Thursday, April 26, 2018

In what way was the leadership talking to the fighters in the jungle?

The Nepali jungles are nondescript, without signs that explain the names of birds, the names of trees. Such jungles would not have been sought in the war. If that is so, the ever present twigs and leaves must have failed to impress the fighters beyond the first few hours of excited walking in it. How, in that nondescript space, is there the possibility to provide a frame of reference to the critical concepts that had to be understood for the war to continue?

How does the leadership itself, given day after day in the jungle, not get distracted from what were once firmly held definitions of concepts? How is some idea like political power to be communicated here? What exactly is to be taken as the object rendition of power? What we come to is the idea of the "heaviness of the sign": a single sign-board explaining names of birds and trees comes to represent many various ideas and concepts; a single sign-board in the jungle, if ever encountered, has thousands of meanings.  

But also, perhaps the sun that peeps through at times is power; perhaps something else which causes pain, perhaps in the first moment of a gunshot wound, a leader comes up and says to the injured fighter: “Son, that is power. You have felt power. That is what power feels like.”


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