To the Reader

My son, who just turned 14, likes to dress up in black leather jackets, wears black gloves all the time and listens to punk rock by groups such as 'The Adicts'. Although him and I share a healthy relationship, he doesn't like it if I on my part show too great an interest in or knowledge about the Punk Rock movement. We had recently rented Stanley Kubrik's 1971 classic 'A Clockwork Orange', and he watched it by himself in his room (remember the scandalous Punk scenes?). When I asked for the DVD, he said, "Pops, you won't probably like it." I had seen the movie before, and I didn't tell him that I was one of the original cult followers. His pride of rebellion would have been robbed by me. Unfortunately, what once was a rebellion has become sanctioned by the establishment. It is The Establishment.

 Where do we find today that what The Establishment doesn't have any idea about? What are today's unthinkable thoughts? The poetry that is obscure now -- awaiting dicovery; Used to be that you would sneak out in the afternoon during the summer holidays, or cut school, and watch delightfully trashy Amitabh Bacchan movies with over the top sentimentality and ill orchestrated fights with badly done dishum-dishum sound effects. Alas, all our set pieces of rebellion -- Marxism, Bollywood, Third World, Negritude, et al, -- have fallen by the wayside. The front page of any Indian newspaper has little but celebrity gossip. A sea of bald heads, veterans of the Long March, greets the observer at the quadrennial Congress of the Communist Party of China, Banner headlines in the Times of India are cheap jingles -- 'Abhi-Ash in Kabhi-Kabhi cash in', or, 'Sush shows Tush', Perhaps it's great that the drabness of the serious political headlines of the 70s and 80s have been replaced by such color, but what of sports? Even that has been taken over by King Khan and his gang. Perhaps it is not fair of us to think that cricket will always be cricket. Hey, the coolness of sports is the fairness of it, right? No gimmick, no show business, you simply do well or not, win or lose in the sports arena, we might have thought, eager to grasp at some straw of honesty and fairness. Now instead, in the rebel ICL league, some blond girls come out on the field and start dancing to Himesh Reshamiya songs every time someone hits a boundary. The mainstream IPL, with much more cash than ICL, has declared that it will have Bombay film heroines dancing every time someone hits a four. I hear that at the little mag corner of Calcutta book fair, billed as the world's biggest, with over two million visitors at the annual ten-day event, the age of the editors of the avant garde little magazines were 65 or over. Gone are the Charminar -smoking, Santiniketan-style jhola-toting intellectuals who lived and breathed Sartre, or Godard, or Mayakovski. He was the guy who used to get the girls, not jeans-clad guys in their father's Marutis. Where are the young intellectuals gone? Gone to Page 3 of TOI or HT. A search on Google for 'Good writing from India' gave me 'Content Writing Service from India', 'Medical Writing in India' and a link to Sulekha.com. Its time for a serious, thoughtful, informed web site where you might find some hard stuff to chew on. Here in Personaeonline.com we will host free, adventurous, unpopular, obscure, dangerous writing from India -- and the rest of the world. Let's be even so old-fashioned as to be literary, difficult, dandyish, aloof. You are invited, you my dear reader, to join in this conspiracy:

 C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!