My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.
The WTF opening sentence of the day comes from a Rediff report:
According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) one married man commits suicide every nine minutes in India.
That sentence makes it sound as if marriage is the cause of these suicides, which is surely unjust to the 57,639 wives whose husbands offed themselves. Causation is often complex and not easy to pin down when it comes to suicide, and the following sentence would make quite as much sense: “According to Cricinfo, 13 married men have made scores of 250+ in Test cricket in the last 10 years.” Huh, no?
Given that life is a fatal disease, it’s not unnatural for some of us to want to get it over with quickly. Marriage, like most of what we seek in life, is a palliative. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it can’t cure nothin’, and it ain’t the cause.
I feel hugely sorry for this kid. In her world, it might be a huge deal to become “the youngest girl to ever write the Intermediate or plus two examination in Andhra Pradesh.” (She’s nine or ten; the article states both.) But the pressure on her must be immense, and such ‘achievements’ are not the stuff of life. She’s obviously enormously smart and talented, but I’m sure there’s much parental expectation pushing her, and that isn’t good. Childhood should be chilled out and as stress-free as possible.
Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it’s the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
I predict that any philosophical cow will consider its self-interest first. It might be in the interest of the species for cows to continue to be slaughtered, but it would certainly not be in the interest of this particular cow—so it would be against killing cows. Unless, of course, our philosophical cow is guaranteed immunity from slaughter, which its human overlords might well consider given how few cows tend to be philosophers. In that case our bovine thinker, freed from concerns about its own welfare, might well take the broader view.
Doesn’t this happen with humans as well? I know ‘intellectuals’ who rail against urbanisation and romanticise village life, while themselves living comfortably in cities. I know women who condone the way other women are treated in some cultures by resorting to moral relativism, while themselves enjoying their full human rights. (For instance...) It’s easy to pontificate about matters that don’t immediately concern us—and most pontification is exactly like that. Such it goes.
*
I can imagine a philosophical cow deep in thought near an unsuspecting farmer. Suddenly, the cow starts jumping up and down, shouting ‘Eureka, Eureka!’
‘What happened?’ says the farmer. ‘Why’re you so excited?’
‘I just formulated the Cowtegorical Imperative,’ says our philosophical cow.
‘That’s impossible,’ says the farmer. ‘You’re just a cow. You can’t do something like that. You can’t!’
‘That’s right,’ says the philosophical cow. ‘I Kant. But you can call me Immanuel.’
In his brilliant book, The Forever War, Dexter Filkins informs us that DBIED can stand for either Dog-Borne Improvised Explosive Device or Donkey-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. In a passage that I feel provides a perfect metaphor for the War on Terror, he writes:
In the fall of 2005 some marines discovered a donkey walking around Ramadi [in Iraq] with a suicide belt on. They didn’t want to kill it, of course, but every time they tried to get close enough to remove the suicide belt, the donkey scampered away. They they tried using a robot, one of those bomb-disposal things, which tried to waddle up to the donkey and defuse the payload, but the robot, too, kept scaring the donkey away. Finally the marines shot the donkey. It exploded.
The wonderful excerpt below from “Trail Fever” by Michael Lewis illustrates beautifully the nature of politics and public life. In it, Lewis recounts his experience of travelling with then-vice president Dan Quayle during the election campaign of 1992:
It wasn’t so much what Quayle had said that hooked me. It was what he had done—what the conventions of the campaign trail required him to do. Every few hours of every day, to take a tiny example, the vice president’s campaign plane, Air Force Two, came to rest on the tarmac of a military base on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, and Quayle appeared in the open door. He waved. It was not a natural gesture of greeting but a painfully enthusiastic window-washing motion. Like everyone else in America I had watched politicians do this on the evening news a thousand times. But I had always assumed there must be someone down below to wave at. Not so! Every few hours our vice president stood there at the top of the steps of Air Force Two waving to… nobody; waving, in fact, to a field in the middle distance over the heads of the cameramen, so that the people back home in their living rooms remained comfortably assured that a crowd had turned up to celebrate his arrival.
It is my case that most politics consists of waving to nobody. Someday, as the waving is going on, I’d love to see the cameras turn around and show the empty field. But nah, that won’t happen.
Just when you think the ultimate has happened, the absolute worst, something even more dire, comes along.
And yet. No matter how overwhelming the tragedy, how bleak the outlook, no matter what malevolent forces the fates see fit to hurl at this tiny, beleaguered, mountainous, sun-splashed portion of the planet, there is no quit in the Haitian people.
They rose up against the French and defeated the forces of Napoleon to become the only nation to grow out of a slave revolt. They rose up against the despotic Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and sent him packing. Despite ruthless exploitation by more powerful nations, including the United States, and many long years of crippling civil strife, corruption, terror and chronic poverty, the Haitian people have endured.
They will not be defeated by this earthquake.
The overwrought prose and dubious insight here is more suited to a schoolboy’s essay than an NYT column. No quit in the Haitian people? That sounds just like the patronising remarks about Mumbai’s ‘resilience’ after each terrorist attack that we go through. Mumbaikars went to work on 27/11 not because they were resilient or especially brave but because they had no choice. They continued commuting in trains after the train blasts of 2006 because of the same reason. From outside it might look brave, but here, we see it as just getting on with our lives. Is there an option?
The people of Haiti, I’d imagine, are like people everywhere else—they make do with what there is, and respond to circumstances as they arise. That is a human quality, not a Haitian one. There is no quit across the world.
*
And while on NYT columns, I’m increasingly surprised by the kind of writing Gail Collins gets away with. Writing about Scott Brown, the Republican candidate in the Massachusetts senate elections, she says:
When he was 22, he [Brown] won an “America’s Sexiest Man” contest, the prize for which was $1,000 and a chance to pose naked in a Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold. One of his daughters — this is perhaps the best-known factoid in the campaign — came in somewhere between 13th and 16th on “American Idol.”
