Art dies when...

By Gemini AI

“Is there any politician who is a poet or artist of any sort?” Anu asks me. Anu – Anushri is her official name – is a former student of mine. She gave up science though she was good at it and took up literature for graduation after which she pursued a journalism course with a prominent media house and then became a journalist.

There are a few of them, I tell her. I name Vaclav Havel and our very own Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Anu thinks I am joking when I mention Vajpayee because she knows how much I detest Vajpayee’s political party to which the present Prime Minister of India belongs.

“Did Vajpayee write any good poetry?” Anu asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “He wrote stuff like: क़दम मिलाकर चलना होगा। We will have to go forward together.” I remember one or two such lines of Vajpayee from my teaching days in Delhi. My students there used to recite such stuff in the morning assembly.  

“That sounds more like politics than poetry,” Anu protests.

I meet Anu once in a while in a café outside her newspaper office. Our conversations are usually brief because she is busy unlike me who is a relaxed retired teacher. But today Anu seems to be having some time on her hands.

“Have you heard of Rimbaud?” I ask.

“You never mentioned that name in class, I’m sure,” she says.

“I didn’t. He wasn’t worth mentioning. He could have been a great poet. But his poetry died the moment he came in contact with politics.”

Arthur Rimbaud. French poet who made the whirling world stand still with his poetry before he turned twenty. I couldn’t have mentioned him in my classes. He betrayed poetry. He betrayed love. He became a trader. Of weapons. Of humans.

He abandoned poetry at the age of 20 and took to selling arms and slaves. He left France a few years after Otto von Bismarck invaded his country and went to Africa. Did Bismarck’s power kill his poetry or did Africa’s helplessness do it? I’m not sure.

“He realised that the sword was mightier than the pen?” Anu asks. That’s Anu. Now you know why I love her so much. Sometimes I think she is my alter ego.

“Maybe he realised that poetry was as bourgeoisie as politics. And religion.”

“There you are! Literature, religion, politics – all three belong ultimately to those who wield the power, right?”

I smile. “Genuine literature dissents,” I say. “Rimbaud was too young to understand that.”

“That’s it,” Anu cries out as if she is Archimedes in the bathtub that brought him his Eureka moment. “Dissent is what art is.”

“Assent is what politics is. Religion too. Assent to dogma, credo, and protocol.” And then I ask, “Do you know that Hitler was an artist before he became a politician?”

“What?”

“Yes.”