Nim Dreme's unlearning

Tsering Droima/Pic Don Sebastian

To,
The Headmaster
Government Primary School, Mohan Camp

Sub: An application for leave

Sir,

With due respect I would like to inform you that I have been suffering from fever since last night.
Therefore, kindly grant me leave for One (1) day only.

Yours faithfully,
Name: Nim Dreme
Class Four (4)
Hall No: Fourteen (14)
Date: 19/11/07


*****************************************************

Seven months after Nim Dreme wrote this leave application to headmaster Y Kishore Singh, it was still embedded on the first page of the attendance register of Government Primary School, Mohan Camp, Nyukmadung. Arunachal may be India’s rendezvous with the first rays of Sun, but it refuses to shrug off slumber. It embraces the snail’s pace and refuses to toe the world which moves on.

This is the state which late Marxist ideologue EMS once described thus: “the land which India claims is India’s and China claims is their’s”. A volcano of controversy erupted then.

Don’t know whether the Marxist doyen ever set foot on this mountainous terrain which is overwhelmingly green, fascinatingly pristine and tucked in the warp of a timeless era, with only the camouflage of olive green military fatigue spoiling its serene charm.

Nim Dreme and his 55 school mates, predominantly kids of migrant Nepali labourers who toil to put roads in shape and remove the trees and roadblocks that hinder traffic with alarming regularity, share an attendance register and two teachers.

Y Kishore Singh hails from Balia, Uttar Pradesh, and his lone colleague is a local lass –the dazzling Tsering Droima. Between them they dabble with Social Studies, Maths, Drawing, English, all and sundry...
Nim Dreme and his school mates get the first taste of knowledge from them.

Near the notice board in front of the school a bill board proclaims:

बेह्थर सिक्षा भरपूर प्यार
बच्चे का पहला अधिकार

That seems unlikely. After Standard V, Nim Dreme would have to walk miles to go to the upper primary school.
Tough luck, but perhaps Dreme’s destiny would be to be a better human being, untouched by the wrong notions of worldly gains and far ahead of the fake pride of “doing well in life”.

Nim Dreme’s wisdom belongs to the virgin woods and lofty heights of Arunachal. Priceless.

A letter from Granpa Castro

Perhaps this letter posted on Granma's web site would be clicked
widely by an army of non-English speaking surfers.

That could be just an amusement tactic to be part of history, but the icon who
spurred the mouse movement has seen unparalelled adulation, survived assassination attempts without parallels from world's military might and curiously enough is even reviled by a section of his own people-- Cubans.

Castro is an enduring symbol of resistance, thwarting the machinations of 9 American presidents to topple a tiny island regime, defying the mightiest military in the world and outliving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which once rallied behind him and later crumbled to their cold war era common enemy.

As Castro decided that being even a nominal head of a nation mostly shadowed by his larger than life halo itself is a daunting physical task, Cuba, as a nation, may not follow the trajectory of a directionless kite.

It can still stay afloat, as Castro did in testing times. It would not have been possible for even Castro to show such cathartic defiance against giant odds had it not been for Cuba.

In his letter to fellow countrymen, Castro does not say good bye. His maverick legacy cannot attempt to bid adieu to a valiant dream.

And the legacy of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz can only be called Cuba.

No other name suits it.

War against conviction

A farce being enacted in the run-up to the US Presidential poll is the way opinion is converging on the war on Iraq. That is the farce of the so-called great American dream, read nation.

Barring Barack Obama, most front-runners for the Republican and Democratic nominee front-runners solidly backing what a certain Texan cowboy fondly refers to as an act to purge an axis of evil.

It was also put across, in a discreet way that it was a war to wipe out terror from the face of earth. Notice the striking similarity of the rhetoric ; War on terror, Iraq War –II.

It was all a scramble for oil. Only, the aggressors had the finger on the trigger and the targets were rag-tag armies which reigned over lawless lands and overwhelmingly innocent civilians.

That was all fine then, but when the scenes turned chaotic and the emotive appeal of Saddam’s hanged torso electrified suicide squads across the Islamic fiefdoms in the Middle East, body bags began to puncture the invincibility of American military might.

In wars the U.S. has fought supposedly to help mankind, they have run into a comic situation without an easy fix. In Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The issue is that they could not digest the fact that the demon of chaos they unleashed on fragile nations – those ruled by iron fist or medieval moorings but without a social ethos – could not be domesticated by mere military might.

And the U.S. is incapable of accepting a bigger picture – that they went wrong as a nation.

Now, only Barack Obama drags the Iraq war, or the initial show of support for it, into the presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton displays lack of conviction when she proclaims she was convinced about the war but was let down by the Texan cowboy style operations in Iraq.

She should have known that as a Senator, she is at least expected to understand that cow boys can never become statesmen.

Super Tuesday may not have been a verdict on this, but there is definitely some GPS-enabled soul searching through the corridors of its limited history that the American public, its foot soldiers in the Western world, the presidential nominees and Democrats as well as Republicans need to do on its war policy.

I, me, mine .gone

premub@gmail.com