Disturbed by the high level of facebook activism surrounding the issue of Anna’s fast and the Jan Lokpal Bill, I had pledged to myself that I will exercise self-restraint and not participate in any online discussions on this issue although I did allow myself to ‘like’ related posts or make a funny/snide remark or two in support/against the same. However, I soon realized that it was going to be a difficult promise to keep so I decided to blog about it instead.
I must admit ,at the very start , that I am not part of the India Against Corruption (I like the facebook page though because apparently, people’s movements have moved online these days). Neither did I once visit Ramlila Grounds but given the 24/7 media coverage, I didn’t have to (because following the movement on television equals participation in the struggle).
I must also acknowledge that I have gone through the motions with the whole issue and have only now developed a clear-ish opinion on this. I went from being anti-Anna and anti-UPA to pro-movement (it took me a while to accept that this is, indeed, a movement of sorts) and anti-corruption, while remaining ill-disposed towards this government the whole time.
To my mind, there are two distinct yet related elements to this movement-one, Anna’s or the public’s right to protest peacefully. And second, should Anna be allowed to hijack Parliamentary powers?
The movement and the public perception about it has changed course since its inception a few months earlier. From being a movement led by Anna, the modern day saint who could do no wrong and his version of the Lokpal Bill as the magical solution to corruption in India, it is gradually transforming into an anti-corruption movement. While there are a number of people who follow Anna, there is an equal number of people who favour the larger cause, even if they do not agree with Anna and his methods. There is also a group who does not support Anna and questions the legitimacy of the movement on the basis that it is driven by right wing, fascist elements and the nature of the demands it makes of the government and its institutions.
On the question of Anna’s /public’s right to protest peacefully, no one can express any doubt about the utter stupidity of the UPA government, both legally and politically. Legally, because what they did was plain unconstitutional and politically, because it takes astounding levels of brain damage for a government literally in the nadir of its existence to screw up its image any further but you know Team Manmohan…they make it possible!! As a result, not only was a potential dialogue process on the Lokpal Bill thwarted, it led to this totally avoidable media spectacle…11 days and counting, and a complete hardening of stance by Anna. Once again, Kudos to the charming UPA folks!!
On the issue of Anna’s refusal to end his fast and hold the government to ransom to agree to his version of the Bill, it is unacceptable. But, as I mentioned earlier, this situation was totally avoidable.
But there is another issue that has been raised by the detractors of this movement, mostly by the left leaning intellectual elite that has been bothering me the most. Led by Arundhati Roy and the likes, this group tends to argue that only certain kinds of social struggles are acceptable in a democracy. In an op-ed piece in The Hindu mockingly titled ‘I’d rather not be Anna’, Roy seductively argues that this movement is limited to the bourgeois (because entrenched corruption such as ours affect only and only the middle class and not the poor).
Questioning Anna’s credentials, she argues
Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.
What if I ask…..Who are you, Ms. Roy? What gives you the right to argue for the rights of those displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project or make one quick visit to the jungles in Bastar and question the Salwa Judum or proclaim that Kashmir is not part of India? Who are you? Nothing more than an attention-crazy Booker Prize winning has-been author!!
What if the civil society had greeted Arundhati Roy’s foray into social activism with such cynicism? Would it not be considered undemocratic by the so-called left liberals? The answer is YES. Then why is Anna’s movement being considered illegitimate on flimsy grounds such as his absence from other civil society campaigns or his so-called links with the RSS? Apparently, Sushma Swaraj ‘admitted’ in Parliament that RSS has been mobilizing support for Anna’s movement. Oh My God, what a travesty!! That is reason enough for the self proclaimed lefties to abandon this movement as it is urban, right wing and bourgeois. If the Left steers away from socio-political struggles because groups with different ideologies than theirs lead or participate in them, then it is only fair that the public have ‘left’ them. Nivedita Menon’s post ‘We should be there’ on Kafila makes a compelling case against the Left’s attitude in this regard.
People choose movements ..movements do not choose people, but Ms. Roy would have us believe otherwise. In this case, many people have chosen this movement to support, for whatever reason. Some of them have chosen Anna and his Bill, some others have just chosen the cause. Anna has chosen, and wrongly so, to demand the space that constitutionally belongs to the Parliament and now is the time for the civil society to withdraw because the process of pre-legislative public deliberation is now over and they have succeeded in putting this issue out there and bringing it back into public consciousness as well as on the public policy agenda. But, I also believe that the UPA maximally used its magical screw-up powers to push him in this direction. Anna has also chosen to be stubborn and continue his fast even after the Government has exceptionally agreed to debate his draft in Parliament, despite advice to the contrary by his comrades. Anna’s detractors have chosen to take a non-existent (in my view) higher moral position that this movement is dangerous, useless, unreal and undemocratic and of course, their position is not radical or absolutist, because they and only they constitute the sane and the liberal in India!! What they do not realize is how easily they are playing into the hands of the ruling government’s stance on people’s movements as such. In fact, it is on this very basis (as potential threat to democracy/law and order, amounting to blackmail etc etc) that the government prevented Team Anna to stage a protest and made pre-emptive arrests on 16 August. May be, the NAC should look into this issue (I will leave my problems with this strange creature called the NAC for another post)
All in all, I am on one hand, reassured by the multiplicity of viewpoints that this issue has garnered, both in favour and against, expanding the space for deliberative democracy and on the other, quite disturbed by the disdain of the Left towards this movement, considering that it is an issue that affects very much their own constituency..the poor, marginalized and the dispossessed. But mostly, I continue to be baffled by the total and complete failure of the political leadership to run this country.
