Aug 29, 2007
Words do play magics
Charles Simic
Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.
His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition.
His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008), My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.
His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition.
His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008), My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
Country Fair
If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.
From Hotel Insomnia, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.
Eyes Fastened With Pins
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.
I read these poems and liked them immensely…so you also share the pleasure with me..
Uday Prakash
Aug 24, 2007
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
May 24, 2007
CHILDREN OF DUST
IMPRISONING A WHOLE NATION
John Pilger
Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft. Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth. "Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] . . ." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported.
The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children". Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship.
The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this. With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . ." On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director . . . The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation." The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants. More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15.
Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare. I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians. There are honourable exceptions.
The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply. A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel.
"The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions . . . If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]." When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.
John Pilger's latest book, "Freedom Next Time", is published in the US by Nation Books. His film, "The War on Democracy", is released in the UK on 15 June
John Pilger
Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft. Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth. "Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] . . ." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported.
The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children". Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship.
The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this. With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . ." On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director . . . The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation." The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants. More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15.
Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare. I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians. There are honourable exceptions.
The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply. A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel.
"The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions . . . If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]." When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.
John Pilger's latest book, "Freedom Next Time", is published in the US by Nation Books. His film, "The War on Democracy", is released in the UK on 15 June
May 16, 2007
A Simple Key to Unlock Giant's Castle
Anti-capitalism in five minutes or less
Robert Jensen
We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.
How do we know all this?
Because we are told so, relentlessly -- typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy. We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim.
Could this really be the only option?
We're told we shouldn't even think about such things. But we can't help thinking -- is this really the "end of history," in the sense that big thinkers have used that phrase to signal the final victory of global capitalism? If this is the end of history in that sense, we wonder, can the actual end of the planet far behind? We wonder, we fret, and these thoughts nag at us -- for good reason.
Capitalism -- or, more accurately, the predatory corporate capitalism that defines and dominates our lives -- will be our death if we don't escape it. Crucial to progressive politics is finding the language to articulate that reality, not in outdated dogma that alienates but in plain language that resonates with people. We should be searching for ways to explain to co-workers in water-cooler conversations -- radical politics in five minutes or less -- why we must abandon predatory corporate capitalism. If we don't, we may well be facing the end times, and such an end will bring rupture not rapture. Here's my shot at the language for this argument.
Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable.
Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children. In short, either we change or we die -- spiritually, politically, literally.
1. Capitalism is inhuman
There is a theory behind contemporary capitalism. We're told that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, an economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behavior if we are to thrive economically. Are we greedy and self-interested? Of course. At least I am, sometimes. But we also just as obviously are capable of compassion and selflessness. We certainly can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity for solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. Our actions are certainly rooted in our nature, but all we really know about that nature is that it is widely variable. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend toward such behavior. Why is it that we must choose an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the most inhuman? Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest. So, the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn't that seem just a bit circular?
2. Capitalism is anti-democratic
This one is easy. Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. Is there any historical example to the contrary? For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary United States, everyone understands that the wealthy dictates the basic outlines of the public policies that are acceptable to the vast majority of elected officials. People can and do resist, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate.
Is this any way to run a democracy?
If we understand democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
Let's make this concrete.
In our system, we believe that regular elections with the one-person/one-vote rule, along with protections for freedom of speech and association, guarantee political equality. When I go to the polls, I have one vote. When Bill Gates goes the polls, he has one vote. Bill and I both can speak freely and associate with others for political purposes. Therefore, as equal citizens in our fine democracy, Bill and I have equal opportunities for political power. Right?
3. Capitalism is unsustainable
This one is even easier. Capitalism is a system based on the idea of unlimited growth. The last time I checked, this is a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this one. Perhaps we will be hopping to a new planet soon. Or perhaps, because we need to figure out ways to cope with these physical limits, we will invent ever-more complex technologies to transcend those limits. Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems. They tend, in fact, to cause more problems. Those problems seem to be piling up. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air.
A tale of two acronyms: TGIF and TINA
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous response to a question about challenges to capitalism was TINA -- There Is No Alternative. If there is no alternative, anyone who questions capitalism is crazy.
Here's another, more common, acronym about life under a predatory corporate capitalism: TGIF -- Thank God It's Friday. It's a phrase that communicates a sad reality for many working in this economy -- the jobs we do are not rewarding, not enjoyable, and fundamentally not worth doing. We do them to survive. Then on Friday we go out and get drunk to forget about that reality, hoping we can find something during the weekend that makes it possible on Monday to, in the words of one songwriter, "get up and do it again."
