चाँद

बिस्तर के एक कोने में ही सोता हूँ

मेरे कोने में

उकडूं हो कर

नए चाँद की तरह, काजू की तरह

तब भी, जब तुम पास में नहीं लेटी होती

चाभी 

एक घर, और चाभियाँ दो

एक तुम्हारी, एक मेरी

तुम घर में हो, या नहीं

मुझे कोई फ़रक नहीं पड़ता

मैं एक बार दरवाज़ा खोलने से पहले ज़रूर खटखटाता हूँ

की शायद तुम खोल दो

तुम घर में हो या नहीं

मुझे सच में कोई फ़रक नहीं पड़ता

चाय

अच्छा है की हमारे गैस के चूल्हे में दो बर्नर हैं

बावर्चीखाने में दो छोटे बर्तन

और दो ही छोटे कप हैं

तुम अपनी काली दार्जीलिंग चाय अलग बना सकती हो

और मैं अपनी दूध वाली मीठी चाय अलग

Four months of self-medication and as many incorrect diagnoses later, exasperated and scared, I finally reported at one of the government run DOTS centres. By then things had reached such a pass that the clinic attendant there, even before running any tests on my blood-tinged sputum, could readily diagnose my affliction: Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

I don’t remember much of the next four months, spent as they were in a drug-induced daze. The large doses of antibiotics took their due toll on my already flailing liver, lending a sepia tone to my ashen appearance. I was asked not to voluntarily reveal my condition to anyone lest I’m taken to be a carrier of some awful contagion. TB is not as infectious a disease as it is made out to be – I mean it is, but not quite if one is undergoing a medical treatment – but as Susan Sontag puts it; “any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.” What could be mysterious about a disease as cut and dry as this? A lot, TB being an affliction of the air.

TB is also known as consumption, a disease which, by and by, drains the body of its life-force – blood. Could it have been possible that – in my case – it wasn’t only a simple bacterial assault? Could it have been that some sort of a bala – pichhalpairi or jaljogini – had taken refuge in my body and was sucking my blood unremittingly? If yes, then did the WHO account for this compounding factor in its TB mitigation programme? Did the attendant at the dispensary see, under his microscope, traces of the supernatural?

Somebody did perhaps. My bhabhi, after offering her daily prayers, would come and whisper something over my head as if gently pleading with the balas to vacate my body. As gently as she’d remind me have my pills. My sister would come to my room and chat up the universe with me, carefully interspersing our conversation with the success rates of the DOTS programme worldwide. As much as I tried to keep away from them, my young nieces would barge into my room every now and then insisting that I play with them. Friends would supply me with reams and reams of photocopied study material to help me prepare for the annual exams. And somewhere in between I was kissed full on the mouth with reckless disregard for both the bacteria and the balas.

If the trademark indifference of the government health workers made me shudder, the healing ecosystem that people who loved me built around me inspired a lot of confidence. This ecosystem more than compensated for what Michel Foucault has called the Medical Gaze, wherein an affliction is seen as something separate from the identity of the patient, to be targeted dispassionately.

No wonder then that Iram Ghufran’s excellent film, “There Is Something In The Air” (TISITA) opens in a psychiatric clinic where the doctor can’t seem to understand what the patient is saying, or, is adamant that the patient speaks in an idiom that she understands.

Ms Ghufran, in this film, seems more interested in exploring the ecosystem of an illness than the illness itself, using frames as varied as dreams and desires.

From the clinic the narrative moves to a Sufi shrine in district Badayun of Uttar Pradesh; from the psychological to the demonological realm, supplanting the medical gaze with a poetic one. Eminent psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar says that “powerlessness is the social denominator of female hysteria – the cumulative trauma of Indian women”. And if ‘expression of desire’ makes for a significant part of ‘power’ could it not be inferred that ‘repression of desire’ is also the social denominator of female hysteria?

But Ms Ghufran doesn’t connect the dots herself. It’s not so much of an argument that she’s constructing here. She’s setting up an experience. The fictive elements of the film are appropriately oblique and the testimonies of her subjects as inscrutable as their afflictions.

It is said all patients slowly become storytellers, by narrating, over and over again, details of their afflictions to friends, shrinks and pretty much everyone who’s willing to listen. Ms Ghufran captures some of these stories, and sutures over them sequences comprising of swaying gaunt frames, faces with owl-like expressions, fettered hands and feet, constructing a metanarrative of sorts. But then she also goes ahead to break it with a damning testimony. The disembodied voice claims that only a fraction of petitioners at the shrine are genuine – Jaayaz pareshaani waale. Rest are fraud – daadhi ke peeche shikaar karne waale.

