Evolution Doesn’t Have Nuclear Weapons

 

 

But we do.

 

 

हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट - नये अनुवाद (1)

तो आखिर मैंने हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट के लिए तीन और अनुवाद पूरे कर ही दिए। इतना समय लगने का एक कारण यह था (इसके अलावा कि मेरी उम्मीद के विपरीत और कोई अभी तक इस काम में शामिल होने के लिए आगे नहीं आया है) कि एक लेख काफ़ी लंबा था और उसमें दो कविताओं के उद्धरण थे, जिनमें से एक शायद दुनिया की सबसे अधिक पढ़ी गई कविताओं में से एक है।

उम्मीद है कविता अनुवाद के बाद भी कविता जैसी ही लगेगी।

नये अनुवाद ये हैं:

• ग़ैर-टिकाऊ अविकास: नोम चॉम्स्की
• कला, सच और राजनीति: हैरॉल्ड पिंटर
• सभ्यताओं का टकराव: नोम चॉम्स्की

और हाँ, ज़ेडनेट की साइट पूरी तरह बदली जा रही है, परिणामतः हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट भी यहाँ से अब यहाँ आ गया है।

और यह भी कि कुल अनुवादों की संख्या अब एक दहाई यानी दो अंकों तक पहुंच गई है।

तीन अंकों तक अकेले पहुंचाना मुश्किल होगा, फिर भी…

Chomsky at His Best

I have read quite a lot of Chomsky. And here I mean his non-Linguistic writings. But today I found the transcript of an answer that he gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi. It’s Chomsky at his best.

Within one answer to a question about the idea of Clash of Civilizations, he has compressed almost everything that one needs to know to understand how the world works. Even though I am very much familiar with his ideas, it was a treat to read this transcript.

I can’t resist the temptation to just quote him wholesale in this post. It’s not a very long article, so it can be read quite quickly. If you think something that he is saying is wrong, you can go ahead and verify it. He has written about the details elsewhere.

As there is no need for me to add or explain, I will just quote. I hope I am not infringing on anyone’s IPR. If I am, I will withdraw the quote. But I would hate to do that.

Here he is:

Remember the context of Huntington’s thesis, the context in which it was put forth. This was after the end of the Cold War. For fifty years, both the US and the Soviet Union had used the pretext of the Cold War as a justification for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out. So if the Russians wanted to send tanks to East Berlin, that was because of the Cold War. And if the US wanted to invade South Vietnam and wipe out Indo-China, that was because of the Cold War. If you look over the history of this period, the pretext had nothing to do with the reasons. The reasons for the atrocities were based in domestic power interests, but the Cold War gave an excuse. Whatever the atrocity carried out, you could say it’s defence against the other side.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pretext is gone. The policies remain the same, with slight changes in tactics, but you need a new pretext. And in fact there’s been a search for pretexts for quite a long time. Actually, it started twenty years ago. When the Reagan Administration came in, it was already pretty clear that appeal to the pretext of the Russian threat was not going to work for very long. So they came into office saying that the focus of their foreign policy would be to combat the plague of international terrorism.

That was twenty years ago. There’s nothing new about this. We have to defend ourselves from other terrorists. And they proceeded to react to that plague by creating the most extraordinary international terrorist network in the world, which carried out massive terror in Central America and Southern Africa and all over the place. In fact, it was so extreme that its actions were even condemned by the World Court and Security Council. With 1989 coming, you needed some new pretexts. This was very explicit. Remember, one of the tasks of intellectuals, the solemn task, is to prevent people from understanding what’s going on. And in order to fulfil that task, you have to ignore the government documentation, for example, which tells you exactly what’s going on. This is a case in point.

Just to give you one illustration. Every year the White House presents to Congress a statement of why we need a huge military budget. Every year it used to be the same: the Russians are coming. The Russians are coming, so we need this monstrous military budget. The question that anyone who is interested in international affairs should have been asking himself or herself is, what are they going to say in March 1990? That was the first presentation to Congress after the Russians clearly weren’t coming – they were not around any more. So that was a very important and extremely interesting document. And of course, it is not mentioned anywhere, because it’s much too interesting. That was March 1990, the first Bush Administration giving its presentation to Congress.

