I Am Not A Man
Manmohan Dutta —————————————- What am I? I am a man. But I do not have humanity in me. In order to have humanity one has to master the art of showcasing hypocrisy, a variance in words and deeds; one must partake of chest-thumping, manifest activism, and arrogance. But I am unable to do all that. Therefore there is no humanity in me. I am unnatural and insane. But those who call themselves human beings—I do not see any natural stability in them either. The whole world is manic. Perhaps that is the reason it is unable to comprehend its different streaks and qualities. And so I am insane. I know this world is but a game of shadows; our existence a seductive trompe l’oeil. I have come alone and will disappear so. None will come along with me. I have realized that one requires both friends and enemies. Just friends will not do. That is why I and my kind of people are not humans. The creatures who call themselves humans loathe us. What shall we do? I am the forest flower. I took birth in the forest. In the forest is all my lingering. I persist there. I do not mind anyone’s not calling me a human. But my only thought, my heart’s desire, is that I should perish in the forest too. Let my final bed be spread amidst the hushed, caring lap of vana-devi. Let me merge and mingle where every atom cries that aching song. There are so many people in this world. So many are rich, others well-regarded, then there are the poor, or stupid, scholarly many, happy or sorrowful, small and big—all are but humans. But not me. Who am I? I am not any other creature. But I could not become a man worthy of his name. So I am mad. Why mad? Because I realize that to work silently here is a waste of energy. Only the one who, with great fanfare, can trump up his eminence and power is mobile. The silent one is dead. I usually do not smile. Why don’t I smile? Is there any subject at which one can smile? Some people smile in order to annoy somebody else. Some other fellow smiles so that he can sweeten and mollify another’s mind. I do not like such smiles. I do not have any interest. So I do not smile. What is smiling? At some beautiful high point of our mind is the source of true smile. Meaningful contortions and distortions of facial muscles have nothing to do with smiling. Where has that smile gone—that truest form of smile that arises from the deepest region of the soul, traipsing along, rejuvenating our heart and mind, reverberating through our veins and arteries? I realize the worth of such a smile. Whereof I cannot smile, thereof I remain silent. So I am a pariah in human society. Therefore I am not a human. I do not have humanity in me. I am useless, insane! Selflessness is the maddest option in this world. So, my kind of people are insane and useless to others. Everyone has one purpose or another. But I don’t have any. Humans are selfish. In every pore and atom of his heart the seed and imprimatur of the self is embossed. Selflessness is a subject beyond their ken. So I am insane. I am useless. Yes, that is the reason that the infant or the teenager, the young man, the middle-aged or the elderly—no one can tolerate me. As soon as they see me, their spite and enviousness automatically spring up. As soon as nature’s child, the tiniest of toddlers, spots me, there emerges a speck of smile on his lips. Sarcasm and mockery writ large all over his distorting and contorting face. The naughty child becomes naughtier the moment he sees me. With his natural mischievousness, augmented manifold, he scrambles toward me. A fresh tide of hope washes over the young-man’s mind as soon as he notices me. Oblivious to the whole of creation, forgetful of every care, he dives into the waves of the snickers and shrieks of my manic condition. The middle aged man begins to foster and ripen contempt and repugnance as soon he recognizes me. He finds a fresh fillip to bring grave charges of fraud, deceit, posturing and swindling against me. For one final time the old man’s begrudging jealousy is inflamed as soon as he spies me. As he gets a sense of my fearlessness, my broad heart, unperturbed by the thoughts of death, he begins to bark and bluster, following the adage. My ways are all against the tide of worldly laws. Therefore, I am useless, insane. I am doing fine being mad. I do not chase worldly distractions. Do not think you can distract me with those gestures of your body or eyebrow. I despise such cleverness. So, they try to ignore and shove me away. With inflamed nostrils, muttering all kinds of known and unknown swear-words they crown me with appellations. Ways to brush me by the wayside. No harm in that. My heart says: Yours and mine, our friendship dawned Infamy was the award Let people spread buzz and slander You and I did our job তেরি মেরি দোস্তি লাগল লোক সব বদনামী কিয়া। লোক সব্কো বকনে দিজে তোমনে হামনে কাম কিয়া ॥ Than-didi says, if you are able to be blessed with your husband’s love, it does not matter whether you receive other kinds of love. But I do not get familial love. Let them ignore. I have spoken to my soul. O my soul—it is very difficult to be good to people. Do not expect the love of ordinary people. Try and turn bad and base as much as possible. You will be freed from all responsibility of being human. Since the zamindar does not accept tenancy tax from fallow land, you will be free. Is it because I follow
