(This column first published in Business Standard: Speaking Volumes, March 29, 2005)
This was a bread-and-butter piece, but writing it was...weird. I've had malaria for the last two weeks, and spent the week before I wrote this in bed with Andersen's fairy tales. Let's just say that delirium isn't helped along much when you're dreaming of giant dogs with eyes the size of teacups and mermaids with bloody footprints. Had fever when I sat down to write this; remember flexing my fingers over the keyboard, remember getting back into bed and going off to sleep, and remember absolutely nothing in between. If you hate the column, don't blame me, go shoot a mosquito.
In the two centuries that have passed since Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, his fairy tales have endured the demands of time. They have been prettified and Disneyfied, like The Little Mermaid , leached of some of their darkness and terror in order to be made more palatable to an audience accustomed only to cartoon evil.
They’ve been used as corporate fables or re-interpreted by the likes of Clarissa Pinkola Estes as primers for women who run with the wolves. Some stories have entered the English language, though they were originally written in Danish: Jassi still undergoes a transformation from ugly duckling to swan, emperors are even now revealed to have no clothes. Some have lost ground over the years, like The Tale of Little Tuk ; some, like The Snow Queen , peaked in popularity over a century ago and are now less told. Some, like Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling , have become so much part of the corpus of fairy tales that it comes as a slight shock to think that the story was invented, rather than part of the general body of folk tales.
In the menagerie of creatures Hans Christian Andersen brought to life, from the dogs with eyes like saucers and the brave little tin soldier with one leg or the strange undersea witch, he was perhaps the oddest inmate. From his portraits it appears that he cut a strange figure—gawky and awkward at over six feet, “with a face as pale as blessed Werther,/ And a nose as big as a cannon,/ And eyes as tiny as small green peas”, as he wrote of himself mockingly in a poem. As a boy, he had survived great hardship and much mockery. He was born in Odense and his early years were marked by poverty: his father was a shoemaker with pretensions to a better lineage, who died when Hans was barely eleven, and his mother was an uneducated seamstress.
But they passed on to him a love of stories. He heard folk tales and women’s stories from the poor women of Odense at the workhouse; his father may have had no more than a one-room house, but he filled it with books and read to his son from Shakespeare’s and Holberg’s plays and from A Thousand and One Nights. Andersen’s mother may have been illiterate, but she, too, told him all the stories she remembered—chiefly tales from myth and legend and more homely local folk stories. After his father’s death, he was allowed to stay at home for a while; he became known for his puppet theatre, his remarkable memory and his love of telling stories.
The full extent of his imagination would only become clear in later years: one scholar estimates that out of the hundreds of fairy tales he wrote, only 12 were based on extant folk tales—everything else came out of Andersen’s mind. Unlike earlier exponents of fairy tales, such as the Brother Grimm or Charles Perrault or even the writers of the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, Andersen’s technique didn’t depend on rewriting or updating old material. Unlike some later writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Andersen’s fairy tales have lasted beyond his time and have passed into popular mythology: the ugly duckling belongs on the same shelf as the wolf in Red Riding Hood in a way that Wilde’s selfish giant doesn’t.
But the fairy tales that made Andersen famous and that are being celebrated this week, in commemoration of his birth anniversary, were not what he had intended to build his life upon. He wrote according to one calculation over half-a-million words during his lifetime, adding to a history of peculiar and persistent failures. He meant to be an actor but his looks and his shyness went against him. He fell in love, with men on several occasions, women on at least three, but this was never reciprocated. He never married, and by his own account, nor did he ever have more than a Platonic relationship with any of his objects of adoration. He earned early success as a travel writer, with a fantastical account of a journey, and his first novel was praised as much as it was attacked. It seemed, in the period between the 1820s and the 1840s, that Hans Christian Andersen would make a career as an acclaimed literary writer after all.
But then the setbacks began to accumulate. The career he had dreamed of in the theatre failed to materialise; his plays were not successes. The fairy tales that had received a lukewarm welcome when they had first been published began to be in demand through the 1840s; three decades later, Andersen was still, if increasingly reluctantly, adding to the corpus. He did not take them seriously himself, and it must have been uncomfortable to realise that this was what readers now wanted from him, not the novels that he was anyway struggling to write. He had written many of them for children; as with many other authors, the best side of his character showed with them.
He drew and illustrated his stories for children; he created cunningly constructed papercuts that unfolded to reveal hidden mysteries; he even made entire books of drawings and papercuts for some of his younger friends. With children, he could let go of the insecurities and unpleasantnesses of character that led Charles Dickens, who met him, to cariacature him as Uriah Heep. He could share with them the secret of his life: “He beheld his own image, and it was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, gray bird, ugly and offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.”
This year will be full of tributes to Hans Christian Andersen, from Tina Turner concerts to symphonic performances of fairy tales, readings and the rest. I’m reminded, however, of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, that has a bronze version of the author seated on a park bench. Children are encouraged to clamber all over it; the duck at his feet and the open book on his lap are supposed to be favourite perches for the young. The best tribute to Andersen this year might be to go back to his stories and rediscover them as he told them, from the sorrowful tale of the Nightingale who sang her heart out to the Little Match Girl lighting inadequate fires, to the Ugly Duckling who found his happiness eventually.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
The Business Standard column: summer reading (non-fiction)
(First published in Business Standard on March 21, 2005)
This was part two of the summer reading special: non-fiction, this time.
