Godiva' s Lane

Travail, tourism, 'Cox and Flings'

2011-02-24T22:56:00.002+05:30

A couple of days ago, I was looking up visa requirements for different countries just to get a sense of how badly Asians fare on the spontaneous wanderlust ability index. Because, you know, nothing cheers a brown kid up more than seeing how suspicious everyone else is of her. I'm serious...sorry white folk, you shall never know how badass being feared by half the world's embassies can make you feel. At any rate, in my perusals of numerous fora across the internet, I realised that there were a lot of people asking questions about visa policies in various countries and saw a pattern. There are two kinds of tourists in the world - those who holiday in Paris and those who vacation in Prague. I realise how this sort of sweeping categorisation can be offensive to the variety of travellers all over the globe. I do realise it.

Pause for effect

Let me be clearer. I am excluding from this binary those people who are hardcore globetrotters, ready to pitch their tent anywhere just for the thrill of it. That's a species that can at least be admired for its unrelenting commitment to transience and celebrated for its love of movement. As long as they aren't lying to the customs officials, of course.

I also exclude the arty bohemian set that will find in Paris, Prague, Pyongyang or Patna the best of culture and tradition that there is to admire, almost in the spirit of amateur cultural anthropologists with extra suntan lotion. There is an earnest willingness to engage with the finest aspects of a foreign culture and enjoy what it has to offer. The world truly deserves tourists of this sort, happy to immerse themselves in the way of the exotic, appreciate its acme, acknowledge misgivings about some aspects of the culture, enjoy the experience while it lasts and then move on. Once in a while, they'll even decide to settle down and adopt the vacation spot as their permanent abode.

The perennial peregrine, in the one case, and the tourmet (as in gourmet) in the other, both treat the act of travel not as something incidental, but as an integer in their sense of being. Like IQ, this Travel Quotient can be plotted as a Bell Curve, the normal distribution in a given population. It is the mass of regular Joes and Janes in the middle of the curve that I speak of when positing the Paris/Prague rule. The ones who take pictures of themselves at the Eiffel Tower, in exactly the same pose for five consecutive snaps, and plaster them all over Facebook; the ones who squeal like piglets about shopping for clothes in Paris; the ones who think that "Swizzerland" is "like, so cool, man." These are the people who provoke xenophobia and piss off several ethnic groups on six continents with their slaughter of language and offence to local ways, not to mention baffling inability to either learn to abstain from or adapt their metabolism to the available variety of alcohol. If you can't handle an extra slice of bread at home, you sure as hell aren't downing that vat of vodka, dumbass.

The behaviour of these tourists can be analogised very aptly to explain dating mores among college-going youth. I call this the 'Cox and Flings' theory of dating that will summarise the attitude of 'tail tourism' that college campuses and adultescence is rife with. Now, being a woman, I can only speak from the female point of view but please free to distort my thesis to accommodate your current post-dump spell of misogyny and repeat viewings of 500 Days of Summer.

The 'Cox and Flings' theory of dating is very simple: just like your average moneyed mister off to "see world", the untended male tail tourist will want to sample everything there is on the relationship market. I use the term 'relationship' loosely of course. It covers the range of liaisons from one-nighters to knight-oners. He will do this out of a sense of entitlement and privilege that only be possessed by a boy brought up in the kind of society that we have. He will want to go sightseeing in Paris - binoculars firmly aimed at skinny French legs - and see subtitled films - because you can hardly make out intelligible speech - and *AHEM* shop for clothes, because frankly, that's what you went there for. Everyone wants to go to Paris. It's almost the first phoren city you learn of, growing up. It's glamorous and giddy and mon dieu! the clothes. Everyone wants to wear 'em and good golly, if you land those threads to show off to the other lads, won't that be something. I hope my attempts at keeping this post respectable by using the clever metaphor of "buying clothes" have not been lost. Because I could just switch right over to speaking of intercourse and such. Paris is the hot girl that must be nailed, that is easily available and that it ups your cred to be...er...in. Paris is ultimately the dream.

