Here’s an interesting comparative study in The Independent of the present international conflicts and what Shakespeare wrote long ago.
Shakespeare could have been writing about Iraq or Afghanistan, his scenes of battle were so prescient, says Robert Fisk. “Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones.
“But who cannot contemplate Saddam’s hanging – the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going ‘to hell’ – without remembering ‘that most disloyal traitor’, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that ‘nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it.’ Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors – ‘to the hell that is Iraq?’ – was truly Shakespearean.
“How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where ‘mouth-honour’ had long ago become the custom, where – as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran – a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was ‘in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er’.
“The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which – if David Damrosch is right – was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast: ‘Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; / He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets…’
“In an age when we are supposed to believe in the ‘War on Terror’, we may quarry our way through Shakespeare’s folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing.
“Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And it’s not difficult to find a parallel with Bush’s disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq – and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran – in Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:
‘…Therefore, my Harry, / Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out / May waste the memory of the former days.’
Meanwhile thousands of schoolchildren in the United Kingdom will soon be taught about Shakespeare by actors rather than their own teachers. “Pupils will take part in dramatisations of the plays they are studying and be given tips on how to interpret the various characters instead of sitting behind their desks reciting them in class…” Read on…
Swaraaj Chauhan describes his two-decade-long stint as a full-time journalist as eventful, purposeful, and full of joy and excitement. In 1993 he could foresee a different work culture appearing on the horizon, and decided to devote full time to teaching journalism (also, partly, with a desire to give back to the community from where he had enriched himself so much.)
Alongside, he worked for about a year in 1993 for the US State Department’s SPAN magazine, a nearly five-decade-old art and culture monthly magazine promoting US-India relations. It gave him an excellent opportunity to learn about things American, plus the pleasure of playing tennis in the lavish American embassy compound in the heart of New Delhi.
In !995 he joined WWF-India as a full-time media and environment education consultant and worked there for five years travelling a great deal, including to Husum in Germany as a part of the international team to formulate WWF’s Eco-tourism policy.
He taught journalism to honors students in a college affiliated to the University of Delhi, as also at the prestigious Indian Institute of Mass Communication where he lectured on “Development Journalism” to mid-career journalists/Information officers from the SAARC, African, East European and Latin American countries, for eight years.
In 2004 the BBC World Service Trust (BBC WST) selected him as a Trainer/Mentor for India under a European Union project. In 2008/09 He completed another European Union-funded project for the BBC WST related to Disaster Management and media coverage in two eastern States in India — West Bengal and Orissa.
Last year, he spent a couple of months in Australia and enjoyed trekking, and also taught for a while at the University of South Australia.
Recently, he was appointed as a Member of the Board of Studies at Chitkara University in Chandigarh, a beautiful city in North India designed by the famous Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students there.
He loves trekking, especially in the hills, and never misses an opportunity to play a game of tennis. The Western and Indian classical music are always within his reach for instant relaxation.
And last, but not least, is his firm belief in the power of the positive thought to heal oneself and others.