Narcissism and Despair

Love Thy Enemy, by Bogdan Migulski

by Ashis Nandy
The Little Magazine

Interpretations of the events of 9/11, 2001, and the diverse political and intellectual responses to them, have oscillated between a concern with the wrath of the disinherited and exploited and the elements of self-destruction built into a hegemonic system. In this essay, I shall focus on the rage of those who feel they have been let down by the present global system and have no future within it. This feeling has been acquiring a particularly dangerous edge in recent times. For the rage often does not have a specific target but it is always looking for one; and regimes and movements that latch on to that free-floating anger can go far. Indeed, once in a while, their targets too have the same kind of need to search for, and find, enemies. The two sides then establish a dyadic bond that binds them in lethal mutual hatred.[1]

Six years after the event, it is pretty obvious that this time there has been a narrowing of cognitive and emotional range all around. The global culture of commonsense has come to the conclusion that it is no longer a matter of realpolitik and hard-headed, interest-based use of terror of the kind favoured by the mainstream culture of international relations and diplomacy — as for instance the repeated attempts by the CIA over the last six decades to assassinate recalcitrant rulers hostile to the United States — but a terror that is based on the defiance of rationality and abrogation of self-interest, a terror that is deeply and identifiably cultural.

It also seems to insist, to judge by the responses to 9/11, that there are only two ways of looking at this link between terror and culture. One way is to emphasise cultural stereotypes and how they hamper intercultural and inter-religious amity. This emphasis presumes that the West with its freedoms — political and sexual — and its lifestyle, identified in the popular imagination by consumerism and individualism, has come to look like a form of Satanism in many millennial movements, particularly in those flourishing in Islamic cultures. Multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue are seen as natural, if long-term, antidotes to such deadly stereotypes. So is, in the short run, ‘firm’ international policing.

The other way is to locate the problem in the worldview and theology of specific cultures. What look like stereotypes or essentialisations in the former approach are seen as expressions of the natural political self of such cultures in the latter. At the moment, Islam looks like the prime carrier of such a political self but some other cultures are not far behind. The American senator who ridiculed those who wore diapers on their heads did not have in mind only the Muslims; nor did the American motorist who, when caught while trying to run over a woman clad in a sari, declared that he was only doing his patriotic duty after 9/11.

The first way — that of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue — is of course seen as a soft option, the second as too harsh. However, the second has in the short run looked to many like a viable basis for public policy and political action. The reason is obvious. Terror has been an instrument of statecraft, diplomacy and political advocacy for centuries. To see it as a new entrant in the global marketplace of politics is to shut one’s eyes to the deep human propensity to hitch terror to organised, ideology-led political praxis. Robespierre said — on behalf of all revolutionaries, I guess — that without terror, virtue was helpless. Terror, he went on to claim, was virtue itself.

This propensity has also enjoyed a certain ‘natural’ legitimacy in the dominant global culture of public life when it comes to the serious business of international relations. Despite recent pretensions, in international politics violence does not have to be justified; only non-violence has to be justified. The mainstream global culture of statecraft insists that the true antidote to terror is counter-terror.

In that respect, the killers who struck at New York on 9/11 and the regimes that claim absolute moral superiority over them share some common values. Both believe that when it comes to Satanic others, all terror is justified as long as it is counter-terror and interpreted as retributive justice. Both look like belated products of the twentieth century, which in retrospect looks like a century of terrorism and its natural accompaniment, collateral damage. Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, Nanking, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are all formidable names in the history of terror and counter-terror, used systematically as political and strategic weapons. On a smaller scale, the same story of attempts to hitch terror to virtue and to statecraft has been repeated in a wide range of situations — from Jallianwalla Bagh to Lidice and from Sharpeville to Mi Lai. The culpable states were sometimes autocratic, sometimes democratic.

Liberal democracy has not often been a good antidote against state terror unleashed by its protagonists. Few are now surprised that some of the iconic defenders of democracy, such as Winston Churchill, were as committed to terror as Robespierre was. Churchill was not only a co-discoverer of the concept of area bombing, as opposed to strategic bombing, he also did not intercede when supplied with evidence, including aerial photographs, of Nazi death camps.

Hence also the widespread tendency to dismiss all talk of fighting terror without recourse to counter-terror as romantic hogwash. It is a basic tenet of the mainstream global culture of politics that only the fear of counter-terror dissuades terrorists from walking their chosen path. Hence also the admiration for the terrorism-fighting skills of a country like Israel in states like Sri Lanka and India and the pathetic attempts of such admirers to use Israeli ‘expertise’, forgetting that Israel has been fighting terror with terror for more than fifty years without success. All that the Israeli state can really take credit for is that, in a classic instance of identifying with its historic oppressors, it has succeeded in turning terrorism into a chronic ailment within the boundaries of the Israeli state, in the process brutalising its own politics and turning many of its citizens into fanatics and racists.

Into this atmosphere has entered a new genre of terrorists during the last few yearsin Palestine, Sri Lanka, India and now the United States. These are terrorists who come in the form of suicide bombers and suicide squads. They come prepared to die and, therefore, are personally and, one might add, automatically immune to the fear of counter-terrorism. Actually, they usually view counter-terrorism — and the reaction it unleashes — as a useful device for mobilisation and polarisation of opinion.[2] This is one thing that the hedonic, death-denying, self-interest-based, individualistic culture of the globalised middle classes just cannot handle. It looks like an unwanted war declared by the death-defying on the death-denying. What kind of person are you if you do not want to keep any options open for enjoying or even seeing the future you are fighting for? What kind of person are you if you do not care what happens to your family, neighbourhood or community in the backlash? To the civilised modern citizen, such suicidal activism looks like the negation of civilisation and the ultimate instance of savagery, apart from being utterly irrational and perhaps even psychotic.

In the nervous, heated discussions about the kamikaze nearly fifty years ago, they often appeared like strange, subhuman adventurers and carriers of collective pathologies, driven by their feudal allegiances and unable to distinguish life from death or good from evil. Recent discussions of the suicide bombers of Hamas, Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and Al Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan and Kashmir invoke the same kind of imageries and fantasies. Hence, probably, the abortive attempts to rename suicide bombings as homicide bombings. They invoke such imageries and fantasies because the modern world is always at a loss to figure out how to deter somebody who is already determined to die.

For most of us, this kind of passion has no place in normal life; it can be only grudgingly accommodated in textbooks of psychiatry as a combination of criminal insanity and insane self-destructiveness.

Outside the modern world too, few call it self-sacrifice. For unlike the freedom fighters of India and Ireland who fasted to death during the colonial period as an act of protest and defiance of their rulers, the self-sacrifice of the suicide bombers also includes the sacrifice of unwilling, innocent others, what the civilised world has learnt to euphemistically call unavoidable collateral damage.

Yet, the key cultural-psychological feature of today’s suicide bombers and suicide squads, despair, is not unknown to the moderns. Indeed, the idea of despair has become central to our understanding of contemporary subjectivities and we also acknowledge that it has shaped some of the greatest creative endeavours in the arts and some of the most ambitious forays in social thought in our times. Van Gogh cannot be understood without invoking the idea of despair, nor can Friedrich Nietzsche. So powerful has been the explanatory power of the idea of despair that recently Harsha Dehejia, an Indian art historian, has tried to introduce the concept in the Indian classical theory of art — by extending Bharata’s theory of rasas itself — as an analytic device. Dehejia feels that without recourse to this construct, we just cannot fathom contemporary Indian art.[3]

One suspects that the desperation one sees in the self-destruction of the new breed of terrorists is the obverse of the same sense of despair that underpins so much of contemporary creativity. Only, this new despair expresses itself in strange and alien ways because the cultures from which it comes are not only defeated but have remained mostly invisible and inaudible. Indeed, their sense of desperation may have come not so much from defeat or economic deprivation but from invisibility and inaudibility.[4]

Of the 18 people identified as members of the suicide squad that struck on 9/11, 15 have been identified as Saudis. They come from a prosperous society where dissent in any form is not permitted, where political conformity and silence are demanded and extracted through either state terror or the fear of it. It can be argued that by underwriting the Saudi regime, which also presides over Islam’s holiest sites and has acquired an undeserved reputation in many circles as a prototypical if not exemplary Islamic state, the United States has helped identify itself as the major source of the sense of desperation that the killers nurtured within them. Violence of the kind we saw on 9/11, Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer argue, presumes “a very high level of dehumanisation of the victims in the minds of aggressors.”[5] That dehumanisation does not happen in a day, nor can it be conveniently explained away as unprovoked.

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and Stephen Schwarz of Spectator have drawn attention to the denominational loyalties of the 18 terrorists. They were Wahhabis, given to an aggressively puritanical form of Islamic revivalist ideology. But all Wahhabis do not turn as aggressive as the Saudi, Palestinian, Pakistani and Pashtun Wahhabis have sometimes done, and certainly all of them do not become suicide bombers. Who does or does not is the question we face.

