Shelley's miching mallecho

The always excellent Carol Rumen has chosen Shelley's 'To Wordsworth' published in 1816 as her poem of the week for the Guardian.

Wordsworth had written 'Peter Bell' in 1798 but published it only in 1819. It attracted execration from Hunt, Byron, Shelley- even Lamb, a friend of Wordsworth.

Was this a case of posh Southron bastids (Byron went to Harrow, Shelley to Eton. Both inherited titles) looking down on a plain Northern lad who had attended the local Grammar School & whose early Radicalism was tempered by common sense & such Christianity as is common amongst even commoners with little sense and less scholarship?

Shelley writes-

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

Pathei Mathos? No. Wordsworth learns from an artless child that 'We are Seven!' though Death is the double Sabbath of the workaday week of even the most heavily burdened. This is the doctrine of univocity unknown to Scholastic Dunces. 

The first mention of tears in Wordy has to do with the vapours of a female novelist slightly less vacuous than Shelley, Schelling, 

That things depart which never may return:

Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

Wordsworth was a poet of the people of the landscapes he describes. But they were his own people by birth or oikeiosis. Since those landscapes were relatively unpeopled. 'Nature' predominates. But Wordsworth isn't the poet of Nature anymore than he is the poet of Geology or Botany.

 Wordsworth, it seems, was given to peripatētikós- going walk about- and what he learnt while walking with and talking to the hoi polloi was that the true peripatetic pathei-mathos- the true pathos of such learning as is love- is that everything that departs returns, by the iron law of palingenesis or re-birth, richer for the change, and all Mourning itself dies along with Death at the time of the true Eschaton- the day of a Wrath not of some currently howling mob but the curtained, or mobled, Lord of all that is mortal.

Dreams may sometimes be sweet- even for those heavily burdened- but in this our common, intersubjective, 'world which is', the sad truth is that the 'sweet dreams' of the leisured aristocracy- even if they extend to chopping off crowned heads & enjoying a Saturnalia more splendid than that enjoined on visiting angels in Sodom- are very different from that of such lowly folk as populate picturesque landscapes & make them comfortably traversable for tourists, by their diligence & decency of character.

The fact is, for working class people (or declasse drinking class people like me) the world of Wordsworth's Preludes is

the world of all of us, and where

We find our happiness, or not at all.

There is happiness in knowing of God's Justice. Even if we are predestined for despair in this life and damnation ever after, some are not. Mum, Dad, Sister, Granny- Woofy the Dog- if even one wins hits the jackpot, there was for all, an albeit stochastic, Jubilee. 

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.

Whatever might be the woes of a wealthy Old Etonian due to inherit a Baronetcy, they were very uncommon indeed. Shelley lost nothing. He got a chance to put the boot into an older poet and gain some publicity for himself. Nowt wrong in that. Poetry simply doesn't matter enough for us to apply any sort of ethical standard to its practitioners. 

Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine

On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:

Shelley, mate, thou art writing fustian. Fuck is wrong with you?

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

Above the blind and battling multitude:

Like the mob that stormed the Bastille? Wordsworth went walk-about in France a year after it happened.  He wasn't the fucking Rock of Gibraltar repelling the forces of the Revolution. 

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —

Guys who inherit a shitload of money can be very censorious of those who rise by their own efforts. The truth is 'Liberty' is a set of Hohfeldian incidents or immunities which are costly to get remedies for under a vinculum juris. Productivity must rise if this is to happen

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

To mock, calumny and mock-crucify. 

Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.

Wordsworth outlived the little shit by 28 years. Apart from Ozymandias- actually written by some other dude but turned into great verse by Shelley- the Old Etonian died when he died. Wordsworth didn't. Cumbria didn't. It will be conserved as a corner in what is merely Cosmic. 

There is a 'babu' quality- Bengali 'ucchvaas'- to Shelley. He was influenced by fellow Old Etonian, Lawerences' 'Empire of the Nairs' & influence Bharati.

A temple elephant killed that Tambram shithead. I guess this shows his poetry was good. Mine isn't. The last temple elephant I met was very affectionate to me even though I, not Bharati, am a genuine drunkard. 

Still, like Wordsworth's Peter Bell's donkey, I'm safely stabled in St.Augustine's stable- or, to be more brutally honest about my IQ, a kitten swatting at Manjara Nyaya. 

This is from Shelley's prologue to 'Peter Bell the Third'

Peter Bells, one, two and three,

O'er the wide world wandering be. --

First, the antenatal Peter,

i.e the foetus created in 'antarabhava' or 'bardo'- i.e. subject to 'karmic' birth-determining particles or forces. This, in Hinduism, is the realm of the Gandharvas- with whom Vak- Speech- went off in vagabondage to create the various lyric forms. Shelley, like Southey or Moore, fed promiscuously on Sanskrit fewmets though, no doubt, they had Greek antecedents. 

