LEFT AS AN IMAGINATION IN THE POST-EMS ERA

We live in a time when the reality is mistaken as fake and vice versa. One is reminded of a 1998 film, The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, in which the protagonist who lives in the US ultimately realises that what he believed to be real in his life was nothing but an elaborate reality TV show.

- J PRABHASH

This summarises our predicament today as we fail to separate the real from the unreal and truth from the untruth. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once spoke about history as a clever divinity that could cheat us, misuse or play a joke on us.

In a sense, Kundera’s reflection about history applies to contemporary Indian/Kerala politics, too, in the post-EMS era. Coming to Kerala, this need not be taken to mean that this twist in state politics is a byproduct of his absence or that his presence would have altered the reality.

That said, one thing remains, he would have at least engaged his party colleagues and the civil society in Kerala in a lively discussion about these changes. Whether he would have justified his party’s changed position on various issues, including its attitude towards neoliberalism, is only a matter of conjecture. But the most important thing is to have an informed debate on socio-political developments, irrespective of the conclusions one may draw. For this makes politics an active laboratory of ideas.

E M Sankaran Namboodiripad, alias EMS, belonged to a generation who believed that politics per se was barren and, therefore, required to be nourished by ideas and culture.

Dialogue is the most important propeller which aids this process and thereby adds to the imagination of democracy. Except for the brief period he remained in office as the chief minister of Kerala, he spent the rest of his life reading, writing and speaking, i.e., articulating ideas and debating issues. In a sense, he measured out his life in words.