The answer to that question, we may find out in the coming years, lies not in the ethnic origins or religious connections of terrorism but in the fear of cultures that encourage us not to acknowledge the sense of desperation, if not despair, that is today crystallising outside the peripheries of the known world. It is the adhesive in the new bonding between terror and culture. This desperation may not always be preceded by Nietzschean theocide but it is accompanied by a feeling that God may not be dead but he has surely gone deaf and blind. The Palestinian situation is only one part of the story. The present global political economy has for the first time become almost totally oblivious to the fact that the unprecedented prosperity and technological optimism in some countries have as their underside the utter penury and hopelessness of the many, accompanied by collapse of life support systems due to ecological devastation.[6]

Nothing I have come across reveals the nature of this nihilistic, suicidal despair in some parts of the globe better than the following extract from a journalist’s story. I request the reader to go through it, despite its length:

Aman [Brigadier Amanullah, secretary to Benazir Bhutto and former chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence in Sind, bordering India] noticed me looking at the painting and followed my gaze. … “A rocket ship heading to the moon?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A nuclear warhead heading to India.”

I thought he was making a joke. … I told Aman that I was disturbed by the ease with which Pakistanis talk of nuclear war with India.

Aman shook his head. “No,” he said matter-of-factly. “This should happen. We should use the bomb.”

“For what purpose?”

He didn’t seem to understand my question.

“In retaliation?” I asked.

“Why not?”

“Or first strike?”

“Why not?”

I looked for a sign of irony. None was visible…

“We should fire at them and take out a few of their cities — Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta,” he said. “They should fire back and take Karachi and Lahore. Kill off a hundred or two hundred million people… and it would all be over. They have acted so badly toward us; they have been so mean. We should teach them a lesson. It would teach all of us a lesson. There is no future here, and we need to start over. So many people think this. Have you been to the villages of Pakistan, the interior? There is nothing but dire poverty and pain. The children have no education; there is nothing to look forward to. Go into the villages, see the poverty. There is no drinking water. Small children without shoes walk miles for a drink of water. I go to the villages and I want to cry. My children have no future. None of the children of Pakistan have a future. We are surrounded by nothing but war and suffering…”[7]

In the bonding between terror and culture, a subsidiary role has been played by the perception that all strange cultures are potentially dangerous and sources of violence, and that multiculturalism is only a means of organising or confederating those cultures that approximate or are compatible with the global middle-class culture — cultures that can be safely consumed in the form of ethnic food, arts, museumised artefacts, anthropological subjects or, as is happening in the case of Buddhism and Hinduism, packaged ethnic theories of salvation. The tacit solipsism of Islamic terrorism and its ability to hijack some of Islam’s most sacred symbols is matched by the narcissism of America’s policy elite that finds expression in an optimism that is almost manic.

At the same time, for a large majority of the world, all rights to diverse visions of the future — all utopian thinking and all indigenous visions of a good society — are being subverted by the globally dominant knowledge systems and a globally accessible media as instances of either romantic, other-worldly illusions or as brazen exercises in revivalism. The Southern world’s future now, by definition, is nothing other than an edited version of the contemporary North’s. What Europe and North America are today, the folklore of the globalised middle class claims, the rest of the world will become tomorrow. Once visions of the future are thus stolen, the resulting vacuum has to be filled by available forms of millennialism, some of them perfectly compatible with the various editions of fundamentalism floating around the global marketplace of ideas today. In the liminal world of the marginalised and the muted, desperation and millennialism often define violence as a necessary means of exorcism.

September 11, Gandhian activist-scholar Rajiv Vora and the Swarajpeeth initiative have recently reminded us, was the day Satyagraha, militant non-violence, was born in Johannesburg in 1906. South Africa at the time was a proudly authoritarian, racist police state, not at all like British India, presided over by an allegedly benign, liberal colonial regime that, some votaries of political realism assure us, ensured the success of Gandhi’s non-violence. Does this coincidence have something to tell us?

One way of understanding the recent changes in the global culture of protest is to offset the despair-driven, suicidal forms of terror against the self-destructive defiance and subversion of authorities, as in the case of the Irish hunger-strikers, whom we have already mentioned. The other way is to compare the new culture of terror with the no less religious, militant nonviolence of a community known all over the globe today for its alleged weakness for religion-based terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pathans, known for their martial valour and officially declared a martial race by British India in the nineteenth century, have virtually been turned into official symbols of mindless violence. Yet, in India at least, till quite recently they were also the symbols of the non-violence of the courageous and the truly martial. They had been the finest exponents of the art of Gandhian militant non-violence, directed against the British imperial regime in the 1930s.[9] The Pathans who participated in that struggle were exactly the community that has in the last decade produced the Taliban and played host to Osama bin Laden and his entourage. Can this discrepancy or change be explained away only as a result of the efforts of dedicated fundamentalist clerics, the brutalising consequence of the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, or the skill and efficiency of Inter Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s version of the Central Intelligence Agency? Or does the contradiction exist in the human personality and Pashtun culture itself?[10]

The second possibility cannot be dismissed offhand. The behaviour of ordinary Afghans after the fall of the Taliban regime — in their everyday life and their participation in politics — does not suggest that the Taliban enjoyed decisive support of the people they ruled. Most Afghans seemed genuinely happy to be rid of the harsh, puritanical reign of the Taliban. On the other hand, some of them have obviously helped their guest, bin Laden, and the now-unpopular ruler, Mullah Mohammed Omar, to successfully escape the clutches of the American ground troops.

Who is the real Pathan? The one sympathetic or obedient to the Taliban or the one celebrating the Taliban’s fall? The one known for his martial values or the one who in the 1930s turned out to be the most courageous passive resister, who, according to a number of moving accounts of the Non-Cooperation Movement, faced ruthless baton charges by the colonial police but never retaliated and never flinched? The Pathans evidently brought to their nonviolence the same commitment and fervour that the Afghan terrorists are said to have brought to their militancy in Afghanistan and in other hotspots of the world. Are they as ruthless with themselves now as they were in the 1930s, during colonial times?

I shall avoid answering these questions directly and instead venture a tentative, open-ended comment to conclude. Most cultures enjoin non-violence or at least seek to reduce the area of violence, and these efforts often go hand in hand with cultural theories of unavoidable violence. Only a few like Sparta and the Third Reich glorify, prioritise or celebrate violence more or less unconditionally as the prime mover in human affairs or as the preferred mode of intervention in the world. In the huge majority of cultures that fall in the first category, violence and non-violence both exist in the same persons as human potentialities. The life experiences that underscore one of the two potentialities are the crucial means of entering the mind of the violent and to understand why the violent actualised one of the potentialities and not the other.

The experiences that in our times have contributed to the growth of massive violence can often — though not always — be traced to the collapse of communities and their normative systems. The old is moribund and the new has not yet been born, as the tired cliché goes. In many cases, the powerful and the rich welcomed this collapse because they did not like the norms of other people’s communities.

But flawed norms, one guesses, are norms all the same.

The resulting flux has psychologically disoriented and sometimes devastated a large section of humankind and generated in them a vague sense of loss, anxiety and anger. They live with a sense of loneliness and a feeling that the work they have to do to earn their living, unlike the vocations they previously had, is degrading and meaningless. Those who do not clearly perceive the hand of any agency in these changes often try to contain their anger through consumerism and immersion in the world of total entertainment. But some do identify an agency, correctly or incorrectly. The contemporary terrorists come from among them.

This also means that only by engaging with these experiences can you battle the worldviews or ideologies that organise these experiences into a work-plan for terror. If you are unwilling to negotiate these life experiences, if you consistently deny their existence and legitimacy and the normal human tendency to configure such experiences into something ideologically meaningful, you contribute to and aggravate the sense of desperation and abandonment for many. At least one well-known Palestinian psychiatrist has claimed that in West Asia ‘it is no longer a question of determining who amongst the Palestinian youth are inclined towards suicide bombing. The question is who does not want to be a suicide bomber.’[11]

You then push the desperate and the abandoned towards a small, closed world of like-minded people who constitute a ‘pseudo-community’ of those whose rage and frustration are sometimes free-floating but always seeking expression in nihilistic self-destruction masquerading as self-denying martyrdom.

NOTES

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a symposium on ‘Edward Said: Speaking Truth to Power,’ organised by the Institute for Research and Development in Humanities, Tarbiyat Modaress University, Tehran University and Center for Dialogue of Civilizations in Tehran, and an expanded version at the Workshop on ‘The Dialogue of Civilizations: Intellectual and Organizational Signposts for the Future’, La Trobe University, Melbourne.

1. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (New York: Jason Aronson, 1988).

2. This is recognised, though in the language of the mainstream, in Michael S. Doran, ‘Somebody Else’s Civil War’, Foreign Affairs, January-February 2002, 81(1), pp. 22-42.

3. Harsha Dehejia with Prem Shankar Jha and Ranjit Hoskote, Despair and Modernity: Reflections from Modern Indian Paintings (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000).

4. Partly because American hegemony today is ensured not so much by an army and a ready reserve of about 3.9 million men and an annual expenditure of about 650 billion dollars as by a near-total control over global mass media.

5. Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer, ‘The United States, the West and the Rest of the World’, unpublished MS.

6. That is why one of the most thoughtful intellectual responses to September 11, 2001 remains Wendell Berry, ‘In the Presence of Fear’, Resurgence, January-February 2002, (210), pp. 6-8; see also Jonathan Power, ‘For the Arrogance of Power America Now Pays a Terrible Price’, TFF Press Info 127, Transnational Foundation, September 13, 2001.

