(Published in The Telegraph, March 11, 2006--the last of the Last Word columns)
If you missed observing International Women's Day on March 8, try November. That's when a handful of men celebrate International Men's Day in Trinidad & Tobago. There is an International Men's Day on February 7 in Malta, on July 15 in Brazil, and on February 23 in the Ukraine. Not only are there very few takers for an International Men's Day, none of them seem to be able to agree on when it should be!
Every so often when March 8 rolls around, I hear grumbles about the apparent gender injustice: why an official day for women, but not for men? (The only answer to that is to ask why women get just one day to themselves—are the other 364 days of the year reserved exclusively for men?)
Over the years, the necessity of International Women's Day has been fiercely debated, even as the occasion has moved far away from its original roots as a protest by women workers in factories facing impossibly cruel working conditions. But in a time when everything seems to have a Day to itself—Aids, punctuality, single parents, the pizza, malaria—IWD has actually become a point of focus for the women's movement.
For me, March 8 offers a rare opportunity to take a look at the concerns of women in other parts of the world: the rest of the year, we're occupied with our own, local concerns. In Pakistan, International Women's Day had more than symbolic resonance, as Mukhtaran Mai, still seeking an elusive justice after being raped by order of a tribal panchayat, led a rally of thousands of women.
In the Philippines, women took to the streets to protest President Gloria Arroyo's policies. A friend in Manila wrote to me: "Being feminist means not celebrating women achievers blindly; just because Arroyo is a woman does not make her pro-woman. It is up to us to say, look, we don't want figureheads, we want real change." In China, some women bloggers debated how much freedom they were really allowed—"we are free to be sex symbols but not to say what we want about politics and economics", one writes. In Iran, government agents tried and failed to shut down protests by women demanding their rights. In the US, the focus was on the body, as women demanded more rights over contraception, better medical knowledge and the right to choose to have abortions in the wake of recent conservative government policies.
There were women too beleaguered to consider celebrating anything. The women in Sudan's refugee camps, the women in Turkey caught between old and modern tyrannies, women in war zones, women under the poverty line. But even here, there was a growing recognition that the problems of men and women are different, and that even in times of apparently general crisis—war, famine, natural disasters like the tsunami—the two genders face different challenges.
Listening to the stories, testimonies and narratives that emerged this week, so many of them harrowing, I found myself glad for the sake of men that they don't have an International Men's Day. Special days are there to provide an outlet for groups that suffer consistently and deeply from specific problems. Feminist or not, I hope there will never come a time when men as a gender must deal with oppression, bias, sexual assault, deprivation, gender violence and contempt at a level where they need a day of their own.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The BS column: Breaking up the neighbourhood
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, March 7 2006)
"So I'll meet you at The Bookshop?" my friend said, and it was then that it hit us both. The Bookshop, one of Delhi's older and more legendary bookstores, has moved, and until that moment, we'd pretended the move didn't matter. It was only the Khan Market branch that was shutting its doors; The Bookshop would still be there, right next door in Jorbagh.
My friends and I had dropped in a few times as KD Singh held clearance sales; it was always comforting to do this and then rush next door to Jorbagh, to see the new racks go up, an assurance that The Bookshop wasn't dying, just changing its address. Professors, fellow journalists, music buffs, those of us who'd bought books and listened to jazz and picked up concert tickets over the years at KD's place, we all told ourselves it wouldn't make a difference.
But bookshops are odd creatures, very different from most other retail spaces. North India has two large chains, Crossword and the Oxford Bookstore-Gallery. Unlike their counterparts in the West (Borders, Waterstones, Barnes and Noble), these two chains haven't killed off the small, individualistic bookstore so much as pulled in new, first-time book buyers. In a smaller way, The Corner Bookstores mushrooming all around town may stock little else aside from bestsellers, but the chain does help to make the idea of buying books seem as normal as buying flowers or chocolates.
Khan Market, where The Bookshop operated for over twenty years, was one of my favourite destinations in a city rich with bookstores. Full Circle draws the yoga-and-crystal healing crowd, but it also has an interesting fiction and travel section—and its signature cafes help build the brand. Faqir Chand is browser-friendly; you may not always find what you're looking for in its muddled stacks, but you'll have a lot of fun looking, and they never throw you out. At Bahri's, the staff ranges from being very helpful to utterly clueless—but it's strong on Indian non-fiction and on books from the more academic imprints.
You could spend an entire day hanging out at just Khan Market's bookshops: I often did, ending with The Bookshop, dropping in as much for the music, the recommendations and the certainty of good conversation as for the books. Friends from out of town were dispatched to various city bookshops according to taste. The rare book collectors were sent off to South Extension, the SF buffs were directed to either Fact & Fiction in Vasant Vihar or the crowded but well-stocked Midlands in Aurobindo Place. The serious book-lover had to drop by Bookworm in CP; the technical books fanatic couldn't miss Galgotia's. And newer bookshops keep coming up, like Eureka, the specialist children's bookstore in GK II.
