Farewell Fred Halliday

 

You were one of the prime reasons that my interest in international affairs got sparked and got the direction it needed…

Your articles dazzled, informed and most importantly cut through bullshit…

You have left the world bereft of another leading light…

Goodbye, Fred…

Open democracy’s tribute

 

del.icio.us Tags: Fred Halliday,death,tribute

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…

del.icio.us Tags: Kanu sanyal,naxals,naxalite,revolutionary,homage,tribute,india,communism,history,insurrection,suicide bomber,west bengal,media

End of an era – Viva Chetak

Ah well…all good things must come to an end, especially if you don't want to own the good thing anymore!!!

Bajaj will, from now on, manufacture only motorcycles, finally bowing to market tastes. With that decision, a product that signified India for decades will pass easily into history pages – the “Hamara Bajaj”, the Chetak.

The scooter that was the beast of burden for the common man carrying whole families on its seats, the acquisition of which (after sometimes years of waiting) truly became a neighbours envy – owner’s pride. The scooter which with its Italian inspired design ruled the Indian roads long before auto majors discovered the market in the country. A scooter which when your father let you drive was when you became a man of the world, a world suddenly free…

That's the nations nostalgia, a collective nostalgia as it were. Anyone above the age of 23 or so will have a special personal memory of the scooter that looks impossibly frail and might I say cute in front of the hulking bikes of today.

We also owned a Bajaj scooter, some 20 odd years ago. One of my earliest memories was the extreme thrill I felt of standing in the front, just behind the handles, my little hands on the dials, my hair buffeted by the wind against which my eyes squinted to see ahead, safe in the knowledge that my father was the captain and my mother the navigator. It was the most perfect Titanic moment (the hands outstretched moment that is – not the crash!!!) I ever had. I used to actually feel that I was flying without making any effort, tagged along by the Gods. Nothing I have done since has come close to that experience…

However I believe that it was time it gets consigned to our nostalgia. The Chetak was not made for the madly commercial world of today. It belonged to the world of movies like “Chashme Baddoor”. It belongs to a world when you actually loved what you owned because you literally bought it – EMI was not yet invented by financial whizkids, a world where cosmetics to make men fairer was not advertised on the TV, a world of sometimes impossibly grotesque fashion but also of rebellion. A world of limited but meaningful TV, not the infinite variety of trash today…

Ironically, It belonged to a world where streets were emptier and you could have done with more power in the engines, instead of in a world where you have all the powers in the world but no streets to drive them on!!!

Of course, scooters have been reinvented – the Activa for instance. But for us Indians, it will never be the same.

The song of Chetak remains humming on in our mind, if only as a dirge. An elegy, even, to a world vanished forever…

Viva Chetak!!!

 

del.icio.us Tags: Bajaj,scooter,India,marketing,product,nostalgia,Chetak,current issue

Autopsy of the heart

 

Michael Jackson, who became a legend in his lifetime and who perhaps was a pioneer of the modern music age, is in the danger of becoming a circus object in the coming days and years; much like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, people would be fascinated by this life of a star which burnt so brightly that it consumed itself all too soon…

People don’t seem to know how they should react exactly to his death. He had become a subject of much ridicule due to his erratic and quite unpredictable lifestyle and he had kept the rumour mills going for more than a decade, the heavy bulk of which had nothing to do with his music.

Suddenly with him gone, after the initial short homage paid to his talent, the media world is slowly turning to what it knows best…dissecting a dead man’s world mercilessly. Dead men don’t lie and nor can they defend themselves. The change of complexion and his transformation into a harrowing physical form is being shown much more than the music he created. The world is watching on vicariously as a one of the world’s most revolutionary and passionate performer is being turned into a circus item.

I can just hope that one day Michael will be remembered as a hugely talented mortal whose talent got ahead of him in life, a talent that got him to the top very quickly but one that did not equip him to deal with that life.

