जलेस की पत्रिका नया-पथ पढने के लिये क्लिक करे!

बुधवार, 29 जून 2011

सौंवी वर्षगांठ पर भारतीय जनकवि तुमको प्रणाम

अग्रज, तुम्हारी सौवीं वर्षगांठ पर
करता है भारतीय जन तुमको प्रणाम ।

आज के दौर के भयंकर संकट के क्षणों में जनकवि नागार्जुन का कृतित्व नये रचनाकारों के लिए प्रेरणादायी है, अंधकार में मशाल की तरह है। भारतीय जनकवि तुमको प्रणाम!
जो नहीं हो सके पूर्ण–काम
मैं उनको करता हूँ प्रणाम ।

कुछ कंठित औ' कुछ लक्ष्य–भ्रष्ट
जिनके अभिमंत्रित तीर हुए;
रण की समाप्ति के पहले ही
जो वीर रिक्त तूणीर हुए !
उनको प्रणाम !

जो छोटी–सी नैया लेकर
उतरे करने को उदधि–पार;
मन की मन में ही रही¸ स्वयं
हो गए उसी में निराकार !
उनको प्रणाम !

जो उच्च शिखर की ओर बढ़े
रह–रह नव–नव उत्साह भरे;
पर कुछ ने ले ली हिम–समाधि
कुछ असफल ही नीचे उतरे !
उनको प्रणाम !

एकाकी और अकिंचन हो
जो भू–परिक्रमा को निकले;
हो गए पंगु, प्रति–पद जिनके
इतने अदृष्ट के दाव चले !
उनको प्रणाम !

कृत–कृत नहीं जो हो पाए;
प्रत्युत फाँसी पर गए झूल
कुछ ही दिन बीते हैं¸ फिर भी
यह दुनिया जिनको गई भूल !
उनको प्रणाम !

थी उम्र साधना, पर जिनका
जीवन नाटक दु:खांत हुआ;
या जन्म–काल में सिंह लग्न
पर कुसमय ही देहांत हुआ !
उनको प्रणाम !

दृढ़ व्रत औ' दुर्दम साहस के
जो उदाहरण थे मूर्ति–मंत ?
पर निरवधि बंदी जीवन ने
जिनकी धुन का कर दिया अंत !
उनको प्रणाम !

जिनकी सेवाएँ अतुलनीय
पर विज्ञापन से रहे दूर
प्रतिकूल परिस्थिति ने जिनके
कर दिए मनोरथ चूर–चूर !
उनको प्रणाम !

शुक्रवार, 17 जून 2011

भारतीय जनकवि का प्रणाम

75वे स्मृति दिवस पर जनकवि गोर्की मखीम को प्रणाम!

यह वर्ष जनवादी-प्रगतिशील आंदोलन के प्रमुख हस्ताक्षरों का जन्मशताब्दी वर्ष है, साथ ही विश्व अपने महानतम साहित्यकार गोर्की मखीम का ७५ वा स्मृति दिवस भी बना रहा है। भारतीय जनकवि नागार्जुन ने गोर्की के सौंवी वर्षगाठ के अवसर पर कविता लिखकर श्रद्घांजलि अर्पित की थी।

गोर्की मखीम!
श्रमशील जागरूक जग के पक्षधर असीम!
घुल चुकी है तुम्हारी आशीष
एशियाई माहौल में
दहक उठा है तभी तो इस तरह वियतनाम ।
अग्रज, तुम्हारी सौवीं वर्षगांठ पर
करता है भारतीय जनकवि तुमको प्रणाम ।

गोर्की मखीम!
विपक्षों के लेखे कुलिश-कठोर, भीम
श्रमशील जागरूक जग के पक्षधर असीम!
गोर्की मखीम!

दर-असल 'सर्वहारा-गल्प' का
तुम्हीं से हुआ था श्रीगणेश
निकला था वह आदि-काव्य
तुम्हारी ही लेखनी की नोंक से
जुझारू श्रमिकों के अभियान का...
देखे उसी बुढ़िया ने पहले-पहल
अपने आस-पास, नई पीढी के अन्दर
विश्व क्रान्ति,विश्व शान्ति, विश्व कल्याण ।
'मां' की प्रतिमा में तुम्ही ने तो भरे थे प्राण ।

गोर्की मखीम!
विपक्षों के लेखे कुलिश-कठोर, भीम
श्रमशील जागरूक जग के पक्षधर असीम!
गोर्की मखीम!