It was exactly the same as every year. We need a huge military budget. We need massive intervention forces, mostly poised at the Middle East. We have to protect what’s called the ‘defence industrial base’ – that’s a euphemism that means high-tech industry. We have to ensure that the public pays the costs of high-tech industry by funnelling it through the military system under the pretext of defence.

So it was exactly the same as before. The only difference was the reasons. It turned out that the reasons we needed all this was not because the Russians were coming, but – I’m quoting – because of the ‘technological sophistication of Third World powers.’ That’s why we need the huge military budget. The massive military forces aimed at the Middle East still have to be aimed there, and here comes an interesting phrase. It says, they have to be aimed at the Middle East where ‘the threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’ In other words, sorry, I’ve been lying to you for fifty years, but now the Kremlin isn’t around any more so I’ve got to tell you the truth: ‘The threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’

Remember, it couldn’t be laid at Iraq’s door either, because at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend and ally of the United States. He had already carried out his worst atrocities, like gassing Kurds and everything else, but he remained a fine guy, who hadn’t disobeyed orders yet – the one crime that matters. So nothing could be laid at Iraq’s door, or at the Kremlin’s door.

The real threat, as always, was that the region might take control of its own destiny, including its own resources. And that can’t be tolerated, obviously. So we have to support oppressive states, like Saudi Arabia and others, to make sure that they guarantee that the profits from oil (it’s not so much the oil as the profits from oil) flow to the people who deserve it: rich western energy corporations or the US Treasury Department or Bechtel Construction, and so on. So that’s why we need a huge military budget. Other than that, the story is the same.

What does this have to do with Huntington? Well, he’s a respected intellectual. He can’t say this. He can’t say, look, the method by which the rich run the world is exactly the same as before, and the major confrontation remains what it has always been: small concentrated sectors of wealth and power versus everybody else. You can’t say that. And in fact if you look at those passages on the clash of civilizations, he says that in the future the conflict will not be on economic grounds. So let’s put that out of our minds. You can’t think about rich powers and corporations exploiting people, that can’t be the conflict. It’s got to be something else. So it will be the ‘clash of civilizations’ – the western civilization and Islam and Confucianism.

Well, you can test that. It’s a strange idea, but you can test it. For example, you can test it by asking how the United States, the leader of the western civilization, has reacted to Islamic fundamentalists. Well, the answer is, it’s been their leading supporter. For instance, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world at that time was Saudi Arabia. Maybe it has been succeeded by the Taliban, but that’s an offshoot of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.

Saudi Arabia has been a client of the United States since its origins. And the reason is that it plays the right role. It ensures that the wealth of the region goes to the right people: not people in the slums of Cairo, but people in executive suites in New York. And as long as they do that, Saudi Arabian leaders can treat women as awfully as they want, they can be the most extreme fundamentalists in existence, and they’re just fine. That’s the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world.

What is the biggest Muslim state in the world? Indonesia. And what’s the relation between the United States and Indonesia? Well, actually the United States was hostile to Indonesia until 1965. That’s because Indonesia was part of the nonaligned movement. The United States hated Nehru, despised him in fact, for exactly the same reason. So they despised Indonesia. It was independent. Furthermore, it was a dangerous country because it had one mass-based political party, the PKI, which was a party of the poor, a party of peasants, basically. And it was gaining power through the open democratic system, therefore it had to be stopped.

The US tried to stop it in 1958 by supporting a rebellion. That failed. They then started supporting the Indonesian Army, and in 1965 the army carried out a coup, led by General Suharto. They carried out a huge massacre of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people (mostly landless peasants), and wiped out the only mass-based party. This led to unrestrained euphoria in the West. The United States, Britain, Australia – it was such a glorious event that they couldn’t control themselves.

The headlines were, ‘A gleam of light in Asia’, ‘A hope where there once was none’, ‘The Indonesian moderates have carried out a boiling bloodbath’. I mean, they didn’t conceal what happened – ‘Staggering mass slaughter’, ‘The greatest event in history’. The CIA compared it to the massacres of Stalin and Hitler, and that was wonderful. And ever since that time, Indonesia became a favoured ally of the United States.

