Starting with this one… a month ago, September 13 to be exact, marked six years since Umar Khalid’s pre-trial incarceration began - and on that day, Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi and Adittya Nath Mubayi (of Quizcraft Global) hosted a screening of Lalit Vachani’s lucid, precise and moving documentary Prisoner No. 626710 is Present. This was preceded by the Vice India short “Activist Umar Khalid on Muslim Identity, CAA Protests and India’s Democracy”.
Together the two films covered ground one already knew - about the vicious majoritarian bullying of the past several years - but it was useful to see it again in consolidated form, and to be reminded of the heady days of the CAA protests in 2019-20.
There were many things to chew on in Vachani’s film, but one moment I felt strong resonance with was the one where Banojyotsna Lahiri mentions that when she first got to know Umar in JNU, he never stopped asking questions, and it was almost exhausting: it was like he thought up 50 new questions at the start of every day and then spent the day asking them.
Asking questions: always a brave and dangerous thing to do in a place where political leaders refuse to face press conferences.
Downside: there was a clip from one of Arnab Goswami’s late-night shows, with all the screaming. The last I saw any of that was more than a decade ago, and I could happily have avoided it for another 50 years.
(I got to see a bit more of Arnab on Insta reels in the past few days, in the context of his screaming “German German German” while questioning Dhruv Rathee’s citizenship; but those clips at least were funny.)
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