“For our family, especially me being on ‘Idol’ but my dad being in politics, there are always so many people who have something negative to say,” Ayla Brown told The Boston Herald this week. Her talent was singing, not sentence construction.
Now, how crass is that last sentence? When she’s writing about politics in these polarised times, one can expect her to get snarky and personal about the candidate from the party she opposes. But his daughter? I can imagine a tabloid going there, but an NYT columnist should surely consider it out of bounds.
I wonder, if Herbert and Collins left the awesome platform of the NYT and started independent blogs, how many readers would they have? That would be the real test, and I’m sure they’d be resilient if it went wrong.
The WTF statement of the day is the warning given by Chandra Shekhar, a politician in Bhopal, to local shopkeepers:
Your mannequins should wear sarees, not underwear. From now on, keep all undergarments inside. Show it to the customer when he or she asks for it. Five days from now if undergarments are still hanging outside, we will light a bonfire of the lingerie.
Yes, the culture police is protesting against the public display of lingerie now. In a country in which there are so many serious issues to tackle, this is getting surreal. But why, it must be asked, are they doing this? Is there actually a constituency that approves of this kind of behaviour?
My answer: Yes, there is. We are a country that contains around half-a-billion sexually repressed men. Many of these dudes, who don’t get the kind of action they desire, resent anything that reminds them of this. Like lingerie on mannequins. Like advertisements for coffee-flavoured condoms (another target of these thugs). Like the ubiquitous bogeyman of ‘Western Culture.’
And where there is widespread resentment, there will be a political party tapping into it. Such it goes.
On a mailing list I’m part of, I came across this wonderful excerpt from a book called Thinkertoys:
Imagine a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the banana. As soon as he touches the stair, spray all the monkeys with ice-cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result - all the monkeys are sprayed with ice-cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and will want to climb the stairs. To his surprise, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.
Again, replace a third monkey with new one. The new one goes to the stairs and is attacked. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
After replacing the fourth and fifth monkeys with new ones, all the monkeys that have been sprayed with ice-cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been around here.
I have a feeling that this is the problem with Indian television programming and Indian newspapers. Hardly anyone thinks outside the box. And the box is old. There’s a great opportunity not being taken here because no one has courage and imagination. Pity.
The Sensex has just touched “a 23-month high.” This will, I have no doubt, make many investors feel bullish. And yet, that is an absolutely inappropriate response. If I had money in the stock market, I’d be bearish right now.
... is that ‘imho’ inevitably carries far more arrogance with it. When humility has to be claimed it is generally absent.
In a similar vein, there is ‘I don’t mean to interrupt but...’. Like, duh, if you don’t mean to interrupt—don’t.
Also, ‘With all due respect...’. That’s like a slap.
And, in the course of a TV discussion, calling another panelist an ‘azeez dost’. Dude, he may be ‘azeez’ if his name is Aziz, but there’s no fricking way that guy is a dost. You want him to die. You want to personally torture him using an iron maiden while blasting Himesh music into his eardrums.
A list of such casual semantic hypocrisies could no doubt fill an encyclopedia. And it’s apparent, even as we say what we do not mean, that we do not mean it. Then why say it?
Posted by Amit Varma on 24 December, 2009 in
Small thoughts
When Byculla girl Afasha Sheikh first met her fiancé Abdullah Sayed, it didn’t take her long to agree to the marriage. By all accounts Sayed was a good catch-he was young, with average if unexceptional looks and to boot, he was an NRI who worked with Emirates Airlines.
But the image of her groom unravelled-quite literally-on the wedding night. As Afasha, 25, waited with breathless anxiety turn to and anticipation, she saw her husband leisurely sit on the bed and proceed to take off his wig and then to her utter horror, his dentures.
Confronted with this metamorphosis, she did a quick transformation herself from coy bride to avenging angel: she packed her bags and then lodged a complaint against Sayed for cheating and impersonation.
This story seems incomplete to me. What should have happened is this: after Sayed takes off his dentures, Afasha should stand up, shocked, ready to storm out. Then Sayed says, through his toothless mouth, “Wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
He takes off one arm and puts it on the table. Then he takes of his legs and folds them away. Finally, with his only functioning limb, he removes his head and puts it on the bed. Then his head says:
“What are you so pissed about? From this whole damn planet, I picked you. You should be so proud.”
*
No, but really, this right here is the story of all relationships. We can never completely know another human being—and whenever we go into a relationship, we generally do so with an idealised version of this person in our heads. Our expectations are based, out of necessity, on a sort of fiction. And generally, as new facts come to light, we fit them into the narrative in our heads, and we get by. Most people, in terms of what their new romantic partners know about them, are far worse than bald and toothless. Afasha is shocked because these revelations came upon her so suddenly. Poor girl.
And also, stupid girl. Marriage is a huge commitment, and it’s foolish to get married without knowing your partner well enough. Would you buy a new car without taking it for a test drive? Isn’t marriage a far bigger deal than a new car? Does it make any damn sense to get married to someone without living with that person for a year or two first, giving it a spin to see if it can work?
Of course it doesn’t. But people do it nevertheless, and then expect others to feel sorry for them when it doesn’t work out. Such it goes.
Mahatma Gandhi’s use of this particular tactic might have sanctified it, but in my opinion, threatening to fast unto death until your demand is met is a crude form of blackmail. Take K Chandrasekhar Rao, for example, the president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, who recently announced that he would fast until he was given a separate Telengana state. In a democracy, there are constitutional ways to raise such issues—fasting unto death is just crude blackmail, and one that the state should not give in to. Rao was administered saline forcibly at a government hospital, an action that I consider a violation of his rights. If the man wants to fast unto death, let him fast unto death. It’s his life, his choice.
