Re-creation

Pushkar is a refuge you want to return to occasionally

(Photo by Roger Bella)

The priest at Pushkar’s Brahma temple was pretty unemployed, the sole sanctum sanctorum of the creator of the Hindu universe filled with a handful of people, three of them white. The prasad was cheap and good, and beggars few and far between. Pushkar was supposed to be a holy place, a centre of pilgrimage, but the poster art — strung on walls and shops — often came close to blasphemy, and I found inside a flower a Brahma in the form of a shaven sardar, mounted legs akimbo on a four-legged half-human. Then there were cubic paintings of Kali by the artist Kikasso, and yogis, sadhus and hippies were all portrayed with thick-smoke spewing chillums.

(photo by Maciej Dakowicz)

At a small shrine to Shiva in the middle of a busy crossroads were an elderly sadhu and a young chela in saffron wraparounds. The chela had been in “Pushkar-Raj” for just two months, but this 3-km radius space between Aravalli hills was on the back of his hand. Moistening the ganja before filling it into the baansuri (flute) — as he called the chillum — he let out a cosmological insight: water will do its work first, only then will fire take over. His guru nodded approvingly, and displayed his much larger chillum to establish his experience in such elemental matters. I was impressed.

Unlike Banaras, removed from Delhi, colourfully insular, Pushkar is a place to go spend a week in. The sunset is magical over the lake, and on the ghats someone is playing either the ektara or drums or singing folk poetry. The bazaar is bristling with tourists and colourful locals selling curious of marble and ivory. Just outside are gardens laden with Pushkar’s famous roses, and the expansive sandy maidan, where the camel fair is held, is right beside the main market. Inside the lanes, especially in winters, is a quietness that is heart-warming. Everything is close to each other, and all’s peaceful. You hardly notice the police, but there has been a string of cases of rapes of foreign tourists, and maybe my masculinity was behind the oversight.

A brief haven for outsiders, a place to stay and write a book. That’s Pushkar: go, be alone, come back.

Free speech and its discontents

Free speech is an idea barely understood, let alone practiced. Rajiv GV explains why Taslima Nasreen’s persecution stems from deep roots

(Cartoons of Prophet Mohammad published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 under the headline ‘Face of Muhammad’)

In December of 1978, Robert Faurisson, a Professor of literature at the University of Lyon, wrote a short article titled ‘The Problem of the Gas Chambers’ or ‘The Rumor of Auschwitz’, in France’s respected daily Le Monde. In the article Faurisson argued that the much written about gas chambers in Germany were never used and also denied the existence of the systematic murder of Jews. The article, predictably, stirred France out of its torpor and caused considerable outrage among intellectual circles worldwide. Later, in the face of continuous threats, Faurisson was removed from his academic position at the French university.
Subsequently, in the fall of 1979, American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky signed a petition over the Faurisson affair. The petition strongly condemned the campaign to silence Faurisson and urged the concerned authorities in Fance to protect Faurisson’s right to freedom of expression and speech.
The petition infuriated many French intellectuals who felt that the petition never raised the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false and slammed Chomsky for signing it.
Chomsky, in response to the criticism, later wrote an essay titled ‘Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression’, in which he attacked his critics for failing to respect the principle of freedom of speech.
Chomsky wrote:
“…Even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi — such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.”
Chomsky’s second provocation, this time in the form of an essay, invited more vicious invective from the French intelligentsia. But Chomsky, a man who practiced what he preached, remained unfazed and stood his ground.
The Faurission affair was an old wound, an old outrage. A fuming democracy and its myopic intellectuals in their collective rage had seriously undercut the democratic culture by denying an elementary right.
It’s been more than 20 years since the Faurisson affair, but new battles involving the right to free speech continue to erupt across the world.

(Sita sitting on Ravana’s thigh in a painting by MF Husain)

The provocateur who happens to be caught up in the latest tussle involving freedom of expression and respecting sentiments is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. The writer was shunted out of Kolkata by the CPI(M) after street riots erupted over her writings on November 21 last year. The Indian government has since then kept Nasreen in a ’safe house’ in New Delhi.