Chaos to Creation: the enigma of Bob Dylan (Part: Three)

In 1968, Dylan came out from his eighteen-month long self-imposed exile, once more picked up his acoustic guitar and recorded John Wesley Harding, a soft, somber acoustic album very different from the surrealistic verbosity and flashy musical arrangements of Blonde and Blonde. Unlike the apparently impromptu manner in which he wrote the lyrics of his previous album, every song of the new album was written with more care and completed before he went for recording. The world he described in the songs, as Mike Marqusee has drawn our attention to, is loaded with connotative characters: the immigrants, drifters, outlaws, hobos, greedy landlords, hateful figures of unentitled authority, saints, martyrs, the rich and the poor. Though sounded simple and rustic, the narrative songs are in fact ingrained deep into elemental social themes, revealing several intertwined layers of subtle political message which went almost undetected to the listeners. During the sparkling 1968 Sing Out! interview, John Cohen asked him why his songs aren’t as socially or politically applicable as they were earlier. Absolutely conscious and confident about his intention, Dylan gave a categorical reply to the question and said: “Probably that is because no one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before, I saw it the way they saw it.”

Chaos to Creation: the enigma of Bob Dylan (Part: Two)

Dylan’s radical spell lasted for a brief period – between January 1962 and November 1963. While his music was been considered as the definitive proclamation of the sixties folk revival and its radical political thought, Dylan had clearly indicated that he is not the conventional folk singer who is just adapting traditional material for a new context, neither a political artist committed only to socio-political causes. Along with the situational songs, he was writing distinctively personal lyrics marked with private references of grief and anxieties, songs about relationship, about the nuances and contradictions of love. He did not hesitate to include a confounding and abstract composition Boots of Spanish Leather in his most politically charged album The Times They Are A-Changin’. Many decades later he complained in Chronicles, “As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now […] the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation […] I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.”

Chaos to Creation: the enigma of Bob Dylan (Part: One)

John Bucklen, the son of a miner, was Robert Allen Zimmerman’s closest high school friend and partner in his teenage musical adventures. The two grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota – once the largest of the many mining towns on the iron-ore-rich Mesabi Range. Just a year after the Zimmerman family moved here from Duluth in 1948, the town witnessed a two months long miners’ strike demanding pensions and insurance rights from the Oliver Iron Mining Company – a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation. The Zimmermans were middle-class Jews and owned a household appliance store in Hibbing. Bucklin’s family depended on his mother’s earnings from sewing after his father was injured in a mining accident which restricted him from working again. By the late fifties, Hibbing’s mining community started to encounter the harsh realities of layoffs and regularly shutting down of mines as the two World Wars had seriously depleted much of the high-grade iron ore of the Mesabi Range. When the two friends parted away in November 1960, the town had become a place of limited prospect due to this bleak economic situation. Young Bobby Zimmerman had two aspirations in his mind when he left his hometown. The first was to meet his idol Woody Guthrie, who was bedridden by Huntington’s chorea in New Jersey’s Greystone Hospital. The second was to become a professional folk singer. Bucklen liked airplanes and so went on to join the United States Air Force.

The other side of Rabindranath Tagore

A remarkable aspect of Rabindranath Tagore’s life is the way his persona had changed radically from the restricted identity of an oriental romantic-mystic to the wide-ranging identity of a concerned citizen of the world. A poet, who had earlier attempted to blend spiritual and romantic notions in his quest of grasping the mystery surrounding individual human soul and the divine, increasingly began to give voice to the minds of the colonized and oppressed people and expressed his passionate desire to be identified as one of them. This absolutely stunning transformation is manifested in the non-conformist and modernist approach of his later works. Quite obviously, this aspect of his life was somewhat overlooked by his ostensible admirers who has imposed upon him the title “Gurudev” and converted him into a sacred idol. W. B. Yeats, who was primarily responsible for forming the synthetic image of Tagore as a mystic poet in the West found problems with his later works. Amartya Sen in his brilliant essay Tagore and his India, has rightly pointed out that the “neglect and even shrill criticism” that Tagore’s later writings received from these early admirers arose from the “inability of Tagore's many-sided writings to fit into the narrow box” in which they wanted to place and keep him. “To those who do not read Bengali, Tagore is exclusively a literary person or a mystic of sorts,” regrets historian Tapan Roychoudhury. He further clarifies, “The fact that some two-thirds of his writings are serious essays, mostly on political and socio-eco­nomic problems of India and the crisis of civilization has been more or less ignored in Tagore scholarship.” (Source)

Kanu Sanyal: the last Naxalbari legend

Journalists who has reported the death of Krishna Kumar Sanyal, popularly known as Kanu Sanyal, couldn’t fail to describe two things. That he lived in a thatched two-room mud hut at Hatighisa village in Naxalbari where a worn out reed mattress and some plain rugs lay on the floor. His only other possessions were few books, clothes and utensils. The other thing they have noticed are the framed black and white portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao that hung on the mud wall. This description is given to confirm the simple yet ideologically dedicated lifestyle of the legendary Naxal leader who has committed suicide on 23 March. For the last one year, the undisputed leader of the Naxalbari uprising was ailing after a brain hemorrhage and had become too feeble to move outside his home. But even so, he refused treatment from any government hospital in Kolkata. How could he approach the State when he is fighting it? – Kanubabu used to argue. “I was popular once,” he bitterly stated in one of his last interviews, “I have lost my popularity. I am unwell. That is the reason I cannot organize the masses anymore.” Former comrade-in-arms Azizul Haque believes that his suicide is symbolical – a protest against “the slaughter of innocent people in the villages in the name of Maoism and its counter-measures”. Kanubabu was known to be severely critical about the Maoists who often torture and kill poor and innocent villagers for refusing to join their movement or for turning against it. “In this respect, I do not approve of today’s Naxals,” was his sharp and clear remark. The reason behind his suicide remains an enigma. Did he take the extreme step because he could not bear the pain of his diseases anymore? Was he depressed and frustrated by the current form of revolutionary extremism in the country? We can speculate whatever we like but the real truth will never be known.

Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal were the three famous leaders of the Naxalite rebellion that sparked off at Naxalbari on March 1967 when sharecroppers armed with conventional weapons rose in revolt against the local jotedars (landowners) and forcefully occupied farmland. On May 23, when a police force raided a troubled village in the area, armed peasants attacked them and killed a police Inspector. The police hit back two days later, by firing upon a crowd of villagers killing ten, including six women and two children. This event became a flashpoint and soon the movement spread like wildfire all over the land. Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal were the grass-root leaders who practically led the Naxalbari peasant uprising. While the two were involved with the day-to-day struggle, trying to spread the movement among the peasants and mobilizing them, the 49-year old Charu Mazumdar who was basically an ideologue was providing the theoretical guidelines. At some point during the incidence, the idea of capturing State power through an armed struggle was born in Mazumdar’s mind as he perceived that “there was an excellent revolutionary situation in the country with all the classical symptoms”.

Mazumdar had even predicted that Indian people will complete “the great epic of liberation” by the end of 1975. How did he predict this specific time limit? In a speech published as “March Onward, Day of Victory is near” in the September-December, 1970 issue of the Naxalite mouthpiece Liberation, Mazumdar explicates: if the idea of armed struggle that had originated in his “revolutionary consciousness” in 1967 could seep into the minds of ten million people by 1970, “why is it impossible then for those 10 millions to rouse and mobilize 500 million people of India in a surging war by 1975?” A brilliant prediction indeed! Mazumdar’s argument sounds infantile and awful today but during those days his fiery clarion call to “Make the 70s the Decade of Revolution” found wide response among the youth, especially among college and university students from affluent families. Ignited by the “romanticism” of an armed revolution, they jumped into the revolutionary fray to pursue Charu Mazumdar’s mistaken dream. In May 1969, on the hundredth birth anniversary of Lenin, Kanu Sanyal formally announced the formation of CPI(ML) at a rally in Kolkata’s Shahid Minar.

In a 2007 interview, Mazumdar’s erstwhile lieutenant Kanu Sanyal passed a caustic remark to strongly counter the popular belief that Charu Mazumdar was instrumental in initiating the Naxalbari movement. “Charu Mazumdar was never directly attached to the Naxalbari Movement. When the Naxalbari uprising took place, Charuda was bedridden at his Siliguri home, with a severe heart ailment,” Kanubabu bluntly declared in that interview. He further went on to affirm that Mazumdar’s “role was limited to providing the philosophical base for the Naxalbari uprising”. (Source) According to Kanubabu, while all the grass-root leaders of the uprising including him were underground, the radical minded people who became excited by the news of the uprising and wanted to join the movement was only able to approach Charu Mazumdar since he lived in the adjoining town Siliguri and was easily accessible. Mazumdar’s infectious, unequivocal and sharp rhetoric promptly induced and convinced the radicals to fight for the great cause of liberation.

