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 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.
While the sickening drama involving Taslima, the CPI(M) and the UPA government played out in the media last year, a section of the Muslim lunatic fringe took to streets and invaded television studious to denounce her writings and asked the Centre to throw her out of the country. The UPA government, after shifting the blame on CPI(M) for a while, finally succumbed and asked Taslima to refrain from hurting the sentiments.
External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee promised to ’shelter’ Nasreen, but urged her to ‘refrain from activities and expressions’ that may hurt the sentiments of Indian people.
Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi went a step further. He asked Nasreen to apologise to the Muslims with folded hands for her writings.
Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference, invited to participate in a debate on the issue by a TV channel, bluntly asked Taslima to desist writing such inflammatory prose as it would lead to law and order problems.
On November 30, 2007, when in the face of unrelenting mental trauma, Taslima Nasreen finally crumbled and agreed to expunge controversial portions from her biography Dwikhandita, a victory was claimed.
As in the case of the Faurisson affair, this sordid saga once again demonstrated an unacknowledged fact that the concept of freedom of expression is barely understood, let alone practiced.
Speaking in an interview to Karan Thapar over the Taslima issue, Arundhati Roy raised some significant points which are worth reproducing here. On being asked whether freedom of speech was an absolute freedom, ‘without any limitations’, Roy said that personally she held the view that freedom of expression is something ‘that should have no caveats, for the simple reason that in a place where there are so many contending beliefs, so many conflicting things, only the powerful will then decide what those caveats should be…’
Later in the interview, When asked to comment on the view that Taslima had offended beliefs held sacred by many Indians, Roy said she didn’t believe that ‘a writer like Taslima Nasreen can undermine the dignity of ten million people.’ ‘Who is she?’ Roy went on, ’she is not a scholar of Islam’.
‘Dwikhandito has not been translated into English but let’s just assume that what she said was stupid and insulting to Islam. But you have to be prepared to be insulted by something that insignificant,’ observed Roy.
Leaving no room for ambiguity, Roy said that without the ‘right to offend’, the right to freedom of expression has no meaning.
In subscribing to the ‘right to offend’ view, Roy was echoing what Noam Chomsky had forcefully asserted in an interview with the journalist John Pilger. That ‘if we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.’
Indeed it is abhorring to witness the continuous and unabashed selective-use of such a precious right.
The editor of the UK media watchdog, MediaLens, which won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award for 2007, when requested to comment on freedom of speech, wrote that, ‘A heavy burden of proof is always on the people arguing against free speech in any given instance because the consequences of suppressing that freedom may well be extremely grave (it’s a very slippery slope, obviously). So if an argument was merely provocative and puerile, then it would be very difficult to argue that it should be suppressed. After all, one can argue that it’s not really the words that are doing the harm, but the uncontrolled, angry reaction of the people allowing themselves to be provoked.’
Clearly, insult to ’sentiments’, one’s ‘tastes’ are not sufficient grounds on which right to free speech can be curtailed. The real test, the extraordinary reason, that might necessitate a surrenering of the right might be irrefutable proof of criminal violence. Barring such a powerful reason, any other complaint might prove to be insufficient to call for curtailment of the right.
It would be appropriate to conclude by recalling another famous, but old, rumble which had a famous philosopher in the eye of a major storm in the US.
In 1940, British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s appointment to teach at the College of the City of New York(CCNY) was contested and the complainant took the matter to court to stall the move.
An enraged NY court viciously attacked Russell for his views on morality and education and issued a stinging rebuke to the CCNY’s board for trying to appoint a controversial figure like Russell. Worried by the unhealthy impact Russell and his views might have over the students, the court voided his appointment.
The issue found echo in the US media and a New York Times editorial disapproved of Russell’s actions and criticised him for not retiring after the row had erupted. Russell, replying to the NY Times editorial, bitterly wrote to the paper that he had not backed off as it would mean surrendering to the will of powerful groups.
“In a democracy it is necessary that people learn to endure having their sentiments outraged,” wrote Russell.
It would be invaluable to remember Russell’s dictum the next time somebody’s sentiments are outraged.

Avram Noam Chomsky (pronounced ‘Khomsky’ in the original Yiddish), didn’t just discover generative grammar, he has given dissent an unshakeable dignity, an almost generative, life-like power.

‘Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population — to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.’

‘Of course it’s extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there’s no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you’re bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them “pathological.” On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them “normal.” But it’s just as pathological. It’s just the pathology of the general society.’

(For the best collection of links to material by Chomsky, visit ZNet)

Keeping it simple, sticking to basics over chicanery can see you through in cricket’s latest circus, says Vikrant 

Test of nerves

The brainchild of Stuart Robertson – Twenty20 – had to weather incessant criticism by the connoisseurs of the game before the ICC gave it the go-ahead as the shortest version of international cricket. So much so that even the respective boards didn’t prod their stalwarts to be a part of the extravaganza, if they chose to watch the world cup from their living rooms.

