The story of two virals – Kolaveri Di and Aalu Anday

Here is a story of two virals.

Separated by a border, two very different videos went viral in the last two months of 2011. Both shared so much in common and were oh so different

Probably what goes viral depends on the current cultural temper of that country. What it considers as an echo of its voice, however subconscious or sublimal

One viral goes on to become a case study in IIMs and goes into the handbook of aspiring social media managers. Sung along by people who didn't care what the lyrics meant. Catapults the singer to national stardom, gains him a lunch with the prime minister….

The other one. One of the most courageous (some would say suicidal) acts in modern times taken in a stand for the freedom to speak the mind. Created and uploaded secretly on YouTube to avoid official censure and blackout. A song that openly mocked holy cows in a country where a state governor is assassinated by his bodyguard for speaking his views.

A song that ended with the words - “If you want a bullet in my head, like this video”.

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Sedition of the good doctor

Binayak Sen was convicted today for ‘sedition’ by the ‘justice’ system of this country. People around the world are appalled that such a thing can happen in the largest ‘democracy’ in the world…

It would almost be abnormal today, in this seemingly ethically ambiguous world, to not feel a sense of hilarity when such heavy words are used with such seriousness. You feel like laughing out loud and then bang your head on the wall…Mr Assagne, you of course understand, dont you?

Dont you know, Mr Sen, that it is sedition to protest against what one considers injustice and it is sedition to care for the people who have been forgotten even by the democratic vote-seekers. It is also traitorous to speak up publicly. All this makes you an enemy of the state…dangerous anti-social…they called you a terrorist too, didnt they?

The justice of this country…they needed to make an example of you. Just like they are making an example of people who have stashed away millions nay billions from sports events or from telecom spectrum or even from onions. You see what I am getting at my good doctor?

There is a saying – Kill a man, you are a murderer. Kill millions, you become a general. Maybe you never heard of it…

If you had, you would not have been in a filthy jail for so many years…nah…you would have had merely a parlamentary committee set up against you (that too after many protests!!) and you would have been busy preparing bytes for our 24 hours news channel, between their reality show updates of course.

Maybe your mistake was in being upfront about it all. Maybe you believed in the balderbash about the essential goodness of it all – you know, humanity, justice, fairness…fraternity, equality and liberty and all that and you know how that one ended up!!!

No Mr Sen, its all your fault. They are right, spot on. People like you just keep cropping up and you just dont learn. You should have really taken up arms against the state or done something really traitorous. Then you would have had politicians lining up at your door so you can help them win elections. Like you were right now, you were of no use to anyone, dont you see that?

And what the world has no use for, it punishes. Ah well, justice meted out wont you say, my good doctor?

Mr Sen, you are already old news…Ah well, time to turn to the sports page…

 

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Ek revolutionary ki mauth…

I took some time to write about Kanu Sanyal, one of the fathers of what is arguably the only genuine revolutionary insurrection in post-independence India. I took some time to write about his death not only because it was a suicide but also because writing about the death of a revolutionary means bringing in his life as well…

Kanu Sanyal was found hanging in his house, at the same place that saw the break of the Spring Thunder in 1967. The end seemed almost poetic, but then you need a Neruda for to make poetry. All that the old warrior had was a few columns in newspapers, one of whom actually described it his death as the “death of a top Naxal leader”, as if he was still in the neo-Naxalite movement…

In the end, all he had become was a blurry myth and a sad present, repudiated by those who carry his legacy and casually ignored by those who once feared him…the fate of all great men who did not die in the blaze of glory and whom history passed by in search of fresher and more photogenic heroes…

His death came a few days before the Naxalites massacred 76 CRPF jawans in an ambush, the biggest attack by them to date. The government and the Naxals have declared open war, in which for now, the government seems to be on the backfoot.

So, at a time that the Naxalites have become, officially, the biggest threat that this country has ever faced (J&K terrorism pales by comparison), with them having a presence in a quarter of the country, with their tentacles reaching out into urban centres as well, you would expect the symbol of the Naxalite movement to be satisfied. At least, the last thing you would expect him to do is to go hang himself…

But then you got to ask yourself – was he a Naxalite anymore? Maybe in his last moments he would have muttered to himself paraphrasing Marx who once famously said “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist”…maybe he was aware that no matter what he did, the media and the society would fail to spot the difference between what he believed in and what the Naxalites today believe in.

The Naxalism that arose from the simple need to fight for dignity slowly became a movement in which violence, not justice (which is an abstract term anyway) became the priority for maintaining momentum. It became a movement in which poor must remain poor in order for having a raison d'etre for the movement.

