It happened several years ago. A week of writers--Pinter, Doyle, Irvine Welsh; musicians and Qi Gong enthusiasts doing their thing on the streets; an afternoon spent with no one but the seagulls; the Irish doctor who showed me around the Canongate and told stories about his favourite writers the way other people tell stories about their favourite aunts; apple-and-cheese lunches; jazz one blustery night near Arthur's Seat; and then it was time to leave Edinburgh.
The Norwegian mime troupe who'd offered me a ride in the van hadn't bargained for the double bass player who was dating the driver; I said, no problem, I'd make my own way back to London. The flights and trains were too expensive, so I booked a bus ticket, and everything, naturally, went wrong.
The wheels on my suitcase locked, so it had to be dragged and carried down the street. It was a grey, mizzling morning; "here, luv, 'av an apple on me, you're too early for breakfuss", the lady at the desk had said kindly when I was leaving the hotel. But the apple and my spare cash had disappeared through a hole in the lining of my coat by the time I wrestled the suitcase into the bus. It was packed; two hours into the journey, I woke to find the guy in the seat next to me breathing his halitosis--stale beer, fried fish--into my face; when we stopped at a gas station, the loos had been pre-puked in by the previous busload getting out of Edinburgh. Five hours later, I'm starving. No, really. I blew my cash in Edinburgh on music tickets and books; it's only genteel starvation, but I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast two days previous. And the people behind me are eating hamburgers with way too many onion rings. And my coat is too thin, I'm freezing, and the window doesn't close all the way...Halitosis opens his eyes, mumbles something, turns the other way and releases an awesome Stealth Fart, the kind that makes your eyes water for the next half hour. I open the window. Now it doesn't close at all, any more, and everyone's glaring at me--but at least I can't smell Fart n' Onion. Only, as we roll into London, smog, car exhaust and Big City Dirt.
London was an indulgence, I knew that right from the start, but it's only at this point that I'm wondering if I made a big, big mistake. Broke, cold, wet, miserable, hungry, sleepy--I should have just got on the flight back home with the rest of the small group from India.
That's when I see Leaflet Boy. He's young, probably in his early twenties, a thin, brown figure wearing too-large spectacles that he has to keep pushing up his nose. He's standing at a corner watching the slow progress of traffic and offering leaflets with a grave, courtly gesture to Londoners who clearly couldn't give a damn about him or his leaflets. I don't know how long he's been standing there, handing out leaflets no one wants, but his eyes are watery in the wind and his cheeks are blue with cold.
I know it's rude to stare, but he's such a small, brave, pathetic figure. I'm about to look away politely when he catches my eye and waves.
The bus has stopped in traffic. I'm at the window; I'm sure he's waving to someone else, so I look around instinctively.
He's smiling now. He waves again.
At me? I'm confused.
He points a finger in my direction and sketches a wide bow. Yes, you.
Tentatively, I wave back.
He puts a hand on his heart and sketches an even lower bow.
Hello! he mimes.
I smile, uncertainly.
He draws a huge smiley face with a flourish in the air.
Cold! he mimes, shivering exaggeratedly.
This I can do. I mime "cold" back with absolutely no trouble. I'm guessing this is just a brown-face meets brown-face encounter.
He does a complicated mime. If you smile--ok, got that--and jump up and down--hmmm, not in a bus--and wave to random passers-by--they look startled, but some smile back at this skinny, exuberant kid--then you feel--he mimes overcoat, comfort--ah, warmer.
I start laughing. By now, other people in the bus are beginning to grin at the kid, wave to him. And people on the street aren't edging past him; they're stopping, briefly, turning around to smile at the loony Indian kid.
The bus starts up again. Leaflet boy looks sad, but only for a second. He crumples one of the leaflets deftly, working fast, shaping it into a rough paper rose. Puts it between his teeth, puts his hand on his heart, gets down on his knees and starts singing.
"Musafir hoon yaaron..." It's a cracked, adolescent voice, getting fainter and fainter until it's lost in traffic.
Soon I can't see him. In the bus, people go back to sleep, rustle their papers, look for mints, stretch, get back to their individual cocoons of silence.
I never saw Leaflet Boy again, and we probably wouldn't recognise each other if we met on the street. But over the next few years, I travel a lot, and each journey brings its own adventures: lonely roads, unsafe trains, fleabag hotels, muggings, magic, great meals, strange pilgrims, the works. But I've never travelled that broke again, or felt that lost and alone in a strange country.
And I'm sure that no matter where I go and how many friends show up at the airport to receive me, I'll never be welcomed as warmly, as gloriously, to a city as Leaflet Boy welcomed me to London. Bless the boy, wherever he is.
Friday, December 02, 2005
The BS column: The Ambedkar Letters
A young person of enterprise could make a fortune in today's India by modelling herself on The Hon Galahad Threepwood and setting up as an Unpublisher. For a modest consideration, such an enterprise would refrain from publishing salacious memoirs, period histories guaranteed to rattle many skeletons in many cupboards, and letters that would hurt the sentiments of such-and-such a special interest group. I can guarantee that Unpublishers Inc would made a tidy profit.
The question of what we don't want to see in the public domain, and why, is always fascinating. Take the recent controversy over the publication of letters written by Frances Fitzgerald to Dr B R Ambedkar.
Frances Fitzgerald was a typist in the House of Commons who met the young Ambedkar in 1920 when he shifted to the boarding house she and her mother ran. The exact nature of the relationship between her and Ambedkar is unclear, but it would hardly have been unusual for a young man trying to survive in the England of that day and age to form a friendship with his boarding house keeper. There was genuine affection on both sides: he referred to her as 'F' and dedicated one of his books to her: "To 'F.', In Thy Presence is the Fullness of Joy". None of this is unknown to Dr Ambedkar's biographers.
In 1923, when Ambedkar returned to India, Fitzgerald began writing to him; they stayed in touch until 1943, when her plans to come to India were disrupted—she was denied a visa because of "the political situation". Fitzgerald's letters were in the custody of Ambedkar's personal librarian, the late S S Rege. The letters were handed over by Rege to Arun Kamble, professor of Marathi and Dalit activist; Kamble also has notes from Dr Ambedkar's second wife, Savita, permitting him to use the letters as he saw fit.
Kamble brought the letters to Roli Books a few months ago. Now there's a considerable tangle over the letters that is playing out through newspaper columns and special reports, each adding to the confusion.
Are the letters authentic? Roli is satisfied on this point, as is Kamble. It may be desirable to verify the provenance of the letters further, but few people seriously doubt that these letters were written by Frances Fitzgerald.
From here, it gets murkier. Dr Ambedkar's grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, wants the publication of the letters stopped, disputing Kamble's right to own them. Ambedkar biographer Gail Omvedt was asked to be a formal collaborator, and told Outlook that Roli was not willing to work with her to establish the authenticity of the letters. Roli, conversely, says that Omvedt never showed up for a meeting arranged between her and Kamble in Pune, and that they broke off the collaboration after other points of difference arose. There may be another factor here: Omvedt is a well-respected scholar with a strong academic background, while Roli is a general-interest publishing house. Their ways of handling a collection of letters like this would diverge considerably.
One section of Ambedkar scholars wants the letters to be suppressed because they might show the Dalit leader in an "unfavourable light". I have no sympathy with this argument; Ambedkar acknowledged the relationship, and it is not for us to censor after his death what he did not censor while alive.
But what about Frances Fitzgerald's story—who was she, what drew her to Ambedkar and India, what happened to her between 1943 and 1945, when she died? Kamble's detractors say no serious research has been done by him on these questions. He and Roli would agree, however; as the publishing house pointed out, the contract had only just been signed when the first rumbles of dissent arose. Kamble is supposed to go to England to find out more about Frances Fitzgerald, and Roli has expressed hopes that they will find the Ambedkar half of the correspondence.
The doubts and fears being expressed about Roli's handling of the affair are understandable; with a figure like Ambedkar, in a country like ours, the instinctive response is to try and protect his legacy.
Perhaps the Frances Fitzgerald letters will be no more than a footnote in Ambedkar's life; perhaps they will be a source of information for feminist scholars or scholars interested in that social period. If Roli does a good job of the book, this could only add to our knowledge of the period; if they make a mess of it, the text of the letters will still be there in the public domain for other scholars to reclaim. Either way, I don't see how suppressing the publication of the letters helps anyone, least of all the interested reader.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 29, 2005)
The question of what we don't want to see in the public domain, and why, is always fascinating. Take the recent controversy over the publication of letters written by Frances Fitzgerald to Dr B R Ambedkar.
Frances Fitzgerald was a typist in the House of Commons who met the young Ambedkar in 1920 when he shifted to the boarding house she and her mother ran. The exact nature of the relationship between her and Ambedkar is unclear, but it would hardly have been unusual for a young man trying to survive in the England of that day and age to form a friendship with his boarding house keeper. There was genuine affection on both sides: he referred to her as 'F' and dedicated one of his books to her: "To 'F.', In Thy Presence is the Fullness of Joy". None of this is unknown to Dr Ambedkar's biographers.
In 1923, when Ambedkar returned to India, Fitzgerald began writing to him; they stayed in touch until 1943, when her plans to come to India were disrupted—she was denied a visa because of "the political situation". Fitzgerald's letters were in the custody of Ambedkar's personal librarian, the late S S Rege. The letters were handed over by Rege to Arun Kamble, professor of Marathi and Dalit activist; Kamble also has notes from Dr Ambedkar's second wife, Savita, permitting him to use the letters as he saw fit.
Kamble brought the letters to Roli Books a few months ago. Now there's a considerable tangle over the letters that is playing out through newspaper columns and special reports, each adding to the confusion.
Are the letters authentic? Roli is satisfied on this point, as is Kamble. It may be desirable to verify the provenance of the letters further, but few people seriously doubt that these letters were written by Frances Fitzgerald.
From here, it gets murkier. Dr Ambedkar's grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, wants the publication of the letters stopped, disputing Kamble's right to own them. Ambedkar biographer Gail Omvedt was asked to be a formal collaborator, and told Outlook that Roli was not willing to work with her to establish the authenticity of the letters. Roli, conversely, says that Omvedt never showed up for a meeting arranged between her and Kamble in Pune, and that they broke off the collaboration after other points of difference arose. There may be another factor here: Omvedt is a well-respected scholar with a strong academic background, while Roli is a general-interest publishing house. Their ways of handling a collection of letters like this would diverge considerably.
One section of Ambedkar scholars wants the letters to be suppressed because they might show the Dalit leader in an "unfavourable light". I have no sympathy with this argument; Ambedkar acknowledged the relationship, and it is not for us to censor after his death what he did not censor while alive.
But what about Frances Fitzgerald's story—who was she, what drew her to Ambedkar and India, what happened to her between 1943 and 1945, when she died? Kamble's detractors say no serious research has been done by him on these questions. He and Roli would agree, however; as the publishing house pointed out, the contract had only just been signed when the first rumbles of dissent arose. Kamble is supposed to go to England to find out more about Frances Fitzgerald, and Roli has expressed hopes that they will find the Ambedkar half of the correspondence.
The doubts and fears being expressed about Roli's handling of the affair are understandable; with a figure like Ambedkar, in a country like ours, the instinctive response is to try and protect his legacy.
Perhaps the Frances Fitzgerald letters will be no more than a footnote in Ambedkar's life; perhaps they will be a source of information for feminist scholars or scholars interested in that social period. If Roli does a good job of the book, this could only add to our knowledge of the period; if they make a mess of it, the text of the letters will still be there in the public domain for other scholars to reclaim. Either way, I don't see how suppressing the publication of the letters helps anyone, least of all the interested reader.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 29, 2005)
Book Review: My Ear at his Heart
My Ear At His Heart: Reading My Father
Hanif Kureishi
Faber and Faber
POUNDS 3.99, 242 pages
In 1989, Hanif Kureishi gave a talk in Calcutta. We were good little schoolgirls, utterly unprepared by a diet of Sharatchandra, Wordsworth and Steinbeck for his funky iconoclasm. Some of us had seen My Beautiful Laundrette ; most of us had been banned by parental edict from seeing Sammy and Rosie , presumably because it had "Get Laid" in the title.
Kureishi was genial, like a temporarily vegetarian wolf consorting with a bunch of lambs. He got us to discuss class and race rage, when most of us had experienced neither, and he looked amused when the boldest of our number asked him whether being gay was "wrong". "It's two people in love, yeah?" he said, and moved on, unaware that he had just undone about 17 years worth of carefully instilled prurience and prejudice.
Months after Kureishi had departed, his rebel's charisma still lingered. We argued about his films; in 1990, we argued about his Buddha of Suburbia ; in 1995, past the portals of college, we were arguing about his Black Album ; in 1998, settled into jobs or relationships, feeling suitably adult, we argued about My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy .
I didn't want to see Kureishi turn 50. If he were to age gracefully into distinguished authorhood, what hope was there for us, with our ironed and laundered lives concealing the urge to grow old disgracefully?
But that's the thing about iconoclasm: it lasts. My Ear At His Heart is a conventional family memoir in the same way that Howl was a pretty poem. It starts with an aborted book, the one Kureishi intended to write about "the way one uses or reads literature", about writers who had been important to him, and of course, about the 1960s and 1970s. The focus would be on one of his father's favourite writers, Chekhov, "and the numerous voices his work can sustain".
Instead, a "shabby old green folder" surfaces after eleven years, containing a novel called An Indian Adolescence . The author is Shannoo Kureishi, Hanif's father; this, along with another unpublished work, The Redundant Man , and other unpublished plays and writings, is a reminder that Hanif was not the only writer in the family, even if he did become the most successful one.
Both his father's books are heavily autobiographical, and through them, Kureishi approaches an intimacy with his father that parallels and also sometimes outdoes the relationship they shared when Shannoo Kureishi was alive. Other books emerge; Shannoo's brother, Omar, had written two books of autobiography, published and well-received in Pakistan. A family story is beginning to come together; like all family stories, this one offers both great knowledge and great danger.
Shannoo came to London after Partition, part of the flood of migrants in that generation. His official life was drab—he was a minor civil servant in the Pakistani embassy whose energies went into reading, and cricket, both obssessions shared to some degree with Hanif; his writing was not secret so much as unregarded. His books reveal a bitter and lasting competitiveness with Omar. His brother was more successful, though Shannoo was the better cricketer, but their early explorations into love were scarred by rivalry.
Some of this rivalry colours Hanif and Shannoo's relationship. Hanif Kureishi recalls his father blaming him for the failure of The Redundant Man to get published, striving for a different kind of brotherhood: "He put us on the same level: writers—almost brothers—together, with neither of us more talented than the other." When Kureishi put on an early play, his father showed up, but hated the production. "…Dad was in rage: for a start, he was giving me contemptuous V-signs from his seat."
Shannoo Kureishi found a kind of life in the suburbs; his son rebelled against the blandness and conformity that his father sought. In his teenage years, discovering sex n'drugs n'rock n'roll—and revolution—Hanif Kureishi learned, too, that "love and sex, taking you out of your family, led you into the strange field of other families".
There is humour here, too, and pride in his father's ambition, even a posthumous gentleness on the part of the son. But as Shannoo's story reveals a Pakistan that Hanif never knew, either through religion or language, and opens up the struggles of the early migrant, it fuels Hanif Kureishi's own journey through his life as he nears fifty.
This is a brilliant, corrosive memoir, whose power lies as much in the questions it raises as in the ones it answers. It's about writing and families, fathers and sons, the weight of our histories and how to carry that weight.
Kureishi starts by reading family history; by the end of the book, he's trying to read all of history. "To what extent do the dead determine the lives of the living? How do you keep them vital within you? And how do you keep them out of your way in order to live within a different age, as a different person?" He closes the manuscript; he walks out, into the chaos outside the order of the room. That, says Kureishi, is the only place to head for: the unknown.
(For The Indian Express, carried November 2005)
Hanif Kureishi
Faber and Faber
POUNDS 3.99, 242 pages
In 1989, Hanif Kureishi gave a talk in Calcutta. We were good little schoolgirls, utterly unprepared by a diet of Sharatchandra, Wordsworth and Steinbeck for his funky iconoclasm. Some of us had seen My Beautiful Laundrette ; most of us had been banned by parental edict from seeing Sammy and Rosie , presumably because it had "Get Laid" in the title.
Kureishi was genial, like a temporarily vegetarian wolf consorting with a bunch of lambs. He got us to discuss class and race rage, when most of us had experienced neither, and he looked amused when the boldest of our number asked him whether being gay was "wrong". "It's two people in love, yeah?" he said, and moved on, unaware that he had just undone about 17 years worth of carefully instilled prurience and prejudice.
Months after Kureishi had departed, his rebel's charisma still lingered. We argued about his films; in 1990, we argued about his Buddha of Suburbia ; in 1995, past the portals of college, we were arguing about his Black Album ; in 1998, settled into jobs or relationships, feeling suitably adult, we argued about My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy .
I didn't want to see Kureishi turn 50. If he were to age gracefully into distinguished authorhood, what hope was there for us, with our ironed and laundered lives concealing the urge to grow old disgracefully?
But that's the thing about iconoclasm: it lasts. My Ear At His Heart is a conventional family memoir in the same way that Howl was a pretty poem. It starts with an aborted book, the one Kureishi intended to write about "the way one uses or reads literature", about writers who had been important to him, and of course, about the 1960s and 1970s. The focus would be on one of his father's favourite writers, Chekhov, "and the numerous voices his work can sustain".
Instead, a "shabby old green folder" surfaces after eleven years, containing a novel called An Indian Adolescence . The author is Shannoo Kureishi, Hanif's father; this, along with another unpublished work, The Redundant Man , and other unpublished plays and writings, is a reminder that Hanif was not the only writer in the family, even if he did become the most successful one.
Both his father's books are heavily autobiographical, and through them, Kureishi approaches an intimacy with his father that parallels and also sometimes outdoes the relationship they shared when Shannoo Kureishi was alive. Other books emerge; Shannoo's brother, Omar, had written two books of autobiography, published and well-received in Pakistan. A family story is beginning to come together; like all family stories, this one offers both great knowledge and great danger.
