Salman ko Salaam ! Review of Bajrangi Bhaijaan
By Aseem Shrivastava
Today is August 9, 2015. Exactly seven decades have passed
since Washington committed perhaps the greatest war crime in the history of man
by testing a plutonium bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, close on the
heels (just three days) after testing a uranium weapon on Hiroshima’s
innocents. I say “testing” because such weapons were new to our species and it
was yet to be known precisely what their destructive potential was. These two
tests in real time helped zero in on the right numbers (for that time. The
remarkable thing is that we still do not know exactly how many - obviously
non-White - innocents were butchered in this dual savagery. Estimates vary
between 130,000 and 250,000).
Equally importantly, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, as the twin
bombs affectionately came to be referred to by the Allied military
establishment, also enabled the Untidy State of America to supersede the rising
Soviet Union and define the contours of the remainder of the century (by
controlling the terms of the Cold War and its hundreds of hot proxies in the
“Third” World), if not also the distant outlines of the century we now live
in.
I remember that many years ago, after India and Pakistan had
conducted their nuclear tests, some words of war criminal Henry Kissinger had leaked
in the media and he was caught saying that the only two countries on earth
which are “nuclear neighbours” are India and Pakistan and they offer the
(obviously for Kissinger, salacious) possibility of what an actual nuclear
“exchange” between such powers would look like in reality (as opposed to the
war-games which provide only conjectural data to military planners and
strategists).
Warmongers and leaders on both sides of this foolish,
metallic, electrically charged border have done everything possible in the last
17 years to bring everyone living in this part of the world rapidly closer to
the day of nuclear reckoning. I remember a cartoon from around 1998 in which
India and Pakistan go to (yet another) war. Islamabad launches a nuclear-tipped
missile at New Delhi. It falls short and lands in Lahore itself, decimating the
‘city with a soul’ instantaneously. New Delhi retaliates by taking aim at
Islamabad but instead finds Amritsar’s Golden Temple in the way. In their
enthusiastic ghost sonata, in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly funny
Dr. Strangelove, leaders on both sides declare victory!
“Jai Bajrang Bali ki!”
It is with this background, supplemented by the latest
refinements of absurdity on both sides of the border, that the film Bajrangi
Bhaijaan is to be viewed...
see also:
"I have never in my life ‘loved’ any
people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the
American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’
my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of
persons.."
