Media & Propaganda in Modi’s India

Mainstream media networks have seldom been able to resist selling themselves out to the ideology of the status quo – releasing coverage that suits only a specific perspective, while simultaneously reconstructing (or completely effacing) the reality that goes against said perspective. This has been the case throughout history, for it is natural that an organisation relevant enough to be the leading disseminator of information in a country and about the country, it should comprise individuals that are staunchly pro-government, or are, at the very least, in sound sympathy of the policies that are adopted by the government. Consequently, any form of ‘debate’ in the news media that purports to condemn a particularly controversial policy taken up by the state is, on closer examination, no less than a milquetoast attempt to convey to the audience that it is, in fact, neutral, and immune to the pressures of power (which is hardly ever the case, as I will discuss in this article).

The main object of the media from the time of the BJP’s unstoppable ascendancy in 2014 has been centred around the demonising of Muslims. It is, in fact, evident that the next generation of Indian Muslims are going to grow up internalising these appalling stereotypes of themselves as barbaric, senselessly atavistic, and inherently different from the people they find themselves pit up against – the reason being, in the eyes of the India media, Muslims do not and have never possessed a history of their own; they are simply a crude generalisation of all the traits and characters one would expect to find in a villain in a fairy tale. From around the time Prime Minister Modi appointed himself as the harbinger of a new India (invigorated as it was with the ideals of Hindutva nationalism, as well as a blind sense of moral righteousness in defending the country against what another prominent member of the BJP would call ‘termites’), the media has spiralled into the black holes of apathy on one hand, and virulent support for the government on the other (which is sometimes barely short of a collective panegyric centred around Modi). This complementation of a negative and a positive inevitably brings about a pathological condition to the state of the media while at the same time providing enough time and space to the ones in power to carry on abusing it, so it follows that the constant vilification of Muslims serves a definite purpose in the political agenda of the BJP – in pushing forth their idea of the ‘other’, the pathological outsider that constantly threatens to destroy peace and order in the country.

The rapacious demands for personal aggrandisement leads to self-appointed ‘experts’, journalists, news media anchors, and other individuals who command cultural respect from fields as varied as the entertainment industry, sports, and of course, politicians, to spew the same rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ – Muslims of the country in this aspect are reduced to a primitive generalisation, an abstraction, even, embodying everything that goes against the essence of modernisation (or westernisation, for that matter, because the lines between the two yet remain blurred to the majority of Indians today) and Hindu nationalism. Media representation of Muslims as terrorists in India isn’t new, but the fact that journalists should appear on primetime TV networks day in and day out and continue propagating this hateful discourse at a time when islamophobia has reached a frightening crescendo all over India, is both disappointing and hurtful.

During the initial rise of COVID-19 cases around April last year, the major news agencies had wasted no time in making the Tablighi Jamaat incident the political scapegoat for the government’s failure in dealing with the pandemic, leading to several distasteful remarks about the irresponsibility and/or deliberate sabotage of lockdown protocols – and grandly coining a new term to shift the focus away from government inaction regarding economic security nets, or migrant workers, or the imposition of strict lockdowns. ‘Corona jihad’, for a good week or two, continued flooding TV channels and newspaper articles, fuelling the resentment towards the so-portrayed betrayers of society. What is particularly disconcerting about this attitude is there is seldom any other mode of discourse that is allowed time and space, let alone mainstream exposure. In fact, any deviance from the negative colouring of Islam in the Indian media results in jubilant approbation from the liberals and an implicit (sometimes explicit) slap on the wrist from the government agencies that play a part in deciding what is to be presented, as well as how it is to be re-presented, so that blind trust as well as hateful distrust of the masses are suitably manifested in the appropriate regions.

Let alone reportage of events, the current trend of journalistic representation of Muslims in India has adopted a manner that is akin to a psychological re-conditioning of the mind – so as to make the masses perceive the world in a highly dichotomised, black and white division between the good and the bad. Anything that falls outside the purview of the ideological interests of the state apparatus is conveniently side-stepped, and in the rare occasions when a hateful incident has been made public by the rising number of independent news agencies, the cause of the problem is immediately ascribed to the likes of ‘infiltrating termites’, ‘terrorists’, ‘anti-nationals’, ‘naxalites’, and so on. Michael Parenti, in a 2003 essay on media hypocrisy, catches the sentiment quite well when he says –

“Newscasters who want to keep their careers afloat learn the fine art of evasion. We should never accuse them of doing a poor and sloppy job of reporting. If anything, with great skill they skirt around the most important points of a story. With much finesse they say a lot about very little, serving up heaps of junk news filled with so many empty calories and so few nutrients. Thus do they avoid offending those who wield politico-economic power. It is enough to take your breath away.”

The main reasons for this terrifying and unending stream of hateful misinformation, lurid sensationalization, and hypocritical bias of the media is because most of the the mainstream media companies in India today are the lapdogs of corporate giants. What results is an arbitrary (not to mention poorly organised) spew of the hateful discourse endorsed by the BJP government, targeting all agencies and individuals that show even a modicum of resistance against their ideology of hard-boiled Hindutva nationalism and conservative chauvinism. The fact that to be critical of the state apparatus in today’s India amounts to standing completely opposed to the very essence of the fabricated ‘Indian-ness’ as propagated by the BJP, is a bone-chilling reminder (and a confirmation) that power in the wrong hands can warp minds, induce hatred, divide people, and uproot peace. It’s true that at the end of the day, news media agencies are nothing more than profit seeking corporations, so it follows that they would have an implicit interest in promoting one category of content over another, hoping to appeal emotionally to the viewers. But again, when this bias swerves out from the territory of mere profit/self-aggrandisement and results directly in the loss of human lives, it’s no longer a question of subjective opinion pieces and prime-time debate hours, but becomes a blatant misuse of power.

