'Aapko kaisa lag raha hai?'

pranab mukherjee says the Indian government has handed over 'evidence of the links with elements in Pakistan of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 26 November, 2008' today. the minister also, according to the news report, 'accused Islamabad of "denial" and "shifting the blame" for the deadly Mumbai attacks'.

isn't that ironic? that the government of india has to produce 'evidence' and go to a court, of sorts, before an indifferent judge, pakistan and the so-called international community of nations, and seek a hearing and justice, ultimately? one'd like to ask the brahminized ruling classes: how does it feel like being an unfortunate dalit or a muslim or an adivasi.... waiting outside a police station, for once?

i don't find arundhati roy disgusting

far from it. i like the impassioned plea she makes for justice at the end of her latest article on the mumbai terror attacks (i'd talked about justice too in this post). but i'm not really sure she understands injustice any better than arnab goswami. about the taj, she says:

It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day.

there are a few problems with her perspective. for instance, i don't think she'd find the taj an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day if the government of india owned it. this is what ms. roy had to say about the public sector company bhel, in an earlier article:

For many years, India has been more or less self sufficient in power equipment. The Indian public sector company, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (bhel), manufactured and even exported world-class power equipment. All that’s changed now. Over the years, our own government has starved it of orders, cut off funds for research and development and more or less edged it out of a dignified existence. Today bhel is no more than a sweatshop. It is being forced into ‘joint ventures’ (one with GE and one with Siemens) where its only role is to provide cheap, unskilled labor while they provide the equipment and the technology. Why? Why does more expensive, imported foreign equipment suit our bureaucrats and politicians better? We all know why. Because graft is factored into the deal. Buying equipment from your local store is just not the same thing. It’s not surprising that almost half the officials named in the Jain Hawala scandal were officials from the power sector involved with the selection and purchase of power equipment.

replace bhel with taj and make minor changes ('world-class service' for 'world-class equipment' and so on), and discover what roy would have said if the taj were a public sector company, like the centaur which was privatized a few years ago. it's privately owned, so it's obscene? one wonders whether ms. roy's problem is with organized capital or with those who organize it? bhel is okay, even if it makes turbines that are largely used in big dams (which ms. roy opposes, of course), as long as it is in the public sector.

i'd pointed out in this post why i consider the organized public sector in this country a largely private affair and the organized private sector a largely public affair: because a great majority of employees in both are upper caste hindus, and both of them are owned by upper caste hindus- upper caste business families or the upper caste dominated bureaucracy or financial institutions. in my view, in india, the public sector-private sector debate is a spurious one, for many other reasons- that requires another post, i guess.

coming back to her latest article, the second problem:

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai.

if ms. roy's problem with establishments such as the taj is the class of people they serve, shouldn't she remember that ordinary people, work at the taj too? that ordinary people were working at the taj when the terrorists attacked?

her kind of ordinary people don't work at the taj? they don't travel in the local trains to cst to work at the taj? and the diamond merchants who travel in trains, an earlier terrorist target, and most probably visit the taj, sometimes, are ordinary people? are all the business executives who travel in trains, because they're convenient for many reasons, to work in the offices at nariman point ordinary people?

any classification, and there has been one other such attempt recently apart from roy's (i refer to gnani sankaran's analysis), that seeks to browbeat you into accepting that the cst stands for ordinary people and the taj for the rich is disingenuous. because all the street vendors, peons, drivers and other manual workers who travel to south mumbai in trains do not belong to the same class as those who trade in diamonds or work in nariman point or lunch at the taj. or to the same castes.

if there is any divide, it isn't between those who travel in trains and those who visit the taj- it is between those the government seeks to protect, on a consistent basis, and those who have to fight with all their puny lives to even catch the government's attention. if the taj were to go bankrupt tomorrow, most of india's indignant classes including the media and people like ms. roy, would stand up for the rights of those who work there and would not rest until the government nationalizes that icon of easy, obscene injustice. not that the government would require any excessive pressure to nationalize it.

