Category: Reflections

The Path to Walk on, by Rabindranath Tagore

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 7 Comments

This, indeed, is the path to walk on.

It has wound its way through the woods to the fields, through the fields to the riverbank, next to the banyan tree; then it courses its way through the villages. As it moves further, beside the lush fields, amid the shadows of the mango orchards, by the bank of the Padma River, I cannot tell in which village it would wind up.

So many have passed by me on this path, some joining my company, others seen from afar; some with a veil over their heads, others without any; some walking to fetch water, others returning with water.

II

The day has retreated and darkness descends.

Once this path had seemed personal, intimately mine; now I see I carried a summon to walk on it only once, no more.

Past the lime trees, the pond, the riverbank, the cowsheds, the paddy mounds, the familiar glances, the known words, the acquainted circles, there won’t be any returning to say “Hey, there!”

This is the path to walk on, not one to return from.

This hazy evening, I turned back once and found the path to be an ode to many a forgotten footstep, all entwined in the notes of Bhairavi.

This path has summarized the stories of all its travelers in a single dirt trail; the one track that traverses between sunrise and sunset, from one golden gate to another.

III

“Dear walking path, don’t keep all the stories you have accumulated through the ages tied quietly into your dust strand. I am pressing my ears against your dust, whisper them to me.”

The path remains silent, pointing its index finger toward the dark curtain of night.

“Dear walking path, where have the worries and desires of all the travelers gone?”

The mute path doesn’t talk. It just lays down signals between sunrise and sunset.

“Dear walking path, the feet that embraced your bosom like a shower of wildflowers, are they nowhere today?”

Does the path know its end—where forgotten flowers and silent songs reach, where starlight illumines a Diwali of resplendent pain.

Translated by: Bhaswati Ghosh

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Latin America: A Journey Inside Out

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 13 Comments

The Duo Hits the Road

Two friends, bitten by the itinerant bug and armed with little more than a Norton 500 motorcycle and the carefree craze of youth, embark on a journey across a continent. Nothing exceedingly extraordinary about that. The human spirit of adventure has seen a lot of heroic trips being undertaken by daredevil travellers. Yet, what is it about the journey of these two Latin American friends that pulls curious onlookers like me to follow their trail to this day?

What is it about The Motorcycle Diaries that makes such a lasting impression on me and so many others? The fact that it isn’t just a travelogue, nor is it just another memoir of youthful impulsiveness; but that it’s a man’s inner journey happening hand in hand with the outer sojourn. It’s also your own journey—as a reader and as a person. A bit surreal to describe in words.

This is not a story of incredible heroism, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it be. It is a glimpse of two lives that ran parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.

[From The Motorcycle Diaries, by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]

Indeed, Ernesto Guevara hits the nail on the head there, at the beginning of the book. When I first read The Motorcycle Diaries some three years ago, I knew little about Guevara. He was this t-shirt and poster figure, the epitome of “revolution.” I only knew him as a left-inclined man who stood and fought for the rights of the oppressed. In hindsight, it’s a good thing that The Motorcycle Diaries, and not one of his political pieces, was the first Guevara writing I came across. The book surprised me. For, here I saw a 23-year-old young man, going on 24, just like any other of his age—bursting with restless energy and the spirit of quest. I saw this young man poking fun at himself, his older pal, and their often unfriendly motorcycle. I found little or none of the political rhetoric that Ernesto Guevara came to be associated with, just a few years since making this defining road trip. And layer by layer, chapter by chapter, I saw the young man changing, until the end of the nine-month journey, when he seemed to have come of age and matured way beyond he could have imagined at the outset.

On Celluloid

And then last month, just like he had done three years ago with the book, my brother gave me the DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries. I had pestered him a lot to bring home the movie. Yet, when it finally arrived, I didn’t show any urgency to watch it. I let it lie until my brother rang an alarm bell saying the DVD was a friend’s and had to be returned. That’s when I finally watched it.

Why this lack of interest? Did I think the film would be boring? No. I just felt sceptical about the movie because I wasn’t so sure the book could be adapted for celluloid without a measure of documentary-like info-dumping. And even though the book is written chronologically, it still has this scattered and fragmented persona, which I thought would make a film made from it less cohesive.

And this is why they say, don’t think about it based on what you read. Go, watch the film.

