Sounds of Silence

06 VIEWPOINT Telangana Today We have yet to see the impact of the strongest, most damaging wave, which will test our material and moral capacities to the limit, as well as our spirit as a society..I know that is a drastic measure but experts agree that it is an effective measure in the fight against coronavirus Deadly attack Respected Prime Minister, why did the government allow the export of all these things (life-saving equipment) till March 19 contrary to WHO’s advice to keep sufficient stock of ventilators and surgical masks. Which forces encouraged these games? Isn’t this a criminal conspiracy? We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. At the end of the 15 day period, we will make a decision as to which way we want to go! 15 days. Then we isolate the high risk groups and the rest of us get back to work before it's all over for everyone!! #Landslide2020 Pedro Sanchez Sanjay Raut Rahul Gandhi Donald Trump Spain’s Prime Minister Shiv Sena leader Congress leader US President A t a time when the entire nation is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, the Maoists took their macabre campaign to a new level by carrying out one of their deadliest attacks on security forces in Chhattisgarh. The killing of 17 jawans in an ambush in Sukma district comes as a grim reminder of the lethal capability of naxalites to strike at will and exposes the chinks in the armour of the security set-up. The tragic loss was the biggest for security forces since April 2017 when Maoists killed 25 CRPF personnel in an ambush near Burkapal in the same district. Though the Maoist footprint has considerably shrunk in other parts of the country following fast eroding public support and successful police operations, the outlawed outfit is still active in the Bastar division of Chhattisgarh, which encapsulates Sukma district, and parts of Maharashtra, Odisha and West Bengal. The biggest attack came in April 2010 when 76 CRPF men were killed by Maoists in the same stretch of Sukma district. Again, in April 2017, a similar ambush had claimed the lives of 25 paramilitary soldiers. According to data collected by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), the left-wing extremism has claimed 34 lives in Chhattisgarh since January this The killing of 17 jawans year. This is despite in Sukma district comes improved intelligence as a grim reminder of the gathering and surveillethal capability of lance. In fact, Maoists naxalites to strike at will have been finding it difficult to get new recruits into their ranks and the strength of their armed cadre is believed to have come down from around 6,000 in 2017 to 3,500 last year. The left-wing extremism, in the words of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is the biggest threat to the country’s internal security. According to the Union Home Ministry’s data, extremist violence has claimed over 14,000 lives between 1999 and 2018. Previous attempts to find a solution to the Maoist problem through dialogue, including the one made by the Congress government in the combined Andhra Pradesh in 2004, have not been successful. There is no chance of revival of dialogue process unless the Maoist outfit gives up arms and joins the social mainstream. At the same time, there is a need to revisit the counter-insurgency strategies. Further improvement in intelligence gathering, better coordination between the State police and paramilitary forces, upgradation of training and adoption of modern technologies must form the key components of such a strategy. The CRPF personnel are often found inadequate in handling counter-insurgency operations because of lack of modern training. Since they don’t have an intelligence gathering mechanism, greater coordination with the State and Central intelligence wings is required. The forces operating in difficult terrains must be equipped with mini unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). And, massive development is the best antidote to Maoist violence. Our Prime Minister is now saying people are not yet taking the social lockdown seriously. Dear Prime Minister, this could only happen because you turn the atmosphere of fear and worry into a festival-like event. If the government shows seriousness, people will act accordingly HYDERABAD, Tuesday, March 24, 2020 Eerie Calm Sounds of silence We now hear sparrows twittering and the breeze swishing. Why, though, is this silence troubling? manipulated into thinking of our environment in terms of data on our screens alone. Nothing else is heard or seen, except that on our screens. The world is, literally, ob-scene (etymologically, ‘obscene’ comes from ob-skene: off-the-stage, meaning what cannot be shown on the stage). There may be life in the city, but that has to be off-the-streets, not staged as a public spectacle. PRAMOD K NAYAR When the curfew congealed around our Sunday, the city fell quiet. We actually heard sparrows twittering, and the breeze swishing. Eerie, troubling — unused as we are to the silence of a city. Why, though, was it troubling? There are two tales that explore why silence is literally dis-quieting. A Fable about Silence We turn to a less-known story by Edgar Allan Poe: ‘Silence: A Fable’. Set in Zaire, the tale is narrated by a demon who inhabits the unfriendly environment: “The waters of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow … palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river’s oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude.” This setting stops at the boundaries of a ‘dark, horrible, lofty’ forest, whose ‘low underwood is agitated continually’. Above, ‘with a rustling and loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly’. In this place, says the demon, ‘there is neither quiet nor silence’. The demon perceives a rock with the word DESOLATION inscribed on it. Perched on this rock is a man. The man ‘trembled in the solitude’ at the sounds of the undergrowth, the noises of the water lilies, the roars of the animals, tempests and the demon engineers, but he does not move from his perch. Frustrated, the demon finally summons up his key weapon: “Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven—and the thunder died away— and the lightning did not flash—and the clouds hung motionless—and the waters sunk to their level and remained— The noises of the city are a code for the noise of human life itself: it is our context, our ethos. The silence ruptures this ethos and the trees ceased to rock— and the water-lilies sighed no more—and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound through-out the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed;—and the characters were SILENCE.” The forest falls silent. Poe describes the man’s response next: “his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.” The man, unsettled but never terrified by animal roars, tempests and the noise of the world around him, is driven away at the terror of a silent world. Perhaps the silence signifies the end of the world for him. Quiet Cities Apocalyptic texts show us what we have