O Sweden my Sweden!

Two of my best lesbian friends have tied the knot and migrated to Stockholm.

I am jealous, because Stockholm, though not a perfect Lesbos, is one of the many dream cities I want to live in.

Till the time I get to migrate physically to Sweden I'll live vicariously through my friends.

Raising a toast to the beautiful city and to my beautiful friends!

Withering heights?

Just as I am preparing to read my copy of A True Novel, Japanese novelist, Minae Mizumura's exquisitely bound two volume rendition of Emily Bronte's 18th century classic, Wuthering Heights, I come across Thug-Notes.

What do I see? A gangsta rap version of the novel by Sparky Sweets, PhD, a.k.a. comedian Greg Edwards.

Incongruity is a versatile tool, especially effective in teaching the classics to those who are too lazy to imbibe them first-hand. But the application of street sensibility to high culture, an innovative approach, merely makes high culture approachable without making it take you back in time and open doors to history.

It's impossible to know why the stuff that happens in Wuthering Heights happens without the historical context of the novel. After all, unlike what Dr. Sparky Sweets says, Heathcliff isn't just another gangsta.

Anyhow, Dr. Sparky Sweet's classics are awful; they're all right as short videos, a form that dominates the land of the Internet these days and masquerade as teaching "tools".

The Japanese Wife: A love story or a triumph of widowhood?

The title of Aparna Sen's 2010 movie, The Japanese Wife, is misleading. There is nothing uniquely "Japanese" about Miyagi, and her being the Indian Shubhomoy's wife does not disrupt the story's cultural code in any significant way because the Indian husband and his Japanese wife never meet one another in flesh and blood.

The film could have been named The Indian husband and it wouldn't have mattered a wit.

If a title, like an epigraph to a text, represents a work of art's central meaning, then Sen's movie should have been "Water 21st century", an unintended sequel to Deepa Mehta's Water (set in 19th century Bengal).

The film's major figures are widowed women: There is Shubhomoy's aunt, a widow who raised Shubhomoy single handedly after his parents die in a flood; Sandhya is a young widow who is Shubhomoy's aunt's best friend's daughter. The aunt wants Shubhomoy to marry her, but Shubhomoy is already in strong epistolary love with Miyagi and can't marry Sandhya. Sandhya returns to the aunt's fold because her in-laws mistreat their now-widowed daughter-in-law.

Shubhomoy is the lone male who is passive and quietly fulfills the role of a provider. He perpetually defers fulfilling his desires, prime among which is a burning desire to be with his Japanese wife physically. But Shubhomoy is too poor to travel to Japan or to send a ticket to Miyagi. He has sexual feelings for Sandhya, seeing her as a proxy Miyagi, but he can't act upon them because of Miyagi. Shubhomoy wants to be faithful to his Japanese wife. 

After she remains a wife for 20 years, Miyagi too becomes a widow. Upon suffering a prolonged bout of pneumonia, Shubhomoy dies and the news of his death reaches Miyagi. The movie ends under a canopy, as it were, of widowhood; we see a shaven-headed Miyagi, adorned in a spotless white cotton saree, get off a boat on the banks of the Ganges with a small suitcase in hand. She asks a villager in broken English, "Bheyar is the house of Bhyomoy, the village schoolmaster?"

There is a cut to the Indian widow Sandhya welcoming the Japanese widow to the house of the widows with a smile and a warm "esho" ("welcome"). 

We are left to imagine the life hereafter of three widows in a house in the Sundarbans, all of whom in one way or the other have been served by Shubhomoy. 

They had sucked the life out of him. I feel sorry for Shubhomoy. 

Oh, but the film would have been vastly interesting had it taken the matriarchal trajectory. The Japanese Wife is blandly bereft of all such possibilities. It's Aparna Sen's Waterloo I believe, where the focus is, as the director herself says, on the "haunting improbability" and the "beauty" of the love story which is "surreal in its innocence." 

I didn't see the adjectives materialize into anything palpable in the texture of the film's world. 

I saw a triumph of widowhood.

Simpsly funny

A collection of the top 10 episodes from The Simpsons.