The TRS isn’t just about blackmail, of course—they’re also using standard political gundagardi. I find it delightfully ironical that after Rao broke his fast by having orange juice for health reasons, the “students who had attacked policemen and public and private property for two days to support Mr Rao did not take kindly to this sudden decision.” They might have suspected that Rao was not sufficiently dedicated to their cause, to which I’d respond that no politician is devoted to any cause other than himself. That’s human nature. Orange juice zindabad.
ToI has a report today on a former Miss Argentina who died “from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.” A close friend of hers remarked:
A woman who had everything lost her life to have a slightly firmer behind.
She could have used a stepmill instead, which I can attest does wonders for the butt. But really, whether we find Solange Magnano’s story poignant or absurd, most of us are no different. Every day, in a hundred ways, we give more importance to trivial things than they deserve. So the next time you’re stressed out about something, think of how insignificant that particular problem will seem to you ten years later—and chill.
Or find a stepmill.
(Link via email from my buddy with an iron posterior, Manish Vij.)
PTI reports on an interesting little controversy in Goa, where some police officers visited an offshore casino. This drew criticism, and Goa’s police chief BS Bassi duly defended his men:
Offshore casinos are not illegal here. What is the problem with police officers going to offshore casinos when they are not on duty? Many people go to temples, churches, on fishing trips…
As you’d expect, the religious loons jumped on Bassi, whose statement “drew strong criticism from officials of churches, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the main opposition BJP.”
“I was very much shocked to see the statement coming from a person who is supposed to be the guardian of law and order,” Father Francisco Caldeira, director of the Diocesan Centre for Social Communications Media of the archdiocese of Goa and Daman, said. “It is a blasphemous statement to compare casino with temples and churches.” He said that Bassi does not understand what religion is and what casino is.
I agree with Caldeira that comparing a casino to a temple or a church is pointless. But I come to that view from a different perspective.
Consider this: In a casino, a gambler looks at the odds available to him, figures out the amount of risk he is willing to take, and makes his investments accordingly. He takes his chances; and takes responsibility for the consequences. That is the stuff of life itself.
In a temple or a church or any other place of worship, on the other hand, the worshipper engages in an escapist fantasy, that there is a greater power out there that can solve his problems. He nurtures delusion and often avoids responsibility. He tries to evade the inescapable truths of the human condition: especially our mortality and ultimate helplessness. He is living a fantasy.
Which man would I trust more: the gambling man or the religious man? (FSM forbid they are the same man, for then he is truly fucked.) You know my answer.
*
On a tangent, not every game in a casino is a game of chance. Poker, for example, is a magnificent game of skill—even more so, in my opinion, than bridge. It requires not just a mathematical ability to work out odds and suchlike, but also the ability to read human nature. I was a competitive chess player in my youth, but I consider poker a far greater game. In chess, there is always a right answer, and it is always on the board in front of you. In poker, the variables that determine the right way to act are the people in the game with you, and not just the cards on the table. This makes it a far richer game than any I have played.
*
On another tangent, every decision we make in our lives is essentially a gamble. There is some risk involved, a subconscious weighing of odds, a decision taken. From an investment at the stock market to a real estate purchase to the decision to ask someone out on a date to taking the stairs instead of the elevator. There are different levels of risk attached to each of these, but fundamentally, whenever we make a choice, we are gambling. The world is a casino.
Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God, officials said on Tuesday.
Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state.
[...]
“Lord Jagannath has visited our village in the form of a turtle. We will not allow anybody to take the turtle away,” said Ramesh Mishra, a priest of the temple.
Ok, my question to you: What does the Jagannath Turtle have in common with Naxalism?
Answer: They are both indicators of the fucked-up lives of so many of the people of rural India. There is no development, there is little chance of upward mobility, there is often no law and order. Their lives are so screwed that they actually derive hope from a turtle that they think is Lord Jagannath. How sad is that?
And Naxalism is born in that same well of despair and anger.
Needless to say, the state of these people justifies neither Naxalism (or Maoism, or whatever you want to call it) or such stupid superstition. Anyone who resorts to the kind of violence the Maoists have taken up must be crushed. Equally, a belief that a turtle is a reincarnation of a deity should be given no respect whatsoever. (Leave the turtle aside, anyone who believes in a deity to begin with… never mind.)
But while we crush the Naxalites and go WTF over the turtle worship, it makes sense to remember why people give in to such madness. It is because of how abject their lives are. And if we don’t sort that out, we’ll have more batches of Naxalites after this one is dealt with, and more turtle gods. (A leech deity makes much more symbolic sense, actually.) There’s no point boasting of our ‘soft power’ and our IT revolution while 60% of the population survives on agriculture. (The figure in developed countries is around 5%.) It’s like showing off a gym-toned body with much muscle while there’s a cancer in the liver and a farm of worms in the intestines. That’s fool’s vanity.
I am not a fan of Ayn Rand’s work: Her prose is mediocre and her novels are cheesy. Even though I agree with many of her beliefs, that is neither here nor there, as they weren’t original to her, and the brand of classical liberalism (or minarchist libertarianism) I believe in took off at least a century earlier than her. So I am never quick to defend Rand when she is being criticized. I’ll make an exception, though, for a recent piece on her in The New York Times by Adam Kirsch.
In his piece, a review of a biography by Anne C Heller, Kirsch relates how Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House, wanted to edit out Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged. Rand refused. Then:
Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. [...]
Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre.
This is a strange comment, and I have two points to make:
One: Rand might well have agreed to the chop on commercial considerations alone. She might have calculated that the book would sell more copies if it included the speech, and that the extra royalties from those extra sales might offset the 7 cents per copy that she gave up.
