[Reader-list] Worries about war from afar

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all at Reader List

I am sitting right now in a city a few time zones away from Delhi, which was 
once devastated by war. Its factories, its roads and its houses were once made 
into cratered into nothingness by intensive aerial attack. Me and some of us 
from Sarai, inhabitants of this list, are installing a work in a far away 
exhibition replete with images of our city, Delhi, the city of Sarais, the city 
of Sarai. There are cyclists breaking through the winter fog on the ISBT 
bridge, there are the strange bleak landscapes of a city that postpones its 
existence on to a perennial tomorrow. Our work goes by a name that recalls the 
co ordinates of our city – 28.28 N/77.15 E – this is how you can find delhi on 
any map of the world. But a map, whether in a book , or in a bomber aircrafts 
navigational system is only a set of co ordinates, it says nothing about 
people, about lives, about houses, lived in, recently demolished by the 
municipal authorities or waiting to be bombed and flattened into a void. I am 
worried that the images in our work might be the last of a Delhi that is yet to 
know the reality of what war, and especially what a war of the cities is like.

Perhaps there is in me only the anxiety of great distance, an uncanny feeling 
of foreboding that makes me see and anticipate war engulf my city, everytime I 
switch on the TV in my antiseptic hotel room. Perhaps that makes my fears and 
my worries exaggerated and unrealistic. I would like you to be able to say to 
me, Shuddha, you are talking nonsense. Today I read in the website of a 
newspaper that I read each day in the morning in delhi that the Indian 
government had pulled out the war book. This is the set of guidelines that the 
state works on in a state of war. This is the document where the state lays 
down how to set out blackout procedures, how to put black paper on windows, how 
to hand out gas masks. But imagine the task of putting out a million fires. 
Imagine the horror of a moderately sized nuclear weapon just a little more 
powerful than Hiroshima, frozen suspended over the sky of Delhi, or Lahore, 
hanging in a nanosecond’s interval away from full impact. There is a voice in 
my head that says that there cannot be and will not be war, that even the most 
cussed fascist prime minister, and the worst adventurist general will think 
twice before sending us rushing into this madness, that there are American 
troops on both sides of the international border that divides the countries 
that have amassed a million men on the border in full battle preparedness. I 
hope this is the case. But honestly, for the first time in my memory I am 
really worried. And perhaps my worries are compounded by distance. For the 
first time in my memory Delhi is a city that is beginning to have a 
conversation with itself. Sometimes lackluster, sometimes heated, sometimes 
tepid, but we are talking, and we have things to think about in a way I don’t 
recall us having had in a long time. And I really worried that this tiny space 
in the imagination that we have laid claim to might disappear in a way that 
none of us are prepared to face the consequences of.

I am hoping that someday soon this list, the city it animates (dimly) and all 
of us can step back and say that all this talk of war between India and 
Pakistan was just alarmist nonsense, and that we can get on with life and talk 
about other things, other places, other times. Noticing, for instance, how 
brightly the glare of war has cast the killings in Gujarat into a dark shadow 
of amnesia. If war happens, the only thing that I hope we will learn is, not to 
forget so easily.

-- 
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI:The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054
India
Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040