'India' today wants poverty eliminated from its midst. Its earnestness towards the cause almost reeks of vengeance and vengeance it shall wreck on the guilty. The guilty of material powerlessness. The sinful dregs of capitalist society. They must be consigned to where they belong - nowhere. It literally is a war unto death and is being unforgivingly raged in the guilt ridden jungles in the middle of nowhere. Out of sight, out of mind, it is raging magnificently. None dead. For they never lived amongst us. Only absent.
Bomb blast in Boston. The spectacle of the Gulf War. And the invisible fluorescence of the golden jungles of the promised land. It is a subaltern war for subterranean causes. Inarticulate. It rages and burns and then razes itself to the silence of ashes. Mute explosions under and beyond the threshold of human audibility. An unjust corpse-ridden Hastinapur. A stilled wasteland. Noiseless. Imageless. Far, far away. Far from here, its distant drums roll away in dead air, incommunicative for the dearth of a recipient. Not even the breeze whispers through the bushes of these impenetrable forests. Death lives and dies there. And the dewdrop and the leaf ask each other if the men care.
The climate is damp and marshy. And the humidity begotten of human blood and the fragrance of virgin earth waft nausea through the chained air of this tormented realm. The vague is ineluctably and gradually ripening into the definite. The direst internal threat is making good its promise of disintegration. Apocalypse has dawned in that other world in untold local blasts of fire and brimstone. Each discrete moment a shred of the world is apocalypting itself on that damned patch of earth. It is not a collective apocalypse but a thing scarier. An estranged annihilation. Companionless. My world drowns lonesome with me. Abandoned. Bereft of that last ray of hope, that last of consolations even in the face of the worst - commonality of experience. I am so individual in my loss and destruction. So alone. And as I lose my last possession too, my individuality, with my life flying a reckless bird away from me, I see a world utterly estranged from me. I see myself utterly estranged from myself. I have reached the limit of fear. My eyes the mirror of incomprehension. And then mystery takes over. This indeed is the end my friend. This is the end.
Whereto from here? Our world is a dead end. Laid waste by an undying optimism. Progress till doomsday. Progress till the end. The red flag of man's forward forever march will be the starkest thing in the sky. Redder than the lovely blood red sky. And against a black cloud in that red sky lightning will, instead of thunder, cry. The blind lineament of lightning will look like a shriek of the heavens. And more black clouds will gather against the redder and redder sky. Black and silver and red. Not saffron and white and green. But black and silver and red will be the colours of this nation. Colours of a troubled sky. Of a gathering storm.
I still have a dream. A dream not of a prosperous India but of an India without poverty. Or invisible poverty. Like the invisible man you will see its cloak and you will know its there. But you shall not see it. It shall disappear. Far out of the perimeter. Where there is none there. Or none that you know or consider. Those are the non-entities out there outside the village of the living. The walking dead. The lepers. The contaminated. Venereal poverty lives there. And your children shall not see the accursed of Sodom and Gomorrah. They shall live in the darkness of night. Their vitalities will be as nothing in the blackness of that space. And this side of perimeter love shall shine gloriously down. And hope. And optimism. Progress, riches, and enthusiasm. The red flag shall flutter sharp against the luminiscence of the transparent sky. The sun will be yours. And the dead souls will be crawling somewhere out of your ruddy faces. One by one dropping dead of a disease called loss of soul as we discover drugs of eternal youth and immortality.
But there are amongst us those too who can see their ghoulish figures amidst us in the broad daylight. Living their deathly existence amidst and oblivious of us. Their eyes burnt blind by the same sun in whose soothing warmth we glow and feel the beauty of life. But like the blind their eyes sparkle too. And feel. As their uncanny innocence feels our presence, the snake of guilt makes that slightest of uncoiling movements within us. And in our discomfiture our infantile conscience seeks to shake off the guilt coursing through our blood. Except that all is vanity under the sun. And most of all our guilt.
But we overrode the guilt. And pushed on. We pushed the dead and the decayed beyond the fringes and margins of the city of our god. And earth was bifurcated between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the poor. They reigned there, we lived here. And touch was taboo. They were the sub-humans, haunting and sniffing the parched and cracked earth like hungry dogs. It was more effective than holocaust. Exile has always been. Exiled, we couldn't see them, hear them. And they were mute anyway. Creatures of stifled cry. The unspeaking subalterns. The sinful scum of Indian karma.
