Changing Guard

I'll be observing from a different vantage-point, at least for a little while.

www.almustafa.wordpress.com


See you there.

On Sexual Harassment

The Literary Society, Ramjas College held a discussion on Gender and Sexual Harassment in collaboration with The Blank Noise Project on November 5, 2007.

The following is a piece I wrote about it, published in a university journal.

Why have so many cases of sexual harassment come up in Delhi University in the past year?

Surely, sexual harassment is not something that is peculiar to DU. It has been established beyond doubt that there is no demographic to harassers and they may come from anywhere in the social strata. My guess is, the big difference is due to the awareness about the issue created through active public discourse.

The major reason behind inviting The Blank Noise Project to Ramjas College was to continue this process of change. Blank Noise, being a public-participatory art initiative, tried to take it beyond the annals of discourse. We discussed strategies for shifting the power balance in a public domain which remains largely male-dominated. This reclaiming of the public space is an important step if we aspire to gender equality. The abdication of the public space to men is nothing but abject surrender. For it is clear, more powerful than harassment is the threat of harassment, the internalization of fear and potential aggression.

In the light of what happened at Ramjas recently, the discussion with Blank Noise acquired a new context. We had planned it a month before the issue engulfed Ramjas, which only showed how pertinent it is. Blank Noise’s emphasis was largely female-centric sexual harassment, but the interaction also went beyond gender. More than girls, we had boys speaking about experiences of sexual harassment. I thought, the unique part was that people felt comfortable enough to speak about difficult things in an audience of about a hundred people. For once, there was no shame attached to being harassed. Maybe it was a small occurrence, but also a powerful step in the process. When we find the courage to speak about it, we make it more and more evident that there is a problem.

And the fight against it must go on.

King of banality and second-hand insights

Shashi Tharoor re-asserts his claim to the throne with this statement -

Drinking Coke has not Coca Colarised India.

What astounds me is the conviction with which he utters these platitudes of nonsense. These are statements that even university undergrads would be embarrassed to utter. Only a paper like The Times of India cares to publish such drivel, which actually makes it a sort of a perfect match.

'India have been dudded'

Excerpts from some reactions in the aftermath of the Sydney shocker.

Peter Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald -

India have been dudded. No one with the slightest enthusiasm for cricket will take the least satisfaction from the victory secured by the local team in an SCG Test that entertained spectators, provided some excellent batting but left a sour taste in the mouth.

It was a match that will have been relished only by rabid nationalists and others for whom victory and vengeance are the sole reasons for playing sport. Truth to tell, the last day was as bad as the first. It was a rotten contest that singularly failed to elevate the spirit.

Mukul Kesavan, in another brilliant piece wrote -

This was a Test match where the excitement was manufactured by incompetent umpires making weird decisions: the Indians players must have felt like lab rats being chivvied by mad scientists.

He also had some advice for Steve Bucknor -

If Benson was incompetent, Bucknor was incompetent and perverse. The moment that summed up this match’s inexplicably bad umpiring was Bucknor’s decision not to refer Dhoni’s appeal for a stumping against Symonds to the third umpire. What was he thinking? Bucknor and the Indians have have a long history of friction and this last performance by him is unlikely to improve things. He is scheduled to stand in the Perth Test: I’d be very surprised if the Indians don’t formally petition the authorities to substitute him. If I was Bucknor, I’d withdraw and use the time to see an opthalmologist: his dismissal of Dravid in the second innings suggests that he’s seeing things.

Prem Panicker on his blog on Rediff called the umpiring 'the most atrocious in living memory.'

Wasim Akram called the Aussies 'crybabies and hypocrites' when they have been cricket's worst sledgers.

One of the lingering memories, personally, would remain Sunil Gavaskar's inflamed outburst in the commentary box after Ganguly's dismissal.

What utter nonsense, he thundered.
Sorry, Mr Benson, you've got it all wrong.

Filth, No More Blood

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's knack for coming out with ridiculous comments doesn't seem to have died with Nandigram. Here he goes again at a function to mark the anniversary of a CPI-M mouthpiece -

The reality has forced us to accept capitalism as the only way to get funds for industries. We are aware of the filth that is inherent in capitalism but there is no other way at the moment.

I have never understood this Marxist obsession with ideological purity, which obviously reduces all other philosophies to filth. I'm always reminded of E M Forster's wonderful quote who called reformers like these 'obsessed with purity and who cannot see that their obsession is impure.'

Instead of blood in the name of ideological puritanism, give me filth any day.

Dynast of the East?

In a brilliant, perceptive piece on Benazir Bhutto in The Guardian, Ian Jack writes -


By her early thirties, she had been imprisoned, held under house arrest, seen a younger brother die, made a last prison visit to her father, now ruined by dysentery and gum disease, on the night before his execution. But the eventual question is, what was she being brave for? "Democracy" and "the people of Pakistan" were always her answers, but it is surely not disrespectful to wonder if her background and all those paternal lessons about "destiny" made her essentially a dynast whose ideas of public duty came out of some ancestral, unexamined self-regard.

Narendra Modi in Hell

In times when mass murderers walk victorious with the hubris of bigots, perhaps only poetry can express our dismay and outrage.

I reproduce below Pablo Neruda's wonderful poem General Franco in Hell, written after the Spanish Civil War, but a voice that belches with deep resonance in our own benighted times -


Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Indeed.
From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling
of your legions, in the holy milk
of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled
along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence, a broken
door.
Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung
of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure
of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,
oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,
of ill-born pallor of shadow?

The flame retreats without ash,
the salty thirst of hell, the circles
of grief turn pale. Cursed one, may only humans
pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may
you not be consumed, not be lost
in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass
or the
fierce foam.

Alone, alone, for the tears
all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands
and rotted eyes, alone in a cave
of your hell, eating silent pus and blood
through a cursed and lonely eternity. You do not deserve to sleep
even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:
you have to be
awake, General, eternally awake
among the putrefaction of the new mothers,
machine-gunned in the autumn.

All and all the sad children cut to
pieces,
rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell
that day of cold festivity: your arrival.
Children blackened by explosions,
red fragments of brain, corridors filled
with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the very posture
of crossing the street,
of kicking the ball,
of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

Smiling. There are smiles
now demolished by blood
that wait with scattered exterminated teeth
and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces
of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless
ghosts, the dark
hidden ones, those who never left
their beds of rubble. They all wait for you
to spend the night. They fill the corridors
like decayed seaweed.

They are ours, they were our
flesh, our health, our
bustling peace, our ocean
of air and lungs. Through
them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,
turned into destroyed
substance, murdered matter, dead flour,
they await you in your hell.

Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,
neither terror nor sorrow awaits you. May you be alone and accursed,
alone and awake among all the dead,
and let blood fall upon you like rain,
and let a dying river of severed eyes
slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.