Blizzard of memos

I remember watching Errol Morris' documentary, Fog of War and feeling that I haven't had a more immersive experience in what I would call a celluloid confessional.

Fog of War allows former Secretary of State Robert Mcnamara's to speak about himself in response to a few questions asked by the filmmaker (who is absent from the screen).

We see and hear Mcnamara journey through his life, first as executive of Ford Motor company, then as an architect of the Vietnam war, as the 8th Secretary of State serving both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Mcnamara basically assumes responsibility for creating the war as a geopolitical strategy instead of as a necessity of defence. The "fog" of the cold war strategist descends as Mcnamara alternately tries to justify the war and recuse himself from the genocidal accusations.

Morris has now made a documentary on yet another strategist cum Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, who migrated from business to politics, just as Mcnamara did. 

Rumsfeld, in many ways is known as one of the chief maker of the war against Iraq.

In place of the "fog" of cold war double-speak, Rumsfeld rained "memos" on his aides and juniors.

Had there been a Noble Prize for such a category of poetry, then rumsfeld would be the winner of the era's best "bureaucratic poet."

Lollywood's "Zero Dark Thirty"

Lollywood is the Bolly and Holly version of Pakistan.

Pakistan's film industry was launched in the 60s, but lately its production has dwindled radically.

Now Lollywood has come out of hibernation, as it were, with Waar, a film that showcases Pakistan's efforts to fight terrorism.

The story is based on the 2009 attack of the Pakistani Police Academy by The Pakistani Taliban.

The rumor is that Waar is financed by the I.S.P.R. or the Inter Services Public Relations, the publicity wing of the Pakistani army.

I don't see any problem with the connection between state apparatus and entertainment industries. After all Hollywood specializes in reveling in these sorts of covert connections. Watch movies like Zero Dark Thirty and say no more.

The death of a poet

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

These are the lines from "Digging" by Irish poet and 1995 Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.

He died at the age of 74.

This is what Heaney had to say about writing:

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.

How technology is anti-matter

[Paul] sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center, Disney’s future-themed ‘amusement park’ that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one robot maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008. At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life—and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death—technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

An excerpt from Tao Lin's new novel Taipei. Technology and drugs play a dominant role in shaping the consciousness of Paul, the novel's protagonist.

Are there any uninterrogated platitudes occupying your mind?

Writer and photographer Teju Cole asks the question about those standard and inevitable reactions we have to any given action.

He calls them annoying cliches--expressions and gestures that are expected but the maker of those expressions and gestures believe that what they are generating are fresh insights.

Cliches come about as a result of laziness, prejudice and hypocrisy among other blockages that inhabit our minds when the mental space has been emptied off thoughts.

Cole cites Flaubert and his absolute hatred of the inevitable and the expected in what people say and do.

Cole has his own list of modern day cliches. The one's I loved pertain to places:

AFRICA. A country. Poor but happy. Rising.

INDIA. Work your tolerance of or aversion to spicy food into the conversation as quickly as possible. “A land of contrasts.”

JAPAN. Mysterious. Always “the Japanese.” Mention Murakami.

PARIS. Romantic, in spite of the rude waiters and Japanese tourists. Don’t simply like it; “adore” it.

HARVARD. Source of studies quoted on BBC. Never say “I went to Harvard.” Say “I schooled in the Boston area.”

The agon between recieved notions and (fresh) thoughts is an interesting one.

English Majors

I am an English major, so I should take the debate about the relevance of this particular major seriously.

In an age of technological hegemony, the relevance of much that doesn't have a direct bearing on technology, or isn't deemed useful/productive in crudely quantitative terms, is questioned.

The relevance of the English Department is under scrutiny, and ex-English majors occupying plum posts within the universities, The NY Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic and other institutions of elite occupancies are coming out of the woodwork, as it were, to chime in in defense of the English major, or more broadly, the Humanities.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker won't be left behind. The illustrious writer who weighs in on every issue ranging from books to poverty and the state of the American prison, makes a point that an English major's preoccupation is books. The English professor teaches students how to read books in a structured and authoritative ways. Gopnik implies that as long as texts, written, visual or oral, are important in our culture, so will be the English major, or the Bachelor's degree in English. Since we can't do without books, we should never dispense with the relevance of the English major.

