 had a production story that since has become formulaic – get people to become actors, rather than actors to become people. More than that, the film offered the outsider an ecstatically earnest view of India, the rough-cuts through the seam of globalised blankets — 

 arrived in India in 1988 and would go on to change the outlook of the Indian middle classes forever and most essentially the street itself. Symptomatic of the malaise at the heart of economic reforms that were to follow, the streets were no longer the site of the story, as much as they were for erecting dreams — the affordable television, the car, the trip abroad and so on.

 put it, reformed not through narrative jollies, or by wrapping things in an optimistic shroud but purely by lending identity to its characters; more than anyone else Shafiq Syed’s 11-year-old 

 who is neither too young for targets, nor too old to lose sight of them in the face of struggle. There is something almost joyous in Chaipau’s calculated retreats to his plan of saving 500 rupees amidst the chaotic, unsentimental community of urchins he lives with. 

 operates between a rock and a hard place, but it never feeds on its brutality, but finds in the friction of life, moments relative to identity and character, of learning, and most tragically, doomed love. Such as the real life journey of Shafiq Syed, who most recently was still struggling to make ends meet.

During the ’60s, the then prime minister 

, in an attempt to re-define India’s space in the world of cinema, did everything in his power to bring a tinge of auspice to the seduction story of India’s oriental past. Two decades on, Nair perhaps shifted the lens to what independent India had created for itself – a sprawling landscape of equal parts singed mortar and limb. After 

resonated with similar themes. Since then, filmmakers with global credence for some reason stayed away up until 

, however, regardless of their roots in fact or fiction, fail to purposefulness akin to Nair’s film. The precociousness of Chaipau and his friends is more learned than the oppressed opportunism of children in 

, both of which were written from the tragedy forward, in past-tense. 

 on the other hand, feels current, even today. Its greatest tragedies appear not in the mirror, but in the imperceptible future where all of its characters want to run.

Most of these films are often criticised for being 

 (though Nair is India-born), made by the ‘other’, which is perhaps educational because the ones made by our own are either utopian or escapist. Indian cinema is atrociously lightweight in exploring its own unscratched belly. On the other hand it chooses to moon over brothels and gangsters, because they automatically seem fetching as narrative boosters. Perhaps, the Indian writer struggles to write beyond the 

 and their girls, or is simply programmed to do so.

, was a documentary maker before she dived into fiction. It shows. Her gaze is unmitigated by the numbness of age. Her film, which was born out of a research project, treats its kids as the first among equals, however sinister or cynical. Perhaps, what filmmakers can take away from Nair’s film is that perversity need not always be a bane. And to treat it for what it is may only be fair. They dream, like we do. The only difference, may be, that like Chaipau at the end of 

. dreams can become endless, and it is not the end that hurts as much as not being able to see it.

WHY SALAAM BOMBAY! STILL REMAINS UNMATCHED

Safdar Hashmi’s biography reminds us what it means to be a citizen of a democracy. The line between Hashmi’s murder by a lynch mob in 1989 near Delhi and the killing of 53 people in 2020 in North East Delhi is a short one.

 deeply humane book on the death and life of 

 opens with the sentence, “I wasn’t even supposed to be there.” This is how many of us feel in today’s India. There’s a line in Sudhir Mishra’s 

 which says something on these lines– when you travel a hundred kilometres from New Delhi you actually travel a distance of a thousand years, that’s the kind of 

 there is between the two worlds. It holds true even when measured in terms of economic growth or basic amenities.

But when it comes to the radical religious and political venom which resides in the heart of the citizens of this nation, there is not much difference between a town in Uttar Pradesh and the heart of 

 where just a few months ago, a clip went viral in which a group of men were heard chanting 

“Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalo ko”

, inside the busiest metro station in central Delhi.
A thirty-four years old Safdar Hashmi, while performing a street play in Jhandapur, a village in Uttar Pradesh not far from Delhi, was beaten to death in broad daylight, hit over 

 on his head with metal rods so brutally that when he was brought to the hospital his brain fluid was leaking out of his nose. But this isn’t a story about the lack of hope or death. This is a book about an extraordinary life cut criminally short but fully lived, with truth and an innate love for theatre and people. This is also a story of inconceivable courage because two days after Safdar died, Mala, his wife, and the other actors went back and performed the play again at the same location, this time till the end.

