Dibyendu's WallScript

Recently, the renowned author Salman Rushdie was barred from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was not permitted even to appear by video link. Rushdie therefore wrote: “India’s secularism is in truth a hypocrisy.” Before the crucial assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress party needed to establish itself as the “custodian of Muslim interests.” Hence, the ban on Rushdie. The threat did not come from religious fanatics wielding swords against free speech, but from the modern descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru — that patrician Indian who had once dug the very gutter of this counterfeit secularism. These power-hungry heirs now wielded the same gutter as their weapon.   The sycophants declared that Rushdie’s presence in Jaipur might incite riots. But let us pause to recall: was it not the same political party that, during the Emergency, managed the “impossible task” of turning the entire nation into a prison? And yet, we are to believe that such a party could not mana...

God is invisible. And yet, with refined manners, humanity has judged Him as the principal fundamentalist force of civilization. No other idea has divided men more grievously, nor inflicted wounds deeper on the body of history. So declare the self-proclaimed enlightened sages of our times. The masses, meanwhile, are no more than pawns — Haridas Pals, carried along by tides of belief and disbelief alike. From disbelief in God arose the new secularism: a conjurer’s box, a talisman, that is said to have delivered the world from His tyranny. A world without it, we are told, would have collapsed entirely into sectarian strife, unfit for liberal habitation. And what, then, of those lecture-laden works of “progressive literature” which promised: “We shall make this earth a dwelling for newborn ideals” ?   I have a friend — an analyst, a philosopher, a steadfast atheist. He once told me that sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake, trembling, and weave together a litany of ultima...

   অন্ধকারে হাতড়াই তোমার স্তনের উপর ওষ্ঠ ছুঁয়ে শুয়ে আছি   অনেক যুদ্ধের পর এই নির্জনতা ভালো লাগে নিরিবিলি আস্তানায় পদ্মের পাপড়ির মতো জঞ্জালের উপর শুয়ে থাকা   তোমার শরীরে ঐশ্বর্য্য গুলি সুঠামতা , কোমল পালকের মতো যৌনাঙ্গের কেশগুলি ত্বকের অনির্বচনীয় মসৃণতায় নিশ্চিন্ত হয়ে রাখা যেত মন   অন্ধকারে হাতড়াই জীবন অনেক ভঙ্গুর পথে কাদা মেখে হেঁটে গেছি রূপনারায়ণের তীর থেকে তিস্তার দিকে কৌমার্য্যের পথে আধ্যাত্মিকতায় একাকী জনপদের নির্জন মানুষদের সাথে কেটে গেছে কতদিন জীবনের মানে খুঁজে   ঈশ্বরের খোঁজ বা মানুষের যন্ত্রনা বয়ে সাম্যের লড়াইয়ে জীবন ব্যাপী জ্ঞানার্জন মোহহীন মোক্ষের পথে   তবু এতটুকু শান্ত হল না ব্যাথা তোমার নগ্ন শরীরের উপর শুয়ে তোমার ভালোবাসার বাহু বন্ধনে শরীরী আবেশে মানবিক শ্রেষ্ঠ শ্রান্তিতে এই নিরাপত্তা আর অমোঘ আনন্দ কাউকে বুঝিয়ে বা নিজে বুঝে পাইনি কিছুতে   তোমার শরীর যেভাবে গ্রহণ করেছে আমার অংশ তোমার ভেতরে , গভীরে এইভাবে মন ও শরীরের সবটুকু দিয়ে কোনোদিন কোনো পার...

The twentieth century bore witness to two colossal ideologies. Both claimed to offer humanity a utopian promise — the assurance of boundless happiness, the end of suffering, the dawn of a perfected society. Yet, what bound them together was not merely the dream of paradise, but also their common intent to erase all traditional conceptions of good and evil that civilization had preserved through millennia.   Marxism decreed that no individual should own any property beyond what was absolutely necessary for survival; no one would have a home or a granary whose doors were closed to others. Human beings were to live collectively, to eat from the same table, in a condition of cooperative fraternity. Wealth, as a private concept, would vanish; capital would cease to exist. All property would rest in the hands of the State. Which, in practice, meant not the faceless abstraction of the “State,” but rather the omnipotent authority of the Politburo — or worse, the single supreme leade...

Those who view Indian cinema as a clash of two diametrically opposed streams—on the one hand, the frivolous gimmickry of Bollywood, and on the other, the classical narrative gravitas of Satyajit Ray in his Hollywood-inspired idiom—forget that there was also a third, vitally important current. That was India’s avant-garde, the New Cinema.   The evolution of the avant-garde in cinema was itself part of a global pattern, a celebrated aesthetic mode that defined experimental twentieth-century filmmaking. It was, in essence, an assault upon tradition—an artistic rebellion that broke apart the ancient conventions of cinema. The term “avant-garde” was first employed in the 1920 s by a small band of theorists. French visionaries such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein attempted to fashion an avant-garde cinema.   This was a cinema that was not merely about stories but about the form of stories—a polyphonic structure that invoked theoretical methods to interrogate realis...

Life is most sorrowful. Only when you are asleep, or when you are dreaming, do you find respite. In the past fifteen days I have slept very little—on average only four to five hours. And because of this dreadful exhaustion, not a single dream has alighted upon my eyes. The beautiful architecture of dreaming has gone missing. Instead, there has been a backdrop of ceaseless and excruciating torment. Whatever life once bestows, it comes again at the appointed time to reclaim.   My father is ill, bedridden for many days. My mother too had become unsettled and anxious for quite some time. It was the season of Durga Puja. I kept thinking—what could I possibly do? There was no leisure for reflection. Nor was there any element of entertainment. At last, last week, I ended up watching four films. Night shows. Two at Nandan, and two more on my laptop, deep past midnight. Cinema distracts one well. Above all, it keeps the nerves occupied.   Whenever I find myself shaken, and feel the ne...