Book review: The Possessed, Elif Batuman

(This review was written at high speed, and I wish I'd done more justice to Batuman's book. The Possessed sent me back to the Russian classics after a decade, and what Batuman does is make you read the books as though you're reading them again for the first time. Review published in the Business Standard, October 2011.)

The Possessed
Elif Batuman
Granta Books/ Farrar Straus Giroux
Rs 753

PG Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialized in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. The Russians draw her in little by little, as she succumbs first to Eugene Onegin, and then to Anna Karenina: “Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified and meaningful in terms of plot.”

Batuman really means to be a novelist, but her creative writing career doesn’t survive the reality of workshops: “Why was it
automatically good for a writer to live in a barn,” she asks, “reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?”

Russia pulls her in gradually; this student of literature, born to Turkish parents and raised in New Jersey, finds herself drawn to study the Russian novelists in Russia, through a series of complicated detours. (One of them involves judging a shapely leg contest for adolescent boys in a village in Hungary. Batuman has a knack for memorable asides.)

As she warms to her accidental subject, she writes: “I stopped believing that theory had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

In Moscow, she dates bankers, for “the first and last time” in her life; elsewhere, she meets Isaac Babel’s formidable, larger-than-life older daughter Nathalie; in St Petersburg, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stay overnight in the replica of an ice palace modeled on the fully furnished House of Ice commissioned by Ivan the Terrible’s niece, a palace that has “no clear purpose, and therefore many unclear purposes”. She lives briefly in Samarkand, where she learns why it is impossible for women to be saints, how to eat lepyushka, and shares with us her readings of the life of the Emperor Bobur (as the name is spelled in those parts) and the fact, unrelated in Indian histories, that he suffered terribly from gemoroi or haemorrhoids.

Behind the exuberance of the travel writing and the conversational digressions, there is also real scholarship (many of these essays were first published in the New Yorker, the LRB and other magazines). At a Tolstoy conference, Batuman argues, only slightly mischievously, that the writer may have been murdered, but the discussion veers off into a heated argument over whether he had or hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland. Dostoevksy’s poor intellectuals, the ones in his book The Possessed who inspired the book’s title, descend into madness as Batuman asks why the Russians required so much grotesquerie.

Just a few decades ago, The Possessed might have been read differently—Russia has slipped from its position as one of the great powers, and perhaps because of that relative erasure from the world stage, the country is once again new territory for a traveler and writer of Batuman’s stamp. She is free to explore it without having to explain it, and free to explain—always obliquely—why the Russians took such a firm grip on her imagination, why their larger-than-life stories were so much more compelling than the stories she had fled from, where “middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions… and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things”.

By the last chapter, where Batuman explores one of Dostoevsky’s more enigmatic works, a novel called Demons, she has taken us halfway across the world and back. Everything that most critics would edit out of their work is here—the backstories, the failed relationships and minor missteps, the cult-like intensity that might sweep a community of academics—perhaps because Batuman knows, and makes the reader see again, the value of digressions and secret histories.

The question that animates this chapter is not really about literature or books or scholarship: what is worth devoting your life to, asks Batuman? She cannot imagine studying, say, Islamic fundamentalism forever; another person might not be able to imagine being a bread-maker in Samarkand.

“If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” The Possessed, peopled with a cast of eccentrics but free of suicidal moujiks, will convince many readers to at least begin that search.

Silencing Ramanujan

(I had just finished editing the chapter on censorship, part of my collection of essays on reading, when we heard that Delhi University had voted to drop Ramanujan's essay on Many Ramayanas from its history syllabus. One of the saddest parts of writing the censorship chapter is that it's never finished: there is always a new ban, a new act of censorship. This is a rough draft-in-progress of the latest addition, and I hope this will be the last.)



There are many official versions of the Ramayana—the one written by Kalidasa, the one by Kamban, Arshia Sattar’s luminous translation of Valmiki's telling of the great tale, Nina Paley's retelling that brings together several different versions. But there has never been a single, authorized, definitive version of India’s great epic.

