Side-effectThe Hungry SeptopusBy Harris KhaliqueWho doesn't know Satyajit Ray? Regarded as India's greatest filmmaker ever and world-renowned for his Bangla language films like The Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar) made in the 1950s, Charulata (1964), Ghare Baire (1984) and the Urdu film Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), which was inspired by a story by the master fiction-writer of Urdu and Hindi, Premchand, Ray was a living legend when he passed away in 1992. A creative genius who would delve into graphic arts, designing typefaces, illustrating covers of his own and other people's books besides writing and directing great films, Satyajit Ray wrote groundbreaking children's fiction in Bangla and wrote many short stories for grownups. Ray writes about unusual happenings and creates strange characters but they are all rooted in familiar surroundings. It is said that in the late 1960s after the success of Charulata, Ray became more diverse in his topics for films, which ranged from fantasy and science fiction to detective thrillers and period dramas. The same range can be observed in his twenty-one short stories, translated from Bangla into English by himself and Gopa Majumdar, and titled "The Best of Satyajit Ray", published a few years ago by Penguin India.
Courtesy Divya Singh, a bright young scholar pursuing her PhD in Delhi, I received a copy of the book and am spellbound by the simplicity of Ray's language and style. Each story is studded with unforgettable characters and peculiar circumstances that these characters go through. Sinister at times, the stories bring forth the inner weakness, desires, ambitions, morality and perceptions of ordinary people who could be schoolteachers, amateur actors, office clerks, a young boy or those with unique hobbies. One such story is about a person called Kanti Babu, a botanist, who is fond of collecting carnivorous plants. He has been to various places in Africa, Asia and Central America to collect the insect eaters and other such species. He would feed his plants with cockroaches, caterpillars, butterflies, crickets, rats, etc. Among his collection, there is a plant which is bigger with a pale bark and brown marks all over. It has strong, large and thick tentacles which would tighten around a prey, a living being, and after making it still the plant would swallow it through its head. The head has a lid and the plant called Septopus, because of its seven tentacles, eats chicken, mutton, other birds, even cats and dogs which were run over by some car and fed to him by the servant of Kanti Babu.
But now Kanti Babu is seriously disturbed because the Septopus is developing a monstrous appetite for flesh. Even after being fed properly the plant remains hungry and on one fateful day, it grabs the hand of the servant called Prayag, tear off a piece of human flesh while the struggle to free Prayag was going on, removes the lid on his head and puts it in. The Septopus would now attack any human being to satiate its appetite. The story has other twists and turns but eventually Kanti Babu's friend, the narrator of this tale, has to virtually shoot the plant down with a gun.
The elite-driven system of governance in Pakistan has become The Hungry Septopus. It has an ever-increasing appetite for power and pelf. After eating up all the resources the common people had to offer, it is now eating our flesh and drinking our blood. The seven tentacles are incompetence, ignorance, injustice, corruption, greed, prejudice and obscurantism. The system has to be shot down.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/editorial_detail.asp?id=188411
AuthorTopic: Side-effect: A report from Pakistan (Read 246 times)