But Khan Market silenced even the most jaded. Friends from Bombay, Dehradun or erudite Chennai loved having a choice of four—five, counting the small one at the back that sells chiefly coffee-table books—bookstores in one space. Friends from First World countries would go off prepared to be condescending about the limited stock in Indian bookstores. They'd come back burbling about the miracle of the Special Indian Price, which can convert one POUNDS 30 hardback into one POUNDS 13 hardback plus leave you enough for three paperbacks.
What worries me about The Bookshop's departure from Khan Market isn't whether the store will survive—some buyers will give more custom to Bahri's or Full Circle, some will drive those few extra kilometers quite happily for the jazz and the eclectic selection. But The Bookshop had to shut down, in part, because the market rents went up—a Swarovski crystal showroom is coming up in its place.
I would hate to see more of Khan Market's bookshops close down or shift location, though two other bookshop owners there have indicated they might have to move if rents go any higher. And I hate the idea that, as markets and malls become more expensive spaces, bookshops might be forced out of business. One of the things that makes Delhi bearable is the fact that almost every decent market offers a good bookshop (or four), a place where you can find friends, and conversation, and retreat for just a while from the insane traffic and the power cuts. It would be tragic if we had space for fashion and chocolates, delis and luxury goods, but none for books and reading any more.
"So I'll meet you at The Bookshop?" my friend said, and it was then that it hit us both. The Bookshop, one of Delhi's older and more legendary bookstores, has moved, and until that moment, we'd pretended the move didn't matter. It was only the Khan Market branch that was shutting its doors; The Bookshop would still be there, right next door in Jorbagh.
My friends and I had dropped in a few times as KD Singh held clearance sales; it was always comforting to do this and then rush next door to Jorbagh, to see the new racks go up, an assurance that The Bookshop wasn't dying, just changing its address. Professors, fellow journalists, music buffs, those of us who'd bought books and listened to jazz and picked up concert tickets over the years at KD's place, we all told ourselves it wouldn't make a difference.
But bookshops are odd creatures, very different from most other retail spaces. North India has two large chains, Crossword and the Oxford Bookstore-Gallery. Unlike their counterparts in the West (Borders, Waterstones, Barnes and Noble), these two chains haven't killed off the small, individualistic bookstore so much as pulled in new, first-time book buyers. In a smaller way, The Corner Bookstores mushrooming all around town may stock little else aside from bestsellers, but the chain does help to make the idea of buying books seem as normal as buying flowers or chocolates.
Khan Market, where The Bookshop operated for over twenty years, was one of my favourite destinations in a city rich with bookstores. Full Circle draws the yoga-and-crystal healing crowd, but it also has an interesting fiction and travel section—and its signature cafes help build the brand. Faqir Chand is browser-friendly; you may not always find what you're looking for in its muddled stacks, but you'll have a lot of fun looking, and they never throw you out. At Bahri's, the staff ranges from being very helpful to utterly clueless—but it's strong on Indian non-fiction and on books from the more academic imprints.
You could spend an entire day hanging out at just Khan Market's bookshops: I often did, ending with The Bookshop, dropping in as much for the music, the recommendations and the certainty of good conversation as for the books. Friends from out of town were dispatched to various city bookshops according to taste. The rare book collectors were sent off to South Extension, the SF buffs were directed to either Fact & Fiction in Vasant Vihar or the crowded but well-stocked Midlands in Aurobindo Place. The serious book-lover had to drop by Bookworm in CP; the technical books fanatic couldn't miss Galgotia's. And newer bookshops keep coming up, like Eureka, the specialist children's bookstore in GK II.
But Khan Market silenced even the most jaded. Friends from Bombay, Dehradun or erudite Chennai loved having a choice of four—five, counting the small one at the back that sells chiefly coffee-table books—bookstores in one space. Friends from First World countries would go off prepared to be condescending about the limited stock in Indian bookstores. They'd come back burbling about the miracle of the Special Indian Price, which can convert one POUNDS 30 hardback into one POUNDS 13 hardback plus leave you enough for three paperbacks.
What worries me about The Bookshop's departure from Khan Market isn't whether the store will survive—some buyers will give more custom to Bahri's or Full Circle, some will drive those few extra kilometers quite happily for the jazz and the eclectic selection. But The Bookshop had to shut down, in part, because the market rents went up—a Swarovski crystal showroom is coming up in its place.
I would hate to see more of Khan Market's bookshops close down or shift location, though two other bookshop owners there have indicated they might have to move if rents go any higher. And I hate the idea that, as markets and malls become more expensive spaces, bookshops might be forced out of business. One of the things that makes Delhi bearable is the fact that almost every decent market offers a good bookshop (or four), a place where you can find friends, and conversation, and retreat for just a while from the insane traffic and the power cuts. It would be tragic if we had space for fashion and chocolates, delis and luxury goods, but none for books and reading any more.