 – the amateur theatre group (JA)na (NA)tya (M)anch founded by Hashmi and a few other young activists in 1973, was nothing less than a small act of rebellion. Hashmi had joined the 

) when it was revived after having been defunct for over a decade since the late 1950s. But by the end of 1972 it was apparent that while the IPTA was keeping itself busy with “Indo-Soviet Friendship Society platforms” and “Durga Puja celebrations”, a faction within the association was more invested in the idea of performing for the working classes and farmers.

So when Hashmi wrote “we propose to leave this organisation at the earliest, carry as many general members along as possible, and start work on a completely new footing”, this group of young 

 was not only evicted, but in true theatrical fashion, their belongings were also thrown out of the first floor window of the IPTA office in Shanker Market. And Janam was born – which in its years of existence went on to produce and perform now iconic plays such as 

Machine, Raja ka Baja, Aya Chunav, Hatyare,

This brilliant and painful biography is like an intimate embrace from one of Hashmi’s oldest comrades and compatriots. It holds the reader’s hand and walks them through a life which defied odds and without intending to leave a mark, continued to do his work as a human being in a world which was rapidly fragmenting in the name of 

 also serves as a startling portrait of an India in transition between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, including the dreadful 18-month period of the 

 from 1975 to 1977, and presents it through the under-utilised lens of art and artists revealing the large scale impact it can have on the political framework and future of a nation.

The book discloses how Janam stopped performing during this period and Hashmi too was dismayed and frightened, perceiving himself as “a great danger to the Indian state.” Many today remember him as a fearless hero, which is a troubling idea, because in deifying people who have suffered immeasurable pain we often tend to segregate them from the rest of us, treating them as rare exceptions and mythologising their stories, which in turn disallows these narratives from percolating into our everyday lives.

This is what we have done to someone like Hashmi, and this is what we continue to do with someone like 

 by eulogising and commemorating her as “

”. There’s no doubt that when Hashmi’s skull was being crushed under metal rods, he was afraid, just the way Jyoti was inside that bus on that horrific December night in Delhi some twenty-three years later.

This book helps humanise such people and their stories. Heroes, they are – not by the virtue of their suffering, but by the strength of the dignity and struggle marking the lives they lived.

The light in Safdar Hashmi’s eyes dimmed that January afternoon, but it managed to awaken a whole new generation. At a time when we are observing countrywide protests against various acts and laws of the government, some of which threaten to divide this nation on the basis of religion, Deshpande’s book is a necessary reading, to awaken not a 

 in us, because that’s not what Safdar’s life endorses if you read this book carefully, but to understand and reinvigorate what it means to be a truly democratic citizen in the most populous democracy in the world.

Every generation is given its heroes: people who give their bodies and minds over in the pursuit of justice and do so with compassion, wit and good grace. This book describes one such person, and we may make him a hero, a beacon, or we may simply remember that this too is a way of being a 

HALLA BOL

The film is about youth and rebellion. It is about fathers and sons. There is a disagreement about the idea of India they all have; about India exploding in a thousand directions. In a sense the film is also about encapsulating all of life in an ideology, but life has a habit of slipping away from ideology. If

still has resonance it is because it wasn’t caught up with the ideology.

, a film about the waning romance with the revolutionary and violent 

, a state sponsored vigilante group out to massacre the Naxals, was unleashed along the ‘red corridor’- those states with Naxal presence. Just about a year after the release of the film, the then Prime Minister 

 for a meeting where he called the Naxals: “

the single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country.

 would be liberally used to brand urban liberals. When 

, made this film, one that is deeply sympathetic to the Naxal cause of villagers feeling alienated, of police brutality, and deep injustice; the word Naxal didn’t have any such connotations. But this doesn’t mean the film today feels dated. In fact, it is for that very reason the film still has such a huge following.

Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

, declaring (though not decrying) the so-called 

At the stroke of midnight when India awoke to ‘light and freedom’”, the world was not asleep. It was for instance, around two thirty in the afternoon in New York

,” the film notes with irony. Released in 2005, the relatively low-budget, no-star 

’ speech on the eve of 1947, but the film is really about love and conflict in the time of 

. The daughter of India’s first Prime Minister and the infamous 1970s Emergency imposed by her in the most fascist fashion disrupting democratic ideals forms a heady backdrop for 

With its depiction, and subsequent disillusionment with Nehruvian socialism, Mishra’s political drama recalls a time when revolution was in the air. In essence, 

 is JNU student politics come to life. The high-caste, privileged characters that populate 

 of the film’s imagination are highfalutin forerunners of – to borrow from the vast and highly innovative vocabulary of the right-wingers – 

‘Urban Naxals,’ ‘Twitter Libtards,’ ‘Tukde Tukde Gang

i talk about ideals, oppression, poverty, capitalism and inequality with passion but their bourgeois-by-birth background is not lost on the audience.

Mishra’s poetic touch and love for music is at par with his anger and bitter humour, all of which are beautifully embedded into the script. For instance, when 

 talks about establishing a new social order and says that life is not all about getting a “

proper English education, fat salary and loving one’s parents

”, it sounds funny because he’s speaking in English himself and he’s a beneficiary of the same convent education he’s pet-peeving about. The joke in the “loving one’s parents” bit isn’t exactly hidden either. Funnier still is a scene in which a rich landlord, down with a heart attack, agrees to be treated by a lower-caste doctor while his son objects. More hilarities: an heir apparent who still answers to the higher calling of socialism but cannot throw away the trappings of the good life.

The movie straddles all the big issues of the 1970s but never without a touch of poetry and dewy-eyed romance. It is Sudhir Mishra’s angriest and yet, his most optimistic film to date. Most importantly, 

 deserves credit for seeking to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the 

 and its intellectual activism by revealing a huge gap between the naïve romanticism of the socialist theories and what it can truly achieve on the ground. 

 are totally disconnected, the film appears to argue, from the unpleasant realities as they pontificate in their ivory towers, far removed from where all the action is. This disconnect is best interpreted in a throwaway scene at a rally in which a farmer asks, “

” and a fellow seated next to him shakes his head, “

Can socialism ever be a force for public good?

’ draws a blank in the end. At best, crusader 

 is still trying to find an answer to it before his plunge into the Naxalite Movement. 

, the film’s most mysterious figure, is the naif who is lured into it from time to time by her ex-lover. She submits eventually. 

I think it is about the vestiges of beauty that lasts when youth fades,

 in 2018. That’s why, he said, the title is an inspired moniker alluding to 

’s philosophical abstractions. Nobody knows the answer, neither 

 well-meaning radicals and their convenient idealism.

Revisiting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Several activists and academics on Monday decried the “arbitrary” arrests, saying they amounted to abuse of the lockdown to silence and arrest opponents of the government.

 have not allowed the preoccupations with fighting 

 to come in the way of picking up at least two 

 in February against the new citizenship matrix. 

 was called in for questioning on Friday and arrested on Saturday by a 

. She has been charged with rioting with weapons in 

, a group comprising students and alumni from the varsity, had condemned the arrest and demanded her immediate release. “

The country is facing a massive health crisis, however, the state machinery is busy harassing and framing student activists in false cases to suppress voices of dissent

 was also arrested for alleged violence at a similar protest. 

 was diligently working to provide ration to the needy during the lockdown.

