New cosmopolitanism

Ask Martha Nussbaum, the noted Princeton Humanist (rather, read her books) about cosmopolitanism, and she will tell you that it's a love for the planet.

It used to be that a cosmopolitan would identify her primary affiliation with the globe, or humanity at large, instead of with narrow ethnicities or nations.

Today's cosmopolitans have no national boundaries either, but according to the Dissent Magazine, they pitch their tents in brand-name goods and expensive experiences that can be bought in such global cities as Zurich, New York, (posher parts of) London, Dubai, Shanghai, not in any modicum of shared humanity.

A dismal cosmopolitanism it is.

Coming out of the Wood(y)work

Whatever (cinematic) Woody Allen makes is worthy of watching, especially his off-the-beaten path classic like Sleeper, a low-fi, science fiction farce.

Sleeper came out in 1973.

And the Man Booker goes to a young woman

The 2013 Man Booker Prize for fiction has been awarded to Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries.

Catton is the youngest woman to win the Booker. While the Nobel prizes are awarded to 70 pluses, a majority of the winners and nominees of the world's other prominent literary prizes are getting younger and younger...

Love in time of need

A recent write up in the New Yorker, on American novelist and social activist Jack London fascinated me, because, among other things, the write up posed a poignant question in light of London's obsession with conditions of material poverty and hunger: "In the absence of money, food, heat, or other necessities, can there be love?"

This question interests me because I've been studying representations of poverty and representations of those whom we label the "poor" in texts of all kinds and in multiple discourses.

Love is rarely a part of these representations and discourses, because the conditions that inspire emotions of love are not the conditions of material wretchedness. 

Somehow, in our minds, love is associated with an above-the-poverty-line existence. That is why even when we see irrefutable evidences of love in ghettos, for instance, we dismiss and deride them as not love, but animal lust, the consequences of which are bound to be disastrous--teen age pregnancy, unwanted procreation, disease, and finally that all-American dread of dependency on the state (to feed the products of ghetto love).

But Jack London, an early representer of the American poor in fiction, thought otherwise.

Love in conditions of indigence is the theme of London's best-selling novel, The Call of the Wild. But the hero is a dog, who finds love and expresses it by closing his mouth around one of his master's hands, "so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterwards."

The master recognizes the (feigned) bite for a caress. 

In London's short story, "Love of Life", the bite, from a wolf, has darker insinuations.

At the end of the story, a famished man and a sick wolf lie down, side by side, exhausted after days of mutual stalking. The man, drifting in and out of consciousness, feels the wolf licking his hand, and thinks of how the wolf is exerting its last bit of energy in an effort to sink its teeth in the food it has been wanting to have for so long.

Like Plato, London perhaps reaches for a higher love, the love for one's fellow being, or a more social kind of love, that flourishes in conditions of material destitution. 

He wrote, that the "very poor can always be depended upon [as] they never turn away the hungry." 

He also implies that it is easier to love the poor back. In one of his stories, the hero is a right-wing man who has to assume the alias of a working-class man to do his fieldwork. He discovers that when he is in his alias, brawling and drinking, he is much looser, warmer, freer, and sexually richer; he abandons himself to his provisional identity forever.

The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.

Das Kapital

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story.

Beggar farm

Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.

The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government. 

This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.

Here is a trailer of the film:

Sweet tamarind of Bastar

Is a defining feature of the rough jungle terrains of Bastar, a region in Southern Chattisgarh in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Arundhati Roy inhales the tamarind that perfumes the air and looks up at the families of tamarind trees "watching over the villages, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods." 

The villages she walks through under cover of the canopy of dense fauna are imperilled by the lurking presence of the Bastar police and special ops forces called the Salwa Judum, commissioned by the Central government of India to fight Maoist guerillas and the tribal residents of the village. The Maoists give protection to the tribals.

In Gandhi But With Guns, Roy writes of her experience touring the Maoist strongholds in Central India.

The literary quality of the writing is high, but as essayist and word Jane par excellence, Joan Didion has observed in a different context, language deceives as it is the tool of the articulate who take it upon themselves to express the truths of the inarticulate with the tool.