Masala art: six food books
(For the Hindustan Times, March 2006)
Pushpesh Pant: Food Path: Cuisine Along The Grand Trunk Road (Lustre Press, Roli Books)
Esther David: Book of Rachel (Penguin India, Rs 295)
Dr Aakash Singh Rathore: The Complete Indian Wine Guide (Lotus: Roli, price not given)
Wine Wisdom: Buying and Drinking Wine in India: Magandeep Singh (Penguin, Rs 250)
Chitrita Banerji: The Hour of the Goddess (Penguin, Rs 295)
Climbing the Mango Trees: Madhur Jaffrey (Ebury Press, POUNDS 18.99)
To understand the really great food writers, test them out in the kitchen and the drawing room. The kitchen is where Escoffier's recipes or MFK Fisher's strictures on salad, or even Jiggs Kalra's more complex prescriptions, offer amateur cooks like me something to aspire to, however distant. The drawing room is where you can use the quirks of food writers as fodder for conversation.
And the best food writers are very strange human beings. Escoffier's Ma Cuisine is a modern Bible of food, even if most of us will never need to know how to prepare Corsican blackbirds or acacia blossom fritters. But he was also an expert on the use of artificial flowers made of wax, and wrote a book on the subject. Ruth Reichl's recipe for American-style coconut shrimp curry is as comfortably utilitarian as the lessons she learns, and passes on, about marriage, adultery and divorce in her food memoirs.
Anthony Bourdain may have opened up the strange and (in his case) machismo-saturated world of the chef's art in Kitchen Confidential , but he also has a passion for writing fast-paced thrillers. And not so long ago, more people were talking about David Foster Wallace's marathon essay on the lobster, commissioned by Gourmet magazine, than were discussing the top ten bestsellers on the NYT list.
Indian food writing has been cramped by a lack of space, not talent. We have the chefs, we have the passionate gourmets; we have a handful, at least, of talented columnists, from Marryam Reshi and Vikram Doctor to the Grand Fromage of the HT himself. We have more foodies than food snobs these days (it's easy to spot the difference, the foodie loves cooking and eating; the food snob loves the sound of his voice holding forth about cooking and eating). But it's only recently that we've begun to have the kind of writing about food—intelligent, open-minded and well-informed—that we deserve.
If you look at food memoirs, part of the problem becomes apparent. Madhur Jaffrey's Climbing The Mango Trees draws on her childhood in India, and she evokes the experience of growing up in a large joint family in a Delhi that no longer exists through taste and recipes. Chitrita Banerji's reissued Hour of the Goddess explores the complexities of food in Bengal, from the clashes between the Bangal and Ghoti approach to fish to Potoler Ma, the kitchen maid who will rarely, if ever, taste the rich delights she helps to prepare. Jaffrey and Banerji both know how to mine childhood memories; but for both of them, the introduction to a wider world of culinary experience began only when they left India. From Jaffrey and Banerji to Sudha Kaul and Shobha Narayan, all these writers found publishers abroad before they found an audience in India.
Esther David's Book of Rachel (Penguin, Rs 295) is a novel that puts the Laura Esquivel-Chitra Banerji Divakaruni format to good use. As Rachel tries to save a synagogue of symbolic importance for the dwindling Indian community of Bene Israel Jews, her daughter Zephra looks for love in some of the wrong places. Each chapter starts with a recipe (Sown Kadhi, Indian matzo, Malida) that shines light on some of the history of the community—it would, as with Esquivel's original romance-inna-recipe potboiler, be gimmicky if the recipes weren't so good. (Trust me. I tried them.)
More typical of Indian food writing is Pushpesh Pant's quirky exploration of the Grand Trunk Road via the food served at its dhabas, langars and shrines. This coffee-table book blends great pictures with a history served in easily digestible dollops. Pant is good at reminding us, for instance, that the popularity of tandoori cooking came from the sanjha chulha set up by the thousands of refugees who were displaced by Partition; the clay oven could be easily constructed and dismantled, perfect for a population forced onto the road. And while not all of his recipes are easily replicated, they provide an illustration of how subtle changes in cooking styles and ingredients can create entirely new dishes that still carry a faintly familiar feel.
What makes Pant's book interesting is that it departs from the standard coffee-table food book format—glorious pictures, no information to speak of—and from the no-frills, versatile cookbook or food guide. Speaking of guides, we have two wine guides out in the market, both hampered despite the best intentions of the authors by the peculiarities governing the Indian wine industry and the slightly bizarre selection of foreign wines that are legally available. Magandeep Singh has the chattier, more approachable Bluffer's Guide-style handbook in Wine Wisdom (Penguin, Rs 250). Dr Aakash Singh Rathore's The Complete Indian Wine Guide is ponderous but painstaking (Lotus: Roli Books). All I have to say is that men who are prepared to drink Bosca and Golconda for the sake of their readers are far better men than I am, Gunga Din.
Pushpesh Pant: Food Path: Cuisine Along The Grand Trunk Road (Lustre Press, Roli Books)
Esther David: Book of Rachel (Penguin India, Rs 295)
Dr Aakash Singh Rathore: The Complete Indian Wine Guide (Lotus: Roli, price not given)
Wine Wisdom: Buying and Drinking Wine in India: Magandeep Singh (Penguin, Rs 250)
Chitrita Banerji: The Hour of the Goddess (Penguin, Rs 295)
Climbing the Mango Trees: Madhur Jaffrey (Ebury Press, POUNDS 18.99)
To understand the really great food writers, test them out in the kitchen and the drawing room. The kitchen is where Escoffier's recipes or MFK Fisher's strictures on salad, or even Jiggs Kalra's more complex prescriptions, offer amateur cooks like me something to aspire to, however distant. The drawing room is where you can use the quirks of food writers as fodder for conversation.
