‘Na jaane kaun si mitti vatan ki mitti thi’

- ‘Hazaar Baar ruke’, from the film Mammo.

‘How many deaths will it take to be noticed that too many people have died?’

- Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind.

As long as there will India and Pakistan, this fight will never stop. Too many times has this been said.

More than 2000 people were killed, slaughtered, burnt in all the violence in 2002 in Gujarat. The mainstream in Gujarat is still in denial.

Millions of people died when the subcontinent was torn apart into Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.

Bomb blasts continue to claim innumerable lives. People from each side are hurt. The real reasons behind these blasts are still elusive. We all guess: terrorism, creating communal unrest…Perhaps all these are true.

For the Hindu, Muslim and Christian Sikh, Parsi and whatever person of faith caught in the middle it is just a matter of living with dignity, with the ability to practice your faith and go on with your life which matters.

For as long as these borders remain, our psyche will always be divided, although we are not divided in our history, culture and consciousness.

We need to do away with these borders, and let us start dreaming now. Because politicians are people and it is people who create opinion. It is people, us who can put an end to communal violence.

September 10 to September 16^th ,2007 is the week for blogging for a united Indian subcontinent. Voices from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh coming together to say why and how a borderless Indian Subcontinent should and can be created.

Here is what you have to do:

Blog about why you want or don’t want an undivided Indian subcontinent. And how you think this is possible. What the future holds in store for an undivided Indian subcontinent, what could be possible…

And there is more coming.

So let us create a coalition to take these voices far and wide. Blogging for a united Indian Subcontinent Week. September 10 to 16th, 2007.

This is a collaborative event. If you want to design posters, hand-outs, invites…the more the merrier…

Suggestions and queries welcome.

Let’s make it happen!

‘Na jaane kaun si mitti vatan ki mitti thi’

- ‘Hazaar Baar ruke’, from the film Mammo.

‘How many deaths will it take to be noticed that too many people have died?’

- Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind.

As long as there will India and Pakistan, this fight will never stop. Too many times has this been said.

More than 2000 people were killed, slaughtered, burnt in all the violence in 2002 in Gujarat. The mainstream in Gujarat is still in denial.

Millions of people died when the subcontinent was torn apart into Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.

Bomb blasts continue to claim innumerable lives. People from each side are hurt. The real reasons behind these blasts are still elusive. We all guess: terrorism, creating communal unrest…Perhaps all these are true.

For the Hindu, Muslim and Christian Sikh, Parsi and whatever person of faith caught in the middle it is just a matter of living with dignity, with the ability to practice your faith and go on with your life which matters.

For as long as these borders remain, our psyche will always be divided, although we are not divided in our history, culture and consciousness.

We need to do away with these borders, and let us start dreaming now. Because politicians are people and it is people who create opinion. It is people, us who can put an end to communal violence.

September 10 to September 16^th ,2007 is the week to blogging for a united India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Voices from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh coming together to say why and how a One State Solution is possible within this subcontinent.Whether and how one State can and should be created.

Here is what you have to do:

Blog about why you want or don’t want an undivided subcontinent. And how you think this is possible. What the future holds in store for an undivided subcontinent, what could be possible…

And there is more coming.

So let us create a coalition to take these voices far and wide. The One State Solution Week. September 10 to 16th, 2007.

This is a collaborative event. If you want to design posters, hand-outs, invites…the more the merrier…

Suggestions and queries welcome.

Let’s make it happen!

‘God is not a square .God is Cross.’, ‘Parmeshvar ke sirf chaar kone nahin hain’.

14^th August 2007.

A performance as part of the workshop, ‘To draw a Line’, a marathon dedicated to Nasreen Mohammedi and Bhupen Khakkar at the Faculty of Fine Art, MS University, Baroda.

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It isn’t so hard to find inspiration in Baroda. The past few months have been tight with debate, dissent and its dissolution.

This was a performance that surfaced at Vivan Sundaram’s strategic reclamation of democratic art space at the eve of the 6oth year of Indian Independence.

A confluence of diverse notions of poesis , this performance, is for me an assertion of my body, as a Muslim woman with all its markedness, within the parameters of institution, nation and godhead.The effort is to shoulder the project of embracing, recasting and reclaiming all of them.

Enveloping my insider/outsider position within each fractal of this moment and space, between stretching and slouching, this work spans the betrayal and anger of God, woman, man (as exemplified by Christ) and democracy in today’s Gujarat.

This work comes from a self that is moving within a cube, one set by the trauma, gravity and despondency of the aftermath of genocide, both on one community and other communities. Emerging from the paradigm set by this workshop, the performance is a siege of the mundane normalcy of the university space to articulate voices far beyond its (current) scope: the shadow-lines of rape mapped on the tryst of exploited women’s bodies starting to realise ‘freedom’.

In terms of type-scape and struggle with form therefore, the self morphs itself into varying positions to grapple with movement. And the release is , in this case in breaking the cube, and ironically, in an act of prayer after.

The workshop was dedicated to Nasreen Mohammedi and Bhupen Khakkar , artists who enriched and nurtured this institution and Indian art, each with their own trajectories of identity.

And as art historian Santosh reiterated again, for each one of us, it’s about time someone drew a line.

So, says the macrocosm, God is not a Square. Stop being so linear.

——————————————————————– ====

*Special Thanks to Vivan Sundaram.

*Photos and video are in the pipeline.

a murmer, thats all.

You had pneumonia.Ha ha…

We’re alive you’re dead, you left-

Us.In this place with raging torrents and harsh hatred.

It killed you, too softly, too silently.

 You’re gone.You left, you went away.

Three or four days ago.

You tried to reach out, but we’re all too harrowed.Our wounds rot and the stench hangs over us, we hang in it.So you’re gone, fresher than we are.

So long.Farewell.

You had a voice.You said things, you reached out.You acted.You cared.

You were a good human being.

There is no I that seperates itself from the journey You embarked upon.We’re together, in strength and sorrow.

I dont know what is left of us.We have betrayed ourselves, each minute in this delusional wreckage of a place.We dont know virtue from vice, food from thought, sleep from the thick ice that prevents us from communicating, the awesome tiredness and exhaustion.We’re a society that needs to heal.

Bye, Bina.

We loved you. Really.

 For Bina Srinivasan.Who is dead.Gone.

In his swearing in speech, the Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh pledged to be a leader in the
complete global elimination of Nuclear weapons.

Today, the opposers of the Indo-US nuclear deal , called the 123 agreement are being dared to withdraw their support of the UPA goverment on grounds of disagreement with this deal.

While the deal itself is comprehensively locked in diplomatic gives and takes, what it really spells is this.That for the future, complete disarmament of nuclear weapons is out of the question.What we will see instead is the powers that possess these weapons will also have the right to determine who else possesses them.

The threat of a nuclear war is as real now as when the US tested the first nuclear test at Alomogordo, New Mexico on 16th July 1945.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty website says   ‘Arms control advocates had campaigned for the adoption of a treaty banning all nuclear explosions since the early 1950s, when public concern was aroused as a result of radioactive fall-out from atmospheric nuclear tests and the escalating arms race.

Over 50 nuclear explosions were registered between 16 July 1945, when the first nuclear explosive test was conducted by the United States at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and 31 December 1953.

Prime Minister Nehru of India voiced the heightened international concern in 1954, when he proposed the elimination of all nuclear test explosions worldwide.’

We have come a long way since then.For those of you who are interested , in more analysis here is the  text of the 123 Agreement, linked via Siddharth Varadarajan’s blog.