Siddhu Warrier, 23
Doctoral student
He 'is fairly intellectual for a 'Latino'.
He 'has no negro strain in him'.
This is what the CIA thought of Che Guevara, the most iconic fighter of our times, who lost his life fighting for the rights of the people of Latin America (and Africa).
But, unfortunately, do most people realise what Che stood for; what he lived and died for? I think not.
Che was not just a person; he stood for a philosophy, an ideology. An ideology that is as relevant today as it was when he walked the streets of Havana. The 'enemies' that the powerful want us to see have changed, but as they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Let us take a look at Che, the person. Is he still, in India at least, an iconic figure of Latin America's assertion over North American hegemony?
A few years ago, I went to a pricey and rather posh shop in Chennai, and asked for a Che Guevara T-shirt. The bloke behind the counter replied, 'I'm sorry, we don't have any Che T-shirts. But we do have some other rock groups - Iron Maiden, Metallica and Rammstein.'
That is what Che has become in the popular consciousness in our country -- a rocker with a 'cool' beard who sang 'revolution' at Trafalgar Square (or wherever else). In a disgusting perversion of his ideas, he (or rather, his visage) has become a poster boy for capitalists everywhere. For Che has become a picture on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and credit cards (Yes, credit cards - a company in Ireland marketed a 'revolutionary' credit card for students!). Thus, from being an icon of proletarian triumph over the vested interests of capitalism, he has become the symbol of how capitalism and the free market can twist everything - including its worst enemy - to serve its purposes.
And Che, the ideology?
Forty years ago, when Che died, communism was the 'enemy'. Communists were the 'other'. Communism spawned 'terror'. Communism is dead for all practical purposes now, and the world has changed. But the more things change, the more they remain the same. All one has to do to see that is to replace Communism/Communists in my earlier sentence with Islam/Muslims. The creation of an 'other', in my opinion, is the way that the rich and powerful distract us from our misery - a misery wrought by them, and not by the 'other'.
Che believed in fighting this inequality, to think for oneself, and not see everything through the prism of 'us' and 'them' that the powers that be in "Western Christendom" and its lackeys in the rest of the world wish us to view the world through. But do we, as Indians, listen to Che? I think the answer is a resounding 'no'. A brief look at any public forum shows us how so many of us Indians have turned against those of our countrymen who happen to be Muslim.
More than fifty years ago, a young Ernesto Guevara - a doctor from a well-to-do family - rode around Latin America on a motorcycle. What he saw - the suffering visited upon the people of Latin America by American interventionism and big business - drove him to the revolutionary life he lived.
Do we young, middle-class Indians feel at all the same when they see the endosulfan-deformed in Kasaragod district and the water starved in Plachimada in Kerala, the sufferers in Bhopal, the newly-created landless in Singur and Nandigram, or the farmers of Andhra Pradesh and Vidarbha? For the most part, I don't think so. We're more than happy to ignore that farmer who's got that bottle of pesticide to his lips as we zoom away on that flashy new motorbike we just bought.
In today's India, Che is well and truly dead. Rest in peace, Che.
Also read: 'Cuba has given me tranquility'
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