Haider and Kashmir

I saw Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider yesterday and though I’m sure I have enjoyed other movies more, I don’t think I’ve thought so much about a film after I’ve seen it. Haider is Hamlet, of course but it is so much more than that. Setting the movie in Kashmir led one to expect the same kind of movie set in Kashmir that Bollywood has shown before, Mission Kashmir and Roja come to mind, I’m sure there are many others. Militancy is seen as a tragic byproduct of misguided minds, and the Indian Army is everyone’s saviour. Of course, there are other movies where even such grey shades are not tolerated.

Which is why Haider was such a refreshing surprise. It is the first explicitly anti-Indian Army Bollywood movie that I have come across. The Indian army is the oppressor force, which summarily kills, and tortures. Many people in Kashmir shout ‘Hamein chahiye Azaadi’ and they aren’t automatically the bad guys. Haider’s father is a doctor who agrees  to treat an ailing militant leader in his house and becomes one of the disappeared. That’s when we learn that there is such a thing as the disappeared people of Kashmir, who the mainstream press doesn’t seem to remember. We learn that there are camps where people are tortured, and Kashmiris live effectively under martial law and occupation. Anyone uncomfortable with such truths is now slamming the movie as disrespectful.

When you have a parent in the army, you know as much about the institution as you can without actually being in the army. I have a complicated relationship with the army. I grew up in it, love and celebrate its histories, traditions and enjoy the feeling of belonging to it in a way. I also grew up with the conventional narrative on Pakistan, Kashmir and patriotism. I remember hating Pakistan after watching border, I remember the Kargil war. And my father has spent many, many years in the Kashmir and the North East. The first time it hit me that there is something wrong in Kashmir is when I read the Wikipedia page on ‘Human Rights in India’ when I was 13 years old. Then I started learning more and more about the way things actually are in Kashmir and the North East for that matter, both places where the army has been called in to quell dissent. For us ‘terrorists’, for them ‘freedom fighters’ which we are certainly entitled to fight, but in the crossfire caught, many, many innocent casualties. And thus, more and more ‘terrorists’.

I have now started wondering whether there is any point to keeping places and people in your country when they clearly do not want to live with you. The Pakistan Army committed genocide on its own countrymen trying to keep East and West Pakistan together. I mean, where will you draw the line. What is the territorial integrity of our country that we are trying to protect? There is an honour in war. War is bloodshed, and war is hell but two armies fighting across borders is something the army is supposed to do. Not Counter Insurgency Operations (as the task of fighting terrorists is called) where there is large scale oppression of your own people.

Maybe somewhere in our nationalistic hubris, some of us will remember Haider looking for his father in mortuaries full of corpses the next time someone says ‘Human Rights Abuses’ don’t happen in Kashmir. All those army wives and daughters will feel some empathy in the face of the mother whose son has been missing.  Even those who believe that their politics is wrong can somehow summon some vestige of humanity from within themselves to say, that killing, murdering, raping, torturing is wrong and someone needs to stop the ones who do so and make them accountable(AFSPA). There are many who say the movie has not gone far enough and there is a copout.(Here and here) Maybe so, but this is a movie where Haider sang ‘Saare Jahan Se Acchha’ ironically (which I really enjoyed, we need more subversion in our movies).

And leaving politics aside, there are so many other interesting things about the movie. The cinematography, showing us the colours of a different Kashmir, the deliberate Kashmiri accents in Hindi and English (love-d, ghar=gar), the not so subtle presentation of the Oedipus complex between Haider and Ghazala, the absurdist theatrics with the masks(the bhand), old men(and young children) lying in graves, Haider’s Toba Tek Singh-esque monologue, the hilarious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern i.e the Salman Khan loving Salmans, and the music etc etc

More movies like Haider please.

Reflections on Partition

Partition was to India what the Holocaust was to Europe. A vast human tragedy, on an unimaginable scale. I’m working with a lawyer in Delhi right now. The clients are almost always prosperous Punjabis. Their ancestors, like some of mine, came to Delhi in absolute penury with nothing at all. Today so many of them are rich businessmen, the upper middle class of Delhi. Those who made the great trek survived the carnage, the mass killings of millions of people. A strange madness hit people on both sides. People and communities who had lived together for generations killing, raping, maiming. A Punjab in India without Punjabi Mussalmans. A Punjab in Pakistan without Sardars or Hindus.

South Delhi and West Delhi’s posh neighbourhoods were all once refugee colonies. Lajpat Nagar, Punjabi Bagh, Karol Bagh, Nizammudin etc. The demographics and culture of Delhi were irreversibly changed to become the Punjabi city it now is. From the tezheeb of old Delhi, the culture became that of the brash Punjabi. The other great city that changed was Karachi. With the influx of Mohajirs, Muslims from Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad and many other cities across India was created the conflict between Sindhis and Mohajirs that still reverberates in modern Pakistan.

As I was watching Bhaag Milkha Bhaag today, the sheer inhumanity of it struck me. We remember it, for sure, but not enough. Too many people have tried to kill each other in a riot motivated by religion in independent India for Partition to be remembered properly.

