People will say all sorts of things

People will say all sorts of things

Ernest Hemingway said all American literature began with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But then L Frank Baum, coming later, shouldn’t have had the hassle he did in trying to sell his wonderful Wizard of Oz. Publishers said to him, full of omniscience, that there wasn’t and couldn’t be, any such thing as an American fairytale.

And all because the prescription was for importing such magic and fairy-dust from Europe, where the culture was considered old and deep. The Judeo-Christian and Anglo-Saxon world never paid much mind to the other “exotic” cultures such as ours, or that of the Chinese for that matter.  

L Frank Baum wrote over a score of books, besides the magical Kansas tale about Dorothy and Toto and the Kansas wind; but nothing else really mattered. But he was spot on about Oz with the lion who was a coward, and the yellow brick road, and the tin man worried about rust, the scarecrow with no brain, and of course, the wizard who knew the way home.

On the converse side of this argument, maybe that’s why so many American writers, and not a few of the painters, went to imbibe the spirit of France. Of course, help from the French, during their war with Britain, also created a subliminal kinship. It’s symbolised by France’s present of the Statue of Liberty, standing to this day in the New York harbour, opposite the fabled old immigration point of Ellis Island.

John Lennon, avant garde Liverpudlian and world citizen, art-schooled and acerbic, was very good at saying things, including something about the Beatles and Jesus. He  also said if you want to call rock n roll by another name, it’s Chuck Berry. He plugged the early Elvis by saying he had actually died the day he went into the US Army, (and not after starting a merchandising empire wearing his bejewelled jumpsuits and demonstrating his karate moves on stage in Las Vegas; and certainly not when he was, by his own description, “fat and forty”). Lennon said a few things about Nixon too, and they probably got him killed.

Rewinding a little, the commissioning executives at Decca and at EMI (the latter now ironically, but not surprisingly, defunct), said that there was no future for four young men with guitars (The Beatles), while turning down the opportunity to sign them up after listening to an audition. It’s fortuitous that the Beatles had Brian Epstein to do their Col. Parker parallel for them, because he did get them in on Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary, later with the help of legendary producer George Martin.

Across the Atlantic, Bob Dylan said to the Beatles, who were fans of his, shortly after their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was right at the beginning of their US invasion, in 1964. What’s this about holding hands, said Dylan allegedly, here smoke this.

People, it appears, will say all sorts of things.

Some of the most inconsistent things being said locally are ironically coming out of the mouths of our  would be reformers in team Anna.

What need was there for Mr. Shanti Bhushan to fly that dangerous kite about Kashmir? Especially now, when all India has to do is wait for the disintegration of Pakistan, because of its extremely unviable internal contradictions, having run with the hares and hunted with the hounds to the point of terminal exhaustion. It is a little like these buildings that collapse in the inner-city every monsoon.

Particularly, when the vandals keep stealing the supporting pillars of US diplomatic protection along with the accompanying dollars, and expect Pakistan to leverage the other yellow pillar, or is it peril, of China, to do the work of both.

And more importantly, pay for the privilege, presumably in Renminbi and Yuan. Yuan apart, every red-blooded scotch drinking elite member of the ruling classes in Pakistan would rather take a George Washington faced dollar and go and bamboozle the Yanks as opposed to the Chinks, “all weather friend” and “deep as the Arabian sea and high as the Himalayas” notwithstanding. But these guys may be surrounded these days.

After all, Pakistan’s terrorist breeding programme is so successful that they are rapidly outnumbering and swamping all other local species including the despised “mohajirs” imported from India. These hapless exiles actually thought they would be better treated in Pakistan amongst their co-religionists than in Allahabad or Lucknow or Hyderabad or Junagadh for that matter. And they’ve been reeling from the shock for every one of these 64 years, even though they are loathe to admit it. And that includes Mohajir former president Pervez Musharraf.

Plebiscites too, much as Bhushan may advocate them, are a page straight out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ghost’s book. The one in which he wants the thing in Kashmir where the skewer of demographics is expected to give him the kind of democratic verdict he was fond of. That is when Zulfie wasn’t drinking the “infidel’s scotch” or profaning the atmosphere canoodling with kafir women.

Plebiscites have had their failed day, and have actually never worked anywhere. They were nevertheless favoured by excellent Roman Emperors such as Nero and Caligula, with death as a reward for ticking the wrong box.

Mr. Bhushan also recently argued his own case seeking Income Tax exemption for his heart-bypass surgery, because he considers it an occupational hazard as a lawyer. He may have something there. Still, Anna Hazare obviously knows how to pick them, but it is a relief to see he knows how to discard them as well!

I wonder what Anna’s going to do with his expense fudging frontrunner for  Jan Lokpal? Or his master’s voice, who hasn’t paid quite a lot of taxes and spent a quantity of time moonlighting from his government job. Or Mr. Bhushan senior blithely garnering himself a farm property “allotted” to him by Chief Minister of UP Kum. Mayawati’s largesse.

What makes it particularly disappointing is the lame excuses they have handed out when it comes to their own integrity and probity. And this, at a time when the race is far from run.

To be fair, it is indeed a very difficult game to stay a jump or two ahead in the honesty stakes, particularly with your supporters immolating themselves on the fervour of their own combustibles (also known as vanity).  

And as for dictators and other infallibles, they have a strange habit of coming to ultimate grief in the vicinity of drains and underground crevasses. Who knows what Saddam and Gaddafi called safety, but it certainly didn’t work for them.

(1,097 words)

October 21^st, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Shake it like Elvis" on 2nd November 2011
and online at www.dailypioneer.com/ as well as in The Pioneer ePaper.