GUNTER GRASS
"On the one hand, there is a landing on the moon and on the other, we haven't been able to feed all the people on the earth." This is Gunter Grass, the Nobel laureate writer, speaking in a recent discussion held in Kolkata organised by Max Muller Bhaban and the the Telegraph.
I've been a Grass fan ever since I read his Tin Drum. Oscar was such a loveable character, and he captivated me completely. But what was strange for me, I never felt inclined to read any of his other works. Somehow I knew Tin Drum is his best work, and he would never ever able to write anything better than this.
But I've kept following Grass through his other activities. Grass is an activist writer, and incredibly vocal against any kind of injustice anywhere is the world. He calls George W. Bush a war-criminal, and calls for resistance to single-power domination to gain an equal footing in negotiation.
But he's not a leftist either. " The leftists are taking us nowhere, but we need them because they talk about poverty," he said in an interview recently.
Gunter Grass is now in Kolkata, the city to which he has been mentally attached for a long time.
MRINAL BOSE
Friday, January 28, 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
THE TOWN BY THE SEA
This's the title of a wonderful essay on post-Tsunami human condition in Andaman and Nicobar by Amitav Ghosh published in Tehelka weekly dated January 22.
Ghosh tells us about three ravaged souls: Obed Tera, a naik in the 10th Madras Regiment of the Indian army, who has not only lost his house, but also his uniform, his ration card, his service card, and is now not in a position to report to his job; Paramjeet Kaur, a Sikh woman, who has got her house and possession, the result of thirty years of hard work, washed away in an instant, and now wants to go back to her ancestral home in Punjab; and an unnamed director of the island's Malaria Research Centre, who gets his wife and daughter killed by the wave while he was away, and now searches them frantically among the debris.
Ghosh writes,"Listening to their stories it is easy to believe that most of them found what they were looking for: here, in this far-flung chain of islands, tens of thousands of settlers were able to make their way out of poverty, into the ranks of country's expanding middle class. But on the morning of December 26, this hard-won betterment became a potent source of vulnerability. For to be middle class is to be kept afloat on a life-raft of paper:identity cards,cheque books,certificates of life insurance and receipts of fixed deposit. It was the particular nature of the disaster that it targeted not just the physical being of the victims but also the proof of the survivors' identities."
A great piece of writing. The narrative of the director who in the end chooses to pick up some laboratory slides as the only memento of his past is really touching, and beats fiction.
MRINAL BOSE
This's the title of a wonderful essay on post-Tsunami human condition in Andaman and Nicobar by Amitav Ghosh published in Tehelka weekly dated January 22.
Ghosh tells us about three ravaged souls: Obed Tera, a naik in the 10th Madras Regiment of the Indian army, who has not only lost his house, but also his uniform, his ration card, his service card, and is now not in a position to report to his job; Paramjeet Kaur, a Sikh woman, who has got her house and possession, the result of thirty years of hard work, washed away in an instant, and now wants to go back to her ancestral home in Punjab; and an unnamed director of the island's Malaria Research Centre, who gets his wife and daughter killed by the wave while he was away, and now searches them frantically among the debris.
Ghosh writes,"Listening to their stories it is easy to believe that most of them found what they were looking for: here, in this far-flung chain of islands, tens of thousands of settlers were able to make their way out of poverty, into the ranks of country's expanding middle class. But on the morning of December 26, this hard-won betterment became a potent source of vulnerability. For to be middle class is to be kept afloat on a life-raft of paper:identity cards,cheque books,certificates of life insurance and receipts of fixed deposit. It was the particular nature of the disaster that it targeted not just the physical being of the victims but also the proof of the survivors' identities."
A great piece of writing. The narrative of the director who in the end chooses to pick up some laboratory slides as the only memento of his past is really touching, and beats fiction.
MRINAL BOSE
Friday, January 14, 2005
VULTURES
They are human vultures, if you allow me to say so. And in Tsunami-ravaged parts of India they're on the prowl for feasting on orphaned children and widowed women, according to a news report published in the STATESMAN of Kolkata.
Natural calamities always are windfall to some. The Tsunami would help many people, especially those in the administration involved in relief and rehabilation programme, to siphon off money from the somewhat unaccounted fund and make them rich. The politicians of different hues will try to get an extra mileage out of their so-called "service". These are given, and you have nothing much to say about these things.
But the middle men preying on the hapless women and children, at this time of devastation and death, are a new phenomenon. Why would the sex industry would let go of this opportunity, one may argue. How could the paedophiles resist such a bounty?
The bottomline: the civilization sinks to a new low, hang your head in shame.
MRINAL BOSE
They are human vultures, if you allow me to say so. And in Tsunami-ravaged parts of India they're on the prowl for feasting on orphaned children and widowed women, according to a news report published in the STATESMAN of Kolkata.
Natural calamities always are windfall to some. The Tsunami would help many people, especially those in the administration involved in relief and rehabilation programme, to siphon off money from the somewhat unaccounted fund and make them rich. The politicians of different hues will try to get an extra mileage out of their so-called "service". These are given, and you have nothing much to say about these things.
But the middle men preying on the hapless women and children, at this time of devastation and death, are a new phenomenon. Why would the sex industry would let go of this opportunity, one may argue. How could the paedophiles resist such a bounty?
The bottomline: the civilization sinks to a new low, hang your head in shame.
MRINAL BOSE
Saturday, January 08, 2005
TSUNAMI, 2004
The Tsunami seems to have a predilection for Asia. Consider the earlier tsunamis that happened. They hit Papua New Guinea(1998), Indonesia(1992)and Japan(1993).
The december 26 Tsunami is perhaps the worst of all, in terms of magnitude and effect, killing about two lakhs Asians across a vast strech of South Asia.
Though I'm not a direct victim of this calamity, it had an overwhelming impact on me, and I found myself wailing for the hapless masses who were caught in it.
Read my column in viewunplugged.com at
http://www.viewsunplugged.com/VU/20050106/mrinalBose_tsunami.shtml
MRINAL BOSE
The Tsunami seems to have a predilection for Asia. Consider the earlier tsunamis that happened. They hit Papua New Guinea(1998), Indonesia(1992)and Japan(1993).
The december 26 Tsunami is perhaps the worst of all, in terms of magnitude and effect, killing about two lakhs Asians across a vast strech of South Asia.
Though I'm not a direct victim of this calamity, it had an overwhelming impact on me, and I found myself wailing for the hapless masses who were caught in it.
Read my column in viewunplugged.com at
http://www.viewsunplugged.com/VU/20050106/mrinalBose_tsunami.shtml
MRINAL BOSE
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