Pier Paolo Pasolini
L'odore dell'India

Yesterday, Marco Pannella died... (rest in peace), and what does that have to do with PPP, you may ask?

"The fascism of the anti-fascists," I will answer you...!

In an article published in the Corriere della Sera right after the referendum on abortion proposed by the Radicals, (despite PPP being against divorce) he noted:

«None of the representatives of power (either the government or the opposition) seem even slightly willing to compromise with Pannella and his group. The vulgarity of political realism seems unable to find any point of connection with Pannella's candor...».

The Radical Party and its leader Marco Pannella were (explained the poet) the real winners of the divorce referendum, and this was precisely what neither the Government nor the Opposition forgave them for,

And PPP continued: "instead of being received and congratulated by the first citizen of the Republic, in homage to the will of the Italian people, a will they foresaw, Pannella and his companions are rejected as untouchables. Instead of appearing as protagonists on the television screen, they are not even granted a miserable quarter-hour of free airtime".

In his last public document, regarding the speech he was supposed to deliver in '75 at the XVº Congress of the Radical Party, PPP wrote:

"Against all this, you must do nothing (I believe) but simply continue to be yourselves: which means being continuously unrecognizable. Immediately forget the great successes: and continue undeterred, stubborn, eternally opposed, to demand, to want, to identify with the different; to scandalize; to blaspheme."

Well, (I will be more than brief alas!) this preface, besides remembering the recently deceased Marco Pannella, (one of the most courageous people in Italy with all his strengths and weaknesses) who always fought in person for his ideas, whether right or wrong, served me to revisit the term untouchables which we will find within "The Smells of India" (a term that qualified and still qualifies the lowest of Indian castes despite the caste system being officially abolished), a little book of just over 100 pages, written by the equally courageous Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1962 after a short trip made with his friend Alberto Moravia and with respective wife Elsa Morante.

Okay, my impression after reading it is that despite being written more than half a century ago, I found situations, lights, colors, and especially some smells that I too have known and experienced during my travels in India between 1983 & 1985...

I will not recount anything of what is contained except for the fact that PPP takes on the responsibility of contributing to the maintenance of a boy without a family, in an institute or hostel where wayward children and teenagers are cared for and taught by a person of goodwill.

And to finish, I will use the same words that Alberto Moravia wrote in his book “An Idea of India”, after the same trip:

“India is the country of incredible things that you look at three times rubbing your eyes and believing you've had a hallucination”...