer is gone. In this town, where I live, out of 6000 people, it’s rare to find a person with book and with pen. They have mobiles in plenty, thousands of them.’ Obviously, I titled the film: ‘Author in the Age of Mobiles’.
Interestingly, the same celebrated thinker, Francis Fukuyama, who had pronounced the death of the history and the last man, in his new book ‘Our Posthumous Future’, makes an alteration about his earlier proclamation. He says:
‘Hegel had been right in saying that history had ended in 1806, since there had been no essential political progress beyond the principles of the French revolution, which he had seen consolidated by Napoleon’s victory in the battle of Jena that year. The collapse of socialism in 1989 signaled only the pronouncement of a broader convergence toward liberal democracy around the globe.’
Well, now just think about these two phrases, ‘Liberal Democracy’ and ‘Political Progress’. We, the authors, who are here today in Agra, coming from SAARC countries, must seek the genuine answers, we must make an effort to redefine and deliberate over these two phrases in our own contexts. Do we really have, or ever had, true liberal, modern democracies in our respective countries? Or have we sincerely witnessed ‘Political progress’ since we were told that we are now independent nations and its citizens? Is it true that we now taste the fruits of that utopia dreamed by Rousseau about ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ and so on? Had descendents of Gandhi, Marx and others have tried ever to create societies which have been transformed medieval , feudal, colonial shapes to a modern, tolerant, liberal and democratic one?
Obviously no! Not anywhere.
Time is dark and gets worsened when we see what’s happening all around. In 1980s we were told: ‘Nothing to worry. The Third Technological Revolution has arrived. Information Technology, along with electronics and bio-genetic labs, is going to create a fabulous, prosperous, peaceful ‘Global Village’ very soon. The new science has now replaced the old politics with its outdated technologies. A new technological civilization has arrived with its new-tech generation. These new drivers will take us to bigger horizons. We silly, unintelligent, childish authors started dreaming the dream of Sahir Ludhiyanvi : ‘Who subah kabhi to ayegi …!”
And what was the aftermath?
9/11, clash of civilizations, growing terrorism and its retaliatory violence, collateral damages, carpet bombings, dismantling of earlier nation-states, new torture centers, POTA and TADA, Special Arm Forces Acts, disregard of UN charter of Human Rights Declarations…..
Author, one of the most vulnerable and powerless creature, witnessed a ghastly, horrific nightmare everywhere. On one hand we saw multiple Airliners, Huge skyscrapers, shopping malls, metro rails and markets full with modern gadgets….! We saw beauty ramps, our girls becoming miss universe, miss world, our masala films getting Oscars…and hundreds of channels showing dance India dance, laughter challenges, reality shows…And on the other hand we saw Mumbai Terror attack, Cannaught place bomb explosions….genocides..Encounters…criminals occupying apex political positions, corrupts sitting on top bureaucratic seats of powers…
This part of Asia, where the new Sun was to rise in the middle of last century, is overwhelmed with darkness, drenching in the blood of its own people….
And we also witnessed conflicts of all sorts, most violent and always on rise. These conflicts are fragmenting all grand-narratives in to narrow, tiny, sectarian pieces. Our minds and souls are restructured, our identities as a modern author has been confiscated and we are given now most retrogressive, obscure, and disgraceful identities of our religion, caste, race, color etc…Time here is now rolling back.
Unfortunately, we the citizens of South Asian countries do not have a homogenous society like most of the western countries. We are plural societies with a great variance of multiple races, religions, languages, castes, colors, cultures and so on. And we also see growing hostilities between all SAARC countries. In fact, they appear in state of a war now. TV channels, news papers are attempting relentlessly to make us all warmongers, enemies of each other. Forces are now on their business to convert us in to subhuman, soulless consumerists, greedy debauches, neo-colonial bastards and citizens of empire.
Castism in my country has been equal to communalism and racism. According to one survey, conducted by CSDS a single caste and its sub-castes monopolize the language I write and live in i.e. Hindi.
I end up this somber note citing about one anecdote. Last year I scripted a film, which was based on my own novella Mohan Das. It was a story a lower caste dalit, who has lost his identity. Mightier do take away everything here in my beloved country as they do in Panama or Pakistan. This film had its premiere in Osian Film Festival, New Delhi, in July 2008. I was not invited, as writers have hardly any space in Bollywood film world. I was passing through a bad stretch of time and was completely down and out.
I was in my village, in Madhya Pradesh searching for modes of survival. It was 19th July, 2008. I had sunk in to depressions. Suddenly my cell phone rang. I picked it up. Ajeet Cour ji was on the other side. Her voice was trembling:
‘Uday ji, I had cried only three times in my entire life. But today, watching Mohan Das, I wept seven times….”
I know she is an author. I’m an author too. Our identities have been taken away. We are Mohan Das and we have strong bonds with each other.
Let us be together…lets cling to each other….lets raise our voices…
Lets make a pronouncement here at Agra, a city of love that History might have ended, we are not concerned with that, but words are still living…
Words are ‘power inscribed’….so the author will remain the final ‘authority; to give a verdict against all other powers…
Jai Ho !!
13th March, 2009