“Don’t roam around with your hair open or a djinn will catch you”, or some variant thereof, is something we’ve all grown up hearing. What better way then there is to subvert the structures of power if not by claiming that one’s indeed been afflicted by a hawaai marz and that one will not tie her hair down? “In case of a sinful man” a pir tells Mr Kakar “it happens that the djinn escapes by hiding in the organs of elimination, which are impure and can’t be reached by the angels”. Is it then just a coincidence that the places demarcated for defecation – bucolic farmlands or khet – also double up as spaces long reserved, in our folklore and even otherwise, for amorous trysts? I accept that it’s a crude illustration, but this is the only one I could think of.

I think it’s TISITA’s nebulous makeup that made me revisit my days in the kingdom of the ill. I could discern patterns between my illness and of those who I heard/saw on the screen. I thought of the time when I was afraid that I’d be isolated because of my condition, I thought of the notion of ‘passion’ associated with both the afflictions, I thought of love and that nervous yet lingering kiss.

I also thought of how demons are perhaps easier to deal with than doctors.

The Death of Multiculturalism

It was in 1999 that East is East came out. From then until now a lot has changed. At different points in the last two years Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and – very recently – David Cameron have announced and appropriately mourned the death of multiculturalism in Europe. The emergence of the political and the religious right on the back of the recent economic meltdown has stress-tested the entire continent which used to take immense pride in its liberal ethos. Add to that the bright and resilient Arab Spring, which continues to demonstrate to the west that Islam and democracy can coexist, forcing even the United States to reconsider its foreign policy in the Middle-East. And finally, the nebulous state that, our neighbour, Pakistan is finding itself in.

In the light of all these developments I was hoping that West is West, being a rather belated sequel, will at least take in its stride some of the more contemporary matters. Our last rendezvous with George Khan & Family was set, I think, in 1971. The story of West is West is set in 1976. So according to the logic of the film there’s just no way George Khan can foresee and therefore become a part of  the world in which his youngest son Sajid will spend a significant part of his adult life. Though it’s purely a personal quibble and a lot of people will indeed find it irrelevant, I believe it’s one of the bigger problems the film suffers from. I’ll come back to this point later, though.

White Man’s Burden

Sajid, George Khan’s young boy hates school. Boys chase him around the school staircases and corridors and after catching him routinely flush his head in a toilet commode. Their headmaster, a rotund and balding Englishman, is something of a Relic of the Raj. He insists on speaking in Urdu to, both, George and Sajid and is roundly amused to hear Sajid proclaim that he’s a Brit and not a Pakistani. Unconvinced, he anyway goes ahead and gives Sajid a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’ and goes on to recite an oft-repeated passage from the book: “Who hold Zam Zammah, that fire-breathing dragon, hold the Punjab”!

Young Sajid, of course, gets none of this “phantom twitchings of an amputated limb” nonsense and squarely blames his father for all his miseries – of being a Paki, of having to “synthesise disparate elements: the pub, the mosque, two or three languages, rock ‘n’ roll, Indian films”, of having to read ‘Kim’ with ‘The Beano’.

Imaginary Homelands

He’s lost almost all his children to Britain and he’s not ready to lose this one. George decides to take Sajid back to Pakistan, where he hopes he’ll be able to help him discover a sense of belonging. This journey to reclaim his past however doesn’t conclude in the way George expected it to. He perhaps didn’t realise “how much disappointment and unhappiness might be involved in going ‘home’ only to see the extent to which you have been formed by England and the depth of attachment you feel to the place, despite everything”. George Khan goes looking for Jahangir Khan, little realising they’re one and the same person, just separated in time.

Fish ‘n’ Chips & Kebabs

A better part of West is West’s appeal lies in its characters and the situations they find themselves in, stereotypical and silly as they are respectively. These things have, more or less, become genre characteristics of British-Asian Comedies. Something, though, must be said of the overhanging sense of nostalgia that mars the film throughout and a conspicuous lack of spontaneity that East is East had in a good measure. It just looks anachronistic and tired.
What Next – West is East or East is West?

My personal disappointment with the film stems from a combination of reasons I’ve discussed above. The migrant experience has gone through hell lot of a change in the last decade. A change whose chroniclers are not so much the likes of Salman Rushdie & Hanif Kurieshi (the two writers I’ve referenced here) but a young brigade that comprises of talents like HM Naqvi, Mohsin Hamid, and Daniyal Mueenuddin. You can’t talk about the sub continental migrant figure outside of the new socio-political context that he finds himself in post 9/11 (I half expected George to suffer ignominy at the hands of security/customs personnel at the airport and was mildly disappointed when nothing really happened).

British-Asian Comedies and Dramas – including their Bollywood derivatives like
Dan Dana Dan Goal and Patiala House – will have to explore new territories now. A sepia-tinted East is East or West is West is ok once in a while, since enough of such films have been made. What we need more of are films like Four Lions and Tere Bin Laden.

