Everywoman's journal

Reema abruptly stopped rubbing Sylvie, her medium-sized golden retriever. She had just remembered something. She turned quickly to her mother, tugged at the corners of her dupatta, something that never ceased to irritate her mother, even if the person pulling it was only eight years old.

“Can I go now to play with Kiran...", she said. "Can we watch Sylvie and her dog Raina mate?” NO, YOU CAN’T. “Why not? Kiran says it is quite natural for dogs to mate. They first lick each other, then chase each other’s tails, then bite...” I’VE HAD ENOUGH REEMA, YOU WILL PLAY WITH SYLVIE HERE, AND REMIND ME TO HAVE A TALK WITH KIRAN’S MOTHER THE NEXT TIME I SEE HER, DO YOU HEAR ME, she said turning to her husband.

Her husband said somewhat intriguedly,“how does kiran know that raina and sylvie like each other?" “I would rather you didn’t discuss dog psychology with our daughter”, said Reema’s mother sardonically. Precocious children, unsensible husbands, dogs that didn’t behave in front of children...well, the behaviour of dogs and husbands was irreversible in various degrees, but Reema’s mother had hope left still for Reema. However, she was quite undecided on strategy.

The other day, she had tried the indulgent, montessori method while they were at Humayun’s tomb, (it was part of a long tour of historical monuments, Ashoka Pillar, Purana Qila, Red Fort, Safdar Jang’s tomb...) Reema’s mother was determined to give her daughter a cultural education to compete with the technical education she was getting from her father. But Reema had shown more interest in the squirrels in the gardens there, having set Sylvie on the task of pouncing on them from a discreet corner.

“Rulers from different dynasties were quite particular that their tombs were constructed in places that were dear to them. But while most of them commissioned reputed builders to do it, his wife Haji Begum built this one”, she said gravely to Reema. “Did Humayun have a dog”, asked Reema quite irrelevantly (irreverently?) Reema’s mother sighed deeply. And then said crossly, “Probably not, they were too busy with their wars and their wives to worry about walking and feeding dogs”
She immediately regretted saying it, “why does Papa have only one wife?" "It was alright to have many wives then, it isn’t now”. “Why not?” “Back then, kings had to marry many women to forge political alliances. Now we don’t have kingdoms, so men don’t have to marry many women to annex kingdoms”, cursing her limited imagination and unfeminist bent of mind, as she spun that. “But if there were kingdoms, would Papa have more than one wife?” No, said Reema’s mother hurriedly. “There were exceptions even among kings, i am sure there were monogamous kings, kings with just one wife, you know.” “If they had just one wife, why didn’t they have the time for a dog?” This is what talking to children does to you, thought Reema’s mother desperately. Dogs and wives appear to be mutually exclusive historical choices that kings made.

The things that I am tempted to do often lie in the no-man’s land between those that are absolutely forbidden and those which are just about alright to do. Sure, my instincts go to the forbidden territory, but they let me relax and breathe easier with the ones in between. Eggs are the first ladies in this no-man’s land...I can’t check my multiplying love for this delight of animal creation.

You see, they have an early morning appeal that no other breakfast item has(to a non-breakfast eating, brunch-eating, repressed diet Tamil). There is the shapely white that keeps you gazing fondly. Then there is the strong suggestion that there are layers beneath that placid exterior. Peel off that white even if it breaks your heart to do so. And what you have is something well worth breaking your heart for. A grainy yellow crust that you want to crush between your fingers. And a slow, painless and guiltless realization that the egg wants to be eaten in every form, at every cost. You don’t even sense the moment when you have lost yourself to a taste-challenged and an artistically challenged Prude God.

Now for the possibilities, the sheer possibilities that these fascinating things allow. The desi egg burji known exotically, appealingly as scrambled eggs...i can only be corny, sorry, eggy and say I want to scramble to eat them. The hint of spice in them, for this juicy combination of chilli and egg, you hold your breath, you let the tastes spread evenly in your mouth, until they are evenly distributed in the recesses of that undemanding palate and you are ready for the next.

I would gladly and warmly recommend all the egg preparations that involve breaking the egg. A more unconventional preparation, the egg sandwich lets you watch the egg in its various moods. There is nothing as riveting as watching an egg boil. It bobs gently up and down in a pan of boiling water, and I have never seen bubbles with so much character as when an egg is causing them. They are huge, not concentrated and celebratory of the egg.

Next, you take a catch or something hard, hold the egg gingerly in your hard (not hard to accomplish, if you feel so tenderly for it) and then gently knock it in the middle. And you will see a couple of reproachful cracks in the egg. Since you are such a tender lover, the egg does not mind you breaking it as it would have otherwise. Permit yourself to touch the egg after you have boiled the egg and removed the first layer of white. If you are a lusty man, you will forget about soft-skinned and shapey women. If you are a paedophile, maybe you should touch eggs, it may distract you awhile. But I digress. Boiling it and cracking the egg is only half the fun, if you know what comes next. That’s right, baby, you take a knife and approach. Have you ever in your life cut anything this willing to be demolished? The egg finally reveals all its secrets to you when you use the knife. Now you scoop the soft, little pieces of the egg and place them firmly between two slices of bread and draw close...

Egg noodles is delightful for the same reason, you know it has involved boiling, knocking, cutting. The only egg preparation that is slightly disappointing and that belies the loveliness of the egg is the omelette. And I will save myself the trouble of google-searching on how you make an omelette, because I really don’t care that much for it. All I can say is, it somehow changes the smell and colour of eggs to something it might never have been. I can be a stuffy academic and say the omelette violates the telos of the egg. But I won’t. Instead I will end the post here satisfied that I have egged you on to do you know what.

This one is for you, Calculus Meticulous Jr. coz I owe you my first egg.

Slurred speech, rapid gestures
Manner of speaking offensive
Frazzled nerves, prickly manners
Quaint diction, unwieldy hair

Speak to her, she will not listen
Reason with her, she will not heed
Sheepishly agreeing to bide
by the hour's untimely request

Racking the man by her weakness
creating a heavenly mess
There is no stopping the tide
of her foolish retreat into impulse

Creeping out of the shadows
Reluctantly facing the monsters
Hiding tearstained face
mistaking devil for saviour.

Meaning lost in counting
the hours left for reckoning
Smiling bravely at victor
lying low at the sight of danger

Smitten by an affected kindness
rooting for a lost affection
gathering menagerie of memory
Looking back in anticipation

I barely finished reading Philip Roth’s novel, “The Counterlife”, it must have been called The Great Jewish Novel really. A book about the strange predicament of American Jews suspended between sceptical self-perception and fanatical repudiation of all that is ‘goy’ (all that is non-Jewish) in one’s personal and public life. The more I think about it, the intensity and resentment of the fanatical Jews is not without context...a history of loss, a history of persecution. All the hate-filled rhetoric of these Jews spoken in a single voice buzzes in the head of the narrator in Counterlife, try as he might to get it out. He holds his own, preserves his sanity delicately against these frenzied people of his own community-he can do this in America, that is kind to Jews, he can even do this in Israel, which tries to lure him into a death trap of service to the Jew cause. He can’t do it, in of all places, in England, which harbours anti-Semitic sentiments under a placid surface of tolerance of diversity.

I can understand, if not sympathize with a community (not the nation Israel) that has a Holocaust to forget, that sees the Holocaust everywhere, a conspiracy to wipe out Jews everywhere. I can view with some concern the defensive Jew who is tired of being hated first because he was weak and non-Aryan, and hated later for being strong and aggressive (as one of the characters in this novel puts it). The zealous need for Jews to marry among themselves, the fear of losing potential soldiers for the war otherwise...there is as I said, a history to all that...narrow , violent and single-minded as Jewish ideals of the Lipmann kind may be, they have a mission. (It is possible to sympathize if one shuts one’s eyes to what is happening to the professed ‘Other’ of Jews, the Arabs)

What I have more trouble comprehending is the community self-perceptions here in India. My community, the Iyengars of Tamland, to take only one instance of a community in India...have no conscious memory of persecution, unless you unearth historical evidence of the Shaivites, the Lingayats, the Jains thirsting for Vaishnava blood...but not in our century, or the last, or the one before the last. Where then is the context for zealous reproduction, for refusing to admit none other than the Iyengar anywhere near their hearth (sad pun, admittedly) Where then the justification for ulle varade? Quite candidly, I am unable to comprehend the exclusiveness, the fearful raising of one’s own children...vaikuntham cannot surely be a Judea for Iyengars taking sanctuary in a fatherland that fiercely and lovingly guards its children from defection into the ranks of the goy.