Among the many Ramayanas I grew up with, there was the comic book Amar Chitra Katha version that ironed out all ambiguity. Rama was handsome and muscular and good, and he was clearly the hero, Ravana had ten heads and the bug-eyed expression that Amar Chitra Katha illustrators gave to all rakshashas and asuras, and he was clearly the villain. The television epic, with cheesy side-effects and paste jewellery, was surprisingly compelling, as much as any of the complex narratives staged every year at the Sriram Centre, or any of the epic retellings and translations that illuminated a different corner of the myth.

One year in Calcutta, I watched a mildly Communist Ramayana, where Sita waved the Left Front’s hammer-and-sickle flag to signal her deep distress at being kidnapped by Ravana.

Another year, Sudama, who worked in my parents’ house, asked my sister and me whether we would loan him a silk sari, dark glasses and a necklace. He had been selected to play the part of Sita in the local version of the Ramlila. We stared at him; Sudama was a strapping, muscular man who suffered from premature baldness. He didn’t fit any image of Sita we might have had in mind.

“Are you sure you’re playing Sita,” we asked gently. “Not Rama, Lakshman, Hanuman, Ravana?” He was sure; he had read her lines with such feeling, he explained, that the troupe had chosen him on the spot. Also, he had offered to punch in the heads of any dissenters.

We enjoyed Sudama’s Ramayana. He played Sita with a surprising delicacy of feeling, putting on the dark glasses to stare down his wicked abductor, Ravana. Rama was played by a 14-year-old who did splendidly until his voice broke on stage in the middle of the battle scene with Rama and his monkey army pitted against Ravana’s Lankan troops. Rama left, overcome by woe, and his stage brother Lakshmana had to step in, announcing that the departure of Rama had struck fear into the hearts of Ravana’s cohorts, for they knew not what fearsome weapons he would return with. The demons, who knew a good cue when they saw it, surrendered in a great joyous clamour; the Ramayana continued to its ambiguously happy ending.

Most Indians have similar stories—depending on where you grew up and whether you heard the Ramayana or read the Ramayana, your sense of the epic will be complex, and will involve multiple versions.

The late poet AK Ramanujan was a scholar and a connoisseur of the many versions of the Ramayana—he had read many of the translations in the original tongues, and he wrote about the epic with a kind of abstract, pure love. The versions he spoke of were far more elevated than the rough exaggerations of our street Ramayanas, but they all had in common what the Communist troupe and Sudama’s friends shared—an understanding that the Ramayana was public property. The 15th century Bengali poet Krittibas had come out with a version that was faithful in its own fashion; it was as legitimate a version as the oral tradition popular among the Muslims of Kerala, called the Mappila Ramayana. Nabaneeta Dev Sen has a brilliant essay on women's versions of the Ramayana.

It’s unclear how and why some rightwing parties decided to target the late poet and scholar, AK Ramanujan, more specifically his classic essay on ‘Many Ramayanas’. This may have been part of the general climate of intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country’s history and its myths that was part of the Indian landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s. The objections to Ramanujan’s essay appeared to be based on simple and willful misreadings of his writings.

This narrow-focus way of reading texts—scanning them only for “offensive” phrases—would happen a year later with Rohinton Mistry’s subtle tale of Bombay and India in the Indira Gandhi era, Such a Long Journey, where many of those who demanded a ban on the book had not read it, but could quote the few sentences where Mistry’s characters had slammed Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena.

It had happened before, reducing Salman Rushdie’s complex Satanic Verses to a series of deranged blasphemies about the Prophet, obliterating the migrant stories and the humour that also went into the Verses. Selective misreading had caused a bizarre situation where the abridged, distorted versions of books and essays circulated and inspired outrage, while the originals were either placed beyond the reach of readers or left unread. Often, it seemed as though the real battle was between those who read freely and those who instinctively feared the subversive potential in books.