If an insurrection goes on for too long, it begins to look like what it intends to supplant. Maybe that's what Kanu Sanyal saw and realized.

When Naxals make pacts with dodgy politicians and when they start to blow up schools, when Naxals become the tipping factors in elections by way of fear, when they begin to claim glorious victory by killing CRPF men who have been pushed to be cannon fodder, maybe he realized that it was a war for its own means – a never ending war in which the people to be killed will be the ones whom he wanted to give a different life all those years ago…

Maybe the end came for him much before the noose tightened. Maybe at the end he had had enough of the power that flows out of the barrel of the gun…

Maybe its time to mourn him as we mourn those great visionaries who dreamt big and tried to live upto that dream, no matter how much the rug was pulled under them.

That takes courage…so does preparing a rope for yourself…

RIP Kanuda…

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Of Defiance and Death – Pinter’s Nobel speech..

G had recommended the Nobel acceptance lecture by Harold Pinter. I got around to reading it after a while…

And boy was it a read…there are some things you read once in a while that sends your blood coursing down your views and leaves you throbbing awake, with all all your senses pounding away…This article did the same for me, having read words of such power after a long time.

The words turn from being dreamy and philosophical at first to savage and bitterly laden with irony by the time it comes near the end. It does not end on a sweet or hopeful note, which is the best way it could have ended…and it has a poem by Pinter which I had not read before, termed “Death”…beautiful!!

The best antidote to banal and tabloid reporting that besieges us everyday…an article for keeps…

Read it here

Of course, an added reason I like this article is that one of the poems that has affected me profoundly is cited here - “I'm Explaining a Few Things” by Neruda…the power of the words in that poem seem tailor made for the article…

A hurray for Pinter…you are sorely missed…

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India sold for 500,000…

I remember a childhood story that i remember affected me profoundly. The story was of the Koh-i-noor diamond and how we lost it to the Britishers. The Brits were the ‘bad guys’ who looted the best things that this country had to offer and how they obscenely display the Koh-i-noor, something that they stole from us.

It was a story told with much pain, a pain which I could articulate later as born out of impotent helplessness. At that time, I could just sense the injustice of it all. I could sense the wound. The pride of India, stolen and displayed openly by the thief. If only we were powerful and could force the Brits give it up, how wonderful that would be, i used to fantasize. I used to fantasize, Hollywood style (or rather Mossad style) of a crack team of commandoes who would steal back the diamond.

I guess i retained a bit of that boyhood fantasy till very late. If some part of it still lived somewhere inside, the following news pretty much would have killed it off…

Tipu Sultan’s sword sold off

The implicit belief of my boyhood fantasy was that no Indian, if given a chance would let a part of his history and legacy be sold off like a cheap trinket. By Indian, I mean us as a collective. The government of the people, as a custodian of the country’s pride…

In spite of having ‘grown up’ i.e. resigned myself to the ‘practical world’ of adulthood, a part of me that never let go of the boyhood fantasy has collapsed with dismay over the almost non-importance of the event for the public, let alone the mandarins in the parliament. It merited a single column in most newspapers. IPL’s cheerleaders get more space.

A part of our glorious history – that of resistance agaisnt the Britishers (Tipu was the last king to defeat the Britishers), a legacy of the perhaps the greatest threat against British rule (before 1857), a symbol of what we have learnt to be proud of (remember the serial ‘The sword of Tipu Sultan’?), is sold off to the highest bidder at an auction house in London and we do nothing!!! and worse, we are still happily doing nothing. And even worse, we have already moved on…

Tipu’s sword was taken (stolen by the ‘bad guys’ remember?) from his dead body when his capital was overrun in the Third Mysore war. The captured sword was taken a symbol of triumph to London and 150 years later, we get a chance to get it back to where it belongs. But we let it go into the private collection of somebody rich enough to display it among his/her other trinkets.

A government that sits back and watches millions of rupees being spent on as useful as their own statues (sometimes complete with handbags) is not able to spend a few million on getting back what is rightfully ours?

In 2000, Vijay Mallya bought another of Tipu’s sword amidst much fanfare, as if he was doing a service to the country by keeping it in his house. Why not make it public property? Why was it not demanded? (I would not be surprised if this is the same sword that Mallya bought, which it is, according to some reports)

Which is all a collective failure, a failure of our pride to galvanize us in demanding the restoration of dignity of our past. We just don't care enough. Perhaps we don't seem to feel that it is important enough. Our so called present ascent to a world superpower (superpower of outsourced work, mostly) gives us more pride, not a supposed colonized past.