on the other hand, if some thelawallahs (or say, the bargirls of mumbai) were stopped from doing business in some corner of south mumbai, they'd have to work up a truly big and spectacular protest to catch the consistent attention of the media or of people like ms. roy. i'm sure ms. roy would be moved by their plight but...if their plot doesn't have an easily identifiable rumpelstiltskin, a villain the whole world could also throw rotten tomatoes at, i'm not sure they'd be able to hold her attention for long.

companies in the organized public and private sector seem to take decades, after they've gone insolvent, to fall. and while they're falling, oh so slowly, like the textile mills nationalized by the goi (i wonder if anyone among the ruling and indignant classes were thinking of the handloom workers across the country when they were embarking on this magnanimous project), a new generation of small unorganized businesses, like the powerlooms in bhivandi, rise and fall, more than a couple of times. and while this is happening, the children of the textile mill workers have moved over to new professions and new age industries. like the children, as this website points out (the internet is such a great forum for celebrating camaraderie of the obscurest kinds!) of those who joined the bhel workforce a few decades ago:

Children of most BHEL employees are currently living overseas, many of them have moved to US and Australia.

that's a random page that i found while googling for information on bhel, hyderabad. this township, a few kilometres outside hyderabad is a meticulously planned gated community, with beautiful tree lined roads, parks, playgrounds (basketball, hockey grounds etc.,) and conveniences of all kinds (auditorium, supermarket, schools, bus station etc.,). in the eighties, i remember, a friend from the township telling me why a lot of officers etc., in the company bought cars (a very rare luxury in those pre-maruti days) even when they did not need them- because they got easy, cheap loans and could pay for them by hiring out the cars as taxis. outside the township, a few kilometres from it, you'll find that life, for men and animals, has gone from bad to worse.

ms. roy's concerns for bhel (our own government has starved it of orders, cut off funds for research and development and more or less edged it out of a dignified existence) are consistent with the concerns of those who successfully protected, a couple of decades earlier, the textile mills taken over by ntc. but i wonder: did those concerns have a purity-pollution angle to them, as gopal guru points out, in another context?

In fact the checkered history of industrial capital shows that this class has followed this ‘veil of ignorance’ principle rather selectively. For example, the textile mills owners in Bombay in the 1930s did not bother to follow the modern criterion of recruiting mill workers and even managers. Relatively more unskilled upper caste mill workers barred more skilled workers from the dalit castes from working in the weaving sections of Bombay based textile mills. The upper caste workers opposed the entry of dalits, not on grounds of merit but on the line of purity-pollution.

mr. goswami and ms. roy have very different visions of what's right for india, but they're in the same room.

meaningless icons

from a paper on the very informative judicial reforms website:

When one is talking about access to justice than one has to keep in mind the level of justice. By and large people do not come in touch with the judiciary in order to enforce their right to justice. But what are the basic problems, which the people face when they do approach the court? They come to the court and then wait for justice for years on end. On August 2006, the figures of pending cases were 39 lakhs at the level of High Courts and 235 crore in subordinate courts, while 35000 cases are pending in the Supreme Court. Figures of cases filed per thousand population comes around 1.2 per 1000 population, which is far less than 17 cases per 1000 in Malaysia and 14 per 1000 in Korea. This shows that in India we do not have many people approaching the courts for getting justice.

Every Law Commission is dealing with disparity in the number of judges per population. According to the standards of the world, the country should have at least 50 judges per million population. But in India in 2004, we had 12 judges per million population. Apart from the fact there are 2000 vacant positions in subordinate judiciary.

Who do these delays and backlogs impact the most? How do they impact access to justice? In case of the criminal cases, the poor people are the most affected. More than 70% of persons inside jails who are held on suspicion of having committed a crime are not able to pay the bail amount, which is very high. They are inside the jails for months and years, as they cannot afford a lawyer.

among other figures and facts mentioned in those few paras, i think this line best illustrates how inaccessible justice is to the great majority of the people in this country:

Figures of cases filed per thousand population comes around 1.2 per 1000 population, which is far less than 17 cases per 1000 in Malaysia and 14 per 1000 in Korea [italics mine].

place that figure alongside these two random facts: number of indians who do not have bank accounts (ans: around 85% of the total population), proportion of people in the country employed in the unorganized sector (ans: 93% of total workforce). those figures tell me: most people in india have a right to be angry. but why aren't they going to the courts?