There may be one explanation for the exclusiveness. The effect of illusion created by that intangible thing called ‘ambience’. And I am not simply talking about the vermilion, the incense, the saaligramams, the prayer-bells, or for that matter, women wearing 'ombodu gajams' (nine-yard sarees) and men wearing 'uttariyams' (a religious dupatta, if you will) No, I am talking about the temple culture, the cuisine, the act of eating itself, observing a respectable distance between the plate and the vessels, the 'madi', the diligent observation of festivals replete with every ritual (not many communities are as elaborate as us with rituals).

There may be other things contributing to the ambience, but these are the ones that no Iyengar will be unfamiliar with, growing up. Some of this may be responsible for the good clean vehemence, to quote Roth, with which we distinguish those who are Iyengar and who are not, before we consider them worthy for marriage.

I can sympathize with the Iyengar tribe as much as I might with the Jewish tribe if there were an effort to project our clannishness into something that transcends marriage. I may have my reservations about the Jewish mission, but at least there is a mission there; while we have ambience...I could go along with a project of Iyengar eugenics if all Iyengars, for instance, resolved to take over the UN. That way, we could find a lasting solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict peaceably. I could go along, if we decided to put our combined effort into opening a health spa, that way we could do what Phoebe in Friends aspired to do, “bodies at peace make peace”. I could go along, if we made our life’s mission advocacy against video piracy, violent video-gaming, child labour, child pornography, against sending all our children to IITs and IIMs...but give us a mission please!

I desire something more than sunlight
Things look brighter than they must
Throwing everything into sharp relief
Affecting leaves and lovers

Sunlight causes persons to suffer forgetfulness
Live in a blizzard of fiery light
Reacting to external rays
Not minding the imminent gloom

Playfully tracing the shadows
Lingering around the trees in hopeful lust
Mopping up the mellow sun
Feigning pleasure in upturned face

Evenings have a mien of sobriety
in the wake of fearsome dazzle
Like a chameleon that learns caution
against its own ruse and charm

Desire is a thing of the past
Flesh of yearning left behind
Meat of hope replaced by
Something less urgent

And hovering beneath its
Demise is a longing less
Intense, less unbidden
More suited to temperament

Nothing to be celebrated
Is the demise of desire
Nothing to be commemorated
Either; for the forfeit of desire

Is no monument to anybody
No sacrament to love
It is no new meaning bared
It is no energy unleashed

Yet a dozen nightmares lurk
Behind desire, and a dozen
Nightmares are truly not
Worth Desire.

The things people contrive to forgive
Are not trite
There is a lost hour, a moment of worry
A slip of tongue, a promise undone

An inclination to forget, a temptation
That is hard to overcome, a citation
Of failure, a wrong move and a classic
Memory of friends gone astray

A lapse of loyalty, a breach of honesty
A face we hate, a mask we loathe
The things people contrive to forgive
Are not trite

The people we contrive to forgive
Are not easily forgiven
A cruel mother, a honest friend
A ceaseless bore, a person you love

The feat of forgiving is contrived
To honour
Those we lost our senses to.

Many diapers back, when I was learning French, my cousin gave me a book called L'Etranger. Ah, I see the look of smug comprehension on your face, reader, but consider for a minute, the agony of a fifteen year-old who now possesses ostensibly a French classic and a beginner's Larousse French-English dictionary.

This is what the blurb said, quite simply, "Quand la sonnerie a encore retenti, que la porte du box s'est ouverte, c'est la silence de la salle qui est monte vers moi, le silence, et cette singuliere sensation que j'ai eue lorsque j'ai constate que le jeune journaliste avait detourne les yeux. Je n'ai pas regarde du cote de Marie. Je n'en ai pas eu le temps parce que le president m'a dit dans une forme bizarre que j'aurais la tete tranchee sur une place publique au nom du peuple francais."

Yes, in hindsight, I think my cousin had it for me and had it for me big. Well anyway, many diapers later, in fact, a few days back, I got hold of The Outsider by Albert Camus (pronounced kaamoo).

There are many things that are fascinating about The Outsider, like the fact that it was set in Algiers rather than Paris, that it was written in the Inter-War years, that it is an extensive critique of 'bourgeois sources of sensation', that its author was the Algiers goalkeeper (ok, I am kidding, no, Camus WAS a goalkeeper, only it's not so interesting) and that the author died quite young.

But Meursault...here is a man we are given to believe is indifferent: indifferent to his mother's death, indifferent to his neighbour beating up his dog, indifferent to Marie who he is involved with, indifferent to the man he has killed. Meursault is alive on each of these occasions to something else. He is alive to the sun overhead at his mother's funeral, to the heat waves, to the sensation of overwhelming drowsiness and exhaustion as he is waiting for her to be buried. His murder of the Arab in the book is a phsyical reaction to a fiery gust of wind and the blinding light of the Algiers sun.

At the trial, he is conscious of a robot-like woman onlooker, the curve of Marie's breasts as she testifies, the panama hat of another friend who is a witness. On all these occasions, Meurault seems almost to be jumping out of his skin, becoming a spectator to his own trial and spectator to the people at his trial. Meursault is astounded by the familiarity of all the details in even a place like the courtroom, astounded that his predicament does not make the ambience look different, astounded by the realization that he can find a way of rationalizing everything that has happened or may happen to him. The pure chance of it all prevents him from being outraged at what is happening to him, the sensation that "familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evening may lead as well to prison as to innocent, carefree sleep."

He does mind staying in prison but not because things are different out there, but because he misses his occasional bathe, the summer nights and the cool air. Yet he does not mind forgoing all these things if he could only be allowed to live. For 'to be alive is to be privileged, and there was only one class of men, the privileged class.' The fact of his death alone is appalling to him, not the circumstance, the occasion or the excuse. Not that his girlfriend was married, not that his mother was gone, not that his friends were unworthy...the instance of his life, not the course of his life mattered the most.

That we can and will find something to preoccupy ourselves is a foregone reality for Camus. Brooding over some irreversibles in life, I find something reassuring about the 'benign indifference of the universe' that Meursault submits himself to.

Merci, mon cousin.

Harry’s real name was Harish, but Harish was so untypical of Harry that everyone called him Harry. Harry drank a lot. Harry was nice to women. He fixed drinks for women. Harry was polite to women. He never misbehaved with the women he drank with. Harry liked to hunt, it was a hobby. Sometimes Harry hunted out of the kindness of his heart, because the crops needed him to kill animals that preyed on the plants. Harry was brash and aggressive but only because other men were brash and aggressive. Harry liked P.G.Wodehouse. Harry’s favourite character in P.G.Wodehouse was Galahad. Which was why he was also called Gally. Harry liked dogs, he gave dogs silly names. He named a dog Dora, and Dora adored Harry.

In academic matters, Harry hated Theory. Harry was averse to talking Theory, hearing Theory and indulging people who spoke Theory. Where topics of discussion went, Harry’s favourite topic was British colonization. Harry believed, like his teacher, that Brits were good sods. He worshipped a teacher who said, “The Brits were not the only colonizers, we colonize, America colonizes, Sri Lanka colonizes”.

Where feminism went, Harry had very outspoken views. Harry incensed a feminist teacher once by remarking that he was tired of feminists who menstruated their nonsense all over their books. But Harry had a soft corner for women. Especially the dark-eyed and the wheatish complexioned ones. Harry loved to sing for women. He invariably sang, Mehbooba, ooh, Mehbooba for them. He sang in a sonorous, manly voice. That was it essentially, Harry was manly, full of manly pride.

Harry’s taste in music was very Harry. He liked Harry Belafonte and not simply because he shared a name with him. He liked him for his touching, simple songs that always beckoned the woman to stay at home. He liked Mark Knopfler too, but that was for a different reason altogether. Harry admired any guy who was unapologetic about his whisky.

Harry was homophobic. His worst nightmare was to travel in a local Mumbai train compartment full of men. However, he had many close male friends he bonded with. He liked a quiet gin with them once in a while, but he preferred the brooding privacy of a whisky with a woman soul-mate.

Harry was not just gay-phobic, he was also lesb-phobic. He could not watch two women hug without shuddering deeply. He looked discreetly away when women complimented each other about their looks. When he himself complimented women, he was very asexual about it. He hid his warm feelings for a woman by constantly calling her a bonny lassie with a toothy smile. He went as far as to say she had a very wringable neck, and when the woman asked him, if that was an insinuation, he blushed hotly and retorted, Of course not, of course not.

Harry liked to think of women as Aunties. He liked his Aunties to call him Uncle. He fancied that the Uncle and the Aunties were all part of a harem. Harry of course was just the kind of guy who had a harem. He fancied that when he had his own house, it would have a zenana, many servants, a pretty wife and loads of children. But most importantly, many servants. Because, you see, Harry liked the feudal arrangement. He never minded it if his servant brought him dinner to his bedside. And he insisted that his servants keep him updated about tribe uprisings, crop failure, estate value. And he was always generous to his servants. He never raised his voice with a servant, he gave them their wage on time, he offered to find brides for them, he sometimes even drank with them. All this he did because he cared for his tribe. He cared for the honour of his tribe.