I never expected to end with a Arun Jaitley quote(but being a democrat, inspiration may come from all quarters, including the far right) but I will, as it succinctly sums up my feelings,
The Prime Minister is the tallest political functionary in the country. It is true the government cannot find a magic wand to end corruption, but the point is, it does not really need one. You have to address yourself to the correct question. Do you have the political will to fight corruption? You have to say, sir, I have the authority and moral stature as the prime minister and evolve that will. Only then will you win back the confidence of this country.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Don't let Osama kill Obama
I am a quote monger. Very early on in life, I realised that being original takes way too much talent which, unfortunately, I have not been blessed with. However, what I do have is the knack and the limited intellect of recognising a good quote when I see one (or so I think!!).
In this crazed media age, a good quote is what you will rarely find. President Obama is a rare gem amidst the crowd of unimpressive national leaders, who just appears well...perfect and seems to say just the right thing on most occasions. His public persona is pleasing and soothing, whether he is enjoying a casual dance with his wife in the company of young students in Mumbai or holding a baby in his arms while visiting Alabama in the aftermath of the Tornado. If there is a people’s president, he is the one.
21 January 2009 symbolised a day of hope and change. Two years down the line, I stand disappointed by Mr. Barack Hussain Obama II, President of the United States.
On 12 January 2011, President Obama addressed a memorial service for the victims of the shootings in Tucson, Arizona. It is easily one of the most beautiful speeches I have heard in recent times. It had all the elements that make a good memorial speech….personal, respectful and intensely emotional. Yet, it all seemed so politically and strategically relevant to our times. Despite his plummeting ratings, Obama had struck out and how.
Obama said:
How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?
You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.
But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.
He added,
' Sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.
And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.
The essence of his speech can be summed up in his own words, as follows:
To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
And yet, a few months later, on 2 May 2011, Obama acted and spoke in sharp contrast to his value system. He glorified the killing of a man who was the mastermind of a terrorist attack on the United States nearly ten years ago through an intensely dramatic televised announcement, his deep voice resonating through the enmpty White House corridors. Just like those sappy patriotic songs honouring the armed forces bring tears to our eyes, with a heightened sense of American nationalism, Obama proudly proclaimed:
On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.
The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.
Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people....And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done .
Where was Obama's civility when he ordered and watched the brutal killing of Osama bin Laden and denied his family the right to perform his last rites? US officials have explained that Osama was buried at sea to prevent his grave from being turned into a shrine.
Most importantly, where was the forgiveness in the aftermath of a tragedy that he preached about in his Tucson memorial speech?
What is truly unfortunate is that Obama has increasingly begun to sound like his predecessor, on questions of national security and counter terrorism. What is also telling is that Obama is not alone in his victory. Not only have all US 'friends and allies' who allegedly stand protected in the post-Osama world expressed their public excitement about the killing, even the UN Secretary General Ban-ki-Moon mirrored the same views, when he stated, 'Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done to such a mastermind of international terrorism'.
The only sensible quote I read was from our battered Prime Minister who, in his endless 'to do' list, must also include driving some sense into some respectable members of his Cabinet who grabbed this glorious opportunity to continue their Pak-bashing.
I welcome it as a significant step forward and hope that it will deal a decisive blow to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The international community and Pakistan in particular must work comprehensively to end the activities of all such groups who threaten civilized behaviour and kill innocent men, women and children.
I am not even talking about the conspiracy theories related to Osama's killing which is inevitable in high profile, covert operations like this. I leave it to experts to figure it all out and the United States and Pakistani government to get their stories right.
As a conscious citizen, I share my concern with Obama that tragedy often forces us to look backwards rather than moving forward and often with devastating consequences. Yet, he does just the reverse, couching an act of revenge as an act of justice. I am horrified when I sense the valiant triumphalism in his tone when he announces Osama's death to the world or see images of him watching US commandos gun down Osama. Even more than the so called gruesome images of dead Osama that Obama refuses to release.
This is not just limited to the United States, of course. We have seen similar scenes in India with regard to Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab.
