Sermon on the Bridge

They have not yet sent the photographs. I am waiting for them, checking my inbox every ten minutes. I have never waited for photographs like this before. This is not the wait of someone who has fallen in love with a stranger and is waiting for her glimpse in a group photograph. This is not the wait of an anxious person who has done something that he is waiting to be reported in the morning's newspaper. This is not even the wait of a student who has found out of his success and only waiting for the official results to be announced. This is an ordinary person's wait for a chance to revisit some extraordinary moments. I am waiting for the pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, in the words of Marianne Moore, of ‘that romantic passageway, first seen by the eye of the mind, then by the eye, waiting for pictures of that Climactic ornament, that double rainbow...

Yesterday, after lunch in one of Brooklyn's small art galleries, in a neighbourhood that looked like a workers' plantation on the sea-side some of us decided to walk across the famous bridge which was forever hanging upon our imagination. The lunch was Indian, the hosts American and the gathering multi-generational. The youngest among us was a three-month baby, who had come with her mother, an American Fulbrighter who had been on a Fulbright to India some years ago. I wouldn’t be sure of who was the oldest of us, though one Indian gentleman, a surgeon on Fulbright sweetly assumed the responsibility of thanking the organizers on the behalf of us, Indians, as “the senior-most, if not the oldest person” from India.

What is it that he has actually ‘crossed’ to be the oldest? What has age got to do with the number of years a man has passed? Who is young and who is not? Is the hundred twenty years old Brooklyn bridge new? Is New York, new?

I was thinking of all these questions when we walked across the bridge, seven of us Fulbrighters from all parts of India, marvelling at the energy of the cars that raced under that footwalkers lane, and under them, the slow, calm river. You couldn’t repeat with Bachhan, “Is paar priye madhu hai, tum ho/ us paar na jaane kya hoga” ( On this side sweetheart, are you, nectar of love/ Who knows what lies on the other?) for there was on the other side Manhattan, the most certain mass of human capital, arranged in dazzling symmetries, almost inviting you, making you feel as if you can walk upon the sky. Now to ask what is that on the other side, to ask if Manhattan is for real, would be considered blasphemy even by the most romantic of hearts. However much your real your love may be, Manhattan cannot be unreal.

The bridge, hanging upon the river, minimally touching her, like a stable volunteer to the cause of humanity who keeps himself away from the attractions of love, looked as human as all those who walked upon it. It was hanging, like we do between life and death, tied by the thousands of strings that weave a net of magic and strength. While we were all fixing our our cameras against the lights of New York and the indifferent sunset on the horizon, Kamran was reminded of his duty towards the Almighty, inspired as much by the vast sky as by the delicately trembling wood under his feet. This was perhaps his first evening in New York and he must have realized that the sun disappears quicker than it does in his native Aligarh in India. He chose himself a corner of the bridge, exactly above the middle of the river, between sky and water, between Brooklyn and Manhattan, between day and night, laid down a piece of a cloth and sat down with his beard brushing his chest, his Kurta covering his thighs, and offered his Namaaz, undisturbed, like the mighty bridge itself, by the swirl of movements around him. Rivers flow, the bridges stand still.

What kind of a bridge Kamran was at the moment, I wondered? What limits he inspires us to cross? What more do we need to bridge and how? What prayer he has for all of us?

The group-walk on the Brooklyn Bridge left me with questions while the rest returned home with their answers and the images in their cameras. I am waiting for the pictures to arrive in my inbox, and then perhaps I will be able to find my answers too!

Water water nowhere water not a drop to drink

Poetry in the times of Drought What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. – from Ulysses, Chapter 17 And what do the poor like us hate about it? ITS UNAVAILABILITY

Filled buckets are heavy, Empty buckets are HEAVIER

Children dragging water slightly above the ground.

