Mitt Romney: study in insentience

The way in which Mitt Romney has been described in the popular (and liberal, if you will) press thus far, reminds me of the character of the bride that rises from the dead in Tim Burton's stop-motion-animated-fantasy musical film, the Corpse Bride.

Except that the corpse bride was more animated than Romney is. 

Frank Bruni, among others, observes that he lacks a "palpable soul" and an "audible heartbeat."

Forms of Indian Neo-Nazism

How do you react to a store called "Hitler" located in Ahmadabad, the capital city of the state of Gujarat in India?  ? That the store owners are atavistic, insensitive or antisemitic? Or, plain ignorant?

I would say that it's a sign of rising neo-Nazism in certain parts of India.

Gujarat is notorious for its communal riots and for its exploitative politics that seeks to divide residents on the basis of religion and caste.

In other words, the state isn't a stranger to genocide, and the name "Hitler" is singularly emblematic of history's worst genocide.

Hindu chauvinists--the kind that propagandize against Muslims, Christians, and homosexuals--have traditionally sought kinship with Nazism laboring under the false assumption that Hitler's brigade appropriated the swastika out of reverence for the Hindu sacred symbol and that the Nazi elevation of the Aryans as the best tribe in the history of humanity brings the Hindu "Arya Putras" into the pantheon of Hitler's Aryans by default.

Thus while they are not consciously antisemitic, Hindu Chauvinists could be considered to be pro-Nazi.

Yet, were Hitler still alive and brandishing his nefarious dreams of global imperialism based on the extermination of the impure races, the Ahmadabaddies would be deemed lower than the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals that Hitler sought to either enslave or destroy.

Not too long ago, The Mein Kampf was on India's best sellers list. I wonder what the status of the book is as we speak.

The white disaster

A new book by India-born and London-based writer, Pankaj Misra, explores, as a review in The Guardian says, 19th century Asia's intellectual response to western imperialism.

The "revolt" in question isn't a military or political rebellion per se, but a cultural one. It implies that at a point in time and history, the East, especially the Eastern elite, found the crass materialism and the vulgarity of the white barbarians quite revolting.

Misra's book traces the evolution of that revolt (a rough Bengali transliteration would be "ghenna") into a firm intellectual response.

Promises to be an engaging read.

Treasure Island revisited

In 1881 Robert Louise Stevenson wrote Treasure Island as a story for boys.

The touchstone for what's to be included and excluded in the novel was the young son of his new wife, an American divorcee. Both "psychology"  and "fine writing" were excluded from the book because  these were assumed to be girly materials in the 19th century.

It's no surprise that there are no female characters in the novel.

Andrew Motion, a former English poet-laureate (1999-2009) has created a female character in his sequel to this English classic. Her name is Nattie and Nattie is the famous Long John Silver's daughter. Natty, however, isn't a girlie girl; she is of androgynous appearance and has the edge of one of Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines.

Nattie and Jim Jr. revisit the island in search of the elusive treasure. The adventures of the boy and his boyish girl companion inform the sequel, Silver: Return to Treasure Island.

Reviews of the sequel can be found here and here.  

Pride and distraction

If Lizzie Bennet were alive today, her greatest fear would be not an accidental pregnancy but an overly eager suitor who might distract her from writing her novel. In fact, it's the men who have a harder time bouncing back from the hookup culture, as Michael Kimmel chronicles in his book Guyland.

Hanna Rosin's view on how a 21st century Elizabeth Bennet, one of Jane Austen's fiercely feminist heroine, would view the advances of male suitors.

I wonder about the 21st century Darcy...

Bone-chilling compliance

A movie of our era, as noted by Frank Bruni.

The story: [...] set during one shift at a fictional fast-food restaurant called ChickWich, it imagines that the manager, a dowdy middle-aged woman, gets a call from someone who falsely claims to be a police officer. [...] The “officer” on the phone tells the manager that he has evidence that a young female employee of hers just stole money from a customer’s purse. Because the cops can’t get to the restaurant for a while, he says, the manager must detain the employee herself in a back room. He instructs her to check the young woman’s pockets and handbag for the stolen money. When that doesn’t turn up anything, he uses a mix of threats and praise to persuade her to do a strip-search. And that’s just the start. [...] The manager’s boyfriend later assumes the duties of watching over the detained employee. Cajoled and coached by the voice on the phone, he makes her do those jumping jacks, which are meant to dislodge any hidden loot. By the time he leaves the back room, he’s also been persuaded to spank and then sexually assault her.

