Dibyendu's WallScript

Dust and sorrow lie mingled on the asphalt roads of a city thirsty with desolation. Here, friendships, oaths, and loves have all been torn apart. To stumble upon any past is unnatural. Once upon a time, the golden wand and the silver wand broke a princess’s sleep. There, Yayati met Sunita. The palash and krishnachura trees had grown old; light had changed its colors; faces had turned pale. From the lines on those faces one could guess entire shadow-paintings. The troupe of nautanki players had dressed one as the hero, another as the heroine. In the small circle of life, love itself had become a cyclical play. Sometimes, suddenly, such things happen. Encounters on the road. Old characters wake from their slumber, only to appear in the ruins of damage and reckoning.   This winter the city had suffered much. Political turmoil, ailing bodies, and a marketplace in decline. Yayati needed to return from his hypertension. His chin was narrow, his forehead broad and stern. Beneath hair stre...

Far away—some radiant city of beauty, its streets made of illusion— I walk there, into a past imagined, dark, uncertain. They say the old days were good, but those days bled with restless questions, with accusations that still follow us like shadows. The historian must answer: why fashion the past from fantasy?   Megasthenes, Abul Fazl, Goebbels— scribes of empire, courtiers of power. We studied their words, believed their pages of glory, yet who will answer for the dried blood at the corner of the book’s cover?   Ancient memories are not gone— they still bind the future with the tightened rope of waves. I walk again into that familiar Bengal, famine’s claw in 1943 , fields empty, soldiers marching for Churchill’s war, while Gandhi’s men sang freedom songs, and the poor farmer’s rice fed the barracks instead of his children.   No salt, no grain, only corpses that never became martyrs, only hollow stomachs that never earned statues. And their children, still alive today, p...

In the language of the critic, the term “contemporary art” refers today to a certain mode of creation by modern artists that obeys no classical dictionary of any art school. Rather, it may be said, it deliberately breaks the ancient vision of art in order to pursue an unconventional practice. Just as the modern poet seldom employs the strict discipline of classical metre, but instead fashions his own rhythms by breaking the rules, so too the modern artist creates. The artists of our day are, culturally speaking, far more diverse, for the old lineage of art has collapsed entirely by the twenty-first century. While certain family traditions of artistry remain, the majority are of the first or newest generation. These artists are technologically advanced, versatile, and have prepared such a domain where any kind of response—whether praise or criticism—may find acceptance. One could call this a democratic atmosphere for art. Personally, I find this deeply significant. The freedom of art an...

We lose — and we grow angry. We win — and we rejoice, breaking into laughter. Whether in war, in sport, or in love, no one ever wishes to embrace defeat. To win — by any means, at any cost — that alone seems to be salvation. Is there not a saying, There is nothing unfair in war and love ? The greater part of humanity across the globe has accepted that competition is the highest form of democracy. Whatever be the culture of the world, whatever be its history, it is ultimately Western man’s cult of hero-worship that reigns supreme. We, the darker and dusky people of the East, have humbly inherited their philosophy. Veni, vidi, vici — come, see, conquer. We have adorned our honeycombs for the victor to plunder. Survival of the fittest. In society, the defeated has no worth. Only the worthy competitor deserves the license to live. Thankfully! For had Alexander, Tamerlane, or Hitler not fallen at last, this world would have been a nightmare unfit to imagine. The conqueror has glory. The va...

"To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm— That is the top of sovereignty." — John Keats, Hyperion   In the year of our Lord, sixteen hundred and forty-three, on the fourteenth day of June, the Lords of Parliament in England did place the realm of printing under Crown regulation. In righteous defiance of such tyrannical injunction, the poet and polemicist John Milton composed his immortal tract Areopagitica , a thunderous defence of liberty in expression. So potent were its words, they reverberated across the continent of Europe.   From the days of Socrates in the third century before Christ, to Galileo in the Middle Ages, to Sister Joan, to Émile Zola, to Voltaire, and onward into the modern century with Upton Sinclair, Solzhenitsyn, and Márquez—voices of truth have dared speak, and dared suffer. Some were exiled, others scourged, but all stood upright, champions of that unfashionable virtue called truth.   And now, standing upon the threshold o...