Glittering beautiful words
Weighed down by their grand meanings
A high-class crudity
Golden cobweb of lucidity
The two of us are enmeshed in it
Sometimes I write and you read
Sometimes you write and I read.
– Sundar Chand Thakur in "Buddhijibi Bimarsha ka Sarbhara Tuchchapan"
The banality of intellectual exchange in South Asia is too stark to warrant a reflection. Yet, it is impossible not to lose your balance when faced with the spectacle of top dogs of the media defending territoriality at a talk-shop held in Kathmandu recently on 'Mapping Borders'. Forget extending the frontiers of knowledge, most of us seem to lack the courage of crossing boundaries – those ludicrous lines in the sand and on the mud that are meaningless without the context that we ourselves provide.
Territoriality, political control over space, is exercised in many ways; writing is one of them. By Benedict Anderson logic, it was 'print capitalism' (the printing press) that imagined a community and spread it as nationalism. By implication thereof, media-persons are as guilty of the excesses of national borders as their governments. If we are as poor at mapping borders as was seen during the Kathmandu meet, the spectre of more intense conflicts over boundaries is what lies in store for us all over South Asia.
It is incredible, but even journalists who treat every decision of their government with scepticism stop short of questioning boundaries that create and maintain the myth of inside and outside. "Bit by bit," Bill Clinton declared grandly in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 1997, "the information age is chipping away at the barriers – economic, political, and social – that once kept people locked in and ideas locked". Sadly, the debonair president of the United States of America could not have been more wrong. Each one of those barriers remain in place, all that has crumbled is the ability of almost every state to withstand the might of the US military and market, though not necessarily in that order everywhere.