Dear Manjit

12:30 pm, August 11, 2013

The Icfai Guest House,

Chaltlang, Aizawl

Dear Manjit,

It’s a mix emotion of sadness, nostalgia and excitement I’m going through in the proportion of 50:30:20 respectively, as I am going to pen down my heart and mind in these eco-friendly, elemental chlorine free papers produced by ITC.

I sometime wonder why I can’t exactly remember the first time we met. This is unusual as I can vividly recall about the occasions when I met others for the first time at Aizawl. I met Pranjal in the late May of 2010 at our old Icfai campus in Chaltlang; I met Gyanashri in January, 2012 picnic at Sairang; I met Koyel on a November afternoon in 2012 at your very own place… However, I do remember the kind of unease that we used to feel during our initial encounters and you too have acknowledged this during our Champhai trip this year. I believe that sense of unease was due to our own reflective individual personalities, which I find quite natural when two people of similar intellectual abilities sits opposite to each other. It’s like the silent counter magnetism – the repulsive phenomenon between two identically polarized magnets. It took some amount of time before we became really close friends, and that is the beauty of bonding; the same magnets can have the strongest bind between them when any of the poles subjectively gets reversed.

I don’t want to sound too exaggerating but I must acknowledge that you are intellectually superior to many of your peers.  I also firmly believe that you still deserve more than what you have achieved till now. You have the kind of leadership qualities that generally change makers possesses. I know that you are aware of your own qualities as much as I do and that is why I need not act like a mentor who speaks in the common mechanical motivating lines derived out of his own snobbery.

I do believe that people like us have larger roles and greater responsibilities to offer. I know that no matter how much you will achieve in the world is not going to sufficiently satisfy you until you pay back your debt to your own family, your own people, and your own place. That is why I would like to see you coming back to India and to the northeast once you complete your formal education from abroad. What bothers me these days is that there are a lot of divisive forces that are playing insensitive games with the short-term emotions of ordinary people. Technically speaking, I am not opposed to boundaries that separates region on the basis of geo-political or socio-cultural identity but I am strongly opposed to the boundaries that divides people. It’s a high time for us to stand against these divisive forces.

Finally, I would like to confess one thing that I am not very good at keeping contacts. But this does not mean that I think any less of my old relationships. I would like to assure you that our friendship will be preserved like a half-read novel. After any unconditional hiatus of any duration, we will certainly begin from the point where we left.

Wishing you all the best for everything…

Shamim

Violence Vs Violence

It disturbs me immensely when people tend to go back to history and try to dig out the cause rather than channelizing their collective intellects in focusing on the effect. This perhaps reflects nothing but an underlying perverted intention of justifying the wrong. Today, what is important for all of us is to stress on the urgent need of putting an end to the terrible wrong that is going on in Bengal. The changing character and present scenario of politics in West Bengal has reached to an alarming level. It’s really shocking to see fountain pens are being replaced by Javelins. If things like this continue, many of us would lose the respect that once we used to have for our glorious past students and youth movements. This may be a high time to come together to disassociate the students movement from our constantly deteriorating mainstream politics. However, it would be foolish to hope for an immediate change knowing how things work and spark in Bengal. “An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind” – I’m afraid today that Bengal doesn’t turns out to be the living example of what MG had once warned. 

Rapists of Article 19

The country we are living has become a pathetic place where:

• Singers are threatened and forced to quit without any sense of reasonableness shown by self-declared protectors of religion and culture.
• Movies are banned even before the public can actually see them to debate or justify their contents.
• Users of social networking sites are harassed, threatened and even charged by police for pointing out and acknowledging injustice.
• Books are banned along with their authors if they are critical about certain ideologies and beliefs.
• Paintings are torn, destroyed and painters forced into exile because some fundamentalists doesn’t have the eyes to appreciate and understand artistic sensibilities.
• Cartoonists are arrested because some politicians don’t have an appetite for humor and the minimum capacity to digest criticism.
• Police in the name of morality, raids, drags, beats and arrests young people for committing the “crime of enjoying life” in a metro.

The article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution of India gives its citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression but it seems that a handful of fringe elements and some vested interest groups have made a clear mockery of the whole concept of Freedom of Expression.

Every Indian citizen has the right to like, dislike, agree, disagree, accept, reject, appreciate, and criticize. But no one in India has any right to dictate and impose his/her views on others even to their own children if they are above 18 years of age. The most unfortunate part of all these is that the government which is supposed to be safeguarding the people’s rights has failed miserably in doing so. Due to narrow political compulsions and perhaps shortsightedness, the government thinks that they are playing safe by not interfering with certain groups and their exaggerated sentiments. The political parties (either in power or in opposition) believe that they are protecting their vote banks by projecting themselves as protecting sentiments of others.  However, this shortsightedness is because of the fact that in India the voices of the ‘Silent Majority’ have long been dominated and often been overpowered by the voices of the ‘Aggressive Minority’. Therefore the time has come for the Silent Majority to come out on the street and say it loud and clear that we won’t tolerate any Talibanization of our society and our country. It is perhaps a high time to hang the “Rapists of Article 19”.