I was introduced to Hitch precisely a month after his demise. It was during a phase of my life of which I am not particularly proud. I was going through my journalism training and every day was a painful reminder that hitherto I had been a troglodyte. So, one day during a writing assignment, our mentor sent us an obituary piece published in The Guardian. ‘What an obituary can be...’, the email said. As it turned out, it was an obituary of Christopher Hitchens by his good friend Ian McEwan. In the course of time, I was to read both these individuals a lot.
As Hitch
himself has written, the temptation to inflate the currency of the past is
always present, I won’t deny the temptation to claim that that obituary set me
on a course to discover Christopher Hitchens. However, to be honest, I gave it
as much attention as I used to give my assignments those days.
About a year
later, while I was in my second job with a newspaper, I was asked by a
colleague if I knew about Hitchens. We both shared an office accommodation and
he was intrigued by the daily sight of me offering my prayers in an elaborate
manner twice a day. "Who?" I asked him back. "Christopher
Hitchens, or Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, anyone," he replied, naming
three of the four horsemen of new atheism (the fourth being Daniel Dennett).
"The names are ringing a bell," I said, "But I don't think I
have consciously heard or read any of them." However, it later turned out
that I had indeed watched a video of Dawkins debating that insidious quack
Deepak Chopra.
Anyway, my
colleague sent me a few videos of Hitchens while the latter was on a course to
destroy religion after authoring that phenomenal masterpiece which has since
become one of my most favourite reads -- God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything. Some of the arguments made therein were a lethal
challenge to my then-held belief system. And in retrospect, I realise that if I
had heard those arguments in any other manner than the one in which Hitch was
making them, I probably would have reacted very differently.
Those
arguments were indeed formidable, and truth be told, no religious person can
answer those without being absolutely inconsiderate. Nonetheless, they didn't
lead to a moment of epiphany. In fact, I can’t pinpoint any moment of epiphany
that led to this huge change in my outlook. But they indeed sowed the seeds of
doubt. And, since then, this change has been gradual, spread over years, but
always accompanied by reading and listening to Hitchens as much as possible.
I remember
the first book of Hitch I picked up was Letters to a Young Contrarian. I
have since read it at least four times. (He always qualified the mention of the
book by saying that it wasn’t him who picked the title, but his publisher. And
he had disavowed the title, and I did that too after pondering over his reasoning
for a while.)
Coming back
to the book, on its very first page he writes, 'I attack and criticise people
myself; I have no right to expect lenience in return'. I can't describe how
receptive this one line made me to views and remarks contrary to my position.
Yet, he is not asking you to tolerate stupidity, as he says later in the book,
'...while people are entitled to their illusions, they’re not entitled to a
limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others'.
He
encourages you to 'never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity and seek out
argument’. And when you’re diffident as you know the mob in front of you won’t
listen to reason, Hitch comes to your rescue and gives you the mantra: ‘What
can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.’
As I continued
to read more and more about him, I found a lot of similarities between us. I
was born in the year his father died. His grandfather was an officer in the
British Indian Army and had kept at their home a huge collection of brasses from
Benares, my hometown.
Just like
him, I spent my university years more in activism than in study, and
consequently, just like him, obtained my degree in third division.
Amusing as they
were, these by-chance similarities weren’t the driving force behind my growing
regard for him. If you read or listen to him too much, you don't just get
hooked, you get addicted. And that's what happened. Why? Because it feels like
he's directly addressing you. That he has read your mind and saying exactly
what you wanted to hear.
Hitch
doesn't fascinate you only by virtue of being a ‘maverick’ (another title he
later gave up), but also because he shows you why he’s being so, and the
edifice of his rationale not only rests upon the robust foundation of logic,
but also on wit and humour that is so hard to match.
Who else can
call a judicial luminary like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a ‘bloody fool’ and
term one of his most famous and revered judgments as ‘one of the stupidest
remarks ever made from the bench of the United States’ Supreme Court’? Who else
can address Mother Teresa as ‘Hell’s Angel’, who was ‘not a friend of the poor,
but a friend of poverty’?
He
challenges conventional wisdom in the most unconventional way possible. And advises
you never to ‘allow your thinking to be done for you by any party or faction,
however high-minded’.
Thus,
despite being a member of the Labour, he goes to their branch meetings only to
agitate against the party’s support to the Vietnam War. A Trotskyist who once
sang ‘The Internationale’ in the dock after being convicted for taking part in
a demonstration broke ranks with the Left on the question of Global Jihad.
‘It seemed
to some as if the Pope has announced he is no longer Catholic,’ wrote someone
whose name I better not invoke lest it should sully this commemoration.
However, I
see it a bit differently. He did not break with the Left as much as the Left
broke with him. He continued to describe himself as a ‘former Trotskyist who
still titillates to Marxism’. In fact, in many ways, Hitchens can save the Left
today if the Left shows the honesty that he demanded them to show.
As he wrote
only a few months before his demise that ‘in any case of conflict, I have
increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side’. Hitch was never
dogmatic in any of his beliefs. He not just opposed Labour for its support to
President Johnson, but also for their attempts to ‘build a corporate state’.
He remained
a supporter of the Palestinian and Kurdish causes all his life, but refused to
accord ‘revolutionary authenticity’ to Hamas or Hezbollah. He dedicated his
last collection of essays to a Tunisian, an Egyptian and a Libyan protester --
all three had given up their lives in their struggle against the totalitarian
regimes of these countries. While doing so, Hitch also invoked the memory of a
Czech student who immolated himself in 1969, protesting against the Soviet
occupation of his country. And then said that all these people acted with a
very different persuasion than Mohammed Atta.
And there
lies the difference. For Hitch, ‘those who regard pluralism as a virtue,
“moderate” though that may make them sound, are far more profoundly
revolutionary’. His sympathy always lies with the victims, and all one has to
do is go through Hitch-22, his memoirs, to confirm this.
He was
wrongly regarded by some as a neo-conservative. He admitted that he made
‘common cause’ with them but said that ’I have never found myself in the same
camp as Henry Kissinger’. All he did was to ask the world to stop showing a
Chamberlain -like attitude to the threat of Global Jihad. He was one of the
very few foreign commentators who condemned the attack on the Indian Parliament
on December 13, 2001 in no uncertain terms and deplored the western media for
not giving it the coverage it deserved. He also asked the western governments
that they would find a better ally in India than in Pakistan. Are all these
warnings not turning out to be true?
Today, when
the world is facing a reinvigorated threat of totalitarianism and religious
bigotry, it is imperative for all of us to turn to Hitchens’ words, because, as
he said, ‘...it is true that the odds in favour of stupidity or superstition or
unchecked authority seem intimidating and that vast stretches of human time
have seemingly elapsed with no successful challenge to these things. But it is
no less true that there is an ineradicable instinct to see beyond, or through,
these tyrannical conditions.’