Bridge and Door
Georg Simmel ________________________ The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms. And, by virtue of this equal demand on self-excluding concepts, natural existence seems to resist any application of them at all. Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other. By choosing two items from the undisturbed store of natural things in order to designate them as ‘separate’, we have already related them to one another in our consciousness, we have emphasized these two together against whatever lies between them. And conversely, we can only sense those things to be related which we have previously somehow isolated from one another; things must first be separated from one another in order to be together. Practically as well as logically, it would be meaningless to connect that which was not separated, and indeed that which also remains separated in some sense. The formula according to which both types of activity come together in human undertakings, whether the connectedness or the separation is felt to be what was naturally ordained and the respective alternative is felt to be our task, is something which can guide all our activity. In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected or connect the separate. The people who first built a path between two places performed one of the greatest human achievements. No matter how often they might have gone back and forth between the two and thus connected them subjectively, so to speak, it was only in visibly impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places were objectively connected. The will to connection had become a shaping of things, a shaping that was available to the will at every repetition, without still being dependent on its frequency or rarity. Path-building, one could say, is a specifically human achievement; the animal too continuously overcomes a separation and often in the cleverest and most ingenious ways, but its beginning and end remain unconnected, it does not accomplish the miracle of the road: freezing movement into a solid structure that commences from it and in which it terminates. This achievement reaches its zenith in the construction of a bridge. Here the human will to connection seems to be confronted not only by the passive resistance of spatial separation but also by the active resistance of a special configuration. By overcoming this obstacle, the bridge symbolizes the extension of our volitional sphere over space. Only for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’; if we did not first connect them in our practical thoughts, in our needs and in our fantasy, then the concept of separation would have no meaning. But natural form here approaches this concept as if with a positive intention; here the separation seems imposed between the elements in and of themselves, over which the spirit now prevails, reconciling and uniting. The bridge becomes an aesthetic value in so far as it accomplishes the connection between what is separated not only in reality and in order to fulfil practical goals, but in making it directly visible. The bridge gives to the eye the same support for connecting the sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical reality. The mere dynamics of motion, in whose particular reality the ‘purpose’ of the bridge is exhausted, has become something visible and lasting, just as the portrait brings to a halt, as it were, the physical and mental life process in which the reality of humankind takes place and gathers the emotion of that reality, flowing and ebbing away in time, into a single timelessly stable visualization which reality never displays and never can display. The bridge confers an ultimate meaning elevated above all sensuousness, an individual meaning not mediated by any abstract reflection, an appearance that draws the practical purposive meaning of the bridge into itself, and brings it into a visible form in the same way as a work of art does with its ‘object’. Yet the bridge reveals its difference from the work of art, in the fact that despite its synthesis transcending nature, in the end it fits into the image of nature. For the eye it stands in a much closer and much less fortuitous relationship to the banks that it connects than does, say, a house to its earth foundation, which disappears from sight beneath it. People quite generally regard a bridge in a landscape to be a ‘picturesque’ element, because through it the fortuitousness of that which is given by nature is elevated to a unity, which is indeed of a completely intellectual nature. Yet by means of its immediate spatial visibility it does indeed possess precisely that aesthetic value, whose purity art represents when it puts the spiritually gained unity of the merely natural into its island-like ideal enclosedness. Whereas in the correlation of separateness and unity, the bridge always allows the accent to fall on the latter, and at the same time overcomes the separation of its anchor points that make them visible and measurable, the door represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act. The human being who first erected a hut, like the first road-builder, revealed the
