SPINE

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Heretics...

...are enormously valuable. They help society tack before we hit the rocks.

So writes journalist William Saletan while reviewing Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind (in the March 25 NY Times' Sunday Book Review).

I agree. Currently I am re visiting the Beat poets and I think that the "counter-culture" heretics. They were and are still valuable as critics of American consumerism.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Good Writers Shine the Brightest Light on Literature

I like it when writers speak about literature. I like it because I learn.

An example: Upon asked what motivated her to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter through the prism of money in a New Yorker short fiction, Appreciation, writer Rivka Galchen traces the motive back to her fondness for 19th century literature. And "the best shorthand for plot in those novels is just to follow the money."

Galchen says more:
Money is the prime mover [in 19th century literature]; it explains near on everything. But only near on. Sometimes it seems to fail as an explanation, to fall down into being just a description.
Money, according to Galchen, fails to explain the motives of a character like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth:
She frustrates us because she doesn’t do what it would seem money as the prime mover dictates she should do; she seems to be made of a substance that suggests a need for a new physics.
Lily Bart illuminated!

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Manic Maids

Jean Genet's The Maids is an eerie play.

Genet wrote the play in 1947.

The play is being currently staged on Broadway (at the Red Bull Theatre) and an apt one-line teaser for the play goes thus: "When the Madam's away, the maids play..."

And what a play the maids play! The description of Genet's play-within-the-play is as follows:

Claire and Solange are maids, sick to the gullet of being scuffed under the heels of their lady mistress. In a twisted evening of power-shifting role play, the two girls bite and scratch at one another in a vicious struggle to the top – a ritualistic tug-of-war which must finally end in silence or in sacrifice.
A turbulent exploration of the games we play, this classic French play was written by Jean Genet, a controversial figure whose work was subsequently banned in Australia and elsewhere around the world. Considered by many to be his finest and most monstrous creations, Genet’s naughty maids allow him to aim the barrel at class, criminality, sex and power.

The ritualistic game that the maids of the upper-class French socialite play, allow the humiliated and the subordinated of society to exorcise the ghosts of these burdens. The exorcism rituals are reminiscent of the "games" slaves used to play, especially in Francophone colonies of the Caribbean Island, like Haiti. The slaves, it is said, would suffer abjection throughout the day and at night, the off-duty servants would role-play. Some would play masters while others would play the slaves and the former would subject the latter to the horrors that they themselves would be subjected to in real life. This was a survival kit for the slaves. Pent-up anger and a pervasive sense of powerlessness is best expended in play.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Sons and Fathers

I am now wondering which one of these two films I should see first: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Clear, based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Kid With a Bike, a French film directed by the Dardenne brothers.

Both seem to be about a similar quest--a boy's search for his father. In Extremely Loud, the boy's pursuit is that of a figment of a paternal figure who has been blown away by the 9/11 explosion. The son takes time for the truth of the father's sudden demise to sink in, and the movie, I hear, is about his frantic movements through Manhattan, aboard his skateboard. 

The Kid is about a boy whose father is living but refuses to take care of him and so he puts him in the hands of kind strangers. The boy does not believe this; he thinks his father is momentarily away on business and one day will come to collect him and father and son would live happily ever after. He rides frantically on his bike, as though he is trying to run away from something into something else--better. During one of his helter skelter movements through the town he collides with a young woman in a hospital. As he collides, he clings to her, perhaps to steady himself. Hospital wardens try to peel off the boy from the woman, but, surprisingly the woman says to the boy, "You can hold me [...] but not so tight." Thus begins a saga of an interweaving of the boy's and the woman's lives.

The interweaving is complex and according to some reviews I've read, unsentimentally rendered. I am almost certain that the American film is loaded with juicy sentimentality. I think, I'd like to see the French film first.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Thin Places

Ethnographer James Clifford talks about "thick description." He urges travel writers to immerse themselves in the details of a place they visit, such that the place becomes visible to readers, just the way it is, instead of becoming a place that is largely a projection of the observer's mind.