It’s the buzz you hear from foreign publishers and editors eyeing the great Indian pool of talent: non-fiction in India is about to take off. The view from inside the well is interesting. Anthologies, fiction and non-fiction, have proliferated in the last few years; HarperCollins released an anthology of new writing last month, and Penguin’s collection, First Proof is out next fortnight.
Reissues are beginning to make their mark, though there’s only space to note one or two, such as EHA’s nature columns, collected as Zoo in the Garden by Permanent Black and Chitrita Banerji’s classic memoir Life and Food in Bengal (Penguin). And there’s some truly funky original writing out there from Indian writers, along with some good stuff from the international market. Here’s the summer reading non-fiction round-up—indicative rather than exhaustive.
Pundits from Pakistan: Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador India): Here’s a guy who can tell you why Sami is a hot favourite with eunuchs in Multan, analyse the peculiar blend of emotions that accompanies India and Pakistan onto the cricket field and sign off with a wry look at the border. Read it for the cricket, or for the gossip, or as a travelogue, or for the historical analysis, or just for Bhattacharya’s particular brand of wit, but read it.
Open Secrets: M K Dhar (Manas Publications) The problem with the memoirs of retired civil servants is that they’re usually less revealing than a nun’s habit. Dhar’s account of his innings as one of the keystones of Indian intelligence is explosively frank, whether he’s writing about Ayodhya or Kargil. He’s sparked off a debate over whether civil servants have a duty to be more reticent, with much muttering over the Official Secrets Act; but the issues he’s raised are troubling and compelling. If this isn’t already on your bookshelf, you’re missing out.
Fearless Nadia: Dorothee Wenner (Penguin) The inside story of the lady with the whip hand, from someone who knew Nadia’s family well. This is where you discover how a solidly built foreigner who couldn’t speak Hindi without turning “kabu” into “Kabul” became the Pauline of India. There are vamps and sirens and item girls galore, but there’s only ever been one Hunterwali, fighting villains by the dozen and leaping off roofs with casual abandon while wearing some of the most bizarre costumes ever designed.
Re-Visioning the Past
Malavika Karlekar (OUP)
Old photographs rescued from the attics and trunks of Bengali bhadralok homes led Dr Karlekar into this academic but very accessible study of the hidden stories lurking inside those early daguerrotypes and lithographs. Children in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, married couples posed against a fake Victorian backdrop, clashes between Indian inventors and a British establishment unwilling to give them credit, carte-de-visits all tell a story of imperialism and the changing face of Bengali society.
Collapse: Jared Diamond (Viking)
There’s always a Big Idea book of the moment; with a writer like Jared Diamond, the moment tends to last a long time. You could see Collapse as the next part of the argument he started in Guns, Germs and Steel . He starts with a deceptively simple question: what makes societies collapse? The search for the answer takes him to Easter Island, to Greenland and to Rwanda among other places. Diamond has provocative arguments, as usual, backed up with awesome knowledge, but some sceptics contend that the human race isn’t going to head the earnest lemming way quite as soon as Diamond suggests.
Blink: Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
And there’s always a Big Idea book of the moment that is strictly of the moment. Gladwell’s thesis is that we make snap decisions far more often than we realise, that most humans process most of the useful information they need in the blink of an eye, and that intuition and “thin slicing” count for more than we think. Blink is a good, fast read and some of Gladwell’s analysis of relationships and how humans make decisions is fascinating. But the real triumph of Blink lies in the manner in which a relatively thin thesis can be stretched far enough for thousands of readers to intuitively thin-slice their way into buying the book.
India in Mind (edited by Pankaj Mishra)
Picador India
This should be read in tandem with Away , Amitava Kumar’s anthology on India seen through the eyes of travellers, expatriates, exiles and well, inmates. Mishra has attempted to cover a century of writers, chiefly from Europe or America, who traveled to India. In his words, “By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus…” From Ackerley to Allen Ginsberg, Forster to Kipling, Jan Morris and Ved Mehta, Paul Theroux and Paul Bowles, there’s quite a collection here.
The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (John Murray, distributed by IBH)
This is the second part of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s travels in the company of a 14th century Arab wanderer. With Ibn Battutah as his guide, if somewhat disconcertingly abbreviated to a more casual ‘IB’, Mackintosh-Smith comes to India. Like other pilgrims, he finds the cartoon India, the cliché India…but also the India of Ibn Battutah’s manuscripts. And he’s good at making you journey inside a book.
The End of Poverty
Jeffrey D Sachs (Penguin Press)
From the Amazon page for Sachs, it appears that half the readers who bought this book also bought books by Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; the other half bought Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalisation and Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works . That’s what I call a balanced audience. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, weaves in personal experience into this passionate appeal for an end to poverty and a guide to how this might be achieved. He also got Bono to write the foreword—so what you’re getting is Sachs, no drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Two out of three is just fine.