Wrapped in weeds of the same metre,

The so-long-predestined raiment

Clothed in which to walk his way meant

This is Swiftian- Latinate & Ciceronian when it ought to be Clerical. Shelley goes astray when he quits Arcadian groves to pose as the Juvenal of the jeuness dorre. 

The second Peter; whose ambition

Is to link the proposition,

As the mean of two extremes --

        (This was learned from Aldric's themes) 

Henry Aldrich's outdated book on Logic (it follows Phillip of Spain) was used at Oxford- from which Shelley was expelled. In Cambridge- from which Wordsworth graduated- Isaac Watts's more recent book was used. 

                         

Shielding from the guilt of schism

The orthodoxal syllogism;

Don't try to be Swiftian if you don't fucking know Logic & Theology. Anglicans have no 'orthodoxal syllogism'. There were 39 Articles. The thing was Contractual, not Logicist. 

 

The First Peter -- he who was

Like the shadow in the glass

Shelley thought Wordsworth started off as a 'Rock'- (as in St. Peter being the rock on which built the Church)- and was a shadow in the dark glass of the Apocalypse. 

Of the second, yet unripe,

His substantial antitype. --

i.e. not a Platonic form but a concrete universal of the Coleridgian type- i.e. an 'educt of the imagination actuated by pure reason'. 

Then came Peter Bell the Second,

Who henceforward must be reckoned

The body of a double soul,

Coleridge had spoken of himself & the Wordsworths as three people with one soul. He also had a tri-partite theory of the soul. He truly was as boring as shit. 

And that portion of the whole 

Without which the rest would seem

Ends of a disjointed dream. --

This is Coleridge's 'esemplastic power' unifying thesis & antithesis in the manner of Schelling & Schlegel & the equally boring Shelley. 

And the Third is he who has

O'er the grave been forced to pass

To the other side, which is, --

Go and try else, -- just like this.

Drown yourself by all means you boring prig. 

Peter Bell the First was Peter

Smugger, milder, softer, neater,

Like the soul before it is

      Born from that world into this.     

i.e. the poet whose topic is otherworldly and fantastical.                               

The next Peter Bell was he,

Predevote, like you and me,

To good or evil as may come;

His was the severer doom, --

For he was an evil Cotter,

And a polygamic Potter.

Wordsworth decides to take a humble, human, theme for his poem. Peter Bell is a hawker. He is sinful. One day he comes across an ass which he beats so as to be able to ride away upon it. It does not budge. Peter sees that it is gazing at its owner- who has drowned. He fishes the corpse out of the water after which the ass is content to carry him away. Peter hears a scream from behind him. It is the dead man's son finding his corpse. Peter reflects on his hard-hearted & sinful life. He passes a Methodist prayer-meeting & his heart is touched by the preacher's words. The ass reaches the home of the dead man, whose wife is waiting for him. She learns that she is a widow, and her children orphans:

And now is Peter taught to feel
That man's heart is a holy thing;
And Nature, through a world of death,
Breathes into him a second breath,
More searching than the breath of spring

In other words, this rough fellow is on the path to repentance. Sadly, this does not involve his becoming an Old Etonian & inheriting a Baronetcy.

And the last is Peter Bell,

Damned since our first parents fell,

Damned eternally to Hell --

Surely he deserves it well!    

Because he doesn't inherit lots and lots of money. True, the fucker might get into a more profitable line of business & end up a very rich man. But he'd still be as common as muck- like Wordsworth who, when all is said and done, was a Grammar School oik. 

Amar Prem, Busy Beaver & Indian Literature in English

Defoe's Moll Flanders suggests an incestuous and thus 'riddle breaking' role for the America- that Wilderness Zion- of English literature. But only because New England was more primeval than Old England. It was neither Utopia nor synoecist Promised Land.

Arranged marriage, or Caste, is about- or ought to be about- incest avoidance. As the riddle grows more complex, all Structuralism is revealed as delusory. The pebble in David's slingshot is larger than the world.

Around the same time as Defoe's novel came out, English began being taught in a few schools in India. But this English was already solidly Casteist. It had not that witty, vagabond, even lyrical, quality of Coryat's crudities. 

Hobson-Jobson increasingly became the lingua franca for all Eurasians and only gradually acquired a comprador identity which was entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan on the surface but mystical and dirigiste in the marrow of its Babu bonelessness and quality of self-satire.