It is to be remembered that the media in India today remains one of the most potent propaganda machines of the state apparatus, and contrary to their jubilant chest-beatings over being the apparent ‘watchdogs of democracy’, they seem to be intent on demolishing the faintest vestiges of democratic freedom in its actual essence. People who know better than to be duped into believing that anything they see on TV is an accurate representation of the truth as it unfolded, have started resorting to independent news agencies on social media, as well as street journalists and youth activists who present the promise of an alternative source to the truth – which is considerably less clouded with the prejudice that is emblematic of the mainstream TV and newspaper organisations. Then again, no news has ever materialised in vacuum, and the presentation of facts/fictions both exist within the political context made effective by the action (and in most cases, inaction) of the masses. Counting on any external sources to hand us hard-boiled objectivity on a silver platter will hardly ever work out; so at the end of the day, the onus is on all of us to step outside our air-conditioned rooms and see the truth for ourselves, so we can move past merely branding ourselves as ‘activists’ and instead start activating the changes we want to see around us.

by prantik ali

On Music Snobs – Ruminations of a Music Snob

‘Culture shock, future shock
Fuck yourself, choke yourself’ – Culture Shock, Death Grips

I have often contemplated on the grounds that make a Playboi Carti fan fundamentally differ from a Hemanta Mukhopadhyay fan. Are the properties of difference, if any, socially determined? Or is the difference based in a combination of that person’s political outlook and ‘progressiveness’ (not to be confused here with some ill-defined essence of modernity, but rather a progressiveness that entails their respective attitudes toward other genres of music). I’m not saying that these two demographics are often found to clash in one’s actual material life; however, there remains all the same a vague sense of discord between the two, an eerily palpable sense of discomfiture, incomprehensible but there all the same, threatening to disrupt the fabric of civil harmony every now and then. Which is why I shall embark on this humble endeavour to voice my own opinions about this divide, the ways to resolve it, as well as to highlight why we shouldn’t.

While going about my day, I have often come across people who, like me, are appreciative of that dangerous genre of music. Hidden away in the corners of the metro compartment, their heads banging away on the surface of those oil-smudged seat windows, eyes closed and pulses raging to the beat of some nasty underground 90s’ east coast project. They could very well be listening to some completely different genre of music, I hear you ask. But take it from any other person, who, like me, has gone through the life-changing experiences of being a devout enjoyer of hip-hop – the haggard looks, the tragically misjudged dressing sense, a plethora of techniques to avoid eye contact with those around them, and of course, you have, if you dare to venture within 5 feet of them, the positively gut-wrenching smell of social anxiety and paranoia. Upon noticing one of these sad, miserable creatures on my journeys in the metro, what should feel like any other communitarian feeling, quickly escalates to an illogical and urgent desire to go up to them and show them my last.FM, thus vindicating the indisputable veracity of my superiority, residing solely on the fact that I lean towards the more esoteric. But then it hits me – it must surely be an inescapable part of their reality too, the fact that they are complete anomalies to a milieu that remains eternally skeptical of the value of all the voices that have spoken out, in verses, of their own battles with their society, the unending list of injustices, meted out ad infinitum by a now hidden, now visible nexus consisting of the state, the judiciary, the police, ex-girlfriends, managers, producers, and so on. With that, my communitarian feelings restore to their normal rates, and I let them enjoy whatever they are listening to.

Now, the first impression one gets when they notice a person listening to a classical Bengali song from the 60s or the 70s in public, tends to differ extraordinarily from that formed around one who might be listening to, say, a Death Grips track in public. A Bengali song, in this regard, requires no justification for the context in which it is played, for it embodies that spirit of harmless reminiscence that appeals to both the aged and the young. The calming melancholy of such old songs will almost always result in a healthy outpouring of amicability from bystanders, irrespective of who is playing it. For the aged, such an occasion will strike them right in the heart, transforming them immediately to the realm of some distant past, to the comforting bosom of some old lover, or the priceless memories of their loving family. And to the young and uninitiated, the very aura of an object dug out of antiquity, however remote and anachronistic it might sound to their uninitiated ears, instils in them a grave respect not for a bygone era, but rather a generalized notion of a fruitful generation which was in the habit of producing genuinely talented artists who knew their ways about their craft, unlike modern music which is always loud, jarring, and imbued with the characteristics of a profession rather than being a realm of pure aesthetic experience. Classical music is not to be toyed with, for it engenders quite an amount of cultural credibility, not to mention that the very utterance of Rabindranath and Hemanta and Manna Dey is enough to send the common Bengali intellectual to unscaled heights of rapturous orgasms. Sure, those names make up the bastion of a cultural legacy that is unmatched even today – an age of degeneracy inundated by artists who would rather churn out ‘content’ by the thousands instead of indulging in the outmoded practice of making good, meaningful art. It follows, from the train of logic I have so far tried to put forth, that the problem is not embedded in that specific type of individuals who I have mocked, but is a far more insidious problem that owes its origin to the recklessness with which we, as a culture treat our artists. But now, back to the dickriding.

Imagine this – you are sitting on a bench in a park enjoying a cup of tea and staring at the trees and humming quietly to a tune from a song that you remember your grandmother listening to on a quite, lazy, winter afternoon (I am here drawing attention to the fact that an ostentatious enjoyment of classical Bengali music is never complete without a fair dose of romanticizing the inexplicable melancholy of such winter afternoons and sunlit verandahs). And then, without any note of caution, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. I take that the closest analogy that exists in the mind of the bhadrolok with regard to rap artists is that they are uncouth criminals, hence, I shall make it a point to use only those adjectives that retain the potential to rekindle in your sanitized consciousness the imagery of axe-yielding anarchists striking down effigies of propriety and good behavior. There is a laughably wide stretch of distance between a man’s voice pining for lost love, and that of a barbarian’s voice boasting about the number of skulls they’ve capped or the women they’ve bedded. Not even ten seconds into the song, you begin to perceive that the lyricism affords you not the faintest trace of peace or tranquility, nor any sense of aloofness or pomposity. And the repeated allusions to sex, capital, and drugs (refer to ASAP Rocky’s P.M.W.) derail the innate intellectualism of a song that is avowedly anti-materialist, preserving all its faith in the ephemeral form of a lost love, or something more profound like one’s epistemological ungroundedness, perhaps. In the mind of the puritan bhadrolok, rap songs typically are not known to address such abstract human emotions, but instead rest on the vulgar desires of a fundamentally broken generation of lost souls who devote all their time to the pursuit of their trivial materialistic longings (P, M, W). Ill-mannered, uncivil, offensive, uncultured, crude, are just a few of the attributes commonly associated with this breed of musicians, which is not only evident from their refusal to recognize and respect the formal changes in music, but more so from the way they react to these songs upon chancing, through some ill-fated hand of providence, to expose themselves to these grievous assaults on their auditory nerves. On such occasions, the music is not merely listened to (or ignored), it is gulped down, it is chewed through, it is consumed, like a spoonful of the most bitter medicine known to mankind.