And then there's Prague. Let's be honest, there's a certain sort of man who would go to Prague for the love of it. For the tail tourist troupe, Prague is the city you go to because you have to exhibit your sense of culture to everyone else back home. Do you know who Kafka is? Of course not. But you'll hang around, take pictures as proof, break your teeth (or have them broken for you) on Czech, pretend to have secret communist tendencies in pubs (comma who now?) and well, not get much opportunity to dress up, if yaknowhadimean. Of course, having gone to Prague will score you bragging rights and the ability to impress a few French fillies. Maybe even some other Eastern European girls. Whatever. At the end of the day, however, Czech is a fucking tough language to learn and the weather isn't as great as Paris - it also doesn't allow for as many legs on display - and the films are much harder to understand even with the subtitles, by virtue of being pitched a little high, and the Marxism just gets to you after a while. And maybe Prague is even more hostile than Paris because it's so complicated. Just sayin'...So the nerdy girl doesn't get the boy, she sulks in a corner waiting for an industry apart from tourism to open up her economy. And the boy gets a smart girl on his air miles.

So, that's it ladies and gentlemen. You're free to disagree of course. But I'd certainly like a male point of view to this.

Memorable Cable

2011-02-16T07:10:00.002+05:30

Have been rewatching some old episodes of TV shows. In no particular order and restricted to non-animated and the '90s and '00s:

1.Lost-The Constant (S04E05)

Dizzying time travel, Great Love that defies the laws of physics (and makes it that much harder for the rest of us), a beautiful score by Michael Giacchino and some fantastic acting by everyone, especially Henry Ian Cusick in his heartbreaking portrayal of an Odysseus unable to return home. The best of 'Lost': super science and duper fiction, fascinating character chemistry and a tautly told story.

2.Seinfeld-The Soup Nazi (S07E06)

"NO SOUP FOR YOU" has become one of the most oft-quoted lines of the show and, indeed, television. I think the episode also works wonderfully because it epitomises the tongue-in-cheek nihilism of 'Seinfeld' ("a show about nothing"), the razor-sharp structure of the episodes and the randomness of it all coming together in a manner resonant with the everyday whimsy of life. Not to mention the weird sexual tension between feisty bitch Elaine and supergrumpy soup virtuoso Yev Kassem. Hey, someone had to say it.

3.How I Met Your Mother-The Naked Man (S04E09)

Always seeking to bedazzle with its unconventional narrative style, it's surprising that this episode sticks out, given how tame it is in the telling. But the other thing that HIMYM does very well is document the rules for this generation's twentythirtyparty. A good example of an episode offering the former would be No Tomorrow (S03E12) but to get back to the chosen one, it's a delightful send-up of dating mores, sexual niceties and just how distorted our attitudes about physical companionship can be. The last scene, a bit of a spoof on Batman I thought, sums it all up - ugly, bald little man turned superhero ;)

4.CID-The Case of the Accused Officer (S03E08)

Inspector Abhijeet accused of accepting a bribe! Our faith has been shaken! OH NOEZ! But wait, of course he was set up! Daya ke darwaaze todne aur Inspector Pradyuman ke pata lagane ke tatpaschaat maloom hota hai ki Abhijeet jaise imaandaar afsar ko bhi phasaaya jaa sakta hai. I remember watching this episode when I was 10, snuggled up next to my CID-phile grandfather, in pin drop silence. Inspector Abhijeet's vindication represents all that is awesome about this crime procedural. No matter the apraadh, CID is ustaad. Also, never mind that the picture isn't exactly relevant you pedants. HOW WIN IS IT!

5.Scrubs-My Screw Up (S03E14)

Not the best episode, but certainly one of the saddest and well-made in its own right. Between the overlapping mentions of Dr. Cox's son's birthday and his best friend Ben's terminal disease and the hilarious discovery of Turk's irksome mole, much larger themes of mortality, closure and acceptance are being spoken about. The bit where JD asks Dr. Cox, "Where do you think we are?" has got to be the one of the most 'Oh fuck...' moments in recent TV, and precisely because it's *so* not a gimmick.

6.Friends-The Last One (S10E18)

OK we all kinda outgrew 'Friends' around 14 but c'mon it's such a cultural fixture. Plus, most of us got to outgrow it just as it was ending so there's some of that syndication bittersweetness going on. Ross and Rachel tied up with a bow, Chandler and Monica having twins, Phoebe married and Joey on his way to stardom (...naaaat, as we would discover in a few months with the execrable 'Joey'), a long lingering look at the apartment one last time and...let's call it a decade.

