Joy Of Reading

Do Walls Work?

DO WALLS WORK?

 Do walls work? I wonder.

They are necessary to support the roof of a house. However, do Walls work to divide countries,  cities and people?

            The new convert to building Walls is President Trump. His wall will be 1900 miles long and at a guestimated cost of around 25 billion dollars. His press Secretary, Spicer, recently showed the press a new version of this great wall.

Before President Trump’s wall, Israel started building its wall. Israel is building a wall through Bethlehem, and across their land, to keep certain Palestinians out. The Israelis are evicting the Palestinians from their homes and sacred places to accommodate the Wall. I do not know how high or how long this Wall will be. Walls, like these, have a tendency to grow both in height and in length. Walls, like medieval fortresses, cut both ways. This Wall will also keep the Israelis in.

Bethlehem is the birthplace of Christ; read whatever symbolism you want into this Wall. It is ironic that the Israelis have taken a leaf out of the German (East) belief in the Wall Theory to control the movements of people. The infamous Berlin Wall, was started at midnight on August 13, 1961 and by the time it was completed, the Wall was four meters high and 166 kms long. The East Germans too forced their people out of their homes and bricked up the doors and windows. So, homes became a part of the Wall. The German theory was that the Wall kept West Berliners out. It also, ostensibly, kept East Germans and East Berliners in. That Wall never worked, despite border patrols and guard dogs and searchlights. Many East Germans defied the Wall, and many died crossing over it. Many survived the crossing too. It came down in 1989; razed by the citizens of Berlin and not governments. They took ordinary hammers to the Wall, and shattered it.

            No doubt, the Israelis will refine their Wall too, as will President Trump’s. No doubt, it will grow too. There will be barbed wire, Wall patrols, guard dogs and searchlights. Many Palestinians will die crossing that Wall. And Mexican’s the American wall. These will be the terrorist and immigrants the Walls are built to contain. In that blood soaked land, it is hard to define who the terrorists are, as many innocents die too.

            The most famous Wall was the Great Wall of China. It can be seen from the moon and every modern day tourist is photographed standing on the Wall. It was not meant to become a tourist attraction. Nor was the Berlin Wall. However, these strange things happen to Walls of this nature. The Chinese emperor Shih-Huang-Ti of the Qin dynasty began building the Great Wall in 221. B.C and completed his portion of it by 204. B.C. When he died, it was 1900 kms long. Later emperors extended his grand effort to protect China and lengthened the Wall to 2400 kms. The average height of the Great Wall is 7.6 meters and the width around 9 meters. The theory behind this Wall was to keep out the nomadic tribes that were raiding China. Obviously, the Wall did not work as, a few centuries later, the Mongols swept over and around it to invade China, to establish an empire.

            I am sure there had been many Walls before the Great Wall, though not so magnificently conceived and executed. And there have been many Walls since.

Walls do not have to be built of brick and mortar. Walls can be invisible, though clearly defined in a peoples mind. The original Walls, before authorities thought of physical Walls, divided people into their social classes. There were the Aristocrats, the Priests and the Peasants, to keep it simple, separated by such inviolate Walls throughout the history of man and well into the 20^th century. In many European cities, there were Walled-in areas where the Jews had to live. These were the ghettoes.  In the last century, Revolts and Revolutions demolished these Walls, especially in Europe. The French demolished their social Wall in a Revolution that took place a century earlier. The people themselves razed those Walls and, though Europe is not exactly classless, the divisions are blurred, and not so harshly defined. Churchill called the Soviet Russian Wall the Iron Curtain. Iron was no stronger than brick and mortar. In the 1980s, Glasnost drew aside that curtain.  Even as a Wall, more a no-man’s land, still divides South from North Korea. In India, mental Walls remain firmly in place and well defined, either through caste or through religion.

            Our newest nation on the planet was also quick to build its Walls. America’s first Walls, as the European settlers spread out across the land, constantly moving west, were the Reservations. The American Indian (Native American) in their time were the terrorists. The Apache, Sioux, Mohican, Comanche and other tribes, fighting a losing battle against the superior numbers and superior firepower of the invaders, conducted guerilla strikes against the settlers. They killed with bows and arrows and spears and, later, guns. They did not possess bombs. Once they were subdued (read defeated and demoralized), they were penned within the Wall. The Wall (Reservation) was supposedly meant to protect them but the Reservations were only prisons to contain and be rid of them, finally.

The other famous American Wall in the south was Segregation. Black people (African Americans ) knew exactly where the Wall stood between them and the white folk.  It was a fluid Wall that ran through restaurants and buses, schools and churches. A Wall does not have to be solid; it is instilled in the minds of the suppressed. It is also a weapon of terror, especially when it is invisible and in the mind. When do you know you have crossed it? A look, a word spoken out of place, could be your end. The Americans fought a civil war partly because of that Wall. It fell finally only in the 1960s and 70s. The South African Apartheid Wall, that saw the condemnation of that country for decades, equally suddenly collapsed.