The aftermath of this experience might entail the bhadrolok to seriously ponder about the status of their Puritanism, and look to preserve the almost torn fabric of their social respectability by putting on an affected display of disgruntled mannerisms – by scrunching their face up till their judgemental beady eyes disappear into tiny slits, from where they continue to survey the sight of crime and ruminate on the dying gentleness of good art. Sometimes, they might click their tongues, suck on their teeth, look on at the architect of their torture with disgust and pity, in a concerted effort to make apparent their dismay at the other’s musical inclinations. What I’m trying to lay bare, is the hypocrisy they knowingly or unknowingly exhibit in responding thus to a genre of music they have lost the ability to reflect on and relate to. This is because of several reasons, and I argue, most of them stem not from personal likes and dislikes, but take shape gradually and then fully from the social conditioning that one is exposed to, telling them to obey the dictates of the old and the bygone, hissing in their ears malicious lies about not only a genre of music, but also reinforcing dangerous cultural stereotypes and moulding them in the shape of reactionary elitists – the gatekeepers of culture itself.

To try and understand this mindset better, it is important that we begin to unpack the element of threat that the bhadrolok at once perceives in rap music, for it would be reductive to endow their hypocrisy only with the fleeting attributes of mistrust and superciliousness. I contend that behind their high-handed dismissal of hip hop, there lurks a cultural anxiety about its far reaching implications on the younger generation, who lack the moral restraint to shun the path of black artists glorifying the dangerous lives they lead. That they have not done sufficiently enough to get to the bottom of the double-edged meaning of this glorification, which presents a nuanced critique of the social forces which have historically plucked them off the refined horizons of bourgeoisie living and placed them in ghettoes, is amply clear. In short, music for them is lumped into one of those agents of relief, or more commonly an ingredient in their otherwise bland recipes to evince a cathartic response by wallowing in a self-idealized realm of ‘high’ culture.

To elucidate on another aspect of their responses, I will take up as an example the way the two warring factions have historically been known to roast the other’s authenticity in terms of pure musical essence. Classical music enjoyers typically see themselves as experiencing music differently, that is, as the consumers of a pure, unadulterated essence of musicality – combined with lyrics that evoke the truest emotions that can ever be conceived of by the human condition. Rap, on the other hand, is barely deserving of being treated as music in the first place, what it does is torment the listener with its unbridled ferocity, its recklessness, and its vulgarity. Therefore, I feel that it is unfeasible for the bhadrolok puritan to even think of these two genres of music as applicable for a justifiable comparison with regard to which one is better. On the other hand, a person who loves rap music might take the opportunity to actually write out a blog post that is highly critical of the snobbishness they have faced from the ‘gatekeepers of culture’.

And after an inordinate amount of rumination on this divide, I have come to the sad conclusion that perhaps it is just so that certain divides were meant to be unbridgeable. Perhaps, it is just so that a Playboi Carti track is meant to be listened to in the form of a subjective experience of social dislocation, and a Hemanta Mukhopadhyay song meant to be enjoyed in the throes of saccharinity, as is always the custom with whatever emits nostalgia in so vague and ample an amount. Disregarding the narrative I have so far painted by highlighting the contrasting perceptions (degeneracy vs refinement, highbrow vs lowbrow), maybe it is wiser to end on a note of unbridled solipsism, and enjoy my own taste of music, with my head rested against the oil-smudged window of the metro, wishing my thoughts have not thrown the world into disarray.

by prantik ali

the beast is dead – long live the king

I have always enjoyed watching King Kong tear apart the constructed civility of Manhattan, but there is something about the way the creature is killed off that has irked me since I was a kid. In fact, many will testify to my inclination towards viewing Kong as the victim of a world that has repressed and lumped the unknown as an entity inseparable from the enemy. At the end of the film, as the great fallen figure of Kong continues to attract wide-eyed spectators, Carl Denham declares that ‘it was beauty killed the beast.’ I disagree – and upon the casting off of the abstract veil of ‘beauty’ (synonymous with the female character of Ann Darrow in the movie) that shields a man like Denham from taking full responsibility of the slain monster, there is the ugly face of Culture, which I deem to be the most dangerous element in the narrative, singlehandedly creating a villain where there is none, and then proceeding to kill it off with the impersonal impunity that is the guiding principle of the age of concrete and steel.  

An unmistakable facet of the journey from America to Skull Island, and then back to America bearing the monstrous ape, is its imperialistic undertone. For instance, although not overtly undertaking any colonial mission, the character of Carl Denham is shown to be intensely devoted to the art of filmmaking, and in the course of his first dialogue with his crewmates, the audience finds in him a character ready to take risks in order to get to where he wants. Driven by the impetus of enterprise, he has taken with himself explosives and gas bombs in his journey to shoot the unknown, and it becomes apparent at once that besides wielding the camera, Denham is prepared to wield arms and use ammunition as well to probe into the darkness of Nature. Before reaching Skull Island, the ship is caught in an almost impenetrable haze of fog somewhere in the deep, uncharted territories of the South Pacific. Although seemingly inculcating notions of blindness and obscurity, this fog, as it turns out, does not merely obscure, but in fact is merely a prelude to a profoundly sad discovery of the fallibility of civilization. On the island, the crew intrudes upon the native inhabitants in the midst of a pagan ritual. Not surprisingly, they speak a different language (if it can be called that), and are rendered practically unapproachable by the horde of white people that have suddenly appeared on the scene with cameras and shotgun rifles – instruments of captivity and violence. By divorcing the indigenous population of a recognizably coherent language, the white intruders implicate themselves in a colonial discourse, which is then taken further by their insistent demonstration of presumptuousness and greed. The white crewmembers and sailors believe, at first sight, that the incoherence of the tribal people translates into their being animalistic savages, with no trace of either a civilizational bulwark, nor a language. They are thus immediately shorn of their intellectual prowess, and presented to the audience as unthinking and archaic humans – the last, blurred boundary between culture and nature. It is the beating of their drums, in symphony with a chant, that first welcomes Denham and his crew into their midst; with no inkling of a language to relate to, all possibilities of a reconciliation of opposites is lost, as if in an untranslated echo. Upon learning, with the help of their ship’s captain, that the natives intend to sacrifice one of their girls to Kong as his ‘bride’, the crew makes a hasty retreat to the ship, but come nightfall, Darrow is kidnapped by the ‘savages’ from off the ship, evidently in preparation of a grand treat to the beast beyond the walls of the island, perhaps as a way of placating its hunger, or the imminent danger it poses to the islanders merely by its persona. Here again is a clear foregrounding of the myth of civilization. The white girl being dragged against her will to an island teeming with what she sees as an inchoate mass of savages, could very well be the mirror image of the beast being shipped off to Manhattan, amid what it perceives as anarchic creatures wielding cameras and machine guns – the ultimate perversion of a supposed modernity, gone down the drains.