7.Frasier-Travels with Martin (S01E21)

I remember being the only kid in class watching this show back in the early noughties, so I'm not sure how many o' y'all will agree on this one. There are many bits of 'Frasier' I love - the allusions to the ever-absent Maris, the hilariously high-brow references, uppity Niles' almost-unrequited infatuation with daffy Daphne, Roz's sass and Martin's lived-in old coolness - but just the breeziness of this episode, when they head off in a Winnebago and accidentally cross over into Canada, remains in my mind. One particularly outstanding bit was a Canadian official asking Niles the purpose of their visit and his zombie-like, deadpan response-"Fun." Genius David Hyde Pierce.

8.Rome-Stealing From Saturn'(S01E04)

A brilliantly mounted historical drama, 'Rome' had many high watermarks in its first season. This episode represented not just the bloody reality of Gaius Julius' rise to prominence but also the vertigo of power politics in the atrium, replete with precocious teenage future emperors (the sublime Max Pirkis), secret epileptic fits and a poisonous dose of feminine Machiavelli. What really gave 'Rome' its vitality though, was its usage of the lives of common Romans ("the plebs") to illuminate the truths of that time; the bromance between angsty, righteous Lucius Vorenus and gold-hearted giant Pullo beats at the very heart of the show. In this episode, the interaction between those at the top of the food chain and the regular bloke on the Roman road is adroitly brought out, not least in the very, VERY memorable scene where a naked Marc Antony nonchalantly intimidates the high-minded Vorenus, discussing the future of Rome with him as if it were the weather and using his body to leverage control, as much as his office and station. Droolworthy drama.

9.Dekh Bhai Dekh-The London Ones

In the words of my friend Powar, "Kameeney, zindagi mein pehli baar ek Indian TV show ko Bombay se baahar le gaye." DBD was standard childhood viewing, when Cartoon Network got boring. The only sitcom worth its salt in this country, exploring our issues and travails with silly desiness, the London episodes are worth remembering for Daisy Irani's adorable Daisy Mausi, that odd phoren relative we all had. Man, this show really captured what family life in the city was like 20 years ago.

That's my list. What you got?

'Ten

2011-01-04T00:05:00.001+05:30

As 2010 ended, I was beset with anxiety. The last time I’d ever felt something like this was when, at the end of fifth standard, we were told that we were to begin using pens instead of pencils. I’d scribbled around with biros before but just the thought that there would be no more opportunities to make a dense granite mess on crisp, blue-lined notepaper was unpleasant. The horror, to my 10 year old mind, was unspeakable.

I welcomed the New Year very...er...responsibly this year, sans alcohol and loud singing (usually in a British accent that would shame the cast of Monty Python), by accident rather than design really. This was it, I said to myself, the end of this decade. I’d lived through two of them. Surely that made me some kind of expert on the experience of counting years in tens. Hell, marriages have been shorter.

So what did 2000-2010 teach me? Here are my top 10 random life lessons learnt in the past decade:

1. Gel pens make you want to write much more neatly than pencils. And it makes your homework look much nicer. You will also experiment with more forms of handwriting than a white-collar fugitive.

2. Modelling your middle school years on Harry Potter will lead to angst and frustration. Having a vague, pre-pubescent interest in seeing Ron and Hermione get together will compound this.

3. Knowledge schmowledge, Google has revolutionised the way long-distance stalking is carried out. I should know, I invented it. Really, ask me my current celebrity crush’s whereabouts at any given point of time. I DARE YOU.

4. There is no such thing as too much beer. There is, however, such a thing as forced celibacy caused by throwing up on the person you fancy. That’s an image no amount of witty repartee will ever erase.

5. Forget fungus, white vinegar will remove entire fucking ecosystems from stale laundry. White vinegar is like the Anupam Kher of domestic necessities – every kitchen must have at least a bit.

6. If, despite multiple time zones and the Atlantic Ocean in between, you still can’t wait to tell someone something utterly trivial and pathetic, that’s your soulmate right there. Never let them go. Threaten them if need be. Sabotage their love life to make them pay attention.