In 2008, members of the student wing of the BJP, the ABVP, reacted violently to the inclusion of this essay in the Delhi University history curriculum, and some of them assaulted the head of the History Department. At that time, the department stood firm, defending their decision to allow students to read Ramanujan’s brilliant explorations of the multiple forms in which the epic had been told across India and other countries.

http://communalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/crying-wolf-ramayana-ramanujan-and-abvp.html

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?236875

So why would the Academic Council decide, three years later, to withdraw Ramanujan’s essay from the syllabus?
http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/du-to-scrap-ramanujan-essay-on-ramayana-that-incensed-right-wingers-104127.html#en

There are easy defences; as was the case with Mumbai University’s craven decision to withdraw Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey from the syllabus, this will in all probability be called a purely internal matter. Despite the apparently furious dissent expressed by nine members of the Academic Council, there is little hope that the decision will be put up for review—changes to the syllabus are made slowly and once made, are usually final.

The damage might seem limited: what prevents a handful of history students from finding Ramanujan’s essay on their own, reading it and discussing it if they so choose? But the real damage is caused by the act of censorship, by the precedent the University sets when it says: this idea is dangerous, or controversial, or too explosive to be discussed. You expect academics and scholars not just to defend free speech, but to defend the work of a man who was probably one of the greatest writers and thinkers in contemporary Indian literature. You also expect them to stand up for the tradition that insists there were always many Ramayanas—that the oversimplified, often chauvinistic version of the epic that the right-wing has often put forward is not, by any means, the only one.

This July, many of us watched in dismay as a screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues was cancelled in New York after a group of Hindutva fundamentalists threatened to picket and protest the film.

Aseem Chabra on Sita Sings The Blues and censorship: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/54/2011080720110807052728135114f274a/Battling-for-free-speech.html

Salil Tripathi on Nina Paley and free speech issues in India: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/24/sita-sings-the-blues-hindu-film-causes-a-stir-in-queens.html

The “offence” Nina Paley’s version of the Ramayana causes is just as specious as the ways in which Rohinton Mistry or Ramanujan have caused offence, but we now have a situation in India where all that is needed to shut down a work of literature is to declare that one’s sentiments have been offended. The real problem lies in the way Ramanujan began his essay:
“How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been?”

It took me some time to understand why this idea might be so threatening, because the way we were taught to deal with books or essays or ideas we didn’t like was the way put forward in the great epics: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are filled with debate, with digressions into discussions of what exactly dharma might be. Most of us are intrigued by the multiple versions of the Ramayana—the feminist version, the rough, bawdy village versions, Nina Paley’s elegant cartoon version, they all have their place.

But if you live in a climate of intolerance, a book that questions the tenets of faith and offers a provocative re-imagining of a religious text might be considered so blasphemous that its author will be persecuted for years (The Satanic Verses). A novel that highlights an inconvenient part of the history of contemporary India, speaking openly of corruption in the Prime Minister’s office and the slow stirrings of narrow-mindedness in a once-great city will be erased from the college syllabus (Such a Long Journey). Ramanujan’s great essay on the tradition of many Ramayanas threatens those who would prefer one version, their version, and so it is removed, and his voice is silenced (Many Ramayanas).

In the “debates” over these books, we no longer debate the ideas they contain. Almost every argument breaks down once the threat of violence is made. The courts have rarely upheld censorship in India, but the other places that should protect free speech—universities, publishing houses, art galleries, bookshops--often crumble in the face of either threats of violence or the staging of actual acts of violence. We are such excellent censors of ourselves, and we rarely talk about the basics of free speech, rarely have a consensus on why freedom of expression is important, or where the tradition of free speech in India comes from.

(Some of the most important free speech battles were won almost accidentally, as demonstrated by Ismat Chughtai’s obscenity trial for her short story, Lihaaf:
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/28naqviExerpt.pdf )

If you find ideas and stories threatening, if your way of life depends on having just one rigid view of faith, or history, or mythology, then there is no possibility of debate. It is in this perspective that the actions of the Hindutva rightwing parties makes sense: the goal is never to encourage dissent and conversation, but to shut it down. There can only be one point of view, one truth. In that world, making a university back down on what it allows students to learn is a major victory, and it holds out the possibility that one day, it will be only this narrow view of history that will prevail, that we will learn only one kind of history, one Ramayana.

