Jaipur lit fest, notes from day two

Notes from the Jaipur Lit Fest, Day Two

Khullar chai
At Flow, the fancy café in between the Baithak and the Mughal Tent, you get hot apple cider honey, green tea and acceptable freshly brewed coffee for a price. Authors and delegates get a decent facsimile of dhaba chai in the Diggi Palace dining room, and students lay siege to the tea and coffee machines near the book stalls. But the one we’re all waiting for is the khullar chai, served in tiny cups. Like the Bisleri water, it’s a junta freebie; I remember buying my own water and tea at Edinburgh.

Crossing the bar
Given that most authors have no limits when handed one of two things—an open mike and a full bottle—it may have been a mistake to offer free booze to authors and speakers. A dashing young author known for his taste in fine hats, women and wine reaches the bar first, aided by some nifty elbow work, asks for five beers, as an aperitif. He’s told his card entitles him to one drink at a time. By the end of the evening, though, the bar has crumbled, and I see the Authors XI (a mixed Delhi-Bombay team) emerge with most of its contents. For non-drinkers, we recommend the hot apple cider at Flow.

Conspiracy theories
The morning session on The Conspiracy has Tunku Varadarajan, Lawrence Wright and Kai Bird. Tunku, it is decided, is the official festival patch: he’s employed in any session that has sprung an obvious leak. I miss The Conspiracy, but am informed it was a Right-Wing, not a Left-Wing one. Over at Open magazine, Rahul Bhatia has the lowdown.

"No place for us"
Diggi Palace is filling up, with Wole Soyinka, the Queen of Bhutan and Tina Brown joining in along with Girish Karnad, Christopher Jaffrelot and company; but sometimes they’re not the biggest draws. The Dalit literature panel is packed to the seams, as O P Valmiki asks whether literature can be for Dalits as well. It’s a question that had to be asked about three decades ago, and the sad part is that Valmiki has to ask it again.
“When we are told not to be victims, who gave us that role? Caste never leaves us alone; it’s so deep-rooted that it lives on in our minds.” S Anand, who’s moderating the session, mentions that he passed a Vaishnava Bhojanalaya earlier in the day, and that he, along with most of us, wouldn’t be able to imagine a Chamar Bhojanalaya. There’s a rush at the end of the session as a score of foreign journalists head towards the Dalit woman writer, Sivakami, for soundbytes. But for me, what resonates is the way Kancha Ilaiah, O P Valmiki and Sivakami make a point of thanking the fest for inviting Dalit writers to join in “so early” in their history. Valmiki mentions that most regional language festivals don’t have space for Dalit writers. It’s not a literary category that counts.

Wole on The Road
On the front lawns, Wole Soyinka takes stage after Her Royal Highness of Bhutan. And for an hour, his voice, deep, sonorous, richly musical, fills the space as he reads from The Road. There’s a gigantic carved wooden door behind him, parrots darting out in formation in the branches overhead, and the bright circus-tent ribbons of the open-air pavilion. Sometimes you have to have the right backdrop.

Two Wole moments, since I can’t reproduce his poetry:

On the need for forgiveness post-apartheid:
“I believe what lends dignity to humans is an acceptance of responsibility. Forgiveness, yes, but also restitution. Not vengeance, not exaction, but restitution.”

And on the gods:
“The gods never really die. They just expand their portfolios.”

On boldly going and the Kindle
The Internet panel—“Can the Internet save books?”—moderated by Barkha Dutt, and including Vikram Chandra, Gulzar, Tina Brown & Prasoon Joshi wanders into the usual maze (e-books versus “real” books, the Death of Reading As We Know It). And rouses a massed horde of bloggers and Internet fiends who’re snoozing at the tables at the back, briefly, when someone says “You can’t take a Kindle into the loo,” referring to the portability of paper books versus the Kindle. Our table wakes up in violent fashion. The chorus of “You can!”s is topped by the one voice saying, “I did!”

