A Horseradish Is No Sweeter Than A Radish
Anna Politkovskaya Selections from A Russian Diary. Time covered here: 2003-2004 [Anna could have left Russia. Family and friends had urged her to leave. Russian soldiers, police, oligarchs, criminal gangs, and the highest-ranking Russian politicians had explicitly threatened her life. When she grew violently ill after sipping a cup of tea on a flight into Beslan to negotiate during the school hostage crisis in 2004, she saw it was an attempt to silence her there and then. Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who became a critic of Vladimir Putin, told her to leave Russia. But she kept on: “Our society isn’t a society anymore,” she wrote. “It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells…..”. On the day Anna was shot to death, October 7, 2006, in the elevator of her apartment block on Lesnaya Street, the editor of Novaya Gazeta says that she was about to file a long story on torture as it is routinely conducted by Chechen security forces supported by Russia. That story will almost certainly never be read by anyone, inside or outside Russia. Even the substance of it will probably never be known. Russian police seized her notes, her computer hard drive, and photographs of two people she would reportedly accuse of torture.] *** December 8 Early in the morning, political analysts assembled on the Free Speech program to discuss the results as they came in. They were jittery. Igor Bunin talked of a crisis of Russian liberalism, about how the Yukos affair had suddenly aroused a wave of antioligarchic feeling in the middle of the campaign. They talked about the hatred that had accumulated in the hearts of many people, “especially decent people who could not bring themselves to support Zhirinovsky,” and the fact that the eclectic United Russia Party had managed to unite everybody, from the most liberal to the most reactionary. He predicted that the president would now stand in for the liberals in the ruling elite. Free Speech was shortly to be taken off the air by its parent company NTV, to which Putin commented, “Who needs a talk show for political losers?” December 9 At 10:53 a.m. today a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the Nationale Hotel in Moscow, across the square from the Duma and 145 meters [160 yards] from the Kremlin. “Where is this Duma?” she asked a passerby, before exploding. For a long time the head of a Chinese tourist who had been next to her lay on the asphalt without its body. December 11 This morning there was more of the same, a reputation destroyed by the Kremlin’s embrace. Andrey Makarevich was an underground rock musician in the Soviet period, a dissident, a fighter against the KGB,* who used to sing with passion, “Don’t bow your head before the changeful world. Some day that world will bow its head to us!” It was the anthem of the first years of democracy under Yeltsin. Today, on live television on the state-run Channel One, he is being presented with a medal “For Services to the Fatherland. December 12 Constitution Day. A holiday. Moscow is flooded with militiamen and agents in plain clothes. There are dogs everywhere, searching for explosives. The president held a grand reception in the Kremlin for the political and oligarchic elite and made a speech about human rights, predicated on the notion that they had triumphed in Russia. Yeltsin was there, looking fitter and younger, but with mental problems written all over his face. He was there because the Constitution was adopted during his presidency. He is not usually invited to Putin’s Kremlin. December 23 Ritual murders are taking place in Moscow. A second severed head has been found in the past twenty-four hours, this time in the district of Go-lianovo in the east of Moscow. It was in a rubbish container on Altaiskaya Street. Yesterday evening, a head in a plastic bag was found lying on a table in the courtyard outside Apartment Building 3 on Krasnoyarskaya Street. Both men had been dead for twenty-four hours before the discovery. The circumstances in the two cases are almost identical: the victims are from the Caucasus, aged thirty to forty, and have dark hair. Their identities are unknown. The heads were found two-thirds of a mile apart. December 27 Sterligov, the coffin maker, has been disqualified from standing by the Central Electoral Commission. Viktor Anpilov, a clown from the Workers’ Russia Party, promptly put himself forward. A horseradish is no sweeter than a radish. December 28 At last they have found a worthy opponent for Putin: Sergey Mironov,* the speaker of the Soviet of the Federation, has been proposed by the Party of Life (another of the dwarf parties set up by the