42 Julian Barnes on Footballers

2012-01-30T18:10:00.004Z

"You can take Lucas to watch football when he's older", she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on the patch - See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football.

- The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

Of such words, books are made...

2012-01-28T17:30:00.002Z

Jeffrey Eugenides in 'Middlesex':

"I'd never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars thrown into the wormholes of her ears"

Guineapig#2 reporting for battle, suh.

2012-01-16T11:36:00.001Z

Somehow,somehow out of all the projects in ConsultCo, I had to be assigned to the exact team which G-man is quitting... so we've managed an intercontinental job exchange where G-man goes to my team in London while I join his super-duper team in Dubai...erm... make that Riyadh.

Ah, this lovely era of globalization when such things are possible.

Well, well, at least we're now clear about who'll be guzzling down beer on Thursdays and who'll be sipping Pepsis at 2am.

Of closet writers and their dreams...

2012-01-15T11:42:00.001Z

Just finished a training course at ConsultCo.

Traces the story of Frank and Katrin. Frank is a high-flier who violates every possible rule of management consulting and client confidentiality... he also dreams of writing a book. Katrin of course is the polar opposite who follows every rule there ever was or ever will be and therefore is the role model for all of us, new bakras at the firm.

Audio signoff at the end of course: "Now Frank has all the time in the world to write the book he wants". Oooooooooooohhhhh... nasty is us.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

2012-01-15T02:10:00.004Z

Went to a book club session about The Glass Room at a cafe at the DIFC; interesting bunch - Muscovite, Britisher, Arab, Serbian, Pakistani, Australian.

Comment of note: "This book opened my eye to the fact that some well heeled Jews made it out of Europe safely with money and family intact and not everyone died in the Holocaust". What?! And for the record, it wasn't an Arab person who made this comment.

Surprised to realize that the Glass Room actually existed... Villa Tugendaut by Mies Van Der Rohe.

Overheard - On Day 2 at work in Dubai

2012-01-12T15:42:00.003Z

Quotes and conversations on 2nd day of work

"It is not very safe to use taxi drivers in XX location, so we have our own fleet. Some of
the locals don't like the idea of using consultants, so can be hostile, so please use our
own fleet always".

"The logistics team doesn't do night club reservations"

"All the support teams have blacklists for you guys; believe me, you'll know it when you're
one"

Bank a/c opening process:

GT: But I don't want a Super Duper Platinum credit card with $300K limit.

Bank rep: Sorry sir, but it is an all inclusive package. You can choose not to use it.And
please sign this...

GT: Sign a blank cheque in favour of "Stinking Rich Bank" LLC?!

Bank rep: That is standard process; not to worry, we won't encash it (chuckle).

GT: Chuckle?! When do I get it back?

Bank rep: When you close accounts and settle matters.

GT: Settle matters?!Bank rep: Not to worry,sir, standard process"

5. Fellow joinee peeks into support team area and says to Lady #1: Hey, you look like that
Egyptian actress!

GT: (thinks) WTF?!?! Will he get slapped? Reprimanded? Shouted at? Stunned silences?

Lady #2 in support team: Which one?

Lady #3: Wait, wait, let me guess....

Lady #1: (Blush) I know who you're reminded of... it is XYZ.

GT: (silently) Ahem, ahem.

First day in Dubai

2012-01-05T10:47:00.001Z

Was received at airport by The Fairmont chauffeur in 7 series Beemer with car gliding in as we walked out. Woman and self much impressed.

Hotel is all right if a bit dated. All lights and smoke and mirrors. Got weary of the super duper breakfast spread, the extensive menu and the concierge service in all of 24 hours.

After refreshing ourselves, Woman and I had lunch. A very big lunch. A very salty lunch. (Dubai Restaurant Reminder #1: Ask for less salad dressing, half portion servings and low salt options. #2: Do not feel guilty about leaving behind food when portions are unwieldy).

Visited M and Baby A in their residence. They live in the Greens, a nice ‘family’ area with plenty of trees, a not so bad view and a decent gym. Baby A is a rock-star, gets friendly but doesn’t grant smiles easily. Quite curious about world at large. My beard in particular. M has put in a word with their concierge for apartments coming up in their building.

Went for a walk by small lake (all water bodies/ gardens in Dubai are artificial, so let’s not get all snotty about the provenance of ‘lake’ now), encountered lady in abaya who gave a smile and said ‘Salaam Aleykum’ but as G would have observed did not move out of the way. Apparently you move out of their way and not vice versa. GT’s cultural adventures… sigh. Sat down at a café and had a Love Juice while Woman had something else tastier. Ordered roast aubergine something. Super salty again. Also bitter. Quickly grab her drink to wash away taste. Ali messages, explaining what happens when certain parts of human anatomy are removed. Can always depend on him to stir up things after bad dinners.

Made mistake of peeking at Baby A who promptly started bawling. Despite Indian-doggy tested tummy tickle and Indian-baby tested coochy-coos, refuses to calm down. So take her and start dancing around. Hunky and bulky Mediterranean man with European girlfriend give strange looks. Woman and M start yakking away happily.

After 20 minutes of see-sawy dancing and walking around to different hums and twitches, Baby A falls asleep. So do my biceps. Manage to fob off sleeping bundle to Woman but bundle comes to life and bawls. Thankfully not in my hands now. Woman does some magic and Baby A goes back to sleepyland in 5 minutes flat. But M says to Woman, ‘Keep holding her. If you try to put her in the pram, she’ll wake up’. Woman says ‘She’s a bit heavy’. M insists, ‘Hold her, its only a short distance and you’ll be fine’. Woman laughs awkwardly. M reassures her, ‘You can do it’. Am I glad I managed to dump bundle onto Woman. Phew.

Back to M’s home and then after besos all round, back to hotel. Promptly fall asleep on arrival. Wake up groggily after 2 hours to say bye to Woman. Go to airport. Wondering what level of body contact would be appropriate. After a while, decide to screw all considerations. It’s bloody sad and sobby farewell, people. Somehow it’s manageable. No sobs, no cries, no loud ululations or lamentations. We manage a decent, dignified ‘see you soon’ with hugs and kisses and tightly grasped hands. Touchy feely score in region of 75%. Keep waving to Woman as she leaves. She unleashes a flying kiss. I return it. Then wonder if security will arrest me. Look around. Two bulky boys in uniform giving me dirty looks. Shivers, shivers. Decide to stick to exuberant and passionate waves, rather than kisses. Wave to her as she crosses security. Wave to her as she wanders towards Departures. And finally, Wave to her as she boards escalator. Such are the mores of global couples. Bah.

Back to hotel and pop in antibiotics and Paracetomol and allow oneself to be knocked out by chemicals, sadness and general fatigue. Welcome to Dubai.

48 hours in Lyon

2011-07-26T16:57:00.005+01:00

Notice fresh-looking scar on ankle, ask her what it is, she says 'winged vampire with tiny wings' and makes motions like a sparrow chick flapping around and gives a series of squeals. A very underfed British vampire, perhaps.

In France, after a litre or two of beer, I insist on speaking French and she insists on replying in Sinhalese. The waiter, sensible man that he was, went with zee English language. I call out to a 6 year old goldilocks next to us and say "Elle est 'opeless". Goldilocks sniggers and hides in her dad's tummy.

She wakes up in the middle of the night with mosquito bites. I do praetorian guard duty, successfully extinguishing the lives of two mosquitosassins. She says she hears a third one buzzing around and goes to sleep. I stay wide awake in the darkness, hearing subliminal buzzes well into the dawn. At breakfast, she looks like she wants to say "why the zombie look?" but sticks to "you look tired". Good girl.

The French waitress at the cafe in vieux Lyon throws up her hands in horror and says "Encore?!" when I ask for my third pain-au-chocolat. I wonder what she'll do when I ask her for ice-cream later. Beaucoup-French-eye-popping sounds ensue 5 minutes later when I ask for 'deux scoops' , blatantly insensitive , IMHO, to the the grave needs of Indian vegetarians for every spare vegetarian protein molecule that can be found in Lyon.

Image from www.mochimochiland.com

The delight that The Observer is… on some Sundays

2010-12-22T14:35:00.005Z

The Observer ran a series two weekends back, where writers chose their favourite short stories and explained why... you can find the article here and The Guardian's done a brilliant job of putting up the podcasts on their books page here.

Anne Enright on Fat by Raymond Carver.

‘A story is something told, it is something that really needs to be said. But though we feel its force and resonance, it is often hard to say what a story means. The most we can say, perhaps, is that a short story is about a moment in life; and after this moment, we realize something has changed’

Philip Pullman on The Beauties by Chekhov

'Chekhov's genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty, and of the sadness of those who observe and think'

Helen Simpson on The Kitchen Child by Angela Carter

‘The narrators mother, a perfectionist Yorkshire cook in the kitchens of a great country house, is impregnated by an unknown admirer as she bends to place a souffle in the oven (she doesn't turn for fear of spoiling the dish)’

Ali Smith on Conversations With My Father by Grace Paley

‘What happens -funny, sad, infuriating- is that the story won't be corralled any more than life itself will’

Colman Toibin on Music at Annahullion by Eugene McCabe

‘McCabe's genius is to make the piano stand for itself and then to have an extraordinary resonance as it comes to stand for all her hope, and all our hopes’

Jeannette Winterson on The Night Driver by Italo Calvino

‘The tension in the story depends on the unknowing. Soon Calvino imagines a perpetual time, the time out of time of long car journeys where it becomes unnecessary to arrive. You have a lover. You're racing towards him/her. Your lover is racing towards you. You will never meet but meeting is no longer the purpose of the journey.’

In a different section on the same day, Lillian Ross of The New Yorker shared her memories of Salinger... and also, JD Salinger's impression about meeting her month old son, Erik:

" Notes on your son: 1. Is an incomparably fine and lovely person 2. Has beautiful eyes 3. Sleeps in a very good position 4. Has courtly manners 5. Is a very very sweet little boy"

On her writing...