7. Peter Landesman, ‘The Agenda: A Modest Proposal From the Brigadier: What one Prominent Pakistani thinks his Country should do with its Atomic Weapons’, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2002.

8. Rajiv Vora, ‘11 September: Kaun si aur Kyun’, Unpublished Hindi paper circulated by Swarajpeeth and Nonviolent Peaceforce, New Delhi 2005; and Arshad Qureshi, ‘11 September 1906: Ek Nazar’, unpublished paper circulated by Swarajpeeth and Nonviolent Peaceforce, New Delhi, 2005.

9. An ethnographic monograph that nevertheless captures the other self of the Pathan in a moving fashion is Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). For a hint that this is not merely dead history but a living memory for many, see Ayesha Khan, ‘Mid-Way to
Dandi, Meet Red Shirts’, The Indian Express, March 22, 2005.

10. See an insightful, sensitive discussion of the way the same cultural resources can be used to legitimise and resist terrorism in Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Dialogue with the Terrorists’, in Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (Sage, New Delhi, 1989), pp. 139-71.

11. Eyyead Sarraj, quoted in Chandra Muzaffar, ‘Suicide Bombing: Is Another Form of Struggle Possible?’, Just: Commentary, June 2002, 2 (6), p. 1.

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Ashis Nandy, renowned political psychologist and social theorist, is a leading figure in postcolonial studies and arguably India’s best known intellectual voice of dissent. He is Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His recent awards include the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize.

Melodious sub-continent

Painting by Jean Kigel

Everyone knows the national anthem of their own country. Some people know something about their anthem, like who wrote and composed it, when it was adopted, what it means and so on.

Very few people know the national anthems of other countries, or care to. But that's to their own loss! For everyone, their own national anthem is something very special. So by knowing another's anthem, one connects with an essential part of them. Its like a people's deep signature. Besides some of the anthems of the world are simply glorious to hear.

We people of the sub-continent of South Asia should hear and learn and know one another's anthems. If nothing else, they are all so melodious, and can be sung with so much feeling. Knowing something of the shared languages of this land, I cannot but be moved to tears by the anthems of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I like to think all the national anthems of the sub-continent are siblings, which indeed they are, in a very profound sense. And the newest entrant to this melodic family is the anthem of Nepal.

I am reminded of the anecdote in the autobiography of musician Yehudi Menuhin (whose siblings were also accomplished musicians), about someone telling his mother, "Madam, you have a very musical womb!"

So here are the anthems of the sub-continent, in alphabetical order.



Amar Shonar Bangla is the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was adopted in 1972. The song was written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore in 1906. It is in Bengali.

Amar shonar Bangla,
Ami tomae bhalobashi.

Chirodin tomar akash,
Tomar batash,
Amar prane bajae bãshi.

O ma,
Phagune tor amer bone
Ghrane pagol kôre,
Mori hae, hae re,
O ma,
Ôghrane tor bhôra khete
Ami ki dekhechhi modhur hashi.

Ki shobha, ki chhaea go,
Ki sneho, ki maea go,
Ki ãchol bichhaeechho
Bôţer mule,
Nodir kule kule!

Ma, tor mukher bani
Amar kane lage,
Shudhar môto,
Mori hae, hae re,
Ma, tor bôdonkhani molin hole,
Ami nôeon jôle bhashi.

My beloved Bengal
My Bengal of Gold,
I love you.

Forever your skies,
Your air set my heart in tune
As if it were a flute.

In spring, O mother mine,
The fragrance from your mango groves
Makes me wild with joy,
Ah, what a thrill!
In autumn, O mother mine,
In the full blossomed paddy fields
I have seen spread all over sweet smiles.

Ah, what a beauty, what shades,
What an affection, and what a tenderness!
What a quilt have you spread
At the feet of banyan trees
And along the banks of rivers!

O mother mine, words from your lips
Are like nectar to my ears.
Ah, what a thrill!
If sadness, O mother mine,
Casts a gloom on your face,
My eyes are filled with tears!



Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Composed and scored by Rabindranath Tagore, it was first sung in 1911. It was adopted as the Indian national anthem in 1950. The music for the current version is said to be derived from a composition for the song by Ram Singh Thakur. It is in Sanskrit.

Jana gana mana adhinayaka jaya he
Bharata bhagya Vidhata
Panjaba Sindhu Gujarata Maratha
Dravida Utkala Banga
Vindhya Himachala Yamuna Ganga
Ucchala jaladhi taranga
Tava subha name jage
Tava subha asisha mage
Gahe tava jaya gatha
Jana gana mangala daayaka jaya he
Bharata bhagya Vidhata
Jaya he jaya he jaya he
Jaya jaya jaya jaya he!

O! Dispenser of India's destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, the Maratha country,
in the Dravida country, Utkala and Bengal;
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,
it mingles in the rhapsodies of the pure waters of Yamuna and Ganga
They chant only thy name.
They seek only thy auspicious blessings.
They sing only the glory of thy victory.
The salvation of all people waits in thy hands,
O! Dispenser of India's destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Victory to thee, Victory to thee, Victory to thee,
Victory, Victory, Victory, Victory to thee!



Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka Hami is the national anthem of Nepal. Adopted in 2007, the lyrics were written by poet Pradeep Kumar Rai, alias Byakul Maila. The music has been composed by Ambar Gurung.

Sayaű thűgā phūlkā hāmī, euṭai mālā nepālī
Sārwabhaum bhai phailiekā, Mechi-Mahākālī
Prakritikā kotī-kotī sampadāko ā̃chal,
Vīrharūkā ragata le, swatantra ra aṭal
Gyānabhūmi, śhāntibhūmi Tarāī, pahād, himāl
Akhaṇḍa yo pyāro hāmro mātṛibhūmi Nepāl
Bahul jāti, bhāṣhā, dharma, sãnskṛti chan biśhāl
Agragāmī rāṣhṭra hāmro, jaya jaya Nepāl
Byakul Maila

We are hundreds of flowers, the one garland - Nepali
Sovereign, spread out from Mechi to Mahakali.
Amassing nature's millions of resources
By the blood of heroes, independent and immovable.
Land of knowledge, land of peace, Terai, hills, mountains
Indivisible this beloved, our motherland Nepal.
The diverse races, languages, faiths, and cultures are so extensive
Our progressive nation, long live Nepal.



The Qaumī Tarāna or Pāk sarzamīn shād bād is the national anthem of Pakistan. Adopted in 1954, the lyrics were written by Hafeez Jullundhri, and the music of the anthem was composed by Ahmed Ghulamali Chagl. It is in Urdu.

Pāk sarzamīn shād bād
Kishwar-e-hasīn shād bād
Tū nishān-e-`azm-e-`alīshān
Arz-e-Pākistān!
Markaz-e-yaqīn shād bād

Pāk sarzamīn kā nizām
Qūwat-e-ukhūwat-e-`awām
Qaum, mulk, sultanat
Pā-inda tābinda bād!
Shād bād manzil-e-murād

Parcham-e-sitāra-o-hilāl
Rahbar-e-tarraqqī-o-kamāl
Tarjumān-e-māzī, shān-e-hāl
Jān-e-istiqbāl!
Sāyah-e-Khudā-e-Zū-l-Jalāl

Blessed be the sacred land
Happy be the bounteous realm
Symbol of high resolve
Land of Pakistan!
Blessed be thou, citadel of faith

The order of this sacred land
Is the might of the brotherhood of the people
May the nation, the country, and the state
Shine in glory everlasting!
Blessed be the goal of our ambition

This flag of the crescent and star
Leads the way to progress and perfection
Interpreter of our past, glory of our present
Knowledge of the future!
Symbol of the Almighty's protection



Sri Lanka Matha is the national anthem of Sri Lanka. Adopted in 1951, the words and music were written by Ananda Samarakoon in 1940. It is in Sinhala.

Sri Lanka Matha, apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha.
Sundara siri barini,
Surendi athi Sobamana Lanka
Dhanya dhanaya neka mal pala thuru piri, Jaya bhoomiya ramya.
Apa hata sapa siri setha sadana, jeewanaye Matha!
Piliganu mena apa bhakthi pooja,
Namo Namo Matha.
Apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha
Obawe apa widya, Obamaya apa sathya
Obawe apa shakti, Apa hada thula bhakthi
Oba apa aloke, Aapage anuprane
oba apa jeewana we, Apa muktiya obawe
Nawa jeewana demine
Nnithina apa Pubudu karan matha
Gnana weerya wadawamina ragena yanu
mena jaya bhoomi kara
Eka mawekuge daru kala bawina
yamu yamu wee nopama
Prema wada sama bheda durara da
Namo Namo Matha
Apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha.

Mother Lanka we salute Thee!
Plenteous in prosperity, Thou,
Beauteous in grace and love,
Laden with grain and luscious fruit,
And fragrant flowers of radiant hue,
Giver of life and all good things,
Our land of joy and victory,
Receive our gratefull praise sublime,
Lanka! we worship Thee.
Thou gavest us Knowledge and Truth,
Thou art our strength and inward faith,
Our light divine and sentient being,
Breath of life and liberation.
Grant us, bondage free, inspiration.
Inspire us for ever.
In wisdom and strength renewed,
Ill-will, hatred, strife all ended,
In love enfolded, a mighty nation
Marching onward, all as one,
Lead us, Mother, to fullest freedom.