it'd seem, for the great majority of people in india, not just the taj mahal hotel in mumbai, most of india's courts too are meaningless icons.

distant justice

BANGALORE: People power is all set to take on a new avatar in Bangalore, and police officials will feel its impact. Mahithi Hakku Jagruthi Vedike, a group of RTI activists, will launch a service to assist citizens in their dealings with police.
This voluntary organization will help you register your police complaint and hold your hand through follow-up action. The Vedike was inspired by the success of Mumbai-based PLEAD (People for Legal and Emotional Assistance to the Deserving).
The Vedike team has about 21 retired persons from all walks of life in each police station limit. Of these, five will be in constant touch with the police station. They will take up a complainant's cause and the idea is to ensure that people get justice. Volunteers will keep an eye on corruption too.
Indur Chhugani formed PLEAD, which has over 160 volunteers. Chhugani told TOI: "We prefer retired officials as volunteers as they have time to spare, and experience too. Our success in Mumbai motivated us to open similar organizations in Bangalore and Kolkata. Many volunteers in Bangalore have come forward. In Mumbai, we were able to get a court order to demolish 137 police chowkis constructed illegally on the pavements. That was a landmark achievement," he explained.

a voluntary organization to help you register your complaint with the police and hold your hand through follow-up action!

urban, educated, empowered citizens need volunteers to help them deal with the police? that's how far the justice system in india has distanced itself from the people. consider these two scenarios: what are your chances of getting your complaint registered at the local police station, if 1) you are a dalit, let's say, living in, not mumbai or bangalore or kolkata, but a village far away from educated, knowledgeable people with time on their hands? or 2) a muslim peon living in a city like mumbai (a city, supposedly, so cosmopolitan that it is many cities), that calls, reverentially, an a#%^&le like bal thackeray 'balasaheb'?

security without justice?

The large number of undertrials — that is, persons yet to be convicted — lodged in Indian prisons has always made it difficult to look straight at the constitutional promises of justice. The latest official figures put that number at 2.23 lakh. Out of a total number of 3.22 prison inmates, that make seven out of every 10 an undertrial. First, then, there is the absurdity — an absurdity underlined with such tragic consequences — of persons charged with petty crime, but in the absence of trial or surety having to remain behind bars for years on end. Second, there is the comment this yields on the carriage of justice in India.

from a news report in the indian express. there are undertrials who have stayed in jails, across the country, longer than convicts sentenced to life imprisonment. does india have a sense of justice? the news report says:

In 1929, Jatin Das’s fatal 63-day fast in a Lahore jail to demand better living conditions for undertrials became an abiding indictment of the colonial justice system. The continued presence of men and women in jails for want of a conclusive trial is, similarly, a blot that discredits democratic India in more ways than one.

in reality, democratic india has been more unjust than india under the british- the undertrials to convicts ratio was 1:2 during british rule, now it's 2:1. can you have security without justice?

the marketplace of security

A brave man lost his fame
and is a pray to injustice today
the truth is buried in the sand of time
and the flag of lies is fluttering high.

Our country India the great
But the jealosy and injustice in here
Is sinking her brave son day by day.

Save this hero DAYA NAYAK
who lived his life for the people of mumbai,
and has carried on his duty to the highest order.
was awake all nights
so that u people there could sleep.

an excerpt from a poem posted in honour of daya nayak by a commenter here. one doesn't know whether daya nayak made a 100 crores but i personally know of a policeman who used to meet his clients mostly in five star hotels. he used to complain that he was sick of five star hotels. he was only a sub-inspector. another acquaintance, also a sub-inspector some fifteen years ago, used to tell me about the two packets of pay he'd get every month- one from the government and one from local businessmen and others. like clockwork. the second packet, like the first, depended on his rank. it didn't represent all the extra money he could make in a month- that'd actually depend on how well he protected the well-heeled clients who visited the police station. on what kind of security he provided them. and i've heard similar stories from other policemen i know of, in hyderabad. but mumbai is much bigger- how many inspectors in mumbai are crorepatis? i think the right question should be: how many aren't crorepatis?