The only question to be asked here – would China (with similar history and the supposed competition to our ascent) have sat back and let their legacy be sold off? Of Mao or of Sun-yat-Sen? How many of us would say yes to that, I wonder? Something to ponder on there…

I guess Tipu fought for the wrong country…

 

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Young green shoot up – why Delhi fares better

I had just come back from Mumbai and had various reasons to like and dislike the city.

However when I came back, while on the road in Delhi, I saw something that struck me as the symbolic basic difference between the two cities.

I saw new saplings having been planted on the divider (see picture), protected by a wire net. I realized what I had missed so much in Mumbai – trees and greenery. The only time I saw greenery was in Powai, the natural mangroves. But then, that too is fast disappearing under the weight of the ‘development agenda’. I did not see green on the streets or in the sprawling colonies – just miles of concrete and walls of jostling people. Delhi, on the other hand, has made an effort to make the city green. Almost every road has trees either in the divider or on the side.Colonies have trees planted on their perimeters.

I don't know why this is. Mumbaikars have an easy explanation – the pressure of living with millions of migrants coming in ; where is the space for poor trees? I don't have the figures but I don't think Delhi is far behind on the migrants radar. Yet, the city and the government has made an effort to green the city.

Probably the reason is the government. Delhi has a stable government which has been focussing on development for a long time and has been rewarded electorally for the same. Mumbai, on the other hand, is torn between ostentatiously corrupt and callous politicians and an ugly chauvinistic fascist ideology. That's why trees don't figure…

When I look at the green shoots, Delhi, for all its faults, gives me hope and for me tips the scales for choice of living here.

 

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Some men are like that only…

 

Like almost a ghost, Kobad Ghandy has risen out of the past. As a reminder. A reminder of a time and an ethos that prompted men of all backgrounds (in his case an exceedingly advantageous one) to give up everything for the sake of something that they believed in. It is true that the revolutionary bug bit many of Ghandy’s contemporaries but only a handful remained faithful to what they believed in as a hot blooded teenager. Mark Twain had once remarked that “If you are not a revolutionary by the time you are twenty, you don’t have a heart; if you remain one when you are thirty, you don’t have a mind”. In cases of men like Ghandy, Twain would have accepted the exception.

A man coming from a rich family, studying in Doon school, higher studies in London, coming back to India to fight for the upliftment of the oppressed masses, marrying a like minded woman and deciding not to have children so as not to get distracted from the cause – his life story reads like that of a revolutionary romance and would find echoes in many places and many times, most however in the past.

His life story also reads as a reminder of how some lives are (and can be) led and how some men (and women) strive to live for something higher than themselves. Compared to most of our ambitions today (including mine), their life-force and motives for life seem impossibly inaccessible and almost an object of awe. We stand in awe mainly because we can never even begin to think of replicating their way of life – firmly ensconced as we are in our single minded devotion to climbing the ladder of corporate life, in search of the best paycheck to buy our peace of mind.

That is why men like Ghandy, men like Che seem like men out of a past – a past where rebellion was not only in rock ballads but on the streets, not only in books but in the mind directing the arm. A past that retains its romance today, when we look back with rose tinted glasses; a past, however, that has lost its relevance for most of us today – mainly I feel because we, (starting with our fathers) compromised, choosing safety and conventionality over fighting in the name of some nebulous ideal. We compromised when we told ourselves that watching TV in an AC cooled room was more rewarding than living in the jungles in the danger of sudden death.

But let us blame nobody. We choose our destinies and the way we would like to lead our lives. But man is essentially an animal and finds solace in herds. It’s the renegade then, who, commands our respect and awe even though we know that they are an enemy to the way we lead our lives.

I am no ideologue of the Naxalite variety. I find their basic demands appealing but not the way they look at implementing it. In answer to the negatives of today, they proclaim a state that would tilt the scale in the exact opposite direction without taking into account the positives gained under the present system. I do not believe that should they ever gain supreme power, the government would get any better. It would be corruption and oppression by another name. It’s the Marxists worldwide who have killed Marx.

But that should not detract ourselves from the man himself. He stands for the best ideals of the Naxalite movement and has stayed true to it. It is of course a given that except a handful of us, we would wilt away in face of so much demands made on us when there is no clear ‘advantage’ accruing to us for all the hardships.

Maybe that’s where our tragedy lies. Our sense of cost benefit analysis has been honed to such an extent in the world we inhabit today, we cannot see beyond a few years without counting the costs and the benefits we hope to get. Everything we interact with simply reinforces that this is the only way to live and the best option to survive in todays increasingly smaller, yet lonelier world.

That is why men like Ghandy rise like a dinosaur. We can only pick at his surface and wonder at him. The ability to truly understand how he lived or thought is lost to us.

 

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