Musings on the Dark side of Urbanity

Sepia Mutiny and Kush both recommended reading Amitav Ghosh's essay on the 1984 riots against the Sikhs.

Below are the excerpts that touched me the most, and my reasons why (not necessarily relevant to the context of the article):

How do you explain to someone who has spent a lifetime cocooned in privilege that a potentially terminal rent has appeared in the wrappings?

I think I'm beginning to realise this at so many values only now - that my world is beginning to fall apart/be rendered a memory in so many ways. I was privileged in being a girl in some ways, and hence protected, treated beautifully as a child, didn't get an opportunity to be streetsmart because it was assumed I'd always have someone looking after me - everything I wanted was magically done - also I had no needs, wants, desires, frustrations, besides piddly little crushes and exam grades. As i grew older, concerns increased - figure, marks, career, marriage, my family began to bear down on me in greater degrees and I slowly realised how unlearned and naive I was - the process is STILL continuing and will never stop :(. I didn't understand the complexity of being a Hindu/Jain till the Ayodhya riots happened in 1993. I didn't understand the political complexities of being an Indian female in the United States till 9/11 happened, and till I noticed that non-Indian men were attracted to me. It's becoming an adult that introduces one to the many shades of gray between black and white. Those that manage to grow up without changing or facing the decision to compromise hitherto unquestioned values are either incredibly strong or colourblind.

Ignorance is trly bliss haan sometimes. Awareness can make you fall apart. Or it can engender change.

That pamphlet and others that followed are testaments to the only humane possibility available to people who live in multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies like those of the Indian sub-continent. Human-rights documents such as Who Are the Guilty? are essential to the process of broadening civil institutions: they are weapons with which society asserts itself against a state that runs criminally amok, as the one did in Delhi in November of 1984. It is heartening that sanity prevails today in Punjab. But not elsewhere. In Bombay, local government officials want to stop any public buildings from being painted green - a color associated with the Muslim religion. And hundreds of city's Muslims have been deported from the city slums - in at least one case for committing an offense no graver than reading a Bengali newspaper. It is imperative that government insure that those who instigate mass violence do not go unpunished.

Basically because I'm against violence. I do believe the pen is mightier than the sword. Because you can kill or crush someone like in the socialist/communist regimes, but by writing about them you render them immortal in collective memory.

Also, in stark contrast to the above pamphlet is the one the VHP circulates against Islam. I had found this at a friend's place once and lost a little bit of respect for him. Wait, let me try to find it if I can. Nothing inflammatory of the kind I had read in that essentially anti-Islam pamphlet, but RIGHT NOW on its website, whose link I refuse to publish but which is easily found, is a polling question: "Do you think Indian History textbooks should be revised to reflect the correct perspective of the original Saraswati Sindhu civilization as opposed to the myth of Aryan Invasion Theory?" First of all, I have not even heard of the Saraswati Sindhu Civilization. And I am your better than av erage student of Hindu Mythology (at least the North Indian variety). In sociology in SYJC we learnt about the theory of Divine Origin and teh theory of Aryan Invasion as justification for the Caste system. With regards to the mythological foundation of Hinduism or Bharatavarsha, I can't remember which, there's something about Mount Meru and all these seas and worlds and all. Whose to say which is true? It was millenia ago at least. I'm wary of anything that propounds greatness rather than stating facts.

To write carelessly in such a way as to endorse terrorism or repression, can add easily to the problem: in such incendiary circumstances, words cost lives, and it is only appropriate that those who deal in words should pay scrupulous attention to what they say. It is only appropriate that they should find themselves inhibited.

Oops, I really need to learn that. I have a terrible habit of saying things just to shock people, and that can make me careless or insensitive. But I think the world is at a point where everyone is so paranoid that even a slightly careless remark has everyone up in arms with accusations. We've lost our sense of humour due to terror :(

Writers don't join crowds - Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the Constitutional authority fails to act. You join and in joining bear all the responsibility and obligations and guilt that joining represents.

What guilt? Writers, in a way, (good ones anyway) are visionaries because they can be objective, or at the very least they've made the effort to write down, organise and analyse their thoughts into something more coherent than the unruly passions of the populace. How would a government composed of writers be? Inefficient but libertarian most likely!

The truth is that the commonest response to violence is one of the repugnance, and that a significant number of people everywhere try to oppose it in whatever way they can.

It's good that mankind still hasn't lost its 'humanity'. That's why we have passive-aggressive types, peopel who try to avoid conflict. Yet we have the few who try to create it. Why? I will never understand how meaningful change can ever come about through violence or force.

Let us not fool ourselves," Karahasan writes. "The world is written first - the Holy Books say that it was created in words and all that happens in it, happens in language first."

Goes with the hypothesis that the man without language is the man most prone to violence - he has no other way of expressing himself.

It is when we think of the world the aesthetic of indifference might bring into being that we recognize the urgency of remembering the stories we have not written.

How many memories have we lost because they haven't been passed down accurately? How many lives have been skewed because of this? National, cultural histories? How many peoples have been uprooted through this oral genocide? Every generation rises in glory like a rocket, explodes with a bang and fizzles out into cynicism or apathy. Except that each generation is exploding and sizzling younger and younger. My baby nieces and nephews get bored faster and faster and look for newer and newer things, that are getting invented and consumed at a rate that exceeds our income or consumption intentions. Will they get bored with the travesties of history? Will they forget to write in the quest to create the superhuman computer? Will they die out because they have forgotten how to live on the planet? Extreme fear I know but definitely a thought worth deliberating. We need to slow down. We need to write. We need to READ. REMEMBER. RELIVE.