those who wish to buy security are making a bad situation worse.

q'ing up

from film stars to screenwriters to reporters to techies: everyone wants to buy better bulletproof vests and other protective gear for our policemen. do they really believe that the mumbai cops wouldn't be able to afford such fancy stuff on their own (without taxing the treasury or those kindhearted citizens)?

not to speak of the guns they want to buy for the policemen. sad.

please take advani

please.

one image from mumbai (c.1989)

for me, many times and especially at times like these, the thought of mumbai/bombay chucks up this image: a young man jerking off in the men's room of churchgate station. people waiting behind him. sudden sniggers. i startled, look up, over the partition at this heaving shoulders. the man, unmindful of the mild laughter, and of, say, three hundred odd people around him, finishes what he was doing, fast. he steps out. somebody else steps in.

i couldn't laugh (it was my second visit to bombay), i was as old as he was, and it was the most terrible thing i'd ever seen. can you get lonelier than that?

v.p.singh, fakir

Shri Somnath Chatterjee: : One clarification. Now the Leader of the Opposition points out serious infirmities, according to him, and deficiencies in the report. Why did not his Government reject this report? (Interruptions)

[Translation]

An Hon. Member: Yes, yes.

Shri Rajiv Gandhi: You were also a Minister, now you are saying Yes-yes.

Shri Syed Masudal Hossain: Everyday you used to change the Ministers, that is why you do not remembers. The faces of memory?

(Interruptions)

[English]

Shri Rajiv Gandhi: Sir, we are taking a lot of time, with all these disturbances. This Committee never met again, and was never consulted again. What I am trying to point out is not that this report is worthless, and should be thrown away. Like I said, there is a lot of substance in the report, but to say that you will just accept it like that, without discussing it or without debating it, is not adequate. It needs more looking into. (Interruptions)

Shri Nirmal Kanti Chatterjee: What did you do for ten years?

Shri Rajiv Gandhi: Forget ten years We made a mistake. At least you should have read this report before making this announcement.

Shri Nirmal Kanti Chatterjee: Now, are you sure about it?

so, rajiv gandhi brought in the muslims, christians, sikhs, dalits and, of course, the only quality that objectively measures misery, economic class, to rip apart mandal, in his 'greatest speech ever', as many educated, middle class indians would like to remember it. the same indians who would again bring in ' muslims, christians, sikhs, dalits and, of course, obcs and..class' to pin the responsibility for mumbai (and india) elsewhere in a few days, i guess.

rajiv gandhi, who could open the gates to a centuries old mandir that never existed, wasn't able to see justice even if it stabbed him in the back like jai chand or v.p.singh. and brahminized india still can't forgive v.p.singh, the treacherous fakir, for opening another kind of gates.

india needs to look at justice, urgently. for everyone's sake. for the sake of those who were killed in mumbai, unjustly.

a dole in pakistan

a slightly old article in cobra post says:

Soon after forming his government, Punjab Chief Shahbaz Sharif announced the Punjab Food Support Scheme to help the "poorest of the poor". This, some insiders believe, was done to preempt the PPP's Benazir Ration Card scheme.

The 'hurriedly shaped' programme is worth 21.60 billion with the aim to pay to each of 1.8 million families, a money order worth Rs 1000. The scheme was formally launched on Aug 14, 2008 and will continue throughout the fiscal year 2008-09. [emphasis mine].

the details in the article are not very clear but i'd admit that this news makes me happy. shows that the pakistani politicians are wiser than many politicians from some so-called progressive states in india. from promising free television sets to free rice to free lpg- political parties increasingly speak like large retail stores in these states.

why doesn't anybody talk about a dole like the pakistanis? because a dole is most likely to be leakage-proof?