Remember, an economic system doesn't just produce goods. It produces people as well. Our experience of work shapes us. Our experience of consuming those goods shapes us. Increasingly, we are a nation of unhappy people consuming miles of aisles of cheap consumer goods, hoping to dull the pain of unfulfilling work.
Is this who we want to be?
We're told TINA in a TGIF world. Doesn't that seem a bit strange? Is there really no alternative to such a world?
Of course there is. Anything that is the product of human choices can be chosen differently. We don't need to spell out a new system in all its specifics to realize there always are alternatives. We can encourage the existing institutions that provide a site of resistance (such as labor unions) while we experiment with new forms (such as local cooperatives). But the first step is calling out the system for what it is, without guarantees of what's to come.
Home and abroad In the First World, we struggle with this alienation and fear. We often don't like the values of the world around us; we often don't like the people we've become; we often are afraid of what's to come of us. But in the First World, most of us eat regularly. That's not the case everywhere. Let's focus not only on the conditions we face within a predatory corporate capitalist system, living in the most affluent country in the history of the world, but also put this in a global context. Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. That's more than 3 billion people. Just over half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than $1 a day. That's more than 300 million people. How about one more statistic: About 500 children in Africa die from poverty-related diseases, and the majority of those deaths could be averted with simple medicines or insecticide-treated nets. That's 500 children -- not every year, or every month or every week. That's not 500 children every day. Poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 children an hour in Africa. When we try to hold onto our humanity, statistics like that can make us crazy. But don't get any crazy ideas about changing this system.
Remember TINA: There is no alternative to predatory corporate capitalism.
TGILS: Thank God It's Last Sunday We have been gathering on Last Sunday precisely to be crazy together. We've come together to give voice to things that we know and feel, even when the dominant culture tells us that to believe and feel such things is crazy. Maybe everyone here is a little crazy. So, let's make sure we're being realistic. It's important to be realistic.
One of the common responses I hear when I critique capitalism is, "Well, that may all be true, but we have to be realistic and do what's possible." By that logic, to be realistic is to accept a system that is inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable. To be realistic we are told we must capitulate to a system that steals our souls, enslaves us to concentrated power, and will someday destroy the planet. But rejecting and resisting a predatory corporate capitalism is not crazy. It is an eminently sane position. Holding onto our humanity is not crazy. Defending democracy is not crazy. And struggling for a sustainable future is not crazy. What is truly crazy is falling for the con that an inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable system -- one that leaves half the world's people in abject poverty -- is all that there is, all that there ever can be, all that there ever will be. If that were true, then soon there will be nothing left, for anyone. I do not believe it is realistic to accept such a fate. If that's being realistic, I'll take crazy any day of the week, every Sunday of the month.
Robert Jensen
We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.
How do we know all this?
Because we are told so, relentlessly -- typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy. We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim.
Could this really be the only option?
We're told we shouldn't even think about such things. But we can't help thinking -- is this really the "end of history," in the sense that big thinkers have used that phrase to signal the final victory of global capitalism? If this is the end of history in that sense, we wonder, can the actual end of the planet far behind? We wonder, we fret, and these thoughts nag at us -- for good reason.
Capitalism -- or, more accurately, the predatory corporate capitalism that defines and dominates our lives -- will be our death if we don't escape it. Crucial to progressive politics is finding the language to articulate that reality, not in outdated dogma that alienates but in plain language that resonates with people. We should be searching for ways to explain to co-workers in water-cooler conversations -- radical politics in five minutes or less -- why we must abandon predatory corporate capitalism. If we don't, we may well be facing the end times, and such an end will bring rupture not rapture. Here's my shot at the language for this argument.
Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable.
Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children. In short, either we change or we die -- spiritually, politically, literally.
1. Capitalism is inhuman
There is a theory behind contemporary capitalism. We're told that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, an economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behavior if we are to thrive economically. Are we greedy and self-interested? Of course. At least I am, sometimes. But we also just as obviously are capable of compassion and selflessness. We certainly can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity for solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. Our actions are certainly rooted in our nature, but all we really know about that nature is that it is widely variable. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend toward such behavior. Why is it that we must choose an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the most inhuman? Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest. So, the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn't that seem just a bit circular?