It continued to have one of the bloodiest records in the late twentieth century (mass murder in East Timor, hideous tortures of dissidents, and so on), but it was fine. It was the biggest Islamic state in the world, but it was just fine. Suharto was ‘our kind of guy’, the way Clinton described him when he visited in the mid-nineties. And he stayed a friend of the United States until he made a mistake. He made a mistake by dragging his feet over IMF orders.

After the Asian crash, the IMF imposed very harsh orders, and Suharto didn’t go along the way he was supposed to. And he also lost control of the society. That’s also a mistake. So at that point the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, gave him a telephone call, and said literally, ‘We think it’s time for a democratic transition.’ Merely by accident, four hours later he abdicated, but Indonesia remained a US favourite.

These are two of the main Islamic states. What about the extreme Islamic fundamentalist non-state actors, let’s say the Al Qaeda network. Who formed them? They’re the creation of the CIA, British intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, Egypt and so on. They brought the most extreme radical fundamentalists they could find anywhere, in North Africa or the Middle East, and trained them, armed them, nurtured them to harass the Russians – not to help the Afghans. These guys were carrying out terrorism from the beginning. They assassinated President Saddat twenty years ago. But they were the main groups supported by the US. So, where is the clash of civilizations?

Let’s move a little further. During the 1980s, the United States carried out a major war in Central America. A couple of hundred thousand people were killed, four countries almost destroyed, I mean it was a vast war. Who was the target of that war? Well, one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. The decade of the 1980s began with the assassination of an archbishop. It ended with the assassination of six leading Jesuit intellectuals, including the rector of the main university. They were killed by basically the same people – terrorist forces, organized and armed and trained by the United States.

During that period, plenty of church people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and poor people also died, as usual, but one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. Why? Well, the Catholic Church had committed a grievous sin in Latin America. For hundreds of years, it had been the church of the rich. That was fine. But in the 1960s, the Latin American bishops adopted what they called a ‘preferential option for the poor.’ At that point they became like this mass-based political party in Indonesia, which was a party of the poor and the peasants and naturally it had to be wiped out. So the Catholic Church had to be smashed.

Coming back to the beginning, just where is the clash of civilizations? I mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who they are. They can be Catholics, they can be Communists, they can be anything else. They can be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s not really racist – they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the major issues.

But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously true. You have to create deep theories, that can be understood only if you have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a clash of civilizations, and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense.

Reminder: This is the the transcript of an answer that Chomsky gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi.

Evolution Doesn’t Have a Conscience

 

 

But we do.

 

 

A Comment on an Influential Article

A colleague has been sending me links to articles by Philip Greenspun. When I got another link today and just finished reading it (a rather long article), I thought I needed to comment on that article. So here it is (I have posted it at his site too):

A great looking intellectual construction, but it is based on some fundamental flaws. So, even though a lot of the things said are correct and sensible, the most important ones are not.

For example, let’s take the practical implications: You first suggest that it is poverty that is increasing the ranks of the suicide bombers. But then you conclude that if we keep these third world incompetent Muslims poor for eternity, we might just save ourselves from terrorism. A dead giveaway I would say.

That’s the trouble with people like you. You ask others to look in the mirror, but you yourself don’t.

What about America’s record in general? I mean active participation in or encouragement of mass murder: Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.? Could that have something to do with the fact a lot of people around the world ‘hate the US’?

The ‘conventional wisdom’ that you quote (”Nations don’t have friends. They have interests.”) is from a person who is actually a mass murderer and a war criminal. You seem to have no problem with these ideas. And this person happened to be a Jew.

But so is Noam Chomsky. So was Spinoza. So was Einstein. So was Joseph Heller. So is Woody Allen.

Like most ‘Experts’, though in a slightly better way, you have presented a mixture of true facts and unjustified simplifications to come up with a theory that is sufficiently complex to bore most people into accepting it as true. It is coming from an Expert after all. Why should we bother to look deeper into it? In fact, most people will be overawed by just the MIT label.

You look hard enough at everyone else: Muslims, Europeans, Third Worlders, etc. but you are unwilling to look that hard at the deeds of the Americans, i.e., the establishment of the USA. You put the USA and Canada in the same category, but the facts, if you look deep enough, wouldn’t allow you to do this. Canada has hardly any record of imperialism and attempts of dominating the world as an unchangeable policy that can justify even mass murder, assassinations, drug trafficking to fund terrorism against enemies (as in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union) as long as it is hidden and there is scope for plausible denial.

