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Despite truckloads of criticism that are heaped on all governments all over the world, they are still looked upon to restore peace and order. In general, they are expected to be fairer than those who are involved in parochial civil or criminal disputes among citizens. Of course, local-level policemen and other overlords can get really nasty if their interests or their oversized egos are hurt. Many also develop vested interests, with or without gratification, and yet, the system creaks along, everywhere.
The claim that some television channels were caught red-handed bribing households to raise their television rating points (TRP) was met with howls of approval from the rest of the media and an exasperated public and, of course, equally cacophonous protests from those accused of manipulation. Interestingly, almost the entire TV news industry appears to have united as never before against this reported malpractice. In this bedlam, major issues are, however, getting mixed up and while scores are being settled, the unprecedented nationwide interest, alarm and angst should call for some positive course-correction.
As the 150th birth anniversary celebrations end and the Mahatma returns to his confined habitat of museums, a fact worth noticing is the visible turn — we still cannot call it a turnaround— in the attitude of the Hindu Right to the man they hounded to death.'
Strange as it may sound, there was a wave of disenchantment about Gandhi ji in West Bengal after Independence and it was passed on to us who were born within a few years of freedom. It stemmed, perhaps, from the shoddy treatment that was meted out to Netaji by a group in the Congress that was close to the Mahatma. Many of us, therefore, began with a negative "opening balance" about Gandhi and that is what makes our turnaround more interesting.
Of the three labour Bills passed by Parliament recently, one has a special dispensation for unorganised workers, who have surely been neglected by successive governments. The utter chaos and largely avoidable pain that migrant labourers, inter-state or intra-state, suffered after the sudden announcement of the nationwide lockdown in March this year is still fresh in people’s minds.
In the performing and the visual arts, there are larger numbers who achieved iconic positions but in the domain of cultural popularisation, theorisation and management, we can recall only very few. Dr Kapila Vatsyayan was the last in the unforgettable trio of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar as her predecessors. Each of them embarked upon separate missions within the vast space of culture.
No, I am neither going to attack nor defend Rhea Chakraborty or Kangana Ranaut. The very fact that they are hogging prime time is repugnant to those who look forward to news for information. For entertainment, there are endless frothy soap operas and many love to see merciless boxing and wrestling matches as proxies for their suppressed rage. But when news television subsumes these genres, it cheats and misleads a nation.
The annual festive worship of Durgā is so comfortably settled in the Bengali imagination that her apparent anomalies and contradictions are hardly examined. The first issue is that popular demand in Bengal mandates that she has to be seen with her four 'children' — which is most unlike other parts of India. The second is derived from this as these four `children' appear quite disinterested in Durgā's ferocious battle with Mahiṣāsura, nor do they play any role in it. The third anomaly lies in the fact that Durgā in Bengal appears resplendent in her best dress with a lot of jewellery, even as she is engaged in a mortal combat.
There is nothing really amiss if a singer insists on bringing his own musicians, as they understand him rather well. But then, when he has pole-vaulted himself to the most critical position of deciding the fate of 130 crore souls, there is cause for alarm at such an infantile insistence. The administration of this vast, complex country requires real professional skills and not just agreeability or the carrying out of commands.
Onam, which bids farewell, is much more than a festival of joy, for it represents the core of the great reconciliatory heart of Hinduism. Most such celebrations recall the victory of a great God or Goddess over dark forces, personified usually by a demonic Asura. The Ramayana marks the destruction of a Rakshasa while the Durga Puja emphasises Devi’s triumph over Mahishasura.
How does one summarise the life of a patriarch who strode the stage of Indian politics for over half a century? As a titan, he towered well above the rather diminutive height that god given him, along with a razor sharp mind and a phenomenal memory for details and numbers.
When he was picked up by Indira Gandhi in 1969 after his skilful campaign in West Bengal that ensured the electoral victory of her father’s favourite, Krishna Menon, little did either of them realise what life had in store for them.
