I facilitate writing courses and run writing communities. I meet, interact with the best minds in the city, in India, occasionally with international students as well.
The courses are structured to challenge and question mindsets, while working on our writing and reading.
The act of deliberate, critical reading makes us keenly aware of messages and themes in a story, in a book, in a poem. These are the lessons the writers want to leave us with and sitting with them changes us as a person. Having these experiences as a group creates a culture and community that is often open minded, receptive, questioning, and humane.
This belief that my work makes a difference in individual lives and in collective groups is why I can do this work day in and day out. I haven’t stopped once in the past thirteen years. Needless to say, I have also grown as a person, a writer, a facilitator, a teacher, a mentor. My relationship with literature too has deepened.
But these are tough times and I am beginning to see that in tough times, literature is the first thing to be forgotten. It is not practical. Maybe this is why most Indian parents want their children to study practical things.
‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Auden said.
In that, unlike bombs or war that changes society, the changes that Literature instigates are slower to alter society. Poetry and literature offer comfort. They protect our finer emotions and elevate us to human beings who know better and so by knowing better, effect the very changes that would look at war or bombs askance.
But in the world of sales pitches and optics and profits and revenues, this way of thinking is naive, useless, unpopular, and impractical.
Oh how I loathe that word ‘optics’.
There was a terror attack in Pahalgam and men were killed on the basis of not being Muslims. The women and children were spared to tell the story of Islamic terrorists and their irrational hatred against Indians, Indian Muslims, Pakistan, Pakistani Muslims, the world.
Why?
Because naturally, India had to retaliate now. This is an affront on our land, our people. We have a jingoistic, nationalist, pro-Hindutva government ruling us. Though I do think any other government would have done the same but our lotuses are sterner. They have to take a strong stance and attack known terrorist strongholds in Pakistan, along the border. So everyone dies.
Normal, everyday Indians who can’t fight for segregation of garbage, or the city governance not providing us good roads and better infrastructure are incensed by Pakistanis who have always been this way. They are twisted and untrustworthy. They love chaos. We must give them chaos. Show them what’s what. Put them in their place. India is not to be trifled with. And we should not trust Indian Muslims too. They are all the same. They have contacts. Don’t trust the liberals either. They are Islam apologists and the reason we have to take a firm stand.
So who is taking this firm stand?
Poor soldiers who come from disempowered backgrounds, army personnel whose privileges are severely cut, fighters for whom we’ll create Insta posts and honour them with Jai Hind and Om Shanti. No RIP. Because we have to be culturally mindful. RIP is foreign phrasing.
We are puffed up, bloated on our self-importance now, we’ve lost our man (we didn’t know he existed a few days ago, we’ll forget him a few hours later) so we are entitled to more blood from their side.
Their side has similar, indignant rationale. Naturally.
But they are more devious, we say.
And so we burn. All of us. Little by little till nothing remains.
And still she cries
And still the world pursues
Jug Jug to dirty ears.
Women worry about safety, medicines, water, vegetables, food, comfort. They fear getting raped, mutilated, widowed, childless. They form a sisterhood, move away from border towns sharing Manto’s stories. Khol do.
Women tell their husbands not to rejoice over a life lost on any side. Women bear lives; they know the cost.
Men smirk and say my wife is a good woman she thinks lives lost anywhere is a tragedy. I agree but those sly cowards, those bastards need to be taught a lesson.
As always they don’t understand what their women are telling them, which in short is, ‘for fuck’s sake, shut up and don’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.’ These men who barely shell peas in peacetime have strategies on shell falling during war.
They are little boys, very small men, playing a dangerous game in the comfort of their homes through mobile WhatsApp forwards, and when the stakes get higher on X, erstwhile Twitter, with AC on full blast on muggy nights far from the border towns. We don’t even hear drill sirens here!
The women grow quiet in distaste.