Human Cargo
Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt)
Moorehead’s travels into some of the saddest stories ever told made one thing clear to this journalist and human rights worker: the 21st century will see the largest flows of refugees, displaced persons and forced migrants ever. She analyses the UN’s hampered and often compromised role and the Fortress mentality of many Western countries with passion and clarity. But she’s at her best telling the stories of those who’ve fled war, violence, poverty and other human tragedies and attempting to give back some of the dignity their journeys have taken away from them.
This was part two of the summer reading special: non-fiction, this time.
It’s the buzz you hear from foreign publishers and editors eyeing the great Indian pool of talent: non-fiction in India is about to take off. The view from inside the well is interesting. Anthologies, fiction and non-fiction, have proliferated in the last few years; HarperCollins released an anthology of new writing last month, and Penguin’s collection, First Proof is out next fortnight.
Reissues are beginning to make their mark, though there’s only space to note one or two, such as EHA’s nature columns, collected as Zoo in the Garden by Permanent Black and Chitrita Banerji’s classic memoir Life and Food in Bengal (Penguin). And there’s some truly funky original writing out there from Indian writers, along with some good stuff from the international market. Here’s the summer reading non-fiction round-up—indicative rather than exhaustive.
Pundits from Pakistan: Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador India): Here’s a guy who can tell you why Sami is a hot favourite with eunuchs in Multan, analyse the peculiar blend of emotions that accompanies India and Pakistan onto the cricket field and sign off with a wry look at the border. Read it for the cricket, or for the gossip, or as a travelogue, or for the historical analysis, or just for Bhattacharya’s particular brand of wit, but read it.
Open Secrets: M K Dhar (Manas Publications) The problem with the memoirs of retired civil servants is that they’re usually less revealing than a nun’s habit. Dhar’s account of his innings as one of the keystones of Indian intelligence is explosively frank, whether he’s writing about Ayodhya or Kargil. He’s sparked off a debate over whether civil servants have a duty to be more reticent, with much muttering over the Official Secrets Act; but the issues he’s raised are troubling and compelling. If this isn’t already on your bookshelf, you’re missing out.
Fearless Nadia: Dorothee Wenner (Penguin) The inside story of the lady with the whip hand, from someone who knew Nadia’s family well. This is where you discover how a solidly built foreigner who couldn’t speak Hindi without turning “kabu” into “Kabul” became the Pauline of India. There are vamps and sirens and item girls galore, but there’s only ever been one Hunterwali, fighting villains by the dozen and leaping off roofs with casual abandon while wearing some of the most bizarre costumes ever designed.
Re-Visioning the Past
Malavika Karlekar (OUP)
Old photographs rescued from the attics and trunks of Bengali bhadralok homes led Dr Karlekar into this academic but very accessible study of the hidden stories lurking inside those early daguerrotypes and lithographs. Children in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, married couples posed against a fake Victorian backdrop, clashes between Indian inventors and a British establishment unwilling to give them credit, carte-de-visits all tell a story of imperialism and the changing face of Bengali society.
Collapse: Jared Diamond (Viking)
There’s always a Big Idea book of the moment; with a writer like Jared Diamond, the moment tends to last a long time. You could see Collapse as the next part of the argument he started in Guns, Germs and Steel . He starts with a deceptively simple question: what makes societies collapse? The search for the answer takes him to Easter Island, to Greenland and to Rwanda among other places. Diamond has provocative arguments, as usual, backed up with awesome knowledge, but some sceptics contend that the human race isn’t going to head the earnest lemming way quite as soon as Diamond suggests.
Blink: Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
And there’s always a Big Idea book of the moment that is strictly of the moment. Gladwell’s thesis is that we make snap decisions far more often than we realise, that most humans process most of the useful information they need in the blink of an eye, and that intuition and “thin slicing” count for more than we think. Blink is a good, fast read and some of Gladwell’s analysis of relationships and how humans make decisions is fascinating. But the real triumph of Blink lies in the manner in which a relatively thin thesis can be stretched far enough for thousands of readers to intuitively thin-slice their way into buying the book.
India in Mind (edited by Pankaj Mishra)
Picador India
This should be read in tandem with Away , Amitava Kumar’s anthology on India seen through the eyes of travellers, expatriates, exiles and well, inmates. Mishra has attempted to cover a century of writers, chiefly from Europe or America, who traveled to India. In his words, “By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus…” From Ackerley to Allen Ginsberg, Forster to Kipling, Jan Morris and Ved Mehta, Paul Theroux and Paul Bowles, there’s quite a collection here.
The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (John Murray, distributed by IBH)
This is the second part of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s travels in the company of a 14th century Arab wanderer. With Ibn Battutah as his guide, if somewhat disconcertingly abbreviated to a more casual ‘IB’, Mackintosh-Smith comes to India. Like other pilgrims, he finds the cartoon India, the cliché India…but also the India of Ibn Battutah’s manuscripts. And he’s good at making you journey inside a book.
