The New Nation - Internet Edition

Subhash Gatade

Saba Parveen still repents the fact that she sent her younger sister Farheen to Bhikku Chowk to buy some Pakoras. Little she could have the premonition that she would never get to see her 10 year old sister a class V student alive.

The blast at Malegaon's Bhikku Chowk, has literally shattered the family of Shaikh Liaquat Wahiuddin, Farheen's father who lives around 100 feet away from the Chowk near the Kasbapada masjid. A father of three daughters and two sons and a wife has seen all the hell broke lose soon after the bomb blast.

The couple fainted when they reached Wadia hospital to see their own daughter who had suffered severe burns in the blast turned lifeless.

The latest bomb blasts in Malegaon have seen four deaths wherein a motorcycle parked near old SIMI office which was laden with explosives exploded killing four people on the spot. It was worth noting that the people living in the vicinity of the Chowk had informed the police about this unclaimed motorcycle standing there for hours together. But the police did not bother to turn up and reached the place only after the blast which saw these deaths.

It is not difficult to imagine the palpable anger which exists among people about the callousness of the police and the insensitivity of the administration. People of this town which has a significant no of Muslim population have not forgotten the treatment meted out to them by the police and the administration when there were similar blasts in the city during their religious congregations killing 40 people in 2006. Despite enough hints about the involvement of Hindutva terror groups in the perpetration of these acts, where a torso with a fake beard was also identified, ultimately saw few Muslim youths getting booked for this crime who are still languishing in jail. A CBI enquiry which was ordered after lot of pressure claims to have reached a deadend.

In a recent meeting with Baba Siddique, the 'guardian' minister of Nasik, representatives of different Muslim organisations in Malegaon gave vent to their feelings of disgust and deep hurt over the developments. Angry community leaders asked the minister "You blame SIMI for blasts in temples, you blame SIMI for blasts in market places, you blame SIMI for blast Masjids. The latest blast has taken place just below the SIMI office. Now whom will you blame ?"( Mailtoday, Oct 3, 2008)

Hemant Karkare, chief of the Anti Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra Police, who was instrumental in nabbing the activists of Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janjagruti Samity for the bomb blasts in Thane, Vashi and few other places in Maharashtra (June 2008) and his team of officers also shied away from blaming some or the other Islamic terrorist organisation for the blast.The perpetrators of the bomb blast who had packed a splendour motorcycle with nuts, bolts, nails and ballbearings and three kilograms of explosive material, near a mosque, beside a SIMI office and the time chosen by them - on the eve of Eid - has definitely put local police and ATS groping in the dark.

But according to an investigative report filed by Mailtoday ( 1 October 2008) : "Police, however, are sure of one thing - that the blasts in Malegaon and Modasa in Gujarat were a coordinated effort, as both occured at around 9.30 p.m. in Muslim dominated areas.Karkare felt that the Gujarat and the Malegaon blasts were similar in nature also."

In fact any close watcher of the bomb blasts in the country cannot miss the fact that bikes have been a favourite instrument of the Bajrang Dal to attack Muslims. A narcotest of those involved in Nanded bomb blasts (April 2006) which saw deaths of two Bajrang Dal activists had clearly revealed that 'mysterious blasts' in Parbhani in 2003 and Jalna (2004) which involved perpetrators on bikes throwing bombs at the congregation and fleeing were actually the handiwork of a terror module of the Bajrang Dal itself. The report in Mailtoday further adds " This is similar to the blast in Mehrauli market in New Delhi blast on Saturday and also some other cases where bombs were placed on bikes."

Of course Mailtoday is not alone in pointing fingers at Hindu terror groups for these bomb blasts, a detailed writeup in Indian Express ( Hindu Extremist Groups on Radar In Malegaon Probe, Sagnik Chowdhury, 1 st October 2008) reiterates the line of thinking of the ATS officials as far as the particular blast is concerned. " A day after the Maharashtra police said it could not rule out the possibility of Hindu extremist hand in Monday's blast in Malegaon, investigators are revisiting the crude bombs that were planted in auditoriums on the outskirts of Mumbai earlier this year." The ATS is planning to question the activists of Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, Sanatan Sanstha and other stray Hindu extremist organisations for their possible involvement in the act.The 1020 page chargesheet filed by the ATS in September against the members of these organisations for their terrorist acts is an added reminder for it to pursue the case in a balanced manner.