But is the study of English in institutions of higher education, a mere study of books?

I think that's just one aspect of the immensely rangy spectrum of what is "English" studies in the 21st century American University. The old world English departments used to teach folks how to "read" and have meaningful discussions about books. But would the Gopniks and the Verlyn Klinkenborgs please look at the complex changes and morphings the newer, more zeitgeist-friendly English departments have undergone? English is no longer English in the sense that the discipline focuses on cultivating taste and a sense of critical aesthetics.

English is more interdisciplinary than it ever has been. So a study of Dickens, is not just a study of Dickens, but a study of Dickens in the context of urban poverty and public policy. Dickens can be taught in conjunction with govermentalism, as much as poetry can be taught in intersection with physics.

Those who are defending the relevance of the English departments are not doing a good job of it, as I feel they are themselves out of touch with the transformations that the discipline itself has undergone.

Indeed, one of the major transformations is manifested in the emergence of the field of the Digital Humanities. It could be argued that the hegemony of technology has coerced this transformation into being, but then English being a minority discipline since the 80s, has to adapt and adjust to the demands of the majority disciplines which are business and technology.

There is so much that the debate on the relevance of the English major is neglecting to rope in.

Brave new world

Denise Calls Up is a 1995 movie that looks presciently to a generation that would prefer texting as the primary mode of communication and contact with their fellow humans, while even phone conversations would become too humanly intimate.

We are living in the midst of such a generation, as Stanley Fish points out in the context of the hegemony of the digital culture that's permeated the way all institutions, including institutions of higher learning, function.

Fish pulls the 90s movie out of the archives and outlines the plot:

Its conceit is that a bunch of supposedly close friends never meet; they know one another only through electronic media. Physical encounters are threatened, but never occur. Everyone pledges to come to a party, but no one shows up. There is a pregnancy, but the father is a sperm donor whose only contact with the mother is through the phone call of the title.

The culture of the movie, Six Degrees of Separations, seems like so cro-magnon by contrast.

Victims brutalizing women in the cities

The gang rape of a Mumbai journalist bears eerie resemblance to many other recent gang rapes of young women in the Indian metropolises.

The female journalist had been photographing a particular site for a Mumbai magazine; she was accompanied by a male colleague. As was the case with the gang rape of the physiotherapy student in Delhi late last year, the male colleague was beaten and tied up, while the perps dragged the woman to a nearby area and raped repeatedly.

All of the perps were mid to late teens who lived in what journalist Robert Neuwirth would call (fancifully) "shadow cities," or in plain old English, unauthorized shanties. 

In short they hail from poverty, and sub human living and life-conditions. They are victims of the great Indian poverty which like a ever-expanding juggernaut is rolling on side by side with an economic boom. 

The inequality between the boomtowns and the shantytowns are growing by the hour, as it were. Worse still, the shantytowns too are booming, in a purely physical and numerical, not economic, sense of growth, in the shadows, literally of luxury high rises and obscenely opulent hotels and office buildings. 

In the India of the old economy, the poor used to live in spatially segregated colonies or slums: the "jungles" of poverty, as an Indian saying goes, signifying everything chaotic or poor with the metaphor of the jungle, grew in the outskirts of affluence in a Jagirdari style. This was horrific in and of itself, but the new economy has brought hordes of the "jungle" dwellers smack into the midst of the oases of extravagance.

One theory (mine) is that this spatial yoking of extremely unequal and therefore culturally heterogenous life conditions and peoples is accentuating the victim status of those already victimized by poverty. The young men who resort to gang rape emerge out of shantytowns and take out their anger at the system and whatever apparatus the system is supported by on young women, usually of the educated and the upwardly mobile kind. 

I hate to oversimplify, but it looks like the "janwaars" as Indians would describe men like these--poor, psychically anarchic and sexually voracious and brutal--are living in too much proximity of their economic better halves and venting their wrath through sexual violence on women.

Why not brutalize the system, instead of the women?

Maybe, just maybe, distorted gender relations and patriarchy, aren't the only causes behind this emergent culture of sexual brutality against women in the cities.