Shannoo came to London after Partition, part of the flood of migrants in that generation. His official life was drab—he was a minor civil servant in the Pakistani embassy whose energies went into reading, and cricket, both obssessions shared to some degree with Hanif; his writing was not secret so much as unregarded. His books reveal a bitter and lasting competitiveness with Omar. His brother was more successful, though Shannoo was the better cricketer, but their early explorations into love were scarred by rivalry.
Some of this rivalry colours Hanif and Shannoo's relationship. Hanif Kureishi recalls his father blaming him for the failure of The Redundant Man to get published, striving for a different kind of brotherhood: "He put us on the same level: writers—almost brothers—together, with neither of us more talented than the other." When Kureishi put on an early play, his father showed up, but hated the production. "…Dad was in rage: for a start, he was giving me contemptuous V-signs from his seat."
Shannoo Kureishi found a kind of life in the suburbs; his son rebelled against the blandness and conformity that his father sought. In his teenage years, discovering sex n'drugs n'rock n'roll—and revolution—Hanif Kureishi learned, too, that "love and sex, taking you out of your family, led you into the strange field of other families".
There is humour here, too, and pride in his father's ambition, even a posthumous gentleness on the part of the son. But as Shannoo's story reveals a Pakistan that Hanif never knew, either through religion or language, and opens up the struggles of the early migrant, it fuels Hanif Kureishi's own journey through his life as he nears fifty.
This is a brilliant, corrosive memoir, whose power lies as much in the questions it raises as in the ones it answers. It's about writing and families, fathers and sons, the weight of our histories and how to carry that weight.
Kureishi starts by reading family history; by the end of the book, he's trying to read all of history. "To what extent do the dead determine the lives of the living? How do you keep them vital within you? And how do you keep them out of your way in order to live within a different age, as a different person?" He closes the manuscript; he walks out, into the chaos outside the order of the room. That, says Kureishi, is the only place to head for: the unknown.
(For The Indian Express, carried November 2005)
The BS Column: Dial B For Bestseller
The author of a successful campus novel gets the plot of his second bestseller off a beautiful woman, whom he meets in a conveniently empty train compartment. The story she tells him is about six friends who work at a call-centre, and a night in their lives that changes everything. The resolution is provided by God via a key phone call. This, slightly summarised, is the synopsis of Chetan Bhagat's second runaway bestseller, One Night at The Call Centre.
I emailed the uncut synopsis from Bhagat's website to a publishing insider I know. He was told nothing about the author's first book, the bestselling Five Point Someone, or about Bhagat's considerable brand equity.
The publishing veteran responded with deep scepticism: "The characters are fine, call centres are a decent, in-the-news setting. But the writer meeting a beautiful muse—give me a break. And God on the phone? That would get tossed from any Creative Writing 101 class. Tell him to rewrite and stick with the voices, or he doesn't have a prayer."
One Night at the Call Centre sold 70,000 copies in the first week of its launch, and still heads bestseller lists. There are two ways to read the moral of this story: one is to say that the critics, including my publisher pal, know nothing, and the other is to look at the story that Indian bestsellers have to tell.
It's almost too easy to set up an opposition between literary writing and Bhagat's attempts. The 31-year-old IIT and IIM graduate does it himself, stressing ad nauseum that he's the champion of the common man, out to write popular books for the "non-reader", not "boring", literary novels.
From the critic's perspective, his two novels read like promising first drafts, untouched by any editor's hand. I'll believe it's God calling at the end of ON@CC, because no one else but the Supreme Deity could have got through so easily to a call centre helpline. More than Five Point Someone, ON@CC is messy: the humour is clunky, the plotting shaky and more happens in 24 hours than is plausible. The critics who see a lack of lasting literary merit in Bhagat's works are perfectly correct.
But there's good reason for readers to love Bhagat's work. His books retail at the right price point for "timepass", the characters are immediately identifiable and the writing is fast-paced, smooth and undemanding. He writes for a generation that sees very few reflections of its aims, heartbreaks and language in contemporary literature.
Go back to a few of the milestones in IWE history, and you'll see another pattern. Rushdie's Midnight's Children lives in the minds of the larger reading public not because of its literary qualities, but because Rushdie scored a significant success on the global stage. Arundhati Roy's Booker win consolidated writing as a respectable, potentially middle-class occupation—though given Roy's iconoclasm, I'm pretty sure she wasn't looking to be a role-model for the bourgeoisie! Pankaj Mishra has a telling anecdote in Butter Chicken from Ludhiana where his admission that he is a writer is evaluated—and judged to be respectable--not by the content of what he writes, but by the potential advances and royalties he might receive.
The great home-grown Indian bestsellers have all spoken to a section of the Indian reading public that's used to being left out of the literary discussion. Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans, one of the longest-running bestsellers in the local Indian market, spoke for those homesick in the Land of Hope and Supermarkets in a way that more sophisticated travelogues could not. Shobha De's novels are incorrectly seen as "socialite" accounts. They're actually written for an audience who stands at the window of the socialite world, tempted and fascinated by what they see, but resigned to the fact that they're on the outside. And for all the surface glitz, De's novels champion classic values: conventional marriages, happy families.
What Chetan Bhagat did, in both his novels, is to address the great Indian middle class with tremendous ease. I'd argue that Sudeep Chakravarti did it better in Tin Fish, a work of fiction set in the boys' boarding school world of a few decades ago, or that Jaideep Varma captured the grind and heartbreak of an office more realistically in Local, to name just two contemporary writers who seem to be both adequately literary and adequately popular.
But Bhagat's more simplistic formula has been rather better marketed. He gets away with sloppy work because of the lack of competition in the popular fiction market. If you're looking to raise the standards there, you need more writers like Bhagat, not fewer. Oh, and better editors. Please.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, on November 22, 2005)
I emailed the uncut synopsis from Bhagat's website to a publishing insider I know. He was told nothing about the author's first book, the bestselling Five Point Someone, or about Bhagat's considerable brand equity.
The publishing veteran responded with deep scepticism: "The characters are fine, call centres are a decent, in-the-news setting. But the writer meeting a beautiful muse—give me a break. And God on the phone? That would get tossed from any Creative Writing 101 class. Tell him to rewrite and stick with the voices, or he doesn't have a prayer."
One Night at the Call Centre sold 70,000 copies in the first week of its launch, and still heads bestseller lists. There are two ways to read the moral of this story: one is to say that the critics, including my publisher pal, know nothing, and the other is to look at the story that Indian bestsellers have to tell.
It's almost too easy to set up an opposition between literary writing and Bhagat's attempts. The 31-year-old IIT and IIM graduate does it himself, stressing ad nauseum that he's the champion of the common man, out to write popular books for the "non-reader", not "boring", literary novels.
From the critic's perspective, his two novels read like promising first drafts, untouched by any editor's hand. I'll believe it's God calling at the end of ON@CC, because no one else but the Supreme Deity could have got through so easily to a call centre helpline. More than Five Point Someone, ON@CC is messy: the humour is clunky, the plotting shaky and more happens in 24 hours than is plausible. The critics who see a lack of lasting literary merit in Bhagat's works are perfectly correct.
But there's good reason for readers to love Bhagat's work. His books retail at the right price point for "timepass", the characters are immediately identifiable and the writing is fast-paced, smooth and undemanding. He writes for a generation that sees very few reflections of its aims, heartbreaks and language in contemporary literature.
Go back to a few of the milestones in IWE history, and you'll see another pattern. Rushdie's Midnight's Children lives in the minds of the larger reading public not because of its literary qualities, but because Rushdie scored a significant success on the global stage. Arundhati Roy's Booker win consolidated writing as a respectable, potentially middle-class occupation—though given Roy's iconoclasm, I'm pretty sure she wasn't looking to be a role-model for the bourgeoisie! Pankaj Mishra has a telling anecdote in Butter Chicken from Ludhiana where his admission that he is a writer is evaluated—and judged to be respectable--not by the content of what he writes, but by the potential advances and royalties he might receive.
The great home-grown Indian bestsellers have all spoken to a section of the Indian reading public that's used to being left out of the literary discussion. Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans, one of the longest-running bestsellers in the local Indian market, spoke for those homesick in the Land of Hope and Supermarkets in a way that more sophisticated travelogues could not. Shobha De's novels are incorrectly seen as "socialite" accounts. They're actually written for an audience who stands at the window of the socialite world, tempted and fascinated by what they see, but resigned to the fact that they're on the outside. And for all the surface glitz, De's novels champion classic values: conventional marriages, happy families.
What Chetan Bhagat did, in both his novels, is to address the great Indian middle class with tremendous ease. I'd argue that Sudeep Chakravarti did it better in Tin Fish, a work of fiction set in the boys' boarding school world of a few decades ago, or that Jaideep Varma captured the grind and heartbreak of an office more realistically in Local, to name just two contemporary writers who seem to be both adequately literary and adequately popular.
But Bhagat's more simplistic formula has been rather better marketed. He gets away with sloppy work because of the lack of competition in the popular fiction market. If you're looking to raise the standards there, you need more writers like Bhagat, not fewer. Oh, and better editors. Please.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, on November 22, 2005)
Last Word: Tearing the Veil
The banner around Miss Afghanistan's waist is a reminder of her country, and also an insignia of exile. When Vida Samadzai entered the world's most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) beauty contest, she was breaking several taboos. Samadzai had left her country in 1996 to study in the US. She became the first Afghan woman in three decades to walk the ramp in that fashion, and then she wore a red bikini for the Miss Earth contest.
The reaction from her home country was immediate, and lasting; if she returns to Afghanistan, she will face criticism and even legal prosecution.
Samadzai makes traditional feminists uncomfortable. Very few feminist thinkers would find it easy to endorse beauty contests, with their emphasis on looks as the most important aspect of a woman, the often negative impact they have on young women in terms of body image, and the sheer mindlessness of most pageants.
But Samadzai made me wonder whether the problem with contemporary feminism was that the rules had become too rigid. For women from several war-torn or otherwise beleaguered countries, from Bosnia to the Lebanon to Afghanistan, taking part in beauty contests has become a symbol of empowerment. I find it baffling, as a woman, that we need to be empowered through teeth whiteners, cosmetic surgery, diets that would call Amnesty down on your head if you administered them to prison inmates, and all the rest of it—but that's just me.
For Samadzai and the many women in Afghanistan who have followed her career, entering that beauty contest was a way of reclaiming their rights to do as they pleased with their bodies. The Taliban enforced the burkha; Samadzai tore through the veil. In that sense, her achievement is as important as the achievements of, say, Afghanistan's first women chess players.
Take another case, that of Samira Haddad, who recently won the right not to wear the hijab in a case in the Netherlands. Haddad applied to the Islamic College of Amsterdam. She was told that, as a Muslim woman, she had to wear the headscarf or risk being rejected. Her win has widely been interpreted by the Western media as a blow against the hijab in the debate over whether the scarf is a symbol of oppression or empowerment.
But Haddad is invoking a different tradition—she comes from Tunisia, where women do not wear headscarfs in public. She wants Muslim religious groups to endorse the right of women to choose what they can and cannot wear. Like women who have fought for exactly the opposite—the right to wear the headscarf in countries where the hijab is seen as a disturbing reminder of religious differences—Haddad is fighting for herself. She is not anti- or pro-hijab—she merely wants the right to wear what she's comfortable with.
These are just two, fairly superficial examples, but they made me think. Women have been told what to do by men, by religious leaders, by social custom, and yes, even by feminist ideologues. Perhaps what we really want is just the right to make our own decisions—regardless of whether they seem to be anti-feminist when they're not, or whether they seem to be feminist when they're actually deeply personal.
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
The reaction from her home country was immediate, and lasting; if she returns to Afghanistan, she will face criticism and even legal prosecution.
Samadzai makes traditional feminists uncomfortable. Very few feminist thinkers would find it easy to endorse beauty contests, with their emphasis on looks as the most important aspect of a woman, the often negative impact they have on young women in terms of body image, and the sheer mindlessness of most pageants.
But Samadzai made me wonder whether the problem with contemporary feminism was that the rules had become too rigid. For women from several war-torn or otherwise beleaguered countries, from Bosnia to the Lebanon to Afghanistan, taking part in beauty contests has become a symbol of empowerment. I find it baffling, as a woman, that we need to be empowered through teeth whiteners, cosmetic surgery, diets that would call Amnesty down on your head if you administered them to prison inmates, and all the rest of it—but that's just me.
For Samadzai and the many women in Afghanistan who have followed her career, entering that beauty contest was a way of reclaiming their rights to do as they pleased with their bodies. The Taliban enforced the burkha; Samadzai tore through the veil. In that sense, her achievement is as important as the achievements of, say, Afghanistan's first women chess players.
Take another case, that of Samira Haddad, who recently won the right not to wear the hijab in a case in the Netherlands. Haddad applied to the Islamic College of Amsterdam. She was told that, as a Muslim woman, she had to wear the headscarf or risk being rejected. Her win has widely been interpreted by the Western media as a blow against the hijab in the debate over whether the scarf is a symbol of oppression or empowerment.
But Haddad is invoking a different tradition—she comes from Tunisia, where women do not wear headscarfs in public. She wants Muslim religious groups to endorse the right of women to choose what they can and cannot wear. Like women who have fought for exactly the opposite—the right to wear the headscarf in countries where the hijab is seen as a disturbing reminder of religious differences—Haddad is fighting for herself. She is not anti- or pro-hijab—she merely wants the right to wear what she's comfortable with.
These are just two, fairly superficial examples, but they made me think. Women have been told what to do by men, by religious leaders, by social custom, and yes, even by feminist ideologues. Perhaps what we really want is just the right to make our own decisions—regardless of whether they seem to be anti-feminist when they're not, or whether they seem to be feminist when they're actually deeply personal.
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
Monday, November 28, 2005
Reasons to hate really good writers
Some day, I'm going to get on a train at Nizamuddin Station, perhaps the one that wakes us up at three am because it has such a quiet, mournful hoot, and take it to the end of the line, and find another train, and take that to wherever it's going, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, well, Paul Theroux did that already. Great Railway Bazaar.
Fine, no problem. So I'll take a look at where colours come from--ochre, Indian yellow, gamboge (what a name, eh?), lead white, which killed off so many fashionable women, cochineal...
Victoria Finlay. Colour: A Natural History of the Palette.
Cities, then. How about exploring an Indian city through the stories of people who live on the fringes? Delhi through its eccentrics, its lunatics, its obsessives...
Yawn. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City. It's Bombay, but you don't want to do the me-too book.
Or it might be fun to see what Kubla Khan's Xanadu was all about, or if we're talking long, continent-hopping journeys now, who could be a better guide than Ibn Battuta?
William Dalrymple, In Xanadu, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels With a Tangerine.
How about climbing Everest? Or doing the inside story on the Deep South, or Venice? Or no, wait, how about I just get in the car and drive? Across the subcontinent, as far and wide as the roads will take me, screw the deadlines (guilty voice in head saying, but who'll feed the cats can be ignored), just follow the highways and the little bumpy potholed roads and see what happens?
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air; John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, City of Falling Angels; Way too many post-Kerouac writers been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Dammit. Going to have to give up reading, aren't I?
Yeah, well, Paul Theroux did that already. Great Railway Bazaar.
Fine, no problem. So I'll take a look at where colours come from--ochre, Indian yellow, gamboge (what a name, eh?), lead white, which killed off so many fashionable women, cochineal...
Victoria Finlay. Colour: A Natural History of the Palette.
Cities, then. How about exploring an Indian city through the stories of people who live on the fringes? Delhi through its eccentrics, its lunatics, its obsessives...
Yawn. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City. It's Bombay, but you don't want to do the me-too book.
Or it might be fun to see what Kubla Khan's Xanadu was all about, or if we're talking long, continent-hopping journeys now, who could be a better guide than Ibn Battuta?
William Dalrymple, In Xanadu, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels With a Tangerine.
How about climbing Everest? Or doing the inside story on the Deep South, or Venice? Or no, wait, how about I just get in the car and drive? Across the subcontinent, as far and wide as the roads will take me, screw the deadlines (guilty voice in head saying, but who'll feed the cats can be ignored), just follow the highways and the little bumpy potholed roads and see what happens?
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air; John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, City of Falling Angels; Way too many post-Kerouac writers been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Dammit. Going to have to give up reading, aren't I?
The BS Column: Ode to Willy D
When William Dalrymple wrote an article recently in which he argued that Indian writing in English had sputtered out in the home country, I found myself wishing he would just read a little more often.
Dalrymple's arguments have been made over the years within India. There are no contemporary writers of the stature of Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh and Mistry; there have been no great literary successes after Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things . (We're not counting Allan Sealy, Ruchir Joshi and company—only commercial successes count in this arithmetic.) The best writing now comes from the diaspora—Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru—and the great 'Indian' successes, such as Pankaj Mishra or Suketu Mehta or Siddhartha Deb, or even Amitav Ghosh, increasingly live abroad for at least part of the year. The best future writing, he predicted, would continue to emerge from the diaspora; inside India, the boom had gone bust.
Dalrymple made some valid points. I agree that some of the best writing will come from the Indian diaspora in the future, as it should—it would be cause for deep concern if crossing the black water robbed Indians of their talent. But the reason why Indian writers need to be in New York or London is simple: that's where the market is, and until local publishing booms, as it might, it's going to be necessary to go to the market. And Dalrymple's argument that Indian writers travel widely or live elsewhere demonstrates a sad lack of historical perspective. From Tagore to Mulk Raj Anand to Nirmal Verma, there are as many great Indian writers who've explored the world outside India as the ones who stayed rooted in one place. Some, like Saratchandra, were just as curious about Burma, for instance, as they were about Bilayat.
But still, I needed a sign. Could Dalrymple be right, or was his piece merely premature provocation?
Just a few weeks later, we heard about Vikram Chandra's big-bucks deal for a thousand-page novel set in Bombay, featuring Inspector Sartaj. I'd claim Chandra as an Indian success, even though he is, using the Dalrymple yardstick, exposed to Foreign Influences, having taught on American college campuses—and enjoyed the experience. Tch.
More omens would be propitious, I thought, so I looked for another sign. And found three.
