Imaginings: South Asia in 2020
By SouthAsian

‘Imaginings’ constitutes our most ambitious initiative to date. With this initiative we invite our readers to participate in imagining our national and regional futures ten years from now. What do we think our country, a neighboring country in the region, or the region as a whole would be like in 2020? And why?

Readers can submit as many essays as they wish but each essay should deal with one country only (any country in South Asia, not necessarily the writer’s own) or with South Asia as a region. The essay could cover any or all of a number of dimensions – politics, economics, culture, etc.

At the heart of the essay would be the identification of the major forces and trends that would yield the future that the writer chooses to describe. What gave rise to these trends, why would they dominate, and what might cause to change their direction or intensity? The credibility of the prediction would rest on the depth of this analysis.

We have chosen a fairly short end point (2020) both to keep us from being too speculative and to provide the opportunity to track how our predictions begin to bear out within a short time horizon. We hope to repeat the exercise in 2015 in order to reflect back on the developments to date and assess where we were right and wrong and to update our predictions in the light of our findings. Hopefully, there will be a lot of learning involved in this exercise of retrospective evaluation.

Depending on the response, we hope to publish the most relevant and perceptive essays in the form of an edited book. We are deliberately targeting this as the work of students and concerned citizens and not of established scholars because the voice of citizens rarely finds an outlet conducive to dialogue and debate.

We look forward to your contributions. Any suggestions to shape the initiative further would be very welcome.

Contributions should be emailed to the southasianidea@gmail.com.

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Thus, we have people defending the opposition to Hussain saying he “hurt Hindu sentiments” by painting Hindu goddesses in the nude, without outrightly condemning the threats he faces or the violence he has had to face at his exhibitions.

Then you have those opposed to Taslima Nasrin saying that what she said about Islam and the Prophet is factually incorrect when discussing the violence her article provoked.

Others object to comparing Hussain and Nasrin because they think the calibre of the work is so different, one cannot compare them.

I may think Hussain’s paintings are superior to Nasrin’s writings, but that is neither here nor there as far as this debate is concerned. On the debate aired on NDTV today, only Javed Anand seems to have understood this and kept forecefully reiterating this point.

Everyone has their own opinion on the quality of the work. But that is not the point. The point is that they (Hussain and Nasrin) should be free to express through their paintings and writings what they want to and we should be free to criticise their expression, without resorting to violence and threating a person’s safety or destroying their work.

As for our “sentiments” (what an awful word) these days, whether Hindu or Muslim, they seem to be remarkably weak, wishy washy creatures. Time to start working on these easily outraged emotions perhaps, before we start attacking people for what they write and paint.

On Hussain’s being granted Qatari citizenship Umm, who lives in Doha, has said it best.

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Seven years ago, when Buddhist scholar and former monk Stephen Batchelor embarked on a search for the real Siddhartha Gautama, rooting through over 6,000 pages of the Pali Canon—the oldest set of texts on his teachings, which provide glimpses into his social and political world—perhaps he didn’t even dream of the Buddha that would emerge from his research. Far from the picture we have of Siddhartha as a prince who grew up in a palace, who renounced it all and became the Buddha, attracting the rich and powerful as well as hundreds of monks and nuns by his teachings, until one day he just lay down and died, Batchelor’s portrait of the Buddha “is not that simple”. In his new book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, to be out in the US early March, this author of eight other books on Buddhism claims the Buddha was a man whose teachings were regarded by his contemporaries as not only radical, but “queer” enough for him to be denounced by one of his own former disciples as a “fake”, who not only managed to win the patronage of the three most powerful political figures of his time, but was worldly enough to survive in the midst of court intrigues, murders and betrayals, effectively quelling a rebellion within his own flock before he was done in by the ambitions of his own family.

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This probably happened because I write on Carnatic music and I like Tamil film songs.

I explained to the originator of the list and my new list of followers that I wasn’t Tamilian, so that they wouldn’t be disappointed later.

It was certainly very flattering to be thought of as Tamilian (as I love the language, food and culture), though I must admit to being perturbed by people following someone solely on the basis of their ethnic origins (I must add, it doesn’t seem to have made a difference to quite a few of the followers that I am not Tam and they’re still on my list. Although I don’t know if they’re still there to avoid my ego being punctured by their departure).

I once went to an Ajoy Chakraborty concert in London. He is a famous Hindustani musician. At this concert, the audience was jam packed with Bongs. I was mistaken for a Bong there. I was annoyed because these people hadn’t turned up when other very good people sang, and that led me to the conclusion they were only there because Ajoy is a Bong (and they were hugely proud of that fact) and not because they care for Hindustani music per se.

Which leads me to think, quite morosely, that if I announce I am a Sindhi, and start blogging on Sindhi music, language and literature, whatever I write/tweet may be almost unread.

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