The ape becomes to Darrow the physical manifestation of all the anxieties and prejudices that pit the white European against the uncivilized, the savage. Content in its paradisal harmony with nature, Kong can be analogized to the Nietszchean Ubermensh; a God reveling in his lonely splendor in a kingdom of his own (in Denham’s own words, Kong is likened to a pagan God, ‘…holding that island in a grip of deadly fear’). The repeated dismantling of the threshold between Beauty and the Beast is achieved not only through the general narrative flow of the movie (culture penetrating the darkness of nature followed by a creature intrinsically tied to nature being brought in chains to the supposed lap of culture), but also through the semantic elements hidden in the interaction between Kong and Darrow. In one scene, Kong is engaged in an act of disrobing Ann Darrow, and with each piece of cloth he tears off her body, his face breaks into a grin, brought about by what can only be assumed as a mixture of voyeuristic delight, and an act of intimate discovery. As a natural element of the forest, he has become Nature, and the cloth that shields and protects the embodiment of Beauty thus becomes to him a vessel of discovery. His foray into the sphere of civil society, although against his will, becomes tantamount to an infiltration into the sanctuary of Culture.

The beast dismantles the basic structural paradigm of the uncivilized as an agent of threat and disruption to the social fabric of the civilized. I would refute the commonplace understanding of Kong as ‘a mighty god who turns out to be an oversexed gorilla’. Indeed, despite being an oversexed gorilla, and thereby unfit to be commanding power in the domain of Culture, Kong subverts the principles of oppression, and firmly reinforces the idea of himself as God even in the midst of the technological revolution which had supposedly wedged open an unbridgeable chasm between nature and culture. Relegated to the status of a passive elemental force, Nature seemed to have bowed before Man’s presumptuousness in an age marked by rapid technological changes and inventions. Nature, so to speak, seemed to have sunk back into dormancy, leaving the enlightened white man to revel in the glory of his freedom. This is precisely the cause of the existence of that sharp disjunction between the images of Kong thrashing anachronistic dinosaurs in Skull Island, on one hand, and him scaling the shiny, phallic structure of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan on the other. Could his ascent, then, be seen as a means to win back the essence of supremacy that he had consequently come to recognize as fleeting and illusory? Or is the beast’s final act of audacity simply an act of unfiltered despair? In plunging to his death on the street of Manhattan, is the fall of the beast a symbolic representation of the savage annihilation of nature at the hands of modernity? The questions are many, but the answers are few.

Technically, God as he is, Kong is a deserving candidate of terror as well as respect in both these arenas, but to his immense wrath, the essence of his terror is turned to a spectacle, and the image of God in chains becomes the ‘eighth wonder of the world’. In the end, even though he eventually falls, like Icarus, upon venturing too close to the sun, the unadmitted triumph of Kong forces the audience to recalibrate their mythical imagination of Man as an infallible, untouchable being. This myth, valued as it is in the hearts of men, is in the process of a slow death. The tragedy is not in that we fail every day to guard this myth from the coldness of reality – it is the very basic fact that we have learnt how to pick ourselves up, and rage on against the world, holding hands and walking into the darkness despite knowing this darkness is impenetrable…even for man. As this darkness – wrought by modernism – slowly recedes into the shape of archaism, Kong becomes an even more compelling evidence of the crumbling façade of Man’s brazen hold on history.

by prantik ali

Apna Time (Kab) Aayega? – Retracing the Struggles of Salim Langda and Gully Boy as Muslim Ghetto Dwellers in Bombay

The release of Zoya Akhtar’s 2019 box office hit ‘Gully Boy’ saw an explosion of its tagline ‘Apna time aayega’ – from being a powerful statement of reassertion over one’s life, it would soon reach the height of a cultural phenomenon in India, a trend that has rolled over into the years that have followed. T-shirts were manufactured in thousands with the words plastered over the front, and if one were to step out and roam the streets they would be sure to come across a significant number of people donning the new cultural ethos of a renewed, aggressive hope, and an unapologetic confidence in one’s ability to turn things around. India being a country where social mobility is nothing but a myth, the ostensible political consciousness that would otherwise be encapsulated in such a tagline soon regressed into a pithy statement of hopeful optimism. A disorganized mass of working class youth seemed to be tentatively asking themselves whether their time would really come, ignorant of a reality which is grossly divorced from the rags-to-riches story of the protagonist, the eponymous ‘Gully Boy’/Murad Sheikh, played by Ranveer Singh.

Thirty years before Murad Sheikh had stirred the hearts of a million young Indians seeking their freedom from the shackles of poverty, Saeed Akhtar Mirza had painted a similar picture of a disenfranchised working class Muslim roaming the ghettoes of Bombay, who had claimed, in as much the same tone of vigorous hope as Murad, ‘apna bhi time aayenga re’. For a more detailed conspectus on how the donnée of these characters, separated in temporality but united geographically (as well as socially), match up to each other, a closer inspection of the guiding motifs of the two films is an indispensable requirement.

In ‘Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro’, Salim Langda, played by Pavan Malhotra, cuts a deracinated figure against the backdrop of a Bombay ghetto in the 1980s that can only be described as being characterized by an excess of squalor. Compelled by his circumstances, Salim is an uneducated tapori who spends his time engaging in petty crime with his friends, Peera (Makrand Deshpande) and Abdul (Ashutosh Gowariker). The film sets itself against the contemporaneity of 1980s Bombay, rife with communal tension between Hindus and Muslims (the contextual background of the Bhiwandi riots of the early 1980s serve as building blocks that lend Salim more depth as an unemployed loudmouth whose only occupation is swindling the shopkeepers and other wage earners of the community), as well as focusing on the economic shambles left in the wake of the textile industry boom and the consequent strikes, which had resulted in massive unemployment across the commercial heart of Bombay.  In Saeed Mirza’s world, the socio-economic turmoil of the ghetto is hence an extension of selective structural prejudice, communal disharmony, disenfranchisement, and the religious chauvinism, whose flames are fanned by politicians, and orchestrated by prejudiced ‘businessmen’ in cahoots with the police.