There was serious difference of opinion among the leaders on the strategy of armed struggle from the initial stage of the movement. Mazumdar propagated for instant armed struggle by forming small and mobile guerrilla units which will annihilate individual “class enemies” and take over the lands. Completely ignoring the need of mass movements or mass organizations to build up popular support, Mazumdar announced that “guerrilla struggle is the only form of class struggle” and annihilation was its “higher form”. He thought that the “actions” will instantaneously lit fire among the masses and awaken them to revolt against the system. Though leaders like Kanu Sanyal too believed in armed struggle, yet they stressed on building up mass movement involving the entire working class and peasantry as the primary task before forcefully taking possession of farmlands owned by big landlords. Deploring Mazumdar’s treatise of individual killing, Kanubabu later sarcastically said, “Charuda never missed the opportunity to preach his line of ‘individual terrorism’, labeling it as the spirit of the Naxalbari Movement.” He further argued that, “In a people’s movement, individual feeling, individual anger must first become crystallized for a people’s movement to succeed.” Armed revolution cannot be forced on the people if the objective conditions are not present.

Charu Mazumdar who coined the slogan “China’s Chairman is our Chairman” had even gone to the extent to proclaim that, “He who had not dipped his hand in the hands of class enemies can hardly be called a Communist”. Infatuated by Mazumdar’s incendiary ideas, the Naxalites went ahead to accomplish India’s liberation and started killing landowners, their associates and agents, money lenders, petty businessman and police informers. Initially, the strategy had borne some fruits. Due to the fear of getting killed by the Naxals, many from the oppressor class in the remote villages either fled or knelt down before them creating a power vacuum in the areas to fill by the “revolutionaries”. The Naxals loved to call those areas as “liberated zones”. In numerous cases individual murders were perpetrated by local criminal and lumpen elements those who had silently infiltrated among the Naxalite rank and file. The top Naxal leadership soon started to access the revolutionary triumph and its spread by the number of class enemies killed by them. Jubilant by this initial “success” in some small pockets of a vast country, Charu Mazumdar and his followers started exaggerating their so-called revolutionary achievement, completely underestimating the mighty State power and also the imminent white terror backlash perpetrated by armed goons of the Congress Party.

Mazumdar committed another serious blunder when he granting full sway to the Naxal action squads to plan and execute their own programmes. The squads started to function independently without any coordination between each other which intensified reckless violence and more bloodshed. Instead of creating confidence among the masses, Mazumdar’s erroneous strategy of revolutionary terror largely alienated the masses from the movement. Soon the State forces swung into aggressive action. Kanu Sanyal was captured along with 37 comrades by the police from his northern Bengal jungle hideout on August 1970. Charu Mazumdar was arrested in Kolkata on 16 July 1972. Twelve days later he died in police custody. The movement collapsed into shambles after being brutally crushed by a massive State repression called “Operation Steeplechase”.

Charu Mazumdar desired for an instant revolution – he was literally in too much hurry. His deteriorating health condition could be the vital reasons why the man became so frenetic to achieve the liberation of Indian masses by 1975. Whatever might be the reason, his ultra left-adventurism and revolutionary romanticism was primarily responsible for the heavy losses of precious lives within and outside the movement. Making a pointed attack on Charu Mazumdar’s tactical eccentricity, Kanubabu had stated, “…with arms in hand, youths tend to believe they can bring about a revolution by using bullets alone. But the reality is, they simply can’t. Without a solid mass base, all efforts will be futile.” In his later years, Kanubabu became an unabashed critic of the common perception that gun-culture is the ultimate identity of a communist revolutionary and continued to say that acts of terror can only damage popular movements and alienates the masses.

After his release from Visakhapatnam jail where he was imprisoned for seven years, Kanubabu took the initiative to form the Organizing Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (OCCR) to assimilate splinter Naxal groups. In May 1985, OCCR merged with the Communist Organization of India (Marxist-Leninist). In June 2003 he formed a new CPI(ML) and kept his political activities confined in north Bengal region. Taking up local issues, he continued working quietly among the peasants and tea garden trade unions. Kanubabu was a severe critic of the Left Front government’s industrialization policy as he felt that the policy will only benefit the imperialists. He had also firmly voiced his opposition to the land acquisition methods in Singur and Nandigram. At the same time he was very much skeptical about Mamata Banerjee and the rainbow alliance led by her party, the Trinamool Congress. He had no doubt in his mind that the alliance “lacks the political will to work for the common people”. On a June 2009 interview Kanubabu had also spoken about his disapproval of the Lalgarh agitation. He considered the Lalgarh agitation “strictly an ethnic insurrection by the Adivasi community”. Condemning the Maoists for exploiting the Adivasis to carry forward their agenda of individual terrorism, he had thundered that, “Lalgarh is certainly not a Communist uprising”. (Source)

Since he had openly repudiated the ruthless violence of the neo-Naxals, popularly known as the Maoists, it is quite natural that their backers will consider Kanu Sanyal’s viewpoint as stale and redundant. A soft and lenient Kanubabu was indeed a disappointment for them in comparison to the fire eater Maoists. While Kanubabu lived and died inconspicuously in a remote north Bengal village and has certainly failed to develop into a “collector’s item”, the smart, crafty and “successful” Maoists have attracted the glossy attention of mainstream Indian media and ensured a high-profile, luxury position in it. The Maoist leadership and the neo-liberal media are equally comfortable when the image of a half-naked sexy model is presented next to the stunning image of a gun wielding grim faced Maoist women. For the Maoist leadership, it is free propaganda. For the media, both the images are sensational and thus a highly saleable commodity.

Highbrow intellectuals and celebrity activists who are singing the same tune to sanctify the Maoists and propagate their cause believes like Arundhati Roy that the noteworthy rebels are keeping “hope alive for us all” by creating “the possibilities for an alternative”. In a recent essay-cum-travelogue of her sponsored journey into the Maoists' hotbed Dantewada, Arundhati Roy writes, “Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone, we cannot judge him too harshly.” She wonders if Charu Mazumdar could have ever imagined that the tribals turned Maoist cadres of Dantewada are “the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest”. Roy is fascinated by the “superbly organised, hugely motivated” Maoist guerrilla fighting force and its members, those who always carry “a weapon and a smile”. She writes emotionally about one Comrade Kamla who told her that she likes watching “Sirf ambush video (Only ambush videos).”

Roy even endorses a Maoists' version of tribal history and shares it with her readers since in her warped “outlook” she measures the tribal people’s struggle for rights and the deceiving politics of the Maoists' as equivalent. Her opposition to the government’s anti-Maoist offensive “Operation Green Hunt” leads her to bizarrely eulogize the total militarization of everyday tribal life, the killing of a village panchayat president because he was a “Tata’s man” and the Maoists' Jan Adalat (kangaroo court) where they regularly try and execute their adversaries. Lionizing the ultra left movement, the believer Roy gets prompted to write, “Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever”. (Source)

Kanu Sanyal was counted out long before his mortal death; today’s neo-Naxals do not need a Charu Mazumdar either. And possibly they never really needed Mao! They just want apostles like Roy to spread their blood thirsty politics under the disguise of a noble intention.

History appears first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It seems that an over-enthusiastic and obsessive Roy has completely forgotten this basic lesson.

Image Courtesy: hindu.com

Charles M. Schulz – visionary and humanist: Part Two

Umberto Eco believes that Charles Schulz is essentially a poet and Peanuts is nothing but poetry in graphic form. In his 1963 essay The World of Charlie Brown, Eco has observed that the strip has an extraordinary capacity of “carrying tenderness, pity, wickedness to moments of extreme transparence” and a distinctive eminence where readers are accustomed to “…identify with the surface of things, a revelation that causes us to touch the depth of things.” Panel after panel Schulz’s artistic mastery is manifested in the graceful way he had moved from one kind of role to another. He can effortlessly drift from a funny cartoonist to a lyrical poet, from a keen social observer to a visionary philosopher almost unnoticed. Eco has also found that regardless of the diverse role he plays while creating the strip, Schulz’s art essentially remains “his version of the human condition” produced from everyday events. Peanuts can be read on several levels due to this assorted appeal and Schulz could create a pensive mood by infusing a tempting optimism and hope within the milieu of despair. Quite obviously, unrequited love became a central theme of Peanuts. The narrative has also given emphasis to various Christian themes. Even if the strip has distinctly represented the American way of life and Schulz had undoubtedly transpired himself into America’s conscience, the strip’s sheer chemistry of blending social and moral subjects with complex themes and ideas, its appealing characterization and lucid dialogues has touched million hearts across the globe. Readers have found it easy to relate themselves with the characters.

Although Peanuts featured only the children, the strip is certainly not about childhood. The losses, rejections and disillusionments faced by the children are mostly related with the psychosomatic torments of the modern industrial society. “Happiness,” Schulz had pointed out, “does not create humor.” According to David Michaelis, the author of Schulz’s recent biography, “In Peanuts, the game was always lost, the football always snatched away … the kite was not just stuck in a tree, it was eaten by it; the pitcher did not just give up a line drive, he was stripped bare by it, exposed.” The genius of Schulz lies in shattering the delusion about childhood inside the adult psyche. The children in Peanuts are actually representing the epitome of human life confronting all the unavoidable complexities of the adult world – depression, loneliness, melancholy, humiliation, struggle to succeed, fear, failure, anxiety and self-doubts. Schulz himself had hinted on the real essence of the strip by saying, “Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy.”

