Indian Writing

From Kalpana Bardhan’s translation of this short story (”Chhiniye khaye ni keno?”) by Manik Bandopadhyay about the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943:

“Dying in hordes, they still didn’t snatch the food to eat. You know why, Babu?

“Not one, not ten, but hundreds, hundreds of thousands, they went to their deaths. They stretched their hands to beg, tossed in the pain of hunger, they begged for the gruel drained off cooked rice to make it fluffy, they fought with stray dogs pawing through rotting dumps, but they did not put their hands to snatch food. Yet food was within their reach. With stacks of good-to-eat stuff in the shops, they waited on the roadside before those shops to lick the serving leaves for bits of syrup and crumbs. The marketplaces had piles of fruits and vegetables and the grocery shops and warehouses held rice and lentils, salt and oil, the illegal godowns were bursting with rice, the storerooms of rich homes stocking ten to twenty years’ worth of food. The word ‘food’ gained currency thanks to you people, Babu, so that even the stupidest weaver of the remotest village know what the word means. They know that the staples of rice, lentils, oil and salt that disappear through hidden transactions from one godown to another, bypassing the hungry mouths of the poor, are called food. Yes, they do know that fish-and-meat, milk-and-butter, those are also food. You’ve given currency to the word food to save your work of saying and writing down ten different names for ten kinds of food; you’ve shouted slogans demanding that the food problem be solved. Well, as far as they’re concerned, you didn’t need to bother so much. You could just as well use the word rice. Just rice, cleaned or not, bug-infested or not, any kind of rice in any form. The people who died from hunger were, of course, not asking for meat-fish, milk-butter, oil-salt. They could’ve done with just some rice, without your having to worry about ‘food.’ There were leaves on trees, roots in forests, and they wouldn’t have died. One can live even by chewing up and swallowing just a handful of dry, uncooked rice a day. You won’t believe it, Babu, but one can. No matter how weak they’d get on that diet, they could go on barely surviving.”

Drawing by Zainul Abedin from his record of the Bengal Famine.

Via Abi’s post on Desipundit.

Nikki Giovanni’s message of hope at the Virginia Tech convocation:

We are Virginia Tech
We are sad today
And we will be sad for quite a while
We are not moving on
We are embracing our mourning

We are Virginia Tech

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly
We are brave enough to bend to cry …
And sad enough to know we must laugh again

We are Virginia Tech

We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa dying of aids
Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of night in his crib in the home its father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destablized
No one deserves a tragedy

We are Virginia Tech

The Hokie nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds
We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid
We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be
We are alive to the imagination and the possibility
We will continue to invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail

We are Virginia Tech

— Nikki Giovanni, poet and University Distinguished Professor of English, VPI&SU
(from Daily Kos)