presidential administration’s deputy head, Vladislav Surkov*). He immediately announced, “I support Putin.” The conference of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The Communists have proposed Nikolai Kharitonov, an odd, garrulous man who used to be a KGB officer. How wonderful! Ivan Rybkin has announced he will stand. He is the creature of Putin’s main opponent, Boris Berezovsky,* now in exile abroad. Rybkin used to be the speaker of the Duma and chairman of the National Security Council. Who is he today? Time will tell. Meanwhile, Moscow is at a standstill. The rich haven’t a care in the world; they are abroad on vacation. Moscow is very rich. All the restaurants, even the most expensive, are crammed or closed for corporate parties. The tables are laden with delicacies beyond the imaginings of the rest of Russia. Thousands of dollars are spent in an evening. Is this the last fling of the twenty-first century’s New Economic Policy? December 30 Putin needed competitors, and he has received them as a New Year’s gift. The new candidates have all promptly declared that the main thing is not to win but to take part. January 5 Putin holds a cabinet meeting. “We need to
Nostalgia For The Light: The FTII Fiasco And A Cinema That Is Lost (1)
Parichay Patra With the appointment of an obscure actor as the director of the most prestigious film school in India, an outrage engulfs social media and the said school erupts into a protest in tandem with a number of other student movements that are going on in different parts of the country.[i] The obscure actor who goes by the name of Gajendra Chauhan happens to be a part of Indian B movie camp, primarily because of his participation in a handful of soft porn belonging to the pre-internet era.[ii] There is an element of moralism at work, a vice from which even the Indian left is not immune, as evident in the Facebook posts on Khuli Khidki (P. Chandrakumar, 1989) and other soft porn ventures involving Chauhan. There are more rational explanations for the outrage available, as Chauhan appeared in the role of the mythical Hindu king Yudhisthira in the well-known Mahabharata TV series (B. R. Chopra Productions, 1988-90). With a Hindutva force in power at the centre and its black shirts on loose,[iii] the appointment of Chauhan as the director has wider political connotations than we can initially assume. Yet there is another, a third explanation circulating on social media, something which has garnered more popular support from the Indian cinephiles than the other two. It talks about the glorious past of the school that once had Ritwik Ghatak as a teacher and produced almost the entire Indian New Wave, barring a few self-taught filmmakers like Mrinal Sen and Govindan Aravindan. As a cinephile, film society activist and a student of cinema, this is the point that troubles me most. Let me elucidate the reasons why I find it problematic. The entire Indian New Wave group that came out of FTII, consisting of Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and John Abraham, used to signify a different age of film production. The setting up of the film institute in Pune, the establishment of a national film archive, state’s encouragement in film society activism[iv]and investment in realizing an arthouse/alternative filmmaking practice are associated with each other as part of a statist project. The statist investment in cinema production created a furore in popular cinema industry, primarily because of the latter’s problematic negotiation(s) with the state. Bombay-based popular industry considered it as a premonition of an imminent nationalization and responded with various substantial changes in film form and aesthetics.[v] As opposed to the popular and middle cinema,[vi] the state-sponsored arthouse gradually secured a place in the wider cultural constellations of the 1970s. Obviously not all of them were state-sponsored,[vii] but the most daringly innovative aesthetes, Kaul and Shahani, were able to make films only because of the statist investment. The nation-state was a Soviet ally back then, and the film school-film society-cultural radicalism-state-sponsored cinema model followed its precedents in the East European nations, with FTII Pune keeping in trends with VGIK (Moscow), FAMU (Prague) and Łódź film school (Warsaw).[viii]The statist investment model itself was a transnational model and filmmakers themselves developed their transnational associations, with Shahani assisting Bresson and taking part in the 1968 uprising in Paris.