Syed Nasir Ershad

In yesteryears, friends used to mean someone we knew and an opinion was something we arrived at after long thought. Since the time of my upbringing I heard people identifying newspapers on the basis of political bias. However, it appears to be difficult to discover that there were politics in any certain newspaper. Politics! Where in its pages does the ‘Daily A’ hide its politics? Even when I got to university I struggled to recognize the political affiliations of any newspaper. How did people know that the ‘Daily A’ was right wing and ‘Daily B’ was left leaning? What gave the game away? And couldn’t you have politics without being on any particular side?
I ascribe my naivety – it may be called ignorance if one chooses – to the entirely non-bias atmosphere in which I had grown up. My parents voted a certain party, but thereafter we had no politics. What we thought about some issue on Monday, we may not remember to think about it on Tuesday. I did have an uncle who was said to be a communist, but the word meant nothing serious that it could really create havoc in my mind.
It was the same with religion. A few simple markers defined us as who we were. I see now that essentially we were nonconformists. Like many other families in those gloriously uncommitted days we cherry-picked at life. My father made merry with the world, my mother watched plays, my sister went to art classes and I daydreamed about being a globe trotter. When I think of the political and religious burdens many of the people I met at university I did not know whether to honor the political views their parents had instilled in them, or to jettison the lot of it. I consider myself fortunate to have been brought up in a state of dogma-free grace.
Today, a segment of young generation hold fast to all tenets of mistrust – refusing anything that looks like a system, owing no allegiance to a party or a line, believing in nothing other than the necessity of believing in nothing. Maybe it is a form of laziness. You do not have to work to be a sceptic.
In the absence of surprises, the entire exercise is only marginally less futile than our complaining about it. I can see why activists bewail the lack of ideology in contemporary politics. Where is the philosophy, where are the big ideas? But maybe we should be grateful there are not any. The humdrum has its virtues. There are still people alive who remember suffering at the hands of the last century’s big ideas. You may take example of a scheme mapped out by ideologues to make the world a better place and you will find in it an apparatus for killing. Those ideologies that do not kill us with boredom, kill us otherwise.
We should learn from art. An artist with an agenda is dead meat unless he leaves his agenda outside the door of his studio or writing room. I would like to say that no great art was ever born out of an agenda, but that might sound as though I have an agenda about the making of art. So I will settle for saying that the point of art is to refute whatever it is we have made up our minds about.

[To be continued]