Upon reading Clifford's "thick description" of a Balinese cockfight, one gets a sense of what he is saying: the details with which the famous Balinese sport--a local obsession in Bali--is registered, often makes the reader go dizzy, but the totality of the picture that emerges could be a more or less an authentic picture of Bali.

However, wonderful Clifford's advice is, would a thin place merit a thick description?

I don't think so, especially in context of how travel writer Eric Weiner defines a thin place:

It isn't a place inhabited by skinny people, like Chile and Los Angeles. Yet the perch atop the valley of L.A. from which the sparkle of Hollywood's tinsel town is visible, could constitute a thin place. Then again, Hollywood itself might turn out to be a thick place, or depending on what kinds of sights, sounds and smells have that transformative effect on you, Hollywood could very well be your thin place.

According to Weiner, the particularity of a visitor's experience of a place could make it into a thin place.

Despite the subjectivity of it all, a generic definition of a thin place is offered: 

They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever [...]Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

But one can't generalize, warns Weiner. Thin places needn't be conventionally beautiful, clean, tranquil, or fun places, thus neither the various Disney Worlds nor Cancun qualify for the status of a thin place.

Though think places, being evocative of something transcendental, could be sacred places, but the obvious sacred places are denuded of their thinness because people visit these locales with high expectation of a spiritual awakening. 

A luxurious airport like HongKong International airport can be a thin places, not simply because of its aesthetic layout, but because of the experience of seeing "life unfold" from one of the mezzanine decks.

It is hard to pin down the definition, because the thinness is an internal experience produced by an encounter between the space one is in and the totality of the visitor.

There are two places that Weiner has experienced complete thinness in: St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and a small Buddhist town in Nepal, where life literally centers around a white Stupa.

However, St. Patrick in and of itself isn't thin: It's the glow of the experience in which the writer casts it. He recalls his visit to the Cathedral with his little daughter who stood still at each and every architectural details inside the Cathedral and took photographs of them. That's where--the standing and stopping of his child--the thinness of this Cathedral lies.

While in the small town in Nepal, the writer remembers sitting in a small restaurant close to the Stupa and contemplating the life around it through the calming effect of a decent bottle of Pinot. The Pinot and the Stupa together comprise the thinness of the place.

Weiner ends by saying, one person's thinness can be another person's thickness and vice versa. 

Sunday, March 11, 2012

I Have A Dream, Of Egg Curry



I thought I made the "perfect" egg curry, but upon reading about Jiro Ono, the 85-year old sushi-making legend of Tokyo, Japan, I have thoroughly revised my position on what constitutes perfection, not only in the culinary sphere specifically, but in the larger sphere of human endeavors.

Jiro has been making sushi since he was nine (when he left home), and he has been making sushi everyday of his life, including holidays (which he loathes), and confesses that he even in his dreams he experiments with ways and means of improving the craft.

Despite the thorough sushification of his being, Jiro still doesn't believe he has reached perfection in sushi making.

Perfection, in Jiro's sense of the term, is paradoxically, an ego-transcending notion. Jiro isn't looking to reach a pinnacle when he can say "Ah, there I have nailed the perfect sushi, and its time to rest."

Perfection, on the contrary, is a constant process of self-improvement and discipline and involves more than just getting the task on hand done flawlessly.

Besides, sushi, it is implied in the documentary Jiro Dreams of sushi, is simply a means to an end, which is the unflagging pursuit of the holy grail (of the perfect).

In an era of mass production and fast gratification of desire, Jiro's art, belief and life-style--he has lived in the same tiny, unadorned, tiny apartment for years and takes the same train to his restaurant in the basement of an office building in Tokyo--seems impossible to replicate, unless one is gifted with a strength of character and a single-mindedness of purpose that is rare.

Jiro's "hole in the wall" eatery can accommodate only ten patrons at a time. 

A meal at Jiro's--about twenty pieces of sushi per serving--costs three hundred and seventy dollars.

Walter Benjamin would say that Jiro's sushi has its "aura" intact.

