The Seventh Circle

Scene from 'A Hetadik Kor’ (The Seventh Circle).

Inferno or hell

Its seventh circle is based on the pillar of violence. I knew nothing about all these till I watched a Hungarian movie ‘A Hetadik Kor’ (The Seventh Circle).

Stunned and Saddened by the movie I was sleepless and afraid of going to bed in packed hotel.

It was late November –Goa, 2009.IFFI

Why so much of pain in some creative work? That too using few innocent children as protagonist?

Distressed and restless by all I went to the sea shore and met one person I befriended two days back in the film festival arena.

We started the topic and he took an opposite point of view –‘why not pain? The genesis of these middle European countries is based on pain; look back at the holocaust, the devastation and the national pain arising out of it.’

He said –‘As a result of all this pain has mutated into each and every individuals living in those area. So pain is used catharsis or as prophylaxis so that such kinds of holocaust never resurface.’

He said these countries were destroyed completely by the holocaust but now?’

I  didn’t had the answer  except my little knowledge from art work of my favourite writers and movie maker from those place I had  didn’t had a grip over the middle Europe .

He said ‘Pain serves as a fuel for progressive genesis.’

To check the truth I goggled and tabulated something like this 

	Population	Noble prize	Literacy rate	Maternal Mortality rate	Olympic gold  2012
Poland	38,511,824	12	99.3%	8 per 100,000	10(2 gold)
Hungary	9 946 282	12	99.4%	15 per 100,000	17(gold 8)
Austria	8,419,000	19	99%	5 deaths/100,000	o
Chech	10,562,214	5		9 per 100,000	10( 4 gold)
Germany	81,726,000	102	99.0%	8 per 100,000	44(11 gold)
India	1,210,193,422	7(except Tagore,and Raman all were either  born or worked outside)	74.04%	540 per 100,000	6 (Gold 0)

My new friend question was what have Indian contributed in original after zero.

I was petrified because I also found that Assam is having a population of around three crore, with literacy rate and maternal mortality rate among worst in Indian state and yet to have a Nobel laureate or Olympic winner?

I asked myself –are we lacking in national pain?

I looked back at Assam history –

1769-1783 The Moamoria revolt

Because of internal feuds (among the becurocrtaes, among different sect 600 year old Ahom dynasty whom Mohugal could never invade was destroyed in internal feud due to this Moamoria revolt

Can’t we call it pain?

But the result of all the revolt leads to the Burmese invasion

Burmese invasion 1817-1825 –the worst days of Assam history.

There were death, mass migration, rape, famine; people who survived saw it all. 

Can’t we call it a national pain?

But what was the result? The English invasion (1825-1947) –for the first time there was victory for western invader in Assam.

Wasn’t it a national pain?

English gave us education, progress, mode of communication, oil tea and we continued the way it always has been –indifferent!

Intoxicated with opium induced plethora we continue to fighting for language, infiltrator, so called independence, State and what not? We saw our land divided into many, we saw mistrust among our self. We lost thousands of people for those reason, missed a university calendar.

We stopped discriminating between martyrs as there are so much of them.

Aren’t these our national pain?

That night my new found friend was saying ‘Pain serves as a fuel for progressive genesis.’

The question in my mind was inst so much of pain over three hundred years not enough?

I felt like the child trapped in self indulged   hanging noose in the movie ‘A Hetadik Kor’.

As if we the people of Assam are trapped inside the seventh circle of violence and there is no chance of reversal.

The Birth of a Phoenix

The eternal question that haunts everyone is ‘Do I exist? (or, Why do I exist?)

Every moment of our life, we answer this question in different ways, as per the circumstances we face. Like destiny, the answer keeps on changing.

And in these transient moments of crisis, we begin to fear that due to change, we would be losing things we know the way they are, the way we know to be correct…..

But things are changing at an awfully rapid pace.

Nothing will ever be the same.

Take the case of ‘C’ grade cinema halls in small mofussils of India and the people associated with them, whom we knew as ‘blackers’. We used to recognize them, not to mention that we knew a few by name as well, as on many occasions, they were our last hope, while trying to get tickets for the first day first show of a block buster movie. And now…..forget the blackers, even those cinema halls are things of the past.

Or, think of the numerous letter head printing presses with their blocks and proof readers.

The photo studios, with dark rooms for developing still film rolls and the waiting for hours together, wondering how the developed photographs would turn out.....

Or, the tape recorder/walkman and the audio cassettes...

The ‘hamara’ (Bajaj) Scooter...

The Black & White televisions....

Or, maybe grandma’s tales by the fireplace on winter evenings.

Think deep…… it’s a whole new world we are living in where nothing is permanent. Eventually no (body) thing exists in this ruthless world.

