Romancing the Retrospect
      an inquiry into India's political nostalgia

When history is rubbed against the grain, to use the words of Walter Benjamin, ripe peels of nostalgia lie convulsing in the sands of time, throbbing with life, often in pools of blood. However, for all texts of culture and civilization that get lost in history, there are some that remain. They linger around, floating in the collective consciousness of cultures, of nations, of people. These strands of history thrive, representing a continuity with the past; a past that is too perfect, too poetic to be forgotten and so it is preserved. Often at the cost of misprizing the present. Nostalgia then becomes a precious sentiment; a defence mechanism to counter the uncertainties of the present with the certainty of a glorious past. 

The political texture of Indian democracy still finds these strands intertwined with contemporary trends. And therefore, it is easy to feel nostalgia hanging heavy on the mindset of the Indian voter. How else does one explain the dominance of the Indian National Congress in Indian politics till at least as long as 1977; riding unbridled on the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family. According to the Prof. Dipankar Gupta at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, such has been the Indian voter’s fascination with the Nehru-Gandhi family that the leadership vacuum created at the centre after the exit of Mrs. Indira Gandhi is yet to be filled. Even with the ideological transition in Indian polity since 1991, Indian intelligentsia’s romantic reminiscence of the Nehruvian era continues. “In a way we are all Nehru’s children. The Indian middle class, with its modernist orientation and its faith in scientific rationality, has had a long standing intellectual engagement with Nehru. Nehru’s conflicting experience with Indian tradition due to his modernist education is shared to various degrees by every Indian growing up along the same educational trajectory, “says Avijit Pathak, professor of Sociology at JNU. Nehru assumes significance not just as a political leader but also as a political thinker. Moreover, with Gandhi dead, he was the only one of a comparable stature who ushered India into independence. To that extent, he provided a continuity between pre and post independence India. Being the first Prime Minister of independent India, he shaped India’s destiny with his policies based on Non-alignment and democratic socialism that still find relevance in the policy discourse of the Indian welfare state. 

As in National politics, so also in the regional domain; J.N.Vyas in Rajasthan, J.P.Narayan in Bihar, Biju Patnaik in Orissa, Periyar and to some extent MGR in Tamil Nadu etc are all examples of charismatic leaders who continue to haunt popular imagination. According to Uma Maheshwari, a professor at the Political Science department of Madras University, the political climate of Tamil Nadu, especially dalit politics, has always been defined with E.V.R. Periyar as a reference point. K. Kamaraj and MGR are the other major reference points. Periyar’s face peeping behind the shoulders of giant cutouts of MGR, Karunanaidhi and Jayalalitha and even local level politicians like Vijaykaanth is testimony to this phenomenon. 

The student movement of the 1970s led by Jai Prakash Narayan is another chapter in the study of Indian political nostalgia. The most interesting aspect of this kind of nostalgia is that it is not just confined to the generation that witnessed these leaders. It transcends generational boundaries and assimilates members of subsequent generations as well. Memory is a pre-condition for nostalgia but this transcending aspect of nostalgia is explained by what Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, Senior Advisor, Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, calls nostalgia without memory, citing examples of teenagers of the current generations reminiscing about Vietnam and the Beatles. It is almost as if the present has been unable to provide any reference point to those who live in it; the current generation has nothing to identify with and so it keeps revisiting the past to make sense of its present.