Harry is now entertaining the thought of a wife. He is however very considerate and is making room for possible reservations she may have. He is however determined not to let his prospective wife trample over his free spirit. He must be able to hunt every once in a while, drink frequently enough and visit the estate to see if all is fine.

And now for the real part. I love Harry. We all love Harry. We love Harry because he is such a nice guy. Because he is unlike everyone else, so easygoing, so good-natured, so easy to forgive. We hate to see him pulled down. Yet it was so easy to be angry with Harry. Because he was so relentlessly himself. And it was easy to forget about what he did, not because he redeemed himself eventually, but because he ended up doing the same things he did. As a friend once put it, “You are a cynic if you have stopped believing in Harry. It’s like you have stopped believing in angels. He will aggravate you no end, but he’ll smile that smile of his, ‘It’s me Aunty, why are you getting worked up?’”

Note: This one is naturally for you Harry, for indulging me, for putting up with my tempers, my impatience, my general waywardness.>

In that city that knows only extremes in everything, sweltering heat or chilly jackety weather, loud and lechy Jats or bonhomous Punjabis, overmade and poutish women or irritable gaali-mouthing aunties. Where barbers shave away at random street corners and where pretentious youths carry their laptops to Market Cafe or Big Chill to check gmail (fancy that) or write novels where "the atmosphere was moist with sexual tension".

This entry is about a series of events, nay encounters of my friends and randomly my own encounters with each other and with that unique variety of Indians, namely, Delhiites.

P~'s encounter with the concerned co-passenger
I'll start with the train journey, where P~ and I were quite oblivious of the world at large, of our scandalous conversation, and most of all, of one gentleman, if you will admit that gentlemen can burp very loudly, sound orgasmic when they drift gently to sleep.

We were then quite unmindful of this gentleman, and given that this was our first long session in quite a while, we had no thought to break up soon. Late in the evening, when we had had our fill, and were actually relaxing in a certain post-coital sense,

Uncle trips into saying: Accha, only one of you is having reservation, is it not?
Me (politely, almost civilly): Yeah, she's my friend and she's here.
Uncle in rising tempo (read temper): I am observing you, you are going on talking, and I was listening to your caanversation, you ARE INDISCIPLINed and disGUSTing, what naansense are you talking, you are giving madam here (and he points at a lady who wakes up reluctantly) a headache. You are...(tapers off, as he is not allowed to finish)
P~: You limit your right to objecting to our conversation. How dare you edit the contents of our conversation? You actually eavesdrop; lap up all that we say keenly and then you ask us to stop disturbing you.
P~ to me: I've had enough of this disgusting creature aunty, I'll see you later.
Me (shrilly and in vain): Aunty wait

P~ walks all the way to her compartment, some eight bogies away, fumes and can't stop fuming, comes huffing and puffing all the way back and throws herself (metaphorically and angrily) at concerned Uncle and says,
Yeah, I didn't want you to think, I got intimidated and ran away, I think you're disgusting, coarse, without an education to speak of.
Uncle (by this time, both his English and his courage have failed him, so he is almost defenseless): Haan haan maa, English bolnese kuch nahi hota, main educated nahin hoon, vohi bolre ho naan?
P~: Yes, uneducated, illiterate and a b, no a peasant (P~ tells me later her first choice was a boor, but she settled on a peasant obviously out of loyalty to and fond memory for V~)

G~’s encounter with the formidable Jat
B~, G~ and me had finished a very fulfilling round of Palika Bazar, that free porn-selling, shady and delicious subway and were gorging ourselves and this time, quite mindful of the formidable Jat (he could be nothing else, he had the belly and manners of one) sitting across, and being something of unrestrained people ourselves, couldn’t help pointing a little unsubtly at him
Me: Your city is full of supercilious bitches and creepy men like the Jat across us.
G~ (looking directly behind him and giggling): Yeah, quite.
Formidable Jat (very formidably and loudly): Yes boss, what is it, talk to me now.
G~ (almost girlishly if not churlishly): Oh nothing

Formidable Jat: Where are you working?
G~ (drawing himself to his full height): Errr…what?
Formidable Jat: I saw you staring and giggling, where are you working
G~ (failing to see the compelling logic): You are a very insecure man Sir, you are not appealing to us in a way we would want to stare.
Formidable Jat (now in full form): Now what are you suggesting Boss, that I am ugly?
G~: Ugly enough for us not to notice.
Formidable Jat: I’ll tell you what (comes right across to G~) and instead of telling G~ slaps him quite hard across the face.
I shall for the genteel readers of this blog, edit the rest of the conversation, but I can’t help adding that an adrenaline-driven G~ managed to stand his own, or slap his own, and the waiters had to interfere and extricate one from the other, after which the Jat made a hurried exit. Later reports of course say that the Jat called the next day, admitted to have been quite alcohol-pumped and offers an apology, but these reports remain to this day unconfirmed.

P's encounter with A~ and B~
P~ was meeting A~ and B~ for the first time and as she reported later, was left feeling quite overwhelmed by the experience, as A~ at least had lived up to the descriptions of him so beautifully that she didn’t believe fact to be different from fiction any more.

Before P~ arrives
A~ to me: Yeah, so this friend of yours, man, describe her (when A~ asks you to describe a woman, he wants only the “bare” details)
Me (angelically): What do you want to know?
A~: Yeah, what makes her interesting, is it her persona, her ravishing looks, is she well-read, does she listen to good music?
G~ to A~ : She is a Mall (as if that were self-explanatory)
A~ (quite needlessly): Oh, I love Malls…
G~: And she is from Hech.C.U (G~ and all the others say I can’t say Ech.C.U. to save my life)
Me: (a little earnestly): By the way, why should she have ravishing looks, listen to good music or any of that, isn’t it enough she is MY friend (stretching my luck really)
A~ (ponderously):Ah, but I don’t bring any of my friends and expect you to warm up to them because they are my friends, like, COME on, man

P~ drops in, swishing her bag and phone a little self-consciously on the table.
A looks a little bashful, and fails to make small talk and so returns to being his boisterous self, ignoring her completely, but later confesses to G~ that he found P~ to be quite the thing, and as “the mysterious woman of strange allure”. P~ of course peevishly says that she cut ice with A~ only when she quoted the Jabberwocky.

G~'s encounter with the eunuch or the eunuch's encounter with G~?
We were all sprawled out quite blissfully at India Gate, P~ and I had finally bored even ourselves gloating about India Gate, when a very pretty eunuch, yes a really pretty and solitary eunuch stepped right in front of us. (She was quite something, very mild-mannered, not aggressive at all, inviting smile and all, and as G~ put it, had it not been for the fact that she WAS a eunuch, she could have passed off as a randomly pretty woman albeit with a deep-throated baritone.)

G~ (a little cautiously): Nahin kuch paise vaise nahin he
The eunuch: Are kuch to hoga, dedona, and makes a pass at him with her toe.
G~ (hotly): Bola na kuch nahin hai, jaaon abhi
The eunuch: Ladki jaisi gussa, kya chupke rakha hai udhar, and points at
G~'s unmentionables.
G~ (spluttering): Jaati hai ki nahi?
The eunuch (reluctantly passes, but determined to deliver the coup de grace)
says: Kabhi tera phutdis ooncha nahin hoga (May you never have an erection)

And here I shall end my narrative…B~ who was present in most of these encounters, you might think, was a silent spectator, but that’s just a euphemism for wily instigator, so don’t you be trusting witnesses who tell you B~ is a harmless guy or that he is a “poet in the garden”.

This one is for G~ and B~, both of whom were beautiful hosts, where beautiful is an adjective that qualifies them as hosts only...

Ramachandra Guha wrote an article a few months back making what he himself calls a controversial point that good musicians make good human beings and what is more, that they make better human beings that artists and authors.

I am not going to offer here, as he does, counterexamples...that is, I am not going to cite an ill-willed, parsimonious, ungracious, cantankerous, malicious musician for every gracious, warm and generous musician he mentions. (I am not going to do this because I neither know if the ungracious musicians are really ungracious, nor am I convinced that the good musicians he cites as good human beings are necessarily so. In short, I don't know too many musicians, North Indian, South Indian or for that matter Western.)

I will instead try to counter his thesis theoretically. But before I do that, let me say that I am bothered enough to do so only because I find Guha's article engaging, (as I find many of his other articles) and worth mulling over.

To be sure, the idea is seductive, if we see music as something spiritual, deeply meaningful in an ineffable sense and elevating, and if the music we listen to, fulfills these criteria, surely the musician must have some uncontaminated source from which this music flows.