Stressed and unable to adapt to the newly defined values, we tend to become prophets/ philosophers /or epitaph writers and start prophesying the death of the things we love (but also fear losing it in the whirlpool of time). I am no exception to this habit. Maybe, growing up at a time of unrest and paranoia adds fuel to the problem, as Assam in the 80s had all the ingredients for these negative thoughts to engulf a pessimist like me.

As always, I was sad that a few of my friends goaded me to head for Corbett National Park. Deep inside the jungle, there is a Guest House named Dikala. To begin with, I hated everything in Dikala. Out here also, people were breaking every rule, competing with one another just like in the concrete jungle. The worst thing was having firsthand experience of seeing human beings invading the animals’ habitat and depriving them of their privacy. Imagine someone lurking inside your room to take glimpses of you bathing or cooking!

But who cares, everyone had to upload a tiger and himself in the same frame.

As I sat glumly in the backyard of the guest house, I started talking to the people who had the “call of the wild” in their blood. As the adda continued, I found that each one of them was an excellent story teller and their never ending stories ranged from tigers of Corbett to Ghosts inside a ‘Peepal’ tree, to the poachers or encroachers of Corbett national Park. Just a few moments ago, due to circumstances, my mind was prophesying the death of an ancient art named story telling. But I found out that it was alive and flourishing in the heart of the jungle in its full potential in the heart of the jungle named Jim Corbett national park.

A tale of two cities

Guwahati

Road renovation in Dehradun

Readers tend to identify a few cities by the names of some authors. My earliest link to this synonymous relationship was a promo of a movie named ‘London Kills Me’. It was a movie made by a writer of Pakistani origin paying tribute to the city he loved. I never saw the movie because at that time, the information provided in the Newsmakers section of The World This Week was our only window to the outside world. But I was hooked by the taxonomy. Being deeply in love with the only city I knew, I was even tempted to name my first script after it – something like Guwahati kills me.

With time, I realized that this tendency of paying tribute to the city you love and recurrent references by various authors has led many of us to identify a city by some famous author, like Orhan Pamuk with Istanbul or Ruskin Bond with Mussoorie /Dehradun etc. I share my love for the city that I call my own with the kindred feelings of these more famous and talented names. Due to circumstances (personal and professional), I had to be away from my first love for the last ten years. And…. Boy, Oh Boy, this city has changed a hell of a lot in these ten years. It’s no longer the mofussil town I had known over the years. All the things we had heard to be the essence of a big city showed their presence in Guwahati. FM radio, multiplexes, pubs, discos became the city’s new craze. That’s cool, no doubt, but with the arrival of this “globalization” thing, a few inherent symbols of identity of the city vanished without a trace.

The familiar smile of the neighborhood, the cricket field in the backyard, the tendency to obeying traffic rules, and that’s not all, the soaring crime rates…… Yes, Guwahati is still the city of my choice, except with many ifs and buts. 

In 2007, I shifted to another city in Northern India, situated at the foothills of the Himalayas that have an uncanny resemblance to the Guwahati of my childhood. (Minus the occasional fear of CRPF/Bomb blast and the nuisance created out of it)

The landscapes, easy going helping nature of the localites, the hybrid facies of Mongoloid and Aryan nature made me forget many times that I was two thousand miles away from home.  Time passed, five years flew by like a whisker, and circumstances kept the ball rolling, so once again I shifted to another city of contrasting nature.

As I was shifting from Dehradun, I noticed trees being chopped off to make way for a big four lane highway. Then, I visited two multiplexes, I saw the mofussil centre of Dehradun, shops near Ghantaghar being recreated with bulldozers (renovated! ). I told myself ---. Here we go seeing another city changing its nature, may be for good may be for.…. So, will it be a repeat telecast of an experience I already had?

Rational Criminal

While surfing through the channels on TV just the other day, I stopped at one channel watching Alfred Hitchcock speaking. I think at that time, he was talking about violence in movies and what society has become. He was referring to violence in real life. At that moment, he was telling a story that could be chillingly true in real life –that a robber with a gun in his hand is telling the victim ‘I am so sorry that I have to do it, but I am helpless and poor. I will not harm you much except for the money.  Please forgive me for what I have done.’ After telling this, the robber takes all the money from the victim, picks up his gun and then shoots him through his heart. Mr. Hitchcock was saying that in “reel” life, he knew it was an irrational plot for a film as the criminal knew what he was doing and was also talking very rationally until he committed that heinous act. But in modern day society, he knew that (It was an interview in the later part of his life) such an incident could not be ruled out.

Since at that time, I was also going through a similar thought process, his example resonated in my mind very strongly. Hitchcock’s premise was very true. Because in modern times, you don’t say what is true, or what you want to say. You only utter what the lawyer has asked you to. I will not give the example of Netahr iKand or AjmalKasab ,as their crimes are beyond the imagination of all (almost!) living humans.But let us take incidents from day to day life experience where we see people doing exactly the opposite of what they are prophesying. Have all of us transmogrified ourselves into the impossible rational criminal as Hitchcock has narrated in his story?