My maternal grandfather, my Nana, who is 82 years old, was born in 1931 in Lahore. Lahore, the lament of so many. That famous saying, ‘Jinne Lahore Nahi Dekhaya, Wo Jameya hi nahi’ ( Whosoever hasn’t seen Lahore, hasn’t really lived, more literally hasn’t been born .) People came from Sialkot, Multan, countless villages but Lahore is the place most remembered. My Nana learnt Urdu and Persian in school, grew up reading in the Nastaliq script. He learnt to read Hindi ( written in Devanagari) much later, as an adult. At the age of 16, he came to Delhi. His brother had a shop and house in Dariyaganj in Delhi. He, his mother and brothers were holidaying in Delhi on 15^th August 1947. (His father had passed away some years earlier.) They never went back. Most of their houses, belongings left behind. They were one of the lucky ones. They had a place to stay in Delhi, and they saw no violence. They were better off than so many people. My Nana tells me how a leading lawyer in Lahore was seen selling food on the streets of Delhi. Just try to imagine it. You’ve lived somewhere, all your life. Then, you can never go back there again. They’ve drawn a border. An imaginary line. It took years and years for people to rebuild their lives.

My paternal grandmother (Dadi) was born in Multan in 1941. Her father worked in the Railways. They lived very close to the Railway Station in Multan. She vaguely remembers the train journey they made to get to Delhi. Her father had paid off someone to take care of the family, and being in the Railways somehow made it possible for them to get here safely. My great-grandfather eventually came later, braving much danger. They were financially ruined, of course, and they rebuilt a life in Haridwar, and later Dehradun.

These are stories I’ve grown up with and they were traumatic events for them and their families, even defined them; and as a child I wondered what led people in power to make such strange decisions, which ruin so many lives. These were people who did not see the horrors and massacres of that time, and it affected them more than most other things in their lifetimes. My other two grandparents are from Gurdaspur, the Muslim majority district which came to India. There is a conspiracy theory that Radcliffe ( and consequently Britain) gave Gurdaspur to India because it is an easily navigable link to Jammu and Kashmir, something that enabled India to gain access to it. Whatever it was, Gurdaspur, by quirk of fate today has almost no Muslims. A few years ago, I was walking around Batala, my ancestral hometown in Gurdaspur, and saw an old abandoned mosque I think which was recently redeveloped by the ASI or the Punjab government. Left behind in 1947, to rot. Like Hindu temples in Pakistan.

The greatest migration in human history. We need a museum for it. Like the Holocaust museum. Where one can go and ruminate, in peace. Amrita Pritam’s dirge for the Punjab, ‘Ajj Akha Waris Shah Nu’ which exhorts the poet Waris Shah(of Heer Ranjha fame) to rise from his grave and stop the madness is one of the many literary works which references Partition. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines( which among other things references the effects of partition in Bengal), Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar, Satish Gujral’s paintings are further examples.

I’m also interested in the cultural consequences. A rejection of the Muslim heritage of Punjab. Apart from Malerkotla near Patiala there are almost no Muslims in Indian Punjab any more. Punjab’s culture became agriculture. I didn’t grow up hearing about Sufi Punjabi poetry. Punjab became a Sikh state, the language an inherent part of Sikh identity. The Punjabi in Pakistan became the oppressor. Their cultural confusion became even more critical. They ended up trying to become Arabs, rejecting their South Asian heritage. As the last generation which lived through partition passes away, people growing up in India and Pakistan today cannot even contemplate how the countries lived as one. That the young Pakistani’s grandmother had Hindu and Sikh friends, that Jalandhar and Ludhiana had a majority of Muslims.

This post in no way yearns for a rejection of Partition. It happened and two countries were created which had widely different destinies. Just that the demonisation of the ‘other’ led to the peculiar circumstances where the ordinary person of each country has no idea how the other half lives and what it is really like. I just hope that it becomes easier to visit Pakistan for the ordinary Indian and vice versa. My attempt to go to Lahore in January this year fell flat sadly due to bureaucratic inanities which would never have been the case had I been trying to get to another country.

India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, Palestine and Israel. Examples of sheer human stupidity. One day we will learn. One day.

A New Beginning

I’m moving to a new city, a new life. I haven’t written here for so long. I wonder if that is because I want to make every post I write mean something, be well written or is it just a general inability to be creative, write anything well? I don’t know, really. I knew I would change a lot in five years. It is a long time when you’re all of 17 years old. Many things that I thought would happen didn’t happen. I had fun, lots of it, met some friends I’ll have for a lifetime, broadened my intellectual horizons, let go of what I thought was my provincial world. I learned to fend for myself, felt blissfully happy, and saw the absolute depths.

I wasn’t conventionally successful here; I wasn’t even unconventionally successful here. There were so many obsessed and driven people, who knew exactly what they wanted. I was looking for something, my place in the world, and I didn’t find it here. I never loved the law, never found the discipline to do things on time. I got addicted to mediocrity, and by the end there was almost complete indifference. It’s too late to regret, and honestly, I don’t. It happened and it is the past, so I don’t really think I would have acted differently, in the place that I was.  There are a few things I’m glad about. I’m glad I kept reading. I’m happy that I saw failure, in many ways; it showed me I can be resilient and I know I can be a strong person. I’m glad I got into running, by the end. I enjoyed my internships; I loved exploring Delhi and Bombay. I loved living in Bangalore, such blissful weather. The quizzing, my passion for knowing inane things, rewarded. KQA is absolutely brilliant, and I intend to keep doing that (quizzing) for the rest of my life.

Delhi is scary. It is full of assholes. Inhospitable, rude people. It is full of the kind of worshipping of money and ostentatiousness I find abhorrent. Yet it is Punjabi, and North Indian and familiar. It also has history, everywhere. I intend to do more with my free time(of which I’ll have sadly little) here. Explore, see every part of it. Nizamuddin, Old Delhi, Mehrauli. Maybe bohemian Hauz Khas (or has it become commercial already?).  My life is open with possibilities though. 5 years ago when I came here, I saw the many different things I could do, the many different kinds of person I could become. That is the case today also. I can reinvent myself. I don’t really want to. I can, however, use 5 years of experiencing life on my own to do some things smarter.