Kalpana Swaminathan first gave notice that she was a writer to watch when she came out with Ambrosia for Afters , an ambitious but uneven novel. Some of us knew her writings already, as half of the Kalpish Ratna combine, a byline she shares with Ishrat Syed. Then she wrote Bougainvillea House , a darkly atmospheric novel set in Goa. Clarice Aranxa, her protagonist, is a woman of the old school, in the last stages of motor neuron disease, watching as sudden death visits some of the key people in her life. It's a brilliant study of obsession and betrayal, an utterly absorbing tale. And Swaminathan wrote it without the cushion of a large advance or the comfort of a thriving community of writers around her.
Then there's Nilita Vachani, the documentary film-maker who's out with HomeSpun . She takes some of the biggest myths we've spun around the freedom struggle, around war and around love stories, and refashions them from the inside out. This debut novel has a few flaws, but her portrait of a man whose idealism sorely tests his wife and her look at how a reluctant fighter pilot really died are not easily forgotten. Nor could I leave Sharmistha Mohanty off this list of new writers to watch: New Life has a predictable plot, with a heroine who discovers strength in unexpected places in love, writing and death, but Mohanty has an astonishing, utterly distinctive handwriting.
Three months, three writers to watch—and they're just the pick of what's been a quiet growth of talent from India, at a time when Indian writing in English is just beginning to stretch its wings.
The proper answer to Dalrymple's arguments, which I believe he made in good faith, isn't going to come from rebuttals written by people like me; they're going to come from the books. And I believe that these three writers are part of a quiet but sure gathering of talent in India that is making the counter-argument, slowly but steadily.
I'll stay on hand, anyway. Someone needs to watch the great Indian melting pot of literary talent as it comes to the boil—and when it's ready, add Dalrymple's article to the mix, so that he can eat his words in comfort.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, November 15, 2005. And that was a truly brief list of writers to watch: for reasons of space, or because I'd mentioned them in previous columns, I didn't mention Timeri Murari (old writer, new book), Jaideep Verma (Local hero), Siddharth Chowdhury (Patna Roughcut), Cyrus Mistry (The Radiance of Ashes), Shankar Vedantam (The Ghosts of Kashmir), Sudeep Sen...oops, that's Sudeep Chakravarti, sorry (Tin Fish)... hang on, Mistry might be "diaspora talent", but who cares, read him any way.)
Dalrymple's arguments have been made over the years within India. There are no contemporary writers of the stature of Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh and Mistry; there have been no great literary successes after Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things . (We're not counting Allan Sealy, Ruchir Joshi and company—only commercial successes count in this arithmetic.) The best writing now comes from the diaspora—Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru—and the great 'Indian' successes, such as Pankaj Mishra or Suketu Mehta or Siddhartha Deb, or even Amitav Ghosh, increasingly live abroad for at least part of the year. The best future writing, he predicted, would continue to emerge from the diaspora; inside India, the boom had gone bust.
Dalrymple made some valid points. I agree that some of the best writing will come from the Indian diaspora in the future, as it should—it would be cause for deep concern if crossing the black water robbed Indians of their talent. But the reason why Indian writers need to be in New York or London is simple: that's where the market is, and until local publishing booms, as it might, it's going to be necessary to go to the market. And Dalrymple's argument that Indian writers travel widely or live elsewhere demonstrates a sad lack of historical perspective. From Tagore to Mulk Raj Anand to Nirmal Verma, there are as many great Indian writers who've explored the world outside India as the ones who stayed rooted in one place. Some, like Saratchandra, were just as curious about Burma, for instance, as they were about Bilayat.
But still, I needed a sign. Could Dalrymple be right, or was his piece merely premature provocation?
Just a few weeks later, we heard about Vikram Chandra's big-bucks deal for a thousand-page novel set in Bombay, featuring Inspector Sartaj. I'd claim Chandra as an Indian success, even though he is, using the Dalrymple yardstick, exposed to Foreign Influences, having taught on American college campuses—and enjoyed the experience. Tch.
More omens would be propitious, I thought, so I looked for another sign. And found three.
Kalpana Swaminathan first gave notice that she was a writer to watch when she came out with Ambrosia for Afters , an ambitious but uneven novel. Some of us knew her writings already, as half of the Kalpish Ratna combine, a byline she shares with Ishrat Syed. Then she wrote Bougainvillea House , a darkly atmospheric novel set in Goa. Clarice Aranxa, her protagonist, is a woman of the old school, in the last stages of motor neuron disease, watching as sudden death visits some of the key people in her life. It's a brilliant study of obsession and betrayal, an utterly absorbing tale. And Swaminathan wrote it without the cushion of a large advance or the comfort of a thriving community of writers around her.
Then there's Nilita Vachani, the documentary film-maker who's out with HomeSpun . She takes some of the biggest myths we've spun around the freedom struggle, around war and around love stories, and refashions them from the inside out. This debut novel has a few flaws, but her portrait of a man whose idealism sorely tests his wife and her look at how a reluctant fighter pilot really died are not easily forgotten. Nor could I leave Sharmistha Mohanty off this list of new writers to watch: New Life has a predictable plot, with a heroine who discovers strength in unexpected places in love, writing and death, but Mohanty has an astonishing, utterly distinctive handwriting.
Three months, three writers to watch—and they're just the pick of what's been a quiet growth of talent from India, at a time when Indian writing in English is just beginning to stretch its wings.
The proper answer to Dalrymple's arguments, which I believe he made in good faith, isn't going to come from rebuttals written by people like me; they're going to come from the books. And I believe that these three writers are part of a quiet but sure gathering of talent in India that is making the counter-argument, slowly but steadily.
I'll stay on hand, anyway. Someone needs to watch the great Indian melting pot of literary talent as it comes to the boil—and when it's ready, add Dalrymple's article to the mix, so that he can eat his words in comfort.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, November 15, 2005. And that was a truly brief list of writers to watch: for reasons of space, or because I'd mentioned them in previous columns, I didn't mention Timeri Murari (old writer, new book), Jaideep Verma (Local hero), Siddharth Chowdhury (Patna Roughcut), Cyrus Mistry (The Radiance of Ashes), Shankar Vedantam (The Ghosts of Kashmir), Sudeep Sen...oops, that's Sudeep Chakravarti, sorry (Tin Fish)... hang on, Mistry might be "diaspora talent", but who cares, read him any way.)
Book review: Curry
Curry: A biography
Lizzie Collingham
Chatto & Windus
Distributed by Rupa & Co,
POUNDS 11, 318 pages
Some years back, compiling an anthology of Indian food writing, I realised that the history of Indian food came by the tiffin-carrier system: one dabba at a time, its contents separate from its companions.
There were histories of Mughal or Rajasthani food; glorious food memoirs celebrating regional cuisines; a glut of Raj food books. But aside from K T Achaya's authoritative companion to Indian food, too magisterial to be comfortable bedside or even armchair reading, there was little in the way of a friendly, useable Indian food history. Even Shraboni Bagchi's Curry in the Crown was restricted to the Raj and then the revenge of the colonies we call "chicken tikka masala".
The food anthology eventually took a contemporary literary turn, dispensing with the historical background reading. I still thought it saddening that a country with a score of sophisticated and distinct cuisines, where eating out was a passion and eating at home a form of duel-by-khansama, had no accessible food history of our own.
Lizzie Collingham's Curry is the history of a dish whose very name is contested: most Indians sneer at "curry powders", and yet, curry is probably the most significant Indian export, outdoing even that other popular export, the software geek. Collingham is a historian who drank her first Bombay lassi in 1994, fell in love with vegetarian thalis and out of love with mulligatawny soup. Her curiosity and passion fuelled this wonderful "biography" of curry.
If you're about to question Collingham's credentials on the grounds of authenticity, pause to consider that the Indian chilli was unknown before the Portuguese brought it here in the 15th century; it remained alien to the north until the Marathas brought it with them in the 17th century. Or consider the parable of the chicken tikka masala, its pungent tomato soup-onion-and-cream gravy invented to please a foreign palate by a harassed Indian chef in a British restaurant. The chef may have been rooted in the migrant community of Sylhetis, who got their start taking over fish-and-chip shops and selling curry and rice alongside the cod.
Collingham gets notions of authenticity out of the way along with caste rituals and food taboos, taking down a few sacred cows as she goes. (The sacred cow, she observes, was not all that sacred in the 1st century AD, but had become holier-than-thou by the time of Babur and Manucci.) Her chapter on Biryani is a romp through Mughal culinary history. The mango helps Babur and his men forget their much-missed melons, Akbar's kitchens where Persian pilau meets Hindustani spices and creates biryani is as much an experiment in synthesis as his court, and Jahangir develops an equal fondness for Gujarati khichari as for his wine. 'Vindaloo' looks at the Portuguese influence, especially on baking, with those dariols, conserves and layered cakes like the bebinca; 'Korma' at the East Indian merchants who ate the staple diet similar to the Islamic and Christian worlds at the time, acquiring a taste for arrack punch and paan alongside; and 'Madras Curry' and 'Curry Powder' look at some of the more bizarre attempts to introduce East to West in British cooking. (My Constance Spry cookery book insists that an "authentic chicken curry" includes apples, raisins, dessicated coconuts, sultanas and cream.)
By the time we've got to 'Chai', a meditation on the humble cuppa, now reinvented as chai lattes, I'm gorged on Collingham's comfortable scholarship. I'm no longer surprised to learn in the last chapter that Indian food is popular in Japan—where the "authentic" curry was introduced by a fleeing revolutionary. Rashbehari Bose was on the run from the British when he came to Japan and found shelter with the Black Dragon society. He helped his Japanese father-in-law open an Indian restaurant. Nakamurya, in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, apparently still serves an R B curry. Revolutionary cuisine, anyone?
(Carried in The Indian Express, November 2005)
Lizzie Collingham
Chatto & Windus
Distributed by Rupa & Co,
POUNDS 11, 318 pages
Some years back, compiling an anthology of Indian food writing, I realised that the history of Indian food came by the tiffin-carrier system: one dabba at a time, its contents separate from its companions.
There were histories of Mughal or Rajasthani food; glorious food memoirs celebrating regional cuisines; a glut of Raj food books. But aside from K T Achaya's authoritative companion to Indian food, too magisterial to be comfortable bedside or even armchair reading, there was little in the way of a friendly, useable Indian food history. Even Shraboni Bagchi's Curry in the Crown was restricted to the Raj and then the revenge of the colonies we call "chicken tikka masala".
The food anthology eventually took a contemporary literary turn, dispensing with the historical background reading. I still thought it saddening that a country with a score of sophisticated and distinct cuisines, where eating out was a passion and eating at home a form of duel-by-khansama, had no accessible food history of our own.
Lizzie Collingham's Curry is the history of a dish whose very name is contested: most Indians sneer at "curry powders", and yet, curry is probably the most significant Indian export, outdoing even that other popular export, the software geek. Collingham is a historian who drank her first Bombay lassi in 1994, fell in love with vegetarian thalis and out of love with mulligatawny soup. Her curiosity and passion fuelled this wonderful "biography" of curry.
If you're about to question Collingham's credentials on the grounds of authenticity, pause to consider that the Indian chilli was unknown before the Portuguese brought it here in the 15th century; it remained alien to the north until the Marathas brought it with them in the 17th century. Or consider the parable of the chicken tikka masala, its pungent tomato soup-onion-and-cream gravy invented to please a foreign palate by a harassed Indian chef in a British restaurant. The chef may have been rooted in the migrant community of Sylhetis, who got their start taking over fish-and-chip shops and selling curry and rice alongside the cod.
Collingham gets notions of authenticity out of the way along with caste rituals and food taboos, taking down a few sacred cows as she goes. (The sacred cow, she observes, was not all that sacred in the 1st century AD, but had become holier-than-thou by the time of Babur and Manucci.) Her chapter on Biryani is a romp through Mughal culinary history. The mango helps Babur and his men forget their much-missed melons, Akbar's kitchens where Persian pilau meets Hindustani spices and creates biryani is as much an experiment in synthesis as his court, and Jahangir develops an equal fondness for Gujarati khichari as for his wine. 'Vindaloo' looks at the Portuguese influence, especially on baking, with those dariols, conserves and layered cakes like the bebinca; 'Korma' at the East Indian merchants who ate the staple diet similar to the Islamic and Christian worlds at the time, acquiring a taste for arrack punch and paan alongside; and 'Madras Curry' and 'Curry Powder' look at some of the more bizarre attempts to introduce East to West in British cooking. (My Constance Spry cookery book insists that an "authentic chicken curry" includes apples, raisins, dessicated coconuts, sultanas and cream.)
By the time we've got to 'Chai', a meditation on the humble cuppa, now reinvented as chai lattes, I'm gorged on Collingham's comfortable scholarship. I'm no longer surprised to learn in the last chapter that Indian food is popular in Japan—where the "authentic" curry was introduced by a fleeing revolutionary. Rashbehari Bose was on the run from the British when he came to Japan and found shelter with the Black Dragon society. He helped his Japanese father-in-law open an Indian restaurant. Nakamurya, in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, apparently still serves an R B curry. Revolutionary cuisine, anyone?
(Carried in The Indian Express, November 2005)
The BS Column: Places of the Heart
Here are the last sentences of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memories of My Melancholy Whores:
The novel has been described as a fairy tale for the old, its narrator a journalist of insecure reputation who at the age of ninety, looks for a final love and finds it in a young virgin being initiated into the world's oldest profession.
But as with Garcia Marquez' most powerful work, it is deeply rooted in the life of the unnamed but identifiable city the "ugly, shy and anachronistic" narrator lives in. He knows the brothels with their cardboard partitions and the humid rooms set in groves of fruit trees; he knows the lanes where the belly-beat of brass bands thump out the time for a perpetual party, the irresistible storms that flood the streets, the jewellers' shops where women of the best families replace precious stones with coloured glass.
He writes of those places with intimacy and longing but without nostalgia. Last week, watching the crowds who had come to honour V K Madhavan Kutty, who died of a heart attack on Diwali in the same week as we lost Amrita Pritam, I thought of Garcia Marquez, the only writer I know who might have done justice to the moment.
Most of those assembled at Kerala House were there for V K Madhavan Kutty the journalist. His body was laid out in a clear plastic coffin-like case in the centre of the room, almost obscured by wreaths and bouquets piled up in little mounds. Everyone had a story to tell about his generosity, his humour, a regret to share about the suddenness of his death.
Like a few others in the crowd, I was there to honour V K Madhavan Kutty the writer. We knew him best for The Village Before Time , published in English under that title in 2000 and in Malayalam as A Feast of Memories in 1991. He had written a travelogue earlier, and he had toyed with the idea of writing about the plane crash that he survived, but that haunted his memories. He had come to writing late, and while his essays and articles were considerable, he had been frugal with full-length work. The Unspoken Curse , his new novel about a young woman shackled by tradition in a village near Kerala, had just come out; it was a sensitive work, set in a place he knew and described with intimate understanding.
I loved The Village Before Time for the same reason I loved Bibhutibhushan and R K Narayan and Mukundan's work. They set many of their books in the villages that they had grown up in and knew so well; but their recollections were free of sentimental nostalgia. Even Narayan's Malgudi was not an idealised world, nor was it recollected from a safe distance—all these writers claimed their worlds with perfect ease. In the Foreword to Village , Madhavan Kutty wrote: "I hoarded all the stories I came upon deep within me, and shared them with no one. Inevitably, many spilled out of that brimming treasure house and are now lost. But those that remain are still bright, untouched by rust." He was writing neither fiction nor memoir, but something in between: his stories were rooted in the real taravad of his memories, but the writer in him was free to add the detail missing from his recollections.
In his autobiography, the film director Elia Kazan wrote of the writers he knew—Steinbeck, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams among them—and of the fact that all of them knew where their material lay. Tennessee's best material came from his memories of the South; he was rooted in that territory; Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is one of the greatest novels of the land ever written; Miller's house for Willy Loman was the mirage the salesman carried with him everywhere he went.
The best writers know where their roots are, whether that is in the tarmac of a city or the soil of a village. V K Madhavan Kutty was just beginning to explore how deep those roots went in his fiction, when death claimed him.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 8, 2005)
"I was arranging my languishing papers, the inkwell, the goose quill, when the sun broke through the almond trees in the park and the river mail packet, a week late because of the drought, bellowed as it entered the canal in the port. It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday."
The novel has been described as a fairy tale for the old, its narrator a journalist of insecure reputation who at the age of ninety, looks for a final love and finds it in a young virgin being initiated into the world's oldest profession.
But as with Garcia Marquez' most powerful work, it is deeply rooted in the life of the unnamed but identifiable city the "ugly, shy and anachronistic" narrator lives in. He knows the brothels with their cardboard partitions and the humid rooms set in groves of fruit trees; he knows the lanes where the belly-beat of brass bands thump out the time for a perpetual party, the irresistible storms that flood the streets, the jewellers' shops where women of the best families replace precious stones with coloured glass.
He writes of those places with intimacy and longing but without nostalgia. Last week, watching the crowds who had come to honour V K Madhavan Kutty, who died of a heart attack on Diwali in the same week as we lost Amrita Pritam, I thought of Garcia Marquez, the only writer I know who might have done justice to the moment.
Most of those assembled at Kerala House were there for V K Madhavan Kutty the journalist. His body was laid out in a clear plastic coffin-like case in the centre of the room, almost obscured by wreaths and bouquets piled up in little mounds. Everyone had a story to tell about his generosity, his humour, a regret to share about the suddenness of his death.
Like a few others in the crowd, I was there to honour V K Madhavan Kutty the writer. We knew him best for The Village Before Time , published in English under that title in 2000 and in Malayalam as A Feast of Memories in 1991. He had written a travelogue earlier, and he had toyed with the idea of writing about the plane crash that he survived, but that haunted his memories. He had come to writing late, and while his essays and articles were considerable, he had been frugal with full-length work. The Unspoken Curse , his new novel about a young woman shackled by tradition in a village near Kerala, had just come out; it was a sensitive work, set in a place he knew and described with intimate understanding.