[please click on the label dole for my other posts on the subject].

on violence

i see this as violence: banks promoted by the government cornering most of the capital in the country to lend only to an exclusive few sections of indian society. how's that violence? because that leaves very little surplus capital outside the banks. and naturally, informal lenders who control this capital demand high rates of interest from the rest of the borrowers.

any solution that ignores the fact that most of the credit in the country is cornered by those banks to be lent exclusively to very few sections of indian society, ignores the whole picture- there is very little left for a very large number of people.

anu: that illustrates violence in its entirety, in my view.

mehmaan

i said welcome to the guest
he said-- i am a refugee
from a certain hunting party
the dove that's escaped!
i regarded him as only a mehmaan
i didn't understand- what do i serve him
i didn't understand- what do i serve him
i asked him what he liked
'eating with my family' he said.
like a dried well
what did he hide inside
is this food?
with frightened eyes that had lost trust
hesitant..
the smoke's still coming out from somewhere he said!
pecking at a few fistfuls
remembering his family with every morsel..
it didn't seem like he was eating- drawing
sorrow from the seas inside
he seemed he's here
but wandering elsewhere..
the brother lost..the sister taken away...
the families destroyed
the estranged watan...remembering in delirium
his lane razed
friends killed
villages disfigured
nation scattered
because two eyes weren't enough
he seemed to grieve with his whole body!
finally without making a sound
departing like he came, he said-
'bloodthirst is a dangerous disease'.

- my translation of the telugu poem mehmaan by shahjahana (first published in andhra jyoti in december 2007).

fund blogging, not reason

1. We need government-run schools because private schools aren’t up to the task
2. But government schools aren’t doing a great job either, the reason is that competition from the private tuitions are taking resources away from them.
3. Hence we should ban private tuitions.

i used to think almost like that, being an indian. but i'm learning:

1. we should fund schooling, not schools because this will build competition.
2. if the competition fails to appear in villages without bridges, the reason is that public transport is taking resources away from them.
3. hence we should fund transport not transporters.

you might ask: what public transport in a village without a bridge? well, if you can make competition appear in a village without a bridge... what do you suggest? the poor want education desperately and viscerally, so they'll cross the bridge when they come to it. meanwhile:

1. we should fund travel, not bridges.
2. if people still fail to travel, the reason is that books are taking resources away from them.
3. hence we should fund reading not books.

readers? in a village without a school? well, nautch girls then. or the local moonshine. to work around that:

1. we should fund drinking, not bars.
2. if people still fail to drink, the reason is that sex is taking time away from drinking.
3. hence we should fund sex not pornography.

what does funding pornography have to do with competition not showing up at the village without the bridge? who said anything about competition in the village? competition would spring up across the ravine. how would that improve access to schooling? that's again indian kind of thinking. my suggestion is:

1. we should fund thinking, not indians.
2. if indians still don't stop thinking, the reason is that they are not blogging much.
3. hence we should fund blogging, not reason.

skirting the question of land

whether it's the government trying to acquire his land or some large businessman, why do you think an indian farmer would always be cheated? because he isn't as smart as you are?

because he's of an inferior variety of the human race?

that's one way of articulating the brown man's burden. here's another kind: one that rests on the principle that the indian farmer shall always cheat. so, you've to save the honest indian businessman or government from the wily indian farmer.

The land market in India is so primitive that very often both buyers and sellers depend on the Almighty and transact business. Around half the operational holdings in States is plagued by legal disputes, most of which are on account of ownership. Sub-division and fragmentation of land holdings is a common phenomenon arising out of excessive emphasis on heritage rights. There are also state-owned land which, either because of misuse or abuse of power by revenue authorities, have been encroached upon. The encroachers, in several cases, have been given titles by default. Though reforms were initiated, defective implementation of land records again led to conferment of titles to those who used them for their own purposes. Such land also got titles conferred over a period of time.

a fair transaction could happen when both - the buyer and the seller- have ready access to reliable information. when both of them have to depend on the almighty as the only source of reliable information- because there are no reliable records on land- how do you judge, later, who was cheated? or arrive at any conclusions, beforehand, who'd be cheated?

the whole debate on singur etc., provides so much fun. no one looks at the questions- where's the land? if there's land, where are the records? if there are no land records, how can there be a land market?

if you believe in the market, reliable land records would be the first step in ensuring that any given transaction would have a fair chance of being fair. you don't believe in the market? good. if you have reliable land records, you could redistribute the land on the basis of the records.