In his essay, Ramanujan does not comment on which telling of the Ramayana is the most accurate, the most authoritative one. Instead, he offers us a bewildering array of Ramayanas: “Hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions.” The Ramayana cannot be owned; it is no one’s property. And this is the idea that the ABVP finds unbearable, so unbearable that it must be silenced.

Here is Ramanujan’s essay—read it, and tell me whether you understand why students shouldn’t be allowed to explore the Ramayana(s) through his ideas.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254

Book review: The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

(Published in the Business Standard, October 5, 2011.)






The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape,
PRICE NOT MENTIONED, 287 pages


“There’s a great line by Ornette Coleman about music,” Michael Ondaatje said in a recent interview. “He says you begin with the territory and what follows is the adventure.”

In his sixth novel, Cat’s Table, Ondaatje knows both his landscapes well. There is the Oronsay, a liner that feels like a castle to the 11-year-old boy who boards the “first and only” ship of his life, bound for England in the 1950s. When most writers use a ship as a setting, it remains just a backdrop, a convenient way to bring a band of characters into close contact with each other in extreme isolation. The sea acts like the white space on the page---anything could happen here, where the normal rules of life on dry land stand suspended.

For a few writers, though, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’ Brian and now Ondaatje, the sea is elemental in the best sense of the term, and a shipboard journey may either bring forth powerful passions in its inhabitants or strip them down to their elemental selves. The nine people Michael will meet at Table 76, the least privileged and the most distant from the Captain’s Table, include two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, and “several interesting adults”. Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael will form a gang whose actions on board the Oronsay range from the exuberantly exploratory to the actively dangerous.
If The Cat’s Table feels like a memoir in parts, this may be because Ondaatje took a similar voyage from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, at the age of 11. “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” the narrator writes in the first chapter, and this imagining belongs both to him and to Ondaatje.

The Oronsay is fascinating, from the engine room “at Hades level” to the gold-painted First Class swimming pool. The passengers include a great philantropist who is suffering from hydrophobia, an accomplished shipboard thief called Baron C and Michael’s beautiful cousin Emily, a first-class passenger. There is a shipboard death, a shackled murderer who inspires a plot among the boys to free him, and there are the secretive, often unsavoury lives of the other passengers who sup at Table 76.

But the real adventure, which will reverberate in the lives of Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael long after they have completed their 21-day voyage, is not so much in the plot as in the magnificent strangeness of coming of age on board ship.
In both children’s fiction and novels that feature child protagonists, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that childhood is as mysterious and as alien a world as any unexplored Amazon forest or distant planet. The best novels step into this world acknowledging that writing from a child’s point of view is essentially an act of the imagination as much as an act of reclamation.
There are very, very few can do it—many novels feature child protagonists who are basically miniaturized adults.

Michael Ondaatje is one of three writers who wrote great books underpinned by a basic truth: children see the world with a kind of merciless clarity, and with few of the calming fictions of adult life. The other two were William Golding and Richard Hughes, and it is interesting that Hughes set his eerie little masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, on board ship. His protagonists, like Ondaatje’s in The Cat’s Table, were children carefully separated from their parents; generations of writers have also recognised that it is only when you allow children to be on their own that you can fully understand them.

It is easy to criticize the slender, tenuous, adventure-filled plot that forms the skeletal structure of The Cat’s Table. But it is also an unrewarding exercise. What makes this one of the most compelling and haunting novels of recent times goes far beyond the question of whether it is well-plotted, or whether its deft, deadly vignettes of characters on the Oronsay, offered up in brief chapters, add up to a satisfying whole. “Over the years,” Michael writes towards the end, “confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

Ondaatje offers us three subtly different voices in which to hear this book (it’s hard to escape the sense that The Cat’s Table should be read aloud). There is the voice, filled with a cautious rapture, of Michael the child; there is the assessing voice of the older Michael as he weighs up his regrets against the many tiny illuminated corners of his life; and there is, like a background murmur, the assured voice of Ondaatje himself, the writer in his prime, spinning out one story after another.