Pulitzer prize winning writer/doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee on his his book “The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”

Historian / Performer / Filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui on his book “Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857″ and a lot more

The idea that the guardian should need a guard throws up an interesting image – of two parallel mirrors in a washroom creating an infinite regress:

That Anna Hazare’s demands threaten to undermine democracy is a subject matter of another post but a few examples should be enough for now to sort of highlight the points I’m trying to raise: One, General Parvez Musharraf (or President Parvez Musharraf?) fired Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftakar Muhammad Choudhary “after receiving numerous complaints and serious allegations for misconduct, misuse of authority and actions prejudicial to the dignity of office of the chief justice of Pakistan”. Is that the kind of system we’re looking at – unelected groups and individuals calling the shots? End surely can’t justify the means. Two, Anna Hazare has been quite dismissive of the Indian voter all along saying that a vote here could be bought for a money or in lieu of liquor or a saree. Does he not know the Indian voter is one of the smartest around? Has the Indian voter not proved her political acumen time and again? She doesn’t need a watchman to tell her what to vote for and who to vote for.

But what he and his supporters need to answer right now is; who watches the watchmen? The media for one aren’t doing their job, dubbed often as the watchmen of the state. They’ve chosen to play the parallel mirror. They have a saying for this where I come from: ‘paad mein seeti milaana’ (to whistle along while someone farts). Save for a few in the print media the rest have jumped the bandwagon and have not tried to either critique or raise  questions and get a more inclusive discussion going.

Source: Reuters

After all who’s is Anna Hazare and how has he appointed himself as my representative? Have I elected either of the Bhushans? If Anna Hazare is saying something new or radical then why, on the other hand, a majority of his supporters been ridiculing people like Arundhati Roy who’ve been saying the same things for the longest time- and a lot more? Why force-feed Irom Sharmila and not Anna Hazare? Why is he praising the chief minister of a state which has failed to appoint a Lokayukta for six straight years? Why go after corruption – why not rampant casteism or the Indian state’s exclusionary policies? Why paint the entire political class in one hue and not talk about corruption in India Inc? Why not check the credentials of the man himself – didn’t he apologise for spending around Rs 2 lakh from his Hind Swaraj Fund on his birthday? Aren’t people flogged when found drunk in his ‘model village’? These and a lot of questions need to debated openly.

Why is it being labeled a movement – every movement has a theory, what’s the theory here? English speaking gentry will have to realise that they’re only being cool when they write ‘my’ as ‘ma’ and not asserting their politics like their African-American peers. Movements can’t be copy-pasted or downloaded.

If somebody were to go through Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works she’d realise that the man did a lot of thinking before plunging into action. You can’t copy Mahatma Gandhi’s methods and let go of the ideas that often gave his practices a context. Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha involves summoning extraordinary moral force. Satyagraha can’t be coercive in nature. Mahatma Gandhi didn’t coerce anyone into doing anything. This, much in vogue, idea of Satyagraha is as perverted as the idea of Jihad where people refuse to look inwards and project all the problems on the world outside. Have we stopped asking for or offering dowry just because there exists a law against it? Yes, we don’t set our wives and daughter-in-laws on fire anymore, we just make sure that they jump off to their deaths from our tall buildings. And how does one make any sense of this:

And even if it’s a movement how representative it is? if we’re celebrating how online social networking has played a huge role in catalysing this ‘movement’ then just have a look at how many people in this country have access to the internet – less than 10%. While you look at this chart you’ll also perhaps appreciate that this country, by and large, has space for expression of dissent as opposed to so many others on this chart. Fruits of democracy.

Source:  The Economist

But like the stock exchange – where less than 5% of Indians trade – becomes an indicator of the health of the national economy a vocal and loaded minority comes to represent the whole of the country. Images and ideas reflected back and forth between sets of mirrors, especially if they’re mounted on idiot boxes, do seem to give an impression of BIG, IMPORTANT and that YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US. But, the question remains: who watches the watchmen? Another set of watchmen?

Prof Gyan Prakash on his new book “Mumbai Fables”

One of the busiest parts of the Jaipur Literature Festival was a small bookshop. The visitors found it very convenient to find their favourite books and authors all at one place — they could get them signed right there and then. But imagine coming to this festival in 2020. Do you see writers putting their unique digital signatures on e-Books? Who knows?

In an age where one could see authors taking a lot of initiative to promote their works, the onus to take the game to the next level now rests with the industry.

Anil Anathaswamy, Consulting Editor, New Scientist, London, responds here to questions on his book “The Edge of Physics“;  his journeys that took him to some of the most hostile parts of the world to experience first-hand some of the biggest and most exciting science experiments; and his take on spending huge amounts of money on science research and making science  accessible to the public.