There is a point beyond which it is impossible, at least for me, to describe death: you have to leave it as a statistic and be done with it.
Akbar, a veteran journalist, traverses a forbidden landscape of our collective consciousness. An area that we pretend does not exist, but is fertile in that corner of our mind.
Riots -- communal, casteist, ethnic -- seldom raise our eyebrows today. Death is a mere tag-along. Even when massacres, mass murders and virtual ethnic cleansing are given the less-offending epithet of “riot”.
Reading through his pages, it is this escapism of ours that is exposed. And besides the mere documentation of such heart wrenching incidents, I have a feeling that precisely is Akbar’s idea. To strip us of our make-believe world where such heinous crimes happen only in the fringe. “It happens to them, not us”.
Blood curdling incidents of human decimation -- be it in the hinterlands of Bihar or UP, or in the heart of Chandigarh, or in the forgotten suburbs of Meerut, or under the pristine foliage of the Dandakaranya -- have been described, investigated into and the culprits found, by Akbar.
Lost innocence, devastated childhoods, vanishing lifestyles -- these are the recurring leitmotifs of the narration that also uncovers the omnipresent web of lies, politics and rhetoric -- used by individuals and institutions to further their own interests.
Akbar spares none. The supposedly “decent” V P Singh, the “living Durga” Indira Gandhi, the “secular nationalist mask” A B Vajpayee. He tracks the establishment’s instincts to side with the perpetrators of sickening crimes like burning of innocent Muslim children, raping of pregnant Dalit women and public whipping of tribals.
He disturbs the apparent calm that has set in for us in the mainstream society. He disturbs our complacence. In the hope that that somewhere we would be stirred.
High hopes, I must say!
"Riot After Riot" is a mere blip in the radar of our conscience, Mr Akbar.
No comments:
Post a Comment