ah, THAT old ugliness...

The ongoing "controversy" surrounding Amitabh Bachchan and the Congress casts a new light on the point made by far too many that celebrities need to stay away from politics; when the stakes are this high and the profile this visible, one is likely to be politicized no matter what one does -- figures as diverse as SRK, Amitabh, and Sachin have become embroiled in manufactured controversies over the last few years -- so rather than try and maintain the naive (and perhaps disingenuous) fiction that one is simply apolitical (as virtually all celebrities do when facing flak from this or that political outfit), one should face the reality of one's position, so that any political interventions are measured and deliberate, not haphazard and reactive, and despite one as it were.

[Aside: the lack of introspection displayed by the ordinarily effective Manish Tewari is amusing: everything he says about Bachchan vis-a-vis the 2002 Gujarat pogroms can also be applied to himself vis-a-vis the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms; to paraphrase Tewari himself, he "would be stripped of his ... job the moment he uttered a word against" the Congress' "record during the anti-[Sikh] violence of [1984]." Not to mention that, given this particular round of the Congress-Bachchan war was kicked off when a Maharashtra minister from the Congress' own ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, invited Bachchan for the inauguration of the Bandra-Worli Sealink's second phase, Tewari needs to do some soul-searching on the impossibility of "construct[ing] walls between" politicos "and the communal violence and choose to see them separately; he must tell us what his views ... are." But that might be too much to ask of the spokesperson of a political party.]

Roy Among the Comrades [UPDATED 3/31/10]

Arundhati Roy irritates me: her tone, her smugness, her careless use of history -- specifically, her stringing of disparate events/places/phenomena as if they all amounted to the same old same old (e.g. lumping together the Indian annexation of Hyderabad as part of the country's "colonialis[t]" course, bizarre given the old order displaced by the annexation was an absolute monarchy hijacked by religious revivalists in its twilight, an old order diametrically opposed to the sort of peasant insurgency one would expect Roy to be sympathetic to -- were the Indian state not on the "other" side of the argument, that is) -- her sloppy and oft-expressed views that the Indian polity is no more than an "upper caste Hindu state", are annoying not only in themselves, but because they mar the force of her arguments, on issues that are so crucial one can ill afford to slip up.

But. But. But. For the courage to talk about what (at least when it comes to what can only be called a civil war in Central India) is barely touched upon by other writers in English, and rarely without resort to the empty platitudes of those who use language not to think about the problem, but to avoid thinking about problems; and for the courage -- and this is perhaps hardest for a writer, even unknowns and aspiring writers, let alone famous ones -- to not pander to her audience, to be unafraid of being misunderstood; everything Roy writes on the plight of the Indian polity's ultimate expendables (far more so than any religious minorities, far more so than even Dalits), namely the "tribal" populations, cannot be missed.

Her latest dispatch from the front-lines is in this week's Outlook.

[MARCH 31, 2010 UPDATE: Here's a clip of Roy reading from her essay (thanks sepoy!)

Time to Listen

On the Indo-Pak front, enough talks about talks. How about some re-/dis- orientation instead?