If public service is about setting examples, then Obama has set a wrong one. I am aware that leading the United States is no joke and your last speech matters only as much as your last meal. I was deeply moved by Obama’s memorial speech because I saw in it a honesty and self-belief that I have rarely seen in my political consciousness and that is why I believe it. What I do not believe is the hollow nationalism and false sense of justice in his statement on Osama’s death. That is a classic un-Obama.
I understand that the last two years have been extremely challenging for Obama, most of which has been spent trying to undo the seemingly irreparable damage caused by Mr. Bush. But, as Obama himself has said:
We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us. And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
I hope Obama rediscovers the civility in himself and finds his true self i.e. a decent and good man.
Don’t let Osama kill the real Obama.
In this crazed media age, a good quote is what you will rarely find. President Obama is a rare gem amidst the crowd of unimpressive national leaders, who just appears well...perfect and seems to say just the right thing on most occasions. His public persona is pleasing and soothing, whether he is enjoying a casual dance with his wife in the company of young students in Mumbai or holding a baby in his arms while visiting Alabama in the aftermath of the Tornado. If there is a people’s president, he is the one.
21 January 2009 symbolised a day of hope and change. Two years down the line, I stand disappointed by Mr. Barack Hussain Obama II, President of the United States.
On 12 January 2011, President Obama addressed a memorial service for the victims of the shootings in Tucson, Arizona. It is easily one of the most beautiful speeches I have heard in recent times. It had all the elements that make a good memorial speech….personal, respectful and intensely emotional. Yet, it all seemed so politically and strategically relevant to our times. Despite his plummeting ratings, Obama had struck out and how.
Obama said:
How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?
You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.
But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.
He added,
' Sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.
And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.
The essence of his speech can be summed up in his own words, as follows:
To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
And yet, a few months later, on 2 May 2011, Obama acted and spoke in sharp contrast to his value system. He glorified the killing of a man who was the mastermind of a terrorist attack on the United States nearly ten years ago through an intensely dramatic televised announcement, his deep voice resonating through the enmpty White House corridors. Just like those sappy patriotic songs honouring the armed forces bring tears to our eyes, with a heightened sense of American nationalism, Obama proudly proclaimed:
On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.
The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.
Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people....And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done .
Where was Obama's civility when he ordered and watched the brutal killing of Osama bin Laden and denied his family the right to perform his last rites? US officials have explained that Osama was buried at sea to prevent his grave from being turned into a shrine.
Most importantly, where was the forgiveness in the aftermath of a tragedy that he preached about in his Tucson memorial speech?
What is truly unfortunate is that Obama has increasingly begun to sound like his predecessor, on questions of national security and counter terrorism. What is also telling is that Obama is not alone in his victory. Not only have all US 'friends and allies' who allegedly stand protected in the post-Osama world expressed their public excitement about the killing, even the UN Secretary General Ban-ki-Moon mirrored the same views, when he stated, 'Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done to such a mastermind of international terrorism'.
The only sensible quote I read was from our battered Prime Minister who, in his endless 'to do' list, must also include driving some sense into some respectable members of his Cabinet who grabbed this glorious opportunity to continue their Pak-bashing.
I welcome it as a significant step forward and hope that it will deal a decisive blow to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The international community and Pakistan in particular must work comprehensively to end the activities of all such groups who threaten civilized behaviour and kill innocent men, women and children.
I am not even talking about the conspiracy theories related to Osama's killing which is inevitable in high profile, covert operations like this. I leave it to experts to figure it all out and the United States and Pakistani government to get their stories right.
As a conscious citizen, I share my concern with Obama that tragedy often forces us to look backwards rather than moving forward and often with devastating consequences. Yet, he does just the reverse, couching an act of revenge as an act of justice. I am horrified when I sense the valiant triumphalism in his tone when he announces Osama's death to the world or see images of him watching US commandos gun down Osama. Even more than the so called gruesome images of dead Osama that Obama refuses to release.
This is not just limited to the United States, of course. We have seen similar scenes in India with regard to Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab.
If public service is about setting examples, then Obama has set a wrong one. I am aware that leading the United States is no joke and your last speech matters only as much as your last meal. I was deeply moved by Obama’s memorial speech because I saw in it a honesty and self-belief that I have rarely seen in my political consciousness and that is why I believe it. What I do not believe is the hollow nationalism and false sense of justice in his statement on Osama’s death. That is a classic un-Obama.
I understand that the last two years have been extremely challenging for Obama, most of which has been spent trying to undo the seemingly irreparable damage caused by Mr. Bush. But, as Obama himself has said:
We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us. And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
I hope Obama rediscovers the civility in himself and finds his true self i.e. a decent and good man.
Don’t let Osama kill the real Obama.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Howl!
As it turns out, I have nothing to say today. I turn to Allen Ginsberg for inspiration. I read Howl! And life's mysteries unfold.....
