[Reader-list] TIME GALLOP (Jamia Shootings)

[shakeb ahmed]

THE TIME GALLOP
I am hanging at the margins. To make sense of it all together, to breathe still, I serialize my suffering…I survive another day! My things fall apart, my known world coming unstuck, swimming up, levitates for a while then blows itself into a shattering brilliance, unexplained it gives in to a deafening silence at last! 
And the detritus rains down against a dark black background blanketing everything I knew from before. 
Thrown back into the past I think about the human family, the helpless, the accused and the banished. There is a cyclical whip cracking all around. There are disappearances; with careful pointing of fingers they become detentions slowly making themselves visible to the unconcerned. There is a flood of skullcaps and inconsequential quartered dwellings of naked unmortared bricks renting out of the news medium that pervades, punishes, and percolates with unabated cold intensity. Tongues cleave! There are braves who sit up taking us in arms, the fallen wretched …but time gallops and threatens an untimely defeat. I have faith in my friends but what if they fail to see my slow rot inside, my advancing loss of faith in myself. In my acute paralysis my friends support me and what shame would engulf me if they know they are defending a corpse. May these be just words and nothing else my distress takes a temporary refuge in! May I not loose the strength that
 came as manna when my devils rounded me up and I was forced into an excruciating cleansing after all the fear, cursing, caged loneliness, and show of solidarity. I pray within my lonely special-cell: let me win my vanished esteem while the time gallops…. let me win it for my friends.

September 24th 2008
Sixth day since Jamia shootings.

In the last few days peaking with young men from the area I cannot help but realize how deep their spirits have plummeted. Today officially The University of Jamia came around to declare to its students in an almost epic gathering that it would lend its help to them as a “guardian” (Vice Chancellor Prof. Mushir’s words). Local sentiment here often tends to get enmeshed in the helplessness a particular religious community …but the hope is making its presence felt stronger because many from outside this preponderant religious identity are coming around for help and moral support in increasing numbers; many from outside these neighborhoods point to a case for violation of civil liberties here, and are very eager to help on the legal and other intervention fronts. 
Lets pick up a picture we all as citizens of a nation state, or simply put a People, desire so strongly to behold once again: If we want a more healthy state, a more civil a society where irrespective of the mind boggling kaleidoscope of identities constituting the same, a more fair and equitable breathing space for everybody is most in want, we should be very vigilant each one of us about the civil liberties our constitution makes place for; and indefatigably we have to set new landmarks to rejuvenate or even refigure the landscape of our felt State (of togetherness!). Today after the Vice Chancellors address, many a students at Jamia feel uplifted a bit - and god knows if he realizes what a responsibility it translates into. Many a locals are coming around to the idea that maybe the university is not that divorced from the larger geographical locality around …of which it can be the most important philosophic organ!