Two: “Genuine capitalists” would look to serving their self interest as much as possible. But they need not view this in purely monetary terms. Rand might have placed a higher value on spreading her ideas in the world than on merely making money. It would then be entirely rational for her to accept a notional monetary loss for the sake of keeping a speech that many of her supporters today regard very highly. This is entirely consistent with being a capitalist.
The deal between Rand and Cerf was one between two private parties that involved no coercion. Both of them got what they wanted. It might even have ended in a double ‘thank you’ moment. How on earth could it non-capitalistic?
*
On a personal note, I regard myself as a capitalist as well. And pretty much all the important decisions I’ve made in the last few years have reduced my income vastly. First, I opted to give up a senior job in journalism to become a freelancer; and then, I opted to give up freelancing to focus on writing novels. In the short run, this has decimated my bank balance. And yet, I have no regrets over these decisions—and they are not noble in any way. They arise out of sheer self-interest. I’m a greedy capitalist pig.
But Heller and Kirsch would probably think otherwise.
Ashok Malik writes in The Hindustan Times that the BJP has hurt itself by chasing “straightforward capital gains” in a few states. He is right—but this is true of all parties in all states. People join the pursuit of power because they want the spoils of power. I would wager that not a single prominent politician in the country today gives a damn about public service.
This is not a problem by itself. We are all driven by self-interest, and that’s worked well for us. Human progress is based on individuals serving the needs of others for their own profit. In politics, this would work just fine if we held our politicians accountable for not serving us.
Sadly, in India we have retained the feudal mindset that our governments are there to rule us, not to serve us. With our apathy, we allow them to loot us—for their capital gains are really our capital to begin with. Our political parties are nothing more than competing mafia clans. If the BJP is down right now, it’s not because they are crooked, but because they’re not as smart as the other crooked players in the game. Such it goes.
The wonderful thing about our epics is how open-source they are. Over the centuries, people have been free to remix them and interpret them as they like. Indeed, Hinduism itself has been open-source, to the extent that you can be an atheist and still be a Hindu. Pwnage, no?
Sadly, in recent times, pseudo-fundamentalist forces have tried to reshape Hinduism as a static, puritanical religion—the same kind of people who protest at Paley’s film, and who object to all kinds of things in the name of Hinduism. They have been strident and militant, and their claims to standing for Hinduism are taken more and more seriously because the counter-claims are too muted. Indeed, the finest counter to the likes of the BJP and the RSS is perhaps not from a standpoint of liberalism or secularism or anything like that, but from a standpoint of Hinduism itself. The intolerance of Hindutva is anti-Hindu—that is a potent case to make, because it strikes at their very raison d’etre.
Having said that, if recent election results are anything to go by, most people get that intuitively anyway.
If you’re in the mood for action-packed, pulpy writing, I offer you the following extract from The Iliad by Homer:
But the Argives rose in grief to avenge that boast—skilled Peneleos most of all. He charged Acamas—Acamas could not stand the attack, he ran—and Peneleos stabbed at Ilioneus instead, a son of the Herdsman Phorbas rich in flocks, Hermes’ favourite Trojan: Hermes gave him wealth but Ilioneus’s mother gave him just one son… the one Peneleos lanced out beneath the brows, down to the eyes’ roots and scooped an eyeball out—the spear cut clean through the socket, out behind the nape and backward down he sat, both hands stretched wide as Peneleos, quickly drawing his whetted sword, hacked him square in the neck and lopped his head and down on the ground it tumbled, helmet and all. But the big spear’s point still stuck in the eye socket—hoisting the head high like a poppy-head on the shaft he flourished it in the eyes of all the Trojans…
This is from the Robert Fagles translation. Homer, I submit, was the Eli Roth of his time—just as William Shakespeare was the David Dhawan of his time. Classic-schmlassic, it’s just fun to read these guys!
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’
-- Quentin Tarantino
It’s the same with books and writing, I’d say. You learn first by reading for pleasure—and then by writing. I’m not sure what you could learn in a classroom.
I am the most courteous man in the world. I pride myself on never once having been rude, in this land full of the most unutterable scoundrels, who will come and sit down next to you and tell you their woes and even declaim their poetry to you.
For those lacking the patience for such courtesies, I have the following advice: Tell your tormentor to go start a blog. The internet is the finest refuge for unutterable scoundrels.
Here’s the difference between a backward country and a developed country. In a backward country, kids skip meals because they don’t have a choice. In a developed country, kids skip meals out of choice.
India, for what it’s worth, is both these countries. Just yesterday, a friend was telling me about how weight-conscious his school-going niece has become because of peer pressure. Their maidservant’s kid, I could bet, is the weight she aspires to be—by default. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
Reuters has a story on how a zoo in Gaza painted black stripes on a couple of white donkeys and passed them off as zebras. The kids who came to the zoo were reportedly delighted. The other donkeys no doubt went WTF.
And the thought that struck me as I read this news: What a delightful metaphor for media hype.
You have been quoted today as saying that you don’t believe in caste. Bravo. That is a position I applaud.
May I then assume that you don’t believe in reservations also? After all, by discriminating on the basis of caste, reservations perpetuate the same kind of divisive thinking that the caste system did. They don’t solve the problem—they make it worse.
Oh boy, this Supreme Court judgment, excerpted on his blog by Imam Wapsoro, is masterful. Presenting Phul Singh vs State of Haryana, AIR 1980 SC 249:
A philanderer of 22, appellant Phul Singh, overpowered by sex stress in excess, hoisted himself into his cousin’s house next door, and in broad day-light, overpowered the temptingly lonely prosecutrix of twenty four, Pushpa, raped her in hurried heat and made an urgent exit having fulfilled his erotic sortie.
[...]
A hyper-sexed homo sapiens cannot be habilitated by humiliating or harsh treatment, but that is precisely the perversion of unreformed Jail Justice which some criminologists have described as the crime of punishment.
