What do the red ants say?

Sanjay Kak's documentary on the Maoists of India, Red Ant Dream.

The book trailer: A necessary evil?

A book trailer of Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure.

A tsunami of pain

Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir, Wave, has received rave reviews as one of the most touching and artistically meritorious rendering of personal loss, pain and recovery.

Deraniyagala lost her entire family of a husband, two boys, mother and father, in the 2004 tsunami, that was spawned by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean, and hit the Southern coast of Sri Lanka (and other places). 

Ms Deraniyagala, who is an economist at London University and Columbia University, was at that time, vacationing with her family at a hotel overlooking the beach.

In one sweep Deraniyagala lost just about everything that constituted life for her. She survived miraculously by clinging to a tree limb.

Wave, true to the image of a dark wave on the book cover, is a "granular" and "tactile" account of grief, regret and survivor's guilt. 

The memoir has found place in several "top ten books of 2013" book lists. 

The book has moments of familial conviviality as in the following passage:

Squid marinated in lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty haloumi cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher…. We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogurt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies…. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe.

But the conviviality makes for extremely painful read, because they are snapshots of the writers' past, compared to which the present becomes all the more unbearable. 

It seems like Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir in which Didion tries to come to grips with the sudden death of her husband, would fade into a fun and frolic read once one delves into the world of Wave.

Teju Cole has a review of the book here.

Mandela's mandala

Last week was a time for the apotheosis of Nelson Mandela.

The world celebrated his passing away with a lot of beautiful noise.

The average person in every corner of the world had something to say about Mandela. People who don't remember the names of their dead ancestors said they felt moved by the memory of "Madiba".

In Mandela we had a global figure, not a South African one, whose loss was a global, rather than a South African loss. 

But the rendering of Mandela's mandala into a global entity and the ballooning of his legacy into a global one, is a sign not of Mandela's achievements, but of his ineffective, mostly symbolical, life during the years in post-apartheid South Africa.

Such is the argument of the brilliant Czech contrarian, Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek writes that Mandela wouldn't have become an universal hero had he really/fundamentally won the invisible yet potent war against injustice and inequality that he said he had dedicated his life to fighting. 

The dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, like the abolition of slavery in Europe and North America, was in and of itself a singular achievement of Nelson Mandela, but the fact (of history) remains that Apartheid as a system had become unsustainable in an era which came to be defined by Perestroika, Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, all symbols of freedom, triumph of free market thinking and unification of people divided by artificial "walls". Apartheid increasingly looked and felt like an analog technology in a time of the digital.

According to Zizek Mandela played an active role in surgically removing the cankerous cyst that was apartheid, but wasn't able to remove the "order" which had given rise to a system like apartheid in the first place.

South Africa, as Zizek reminds us, continues to be a deeply troubled society, divided on the basis of race still. After apartheid, the Black elite joined hands with the White elite to practice what would be a structural apartheid (like structural racism in the United States), i.e. where exploitation of the powerless by the powerful is carried on indirectly instead of directly. 

Zizek doesn't blame Mandela for failing to sustain the momentum of a radical emancipatory politics that he was instrumental in ushering into South Africa, but he reminds us that Mandela would not have been thus universally glorified had he really disturbed the dominant global order.

I keep thinking of the brutal, untimely assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among many others. These leaders did disturb an order, not just dismantle a temporal system. Che Guevara disturbed a dominant global order of capitalist exploitation in Latin America, and we know how his life ended.

Continuity of life isn't innately a sign of ineffectuality for leaders, but Zizek has a point when he says that the reason why Mandela had transcended the local and the specific to become so universally loved and revered is because like Mickey Mouse he had pleased more people than threatened their securities:

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn't disturb the global order of power.

What is "House Work?"

Does giving "emotional support" to a householder (from another) constitute what's defined as "house work"?

Does planning ahead of time and purchasing stuff through navigating a tight budget for the household, constitute contribution toward "house work"?

Or, is just cleaning, in the traditional sense, organizing closets and other kinds of tangible labor that goes into keeping a house as some say, are the only forms of "house work"?

The Case For Filth is a revealing piece of writing and gives lovely responses to the intellectually confounding definition of "house work."

One observation that stands out in my mind is about house work around the task of cleanliness; while cleanliness feels highly organic (my house is "clean" because I am clean"), it really is constructed, as "the relativism of hygiene over time is amazing."

Patriarchy is in India's collective consciousness

Hail to actress and Indian popular culture's prima donna, Sharmila Tagore, for recognizing this vital truth of India:

Traditionally, we as a nation have tended to view a woman either as devi (goddess) or as property of man but never as an equal.Treating a woman as a devi is pretty ingenious because then she has to be on a pedestal and conduct herself according to the noble ideals a patriarchal society has set for her. Women seem to like being on that pedestal and despite their inner urges cling to this ideal of being perfect at great personal cost. So, in spite of the outstanding advancement of both men and women, mindsets have been slow to change. And these mindsets have influenced our cultural spheres, and have been celebrated in festivals like karva chauth, raksha bandhan, Shiv ratri, appealing to a man’s ego in protecting and indulging the women in his family. So it is not surprising that a mass, popular, highly visible media like cinema, particularly Hindi cinema, has perpetuated these cultural myths. 

