Whistleblower!

                   Emile Zola- “J’ accuse !”               

With a spate of articles in the newspapers about whistleblowers like Dinesh Thakur and now Edward Snowden exposing irregularities and covert missions, I was reminded of the great French writer Emile Zola who published a letter in the L’ Aurore daily on 13 Jan 1898,  a letter addressed to the then President of the French Republic.

Letter to the President of the Republic

I accuse!

Sir,

Would you allow me, grateful as I am for the kind reception you once extended to me, to show my concern about maintaining your well-deserved prestige and to point out that your star which, until now, has shone so brightly, risks being dimmed by the most shameful and indelible of stains?

What filth this wretched Dreyfus affair has cast on your name - I wanted to say ‘reign’ -. A court martial, under orders, has just dared to acquit a certain Esterhazy, a supreme insult to all truth and justice. And now the image of France is sullied by this filth, and history shall record that it was under your presidency that this crime against society was committed.

But this letter is long, Sir, and it is time to conclude it.

I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice - unwittingly, I would like to believe - and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations.

I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century.

I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face.

I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.

I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L’Eclair and L’Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing.

Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.

In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily.

As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.

With my deepest respect, Sir.
Émile Zola, 13th January 1898

(It’s a very long letter, I quote the first two paragraphs and the concluding part of the letter, only.)

Emile Zola was a naturalist writer whose sordid detail of corrupt life and degradation of human values repelled the public and paradoxically made him attain fame and win accolades as a writer. The truth hurts and disgusts, but we cannot escape it. His long legendary friendship with the painter Cezanne, too, perpetuates his ideology in life, though one cannot say who took off from the other, but they met at an intersection of their mindscapes. Cezzane painted the world in basic shapes of a circle, a square, and a cylinder, objects and forms reduced to their originality and truth. Zola’s 20 volume series Les Rougon-Macquart is a story of five generations of the respectable (legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts ,  a fallout of the effects of the industrial revolution of greater wealth and its entrapments.

He had followed the Dreyfus affair all along. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was tried for treason on slim evidence in a wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the country and sentenced to life imprisonment at the dreaded Devil’s Island, off the South American Coast. Two years later, a Colonel in the intelligence section uncovered evidence that pointed at a Major Esterhazy who had passed on secret information to the Germans and exonerated Capt.  Dreyfus. In the meantime, a few other senior army officers had arrived at the same truth.  But in their minds, the prestige of the army and the country was greater than the honor of a Jewish man. In the name of patriotism, they resorted to perjury.  Major Esterhazy was tried and acquitted, the indiscreet Colonel transferred to far dark Africa, and Dreyfus left to rot.

Emile, a dedicated follower of truth and an enemy of injustice, wrote three articles on the Dreyfus affair, but to no avail. The cynical whitewash of Esterhazy propelled him to write an open, flaming letter to the President of France, which he  took to George Clemeanceau , the editor of a struggling liberal newspaper who in turn printed it on the front page under the heading – J’ accuse (‘I Accuse!’). Zola was prosecuted for libel by a hostile jury under the influence of a raging army and sentenced to one year of imprisonment. He wrote in his letter – ‘In making these accusations, I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily.’

He had accomplished his purpose. Dreyfus affair reopened as an open public trial, and he was vindicated. When he died in 1902, he was mourned as a national hero. His service was attended by thirty thousand people, and Capt. Dreyfus too was present at the moment that the priest spoke the final words:  “Envy him! Envy him his destiny and his heart………..He was a moment of the conscience of man!” 

Whistleblowers are a breed unto themselves, who go all the way with their conscience, acknowledging all dangers and repercussions of their actions. Courage in the face of fear! Acts of godliness by a few in an otherwise ever-erring human species!

The Great Gatsby

            The Enigma of The Great Gatsby!                

I watched the film ‘The Great Gatsby’ over the weekend. I was driven by an irresistible urge to relive GATSBY whom I had encountered in the eponymous novel in my postgraduate course. He had left an indelible mark on my mind and I savored him on my treasured list of classical characters that live in my thoughts. ‘No one can doubt that the legend(Gatsby) engaged the imagination of the author more deeply than the society in which the legend is played out’. Scott Fitzgerald came into his own with his book ‘This Side of Paradise,’ but he became a critically acclaimed author only with the publication of this book. A book of the Jazz Age,  the roaring twenties (1920s) , written by an author of the ‘Lost Generation,’ it has lived up to all its tags and has gained fame and widespread appeal with time.  It stands true for contemporary India and many other nations in the third world. An age of pleasure orgies, flamboyant display of wealth, singing and dancing , as if eradicating the conventionalities and moralities of the past which had culminated in World war I, a repercussion beyond human comprehension. A world gone berserk on a mindless spree. A study of the milieu and moment of the novel centers the hero and the ambience in the mind of the reader.

