Firoz Khan
Film maker and eminent theatre person
I have spent most of my life in Mumbai and never seen anything so ghastly happening here before. It was mind-numbing – the absolutely brazen manner in which the terrorists laid siege on major city landmarks, killing over 200 hostages and injuring over 200. Soon after the carnage, I went to St John Hospital where I was born. The wards spilled over with injured people, and for all of us it was a personal tragedy. It was the same when the city had witnessed the serial blasts of 1993 and the explosions in trains in 2006. But the scale of the latest senseless killings had no parallel anywhere.
One really fights for answers – but then what can be said about the unanswerable? Such horror completely negates the meaning of life. Where is the point in making a film or writing a play or any of a hundred other things that make life meaningful and relevant? For if everything can be blown up in a moment, how can one find the motivation to do anything at all? Even a simple mechanical activity becomes a challenge, as those who lived through America’s 9/11 know only too well.
Mumbai’s 26/11 has thrown up a very similar conundrum that will not be easily resolved; and that, if it happened again, would completely, once and for all, shatter the very idea of the old Bombay. Somehow this time I personally experienced such a sapping of creative energy, that I totally lost the will to do anything. And many other creative people have spoken of a similar sense of bewilderment. It was this sense of nothingness and nausea that pervaded my play “Tumhari Anita” in 1999. That had been our statement then on terrorism – this great bloody leveler whose sole aim is to crush everything bright and beautiful. But we were never cowed down, despite this overweening, deeply personal tragedy that sought to make graves of our minds even as the body count in hotels and other places kept mounting. Yes, so darkly absurd is this whole thing that one feels guilty even to think of “recreating” those blood-drenched scenes, to record, say, the incessant cries for help that the staccato bursts of intermittent gunfire throttled. When the real world hits you so hard, can any artist venture to recreate the horror? What does one do, how can one want to create anything, what is a creation worth if annihilation is ever imminent? And this time we saw a strange, new, horrific paradigm unfolding. Here we are – all agreed that life is the most supreme of all. All our democratic institutions are committed to enriching this life.....Continue
Film maker and eminent theatre personI have spent most of my life in Mumbai and never seen anything so ghastly happening here before. It was mind-numbing – the absolutely brazen manner in which the terrorists laid siege on major city landmarks, killing over 200 hostages and injuring over 200. Soon after the carnage, I went to St John Hospital where I was born. The wards spilled over with injured people, and for all of us it was a personal tragedy. It was the same when the city had witnessed the serial blasts of 1993 and the explosions in trains in 2006. But the scale of the latest senseless killings had no parallel anywhere.
One really fights for answers – but then what can be said about the unanswerable? Such horror completely negates the meaning of life. Where is the point in making a film or writing a play or any of a hundred other things that make life meaningful and relevant? For if everything can be blown up in a moment, how can one find the motivation to do anything at all? Even a simple mechanical activity becomes a challenge, as those who lived through America’s 9/11 know only too well.
Mumbai’s 26/11 has thrown up a very similar conundrum that will not be easily resolved; and that, if it happened again, would completely, once and for all, shatter the very idea of the old Bombay. Somehow this time I personally experienced such a sapping of creative energy, that I totally lost the will to do anything. And many other creative people have spoken of a similar sense of bewilderment. It was this sense of nothingness and nausea that pervaded my play “Tumhari Anita” in 1999. That had been our statement then on terrorism – this great bloody leveler whose sole aim is to crush everything bright and beautiful. But we were never cowed down, despite this overweening, deeply personal tragedy that sought to make graves of our minds even as the body count in hotels and other places kept mounting. Yes, so darkly absurd is this whole thing that one feels guilty even to think of “recreating” those blood-drenched scenes, to record, say, the incessant cries for help that the staccato bursts of intermittent gunfire throttled. When the real world hits you so hard, can any artist venture to recreate the horror? What does one do, how can one want to create anything, what is a creation worth if annihilation is ever imminent? And this time we saw a strange, new, horrific paradigm unfolding. Here we are – all agreed that life is the most supreme of all. All our democratic institutions are committed to enriching this life.....Continue
