SPINE

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Women want freedom not protection



Recently the government of India granted the state of "personhood" to dolphins, in an effort to end exploitation of these lovely sea-creatures.

A dolphin will from now onwards be recognized as a "non-human" person in India.

Advertisers and other agents of popular media, have, on the other end of the sentient creature spectrum, been busy granting a similar status to women.

In light of the gang rape and murder of a Delhi college student in December 2012, popular media, according to a blogger on Indian affairs for the NY Times, is making some serious changes in the way it portrays women.

The one clear message that emanates from both videos is that women are "persons" too (like men), and they should be treated as such. The solution to the problem of sexual and other kinds of violence against women is "protection" or its Hindi counterpart, "suraksha." It's never clear as to from what women ought to be "protected."

This is the voice of classic Bollywood writ large.

Bollywood has traditionally conceived of and depicted women as women are conceived of and depicted in patriarchy. In fact so embedded is patriarchy in the DNA of Bollywood cinema that I've often wanted to rename it Pollywood. Bollywood males display their machismo (or "mardangi" in Hindi) by protecting their sisters, mothers, girlfriends and wives from the forces of malevolence (male + violence).

But, seriously, is granting "protection" to women equivalent to granting them personhood?

To grant personhood means that those who are persons are persons by virtue of having liberty or freedom to roam around unmolested, not to freshly incarcerate in the name of protection.

So, I agree with the blogger Snigdha Poonam when she calls the bullshit on the new pro-women propaganda launched on Indian mass media.

Women, she argues, want the freedom to roam, both literally and in a broader sense of the term, without fearing harassment in public and or/private spaces, but these kinds of interventions by popular Indian culture for better gender relations push "chivalry on men, not freedom, choice and equality for women."

Besides, the equating of women with the nation brings back shivers of anachronism. Not the mother India figurine again, the one for whom men live and die?

Really, can't Indian women be talked about rationally and normally for once?

The rape-olution will be tweeted

In 1988 Laramie, a picturesque little city in Southeastern Wyoming was put momentarily on the national map as the site of the notorious homophobic murder of 22 year old University of Wyoming college student, Matthew Shepard.

Shepard was gay and on the night of October 7 he was brutally tortured to death by two Laramie boys who had met Matthew in a local bar and had led him to believe that they were gay.

Matthew had been lured outside into a desolate field, tied to a wire fence and beaten to death. 

Over the next few months Laramie was transformed from a quiet town into an object of media attention; the Shepard story was told and retold till it emerged into a tragic saga that found place in plays, films, songs (one by Sir Elton John) projects of social activism and documentaries. An anti-hate crime bill, named the Shepard bill, was passed in Congress in 2008.

But the world of Laramie in 1988 was very much the pre-digital, old world, so the story of Shepard took a while to spread and a demand for an alleviation/eradication of a homophobic culture was made slowly but surely. In the absence of social media the process now looks long drawn, gradual and human, in retrospect. 

On the night of August 11, 2012, an inebriated high school girl from West Virginia was sexually assaulted for about six hours by her peers in the town of Steubenville, Ohio. The act was well-documented by those who stood and watched and videotaped the scene, as well as tweeted episodes out in the grotesque language that only testosterone-driven high schoolers on drugs and alcohol can produce. 

The catapulting of Steubenville, from an obscure little town with a fanatic devotion to its high school football team, to a globally reviled place nicknamed "rapeville", was overnight. The instrument of this catapulting was social media. Had it not been for the Instagram images, the Youtube videos, the facebook updates the tweets, and the textings, the trial itself would not have taken place. 

The evidence presented in court against the rapists consisted mostly of data gathered from social media because the victim claimed to have no memory of those six hours.

Though social activist and crime blogger Alexandria Goddard initially exposed the rape, it was the (in)famous hacking collective Anonymous that helped the case gain unprecedented momentum.

