ON TWO ANGRY YOUNG MEN

ON TWO ANGRY YOUNG MEN
(by Karunakaran)

A few weeks back I saw two ‘angry young men’ in television.
Seeing is what you believe. I watched them alone, in crowd, and even when I closed my eyes to get a sleep. And, it (be asleep) opens the back entry to all the wrongful doings a day carries: how sinful, how pleasant, how sorrowful, I was, could be the utterances at the entries.
Then the two angry young men again, came in : the first one was a ‘captive n ‘escapee ‘ from the Taj Hotel carnage and the second was a journalist from Baghdad : the other day he just thrown his shoes to the American president, George Bush, as a gift to the departing president. To Arabs, it seems, throwing one’s shoes is a sign of utmost ‘insult’ one could express. He insulted the president of a country in front of world television channels (believe, what you see) and got arrested. He is still in ‘custody’.
I saw the other angry young man of Mumbai in NDTV and he was really angry :
(1) to Pakistan ‘for sponsoring terrorism’ in India
(2) to Indian authorities for ‘not doing anything’.

(“India should reply to Pakistan in a proper manner”) (“War is a proper answer”)
Anger is constructive.
Constructive in the sense that it is historical even in personal scale. However, anger is destructive also since it is historical; historical in the sense that history is a man made route to a given time. And, we knew that man is a victim, too, of his time, place.
Thus the politics. Whenever the politics miss to understand its ‘present’ it misses its historical relevance itself in present. In most of the cases, it carry the burden of past. Politics is a culture in which the history itself get a character. Like the hero of Umberto Ecco’s novel , “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” , to get into one’s own memory one has to catch with the history already told. In Ecco’s story, the hero meets Italy’s fascist past while constructing his own past.
With out a past one has no entry to present. Present is a premises where one is honorably invited.
Anger is an ingredient in every culture. Anger, too, has a role of communication of opposites in a society and its given time is the one with we, as a ‘commune’, get ready to communicate. Readying to communicate is the cultural politics the modernity warrant.
An ‘individual expression’ of anger is a limited communication as it is limited within its own ends. But, anger of a ‘civilian’ is more than that : where the ‘state’ itself is being taken in. Anger of the State(s) is somehow reflects its ‘ruling’ on the issues : issues, like, freedom, liberty etc. Then, the two angry young men were presenting the ruling of their States, though all of us may not subscribe it. Which doesn’t matter.
However, the angry young men we met above were the victims, not the communicators, of an anger, we call terrorism, which modern societies yet to address wisely. They were victims because , as civilians, they failed to represent their case. The case they wanted to argue is ‘their well being’, as we all dream, live peacefully to die at an old age where you may not able to memorize anything. The angry young man from Baghdad met ‘his enemy’ who he hold responsible of utter destruction of his “Nation”, “People”, the political terms where his own well being is defined. His anger was against the destruction of his well being and its given definition.
Ruling of the State(s) is also a kind of expression a society been trained to live. So, when you present your rule on liberty, rule on freedom etc., also cover a liberty, a freedom to agree and disagree, too, which in either case has confrontation with the State itself. After all what democracy is offering is his or her practices in power, as an individual, as a member of State.
War with any of its forms is there always in a democracy. Or democracy contain the war(s). Terror is a kind of war as the anger is. The civilian casualty in a war, in a terrorist attack, is not counted in numbers only; instead it also meet the casualty of our understanding of a period, a society, where we live a life of civilians. And, how we practice our power. We have named us surely : “Political animals”. And, we are.