[Reader-list] All you who do not sleep tonight...

Mon Nov 19 01:48:16 IST 2007

Hi all.
Let me acknowledge that I don't know about Munawar Rana's poetry, but I 
think that the poets today are generally Eliotic Hollow Men.
I just wanted to comment on the lines you quoted, even though I know that I 
don't know the context to these lines.
To speak nothing but truth in the court (better equivalent of "darbaar") of 
lies, is akin to speak nothing but French where only English is understood. 
As long as you go by the rules of the bourgeois form of parliament, telling 
lies/truths (it varies with divergent perspectives) matters nothing. Stop 
talking in the court, stop being the poet of the elite, become people's 
poet, I am sure your wish will be granted. The poet then will be certainly 
prosecuted or persecuted. The prime suspect of the latest high profile 
killing in Jhar Khand is a poet. In Andhra, too, the government is 
mercilessly after Maoist activist poets.
The poets otherwise are very willingly ready to be moved by the market 
forces. "Tum din ko agar raat kaho, raat kahenge." Somebody said in 
Sanskrit, and interestingly it seems such an appropriate critique of post 
modern? poets.
"Ushtranam vivaheshu, geetam gayanti gardabhaah,
Parasparam prashasanti. aho shabdah aho dhvanih."
(In the weddings of camels    , asses sing songs; praising each other's 
performance, "what lyrics, what sound!)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "inder salim" <indersalim at gmail.com>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 2:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] All you who do not sleep tonight...

