To write in these times is to re-commission the last crimson, to re-reveal a part of the folded flower – a reserve of inexhaustible tenderness. To write in these times, is to rehabilitate the enduring into lands of the rational, where the sun shines tenderly in a sky of clarified thoughts.
Rallying bitterness across temporal blind spots
In an attempt to grapple with the psychological blows inflicted by Modi’s surreal win back in 2014, I wrote this:
Few weeks back, I visited a bookshop, one of my favourite daytime haunts in the town. I hastened to a rack that held all the yellow, dewy-eyed and age-struck narratives – a spectral wasteland of books. I randomly pulled out a hard bound book of poetry – after Gujarat and other poems by Seeme Qasim. This collection had poems that survived the Gujarat riots.
This was the call that I needed amidst the hysteria that had blatantly cast a scotoma – a veritable blind spot – on India’s mind. As I read the book, I realised that Indians had indeed forgotten the ‘what’ and ‘how’abouts of the riots. For an event that prematurely expired within the nation’s mind, this book is as fitting a tribute as it is a call to people like me who wonder at the efficiency with which human minds undermine a humanity-numbing ghoul of an event into yet another thing of the past.
Did this ‘thing of the past’ hit a temporal blind spot? Or is it still levitating around, between ghosts, and basic amenities, as a curvy legged, pot-bellied child? This systematic forgetfulness is not a random prodigy from the heavens; it is merely an outcome of a process that started churning from the bottom of the layers.
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