The End of Poverty
Jeffrey D Sachs (Penguin Press)
From the Amazon page for Sachs, it appears that half the readers who bought this book also bought books by Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; the other half bought Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalisation and Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works . That’s what I call a balanced audience. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, weaves in personal experience into this passionate appeal for an end to poverty and a guide to how this might be achieved. He also got Bono to write the foreword—so what you’re getting is Sachs, no drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Two out of three is just fine.
Human Cargo
Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt)
Moorehead’s travels into some of the saddest stories ever told made one thing clear to this journalist and human rights worker: the 21st century will see the largest flows of refugees, displaced persons and forced migrants ever. She analyses the UN’s hampered and often compromised role and the Fortress mentality of many Western countries with passion and clarity. But she’s at her best telling the stories of those who’ve fled war, violence, poverty and other human tragedies and attempting to give back some of the dignity their journeys have taken away from them.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
The Business Standard column: summer reading
I normally shy away from summer reading round-ups, but this one...was kind of fun to put together. It came from realising that there were so many decent books on my desk that I was reading them too fast to write about them, which is a goooood feeling if you're a hack reviewer.
Here's the link and two brief excerpts:
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafon (W&N) A long-forgotten book by a long-forgotten author is rediscovered by a young boy growing into manhood in Barcelona; but someone wants the author’s name, reputation and books to disappear into oblivion. Zafon came up with a brilliant idea in the form of the “cemetery of forgotten books”, a place where every book has at least a chance of discovering a reader. As to the rest, he introduces skullduggery, romance, and twists in the tale every few pages to form a baroque, bizarre romance. The author is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles, and drew some complaints from residents of Barcelona who griped that it’s always raining or cold in the city as depicted in his book. Still, a great read, especially for bibliophiles.
The Alchemy of Desire: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins) Rarely has a simple blurb caused so much heartburning in Delhi’s literary circles. But then this one — “At last —a new and brilliantly original novel from India”— was handed out by V S Naipaul, known to bury debut authors rather than praise them. Tejpal accompanied him to Stockholm when the Great Curmudgeon won his Nobel, though, and the friendship between them is of long standing. The book’s about a young couple’s odyssey into desire and marriage, with the point of fading lust marked by the narrator’s growing obsession with a ghost from the past, in a very literal sense. I normally resist coupling book titles, but not very hard. Think Love Story meets Plain Tales from the Hills.
Here's the link and two brief excerpts:
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafon (W&N) A long-forgotten book by a long-forgotten author is rediscovered by a young boy growing into manhood in Barcelona; but someone wants the author’s name, reputation and books to disappear into oblivion. Zafon came up with a brilliant idea in the form of the “cemetery of forgotten books”, a place where every book has at least a chance of discovering a reader. As to the rest, he introduces skullduggery, romance, and twists in the tale every few pages to form a baroque, bizarre romance. The author is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles, and drew some complaints from residents of Barcelona who griped that it’s always raining or cold in the city as depicted in his book. Still, a great read, especially for bibliophiles.
The Alchemy of Desire: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins) Rarely has a simple blurb caused so much heartburning in Delhi’s literary circles. But then this one — “At last —a new and brilliantly original novel from India”— was handed out by V S Naipaul, known to bury debut authors rather than praise them. Tejpal accompanied him to Stockholm when the Great Curmudgeon won his Nobel, though, and the friendship between them is of long standing. The book’s about a young couple’s odyssey into desire and marriage, with the point of fading lust marked by the narrator’s growing obsession with a ghost from the past, in a very literal sense. I normally resist coupling book titles, but not very hard. Think Love Story meets Plain Tales from the Hills.
Listing to one side
I've been lazy, lazy, lazy about posting; so here's some stuff.
(This was first published in the Business Standard on March 8, 2005)
"Why are people in love with lists?
Because they’re fun—so long as they aren’t done to excess. And because, if done well, they make you back up a bit and think. Jerry [Pinto's list of the top 25 works of Indian fiction], for instance, includes the big guns—but he also includes writers who are rediscovered by each generation with fresh surprise (G V Desani, Kiran Nagarkar), and writers who are almost forgotten (Aubrey Menen).
Part of the fun we had this weekend involved rummaging the battered steel trunks of memory for our own personal lists of the great, the glorious, the unjustly remaindered.
Part of it involved re-examining books: would you really choose Mistry’s short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, over the better-known Such a Long Journey? Or how would you weigh the respective merits of R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days and The Guide versus Swami and Friends?
When you’re done with party games, you might want to settle down with the books themselves. Several of the books on Pinto’s lists are ones that I acknowledge, automatically, as classics—but that I haven’t revisited since my college days.
So I went back to Kanthapura and discovered in that tale of a village in upheaval contemporary echoes, as though R Raja Rao was also speaking to Bama or P Sainath or M Mukundan from across the years.
Some books belong to the category of works you should re-read every decade, to see what has aged faster, the books or yourself: Midnight’s Children, H Hatterr, The Shadow Lines.
And some books, unvisited for years, have remained as fresh as when they were written, like Swami and Friends and The Golden Gate. Most of all, what a good list does is to return you to the books and to reading. And if you disagree with Jerry’s 25, no problem (he likes a good argument): get out paper and pen, and make your own list."