According to The New Yorker Magazine 
[...] since it came to prominence, in 2008, for pursuing the Church of Scientology, [Anonymous] has staged cyber attacks on MasterCard and Sony, and on the governments of the United States, Nigeria, and Turkey. It is an amorphous and mutable collective. According to a video statement recorded by an Anon, as affiliates refer to themselves, “There is no control, no leadership, only influence.” Its membership extends from the libertarian right to the far left, united by the belief that many institutions are inherently corrupt, or at least incompetent, and that the Internet provides the means to strike back from behind a digital cloak.
The New Yorker story "Trial by Twitter," suggests that Anon single handedly pressured the state of Ohio to bring charges against the culprits through a mixture of fear, coercion and blackmail. They are also said to have brought the entire community to its knees, as it were; Steubenville was besieged, if residents are to be believed, by forces from the digital world they were not familiar with.

In an essay, "The Revolution Will Not be Tweeted," Malcolm Gladwell writes of the inadequacy of social media as a tool for bringing real social change. The role of social media in the Steubenville case shows that the tool can't radically alter existing social orders, yet it can expose social ills and injustices that would otherwise remain concealed or hidden from the world's eyes.  

Were it not for twitter, the rape of Steubenville would've remained a local incident. It's now part of a global discourse on the culture of rape and violence against girls and women, to such an extent that Nicolas Kristof (in an NY Times column) compared the rape to the horrific rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Social media has affected a kind of parity between Steubenville and New Delhi; where rape is concerned, we were denizens of a flat world.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

A cartoon carnival




I love the New Yorker cartoons and find them to be multi layered in meaning and humor.

Here is a compilation of some of the best cartoons over the years.

The incredible diversity of the Man Booker list

The long list for the 2013 Man booker Prize has been published.

A surprising nominee is a multimedia ebook series.

The list: 
Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (Granta)
Harvest, Jim Crace (Picador)
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)
The Kills, Richard House (Picador) 
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)
Unexploded, Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton) 
TransAtlantic, Colum McCann (Bloomsbury) 
Almost English, Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle) 
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)
The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín (Viking)

Sunday, July 21, 2013

"He could have been me"



Repeatedly, President Barak Obama has proven that words matter, especially when spoken in the liminal zone between the professorial and the poetic.

He is one President who has managed to stay in power and enter people's heads via the power of words. That's a refreshing fact, like a cooling rain shower, in an era of arid technology.

In his poignant statement, delivered in the wake of a brewing protest movements that take a stand against the George Zimmerman verdict, the President succeeded in making the occasion of Trayvon Martin's tragedy, as his own. 

Some highlights from the speech are:
When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son, [...] Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago.
There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.
We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them?
The text of Obama's statement is to be found here.

The Allen wrench



The new Woody Allen movie is slated for release shortly.

Blue Jasmine, is, as is a typical Allen movies, primarily the story of a woman, trapped inside, what Allen calls the "Greek cycle.".

He sees the Greek cycle--a life cycle in which both fate and free will determine a life's path from an acme to its nadir--in the fall of a super-rich housewife as earnestly as the Greeks saw in the kings and gods'. 

In Allen's own words, Blue Jasmine is the story of 
[A] very high Upper East Side liver” who “had a precipitous drop and had to downsize radically. [...] She went from someone with charge accounts every place and a limitless amount of money, virtually, to someone who had to shop in bargain places and even get a job.
A lovely piece on Woody Allen's reputation as the "woman's man," is here.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

In praise of the non-sexual life


When somebody speaks of celibacy, it often sounds like a position-paper, one in which the speaker is taking a political stance against sex and using abstention as an ideological weapon to demean sex as an immoral act.

But when Sophie Fontanel, Parisian, woman of the world and a senior fashion editor, writes of giving up sex and enjoying sleeping alone for years, it reverberates with irony, charm and intelligence.

Her memoir of living sexless, The Art of Sleeping Alone, is, however, a lonely voice.