seen in recent days of curfews and lockdowns: empty streets, devoid of all but stray animals and birds. Very rare human movement. Vehicles unmoving, machinery silent, stores shut. Films like I Am Legend or Book of Eli are replete with scenes of the hollowed-out, silent city. The noises of the city are a code for the noise of human life itself, it would seem. We live in the immersive environment of the city’s noises: it is our context, our ethos. The silence ruptures this ethos. In the age of the social media’s total control and the pervasiveness of the WWW, this silent city exists in an awkward relationship with the data streaming onto our devices unrelentingly. Streaming videos, films, news and a host of other useful and frivolous data, there is ambient noise within the houses, though external noises of vehicles and people are absent. We believe, from the data we are fed on our devices, that the world is still out there: but the silence communicates something else. Silence can be the absence of information that sustains life itself. In public discourses, as Thomas Huckin has shown, the media is often silent on key informational aspects, so that we as readers are intentionally misled into opinion. These are intentional, and the reader does not know what has been omitted — what Huckin calls ‘manipulative silences’. When the city is silenced thus, we are Rallying on streets by making noise and similar group activities defeats the purpose of physical isolation India A Counterspectacle The silent city is anathema, a sacrilege, a travesty. It is the antithesis of what we have come to expect in our metropolises. A city minimised, reduced to its bare bones, the exact opposite of the dynamism of its sounds. Decades ago, TS Eliot would declare that ‘this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but with a whimper’. Others would not countenance even a whimper. The silent city is a counterspectacle, as first described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road (2006): “The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever… Tall buildings vaguely askew ... softened in the heat and reset again ... melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake.” In this melting, liquefying city which is losing its solidity and its referents — life itself — McCarthy suggests, we can see a counterspectacle: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.” In Poe, the silence drives the man into insanity and terror. In McCarthy, it is a signifier of an apocalypse. As we wait to see what lurks under the silences of the city, the last word must belong to the world’s most fearsome imagination, Stephen King, who in Desperation, would say, ‘in these silences something may rise’. (The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad) the hotspot How Parsis shaped India’s taste for soft drinks Letters to the Editor We invite your views and comments at [email protected] Gone wrong Best representatives Country music legend he government must be lauded for encouraging people to observe Janata Curfew and also to dedicate a few minutes to make sounds as a token of appreciation for the frontliners who are working assiduously round-the-clock in the midst of the grave health crisis. However, the curfew wasn’t without hiccups. The raison d’être of Sunday’s curfew to maintain physical isolation was blown to smithereens in a few areas where large groups of people rallied and danced on the streets by making noises. Moreover, it was disconcerting to watch people making noises with a misconceived notion that loud sounds and vibrations could kill the coronavirus. Rumour mongering and ineffective dissemination of credible information could derail government’s efforts aimed at eliminating this pandemic. Y Meena T I was happy to read a small report ‘Two marriages postponed’ (TT, March 23). Though I fully sympathise with the families where marriages had to be either cancelled or postponed after the outbreak of Covid-19, kudos to the two tribal family members at Mancherial and Adilabad who agreed to postpone the marriage in view of Janata Curfew and for apologising to the invitees for the inconvenience caused to them. Unfortunately, the same gesture has not been shown by the educated class in cities. Even before the announcement of janata curfew, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and even Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao had urged the citizens to scale down the ceremony with fewer invitees. One hopes the educated city folks learn some lesson from such tribal families living away from us. N Nagarajan The demise of Kenny Rogers removes from the scene one of the greatest icons of country music the world has ever seen. Rogers who had a mind-boggling 24 No.1 hits was known for a string of massive hits, including ‘Lady’, ‘The Gambler’, ‘Lucille’ and ‘Islands in the Stream’. Rogers also starred in the film ‘The Gambler’, which was based on his signature hit number, but he liked to joke that he wasn’t much of a gambler himself. He may be gone, but his legacy will always remain. Adios! NJ Ravi Chander Hyderabad Secunderabad A bottle of Pallonji’s raspberry soda comes with this helpful disclaimer: “Contains no fruit.” Electric red in colour, and syrupy sweet to the taste, the raspberry soda is a beloved cultural icon of the Parsi community. But peer more closely into one of Pallonji’s ancient glass bottles and you can discern a story of much greater significance: how Parsis shaped India’s taste for soft drinks. US-India relations shape Japan’s strategic environment US President Donald Trump’s visit to India had a fivefold significance. Both Indian Prime Minister Modi and Trump are instinctive strongmen who love showmanship, have mass social media followings and react harshly to perceived slights and criticisms. All this is relevant to Japan whose strategic environment is shaped by the intersection of three major geopolitical story lines. Bengaluru Delayed but not denied It was an eight-year long struggle for Nirbhaya’s parents. The convicts deserved this punishment. Laws are stringent but there are loopholes in implementing them. S Chethana Pujitha Rani Hyderabad Indian workers flee to villages amid strict Covid-19 measures Thousands of poor city migrants whose livelihoods have collapsed due to India’s coronavirus measures headed back to their villages. “Work has stopped. I’ll go back and work on the farm,” said Rakesh Kumar Gupta, 40, who sells mosquito nets and was heading back to his family house in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Printed and Published by Damodar Rao Divakonda, on behalf of Telangana Publications Pvt. Ltd., Printed At Telangana Publications Pvt Ltd, S.No. 437, Near Velama Kalyana Madapam, DevaraYamjaal, Shamirpet Mandal, Dist. Medchal-500078. Published at Telangana Publications Pvt. Ltd, #8-2-603/1/7,8,9, Krishnapuram, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad-500034, Telangana State. Editor: Koothuru Sreenivas Reddy. Ph: +91 40 2329 1999, Fax: +91 40 2332 3313, Toll Free: 1800 599 3666. RNI No. TELENG/2016/70426.