Aslam, the much more refined and socio-politically conscious suitor to Salim’s sister Anees, is diametrically opposed to Salim as far as a general outlook on the socio-culturally depleted Muslim populace is concerned. Pursuing an education in Urdu, he advocates higher education for Muslim women (something which wins him the unwanted harassment of the orthodox-conservative Muslims of the ghetto), and his room is littered with books, signifying his aspiration of success via education and toil. As noted by film critic Ira Bhaskar, even the languages employed by the two go on to reinforce their disparity in cultural refinement. While Salim’s dialect is characterized by the typical Bambaiya accent, Aslam ‘clings to the refined language of an older social formation as something sacred, something that can give value to a life that otherwise seems devoid of any purpose’ (Bhaskar, Allen : 299). Under the patronage of Aslam, Salim starts noticing how the ‘business’ of promoting differences between Hindus and Muslims plays into the agenda of the ones in power in distracting people like him from the more contentious socio-economic subjugation which have kept them fettered and hence unable to bring about any significant material changes in their lives for generations. Aslam influences Salim to confront the hard truth of their social immobility, and pushes him to follow in his dead brother Javed’s footsteps, who was brave enough to break out of the social stagnancy of a life in the ghettoes and pursue his education in full earnest. With the application of effort, he claims, even the poorest of the Muslims can climb out of the gutter of generational poverty, and move towards emancipation and prosperity.

Salim, however, finds all paths to such emancipation barred off due to his identity as a Muslim ghetto dweller, and even admits to his sister Anees on one occasion that he feels trapped and unable to escape the ‘gutter’ –  revealing at once his resultant social alienation after achieving the first semblances of socio-political consciousness, which could just as easily be translated as a feeling of entrapment in the jaws of a social reality he is powerless to change, let alone ward off through his exaggerated machismo. As the camera hauntingly captures the scene of the siblings hugging behind the bars of a kitchen window, one can only assume that for Salim, Aslam’s prescribed panacea for their social immobility is but a far-fetched chimeric dream that only works its charms for individuals, and not entire communities.

We thus see Salim’s religious identity seep into his class identity, with the co-existence of both these axes simultaneously dictating how he reacts to the world (petty crimes, hoodlumism, masculine arrogance masquerading as street-smartness, and so on). The narrative is interspersed with mention of riots and communal disharmony, and the ghettoized existence of the social milieu is weaved into Salim’s own experiences as a Muslim vagabond who is almost compelled to participate in actions that perpetuate the poor social condition of his community. Even as Aslam’s rational wisdom pushes him to take the dignified way of hard work in order to change his fortunes, Salim’s father’s dismissal from his job and his inability to find work is a contradictory case in point that negates such wisdom – Saeed Akhtar Mirza is not interested in handing down a toned down version of social reality, or even providing the audience with a blueprint of success that is often a concomitant of individualized tales of struggle. The title of the film is therefore as prescient as can be. Salim Pasha, who goes by the name of Salim Langda as a signifier of his exclusivity from the other Salims of the ghetto, will die as a faceless product of his socio-political circumstances, and there is no point at all in wasting tears crying over his fate.

Following a similar analysis, in Gully Boy, Akhtar pushes a similar model of social (im)mobility through the character of Murad, whose identity is, tragically, all but limited to the enforcement of Islamophobic stereotypes. Several instances of this stereotyping can be noticed throughout the film, which is after all a common trend in the representation of Muslims in commercial Bollywood cinema. Murad’s father (Vijay Raaz) is an aggressive patriarch who marries a second wife, and his mother (Amruta Subhash) is defiantly silent in the face of oppression (which she faces not only from the male members but also from her mother-in-law), with the only exception being Murad’s girlfriend Safeena (Alia Bhatt), whose violent temper and aggressive self-assertion may be considered a subversion of the submissive Muslim girl trope. Murad himself is shown twice in the film offering prayers, but the interrelatedness of his identity as a Muslim who has been forced to inhabit the lowest sections of existence in the slums of Dharavi through continued social oppression and prejudice, is erased completely. Stripped of the historicity (and contemporaneity) of his religious identity, the only thing that can be assumed to be driving Murad into aspiring for the heights of fame and glory is the humiliation he faces on a daily basis for belonging to the lower classes. As such, the idea of his struggle to claw through to the top is based around an atomized version of the larger struggles that generally engender the minority proletariat. This effacement of religious identity politics, however, does not result in a sharper focus on the class dynamics either, with the exception being the fiery soundtrack of the film, which consists of a large collaboration project between contemporary Indian hip-hop artists including Divine and Naezy (the inspirations behind the film’s protagonist), Dub Sharma, Jasleen Royal, Rishi Rich, and other emerging voices of rage and discontent. Akhtar’s choice of representing the bedrock of hip-hop as a means of articulation for the marginalized voices is a uniquely original idea which has seldom been put to trial in Bollywood cinema, but the result is quite an injudicious, half-baked take on marginalized protest culture – especially in the light of the fact that both the director as well as the cast has come out in subsequent interviews as being steadfastly apolitical in all intents and purposes. The revolutionary aesthetic of using Kanhaiya Kumar’s famous Azaadi slogan in one of the most famous tracks of the soundtrack is, in the context of its usage in a self-proclaimed apolitical film, nothing but a pretentious pratfall, failing to fully tap into its anti-authority stance, and failing also to decipher the urgency in the call for freedom popularized in the independence struggle of Kashmiris, turning the slogan instead into a trite pop cultural merchandise bereft of any revolutionary potential.

While both Murad and Salim profess to break the shackles that keep them confined to a life of misery, the overarching dominance of their respective circumstances in the fulfillment/futility of their aspirations is also worth a closer look. In the case of Murad, the only obstacle that is concretized as a tangible source of his existential crisis is his poverty, but there is little to no commentary on why he has no weapon to fight his poverty with. Until he finds his voice in an underground rap battle, Murad has no ways of dealing with the frustration that comes with being socially impotent; on the contrary, the narrative is built in such a way that it becomes easy to insinuate on the part of the audience that he is poor because his family lives in a ghetto, and he lives in a ghetto because his family is poor. Murad’s tale is, simply put, a libeal/utopian moment of glory that is more about personal endeavors and dreams than it is about the reclamation of one’s identity through art as protest, although the symbols associated with his character have proven to be marketable to both the audience as well as immensely meaningful to the voices that continue telling their tales of hard-earned success through hip-hop and its various subcultures. Murad Sheikh, played by Ranveer Singh, is one of the countless other worn out faces travelling in a packed local train to earn a daily living, often to the detriment or total annihilation of their personal passions. That he is shown to rise out of the rubbles of Dharavi and achieve fame and glory is nothing but an anomaly. Without a vestige of social commentary on why it is that he finds himself in such a condition, Gully Boy fails to address the problems that shape the destiny of a thousand other Murad Sheikhs.

