Indian Writing

Email from WSD:

The Welfare Of Stray Dogs and Cymroza Art Gallery would like to invite you to an exhibition of photographs titled ” Stray Snapshots” by Rohan Mukerjee at the Cymroza Art Gallery between October 27, 2008 and November 1, 2008 between 10 am and 8 pm.

Rohan Mukerjee, a WSD volunteer and photographer has beautifully captured these thirty one stray dogs and cats in their natural surroundings in Mumbai, Kolkata , Shanti Niketan and other parts of India.

WSD spends about Rs 3 lakh per month on all its activities for strays which include mass sterilization and immunization, on-site first aid and immunization, adoption, education and awareness. All proceeds from the sale of these photographs will be used for funding these activities.

The WSD 2009 ‘Strays of Mumbai’ calendar will also be available at the venue.

In the NYT, Margaret Atwood on debt and fairness:

As for what will happen to us next, I have no safe answers. If fair regulations are established and credibility is restored, people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more — friends, family, a walk in the woods. “I” will be spoken less, “we” will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good…

From this Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel:

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

He did not think it was right, as a human being, that a harsh mechanical sound produced by the pressing of a lifeless plastic button should result in the arrival at his desk of another flesh-and-blood human being, huffing and puffing.

Vinayak Dattatreya’s view of life, quoted in Trisha Gupta’s review of Uday Prakash’s collection set in Delhi.
(from Time Out Delhi)

Reading that Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Sea of Poppies is on this year’s Man Booker shortlist, my thoughts went back to one summer in Bangalore many years ago, when I was teaching one of Ghosh’s prose pieces to a class of teenage schoolboys. Titled The Imam and the Indian, it was part of an anthology included in their English syllabus.

The boys were restless and bright and awkward, as boys of that age tend to be. As for me, I had chalk dust on my hands, notebooks to correct, and this wasn’t quite my idea of fun. (more…)

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
— Mohandas K. Gandhi

Dear Santosh

That was your name, wasn’t it? It was about the only thing I could be sure of. I’m not even sure how old you were - one report said 9, another said 11, another said you were 13 years old. Were you Santosh Kumar, or Santosh Mahto? The reports weren’t sure. You studied at the nearby municipal school. Were you in the fifth standard at school, or sixth? Not sure. You played football. Which position? We’ll never know. Already the details are blurring, disappearing from our minds.

The only thing we know, because this was reported, is that you were the boy who picked up a packet that Saturday at Mehrauli, a packet that two men on a motorbike had dropped as they drove past, and you ran after them, saying, Bhaisaab, aapka saamaan gir gaya…

Or some such thing. Because you were only trying to help. What you didn’t notice was that the packet was packed with nails, and when it exploded, it was still in your hand, and yours was the first life it took.

The odd, sad thing is that you might not have even had to die. You were only there in the market at that moment because your older brother had asked you to go get a crate of eggs. Your brother - I think his name was Bumbum, according to a report I read - who apparently works during the day and every evening runs a stall selling omelettes and boiled eggs, and perhaps chai as well? - for those like him who work long hours mainly doing physical work in the sun, who have no homes to go back to and who eat on the streetside. They, too, are among those who lose their lives or suffer injuries in attacks like these.

You were only trying to help, and look at what happened. Perhaps people will, in future, think twice before bending down to pick up something for the next person. Or hesitate to offer help without being asked. If so, then with you, Santosh, we will have lost yet another part of our humanity.

And now, Santosh, you too will become one more number in a ghastly count of lives. Except for your family - they will remember, and feel the loss and the injustice. Your mother and father, your sisters and brothers, your grandmother, the uncle who saw your body. Your father, a casual labourer who earns by the day, who migrated with his family from Bihar, some years ago, in search of work and some sort of a future for his children. Unlike the recent Vogue issue that used poverty as an interesting new backdrop for their photoshoot, your father had lived poverty and knew how terrible it was. He wanted his children to have a better life.

I found a picture of you in one of the news reports. You were wearing a blue shirt, you had an open, wide-eyed expression on your little face, and you were wearing a red thread tied around your neck. Someone at home - perhaps your grandmother, or your mother - had tied a charm around your neck to ward off the evil eye. It didn’t, however, manage to save you from the evil that lurks inside the hearts of men who throw bombs.

Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan, founders of LAFTI, have been honoured with this year’s Right Livelihood Award for their lifelong work with Dalit labourers and farmers. They have also received other awards and recognition for their work. From their website, in Krishnammal’s words:

My only prayer was to study, and equip myself to work for the uplift of the most downtrodden people. Fortunately, I became the first woman among the dalits (”untouchables”) within my community to study at the local school. In those days, there was no local newspaper. I used to draw pictures of a small hut, and explain the suffering of the people, and send it to all educated youth throughout the entire district, hoping to awaken their
minds and develop within them a commitment to service.

Throughout my life, I have been lucky. My prayers were answered. After graduation in 1952, I was privileged to be able to join Vinoba Bhave, as we walked from village to village in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, obtaining gifts of land for the landless.

But something remained burning in my heart. The wretched, airless mud huts were damaged every year by rain. Generally, the landless dalits live outside the village in low-lying areas. They have become so habituated to their suffering that they hardly pay attention anymore.

There was a woman living in a small hut near here that I couldn’t get out of my mind. After heavy rains last year, I couldn’t sleep, thinking of the awful conditions of the mud hut. In the early morning, I went to express my feelings to her. She laughed, and replied, “This is not much suffering. When the water comes in, I place vessels to collect the water as best I can. It is the best that can be expected.”

In response to the Berlin International Literature Festival’s appeal
for a worldwide reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry on October 5, 2008
Gallerie-PEN India-Jnanapravaha come together to commemorate the life and work
of the world-renowned Palestinian poet with an evening of readings.

Readings of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems by

Gieve Patel, Sampurna Chattarji, Prabodh Parikh, Yuki Ellias,
Anand Thakore, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Bina Sarkar Ellias.

October 5, 2008
6 pm
Jnanapravaha, Queens Mansion, 3rd Floor, G. Talwatkar Marg (Prescott Road), Fort, Mumbai.

—

A slaughtered house is the severing of things from what they meant, from the feelings they inspired. It’s the duty of tragedy to change the gaze of eloquence and to reflect upon the life of Things, for in everything there’s a being that suffers: a memory of fingers, a memory of a smell, a memory of a picture. Houses are murdered just as their inhabitants are killed and the memories of things are slaughtered: stones, wood, glass, iron, mortar - scattered like human limbs. Cotton silk, linen, exercise books, books - torn apart like the unsaid words of people who did not have the time to say them. Dishes broken, spoons, toys, old records, pipes, doorknobs, the refrigerator, the washing machine, pots, jars of olives and pickles, cars - all broken, like their owners…

Saturday, October 11, 2008, 6.30 pm,
Prithvi House, 1st Floor, Opposite Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu.

A reading-cum-discussion centred around a recently-published volume of two plays
The Last Train and If Wishes Were Horses by ANJU MAKHIJA
The reading by actors Kanika Dang, Raj Kanojia and Ashok Banthia
will be followed by a discussion on ‘THEATRE & POLITICS’.