More on events in Pakistan

In response to my post on the people's movement in Pakistan and the comments made by some readers, Dr Nayyar Hashmey, of Wonders of Pakistan wrote:

"I sent this rejoinder to all my friends on 14th of this month when the clip titled "Sheeshay ke GharoN maiN" was being aired on the Geo News Channel here in Pakistan.

I am also sending my comments which I put up on my blog in response to my dear Sidhu Saaheb, who too is a blogger friend from India.

I hope this will clarify a lot of reservations expressed by our friends in India."


This text was written and sent on 14th March, two days ahead of the proposed Long March to Islamabad.


I do not agree with the friends who say that country’s major news channel is adding fuel to the fire. (I have seen that clip “Sheeshay kay Gharon maiN” and found nothing wrong in that).

First of all, let me make it clear I am neither a supporter of Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif nor an opponent of Mr. A. Zardari. I am a common Pakistani. I do feel, however, whoever does good for this country, is acceptable and respectable; no matter to which party, group, section or community he belongs. Yet, while assessing the role of Mr. Zardari vis-à-vis the lawyers, the civil society, and the political parties, who have joined together for a long march - there are those who label everybody raising their voice to restore the ex C.J. as biased against Zardari. They support Mr. Zardari and label others as biased, whereas most of them seem to be tainted with a heavy bias in favor of Mr. Zardari & his policies.

What is wrong if a news channel or for that matter anyone else hints on those long speeches & sermons made by politicians in the past about democracy, about independence of judiciary, independence of media, and economic issues (so brutally restricted to the cheap slogan of roti, kapRa aur makan i.e. bread, clothing and shelter).

To have an overview on this slogan, we will have to dig a bit of history. The founder of the PPP, Mr. Z.A. Bhutto (ZAB) coined this slogan when the whole world was clamouring for socialism. It was in this peculiar climate (in the sixties) that ZAB’s slogans like "Democracy is our politics, Islam our creed and socialism our economy" became the hallmarks of the PPP and mesmerized the people, the workers, the peasants, the lower middle class, the intellectuals as well as leftists of that age. As a result, he sweeped the elections in the then West Pakistan, presently Pakistan.

On whether he achieved this objective: to my mind he utterly failed to deliver what he had promised. His greatest achievement, however, of historical import was to create awareness among the downtrodden of the society that they too are human beings and, therefore, deserve every thing which the rich have in this country.

Now taking a cue from late ZAB, Mr. Zardari again copied the roti, kapRa aur makan stance. Unfortunately he never elaborated how he would ensure this roti, kapRa and makan for everybody.

To do this, some homework is required by the party’s own working groups on different policy issues like finance, economy, foreign affairs and so on. These issues are tackled by technocrats who believe in the manifesto or the guiding philosophy of a particular party. Where Mr. AAZ stands in this regard we all know very well.

Now when the same man says he has restored the deposed judges, I think, he, being a cinema runner-cum feudal-cum politician doesn’t seem to have any credentials in that regard. He only reaped the advantage of Mohtarma’s (i.e. Benazir's) sudden killing by unknown assailant / s, and who despite being all-powerful in the country is unable to do any thing with regard to the murder of his own slain wife. And then he doles out half a billion Rupees to UNO’s investigators, when people are taking their lives to be free from wretched life.

Now the second point that these friends raise is that some judges have become controversial. But dear friends, the same judges who took the oath (and who had originally sided with the former CJ but later could not sustain the economic and administrative pressure by Mr. Zardari’s cohorts) were inducted into their respective posts because they agreed to toe the line of his government. What justice can we expect from such judges?

Agreed, the ex-CJ is also the person who took the oath under the PCO and who earlier granted indemnity to the ex-Dictator Parvez Musharraf, but as you know, the end justifies the means. Had he not taken oath then, how could he then later decide to go against the infamous doctrine “of necessity”.

Secondly, in one’s life, one needs to take decisions according to the situation prevailing at a particular moment of one’s life / history.

Times change and so do the strategies. This is what the ex C.J. too did.

As for Zardari adopting the policies of Parvez Musharraf, or trying to copy ZAB’s style of the sixties - that cannot succeed now, as he is neither ZAB nor do we live in the sixties. And the ex-Dictator Musharraf has also gone with his “danda mar” (i.e. wield the stick) policies of yesteryears.

Through his amateurish and immature politics, AAZ has brought the country to an abyss just like the ex-dictator Musharraf, and similarly he will meet his fate which is already written on the walls.

History gave him a big chance. He could have mended the past mistakes, corruption and high-handedness. His dubious deals, his 10 percent past, his buying Surrey Palace and offshore bank deposits ... all amassed during Mohtarma’s previous stints in power (the poor lady earned all the disrepute, just because of her husband’s extraordinary lust for money). The nation gave him a chance but he has failed and failed miserably.

As I said earlier, it is now written on the wall that he is going, I only pray that his successors do not repeat the same mistakes which he committed. Because our history shows that our politicians are the best people in their thoughts and approach when they are in opposition but once they come into power, its another story. As they say in Persian, ‘one, who enters a salt mine, turns salt himself’.

Let us pray and endeavor that this does not happen now.

I do agree, things will not change overnight. We are plunged in so many issues, so many problems, on so many fronts and each one demands vision, statesmanship, guidance and sincerity of purpose at the top level, which can bring results in tangible terms, otherwise taqreer ke badshah tau iss mulk main pehle hi bharay paRay haeN (i.e. retribution already hangs heavy upon this nation).

I hope my friends won’t mind my lengthy rejoinder in this regard. It is being sent in all sincerity and love for my country, which all of us know is our last refuge. God forbid, if we lose this, in any form - geographically, economically, politically - it will be worse than a nuclear holocaust.

With all the good wishes.

Nayyar Hashmey

P.S.

Although I had my reservations about Mr. Zardari’s capabilities to deliver, yet when he addressed the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi via a satellite link from his official residence in Islamabad last November, suggesting good relations with our big neighbor India, I felt at that moment that perhaps he does have the vision, the mindset that may bring this country out of its perpetual aggrandizement against India (which our army generals-cum-CLMA’s-cum Chief Executives-cum-Presidents adopt, as such a stance suits them best), but alas! Instead of demonstrating some bit of statesmanship, he has involved himself into petty issues like refusing to reinstate the ex-CJ (to whom he too owes a lot, since it was the ex-CJ who had the courage to challenge the brutal dictatorship of Gen. (Retd.) Parvez Musharraf. You can see some material in this regard on my blog.

Pakistani Zindabad!

I celebrate with Pakistanis the announcement by the Prime Minister of Pakistan that the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who had been sacked by erstwhile dictator Musharraf, would be reinstated. This followed the mass demonstrations across the country, led by lawyers.

Indians have much to learn from Pakistanis about keeping democracy alive. Indians have been lulled into slumber by the rituals of democracy in India, devoid of its substance. Thus, the forthcoming parliamentary election in India (April-May) is being billed as the greatest event in the history of democracy... rubbish!

For too long, for an entire generation, Indians have taken their democracy for granted, and been steeped in apathy. And thus rendered our democracy comatose. A democracy is only as good as its citizens' consciousness and activism.

In the state of West Bengal, where I live, the ruling govt committed a crime against humanity in Nandigram exactly 2 years ago - and is still in office! Yes, there were protests, rallies and demonstrations. But the people at large, and especially the "intelligentsia", are great "constitutionalists". The rulers can only be overthrown through the ballot, they say! "Politics" is understood to mean merely party-politics. Not popular consciousness and action! But if 1 million people had converged on Writers' Building (the seat of govt, in Calcutta) and bayed for the blood of the killer govt / ruling party - that would have seen the rulers scurrying out like rats through the drain-pipes.

So, I hope my fellow-countrymen (and women) learn from our dear neighbour, Pakistan. And until then, I doff my topi to Pakistanis and say: Pakistani Zindabad! (Long Live Pakistanis!)

Photo: Courtesy Dawn

Ten myths about Pakistan

by Mohammed Hanif
Times of India, 4 January 2008

Living in Pakistan and reading about it in the Indian press can sometimes be quite a disorienting experience: one wonders what place on earth they're talking about? I wouldn't be surprised if an Indian reader going through Pakistani papers has asked the same question in recent days. Here are some common assumptions about Pakistan and its citizens that I have come across in the Indian media...

Pakistan controls the jihadis: Or Pakistan's government controls the jihadis. Or Pakistan Army controls the jihadis. Or ISI controls the jihadis. Or some rogue elements from the ISI control the Jihadis. Nobody knows the whole truth but increasingly it's the tail that wags the dog. We must remember that the ISI-Jihadi alliance was a marriage of convenience, which has broken down irrevocably. Pakistan army has lost more soldiers at the hands of these jihadis than it ever did fighting India.

Musharraf was in control, Zardari is not: Let's not forget that General Musharraf seized power after he was fired from his job as the army chief by an elected prime minister. Musharraf first appeased jihadis, then bombed them, and then appeased them again. The country he left behind has become a very dangerous place, above all for its own citizens. There is a latent hankering in sections of the Indian middle class for a strongman. Give Manmohan Singh a military uniform, put all the armed forces under his direct command, make his word the law of the land, and he too will go around thumping his chest saying that it's his destiny to save India from Indians . Zardari will never have the kind of control that Musharraf had. But Pakistanis do not want another Musharraf.