Mahim Singh

In Cold Blood
an inquiry into law, literature and violence

Law serves justice by means of violence. It “cures” the perpetrators of violence by inflicting violence upon them; violence that is dark, secret, silent and often disturbingly dignified. It is this violence orchestrated by the juridical apparatus that Michel Foucault talks about in Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason and also in Discipline and Punish. While ancient and medieval periods served justice by explicitly severing bodies, the modern juridical apparatus, powered by modernist rationality, does the same by denying freedom to the accused. The accused thus retains life but at the cost of freedom. And even when the law condemns someone to death, it makes sure it is a quiet, bloodless, painless death; an act performed through scientific, objective means in absolute secrecy. Justice served to perfection by absolutely rational means. Robert Cover echoes these very articulations of a disturbingly dignified violence in his article Violence of the Word. The notions of pain and suffering are strictly tabooed in the juridical vocabulary. The idea is just to deny freedom, or life for that matter, but without pain and suffering. Consequently, the “word” as Cover would say, inflicts violence without pain and suffering. Inferentially, pain and suffering get lost in legal narratives when crime translates into justice. Notions of pain and suffering being lost in legal narratives are often re-invoked and relived in art; in literature, paintings, music, films etc. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documents this rediscovery of pain and suffering exceptionally. A story about the murder of a prosperous Kansas family by two criminals Dick and Perry, In Cold Blood celebrates pain and suffering with disarming gruesomeness. Capote weaves a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder. A large part of the story involves the intense psychological relationship of the two felons that culminated in this cold-blooded crime. What stands out in Capote’s account of the murders is the fact that he succeeds in bringing out aspects of pain and suffering that got lost in juridical interpretation. Capote began researching for the book even before the murderers were captured and a lot of it was conducted while they were still under trial. He covered every single detail of the act, interviewing local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took down thousands of pages of notes. The fact that he could actually live the reality that he was about to document made In Cold Blood a seminal work on true crime and the first non-fiction novel ever written. Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” brings out the loss of pain and suffering at the hands of the juridical apparatus. In Cold Blood, pregnant with details of the murders, with graphic descriptions of the methods employed in committing the crimes, successfully brings out this pain. Capote manages to document the violence inflicted upon the family and betters it by capturing the violence implicit in the psyche of the perpetrators. This is where Benjamin’s thesis on the parallelism of civilization and barbarism applies to In Cold Blood, with violence inflicted upon the family representing the former and the psychic violence of the perpetrators representing the latter. It is precisely this barbarism that gets lost in the juridical narrative and that Capote brings out so vividly. The book spawned two movies, In Cold Blood (1967) and Capote (2006). While both were cinematic articulations of the same event, Capote, fueled by Philip Seymour Hoffman’ sublime impersonation of Truman Capote, succeeds in


terms of representation of reality. As a visual narrative, Capote, is dark, subtle and disturbing in its representation of the events as well as the psyche of the perpetrators. The film, as a text that is textured of violence and the ensuing pain, can be analyzed through both Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality and McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the massage/message.” In terms of representing the infliction of violence by the perpetrators and the pain thereby produced, first on the screen in the narratives of the criminals, and then reproduced and externalized onto the viewer, Capote conforms to both of the aforementioned concepts. These interpretations of the film as well as the text, however delineate essentially from Benjamin’s storyteller. So while Truman Capote assumes the role of the storyteller as the author of In Cold Blood, Bennett Miller does it as the director of Capote. And as narratives documenting crime, violence and pain, the book as well as the film transcend limitations of media and emerge as “storytellers” themselves. Law, in this sense, betrays experience by denying it pain and suffering in legal narratives. Benjamin probably realized this when he commented, “for never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly…..” To this extent, these media succeed in documenting experience where law, as providing the expressionless with expression according to Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” thesis, fails. 

Mahim Singh

"The mind is a drunken monkey"
                                         -M.K.Gandhi

half-past midnight, with the rusty voice of a dead man singing romance into my ears, i decided it was time to start dying, becasue living had gone out of style...and so i said to the monkey,
"start dyin' your dudeness, coz livin's gone outta style,
when the lifeworld gets bureaucratized, you are nothing but information on a file, or a floppy,
and your existence gets carbonized to a copy of a copy of a copy."

skipping corporeal milestones, leapfroging from one body to another,
cutting himself free from the viscous web of failed relationships,
the monkey seeks salvation in the cluttered nothingness of hostel rooms;
nothingness punctuated by Marx, Foucault, Bhagat and Sartre,
ethnoscapes of a student life glowing in the golden dampness of the dim table-lamp light,
deamplifying darkness and mediating memory through amnesiac tunes flowing along the moist edges of beer mugs;
lifelines dotted with two beds and two tables, an old dusty computer, some old dusty books, half a pack of marlboro reds...
and some half-burnt fragments of a third-world life lying stubbed face-down,in the forced ashcan,
colonised and re-colonised by the assembly line of the empire.

and amidst all this, the monkey stays drunk....on romance mostly,
watering tiny revolutions with idealisms,
and then wails watching them burn down to ashes against the simmering winds of pragmatism.
it consumes Palestine, Darfur, Iraq, New orleans, Gujjars, Gorkhas and Monks,
smokes up with nicotine the lefts taken by the right and the rights crushed by the left...
and seeking purpose in its refusal to barter magic for fact,
the monkey floats down the undepths of nihilism,
asserting the annihilation of the self as the ultimate expression of existence..

CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME FINISH IT?

mahim P singh

Style maarat hain...ssaalaaa



The Parul and the Sheenu



1st class mein sote hue...HUM...hamraa pehla fotu hai 1st class mein...bahute cool hai...