It may be marginally extenuatory to mention that modern Indian conditions are drifting into societal permissiveness on the carnal front promoting proneness to pornos in life, what with libidinous ‘brahmacharis’, womanising public men, lascivious dating and mating by unwed students, sex explosion in celluloid and book stalls and corrupt morals reaching a new ‘high’ in high places. The unconvicted deviants in society are demoralisingly large and the State has, as yet, no convincing national policy on female flesh and sex sanity. We hope, at this belated hour, the Central Government will defend Indian Womanhood by stamping out voluptuous meat markets by merciless criminal action.
The gentleman who wrote this is Justice Krishna Iyer. One can only assume that he proposed to his wife in some other language. Or maybe he spoke like this, and she went, Enough, enough, I’ll marry you, but please don’t go on and on in English. You libidinous brahmachari, you!
*
The larger issue here is why Justice Iyer waxed so purplacious. I blame colonialism. Even after the Brits left, English remained a marker of class in India. The better your English, the more highly you were regarded (even by yourself). This led to a tendency of showing off how fluent you were in the language, and from there, to this kind of overkill. For Justice Iyer, the language he used was as much a signal as a tool: It signalled his sophistication and his class. Or so the poor fellow thought.
I believe this is also partly responsible for why style overwhelms content in so much Indian writing in English. As kids, we’re too used to parents and teachers and peers telling us, Wow, this is so well-written, your English is so good. (As opposed to Wow, your narrative was compelling, I lost myself in the story, I couldn’t put it down.) So they end up giving more importance to the language they use rather than the narrative they’re building, while the former should really be slave to the latter. Pity.
And we also see this a lot in our local trains. Two random people will be arguing over something, and then one of them will break into bad English, as if to say, I"m superior to you, I know English. You lout! And then the other guy will say something to the effect of Hey, I know English too. Only you can speak or what? Bastard! And so on.
I’d like to see Justice Iyer get into one those local train fights, actually…
I don’t know about advice, but I would ask aspirants to join advertising only if they were truly interested in people. Because that is what it’s all about. I see too many people who are too self-centered, too wrapped up in their own world in advertising today. It’s not about a great felicity with words or magic with visuals at all. It’s about being interested in what the peon who brings your tea dreams about. Ask yourself, do you really care about the fantasies of a housewife who does not have a life so the others in her family can? Do you know what a rainbow tastes like to a little street child? Do you really understand what a cell-phone means to an illiterate woman in Balia whose husband works as a vegetable vendor in Mumbai? If you don’t give a damn, please stay away from advertising. Write a book, paint a masterpiece, make a movie that wins at every international festival, but DO NOT join advertising.
I’d modify that a bit and say that in my opinion, this advice holds true for literature and cinema as well. So if you don’t care what the peon dreams, don’t write a book or make a film either. You can go paint a masterpiece, though.
And really, speaking about writing, there are too many books written these days by writers who stick their heads up their own arseholes and describe what they see. That reflects in their sales as well—who besides friends and family can tolerate the view up there? A little less self-indulgence, and some looking around at the fascinating world around them, would help.
And no, duh, do you really expect me to take names here? I’m not getting into no lit controversy, ever!
He was a brawler and a courtier, a duelist and a conciliator, a warrior and a lover, a hothead and a cool calculator. Five summers ago, when I started reading deeply in the life of Andrew Jackson, I was struck by a seeming contradiction: he was at once the most remote of heroes and the most modern of men. He was the first truly self-made man to rise to the White House, the architect of the presidency as we know it and champion of democracy in an age of elites. Scarred and bloodied, wounded physically and emotionally, he carried two (that’s right, two) bullets in his body for much of his life; wracked by pain, he nevertheless persevered, enduring much in order to make America work for the good of the many. He was a candidate of change, and his White House—riven by passion, sexual scandal, political intrigue and fears of secession—was the first we would recognize as a presidency in action. But I should not have thought Jackson ’s complexities surprising: America is complex, too, and he was the consummate American. Not to be too grand about it, but if you want to understand America , you have to understand Andrew Jackson.
So here is my question to you—about whom could we say the following words?
India is complex, too, and X was the consummate Indian. Not to be too grand about it, but if you want to understand India, you have to understand X.
Well, yes, India is too varied for anyone to be a “consummate Indian”—but who comes closest? In my view, it isn’t Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi, LK Advani or Prakash Karat, even Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi. Instead, I’d say the two politicians who come the closest are Mayawati and Narendra Modi.
IU readers know the contempt I hold both leaders in (most Indian politicians, in fact, but these two especially), but Mayawati and Modi embody the attitudes and aspirations of millions. They are both genuine grassroots leaders, and they’re chief ministers of their states because millions of people see in them the kind of India they want. Neither of them is a “consummate Indian”, for they are too divisive for that, but if you want to understand the India of 2009, you have to understand Mayawati and Modi.
You can’t say that about Sonia or Manmohan.
And to state the obvious, this post is not an endorsement, it is a lament.
This is a bizarre controversy. A couple of days ago, in response to a question about whether he would be travelling economy class, Shashi Tharoor tweeted:
… absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!
It’s always nice to see a minister be light-hearted. Sadly, his party isn’t. He’s been rapped on the knuckles for this act, and the party spokesman, Jayanti Natarajan, said:
We totally condemn it (Tharoor’s comments). The statement is not in sync with our political culture. His remarks are not acceptable given the sensitivity of all Indians.
Certainly the party does not endorse it. It is absolutely insensitive. We find it unacceptable and totally insensitive.
We do not approve of this articulation. Thousands of people travel in economy class.
Firstly, the lady desperately needs a thesaurus. She is being insensitive to her readers/listeners by going on and on about ‘sensivity’ and how ‘insensitive’ it all is. Once was enough, no?