नागार्जुन

मंगलवार, 24 मई 2011

चन्द्रवली सिंह जी नहीं रहे

हिन्दी के वरिष्ठ आलोचक और जनवादी लेखक संघ के पूर्व महासचिव चन्द्रवली सिंह के निधन का दुखद समाचार अभी मिला है। उन्हें विनम्र् श्रद्धांजलि।
वीरेन्द्र जैन

सोमवार, 14 मार्च 2011

Fukushima Nuclear Accident: A Warning for Jaitapur

Prabir Purkayastha, Newsclick, 12-March-2011

The ongoing nuclear incidents involving the Fukushima reactor in earthquake/tsunami affected Japan has posed serious questions already to the nuclear industry in India as well. Prabir Purkayastha writes.

As I write these lines, it appears that Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is moving towards a core meltdown as it has lost control of the cooling system. An explosion has blown the wall of one of the buildings there and radioactive iodine and caesium has been vented from the plant. The Fukushima Daini plant, about 10 km from the Daiichi plant, is also moving in the same direction with a similar loss of control of the cooling system, but without release of radio activity as yet. Both these plants belong to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

The Fukushima Daichi plant has 6 reactors of which 3 were out for normal inspections before the earthquake. Three running reactors are 460 MW (Unit 1) and 784 MW (Units 2&3) and are about 35 years old. Once the earthquake hit Japan, the three running units were tripped safely. However, with the units going off-grid due to grid failure, the only power available for safety system operations was the emergency diesel generating sets and battery power. The tsunami which hit the plant one hour after the earthquake seems to have taken out the emergency DG sets, he only power now available in the plant is battery power.

Once a reactor is shut down, the fuel rods still generate heat and must be cooled. This is where the problem in both these plants started – in both plants the cooling pumps seemed to have lost power. The battery power allows valves and controls to operate for another 8 hours after which all controls of the plant would be lost. Once the cooling power is lost, the nightmare scenario of a meltdown starts.

The Japanese authorities have declared a nuclear emergency in both these plants – the first time that such an emergency has been declared in Japan. In the Daiichi plant, the evacuation radius was initially 3 km and then expanded to 10 km and now to 20 km. More than 46,000 people have been evacuated from the Daiichi plant area, and another 100,000 people may have to be evacuated now. The Daini plant, which has 4 reactors, has also declared a nuclear emergency and evacuation is under way in a 3 km radius.

What is happening currently is that due to heat build-up within the reactor, steam is being vented out periodically. This means radioactive material is being released, first in the containment building and later reaching outside the plant. But the explosion makes clear that controlled release did not succeed or at some point there was not enough coolant left in the reactor core. This would explain the explosion, which Fukushima prefecture now says has blown the roof of the reactor has collapsed. TV and press reports indicate that the outer walls of the reactor building has also been blown off.

All this brings out the nightmare scenario of a complete core meltdown. As the fuel rods continue to heat up, they will melt at some point, first the metal cladding of the ceramic encased fuel pellets, then the ceramic pellets themselves. At this point, the containment vessel should hold the radioactive release, however already this is a huge disaster. Managing this is a complex operation for the future. The key issue, will the containment hold. The explosion in the reactor building might well be that it has not. The explosion seems to have been caused by hydrogen accumulation inside the containment building. Has it breached the containment building is yet not known. The final disaster is if the molten fuel rods go through the floor of the containment building, in which case it would explode in a mass of steam and radioactive material. This has never happened till date is an extremely unlikely scenario. This was the theme of the film, The China Syndrome.

The conditions in the Daini plant is currently better, but it still is in a critical state. In both these plants, coolant is being injected manually to maintain the coolant levels.

The accident shows that nuclear plants need to have a number of fail safe devices and layers of protection. In this context, should India be looking at untested and untried designs of the Jaitapur type needs to be seriously examined. Fukushima has posed serious questions already to the nuclear industry and only the foolhardy would rush in with completely unknown designs that Areva is pushing on India.

(URL: http://newsclick.in/international/fukushima-nuclear-accident-warning-jaitapur)

रविवार, 13 फ़रवरी 2011

Celebrating the Idea of Revolution

It is a remarkable coincidence that this issue of People’s Democracy is dated on the birth centenary of eminent poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a powerful ideological symbol of fight against oppression, defence of democratic rights and love for humanity. We commemorate this occasion as a celebration of the idea of Revolution.

