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	"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." Charles Lamb, 1833 "Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers." Luis Buñuel, Spanish filmmaker "I often wonder what future historians will say about us. One sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers." Albert Camus, French novelist, dramatist, philosopher, 1956

Oye tu bahar nikal…

S P Singh

North western raiders knock at our borders no more. Ahmed Shah Abdali's offspring no more threaten to take away our wealth or women. But Punjabis, groomed in a matrix of masculine bravery – challenging the other to step out (Oye Tu bahar ta nikal) is an ingrained characteristic behavioral trait – have adopted jingoism as an idiom of politics.

So when a nearly 100,000-strong sea of blue and kesri turbans came swarming to Chandigarh for a major political rally of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the crescendo was that this was a challenge for the Congress and CM Amarinder Singh to match. The challenge of course lay in the numbers.

As the rally hurled Punjab head long into the throes of upcoming no-holds-barred electioneering, the talk was about numbers. "How many?" The guessing game was on. "Lakhs," claimed the Akalis in the huge photographs inserted in the next morning newspapers which were actually paid advertisements. Congressmen tried to play it down but the sea of humanity is a hard thing to hide.

Prakash Singh Badal, that paragon of intellectual debate and cerebral engagements, delineated his thesis to prove that the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, is anti-Punjab. His thesis? Well, he said it. You think it requires more logic? Go tell that to his matching intellectual storehouse Sukhbir Singh Badal.

Of course the high memory recall scenes at the rally were those of Punjab policemen molesting veterinary girl doctors in Ludhiana. This was Amarinder Singh's government's gift to Punjab's collective political memory and will remain imprinted for many years to come.

The one thing that remained unspoken was understood by the thousands of faces below as well as the score odd leaders on the dais: Sukhbir Singh Badal was being clearly projected as the legacy holder of Prakash Singh Badal.

Amarinder Singh is now planning a road show across Punjab, Sukhbir Singh Badal is threatening to follow him with his cavalcade. Punjab is soon going to be drowned in the throes of intelligent debate. "Oye tu bahar nikal ke gal kar" may become a political line.

Challenging is a favourite Punjabi activity. Electoral duelling is only its one form. As for the people of Punjab, the show has just begun, and it’s going to be very nasty soon.■

October 17, 2006

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Posthumously speaking

Hugh Massingberd, a former editor of the obituaries page of the Daily Telegraph, recalled the unwieldy challenges posed by a refusal to capitulate to the seductions of the posthumous parallax (a bending of life histories toward all that is light and wholesome, away from anything that might reflect unfavorably on the dead.

"'One day, an injunction arrived from on high that we were to make a point of including the cause of death,' he reminisced in The Spectator (in 2001). 'As it happened, a candidate for the morgue of the morrow, a priapic jazzer, had handed in his dinner pail after a penile implant had unfortunately exploded. We duly complied with the editorial diktat.'"

P.S. The Daily Telegraph's obituaries have become so popular that (in 1995) the paper began publishing obituary anthologies, many of which have become bestsellers.

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