Pakistan, which Pakistan? For a small country, Pakistan is very diverse, not only ethnically but politically as well. General Musharraf's government bombed Pashtuns in the north for being Islamists and close to the Taliban and at the same time it bombed Balochs in the South for NOT being Islamists and for subscribing to some kind of retro-socialist, anti Taliban ethos. You have probably heard the joke about other countries having armies but Pakistan's army having a country. Nobody in Pakistan finds it funny.

Pakistan and its loose nukes: Pakistan's nuclear programme is under a sophisticated command and control system, no more under threat than India or Israel's nuclear assets are threatened by Hindu or Jewish extremists. For a long time Pakistan's security establishment's other strategic asset was jihadi organisations, which in the last couple of years have become its biggest liability.

Pakistan is a failed state: If it is, then Pakistanis have not noticed. Or they have lived in it for such a long time that they have become used to its dysfunctional aspects. Trains are late but they turn up, there are more VJs, DJs, theatre festivals, melas, and fashion models than a failed state can accommodate. To borrow a phrase from President Zardari, there are lots of non-state actors like Abdul Sattar Edhi who provide emergency health services, orphanages and shelters for sick animals.

It is a deeply religious country: Every half-decent election in this country has proved otherwise. Religious parties have never won more than a fraction of popular vote. Last year Pakistan witnessed the largest civil rights movements in the history of this region. It was spontaneous, secular and entirely peaceful. But since people weren't raising anti-India or anti-America slogans, nobody outside Pakistan took much notice.

All Pakistanis hate India: Three out of four provinces in Pakistan - Sindh, Baluchistan, NWFP - have never had any popular anti-India sentiment ever. Punjabis who did impose India as enemy-in-chief on Pakistan are now more interested in selling potatoes to India than destroying it. There is a new breed of al-Qaida inspired jihadis who hate a woman walking on the streets of Karachi as much as they hate a woman driving a car on the streets of Delhi. In fact there is not much that they do not hate: they hate America, Denmark, China CDs, barbers, DVDs , television, even football. Imran Khan recently said that these jihadis will never attack a cricket match but nobody takes him seriously.

Training camps: There are militant sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan but definitely not in Muzaffarabad or Muridke, two favourite targets for Indian journalists, probably because those are the cities they have ever been allowed to visit. After all how much training do you need if you are going to shoot at random civilians or blow yourself up in a crowded bazaar? So if anyone thinks a few missiles targeted at Muzaffarabad will teach anyone a lesson, they should switch off their TV and try to locate it on the map.

RAW would never do what ISI does: Both the agencies have had a brilliant record of creating mayhem in the neighbouring countries. Both have a dismal record when it comes to protecting their own people. There is a simple reason that ISI is a bigger, more notorious brand name: It was CIA's franchise during the jihad against the Soviets. And now it's busy doing jihad against those very jihadis.

Pakistan is poor, India is rich: Pakistanis visiting India till the mid-eighties came back very smug. They told us about India's slums, and that there was nothing to buy except handicrafts and saris. Then Pakistanis could say with justifiable pride that nobody slept hungry in their country. But now, not only do people sleep hungry in both the countries, they also commit suicide because they see nothing but a lifetime of hunger ahead. A debt-ridden farmer contemplating suicide in Maharashtra and a mother who abandons her children in Karachi because she can't feed them: this is what we have achieved in our mutual desire to teach each other a lesson.

The writer is the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Photo: Courtesy National Geographic.

"In the silence, I speak"

Women’s Feature Service

Writer, filmmaker, actress, political economist and a former UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador, Feryal Ali Gauhar (47) of Pakistan was recently in India where she released her new novel, No Space for Further Burials.

In an exclusive interview, she speaks about her new book and the disturbing consequences of war, politics and colonialism, and adds that her book was termed “too violent” by her American literary agent.

In February, the India chapter of Women’s WORLD, an international network of feminist writers that addresses issues of gender-based censorship, held the first ever colloquium of South Asian women writers to discuss “The Power of the Word”. Ali Gauhar was in New Delhi to attend the colloquium.

She has trained as a political economist and documentary filmmaker and is also a well-known television actress. Her first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August (2002), was based on her film, Tibbi Galli. In addition to having served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund, Ali Gauhar works as a development communications specialist and teaches film at the National College of Art, Lahore.

Set in Afghanistan in late 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a haunting indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence. The novel’s narrator, a US army medic, has been captured by Afghan rebels and thrown into an asylum whose inmates are a besieged bunch of society’s forgotten and unwanted: refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound.

As the medic struggles to come to terms with his changed circumstances - the American liberator now sentenced to indefinite confinement in “a tomb for the living”, much like his fellow inmates and, indeed, Afghanistan itself - the novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, both fuelled by ideology, desperation and greed. How, Ali Gauhar demands, do a people survive in a world where the boundary between sanity and insanity dissolves, reality blends into nightmare and friends and foes become blurred because brutality comes from within and without?

“There is a war going on,” says Ali Gauhar, “but it’s not the war on terror, it’s a war within ourselves”.

The inmates’ individual stories of displacement (including the medic’s own family story) echo the dislocation of people throughout history, “wherever war and the colonial attitude of conquest has demanded that the less powerful give up what is theirs”.

For Ali Gauhar, the slaughter of native Americans as America expanded its Western frontier, the Great Game played by colonial powers in Afghanistan and the machinations of the Cold War are all premised on the same logic of Manifest Destiny that is relentlessly replayed: “I believe such terrible violence remains in the air, it lingers in the consciousness of the people, it is transmitted through generations and becomes part of behaviour. Unless we confront this, we are destroying life and the earth.”

Before the medic came to Afghanistan he wanted to be a writer. As it turns out, he narrates a war that eventually robs him of coherent speech. In the asylum, language - of story telling, of fear and of survival - both bridges the divides of nationality, politics and culture and also becomes unravelled in the depths of the medic’s bewilderment and despair.

What is the role of writing in a state of siege? What makes Ali Gauhar write? “For people who feel the sadness they always see around themselves,” she says, “it’s very difficult to cope - not to resolve it, but just to relieve your heart of the burden of sadness. I only write from a place of siege, a sense of loneliness and an undefined sense of loss. This is not the same as a sense of deprivation. It’s a loss of faith in humanity’s ability to heal itself. Having arrived at this conclusion, the only thing I can do is relieve my heart by writing.”

Unlike filmmaking, “writing is a very solitary process. I wrote (this novel) not to get read. To be read is a bonus; to be understood an even greater joy. Empathy creates solidarity”.

At the Women’s WORLD colloquium, Sri Lankan writer Ameena Hussein spoke eloquently of the “private siege of self censorship” under which she works. Being part of a Muslim community that feels “globally suspect” exacts a toll on free speech: “I’m like the insider outside: if I critique the Muslim community, I’m a friend of the anti-Muslim; if I remain silent, I’m the enemy of myself”.

And while she empathises with Hussein’s predicament, Ali Gauhar feels it’s also very important to challenge the stereotype of the silenced Muslim woman writer.

“I’ve been silenced in the West,” she says, referring to her experience as a college student in the US, where she first realised that its much-vaunted rhetoric of free speech did not take kindly to a critique of the country itself.

No Space for Further Burials is “too violent”, according to Ali Gauhar’s American agent. “She told me: ‘Honey, Americans aren’t going to want to know about this’.” By contrast, Ali Gauhar has “great respect for the Pakistani print media” where she has “a clear voice, a privileged space”.

Her silencing, then, is primarily outside Pakistan - in the West and in India - where she is assigned a particular identity of oppression and where she generates consternation by stepping out of that cliché and speaking as a global citizen. The Indian media’s impressions of Pakistani Muslims, she feels, are “stereotypical and under-researched”: “There’s a fascination with and contempt of Muslim culture. I dress traditionally, so I’m expected to have a traditional voice. Once the dissonance is established, there’s a sense of astonishment and intrigue. I’m asked to comment on the suffering, abused Pakistani woman.”

Such questions indicate a misplaced sense of smugness about Indian secularism and a regrettable resurrection of the “Islamic bogeyman”: “The Indian media plays off the relationship between Islam and violence. The clash of civilisations thesis would fall apart without the bogeyman, but just as the Great Game continues in a different form, so do the Crusades and Inquisitions.”

Kashmir, for instance, “is assumed to be a Muslim question, but ordinary Pakistanis are not concerned about Kashmir. They’re pushed up against the wall because of the rising cost of living, unemployment, lack of access to healthcare, justice and the political process - these glaring issues are of far greater concern to Pakistanis than some sense of being part of a global Muslim community”.

Regardless of its source, silencing does not intimidate Ali Gauhar. “Silencing,” she says, “is a very important part of the process of finding one’s voice. In the silence, I think, I speak.”