It takes courage to go against the grain in matters sexual in France, where as Fontanel says in another place, to have sex is compulsory and to go sexless would most likely be a cardinal sin.

Yet, as Fontanel suggests, many, even in Paris would love to go sexless. But they are afraid to live a non-sexual life, lest they be perceived as un-French.

The French like to pretend they are in love with sex and put on a show to save their reputations (as the oh-so-sexy French).

Fontanel thinks of desires other than those that manifest themselves in sexual contact with another body:
I can take more pleasure while watching Robert Redford shampooing Meryl Streep’s hair in “Out of Africa” than being in a bed with a man. Sometimes I took pleasure just by staring at men’s necks. Sometimes, just by listening to a voice. It was libido, trust me. It was desire. But society doesn’t recognize this kind of felicity. It’s too much! I’ve learned that most people mainly want to prove that they are sexually functioning, and that’s all. Strangely, people are ashamed to admit that they are alone in their beds, which I discovered is a huge pleasure..
A review of Fontanel's memoir can be found here.

Friday, July 19, 2013

The killing fields of Indonesia



"What is war crime?" asks one of the subjects in Joshua Oppenheimer's new documentary Act of Killing. The subject had been a mastermind of a little-known Indonesian genocide--a brutal massacre of suspected Communists, ethnic Chinese and critics of the military junta that overthrew the government of President Sukarno in 1965.

The definition of war crimes is in the hands of winners, says the subject. Then, with a toothy grin, he adds, in this case he is the winner, so he gets to decide the definition.

Neither Anwar nor Herman, confess themselves to be remorseful war criminals; nor has history treated them as such, because both continue to live normal, even privileged lives in Indonesia, and in some quarters are even deemed heros.

Act of Killing isn't an usual documentary on historical atrocities and doesn't focus on the victims, survivors or the resistors. It focuses on the minds of the perpetrators who are monsters but nonetheless humans at the same time.

The director asks Anwar and Herman to recreate the brutal campaign they launched 50 years ago and killed 2.5 million people. The men, who look and talk and comport themselves like ordinary family men, happily collaborate on a series of elaborate re-enactments, using makeup, costumes and special effects to evoke the terror and (for Anwar and Herman, the glory) of the past. They become the stars and auteurs of a grandiose spectacle.

A startling thing about Act of Killing, writes film critic A.O. Scott, is that the killers,
Seem to have no interest in denying, excusing or minimizing their crimes. On the contrary, they are candid, even boastful about what they have done, and eager to share their recollections of torture and murder. “Never forget” is traditionally the slogan of victims fending off revisionism, indifference and the passage of time, but in this case the killers themselves seem most interested in keeping the memory alive.
Scott says that the deadpan way in which the documentary shows the killers does not dissipate the horror of it all:
Some queasiness may linger at the thought of a Western filmmaker indulging the creative whims of mass murderers, exploiting both their guilelessness and the suffering of Indonesians who remain voiceless and invisible here. But this discomfort is an important indicator of just how complicated, how perverse, the cinematic pursuit of truth can be. This is not a movie that lets go of you easily.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Novel race


The Long Division is a timely novel.

The novel, by Derek Nikitas, explores the messy complexity of race relations in America.

Then again, if one uses the word "race" in the same breath as America, "timely" can't be an apt descriptor of the novel.

Americans are known to have little or no historical consciousness, meaning that everything that happens is more often than not taken to be happening for the first time.

Yet much of what's happening today is happening along a historical continuum.

The messy complexity of race relations has had a messy, bloody, violent and long history. Seen from this angle the novel (with its telling title) isn't simply timely, but timeless.

A review of the novel is here.

The first pornographic novel in English


Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a a Woman of Pleasure, is considered to be the first pornographic novel in English.

John Cleland, a young East India company employee, wrote the novel as a response to a friend who challenged him to write about a prostitute without using a single obscene word. 