As the ‘circus’ began, the format was subjected to microscopic examination, its finishes tickled the most dead nerves and received rave reviews from the fraternity. You bet, players like Tendulkar, Ganguly, Youhana, Murali (though Murali cited health concerns) and the likes must be ruing the lost chance.

Seeing through the lens, there’s more to Twenty20 than meets the eye. Some of it is even contrary to the popular beliefs. First and most incredibly, the pressure is on the batsman and not the bowler. Picture this: a run-a-ball fifty is snubbed as an anchor innings while an economy rate of even 10 an over is allowed to pass without scrutiny.

Secondly, Twenty20 and spinners were not supposed to fit in the same bracket. The stats aver otherwise. Daniel Vettori single and ‘left’-handedly steered his team to the semi-finals. Harbhajan Singh has had more than a decent outing. Needless to mention the exploits of Shahid Afridi and Sanath Jayasuriya.

Thirdly, it is a long enough game, averaging 15 wickets per match. This implies that specialists have limited utility. All-rounders, particularly those who can wield a bat, can turn it on for a side. Albie Morkel is one who has maimed the English bowling and dealt acceptable efforts with the leather. Misbah ul haq (against India as well) and Shoaib Malik versus Australia demonstrated that it is not all about slam-banging. Keeping it simple, sticking to basics over chicanery can see your side through.

The all-important question — the future of cricket — still begs an answer. The instant cricket’s potential to instil assurance amongst pygmy cricketing nations that they can dislodge the mighty teams, promises to amplify its popularity. So, if the circus is the panacea for world cricket, so be it.  

From an island of memory, Geeta leaps into the river of forgetfulness.

Wait for the morning,
and give grace another chance.
I know, I know,
once bitten is twice shy,
a million bitten is a million bitter;
but step another step.
See how nestled in its black mother’s breast,
the white morning waits to arise.
Do not think of woes,
or wallow in pity, despair and loss…
I have always kept my promises,
So said the saint,
after cigarettes and coffee.
So, I awaited the next journey,
Sleeping on the feet of the next door.
I readied my feet in broken dreams.
All the doors are me,
all the rooms are mine,
and the corridors echo forever
with my steps.
And what are my moments,
but rivers flowing through
old lands.
Look those immortal ghosts,
talking to me,
carrying me to a place uknown.
There is something still to be found,
and to vanish forever in it.
But, I`ll walk tomorrow,
for now,
it’s time for rest.
For forgetting.
And I jump into hay from abandoned palaces,
I play in the rivers.

(Painting by Jamil Naqsh, Blue Woman with Dove)

Pakistani painter Jamil Naqsh. Pigeons I. 1989.

Watercolor on paper.

Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time’s long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.  

The time, Nietzsche predicts, is fast approaching when secular crusaders, tools of man’s collective suicide, will devastate the world with their rival claims to compensate for the lost kingdom of Heaven by setting up on earth the ideological economies of democracy and justice, economies which, by the very force of the spiritual derangement involved, will lead to the values of cruelty, exploitation, and slavery. “There will be wars such as have never been waged on Earth. I foresee something terrible, chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value, nothing which commands, ‘Though shalt!’” Ecce homo; behold the man, homo modernus, homo nihilismus. [More]

For heaven’s sake do not confound me with anyone else

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche’s analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people’s unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud’s idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.

But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer’s outstanding new biography of Freud, one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer’s Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s will to power. It’s not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud’s determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud’s colleagues called it a “psychical need.” [More]

Ghalib scholar Ralph Russell on himself:

I was born in 1918. I became a communist at the age of 16 and am still content to call myself one despite the traumatic experiences from 1946 onwards of the corruption and eventual collapse of the communist movement and the Soviet Union, because I still hold to the humanist values which made me a communist.

[More]

The Plebeian Postcard

Now that Lalu Prasad Yadav has managed a detour at an Indian Institute of Management, one wishes he would change track to the Ministry of Post and Telegraph and infuse some steam into the sorely unambitious postcard. For a postcard is not only what a postcard does, it is also what a postcard can.

I do not know what the postcard’s share in the revenue of the Indian Postal Services has been over the years, but I clearly remember seeing it piled up in ever increasing heaps on DD’s Surabhi programme. Surabhi asked some difficult questions of its viewers but answers poured in on postcards from exotic and unheard of places.

Then Cable TV came, and other shows promising more lucrative prizes, and the poor postcard got an affluent cousin–the competition postcard. Shortly after that those enormous heaps grew smaller and smaller until they vanished.

