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S Prasannarajan

LOCOMOTIF

Less Than Fabulous

A year in the life of a nation is a comma in history. The men and women who inhabit that space in time are the dramatis personae, most of them uncredited, in that serial thriller . And we the calendar nuts of journalism take this moment of End of the Year, with ritualistic regularity, to look back in simulated wisdom. We see grains of trends, themes, threats and hope dancing from the vanishing screen, and with what flourish we push the stylus in yet another attempt to make sense of it all!

So let us make sense of it all, and let us begin with the most obvious concern of us all

Health of the Nation.The first signal came from Nagpur. Then it came from a frozen moment in a White House reception. What’s wrong with the Prime Minister? There was even that uncharitable after-Vajpayee-who whisper from the back alleys of power. It was politics of mortality at its premature best. It was a case of ‘whither prime body’ replacing ( or becoming one with ) ‘whither India’. Susan Sontag could not have hoped for a more elaborate translation of ‘ Illness as a Metaphor’. It was all about the knee, and the last time this organ became part of a national crisis, the defining factor was not the ruler’s knee but “ that woman” who did it on him withot a knee pad. But the end of the year saw the knee-restored Vajpayee bouncing without pain, and at this moment, it’s pleasure and prawns in the backwater. Well, the nation is standing on its own legs.

End of Heroism: Thanks to Francis Fukuyama, endology has become the most popular branch in the science of prophecy. End of history, end of ideology, end of politics, end of the author, end of the novel... ah, prophets can only look back in despair. ( Actually, it is not their job to look back.) So, shall we add “ end of heroism” too to the list? In retrospect it looks like the the humanisation of cricket --- maybe Indianisation is the right word. It was the evolutionary tale of the game as well as the player, and let us call the representative player Azharuddin. Really, somebody else’s game could not have become our own without acquiring the basic instincts of public India. But the end of the year saw heroism regained , that too in our own scheming, original game, in Vishwanathan Anand. The hero continues to be alive.

India of the Imagination: When the tyranny of realism is overwhelming, there is always the alternative reality. It’s not the escapist’s last refuge, it’s perhaps the meta-reality. If memory is art’s alternative to history, the remembering novelist is the redeemer of national reality. That is why the so-called magical realists ( though the the magic in narration is passe nowadays) of Latin America are more than mere sorcerers in the Republic of Imagination. They have made sense of a cruel history, of nations suffering from one hundred years of solitude and one hundred forms of paranoia. Then India is a country suffering from five thousand years of solitude. And it continues to be almost untold. In spite of Salman Rushdie. The banished blasphemer continue to remember, but as he himself had admitted to me in an interview, but home was growing larger than memory. So the homewriting writer came home, and it was the most poignant homecoming after Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in Moscow. Well, that was real. The post-Rushdie arrivals in the Indian imagination in English still have the market value as the literary sundowner. But we are yet to get drunk.

Still, let us agree with the novelist: every future is fabulous. So a fabulous 2001, friend.

(S Prasannarajan is Senior Editor, INDIA TODAY. Write to S Prasannarajan)

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