Issue 66 Vol III, June 30, 2008

A R T  &  L I T E R A T U R E

Gulzar: a kaleidoscopic view
Randeep Wadehra
Echoes & Eloquences: the life and cinema of Gulzar by Saibal Chatterjee
Rupa & Co., N. Delhi. Pages: x+266. Price: Rs. 795/-.

THE Art of Biography/Is different from Geography/Geography is about Maps/ But Biography is about Chaps. ‘But what sort of chaps?’ one might well ask while recalling this ditty penned by the late British writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Certainly not ordinary ones, and Sampooran Singh Kalra aka Gulzar is a remarkable man in more than one sense. He is a poet of fine sensibility capable of conjuring up strong graphic imagery. He is a filmmaker whose movies stir up our souls and effervesce our emotions like only he can. He is reclusive and enigmatic but his works are eloquent. A man of fine tastes, he avoids harshness and yet his movies leave a powerful impact on one’s thought processes; the soft, understated dialogues, lyrics and portrayals keep echoing long after the theatre lights have been switched on.

As the cliché goes, creativity is intrinsic to all human activity. But what lends enough edge to some people’s works that they stand apart from the crowd? There is no easy answer as different ingredients decide the shape and substance of creative processes in different persons. In the case of Gulzar, perhaps, smoldering embers lit by several contrary situations and events set his emotions churning, leading to decoction of classy creative juices. He was a lonely child among a brood of nine siblings – the other eight were his step brothers and sisters. Nostalgia regarding his ancestral village of Dina in Pakistan, where he had spent a part of his early childhood, no memory whatsoever of his mother who had died when he was an infant, and the frightful impact of the Partition related bloody violence in Delhi’s streets combined with a difficult childhood to sculpt the worldview of young Gulzar. Add to that the fact that he was introduced, albeit inadvertently, to the works of such all-time great litterateurs like Premchand, Tagore, Sharatchandra etc, along with popular literature, when still in his teens, the seeds of exceptional creativity had been sown into a sensitive mind with fertile imagination.

Soon enough the creative juices began to flow in the form of excellent poetry which was duly published in such prestigious Urdu journals as Shama. His stepmother ended his college studies prematurely and packed him off to Bombay. This proved to be a blessing in disguise. He came into contact with the legendary filmmaker Bimal Roy and joined his team as a lyricist and assistant director, where he penned such memorable songs as Mera gora ang lai le mohe sham rang dai de… (Bandini) and Ganga aaye kahaan se… (Kabuliwala), among several others.

While mentioning his talent and accomplishments as poet, story writer, scriptwriter, composer and lyricist, Chatterjee has focused on tracing the evolution of Gulzar as filmmaker. His debut film Mere Apne (1971) portrays the angst and anger of youth in the 1960s, a theme he revisits in 1996 with Maachis. In both the movies the influence of the post-Partition street violence that the director had witnessed as a lad in Delhi could be discerned. Similarly, while analyzing his other movies like Achanak, Angoor, Koshish, Khushboo, Kitaab, Kirdaar, Khamoshi etc he dwells upon the influence of the filmmaker’s variegated experiences. The sensitive portrayal of women is traced back to the absence of mother’s love in his life. Again, Gulzar’s movies deal intrinsically with relationships wherein he rarely portrays female protagonists in dark shades. The attempt is more at understanding the female psyche than making value judgments.

Perhaps Chatterjee is right when he observes that Gulzar’s matchless cinematic style and metaphor render his movies immune to remakes. His unique comic sense manifests itself in Angoor as director, and as scriptwriter in movies like Chupke Chupke, Bawarchi, Golmaal and Khubsoorat. He also dwells, albeit none too comprehensively, on the process that enabled Gulzar to pen such subtly sensuous and sublime stuff as Humne dekhi hai un aankhon ki mehakti khushboo… (Khamoshi) as also the starkly temporal Beedi jalaiye le… (Omkara). Although Chatterjee has explored his films exhaustively enough there is not enough on his lyrics and non-filmy literary output. What yearnings led to the moon becoming a constant motif in his oeuvre? We get no insight into this aspect at all. Similarly, he deals at length with the classic TV serial Mirza Ghalib but ignores another cerebral creation Tehrir…Munshi Premchand Ki, a tele-series. But this is nitpicking really.

The biographer studiously avoids all controversies involving the living legend’s professional as well as personal life even as he touches several relevant aspects. He does allude to the insinuations of plagiarism vis-à-vis movies like Koshish and Parichay, and to the marital break-down; but, by and large, controversies have been avoided. This somehow makes the book more eulogistic than biographical in nature. The rose tinted smooth visage is prominent but warts and moles are missing. It’s like watching a kaleidoscope that does not show all the colors. Hope this eminently readable biography will present the complete picture in its next edition.

