The Lost American Decade – 1

The Congressional Budget Office released its report on the trends in household income distribution in the United States from 1979 to 2007 this month.  The report, a dour-visaged, smug little document that bursts with tedious detail and persnickety clarification, received front-page coverage.  In previous years the report would have garnered no more attention beyond stuffy boardrooms with crusty economists, but this year, the writers of the report were suddenly front page celebs, their work lasting on the front pages just long enough between Herman Cain’s 5th Beatle auditions and tikin Kardashian’s long-rumoured divorce.

Lugubrious-looking presenters repeated the report’s damning statistics – figures that provided the perfect justification for a nation’s simmering anger: the top 1% of American households had seen their after-tax income increase by 275% over the 28 years from 1979 – 2007.  The bottom 20% had seen it increase at 18%.  The vast middle class – income quintiles 2 and 3 – had seen an increase of less than 40%, and the remaining rich guys (80 – 99%) had seen a robust 65% growth.  The report then goes on to document, in clear terms, what many of the people I speak to have acknowledge  for some time : the United States is a deeply unequal society, and one that has been growing more unequal as years pass.  The Gini coefficient is the statistical relationship between income share and population share for a given country.  For smart economist-types, it is the area under a Lorenz curve plotting income share versus population share, and it should ideally tend towards zero (perfectly equal societies) and attempt not to tend towards one (perfectly unequal societies).

The OECD recently underwent a hand-wringing exercise about the rising inequality in their countries, but even while doing so, they commented on how the US was in the back of the pack not just in income inequality, but also in most of the six indicators necessary for social justice: poverty prevention, access to education. labor market inclusion, social cohesion and non-discrimination, health and inter generational justice (Social Justice in OECD Countries 2011).  A growing chorus of reports are beginning to point out what people have begun to feel ever more acutely over the past couple of years: that America has become more unequal, and has spread the inequality unequally too.  Thus poor blacks and hispanics have a rougher time than white Americans of a similar income category, and they score consistently lower on social justice parameters.  America fares pretty poorly in the global inequality sweepstakes, coming in at 0.408 for income inequality, below India’s 0.368, and marginally worse that the Russian plutocracy at 0.399.  These BRIC giants, traditionally hierarchical and unjust societies both, are shown to be more income-equal than the United States.  At 0.408, the US has China (0.469), Brazil(0.55) and South Africa (0.578) among its list of comparably unequal friends, some consolation before the list completely degenerates into egalitarian nightmares like Haiti (0.59) and Mexico (0.516).

Needless to mention, a whole bunch of cassandras has crawled out of the woodwork: established hacks, young scribes, pundits, professors: all waving some article with an I-told-you-so moment from four, maybe six years back: their bosoms puffed, recognised at long last for their  prescience.   Respected periodicals have made American Decline the focus of ongoing journalistic memes, making me wonder whether they were, displaying classic American entrepreneurship, deciding to make the most of a good trend and ride out the crest of bad news with more eyeball-grabbing, and thus more newspaper profits 🙂

But occasional stories send a chill down my spine, leaving me shaken and afraid.   According to a recent book titled “With Liberty and Justice for Some” by Glenn Greenwald, a prominent lawyer-journalist, citizen liberty lies trampled in modern-day America, an empire forever battling against real and manufactured djinns in a far-off desert, and there is serious reason to suspect that political interest has derailed the very process of law-making, creating an unequal two-tiered justice system where “political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world’s largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses”.

Many people are calling today’s youth a “Lost Generation“, and warn that just as the retreating tide drags down all boats, the absolutely poor have had a miserable time in America over the last 10 years.  Who are the poor?  The census bureau figures state that households (of 4) earning $22,113 or less a year, or alternately single persons earning 11,334 or less a year are designated as poor.  The rising levels of poverty over the last ten years have led to a total estimated number today of 46 million poor –  more than 15% of the population – a rising graph that stands at an almost 20-year high.  The swelling ranks of the poor that have been added in the last decade, bookended by two bursting bubbles and an anemic recovery in the middle are disproportionately minority (black, hispanic) and indiscriminately urban.  This has caused some commentators to use the term “Lost Decade” to refer to the naughties, a pejorative commonly reserved for the Japanese downfall in the 1990’s.

How did it come to this?  How did the decade, which began with George Bush’s fateful anointing as commander-in-chief and a rapidly swelling dotcom bubble, finally come to rest in the winter of discontent that is today: burnt, broken and utterly bereft?  Why are the swollen ranks of the unemployed (itself near historic numbers at over 9%) spilling out onto the streets and carrying out civil disobedience movements across the country?  Why do most respected commentators and even regular citizens have such a pervasively dismal view for the future of this country?  Why does one political party make politics a personal contact sport, demeaning democracy, obstructing legislation, fomenting suspicion and obfuscation in the public space, and use every opportunity to pillory the President, often to the detriment of its own image in the country?

I believe the answer is War.  Conflict is like a poison, and America’s unjust wars over the past decade have finally come home to roost, leaving a 3-4 (maybe 4-5! Who knows?) trillion hole in the country’s finances.  The effect of this jingoistic hatred, this illusion of imminent threat, not to mention this Goliath-sized tab – is toxic and corrosive.  A certain suspicion and fear has invaded the American mindspace, occupied center stage, and altered public discourse adroitly – manipulating national opinion so skilfully that noone is the US thinks it amiss that the sole superpower in the world is militarily engaged in 97 countries across the world, policing an arc of instability in the middle east with its secret bases lodged deep in pliant Arab countries.  These countries, ruled by autocratic, non-democratic Arab leaders, are unlikely to do a Mubarak, or a Gaddafi anytime soon, central as they are to the supply of cheap and abundant oil to the US.

Because ultimately, that’s what its all about, and we all know it.  As She put it so eloquently with her sardonic chuckle “Any which way you look at it: Oil is the Turtle, baby: and its Turtles all the way down.”

Next Post: War and the American Empire

Regroup, Reassess, Resume

Hello World!

Over the past few months I have been wondering about why I have hit a writer’s block on my blog, and what I can do to overcome it.  And I’ve come to some interesting conclusions:

One, changing appearance, and other cosmetic changes can add only so much to the overall experience.  Ultimately, output matters.

Two, frequency of posts is important.  As is content.  And brevity.

Three, topics must cover a broad theme, an overarching message, and must deal with a few core ideas that the intended audience is interested in.

Three is what I set out to define in this post.  What shall I write about? Where shall I begin?

From what I’ve seen, there are three approaches that I can take:

One is to write about my life and my experiences.  Admittedly, this is an alluring approach to blogposts, one that my friend Sanjukta, avid blogger and social media guru, uses to brilliant effect.  I have lived on three continents over the last 3 years: two of these countries are diverse and waking up to the immense potential of equality and universal suffrage after years of crippling social segregation and discrimination (India, South Africa).  They are both members of the BRICS, and are both nations where in the past, institutional systems enforced a strict hierarchical order of individual destiny and prevented social mobility between classes.  This restrictive past has now given way to the present, with its chaotic democracy and attendant opportunities (and pitfalls).  The third country is the United States, sole superpower and global liberal hegemon, today going through a crisis of confidence that has resulted in serious soul-searching and introspection.  Arguably, social mobility in America is today the lowest it has been since the late 80’s, and in more real terms, represents a bottom-of-the-barrel picture not seen since the Great Depression.  The Occupy Wall Street movement is attempting to create a new national discourse about democratic capitalist states- one that is exciting and much-overdue, and has the potential to challenge the very foundations of this nation.  In 2011, popular protests have erupted in two of the world’s largest democracies this year in response to an unjust status quo.  Over North Africa and parts of the greater middle East, citizen-led revolts have challenged the will of despots, deposing some, beheading others.  In yet other countries, a raucous populace marches on, unwilling to be silenced.

This is my present, and it is a seminal moment: pregnant with possibility.  Is it not an exciting time to write about?  I think it is.

My second approach is to write about the issues I care about.  These are diverse, and range from the suppression of civil liberties in tribal India to the alarming effects of positive feedback loops on global warming.  Broadly speaking, these can be categorised as musings into the future, and they are an exploration of what our policies of today will mean for our tomorrow.  Climate change is of course the most pertinent of these issues, but they encompass geopolitical events today that I believe will have profound consequences for us into the future, such as the continued occupation of Palestine, or the collapse of the Eurozone.

This is my future, and it is an unpredictable and chaotic maelstrom.  Is it not worthwhile to mull about?  I think it is.

The third approach is to reflect on my past.  Having grown up in India in the eighties, immersed in the syrupy mediocrity of Bappi Lahiri’s plagiarism and Doordarshan’s parsimonious helpings of mass media, it is astonishing to see a country that currently eyeballs more than 500 TV channels.  For better or for worse, the last 20 years have created seismic shifts across India, and contrasted against the grimy steampunk of modern Bharat, my childhood seems starkly remote, almost idyllic.  Multiple writers have exploited this meme to the max, writing about every rich Indian’s deprived (yet happy) youth.  In the afterglow of success and prosperity, the exigencies of childhood can be rewritten as moral fables, the inadequacies papered over with a patina of quaintness.

This is my past, and it is the age when the elephant began to sprout tusks.  Is it not a fascinating era to recount?  I think it is.

So this is it, people.  In a nutshell, what I hope to write about eventually comes to this:

My past, this present, and our future.

Happy Reading!

……. and back.

Its been more than a year.  Far too long.

Oceans rose, icebergs melted, and a few hundred polar bears drowned, their bellies churning fat blubber and polychlorinated biphenyl pesticides, their heavy fur dragging them down, the next ice floe too far, their flesh too weak, their spirit too crushed.  Then just for solidarity, the Greeks did a polar bear too.  As did a derrick named Deepwater, sinking more than a mile to the ocean bed, its ugly visage no longer blocking our Horizons.