The Boston Globe reports that the novel was a success and its sales got Cleland out of debtor's prison, but ironically landed him back in another kind of imprisonment on charges of obscenity.

The first story speaks

We have had countless Disney movies, where everything is given a voice, ranging from bugs, to ants to cars and washing machines (I made the last one up, but we could have a Disney animation where washing machines jump around and talk).

What happens when a your first story speaks?

The one, that as the story says, you are about to submit to your MFA class for peer discussion, and to your professor for feedback?

For one, the story begins its story with the lines, "Look at me. Look at me. I am a mess."

It ends with:
Except, wait, no. Don’t touch me. Slide me into the trash. Withdraw me from submission. Avert your gaze. Because, well, look at me. I’m a little cross-eyed and am pretty sure I ate two lunches. I’m your first short story. And I’m a mess.
Peter Kispert writes this innovative monologue in McSweeney's.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Bloody leaves



This is Billy Holiday singing "Strange Fruits," a song that has a reference to "blood on the leaves."

More than a year ago, protestors had gathered in places all across the U.S. to demand the arrest of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

The crowds had made references to "blood on the leaves," in tribute to the image of Martin lying prone and lifeless on the grass after he was shot by Zimmerman. 

The lyrics of the song are:
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
Blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather
for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot
for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
The words invoke the grating juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the horrors of post-slavery lynching.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Ethicist

Over the years, I have read the NYT advice column titled "The Ethicist."

It comes out every Sunday and the Ethicist is Randy Cohen who with a quirky admixture of intelligence, practicality and integrity, answers his readers' moral queries.

This week's moral query comes from a gentleman from Massachusetts. The man writes:
I know a woman, an undocumented immigrant, who wishes to get married in order to be able to return to Brazil to see her children (after an absence of nearly seven years). She works at a chain store and seems to be there 60 to 80 hours a week. She sends most of her money home to her children. She is always kind, decent and helpful to others. I’ve known her for three years and believe she would be an exemplary American citizen. She has saved money in order to pay someone to marry her; I believe this would be wrong. If I were to marry her, I’d expect nothing. I live alone, have no girlfriend and think this marriage thing would be the morally correct thing to do. What do you think? 
Here is The Ethicists' response, and it's a layered one to say the least:
Let me open by stating that you seem like a great person. Let me follow that compliment with this irrefutable fact: This is illegal. Don’t do it. You could receive an enormous fine and some jail time, and so could she (the maximum sentence for marriage fraud is five years in prison, a $250,000 penalty and her eventual deportation). I can’t justifiably instruct you to do this, regardless of its moral underpinnings. But let’s say you did do this, against my advice. Would it be ethical?
I don’t know you, and I don’t know this woman; you might be a horrible judge of character, and she might be a con artist. All I can do is take your letter at face value and assume what you’re claiming is accurate. And if it is, my conclusion would be this: If you married this woman, it would be positive for society. It would be transformative for her children, it would eliminate the possibility of her being taken advantage of by someone marrying her for financial gain and it would add a hardworking person to the American populace. I suppose some will argue it would unjustly place her in a position to take a job from a “more deserving” U.S. citizen, but I don’t believe mere citizenship entitles anyone to a job.
The ethical quandary is your entrenched motive. By writing this letter, you are openly defining this marriage as a loveless transaction that falls under the rubric of illegal activity. But something else strikes me about your letter: You seem to respect this woman. You see her as kind, and you see her as good. Have you considered asking her to dinner? Does she seem remotely interested in you as a person? Many long-term relationships begin with a physical attraction that evolves into a state of mutual appreciation; it’s not impossible to imagine that process happening in reverse. If you were to fall authentically in love, any subsequent marriage would not be a sham.
Now, is this suggestion realistic? Perhaps not. In fact, probably not. It’s almost as if I’m trying to persuade you not to steal a loaf of bread by advising you to open a bakery. But what have you got to lose? The worst that could happen is that you have one awkward date while coming to the realization that you’ve tried harder to help this person than perhaps anyone she has ever met.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

The six tepid women of Florida

I love Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, a tale of 12 jurors deciding the fate of a young black ghetto boy who was on trial for the alleged murder of his step father.