In an age of rampant islamophobia, to show a Muslim character submerged in poverty while simultaneously exploring their Muslim identity in the context of their social immobility would be tantamount to bridging that dangerous gap between cause and effect, and would automatically lead to a more clearly defined commentary on the disenfranchisement of working class Muslims. This is not to say, of course, that other groups besides the Muslim working class demographic are exempt from suffering the consequences of living in a world that is unbothered about the trials and tribulations of the masses, while the privileged few get wheeled around to their parties and engage in their strictly enclosed upper class shenanigans, displaying an excess of wealth, pomp and indifference. But beneath the idea of choosing a markedly Muslim protagonist, with all the resultant stereotypes which I have referred to earlier, and then proceeding to efface the intersectionality of class and religion while on the other hand making use of the Azaadi slogan in pushing its supposedly inflammatory rhetoric of complete emancipation, lies a perverted motive of apolitical marketing/commercial profit. One only has to look at the urban elite’s appropriation of the raging discontent that characterizes a voice like Murad’s, to come to the realization that perhaps it was never the film’s intention to politically motivate the dispossessed, but instead to compress it into a neoliberal tale of dream achievement in the face of the hurdles that life is guaranteed to throw one’s way irrespective of which identity they fall under. As Murad reiterates his guiding maxim in front of a crowd that swings to his words, which he claims comes straight from his heart, one cannot but marvel at the ferocious power emanating from his voice – but it hardly takes a serious amount of research to come to the sad conclusion that in a country like India, the promised time of unmitigated freedom will remain an unachievable dream to the residents of such ghettoised communities that produce the likes of a Murad Sheikh or a Salim Pasha. For the time being, the voices that bring these struggles to a larger audience must resonate fiercely in the hearts and minds of all those who can listen, so that these untamed dreams can translate into reality, and so that one day, we might find a reason or two to shed a tear for Salim Langda, just as we clap in rousing affirmation of Murad’s glory.

by prantik ali

Thoughts on the Opening Five Minutes of The Kashmir Files

That cinema is passing through an abominable phase in its current rendition in India deserves no serious contention. At no other point in history has there been such an unremarkable (and appalling) production of filth passed along as something important and revelatory in its politics (I am, of course, only counting the negatives for the simple reason that there are no positives), and enjoyable to consume, numb-witted and dull as they invariably are. Not counting the astonishing number of plot holes and illogicalities that are a feature of Akshay Kumar starrers,  I will move directly to a more precise engagement with the idea of Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files’ as dangerous propaganda.

I will start by saying that I haven’t watched the film in its entirety – I couldn’t. The sole point of the film, as I gathered from the bit I ended up sitting through, is to provide that all too similar spark of vengeful hatred to its audience, working at the behest of the Hindu nationalist agenda pushed by the Modi government. Representation is a fundamental element to the materiality of this hateful discourse, and it is interesting to see how the Kashmiri Muslim is represented in the first five minutes of this film – progressing further than that would have posed serious challenges to my mental well-being, so I refrained from putting myself through that risk.

The mass appeal of what is being touted by right wing media outlets as something uncompromisingly tragic, however, is hypocritical, given that they have never hesitated to lump all Kashmiri people into one undignified heap and brand them terrorists whenever an opportunity arises. The mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, as well as the brutal killings that have followed since, warrants no explanation, and is justified by no conceivable excuse. To take a tragedy, and under the farce of art, turn it into a demonizing account of the freedom-aspiring Kashmiris is anything but harmful to the social body of Muslim Indians, given the depressing context of their condition as it stands today in an aggressively islamophobic India. Also, for obvious reasons, the Azaadi slogan in this film has villainous connotations and is used very early on in the film within the visual framework of bloodthirsty terrorists running through the streets of Kashmir with AK-47s pointed to the sky. To the layman, the word is certain to bring to the fore an immediate sense of repulsion, merged thoroughly as it is in the socio-cultural vocabulary with such inexplicable forces of threat like the Shaheen Bagh protests, Umar Khalid, and of course, Kashmir itself.  

The movie begins on an innocent note. A group of children play cricket in the snow, in rhythm to the audio commentary of an India-Pakistan cricket match which emanates from a radio precariously balanced on a pile of snow some distance away. Upon hitting what is presumably the winning runs, a kid breaks out into a joyous rapture for his esteemed moment of simultaneity with Sachin Tendulkar, and is then tackled to the ground by his Kashmiri playmates for cheering on an Indian cricketer. They are then heckled by a group of Kashmiri men (with ridiculous dialects falling somewhere in between Hindustani, English, and Scandinavian) who have seemingly taken serious offence at his overt Indian-ness, beating him up in a joint effort to make him say ‘Pakistan Zindabaad’ (another misconception staunchly played across as the reality by Agnihotri, since the common Kashmiri person is allied to neither Pakistan nor India, but is terrorized by both). The little kid in the movie lives to see another day, and is saved from the Pakistani/Kashmiri Muslim separatists by his friend who has the novel idea to aim a ball of snow at the hooligans, thereby rendering their impending act of murder(?) incomplete. One can only suspend their disbelief for so long without wanting to blow their brains out.

The preceding scene is eerily similar to what is now a disgraceful taint to the fabric of Indian patriotism – for who can forget the crying face of 23 years old Faizan, who was forced by the police, under threat of violence (or more) to sing the national anthem while lying on the road half-beaten to death (and who died a few days later from the injuries sustained)? This is just one of the innumerable other taints which stick on obdurately to the hands of a million Indians complicit in the unspeakable range of atrocities committed against Muslims under the regime of Modi, and it does not show any sign of abatement given the fact that a film like Kashmir Files has already broken several box office records since its release three weeks ago. But all this stopped being disappointing ages ago, now it’s just scary to comprehend.  