Gandhi the missing Nobel laureate

I had often been struck by the hollowness of the Nobel peace awards, for awarding people like Henry Kissinger while excluding Mahatma Gandhi, whose very name is a symbol of the non-violent struggle for humanity, peace, harmony and justice. And ironically, Nobel Peace Prize winners like Dr Martin Luther King and The Dalai Lama have acknowledged Gandhi as a powerful source of their inspiration.

I stumbled today upon an article written in 1999 by Øyvind Tønnesson, "Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate". This is carried on the Nobel Prize website.

Read the article here.

My reaction on reading the article was - if such high standards were applied to find Mahatma Gandhi wanting, then similar standards appear to have been singularly lacking in other instances. There simply can be no rationalisation. Hence, sadly, the award is severely devalued and inconsequential. While Gandhi stands tall and walks alone, and continues to touch the hearts of people everywhere.

Reflections: 1

The Sachar committee report has documented the abysmal condition of India’s Muslims. Download the report here. Backwardness of the Muslim community is most acute in West Bengal. The report has only corroborated what grassroots activists and researchers in India have been crying hoarse about for years, only to be labelled “communal”.

The govt has appointed a high-level committee to look into the recommendations of the Sachar committee, its deadline being 30 January 2007.

Across the western border, Pakistan has decided to change the history texts and discard the “two nation” theory, and speak instead of the deprivation suffered by Muslims in British India. But the Sachar report can also be seen as vindication of the view that Muslims could not get their just share in society in India. And that therefore a separate nation was necessary. It may have to be admitted by Indians that the human and social development enjoyed by Muslims in the subcontinent is largely the result of first Pakistan and then Bangladesh being created. Acute poverty and disparities exist in Pakistan and Bangladesh; but whatever social and economic fruits are being enjoyed by the people of these countries are surely only the result of their independent nationhood.

Awesome advances have been achieved by India too. But the Muslims of India have been left behind. All the achievements of India are rendered hollow for that.

Sight cannot be described to the blind. Similarly, it is impossible for educated Hindus, including highly educated and socially, economically and culturally empowered people, to realise how bigoted, prejudiced, and communal they really are. The very notion of “Muslim appeasement”, so widespread and deep-rooted in the Indian Hindu upper caste psyche is proof of this. The reality of Muslims in India has been laid bare before us. So much for appeasement.

Every kind of indignity, closure, discrimination has to be faced by the average Muslim in every sphere of life. But to mention “Muslim” as a specific entity to focus on in development efforts and benefits – is called “communal”. But clearly the non-communal, purely “human” definitions and directions have not worked as far as Muslims are concerned. So why are Muslims dropped from “human”? Obviously for the same reason that a pogrom aginst Muslims was unleashed in Gujarat: to eliminate and crush them.

After assuming that at least some people, among those I knew, would have humane and dignified perspectives, I am perpetually surprised by finding this and that person also being full of his / her own hate. Its only among those one knows that one feels comfortable to say what one feels. Otherwise we don masks and play deceits. So I don’t have to look far to find such people. They are there in my family, in my friends and social circle. I have stopped being bothered about this. I simply see it as a deformity in the people, something to ignore. I will not waste my time in any serious discussion about socio-cultural-economic matters with them.

The very mention of “Muslim” – conjures up for them someone about whom all kind of stereotypical notions are emphatically believed. And what is the source of the person’s beliefs or knowledge? Simply received wisdom, gossip, socialisation, hateful bigotry. Very few go through the experience of observing their own habitual embrace of various notions; or examining honestly and systematically the extent to which these believed notions are true. They do not see anything wrong about all this.

The average Hindu, upper caste, educated, middle or upper class person – those who have enjoyed in full measure the fruits of India’s development – would typically not know a single Muslim in any intimate fashion. Though Muslims are all around him, he chooses not to see the reality of the acute poverty and deprivation suffered by Muslims. The Muslim areas - outside which they are not allowed to live in Hindu India - are not places where the "respectable" ever go to. But he doesn’t think that this disqualifies him from holding forth on the peculiarities, idiocies, irrationalities, obscurantisms, cussedness of Muslims / Islam.

The media has of course played a demonic role in this regard. The education system too has failed. More fundamentally, India has failed to even consider the questions of how to be a plural nation; how to educate children to live in peace and partnership with other communities; how to co-exist and thrive amidst diversity.

Pluralism allows communities to see themselves through one another's eyes. And thus grow in stature.

Do we want to be a plural nation? Do we want dignity and justice for all? If we don’t, then further partitions may be the result. Just as crime and terrorism are natural outcomes of the deprivation suffered so far.

Reflections: 3

Much the same can be said vis-à-vis Dalits and Adivasis. If the desire for Pakistan was a historically vindicated aspiration for the subcontinent’s Muslims, similarly, so can I understand Dr BR Ambedkar’s alienation and non-identification with upper caste Hindu dominated discourse and association.

Gandhi, by his own admission, failed miserably in his mission. His dream lay torn and drenched in blood. He made mistakes all his life. But he always tried to learn from them. As he said, consistency is the virtue of an ass. His books have a note by him which say that he has constantly changed his beliefs, and that a later statement should be considered a truer representation of his beliefs that an earlier one. Subhash Bose left the Congress party after Gandhi ensured his ouster from the party president-ship. Yet, after the partition resolution, Gandhi lamented “if my son Subhash had been here this would not have happened.”

At the end of his life, Gandhi came to have some emotive meaning for India’s Muslims. And even gave his life eventually, in the cause of Hindu-Muslim amity. Dalits do not have that emotive pull. Gandhi is irrelevant to India’s Dalits. Dr Ambedkar is the preferred icon of Dalits. I am not expressing an opinion. I am merely describing what exists. If Gandhi had been with us today (aged 137), he would not have needed the Sachar report to tell him what the plight of Muslims was, or have to read about atrocities against Dalits. He would have seen for himself. And he would have been in an ongoing freedom movement, to bring real freedom to the bereft.

If India is to sustain, healing, reconciliation, reconstruction and renewal has to take place in society, between those who have moved ahead without rein and are in prosperity and comfort, and those left behind in despair and rage.

Teaching the children

from The Telegraph

Pakistan will change its textbooks to say it was “Muslim deprivation, not religion” that led to Partition.

A new curriculum will give grade IX and X students “less biased explanations” of the subcontinent’s division in 1947

The new curriculum, to be implemented from the 2007 academic year, will “exclude all material that promotes prejudice against non-Muslims of pre-Partition India”. “The changes include enlightened moderation and less biased explanations of the two-nation theory and Partition.”

Educationists and rights activists welcomed the changes. “It is a good move to redefine the two-nation theory in a very objective manner,” rights activist A.H. Nayyar said.

He agreed that social and economic deprivation of Muslims in undivided India was the main concern for Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal, and lay behind the creation of Pakistan. But, he argued, religious groups in Pakistan had hijacked the two-nation theory.

“I believe that the new curriculum will also remove hatred and prejudices created by religious groups against non-Muslims and all those who did not fit into their scheme of things.”

“The new curriculum explains Pakistan’s ideology with reference to the pronouncements of Allama Iqbal and Qaid-e-Azam (Jinnah),” an education official said. The removal of hate material from textbooks is in line with President Pervez Musharraf’s policy of “enlightened moderation” that looks to stem extremism and militancy and promote progressive and moderate ideas.

The redefining of a theory that had been the bedrock of Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies comes after Washington widened its “strategic dialogue” with Islamabad from madarsa reform to textbook revamp.

The new “Pakistan Studies” curriculum will describe Pakistan’s creation and ideological basis, history, foreign policy, economic development, environment, population, society and culture.

It will cover pre-Partition history and the policies of all governments in Pakistan since 1947, as well as the causes of Musharraf’s take-over and the process of devolution of power he has introduced. It will also deal with Islamabad’s relations with its neighbours as well as the US, Britain, China, European Union, Russia, Japan and the Islamic world.

“This is a wise decision that will introduce our students to the changing global realities and weaknesses of Pakistani society in transforming itself in accordance with the evolving concepts of science and technology,” educationist Dr Khwaja Masood said.

He said the changes would also address the misunderstood issue of “religious ideology”, whose “wrong interpretation… gave birth to highly discriminatory laws against women”.

Physicist and rights activist Pervez Hoodbhoy sounded a word of caution: “How textbooks will be written to reflect the new directives and how teachers will present new materials to students remains to be seen.”

Homogenous People x Self-Determination = Nation

by Mukul Kesavan

The justificatory back story … One, the near-extermination of European Jews during the Holocaust justifies a secure Jewish state in Palestine. Two, the Jewish state has a right to defend itself against the hostility of those of its Arab neighbours who refuse to recognize its existence: how can Israel be expected to respond proportionately to those who would undo its existence? And three, rocket-firing Arab refuseniks are responsible for Israeli reprisals because they futilely challenge the historical reality of Israel. Israel, in this account of west Asian conflict, exists as a sovereign democratic state in a sea of Arab authoritarianism, seeking co-existence with a Palestinian state that Israelis are willing to negotiate into existence, were there a negotiating partner.

This legitimizing narrative is misleading. The violence in Palestine is not generated by the struggle of a secular democracy defending itself against Muslim terrorism: it is the consequence of a majoritarian nationalism, Zionism, trying to force the people it dispossessed, the Palestinians, into accepting their dispossession, into accepting their ethnic cleansing as a necessary cost that humanity had to pay to right the wrong done by Hitler to European Jewry.

