The author of Rang De Basanti raised a very valid question in one of his interviews. After the independence, our politicians never paid much attention to all those people — hundreds and thousands of them — who left their education and joined the struggle for independence. Since they didn’t have any educational qualification, I wonder what these people did after the independence. Did the government ever form a committee or something to take stock of how many such people needed to be rehabilitated?
My grandfather used to get pension because he was a freedom fighter. I don’t know how much the pension was but it must have mattered to him because right till his last days he religiously collected his pension. After his death my grandmother used to get it. I don’t know if my father was supposed to get it or not. Obviously my father didn’t take the trouble of going to the office and do the needed paper work because even the large-size pizza these days costs more than the pension amount.
Giving a lifetime pension (this was the least the country could do), although a good step, was not a long-term solution. The government should have set up a separate ministry to get all those people prepared for the future. I think our forefathers missed a great opportunity here. Just think how motivated all those people were. They were reaping the fresh fruit of their toil and blood. Their focused drive could have literally changed the fate of the country.
Rather than calling it a shocking incident — the expression “shocking” gets redefined almost on a daily basis — I’d call it a bizarre incident. A man was shot dead for showing empathy towards a dog in pain.
An insane man called Dinesh Kumar Tiwari trampled a sleeping dog in a hurry and when the dog yelped and moaned in pain this man started kicking the hapless animal, causing more cries of pain. A passerby, Rajesh Kumar, pleaded with him not to torment the animal like that, and Tiwari shot him for doing that.
How do you view such a murder? It certainly doesn’t have a motive. It can surely be called an act of insanity. It can also be termed as a cold-blooded murder just because the murderer thought he could get away with that, and this sense of impunity had to be ingrained because at such moments there isn’t much time to weigh pros and cons. It was cold blooded, and it was at the spurt of the moment. You just don’t kill people for telling you not to hurt a dog. For Tiwari, kicking a dog and killing a person (I’m not undermining the dogs hurt, I’m just talking in terms of conventional, human wisdom) didn’t bear much difference. “Heck, now that I have kicked the dog,” he must have thought, “why not kill this annoying guy since the gun is available?”
This is similar to the Jessica Lal murder case. She was killed merely for refusing a drink because the time was over.
So what sorts of people do such things, killing people for trivial matters? Did they never learn how precious life is? We’re told this all the time. Take for instance Manu Sharma. Recently when he was acquitted he visited the Vaishno Devi temple to thank the revered goddess for saving his life. It means he loves his life so much. Didn’t he think about how much Jessica loved her life? Didn’t Tiwari, who first inflicted pain upon the dog and then shot a passerby, know how precious life is, or how pain feels?
I think both these persons felt very powerful. When you control life and death of another person, you feel the mightiest. And it’s not even about power; it’s about the wielding of the power. In himself, Manu Sharma is nothing without his gun and without the influence of his father. For all you know, Jessica could have pinned him to the ground had he challenged her to a hand-to-hand combat without getting his friends involved. Tiwari too, would have been a different persona had the dog retaliated and bitten him, or if he hadn’t had a gun, or had Rajesh Kumar manifested the same hot headedness.
It’s a shame if such impotent power-wielders get away with their crimes.
This time I finished reading On Beauty in record time; record time in terms of my reading speed. I took a week to read the first 15 pages, and then I read the entire book this weekend.
On Beauty more or less defines my taste. This is what I like to read; this is the stuff that tickles my literary taste buds. I like bland food that is devoid of all embellishments and masalas but when it comes to reading literature — whether fiction or non-fiction — it has to contain the masala elements. I don’t like bland literature. I don’t like “simple facts of life beautifully written in small sentences.” No. I like my reading complicated. I don’t mind if a sentence stretches to a paragraph and there are at least 3-4 words in that paragraph that are incomprehensible to most readers. This is the pickle for me that make the book, the reading material in it, tasty. I like writers who can juggle with words and orchestrate intricately beautiful patterns with them. OK, if you are Kundera, it’s totally a different matter. But then, enough with my stylistic proclivities.
The book is mostly about the university life of Wellington — a posh, laidback American suburb near Boston. A black family having a white, British father lives there. The father, Howard, is a Rembrandt scholar and is the professor of liberal arts in the university, and is at loggerheads with another black professor — Monty Kipps — a thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt, again, and hence the conflict, who is hell bent upon taking the word “liberal” out of liberal arts.
Howard’s family consists of a big-black-but-beautiful wife Kiki, the eldest son Jerome who falls in love with Monty Kipps’ daughter Victoria (who is out to get laid by all and sundry throughout the novel), a daughter named Zora who is a pseudo-scholastic intellectual pursuing arts studies in the same university, and the youngest son named Levi who tries to get to the root of his black identity in a white neighborhood and ends up with a group of Haitian thieves. And of course, they have a dog named Murdoch.