But we who had eyes were sad. We felt for ourselves. It was an ominous time to be. To be equipped with the infrastructure of language and still possess the eyes of conscience. All the machines of civilization, luxuries of speech, economies of oversatiation were so much noise inside our head. It was a sorry world to live in O' my brothers. It was a slow death for all in the fast lane. The blessed and the cursed alike were dying a voiceless death. There was so much noise everywhere. But at the heart of it all was a screeching deafness. A suicidal message. Suicide soldiers prepared to kill others and oneself in the name of communism, jihad and democracy. But mostly in the name of democracy. And a more equitable distribution of oil and the riches of the netherworld.
Then the others disappeared from the world and became guerillas and got rehumanised. They were standing out there with their guns aimed at the community. The city gates were shut tight and high against their faces and fury. They populated that purgatory inhabited by the ostracised fighters who after every extermination are replaced by their progeny of the next generation. Like the waves of the sea they follow hard one upon the other. After one has receded into the sand the next comes rushing onwards headlong into its death. They are here. They are still here. Always here. When the last trace of life has disappeared from those sterile ruins of sickness, death and dilapidation, they are still there in the ashes alloyed with the infected dirt. And blue moon after blue moon they arise from those ashes as from a troubled dream in savage irruptions of retribution against the looters. Fight them if you will but these howling and hungry jackals will yet carry the day. For they have been entrusted with a business unto death and dying is only a tactic. You cannot defeat those who have already accepted death. It is the new dilemma of powerlessness and you are flabbergasted.
For centuries these sub-humans have belonged unrecognised among us. Excluded, the land that shelters them has itself become infected and subhuman. And always it awaits a new generation of untouchables after the last has been wiped clean off the face of civilization. It feeds on and is fertilised by their dead and
this fertile and hungry womb begets a new harvest of disenfranchised, blue moon after blue moon. Nay, they rise quicker than vampires. They rise rising sun after rising sun. Each new dawn is a ruination as they prepare to shed more gore and souls.
They have been called by different names. But whatever the name, whatever the incarnation, whatever the anthem of its freshest cause, nothing has changed since man's struggle with man began. The same violence, the same rapine, the selfsame corpses of men, women and children and of the ancient who were anyway on the verge of the new. Two men in the ring trying to subdue each other into submission with a volley of brutal punches to the vitals and the people clapping the more enthusiastically as the pitch of cruelty climbs higher and climaxes in a mortal knockout. Kill them! Kill them! is the chorus from all directions. The winds howl death and the floods clamour for blood and viscera. Look at nature's reprisals too. She the most patient of all has run out of patience and blown Armageddon's bugle against humanity. Not yet. But very soon perhaps. The signs are ominous and the storm is gathering apace.
But we admit that this awful state of affairs is what constitutes the human condition. As long as there are two men there will be a no-holds-barred-till-death-do-us-part struggle for ascendancy. There will be the master and slave, the colonist and the colonized, the imperialist and the subject, the dominant and the subjugated. And evil will be as banal as trees. No, more banal. Even after the last tree has been hacked down there will still be the same irreducible quantity of evil in the world. Perhaps it will be the last thing surviving. Not cockroaches. But there will be good too so that evil can exist. There will be punches and counterpunches of morality and power. Every human encounter is saturated with this violence of the ring.
In the face of the other, force is what flows out - inwards into fear or outwards into aggression. And fear is the worse of the two as it aggresses against the soul. And both are violence. And when the individual becomes the corporate, it is the same game of violence-ridden politics, only exceptionally more visceral and entrenched. It is always one against the other. One race against another. Class versus class. Nation versus nation. No quarter asked, none given. Always against. Always antagonistic. And the rule of the game is that there is no victor until the vanquished is dead. Absolutely dead. Until the throne along with the realm has been ceded and all threats exterminated. The foundation has been determinantly dug up and the whole superstructure overhauled. No trace, nothing, remains of the previous. It is a new system, a very another world, a strange incarnation.