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Through the years, the strip has skillfully addressed various socio-political issues with a dry sense of humor. Reading Peanuts in a socio-political context can uncover interesting aspects of the strip. An early strip had lampooned present-day consumer culture by showing Charlie Brown getting disempowered by the false needs of consumerism. Charlie Brown purchases a wastebasket, unpacks it, and feels gratified by the usefulness of his purchase after throwing the useless wrapping paper into it. In a 1957 strip, Snoopy is seen holding his fist in the air and moving around like the fascist dictator Mussolini to suggest Lucy’s fascistic temperament. In a July 1970 episode, Snoopy gets trapped and tear-gassed with the rest of the crowd while delivering a speech at Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. The trouble was caused by a riot that broke out during a demonstration against dogs being sent to Vietnam, and then not getting back. In another remarkable episode, Charlie Brown’s African-American friend Franklin reveals that though he had three good memories once, he has forgotten all of them. Franklin’s revelation comes after the opening panels where Schulz had related “good memories” with “hope”.

The crabby Lucy’s psychiatric booth is another superb idea conceived by Schulz to ridicule the neurosis of modern civilization and its citizens. Lucy, who probably achieves tranquility through her insensitivity, councils the alienation, fear, anxieties and frustration of any patient, “who has a problem and a nickel,” with her aggressive psychobabble. In one of the episodes, Lucy counsel Charlie Brown to develop a personal philosophy which will carry him through times of stress. After thinking hard, Charlie Brown finds one: “Life is like an ice cream cone…you have to learn to lick it” which caused a stunned Lucy to yell, “That’s the most stupid philosophy I’ve ever heard!” In an early 1958 strip, Lucy’s tousle-haired brother Linus gets terrified after he mistakenly interpreted snowfall with nuclear fallout. In another episode, Linus finds a note carrying several parental advices in his lunch packet and anxiously reads it. When Charlie Brown inquires about his lunch menu, Linus replies, “Carrots, Peanut butter and Guilt”. A 1969 series show Linus’s teacher Miss Othmar losing her job for participating in an ongoing teacher’s strike. In a parody of the space race hype, Snoopy imagines himself as the first beagle to land on the moon and feels jubilant for “beating Russians”.

The strip had also carried an interesting number of popular culture references. Charlie Brown wears a Davy Crockett hat and is seen surrounded by Crockett merchandise, Linus turns depressed because Bob Dylan was about to turn thirty. Peppermint Patty tells Marcie “Has anyone ever told you that when you're mad, you look just like Billie Jean King?” and refers to Marcie’s “Billie Jean King glasses”. Snoopy imitates Mickey Mouse and leans against a wall putting on black glasses to resemble Joe Cool. There are many other popular culture references like pop singer Pat Boon, rock king Elvis Presley, baseball star Duke Snider, comedian Mort Sahl, the popular children television show Howdy Doody, The Beat Generation and sci-fi movies that can also be found scattered in the strip. In a 1958 strip Charlie Brown asks Lucy, “How did you ever get to be such a fuss-budget?” Lucy explains her source of inspiration by displaying all the “fuss” titled books she has studied. Every of the titles were a distorted version of actual popular book titles of that time. Lucy’s favorite title I Was a Fuss-Budget for the F.B.I. was derived from I Was a Communist for the FBI, a radio show and later film based on an undercover agent infiltrating communist organizations.

Charlie Brown’s baseball team had three regular girl members Lucy, Marcie, and Violet on the side – an ideal example of gender equality. He even refused sponsorship for his team because the sponsor objected having girls or dogs on the side. Toy piano prodigy Schroeder with his obsession with Beethoven becomes the symbol of cultural snobbism. Pig Pen is always dirty and messy but when his companions accuse him for his filthy appearance, Pig Pen loudly proclaims that he has clean thoughts and an immaculately clean conscience. When Charlie Brown laments after losing a baseball game, “How can we lose when we’re so sincere”, he epitomizes all the misfits of a human society gone paranoid. This superb dialogue is a testimony of why Charlie Brown is called “the most sensitive child ever to appear in a comic strip”.

Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally’s school building has a habit to drop bricks on people it didn’t like. Sally loves to talks with the building and frequently questions its authoritative existence. Burdened with numerous complains and criticism, the building collapses from depression. While presenting a report on rain in her class Sally reads, "This is my report on rain. Rain is water which does not come out of faucets...after a storm, the rain goes down the drain, which is where I sometimes feel my education is also going". Sally also considers her a good evangelist because she was able to “convince” a classmate about the superiority of Christianity – by hitting him with her lunchbox. In an obvious display of the darker side of his humor, Schulz once showed Lucy’s “still on the bottle” baby brother Rerun Van Pelt getting involved in a gambling scandal while playing for Charlie Brown's baseball team. But Rerun has a point. How will he know that gambling is wrong when he is “still new in the world”? Besides, he had only bet a nickel. “What else can you do with a nickel these days?” baby Rerun candidly spells out.

“I want to remind adults of the pressures children are always being put under,” Schulz once said. In various instances his calm observation has revealed several absurdities of the modern world. In a 1988 interview with Michael Barrier, Schulz had spoken about the strip’s relation to social issues:

I think the social issues that I deal with are much more long-lasting and more important than losing the White House…..People say, “Don’t you ever deal in social issues?” “Well, don’t you read the strip?” If you read the strip every day, you’ll see that I deal with more social issues in one month than some of these deal [with] in a whole year. But you have to be a little more sensitive to it. (Source)

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In the year 1968, Schulz introduced the little African-American kid Franklin in Peanuts. Franklin is the first African-American character to feature in a mainstream American comic strip. From the introductory episode located at a public beach, Franklin informs Charlie Brown that his father is fighting over in Vietnam. They quickly become friends and Charlie Brown invites Franklin to visit him at this house. Schulz had never emphasized on Franklin’s racial background and denied any political motivation behind this character. But showing Franklin at a racially integrated beach at the time when the presence of African-American families on American public beaches was rare, Schulz might have made an effort to express his view on race discrimination with his characteristic subtlety.

At the time when the civil rights movement was at its peak, the introduction of Franklin was obviously controversial. Schulz received a letter of objection from a Southern editor for showing Franklin sitting in the same row in school with Peppermint Patty. United Features too didn't like to see an African-American child inviting his white friend to come on over to his house and asked Schulz to change it. In the same Michael Barrier interview, Schulz had expressed his displeasure against the syndicate for objecting Franklin’s introduction into the strip. The dispute on the issue finally ended after Schulz threatened United Feature's President Laurence Rutman: “Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit.” Schulz continued to draw Franklin attending school with his white friends.

Franklin is a thoughtful and sensitive kid who frequently quotes from the Old Testament. He is an active and serious student who reads psychology books and refuses to play a game of marbles after school because “I have a guitar lesson at three-thirty…right after that I have little league, and then swim club, and then dinner and then a ‘4H’ meeting.” He can ingenuously ridicule Lucy’s psychiatric booth by calling it a lemonade stand. He is the center fielder of Peppermint Patty’s baseball team and has a common subject to converse with Charlie Brown – about his grandfather. Unlike the other characters, Franklin has the least anxieties and obsessions but when Peppermint Patty cries after she is forced by the school principal to wear shoes that hurts her, Franklin comments, “All I know is, any rule that makes a little girl cry has to be a bad rule!”

Schulz had sought to depict the character in an unprejudiced manner and refused to make any overt political statement through him. Franklin was naturally accepted into the integrated milieu of the strip, treated as any other character and his existence was as normal as the other members of the gang. But still Schulz could not avoid being impaled by critics for showing Franklin as a “token black” character who had “no personality traits at all”. (Source) He had never addressed the ‘race issue’ openly because he believed that race was not his subject. He didn’t want to draw things unless he really understood them. Though on occasions, race did appear as an issue in the strip. While watching Franklin practicing ice-hockey to “become a great hockey player”, Peppermint Patty asks him, “How many black player in the NHL, Franklin?” Readers are divided on whether this is a racial comment or a question addressed to white America. (Source) In the animated film A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a particular scene became the subject of severe criticism due to its “casual racism on display”. In that scene, seven members of the gang, including Snoopy, joins together to celebrate Thanksgiving and Franklin is shown sitting alone on one side of the table, on a fragile beach chair below the level of others. The scene has been read by critics as a subtle but insidious depiction to ascertain Franklin as a “racial outcast”. (Source) Whether this one-off example proves anything about Schulz’s race outlook remains arguable. But Schulz’s handling of Franklin is definitely different from the typical African-American stereotype depicted in American comics.

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Charles M. Schulz had “changed the entire face of comic strips” thinks Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson further acknowledges that “there's not a cartoonist who's done anything since 1960 who doesn't owe Schulz a tremendous debt.” The Times called the Peanuts characters “international icons of good faith”. The New York Times editorial defined Peanuts as “an ongoing parable of contemporary American existence”. Garry Trudeau called it, “the first (and still the best) postmodern comic strip”. The strip continues to receive heaps of praise and gratitude even today. But there is also a growing school of thought that wants to remove the visor of appreciation and read the strip differently.

