Blood is the inevitable price you pay to earn your place in your country. The narrator's grandmother in Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Shadow Lines, says that. Maybe you don't pay it yourself, your parents or grandparents or their uncles did. People draw their national borders with blood. That bloodshed is a religion for people.
India seems to be getting ready for another national sacrifice. If the freedom fighters of yesteryears paid that price for all Indians, today's nationalists are doing it in order to snatch the country from certain religious communities. "India belongs to Indians" was the old slogan. The new one is, "India belongs to Hindus."
It's about territory anyway. This territory belongs to me and people I consider mine. Like the beasts in the forests, we mark out our frontiers. This is my den, keep out or else you're doomed. Nationalist slogans bear the tang of the wild growls in primitive enclosures.
National borders are shadow lines, but. Amitav Ghosh shows that in the novel mentioned above. Khulna in Bangladesh is not quite hundred miles from Calcutta as the crow flies. But the two cities face each other at a watchful equidistance across the border.
Put the leg of your compass on Calcutta and draw a circle. More foreign cities will fall inside than Indian ones. Your circle will pass through Thailand and Vietnam and Laos and...
Who drew the shadow lines between nations? How much more blood should those shadows suck? Who decides who belong to which side of the lines?
When the shadows of your life lengthen in the twilight that will come sooner or later, maybe a realisation will rise from those shadows: you can't take the conquered territory with you. What you gave is what will accompany you. The only sacrifice worth making is your own: self-sacrifice.
India seems to be getting ready for another national sacrifice. If the freedom fighters of yesteryears paid that price for all Indians, today's nationalists are doing it in order to snatch the country from certain religious communities. "India belongs to Indians" was the old slogan. The new one is, "India belongs to Hindus."
It's about territory anyway. This territory belongs to me and people I consider mine. Like the beasts in the forests, we mark out our frontiers. This is my den, keep out or else you're doomed. Nationalist slogans bear the tang of the wild growls in primitive enclosures.
National borders are shadow lines, but. Amitav Ghosh shows that in the novel mentioned above. Khulna in Bangladesh is not quite hundred miles from Calcutta as the crow flies. But the two cities face each other at a watchful equidistance across the border.
Put the leg of your compass on Calcutta and draw a circle. More foreign cities will fall inside than Indian ones. Your circle will pass through Thailand and Vietnam and Laos and...
Who drew the shadow lines between nations? How much more blood should those shadows suck? Who decides who belong to which side of the lines?
When the shadows of your life lengthen in the twilight that will come sooner or later, maybe a realisation will rise from those shadows: you can't take the conquered territory with you. What you gave is what will accompany you. The only sacrifice worth making is your own: self-sacrifice.
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