Dear Arshia Malik,
Ramzan Mubarak!
I am seeking your moral guidance.
Now that the carrion eaters have started descending on our cremation grounds, with hi-tech sophisticated drones, I will not hesitate to admit that I have been rattled out of my senses.
The way the pyres of the faceless, nameless dead have been desecrated by global media, and then, vicariously played out by rabid sections of the Muslim community (if not by the morally depraved among ‘our’ own), it has been a cause for immense personal trauma. It’s as if these stark visuals of our mutilated dead seem to foreshadow the eventual aftermath of the next Great Mahabharata War.
Over the past few days, I have tried to retort to individual posts, but I see no attempt at course correction by the conscience keepers among the convinced-converted.
A Kashmiri friend, I have known for years, and who has been grieving the death of his dear brother on social media platforms for almost a year now, first put out BBC’s flash dance of the dead, sadistically invoking ‘hellfire’ from his ‘holy text’.
I do see an unholy nexus in that.
No matter how much I detest Modi’s call for communal profiling, it’s no coincidence, perhaps, that the first drone image of ‘Ali’s hellfire’ was shot by a Muslim on assignment with Reuters.
But, the last straw on the camel’s back came from a tweet reportedly from a much-respected Bollywood actor I admired since I was a child. For he raised a pertinent question: ‘It’s not an issue who burned the ghetto, it’s time to ask who gave the match box to the madman.’
For all I care, that matchstick might well have been lit by a kabab vendor in an overcrowded and dingy back lane of Lucknow, who has over the years acquired mythical reputation for fried beef patties with an overwhelming dose of common salt.
I am not a flesh eater in the sense that I don’t need to dig into burning carcasses at cremation ghats or maggot-infested rotting corpses in burial grounds to satisfy my rapacious hunger.
Except for occasional political commentaries where I have made observations from the moral high branch, on which I always strived to perch myself, my Facebook posts have largely been a Celebration of
Life even when the Call of Death seems so near.
As a journalist, my reference point had always been a movie called ‘Red Bells: Mexico in Flames,’ that I watched while still at school.
It’s about the 1915 Communist Revolution in Mexico. In the closing scene, the protagonist, John Reed (Franco Nero), a New York Times’ reporter picks up the bomb and hurls it at the agents of the State. And at that moment, Reed ceases to be a journalist and moves on to co-found Lenin’s Communist International (Comintern) in 1919.
Hundreds of morally upright journos have walked through the hallowed portals of NYT since then, a newspaper I was proud to collaborate with for six eventful years of my life. And now I stare at its Page I feast of hellfire photographed by carrion-shooting drones.
Ever since I watched that masterpiece -- Red Bells, not NYT -- I kept reminding myself, I would never hurl the grenade as long as I was a journo, come what may. And I lived by my word, drilling that credo into the minds of many young colleagues I was privileged to train and work with over the years. I hope some of them have finally watched the biopic of John Reed.
Yet, it’s been years since I stepped out of the newsroom and ceased to wield the stylus.
While I have raised valid questions since, on Islamic and Hindu best practices, in several public posts on Facebook, I have never used my Writing On The Wall to spread toxic counter narrative by digging up the dead. And that’s because I never wished to hurt my many close and dear Muslim friends, some of whom are now, sadly, coping with their own personal misfortunes brought about by the pandemic.
It’s another matter, of course, that with your sole exception, I have seen none of them attempting to calm the hotheads, obsessed as many among them seem to be, with setting up an inquisition of the ‘villain’ to exorcise the Devil.
Yet now, I am tempted by, of all things, Tunday Kabab, to turn the narrative around ... only if to show Mr Naseeruddin Shah, who exactly among India’s countless billions might have actually lit his ‘matchstick.’
So, here I go ‘public’ with a lot of hemming and hawing.
My heart still doesn’t want to put out this post. But my head says go out and do it, only to preserve the sanctity of the sacred fire and the holy ground where our beloved are interned. For once, if I do it, I know it will hurt my Muslim friends, some of them dearer to me than The Presence!
So, let me end this post with a dua from the head priest at Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah, Syed Majid Ali Nizami in this holy month of fasting.
May his prayer cleanse our souls.
You haven’t known me long enough. But I trust your advice.
Love and regards,
Meanwhile, for those who refuse to pray:
[Video]