The living asks: whose culture?

Holding your sister's one-month baby in your arms can give you the courage to question everything! When there's pure life lying there com...

Holding your sister8217;s one-month baby in your arms can give you the courage to question everything! When there8217;s pure life lying there completely defenceless, embarking upon a long, shocking journey it knows nothing about, you ask yourself what8217;s the tiniest contribution you would hope to make to the world that child is going to grow up in. If you stare at the baby8217;s face long enough you are sure to hear the rumble of the wind that sweeps away old fears.

I have heard such stirrings of life in the chorus of the protests I8217;ve been hearing over the past few days against the Shiv Sena all over the country. What had begun as a few angry whispers have now grown into a unanimous outcry: We don8217;t want to be made fools of in the name of that great altar 8212; 8220;culture8221; 8212; anymore. We accuse the Shiv Sena of a fascism of a rotten, most blatant kind.

The kind to earn which they have only changed the name of a city and then bullied it into suppression. This city and state they claim to love and live for, but bring itdown on its knees by spreading not love but terror. A terror so shameless that it doesn8217;t even allow us to ask 8220;what have you done for me that I must fear you so?8221; We accuse the Shiv Sena of pressing the easiest of all emotional buttons 8212; 8220;culture8221; 8212; to manipulate our response to their outright mob-rule.

We cannot be fooled by their constant reverting to symbolic action that is supposed to protect Indian values and tradition because we know what our lives truly are. Our lives and particularly their lives run absolutely contrary to the culture they claim to bear allegiance to. What happens to their sense of culture when crime skyrockets in Mumbai and shootings, extortion-threats, rapes, murders happen faster then we can count them?

Doesn8217;t it offend their pride in our culture when money dwindles desperately in most of the businesses and industries of this state even as lakhs of people languish with no food or shelter, and all they pay attention to is the sexual content of a film? Doesn8217;t theirculture take a beating when they oppose the constitutiional right of Indians to freedom of expression?

Doesn8217;t it demolish their faith in their culture when they make grand promises to Maharashtrians on housing and electricity which they don8217;t keep, but discuss cricket matches instead? I8217;m afraid if such people are the custodians of our culture then I want to delink myself from this culture. I want to admit as true what the Shiv Sainiks vandalising the movie threatres in Mumbai and Delhi accuse Deepa Mehta8217;s film of: I8217;m not a part of this Indian culture.

I want to resist my past. When nature itself never reproduces an exact clone of itself why should I remain shackled to the past in order to uphold the redundant institution of tradition? I want to reject the blindness that refuses to see that the nature of human communities, the very notions of society and culture, have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past.

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What is new is new not because it has never been there before butbecause it has changed in quality. The past is dead. A professor of history is himself history the minute he walks into a classroom. It8217;s the voice of dissent that lives because that8217;s the fire of life. Only in the corruption of the past lies its redemption. All great sages, all great philosophers, scientists, warriors, artists, even the gods that once walked on this earth, are dead. It8217;s a grave injustice to the living and the just born to constantly worship the passing of the dead.

This universe, the solar system, was itself born out of the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that were cooked in the interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. From these ashes of stars, life arose on earth till two million years ago man appeared. Today he has become the dominant species on earth; all other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. As the self-proclaimed custodian of life on earth and in our solar system he has a big responsibility.

That responsibility I see being addressed in the beatingheart of my sister8217;s sleeping baby, not in the ravaged face of a history and tradition whose self-inflicted wounds have only become more and more atrocious.

The writer is a Mumbai-based filmmaker