 By the time Ben Franklin's pragmatic Deism prevailed in America, French and English 'dubashes' or compradors were commencing a long hegira in the reverse direction. But that direction was away from any Reality other than the Statistical, Theophrastian, or that of the Busy Beaver's unmeaning industry. The thing lacked dynamics. It was a worthless virtue signallers' Lotus Land defeating itself in advance by positing an Indian identity so abject as to be incompossible with the Cosmos.

 Compare Emerson's Unitarianism's and the Tagores' Brahmo Samaj. The former dissolved itself in Americanism.  That Republic could accommodate multitudes. But those multitudes were becoming self-similar. India's monism, however reformed or deformed, could neither provide leadership to Hindustan nor- in the manner of Kipling's Kim- dissolve itself in its own Kena fragrance. 

At the margin, Brahmos were entrepreneurial but too English, or 'Gora',  to engross the larger market and thus failed to gain scale and scope economies. The thing became a handicraft or hobby. 

That's why the history of Indian Literature in English is largely the history of the unread, the unreadable and the shite which one did read but only so as to feel such contempt for the writer that one could rest content in the notion that one could have written better if only one had been arsed. 

However, there were some stories by humble folk which 'England returned' Graduates like myself were asked to read and which, against all odds, remain fresh- indeed fragrant- in memory.

One such concerns a young Khattri whose education in a good enough 'Convent school' clone in Ludhiana was interrupted by the death of his father. I suppose this was about the time that Bhindranwale was active. Anyway, the boy now had charge of an Uncle's Wine Shop in Khan Market- which is how I came to know him. 

I thought his English perfectly serviceable and asked my father to place a story of his in the Herald or some other such second tier paper. Dad said it couldn't be done. Characters in the narrative were clearly based on real life people. Lutyens' Delhi was a small place. The story was prima facie defamatory. No editor would touch it. Change the location to Calcutta and maybe the thing could find a market.

I told my friend this and he quickly revised his story. Khan Market became Chowringhee. However in the process the plot had changed. It now possessed a luminous humanity- a universalism- where previously there was but pathos, gender politics, and the crushing of a merely provincial dream of Delhi as the Nation's chatushkoti 'four chambered' heart.

The first version begins with a description of Khan Market on a drowsy August afternoon. The nameless protagonist has ensured that his Government regulated Wine Shop is not openly displaying any sign of its merchandise. We learn that his shop is on an upper story with little foot-fall. Others of his community avoid him. He has been unfortunate, true, but his own anger and resentment are unjustified. Krōdh katōrī mōh bharī pīlāvā ahankār .The cup of anger's intoxication is egotism's gnawing rat. But, karanī lāhan sat gur sach sarā kar sār, selfless service yeasts in the Guru's elixir's vat.

I must admit that I thought the young Khattri was writing about his Uncle not himself. That was foolish of me. The fellow was my age. He was on his path to wealth, a beautiful wife, and expensive schools for his kids. That's why the fucker quoted Scripture. I didn't know it yet, but I was on the path to poverty, divorce and a son who would have to rely on scholarships. Thus, I associated Scriptural knowledge with middle age and commercial failure whereas it is actually the key which opens the doors to wealth and virtuous life for young peeps wot didn't get to Collidge. 

I'm sorry for that digression. Let me quickly tell you the rest of the story.

Two elderly women in antique silk sarees approach the Wine Shop manager. One has the vestiges of great beauty. The other is thin and her eyes are like daggers. The manager rises up and, speaking in  English, suggests that the women have taken a wrong turning. What type of merchandise they are requiring? The thin one spits out the word 'nails'. She glares at him. The fatter, more comely, lady says in simple Hindi- 'You don't know me but I have purchased nails from your father and grandfather. Even I brought my daughter here to buy nails. This good lady is a big Mem Sahib recently established here. Be sure to supply her with good nails. '

The Manager did not know what to do. Because he was running a Wine Shop there was no seating arrangement for clients. He said humbly in English, 'Ma'am, my Uncle is running tip top shop for all sundries. I'm taking so you can be seated there comfortably. Then delivery also and everything can be arranged.' 

The dagger eyed lady shouted 'I want a gross of 6 cm nails!'  The manager said 'Ji, Memsahib' and sent the boy to get them. He understood what was happening. The fatter woman's large eyes became moist as she looked at him. She said in faltering Hindustani- 'I knew your grandfather and your father. They are my family. Because of 'majboori' not just me but daughter also were 'outside' for long spells.  Now, I'm introducing this Mem Sahib. Treat her as you would treat me.' 

