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Kill me if you can
The sands of wistfulness
When the closebys are nebulous
The distant a figment of
The fatalist imbeciles.
The granules slip away
From my nonconformist grasp
Tearing me up as they go go
With eyes dying to cry.
Helplessness is, as helplessness was
A shrieking heart of despair
An angry mind of iconoclasm
Fast drying up as wistfully.
I will corrode, I will fade away
I will die, I will cry
I will kill myself, but not kill
The being of mine, that make me.
• Collection:
The Fire of Nothingness
• Originally written on
June 12, 2002
[ First published: September 16, 2008
Last updated: September 16, 2008
]
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink:
The silent Bangladeshi invasion of Assam
A week ago an unsettling incident occurred in Assam that went largely unnoticed in the Indian media.
Over a thousand suspected illegal migrants crossed the Dhansiri river and, with impunity, took over parts of Orang National Park in Darrang district in the early hours of May 6. They came from the innumerable chars (riverine islands) that dot the Brahmaputra river. They did not come empty-handed – they brought along building materials and cattle. They apparently had come to stay. For good.
By the time forest guards spotted the invaders that afternoon, the migrants had already erected a hundred makeshift houses or more. The unnerved forest personnel called back for more hands and resources; they did not dare take on the illegal migrants who were armed with sharp weapons. The latter had not only come here to stay, but seemed inordinately determined to do so.