Internscapes-3

The "I"...





life in eastman color



what's the BUSS?



Marathi Manus



wish you were here....



Navanirman....MNS guys...samjhe?

Internscapes-2


the TISS skyscape...corporate social responsibility gets a new name..corporate social work..!!


See what I mean?


road to the field is long...so stop,have a snack and start ramblin' again...


Life's prepaid here...remember the forced insurance....??

Internscapes from Tuljapur, Maharashtra


the place



the self

abstraction


undrowning myself out of your person,
as blazing petals of a just climaxed, momentary intervaniousness fall melting around me,
burning holes through the intimate folds of the white linen as they fall,
i sit nibbling at the darkness within,
kneading deep,
trying to find streaks of purpose fading out in the dense nothingness,
tracing your anatomy against the fogging window pane,
finding rhythm in the numbness of your heartbeats against the thundering silence of the rain lashing outside,
i seek the culmination of my existence in the careening ballet of white cigarette smoke,
the "cuts" heal my wounds....

Mahim P Singh

The Shock Doctrine (Shock Doc)
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism- by Naomi Klein
Analysis of Part 7: The Movable Green Zone: Buffer Zones & Blast walls
(by Mahim Pratap Singh)

Blanking The Beach (The Second Tsunami): Sri Lanka, Thailand and Maldives. Three different countries. Three different types of governments. Three different populations meted out strikingly similar capital (ist) punishments. Colorful beaches of the idyllic Arugam Bay that sustained simple fishing communities and entire ecosystems, faced the wrath of nature during the December of ’04. The destruction caused by the killer waves was no match for the havoc wreaked upon unexpecting fisherpeople by what can be called the “second tsunami”. A giant killer wave of unrelenting capitalist expansion that rendered homeless scores of civilians already shattered by a long-drawn ethnic strife. The pain caused by the second tsunami proved way more acute than that caused by the first one. The first at least could be bore with as a “natural” disaster, beyond mortal control. But the subsequent wave, brought in with the help of the same government that the people had shown faith in, at a time when storm battered families awaited state help, was too much to bear with. The beaches where fishing communities had been living for generations were taken away from them in order to make way for a multi-billion dollar tourism industry. Expectations of state-intervention were belied and met by state orchestrated evacuations and repression. The global politics behind these evacuations is evident from the fact that long before the tsunami actually struck, the state tourism industry, lured by typical Chicago-school capitalist gains being sold by western capitalism, had been making attempts at driving fishing communities out of the beaches in order to convert the Sri Lankan East coast to a paradise retreat for wealthy tourists. Centuries old cultures sold off to wealth of the west and replaced with vulgar monstrosities available for capitalist consumption. Numerous anthropological studies have documented cultures of consumption as well as consumption of cultures. How about cultures being sold off to consumption? An ecosystem sold-off to capitalism in exchange for a market catering to the stinking desires of a few. The money was there, in the form of high disposable salaries of modern day IT sweatshop (BPOs) slaves and their masters, along with various other capitalist encampments in Asia; what was needed was an untouched-by-globalization natural paradise that could offer them a vacation for their money’s worth. What the tourism industry had been long trying to achieve without much success i.e. large-scale displacement and gentrification, was orchestrated by the tsunami over a matter of weeks. As with Sri Lanka, so also with Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations. Under the repressive regime of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Maldives has been transformed into a chain of luxury island resorts, providing getaways and vacations to an elite clientele, displacing thousands of fisherpeople and other island communities. State-assisted corporate land-grab on a massive scale. A Throwback to the colonial doctrines such as terra nullius and the doctrine of lapse? “Efforts” towards reconstruction have given rise to the slummification or ghettoization of an otherwise self-sustaining fishing community, in the process making the people lose faith in the role of NGOs and other voluntary organizations. The same reconstruction myth that was played out in Iraq and Afghanistan and had blunderous consequences is being staged in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka on its way to reconstruction- U.S. style.