Avigdor Lieberman is a Russian Jew who advocates population transfers to consolidate Israel’s Jewish nature. He wants the Arabs of north-eastern Israel to be stripped of Israeli citizenship and their areas merged with a Palestinian statelet. In return, he wants Israel to annex large parts of the West Bank as territorial compensation. He is part of a far-right fascist party and his political instincts are the same as those of Le Pen or Jorge Haider. Israel’s ruling coalition has tried to distance itself from his ethnic cleansing prescriptions by describing them as his personal views, not those of the Israeli state.

The truth, though, is that from its inception, the expansion and consolidation of Israel as a Jewish state have been predicated on a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Modern nationalism as invented in Europe invokes a homogenous People as its justification. Homogenous People multiplied by Self-Determination = Nation. These self-determining Peoples are nearly always defined by a mix of language, religion and race, a mix that contemporary usage calls ethnicity. Like the European nationalisms on which it was based, Zionism is an ethnic nationalism that established an ethnic state whose organic citizens were Jews. If the natural citizens of Israel are Jews, by definition a Zionist state will see non-Jews as a problem, as foreigners who dilute the People.

When Lieberman argues that Israel should have no Arab citizens because a Palestinian state in the West Bank will have no Jews, he is saying openly what many Israelis privately believe. He is taking to its logical conclusion a policy of discrimination and dispossession that every Israeli government, Labour, Likud or other, follows. The creation of dense Jewish settler enclaves on the West Bank, the systematically engineered changes in the demography of East Jerusalem, the restrictions placed on the entry of the relatives of Israeli Arabs, the self-evidently second-class status of Arab citizens, taken together make Lieberman’s prescriptions a logical consequence of ethnic nationalism, not an aberration.

The brutal, incoherent history of Pakistan shows us clearly that a nation founded in the name of a faith-based People is essentially sectarian and illiberal. Even democratic states like Sri Lanka or Israel create a class of helots once they nominate an ethnic majority as the proprietors of the nation.

In the West the very idea of a properly secular, pluralist state in what was once Palestine is outrageous, a symptom of insidious anti-semitism. But as citizens of a pluralist republic surrounded by failed majoritarian states, Indians must argue that our experience teaches us that ethnic nationalism is a prescription for civil war and ethnic cleansing. Western nationalisms achieved the homogeneity they desired by suppressing difference in faith and language in Europe, by killing off the natives in their settler colonies and by ignoring the humanity of slaves. These aren’t examples that younger nations should imitate. When Western policy establishments extend uncritical support to Israel because they see that country as a beacon of Western values, they should know that their embrace includes Avigdor Lieberman and the Zionist tradition of ethnic cleansing.

For Indians, Avigdor Lieberman is a reminder that the violence, purging and subordination that he plans to subject Israel’s Arabs to, has already been visited on Gujarat’s Muslims by a political tendency that is a close cousin of Zionism, Hindutva.

In recent weeks the Hindustan Times and Himal have separately described the systematic and continuing subordination of Gujarat’s Muslims in the aftermath of the pogroms. We have, on our western border, an educated, wealthy province which once gave us Gandhi and is now incubating an Indian fascism.

Racist poem

According to a report by Ben Russell in The Independent, Britain’s Opposition Conservative Party chief, Mr David Cameron, faced an embarrassing race row last night when he was forced to suspend a former parliamentary candidate from the party because of a racist email.

The Liberal Democrats reported Mrs Ellenor Bland, who stood as a Tory candidate for Swansea East in the last election, to the Commission for Racial Equality, over the message sent from her email address to council colleagues. They said it showed “deeply unpleasant elements” in the Conservative Party.

Party managers immediately suspended Mrs Bland over the email, which included a poem about immigrants coming to Britain to claim benefits and a cartoon of the white cliffs of Dover emblazoned with the words: “piss off - we’re full”.

Mrs Bland denied sending the email, which was signed “Oh Yes! Ellie”. Her husband, also a Tory councillor, said he forwarded the message as a “light-hearted” joke and said he regretted any offence.

The Poem

I cross ocean poor and broke.
Take bus, see employment folk.
Nice man treat me good in there.
Say I need to see welfare.
Welfare say, “You come no more,
we send cash right to your door.”
Welfare cheques - they make you wealthy!
NHS - it keep you healthy!
By and by, I got plenty money.
Thanks to you, British dummy!
Write to friends in motherland.
Tell them “come fast as you can”.
They come in turbans and Ford trucks.
I buy big house with welfare bucks!
They come here, we live together.
More welfare cheques, it gets better!
Fourteen families, they moving in,
but neighbour’s patience wearing thin.
Finally, white guy moves away.
Now I buy his house, then I say,
“Find more aliens for house to rent.”
And in the yard I put a tent.
Everything is very good,
and soon we own the neighbourhood.
We have hobby, it’s called breeding.
Welfare pay for baby feeding.
Kids need dentist? Wife need pills?
We get free! We got no bills!
Britain crazy! They pay all year,
to keep welfare running here.
We think UK darn good place.
Too darn good for the white man race!
If they no like us, they can scram.
Got lots of room in Pakistan!


But the idea of lots of Britishers visiting Pakistan is not a bad one, from the point of view of promoting improved international understanding, and people-to-people friendship.

Good neighbours

Not to be left behind in good neighbourliness, Harpreet Singh has written in today’s The Statesman about Gen Musharraf’s proposal for an “out-of-the-box” solution to the Kashmir conflict.

He writes:

Pakistan should thank its stars for not being situated next to Israel. Faced with the kind of misbehaviour India has been living with, the latter would have gifted Pakistan a time machine much before the idea appeared in any book or movie and sent it straight to the Stone Age.

You don’t speak for me Mr Harpreet Singh! I do not believe in harbouring or expressing such views. They are simply not conducive to good relations with one’s neighbours. This kind of talk, injurious to the dignity of the citizens of Pakistan, is ugly and uncivilised. We can do without super-patriots like you Mr Singh!

Come and see Pakistan!

Shirazi is a blogger friend from Lahore, Pakistan. Through his blog, he shares – with love, insight, and tenderness - his land, her history, sights and sounds, people, culture, language, food … He is a great ambassador for Pakistan. Reading his pieces – one has to urge to go there immediately!

Come and see Pakistan!

Especially in the present context of the “war against terrorism” and the unfortunate association of terrorists with this country – it is vital that people across the world see Pakistan and know the country and her people for themselves. They would realise that everything they heard and thought about Pakistan was only a distorted image through a discoloured lens. The real Pakistan is something else. It’s a land of amazing human warmth and cultural and spiritual wealth that would captivate anyone – of sensibility. Every sensitive visitor to Pakistan would return as an ambassador of this country.



Reading Shirazi’s posts, it struck me that someone like him should be organising conducted tours for discerning people from across the world. I remember the advertisements for cultural tours in magazines like New Yorker and Harper’s (or CAM, the Cambridge Alumni Magazine). Shirazi’s posts establish that Pakistan is a prime candidate for similar tours.

Yesterday evening I was talking to Mick Douglas, a friend from Melbourne, who had organised a inter-cultural project in Karachi and Melbourne, highlighting the fabulous “mini-bus art” of Karachi. Mick agreed with me that aesthetics and art is impregnated in the daily lives and activities of the common people.

One comes across Visit Thailand Year, Visit Malaysia year, even Visit India Year. I don’t recall a Visit Pakistan Year. India organised several Festivals of India in different countries in the 1980s. I don’t know whether Festivals of Pakistan have taken place anywhere. Its high time …

I would like to see a Come and See Pakistan! movement, taken up by the people of Pakistan: civil society organisations, business and professional groups, artists, performers, sportspersons etc.

Pakistan is a very special country, a precious treasure in the world community. The world needs to start discovering this now, and thus be uplifted towards building a better world. And thus would the real Pakistan too emerge out of the dark clouds that have overshadowed this beautiful land for a long time.

Where the high mountains are …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where the cradle of civilisation is nestled …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where treasures of antiquity abound …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where mystics and saints hover …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where songs of ecstasy resound …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where bedazzling textiles sway …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where feasts of emperors invite …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Where the friendliest people are …
Come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.


Note to Shirazi: Don’t forget to pass on my commission, okay?

Feroze

Also here for the birthday party, was my cousin Feroze who lives near London and is visiting India. He is studying law at university. He turned 30 a couple of months ago. He had attended the 50th birthday of another common cousin in London two months before that. And later this year, his father Satish turns 70. Feroze and his father will be visiting Pakistan soon, and will be going to Satish’s family home (before the partition of India) in Multan.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Today marks the 9th death anniversary of the great singer and voice of mystical Islam, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, of Pakistan.

Though he is no more, his voice lives on, it cannot be extinguished. His voice continues to ignite and inflame people, maddening them, making them thirsty – for oneness and unity.

Thank you Nusrat for the supreme blessing of your songs.



Here's the master singing Haq Ali Ali Maula Ali.

Salaam Pakistan!

The Economist had carried a "Survey of Pakistan" in its 8 July 2006 issue. When I read that, I realised that if I had been a thinking Pakistani citizen with a sense of self-dignity, I would have been angered and offended by much of what had been written. In short, the analysis is clichéd and superficial, and does not really present what the people of Pakistan are thinking or doing.