Shakespeare down the cliff

CliffsNotes, the educational company that do study guides for students in the U.S. has encroached into animation territories.

Without further ado, I present the CliffsNotes guide to Shakespeare's Macbeth:

Napoleon explains globalization to Pocahontas on the moon

Only in an Xtranormal story of globalization can we imagine Pocahontas meeting Napoleon on the moon, not to get married so Poca can become the ghost of Napoleon's umpteenth global empress, but to get lessons of globalization from him.

Incidentally both Pocahontas and Napoleon could be said to be two representative figures of globalization, if we define globalization as a complex web of forces and factors that bring people, economic activities and cultures together (not always a "happy" contact, but a contact nonetheless).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon sought to integrate the world along the Enlightenment values of equality, fraternity and liberty espoused by the Revolution, but of course Napoleon's bent was primarily toward accumulation of world power based on conquest through military might:-) 

Poca herself was a victim or a beneficiary (depending on what side of the fence one is) of globalization: Born in a native-American tribe, Poca was kidnapped by the English during an English-Indian skirmish of around 1613. Poca was converted to Christianity and acquired the name of Rebecca while in English captivity. When it was time for her to return to her tribe, Poca chose to stay back with the English and married John Rolfe, an English tobacco planter in 1617. The Rolfe marriage is American history's earliest recorded example of an interracial marriage. Pocahontas or Rebecca Rolfe became a token symbol of the "civilized savage" and was shown off as such by Rolfe in London. 

Pocahontas may have been a female counterpart of the Thomas Babington Macaulay's 19th century human project of the "brown sahib", the Bengali administrative unit that Macaulay bragged to have created by infusing a "white soul" into the "brown" bodies of Bengali men. 

In the 21st century an aspiring globalizer of the 17th century stands face to face with a hybrid-identity endowed, "globalized" historical figure, on the surface of the moon, in and of itself an extra-geographical terrain that is a site of global competition in the world today.

The possibilities are immense.

China Shining

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence in "The Shining" 

You can't forget the scene in Stanley Kubrick's psychological thriller, The Shining. Jack Torrence would stick his face from behind drawn curtains and utter, "Heerrrrr's Johnny!" to scare the brains out of his son Danny.

Imagine Jack in a different setting, let's say an abstract global setting, perched atop a vantage point somewhere between the global North and the South and announcing "Heerrrrr's China! !" Would he spook people out?

Contending powers like America, might be nervous to know that China is indeed "here", as a superpower, as is evidenced by this blurb of its influence in the world today:

To fuel its export engine China, has scoured the world to acquire energy, minerals and other natural resources and has emerged as the biggest donor of aid to Africa. By 2035, China will be consuming a fifth of all global energy; it already buys 22 percent of Australian raw material exports, 12 percent of Brazil's and 10 percent of South Africa's exports. China’s own export clout has been translated to a record reserve of 3 trillion dollars, some 900 billion dollars of which consists of US debt. A wealthy China has emerged as a helper in a financial crisis. Chinese purchase of Greek government bonds helped to diffuse the country’s recent crisis. If additional proof was needed for China’s rise as a global economic superpower it came in December 2010 when Portuguese officials traveled to China to seek its help in averting a Greek-style default.

Magazine covers

In these times of bad to really bad magazines, The New Inquiry and Dissent are two good magazines.

They have great covers. I like magazines with meaningful covers, as meaningful covers tell the story of a culture about which the magazines write.

The New Yorker is a superb magazine not only because it has insightful stories on culture, society, politics and economics (among other things), but also because The New Yorker has culturally evocative covers.

The New Inquiry

Dissent

The New Yorker

Down the biscuit lane

Two biscuits float in my memory when I try to recall my childhood days in India: The paper thin (true to its name) Britannia thin arrowroot biscuit, and the Parle Glucose.

The former tasted papery, while the latter had a sugary sweetness about it. One is shaped like a chakra with a serrated edge, while the other is rectangular in form, looking more like a carved terracotta artifact than a biscuit.

Both went well with the first cup of tea we had in the morning.