Also packed: the Katha Kram: Readings From Rajasthan session, and the Tibet debate, with Isabel Hilton and Tenzin Tsundue—introduced by Dalrymple as “the most-arrested author of the festival”. More on that later; the khullar chai calls.

Notes from the Jaipur Lit Fest, day one

The Jaipur Shuffle

The Jaipur Shuffle is a well-known manouevre executed in obeisance to the local gods of fog and missed flights, and it was done with expertise on the first day of the fest. Wole Soyinka—“Mr Woyinka”, says a distracted organizer, and the contraction shows every signs of catching on--Girish Karnad, Jamaica Kincaid and Andrew O’Hagan are among the authors felled by the elements, though Karnad and Mr Woyinka are rumoured to be likely to join us tomorrow. Not so Louis de Bernieres, whose passport was dispatched by the Indian Embassy in error to a shop in Brighton. It was recovered—and then he discovered that it had no visa. So no Bernieres, either.

Undeterred, the fest organizers reshuffle panels with the same careless élan that Indira Gandhi once employed with her cabinet, and authors dash in at the eleventh hour to the rescue. This is a very good thing for some of us. When I stroll in at 10 am, I’m looking at moderating The Art of Criticism panel at 11 am with one participant, ie me. Fascinating as the prospect of interviewing myself may be, it’s a relief when Amitava Kumar (Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York, Evidence of Suspicion) trots in, followed soon by Geoff Dyer. We turn this into a two-author conversation on Writers as Critics (general consensus: Better Than Critics as Critics, a view shared by all but the critics in the audience), and then Amit Chaudhuri joins us fresh off the Delhi-Jaipur highway.

There are horses behind the Baithak Tent, which offers Amitava Kumar an opportunity to air his critical acumen. On what critics and writers think about popular but Not Literary bestseller writers, such as a certain Shobha De, he gestures at the horses:
“From where we sit, the refreshing smell of manure wafts in from time to time and we breathe this air, along with the very pleasant breezes of Diggi Palace. But we might not want to breathe it all the time.”

It says "fiction" on the back cover
Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, on the difference between writing fiction and writing autobiographically:
“My character is called Jeff with a J, whereas I am Geoff-with a G.”


The Gulag Archipelago
Anne Applebaum on the difference between gulags and Guantanamo Bay:
“Guantanamo Bay was set up for prisoners of war, at the time of Afghanistan. The gulags imprisoned ordinary Russians, in a deliberately random way.” She admits the deficiencies in the Guantanamo Bay prisons, refers briefly to the ways in which it has gone wrong, but adds: “I do believe in using language accurately. There’s a difference between a prison, a concentration camp or a Nazi camp, and a gulag.”
Gulag, her authoritative history, is published in Russia by a small academic press. It’s available in 25 languages across the world—including, she stressed, most of the Baltic countries—but hard to find or read in Putin’s Russia.
One part of the discussion, ably and gently directed by Tunku Varadarajan, was especially moving. Applebaum spoke of how the era of the gulags, once documented by Solzhenitsyn, had vanished from the media and from the official histories—but not been wiped from the collective memory. “It’s still so close—only a generation away. Your taxi driver may have an uncle who was in the gulags. A neighbour knows a cousin who died there.” In libraries across Russia, she met with an almost frantic eagerness, once the staff discovered what she was working on. "Have you read this? And this?" librarians would ask, pulling out histories, journals, diaries, letters. "Let me find that volume for you."
That eagerness reflects the need to make sure that a history that may not be spoken of will nevertheless be documented; as Applebaum noted, the truth of how the gulags were built and run were only released over the last decade. The agreement to erase, or maintain a silence about, or forget the gulag years is then only an agreement to wipe it from the official memory; not the folk memory.
In the little gulag literature I’ve read, a curious detail: there are relatively few references to “a gulag”, almost always to “the gulags”. At some point in the history of the Holocaust, the camps were referred to by their names-Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau—but most often collectively as “the camps”—few are dispatched to “a camp”, or “a gulag”. You might go to “a prison” in a normal country; but it will be to “the gulags”, as though we understand that these structures have acquired a collective horror that wipes out individual differences between one place and another. I could be wrong here, but I would like to re-read the gulag shelves to make sure.