But before this new world can come into being, there must have been a beginning. The origin of a change where nothing of its afterlife is yet born but the change itself. It is born as a child of time for since its beginning time has harboured change in its womb. Liberation from status quo is the sole direction in which history moves. The rise of all that is new is always a legacy of the annihilation of the old.
Bomb blast in Boston. The spectacle of the Gulf War. And the invisible fluorescence of the golden jungles of the promised land. It is a subaltern war for subterranean causes. Inarticulate. It rages and burns and then razes itself to the silence of ashes. Mute explosions under and beyond the threshold of human audibility. An unjust corpse-ridden Hastinapur. A stilled wasteland. Noiseless. Imageless. Far, far away. Far from here, its distant drums roll away in dead air, incommunicative for the dearth of a recipient. Not even the breeze whispers through the bushes of these impenetrable forests. Death lives and dies there. And the dewdrop and the leaf ask each other if the men care.
The climate is damp and marshy. And the humidity begotten of human blood and the fragrance of virgin earth waft nausea through the chained air of this tormented realm. The vague is ineluctably and gradually ripening into the definite. The direst internal threat is making good its promise of disintegration. Apocalypse has dawned in that other world in untold local blasts of fire and brimstone. Each discrete moment a shred of the world is apocalypting itself on that damned patch of earth. It is not a collective apocalypse but a thing scarier. An estranged annihilation. Companionless. My world drowns lonesome with me. Abandoned. Bereft of that last ray of hope, that last of consolations even in the face of the worst - commonality of experience. I am so individual in my loss and destruction. So alone. And as I lose my last possession too, my individuality, with my life flying a reckless bird away from me, I see a world utterly estranged from me. I see myself utterly estranged from myself. I have reached the limit of fear. My eyes the mirror of incomprehension. And then mystery takes over. This indeed is the end my friend. This is the end.
Whereto from here? Our world is a dead end. Laid waste by an undying optimism. Progress till doomsday. Progress till the end. The red flag of man's forward forever march will be the starkest thing in the sky. Redder than the lovely blood red sky. And against a black cloud in that red sky lightning will, instead of thunder, cry. The blind lineament of lightning will look like a shriek of the heavens. And more black clouds will gather against the redder and redder sky. Black and silver and red. Not saffron and white and green. But black and silver and red will be the colours of this nation. Colours of a troubled sky. Of a gathering storm.
I still have a dream. A dream not of a prosperous India but of an India without poverty. Or invisible poverty. Like the invisible man you will see its cloak and you will know its there. But you shall not see it. It shall disappear. Far out of the perimeter. Where there is none there. Or none that you know or consider. Those are the non-entities out there outside the village of the living. The walking dead. The lepers. The contaminated. Venereal poverty lives there. And your children shall not see the accursed of Sodom and Gomorrah. They shall live in the darkness of night. Their vitalities will be as nothing in the blackness of that space. And this side of perimeter love shall shine gloriously down. And hope. And optimism. Progress, riches, and enthusiasm. The red flag shall flutter sharp against the luminiscence of the transparent sky. The sun will be yours. And the dead souls will be crawling somewhere out of your ruddy faces. One by one dropping dead of a disease called loss of soul as we discover drugs of eternal youth and immortality.
But there are amongst us those too who can see their ghoulish figures amidst us in the broad daylight. Living their deathly existence amidst and oblivious of us. Their eyes burnt blind by the same sun in whose soothing warmth we glow and feel the beauty of life. But like the blind their eyes sparkle too. And feel. As their uncanny innocence feels our presence, the snake of guilt makes that slightest of uncoiling movements within us. And in our discomfiture our infantile conscience seeks to shake off the guilt coursing through our blood. Except that all is vanity under the sun. And most of all our guilt.
But we overrode the guilt. And pushed on. We pushed the dead and the decayed beyond the fringes and margins of the city of our god. And earth was bifurcated between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the poor. They reigned there, we lived here. And touch was taboo. They were the sub-humans, haunting and sniffing the parched and cracked earth like hungry dogs. It was more effective than holocaust. Exile has always been. Exiled, we couldn't see them, hear them. And they were mute anyway. Creatures of stifled cry. The unspeaking subalterns. The sinful scum of Indian karma.