I loved The Village Before Time for the same reason I loved Bibhutibhushan and R K Narayan and Mukundan's work. They set many of their books in the villages that they had grown up in and knew so well; but their recollections were free of sentimental nostalgia. Even Narayan's Malgudi was not an idealised world, nor was it recollected from a safe distance—all these writers claimed their worlds with perfect ease. In the Foreword to Village , Madhavan Kutty wrote: "I hoarded all the stories I came upon deep within me, and shared them with no one. Inevitably, many spilled out of that brimming treasure house and are now lost. But those that remain are still bright, untouched by rust." He was writing neither fiction nor memoir, but something in between: his stories were rooted in the real taravad of his memories, but the writer in him was free to add the detail missing from his recollections.
In his autobiography, the film director Elia Kazan wrote of the writers he knew—Steinbeck, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams among them—and of the fact that all of them knew where their material lay. Tennessee's best material came from his memories of the South; he was rooted in that territory; Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is one of the greatest novels of the land ever written; Miller's house for Willy Loman was the mirage the salesman carried with him everywhere he went.
The best writers know where their roots are, whether that is in the tarmac of a city or the soil of a village. V K Madhavan Kutty was just beginning to explore how deep those roots went in his fiction, when death claimed him.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 8, 2005)
Last Word: In the ghetto
"Why do we need a Woman's Page?" a friend asked me recently. To her, a page marked 'Women' or 'Gender' is a tacit admission that there is no space for "women's issues" or "gender issues" in everyday, normal discourse.
And perhaps that admission is true. When I look at women's issues, as presented by activists, academics and thinkers, they seem to revolve around specific areas. Sexuality and reproductive health; marriage; earning equal wages; children and childcare issues; domestic rights and how to fight domestic violence; safety in the home, the workplace and the public world. All of these are deeply important issues—a woman who has no say in her sexual and reproductive choices, who cannot be free in the office, the home or on a public road, is half a human being.
But there's an unspoken corollary to this branding of certain spaces and certain issues as women's spaces, women's issues. It's a way of saying that women have no right to comment on other areas that might affect them just as strongly.
Every year when the Budget is discussed, for example, noises are made about making the Budget more "woman-friendly". This seems to translate into lower LPG prices, more tax breaks for women entrepreneurs in small businesses, with a few sops in education and health care thrown in. But I rarely hear arguments for cutting defence spending drastically in order to spend more money on enabling the education of young girls, for example; nor has there ever been a Finance Minister who has insisted that unequal wages for men and women working in the same field is a huge shame at the national level.
POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and similar laws often have the effect of drastically reducing women's freedoms and rights—but this is not often seen as a feminist issue. It takes an unusual gesture—the protest of Manipuri women last year, who stripped naked in order to draw attention to what POTA and laws like it were doing to their lives—to make us think about what effect ordinary, apparently non-gender specific laws might have on the lives of women.
In a different vein, the increasing demand for the Right to Information has not been seen as a gender issue. But if women had a genuine, unassailable right to information, and were able to access information comfortably, so much would change. If most women knew that they had an equal right to property, that they had a right to be paid the same wage as a man doing the same job, that they had a right to expect some recompense for looking after the family and bringing up children, and most important, that they had an absolute right to dignity, our society would be very different. Most of this information is coded in ways that many women find hard to decipher: wills, property deeds, tax laws, job contracts, share certificates, legal notices. But the battle for the Right to Information has been taken up by women's groups at the village level, and it is significant that in areas where information is freely available, that availability has changed the quality of the lives of women radically.
It would be nice to be able to do away with a gender page, or a focus on women's issues. But that would require a world where women's issues were intrinsically entwined with everyone's concerns, where recognising discrimination was as natural as breathing, and where equality was not just a distant concept, but a natural condition of who we are. And that world, unfortunately, is still a little distant.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
And perhaps that admission is true. When I look at women's issues, as presented by activists, academics and thinkers, they seem to revolve around specific areas. Sexuality and reproductive health; marriage; earning equal wages; children and childcare issues; domestic rights and how to fight domestic violence; safety in the home, the workplace and the public world. All of these are deeply important issues—a woman who has no say in her sexual and reproductive choices, who cannot be free in the office, the home or on a public road, is half a human being.
But there's an unspoken corollary to this branding of certain spaces and certain issues as women's spaces, women's issues. It's a way of saying that women have no right to comment on other areas that might affect them just as strongly.
Every year when the Budget is discussed, for example, noises are made about making the Budget more "woman-friendly". This seems to translate into lower LPG prices, more tax breaks for women entrepreneurs in small businesses, with a few sops in education and health care thrown in. But I rarely hear arguments for cutting defence spending drastically in order to spend more money on enabling the education of young girls, for example; nor has there ever been a Finance Minister who has insisted that unequal wages for men and women working in the same field is a huge shame at the national level.
POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and similar laws often have the effect of drastically reducing women's freedoms and rights—but this is not often seen as a feminist issue. It takes an unusual gesture—the protest of Manipuri women last year, who stripped naked in order to draw attention to what POTA and laws like it were doing to their lives—to make us think about what effect ordinary, apparently non-gender specific laws might have on the lives of women.
In a different vein, the increasing demand for the Right to Information has not been seen as a gender issue. But if women had a genuine, unassailable right to information, and were able to access information comfortably, so much would change. If most women knew that they had an equal right to property, that they had a right to be paid the same wage as a man doing the same job, that they had a right to expect some recompense for looking after the family and bringing up children, and most important, that they had an absolute right to dignity, our society would be very different. Most of this information is coded in ways that many women find hard to decipher: wills, property deeds, tax laws, job contracts, share certificates, legal notices. But the battle for the Right to Information has been taken up by women's groups at the village level, and it is significant that in areas where information is freely available, that availability has changed the quality of the lives of women radically.
It would be nice to be able to do away with a gender page, or a focus on women's issues. But that would require a world where women's issues were intrinsically entwined with everyone's concerns, where recognising discrimination was as natural as breathing, and where equality was not just a distant concept, but a natural condition of who we are. And that world, unfortunately, is still a little distant.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
The BS Column: Nirmal Verma
"Sometimes I think what we call our lives, our past, our history, brings us peace—no matter how painful it may have been to live. No matter how forbidding its terrain might have been, it is familiar country."
It was almost 40 years after Nirmal Verma had startled the Hindi literary world with 'Parinde' and the stories that marked the beginning of the Nayi Kahani movement that he wrote these lines in Antim Aranya (The Last Wilderness) . But the words he gave his narrator could have served as a personal philosophy of sorts for this most private of writers, who died last week in Delhi after a long illness.
He was a familiar and yet distant figure, a small, almost fragile, almost birdlike man who retained a quiet wall of silence between him and the world he observed with such care and understanding. The myth that has grown up around him over the years stresses the silence and the privacy, with good reason, but also stresses his ability to engage with the world—on his own terms. He was often called apolitical; though his essays, travelogues, novels and short stories explored the world of politics, it would be a very foolhardy critic who attempted to label Nirmal Verma, to pin him down as a socialist or a leftist or an espouser of any other ism.
But his quiet voice rang out several times over the years in support of the causes he truly believed in. He joined the Communist Party in his youth, and spent several years travelling in East Europe, many of them in Czechoslovakia. ("Kafka and Prague," he wrote, "in those day, the haunted dreams of one were strangely intermingled in my mind with the confused images of the other.")
What he saw and absorbed in that period made him critical of the politics of the Left in action; he gently criticized Bhisham Sahni, whose writings he admired greatly, for that great author's inability to see the flaws in Communism as clearly as he did. He wrote about the Free Tibet movement often, and lent his voice in support of their cause; they have lost a generous, open minded supporter in him. When India became the first country to ban The Satanic Verses , he raised his voice in support of Rushdie's right to write freely, while gently excoriating what he saw as Rushdie's distance from and ignorance of India. He was unequivocal, though, when he said that the Indian state had no business censoring writers.
In later years, many of his colleagues viewed Nirmal Verma's growing interest in Hindu philosophy and the underpinnings of Indian culture with dismay; he was accused, inaccurately, of being a soft supporter of Hindutva. His actual position is more accurately understood if you look at what he said when he was discussing the Rushdie ban in an interview: "There is a double standard of 'secularist modernity', both in public life as well as in the sphere of art. In Indian culture, there is no line of demarcation between sacred and profane. All art is sacred, precisely because it contains within itself all the profanities of worldly life. This traditional concept of the sacred, itself, should serve as the bedrock of genuine secular polity in our country."
To see a position as nuanced as this as an attack on secularism would be naïve; and naïve interlocutors would make little or no sense of Nirmal Verma's body of Jnanpith-award winning work. He was interested in human relationships, in how some of these were breaking down in the age of anomie, and what was emerging out of the wreckage. He explored the darker reaches of the human psyche, and the silent spaces between what people said and what they thought. The past has its own comfort to offer, he suggested, no matter how painful it might be to remember; and he was the ultimate poet of memory.
What I loved most about Nirmal Verma, perhaps, was the ease with which he moved between cultures; he was a translator as much as he was a writer. In one of his interviews, asked to name his favourite writers, he came up with this eclectic list of names: Simone Weil, Camus, Rilke, Orwell, Vaclav Havel, Toni Morrison, Chekov, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Agyeya, Virginia Woolf. It's just the list you would expect from a writer who was deeply rooted in his own culture, but who claimed the entire universe as his rightful terrain.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 1, 2005)
It was almost 40 years after Nirmal Verma had startled the Hindi literary world with 'Parinde' and the stories that marked the beginning of the Nayi Kahani movement that he wrote these lines in Antim Aranya (The Last Wilderness) . But the words he gave his narrator could have served as a personal philosophy of sorts for this most private of writers, who died last week in Delhi after a long illness.
He was a familiar and yet distant figure, a small, almost fragile, almost birdlike man who retained a quiet wall of silence between him and the world he observed with such care and understanding. The myth that has grown up around him over the years stresses the silence and the privacy, with good reason, but also stresses his ability to engage with the world—on his own terms. He was often called apolitical; though his essays, travelogues, novels and short stories explored the world of politics, it would be a very foolhardy critic who attempted to label Nirmal Verma, to pin him down as a socialist or a leftist or an espouser of any other ism.
But his quiet voice rang out several times over the years in support of the causes he truly believed in. He joined the Communist Party in his youth, and spent several years travelling in East Europe, many of them in Czechoslovakia. ("Kafka and Prague," he wrote, "in those day, the haunted dreams of one were strangely intermingled in my mind with the confused images of the other.")
What he saw and absorbed in that period made him critical of the politics of the Left in action; he gently criticized Bhisham Sahni, whose writings he admired greatly, for that great author's inability to see the flaws in Communism as clearly as he did. He wrote about the Free Tibet movement often, and lent his voice in support of their cause; they have lost a generous, open minded supporter in him. When India became the first country to ban The Satanic Verses , he raised his voice in support of Rushdie's right to write freely, while gently excoriating what he saw as Rushdie's distance from and ignorance of India. He was unequivocal, though, when he said that the Indian state had no business censoring writers.
In later years, many of his colleagues viewed Nirmal Verma's growing interest in Hindu philosophy and the underpinnings of Indian culture with dismay; he was accused, inaccurately, of being a soft supporter of Hindutva. His actual position is more accurately understood if you look at what he said when he was discussing the Rushdie ban in an interview: "There is a double standard of 'secularist modernity', both in public life as well as in the sphere of art. In Indian culture, there is no line of demarcation between sacred and profane. All art is sacred, precisely because it contains within itself all the profanities of worldly life. This traditional concept of the sacred, itself, should serve as the bedrock of genuine secular polity in our country."
To see a position as nuanced as this as an attack on secularism would be naïve; and naïve interlocutors would make little or no sense of Nirmal Verma's body of Jnanpith-award winning work. He was interested in human relationships, in how some of these were breaking down in the age of anomie, and what was emerging out of the wreckage. He explored the darker reaches of the human psyche, and the silent spaces between what people said and what they thought. The past has its own comfort to offer, he suggested, no matter how painful it might be to remember; and he was the ultimate poet of memory.
What I loved most about Nirmal Verma, perhaps, was the ease with which he moved between cultures; he was a translator as much as he was a writer. In one of his interviews, asked to name his favourite writers, he came up with this eclectic list of names: Simone Weil, Camus, Rilke, Orwell, Vaclav Havel, Toni Morrison, Chekov, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Agyeya, Virginia Woolf. It's just the list you would expect from a writer who was deeply rooted in his own culture, but who claimed the entire universe as his rightful terrain.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 1, 2005)
Bibliornithology
The best season for intellectual birdwatching is just after the rains, as the first signs of winter—garam chai and the city's patented smog, the colour and consistency of snot—appear. The only equipment you need as a fledgling bibliornithologist is a sharp pair of eyes, useful for spotting the discreet notice in the papers that says Professor Hugh Lee Famous is speaking at JNU or Dschool. Access to the flocks of bright-eyed babblers who run the bush telegraph, and a place high up enough in the pecking order not to have to fight for passes, also help.
This year, Professor Amartya Sen was among the early birds of passage to stop by Delhi. As previous migratory visitors, from Stephen Hawking to Vilyanur Ramachandran to Ben Okri, have discovered, Delhi's audience includes quantities of Restless Chattering Starlings. They need to be present at the first fifteen minutes of the lecture, speech, panel discussion or reading of anyone famous. Once their plumage has been admired, they move on to the feeding table at the nearest dinner, leaving large blank patches in what was initially a packed audience.
At the Sen lecture, though, it took 45 minutes before the first rustlings of departure interrupted the Nobel Prize winner's speech on the idea of India, something of a record for Delhi. His grand vision of a civilisation less wounded or divided than some might suppose went down well. And his belief in the argumentative tradition was justified by the number of Brainfever Birds who pecked, unsuccessfully, away at his logic after the speech.
Soon enough, the rest of the flying visits began. There was Lord Meghnad Desai, who gratified India and his publisher by marrying his editor last year, and who, like Sunil Khilnani, is becoming a regular on the circuit. Sir Vidia is missing this winter, but he dropped in earlier to endorse Tarun Tejpal's first novel. Salman Rushdie made more of a stir when he did a surprise reading of 'The Firebird', his new short story, dropping by as William Dalrymple's guest at the Oxford Bookstore. And the circuit's broadening—new faces included Thomas Friedman, who aired his flat world theory in front of a CII audience, Mike Marqusee, whose Bob Dylan book drew every ageing hippy in town out of their lairs, and Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari .
Of the visitors, the one and only bard of passage was Vikram Seth, who last gave an official reading after the publication of An Equal Music . So when he showed up to plug Two Lives at the Taj Mansingh recently, the Diwan-e-aam and khas were packed. The only guest who had breathingspace was an anonymous painter who had arrived with a huge canvas that depicted Seth against the cover of Two Lives , portrayed as a sort of reverse Dorian Gray, wizened, simian and with a sinister leer marking his features. But then that's another species Delhi specialises in at book readings—the Feather Brained Cuckoo.
It was when the terrifyingly sharp Umberto Eco made his maiden visit to India, though, that you saw the full complement out in force. There they were at the Alliance Francaise: the Bibulous Bulbuls, the Culture Vultures, the Page Three Mynah Birds, digging for gossip, the Greater Common Shrills, the caustic Butcher Birds, the Racket-Taled Drongos, the agreeable Wagtails, who never contradict or express an opinion. There were even a few Birds of Paradise, usually seen on the polo or fashion circuit where they're stalking bachelor pigeons ripe for the plucking.
Eco made his points about how text messaging may actually help return the next generation to the printed word, the survival of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the uses of mistranslation. It was only when an overexcited man declared, "You are just like Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer; he was as weighty round the waist as you," that he was even slightly ruffled. "Who was that?" he said genially.
Just a very odd bird. Their keepers let them out especially for readings. And no doubt, if Michael Ondaatje (already been here) or Amos Oz (never dropped by, but might) or other literary luminaries come by, they'll be there, ready to shake a tail feather.
(Published in Outlook City Limits)
This year, Professor Amartya Sen was among the early birds of passage to stop by Delhi. As previous migratory visitors, from Stephen Hawking to Vilyanur Ramachandran to Ben Okri, have discovered, Delhi's audience includes quantities of Restless Chattering Starlings. They need to be present at the first fifteen minutes of the lecture, speech, panel discussion or reading of anyone famous. Once their plumage has been admired, they move on to the feeding table at the nearest dinner, leaving large blank patches in what was initially a packed audience.
At the Sen lecture, though, it took 45 minutes before the first rustlings of departure interrupted the Nobel Prize winner's speech on the idea of India, something of a record for Delhi. His grand vision of a civilisation less wounded or divided than some might suppose went down well. And his belief in the argumentative tradition was justified by the number of Brainfever Birds who pecked, unsuccessfully, away at his logic after the speech.
Soon enough, the rest of the flying visits began. There was Lord Meghnad Desai, who gratified India and his publisher by marrying his editor last year, and who, like Sunil Khilnani, is becoming a regular on the circuit. Sir Vidia is missing this winter, but he dropped in earlier to endorse Tarun Tejpal's first novel. Salman Rushdie made more of a stir when he did a surprise reading of 'The Firebird', his new short story, dropping by as William Dalrymple's guest at the Oxford Bookstore. And the circuit's broadening—new faces included Thomas Friedman, who aired his flat world theory in front of a CII audience, Mike Marqusee, whose Bob Dylan book drew every ageing hippy in town out of their lairs, and Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari .
Of the visitors, the one and only bard of passage was Vikram Seth, who last gave an official reading after the publication of An Equal Music . So when he showed up to plug Two Lives at the Taj Mansingh recently, the Diwan-e-aam and khas were packed. The only guest who had breathingspace was an anonymous painter who had arrived with a huge canvas that depicted Seth against the cover of Two Lives , portrayed as a sort of reverse Dorian Gray, wizened, simian and with a sinister leer marking his features. But then that's another species Delhi specialises in at book readings—the Feather Brained Cuckoo.
It was when the terrifyingly sharp Umberto Eco made his maiden visit to India, though, that you saw the full complement out in force. There they were at the Alliance Francaise: the Bibulous Bulbuls, the Culture Vultures, the Page Three Mynah Birds, digging for gossip, the Greater Common Shrills, the caustic Butcher Birds, the Racket-Taled Drongos, the agreeable Wagtails, who never contradict or express an opinion. There were even a few Birds of Paradise, usually seen on the polo or fashion circuit where they're stalking bachelor pigeons ripe for the plucking.