"You're yourself whether you're writing fiction or fact. It's very moving. I mean more than that, but that's my first thought"

Hemingway to a young and unknown JD Salinger commenting on Salinger's unpublished stories: 'First you have a marvellous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet... how happy it makes me to read your stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are'

And Laurie Hutton recalled the origins of Malcolm McLaren's stories:

‘ She (his grandmother Rose) dressed him up as a girl, didn't allow him to go to school until he was 10. He had Shirley Temple sausage curls down to his shoulders held Toby tortoise-shell combs... Ever night he had to sit in the corner if the sitting room on a chamber pot while her sisters read to him from the novels of the Brontes and Dickens... Rose didn't allow him to swim in the sea because fish pee in the sea... He was the best storyteller I ever met, and I've met some in my time. He learned it in that room on the chamber pot’

This is what a good Sunday paper should do, make you read and re-read it through the week, increasing your unreasonable hopes that the weekend is just around the next corner and of course, next Sunday's will be better, with its extracts from Tolstoi and Basho and Homer; will be much better as you slowly read it distracted by the falling snow, milky masala tea, short-bread and crackers... London, my London.

Notes to women...

2010-11-17T11:26:00.006Z

... who travel with men in France.

Yes, it is true… especially in France, waiters are snobbish. We have noted this with great respect and countless nods, your detection of this secret... très très diabolique, these Frenchies, eh. Now, could we get over it... please? French waiters really don't get kicks out of serving you slices of warm wholegrain bread, with flavoured olive oil and 8 varieties of artisan cheese like all your friends said they would. The waiters in the cheap, touristy restaurants that we usually visit get kicks out of 'phhhrrooofing' and saying "Je comprends pas" to English speaking women with fake Louis Vuitton bags.

In France, the people speak French. If you don't speak French and they don't speak English, they don't have a problem. You have a problem. Recall previous point about getting used to it, over it, under it, whatever.

If you are visiting a town next to the Alps with a chateau on a hill, and also plan to visit the village of Èze located 2000 feet above sea level, it might be a good idea to bring along shoes for walking. Not heels. Not as the only pair you're bringing along because you "pack light and that's soooo cool". Not for a place that has for its main attraction, Le Promenade Des Anglais.

If you like the charming, rustic marketplace, you should also like the rustic fruits sold by the charming French farmers. And no, even though us men might know ticket-buy-worthy French, we don't ask "Can you wash this fruit for us, please?". Not to French farmers. Nope. Nada. Non. Especially not after you gave us that "eeeek"sy look when we bit into the ripest, juiciest, tastiest unwashed figs of our lives.

Caramelized almonds in a supermarket aisle won't be as fresh as the hot ones we bought for you from a roadside stall run by an unusually, happy Italian grandpa on a cold, windy day. Which you happily ate up after turning up your nose at, to start off with. Declaring this discovery of yours, that they aren't as fresh, doesn't exponentially increase our estimate of your reasoning powers.

We find it puzzling when after we've explained what options are there to explore in Town A (which, incidentally, happens to be the town we're in), you suddenly look up after breakfast and go "Let's do Town Z, yaaaaaar"... what exactly does this mean? That you don't like Town A? That you want to visit Town Z? Wander around it? Eat in it? Gamble in it? Dance or sing on its roads? Or is there some deeper Freudian thingy that we've missed here? This puzzling feeling does get exacerbated when we ask you "Uhm... Er...ok, so what's in town Z?" And you say "I don't know" as if that explains everything. However, we are willing to ignore/forgive/move on through such events as we consider the eternal human desire to explore the unknown. Us men get cheap thrills out of such uncalled for forgiving stints.

If you like something in a shop window, it might be a good idea to check the price before you ask the shop-keeper for it. And not after she has packed it up for you. And no, at this point, we don't translate "I don't want the thing you packed for me, the one I asked for, because I think it's too expensive, now that you've printed the bill"

If you don't like art, it's perfectly OK to say "I am not really interested" when we consider the idea of visiting museums in a region that Van Gogh, Matisse and Chagall breathed, painted and lived. Rather than wondering thrice in 5 minutes about how far the museum is, commenting on the inferior quality of hot chocolate at the museum cafe and finally, at the museum admission, turning away from the lady who says "7 euros, please" to tell us "I think I will go for a haircut rather than do this". As Chagall spins desperately in his grave, we too, are tempted to, right there in front of that very lady.
PS: At this point, it isn't mightily endearing to raise your eyebrows and say "How long are you going to take at 'this' place?"
PPS: Maybe it would be a better idea not to declare intentions of getting a "classy French haircut" rather than admitting later that the French charge atrocious rates for haircuts and that discovery kept you away from the salon which you headed to when you found the museum too expensive.
PPPS: DO NOT ask us why we sob when, after all of the above, you declare that you "just want to leave it all and start an art gallery" in a medieval village in France. It's a man thing, we sob, we suffer... all for art.

If you insist on having a conversation on media freedom, the role of regulation in the private sector and the drivers of economic growth in developing countries on a warm sunlit evening in a plaza flanked by a 18th century church as we sip a particularly, pleasant cuvée of the Côtes Du Provence... well, what can we say, let's. But it just might be worth your while to consider briefly before we start, the knowledge you possess on these topics, the sources you gained it from and your ability to remember those sources. Depending on "My uncle said so", "I just know it" and "I don't remember" doesn't count as meaningful evidence. Much as we would like to admit to many meaningless things in the cause of chivalry, this time... no, we can't.

Despite being regular fountainheads of stunning wisdom, we really do not know...

- Why French beaches don't have sand

- Whether you should get fake-looking lavender soaps or garish souvenirs with "Produce De Provence" stamped on them for your friends

- Why French roads change names at junctions (Refer to previous point about the deliberately diabolique French)

- Why people don't get electrocuted when they step on tram lines

- Why restaurants don't serve artisanal (that infernal word!) cheese the way Jamie Oliver promised that they always did in the South of France

- Why the pianist who works magic on a rented piano at Place Massena as he floats, crawls, creeps his fingers around the keys, hasn't become famous across the world (but you get brownie points for deep thoughts)

- Why vendors insist that you MUST pick something after you spend 25 minutes quizzing them about prices and tasting free samples.

- Why the modern, anarchic artist has splashed his blood on the canvas and packaged his shit in a jar (but we might be able to give it a decent shot if you let us listen to the audio guide rather than asking us to come with you to the museum shop)

Reading 33 pages of a 350 page novel may not quite place you in an optimal position to declare with critical airs that "it's a kind of a slow book". Why spoil a nice sunset on the French Riviera? Let’s not.
PS: But since it looks like we MUST, please consider the fact that a book that involves 3 grieving Jewish men at the sunset of their lives and has a blurb describing itself as a "funny, furious and unflinching look at friendship, loss and growing older" is unlikely to be fast... It will not accelerate like an Aston Martin, probably doesn't have heaving hearts à la Mills & Boon and may not twist & turn like Jeffrey Archer used to in his pre-prison days. Even if the heavens parted and it did any of that, maybe not in the first 33 pages? Ah, but you beg to differ, don't you... Your point being that it should.
PPS: Doubtless the idea greatly excites you, but suggesting a "cozy, classy restaurant" that you spot along the Côte D’Azur as a possible venue for our next book reading session doesn't help obliviate our memories of the time that you showed up without reading the book. Oh, sorry, make that "without buying the book".

Now, which part of this is confusing?

NB - Obviously, this is an entirely fictional take on an imaginary trip with impossibly indelicate women. We all know how reasonable ladies usually are in real life. So there.

Finding Stuff.

2010-11-11T10:04:00.001Z

Was surprised to find this in an old copy of "The Burden And The Glory" from home.
The devout romantic that a sailor of 6 years was at age 23, in 1970.
A warm find on a cold, rainy London morning.

RIP... Reader, Sailor, Captain, Dad.

A.E. Housman on the Central Line

2010-11-10T10:37:00.002Z

For The War Dead

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

-A.E.Housman (1859-1936)

Spotted on The Central Line at 0945, 10-Nov-2010; part of the Poems on The Underground series

Catfish by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

2010-10-28T11:35:00.005+01:00

Film #8 at The BFI London Film Festival

To try to explain "Catfish" is to give away a surprising story... watch the movie and walk away with the disturbing knowledge of how our virtual worlds can trick but yet hold us in thrall with shards of online humanity.

It was TS Eliot who said about his poetry "against these fragments, I shore my ruins". Catfish reveals how against the fragments of Facebook, a human can shore the regularly rough edges of reality.

Image from BFI site here

Life, Above All by Oliver Schmitz

2010-10-27T13:29:00.016+01:00

Film #7 at The BFI London Film Festival 2010

Somewhere in Africa, a ‘bug’ gnaws away, pulling mothers away from children, fathers from families and friends from each other. Even as the adults waver between choosing Christianity, black magic or isolation to deal with this menace, the children try their best to pick up the pieces and move on.

One of these children is Chanda in Oliver Schmitz’s ‘Life, Above All’. Adapted from Alan Stratton's "Chanda's Secrets", this is the story of a teenage girl in Africa who deals with the blight of AIDS in her own ineffable way. Growing up in a family where her father has died and her mother has taken up with another man (Jonah), Chanda lives life on her own terms and indeed she needs to… she takes care of her step-siblings, helps arrange the funeral of a baby sister, snatches money from a drunk step-father, does homework and tries her best to be a good friend to Esther (whose parents have died of AIDS, leaving her homeless/hopeless in a shack at the edge of the town).

The casting was mostly amazing… flinty Esther, precocious Chanda, the drama queen neighbours… all of these do complete justice to their complex roles (although just sometimes, it becomes a bit unreal as the milk of human kindness overfloweth– good-hearted shopkeepers and ambulance drivers seem to abound in Africa; in real life, in a developing country, I would imagine that ambulance drivers demand extra moolah for home delivery and shop-keepers being quite ruthless with margins). The music and the melodrama mix well with each other especially in the last scene where just the music/song could define the “desperate-for-salvation” mood that the movie plunged us, watchers into.

All through the movie, the spectre of AIDS is unyielding and omnipresent, casting a dark shadow over the sunny land... with Jonah catching the ‘bug’ and dying and her mother seeming to have contracted it as well, Chanda has to manage a complex maze of relationships and obligations that could easily overwhelm a regular 16 year old. But then again, this is no regular girl… this is Chanda, the girl who stands up against shrews, who brings back an abandoned mother from the edges of hell… this is Chanda who can and does anything.

I enjoyed best the scenes where the girls negotiate the hazy netherworld of adulthood… Esther’s miniskirted attempts to be cool and Chanda’s coy conversation with a boy after a dance are special and very deserving of the attention that the script and the camera pays to them. But fuzzy scenes do not a movie make; the harsh reality of an African generation blighted by AIDS re-emerges very soon and stuns you into silence – when the lights came on, I found a couple, almost looking stranded, in shock with tears in full flow.

But girls like Chanda redeem us all and lead... lead kindly, light, amid th’encircling doom.

