Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Sometimes reading this blog makes me think how the complexity of feeling and the constant need for it, is most simplistic.

I was reading Safdar Hashmi today, talking about his dreams for theatre, for the people. His almost innocent, unflinching belief in hope struck me. It made my easy cynicism uncomfortable. A man beaten to death for performing a play outside a factory. In an interview he says, "when the emergency was declared, many of our friends were arrested we got scared as hell. We thought we were a threat to the Indian State. We exaggerated our own threat and thought we were bound to be arrested and tortured. So we disappeared, We didn't perform anymore..."

He wouldn't have known, the lines would ring as comically prophetic and piercingly satirical one day.

I was born many years after the emergency he refers to was lifted.

He was murdered in public just a few days after my second birthday, leaving me and those born since with the knowledge that the emergency was always in continuum and the response could be either- hope that smells of sweat(as Safdar and those like him would have most days of their lives) or cynicism, the smell of my air conditioned classroom.

I choose the latter too many times, this blog tells me.

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