The chill factor: the gullibility of ordinary people. A culture where a politician can run for office by claiming that there exists a form of rape that is "legitimate", and that a woman in the process of being raped can "shut down" or make her eggs immune to the overtures of an invading spermazoid, is a culture where gullibility has become a monstrous liability.

As Bruni says, we have dwindled into people who are willing to "trade the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what."

The voice on the phone is the voice of the slick marketer, slick, emphatic and highly persuasive, with that right amount of affected empathy that bring people to do as he commands.

T and I: Potato Au Gratin

T and I shared a knockout dinner tonight: potato Au Gratin and broccoli on the side.

It was entirely made by T. I only did the grunt work of going to the grocery store and buying the ingredients.

It was a hot day today.

Mar(x) Bittman

Karl Marx once wondered about why the piano-maker makes substantially less than the piano.

He came up with an explanation that I can at best oversimplify thus: The value labor is typically less than the value of commodities.

As pointed out by food-critic Mark Bittman, in today's economy, certain labor gets more adulation than certain other kinds of labor.

Within the food-economy, for instance, the restaurant chef gets more publicity and money than the farmer.

Bittman asks consumers to reverse the trend: less focus on the chef and more on the farmer because the farmer has a more challenging task on hand in growing quality food against the vagaries of nature.

The chef, on the other hand, does a relatively "easier" task--transform already existing ingredients--of catering to the palate.

There is a Marxian bent in Bittman's thoughts.

A bit of France in Kolkata

"Paris" is a tailoring shop in Kolkata, India--or shall I say, a shoppe--where we got all of our clothes "tailor-made."

Many of the illustrious Kolkata institutions, like the Presidency College building, Indian Museum, National Library are in a state of dereliction. So is Paris on Lindsey Street; but the building in houses a deep history as do most of the buildings in this ex-capital of the British empire.

Hapless jaws

Back in my undergraduate days, as a mini-Shakespeare buff, I used to carry a very negative image of dogs in my mind.

The Renaissance didn't think too highly of the dog: the same hypothetical dog that would be faithful to a noble person, would be faithful to an abominable villain. 

This meant that a canine has no ability to discern between good and evil, an unbearable lack that the Renaissance mind couldn't take kindly to. 

Today, the dog is a repository of many of the cherished human virtues like loyalty, bravery, etc. It's the shark that could be the 21st century's equivalent of the 16th century dog (though the dog was never considered vicious like the shark is).

As Theo Tait points out in his review of Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks by Juliet Eilperin, the shark is a much-reviled animal because of "the creatures’ failure to behave in a sympathetic, anthropomorphically pleasing fashion." 

(Indeed, I recall a scene from Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking: Didion has a nightmare of her daughter being attacked by sharks. It foreshadows the ailing daughter's death).

Eilpern's book works to dispel the American myth of sharks as monstrous carnivores. It also tells us that the shark population is shrinking globally. 

The Chinese consumption of shark fin soup has gone up phenomenally, and unlike the cod, herring and the tuna, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value, so little effort is made to protect stocks.

T and I: god is in the details

Both T and I agree that to write well one has to invest in details. 

Indians, I finds, have a particularly poor eye for details.

I has a nephew who travels the globe--or certain parts of the globe--as an auditor. He fancies himself to be an Indian Graham Green. He likes to give little descriptions of places he visits. The descriptions are planted on his Facebook page. 

Here is an update on Miami:

Back in Latin America for a few days - in the beautiful city of Miami in the Sunshine State of Florida in the country called Estados Unidos de America. Glad to be in the Land of the Brave & Home of the Free and...unfortunately at times...the Abode of the Home-grown gun-totting lunatic who goes berserk at movie theatres, temples etc.

He has been describing Miami for the last 3 years in the same way. He seems not to have the eyes or the inclination to actually observe anything. the description above is hardly a description; it's a verbiage of his vague notion of "America".

He ought to stick to numbers.

As I was saying, the typical Indian has a lousy eye for detail. 