Boxing Gym by Frederick Wiseman

2010-10-22T11:10:00.007+01:00

Film #6 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010

Every art, every sport, every repeated ritual has a rhythm of its own making... this is almost a secret that practitioners effortlessly tap into, while for many outsiders this rhythm seems almost hypnotic in its pace, sound and sometimes, fury.

Boxing Gym, a documentary by Frederick Wiseman, captures the rhythm of the sport of boxing in all its glorious variations. Filmed in Lord's Gym at Austin-Texas, the film looks at the fascinating variety of people who jab and dance around on the gym's rings... men hiss/sputter their way into punches as babies watch, a mother bring her epileptic son to see if there's a chance for him to start, grandpa's almost do a slow waltz in the ring, all the while timing themselves to the omnipresent clang of the timer.

As the blurb on the BFI site says, 'this is a story about the human condition as much as it is about boxing'... the 'human condition' in its relentless pursuit of perfection and triumph and the ebbing impotence that awaits us all around the corner. If you're not the type that is taken aback by the wonder of all this, then the sheerly physical intensity of Richard Lord and his fighting women (and the occassional man!) will keep you alive through the 91 minutes of the film.

There is an utterly beautiful scene in the film where two of Lord's best boxers, a young woman and a slightly older well muscled man, practice in the same ring... they don't fight each other but shadow-box in the same enclosed space. The woman slips around the ring, breathing softly and scarily, in sleek sinous movements... yet you instinctively sense the immense, trapped power that lies within her, especially when you get a glimpse of her eerily focused, fierce eyes . The man on the other hand is much more direct and blunt about the retribution that he will exact... like a well oiled machine going though its paces, he chops the space of the ring into neat pieces, with angular shifts, sharp turns and the constant hiss that flies with his punches. Wiseman does a brilliant job mapping this interplay between the sexes... the footwork of the boxers, their glances, the movement of their muscles and in doing so, captures the spell-binding contrast between a man and a woman in a fighting space. Not very unlike two dangerous and completely alive animals in an arena, testing their territorial limits, marking their borders, the air crackling with the barely contained danger of it all.

PS: To be seen after reading Gordon Marino's take on the philosophy behind boxing in the NYT here.

Image from the mubi site here

To The Measures Fall - Richard Powers in The NY'r

2010-10-20T11:53:00.005+01:00

A passage from Richard Power's new short story in the New Yorker "To The Measures Fall".

A story that starts with a bike ride through the Cotswolds and the discovery of a book and the changing meaning of the story and the book, a thread that follows the owner all through her life.

More about it here and an abstract of the original here (The NYr's put it behind a pay wall, sorry :-( )

I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke

2010-10-19T14:29:00.004+01:00

Film #5 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010 – I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke

I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke is a collection of memories and experiences about Shanghai… over 18 interviewees recount the role that Shanghai has played in either their own or their family’s lives. From sons of soldiers executed by the Kuomintang, to port labourers to gangsters to award-winning textile workers to actresses to bloggers, Shanghai and this film has it all. With the raw emotional intensity that real people bring to a documentary, the film cuts across the borders of mainland China to Taiwan and even Hong Kong and in doing so paints a telling picture of the politics and history of China. It easily took me back to Class 10 history books in India that almost painted Sun Yat Sen and the KMT as exiled heroes and Chairman Mao as the villain.

At the same time, the documentary does not flow easily and that is a primary failing, I think… each anecdote, each character brings a thread of history and emotion which is beautiful by itself (imagine a textile worker who gets to meet Chairman Mao and getting a chance to visit Vienna, where she recalls streets filled applauding Austrians) but at the same time, deserve a better job of being woven to form something larger. Combining many vignettes about a dynamic city is no doubt a daunting challenge, but is much needed in a 2+ hour film… and when not executed properly, the disjointed pieces detract from the formidable theme and almost become tiresome.

But the stories themselves, from the little boy who wants to beat up the world to Han Han, the blogger who didn’t buy a Jeep because it was too cheap, are truly memorable and evoke memories of a city and era gone by, but preserved in film by Jia Zhangke.

Image from www.filmofilia.com here

Circo by Aaron Schock

2010-10-18T11:25:00.005+01:00

Film #4 at the BFI LFF 2010 – Circo by Aaron Schock

The Circo Mexico is a travelling circus company run by one of the Ponce brothers, part of a family that has been running circuses for over 100 years in Mexico. With a rag-tag collection of animals and artistes, the Circo tours rural Mexico putting up an inventive variety of shows and acts. Everyone in the circus has their role to play: from the ‘patrone’ grandfather who collects tickets, to the teenage ‘contortionistas’, to the ‘death-defying’ motorcyclist... all the way down to 8 year old Neymadelita (?) who dons an outsized mask to become a very popular, hand-shaking clown, her 15 minutes of fame.

But all the vignettes and fun cover the many fault-lines underneath… of wives unhappy with their children's burden, of grandparents (almost a Greek chorus in themselves, as the presenter said) who constantly judge their sons' women, of children who only know to spell mama, papa and bear, of boys who break teen hearts in every town they visit. Suffused with an exact delicate mix of humour and pathos that makes it such a feast, the movie pans across a dying tradition and way of life... one that is precious for its practitioners now as it was for it’s audiences 50 years ago.

Aaron Schock, the director came on stage to talk about the movie – he had actually gone to Mexico intending to make a documentary about the NAFTA impact on Mexican corn farmers… he said he was gathering information and searching for a story when Circo Mexico came into town. After meeting up with the artistes and the Ponce family, he knew he had his story.

He was pleasantly surprised that the London audience ‘got’ most of the funny quirks he had captured, in marked contrast to American audiences, he said. He was looking forward to the Mexican premiere, 2 days from now when ‘Circo’ would be screened in a plaza with Tito Ponce & family attending. Someone in the audience asked the question that was on everyone's mind, "What happened next?" - the movie closes with Tito's wife insisting that they split from her in-laws and they actually do. The director said that the (Greek chorus!) grandparents had actually shut down the circus and settled down near their daughters; meanwhile, Tito and his wife, Ivonne along with their children have started off their own circus on a much smaller scale with much less resources... but as Schock said, "If anyone can pull it off, it would be them". When you watch the documentary, you'll know why.

‘Circo’ continues from where “The Eagle Hunter’s Son” left off from last year… the only difference was that this was real and therefore, direct and disturbing.

Viva El Circo Mexico!

Image from BFI website here

The Temptation of St.Tony by Veiko Ounpuu

2010-10-17T11:39:00.005+01:00

Film #3 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010

The Temptation of St.Tony This was my first Estonian film (at first, I thought it was Finnish) and it was… uhmmm… different. The movie opens with Tony, a factory manager, attending the funeral of his father and from thereon, events spin out of control. In a jagged, surreal, allegoric narrative, Tony spins around a bleak, white landscape getting manhandled by goons, almost being eaten alive, making love to a dark haired beauty, running naked with only the Estonian flag between him and fierce winter.

The unforgiving land, grim music and whipping snow are the only constants as the movie wavers between real life, dreams, nightmares, questions and incomplete answers. Stark and spell-binding, Tony’s trips into the netherworld of morality may be enjoyable only in bits but are always thoroughly engrossing.

3 Seasons in Hell by Tomas Masin

2010-10-17T11:36:00.003+01:00

Film #2 at the BFI London Festival

“3 Seasons In Hell” is about the life of Ivan Heinz, a young Czechoslovakian poet as the Iron Curtain descends upon his country and people. His anarchic, bohemian spirit pours over into his poetry, into his friendships, into his father’s home, into every corner of his life… at the same time, he also meets another free spirit, Jana, who refuses to let him make love to her, hoping that this will drive his creative forces.

But even as he succumbs to the charms of chaos, rebellion and Marxism, the angles of his life repeatedly abrade against the newly formed Iron State. His friends are executed, he steals food to survive and his father’s house is 'socialized'. As he decides to make a last ditch attempt to flee to Paris, fate intervenes. But then again, so does the goodness of humans. Great casting; if Krystof Hadek (Ivan) is good, Martin Huba (Ivan’s dad) as a retired Colonel is impeccable.

Incidentally, I realized that the title is from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer)

The Life & Times of Gloria Wasserman

2010-10-17T11:09:00.005+01:00

Look at these pictures and try to imagine what this woman would have become... now read this.

Pictures from The NY Times.

The Courage of Saved Children

2010-10-16T09:47:00.002+01:00

Iana Matei, Romanian rescuer of trafficked women, on the incredible courage of salvaged children "When they are back in school and all the boys are offering them money for oral sex because they know, that’s not easy”

http://nyti.ms/c1LouE

Manila Skies by Raymond Red

2010-10-16T00:33:00.004+01:00

Film #1 at the BFI London Film Festival

Manila Skies

About Raul who treads the edge of breakdown and madness.

An old story about the boy from the village who becomes a man in the Filipino city.

About a man who twists from vise to vise, in the grip of many hungers... for food, jobs, woman, home. Stunned by the results of a heist in which he's a mute spectator, Raul decides to return home to his ailing father in the island of Ramblon... how he does it would have been comic if it hadn't been tragic.

Image from the BFI site here

The Skin & Dreams of Saul Bellow

2010-10-10T22:42:00.004+01:00

Just read an Observer article on the letters of Saul Bellow accompanied by an interview with his last wife, Janis:

"And sure enough, when I ask Janis how she prefers to remember him – how she would describe him to an old girlfriend as if she had met him only yesterday – it is not his giant brain she thinks of first, nor his amazing facility with words, nor even the fact that, as she told me earlier, he had "read everything, six times". It is his physicality, the way he felt in her arms. "He had beautiful skin, healthy young skin, even at the end. He wasn't exactly tall, but he had this broad upper body, these giant arms." She slips into the present tense. "He's the kind of person you're so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He's so full of excitement, and energy." She presses her hands to her chest, and closes her eyes"

Also in the same article, from Bellow's letter to Martin Amis:
"Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc"

The Lazy Logic & Fantasies of Sanjeev Nayyar

2010-10-05T13:38:00.008+01:00

If you would believe Sanjeev Nayyar of DNA India, the right way to understand American opposition to a mosque in New York (conveniently titled the Ground Zero mosque) is to:

· Quote a battle dating from 1683 AD & claim a precedent of revenge dating from that battle and claim that "American" memory extends all the way back to 100 years before their country was formed.

· Claim a semantic objection by the collective unconscious to the name proposed: "Cordoba House". The stunning logic is that "Cordoba" symbolized Islamic inroads into Christian Europe; never mind that since then, the south of Spain has almost developed a collective amnesia to their Muslim heritage, as a visit to the region would inform anyone.