It would be a very bloodless reader who could resist the temptation of taking a seat at The Cat’s Table and revisiting childhood as it was, not as we would like to think it should have been. And it would be a very churlish reader who didn’t succumb to the magic of Ondaatje’s summoning up of “all new things in life”, carried by a boat that comes breasting out of the mist.

Banned Books Week, 26 September-1 October 2011

Every year around this time, I dust off two old pieces I'd written on banned and censored books in India, here and here. I read through these lists with a sense of failure: for all of our pride in India's democracy, the rise of Indian writing in English and this country's openness to argument and debate, we still have a deep unease when it comes to protecting free expression.

As a reader, which is what I've been for most of my 20 years in the workforce, whether in journalism or in publishing, I find it terribly saddening and disheartening that we haven't been able to examine previous bans on books. Would the earth really shake if we made copies of Aubrey Menen's gloriously subversive take on the Ramayana, The Ramayana Retold, available? Is there no way we can come back to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, 23 years after it was banned in India, and allow readers to discover the book for themselves? It often seems to me that Satanic Verses marked a turning point in the history of Indian thought: the day we banned this book was the day we lost nuance, and lost shades of meaning.

Every argument about the Verses in the two decades since then has stalled on gross simplifications: this is the book where Rushdie "insulted" Islam, and that is the end of all debate. Denied the right to read the Verses for themselves, Indians are unlikely to discover the layers to the Verses, the migrants' story at its heart, the exploration of insanity, the questioning of faith that Rushdie permitted himself. It followed, from the ban on the Verses, that we set a precedent that dissuaded authors from exploring the big questions about faith, belief and religion. It's easy for a contemporary writer to criticise the India Shining story--but faith has slid silently out of the frame, no longer to be discussed with ease.

Banned Books Week makes me envious. The reverence with which the US still--by and large--regards the right of its citizens to free speech is not encoded into our own DNA. We haven't yet had a political party or an individual politician stand up for free expression rights, even though a culture that bans books freely is also often a culture that will work very hard to shut down other forms of debate and dissent. Few of us would be surprised if school libraries banned books--in fact, in most schools, the librarian is expected to act as a kind of moral guardian, and many "filter" out books that might be seen as too violent or too unsettling for their constituencies.

The courts have consistently worked to protect free speech rights, but as a culture, I think we prefer silence to dissent and we would all too often choose the right not to be offended over the right to have our minds and beliefs challenged. We very rarely connect all the dots and ask what a book ban pronounced (and never re-examined) twenty years ago might have to do with a state that thinks it's all right to deport foreign journalists who are asking inconvenient questions, or another state that thinks it's okay to force Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey out of Bombay bookshops because his writing does not spare the Shiv Sena.

Perhaps we could start Banned Books Week here in India just by talking about, and thinking about, censorship. There's the censorship of the state, but there is also the far more insidious and damaging self-censorship that we often practice, or the intolerance many might face when they express views that differ from the hard certitudes of the moral majority. I hope to spend at least part of Banned Books Week thinking about the ideas and debates that make me uncomfortable, and trying to figure out where, and why, I have been silent in my own life. And if I have time, I'll try to share posts about books that have been banned in India, and what they might still have to offer us as readers. Feel free to share your own thoughts.