The jurors are shown deliberating on a sweltering summer afternoon in a courthouse in New York City. A majority want to go home so they have no problem saying they believe the boy to be guilty; he is after all black, poor and thus criminally inclined.

One juror dissents and puts a spanner in the work of a quick, unanimous verdict. And then begins the arduous process of the dissenting juror slowly and patiently planting the seeds of reasonable doubt--about the boy's guilt--in the minds of the "angry" (and white) males.

That was then--in the pre civil rights era (1957) when the film took a bold turn toward suggesting the racially deeply biased nature of the American judicial system.

This is now--The jurors in the trial of Florida's George Zimmerman are mostly white females, barring one woman who is black/hispanic (juror number B-29). Incidentally, the latter is the sole juror with an arrest record, and she has said she doesn't have the foggiest clue as to why she was arrested. The woman is a transplant from Chicago.

The 5 white and the 1 non-white women found Zimmerman to be non-guilty this evening. The verdict came after a 14 hour deliberation. Apparently, it's okay to hunt down and kill black males like game in the state of Florida (or so some say).

I was surprised to find that on May 11 of this year yet another Florida resident, of Jacksonville, was arrested on charges similar to George Zimmerman's. But the black woman hadn't shot and killed anyone. She had merely fired a gun in order to "scare off" her abusive husband. The state attorney general's office that   prosecuted Zimmerman, also prosecuted the woman. They won this case and the jury took a mere 14 minutes to reach the verdict.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Old Mr. Sacks

If Old Mrs. Grey, the aged peasant woman had the expressive ability of a Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, her creator, wouldn't have wished her body to have un-pinioned itself from the "wire," as it were, of life.

Old Mrs. Grey, Woolf writes, has lived in the countryside for 92 years, surviving dead children. She had simply lived, seeing the world, "but without looking [...]She had never used her eyes on anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields." 

Because old Mrs. Grey lives sans mental acuity, Woolf sees her as good as dead.

Everytime I read Old Mrs. Grey, I feel sorry for the nonagenarian and hate Woolf's cruelty toward her. 

Is old age nothing more than a battered body, half blind, half deaf and half mute, pinned like a rook on a barn door, living, "even with a nail through it?"

Is old age the mere sum and substance of an imminent wreckage?

Not so, says Oliver Sacks, who penned, what could be described, as a sober paean to old age. Having turned 80, the famous neurology professor and writer, sees old age richly, through celebratory, rather than the usual eyes of anxiety, fear and lament:
My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
This is radical in the sense that everything we do to devalue old age as a negative phase in our lives, is turned on its head.

"Pratham" (first) in many ways

Let me declare at the outset that I have a prodigious memory for trivia.



When I think of my school days in Kolkata, India, the one name that pops to my mind is The Radiant Reader—an anthology of short stories written mostly by British writers from the mid-19th to the early 20th-centuries. It was our principal English textbook, which we were forced to befriend in grade two. It continued to bore us for the next four years, until grade six, when we were finally able to bid it adieu.

What’s interesting about this book as well as the vast majority of the later textbooks we read, was that they were foreign imports from British and American publishing houses. Because they were not printed in India, they were expensive.

I still remember how I would guiltily hand the book list to my father at the beginning of the school term, shriveling inwardly at the thought of how it would shrink his wallet. Back then, the indigenous publishing industry was in its infancy and its output of children’s book and those for adults alike, was minuscule. 

