January 02, 2009

Martyrdom

The Asian Age today (Jan 2) carries this essay I wrote, following a brief to write about Hemant Karkare, AR Antulay, Tukaram Ombale and patriotism.

(I called it "Never Forget", they changed that to "Stop Politicising Martyrdom").

You're welcome to let me know if I fulfilled the brief, or to let me know anything else too.

4 comments:

Neeraj said...

Very nice essay. As Shashi Tharoor points out in The Great Indian Novel, politics is in our blood, so politicizing issues like this does not come as a surprise at all. No, no, nothing is a mystery any more. We have come to expect this from our opportunistic politicians for whom this kind of act must be just 'regular'.

Whats even more shite is that comments made by no gooders are allowed to be dragged into national debates. The need of the hour is thrown aside and more crap is allowed to seep through into the parliament. As you can imagine, the parliament is now filled with crap. It is just as futile for us to ask why this as it is for the parliamentarians to be discussing Antulays comments at all.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Spot on. The only edit I'd have made was to order the names at the end alphabetically (it's not clear what the ordering is; I'd assume it's random and neutral, but alphabetical would be seen to be neutral).

As for Antulay: if the media did not want their soundbytes, his comment wouldn't have mattered. Conspiracy theories and angry condemnations are more exciting than serious discussions of how to approach such situations in the future.

Anonymous said...

Rahul,

AR Antulay is not as harmless as you seem to imply.

Such callousness is what that brought us to 26/11.

About time we call a spade a spade

-RR

??! said...

I read the original article in the paper just two days after thinking to myself that I should blog about the very issue. I didn't, but I was glad you did. Well written, indeed.