2. Capitalism is anti-democratic
This one is easy. Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. Is there any historical example to the contrary? For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary United States, everyone understands that the wealthy dictates the basic outlines of the public policies that are acceptable to the vast majority of elected officials. People can and do resist, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate.
Is this any way to run a democracy?
If we understand democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
Let's make this concrete.
In our system, we believe that regular elections with the one-person/one-vote rule, along with protections for freedom of speech and association, guarantee political equality. When I go to the polls, I have one vote. When Bill Gates goes the polls, he has one vote. Bill and I both can speak freely and associate with others for political purposes. Therefore, as equal citizens in our fine democracy, Bill and I have equal opportunities for political power. Right?
3. Capitalism is unsustainable
This one is even easier. Capitalism is a system based on the idea of unlimited growth. The last time I checked, this is a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this one. Perhaps we will be hopping to a new planet soon. Or perhaps, because we need to figure out ways to cope with these physical limits, we will invent ever-more complex technologies to transcend those limits. Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems. They tend, in fact, to cause more problems. Those problems seem to be piling up. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air.
A tale of two acronyms: TGIF and TINA
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous response to a question about challenges to capitalism was TINA -- There Is No Alternative. If there is no alternative, anyone who questions capitalism is crazy.
Here's another, more common, acronym about life under a predatory corporate capitalism: TGIF -- Thank God It's Friday. It's a phrase that communicates a sad reality for many working in this economy -- the jobs we do are not rewarding, not enjoyable, and fundamentally not worth doing. We do them to survive. Then on Friday we go out and get drunk to forget about that reality, hoping we can find something during the weekend that makes it possible on Monday to, in the words of one songwriter, "get up and do it again."
Remember, an economic system doesn't just produce goods. It produces people as well. Our experience of work shapes us. Our experience of consuming those goods shapes us. Increasingly, we are a nation of unhappy people consuming miles of aisles of cheap consumer goods, hoping to dull the pain of unfulfilling work.
Is this who we want to be?
We're told TINA in a TGIF world. Doesn't that seem a bit strange? Is there really no alternative to such a world?
Of course there is. Anything that is the product of human choices can be chosen differently. We don't need to spell out a new system in all its specifics to realize there always are alternatives. We can encourage the existing institutions that provide a site of resistance (such as labor unions) while we experiment with new forms (such as local cooperatives). But the first step is calling out the system for what it is, without guarantees of what's to come.
Home and abroad In the First World, we struggle with this alienation and fear. We often don't like the values of the world around us; we often don't like the people we've become; we often are afraid of what's to come of us. But in the First World, most of us eat regularly. That's not the case everywhere. Let's focus not only on the conditions we face within a predatory corporate capitalist system, living in the most affluent country in the history of the world, but also put this in a global context. Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. That's more than 3 billion people. Just over half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than $1 a day. That's more than 300 million people. How about one more statistic: About 500 children in Africa die from poverty-related diseases, and the majority of those deaths could be averted with simple medicines or insecticide-treated nets. That's 500 children -- not every year, or every month or every week. That's not 500 children every day. Poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 children an hour in Africa. When we try to hold onto our humanity, statistics like that can make us crazy. But don't get any crazy ideas about changing this system.
Remember TINA: There is no alternative to predatory corporate capitalism.
TGILS: Thank God It's Last Sunday We have been gathering on Last Sunday precisely to be crazy together. We've come together to give voice to things that we know and feel, even when the dominant culture tells us that to believe and feel such things is crazy. Maybe everyone here is a little crazy. So, let's make sure we're being realistic. It's important to be realistic.
One of the common responses I hear when I critique capitalism is, "Well, that may all be true, but we have to be realistic and do what's possible." By that logic, to be realistic is to accept a system that is inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable. To be realistic we are told we must capitulate to a system that steals our souls, enslaves us to concentrated power, and will someday destroy the planet. But rejecting and resisting a predatory corporate capitalism is not crazy. It is an eminently sane position. Holding onto our humanity is not crazy. Defending democracy is not crazy. And struggling for a sustainable future is not crazy. What is truly crazy is falling for the con that an inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable system -- one that leaves half the world's people in abject poverty -- is all that there is, all that there ever can be, all that there ever will be. If that were true, then soon there will be nothing left, for anyone. I do not believe it is realistic to accept such a fate. If that's being realistic, I'll take crazy any day of the week, every Sunday of the month.
