The Deer at Providencia - Annie Dillard

The Deer at Providencia is a short story by Annie Dillard which deals primarily with our response to suffering.

The story goes as follows. The author along with 3 of her friends from North America, are on vacation in the Amazon jungle, eating lunch with a tribe. While they are eating, the narrator notices a wounded deer tied to a pole. Upon asking the villagers about it, she discovers that it was caught in the morning and will probably be prepared for the evening meal. After the meal, she overhears some of the other tourists talking about her and her apparent lack of sympathy for the wounded creature. They are certain that if any of their wives were in her stead, they would have cried or at least attempted to help the deer. From this point, the story takes an abrupt turn.

The author immediately, with a switchover of barely a line or two, begins to talk about a man she had read about in the newspaper who had been burned severely for the second time. She describes the torment and agony that such victims must go through day after day and the high suicide rates of burn survivors. The story concludes with her giving a pitying glance and a kind word to the deer, followed by the line, “I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.”

The primary theme throughout the piece is that of the mystery of suffering, of pain and sorrow, and of its universality. People from all walks of life must endure it, money has no weight in its hands.

The vivid contrast between a bunch of well off people pitying an injured deer and a hideously burned man in pain and with no reason to live on, provides rooting for the aforementioned concept of sorrow’s universality. The tone in which the first half is written is quite descriptive and realistic, on a relatively upbeat note. The second part of the story is written with vivid details of the man suffering, and by doing so, renders the seemingly insignificant suffering of the deer obsolete.

The only thing in common between these two almost entirely clashing themes is the concept of suffering and our inability to do anything about it. The narrator couldn’t help the deer with her kind words at the end, and neither could she help the burn victim with a consoling letter. The implied conclusion is to accept that suffering is present in the world, but also accept the fact that the vast majority of the time, there is little to nothing that we can do about it.

Communalism and Politics in India - Ashis Nandy

The essay starts off with the reallocation and correlation of communalism to the right examples of the related violence and affirmation that the problem is not impossible to solve.

Example 1: No. of people killed in Communal violence < No. of people killed in street crimes of the last 50 years in Detroit alone (Detroit being one of the most crime affected cities in the world).

Example 2: 2 million people killed in Partition Violence (Communal) < 5 million people killed during separatist movements in the country (non-communal)

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With an example of a family which tried to save their friend from communal violence gets to know that the son in the family was one of the soldiers working towards the main perpetration of the plan. The setting of this story is the communal riot(s) of 1992 caused because of demolition of the Babri masjid.

The main point of the essay comes out during this reading. Internal contradiction occurs which leads to a number of different facets telling us that communalism is a complex phenomenon and not so easy to deal with.

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Up until now we understand that Communalism can be extinguished but because of its complexity, each and every element has to be smartly distinguished and analysed to come up with a proper plan to exterminate communalism.

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Propositions of Communalism:-

1.       Communalism is from its roots is an urban phenomenon. Compared to the villagers there are more communal riots in cities and village city borders than in actual villages. This is something the city dwellers should learn from their “rustic, illiterate” counterparts of development.

2.       Secular issues are usually the issues due to which communal riots are caused. Due to this the non-secularism also seeps in (indirectly) giving rise to Religious issues giving rise to communal religious riots.

3.       Political parties, secretly also encourage communalism as it helps in the promotion of the individual parties and helps gain more individualised power to themselves.

4.       Some communal riots are fuelled by the fanaticism of political parties. As followers of a party get into an argument into followers of other party leading to discrimination and loose parallels.

5.       The Indian social system is traditionally community based and not individualised. So people are discriminated according to the community they are from and not their individuality.

6.       Self-hatred among Hindus is dominant and many of us might have seen such examples. Inclination to Islam or Christianity is commonly seen amongst many Hindus.

7.       Communalism fuels material based politics as the society doesn’t clearly understand (vs.) ideology based politics anymore. One must try and understand the ideas and the ideology which is trying to be established by the political party rather than just checking the growth in GDP that could be caused by them coming into power.

8.       The NRIs fuel this material based politics. This is the same situation as the Tamilians in India funding LTTE and American Jews donating Israelis if looked at properly.

9.       Communal politics seems like a way of secularizing politics.

10.   This gives rise to a new kind of political culture of flesh and not of the mind.

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Important Issues:-

·         Change in the hierarchy of castes in terms of wealth caused due to communal riots includes elevation of castes such as Kurmis, Jats, and Reddys.

·         Laws and legal matter are the only ones that can suppress communal riots.

·         Secularisation creates its own insecurities due to internal conflicts.

·         Secularisation gives rise to increased individualisation giving rise to gradual increase in absence of faith in individual communities.

·         Coalition politics or Allied politics is on the rise to secularise the country, but will it turn out to be conservationism? That is the end question.

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