And the best food writers are very strange human beings. Escoffier's Ma Cuisine is a modern Bible of food, even if most of us will never need to know how to prepare Corsican blackbirds or acacia blossom fritters. But he was also an expert on the use of artificial flowers made of wax, and wrote a book on the subject. Ruth Reichl's recipe for American-style coconut shrimp curry is as comfortably utilitarian as the lessons she learns, and passes on, about marriage, adultery and divorce in her food memoirs.
Anthony Bourdain may have opened up the strange and (in his case) machismo-saturated world of the chef's art in Kitchen Confidential , but he also has a passion for writing fast-paced thrillers. And not so long ago, more people were talking about David Foster Wallace's marathon essay on the lobster, commissioned by Gourmet magazine, than were discussing the top ten bestsellers on the NYT list.
Indian food writing has been cramped by a lack of space, not talent. We have the chefs, we have the passionate gourmets; we have a handful, at least, of talented columnists, from Marryam Reshi and Vikram Doctor to the Grand Fromage of the HT himself. We have more foodies than food snobs these days (it's easy to spot the difference, the foodie loves cooking and eating; the food snob loves the sound of his voice holding forth about cooking and eating). But it's only recently that we've begun to have the kind of writing about food—intelligent, open-minded and well-informed—that we deserve.
If you look at food memoirs, part of the problem becomes apparent. Madhur Jaffrey's Climbing The Mango Trees draws on her childhood in India, and she evokes the experience of growing up in a large joint family in a Delhi that no longer exists through taste and recipes. Chitrita Banerji's reissued Hour of the Goddess explores the complexities of food in Bengal, from the clashes between the Bangal and Ghoti approach to fish to Potoler Ma, the kitchen maid who will rarely, if ever, taste the rich delights she helps to prepare. Jaffrey and Banerji both know how to mine childhood memories; but for both of them, the introduction to a wider world of culinary experience began only when they left India. From Jaffrey and Banerji to Sudha Kaul and Shobha Narayan, all these writers found publishers abroad before they found an audience in India.
Esther David's Book of Rachel (Penguin, Rs 295) is a novel that puts the Laura Esquivel-Chitra Banerji Divakaruni format to good use. As Rachel tries to save a synagogue of symbolic importance for the dwindling Indian community of Bene Israel Jews, her daughter Zephra looks for love in some of the wrong places. Each chapter starts with a recipe (Sown Kadhi, Indian matzo, Malida) that shines light on some of the history of the community—it would, as with Esquivel's original romance-inna-recipe potboiler, be gimmicky if the recipes weren't so good. (Trust me. I tried them.)
More typical of Indian food writing is Pushpesh Pant's quirky exploration of the Grand Trunk Road via the food served at its dhabas, langars and shrines. This coffee-table book blends great pictures with a history served in easily digestible dollops. Pant is good at reminding us, for instance, that the popularity of tandoori cooking came from the sanjha chulha set up by the thousands of refugees who were displaced by Partition; the clay oven could be easily constructed and dismantled, perfect for a population forced onto the road. And while not all of his recipes are easily replicated, they provide an illustration of how subtle changes in cooking styles and ingredients can create entirely new dishes that still carry a faintly familiar feel.
What makes Pant's book interesting is that it departs from the standard coffee-table food book format—glorious pictures, no information to speak of—and from the no-frills, versatile cookbook or food guide. Speaking of guides, we have two wine guides out in the market, both hampered despite the best intentions of the authors by the peculiarities governing the Indian wine industry and the slightly bizarre selection of foreign wines that are legally available. Magandeep Singh has the chattier, more approachable Bluffer's Guide-style handbook in Wine Wisdom (Penguin, Rs 250). Dr Aakash Singh Rathore's The Complete Indian Wine Guide is ponderous but painstaking (Lotus: Roli Books). All I have to say is that men who are prepared to drink Bosca and Golconda for the sake of their readers are far better men than I am, Gunga Din.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Speaking Volumes: Octavia Butler, 1947-2006
You'd have to be a serious B-movie fan to remember Devil Girl From Mars , a piece of generic schlock in which a Martian woman arrives in a Scottish town in search of willing, able male volunteers to breed with other women from her planet.
Octavia Butler saw the film when she was 12 years old and decided she could do much better—she had been writing since she was 10, but it was the Devil Girl who inadvertently kickstarted one of the more unusual SF careers of our time. Butler had all the wrong credentials for a writer in a white, male-dominated field: she was black, female and utterly uninterested in writing about gizmos and machines.
Many years later, when Butler had become a name to reckon with in SF and experimental fiction, her intelligent, morally questioning work the precursor to the kind of SF novels Margaret Atwood and Nancy Kress would write, she looked back to the early struggle. She had a hard time finding a publisher for her first novel, Kindred . This work, set in the plantations of the American South that featured a black woman protagonist who travels in time to save a white man who turns out to be her own ancestor, fitted no conventional SF matrix. The meagre $5,000 advance she got for the book helped Butler, no stranger to hardship and deprivation, survive for almost a year.