7. Don’t waste your time with clever jokes and interesting conversation. Only two things work with men: mini-skirts and lowering your eyelashes for a split-second before shooting them a sidelong, upward glance. It makes them feel manly and big and distracts them from your legs long enough to elicit an intelligible sentence. Women are even easier: random sarcasm and an inscrutable expression go the longest way between women and women, gay or straight.

8. When in doubt, have a go-to classical myth on standby. In academic circles, this is a big hit. Outside them, you will be The Wise One. Also, in intellectually pressurising situations, NEVER underestimate the power of gossip and irreverent titbits about the personal lives of great women and men – it makes it appear as if you’re so well up on them that you can jest about the fun stuff.

9. If Justin Timberlake can do it, so can you. The man was in a boy band, fuhtheluvvaShiva.

10. CID will never end.

Artful Dodger: 'The American'

2010-10-17T06:02:00.001+05:30

Well well well, a George Clooney film without George Clooney, if that makes sense. Indeed, The American is a film without much claim to plot, action or dialogue and is yet a compelling watch. Of course, I must add here that my fellow blogger, Shwetank, does not share this view at all and thought the film much too shallow in parts. I, on the other hand, was seduced by its atmospherics and ambition. Anton Corbijn (not only has a cool name but has) also directed the luminous love letter to Ian Curtis and '80s rock-n-roll decadence Control (2007), so I was expecting great things from The American, its poster mustering a late Hitchcockian retro-chic even as the movie itself suggests sophisticated European noir at its simmering smoothest. I was not disappointed.

There is a tang of Leon about the story but with an infinitely more nocturnal zest. George Clooney's assassin protagonist, Jack, is a character study of the modern tragic hero, anguished by his choices and doomed by his ethical autonomy. I assume he is the American simply because there is nothing else at all distinctive about him, he can only be tagged by his accent and the origin it betrays. The film's repeated use of a butterfly is a sideways glance at its chief conceit - freedom and its cost. The muslin-winged insect, an ironic counterpoise for a bloody murderer, perfectly symbolises the desolate life of a man without any discernible past or identity, forever fluttering his gauzy morals in a bid to propel himself forward somehow. His existential unrest and spiritual fatigue, unfurled with reverent gravity in tart interactions with a priest and nervous attempts at love, tussle with the reality of his life as a killer and as the story unfolds, the futility of his experience is divulged. Human liberty is denounced as a myth, our moral agency a necessary lie on which the individual arranges his or her existence, and Jack's slow-boil confrontation with this truth, against a backdrop of self-deceit, paranoiac guilt and agnostic impertinence, a haunting account of a man trying to free his soul from the weight of his decisions.

I think the problem encountered by Shwetank was in the lack of an obvious "point" to the film. This is an interesting question - what kind of point does art make? And when does the absence of an obvious one deter our enjoyment of it? Purpose is not utilitarian of course, in the case of aesthetic products, but then how do we define it? Some of the most celebrated examples of good cinema are rather pointless, at least on the surface, more tributes to some deep, complex facet of a truth about our world than invested in a particular sequence of events. The American was not meant to be an action thriller designed to labour through a three-act Hollywood structure and deliver an Aesopian edict; its meandering, disconnected amble sustains the deceptive humdrum of Jack's ominous oppression. Its point was to depict the despair of a conflicted and lonely man with muted refinement, rather than melodramatic exposition. One might say that the film suffers from lack of exposition, a cinematic crime so much rarer than its opposite that one blinks a bit before even acknowledging it, but how much of the integrity of the film's filigree would be compromised by letting on any more? Part of our engagement with Jack lies in the melancholic mystery of who he is and our ability to then inhabit his immediate crisis from the viewpoint of strangers rather than intimates. This is a character we must not care about, else the crucial question of what is to be free will be sacrificed at the altar of familiar and excessive empathy.

The sparse narrative is a perfect vehicle for this subterranean trauma defining its protagonist and, indeed, professing a universal summation of man and woman's tormented relationship with themselves. Wide frames and a '70s-ish faux-aged palette lend an air of vintage spy movie (The Parallax View et al) and the hemmed-in tightness is brought out with some well-considered camera angles. The stylishness of Corbijn's work cannot be doubted - the bright hues of the remote Italian village where our Mr. Butterfly cocoons himself, are drawn out intensely and the design of The American has an artisanal virtuosity that almost eats up the gaps in exposition.

