A very happy ‘Vishu’ to all my friends in Kerala A very happy ‘Vishu’ to all my friends in Kerala
A very happy ‘Vishu’ to all my friends in Kerala

Betrayal and intrigue has been laced with deceit and untrustworthy temperament at RGV’s ‘India 24/7′ and these are expressions that do not come easily to me. So the director and I struggle, until all is exactly right and canned.

The morning before all this was less exciting. They are putting new poles at the crossing outside Prateeksha. Poles of a more modern design to hang the traffic lights from. One of them is being dug in right outside the gate on the pavement. So they had come to inform me. Sweet of them. The establishment generally does not.

I wonder at the justification of such an exercise. Traffic lights are put up to control and manage traffic. PROVIDED… people and vehicles pay heed to it. Why spend peoples money on matters which do not benefit anyone. There is no respect shown to the signals. Red, green, yellow are merely there for entertainment, for, in the eyes of the motorists they only signify ‘GO’ !!

I wish they would spend this money in educating car owners and conducting severe driving tests before surreptitiously handing them the coveted driving license. I wish they would spend this money in teaching the basic ethics for pedestrians on the road. I wish they would use these funds to teach those that walk the streets, that the central divider on the road is just that, a divider. Not a spot for evening strolls, or meeting spots for your amorous designs. Would someone tell them that in this country traffic moves on the left of the road and that when you shall walk up in an opposite direction to this basic rule on the same side as the traffic going down, with your mobile stuck to your ear in animated conversation and in complete disregard to the cars coming your way, you are likely to get HIT …!!

That parking your vehicle or the auto rickshaw on a turning, or within 5 to 7′ of it, is against traffic norms. That traffic coming from the right has the right of way when you approach a crossing. That.. gosh I could just go on endlessly…

And the frustration would never end. Because here, the car owner whether he is right or wrong, is ALWAYS wrong. He will get beaten up and lynched irrespective of who’s fault caused the accident. A daily conducted an opinion reaction on what people felt on the fate of the pedestrian on the streets of Mumbai and each one of them unanimously stated that the pedestrian was the one that suffered because the car drivers showed no consideration for them. Could be true. But how much discipline does the pedestrian show ? Because even as I write, pencils and minds will be sharpened against this stance being elitist and unmindful of the less privileged.

Nothing of this sort crosses the minds of the so called privileged. What does cross their minds is the dire need to certain basic civic sense. Not just how they behave on a road, but general basic civic senses - of litter and garbage disposal. Of a systematic road culture, of behavior and temperament, of patience and regard.

Dear me..!! Look where we started from and where we are at now. It was a traffic pole was it not ? Yes, a traffic pole for a new light at the crossing. Thank you sir, you are right. Do we dare question authority ? Authority of the establishment ? NEVER ..

I requested 24/7 to finish early. I was to be in town for the book release of Anil Dharker’s publication, ‘ICON’. At the Oberoi Trident Rooftop, one of the locations during that dastardly attack on Mumbai 26/11. So leaving Madh Island at 4:30 pm to be in time for the 7:30 event was not a very big wonder. And I made it in just about good time.

20 Indians that have shaped India were in the book. Yours truly, there as well, along with a huge variety of eminent individuals whose contribution has been large and distinguished. Sunil Gavaskar and Charles Correa that great architect present in person and a very select decorated audience in the hall.

I did a repeat of my speech at the Delhi release of the book, with some minor changes and I put it out now for my EF to read and comment -

Icons

Speech for April 2009

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman -

It is an honour that Anil Dharker has asked me to say a few words, well.. more than just a few words, today, to commemorate the launch of his book, ‘Icons: men and women who shaped today’s India’. Naturally I am at one with the editor’s desire to address the state of our nation, how we all arrived where we are now from our freedom at midnight.

Eternal vigilance, after all, is indeed the price of liberty.

Anil Dharker has gone about his unenviable task of vigilance with forbearance: we live in times of rapid change. With the infinite passing of the present at any one moment, we should all be ever-present here together to debate and contest today’s India. We cannot. The task must be shared across our citizen fraternity. It is to his credit then that Anil Dharker has given us the opportunity of vigilance right now.

The creation of a book is a monumental undertaking. I salute Anil Dharker’s work, its eminent contributors, and all the others basking in the delights of anonymity who directed their energies towards its publication.