A deeper analysis of terror strikes since 2006 also reveal that there are at least five such terror strikes which targeted minorities and their religious places and they still remain unresolved. A report filed by Aman Sharma ( Mailtoday, October 3, 2008) provides details of these blasts and the status of investigations. Jama Masjid blast ( 14 injured, April 2006 - Friday) where low intensity, crude bombs were placed in a polythene bag is still pending with Delhi police, no outfit has been named. Malegaon ( 40 killed, September 8, 2006 - Friday) which saw four bombs outside mosques on Shab-e-Barat where RDX-ammonium nitrate bombs in boxes on bicycles was used, still remains unresolved. The investigation in Samjhuta express blasts (66 killed, Feb 19, 2007) where six bombs were planted inside Indo-Pak Samjhauta Express has also not shown any progress and neither any organisation has been named. The case of Mecca Masjid blasts ( 11 killed, May 18, 2007 -Friday) where two bombs were planted inside Mecca Masjid in boxes, is also pending with CBI. The enquiry into Ajmer Sharif bomb blasts (3 killed, October 11, 2007 - Friday) where two bombs in tiffin boxes wee used and where ammonium nitrate bombs were triggered by mobile phone has also not made much headway.The case at present pending with Rajasthan police has also not named any organisation.

Looking at the fact that communal common sense dominates the functioning of the police and the media in our country it is difficult to predict what will happen next. The investigations into the recent Kanpur blast (24 August 2008) which saw deaths of two RSS activists, Rajiv Mishra and Bhupendra Chopra, while making ammonium nitrate bombs, is an example worth studying. While the police took two of their colleagues for narcoanalysis, it did not even bother to question their alleged mentors -one of whom happened to be a Professor in IIT with RSS background.

(Source: http://www.counterc urrents.org/ gatade041008. htm)

Garrison Keillor

Nothing to be frightened of By Julian Barnes 244 pages. $24.95. Alfred A. Knopf.

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," the book begins. Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death - why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.

Thanatophobia is a fact in his life - he thinks about death daily and sometimes at night is "roared awake" and "pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world t awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting 'Oh no Oh No OH NO' in an endless wail." He dreams about being buried and "of being chased, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, of finding myself bulletless, held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, informed that there is even less time than I imagined. The usual stuff."

Beyond the big knock-down stuff, he dreads the diminution of energy, the drying-up of the wellspring, the fading of the light. "I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships. " He has seen his parents through their decline and deaths - "however much you escape your parents in life, they are likely to reclaim you in death" - his father, a teacher of French, felled by strokes, reading the "Mémoires" of Saint-Simon at the end still tyrannized by his wife "always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling" - a few years later, his mother in a green dress, in a wheelchair paralyzed on one side, "admirably unflinching, and dismissive of what she saw as false morale-boosting, " and what he sees there is hardly comforting.

Religious faith is not an option. "I had no faith to lose," he writes. "I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. t I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was."

The Christian religion has lasted because it is a "beautiful lie, t a tragedy with a happy ending," and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the paintings of Donatello - "I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm."

Barnes is not comforted by the contemporary religion of therapy, the "secular modern heaven of self-fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, t the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn't it - doesn't it? This is our chosen myth."

So Barnes turns toward the strict regime of science and here is little comfort indeed. We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won't care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion.

Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death, but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat, and the soul is merely "a story the brain tells itself." Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of "self" - it is something we've talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope. "There is no separation between 'us' and the universe." We are simply matter, stuff.

"Individualism - the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists - has led to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience."

All true so far as it goes, perhaps, but so what? Barnes is a novelist and what gives this book life is his affection for the people who wander in and out, Grandma Scoltock in her hand-knitted cardigan reading The Daily Worker and cheering on Mao Zedong, while Grandpa watched "Songs of Praise" on television, did woodwork and raised dahlias, and killed chickens with a green metal machine screwed to the doorjamb that wrung their necks. The older brother who teaches philosophy, keeps llamas and likes to wear knee breeches, buckle shoes, a brocade waistcoat. We may only be units of genetic obedience, but we do love to look at each other. Barnes tells us he keeps in a drawer his parents' stuff, all of it, their scrapbooks, ration cards, cricket score cards, Christmas card lists, certificates of Perfect Attendance, a photo album of 1913 entitled "Scenes From Highways & Byways," old postcards. The simple-minded reader savors this sweet lozenge of a detail.

"Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. t And there is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. t Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply." And so he does. In this meditation on death, he brings to life his parents, Albert and Kathleen.

"She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head towards me. t She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than the right, which was just like her - she used to hang a cigarette from the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the opposite side. t I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. Was she that cold because she'd been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally so cold? t 'Well done, Ma,' I told her quietly.

"She had, indeed, done the dying 'better' than my father. He had endured a series of strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily."

In her effects he finds a full bottle of cream sherry and a birthday cake, untouched.

This is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head.

(Source: International Heral Tribune. Garrison Keillor's most recent book is "Liberty: A Lake Wobegon Novel.")