A committed Marxist, one of the greatest Urdu poets, a journalist, film maker, trade unionist, broadcaster, teacher, translator, Lenin Peace Prize winner, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, had also served the British Indian Army rising to the rank of Lt Colonel. Born in Sailkot, Faiz was educated in Lahore, the city which served as his base throughout his life. He continued to live there after the unfortunate partition of the sub-continent.

The trauma, torture and torment of the partition are deeply reflected in his poetry. His love for the liberation of the peoples of the sub-continent as a whole was unquestionable. When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, a London newspaper said that he was “A brave enough man to fly from Lahore to Delhi for Gandhi’s funeral at the height of the Indo-Pakistan hatred”.

His work reflects that his identification with the masses of the poor and exploited, his espousal of the cause of liberation from all forms of oppression and exploitation was complete. He was an active member of the anti-fascist movement and the struggle for freedom from colonialism led by the Communist Party of undivided India.

Along with great stalwarts of his time, he was instrumental in founding the Progressive Writers Association in 1936 when the Communists also organised the students in the All India Students Federation and the peasantry in the Kisan Sabha in the same year.

The Communist Party had sent Comrade Sajjad Zaheer along with some others to organise the Communist Party in Pakistan. Sajjad Zaheer, also a noted and accomplished intellectual and writer, became the founding general secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan. However, in 1951, Sajjad Zaheer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and other leading Communists were imprisoned in solitary confinement under sentences of death in the infamous Rawalpindi conspiracy case. Faiz remained in prison for over four years.

Far from either breaking his spirit or sapping his energy for the cause of the revolution, imprisonment stimulated Faiz’s creativity. The remarkable tribute brought out by Pakistan’s leading group of newspapers Dawn, in 2004, informs us of his impressions during imprisonment.

“Like love”, he wrote, “imprisonment is a basic experience. It opens many new windows on the soul”. Some of his best works were to emerge from the confinements of the jails. Dast-e-Saba (the wind writes) and Zindan Nama (prison journal) elevated him to the status of a literary poetic genius.

In Dast-e-Saba, he reflects the basic essence of the Marxist outlook when he states that: “The understanding of the struggle of human life, and a participation in it is not only a pre-requisite of life, it is also a pre-requisite of art”.

While studying the eternal man-nature dialectic, Marx and Engels reached the conclusion that: As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends upon material conditions of production.

Eric Hobsbawm, in his latest book How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism recollects that at the 2007 Jewish book week coinciding with Marx’s death anniversary, Jacques Attali while paying tribute to Marx had said, “Philosopher before him had thought of man in his totality, but he was the first to apprehend the world as a whole which is at once political, economic, scientific and philosophical”.

This personal attribute of Marx is actually a reflection of the attribute of the Marxist world outlook. This goes beyond conventional meaning of `interdisciplinary’ approach to the world. Marxism, a creative science, is trans disciplinary which integrates all disciplines of thought and creative capacities of the human mind.

Faiz, in a sense, reflects such an integrated approach through his life and work in the times that he lived. In his preface to The Rebel’s Silhouette Agha Shahid Ali says: “Faiz was such a master of the ghazal, a form that predates Chaucer, that he transformed its every stock image and, as if by magic, brought absolutely new associations into being.

For example, the Beloved – an archetypal figure in Urdu poetry – can mean friend, woman, God. (Or, for that matter, Motherland, that Bahadur Shah Zafar, lamented for his burial, when blinded in confinement by the British in Rangoon.) Faiz not only tapped into those meanings, but extended them to include the Revolution. Waiting for the Revolution can be as intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover.”

Adopting the penname, Faiz, which can be best described to mean `dedication to the service of his fellowmen’, he revolutionised Urdu poetry. He relentlessly showed that the pen is mightier than the sword in rousing the people. Just one example of his work as a poet of the Revolution is his work known as Hum Dekhengay.

We shall see,
It is certain that we shall see
The day for which there is a promise,
The day recorded in the eternal tablet,
When the weighty mountains of cruelty and oppression,
Shall be blown about like cotton-wool;
When under the feet of the oppressed ones
The earth shall shake noisily,
And over the heads of despotic rulers
Thunder claps will burst …
When the crowns will be toppled,
When the palaces will be demolished….

His eternal humanism, which in the first place, led him to embrace Marxism and its world outlook, drove Faiz to espouse the cause of revolution all across the globe. He was a true internationalist.