[ix]As Shahani told me in a telephone conversation, Indian cinema was transnational in their days, it has been reduced to be merely global in the age of Bollywood. Indian New Wave’s liaison with the state began to wane soon with the changing perspective of the state and the evolving economic policies. Film industry journals and popular film magazines featured debates on various problems concerning the economic model of FFC/NFDC. Bharat Rungachary accused Mani Kaul of being more expensive than Manmohan Desai in the pages of Filmfare (Rungachary 1980). Jagdish Parikh, coming from a business management background, introduced corporatized policies during his four year chairmanship of FFC, arousing controversies concerning loan and/or subsidy (Parikh 1980). The final nail to the coffin is the economic liberalization, which resulted in massive changes in popular film forms, state policies, production-distribution-exhibition circuit and a rapid proliferation of the Indian diaspora worldwide, with the global Bollywood being a part of the emerging superpower’s cultural diplomacy. It is also simultaneous with the meteoric rise of the Hindu Right. The last major interview of Kumar Shahani that I could locate in the NFAI archive shows how sad Shahani was to find that none of his students can make films because of the unavailability of state-funding (Shahani 1992). Incidentally, but not coincidentally, the interview was published on 6 December 1992, a historic day in the history of modern India. Coming back to the present, what I want to consider as a problematic is the referencing of the New Wave, the nostalgia for a lost cinema in popular parlance. It is quite clear that a non-entity like Gajendra Chauhan should not be appointed as the FTII director, it defies the economic logic behind a film school that works as a supply-line for Bollywood. Hindi popular cinema generates a huge amount of revenue for the state and the state spends a miniscule part of it to subsidize film education. We wonder whether the Modi administration is going to represent itself as an incompetent one, one that fails to realize the significance of FTII in the domain of one of India’s largest industries. Modi’s affiliation to the PRC model of capitalism sounds hollow, PRC would never have appointed someone like Chauhan in Beijing Film Academy, a school that produced all the major fifth and sixth generation Chinese auteurs. But the economic logic hardly features in popular discussions on the FTII fiasco, it revolves around the binary of an art cinema of Ghatak/Kaul/Shahani pitted against the B movie of a Chauhan. Jeffrey Sconce, citing Pierre Bourdieu’s influential critique on taste preference and class privilege, considered B movies and cult films as ‘paracinema’ (Sconce 1995). The subjective and impressionistic judgement on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ cinema involves wider critical debate.[x] So the outrage over Chauhan’s inadequacy for being a B movie actor cannot avoid the risk of being elitist, especially since there are reasons more valid to oppose
Champak, Certified
Shubham Shree Comrade I right through the evening, samosas wolfed pakoras, bread rolls gobbled a million cups of tea guzzled marking time for those mess bells at the age of 28, measuring the mirror those piercing eyes. a few grey hairs, ailing father and some relatives mother’s absurd clamour for a studio-photograph home a door bolted. in my eyes you smiled a fist stretched a fiery slogan a poster, off-colour, on the wall a kurta trailing thread chappal-straps unpinning polycystic ovarian syndrome. quietly you are that too. life unspools, thus dreaming politbureau chores for the mahila-morcha hawking manifestos at seminars or out on streets, baton-beaten some days in remand making it to the newspapers but in the room, the pillow that remains drenched malodorous where do I report that, comrade? *** Comrade II that pole 20 centimetres by the tape and his body are matched evenly at 30, a loosely hanging shirt, remnant of the early nineties and the denim, a gift from the archaeology department even after the last drag on the circulating cigarette if that parantha remains elusive then a fit of laughter is fine. MA second division whole-timer used to be a mental patient until last month his party membership an inheritance from a dead father chuckling, nonchalant this comrade, knows all about the world but not about his home inundated by last night’s flood. for a fortnight, his cellphone balance =zero! *** About That Boy with three days of stubble every guy looks hot (that is what I believe) and if, instead of the gym, for a week he is hospital interned then his eyes turn philosophic yellow and melancholic burning and lifeless unsalted laughter, shriveled smile walking but to tire on a fulsome evening, shawl-wrapped—looking at infinity eating once, puking