OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
“Is there a God’s law
Of truth and beauty
Harmony to eye and ear?
Or is it all Darwin
Tooth and claw
Survival of the fittest
Ugliness and fear?
Oh Bachchoo, don’t we earnestly wish
That all was willed from above?
Alas, we know without relish
The world is not all truth and love…”
From The ‘Eek’ Shall Inherit The Mirth, by Bachchoo
“You Can’t Please All”, says the veteran left-winger and street fighting man, Tariq Ali. That’s what he’s called his recent 800-page autobiography.
Tariq was born in Pakistan and began his political agitations as a schoolboy, leading protests outside the embassies of nasty nations. This second autobiography — the first is called Street Fighting Man — covers the eight decades of his life and chronicles world politics and his interaction with the people and events therein, besides stories of his writing and journalism.
He even admits that he set out to write Ho Chi Minh’s biography and received a telegram from Ho asking him to desist.
This, gentle reader, is by way of introducing the fact that I was asked by the Khushwant Singh Literature Festival in London to interview him.
On the day of our session, I met Tariq early and he said he would answer my prepared questions, but said: “Yaar, Farrukh, gup-shup (chit chat) karthein”. We did.
I started by asking Tariq how and why he became a socialist. He said his parents were both fervent members of the Communist Party of India before the formation of Pakistan. His household was always full of leftist discussions and arguments and he was of course carried by the current and inducted into it.
My own experience (in the interests of the “gup-shup”) was very different.
My immediate family had no strong political leanings though I did spend a good few months living with my granduncle who was a fervent, dedicated Gandhian — so much so that he would only wear khadi, was a strict vegetarian, wouldn’t wear leather slippers or shoes, but only those made of rubber or cloth… etc. It put me off severe Gandhi-ism. What did painfully convert me was observing the poverty of India all around me and the superstition and ritualistic, irrational religious practices. I was convinced that one bred the other.
And then there was my neighbour, a sceptical “Marxist”, Aspy Khambatta.
He was a few years older than myself, fair skinned, blue-eyed and had blonde hair.
His mother’s husband, who had two children with her, took one look at the baby at birth, accused the mother of adultery with a British Raj soldier, disowned the baby and abandoned his wife.
Aspy grew up in poverty as his mother, desperately attempting to maintain a veneer of middle-class Parsi respectability, had to rely on the charity of neighbours and her previous son and daughter, who would give her what money they could steal from their father.
By the time I got to know Aspy in my early teens, he was an ardent socialist and my friends and I would listen dedicatedly, if without perfect understanding, to his detailed descriptions of Soviet agricultural policy and Lenin’s works. He was desperately, contemptuously critical of Indian religious ceremonials and superstition. My first rationalist model?
Aspy joined the Indian Civil Service and was sent to the United States on a trade delegation. He met a lady there, quit the ICS and never returned.
When I was working as a commissioning editor at UK’s Channel Four, perhaps thirty years later, he wrote to me from America. He had joined a Christian evangelical cult and he proposed that I make a documentary of the Devil stalking the earth in three avatars: Hitler, Yasser Arafat and someone called the Rev. “Joe Blogs” (I forget the precise name) — leader of a rival evangelical cult in his town. Did I commission the documentary? Is the present Pope a MAGA Trumpist?
I then asked Tariq about a play he’d co-written called Iranian Nights about the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. It was performed in several mainstream theatres and had the conceit of being narrated by Sheherazade. Salman didn’t like the play and said so publicly. Tariq told the audience that Ayatollah Khomenei, who didn’t read English, issued the capital punishment “opinion” after being told that the book was blasphemous and Muslims were burning it in Bradford and Pakistan…
I said I remembered telling Salman I didn’t in principle object to book- burning and would be quite pleased if, say, the objectors bought 30,000 copies of one of my books and did what they had to. This was before the fatwa. Regrets for frivolity.
At Channel Four, I recruited Tariq and his partner Darcus Howe to start a programme called The Bandung File. At the KLF I invited Tariq to recall the triumphs of this series and he described how it had exposed and brought down the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce and how they tricked a Pakistani vote-fixer into admitting electoral fraud in the UK constituency of Roy Hattersley, the Labour Party’s deputy leader.
Tariq at that session didn’t recall the programme in which both of us went to interview the newly-installed Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister of Pakistan. She invited the two of us into her private chamber with great dignity, but when the general who was escorting us left the room, Benazir jumped into Tariq’s lap, shouting: “Tariq, kya ho raha hai? How does it look from outside?”
Source link
[ad_3]
[ad_4]