May 10, 2007
Paul Gomra : The Deranged Poet of Highway by Amitava Kumar
The real task for Indian writers-at home or abroad-is to contemplate these thorny questions of illusion and substance, guns and books, bombs and education. Neither the writer nor the scientist can save the world by herself. Or escape it entirely. That is the plain truth of the nuclear bomb, which makes visible the limits of our fantasies of withdrawal. When it explodes, it will finish you, wherever you reside, however mobile your republic.
Of course, Arundhati Roy is hardly the only Indian who finds solace in fantasy. In Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), Pico Iyer argued that the whole country "suffers from a kind of elephantiasis of the imagination." Like Theroux, Iyer is quick to raise loquacity to a national trait, and he approvingly quotes John Russell's claim that "Indians are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers." In Iyer's opinion, India's yakkers are reflected in the loud, vulgar, masala films of Bollywood-the eight hundred or more "epic concoctions" made in India each year. Iyer writes: "When it came to the production of dreams-or gods-India had the biggest, busiest, noisiest industry in the world."
In short stories collected in Love and Longing in Bombay (1997),Vikram Chandra takes Iyer's insight to heart, inflecting his stories with the garish grandeur of Hindi films. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, makes no pretense of producing radical fiction. And in shedding the middle-class writer's impulse to speak in the voice of the underclass, he produces stories that offer a stark portrait of India's urban elite. The only drawback of this approach is that, swayed by the delusions of the ruling class, Chandra reaches laughably simplistic conclusions about history. He ends one story with the dramatic announcement that it was a marriage between two leading families that determined the flow of transnational capital and the longevity of governments in India.
Perhaps because Chandra narrates these stories from the security of the Indian bourgeoisie, they convey a confidence that is lacking in the fiction that addresses the lives of Indians living outside the national borders. In some of the better stories, like "Kama" and "Artha," one detects a refreshing quality that can only be described as contemporary. In these stories, the reader encounters a female software engineer at work, wellknown Bombay bars, a homosexual relationship, and untranslated snippets of Mehdi Hassan's popularghazals. There is a bold ordinariness to this presentation. The India of these stories is one in which neither tradition nor modernity holds unchallenged sway: its urban centers have been altered decisively by migrations and industry, slums and high finance, crime and films. The eruptions of urban speech in these tales reveal a new India that is at once more crude and more complex than anything the fabulists have been able to conjure.
Like the Hindi films that give his book its dramatic backdrop, Chandra's stories paint a world of urban glitz, heartbreaking romance, and petty intrigue. And, as in some Hindi films, this high-gloss surface is rent by explosions of fundamentalist violence. The stories attest to the citizens of today's India, who find their lives unavoidably mixed: Hindus and Muslims live as lovers, Christians and Hindus help each other as workers. Yet Chandra does not seem interested in pushing these complex relationships any further. Artists like the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan have started to dissect the conspiratorial relationship between Indian masculinity and religious fundamentalism, but Chandra barely hints at a connection. Is it because he feels that ordinary folks-as opposed to card-carrying communists-are incapable of understanding the reality that surrounds them? Amid all the talk of fundamentalist violence, why is Chandra silent about the mohala committees, the civic groups? In any case, wouldn't Chandra know from watching Hindi films that even ordinary people can become heroic?
This last notion, I'm pleased to report, has not gone entirely unnoticed in contemporary Indian literature. His teacher may have been Hollywood rather than Bollywood, but Dinesh D'Souza has nevertheless produced Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (I997)-a tome that proves garishness and grandiosity are not the sole province of Indian film. It is a thick book. There are a lot of non-Indians yakking at length on the dust jacket about the book's worth. Tom Wolfe writes, "This marvelous book will drive the intellectual establishment-the conservative cadre as well as the liberal legionsstraight up the wall. It convincingly demonstrates Ronald Reagan's moral, political and-yes! I'm afraid so!-intellectual superiority to the entire lot of them."
I bought the book, but I have not been able to finish it. I stopped reading many times, but after page forty, I found I could not go on. On that page, where my adventure with the book ended forever, D'Souza cites a poem written by Reagan-every bit as fantastical as contemporary Indian literature, but perilously underspiced-as an illustration of Reagan's "gift for hope."
I wonder what it's all about, and why We suffer so, when little things go wrong? We make our life a struggle When life should be a song.