The men don’t shut up. You can’t make them. They post forwards full of righteousness and rigour. They argue. They pontificate. They proselytize.
I am not left nor right. I am centrist.
I am left but I am proud of my country’s stance. Nationhood comes first.
I am right, fine you say Hindutva as a slur, but think about it. Even Rama waged a war against Ravana. Evil must be vanquished. These are not myths. Look at these Muslims, Christians. Do they call the Quran a myth? The Bible a myth? How many young people go see Rama in Ayodhya as our ancestor? These are our ancestors. I will fight for humanity. I will fight for justice. I will wage a war for my country.
Everyone talks ideology.
They label you naive when you talk about humanity.
***
Two weeks ago, I discussed Banu Mushtaq’s Fire Rain translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.
In this short fiction discussion about a manufactured communal episode, some of my participants said, ‘These common people couldn’t even see what was happening in front of their eyes.’
‘Conflict in the story? Moral corruption of course.’
‘They used religion as a distraction tactic.’
‘Religion as a convenience tool. More like idiocy.’
“‘Islam is in danger’ it seems. So dramatic. I cannot believe they fall for it.”
‘They didn’t care about the child, the women, the poor.’
‘Such a heavy prize to pay, for what? It’s a brilliant satire.’
It was a great discussion because I believed something was learnt. Readers at least won’t be easy to manipulate.
A week later I am trying to squash a full-blown pro-war anti-war debate on one of my communities and ruing how freedom of speech has such few caveats, and seemingly intelligent people have no sense of tact nor timing. Nobody at this point cares about circumspection. Silence is best avoided till we are permanently silenced, lest we have regrets.
‘Nationhood is not an ideology. It’s our identity. Are you even an Indian, a real person?’
‘For Asians, nationhood is reclaiming dignity and power from a white oppressor. For the colonizers, nationhood is plundering.’
‘It is all very nuanced.’
Only it isn’t. Nothing about a war is nuanced.
Wars were fought in Asia too to plunder as much as to protect.
Nationhood and patriotism are all good emotions in peace time. In war time, they are mere tools for propaganda and power.
My friend’s Holocaust professor said this in a Harvard lecture that she attended. She shared this with me over lunch a few years ago and the message was seared into my brain, “In a fight against ideology and human lives, choose human lives.”
But nationhood is not merely an ideology. And we are choosing human lives. Our human lives. They have a different ideology that doesn’t value human lives so they must go.
Anyway don’t worry, we can shut Pakistan for good. We have enough going, to do that. China? We can take on China too. No big deal. Russia will support us. US too. This is in the bag.
But, lives will be lost.
It’s likely not going to be ours.
Some casualties are to be expected, of course. We’ll post about our martyrs. It is a war.
I ruthlessly shut everyone up on the communities. For now. They were good enough to listen. For now.
It achieved nothing.
***
Why are we clamoring for war?
It is war.
'Do you know nothing?
Do you see nothing?
Do you remember
‘Nothing?’
From the Illiad to the Mahabharata, to the holocaust accounts to the accounts of civil wars tearing Africa apart, we have read these books so often, discussed, discoursed, intellectually masturbated so hard and well, we could smoke an entire box of slim, imported cigarettes afterwards, that’s how good our discussions were.
We were puffed up with our intelligence, our empathy, our ability to classify our ideologies.
Today I feel we were nothing but crickets scratching on a windowpane, achieving nothing.
The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden
1907 – 1973
. She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
. She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
From The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1955 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
We the students of poetry read and saw The Shield of Achilles again and again.
Sightless. But oh so smug.
And in my communities, in a few days, someone will quote from the Bhagwadgita or some such, about how we are to play our roles with detachment, they also serve who only stand and wait, or whatever will be will be, etc., and I will pretend to be convinced about the import of words.
I’ve never felt more impotent in my work life. My life’s work has achieved nothing.
Poetry indeed makes nothing happen.
Literature and writing even less.
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