thrice crouched in syringe-fear. running her palm over the wistful face of that boy the girl thinks deep within, let me die but nothing should happen to him ailing boys become suspicious of their lovers they cannot read minds—these ailing boys. *** Women they were to pick-up Asia’s patience Africa’s endurance Europe’s sense of fashion American glitziness but they lost their bearings they gleaned love from Asia philosophy from Europe Africa gave them uprightness America, revolt they lost all the competence of a good wife and ended up as blemished lovers too. *** Till Language Gives Us Words my mind will brace me countless dreams I will dream squeezing my native power to the final drop I will love you. whatever the yoke, as long as language lives there is complete freedom *** Love the Ganga’s the sun’s the harvest’s the flowers’ my dialect’s and your enchantment will not wane however life goes till the scent of your bosom lingers on my tongue the heart will not break. *** Rubber-Band on Socks Golu of class I, early-morning lone and shy tiptoes tothe monitor of the second grade and submits: “Please, will you give me that rubber-band from your plait?” “Sir will spank.” “Please, give, na? Sir will not thrash girls, really he won’t, My socks, they are slipsliding away.” *** Elegy Written for the Champaks Lout I was, lout I am, lout I will be whether I say it or not it will be plain from my face wily, oily, roily if you say so sure shall flash all thirty-two and endure not of this world, custom made, bonafide shall still study Hindi. Champak, certified. _____________________________ कॉमरेड I पूरी शाम समोसों पर टूटे लोग दबाए पकौड़े, ब्रेड रोल गटकी चाय पर चाय और तुमने किया मेस की घण्टी का इन्तज़ार अट्ठाइस की उम्र में आईना देखती सूजी हुई आँखें कुछ सफ़ेद बाल, बीमार पिता और रिश्ते स्टूडियो की तस्वीर के लिए माँ का पाग़लपन घर एक बन्द दरवाज़ा — हमारी आँखों में तुम हँसी हो एक तनी हुई मुट्ठी एक जोशीला नारा एक पोस्टर बदरंग दीवार पर एक सिलाई उधड़ा कुर्ता चप्पल के खुले हुए फीते की कील पॉलीसिस्टिक ओवेरियन सिण्ड्रोम भी हो तुम चुपके से ___ यूँ ही गुज़रती है ज़िन्दगी पोलित-ब्यूरो का सपना महिला-मोर्चे का काम सेमिनारों में मेनिफ़ेस्टो बेचते या लाठियाँ खाते सड़कों पर रिमाण्ड में कभी-कभी अख़बारों में छपते पर जो तकिया गीला रह जाता है कमरे में बदबू भरा उसे कहाँ दर्ज करें कॉमरेड ? *** कॉमरेड II टेप से नापकर 20 सेण्टीमीटर का पोल और उसका शरीर बराबर हैं तिस पर एक झलंगी शर्ट 90 के शुरूआती दिनों की और जींस पुरातत्व-विभाग का तोहफ़ा पैंचे की सिगरेट के आख़िरी कश के बाद भी पराठे का जुगाड़ नहीं तो ठहाके ही सही सेकेण्ड डिवीजन एम० ए० होल-टाइमर मानसिक रोगी हुआ करता था पिछले महीने तक दिवंगत पिता से विरासत में पार्टी की सदस्यता लेकर निफ़िक्र खिलखिलाता ये कॉमरेड दुनिया की ख़बर है इसे सिवाय इसके कि रात बाढ़ आ गई है घर में पन्द्रह दिनों से बैलेन्स ज़ीरो है ! *** उस लड़के की याद तीन दिन की शेव में हर लड़का हॉट लगता है (ऐसा मेरा मानना है) और जिम के बदले अस्पताल में पड़ा हो हफ़्ते भर तो आँखें दार्शनिक हो जाती हैं पीली और उदास जलती हुई और निस्तेज बिना नमक की हँसी और सूखी मुस्कुराहटें चले तो थक जाए भरी शाम शॉल ओढ़ कर शून्य में ताके एक बार खाए, तीन बार उल्टी करे दुबक जाए इंजेक्शन के डर से उस लड़के के उदास चेहरे पर हाथ फेरती लड़की मन ही मन सोचती है मैं मर जाऊँ पर इसे कुछ न हो बीमार लड़के प्रेमिकाओं पर शक करने लगते हैं मन नहीं पढ़ पाते बीमार लड़के *** औरतें उन्हें एशिया का धैर्य लेना था अफ़्रीका की सहनशीलता यूरोप का फ़ैशन अमेरिका का आडम्बर लेकिन वे दिशाहीन हो गईं उन्होंने एशिया से प्रेम लिया यूरोप से दर्शन अफ़्रीका से दृढ़ता ली अमेरिका से विद्रोह खो दी अच्छी पत्नियों की योग्यता बुरी प्रेमिकाएँ कहलाईं वे आख़िरकार *** जब तक भाषा देती रहेगी शब्द साथ देगा मन असंख्य कल्पनाएँ करूँगी अपनी क्षमता को आख़िरी बून्द तक निचोड़ कर प्यार करूँगी तुमसे कोई भी बन्धन हो भाषा है जब तक पूरी आज़ादी है *** प्यार
Notes From The Underground
Avishek Parui Picture a train leaving an underground station. Neither the name of the station nor the destination of the train should be important. Names and destinations rarely matter. You could be anywhere while picturing the train. Anywhere with a river before you, preferably standing on a river-bridge. For rivers are like trains. They help you imagine moving bodies. Moving bodies help you make memories. The loveliest memories are of course of things and events that did not happen. How many real rivers have you really seen? Liffey, Brahmaputra, Thames, Ganges. But don’t digress. Bring yourself back to the image. Picture a train leaving an underground station. Of course you are in the train. On a lovely window seat if you like. Looking out at yourself standing on the platform. Two pairs of hands waving goodbyes at each other, if you want to picture something more sentimental. This isn’t a dream by the way. This isn’t real by the way. There aren’t many ways anyway. You look at