The earth trembled, then shook, and giant ripples washed ashore: snapping bridges, crunching cars.  Rivers flooded, and torrential deluges washed away a people already embittered by hate and Hadith.  Afterwards, the sun shone, and then shone some more.  Parched leaves wilted and curled in the heat, then kindled and crackled in the shade.  The smoke was visible from the moon, they told us, as if that somehow were a matter of pride: even the Gods can witness our follies now.

Someone set fire to a fruit-seller, and the people – incensed, hungry and bitter, rose to rid themselves of their masters.  Scepter and crown came tumbling down, and in the shifting sands, were made equal.

Bombs went off in crowded markets, and near leaders’ houses.  In the mountains, not far from the roof of the world, tribal areas that were once federally administered were now listless and pockmarked – their  complexion blemished by big metal birds that prowled the sky.

A tall man with a long beard was dragged away from his home by soldiers.  His body was dropped into the ocean a few days later, sinking softly to the bottom of the sea: Deep Waters once again.

So much has changed, yet nothing has changed.  The more I run, the clearer it becomes to me that I am not going anywhere.  This is just a slow sort of place, where the eddies and whorls in the stream of time wash over the boulders every day: seething, smoothing.

The Red Queen would approve.

: 291 Vaswani Nagar, North Main Road, Koregaon Park, Pune :

Pune was a quieter place then.  It was 1997, the year of the last great Pune Floods. M G Road was a one-way road, Deccan looked like a vast campus and Orient Express (since deceased) delivered pizzas to homes. Aundh was a forest, and NDA stood atop a dark and lonely hill in Khadakvasla.

There were birds in the lake beyond the NCL campus.

Laxmi Road was the artery that ran through the city. Camp was the green lung that breathed, its alveoli soaking the heat and the air. Sassoon stood stolid next to The Railway station, housing (among other things) 2000+ hospital beds and one appendix (belonging to one mr mohandas karamchand gandhi, preserved for posterity). Budhwar Peth was the red light district.

And Koregaon Park was the centre of the Universe.

Its own universe, alone and distinct. A mysterious world of brooding buildings and overgrown gardens, plaster seraphs and purple robes – roaming the streets during the day, their open hair catching the dappled sunlight.

As you passed over the bridge leaping across the railway lines from Camp to Koregaon, the Don Bosco centre would rise on your right, and the turn off to North Main Road soon after.  North Main Road snaked its way to Mundhwa, umbilically connected to South Main Road by a ladder-rung of gentility, seven in all: unobtrusive portals that would ferry you from bustling NMR to the leafy temple-strewn length of SMR. In between the two roads was a mystery land of crumbling old houses and mysterious manors, their facades fenced by ferns and foliage, set deep inside from the tree-lined lanes, in coccoons of sound-soaking eternity. “Old Parsi houses”, we would intone, part-admiration, part-awe, whole-envy. “Old Money”, we would add, throwing in a grimace with pursed upper lips pushing down the corners of our mouths- the ultimate Indian expression of begrudging appreciation.

And right there in the beginning of North Main Road, before the right turn to the Osho Ashram, opposite the yet-to-be-born Hot Breads, next door to Gourmet, home of mouth watering waffles with unlimited honey and butter (which has since been ambushed and swallowed by a bright young Cafe Coffee Day, swarming with peri-pubescent puppydom), was German Bakery, the cafe at the end of the Universe, where burnt-out souls came to rest and feed, to sleep, perchance to dream.

German Bakery was on the first corner, its mian entrance opening out to the main road: the itinerant visitor would step through the threshold into a large leafy courtyard, littered with low stools and short tables, and intellectuals contemplating the swirling grounds in their coffee dregs. The aisle along the side led to the Tibetan shops, presided over by slightly intimidating aunties selling smooth coral stones and necklaces. Between these and the Bakery was the exit to the side lane, leading off to the river and the cremation ghat – a bare clearing with rectangular depressions set into the concrete. The river was full, dark and sludgy, and an Aghori sat on the far side steps of the ghats, tending to the shrine, making conversations and fires, and smoking his butter-like charas in his chillum.

German Bakery itself was always abuzz, and yet untouched: a tiny oasis of Truthful Chocolate ecstasy in a harsh and cruel world. A large Masala chai cup and croissants were among things on offer, along with mashed potatoes, hummus, fruit salads and cream and scones and cakes, and a pick of delicious omelettes. A wide and eclectic menu stared the visitor in the face, neatly inscribed and hung above the smiling Nepali waiter’s head, his cheerful frame dwarfed by the counter, piled high with such suspicious events like Organic Muesli and Pekan Boe tea. The cafe itself wrapped around the kitchen and the manager’s room, and was lined with wooden benches and white-washed walls. The monotony of the walls was broken by random advertismenets for colon irrigation and tantra classes, an ironic speech bubble above the head of Nirvana in night-blue ensemble talking to Pretty Young (Confused) Thing in the corner. A list of rules for visitors on the wall offered pragmatic advice, such as to not offend the locals by kissing in public. A bulletin board advertised second-hand enfield bikes, houses for rent and eternal salvation in Hebrew.

An air of calm ran through German Bakery, with swirling cigarette smoke from tables mixing with the clouds from the coffee. Conversations ebbed, and flowed, and ebbed again, their lines looping and dipping and whorling through the hot summer air. Regulars dotted the tables, sitting beside newer wannabes, and pondered on the meanings of the universe, and on the vagaries of Kishan’s waiters.  As the cries of hawkers wafted across to the tables, somewhere a pair of flip-flops shuffled its way to the gate, its wearer drawn to the swelling tide of human consciousness outside – propelled forward by the purposefulness of the truly aimless. Ashram inmates walked in, their eyes scanning the cafe,  and their purple robes revealed shapely ankles beneath (as their erect nipples revealed sheer nakedness beneath, or so it seemed to our hormone-addled brains). Couples necked in the corner, and sometimes, a Warkari wandered in, lost on the way back from Pandharpur. Her Sari tucked in between her legs and folded neatly into her waist-fold, her forehead marked with a large vermillion circle of sometimes-purple red, she walked into German Bakery, her dish held out in front of her: battered, aluminium. 

And somewhere, another star-struck student would step through the threshold, his eyes drinking in the slice of peacefulness before him, his mind noting with sudden bemusement that time was treacly-thick here, the hours passed like days passed like minutes passed like the lifetimes that spent their years contemplating the slow settling of the black grounds into the murky depths of the Mint Ice Tea…

And history would play itself out again, a tired organ-grinder in the corner cranking up his instrument, preparing to play out the same tune again for the umpteenth time, as a new monkey prepared to dance.

                       – In Memory, German Bakery, No 291, Vaswani Nagar, North Main Road, Koregaon Park, Pune.

 

*Author’s postcript

Like everything else in Pune, the German Bakery was also torn down by the assault of invading Megapolis-Pune. In 2002, Pecuniary Pune crept slowly into Koregaon Park, widening North Main Road and taking a great big slice of German Bakery’s facade with it. The slow decay of the Osho Ashram and the steady invasion of more upmarket coffee chains turned GB into a symbol of wannabe kitsch: frequented by itinerants, populated by infrequents.  As traffic and dust rose with equal ferocity through Pune’s roads, the calm around German Bakery was shattered: its unhurried pace lost, its extravagant space now a thing of the past. Its access to both the main road and the side alley- a metaphorical cul-de-sac linking the mainstream and the alternate, was taken over by an army of rude short-cutters, turning the aisle of wafting thoughts into a thoroughfare to somewhere else. In 2008, when I spoke to Kishan, he confessed that times were hard, and he was staring closure in the face if things didn’t pick up. Presumably they did, because he was open and active till the 13th of February, 2010, over 22 years after German Bakery’s inauguration.

On Saturday, February 13th, 2010, an Improvised Explosive Device ripped through German Bakery, killing 9, and injuring at least 45 persons. Random images of carnage greeted passers-by, in an attack believed to have been targeted at foreigners, or the Jewish Chabad house, located less than 400 metres away. Terrorist outfits are being implied darkly in discussions, impending bilateral talks are being touted as immediate provocations. Possible links to Mumbai are being investigated. Inevitably, a high-profile blame game will ensue, and outrageous statements will be made; ultimately, the powers-that-be will continue to fiddle as Home burns: their railings all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And yet another loud bang will rip through the sunny afternoons of our collective consciousness, tearing through the peace, severed limbs and shattered viscera piercing the bubble of calm around our most precious memories.

                           German Bakery is Dead! Long Live German Bakery!

Invictus in the land of the ‘Boks

Early on in the movie “Invictus”, there is a scene when Francois Pienaar’s father sits around and does a cassandra, while looking at the telly and talking generally, on The State of the Nation. His manner is disaparaging, his atitude pessimistic. As he rails and rants against what he sees as the inevitable collapse of the new dispensation in power, Pienaar (played brilliantly by a buffed-up matt damon) looks across at his mom, and they exchange The Glance.

Eyes rolling, and mouthing some inside joke, I imagine that this must have been a look in many households across SA, circa 1994. Mandela had been freed, and what the world saw as a moment of delirious celebration of victory for the forces against imperialism and racist bigotry was often seen very differently in South Africa, where the sudden appearance of black might and white fright turned the tables, and how!

And as older generations railed against the collapse of the world as they knew it, I imagine that younger people perhaps rolled their eyes at their mothers, and moved on with their lives.

In the evolving sensibility of Invictus, decades-old suspicion and mistrust is slowly replaced by interracial secret service camaraderie, hunger is replaced by a love for rugby by poor township boys, and eventually everyone (yes, yes! everyone, even the black xhosa maid!!) goes to see a rugby game where the national team grunts against oversize maori warriors. In a tensely fought final, the entire country stays indoors (white men in raucous pubs, black men in roadside shebeens), and a toothy boy from the townships shares the radio with on-tenterhooks Afrikaans policemen. The national team wins, people cheer madly, and a grinning Morgan Freeman- as- Madiba looks on at the tranformative power of sport.

