THE DIALOGUE

The small room seemed less like a place of human residence and more like an agglomeration of books and CDs spread all over the floor and some makeshift racks, with a computer claiming its own little territory shared with unwilling helplessness between a dusty old table and itself, playing “down to the waterline” from Dire Straits through two cheesy speakers with unaccomplished perfection, vainly trying to fill up the deafening silence suspended between the only two visible carbon-based life forms, of mentionable significance, in the room. And as they lay on the single bed, in the after hours of the lazy winter afternoon of January, she graffittying his chest with her bare fingers and he stroking her face with the back of his hand, simultaneously lighting up the last cigarette from the big red pack of Dunhill, trying to fix up the arduous uncertainties of the day, he suddenly spoke, disturbing the careening ballet of white smoke, breaking the ennui enveloping the smoke filled room, that both parties shared with mutual comfort.

“Do you think suicide-bombers are brave people?”

“What?” She realized the initiation of a dialogue.

“Do you think/believe/feel that the act (s) committed by suicide-bombers are those of bravery? Or courage?” He said, stressing on certain words.

“ Which ones? I mean there are so many of them...Arabs, Sri Lankan...even Indians...which ones are you talking about?” she replied with an obvious lack of interest.

“I don’t know. Come on. You don’t have to knead into it. Just answer the fucking question, will you? If you remember it!” His irritation was apparent.

“Well...no! Absolutely not; its utter brazenness. I mean you’re marching into certain death” She was still not seriously engaged into the conversation.

“Yeah? What about the soldiers fighting under the Rajputs? Or the Sikhs? Or the Japanese during the Second World War? Or the Marathas & Tipu Sultan against the British? An insignificant handful of them fighting for territories, which did not even belong to them in the first place, ramming head-on into forces much larger than theirs. But we prefer to call it courage. I mean, they marched into certain death too. But we heroicize all those ill-planned endeavors of eccentric emperors. We don’t...”
“...Oh come on! It’s not even the same thing. Those armies, those soldiers had a cause to defend. They fought to ensure safe existence for societies, which they belonged to. What you are doing is taking one thing and calling it another.”

“ & What you are doing is euphemizing the brazenness of a section of favored individuals or groups by calling it courage, when it can be easily established that their characterization, or attribution, as I would like to call it, was just the outcome of a series of convincingly-fed historical accidents by the media, which we accepted with compromised convenience as true acts of unbridled glory.”

“Well, you can say that with the benefit of retrospect on your side. To me, these so called Suicide-Bombers of yours are religious fanatics, shamelessly brandishing irrationally raucous recalcitrance, fuelled by constant indoctrination and brainwashing by shady ideologues; self-proclaimed messiahs of mankind, who place their hollow religious claims over and above everything else. They don’t give two fucks about education, economic development, unemployment or any other indicator of human development.”

“That’s where you give in to the temptations of conjecture and resort to the employment of convenient mental categories, which the society has been feeding you with, and decide to assume things and ideas whose validity or even existence is questionable, as it remains unsubstantiated by the lack of empirical evidence. Cognitive economy, you see! How can you just decide, single handedly, all by yourself, that “those people” are indoctrinated with venomous fanaticism by vested interests. What makes you declare with such conviction that they are “brainwashed” and not genuine believers in their actions? Just by this simplistic and conjectural assumption you can’t decide, they are wrong. Don’t you know that we humans have this irritatingly uncanny ability to justify our actions, no matter how offensive they are to others? Go ask “those people”, they will give you a thousand reasons why they do what they do and to your uncomfortable surprise they will all manage to convince you. They can justify their so-called fanaticism just as well as you and me can justify the selfishness behind our occasional altruism. So don’t brand their actions as wrong, just because you think they are wrong.”

“Well, it’s not about justification. Just because something is justifiable, doesn’t necessarily mean its “right.” So when you make love to me and leave your lingering aroma all over my soul, even after all your aggressive ways, I feel indulged in pleasure. But when a stranger does it without my consent, I’d call it rape. That the rapist would anyhow justify it, doesn’t make it right. Although the acts are similar, their meaning and consequences to the other person make them polar opposites, one epitomized as the meeting of souls, worthy of extravagant nomenclatures and divine comparisons, the other despised as a manifestation of basal instinct, a lack of respect and compassion towards the other person and the abasement of that blissful interaction of two consenting bodies, reveling in each other’s warm embrace, which we often, with nonchalant convenience call “fucking”, which again makes the same process sound cheap and animalistic. Morover, on another plane, its a violation of and contradiction to the accepted norms and ideals of the collectivity. So at this level, it’s about the collective conscience; what the collectivity considers wrong or extreme.”

“I don’t know. The example you give makes your argument sound believable, but nevertheless renders it ineffective when viewed through a macro-perspective, by being extremely specific and over-inductive. Morover, what you call respect and adherence to the collective conscience, I call institutionalized passive conformism. So Arabs are terrorists, Israelis are not, just because the they’re backed by the US, even though they may have been constantly acting in ways that have doomed millions of innocent Palestinians to a life plagued by a perpetual fear of impending death and terror.”


.........to be contd.
mahim