Thursday, August 28, 2008
LOVE URDU POETS - HATE URDU
Thursday, August 28, 2008
To: The Editor, Afternoon, Mumbai
LOVE URDU POETS - HATE URDU
This has reference to Tavleen Singh's article: A literary interlude (Afternoon, Aug 28, 2008).
This is Tavleen Singh in all her communal glory. She writes a thousand-word article on the occasion of the sad passing of Ahmed Faraz, Urdu's most loved poet during current times. She cherishes her chance meeting with him at New Delhi airport. She extols him for his gazals that is the rage of the gazal lovers all over the world. She mentions the names of Ghalib, Mir, Iqbal, Faiz, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Munshi Prem Chand. It is a tribute to her journalistic integrity that in full commitment to her brand of communal writing, she succeeds in completely avoiding the word: URDU.
Is Urdu so untouchable; so unmentionable?
The nearest she comes to acknowledge the existence of URDU as an Indian language, when she writes: It is sad that these wonderful writers are not translated into other Indian languages and their works are not taught in Indian schools. This is at best a backhanded acknowledgement that URDU is an Indian language.
It is time Tavleen Singh reflects how much damage she has done to the Hindu-Muslim unity of the nation by her warped line of communal writings. It is time she starts rebuilding the bridges that had been torpedoed.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com
www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.com
Arushi and SIMI - By Ghulam Muhammed
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Arushi and SIMI
Arushi and SIMI, thanks to media, have become household names in India. However, there is a strange link between the two, which will escape a cursory reader. Both became national issues, due to the peculiar state of affairs prevalent in India, giving unfettered liberty to both, police and media to impinge on the rights of the common people.
Arushi, was the unfortunate young girl, murdered in her own house. Police and media played havoc with the investigation of the murder case, filing public pronouncements by the hour. As they changed the fictitious scenarios about whodunit, they kept changing the culprits. The whole nation was glued to their TV screens, being fed with most outlandish crime stories spun on the bare facts of the case. Police even arrested Arushi’s father. Her whole family came under outrageous defamatory description of their supposedly lurid lifestyle, pairing male and female characters in so many mind-boggling permutation and combination, that ordinary people had nothing but abject hatred for the whole group of people picked up by the police.
Within days, there was a media backlash, both against the police and against erring media, when analysts wrote article after article, condemning their own fraternity, in organising a ‘trial by media’ frenzy, that had no relevance to the rule of law, by which our nations stands.
Thanks to the Arushi case, judges in courts did come out with generalized rulings against such travesty of laws. However, the government kept its silence, as if it all hardly concerned it.
A similar case can be made out about SIMI. The demonic avatar of SIMI was deliberately created by a conspiracy by two non-Congress Hindutva protagonists for political expediency. They were not satisfied with the ongoing demonisation of Muslims, on which their political stakes were based. By denigrating everything Muslim and Islamic, they tried to build up their Hindu vote bank.
To compound the misery, the Leftist too joined the bandwagon by scaring the Muslim community about the most terrifying backlash by ‘the Hindu extremists’. The Leftists/Communists posed as secular friends of the Muslims, but in fact, had chosen the scare-tactic as the best means to demoralize the Muslim vote bank and claim their allegiance and trust.
This strange jugalbandi between the so-called secular Left and the Hindutva Right, all concentrating on the biggest problem that the nation is supposed to face, has left the people most confused.
Instead of exposing the real culprits of these scare-mongering games, the politicians from both Right and Left seem to be hand in glove in demonizing of Muslims, by every means possible, every opportunity at their command. It is the politicians, who are the motivating factor in police, investigating agencies and media, all indulging in fictionalising the real life, in a heady abandon, without any fear whatsoever of any accountability.
They are hardly aware of the dire consequences of their speedy slide into a fascist society, where India will eventually be left gasping for air of freedom and sanity.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com
www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.com