Like all great art, Peanuts also must be read objectively; with extreme care and attention. There are skeptics who believe that a genius with a tremendous mastery on medium can also elusively intoxicate minds and push people towards the realm of fabricated believes. How a comic strip that is devoted to failure did achieve such a universal success? Is Peanuts successful because it has worked like a palliative in the mind of the readers and diverted them from the rigors of their daily survival? Does Charlie Brown’s inability to establish meaningful relationships, his guilt, futility and subjection somehow create an off-putting feel about the complexities of life? Was there an innate but generous escapist feel that worked silently within the brilliant ideas of Peanuts? Did Schulz deliberately underestimate the social powers that controls life and ignored to expose them? Did he instead, accentuated too much to comprehended and explain psychological and emotional aspects through funny episodes involving funny looking children? For a genuine evaluation of Schulz and his creation, these awkward questions need to be debated.

(Return to Part One)

References:
1. Chip Kidd edited: The Art of Charles M Schulz
3. Charles M Schulz: You really don’t look 50 Charlie Brown
4. Charles M Schulz: The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970 (Vol. 10)
4. Comics.com website
5. Annotations of The Complete Peanuts
6. Umberto Eco: The world of Charlie Brown (reprinted in the collection of essays Apocalypse Postponed)
7. Calvin Harlan: Visions and Invention, an introduction to art fundamentals

Image Courtesy: tributes.com

Charles M. Schulz – visionary and humanist: Part One

When Charles M. Schulz died in February 2000 after a battle with cancer, he was already famous and richer than any other comic strip artist in the world. He had achieved this phenomenal commercial success after a quiet start and became the highest paid newspaper cartoonist in the history of the medium. Over the course of fifty years till his death at the age of 77, Schulz had grown into a cultural icon of his era along with his creation Peanuts, reaching the peak of recognition between 1965 and 1982. The licensing agency United Features Syndicate Inc. earns billion dollars every year from Peanuts merchandise and paraphernalia. Schulz is the only American comic strip artist who was honored by Louvre with a retrospective show in 1990 – a rare honor for a cartoonist, keeping in mind that comic strips are generally considered as a trivial art form and hence not taken seriously by connoisseurs of art. Peanuts has introduced some of the most loving fictional characters of the twentieth century and is considered to be amongst the greatest comic strips of all time. While this strip has primarily dealt with the daily conflicts, complexities and torments of human life through a filter of innocence, the deeply insightful work cannot be tagged just as a bleak representation of every day reality. Schulz’s intention was to deliver dignified humor to his readers; he wanted to see them happy. He gradually developed a sensitive but highly personal language that spoke with absolute integrity and depth. His simple looking art was able to connect with his worldwide readers emotionally, equally charming innocent children and complex adult minds. The central theme of Schulz’s art was relationship – a timeless subject having a universal appeal.

Schulz had a rare ability to overcome all sorts of professional constrains and obstacles rising from the contradictions of a profit driven industrial-commercial production cycle. Instead of falling to its prey he had excellently converted them into his advantage. His artistic efforts and humanistic style has deeply inspired and influenced many of his fellow travelers who have passionately admitted to be greatly indebted by him for expanding the possibility and dimension of the art form. One among them is Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. While paying a warm homage, Trudeau explained how Schulz had, “... completely revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and intellect.”

The creative journey of Charles M. Schulz started in 1947 with Sparky’s L'il Folks, a single-panel weekly comic strip. United Features soon changed the strip’s title into Peanuts which made its debut in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. All through his life Schulz never ceased to loathe the new title imposed on his strip as he always considered it as the “worst title ever thought up for a comic strip”. However, the production manager from United Features who was responsible for the title later tried to justify himself with the claim that he had to name the strip without actually seeing it! The four panel format carrying Schulz’s highly expressive drawings ran everyday on 2,600 newspapers in seventy-five countries and reached to more than 355 million readers. The strip got translated into twenty-six languages and was merited to be the world’s most widely read comic strip during its heyday. Even today, Peanuts continues to appear in most of the newspapers that was publishing the strip when Schulz was active and alive. According to the United Features website, the strip “consistently ranks at the top of newspaper readership polls worldwide.”

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The foremost appeal of Peanuts is certainly its unique visual style. The extremely funny, simple looking yet highly sensitive drawings have always provided a rare freshness to the 17,897 strips that Schulz had created during his lifetime, all by his own hand. One can imagine how difficult it was to create a comic strip each day for fifty long years – the “never-ending burden of having to do something day after day after day”, to regularly generate new ideas and maintain a high level of quality. Schulz had to repeat his motifs and few basic themes time and again but was largely successful to preserve the magical quality of his strip all the way through. This is undoubtedly a phenomenal achievement.

It is well-known that Schulz had worked on every part of the strip alone, carrying out all the drawings with lettering, inking the backgrounds and writing the immaculate dialogues. He even drew the sheet music in the strips by hand. The apparent ingeniousness of his child-like drawings is in fact extremely sophisticated and formal in nature. Lucy leaning on Schroeder’s toy piano, Linus holding his security blanket, Charlie Brown hitting or pitching in his game outfit, a running, dancing or flying Snoopy, Peppermint Patty snoozing on her school desk, the typical somersaults and falls – all look fairly simple as a form but not really easy to draw. Schulz succeeded as a pictorial storyteller because his eyes were able to recognize the minimum clues that can express maximum message.

While drawing the strip, Schulz used pencil mock-ups as less as possible – only “to get the heights and space right”. He drew the faces directly from a 914 Radio crow-quill nib. The inward and outward pressure of the nib has provided a free linear rhythm and spontaneity to his strikingly beautiful drawings. As a pictorial composition, the panels of Peanuts are a spectacle of playful, expressive, polyphonic and tectonic line elements with directional contrasts. Schulz could inject a rare energy and grace in his tender and neatly rendered line drawings with remarkable variety, inventiveness and wit. On many occasions these drawings have achieved their expressive extremes to create visual poetry.

The linear tension of a Schulz composition is limited within the boundary of a square or a rectangle. These flat formats have an inherent psychological and physical peculiarity. The two-dimensional surface of a square or rectangle has a strange compatibility with the three-dimensional concept of the viewer’s mind. A diagonal line placed on a flat surface can project forward and backward depth instantly. When a line or a shape is placed upon a flat surface, the eye instead of focusing only on the line or shape is more likely to create a sense of pictorial depth. This perceived depth enhances the quality and scope of the given surface and converts it into a lively pictorial space. The perceptual forces are also relatively easy to control within the fixed boundaries of a square of rectangular panel space. Schulz became extremely aware of this phenomenon and cleverly used the perceptual relation between objects, shapes and figures as a structural and expressive advantage while drawing his strip.

There are some unique features in his cartooning style. Graphic marks are the indispensable property of a Schulz drawing. Juxtaposed or detached placement of dots, inverted commas, hyphens, a spiral, a little curve or wavy line became the graphic shorthand of Schulz that could lucidly express all sorts of human emotion – wonder, gloom, happiness, annoyance, grief, adoration or weariness. Most of the panel space is filled by one or two figures and their speech bubbles. The remaining space is either left empty or divided by using bare minimum props and settings. In several panels, only a horizontal or vertical stroke of line is sufficient to create the illusion of perspective. Except the speech bubbles, Schulz never required a voice-over narration to tell his story. A master with an economy of expression, Schulz can magnetize the readers by repeating a horizontal wall or a fence and two talking heads in every panel of an entire strip without being dull for a moment. Through this form of graphic simplicity Schulz continued to produce funny looking expressions and endearing gestures. A minimalist approach, sensible meandering of line, insightful use of pictorial space and a cinematic medium-shot viewpoint, all with impressive economy, has contributed the trademark visual style of the strip to stand out from the rest.

Peanuts took a long time to develop its readers. It also took many years for Schulz to mature from a draftsman to a highly skillful artist. He gradually eliminated all the aesthetic deficiencies from his artwork. The enormous round head of Charlie Brown in the early drawings were scaled down and fine tuned to get the perfect proportion and balance. The forehead of the figures flattened; the body curves became loose, wavier lines was introduced to enhance the design impact of the drawings. The beagle Snoopy deformed brilliantly to stand on his hinder legs from a four-legged semi-realistic beginning. Schulz later confessed that every time he drew Snoopy “he probably changes a little bit”. The naturalistic birds of the earlier strips transformed into Woodstock. The personalities of all Peanuts characters too developed alongside the transformed visual aspects of the strip. But under no circumstances did Schulz ever depart from his primary objective of drawing cartoons – the objective to draw funny pictures.

Schulz was conscious that he cannot draw the children from an adult perspective and so brought his viewpoint down to the level with children. His sarcastic humor rose from the everyday struggles of life as it passed through a filter of innocence. The eminence of sarcasm is noticeable in the way the strip has depicted the losses, cruelty and rejections of life in an apparently placid tone. Schulz, who was also a gifted writer of remarkable skill, knew how to effectively express all the complex ideas through his eloquent prose. Through words and graphic images he had created an illuminating and aesthetically refined language of his own. Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco has found his prose “almost courtly, in a language worthy of Harvard”. Eco has correctly observed that “these children rarely laps into slang or commit anacoluthon.” The Peanuts children were never seen to use an offensive word stronger than “Good grief!” while expressing their feelings even during the most despondent situations. The use of dignified verbal language with sparkling laconic wit is an indisputable feature of the strip.

