| PM CONDOLES DEATH OF SHRI CHANCHAL SARKAR
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The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, has expressed shock and grief over the passing away of the doyen of Indian Journalism and former Director of the Press Institute of India, Shri Chanchal Sarkar in New Delhi.
www.goa-world.com Team adds from one of the selected writings of Chanchal Sarkar - selected by Gaspar Almeida:
Comments Unkempt http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20041031/edit.htm#3 1984 wasnt just George Orwells novels famous title, it was also the year of Bob Geldofs Ethiopia Rock Concert. What was almost unmanageable in that pop concert was not the millions in currencies that rolled in, often flooding the 200 lines set up for contributions while the concert was on, but the fallout. People from many scores of countries were shaken to the bottom of their beings and reached for their credit cards, ran for Africa and used diverse other ways of raising money. But did those millions do much? Geldof has been back recently to Ethiopia after 20 years and he says bitterly that all he was able to do was to leave behind a nation of half-starved beggars. There have been many famines since in starved foodless Sub-Saharan Africa. We have seen many clips on television of camps of twigs and plastic, set up in bone-dry lands with little children dying every day, their mothers desperate, their fathers overcome. In Darfur in the south of Sudan (which is a country as big as France) we hear that over 70,000 people are dead and that over a million have been forced to leave their homes and trek for many days to camps. Pictures as rending as those from 20 years ago have come to us from Darfur, of course, but also from Liberia, and Congo and elsewhere. From Uganda have come stories of the Lords Resistance Army which has raided hundreds of villages, lifted all the children and forcibly made them fight, and die, for the Army. I wonder if reactions in India to those pictures from Geldofs time and in the 20 years since have not been kind of sophisticated fashionable and put on. Since there were runs in Budapest, London, Chicago and elsewhere so why not Delhi? The young in Europe were moved to shouting and screaming during the Geldof concerts so why not also the Indian young today in jeans and t-shirts? But was there any, real surviving and disturbing sympathy? Then why not concerts for those dying from starvation in Amlushope (in Midnapore) in Purulia and many, many other places like Kharsawan, of which we see flashes, clips in the TV news and then forget them? TV has failed the greatly lauded plays of the Bohurupee and IPTA have become stunted to casual communication and young people are not flocking to the hungry districts any more. Some did slide off their backsides and rush to Gujarat and Latur after the earthquakes there as others had done to a lesser, but no less dynamic, degree during the Bihar famine which JP grappled with almost single handed. Why this passivity, this drying up of the soul? Why does indifference sit so heavy on the children of the English-educated with their dreams focused on the West and not on those who have been persuaded to emerge from the forests in Andhra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa for a dialogue with the Central Government? Television for us is a riffle through utterly predictable pictures of consumer goods clothes, bathroom-fittings, toothpaste, cars, mobikes, pelvis-wrenching goods dance contortions, interviews, films and tourist puff. Sounds like a lot but adds up to a zerosum game. Theres much of the same abroad, too, but when they want to redeem they redeem. The American election is a TV blanket the covers everything, in the USA and also in Britain. In university lecture halls, town meetings, presidential debates, restaurants and pubs its the same themes and questions over and over again. But there are exceptions. A debate in George Washington University with four senators, two on each side, along with a couple of party spokespeople or advisers ruled by very good moderators make American issues come to life. Likewise the impact of American foreign policy set in Berlin with the European view of the election being picked over. These have brought information and awareness but at its best, Television can bring comparisons. This came home to me in a BBC programme on the Sudan which focused on a little baby daughter too weak to live carried by her father to the graveyard wrapped in farewell clothes. We saw in her eyes the helpless stare of death and our senses constricted. But she didnt die. She was still warm and her father pulled her out of the grave. An aid-worker nurse gave her an injection, some food and something to drink and she came to life again before our eyes. The rest of the film is set around the girl, glorious by alive and, after a series of tribulations, back in her village with her father smiling at the same photographer who had recorded her near-death, now full, goldenly full of her second life and her ever-grateful father. Such films bring tears to the eyes, soon to be forgotten. But at their back they bring a slow-burning anger and negative self-pity at our own uselessness. Ever new restaurants are sprouting in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata with ever bold decor and food (and, often drink) from all the continents. But a few yards away there would be families living on the footpath, children, taught to beg, bemused mothers in rags with worry in their eyes about where the next meal will come from. We laugh our goodbyes and the car rolls away to our comfortable homes. So the seat of starvation is not only in Darfur or Northern Uganda its not more than few yards from our door. The high-noise fire works, fabulously expensive, have already begun to burst, the new world class malls in Gurgaon are all lit up for Divali. I wonder what Vivekananda would have done in todays feast of colour, bangs and razzmataz? What might he not have done with the modern means of communication and transport? Would he have endured whole families committing suicide for debt and want of food, and skeletal old women repeatedly and uselessly visiting the District Magistrates office with an application for a tiny pension for food? In the mean- time, so many lakhs are spent on innovative pandals, Ganesh Chaturthis and fiestas planned for Christmas just around the corner. |
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