I don’t want to whine, and spout self-indulgent psychobabble. Which is what I’m doing! I’ll just promise myself one thing, I’ll write, in Delhi. For the blog, too. I am obsessed with many things. Indie music, Pakistan (and partition), languages, immigrants(of all kinds), mixing of cultures, football, running, Indian (and Pakistani) writing in English, Islam in India, the Indian Army, Tehelka, Open, and the Caravan, Hinduism in Pakistan, Biharis in the West Indies, the novels of Amitav Ghosh and a thousand other things. I want to write about them. It is certainly more interesting than my quest to find myself. I am a product, of a certain time, of certain cities, of a particular upbringing, and I need to have the hubris to think that my thoughts, my opinion means something. To a glorious future!

Letters

I want to send letters. I want to write letters. On paper. Instead of looking at pictures of friends on facebook, I want them to write to me describing their life. When you write a letter, you create a story, a narrative, about yourself, and everyone around you. Letters have a physical existence, which cannot be snuffed out by pressing the delete button. Sure, you can burn them or lose them, but they can also be around for really long.  I've read letters sent to my mother from my father, from my grandmother to my father, from my great-grandmother to her daughter. All these letters are anything but bland descriptions of life. They include heartfelt emotions, philosophical ruminations, and hilarious anecdotes. These were the days before instant communication, and they are not so long back. From 1999 to 2001, my dad was posted in Kashmir, and he lived in an area where decent phones were non-existent. Talking to him was only possible on a garbled Army phone line where only one of us could talk at the same time. Therefore the conversation usually went like this, I’d say, “Hello, Dad. Over.”( In the manner of a radio operator, telling the other person that I have finished speaking)  My dad would reply, “Hi, son. Over.” Such conversations were finished with an ‘Over and Out’. Having such conversations was just a sort of reassuring exercise where we would have heard the other's voice. 

The only way to have a conversation about the details in our life was writing letters. Those letters to my father when he lived away from us were the only letters I ever wrote. I bought a letter pad and wrote letters 1 or 2 pages long telling him what I did at school, who my friends were and the wonderful food that Mom was making. He'd write back, describing the mountains, the bunker he lived in, fishing for trout in the freshwater lake they lived near, when he's coming back home, and there'd be photographs of him standing in the snow attached. I never wrote any letters after that, I think, except one to my grandfather many years ago.

Sure, phones improved, the next time Dad got posted to Kashmir, we could talk, and then came email, then Orkut, and Facebook, and smartphones and BBM, and now wherever anyone I know is, I can talk to, or send a message instantly. It is a good thing you know, but is my communication with people on the internet a record or reflection of me. I don't send any long, personal emails to my friends or family, people I haven't met for years are online at the same time as me, but I, and they, don’t care. People chat with me online, asking, “How's life?” and I reply with a banal, one line answer. Then they reply with their own banal, one line answer. I send impersonal birthday greetings to people on facebook, and they send them to me. 

In contrast with this, someone's sent and received letters are a reflection of their life because they're inherently more personal, more confessional and more detailed. Letters tell us a lot about a person. Famous people's letters are published, because we want to know more about them, their correspondence is a record of their life.  To write a letter is to pause, to stop, and think and then to have the freedom to go on and on. The emotions just seem truer. Letters expressing love can be dramatic, filmy or even lame, but the ordinary correspondence of two people separated by time and space expressing that emotion can be rather beautiful too. There are still boxes full of letters sent by my parents to each other before they got married. Today, two people like that would probably Skype.

I want to feel the paper under my hand, as I write a letter, in longhand. The only writing I do physically is in exams. I want to write, for pleasure, and then fold the page I wrote on, put it an envelope, put stamps on it, and post it. Then I want you to do the same for me.

2 Weeks in South Bombay

There is something oddly beautiful about South Bombay. A sense of history, even though it’s far more recent than say, Delhi. I especially like Fort. All the buildings look old, are old. There are vast multitudes walking in the streets, every one rushing to work. It is also confusing, getting from one part to another means getting past a number of streets , most of them named after Parsis. Till now, I’ve seen the name of every famous Parsi person I know(not living) except Maneckshaw. And many I’ve never heard of. Even a gali which is barely 100 m long has its own name. The variety of food available within five minute’s walk of my office is mind-boggling. A quaint Irani cafe. Dosa places selling kinds of dosa I’ve never heard of in Bangalore. Seafood. Vada Pao, Samosa Pao, Misal Pao and Cutting Chai. The Sandwich, nothing like I’ve tasted before. It feels odd asking for Pani Puri and not Gol Gappe. Three different Parsi restaurants. Kababs, and generic Veg restaurants which sell everything from Pao Bhaji to Puri Bhaji. One side out of Fort is Kala Ghoda. The Jehangir Art Gallery, and everything around it. The museum. Walk a little. Flora Fountain, or Hutathma Chowk. Doesn’t the marble fountain with angels, made in 1869 look better than the monument dedicated to the leaders of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement with its divisive message ‘Jai Maharashtra’? I bought an old book there, for very cheap. 

Very close is Churchgate, for local train travel. Otherwise, if you take the subway, there is Eros Cinema on the other side. Not very far is the Oxford India Bookstore. Sometimes I drank tea, sometimes coffee, and read half a book without buying it.