(Part Two)

Title image: Poster of the 1990 Schulz retrospective at the Louvre Museum, Paris; curated to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Peanuts.

Image courtesy: rubypersson.com

Reassessing 'Agantuk' - Satyajit Ray’s final statement as an artist

In the year 1991 Satyajit Ray made Agantuk (The Stranger), his last film before his death in April 1992. Here, Ray made a unique attempt to convey his annoyance about the materialistic quest of modern civilization through his characteristic storytelling style. The film depicts how the protagonist uncle Manomohan Mitra’s sudden landing into a conventional milieu of hosts made a panicky effect on them and exposed their priggish pride as a sham. The uncle was initially suspected as a fraud and later assumed to be a person with an insular objective to ‘fill his empty pockets’. In fact the depiction in the film turns into a near perfect surgical analysis of not only the benevolent protagonist but his mean-minded middle class hosts. It uncovered a terrible status of the modern urban middle class – acutely selfish and self centered, extremely money driven, always worried about security and hypocrite to the core. When at the end, taking account of his host’s ‘hospitality’, the altruistic uncle simply leaves the million dollar cheque of his inherited money as a small message ‘of little or no value’ for them, it falls like a slap on the face of the middle class smugness. The only member of the host family who was totally unsuspicious about Manomohan from the beginning was his grandnephew - the host’s little son. He was the first to convincingly declare that his grandfather is not a fake but genuine. The child has not yet been infected by the synthetic worldview of his parents and is yet to become a slave of conventional habits. His innocent and keen observations of his grandfather were the only one which was without any prejudices.

In many ways Agantuk is an inciting film. Though there is a genuine doubt if at all the grungy middle class can really think today in the way Ray wanted them to think. The basic theme is an intellectual soul searching for a re-discovery of the lost human values. It bluntly focuses on the vices of the post-modern world. The reckless immorality of the elite class, their greed for material possessions is harshly criticized. A ‘civilized’ person was defined as the person who can wipe out an entire population with lethal weapon by just pressing a button but has awfully forgotten how to embrace an alien stranger! The contradictions of high-rise and rickshaw pullers, NASA and ‘NESHA’ (drug addiction), technology and organized religion, the phenomenal decay of principles and values, the deep rooted systemic corruption and the death of curiosity are among some of the dark hidden corners of civilization that Ray has scornfully declared in Agantuk as ‘symbols of civilization’. How can the tangibility of a person's identity be proved through a passport in a fraudulent world? Who is civilized and who is savage? Class, caste and religion, values and prejudices, politics and power really have no place in the concrete humanity and morality that Ray has articulated throughout the film. Through his quest and vast experience of life Manomohan has recognized the brotherhood of Man which is beyond any country, language, cast or religion and free of any form of identity crisis. Ray’s own beliefs become clear when he speaks through Manomohan that, “I do not believe anything that divides Man – religion does it, and organized religion does it certainly. For the same reason I do not believe in caste…” According to him, caste and religion in the present form is only spreading hate and dividing Man. Technological achievements may well become counter-productive to provoke blatant greed. Modern civilization boasts on the achievements of science but forgets that it was the Neolithic age when Man had already made most of the indispensable inventions crucial for his survival.

Agantuk has two discern layers. The upper layer of the film deals with the problems of the urban middle class morals. This layer is relatively easy to recognize while viewing the film. In this layer Ray is mercilessly probing the harmful effects of money, the artificiality of values, the idiocy of war, the emptiness of an acquisitive worldview and the absurdity of identity. But there is also another deeper and subtle layer that exists side by side with the upper layer which apparently looks abstract. It deals with a much wider gamut of pertinent issues. This layer is inciting the viewer to position him/her in front of the history of human race to re-discover the natural Man in relation to his social state.

Honestly speaking, the anthropological aspects of the film were not Ray’s own. He had often spoken about how Agantuk was inspired by the thinking of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his works Lévi-Strauss had firmly stressed that the mind and intelligence of the primitive savage people were certainly not inferior to civilized people. The universe of the primitives and of the civilized is different due to the approach in which primitive and civilized people conceptualized their world. The savage mind according to Lévi-Strauss is equally logical ‘in the same sense and the same fashion’ as the civilized minds and therefore no negative value could be attributed to it.

In his memoir Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had revealed that in every part of the world and in every forms of society, whether savage or civilize, human beings has always followed its own styles and methods of thinking and has structured unlimited social systems for themselves. Every society is a product of the inescapable norms of these systems. The systems originate from the human thought process and then are applied in real life practices. The application of systems to reach the objectives of life might differ in time and space according to the cultural values of a specific society. This diversity is caused mainly by the different thought processes and its conclusion which evokes from the diverse reality of a particular time. The physical world is approached and conceptualized by the savage thought process in a supremely concrete way where the point of view originates from the sensible qualities of the savage mind. On the other end, civilized humans apply a supremely abstract method in their thought process which is derived from the formal properties of their civilized minds.

Whenever the strangeness of the primitive world is unintelligible to the people of the civilized world, the reality of the primitive people is viewed by them as ridiculous and disgusting. Frustrated by the inability to comprehend the culture and values remote from them, the primitive reality becomes insignificant, a ‘vanished reality’. This ignorance then becomes an excuse for the modern mechanistic civilization to gradually trap, overcome and finally destroy the radically different society of the primitives. As Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, human societies or individual human beings never create absolutely but “choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute.” The values and social norms of the primitives are therefore important. To understand another system one needs to be tolerant, reflective and curious. Sadly, the mechanistic civilization by and large has lost these qualities.

Lévi-Strauss has asserted that, “Certain social groups must be adjudged superior to ourselves, if the comparison rests upon their success in reaching objectives comparable to our own…” The phenomenal evolution of human beings from anthropoid apes to modern man is the greatest evidence of this success. Certain civilizations of the past knew quite well how best to solve the same problems which the modern civilized society is still struggling to solve today. If one can diversify the field of investigation into different societies it will “eventually become plain that no human society is fundamentally good: but neither is any of them fundamentally bad; all offer their members certain advantages…” Cannibalism is considered to be the most horrible, disgusting and ‘uncivilized’ of all savage practices. But according to Lévi-Strauss, “…no society is proof, morally speaking, against the demands of hunger. In times of starvation men will eat literally anything, as we lately saw in the Nazi extermination camps.” By looking from outside one could be easily tempted to distinguish two opposing types of society. But once one had “lived as they live, and eaten as they eat, one well knew what hunger could be, and how the satisfaction of that hunger brought not merely repletion, but happiness itself.” Every form of society thus has its own impurity within itself that “finds outlet in elements of injustice, cruelty, and insensitivity.” Societies which seem to be brutal may turn out, to be reasonably humane and benevolent when examined from another point of view. By nature, no society is perfect. Claiming one form of society as superior in its relation to all the others is thus a shameful stupidity. In Agantuk, the representation of the Bison of Altamira convincingly explains this point.

In a most bizarre way, the honest provocation generated by Ray in the film has stirred his detractors. He is criticized as an ‘armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist’ who is placing his ‘hopes and disillusionment on some grass-root cultural activity’ and on the innocence of children. Is he not oversimplifying social reality by viewing it as an ‘individual vs. society conflict’? Is he not an old fashioned, anti-progressive artist under a humanist cloak trying to spread pessimism? Do not forget that Ray was accused by similar criticism for romanticizing India’s poverty for foreign consumption in his seminal work Pather Panchali. These are stupid arguments essentially stimulated to achieve solace from envious intellectual melancholy of the present time and its flatulence from indigested modernity.

Ray did not profess for the primitive form of society which many of his critics thought he did. He has simply chosen a middle path where Shakespeare, Tagore, Marx and Freud can equally contribute along with the experience and values of primitive ancestors. While he has harshly criticized the war mentality of the civilized world, similarly he has disapproved the tribal custom of polygamy. His intention was to raise relevant issues from a certain perspective which can stir his audience to look differently. As a genuine artist, Ray did not intend to show the solution but tried to guide the audience to find one. Agantuk assists to shift the focus of the civilized world towards re-evaluating its root.

Similarly, Ray has definitely not spoken about any individual vs. society conflict in the film. He got the fundamental idea from Lévi-Strauss to put up incisive interrogations on society and culture as a whole. Is it possible to take an unbiased view of customs and ways of life distant from one’s own? Is it possible to doubt the rightness or naturalness of the customs of the civilized society instead of taking it for granted? Is it possible to find a middle way between the primitive and modern values? How to find elements from other societies and make use of them that will help the civilized world to reform its own customs? How to gather experiences from a remote culture and get enriched by them? Is it possible to unravel what in the present nature of Man is original, and what is artificial? Is it possible to re-discover the natural Man in his relation to the social state he belongs to? Even if we believe, how do we prove that other societies may not be better than our own?