I like the brevity of his introduction. It is polite, restrained. It allows the characters some space; it allows the reader space to draw his or her own conclusions.

I like the breadth of the book, its choice of myriad diversity, the way it spans the whole of our culture: institutional, political, economic, scientific, artistic, and journalistic.

I like its humane approach, at once gently critical and yet ultimately sympathetic. Its twenty central figures have not been boxed into an over-arching ideological incarceration. Not over-theorised, there is room to gain a sense of an individual, a real human being in there, in each chapter. There is enough room for both the reader and the read to breathe.

And the book is not smug celebration: there is an overall sense of the great strivings and achievements of this country portrayed in its pages, but also constant reminders of obstacles, difficulty, frustrations, adversity, both potential and very real. Achievement and progress are most interesting against such a backdrop.

It is also then an inspiring book, and a hopeful one. Whilst acknowledging the past, it looks to the future through the lens of the present. We are a nation born of great idealism and hope. Here in this book, we read the best of ourselves, represented by these various icons. We must endeavour to keep faithful to that spirit, trying to do more than just survive and endure.

We may not all agree with the twenty people who were chosen to depict our national condition – in fact we definitely won’t. I don’t for a start. But thank god for that: a book can only be so long - twenty is just as arbitrary as any other number. And agreeing so easily would not be any fun at all. Amartya Sen himself has called us Indians particularly argumentative. And Narayana Murthy would not take a moment to remind us of the much celebrated adage, “I disagree with what you say, but I defend until death your right to say it”. Voltaire: nobody would want to disagree with him.

In the present climate of change, just imagine what could be achieved if we channelled more of our military budget into further cultivating our inclination for debate: we would be the most well-defended nation in the world. After all, it is the very citizens, each one of us, who create, sustain and defend a republic.

This book entertains my thoughts beyond its cover, as it should any Indian; anyone who claims an interest in the condition, development and trajectory of the most populous democracy on earth; and anyone else for that matter who takes interest in the general nature of representative democracy in modern times.

I find it a genuine embarrassment to be counted as one of The Twenty. I should not be alphabetically 3rd, or even the 21^st in rank. I shouldn’t be there at all. Not only do I feel that such import is undeserved, but I find myself stupefied by the weight of its responsibility.

Let me introduce myself, as you may not be sure who I am – at least in this capacity – as I stand here before you. I am just an actor. It is my job. I am not the sum of all of my parts, as such. Yes, I am heartened that I seem to give pleasure to some of the audience some of the time – definitely not all the time – and the satisfaction I feel at doing a good job on the odd occasion should be the extent of my reward, beyond the necessity of earning a living.

Of course I like the material remunerations of that living: I am no sadhu ascetic. Admittedly, I daily fantasise about taking off to the mountains to find a suitably quiet cave unfettered by worldly cares to watch the shadows flicker their reflections on the walls. But such yearnings of renunciation do not make an exception of me either, for many of us right here share them. If we all just got up and left for higher ground en masse, that wouldn’t be too good, not enough dank and uncomfortable caves up there for the lot of us, unless Charles Correa has some bright ideas. But no, more seriously, we do not go because we honour our duties and obligations to others. As spouses, parents, friends, workers, citizens, human beings. We don’t go because imperfect as we are, we gain pleasure and delight in the bustling course of profane – the opposite of sacred - daily living, often saving precious little of what we have left over of ourselves for rigorous introspection. My father put it better in one of his poems:

जीवन की आपाधापी में ,

कब वक़्त मिला कुछ देर कहीं पर बैठ कभी यह सोच सकूँ ,

जो किया कहा माना, उसमे क्या बुरा भला -

Where was the time in the hustle and bustle of life

To sit down a while somewhere and reflect

What was good and bad in what I did, said and believed

But that returns me to my point: I can recite lines, sometimes so that they move others to feel and even think on occasion. But I don’t write them. If I can captivate and inspire, it is only with my skill as an actor. I am a foil, merely a mouthpiece, for the inspired creations of others. It is a wholly different matter to take the analogy further – to insist that I am a foil or mouthpiece for the imaginations, hopes, dreams, anxieties and frustrations of a whole nation. Foils, mouthpieces, are empty in themselves.

Zubin Mehta can conduct a full orchestra to bring the music of Wagner to life; I sometimes feel that I can hardly even manage the task of conducting myself.