Here is a pair of detail-absorbing eyes:

The Owl Man has gone. He has left Hackney, left London. His gaunt property, close to the newly fashionable barbecue pitch and managed wildflower meadow of London Fields, has been made secure and rigged with scaffolding. Above mildewed steps, pasted with boot-smudged council notices, a wonky sign, hand-painted in red on white, is still visible: DISABLED BIRD OF PREY KEPT HERE. GUARD DOGS LOOSE. CCTV IN OPERATION. The faint reek of feathers, rotting meat, might have something to do with the drains, but it persists [...]

The writer above is describing Hagerstown Park, London, before its conversion to the main site of the recently concluded London Olympics.

The impression of ruin is evoked through sheer accumulation of details.

I and T would say that the Britisher has an eye for detail. 

Facebook empire

Facebook's poor performance on Wall Street is described in terms of a "tension" between two money-making cultures (read "vultures") in America: Wall Street and Silicon Wall-ey:

They are as symbiotic as they are dismissive of each other. They are equally focused on making money, but their approaches are different.

But what impresses me most is the elevated tone in which a corporation's fluctuating fortunes in the marketplace is described. If one were not a little alert, one would think that the story of a whole empire is being narrated.

Take the image, for instance. Mark Zuckerberg's Grecian head has a distinct Caesarean aura about it. He is an emperor and the thumbs up and down icons begin to look like the rise and fall of an empire. 

There are hints galore that emperor Markus Zuckerbergus is an incompetent king and the fate of his kingdom atop Menlo Park is imperiled. A previous empire that had risen and collapsed in this region was that of Sun Microsystems--it was Facebook's predecessor in Menlo Park and ruled till the time Oracle came by and gobbled it up.

The fortunes of manufacturing companies are not narrated in such imperial tones--recall the stories of GM, Ford and Chrysler. They were told in sepia tones of foreboding--as though these troglodytes were bound to fail. 

I keep on forgetting that Facebook is not just a company--it's a TECHNOLOGY company and TECHNOLOGY companies are not regular companies, they are empires. They are not economic entities but culture-shapers and "world"-changers.

Misanthropic laughter and loathing in Seattle

Maria Semple's novel on living in Seattle has been dubbed this summer's "most absorbing" novel.

Where'd You Go Benadette's heroine is Bernadette Fox 

[...] A former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school. 

Bernadette is a misanthrope and views Seattle through a misanthropic lens:

[...] where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman, [...] It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. 

As far as I know, Seattle has been home to a vast array of novels, none of which hold Seattle in bright light.

I had in mind Jonathan Raban's Waxwings, that showed Seattlelites as ruthless and mindless wealth-accumulators during the dot com boom era. 

A large number of zombie and vampire novels, including one of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, have Seattle as background. 

Georgian garden

While reading a review of Orwell's Diaries, I came across the following Orwellian dictum: 

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

(Didn't Sylvia Plath express a similarly foreboding sentiment, about her present?)

The Diaries, reassures the reviewer, reveals Orwell in a different light--as an approachable flesh and blood man, who loved gardening.

Enigmatic art

A Marcel Duchamp piece has always been a brain-teaser for me. I confess to carrying a pretty fuzzy notion of the artist in my head.

On display at the exhibition entitled "Ghosts in the Machine" at the New Museum in New York City, is a re-creation of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

A beginner's exclamation: What a subtitle! (The painting is more popularly named "The Large Glass").

A beginner's question: What does the work represent?

Some help from Art critic Peter Schjeldahl:

[Duchamp] presides as an icon for renegade urge to complicate, if not to destroy, conventional notions of what art is and is not. Duchamp never stops intoxicating young artists with his games of logic, which tantalize by falling just short of making ultimate sense. What the work means, in what way, seems within reach but safely beyond grasp, like a dangled cat toy. Your response depends on how much [...] you like to think. Duchamp is, as well, an avatar of ever-popular sex in the head. The assorted mechanical forms, the bachelors, at the bottom of the "Glass" supposedly yearn toward the more sinuous doodads of the bride, above. This arcane fiction has transfixed generations of followers who glory in feeling libidinous while proving themselves super-smart.

Timon of Athens

When I read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens for the first time, I thought it was too loud to be Shakespearean. 