The boy came with the nails. The dagger eyed woman examined them suspiciously. She flung down some small coins. The manager said in English 'Madam please to thank for esteemed patronage'. This mollified the lady. She dragged away her moist eyed companion.

What had just happened? A courtesan- South Indian by the looks of things- had bought wine from this shop for many years. No doubt, the word 'nails' was a euphemism. The poor woman had also got her daughter into the trade. Both had been 'inside' though, typically, the jail-bird referred to it as 'bahar' (outside). The poor woman was now trying to ingratiate herself with the new Madrasi Madam of the area-  that scrawny hag probably provided Madrasi legislators in the Capital with the sort of young meat from the villages they craved. The fat woman, just out of jail, thought this dusty daru shop represented a valuable black market liquor connection. The truth is, in the past, this Khan Market Wine shop had bought duty free liquor off Communist or African diplomats to supply the Madams and Procurers who had set up shop in Lutyen's Delhi to service the Nation's Gandhian legislators. But, after Madamji's return to office, that business had been engrossed by ex-Khalqi Khans from Kabul and their Youth Congress cronies. There was much more money about. Blue label Johnny Walker had displaced Black label in quantities so copious that the Yamuna had shrunk with shame. 

This, I suppose, was 'social commentary'. But 'angry young men', like 'Young Turks', were passé now Amitabh had defeated Bahuguna. The (I had assumed, middle aged) manager grieves. Why? He had felt anger when the fat Madrasi jailbird spoke of his own grandfather as being 'family' to her. No doubt, as refugees, his people had had to make compromises. Still, there was this pathos to that prostitute. She had looked upon him with love. Maybe, in some sense, it was to give someone, anyone, that look that she had returned to Dilli- the heart of India. But that heart has but two chambers- an Upper and a Lower.  It needs four. Duality can be so doubled that but Monism prevails. If the wine-seller and the courtesan cease to look down on each other- after all, it is only the prostitute who knows how truly vile is the vintner's trade- if they become 'family' in other chambers of the heart- what happens? 

The Guru's चतुष्कोटि, or tetralemma, prevails. 

Predictably enough, the Khattri's lad's story- which, I now realise, was in better English than my own- which is why Dad was prepared to get it published- ended in Trilokpuri.

I spare you the details.

The Chowringhee version of the story was, as I have said, luminous in its humanity. The manager was a sweet looking 20 year old. His Mummy had died when he was 8. Then Dad was killed in 'communal violence'. But the manager sports a particular Khattri surname- Tandon. That may possibly have some significance which escapes me.

The elderly prostitute is no longer Madrasi. She is Muslim and wears burqa. She is invited to sit inside the shop because who the fuck knows or cares what the Government regulations are for Bengali Wine Shops? 

What's the denouement? No, she wasn't his own Mummy who had run away due to Gender Oppression & deficit in Socialist Secularist Governmental Performativity. But she could have been his loving foster-mother- i.e. this is the plot of the Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore, starrer 'Amar Prem'. I liked it. It had luminous humanity. I will not say I shed tears but I developed a defensive latency of that type. 

Then, I found out the truth from my sister. Mum, having returned from Dad's final foreign posting (not jail) was taking Additional Secretary Bhaktavatsalam's wife (her batch mate from Madras Christian College) to Khan Market to introduce her to various vendors and set up accounts with them.

 Mum had done the same thing for my sister- an IFS officer.

 Mum's poor eyesight caused her to take the wrong turning. The truth is Mum is lovable and Hindi speakers adored her just as much as Tamil or English speakers. But, the fucker whose story I asked Dad to get published had thought my Mother was a fucking prossie! Should have fucking killed the cunt. But, I iz three sheets to the wind Hindutva, innit? The fourth chamber of my heart is precisely that thirst which this Khattri, or that imaginary prostitute whom he briefly worshipped as Mother, did not, could not, have. Why? Scripture to them was more than scription. It was the hypokeimenon of a four chambered heart.

India may one day gain a Literature in English. Vak- Speech, even our Indglish jibber jabber- may go off with the Gandharvas. But its vagabondage will be dark and cold. 

āpē sur nar gan gandharabā āpē khat darasan kī bānī 

The Creator is himself the singer, the song and the six schools of philosophy

But, sadly, not in Indian English Literature. What we have instead is a 'Busy Beaver'- i.e. an attempt make disparate philosophies exponential, or even more 'State Space' wise explosive, by linking them up (izafat) - e.g. Marxian-Gandhian-Feminist-Environmentalist-Libertarian- Jain-Advaitic- Bhakti- Jerry-fucking-Lewis-rather-than Sienfeld (like my own 'Samlee's Daughter')- and the result is weak, stupid, shite. 