My fourth day in Bombay, I still haven’t seen the sea. As I get out of office, I decide to walk. Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Gateway of India. Police don’t check my bag. The Taj Mahal Hotel is just beautifully lit up. I see Colaba Causeway on the way. I go see Leopold, imagining it in the 70s. My Shantaram moment done, I know it’s too expensive for me right now. We walk behind the Hotel, see the cars, the buildings, and the odd mix of people. 

One day, my non-drinker friend sees a place and says, ‘Hey, that looks like a nice place for a beer’. I tell him he has good taste, but we can’t, it’s the Bombay Gymkhana. Every day I get out of Marine Lines, Azad Maidan on my left, and take the cab. My cabbie returns change when I pay him 20 bucks, without asking for it. I figure out, Cabs cost less here than autos in Bengalewdu. What a city!

However I sweat, more and more. But I drink Sugarcane juice, and feel refreshed. One night we go to Marine Drive. I’ve seen it on TV, and don’t really expect much. It is unexpectedly spectacular. The number of people out late, the lights. And finally, the breeze. On Sunday, we go to Hajji Ali. Dirty, insanely crowded. No spiritual feelings awakened. Chowpatty, then Marine Drive Again. NCPA Apartments look like nice place to stay. Find out they’re the most expensive apartments in the country. Ah, well.

Finally, back at the Gateway. On Sunday, it’s so crowded, we think of coming back later. There’s a line. People formed it, by themselves, voluntarily. What a city.

Jaipur Literary Festival: Day 1

I wrote this on the 2nd day of the Jaipur Literary Festival. I was too lazy to write descriptions of any other sessions and I can’t remember details of most others. Suffice to say it was an amazing experience and deserves a lot more written about it.

I’d left for Jaipur the night before the fest was scheduled to start. A night spent in a bus gives one a lot of time to think, and not much sleep. Ever since I knew I was going to Jaipur, I’d been willing myself through the exams with the promise of what was to come after. I anticipated seeing and meeting interesting people, see authors talk about their books and hear a dialogue on literature I hadn’t heard before. But oddly enough, the night before I reached I was worried that it would be an anti-climax. I fell asleep to that thought. The next day though I was excited. I reached Jaipur around 6:15 am and didn’t sleep at all after that and reached the Diggi Palace, the venue of the festival at 9:40, twenty minutes early. When I saw the huge crowds walking in along with me, I felt upbeat, and couldn’t stop smiling. There were a lot of pretty girls around, a consequence of anyone with any kind of literary pretensions from Delhi descending to Jaipur.

I walked in to strains of the Kirtan Gurbani sung by singers from the Golden Temple. The festival begun to a few speeches by various people, one of them to my delight being William Darlymple. The tension of Rushdie’s pulling out hung in the air. Most alluded to it in some way. The lamp was lit, and slowly, crowds started pouring in, a significant portion were foreigners. A lot of confused schoolchildren of varying ages were also around. The keynote address was delivered by Purushottam Aggarwal and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on Bhakti Poetry: The living legacy. Purushottam Aggarwal spoke mostly in Hindi and explained the legacy of Bhakti poetry as being different from that of submission and devotion and more akin to love arising out of relative equality. In Bhakti poetry, the Bhakta(Devotee) would show his Bhakti by treating his god like a lover, or a little naughty child( both alluding to Krishna). What was more interesting was what Mr Aggarwal said next. After showing the scope for dialogue and reason between the God and the Bhakta, he explained how the Bhakti poets were reactionaries of their times, who fought for the right to say what they want. He beautifully linked the spirit of Bhakti poetry to the spirit of Bhakti poetry to the spirit of free expression, and though he never explicitly said it, the allusion was clear (Hint: Salman Rushdie). Mr. Mehrotra then launched straightaway into some translations of Tamil Bhakti poets, like Tukaram. After some verses( translated in a very minimalist way), he regaled everyone with verses with the perspective of Tukaram’s wife and son, who curse Tukaram (and God) for his devotion to a God who does not give them the basic necessities of life, since he has turned Tukaram into his devotee. He next went into Kabir’s verses and translated many of them, focusing on verses which show his contempt for religion After some verses where Kabir made fun of Hinduism, there were more which made fun of Muslims and Islam. Mehrotra then wryly remarked that Kabir and Richard Dawkins would find a lot of common ground if they met each other!

Moares had arrived in the interim. I loved the beginning, and knew this was my kind of place to be. I looked around at the kind of sessions I could be at, and had the choice of a biographer of Tolstoy, a discussion of the Sikh gurus, and the award winning author of the English Patient, Michael Ondaatje. I chose Ondaatje even though I’d read the English Patient many years ago and had not read the book he was going to speak about. The person who was interviewing him, Amitava Kumar had also had also written a book I was really fond of, called Husband of a Fanatic. It was an interesting session, very focused on Ondaatje’s writing process, his aims when he writes, what he explores when he writes etc. He explained how he came to write his latest book. He saw a vision, of a boy boarding a ship, a journey he had himself made many years ago as an 11 year old boy going from Sri Lanka to England. He did not remember the journey, so he set out to write a fictional book about it. He said many things very specific to the books but there are certain things I remember and appreciated. He tends to look at multiple perspectives of different characters and bring the characters at the margins into the mainstream. His historical novels tend to look at the events whose stories were never told, those at the interstices of history. Amitava also went into a thread of the process of lost innocence which recurs in his works. I was also very interested in his writing process, a process I found very similar in another writer I admire, especially the way he begins. He sees an image and wants to write about that image. Then, as he himself said, he creates collages( a form of art he is interested in) and connects the dots together until they form a story. Also, he has no idea about what the books are going to be about until he writes them. Ondaatje spoke really well and I learnt and understood things I would never have heard of otherwise.