The atmosphere is so charged after the ceremony for the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya that it seems well nigh impossible to discuss positive aspects of this epic in the life of India without flare-ups. But we are not here to debate whether it is myth or history, or even bits of both, nor condone or condemn the destruction of another place of worship. Here, our focus is on the historic unifying role of an epic that is viewed by some as a sharply divisive text.
As in the recent past, on this Independence Day too, we shall hear a lot of chest-thumping from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, along with a call to immerse ourselves in patriotic passion. But when the present prime minister of India recalls the role of our immortal martyrs of the freedom struggle, will he really tell us the whole truth about this phase? No: he will not make the mistake of mentioning that the organisation that commands and inspires his political party did not participate in the struggle for independence, and that it actively opposed it at times.
“You see” said the Red Queen to little Alice in Lewis Caroll’’s Through The Looking Glass, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”.
She was referring to fast moving developments and how the world under our feet moves so rapidly that we all need to keep running all the time — just to stay in the same place. The Red Queen also gave a corollary “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
August 5, 2020, surely joins December 6, 1992, as another ‘black day’ for ‘the idea of secular India’.
We may bemoan the endless assaults on the secular polity and scream from every rooftop, or even add our names to ready-to-sign electronic petitions, but the fact is that we have lost this round, quite decisively. It is time for us to seriously introspect, not fume with rage or lament. After all, history may very well turn around and ask what we were doing during the 28 long years that separated the two tragedies of 1992 and 2020.
A foreign broadcaster wanted to know what I felt, as the former head of Prasar Bharati, about Doordarshan preparing to telecast live the proceedings of the groundbreaking ceremony for a Ram mandir at Ayodhya. I replied evasively as I was schooled in service, but this issue of a supposedly neutral and secular public broadcaster covering an event glorifying one religion is quite touchy.
No, we will not discuss Vikas Dubey. But we need to revisit occasionally that very shadowy zone where the state assumes the power to liquidate certain citizens. We know that this is one of the three unique traits that distinguish the state from all other organisations, including those more prosperous or powerful. These are the legitimate right to impose taxes (everyone else ‘charges’ people); the inherent right to requisition men, materials, places and buildings (as during elections or wars); and the third is its basic right to kill. It thus declares all other killings are homicides and prosecutes the perpetrators, leading occasionally to capital punishment, after due trial and the process of law.
In these troubled times, when the soldiers of the two largest nations of the world fight and kill each other so viciously, let us try to trace the historical roots of such antagonism. If both nations hark back to a common narrative about Buddhism being a gift from India and both respect the pious Chinese monks who came here on pilgrimage, where does such pent up anger come from? We need to understand first that India and China are not just two nation states and that they are really two of the world’s oldest and largest civilisations.
It is only after the recent ravages of the coronavirus that much of the world suddenly realised the virtues of the Indian cultural trademark called ‘namaste’. In the past, foreigners were often surprised or upset when they extended their hand to Indians for a friendly shake, only to be greeted by two palms of the hands joined together, fingers pointing upwards.
We are all aware of the large-scale protests, some violent, that shook the United States soon after videos showing how white police officers mercilessly caused the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis went viral. As ‘coloured’ people, our natural sympathies go to those oppressed by the white man, but we also realise that as long as the malaise of racial discrimination is not eradicated, its external manifestations are bound to recur. Colourism—which propagates an aversion towards those who do not look like us and are therefore ugly—is our enemy, not the police.
Despite considerable material progress, the world still views India as an ancient land steeped in spirituality, with a culture that stretches back to a hoary, unfathomable past. Indians, too, subscribe to this glorification of its timelessness and have been encouraged, especially in the last few years, to take an obsessive pride in this tryst with eternity. Thus, we can hardly be faulted in subscribing to very marketable propositions, like the one that claims our classical dance forms represent an unbroken tradition for several millennia and all of them go back to the venerable sage, Bharata Muni, who composed Natyashastra.