Frameless Heads on Nameless Walls

"You say you're a lion, but your great-grandmother, three generations ago, she was a deer - someone told us - and that makes you a deer! And that's your Hidden Fire. So we have got to put you out."
- Rashi Bunny (in Arvind Gaur's play 'Hidden Fires').

How important do you think is a name? We are given one when we are born, we go to school and college with that name. It remains with us once we work and get married, have children who get their own names. It stays with us forever, as the most important part of our identity.

Now let's see how disastrous this one name can be. In a communal riot, people are often shot by the mere mention of their name. Point blank. Your biggest asset turns into your biggest disadvantage. In your face. And that's the end of that. The names are slashed off all their significance, since they are no form of sacrifice or respect. And so that same name is hidden, as a source of disgrace to the nation. Only to be recorded as a number in the statistics.

Like these names, the riots too are a hidden reality of our society. The truth about our lives that we want to hide, run away from. The names of millions of people like us who tragically lose their lives in the throes of violent uprisings for no fault of theirs.

The media as well as politicians give its countrymen a vision through rose-coloured spectacles when they commercialise riots and other national communal politics, by assuring its population with the false notion of "all is well" - that no lives are in danger, so "don't follow whatever the foreign news channels like BBC are telling you."

It reminds me of an evocative socio-political theatre production I watched recently by Arvind Gaur's popular Asmita group, called 'Hidden Fires.' A bilingual solo performance by Rashi Bunny, it took shape as a unique three-part illustration by Manjula Padmanbhan. After the much hulaballoo made out of Gujarat and its various postmortems, I expected, honestly speaking, another hyped version of religion and bloodshed, with a social message promoting peace at the end of it.

However, the last sequence, where the protagonist reads out a list of one thousand names - selected randomly by sticking a needle into a telephone directory - gives you the irrepressible feeling of 'it could have been me" - among those millions of innocents - the lion who killed another lion for having a deer in its ancestry. And the three big reasons for why we hear these names - simply 'lest we forget' - the names that won't be commemorated on any memorial stone; in order to remind you of the invocation of democracy
- to the people directly, itself. A call about all the violence that exists in places all over the world - be it in Gujarat, Rwanda or Kosovo...as the protest of a generation. The muse ended with Bob Dylan's immortal wisdom in the lyrics which remind you that "the answer my friend" is only just "blowin' in the wind."