There were a lot of random rich people, bored students bored by what this festival was really about, people talking about books, and writing them. But so many people were interested, you could see it in their faces. I had some interesting choices in my next session, but I went for the big name one, David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker and biographer of Barack Obama, on supposedly the ‘Dissapointment of Obama’. Remnick sounded far from disappointed with Obama however. The session was very crowded and I was standing in the aisle. I had been looking forward to meeting Amitava Kumar earlier and asking him about his book but had lost him earlier and was thus late and had to stand. A man poked me from behind and asked me to move and I found it was Amitava Kumar himself. I promptly told him I loved a book of his. Then I spazzed out and temporarily rendered speechless didn’t remember the name of the book. He actually kept naming books he’d written till I remembered. Feeling exceedingly lame, I trooped off only to find a seat next to him again. Mortified though I was, I tried to talk to him but he seemed interested in something else and I let it go.

Coming back to Remnick, he described the phenomenon of Obama and how improbable it was. Though he stressed that race, that is being African American was a big part of Obama’s success, that was very specific to his own persona. He also explained that the fact of his race applied because of his specific persona, his diverse background and that advantage would not apply in case of most other African Americans. He rose from the position of state senator, a very insignificant position in American politics to the President because of his charisma, his persona and his circumstances. On Obama’s disappointment he explained that the main reason is the polarisation of American politics and how the Republicans wouldn’t let him do anything. He bashed the American Right of course and since I’d been watching the Daily Show for a while it was fun to see the liberal newsmedia in action. Man had charisma too, I had been very interested in American politics for a while, but he kept everyone enthralled, breaking everything down.

After some Papri Chat and Pushkar Chai in hot clay cups, I hung around at a session chaired by Barkha Dutt called Arab Spring: A Writer’s View which contained some writers from the Muslim world that is an Iranian woman, an Egyptian woman, a Palestinian man, an ‘expert’ American’ journalist and an Indian diplomat(presumably another expert)! First thing I noticed was Barkha Dutt is actually really good at her job, I had seen and saw subsequently badly moderated sessions but this one went off flawlessly. All the writers spoke about their experiences of the Arab Spring and their hopes for the future. Things looked bleak for the future in many of those countries and the conclusion seemed to be that the transition from dictatorship and democracy would not be seamless, it could be long and bloody, or it could certainly be delayed. Barkha Dutt kept pressing the women, saying that things are really getting worse for women after the regimes, be it Egypt or Libya, but the women only said that the situation was intolerable and though they don’t like the possible erosion of their rights, the old regime had to be changed. In the middle of this, I figured that there was a session with Pavan K Varma( a non-fiction writer I admire) and Gulzar and left for there. The next twenty minutes I was enthralled and watched both of them recite couplets in Urdu and English. Gulzar’s language is not very hard to understand( Urdu can get very grandiose and complicated) and even my limited Urdu vocabulary sufficed. Then they read out verses which Varma had written and Gulzar had translated. So, beautiful verses in English followed by even better verses in Urdu. Nice vivid imagery. Gulzar never changed the literal meaning but added something in translation that added a rhythm to them.

I stayed put after that because the man I’d come to see, Mohammed Hanif was next. He wrote one of my favourite books, The Case of Exploding Mangoes which was a thriller, satire set in Zia’s Pakistan which culminates with Zia’s assassination. I highly recommend that you read it. Anyway, Mohammed Hanif is brilliant, and very funny in real life. His self deprecating humour kept everyone in splits. His satire on Pakistani society and politics is laugh-out-loud and bitingly satirical at the same time. He writes in Punjabi, Urdu and English but writes his novels in English. He described how in Pakistan, he grew up with Punjabi as his mother tongue, but the funny thing about the education system in Pakistan is that he had to learn Urdu in school and not speak Punjabi and then later in life had to speak English and not Urdu. This multi lingual confusion certainly made him very good at all those languages( as l saw later also). I was happy now, a literary hero of mine more than measured up to my expectation, he was even funnier in real life than in his books! After asking a very stupid question, which I immediately regretted, I left, kind of content.

What I saw next did not leave me feeling as good. Brilliantly moderated by Siddarth Vardarajan( He’s now editor of the Hindu) was a session on Prison Diaries. Three people, Iftikhar Gilani, Anjum Zamarud Habib and Sahil Maqbool had been arrested for crimes they did not commit just because they were Kashmiri. Iftikhar Gilani we all know, was arrested after the Parliament attacks. Prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for a document that was publicly available, he spent many months in jail. All three described their experiences in prison that they’d written about and one wondered at the callousness of the Indian state which imprisoned them and so many other people. As Sahil pointed out, you know about us since we wrote our diaries but you don’t know any of the nameless, faceless people who have no one to speak for them. Iftikhar also made a plea to journalists. While he was in jail, he was regularly beaten up by jailors who read about his supposed ‘proved’ treachery in newspapers every day. These accounts had no sources and no truth to them. He pointed out that the common man takes what is written in a newspaper or on TV as the gospel truth, you have that power over people, please don’t misuse and abuse it.