The surprise was in seeing George Clooney play a character so unlike any that he has portrayed before, sullen and silent yet still kinda cool, a Steve McQueen without the charm if I may (and for Mr. Clooney, that's saying something). His imperceptibly terrified Jack, going through the motions of life and making perfunctory attempts to salvage it even as he is vaguely aware of something gone awry, is a competent lead who summons enough solemnity to balance the delicately wrought porcelain narrative on his impressive-for-50 shoulders. Having said that, who knows what a Viggo Mortensen or a Clive Owen might have done with the role. The rest of the cast is almost one single cameo, Thekla Reuten's enigmatic professional, Mathilde, brings a formidable force for Jack to play off his frustrations against and Violante Placido's Clara offsets his darkness with an angelic sincerity that does ultimately become the viewer's sole point of entry into Jack's wretched heart and allow them a moment of sympathy for him.

The American is an elegiac meditation on the perils of free will, its nihilistic indifference to penance and the misery of self-imposed solitude. In the end, we are alone in our retribution and are invariably responsible for what we choose to do; we cannot escape destinies of our own logical selection. Corbijn's austere rendition of a great modern dilemma occasionally tests one's patience but offers at least some succour for the thinking viewer.

Demockracy

2010-10-02T04:40:00.004+05:30

The problem with democracy is that our choice becomes operative at a stage where it no longer holds the strength we invested in it during its conceptualisation. As with all complex systems, there are parallel processes of sociohistorical power play that undercut the fundamental tenet of this one institution.

So, is a government acceptable because we deserve it? When in fact, we have nothing but an illusory stake in even claiming it?

And in the case of a political procedure, which has no value independent of its actualisation, one cannot retreat to sophist arguments of some ideal that remains unrealised. You can't say, "It's a good idea but we implement it wrong." because in the case of a material process, its worth lies only in its implementation. And we forget that it is only one element in a larger structure that is not necessarily benign to its aspirations.

Anorexic books and 19th century kooks: Part Two

2010-10-02T04:37:00.004+05:30

I am a bit surprised that more people have not read Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Nikolai Leskov's arctic account of sex, lies and coldblooded murder. More than a century before Fatal Attraction's Glenn Close made men defecate in their lower body garments, Katerina Izmailova was already a villain for the ages, having been later immortalised in Shostakovich's eponymous (and, on expected lines, banned in Stalin's Russia) 1932 opera. Nothing was ever good enough until the politburo outlawed it. I imagine the Russian public must have had a fairly accurate rule-of-thumb to know what was shit and what wasn't and forewent the kopecks on reviews in the local rags.

I read the foreword by the translator Robert Chandler before getting into the book, mainly because I'd read his English language version of Apollinaire's Calligrammes and, having no knowledge of French, found it as lyrical an approximation as I was likely to find. It was interesting to browse through Mr. Chandler's opinions about the Russian original and recall them when settling down with the actual novella because when you're reading something in translation, you're already pretty handicapped and so I like to at least equip myself with a perspective with which to connect the dots of language when forming the literary picture. I won't pointlessly enumerate them here but it is true that even accessing the novel in a second telling, it is quite apparent that the use of Russian to enrich the narration is deliberate and dynamic, offering symbolic hints and bringing out the silhouette of the dark plot with a slow swell. That's all Mr. Chandler's masterful cross-breeding though, where even as an Anglophone I was able to glimpse the verbal garnish that offered a fuller view of the background and sociocultural bric-a-brac in which the central story survived.

The protagonist is a lusty young siren who has an extramarital affair with a (hot) stable boy and when he tries to break it off, destroys everything in her path to keep him. Sounds lurid enough to be a Danielle Steele plot, huh? Katerina Izmailova's passionate femme fatale is made all the more sinister by her opaqueness; Leskov has an anti-Dostoevskian offensiveness that does not apologise for his main character's being...well, something of a loony. With lint-picking nonchalance Leskov reports, rather than regales with, the rise and fall of a woman who craves the physicality of love to the extent of implosion. There are no attempts at psychoanalysis or explanations and that's what causes one's internal fluids to curdle when following her exploits. There is a dehumanising element to so much ho-hum coldbloodedness on display and you know Leskov is revelling in your horror, so well-structured is the simple tale.