Eco made his points about how text messaging may actually help return the next generation to the printed word, the survival of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the uses of mistranslation. It was only when an overexcited man declared, "You are just like Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer; he was as weighty round the waist as you," that he was even slightly ruffled. "Who was that?" he said genially.
Just a very odd bird. Their keepers let them out especially for readings. And no doubt, if Michael Ondaatje (already been here) or Amos Oz (never dropped by, but might) or other literary luminaries come by, they'll be there, ready to shake a tail feather.
(Published in Outlook City Limits)
The BS column: Umberto and the Tiger of Malaysia
Suspended by a 130-foot long cord, a giant pendulum swept back and forth across the halls of a basilica in Bologna, recreating Foucault's famous experiment. Perhaps the most famous of the assembled watchers there to testify that the world still rotates on its axis, as Foucault proved 154 years ago, was Umberto Eco.
This was on October 8, just two weeks before Eco's first vist to India. As we watched him turn a panel discussion into a superlative solo performance this Sunday, I thought of what the author of Foucault's Pendulum had said about Foucault's pendulum recently: ""We think of ourselves as a fixed point in the universe. But in fact, we are all 'gironzolini' [wandererers]."
Eco's reputation is such an imposing edifice—philosopher, semiotician, linguist, bestselling popular novelist—that the gentle reminders he issues from time to time are necessary. "I am a teller of tales," he's said in several interviews. He refers to the process of writing novels simply as "narrating", claiming an ancient link between today's most experimental writers and the oldest bards and griots. From The Island of the Day Before to The Name of the Rose to his most recent fictional work, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana , all his novels have been "books built of books".
Eco is speaking on knowledge exchanges between cultures, a topic that springs to life when he begins with an anecdote about a very famous gironzolini—Marco Polo. In his telling, even though Marco Polo was a man from a mercantile background, he must have known the legends of unicorns. On his travels in Asia and Africa, Marco Polo saw animals that looked like unicorns. "To be sure, they were black; their hooves were as big as elephant's hooves; and while the legend of unicorns says that the beasts could be captured by virgins, in whose laps they would lay their heads, these unicorns acted quite differently with any virgins they met." Polo had seen rhinoceri, not unicorns.
"We cannot say he did not tell the truth. He was the victim of his 'background books'." The question Eco wants to ask today is simple: "Can we travel without the background books?"
Afterwards, I ask him about his own "background books". This is tricky terrain. Eco's own library may not be as vast as the Borgesian one he created in The Name of the Rose (he paid tribute to Borges by naming his fictional librarian Jorges of Burgo). It is legendary, though. He lives in a remodelled hotel building in Milan, and has converted its long corridors into the shelves of his library. It contains over 30,000 books, and being Eco, he has read them all.
But the name he invokes is not what I expect at all. "I know your country through Sandokan," he says, his sharp eyes twinkling with mischief. He inherited a taste for popular literature—Verne, Dumas, Salgari--from his grandmother, who made no distinction between the literary and the dime-store novel, and perhaps this is what allows him to discourse as comfortably on porn films, blue jeans and mobile phones as semiotics and language theory today.
Indians remember Sandokan ("the Tiger of Malaysia") for the TV serial and Kabir Bedi's charms, but the books, by Emilio Salgari, were quite astonishing. Salgari was no traveller—the longest journey he undertook is said to have been an Adriatic cruise—but this didn't prevent him from setting the Sandokan books in exotic locations. Sandokan was an early anti-imperialist, a Robin Hood-style pirate whose war against the agents of Empire takes him to Malaysia, the Caribbean, and even to the Sunderbans where the Thugs are doing their bit to strangle the forces of imperialism, all too literally.
So Umberto Eco's favourite "background books" on India are these swashbuckling epics of exoticisation where the hero faces Black Jungles or embarks on Kohinoor-inspired quests. (This is no barrier for him; he can still, listening to bad translations from Sanskrit, one of the few languages he doesn't have under his considerable belt, discern the shape of the original.) And I love the idea that stories about river pirates and warriors against the East India Company would have travelled far enough to reach an Italian popular novelist who never saw the country himself, and then have travelled down the ages to reach the man who would become one of the greatest public intellectuals of his time. We are all gironzoloni, of one kind or another.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, October 25, 2005)
This was on October 8, just two weeks before Eco's first vist to India. As we watched him turn a panel discussion into a superlative solo performance this Sunday, I thought of what the author of Foucault's Pendulum had said about Foucault's pendulum recently: ""We think of ourselves as a fixed point in the universe. But in fact, we are all 'gironzolini' [wandererers]."
Eco's reputation is such an imposing edifice—philosopher, semiotician, linguist, bestselling popular novelist—that the gentle reminders he issues from time to time are necessary. "I am a teller of tales," he's said in several interviews. He refers to the process of writing novels simply as "narrating", claiming an ancient link between today's most experimental writers and the oldest bards and griots. From The Island of the Day Before to The Name of the Rose to his most recent fictional work, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana , all his novels have been "books built of books".
Eco is speaking on knowledge exchanges between cultures, a topic that springs to life when he begins with an anecdote about a very famous gironzolini—Marco Polo. In his telling, even though Marco Polo was a man from a mercantile background, he must have known the legends of unicorns. On his travels in Asia and Africa, Marco Polo saw animals that looked like unicorns. "To be sure, they were black; their hooves were as big as elephant's hooves; and while the legend of unicorns says that the beasts could be captured by virgins, in whose laps they would lay their heads, these unicorns acted quite differently with any virgins they met." Polo had seen rhinoceri, not unicorns.
"We cannot say he did not tell the truth. He was the victim of his 'background books'." The question Eco wants to ask today is simple: "Can we travel without the background books?"
Afterwards, I ask him about his own "background books". This is tricky terrain. Eco's own library may not be as vast as the Borgesian one he created in The Name of the Rose (he paid tribute to Borges by naming his fictional librarian Jorges of Burgo). It is legendary, though. He lives in a remodelled hotel building in Milan, and has converted its long corridors into the shelves of his library. It contains over 30,000 books, and being Eco, he has read them all.
But the name he invokes is not what I expect at all. "I know your country through Sandokan," he says, his sharp eyes twinkling with mischief. He inherited a taste for popular literature—Verne, Dumas, Salgari--from his grandmother, who made no distinction between the literary and the dime-store novel, and perhaps this is what allows him to discourse as comfortably on porn films, blue jeans and mobile phones as semiotics and language theory today.
Indians remember Sandokan ("the Tiger of Malaysia") for the TV serial and Kabir Bedi's charms, but the books, by Emilio Salgari, were quite astonishing. Salgari was no traveller—the longest journey he undertook is said to have been an Adriatic cruise—but this didn't prevent him from setting the Sandokan books in exotic locations. Sandokan was an early anti-imperialist, a Robin Hood-style pirate whose war against the agents of Empire takes him to Malaysia, the Caribbean, and even to the Sunderbans where the Thugs are doing their bit to strangle the forces of imperialism, all too literally.
So Umberto Eco's favourite "background books" on India are these swashbuckling epics of exoticisation where the hero faces Black Jungles or embarks on Kohinoor-inspired quests. (This is no barrier for him; he can still, listening to bad translations from Sanskrit, one of the few languages he doesn't have under his considerable belt, discern the shape of the original.) And I love the idea that stories about river pirates and warriors against the East India Company would have travelled far enough to reach an Italian popular novelist who never saw the country himself, and then have travelled down the ages to reach the man who would become one of the greatest public intellectuals of his time. We are all gironzoloni, of one kind or another.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, October 25, 2005)
Last Word: Get Ripped
Don't tell me about the success of Fair and Handsome skin whitening cream for men. Don't send me any more news stories about the growing industry in whisky facials or cucumber under-eye treatment for the metrosexual Indian male. And don't tell me about the hordes who're flocking to cooking classes, getting in touch with their softer side, or learning it's okay to wear pink and magenta.
The truth is that equality between men and women will only be achieved when they join us in the nastier rites of beauty. Skin whitening creams? All that they prove is that men are just as capable of being brainwashed as the erstwhile fairer sex into believing that you can have any colour of skin you like, so long as it's white.
I deplore this, as the authors of our epics and shashtras would have. They waxed lyrical about the allure of skin with the glow of the evening sky, skin with the eloquent darkness of rain clouds, skin the exact shade of rich, fertile earth under the plough, all shades we're being persuaded to discard for a uniform shade of bland wheatishness. And all I have to say about facials, aside from the fact that men who shave regularly need them more than most women, is that they require no effort on the part of the customer.
For men who're celebrating the new metrosexuality, or trying to get in touch with their feminine side, I have two words: bikini wax. We'll set aside the minor rites of beauty for the moment. Colonic irrigation is merely stomach-churning, but Gandhi led the way for generations of men to come. Threading is mildly painful, whether you're doing it to your eyebrows (chiefly women), your moustache (chiefly women) or your chest hair (some men); waxing arms and legs or the chest is uncomfortable; but in terms of surviving serious pain, the bikini wax has to be at the top of the list.
This form of sanctioned torture has been around since ancient times, when early writers of treatises on female beauty urged women to use mixtures of honey and sugar to "remove the weeds from the garden". In the last century, bikini waxing returned with a vengeance when Brazil shrank the swimsuit down to dental floss size.
It's one of the enigmas of fashion that the shrinking bikini didn't actually make the public display of pubic hair trendy. At different times, it has been considered appropriate to display various areas of the human body seen as taboo in other eras—we think nothing of displaying ankles or calves, but the Victorians would have swooned in shock at a glimpse of either. Given the recent trend towards "butt cleavage", it is surprising that the Brazilian style eschewed displaying hair down there in favour of ripping it out by the roots in a region of the body known for its extraordinarily high numbers of sensitive nerve endings.
The metrosexual man has caught up with his female counterpart in several areas. Hair styling, skin care and wardrobe changes are only the most obvious signs—the real change has been, more positively, in areas like sharing parenting skills, being more emotionally open and less attached to traditional male roles. But here's a tip for today's man. Skin lotions and fairness creams are surface stuff. You really want to be in touch with today's women? Get those Calvin Kleins off, let the waxing begin, and trust me—you'll feel our pain.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, October 2005)
The truth is that equality between men and women will only be achieved when they join us in the nastier rites of beauty. Skin whitening creams? All that they prove is that men are just as capable of being brainwashed as the erstwhile fairer sex into believing that you can have any colour of skin you like, so long as it's white.
I deplore this, as the authors of our epics and shashtras would have. They waxed lyrical about the allure of skin with the glow of the evening sky, skin with the eloquent darkness of rain clouds, skin the exact shade of rich, fertile earth under the plough, all shades we're being persuaded to discard for a uniform shade of bland wheatishness. And all I have to say about facials, aside from the fact that men who shave regularly need them more than most women, is that they require no effort on the part of the customer.
For men who're celebrating the new metrosexuality, or trying to get in touch with their feminine side, I have two words: bikini wax. We'll set aside the minor rites of beauty for the moment. Colonic irrigation is merely stomach-churning, but Gandhi led the way for generations of men to come. Threading is mildly painful, whether you're doing it to your eyebrows (chiefly women), your moustache (chiefly women) or your chest hair (some men); waxing arms and legs or the chest is uncomfortable; but in terms of surviving serious pain, the bikini wax has to be at the top of the list.
This form of sanctioned torture has been around since ancient times, when early writers of treatises on female beauty urged women to use mixtures of honey and sugar to "remove the weeds from the garden". In the last century, bikini waxing returned with a vengeance when Brazil shrank the swimsuit down to dental floss size.
It's one of the enigmas of fashion that the shrinking bikini didn't actually make the public display of pubic hair trendy. At different times, it has been considered appropriate to display various areas of the human body seen as taboo in other eras—we think nothing of displaying ankles or calves, but the Victorians would have swooned in shock at a glimpse of either. Given the recent trend towards "butt cleavage", it is surprising that the Brazilian style eschewed displaying hair down there in favour of ripping it out by the roots in a region of the body known for its extraordinarily high numbers of sensitive nerve endings.
The metrosexual man has caught up with his female counterpart in several areas. Hair styling, skin care and wardrobe changes are only the most obvious signs—the real change has been, more positively, in areas like sharing parenting skills, being more emotionally open and less attached to traditional male roles. But here's a tip for today's man. Skin lotions and fairness creams are surface stuff. You really want to be in touch with today's women? Get those Calvin Kleins off, let the waxing begin, and trust me—you'll feel our pain.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, October 2005)
Speaking Volumes: The One About Pinter
The audience had been queuing for an hour in order to hear Harold Pinter speak at Edinburgh. This was 2002; the Iraq invasion was in progress and phrases like "freedom-loving people" and "axis of evil" were the common currency of the day.
Pinter had just recovered from major surgery for cancer of the oesophagus, and written a poem—Cancer Cells—to celebrate, his first published poem in decades. We expected him to speak about his fight with cancer, which he did, eloquently and movingly. And then he moved on to the matter of the US war in Iraq, and made his strong opposition perfectly clear. Pinter likened Tony Blair's plans to bomb Iraq to an act of "premeditated murder". He spoke of the war as an exercise in power, he spoke of the silence and acceptance that greeted the ritualised killing of people outside the "Western world" and he said: "I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse."
In the three years since his Edinburgh comeback, Pinter has kept that promise. He has heckled Bush and Blair, campaigned against the war, and written cheerfully obscene poetry slamming the US army's tactics in Iraq.
This record has helped many see the 2005 Nobel, awarded to Pinter last week, as one of the most politically charged decisions in the history of the literature Prize. The Nobel announcement was delayed by a week; there was speculation that the Academy was considering Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who's in trouble for speaking out against the Armenian genocide. (Turkey officially refuses to accept that the mass killings of Armenians occurred on the scale on which Pamuk and other observers point to, and refuses to call those murders genocide.) There is now much speculation, as one commentator put it, that this year's Prize is a rebuke to America, an anti-US Nobel.
To see the Prize simply as a politically correct decision would be to overlook Pinter's work. That would be naïve: I cannot see how you could possibly look at this century in theatre—and film—and ignore Harold Pinter's contribution. (He would probably be amused to know that in Calcutta theatre troupes, a standard stage direction was: "Aaro Pinteresque deen, dada!", meaning that more Pinteresque pauses were necessary.)
His first two plays, The Room and The Birthday Party , were ahead of their time. Their themes would eventually become familiar, much-imitated cliches of the stage—the damage that families inflict on each other, the struggle for power in everyday domestic life, the power of obsession, violence and the erotic, all of this presented by a man who had a gift for listening to the silences that lie between the lines. The Birthday Party ran for just a week, initially, before being taken off, and Pinter tells of how he met an usher on his way to one of the last performances. She asked who he was; he said he was the author. "Oh, are you?" she said. "Oh, you poor darling."
The late Samuel Beckett, who greeted his Nobel Prize with dismay rather than Pinter's expletive-laden exclamation of delight, had rather less trouble than those early audiences in recognising his younger colleague's talent. He and Pinter met often; I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Edward Albee, Beckett and Pinter spent a long evening in a pub discussing the Marquis de Sade—the three great chroniclers of the absurdities of modern times on the life of the sensualist who took the pursuit of pleasure to lengths beyond the absurd. Pinter sent Beckett his plays, in typescript, and Beckett reserved a special place in his library for Pinter's dedication copies.
Pinter's plays, from The Room to Ashes to Ashes and Remembrances of Things Past are still performed today. If you've seen the film versions of The Comfort of Strangers, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial or The Last Tycoon , to name just a few of his adaptations, you know that he is also one of the greatest screenplay writers of our time.
What I'm looking at is not the work, or the man, but at his signature: Harold Pinter, scrawled in a bold, unwavering hand right across the page, the letters large and uncompromising. That signature, the mark of the author, the political protestor, the man who refuses to back down, is scrawled all across the 20th century.
Pinter had just recovered from major surgery for cancer of the oesophagus, and written a poem—Cancer Cells—to celebrate, his first published poem in decades. We expected him to speak about his fight with cancer, which he did, eloquently and movingly. And then he moved on to the matter of the US war in Iraq, and made his strong opposition perfectly clear. Pinter likened Tony Blair's plans to bomb Iraq to an act of "premeditated murder". He spoke of the war as an exercise in power, he spoke of the silence and acceptance that greeted the ritualised killing of people outside the "Western world" and he said: "I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse."
In the three years since his Edinburgh comeback, Pinter has kept that promise. He has heckled Bush and Blair, campaigned against the war, and written cheerfully obscene poetry slamming the US army's tactics in Iraq.
This record has helped many see the 2005 Nobel, awarded to Pinter last week, as one of the most politically charged decisions in the history of the literature Prize. The Nobel announcement was delayed by a week; there was speculation that the Academy was considering Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who's in trouble for speaking out against the Armenian genocide. (Turkey officially refuses to accept that the mass killings of Armenians occurred on the scale on which Pamuk and other observers point to, and refuses to call those murders genocide.) There is now much speculation, as one commentator put it, that this year's Prize is a rebuke to America, an anti-US Nobel.
To see the Prize simply as a politically correct decision would be to overlook Pinter's work. That would be naïve: I cannot see how you could possibly look at this century in theatre—and film—and ignore Harold Pinter's contribution. (He would probably be amused to know that in Calcutta theatre troupes, a standard stage direction was: "Aaro Pinteresque deen, dada!", meaning that more Pinteresque pauses were necessary.)
His first two plays, The Room and The Birthday Party , were ahead of their time. Their themes would eventually become familiar, much-imitated cliches of the stage—the damage that families inflict on each other, the struggle for power in everyday domestic life, the power of obsession, violence and the erotic, all of this presented by a man who had a gift for listening to the silences that lie between the lines. The Birthday Party ran for just a week, initially, before being taken off, and Pinter tells of how he met an usher on his way to one of the last performances. She asked who he was; he said he was the author. "Oh, are you?" she said. "Oh, you poor darling."