yourself leave in the train. You think of leaping in front of it. Not now, not yet. But that would be so much better than jumping off a window ledge or a bridge. You could never do it. You have tried. Why only last night. You were sitting on the ledge of your hotel window. Overlooking the Liffey with all its bridgelights falling across the cold Dublin nightair. For twenty minutes or so you ceased to care. You felt so free that you wanted to fly, knowing you will fall. You didn’t care. You just wanted to end it all. But it never works out that way. And you always end up with a tiredness that traps you back. Then it all dies with the thoughts about things to do and stuff to produce and reproduce. Stuff you know you cannot produce and reproduce. For your life is a long lonely struggle not to be found out. So you step down. From the ledge or the bridge. Hoping you will climb again soon. Your stories are never complete. Waiting for trains in a platform full of strangers is a good exercise in existential solidarity. For you end up sharing a slice of time with a random group of people, a slice of time that will slip into all your lives and connect you all for as long as you live although you may never see each other again. All your lives will always contain this wait. Standing with strangers in a metro station makes you feel most comfortable with yourself. You feel freer, sweat lesser and breathe easier. Away from the familiar faces you endlessly entertain with your overdone orchestra of mindful mannerisms and manoeuvres. Waiting at a metro station is a pleasant break from the barbed wires and booby traps in the world of contraptions above. Till the train that comes to take you back. There’s always a train to take you where you don’t want to go. To what you don’t want to know. But waiting for a train isn’t that bad. Especially in the underground where the white platform light oversees yellow trains swishing in like monocled machines. The lights cross and mix with the electronic announcements and screeches. Like metronomic music pieces. Triggering off a synaesthetic stream of consciousness. Together the alchemy makes you feel more alive than you really are. Everyone seems to behave better in the underground. And noises turn to smaller sounds. You may also want to experience the smells in the underground station, if you like. It’s that time of the night when the smell of bleach mixes with sweaty shirts in quiet corners. You have always thought bleach smells a lot like rotting knee-wound, especially mild bleach of lesser quality. You could be mistaken. Perhaps you smelt bleach right before or after you first smelt a rotting knee-wound. Your knee-wound. Perhaps that memory stayed with its associative effect. Memories of smells and their subconscious stains. But you digress again. Meanwhile, someone in the platform has just peeled off an orange, or a peach, if you please. An orange smells better though, you think. And then there are evening newspapers with coffee smells and old leather bags and warm groundnuts bought from the station entrance above. Smells bring back memories, as scientists say and novelists show. Almost everyone around you is remembering something now as the bleach, sweat, orange, coffee, leather and groundnuts mix in unequal intensities. The train is still leaving the station. Slowly slowly slowly. Just in case you don’t lose sight of it in your mind. You can quicken or slow it down as per your wish. Remember. You are in it. Step back a bit. Step up again. Position yourself in the platform perfectly diagonal to the driver’s cabin. Till the train becomes a hazy yellow. Till the only things clear are a wholly peeled orange skin on the platform and you sitting in the moving yellow by a glass. Let a moment pass. The faces around you have become apparitions. Apparitions in a cold morgue like metro. Think of all the madmen you have met. The ones who revisit you in narcoleptic afternoons, standing on the edge of your Rapid Eye Movement visions. By the Brahmaputra, the Thames, the Liffey, the Ganges. Rivers again. Rivers leave memories and madmen behind by their muddied banks. By the bridges. The Howrah Bridge, Old London Bridge, Ha’Penny Bridge. All have homeless madmen along their railings staring at stars. Not all madmen are homeless though. Some draw salaries and drive their own cars. Look at yourself sitting on the train looking at you on the platform. One of you should be leaving behind the other. You aren’t sure yet who is really being left behind. The train is now a river. A yellow river with no name. Remember. A certain madman before the closed Coffee House in Calcutta had told you that the State shouldn’t exist, except as an idea