As for my egg curry? I realize, somewhat shamefacedly, that it would be sheer buffoonery on my part to use the adjective "perfect" in conjunction with it. It's just a routine egg curry with no a strand of aura about it.

Besides, the making of it comes wrapped up in my ego: I feel that when it's time or occasion for me to name my favorite dish (there are one too many more than 85% of which I am unwilling to cook for fear of failing in the process to do so), I would reflexively say "Egg curry," and revel in that statement momentarily because its one dish that I have cooked multiple times with confidence.

My involvement with the egg curry is petty. No wonder neither eggs, nor the curried version of them, ever come into my dreams.

Translit(erature)

Hari Kunzru's new novel Gods Without Men, gives critic and fellow writer/artist Douglas Coupland the occasion to name the birth of a new genre: Translit.

The prefix "trans," signifies "beyond," as in "Transnational," and Coupland thinks of Kunzru's novel as a novel that, in order to represent the new reality of our times, one in which we live "in a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet," transcends the limits of the traditional novel, and yet retains some of the long-form writings' quintessences:

Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span geography without changing psychic place. Translit collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. It inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present.
Some Translit precursors of Kunzru's novel are Michael Cunningham's The Hours and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Americanization or Globalization?

When it comes to writing about the "changes" that countries like China and India are undergoing, as a result of globalization, the results are, to say the least, oversimplified and even erroneous.

A recent instance of the oversimplification is Akash Kapur's Op-Ed piece on the Americanization of India in The New York Times.

Mr. Kapur, who divides his time between two villages--the ancestral one in the southern part of India from where his father hails, and a rural enclave in Minnesota, where he spent his summer (attending boarding school?)--writes that of late he has found the landscape of the former village to have undergone radical change: From being Indian, it is now poised to become American.

The two "villages" are starting to look alike, both in tangible and intangible terms:

The tangible signs included an increase in the availability of American brands; a noticeable surge in the population of American businessmen (and their booming voices) in the corridors of five-star hotels; and, also, a striking use of American idiom and American accents. In outsourcing companies across the country, Indians were being taught to speak more slowly and stretch their O’s. I found myself turning my head (and wincing a little) when I heard young Indians call their colleagues “dude.” 

But the intangible Americanization of India is "even more remarkable":

Something had changed in the very spirit of the country. The India in which I grew up was, in many respects, an isolated and dour place of limited opportunity. The country was straitjacketed by its moralistic rejection of capitalism, by a lethargic and often depressive fatalism.
Now it is infused with an energy, a can-do ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit that I can only describe as distinctly American.

What Kapur is beholding is the morphing of an Indian village into an American one.

I understand the part where Kapur registers the "change." But I don't quite agree with the name he gives to the alteration.

The word "Americanization," I feel is a little outdated, and ought to be replaced by or accorded space-share status with the word "globalization."

Earlier, Kapur cites an Indian newspaper's description of the recent entries of Starbucks and Amazon into the Indian market as "the final stamp of globalization," only to dismiss the epithet. 

It is a stamp of Americanization, he implies. Why? because, among other things, Starbucks is a quintessentially American company, "emblematic of American consumerism."

I'd say "no" on two accounts: Yes, Starbucks is a quintessentially American company in many ways, but it does not emblematize American consumerism in a straightforward way. It does emblematize globalization in complex ways.

Starbucks has entered the Indian market in a globalized way, not in a traditional American way. Actually, back tracking a bit, one could say that Starbucks, even within the landmass of America, has self-globalized. A year or so ago the company got rid of the name "Starbucks" on its logo. The Mermaid now stands by itself without the name. If you lose your name deliberately, it means you are willing to let go of the rigid boundaries of your name-imposed identity, and willing to take on whatever identity you are asked to take to adapt and adjust to the demands and quirks of other places, other cultures.

Starbucks' self-willed erasure of its name coincided with its globalization or expansion of its operation abroad. The Mermaid, though a staple of Western fantasy, could be at home anywhere, since it is primarily a mythical construct anyway. The Mermaid has porous borders and in India, for instance, it could become an Indian Mermaid, perhaps coy, with longer hair, darker skin, and a Bollywood-bindi, to boot. 