If only life were so simple. Less than 15 years after the historic triumph, sitting in a darkened theatre in Gateway, Durban, I heard barely-suppressed snickers of derision when the scenes of reconciliation and repair flashed on the screen. The tragedy of South Africa today is that the bitterness is still very much in the air, and maybe as fathers rant, the glances are not even exchanged any more at breakfast tables.

The transforming power of sport is something that many hollywood movies have tried hard to exploit over the years (and succeeded admirably). The image of the last-minute touchdown with the orchestra crashing to a crescendo in the background, and the hero’s muddy face streaked with triumph, amid close up shots of the clock signalling timeout and a field invasion by fans, is legend. Invictus has all of that glory, and greatness.

The captain is a taciturn Afrikaans boy overwhlmed by the humility and greatness of the president. Madiba is a kindly old man : graceful, dignified and astute, charming supporters and critics alike with his simple and powerful philosophy. Even the rugby team, beefcake-bourgeoise before, are attentive anthem-singers after, all smiles and happy grins after Pienaar’s pep-talk. Heck, even the grubby kids from the townships, with the ragged trousers and no shoes, are a toothy crease of joy.

The reality, in today’s SA, is vastly different. In the year of World Cup SA 2010, it’s really pretty evident that sport, like everything else in south africa, has been carved up along racial lines, and distributed: the whites get rugby, the blacks get soccer and the indians get cricket , with the mandatory outliers all round. The coloreds, of course, are too busy hanging around Cape Town and being cool. Sports are only the tip of the iceberg: in a nation poisoned by years of institutional racial identification and prejudice, it takes more than a world cup win to bring the fractured pieces together. Depending on the color of their skins, foreigners will eventually get to be privy to the “South Africa is going to the dogs” dialogue. Everyone is a pocket anthropologist, and crude racial generalisations will be made over the poitjie pot, even as you stand around embarassed, and stammering thanks. Whites and Indians will be the first to moan and groan, even as they drive their fancy cars with super-sensitive alarm systems across the city to their fancy houses in the swankiest parts of town. Black moaning is different, and usually laments the fate that has befallen. And how powerless they are to stop it.

When Madiba talks in the movie of a “Rainbow nation”, and borrows Archbishop Tutu’s term to talk of the glorious multi-culturalism of South Africa, the whole world was charmed and touched. Today, the description seems eerily literal, of a prismatic country bent on splitting white light into its components. Maybe the great man was being  prescient, in his own ruined, tragic way.

Adapted from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, by journalist John Carlin, Invictus is a portrayal of the intimate relationship between sports, pride, honour, and the inner core of decency and fairness that exist at the heart of every person. Some inconsistencies have been noted in the movie (Mandela quoting Invictus and not Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena  speech to Pienaar and the boys, the pile of stones on Robbyn Island that could not have existed in 1994), but the greatest inconsistency is the image of a united, cheering-as-one, proud and integrated South Africa. As we shuffled out of the movie hall, I could not but help noting with a sinking feeling that THAT particular cheer probably lasted barely as long as the credits.

who’re the three?

3 idiots is a movie that was released over christmas in an unprecedented 2126 screens across the world, multiplex screens from Cape town to Canberra carpet bombed with raj kumar hirani’s latest offering. The film has grossed over 300 crore rupees (thats about $ 70 million) in 19 days, a record in itself, and is probably on its way to settling comfortably on the summit of the largest grossers’ mountain, glitteringly studded with some other A Khan –  starrers, like “Ghajini”, or older gems like “raja hindustani”: reigning favorites till they were toppled by other, more substantial offerings like “gadar”(dir: anil sharma, whose next movie “veer” is on its way : salman leading a mercenary army in pre-handpump india- so be warned) et al.

the film was preceded by careful branding and market promotions, for this was the latest offering from a director who had provoked countrywide discussions, chatter, and more importantly, emulation from the adoring masses for his last movie, and even, to a lesser degree for his debut film: both candyfloss social commentaries with the same protagonists who stumble with brilliant comic timing through life-as-idyllic-comedy.

As I went to see it, though, my tickets placed me right next to 2 south african-indian kids, who, after watching the opening credits and Aamir’s stellar entrance, rolled to their sides, and promptly went to sleep. hmmm, not part of the adoring masses, i see.

3 idiots was also the latest movie to be graced by the great khan (henceforth known as ‘gk’), whose return to normal size after acquiring rectii, biceps and a hydra-like* deltoid in his last offering “ghajini” has been the subject of excited speculation.

so its with some degree of reserve that one approaches 3 idiots. on the one side, adulation from the masses is almost always suspicious. yet, the team making the movie seems to be adept, and the marketing seems synchronised, right down to the facetious spat over acknowledgements and titles when a legal contract was signed between all parties concerned, (whose contravention should have provoked court action, not petulant tweets and angry press conferences)

and this post is meant as a review, so I shall cut to the chase, and try to concentrate on the movie itself, and chop out the chatter.

3 idiots is a movie about 3 friends, 2 adversaries and 1 sweetheart (supported by one pregnant sister, two differently autocratic families, and a surprise jaaved jaffery appearance). The movie is set in an engineering college in Delhi, the Imperial College of Engineering, a none-too-subtle reference to the IITs in India.

Indeed, none-too-subtle is a theme that runs through the movie, as the theme of “suicide due to academic pressure” is rammed down audience throats with vigour at three separate instances in the movie. I agree that suicides are a part of professional college life in India, particularly at high pressure institutions like the IITs, and we have all lost friends or classmates to the pressures of academia: some burning out, others fading away, and a few taking the plunge towards ending it all (and successful at it).

Yet is that the dominant experience of college life? is it the dominant tragedy of our university-attending students? is the oppressive teaching system, with its over-emphasis on memorisation and academic rigour, choking creativity and innovation in our institutions?

Does 3 idiots adequately address these issues?

Does it do so without resorting to tired cliches, painful melodrama and flaccid jokes to pepper the narrative?

The answer is no. on both counts, which is sort of paradoxical, I recognise.

Right from the name of Aamir’s main adversary (Chatur Raamalingam? Why don’t you just get out the Mehmood tapes and dress up the man in a dhoti, carve out a sikha and smear him in bhasma? Why not just address him as “oye madraasi”, mister hirani?)

The geeky, no-social-skills rival does not really have to be from Madras, or Hyderabad, neither does it really behove well to pick on a person schooled in Kampala and Pondicherry (both with no hindi included in syllabus) and from a non-hindi speaking background for their poor skills in the national language. Chatur’s attempts to speak in hindi are pretty good, and he improves through the movie, achieving a passable grammar and vocabulary at the end, enough to make himself understood to movie goers without subtitles.

Yet the cliche is repeated, as always. To Hirani’s credit, at least the token muslim was not subjected to kid-gloved condescension, neither was the inventor Lobo’s dad a “God tumhe hameshaa khush rakhenge” padre in goa.

That was some relief, certainly. But the tired cliches, and the flaccid jokes, and the forced hilariousness was almost as irritating as the sight of men in their late 30’s and mid 40’s playing boys less than half that age. Admittedly, parts of the movie are funny, like the sanskrit verse at the end of Chatur’s ill-fated speech, like some of the gags with the teachers. But when this is seen in the backdrop of gk’s condescending, sanctimonious elder statesman patronage, the humour is too little compensation. 

Aamir-as-superman is a role that movie goers have come to identify since Ghulam more than 11 years ago. With the possible exception of 1947: Earth, gk has played the squeaky clean and patronising hero in all his movie: saving enslaved childhoods in “taare zameen par”, saving enslaved villages in “lagaan”, defending the nation in “sarfarosh”, defending his faith in “mangal pandey”. Its about time that the long, self obsessed biopics of himself, embellished with a million edited-to-make-aamir-look-good moments are treated with scepticism, and not unabashed admiration.

Don’t get me wrong. I would go for an gk movie far more readily than an SRK , or Salman movie, but I still think that the alaborate paeans to the man’s megalomania are getting a bit too tedious. So while gk fools around “more outside classes than inside”and “attends whichever class he wants to”, other students in the class do the boring humdrum job of sticking to the schedule. Yet gk shines in every class, does projects for other students, delivers babies using vacuum cleaners, and spends the night before the finals ferrying a friend’s invalid father to the hospital before topping the finals with the highest percentage aggregate. Any student worth his/her salt who has gone through engg / med school can tell you that at the highest level, toppers ae created by a combination of genius, obscenely long hours, application, luck and perserverance. A genius who flits airily from lecture to lecture absorbing what he can may be able to do really well in the results list, but topping? Unlikely.

But the most irritating quality of the movie is certainly its unsubtlety. And the patron saint of that is Boman Irani. If I am forced to see another of Irani’s over-the-top performances with fake lisp/beard/pagdee/wig/limp/mole, i think i shall scream. To see him as a cardboard tiger in too-high pants and tight coat, with a poisonous persona defined by peevish petulance and rather uneducated comments about “engineering”, and “machines” was tortuous, to say the least. To watch his teary-eyed capitulation to the bright side was even worse, and it is here that the movie fails to move, or even push or nudge.

All-in-all, if Hirani doesn’t change his style of aseptic cinema stories, unsubtle social messages, happily-ever-after endings, random resuscitations of paralysed patients, all embellished with dialogue that uses puerile jokes that may cause primary school teachers to blush and giggle nervously  in their classes, its going to become increasingly difficult to see his movies.

Evidently, I am in a small minority here, and along with the 2 children snoring peacefully in the seat next to me at the theatre, probably I make up the 3 eponymous heroes of this movie.

