Fierce pajamas

@ the roundabouts of power

Meandering through central Delhi, negotiating its pristine beauty and sanitized environs, I came across this silent band of people–old, hopeful, tired, yet also inspiring–in the shadow of the Ashoka-Samrat hotels, a few metres from the Prime Minister’s forbidding residence.

I stopped and took this picture, much to the amusement of the group (and the angered irritation of fellow motorists) which seemed powerlessly lost, yet powerfully determined, amidst the stench of burning fuel, vehicular metal, and the hidden specter of awesome power.

I’m sure the group risked being removed with force, but this rag tag gathering, illuminated in the dying light of day by candles, spoke to me in a powerful way about the status of the citizen in this country, his struggle against power, memory and forgetting, and his claim to spaces of protest. It is, ultimately, a claim, a scratch, upon the surface of our collective conscience.

I wish to enable the broadcast of this message: captured by one citizen, it is the image of our political life. That image was to be found in the interstices of both political power and professional journalism, growing in the very space where that power and journalism failed (and routinely continues) to respond or reach out to the sentiments of these candle bearers and their cause.

 

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