Starbucks has entered Indian shores as a massive transnational corporation, that transcends American anything. 

Kapur is right in suggesting that consumerism will result due to the entry into the Indian market of corporations such as Starbucks (and Amazon). 

But endless consumerism is precisely the motto of globalization. Economic globalization, if I understand it somewhat, is an engine of the global free-market economy, which seeks to enrich consumers, on the one hand, by creating opportunities for upward mobility, and on the other, it wants to create a global consumer class who will buy, to the detriment of their own long-term economic well-being, products and ideas of the globalized economy, in perpetuity.

As a representative of this global economic urge to spread everywhere--it would set up shop in the Nubian mountains in the Sudan, were the civil war not raging--Starbucks couldn't care less if it were perceived as American or Norwegian. 

So, I would choose the Indian newspaper's designation of the change that the Indian market is undergoing as "globalization" over Kapur's naming it as Americanization.

Now about how Americanization manifests itself intangibly in contemporary India: There too, I have to dissent from Kapur's nomenclature here as well. That Indians are less fatalistic and more "entrepreneurial" and more consumeristic in spirit, can't be simply pinned down as the Americanization of the Indian spirit. Just as the rising popularity of Yoga and a deep interest in spirituality, in the U.S, can't be said to be an emergent "Indianization" of the American spirit.

First off, America, I'm sure, is not the patented creator of the entrepreneurial spirit. More importantly, the entrepreneurial spirit is only recently ravaging the American spirit itself. In America today, we are buffeted by the tornado of a propaganda that to survive the grand turn in the global economic tide, we have to quit depending on salaried jobs or traditional manufacturing jobs and become more "entrepreneurial." 

Sometimes I feel like I should--to ensure I never run out of a monthly paycheck--transition from traditional college-teaching to opening my own "virtual" University, an educational consulting service, or develop a "college-app," that I can then sell and rest my laurels on. 

Indeed, more Indians are getting into the "middle-class" bracket, I hear, but the American spirit of the rich investing in socially productive schemes, is hardly settling into the Indian middle-classes. The Indian rich are unwilling, as Indians traditionally have been, to share or reinvest their wealth in the service of nation-building. What's happening is an "Argentinianization" or a "Venezualization" of the Indian spirit, not an "Americanization."

The American spirit of free-enterprise and hard-work and sharing of the (sometimes unfairly-got) wealth through a trickle-down mentality, has also undergone a "Latin-Americanization." 

Except that, as I see it, the "Latin-Americanization" is now more aptly called "globalization." The recent "Occupy-Wall-Street" revolution teaches us that those who have got fabulously rich as a result of the change in the tide of the global economy, are distinctly un-American in their narrowness of spirit and hoarding-all-to-themselves tendencies. 

What I mean to say is that both America and India are currently under the yoke (or, liberation, depending on the way you see it) of globalization, in its tangible economic manifestation, as well as in the imperceptible one of its spirit. 

As Kapur says, Indians no longer "moralistically" reject capitalism. However, the capitalism that Socialist/left-leaning India rejected, was a different Capitalism that is gradually receding from America as well. What's replacing good, old-fashioned Capitalism within America is globalization.

All of us--even the peaceful pockets of South Sudan--are under the rule, as it were, of globalization, with a capital "G." Or as theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt said in their seminal work Empire, the world has slipped under the regime of a postmodern Sovereignty, which does not look or feel like a Sovereignty and thus can't be resisted easily. Because it eludes specific naming because it operates in non-imperialistic, even anti-imperialistic ways, we can safely call it "globalization."

Eons ago, Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, the West reveals itself in the image of the East's "future." They meant that the spirit of equality, enlightenment, democracy (like the sort the French Revolution and the displacement of feudalism by bourgeoisie-capitalism ushered in) will first exert itself in its full panoply in the region of their birth, and then travel gradually to the East.

