Saturday, January 30, 2010
Experience of symbioting with Listening to the Grasshoppers
Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Penguin,2009
It’s difficult. It’s engrossing. It’s self-revealing and it’s stupendously mind-boggling to read a genre where you just can’t read and put it aside but you are compelled to react with the verbose pages those demand your attention rapt, multi-dimensional and reactive.
It’s been a few months I spent a symbiotic period with this book, but actually I have not come out of this very title till. With the every incident reported in news aligned to the scope of this book be it in India or abroad I immediately could relate them with the jihad of Ms Roy against the very linear power-centric liberalization along with marginalization of the sects of population in various ways, even sometimes with helplessness.
Arundhati Roy is synonymous with various impressions across the globe. Her literary achievement like a comet and then her self-chosen separation from fiction and her journey towards right-based politics, human-rights, eco-rights has evolved so many different impressions about her is exemplified by her nicely in an essay of her “I met a group of polished, nurtured ladies of Delhi society in a party a few days back. One of them told me that she was going through my account about the tribal issues and she said she actually felt bad, and then she asked me to join them with a drink. Poor tinsel girl!”
This is the problem of reading Roy that the readers are suffering for near a decade. Her every account rises from the level of soil and then deepens the forest of thoughts like the villages and fields get submerged when the dam whirls up, like the heavy army-boot-march takes away the peaceful-dreams in a sleepy town.
Continuing her consensus against the wealth-reapers, the genociders, the fundamentalists (be it market or communal) Roy appeals her readers along her very own literary excellence. Her arguments at times look cliché, her repeated strings sound monotonous but none can be ignored. Looking at the things from a distance we can see how we are getting disconnected from the fellow country-men and this divide is made may be for rule-sake, power-sake, governing-sake…and more faceted. The chapters of this anthology addresses the problems surging in Kashmir, the issue of Maoists, the communal issue of Gujrat, the issue of Nandigram, the issue of killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915, the issue of Iraq and Afghanistan after the war operations by US and the issue of ‘democracy’ in India with emphasize on ‘strange-case’ of Afzal Guru in the parliament attack case and Mumbai terror attack. The argument of Roy about helplessness of the millions who are in the shadow (more precisely dark) of the very development are pushed to armed-liberation and its conflict with state looks much linear at times, which is contrary to her style of describing the issues. Still you may like her, you may dislike but you cannot exclude her.
In a way Roy is the member of a very niche society, where the thinkers, creative minds engage to come up as a social-consensus; like Sartre or Chomsky. And here it’s worthy to mention that in each of these cases, they participate while keeping their ‘signature’ intact, mention not Roy is very much in this league.
At the end I cannot resist myself quoting from the essay with the same title as the book:
“…Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting.
"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they say, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.
And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."”
The ones who can listen to that swarm of the grass-hoppers; this book is a must read for you. And who can’t, this can be a start for you.
Arundhati Roy
Penguin,2009
It’s difficult. It’s engrossing. It’s self-revealing and it’s stupendously mind-boggling to read a genre where you just can’t read and put it aside but you are compelled to react with the verbose pages those demand your attention rapt, multi-dimensional and reactive.
It’s been a few months I spent a symbiotic period with this book, but actually I have not come out of this very title till. With the every incident reported in news aligned to the scope of this book be it in India or abroad I immediately could relate them with the jihad of Ms Roy against the very linear power-centric liberalization along with marginalization of the sects of population in various ways, even sometimes with helplessness.
Arundhati Roy is synonymous with various impressions across the globe. Her literary achievement like a comet and then her self-chosen separation from fiction and her journey towards right-based politics, human-rights, eco-rights has evolved so many different impressions about her is exemplified by her nicely in an essay of her “I met a group of polished, nurtured ladies of Delhi society in a party a few days back. One of them told me that she was going through my account about the tribal issues and she said she actually felt bad, and then she asked me to join them with a drink. Poor tinsel girl!”
This is the problem of reading Roy that the readers are suffering for near a decade. Her every account rises from the level of soil and then deepens the forest of thoughts like the villages and fields get submerged when the dam whirls up, like the heavy army-boot-march takes away the peaceful-dreams in a sleepy town.
Continuing her consensus against the wealth-reapers, the genociders, the fundamentalists (be it market or communal) Roy appeals her readers along her very own literary excellence. Her arguments at times look cliché, her repeated strings sound monotonous but none can be ignored. Looking at the things from a distance we can see how we are getting disconnected from the fellow country-men and this divide is made may be for rule-sake, power-sake, governing-sake…and more faceted. The chapters of this anthology addresses the problems surging in Kashmir, the issue of Maoists, the communal issue of Gujrat, the issue of Nandigram, the issue of killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915, the issue of Iraq and Afghanistan after the war operations by US and the issue of ‘democracy’ in India with emphasize on ‘strange-case’ of Afzal Guru in the parliament attack case and Mumbai terror attack. The argument of Roy about helplessness of the millions who are in the shadow (more precisely dark) of the very development are pushed to armed-liberation and its conflict with state looks much linear at times, which is contrary to her style of describing the issues. Still you may like her, you may dislike but you cannot exclude her.
In a way Roy is the member of a very niche society, where the thinkers, creative minds engage to come up as a social-consensus; like Sartre or Chomsky. And here it’s worthy to mention that in each of these cases, they participate while keeping their ‘signature’ intact, mention not Roy is very much in this league.
At the end I cannot resist myself quoting from the essay with the same title as the book:
“…Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting.
"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they say, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.
And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."”
The ones who can listen to that swarm of the grass-hoppers; this book is a must read for you. And who can’t, this can be a start for you.
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