The play could have come out of a Bollywood studio, so shallow it's storyline was and so bombastic were its dialogues.

Theatre critic John Lahr points out the un Shakespearean traits of Timon well:

The play in which the well-heeled Timon gives away so much money to his so-called friends that he ruins himself, can't decide if it's a comedy or a tragedy; its characters have humors but lack depth; the plot is thin, with few dramatic reversals, and Timon's trajectory from philanthropy to misanthropy is a precipitous straight line. 

There is a saying that Shakespeare was a bit embarrassed about staging Timon. It was thus never staged during his lifetime.

Perhaps it was the subject matter that made the play ahead of its time. As Lahr praises a recent revival of the play by London's National Theatre, he makes it look like Timon was written for a time of global economic meltdown. 

The play opens with an onstage replica of the tents of the Occupy London protesters, and ends with a view of the logo of HSBC, the bank that was caught laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.

According to Lahr:

In its gaudy shadows, Timon's tale of collapse catches not only the fragility of the British economy but the unnerving immanence of the collapse of its ruling elite.

Shakespeare must have written a recession play in an era when economic systems were in a very nascent stage.

India's Tea Party

August 15, 2012: The 65th year of India's independence.

Very little is said about how the ideals of American republicanism had inspired a part of the independence movement in India.

Ram Chandra, a co-founder of the Gadar party, a pro-independence party formed in America by expatriate Indians, paid tribute to these roots and this tribute is quoted here in full:

Residence in the U.S. has not made [Indians]…who returned home ‘imbued with revolutionary ideas’ but it has made them republicans.” He added, “The whole country has been stirred by their vision of a United States of India.”

Chandra's mention of American republicanism as a virtue that enables people to stand up against tyranny of foreign rule, reminds me of the sea-change that the word "Republican" has undergone since the 1930s. I'm certain today's American Republicans wouldn't "inspire" revolutionary ideals in the breasts of potential uprisers against any form of tyranny.

Writing

Verlyn Kilnkenborg addresses some misconceptions about the "source" of the perfect sentence and about writing in general:

There’s no magic here. Practice these things, and you’ll stop fearing what happens when it’s time to make sentences worth inscribing. You’ll no longer feel as though a sentence is a glandular secretion from some cranial inkwell that’s always on the verge of drying up. You won’t be able to say precisely where sentences come from — there is no where there — but you’ll know how to wait patiently as they emerge and untangle themselves. You’ll discover the most important thing your education left out: how to trust and value your own thinking. And you’ll also discover one of things writing is for: pleasure.

Titular

The borders are porous--between fiction and non-fiction. I understand that.

While it's great to live in an era of no borders/liminal zones and extreme fluidity where classifications are concerned, I feel like in the world of writing the borderlessness has generated a plethora of "ugly" sounding titles.

What's with a title like You Shall Know Our Velocity? (Dave Egger's first novel)

Or, with a title like A Working Theory of Love? (Scott Hutchins' forthcoming novel)

Here is a list of titles from a medley of short fiction and novels by Jonathan Safran Foer:

A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease ( a New Yorker short story)

Extremely loud and Incredibly Close ( a novel).

The titles are evocative of hypotheses, or of self-help mantras, not of imaginary places and things that used to be the domain of fiction titles.

I think it all began with Martin Scorsese's monstrous sounding There Will be Blood.

John Ashbery

A John Ashbery take on sustainability; on how there is too much gabbing and no action to stop denuding the environment. The earth in this poem seems to be slipping from our grasp:

So it all comes round
to individual responsibility and awareness,
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by. 

I like the phrasing, "the circus of dusty dramas."

Paulo Coelho on James Joyce

For years I've entertained the opinion that Paulo Coelho's is an incredibly shallow writer.

I haven't read a single Coelho production, precisely because of the reasons cited in The Economist. But a million and a half others worldwide have read Coelho and they adulate him. 

I believe that as a writer/artist the shallower one is, the wider her popularity might be. My rationale is simple--a novel/a piece of art is not the exact equivalent of a mass product.

The Bible is the world's biggest seller, and from personal experience of it, I can tell that it's a supremely bright book.

But the Bible is one of "The Books", not a book.