Our honourable APJ Abdul Kalam directed the creation of machines of excellence with brilliant ingenuity. Amartya Sen thought and dreamed his way to theories that are beautiful in both their conceptual, practical and moral aspects. Lakshmi Mittal, Ratan Tata and Narayana Murthy are our magicians of industry; Manmohan Singh has guided us on a thin tightrope of tremendous structural change; Sonia Gandhi has courageously aided in persuading us to follow, however unsure and teetering our step; PN Bhagwati has done much to creatively reinterpret and readjust a once foreign system of justice to our own needs.

These are all true artists, each and every one.

And then the late Baba Amte paints our vast landscapes; MF Husain links points on a psephologist’s graph with his exquisite line; Gavaskar and Tendulkar, gladiatorial, battle it out with our fiscal demons; Ebrahim Alkazi directs our missiles into a disciplined row of Greek chorus; Salman Rushdie develops our waking dream of substantive freedoms; Charles Correa’s square zings through time and space with the same energy as those of silicon; Deepak Chopra’s ‘Leela’ plays across the surfaces of millions of tonnes of steel; India’s Nightingale sings the abstract equations of statistical analysis with unearthly purity.

Perhaps I go a little too far in reverie, but mixing my metaphors has a serious point. Honour must be commended where it is due, and our diverse achievements as a nation ever weave us into each other, unite us as one. Our unity is ultimately an imaginative endeavour, a creative act. This in no way depreciates the exercise: quite the opposite, for the power of our collective imaginations infuses the very core of the democractic project of a nation with its life.

I save a special mention for our nation’s great tradition of professional journalism, so well exemplified by the eminent figures of Khushwant Singh and Prannoy Roy. Need I say, I myself have had some - at times energetic - interactions with this profession over the years. And thus all the more so do I believe that our journalists are our gatekeepers, our interpreters, our honourable messengers between each other: in a democratic, secular, and open society they inform us of what is relevant to our political, cultural and civic interests. Our trust in them must be complete. We owe them the safety of our democracy. We owe them the virtue of their vocation. We owe them their eternal vigilance.

So yes, I am just an actor. And here today I find myself further embarrassed because no one has given me my lines. I am not an intellectual, nor do I have the other option provided by a high-definition six-pack, so that I can bluster my way through things I do not understand. Or if I do, I’m keeping my shirt on.

Nevertheless, this book touched upon some things that I have been thinking about for some time and I take the opportunity here to air them when they are so relevant.

Anil Dharker in his introduction does not dwell upon his choice of the word ‘icon’. His lightness of touch as I have said earlier is much appreciated, but for me I am troubled and would like to talk about why.

I went straight to Wikipedia for starters and looked it up. ‘Icon’, the word for image from the ancient Greek, in a secular sense is simply anything that represents something else of greater significance and apparently does not necessarily imply its sanctity or veneration. But it does say that a cultural icon is irreplaceable, incomparable and timeless. A cultural icon captures the imagination of a cultural group.

I read on: St. Basil the Great says,

“If I point to a statue of Caesar and ask you ‘Who is that?‘, your answer would properly be, ‘It is Caesar.’ When you say such you do not mean that the stone itself is Caesar, but rather, the name and honour you ascribe to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself.”

So it is with an Icon.

The honour bestowed upon me by being included amongst The Twenty makes more sense in this context: by analogy, it is the Indian Film Industry who is Caesar; I am merely a stone, only one of their many stones, and a rather old and battered one at that.

But to take the thought further, I wonder about what cultural icons do for us.

As this book demonstrates, they can inspire, give hope, capture our imaginations and these responses can only be an ultimate good in the world.

The concern really however, is the extent to which we give our contemporary cultural icons power beyond what is good. For instance, there is something else going on than my simply being treated as a stone.

Our great nation was born with the aid of the greatest of midwives, great leaders, true Leviathans. We Indians have a long tradition of the heroic. We also like our stories as grand narrative, with big drama, big passion, big character, big suffering, big endurance, big overcomings.

Yes, I have, with so many others of The Twenty, provided my fair share of all things Big, even a B. With such a publicised life for over forty years, I have provided ample and extended narrative footage for the public, for delight in the giddy highs of success, the passion of suffering and loss, and the schadenfreude of defeat, on and on.