so, why is everyone, from the left and the right, who's talking about land (in singur or other such places), not talking about land, actually? because they all emerged from somewhere above brahma's ankles? because if you have reliable land records, you would have to redistribute the land on the basis of the records?

will obama be good for india?

here are the results of a snap poll held across the country:

hyderabad: both of us had grown up in hyderabad so we had lots to talk about.

hoshiarpur: i got several good proposals.. finally i chose him.

chennai: we met for the first time at my uncle's house in chennai.

lucknow: my parents spoke to his parents and we're planning to get married.. next month.

kolkata: when he..first emailed, i knew that we'd get along well.

all of them seem to agree: india, if you want a better match than obama, please go here.

chandala age

shambhuka, smile on his lips,

is killing rama.

ekalavya with an axe

is chopping down drona's thumb

bali with his little feet

is stamping vamana down to patala


manu, piercing needles in his eyes

cutting his tongue

pouring lead in his ears

is rolling in the graveyard


standing on the butcher's knife of time

the chandala roars

setting four hounds

on adi sankara


oh..!

this current age

is an extremely chandala age


my translation of sivasagar's naDustunna caritra (1994).

civil society and political society

a very interesting paper(pdf), by partha chatterjee- a key formulation in the paper 'is a split in the field of the political between a domain of properly constituted civil society and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of political society'. an excerpt:

Let me summarise my main argument. With the continuing rapid growth of the Indian economy, the hegemonic hold of corporate capital over the domain of civil society is likely to continue. This will inevitably mean continued primitive accumulation. That is to say, there will be more and more primary producers, i e, peasants, artisans and petty manufacturers, who will lose their means of production. But most of these victims of primitive accumulation are unlikely to be absorbed in the new growth sectors of the economy. They will be marginalised and rendered useless as far as the sectors dominated by corporate capital are concerned. But the passive revolution under conditions of electoral democracy makes it unacceptable and illegitimate for the government to leave these marginalised populations without the means of labour to simply fend for themselves. That carries the risk of turning them into the “dangerous classes”. Hence, a whole series of governmental policies are being, and will be, devised to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation. This is the field in which peasant societies are having to redefine their relations with both the state and with capital. Thus far, it appears that whereas many new practices have been developed by peasants, using the mechanisms of democratic politics, to claim and negotiate benefits from the state, their ability to deal with the world of capital is still unsure and inadequate. This is where the further development of peasant activities as non-corporate capital, seeking to ensure the livelihood needs of peasants while operating within the circuits of capital, will define the future of peasant society in India. As far as I can see, peasant society will certainly survive in India in the 21st century, but only by accommodating a substantial non-agricultural component within the village. Further, I think there will be major overlaps and continuities in emerging cultural practices between rural villages and small towns and urban areas, with the urban elements gaining predominance.

should read it again. [thanks, rama].

son! yesoba!

what can i say sir!

my son yesobu

died in the war

my son who could conquer neerukonda*

lies sacrificed on a slab of ice

he left with a smile

and has returned as a corpse

smiling, he calls 'nAnna'*

he went on foot and has returned a bridegroom

a flowering plant has returned as a fallen banyan

he has returned

what can i say? and how?

people turn up here as at a fair

in throngs and throngs

addressing them, speaking of

my son's 'sacrifices, patriotism'

you, sarpanch babu! sir!

when he stopped

people washing their animals

in the tank*

didn't you, with a whip

lash my son's chest

mark him with stains

in the cinema outside our village

for buying a big ticket*

and sitting alongside you

didn't you scheme

to cut his hands legs

was it your daughter who looked at him

or he who looked at her

i do not know but-

to kill lionlike yesobu

you wove the noose

how can we forget this history!

we know all this

does the rain wash away the wounds, sir!

on the untouchable's eyelids

these truths stand erect

like crowbars driven into our hearts

mothers! sirs!

my son's death

this isn't the first

many times in our village

he died and lived

to live he joined the army

as a corpse, he has returned alive

ayyo!

my mind's not in my mind

my mind's not in my mind

sir! in my eyes

the pyre dances

son! yesoba! yesoba!

yesoba! my father*!