The American sun of capitalism did fulfill this prophecy by traveling from America to the Soviet Union, and the world was exorcised of the evil spirit of Communism. However, the sun that is currently spreading its light and warmth, isn't the American sun per se, but the sun of globalization, which does not rise in America, but in the coteries of Davos.

(Where was Akash Kapur's prognosis when the Agro-giant Monsanto entered India?)

Marx and Hegel's clairvoyance does, however, stand the test of time. We are looking at a Western present that is bleak, and indeed by the logic of the prophecy, in about 20 years or so, the Indian and Chinese future will also go bleak, for if the forces of both economic and societal globalization have wrecked the landscapes of America at large, then this is the image of the rest's future as well.



Friday, March 9, 2012

Modern Times in Three Cartoons



The cartoons from the current New Yorker (March 12) are simply evocative (and provocative).


This one gives me the chills, as I just deleted my Twitter account. 
Will I go the Gregor Samsa way?


And then, there is the emergence of the lobbyist as a lion that seeks
to bribe his way into the pantheon of Darwinism. But really, we all
know that Social Darwinism is a wholly engineered thingie, 
not "natural" as some would us think. If you don't believe that see
Andrew Niccol's grand movie In Time.



At least a few people showed up at the funeral of America's most
famous Salesman, Willy Loman. Nobody shows up at this one's
(except the lone figure of the wife), because in an era where 
you can mourn via the medium of technology, why bother to be
physically there at the service?

Monday, March 5, 2012

My Hair and a Jog Down Memory Lane

I have plans to shampoo my hair today. Typically, I apply oil--not the American hot oil, but the Indian "cold" (room temp) oil--before I shampoo, because it is said that mass-produced shampoo has high soap-content that dries the scalp.

When applying oil ("Keokarpin") I remembered how in India girls used to be told, that to grow long, "black" hair, a definite sign of the fact that you are a female, you had, not only to apply oil regularly, but also comb through the hair strands.

There are Indian erotic temple sculptures where ample-bosomed and narrow-waisted female pose with implements in their hands--the all Indian comb.

To comb through the length and depth of your hair is, by default, a rite of passage into womanhood (the right kind of womanhood).

So, in response to my memory jog to time past, I picked up my hair brush after applying oil to my hair. Then, I put it down. Nope, I also remember the scientific discourse on the Indian female's conviction that combing hair frequently will make the hair fuller and better. Even then, scientists said the opposite was true: To subject the scalp to the rough teeth of a comb was to depredate the scalp and the hair roots embedded therein. The advise was to comb less frequently and use a comb lightly to untangle strands.

I recall that the popular voice of this anti-popular hair discourse was one Sravanti Mazumdar, a brand-ambassador for the body cream Boroline via radio. 

Mazumdar, a fashionable woman with short hair, would remind listeners in the "Jobakusum" hair oil radio advert, how not to engage in "excessive" combing.

Modern & Modernist

Teaching Modernist poetry, in the form of T.S. Eliot, can be a tricky task, especially if the classroom is dominated by undergraduates who take "Modernist" to mean "Modern," and then simply the meaning of "Modern" to mean anything that is connected with "moving forward" in a most jejune sense of the term--technology.

Reading a review of a collection of letters by Samuel Beckett this morning tells me that I need to get traction in my explanation of how "Modernist" poetry could be the opposite of what to be "Modern" in the early 21st century signifies to a bunch of people with thinking that is pretty straight-jacketed.

Beckett was an arch-Modernist. He wanted to shear expressions off linguistic excess. He is best known for sparseness of expression, and he felt that sparseness would enable him to hold up for the reader's viewing that which he is really trying to show.

Language can diffuse the picture of what one tries to show, or language can cloud our vision of the "nothingness" that Beckett felt ultimately lay behind language.

Here is a sample of that linguistic bareness: 

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Beckett is establishing his Modernist stance here: Trying to express/represent that we see almost everyday and hold in our memories--the scene of an oldster holding the hand of a child and moving.

The linguistic bareness upholds the motion. We see the two walk.