· In the fantastic imagination of the columnist, 9/11 is "perceived as an Islamic attempt to take revenge for the loss in the Battle of Vienna in 1683"... perceived by whom? And how? In which opinion poll? Or in which interview? Oh bother, never mind with the trivial details.

· Then Sanjeev jumps on a magic carpet and travels from New York to North India to draw parallels between a mosque in present day New York and temples destroyed in the 17^th century by Aurangzeb... never mind the Taj Mahal built by the Mughals, screw the Red Fort, forget the ghazals and the famous miniature paintings... let us focus solely on the sordid details of two destroyed Hindu temples just because they serve this argument better (that " the mosque is a symbol of Muslim victory over the Christian west … (or over tolerant Hindustan?")

· Lo and behold, it is at this juncture that "a few questions arise" in the mind of Sanjeev Nayyar and what are they?

o Why do liberals in democracies not use the same yardsticks to apply in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia and J&K?

o Consider, my thudding heart, these paragons against which we are advised to compare ourselves:

o Saudi Arabia: never was a democracy; is a monarchy (defined as King Rules. King with very deep oil wells. Hence everyone's friend. Regardless of liberals, yardsticks and oil-sipping hybrids)

o Pakistan: tin-pot generals, Mr.10% presidents, cataclysmic floods and the Taliban... they have enough slightly more pressing problems than liberals with yardsticks, no?

o Malaysia: I haven’t heard much about religious persecution in Malaysia but I do know there are very big Hindu temples in Malaysia which entertain quite a few pilgrims.

o J&K: J&K is a mess, more or less the same as Pakistan where people have enough problems from the mujaheddin, the Indian Army, the Pakistani ISI, the VHP, you name it... and we wonder why they don’t proclaim deep and profound thoughts about religious freedom.

Hence, as this utterly logical flow of argument flows, this mosque becomes “an attempt to rewrite history which will result in Americans forgetting the Twin towers 200 years from now”. Ah, the utterly sinister workings of the Islamic mind... who else could have smoked out this devilry but Mr. Nayyar from DNA!

Towards the end of the article, the mysterious & secretive liberals (They Who Shall Not Be Named) who made an appearance earlier in the column, arrive again to raise a parting question “Why the past is so important when there are more pressing concerns in the present?” and vanish again, into the mists of time, confusion, secrecy, whatever. But intrepid Mr.Nayyar, who never bothers to mention them by name or quote sources, doesn't spare them... no way! He trots out poor Vivekananda to track down and answer these confounding liberals with a good patriotic dose of Hindu nationalism.

So lets quickly recap the highlights of shoddy journalism in play here:

Connecting facts that sound significant but bear no relation or impact on each other (eg: American memory and Islamic inroads in Spain)
The creation of strawmen (liberals) without any records to back up who they are or what they said; the creation of another level of strawmen (the so-called intolerant states against which Level 1 Strawmen raise arguments)

And thats just the top two...

I know of at least a dozen bloggers who write phenomenally better copy than this; so I wonder why DNA relies on such inferior talent to turn out fundamentally flawed opinions like this?

British Butterfly History

2010-10-04T23:21:00.002+01:00

But there is some good news: as the climate gets warmer, Britain is attracting butterfly immigrants such as the Queen of Spain fritillary from Southern Europe. In the last chapter of the book, Barkham finds a pair of Queen of Spains mating (his 60th species). His companion, the butterfly expert Neil Hulme tells him not to get too excited...

"We mustn't get too close. This is British butterfly history unfolding before our very eyes"

- From The Sunday Times review of Patrick Barkham's "The Butterfly Isles"

Like the Rape of Christ

2010-10-02T22:41:00.004+01:00

Last May, I was at the Guardian Hay Festival listening to Colm O’Gorman on the behaviour of the Catholic Church and its response to the child abuse scandal... and this was what he called it “Like the Rape of Christ Himself”.

Colm O’ Gorman is a man of unassuming looks, who wouldn’t stand out if you crossed him on the Tube. But listen to him and you get a hint of the trauma that he’s been through... Colm grew up in an Irish village where the parish priest regularly abused him. It was very difficult to explain to his mother why he wouldn’t visit the priest and help him, when it was almost a moral obligation for young Catholics do so. Sometimes when the priest came to collect him for “volunteer” duties, he would refuse to come down and his mother would try her best to convince him to go and help out – she found this weird because he was normally a well behaved child.

Unable to put up with this, he broke off contact with family for over 4 years, “kept running” as he said and ended up in London. It was only in 1995 that he went back to Ireland and told his sister what had happened. What spurred him to action was a chat on the phone when his sister remarked that she’d seen the priest at a marriage and that he had a lot of young boys around him... that’s when he knew he had to something and within 6 weeks he was back in Ireland.

The Need Not To Hear, Not To Listen | He spoke about how receiving such brutal news could be traumatic for people who had grown up with the Church as a pillar of their life: “the need not to hear, not to listen to this terribly destructive experience”... Indeed, when a friend tried to tell his mother about how a priest had abused her son, she was so disturbed that she got up and throttled him, as if to hold him by the throat would prevent such a thing from happening.

And in one sense, this was what the Church was also struggling with… and coping by denying the existence of a serious issue: out of 4 bishops who resigned in Ireland, only 2 were allowed to go. He shared an example of what happened to a priest who abused boys in a group in a Boy Scout training session; while the Scouts banned him for life, the church made him a priest. An escalation of the issue to the Papal Nuncio (ambassador) of Ireland in 1987 earned a callous response: "The Holy See is aware of your concerns". And so the priest continued to abuse until Colm complained to the police and the priest was finally arrested in 1995.

It is difficult to imagine the very personal trauma of being abused… Colm wondered about how it would feel to confess your sins to a man who has raped you? He gave the horrific example of a priest who abused a nun, arranged for abortion when she got pregnant and when she died of medical complications, officiated over her funeral.

A Secular Conspiracy| He went on to show how the sub-text of every communication from the Vatican detracted from the primary issue…

...somehow the corruption of the society was part of the problem…
...somehow it was a secular conspiracy against the Church…
...it was the result of celibacy…

Since when does celibacy (or the lack of it or anything else, for God’s sake) allow a man to go out and rape a child?

At the end of his interactions with the Church, he had to conclude that the Catholic Church had been morally corrupt in dealing with the situation… an institution that was supposed to stand up for truth, love, pursuit of justice was shielding rapists against the justice, against the rights of victims. And by ignoring the cries of victims and abetting this behavior, the Church was almost abetting the rape of Christ (Mathew 25:45, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me”)

I found it a very disturbing, stark and almost gimmicky comparison… but think about it, maybe not too far from the truth. All the AIDs clinics that the church builds, all the priests and nuns who slog thanklessly in jungles and deserts, all the schools and colleges that have fed a hungry mind… the goodness of all such outstanding acts of courage and faith go waste in the face of the Church leadership’s utter cowardice in obfuscating these crimes.

Creating an opportunity to prey| In the Q& A session after the speech, a social worker explained how her organization realized that if there weren't enough checks in place, enough empathy in listening to victims and enough measures to apply against criminals, you would become an organization that attracts paedophiles, because this is how they find opportunity and prey... And she felt that the Church was in danger of going down that route.

Colm agreed with this and added that that there had been several petitions submitted to the Vatican but it still refused to put in place mandatory child protection policies. If this was possible in England, which enjoys good standards of freedom of speech and law enforcement, he wondered what would be the case in Philippines or Brazil or other developing countries where people are more vulnerable and the Church has more authority. An example he quoted: In Brazil, a priest regularly abused a kid from a favela; when the grandmother complained, the Bishop ex-communicated her and tried to suppress the issue. But it was only when they realized that everyone teased the victim as the priest’s “little wife” and when they discovered a diary with details of whom to target and how to abuse, that the priest was finally arrested.

In his closing remarks, Colm insisted that the State cannot abdicate responsibility...it needs to ask questions and not let the Church dodge responsibility.

I wonder…| What men are these, that lurk in the corners of churches... and what men are those that allowed them to prey on children? My High St. Kensington parish priest took great pride in booming across the pews at mass: that abusers constituted only 0.4% of the total priest population and most parishioners clapped their hands as if this somehow constituted a remarkable achievement. Since when does rape get sanction, go unpunished or become justified because such an ugliness occurs only rarely? (A questionable statistic considering the Church’s lack of transparency in the issue).

No one takes issue with the 0.4% statistic or with the truly noble work done by the Mother Teresas and Father Damiens of the Church… but when Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope himself turn a blind eye to acts of evil under their roofs, I wonder if Colm had it right there: like the rape of Christ Himself.

Notes

Colm O'Gorman's "Beyond Belief" is available (with a needlessly sensational subtitle - "The Story of the Boy Who sued the Pope") from Amazon for GBP4.89 here.
Image sourced from a Telegraph article about Colm O'Gorman here

The 4 women

2010-10-02T21:50:00.003+01:00

" Used to say there was four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman"

Billy Pretty in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx.

A reflector reflects...

2010-08-31T16:01:00.003+01:00

Jarod Lanier in the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about the end of human specialness and the alarming ascendance of a computerized collective unconscious:

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

His speech at the LSE last year, in which he lays out the premise behind his book "You are not a gadget" is interesting, provocative and is available as a podcast here.

That Which Is Beauty Is Also Beast

2010-08-26T11:48:00.004+01:00

Fiona Banner has hung up a couple of fighter jets at the Tate Modern - this extract from either The Sunday Times or The Observer or the New Yorker is her comment about them...

PS: If anyone knows the exact source, do let me know- would be happy to cite and link up.

An Acceptable Substitute for Light

2010-07-05T07:06:00.003+01:00

The Crepuscular Theory of Light
- Richard W. Halperin

That light in it's purest form is found
In jazz heard on a summer night;

That light is drinkable in any
Colour one chooses, as the mad know;

That we think light bends because we bend -
Racine knew better: it's a hatchet;

That where she lives now is a bossa
Nova of light, as when she lived here;

That just to to think of her name is an
Acceptable substitute for light.

From the latest Poetry Review

The Consequences of Earshot

2010-06-10T12:00:00.000+01:00

I've always been a merciless eavesdropper but much as Alaphia points out here about its merits, it has its own consequences... on one's sanity!

We have a Flexidesk system at work - Flexidesk is companyspeak for "Let's see if you can reach early enough to catch a chair, the number of which outnumber by 2:1, the building's occupants". A.K.A. "Gotcha".

