World’s conscience-keeper

GUNTER Grass — novelist, playwright, essayist, polemicist, "professional disillusionist" and now the 1999 Nobel laureate — has all along been "one of the world's most functioning conscience keepers". He flings his words of protest, which come hurling down against "every pretence of separation", disunion, break-up, estrangement, be it in the form of the Berlin Wall, or deprivation, dispossession, destitution and privation, as in the slums of Calcutta, or "every notion of bourgeois existence in pre-War Danzig", or Plebeian uprising in East Germany in June, 1953, or even capitalist madness and "nationalistic narrowness" in an age of post Communism and post-reunification era.

Gunter Grass has been "an exponent of a German form of magic realism". Inspired by German expressionist, Thomas Mann, Grass is "a self-chosen outsider in a monstrous fatherland where one man's mega-fantasy has become a million's marginalisation', and "where the wall has migrated to the mind".

Mann added a new dimension to the novel by his searching enquiry into the history and civilisation in which he created his fictional world. In the same way, Grass, "a sorcerous stylus of history", beating "The Tin Drum", shattered "every notion of bourgeois existence in pre-War Danzig". Thomas Mann's subject, like the pre-occupation of Proust and Joyce, was "the inner life of Man", and from the narrow national perspective, he, over the years, moved into wider and deeper waters, until he reached the all but unfathomable bottomless past.

For Grass the sight of Germans and Poles hounded out of Danzig during the War vis-a-vis political ambitions and capitalist madness is chilly and frigid. So is the sight of "the underbelly of Calcutta". His association with "The City of Joy" is 13 years old, when his visit to this "clearly not forgotten city" whipped up a storm with his rather "acerbic comments".

Contrasted with the tradition of Central European men of letters, who have been interested only in the "artistic and moral universe" of Calcutta, the slums of this city and their darkness have always attracted "this scourer of black humour in history", writes Soutik Biswas.

In Calcutta, he got involved with slum children, co-directed a Bengali adaptation of his play, "The Plebeians Rehearsed The Uprising", a revolutionary adaptation of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus". The Marxist government was "so paranoid" that "a DD interview with today's Nobel Laureate was mysteriously spiked", although its relevance was fascinating in today's context.

DEEPAK TANDON
Panchkula

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The consensus idea

Mr Inder Malhotra deserves to be complimented for his excellent article "Beyond Vajpayee's victory — hard decisions need consensus" (The Tribune, October 13). I liked his analysis of the performance of the BJP and the Congress — the main national political parties — in the recent elections to the Lok Sabha!

The outcome of the electoral exercise does not seem encouraging. As it is, it is anybody's guess as to how long the unwieldy coalition government will last.

But, then, the country has to move on, the murky political situation equations notwithstanding. This obviously means a broad national consensus vis-a-vis the major issues plaguing the polity as also their possible solutions, failing which the sickening problems would simply defy solution.

No doubt, Prime Minister Vajpayee faces a grim challenge ahead. The question of questions: would the Prime Minister meet the aforesaid challenge boldly and squarely? Well, we hope for the best but would perforce keep our fingers crossed!

TARA CHAND
Ambota (Una)

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Tailpiece

The JKLF plan to cross the Line of Control fizzled out and not a single activist of the Front intruded into any sector in Jammu and Kashmir.

Bahot shore suntey they paihloo mein dil ka.

Jo cheera to ik qatra-e-khoon bhi na nikla.

BHAGWAN SINGH
Qadian