But if we were to stop for a minute and consider, that which is spiritual or poignant in itself is not something that is necessarily happy or expressive of joy. One has to only listen to the tawaifs in India singing to know that singing is a grave, sometimes angry (with having to sing and with the world at large)experience.

Now for Guha's beliefs that musicians have to deal with the dark side of life less than authors and artists...to quote Guha here,

"One reason for this may be that artists and writers need to know of the darker side of human existence. Because they must necessarily deal with evil as well as good, with the malevolence of the human character as much as with its benevolence, their own personalities are likely to be more ambiguous. How can one write or paint effectively about wickedness unless one is something of a rascal oneself?"

Again, a tempting mistake...after all, musicians aren't creating wicked characters, they are not weaving morbid fascination and imagination into reality, they are not driven to madness by the things they paint.

Just as writers or painters are persons inhabiting a world of fellow-creatures, before they are writers or painters (and this leaves them free to an extent, to be compassionate once in a while), musicians are free to fight their petty fights, be quarrelsome or nasty or lead unhappy family lives. What is more, if writing or painting forces artistes to be wicked and nothing else, and if singing soulful music makes musicians mostly good, then the rest of the world must be plainly without attribute.

Guha describes episodes in the lives of a few singers, whose lives have been punctuated by hardships that they have struggled to overcome (Guha offers the examples of Gangubhai Hangal, Sawai Gandharva and Bhimsen Joshi), Guha concludes that it make them somehow good human beings.

What is at dispute here is of course, what good human beings are. I always thought that musicians were a little selfish, that they were wrapped up in a world of their own that they didn't really care to share with us, but if we were interested, they didn't mind. One wonders if Hangal, Gandharva or Joshi were full of the milk of human kindness in matters that didn't concern them.

One may of course argue that how did it matter that they weren't philanthropic or compassionate creatures, that wasn't their business. But that is precisely my point. If it was their business to sing and sing well and if they are generally good-natured about it, they are no more good human beings than say the amiable Sachin or the talented Jaya.

So that is essentially it then, good musicians may make good human beings, but
1. no more than what their nature allows them to be.
2. no more than good human beings are good human beings.

Mera Bharat Mahan.

Link to Ramachandra Guha's article: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/12/10/stories/2006121000110300.htm

Dedicated to G~ and B~ without whose "exhortations" this entry wouldn't have made it this soon to the blog. Not that G~ or B~ would care to read this particular entry, G~ probably would think I deserve to be shot, while B~ will have some wise crack to make. But as they say, it is the gesture that matters.

"In the two and a half minute video, one of those present at the execution can be heard shouting “Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!” at a sneering Saddam. That someone in the execution party should be a Sadr supporter has angered Sunnis" – The Hindu, Jan.3, 2007.

The hanging of leaders, national and religious leaders, has always been charged: Bhagat Singh, Mangal Pandey, abroad the Nuremberg-handed executions of Nazi leaders, the execution of Milosevic had he not died and instead been executed, and now Saddam. Charged because the leaders are not hanged like any other men, the trials that precede the hanging are not either like the hanging of other criminals. A nation is seen to be protesting or applauding when these leaders hang, not the case with the hanging of other criminals.

In Saddam’s case, the nation protesting and the nation applauding are both realities and ironic ones because of the fluidity of the entity that is Iraq. There is no telling where the international image of Iraq ends and Iraq’s own national identity begins, no telling where American built-or-ravaged Iraq ends and Iraq’s national sovereignty begins and where the internationally influenced trial of Saddam ends and Iraq’s own verdict on Saddam begins.

This is why it is so hard to gloat or mourn over Saddam’s hanging. The trial was unfair not because it was hastily conducted, or partisan, not because Judges vanished and Defense Attorneys were killed, but because of the flimsy authority that prevailed over the trial and the hanging. The trial would have been no fairer, had there been Sunni representatives sitting on the Benches, for the trial to be fair, Iraq as a nation had to have conviction of its identity.

Interestingly, The New York Times in an article, "Iraq to review Abusive Acts at Hussein’s Execution" writes that American officials did much to prevent the hanging of Saddam pleading with the Prime Minister, Kamal al-Maliki. These officials reportedly argued that there were constitutional and legal questions that needed to be answered, what was more, Saddam could not be executed on an Islamic festival day. They however desisted from pressing the matter, writes this reporter in NYT, out of respect for Iraq’s sovereignty!

What has the trial meant to various people and what does the execution? For Iraqis, the trial of Saddam was symbolic to say the least…symbolic for some people of the historic crimes of Saddam, for the Shias the end of Sunni hegemony, for the Sunnis the humiliation of their community, humiliation of the Sunnis, for the world at large, the bringing to book of a dictator and the accountability of national leaders and more dubiously, for the Islamic world and the Arab world, the onslaught against their religion.

And what has the execution meant for the people of Iraq? One is tempted to say more insecurity, more sectarian strife, more communal violence…but that would be too facile. In fact, NYT in another article, where it dramatically states that Saddam is dead, but his legacy lives on, says that the day of Saddam’s hanging witnessed much violence in different regions in Iraq. However the same article makes the point that there is no connecting the two really, given the everyday anarchy in Iraq.

If some within and outside Iraq saw the quick execution of Saddam as provocation and invitation for more horrors in Iraq, others thought a quick and unprotracted execution would see the end of a Saddam-inspired insurgency. Strangely enough, in the NYT article I mentioned earlier, the PM is quoted as saying that Hussein may become the cause for never-ending insurgent attempts to free him if the execution were withheld. So for reasons of security of Iraq, Iraq’s one-time national leader must be prosecuted.

Other reports talk about the disappearance of friendly neighbourhoods, the demolition of a mosque is a sign that the neighbourhood has been taken, the demolishers, most of the time Shia leaders have established their writ there.

As Saddam’s crimes are being held against the Sunnis, the Sunnis hold the crimes of the Shias against Iran and its Shia-dominated leaders and people. With the hanging of Saddam, Sunni supporters weeping over his body vowed to take revenge on Iranian infidels. The execution of Saddam may well incite a West Asian civil war: a war that may be fought over symbols like Saddam and Moqtada al-Sadr, just as terrorist acts continue to be perpetrated in the name of Osama.

On a different note altogether, it may be worth asking why Saddam was hanged, not injected? NYT talks about the various exceptions that were made for the trial of Saddam… about how Saddam was the first such leader to be tried by a domestic tribunal for crimes against humanity, about how the Iraq tribunal has ignored recent changes made to international law. By the mandate of these changes, the death penalty can no longer be imposed.

But to return to my question, why was Saddam hanged and not injected, why was he not killed in his cell, but taken to the gallows? American troopers did not ask Iraqis permission to hunt down and capture Saddam, how come they were so eager then to hand over punishment of Saddam to the Iraqis? In America, the practice of hanging criminals or terrorists, or for that matter, the death penalty itself is near extinct. How were they then so comfortable with the barbarism of hanging?

An answer might be that Saddam deserved to be hanged in public, for his crimes were perpetrated against a nation (Kuwait), for his hatred was directed against races like the Kurdish people, and his politics inside his country sought to wipe out a community, namely the Shias. Maybe dignity in capital punishment is reserved for less politically prejudiced criminals.

Not for Saddam then the death of Timothy McVeigh (guilty of the Okhlahoma city bombings)…the latter was put to death by American authorities by lethal injection. Not for Saddam, the luxury of being killed by injection, of writing as Timothy did, “My head is bloody but unbowed, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” (words taken from the poem ‘Invictus’ by Ernest Heneley.

A few llinks:
-http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/world/middleeast/03iraq.html?hp&ex=1167886800&en=f6357bb4ee32bc25&ei=5094&partner=homepage
-http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/world/middleeast/31history.html
-http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/world/middleeast/31history.html

Note: This wasn't a class assignment, that should make my blog feel
special, even if it doesn't do anything to please readers.

From the first of time,
before the first of time, before the
first men tasted time, we thought of you.
You were a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives—
perhaps a meaning to us . . .
Now
our hands have touched you in the depth of night.

"Voyage to the Moon" by poet Archibald MacLeish, New York Times

Neil Armstrong landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. ET accompanied by Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins. The space mission was televised back to Earth making the landing an intense media event.

The Cold War was carried into space soon after USSR launched its first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The Sputnik launch was a spectacular propaganda victory for the Soviet Union and its leader Nikita Khrushchev. Vying for recognition in space, President Eisenhower in 1958, passed a bill in the Congress to create NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Later the Soviets sent their first manned space rocket with Yuri Gagarin as the cosmonaut. On July 29, 1969, Neil Armstrong led the Apollo 11 team to the moon. Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon’s surface, marking the space mission to be an American one When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, he said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

The New York Times engages in a creative linguistic debate about what implications the landing could have possibly had for mankind. The debate was did Armstrong say one small step for a man or a small step for man? Because for all the linguists in the Associated Press and the New York Times, the “a” made all the difference in space.