The Modernists like Beckett thought the middle class wanted too many words behind which they conveniently incubate in their complacency. The aim of the Modernists were to jolt, amaze and shock the middle-class out of their complacent thinking of what it means to be modern.

T.S. Eliot might have wanted to do the same: unhinge the bourgeoisie's settled ways of thinking. I'm not sure technology by itself can do that. Where communicating ideas are concerned, technology, I feel, can cast the already nonsensical verbiage that is spewed in the name of "expression" every day (especially on the Internet), in a further sheen of mental staidness. 

Modernism can help us understand where we confuse words and meanings.


Sunday, March 4, 2012

Humility

I was moved by the New York Time's March 3 (2012) Editorial on how as humans we ought to measure ourselves down here, on this earth, by looking up and gazing at the stars.

I'm quoting what I would call an Ode to humility in the full:

Sometime in the next few nights, if the sky is clear, go out and find the western horizon just after dark. Look for the Moon and the two bright objects below it — the planets Jupiter and, closer to the horizon, Venus — all in a rare moment of alignment. Mercury will have just set, and in the east, Mars will be rising. If you’re able to watch the sky for several nights in a row, into early March, Jupiter and Venus will appear to be getting closer and closer to each other while the Moon drops behind, even as it swells toward full moon on March 8.
These are glorious nights for realizing just where we are, for looking out upon our neighboring planets and recognizing that we all do, indeed, belong to a system: the solar system. Watching Jupiter and Venus converging in the night sky, you can easily imagine the plane in which the planets lie as they orbit around the sun. Yet it’s also easy to imagine the pre-Copernican view of things, as though we were the fixed point in the sky and all those celestial objects were revolving around us.
With a little help, you can puzzle out just how these celestial movements work — why Jupiter and Venus appear to be approaching each other now, why the Moon lags farther and farther behind them. But, even if you don’t, you can still look up at a remarkable night sky that reminds us how infinitesimal human affairs are against the celestial scale. And, by the middle of March, when the Moon is growing wan and rising later and later in the evening, you’ll be able again — from the darkest places — to glimpse the uncanny depth of the stars, the uncanny minuteness of the planet we call home.


Kohlrabi

I don't hold a candle up to somebody like writer V.S. Naipaul, yet, following his example, I want to write an essay entitlement Kohlrabi.

In the 1960s, Naipaul wrote an essay, Jasmine. In it he reminisces about his education in colonial Trinidad. He remembers having studied English literature, especially the poem's of a supremely English poet William Wordsworth. 

Wordsworth's poem "The Daffodils" had a profound effect on him. The child Naipaul had never seen a daffodil as daffodils didn't grow in tropical Trinidad. He thus had no clue as to how a daffodil looked and smelled. Nonetheless, he wrote a proper essay on "The Daffodils."

In hindsight, he writes, he would have preferred to write an essay on the "Jasmine" a tropical, West Indian flower.

Flowers, fruits, veggies, and such things ought to be seen, smelled and tasted before they are read of as a linguistic object, else they risk just becoming linguistic constructs in our minds.

When I read the word "kohlrabi," I, naturally, drew a resounding blank.

It's a vegetable, I learnt.

I Google-searched the term and found the above "stock-picture" of it. It looks more like an IED that the lead character in Kathryn Bigelow's movie The Hurt Locker might want to defuse.

Kohlrabi is a German turnip instead, and true to its Germanic heritage, it looks sturdy with spikes.

I mean it looks forbidding.

But thanks to the fact of being "colonized" by Google-Earth, at least now I know what an exotic vegetable looks like.

The Times: Roll Back From Global to Local

A Professor I studied under, once told me that he really liked reading the New York Times, and he especially cherished its "World" section.

She knew I was from India, and assured me that she knew of Indian affairs through the Times.

Over the years, I had grown to develop a certain perspective on the value of the Times as a window on the "world."

My initial experience of the illustrious newspaper's coverage of world and Indian "affairs" bordered on the ecstatic.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, imagine the world's best known daily reserving space for stories on the Indian scene. This was the rough opposite of what the Indian dailies--particularly the non-vernacular one's--I grew up reading preferred: They would rather focus on the world outside--the goings on in the Western world--and disdainfully scratch something in about the local.

