“Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts
No place to shit but sand channel ruts"
"Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone.”
-Allen Ginsberg
While trying to outline how this post will be, deep within myself, I just realized that I am not the right person to talk about politics! I am a very sentimental guy, and sentiments cloud proper judgment! Makes one face difficulties being neutral. In hindsight, now I understand why dada says it is hard for him to talk about politics. As so it seems, being neutral and still trying to uphold one's core values doesn't mix well! So I, too, should rather skip it!
To me, when I think about what a human being could treasure as their most valuable possession, it is one's legacy! The work they do, the thoughts that make them more unique than anyone else, their children, and that is what legacy is! But when I look at my surroundings, neighborhood, and in a broader sense, my country, the legacy it has always screamed of blood! Red, slightly thickened so much blood that you can almost taste the metal that is in the air! It's because, as the legacy, our life was traded for a sea of that red human bodily fluid!
I initially set off to write about a long-forgotten genocide that most people who think of themselves as the torchbearers of humanitarian issues worldwide might have never even heard of! As that is the case for most people in my country too. It is not like they also don't know about it; they, who have suffered this massive loss of life, too, just love to play dumb and ignorant about it. So in all reality, it's not something extraordinarily awakening.
Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities...... Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy . .The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.
In 1971, when the war broke apart, the US consulate general of that time, Archer Blood, wrote a telegram to the US government asking to intervene! In his eyes, what happened then was nothing but a mindless massacre of a population that was closed from the world by the Indian border on three sides! Millions of people got displaced from their homes within months, and in those nine months the war went for, 3 million civilian bystanders had already died! More people than both the Rwandan and Cambodian genocide combined! And yet, no international intervention, except by the Indian army only at the very end of the war, ever reached this piece of land! Even when blood had sent that telegram, in his words, what came back from Washington was nothing but deafening, eerie silence! You know why? That is because the Nixon and Kissinger administration back in that time was using Pakistan to open up a diplomatic channel with China! A diplomatic channel has cost more people's lives than the two atom bombs did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
I am only 24 years old, and so whatever I know about this dark phase of human history is either from history books or first hand FGDs and interviews! And what I have come to learn is that the first time the world realized what was happening back then was through George Harrison's song Bangladesh, and the benefit concert by him and Ravi Shankar, the legendary pundit of sitar! Live Aid, the benefit concert where Queen, Pink Floyd, and bands with such cult status had performed to make it one of the biggest live events in world history to have had an astonishing 1.9 billion viewers wasn't the first of its kind! In its infancy, such events had found their first precedence almost 15 years ago, back in 1971 through Concert For Bangladesh in Madison square!
Allen Ginsberg, an activist and a poet, later on came to see the devastating effect of the war first hand in September with Sunil Gangopadhyay! And what he saw is still quite vivid in his poem! He entered the country through Benapole and visited Jessore road! Ironically this was the same road that the millions of refugees were using to flee the country into India! Miles after miles of makeshift camps right beside the road, famine, cholera, and piles of dead bodies had made it look similar to Dante's eighth level of inferno! The trees, forming the thick canopy and coveting over Jessore road, where Ginsberg saw the viciousness of the genocide, are more than 100 years old! And the human maleficence and misery are still written in their leaves as well as in the poem! To exist for as long as human history exists! And yet, we choose to forget it. Why? A question I am afraid I have no answer to!