The missing article made a world of difference in literal meaning, instead of a statement linking the small action of one man with a monumental achievement for (and by) all of humanity, Armstrong instead uttered a somewhat contradictory phrase that equated a small step by the human race with a momentous achievement by humankind ("man" and "mankind" having the same approximate meaning in English).

Journalists as much as Armstrong himself were bothered about the linguistic omission. Indeed, the journalists were afflicted with a kind of space sickness as they battled amongst themselves about the step that was taken. The journalists from the major wire services and newspapers gave up watching the live broadcast and huddled in the press room debating what to do. They decided that they would agree on what they heard and all file the same quote.

"We concluded that he did not say 'a man' and that's the way it went out to the world," says Mr. Shurkin, the then chief of the Reuters news agency's team at Mission Control in Houston, Tex.

“NASA's own recording of Armstrong's transmission from the lunar surface reveals that his words are clearly audible over the background static; that the word "man" follows immediately on the heels of "for," with no gap between them into which Armstrong could conceivably have inserted the word "a"; and that Armstrong pauses noticeably after the word "man," as he realizes he's flubbed his line and hesitates momentarily before completing it.”

The New York Times article continues “Later, a representative for the Grumman company (it had built the Eagle, essentially a high-tech aluminum can) presented Mr. Armstrong with a silver plaque bearing his 11-word — now immortalized — sentence, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Mr. Armstrong insisted that they had left out an "a".

Sure, he had been awake for 24 hours before his epoch-marking pronouncement, battling lunar stage fright in front of the world's largest audience ever, and was mulling over the fact that while putting on his bulky space suit he had broken the circuit breaker for the switch to start the Eagle's engine for ascent.” The quote carried more import without an “a” than with the “a” or so the journalists decided.

It cannot however be said that the media was reading too much into Armstrong’s words. For instance, Neil Armstrong says in the book “Chariots for Apollo” in 1986 "There must be an 'a'. "I rehearsed it that way. I meant it that way. And I'm sure I said it that way." Buzz Aldrin stepped out into what Mr. Aldrin described as "magnificent desolation." So the Apollo team was not playing into the hands of the media, they were playing along too.

The media in covering the landing spoke alternately of the Cold War one-upmanship, the technological prowess and space travel. “The 1969 moon landing, which occurred 35 years ago today, was a peak moment for technological achievement, Cold War one-upmanship and national pride”

The papers were diligent in crediting both Presidents, John F.Kennedy and Richard Nixon with the successful mission, Kennedy for his promise to Congress that United States would get men on the moon and back home safely by the decade's end.

While on the moon, the astronauts talked to President Nixon. Armstrong turned to the camera to give a salute to Richard Nixon, who stood in the White House watching hopefully. Papers wrote that Richard Nixon was overwhelmed as the dramatic moment saw all of America was united after the separation of the troubling sixties.

In reporting the landing on the moon, the newspapers have highlighted what it has meant to America-the American people, not simply the American government. While some papers have written on the inspiration that Armstrong held out to the youngsters, some other papers have written reporting that the landing was staged one year after soon after riots had convulsed the city, following assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.(in 1968).

Soon after John F.Kennedy became the President of the US in January1961, America was snubbed in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The space race complemented the arms race. Though the US and Soviet Union were trying to gain in superpower strength, the race was also gauged to gain an edge in third world countries. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy gave a speech to Congress, "First I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth."

Tennessee Williams’ “The glass menagerie” talks in part of the alternate world that the movies conjure up for the people-“people go to the movies instead of moving” and only wars bring the public to real life. Wars are the only instances where men set out to have their own adventures instead of reveling in Clark Gable’s escapades. The landing on the moon was as real as war got for the Americans.

Sue Ann Presley writes for the Washington Post in her article (July 20, 2004) “A small step towards Unity” that “And as Armstrong and crewmates Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins approached the moon, feelings at home were mixed.” Korea Strowder, a community activist in the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast Washington was a struggling black American who had very little to do with the moon landing.

His wife and neighbors were too busy trying to make a living when Armstrong made his magnificent landing. Racial discrimination was overt, his wife says, recalling that because her husband was black, he was denied promotions he deserved.

Ann Presley writes “And yet the Strowders gathered around the TV, too, whenever they could. "We did watch it," she said. "It was the biggest thing. I was just a little bit fearful. Would this person be able to get back in the spacecraft? That was somebody's husband, somebody's child. Would they be able to get back safely to earth?"

"It was exciting, but yet there was sort of a resentment," said Korea Strowder, 84,. "You know, you're thinking about all this money going up in space, and so many issues have not been resolved here on earth."

Washington Post while it accounts for the remote happiness that the landing might have entailed for a few people in the US, also speaks of the possibility that the landing redeemed the Americans during Vietnam. For a country torn by the Vietnam War and civil unrest, it was a chance, if only a brief one, to unite in wonder as mission commander Neil Armstrong touched his foot to the lunar surface and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

For the Fox News, the landing on the moon was a technological and a satellite ruse, a movie that was cleverly shot. Cold War resentment against the Russians manifested itself not really in the launch of the Apollo 11 mission but in the form of a movie graphically shot in the US.

Fox News that came up with a programme called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? says the US moon landings, as any good conspiracy theorist knows, were staged on a movie set by Americans eager to outstrip the Russians in the space race.

You can tell because the flag they plant there ripples in a gust of wind, because the film-makers forgot to include stars in the night sky and because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have never spoken about their lunar adventures. Oliver Burkeman wrote an article for The Guardian “It’s offical-US did land on moon” (Nov.6, 2002) repudiating the conspiracy theory.

The Guardian writes ”The space agency is to launch a publication setting out the evidence that the 1969 Apollo landing really did take place, Nasa's former chief historian told the Guardian yesterday, in response to a flood of questions from school students and their teachers.

"Hardcore conspiracy theorists," Roger Launius said, "are not the audience - nobody believes you can convince them of anything. But teachers are always saying they were asked in class and want to know how to respond." The Guardian reports that the NASA undertook to address the concerns about the mission being staged.

The NASA explained the missing stars by saying that a huge patch of brightness washard to combine on the same exposure with dimmer flickering lights. “And the flag rippled because the astronauts had to twist the flagpole to insert it into the moon's surface, and doing so caused it to ripple. In the absence of any atmosphere, the rippling continued long after they had moved away.”

Burkeman also writes that that filmmaker Bart Sibrel, who actively propounded the theory confronted Mr Aldrin, asked him to swear on a Bible that he had walked on the moon. Mr Aldrin simply punched Sibrel..

On the other hand, many papers have however written that satellite TV cashed in on the landing without having to fabricate anything. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a TV to see the landing - embassies, government office buildings, restaurants and bars.

Washington Post writes “Abe Liss and his brother, Ben, had already rented out more than a thousand sets, but the phone at Beacon Television Rental, their store on Seventh Street NW, continued to ring…. Because TV sets were not as common in public places as they are now, Abe Liss said, many people turned to rentals, giving his company one of its biggest business booms ever. Back then, black and white sets were the rule, but it didn't much matter -- the lunar video was mostly gray anyway.”

Eric Newton, Managing Editor of the Newseum in his article “Front Pages tell a tale of more than the moon” writes that The Boston Globe forces itself to place the moon landing atop Page One, even though Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was charged on July 20, 1969 with leaving the scene of an accident for driving his car into a Chappaquiddick pond and killing 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. “For a day, at least, heavenly conquest defeats earthly scandal.”

The various media in reporting Armstrong’s landing on the moon shared a sense of history. But they also did a good job of recording the timing of the event, how it coincided with significant political events in America and how it contributed to alienation of the people in a few quarters and a sense of accomplishment in other quarters.

Note: This was something I wrote a while back, but who said I can't put
up class assignments on my blog?

Parvathy gingerly touched the paperweight. She lifted it, whizzed it around in her palm, turned it over its head, peered inside the paperweight and kept peering. It was one of those old-fashioned, oval-shaped paperweights, made of glass, hosting a kaleidoscope of colours.

She could make out streaks of blue and red, and a touch of green but she could never be sure. The green blended into the blue so completely when she inverted the paperweight, the blue was a pale green and when she held it straight, it was a straightforward blue.

And then there was the unmistakable streak of fiery red that shot through the paperweight...as Parvathy tilted the paperweight, she could see the red gaining full colour as it made its way from one end of the paperweight to another.