But what of those writers who, unlike D'Souza and Naipaul and Divakaruni, do not write in English? Would the reviewer from the New Republic, heralding the new Indian "masterpieces," know any more about this other Indian literature than Macaulay knew about the whole Indian literary tradition? What is Salman Rushdie missing out on?
One example of the literature that has escaped the current boom is "Paul Gomra Ka Scooter" [Paul Gomra's scooter], by the Hindi writer Uday Prakash. The eponymous protagonist of Prakash's short story is a Hindi poet who works at a newspaper in New Delhi. Paul Gomra was born Ram Gopal Saksenaa typical Hindu name. But, the narrator informs us, as a result of "technological and social changes, globalization, information and communication revolutions, the end of socialism, and the spread of markets across the entire planet," names like Ram Gopal Saksena had begun to seem "backward, narrow-minded and lower-class." Consequently, our hero took the "pal" out of "Ram Gopal" and made it "Paul"; then, he took up the remaining "Ram Go" and turned it around to read "Gomra."With this nominal change, he joined figures-real and imagined-of cultural and political importance on the current Indian scene. "No doubt this name became one on par with the names of Apache Indian, Louis Banks, Remu Fernandez, Sam Pitroda or T. K. Banji. In fact, T. K. Banji became 'Banji' from Tushar Kanti Banerjee."
After changing his name to Paul Gomra, the former Ram Gopal Saksena does something equally momentous: he buys a scooter. This latter decision is precipitated by the fact that, all around him, people have begun to travel in new cars "with names like Maruti, Cielo, Zen, Sierra, Sumo, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and whatnot." While these people "reached new, impossible destinations," Paul Gomra felt he "was dragging behind time like a worm, a centipede, a turtle, a snail."
As it happens, the new scooter doesn't help matters any: Paul Gomra does not know how to drive it. Its gleaming skeleton begins to rot outside his apartment. Finally, Paul finds a man who is able to drive the scooter to work; he accompanies the man as a rider. In the hours that he must wait each night for this man's work to end so he can catch a ride home, Paul Gomra rediscovers his passion for poetry. One night, he goes to a glamorous literary event in New Delhi. The reader gets only a muddled, secondhand account of the evening's events: we hear that Gomra drunkenly berated the assembled guests for their worship of officialdom; he gave them a lecture on the scooter as a revolutionary tool; he fulminated against Delhi; he said the countryside had not vanished. "Dinosaurs become extinct," Paul seems to have shouted. "The ant survives, you thieves! Delhi will become history, but Gurgaon will remain alive." On the ride back home, Paul Gomra and his friend met with a mysterious accident. Hours later, they are found and admitted to a hospital, but Paul Gomra disappears three days later. We hear of a deranged highway poet who has taken up a pre-Independence slogan: "Quit India!" But already, his memory has begun to vanish; all that's left are twisted remains of Paul Gomra's scooter and the yellowing diary pages locked inside the scooter's trunk. On the last page, dated August I5, I995-the date when India celebrates its independence each yearare the words of Paul Gomra's last poem:
Paul Gomra, the deranged poet of the highway, the specter that now haunts the roots and the routes of the Indian nation, is a kind of travel writer, an elegiac wanderer who mourns lives that have been lost. Paul Gomra's angry voice arises from his impossible identity: he belongs neither to the old world he has left with his new name, nor to the new world that he cannot quite reach on his scooter. You might say Ram Gopal Saksena is the archetypal postcolonial: with wit and some sadness, but with his eyes fully open, he changes his name. He has the courage to step into a new world that has no place for him. Ram Gopal Saksena knows he cannot last, even as Paul Gomra. Prakash's story is a fable about survival amid the forces that have legislated extinction for all. Paul Gomra-like his creator, Uday Prakash, or like Sir Vidia himselfknows very well that he will not be liked any better if he stops yakking.
Of course, Arundhati Roy is hardly the only Indian who finds solace in fantasy. In Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), Pico Iyer argued that the whole country "suffers from a kind of elephantiasis of the imagination." Like Theroux, Iyer is quick to raise loquacity to a national trait, and he approvingly quotes John Russell's claim that "Indians are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers." In Iyer's opinion, India's yakkers are reflected in the loud, vulgar, masala films of Bollywood-the eight hundred or more "epic concoctions" made in India each year. Iyer writes: "When it came to the production of dreams-or gods-India had the biggest, busiest, noisiest industry in the world."
