Death in the Clouds

It is a timely piece and right on the money. Out of the total 502 words, a third are not original and the rest 2/3 are inspired by a movie or are words that have been pretty commonly used on many forums.

I agree that many have written about this event and many more would still write in the years to come and chances are most of them would be repeating a second hand account that was released by the US government. Since there is no eyewitness, a handful of people heard tape-recorded conversation that did not perhaps last more than a few minutes and out of that, only one sentence has been issued for public consumption.

Is this tribute inspiring or is it inspired? How are we going to determine that? We do that by looking at the past history that certainly shows that there is a huge desire to gain sympathy not for the brave souls that perished in Pennsylvania but the effort is to benefit personally from the tragedy.

Some have this exogenous desire to appear incredibly sensitive to subjects that can bring them some redundant recognition. This desire to be recognized emanates from a very shallow tutoring and nurturing in very taxing circumstance while growing up.

This write up is a sick humor when you consider that the purpose is to take credit on the backs of some innocent dead people.

I sometimes think that the God who supposedly created people of his sort had a very sick sense of humor. Is there a Yiddish word for that feeling?

BJK,

You disappoint us. Even compared to your previos articles, this effort is quite pedestrian.


It appears that

1. Either, for a change you have tried to write something original and this, for the first time, reflects your true calibre.

2. Or, more likely, the prtion after Psalm 23 has been lifted straight from somewhere and then you have painstakingly altered phrase by phrase so as to avoid detection.

Whatever it was you were trying, you did not succeed.

Note: thanks are due to chowk.com for putting this piece up in a timely manner to coincide with the September 11 anniversary.

9/11 was a turning point in the life of this country. In many ways, it changed the world and the world has never been the same since. EVERYONE has been affected by it. The hijackers who perpetrated that outrage had the element of surprise on their side – but have it no more.

#14 Borivili Express

I agree that the subcontinental partition was a great tragedy. From my simple perhaps simplistic viewpoint, it was a failure of monumental proportions. The people paid a price for the fault of their leaders – in particular, from my viewpoint, for the megalomania of one racist Muslim leader. But this piece is not about the partition. We live in the present. (Some people claim that many Pakistanis refuse to come to terms with it.) The reality is that India and Pakistan are two separate and (now) very different countries. The other part of the simple reality is that Pakistan is a much smaller country (by its own choice) and by virtue of simple physical size, will always be relegated to a lower status.

#13 Posted by DrDr

Double Doc, you need to make a distinction between those who are untrained civilians – who end up in a situation not of their choosing and found the strength inside, on real short notice, to meet the challenge vesus those who are trained killers, who train for the specific purpose of killing civilians for advancing their political agenda!

#12 Posted by zeemax

Zee, thanks for dropping by! Now go and respond to the poll I was running on the UP thread this morning. :)

[the style seems familiar :) ]

I know, I know – you have absorbed my “style” at such a deep level that it defines your very consciousness and you have not the ability to look at the most mundane of (my) creations without thinking of me. You breathe me, you think of me day-and-night, in moments awake and in moments of sleep and in every moment in-between and it is impossible for you to make a distinction between what is real and what is make-believe. My dear, you are so totally, absolutely, gone-casedly hopeless! I sympathize with you.

#11 Posted by AlephNull
Reminds me of an old song…”Celebrations, and jubiliations…” etc.

#10 Posted by Naqshbandi
Dr. Naqshbandi, I will take that as a compliment and leave it at that. Thanks for the welcome!

#8 Posted by VRV on September 11, 2007 4:59:06 am
Which facts you are referring to? Feel free to elaborate and provide your own perspective based on real information - not the foolish propaganda which has been propagated since right after 9/11 in parts of the Arab world.

(PS: VRV, your “girl friend” is a LOT better-looking than you!)

#14
1947 was a DEFINING moment in the history of India even whole ASia.
More people might have died violent death as in war but never as many civilians

look at this hypocritical stupid hindu, he is sympathizing with a few hundred rich whites and lakhs of browns he has no sympathy for:

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Magazine| Sep 17, 2007

Review

One Word, Many Meanings

Such was the polysemy of Partition in the minds of those who lived through the transfer of power

MUSHIRUL HASAN
Qurratulain Hyder died a fortnight ago. Her novel Mere Bhi Sanam Khane portrayed the sparks of Partition blowing up the pathways of a composite culture, leaving a yawning gap of burning dust. Some of the writings of Intizar Husain, now in India as a Sahitya Akademi guest, reflect how an ongoing cultural process was stalled in "a very unnatural way" by a few Muslims and Hindus who, with their puritan frame of mind, contributed to the tragedy of Partition.
To survey the making of Pakistan as a whole, to discover trends in the Partition movement and to seek out its meanings, Yasmin Khan is not the first to make the attempt. Why, then, another tome? Partition, she writes, deserves closer attention as one of 20th century’s darkest hour. It is a loud reminder of the dangers of colonial interventions, and the profound difficulties that dog regime change; lastly, it is "a testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken...unknowable...paths".