Parvathy continued to gaze at the paperweight. After a while, she closed her eyes for it was straining her eyes. She didn't how long she remained that way, with her eyes closed. When she looked around, she felt weird. She blinked, no she was in the same room but the paperweight was not there any more.

The walls were always plain white, why did they look different now.... as if somebody had splashed some blue paint a long time back, so now they wore a faded blue look. She turned to her right slowly and stared. The walls were translucent now, they looked fragile and....angry.

As she kept staring, there were shades of green that seemed to be deepening every moment, she looked back to where she was sitting when she woke up. The blue had turned shades from a dull blue to cerulean. She looked up and gasped as something hit her. It was a shot of red that moved from the ceiling rapidly to where she stood.

Parvathy started running. She started at a slow pace for something seemed to have happened to her reflexes, but why couldn't she get out of the room, it was barely ten feet, why couldn't she get out? She couldn't help looking at the colours that were assaulting her from all sides.

And as she kept looking, she could see waves of blue floating gently towards her, the red could not be distracted even if she was no longer in the spot where it hit her and she could sense its weight on her shoulders. The green was now under her feet, so she could no longer run without stepping on patches of slippery green gooey.

The colours were closing in on her. There was no use fighting them off and there was no use trying to get out. She was now running to and fro, from one end of the room to another, but there was no escaping the fast gaining colours.

And the brilliance of the colours was increasing in hue with every step she took, until she could no longer stand to look at them.

She shut her eyes and opened them and felt something settle on her eyes. It was a thick layer of glass, she couldn’t blink, her eyes were transfixed. She stood glazed though she could feel the colours weigh down on her, slowly wash over her and overtake her.

As she stood there, she could feel herself revolving and though she couldn’t move, she could sense that the world she presently was in, was going round and round. She was in the paperweight and somebody was spinning it around.

Courtesy: A dream that my friend P~ had.

Tara put her pen down wearily. She decided that a writer's block was not essentially a state where the author could not think of anything to say, but a state where the author's thoughts were too crowded. A sense that you can’t get the words out without betraying yourself...and the crucial choice of what was alright to say, without a hundred people reading meaning into it.

It had been two whole years since she had written her first book and it had been two whole years since that painful episode took place, of which she could not afford to think about, much less relive without falling apart all over again.

She had to force herself to keep writing, she had to convince herself she could write, she had to draw inspiration from the characters she was creating...she had to let them surface before they died even before they were born. They were essential to her sanity.

Where other authors worried about making characters in the image of their better selves, (of how they would have done it differently), Tara wanted none of it. She had succumbed to the folly of writing of things as they were and as they should have been in her first and only book...and where had it taken her?

She had to do that elusive thing of starting anew, on a clean slate, did they call it? And starting afresh meant not writing about herself.

Fiction was hard work, Tara thought. Because all creative expressions are a reflection, a point of reference really. How do you write without touching some raw nerve, without making sense of reality? There was no experience other than the personal one, was there? Perspective was not an acquired taste, now was it?

In a review of that failed first book, a critic had written, "An outpouring of emotions is not good enough. An author has essentially to be an incompetent failure to be able to write. Painful disappointment, the result of unrelenting dissatisfaction with one's self can alone find its way to a creative and a readable outlet. And Tara's book belies every such realistic hope, and...is quite unsurprisingly then the work of no eminent debutante."

That was the least uncharitable review, Tara reflected. Unrelenting dissatisfaction though, Tara repeated to herself aloud, forcing herself to laugh, yeah, that was no problem managing...only dissatisfaction had not exactly helped her finish writing a book in a stroke.

A hysterically favourable response, and then slur after slur to her book, her name had left Tara wondering about the phenomenon of a pontificating reading public. The same admiring authors and journalists, who wrote rave reviews, were now talking about overreaching Indian immigrants.

Forcing herself to stop thinking, she looked at the diffident scrawl in front of her…her mother then just pushed the door open with some hot chocolate and cake. She smiled fleetingly as she came in, wincing a second later when she saw garbled sheets and her daughter painfully lost in uncreative thought.

Her family had gone into a shell, unsurprisingly enough, and were still grappling with the emotional crisis that had enveloped them after…Parashu had called, her mother said, I guessed you didn’t want to talk, he wants to see you, he sounded quite determined. He said he was coming over tomorrow, wanted to prepare you.

Tara nodded briefly at her mother and turned away. She hadn’t yet figured out a way of prolonging conversation with her mother ad hoc, and they had both preferred it that way for a while now.

Tara turned back to her work more listlessly than before. She should have been prepared for this, every writer was prepared to be written off the first time. Only there would be no second time, she had committed a sin which though few writers had been found guilty of, none were ever forgiven.

To float in a heady cloud and then to be washed out without ceremony, was alright for a writer, but what if the washout was so complete, the storm an apocalyptic one, as it was in her case? Her world had ceased to have an audience not because the audience found her writing distasteful or banal, but because….

Where could she start, she wondered aloud again. There was a knock again on her door, she refused to heed it, the door flew open and her childhood-friend Parashu stood at the door looking somewhat breathless. She looked at him evenly and gestured for him to sit down.

“What is it, I thought mother said you were coming tomorrow, not today”, she asked. Parashu looked at her rather nonchalantly for a breathless-looking and sounding person, and said, “Oh was driving home, and I decided I was too lazy to come tomorrow”

“And?”
“I am going to go back to India for a spell, was missing the familiar scene, miss hurling foul abuse in bong, and durga puja beckons with all its clichéd glory. Mom was also not too well, thought I would check on her. But wanted to see you first, since it’s been so long.”

He paused. Tara realized with some amount of surprise, it had been a really long time since she last spoke to him. Hell, it was more than three years, and that was more than a year before the whole incident. He hadn’t been there before or after the book got published, he hadn’t been there when she was in grace and then in disgrace, if there was something like being in grace.

“So for how long have you been looking the Tragedy Queen?”
Tara managed a small smile, “for as long as you have been my friend”
“Stop kidding me, I had to cringe every time I introduced you to my friends, what with you doubling over every time I said, meet my friend Tara.”

Tara smiled with less effort and said, “Correction, I doubled over every time your friends said, the Gone with the wind Tara? But why would your parents name you after a plantation?”

Parashu laughed invitingly and Tara kept smiling. “When will you come back?”, she asked. Parashu looked at her seriously, “Not for a year really, planning to shift base temporarily…was actually hoping to take you along. It might be a change after all that you have been through.”

Tara froze, “what would you know about that” and immediately regretted saying it. She thought bitterly little luck he wouldn’t know about it when nameless Indian authors back home made a point to say, “Tara has done us obscure Indian authors a bad turn, now no budding Indian author can ever hope to make it big for fear of being thought a Tara”

But Parashu overlooked that and said, “That’s true, I know, and I can’t make it up to you in one go. Maybe I can start with this, and placed a thin book with a glossy cover on her lap.

Tara looked at it curiously, it had a disturbing illustration of a woman clad in clothes that were torn, and the torn places revealed scars that looked more like slashes that one made with a knife. The woman was encircled by a lecherous crowd of writers who held up their books proudly, and the woman was almost cowering in their presence.

Tara looked up quickly to see Parashu, and he signaled for her to look inside. She looked in and recognized the poems to be her own, poems she wrote just before she wrote that book.

She had wanted to write something less ambitious than that book, and she remembered doing this as something that would give her the inspiration to start writing the book. She had mailed Parashu these poems, she remembered now.

She looked at Parashu once more, this time with anger. And then something funny struck her, and she closed the book to look at the cover again, the book had no author, she impatiently turned to the first page again, the introduction to the author read,

This is the first collection of poems that the author wrote. The author however does not wish to be known. This is not simply because she thinks less harm will come to her this way. Praise or censure matters to her little now that she feels there is much more satisfaction in the realization that one can write and be read

Tears streamed down Tara’s face as she embraced Parashu and as Parashu embraced her.

It was a golden evening, the sun was glowing a pleasant red, and the little boy slowly traced his steps back home after casting one last longing look at it. He always wondered how the moon could possibly be a reflection of the sun, if one blinded with its brilliance and the other lulled into pleasant dreams.

Rabi was not like other boys, his servants and his brothers were the only people he knew and he did not go to school. He had to make do with gazing at the sun from his own room, reading books and playing with his brothers. His father was a busy man, who was devoted to his ascetic duties and lived in a world of his own that he called the Brahmo Samaj.

As he reluctantly walked back home, to the Jorasanko mansion, he felt vaguely guilty, and increasingly fearful of the servants who were awaiting his return with grim countenances. He had willfully run away from home to look at the sun in the full loveliness of the evening. He had not felt guilty while he had spent the day dancing pebbles around merrily with his feet and jumping madly around the sun, pretending awhile to have made marks on it.