Which really answers my question, of course.

* – read: many headed.

in the winter of our disconnect

A few days back, a man called balasaheb thackeray, aging tiger and ailing supremo of the shiv sena made a few snarky comments against sachin tendulkar- cricketing god and all-round nice guy (actually that phrase is more aaccurate the other way round – “cricketing nice guy and all-round god”).  The issue was Sachin’s comment about how he played for India, and not for the state of Maharashtra, and how Mumbai, his city, was for all indians. 

Balasaheb’s patronising manner was criticised by the papers, and his condescension ridiculed.  Some papers used it as a chance to twist the knife in further after the recent humiliating election drubbing, some others pointed at the sena’s increasing disaffection with the pulse of the people.  “Marathi Manoos” has suddenly become a funny buzz word, to be used in cheeky jokes and trying-desperately-to-be-vernacular English newspapers.

Then the Sena struck back.  The office of one of the offending papers was attacked, the editor roughed up, the receptionist slapped.  Escaping journalists were grabbed by the shirts on their backs : buttons popped, fabric ripped.  The sena was triumphant in its admission.  Yes, it was us, they said to anyone who would care to listen, and this is a warning, so please note.

There was media outrage, predictably.  The press angrily demanded just retribution, and the chief minister cooed, and tried to soothe ruffled feathers.  The issue was not about the marathi manoos, he said, it was about vandalism and petty populism.  The attacks were heinous, the perpetrators dastardly.

Then two days later, the chief min raised the marathi manoos issue again in public.  People who are local should be given priority for jobs, he said.  I shall take the matter up with the railway minster, he promised a cheering and adoring audience.

And the media continued to sullenly fold its arms and pout in offended disaffection.

Something does not make sense here.  Hooliganism is one thing, but hooliganism and post- ‘ganism chest- thumping is not usually par for the course, especially when it is such a sensitive issue and involves the greatest sportsman in the land. 

Generally, when a political party owns up to something, you can be sure that that “something” resonates with the approval of a significant number of people, of a group that is on its way to being considered a ‘majority’.  When a political party owns up to vandalism and wilful attacks on media, involving (however obliquely) a national hero, you can be sure that there’s support, even approval.

The bottom line is this: If there was no public support for the entire “maharashtra for maharashtrians” polemic, then it wouldn’t be made, stridently, from every available political pedestal that an avaricious neta can clamber upon.  The very fact that political parties make it a point to defer to linguistic chauvinism to define their ideology means that it resonates with their voting public, as well as with swing voters, disaffected and undecided.

Anyone who has travelled in the dusty bylanes of rural maharashtra will know that there are only two things that penetrate into the heart of the impoverished state: politics and cinema.  While this is true for almost all of the vast rural hinterland in India, in Maharashtra, that other great Indian Arterial presence : The Indian Railways, is conspicuous in its absence.

Cinema is paradoxical, because it is hindi cinema that thrives in the boondocks,  from slick SRK starrers to slimy sordid skinfests.  It is hindi cinema, certainly, but the sensibility it represents (NOT its context – most hindi cinema is exaggerated vaudeville of Punjabi ritual) is something that people feel they can ostensibly connect to, and revel in.

Politics, though, is ubiquitous.  And while each of us purse our lips in exasperation when we see political antics, and their unfortunate consequence, we spare very little thought for the core demographic for whom that elaborate charade is meant.  How many of us have travelled across villages in the country, outside of our own provincial “native places”?  And I don’t mean 79 photographs set against the quaint prettiness of Fatehpur Sikri or Khajuraho, but really travelling through unremarkable shanty towns and rural homesteads, filled with hopeless dreams and the grimy effluent of cities?  When villages are mentioned, how many of us imagine a SRK-less “Swades” landscape, or an amir khan-less Champaran?

For all most of us know, rural India could be anything from an 18th century feudal fief to a idyllic pastoral-paradise filled with belles and moustachioed villains at every corner.

If there is anyone who bothers to visit, or even tries to understand what the hinterland thinks, it is the local candidate, anxious to please, geared to ingratiate.

It is this knowledge that emboldens our political parties, this invaluable understanding of the “grassroots”.  And if the Sena and the MaNSa are pushing the marathi manoos plank, then it is because it finds currency with a significant section of that grassroots.

I am not for one moment condoning the violence and the hoologanism. I am also not for one moment condemning it.  But I do think that with the horrified, faux cosmopolitan and pseudo- liberal reaction to the controversy, urban India and the English media have truly exposed the extent of their disconnect with perspectives that other parts of the country consider justified.  Its as if among the many Indias that coexist in the one great India, two groups of competing India stand, unable to understand the other’s stance or vision.

Truly, this is the winter of our disconnect.

things the indian people are doing – 2 :: the mumbai wall project, tulsi road ::

Letter to an ex- mumbaikar:

” see! brilliant idea of bee-emm-cee!
  see! hordes of dreamers descend on pipe road, tulsi!
( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9822921861#/group.php?gid=9822921861 )
 
see! a row of dull gray transform into a wall of whimsy and wit!
see! lurid bollywood posters of “gair” & “aladin” plastered all over it!
 
(as amitabh glowers and snarls,  riteish plays the lover –
the ex- chief minister’s son, now returned to power)
 
see! righteous indignation galvanise sensitive bombay youth,
see  anger and disgust for publicity most uncouth.
( http://random.asfaq.com/less-than-24-hours-after-the-wallproject )
 
see striped-shirt man in far corner snigger,
(himself a much-maligned, cliched figure)
and whisper:
“yeh hai mumbai meri jaan!”
 
–     nirvana demon (2009)”

11 of october, 2009 :: things the indian people are doing – 1 ::

This column is inspired by the immensely popular “stuff white people like” [read http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/]

With significant differences, of course. I’m not white, for instance.  Neither am I christian (nor is my name Christian, for that matter). And most, importantly, Indians aren’t white.

Other attributes are also that they are not homogenous : scattered as they are across more than a couple millenia and a few thousand square kilometres in that faux-rhomboid subcontinent south of the himalayas and flanked by the seas. With a political identity that crystallised itself to its presentness only about 60 years back, (and with transplanted seeds scattered far and wide across the world: Jamaica, Durban, Mauritius, San Jose, Dubai, Toronto), Indianness is both an identity and a self-realisation… who is to say william dalrymple is not Indian, or that the swollen masses outside a soccer field in port au prince are…?

Yet there is a common thread that unites them all, and a common set of likely actions and predictable responses, a thread that broadly fits into the things that the indian people are doing…

Queuing

Its ironic, perhaps, that I begin this series with things Indians are not doing,  what they internalise not to do from a very young age, and what they eventually never learn to do until their dying day, where they would no doubt push and shove to get through the Pearly gates too (“me first! me first!! You bleddy Saint Peter, Do you know who my father is??”)

We were driving through the orderly streets of Durban’s downtown, and suddenly came to a chaotic junction where three cars converged on us, seemingly oblivious of the traffic lights… I turned to her and asked reflexly “Guess where the Indian part of town is!”  She rolled here eyes laterally towards the nearest samosa stall…

Indians hate queues. The fact that someone else should get ahead of me, merely because of having reached that part of the universe earlier, in that specific space-time continuum, is a fact that is abhorrent to every Indian. Queue after queue in front of ticket counters will be thrown into disarray by the one joker who barges up to the head, and tries to muscle his way to the head of the line. What adds insult to injury, of course, is how he will then proceed to turn and loudly berate the people behind him in the line “Why are you pushing me, yes? what-what is it that you are doing?”, or better still, the ones who turn with a sweet smile, and assure you that yes, this is just a small interruption, and he will be off once he is done with the small task of buying the ticket….

And as the snaking queue that stretches all the way to the main gate (and spilling into the road outside) shouts and screams at the interloper in one voice, he will react with equal fervour. His shameless persistence in the face of all berations or his baleful retreat in the face of insurmountable odds will determine his success in the larger Indian Rat Race, where a billion pushing, jostling, shoving mass will leave you behind, if you don’t struggle… to stay in the lead.

And his loud protestations will give a million reasons why he should be allowed to precede everyone else waiting patiently behind him: his urgency, his occupation, his dying grandmother, his broken-down car, his connections in the ruling party, his previous experience waiting in the same line, or, most importantly… his Father’s position in society… (jaanta nahin mera baap kaun hain?)

But that is the subject of another post.

 

2nd october 2009 :: Happy Birthday ::

Barack Obama just increased his fan base by another 100 million or so. Amid widespread american disaffection with what they see as selling out to the devil (read republican profligacy and heavy-handedness), this man is looking at other, more friendly shores for his re-election bid.

He should come to India, really. Considering the country’s future options are between a scion of the Nehru Royal family, (whose most notable asset is to be described as  “well-meaning” and “sincere” by commentators getting their panties in a wad to give him a great review) and who-knows-whom from the beejaypee, the leader most likely to succeed advani’s inglorious and inevitable exit.

Anyway, Obama should know at least that this is one country where ure parents’ miscegenation is certainly something that qualifies you to aspire to the highest office in the country. Where else would he be able to find such an accomodating and broad-minded electorate?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/world/us/America-has-its-roots-in-India-of-Mahatma-Gandhi-Obama/articleshow/5079579.cms

is what Obama said, and as the article points out, if he could have dinner with anyone in the world, alive or dead, it would be The Mahatma. A man who was the single most important person to cause the ultimate dismantling of the British Empire, admired by a man who has succeeded one of the most vilified neo-imperialists of recent times.

Its not ironic, just interesting. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On to other things: I had the most amazing weekend away from cold, misty and freezing-at-times Hilton last week. Drove to Coffee Bay, a beach resort in the Eastern Cape, beyond Mthatha. Coffee Bay is called that because sometime n the late 1800-s, a ship carrying coffee beans washed ashore on the beach and for a brief, crazy while, coffee plants grew along the eastern cape’s coast. The plants died soon enough, and the bay never got back to its coffee-growing ways, but the name has stuck.