Thanks to the seeds of dissension and strife sown by the British in India – on a soil already fecund with the divisions of caste, class, power and ethnicity – the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, popular, pluralist, secular, democratic and pro-poor struggle and legacy of the subcontinent was ruptured. Though people in today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) had actively fought for freedom from colonial rule, yet, because of the Hindu-Muslim conflict, power-politics, partition and the resulting riots - this legacy was overshadowed and forgotten.

This evening I was reading the 12 August 2006 issue of The Economist. Right at the beginning, in the "Letters" page, I saw six rejoinders to the Survey. Two were from Pakistan and four from Europe, presumably by persons of Pakistani origin. Reading these really warmed my heart. They have expressed the kinds of things I wanted to hear. They have stood up for, and done their people proud.

Today is Pakistan’s Independence Day. I really felt like shouting out: Salaam Pakistan! (I salute you, Pakistan!)

My heartiest greetings to my brothers and sisters in Pakistan.

One Hundred Poems for Peace

PeaceWorks, Calcutta, invited young people to write poems for peace, knowing that often the things we feel most intensely about are also those hardest for us to speak coherently about, unless we can speak them as poetry. Or as images. Poetry gives our thoughts and emotions power, clarity and a graphic quality.

Schools from across the country and across the border, in Pakistan, responded to the invitation with a flood of poems by their students. Most of them were written in English, but some were in Bengali too. Drawings were asked for as well. Three eminent literary personalities were invited to act as judges: Sanjukta Dasgupta, a professor of literature at Calcutta University, herself a well-known and much published poet; Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, musician and poet; and Ruchir Joshi, novelist and filmmaker. A panel of experts selected one hundred poems, and then the judges chose their favourites from among them.

One Hundred Poems for Peace, is an anthology compiled from the entries submitted by schoolchildren from across India and Pakistan for the PeaceWorks 'Poems for Peace' project.

As one reads these poems of despair and anger, of fear and sorrow, of hope and compassion, one cannot but feel that these adults of tomorrow will raise their voices against violence and hatred and bloodshed-and for peace. That in their own small way, they will try to make a difference, a different world.

A selection from the Judges' choice is accessible here.

One Hundred Poems for Peace is published by Seagull Books.

Peace

Peace

Gull Feroz, 18 years, Salamat School System, Girls Campus, Lahore, Pakistan

Had you not said a bad word,
Had I not said the worst,
Had you not taken a step forward,
Had I not with revenge, burst.
Had you not unsheathed your dagger,
Had I not thrust mine at you,
We must have been at peace together,
With good in our minds, nothing blue.
Had you listened to what I said,
Had I agreed, with compliance,
Had we not been at odds instead,
We would have formed the alliance.
Had we spent our vigour at something better,
We would have got excellent results,
Within seconds, would have solved the matter,
And nobody would have objected to the cult.
Yet peace was not in your mind,
And tranquillity was not in mine,
We never thought of looking behind,
And always let our hatred shine.
It’s time to make a new start,
And make an effort to smooth the crease,
It’s time to purify our minds and hearts,
And make an effort to create peace.


Illustration: Gagandeep Singh, 14 years

Beyond the Prison of Mirrors

In April 1997, I went to Hyderabad, again to contribute towards the research study on urban poverty, which was now being initiated there. I took an afternoon flight to Hyderabad. The flight route was over the Bay of Bengal coast, which was one’s companion below for half the journey, the white line of the waves spilling out on the sand cutting across the window glass. Then the plane swings inland, westwards, and the eastern ghats come into sight. The coastline is still visible, though going further and further away from sight and becoming fainter, but nonetheless still discernable. Finally it reaches the edge of the horizon. Looking directly below one sees the high hills of the western edge of the ghats, well inland. I could see the highest point of the eastern ghats, and also the coastline, a sight one could not get even if one stood at the top of the highest peak below, for the sea was too far away. Wow! Was I thrilled! (Last year, on a morning flight from Calcutta to Delhi, in peak summer, in the distance, at the the northern horizon, the majestic Himalayas were one’s companion for a good part of the flight.)

Arriving at Hyderabad, I looked at the city below and very soon I could see the large Hussainsagar lake and my eyes searched to spot the Buddha statue in the middle of the lake, installed 5 years earlier (after having sunk to the bottom of the lake accidentally when it was taken for installation in 1988; while doing a short course on remote-sensing at the National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad two years earlier, I had seen a satellite image of the formerly-sunken statue). I saw it, a white needle over the dark water! My eyes stayed with the statue as the plane descended, until a fraction of a second before touchdown, when its top flashed briefly over the city before going out of view.

I was really taken by that sight, of the gigantic Buddha statue over the lake bearing the name of the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, and spoke of this to friends during the trip. Returning to Calcutta after the visit to Hyderabad, I had with me a copy of the Dhammapada which I had found at the airport bookshop and begun reading avidly in the lounge. It was late evening when the plane reached Calcutta. I remembered my sight from the plane over Delhi six months earlier, and the reflection on stars and Mahatma Gandhi. I remembered the Great Calcutta Killing, of 16 August 1946, and wondered how my city below looked, on that night of arson.

On the taxi ride back home, I hurriedly scribbled some notes on the reverse of my boarding pass, to put down the rush of thoughts and reflections that came to mind.

But between the ascent over Delhi and the descent in Calcutta – much had happened, and all entirely unanticipated, turning me upside down, transforming my life. A veil had been pierced … the prison of mirrors had been shattered. India, freedom, independence, partition, Hindu-Muslim riots etc etc – I had become one with all this, this was now the stuff of my own life.

I rewrote what I had earlier written, adding a final line, and a title:

The Prison of Mirrors

Starlight, like remembrance, weaving constellations of tales
Floating in immensity.
The human experience, a great Milky Way.
Life and the universe, mind and material,
One mirroring the other,
In infinite rounds of resonance,
Awaiting the shattering of mere echo and image.

And I began another word-log, bringing together Delhi, Calcutta and Hyderabad. But that was only completed some months later, after I had visited Hyderabad a few more times in connection with the poverty study. And this was now a city that was dearly beloved to me. In August 1997, I attended and participated in the “Festival of the Subcontinent” in Hyderabad, organised by COVA, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of independence of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Of course, I saw the Hussainsagar lake and the Buddha statue several times every day, as well as the waterfront adorned with statues of Andhra Pradesh’s luminaries from various fields.

As I write this, my colleague Prodyut tells me that his cellphone was pick-pocketed a couple of days ago. I remembered being pick-pocketed during the Hyderabad Festival, Prodyut had also been there. But that did not mar my spirits, for I was truly flying high during that week in Hyderabad, I was not in this world, but in some other heaven. What a rich experience it was! I bought and heard some fantastic music albums. I even came across an important book on the Buddha in a pavement book-sale while walking along casually; reading that in turn triggered another rich wash of realisation. (My friend Achinto, the documentary photographer, was also there, and during a visit to the magnificent Golcunda fort, he photographed me as I stood over one of the high ramparts of the fort and told a tale to some school boys who were there, gesticulating with my hands and throwing my arms out over the outstretched landscape. He later said he wanted to capture me in this inspired-possessed state!)

I wrote:

Beyond the Mirror

Night.
Ascent.
Lights of the city.
Memories :
of funereal processions,
of once beloved saints,
and conflagrations, of riotous arson,
spreading hatred’s poison fire.
The stars, far away,
faint dots in the black sky.

Day.
Descent.
The needle of eternal knowledge,
poised on the still waters of the ocean of sacrifice
ringed by the pearls of devotion and service.
The light of the city dispells the noon of despair,
streets paved with jewels of wisdom,
beckoning the children,
to come,
and build tomorrow’s citadel of peace.

On 16 August 1997, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan passed away. Since I first heard his songs a couple of years earlier, I had been set on fire as it were by his voice, which sent me into a fevered inner quest. At Hyderabad, on the evening of 17 August 1997, the Pakistani singer Reshma performed at the Festival. Before the programme began, the organisers were playing some awesome songs of Nusrat, from private studio recordings. The large gathering of people stood in silence for two minutes in homage to the great master as the programme began. As Reshma sang, and I remembered Nusrat, I looked up at the star-lit sky. There was a big full moon smiling down. For me, that was the great water-melon of voice of the music of mystical Islam.

Returning to Calcutta, I completed my account of the Delhi-Calcutta-Hyderabad experience.

Beyond the Prison of Mirrors

Night.
Ascent.
Lights of the city.
Memories:
of funereal processions
of once beloved saints,
and conflagrations, of riotous arson,
spreading hatred's poison fire.
The stars, far away,
faint dots in the black sky.

Day.
Descent.
The needle of eternal knowledge
poised on the still waters of the ocean of sacrifice,
ringed by the pearls of devotion and service.
The light of the city dispells the noon of despair.
Streets, paved with jewels of wisdom,
beckoning the children,
to come,
and build tomorrow's citadel of peace.

From great killings partitioning the soul
to joint celebrations for union of hearts:
now is the city truly lit.
The light of the city
glows
with an infinitude of starlight...
a symphony of illumination.

(Calligraphy: The name of the Prophet Muhammad, in mirror images, by Subail Anwar, Istanbul.)