There is an excellent control of momentum throughout the novel and during individual episodes that draws the reader in like a keyhole peeper. The movement from the suffocatingly quiet mansion in the beginning to the tempestuous river at the end supports the basic arc of the tale and unassuming annotations like the hazily sexual act of the hot lover climbing up and down his deranged Rapunzel's window (too many cultural studies classes, you say?) and the abrupt and very brief switches of point of view to cameo third parties. A talented moderator of response, Leskov clearly knew how to take a taut narrative and make his readers view it just the way he wanted them to.

A feminist reading might pinch its nose at the conflation of female libido with insanity and crime but this is a tricky issue because on the one hand you do have a strong, proactive and truly evil female lead in a 19th century work and on the other, you can't detach the awful things she did from her gender since it becomes an issue of sexual politics as well. Is Katerina punished for bumping uglies? I don't know but I suppose looking up Leskov's general attitude towards the incumbent Woman Question of his time might offer insight. Just off the book though, I felt that the insouciant description was far less judgemental about her right and want to have sex, almost defending it at times, and even gentler during her decline and dejection, when she became an object of derision than desire, as if to lament the loss of a spirited woman driven to such wickedness by the strictures placed on her. Of course, this is conjecture from the perceived tone of the language (a big reason why language played such a particularly important role in Mstsensk) as Leskov refused to invest his heroine with the benefit of a psychological moment.

Lady Macbeth of Mstsensk is a deadly little justdunnit with enough of the creepy quotient to keep one up till the very end and the modern reader will be just as scandalised by some of it as the original public. Don't lock up your daughters.

Artistik Edukation

2010-10-02T04:34:00.002+05:30

I saw this cult German film with my co-blogger yesterday, Hans Weingartner's The Edukators which apparently had young Europe's knickers in eine Twist a few years ago. An angst-fizzed, brightly coloured comment on the wicked witch of the West, capitalism, it is also a story of youth in revolt against their own worlds rather than the world, even though they would like to believe the opposite.It has sterling performances from its three young leads, who have since gone on to be arguably more famous for other things - Julia Jentsch was phenomenal in Sophie Scholl and Daniel Bruhl basked in his moment of international disgust and pity in Inglorious Basterds, a great sense of purpose and what I liked most - a rare feeling of actual frustration that underlies it, that so many political films these days are bereft of. This isn't really a review although I will say that I enjoyed the film and I think everyone who has ever felt like they needed to change the world should see it.

Why I blog about it is because my co-blogger and I had very different interpretations of the ending. A quick lurk on IMDb proved that the ambiguity was shared by many viewers. There was a furious SMS battle later that night between myself and Shwetank, both of us having had time to chew over and digest our respective perspectives enough to be adamant about our interpretations. The director remained non-committal, as we expected he would be. And I wondered: well, if both of us saw the same film and concluded so differently, where were we really disagreeing? Good narratives allow us so much space to fill in gaps and good plots are built on such a complete understanding of character and statement that we can insert our own processed version of what actually happens into what we see. We may be watching the same scenes, but really, we're already deriving our own ideas of what the characters are like, what their motivations are, how the story unfolds the way it does, how everything falls into place...we really create the film in our own minds using the material given us by the director. But if everything is so subjective, where does the authority of the auteur (and yes, I subscribe to that theory) really lie? Is the intention of the artist undermined by the viewer's agency in regarding it? Is not the value of the object and the evaluation by the subject a sacred contract?

It can't be that we conveniently impute this cleavage of opinion to relativism, a cheap and misused retort that, to me, seems like a slap on the face of any artist. So where do we anchor our differences about a film's plot and look for the similarity that must bind our points of view together in the face of the artist's interest? I gave it a lot of thought and finally made sense of it thus: we may consider an art object as a moment in the artist's life and try to seek insight into his or her creative impulse by being both subject and artist-by-proxy, receiving his or her work in the spirit of the observer and attempting to view it almost by inhabiting his or her space, in a quickened practice of detachment and attachment. I think we do this anyway, so I'm not sure if this Method Contemplation is something one works at. So much of the language of our discussions about the complexities of art and ethics is mired in oblivion that we do not stop to realise what it is we are conversing about. We are lazy subjects of art.