Remembering Harold Pinter

Is Our Conscience Dead ?
Ann Wright

Friday 26 December 2008
On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptance speech. I was in London in December 2005, speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech - not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.
I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Nobel Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight on the tragic effects of the past decades of US foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.
Pinter's Laureate speech question, "Is Our Conscience Dead?" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech, "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or, as in Cheney's case - purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable.
Following is the part of Pinter's lecture that speaks to the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo - and our collective and individual conscience:
"Art, Truth and Politics" Noble Lecture by Harold Pinter December 7, 2005
"... The United States no longer ... sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.
It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?
Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture.
What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?
More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and show no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
I hope you will decide that yes, we do have a conscience and that you will join the millions of Americans who say we must hold accountable those who have committed criminal acts while in government - the policy makers as well as the implementers.
Write and call the new President and the new Congress and demand official investigations into war crimes and other criminal acts committed by members of the Bush administration and join us on Inauguration day to remind the new President of his responsibilities.

From Mumbai to Obama: End Bush's 'War on Terror'

By Steve Weissman

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai call out to President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors to rethink the signature blunder of George W. Bush's eight years in office - the so-called War on Terror. As US intelligence reports have made clear, the centerpiece of the supposed campaign against terror, the military occupation of Iraq, has increased the likelihood of more attacks like those in Mumbai, Madrid, London and Manhattan. The new escalation in Afghanistan will similarly increase terrorist attacks there, in neighboring India and Pakistan, in disputed Kashmir, and throughout the world.
Bush and Cheney chose the word "war" with malice aforethought. From the start, they intended a military response, first against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And, as Barton Gellman shows so brilliantly in his book "Angler," Dick Cheney and his team consciously wanted to create a wartime presidency with enormous unchecked power and scant regard for basic American liberties.
By contrast, Obama's advisors openly acknowledge that military force alone will never bring victory over terrorism. They would, in addition, provide more economic aid, use counter-insurgency tactics to pacify local populations, and work with surrounding regional powers, including Iran.
But Obama and his people still talk far too much about using military force and delude themselves into believing that the physical defeat of Al-Qaeda will significantly weaken the current terrorist threat.
Though it's still too early to know who staged the attacks in Mumbai, they were most likely militant jihadis, possibly with links to Kashmiri rebels and renegade elements of Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI. Al-Qaeda may or may not have played a role in the planning.
But even if Al-Qaeda did, how would killing Osama bin Laden - if he's still alive - or hanging all of his top aides, or hammering the Taliban in any way defuse the toxic brew of often justified grievances and outrageous religious fanaticism that we now face? The enemy is not a single man, and not a single group. It is a movement of shared ideas and beliefs, all too often encouraged by Washington's pursuit of policies that are both unjust and counter-productive.
The terrorist bloodshed started long before bin Laden and will continue long after his dialysis machine packs up. No magic bullet will end it, but military boots on other people's ground will almost always make matters worse. That's what they did in Iraq. That's what they are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What bin Laden added to the mix was the well-articulated idea that terrorist attacks could promote a clash of civilizations, or holy war. With his War on Terror, George W. Bush, the Crusader-in-Chief, responded exactly as bin Laden wanted, turning moderate Muslims around the world into terrorist supporters, funders, and enablers. Why would Obama want to continue the madness?
To gain perspective, Obama might ask his advisers to brief him on the very different wave of terrorism that spread from Russia, through Europe, and into the United States between 1881 and 1914. The terrorists were mostly anarchists, and they killed, among others, Czar Alexander II, King Umberto I of Italy, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, and the president of the United States, William McKinley.
The assassinations shook the established powers throughout the Western world. One terrorist, a Bosnian nationalist, even triggered War I when he assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in historic Sarajevo.
The new media of the time, the daily newspaper, naturally exaggerated the threat, spreading the terrifying specter of the crazed anarchist bomb-thrower. Just as naturally, the papers gave considerably less coverage to another image of the age - that of the government-paid agent provocateur.
In time, the anarchists themselves saw that their violence, their propaganda of the deed, was not sparking the revolutionary movement they wanted, and they turned instead toward organizing workers into unions. But, even at the time of the greatest murder and mayhem, I can think of no government that ever went anywhere near as far as the Bush administration in making the fight against terrorism a question of military force.
Today's terrorists have far more deadly weapons at their disposal, as Dick Cheney always told us. But today's police and intelligence services have more than enough technology to meet the threat. What they need is far greater international cooperation, which a reliance on the military makes more difficult.
Similarly, Islamic societies around the world have more than enough creativity to see the dead end into which terrorism leads. What they need is time and space to adapt to a changing world.
Barack Obama is in a unique position to build cooperation and encourage Muslims everywhere to find their own way forward. Happily, he has made a good start by announcing that he will close Guantánamo and end the horrors of torture. He has also raised the hope, however faint, that he will work toward a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians and between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Even more to the point, his pledge to build a green economy will reduce any argument for continuing American support of despotic governments in countries with large reserves of oil and natural gas.
All this is promising. But it remains only a promise, and all of it will come to naught if Obama gives the orders to continue killing people and breaking things wherever and whenever the United States wants.

