Cheetah and Blast from the Past

1.

The Immortal Cheetah

A cheetah given into leaping by nature

Leapt across swamps of grief

Crossing miles in air

Feeling the rush of wind in his eyes

He was crying – tasting the salt of his tears in his eyes and on his tongue

The indigo stars illuminating the silence of the universe with a strange tinge of blue sighed: Oh god! The cheetah is crying!

The cheetah flies in the air almost daring to cross the planet with a half-leap

Falling all of a sudden through midair as if he had crashed into an invisible cliff trapped within a canopy of clouds

Falling inside a jungle: a boiling cauldron of darkness, incessant rain and violent vegetation

The celestial bodies in the sky prayed for the cheetah – with the finest bones and flesh ever to find their unified life – to make his final motions against the entrapments of this fateful jungle

Nobody knows what happened to this cheetah

Except that we make yarns about this cheetah, who leaps inside our souls forever

2.

Jump cut – in the past – 25 years – almost – approximately – a full-moon night – after midnight – on the terrace of a G+3 newly built apartment block – on the fringes of the city violently pushing against the margins of a crumbling suburban landscape – full of dreams – a series of conquests – a bright disc of silver hanging in the sky – an elderly friend of mine and I – a telescope in between us – a gazer of stars and galaxies – well, planning to show me what is a sky and infinite continents of space – a wise man – hating my absolute love for rock music – dismissing it as ‘boyish elitism’.

A night redefined!

We smoked hard. We smoked hard – only nicotine fellas! We discussed Dakghar. We recited Wasteland. Death was looming large on our sub-conscious.

Then he asked me to take a drooling walk to the phallic instrument chilling in the night – his love and work of love.

“Boy you could look at the moon both ends from! This end from it looks like a shining piece of nut. And this end from it blazes on you like a scorching sun … So you see; there is nothing right or wrong!”

I asked parched in smoke, “Is there no perfect way of life on earth? Ideals to follow? Creating and adding on to the civilization of men? No right and wrong! Live like dogs, do we?”

He whispered in my ears, “You hate dogs, don’t you? There are ways. There are no ways still. A creative man must learn to suffer multiple takes on life. A creative man must strive for his absolute solitude to unburden his load on us. He walks through the world but returns to his cave. Your cave is this universe of galaxies, constellations and pacing heavenly bodies. You are a banished soul attempting to be a part of this colossal space. Don’t you feel like that? How tiny you are, my boy!”

We fell silent for a long time – looking at the sky – and then we fell asleep! Dreaming: this sleep will take us away …

2 Observations [Predictions]

I want to make 2 observations:

1. The disconnect between urban, semi-urban, mofusil settlements, villages and forests has attained a critical mass in India that is likely to result in a series of violent civil-war like situation in the next 5 years. This disconnect primarily relates to wide disparity of economic opportunities, concentration of private wealth and assets and access to natural resources across sections. It is essentially a fallout of rapidly shifting of national economy from communal and traditional food production to laying integral focus on industrialization and high-technology services following [actually succumbing to] the vested interests pursued by the large commercial corporations of a economically globalized world [where political systems whether democratic or otherwise are more or less subservient to the commercial interests of large corporations]. The central and the state governments are coercively pushing forward a development agenda based on mass-scale industrialization, urbanization and converting all kinds of labour into technology driven manufacturing. As such, the urban localities are directly eating up vast volumes of resources leaving very little for others. So the urban areas are extending into farmlands and farmlands into forests. This is of course creating terrific levels of human migration [which goes incipient most of the times] and irreversible destruction of ecology. Most importantly these speculated civil wars spread across regions within forests, at the fringes of forests and towns and affluent centers of metropolitan cities are likely to be sporadic, very violent, sustained yet non-cohesive giving one an impression of mindless rioting, looting and arson as they would lack any comprehensive political leadership [I’m not taking cue from the recent London riots because they were not civil wars by any stretch of imagination]. The State and the mainstream media would be as insensitive as ever – religiously upholding the sacred nature of our Constitution and Parliament – to these perpetrators of mob violence. They would treat it as a law and order crisis and thus react with greater degrees of security intervention: the States’ Police and the Armed Forces will start killing increasing number of Indian citizens in due course. Acute hunger and impoverishment coupled with years and years of neglect relating to identity crisis of people living in Kashmir and the Northeast and that of the minorities and the perennially disadvantaged [Dalits etc] would land us into a spiraling darkness of mayhem and chaos. However what this would end up underlining emphatically is questioning of the very tenets and assumptions of: Nationhood, Political Democracy and the belief that Institutionalization of all functions can deliver equitable and just results for people at large and organization of operations at a magnum scale. We must ponder: whether we want things to become so big and so overpowering as to make us feel helpless in negotiating its consequences in the long run; is the idea of living collaboratively in stateless communities an idea worth pursuing; is an economy based on barter of goods and services considering survival requirements a more balanced and holistic economy compared to a currency economy … well, there are many things likewise to ponder! If our contemplation remotely convinces us that these ideas could be worth dying for [I actually mean worth living for in spite of the embedded consciousness in the human animal that makes this strange animal continuously susceptible to exploring newer and meaner power structures in the name of ideas and having accepted this anthropological truth one can only understand the true nature of this rebellion is against your own natural self]; the larger question would still remain: how and where do we start; how do we negotiate with the accumulators and multipliers of assets and lobbies of unassailable power in ensuring our way to leading a contended, small, zero-development life. Or, is it because we know subconsciously that choosing such a path might make us tread the harshest of harsh, scorching by-lanes and labyrinths that Michael K had traversed [I recommend a reading of J.M.Coetze’s Life and Times of Michael K] that we are convinced a spectacle of fire and violence is a better choice to put an end to oneself if not the man-made power structures and towers constructed in the name of humanity!