I saw Mulholland Drive again after a long time, a couple of days ago. The same thing: Lynch's cinema is so invested in that twilight zone between creation and contemplation that to our lethargic aesthetic sensibilities he appears a bizarre patience tester rather than the brilliant storysmith that he is. I dare any two people to sit down and watch any of his films or even Twin Peaks and be on the same page. And yet, Lynch knows exactly what he's saying and expects us all to cotton on to the same things. It is we who must see the film as Lynch would have and as we, as ourselves, do, simultaneously and in a flash of film-drugged high. Perhaps then we can maintain our differences and sustain the similarity of a shared aesthetic experience.

And She's Hot Also

2010-08-23T08:53:00.002+05:30

I was watching an episode of Bones the other day and marvelling at how Bones manages to have a perfect bod and porcelain complexion while being insanely smart and kicking butt with as much testosterone-fuelled ardour as Booth. Then there's Liz Lemon from 30 Rock who is a woman so cool and so hot at the same time that it's a wonder her appeal hasn't turned tepid since the show's debut. There's even Dr. Juliet Burke from Lost who is such a genius that she had a male rat give birth (yes, you read right) but has a waist that Dr. Jack 'Hottie' Shepherd can span with his hand and hair so luxuriously blonde you wonder whether there's an ad campaign for L'Oreal being shot secretly somewhere.

I mean what. the phug.

Is it a case of life imitating art or vice versa? Are all women really that attractive and cerebral? I mean I like the idea of a beautiful nerd as much as the next person but is it a bit disconcerting to be bombarded with media portrayals of ladies who look like supermodels and think like Nobel laureates? There is a sort of inverse sexism at work here: we often bemoan the fact that airbrushed pictures on magazine covers send out the wrong message to girls that they can only be valued if they look like that. But I have a bone to pick with this perverse sub-strand of chauvinism permeating our popular culture which communicates to girls an even more harrowing message: it's not enough to be smart. You have to look like that anyway.

Why I say this is more damning is because in the first instance, the entire value of a woman is being placed in her physique but in the second, value is actually being wrested away from her intellect and bestowed upon her physical appeal. It reminds me a bit of the Beauty Pageant and the imagery it evokes of a swimsuit-clad siren answering presumably thought-requiring questions. She could answer a (arguably more intelligent) question on the road, in a boardroom, at a university debate...but she does so flaunting her figure on a stage. I never really understood that. I firmly believe that a beauty pageant should be just that: a BEAUTY pageant; stop trying to endow it with some misguided notion of political correctness.

Coming back to my earlier contention about media portrayals of women, I read this article a year or so ago, in The New Yorker (here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/23/070723fa_fact_denby) which mentioned the invasion of the slacker-striver pairing in romantic comedies of the past decade. You have a useless, dim-seeming, nice enough , non-fugly bloke coupling with a career-driven, successful, very pretty woman and this has been passed off as a rather staple archetype in not just romantic comedies but also TV shows since the mid '90s/early '00s. The idea is that the woman cannot be anything but bright and upwardly-mobile, efficient and alpha, professionally powerful and of course, she must be gifted with long legs and perky breasts to boot (the 18-35 male demographic being the prime consumer of romantic comedies???). As the article asks, where are the women who aren't that awesome? Are they languishing in development hell as the protagonists of Oscar bait 'women's movies' or as sidekicks and dispensable love interests of the hero in another male-oriented 'dick flick'?

My truck with this rests on aforementioned social and aesthetic grounds. But there is one last angle to consider: what about the men? If you google 'good looking nerd' you'll only get a bunch of pages about the hottest female celebs who also have a brain. But why is it that men aren't put under the same microscope? It can hardly be because women don't mind ugly, stupid partners...although that's what Hollywood (and Bollywood, though its problems are way more complex) is conditioning females to believe. And I don't think women are less shallow than men and don't mind a so-so face as long as he can string a sentence together. Why wouldn't girls want to be in the company of great looking guys who are also very smart?It's also a little dangerous to be repeatedly hinting to women that they should just 'settle' under the specious marquee a seemingly feminist 'self-fulfilment' agenda.