Language not only deceives, but it also constructs a secondary truth or reality that may be twice removed from the primary one.

Over and above being supremely articulate, Roy writes in English and translates the life-worlds of the Bastar residents and their Maoist vigilantes for a Western audience. Can English do justice to the language of the Chattisgarh tribals who speak a tongue that bear no resemblance to the major Indian languages?

Better perhaps to read this? (down below)

Satnam's Jangalnama is about the Gonds; According to the blog The Middle Stage he writes in Punjabi and revels in a

Depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet.

2025?

2025 could very well be the title of a new Dave Egger's new novel, The Circle, because the plot is a close echo of the plot of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984.

Orwell's totalitarian regime was the government, whereas Eggers' is a tech-behemoth resembling Google or Facebook. The company credo is "All That Happens Must Be Known." It has several Orwellian maxims like, "Secrets Are Lies," "Sharing Is Caring," and "Privacy Is Theft."

According to the New York Times, The Circle

Attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. [Eggers] reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of “the hive mind” can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja.

America adrift

Two films, A Sandra Bullock-George Clooney starrer and a Robert Redford acted (Redford is put off by the word "star" in connection with actors), Gravity and All is Lost, respectively, are about men and women who are adrift, one in space and the other at sea.

The films seems to reflect, as Maureen Dowd says in her profile on Robert Redford, the national mood, which is that of a nation unmoored.

I am a fan of Hollywood, and an ardent critic of its Indian counterpart, Bollywood. Hollywood has its high and low moments and defects; but from time to time one can hark back on films coming out of this entertainment goliath and claim that in some ways some films manage to mirror the American soul (if there is such a national soul). 

I rarely see a Bollywood movie that deals with the Indian soul in the sense that it catches the national mood in a particular state of anger, melancholia, elation or depression. What Bollywood does is take on an event by the neck, convert it into a crude story, and fling it at the audience with song and dance sequences.

How else does one account for the birth of a movie like Raanjhanaa, which glorifies male obsession for a female object of love? In these times when stalking, brutalizing and raping of women in India are disturbing the national conscience, a movie celebrates a cause of that disturbance.

And, the surprising part is that Raanjhanaa is a big hit in India.

Anyhow, India has been adrift for a long time. Care to make a movie reflecting this, Bollywood?

Pirates of global capitalism

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass's movie, Captain Phillips, has been marked by film critics, including Manhola Darghis, as a story of "global capitalism" more than as a story of a virtuous captain attacked by villainous Somali darkies.

It's the forces of global capitalism that make outlaws out of the Somalis and the American Captain Phillips, a temporary hostage. Both are pawns in a "warfare" that's impossible to define in terms of a conventional warfare, but one can tell that the Somalis are emaciated, underfed, yet armed with stolen automatic weapons, and are interested in laying their hands on a jackpot of food that is ironically on its way to Somalia. The pirates have no affiliation with a nation; they want to seize this opportunity to pull off a heist.

The forces that bring the Somalis and Captain Phillips, who has roots in white and liberal Vermont, in the same space, need to be talked about, hints reviewer Darghis.

The bringing together of such disparate members of the global community also raises a poignant question of responsibility: In what ways, big or small, direct or indirect, are the likes of Captain Phillips responsible for the famine and war in Somalia?

I am reminded of Teju Cole's call for "constellational thinking" in order to respond to the question of responsibility. To understand Captain Phillips' role the dots in the landscape of global capitalism, of which the fugitive Somalis and the white liberal Phillips are residents, have to be connected.

The U.S. Marine rescues the ship and its crew members as we all know from the incident and Darghis says how the film ends with no David in sight, only Goliaths, meaning the muscular security men who are the keepers of the new world order.

Yet globalization had once upon a time promised the emergence of a multipolar world. The title of the film omits naming any one of the pirates as agents of the primary action, but that is to be expected; the world of Western entertainment media is largely unipolar. But Greengrass has made some room for the pirates in the movie, and humanized them somewhat.

As I understand, global capitalism has created a world of enormous economic disparities and the doors to opportunities of participation in the economy of global capitalism has gotten smaller and smaller. The Somali pirates in no way can lay hands on material resources by following the law. Captain Phillips alone makes twice the amount as a merchant navy captain, as a messenger, that is, than all of the Somalis who invade the ship taken together in a year.