2. Globally in the next 5 years we will find a substantive reversal of technological interventions. Technology until now has been earning its maximum revenues from: gadgetry [evolving and satisfying intense consumerist aspirations] and warfare. It is prolonging life spans at one end whereas helping conduct our businesses and transactions much faster [the speed is enhancing every passing year] leaving us with unending pools of time. We are a baffled and bewildered lot as we do not know what we should do with such large gaps in time. What was the time taken to seduce a woman in the 2nd decade of the eighteenth century? What was the time taken to seduce a woman in the 2nd decade of the nineteenth century? And, now? Well, the 3 figures would seem to be in geometric progression in a telescopic descending order. That tells us something; simply put the fun of an exploit is gone. So we get very easily bored. [I recommend a reading of Milan Kundera’s Slowness in this connection]. You can decimate a country by directing missiles from 2000 miles away – well, that is another big contribution of technology. But to win a war comprehensively you need to win in a land battle that requires raw courage, organization, planning and sheer mental strength – some things which are clearly not derivatives of technology. Afghanistan and Iraq are cases in point. I am inclined to believe long life spans with loads of idle-time on hand can actually lead to a very different kind of violence arising out of relentless boredom. An understanding is slowly descending about the farcical nature of extending life on expensive, invasive and exclusive life support systems. Technology has also altered the appreciation of the natural sciences which is nothing but your unending conversations with the silence of the universe [there was a time when pursuing astrophysics was sexier than becoming a computer engineer; it soon got changed; the process is likely to be reverted although interventions of the industry may not allow such a move so easily]. The split between technology and science is being gradually understood in a more explicit manner. Technology is no longer innovation [at its core an audacious defiance of nature] of goods and materials based on the principles of natural science; it is something much more colossal: it has become a way of life – it panders to the whole idea of modernity [hyper-cool; monstrously big beaming an image of power and success; integrating – making distances look shorter and thus deriving an unimaginable control of transport; simulating pace; reducing costs and thus becoming more and more profitable in commerce]. It took many, many, and many … yes, many years for our brains to evolve to create the kinds of art and literature we have made over the years. But the news is: our brains have started evolving very differently now in this world of digitization and we are soon on the verge of losing critical anthropological traits of identity – handwriting per se!

4 Concerning Issues

4 issues for concern:

1. Mr. Narendra Modi will go on a fast starting 17 September for 3 days. He wants to build a stronger and unified [the words used are peaceful and harmonious] Gujarat / India; integrating people of all communities and shades. This must be one of the most obscene jokes that can actually make you cry! The Supreme Court [SC] is becoming very popular of late because of its activism in the corruption cases, which are essentially corporate crimes of a monumental magnitude. While the SC cannot be faulted on technical merits in the Gujarat case – relegating the lower court in Gujarat to decide on dispute of facts – however one ponders whether going by the background and climate of the events under question it should have worded and safeguarded its judgment in a manner so as to insulate it from being manipulated and misused by the political masters in furthering their personal agendas – Mr. Modi is not fighting for the BJP at this moment; he is fighting within the BJP for his space to become its nominated PM candidate in the national elections of 2014.

2. Listening to the interviews given by Mr. Anna Hazare to NDTV, CNN-IBN and TIMESNOW I get a feeling he is much smarter than what he sounded between and during the 2 fasts conducted at Delhi recently. There is a group working with and behind him invisibly who are aware that with the irreversible fall of the Parliamentary Left there is a space that requires filling: the space belonging to the anti-right [anti-Congress and anti-BJP to be specific]. As such this group is fast extending its articulation to multifarious subjects apart from the Janpal Lok Pal Bill, which has been their principal talking point until now. If they tend to be aspirational, which they seem to be at the moment, they are likely to switch over to a structured political formation from their NGO style of operation and hit the roof to enter the political system. While NGOs can aspire to get issue-based funding, a political formation requires substantial amounts of money on a sustained basis to win elections to be of some relevance. Who will fund them and why?

3. Ms. Mamata Banerjee clearly runs a party made up of goons. That is the story unfolding in Bengal for the moment. It is not in her capacity to control this mess. She will be heard making a few loud sound bytes against her own party men and women; very soon she will switch over to a mode of ignorance to be followed by a mode of denial. The Left in Bengal [I mean whatever is left of them] is only shouting from rooftops against TMC’s atrocities against their party cadres and forceful shutting down of their offices. Nobody is listening to them, actually they are not interested and in many a case people are happy that the arrogant Left is getting a good thrashing and being roughed up so ruthlessly. What is absolutely missing the Left by zillions of miles is: they have to go back to the ways of painstakingly organizing economic movements, social movements and political movements from the grassroots to be able to reengineer their organization. To me the Left, which actually believes the madness of the TMC will automatically usher them in a resounding comeback victory after 5 years in spite of its tired [almost extinct] leadership and uninspiring cadres, can never make a meaningful come back.

4. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar is a strange phenomenon, well rather a strange oratorical fashion icon. He is deeply entrenched inside the capillaries of a centre-right political party and yet he mouths uproariously all kinds of leftist and at times ultra-leftist talks. Talking, of course, one has to admit he does it quite well. But the point is very few political personalities exhibit this dichotomous [what kind of a jerk can imagine that words like ‘dichotomous’ are only known to a breed named Stephanians!!] proclivity so effectively. Strangely he is never slapped with charges of sedition or abetting militancy / extremism!

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