Delhi: Emergency numbers

Police numbers/ stations/ helplines:

Police
100

Commissioner of Police 3319661(O) 3319721(O)

Police Headquarters 3352678

Chanakyapuri Police Station 3011100, 3012003

Parliament Street Police Station 3361100, 3542700

Tughlak Road Police Station 3014878, 3012100

Tilak Marg Police Station 3382100

Fire Service 101

Ambulance 102

Accident & Trauma 10999

Hospitals

Emergency numbers for #RML hospital: 23348200 23404446 23743769 23404478
Emergency numbers for AIIMS 26588700;
Emergency numbers for Safdarjung Hospital: +91-011-26101925, +91-011-26161960, +91-011-26194690, +91-011-26165032, +91-011-26168336,

Blood Banks in Delhi (via ClickIndia):
CENTRAL DELHI

Connaught Place
Indian Red Cross Society
Located in Connaught Place, Indian Red Cross Society is a voluntary humanitarian organization which provides relief in times of disasters/emergencies and promotes health & care of the vulnerable people and communities.
http://www.indianredcross.org/

Red Cross Road, Janpath
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)23711551/6441

Karol Bagh
Bajaj Blood Bank
Bajaj Blood Bank is situated in Karol Bagh. It has a collection of all blood components, who wants to take on emergency basis.
Karol Bagh
New Delhi 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 28712849
Blood Bank Organisation
Located just opposite Telephone Exchange, it is an organization which provides blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals.
11/6 B, Shanti Chamber, Oppositte Telephone Exchange, Pusa Road
New Delhi - 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 25721870, 25711055, 25730773
Fax:+(91)-(11) 25745208
Sir Ganga Ram Hospital
The Blood Bank at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is housed in a newly renovated larger area. It has been equipped to provide not only good quality blood but also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various haematological diseases and complications in medical cases.
http://www.sgrh.com/

Rajinder Nagar
New Delhi 110060
Tel:+(91)-(11)25735205, 25861463
Fax:+(91)-(11)25861002



EAST DELHI
Mayur Vihar
Dharmashila Cancer Foundation & Research Centre
Situated close to Noida, it is well equipped with ultra modern facilities. It has a list of voluntary donors from whom blood can be collected on urgent basis.
http://www.cancerdch.org/


Vasundhara Enclave
New Delhi - 110 091
Tel:+(91)-(11)-43066666, 43066688, 22617771-75
Tel:+(91)-(11)-22617770, 22619033


NORTH DELHI
Civil Lines
Sant Parmanand Hospital
The hospital's Blood bank is situated in the basement. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells are available round the clock. It has the latest Apheresis system for preparation of Mega units of platelets (Single Donor Platelets).
http://sphdelhi.org

18, Sham Nath Marg, Civil Lines
Delhi -110054
Tel:+(91)-(11)23981260, 23994401
Fax:+(91)-(11) 23974706
Pitampura
Lions Blood Bank
One of the newly opened blood bank in the town, Lions Blood Bank is equipped with all the latest technologies & testing facilities and it is a 100% voluntary blood bank.
AK - 100, Shalimar Bagh,
Delhi -110086
Tel:+(91)-(11)- 47122000, 42258080, 9717897500

SOUTH DELHI
Greater Kailash
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank is situated in Greater Kailash. It operates on a round the clock issue basis.
E49, Greater Kailash II
New Delhi 110048
Lajpat Nagar
CPC Blood Bank
Located in the posh shopping area of Lajpat Nagar, CPC Blood Bank provides the safe healthy tested blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals. It has the full stock of Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells.

J-36 Lajpat Nagar-II
New Delhi 110024
Tel:+(91)-(11) 26834101
Mehrauli
Batra Hospital & Medical Research Centre
Located near Hamdard Nagar on the Mehrauli Badarpur Road, Batra Hospital provides the blood on a round the clock issue basis. Blood and apheresis component donations are carried out from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (week days).
http://www.batrahospitaldelhi.org

1, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, Mehrauli Badarpur Road
New Delhi - 110 062
Tel:+(91)-(11)-26056148, 26056153, 26057154

Rotary Blood Bank
Located in Mehrauli, it has been established to alleviate the tremendous shortage of healthy, fully tested blood and blood components. Whole blood, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma and packed cells are available any time.
http://www.rotarybloodbank.org/