Now for some salutary Samkhya- which genuinely is Ind's organon or 'darshan'. 

Busy Beaver (4) is 107- i.e. the size of a hunter gatherer community where everybody knows each other and Justice and Mercy and Love and Forgiveness are pretty much 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' and a nice drunken barbecue type potlatch puts everything right every so often. In other words, Arrow's theorem is defeated by a Voting rule's tendency to, Barnum & Bailey style, attract more marks. 

So much for chaturvarna. The problem is that Busy Beaver (5) is at least  8,690,333,381,690,95

Thus, one chamber of the heart must be left empty, at least for Saivites, because it is only the fifth class which performs the Imitatio Dei of the Supreme Lord cleansing the soul of filth at the burning ghat. 

Indian Literature can only express an immortal Smarahara love where there is space for darkness, implacable alterity, and the comic for cosmic triumph of the utterly inhuman. That's why it is either clownish or cliched in an English incarnation. What is Urdu 'sauda' in English? We don't know. But we do know it is 'saudismo' in Portuguese. 

I'm sorry. I'm recycling my own bromides. Why? There's something shameful I don't want to admit. 

Mum loved that Khattri lad. By some cosmic accident- or simply the fact that I, surreptitiously, bought booze at his shop when I was staying with Mum & Dad- I got to learn.... what? 

Punjabi fucking Khattris wot didn't go to fucking Collidge are superior to... who? Me? Fuck off. I can't write for shit. Everybody is superior to me.

After as much reflection as my depleting whiskey decanter affords me, I've decided what I'm most likely doing is taking a dig at Vikram Seth. I've no doubt he has an 'Amar Prem' but we can only read it in his English by not doing so at all and being ignorant or too knowingly Indian of his oeuvre. He was and is a 'Suitable Boy' right enough. But his meta-language is Bengali or Punjabi or...fuck that... the type of Hindi even I speak- but only when in Bihar- that Vihara of Amar Prem where...Muslims did what Muslims do- y'all! Till they stopped & beef, beefcake, and bisexuality were suddenly off the menu for such as are into that sort of thing. Sad.

Rafiq Kathwari raping virginal glaciers

Correction. Rafiq Kathwari is the brother of a successful businessman whose son was a jihadi. I did not realize that Rafiq was wholly useless and has no skin in the game. He is just exploiting Kashmir to build his own reputation as a stupid Brown person who needs affirmative action NOW  or else he will stick his head up his own bum and then we'll be sorry we didn't give the cretin a Pulitzer. After all, if Vijay Sheshadri got one, why not Rafiq? Is it coz he is Moooslim? Or does it have something to do with an inability to rape a nice virgin glacier? 

Rafiq Kathwari is a successful American businessman one of whose sons died fighting in Afghanistan in 1992. He left Kashmir in 1965- when Muslim Kashmiris refused to support a Pak sponsored invasion. This was probably because they retained bitter memories of the looting and rape committed by tribal irregulars during the 1948 invasion. But this did not mean the Kashmiri Muslim had any affection for the non-Muslim. It was just that he feared conquest by more warlike tribes from Pakistan. It wasn't till the late Eighties that young Kashmiris started getting military training across the border. The problem was that they had no chance against the Indian Army. Their handlers regarded them as canon fodder. Indians can sympathise. One motivation for the Indian Freedom Struggle was the British 'martial races' policy such that the Army rejected large swathes of the population on the grounds that they lacked military ability. Paradoxically, this meant that some Nationalists eagerly joined the Army during the two World Wars to gain military experience. In India, people realised that the crucial determinant of a community's representation in the Army was the type of provision that was made for ex-servicemen. Fix this problem and any community can have, proportionally, just as many gallantry award winners as any other. The knowledge that this is so reduces friction between communities and makes for 'National Integration'.


With hindsight, the Americans should have appreciated and highlighted the success of new immigrants in their Military. This would have reduced the attraction of joining jihadi outfits to prove the military capacity of one's lineage. Ignoring the 'soft power' implications of having such immigrant soldiers hurt America- e.g. in Somalia where a son of the Warlord they were, foolishly, fighting was actually a Sergeant of their own on the spot. He later inherited his father's position but seems to have retained sympathy for the US (he had been naturalized by then). Indeed, it seems that he warned that something was brewing before 9/11.