Jerry's List of the Indian Top 25
1. Vikram Chandra: Love and Longing in Bombay
2. Aubrey Menen: The Fig Tree
3. Rohinton Mistry: Tales from Firozhsha Baug
4. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Interpreter of Maladies
5. Hari Kunzru: The Impressionist
6. G V Desani: All About H Hatterr
7. Vikram Seth: The Golden Gate
8. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
9. R K Narayan: Swami and Friends
10. Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie
11. Kamala Markandaya: Nectar in a Sieve
12. Anita Desai: Baumgartner’s Bombay
13. Amitav Ghosh: The Shadow Lines
14. I Allan Sealy: The Trotternama
15. Shashi Tharoor: The Great Indian Novel
16. Githa Hariharan: When Dreams Travel
17. Kiran Nagarkar: Raavan & Eddie
18. Shashi Deshpande: That Long Silence
19. Arundhathi Roy: The God of Small Things
20. Raja Rao: Kanthapura
21. Khushwant Singh: Delhi
22. Nisha Da Cunha: Old Cypress
23. Ruskin Bond: The Room on the Roof
24. Gita Mehta: The River Sutra
25. Indi Rana: The Devil in the Dustbin
(This was first published in the Business Standard on March 8, 2005)
"Why are people in love with lists?
Because they’re fun—so long as they aren’t done to excess. And because, if done well, they make you back up a bit and think. Jerry [Pinto's list of the top 25 works of Indian fiction], for instance, includes the big guns—but he also includes writers who are rediscovered by each generation with fresh surprise (G V Desani, Kiran Nagarkar), and writers who are almost forgotten (Aubrey Menen).
Part of the fun we had this weekend involved rummaging the battered steel trunks of memory for our own personal lists of the great, the glorious, the unjustly remaindered.
Part of it involved re-examining books: would you really choose Mistry’s short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, over the better-known Such a Long Journey? Or how would you weigh the respective merits of R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days and The Guide versus Swami and Friends?
When you’re done with party games, you might want to settle down with the books themselves. Several of the books on Pinto’s lists are ones that I acknowledge, automatically, as classics—but that I haven’t revisited since my college days.
So I went back to Kanthapura and discovered in that tale of a village in upheaval contemporary echoes, as though R Raja Rao was also speaking to Bama or P Sainath or M Mukundan from across the years.
Some books belong to the category of works you should re-read every decade, to see what has aged faster, the books or yourself: Midnight’s Children, H Hatterr, The Shadow Lines.
And some books, unvisited for years, have remained as fresh as when they were written, like Swami and Friends and The Golden Gate. Most of all, what a good list does is to return you to the books and to reading. And if you disagree with Jerry’s 25, no problem (he likes a good argument): get out paper and pen, and make your own list."
Jerry's List of the Indian Top 25
1. Vikram Chandra: Love and Longing in Bombay
2. Aubrey Menen: The Fig Tree
3. Rohinton Mistry: Tales from Firozhsha Baug
4. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Interpreter of Maladies
5. Hari Kunzru: The Impressionist
6. G V Desani: All About H Hatterr
7. Vikram Seth: The Golden Gate
8. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
9. R K Narayan: Swami and Friends
10. Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie
11. Kamala Markandaya: Nectar in a Sieve
12. Anita Desai: Baumgartner’s Bombay
13. Amitav Ghosh: The Shadow Lines
14. I Allan Sealy: The Trotternama
15. Shashi Tharoor: The Great Indian Novel
16. Githa Hariharan: When Dreams Travel
17. Kiran Nagarkar: Raavan & Eddie
18. Shashi Deshpande: That Long Silence
19. Arundhathi Roy: The God of Small Things
20. Raja Rao: Kanthapura
21. Khushwant Singh: Delhi
22. Nisha Da Cunha: Old Cypress
23. Ruskin Bond: The Room on the Roof
24. Gita Mehta: The River Sutra
25. Indi Rana: The Devil in the Dustbin
Friday, March 04, 2005
Outlook Traveller: Loos connection
Stumbled across an old piece I did for Outlook Traveller back in 2001. Since I wrote this, have added to list these specimens:
1) the loo on board the train from Jammu to Kanyakumari, where the person who visited before you is always the one with the really upset stomach, and where cleanliness over a three day period is next to impossible. Also included Peeping Tom door with large gap where passing army jawans could stop for a quick (or slow) dekko while you attempted to use the one bright spot in the whole damn thing, ie the pink plastic showerhead that means you can bathe, if you don't mind putting one foot in a receptacle where no foot should go.
2) the one in the temple complex at Modhera where you have to borrow sword and slash through cobwebs in order to enter. Then you finish your business and stand up to discover that there is a) only half a roof b) which means the three chaps doing restoration work on the sculptures a level up have had their lunch hour greatly enlivened by you.
3) not forgetting the one in the DDA complex in Delhi where you queue up for ages and ages and finally ask the dour guard nearby whether the woman inside might need medical attention, and he says, oh, that's no woman, it's the office monkey's bathing hour.
