Ashwatthama

[Raqs Media Collective], Friday, October 13th 2006, 17:30 - 18:00

Ashwatthama is a character in the Mahabharata, cursed to live forever, as a kind of wandering warrior.

Almost every city in the world has a memorial to the unknown soldier. Elsewhere, we in the Raqs Media Collective, have remarked that there are hardly any memorials to unknown citizens. To those felled in the ordinary, banal course of day to day statecraft. But that is the subject of another dictionary, a specialized dictionary, pehaps a sub-lexicon that annotates the civil war of daily life, but to go into that would be to stray from my appointed task today.

I am going to speak to you about a soldier condemned to wander the earth forever. There cannot be memorials to him, because he is not allowed to die. And though he may be relatively little known, he cannot be considered unknown. In some places, like where I come from, he is quite well known. When I speak his name, people recognize him. So, I cannot quite call him the unknown soldier. He is undead, he is not unknown. I cannot memorialize him.

I am speaking of course of Ashwatthama. And I offer you, from the Raqs Media Collective, which I represent here today, his name as an entry to the dictionary of war. When a name becomes a word, then the burden of the man who carries that name becomes somewhat lighter. Because everytime someone utters the word, the man whose name it is feels he has a helping hand. So, I offer you an old name, a very old name, and a new word, a very new word - Ashwatthama.