The arrests have largely remained under the radar, possibly because the attention of most of the country has been focused on the virus outbreak and the efforts to contain it. On Monday, 

At a time when citizens in lockdown are unable to fully exercise their democratic rights, it is the moral duty of governments to guard against any abuse of power by the State. Instead we see open communalisation of this pandemic and targeting of students and activists by agencies of the State

 coalition that led several protests against the 

there is now an attempt to implicate them in false cases related to the

violence. The memories of that violence unleashed in

-dominated localities between February 23 and February 26 are still fresh.

stood mute during the worst of these attacks, actively participated in some and refused to file FIRs against leaders of the ruling party for incitement. Now, weaving fictitious narratives about the

lockdown to silence and arrest those who oppose government policies, hoping that this abuse of State power will go unreported, with neither news coverage nor democratic protest.

Jailing activists and students on false cases amid this pandemic puts their lives in peril and with courts functioning only partially owing to the lockdown, those arrested are being denied proper legal aid.

 said that her custody was extended after being booked for another protest-related case in northeast 

. She has sought bail on health grounds. The police had not responded to questions from major newspapers till Monday evening.

Delhi Police hunts Jamia students: Artists & Activists witness lockdown abuse

’s book is a sometimes lyrical, sometimes strident record of a country’s slide from a liberal secular centrist identity to a

nation of capitalist inclination and extreme-right-wing faith

‘Princess of prose’, ‘darling of bleeding-heart left-liberals’, ‘Maoist’, ‘Ambedkarite’, ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘anti-development’, ‘anti-nuclear’, ‘anti-government’, ‘anti-state’, ‘anti-saffron’, ‘anti-national’ — any three or four of these epithets together can identify 

. Such is the fame (rather, notoriety) that 

 bears on her feisty shoulders: a reputation built word by word through a quarter century of impassioned writing about the desecration of 

 democracy on every front, perhaps a perspective shared only by a shriveling minority in the country today. All the more reason, then, for a collector’s edition of her ‘collected non-fiction’ spanning more than two decades — book ended by her two novels of 1997 and 2017 and titled, like a sentimental and transgressive romance, 

This title (taken from the final essay) is no small irony: few would have sensed in July 1998, when the first one, “

”, was published in Outlook and Frontline, how prescient her romantic and defiant outcries against an emergent non-democratic 

 and her alarmist predictions of its multiple woundings would seem in just 20 years. There is something of a sombre irony, too, in the book being bound like a classic, replete with gold embossing: it is as if we know now that we must put it away with care on a high shelf and let it gather its rightful dust for the times, they are rapidly a-changing.

 950-page tome is also a record, distasteful as it may be for many, of how this apparently astonishing reversal of national colour was aided and abetted by successive governments since 

 that were hardly all saffron-hued. For these achievements alone, 

 is a classic. And seeping, leaking, lurching through every page is her intrepid politics. For 

 (despite the company she is sometimes seen to keep at public meetings and protests) is actually no mere 

, but a visionary writer-activist in whom is melded a fearless political imagination and an instinctive understanding of the underbelly of a monstrously threatened democracy, who wields a pen that races ahead even of her, most of the time.

 avowed credo in her response to policies of governance in 

 over the past two decades. Simply defined in the dictionary as ‘

language or behaviour that is intended to persuade other people to oppose their government

’, what this amounts to, in these perilous times, is the sustaining of a sharp, critical, combative, idealistic eye on maneuveres and machinations of the economically, socially and politically powerful to betray the common people. Sedition, of course, can be outlawed as treason and punished with jail time for its criminal intent and action — and 

, despite the romantic lilt of the eponymous ‘

’, would hardly wish to lighten the seriousness of the writer’s task she appropriated for herself since the demolition of the 

. She has been jailed (for a day) and fined for her seditious heart and voice, and pen, and remains constantly under surveillance and threat.