What this hustle means is that one's neighbour varies everyday, an absurdist human lottery of sorts... the glorious gongura-pickle eating South Indian, the Frenchman going brrrppoooofff all the time, the Arab who seems to hiss at/curse everyone's grandfathers, the stinky nerd with the shiny Mac, the woman with hula-hoops on her ears impeccably complemented by a Chanel No.5 forcefield and the occassional tobbaco chewing Texan. All stereotypes duly make their appearance at regular intervals.

Today, however, is an outlier of a day. There is a plain looking 55+ year old man next to me. Harmless almost, until he gets on the phone. Wears a tie, really looks white but speaks Sinhalese to his relatives. He varies his accent depending on whom he speaks to and presents his complicated surname to Brit callers in two simple syllables. He calls his niece on the office phone to tell her friend about not mentioning his Tamil origin on his UK visa application.

Needlessly funny at most times, he tells a caller to hold on for a second while he weeps in the corner and comes back. To another, he shares the discovery of his professional incompetence by the company (in a hushed tone) and shares his new responsibilities which may include shredding blank paper and fetching vanilla tea. He has been apparently reassigned as part of a management shakeup (he shakes himself, his chair and MY desk, somehow communicating the agony of it all, down the thin copper line) and is awaiting his new role.

He explains to his cousin how senior managers in the firm are practititioners of the exotic language of Jar-Gon-Ese and also how his new boss was supposed to turn up to tell him what to do but has been AWOL for the last 5 days and so he enjoys the sun in the office atrium but has regretfully left his suntan lotion at home.

Then he calls to check on his aunt in a care-home. On being told that she is asleep, he signs off thus "Tell her that her little nephew, 'S' called and that he is praying for her daily".

The wonder, the horror. Yet another day winds down.

Image sourced from here.

And I too suffer...

2010-06-08T22:45:00.006+01:00

"...but always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer..." Bertrand Russell in The Prologue to his autobiography.

I just finished Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Pain of Others” and it was a such a strong reminder of all the reasons why I love reading and how a powerful compendium of words can ram home unpalatable truths. In this book, Sontag makes an unflinching study of the many images of human distress and dissects our thinking as we consider such images. In doing so, she not only spells out the tenuous limits of morality (during wartime, especially) but also marks the larger manipulation of memory that human society chooses to live with.

Some excerpts from the book:

"...and the pity and the disgust that pictures like Hick's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown"

“When Woolf notes that one of the photographs she has been sent shows a corpse of a man or woman so mangled that it could as well be that of a dead pig, her point is that the scale of war's murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings”

“It is the same intelligence whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter, wrote Junger, that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.”

“The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees; but surely the Taliban soldier begging for his life whose fate was pictured prominently in the NY Times also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three colour photographs of their husband, father, son, brother being slaughtered-if they have not already seen them.”

“Photographs that everyone recognizes, are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about or declares that it has chosen to think about...what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating; that this is important and this is the story about what happened with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

“The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs… to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

“Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe that we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African American men (and women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America… A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most in the United States is a national project that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic value. The acknowledgement of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in a violation of one of the cardinal principles of war) is very much not a national project… would be regarded-now more than ever-as a most unpatriotic endeavor.”

“We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

The book is available at Amazon for $9.36. Capa's falling soldier picture from the BBC site here.

Characters on The Underground

2010-06-08T15:35:00.002+01:00

The man with the glass-ball – 16th January 2010 (Piccadilly)
A wild haired man with blonde hair curly and pointing in all directions. Large eyes, small jowls on his cheek, tiny chin. Stands next to door leaning on glass partition. Takes off coat. Rolls up sweater sleeves. Takes out a glass ball about the size of a small football. Holds it on palm then turns palm upside down and holds ball on top. Then glides it to crook of elbow. Up and down. Left to right. When Holborn hits, takes it on left side and makes a block gesture with his right. I pretend to look the other way and get off at Notting Hill Gate.

The girl without makeup – 19th January 2010 (Central)
Indian origin; camel haired coat, stockinged feet, Padukone lookalike, more rounded. No rings. Unusually large calves, firm and stockinged. No makeup. Plain well tended nails. No lipstick, no mascara, no rouge, no nail polish, no eyeliner. Maybe coming in from the gym? Rolls eyes to side and I see them... black. Black flat shoes with small silver bows. The crowd pushes us nearer but I edge away from the brush of her hair. It is, after all, a disturbing feeling. Gets off at Chancery Lane.

The kid with the touch-screen phone – 10th April 2010 (Central)
Little blonde kid, lavender crocs, tights with metal studs around the ankle, plastic hair-band. Black short-sleeved tee that reveals gangly, long arms. About 8 years old. Fiddling with a Palm Pre encased in florescent green rubber. Looks up at Mom who's busy reading a magazine. Turns away and licks touch-screen with tongue to see if it works. Tiny delighted smile when it does. Briefly struggles with thought of sharing discovery with Mom. Decides to. Mom nods, smiles and turns away. I nod to the little discoverer in acknowledgement. 1845 hours on the Central line.

Image from this Evening Standard article with Tube Trivia

Admiring the King's legs, among other things...

2010-05-15T08:50:00.012+01:00

In 3 hours at The National Portrait Gallery, you can discover:

In a corner, next to the portrait of Lady Jane Grey, queen of England for a week, a girl’s reply to a museum notice board that asked visitors to list down what they would do if they were The Queen for a day: “Joe Jonas would be my king; I would wear only the crown jewels and walk around the palace”. Go Joe!
That Queen Henrietta Maria thought that the future King Charles II at the tender age of 4 months was “so fat and so tall that he is taken to be a 1 year old”.
Some of the girls who strew flowers as Princess Alexandra landed at Gravesend were maybe prettier than the princess herself.

History being airbrushed at 'The Indian Portrait, 1560-1860' exhibition...

Ghulam Ali’s portrait of Bahadur Shah II, a cultivated poet and calligrapher who was “sent into exile into Rangoon”... Hah! Put in a cage like a monkey, stripped of all human privileges and made to live & die in filth – tragically recounted in Dalrymple’s brilliant book, “The Last Mughal”
One man’s betrayal can be another man’s 'brought over' – Francis Hayman’s painting of Rob Clive receiving the homage of Mir Jaffir after the Battle of Plassey describes how Mir Jafffir ‘brought over’ his troops to Clive and was appointed Nawab of Bengal for his support. A lowly traitor in Indian history becomes a “well rewarded supporter” at the National Portrait Gallery. Amen.
Quiet sense of wonder at how Mughal art, architecture and literature did their Persian roots proud.

Moving on, you will encounter...

The red red bust of the artist, Mark Quinn (“Self”) cast and frozen in several pints of the artist’s own blood, maintained by a refrigerating unit, reminding us “of the fragility of existence”.

That Mary, Queen of Scots was the first woman to play golf and the word “caddy” evolved from the French military “cadets” who carried her clubs in France.

The smooth, lovely, long legs... of the King of England!

The gently entwined hands of the eloped poet-couple, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, captured in bronze for eternity by Harriet Hosmer

The impeccably stylish Lady Colin Campbell, painted in black(dress) & ivory(skin) by Boldini; a stunning woman of “lightning wit” who married His Lordship, not knowing he was suffering from syphilis. It must be noted that she sometimes "wore a live snake around her throat in hot weather because it keeps one's neck so cool".

The Raging Red Eyes from the “Head of A Man” by L.S.Lowry who poured out his impotent rage as he watched his mother’s life ebb away... few know that he moon-lighted as a rent-collector. The many lives of angry artists.

The Babyface of Dylan Thomas by Augustus Edwin John... who would have dreamt this boy, he of the lush lips, curly red hair and leopard spotted coat/cape, would rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The plaster bust of Dorothy Russell sculpted by the psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and artist, Ismond Rosen... a deserving honor, no doubt for the first woman to hold the 'Chair of Morbid Anatomy' at the London Hospital Medical College, apparently an eminent position, which a few of us might find semantically interesting.

The ascetic profile of DH Lawrence, infused with all the suffering brought about by the obscenity trial of 'Lady Chatterly’s Lover'. If you peek around with sufficient enthu, you might even spot the ironic Philip Larkin and his ‘Annus Mirabilis’, celebrating the discovery of sexual intercourse in 1963 when the book was finally allowed to be published (the first edition of which was dedicated to the jurors who returned the verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ in the obscenity case)

Paul McCartney, blissfully bleeding colour all over as “Mike's Brother” by Sam Walsh

Dame Judi Dench, looking like The Angel of Soothing Death, her mop of hair well-coordinated with her dress and matching the immaculate white of the canvas.

And if you’re persistent enough and try to escape to the basement as the closing bell rings, you will discover “The Singh Twins” series, a delightful modern interpretation of miniature Indian Art by Amrit & Rabindra, twin BBCD sisters. This colourful collection is complete with texting phones and DDLJ in the background... and even Muhammed Ali, reminding us (and all Americans) about his personal stand against the Vietnam War - “after all, no Vietnamese ever called me a nigger”. Truly, The Greatest Hath Spoken.
Until I saw their 1984, I did not know that at least 484 civilians were slaughtered in Operation Blue Star; always remembered it from high school history as a terrorist vs. army story. Another case of History being kind to those who write it, no doubt.

And in the final minutes as one slips down to the toilet, Venetia Dearden interrupts us with her work on the Glastonbury Festival... the strikingly innocent face of a young girl splendidly contrasting her pierced nipples and navel, around which her equally metaled boyfriend’s arms wrap around.

A cold, rainy afternoon, well spent, topped off with Kir Royale and some sautéed garlic mushrooms. Ooh-la-lah.

A Day In The Life Of India

2010-05-11T15:53:00.011+01:00

The official global narrative of events in India is sometimes so misleading, that when the truth emerges, foreigners are stumped at the impossible contradiction of how we are the way we are. Here are two examples:

Case No 1: TELECOM-GATE

Official story: Government privatizes telecom, market booms, consumers get cheap handsets and cheaper tariffs, behold the world's fastest growing telecom market.

Unofficial story: In the background, someone in the Telecom Ministry auctions spectrum without proper guidelines or government consensus for what must have been “super-sized-incentives”. Real estate firms, stock broking firms, Tom, Dick, Chotu and Hari all apply for spectrum (after all, there’s no ‘tender’, it’s on a first-come, first served basis) and a small number of firms without any telecom expertise get valuable spectrum at grossly under-priced 2001 rates. The buyers (make that brokers) quickly mark up and resell licenses to foreign operators for huge profits soon after. Issue becomes public thanks to media (Ave 'The Pioneer'!) doing its glorious duty of exposing all, opposition parties demand resignation. The leader of the coalition party (to which the minister belongs, goes to Delhi, trots out the much-flogged, completely irrelevant caste horse. Matter not being actively pursued by Government because of the delicate nature of the coalition government. Oooooh.