Considering the vast multitudes of our fellow citizens who have anonymously and quietly succeeded, suffered and endured far greater than me, I feel it at the very least a morally dubious thing that such public attention has been bestowed upon my private existence. I have not sought it. I have tried to maintain silence in the past because that is all I could do to preserve some sense of dignity and sanity in my private life.

But my preferred silence is apparently at once dignified and at the same time not so. It is an oft-repeated argument that despite the fact I am not holding public office, being a public figure I should still be obliged to explain myself. When I do speak, it is regularly shot down as mere self-promotion, or with no response whatsoever. The latter was very much the case after the event of a recent wedding in my family. Kept as a private and small event amongst my immediate kin and intimate friends due to the mortal condition of my late mother, it was apparently an act of self-promotion for many, or a mean-spirited exclusivity for others. The irony of it was astonishing to me.

I was moved to write at length to the editors of many reputable newspapers, magazines and journals – they all know who they are – to correct the manifold errors of much of the press at large about the event, some of them verging on shocking absurdity. Not one copy of my written response has been published. I have a human right to reply to public slander against myself or my family, with the public witness of my fellow citizens. This right was met with indifference. Even now, again, I have been forced to correct the very same error. Again, I receive no redress.

Faulted in silence; faulted in speech.

What sort of double-bind is this, what sort of culture of news media do we have that could find justice in this Catch-22? I am just an actor: what sort of directors are there in the public sphere who really want to go down this narrative path? I am a stone. This is no way to treat the achievements of its Caesar.

What sort of country is this, that they place a mere actor amongst its gloried Twenty? Where are our other real heroes? Have we become so enamoured of sheer fame, wealth and privilege that we hold these up as transformative for a culture as rich in heritage as ours? Where is the maturity in our free society that we must glorify such empty vessels as myself for admiration?

Of course I acknowledge the role of inspirational individuals to cultivate our dreams and hopes as a community, but why is there so little public concern about the delicate point at which inspiration morphs into mindless and infantile idolatry? Icons remain legitimate as long as they do not become idols.

And what sort of power do we really worship in our endless compulsive listings and rankings of our fellow citizens? Power lists! Rich lists! It seems to me a kind of destructive avatar, a new confabulation of our cultural obsession with hierarchy so catastrophically manifested in the caste system. Ranks! Stratified categorisations! We need to get over this, move on. Have we become so frivolous and superficial in the last 60 years that we have become blinded to undifferentiated power, that it is enough of an end in itself?

Undifferentiated power: the conflation of material power, political power, the power of knowledge, moral power. Power is a potential, not an end in itself. What do we plan to do with ours, newly found?

What would all of those who paid so dearly for our Independence 60 years ago think of us now? Yes, they would at least feel gratified that there has been some progress towards alleviating the terrible suffering of all the forms of poverty that have plagued our population, material and cultural. But we still have a very long way to go.

Is this really a time to rest on our laurels?

I am an actor. I find that from my humble position, I merely end up with a lot of questions to ask. I do not have the talent, the intelligence, or the training to ask them well, let alone answer them.

So I call upon our public intellectuals in all walks of life to vigilant debate, to argument. Be Indian: be argumentative. It is, indeed, a high price, this price of freedom.

The onus falls heaviest on the shoulders of my betters, those who can argue for us and be heard, those who by doing so, not only raise the standard of public discussion, but raise the most urgent of contemporary issues. And I implore them to raise their voices when they sit down awhile everywhere and reflect together about what is good and bad in what we do, say and believe. I beg them for loud and clear direction on set, in our public sphere. I want to hear more, and the best of them. Even if they disagree with me. If they do, then I threaten them, with my defence until death for their right to do so.

The camera rolls on all of us as we face our future together as citizens of India with 60 years of tens of thousands of midnights behind us. May we face it, and each other, with imaginative generosity, to go forth, inspired to action.

As human beings in the world, we have had a rather longer chance to sort ourselves out, and now a good chance of running out of time, not only this evening, but in general for humanity at large.

I make a last salutary gesture to the book that brought us all here today by responding to the quotation with which Anil Dharker captured its spirit.

He addresses his daughter in the closing moments of the book with the following -

‘These are wonderful men and women, Ayesha.

But there’s always room for more.’

We need many more and urgently.

My love and my affection …

Amitabh Bachchan