A martyr and a forever student

Two days after Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hung, another glorious martyr gave his life for India. Most of us have forgotten him and if we do hold on to the memory of his name, it is through a few colleges and an award for journalists. His values and his remarkable courage have faded from our minds.

Ganesh Shankar ‘Vidyarthi’ was just 40 years old when, on March 25th, 1931, he was killed while trying to rescue people during a communal riot. Mahatma Gandhi had described it as a “shaandar” (glorious) death, one he envied. In this respect, he was not a man who followed in Gandhi’s footsteps. He was the man who showed Gandhi the way.

Read the full article here: https://www.dailyo.in/variety/ganesh-shankar-vidyarthi-journalist-died-fighting-riot-allahabad-adityanath-communal-violence/story/1/23138.html

A rough road to development

There's a conversation I often play back in my head. I keep wishing I could back in time and argue properly.

I had gone to an area where there was some conflict between business interests and the interests of local residents, who felt that the factory was not to their advantage. So I went to discuss their concerns with one of the managers and he sort of snapped at me. He asked, “What is development?”

Without waiting for an answer, he declared, “Development means, a man has food, and a hundred, five hundred rupees in his pocket, right?”

He patted the front pocket on his shirt as he said this, and I was so puzzled that I could not come up with an adequate response. It was only later that I started to be shocked at the poverty of this gentleman's imagination, the narrowness of his vision.

What he was actually saying was this: villagers would (perhaps) get jobs at the factory and therefore they ought not resist factories/ big businesses; they had no right to expect more from a changing nation than their continued survival.

I bet this same gent would have a totally different view of “development” for himself. He already takes for granted his food, clean and plentiful water, a few hundred rupees in his pocket, a home to shelter in, gas, education, healthcare and comfortable transport. For his own class, “development” would imply access to high quality higher education, preferably subsidised by the state, state-of-the-art medical facilities, organic chemical-free food, perhaps free museums of art and generously proportioned libraries.

He knew that the basics are not available to most villagers. If I'd prodded him, he'd have shrugged and said: “Well, that is the state's responsibility.” Or, he may have added: “But we are doing something about that; we set up a school and dispensary.”

He would have side-stepped the question of how the factory implies “development” if they suffer water, air, ground pollution, and the fact that they would be at the mercy of a private firm for health and education access.

If this is all “development” means – food on your plate, money for clothes and other essentials – then development can just as easily be attained through farming practices that have been in place for a thousand years. After all, ancient Indians did eat a wide variety of foods. They did have clothes and some coins in their pockets.

The question is: how have we “developed” over the last thousand years? In a nation where millions are hungry or have no resident doctor within a two kilometer radius, what is the meaning of cement and steel factories, of petroleum and cars? What is the meaning of electricity and anesthesia?

The answer to that is: we have developed erratically, unequally, unjustly. There is no doubt that electricity and anesthesia are vital developments. There's no denying that the poorest people also want roads and buses. The dispute is about what development costs us, individually and collectively, and who pays the price through natural resources and taxes, direct and indirect.

This word “development” is used arbitrarily because it gets a lot done. It wins elections. It describes aspiration. It helps suppress crimes against rural and forest-dwelling communities. It flattens out all arguments in favour of ecological preservation. It twists our public discourse away from other important words such as “rights” and “health” and “freedoms”.

If I could meet that gentleman again, I'd say that development has multiple meanings but none of those meanings involve throwing rural or forest dwelling people under a road-roller whilst pocketing a fat profit.

First published here: http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/motoring/a-rough-road-to-development/article23301709.ece

On Kedarnath Singh

I have a favourite poem. Not necessarily a favourite poet, but a single short poem that demands that I hold on to it, remember it, like a talisman of sorts. The poem is Kedarnath Singh’s “Aana Jab Samay Mile”.

I found the poem at a juncture when my link with Hindi literature had all but snapped. Growing up, the Hindi poems prescribed by the school syllabus intimidated and bewildered me. I experienced those poems as if they were remote, supercilious, unforgiving teachers, and as soon as I could, I distanced myself from them. I went back to reading exclusively in English. But a few years out of college, I met friends who were reading across a swathe of poets, ranging from Kedarnath Singh and Kunwar Narain to Gorakh Pandey and Paash. It was as if I’d needed my eyesight corrected all these years and now somebody had taken me to the optician.

It is difficult to describe the experience of finding a poet who speaks to you intimately, whose words reach inside you, drops pebbles into the lake of your mind, casually strolls through your bloodstream. I borrow the latter image from the poem “Surya” from Zameen Pak Rahi Hai(listen to the poet’s recitation), where he describes the sun as the only thing his people can trust.

Kedarnath Singh has had an immediate, deep impact on me. Many of his contemporaries are among my favourites, but Singh’s work has a quality of stillness infused with drama that resonates with my own sensibility. Emotion plays out with a seemingly artless restraint.

Consider the favourite poem mentioned above, where the poet addresses a beloved, asking her to show up in all circumstances: whether or not she has time to spare, to show up like fire in a stove, or like a thorn on the branch of a thorny tree, like a storm, like a Tuesday. Each image stands strong, distinct, and the poet sews the whole up into a poem filled with an ancient, eternal distillate: a human being devoted to love, waiting.