The eastern cape is among the poorest areas in SA, a former homeland where poverty and neglect were allowed to run riot, where successive legislations like the Bantu Education Act 1953 created a large population bereft of skills or knowledge in a part of the country not particularly blessed with arable land or large natural harbours. It is also home to Nelson Mandela, a Xhosa who was brought up in a village outside Mthatha.

Indeed, Port St. John, north of Coffee Bay, and about one hour from Mthata, is the site of some of the best cannabis grown in SA. This weed was shipped in large numbers by the government and surreptitiously supplied to the Black workers in the mines in Gauteng (thats Johannesburg and its surrounding areas) so as to keep them perpetually dull and simple, giggling and drooling, staring at random events by the wayside, and laughing.

Kept apathetic and moribund by a willing government, the mind boggles to even imagine the incredible amount of insult and injury that must have been perpetuated in the notorious ‘hostels’ outside Jo’Burg. It also makes so much more sinister reading when you think of the number of women who may have been consuming alcohol and cannabis and tobacco through their pregnancy, and to imagine the number of children born with deficiencies.

The blacks who lived in the homelands were used as cheap labour, in homes and on mines. The steady stream of migrant labour created parentless homes and unsupervised children in the villages, and rampant promiscuity and breakdown of family structures in the mines and at workplaces. Add to that the AIDS epidemic, and this potent brew of patriarchal african value systems, insiduous white oppression, systematic neglect and marginalisation, poor health outcomes and internecine rivalry, and this powder keg of conflicting interests is just about ready to go ka-boom, like noone else’s business.

Still, Coffee bay is a stunningly beautiful part of the country, and along with its beautiful and more famous neighbour, Hole-in-the-Wall, it forms among the most beautiful natural rock formation on the seas that i have ever seen. We stayed at a place called coffee shack, across the river, on the beach.

http://www.coffeeshack.co.za/

 

The weekend we went was that of the Worldwide Earth day celebrations, and in 200 sites across the world, a trance party was being held to herald the world’s imminent descent into destruction. As stoned presenters greeted their happy audiences with “got some spliffs on u?”, trance music throbbed in the background and psychedelic colours glowered from the walls. We were in a cottage nearby, and 72 hours of pulsating techno accompanied our vacation at coffee bay. Sometime during Day2, Mr DJ decided that he would use his strange machine-like grunts to fill up the space between spliff-breaks. Having realised that he was onto a good thing, (or passing out next to the munchies in the back kitchen), the machine-groans continued for the next 12 hours. As I woke up, disoriented, at 3 in the AM, a washing machine was making its bizarre mating call to another. Some serious discussions later, a refrigerator had joined in the chorus, and all three were engaged in loudly addressing each other across the bar mouth.

I turned over, muttering angrily in my sleep. Save the world with lousy trance and inebriation. May work. All I know is that I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

All hail Jim Morrison, american poet, savant of the torpedoed masses!!!!!!!

22 july, 2009 :Global Warming and the Democratic Paradox:

Much of my attention of late has been directed towards the monumental waste of resources that I see around everyday, in Durban, with its first world cities (and third world villages – but thats the topc for another blog altogether), correlated with images from the US and the UK on my brief visits there in the past.

The amount of waste that is perpetrated by the developed world is staggering in the enormity of scale. Paper, electricity, water, petrol, diesel, edible food, the list is endless. It seems to me that being “developed” essentially means going to an incredible amount of discomfort in order to ensure comfort to yourself.

Maybe that is not exactly true, after all. The paradigms of reference vary, certainly. So while the discomfort is relative (the trouble of having to pay for purified drinking water- purified with an immense amount of energy expenditure and cost – just so that you can wash your clothes and flush it down ure drain), the comfort is a no-brainer, designed to make life simpler, easier, hassle-free, and predictable.

this perhaps explains why traffic rules work so well in the developed world, with drivers’ absolute willingness to stand in long queues behind capricious traffic lights just so that they may be able to travel at great speeds with the promise of increased safety.

This philosophy, however, does not seem to work for global warming. And herein lies the rub. the reality of our age is that global warming and large-scale environmental degradation are realities that are projected to take place in a foreseeable future, with largely uncertain effects. Yet, the irony is that their extent and actual impact are matters of projection, at best. The effects of environmental collapse can be only appreciated by a person who has spent sufficient time imagining the future, and who is able to have a very sophisticated understanding of the “if-then-else” loop of reasoning.

Simple though this reasoning may seem, it is sadly not very common.

Again, changes, if and when they come, would happen at a gradual pace – effecting a gradual erosion in our quality of life in a way and so as to allow for enough time for civilisation to adjust to it.

What this does mean is that in the case of environmental protection, people will very often be willing to disregard the long term deleterious effects of their actions if they imagine that the short term benefits are attractive enough.

It also makes the process of educating people difficult because all that you have by way of reasoning is the vague threat that things may slide into a dystopic future where matters will be out of hand, and that responsible behaviour will help you to live a vastly less profligate lifestyle for a longer time frame.

Maybe, if you’re lucky.

This is where systems of governments come into play. And where democracy tries so valiantly. And fails: so completely, so pathetically.

Democracy has the reputation of something of a sacred cow in the world we live in today. It is seen as the best system of governance, and countries have been invaded in its name. Regimes have been toppled, rulers deposed, and the will of many people squashed because of the modern  (essentially wetsern) belief that democracy will solve most of the nation’s worries.

I do not want to go into the relative merits or demerits of the system. That is the topic of another post.

But democracy, as we know it: a system of government consisting of proportional representation of the citizens of the country, who are assisted and guided by the executive and judiciary, is not a system that is known for its long-sightedness. One of the important aspects of democracy is the fact that governments have a finite lifetime, after which they have to seek the approval of the electorate again. It follows, therefore, that to retain the favour of the electorate, a government shall have to take popular decisions that shall ensure another term in office.

It is within the dictates of electoral compulsion, and onlycorrect within the mandates of a democratic election, that a group of elected representatives should strive to take the decisions that the majority would support.

Herein lies the rub. So while elected governments will see it as morally justified, even pertinent, that they safeguard the immediate interests of their citizens, the long-term decisions (that may be uncomfortable in the short term and may have questionable effects in the long term) may be put on the back burner.

And why not? Governments do not fret about the world that they are handing down to their successors, 20 years into the future. Hell, the incumbents don’t even bother about the poor gits who’re coming in after them in a month’s time! This is is entirely different from, say, a monarchy, where the king has a vested interest in preserving and nourishing the kingdom for future generations, since succession is most often lineal.

This does not in any way mean that I am suggesting that monarchy is better or worse than democracy.

In fact, it does not even mean that I am suggesting that democratically elected governments are incapable of saving the environment.

But it certainly means that there will need to be an incredible amount of vision and concerted effort, and a will to think beyond the next general elections, if a democratic government based on popular consensus is to have a realistic chance of making long-term decisions that improve conditions and forge a new way forward.

That takes courage, and maturity, and selflessness. Because after all the considered thought and concerted action, the opposition may just win at the hustings by trumpeting the obvious current shortcomings of the government. Charges which would be impossible to disown, without scare-mongering about a nebulous future.

This is the democratic paradox, and it will be interesting to see how we shall negotiate it in the years to come.

16 Jul 2009 : :the unbearable heaviness of being (indian) part 3

It has been a long time since I have written, and while that may not mean anything to you, o occasional reader, o itinerant wayfarer, to me it represents a great departure indeed, after months of indolence. The motivation to stretch and move, to coax my tired digits to clatter over the keys and beat out the tattoo of a new blog post, is one that does not come easily, which requires practice and regular effort.

Yet this is here, and I am in Durban, and the excitement of a new universe opening itself before my eyes like the petal pink folds of a nautilus shell, is one that has to be discussed, and shared, and written down for future perusal, and reflection.

Durban is a port city, and home to a fascinating mix of people: of Indian, African, European and Mixed descent. Indeed, one of the first things a Durbanite will enquire after referring to a person will be the appropriate racial box that you can check them under (like “…so this is your family friend? Her name’s Barbara? She’s white, eh?”)

The totally unselfconscious way in which these people seek to know the racial origins of everyone they interact with is disarming in its directness. To people used to the almost aseptic political correctness of the United States or the UK, it represents the conversational equivalent of a loud fart (with concomitant malodorous accompaniments) in a packed elevator. There is a sudden widening of the pupils, and an effort to keep the twitching facial muscles under check.

It is interesting for me to see this, coming from an Indian perspective, and watching the racism from within the view of the community that identifies itself as Indian.

The Indians in South Africa are different from the expatriate Indians in the US, or say, the UK. And while this can be said of Indians in almost any part of the world, the south African Indians are reportedly the second largest concentration of Indians in any place outside of India, (till recently, the largest).

This makes them a group certainly worthy of attention and study, and their difference from other expats is thus significant.

Yet, it is this terminology of being Indian that is problematic. Because of course, “Indian” is not a racial type exactly, and though there might be an overall way of behaving and of dress and culture and attitude that is prevalent among people from the subcontinent, it is sufficiently diverse as to render any common grouping fairly irrelevant.

To elaborate on my favourite thesis, India is like Europe, and to think that there is a commonality to all of Europe that manifests in ways besides the Euro and EU summits would be a little simplistic.

Anyway, all that is neither here nor there, because the Indians in South Africa came here when India was not the nation we now know, when it was a huge conglomerate of colonies administered by the British. So all people of South Asian origin, from present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh and even Sri Lanka, are identified as Indian. The majority of Indians came in the 1800’s, brought in by the british, as indentured labour to work on the plantations. Following this, they set up shop, as small businessmen and traders in the cities, and proliferated and grew.