It's all about the navel-gazing
It is also confirmed that, as in his author photograph, H M Naqvi (author of Home Boy) believes in wearing his tops unzipped to either navel or at the very least, chest. This is perfectly acceptable fashion, and Naqvi can carry it off. But by evening, I notice at least two photographers, blessed with far more flabby embonpoint than Naqvi, with their shirts unbuttoned to below-chest levels. I am contemplating adding this to the list of Things Writers Should Be More Responsible About.

Packing them in
The organizers were apparently worried that they might not have much of an audience on day one, what with the weather and the traffic and uncooperative airlines. The morning sessions, with or without Soyinka and company, are packed: over a hundred people squeeze into the Baithak for the criticism session and the Applebaum session, and at least 50-70 for the Claire Tomalin/ Austen sessions, twice that for the Adaptations session (with Rahul Bose, Michael Frayn & co). Gulzar, Shabani Azmi and Om Puri reading from Tughlaq draw audiences in the hundreds.
Overheard, from a Jaipur local on his cellphone: “Yes, yes, fest is a big success. (He looks from the Baithak to the packed Mughal tent.) Lefthand tent AND righthand tent. It is popular on BOTH sides.”

The old razzle-dazzle
The day closes with the Alexander McCall Smith session, called Tea Time For The Traditionally Built. (William Dalrymple, conducting the conversation, explains carefully that the title has no reference to the girth of either of the gentlemen on the podium.) It’s a hilarious, you-had-to-be-there session, but here’s a small sample. McCall Smith is asked whether he found it difficult as a man to write about women, of traditional builds or otherwise.
“Authors have to get into the shoes of very many characters.” Then he thinks about it:
“I think some male authors quite enjoy getting into a woman’s shoes.”
Literary cross-dressing, says William D, and the evening continues with enough in the way of Jaipur brass bands, sparkly lights, fire-jugglers and Rajasthani folk dancers for me and Dilip Simeon to argue that this isn’t really a lit-fest, despite the august presence of the likes of Roberto Calasso, Nayantara Sahgal, Tenzing Tsundue and some of the most interesting of the Dalit writers. This, we agree, is really the Great Indian Wedding in masquerade, right down to the squabbling biradari, the grumbling auntyji who needs constant appeasement, and the flourishing of clan feuds and alliances among the various branches of high and low literature.

Jaipur and All That

I've been warned that the Jaipur Literature Festival is no longer the cozy and cheerfully eccentric fest of my memories--"darling, it'll be like Polo Season out there," a friend said darkly, packing her pearls as she spoke. But I'm still fond of it for two reasons: 1) I don't have to travel to Edinburgh to listen to the likes of Jamaica Kincaid, Wole Soyinka, Vikram Chandra and Anne Applebaum and 2) the Jaipur Fest has a palace cat and horses. Off whenever the fog clears in the afternoon, or I find my pearls, whichever comes first.

Here's the list of speakers for 2010; and here's the rest of the program. I'm doing the Art of Criticism panel with Amit Chaudhuri, Geoff Dyer, Amitava Kumar and Andrew O' Hagan on the 21st, a session with Claire Tomalin and Andrew Lycett on Austen and Kipling on the 23rd, and a discussion of the short story with Mridula Koshy, Nighat Gandhi and Marc Parent on the 25th. I plan to spend the rest of the fest in a hammock, chaise-lounge, or howdah, according to availability.

Here are some posts from previous years:

1) On the delights of Diggi

2) On the "elbows out" school of poetry reading
3) On Salmagundi

Don't miss Jai's set of posts on Jaipur, here.