In short stories collected in Love and Longing in Bombay (1997),Vikram Chandra takes Iyer's insight to heart, inflecting his stories with the garish grandeur of Hindi films. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, makes no pretense of producing radical fiction. And in shedding the middle-class writer's impulse to speak in the voice of the underclass, he produces stories that offer a stark portrait of India's urban elite. The only drawback of this approach is that, swayed by the delusions of the ruling class, Chandra reaches laughably simplistic conclusions about history. He ends one story with the dramatic announcement that it was a marriage between two leading families that determined the flow of transnational capital and the longevity of governments in India.
Perhaps because Chandra narrates these stories from the security of the Indian bourgeoisie, they convey a confidence that is lacking in the fiction that addresses the lives of Indians living outside the national borders. In some of the better stories, like "Kama" and "Artha," one detects a refreshing quality that can only be described as contemporary. In these stories, the reader encounters a female software engineer at work, wellknown Bombay bars, a homosexual relationship, and untranslated snippets of Mehdi Hassan's popularghazals. There is a bold ordinariness to this presentation. The India of these stories is one in which neither tradition nor modernity holds unchallenged sway: its urban centers have been altered decisively by migrations and industry, slums and high finance, crime and films. The eruptions of urban speech in these tales reveal a new India that is at once more crude and more complex than anything the fabulists have been able to conjure.
Like the Hindi films that give his book its dramatic backdrop, Chandra's stories paint a world of urban glitz, heartbreaking romance, and petty intrigue. And, as in some Hindi films, this high-gloss surface is rent by explosions of fundamentalist violence. The stories attest to the citizens of today's India, who find their lives unavoidably mixed: Hindus and Muslims live as lovers, Christians and Hindus help each other as workers. Yet Chandra does not seem interested in pushing these complex relationships any further. Artists like the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan have started to dissect the conspiratorial relationship between Indian masculinity and religious fundamentalism, but Chandra barely hints at a connection. Is it because he feels that ordinary folks-as opposed to card-carrying communists-are incapable of understanding the reality that surrounds them? Amid all the talk of fundamentalist violence, why is Chandra silent about the mohala committees, the civic groups? In any case, wouldn't Chandra know from watching Hindi films that even ordinary people can become heroic?
This last notion, I'm pleased to report, has not gone entirely unnoticed in contemporary Indian literature. His teacher may have been Hollywood rather than Bollywood, but Dinesh D'Souza has nevertheless produced Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (I997)-a tome that proves garishness and grandiosity are not the sole province of Indian film. It is a thick book. There are a lot of non-Indians yakking at length on the dust jacket about the book's worth. Tom Wolfe writes, "This marvelous book will drive the intellectual establishment-the conservative cadre as well as the liberal legionsstraight up the wall. It convincingly demonstrates Ronald Reagan's moral, political and-yes! I'm afraid so!-intellectual superiority to the entire lot of them."
I bought the book, but I have not been able to finish it. I stopped reading many times, but after page forty, I found I could not go on. On that page, where my adventure with the book ended forever, D'Souza cites a poem written by Reagan-every bit as fantastical as contemporary Indian literature, but perilously underspiced-as an illustration of Reagan's "gift for hope."
I wonder what it's all about, and why We suffer so, when little things go wrong? We make our life a struggle When life should be a song.
But what of those writers who, unlike D'Souza and Naipaul and Divakaruni, do not write in English? Would the reviewer from the New Republic, heralding the new Indian "masterpieces," know any more about this other Indian literature than Macaulay knew about the whole Indian literary tradition? What is Salman Rushdie missing out on?
One example of the literature that has escaped the current boom is "Paul Gomra Ka Scooter" [Paul Gomra's scooter], by the Hindi writer Uday Prakash. The eponymous protagonist of Prakash's short story is a Hindi poet who works at a newspaper in New Delhi. Paul Gomra was born Ram Gopal Saksenaa typical Hindu name. But, the narrator informs us, as a result of "technological and social changes, globalization, information and communication revolutions, the end of socialism, and the spread of markets across the entire planet," names like Ram Gopal Saksena had begun to seem "backward, narrow-minded and lower-class." Consequently, our hero took the "pal" out of "Ram Gopal" and made it "Paul"; then, he took up the remaining "Ram Go" and turned it around to read "Gomra."With this nominal change, he joined figures-real and imagined-of cultural and political importance on the current Indian scene. "No doubt this name became one on par with the names of Apache Indian, Louis Banks, Remu Fernandez, Sam Pitroda or T. K. Banji. In fact, T. K. Banji became 'Banji' from Tushar Kanti Banerjee."