[Email:- randeep_wadehra@yahoo.co.in]

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"Seeds of destruction, the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation"
Some comments on F. William Engdahl's Book. Published by: Global Research
www.globalresearch. ca

ONE reviewer aptly summed up F. William Engdahl's Book Seeds of Destruction: “This cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl's book focuses brilliantly on one of them.”

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who has written on energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant's Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Engdahl also wrote two important books - "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" in 2004. It's an essential history of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America's post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world's reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources.

Those who know and understand how our lives are shaped and governed turned into robot like feel the pain and expose. This book precisely does this.  It provides a detailed documented geo political story about seeds as weapons for mass destruction.

Arun Shrivastava writing about the "Seeds of Destruction" says “ the   last three or four years have seen a number of books, documentaries and articles on the dangers of Genetically Modified (GM) seeds. Majority has focused on adverse health and environmental impact; almost none on the geo-politics of GM seeds, and particularly seeds as a weapon of mass destruction. Engdahl has addressed this issue but the crop seed is one of the many "Seeds of Destruction" in this book.”

Shrivastava further says. “Engdahl carefully documents how the intellectual foundations of 'eugenics,' mass culling of the sick, coloured, and otherwise disposable races, were actually first established, and even legally approved, in the United States. Eugenics research was financially supported by the Rockefeller and other elite families and first tested on Jews under Nazi Germany.

“It is purely by chance that world's poorest nations also happen to be best endowed with natural resources. These regions are also the ones with growing population. The fear among European ruling families, increasingly, integrating with economic and military might of the United States, was that if the poor nations became developed, the abundant natural resources, especially oil, gas, and strategic minerals and metals, may become scarcer for the white population. That situation was unacceptable to the white ruling elite.

“The central question that dominated the minds of the ruling clique was population reduction in resource rich countries but the question was how to engineer mass culling all over the world without generating powerful backlash as it was bound to happen. When the US oil reserves peaked in 1972 and it became a net oil importer, the situation became alarming and  the agenda took the centre stage. Kissinger, one of the key strategists of Nixon, nurtured by the Rockefellers, prepared what is known as National Security Study Memo (NSSM#200), in which he elaborated his plan for population reduction. In this Memo he specifically targets thirteen countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, and The Philippines.

“The weapon to be used was food; even if there was a famine food would be used to leverage population reduction. Kissinger is on record for stating, "Control oil, you control nations; control food and you control the people." How a small group of key people transformed the elitist philosophy, of controlling food to control people, into realistic operational possibility within a short time is the backdrop of Engdahl's book, the central theme running from the beginning till the end with the Rockefellers and Kissinger, among others, as the key dramatis personae.

He describes how the Rockefellers guided the US agriculture policy, used their powerful tax-free foundations worldwide to train an army of bright young scientists in hitherto unknown field of microbiology. He traces how the field of Eugenics was renamed "genetics" to make it more acceptable and also to hide the real purpose. Through incremental strategic adjustments within a handful of chemical, food and seed corporations, ably supported by the key persons in key departments of the US Government, behemoths were created that could re-write the regulatory framework in nearly every country. And these seeds of destruction of carefully constructed regulatory framework- to protect the environment and human health- were sown back in the 1920s.

“Pause to think: a normal healthy person can at the most go without food for perhaps seven days but it takes a full season, say around four months, for a seed to grow into food crop. Just five agri-biz corporations, all US based (Cargill, Bunge, Archer Daniels, et al), control global grain trade, and just five control global trade in seeds. Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, DuPont, and Dow Chemicals control genetically engineered seeds. While these powerful oligopolies were being knocked into place, anti-trust laws were diluted to exempt these firms. Engdahl writes, "It was not surprising that the Pentagon's National Defense University, on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War, issued a paper declaring: 'Agribiz is to the United States what oil is to the Middle East.' Agribusiness had become a strategic weapon in the arsenal of the world's only superpower."

The "Green Revolution" was part of the Rockefeller agenda to destroy seed diversity and push oil and gas based agriculture inputs in which Rockefeller' s had main interest. Destruction of seed diversity and dependence on proprietary hybrids was the first step in food control.

It is true that initially Green Revolution technologies led to spurt in farm productivity but at a huge cost of destruction of farmlands, bio-diversity, poisoned aquifers and progressively poor health of the people and was the true agenda of 'the proponents of Green Revolution.'

In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful job explaining the dangers of GM foods and ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes much further brilliantly in his blockbuster book on this topic. It's the story of a powerful family and a "small socio-political American elite (that) seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival" - future life through the food we eat. The book's introduction says it "reads (like) a crime story." It's also a nightmare but one that's very real and threatening.

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