The book’s foreword spells out the structure of the collection, and its 

. Chronologically arranged and unrevised, occasionally repetitive, “

the essays… are as pieces of laundry — poor people’s washing — strung out across the landscape… interrupting the good news bulletins and spoiling the view

”: as inevitable and necessary, and as disruptive and difficult to accept, for anyone who wishes to float on a sense of well-being about the ‘development’ of 

 into a ‘global’ presence through so-called domestic growth and international alliances. The longest section in the collection is also her most controversial piece of writing: “

Then, the best-known of Roy’s long-form essays from “

”, on the struggle against the building of the 

Big Corporations, NGOs, American funding agencies

”, are buttressed by more than 30 essays of varied length addressing inequities, aggrandisement, exploitation, power-grabbing, hypocrisy, corruption, terror and megalomania that constitute the ‘dirty laundry’ of the contemporary 

. She appendices her early two-part essay, “

 agential possibilities had been obliterated in his visual narrative: “

The film incensed me because it took the story of a most extraordinary woman and portrayed her as someone who had no volition

 wealth of ideas and argument continuously challenge the moribund state of 

 democracy, which has been crumbling since 1992, and her flamboyant rhetoric is girded by intense research. But does 

 provide solutions? Mostly, not. She asks questions that chew our brains, and she can do that in language that exhilarates and chokes, at once. And when the hurly-burly’s done, she returns (us) to the sense of who she is and what she possesses, a magician of words, and an imagination that leaps and soars with this anxiety: “

As… 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 allowing 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

At their best moments, her essays sound that feral howl, and touch, however fleetingly, the power and precision of poetry. It is in this, finally, that 

 strikes and shifts the ground we stand upon: 

The Seditious Heart

The Indian economy is currently in a state of changing moods, from euphoria to dejection. There are unmistakable signs of slowing down and growing misery. Amidst all this, two questions come to the mind of ordinary citizens: what is the cause of this impending gloom in the economy, and what, if anything, can be done about it to improve the situation?

Market capitalism suffers from, what psychiatrists describe as, bipolar disorder. The affliction leads to alternate periods of elation and depression. This ailment can be controlled and managed by treatment, but never completely cured. The Indian Economy is currently in a state of changing moods, from euphoria to dejection. There are unmistakable signs of slowing down and growing misery — low demand, absence of private investments, rising unemployment and stagnating production in many important sectors of the economy, including the agricultural sector where farmers are in acute distress. Two questions come to the mind of ordinary citizens: what is the cause of this impending gloom about the economy, and what, if anything, can be done about it to improve the situation?

Let’s take the second question first. That the economy is not in proper health is accepted by even the most die-hard 

 supporter. The issue is whether we need to do anything about it. An ideal analogy would be the situation when we fall ill. There are many people who have strong faith in the built-in natural immune system of the human body and refuse to take strong medicine with harmful side effects that could be long-lasting. There are others who believe in taking quick action and allowing the medical practitioner to prescribe medicines that modern science has to offer. Economic policymakers are split along similar lines. There are conservative economists who believe that the market system can, given a little bit of time, recover automatically from its ailment of unemployment and low levels of output. The logic is simple: if there are unutilised resources like capital and labour, their prices (provided market prices are allowed to be flexible) will fall. This would be a signal for producers to hire more workers at a lower wage and use more productive capacity. Output and income would then increase. Markets would return to health, once again. The government has no role in this. Indeed, it should remain hands-off and not mess up by meddling with medicines with strong side effects.

There are other economists who believe that this process could take a long time to return the patient to good health. Meanwhile, individuals and firms affected would suffer or protest, neither of which is a situation that is politically palatable to governments. Unless, of course, the government cares little and can suppress dissent or deflect attention with demonic craftiness. Moreover, prices are usually inflexible in a downward direction. Take, for instance, wages in organized sectors. Price of labour is usually contracted for a period of time during which it is impossible to force wage cuts on workers. Hence, these economists call for some treatment after a diagnosis of which specific symptoms need priority attention. For instance, if credit is expensive and credit flows are clogged, then reducing the cost of credit and increasing the liquidity of the financial system might work. If there are new opportunities and growing demand, lower cost of loans and greater flows of loanable funds can do the trick. On the other hand, if the sentiments of the investors are pessimistic and they do not foresee new demand for their goods and services in the near future, they will be loath to expand businesses even if the cost of credit is low and loans are available easily. In such a situation, the prescription is for the government to spend directly on public investments, such as infrastructure or expansion of education and healthcare facilities by borrowing.