Am I fixated on loos? I ask the husband. Yes, he says, through mouthful of food. Pay attention, I say. By fixated, I mean neurotically insistent on cleanliness. Yes, he says. Reason we have a happy marriage is we have separate loos. That’s not true, I say. We’ve shared a bathroom before. Yeah, he says, that was the year we almost got divorced.
So maybe I’m a little fussy, I tell a friend. A little fussy? he says. You keep your bathroom floors clean enough to eat off, except if anyone did you’d whip out the phenyl and start swabbing again. Oh go boil yer head, I say crossly. Slam phone down. Phone rings again. Travel agent, saying he’s booked holiday-in-the-hills. Joelikote? I say. Why not Bhimtal? Travel agent says, Joelikote has better, ah, facilities. Your sister said if I’m doing bookings for you, bathrooms had better be spotless. Bhimtal...his voice trails off. We go to Joelikote.
Only person who doesn’t give two hoots about insistence on clean loos is sadistic Outlook Traveller editor. Has five-star hotels begging him to send Ms N.S. Roy over just so that she can check out the new bidets that play ‘Up Where We Belong’ when you sit down. He sends her off to places like Sikkim and Ladakh instead. Scenic beauty unbeatable. Loos? Sikkim has Gurudongmar, Gurudongmar has army loo made out of leftover bulletin boards where if you raise your head slightly everyone inside the army quarters can see you. Forces one into ostrich thinking: if I can’t see them, they can’t see me. And its logical corollary: who cares if they do, I’ll never see them again. Ladakh has interesting phenomenon where Western-style loos overflow because there’s no drainage, and Indian-style loos are ringed with ice that has turned a shade of yellow-green for reasons we will carefully skirt.
Only collect, as E.M. Forster didn’t tell travellers. My family leaves the shrunken heads and Bohemian crystal to the tourists, and concentrates on who’s going to win the Most Fascinating Loo in the World award.
I picked up the trophy twice: once for a bathroom in Lucknow, once for a pissoir in Nepal. The Lucknow one graced the crocodile sanctuary in Kukrail, and was built by some back-to-nature architect. The floor was made of widely spaced wooden planks over wire mesh. One settled, heard a premature splash, and sighted a baby gharial snout poking up through the bars. Two more snapped cutely through the mesh. It was an improvement over the old Goa system of positioning loo over pig enclosure, thereby allowing for rustic charm and sanitary disposal system in one.
The Nepal pissoir would’ve made the most hardened slumdweller in Delhi shudder. It required you to climb atop the porcelain and thence onto a mountain of ordure that extended out of the bowl for a foot. I found a discreet corner of a field while courting couple made out in opposite discreet corner. They were quite friendly, breaking off to ask whether I stood (or sat) in need of a lota.
Past winners have included the loo on a Sunderbans launch, where if you lowered yourself incautiously, small fish nibbled at your nether regions; the olde English wooden thunderbox in a Kasauli hotel, where pulling the chain called down a celebratory shower on your head; and the one in Samarkand (last year’s winner) where my cousin found that the awful smell in the corner was a rotting sheep’s head (he took a picture, the little pervert). We agree that ladies’ loos tend to be grungier, on the whole. Men have an aiming problem (amazing how many use the ‘Look Ma, no hands’ method), but women have more paraphernalia to scatter around.
Me, I’ve perfected the art of bathroom Zen: you are not here, the things that squelch underfoot are not here, toilet paper is the only reality in a world of illusion. For my next trip, five-star hotels beckon: trust-in-us-just-in-us, they say, our loos are...scented, marbled, tiled, faucetted, spotlessly, squeaky clean. But there’s this drive I want to go on. Across the Himalayas again. To places where the loos, or the ammonia therein, will bring tears to my eyes. I shrug my shoulders, coin Zen aphorism: bad loo make good trip.
1) the loo on board the train from Jammu to Kanyakumari, where the person who visited before you is always the one with the really upset stomach, and where cleanliness over a three day period is next to impossible. Also included Peeping Tom door with large gap where passing army jawans could stop for a quick (or slow) dekko while you attempted to use the one bright spot in the whole damn thing, ie the pink plastic showerhead that means you can bathe, if you don't mind putting one foot in a receptacle where no foot should go.
2) the one in the temple complex at Modhera where you have to borrow sword and slash through cobwebs in order to enter. Then you finish your business and stand up to discover that there is a) only half a roof b) which means the three chaps doing restoration work on the sculptures a level up have had their lunch hour greatly enlivened by you.
3) not forgetting the one in the DDA complex in Delhi where you queue up for ages and ages and finally ask the dour guard nearby whether the woman inside might need medical attention, and he says, oh, that's no woman, it's the office monkey's bathing hour.
Am I fixated on loos? I ask the husband. Yes, he says, through mouthful of food. Pay attention, I say. By fixated, I mean neurotically insistent on cleanliness. Yes, he says. Reason we have a happy marriage is we have separate loos. That’s not true, I say. We’ve shared a bathroom before. Yeah, he says, that was the year we almost got divorced.
