There we are. With the forty second issue of our magazine. And that grumpy old (and young) Jean Paul Sartre utterance hammering inside our heads: “Everything has been figured out except how to live.”
That there is a sharp economic divide between the haves and the have-nots is not new. What is new and what is even graver than this schism, is that there are more efforts to increase the gap than to arrest the slide.
We must confront the implications crafted by a society driven by consumerism, one that operates on the premise that the environmental side-effects(read gashes, scars, wounds, stab-marks) of industrial growth can be rationalised (read externalized) indefinitely… with some carbon credit exchange (emit some, omit some more, give, take, buy, acquire, merge, submerge, disseminate).
In a nation with 1.21 billion people and a workforce of 405 million (growing 2.5 per cent annually), these assumptions must be questioned. And these questions cannot be answered by productivity parameters alone. Let us pose five questions to ourselves… let each question be an aching finger in our five fingered hand and a palm that can cup the universe as much as it can be dazzled by gripping a Blackberry handset(as if that is our last outpost of ever-flowing data exchange).
Q1: What would be the true nature of this unavoidable beast called globalisation…the foregone conclusion of the existence of two cities inside a city (whether you take it physically or metaphorically)… a city where there is a sense of elite affluence or a middle class drift and another city where there is a ghetto, a slum, a drifting shifting populace…
Hang on, Isn’t it is easy to categorise this as “us” and “them” and even more easier to have some designed outreach methods or the so-called funding-driver social work programmes and some apparently wholesome sales pitches masking themselves as projects? But that would go nowhere till we understand the desperation of poverty, the smell of the ghetto and of course till we have regular programmes for the urban schools and colleges to understand the poverty beyond the economics lesson
Q2: What then is inclusivity….as opposed to exclusivity…how do you include more and more people than create the so-called niche?
Q3: How to dispel the notion of “being educated” as opposed to learn “all our lives” that is the whole notion of unlearning to understand a tribal ethos… standing up to acknowledge that a local auto driver can understand consumer behaviour in his own way as much as a MBA can…and this “own way” of the driver…of the farmer must be treated as an alternative methodology..as skill literacy in this all pervading text literacy, degree eating nirvana
Q4: In this crossroad; are we then clear about the ever-evolving between the glut-glitz versus the gap-ghetto?
Q5: How to go beyond dogmas, marks, cgpa (grade point average marking scheme), degree slavery of colleges, so-called ambitions of I-me-myself … and be a part of the larger social structure that helps us to build social bridges, as opposed to social empathy and sympathy.
And then we have to unlock our left secrets beyond clever constructs of neo-cons, sub-altern mandarins, dialectic spouting academia… to this zebra crossing…
Here stands Marx with his necessary notions of lived equality, Hegel with his third way key to conflict where intervention cycles take over the isolation loops, here sits Gramsci and Giddens hand in hand, questioning the basic fabric of the concept of “ideology.”
Squatting in the footpath near the zebra crossing is Felix Guattari. He talks about the fringe groups who are left out by the mainstream discourse and even at times by progressive groups.There are others who are constantly crossing the road, coming back, crossing again… not as escapists but as benchmarks to direct and re-direct the traffic. M.N. Roy, Howard Fast. Jangal Santhal. Muzaffar Ahmed, Nirmal Verma and O.V. Vijayan (so what if they turned spiritualists), Habermas (please go beyond the parameters of Frankfurt school), Ritwik Ghtak, Julius Fuchik, Jean Luc Godard, Leo Tolstoy, Federico Garcia Lorca, Shishunala Sharif, Leonardo Boff (amongst others) paving way for liberation theologists, Kabir, Tukaram, Engels, Eknath, Gandhi, Periyar and the ORIGINAL Marxist much before Marx, called Gautama, the Buddha
Our Left issue includes diverse point-of-views with head on collisions, negations, assertions, tangents, interpretations, loneliness, radical contours, red, off-red, semi-red, blurred red, reddish tinge, blood-red, hope, despair but yes like fat-free food… we tried to be a dogma-free left issue,
Yes, we probably failed. Failed magnificiently. But that’s okay. You can’t succeed with a Left issue till the last hungry eyeball from that deep socket stares at you with this helpless angst… has stopped staring. And we are far far away from that.
Comrades… here is the issue… here are the issues… stare on… towards the red sky…try to understand why is the young one from Kashmir, Syria, Jangalmahal, Koraput, Bahrain, Haiti angry… also why aren’t you angry…
Read on. Left is not official left but all that is left to pick up and set things right. And that “right” is why a hundred years later… we would be still compiling this issue and still failing to get it “right.”
Right,
And still wanting to compile another issue… another thousand years later….and another thousand years later…. still wanting to do a …..
Laal salaam…