My point is that young people are attracted to terrorism or insurgency because they want to prove the macho quality of their lineage. Having a Dad who is a successful businessman doesn't quite make up for his lineage being associated with cowardice. Perhaps this was the reason Kathwari lost a son. It has certainly been suggested that Kashmiri origin terrorists in the UK have some such motivation. However, their fathers were not so educated or so successful because they had not had proper opportunities. On the other hand, they were upright, religious, and very hard working. For historical reasons, they tend to be from Mirpur- which is under Pakistani control. This meant it was easier for their youngsters to get terrorist training on the pretext of visiting family, without raising flags.


I personally think it is tragic when kids, who grow up hearing Dad moan impotently about injustices in the old country, go crazy and, like Sirhan Sirhan, end up harming the ancestral cause.


Listen to Rafiq Kathwari, now a poet, not just a businessman, and a very senior citizen indeed, utter 'random thoughts' on Kashmir in 3Quarks-

Before the Modi regime annexed Kashmir on August 5th last, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minster, in fact annexed Kashmir in 1947 just months after India partitioned herself to create the new state of Pakistan.

As in 1931, virile tribesmen had invaded from the North West. The King appealed to the Govt. of India to send troops to save his people from rape, massacre, and looting. He himself would have to retreat to Jammu where his own people, the virile Dogras, would ethnically cleanse Muslims in retaliation, unless Indian Army soldiers kicked the ass of the tribals.

Why does Kathwari drag Nehru into this? It is because he won't admit that the invading tribals considered Kashmiris like himself to be a supine and submissive people. By contrast, Nehru, though equally non-violent, was not wholly a eunuch. This sexual element will reappear in Kathwari's stream of consciousness.

Delhi flew in a regiment of troops to Srinagar as soon as the Maharajah of Kashmir signed an Instrument of Accession. Even the great Mahatma Gandhi approved of Nehru’s action.

Kathwari neglects to mention the courage shown by Kashmiri Muslims in trying to hold the invaders at bay till the Indian Army could arrive. The fact is Kashmiris are civilized and spiritual. They aren't cowards at all. The Pak Army was left in the lurch when the tribals ran away with all the loot they could carry.

Kathwari feels that Kashmiri Islam is 'Hindu' in the sense of being non-violent and spiritual. It is an unbearable that Hindus look more martial and macho than Muslims- though this is not the view of the 'martial races' which actually had to fight Dogras or Sikhs or Garwalhis or Rajputs or Gurkhas- or, more recently, Indians from any community whatsoever, who have joined the Indian Army. Indeed, the day will come when they are running away from female Indian soldiers. But that is perfectly compatible with being macho. It is sensible to flee from well trained, well disciplined, troops so as to live to loot and rape another day.

Modi’s so-called annexation last year was religiously motivated. Kashmir penetrates the core of Hindu nationalist idea of Akhand Bharat, united, undivided Hindu India from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Myanmar to Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.

Apart from cowardice and commercial cunning, Sub-continental Muslims have stigmatized the Muslims of the Vale as fantasists and liars of Munchausen like proportions. There is nothing wrong with telling whoppers. A hero can do it with a smile on his face. Stupid Kashmiris repeat such lies but they actually believe it themselves! Such is the canard which Kathwari 'performs' because he is an old man, he lost a son, and has taken to poetry without, sadly, that sublime Kashmiri spirituality and metaphysical profundity which sets the Vale apart.

That’s the map draped in orange the color of choice of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, founded in 1924, a volunteer army of the young, world’s largest fascist organization, based in Nagpur. It’s the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, the present xenophobic regime in Delhi.

What Kathwar means is that the Hindus have been transformed into a virile Maratha type federation. They have become manly. But Kashmir is supine.

Modi’s functionaries told their Hindu goons that Kashmir’s Muslim majority population was now truly an integral part of India and that Hindus should at once apply for Domicile Certificates to buy property in Kashmir. and marry fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.

This is the sexual component that obsesses the Pakistani Punjabi. They get very worked up by the idea that Nehru fucked Lady Mountbatten. If only Jinnah had slipped her the old seekh kebab, History wouldn't have been so goddamn unfair.

But Nehru loved Kashmir. It was his ancestral home. His family were Kashmiri pandits. There are 250,000 pandits in Kashmir, 3% of Kashmir’s 8 million Muslims. Pandits are 0.1% of India’s 1.2 billion, but Modi’s regime has weaponized the 0.1 % pandits to rouse India’s Hindus. Modi will dump the pandits after doing his feats, and the pandits know it.

Because Kashmiris are shit. They are eunuchs. Okay, Nehru was slipping the old seekh kebab here and there which is why, for once, a Kashmiri rose to the top. But even that is unfair. Jinnah, a Gujerati, refused to slip Lady Mountbatten the seekh kebab. Thus Gujjus like Gandhi and Jinnah get to be called 'Fathers of Nations' while Kashmiris, though maybe doing well in business, or poetry, end up losing their sons if they show manliness.