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humour
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humour
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Career Women in Hindi Cinema
Hindi cinema has come a long way but how far has it reached in terms of depicting Indian women professionals on celluloid remains a question. The earlier films from the 1950s portrayed the Hindi film heroine as either an urban, college going daddy's girl or as the poor, underprivileged single woman battling it out in the big, bad world until rescued by the hero. In the 1960s, we saw the emergence of an urbane, fashonable, independent woman travelling the world with friends or family and falling in love (Love in Tokyo, An Evening in Paris).
It was not until the 1970s that the woman with a career (career women, as they are suggestively called) or those who simply earned their living was portrayed on-screen. There were women from lower and middle class backgrounds working as housekeepers, office secretaries and nurses and then, there were doctors, businesswomen and lawyers. With more and more women becoming financially independent in India and with the increased reportage of crimes against women, the mid to late1980s saw the emergence of the angry young woman often portrayed as agents of justice such as police inspectors or lawyers who took on the system head on and did not hesitate to give the men a piece of their mind.
Incidentally, this was also the time when the age old Bollywood theme of 'revenge' began to be articulated by these very powerful female characters. These women had to 'become' like men to fight the injustices that they or their families had been subjected to- so, rage and revenge it was. And the fact that they were dressed in masculine clothing also helped them play these parts in male ways.
Most of the 1990s, the decade I grew up in, was a regression in terms of portrayal of women in Hindi cinema. The rise of candy floss cinema and the Hollywood rom-com rehashes relegated the heroine to the background. She remained auxiliary and not essential to the plot of the film, mostly providing emotional support to the hero as a wife or girlfriend. But a trend that I noted in a few films during this time is the emergence of the 'other' woman. Both on television and film, extramarital relationships gained a lot of prominence. However, the 'other' woman was always a career woman, ambitious and thus, uncaring and responsible for the breakup of a marriage. I remember this movie called Biwi No. 1 where Sushmita Sen was a successful model, a woman with questionable morals who came in between a happily married couple, that of Salman Khan and Karishma Kapoor, a docile homemaker, and their two kids. Salman Khan’s wife and friends embarked on a mission to rescue him from the clutches of the career woman. What remained unquestioned was Salman Khan’s character’s own role in this affair (he had lied about his wife and kids and when his girlfriend does find out about his marital status, he informs her that his wife is his widowed sister-in-law and the kids are not his own).
Even in a 'different' movie like Dil Chahta Hain, the only seemingly strong female character played by Dimple Kapadia dies unhappy and soon after, her almost beau meets a PYT just like his other two friends.
This trend continued well into the 2000s when Hindi cinema continued to portray women as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Those women who had successful relationships had either no career or had sacrificed her career it at the altar of a happy marriage and those who had successful careers failed in the love department. Aitraaz, the Bollywood remake of a Hollywood film, Disclosure, had Priyanka Chopra play the role of a successful model who had sacrificed her relationship to focus on her career wanting to win back her lost love (Akshay Kumar) who is now married (to Kareena Kapoor). In a tale of seduction and revenge, Akshay Kumar’s character is accused of sexually molesting Priyanka Chopra’s character. In a display of great wifely devotion, Kareena Kapoor’s character who had long given up her career as a lawyer returns to the court of law (one last time, I think) to fight the case to prove her husband’s innocence. In order to do so, she, of course, maligns the ‘other’ woman as being cold and heartless as she is rich and ambitious who is trying to phasao her poor husband.
The ‘vamping’ of the career woman in Hindi film continues unabated. The plot punishes them by depriving them of love, marriage and children, all in an effort to reward and glorify the more 'traditional' woman. Then, of course, there is the fallen woman, the prostitute, with the sad back story and a heart of gold who, by virtue of her position in society, can love but never really be loved in return.
Despite recent attempts at redeeming the career woman in Bollywoodland, scriptwriters, directors and actors are trapped in the same trajectory. No One Killed Jessica is one such film that immediately pops to mind. Along side terribly botched up court room scenes, this film kills it for the career woman while actually intending to uplift her from the dark margins of Hindi filmdom (Not to say that this movie is entirely a bad one). Rani Mukherjee who plays the Barkha Dutt-esque cold blooded journalist always hounding for the story that sells does not initially find that spark in the Jessica Lal murder case because it seemed to be an ‘open and shut’ case. Throughout the movie, she refers to herself as chudail or bitch. As she has such a high opinion of her own self, it is not unnatural that others, from the hapless male boss to the foul mouthed and fiery female house help, address her in those very terms. It can be inferred from her characterization that in her ambition to succeed, she will go to any lengths, which begins with her rant ‘You know I am a bitch/ I am a bitch and I don’t care” then, reflects in her dissing a lover in a moment of passion to chase the big story and also, in her use of ‘dubious’ (if there is any such thing as that in journalism today) means to achieve her journalistic ends. Whether this is self-deprecation or self-endorsement is hard to say.