56-57,Tuglakabad Industrial Area, Mehrauli - Badarpur Road,
New Delhi - 110044
Tel:+(91)-(11)29054066, 29054067, 29962078

Safdarjung
All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)
The Deptt. of Transfusion Medicine at AIIMS is running a full time Blood Bank whcih is open round the clock. It is one of the Regional Blood Transfusion Centre for south Delhi. It collects blood from all the healthy donors who wants to donate blood in the Blood Bank and in the Blood Donation Camps organised in and outside Delhi.
http://www.aiims.edu/

Ansari Nagar
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)26588500, 26588700
Fax:+(91)-(11)26589900

South Extension
Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center
Located in Kotla Timber Market, Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center provides the various blood components on emergency basis.
806 Arjun Nagar, Kotla Mubrakpur,
Opp Defence Colony
New Delhi 110003
Tel:+(91)-(11)46507646


WEST DELHI

Janakpuri
Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital
It can be access through Dwarka – Connaught Place Metro line, just 02 km. from Hospital. It provides the various blood components on urgent basis.
Hari Nagar
New Delhi 110064
Tel:+(91)-(11)25494403 Upto, 08, 25125259
Fax:+(91)-(11)25494264

Rohini
Jaipur Golden Hospital
Jaipur Golden Hospital is housed in Sector 3. There is not only good quality blood in fact it has also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various diseases.
2-Institutional Area, Sector-3, Rohini
New Delhi - 110085
Tel:+(91)-(11)27525984-88
Fax:+(91)-(11)27518121

NCR
Noida
Kailash Hospital & Research Centre
The hospital's blood bank is located in Sector 27, Noida. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma are available. It has been provided with high-tech refrigerators, freezers, and cell separator.
http://www.kailashhospitals.com/

H-33, Sector-27
Noida-201301
Tel:+(91)-(120)2444444, 2440444
Fax:+(91)-(120)2552323

General link to a list of hospitals/ ambulance services, from the Delhi Traffic Police site.

The khichdi conundrum

(From my food writing files, in honour of the weather, this August 2010 piece on khichdi, carried in the Business Standard.)


As the rain clouds settle in and the skies darken, a primitive instinct kicks in: like so many Indians, I must make or eat khichdi, preferably with the accompaniments, but at need, just the plain rice-and-dal dish that has travelled down to us from the time of the Vedas. (Note: There are recipes for rice dishes in the Upanishads, too, but they may have unintended consequences--see below.)

Khichdi is perhaps one of the universal Indian dishes, found in some form or the other across all regions; and yet it’s rarely found in restaurants, and outside of Bengal, khow-swey parties would be more common than khichdi parties. This is not so much household food as langar food, puja pandal food; it hasn’t yet migrated to coffee shop menus. (Given the number of road warriors who look eagerly for home-style food in their fancy hotels, I’m willing to bet it would be a hit if anyone took the plunge and introduced it.)

The closest equivalent to khichdi-on-the-menu is Karnataka’s Bisi Bele Bhath, a complex union of toor dar, rice, tamarind, spices and an assortment of vegetables that may have originated in its present form in the Mysore Palace. Bisi bele bhat enthusiasts will argue hotly over such minutiae as whether one can add green peas (no, say the purists, and I agree), what accompaniments may be served (none or an assortment of vegetable dishes, according to taste) and whether bisi bele bhat tastes even better reheated the next day (no, but it remains edible, unlike leftover sambar-rice).

The Bengali version of khichdi I grew up with had many variations: there was the soupy invalid dish that resembled nothing more than the gruel described in the grimmer work of Charles Dickens’, flavoured austerely with salt, and then there were the infinite variations on the grand “party dish”. Perhaps this is why khichdi doesn’t make it to restaurant menus: anyone can make an average khichdi, but it takes a master to blend the deceptively simple array of spices, lentils (roasted moong dal, the humble masoor), rice and vegetables to the correct pitch.