Disaster Apartheid- another instance of disaster capitalism playing out its dirty games. The aftermath of the hurricane Katrina exposed the weaknesses of a state rendered incapable of discharging its civic duties on account of mindless privatization. It also brought to light the limitations of a rich, industrialized, western nation with regard to its preparedness for a natural disaster that had been 6 months in anticipation. Or were they limitations at all? As noted by Naomi Klein, mistakes repeated in the form of a pattern across two geographically and ethnically distinct locations are not mistakes. When the Green Zones of Iraq are staged out in New Orleans with striking similarities, calling carefully planned profit-making strategies mistakes, would be naivety. Another point that the author hammers in several times is that earlier, disasters were periods of social leveling, when communities put hatred aside to help each other. Now, of course, they are periods that guarantee huge state-sponsored profits, where “money and race buy survival”. State intervention during the hurricane was minimal and civilians were left at the mercy of the market. Activities like rescue-ops, providing rehabilitation, medical care, food etc to the victims, that should have been the responsibility of the state were mechanically “awarded” to private players such as Halliburton/KBR, Shaw, Flour, Blackwater etc. in the form of contracts. That these contracts were all paid off with the taxpayers’ money, that they were awarded without even an open bidding, that they were awarded almost exclusively to corporations that are regular contributors to right wing political organizations and that these corporations donate generously to the political campaigning of the Republican party are not mere coincidences. The fact that this post-disaster management has given rise to and sustains an entire parallel economy and even something close to a parallel private government (Blackwater’s private mercenaries etc.) is shocking. In the words of one Dave Blandford, an exhibitor at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, Florida, “this is huge business man…I’m going to be a hurricane debris contractor”. This statement shows how disaster capitalism is not a third world concern or a threat to “other” countries by western capitalists. With no regard for human existence and with no respect for the sanctity of human life, the evils of this self-styled money-spinning business know no bounds, even if the target is one’s own country, which would definitely disturb even the most hardcore right-winger, as is evident from this statement by Martin Kelly, a widely believed “believer”, “ the collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Berlin wall had on Soviet Communism”. With increasing privatization of state responsibilities, constant cutting back of public funds and expenses and humanity at the mercy of a ruthless profit-seeking market, disaster capitalism will successfully continue churning out one crisis situation after another. Even for those working within this system, the gains are reaped by only those at the higher rungs and “actual” workers have to sustain themselves on marginal wages, as happened with the large number of immigrant, mostly Hispanic, workers employed in the reconstruction process after hurricane Katrina. Do the poor always have to bear the “costs” incurred during the profit making practices of disaster capitalism? The rich, meanwhile stay convinced that they can buy their way out of any crisis. Making money out of human death and misery? Does the post-Kargil war coffin-scam in India qualify for a berth on this disaster capitalism bandwagon? Are these crises of governance? Or are those of morality? Civil society? Or are these crises of humanity that the globalized world faces?

Global Governance and the Causes of Conflict
Mahim

An analysis of the above-mentioned chapter from Mark Duffield’s
Global Governance And The New Wars

