It took him 22 years, working with a hammer and a chisel, to cut a road through the huge rocky hillock - a road that could lead to school, save lives, and show his people the way forward.
What a story, and what a man. More here.
Hindi film actor Salman Khan’s five-year prison sentence in the blackbuck poaching case has been confirmed. Bombay “Thank God It’s Sunday” Times checks with ten people whether Salman is a “victim of his celebrity status”, and asks, “Does he deserve what fate has befallen him?” (sic) Read the responses here.
Good friend Suniel Shetty offers this mystifying explanation: “There’s a lot of jealousy floating against him because he has a great physique.”
Btw, here’s the reported status on the hit-and-run in Bandra five years ago in which Salman was charged with culpable homicide.
It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time.
- Grace Paley. (Source: this interview)
Do writers have a moral obligation?and Qurratulain Hyder, about whose Aag ka Darya Kumkum Sangasri writes:Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn’t been seen.
Aag ka Darya held together, concurrently, a vast temporal and spatial ‘civilizational’ spread that asked now for a loyalty that was different from older loyalties of region, religion, or language; a loyalty to the idea of civilization that was wider, deeper, and more compelling than its division into separate nations.
(via Prufrock and Amitava Kumar)
Gandhian Baji Mohammed, one of India’s last living freedom fighters, in Koraput:
While hundreds marched towards Koraput, Baji Mohammed headed elsewhere. “I went to Gandhiji. I had to see him.” And so he “took a cycle, my friend Lakshman Sahu, no money, and went from here to Raipur.” A distance of 350 km of very tough, mountainous terrain. “From there we took a train to Wardha and went on to Sewagram. Many great people were at his ashram. We were awed and worried. When could we meet him, if ever? Ask his secretary Mahadev Desai, people told us.”“Desai told us to talk to him during his 5 p.m. evening walk. That’s nice, I thought. A leisurely meeting. But the man walked so fast! My run was his walk. Finally, I could no longer keep up and appealed to him: Please stop: I have come all the way from Orissa just to see you.”
“He said testily: ‘what will you see? I too, am a human being, two hands, two legs, a pair of eyes. Are you a satyagrahi back in Orissa?’ I replied that I had pledged to be one.”
“Go,’ said Gandhi. ‘Jao, lathi khao. (Go and taste the British lathis.) Sacrifice for the nation.’ Seven days later, we returned here to do exactly as he ordered us.” Baji Mohammed offered satyagraha in an anti-war protest outside the Nabrangpur Masjid. It led to “six months in jail and a Rs. 50 fine. Not a small amount those days.”
More episodes followed. “On one occasion, at the jail, people gathered to attack the police. I stepped in and stopped it. ‘Marenge lekin maarenge nahin,’ I said. (We shall die, but we shall not attack.)”
“Coming out of jail, I wrote to Gandhi: what now? And his reply came. ‘Go to jail again.’ So I did. This time for four months. But the third time, they did not arrest us. So I asked Gandhi yet again: now what?
Have been reading about the devastating impact of the floods in Bihar, eastern UP and elsewhere. Much of the newspaper coverage seems to have gone into the inside pages while the front pages were taken up with news of Sunjay Dutt’s prison term. Here is an online diary by an Oxfam aid worker. The page also provides links to the sites of some relief organisations. Here’s a Unicef report about their mobile medical camps in the region. Also see Goonj for their work in flood-hit areas.
Like Guru, I don’t quite understand what Ramachandra Guha is on about when he writes, in the NYT, of how he “came to understand (though not support) why so many Indians had favored building a Ram temple in Ayodhya.” He writes:
Once a center of Islamic civilization, later the center of a white man’s Raj, after 1947 Delhi had become a city of the Hindu and Sikh victims of partition. These Punjabi migrants had lost homes and businesses in that bloody summer of 1947. Starting from scratch, they had come to dominate Delhi’s commerce and social life. Yet they remained insecure; who knew when catastrophe might come again? And so they hoarded diamonds and maintained Swiss bank accounts.Why does Guha generalise that all Punjabi migrants were a bunch of cheats? Why does he forget that the Ram temple project also received support from quarters that were unaffected by Partition? And finally, what does it mean to “understand (though not support)”?They also cheated their tenants. In six years in Delhi, my wife and I had four landlords, all refugees from the Pakistani part of Punjab. All four hooked their appliances to our electricity meter, and all kept our deposits when we left.
The rest of the piece is also rather strange, especially some stuff about a dream…
…a family member has cancer. You learn to be organised. You plan your time. You learn new skills. You become more self-aware than you ever were… Pankaj Mehra describes the many ways in which one learns to cope.
