Friday, September 25, 2009

The rebel



She could have been the academician who does the circuit at seminars and round tables. Or the opinion leader in a NGO or a UN body. But she chose to sling a rifle on her shoulders, and stride in the dreaded jungles of Bastar for the sake of the poor and overlooked.

The life and times of senior Naxal leader, Anuradha Ghandy who died of cerebral malaria in April 2008. Her husband, senior Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy was arrested in Delhi on September 20.

Read here.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah! The thoughts of could-have-beens.
What I could have been. What you could have been.

Sourabh

शायदा said...

very important post. आज ही एक हिंदी अखबार में भी पढ़ी। मन कैसा हुआ, ये बताना तो शायद मुश्किल होगा लेकिन इस बात की तसल्‍ली ज़रूर हुई कि आपने अपना नज़रिया और बात साफ़-साफ़ सामने रखी।

Anonymous said...

LATER--IN THE TEAK FOREST, in the first camp, when during his first night on sentry duty he had found himself for periods wishing only to cry, and when with the relief of dawn there had also come the amazing cry of a far-off peacock, the cry a peacock makes in the early morning after it has had its first drink of water at some forest pool: a raucous, tearing cry that should have spoken of a world refreshed and remade but seemed after the long bad night to speak only of everything lost, man, bird, forest, world; and then, when that camp was a romantic memory, during the numbing guerrilla years, going on and on, in forest, village, small town, when to travel about in disguise had often appeared to be an end in itself and it was possible for much of the day to forget what the purpose of the disguise was, when he had felt himself decaying intellectually, felt bits of his personality breaking off and then in the jail, with its blessed order, its fixed timetable, its protecting rules, the renewal it offered--later it was possible to work out the stages by which he had moved from what he would have considered the real world to all the subsequent areas of unreality; moving as it were from one sealed chamber of the spirit to another.

Opening para of Naipual's Magic Seeds

sourabh

Rahul Pandita said...

What is your point, Sourabh?

sarika said...

i began reading rahul pandita, then anuradha took over...
realised that i was reading you at the end once again...

Nikhil Srivastava said...

Nice to see you in Hum Log.

appu said...

very nice post ......
u r mre weighted dan others in HumLog.....Presented the fact wid logic ....Nice to see you .

Sourabh said...

Rahul,

Naipaul, I feel, has explained well the inside of a guerilla's mind in that para. Just wanted to share that.
Also, wanted to say that when a person becomes a guerilla, he did not chose to be a guerilla. There is no choice for him or her. This he must. or burn in the eternal fire of regret. As such, there is no nostalgia of what could have been. Such thoughts can weaken even the strongest of them.

sourabh

Unknown said...

Some people find their calling and very few are born with one.

Y? said...

I read this piece a while ago in the magazine. It is important.
You write well.