A comparison can be made between Ceolho's The Alchemist, which has sold a 150 million copies worldwide, and James Joyce's Ulysses, which didn't sell during his lifetime, but has grown to become a biblio-institution over time.

The former is shallow; the latter is deep, and if you are fishing around for an explanation try veering in the direction of Nicolas Carr (he'll tell you why Ulysses endures over The Alchemist or 29 other "mystical" books Coelho has fabricated over the years).

When a bad writer attacks a pioneer of form, the depth of the former's intellectual impoverishment is exposed. 

Coelho's propaganda against James Joyce is a mark of his abys(s)mality:

[Joyce has damaged the 20th century novel by reducing it to] pure style [...] there is nothing there [...] If you dissect Ulysses it gives you a tweet.

Defenders of Joyce have justly lashed out against Coelho, and the lashings sound better-crafted than some of the zombie-musings of Coelho on mystical whales etc.:

Here's Stuart Kelly in The Guardian:

Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion, just as I am entitled to think Coelho's work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysticism with slightly less intellect, empathy and verbal dexterity than the week-old camembert I threw out yesterday. 

What a wonderful way to call Coelho "stinky"!

Are we Victorians?

According to William Gibson, in many ways we are:

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. 

Of course, we might be Victorians, too.

Gibsonism

In a recent Paris Review interview, novelist William Gibson says the following about his craft:

No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

Unlikely teachers

Sometimes the best of observations on eras and literature are to be found in the most unlikely of places.

Here's something I read in the context of movie critic Anthony Lane's remark on the tepidness of The Dark Knight Rises: While The Dark Knight taps into the revolutionary spirit of Occupy, says Lane, the film at large "coughs politely and moves on" and its clamor for social change is positively "Victorian".

How is Batman Victorian?

In that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged.

The observation allows me to see in a sentence the contradiction of Victorianism, celebrated as the era is for being both reformist in spirit and conservative to the core. The observation also helps make an extraordinary adjective out of "Victorian". You can call Obamacare, for instance, "Victorian".

My thought then turns to Jerry Sandusky's take on why Captain Ahab so vehemently hated the whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. According to Sandusky, the once stellar and now disgraced college football coaching legend, Moby had the advantage and privilege of "depth". Living under the sea, the whale knew, saw and understood things the mere human, Ahab, couldn't; Ahab found this truth of his own imbecility relative to that of the whale, intolerable. 

Then there is the excellent interpretation of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in the film Six Degrees of Separation. Best if one were to just listen to this one:

TriBeCa Nation

Once upon a time the novel used to be spoken of in the same breath as the nation. It was said that the "rise" of the novel was more or less synchronous with the "rise" of the nation (one has to read Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel to make sense of the affinity between the genre and nation-formation).

Today the typical novel is written within the context of a specific locality. Karl Taro Greenfeld's debut novel Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa, an enclave within the borough of Manhattan.

Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa from being an artist's colony/bohemia in the 1970s to becoming what it is today: one of the most expensive urban zip codes in the U.S.

The following are some self-reflective lines spoken by one of the characters in the novel:

We are a prosperous community [...] Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of the ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better than that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on our iTunes playlists, our children in their secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.

Who knows, next we might just have a novel named Sohonama?

Marilyn Monroe

A new biography of Marilyn Monroe is on the block: Lois Banner's The Passion and the Paradox.

A review of the book has three striking observations about Monroe:

1. There are multiple rumors of who Marilyn really was. I like this one best--she was both a dumb blonde and a bookworm who read Dostoyevsky.

2. Monroe justified promiscuity with the conviction that sex was "an act that brought friends closer together."

3. Marilyn had recurring visions of striding over a supine row of church congregants who peered up her skirt.

Globalization gives me the creeps...

Now that I know that "globalization" is a "zombie" noun, I feel like I expose myself to the undead whenever I put down in a cover letter the following sentence: "I specialize in literature and globalization."

"Zombie" nouns, according to Helen Sword, an Auckland-based academic, are results of nominalization, a process via which new nouns are formed from other parts of speech (from an adjective, an active verb or another noun). 

Why "zombie"? 

Because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

Zombie nouns are used mostly by academics, lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers (who have no business using zombie nouns).

I confess I have used many a zombie noun in my academic essays. I've always found it difficult to express abstract and cerebral concepts in concrete terms. I take Ms. Sword's advice and will try to write of complex thoughts in "language [that] remains firmly anchored in the physical world."