Now, after a marathon first day, the last session. Jeet Thayil, well known poet had just released a book called Narcopolis which was about Bombay and drugs in the 70s and 80s. Ruchir Joshi, a journalist from Calcutta wrote a book called Poribartan about Mamata Bannerjee in Bengal. What followed was a surreal reading experience. The contrast between Jeet’s vivid, poetic, dark passages and Ruchir’s wry, anecdotal, funny accounts of the transition in Bengal was entertaining. They read one passage, each and I was drawn into the contrast. Then they read together, a certain passage and I’m pretty sure I was one of the first people in the room to figure out the passage’s content( having read the book in question). They were the offending passages in the Satanic Verses, read out with gay abandon. As soon as people started figuring out what it was, the clapping started. And it ended with a standing ovation. I later found out that Hari Kunzru and Amitav Kumar had done the same thing in the last session but they were stopped.

This laboriously written description cannot give you the sense of the place. A lot of people did not like the tamasha nature of the festival, the amount of people, the crowd from Delhi( especially Delhi University people, most of whom came to party) and many of them were regulars, nostalgic about its beginnings. However, for me, the people I met, the huge crowds that I navigated through, the Kachoris and Pushkar Chai, the conversations I overheard, the conversations that others overheard and joined, the stunning bookshop, the beautiful location, everything was part of what has been called the ‘greatest literary show on earth’. Sure, Rushdie didn’t come( and I very much wanted to see him) but so many other people did and I saw many of them speak. That’s what it was about, interesting people talking about literature and politics, often very subaltern rather than mainstream.( For example, many sessions on Bhakti poetry, poetry Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil , writing in Latin America, China, the Carribean, Africa). It is a place to discuss things which we don’t have a discourse about. Just go see the mind-boggling variety of sessions on offer in 2012. I’ll suggest if you ever have a chance, go. You’ll find something you like.

Strawberry Fields: A tribute

There is something about Strawberry Fields. Half of my euphoria about getting into law school stemmed from the fact that my college organized Strawberry Fields, India’s largest competition for bands, a three day festival where people would play rock music, live. I had never seen a concert where rock music was played, Allahabad wasn’t that kind of place.

Did it live up to my expectations? Yes, it has, without question. The four SF’s that I have seen have been my favourite times of the year they were held in. The music has ranged from terrible to great, but whatever is being played, when I’m standing on a field listening to the music coming from the amazing system, I feel inner happiness at the beauty of it all. My first year, I ran from the acad, where I was doing work for LeGala, to the field at least twenty times per day. The music at Strawberry Fields has always had a huge quantity of really bad metal. Even that has a bunch of fans who talk about how broootal the previous band was. But one can always find the good bands who entertain you with their awesomeness. Strawberry Fields is where I first learnt to appreciate metal, especially the more extreme forms of it. I listen to a few metal bands but they’re kind of progressive or alternative metal like Opeth or Baroness. Full on loud sonic assault metal is however, I think best appreciated live. The rush of headbanging and the enthusiasm of the crowd can make you appreciate the skill and virtuosity of the band that’s playing, and the music grows on you.

However, Strawberry Fields is not just about the music, it is about the sheer epicness of it all. On the days of the prelims, there is music from morning till night and you can chill right there, with a beer in your hand, while the bands keep coming. It feels almost as good as sitting on the beach with a beer. You can hang out with great people, you listen to fun music, you can get super happy if a great band plays, and later you can head bang as much as you want. You’ll eat a Nizam’s roll or a Hungry Hogs hot dog for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can sit in the field till late at night, talking and drinking. If you’ve been working at organizing all day, you can have the satisfaction of a job well done. My first memory of SF is walking towards the field and upon hearing a band play an Avial cover, ‘Nada, Nada’, running like hell to get there as soon as possible. It was glorious.

The prelude to the final day has always been the same. I go for the NLS open quiz, first thing in the morning, doing progressively better over the years but always just falling short of how well we wanted to do. And then, the field. The first band, almost invariably, not metal, plays at around 5:30-6:00 and the crowd is much better than previous days but it’s still relatively sparse. I always feel a little bad for the first band, they’re the only ones to play in daylight and to a relatively smaller crowd. Then, happiness. Because as soon as they start playing, the next 4-5 hours are pandemonium. Lights, lasers, smoke, loud ear shattering music, it feels a lot more intense than the previous two days. The lawschoolites are all in their enclosure but that is also very crowded. One sings along, screams, applauds, headbangs and by the end you’ve had a terrific time. Inebriation helps, of course but is not compulsory and it is the music which alters your consciousness to make you happy. The headliners which for me were Pentagram, Parikrama, Raghu Dixit and Rudra respectively always play a short but stunning set and when it ends, an emptiness sets in, because you know the next one’s twelve months away. I can ramble on and on, but the last SF just ended two days ago, and I miss it. Next year’s the last one, and whatever else happened in college, I’ll always miss these three days a lot.

A Day in Class

So this is the kind of stuff that passes for poetry in this blog. Anyway, boring class, the creative output of which is set out below.


I sit and stare, at a clock, while people around me,
make no sense when they talk.

The master of proceedings, the professor, leads a discussion superfluous,
time slows down, no one makes a fuss.

Some go on and on, loving the sound of their own voice,
if they only knew, half the class would shoot them if they had a choice.

Paying attention, the blessed note-takers,
sleeping in the back, the usual rule-breakers.

Someone’s doing the crossword, one is catching up on his reading,
others are staring at their watches, and silently pleading.

The bored student, staring at a pretty face,
gets caught in the act, hastily lowers his gaze.

Amidst the drudgery, something mildly amusing is heard,
there is desk banging in unison, though most didn’t even catch a word.