Duffield analyzes the Northern project of global liberal governance discourse and causes of conflict as dictated by this discourse. The causes of conflict that this discourse dictates serve to justify the “need” for “liberal” aid in conflict-ridden areas and hence formulation of aid policies voicing out political rhetoric and free market propaganda as articulated through the “structural adjustments” they impose on receiving countries.
There are two causes of conflict dictated by two different discourses. The first is New Barbarism, which is rooted in the neo-racial or bio-cultural discourse of the 1960s. New Barbarism, like multiculturalism recognizes racial and ethnic diversity and concurs with multiculturalism over the non-superiority or non-inferiority of any race. However, unlike multiculturalism, it does not understand these differences as being a source of richness and vibrancy, but as a reason for conflict and antagonisms. New Barbarism thrives on primordialization of the “other”, thereby presenting them as traditionally harboring antagonistic and hate-producing feelings towards each other. Duffield gives a lot of examples to hammer this point down (Chechen wars, Balkan mentality of Yugoslavia, Bosnia conflict, Rwanda genocide etc.) and refers to Kaplan, Goldberg and obviously, though importantly, Huntington, with the latter’s thesis on Clash of Civilizations asserting civilization as the ultimate human tribe and the clash of civilizations, therefore, as a global tribal conflict. Huntington clearly mentions how cultural and civilizational identities are increasingly shaping patterns of cohesion and conflict, with civilizations sharing similar values or characteristics realizing cohesion and those having contradictory values producing conflict, what he calls fault line wars. Further, Duffield underscores the emergence of disease perceived as being as great a security threat by the North, as terrorism or arms proliferation (do they view it as bio-terrorism of a different kind?). The “remedy” to anarchy and disease prevailing in Africa as articulated through Goldberg’s argument, lies not with the state or assistance, but with the free market, as it would provide “astute” leaders “encouragement” to keep primordial animosities in check. The second cause of conflict is Underdevelopment, which draws fuel from the free market discourse and advocates multiculturalism as promoting vibrancy and vitality, provided free market forces are allowed to exercise their benevolence. The association of underdevelopment with a high risk of conflict is the core assumption within the developmentalist discourse, which by implication would mean “development” as resolving conflict and there is of course no debate on the model of development ! Further the changes that have occurred in the nature of conflict and the institutional adaptations that these changes spur shape the emergence of global liberal governance. The disappearance of former constraints in liberal economic governance make the task of global liberal governance easier by presenting new policy measures as undoing the “damage” done by inappropriate governance of the 1980s, which rendered that decade “lost” for many countries. In the context of this, the repackaging of development aid as effecting structural conflict prevention has been the major emphasis of the liberal governance regime. This also means that poverty, which has no doubt been central to even past developmental discourses, is rearticulated as intertwined with underdevelopment and a cause as well as effect of conflict, though this causality may or may not be direct as evident in case of middle-income Balkan countries. Causality, therefore, in this case, would lie in probability i.e. poor countries carry within their structures a high risk of conflict but not necessarily a definite cause for conflict. By implication, conflict itself is seen as deepening poverty as it destroys developmental assets and social capital e.g. the 15 year civil war in Mozambique which led to the declaration of it being the poorest country in the world. However, Duffield says, it’s difficult to trust the validity of such assertions as they are seldom backed by reliable statistical evidence. Citing, Nordstrom (2000) he says the UN claim of Mozambique being the poorest country was made during the war and not following it. A cause effect relationship in this case is therefore skewed and unsubstantiated by empirical evidence. This is further supported by the fact that neighboring countries like Zambia and Malawi, which haven’t suffered any major conflict, have similar poverty levels. This makes it clear that even under dearth of empirical data, the mere idea that conflict deepens poverty helps mobilize support for liberal peace. Taking this rhetoric to ridiculous levels, former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz asserts that the persistence of traditional values and cultures in conflict ridden poor countries is a sign of past developmental failures, thereby providing liberal governance an excuse for systematic destruction of indigenous cultures and value-systems and replacing them with “modern” pro-developmental and “progressive” institutions. Interestingly, conflict is utilitarian for the cause of liberal peace as it is seen as eroding traditional cohesion, culture etc. which would mean an opportunity for the new radicalized developmental discourse to transform entire societies, including popular beliefs and attitudes. [Given this argument, what would stop even the most ignorant observer, from believing that the contractors of liberal peace would not create and sustain conflicts, in order to simplify their cause?] According to Duffield, conflict may actually have the opposite effect; in making social groups more dependent on their resources, coping strategies and social networks, it often acts to reaffirm or even strengthen socio-cultural cohesion [I see an example of exactly this in the form of community based security groups in the Shias of Iraq]. Moving ahead, the destructive effects of conflict, both on development and culture, cast the poor as victims, thereby providing liberal peace an opportunity to intervene. However, besides just justifying intervention, the liberal peace project also intends to make the poor allies to its cause, casting them as self-acting agents. Conflict is thus portrayed by liberal peace as a reaction by the poor against the oppressive regime of underdevelopment. This, however, hits a roadblock due to the fact that the poor already have their own local non-liberal leaders and liberal peace resolves this by delegitimizing previously existing local leadership by problematizing the very basis of their leadership as something leading to violent, oppressive and underdevelopmentalist conflict. The developmental discourse uses two approaches for this- the first fuelled by New Barbarism, depicting traditional leadership as being anarchic and fragmented, lacking any clear political purpose; and the second, more recent approach, which goes a step further and criminalizes conflict and leadership (Rwanda and Bosnia), rather than calling them just anarchic and un-political. The first approach, as I see it, was more innocent in that it saw leadership and conflict lacking motive and going nowhere; the second approach, however sees a criminal motive that would definitely lead to destruction, thereby separating people from their leaders. The project for designer peace therefore uses aid to buy-off leaders and if that fails, creating linkages between those who oppose violent conflict and constructing spaces for peace.

Rang De Basanti


“ courageous, untroubled, mocking, violent- that is what wisdom wants us to be”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Courageous, untroubled, mocking & violent-adjectives for the ways in which dissent among youth burst upon the Indian celluloid in the form of Rang de Basanti. Directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, this story involving a bunch of young college students, impervious to any and everything happening outside their immediate worlds, was a major success and one of the few movies to achieve a cult following among the youth of a nation where dissent is equated with indiscipline and indiscipline is criminal. The notion of dissent being criminal is reflected in constant and unquestioned state policing and suppression of “rebellions”. Whenever the state denies accountability to the people, a section of the population questions it and the authority does what its known best to do: silence it.