, at the moment, the current government believes in a hands-off approach. That belief was well reflected in a statement made by the 

 that Indian industrialists need to grow up and not come running to the government for help when they start making losses. What the government’s approach has been is to use monetary policy to lower the cost of borrowing by reducing the benchmark interest rates. Banks on the other hand, stuck with a large amount of bad and doubtful loans, are not ready to open their purses and take on fresh risks even if there were borrowers lined up in front of their offices. To restore some confidence, the 

 of the nation has committed a large infusion of fresh capital into the banking system. The amount committed is close to the amount it has taken away from the 

’s kitty. This would avoid increasing the budget deficit of the government. The real trouble is that there are very few new takers for loans. The senior most officer of the largest bank, the 

, has proclaimed that he is sitting with a loanable funds kitty of one lakh crore and can disburse the amount in one month’s time. What he refrained from saying was that this would be well-nigh impossible to lend due to the paucity of borrowers.

International capital as well as large corporations, domestic and foreign, tend to prefer non-interfering governments with low deficits. The reasons are straightforward. They do not want the government to compete in profitable areas. Borrowing by the government also increases interest rates and this elbows out private borrowers from the funds markets. A government that is financed and endorsed by large corporate power is very unlikely to indulge in big-ticket public investment projects. Instead, as a recent press report suggested, there is consideration to bring down the minimum legislated wage rate in the country from Rs 300 a day to Rs 200 a day. This would stimulate demand and recovery as the hands-off approach suggests. Restoring the purchasing power of the middle and poorer classes of society would require some form of systemic redistribution of wealth from the very rich elites. Economic inequality in 

 has increased at an astonishing pace in the last three decades. It will be very difficult for any democratically elected government to upset the apple cart that would disturb the wealthy and the powerful.

There was another question we had raised. What caused this state of affairs? It is not unusual for a patient to have bipolar disorder. However, this time, there is an added systemic risk the patient will have to face. That is the inexorable march of automation and the huge disruption it will bring to the labour market in the coming few years. Jobs becoming obsolete are expected to surpass the new jobs that would be created. The latter will be only for people with exceptionally high cognitive skills and analytical abilities. 

 will not be an exception to this global trend. However, we are not ready with any contingency plans like universal basic income or new skill training schemes. Our higher education system is becoming outdated day by day. The economic weaknesses are both cyclical and structural. How would the government manage the crisis if it believes in a hands-off approach? It would have to suppress dissent and criticism. One political answer to all of this is to have a permanent state of undeclared emergency with severely curbed fundamental rights and civil liberties. We will still have a chattering class of sycophants applauding on the sidelines, relishing the suffering of others.

Capitalism is growing old. Bipolar disorders usually become more acute and complicated with age, especially if left untreated. Its institutions are becoming weak and dysfunctional. People crave for order amidst chaos. They do not always have the foresight to realize that the desired order can be best found in a jailhouse or a cemetery.

Articles by Varda Ahmad

WHY SALAAM BOMBAY! STILL REMAINS UNMATCHED

HALLA BOL

Revisiting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Delhi Police hunts Jamia students: Artists & Activists witness lockdown abuse

The Seditious Heart

The Indian Economy’s Bipolar Disorder

WHY SALAAM BOMBAY! STILL REMAINS UNMATCHED

HALLA BOL

Revisiting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Delhi Police hunts Jamia students: Artists & Activists witness lockdown abuse

The Seditious Heart

The Indian Economy’s Bipolar Disorder