Someone is interrupted, from his daydreams and thoughts,
asked to answer a question, he doesn’t know squat.

People texting each other, and notes being passed,
messages delivered, in the way of the present, and the way of the past.

The process of attendance, was pretty much a farce,
for most of those marked present, are not in the class.

One of the blessed souls, who made the effort of staying behind,
was caught using his phone and very heavily fined.

‘No more’, he swore, ‘Hey Teacher, have some mercy’,
I made the effort of coming to class, please show me some courtesy.

His plea unheard, his voice marked with resonance,
he resolved in future, to deny the class his presence.

Another subplot, the students sitting so close,
giggling to each other while people behind them doze.

A person moves to the next seat, there begins a fight,
for a student sleeping comfortably, is now in the teacher’s line of sight.

Sit in front of me please, a cacophony of voices breaks out,
the teacher, interrupted from his reverie, wonders what this is all about.

The classroom is a place to chill, a place to unwind,
but we grow dull and despondent, if we’re there for too much time.

I yearn to be liberated, I yearn to be free,
I yearn to escape from this room so dreary.

A sigh of relief, someone’s rung the bell,
it’s time to escape, from the classroom from hell.

Pakistan, Dussehra and Ganganagar

I am currently in Ganganagar, a relatively small city in northern Rajasthan. Right now, since my dad is posted here, this is home. There is not much to see but I’m staying in a beautiful, green cantonment full of trees, gardens and other flora. The reason it is so green despite being in Rajasthan is because the Indira Gandhi canal runs through it and the army maintains it very well. Most of the area of the cantonment is in fact covered by a golf course. There aren’t many people. One has a greater chance of seeing wildlife like hares, nilgais( who despite the name are a form of deer) and other animals than people while taking a walk after 6:00 pm in the night. It is also idyllically lit up at night, ideal for night-time excursions where one can think in peace. There is a theatre inside the cantonment where movies can be seen for free and I have access to a reasonably decent library, so along with my laptop, I have things to help me pass the time. The city is like a regular small town in any part of the country and it has amazing street food and very cheap good places to eat. Since it is barely 10 km from the Punjab border, the culture is Rajasthani but with a strong Punjabi influence and has a very significant Sikh population also.

One of the many examples of horrendous spelling in Ganganagar

One fascinating thing in the city is the many billboards and road signs which are paragons of bad spelling. I also saw the burning of the effigies of Ravan, Kumbhkaran and Meghnad on Dussehra for the first time in my life. Out of interest I convinced my parents to take me there and it was a colourful and entertaining spectacle. People dressed up in costume actually shoot a burning arrow at the effigies which being full of firecrackers burn up, explode and fall in spectacular fashion.

Effigies to be burnt during Dussehra

The highlight of my visit though was going to see the Pakistan border at Fazilka. Like at the Wagah border in Amritsar there is a post there and both sides hold a ceremony called Beating the Retreat which concludes with the border guards pulling down their respective flags in synchronized fashion. It took us around an hour and a half to get there in our army gypsy and I was following our route on GPS and gleefully watched us inch closer and closer to Pakistan. Around 500 m before the actual post there is some very dense fencing which my dad told me is in many cases electrified. No regular vehicles are allowed beyond that point. We got off and had tea with the BSF officer in charge there. We got onto a BSF gypsy and arrived at the post. There were around 50 people on our side along with the BSF jawans and there were many more on the Pakistani side which according to the BSF officer was because it was a Friday. There were loud patriotic songs coming from the Pakistani side, so much that it overpowered the loudspeaker on our side, which at one point for some reason was playing, “Kajra Re”! The Pakistani Rangers in their salwars and the people must have been 200 odd metres away so we could see them pretty well.

Jawans from the BSF during the ceremony

The ceremony soon started with guards from both sides screaming louder and louder, marching in perfect synchronization, getting their legs higher and higher and making weird provocative gestures at each other like some oddly choreographed military dance. Things were quiet at first but soon there was clapping from the Pakistani side with shouts of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, ‘Jiye Jiye Pakistan’ and the occasional ‘Allah-u-Akbar’. The Indians were quiet for a while but then a lady in our crowd started chants of ‘ Hindustan Zindabad’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. The Indian side was hopelessly outnumbered though enthusiastic.

I and my parents though shouting along with the others were finding it really funny and all the chanting was more in fun than in any hostility towards the other side. Both officers on both sides stood up and saluted the parade of marching men. The whole thing went on for some 20 minutes and soon the bugle was being played and the flags went down synchronized to the inch. I thought the show was over, but there was one last subplot. The people from both sides were then allowed to come up to the thin barbed wire which marked the border with huge men on both sides standing in front of them to make sure nothing untoward occurs. Then it was odd, people were staring at each other like they were looking at aliens from another world, most would never meet anyone from the other country. I think one Pakistani started the waving, and soon there was waving and good natured staring very unlike the patriotic brouhaha that went on a few minutes ago. Though separated by a few miles, the appearance of the locals on both sides showed a marked contrast. Women were in a separate group there, wearing burkhas or covering their heads in lightly coloured chadars. And most of the men there were wearing salwars.

Pakistanis staring at us, and we at them

On the Indian side, most men were in jeans, the women were brightly dressed up and there was no obvious segregation. It was very obvious that this was relatively impoverished rural Punjab from the way ordinary Pakistanis looked to us while Fazilka is a prosperous district in a very prosperous state and it showed.