Book review: Too Much Happiness

(Published in the Business Standard, January 2010)

Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro

Chatto & Windus

Distributed by Rupa & Co, POUNDS 11.99








In an Alice Munro essay on writing, she explained her view of the short story: “A story is not like a road to follow. It's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows...."

Stepping into any one of the collections of short stories she’s been writing for the past four decades—her first was published at the age of 37—is like stepping into a bigger and broader house than most in the world of literature. Munro has said elsewhere that most humans have a need to explore and examine the materials with which they have constructed their own lives; few of us, as she observes so astutely, want to believe that our lives are constructed of pointless moments. And perhaps it is this quality that makes Munro so celebrated and so often a locus of critical discomfort—wisdom is a writerly virtue that’s currently out of fashion.

In ‘Fiction’, one of the sharpest and most satisfying stories in Too Much Happiness, Munro allows herself a moment of sly fun. A music teacher is reading a book by a former student who remembers their relationship with far greater intensity than the teacher does. The book is: “A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than settled safely inside.”

This is an often cited argument against the short story: its relative brevity makes it suspect, and serious writers are expected to graduate at some point to the novel. Munro began her career by trying to write novels, but as the mother of three and the manager of a busy household, she discovered as far too many women writers have that her writing had to be snatched, had to fit into shards of time. Success and fame bought her time—but it also brought her the realization that the short story was her form, not the novel.

Munro has built a far larger, more sprawling house in her apparently confined chosen space than most writers have with the vaster terrain of the novel. The stories in Too Much Happiness, for instance, deal with a father who kills his children after a marital quarrel, a predator whose particular form of abuse, practiced on young girls, is less obvious and more scarring than rape, the subtle traps woven into the waft of female friendship, the hidden ‘deep holes’ lying in wait for a couple in a long marriage. These are only the roughest plot summaries; Munro’s skill makes each short story, from Dimensions to Wenlock Edge and Child’s Play, open up an entire world, complete in itself.

Munro’s view of the world is not harsh, but it is pitiless, as in this stray observation from ‘Fiction’, which is in part about the particular humiliation of a marriage ended by one person’s inappropriate, almost risible, choice of another. “It almost seemed,” Munro writes, “as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”

Perhaps the only sign of her age lies in this willingness to make sweeping authorial comments, to take the long view instead of seeing the more distressing human trials—divorce, terminal illness, lost love, betrayal, grief—as unjust, unbelievable upheavals.

This can be stretched too far, as it is in ‘Free Radicals’, which brings together a woman dealing with cancer and a killer on the run. This is lukewarm Flannery O’Connor territory, rather than vintage Munro. And in the title story, Too Much Happiness, the average reader will have to work to match Munro’s enthusiasm for her subject. This is a fictionalized version of the life of mathematician Sophia Kovaleski, who survived the suicide of a spouse and the gender bias of the time in Russia, only to die of influenza at 41. Too Much Happiness is Munro’s answer to a play Kovaleski wrote, The Struggle for Happiness; but it occupies an uncomfortable length, and reads far more like an embryo novel than most of Munro’s longer short stories.

As always, though, Munro’s work opens up more windows than any reader might expect. Too Much Happiness is a mesmerizing, rich collection, filled with Munro’s understanding of the workings of the world, and her continuing wonder at the variety and depth of our lives. Wenlock Edge closes with a brief look at people on the streets, going about their ordinary business, to shops and libraries and homes, and then ends on this note: “On their way to deeds they didn’t yet know they had in them.” It is this sense of possibility, good and bad, that Munro’s best work awakens in her readers, and Too Much Happiness more than delivers on the promise of the title.

Food: India's national dish

(Published in Outlook, January 11, 2010. I had a wonderful sparring match with a foodie friend where we both agreed that India's national dish should be dal--but that since there's no chance of agreeing on what kind of dal, I said I'd stick with the choice of the masses.)





