Democracy’s failing light - (Outlook Mag July 13)
Arundhati Roy
Is democracy a hit with humans because it mirrors our myopia?
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhere prickly, comabative defense of democracy. Its flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s an offer. Inevitably someone in the room will say. “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia…is that what you would prefer?
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all developing societies aspire to is a separate question altogether (I think it should. The early idealistic phase can be quite heady) the question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment.
The question here really is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hallowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institution has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing the profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back into what ii used to be?
What we need today for the sake if the survival of this planet is long term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly – our nearsteadfastness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.
It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and the democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent public interventions at critical moments in India during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammed Afzal, the accused in the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack; during US President George Bush’s visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; after the November 26, 2008, Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just response to events; they were responses to the responses.
Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberration in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they’re about the fire in the ducts. I should also say that they do not provide a panoramic overview. They’re a detailed under view of specific events that I hoped would reveal some of the ways in which democracy is practiced in the world’s largest democracy. (or the world’s largest ‘demon-crazy’, as a Kashmiri protestor on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: ‘Democracy without Justice = Demon Crazy’)
As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am following myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl or the transformative power and real precision of poetry. Some thing about the cunning Brahminical, intricate, bureaucratic, file bound, apply through proper channel’ nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Friday, 3 July 2009
Art Lives Artist Dies - Obituary- MJ and Lohitadaas
As I write this blog the question that I am asking myself at this moment is this -What is the connection between MJ and my life. It was in 1990's that I started liking him. The good old days at home watching the 2 hour free MTV broadcast in DD Metro. That was the time when his History album came out and the song that shook me was – The Earth Song. It had a noble cause. When I became a teacher I used his 'We are the World' and 'Heal the World' in my theatrical productions and class room presentations. Through his music he sensitized the world about poverty, violence and environment.
Lohitadaas captured my attention through Mrigaya. I even wrote an article about 
the script. At that time I was interested in the area of cultural studies and film studies. My article was based on the topic of the hunter and the hunted. How cleverly Lohi used the universal motif in the movie even reversing it at the end when the hunter becomes the hunted. Even as an actor I liked him in Udyananu Tharam. In the movie his conversation style was filled with honesty and simplicity.
The artists are gone. But the art remains. MJ had a load of allegations against him. Lohi's life was also riddled with some hot rumors. Both were addicted to drugs and alcohol. As a fan of both these artists, I have to admit the fact that it is easy to identify with the art than the artist.
The artist sacrifices his life so that his art will live forever.
Long live the art
Let the artist rest in peace
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