Govt’s sudden announcement of a complete lockdown when Covid struck, without even the basic level of preparedness, was akin to dictating: from this hour onwards, no food and water and shelter!
I’m just back from a radio talk-discussion on Mulk Raj Anand. And that’s got me thinking how our best known writers like Munshi Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Saadat Hasan Manto, and the so many other writers of that era would have reacted to these bulldozer times.
Don’t know how Munshi Premchand and Manto’s stories would have shaped. How very dark the colours and strains of grief and pain would have got… penetrating deep in their long and short stories. After all, these writers would have been just too upset and pained and grief-stricken.
Mulk Raj Anand would have been just too agitated and vocal, as he was all for the disadvantaged and the neglected and bypassed. He would have been out there in the lanes and by-lanes, standing in those marked localities; probably standing in front of the bulldozers, trying to prevent destruction of homes and livelihoods.
In fact, our destruction, as a people, has been on and accelerating in these recent years. I recall just before 2017 ended, Gulzar saab didn’t mince words whilst describing in his own special way, the halaats around. Commenting, that if one were to pick up the day’s newspapers and squeeze those newspaper pages, drops of blood would spread around, because those pages would be so heavily laced with news reports of violent killings!
And as the winter peaked in 2019, so did the protests against CAA-NRC- NPR. Students and activists took to the streets, protesting, making it absolutely clear that they do not trust this government’s controversial policies. Indians settled in the different lands of the world echoed similar sentiments — halt the dangerous destructive moves, so that the country and its citizens could remain intact.
Coronavirus hit…hit hard at the start of 2020. It dragged along with it darker realities. With the police-wallahs overtaking all possible roles. Controlling human forms by the brute force. Unsparing even the young. Two images hit and hurt so much that it gets difficult to even describe. One image — that of a cop writing details to the lockdown on a young man’s forehead; a huge pen clutched in that cop’s hand went all over the forehead! It seemed worse than those dark ages! The other image — cops ruthlessly thrashing a group of Muslim men who had walked to the nearest mosque for namaaz. Instead of explaining or even scolding them for stepping out of their homes, they unleashed threats and abuses and lathis! Barbaric!