In Looking Through Glass, Mukul Kesavan exhibited the classic cunning of the Indian intellectual. Faced with the question of naming a national dish, his narrator ducks and suggests instead a tricolour banquet, with delicacies drawn from various regions across the country.



It’s a clever and diplomatic solution, given the alternative. Scotland’s national dish, haggis, pays obeisance to that country’s sheep-rearing past, by stuffing sheep’s intestines with oatmeal, mixed meat and blood. (Scotland’s unofficial dish is technically vegetarian, but is considered culinary barbarity—Mars bars, coated in batter and deep-fried.)



Foie gras is for political and other reasons not officially part of France’s heritage, but in 2005, the country announced that goose livers, however unpalatable to the animal rights brigade, were to be considered part of its proud culinary heritage—by law. And several countries across the Middle East proudly claim credit for being the first to serve sheep’s eyeballs to (suffering) visitors. (They’re mentioned in passing in the Arabian Nights.)



If we were to follow suit, we might find ourselves ransacking the Nimat-namah and other medieval cookbooks for peacock recipes, economically combining the demand for a national dish with the presence of a national bird. There’s an ancient Rajput recipe for goat stuffed with peacock, while the ingredients for a banquet in Jahangir’s time lists the quantity of gold leaf required to coat a hundred roasted peacocks, along with helpful suggestions on how to place the feathers back on the cooked bird for maximum presentation points.



But tricolour peacock pate or biryani is destined never to grace our August 15 tables. In one sense, it fulfils all the requirements of a national dish: it’s an equal-opportunity shocker, guaranteed to offend vegetarians of all religious persuasions, environmentalists and bleeding heart liberals. Given the fragility of these sentiments, a wise writer of this sort of article would hastily remove it from her hypothetical menu, before the guardians of India’s cultural traditions start rumbling ominously.



Why do we need a national dish in the first place? It’s a good question. Given that this is a country where a tiny shift in dialect can be enough to split a state, and where arguments continue over whether clubs in the 21st century shouldn’t wake up to the fact that the British have left the building and allow its members to sport dhotis, the debate over what would be the perfect national dish is bound to be fraught. And in India, given the number of contenders from biryani-pulao to tandoori chicken to bhelpuri to dosas and parathas—and the infinite variety of regional variations—we could spark off the desi version of the Boston Tea Party: the Indian Chai and Curry Riots.



Even Wikipaedia, that unfailing source of dubious information and debatable facts, sensibly shies away from naming India’s national dish in its otherwise long list of what’s on the world’s tables—though it does, tentatively, offer chai/ lassi as our national drink. (Thereby offending, and uniting, kapi drinkers across the country, whether they take their brew French-press style or in time-honoured filter fashion.)



This should be simple enough. Given that biryani, pulao and khichdi are part of the Indian palate, and that a rough three-fifths of the world’s nations have some kind of rice dish as their national favourite, surely we can anoint some combination of rice-and-veggies or rice-and-meat? Not so. Aside from the fact that wheat-eating regions will have their sentiments damaged, there’s the tricky question of which recipe you choose. The classic, plain vanilla dal-and-rice khichdi has over 60 variations. Choosing a Lucknawi biryani over the Hyderabadi kacchi biryani over say, a classic coastal seer fish biryani is beyond my capabilities—and we haven’t even got to the pulaos yet.



The same issues crop up with almost every dish you might offer. Bhelpuri is present in most regions of the country, as is its predecessor, the humble dalmoth mixture—but Bombay claims the bhel, which makes it far too urban a dish, and it is almost absent from the further reaches of North India. The ubiquitous bread omelette seems, at first glance, to be a unifier—it’s the hostel food of necessity across the country—but it contains eggs, alienating most of sattvik and pavitra India, and is, to the best of my knowledge, unsanctified by tradition and unmentioned in the Vedas.



