Attacking Authors, pun intended!

 The evening turned out to be quite terrible. Fast spread the news of the attack on Salman Rushdie. Now that the fatwa-based threat against him seemed to be a distant nightmare, this had to happen!

It is clear by now that the septuagenarian author would survive the severe attack. Multiple meanings would be assigned to it even though the identity of the attacker is not yet clearly known. For all you know, it could be a public retaliation to the Jawahiri death, a retribution by the radical groups, could be!

Let us not get in to all that international politicking until the truth gets told. Hopefully, it would  be though. Instead, let us concentrate on the murderous attack, the attempted 'death of an author'.

Well, authors are always a pain in the neck. Both for the powers that be, and the society as such.  Though artists of all 'sounds, shades, shapes,colours and forms' share their yen for "speaking truth to power", authors appear more dangerous as their medium, language, is easily shared. Their truth is hence easily relatable even for the common man.

 Let us look at a concrete example. Let us look at two representations of the gut-wrenching world wars in the last century. Well, not everyone can understand a "Guernica". But the "shell shock" literature of the first world war or an Anne Frank or an Elie Wiesel can transform the most cynical, life hardened, war seasoned heart. 

Authors are indeed the soul of the very humanity, and the solid pillars of the civil society. Literature is indeed ''mirror walking down the road". It reflects the reality, warts and all, whatever narrative mode it may adapt. The 'real toads in the imaginary garden' that literature depicts make an entire readership conscientious, and conscious, too, against multi-layered injustices and falsehoods of multiple varieties.

Literature adds sobs, smiles and,most importantly, soul to life whose spatial and temporal boundaries it effortlessly  transcends "in style", right? The pleasure it provides through its "form-al"qualities is intellectual and yet ethereal, while its content, if at all it can be conveniently separated from the form, is soul stirring. 

Be it literature of knowledge or of the aesthetic variety (to quote the famous differentiation by De Quincey, the contemporary of the great Romantics), literally literature lifts us up, every which way. In brief, authors never die, however much attacked for every possible controversy. Long live authors! 

Pratima@ Socrates to Soyinka, and beyond, both in space and time, wordsmiths have spoken their truths, and enriched our lives beyond measure. They live for an eternity, however much 'under attack'.