Rang de Basanti is a story of five friends who are disillusioned with the state India is in but nonetheless are too happy in their own world to either realize or do something to address this disillusionment. The movie addresses this disillusionment of the youth by historicizing and juxtaposing it with the lives and events occurring within them of DJ (Aamir Khan), Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), Sukhi (Sharman Joshi), Karan (Siddharth), Laxman (Atul Kulkarni) and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) with those of revolutionaries Chandrashekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh, Ram Prasad Bismil and Durga respectively. This juxtaposition is manifested in and through a documentary being filmed by Sue (Alice Patten) who plays the granddaughter of a British Police officer who was in charge of the jail-terms and executions of the revolutionaries. DJ, Aslam, Sukhi, Karan, Sonia are all college students who’s philosophy in life is “live for the moment”. This seemingly hedonistic but naïve philosophy comes across as an escape route if one looks closer, for all of them, in their own ways are unhappy with the “system”. Conversations among them repeatedly bring out the hopelessness they perceive and the futility of everything that India has to offer, even independence. There is a strong irony in this disillusionment with independence. While the “heroes” that they are being compared with fought and died for India’s independence, it’s this independence, its perceived ineffectiveness, futility and a quest for its reclamation that drives the friends to rebellion. The realization of this, of course, is triggered off by a personal loss, the death of Ajay (Madhavan), a pilot with the Indian Air Force and a close friend of the five. This sets in motion a series of events that leads to friends’ decision to kill the Defence Minister Shastri (Mohan Agashe) who is shown to be responsible for an arms deal that causes Ajay’s death due to a MiG air crash. They however witness an unexpected bouleversement of their action, as the DM is decorated as a martyr and a hero. It is at this point that they decide to do what the film symbolically equates with Bhagat Singh’s action of dropping a bomb in the assembly chamber of the British Parliament; they decide to assume the responsibility of the DM’s murder on AIR. The message conveyed through both acts is the same: “it takes a loud noise to make the deaf listen”, a statement originally attributed to Valliant, a French anarchist martyr, but made immortally famous by Bhagat Singh and revolutionarizingly relived in Rang de Basanti. At this point, the state intoxicated with power and forever ill-equipped to address dissent resorts to what its best known for, suppression through violence. The students are immediately declared terrorists, even as the truth about the DM spreads around India, creating a huge wave of support for the students. Unarmed students are cornered and executed by the use of heavy firing and dissent is silenced.

The film, however, remains “unclimaxed” with various questions thrown at the viewer. Is violence the only means of expressing dissent? Is violence necessarily wrong, even when it is resorted to by the oppressed and targeted towards the oppressor? Who is the enemy; does it have to be a foreign power? Can it not be the state itself, the independent, democratic government of the day? Why is dissent so unsettling? Why is change so dreaded? What is the truth and more importantly how it is to be told to who it is to be told? These and various other questions float in the unsettling numbness and the vacuum that the film creates. The film, in its course, celebrates the spirit of rebellion as inherent in the ideas of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. It celebrates the romance of youth and the varicolored expressions of its nature to question, to rebel, to change what is unsettling to it. The idea is to bring about the need for dissent, the need to question the order, the authority, the need to realize and reclaim freedom in all its spirit, in all its rawness, in all its undiluted, intoxicating glory.

These ideas are voiced with screaming conviction through the movie’s electrifying soundtrack (A.R.Rahman). Words, lyrics, poetry have always been faithful comrades of revolutionaries all over the world, as rightly portrayed in the movie through the observation of Chris Patten (the officer in charge) “ I think it was their poetry that kept them alive”. Every revolution in the world has had some sort of a “soundtrack”. Prasoon Joshi’s simmering lyrics set on fire by Rahman’s electrifying tunes provide the lyrical fuel for the movie’s revolutionary ideas. The songs all celebrate rebellion and the existential chaos experienced by the youth. Whether it be the screaming “Loose Control” or “be a rebel” or pathshaala or the liberating assertion of chaos in “Khalbali’, forcefully brought out by lyrics like “ hum lapakte saaye hain, hum sulagte aaye hain, ghar bata ke aaye hain……hai khalbali!!” Also brought is the need for blood that the revolution demands in “ khoon chalaa” and of course the famous pronunciamento of the realization of the fire within, in “roobaroo”.