The samosa seems promising—but then we would have to acknowledge the possibility that it’s actually the sambusak, brought into India by marauding traders who borrowed this from their travels along the spice route. Even the khichdi is tainted by the British insistence on adding flaked fish and hard-boiled eggs to a much drier rice-dal blend, and renaming it kedgeree. It’s hard to escape the alien taint, whichever way you look.



History revisionists, and apologists for the tendency of heartland Bharat to ignore the North-East, might urge that we adopt either the momo or chowmein, both of which have travelled well around the country, and been forgiving of adaptation. Chowmein, in particular, should please the post-liberalisation generation. Instant noodles were for a brief while in the 1980s the most identifiable, and affordable, signal of a new modernity, and feminists might argue that Maggi did more to free women from the drudgery of domestic work than a thousand scholarly rants. But chowmein isn’t as ubiquitous across India as, say, the equally alien import of the pizza is in America: it fails the Railway Station test, which requires that any national dish be by and large available at most of the stations of the cross from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.



Given the complexities of the problem, why can’t we do without a national dish? The answer, in one word: curry. As generations of Indian food historians from the venerable K T Achaya onwards have pointed out, there is technically no such dish as curry. There’s a curry leaf; there are different kinds of curry powders and masalas, though these must not be confused with the post-Raj abomination known as Madras Curry Powder; and you might admit at a pinch that to curry a dish is to use a combination of specific cooking techniques.



The problem is that given our reluctance to anoint a national dish, we’re stuck with a non-existent version—the phantom Indian curry. In the popular foreign imagination, a dish of curry is pretty much the way the ambassador to Jahangir’s court, Thomas Roe, described it: a mess of spices in an inexplicable gravy. Roe redeemed himself by noting the plethora of sauces that went into the makings of different kinds of curry, but to the world at large, “curry” conveys the sense of a kind of spicy, mouth-burning hodge-podge.



The UK adds insult to injury by dubbing any Indian meat dish with a fiery, coconut-infused gravy a “vindaloo”, causing the ghosts of Portuguese seafarers past to turn in their graves. And a recent survey in the UK revealed that chicken tikka masala rivals fish n’ chips in popularity as the national dish. This might seem like the revenge of the empire, but consider this a moment: the CTM was invented by a cook in a Bangladeshi restaurant and its main ingredients include Campbell’s tomato soup. To settle for curry, conjuring up in most minds this bastardised concoction, would be to insult India’s centuries-old culinary tradition most grievously.



That leaves an insidious staple, as popular as the bread-omelette, more ubiquitous than the chowmein, found in pre-Mughal if not quite Harappan India. The dosa has crept into our lives in a quiet revolution, a stealthy and entirely bloodless coup. It can be found in dhabas in the Himalayas, stuffed with exotic ingredients in five-star restaurants—no one has yet invented the black truffle dosa, but some of us bet that this is only a matter of time. It can be stuffed with paneer, or with chicken and keema fillings for the unregenerate carnivore, but it’s the masala dosa that flies its flag across India.



And best of all, it is guaranteed to offend everyone equally north and south of the Vindhyas; the true Chettinad or Syrian Christian purist finds the masala dosa an abomination, and the North Indian culinary enthusiast is horrified at the pan-national appeal of this South Indian invention. You can even, experimenting with spinach and carrot fillings, create a suitably tricolour masala dosa, while retaining the potato stuffing that is the trademark of the true Udipi stalwart. We can continue to argue over the rest of the menu for a genuinely nationalist Indian banquet, but for the moment, the dosa gets my vote.

Speaking Volumes: Blyton Rocks

(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)

The BBC thought she was a “mediocre…boring” writer; librarians at various times across the world have called her books sexist and racist; and over in the US, her name evokes polite puzzlement. But Enid Blyton is the only dead writer to make it to a list of bestselling authors of the last decade, joining modern-day stalwarts like Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling. And her popularity makes no sense whatsoever.