You even refer to decolonization as if it was only a bad thing. I come from a country where more people died at the time of independence and the partition (of India at the time of ‘decolonization’) than did in the Holocaust. There is no way you are going to confuse me into thinking that the independence (decolonization) was the same as (or the cause of) the horrible events that followed. Decolonization was a good thing. A lot of the events that followed were horrible. There are two different things we ought to be talking about. But, of course, you are not interested in that. It might show the flaws in your theorizing. For example, did colonialism have anything to do with the fact that a lot of non-westerners ‘hate’ westerners even if they try their best to get into the western paradise? And the fact that the US now represents what the UK did in an earlier age. The empire that seeks to rule the whole world and won’t be satisfied until it has risen enough and then falls down (perhaps to be replaced by another empire that would also be hated by the rest of the world). At a huge cost to be paid by people other than you.

Mr. Expert-Vexpert, Please Leave Them Alone

My laptop was out of order for some days. For the last one year, since I bought it (my first), I was completely addicted to it. I became a laptop junkie. Then suddenly one day it was not available.

Life stopped.

But not for long. I picked up one book and again became a reading junkie. I finished ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ (another British Man Booker Prize winner written by an Indian woman). I won’t talk about it now. Deserves more than a few lines. I also kept reading a (Linguistics) book I am going to review. Then I picked up D. J. Taylor’s biography of George Orwell.

I have not finished it, but whatever I have read has provoked me to write this post. I will complete it and if there is something significantly better than what I have read till now, I will modify my comments. Eat my words as any person proved wrong should.

So what was in the book? A wealth. Of trivial details. Of no significance. I was hoping I would at least get some new insights about what kind of a person Orwell or Eric Blair was, if not about his work. The biographer claims to be an Expert on Orwell, so much so that when someone else wrote a book about Orwell, he reviewed it with the feeling of his territory being trespassed. He says he has read and researched Orwell for over twenty years.

He doesn’t seem to have much to show for it. I didn’t find anything new of any value about Orwell or about his work, even though I haven’t read any other biography of Orwell. I have not even read his literature as extensively as this biographer has. Then how come I got nothing new? Because what the Orwell Expert presents to the reader are a deluge of bits of information which are not even well connected. And these bits tell nothing of interest or consequence which can’t be obtained from reading Orwell’s two three novels (1984, Animal Farm), one or two non-fiction books (Homage to Catalonia), some essays written by him (Shooting an Elephant, Reflections on Gandhi) and some essays written about him (Tourism among the Dogs by Edward Said).

What the bit torrent from the big expert boils down to is that Orwell was not really a ’secular saint’ and that he was just a mortal with many shortcomings. Of course, all this comes with a lot of technical trappings, just to show how big an expert the biographer is about Orwell and how much research he has done.

Big deal.

I knew that much just by reading one of his books.

The fact is that Orwell was one of those authors who are quite self-conscious and self-consciously responsible. He doesn’t really hide what kind of a person he is. Of course, a small margin is due to everyone, including the saints. He shows up in his writings quite clearly. The biographer (I am not writing about Taylor because I want to make a general point: My objective is not to review his book) does try very hard to show that Orwell was in many ways different from the impressions his books give. But he fails miserably. Every ‘insight’ that he tries to derive from his extensive research of two decades is easily derivable from the books written by Orwell. From just a few of his books.

Mind you, I do believe that trivia can give illuminating insights quite often. But not always and not everywhere. The biographer seems to have forgotten that.

The fact also is that Edward Said, who wrote quite critically and disapprovingly, did a much better job at showing that Orwell was not as great a human being as some of his fans might believe. And he did this in a short essay I mentioned earlier, not in a fat book.

Tell you what: George Orwell or Eric Blair was nonetheless a great and rare human being and an even greater a writer. He was (relatively) exceptionally honest in his writings. What’s more important, he was unpretentiously honest, which many of the ‘high class’ elite writers, artists, scientists, movie makers etc. are not. Of course he was no saint. He never claimed he was. Just as Gandhi didn’t: A fact which Orwell pointed out in his essay.