            So, how long, both in length and in time, will the American and Israeli Walls exist? There is no doubt they will grow longer. It is the nature of these Walls.  It will encircle the Palestinians, even as the American Wall excludes Mexicans. Every Wall comes with its own baggage that cannot be contained by it. The Wall never grants the wishes for which it was built. A Wall does not bring peace of mind, security or serenity to the people who build the Wall. A Wall only becomes a challenge for the people it is meant to contain or exclude. They will devise ways and means over and around it, even as the Mongols breached the Great Wall of China.

            Every Wall reveals only that man has exhausted his imagination, and compassion, to deal with a people whom he desires to reject from his vision of the Promised Land. We have not progressed far since 221 B.C.  The Bethlehem Wall, like all Walls, is only a monument to failure. One day, the toot of a trumpet could bring it tumbling down. Like that Wall in Jericho.

           

           

           

joy of reading

FAIR & LOVELY

FAIR AND LOVELY

 My hair stylist, once known as a lowly barber, was not watching his scissors, snipping away my locks. Instead, he was studying my face with one of those commercial looks I have learnt to recognize. I waited for the pitch – head massage, body massage, face massage, hair dye. Usually, it’s the hair dye that will turn my hair, not black, but a muddy orange.

Finally, he announced for all in the salon to hear: ‘You are dark, sir. I have a good whitener, 100 percent you will become very fair.’ My aunt, now long gone, always made a similar remark, without the ‘good whitener’. After a long winter in New York, where the sun barely shone and the cold cut one’s face, my aunt’s first remark when I visited her was ‘you’ve gone dark’.

            I saw what my hair stylist saw. A brown face. It was the same brown I had been born with, and had never bothered about. It was part of my package like legs, arms, a head, a pair of eyes and black hair, thinning fast, on my head. I’ve had my hair cut all over the world, and the hair stylists have never remarked on my colour. At least, not to my face. He cut my hair, I paid and walked out.  Maybe he commented to a colleague later ‘that fellow had a brown face’.

Driving home, I stopped for a red light, a rare occurrence in the city, causing chaos behind me. Cars with red lights never do.  A scooter pulled up beside me, driven by a woman, She wore a long sleeved, winter jacket, zipped up, and grubby white gloves. She wore a helmet too, which was remarkable enough. It was 40 degrees in the city but the sun would never dare stain her delicate skin.

            During the IPL tournament there was a commercial of a man running along the beach, having a shower (half naked muscled torso which made me tuck in my tummy) and then rubbing some stuff on his face. I thought it was an after shave. But when he brandished a dip stick showing the varying degrees of lightness, I realized it was a commercial for a skin whitener.

            Of course, we have known for a long time that we Indian are the most racially conscious people on this planet. The Australians are amateurs compared to our discerning eyes which can pick the slightest variations in brown.  We’re obsessed with colour – the matrimonial columns in our newspapers are filled with ‘fair’ complexioned brides and grooms searching for the perfect colour match. The Indians we see now in our countless commercials are no longer even a lighter shade of brown. They are as white as any Anglo-Saxon could ever get. They are so white on my screen that my eyes hurt. Europeans are actually pink, not the ghostly white of our commercial models.  Thankfully, they still have black hair but, if the whitener sellers could pull it off, they would be blondes or redheads, selling us scooters, cell phones and soaps.

            What brought us to this? History? In the earliest days the divide would have been Aryan/ Dravidian. The colour contrast between the nomads of central Asia and the indigenous natives of the sub-continent. This colour colonialism had to have continued through the many invasions – the Afghans, the Mughals and, finally, the whiter than white, though they did turn puce in our Indian sun, the British. Subconsciously, we equate superiority with colour. White is better than brown, brown better than black. And as the internet and television invades our lives, we’re constantly bombarded with images of the white superiority. Those who leach and bleach their skin, all those super white models in our television commercials, are embarrassed at their own colour. They yearn for the white that will equate them with the European. While the Europeans spend billions of dollars on sun tan lotions, sun beds and lying on hot beaches, so as to look brown as Indians.

            The human race is never happy with that it’s got, naturally.

ENTER QUEEN LEAR , written by me,starred Jenny Runacre in the production which ran for 3 weeks at the Drayton Arms Theatre, London, from September 13th to October 2nd 2016.

An ageing, glamorous film star falls in love with a younger man, a refugee. Now, past her cast-by-date, she accepts to play Lear as a woman just to act again. Throughout rehearsals, she is confronted by the men in her life – two ex-husbands, two sons and the younger lover. Her only real constant is her relationship with her long time female dresser.
Jenny Runacre said: “I do really think it is a fascinating play, with so many levels in it. It is not very often that an actress is given a role that has so much meat in it.”

If you want to listen to the play, I adapted it for the radio and you can hear it by clicking on the link below.

http://www.wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk/product/enter-queen-lear/

 

 

   

Doctrate on my writing

There is now a doctorate published on my writings. A bright young man from a university in Pune, now has a Ph.D after reading my novels and non-fiction works. You can check this out on this web link:

http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/95798

THE AXXISS TRILOGY

THE AXXISS TRILOGY. (Scholastic)
Murari leaves his readers with almost a Sudoku, which until solved, the reader cannot put the books down. Thus, shifting the power to the reader, Murari manages like an astute dramatist to pull his reader into his plot, involving him, engaging him or her, till he has found the answer. He must now join the famous six teenagers searching the meaning of those numbers, put singly, or in a combination, or whatever. - GOODREADS