I had a lot of fun but I felt oddly philosophical after the whole experience. I’m known for my fascination with Pakistan and its culture and one day want to go there. As a child growing up in the Army my views were fairly atypical. We visited a beautiful war memorial from the ’71 war which was on the way. There you see the names of the dead, army men like my dad, who fought and died. The regular person’s anger is then directed at the enemy. For me, however the notion of a country, a stereotype of a people as an enemy is absurd and can only come when it has been drilled into you that a country is an enemy. Wars are huge impersonal things and Pakistan cannot be our enemy forever. One day we’ll be able to walk across the Wagah border with ease like this guy did. Till then, I can at least break stereotypes and blogs like this and this give me hope. The flow of information that has been facilitated by the Internet has given me a solution to a problem which I pondered as a child, how does a Pakistani child, the same age as mine believe the things he does, when it so obvious that we are right about everything. The answer is, no we aren’t right about everything, there is no black or white, there is always another side to what we believe. And once we all understand that, we won’t hate the ‘other’ as much.

Part of the war memorial where soldiers' ashes are kept

Finally, after all I had seen, the enduring image from the whole exercise was a bird, which kept hopping from one side of the border to another, back and forth almost as if to show the meaninglessness of the border for it.

Being Punjabi

A certain blog post gone viral , an open letter to a Delhi Boy, specifically a very Punjabi Delhi Boy had me thinking. I’m not from Delhi, never even lived there, but whenever I’ve stayed there for any length of time, the place feels excessively familiar. It’s the Naarth, and most people speak in a very familiar accent. There is a certain Punjabiness about the place, from the food(which is awesome) to the way people behave in traffic to the way people spend money, and also unfortunately the way people stare at women. This viral post (has a 1000+ comments right now) generalizes to a fault and has attracted vitriol from many defenders of the faith and rational commentators who point out that she well spews hatred and makes too much fun of Punjabis. The open letter is funny in places, and I agree with her about certain things, but gets a little nasty sometimes (the Gurpurab and partition references).

Reminded me however, that I am Punjabi. Specifically a Punjabi Brahmin. Almost seems like a contradiction, ‘cause Punjabis are supposed to be overtly masculine and Brahmins are well...not. Also, reminds me of the time I read in an old sociological study while researching for my project that Punjab is one of the few places that the Brahmin is not dominant, in fact rarely owns land and most are priests or petty shopkeepers. At least my ancestors were in no position to oppress anyone unlike some others( Hint: Tambrahms :) ). There are however, certain Punjabi stereotypes that don’t come off too well on me. As a friend pointed out, “You can’t be Punjabi.” “Why?” “ You well, READ!” I can be loud, I put lots of white butter on my pronthas, I relish rajma-chawal( and BUTTER CHICKEN) , am prone to breaking into bhangra in quad parties when a Punjabi song comes on, I can atleast understand the language, but I have committed the cardinal crime of being “intellactual”( said in a strong Punjabi accent). I was the toast of all my buas and masis and chachis for being the only child to be found reading in a corner when all others were busy playing something or the other. I can’t drink great quantities of alcohol without being affected, can’t play sports to save my life, and try not to lech at girls on the street. When I meet ‘REAL’ Punjabi cousins I don’t like it when they drive their cars having downed pegs of whiskey playing very loud music and driving very fast. (especially when those cousins are fifteen years old). I don’t think it is my right to control my sister’s and every other female cousin’s life because I am their big brother.

On the other hand, I love Punjabi weddings , with their sheer ostentatiousness and spirit of celebration with the whole extended family, and the bloody incredible food( and hopefully for me in the future, alcohol). I am obsessed with Pakistan, actually just Lahore, because my grandparents came across the border. I love it when they talk in Urdu sounding Hindi, or when my relatives from Gurdaspur( who never came from across the border) call a Minister a ‘wazir’ rather than a ‘mantri’. For that is my heritage, to all those who call Punjab’s culture agriculture, I would like to point out the stunning Punjabi poetry ( Bulleh Shah, Shiv Kumar Batalvi) which has come to me via Rabbi, and my mom, who explains them to me. Having learnt Hindustani classical music I appreciate things like the Patiala Gharana and the stunning Sufi Punjabi heritage which also comes to me via Pakistan. No way can I disregard Bhangra, which is awesome to dance to, and which has had awesome things done to it in ‘Caneda’ and ‘UK’ by overseas Punjabis. For after all, culture is not the exclusive preserve of the Bengalis. And only in Punjab do you have things like Gurudwaras which give away free meals as langar. I also remember the time in a train when Hindu pilgrims from Ludhiana going to Haridwar shared food with the entire bogie. And the language in the state is awesome, unlike Delhi where they just speak Hindi with a Punjabi accent.

I am Punjabi, and I’m not Sikh (though I have a few Sikh relatives). Why do I emphasize that? It’s pretty cool to be Sikh but I just am not, and I’m still Punjabi. We don’t wear Pugries and along with gurudwaras(everyone goes to Gurudwaras, the Golden temple is just incredible) go to temples too. We speak Punjabi, comprise 45% of the state’s population and exercise a pretty pervasive cultural influence(check Bollywood) but I still get the ‘how’re you Punjabi but not Sikh routine’.

Punjab to me was always Chandigarh. On moving to law school I saw the rest of it for the first time, and though there are certain things about it that I can’t stand, it is a pretty incredible place. Unlike the rest of the country, most people are not poor, people have a lot of money and love to spend it, and there’s a certain altitude to life which is fun. I may personally don’t feel that way because I’m too ‘intellactual’ for them and thus will always not be exactly like them. But there is a certain part of me that is, and I think that’s pretty great.