Knowingly or unknowingly, the ultimate effect of the book (in cases where it has turned out to be effective) is to undermine Orwell’s writings and concentrate on showing that Orwell has two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two hands, etc. and that he ate food to keep alive, that he needed money to buy food, that he had to earn money, that he managed to earn some money from writing, that he tried to have relations with women, that he even flew into a rage once in a long while etc. Very illuminating. Should we thank the author to tell us that Orwell was a more or less normal human being but was also quite different?

There are references to Orwell’s writings, of course, but they mostly seem to be dismissive in the sense that author is more interested in proving the above mentioned fact than what Orwell’s work tells us. There are a few interesting things, but they are very infrequent.

Orwell’s name has been so much misused that it’s no less than a tragedy that a person who claims Orwell to be his territory and has read and researched on him for over twenty years seems to be so little interested in the insights that can be obtained from Orwell’s life and his work and so much more interested in the fact that Orwell studied at Eton.

I would any day prefer a ‘fictional’ biography like Lust for Life if I want to know about Van Gogh. Even if I want to read a ‘researched’ biography, I would like to read again (third time) Awaaraa Maseehaa (आवारा मसीहा) by Vishnu Prabhakar (विष्णु प्रभाकर) if I want to refresh my knowledge about Sharat Chandra (शरतचंद्र). Or Ray Monk’s Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude. Even though Ray Monk didn’t really like Russell, he still tells you much more about Russell. And he doesn’t waste pages in his two (fat) volume biography on proving that Russell had two eyes and so on.

My advice to expert-vexperts like Mr. Taylor, researching writers or artists, is to just leave them alone.

Do something useful with your life. Orwell’s work can give a lot of clues about that.

For the rest, just leave him alone. Your kind of expertise is not worth two pennies. Or two pens. Or two pencils.

P.S.: Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that this Expert of Literature understands so little of literature. You shouldn’t really expect much from a person who calls Guliver’s Travels a ‘children’s classic’.

‘Just Believe’ doesn’t Help Much After All

Yesterday I wanted to see a movie: a not too depressing one. When I looked through the collection, I came across Finding Neverland. I wasn’t sure whether I had seen that movie before or not, though I remembered seeing Finding Nemo: I had seen it just a few months ago. Since there weren’t many options, I decided to check out this movie.

It turned out that I hadn’t seen it. So I saw it. A movie about a writer? That was enough incentive, but there were also Dustin Hoffman and Kate Winslet. Not necessarily in that order.

To be frank, I didn’t dislike the movie as it went on. However, I started getting uneasy as the words to the effect ‘Believe! Just believe!’ were uttered frequently. And these words were more of a summation of the theme of the movie than a minor highlight. The viewer was not being asked to believe in religion or God (at least not explicitly). So the cause of my unease was not related to believing in religion or the God. The author was asking other characters and the viewer (or the reader) to believe in fairies. In a place called Neverland. Yes, I know the name of the place was meant to be ironical, but the exhortation of believing, just believing, was quite genuine.

I also know that everyone needs the enjoyment offered by some escapist fare at least once in a while. It can even be a positive thing when your spirits are so low that you have to take a break and forget about the depressing reality for a while. Even the most ‘cynical’ or nihilist or ultra pessimists have their own kind of escapist fare. And so do those who believe in directly facing the reality and trying to change it for the better, even if very slowly.

The sincerity of the writer and the other characters of the movie was making me like the movie, but the mantra of ‘Believe! Just believe!’ was putting me off.

I should confess here that by the end of the movie the escapist philosophy was getting a slight edge over my usual outlook. That set me wondering whether escapism may not be a valid way to improve the quality of life. I am what I am because I am constantly susceptible to these self-doubts. Even about the most fundamental issues. Earlier it used to bother me, but now I know that it is not such a bad thing. I mean I know this from my personal knowledge, experience and reasoning, not from what others have said. Learning from personal experience is different from just being told about something. Anyway, I was wondering whether I was wrong in dismissing many escapist works of art (whether high brow or down to earth).

It just happens to be that J. M. Barrie is one of those rare ‘great’ (English language) authors whose books I have not read so far. So I started reading about him (and the movie and the play on which the movie was based) to resolve my transient doubts about my stand against escapist works of art.

And what do I find? On the Wikipedia page itself there was this bit of information:

The lives of the Davies family were rife with tragedy following the film’s optimistic ending: George died fighting in World War I in 1915, Michael drowned with a friend at Oxford in 1921, and Peter grew to hate his identification as “Peter Pan”, eventually committing suicide in 1960.