But we who had eyes were sad. We felt for ourselves. It was an ominous time to be. To be equipped with the infrastructure of language and still possess the eyes of conscience. All the machines of civilization, luxuries of speech, economies of oversatiation were so much noise inside our head. It was a sorry world to live in O' my brothers. It was a slow death for all in the fast lane. The blessed and the cursed alike were dying a voiceless death. There was so much noise everywhere. But at the heart of it all was a screeching deafness. A suicidal message. Suicide soldiers prepared to kill others and oneself in the name of communism, jihad and democracy. But mostly in the name of democracy. And a more equitable distribution of oil and the riches of the netherworld.
Then the others disappeared from the world and became guerillas and got rehumanised. They were standing out there with their guns aimed at the community. The city gates were shut tight and high against their faces and fury. They populated that purgatory inhabited by the ostracised fighters who after every extermination are replaced by their progeny of the next generation. Like the waves of the sea they follow hard one upon the other. After one has receded into the sand the next comes rushing onwards headlong into its death. They are here. They are still here. Always here. When the last trace of life has disappeared from those sterile ruins of sickness, death and dilapidation, they are still there in the ashes alloyed with the infected dirt. And blue moon after blue moon they arise from those ashes as from a troubled dream in savage irruptions of retribution against the looters. Fight them if you will but these howling and hungry jackals will yet carry the day. For they have been entrusted with a business unto death and dying is only a tactic. You cannot defeat those who have already accepted death. It is the new dilemma of powerlessness and you are flabbergasted.
For centuries these sub-humans have belonged unrecognised among us. Excluded, the land that shelters them has itself become infected and subhuman. And always it awaits a new generation of untouchables after the last has been wiped clean off the face of civilization. It feeds on and is fertilised by their dead and
this fertile and hungry womb begets a new harvest of disenfranchised, blue moon after blue moon. Nay, they rise quicker than vampires. They rise rising sun after rising sun. Each new dawn is a ruination as they prepare to shed more gore and souls.
They have been called by different names. But whatever the name, whatever the incarnation, whatever the anthem of its freshest cause, nothing has changed since man's struggle with man began. The same violence, the same rapine, the selfsame corpses of men, women and children and of the ancient who were anyway on the verge of the new. Two men in the ring trying to subdue each other into submission with a volley of brutal punches to the vitals and the people clapping the more enthusiastically as the pitch of cruelty climbs higher and climaxes in a mortal knockout. Kill them! Kill them! is the chorus from all directions. The winds howl death and the floods clamour for blood and viscera. Look at nature's reprisals too. She the most patient of all has run out of patience and blown Armageddon's bugle against humanity. Not yet. But very soon perhaps. The signs are ominous and the storm is gathering apace.
But we admit that this awful state of affairs is what constitutes the human condition. As long as there are two men there will be a no-holds-barred-till-death-do-us-part struggle for ascendancy. There will be the master and slave, the colonist and the colonized, the imperialist and the subject, the dominant and the subjugated. And evil will be as banal as trees. No, more banal. Even after the last tree has been hacked down there will still be the same irreducible quantity of evil in the world. Perhaps it will be the last thing surviving. Not cockroaches. But there will be good too so that evil can exist. There will be punches and counterpunches of morality and power. Every human encounter is saturated with this violence of the ring.
In the face of the other, force is what flows out - inwards into fear or outwards into aggression. And fear is the worse of the two as it aggresses against the soul. And both are violence. And when the individual becomes the corporate, it is the same game of violence-ridden politics, only exceptionally more visceral and entrenched. It is always one against the other. One race against another. Class versus class. Nation versus nation. No quarter asked, none given. Always against. Always antagonistic. And the rule of the game is that there is no victor until the vanquished is dead. Absolutely dead. Until the throne along with the realm has been ceded and all threats exterminated. The foundation has been determinantly dug up and the whole superstructure overhauled. No trace, nothing, remains of the previous. It is a new system, a very another world, a strange incarnation.
But before this new world can come into being, there must have been a beginning. The origin of a change where nothing of its afterlife is yet born but the change itself. It is born as a child of time for since its beginning time has harboured change in its womb. Liberation from status quo is the sole direction in which history moves. The rise of all that is new is always a legacy of the annihilation of the old.
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