In other words, to portray an independent woman, Bollywood will construct a career woman in Bollywood as a ‘bitch’, both by her own admission as well as by others. She is self-centred, arrogant and will happily trample over others without care or concern to reach her ‘career’ and ‘personal’ goals (which is almost always related to being romantically involved with a married man). Her personal life, however, will be empty where she will either be abandoned by her parents/husband/lover or she will remain without love until she reforms herself (does a good deed like help a fallen colleague in Fashion or start being nice to boyfriend’s kids in We Are Family or completely or partially abandon her career.). Please note, that the ‘real’ heroine (first lead) in such films will almost always be a 'modern' Indian girl with 'traditional' values…the one who can be the good wife with/without a career.
I remember the time when hours were spent discussing the objectification of women in Hindi cinema. Today, they are subjects in Hindi films but their subjectivity is of a different kind. The ‘vamp’s has been revamped and this time around, it is the 'career woman'.
P.S- I use several words in quotes to point to the fluidity of all these concepts.
It was not until the 1970s that the woman with a career (career women, as they are suggestively called) or those who simply earned their living was portrayed on-screen. There were women from lower and middle class backgrounds working as housekeepers, office secretaries and nurses and then, there were doctors, businesswomen and lawyers. With more and more women becoming financially independent in India and with the increased reportage of crimes against women, the mid to late1980s saw the emergence of the angry young woman often portrayed as agents of justice such as police inspectors or lawyers who took on the system head on and did not hesitate to give the men a piece of their mind.
Incidentally, this was also the time when the age old Bollywood theme of 'revenge' began to be articulated by these very powerful female characters. These women had to 'become' like men to fight the injustices that they or their families had been subjected to- so, rage and revenge it was. And the fact that they were dressed in masculine clothing also helped them play these parts in male ways.
Most of the 1990s, the decade I grew up in, was a regression in terms of portrayal of women in Hindi cinema. The rise of candy floss cinema and the Hollywood rom-com rehashes relegated the heroine to the background. She remained auxiliary and not essential to the plot of the film, mostly providing emotional support to the hero as a wife or girlfriend. But a trend that I noted in a few films during this time is the emergence of the 'other' woman. Both on television and film, extramarital relationships gained a lot of prominence. However, the 'other' woman was always a career woman, ambitious and thus, uncaring and responsible for the breakup of a marriage. I remember this movie called Biwi No. 1 where Sushmita Sen was a successful model, a woman with questionable morals who came in between a happily married couple, that of Salman Khan and Karishma Kapoor, a docile homemaker, and their two kids. Salman Khan’s wife and friends embarked on a mission to rescue him from the clutches of the career woman. What remained unquestioned was Salman Khan’s character’s own role in this affair (he had lied about his wife and kids and when his girlfriend does find out about his marital status, he informs her that his wife is his widowed sister-in-law and the kids are not his own).
Even in a 'different' movie like Dil Chahta Hain, the only seemingly strong female character played by Dimple Kapadia dies unhappy and soon after, her almost beau meets a PYT just like his other two friends.
This trend continued well into the 2000s when Hindi cinema continued to portray women as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Those women who had successful relationships had either no career or had sacrificed her career it at the altar of a happy marriage and those who had successful careers failed in the love department. Aitraaz, the Bollywood remake of a Hollywood film, Disclosure, had Priyanka Chopra play the role of a successful model who had sacrificed her relationship to focus on her career wanting to win back her lost love (Akshay Kumar) who is now married (to Kareena Kapoor). In a tale of seduction and revenge, Akshay Kumar’s character is accused of sexually molesting Priyanka Chopra’s character. In a display of great wifely devotion, Kareena Kapoor’s character who had long given up her career as a lawyer returns to the court of law (one last time, I think) to fight the case to prove her husband’s innocence. In order to do so, she, of course, maligns the ‘other’ woman as being cold and heartless as she is rich and ambitious who is trying to phasao her poor husband.
The ‘vamping’ of the career woman in Hindi film continues unabated. The plot punishes them by depriving them of love, marriage and children, all in an effort to reward and glorify the more 'traditional' woman. Then, of course, there is the fallen woman, the prostitute, with the sad back story and a heart of gold who, by virtue of her position in society, can love but never really be loved in return.
Despite recent attempts at redeeming the career woman in Bollywoodland, scriptwriters, directors and actors are trapped in the same trajectory. No One Killed Jessica is one such film that immediately pops to mind. Along side terribly botched up court room scenes, this film kills it for the career woman while actually intending to uplift her from the dark margins of Hindi filmdom (Not to say that this movie is entirely a bad one). Rani Mukherjee who plays the Barkha Dutt-esque cold blooded journalist always hounding for the story that sells does not initially find that spark in the Jessica Lal murder case because it seemed to be an ‘open and shut’ case. Throughout the movie, she refers to herself as chudail or bitch. As she has such a high opinion of her own self, it is not unnatural that others, from the hapless male boss to the foul mouthed and fiery female house help, address her in those very terms. It can be inferred from her characterization that in her ambition to succeed, she will go to any lengths, which begins with her rant ‘You know I am a bitch/ I am a bitch and I don’t care” then, reflects in her dissing a lover in a moment of passion to chase the big story and also, in her use of ‘dubious’ (if there is any such thing as that in journalism today) means to achieve her journalistic ends. Whether this is self-deprecation or self-endorsement is hard to say.