Empty plastic buckets in queue for water

Welcome to Dumka

Dumka is surrounded by hills on four and naxalites on three sides.The one rather less exciting direction is from where you enter the town.Some ambitious town planner, a decade ago, had decided that Dumka would have its own Big Ben. So an apology of a tower with a big clock was built to greet all who. The clock however never ran on time.For ten years this tower that aspired to be the poor man's Qutub Minar hosted a clock (or are there four facing each direction?)that the poor man called "pagal ghadi"..i prefer to translate it not as "the mad clock" but as "the mad times".at five in the morning it would announce the midnight and the broad-daylight could be late evening by its logic.the town also couldnt console itself that the clock is meant for the indian trains since it is not connected with the railways network.
Change came to the sleepy town ten years after the installation of the big ben.It hit the national headlines for a brief moment when we heard that "singur" is being repeated in 'Kathikund' a small block in Dumka district.(Kathikund may be translated as the "lake of trees").Land was being acquired for developmentfollowed by tribal uprising,lathicharge, arson and a police firing.One bus was burnt/lit and two young boys were shot.One tribal boy,in the orientalist fashion a friend told me,was shot in the head when he sat down to duck the bullets!!The police only fires at the ground!!U stoop to get shot...
Media created and recreated this Singur trope and politicians exploited it.In the coming Vidhan sabha elections many of these agitators became political leaders,some fought elections, all lost.Land was peacefully transferred and the dream-hungry town began seeing real mercedes cars,flashy dresses, english speaking bosses and swarms of engineers.how many parents had lived under the fetish of engineer sons!at last they could see how do they look like:men in uniform...and yes that reduced the glamour of the bureaucrat and added to the stain on the perceived soiled kurta of the politician.Soon they hoped they will have air-conditioned shopping malls.After the Naxals,the employable youth had other set of recruiters:the Jindals. Modernity,though late,had arrived.Or had it?
The mercedes people had come and were greeted by the same clock i told u about in the beginning.They were smart people and were driven by values of punctuality and clock time.They had immediately bought ten pencil batteries for fifty rupees,less thah half of what the Mnrega worker earns in a day.They waited for the right time to run the clock.Post-election the mad time was sane again and along with the tower and right clocks were huge corporate posters to welcome you.They say times maintained by Jindals.People read:times maintained by Jindal.Welcome to Dumka.

Dumka:Violence,Being and Nothingness

I have already made the uneasy confession of my inability to have a dialogue,the primary reason being the inequality in our positions...I mean between the positions of the writer and the reader.There is nothing brilliant in claiming that all of us are unique individuals by virtue of our being positioned uniquely,historically and sociologically.This confession still has its exceptions that need to be pushed to the centre.
There are, i believe, many places like Dumka, in the map of India.Places where the native lives in exile:forced,condemned and quiet.This native population is usually an elderly and middle-aged multitude who cant speak in English and good Hindi,whose children live far away chasing either the blend of the feudal-corporate dream or getting what is known as education in our world.This population suffers from a defect of vision following sixty years of a post-colonial nation state that has let it see only defective systems of governance and culture.
I am aware of the obscurity of my expression and am rather unashamed about it.Important political theorists call this region the cow-belt and the term is quickly losing its derogatory connotations.The area has found new states,Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh in our constitutional framework.

No newspaper is complete these days without reports of a new category of insurgency called "Naxal violence" in some or the other corner of these two newly formed states.The legal/legislative apparatus of the socialist,secular,democratic nation has declared it criminal to have any sympathies for this kind of violence, as if criminalising violence was unprecedented and insufficient.An ex-Jharkhand chief minister is alleged to have amassed thousands of crores in an year of regime.He was busy buying mines and islands in English and Japanese speaking countries of the world while we were mourning that fact that we dont have smart ministers who can make effective deals in times when chief ministers compete against each other in wooing the mittals and jindals of the world!His acts, and many other acts of a similar kind, are softly called 'scams',perhaps to rhyme with 'spams' that fill up our mailboxes,in the vocabulary of the self-governed country while legal activists are busy wondering how many acts in the domestic and public sphere can be called "violent".

Violence needs bloodshed,broken skulls and a few blasts;the more glorified ones achieve the dubious status of becoming an '-ism' like terrorism.The one in which our ministers and bureaucrats engage in are non-acts of violence.One doesnt have to act to kill, merely sit and watch.Some strange postmortems discover a nothing in corpses that die unnatural death in these absurd places:the nothing that the starved consume.But this violence is not violence simply because no violent act has been committed!!

These inactive people,not surprisingly, have their supporters and yes symapathizers. Did some Nazi sympathizer write a book called "Being and Nothingness?"

Newspapers of the last week in jharkhand published photographs of aides in this scam and stories of this man who used to sell milk door-to-door and is now owner of properties in the land of diamonds and that man who once ran a khaini-shop before becoming this person with aay se adhik sampatti. What say economists about this magical phenomenon of assets more than income?I am afraid the media reports and the photographs of these men and their and properties are clipped and pasted on walls of many aspiring scamsters who are selling tobacco,milk,liquor or (horror,horror) medicines in some small towns like the one from where i am writing or some big city where you are reading this....

Marquez claims to have invented his magical realism since the traditional realism was inadequate to contain the reality he set out to negotiate with in his fictions.Our English fiction writers, children of Rushdie,find no less magical our own reality...but is it adequate too?Is reality indeed a matter of the magic of words and nothing more?Perhaps so.Or else why should our newspaper readers need no Rushdie, no Marquez.An average reader of daily Hindi newspapers,i have a hunch, will find magic realism a poorer art,stale, incomplete and conservative.

What say you?