Cry, My Beloved Country.

Case No: 2: IPL GATE

Official story: America-returned entrepreneur back in India, replicates NBA-style model for cricket, rejuvenates the sport, film stars cheer their own teams, nation rejoices & gets glued to new format.

Unofficial story: A junior minister jumps in to "mentor" a league bid, impropriety suggested, he resigns, other murky deals by murkier politicians come to light, the aviation minister’s daughter cancels a scheduled flight of the state owned airline and uses the plane to charter self and cricketers from her team. Caught in scandal, aforementioned entrepreneur claims innocence, denies owning proxy stakes in different teams, releases occasional emotional tweet, expresses sense of wonder and amazement about personal astrological predictions (including but not constrained to: ...is a dynamo...a package of raw radioactive energy... a true Pluto child... will soar like a phoenix... will conquer the 25 moons of Jupiter, surf the rings of Saturn and tenderly twist the time-space continuum... ok, I made up the last one), on verge of getting sacked, prepares to defend himself, as documents from his golden days as a part-time kidnapper emerge, detailing his arrest and indictment.

Comments from spectators: Dhiraj Nayyar of The Financial Express explains: "In many ways the I.P.L. is a confirmation of what India really is: an emerging economy". Ramachandra Guha reminds: "It is the India that is doing well economically. It shuts itself off from the other 800 million Indians who live in the hinterlands."

Another Day in the life of India.

Documenting Life - At The Barbican

2010-05-11T00:15:00.006+01:00

The recently concluded London International Documentary Festival at The Barbican had some fantastic films in town and I got a chance to watch two of them:

Isolation is the story of Britain’s dispossessed war veterans; over 25% of former soldiers are living on the streets. Told by Stuart Griffith, a former veteran who too was once homeless, the story retraces his steps across the streets of England as he encounters former soldiers on the streets, on park benches, in temporary hostels – strong men, angry men, lost men with tattooed bodies and scarred minds.

It was eerie to watch this shadow-filled movie especially with the unforgiving and jarring live music; we see veterans whose flesh has been gouged out by shells and peeled by fire, who have lost limbs, lost half their mind watching friends die, who struggle everyday to make it to the blessed night. The stark loneliness of civilian life seems to be often the biggest shock for these men so used to the espirit-de-corps of military; Griffith walks us through the despicable unfairness of a system that grinds young men through war in strange lands and almost abandons them when they reach home.

In the post-screening discussion, the directors talked about how their movie was almost a portrait of the netherworld, of people inhabiting two different worlds. They explained how, after a while, a normal person might become immune to war statistics & body counts in the media; their making of this movie was intended to break through that veneer. As one of the directors said “How does society deal with the monsters it creates to fight wars? It would prefer that they be brushed under the carpet but I am going to annoy them”.

The movie ends on a grim note… More veterans of the Falklands war committed suicide than died in combat.

This Way Of Life on the other hand is the joyful celebration of a wild and fragile existence. It follows the life and family of Peter Karena as he copes with the burden of his ‘integrity’, his insistence on making a living off the land in the wilderness of New Zealand. Through the chaos of a burnt home, stolen horses and a raging father, Peter manages to hold on to his beliefs and manages to pull his family and his 50 horses through, barely at times, with him.

A strong man battling nature and malevolent family is cause enough for some spellbinding cinema but watching his brood, all 6 of them, grow up unabashedly, unafraid, untamed becomes a fiery raucous paean to mankind itself. As a 5 year old girl rides horses bareback and a 12 year boy guides fully loaded animals down a steep mountain slope, we gasp and sigh… in relief and in wonder of the impossibility of a man without a job, living in the forest with a woman he loves and teaching 6 lovely children how to lasso horses, swim naked and skin hogs. Amen.

Image sourced from the LIDF website here.

The Anatomy of Repression

2010-05-10T16:15:00.007+01:00

Amnesty International India is running a Facebook campaign on the Top 10 Things to Know about the post-conflict situation in Sri Lanka; if you care about the issue, you might consider joining their soon-to-be launched signature campaign that puts pressure on the UN for an independent investigation.

During the Sri Lankan conflict, I had put up a note on The Anatomy of Repression (see below), about the Lankan government’s callous approach to what had become a humanitarian disaster. Especially notable is the first link, a posthumous letter from Lasantha Wikramatunge (former editor of The Sunday Leader, assassinated in January 2009) to the Sri Lankan President, sent from the grave – it sets the tone for everything that follows.

The Anatomy of Repression

Kill off dissenters...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/01/letter-from-the.html

…block relief agencies…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/20/red-cross-unrestricted-access-sri-lanka

… use children for propaganda…
http://innercitypress.blogspot.com/2009/05/in-manik-farm-camp-children-forced-to.html

… deny media reports on civilian casualties …
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6383477.ece

… and 'try' (spelled j-a-i-l) the messengers!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8083505.stm

To be read, of course, in conjunction with The Dictator’s Handbook at:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4877

(Oops, the last link's been swallowed by a subscription wall; it essentially talked about how dictatorships quickly adapt to circumstances, have learnt to use new technology like social media, uncannily co-opt allies and neutralize enemies by using a combination of quasi-legal (e.g. rigged elections) and guerrilla-like tactics (E.g. Sri Lanka playing off India vs. China in exchange for arms)... which were likely to have been the staple of the dissidents of the regime in the first place. A reader's reaction to this article is openly available here)

'Sand is like sand, but you are of the blue'

2010-05-04T21:27:00.004+01:00

"Sand is like sand, but you are of the blue"

Nasiri Hajjaj’s movie “As The Poet Said” about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish starts with this line and wanders across half the world before coming home. On the last day of The London Palestine Film Festival at The Barbican Centre, we were granted a languorous film filled with the powerful poetry of Darwish read by people he knew, filmed in places that he had visited.... Tunis, Paris, Ramallah, Spain, Haifa – all illuminated brilliantly with only the starkness of his words.

The Director In the discussion after the movie, Hajjaj called this film his letter of love to Darwish; he spoke about how he had met the poet when he was young and wanted to make a movie about one of his Darwish’s epic poems (much to the consternation of the poet, apparently!) but never had the money to get it started.

The Title The title of the movie “As The Poet Said”, is supposed to be a phrase that’s culturally loaded with meaning in Arabic. Explaining the origin of this phrase, the director spoke about how Darwish would often use this particular phrase with reference to the 9th century poet Al-Muttanabbi, someone he considered THE most famous poet of all time in the Arab world. Hajjaj explained that “Al-Muttanabbi : Darwish, Darwish : Hajjaj” and voila, the title.

The Poet of The World The director also spoke about how he went out of his way to cast Darwish as a poet of the world rather than a poet of Palestine. He deliberately ignored the poet’s early nationalistic works and did not use the usual Palestinian collaborators of Darwish in the movie at all (“there are still people in Ramallah who are very angry with me”, he says, “Darwish was Palestine’s gift to the world and I want him to be remembered like that”). He also spoke about how he forced himself to use emptiness throughout the movie, saying that only the poetry should speak about Darwish and nothing else should detract from the experience.

The Readers Wole Soyinka and Jose Saramago, who read in the movie, had actually visited Darwish in Ramallah during the 2nd Intifada; Dominique De Villepin, the former French Prime Minister and poet, who also reads in the movie, had attended the poet’s funeral and wrote a moving elegy in the French press for him. Other readers include American, Israeli and several Middle –Eastern poets as also a dumb boy who shares in sign language, a Darwish poem that he knew.

The Democratic Flourish In explaining how the poems were selected (especially the ones read out by other poets), the director spoke about his democratic approach – he asked the reading poet to choose a Darwish poem and Najjaj himself would choose another one. The poet would read both poems for the filming but in his film, Najjaj finally used only the poems he chose. “Perfectly democratic”, he informed us.

The Poetry As an old, steady voice read the poem below, the frame panned across the landscape with old men, women, poets, Palestinian school-kids... reciting, reading, remembering these lines... I thought to myself, how better can a man be remembered, than for the force of his words and the fires that they light.

WE HAVE ON THIS EARTH WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING

Mahmoud Darwish, 1986

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s
hesitation, the aroma of bread
at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of
Aeschylus, the beginning
of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and
the invaders’ fear of memories.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the
final days of September, a woman
keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in
prison, a cloud reflecting a swarm
of creatures, the peoples’ applause for those who face death
with a smile, a tyrant’s fear of songs.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this
earth, the Lady of Earth,
mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called
Palestine. Her name later became
Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

(Image used was sourced from here)

The Mad Women of Gabriela Mistral

2010-05-03T16:52:00.007+01:00

Just found my unread copy of Poetry News, Winter 2009 and in it, a lovely Latin American poem. Randall Couch's translation of "Locas Mujeres" by Gabriela Mistral won the 2009 Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation - here's a brief excerpt that I copied from Poetry News:

GABRIELA MISTRAL
from THE ABANDONED WOMAN

for Emma Godoy

(...)

I have sat down in the middle of the Earth,
my love, in the middle of my life,
to open my veins and my chest,
to peel my skin like a pomegranate,
and to break the red mahogany
of these bones that loved you.

I'm burning all that we had:
the wide walls, the high beams,
ripping out one by one
the twelve doors you opened
and closing with axe blows
the cistern of happiness.

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy, the first Latin American to win the Nobel; she knew Neruda (another pseudonym, originally he was Neftali Basoalto) when he was a 16 year old aspiring poet, 3 years before the maddening brilliance of Twenty Poems of Love and A Song of Despair.

I never knew about Mistral until I saw this feature but it looks like she's written some exceptional literature. She says about her poetry:

"I write poetry because I can't disobey the impulse; it would be like blocikng a spring that surges up in my throat... it no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel".

Wow.

Image sourced from here.

Un Privilegio Raro

2010-04-26T10:05:00.004+01:00

60's Italian version of #209 (Geordie) of Francis Child's collection of English and Scottish ballads.

Banishing Indian inequality through press conferences

2010-04-21T10:17:00.005+01:00

Manmohan Singh on the Maoist threat recognizes that "“Rapid growth will have little meaning, however, unless social and economic inequalities, which still afflict our society, are not eliminated quickly and effectively.” He also urges civil servants to ensure that no area of the country is denied the benefits of the government’s developmental programmes.