In other words, to portray an independent woman, Bollywood will construct a career woman in Bollywood as a ‘bitch’, both by her own admission as well as by others. She is self-centred, arrogant and will happily trample over others without care or concern to reach her ‘career’ and ‘personal’ goals (which is almost always related to being romantically involved with a married man). Her personal life, however, will be empty where she will either be abandoned by her parents/husband/lover or she will remain without love until she reforms herself (does a good deed like help a fallen colleague in Fashion or start being nice to boyfriend’s kids in We Are Family or completely or partially abandon her career.). Please note, that the ‘real’ heroine (first lead) in such films will almost always be a 'modern' Indian girl with 'traditional' values…the one who can be the good wife with/without a career.
I remember the time when hours were spent discussing the objectification of women in Hindi cinema. Today, they are subjects in Hindi films but their subjectivity is of a different kind. The ‘vamp’s has been revamped and this time around, it is the 'career woman'.
P.S- I use several words in quotes to point to the fluidity of all these concepts.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Academic Actors
There is something extremely sexy about actors with an education or (earned) academic degrees.
James Franco (who, in my eyes, arrived way before 127 hours) completed his undergraduate studies from UCLA and his graduate degrees from NYU (film making) and Columbia (fina arts). Now, he has been accepted as a doctoral student in English Literature at Yale. All this, while continuing to make quality movies, write books and screenplays, paint etc. ( I am quite sure I am missing out some things here)
David Duchovny, on the other hand, has not enjoyed the kind of success and adulation that Franco has which has mostly to do with his disastrous movie choices!!! He studied at Princeton, got a Masters in English Literature at Yale and then, enrolled but did not completed his PhD from the same University on the topic " Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose". Despite his continuing struggle to find his feet as an actor, I find his role as Hank Moody in the otherwise extreme, explicit television series CALIFORNICATION as one of his finest and most 'real' to date. This is not to discount his performance as the wry but lovable Fox Mulder in The X-Files.
Duchovny has expressed his interest in completing his PhD some day.
The fact that Franco and Duchovny look the way they do cannot possibly hurt in the 'charm' department!!
Back home, we have a host of our very own Bollywood celebrities who have been showered with honorary doctoral degrees by 'phoren' Universities. Leading the pack are Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and Shilpa Shetty for their extraordinary contribution to Indian cinema. I believe Katrina Kaif and Imran Khan are due to receive it anytime soon!! :-)
I, of course, choose not to mention some truly 'eligible' actor/honorary doctorate holders like Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah.
This post is not meant to undermine the host of intellectually leaning actors/creative persons who decided to quit higher education as they deemed it pointless at some stage. But, in a traditional society where merit is still judged by academic achievement, a handful of actors with degrees are refreshingly attractive as compared to a sea of dopey drop outs!!
James Franco (who, in my eyes, arrived way before 127 hours) completed his undergraduate studies from UCLA and his graduate degrees from NYU (film making) and Columbia (fina arts). Now, he has been accepted as a doctoral student in English Literature at Yale. All this, while continuing to make quality movies, write books and screenplays, paint etc. ( I am quite sure I am missing out some things here)
David Duchovny, on the other hand, has not enjoyed the kind of success and adulation that Franco has which has mostly to do with his disastrous movie choices!!! He studied at Princeton, got a Masters in English Literature at Yale and then, enrolled but did not completed his PhD from the same University on the topic " Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose". Despite his continuing struggle to find his feet as an actor, I find his role as Hank Moody in the otherwise extreme, explicit television series CALIFORNICATION as one of his finest and most 'real' to date. This is not to discount his performance as the wry but lovable Fox Mulder in The X-Files.
Duchovny has expressed his interest in completing his PhD some day.
The fact that Franco and Duchovny look the way they do cannot possibly hurt in the 'charm' department!!
Back home, we have a host of our very own Bollywood celebrities who have been showered with honorary doctoral degrees by 'phoren' Universities. Leading the pack are Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and Shilpa Shetty for their extraordinary contribution to Indian cinema. I believe Katrina Kaif and Imran Khan are due to receive it anytime soon!! :-)
I, of course, choose not to mention some truly 'eligible' actor/honorary doctorate holders like Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah.
This post is not meant to undermine the host of intellectually leaning actors/creative persons who decided to quit higher education as they deemed it pointless at some stage. But, in a traditional society where merit is still judged by academic achievement, a handful of actors with degrees are refreshingly attractive as compared to a sea of dopey drop outs!!