The silver screen version of The Motorcycle Diaries moved me just as much as Guevara’s own words had. In fact, there couldn’t be a better rendition of the book in film format than the one we now have from Director Walter Salles. It stands out for all the elements that define fine filmmaking. Besides being technically slick, it impacts the viewer at a very human level. That is where it’s real victory lies. It entertains you wholeheartedly yet leaves you uneasy by posing difficult but nagging questions through young Ernesto’s observations.

 

http://www.motorcyclediariesmovie.com/home.html

The breathtaking scenery first. Guevara himself does a fantastic job of describing the spots he and Alberto Granado pass by and visit during their epic journey through five South American countries—Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The manner in which he shows a human intimacy with the immediate landscape can put a lot of fiction writers to shame. He talks of the sea as his confidant and friend that can absorb all secrets and offers the best advice, if only you carefully listen to its various noises.

 

http://www.motorcyclediariesmovie.com/home.html

That the filmmakers chose to shoot the film at the exact locations where the journey took place doesn’t just enhance its credibility, but also makes for exhilarating visual treat. Cinematographer Eric Gautier superbly captures the scenic charm of the places on his camera, often giving the viewer the feeling of being there with Ernesto and Alberto. And the landscapes covered are magnificently diverse—from the green of Argentina, to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to Peru’s mountain tracks. I seriously want to see Latin America based on what the film portrays.

The Light Side

The Motorcycle Diaries is a testimony of Guevara’s brilliant sense of humour, something he is said to have possessed until the very end, even when he turned into a hard-boiled guerrilla fighter and a mass leader.

Alberto, unmovable, was resisting the morning sun’s attempt to disturb his deep sleep, while I dress slowly, a task we didn’t find particularly difficult because the difference between our night wear and day wear was made up, generally, of shoes.

[From The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]

Toward the end of the book, Ernesto lays out a neatly chalked-out “anniversary” routine he and his friend had devised to manage some food off unsuspecting people. The five-step program started with the two friends talking loudly with some local twang thrown in to pique the curiosity of those around them. A conversation would ensue, and our peripatetic friends would subtly enumerate their hardships on the road and then one of them would ask what date it was. As soon as someone told them the date, the other friend would let out a massive sigh, saying softly it had been a year since they started their journey, and they couldn’t even celebrate, they were so broke. Their “victim” would then offer some money, which the duo would refuse, before finally accepting it with reluctance. Their host then treats them to drinks. After the first drink, Ernesto refuses another one. The host persists, asking why he wouldn’t have another one, and after much requesting, Ernesto confesses that according to a custom in Argentina, he can’t drink without eating alongside.

In the film, actors Gael García Bernal (Ernesto) and Rodrigo de la Serna (Alberto) portray the “anniversary” act hilariously before a couple of Chilean girls, about their age. I was in splits watching the duo performing their antic, mischievous innocence and the desperation to fulfil their stomach’s cries leading them to stand-up comedy brilliance.

The Humanist Emerges

However, what set both the book and the film completely apart are the pertinent and often not-so-easy questions about the human condition. As Guevara and Granado travel farther and deeper, they have a close brush with the lives of the poor and exploited. This becomes possible because of the tramp-like nature of their journey for the greater part of the trip, since their bike breathes its last at a location in Chile. As they hitchhike their way through the Latin American landscape, a lot of times aboard trucks laden with indigenous people, Ernesto realises the tremendous humiliation meted out to poor people across the continent—whether it be a mining couple they meet in Chile who are persecuted for the man’s “communist” leanings, or the abject conditions to which Peru’s native mountain tribes are relegated, or the hapless state of leprosy patients they visit at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru. Every instance of coming across such injustice pains young Guevara and his anger and frustration is reflected throughout the book. Director Salles brings out this sense of pain very well in the film.

It isn’t unnatural for a human to feel moved or sad at the plight of a fellow human. Most of us would feel the same emotions that Ernesto does. However, there are a few human beings, for whom the pain becomes so intense they can’t remain silent about it. Even though the book is primarily a record of Guevara’s and Granado’s journey, you can see Ernesto belongs to that rare breed of empathising human beings.

The book carries tell-tale signs of the man he was to become later. The man who would galvanise poor peasants across Latin America to take up armed struggle for the life of dignity to which they had a birth right yet which was denied to them for lifetime after lifetime. And underlying the most violent of approaches he undertook as a guerrilla commandant was his deep love for human lives that had been rendered powerless through centuries of unjust subjugation. The Motorcycle Diaries—the book and the film–reveal this loving, soft-hearted man time and again. We see Ernesto’s vision of a United Latin America, when at a party thrown by the staff and patients of the San Pablo leper colony to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday, he delivers a speech saying “the division of Latin America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictional.”

