"A friend quoted from Brecht's Conversations in Exile which he wrote in the 1940s, and in which he mentions, with bitter irony, "the great men who have surfaced in various parts of the world". Indeed, we are at the mercy of just such who are busy chasing their own “greatness” and have left the country orphaned and lawless. No protection even inside the four walls of our house; and certainly none if you wish to be anything but an obedient robot.
It is too distressing, and even our outrage feels so helpless. But we have to guard against this helplessness. Gauri Lankesh is yet another warning that we must protect human values and decency in our world and reinstate justice, responsible governance and a tolerant society."
Geetanjali Shree
Angelus Novus – For Gauri Lankesh
When the dark gunners got her
We walked backwards
When Rohit tied that eternal
Knot, we walked backwards
When they raped Nirbhaya
On Delhi’s streets, we walked
Backwards into hate’s red storm
When the CPM and RSS tribes
Wiped each other out in Kannur
We walked backwards
I did not know her or him or him
Or her or those tousled children
Dying in their mothers’ arms
In the feckless hospitals of UP
What I knew in my quiet
Scholar’s retreat was Death
On my walls and the cold winds
That drove the Angel of History
Backwards and blindsided him
Into the commons of night
Paul Klee’s helpless creature
Caught in Walter Benjamin’s
Unutterable net of words
Thus: His eyes are staring
His mouth is open, his wings are
Spread. This is how, he wrote
One pictures the angel of history
His face is turned toward the past
The angel would like to stay
Awaken the dead, and make whole
What has been smashed
But a storm is blowing from
Paradise, it has got caught in
His wings with such violence that
The angel can no longer close them
The storm irresistibly propels him
Into the future to which his back
Is turned, while the pile of debris
Before him grows skyward
This storm is what we call progress
These were Benjamin’s wise words
Mine are simpler and far less certain
Progress is no storm, nor is it
Walking backwards into the future
It is the freedom to speak without fear
And to study history without hysteria
Or if this is not Progress, at least it is
The right to say: I did not know her
I did not know him and there are
A zillion other unfathomable things
I do not know but when I hear them sing
I know some have guts – and also wings
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