Friday, January 7, 2011
Law, Like Love: W.H. Auden
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.
Friday, December 3, 2010
On Media Ethics (no, Barkha Dutt)
What can I, as a layperson, say about media ethics or the lack of it that has not already been said before? That the triangular bonding between the media-corporations-politicians is deeply dubious; that the daily news manufacture and manipulation at the television news channel factories is unacceptable and that Rakhi Sawant’s gradual siliconisation is not exactly ‘breaking news’. Suffice to say that the Fourth Estate is crumbling, collapsing and how.
A lot has been written about the devastating blow that the Radia tapes have proved to be on the Indian public’s faith in the media. Media darlings such as the fiery Ms. Barkha Dutt and the suave Mr. Vir Sanghvi ( I thought he had quit non-serious political reporting to become a serious food/restaurant critic hosting custom-made eponymous television shows but hey, what do I know and who am I to say?) have been gamed, named and shamed-all in one go.
Dutt and Sanghvi’s equally glorious media buddies after maintaining uncharacteristic silence for several days on the pretext of upholding highest journalistic standards ( hat they were waiting for the verification of the authenticity of the tapes etc) were finally pressured to speak but they only squealed. Mostly, they argued that the larger issue of business- politician nexus (most important) and media ethics (less important as it exists in abundance) should not be diverted by targeting individual journalists/small fries such as Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi ( who are only the editorial bigwigs in the country’s most watched English news channel and most widely circulated English daily).
I will not talk about Vir Sanghvi as I think he has long moved on to reporting on food, luxury brands and other fancy-shmancy stuff and post the tapes, has severed his last tie to serious journalism by suspending his newspaper column but has promised to be back when this controversy is resolved.
But I wish to talk about Barkha Dutt who is really the ‘face’ of news in India. In the past, her journalistic style has raised a lot of questions but never her journalistic standards. For several days, she did not think it fit to speak on this issue citing legal reasons and deep personal hurt and outrage. Yet, she happily tweeted away in her distinctive self righteous, moralistic and catty style that SHE COULD DO NO WRONG!!
As an afterthought after a few weeks of the expose, (which could only be explained in terms of thousands of I hate Barkha Dutt emails and facebook pages of Take Barkha Dutt Off the Air), NDTV decided to host a dialogue between four senior journallsts, including Manu Joseph, Editor, Open Magazine which published the taped conversations and Barkha Dutt which was hopelessly mediated by Sonia Singh. It turned out to be what it was always supposed to be- a slanging match between Dutt and Joseph (some internet news stories have amusingly titled this debate as a due between BARCA and Man U).
Many commentators have commended NDTV’s largesse in this regard for hosting this discussion but cynics like me believe that this was the least that they could do. In fact, what startled me was the complete absence of Prannoy Roy in this discussion (which would have added a lot more credibility to this debate). I was outraged when I saw Barkha Dutt continuing to report and discuss the whole 2G scam and the Radia tapes as if she were not involved (even if, in a small way). And of course, no sanctions (however, minor) were issued against her by the channel.
On this NDTV mediated dialogue, Barkha Dutt, as expected, showed scanty regard for other people’s views by systematically attacking and interrupting them, completely sidelined the mediator proving once and for all who’s the real boss at NDTV and also, played (rather unsuccessfully) the gender card which seemed to be the last resort of this otherwise verbose and vociferous journo.
She tried in vain to appeal to public sentiments by quoting her long, illustrious and immaculate career in the media. She launched a verbal assault on Manu Joseph as he had not consulted her before publishing the raw tapes in his magazine as if she has, in her investigations always sought the views of her subjects before she telecast a news story on her channel. Manu Joseph’s question as to why she did not break open the story about corporate collusions in cabinet formation/s in 2009 and also in 2010, when there was clear evidence of corruption in the Telecom Ministry and Swapan Dasgupta’s question as to why Radia chose her to plug a request to play mediator between Congress and DMK and endorse Raja as Telecom Minister-was it because of her closeness to the Congress party and the pro-Congress slant in her reportage) remained unanswered.
Barkha’s dull and uninspiring response to these questions will put even an aspiring school magazine reporter to shame. Like a five year old, she mumbled and grumbled that she was a victim of a conspiracy and the poster girl for a smear campaign that helps Open magazine to sell copies. She said that she was naïve and gullible and as a political journalist, did not understand the workings of the brutal corporate underworld. Isn’t gullibility and naive ness the lamest possible excuse for someone of her stature and experience?
When one of the panelists asked her to end this debate by admitting and apologising to her viewers for a mistake that she had made, she doggedly refused, reiterating that the only mistake that she had made was in relation to the alleged casualness of her conversation to Radia and her promise to speak to the Congress on Raja’s ministerial berth was just to humour her source (because words like ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ were too hard to find in her vast vocabulary).