for you

i'll weep like karamchedu*

for you

i'll weep like chunduru*

for you

i'll weep like vempenta*

i'll weep like yesterday's gosayipalem*!

father! as a tear big as the sky

i'll pour like a storm for you!

elders! lords!

salutations!

i wish to curse you

a basketful of curses

i wish to drive a basketful of wild ants

to bite you all over

to see my son's corpse, arriving

like armies of ants

and disappearing like swarms of locusts,

you patriots!

wait a second

if you're made of pus* and blood, shame and honour

if your liver hasn't melted yet

answer this untouchable's questions

not my son

you've come to visit his corpse

do you agree!

my son dead is a veera jawan

alive he's a mala* jawan

what do you say?

answer me!

swear on your manu

as a pigeon and a snake

can't be linked

your upper caste pride

can't go with patriotism

elders! lords!

listen! listen to the untouchable word

between the village and the wada

there's a kargil

from grandfathers' forefathers' age

burning between us

this kargil war

hasn't stopped, it goes on

son! yesoba!

on the third day

if you can't return

find the time

to return some day

and wipe my tears! father!

-my translation of sivasagar's kodukA! yEsobA!, written in 1999.
note: will explain the asterisks and my inadequacies as a translator later.

telugu, of song and rebellion

the bow and arrows hidden in the mahua trees' tresses
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the spears hidden by the path to lohar jwala
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the glistening swords dipped in the landlord's blood
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the guns hidden in the tulasikonda ravine
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the rifle snatched from the garla train
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the sepoy's throat slit in rupaayi konda
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the martyrs' blood flowing in misty mountains valleys
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the moonlight caught in the eyes of dark hills
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the flowers that grew wild on the budarisingi peaks
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the heroism of boddapadu- the lightning courage of garuda bhadra
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the twinkle of kailasam's eyes- the intensity of venkatapu's stare
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

panigrahi's swordsong- mallik's childlike smile
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

the hopes of the poor- the battle of srikakulam
i give you my brother! i give you my brother!

put down the traitors- grab the rifles
build a red army- form a red zone

join hands with your brothers- free mother earth
come along brother- don't tarry brother!

- my translation of the poem nEla talli ceranu viDipinchaga ('to free mother earth'), written by 'sivasagar' (k.g.satyamurthy). it was written in october 1973 when the poet, a leader of the earliest naxalite movement in andhra pradesh, was organizing little rebellions (notice the reference to various battlefields) across the state, from srikakulam to adilabad.

honourable judges!
sunrise is not a conspiracy
the sun is not a conspirator
are a mother's labour pains a conspiracy?
what would you call the progress of the chariot of history?

honourable judges!
demoniac feudalism that's tucked up earth,
like a rolled mat, inside its armpit is a conspiracy
the selling of my country to outsiders
is a conspiracy
brokered at kosygin's leprous feet
the peace treaty is a conspiracy
the food that nixon's ships
bring is a conspiracy
indian independence is a conspiracy
the ballot box is a conspiracy
'garibi hatao' is a conspiracy
indira's smile is a conspiracy
waiting to hang the sun
the arrogance of your unjust laws is a conspiracy
honourable judges!
the srikakulam sunrise is not a conspiracy
the guerilla sun is not a conspirator
isn't driving away darkness sunrise
isn't spreading light warmth among people sunrise

honourable judges!
you, you..are all very righteous
in adharma's destruction, as just as yama.

- my translation of the poem kutradarudu vAj~nmoolamu ('the conspirator's admission') by 'sivasagar' (k.g.satyamurthy). this poem was his statement before the court trying him for participating in the parvathipuram conspiracy.

telugu doesn't need this or any other government's endorsement. it has battled sanskrit (for five centuries?), prakrit (for another five?), persian (for yet another five?)..and repression in one telugu region or another for more than two thousand years.

in thanjavur, or golkonda, and in srikakulam or jagityala, it's been the language of song and rebellion. now, it's gaddar's language, and sivasagar's. and of all dalits, sudras ..and, as sri sri would have said, of all pathithulu, bhrashtulu, badha sarpa dashtulu.

s*&&% the pundits in delhi. i'd rather remember:

endarO mahAnubhAvulu..