When he threatened to run away a few days back, his servant had actually drawn a circle around him, daring him to step out of it. It was then that he realized how much he hated boundaries, and how much he longed for the world outside.

It was not that he did not love home, but he could help yearning for the strange, for the unfamiliar. What he resented about home was that the only winds that blew in were those created by the trees in his own backyard. He wanted to see other trees as well, smell other flowers, and not hear the familiar chirping that had grown almost oppressive to him.

As he walked back home tremulously, he saw a boy his own age walking carelessly, a strange lute in his hand, singing a Bengali song, “The flowers in my garden are beautiful, but the flowers in my memsab’s garden I love more because I water them. The scent of soil is not the smell of wet earth, but my love for the flowers in my memsab’s garden”

Rabi had secretly followed the boy as he kept repeating the lines, so that he had recorded the song in his mind. He did not know what the song meant then, but he was determined to find out, a song that sounded so intoxicating, must also be beautiful in meaning.

When he reached home, his servants were predictably angry, his father, for a change had asked after his youngest son, and the household was beside itself with anxiety. But Rabi looked radiant though each one of his servants scolded him.

He knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to be a poet, write beautiful songs that he could understand, and one day he would be the little boy singing and some other boy would listen to him, and learn the song the way he did.

Note: This be a story I wrote for a website called tumhareliye.com. Thought I would post it here in the hope it may be more to the taste of some imbecilic friends and cousins (i know not why I wish to pander to them)

My friend, Malar and me were listening to the Tamil FM play when she got all senti over the song, “Malare Un Muhavari Enna” (loosely translated as ‘Malar, what is your address) I don’t know the Tamil word for identity….‘muhavari’- but i would like to think muhavari is identity, for isn't address a kind of identity really? Ok, I just wanted to get started, and starting with a silly personal anecdote always helps.

Identity has meant nationality for some, religion for others, race, ethnicity and caste. In mainstream debates, reason has never been part of a man’s identity. Yet in philosophy, political theory, literature, science and psychology and strangely in technology, reason is a ready reckoner for identity. But once you get over the shock that reason can ever be what essentially defines you, you are amazed at the connivance of disciplines like philosophy and science for instance share in their trust of reason as something that makes you.

Take political theory for instance, something that I am comfortable discussing…the Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Kant wrote passionately (and many times incomprehensibly, as in the case of Kant) about reason being the intrinsic self. All choices have then to be made and tempered through the reasoning self: internal conflicts were to be resolved by consulting reason. This, for Kant and Rousseau was essential not only for individual welfare, but for common good.

Problems with Enlightenment, with its pathological trust of reason were inevitable, when societies turned to entities like the totalitarian state, the Nazi state and the colonial state and to an extent market economy, entrusting these entities with their “Reason”. The desire then to divorce self from state, self from any constitutive reason was overwhelming….the need for individual-centred freedoms signaled the disillusionment with grandiose projects of Reason.

The problems that political theory has with Reason as identity, are largely external…namely that Reason overlooks and sacrifices individual liberty. Political theory is not very satisfactory in discussing the internal inconsistencies with Reason. Later theories of postmodernism, do attempt to do this, but are not really cogent. (OK, B and M, back off, write entries in your own blogs, if you want to fight that one!)

Science fiction has been much more obliging on that count. Brave New World, the Matrix trilogy and more than anything else, I, Robot (both the book by Isaac Asimov and the film really) conjure situations that involve robots caught in logical traps.

Aside: The robots in Asimov's "I, Robot" are rather endearing, they live in a world of their own, when faced with dilemmas, sing soapy songs and get drunk, and take off on the Earthmen by packing them off to space when they have had too much of them, have an exasperating sense of humour in crucial situations and simply refuse to co-operate....and have the cutest of names. For instance, QT becomes Cutie, SPD becomes Speedy and HB is Herbie.

Back to the point anyway, the "positronic brains" of the robots have their own style of reasoning, (quite defiantly seeing reason they want to really), putting the Earthmen in the most complex of situations.

A mind-reading robot, Herbie is bored with mathematic equations, preferring the causal thinking in psychological texts and novels to the math. Herbie then leads this thin-lipped, sex-starved, unattractive and efficient robopsychologist on the wrong foot, leading her on to think that her colleague had the hots for her, when her colleague really loved somebody else. Herbie, when found out, admits to have merely obeyed the three laws. (the first robotic law that forbids robots from harming humans, Herbie interprets in his own fashion: he claims to have told the robopychologist what she wanted to hear really, that somebody found her attractive enough to be in love with her)

Cutie, another eccentric Robot is possessed of a "religious mania", where her Reason leads her to believe she is the Prophet of the real Master, an energy converter, which she finds more worship-worthy than the human race.

Cutie refuses to believe that humans made robots, for it goes against her logic to believe that men who were "soft and flabby, lacking endurance, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material" like sandwiches! and that went into a periodical coma, could possibly have made an infinitely superior creature like herself.

And so Asimov weaves story after fantastic story of all the places where human reason can not simply go wrong, but can come headfirst into collision with other brands of Reason. Asimov writes out of a level-headed disagreement with techno freaks, not out of an instinctive distrust of scientific development like Aldous Huxley. What's more, his skeptical outlook of virtual, programmed or positronic brains does not lead him to back away in fear or revulsion from such technology. He, I am sure, finds them too amusing and robots too endearing to give up, at all costs of incompatible relationships between robots and humans.

All this is to separate the paranoia of the postmodern way of thinking (the Ashis Nandy kind) from the kind of informed, insider perspective that Asimov offers. Asimov poses conflicts for us, conflicts in the mind of robots between the Robotic laws that are the perfect circle of reason for human survival; conflicts between their self-consciousness and their need to obey, conflicts between the more compelling first and second Robotic laws that ask the robots not harm humans and to obey humans and the less compelling third law which protects the Robot's existence, conflicts between the Robot's need to protect men and men's own desires to overlook death to achieve something.

The postmodernists on the other hand, who hate all essences and definitions, reject logic as being of mainly one variety, that which privileges some and oppresses others. There can be no Reason that is reasonable for them, it is the subaltern, the unprivileged that should prevail.

The age of the postmoderns is as formidable as the age of the Machines, the one threatens to wipe your mind clean of reason, the other relies excessively on reason. Personally, I like Asimov better than Foucault.

An artist I met on a trip that I recently made, told me, "The artist always contradicts the layman and his point of view. Therein lies the beauty of his art. It is not the artist's fault that he doesn't think like the layman and it is not his fault that the layman does not understand the artist's painting. And it's certainly not his fault that the layman sees the art narrowly and crassly while this was not the artist's intention at all"

Even for a person of few artistic pretensions, like me, this was stating the obvious. You expect art to be more complicated than reading Robert Frost, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep"

(Hey, dont mistake me here, I have pondered deeply about and saluted Frost highly for the meaning of that poem. Every time I am at the summit of a mountain, I have thought characteristically of the beauty encompassing the imminent danger of taking a wrong step, where death is one step further and beauty is right where you are. But that again goes to show the crassness of my comprehension where matters of art are concerned.)

My point anyway is that it has become a habit to blame the artist for making us see things in contrasting colours, in confusing perspectives and for making us love the wrong things. We blame the artist every time we see the beauty of a war-ravaged country, the smell of napalm in the early morning, or the distant horizon of the nuclear dawn.

If Picasso himself found Guernica, that devastated Basque settlement in the Spanish Civil War beautiful enough to reproduce its pathos, why should we, lesser painters and artists feel guilty about it?

How can we help it if art deceives us with its sensuous colours, its heady surrealism, its Abstract romanticism, and its lovely illusion of misery and grief?

How can we help loving Lolita for its arduous hero, Humbert and his ardent love (that stripped of all sentiment, is plain pedophilia) for that eleven year-old something, Lo, Lola, Lolita? Is it our fault that we see Lo as Humbert does, that we share his lust or forgive his lust because he is so Goddamn elegant about it?

It is the artist's fault, not our fault, for he does not describe the faultlines in his painting betweeen the beautiful and the ugly, the enduring and the trivial, the crass and the profound. The artist must then take responsibility for our irreverent adoration of beauty that is by nature, despicable, repulsive and plain wrong.

Read this passage in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughter-House Five" describing a second world war scenario of American prisoners being booted around by the Germans.

Even though Billy's train wasn't moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.

Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. THe legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.

This passage intends to achieve the opposite effect that Lolita does. It intends to repulse you, its descriptions are vivid, but not eloquent as in Lolita, they present a warped perspective of the narrator, Billy Pilgrim who laughs when he is supposed to cry and cries without any reason.

Yet this kind of art has found a reception similar to the kind of art that Lolita can boast of. People reading Lolita are awed by the artistry of a master who can make you revel in impure love, and people reading Slaughter-House Five are awed by the artistry of a master who can make you stomach humiliation because it is so realistic.