In a year’s time I have learnt to be more practical or, at any rate, more street-smart. I know where I can get cheaper medicines, and how and when to bargain while shopping. I am also learning how to save because now every penny counts for us. And we have to be very careful that Sadhika doesn’t get hurt. “Save Infection, Save Life,” the doctors have told us many times. It means she can’t play as hard as other children her age do, but she seems to accept it. In fact, she is quite used to her medical regimen, the painful injections and the bitter medicines. Sometimes she plays ‘Blood Test’ and tries to take her brother’s blood samples, her eyes twinkling mischievously. She doesn’t complain when we take her for a check-up and injections every Monday. Her medicines are expensive, costing as much as Rs 300 per dose. Sometimes she vomits it all out. I don’t want to admit it, but though I hate it, I do find myself tallying up the monetary loss.Does she really understand what she is going through? This angel of mine doesn’t know how fragile her life is — that anything can happen to her anytime. But we are determined to fight till the end, and we know that we will emerge victorious. I will leave no stone unturned for my little girl.
I am trying these days to learn how to use the Internet as I want to find out about the Bone Marrow Bank in Australia. I did finally manage to create an email-id for Sadhika…
Many thanks to Sunil Poolani and Frog Books for sending me a copy of their new journal Urban Voice: Identity, Publishing, Writing. This first issue is an interesting, if somewhat uneven potpourri of poetry, fiction, essays and other stuff. Including poetry by Meena Kandaswamy and Sudeep Sen, fiction by Suma Josson, and an essay by O.V.Vijayan written shortly before his death. An Orwell special, this issue also contains three of George Orwell’s essays - “Politics and the English Language”, “Why I Write” and “Writers and Leviathan”.
Good luck to the enterprise!
Lakshmi Chaudhry doesn’t heart Harry Potter:
Rowling’s ham-handed characterization of Voldemort is in stark contrast to her depiction of a far more insidious and contemporary kind of evil, one captured so brilliantly in the bright-eyed malice of Dolores Umbridge, the Grand Inquisitor in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In the Ministry of Magic–originally led by Cornelius Fudge, who is later replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour in Half-Blood Prince–Rowling points her finger at elected officials hellbent on preserving their power at the expense of their citizens, wresting basic rights, eroding freedoms and manipulating information, all in the name of maintaining order. But in her final book, Rowling simply sweeps aside the multitude of the Ministry’s sins in the wake of Voldemort’s bloody coup…
On the other hand, Charles Taylor does:
Because literary culture is so insular and defensive, it’s no surprise that the out-of-nowhere success of Rowling would be taken as a threat. But I think that anyone who has a stake in seeing literature not just survive but thrive is a damned fool not to rejoice in the success of the Potter series. Not because the books are popular but because they are popular and good. The kids for whom the Harry Potter books are the first big books they’ve embarked on will start off with a belief that books must engage them, must make them feel swept up in something bigger than themselves, must make them feel the joy and the pain of having an emotional stake in characters and in story…
From the Indian Express editorial “Heart strings and Purse strings” of August 19, 1942, in which the newspaper declared that it was on the side of Gandhi’s nationalists (the paper went on to shut down operations in protest against the gag order imposed by the British government and reappeared on the stands only in December that year):
Only the other day we published the message of Mahatma Gandhi about the duty of the Press and we have done our best. The recent orders of the government mean nothing but that we shall be glorified issues of the Gazette of India…… We somehow feel that the same blood runs in our veins as in those of Gandhiji, Azad, Nehru and other leaders who are in jail… We do not want to detail to the public the gagging orders that we have received. Suffice it to say that we cannot publish news relating to our leaders, to the Congress movement, or relating to anything for that matter — indeed, not even facts that vitally affect the community — unless it is contained in a government communique or in a report from a registered correspondent blessed by the District Magistrate. It would be nothing less than a fraud on the public for us to send out a paper containing just that and nothing more…
Political economy fails in the face of events and impressions which we cannot forget if we are to live a thousand years … The human race is said to be fighting for its freedom; what avails it to us unless it includes the freedom of our country? … We have no regret in suspending publication because we firmly believe that the children of India will hear the voice of the Mother, telegraph or no telegraph, newspaper or no newspaper, Gandhiji has given his message to the people and it does not require further publication. His message lives and will regenerate itself in the heart of every Indian. If the government still wants to save the situation, there is one course, and one and only one, open to them — to release Mahatma Gandhi and concede the national demand.
I don’t agree with some of the things Suketu Mehta says in this piece about living in Mumbai, and the tone of this sentence irritated me for some reason:
Disease and genius, crime and religion, poverty and wealth, are all maximized there, and, given the cheap availability of air fares, are coming soon to a theater near you.
But there’s a short answer to the question of why people still live here. We wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