In the book Poetry East, Carlo Coppola calls him: “A spokesperson for the world’s voiceless and suffering peoples – whether Indians oppressed by the British in the ‘40s, freedom fighters in Africa, the Rosenbergs in cold war America in the ‘50s, Vietnamese peasants fleeing American napalm in the ‘60s, or Palestinian children living in refugee camps in the 1970s”.

Faiz traveled abroad widely some times out of choice as the editor of the Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus being published from Beirut. On some other occasions, he traveled abroad in exile.

Edward W Said described a meeting with Faiz: “To see a poet in exile – as opposed to reading the poetry of exile – is to see exile’s antimonies embodied and endured. Several years ago, I spent some time with Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the greatest of contemporary Urdu poets. He had been exiled by Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime and had found a welcome of sorts in the ruins of Beirut.

His closest friends were Palestinian,” further he said in his essay The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile: “The crucial thing to understand about Faiz is that like Garcia Marquez he was read and listened to both by the literary elite and by the masses…His purity and precision were astonishing, and you must imagine therefore a poet whose poetry combined the sensuousness of Yeats with the power of Neruda. He was, I think, one of the greatest poets of this century”.

Much has been written and will, indeed, be written in the future about the work of this socially committed literary genius and a dedicated Communist. A particular lesson that everyone of us who aspires for and works towards Revolution must learn is to combine the passion of commitment with creativity.

Faiz did this with his poetry and mastered the use of classical forms transforming them before his audience rather than break from the old forms. He makes you hear and recite his revolutionary message in the old and the new together and at once.

People’s Democracy continues to draw inspiration from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s celebration of the idea of the Revolution.

Editorial in People's Democracy (Feb 13, 2011)

फ़ैज अहमद फ़ैज जन्मशती


ज़ुल्म और ख़ल्क़ के बीच चल रहे अंतहीन संघर्ष की समझ रखने वाले एक महान रचनाकार और चिंतक के नाते फ़ैज़ को उनकी जन्मशती पर याद करने का मतलब है, ख़ुद को इस टकराहट के हस्तक्षेप के लिए तैयार करना।
कांटिनेंट के महान मुस्न्निफ फ़ैज़ अहमद फ़ैज़ को लाल सलाम।

मंगलवार, 9 नवंबर 2010

स्याहफाम सौदागर

स्याहफाम सौदागर
मजदूर की आंख में रोजी का सपना
भूखे की आंख में रोटी का सपना
बरहना की आंख में कपड़े का सपना
बेघर की आंख में मकान का सपना
किसान की आंख में मानसून का सपना
तालिब इल्म की आंख में तरक्की का सपना
दुनिया की इस सबसे बड़ी ख्वाबिदा मंड़ी में
सपनों के करोडों सौदो का हसीन सपना संजोये
कल सपनों का स्याहफाम सौदागर आया था
अपने सपने को हकीकत में बदलने।

बहुत धन्यवाद जय-हिन्द
उसने रोजी मांगी
हम हसते-हसते बेरोजगार हो गये
उसने रोटी मांगी
हम हसते-हसते दाने-दाने को मोहताज हो गये
उसने गिरवी पड़ा मकान मांगा
हम हसते-हसते बेघरबार हो गये
उसने कपड़ा मांगा
हम हसते-हसते दिगम्बर तक हो लिये
हमने इक अपना हक मांगा
वो हसते-हसते बोला सूपरपॉवर बहुत धन्यवाद जय-हिन्द।

हत्यारा
गगनचुम्बी इमारते, मॉल, तकनीकी
विलासिता का हसीन मायाजाल

साम्राज्यवादी अर्थविदों का अनगढ
नास्त्रेदेमस भविष्यवाणीयों का चक्रव्यूह

लहुलुहान फिलीस्तीन-अफगान-इराक
विषैला नागासाकी-भोपाल-विएतनाम

भूखी-प्यासी-नंगी तीसरी दुनिया
दाने-दाने को मोहताज

खुदकुशी के ताल पे थिरकती
किसानों की जान

मुक्त-बाजार का कोलाहल और
आज का सबसे कीमती जिंन्स
यतीम सताये हुवे बच्चे और उनकी
बेवा मां के आंख से उतरता खूं

खूं से वजू कर रहें
तुम भी तो हो
महात्मा गांधी-मार्टिन लूथर किंग जूनियर
के हत्यारे।