There was also a smaller community who came about a century before, but the overwhelming majority today are the 1800-ers.

anyway, after 1948, the South African government banned the further immigration of Indians into the country, following which India also passed an embargo against them. It got messy, and there were situations where people who married women in India (as indians are wont to do, of course 🙂 were not allowed to bring their brides into the country.

All this changed in 1994, when the country became a democracy, and equality was ensured by law. But not before ensuring that the primacy of racial identity was forever ingrained in the worldview of the south African Indians, without a commensurate level of contact with the subcontinent.

So we have here a situation where the India that the south africans were forced to identify with was a country that was carried forward in the collective consciousness in a group of immigrants, about 100 years before, and with all the resulting bastardizations of the process of migration and settling.

It created a fascinating mix, and thus we have the Indian community here, which barely speaks any Indian language fluently, and have not traveled to India in the past 2 generations at least. But a community which identifies fiercely with India, and what it sees as common Indian values and traditions.

 

(next post: marriage laws in pre-’94 South Africa)

17-02-09: (most of) what i know abt gaiman… a.k.a. authors i like to read (part 1):

there are people you love to read.  all the time.   any which way.   the regular stash run thru, you are reduced to digging out old forgotten books published in the early part of their careers and dismissed in their time as frivolous, or as strictly avoidable.

these are the authors whose books wou will end, close, and wish you had not read so that you can read it again, and hope that there will be occassion, at some point in the distant fuure, when you may have  forgotten the plot  enough to read it again.

these are authors whose characters or writings or stories stick with you for a lifetime, whose metaphors twist their way into your everyday moral measures, tipping the scales as you judge and evaluate.

i wish to make a list of such authors.  every one has different lists, and i am sure any list i rattle off the top of my head would be incomplete.  and miss out on some really good people.   yet, here is my first attempt:

of course, before we go on,  there are rules.   as always.   there are rules.

1. the book should not be an established religious text that has disputed authorship.  you cannot claim to love king james, or mathew, or whoever it is that you wish to attribute you corner of the bible to, but no it doesn’t work.
2. the writer should have attempted to be prolific.  that could mean anything depending on the resources availble at that point of time, like lao tzu‘s writings, which definitely qualify for a whole body of work. yet one-time authors (like, say, siddharth sanghvi) in a post-printing press-era are not allowed.  so while there is certainly no doubt about considering someone as versatile as shakespeare (let’s just asume for the sake of this post that there was only one man, that it was a bargain that he had made with an extra terrestrial entity, who exacted his part of the bargain, or maybe didn’t 🙂  the works of kalidasa, or homer would certainly to be considered to be in the running,  too.
3. there has to be a book.  that you can hold.  in your hands.  it can be any format,   novel, essays, short stories, graphic novels, collage narratives, picture books, what have you.  but books.   no blogs, no online columns, no periodicals, no newspapers, no official correspondence (u cannot claim to love the bukke shahato, saying that Tokugawa leyasu is your favourite author)
4. group authors are ok, so long as they show cognisable evidence of having worked together.   (like lapierre and collins are perfectly ok, above the board, ekdum bindaas chun.)

but why am i saying all this in the second person, addressing it to you?  it is, obviously, dear reader, because you would have perhaps read so far, and have moved on to fantasising about you own list, so this is just a framework that you can use, to narrow ure search…

P G Wodehouse.

will certainly be the author to have influenced me the most, in so many different ways.  he has written books that i wished would never end, books that i thought were so hilarious, i have rolled around and laughed, tears streaming down my face.   contrary to most media representations, it is not the story of bertie and jeeves that interests me, tho i must confess a more than grudging respect for the entire line now, in retrospect.  my favourites were always situated in blanding’s castle, near market shropshire, with the butler Beach who enjoys his glass of port down by the pantry. and the pigman who keeps changing:  cyril wellbeloved was the most popular of them, elciting the approval of lord emsworth, anyway.  and when two variant characters and worlds collide, as in leave it to psmith which has psmith coming to blandings, and going thru that entire routine with baxter and the flowerpots, it adds a whole different level of hilarity.  “psmith leapt across the lawn like a long-legged mustang”.  i also thoroughly enjoyed monty bodkin (heavy weather “uncle woggly to his chicks: “hullo chikkabidies…” “) and other books here and there like meet mr mulliner, brinkley manor, and doctor sally (errmmm… ummmm personal tee hee and furious blushing moment).  spoken simply, or better, in evelyn waugh‘s words, “…wodehouse’s idyllic world will never stale….(he has)  created a world for us to live in and delight in”.   if ever i should use terms like ‘blithe insouciance’ and still have a straight face it should be for describing wodehousian characters.  the man is genius, of course.   his language, his turn of phrase, his sharp wit, self deprecating comments only serve to romanticise the fate of the foppish nobility in the twenties, as these penniless young men waltz in and out of his books, their wits about them, their innocence intact, and their idyllic world never stale.  the women are cuteness, desirability, wit and charm all rolled into one.   the men are goofy and lovable, or suave and sophisticated.   either way, the result is confusion, charm and hilarity.

Goscinny and Uderzo

some of the best humour in graphic literature has come from both these guys, especially thru their immensely successful and hugely popular “asterix” series.   honestly, i think that the great divide (with its lead couple melodrama and histrionix) is one of the smartest, brightest, funniest books ever written.   as for sheer genius, it has to be  asterix and the roman agent featuring the indomitable tortuous convulvulus (they put him in the circus in rome, but the lions eat each other).   for sheer inventiveness, you have to note asterix and cleopatra, aand as for smart and biting european farce and comedy, i suppose asterix and the banquet, asterix and the magic cauldron would get my vote.   also, the great visits to foreign countries for these thrilling adventures : corsica, britain, belgium, scandinavia (great crossing), greece, india, the middle east (asterix and the black gold) and so on.  the ability to keep such hilarious names intact, even after the translation from the french and the ability to retain the humour in exchanges like “join the army, they said…. its a man’s life they said (muttering)” is what really astounds me.   and also the great cameo performances (like ‘dubbelosix’ in asterix and the black gold and the fly who is his carrier fly and is in love with him). clearly, goscinny and uderozo were humorists far ahead of their time, using humour to tell a self-deprecating story that makes light of the more glaring truth : that all of france was run roughshod over by the italians, who plundered and conquered and toyed with the french till the last blue-gummed dying days of their own lead-fuelled demise

…………….

Next post  : features christie, crompton

friday, 13th february, 2009 : sri ram sene and the slumdog millionaire :

well, today is friday the thirteenth.  wat sweet irony, tomorrow is valentine’s day.  and made ever more so (ironic, ie) by the flurry of pink panties, godless women and publess men, scary economy blues, lunar eclipses (ok so there was only one), scarier environment reds and the victory of likud with the spectacular rise of lieberman….

never before really has love had such a bad chance.  it has been amusing to see the amount of anger and righteous indignation that has poured out on to the indian streets over the last few weeks.   of course, in some cases , it has been just outrageous and tragic (sri ram sene dragging women out by their hair), in some cases dangerous and thought provoking ( a free and fair election in israel that threw up the anger that it did), in some cases eerily premonitory (the moon, that trusted friends of lovers everywhere, obscured by a shadow of the earth), and in some cases, just downright insulting and presumptuous (the widespread disapproval of slumdog millionaire for portraying the ugly india)

so let me dwell on two of these issues that i feel are related in some way, and which have animated our discussions, in the month past.

when slumdog millionaire was released, at first, there was the pleased smile of a nation that was charmed.   here was danny boyle, maker of the beach and trainspotting, making a movie on india, shooting in mumbai.  and all that had happened in the city over the last year would be laid to rest.

then there were the whispers that it showed india in a bad t, a throwback to the snake charmer-and-elephant days.  nooooooo……  a collective groan rose all over the country, not again, we don’t want to be branded as exotic pieces in a cornershop in colorado, oh no!

then a few days later the great B spoke, and said : ” if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.”

oooohh. prickly, aren’t we?  protests went off across the nation.  said voices …this is not how we are: a bunch of dirty, impoverished, thieving schemers, flirting with disease and danger with easy nonchalance.   we are the new india. the one that grew up after shriman bakshi left, so thank you very much mr peter sellers, but we’ll be the judge of how funny your faux indian turn in the movie was.   and if you want to look at the new india, the real india, then for heaven’s sake get your nose out of the gutter and see the millions of young people who’re crouching in front of a “roadies” skinned orkut, sending sixteen scraps to suneeta and sunaina, sataak-se, like that!  we’re cool, really, and we listen to a r rahman’s remixed sufi tunes on our pink iPods while waiting to talk to business associates across the globe, shivering in a european winter..   wake up.   this is the new india…..