I chanced upon two contemporary ads of the biscuits and realized that the biscuits, like people and their lives, have come a long way. Britannia now has the middle name of "nutrichoice" while the "Glucose" from Parle has been replaced by the letter "G".

I was disappointed to learn that Britannia nutrichoice thin arrowroot biscuits, while retaining the shape of a chakra, has undergone an identity change into becoming a stomach-friendly biscuit that cools down the stomach after a bout of binging on spicy Indian snacks.

Parle-G, on the other hand, is shooting straight for the brains.

Is technology boosting or roasting our cognitive abilities?

A polarizing topic of the 21st century: Is technology making us smarter or dumber? Dumber, says Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows, and smarter, says Clive Thompson, in Smarter Than You Think.

In a New Yorker Blog on technology and intelligence, Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School, makes the debate less polarizing by noting that the two writers aren't saying two opposite things, but two different things, because each is addressing a different "Us". 

The "Us" in Clive Thompson's book is the cyborg part of "Us", i.e. our auxiliary brains, while the "Us" that Carr is concerned about is the "man" whose identity is moored in the rich and timeless heritage of Western Enlightenment. The "man" in Carr's notion is getting diminished in the hegemonic universe of technology.

So, depending on which part of the "Us" "you" are addressing, technology is an augmenter or a diminisher. 

Titanic To Be Cloned By Chinese

The Chinese, I feel, have an interesting take on everything. 

This is what they have taken from James Cameron's 1998 blockbuster, Titanic: That the film is not just a love story, but a celebration of the noblest aspects of human nature.

Thus for 1 billion renminbi the Chinese will clone the Titanic and name it Titanic II. Titanic II will be permanently berthed as the main attraction in a Chinese theme park in the Province of Sichuan. Theme park visitors can experience not only the pleasure of being inside a fabulous luxury liner, but also the pleasure of being part of history.

The goal is to teach people a lesson of responsibility in the face of a monumental catastrophe. 

A spokesperson for Seven Star, a shipbuilding corporation in China, claims that the Titanic represents the "pinnacle of the spirit of human responsibility" and could teach Easterners the value of "responsibility". There is a implied nationalistic message in this.

In the parlance of Chinese nationalism, being "responsible" could mean putting the larger interest of the nation before the selfish interests of the a individual.

The one Western thought that stands out in my mind about the sinking of the Titanic is that of memory and death. Western intellectuals, in love more often than not with the aesthetics of an experience over the moral lessons of it, have said that we remember the Titanic precisely because it died at the moment, as it were, of its inception. Had the Titanic lived on to become one of the many luxury liners that have sailed the seas, we would simply have regarded it as yet another engineering marvel.

But to the Chinese the lesson of the titanic is not in aesthetics; it's another occasion to call upon the people to develop their nationalistic muscles.

When the girl-savior does not catch fire

The face on the cover of Chang-Rae Lee's new novel, On Such a Full Sea, is featureless, and it's the face of Fan, the sixteen year old female protagonist of Lee's first dystopian fantasy fiction.

Fan is quite the opposite of heroines like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games trilogy; Fan doesn't have a distinctive personality, a trail-blazing individualism or the prettiness/inventiveness of Katniss. Neither does she possess the innate leadership potential of the usual teen protagonists of Western fantasy fiction.

Might Fan's facelessness be on account of the a new breed of colonizers who rule America in Lee's dystopia? For, the new colonizers are Asians who are said to come from "New China." Facelessness and communal structures are what the colonizers import from their homeland and transpose on the ruins of a broken America.

Fan, as a New York Times review tells us, is more of a cipher on whom the fears, desires, hopes and despairs of the community are projected. No sooner than the novel begins, Fan disappears, in search of a lover who had freed himself from his societal constraints and gone elsewhere. Much of the novel traces the mental and physical journeys of characters who, in turn, go in search of Fan, their appointed savior.

Fan is more like the Panchen Lama, the boy appointee who is sought out in the world by the community of believers and then anointed the king.

On the whole, On Such a Full Sea looks and feels, says the review, like a fantasy fiction inspired more by "Phillip Roth than by Phillip Dick."