India and freedom: oxymoron?

I had wished "happy birthday" to a cousin of mine on Facebook.

I noticed that others had posted the same on his "wall".

But the birthday boy never thanked anybody back till very recently.

He said he had been in China and he wasn't able to access Facebook because "Facebook is banned in China."

The tone in which my cousin mentioned the fact of banning was normal, as though he were reporting the absence of bananas in Alaska.

My cousin's nonchalance in this matter didn't perturb me in and of itself. After all Indians are phlegmatic where the question of human rights violation, or threats to autonomy and freedom--abstract stuff like that--is concerned. But threaten the urban middle class with a ban on malls, then Indians would be up in arms.

What perturbed me was what the cousin said in conjunction with the "ban". He said that "China is a magnificent country."

How could a member of thriving democracy (then again, India is a poster child for democracy without being really democratic in any meaningful sense of the term) commit the sin of such a blatant oxymoron?

"Facebook is banned in China. China is a magnificent country." The utterance has two separate parts not joined by a "but" or "however" to highlight a contradiction. It's as though the observer were looking at two different parts in the same thing and is deaf and blind to the contradiction.

I'm not saying that my cousin is politically obtuse; it's just that he is being characteristically Indian in his observation of China. He notices the presence of Beijing's beauty--the gorgeous malls, the clean roads, the overall architectural splendor, cleanliness and efficiency. In this aesthetic and infrastructural sense, China is the obverse of India.

The beauty of China has obviously mesmerized the Indian visitor, as it had mesmerized the American visitors back in the day of the 2007 Beijing Olympics.

But the absence of freedom did not register as a significant lacunae in China's apparent perfection. He didn't express shock at the fact that Facebook is banned in China. Nay, he overrode the concern for freedom and democracy and a lack of both in China as frivolous and went on to tub thump about the nation's "magnificence."

I believe that Indians in general are comfortable living with violation. There are low and high level violations of all kinds everyday in India. Take freedom or rights away from Indians--they won't mind is my guess. But take the guarantee of a monthly wage away from them, they'll faint in horror. Trade security (of a monetary kind) with freedom and Indians will be un-protesting to the hilt.

In light of the recent power blackouts in large parts of India I noticed a queer sentiment among my Indian brethren (and sisterhood) on Facebook. Many were "fed up" with living under Indian governance, marked as it is by inefficiency and grave corruption. Some yearned for a recolonization of India. The argument was that Indians fared "better" under the British Raj.

Perhaps Indians don't quite care for freedom-"shreedom" and such non-material garbage.

What do they care for? I don't know; maybe a flat far removed from the stench and squalor of everyday Indian reality? To attain that they might be willing to forego freedom and many rights.

As my favorite fictional servant Balram Halwai had noted in The White Tiger, Indians are born to be ruled and if ever they are in the market looking for an invader/ruler, China would be the nation of choice.

Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.

The 21st century family

I remember this: I was teaching an advanced creative non-fiction class to undergraduate business students. Students who take to majoring in business are generally whip-smart, but they also tend to possess pretty deterministic world views.

As a representative of the non-business mode of thinking, I had felt burdened with the task of attempting to "break" such views, or at least instill some sort of uncertainty and doubt into them.

From day 1 we ran into problems of definition. Can one define what a "family" is?

Everybody said in unison, "yes".

It's easy--a family comprises a father, a mother and children. I had winced at the patness of the answer; but by then I had got used to such patness in every answer that a typical business undergraduate was capable of giving.

"A family could be any unit of emotional intimacy," I had suggested. "A woman with a cat could be a family." I hadn't spoken of the gay and lesbian family because the frame of reference simply wasn't available back then.

This was in 2000; the young corporate-acolytes in my class thought I was joking.

At that time corporations didn't seek to normalize the non-traditional/non-heterosexual family. (Now even Budweiser has an ad showing a soldier coming home to the embrace of a male "special" other).

Thus the J.C. Penny catalog celebrating Father's and Mother's days with images of alternative families--the one I had poster-childed with the "woman with a cat" theme--would only elicit nods of assent were I to teach that class today. To do otherwise would be unsophisticated and unmodern.