The late Samuel Beckett, who greeted his Nobel Prize with dismay rather than Pinter's expletive-laden exclamation of delight, had rather less trouble than those early audiences in recognising his younger colleague's talent. He and Pinter met often; I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Edward Albee, Beckett and Pinter spent a long evening in a pub discussing the Marquis de Sade—the three great chroniclers of the absurdities of modern times on the life of the sensualist who took the pursuit of pleasure to lengths beyond the absurd. Pinter sent Beckett his plays, in typescript, and Beckett reserved a special place in his library for Pinter's dedication copies.
Pinter's plays, from The Room to Ashes to Ashes and Remembrances of Things Past are still performed today. If you've seen the film versions of The Comfort of Strangers, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial or The Last Tycoon , to name just a few of his adaptations, you know that he is also one of the greatest screenplay writers of our time.
What I'm looking at is not the work, or the man, but at his signature: Harold Pinter, scrawled in a bold, unwavering hand right across the page, the letters large and uncompromising. That signature, the mark of the author, the political protestor, the man who refuses to back down, is scrawled all across the 20th century.
Last Word: Jobs for the girls
Among the film star posters and portraits of goddesses on the wall of her room, Mumtaz has an unusual exhibit: a picture of the women drivers who handle Maruti's factory cars. Mumtaz has spent her entire life in Delhi's slums, but her parents are determined to build a better future for her. They want her to work in a beauty salon, perhaps as a clerk.
"Didi, I want to drive," Mumtaz tells me. A ragpicker friend saw the glossy magazine that had carried the story on Maruti's women drivers and sneaked it out for her. Mumtaz got her teacher to read out the story. Now she knows it by heart. She can tell you that Maruti was initially sceptical about employing women as drivers: driving cars from the factory to various showrooms is a gruelling job, and drivers are typically expected to make between 15 and 20 trips a day.
It was a pioneering woman Air Force officer who backed the first women drivers. Maruti was enthusiastic when they discovered that the women spent less time goofing off. The male drivers were mocking, then resentful; now they've moved towards acceptance. Maruti might hire more women for the job. Mumtaz wants to be one of them.
When you think of women breaking through the glass ceiling, the conventional image is of a businesswoman storming boardroom barricades, a politician building a power base in Parliament. But real change happens in other, less visible areas.
Like the petrol pump near Nizamuddin that was staffed by women. When I drove up one day to discover that men were manning the pumps, I assumed the experiment hadn't worked. Quite the contrary, the manager told me. It had been so successful that the women's team at the pump were now busy training other groups of women to do the job.
Or the women priests who're demanding the right to address their god themselves. The Catholic Church is debating the issue. Last year, women clerics led prayers in mosques across the Muslim world. And while Hindu women priests may find Durga Puja gigs hard to come by, their presence is in demand at weddings, at family pujas, even at cremations.
For years, the construction business has been gender-skewed. A casual observer would assume that it's not, given the number of women migrants who work on building sites. But the jobs women do are the least skilled, the worst paid: shifting rubble, lifting bricks, clearing dust and sand. Even whitewashing and bricklaying are male preserves. On a Noida building site, though, I stopped to chat with women who were doing the scaffolding and the bricklaying. Munni Devi had begun this work when her husband started drinking too heavily to do it himself; she got him to teach her, then she taught other women. "The foreman didn't like it," she said. "But we do the work faster and better, so he's happy enough."
They know how temporary and tenuous their jobs are, but they've got used to the work—"not so boring!"—and the higher pay. On the next job, they'll be looking for a company and a foreman who can use them. "Look at you," says Munni Devi, pointing to my car. "You drive like a man. No problem, na? So no problem for us, too." And maybe someday, Mumtaz will post a picture of a woman operating cranes and bulldozers alongside her women drivers, expanding the circle of her dreams.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, October 2005)
"Didi, I want to drive," Mumtaz tells me. A ragpicker friend saw the glossy magazine that had carried the story on Maruti's women drivers and sneaked it out for her. Mumtaz got her teacher to read out the story. Now she knows it by heart. She can tell you that Maruti was initially sceptical about employing women as drivers: driving cars from the factory to various showrooms is a gruelling job, and drivers are typically expected to make between 15 and 20 trips a day.
It was a pioneering woman Air Force officer who backed the first women drivers. Maruti was enthusiastic when they discovered that the women spent less time goofing off. The male drivers were mocking, then resentful; now they've moved towards acceptance. Maruti might hire more women for the job. Mumtaz wants to be one of them.
When you think of women breaking through the glass ceiling, the conventional image is of a businesswoman storming boardroom barricades, a politician building a power base in Parliament. But real change happens in other, less visible areas.
Like the petrol pump near Nizamuddin that was staffed by women. When I drove up one day to discover that men were manning the pumps, I assumed the experiment hadn't worked. Quite the contrary, the manager told me. It had been so successful that the women's team at the pump were now busy training other groups of women to do the job.
Or the women priests who're demanding the right to address their god themselves. The Catholic Church is debating the issue. Last year, women clerics led prayers in mosques across the Muslim world. And while Hindu women priests may find Durga Puja gigs hard to come by, their presence is in demand at weddings, at family pujas, even at cremations.
For years, the construction business has been gender-skewed. A casual observer would assume that it's not, given the number of women migrants who work on building sites. But the jobs women do are the least skilled, the worst paid: shifting rubble, lifting bricks, clearing dust and sand. Even whitewashing and bricklaying are male preserves. On a Noida building site, though, I stopped to chat with women who were doing the scaffolding and the bricklaying. Munni Devi had begun this work when her husband started drinking too heavily to do it himself; she got him to teach her, then she taught other women. "The foreman didn't like it," she said. "But we do the work faster and better, so he's happy enough."
They know how temporary and tenuous their jobs are, but they've got used to the work—"not so boring!"—and the higher pay. On the next job, they'll be looking for a company and a foreman who can use them. "Look at you," says Munni Devi, pointing to my car. "You drive like a man. No problem, na? So no problem for us, too." And maybe someday, Mumtaz will post a picture of a woman operating cranes and bulldozers alongside her women drivers, expanding the circle of her dreams.
(Carried in The Kolkata Telegraph, October 2005)
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Chicken run: The IIPM affair (2)
This was the second post:
Consider this. A youth magazine runs a standard feature checking out the very tall claims made by an institute that offers high-priced management degrees. The claims don’t check out; the magazine prints its findings. The institute sues the magazine. It sues the magazine’s editor. Vicious and obscene comments pop up on her blog. A set of fake blogs praising the institute appear from nowhere. Another blogger comments on the institute and, substantiating his rhetoric, calls its claims “crap”. He gets sued. Then the institute complains to the organisation he works for about the posts he’s made in his personal capacity; then it threatens that its students will burn the laptops provided by that organisation. Gaurav Sabnis, the blogger in question, decides to quit rather than cause his organisation more grief—or back down on his posts.
This is what IIPM wants.
A ban on any criticism, however valid, of its claims, its facilities, and the worth of the degrees it provides. It doesn’t want students evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want a student magazine evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want bloggers evaluating any of this.
And I’m thinking, for an institute that’s supposed to specialise in management, they haven’t done a very good job, have they?
Because until Bansal was barracked on her blog by a bunch of perverts, until she and JAM had lawsuits chucked at them, until Sabnis was sent legal notices and then forced to choose between his job and his beliefs, the truth is that I didn’t really think much about IIPM or what they stood for or their claims or whether they were any good.
Now I’m very, very interested. And so is DesiPundit, who's been holding the reins of the campaign for free speech. And India Uncut. And the whole bunch of Indian bloggers named in DesiPundit's post.
Now we really do want to know what makes IIPM tick. And what makes it think it’s going to get away with using bluster, force and blackmail to shut down the right of every Indian citizen to discuss, dissect and, occasionally, dismiss a public institution.
Gaurav Sabnis didn’t lose his job because he’d done anything wrong. All he did was to call IIPM on its claims and suggest you really might want to look at its claims very hard before you applied for admission or sent your kids there.
He didn’t lose his job because his organisation told him they couldn’t deal with the pressure, even though it was clear that IBM was worried about where this was heading: IIPM’s threats weren’t, shall we say, on the level that constitutes a civilised discussion.
He lost his job because a bully said, I’m going to twist your arm till you take down those posts, because I don’t like what you said, and most of all because I can. And Gaurav’s response was to see to it that IBM didn’t get hurt, and to say, No, you can’t. I won’t let you.
I know how much anger this issue is going to raise. I know that some of our responses are going to be off the wall, I know that it takes considerable restraint to keep the rant nice and pure and invective-free.
But in the end, there are just two things to remember. One is that every citizen of this country has a right to express his opinion, that IIPM is trying to shut down free speech, and that it would be very, very nice if every blogger from India saw to it that we made their job that much harder for them.
And the second is that Gaurav Sabnis is standing up for his principles in one of the hardest ways any of us can. Give him all the support you can provide. IIPM doesn’t just owe him an apology; it owes him his life back.
Consider this. A youth magazine runs a standard feature checking out the very tall claims made by an institute that offers high-priced management degrees. The claims don’t check out; the magazine prints its findings. The institute sues the magazine. It sues the magazine’s editor. Vicious and obscene comments pop up on her blog. A set of fake blogs praising the institute appear from nowhere. Another blogger comments on the institute and, substantiating his rhetoric, calls its claims “crap”. He gets sued. Then the institute complains to the organisation he works for about the posts he’s made in his personal capacity; then it threatens that its students will burn the laptops provided by that organisation. Gaurav Sabnis, the blogger in question, decides to quit rather than cause his organisation more grief—or back down on his posts.
This is what IIPM wants.
A ban on any criticism, however valid, of its claims, its facilities, and the worth of the degrees it provides. It doesn’t want students evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want a student magazine evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want bloggers evaluating any of this.
And I’m thinking, for an institute that’s supposed to specialise in management, they haven’t done a very good job, have they?
Because until Bansal was barracked on her blog by a bunch of perverts, until she and JAM had lawsuits chucked at them, until Sabnis was sent legal notices and then forced to choose between his job and his beliefs, the truth is that I didn’t really think much about IIPM or what they stood for or their claims or whether they were any good.
Now I’m very, very interested. And so is DesiPundit, who's been holding the reins of the campaign for free speech. And India Uncut. And the whole bunch of Indian bloggers named in DesiPundit's post.
Now we really do want to know what makes IIPM tick. And what makes it think it’s going to get away with using bluster, force and blackmail to shut down the right of every Indian citizen to discuss, dissect and, occasionally, dismiss a public institution.
Gaurav Sabnis didn’t lose his job because he’d done anything wrong. All he did was to call IIPM on its claims and suggest you really might want to look at its claims very hard before you applied for admission or sent your kids there.
He didn’t lose his job because his organisation told him they couldn’t deal with the pressure, even though it was clear that IBM was worried about where this was heading: IIPM’s threats weren’t, shall we say, on the level that constitutes a civilised discussion.
He lost his job because a bully said, I’m going to twist your arm till you take down those posts, because I don’t like what you said, and most of all because I can. And Gaurav’s response was to see to it that IBM didn’t get hurt, and to say, No, you can’t. I won’t let you.
I know how much anger this issue is going to raise. I know that some of our responses are going to be off the wall, I know that it takes considerable restraint to keep the rant nice and pure and invective-free.
But in the end, there are just two things to remember. One is that every citizen of this country has a right to express his opinion, that IIPM is trying to shut down free speech, and that it would be very, very nice if every blogger from India saw to it that we made their job that much harder for them.
And the second is that Gaurav Sabnis is standing up for his principles in one of the hardest ways any of us can. Give him all the support you can provide. IIPM doesn’t just owe him an apology; it owes him his life back.
Chicken run: The IIPM affair
(Crossposted on Kitabkhana. India Uncut, DesiPundit and Sambhar Mafia were the first to speak out and have been monitoring the situation; Gaurav Sabnis' Vantage Point is here, Rashmi Bansal's Youth Curry is here.)
This was the first post. It's just a summary of what's been happening; please do visit the blogs listed above for the full story.
It started off innocuously. JAM Mag, aimed at teenagers and college students, has a regular feature called MBA Corner. Some months ago, it evaluated IIPM, the institute run by Arindam Chaudhuri, which claims to be one of the top ten B-schools in India. JAM’s correspondent discovered that the rankings IIPM used in its ad were taken from the Outlook-C fore rankings in 2003. The C fore website says: “IIPM has been removed from ranking as we received serious complaints about the veracity of information given by them.” JAM asked: “So how can IIPM continue using these rankings, AFTER they’ve been removed from them?” JAM also reported that many of IIPM's other claims were dubious, to say the least.
In June, Rashmi Bansal, who edits and publishes JAM, mentioned the story on her blog, Youth Curry. Among the responses it drew were two vitriolic responses from people who seemed to have fake IDs; one said she was an IIPM student, the other called himself Real Gaurav Sabnis, referring to another blogger who had also posted about IIPM.
In August, Gaurav Sabnis, who runs Vantage Point, posted about IIPM. He wrote:
“You all must have seen full-page IIPM ads in all national dailies, asking student to "dare to dream beyond the IIMs". If one went by the ads, one could be forgiven for thinking that IIPM is the institute with the best possible infrastructure, faculty, and placements in the country.
Scratch a bit and you realise what a load of crap it all is.”
Quoting, mind you, from the company’s own ads, he noted:
“At the end of every IIPM ad, there is a fine print which goes -
IIPM conducts its own programmes in Planning & Entrepreneurship (a non professional course) and does not teach any foreign institute’s courses... The MBA/BBA degrees are conferred by IMI, Europe and is internationally renowned and does not come under the purview of AICTE, UGC or other state acts.
Which means the so-called MBAs from IIPM are not even MBAs."
On 6th October, Sabnis received, and posted, a “legal notice” from IIPM that had him almost falling off his chair laughing.
(I particularly liked the lawyer’s demand that Sabnis “Refrain in the future from releasing any news item containing IIPM's reference without the prior explicit written approval of IIPM.” Wow. So now colleges get to censor their own news? Even the PM can't do that!)
On October 10, Sabnis posted. IIPM had been in touch again. IIPM, incidentally, has very serious marketing muscle. It appears it's not shy about using it.
In response to Sabnis' posts about IIPM, posts in which he’d raised very legitimate questions about the institute’s claims and functioning, guess what IIPM had done? They’d gone after his employer, IBM.
Writes Sabnis: “But apparently, the Dean of IIPM wrote [a senior colleague at IBM] a mail saying that the IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted, then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes, that's right. Burn laptops!”
His superiors and colleagues at IBM didn’t ask him to remove the posts. They didn’t ask him to resign. But Gaurav, faced with a pretty serious dilemma, thought it through and made his decision. He didn’t want to remove the posts; as a citizen, he felt he had the right to comment on the functioning of an institution of learning. Nor did he want to drag IBM, an organisation that had treated him well, into this ugly mess. So, he quit his job.
This was the first post. It's just a summary of what's been happening; please do visit the blogs listed above for the full story.
It started off innocuously. JAM Mag, aimed at teenagers and college students, has a regular feature called MBA Corner. Some months ago, it evaluated IIPM, the institute run by Arindam Chaudhuri, which claims to be one of the top ten B-schools in India. JAM’s correspondent discovered that the rankings IIPM used in its ad were taken from the Outlook-C fore rankings in 2003. The C fore website says: “IIPM has been removed from ranking as we received serious complaints about the veracity of information given by them.” JAM asked: “So how can IIPM continue using these rankings, AFTER they’ve been removed from them?” JAM also reported that many of IIPM's other claims were dubious, to say the least.
In June, Rashmi Bansal, who edits and publishes JAM, mentioned the story on her blog, Youth Curry. Among the responses it drew were two vitriolic responses from people who seemed to have fake IDs; one said she was an IIPM student, the other called himself Real Gaurav Sabnis, referring to another blogger who had also posted about IIPM.
In August, Gaurav Sabnis, who runs Vantage Point, posted about IIPM. He wrote:
“You all must have seen full-page IIPM ads in all national dailies, asking student to "dare to dream beyond the IIMs". If one went by the ads, one could be forgiven for thinking that IIPM is the institute with the best possible infrastructure, faculty, and placements in the country.
Scratch a bit and you realise what a load of crap it all is.”
Quoting, mind you, from the company’s own ads, he noted:
“At the end of every IIPM ad, there is a fine print which goes -
IIPM conducts its own programmes in Planning & Entrepreneurship (a non professional course) and does not teach any foreign institute’s courses... The MBA/BBA degrees are conferred by IMI, Europe and is internationally renowned and does not come under the purview of AICTE, UGC or other state acts.
Which means the so-called MBAs from IIPM are not even MBAs."
On 6th October, Sabnis received, and posted, a “legal notice” from IIPM that had him almost falling off his chair laughing.
(I particularly liked the lawyer’s demand that Sabnis “Refrain in the future from releasing any news item containing IIPM's reference without the prior explicit written approval of IIPM.” Wow. So now colleges get to censor their own news? Even the PM can't do that!)
On October 10, Sabnis posted. IIPM had been in touch again. IIPM, incidentally, has very serious marketing muscle. It appears it's not shy about using it.
In response to Sabnis' posts about IIPM, posts in which he’d raised very legitimate questions about the institute’s claims and functioning, guess what IIPM had done? They’d gone after his employer, IBM.
Writes Sabnis: “But apparently, the Dean of IIPM wrote [a senior colleague at IBM] a mail saying that the IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted, then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes, that's right. Burn laptops!”
His superiors and colleagues at IBM didn’t ask him to remove the posts. They didn’t ask him to resign. But Gaurav, faced with a pretty serious dilemma, thought it through and made his decision. He didn’t want to remove the posts; as a citizen, he felt he had the right to comment on the functioning of an institution of learning. Nor did he want to drag IBM, an organisation that had treated him well, into this ugly mess. So, he quit his job.
The BS Column: The Booker shocker
(There I was up at 4 am IST waiting to see who'd win the Booker, thinking I had all the bases covered: Ishiguro was my frontrunner for this year's prize, Barnes my backup and I had outside bets on Smith n' Smith. And they gave it to Banville--great writer, wrong year--for a book only a critic could love? Sheesh.)
There's just one question I have for this year's Booker judges: what were they smoking?