Readable and insightful in parts, Khan’s book neither sheds much light on the protracted negotiations between the Congress, the Muslim League and the British, nor does it seek out and punish the ‘guilty’. Instead, it challenges the one-dimensional versions of the past, the "messy ambiguities" of Partition, and the uncertain meanings of Partition and Pakistan in the minds of the people living through the transfer of power. The book’s merit lies in introducing the various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s.

Elsewhere, I had argued that people had no sense of the newly demarcated frontiers, and little or no knowledge of how the Mountbatten Plan or Radcliffe Award would change their destinies, and, moreover, uproot them from their familiar socio-cultural moorings. "The English have flung away their Raj like a bundle of old straw," an angry peasant told a British official, "and we have been chopped in pieces like butcher’s meat." This was the meaning a ‘subaltern’ attached to the Partition movement.

Did Panipat’s Muslim weavers plan to set up home in Pakistan? No, said Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the writer-filmmaker. Expectations of what Partition would be were mixed. Some longed for Lahore’s inclusion in India; others hoped the boundary in Punjab would be drawn to include Delhi. "For millions of people like myself," wrote Pakistani writer Shaista Ikramullah, "a Pakistan without Delhi was a body without heart."

Khan holds out much promise in her introduction. Thereafter, her narrative comes alive. She juxtaposes ‘high politics’ and popular mobilisation deftly. The picture is irresistibly suggestive and the prose elegant. She takes a dim view of British pride and conceit, and indicts officials for their hypocrisy and failure in dealing with Partition violence. Her account does not work in a void; she has a sense of the factual.

In describing the horror stories, there is always the great danger of repetition—more trains full of dead bodies, more hacked limbs. At the same time, there is also the redeeming repetition of a strong sense of hope and optimism in these tales of despair. According to Prof Amrik Singh, the Muslims from a village in Rawalpindi district did not want to send the non-Muslims away. Nor did they want to kill them. Those who caused mayhem did not belong to his village but were brought in from far away. Many ordinary people rose above the macabre and sinister politics to help the ‘other’ at the risk of their own lives. In a nutshell, small enclaves of humanism and sanity existed in the surrounding bloodshed.

In a thoughtful epilogue, Khan raises important questions about "a deeply ambiguous, transitional position between empire and nationhood".She asserts, "there was nothing inevitable or pre-planned about the way Partition unfolded". Indeed, "the history of Partition has suggested that modern nation-states had to be crafted out of a chaotic...situation in which myriad voices made their claims and counter-claims".

Saadat Hasan Manto, the enfant terrible of Urdu literature, refused to accept Partition’s bloody consequences for long, but did so in the end, without self-pity or despair. It’s time we did the same.

hmmm.. thin red line - is that what suicide bombers draw too

Hmmm ... the style seems familiar :)

beej:

A very well-written tribute. But I am sorry to see that you have plagiarised from a celebrated lady writer yet again.

I liked this. The quotations from the King James' Version of the Bible with its unmatched language of power and beauty was a delightful reminder of its contents.

Don't know about the twist at the end though...

welcome to Chowk.

I liked this. The quotations from the King James' Version of the Bible with its unmatched language of power and beauty was a delightful reminder of its contents.

Don't know about the twist at the end though...

welcome to Chowk.

Beej, ur writing skills are very good but I doubt ur depiction of United 93 is matching with facts.

I too sympathise with the victims of the 9/11 but United 93 is a different story.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JZekosYOmXc

Beej, ur writing skills are very good but I doubt ur depiction of United 93 is not matching with facts.

There are countless web-sites set as memorial to the Flight 93 victims (e.g., www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011028flt93mainstoryp7.asp ). For those who care, those are worth a look.

Many of the passenger names (e.g., passengers Beamer, Glick, Bingham and so many others) have virtually become household names - have come to symbolize courage.

Practically nobody remembers (or wants to remember) the names of those hijackers today.

There is little doubt who emerged the REAL winners from this tragedy!

Not that it is something inferior, but I cannot believe you are a janitor. It is OK if you do not wish to disclose your true profession :-)

Harish, I thought you would no by this time! In my "real" life, I am a simple "janitor"! :)

I think you should revive your Hercule Poirot (was it that?) series. Probably make a collection of all those stories and send it to a publisher. Are you a writer by profession? If not what are you?