After changing his name to Paul Gomra, the former Ram Gopal Saksena does something equally momentous: he buys a scooter. This latter decision is precipitated by the fact that, all around him, people have begun to travel in new cars "with names like Maruti, Cielo, Zen, Sierra, Sumo, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and whatnot." While these people "reached new, impossible destinations," Paul Gomra felt he "was dragging behind time like a worm, a centipede, a turtle, a snail."
As it happens, the new scooter doesn't help matters any: Paul Gomra does not know how to drive it. Its gleaming skeleton begins to rot outside his apartment. Finally, Paul finds a man who is able to drive the scooter to work; he accompanies the man as a rider. In the hours that he must wait each night for this man's work to end so he can catch a ride home, Paul Gomra rediscovers his passion for poetry. One night, he goes to a glamorous literary event in New Delhi. The reader gets only a muddled, secondhand account of the evening's events: we hear that Gomra drunkenly berated the assembled guests for their worship of officialdom; he gave them a lecture on the scooter as a revolutionary tool; he fulminated against Delhi; he said the countryside had not vanished. "Dinosaurs become extinct," Paul seems to have shouted. "The ant survives, you thieves! Delhi will become history, but Gurgaon will remain alive." On the ride back home, Paul Gomra and his friend met with a mysterious accident. Hours later, they are found and admitted to a hospital, but Paul Gomra disappears three days later. We hear of a deranged highway poet who has taken up a pre-Independence slogan: "Quit India!" But already, his memory has begun to vanish; all that's left are twisted remains of Paul Gomra's scooter and the yellowing diary pages locked inside the scooter's trunk. On the last page, dated August I5, I995-the date when India celebrates its independence each yearare the words of Paul Gomra's last poem:
Paul Gomra, the deranged poet of the highway, the specter that now haunts the roots and the routes of the Indian nation, is a kind of travel writer, an elegiac wanderer who mourns lives that have been lost. Paul Gomra's angry voice arises from his impossible identity: he belongs neither to the old world he has left with his new name, nor to the new world that he cannot quite reach on his scooter. You might say Ram Gopal Saksena is the archetypal postcolonial: with wit and some sadness, but with his eyes fully open, he changes his name. He has the courage to step into a new world that has no place for him. Ram Gopal Saksena knows he cannot last, even as Paul Gomra. Prakash's story is a fable about survival amid the forces that have legislated extinction for all. Paul Gomra-like his creator, Uday Prakash, or like Sir Vidia himselfknows very well that he will not be liked any better if he stops yakking.
Apr 23, 2007
Rage, Revelry and Romance
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Stories with a difference
Aditya Sharma
Rage, Revelry and Romanceby Uday Prakash. Translated by Robert A. Hueckstedt. Srishti. Pages 216. Rs 145.
PENNED by noted Hindi writer Uday Prakash and translated into English by Robert. A. Hueckstedt, who teaches Hindi and Sanskrit at University of Virginia, USA, the book is a collection of short stories. The common thread that runs through these narratives is the element of realism with which they have been recounted. These tales portray a common man’s life and hence the readers will find it easy to identify with the characters. Almost all the stories in the anthology have yet another thing in common. They expose the rot in the country. The pathos of the stories get heightened by the tragic-comic tone which the writer adopts to recount them.
Heeralal’s Ghost describes the life of a simpleton farmer, Hiralal. The author brings out the misery and wretchedness of his life in a way that stirs one to the marrow of one’s bones. Mercifully, unlike modern fiction, it evokes no depressing sentiments but an empathy that is almost elevating. The thakur and patwari of a village divest a poor farmer, Hiralal, of his lands. They, then, forcibly make a common mistress out of his wife. Unable to withstand the physical and mental torture, the couple perishe in abject circumstances. Now comes the dramatic denouement. Events in quick succession bring about complete ruin of the thakur’s family by Heeralal’s Ghost. In fact, the apparition chases the thakur several times with a bottle of mustard oil in his hand, inquiring if he still needs a massage! The once resplendent haveli of the thakur falls to ruins and is rumoured to be a haunted place. The village patwari too runs away from the village. Along with these gripping sequences, Uday Prakash ingeniously portrays the details of parochial rural life with its miseries, customs and superstitions.