The world that Blyton described belonged to the realm of fantasy even in her day. There were few boarding schools as pleasantly idyllic as Mallory Towers; even in a much safer time, responsible parents didn’t allow their children the kind of freedom the Famous Five have as they explore islands and run off with the circus; and the England she describes is as mythical as the Faraway Tree or Toyland.



In a brilliant article for The National, writer Amy Rosenberg discovers and explores the fascination that Blyton continues to hold over her fellow writers, from Siddhartha Deb to Pankaj Mishra and Rukun Advani. And every British colony has its own reasons for the Blyton fascination—her easy-to-understand vocabulary, the pull of the exotic (muffins, midnight feasts, caravans), the insidious pleasures of being children in a world where adults are only peripheral.



In India, Blyton formed part of a strange Holy Trinity. Kay Webb’s marvellous Puffins came into the country long after the influx of books from Soviet Russia. So while there were some of us in a particular generation who graduated from Young Pioneer stories to the Wombles and the Borrowers, this was not a universal reading experience for the English-speaking generation of a certain era. The classic children’s authors of the US are available now, so my nephew reads Maurice Sendak, E B White and Frank L Baum—but again, these were precious commodities in Nehru’s India.



For Indians now in their mid-thirties-early fifties, the three authors who shaped our childhood reading more than any others were P G Wodehouse, Frank Richards and Enid Blyton. Richards’ Billy Bunter books were a marvellous example of how easy it is for children—and their parents—to overlook the politically incorrect in favour of excellent entertainment: few of us, reading his boarding-school classics, remarked on the exoticism of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, whose accent was a constant source of comment and hilarity for Bunter and co. But then, few of us remarked on the stridently Communist propaganda of the Soviet classics; my impression is that as children, we skipped the politics and stuck with the colour.



Wodehouse still survives as a peculiarly Indian passion; but his universal popularity in the last two decades has been on the wane. (We may be the last generation to keep the Blandings flag flying, or to speak fondly of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets.) A small nostalgic segment of readers in the UK keeps his world of crumbling estates, chorus girls with hearts of gold and daft young men attended by perfect butlers alive, but he is much more celebrated in this quarter of former Empire than anywhere else in the world.



Blyton, for all her prosy moralising and blatant class-consciousness, is still read, loved and celebrated everywhere except for the US, where her books lost their moorings. This might have been because the US adheres with such fierceness to the principle of a classless society, or because much of Blyton’s appeal is too English, and too steeped in nostalgia, for the Americans.



Reading her books as an adult is a discomfiting experience. Blyton was far more intolerant of the lower classes—policemen, gypsies, domestic servants—than an E Nesbit or an Arthur Ransome, and her children protagonists share much of her smugness. The Toyland books have been dissected for the bizarre relationship between a crusty old bachelor—Big Ears—and an impressionable young protégé—Noddy, not to mention the strongly racist reaction to Gollywog. And the elves and goblins of The Faraway Tree are almost sickly-sweet, compared to the malevolent orcs and balrogs of Tolkein or the seductively bloodthirsty vampires of the Twilight series.



And perhaps that is part of Blyton’s continued appeal. Where else in children’s literature today, where issues from drug use to homelessness to abusive parents or date rape are part of the fabric of teen novels, would you find such an idyllic world? Blyton’s world contained fewer Wild Woods than a Wind in the Willows, but were much more geared to the older child’s experiences than the equally sunny world of Winnie the Pooh.


It was a world of ginger beer and potted meat sandwiches, a world where your toys could come alive with no sinister aftermath, where smugglers and spies were relatively benign creatures who wouldn’t dream of bombing the London Metro or the Taj in Bombay, and where the Faraway Tree could transport us, in a blink, to an even more magical place than boarding school.



Blyton’s world never existed. But perhaps the continued appeal of her books, down the generations, is an index of how much we wish it had—in these times almost more than in her age.