Such reception is flawed because they attribute to the author and the artist, a certain perversity of values. What may have been intended by the artist as satire, is often taken by the 'layman' to be artistic truth. What the artist hates and works to destroy in his painting or book, is what the layman ends up loving.

There has to be a distinction established between a book like Lolita and a film like the Godfather, a book like Slaughter-House Five and a book like Hannibal. Because, as I see it, what is at stake is genuine artistic freedom and the promise of real art.

What Nabokov attempts to do is tell you what an intelligent and imaginative bastard the hero Humbert is. Humbert knows full well, that he can trap the reader into pardoning him and even loving him, every time he says, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury". He knows he can get away with doing what he wants with Lolita, and escape censure, by saying something like she was hot, but she was mediocre really, with vulgar interests that led her to look only at the light, gossipy columns of a newspaper.

this is not my take, Azar Nafisi in her novel, 'Reading Lolita in Teheran' says this, though I am paraphrasing her loosely) The artist sets trapdoors for you, knowing it will take a while before you can watch out for the trapdoors and get past them. And so Nafisi says, it is possible for us to not only love Humbert but to hate the wayward Lolita who seduced him after all. And given that she was such a mean brat, Humbert was not so wrong in having his way with her.

Now look at a film like The Godfather? Everything mean is beautiful in that definitive macho sense, where you seek to revel in the decapitation of a beautiful horse. If you have actually distanced yourself from the hype around 'The Godfather', you dont see anything artistic about it except perhaps, the amorous descriptions of Appolonia.

Slaughter-House Five, similarly, (and this is my limited take on it), tells you in misleading language, the lack of humility on the part of those who go to war. Though every impending moment is uncertain, you persist in torturing your fellow traveller, and your rival, when you imprison him.

Now take Hannibal or Silence of the Lambs, the senselessness of it all, here, both Nafisi and a political theorist, Hannah Arendt make useful observations, the average reaction to films like The Godfather and Hannibal are, "Yeah, I know it's mean, but it's clever"
Unfortunately it is the same reaction that guides reactions to Lolita and Slaughter-House Five where it is the meanness that the authors hate and work to engender hate for. While the Francis Coppolas and the Martin Scorceses would have you love the meanness.

Art promises to tell you something more profound than that which is mean, crude or that which is romanticised. It is this promise that was betrayed in the Danish cartoons about Prophet Mohammed.

By equating the Prophet to a terrorist, what the cartoonists did was reflect the vulgar point of view of the layman, betraying the promise to say something besides the obvious. They betrayed the love of the artist for the profound. Artistic questions of freedom of speech were flawed because of this betrayal. You can cite freedom only when you are strong in your conviction that what you are saying, however controversial, is valuable, is useful to mankind.

The cartoons threatened to take art away from the artist and give it to the layman, for him to interpret and kill, for him to simplify and destroy. And the layman set about the task with a vengeance, with atavistic pleasure.

This is what the layman threatens to do to art, rob art of creativity and imagination in primitive fashion.

All I am saying is, dont you go blaming the artist for all this degeneration, he was on a different vocation altogether.
Amen.

PS: Ok, the Monkey-man reference is there only because I liked the idea of the Monkey-man, any Monkey-man. So don't you go picking on inconsistencies.

DEDICATION: FROM A 'MADRASI' TO A 'CHAPRASI'

Yeah, a pride of Tamilians, but a pride of Tamilians is not all. The Tamilian race, according to my friend, is doomed to die in 'vain', for they are arrogant without a cause, he says. Ha!

It all started in that city where autowallahs were doomed to deal with blasphemous and barbaric North Indians, I mean Chennai, where my uncultured friends did not have the culture to learn Tamil to curse autowallahs in Tamil. They chose instead to f**** them and call them b******, when they refused to go for 40 rupees from college to our flat.

Well, more than on one occasion, the autowallah proved to be a match, so when S~ did the routine drama, one of these sports actually said, "Ennada Dadiya, fucka, enaku teriyadada, onga amma fucku, onga appa fucku, onga paramparaye fucku" And I refuse to translate that.

All this is just to say that the average Tamilian cannot be taken lightly. Take dear M~ for instance. One of our friends, A~ actually made the mistake of calling her a dowdy bitch. M~ being of a militant and fiery temperament, not to mention being a vintage Tamilian, was not one to take the slight in good humour. She wasted no time marching up to me, a trusted ally "A called me a dowdy bitch, we have got to do something about it."

Faltering under M's penetrating gaze, I said tremulously, "Like what?"
"Like putting up a poster about the intolerance of North Indians and their
stereotypes of Tams."

And M~looked so imposing in her new role, and something about her ciefl days shone so brightly in her eyes, I realised there was no stopping her. And I reflected, M being much loved and adored by teachers, I am safe if I gang up with her and a catfight, as Seinfeld puts it is always irresistible.

And so we 'girdled our loins and marched forth' once more to the lab, where we undertook to bring down the Northies to their knees, eeow, yuck, gross thought. It suited us of course that A~, the dubious muse of the poster was right there, awaiting M~ with masochistic pleasure.

Now I do not remember the holy contents of the poster, but some of the safe ones would be, "In spite of being a South Indian, you are actually pretty", "You actually look good in a sari". Apparently some of these, A~ was actually guilty of saying.

Of course with a project like this, you get ambitious, so I decided to do some mind reading, generally creep into the North Indian psyche, try and imagine what South-related xenophobia he was capable of. I suggested to M, how about, "Rasam is like fermented vomit"

Anyway, the poster came up finally, we had finished signing on it, when the cheap Northies had their revenge by exchanging stereotype for stereotype.

Even as one dastardly Northie distracted me by engaging me in a choice tirade about the worth of this Kshatriya clan, another scribbled rapidly on the same poster, “How does it matter if you are from Mumbai or from Delhi. You all speak bloody Hindi, that’s North Indian for you” and this Northie went as far as to attribute this quote to me.

And the same nauseating race of Northies, now indulges in sickening nostalgia about Chennai now that they are back home. Why don’t they admit it, they are in love with a higher culture, a superior state of being, a sublime race?

Note: It took great restraint on my part to not say Tambrahms all the while. But there were vested interests involved.

I quit day before yesterday. If that is not reason enough to get personal in my blog, I don't know what is. Fear not, this shan't be a rant, it shall instead be an outburst.

One of the last few stories I did involved me heading to T~, a good ole five star something that hosted pointless launches. Or worse, where the big corporate fish were 'doing their bit on CSR' where the champagne made you heady enough to say ridiculous things like you cared for children's education or that female foeticide was outrageous.

Ok, they did not serve champagne all the time and they did do sensible things once in a while, only not in T~. And that was not why I quit either, I mean why should I personally object to champagne, I mean there can be worse drinks like let's see the guy's drink, beer or for that matter whiskey (Quick aside/disclaimer: My friends tell me this, I mean how would I know, after all I am pure and puritanical Tambrahm. It matters not that I am saying this for the benefit of folks like my firebrand RSS cousin)

Well anyway, on one such occasion, popular Hindi, Tamil and Telugu actor, S~, who had embraced a marketing company's initiative to put children in school turned up at T~.

S~ being of a naturally bright, cheerful and eager temperament of course endorsed the product, only it wasn't a product..it was a cause. All that people had to do was to buy a pack of Gillette, Whisper, Tide, Henko, Pantene, Rejoice, Vicks VapoRub, and 50 paise of each product a consumer bought would go into putting a child in school.

I could not sit still and watch on as actor after actor testified to the cause-worthiness of it all. Ok, that wasn't entirely truthful. I wanted to feel liberated, a bit like the old me that loved being polemical and a bit much like the insolent A~ in ACJ that asked questions to offend.

So I drew myself to my full height, all of 5'6", and shot away, "Don't you think this is a facile way of supporting a cause? Don't you think the consumer you are celebrating is a pretty daft guy, who is not going to really notice that he is not doing anything noble. I mean 50 paise isn't really a good night's rest, is it?"

Now, like all vintage question-askers I was absolutely self-satisfied once I had done the needful and I didn't really notice what S~ said. I could see that he bristled suitably, and said something to the effect of there being many modes, and this was a mode no lesser, and that it was very harsh and unfair to use words like facile and the garb of corporate social responsibility.

He may have been right, the CSR mode is probably a respectful one, as a colleague painstakingly explained to me afterwards. As I said, it wasn't why I quit, but it was some kind of a trigger. I can't keep doing something I don't believe in. While I believe in the food they serve at T~, I don't trust them as hosts who eradicate child labour.
D.

PS: I have a confession to make. I didn't stay back to eat in T~ after that event. I instead went to a party at T something else where my friend was celebrating the delivery of her baby.