Things changed by the time I reached grade seven. The National Book Trust, India (NBT) began rolling out science and history textbooks. They were cheap. But they were also of poor quality. Their text was under-researched and their perspective (especially, in the case of history books) was unambiguously Hindu nationalist, even distorted. The patriotic fervor didn’t move us, really, for we yearned nostalgically for the older books.:

For many generations of middle-class Indians, works by [Enid] Blyton and the popular American books about Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys were essential childhood reading. Barely a handful of Indians wrote stories for children in English. But that may be changing.

In the past decade, a publishing boom, rising middle-class affluence and creeping cultural guilt among parents have led to a steady growth of Indian books for children with distinctly local characters and stories.

Pratham Books—the book wing of Pratham, a non-governmental organization working to provide quality education to the underprivileged children of India—publishes high-quality, low-cost children’s books. 

Pratham Books, a non-profit trust, was established in 2004 to fill a gap in the market for good quality, reasonably priced children’s books in Indian languages. The mission of Pratham Books is to make books affordable for every child in India.

Pratham Books publishes books in 11 Indian languages. The stories are written by Indian authors and are rooted in Indian culture and people. Each book is beautifully illustrated and the quality of printing is high. Most importantly, the books are priced between Rs. 10 and Rs. 25 (25 cents to 62.5 cents), making them affordable to millions of children.

East-West


I grew up reading Bengali detective fiction by Satyajit Ray and Saradindu Banerjee. Even today, Ray’s crime-solver par excellence, Feluda, a.k.a. Mr. Pradosh Mitter, and Banerjee’s wily detective Byomkesh Bakshi, are household names in (literate) Kolkata.

While both Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi were as Bengali as tomato diye dimmer jhaal, neither Ray nor Banerjee laid any claims to being the creators of original fictional paradigms in this particular genre.

Ray was happy to see Feluda as a Bengali descendant of Sherlock Holmes. Likewise, Byomkesh Bakshi wasn’t conflicted about borrowing the crime-solving methods of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown.

In other words, neither Ray nor Banerjee nor the Bengali-reading public of their time found the idea of accepting Bengali-Indian detectives as local adaptations of the more globally-renowned English detectives, problematic or unnatural.

Today, it is different. Listen to what Vish Puri, the private eye in Tarquin Hall’s new detective novel "The Case of the Missing Servant" has to say about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, reflects Puri, is a Johnny-come-lately, an upstart who allegedly stole many of his crime-solving methods from an Indian named Chanakya, who served as prime minister in the royal court of emperor Chandra Gupta Maurya in 300 B.C. and believed to be the world’s first spymaster and founder of espionage.

Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is displaced from his iconic status as the greatest fictional detective ever, and relegated to the status of a second-rate pilferer. At a glance, this appears to be a novelist’s whimsical reordering of reality in the realm of fiction. But it’s a bit more serious than that. The implications of what Puri says about the relationship between Holmes and Chanakya, is political as well.

Back in the days when I was a young adolescent in Kolkata, Dev Anand, the famous Hindi film hero of the between 1960s and 1980s, was regarded as a second-rate Gregory Peck, who aped Peck’s style. There was also Raj Kapoor and his on screen persona of the ‘lovable tramp’ that was a carbon copy of Charles Chaplin.

Even Chanakya, was fed back to us as the "Indian Machiavelli." Back then, few would have even entertained the idea of contesting, howsoever fictionally, the notion that everything originated in the West and then, spread elsewhere. It never occurred to us to say, even in jest, that a Gregory Peck or a Charles Chaplin stole their acting art from a Guru Dutt or a Dada Saheb Phalke.

Today, the conditions for the creation of narratives where history can be rewritten exist in South Asia. Following in the (hopefully, successful) footsteps of "The Case of the Missing Servant," we’ll have fiction where we’ll be told with zestful impunity that Galileo stole his ideas from the Aryabhatta (ancient Indian scientist) or that Aristotle plagiarized Gangesa (5th century B.C. grammarian), the or that Schubert is indebted to Surdas (medieval composer).

I look forward to the day when Machiavelli is reintroduced in the West as an "Italian Chanakya."