[Some years later, while admiring the letters section of Outlook magazine I read its editor Vinod Mehta wishing for letters written on postcards. Wo din hai aur aaj ka din hai, the writing space that a postcard offers remains perfect for publishable letters in sundry
periodicals. Brevity still being the soul of wit, it also remains perfect for sonnet, epigram, ghazal, haiku, cartoon. And since a postcard is meant to be posted, the shy or uncertain composer may be induced into sharing her work more freely,  and the world might grow a
more poetic, artistic place.

Postcards make for quick and more frequent letters, a development today’s scattered and lonelier familes might look forward to. Postcards are also environment-friendly, unlike the silicon-guzzling computers and mobiles that promise to replace paper. If all this sounds Luddite and nostalgic, postcards hold at least one practical prospect: writing on them may help bring down the average size of mankind’s handwriting. What is large handwriting if not waste of paper?

The postcard admits no attachment, no cover, no stamp. It serves exclusively the written word (or a drawing) and its nakedness spurs a more honest discourse. Perhaps its time is over but there is something to be gained if it lives.

A 1951 law held that “should a post card be posted without the postage having been prepaid in full, it will be forwarded to the Dead Letter Office (DLO) to be destroyed forthwith.”  A suitably mass non-violent movement grew against the provision with numerous representations to the Government of India on the matter. In June 1954, the government changed the law,  and said that in case of any infringement of rules “the post card shall be treated as a letter and the amount of postage prepaid on a single post card shall be taken into account in assessing the postage to be charged on delivery.” Further, it said, “In no case the addressees shall be given a chance to go through the contents of
such postcards before recovering the dues.”

Millions may still be using the postcard for all I know, but the idea of the postcard in our troubled times admittedly seems quaint. But the quaintness, dear reader, lies not in our postcards but in ourselves that we are human, all too human. The postcard has been saved from the netherworld in the past. All it needs is a stamp of approval.

Leafing through Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar

The books arrive on rickshaws and autos, in Maruti Omnis and 800s, and burst upon the pavement in rubble-like heaps, or quietly lay claim to separate portions of the available earth.

Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar isn’t firmly established until after 10 in the morning but it begins practising its charms from three hours before. The wide road is traffic-free, the crowd not yet gathered, and the day’s stock is virgin. Slowly and suddenly you find yourself entangled in a careless pile, lost in the smell of old paper, warmed by the lovely words in which a book is gifted. No matter how far you dig, the curious book keeps turning up.

[By the time you reach out for the kachauris, the place is milling with purpose. Soon the ground is a swamp of textbooks, ‘competition books’, software programming manuals, and a bizarre crop of religious, spiritual and astrological guides. The small collection from a
Salisbury library is irretrievable among the pirated bestsellers rapidly colonising the pavement. But what magazines inhabit our planet! At one stall I counted 11 extremely expensive looking magazines on interior decoration alone.

One plump Punjabi manning a huge collection of Coelhos and Wallaces, swept away a flood of sweat from his forehead onto a glistening bunch of Gladrags, and bemoaned to an acquaintance, “ye dhandha ab bahut paisa maangta hai. Pichhle maheene 40,000 oopar se kharcha aaya tha.”

Across the Ansari road, which the book market doesn’t cross, stand decrepit 19th century houses with no signs of habitation except air conditioners fitted onto the windows. Maybe there live in these houses people who once owned bookshops in Daryaganj, and now have shut out the sight of the rude street market. Were it not for the air conditioners, it would be certain the houses were home to ghosts.

The pavement, though, is brimming with mortal life, and the road with honking machines. Finding a book now becomes an affair of the hard grind. The whole place looks a dumping ground for America’s publishing industry–weirder and weirder paperbacks stretched out for a good tropical tan. But at least a book is a book is a book: paper that can be recycled.

Two boys from Delhi University have newly entered the trade. Part time, they explain. They are selling run of the mill stuff and refuse to bargain. Ahead, a woman stands to attention, fanned furiously by an attendant. She shrills the exact price of each book from that studied distance, and those who pass close by her  quicken their steps.

But really, all’s well with the Daryaganj bazaar. William Shakespeare still towers overs this stage. In countless editions and imprints, and at at least half of all the stalls, the bard is alive and singing. The Signet edition, selling at Rs 20, remains the best place to find him
though.

At the end, my picks of the week: Sarvepalli Gopal’s three volume biography of Nehru, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Economics and the Public Purpose, and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception–two essays on the liberating effect of psychedelic drugs that inspired Jim Morrison to call his band ‘The Doors’–all of them for Rs 140.

Now that the hurlyburly’s done, there’s one small thing left. Riksha! Onwards to Karim’s.