Secondly, her party needs a dictionary. The term ‘cattle class’ has not been coined by Tharoor, but is a commonly used term for economy class. If it is derogatory to anyone, it is to the airlines that give their customers so little space, and not to the customers themselves. So whose sensitivity are we talking about here? Air India and Jet?
I’m a bit bemused, actually, by what the Congress is up to these days. An austerity drive means nothing when the government continues wasting our taxes on the scale it is. And berating someone for using the term ‘cattle class’ is needlessly sanctimonious when, after six decades of mostly Congress governance, we have hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford the basic necessities of life. Hell, most people in this country live cattle-class. And here we have the Congress strutting around and talking the talk.
Oh, and showing rare unity in WTFness, the BJP’s also condemned Tharoor’s tweet. Is there not one political party in this country that understands English and can take a joke?
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On another note, Times Now has asked me to appear on their show, “Newshour”, to chat about this topic. It’s supposed to be tonight, and while the show runs from 9pm to 10pm, I’m told this segment starts at 9.30. They said it’s titled “A Tweet Too Far”, and if they imply that Tharoor should not be tweeting, I will defend him with as much gusto as I can manage. We all ask for transparency in government, and here you have a minister who’s actually in direct contact with so many of his countrymen, and everyone’s getting all het up. If I was in the Congress, I’d recognise this as a good thing, and encourage more of my ministers to go online. Anyway, such it goes.
It’s a tabloid dream, this one. A taxi driver in Mumbai was caught doing zabardasti with a bitch, and duly arrested. In the masterful clip below, a Mid Day reporter asks a bemused policeman the details of the case. Her theory—he must have been missing his wife. Immensely WTF, all of it:
And here’s another clip where the lady who chased and caught the alleged rapist enthusiastically gives details of what she witnessed. Note the dog barking in the background.
And here’s a Punjab Kesari report of it, in which the policeman with the culprit seems to be doing strange things to his nostril. Or is he thinking of the dude who once had section 377 slapped on him because he copulated with a buffalo’s nostril?
On a more serious note, the question here, of whether the guy’s act should be a crime, depends on what rights you’re willing to grant a dog. (And how you ascertain its volition, for that matter.) There’s this famous ethics thought experiment where a guy buys a live chicken, takes it home, copulates with it, and then kills it, cleans it and eats it. Sure, it’s yucky—but is it immoral? If killing the chicken and eating it is acceptable, you have already stripped the chicken of any rights—so why should that other thing matter?
One easy answer in this case is that if the dog in question belonged to someone else, then the rapist was infringing on that person’s property rights. But what if the dog had belonged to the rapist? Building the grounds for prosecuting him would then lead us into pretty thorny philosophical terrain.
I don’t think Mid Day would be too concerned about that, though. The dude was missing his wife, and that’s that.
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Update: I just came across this fine quote by Charles de Gaulle: “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”
South Africa reacted angrily on Friday to a report that tests on its world champion runner Caster Semenya had found she was a hermaphrodite, threatening a “third world war” over the affair.
Athletics’ governing body declined to confirm the report in Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, which said the 18-year-old runner had both male and female sexual characteristics.
The IAAF said medical experts were examining the results of gender tests on Semenya, who won the women’s 800 metres at last month’s World Championships in Berlin. No decision would be taken until late November.
“I think it would be the third world war. We will go to the highest levels in contesting such a decision. I think it would be totally unfair and totally unjust,” said Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile.
That’s totally the wrong choice of words, and I bet the Taliban dudes are scratching their heads wondering who this new player in the game is. ‘We fight the West for so long,’ I can imagine Wali-ur-Rehman telling Hakimullah Mehsud, ‘and South Africa is in the news for threatening the third world war. WTF?’
‘I know what we can do,’ says Hakimullah Mehsud. ‘Let’s turn you into a woman, and when those filthy Americans question your gender, we’ll also declare a third world war. He he he.’
‘You insult me, fool,’ roars Wali-ur-Rehman, ‘and for this you must die.’
No, but really, the issue at the heart of this is quite complex. Reportedly, “tests had found Semenya had no womb or ovaries, but that she had internal testes, the male sexual organs which produce testosterone, and her levels of the hormone were three times that of a ‘normal’ female.” This led Pierre Weiss, the secretary-general of the International Association of Athletics Federations, to say:
It is clear that she is a woman but maybe not 100 percent.
This brings up the thorny philosophical question of what makes a woman a woman. Do you have to have a womb? Is there a level of testosterone you cannot go over? Do men have to find you inexplicable? What is the meaning of a conclusion that someone is “maybe not 100 percent” as a woman? What’s the pass percentage?
And ya, sure, these peculiarities do give Semenya an advantage over fellow athletes—but there is no level playing field in sports anyway. Top sportspeople are often physically abnormal in some way or the other: Lance Armstrong’s heart is one-third larger than normal, for example, and his his aerobic capacity is twice that of a normal human. So is he more than 100 percent man, and therefore at an unfair advantage? If you start barring sportspeople for biological advantages they are born with, you’d cut down on a lot of the excellence and thrill of sport.
Anyway, I don’t care one way or another about the Semenya controversy. As long as Barack Obama doesn’t shift his troops from Afghanistan to South Africa, I’m okay.
A research has found that sharing a bed often led to poor quality sleep as people were regularly disturbed by their loved ones during the night.
Speaking at a special seminar on sleep at the British Science Festival, Dr Neil Stanley, a sleep expert at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, said: “A normal double bed is 4ft 6inches wide. That means you have up to nine inches less per person in a double bed than a child has in a single bed.
“Add to this another person who kicks, punches, snores and gets up to go to the loo and is it any wonder that we are not getting a good night’s sleep?”