It was a talent that gave him the means to live in a personal Neverland but denied him the reality he always craved. It was a talent that gave the world the license to invade his most inner privacy and slice and dice his every word. It was also this talent that probably killed him at the end, when he starved himself to get into shape for his ‘final’ comeback tour.

Michael, there are a lot of things that will be said of you but there is one thing that I would like to say to you. We may autopsy your body but we can never autopsy your heart. It is this heart of yours that will always stay with those of us who have loved your music and what you had to say. Your heart is what we would always carry with us…

RIP Michael Jackson

“In My Anguish And My Pain
Through My Joy And My Sorrow
In The Promise Of Another Tomorrow
I'll Never Let You Part
For You're Always In My Heart.”

                                                     – from “Will you be there”

Technorati Tags: Michael Jackson,Music,tribute

Farewell Foundation!!!

This post is a post of remembrance of the ten months in which I finished the Foundation series by Asimov; a ten months which I enjoyed immensely and in which i became a lifelong advocate of science-fiction stories.

My flirtation with the foundation series began five years ago when foundation series was a part of G's course. There was no Wikipedia but Google was enough to whet my appetite. But being perpetually broke, and each book costing upwards of 300/-, the foundation series were out of reach.

But before foundation series, I read the short stories of Asimov. This is when I simply fell in love with the genre. Having been a fan of Star Trek, i guess i was very susceptible anyway.

In my first year of MBA, i discovered the magic of e-books. Having got hold of the whole collection of Asimov a few months ago, i finally took the plunge and read the first book of the series i.e. "Prelude to Foundation" in my second semester of MBA. And boy was i hooked!!!

There are these books in which you just immerse yourself - not only in the storyline but also in the characters. By the time i was through with the first book, Hari Seldon, Dors Venabili, Raych etc were familiar people. The combination of a rollicking adventure, the science aspect, the creation of a whole new universe in itself was seductive.

Over the next ten months, i wolfed down the rest of the series one by one, whenever i had time; of which i did not have much, considering the pressure of MBA and the work of the council team on top of that...but as they say, you always find a way if you really want it bad enough; and reading this series was something i did want badly. The galaxy of people who became an enjoyable fixture expanded to include people like Savor Hardin, Huber Mallow, the Mule etc. The more i progressed in the series, the more i got immersed in the twists and turns of the story - from the mentalics to intergalactic wars - the series, for me, becoming nothing short of a visually entertaining play of words

The hallmark of a successful series, in books or movies, is that you simply cant stand still until you have finished the whole collection. The Foundation series was one such for me.

Of course, later on, i found out that the Foundation series won the Hugo prize for the "Best science fiction series of all times", beating the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In any case, i enjoyed the Lord of the Rings more so because of the magic that the Foundation series was weaving on me at that time.

I am through with the whole series and as it happens with the best of books, i feel a certain void that is bittersweet - of having something that you really loved for a long time and knowing that you enjoyed every bit of it; and then realizing that the best of things always must come to an end.

I have a 2 GB collection of e-books of science fiction books. But probably having started with the best of them, the rest of the same may not be the same. But who knows - the foundation series has opened a door for me.

END OF POST

The Girl with the Gun...A tribute...

 

There are these pictures that captivate you even though you the only glimpse that you have got of them has been only fleeting

I saw this picture long long ago,it would be easily 15 years or more, in a documentary being shown on TV about the Vietnam war. This picture was a part of a slideshow and it was on the screen for barely a couple of seconds, but it had a strange effect on me. I have never put it in words.

It took so long because I simply could not find this picture. Searching with all possible combinations on Google images did not yield much. Searching for Vietnam images from that period just brought up the regular images - mainly the world famous images - the napalm image of the children of the bombed out villages running with their clothes simply torn off by the Agent Orange chemical and the image of the US controlled South Vietnamese captain shooting a POW in cold blood. The image of My Lai massacre came up along with some images of the Tet offensive

It was as if no 'non-violent' or 'beautiful' images of the war were put up. Wars and 'beautiful' images seem contradictory but they are not. These are the images when the human spirit comes forth in the midst of a human-made hell.