That Brass Of Our Inheritance
Translations: Tarun Bhartiya ____________________________________ Raghuvir Sahay Laugh Laugh Laugh Instantly Laugh – you are being watched, Laugh but not at yourself because its bitterness Would be noticed and you would not survive it Laugh in a way that your happiness does not show As it would be suspected that you do not participate in the remorse And you would not survive it While laughing, don’t let anyone know who you are laughing at Let them all believe that like them you laugh A defeated laugh of intimacy Just as they laugh instead of speaking As long as that mighty round dome reverberates you can Speak to yourself When the echo is about to fade laugh again Because if found quiet, you shall be indicted for resistance If you laugh at the end then all will laugh and you can be safe Laugh but be careful of the jokes Jokes have words And words may have meanings ascribed by some person a century ago It is better to laugh while talking So that the talk looses all significance And laugh on those compulsory moments Like the assault on the destitute by the privileged When no one can do a thing Except for that destitute And even he often laughs Laugh laugh laugh instantly Laugh before they leave While shaking their hands With pleading eyes Laugh and remind them That you had laughed yesterday Coming Danger In this shameful and defeated age Go and find a mind Which does not flatter out of habit Go and find poverty Which asks nothing for itself And let it for once stare you in your eyes Do it right now, for the people have started flourishing Women would drink, men would eat – Ramesh There would come an age like this- Ramesh No one would have any point of view – Ramesh There would be anger but no resistance Except for petitions – Ramesh There would be Danger and Danger’s warning bell And the King would ring it – Ramesh Your Laugh The poor are being oppressed you said and laughed Democracy on its death bed you said and laughed Everyone is corrupt you said and laughed Everyone despondent you said and laughed So secure you must be I thought Suddenly finding me alone you laughed *** Dhoomil Lying Next To That Woman For the first time I felt That nudity Militates Against blindness Lying next to that woman I felt that where hatred and Candles have proved useless And the shadows of the melted Words have turned into faces Of menacing animals, my Poems survive on a diet of Mud and meat To rub out and Obliterate time It is not enough to have bouncing bodies While our faces face Leaking pots in the kitchen And night Does not become a path When water melons are being slaughtered inside us But our heads have Turned to stone on the pillows Lying next to that woman I have felt that home is Built on curses of small comforts And where it is forbidden to Walk with shoes This is grass i.e. green fear Enforcing my thoughts Is it not nice That my neighbour has lost All his teeth Like frostbitten peas Movements in his thighs Have collapsed And termites Have eaten through his ocular health Lying next to that woman (when suddenly the pumps fell silent in front of dingy houses) I felt that to turn Breathlessly into a forest next to a swamp Is not a man’s habit but his petty helplessness And there lives a coward mind inside me Which not only protects But is heir to my buttons *** Asad Zaidi East of West The poor knows nothing beyond his village The one who is less poor has seen the whole district Only the tyrants have seen the province and the nation They are the ones discovering novel ways of devotion Turning people into radishes and carrots And the poor into dried dark pickle Even the English found India very Indian As it seems these days to some Hindi Journalists Nineteen Hundred and Sixty Five I am talking about Aapaa[2] who is Talking about Ammi[3] who is talking of her Shauher[4] who was talking of that Officer who was Talking about the country who was talking About the war in a screaming voice Right now I am not going to talk of Pakistan Hindi Journalism I have a packet in my pocket It would profit you if you buy it View it and you would be surprised at your ability Feed it to a bad Muslim He would mutate into a good Hindu If a good Sikh eats it He would surely vanish in an instant Come on Sir, taste it, you shall be blessed with a grandson soon Poetry Reading I went to a place famous for its goons disillusioned prophets and unemployed half-poets It was evening and in my welcome a light was lit Audience trickled in one by one I kept getting their introductions – what they did what was their name Things I am sure to forget Students, clerk, few teachers even a postman and a Paanwaal That wretched Panwaadi He was smiling a very paternal smile and offering examples of self-composed poetry I spied a few old ladies some girls-adolescents Some Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh louts Extending their humble respects – O God how would poetry be saved in this province At last, clattered in wife of the city administrator to kick off the show (Recently I saw in the papers a small news item announcing her death reasons unknown) Ancestral Cannon Come sometimes to our place To view our glorious destitution There is this medieval cannon Difficult to use That brass of