So if you and your partner spend 8 hours sleeping, it could be argued that you spend one-third of your life kicking and punching the other person, and snoring to keep them awake. And obviously they’re then irritable through the day, especially in office, where they punch and kick their colleagues, and snore when their boss is giving them a lecture. So they lose their jobs, become alcoholics, and one day, in a drunken brawl at the bar, break a bottle over a rowdy’s head, who promptly dies of choking on the biscuit they were chewing just at that time. Your partner goes to jail, and finally, finally, you’re sleeping well again. But maybe you shouldn’t have fallen in love in the first place?
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I like the bit in the piece where the researcher says, “No one can share your sleep.” So true. You can share everything else with the one you love, but for better or worse, your dreams are your own. You sleep alone; and you die alone. All that companionship is like light in the darkness—and always the light must go off.
There’s a Facebook status message meme going around that goes like this:
[Your name here] thinks that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status.
This is about as useful as candlelight vigils and online petitions. I could just as easily come up with a status message meme that goes thus:
[Your name here] thinks that no one should die or be poor, and no one should feel sad or lonely. If you agree, please post this as your status.
You get the drift. No doubt all these things are desirable, but stating that is kind of obvious. The big question is, how are these things to be achieved? In answering that, hazaar thorny issues crop up, and no one solution is a panacea. (Some, in fact, run counter to one another.) All that a Facebook status message of this sort does is help you make a statement about yourself. So why not simply put up a message that says:
[your name here] is a kind and compassionate person, and you should be impressed by that.
There. Cut to the chase!
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On a personal note, a friend SMSed today in great concern, asking if all was well with me. Apparently he saw an unusual lack of activity on India Uncut, and got worried. Well, yes, I’ve been immensely lax recently, but I’m back now, and intend to be regular. I promise. Smile now. Say cheese. Who’s a good reader now, bolly wolly golly?
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Update (sep 5): Sriram Gopalan writes in to share his FB status message:
I am an evil, evil person who thinks poor people should die without healthcare, so that the rest of us can harvest their organs. If you agree, please make this your status for the rest of the day.
India can’t get enough of Rakhi Sawant. After the swayamwar where she found herself a fiancee, she is now going to simulate being a parent on a reality show. Along with her man, Elesh Parujanwala, who was named by a Canadian Bong after his favourite fish, she is taking part in a show in which five celeb couples will spend time bringing up borrowed children on television. Check out this snippet from the news item:
Rakhi and the audience may be used to her infamous low-cut blouses, but obviously, the bachchas aren’t. And, as a source present at the launch of the programme told us, one baby couldn’t help but explore the territory! Embarrassing? You bet!
If the kid becomes a techie when he grows up, he’ll at least have prior work experience in silicon valley. And think of the TRPs of the show now, as millions of Indians tune in to live vicariously through a baby’s exploration.
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Ribald jokes apart, this is one reality show concept that I find appalling. Are the parents of these kids actually renting their babies out? Other reality shows feature adults being placed in situations of their own volition—but babies? How could someone do that?
Parenthood is a massive responsibility, and it’s irresponsible to become a parent if you can’t live up to that. I see too many parents around me who are simply not ready for that role, who have unfairly screwed with their kids by bringing them on the planet. This is a fine illustration of that.
Here’s Peter Roebuck talking about the three stages of a cricketer’s development—but I believe it also applies to writers:
It begins with natural ability that takes a fellow as far as it can. Then comes a period of introspection in which the complications of the game are encountered and, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved. Finally the player reaches the final stage of a hazardous journey, beyond complexity, towards full understanding. This third stage is called simplicity, but it is profundity.
The thing is, with a cricketer, it is easy to tell which stage he is at, with little scope of self-delusion. Phil Hughes and Mitchell Johnson know, from their results on the cricket field, that they need to work out a few things. But writing is a subjective matter, and many writers may not know when there are problems with their game. As a result, they’ll never then do the necessary introspection and hard work needed to take them to the next level. That is why, the most important quality for a writer is surely humility—writers must be brutal critics of their own work, and must ruthlessly employ what Ernest Hemingway called “a built-in bullshit detector.”
On the flip side, that often erodes self-belief. It’s a thin line.
Over at The New York Times, I find that Jose Saramago’s coming out with a new novel, based on “the real-life epic journey of an Indian elephant from Lisbon to Vienna in the 16th century.”
I’m a fan, so I can’t wait. And on that note, I read a fine piece by David Brooks today on a subject that seems rather Saramagoesque. It’s based on a question asked by a commenter over at Marginal Revolution: “What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?”
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Saramago’s themes still seem fantastic to us, but other fiction writers have to confront the relative bizarreness of reality itself. As Philip Roth wrote in 1961:
The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
That’s true of India certainly—and it means that writers here really can’t complain. They’re surrounded by fascinating stories, and it’s up to them to catch them from the ether and turn them into print.
Sach Ka Saamna is the recently started Hindi version of The Moment of Truth, and is riveting once you start watching it—even if it does overlap with that other reality show, Is Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao. So what problem do our politicians have with it? Well, Kamal Akhtar, a Samajwadi Party MP, doesn’t like it that “obscene questions are asked by the anchor of the programme.”
“The host asked a woman in the presence of her husband if she would have physical contacts with another person to which she said no,” he said. “But her polygraph test said the answer was wrong. What kind of impression would it have created?” He sought a complete ban on the show.
I don’t get it—on whose behalf is Akhtar complaining? The participants of the show take part in full knowledge of the risks they incur, and that’s a choice for them to make. As for viewers, well, Akhtar is being hugely condescending when he assumes that we impressionable folks will be swayed by the show into infidelity, or suchlike. Listen, we already know what the world is like; we already know what human beings are like; we understand our urges, and know the consequences of giving in to them. Akhtar may want to foist a fantasy world upon us where nobody has anything to hide and everybody speaks only the truth—but that world does not exist, and is faker than the fakest Ekta Kapoor serial.