The level of depth inscribed in the oeuvre of Satyajit Ray’s films is unique. In the age of the banality of Slumdog Millionaire and the hoopla surrounding an overcooked myth of Bollywood’s theory of culture, it is worth talking about Ray and his phenomenal artistic mastery.

Altamira Bison image: chenzhaofu.cn

50 Years of Cuban Revolution

The two legendary figures of Fidel Castro’s rebel army – Ernesto Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos was in charge of the two guerrilla columns that attacked the city of Santa Clara, Cuba's third largest city and the capital of Las Villas province. It was the last important bastion of Batista’s defensive strategy where his army had consolidated a huge force to resist the rebels. The rebel army’s plan looked suicidal as it had just 300 men and were comparatively ill equipped in arms and supplies. In contrast, the Batista army had the strength of 3500 soldiers and ten tanks. Also an armored train was on its way from Havana carrying another 400 well-armed soldiers, weapons, ammunition and supplies. Che had chalked out a three tire battle strategy: to keep the Batista troops confined, to stop the armored train and to involve the generally supportive locals to assist the rebel force. All his plans worked perfectly. The locals restricted the movements of Batista army's tanks and armored vehicles by creating barricades all over the city; the supply train was attacked and seized after a part of the railroad track were removed with tractors by the rebels. With considerable firepower at their disposal the rebel army was able to triumph over the already dispirited defenders to surrender. The battle of Santa Clara was the conclusive battle in the Cuban revolution. Less than 12 hours after the fall of Santa Clara, Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba. The day was 31 December 1958, exactly 50 years ago from today when Fidel and his comrades created history.

50 years after the revolution, under half a century of scrupulous blockade and economic warfare, Cuba has attained many considerable achievements to be proud about. It has completely eradicated illiteracy, an unparalleled achievement amongst the countries of Latin America, or even the US. The Cuban government provides free education to all its children up to University level. The country has the highest school retention rate, highest number of teachers per capita and the lowest number of students per classroom among the whole world.

Cuba has also successfully created an incredible ‘cradle to the grave’ national healthcare system that is completely free for its citizens. The infant mortality rate of Cuba is also the lowest in Latin America. Compared with the conditions of 1959, when average life expectancy was just 58 years, figures according to World Health Organization (WHO) suggest that life expectancy in today’s Cuba is 78 years – a remarkable increase of 20 years. Its healthcare system has completely eradicated many infectious and contagious diseases like polio, malaria and dengue from the country. Today, Cuba has the highest number of doctors per capita than any other country in the world. It is also training 76,000 foreign medical students free of charge and is exporting health care facilities to other poor countries. To provide first-rate health care facilities to the underprivileged people all over the third world, in 2008 Cuba has sent 36,500 doctors to eighty one third world nations. It has a flourishing biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, has developed a vaccine for meningitis B and world-wide exports the world’s best hepatitis B vaccine.

Today, the Cuban people enjoy cent-percent social security covers and the advantages of institutional equality provided by their government. Cuban society is absolutely free from racism and exploitation and has accomplished remarkable success on women empowerment. Cuban women constitute 40 percent of Cubans labor force, 66 percent of the country’s technical and scientific workforce and 36 percent National Assembly Members. It has also attained considerable success in the sporting arena. Today, Cuba has the world’s best environmental record, having increased its forest coverage by over 50 percent, drastically reducing electricity used for lighting, and implementing a revolution in organic agriculture. The World Wildlife Fund has described Cuba as the only environmentally sustainable country in the world.

It is significant to note that all of Cuba’s major social achievements are principally acquired through social solidarity – by the active involvement of the organized Cuban mass under a brilliant and inspiring leadership of Fidel Castro. When a tiny Latin American country provides free health care and education to its people, endows them with full social security and liberates them from the bondage of social injustices – the country and its ideals are certainly dangerous! And when the same country inspires other deprived nations to revolt against imperialists and neo-liberal crooks, stimulates them to contravene the US superpower – it must be considered as a grave threat!

Cuba was the first Latin America country to achieve liberty from incessant imperialist domination through an armed revolt. It was a brilliantly original revolution; passionately inspiring to ignite waves of revolutionary struggles across the globe. It is also an extraordinary revolution in connotation with the fact that none of its leaders were steadfast communists but young radicals with a broad, democratic and anti-imperialist vision. The origin of these radical youths was a popular movement called the 26 July movement which primarily aimed to bring social justice for the Cuban people through its struggle against the despotic and corrupt rule of Fulgencio Batista, an avaricious scrooge and loyal US agent. After the revolution, the ultimate decision-making power of the revolutionary government remained with the guerrilla fighters of Sierra Maestra under the leadership of the young and unorthodox revolutionary leaders like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Raul Castro, Celia Sánchez and Juan Almeida. These young leaders represented the true spirit of the revolt, believed in collective struggle and ideological novelty. They did not follow any dogmatic revolutionary recipe to achieve their objective. In their early discourses, words like ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ was never even uttered by the rebel leadership. But gradually things changed when the ‘naked truths of imperialism’ started to reveal its hideous face. This revelation ultimately enforced the leadership to consciously explore the path of socialism. In April 1961, two years and four months after the victory of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro declared the rebellion as a socialist revolution. The US establishment transpired into a state of colossal dismay when Fidel confirmed that he is a Marxist-Leninist.

A commendable aspect of the Cuban revolution is Internationalism, the convenient assistance it provided to countries engaged on processes of radical transformation. Cuba had played a radical role by extending its hand of international solidarity towards the exploited and oppressed regions world over, to abolish the ‘exploitation of man by man’. The Cuban attitude of internationalism is best expressed by Che. In the speech delivered on February 1965 at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria, Che had stated:

There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples struggling for a better future, it is an inescapable necessity. If the imperialist enemy, American or any other, develops its attack against the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries, simple logic determines the necessity of an alliance between the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries. If there were no other uniting factor, the common enemy should be it. (Emphasis added)

Cuba had extended its support to the Algerian patriots in their struggle against French colonialism. In 1963, when Algeria was attacked by the Moroccan armed forces Cuba shipped a battalion of 22 tanks and several hundred troops to assist the endangered Algerian revolution. In Republic of Congo, Cuba supported the popular leader Patrice Lumumba. After CIA assassinated Lumumba, in 1965, Che Guevara led a group of more than 100 Cuban guerrillas in Congo to help the Simba movement and the Congolese rebels to fight against the US and Belgian colonialists. Cuban internationalism helped to pave way for the independence of Namibia when in 1966 Cuba extended its all-out support to SWAPO and Cuban troops, united with Angolan and Namibian forces defeated South Africa. Between 1973 and 1975, Cuban force aided Syria to guard the Golan Heights from Israeli aggression. In 1975, Cuba assisted Agostinho Neto’s MPLA in the struggle against the US backed racist South Africa in Angola. Thousands of Cuban volunteers participated in defending Angola from the attacks of South African troops. Cuba’s role in Africa is acknowledged by none other but Nelson Mandela when he had remarked that, ‘Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice’. Cubans had extended solidarity with the heroic fighters of Vietnam and fought in Bolivia. Cuba also actively helped the revolutionary organizations in Nicaragua from 1967 and trained the courageous Sandinista guerrilla force to fight the US backed reactionary Contras. When the US troops invaded Grenada in 1983, Cubans fought along with Grenadian soldiers to resist the invasion. Even today, thousands of Cubans are assisting to implement the Barrio Adentro health mission and the Robinson literacy mission in Venezuela. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales or Ecuador's Rafael Correa would have faced greater difficulty implementing the popular political empowerment projects in their respected countries without the towering inspiration of the Cuban revolution and the vital support of the Cuban leadership. Without Cuba, it is difficult to imagine the rise of the self-respecting Latin American voices, those who are challenging the hegemony of the US imperialism in their unique way today.

The right wing mainstream media was always pejorative about Fidel and his men from the days they took power. In fact it was this propaganda apparatus which the reactionary forces used as their main bludgeon against Cuba for the last 50 years. Instead of looking at the miraculous survival of Cuba under violent economic, military and counter-revolutionary attacks for almost half a century, instead of looking at the triumphs it has achieved with very limited resources, the mainstream media meticulously continues to supply trite observations, spurious news and analysis. Millions of dollars are spend in the name of academic research to prove why the Cuban revolution is a failure. Today when they proclaim that the island is near to bankruptcy, they do not mention about the illegal economic embargo imposed upon Cuba in context. When they mention about the embargo, it is only to mock Fidel and his team for artfully using the embargo pretext to cover-up their 50 years of misdeeds. The ‘most influential’ English-language weekly The Economist embraces high hope that once Barack Obama is in office, he will lift the embargo. Well, this tremendous hope is not because The Economist is a friend of the Cuban people. It is also not because lifting the unlawful economic blockade will provide a mouthful of air to the suffocating Cuban economy. It is because, ‘Cubans would know they had nobody except their rulers to blame for their plight.’ The mainstream media is showing signs of restlessness since Fidel has stepped down and handed over the charge to Raul.