Yet, the maturity doesn’t happen overnight. The self discovery happens layer by layer, and here, the filmmakers pull it off with great sensitivity, without the slightest trace of sensational exaggeration.

The symbolic nine-month journey is also a tale of immense physical grit. The two friends brave harsh blows of nature—from walking through a completely uninhabited stretch at pitch dark, to trekking their way through forests and the Atacama Desert, even as Ernesto falls prey to a series of asthma attacks (he was chronic asthmatic).

The Motorcycle Diaries includes a few letters Guevara wrote to his parents. These lend a fresh dimension to the book, reflecting his close bonding with family members with whom he freely shares his disenchantment with the appalling conditions of the poor across Latin America.

Chillingly Prophetic…

Although it’s difficult and unfair to pick sections of the book as favourite, the parts I found the most chilling were those in which Guevara envisions a future for himself exactly as it unfolds years later. Early in the book he says his destiny is to travel. Indeed, in the succeeding years, right up to his death, he travels and travels—across the world—from Russia to Asia and Africa. Only now he is shorn of youthful indulgence and is a champion for the voice of the proletariat.

And again at the end of the book, in the very last chapter, “A Note in the Margin,” Guevara gave me goose bumps, when he predicted his death.

“…I knew when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people…I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa.”

[From The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]

As insensitive as it may sound, perhaps it was only fitting that Guevara died young. He remains a youth icon through generations, although it’s sadly ironical that the ideals he stood for are now mere footnotes in history for the very people who use merchandise bearing his image.

Ernesto Guevara would be 78 today (June 14). In my opinion, people like him don’t die. Only their bodies perish. Happy birthday, Che.

And a useless bit of trivia: Ernesto Guevara shares his birthday with yours truly. How old am I? Let’s hope like Che, forever young.

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The Alleyway, by Rabindranath Tagore

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 15 Comments
One day, this concrete-laden alleyway of ours set out—twisting her way right and left again and again—to find something. But she would get stuck at every move–a house on the right, a house on the left, a house right across.

From what little she could see by glancing above, a streak of the sky revealed itself—as narrow and as skewed as herself.

She asked that filtered slice of sky, “Tell me sister, of which city are you the blue alley?”

In the afternoon, she would catch a glimpse of the sun for just a moment and think, “I couldn’t understand any of that.”

Thick monsoon clouds cast shadows over the two rows of houses, as if someone had scratched out the rays of light from the alleyway’s notebook with a pencil. Rain slid through the concrete, swooshing the snaky stream away with a snake charmer’s drum beats. The road became slippery, the umbrellas of pedestrians hit each other, and the water from an open drain suddenly splashed up to an umbrella, stunning its carrier.

Overwhelmed, the alleyway uttered, “There wasn’t any problem when it was parched dry. Why this sudden pouring trouble?”

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At the end of spring the southern wind looks delinquent, raising swirls of dust and sweeping torn pieces of paper. The alleyway says, bewildered, “Which god’s drunken dance is this?”

She knows that all the garbage that gathers around her every day—fish scales, stove ash, vegetable peels, dead rats—are reality. With those around, she never thinks, “Why all this?”

Yet when the autumn sun slants itself on the balcony of a house, when the notes of Bhairavi float from the puja nahabat*, she thinks for a second, “Perhaps something big really lies beyond this concrete track.”

The day yawns; sunlight drops from the shoulders of the houses to rest in a corner of the alleyway, just like the slipping away of the end of a housewife’s sari. The clock strikes nine; the maidservant walks by, tucking to her waist a basket of vegetables she bought from the market; the smell and smoke of cooking envelopes the alleyway; office goers get busy.

And the alleyway thinks again, “All of reality is contained within this concrete road. What I had thought of as something big must be just a dream.”

* Music room or a tower from which live music is played/performed during festive occasions.

Translated by: Bhaswati Ghosh
Image courtesy: Flickr

Friend, True North, Ocean of Life

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 16 Comments


The day darkens as the sun’s about to set
Clouds swarm the sky, it’s the moon they want to get
Cloud overtakes cloud and colour cloaks colour
The dong-dong of temple bell rings loud and clear
Rain pours on that side, hazy goes the green
On this side of the horizon, a million gem stones shine
The cloudy breeze brings back a song of my childhood
Rain falls pitter patter, on the river comes a flood.