The first African-American woman to break barriers in the SF field continued to break the mold right till the end. Butler died this week at the age of 58 after she slipped and fell on the sidewalk near her house; news of the accident spread fast on SF networks, and tributes have been coming in from Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison: peers who were also fans. She had just published Fledgling , which promises to change the face of vampire fiction. The protagonist of Fledgling , Shori Matthews, is a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl—probably the first time Dracula's many literary descendants have included a black female among their numbers.
Butler came up with two fabulous twists on the vampire story. In her version, vampires are actually members of a matriarchal race that predates humanity: aside from needing human blood to survive, they are shy, peaceful people. And Shori's skin colour is because of an experiment to see whether black-skinned vampires might be able to bypass the race's legendary intolerance of sunlight.
Like many women writers in the SF field, Butler's work often revolved around gender. In Bloodchild , for instance, she asked a deceptively simple question—what if men could become pregnant—and came up with a typically unusual answer. But while she was definitely a feminist role model for many writers, it would be limiting to define her as a writer whose central theme was gender.
Butler's fascination with women's stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history—her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences. And like the best of writers in any field, she never let go of a driving moral curiosity, a passionate interest in how to define virtue, religion and ethics in rapidly changing societies. Perhaps her best known sequence of novels is the Patternist series, where she created a world of elite humans who had developed telepathic powers—Butler's interest lay not in the mechanics of psionic powers, but in the way a telepathic culture would develop its shibboleths, taboos, virtues and cultural straitjackets. Wild Seed was described by one reviewer as "an unholy cross between Roots and Wuthering Heights .
For me, Butler provided the key that unlocked the doors of science fiction. I read Kindred years ago with joyful astonishment: instead of the stereotypes of SF that we had been fed, tales of spaceships and wars between distant galaxies, here was a writer who was willing to push the frontiers of the genre as hard as she could. There were other writers who made me realize the vast, rich variety of SF, from Philip K Dick to Walter Leibowitz to Jorge Luis Borges, from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood to James Blish. But Octavia Butler was the first. For all of us who knew her work, the true sadness lies in knowing that we will never again look forward to seeing what brave new worlds she would open up this time.
(I miss her. Wrote this just after she died, and my reaction to her death was simple: no way, she was too young. I know: we reserve the "too young" cliche for people who die in their twenties and thirties and teens. But Butler was only in her fifties; she had at least two, maybe three, great writing decades left. She died way, way, too young.)
Octavia Butler saw the film when she was 12 years old and decided she could do much better—she had been writing since she was 10, but it was the Devil Girl who inadvertently kickstarted one of the more unusual SF careers of our time. Butler had all the wrong credentials for a writer in a white, male-dominated field: she was black, female and utterly uninterested in writing about gizmos and machines.
Many years later, when Butler had become a name to reckon with in SF and experimental fiction, her intelligent, morally questioning work the precursor to the kind of SF novels Margaret Atwood and Nancy Kress would write, she looked back to the early struggle. She had a hard time finding a publisher for her first novel, Kindred . This work, set in the plantations of the American South that featured a black woman protagonist who travels in time to save a white man who turns out to be her own ancestor, fitted no conventional SF matrix. The meagre $5,000 advance she got for the book helped Butler, no stranger to hardship and deprivation, survive for almost a year.
The first African-American woman to break barriers in the SF field continued to break the mold right till the end. Butler died this week at the age of 58 after she slipped and fell on the sidewalk near her house; news of the accident spread fast on SF networks, and tributes have been coming in from Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison: peers who were also fans. She had just published Fledgling , which promises to change the face of vampire fiction. The protagonist of Fledgling , Shori Matthews, is a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl—probably the first time Dracula's many literary descendants have included a black female among their numbers.
Butler came up with two fabulous twists on the vampire story. In her version, vampires are actually members of a matriarchal race that predates humanity: aside from needing human blood to survive, they are shy, peaceful people. And Shori's skin colour is because of an experiment to see whether black-skinned vampires might be able to bypass the race's legendary intolerance of sunlight.
Like many women writers in the SF field, Butler's work often revolved around gender. In Bloodchild , for instance, she asked a deceptively simple question—what if men could become pregnant—and came up with a typically unusual answer. But while she was definitely a feminist role model for many writers, it would be limiting to define her as a writer whose central theme was gender.
Butler's fascination with women's stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history—her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences. And like the best of writers in any field, she never let go of a driving moral curiosity, a passionate interest in how to define virtue, religion and ethics in rapidly changing societies. Perhaps her best known sequence of novels is the Patternist series, where she created a world of elite humans who had developed telepathic powers—Butler's interest lay not in the mechanics of psionic powers, but in the way a telepathic culture would develop its shibboleths, taboos, virtues and cultural straitjackets. Wild Seed was described by one reviewer as "an unholy cross between Roots and Wuthering Heights .