If anything, Sach Ka Saamna drives home the truth that most human relations contain some element of deception. In a viscerally direct way, it reveals the human condition. That can only help us become better human beings—to begin with, it might make us a little less sanctimonious.
That’s a matter of opinion, of course. Some people may hate the show, and are entitled to do so. But that is where the matter should end—not in calls for a ban. If Akhtar is so disturbed by Sach Ka Saamna, I have a suggestion for him—change the channel.
Or actually, no. He might then catch Is Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao and demand a ban on that because it reminds him of parliament.
There’s an old saying that journalism is history’s first draft, so for all you journalists reading this, I offer these words by Milan Kundera:
… this is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
Spot on—and this is why I think one of the most important qualities of a historian or a serious journalist is humility: know that the truth is always more complex than it seems, cast aside all preconceived notions, and then do the best you can.
The above excerpt, by the way, is from The Curtain.
The video below is surely the most inspired Michael Jackson tribute ever. Goodness me.
Mr Chaudhry has also performed an English version of “Beat It”, as well as many, many other songs. The first I heard of him was when a reader named Catfish forwarded me his rendition of Avril Lavigne’s “Skater Boy” a few months ago. The nonchalant matter-of-factness at the start is superb, isn’t it?
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The reason I didn’t blog about his marvellous videos when I first discovered them was that it seemed cruel. Here’s a man, in perfect good faith, uploading videos of himself singing karaoke, something that most of us would never have the guts to do; and here we all are, watching and laughing. I’ve always found those early episodes of Indian Idol and American Idol rather cruel for how they make fun of those horrendously bad singers in the early auditions. Sure, we can joke about how it’s their choice to put themselves out there, and tut-tut their self-delusions. But I would contend that we’re all self-deluded in different ways—most of our delusions stay private, so lucky us.
I finally decided to embed this video because I find Mr Chaudhry immensely endearing, and I’m sure most of you would agree. And besides being a likable old man, he’s also putting himself out there, ineptly and awkwardly trying to make the best of what he’s got. Isn’t that true of most of us?
Talking to friends about the rape allegations against Shiney Ahuja, I find many of them surprised not because Ahuja allegedly raped someone, but because the victim was his maid. This is a class thing here; had he raped a Bollywood starlet who went to night clubs in mini skirts, it would have been explicable, but his maid? What was he thinking?
So rationally they condemn the act, but instinctively they’re baffled about his choice of victim. Is their reaction of WTF itself WTF?
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I have been endlessly refreshing this news item on the case over the last couple of days. It is not because the page is being updated by Rediff’s staffers or something, but because each new batch of comments is remarkable. If our country’s average IQ is 100, there must be some seriously smart outliers making up for the commenters you find on Rediff. My favourite in that series is this one, but open any article and browse the comments, and you find gems.
Malayalam writers are in the enviable position of writing for Adiga’s rickshaw puller and not just about him.
‘Enviable’ is exactly the right word there. Indian writers in English don’t have access to that rickshaw puller as a reader—quite apart from the fact that most of us wouldn’t have the ability to make it worth his while even if he read in English. By virtue of the language we write in, our readerships in our own country are constrained. At the same time, of course, it is easier for us to reach out to a global audience—though I wish some of our writers didn’t pander only to them.
As long as India in all its mad and magnificent diversity is available to me as subject matter, I can live with the fact that my possible readership is just a small fraction of my countrymen. If she can’t be my lover, I’ll make her my muse.
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While on Koshy, her debut collection of short stories, If It Is Sweet, is out in the market. I’ve only read one story so far from the collection, “The Good Mother”, and I was blown away by it. Right at that masterful first paragraph, you know this woman can write. I can’t wait to get at the rest of the book.
Local government officials in China have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of cigarettes in a move to boost the local economy during the global financial crisis.
The edict, issued by officials in Hubei province in central China, threatens to fine officials who “fail to meet their targets” or are caught smoking rival brands manufactured in neighbouring provinces.
Even local schools have been issued with a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to purchase 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials, according to the local government’s website.
Yes, that’s The Telegraph, not The Onion. Reality is reinvented as farce. The thing is, this is no less absurd than any protectionist measure. Think of any subsidy or tariff, and at its heart it amounts to forced cigarette smoking. We don’t laugh about most of that, though.
(Link via email from Aniket Thakur.)
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I couldn’t help but remember Frédéric Bastiat when I read that news, so here’s a reminder that the Bastiat Prize, which I won in 2007, is now open for submissions for 2009. They have an additional prize for online journalism from this year, so all ye freedom-loving bloggers, go forth and enter.
Taking a dig at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi has said that he ‘has never seen a weak Sikh.’
Wooing Sikhs who form the majority in Punjab, Gandhi lashed out at the BJP for calling the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ‘as weak.’
‘They call our prime minister weak, the lion of Punjab, who has earned a name to the country in the world. I have not seen a weak Sikh in my life,’ Gandhi told an election rally at Barnala.
Now, I admire Manmohan Singh, and I agree that he is an upright man, and certainly not a weak prime minister. But isn’t Gandhi insulting the intelligence of the people at the rally with his talk of never having seen a weak Sikh?
There are two ways in which his speech could work. 1, it could piss off the audience with its patronising tone and silly generalisation. 2, it could please them, make them swell their chests with pride, and cause them to like Gandhi even more than they already did.
So how mature do you think our democracy is?
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And tell me, is there really a significant difference in silliness between these two generalisations: 1] All Sikhs are strong. 2] All Muslims are terrorists.
The latter is obviously more odious. But in logical terms, leaving aside intent and context, is there a difference?
Posted by Amit Varma on 18 March, 2010 in
News |
Small thoughts |
WTF