………………………..

the sri ram sene, on the 25th of december, dragged women out of a pub in mangalore, ironically named “amnesia”, and thrashed them in public, obliging eager videographers in the vicinity.   when confronted, the leader of the ram sene, muthalik, said that this was his duty, so to speak, he was just doing what the parents of these girls would want, and that this was the sene’s way of enforcing the dictates of indian culture.  this is not indian culture, all these women going to pubs, taking drugs and indulging in alcoholism, he said.   plus, we have reasonably certain information that some pubs are fronts for making blue films, and also for prostitution.

muthalik is a vandal, a publicity-hungry hound who will sell his own mother for a record price if the attention and sensation is worth it.   i shall not waste any time talking about him.   even as i write, a group of women have spearheaded a campaign to send him pink panties, and sanjukta, my friend (of http://www.sanjukta.wordpress.com  fame) is at the spearhead of a “hug karo pub bharo” cmpaign.   there are many women across india who want to join her, and many more who are pledging their support.   many men, too, and children.

my point is this: at a very basic level, wat is the difference between muthalik and the persons protesting the depiction of poor people in SLD? lete us refer to “persons protesting the depiction of poor people in SLD” henceforth as big B, since he has actually voiced it after all.   muthalik believes in a depiction of india that he defines narrowly within his limited understanding of what it is to be indian, and how one must behave.   having done so, he goes on to enforce it, using force to do so.   big B objects to a depiction of a slice of india  shown in an international film that’s gathering much acclaim because he believes its not the india he wants shown outside.   there are many other things here.   why don’t you write about them?   (pardon me for shuddering, but i cannot help but get  a deja vu of some idi amin-esque african dictator’s helpful advice to a visiting journalist: “there are many other things here.   why don’t you write about them?”)

yes.  the difference is the use of violence.  that’s right.

i don’t know if you have seen the movie.  i have, and i did not imagine that the movie depicted anything that was hyperbole in the extreme, nor did it show scenes of incredible squalor and deprivation.  if anything, it showed a smart, self-sufficient people, resourceful and ingenious, living in the massive slums of mumbai (itself housing a population that rivals that of many world cities) and leading their lives with dignity, not as wasted junkies living on dole and roadside crack.  the ugliness that we glimpse thru the movie too, is real, and boyle’s mistake is in perhaps making jamal’s life a generic collection of different situations that may eventually only occur independently to different people.  yet, the details are true.   if you don’t believe me, the proof is a short auto ride away.   your city has a slum too, you know, teeming with people who work in your garages, in your homes, on the fringes of your lives, keeping costs low and luxuries affordable.

yet the great B deems this as causing “pain and disgust” among patriots and nationalists.

wowow. lets stop for a minute here.   what if someone came up to you and told you that the india that you knew, the india that formed your daily existence, your everyday reality, that india (for india is simultaneously many indias rolled inside of one)  is not pretty enuff to swell the hearts of patriots, and showing it is in bad taste?  how would you feel?  what if someone came to you, mr big B-aka-millions-masquerading-as-one, wat if your world of forum malls and swank offices and smart plastic cards clipped on smooth pinstripe shirts  was not beautiful enuff for people to show in an english movie?

what then, mister big bee?

what, indeed?

as a matter of fact, if i have a complaint with SLD, it was the characterisation of anil kapoor as rude and derisive, heaping insult upon pejorative, and heckling a chai-wallah working in a call centre in mumbai.   is that how the west sees noveau rich india, how it imagines the perfumed plutocracy of this country to be, as shallow insensitive cads without a shred of conscience or a sliver of empathy: cold, crude and calculating, calmly calling the cops to carry out their corrupt bidding?

and if that is so, isn’t that wrong?   the great indan middle class cannot be like that!

after the uproar, i’m suddenly not so sure.

abdul rahiman and the mutilated breasts

the day was warm.  not sultry, just warm.  a maybe-a-little-too bright sun beat down on the cliff side.  the day was late january: the winter chill still in the water, while the fickle earth baked in the day.

we had been to daulatabad fort the previous day, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daulatabad ) and were a bit overwhelmed at the sight of formidable mughal power.  there is nothing like the sight of a conqueror’s fortress marked by his pillar to evoke ancient feelings of nervousness and disquiet.  daulatabad fort, much coveted and fought for, is set into the rock at deogiri.  and thrusting upwards with macho self assuredness is the chand minar, rising like a phallus of the foothills to survey the landscape around.

chand minar, looking out over the foothills of deogiri

the view from the top was majestic, and the sheer ingenuity of the custodians of the fort, not to mention their capacity for savagery was what we marvelled at.  this here was the fortress of a people fiercely victorious in a hobbesian hell, an age where caution was perennial, and nervous.

the labyrinth is excitedly pointed out to everyone, called “andheri” and reeking of bat shit and paraffin fumes.  then there are also the ruined halls, and the chini mahal, where the last king of golconda was held captive, and eventually died.

distant view of a minaret

the grandeur was hard to not get affected by, as also not to shudder at what might have passed here, in these lawns, what sordid tales of palace intrigue and foiled plans would they tell?  when enemy armies were cut down mercilessly, their numbers slaughtered, their ranks scattered, their few surviving members greeted with boiling oil and scalding water, what might have been the feeling in the denizens of the fort?  where might the head waiter have directed his concerns first?  supplies?  sustenance?  safety?  or self?

it was an exercise in harsh realities, reminding us of the mindless slaughter preceding our age, and remembering, with gladness, our own lives.

…………………… xxxx

so the day was warm. not sultry.  we were in ellora,  in verul, further down from deogiri, on the road to dhulia.  ellora is a UNESCO world heritage site, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora_Caves ), and is a spectacular structure, its 34 caves dotting the hillside, set into the cool rock, and looking down on the land for 1300 years.  the structure was built by the rashtrakutas and possibly the chalukyas from the 5th to the 11th century AD, and has buddhist, hindu and jain caves built more or less in that order, as allegiances to the gods slipped and shifted and slipped some more.

the hindu caves show shaivites and vaishnavites in collaboration in the gigantic friezes on the walls, half of one hall given over to shiva, and the other half to vishnu.

the caves are spectacular because they are built out of a single rock, essentially.  that is, teams of workers sat in quiet perserverance on this cliffside for centuries to carve out, one by one, each of these caves.  the caves, in turn, house large temples, statues of elephants, stupas, intricately carved panels and pillars within them.  there are “living bridges”, namely bridges fashioned out of the rock as they were, the passages fashioned out of the rock, thus creating the bridge.  this in cotrast to the usual way when passages dictate the bridge.  the entire structure is one single rock, and voluptuous women smile at you from the ends of corridors, their presence witnessed by lissome caryatids on the side,supporting the smooth black rock.  churned out of the granite rock is an entire fantasyland of figures, dancing, preening, fighting, supplicating, copulating, frozen forever in mythological tableaux, locked in timeless urgency.

cave 21

the pinnacle of the caves, of course, is the much photographed cave no. 16, called “kailasa”. it is a spectacular cave, with an extensively carved temple complex in the centre flanked by massive halls, ostensibly for dance performances.  then there is much-photographed elephant with the broken trunk, a mutilation that nevertheless makes it as arresting as, if not more than, the elephant in cave 32.

the elephant with the broken trunk, kailasa.

the body is chipped, and the broken face is no longer the beautiful, kind yet haughty visage it must once have been, as young girls with lamps in their hands passed under its smooth belly, reaching out to touch its legs, and place their hands on their lidded eyes.  the temple, beautiful and old, is cracked in places, torn down with a vengeance and ferocity that seems almost insane.

elephant, indrasabha

cave 32, (also known as indra sabha – a historic misnomer) is a jain cave at the end of the road, about 3-4 kms to the north.  there are still many well-preserved pieces of sculpture here, with exquisitely carved inner sanctums, and the only other proudly standing elephant.  for a sense of size, think kailasa’s elephant the size of an african pachyderm, and the one in the indra sabha the size of an indian cow elephant.

the complexity is vast and gargantuan; the audacity of the work has to be seen to be believed.  there are passageways, chaitya halls, viharas, friezes of tirthankaras, stone benches for disciples and ribbed vaulted ceilings which were painstakingly conceived as wooden-ceiling mimics.  the scale and scope of the undertaking is staggering.  the entire structure lies before you, in splendidly detailed ruin, marred by deliberate vandalism and petty destruction, pages of poetry in stone torn apart by a petulant and spoilt child.  at corners, i stopped to wonder – who would order such a thing? which general would instruct his troops to deliberately destroy this extraordinary work of art, who could have done it with such careless nonchalance?  the thoroughness of the demolition is frightening.  the faces are almost all mutilated, beautiful lips and graceful cheekbones all broken off by rough swipes at the stone with blunt hand held instruments.  would the general have ordered that all statues be destroyed by the morning, and extra rations offered to those who broke off the most?  would he have set targets per regiment, punishing those that came back to camp with less mortar and booty?  the savagery of the marauders shocked me.  some had driven iron nails into the statues’ eyes and body, in a spiteful and desperate attempt to disfigure and mutilate.

why would they do so?  would any one of them have felt a remorse, a sadness, a sense of the immense consequence of their actions?  would at least some of them have stopped to admire the carvings, stopping to caress the stone’s rough hewn edges and smooth surfaces?  would they have felt heavy in the heart, for having destroyed such beauty?

the breasts are the most important.  across the caves, the female figures, blessed at birth with deliciously globular breasts and smooth bodies stare out at the world with almond-shaped eyes.  their sexy come-hither looks are marred, however, by the disconcerting effect of their breast-less visages.  their cleavages, once deep walleys of dark granite, are now craggy rocks of forlorn two-dimensionality.  it is the odd sculpture scattered across the caves that gives us a glimpse of the grandeur of those mammaries, 1500 years back, when they were hewn out of the rock.  systematically, someone has attacked the sculptures, and hacked off the breasts of the women.

the discomfort of these invaders with female sexuality is evident.  in the indra sabha, a jain cave of the digambar sect, naked tirthankaras stare at you from every wall. some of themhave their heads chopped off, their genitals still preserved, intact and forlornly southward-pointing.

the headless tirthankara

there has been very little concerted efforts to mutilate those genitals, the humiliation heaped upon the statues limited to the beheading and the occassional severance of torso from lower limb.

its almost as if these invaders wanted to prove a point, by their excessive savagery towards the female statues.

i exited the cave, musing.  kailasa is cave 16. lesser known, but no less fascinating is cave 15, with a long flight of steps leading up to it.  we walked up, and being the only people in the cave, engaged the man who was there for a short guided tour.  he took us around, and we were charmed by his poetic and skilful explanations of the sculpted frescoes.  he explained the shaivite and the vaishnavite parts of the wall, pointing out the different incarnations from the dasa avatar: there is matsya, here’s varaha, etc etc.  he explained in detail the popular ellora motif: ravan, in the arrogance of new-found power, tries to shake the mount kailasa.  shiva puts him in his place by flexing his great toe, meanwhile reassuring parvathy that the situation is under control.  it is a moment of infinity, pregnant with the possibility of action, and drama.  he took us all round, and showed us the ananthapadmanabhan, ie, the infinite vishnu with the lotus from his navel, and with brahma seated on the lotus.