But my view of the Times' world coverage has undergone evolution since then.

I have discovered that the world that emerges in the pages of the Times' International section is a world that is seen through a Western/American lens. Of course, today, we would call the lens "global," but my personal feeling is that the "global" lens is still fogged up by the mist of a residual Western.

The stories on India are of an India that is either rigidly one thing or the other. In the 90s, the Times would write of India as though it were in a morass of doom and poverty that is a national fait accompli.

Things changed and India bloomed into a nation of galloping economic growth, and now the India that is seen through a global lens in the Times is an equally monolithic nation. Now the stories are about the rising middle class, their increasing buying power, and the break down of the caste system in a way that's allowing the previously downtrodden-by-birth to come up.

What I mean to suggest is that the stories of India and by default of the world that appear in the Times, are stories of a formulaic kind.

These days, I skip the "World" section altogether and focus on the "New York Region/Metropolitan" segment.

Magically, the lens seems to disappear in the stories of local reality in the Times. In other words, it seems like the stories of local people and places and events we read are results of an unmediated eye-witnessing.

So fascinating they are and so faithful they are in investing the "life" of the city with a dynamic that inheres in the life itself.

Take for instance the stories from the Metropolitan section of today's (March 4, 2012) Times:

The story of Chinese take out deliverers who risk so much for so little remuneratively speaking. Or, the report on Park Slope's Food-Coop's agonizing, internal debate on whether/not to boycott food products from Israel. Then again I came to know of the existence of Keens Steak House (Chelsea) and how exclusive a membership to it's special "Pipe Club" is (it's passed down from generation to generation of the club's members, i.e. from grandfather to grandson).

I was enthralled by the life of an African-American who has an ancient Egyptian, Pharaonic shrine smack in the middle of China town. He is a 70 something man who believes that the Nubian Egyptians were actually black/North Africans. With this belief firmly in his mind he set about being a cop on the mean streets of East New York in the 1960s. While policing the streets he found that he had become a pawn of the "white" powers that be in that he was wielding weapons at his own people. He was also into his Egyptian thoughts, so he decided to carry with him not only guns and handcuffs, but also the "ankh" or the Egyptian symbol of power and peace. His mission was to uplift the morale of the demoralized blacks through an act of symbolism that reminded them of their real origins.

The stories of New York City are very many and each has an individualistic flavor about it. I get a sense of the city with an energetic pulse. The stories surprise.

The stories of the "world," on the other hand, are predictable and grist to the mill of a standardization that is boring.

My take: the Times should retract into a national and mostly a regional newspaper, at least from the point of view of somebody who cherishes language and related virtues of the cultural sphere.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

The Wasteland

Tough to teach T.S. Eliot's "modernist" epic, The Wasteland, to a class of today's young men and women.

And I won't even pare the class down to its (the other) class and demographic.

Nonetheless, I have started the process.

Day 1: The title and expectations raised by the title. A dumpster, a landfill, a death, a sterility...

From the previous Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I borrow a line and would like to ask this to the learners as well: Do I dare disturb the universe?

Do I dare disturb the learner's "universe" by saying The Wasteland is indeed an anti-homage paid to post-war European culture. However, it is also produced during a time of acute personal distress for the poet.

Eliot wrote The Wasteland as a result of his terrible marriage with his terribly unsuitable wife Vivienne. It's his wasteland. He has externalized his interior garbage spewed by his nagging, bordering on the insane, Vivienne.

Nah, that would reduce the poet's gravitas and I'll be left with nothing to pad it with except biography.


Friday, March 2, 2012

Indian Dream

A book I want to read.

I hear it's about Mumbai, but having read an excerpt, I believe it to be about contemporary India, or the India that is a maddening contradiction in being both incredibly "rich" (second only to China in its growth rate) and mind-numbingly poor.

What is striking to me is Boo's ability to capture the Mumbai underbelly's version of upward mobility.