Rang de Basanti is thus a film that is unapologetic about the ends it’s characters achieve and at the same time wonders whether the means employed towards that end are justified. The revolutionary overtones of the movie set up debates on violence and rebellion and the role of state.

Mahim Pratap Singh
M.A.
JNU

Renaissance....revival of digital art

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University



By Mahim Pratap

Embrace...a design firm Poster

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University



By Mahim Pratap

An awareness postcard against violence agianst women and for gender sensitization among men

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University



By Mahim Pratap

A Cover designed for an imaginary magazine called street sounds

part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University



By Mahim Pratap

Awareness Poster against Domestic Violence

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University



By Mahim Pratap

Awareness Poster for a No-Smoking Campaign targeting the Youth

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University




By Mahim Pratap

An imaginary publicity poster for the Monte Carlo Rally..done from imagination and not as part of some official project.

Part of the CPID portfolio for Carnegie Mellon University




by Mahim Pratap

JNU:The Perversion of the Polemic

Arrey Naxalbaari.... Laaal Salaaaam...!!...Roaring voices soaring high, filling up the crowded air lanes of the red JNU sky, carrying forward the lingering legacy of the comrades of the east. As an outsider, you hear all kinds of stories about JNU, part true, part false, all romantic...guaranteed! So when you become a part of this “socially responsible university”, the first thing you do is go accosting these suave stereotypes, excitedly hoping them to be true (whether they actually are is another issue, worthy of another essay, probably longer than this one.)

So in this institution that prides itself in being the “red corner” of the national capital, with a student union that has been legendarily “anti-establishment”, the P-word assumes enticingly tempting proportions. Apart from the acclivity of its academic endeavors, the next best thing that abscises JNU from other universities of the country is its politics & the culture it has spawned over the years- revolutionary, intellectual and essentially non-violent.... while still being courageous, after all, showing black flags to the Indian prime minister requires balls, doesn’t it. In this sense, politics in JNU becomes so all-encompassing that it becomes difficult, almost impossible to understand anything on the campus in exclusivity. From belabored discussions around dhabas over chai and relaxed carefree smokes to organized debates between celebrated experts in a post-dinner capacity filled hostel mess, politics is everywhere in JNU. So much so that when you approach a girl here, you don’t ask her out for coffee straightaway (like in other places with similar emotionally demanding situations, which put to test all your communication skills). Instead, you remember Al Pacino from “scent of woman” saying “we should meet up for coffee sometime, to discuss politics” & give your best at appearing as a faithful comrade of Che, disillusioned with the unfulfilled promises of the establishment, angry with the world and most importantly, desperately in need of lady love to guide you through the blood-spilled thorny passage to the revolution. Erwing Goffman becomes your god and Marx shines brightly from behind her as your angel of redemption, with a red halo around his big hairy head. The coffee, meanwhile (or chai, as it’s JNU we are talking about) is reduced to a mere adjunct. Take a look around the campus and you will discover that canteens and dhabas are not mere eating joints. They double up as heavily-graffitied hot spots for political ideologies and discussions and also as agencies for mobilization of public opinion.


Such is the presence that politics in JNU commands in matters of students’ everyday lives. Even the professors wear their political ideologies on their proverbial sleeves. So, as you slowly get acclimatized to this politically supercharged island of confluencing ideologies, you finally have your first rendezvous with your eagerly awaited folklore-ish comrades, accoutered with their legendary jholas, kurtas and left-aligned rings of cigarette smoke. Divided on ideological lines of radical and liberal “leftism”, each of these groups of debate-happy connoisseurs of communism claim themselves to be more genuinely left-oriented than the others. You also, very soon, meet the right wing and centrist “conservative” “elements”, who are, with practiced convenience, called “sanghi lumpens” by their left wing comrades. The “rightists” and “centrists” receive this nomenclature, which has been bestowed affectionately upon them by their political brethren, with amazing abjectness. Now, what’s interesting here is that unlike most other universities in India, where the left struggles for an also-ran status, here in JNU, its the other ideological groups that play this part, surviving on mere “leftovers”.