So, the reality before the play (Peter Pan) was written was not as bad as shown in the movie, but the reality after the play was written was as tragic as it can get for a family of the class to which the Llewelyn Davies boys belonged.

Evidently the ‘Believe! Just Believe!’ philosophy didn’t prove very helpful. Even to the family for which (or based on the members of which) the play was written.

The world may be as bad as I thought it was, but at least I am free from this new unease. Now I can again enjoy escapist fare once in a while.

Without Just Believing.

Cinema on Cinema

I saw two movies about movies within three days. Not quite intentionally. Both were by the high priests of cinema (auteurs, maestros). One from Italy and one from Iran. The first is called ‘8 and a Half‘ and the second ‘Salam Cinema’ ([1], [2], [3], [4]). If you are a movie buff (of the serious or the artistic kind), you might have heard of them.

How to describe these two movies? Disturbing is one word. Voyeuristic is another. Redeeming can also be tried. Both of them take a good look at cinema and the making of cinema and the people involved in cinema. And they do it quite mercilessly. The risks that both the directors take clearly show their confidence: obviously their kind of courage is not due to ignorance. It is because they know they are good. Lesser mortals won’t try things like these.

In style, the two movies are very different. While the first is still a proper feature film, even if it is a film about films (and one fictional film in particular), the second one is almost a documentary, though not the usual kind. There are other differences too. The first one focuses more on the director, while the second one focuses more on the actors. Or would be actors. Actually, about the mostly would never be (or could never be) actors. As a digression, I can also mention here (shameless showoff!) another movie which focuses mainly on the viewers: Nuovo Cinema Paradiso by yet another maestro, Giuseppe Tornatore. (I will hopefully write about another one of his movies in a later post). Of course, all of them cover the world around the director and the actors too. Still, the real focus of both the movies is cinema itself.

When language is used to talk about language itself, we call it Linguistics. What should it be called when cinema is used to ‘talk’ about cinema? Should it be Cinemistics? That sounds like Cine-Mystiques.

Never mind.

Many movies have been made about cinema, but these two are surely among the best. But only the patient ones will be rewarded with the pleasure (and the good kind of pain) that can be obtained from these movies.

(To be continued…)

The Work of a Responsible Genius

Here comes the rave I promised.

A few days back, in the middle of heavy workload, I happened to see Missing. It is a movie directed by Costa Gavras. For the uninitiated, he is the one who directed Z. Till now, these are his only movies that I have seen. Just like in the case of Missing, I didn’t know about Z when I saw it. And, at that time, I had not heard of Costa Gavras either. Still, I had no doubt even then that Z was the work of a responsible genius.

What does responsible genius mean? Long ago, Chomsky had written an extremely influential and important article called The Responsibility of Intellectuals. I would call a person a ‘responsible genius’ if that person fulfills the responsibilities indicated in this article and also deserves the epithet ‘genius’. Assuming that no word in this paragraph has been used lightly, especially the words ‘responsibility’ and ‘genius’. Of course, Chomsky’s is just a reference. Even if there had been no Chomsky, there would still be the idea of a ‘responsible genius’.

Note that what I said was ‘Z was the work of a responsible genius’, not that Costa Gavras is a responsible genius. He may be, but I don’t know much about him. What I do know is that both of his movies that I have seen are the works of a responsible genius. It is amazing how difficult it can be to understand (stock phrase!) the subtle differences in meaning due to slightly different phrasing. It’s not so easy to really learn to read. From my experience I have found that most people are bad readers, including those who are supposed to be scholars and intellectuals. I find that out again and again now that I am into research. Sometimes, from the reviews that I get for my papers, it’s hard to believe how badly the reviewers read. Reading is not about understanding syntax or even semantics. Reading is about understanding the meaning, including the fact that there can ambiguities and multiple interpretations, many of them intended by the writer. Good reading, like good everything, requires sincerity.

Digression! Digression!

Back to business. You may find it interesting to know that Costa Gavras is the man who refused to direct Godfather (at least that’s what I have read) because he wanted to make modifications in the script, which was not acceptable to the producers. His argument was that the script, as it was, glorified mafia. And he was offered Godfather because Z was actually quite successful commercially, even though (like Missing) it was an overtly political movie.