Anyhow, the point of this tirade is that those who have the power and influence over the spoken and written word owe no responsibility to their readers/viewers. Barkha Dutt’s continued screeching on television grossly overvaluing her own importance and undermining the viewer’s intelligence does not annoy but amuses me, the viewer –because it does not matter, SHE does not matter!
A lot has been written about the devastating blow that the Radia tapes have proved to be on the Indian public’s faith in the media. Media darlings such as the fiery Ms. Barkha Dutt and the suave Mr. Vir Sanghvi ( I thought he had quit non-serious political reporting to become a serious food/restaurant critic hosting custom-made eponymous television shows but hey, what do I know and who am I to say?) have been gamed, named and shamed-all in one go.
Dutt and Sanghvi’s equally glorious media buddies after maintaining uncharacteristic silence for several days on the pretext of upholding highest journalistic standards ( hat they were waiting for the verification of the authenticity of the tapes etc) were finally pressured to speak but they only squealed. Mostly, they argued that the larger issue of business- politician nexus (most important) and media ethics (less important as it exists in abundance) should not be diverted by targeting individual journalists/small fries such as Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi ( who are only the editorial bigwigs in the country’s most watched English news channel and most widely circulated English daily).
I will not talk about Vir Sanghvi as I think he has long moved on to reporting on food, luxury brands and other fancy-shmancy stuff and post the tapes, has severed his last tie to serious journalism by suspending his newspaper column but has promised to be back when this controversy is resolved.
But I wish to talk about Barkha Dutt who is really the ‘face’ of news in India. In the past, her journalistic style has raised a lot of questions but never her journalistic standards. For several days, she did not think it fit to speak on this issue citing legal reasons and deep personal hurt and outrage. Yet, she happily tweeted away in her distinctive self righteous, moralistic and catty style that SHE COULD DO NO WRONG!!
As an afterthought after a few weeks of the expose, (which could only be explained in terms of thousands of I hate Barkha Dutt emails and facebook pages of Take Barkha Dutt Off the Air), NDTV decided to host a dialogue between four senior journallsts, including Manu Joseph, Editor, Open Magazine which published the taped conversations and Barkha Dutt which was hopelessly mediated by Sonia Singh. It turned out to be what it was always supposed to be- a slanging match between Dutt and Joseph (some internet news stories have amusingly titled this debate as a due between BARCA and Man U).
Many commentators have commended NDTV’s largesse in this regard for hosting this discussion but cynics like me believe that this was the least that they could do. In fact, what startled me was the complete absence of Prannoy Roy in this discussion (which would have added a lot more credibility to this debate). I was outraged when I saw Barkha Dutt continuing to report and discuss the whole 2G scam and the Radia tapes as if she were not involved (even if, in a small way). And of course, no sanctions (however, minor) were issued against her by the channel.
On this NDTV mediated dialogue, Barkha Dutt, as expected, showed scanty regard for other people’s views by systematically attacking and interrupting them, completely sidelined the mediator proving once and for all who’s the real boss at NDTV and also, played (rather unsuccessfully) the gender card which seemed to be the last resort of this otherwise verbose and vociferous journo.
She tried in vain to appeal to public sentiments by quoting her long, illustrious and immaculate career in the media. She launched a verbal assault on Manu Joseph as he had not consulted her before publishing the raw tapes in his magazine as if she has, in her investigations always sought the views of her subjects before she telecast a news story on her channel. Manu Joseph’s question as to why she did not break open the story about corporate collusions in cabinet formation/s in 2009 and also in 2010, when there was clear evidence of corruption in the Telecom Ministry and Swapan Dasgupta’s question as to why Radia chose her to plug a request to play mediator between Congress and DMK and endorse Raja as Telecom Minister-was it because of her closeness to the Congress party and the pro-Congress slant in her reportage) remained unanswered.
Barkha’s dull and uninspiring response to these questions will put even an aspiring school magazine reporter to shame. Like a five year old, she mumbled and grumbled that she was a victim of a conspiracy and the poster girl for a smear campaign that helps Open magazine to sell copies. She said that she was naïve and gullible and as a political journalist, did not understand the workings of the brutal corporate underworld. Isn’t gullibility and naive ness the lamest possible excuse for someone of her stature and experience?
When one of the panelists asked her to end this debate by admitting and apologising to her viewers for a mistake that she had made, she doggedly refused, reiterating that the only mistake that she had made was in relation to the alleged casualness of her conversation to Radia and her promise to speak to the Congress on Raja’s ministerial berth was just to humour her source (because words like ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ were too hard to find in her vast vocabulary).
Anyhow, the point of this tirade is that those who have the power and influence over the spoken and written word owe no responsibility to their readers/viewers. Barkha Dutt’s continued screeching on television grossly overvaluing her own importance and undermining the viewer’s intelligence does not annoy but amuses me, the viewer –because it does not matter, SHE does not matter!
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