Some might find this implausible, since the line comes from a brilliant but little-known book written in 1947. “Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse.” So Bhupinder ‘Bindy’ Singh Johal is reputed to have told his friends. It is key, though, to understanding the toxic tide washing over young people in Punjab.Īlso read: Crime, cult status, young death - Moose Wala killing brings focus on Punjab’s brutal gang feuds The story of how those gangs emerged on the shores of the Pacific, and then returned home, is little known in India. The murder of Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu popularly known as Sidhu Moose Wala-politician, sometime Khalistan advocate, and poet of Punjab’s gangster subculture who exhorted his followers to “live by the gun and die by the gun”-has cast grim light on the growing reach of transnational criminal groups in the state. “The minute you pick it up, you feel like shooting someone.”
“What a marvel the Kalashnikov is,” one Khalistan hip-hop video gloats, against a backdrop of Rolls-Royces, elegant villas, and podgy twenty-somethings in baseball shirts. In the shade of the Maple Leaf, a somewhat different revolutionary aesthetic has grown.
In themselves, Guevara firmly asserted, these were the pastimes of bandits.
The revolutionary, wrote Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, whose words and good looks inspired a billion t-shirts, “should be a complete ascetic”: A man wedded to “an austerity born of rigid self-control,” with “moral conduct that shows him to be a true priest of the reform to which he aspires.” Life in the revolutionary vanguard, the highest stage of human evolution, did not consist of cradling rifles, sleeping in hammocks, or being hunted by police.
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