Singh is able to maintain a near-conversational tone in many of his poems, which makes it seem like he is, in fact, addressing you directly. He turns a warm gaze upon his country, his people, the objects in their lives, nature. However, he does not shy away from the role of the poet as public critic. Another of my favourites is “A Two-minute Silence”, where he uses a standard expression of shared grief upon hearing of someone’s death to unpack the little sadnesses that go unmourned, and follows it up with the great sadness that none of us dares to mourn:

'...for this great century
for every great idea
of this great century 
for its great words
and great intentions
a two-minute silence...'

[— Translated by Alok Bhalla]

He sometimes approaches the page with a certain whimsy that suggests he is not taking his craft, or indeed, his subject matter very seriously, and yet, by the time the reader has finished reading the poem, the tongue is covered with the thick residue of loss. This is most obvious in poems where Singh uses the writing of poetry itself as a device.

In “Ek Prem Kavita ko Padhkar” (the poet’s recitation), he writes about looking out for ducks in the third line, because that’s where they ought to have been. A woman does not appear until the twelfth line, and he writes her in, and then he cleverly shifts the location of the woman in the poem, along with the reader’s mood.

I had a chance to watch Kedarnath Singh read at an event once. It was a gathering of Hindi poets and critics and I was struck by the cheerful informality in the room. The stage was filled with literary luminaries who appeared to be unafraid of critique or jokes at each other’s expense. Singh remained unfazed by a joke about his numerous awards and the ease with which he gathered them, went up to the microphone, and in a even, low voice, began to read. The calm dignity that came off his person also inhabits his work.

He continues to occupy the quieter corners of my mind. His is a body of work filled with broken down trucks, ducks, potatoes, cranes, abandoned shoes, mothers afraid of abandonment, and books that rebel against cupboards demanding to be set free so they may return to the bamboo forest, to the sting of the scorpion and the kiss of the serpent. It is a body of work imbued with the love of everything in the world.

This article was first published in Scroll. Link here:

https://scroll.in/article/872685/reading-the-poetry-of-kedarnath-singh-1934-2018-is-to-be-reminded-of-his-love-for-everything

Something Approaching Home

I'd been told the village I was headed to would be twenty-five or thirty kilometers from the kasbah where my family home was. I could take a bus, they said. Well, two buses. Or a series of auto-rickshaws.

It didn't sound so bad. What was thirty kilometers? I had forgotten though; thirty kilometers in metropolitan cities is a whole different kettle of fish. Mumbai's local trains maybe akin to a tin of sardines but I don't have to be in the tin for longer than an hour. On rural Uttar Pradesh roads, it's like having fish pressed into a series of tins over the course of two-and-a-half or three hours, and being shaken violently all the while.

The auto-rickshaws I found were modified vehicles. They are smaller than tempos, which seat eight or twelve people, but slightly longer than the three-wheelers in metros, and not much wider. The passenger seat can properly seat only three, but four adults are squeezed in. The driver's seat is replaced by a long seat. Here too, four adults sit, including the driver. Behind the front seat is affixed another narrow seat. Here perch another four passengers, facing the four who occupy the, well, the seat that's originally meant to be the passenger seat.

Behind the passengers' seat, there is a narrow space where two tiny seats are affixed, facing each other. Two adults sit there. Two more passengers are taken on and they sit on the strip of metal that serves as the body of the vehicle at the back, which is open to the elements.

That makes for sixteen adult passengers, every one of them more patient and in better humour than me. I'd begun to crib as soon as four passengers were found, telling the driver to get moving. He politely ignored me until he had all sixteen wedged in tight.

There is an equally tight budgeting system for local auto-rickshaw drives, and equally narrow profits. I paid just twenty rupees for the longest stretch of my journey. Most others paid ten, or five. There was one passenger who got on and off mid-way, travelling a distance of two or three kilometers. She paid only two rupees. Or tried to. The driver cursed and humiliated her - “You think you can get into a vehicle for two rupees?” - and made her fork over another rupee. She parted with it reluctantly.

It has been years since I last saw someone haggle whilst trying to hold onto her dignity for a rupee. In Delhi and Mumbai, both passenger and the cab or auto driver routinely shrug off a few rupees for the lack of change. No wonder, I thought, people move to Delhi or Lucknow or Mumbai. This, the heartland, the homeland, squeezes you too hard.

The elderly woman on my right laughed and bantered a lot though, and kept trying to strike up a conversation. I kept saying, apologetically, that I didn't understand. She spoke a Bhojpuri so far removed from Hindi that it may as well have been Bangla or Marathi. She asked where I was from. I caught the word “ghar”, home, and understood. I said, my family belongs to these parts, actually.

The elderly woman gave me a sideways stare. After a while, she resumed her one-sided conversation in Bhojpuri. I gathered that she was trying to tell me the names of the crops standing in the fields on either side. I told her, I know a mustard field when I see one. She let out a small laugh that suggested she didn't think I knew anything at all.

First published in The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/motoring/something-approaching-home/article22946065.ece