Worth reading article by Abhi Subedi in thursday's The Kathmandu post. Poetics of fear By ABHI SUBEDI - I want to begin with the reiteration of my very simple yet profound knowledge. That is, all the major wars of the poor countries are fought with the weapons given or sold out by the powerful countries of the world. Students at the Central Department of English asked me once to sum up the legacy of the Western rule in the postcolonial world in one word. I put what was coursing through my turbulent mind for long in one tangible word. I said?the word is ?gun?, which can represent the legacy of the Western world to the garib or the poor countries of the third world. After I pronounced the word I felt an energy welling up within me as it were. I became so eloquent on the subject that I covered in brief the history of the countries that I have followed with interest over the decades. Lethal trade Examples abound. The nearest one comes from South Asia. Indian and Pakistani leaders vie for arms. If an American President or the Secretary of State or even a simple envoy gravitates to this part of the world, Indian and Pakistani politicians in the government and outside compete to get this person?s greater attention. They look at this person with covetous eyes. The expectation is not for food or medicine, but for arms, yes, the lethal, horrible arms and ammunition and money to buy them. "What do they need these arms for?" I asked the students on my part. Students scored full marks in that question. They said in a chorus?"to kill each other." The next question I rolled down was: "Why do they want to kill each other?" The students could not score any marks. They did not know why the people of India and Pakistan want to kill each other. Personally, I hazarded many guesses for the exact answer. I said?perhaps they started killing each other to rewrite the geopolitical boundaries. Perhaps they want to kill each other because they pray to different unseen or nebulous deities. Perhaps their prayers have different morning and evening ragas. Perhaps they think they feel differently when it pains them. Perhaps they know that they have guns and the Americans and other metropolitan powers have promised more guns so that they can kill each other. Finally, perhaps they think they do not know why they kill each other. In this confusion, they have groped for answer inside and outside the bleeding, burning boundaries and territories of this region. They have come up with a devastatingly complex answer?the nuclear weapon. Governments, who need to address the most human questions, slide more and more into the terrible realms of history. They are both the victims as well as the creators of their own traps in history. They do so by creating the other?the giver of guns by using which they perpetually fight futile and useless wars. This is a unique inverse postcolonial alterity that the countries once ruled by the Western powers have created. Farewell to arms But the present reality is that ideologies, historical contestations and rhetoric of utopia have to be thoroughly rephrased and reworked. Traps, torture chambers and killing machineries are things to be stored in the museums but not to be practised in reality anymore. The hungry people need food; the weak and ill people need nourishment and medicine; the children need education and all people need security and minimum care. It is the responsibility of the state and related organisations at both the national and international levels to work towards it. Finally, every person even if he/she has to go to bed most nights on hungry stomach has self-respect. That needs to be restored and honoured. But these simple propositions are lost into the tangled maze of the postcolonial history. Hunger for more guns among the people of these poor regions is increasing. And the gun givers or gun snatchers happily play the role. They rule this and similar other postcolonial world with contentment and contestations among themselves. The gun irony cuts deeper. Though I never like guns, they gave me a great revelation in my life when I suddenly woke up one morning to hear the news that the foreign donors were going to cut the supply of guns to this country. Such a decision will make some Nepalis jubilant and others unhappy. The insurgency side too would be doing the same?reacting to the gun-giving and gun-snatching issues differently. But my shock is deeper. If the people of a small and poor country like Nepal have already begun to use guns as stake like India and Pakistan to draw bleeding boundaries between the people, that means they are sliding into a hopeless situation. Jubilation and dismay over who loses and who receives guns is the greatest absurdity ever experienced by this country. What is going on? The metropolitan countries wanted to see Nepal as Shangri-La and save it as a "bell jar" where they could come and make up for the entropy they have experienced back home. But now if others want to see as yet another model in Nepal where even the poorest of the people can continue the violent contestations with guns and prove themselves as the models for bloody experiments for the 21st century, then we are doomed. Nepalis have only one option to save themselves from becoming the Western gun babies. They should end the gun game and stop narrating the gun saga to their children. To engage in a lethal contestation is to become the absurd victim in the hands of those who have always supplied guns to the people of the poor hemispheres. Finally, a few words about the poetics of fear. In literature and arts, fear is always given a structure like Gothic novels, magic realist narratives, turbulent visual images as in the paintings of Europe in different centuries depicting the horrible cholera epidemic. But in Nepal the politics of fear is going to have far-reaching consequences. The people sandwiched in the fear game will be demoralised and will take at least half-a-century to fully recover from the trauma. It is easy to create fear, but difficult to undo the terrible impact of fear. Haunted people will long lose the sense of balance and liberty.