(Rain Falls Pitter Patter, Rabindranath Tagore)

That’s how you came into my life–in the playful guise of a grandfather sharing this eternal childhood ballad with the five-year-old me. This was the first of your poems I uttered–in a recitation competition for children. Ma taught me the poem and also your name, but back then, your name meant no more than a big, tough-to-pronounce word. You knew better; you drew the innocent heart in with the pitter-patter of rain and a million gem stones. Don’t I also remember the poem in which you talk about a little boy imagining playing hide-and-seek with his mother by becoming a champa flower? The boy’s wish, to quietly watch Mother go through her day–doing her worship ritual, reading the scripture in the afternoon, lighting the evening lamp on her way to the cattleshed–even as he remains hidden from her view, is something with which every child heart would commune. How did you know that, wise grandfather?

Even as the sea beckons at the river to join it, your ocean kept splashing gently across the humble stream of my life. Every Wednesday evening during my growing-up years, Ma would tune in to a radio station to listen to a fifteen-minute broadcast of your songs, sung by various artistes. I understood little of the words then, but your melody had made me a captive for life. In time, the words resonated too:


“My freedom is in the sky’s bright light,
My freedom is in dust and in the green of the grass.”

Your songs of freedom gave me the key to unlock the realm of unbounded freedom; of liberation that’s found in the blue of the sky, the green of the grass, in the hearts of all people, and in work that defies all danger and sadness.

Your immortal call of “Walk alone if no one heeds thy call,”has been the beacon that has guided many a lives through darkness, even after nearly fifteen decades since you called the earth your abode.

Slowly, your picture started becoming clear to me. As we paid homage to you on your birth anniversary in junior school, I was entranced by your music. When I sang in the chorus for Chandalika, it felt like swinging rapturously amid a musical joy ride–from the boistrous song of the curd-seller to the meditative melody of the Buddhist monk. Later, as I grew up, I wouldn’t tire of wondering how you brought about such magnificent diversity in your nearly three thousand songs. I haven’t stopped being amazed.

More songs, more memories, more of my little stream meeting the ocean that you were. I remember many a summer afternoon, sitting on the floor with Grandma, who would prod me to sing your songs to her. She had her favourites, no less. The one where you cried for peace with your disenchanted opening lines, “The world, fervid with violence, sees new skirmishes daily.”And the song of the seeker that goes like,

“Who is the crazy one that makes me wander from one neighbourhood to another?
What tune is it that rings in the air so melodiously?”

And then came the poetry, the novels, the short stories. All bearing your heartfelt understanding of humanity, nature, and the timeless mystique that governs the day-to-day functioning of the universe.


“In what way has the sun’s rays touched my life today
How has the morning bird’s song penetrated the cave’s darkness
I can hardly fathom how life has awakened after so long!

Life has awakened,
And water surges forth,
I am unable to hold back my desires and emotions any longer.”

(The Waterfall Awakens, Rabindranath Tagore)

Sanchaita, your anthology of selected poems, became my guiding star through many a difficult times. As I saw my feelings manifesting in your eloquent poetic expression, I wondered how you found access to my innermost being. How did you, dear true North?

In Gora, you taught me what nationalism and political consciousness really meant, without ever being didactic about it. I am stunned to see how relevant it reads even today, so many decades since you penned it. But isn’t timeless your middle name?


 Photographer: Eve Andersson

And how could I ever forget little Mini’s innocent-yet-demanding interactions with the unforgettable Kabuliwala? How effortlessly you made two such disparate characters bond. And the poignancy as Mini grows out of her carefree childhood even as the Kabuliwala yearns for the innocence of her toddler days, years later?

In my adulthood, you continued to enmesh me into your infinite realm. The songs became more prominent, and every time I sang them, my heart felt emancipated. What’s it with your words, mystic sage?


“The sky is laden with stars and the sun,
The earth full of life,
In the midst of it all, I have found my place,
Amazed I am, and thus bursts forth my song.”

The songs continue. In the middle of a chore, on seeing a fresh morning, or without any reason at all. How did you entwine them with the beat of my life, dearest friend?

Today, on your 145th birthday, am I paying you homage? Nah, I hardly can. I can’t even claim you as mine. For as you would have said, how can the stream claim the ocean? It can only aspire to merge with the ocean. And like my mother says, even oceans have limits, but Rabindranath is limitless.

You belong to the green of the grass, the song of the morning bird, the pain of the kabuliwala. And to the whole of humanity.


As I remember my life’s journey holding your hands, I only aspire for my country and the world, what you would have.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

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