Obituaries: Paul Samuelson, Dilip Chitre

(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)

Paul Samuelson had a Nobel Prize in economics to his credit, a large and faithful following who venerated him for his resurrection of Keynesian economic theory, the ear of several US Presidents and a tradition of fruitful, running battles with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. But when he died this Sunday, at the age of 94, the legacy he left behind him was to be found in college classrooms across the world.



The fascinating thing about Economics, his bestselling textbook, is not that it was so comprehensive and influential when it first came out in 1948. Samuelson was very much a product of the Great Depression in the US, and credited his development to being in the right place at the right time—ie, Harvard of the early 1930s, where he learned his trade under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and others.



In his Nobel acceptance speech, Samuelson spoke of that era: “Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.”



The other great truth of his life was the importance of getting paid for work that he would happily have done for free. When McGraw Hill approached Samuelson to write a basic textbook on economics, he took on the task with trademark seriousness. When the classic 1948 textbook celebrated its 50th anniversary—Samuelson’s Economics, in its updated edition, is now just over 60 years old—he set down his intention as a young, upcoming academic in the 1940s:



“My great predecessors—John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher—were writing for their times. I was writing for the last half of the 20th century—an epoch that surpassed even my youthful optimism.”



Over the decades, Samuelson’s brand of economics has been revised, attacked and reassessed. But his textbook, augmented by William Nordhaus’ corrections and updates, has endured, in a field where shifts in theory can be violent, merciless and leave innumerable “books of the decade” on the remainder pile.



Stanley Fisher, who read the textbook as a student in Zimbabwe, got its enduring appeal better than most: “To read Economics is to have a glimpse of the extraordinary mind that created it: undogmatic, generous to predecessors and contemporaries, encyclopaedic, of course brilliant, and, most remarkably, sceptical, not inclined to take itself too seriously.” Literary classics often survive a century, but if Samuelson’s Economics does, it will be among the few textbooks aside from Gray’s Anatomy to achieve that distinction.



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In memoriam: This week also marked the passing of the poet, translator and critic Dilip Chitre, who died at the age of 71 in Pune, of cancer. For many of us, Dilip Chitre often represented three poets in one. There was his own, iconoclastic work—a massive corpus where the Ekun Kavita (collected poems) runs to three thick volumes.



Chitre’s comfortable bilingualism and his famous intolerance for shibboleths guaranteed that he would not be lionised by the Marathi critics of his day, though it was a different story when it came to his work in English.



For readers outside Marathi, Chitre opened up and made new the work of two distinctly different voices—Sant Tukaram, the 17th century Marathi poet-saint known for his sinewy, uncompromising mysticism, and Namdeo Dhasal, once seen as the firebrand of contemporary Dalit literature. Chitre was drawn to the power and strength in both these writers. He was influenced by another great poet, Arun Kolatkar, when it came to translating Tukaram: he approached the poems “like a dance”, paying attention to the rhythm and the back-and-forth of the structure, where each poem begins with the words “Says Tuka”.



His Dhasal translations are towering, and are deliberately unlyrical: Gaandu Bagicha, for instance, is translated with no euphemisms for Dhasal’s out-to-shock language of the streets and the slums, and the Golpitha poems retain Dhasal’s searing images. (Dhasal grew up in Golpitha, and his memories of his father’s butcher’s shop form some of the most powerful images in that early series of work.)



Chitre was unimpressed by the rabid demands of those who wanted cultural censorship on the grounds that specific books or works of art offend religious sentiments. In a classic email to India Uncut, he laid down the true meaning of the word secular: “In India, it is often misinterpreted as ‘equally sensitive to all religions’ and not ‘equally neutral to all religions’… Whether God or democracy is our priority as citizens of this nation cannot be left to God to decide. He is not a registered voter in India.” Many of us hope that even after his death, Chitre will have the final word on this subject.