Greengrass has globalized the book A Captain's Duty, in which Captain Richard Phillips gives an account of the Maersk Alabama saga.

This acephalous world

What is common to Riken Patel, British/Canadian social entrepreneur, and Sharbat Gula, the Afghani girl, the photograph of whose face on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, launched a thousand emotions in the breast of the Western world?

Nothing barring the color of their eyes.

But something like globalization is common to them as well, though Sharbat has zero notion of globalization and hence can't take advantage of it, while Riken is awash in the art of making it big in the global world.

Globalization separates Sharbat and Riken by an infinite bandwidth of power, placing the Afghani girl in tatters at the receiving and the Western millionaire with a conscience at the giving ends of the bandwidth. 

Patel is the founder of Avaaz, an International human rights advocacy group that harnesses the power and reach of technology to help "organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want." 

Awaaz is the world's fastest growing (till date it has 25 million subscribers, though it was launched as recently as 2005) online activism forum. It's most likely to help women like Gula if they are the receiving end of the injustice spectrum.

I had a tough time tracing the organization back to its founder, and that's one of the other aspects of a global entity like Awaaz. 

I chanced upon the organization's name in a NY Times Op-Ed column by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who writes of the prospects of genocide looming large on the African horizon. The name struck me as non-Western and I surmised that the founders must be of South Asian origin.

These days, it's not easy to find out who the face behind the .org is, and I was reminded of the description of the networks of power within the circuitry of globalization as "acephalous" or headless. 

From whom does the fountain of grief originate? If somebody were to ask this of the ancient Greek world, the answer would be a pat, "Niobe," as we all know precisely which peg to hang the inconsolable tears that flowed in gushing currents as a result of the deaths of sons and grandsons in the Trojan war, on: the almost eyeball-less eyes of the maternal Niobe.

But were one to ask from whom the fountain of empathy and activism originates in the case of an organization like Awaaz, the answer would be hard to get to fast.

It took me a series of searches online to link Awaaz to Riken Patel.

Isadora Wing turns something like 60ish

Isadora Wing is the funny, vivacious heroine of Erica Jong's memorable book, 

Isadora is in a perpetual state of unzipment, one could say.

Critics are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Fear. Jong writes an essay on it as well. 

A book like Fear would have only been possible in the 70s, an era described by Jong as "thrilling", producing both "startling wisdom" and "banal blather."

Fear has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 40 languages. 

Publishers wouldn't touch Jong's manuscript initially, but it got popular through word of mouth, much like E.L. James' Fifty Shades did, but without the aid of the Internet.

Sex and the ditty

An interesting read in today's New York Times' Sunday Book Review section: A bunch of writers have written on how to best represent sex in literature and on what their first encounter with sex scenes in literature were.

I liked what Nicholson Baker said: His first brush with sex was via a "porno paperback" in 4th grade, and an image struck him, an image of a woman squatting.

"I thought that “squat” was just about the most exciting notion I’d ever encountered" he writes, and adds that "a good sex scene needs thwartedness, surprise, innocence and hair."

When it's Alison Bechdel's turn, she does it graphically:

Chicxulub

Such is the title of a 2004 New Yorker short fiction by T Choraghessan Boyle (T.C. Boyle).

T.C. Boyle writes of his fictional vision in the current New Yorker and mentions Chicxulub in passing.

He says:

There is a daunting power in storytelling and a daunting responsibility too. We each receive the world according to our lights and what the sparking loop of our senses affords us and all I can do is hope to capture it in an individual way, to represent the phenomena that crowd in on us through every conscious moment as they appear and vanish again. I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions. I don’t make music anymore, I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines—it’s all too much. The art—the doing of it—that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else. Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it was I who’d been the demiurge and the original creator—the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.

War and the peace of baked beans

The writer here manages to embed his mother's baked beans recipe in a subtle vitriol against the American tradition of violence.

And in these days of multi-platform storytelling, the curious piece is incomplete without a more-curious mini-comic strip: