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.

Mohan Das : Hindi film's nasty face

Mohan Das, a novella authored by me, which has been translated in to almost all Indian languages by eminent translators, including English and which is still being staged by various theatre groups all over the country, seems has fallen in to the wrong hands for its film version. I just had a chance to see its brochure, printed by the producer for the publicity and promotion of the film, it steals credit titles which have been duly signed by me and the producer in a stamped legal agreement. Fact is, I've written the screenplay and Dialogues, which producer has acknowledged. I had faced some delay in getting agreed upon fee, but finally it was paid.
In addition, today I just spotted an interview of the Director in India Times and to my surprise, the director is conspicuously silent about the story, screenplay and dialogue.
I paste the entire text below so that you can see it yourself. I'm also approaching Osians to safeguard my rights as an author because this organization is headed by Aruna Vasudev, who herself is a writer, journalist and filmmaker.
I'll be moving to the court, if the credits are not properly shown in the film, to seek justice.
(For your information, few Hindi-power-centers are involved in this nasty game beside Bollywood, which has already earned notority in plagiarism, piracy and cheating the artists and writers)
Well, now read the interview:

Director Mazhar Kamran's film Mohandas, starring Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid , Sharbani Mukherji , Sushant Singh, Aditya Srivastava and Govind Namdeo, has been selected for screening in the 10th Osian's Cinefan, Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema (OCFF10) that will take place in New Delhi from 10th of July to 20th July 2008. Presented as an investigative satirical thriller, Mohandas unravels an unusual small-town scam of stolen identity. It has been filmed in remote parts of UP and MP, against the backdrop of the coal mines.

Comments Mazhar Kamran, "I am happy that I will be showing my film for the first time at a film festival with an Asian focus. Given the nature of the subject of my film and its roots, it is only proper that one begins at home. We are prone to looking elsewhere for recognition, when the best thing to happen is to be recognized in your own milieu." He goes on to add, "There is no dearth of stories that are unique to our time and place. We are not looking here hard enough and go on borrowing from other cultures. In the past, we have had our unique voice. Film-makers like Guru Dutt, Mehboob, Bimal Roy and K. Asif have shown the way our mainstream cinema could go."

Since its establishment in 1999, OCFF has become one of the most important film showcases in Asia. Founded in 1999 by Aruna Vasudev, as a film festival that screened 27 films, OCFF has grown rapidly, diversified and become competitive. It is now recognised as a leading film festival.

In the forthcoming 10th edition, OCFF will screen films from more than 40 countries. Osian's-Cinefan continues to bring the finest films from Indian, Asian and Arab countries and to breaking down artistic hierarchies of the popular and the highbrow -to re-invent a thoughtful and creative film culture for our times.

International Seminar in South Korea

Literature in the Age of Internationalism
Uday Prakash
(This paper was read in the recently held International Byeong ju Lee memorial Literature Festival, 2008 in Republic of Korea)
‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.*1

If literature is a verbal art form and if we accept it as an objet d'art of creating infinite possible architectures and structures in speech by an author, this quote coming from one of the most significant philosopher investigating the cryptic logic of language and mind, is of great help to understand the role and fate of literature in the age of globalizing or almost globalized (Internationalizing or almost Internationalized, we may call) world we live in.
From another point of view, what Wittgenstein had said, stands true to all works of language, from the time of epics and novels to newspaper stories and advertising copies, from poetry to a political party’s manifesto, a corporate media campaign and to a scripture. However, there is always a very thin line of ‘ethics’,’ aesthetics’ and ‘concerns’ which often separates literature from other constructs of the language. This we can feel if we look back to Wittgenstein’s time again, when he wrote these sentences. In a tormented and traumatized soul after the First World War’s catastrophes, his ascetic deviation from a turbulent power-capital centric world towards an exiled space of ‘abstinence,’ ethics’ and ‘religion’, he wrote his masterpiece ‘Philosophical Investigations’ and attempted to explore and discover a ‘logic’ under it. And while doing so, in my opinion, Wittgenstein was not working as a philosopher of language, but he was exerting himself in the language as an author because ‘author is the last philosopher of the book’ as said by Derida. Literature succeeds in providing an alternative world, a different space and time because: ‘Writing requires a break, with thought when thought ascribes to itself immediate proximity, a break with all empirical experience of the world. In this sense, writing is also a rupture with all present consciousness, being always already involved in the experience of the non-manifest or the unknown…’ *2
This ‘point of rupture’ with the ‘empirical experience’ and ‘present consciousness’ empowers literature, an objet d'art of language, to play its own role with its own power, in a world dominated and occupied by the other powers with their other roles. In a way, writing is ‘returning to a time before world and reaching to a time after the world’. It is speaking in language already spoken in elsewhere but with words, which reveal nothing, or something else. Writing is creating ‘signs’ which confront all other ‘signs’ manufactured and perpetuated by other powers through all possible technologies and affluence in world.
And it is here that literature attains its autonomy, emancipates itself to a privileged-private place. From here it might know about its own role, which only words can play. But then there is another crisis. As a famous proverb says –‘there is no inside whale to hide’ from the catastrophe and onslaughts of violent powers of greed and destruction. After all language is a product of world of reality. Therefore ‘word’ itself can never remain unscathed. Words are used, abused and exploited by the powers of reality. Words are wounded and contaminated. Recently in my trip to US, I bought a new collection of poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz, my most favorite Polish poet and was astounded to understand about another sphere where global forces might inflict injuries, the sphere of words:
‘Words have been used up
Chewed up like gum
By lovely young mouths
Have been turned into white
Ballon bubbles
Diminished by politicians
They are used for whitening teeth
and for rinsing out of mouths
in my childhood
words could be
applied to a wound
could be given to the one
you loved..’ *3
This poem’s concern about the basic nuclear component of poetry itself, in a lamenting spirit, reveals about the encroachment and invasion of techno-market-centric powers on language through everyday renewed technology. It consumes and exploits all verbal structures and manipulates and moulds them for its own tasks. The industrialized, commercialized capitalist world has become an outside world with invincible material connections and associations, and the individual (here poet) is living in the midst of that world.
If we probe this new world, it is ‘post industrial’ or ‘post-modern’ as it is generally defined and explained by sociologists and scholars. There are few who name it ‘post-colonial’ and there are others who term it as ‘neo-colonial’ or ‘late-capitalist’. There are few younger journalists and activists, who admit that now we all, irrespective of our nation and profession, have become ‘Citizen of Empire’. *4. The poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, I have quoted above talks about the fate of word in context of this specific time which has arrived since the last couple of decades of twentieth century.
And indisputably this is the era of ‘globalization’ (or internationalization, as per topic of this seminar paper). It is typically defined as a time in which the sovereignty of nation states has declined and modes of exchange operate with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries, producing configurations of power that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. It is said to have been ‘born’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of USSR as socialist super power and end of the Cold War. It is now a world of reality and virtual reality where an individual breaths and survives alienated from it and from himself. Most of the writers of the peripheral nation states or the third world countries or the developing countries witness this new ‘disni-fied’,‘Mcdonaldized’ or ‘pizzahutted’ *4 world on one hand and a world with ‘carpet bombing’ and bio-genetic terminator seeds and WMDs on the other hand, with instinctual skepticisms. The familiar world, they used to know, has become estranged and altered.
‘A reality belonging to the day before yesterday, a reality that long ago became its own ghost, is being conserved in rigid framework of phrases, prejudices, and hypocrisy. The end product of a vast machinery of research, investigations, analyses, statistics, conferences, reports and headlines is the comic strip, the embodiment of an illusory world of Everyman and No-man. Illusion displaces contradiction. The outcome of a multitude of ‘point of views’ is a hideous ‘uniformity’ of minds.’*5
This perception now appears a bit stale. Scenario now is much more changed and complex. As a result of multiplication and advancement of media and telecommunication technologies including cybernetics what Walter Benjamin had said in his most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ or what Karl Kraus wrote about the printing press or Bertolt Brecht wrote about Radio, now appears stale, clichéd and sometimes juvenile. No other civilization in the past, had used and produced language itself in such a mammoth quantum. Just look around, it’s a big noise. Every channel and every electronic gadget, small or huge, is churning out language and converting it in to ‘chatter’ where words don’t posses any meaning. A language is reproducing itself, a language without truth, an endless meaningless chatter.
Language used and consumed for lies, biggest in it is the global industry of advertising. This is not merely the language of ‘Double Speak’ as George Orwell had thought in his dystopic prophecy of a totalitarian state. Liars of the past, Big Brothers and Goebbels appear tiny and dwarf when we witness colossal lies televised, screened, shown, thrown on masses, because the mind of the masses has to be manipulated through the power of ‘words’ and ‘images’.
In Samskrit, ‘pada’(word)has been conceived as Lord ‘Shiva’ and ‘artha’ (meaning) as Goddess ‘Parvati’ or ’shakti’. They were thought to be inseparable; any act of splitting them apart would have been a blasphemy. Everyone living on earth, which uses ‘pada’ (words) for his interest, is warned to have a restrain over using it excessively. Restrain and control in consuming and producing speech (Vaak samyam). It was thought that this universe has been born from the explosion of ‘nada’ (boom/ sound) which is the base component of speech or language. Poem is also born in the same manner like an universe. Through the explosion (sphota) of word (pada) meaning (artha) is produced which in a serial explosions of following words, form a sentence (vaakya) and through this process a poem (kavya) is born. This is what Bhartrihari had said in his treatise. It appears now, on the face level, an enigmatic, irrational, pre-scientific and obscure theory of genesis of a poem or an universe. But Derida in his Grammatology tells similar things in a little different style.
Now, if we look back again to the poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, where we see that the ‘words have been used up like chewing gum’ by ‘lovely young mouths’ (of tv news anchors) and ‘diminished by politicians’ for ‘whitening their teeth’, then is it really possible now to compose a poem using same ‘used up’, ‘diminished’ words?
What after all a poet should do when a huge, demonic global commercial-political industry is using and manufacturing mammoth quantum of words every fraction of second? And that all for nothing but in advertising its product or lying to consolidate its power?
But, there is a hope. I now quote the last remaining lines of the poem:
‘Now diminished
Wrapped in newspaper
They still contaminate
Still reek
They still hurt
Hidden in heads
Hidden in hearts
Hidden under the gowns
Of young women
Hidden in holy books
They burst out
They kill.’ *6
And here is a hope for a writer or for literature to perform its role in a world where spaces for individual object de-art is shrinking every day. Word can still play a role. Word is ‘power inscribed in language’ so it holds a power, where all outside powers cease to exist.
But there is another plane where the process of internationalism is more concrete and physical. A strong storm of homogenization of cultures on international scale is on since the incoming of this ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-cold-war’ era. Peripheral countries and developing societies do not have any other option except adopting and accepting the economic policies and model of ‘development’ dictated by the rich countries of west, led by US and laid down by international organizations like IMF and the World Bank. India too is a country, with its multiple cultural-ethnic societies and sub-nationalities, which are undergoing through a complex and turbulent, process off late. In India, particularly, we witness a fierce resurgence and re-assertion of micro ethnic identities on rise and conflict since last few years. What Samuel Huntington had prophesied in his infamous book, contrary is the present scenario. These are not the ‘civilizations’ which are clashing against each other, these are much smaller cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious identities which are indulging in violent conflicts every day. Homogenization through mass consumer culture, riding on the multiplied media campaign and dumping of luxury products in the indigenous market, from cars and bikes to fast food and fashion, is consequently developing in to balkanization of a post-colonial nation-state than homogenizing and integrating it.
Recently, I have read a paper by Girish Mishra, a noted Indian scholar, I quote a portion below to elaborate my point of view:
‘Fukuyama rejects the view that globalization is leading to cultural homogeneity. There may be homogenization of certain aspects of the economy and the society, but, at the same time, there will be an affirmation of distinctive cultural identities. If the process of cultural homogenization takes place, it will be too slow to discern. “Many people think that because we have advanced communications technology, and are able to project global television culture worldwide, this will lead to homogenization on a deeper cultural level. I think that, in a way, it’s done just the opposite.
“For example, there is probably less mutual liking, more distrust and greater emphasis on the difference between the cultures of the United States and Asia today than there was
40 years ago. In the 1950s and’60s, Asia looked up to the United States as a model of modernization. Now, Asians look at American urban decay and the decline of the family and they feel that America is not a very attractive model. Communications technology has allowed both Asians and Americans to see each other more clearly, and it turns out they have very different value systems.’*7
One need not agree with this geo-cultural estimation of growing distrust between Asia and the West or the US, here does come a perturbing question about the state of minor, lesser developed, poorer and deprived human groups in this process of global homogenization. Accumulation of wealth in a small section of people where more than 40 percent of population lives much below poverty line and 60 percent of it does not have access to health, education, sanitation and towards basic civil amenities, any such ‘modernization’ stands fake and farcical.
Literature again becomes an arena, where the voices of the diminishing cultural identities and suffering subjugated masses can be heard. Literature, if resist to get itself commoditized by the alluring offers from the market, can unambiguously play a significant role in these testing times.
In my opinion in the age of end of all adolescence, in the age of dystopia and chattering ideologies, it is literature alone, which through its murmur of words and fragile sentences, can act as a vanguard of suppressed identities and individuals. Because literature has an ability to create a critique and a comic versus any hegemonic power, out to dominate and subjugate smaller beings on planet. Words are the Gods of small things. They remain immortal and defy their death. Words can laugh, cry, ridicule, mimic and dance against all forms of violence of powers, anywhere.
‘Writing is the beginning of a mass gesture: against all discourses (modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols, social symbolic), writing alone today, even if still in form of luxury, makes of language something
a-topical, without place.’*8
Therefore, it is literature, which is finally ‘Internationalist’, not the market and never the politics.
Words remain eternal even after the world.
I request you to recall the beginning of this paper, where I had put a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, to explain about the role of an individual writer and poet in the ancient city of language named literature, now I end this paper with a few words from Mahatma Gandhi, the father of post colonial independent India:
‘I do want that the winds from other cultures should enter in to my house, and I have let my doors and windows open to receive it, but I do not want that my foot gets uprooted, lose my balance and I get blown away with the winds. No way I want to go to the other’s house begging as a slave and no way I want to live like a emulator..!’*9


*1 - Ludwig Wittgenstine, Philosophical Investigation,’ Post-Modernism-Philosophy and the Arts, Edited by Hugh J. Silverman, Chapter 5, ‘In Situ: Beyond the Architechture of the Modern’, Stephen H. Watson p.p. 83, Published by Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York-10001.
*2 - Mark C. Taylor, ‘Back to the Future’. Ibid. p.p.15
*3 – Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*4 – Robert Jenson, ‘Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our Humanity’, City Light Books, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, 2004.
*5 – Ernst Fishcher, ‘The Necessity of Art’,Translated by Anna Bostock, Penguin Books,625 Madison Avenue, New York – 10022, p.p. 203
*6 - Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*7 - Girish Mishra,’Globalization and Culture,’ yet to be published, 2008.
*8 – Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, Selected Writings, Edited by Susan Sontag,Fontana Paper backs, p.p. 401, 1983.
*9- P.C.Joshi,’Parivartan aur Vikas ke Sanskritik Aayaam’,Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi,p.p.67, 1987

Cheena Baaba : A Novel in Progress

Literature UDAY PRAKASH ‘Violence silences people. The story of Cheeni Baba fascinated me because he had actually been silent, a deserter from the Chinese army hiding out in a banyan tree in Kushinagar for years. So many of us are rendered silent and don’t even know it’ Uday Prakash, acknowledged master of the Hindi short story has been, in recent years, working on his much-awaited first novel. Cheeni Baba, based on a series of real-life events, tells the story of a teenager who was drafted into the Chinese army during World War II. Shocked by all that he saw, he ran away and ended up in a village in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh. Still traumatised, he climbed a tree and stayed there. The villagers were at first astonished but then came to accept him as a Baba. And then, one day, the Chinese premier came calling. (Forthcoming, Penguin India, 2008)

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 12, Dated Mar 29, 2008

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Fiction

Slice of history vis a vis modern times

Written by Tribune News Service, Chandigarh

Thursday, 14 February 2008

The department of Indian theatre is ready with its annual production and this time it is history vis-à-vis modern times. The play titled ‘Warren Hastings ka saand’ is based on a short story written by writer Uday Prakash by the same name. The play portrays various aspects of exploitation, be it at the hands of the Britishers in the past or Indians at the hands of fellow Indians in the present. Directed by Kumara Varma of the department, the story revolves around Warren Hastings who comes to India and adapts the culture and later on succumbs to the system and becomes what the system wants him to be. “The idea is to show that in some form or the other the exploitation continues even after India being independent. Sometimes it is in the form of capitalism, sometimes globalisation and at times when the outside forces capture our markets. But it’s the common man who suffers ultimately”, said one of the actors. Lord Clive had observed what was happening in the contemporary times more than 200 years ago and his observations were depicted through a powerful speech in the play”, said another. To make it a success, the students are researching, rehearsing and doing everything related to the play themselves from costume designing to lights arranging. The show would be organised at the studio theatre in the department of Indian theatre, Panjab University, from February 14-23 at 6.30 pm.