I come not to bury John Banville. Banville is an honourable writer, an austere but impeccable critic. It's true that his books remind me a bit of Gerald Durrell's description of Argentinian tangos: this one is about a man who is grieving, he is very sad and he asks the meaning of life; this one is about a man who has suffered, he is very sad and he asks the meaning of life; the next one is, well, the same. But the quality and the depth of his prose, the weight of experience with which he writes, these always carry me through.
There is no doubt that John Banville deserves the respect of his peers. To use that nasty phrase literature holds out as compliment and kiss of death combined, he is a writer's writer. He probably wrote the best description of his own writing in Ghosts : "Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that's not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything."
In the seventies and the eighties, he wrote a series of intense, haunted portraits of scientists—Copernicus, Newton, Kepler. Between 1989 and 1995, he wrote a classic trilogy-- Ghosts , The Book of Evidence and Athena --a study in part of the mind of a man whose obsession with a particular painter leads him into murder. The act of murder was not the focal point of the trilogy; it was the cold heat of obsession that Banville found fascinating. In The Untouchable , he based his protagonist on the Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. Shroud was a grim, dark exploration of identity, juxtaposing a professor who may not be what he seems and a woman whose madness does not make her necessarily less in possession of the truth.
You cannot fault his prose, you cannot deny the courage with which he lays bare the most pathetic, most obscure corners of the human heart. Should John Banville have won the Booker Prize? Of course.
But not this year. With The Sea , Banville penned a complex tale about a man who had lost his wife to cancer, returning to the childhood resort on the Irish coast where disturbing memories of a family he knew as a child begin to surface. It is an axiom that all of Banville's narrators are flawed; in Max Morden he has created not just an unreliable narrator, but an almost unbearably mannered one. Critical consensus on The Sea was mixed, but Tibor Fischer caught the problems best when he said reading the novel felt like "sitting an exam": "There's lots of lovely language, but no novel."
In a different year, with a weaker shortlist, The Sea might yet have been an honourable winner: it is exactly the kind of high-literary novel so beloved of Booker judges. But 2005 has been an extraordinary year for the novel, and the Booker judges controversially left three of the biggest names in the literary firmament off the shortlist—J M Coetzee, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. They've all won Bookers before; Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers, in fact, and Coetzee, aside from winning the Booker twice, is a Nobel laureate. By omitting them, the judges were sending out a message: it would be only the book that mattered this year, not the reputation of the writer.
Of the other works on the shortlist, four at least were extraordinary. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a poignant but unsentimental exploration of what it would mean to be a clone in our world; Julian Barnes' Arthur and George blends biography and fiction as he impeccably recreates the strange case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, a lawyer of Indian descent falsely accused of maiming farm animals. Zadie Smith's On Beauty is tongue-in-cheek homage to Howard's End , beautifully contemporarised; and Ali Smith's The Accidental is an incandescent tale of a stranger who crashes into the life of a family, told from the perspective of a 12-year-old. I have no hesitation in saying that if you're looking for the best book of the year, any of these fit the bill far better than Banville's overwritten work.
John Banville was in great company, and he deserves to be there. But The Sea didn't deserve to win. The Booker judges called it wrong, and this year, they had absolutely no excuse.
There's just one question I have for this year's Booker judges: what were they smoking?
I come not to bury John Banville. Banville is an honourable writer, an austere but impeccable critic. It's true that his books remind me a bit of Gerald Durrell's description of Argentinian tangos: this one is about a man who is grieving, he is very sad and he asks the meaning of life; this one is about a man who has suffered, he is very sad and he asks the meaning of life; the next one is, well, the same. But the quality and the depth of his prose, the weight of experience with which he writes, these always carry me through.
There is no doubt that John Banville deserves the respect of his peers. To use that nasty phrase literature holds out as compliment and kiss of death combined, he is a writer's writer. He probably wrote the best description of his own writing in Ghosts : "Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that's not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything."
In the seventies and the eighties, he wrote a series of intense, haunted portraits of scientists—Copernicus, Newton, Kepler. Between 1989 and 1995, he wrote a classic trilogy-- Ghosts , The Book of Evidence and Athena --a study in part of the mind of a man whose obsession with a particular painter leads him into murder. The act of murder was not the focal point of the trilogy; it was the cold heat of obsession that Banville found fascinating. In The Untouchable , he based his protagonist on the Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. Shroud was a grim, dark exploration of identity, juxtaposing a professor who may not be what he seems and a woman whose madness does not make her necessarily less in possession of the truth.
You cannot fault his prose, you cannot deny the courage with which he lays bare the most pathetic, most obscure corners of the human heart. Should John Banville have won the Booker Prize? Of course.
But not this year. With The Sea , Banville penned a complex tale about a man who had lost his wife to cancer, returning to the childhood resort on the Irish coast where disturbing memories of a family he knew as a child begin to surface. It is an axiom that all of Banville's narrators are flawed; in Max Morden he has created not just an unreliable narrator, but an almost unbearably mannered one. Critical consensus on The Sea was mixed, but Tibor Fischer caught the problems best when he said reading the novel felt like "sitting an exam": "There's lots of lovely language, but no novel."
In a different year, with a weaker shortlist, The Sea might yet have been an honourable winner: it is exactly the kind of high-literary novel so beloved of Booker judges. But 2005 has been an extraordinary year for the novel, and the Booker judges controversially left three of the biggest names in the literary firmament off the shortlist—J M Coetzee, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. They've all won Bookers before; Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers, in fact, and Coetzee, aside from winning the Booker twice, is a Nobel laureate. By omitting them, the judges were sending out a message: it would be only the book that mattered this year, not the reputation of the writer.
Of the other works on the shortlist, four at least were extraordinary. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a poignant but unsentimental exploration of what it would mean to be a clone in our world; Julian Barnes' Arthur and George blends biography and fiction as he impeccably recreates the strange case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, a lawyer of Indian descent falsely accused of maiming farm animals. Zadie Smith's On Beauty is tongue-in-cheek homage to Howard's End , beautifully contemporarised; and Ali Smith's The Accidental is an incandescent tale of a stranger who crashes into the life of a family, told from the perspective of a 12-year-old. I have no hesitation in saying that if you're looking for the best book of the year, any of these fit the bill far better than Banville's overwritten work.
John Banville was in great company, and he deserves to be there. But The Sea didn't deserve to win. The Booker judges called it wrong, and this year, they had absolutely no excuse.
Last word: All about us
(What can I say? It's a soppy column. I'm still a cynical bastard deep down inside, where it really counts. Written for The Kolkata Telegraph, October 2005)
This one's for all the women in my life, from the toddlers to the grandmothers. But most of all, it's for the thirtysomethings, those of us who've survived the teens and twenties and don't know what the fifties and sixties will bring. Have a great puja.
This is what we inherited. The belief that we could earn our own paycheques; the ability to switch from saris to silk sheaths in a second; the knowledge that the best friends are those with whom you laugh till tears come to your eyes.
From our mothers and sisters, we inherited strength and grace, histories of abuse and violence, histories of growth and nurturing, stories and poems, tips on makeup and tips on how to handle office politics. They put us on the road to independence, the road on which so many of them had made long or short journeys; they handed us maps and the car keys, and waved us goodbye.
From our fathers and brothers, we inherited the knowledge that men were not the enemy, were not aliens. They let us see their force and their vulnerability. They taught us how to dance, how to shoot and how to cook; they shared our bad hair days and our losses on the stockmarket, they shared their problems and they picked us up when we stumbled. They let us go down our various roads, and sometimes, they made the journey with us.
This is what we learned. We learned to handle our own taxes, we learned what it feels like to hold the first paycheck; we learned to be many different women while holding on to the one we really wanted to be. We survived pain, grief, abuse, addiction, loss; we embraced joy, comfort, maturity, love, friendship--and chocolate. We learned how to pack a suitcase, how to make many cities or continents our homes, how to stay in one place.
We learned how to love men, and some of us learned how to love women, too. We learned how to lead the busy lives of mothers while holding on to ourselves, we learned to refuse motherhood without fearing emptiness. We learned how to dial an old friend whom we hadn't seen for years, we learned how to sms new friends. We learned enough to want to kill our policymakers, legislators and bureaucrats for messing this country up; then we learned more, and started to become all those things ourselves in order to turn it around.
This is what we're looking for. We're wondering what secrets those women in their fifties know, the ones who dye their hair defiantly, the ones who let the silver show. The ones who for the first time are taking that Spanish course, taking the flight to foreign places that were always waiting for them, the ones who have their book groups and their Fortune 500 companies, who're always on the move but who know when to sit back and cackle with their friends and lovers.
We want what those gorgeous women in their seventies and eighties have, the ones with the laugh lines and sorrow lines marking their faces, the ones who can still jive, still love their great-grandchildren, still cook, still love watching soaps on TV, the ones who still know how to hold their arms out to the world. Some day, we'll be them; here's to all of us.
This one's for all the women in my life, from the toddlers to the grandmothers. But most of all, it's for the thirtysomethings, those of us who've survived the teens and twenties and don't know what the fifties and sixties will bring. Have a great puja.
This is what we inherited. The belief that we could earn our own paycheques; the ability to switch from saris to silk sheaths in a second; the knowledge that the best friends are those with whom you laugh till tears come to your eyes.
From our mothers and sisters, we inherited strength and grace, histories of abuse and violence, histories of growth and nurturing, stories and poems, tips on makeup and tips on how to handle office politics. They put us on the road to independence, the road on which so many of them had made long or short journeys; they handed us maps and the car keys, and waved us goodbye.
From our fathers and brothers, we inherited the knowledge that men were not the enemy, were not aliens. They let us see their force and their vulnerability. They taught us how to dance, how to shoot and how to cook; they shared our bad hair days and our losses on the stockmarket, they shared their problems and they picked us up when we stumbled. They let us go down our various roads, and sometimes, they made the journey with us.
This is what we learned. We learned to handle our own taxes, we learned what it feels like to hold the first paycheck; we learned to be many different women while holding on to the one we really wanted to be. We survived pain, grief, abuse, addiction, loss; we embraced joy, comfort, maturity, love, friendship--and chocolate. We learned how to pack a suitcase, how to make many cities or continents our homes, how to stay in one place.
We learned how to love men, and some of us learned how to love women, too. We learned how to lead the busy lives of mothers while holding on to ourselves, we learned to refuse motherhood without fearing emptiness. We learned how to dial an old friend whom we hadn't seen for years, we learned how to sms new friends. We learned enough to want to kill our policymakers, legislators and bureaucrats for messing this country up; then we learned more, and started to become all those things ourselves in order to turn it around.
This is what we're looking for. We're wondering what secrets those women in their fifties know, the ones who dye their hair defiantly, the ones who let the silver show. The ones who for the first time are taking that Spanish course, taking the flight to foreign places that were always waiting for them, the ones who have their book groups and their Fortune 500 companies, who're always on the move but who know when to sit back and cackle with their friends and lovers.
We want what those gorgeous women in their seventies and eighties have, the ones with the laugh lines and sorrow lines marking their faces, the ones who can still jive, still love their great-grandchildren, still cook, still love watching soaps on TV, the ones who still know how to hold their arms out to the world. Some day, we'll be them; here's to all of us.
The BS Column: The Colour of Magick
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, October 4, 2005)
One of the perks of my job is that I can return to the surreptitious pleasure of reading "kid lit" with my halo intact: of course I'm not enjoying reading about dragons and novice girl magicians, this is hard work. (Heh!)
The children's titles that look promising this season are all variations on the classic quest story. This is probably one of the oldest stories humans told each other, from Beowulf and Jason and the Golden Fleece to the quest for the Holy Grail; you can make the case that the first truly modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote , had to break new ground for itself by subverting the conventions of the quest. The basic ingredients of the epic haven't changed for millennia: a hero or a being with heroic powers who must be tested, often through perilous journeys in order to find either an object of power or to unleash the powers within himself, pitted against and often aided by gods and demons.
Children's books are perhaps the last bastion of the true epic in our time. We're so steeped in irony, ennui and apathy that an attempt to write a straight epic narrative for adults comes across a bit like Prince Bolo in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories --it's dashing, but a little foolish. When you're writing for children, though, you can play it straight, knowing that your audience hasn't yet been hardened to wonder, doesn't yet scoff at magic, and still, despite all that guff about the growing cynicism of youth, cherishes the firm belief that Good will kick the pants off Evil in the end.
One of the most promising new series is Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians . Percy Jackson has ADHD, an absentee father who is one of the gods of Olympus, and is being hunted by Zeus, Hades and a few other immortals you really wouldn't want to annoy. Since the non-divine part of him is also just a 12-year-old kid who's stuck with Ugly Gabe as a stepfather, he has pre-teen problems—but his best friends are a satyr and Annabeth, daughter of Athena, so it all balances out. Riordan makes the assumption that his audience knows absolutely nothing about the Greek myths, which is deeply annoying if you had them stuffed down your throat as a child, but otherwise this is a fun debut.
Christopher Paolini's Eldest , the second in his trilogy starring a dragon warrior, is pretty promising, though absolutely humourless. Paolini is one of the youngest authors to experience overnight fame (in the way of overnight fame, it actually took about six months to happen, but never let the facts spoil a great publicity story), and in volume two, he shows some growth. His dragon hero has won his great battle, but is now in training as the Empire gathers its strength for bout number two. Eragorn and Eldest are classic fantasy novels—perhaps too classic for my taste, given that the pawprints of Lord of the Rings and a dozen other sagas are all over the manuscript—but Paolini does a nice, old-fashioned job of telling his story.
Trudi Canavan's The Magicians' Guild is an interesting riff on the usual wizards-in-robes routine. In a city called Imardin, a young urchin accidentally discovers her magical talents. Sonea's powers almost destroy her, until she reluctantly joins the magicians whom she and the other denizens of the slums of Imardin hate. The Magicians' Guild is entertaining, but reads as though Canavan is just warming up for book two. (The demise of the three-volume-novel was greatly exaggerated: in today's publishing world, kid lit sells best in multiple volumes.)
I have to admit to favouritism here, since I'm a diehard Neil Gaiman fan, but Gaiman's latest, the relatively lighthearted Anansi Boys makes even this bunch of promising debutants look like the talented amateurs they are. Meet Fat Charlie, whose father is the African trickster god Anansi, and whose brother is the equally charming, equally tricky Spider. Then stand back and give thanks for your family: they might drive you up the wall, but they're not in the same league as trickster gods.
I could go on, but next week is when both the Booker and the Nobel prize winners will be announced. That means having to get back to literary giants—a pity, it's been really hard work reading kickass sagas and sword-and-sorcery fantasies, but someone has to do it.
One of the perks of my job is that I can return to the surreptitious pleasure of reading "kid lit" with my halo intact: of course I'm not enjoying reading about dragons and novice girl magicians, this is hard work. (Heh!)
The children's titles that look promising this season are all variations on the classic quest story. This is probably one of the oldest stories humans told each other, from Beowulf and Jason and the Golden Fleece to the quest for the Holy Grail; you can make the case that the first truly modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote , had to break new ground for itself by subverting the conventions of the quest. The basic ingredients of the epic haven't changed for millennia: a hero or a being with heroic powers who must be tested, often through perilous journeys in order to find either an object of power or to unleash the powers within himself, pitted against and often aided by gods and demons.
Children's books are perhaps the last bastion of the true epic in our time. We're so steeped in irony, ennui and apathy that an attempt to write a straight epic narrative for adults comes across a bit like Prince Bolo in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories --it's dashing, but a little foolish. When you're writing for children, though, you can play it straight, knowing that your audience hasn't yet been hardened to wonder, doesn't yet scoff at magic, and still, despite all that guff about the growing cynicism of youth, cherishes the firm belief that Good will kick the pants off Evil in the end.
One of the most promising new series is Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians . Percy Jackson has ADHD, an absentee father who is one of the gods of Olympus, and is being hunted by Zeus, Hades and a few other immortals you really wouldn't want to annoy. Since the non-divine part of him is also just a 12-year-old kid who's stuck with Ugly Gabe as a stepfather, he has pre-teen problems—but his best friends are a satyr and Annabeth, daughter of Athena, so it all balances out. Riordan makes the assumption that his audience knows absolutely nothing about the Greek myths, which is deeply annoying if you had them stuffed down your throat as a child, but otherwise this is a fun debut.
Christopher Paolini's Eldest , the second in his trilogy starring a dragon warrior, is pretty promising, though absolutely humourless. Paolini is one of the youngest authors to experience overnight fame (in the way of overnight fame, it actually took about six months to happen, but never let the facts spoil a great publicity story), and in volume two, he shows some growth. His dragon hero has won his great battle, but is now in training as the Empire gathers its strength for bout number two. Eragorn and Eldest are classic fantasy novels—perhaps too classic for my taste, given that the pawprints of Lord of the Rings and a dozen other sagas are all over the manuscript—but Paolini does a nice, old-fashioned job of telling his story.
Trudi Canavan's The Magicians' Guild is an interesting riff on the usual wizards-in-robes routine. In a city called Imardin, a young urchin accidentally discovers her magical talents. Sonea's powers almost destroy her, until she reluctantly joins the magicians whom she and the other denizens of the slums of Imardin hate. The Magicians' Guild is entertaining, but reads as though Canavan is just warming up for book two. (The demise of the three-volume-novel was greatly exaggerated: in today's publishing world, kid lit sells best in multiple volumes.)
I have to admit to favouritism here, since I'm a diehard Neil Gaiman fan, but Gaiman's latest, the relatively lighthearted Anansi Boys makes even this bunch of promising debutants look like the talented amateurs they are. Meet Fat Charlie, whose father is the African trickster god Anansi, and whose brother is the equally charming, equally tricky Spider. Then stand back and give thanks for your family: they might drive you up the wall, but they're not in the same league as trickster gods.
I could go on, but next week is when both the Booker and the Nobel prize winners will be announced. That means having to get back to literary giants—a pity, it's been really hard work reading kickass sagas and sword-and-sorcery fantasies, but someone has to do it.