On contemporary Bollywood's packaging of the woman as "modern", Tagore muses:

They also reduce modernity to a matter of packaging. A modern woman is defined by her westernized attire. She looks modern but when it comes to making informed choices, she chooses the conventional. The moment she is to be presented to society for marriage, her sartorial style undergoes a complete traditional overhaul, because now she is expected to become part of the collective, her individuality discarded for the sake of the community. It is implied that the modern woman who asserts herself and her independence can never bring happiness to anyone, nor find happiness herself. Often, in the first half of a film a lot of new and dynamic ideas are introduced, only to be diluted and compromised in the second half.

But cinema, especially Indian cinema, is largely a passive reflection of social preferences, values and attitudes at large:

Today, in India ‘women’s empowerment’ is a government slogan; it is a feature of every party manifesto. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Indian women, seemingly protected by law, celebrated by the media and championed by activists, remain second-class citizens, most obviously in rural areas, but in some senses everywhere.

A bit of a slap on the face of the discerning reader

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is, has been, for me a good reading experience. I read the novel, during my long subway rides to and from work, in November 2010, and 7 months later, much of the novel exists on the canvas of my mind as vividly illuminated flotsam.

What I’ve managed to salvage from the 500+ page-long novel is a notion that Tsiolkas is offering readers a bird’s eye view of contemporary, multicultural Australia. Multiculturalism, as seen through the primarily Greek-Australian eyes of the novel’s main characters, is both a boon and a curse for the evolving fabric of a 21st century life down under.

For the Greek immigrants—and being of Greek origin, Tsiolkas writes of them with panache—Australian multiculturalism is nothing but the modern state’s attempt to police both public and private human behavior so as to manage and contain intra-ethnic conflicts, if and when they arise.

Many of the characters in the novel seethe internally at the extremities to which a culture of political correctness has traveled and distorted one’s will to live freely. People are in loathing of being berated, rapped on the knuckles by the local judiciary and even arrested by the police for smoking inside a cab or for making an allegedly racially insensitive remark. Minor domestic actions, like slapping a brooding, recalcitrant child because he is trying to crack open another child’s skull with a cricket bat, become occasions for a major discourse on anti-child offence. 

The excesses of multiculturalism is abhorred, and the excess is foreshadowed best in the beginning, when one of the central male characters, Hector, finds himself waking up on his bed next to his lovely Indian wife, Aisha, wholly dissatisfied and resentful. The experience of his conjugal bed-mating, he realizes, is artificially fabricated, not an expression of his authentic self. He has had to rein in his organic bodily functions, and sanitize his physical being to ensure sexual cordiality between him and his wife. He has had to ostracize a significant part of his physical reality simply to be sexually/conjugally acceptable and/or functional. 

Hector likes to fart, but in the presence of his wife, he has to censor this most natural of his bodily desires so as to keep himself desirable in her eyes:

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I don’t want to sleep in a boy’s locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learnt to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude; she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girl’s locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleep’s tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt, he’d spoken out loud.

His wife makes similar compromises. The absence of authenticity in their marital bonding spills over from body to mind, from outside to essence. Thus Hector and Aisha compromise on mutual truth-telling—if the truth is told, the edifice of the marriage will collapse.

But multiculturalism has not only bred a culture of self-policing; it is also upheld as the inevitable and alternative-less direction in which the destiny of the industrialized Western world—a world that has for ages been hosting within its demesnes the arrival and settling in of migrants from every conceivable corner of the globe—unfolds. Australia has no option but to endorse diversity in order to survive as a modern nation.

As a genuflection to the marvels of accepting diversity as the norm rather than the exception of modern life, the novel creates another male character—that of the very Australian Richie. The characterization of Richie, a young adolescent who comes of age as an openly gay man in a society that’s pretty Grecian (Tsiolkas refers to contemporary Greece—not the mythical Greece of yore—and its practices of rampant sexism) in its intolerance of anything but the purely heteronormative, is, I feel, the most refreshing in The Slap. Richie is gay and sensitive and very intelligent; most significantly, he is loyal as a driven in nail to his friends and is capable of making cardinal sacrifices to protect the sanctity of friendships. He is, in other words, selfless without being naively cacophonic about being so.

Richie, the independent-minded, attuned-to-the global complexity of the world (he realizes he is emerging into a global society, not just an Australian one) gay male is, I believe, Tsiolkas’ best gift to his readers.