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Benazeer Bhutto Assasinated

December 27, 2007 20:16 IST
Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Thursday when gunmen opened fire at her vehicle just before a suicide bomber blew himself up at an election rally in Rawalpindi, killing more than 20 people and injuring several others.

Reports said five bullets were fired at Bhutto, one of which pierced her neck. The 54-year-old leader of the Pakistan People's Party was rushed to the Rawalpindi general hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
According to rediff.com columnist Hamid Mir, "Benazir was shot at by a sniper rifle from close range and a few moments later a suicide bomber created the blast to make sure that she is assassinated. It was a determined effort. They made sure she doesn't survive the attack. She died due to the injury in her neck. I was told about it by injured party leader Ibne Rizvi before he went into comma."
"She expired at 6:16 pm," said Wasif Ali Khan, a PPP member at the hospital.

She is survived by her husband Asif Ali Zardari and three children.
Bhutto was shot as she was getting into the car after addressing thousands of supporters to canvass votes for the January 8 parliamentary election. Before her supporters realised what had happened, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the rally at the Liaquat Bagh Park. Several people, who were around her car, were blown to pieces. A television reporter at the scene said the suicide bomber's head was found almost 70 feet from the site of the blast.

Eyewitnesses said body parts were strewn across the area. Ambulances rushed the injured from the spot to nearby hospitals.

Mir said, "Yesterday, I had chatted with her. She was told many times that she carries as much risk as (Pakistan President Pervez) Musharraf. On October 15, (army chief) General Ashraf Kayani and the director general ISI met her in Dubai. They clearly told her that there are forces determined to assassinate her. She thought they were trying to deter her from coming back to Pakistan. I found she was overconfident."
Added Mir, "Her partymen forced her to take risks. They were dragging her from one constituency to other. The threat to her life was so clearly understood by everybody. It was like the writing on the wall."
Liaquat Bagh Park is where Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in October 1951. Bhutto's father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged in April 1979 at a spot not very far from where his daughter was killed.

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan after a eight-year self-imposed exile on October 18. She served twice as Pakistan's prime minister between 1988 and 1996.

Darling of the West

Charismatic Benazir Bhutto was beauty personified and the Oxford and Harvard educated former Pakistan premier was once on People magazine's "50 most beautiful people list".

Bhutto's glamorous looks and her dress sense, including her trademark white scarf, had made her a media darling in the West.

Bhutto was featured in the People Magazine in 1988 when at the age of 35 she became the youngest person-- and the first woman--to head the government of a Muslim-majority state in modern times.

Jemima Khan, former wife of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who has launched the 'Free Pakistan Movement' in London, had written a long piece in a British newspaper calling Bhutto, who was  "A Cleopatra in a Hermes scarf".

"She's back. Hurrah! She's a woman. And she's not bad looking either. Benazir may speak the language of liberalism and look good on Larry King's sofa, but both her terms in office were marked by incompetence. Make no mistake, Benazir may look the part, but she's as ruthless and conniving as they come -- a kleptocrat in a Hermes headscarf."

Pop diva Madonna is famous for flaunting her Hermes scarves along with several other fashion divas.

Bhutto's "diamond studded designer fashion glasses" have also become the cynosure of all eyes. Former railways minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed had even taken a dig at her designer glasses at a press conference recently.

A senior journalist had once written about her designer glasses: "With her designer glasses and bright lipstick she looks like a young version of Greek singer Nana Mouskouri."

"Bhutto's pale skin, designer clothes and degrees from Harvard and Oxford seem to contradict her self-appointed role as saviour of Pakistan's poor and illiterate -- particularly in Karachi's slums."

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