Last Word: The ostrich approach
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, September 2005)
Once upon a time, there was a young man who decided to do something special for the woman he loved. That night, he stood outside her window and serenaded her with a violin concerto. He played so well, she and her family came out and applauded. The next night, he was back to serenade her on the flute. She and her family were warm in their praise. The third night, he arrived with a saxophone and began to play. Her family came out, shouting abuses; they thrashed him, she threw her engagement ring in his face.
"Why'd you do that?" he asked from the pavement. "Young man," said her father, "shame on you. We don't believe in premarital sax for women."
We'd like to dedicate this shaggy-dog story to Khushboo, the actress who's been in the news this week for casting aspersions on the moral character of Tamil—and by extension, Indian—womanhood.
Khushboo told a magazine that society had to free itself from the "outdated thinking that a woman has to be a virgin at the time of her marriage". She suggested, too, that Tamil women "should know to protect themselves from pregnancy and AIDS if they chose to have sex before marriage. Educated men these days do not expect their spouses to be virgins at the time of marriage". A few days later, harassed by groups protesting the slur she had cast on Tamil womanhood, picketed and facing a firestorm of righteous indignation, Khushboo withdrew her comments and made an apology.
Khushboo's comments were refreshing, in an industry where all starlets feel obliged to explain that they only "expose" when "the role demands it". She didn't feel the need to suggest, as her blinkered critics did, that premarital sex was against Indian culture; instead she accepted the prevailing reality, which is that men and women can have guilt-free relationships without the benefit of a mangalsutra.
I particularly liked her emphasis on protection and sexual health: the unembarrassed and empowering acceptance that if you're going to have sex, you need to be responsible about it. And she paid a definite compliment to today's men when she pointed out that male attitudes to virginity might have changed. I like the idea of a man who is unthreatened by the fact that his future wife might actually have experienced a genuine relationship before she met him.
The guardians of Tamil Nadu's culture might want to consider some other statistics: like many Indian states, TN lags behind in several areas. The rate of female infanticide has gone up sharply in TN over the last five years. While boys and girls join school in high numbers, the percentage of girls who drop out is uncomfortably high. And, oh yes, the abortion rate in TN's cities suggest strongly that whether they're against or for that mythical beast known as "Indian culture", women aren't exactly against premarital sex.
Khushboo's views could have led to a more open discussion about sexuality, about the growing ease between men and women, about responsibilities in adult sexual relationships, about the new Indian man who's comfortable with independent women, and so different from his repressed, repressive stereotype. Instead, she's the target of a bunch of hysterical prudes who're desperate to pretend that women are still legless angels. Now that's the ultimate shaggy dog story.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who decided to do something special for the woman he loved. That night, he stood outside her window and serenaded her with a violin concerto. He played so well, she and her family came out and applauded. The next night, he was back to serenade her on the flute. She and her family were warm in their praise. The third night, he arrived with a saxophone and began to play. Her family came out, shouting abuses; they thrashed him, she threw her engagement ring in his face.
"Why'd you do that?" he asked from the pavement. "Young man," said her father, "shame on you. We don't believe in premarital sax for women."
We'd like to dedicate this shaggy-dog story to Khushboo, the actress who's been in the news this week for casting aspersions on the moral character of Tamil—and by extension, Indian—womanhood.
Khushboo told a magazine that society had to free itself from the "outdated thinking that a woman has to be a virgin at the time of her marriage". She suggested, too, that Tamil women "should know to protect themselves from pregnancy and AIDS if they chose to have sex before marriage. Educated men these days do not expect their spouses to be virgins at the time of marriage". A few days later, harassed by groups protesting the slur she had cast on Tamil womanhood, picketed and facing a firestorm of righteous indignation, Khushboo withdrew her comments and made an apology.
Khushboo's comments were refreshing, in an industry where all starlets feel obliged to explain that they only "expose" when "the role demands it". She didn't feel the need to suggest, as her blinkered critics did, that premarital sex was against Indian culture; instead she accepted the prevailing reality, which is that men and women can have guilt-free relationships without the benefit of a mangalsutra.
I particularly liked her emphasis on protection and sexual health: the unembarrassed and empowering acceptance that if you're going to have sex, you need to be responsible about it. And she paid a definite compliment to today's men when she pointed out that male attitudes to virginity might have changed. I like the idea of a man who is unthreatened by the fact that his future wife might actually have experienced a genuine relationship before she met him.
The guardians of Tamil Nadu's culture might want to consider some other statistics: like many Indian states, TN lags behind in several areas. The rate of female infanticide has gone up sharply in TN over the last five years. While boys and girls join school in high numbers, the percentage of girls who drop out is uncomfortably high. And, oh yes, the abortion rate in TN's cities suggest strongly that whether they're against or for that mythical beast known as "Indian culture", women aren't exactly against premarital sex.
Khushboo's views could have led to a more open discussion about sexuality, about the growing ease between men and women, about responsibilities in adult sexual relationships, about the new Indian man who's comfortable with independent women, and so different from his repressed, repressive stereotype. Instead, she's the target of a bunch of hysterical prudes who're desperate to pretend that women are still legless angels. Now that's the ultimate shaggy dog story.
The BS Column: (Contra) banned
It's fitting that the Calcutta High Court lifted the ban on Taslima Nasreen's Dwikhondita on the same day that Banned Books Week was kicked off in the US. Banned Books Week, the brainchild of the American Library Association, is an annual event that draws attention to freedom of speech issues.
In the US, book bans are most often demanded by conservative parents who don't want their children to be exposed to "unChristian magic" (the Harry Potter book ban), discussions of teenage sexuality (the Judy Blume books) or racial issues (Toni Morrison's books).
In India, it's the state that usually decides whether or not to ban a book. Most books on the censored list are there because they might offend a religious community or because they're detrimental to the country in some way. And we're very easily offended.
India set a deeply dubious example in 1998 by being the first country to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, while issuing a statement that the ban should not be construed as criticism of the book's literary qualities. This was disingenuous: I can't think of a more decisive act of criticism than a book ban, nor one more readily guaranteed to muzzle the author.
Other books on the banned list have included Katherine Mayo's Mother India, which Gandhi famously dubbed "a drain inspector's report". Again, the ban seems an over-reaction. Mayo's travelogue deserved to be censured on grounds of cruelty to the reader; she had little regard for either accuracy or literary style. But to ban Mother India was to accord the book an importance it didn't deserve. Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, a classic account of the events that led to Gandhi's assassination, exemplified the over-protectiveness of the state. It was banned because the government didn't think it would be healthy for the Indian people to read it. This deeply paternalistic attitude, the sarkar protecting a volatile, inflammable, infantile public, remains ingrained in the Indian ethos.
Many of the books on the banned list are panting, heaving works of near-pornography set in a wildly exaggerated Land of the Kamasutra; often they were works of evangelism where the authors frothed at the mouth at our godless, pagan ways Hindu Heaven, Land of the Lingam). The ban on The Scented Garden, a narcoleptic exploration of sexual anthropology in the Levant, has never been rescinded, though the passage of time has rendered the book's revelations thoroughly harmless.
In recent years, the track record of the Indian government with book bans has been wildly varied. While it is unlikely, as one newspaper has speculated, that the Indian government will ban The Mitrokhin Archive because of the controversy that the late KGB officer's disclosures about Indira Gandhi and Leftist parties has occasioned, we still seem to be happy to reach for a ban, at least as a temporary measure.
D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow is a scholarly, academic examination of the sacredness of cows in India. Jha uncovered many references to animal sacrifice--and cow slaughter--in the scriptures while arguing that the demand for cow slaughter was a contemporary development. The book was banned in 2001, not because Jha's research was incorrect, but on the grounds that it might hurt religious sentiments.
The reasons for the ban on Dwikhondita were the usual: Ms Nasreen's frank approach to autobiography deeply disconcerted the guardians of morality in Bengal. The Left Front government banned the book "for the sake of maintenance of democracy" in Bengal, a puzzling statement given that Nasreen had hardly prescribed anarchy or bloody revolutions. The book was condemned as "pornographic", and as being likely to "offend the sentiments of Muslims": I would have condemned it merely on the grounds of mediocrity, which is unfortunately not a ban-worthy offence. The Calcutta High Court observed that the ban was "unjustified" and "untenable".
This is just a humble suggestion, but it seems to me that we would have a much easier time of it--and more reading material--if we stopped banning books on the grounds that they would hurt religious sentiments. Instead, I want a ban on anyone whose sentiments, religious or otherwise, are so excessively sensitive that they might be hurt by a book that they can always exercise the choice not to buy, or read, or even discuss.
In the US, book bans are most often demanded by conservative parents who don't want their children to be exposed to "unChristian magic" (the Harry Potter book ban), discussions of teenage sexuality (the Judy Blume books) or racial issues (Toni Morrison's books).
In India, it's the state that usually decides whether or not to ban a book. Most books on the censored list are there because they might offend a religious community or because they're detrimental to the country in some way. And we're very easily offended.
India set a deeply dubious example in 1998 by being the first country to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, while issuing a statement that the ban should not be construed as criticism of the book's literary qualities. This was disingenuous: I can't think of a more decisive act of criticism than a book ban, nor one more readily guaranteed to muzzle the author.
Other books on the banned list have included Katherine Mayo's Mother India, which Gandhi famously dubbed "a drain inspector's report". Again, the ban seems an over-reaction. Mayo's travelogue deserved to be censured on grounds of cruelty to the reader; she had little regard for either accuracy or literary style. But to ban Mother India was to accord the book an importance it didn't deserve. Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, a classic account of the events that led to Gandhi's assassination, exemplified the over-protectiveness of the state. It was banned because the government didn't think it would be healthy for the Indian people to read it. This deeply paternalistic attitude, the sarkar protecting a volatile, inflammable, infantile public, remains ingrained in the Indian ethos.
Many of the books on the banned list are panting, heaving works of near-pornography set in a wildly exaggerated Land of the Kamasutra; often they were works of evangelism where the authors frothed at the mouth at our godless, pagan ways Hindu Heaven, Land of the Lingam). The ban on The Scented Garden, a narcoleptic exploration of sexual anthropology in the Levant, has never been rescinded, though the passage of time has rendered the book's revelations thoroughly harmless.
In recent years, the track record of the Indian government with book bans has been wildly varied. While it is unlikely, as one newspaper has speculated, that the Indian government will ban The Mitrokhin Archive because of the controversy that the late KGB officer's disclosures about Indira Gandhi and Leftist parties has occasioned, we still seem to be happy to reach for a ban, at least as a temporary measure.
D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow is a scholarly, academic examination of the sacredness of cows in India. Jha uncovered many references to animal sacrifice--and cow slaughter--in the scriptures while arguing that the demand for cow slaughter was a contemporary development. The book was banned in 2001, not because Jha's research was incorrect, but on the grounds that it might hurt religious sentiments.
The reasons for the ban on Dwikhondita were the usual: Ms Nasreen's frank approach to autobiography deeply disconcerted the guardians of morality in Bengal. The Left Front government banned the book "for the sake of maintenance of democracy" in Bengal, a puzzling statement given that Nasreen had hardly prescribed anarchy or bloody revolutions. The book was condemned as "pornographic", and as being likely to "offend the sentiments of Muslims": I would have condemned it merely on the grounds of mediocrity, which is unfortunately not a ban-worthy offence. The Calcutta High Court observed that the ban was "unjustified" and "untenable".
This is just a humble suggestion, but it seems to me that we would have a much easier time of it--and more reading material--if we stopped banning books on the grounds that they would hurt religious sentiments. Instead, I want a ban on anyone whose sentiments, religious or otherwise, are so excessively sensitive that they might be hurt by a book that they can always exercise the choice not to buy, or read, or even discuss.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The BS Column: Mitrokhin's Revelations
(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, September 20, 2005)
The end of the Cold War almost killed spy fiction. John LeCarre turned his attention to pharma multinationals and dug up Smiley's old cases, other spy writers were forced into the parallel world of technogeek conspiracies.
I have to thank Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin for returning me to the illicit pleasure of that genre of books, where the CIA and the KGB faced off in intricate tangos and where codenames like NEVEROVA or RADAR were employed in deadly earnest.
When the first part of The Mitrokhin Archive came out in 1999, it was hard for those in intelligence to comprehend the range and depth of the information that Vasili Mitrokhin offered. Mitrokhin had worked for the KGB for 30 years in the foreign intelligence division. In 1992, he walked into the British Embassy in a Baltic country and offered to share his secret and very detailed notes. The first part of the Archives was hammered into shape by him and Christopher Andrew, the Oxford don and a leading expert on intelligence. Serialized in The Times in 1999, Part One covered the KGB's activities in Europe and the West.
Christopher Andrew writes, "For a quarter of the century, the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War." Mitrokhin, who retained a taste for home-made cabbage soup and the habit of doing push-ups in the middle of meetings well into old age, died in January 2004. By that time, he and Andrew had shaped the second part of The Mitrokhin Archive; it covers the KGB's activities in the Third World.
Two chapters of The Mitrokhin Archives: II are devoted to India. In Nehru's time, "The Indian embassy in Moscow was being penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was recruited…with the help of a female swallow, codenamed NEVEROVA…" By the 1960s, the KGB had become, according to the authors, the main conduit for "both money and secret communications from Moscow" to the CPI.
During Indira Gandhi's first visit to the Soviet Union in 1953, the KGB "surrounded her with handsome, attentive male admirers". By 1969, the Indo-Soviet "special relationship" had grown; "encouraged by Moscow, the CPI swung its support behind Mrs Gandhi". The situation in the 1970s sounds like a bizarre free market for intelligence: "It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB—and the CIA—had deeply penetrated the Indian government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realizing their enemy would know all about it the next day." Andrew says the KGB was better at exploiting "the corruption that became endemic" under Indira Gandhi's regime, in an era when "suitcases full of banknotes" routinely found their way to her residence. (The suitcases themselves were not returned.)
The CPI had no cause for complaint: "By 1972, the import-export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than 10 million rupees to Party funds." Nor was the media left out: according to KGB files, there were "ten Indian newspapers on its payroll" by 1972.
These are some of the revelations that have drawn such vigorous reactions—denial, counter-accusations and stout defenses of the dead—from our politicians. But the India chapters form only part of The Mitrokhin Archive; Andrew is equally illuminating about the KGB's role in Cuba, in Africa, their machinations with Allende, and the high cost that the special relationship with India extracted in terms of their ability to handle Pakistan. Most of Mitrokhin's information in Part One was accurate; there's little reason to speculate, as some have, that Part Two of the archives is either inaccurate or part of a darkly twisted plot by the CIA to discredit the shining legacy of two of India's most prominent political parties.
Ignore the hysteria; read the Archives as a window into the Cold War. As Andrew says, perhaps the most important aspect of this book is that it redresses the way in which we've seen the Cold War, where the CIA's role has always been the focus of attention. It turns out that the KGB's footsoldiers, spies, honeytrap specialists and bankers were equally busy. Until John LeCarre writes his next book, this is as close as you're going to get to cloak-and-dagger spy stories.
The end of the Cold War almost killed spy fiction. John LeCarre turned his attention to pharma multinationals and dug up Smiley's old cases, other spy writers were forced into the parallel world of technogeek conspiracies.
I have to thank Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin for returning me to the illicit pleasure of that genre of books, where the CIA and the KGB faced off in intricate tangos and where codenames like NEVEROVA or RADAR were employed in deadly earnest.
When the first part of The Mitrokhin Archive came out in 1999, it was hard for those in intelligence to comprehend the range and depth of the information that Vasili Mitrokhin offered. Mitrokhin had worked for the KGB for 30 years in the foreign intelligence division. In 1992, he walked into the British Embassy in a Baltic country and offered to share his secret and very detailed notes. The first part of the Archives was hammered into shape by him and Christopher Andrew, the Oxford don and a leading expert on intelligence. Serialized in The Times in 1999, Part One covered the KGB's activities in Europe and the West.
Christopher Andrew writes, "For a quarter of the century, the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War." Mitrokhin, who retained a taste for home-made cabbage soup and the habit of doing push-ups in the middle of meetings well into old age, died in January 2004. By that time, he and Andrew had shaped the second part of The Mitrokhin Archive; it covers the KGB's activities in the Third World.
Two chapters of The Mitrokhin Archives: II are devoted to India. In Nehru's time, "The Indian embassy in Moscow was being penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was recruited…with the help of a female swallow, codenamed NEVEROVA…" By the 1960s, the KGB had become, according to the authors, the main conduit for "both money and secret communications from Moscow" to the CPI.
During Indira Gandhi's first visit to the Soviet Union in 1953, the KGB "surrounded her with handsome, attentive male admirers". By 1969, the Indo-Soviet "special relationship" had grown; "encouraged by Moscow, the CPI swung its support behind Mrs Gandhi". The situation in the 1970s sounds like a bizarre free market for intelligence: "It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB—and the CIA—had deeply penetrated the Indian government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realizing their enemy would know all about it the next day." Andrew says the KGB was better at exploiting "the corruption that became endemic" under Indira Gandhi's regime, in an era when "suitcases full of banknotes" routinely found their way to her residence. (The suitcases themselves were not returned.)
The CPI had no cause for complaint: "By 1972, the import-export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than 10 million rupees to Party funds." Nor was the media left out: according to KGB files, there were "ten Indian newspapers on its payroll" by 1972.
These are some of the revelations that have drawn such vigorous reactions—denial, counter-accusations and stout defenses of the dead—from our politicians. But the India chapters form only part of The Mitrokhin Archive; Andrew is equally illuminating about the KGB's role in Cuba, in Africa, their machinations with Allende, and the high cost that the special relationship with India extracted in terms of their ability to handle Pakistan. Most of Mitrokhin's information in Part One was accurate; there's little reason to speculate, as some have, that Part Two of the archives is either inaccurate or part of a darkly twisted plot by the CIA to discredit the shining legacy of two of India's most prominent political parties.
Ignore the hysteria; read the Archives as a window into the Cold War. As Andrew says, perhaps the most important aspect of this book is that it redresses the way in which we've seen the Cold War, where the CIA's role has always been the focus of attention. It turns out that the KGB's footsoldiers, spies, honeytrap specialists and bankers were equally busy. Until John LeCarre writes his next book, this is as close as you're going to get to cloak-and-dagger spy stories.
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