Nehru hoisted Kashmir on the flagpole

Flagpoles, eh? How Freudian!

of secularism to flaunt India’s republican credentials to the West, and the West clapped. Nehru became a celebrity on a state visit to Washington.
Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t seem to mind him touching her bare arms, reportedly.
“I have a right to bare arms,” she told him, reportedly.
President Kennedy didn’t like that.
Ironic.

When a Pakistani Punjabi or Pathan talks in this sleazy vein, no great mental abnormality is indicated. It is good to pretend to be above slipping the seekh kebab to all and sundry while actually doing so, on the sly, hoping you can get some money or land out of it.

But Kathwari is an educated, successful, American businessman and poet. He is from a part of the world which produced or sheltered great scholars and poets. Thus, the thing has pathos, albeit of a squalid sort- which the dude probably knows all too well. He is ashamed of his 'people-pleasing', but does it anyway because he is old. He lost a son. The Hindu reading this feels disgust but also compassion.

Nehru had a torrid affair with a socialite in the Hamptons who, subsequently, went around wearing a Nehru jacket with a red rose stuck in the second buttonhole, imitating Nehru.

Nehru wasn't the only sexually successful Kashmiri. Sheikh Abdullah's first wife, according to Tariq Ali, was descended from the Italian proprietor of Nedou's hotel and had been married to T.E Lawrence.

Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, 1905-1982, one of the most important political figures in the modern history of Kashmir, was a tall slim man, all too human: with one stroke of his fountain pen the Sheikh gave tillers the land they ploughed, freeing Kashmiri peasants from serfdom. It earned him the title, ‘Lion of Kashmir’”

The Abdullah dynasty, like the senior branch of the Nehru dynasty, is less and less Kashmiri. Farooq married an English nurse. His son married a Hindu, though they have separated. A daughter married Sachin Pilot.

Kathwari is quoting his own poem which purports to be a letter written by an elderly Pakistani woman, in a Jewish nursing home in America, to Sheikh Abdullah. It seems unlikely that such a lady would have sexual hangups associated with elderly men worried about their virility.

This frightened the sexually-transmitted Dogra dynasty who thought of themselves as proprietors of paradise, its people, flora, fauna, pashmina goats—words enshrined by the British in the Treaty of Amritsar that in 1845 sold Kashmiris into slavery.

But the Sikhs had previously conquered it as had various other virile peoples who subjugated it in the past.

Nehru exiled the Sheikh.

Abdullah was under house arrest- of a comfortable enough sort- but incarcerated all the same.

How dare he give land to tillers. It wasn’t his land to give.

Abdullah was brought down by his own chief lieutenant. He was a crap administrator. He did a deal with Indira to get back in office. Then he passed power to his son, which his deputy resented. So once again there was a split. By now these two dynasties were seen as corrupt, incompetent, and increasingly removed from Indian reality.

Kathwari, a very old man, appears envious of virility. Why? He still has a living son and probably has grandsons and so on. Virility is no big deal. What matters is doing smart things- which Kathwari himself did. He got to the top in the highly competitive American Market. True, his son died- perhaps because he felt he had to prove the valour of his sept because of stupid shite he'd heard in childhood. But he died many years ago. It little matters whether this happened on a virginal mountain or in a whorish village.

Modi’s Neanderthal of Nagpur follow the dictates of Mussolini’s black shirts. Every Summer they spread the legs of virgin glaciers in Kashmir, encourage thousands of Hindu pilgrims shielded by the armed forces to worship Shiva’s icy lingam —daring an ecological tragedy, or even a plague.”

 Flagpoles and Lingams. I get it. I too feel my erections are no longer massive enough to turn off the TV from across the room which is why I have one of those zapper thingies, which, however, I keep losing.

The Neanderthals have demolished 500-year-old mosque built by the first Mughal emperor, claiming the mosque was built upon the birthplace of Lord Rama.

They did it with their iron hard erections. Fuck you Neanderthals! I want an iron hard erection too so I can fuck some virgin glaciers!

It’s all religion, not politics. They plan to build a temple to reprise history, and the architecture of the temple is being beamed in Times Square on August 5th bankrolled by the Hindu diaspora in the United States.

Which we'd be cool with if only we had massive iron hard pricks with which fuck them virginal glaciers before they all melt due to Climate Change.