The two kids, having run away from the soft whiteness of snow (a paean to the beauty of  Kashmir in the common imagination of Indians) to the claustrophobic architecture of small lanes, and walls with anti-national slogans painted on them in defiance of the heavy militarization that cuts up the territory into a landscape of barbed wires and barricades, have now taken refuge in a makeshift shelter. The director seems to be implying that these are but the only two ways of subconsciously envisioning Kashmir, and given the free rein on the production of such reductive takes on human suffering, this fetishism (of beauty marred by bloodshed, or alternatively, bloodshed enhanced by the backdrop of pure, white innocence) will only enlarge in all its monstrous apparitions in the future. As they look on from within the small hut, a policeman is gunned down by an invisible terrorist (who is shown to saunter up the road by emerging from a bend a while later), while trying to help a woman and her sick daughter. Although innocuous in its intent to represent the barbarity of militant activism, the scene goes a long wall in shaping early (and half-baked) valuations on the police and the ‘terrorists’, aligning one side as being deserving of sympathy, and the other with an image of viciously uncontained power.  To make matters worse, on the wall right beside them is written ‘Azadi Chota Pakistan’, which, besides making no sense whatsoever, seems limited in its semantics to a total, uncompromising hatred towards the outsiders. Whether the term ‘outsider’ allows within its ambit only Islamic terrorists and Pakistani insurgents, or extends to Kashmiri people and Indian Muslims, is a befuddling notion to anyone with even the tiniest amounts of political awareness.

Despite working up the limits of my endurance to its peak, I couldn’t finish the movie (far from it). I can only wish more people had it in their hearts to be so overcome with disgust that they could will themselves to call this movie out for what it is – a disguised effort to make use of human suffering to prolong human suffering.  

I know that won’t happen, not just yet, but I can wish.

by prantik ali

Drab Affairs and Dire Consequences






I solemnly believe that of all the cricket debates that make the rounds on my twitter feed these days, the one focusing on the relative phallic superiorities between Virat Kohli and Babar Azam is the most engaging. After nearly 10 years of devoutly following cricket (to the extent that I always had enough confidence to be able to put in a snide remark about Dhoni’s inability to live up to his hype after the World Cup era in any cricket discussions that took place in my proximity), I have finally come to the conclusion that India vs Pakistan matches are nothing but a psychological operation carried out by the political elites of both godforsaken countries to incite communal tensions and/or arouse jingoistic fervour for electoral purposes.





This year, I had waited to watch the India-Pakistan T20 clash hoping it wouldn’t be a drag of a game (something it almost always is, by the way). Fuelled by the kind of fervour that lacks any description (or any invitation to participate in the same), these matches give rise to emotions that are no less passionate than a war general’s voice booming out to give last orders to his kamikaze troops. The match, however, ended badly for India, with Pakistan decimating the former’s bowling attack (after some brilliant overs from one Shaheen Afridi, and some gritty fightback from one Virat Kohli), winning the match by 10 wickets. The fans were horrified. If you focused on the dark edges of your TV you could clearly see bewildering scenes of people in green jumping in joy and those in blue muted out, almost depleted by their sense of newfound humiliation. I could not decide how to feel, so I hopped on into Twitter to make sense of what had just happened.





After a barrage of abusive content targeted towards Shami Ahmed for his below-par performance (the only Muslim player in the Indian team’s playing XI) I was greeted by a more positive section with images showing Kohli congratulating Azam. Even on first sight, I was able to make out that this picture would, for the week to come, be the subcontinental equivalent of that infamous Pepsi advert showing Kendal Jenner solving racism by one simple, meaningful act. Fans glorified the Pakistani performance and were quick to note that at the end of a cricket match, the best team wins, and mostly the audience should just enjoy the spectacle of men with sticks hitting a ball hurled at them by another adult charging towards them, while a morose personality stands making strange hand signs and observing the rugged athletes in undisclosed voyeurism. I chuckled at these responses, knowing deep enough that I knew the game better than these jokers who had accumulated to a virtual space to interact (/fight) with anonymous people all over the world in order to give more collective meaning to this yet unprecedented phenomenon in human history.





The novelty of it was however soon ended. The hatred towards Muslims in India did not. In poured a series of horrifying news – Kashmiri students being assaulted, a teacher being arrested for putting  out a WhatsApp status in support of Pakistan, and other oft-repeated tales of harassment. I tried in vain to concoct a theory which would justify such an extreme condemnation of supporting another country’s cricket team, but that led to me a more disturbing question – was not supporting India an even graver crime than supporting a foreign nation?





In response to the hatred against Shami, Kohli, after almost a week’s absence from any kind of comment on this selective outrage, decided to step up and defend his teammate, calling out bigots for their religious prejudice in the whole affair. In a surprising turn of events, the heartthrob of the nation, whose unapologetically aggressive on-field mannerisms seemed to affirm Modi’s ‘ghar mein ghuske marega’ ethos all too perfectly, was also attacked by online trolls from BJP fanboys, with an IIT Hyderabad graduate going to the extent of threatening his 10 month old daughter with rape. 





If these are the consequences of a cricket match, I would just rather they never took place at all.





After another defeat at the hands of New Zealand (a team I feel is more suited to bear the label of Team India’s arch-nemesis on the cricket field), India was all but out of contention for a potential spot in the semi-finals. However, they did manage to win the last three of their matches by fair margins. Thus, Kohli managed to step down from his role as the T20 captain in good favours of all, KL Rahul managed to solidify his stay at the opener spot, and Shami managed to postpone his Kabir Khan type-beat biopic by the barest of margins. Pakistan, on the other hand, cruised along forward (before losing to Australia in the Semis) making it a 5/5 in the group stages.





The Pakistani loss to Australia, in many ways, re-shifted the power dynamics that had taken hold of Cricket Twitter for almost three whole weeks. People from both sides of the border, wilfully blind to the commonality they share with each other, went back to inventing the vilest of abuses with which to emotionally castrate their enemies. Whether they are indeed able to harm the pride of either country by beating them in a game of cricket, only they can tell. What I know for sure is it’ll take some insane amount of love among the people of two countries poisoned with hatred to break through the shackles of communal indoctrination and see the good side of cricket – Pat Cummins for instance.