Incredible titles

Some of the current works of fiction have intriguing titles, a trend that I attribute to Milan Kundera's The Incredible Lightness of Being.

Some recent titles of novels:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

A Marker To Measure Drift

In contrast, a title like The Flamethrowers, is concrete and un bewildering, and harks back to an age of innocence in book titles, when titles would signify something historical or allude to something that is factored into the plan of the book.

Teacher, teacher where art thou?

I remember the names of some of my teachers and a few faces as well. There a Mrs. Sen, a Mrs. Dutta, and a Mrs. Swing, Mrs. Wright and a Mrs. Sen Sharma among others.

To be honest none of these teachers have impacted me on account of their teaching or on account of having inspired me with what they did in the classroom.

These were teachers at the school I attended in India from K through 12.

Back then, I categorized teachers as good or bad. The kind one's--the one's who didn't scold us or discipline us at the drop of a hat, were "good," and the "strict" one's--those who were harsher and used the tactic of intimidation and humiliation as a tactic to establish control over students, were "bad."

All these teachers were however, universally feared regardless of the quality of their teaching.

Upon entering college, I had more of the same: Professors who taught because it was their job to teach; they didn't leave much of an imprint on my mind as inspirational or insightful.

The parameters for judging educators in India, were, I suppose, entirely different.

None match those highlighted by Mark Edmundson in his new book, Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. 

A good teacher in America and by default in the Western hemisphere, is somebody who sees teaching as a "calling" and an "urgent endeavor" in which the lives and "souls" of students are at stake.

I believe that in India, teachers didn't burden themselves with the task of shaping lives and souls; instead of "shaping" we, the students were merely accompanied through the various levels of education by our teachers, I feel. 

In America teachers are historically said to shape, influence and inspire learners. It's only lately that they are beginning to resemble the Indian teachers.

Real teachers, laments Edmundson, himself an English Professor at the University of Virginia, are an endangered species in the current academic ecology. The conditions of the ecology, argues the professor, are the consumer mentalities of students, their families and those who administer the educational systems. Administrators are bent on giving students, not real education, but a "full spa experience, whereas educators are eager to escape the actual teaching into esoteric research.

I don't recall ever receiving a spa treatment by school administrators in India, but then again I got my education under a socialist regime. These days, I hear, a deep consumerist culture drives private education in India and students with resources receive the spa treatment to an extent that many schools graduate students without needing them to follow a rigorous academic regimen, or any academic regimen at all. Diplomas are to be had in exchange for money.

But nobody laments in India and no voice like Edmundson's arise. Decline is a given in India and people turn a blind eye to it.

Decline is pervasive in American culture as well, but thinkers like Edmundson make a note of it. 

No girl, no Lolita

Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl considers the history of making a cover for Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, regarded as the most notorious and acclaimed literary work of the 20th century.

In our minds Lolita is associated with a sexualized teen girl, however, as Mary Gaitskill writes in an essay included in the book, Nabokov's book isn't about sex but about the "infernal combination" of love and cruelty.

In fact Nabokov did not want his novel cover to portray a girl or any human form for that matter:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.

Nabokov was looking for an artist, 

Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

But thanks to Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's 1962 rendition of the novel, the image of the "girl" has stuck to Lolita.

Time after time

Anand Patwardhan and Simanthini Dhuru's 1995 documentary, A Narmada Diary, takes a fascinating look at forms of tribal resistance against mass-scale industrialization.

The object of tribal ire in the film is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada, a project that displaced thousands and stole traditional means of livelihood.

London's Tate Modern recently held a retrospective of Patwardhan's socially conscious films. It says the following of A Narmada Diary:

The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Patwardhan and co-director Simantini Dhuru let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region – overwhelmingly adivasis, long scorned as ‘tribals’, are descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India.

What interests me is the kernel of the film--the collision of two temporal paradigms. Truly, as the blurb above reminds us, "industrial" or technological time has, with the help of all the apparatus of capitalism and industrialization, gained immeasurable advantage over the other time, illogically defamed as anachronistic. Yet, as the tribal resistance demonstrates, time's "other" isn't unworldly at all; rather, it is infused with elements of real, day-to-day living.