The People's Choice

Something caught my eye the other day – amongst usual TV fodder there was a report from “democracy week in the provinces”. Just another pathetic initiative, thought I , sponsored by European Union and supported by keen –for- funds local governments – these “hypocrisy weeks” happen by dozen in a week. All are happy in the knowledge which leads nowhere - we are taught principles of democracy and shake hands with our European advisors - Europeans are happy with funds being spend on future “never-will-be-a-member-but-let’s-pretend” program. But what made me think was faces of people in the provinces listening to the gibberish of yet another initiative to teach them how EU works, and how Europeans are multicultural and how press is free. Looking at me were the faces of peasant men and women, old and withered as the soil they work on, like the carpets they weave, unkempt and unbothered by all the madness around them. For seventy years these were the nodding heads in the party meeting to support this or that initiative against “rabid imperialist dogs”, for hundreds of years before that – they were – if touched at all – preached to by an imam about this or that jihad, and before that, maybe by a Christian priest. But those faces and those people with the faces – the soil of the land – they stayed the same, they have not changed - and they are what we call “the nation” – Millet or Khalg. Real nation that I designated by an Azeri world Khalg (it is a better term to use than “nation” which I find a bit limited: maybe “the people” is better), not the nation of nationalist dreamers, communists or puritanic preachers. They kept their clothes, they toiled their land, they kept to their music and their customs. Khalg are a force yet untamed by anyone – they live by their own laws, always adopting to forces outside their control but always surviving to give our culture to a next generation, for no city folk can preserve an oral tradition, beyond studying it – once its dead and gone - in university. Everyone is upset, fed up with “the people”, wanting to change them for the better, for they are conservative lot – they don’t want to change, stoically keeping “the old ways”. For some they are backward force to be educated, for others – they are pagans – not Islamic enough. Seventy years communist city folk wanted to make them model citizens free of prejudices, and yet they still come back to the land, to live among the olive groves, to make bread and sing merry songs during the springtime festivals. They still visit shrines of saints, protect against the evil eye, and marry their girls young. The people – they never disagree with their tutors – inside one ear and out of the other. They will continue to live a true life, which is just this – a life worth living.