THE CANCER OF SILENCE - How does one bring back the meaning of protest? THE THIN EDGE - Ruchir Joshi

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THE CANCER OF SILENCE - How does one bring back the meaning of protest?

THE THIN EDGE - Ruchir Joshi

Don't stop And they say there is no god. I began this year with a promise to myself: this was going to be the year when I would not let fear in through the door, any kind of fear, not even for a quick cup of tea. When I was making this promise, I was thinking of the fear that had returned after many years of banishment — I used to be very unhappy when flying and had overcome that; but now, with some recent turbulence, I was getting tense on flights again. I was also thinking of the fear of putting out work, where endless tinkering and fidgeting would block the completion of a film or novel — I was determined to finish a long overdue book and a half completed film that's been on the back-burner too long. I was thinking of the fear of travelling light, of leaving objects and objections behind and actually wandering across India. I was thinking of the fear of doing without my addictions, or of making do with less of them. I was thinking of the fear of re-connecting with old and close friends with whom I'd fallen out, with whom I was still angry. The other thing that was playing in my mind was that it was coming up to 10 years since I began writing this column, "The Thin Edge", for this newspaper. I've done many things in the last decade, and failed to do many more, but the one thing that has stayed constant through Enron scandal and Iraq war, through Gujarat Killing, Arab Spring and Poriborton Elation has been the act of, once or twice a month, putting out my opinion on this newsprint (and later net) segment of The Telegraph. This column began after I wrote a personal piece about what happened at Neemrana in Rajasthan, on the last day of the resort leg of a literary festival. There, I'd had a moment where a pulse of Non-Fear shot through me. If we accept Hemingway's definition of courage being not the absence of fear but the overcoming of fear, I wouldn't call what I did 'courageous'. I hadn't been afraid in the first place, so there was nothing to overcome except the silence, or reluctance to speak, of most of the people sitting around me. At a massively attended panel, a famous man was verbally defecating on all of us and someone needed to challenge him. I had a microphone in front of me and I only said what I felt many of us wanted to say: "Stop it! You're being obnoxious!" If I'd hesitated for a minute, I'm sure somebody else would have done the same thing. In that particular high noon, I was quicker on the draw, that's all. Dying gunslingers and dismissed batsmen rue their slow reactions in terms of milliseconds. I'm an artist, a film-maker and writer. We autist-maanush, we intellect-dependent junkies, battle on a far slower plane. Sometimes you can even put our reactions in a glass case filled with formaldehyde. Sometimes, in order to perceive signs of life in us, you need a special, fast-motion camera to speed up what seems absolutely still. Sometimes, it takes 23 years before two of us can manage to publicly read aloud four sentences from another writer's book, sometimes it takes dozens of mob assaults across two decades to get two of us to read publicly for 15 minutes from a book that is not even banned. Speaking strictly for myself, among the important things I've failed to do, in the 10 years since I pressed the red button on the microphone at Neemrana, is to properly fight the cancer of silence that has spread in the country I claim is mine. By the end of January, my collection of usual-suspect fears was expanded. I'd forgotten that Fear Lala often works as part of a two-man hit team with that other quiet guy, Unexpected Khan. Also, by the evening of the 24th, any choice as to the subject of this column was taken away — some odd, godly symmetry found me involved with another grand literary event in Rajasthan, being castigated by some of the same people who had castigated me in 2002. Instead of telling me off for insulting a favourite author of theirs, they were now berating me for standing up for a favourite author of mine. The difference is what I chose to do this time was not impulsive but thought out. The satellite dish of my fears, (such as they are), is not turned towards the authorities or the people who are celebrating the great victory of not allowing a video uplink with Salman Rushdie, it is turned towards those who want to put a dismissive spin on what we did, it is turned towards people from the secular zone who write authoritatively without even having been in Jaipur, imputing that to us, accusing us of this, sidling away from addressing the issue that dropped like a huge, immovable boulder before any of us even crossed over into Rajasthan. Not all protests can be or need to be well thought out in advance, some of the most effective ones happen on the spur of the moment, we only have to look at Tunisia and Egypt to remind ourselves of this fact. In any case, whether spontaneous or planned, protests, or normalizing acts which are seen as protests, can have many outcomes and shapes, not all of them predictable. The real question is what happens after the first act? The really interesting story is to watch how people claiming to be behind an argument behave, once that argument has been smacked on the table. In this case, any fears I might initially have had are rapidly turning into curiosity. Is the Indian secular discourse only an instrument for liberals to mask their eliteness? Will they cut and run once uncomfortable secularism leaks out of the pages of papers and the edges of the TV screens into a wider arena? How does one bring back the meaning of protest? Is any literature festival, no matter how brilliant and successful, more important than the writers from whose free expression it finds its fuel, its very reason to exist? Can Oprah and Chopra carry the show by themselves next year? Could someone at the Centre have said to the chief minister of Rajasthan: "Sir, please fully ensure Mr Rushdie's safety or these people will move this festival to one of the many other locations in India which will welcome them"? Will this country stand by and watch three festival organizers and four not very well known writers being harassed and worse by self-proclaimed 'Defenders of Islam' because they read a total of 25 minutes from a text that is legally available in Turkey and Egypt? God may exist or not, but I can tell you a couple of places where science ends, where it reaches a border beyond which it has no visa. One is the frontier where someone is saying: "Hey, kid, look! Do you see that man there, quietly reading that book? I know you can't read, so let me tell you — that book insults your father! Therefore the man reading the book is also insulting your father, and therefore we have to stop that man from reading that book, no matter what it takes." The other is the checkpoint at which there are thousands of people, all holding different books, all of them saying, "We will no longer let you stop us from reading, no matter what it takes." Whatever happens from this point on, I know at which unscientific border many, many of us stand.