The luminous Cuban revolution has brought sovereignty and dignity to the people of Cuba by ending decades of imperialist exploitation and oppression. From an informal US colony the revolution transformed Cuba into a confident and dignified nation. The Cuban revolution has also in many ways transformed Latin America from the subjugated backyard of the US into a distinguished voice of its own. The US authorities greatly wanted and still want to destroy Cuba because it has become a symbol for others to follow. For 50 long years, Cubans have deeply respected and heroically defended their revolution with admirable courage and dignity from the illegal embargo, forced isolation, aggressive counter-revolutionary military attacks, sabotages, assassination attempts and repeated threats of the US establishment and its lethal foreign policy. Noam Chomsky in a recent interview has accredited Cuba as ‘a symbol of courageous resistance’.

Despite of unbelievable odds, Cuba’s splendid achievements helped to keep a bright beacon of hope alive in the hearts of millions of people all around the globe. Cuba has shown us how to subsist in a better and humane way which is founded on the principals of peace, social justice and human rights. Today, Cuba is the inspiration to millions who keep on believing that an alternative society, a better world is certainly possible.

Hasta la victoria siempre!

Fidel Castro & Che Guevara image courtesy: Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Camilo Cienfuegos image courtesy: wikipedia.org

The miracle of Diego Maradona

It was the 1986 World Cup quarter-final match in Mexico where the two rival teams Argentina and England met for the first time since the 1982 Falklands war. There was a sizzling pre-match temperament amongst the Argentine team members and according to the Argentine defender José Luis Brown, “Everybody in that squad knew of someone who had been sent to fight for the country and each one of us had our own feelings”. The Argentine captain Diego Maradona scored two memorable goals in the match and permanently imprinted this famous encounter and himself into the folklore of world football. The first one was ‘scored’ in the 50th minute of the match by a punch of his hand - it was the infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal. If the Tunisian referee Ali Bin Nasser had properly noticed the action, he would have certainly penalized Maradona and disqualified the goal as a handball. Maradona however, symbolically attributed this goal as a sweet revenge to Argentina's Falklands war defeat in the hand of the British force and remained impenitent about the goal for twenty long years only to coyly admit later that the goal was “A little of the hand of God, and a little of the head of Maradona”. Also in his bestselling memoir Yo Soy El Diego he had confirmed that, “Now, yes, I can say what I could not say before….What hand of God? It was the hand of Diego!”

The second goal was the one cited today as the greatest goal in the history of World Cup and also the ‘Goal of the Century’. This is a goal worth describing. Six minutes after the infamous first, Maradona possessed the ball near the right sidelines in his own half. After gaining control of the ball in the fraction of a second, he masterfully dribbles out half of the England team with eleven virtuoso touches of his foot (he had a miraculous left foot and rarely touched the ball with his right) that apparently made the world-class English players look haplessly naïve. He finally dribbled past the English goalkeeper Peter Shilton to calmly roll the ball into the net. This marvel of 10 seconds was undoubtedly a piece of sheer magic. Gary Lineker, the English striker later recalled that he “…just stood there on the halfway line and thought, ‘Wow’. That could have meant we were out of the World Cup, but it was just breathtaking.” Argentina defeated England 2-1 to enter the semi-final. (See Chris Hunt: The Hand Of God)

In many ways, the 1986 FIFA World Cup will be everlastingly connected with Maradona’s name. Never in the history of the World Cup since 1930 did a single player seen to absolutely dominate the entire tournament as the Argentine jersey number 10 did it in 1986. Maradona was the captain of a relatively weak side, energetically played every Argentine matches in that tournament with a supreme presence on the ground, was the powerhouse behind the game strategy of his side and was singly responsible for converting Argentina from a good team to a great team. Following the quarter-final match against England he netted two more brilliant goals in the semi-final against Belgium. In the final match against the reasonably strong West German side, the German players were by and large successful to pin down Maradona in the entire match by double-marking him except once when Maradona made-up enough space for him to send a lethally accurate through pass to Jorge Burruchaga to score the match winning goal. Argentina lifted the cup beating Germany 3-2. Indisputably, Maradona won the Golden Ball award as the tournament's best player. It is widely accepted today that any participating team on that particular World Cup could have been the champion if they had Maradona on their side.

The legend of Maradona is the universal story of a genius with real hardship behind, a career dotted with momentous highs and lows. Diego Armando Maradona grew up in the working-class barrio of Villa Fiorito located on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires. The place was poor and troubled; inhabited by paupers, drug addicts, drug peddlers, thieves and stray dogs. Describing the place Maradona once said that “If it was possible to eat, people ate. And if it wasn't, they didn't.” Though Maradona’s family was poor, their condition was not as terrible as some of the other neighboring families as his factory worker father had a job. He spent his childhood in a shack, shared a room with seven brothers and sisters. While rainfall, their beds had to be moved to keep away from the ceiling leakages and regularly walked down the street to fetch water from a community tap for the family’s daily use. (See Matt Dickinson: Maradona, a slum and the birth of a legend)

It is on the same potholed streets of Villa Fiorito where the gifted Maradona started kicking the football along with the local urchins. Lucky for him, his genius was spotted in his early age of 11 while he was playing in the local club Estrella Roja. From then onwards it was a straight rags-to-riches story. His professional career started ten days before his sixteenth birthday in 1976 with the Buenos Aires club Argentinos Juniors, where he played for the next three years and later joined the famous Boca Juniors. At the age of 16 he was selected in the Argentine national team as the youngest player ever. His first World Cup tournament was in 1982 and he continued to play in three consecutive World Cups. He captained his country in 1986 and 1990, winning the first and losing the second in the finals to West Germany. He played his last World Cup in 1994. After the second match against Nigeria he was tested positive for ephedrine doping and expelled from rest of the tournament. He was subsequently banned by a FIFA disciplinary panel from playing nationally or internationally for the next 15 months and was fined $15,400. The whole world was shell shocked by this startling news. The media which always had a love-hate relationship with him was particularly harsh. In response to the ongoing Maradona bashing by the press, Nicolas Michael in a letter to the sports editor of The New York Times wrote:

“Diego Maradona messed up. Diego Maradona is far from perfect. All of these facts have been covered in substantial detail and with much emphasis again and again. There is one other fact that also needs to be covered again and again, with the same amount of emphasis. Diego Maradona was not just a very good soccer player. Diego Maradona was the best player to play this game, with perhaps one exception, that of the great Brazilian player Pele.”

Maradona also had a phenomenal club career. After his initial stint with Argentinos Juniors, from 1981-84 he played for Boca Juniors and FC Barcelona and from 1984-92 for SSC Napoli. It is at Napoli were his professional career reached its zenith and also elevated the Italy club to the most successful era of its history. His Napoli years ended disgracefully in 1992 after he served a 15-month ban for failing a drug test.

It is widely believed that Maradona got addicted to cocaine in the mid 80s during his Barcelona days due to his failure to cope with the pressures of success and his roller-coaster lifestyle. His addiction aggravated while he was with Napoli. In 1991, Maradona was tested positive for cocaine use after an Italian league match and was suspended from professional football for 15 month. Few months later he was arrested for possessing half-kg of cocaine and was slapped with another suspension for 14 months. After the 1994 World Cup disaster, Maradona gradually retired from professional football. Following his retirement, his health condition worsened. He became overweight and suffered increasingly from obesity. In 2000, Maradona went to Cuba for treating his heart problems and cocaine addiction. Wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and a huge Che tattoo on his right arm he commented after arriving at Havana that he ‘chose Cuba because of the dignity of its people.’ He had also donated the Cuban royalties of his memoir to ‘the Cuban people and Fidel’. Maradona returned to Argentina in 2001 after staying for nearly two years in Cuba only to go back again in 2004, after a major heart attack that almost took his life. However, in 2007 he announced that he was finally been able to quit drug and drinking. In 2008, Maradona was handed over the job to coach Argentina’s national team for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

In the recent years, Maradona has openly displayed his leftist sympathies and anti-imperialist stand. He became a friend of Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, supported Hugo Chávez, declared Che Guevara as his hero and grew more and more anti-American. He posed for the famous photograph wearing a T-shirt labeled ‘STOP BUSH’ and called George Bush ‘human garbage’. In 2007, he stated that he ‘hate everything that comes from the United States’.

During his recent visit at Kolkata, the public was seen to turn almost crazy. Was it due to this leftist anti-American stand of Maradona? Certainly not. What was then the reason? Why the crowd was seen to patiently wait for the entire night at the airport to have a glimpse of him? Was it just because he was a living legend? Why many of their eyes got moistened with joy when they finally saw him? Why were they so emotionally aroused when they touched the famous ‘Hand of God’? A recent article by Nirmal Shekar in The Hindu has incisively described it:

"For a good part of the 1980s and well into the 1990s, no single sportsperson captured the imagination of a greater number of sportslovers all over the world than did Maradona. From the dusty maidans of Kolkata to the village greens of middle England, from the shanty towns of sub-Saharan Africa to the football-crazy Italian cities of Naples and Milan, his was the most readily recognisable name in sport, his was the face that stirred emotions like no other, his were the feet that at once brought back memories of transcendental magic."