So maybe I’m a little fussy, I tell a friend. A little fussy? he says. You keep your bathroom floors clean enough to eat off, except if anyone did you’d whip out the phenyl and start swabbing again. Oh go boil yer head, I say crossly. Slam phone down. Phone rings again. Travel agent, saying he’s booked holiday-in-the-hills. Joelikote? I say. Why not Bhimtal? Travel agent says, Joelikote has better, ah, facilities. Your sister said if I’m doing bookings for you, bathrooms had better be spotless. Bhimtal...his voice trails off. We go to Joelikote.
Only person who doesn’t give two hoots about insistence on clean loos is sadistic Outlook Traveller editor. Has five-star hotels begging him to send Ms N.S. Roy over just so that she can check out the new bidets that play ‘Up Where We Belong’ when you sit down. He sends her off to places like Sikkim and Ladakh instead. Scenic beauty unbeatable. Loos? Sikkim has Gurudongmar, Gurudongmar has army loo made out of leftover bulletin boards where if you raise your head slightly everyone inside the army quarters can see you. Forces one into ostrich thinking: if I can’t see them, they can’t see me. And its logical corollary: who cares if they do, I’ll never see them again. Ladakh has interesting phenomenon where Western-style loos overflow because there’s no drainage, and Indian-style loos are ringed with ice that has turned a shade of yellow-green for reasons we will carefully skirt.
Only collect, as E.M. Forster didn’t tell travellers. My family leaves the shrunken heads and Bohemian crystal to the tourists, and concentrates on who’s going to win the Most Fascinating Loo in the World award.
I picked up the trophy twice: once for a bathroom in Lucknow, once for a pissoir in Nepal. The Lucknow one graced the crocodile sanctuary in Kukrail, and was built by some back-to-nature architect. The floor was made of widely spaced wooden planks over wire mesh. One settled, heard a premature splash, and sighted a baby gharial snout poking up through the bars. Two more snapped cutely through the mesh. It was an improvement over the old Goa system of positioning loo over pig enclosure, thereby allowing for rustic charm and sanitary disposal system in one.
The Nepal pissoir would’ve made the most hardened slumdweller in Delhi shudder. It required you to climb atop the porcelain and thence onto a mountain of ordure that extended out of the bowl for a foot. I found a discreet corner of a field while courting couple made out in opposite discreet corner. They were quite friendly, breaking off to ask whether I stood (or sat) in need of a lota.
Past winners have included the loo on a Sunderbans launch, where if you lowered yourself incautiously, small fish nibbled at your nether regions; the olde English wooden thunderbox in a Kasauli hotel, where pulling the chain called down a celebratory shower on your head; and the one in Samarkand (last year’s winner) where my cousin found that the awful smell in the corner was a rotting sheep’s head (he took a picture, the little pervert). We agree that ladies’ loos tend to be grungier, on the whole. Men have an aiming problem (amazing how many use the ‘Look Ma, no hands’ method), but women have more paraphernalia to scatter around.
Me, I’ve perfected the art of bathroom Zen: you are not here, the things that squelch underfoot are not here, toilet paper is the only reality in a world of illusion. For my next trip, five-star hotels beckon: trust-in-us-just-in-us, they say, our loos are...scented, marbled, tiled, faucetted, spotlessly, squeaky clean. But there’s this drive I want to go on. Across the Himalayas again. To places where the loos, or the ammonia therein, will bring tears to my eyes. I shrug my shoulders, coin Zen aphorism: bad loo make good trip.
Business Standard: Speaking Volumes
(This column first published in the Business Standard, February 2005)
Feeling too lazy to remove the BS HTML tags and can't find the piece on this computer (write them on whichever PC's free, and then get my filing thoroughly confused), so...here's the link. It was a speculative look at the state of Indian publishing.
Feeling too lazy to remove the BS HTML tags and can't find the piece on this computer (write them on whichever PC's free, and then get my filing thoroughly confused), so...here's the link. It was a speculative look at the state of Indian publishing.
Book review: St Cyril Road
(First published in the Indian Express, February 2005)
This wasn't an adequate review; barely a summary of salient points. There was a great deal to say about the relative absence of poetry on the bookshelves, and with more space I'd have liked to have taken a closer look at the very different ways in which Chaudhuri and Kolatkar deal with neighbourhoods. Both Kala Ghoda and St Cyril Road revolve around what in criticspeak is called a sense of place, but that's where the resemblance begins and ends... might come back to this some day when there's less white noise in my life.
St Cyril Road And Other Poems
Amit Chaudhuri
Penguin Viking
Rs 200, 78 pages
“To want to be not an Indian or English
poet, but simply a ‘poet’ like the others,
to be undivided from them by class and geography,
those other languages within language,
as I believed them fundamentally
undivided from each other…”
Perhaps these lines from ‘Memorabilia’ are the key to Amit Chaudhuri’s poems. Here is an articulation of his aspirations, to be part of “the great equality conferred by the bookshelf”, measured only by the worth of his writing, not by his rank, position and place in the card catalogue of writers. Here, too, is the gulf between image and representation, the clunky lines and awkward rhythm unable to do justice to a poet’s desires.