Slumdipus Millionairex

The Times columnist Alice Miles’ assessment of Danny Boyle’s much-touted Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" as brilliant but unethical has struck an Aristotelian nerve in me, if you will. It brings to mind "Poetics".

In this celebrated treatise on the moral function of art, the Greek philosopher said that if a creative work (a play, a recitation) represented human misery in a manner that induced chortles in the bosom of the audience—instead of pity, fear and sadness—then such a piece of art should be dubbed immoral.

It’s hard to tell what Aristotle would have thought of pornography, but as a student of Greek tragedies, I do know that he detested farce. The idea of laughter at the spectacle of a man slipping on a banana peel and crash-landing on his bottom was repugnant to him. Classical Greek thought would have shuddered with horror at the aesthetic portrayal of pain in say, "The Rape of Lucretia" by Titian.

The best of Greek tragedies typically centered on the twin themes of carnage and the suffering of the body and soul. But Aristotle asked playwrights to refrain from representing them overtly. I imagine him instructing them to represent violence through words, and not theatrical acts.

Little wonder then that the audience in an Attic drama seldom saw the maiming, the raping, the burning, and the looting on the stage. Instead, he or she heard an announcement of the act by a character called the "messenger" or "the chorus."

Take for instance, Oedipus’ blinding of himself by thrusting the sharp end of his mother’s brooches into his eyes. As an audience, seated under a large tent in Athens in 300 B.C., one wouldn’t have witnessed this sight in its gory details, but rather, seen a Corinthian messenger make his appearance and announce Oedipus’ blinding. Next, one would have seen the blind hero stumbling onto the stage.

In "Slumdog Millionaire," by contrast, a whole scene is dedicated to the display of the blinding of a child’s eyes with molten wax. It’s captured on camera with the ardor of one filming an orgiastic scene.

Maybe that’s why it’s been denounced as “poverty porn” by critics, though its content isn’t pornographic in the strictest use of the term. Set in the slums of Dharavi, in the outskirts of Mumbai, the film celebrates lives brutalized by unmitigated poverty and violence. The razzle-dazzle of groovy soundtrack and high-technology lighting titillates the viewer, rather than move him or her.

Aristotle, I believe, would have called "Slumdog Millionaire" not “poverty porn” but a farce—an ignoble piece of entertainment that harnesses human misery for entertainment purposes. So how would Aristotle have directed the film?

Sunday, July 7, 2013

The strutting peacocks of the India-Pakistan border



An excerpt from a BBC produced film on modern India.

The moment of fascination for me is the border-closing ceremony at the Wagah Attari border between India and Pakistan.

The "strutting peacocks," as the voiceover says, mimic one another with a ferocity that takes this ceremony to another level--of ego and competition.

Friday, July 5, 2013

First hunger, now bones




At first I thought this is the trailer of a movie based on Samantha Shannon's debut fantasy fiction, The Bone Season.

No, it's a book trailer of The Bone Season.

Bloomsbury Press, the venerable British publishing house, which at one point would surely have sneered at the likes of Samantha Shannon and her ilk, is now pinning its hope of an economic revival, on Shannon as the world's next big fantasy-fiction franchise.

The Times of India(na) Jones and the temple of journalistic doom

As a child growing up in Kolkata, we got our news primarily from the English daily The Statesman.

The Statesman, with its ponderous title and equally ponderous editorial style, vestiges of a British-colonial legacy, was a paper that I really looked forward to, because it was my window, not only to the city's happenings, but also to the world's. 

The Statesman was a serious newspaper; there was not a shred of entertainment in it. Even the gentleman who delivered the paper every morning at 6:00 a.m. looked very soberly mustachioed; he never cracked a joke and I never saw him smile.

He just delivered, just as The Statesman just delivered the news.

Starved for entertainment, I would turn to publications like Stardust and Filmfare, and now and then we subscribed to these Indian equivalents of Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine.