The residents of Annawadi, a decrepit slum sandwiched between islands of affluence in the city, live their life believing in the narrative of a freshly minted Indian dream (a counterpart of the American dream). They live, as one resident claims, like "shit", surrounded by "roses."

They don't like living in the "shit" but they're not angry at the rich for their condition. Unlike the angry poor of an older India I grew up witnessing on celluloid and in political upheavals tinted with Marxist (anti-rich) sloganeering, the new breed of urban poor seem to have tremendous faith in their ability to "make it" in the new India.

Annawadians, as Boo calls them, as though Annawadi is a sovereign territory within the landmass of Mumbai, have distinct dreams:
There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past. 
Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables. He wanted a clean job like that. “Watch me!” he’d once snapped at their mother. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!” 
The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behind Abdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d survive to finish raising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut was around the corner, craved a taste of the freedom and adventure she’d seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged marriage and domestic submission. Sunil, an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger, wanted to eat enough to start growing. Asha, a fightercock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenaged daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s first female college graduate.

Mirchi's dream is startlingly refreshing. Were Mirchi to be growing up in the 70s and 80s, in the regime of Indira Gandhi, he wouldn't thus glorify the job of a waiter and aspire to a job that entails inserting "toothpicks into pieces of cheese," as it would be against his self-respect and dignity to do. Respect was a big word in the lexicon of the poor in Socialist India. But today's poor, symbolized by Mirchi, want to get inside the luxury hotels, if not as a guest, then at least as a lowly wait-staff (poor Mirchi doesn't know that the wait-staff are also made to clean the shit left behind by the rich sojourners).

I feel like Raja's dream is touching, as are the girls', Meena and Manju's. Asha is clearly seeking empowerment in wanting to be a ruthless slumlord.

But they all want to move up the economic ladder. That is a normal desire the world over. However, when one reads about the life in Annawadi, it becomes hard to conceive of such a movement. 

The ideology of India's (free) market economy has succeeded, it seems, in ensuring that if not wealth, then at least the dream of making more and living better, has trickled down to the wretchedest of the wretched in India. 

I think they're in for a huge disappointment, though if one were to follow the logic of India's free-market economy guru numero uno Nandan Nilekani argument, the Mirchi's, the Asha's and the Manju's of today are India's human capital that needs to be thoroughly mined. To be sure, the station of Mirchi's life will be better if he were to get inside the Hyatt from the shit pond on whose edge he and his family are living (in a card board hut). But how is he to get there with all the other masses of slum boys eyeing the same prize post? More importantly, will he really get there, or will he perish or get criminalized through police brutality as a child. 

Boo writes of extreme police brutality in Annawadi. The police have a ball extorting, bullying, terrorizing and raping the Annawadians and they aren't accountable for their acts. 

Mirchi and his family (of eight siblings), for instance are hiding from the police because the police suspect them of having burnt to death the one-legged woman. Their neighbors, who are primarily Hindus, have managed to scapegoat Mirchi's family because they are the only Muslims in Annawadi.

Yet nobody had liked the one-legged woman as she had the reputation of being an immoral slut who slept around with men for pleasure. Anybody could have been responsible for her death. The One-legged woman herself could have put an end to her life, unable to endure the ostracism.

The poor of Annawadi, especially the children whose minds have been invaded by dreams of future well-being, are perilously perched to sink into the bottom most level of the shit pond they are so desirous of escaping from. 

Yet, they dream of rising from the pits to the status of working-class.

I liked the one-legged woman's dream the best:
Her abiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change alone. That, her neighbors would have understood. But the One Leg also wanted to transcend the affliction by which others had named her. She wanted to be respected and reckoned attractive. Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.
Ah, here is someone who wanted to be raised to visibility that only the "respectable" have in India.

Sadly, because her dream stood out and was thought of as "preposterous," she had to go.

Irony: It is permissible, even socially applauded, to become a toothpick-thrusting waiter in a five-star hotel, but it's daring and impossible for a disreputable woman to want to be respected.

India, after all, hasn't fundamentally changed.