I went through quite a lot of images before I atlast found this image. Even then, it was a part of an animated gif and I had to isolate the frame. But the difficulty and the wait was worth it.

Today I can pay my tribute to the Girl with the Gun.

I can stare at the girl, fascinated, for hours on end and the only thing I can be absolutely sure of is that the beauty that I see cannot be simply expressed in words, no matter how long I try. But try I must.

To me, its both an image of the absurdity of war and its power to play carnage with life and of the indomitable image of the human being in facing and fighting back even when faced with impossible odds.

Sometimes, I think we are so enmeshed in our daily chores of existence that we forget about the human spirit that resides in us - the spirit that would rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas would have said; the spirit that led us to conquer icy wastes and dry deserts alike. Its looking at picture like these that helps me to discover that spark.

Without the war, the girl would probably had found choosing between which which dress to wear on a date to be one of the most important decisions in life; would have been perhaps a beautiful, dreamy girl having regular crushes and planning big-small plans for the future. Here, there is an unmistakable feminine charm in the freeze-frame which neither the Vietcong uniform nor the gun, nor indeed the war, can hide.

The easy gait with which she carries the gun slung across her back is at the same time, both pitiable and extraordinarily terrifying. We would perhaps never know how or why she took up the gun - whether it was a split second easy or an agonizing decision. But the gun having become a part of her body lends a strange, terrible beauty - a beauty that cannot be shaken off easily maybe because its a beauty that we are privileged to see so seldom and in our own lives, maybe never.

I find her gaze arresting. The half glance that gives us a part view of her face reveals a face that seems beautiful because and inspite of a severity - a baby faced soldier with soft edges to the face that nevertheless seems to have acquired a glint or a sharpness that a guerilla warfare would bring. What is she looking back at? It could be just a casual glance to someone who has called from behind or maybe its a glance of introspection. The beauty of the picture is enhanced by the fact that we would never know what was it she gave a backward glance to. Its almost a symbolic look back at the devastated country that she is fighting for; a glance of reaffirmation of faith. Maybe it is also a glance of solitude. War invades privacy like no other pestilence. Maybe its a look she allowed herself when she felt herself unobserved, a glance that allowed her glance to soften for a bit.

An easy question to ask with a sigh and a wonder is "Will we ever know what happened to her". It would be a good thought to believe that she survived the war and led a full life. But then, she might have been killed an hour after this photograph was taken. But does it matter? She probably proved herself much more to her own self than many of us can even aspire to. When it mattered, she did not take cover and run; did not whimper and plead for mercy from the heavens; did not bemoan her fate to be born during a time of war; was not paralyzed with the tragedy of the possibility of her youth never reaching maturity, fully aware of the possibility of her life being extinguished any instant; she probably kept on walking inspite of facing the possibility of the fact that that no one might survive who would remember she even existed - the loneliest feeling of all. 

Instead she fought back knowing fully well it was not a fair war (is it ever?), knowing that her rifle would be useless against a B-52 bomber. Yet she chose to fight. I think it was this thought cumulating in a split second that marked me forever when I saw this picture.

Maybe we would never be able to put a name to the face. But its just as well. Let her be a symbol of every unsung and unhonoured hero that has fought in every war of resistance - resistance perhaps being our only inalienable right in life.

Let her also be a symbol against every kind of stereotype and limitations that we accept easily around us, stereotypes that allow us to neatly draw boundaries between what each of us can and cannot do.

In the end, I would just end my tribute to you by repeating a lyric that seems to have been sung just for you. In his song 'Unknown soldier', David Rovics sings in the end - "In all the trials of my life, I could only hope to be as beautiful as you".

Because of you, my heart has grown.

Rest in peace wherever you are.

END OF POST