I couldn't imagine a Stardust and a Statesman combined into one single publication. 

But things have changed. What was valid twenty years ago is invalid today in the Indian journalism scene. The Times of India, India's and the globe's largest-selling English language daily, primarily sells entertainment and secondarily serious political and social news. 

When I go to the Times of India website, there is Bollywood news front and center. I have a nagging suspicion that TOI has appropriated the roles that the Stardusts and Filmfares used to play in the past.

Lately, this tendency of the nation's most-read newspaper--to blithely ignore the responsibilities of serious journalism and focus on entertainment--has come under attack, mostly in the Western media. The New Yorker's Ken Auletta had blasted the TOI for taking the easy route to survival in an era of declining popularity of print journalism globally. 

Indian newspapers in general, says Auletta, have become pimps in the marketplace of entertainment. They have "dismantled the wall between newsroom and sales," and The Times of India has
celebrities and advertisers pay the paper to have its reporters write advertorials about their brands in its supplementary sections; the newspaper enters into private-treaty agreements with some advertisers, accepting equity in the advertisers’ firms as partial payment.
In a recently published book on the contradictions inherent in modern India, economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, have similarly chastised Indian journalism for not bearing its moral obligation to serve the interests of the millions of Indian poor.

If selling entertainment and brands is key to the success of papers like The Times of India, then there has to be a justification of this choice. Indians are especially adept at creating magnificent rationales to justify all acts of pimping for the sake of lucre, even if they are pimping off, as goes a folksy Indian saying, "their mothers and daughters."

The owner of the TOI rationalized his paper's decision to devote more space to Bollywood and cricket  and less to news of poverty, exploitation and corruption in India, by comparing a newspaper to a "temple." 

The objective of a temple was to use entertainment of rituals and frivolity of festivals to lure worshippers into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple where the more serious matter resided. Likewise the TOI 
[Uses] the outer sections of [the] newspaper — the dramatic news, the sports pages and the colorful supplements about beautiful ladies and men in red pants — to lure readers inside to serious news, and finally to the sacred editorial page.
[One wonders about the men in "red pants"]

The belief system on which this rationale rests is borrowed from Bollywood. For eons now, the Indian film industry has argued that their priority is to entertain, not to make the "man on the street," think.

This works well for the entertainment industry, but to make it the motto of journalism degrades the "temple" of journalism into the temple of doom.

What sits inside the sanctum sanctorum of the "sacred editorial page," one might surmise, aren't the Jain brothers, but a figure like Mola Ram.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Cli-Fi




Once upon a time, there was "Chick lit"; then there was "Clit-lit".

Now there is Cli-fi, echoing Sci-fi, WiFi and Hi Fi, words that mean disparate things, but rhyme nonetheless). Cli-fi is a literary term, coined to denote works of fiction that grapple with global climate change.

Polar City Red, by Tulsa-based writer James Laughter, envisions life in the great frozen north, where populations migrate to after global warming has destroyed the earth's ecosystem. 

The hero of Odds Against Tomorrow is a mathematician who specializes in the math of catastrophe--global wars, natural disasters and ecological collapse. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters.

The novel is more about cultural fears brought on by the spectres of an apocalypse.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior is on global warming and the abysmal failure of public education in enlightening people about this most significant of issues in a scientific and reasonable way.

The name, Cli-fi, maybe new but as the New Yorker writes:
Environmental havoc has flourished in postapocalyptic fiction, where it makes for vivid, frightening atmospherics and, paradoxically, fosters a sense of unreality. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, from 1956, a new virus infects grasses across the globe, causing mass famine. The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard, published in 1962, is set in 2145, after solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and London has become a tropical swamp. T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, from 2000, is set in a nearly apocalyptic 2025—a hot, food-scarce U.S. that is plagued by mass extinction. Margaret Atwood’s great dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and the forthcoming MaddAddam, engages with similar disaster scenarios.