we were done with the cave, and had caressed the smooth sensuous back of the enormous humped bull nandi in the middle of the hall with longing.  we were leaving, and turned to ask the man if he were a guide.  no, he said, he was a class 4 employee, there to sweep the floor of the cave, much less frequented than other caves because of the flight of steps and its proximity to more famous kailasa.

we asked him his name, and abdul rahiman was his name, as he told us.  as we left, having slipped a fifty into his pocket for his expertise and time, we looked back one last time and saw abdul standing in his courtyard, the two storeys of the cave rising behind him, the monkeys his only company as the sun beat down upon the granite around him, the sheer walls splashed with mutilated bodies and headless torsos.

abdul rahiman, the class 4 employee, archaeological survey of india.

vanars watching varaha : cave 15, ellora

january 5th, zero-nine : the lo-to-pha-gi :

They were not greek.  No, altho there was much insinuation made of that brand of love in the house. The dark, slightly damp corner of the room forever redolent of soft sighs, or (more often) of frantic urgings, would join in the discussions, often offering surprisingly imaginative suggestions for buggery.

There was a large game board in the middle of the room. This was the front room, the one that greeted every weary traveller who set foot in the house, greeted him before the inevitably empty bottle of water and the massively rolled joint.

The bottle was to be filled from the tap, the bong was to keep him company on his journey.

It does not matter what the game board was. Depending on which particular racial reality was being eked out in the room, or even, whichever reality was being played out that day in that common living space, the boards would change. Four heads in shared concentration would pore over the central table, their hair tousled, the skin over their foreheads thrown into deep furrows of intense thought. Sometimes it would be carrom, sometimes battleships, often a pack of cards and a flat surface

There would be assorted debris around the room, the flotsam and jetsam of the forever-itinerant-always-static life: assorted mobile chargers, crust-filled boxes of pizza, sandals, reed mats spread out against the far wall, newspapers folded neat and knife-like, pressing finely powdered cannabis in between their grimy leaves, two books by kafka, one assorted dvd of the x-men series and daredevil, and a fine sprinkling of ash coating the entire room, mingling with the dust and entering their lungs, to be wracked out a hours later, trapped in large globs of phlegm.

In an inside room, in a dank and furtive corner, someone wrapped in an oversize blanket would wave distractedly, his eyes intent on the foreign language film flickering on the screen in front of him, its eastern european heroines restricted to limited english lines of ‘yes’ and ‘harder’.  The dialogues would seem to be terse, and pithy, and the urgency of the actors evident in their insistent utterings.

Sometimes, there would be a tv in the corner, the channel forever tuned to Ftv, the cute gluteal folds of some brazilian ramp model ignored in the general interest over the evolving game.

The kitchen would be filthy, and largely unused, grease encrusted plates congealing near the sink while water dripped over the chipped white tile surface. Empty bottles would line the wall, and the fridge would be empty, save a half-empty bottle of flat pepsi and mouldy bread against the far corner.

On the counter, the cool earthern pot would store water, dark and refreshing.

The loo would be small, and often serviced by the only perrenial tap in the house, its lowly status as toilet-water-supply (kindly note the second hyphen) forgotten often when it is the only source of water in the house when the sun was high.

These are the lotus eaters, the carrom players, eternal drifters testing newton’s first law and proving it right every time, stopping only for a smoke or a roll, or reaching out for crumpled newspaper to wipe away the mess.

These are the Lotophagi.

“….How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other’s whisper’d speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap’d over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!”

—                               From “The Lotos Eaters” Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892

3-01-09 : Australia :

the movie is baz luhrman’s and has been officially declared a flop before it got here to india. which is a pity, beacaus ein a way, luhrman is the most bollywood of the english directors that i have seen. his movies have it all: pathos, melodrama, grand sweeping stage, songs, obvious motifs, larger-than-life canvas, and more money spent on a single spectacular sequence than on the scriptwriter’s part of the spoils ( i think:)

its always a pleasure to watch one of these sweeping historicals, especially if its abt something that u have only a little bit of knowledge about, so ure not nitpicking abt the details. am sure that there’s junta in australia and darwin who’re smarting , or seething, depending on wat their deal is, seeing the liberties he’s taken with the narrative and with reality.

i loved the period settings, the scenes in the outback, the grimy and dusty land stretching in front, the two thousands head of cattle, and the genteel english society in darwin.

the casting is impeccable, and this is a pair that i find especially handsome. as was probably the attempt. the idea, i think, was to make the couple seem as statuesque as possible. have words like “elegant”, “classic”, “striking” to be written about them in the reviews (which they have). it was irritiating how jackman looked forever like he had freshly emerged from his makeup van (he probably had) when the gringos arnd him looked dirty, swarthy, grimy and sweaty.

kidman looks gorgeous, stunnning, elegant, beautiful, basically just being kidman. and does a great role of going from prissy englishwoman to daughter-of-the-outback.

the movie’s other actors are passable. the dogged villain, set upon revenge and recrimination even as his wife was mowed down by enemy fire, his stock razed and his fortune destroyed, does strike this ludicrous note,  but its overlook-able.

there are some great sequences depicting the herding of the catle, and an eerie sidetrack involving a shaman, who coalesces into the movie’s convenient “lets’- not-disturb-indigenous-cultures” form of white apologism. the caucasian guilt at having colonized the land stretches down to the trite two messages at the end describing the prime minsiter of australia “apologising/ admitting” to the process of “assimilation” of native australian people (alternately described as savages or aborigines in the movie). i don’t want to make a political point; indeed i know too little to try and make insinuations, but to me, wat was more important was the land itself, and the depiction of the follies of the early 20th century english settlements in australia.

coming fresh as i am  from diamond’s labour of love on “why societies choose to fail or succeed”,  in his 2005 book : “collapse”, i am intrigued by the decsions made by the early settlers on the land in  australia, decsions that were uniformly disastrous for the environment, the indigenous people and animals, and ultimately(which is one of diamond’s points) for  the settlers themselves.

(but of course, by this stage they’re not settlers really, they’re australians really aren’t they?)

read abt the book at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)

meanwhile, very happy nicole-watching to the rest of u.

: second of january, 2009 :

.  December’s face is turned away;

.                january’s

.  smiling at me.

.                                            

.                              Nirvana Demon (2009)

.

.                                                good morning, 2009!

: thirty first of december, two-thousand-and-eight :

.        Leaf dropping straight

.                       In the windless midnight:

.        The dream of change

.                                 – Jack Kerouac, “Dharma Pops”

.

.

.                                                goodbye, 2008.

december 27, ’08 : Ghajini – the left hand of godd

i saw the movie. and am not going to add to the list of conversely awed-yet-disparaging reviews.

the movie is entertaining, though should have received an adults certificate for the violence. the plot is catchy, has huge loopholes, yet uses the pace of the narrative to hurtle it forward. the 3 hours are well accounted for.

asin is from my city, and i cannot but root for her. she is gorgeous, and oozes confidence and chemistry. she’s no great shakes as an actress, or she wasn’t really tested here thus, so i’;m willing to give her the benefit of the d. in the words of a contemporary reviewer for a prominent website “she was good in the dying scene”. and avregae pretty much else, as they left unsaid.

jiah khan was irritating, which was probably the point. ghajini was menacing, a throwback to villains in lurid tamil and malayalam films in the 90’s when dolby cinema sound and DTS systems in every town and city theatre ensured movies that spawned a whole different genre of gut-wrenching violence. if my hindi-only-viewing readers find that difficult to believe, think the factory’s recent movie titled “risk”, and think of its awful carnage. that is passe fare for most southern films. of malayalam and tamil i can vouch, and what little i’ve seen of telugu, they seem to follow the same bone-crunching path too. even ghajini the hindi movie had villains looking decidedly south india and whose names were dead giveaways.

it is my theory that where the southern films cannot offer glamour (read  skimpily dressed women with smooth alabaster bodies cavorting beneath waterfalls/disco arc lights), what they can offer is some gruesome violence to rev up the audience, and to enthuse the (predominantly )  male audience with a sense of self-aggrandisement, a sort of vicarious bravado, that courses thru  their veins till the short ride and vigorous fuck back home with the missus.

but we digress…

in ghajini, there is amir. his perfomrance masterful, his supremacy total. the loops and twists in the plots portrayed beautifully by his frenetic action, his wild look. he has very few dialogues in the movie, his short-term-memory-loss version a personality shift from his poetry as tycoon-turned-lover boy. that shift from confident sophisticate, simultaneously vulnerable and  self-assured , is not the only one of the fantastic paradigm twists in the story. witness amir’s rapid memory fade and return to confused awareness of the present, moments after he has exploded in bloody rage and violence. it is very skilful.

yet, why i am writing this blog is to bring out one detail. amir has played a left-handed man in ghajini, he has had shots (one in the plane) where he’s writing with his left. the pen is held awkwardly in the hand, yet the flow seemed to be smooth enough. the handwriting slope in the diary was that of a left hander’s. and his final swing (u’ll know it when u see it) is also left-handed. i sometimes also noticed he would lead from his left in a fight.

why? what was the reason for introducing this quirk? why was this apparent character detail tossed so carelessly into the narrative? what did it signify? does anterograde memory loss have some strange associations with left-handedness in some publishe d journal article? was it just another quirk to add to the strangeness of ghajini?

i am forced to think, it is the latter.

bravo murugadoss. bravo amir.