For me, Butler provided the key that unlocked the doors of science fiction. I read Kindred years ago with joyful astonishment: instead of the stereotypes of SF that we had been fed, tales of spaceships and wars between distant galaxies, here was a writer who was willing to push the frontiers of the genre as hard as she could. There were other writers who made me realize the vast, rich variety of SF, from Philip K Dick to Walter Leibowitz to Jorge Luis Borges, from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood to James Blish. But Octavia Butler was the first. For all of us who knew her work, the true sadness lies in knowing that we will never again look forward to seeing what brave new worlds she would open up this time.
(I miss her. Wrote this just after she died, and my reaction to her death was simple: no way, she was too young. I know: we reserve the "too young" cliche for people who die in their twenties and thirties and teens. But Butler was only in her fifties; she had at least two, maybe three, great writing decades left. She died way, way, too young.)
Taxi No 9211: oddball review section
(Dir: Milan Luthra, starring Nana Patekar, John Abraham, Sameera Reddy, Sonali Kulkarni and a very battered Fiat)
Halfway through, Taxi no 9211, stranded on the rail tracks, meets its end in a brutal collision with a Mumbai train. Perfect metaphor for what the director did with this film.
Milan Luthra has great casting: John Abraham versus Nana Patekar is like pitting Yana Gupta against Judi Dench. He has the perfect anti-hero in Bombay's traffic. He even—and he should, since he borrowed it from Changing Lanes and the original Nau Do Gyara--has a potentially great plot. Raghav Shashtri (Patekar) doesn't want his wife (Sonali Kulkarni) to know he's not a LIC agent but a taxi driver in financial trouble; spoilt playboy (Abraham) needs to reach court in time or risk losing a fortune, and they both desperately need anger management classes. With Abraham in Patekar's cab, they might drive each other over the edge.
But Taxi No 9211 has serious steering wobble, bypassing noir and comedy in favour of sentimental slop. Patekar rises brilliantly above a schizophrenic script, half of it written by a genius, the other by a touchy-feely New Age therapist; Abraham, unfortunately, displays all the burning emotion of a model who's discovered that the last three feet of the catwalk just went missing. The song 'Meter Down' is a blast, but the rest—well, as the guy behind us said when his girlfriend griped about gaping plot holes, "What do you want, film Fiat hai, Pajero nahi".
Halfway through, Taxi no 9211, stranded on the rail tracks, meets its end in a brutal collision with a Mumbai train. Perfect metaphor for what the director did with this film.
Milan Luthra has great casting: John Abraham versus Nana Patekar is like pitting Yana Gupta against Judi Dench. He has the perfect anti-hero in Bombay's traffic. He even—and he should, since he borrowed it from Changing Lanes and the original Nau Do Gyara--has a potentially great plot. Raghav Shashtri (Patekar) doesn't want his wife (Sonali Kulkarni) to know he's not a LIC agent but a taxi driver in financial trouble; spoilt playboy (Abraham) needs to reach court in time or risk losing a fortune, and they both desperately need anger management classes. With Abraham in Patekar's cab, they might drive each other over the edge.
But Taxi No 9211 has serious steering wobble, bypassing noir and comedy in favour of sentimental slop. Patekar rises brilliantly above a schizophrenic script, half of it written by a genius, the other by a touchy-feely New Age therapist; Abraham, unfortunately, displays all the burning emotion of a model who's discovered that the last three feet of the catwalk just went missing. The song 'Meter Down' is a blast, but the rest—well, as the guy behind us said when his girlfriend griped about gaping plot holes, "What do you want, film Fiat hai, Pajero nahi".
Last Word: The Masculine Workplace
They came from different professions, but they shared much They were all women in their mid-to-late thirties; all had worked hard at their careers; most of them had supportive husbands and families; and all of them had made very similar decisions to quit the conventional workplace.
Some made the decision after they had children; some quit in order to spend more time looking after ill or ageing parents. Meera said: "I wasn't happy to leave. I felt I could do the job, given flexible working hours and a very helpful partner. But the norms of the workplace are too rigid to accommodate my needs." She's continued to work with more understanding employers, but at a price—her flexible working hours come with a substantial pay cut, and she has fewer career opportunities.
Ayesha was blunt. "It's the offices, no matter how many crèches they put in, it's still a man's world out there." This week, an international business magazine looked at the European conundrum. Europe offers working women more maternity and family leave, better day care and flexible working hours; America did nothing of the kind, but there were more women in the top job ranks in the US.
That's because flexitime and longer leave worked to the disadvantage of women in the workplace: employers are reluctant to hire women who might take time off to have children, and longer leaves made it harder for women to stay in touch with work. Women who sacrificed personal time in order to get the job done were rewarded, like their male counterparts. Women who took advantage of what seemed to be personally enriching policies were penalized at the workplace.
But listening to my friends' stories, I began to wonder about the other side of the picture. Gender policies at the workplace are all directed towards helping women to balance the roles of mother and employee, CEO and daughter, executive and wife. Men are missing from this equation. Paternity leave may be available, but it's not taken seriously. Single fathers who take time off to be there for their kids' exams or to do household chores are, interestingly, penalized in the same way as women: the new, sensitive workplace may give them "fathering time", but they get fewer promotions.