The underlying theme of the novel seems to highlight that you can never be too sure of your ideologies and intellectual pursuits. Almost all the characters are proven wrong in the end whether throughout the book you agree with their opinions or not. Levi (who cannot go out without his iPod), while all the time trying to fight for the cause of the underpaid Haitians, ends up a thief. Zora all the time defends her father’s infidelity but in the end finds she was on the wrong side of the debate. The only stable person in the novel is Jerome, with whose emails to his father the novel begins (ummm…I wonder if this is a right sentence). In a series of emails to his father — who doesn’t seem to be replying because Jerome has decided to go to London and work under his rival, Monty Kipps — Jerome reveals that he and Kipps’ daughter are getting married. It’s from here that the story moves forward.
You can call it a saga of intellectual hypocrisy — this book — with both opposing professors having no moral clue of exactly what they think. Both end up having sex with their students without emotional ties, both are selfish and self-obsessed and not particularly interested in the affairs of their families. Howard cannot even put up a decent fight with his wife because all the time either he is guilt-ridden, or too genteel to show aggression. He even tries to justify to Kiki why he ended up in bed with their common friend (a 50-year-old professor of modern poetry in the same university). I think he is also uncomfortable with his predominantly black family (all the children are dark or semi-dark) although it is never mentioned in the novel.
The same is true for the Wellington University. They claim to espouse for liberalism and openness while wallowing in the same old mud of prejudice, raw ambition, arrogance, deceit and exploitation.
Even when Kiki and Howard’s daughter, Zora, tries to help a street rapper, Carl, to get some decent college education, her underlying motive is to portray herself as a highly sophisticated crusader, to get some romantic attention from the handsome rapper.
On Beauty does not have a central character: all the characters pursue their individual obfuscations and contribute to the overall deceitfulness of their natures
A few reviews I’ve read suggest Zadie Smith got inspired by EM Forster’s Howards End. I’ve never read Forster so I cannot draw qualified parallels, but she knows how to write. She is a Bohemian expressionist, you may say. She doesn’t dabble with the hyperbole and remains rooted to the ground. Despite her literary grip and command she doesn’t get carried away and concentrates more on the narrative and lets the style effervesce at its own discretion. This book is worth a read.
A little support from you can make a big difference. The Manjunath Shanmugan Trust desperately needs your help to keep the flag of his ideals fluttering.
We should always keep in mind that this world survives due to people like him because they are constantly trying — even at the costs of their lives — to make this world a better place for us and for our generations. He stood up against the corrupt and lost his life. Like the rest of us he could have easily went on living a comfy life: get the monthly check and give two hoots about what’s going on around him. Instead he chose to follow a different path and raised his voice. The least we can do is, let the echo haunt the perpetrators for a long, long time, so if our children choose to follow a different path, they know there are people to back them.
NDTV has started an SMS campaign to get the Jessica Lal murder trial re-opened. You can send an SMS to 6388. Type “Jessica” and send the SMS. Then an appeal will be made to President Kalam to get the trial re-opened.
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.
– Woody Allen
I too believe in this.
It seems our country really has a law that cannot see.
My father lives in Abu Dhabi. He often tells us that if you get into a law-related situation involving you and a local, it’s by default assumed that it is your fault. There is no concept of a fair trial.
The same is happening here: if you get into trouble with the rich and the powerful the outcome is always going to tilt in their favor. They can do anything to you: they can rape you, murder you or beat you up — in broad day light, or at a place full of people. You cannot do anything. Witnesses can be bought or threatened, police can be bought, and let’s not even talk about the judges.
There is a great frenzy in the media regarding this case, and I know this is going to be an ephemeral exercise, going by the history of such cases.
Go on Manu Sharma, go on a killing binge again and again: baap ka raaj hei bhai
These two lines manifest a pseudo-scientific, metaphysical reality:
???? ?? ??????????? ??
????? ???? ???? ??
?????? ???? ???? ???
??? ???? ??
I’ve seen life with such proximity
that every face appears strange and grotesque now
As you go on experiencing life, two things begin to happen; everything becomes so lucid and perceivable that you love life just for being alive. There are no doubts, there are no confusions and hence there are no emotional and physical catastrophes. Life becomes a mixture of tranquility and enjoyable adventure. Take for instance the martial arts experts. They can maintain sangfroid even during most trying combat situations because they completely understand what’s going on and thus know in advance what their opponent’s next move is going to be. There is sometimes so much understanding of life that we become either saints or spiritual gurus.