Dear Mr.Singh,
Do you believe that

Our existing civil governance infrastructure with a notably specious record
With skewed incentives, rehashed development plans and large implementation gaps
Dealing with the same resource hungry corporate players

will suddenly heed your call and start super-effective/efficient execution of your government's plans just because more people might be watching them?

Do you believe that and do you expect us to seriously believe that? Are these the most concrete plans that the PM and Home Minister (ministers I consider to be of the highest calibre in the current government) have for eliminating social and regional economic inequalities? (after an incident that shows the appalling fallout of not doing so).

Opinions we can do without - C.V. Arvind in The Hindu

2010-04-17T21:24:00.006+01:00

C.V. Arvind painstakingly writes in The Hindu about the perils of pre-marital sex and live-in relationships, an issue of undying importance to upholders of the definitive, untraceable collection of sacrosanct (Indian!) values (a shield usually deployed by morally-challenged, politically shrewd characters which includes the Shiv Sena, the RSS, Sri Ram Sena, random Mullahs issuing fatwahs against Sania's skirts etc).

I wonder how The Hindu let this completely WTF article slip through their usually reasonable quality gates. Note the flimsy assertions and generalizations unbacked by any data/research/findings/polls whatsoever other than the writer's (warped and repressed, I would say) opinions:

"Indian society, by and large, continues to frown upon both pre-marital sex and live-in relationships"
"In the West...couples walk in and out of relationships with consummate ease and with hardly any passion or affection characterizing these relationships"
"Entering into a bond where there are no vows or values is something that cannot be endorsed"
"One could well ask what sanctity is there in such live-ins"
"Often, when these live-ins come apart, they could scar either the man or woman for life"
"Pre-marital sex too is alien to our culture"
"Awareness has to be created in these young minds"
"It is in the interest of all that we continue to be old-fashioned and prude"

It must be admitted that one has to try very hard to retain any respect whatsoever for the intellect and education of such a writer and readers can choose to puzzle even harder as to how a respected national newspaper could allow such poor style and content. It is in the national interest for all concerned to do so... OMG, this is infectious. Stay away from this guy.

How do we wage a war against our own people?

2010-04-16T17:47:00.003+01:00

In “Traffic”, Michael Douglas is a DEA official about to launch a “war against drugs”. At the last moment, he walks out of a press conference angrily recognizing the illogic of waging a war against one’s own own daughters and sons, victims and perpetrators in the uncharted waters of drug addiction.

The same question strikes me when I read the many arguments and counter-arguments about the Maoist struggle in the mineral laden states of India; the most recent of these were Arundhati Roy’s outstanding essay in Outlook and the CPI(Maoist) spokesperson interview’s in The Hindu. Anyone reading these (sometimes overly) impassioned pieces cannot but be moved by the poignant (and soon-to-be tragic?) struggle of illiterate men and women with muzzle loading rifles and pitchforks who take on the sophisticated legal might of Vedanta-like corporations, the financial and logistical muscle of the Indian government and the savagery of the Salwa Judum. Especially notable is Roy’s brief, acerbic dissection of the twisted language of war (“the Maoist infestation”, “The greatest threat to Indian democracy” etc). But all the literary eloquence of the world cannot mask the stench and horror of 75 dead CRPF men killed last week. So what is it that pits the Indian government to move battalions of police against terrorists… and also its own people? Minerals, apparently. Millions of tonnes of minerals.

A few good answers A couple of months back, I met an LSE grad who had done her PhD on the Maoist movement in India – she had visited Bihar, Jharkand, Uttaranchal etc and clocked miles and hours with both comrades and government officials. She summed up her findings thus - Wherever there are scarce natural resources, there are also fierce power struggles to control them. And inevitably, the local populace suffers and often suffers terribly. This is not a new chapter in human history: Red Indians were driven off their lands and away from their hunting grounds by American settlers looking for ranching land, gold and bison. The island of Nauru was thoroughly strip-mined of all its minerals by the British Phosphate Commission and left to die (or rather, to exist on pittances from becoming a tax haven and running detention centres for illegal Australian immigrants). “Avatar” rehashed this storyline, with humans attempting to wrest control of Unobtainium ore from the Pandorans. In an eerily similar real-life tale, a friend at Amnesty International shared with me their campaign against Vedanta’s attempt to mine the Niyamgiri Hills, sacred to the Dongria Kondh community.

I do not possess the legal, political or philosophical bandwidth to discuss issues of whom the land belongs to and which is the greater good; but whomsoever it belongs to and whatever its worth, surely there must be a more humane process to work this issue through… a process that does not completely condemn barely literate tribals to the mercies of unscrupulous corporations (make no mistake, I am a U.Chicago grad, all in favor of capitalism and free markets, but I was also alive when Bhopal happened to my countrymen), money-making chief ministers and masochistic vigilante organizations.

In this context, I disagree with Shankar Aiyyar of India Today who declares Maoists as terrorists (Yes!) and calls for a new strike force (considering sketchy human rights record of such forces, strike against whom exactly?) brushing aside what he calls “pacifist”(as opposed to a government’s war against its citizens?) objections. His strongest premise is particularly weak in an Indian context: that “a democracy affords many avenues to seek justice and violence is not an option”. I would invite Mr.Aiyyar to the Indian hinterland and ask him to go through the simple motions of registering any kind of complaint in a police station - what a joke! The only avenues of justice available in the Indian democracy are limited to those with one or more of the following:
A. An education
B. An income or wealth that can support bribery and legal costs
C. Extensive contacts in the political or bureaucratic system.
D. The means to inflict violence.
Let us try to guess which of these opulent options an Adivasi in the jungles of Jharkand could (not would) choose. Duh.

I suppose one should be relieved that the Honorable Home Minister of India and the Air Chief Marshall are unsure about the option of using air power for fear of collateral damage; apparently, it’s not just our government servants who are weighing such mighty choices – Harper’s Magazine (currently absconding behind a pay-wall) in a recent article by Ando Arike chronicles the many slippery-slope measures that authorities are considering against protesting and pestering populations. Options include microwaving people, low intensity lasers to make crowds singe and piss, flash-bang grenades that puncture ear-drums, all adding to a range of strategies & tactics to ensure success in “asymmetric confrontation” against restless civilian elements. Us unruly masses need to be taught unforgettable, humiliating, painful lessons on the consequences of naughty behavior, apparently.

Rants aside, why Pandora cannot exist It is stupid to argue that the earth be left in its pristine glory with minerals safely ensconced in their ore… it is only a matter of time before someone discovers/creates shortcuts to make a grab at such resources. Human need has driven human action and will do so forever, wherever, flattening the mountains of America and damning the rivers of China.

Neither does it make sense to always rant against MNCs the way Roy goes on about the Tatas, Vedanta and every other large company. The world does not possess enough resources that match the gentle alternative model that Roy suggests nor do its inhabitants possess the time and patience to wait for such a model’s results. Every day, the iPhones and Priuses of the world demand Bolivian lithium, lithe Formula 1 machines need Nigerian petroleum and millions of Indians want their feisty steel-clad Nanos - now! Such a world we have chosen and wrought, go figure. Rather than confining our reflections to the beauty of a night in the Jharkand jungle, we need to ask more pertinent, more realistic and more urgent questions, like:

PREMISE: Given that large corporations, mining industries, well-paid lobbyists and giant Chinese, American, Russian and Brazilian metal extractors and the irrepressible appetites of global consumers are here to stay…

QUESTION 1: How can we ensure that the transfer of scarce resources from traditional regional inhabitants (guardians?/ owners?/ people?) to industrial economies happens in the most civilized manner possible with the least costs inflicted upon human inhabitants?

QUESTION 2: How can the resultant benefits be spread across fairly across the chain - from the dwellers of the land to the sellers of the metals?

I know, I know, infinitely easier said than carried out. One would think that the world's largest democratic system would at least make an attempt to answer this with some modicum of decency … but no, the Indian government seems to have utterly failed. By abandoning legal and moral responsibilities to the whims of rapacious industrial partners and local politicians out for a quick buck, state and central governments have created a power vacuum, one that dacoits/ extortionist mafias/ Maoists moved to fill in quickly.

In the mines and quarries of Bellary, Naxalbari and Keonjhar, we sowed the wind… And an angry whirlwind visits us in Dantewada, reminding us of the questions we forgot to answer and the bodies that we need to bury. Thanks to the Roys, the Muhajirs, the Sainaths and the Hindus of the world who force us to confront the truth, almost swept under the carpet of economic growth.

Convoluted PS: The act of labeling something as “terrorism” and undertaking all further action based on that premise should not hold one back from recognizing, understanding and ultimately preventing the conditions that led to its formation in the first place. (Prevention not necessarily limited to scorched earth tactics that create desolation and call it peace). No?

PPS: Noompa does a neat job of explaining exactly where Arundhati Roy went too far and why it is a great “disservice to the compelling power of her underlying arguments”. Also note her links which lead on to some measured and rational responses.

What does Anupam Kher think?

2010-02-17T14:38:00.004Z

Dear Anupam Kher,

I read your comment on The Hindu questioning why anyone should support Shah Rukh Khan during the recent Shiv Sena controversy. You said “Why should we come out together? We come out together when there is a national calamity. We come out together when there are issues related to the nation”.

First of all, I would like to understand your idea of a national calamity – perhaps you imagine that only earthquakes, genocidal riots, terrorist attacks and the like can damage our 2000 year old civilization and therefore it is only the occurrence of these events that call for a show of national unity and support.

But I ask you for a moment to consider these acts of vandalism perpetuated time and again by the Shiv Sena on anyone who does not toe it's line. Is this something that you consider normal in the modern Indian nation?
The fact that an Indian citizen, artiste or a producer in BOMBAY (now deal with that, Sena!) cannot express his/her/their opinion without being subject to ugly threats reinforced by vandalism and violence, isn’t that a more fundamental and more dangerous threat to all that our country represents?
If every movie, every sports event, every public service examination in India's most happening metropolis must gain the hallowed blessings of a few bigots... do you think this is not cause enough to protest in unity?
Must we wait for extreme measures like these to be enacted or can we be more civilized in unifying and expressing our dissent?

Unless, of course, if you believe that our prerogative to unite as a nation is limited to natural disasters or wars in which case I think you are surely underestimating and almost insulting the intelligence of the Indian people.