So, while the left is forever trying to bring to light the blatant bigotry & the ever-absconding position of the right wing bugaboos on major political and campus related issues at the same time condemning their jaded calls for jingoism, the right, in its own largely unnoticeable & garishly grandiloquent gimmicks, attempts to bring out the romanticized hypocrisy and the abstruse ideological claims of the left. Hypocrisy, did one say? Well, you got to be careful mate, for this is the last bastion of the socialism in India, gloriously upholding the ideals of Marx, Lenin and Bhagat Singh, with the last name bearing ideological claims of both the left and the right. Anyways, it should not be forgotten that our comrades here, abhor all forms of hedonism and stand up against the naked narcissism of the bourgeoisie. So what if their cigarette expenses exceed the minimum daily wages of the workers they are fighting for? Come on, we are all answerable to our mortal bodies and their demands of immediate gratification and therefore are tempted to...or rather bound to fulfill our duties towards them by indulging in occasional pleasure “trips”. Even comrade Che smoked fine Habanos cigars, which by no means imply that he did not fight for the rights of his comrades. So treading his footsteps faithfully, our comrades here in JNU too, by acrimoniously attacking the governmental policies actuated by capitalist transformation, fight for the common good of the brotherhood...err.... and also of the sisterhood (careful mate; you don’t want to offend your rapidly-increasing-in-number-everyday feminist friends, do you?) Whoa! JNU is a politically charged place demanding political correctness all the time and you cant dare to be politically incorrect, even if it means incorporating a break in the flow of the passage on account of grammatical inconsistencies due to unnecessary ideological accommodation.

Color, comrades, is another inalienable aspect of the student politics of our great institution, with two hues varying in saturation, battling for supremacy. Now hold your horses & for once, don’t read between the lines, for its not racism that is being talked here, its just color, plain and simple. So the campus politics and affiliations are clearly defined on the colored lines of RED and SAFFRON, each trying to prove itself as the identifying hue of JNU. So there are shouts of “ bhagwa hai bhai bhagwa hai, JNU bhagwa hai” by the right wing patriots and “laal hai bhai laal hai, JNU laal hai” by the leftists. Now, even within the comrade camp, there is a fight over which group represents the true red. So, we hear shouts of, “jab asli laal lehrayega, toh hosh thikane ayega” and finally there are the unnoticed wails of the centrists and other groups who fill in by vouching for the tricolor. See how important color is?

Come election time and the entire campus transforms itself into a politically charged landmine-zone. Any kind of political incorrectness implies tripping over (sometimes over mines you set yourself) and thereby, voluntarily or involuntarily, though successfully in either case, inviting acrid controversies and unparalleled street credit, leading to overnight celeb-status to some and instant labeling as a killjoy onto some others. There is surprising warmth in everyday interaction and every other person seems like your best friend, especially those who come seeking your honored support to their cause. Election Committee members, who constitute of faces seldom known to people otherwise, command faithful avoidance and cosmetic respect, for they will be the ones required to manage all the chaos and pandemonium in the various GBMs and during the polling sessions and then stay up two nights and one day, locked inside the exciting interiors of the School of International Studies, counting and recounting votes. Their repeated demands to the Vice Chancellor for the deployment of EVMs have been religiously opposed by the union, for EVMs would reduce the time (read: days) required for counting and thus the counting extravaganza, spread over two nights and a day, would be reduced to a few hours, in the process, ending all the razzmatazz going on in the all-day, all-night bivouacs of various political organizations. The campus territory, meanwhile, becomes an agglomeration of pamphlets and posters of contesting candidates, efficiently covering every corner, every alcove of the campus, hardly leaving any space, even on the ground, unutilized. Adroit utilization of resources, you see. And in the cacophony of various ideological slogans, the concerns of some sections of students about environmental pollution and paper-wastage seem too insignificant to be considered. Moral of the story: politics is the religion of JNU and the Student Union Election is its annual festival, which needs to be celebrated in all its glory, without caring about petty financial, environmental and other related issues.

A final word of caution before we part amigos. Walking around the campus, when you hear gut-wrenching slogans of JNUSU “maachh-O, maachh-O” don’t just succumb to the innocent perversions of your naive mind and the phonetic comparisons it’s forcing you to make with similar sounding expressions of uncensored anger. Don’t start retreating, predicting a violent riot; look closer...for all our politically supercharged friends are doing is urging you, as members of the JNUSU, to “march-on, march-on!” You get the drift, right?

P.S. Word’s around that a new political outfit is making its presence felt around the campus. It’s called the FTG; the acronym, true to the democratic traditions of JNU, is open to subjective interpretation. For The Good, Fight The Goons, Fire The Guards, Fuck The Guerillas, are some of expressions floating around.... take your pick!


Mahim P. Singh
JNU

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