Talking At Each Other

Sulekh (28) is a television professional presently working in New York, the USA. He permanently moved to that country in 2001. He witnessed the second of the twin towers tumbling down, emerging out of the subway station at Manhattan. Sulekh and I talked yesterday (28 Jan) night:

PINAKI: We are finally on the same page

SULEKH: Yes

PB: Shall we begin talking at each other

SU: What happens if Al Gore wins the Oscars for non-narrative

PB: I remember the great Time magazine cover in 2000 which called the two contestants Bore and Gush

SU: I am serious, he could come in by end of Feb into the Democratic fray which is currently dominated by Barak Hussein Obama n Ms. Clinton


PB: I think 2008 is long way ahead...bt let's pause for a moment n begin with asking you how's the "Chasing the American Dream" project going for you?

SU: I never believed in the American Dream. I see myself in a perpetual state of drift. A chronic alienation from endemic violence in the state of India was the push.

PB: What took you to United States?

PB: Man, come on, give me another one. You don't feel alienation and reach the heart of the MAINSTREAM

SU: I felt nauseous even before I was politically aware or conscious. As A sensitive kid, I remember writing my first poem against state violence in Punjab. My father who happened to be a poet himself was shocked at the intensity of my reaction as a 10 year old.

SU: My home town had a parallel administration led by Goons, corrupt bureaucrats, and downright incompetent politicians.

SU: What many don't realize my journey began a long time before I left India. A near public lynching in my hometown that involved an accident on the street, followed by the humiliation at the hands of the local police administration stayed with me.

SU: Leaving home was never easy. And once I did leave home, there was nothing else to connect with. The umbilical cord in a metaphorical sense was broken with no prospect of repair. I don't consider myself an economic migrant. I seek a place to live which will allow me to be myself without omnipresent violence, aesthetic, cultural, political, social.

PB: Ask Melissa, doesn't it sound a bit like the story in hicktown, Wild West, USA? No offence meant to Muzaffarpur

SU:I am sure it does but it was worse than that. Worse still it continues to be so.

PB: No ordinary mortal in India is allowed to own guns like they can in the USA...And state violence, isn't it inherent in the nature of states if you remember your Max Weber.

SU: Thats the irony that no mere mortal can own guns. I value

PB: You obviously have the necessary space in New York that the country here did not allow you to have. But would not Delhi or Mumbai, both cities you have worked in, would have accorded that to you?

SU: Its not the country. India is a psychological entity that I value a lot. Its how I personally felt that we lacked on a lot of counts that made me an outsider.

PB: Can you spell out what the USA is providing you not so much in the philosophical realm, but in a more temporal sense?

SU: No one, just about no one can come and touch you without definite consequences for them under the law of the land

SU: Its a big assurance. I could be hit by a hurricane, die in an accident, get killed by a terrorist attack, but my dignity isn't compromised ever just because a drunk constable didn't think it was proper for me to be with a woman in my car.

SU: If I were to compare the instances when I felt violated as an individual, I can't compare India with the US. There wasn't a day when I didn't feel helpless back home. I think beyond a point there was a disconnect that I couldn't work around.

SU: I have a self image of an artist and coping with my own experience vis-a-vis my surrounding was driving me insane. I was pathologically depressed. In a nutshell, I guess the guarantee of life, liberty and equality to the extent that US provides far more important than the economic opportunities that have been a traditional pull for immigrants from the world over.

SU: I made a decent life in India and my miseries were not at all borne out of any economic distress.

PB: Well, Sulekh, your personal demons are purely your own to slay...but considering that you are a sensitive and sensible social individual, I would like to ask you that whether the picture you painted and the the situation is still the same, being a racial minority under the regime of the Homeland Security Act or the Patriot Act? Is the Miranda Law is still read out each time a person is accosted by the law enforcement just as the Hollywood would like to make us believe?

SU: I said yes!! And I believe its important that its continued to read. My personal demons were not a genetic fall out of my being. The political system in India is largely responsible for violence without respite. Wonder if any good were to come out of a complete re-writing of the Indian constitution.

PB: Well, I think that you are not fully informed about the situation that I inquired about in my question. My information is based upon the few civil rights suits that are coming up in the US courts filed by Muslims. In fact, those suits are mostly barred from coming to a court of law. By the present definition of criminal justice in the USA, the burden of proof has shifted to the accused from the accuser...But leaving that aside, wouldn't you consider that while the USA is a 250 year old and more of a democracy while the same is barely six decades old in India? In fact, I remember an interesting conversation an American academic a few years ago when he had told me about Laloo Prasad Yadav and the phenomenon you just described the likes of him perpetrated. I had to remind him that American history is replete with the political and social machinations of the robber barons and railroad ganglords. In fact, if I remember correctly that Joe Kennedy was one such. he did acknowledge that even his country had to pass through periods of difficult transition....

PB: But coming to a different point, as a student of international relations you are possibly aware the important ideological standpoint of Americans about "American exceptionalism." Now i beleive that a lot of that moralistic understanding of life emerges from pioneering entrepreneurial instincts of the people. Do you see a lot of that in evidence?

SU: You are right except that I don't believe in re-incarnation or eternal life as an individual. There is a reason why I don't have a religion. I am responsible for what happens to me thus no sympathies extended to the faithful of either faith.

PB: You have not answered my immediately previous question?

SU : American exceptionalism is a coincidence at best and a fallacy at worst. The Home of the brave and land of the free is as gullible as any other society. Its decision to not be bound by international law lie more within the realist paradigms of power than a nebulous, ethnocentric/jingoistic assertion of its exceptionalism/superiority.

PB: Without turning this into a IR seminar, let me remind you that realism really ask you live within international covenants that have been arrived at through a global consensus. My question was slightly different. How entrepreneurial and pioneering are the American people, and by that I don't mean the emigrants, but the usual WASP varieties or the Blacks, though they are still fighting for equality? Would you say that they White poor are as socially and economically mobile as say the intermediate castes in India?

SU: This is a difficult question. Every once in a while a Google/ Apple/ Microsoft come up on the radar. To keep the wheels of an economy this size moving, the contribution of its citizens can never be underestimated. The role of class and its bearing on entrepreneurialism can be historically evaluated.

SU: As an aside I recommend that you watch Lars Von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay. Its part of the trilogy entitled USA: The land of opportunities. The third and final film in the trilogy "Washington" had been recently announced.

SU: The relentless Danish critic of course has never visited US. His films have constantly pushed the film form as much his avowed political agenda.


PB: Send me the DVDs pal. Find the reason to live there. Sending me good books and DVDs are your reason to live in the Promised Land.

SU: LOL

PB: Now if that is an oblique reference to my not visiting that neck of the woods, send me a ticket and see! Now is that person who works for "No Lobbyist Left Behind" programme by your side? I would like to tell both of you why I dislike the US of A as a notion: I dislike the notion because it sells dreams it cannot fulfill.

SU; She isn't an active contributor to this yet. She refrains from journalistic pomposity.

PB: I like that. But I thought all special interests have to be inherently pompous only to obscure their more narrow goals at the end.

SU: That's why a selfish existence doesn't beckon no pomposity.

PB: One final question before this becomes unreadably long. Do you feel that Americans are social conservatives? Again, I don't include immigrants.

SU:Wrong! Americans are no one people. And the ones I know are certainly not. I am on no ones side. The Americans, the Indians, the Asians or whosoever. Left, right, centre, conservative, liberal, moral, the binaries are all repulsive.

PB: Well, we truly talked at each other. Will do it again in about a decade.

SU: I don't know if I will last that long. I would put together a little piece on my interaction with the Indian Diaspora over the last five years.