St Cyril Road and Other Poems is an unusual collection of poetry from a prose writer often praised for the poetic quality of his prose. It bears the stamp of poems written in Chaudhuri’s youth when he intended to be not just a writer, but a poet; and the more private watermark of poems written at a stage when he had become the writer, poems not meant for publication. And it has the hallmarks of his prose work: his ability to store away apparently unremarkable moments and images and illuminate them in recollection, his love for the mundane over the extraordinary, the connections he makes between language and music.
A painting on the wall of a room in India becomes the starting point of a journey into England—“Growing up and taking the trouble to see the real thing/ hasn’t diminished the village, its heart as full/ of sleeping resonance as the unstruck church bell.” His mother and her music teacher create “something liquid and grieving”, “through the clear archway of notes”, a “mortal moment” shadowed by an impending but as yet unsuspected death. ; The sting of Old Spice; frost on a Mercedes-Benz; the mud-like stain on toilet paper, too dark to blend in with the “pale shit” of the English boys; the place in all conflicts but especially in Gaza, “between the kitchen and the garden and the wall and the barbed wire”. Revelation can come from anywhere, in Chaudhuri’s muted but vivid world.
For all that, St Cyril Road suffers from inwardness; Chaudhuri’s world is deeply internal, implacably personal, despite the stray poems here on war and Kashmir and violence. It is unfair to compare two poets as different as the late Kolatkar and Chaudhuri, but Kolatkar’s cycle of Kala Ghoda poems has all the vitality, the force that this collection lacks. St Cyril Road is important for readers in search of the quiet moment, or readers who want to trace Chaudhuri’s development as a writer in love with language. And it is an important book for Chaudhuri to have published; it takes some courage, after years of being identified as a prose writer, to stake claim to the poetry that was his first love. But this is too slight a collection, its impact too mild, to establish Chaudhuri as a major poet. He has staked his claim; perhaps a second collection, less haphazard, more intense, will consolidate it.
Nilanjana S Roy
This wasn't an adequate review; barely a summary of salient points. There was a great deal to say about the relative absence of poetry on the bookshelves, and with more space I'd have liked to have taken a closer look at the very different ways in which Chaudhuri and Kolatkar deal with neighbourhoods. Both Kala Ghoda and St Cyril Road revolve around what in criticspeak is called a sense of place, but that's where the resemblance begins and ends... might come back to this some day when there's less white noise in my life.
St Cyril Road And Other Poems
Amit Chaudhuri
Penguin Viking
Rs 200, 78 pages
“To want to be not an Indian or English
poet, but simply a ‘poet’ like the others,
to be undivided from them by class and geography,
those other languages within language,
as I believed them fundamentally
undivided from each other…”
Perhaps these lines from ‘Memorabilia’ are the key to Amit Chaudhuri’s poems. Here is an articulation of his aspirations, to be part of “the great equality conferred by the bookshelf”, measured only by the worth of his writing, not by his rank, position and place in the card catalogue of writers. Here, too, is the gulf between image and representation, the clunky lines and awkward rhythm unable to do justice to a poet’s desires.
St Cyril Road and Other Poems is an unusual collection of poetry from a prose writer often praised for the poetic quality of his prose. It bears the stamp of poems written in Chaudhuri’s youth when he intended to be not just a writer, but a poet; and the more private watermark of poems written at a stage when he had become the writer, poems not meant for publication. And it has the hallmarks of his prose work: his ability to store away apparently unremarkable moments and images and illuminate them in recollection, his love for the mundane over the extraordinary, the connections he makes between language and music.
A painting on the wall of a room in India becomes the starting point of a journey into England—“Growing up and taking the trouble to see the real thing/ hasn’t diminished the village, its heart as full/ of sleeping resonance as the unstruck church bell.” His mother and her music teacher create “something liquid and grieving”, “through the clear archway of notes”, a “mortal moment” shadowed by an impending but as yet unsuspected death. ; The sting of Old Spice; frost on a Mercedes-Benz; the mud-like stain on toilet paper, too dark to blend in with the “pale shit” of the English boys; the place in all conflicts but especially in Gaza, “between the kitchen and the garden and the wall and the barbed wire”. Revelation can come from anywhere, in Chaudhuri’s muted but vivid world.
For all that, St Cyril Road suffers from inwardness; Chaudhuri’s world is deeply internal, implacably personal, despite the stray poems here on war and Kashmir and violence. It is unfair to compare two poets as different as the late Kolatkar and Chaudhuri, but Kolatkar’s cycle of Kala Ghoda poems has all the vitality, the force that this collection lacks. St Cyril Road is important for readers in search of the quiet moment, or readers who want to trace Chaudhuri’s development as a writer in love with language. And it is an important book for Chaudhuri to have published; it takes some courage, after years of being identified as a prose writer, to stake claim to the poetry that was his first love. But this is too slight a collection, its impact too mild, to establish Chaudhuri as a major poet. He has staked his claim; perhaps a second collection, less haphazard, more intense, will consolidate it.
Nilanjana S Roy
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