"All my colleagues will tell you they'd like to spend more time with the kids, with the family," said a cynical male friend who heads his own consultancy. "But the truth? Not if their careers will take a hit. And the joys of family life? Get real: given a choice between doing a business lunch at the Oberoi and picking up the kids from school, what would you rather do?" A few others were less cynical, though the strongest reactions came from men near retirement. "I wasn't there through my kid's first play, my mother's illness, wasn't there when the dog had puppies, and now I think, what was I doing? I don't remember what seemed so important. But it seemed important at the time."
The problem with today's workplace isn't that it's not woman-friendly. It's that offices and companies don't see it as their job to enable their male employees to be good fathers, husbands and sons, as well as good bosses and colleagues. In the short run, the masculine workplace seems to offer men a good deal. In the long run, it cripples men by forcing them to pretend that being in a suit 14 out of 24 hours is the most important thing they can do with their lives.
(One of the last Last Words published in The Telegraph--they killed the section shortly afterwards.)
Some made the decision after they had children; some quit in order to spend more time looking after ill or ageing parents. Meera said: "I wasn't happy to leave. I felt I could do the job, given flexible working hours and a very helpful partner. But the norms of the workplace are too rigid to accommodate my needs." She's continued to work with more understanding employers, but at a price—her flexible working hours come with a substantial pay cut, and she has fewer career opportunities.
Ayesha was blunt. "It's the offices, no matter how many crèches they put in, it's still a man's world out there." This week, an international business magazine looked at the European conundrum. Europe offers working women more maternity and family leave, better day care and flexible working hours; America did nothing of the kind, but there were more women in the top job ranks in the US.
That's because flexitime and longer leave worked to the disadvantage of women in the workplace: employers are reluctant to hire women who might take time off to have children, and longer leaves made it harder for women to stay in touch with work. Women who sacrificed personal time in order to get the job done were rewarded, like their male counterparts. Women who took advantage of what seemed to be personally enriching policies were penalized at the workplace.
But listening to my friends' stories, I began to wonder about the other side of the picture. Gender policies at the workplace are all directed towards helping women to balance the roles of mother and employee, CEO and daughter, executive and wife. Men are missing from this equation. Paternity leave may be available, but it's not taken seriously. Single fathers who take time off to be there for their kids' exams or to do household chores are, interestingly, penalized in the same way as women: the new, sensitive workplace may give them "fathering time", but they get fewer promotions.
"All my colleagues will tell you they'd like to spend more time with the kids, with the family," said a cynical male friend who heads his own consultancy. "But the truth? Not if their careers will take a hit. And the joys of family life? Get real: given a choice between doing a business lunch at the Oberoi and picking up the kids from school, what would you rather do?" A few others were less cynical, though the strongest reactions came from men near retirement. "I wasn't there through my kid's first play, my mother's illness, wasn't there when the dog had puppies, and now I think, what was I doing? I don't remember what seemed so important. But it seemed important at the time."
The problem with today's workplace isn't that it's not woman-friendly. It's that offices and companies don't see it as their job to enable their male employees to be good fathers, husbands and sons, as well as good bosses and colleagues. In the short run, the masculine workplace seems to offer men a good deal. In the long run, it cripples men by forcing them to pretend that being in a suit 14 out of 24 hours is the most important thing they can do with their lives.
(One of the last Last Words published in The Telegraph--they killed the section shortly afterwards.)
Who Let The Blogs Out?
Neither Beijing nor Microsoft can shut down Zhao Jing. The blogger better known as An Ti had run a popular blog for over a year, with the Chinese government censoring several of his posts, when he shifted to MSN Spaces. After receiving complaints from a government unused to its citizens expressing themselves freely, MSN controversially pulled An Ti's blog a few months ago.
MSN was not alone in complying with China's demands to censor the Net; Google and Yahoo! have faced increasing criticism for their apparent willingness to fall in with the Beijing rules of censorship in order to do business in China. But with the emergence of a strong cyber-dissidence movement online, An Ti and his fellow bloggers are finding ways around the rules.
This week, An Ti restarted his blog (http://anti.blog-city.com in Chinese, and some of his posts are carried in English translation at http://chinathinkbase.com). In Iran, blogger Arash Sigarchi (www.sigarchi.com/blog -- currently down, but a search brings up his archives fairly easily) hasn't been that lucky. He was imprisoned this January for "insulting the Supreme God" and "propaganda against the regime"; this is his second prison term. One of Vietnam's most prominent cyber-dissidents, Nguyen Khac Toan, has just been released after four years in jail—but he's sentenced to house arrest for the next three years.
And the continued silence on Radio Free Nepal (http://freenepal.blogspot.com) is worrying, given a September 2005 post: "Radio Free Nepal has been silent for more than three months – not because the problem in Nepal was solved. It was rather because of the problems with us. It's not always easy to blog anonymously. But now we will write frequently because our fight is not over yet!" Reassuringly, the very similar Free Nepal (http://freenepal.org) has been regularly updated. But a blogger at BloggerNepal reports being threatened; The Committee To Protect Bloggers (http://committeeto protectbloggers.civiblog.org/) has more news.