The narrative of The Third Degree can be termed as the gem of all stories. Written with humour, irony, fantasy and satire, the story describes the rot in the police and civic system. It also describes how these corrode the life of a common man. It so happens that Suresh, the protagonist, lodges an FIR against Fakira suspecting him to be behind the burglary in his house. The SHO, in a drunken state, applies such third degree measures on the suspect that he almost dies. Realising his folly, the SHO calls on Suresh and asks him to bail out Fakira or else his own job would be in jeopardy! Suresh fails to get back his stolen jewellery and other goods, though he locates his wife’s petticoat in the suspect’s home. In the process, however, he succeeds in seducing the neglected wife of Amrik Singh, the man shielding the real culprits. His wife wisely consuls Suresh to forget the case or else he would soon be a dead meat.
Another story The Tirich comes out as a powerful narrative that is rich in both content and form. The author once again creates a gripping picture highlighting the travails of a father who meets his death while going to the town to depose before the court of law. The story is one of the writer’s earliest.
Uday Prakash’s three-page narrative, The Professor, is a scathing attack on the double standards and affectations of the academicians. Written in a humorous vein it drives home its point rather forcefully.
Several surprises lie in store for the readers in the volume. Those keen on the shorter version of fiction shall find it exhilarating reading.
Stories with a difference
Aditya Sharma
Rage, Revelry and Romanceby Uday Prakash. Translated by Robert A. Hueckstedt. Srishti. Pages 216. Rs 145.
PENNED by noted Hindi writer Uday Prakash and translated into English by Robert. A. Hueckstedt, who teaches Hindi and Sanskrit at University of Virginia, USA, the book is a collection of short stories. The common thread that runs through these narratives is the element of realism with which they have been recounted. These tales portray a common man’s life and hence the readers will find it easy to identify with the characters. Almost all the stories in the anthology have yet another thing in common. They expose the rot in the country. The pathos of the stories get heightened by the tragic-comic tone which the writer adopts to recount them.
Heeralal’s Ghost describes the life of a simpleton farmer, Hiralal. The author brings out the misery and wretchedness of his life in a way that stirs one to the marrow of one’s bones. Mercifully, unlike modern fiction, it evokes no depressing sentiments but an empathy that is almost elevating. The thakur and patwari of a village divest a poor farmer, Hiralal, of his lands. They, then, forcibly make a common mistress out of his wife. Unable to withstand the physical and mental torture, the couple perishe in abject circumstances. Now comes the dramatic denouement. Events in quick succession bring about complete ruin of the thakur’s family by Heeralal’s Ghost. In fact, the apparition chases the thakur several times with a bottle of mustard oil in his hand, inquiring if he still needs a massage! The once resplendent haveli of the thakur falls to ruins and is rumoured to be a haunted place. The village patwari too runs away from the village. Along with these gripping sequences, Uday Prakash ingeniously portrays the details of parochial rural life with its miseries, customs and superstitions.
The narrative of The Third Degree can be termed as the gem of all stories. Written with humour, irony, fantasy and satire, the story describes the rot in the police and civic system. It also describes how these corrode the life of a common man. It so happens that Suresh, the protagonist, lodges an FIR against Fakira suspecting him to be behind the burglary in his house. The SHO, in a drunken state, applies such third degree measures on the suspect that he almost dies. Realising his folly, the SHO calls on Suresh and asks him to bail out Fakira or else his own job would be in jeopardy! Suresh fails to get back his stolen jewellery and other goods, though he locates his wife’s petticoat in the suspect’s home. In the process, however, he succeeds in seducing the neglected wife of Amrik Singh, the man shielding the real culprits. His wife wisely consuls Suresh to forget the case or else he would soon be a dead meat.
Another story The Tirich comes out as a powerful narrative that is rich in both content and form. The author once again creates a gripping picture highlighting the travails of a father who meets his death while going to the town to depose before the court of law. The story is one of the writer’s earliest.
Uday Prakash’s three-page narrative, The Professor, is a scathing attack on the double standards and affectations of the academicians. Written in a humorous vein it drives home its point rather forcefully.
Several surprises lie in store for the readers in the volume. Those keen on the shorter version of fiction shall find it exhilarating reading.
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