In that sense, a khichdi is closer to the paella than to the risotto: everything depends, not on the grain of the rice or the release of starch at the right moment, but at the cook’s ability to add in ingredients at just the right stage of cooking. It’s also a dish best made in quantity and served steaming hot; reheating dries out the lentil grains (my theory is that the tamarind sauce in bisi bele bhat makes it slightly more amenable to reheating than the classic khichdi/ khichuri).

Just a few restaurants in Calcutta offer khichdi—these used to be the old “canteen stalwarts”, formica tables, plastic chairs, the haunt of the working class clerk who will settle down in comfort, secure in the knowledge that the smart set will not invade his privacy. Kewpie Kitchen’s offers, in season, grand khichuri-thalis—platters of either hilsa-khichdi, meat curry-khichdi, or the not-to-be-despised niramish or vegetarian version. The accompaniments are classic. The purest of ghee is a must, and will be ladled on to khichuri in quantities that demolish any faint idea that this is a meal for the health-conscious.

Fried vegetables in besan batter—or in the case of aubergines, thinly sliced or cut in fat wedges and fried to an irresistible meatiness—will accompany the khichdi. As with the North Indian obsession with making different kinds of pakoras, delicacy and skill is everything: the highest praise is reserved, as the author Bulbul Sharma noted in her collection of food stories, the Anger of Aubergines, for single leaves of spinach lightly coated in besan batter, introduced briefly to a cauldron of hot oil, and flash-fried, in the same manner as parsley might be fried in the West. Meat and fish accompaniments are permissible, but not really classic.

Which brings me to another pet theory: the first restaurant to set itself up as a langar-specialist, bringing together Amritsar’s gurdwara classics alongside Bengal’s puja-pandal khichdi and labra and Kerala’s temple payasam will make a killing. All we need is the right backer, and a chef who understands the importance of the perfect plate of steaming-hot, delectable, nostalgia-laden khichdi.

The Upanishads on the cooking of rice:

Now, when the monthly sickness comes upon anyone's wife, for three days she should not drink from a metal cup, nor put on fresh clothes. Neither a low-caste man nor a low-caste woman should touch her. At the end of the three nights she should bathe and should have rice threshed.

14. In case one wishes, 'That a white son be born to me! that he be able to repeat a Veda! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice cooked with milk and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].

15. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a tawny son with reddish-brown eyes be born to me! that he be able to recite two Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice cooked with sour milk and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].

16. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a swarthy son with red eyes be born to me! that he be able to repeat three Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with water and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].


17. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a learned (pandita) daughter be born to me! that she attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with sesame and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [her].

A. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a son, learned, famed, a frequenter of council-assemblies, a speaker of discourse desired to be heard, be born to me! that he be able to repeat all the Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with meat and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him], with meat, either veal or beef.

The furore over 2(m) and parallel imports

The problem with the debate over parallel imports is that it has, inevitably, pitted the interests of readers, students and academics against the interests of authors, publishers, and well, readers again. As someone who might write books at some point, and who's worked in the publishing industry, I was very glad to hear that the controversial 2(m) amendment had been dropped. The parallel imports debate is a complex one, and here is a link to old posts on Akhond that cover the entire debate:

Three posts on the parallel imports debate:

Here is a link to a piece in Mint that explains the position from the other side, from the point of view of students and readers:

But much of the debate has ignored the unpleasant realities that drive the publishing industry. The first is that the Indian publishin industry does not operate in isolation; as I and several others have argued, there is no benefit and a great deal of harm in opening up our markets one-way, without being able to access the great souks of the West in an equivalent fashion. The second is that it doesn't make sense to treat academic and trade publishing as the same kind of beast, and assume that laws that are good for one sector will be good for the other. They operate in very different ways, and part of the problem here is that what might work in the textbooks/ academic sector does not work at all for trade publishing and for mainstream fiction/ non-fiction writers.

I'm relieved that 2(m) has been dropped, but I also hope that this will start a longer and more complex debate on parallel imports, and what we can do to bring better books more cheaply to Indian readers--without killing off what is still an emerging English language publishing industry.