Post # 19 # Anna Wanna Fast!

But I'm so hungry.

I'm not the typical gannet-next-door. I'm hungry to live my life as I want it to be. The mainland India is all gaga about Anna Hazare going to fast, while back in my hometown, we are fighting for our survival.

For 11 years, our Iron Lady, Irom Sharmila has been on a fast to protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). A droconian law which might be suitable in a land of dictator, but which has been imposed on us, making a mockery of democracy -- while India shouts about being the largest democratic country. Beware! This superlative is only by virtue of its unstoppable population.

First, the mainstream media of the mainland is not interested. We have no sponsors for the crony capitalists. Secondly, there is a mistaken belief that AFSPA affects only a part of the Great India, while this military law shams the democratic principles that India is boasting of.

This is not victimisation. Though we are used to it.

I do feel pity for the old man with his unaffected simplicity. But I have no polite words for his followers. Simple as that.

Arundhati Roy puts it aptly in The South Reports:

"... The right to protest of the people in Posco, Kalinganagar, Dandakaranya were taken away a long time ago. Even in Delhi, at the Jantar Mantar, people from Bhopal or the Narmada Valley cannot stay overnight. The Right to Protest is only for the middleclass...

When you talk of the 'Fast', you only mean Anna Hazare's fast. Right now, 10,000 villagers in Koodankulam are on a relay hunger-fast against a nuclear plant. Sharmila Irom has been on a fast for 10 years against an Act that allows soldiers to kill on mere suspicion. But we are not talking about these fasts.

Deep inside the forest in a tribal village, when 500 policemen surround and burn your village and there is no TV camera, you can't go on a hunger-strike. You can only fight back. In any case, can the hungry go on a hunger-strike?"

Post # Seven # Simple Living, High Thinking

I believe in the formula of simple living and high thinking. It sounds so simple, yet so high. On one hand I'm suffocated with the ideals that I have been building on. And even if I find it hard to reduce my basic minimum requirements, on the other hand, I believe simplicity is what differentiates the hues and contrasts of life. Well, well, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Perhaps I have always tried to focus on the high-thinking part though my IQ is hovering only around 80-100. I have recalled this formula after finding myself in a deep, unknown soup. The story is: I'm always led by the ideals. Remember I told you about a bomb blast days ago that killed no only common men but two little schoolchildren. I have always held the belief that the first thing we need is to cleanse our collective consciousness, though I don't know how or when. This confusion makes the formula of simple living and high thinking so out of sync of the reality and all these bullshits about philosophising the issues so absurd and meaningless. This makes me realise again what the Jonathan Livingston Seagull's writer's saying that the simple things are the truest.

But there is a predicament. If I join the mass protesting on the streets against everything and anyone that can be protested, I would be like just swimming with the tide. In the contradiction of life, my stories are flowing in a serpentine path while I'd love to sit back and look into the issues immaculately. Just sitting back is not enough. Not Enough!!! But the question and method of starting my revolt against the destroyers is still open ended. I want a radical way of protest.

A peace demonstration in the national capital city, New Delhi,
organised by a student organisation *

[ * Image originally published by Manipuri Students' Association, Delhi on their Facebook wall at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002616454871 ]

Post # Four # Killing in the Name of

Only the death is the loser

An hour ago, I was brought down from my creaky ivory tower when I heard a few gunshots. One of my neighbours went by shouting... I could understand the frustration in his voice but it was not clear what it was all about. And there it was -- the unexpected event but which is not unexpected at all: An old man, believed to be around 50 was lying in a pool of blood. I have never seen him before, but I heard some people saying he worked inside the mission campus of the temple at the street corner. We hired a cab and took him to the government hospital but the doctors only uttered their favourite line: Brought dead.

It was all gloom and doom and I hate it especially in the morning hours. Some of the guys who stayed back and his family members have lodged an FIR to the district police when we came back after we were told that we can fetch the body from the mortuary. We saw a police Gypsy around the spot, doing some inquiry about this and that. But I doubt for it's too early to predict who did it and that the police would ever catch the culprit. Things are just like that. But I don't doubt the FIR report will find its eternal place among the dust-covered, moth-eaten racks of the police station. And I feel sorry for the old man. His family said there had been no enmity with anyone of late. My voice got blocked with nothing to say.

I heard now, they are staging a sit-in protest. We call it 'wakat meepham' in Manipuri. It has become some kind of formality to express that we do care about decadence of our values but the only thing we can do is to sit, with some catchy banners and coconuts, at the roadside while the concerned authorities will become deaf, dumb and blind. Pain and gloom are all lingering in the air.