In most of the world, blogs run alongside conventional media, providing alternative if influential viewpoints, quirky entertainment, sharply focused information. But in many troubled countries, blogs and bloggers play a much more significant role. In China, the controversy over censored blogs and reports of bloggers and other cyberdissidents being persecuted, even jailed, has been balanced by the sheer volume of numbers. Even if MSN, Yahoo!, Google and other tech companies remain willing to play censor or provide censored search engines at the behest of the Chinese government, there are now too many blogs and journals out there for the infamous Great Firewall of China to catch up with every dissident.
The Nepalese government hasn't always been able to penetrate the anonymity of bloggers; when one site closes, another opens up in its wake. Iran and Vietnam cope with cyber-dissidence by doling out harsh punishments, but media watchdogs are increasingly arguing that bloggers—at least, the responsible ones—are just as entitled to support and protection as more conventional journalists.
Reporters Sans Frontieres maintains a list of jailed and threatened cyber-dissidents, and has just issued a very useful handbook for dissident bloggers (http://www.rsf.org/ rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542). (You don't have to be a blogger, or even a dissident, to benefit from the section on ensuring that your email really is private, incidentally.) Elsewhere, one of the best guides to blogging from war zones, hostile countries and other areas of risk is at the AnoniBlog Wiki (http://anoniblog.pbwiki.com/). As they write, "Across the globe, countries that discourage free speech have followed their citizens into the blogosphere… Regardless of your culture, your country, your politics or religion, we believe you deserve to speak your mind without falling afoul of state power…"
With luck, Indian bloggers will never need the RSF handbook or the services of AnoniBlog. In countries where bloggers don't comment on the news but make the headlines themselves, a guide to effective cyber-dissidence is never going to go out of style.
(Published in the Business Standard in February 2006)
MSN was not alone in complying with China's demands to censor the Net; Google and Yahoo! have faced increasing criticism for their apparent willingness to fall in with the Beijing rules of censorship in order to do business in China. But with the emergence of a strong cyber-dissidence movement online, An Ti and his fellow bloggers are finding ways around the rules.
This week, An Ti restarted his blog (http://anti.blog-city.com in Chinese, and some of his posts are carried in English translation at http://chinathinkbase.com). In Iran, blogger Arash Sigarchi (www.sigarchi.com/blog -- currently down, but a search brings up his archives fairly easily) hasn't been that lucky. He was imprisoned this January for "insulting the Supreme God" and "propaganda against the regime"; this is his second prison term. One of Vietnam's most prominent cyber-dissidents, Nguyen Khac Toan, has just been released after four years in jail—but he's sentenced to house arrest for the next three years.
And the continued silence on Radio Free Nepal (http://freenepal.blogspot.com) is worrying, given a September 2005 post: "Radio Free Nepal has been silent for more than three months – not because the problem in Nepal was solved. It was rather because of the problems with us. It's not always easy to blog anonymously. But now we will write frequently because our fight is not over yet!" Reassuringly, the very similar Free Nepal (http://freenepal.org) has been regularly updated. But a blogger at BloggerNepal reports being threatened; The Committee To Protect Bloggers (http://committeeto protectbloggers.civiblog.org/) has more news.
In most of the world, blogs run alongside conventional media, providing alternative if influential viewpoints, quirky entertainment, sharply focused information. But in many troubled countries, blogs and bloggers play a much more significant role. In China, the controversy over censored blogs and reports of bloggers and other cyberdissidents being persecuted, even jailed, has been balanced by the sheer volume of numbers. Even if MSN, Yahoo!, Google and other tech companies remain willing to play censor or provide censored search engines at the behest of the Chinese government, there are now too many blogs and journals out there for the infamous Great Firewall of China to catch up with every dissident.
The Nepalese government hasn't always been able to penetrate the anonymity of bloggers; when one site closes, another opens up in its wake. Iran and Vietnam cope with cyber-dissidence by doling out harsh punishments, but media watchdogs are increasingly arguing that bloggers—at least, the responsible ones—are just as entitled to support and protection as more conventional journalists.
Reporters Sans Frontieres maintains a list of jailed and threatened cyber-dissidents, and has just issued a very useful handbook for dissident bloggers (http://www.rsf.org/ rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542). (You don't have to be a blogger, or even a dissident, to benefit from the section on ensuring that your email really is private, incidentally.) Elsewhere, one of the best guides to blogging from war zones, hostile countries and other areas of risk is at the AnoniBlog Wiki (http://anoniblog.pbwiki.com/). As they write, "Across the globe, countries that discourage free speech have followed their citizens into the blogosphere… Regardless of your culture, your country, your politics or religion, we believe you deserve to speak your mind without falling afoul of state power…"
With luck, Indian bloggers will never need the RSF handbook or the services of AnoniBlog. In countries where bloggers don't comment on the news but make the headlines themselves, a guide to effective cyber-dissidence is never going to go out of style.
(Published in the Business Standard in February 2006)
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