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Ways Of EscapeBy Subhash Chandra Chattopadhyay |
| In India, the desperate have traditionally taken to the road to find in solitary travel the cure for the kind of loneliness that society at times immerses an individual in. | The Web is often the refuge of even the least desperate of us. |
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I have travelled widely through India, which to me is in many ways still the last frontier left on earth, with no chain link fences or "No Tresspassing" signs to block the determined.
You can walk from one end of the country to another in a straight line without social or legal hindrance provided, of course, you are capable of crossing hills, mountains, water bodies and clambering through huts with occasional bodies engaged in furious intercourse. It is perfectly permissible to walk through somebody's house proffering perfunctory proprieties without being shot at.
In the old days it was even better. With the good sahibs maintaining a semblance of order and separating the chronically conflictuous, a well girded traveller could traverse the legendary Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to the Khyber Pass. No border guards, checkposts or trigger happy soldiers to gun you down. The only unfortunate part is that before the colonialists left they made up for all the good work they had done in the Subcontinent by trying their best to return it to the pristine past when the whole bloody place was made up of rival kingdoms who fought more amongst themselves than with outsiders. This terrible reality returned the moment the Union Jack, God Bless the Queen, came down on the Subcontinent. My father was left homeless. I with an "English" education that made me a brown sahib, distinctly disadvantaged in a society where chust Urdu or Hindi was the new order of the day. There were other orders as well. Including, you shall change the names of all streets with British names, turn the familiar into the imcomprehensible and finally prove to the world and history that Clive was a petty thief compared to the new conquerors of the Subcontinent. And so I lived on, watching the outrageously dis-tasteful monuments of the new order pullulalting amidst the ghastly grandeur of a parasitical past. The only escape was travel. There were still some places the combined assault of the colonialists and the neo-colonialists (all brown, black and in between after them) had not touched. Despite the borders, manned by armed guards, the Subcontinent remains a way of escape. The world needs a place for the flotsam and jetsam of the world. A place where the feckless, the under-achievers and the ontologically displaced can feel at home. |
To those who have the time to follow some of the more useless journeys in non-history, I dedicate these pages. May purposelessness guide your actions...
Subhash Chandra Chattopadhyay, as some canny readers might have guessed, is a mere pseudonym. The author is a member of the lower bureaucracy who wishes to maintain his anoynymity. |
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