Secondly, I completely agree with your other comment that “It’s important everybody has an individual (opinion)”. In this context, I would like to know what your opinion is...

As a respected artiste who has commented in media about why this may not be worth supporting, you no doubt have formed a well thought-out opinion about the Sena’s threats and vandal actions against any form of cultural expression that does not fit in with their specific world-view.
Do you believe this is right or wrong? Do you think this is justified or should it be punished? Or will your opinion on this be always politically correct and/or forever withheld?

What do you really think, Mr.Kher?

PS: Sorry, Amit, for riding on your format - will buy you a beer if ever we meet.

Only at U.Chicago...

2009-11-10T23:55:00.006Z

... could a geo-physicist professor take on a NY Times best selling econ professor and come out on top!

... could this attract 652 comments citing references to long forgotten academic papers!

Raymond Pierrehumber of the Geophysical sciences Dept. shreds Levitt's arguments on global warming here. Quoting easily available resources, he turns some of the arguments in 'Superfreakonomics' on their head. From what I have seen till now (and from 652 comments quoting every kind of academic journal and cross referenced studies), Levitt seems to have drawn some shoddy conclusions from superficial facts... a pity, because, Malcolm Gladwell already makes a living out of it. But seriously, c'mon, a Clark medallist couldnt have slipped up so badly... so much so that Liz Kolbert at the NYer tears it apart, quoting 18th century horseshit and Al Gore... sheesh. My GSB tee cringes while my U.Chicago flag flies high!

And if that wasnt enough, Krugman at the NY times gets all wistful that he isnt being allowed to do this....Awwwww.

Scathing, fascinating, Darwinian U.Chicago culture at it's best and no holy cows, not even the ones that win Clark medals... do check out the map at the end!

Even the Bean

2009-01-15T05:44:00.006Z

... is frozen! Its - 26C outside...they did warn me that Chicago is a tough city, but after the madness of Madurai, I thought I knew it all. Well, come Sunday, some skating and sledding shall happen and then we will know what's tough and what's not. The man in the mirror rolls his eyes: "Here we go again"

The right to die... is not ours to give.

2008-12-21T04:52:00.005Z

Since we're on a rebellious rant streak here, here I start again on why euthanasia (the right of a person, usually in mortal sickness, to choose to die) needs to be respected... obviously the seers of the Church don't agree.

Actually, Margo McDonald is way better than me at explaining about this here in The Daily Telegraph- to quote her, ''What I find immoral is the insistence of these people who presume that they can impose their moral code on people for whom life has become totally intolerable". Or more bluntly, if you haven't been stuck in a bed completely paralyzed with someone wiping your ass 7/365 or with half of your body missing after an accident, how can you presume to impose your unfair moral code on someone for whom life is a daily struggle?

I've reached this conclusion after seeing people suffer endlessly and also after playing out quite a few ethical arguments like the parallels to suicide and murder and of course, the inevitable Biblical stances. I completely respect people,who in in similar conditions, choose to live and fight it out against tremendous odds - it is an individual choice that requires amazing willpower and dauntless courage... stuff that most of us will probably never draw upon in one entire lifetime. But like I said, it is an individual choice and I stand by my argument.

Being a X'ian - Of faith and its failings

2008-12-19T16:36:00.004Z

So matters of faith have always been a sticky issue for me - because of a Catholic upbringing, my default has always been belief in the existence of a Christian God. But growing up in India with its ancient, evocative and powerful epics and with Hindu/Muslim friends who live by the faith of different books has made me wonder about the wisdom of professing that only "believers" of a Christian god would be saved. Add the usual existential angst of college years and the mandatory Ayn Rand and Nietzche reads, you can imagine why I opted for the more physical horrors of the NCC.

So here I am, after a while, faith in a year where matters of religious faith have manifested themselves in forums ranging from the US Presidential elections to the Mumbai attacks. As a X'ian, I have serious rants about the institution of the Catholic Church - its' beliefs about saints, its stance on abortion and stem cell research...there's quite a few "official" opinions that I strongly resent. At the same time, I think the Church has been a force of good for humanity, the causes of poverty alleviation, literacy, health-care and political change. There are many strong arguments for and against the Church and its behavior - but I have also come to realize that such issues and differences exist among any body of people on probably any topic under the sun... and the only way to address such issues are to engage and talk about them, rather than ignore them them to a point of explosive isolation.

Consider this debate between a preacher and a public policy expert on the spiritual legitimacy of gay marriage - this was subsequent to a Newsweek article by Lisa Miller where she argues that with the coming of Jesus (and therefore based on the New Testament) the Bible does not exclude any particular group of people based on criteria such as race, region, church or... sexuality. Not only do I appreciate the content of this discussion between these experts but I also have great regard for tone and respect inherent in the discussion. I will leave aside the actual arguments to your interest, but look at how the counter-arguments start:

"Thank you for this. We are actually engaging one another. By my lights, a rarity between our sorts. Please forgive me for being surprised. Our conversation may be more important than I first guessed. And I'm going to be emboldened to say some hard things in response"

"I think we've had a very good exchange. Thanks for being open with me, and letting me understand your thinking. I hope I have adequately communicated why I take the position I do on the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage."

Whenever I've tried to start a reasonable debate with the evangelical Xians that I know (sometimes even with my brother, cousins, aunts etc), I get the v"Revelations" and half the scary verses of the Old Testament thrown at me with such vigor and passion that it becomes impossible to be objective, especially with the usual condescending scorn comes along with this "Ha, he argues with his mind and not with his spiritual soul".

In the face of such biased "faith", what does one conclude? That God fearfully and wonderfully made the brilliant mechanism of the human brain so that we could dump it cold storage when we go to Church or when we read the Bible? That we adhere to what we like about the Holy Book and listen to the preachers we are comfortable with, rather than search ourselves for meaning and relevance? Here's to hoping to more reasonable, vitriolic, more inclusive, less bigoted discussions and debate on "Faith" in the year to come.

NYT IDEAS OF THE YEAR 2008

2008-12-16T02:02:00.003Z

An interesting list that includes...

The implications of dancing cockatoos
Airbags for the walking elderly
A bio-mechanical energy harvester (I had trouble with that one the first time around)
A new+radical auto-engine design that consumes 50% less fuel (Nah, not yet, its just at the R&D stage)
Endlessly burstable bubble wrap toy - could be only from a company called Mugen Puchi Puchi and only from the country of...Japan!
The bus wait formula-what if you could minimize the time you wait for a bus?
How real warmth (as in heat) melts a cold heart- no, seriously!
The best way for a goalkeeper to stop penalty kicks is to stay still?!?
Crows with vending machines of their own
Spray-on condoms
Moonvertising - yes, lasers on the moon that spell,what else, COKE!
Minicattle
And a national 10% off sale,thats likely to work better than the eco-stimulus cash that the US Govt sends in right now.

The rest of a mostly interesting list is here

Women needed to prevent impending demise ...

2008-12-15T02:41:00.005Z

...of dating. David Blow writes in The NY times: "The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay. (For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)... It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability — the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them”

Sigh... ladies, I keep telling you, but you never listen - we need to urgently act to prevent such a societal breakdown - so let's have some initiative and pro-action on this! I mean, I am sure you've figured out that we guys are really bad at this and before we start thinking "Hey, come to think of it... a hook-up is actually not that bad, right..." so let me reiterate, action is the need of the hour, quickly reach out to the men around you!

PS: A comment on the article - "In the UK, you meet people through friends, hang around in groups for a bit and then find an excuse to go home together one night. If the sex goes well, then you start going out to dinner alone, introducing them to your other friends, etc". I like.

Corruption...Blago-style!

2008-12-14T18:47:00.005Z

For those who complain about the irredeemable corruption in India, we present competition from Chicago!

Rod Blagojevich, came to gubernatortial power in Illinois, the 1st Democrat to do so in 30 years, campaigning as an anti-corruption crusader. In his winner's speech, he said "Tonight, Illinois has voted for change". And what a change that was...

6 months of legally authorized FBI wiretapping has found out that:
1. Rod attempted to arm-twist the Chicago Tribune by withholding state aid if they did not sack editorial staff who wrote scathing critiques of our hero's tenure.
2. Rod tried to wring money out of the Mercy Children's hospital and threatedned to refuse state funds/approval if they did not undertake sufficient fund-raising efforts for his campaign.
3. Rod tried to "sell" off Obama's seat to the highest bidder, calling the President-elect a "MXXXXfucker" and berating Obama's team because they promised him mere "appreciation" instead of monetary benefits or high-ranking positions that he coveted.

Of course, Leno, Letterman and the rest of the talk-show gang have already moved in, smelling blood:
LENO: "Hey, you probably saw this on the news. A very embarrassing moment at the Illinois State Capitol today. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich attended the opening of the nativity scene. And when the three wise men showed up with gifts for the baby Jesus, Blagojevich demanded half the loot."
LETTERMAN: "We're not kidding about this economy, which is so bad that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had to mark down the price of a Senate seat 40%"

More profanity by Blago & wife here, more news about Blago's senate selling spree here and more fun about his hair here.

Like my Dad said, corruption in India is very obvious and low-level - you can bribe the cops, the health inspector and the meter reader. IMHO, in the US it's not so obvious but very much prevalent and quasi-legalized with official lobbyists and think-tanks. The system definitely works better but is oiled and rigged at the highest levels, methinks.

From Chicago with Love!

2008-12-14T02:46:00.005Z

So Karupp's (aka Blackie) is so delighted with his box of goodies from Amrika that he's promised not to pee on Mom's garden plants...for the next 1 month at least.

With roadside bitches edging up to him daily, he plans to use the Breathbuster biscuits to make his "move" to jump over our gates sometime in the New Year. His UltraGuard drops and Pro-Pet (Senior!) pills should keep in good scent/shape for all the titbits from X'mas guests. And of course, he starts his mornings with Snausages, shaped so lusciously like egg and bacon pieces that my aunt popped in one of them and was retching for the next 20 minutes(which started only after we told her, before which happy chewing happened).

And me, I am wondering if I should consider the sheer vanity of it all or the awesome retail marketing that's made me buy breath buster biscuits and multivit tabs for a black Lab?

Try to praise...

2007-10-15T15:46:00.000+01:00

Adam Zagajewski, whom I have never heard of before I received this mail from the U.Chi poetics list seems to have written an amazing poem here...a grey poem with just a glimmer of light to be served with wild strawberries and wine on what would be an otherwise pointless Monday morning...here's to hearing him read this Wednesday!

Try To Praise The Mutilated World
- Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.