A post-colonial neo-sneer

Essay- satire


A post-colonial neo-sneer


Mick Jagger, just launched on his multi-city US tour along with the Stones, has been back-pedalling furiously. The source of his discomfiture is a media attention grabbing song in their new album A Bigger Bang allegedly calling president George Bush and vice president Dick Cheney neo-cons. Neo-cons, for the uninitiated, are 2005 versions of the old-style imperialist. Rock, for the longest running No. 1 rock n roll band of all time, has grown wings of political neo-comment. In the past, you didn’t find oil-field contractors such as Halliburton featured in the lyrics unless they were by rock prophets like Mr. Zimmerman.

Columnists, always a precious breed, also wear badges these days. They hunt in packs of forism and againstism with conscious refusal to present both sides of an argument. So when I went to see Mangal Pandey soon after it came out, and liked it, I didn’t quite know whether I needed my head examined for saying so. I felt that perhaps I lacked taste and good sense, both, because all the comment in the first flush (good word that-flush), said that it was a crappy movie. But, this, as it turned out, was the charge of the against brigade, who happened to have got off to an earlier start than the other side. It makes you wonder when they wrote their pieces, but, in any case, the againsters are adept at using variable yardsticks or different bits in their Swiss knives depending on what it is they wish to cut down to size. If they want to carry axes they invariably reserve the right to grind them wherever they feel like it. They have an audacity about them, like supari killers, and there is a sense of inevitability. It is rumoured that once a supari killer has been contracted, the intended target is already a dead-man-walking.

Happily for me, just a mere day or two later, before my depression with my lack of discernible judgement had time to settle in, comes the forka brigade. This lot agrees with me and says it was a good film and gives a fulsome number of positive reasons for saying so. The film producer and the script-writer also weigh in. They let fly with a good number of volleys of their own, all implying acute stupidity as the given life condition of their critics and then point out, in self-defense, that the film had done well in its first week and was making money by virtue of ordinary film-goers going in to see it. Just so you don’t think they are just full of lies and bluster, the affected parties also release figures and facts to bolster this claim.

The net effect on me, happy as I am for all connected with Pandey, is one of relief. It is nice to know my taste in things is shared by others. It is good to know I don’t suffer from alienation and a sense of unreality for not agreeing with precious arguments and therefore do not need a mental overhaul after all.

It also gets me thinking about the tyranny of the opinion formation process and how it tries so hard to affect outcomes with means fair and foul. Then I think, with further relief, how nice it is that we have Amartya Sen, an Indian Nobel laureate, no less, who has put his seal of approval on the Indian love of diversity and argument. I don’t know about national symbol Pandey but I’m sure it would have brought a tear to Emperor Akbar’s eye.


(610 words)

Title: A post colonial neo sneer
By Ghatotkach
Friday, 26 August 2005

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