Both the movies are based on true events, and Missing much more so. In Z, we are shown how a judge (in Greece, with powers very different from that of a judge in India), who is a very normal non-radical person just trying to fulfill his responsibilities sincerely. And just in doing his work as he is supposed to (in theory), he brings down the government whose high ranking officials (including generals) have been involved in the assassination of a popular (really) democratic leader.

In a format which is almost that of a commercial thriller, we are shown how almost everyone in power is either involved in the assassination or in the cover up. In the process, we also get to see how fascism works at the ground level. This should not be unfamiliar to Indians, or to any other people for that matter, but it still needs to be shown effectively because no people are ready to see (and accept that they see) the true ugly face of fascism among them, until it reaches the Holocaust or pogrom level and at least thousands of people are very visibly killed and brutalized. If then.

So, Z doesn’t show anything very new. Nor does it boast of fancy, brand new stylistic effects. That’s why a lot of people don’t even notice that it is an artistic movie. Nor is it so easy to dismiss it as the work a loony-toony leftist.

But the movie doesn’t leave much scope for denial, provided you at least see it. And are prepared to see what it shows. At the same time, it is entertaining too. Without making many compromises or diluting the commitment. This is not so easy to achieve.

More to come. Next time about Missing.

So Now, that’s How it Goes

So a ’state of emergency’ has just been declared in our enemy-friend-enemy-friend-enemy-… country. The reasons given by the president, who is a semi-westernized upper-middle-class-type reformer president (an admirer and follower of Kemal Ataturk Pasha) are:

1. That the judiciary was interfering with the government
2. That Islamic militancy posed a grave threat

Sounds familiar? What about our beloved country? Can we expect a similar news, which will surely gladden the hearts of numerous admirers (including those in the Sangh Parivar) of the first woman Prime Minister of India and her no-nonsense son, according to whom the only way to make the Indians behave is by the dandaa: the policeman’s (or the svayamsevak’s) lathi. Those who still have nostalgia for (to some) the infamous era of Emergency when everyone stood in a queue to get on a public transport bus and when some serious measures were taken to get rid of the biggest curse of our glorious nation, viz., the ever increasing population of human beings: if only a lot of them could be exterminated! But which ones?

Extermination may be politically incorrect and it may not be financially feasible, but we can at least hide them under the carpet? Don’t we have our own Château d’Ifs? Why not do that on a war footing, if we want India to become developed by 20[0-9]{2}. And the only way to do so is by declaring… We should then be able to adapt and continue. That’s what the Germans did in the late thirties and early forties. That’s what the Indians did in the mid-seventies. That’s what the Pakistanis will do now. That’s what the Iraqis are trying to do (not quite succeeding). Keep your face down and keep on doing your work.

Things are already moving in that direction. Nothing will make it quicker than, well, you know what (from the reasons given above). Many must be waiting for that to happen. They are doing their bit.

Oh yes, India is the largest democracy in the world with one of the most independent and vibrant media in the world. So I have said myself. And I still do. But India had these characteristics in 1975, perhaps more so, what with that spirit of the 70s and the still somewhat strong legacy of the freedom movement. And the human manifestation of Durga had recently won a war against our arch enemy(-friend-enemy-friend-enemy-…).

And what about the role of the reformer president in so many things having a close connection with Islamic militancy? You are not authorized to ask such questions (at least in his country). Don’t you see there is threat to the country from abc and xyz? Oops! these abc and xyz aren’t the same as those mentioned in an earlier post. What about कखग and क्षत्रज्ञ?

There were reasons why emergency was declared then:

1. That the judiciary was interfering with the government
2. That Islamic people’s militancy* posed a grave threat

* Partly led by Jayaprakash Narayan, the great freedom fighter against the British.

If your ears are tuned to the ground and if you have been observing things happening at the micro level, you won’t be surprised if a similar news comes from our land.

Will you swallow it, or you won’t? That will decide whether all your talk about democracy and fair play and making India a developed nation has any sincerity or not, let alone substance.

It is impossible that there will be emergency in India again? Perhaps you are right. Some powerful people do learn something from History. Such as the fact that you can have a state of emergency without actually declaring it.