Watching Maradona on the field was like looking at a delicate piece of oriental artwork. Every bit and piece of his game was decorated with glittering artistry. Diego Armando Maradona was the artist par excellence who could create extraordinary moments of splendor on the football ground at ease. His outstanding technical mastery with the ball, his marvelous sense of timing, his ability to find out amazing openings between the huddle of players in a very limited space, his high-speed short and long sprints, his incredible dribbling power, his ability to take deadly free-kicks and reverse-cross pass shot behind the leg, his amiable skill of holding the ball for a longer time amid fierce challenges from opponent defenders and intelligently releasing sudden but accurate passes en route for his fellow players to finish – all this has made him the greatest creator of football magic in recent times and an extremely delightful player to watch.

It is heartbreaking to see that most of India hardly recognizes Maradona. It is also a pity that today’s kids do not feel the similar goose bumps their fathers and grandfathers still experience while recalling this miraculous footballer in their minds. But they cannot be blamed for it. They have not seen Maradona playing the 1986 World Cup.

Photo courtesy: Natacha Pisarenko - AP

Homage to a fighter extraordinary

The mid eighties were the time when Bengal cricket was eagerly tracking around to find out its representative for the national arena, mostly controlled then by the Bombay lobby. Though Kolkata was famous for its football passion, cricket was not much behind – the city possessed Eden Gardens, a magnificent cricket ground which was also the oldest and biggest in the country, numerous clubs were trying to raise aspirant Bradmans, Trumpers or Larwoods in the vast stretch of the lush green maidan area. Local ‘para’ clubs regularly organized tennis ball cricket tournaments. By and large, the local cricket buffs fulfilled their appetite by involving themselves with devotional affection in this typical ‘goly’ (lane) form of cricket. One day matches (ODIs) were still not so popular and therefore a five day Test match in Eden Gardens was something like a festival. The lucky ones who had managed to grab a day’s ticket packed their lunch early in the morning and floated in the festive wind towards Eden Gardens. The unlucky ones had to keep themselves satisfied with the vernacular newspaper stories which used to devote their entire first page to cover the match and by the passionate radio commentaries. When Doordarshan started telecast Test cricket directly, there were fewer households that had a television set. Those houses which owned one, was invariably swamped by community visitors from 9 o’clock morning to afternoon till the days telecast was over. Fans crowded in front of the majestic Grand Hotel, where the cricketers generally stayed during Test matches to have a glimpse of the celebrity players. While Kolkata had every setting for cricket phobia – all the enthusiasm were falling short because the local heroes were unable to make any visible mark in the national side. After Pankaj Roy, Bengal couldn't produce a cricketer who could wear the India cap for a lengthy spell.

Snehashish Ganguly was a talented cricketer in the mid eighties Kolkata. The elder son of an affluent father – a printer by profession but also a onetime state player and widely known as a cricket enthusiast. Snehashish was a fine left-hander batsman and an occasional right-hand off break bowler. Cricket watchers of Kolkata held high expectation about this local lad. In the 1989-90 seasons, Snehashish played six Ranji Trophy matches, scored 439 runs with two centuries and finished with an average of 73.16. Apart from his father, Snehashish also had an ardent follower in his family – his younger brother Sourav. When Sourav also started playing alongside him in the Bengal team, people used to identify Sourav as the younger brother of Snehashish.

From formation days Sourav was blamed for his arrogance. His teammates of St. Xavier’s School cricket team complained against him to their coach. He grew up in an opulent dwelling where his father had arranged an in-house multi-gym, a batting range and rare cricket videos to watch – a facility most of the budding cricketers seldom get. He was picked for the Bengal team in 1989-90 after his initial stint in the Under 15 tournament where he smashed a century against Orissa. In the next Ranji Trophy season Sourav scored 394 runs with an astonishing near eighty average. In a 1991 Duleep Trophy match against West Zone in Guahati, Sourav hit a tidy knock of unbeaten 124 runs and earned a place in the Indian team under Mohammad Azharuddin for the 1991-92 Australia tour. Quite naturally, his inclusion was ridiculed as a quota selection. Sourav was then 19 years old.

In Australia, Sourav was accused for behaving like a spoilt brat, like a ‘maharaja’ who refused to carry the drinks or baggage of his seniors. Those were the times when a junior member in the side felt obliged to do petty services for the senior members to gratify them. Sourav was definitely not a conventional junior member though there are absolutely no proofs at all that he was ever disrespectful about his seniors. An 'attitude problem' tag was stuck on him from the very beginning of his career. He played one ODI, scored only 3, and failed to impress the selectors for the next four years. Keeping in mind the past treatments delivered to other Bengal players of class – from Shyamsundar Mitra to Sambaran Bannerjee by an extremely politicized and parochial selection process, many considered that Sourav’s international career was finished. But Sourav didn’t think so. The bitter experience of this tour tempered him bit by bit into steel. He had also acquired some basic lessons that he will start implementing eight years later.

His inclusion to the Indian side touring England in 1992 was similarly credited to Jagmohan Dalmiya – the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) strongman from Bengal and the newly emerged Bengal lobby. After the departure of Navjot Singh Sidhu following an ugly spat with captain Azharuddin, Sourav was lucky enough to play his first Test at the Mecca of world cricket – The Lords. The Sourav myth that will rule the mind of millions for the next sixteen years was launched here with a classy 131 and the subsequent century in the next Trent Bridge Test. From 1992 onwards people referred to Snehashish as the elder brother of Sourav. Though Snehashish played 59 first class matches with a near forty average and made 6 centuries, he gradually faded away from the cricket scene.

There is nothing unknown to cricket followers about the controversial career graph of Sourav. The public opinions and emotions about him were always sharp and divided all through his career. But there is a general consensus about one aspect – that this young man had singlehandedly changed the way our national cricket team played its cricket. Only with the exception of the Tiger Pataudi era, the Indian cricket team was universally recognized for its meek and surrendering approach. Indian cricket was mostly observed to follow the achievements of individuals – not for the achievements of a team. Sourav transformed Indian team into a rock solid unit, with a combative and thorny approach which caused lots of uneasiness for many opponent super captains. What cricket journalist Harsha Bhogle observed as the basic persona of Sourav also became the identity of the team he led – not rude and disrespectful but defiant and increasingly confident. This changeover was achieved with a one point strategy that he had picked up from personal experiences of his first tour – nurture young talents, trust their ability and protect them from the parochial trends that have always influenced Indian team building. By doing so, Sourav turned the younger players into daring fighters who in return trusted him deeply. For the next five years after he was named the full-time captain, India played 49 Tests, lost 13 and won 21 which include the 11 wins abroad. Tiger Pataudi, considered by many as India’s finest captain, led in 40 Tests, lost 19 and won 9 including 3 wins abroad. Sunil Gavaskar led in 47 Tests, won 9 and Mohammad Azharuddin captained in 47 Tests and won 14 of them. As a captain, Sourav achieved a winning percentage of 42.86 in Tests and 51.70 in ODIs. In both form of the game Sourav surpassed the achievements of all previous Indian captains.

In his 16 years of international career, Sourav scored 7217 Test runs including 16 centuries with an average of 42.17 and took 32 wickets. He scored 11363 runs in the ODIs including 22 centuries with an average of 41.02 and took 100 wickets. Among those who have scored over 10000 runs in the one day matches, only Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting has a better average than him.

Even after these spectacular successes, Sourav always had to be ‘reselected’ as captain before every series. He was finally sacked in 2005 – first from captaincy and then as a member of the squad. Greg Chappell, the newly appointed coach of the Indian team gradually surfaced to be a manipulative and megalomaniac individual, pooled himself along with the animus administrators like Kiran More and Raj Singh Dungarpur (Dungarpur famously said at that time that, “Chappell is a genius; Sourav is much below him in stature”) and was successful in getting rid of Sourav. Chappell only wanted docile players to maneuver his crummy scheme and his Indian henchmen had to accomplish their personal aversion agenda. Thankfully, it did not take long to prove that Chappell is a total failure. After the disastrous 2007 World Cup performance of India, the scratchy Australian was duly removed from his job. Whereas Sourav, within less than a year after his removal astoundingly bounced back into the team in 2007. He returned with a 98 run ODI score against West Indies, became the top scorer with 534 runs and Man of the Series in the three-Test series against Pakistan. Surprisingly omitted from the ODI side, he scored nearly 2000 Test runs including a double century. He had to prove a point. And he did it in style.

If Sourav had ended his career as soon as he was sacked, he would have been still called a ‘hero’, but apparently a tragic one. History would have looked at him through the ‘great-good-error-downfall’ model of the Aristotelian ‘tragic hero’. But Sourav cannot tend to carry the ‘tragic’ tag along with him for the rest of his life. He has imprinted his own destiny through hard struggle, absolute determination, great courage and outstanding achievements. He has always seized the public imagination as the eternal symbol of the good combating the bad. Why should he like to see his feat as tragic? After the dignified manner in which he drew the final curtain, history will always recall Sourav not as a tragic but a true hero. He leaves behind the legacy of an extraordinary fighter and a wonderful leader who can proudly recall about his team that, “…I know, even when I get it wrong, that my team believes I was wrong in trying to be right.”