Dynast of the East?

In a brilliant, perceptive piece on Benazir Bhutto in The Guardian, Ian Jack writes -

By her early thirties, she had been imprisoned, held under house arrest, seen a younger brother die, made a last prison visit to her father, now ruined by dysentery and gum disease, on the night before his execution. But the eventual question is, what was she being brave for? “Democracy” and “the people of Pakistan” were always her answers, but it is surely not disrespectful to wonder if her background and all those paternal lessons about “destiny” made her essentially a dynast whose ideas of public duty came out of some ancestral, unexamined self-regard.

Narendra Modi in Hell

In times when mass murderers walk victorious with the hubris of bigots, perhaps only poetry can express our dismay and outrage.

I reproduce below Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem General Franco in Hell, written after the Spanish Civil War, but a voice that belches with deep resonance in our own benighted times -

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Indeed.
From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling
of your legions, in the holy milk
of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled
along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence, a broken
door.
Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung
of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure
of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,
oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,
of ill-born pallor of shadow?

The flame retreats without ash,
the salty thirst of hell, the circles
of grief turn pale. Cursed one, may only humans
pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may
you not be consumed, not be lost
in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass
or the
fierce foam.

Alone, alone, for the tears
all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands
and rotted eyes, alone in a cave
of your hell, eating silent pus and blood
through a cursed and lonely eternity. You do not deserve to sleep
even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:
you have to be
awake, General, eternally awake
among the putrefaction of the new mothers,
machine-gunned in the autumn.

All and all the sad children cut to
pieces,
rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell
that day of cold festivity: your arrival.
Children blackened by explosions,
red fragments of brain, corridors filled
with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the very posture
of crossing the street,
of kicking the ball,
of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

Smiling. There are smiles
now demolished by blood
that wait with scattered exterminated teeth
and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces
of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless
ghosts, the dark
hidden ones, those who never left
their beds of rubble. They all wait for you
to spend the night. They fill the corridors
like decayed seaweed.

They are ours, they were our
flesh, our health, our
bustling peace, our ocean
of air and lungs. Through
them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,
turned into destroyed
substance, murdered matter, dead flour,
they await you in your hell.

Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,
neither terror nor sorrow awaits you. May you be alone and accursed,
alone and awake among all the dead,
and let blood fall upon you like rain,
and let a dying river of severed eyes
slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.

The Challenge Down Under

The BCCI’s ridiculous scheduling of the cricketing season means that India have little match practice before the toughest challenge in world cricket. They play the Aussies in the Boxing Day Test just a week after arriving in Australia. Harsha Bhogle, in his column in The Indian Express, though sounded a few optimistic notes ahead of the first Test in Melbourne -

So how does one become optimistic about this tour? There is quality in this team, there is a great deal of experience and there is the lingering smell of victory in the air. Two bad sessions in South Africa undid a lot of good work but there were series wins in the West Indies, Bangladesh and England. Now Pakistan have been beaten comfortably at home and the atmosphere in the dressing room is cordial. Players are looking up to the captain who has made it clear that the pitch and such factors will not be used as excuses. And even though recent overseas wins have been fashioned by the bowlers, if the batsmen put runs on the board, India will be a different side.

Dean Jones also struck similar notes about how the Australian cricket lovers are hungry for a fight. I just hope that the BCCI’s insatiable hunger for revenue doesn’t end up ruining a potentially great contest.

Loneliness

“Are you as lonely as that?” I asked.
Kafka nodded.
“Like Kaspar Hauser?”
Kafka laughed.
“Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I’m as lonely as…..as Franz Kafka.”

- extract from Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka

Anfield’s title famine

This line, uttered by Jack Nicholson in The Departed, says all about Liverpool’s domestic woes -

No one gives it to you, you have to take it.

The Merseyside club could do with some focus and determination in the Premier League than doing their usual (and by now boring) annual pre-season vows about winning the league.