Also read Nilaknatha  ,Meghe Dhaka Tara

Of omens and history

’পাচে ১৬৬৯ শকত আশ্বিত পাচদিন যাঁতে আকাশত নেজলগা তৰা ওলাইছিল, অমঙ্গলসুচক ।’ শ্রীনাথ দুৱাৰা বৰবৰুৱা, তুংখুঙ্গীয়া বুৰঞ্জী। (১৬৬৯ শক =১৭৩৮ খৃস্টাব্দ)

  In 1689 Sak (1783 AD), on 5^th of ashwin a comet appeared in the sky ….predicts bad omen

Srinath Duwarah Barbaruah ….Tunkhungia Buranjee

(A premier historical manuscript of Tunkhungia clad of Ahom dynasty.)

History beckons me and this line from the Tunkhungia Buranjee was a key foundation for genesis of a story.

I have mentioned it many times being borne and brought up in Assamin a dark era has left many scarred memories on our generation. Later on when I developed interest in the history of my native land I was horrified when I saw hundreds of parallel example in every century; all mimicking the unfortunate cascades of events of our troubled time.

I was sad as it meant over last 1000 years we have learnt nothing from our past.

As inter personal /interracial conflicts, hatred and intolerance are the same more or less as in our present time.

If I tell you rebel going out to Burma to cause chaos and death you might say hey you are talking of ULFA/NDFB etc / But sorry I was referring to Badan Barphukan's escape to Burma  which let to three consecutive Burmese attack ,Mass death ,mass migration of indigenous Assamese everywhere (may be one of the reason we find Baruah ,Talukdar ,Kalia in West Bengal ,Tibet and Bangladesh )

If I tell you about few young Turks capturing the Royal throne and selling his motherland to materialistic world, you might be referring it to the rise of AGP after 6 years of unrest .But I was referring to three Moamoria revolt with had many (or few) parallel sense when the revolt started .And after few months of rule the people knew that we are dealing with something worse....

            If I give example of  top bureaucrat fighting with each other I am referring to the differences between Purnanada Buragohian and Badan Bophukan, (Or Kirtichandra and The Parbatiya Phukan with Moyamoria satra or between Sankaria sakt and the followers of Anirudhadeb  etc etc) not what we read in news paper everyday.

            If I discus religious and castist intolerance I am referring to the fight between the satra and the monarch in 17 th century, or  between different community at that time  not what we see in present day situation.

At that time 1738 AD Ahom dynasty was at its pick of grandeur and when looked from outside. But internally everything was gradually ruining. Like fight between the various Knowars eligible for the royal throne, various burocrate, the differences between the Satras and the royal house, intra and inter fractional differences between Satras that were becoming powerful entity at that time.

So the paranoia was infective and later proved to be catastrophic for the Assamese entity as a whole.

We all know history repeats itself until and unless you take measure not to repeat the national mistakes we keep on doing.

Sometime I feel that that comet is still persisting in the sky of Assam...

Metaphorically I feel all the events that followed were marked by that omen.

When I read that line mentioned in the heading:-I knew it well this was an omen people failed to read at those times. There were no rectification of the faults and gradually it lead to destruction of a thousand years pride.

Hope we don’t repeat what our past has thought us over the years. 

May be it’s Dostoevsky.

I don’t remember since when I graduated from comics and superhero books to narrative fiction with a grey sense. And without noticing one day I become master of dark taste when it comes choosing any art form (books, cinema, music, painting etc) for creative inspiration .Now while trying to get rid of all those for some personal reason I did looked back at the genesis of all those taste . May be that attraction was seeded in my formative years.

I was wondering since when?

Or rather who?

I kept thinking who was the first culprit that introduced black literature to me?  

As far as I remember our early childhood heroes were Dem Peha, Supandi, to Tintin Bahadur and all those Chandamama characters. As I was a voracious reader and I finished reading those entire books we had in that charming family book almirah. Gradually there were huge discrepancy between the demand versus supply when it came to reading .One day I came across a dirty thick book upon which it was written ‘Pain is the outcome of sin’-Lord Budhha

We all have to admit –darkness has its own charm .And at those times the unexplored world that is related with sin /sex/ pain/death /drug seemed very appealing .As if you explore those trail you will attain some knowledge that is equivalent to an unexplainable transcendent state of mind.

‘Pain is the outcome of sin’ -The line attracted me.

I started reading the book after few pages I was captivated by the explicit details of the horrendous murder committed by the protagonist, and I kept reading.

I liked (!)  The way writer described his penance and suffering. It was a new thing to my experience.

I thought this is the way in which art should take its turn ….

Now when I look back and someone accuse me of darkness and if I have to deny and project it big I would say ‘it’s not me. May be its Dostoevsky.’