By Madhulika Liddle http://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/Paradox-of-perception-between-Sight-and-insight/2016/08/27/article3596974.ece In a small, insignificant incident in Joginder Paul’s novel Blind, the inhabitants of a home for the blind hear a piece of news. A man convicted of murder has been hanged, and his eyes are being donated. One person among them may receive the gift of sight. Is there chaotic clamouring for that precious pair of eyes? Do the blind fight to be the lucky ones?
No, because these are the eyes of a man who has been hanged. Not because he was a criminal (in a sad twist of fate, it is discovered—after his execution—that he was innocent) but because the blind, in the wisdom, and paradoxically, the naïvete born of years of blindness, know that eyes can hang a man. Sight can be the death of a man, it can bring ruin. Blind (a translation of the original Urdu title, Nadeed) is loosely woven into a plot. A home for the blind, run by a benevolent, fatherly blind man named Baba. A place where the blind, like the canny Bhola, the basket-weaver Sharfu, his beloved and beautiful Roni (who has also been Baba’s beloved, and is one brief tryst, of Bhola), live in their own not-quite-cocooned world. From being the story of Sharfu, Roni and Bhola, this becomes the story of Baba, who suddenly regains his eyesight. Unwilling to tell his ‘children’ that he is now different from them, Baba hides the truth. But Baba can see, and what he sees sends his life into a mad whirl of corruption and deceit. “I roam around with open eyes in my blind home, and steal all their secrets without them knowing it,” he says. He sees the mild pilfering that goes on, the way one blind person steals from another, cheats another. Beyond that, he sees the ugliness of the world. This is not a case of innocence gone sour; Baba is not an innocent, but it is a reinforcement of several interrelated themes that dominate this book—the difference between seeing and looking; between sight and insight; between vision and vision—in its literal and metaphorical senses. This is an abstract, metaphysical story, not an easy book to grasp if you’re looking only at the obvious—which, of course, is ironically enough a message of the story. It is thought-provoking, at times elusive, paradoxical. An interesting and unusual book, and one that is symbolic of so much: of modern society itself, of the loss of values and morals that mark this world of ours. Of how we have all, to some extent or the other, become blind to what goes on around us, and have built up our own perceptions of what we would like the world to be. “Is the eye of the mind better or that of the body?” a character asks another. A pertinent question, and one the author encourages us to ponder upon -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