The Great Gatsby does not deal with an imaginary space of fetish materialism but is very much rooted geographically in Long Island district of New York.   It was home to the rich immersed in hedonistic life styles , a psychedelic  indulgence of senses,  in the  excess that they had garnered through a thriving economy and prohibition era of the 1920s. Akin to the world today of guns and extortion, black money and power axis.  In that era, Fitzgerald imagined a Great Gatsby , not because his was a rags-to-riches story but that in poor dwellings, he dreamt of himself as ‘a son of God’ . ‘For Gatsby , life with all its absurdities , shortfalls and sadness  is still valuable. He is obsessed with the wonder of human life and driven by the search to make that wonder a reality. An urge that drives prophets and visionaries of this world to make the facts of life measure up to the splendors of human imagination. In the day-to-day realities of existence nothing or nobody is to blame, people are what they are and life is what it is. At this level most people don’t count, they are just refined animals living out a mundane existence, the Tom Buchanans,  the Jordan Bakers, the Daisy Fays.  Only Nick and Gatsby count. Nick tells him so in his last exchange, ‘You are worth than the whole bunch put together’. Nick who is as much of this world as Daisy is in hers, still sees , obsucurely , the significance of Gatsby. He can see that  the content of Gatsby’s dream is corrupt but he senses that its form is pristine’. 

Nick is the narrator of the book. He is within and without as he profoundly defines himself in the movie too. Fitzgerald used the Conradian device to the hilt, by having Nick use the letter ‘I’ and brilliantly perceiving characters and situations through his eyes ironically. The narrator( Nick)  has two styles of narration.  In one, he describes in detail what happens, and in the other he debates, fills in the background detail, muses and summarizes. He is a bond salesman, from the Midwest with his education from Yale and a sound philosophy rooted in values from his rich father. His cottage is set between two large mansions on Long Island, one of which is owned by the mysterious, young  Gatsby, who gives huge parties each week-end, and people come in uninvited in overflowing buggies -  politicians, celebrities, secret agents, actors, extortionists…….  .   A rich married couple, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, friends of Nick, live on an estate opposite the bay, marked by a green light at the end of the dock. Tom is engaged in a sordid liaison with the wife of George Wilson,  the owner of a local garage in the valley of ashes, where the rich dump all their industrial grey waste . Daisy has everything but her husband’s love and is unhappy.   Gatsby wants to take the relationship between him and Daisy five years back, when they were lovers. The book ends in an act of betrayal and ingratitude on the part of Buchanans and Gatsby’s former friends and business associates, and finally Nick concludes that the bootlegger Gatsby, embodied something more genuine and on the whole less depraved than the parasites he entertained, or the so- called aristocratic Buchanans, who run away sheltered by their money and dead conscience. The writer means us to be wholly on the hero’s side, to believe that without Gatsby’s extreme idealism, life is simply a mundane unlivable reality.

The entire fairy tale atmosphere in the background of the Long Island sets the scene for the tragedy in the end. The very first introduction to Gatsby’s mansion and persona is that of a glittering caravanserai, the towers lighted from bottom to the top like a world fair. The symbolic implication of the green light at the end of Daisy’s estate which has a colossal significance for Gatsby is indicative of the green pastures and the desperation for the green card, which drove people in droves, to acquire the ‘American Dream’.  The enormous eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg, on a billboard are always watching – ‘God sees all’ as Wilson says ; the moralistic strings of the story.

On an allegorical level , Nick is reason, reality, experience, history, like Wordsworth listening to the sad music of humanity whereas Gatsby is imagination, dream , eternity , like William Blake seeing angels in the sun. Nick sees the tragic, can never be hurt, is a moralist but then he can neither be happy. Gatsby transforms it by the power of his imagination – radical and apocalyptic. Gatsby is hopelessly out of time, and pursues the green light.  He can touch realms of ecstasy - a radical to the core.

Gatsby’s foray into immense wealth comes about through dubious means of bootlegging and his association with shifty characters like Dan Cody and Meyer Wolfsheim(played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie).  The reason he projects himself larger than himself in epic proportions is a ploy to buy respectability, in the form of his yellow buggie, an Oxford Man, parties and the poise of a thorough gentleman. A phrase from the book – ‘he had a platonic conception of himself’ points to his dual character of criminal wealth and respectability.

Amitabh Bachchan and his part in the movie takes us to the Indian Gatsby’s  of today who have acquired their fortunes through grabbing mines, forests and water , exploiting the poor and tapping into the aspirations of the middle class for amassing great turnovers. The luxury-goods market in India has expanded to $ 8.21 billion this year. Studio Creo sells ceiling fans and mattresses priced upward from 2 lakhs. Items of necessity have become luxury goods to acquiesce the pure luxury-living demands of the nouveau riche to lend them a worth in the  eyes of  their so called friends, which makes them worthy in themselves.  People want to own the idea of luxury. They have forgotten the essence of what made Gatsby, ‘The Great Gatsby’ – his pristine vision and genuineness. He is ready to sacrifice himself and his fancy world for the safety and well being of others. After the reader finishes the book or the movie ends our hearts feel heavy and we are filled with despondency for the Great Gatsby himself.

Baz Luhrmann and his design/vision mate Catherine Martin packaged the movie in a radical display of opulence, an aesthetic which seems sublime . This sublimity is blinding the population to its vulgarity of greed, superficiality, envy, selfisness and a pursuit of happiness in indulgence of sensual desires. This is what we are ; the truth stares us in our face. Don’t be dazzled by the veneer – go look for the darkness beneath!

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’!

Theatre Review 'No Birds in My Attic'

The Mustard Seed English Theatre Company in Goa and their production 'No Birds in my Attic' engaged theatre lovers in Goa in May, 2013 , with its witty dialogue and sparky enactments. Isabel Vaz the director yet again proved her mettle in script -  writing and direction. I was asked to review the play and the print  appeared in the 'Herald' .

The English Theatre scene in Goa seems to be looking up with Mustard Seeds production last month in Kala and the ongoing play readings in International Centre Goa every first and third Thursday of the month, an initiative by Karan Bhagat.