The erasure of Islam, its decimation in India, has begun. Thin bureaucrats

Thin? Thin? Babus in India are fat. Why does Kathwari say 'thin'? Recall he described Sheikh Abdullah as 'thin'. Perhaps Kashmiri's prize thin but tall cocks. I've always heard it is girth that counts. But then, than God, I've not been on the receiving end.

from the plains have sealed Srinagar’s Sufi shrines where 8 million Kashmiris once swayed with Allah — that’s how Modi and his ventriloquists will turn shrines into bars and each shrine will be re-branded, ‘Jai Shree Ram’ or Long Live Lord Rama.

Kathwari knows Hindus are cool with Sufism. It is in Pakistan that the Islamists attack them with bombs.

Since Augut 5th 2019, 8.8 million mobile phones were blocked in the Vale of Kashmir, 7,000 Kashmiris, including politicians, activists, including 144 children were arrested. Mining rights were opened to all Indian bidders and the bulk went to non-Kashmiris. Urdu is being replaced by Hindi. the Vale of Kashmir is deemed a strategic area where the army is allowed to build anything anywhere anytime. No questions asked. There is talk of rounding up Kashmiri youth, bussing them to reeducation centers, their heads shaved off.

Where has all this already happened? Perhaps Kathwari would prefer that the Vale comes under that nice Chairman Xi who knows how to do the thing properly.

Here’s a tweet I read today on my timeline: “If England removed internet access in Scotland, locked them down saying you are now England, sent in 900,000 troops, raped women, blinded children and killed thousands, why should the world be so silent about Kashmir?”

Trillions of wee Scottish bairns were deliberately starved to death by 'Milk Snatcher' Thatcher. Just last year the UN special rapporteur on Food Security pointed out that Scottish women had inadequate access to arable land so as to grow root vegetables to feed their children. 14 gazillion Scotsmen have been raped by the Duke of Edinburgh. Get woke, Kathwari! Smell the fucking pumpkin spice latte!

I am livid. I feel the rage swelling.

What about your cock? Is it rock hard? Can it now rape some virginal glaciers? If not fuck is the point of working yourself up like this? You'll give yourself a stroke.

Neanderthals marching to the drumbeat of Hindu supremythology have turned a Vale of Lotus Eaters into the world’s most militarized place.”

There it is! Vale of Lotus Eaters. Kashmiris are weak, they lack valor, they are eunuchs. Why is Kathwari writing this shite? The Vietnamese were small, rice eating, brown people. They defeated the hefty American G.I. Why? They were smart and disciplined and did not think constantly about their cocks. But all the so called 'non-martial races' of the sub-continent too have shown that they are perfectly capable of valor- when it is called for. As for cocks, the truth is they are not mighty at all. Women show valor giving birth. Dicks shrivel up unless wifey talks nicely.

The Muslims of Kashmir using all means necessary are trying to rouse the 250 million Muslims of India, more Muslims than there are in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, to fight the subversion of India’s secular constitution which the Neanderthals believe is imposed by the west.

The Muslims of Kashmir alienated Indian Muslims long ago. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai pulled the trigger on Abdullah's imprisonment. But then Kashmiris are equally held in contempt in Pakistan. It was the ISI which bumped off a lot of its militants because they were suspected of wanting Independence, not annexation to Pakistan.

The battle is not merely for the soul of Kashmir, but for the compassion of India even though the Congress party did to Kashmiris by night what the BJP is doing by light. They came yesterday for the Kashmiris. They will come tomorrow for India’s Muslims. Beware. Preparedness is everything.

But Indian Muslims know that Kashmiri Muslims refused to let them settle there. So why should they sacrifice anything for those ingrates?

We are not alone. There are concurrent historical battles being waged beyond Kashmir. Women are heroines in our battle, not reduced to weeping or objects of desire. Remember, history is on our side. The French colonized Algeria for 132 years, but the men and women of the Kasbah in Algiers, using all means necessary, kicked out the French who rolled up their Algerian Domicile Certificates under their armpits that smelled of fleas from a thousand camels.

The Algerians crushed the Islamists. They got on fine with the French. History is not on the side of insular in-bred minorities. Demographic replacement occurs. Why? Only in that sense do cocks matter. But only by wombs' by-your-leave. Still, I hope Kathwari got sufficiently enraged and engorged to go fuck the fleas of some camels. After all, I too am an increasingly senile poet. But I was never a successful businessman because I'm as stupid as shit. I'm not a successful poet, like Kathwari, but then my writing isn't quite stupid enough. Oddly, this is a matter of pride for me. But pride is a spiritual sin. By displaying his abject, impotent, stupid-as-shit, mentality, Kathwari may be continuing, by other means, Kashmir's sublime tradition of spiritual poetry- or pathos.