Loverant (or Nandigram year Zero)

Just graze your eyes on my green grass
My words might be your midnight meadows or evening pastures
Just say you like my wordlings
My scribescreams and I might offer you my service
Of loveletters without any promises

Your Highness, my lowness
Is pent-up, I am fed-up
It bothers me I am too pissed on
I wanted to mutate to pistons
Grinding my yesterdays into a pulp
And sculpt all into a totem to shoot or shit on

And a distant night-train whistles
That my life
is well, is fine, is immersed sublime
Elsewhere elsewhere

Just recall a year just passed by
Weary guts were shot and greenlands purchased
Pastures and meadows were bloodsoaked
I’m sorry my nails are plucked off
Your skin never ever intended to be painted
Excuse my bloodstreaks mapping my caresses

For just one night still, whisper you like
My fumblings and mumblings, howls and barklings
Are music to your smile-eyes, just lie me
You can tie me up, and tie me down
I’ll offer myself as a totem to spit on
And if the hailstorm in my cranium subsides

A distant nightplane might rumble
Our life
is well, is fine, is reversed in timeline
Elsewhere, elsewhere

Image Courtesy: Anthropomorphic Sculpture 3 by Massimo Conti

Nandigram Reloaded: Dissenting the Gods (updated)

Not anything written by me; I am just keeping this for record…essentially leftist stuff.
Updated

SORRY TIME!

News Source: The Telegraph, Dec 05

New Delhi, Dec. 4: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee went on a public relations drive in Delhi today, stung by widespread criticism of his remarks justifying the violent “recapture” of Nandigram by CPM cadres last month.
The Bengal chief minister not only admitted that Nandigram was “an administrative and political failure” but for the first time publicly regretted his “paid back in their own coin” remark.
“I said we (the CPM) had paid them (Opposition activists) back in their own coin. I think I should not have said that because now I want peace, peace for all, peace for all sections,” he said.
He added: “Nandigram was an administrative and political failure. We have learnt (the) lesson… that we have to take people into confidence.”
Such admission before the “bourgeois” media is rare from a leader of a communist party, where self-criticism is usually confined to closed-door party forums.
A day after making the “own coin” remark, Bhattacharjee had justified it saying that though he was chief minister he wasn’t “above the party”.
But today, asked if he regretted the words, he tried to explain: “I was trying to tell them (the media) that our boys were getting desperate and out of desperation they entered the area.”
Bhattacharjee, compared to Narendra Modi in the media in recent weeks, went out of his way to play up his image as a man of culture and literature.
He spoke of his cordial ties with Gopalkrishna Gandhi, unlike party colleagues who have hit out at the governor for his repeated criticism of the government’s handling of Nandigram. Bhattacharjee said he and Gandhi discussed not just political and administrative matters but “literature” as well and exchanged books.
In the same vein, he said the angry reaction of intellectuals was “understandable” since they tended to be “sensitive people” — a clear attempt to signal to the world outside Bengal that he remained a bhadralok, never mind Nandigram.
“My duty is to explain to all of them (intellectuals) the actual situation. We have to convince them that… Nandigram won’t be repeated. Many of them have now been convinced.”
The chief minister, however, evaded most of the questions on Taslima Nasreen. He said he had discussed the issue with foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee today. “I have spoken to Pranabda. Now it is up to the Centre.”
He was confident that the year-long land battle would not affect his drive for industry. “Nandigram or no Nandigram… industrialisation in West Bengal cannot be stopped because it has captured the imagination of the younger generation.”
Bhattacharjee said the CPM would settle its differences with its partners over Nandigram. “The Left Front… is not a hotchpotch coalition like the UPA or NDA.”
He said he would not visit Nandigram now since his first task was to restore normality. Besides, the farmers were busy cultivating the rabi crop. “Let the situation get back to normal. Political speeches won’t help at the moment.”
He claimed normality was returning fast and most refugees had come back home.
Bhattacharjee had yesterday met the Prime Minister to discuss the progress on a deep-sea port and some other projects in Bengal.

Reply by Chomsky, Tariq Ali et al after strong reactions to their earlier statement regarding Nandigram

We are taken aback by a widespread reaction to a statement we made with the best of intentions, imploring a restoration of unity among the left forces in India –a reaction that seems to assume that such an appeal to overcome divisions among the left could only amount to supporting a very specific section of the CPM in West Bengal. Our statement did not lend support to the CPM’s actions in Nandigram or its recent economic policies in West Bengal, nor was that our intention. On the contrary, we asserted, in solidarity with its Left critics both inside and outside the party, that we found them tragically wrong. Our hope was that Left critics would view their task as one of putting pressure on the CPM in West Bengal to correct and improve its policies and its habits of governance, rather than dismiss it wholesale as an unredeemable party. We felt that we could hope for such a thing, of such a return to the laudable traditions of a party that once brought extensive land reforms to the state of West Bengal and that had kept communal tensions in abeyance for decades in that state. This, rather than any exculpation of its various recent policies and actions, is what we intended by our hopes for ‘unity’ among the left forces.

We realize now that it is perhaps not possible to expect the Left critics of the CPM to overcome the deep disappointment, indeed hostility, they have come to feel towards it, unless the CPM itself takes some initiative against that sense of disappointment. We hope that the CPM in West Bengal will show the largeness of mind to take such an initiative by restoring the morale as well as the welfare of the dispossessed people of Nandigram through the humane governance of their region, so that the left forces can then unite and focus on the more fundamental issues that confront the Left as a whole, in particular focus on the task of providing with just and imaginative measures an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism that has caused so much suffering to the poor and working people in India.

Signed

Michael Albert
Tariq Ali
Akeel Bilgrami
Victoria Brittain
Noam Chomsky
Charles Derber
Stephen Shalom