MOHANDAS : ABDUCTED, LYNCHED AND TORTURED

I’m back to Delhi, the capital of India, a country I loved so much since the arrival of my breath in wind of my small village. It was quite more than three months long wanderings in another planet enduring anyhow in the same nation-state.. My small village, Sitapur is just struggling to survive under the clutches of builders, contractors, corrupt officials and politicians who have one genetic consistency amongst them which owns greed and violence as their DNA distinctiveness.
They must be tested for it, medically and neurologically.
My novella Mohandas was born here, in the same soil, under the same sky, at the bank of the same river Soan, where I was born too around 56 years in the past.
Mohandas was never a fiction, a handiwork of imagination, an objet d'art created through arduous skills in a language named Hindi. It was not a daydreaming or scaring nightmare. Mohandas was and is never a fantasy….
It ‘s too real. Corporal truth about the life of us all working, moral and powerless subjects of this mighty corporate-political state. It’s a narrative which narrates its time and its helplessness. A gloomy, pessimistic saga of our life which succeeds to continue anyhow.
Well, Mohandas became very popular in no time throughout India. It’s translated in to almost all Indian languages, including English, which also is an Indian language without any snag. It has been played and being played as theatrical performances in big and small cities well spread over the country.
However, like ‘The Girl with the Golden Parasol’ (Peelee Chhatari waali Ladkee) this novella too created chaos and mess in my life. Now my being, I deeply feel, is an subversive act of clinging to life in a political, dehumanized, business minded state.
Irony or tragic comicality was here. If you remember, the novella Mohandas was dedicated to a lawyer who had taken up his case to the judicial magistrate, to my shock, the lawyer is now the Secretary of the Lions Club. A city club of businessmen and contractors. At the same time he is also the district secretary of the Communist Party of India.
So, things have changed very soon. History has ended and pragmatism has replaced ideologies. I visited the lawyers chamber, it’s equipped with split AC and interiors are lavish with expensive furnitures.
Well where Mohandas will go? And me, his author? Unemployed, uprooted…..! Money and power has snatched away our identities. I exactly remember the time when I wrote Mohandas three years before. I’d gone back to my village in search of survival as I was rejected by the selection committees for a University and an Academy. The member got his own son in law appointed in the same university and had full support of power centers of capital’s Hindi elites. Now, when I read a newspaper I found that the man who was selected for the post I was contender, is found guilty of sexual abuse and exploitation of a research student and an inquiry is on.
I know, nothing will happen. He’ll come out smiling in the same way as Vishwanath smiles as a victor, impersonating as Mohandas, seizing his identity. They are the Brahmins. Our life has been subjugated and slaved by them. Hindi is their colony.
Yes, Mohandas is made in to a feature film, produced by another Brahmin, who has nothing beside power and money and ambitions. Although he’s running his ‘production company’ faking it with his wife’s name in actuality he’s a government official. One can guess about his resources of wealth in today’s India very well.
I thank to media and media critics who came out questioning my absence during the Osian Film Festival and I also thank Osian people for displaying my name in all their banners and folios.
But the news is that film Mohandas repeated the same tragedy, perhaps as a farce this time with his author and writer.
I sincerely oppose it and criticize it.
I wrote a poem just before I left to my native land (Remember the brilliant poem by Amme Cesare : Return to My Native Land). The poem I wrote is about Delhi and its title is ‘Dayaar’. It’s published in a small magazine ‘samved’ edited by Kishan Kaljayi. I’ve been receiving many phone calls since then.
Yes, my friends …I’m down and out…
And the truth is, I’ve not opted for it !
I’ll write more very soon about all this.