The other thing that can happen is, every new experience, every new insight leaves us clueless, frustrated and angry. The more we understand life, the less we find it livable. We begin to resent the mere existence of it. We suffer from the “Big deal! I already know this so lay off” syndrome. So much understanding makes us cynical. It seems everybody is out to betray us. Even small objects create giant shadows on our walls of agnosticism.
Understanding life should obviously culminate into a deeper respect of its perplexities and the solutions it decants into the simmering pots of our dilemmas. The learning experience is sometimes very painful and can prove fatal if not handled with caution, but we can always use the overall result to our advantage. First of all, when we observe life closely, we know why things happen — there happening is an amalgamation of many factors. Once we know why they happen, there is less of anger and frustration, and more of analysis. Let’s revert to this song for instance.
Haven’t seen the movie, and I haven’t even seen the video of the song, but most sad songs in Hindi movies deal with the interminable saga of heartbreak. So the character who sang this song must have realized this overwhelming truth (the life seeming grotesque, etc.) after he is ditched by the heroin (of course it is a misconception, as it is proven in the end). As long as he sings the song it is well and good — he is being creative after all. But it would be alarming if he turned destructive towards himself, or towards the heroin, or towards that unassuming street dog that just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. A session of analysis is what this guy needs.
Every betrayal, to be frank, leaves you wiser. In close proximity if life seems distorted to this guy then there is a great chance he suffers from myopia. Proximity to life gives you a sense of clarity. If a person betrays you and leaves you for another, no matter how much it hurts, if at that time you understand life, if your grasp of the dealings of the world is stronger, you know you are better off without this person. You should be thankful that this person left you. Agreed that so much has been invested — emotionally, and these days financially — but still, why suffer more loss? At a later stage this person could have cost more. Your dreams are shattered, it is understandable, but then, if you know life, you know that dreams can be infinite in this world and in this life. Life is so unpredictable that you don’t even know what can happen tomorrow. Unless you’re totally a gone case — fatewise — then every bad person that goes from your life leaves the space vacant for a nicer person; it’s been my personal experience. The same holds true for situations? Every adversity renders muscle power to your intellect and diligence. The old adage that fire purifies gold is so true.
So I firmly believe the first point I mentioned: that your understanding of the world shouldn’t make you cynical; it should make you wiser; it should make you emotionally strong. This is not something that you can learn in a day, a week, or even in a month. It may take years and years of conscious effort. But once you understand the world, you become invincible.
It is insulting that such people exist in our country. I believe in their right to protest, but this is totally anarchic. Just imagine, openly urging people to go kill another person. This community desperately needs to rid itself of such mullas and hajis. It’s so embarassing!
You may say that in a country where even human life has no value why such a hullabaloo is being raised for getting Salman Khan punished for killing the black bucks in Rajasthan. And surprisingly, tragically, you might be in the majority group who keeps on watching his movies and using products promoted by him.
First of all, two wrongs do not make a right: not valuing human life doesn’t mean devaluing the wildlife. Right now I’m not even talking about the psychological aspect of hunting. If you think about human nature, everything is inter-connected, and it is evident in the way he mowed down a few pedestrians and didn’t even stop to see if they were dead or alive. You don’t value life you don’t value life, any life: whether on 4 legs, or two legs.
I believe people who kill animals as a leisure activity don’t love anybody in the world (not that they deserve to be loved). If you love people around you, you want to preserve the world for them. When my child grows up, I want her to experience the flora and fauna of the country and the world in general. I want her to know how beautiful (and the only, incidentally) this planet is, and how myriad forms of life inhabit it. I want her to breathe air and drink water that is not polluted. When you kill an animal or pollute the environment just because you’ve got nothing better to do, you are harming your children, you are harming your loved ones, and you are harming those people who have got nothing to do with you except for unfortunately sharing this world with you. So how can you claim you love your wife, your children, your parents and your friends if you are killing a beautiful part of their world?
Now the psychological aspect. The research has proved that people who hunt animals for fun suffer from very low self-esteem. They get a high when they think they are so powerful that they can kill a wild animal; they get a chance to pull the trigger and take a life; they get a chance to showoff the kill to their friends. Doesn’t it sound scary, that people like Dick (uhumm…) Cheney make decisions that influence the world whereas he should have been getting some serious counseling from a shrink? How does he make so important policy decisions with so low a self-esteem? He should be immediately removed from the office.
And how can Salman Khan promote brands when actually he is a teeny-weenie soul from inside that needs to kill animals to feel worthy of itself?
Do I hear a “DUH?”?
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