> dear Shuddha
>
> Mein joot kay darbar mein saach bolta hoon
> hairat hai ki sar maira kalam keun nahien hota.
>
> ( in the parliament of lies i speak nothing but the truth, and it
> surprieses me if i am not beheaded )
>
> At the moment, It just happens that Munawar Rana is at the back of  my
> head. I am quite lucky to hear his great Urdu poetry both recited live
> and recorded on Urdu Channel. He is certainly a peoples poet.
>
> I guess, this poet only dreams but never sleeps.
> in one way, he ( Munawar Rana ) regrets the fact that we are quite
> incapable to speak the truth. Hazarat Sufi Sarmad Shaeed was beheaded
> by the King Aurangzeb for daring to speak the truth in the kingdom of
> lies. The poet wants to be the hero, but has perhaps lost the
> language. So paradoxically, we lost the poet and the organ which
> speaks truth. This is a question i ask myself?
>
> This may be he dilemma of the language only, but most often the prime
> symbols of our society dont dare to speak the speak the simple truth
> even, which is a real tragedy of our tiems. It is a collective loss. .
>
> this is late night, distancing sleep from  my eyes,  but i know sooner
> or later i too will feel sleepy, i fear none but myself.
>
> thanks for the piongnant mail
> is.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 16, 2007 11:06 PM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote:
>> Dear all, (apologies for cross posting on Kafila.org)
>>
>> Sometimes I wonder whether, when I use the phrase 'rentier cultural
>> apparatchiki' it actually describes faces, real people, or is it just an
>> abstract category, that one deploys in anger and sadness.
>>
>> Well, em, here are some faces, some names - people we meet, say hello
>> to, read the books of, see the art of, watch the films of...
>>
>> As the weather turns in Delhi, we will meet them more often, there will
>> be soirees, readings, screenings, exhibition openings, so much fun in
>> the winter whirlwind, and they will turn up - two by two, or one by one,
>> and in the silence between us will hang the heavy weight of the name of
>> a place called Nandigram.
>>
>> Read these names, read them carefully -
>>
>> Irfan Habib, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, Shireen Moosvi, Jayati
>> Ghosh, Indira Chandrasekhar, Rajen Prasad, Arjun Dev, D.N. Jha, Vivan
>> Sundaram, M.K. Raina, C.P. Chandrasekhar, and Saeed Mirza.
>>
>> Please read, also below, their exemplary contribution - to our
>> understanding of the unfolding situation in West Bengal
>> in the Hindu yesterday -
>> http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/15/stories/2007111561391600.htm
>>
>> Notice - how they nod their heads sagely between the words -
>>
>>   ' "complete sympathy" for peasantry *anywhere* fighting forcible
>> dispossession by or on behalf of corporate interests'
>>
>> Except of course, in West Bengal. West Bengal is not *anywhere*. It is
>> the citadel. And so when they express their complete sympathy with
>> fighting peasants - *anywhere*. They are actually completely consistent.
>> West Bengal is not *anywhere*. There is no soil, no rivers, no fish, no
>> rice, no nothing,  there are no people in West Bengal. There are a few
>> acres of land, which has come unhinged from a settlement that was
>> thought to be permanent, and these gentlemen and ladies are busy gluing
>> the permanent settlement back, more securely, with all the adhesive that
>> they can secrete together.
>>
>> Their verdict - can be read to mean - "Agitation warranted if any storm
>> happens in any teacup anywhere, but agitation unwarranted if villages
>> are pillaged and burnt in West Bengal".
>>
>> But villages can be pillaged, indeed must be pillaged, because these
>> villages are not *anywhere*. They are in West Bengal. And there are no
>> people in West Bengal. Just as a notice for the acquisition of land is
>> not a land acquisition notice, when it gets posted in a West Bengal
>> Panchayat office, so too, there may be voters and cadres, but there are
>> no people in West Bengal. And those who are not voters and cadres are
>> non-persons anyway. They (the non-people) have been dissolved, and the
>> party will think of how to reconstitute a new people, so that their
>> consent can be ascertained for the building of a chemical hub. New
>> improved people in new improved West Bengal, how could that be
>> *anywhere*?  It never existed, it never will. It won't be *anywhere*.
>> How could we get such a simple equation wrong? How can we not understand?
>>
>> A rentier is someone who lives off the investments they have made in a
>> piece of property. These worthy eminences invested the substance of
>> their lives, and their intelligences, - in the party, or should I say
>> the corporation, that they hold dearer than all the words they have ever
>> written, and all the pictures they have ever made.
>>
>> The party-corporation has now called a shareholders meeting, and
>> promised higher dividends, in radical prestige, in social capital, in
>> whispering distance to power, in the ability to make a phone call and
>> get things done, and the shareholders have closed ranks, made sure that
>> their investments are  secure. They have issued a promotors notice to
>> the market. Their investments are secure. The party is safe. Normalcy
>> has returned. This is not *anywhere*. This is West Bengal. The people
>> who are not yet the people, or who may once have been the people, have
>> spoken. its just that it is a bit difficult to hear them speak. Or maybe
>> it is just me that is hard of hearing.
>>
>> Anyhow, I hope that each one of these 'activists', (for that is how the
>> newspaper report below describes them) these worthy gentlemen and
>> ladies,  have bought an adequate supply of sleeping pills tonight.
>>
>> Because, as I know some of them, and as they are, at the end of the day,
>> ordinary, way too ordinary, men and women, with headaches, joint pains
>> and bad hair days ike the rest of us, they might have some trouble
>> sleeping tonight.
>>
>> There is after all, that prickly and inconvenient human faculty-thing
>> called a conscience, and that strange piece of connected human tissue
>> called a spine, or back-bone, which sometimes makes the softest beds a
>> torture if you twist it or bend it too often.  Am I being presumptuous
>> in thinking that they are troubled by their consciences and their 
>> backbones.
>>
>> Or did they lose both, conscience and back bone,on the way back from the
>> last meeting of the corporation-party. There is a species that in the
>> course of evolution decided to do away with the inconvenience of the
>> back-bone. As far as I know it is not trobuled over much by a conscience
>> either. In Biology, they are called 'Sarisreep' - Phylum Reptilia.
>>
>>  From the sidelines, it is interesting and instructive to watch the
>> shareholders of the corporation-party evolve into a wonderful new
>> life-form that exhibits so many anatomical similarities to the Phylum
>> Reptilia.
>>
>> Good luck to them, I hope they use their waking and sleepless hours to
>> think about the distances that they have travelled, or should I say
>> crawled, each one of them.
>>
>> best
>>
>> Shuddha
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------
>> Agitation unwarranted, say activists
>> The Hindu, November 15, 2007
>>
>> Special Correspondent
>>
>> NEW DELHI: Academics and artistes on Wednesday described as "totally
>> unwarranted" the agitation in the Nandigram area of West Bengal after
>> the Left Front government's repeated announcements that no chemical hub
>> would be established there.
>>
>> In a statement, they also said the protests being organised against the
>> return of Communist Party of India (Marxist) sympathisers to the area
>> are "as unjustified as they are unhelpful" for the restoration of 
>> normality.
>> Sympathy with peasantry
>>
>> Expressing "complete sympathy" with peasantry engaged anywhere in
>> struggles against forcible dispossession by or on behalf of corporate
>> interests, they said the continuation of the agitation in Nandigram was
>> a "means of making the region out of bounds for CPI(M) sympathisers."
>> Return of refugees
>>
>> Also, according to them, it was a means of preventing the return of
>> refugees driven out of their homes and into refugee camps since January,
>> of keeping out the administrative personnel of the State, and of
>> establishing the unchallenged writ of a coterie over the entire area;
>> all of which violated basic human rights and constituted a blatantly
>> anti-democratic act reminiscent of what happened at Kespur in West
>> Medinipur district a few years earlier.
>>
>> The signatories said no voices of protest other than from the Left Front
>> were raised against the "flagrant denial of basic rights" to thousands
>> of people whose only fault was that they supported the Left Front.
>>
>> "In the absence of intervention by the State machinery and civil society
>> organisations, and of unwillingness for a political dialogue by the
>> Opposition Trinamool Congress, is it surprising that the displaced
>> CPI(M) sympathisers made their own moves to return to their homes?"
>> Displacement
>>
>> The real need of the hour is to ensure that this return does not give
>> rise to a further round of displacement — "this time for the opponents
>> of the Left Front, and that peace and normality returns to Nandigram at
>> the earliest."
>>
>> The signatories include Irfan Habib, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik,
>> Shireen Moosvi, Jayati Ghosh, Indira Chandrasekhar, Rajen Prasad, Arjun
>> Dev, D.N. Jha, Vivan Sundaram, M.K. Raina, C.P. Chandrasekhar, and Saeed
>> Mirza.
>>
>>
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>
>
> -- 
>
> http://indersalim.livejournal.com
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