Like I’ve taken pains to mention before, I’ve been well accustomed to the game of cricket for well over 10 years now. What’s horrifying is how it’s almost too easy today to dislike the game, or to take the easier way out – end up cheering for not just Pakistan in particular, but any other team that locks its horns with a team which has for its supporters a crowd of bloodthirsty hounds that will sink to any depth to brandish their terrifying hatred at every conceivable opportunity. 





What’s just as horrifying is that in all this time, I haven’t been able to fathom an iota of indifference to the game either.  







			

				 by prantik ali			


					


		

					

	




							


							


			

	
		

				

			
khabarer shaad – a marxist critique of nonte fonte’s revolutionary potential
		


		

			

in almost all instances of marxist critique in today’s day and age, one of the first things that catches my attention is the fact that almost always, the critique is done with the implicit assumption that the audience has easy access to the material being studied. never mind that it’s a poorly restored version of a barely discernible film from the early 1930s, or perhaps a text that survives in its extant form only in the digitized memory of a russian piracy site – the intellectual elite has hardly cared, throughout the various epochs of history, to make the object of their study more accessible to the wider masses. it is an axiomatic fact that in order to properly disseminate any idea, it needs to be rooted within the grasp of the masses, and i refuse to acknowledge that the highbrow cultural commodities which have remained at the nucleus of these much-hailed critiques, are within the reach of every tom, dick, and harry.





with this thought in mind, i have taken up the noble, and yet unprecedented job, of studying a nonte fonte episode with the same amount of critical determination one would likely use while writing their final semester assignment.





in the particular episode i speak of, aptly titled ‘khabarer shaad’, i believe there is immense scope of picking up certain ideals which the characters espouse that are at once incredibly revolutionary in their essence. as soon as we are faced with the familiar faces of nonte and fonte, we can make out faint vestiges of a revolutionary consciousness starting to ferment under their scrunched-up expressions. they are seated at a table, with another kid in purple – eating from their plates (which seem pitiable in that it consists of a mere fistful of rice at best, a spoonful of dal thrown in to give it some colour, and shrivelled up bits of an unrecognizable vegetable that look like they’ve been subjected to horrors that are perhaps not less tragic than the service meted out to our proletarian friends in that ridiculous hostel), and contemplating the overthrow of the dictatorship of the superintendent, whose tyranny, as further investigation of other episodes reveal, is not restricted simply to dishing out poor treatment towards his pupils, but includes instances of gaslighting and severe negligence as well. anyway.





the hostel cook speaks with a non-bengali accent, drawing our attention to the sordid unemployment rates in much of the hindi-belt spanning across the torso of our motherland. thakur, as he is referred to by fonte, placates their desire for more rice by coming up with a pathetic excuse – there is no more food in the kitchen, with a ‘take it or leave it’ assumption hiding behind the dismissive lie. we are led to believe that is the way it has always been in the hostel, which results, of course, in dissatisfaction among the three kids. the guy in the purple, unfortunately, backs out of resolving this issue through direct action, as opposed to nonte and fonte, the less celebrated (indeed, underestimated and overlooked) vanguards of revolutionary political praxis in bengali animation. after a thinly veiled remark of disgust at the complacency of the kid in purple, the two (friends? brothers? sweethearts? who knows?) set out for the superintendent’s office.





it makes no sense for the figure of authority, in any given social system, to rapaciously exploit its subjects and then brandish this act of exploitation in view of all – but this is precisely what goes on in this weird little hostel. the superintendent is shown to be having his lunch (which consists of more than a fair amount of rice, a huge chicken leg piece, and what looks like either a bowl of rosogollas or poorly baked potatoes) in full view of anyone that might have cause to enter his room, with an audacious disregard for both manners and social ethics. when held to question about the poor quantity of food they receive, the superintendent comes up with an excuse that is much more intelligent than the one offered by thakur (could this be a tacit nod to the intellectual inequality that exists between two classes of people, or is this merely a stereotypical archetype of the witty bengali bhadralok vs the stupid bihari worker?) – he claims that a lower ration of food will inevitably lead to the students being more healthy. it makes sense to come up with this logic, ridiculously erroneous that it may be, for the simple reason that teenagers like nonte and fonte could easily be fooled into believing that consuming less food equates to a generally more healthy state of the body, for in the cesspool of late stage capitalism, we are all working incessantly to build a better version of ourselves – one that is lean, muscular, and decked with toned abs, so that our appeal in the sex market increases and we can thus dispel with our crippling alienation with unbridled physical gratification from anyone and everyone around us. the superintendent knows how to exploit the kids into accepting that this absence of a choice on their end is actually a force working in their own favour – and therein lies the tragedy of the notion of free will, be it in a fictional hostel headed by an unapologetic autocrat, or in the modern-day democratic society at large.





at this stage, the audience might feel that a soul-crushing defeat, and the consequent eating disorder brought about by the exploitative trend of body-image issues, is eminent for our proletarian friends. however, nonte and fonte know of no such notion of submission. just like history has taught us, victory will always side on the favour of the disadvantaged, if only they have the means of accumulating such courage and resolve that transforms dissatisfaction into revolt. i will not go into how the solution adopted by nonte and fonte breaks away from the even more radical step of bashing in the superintendent’s head with the chicken leg, or maybe even throwing him out of the window so as to fashion an assassination under the guise of an unfortunate accident. the solution which they adopt, is by no means the best that they could have gone with – however, I’m certainly not qualified enough to judge the extent of their revolutionary potential/look down upon their mode of revolt, taking into account the hard reality that nonte and fonte happen to be kids in the embryonic stages of their political consciousness.





what follows is a somewhat disappointing ending to an otherwise politically charged tale of resilience against tyranny. nonte and fonte manage to break into the kitchen and pour in massive amounts of salt to the dish sanctioned for the superintendent, resulting in the latter having an outburst over his perceived notion of poor thakur’s incompetence. this reflects the very real and sad truth of the ones in power stopping at nothing to exercise their arbitrary authority. even through thakur has managed, all this time, to provide him with a lion’s share of the food, one isolated incident of failure on the former’s part to satiate his master’s hunger has resulted in him being chased around the hostel premises in a tragic display of ignominy and injustice. even though nonte and fonte are well within their rights to gloat over this tiny accomplishment in defying their superintendent his lunch, the audience is well aware that at the end of the day, this changes nothing in the grand scheme of things, besides leaving us with a bittersweet taste of victory in our mouths. perhaps that is all khabarer shaad will ever entail.


			

				 by prantik ali