There'll be whole bunch of evolutionary theories and sociological responses entailing 'social capital' rationalising this trend, I'm sure, but to be fair to the real world, I have seen far more evenly matched couples (in both the IQ and the GQ departments) than scruffy, semi-literate schmos hanging with overachieving Ms 10s. I speculate that this problem is more restricted to the nebulous universe of the media but worry about the kind of pressure this is exerting on young women to not only work hard towards academic success but whip themselves into an hourglass while they're at it. Will women never be taken seriously just on the basis of just their intellect, a privilege men have been enjoying forever? Must they always have an also attached to their worth?

I like that a geek can be lovely, but if she isn't, nobody should give a damn.

We need a new 'mance?

2010-08-23T08:51:00.001+05:30

Remember When Harry Met Sally? I mean, apart from that 'diner scene'. If you'll recall, the central premise of that film was a probe into whether men and women could be 'just friends' (which is offensive to friendship since it implies that it's somehow lower on the rung than romantic relationships). The answer, to anyone who is familiar with even the rudest blueprint of romance, was HELL NO. A lot of films and books and songs have been produced about this persistent puzzle of heterosocial interaction: The Friendship. They all seem to come up with a dismal and skewed picture of man-woman camaraderie.

WHMS was remade in Bollywood a few years ago as the forgettable Hum Tum, a film that managed the feat of trying to be both insultingly sexist and refreshingly modern at the same time. Sadly, it only actually accomplished the first part. Male-female dynamic has always been confusing territory but ever since the entry of women into public spaces and the collapse of concrete societal barriers between boys and girls, gender politics has forayed into some interesting areas. The relatively recent cultural desire to scrutinise non-sexual relationships among members of the sexes is fun to glance at.

What is so mysterious about a guy and a girl hanging out with absolutely no wish to get with each other?

There are a couple of reasons this transaction is such an enigma: here are two members of a species designed to copulate with each other and procreate, to propagate said species. The fact that they aren't doing that is enough to throw our evolutionary rationale off balance. The Homo Sapien(s) hasn't yet caught up with history. Perhaps suspicion of opposite-sex platonic friendships is natural because it violates our instinctive understanding of primordial mating rituals. If a man and a woman spend inordinate amounts of time in each other's company, this is a sign of coital interest - the woman, with her limited eggs and honed screening sense, would take that time to gauge the male, with his compulsion to ensure his genetic legacy's survival by increasing the odds, and decide that she is willing to have his offspring and thus preserve her legacy. Darwin would probably tell you that it makes absolutely no sense for a gal to be wasting time that could be better spent getting knocked up and guaranteeing her awesome math skills' transfer to a child, hangin' with a pal that she doesn't consider good enough to change the diapers. Selection is a process that does not brook much deviation from the practice of...well...sex and everything it entails.

However, as we've seen throughout the past of (wo)mankind, biological factors are one part of the story and rarely suffice to explain complex social phenomena. What could possibly be the societal reason for a mistrust of X-Y associations that claim abiding love but denounce the possibility of co-parenthood?

Obviously inhered in a font of patriarchy that seeks to control women, property and ultimately power, customs of sexual segregation and work demarcation have maintained the sociopolitical machinery that supports the physiological chasm between men and women, ensuring very little non-bodily exchanges between the two. In a global tradition that disallows equality and facility of opportunity, why would men and women want to be platonic friends at all? If I'm slaving away in the kitchen and you're off fighting wars, there's not much to talk about over a cuppa, is there? It's a documented fact that in cultures forbidding intergender contact, sexual discrimination is the highest; one needn't look far to infer the obvious: sexual discrimination and sexual inequality are logical equations. Friendship can only occur among equals. Thus, friendship cannot occur between men and women in societies that do not permit egalitarianism in public culture or communication between the two. Over the past 5,000 years, that has been pretty much every society. It's only in Western Europe in the past few centuries that the divide has been very slowly but steadily lessening and yet there's still a long way to go in terms of breaking millenia of conditioning. It's only now, with equal participation in the sphere outside the domestic, that true sharing of space and time has led to sharing of lifestyles, jokes and secrets, the mortar of friendship and affection. Ta-da.

Which brings me to my point of inquiry: we know why we doubt the existence of platonic love between men and women and acknowledge that those hang-ups, both natural and constructed, may have descriptive value i.e. we can rationally understand why things are this way. However, and this is really the heart of the matter, is this doubt justified? Can a woman and a man be best buddies, even though their inherited biochemistry is screaming at them to do what their ancestors created them to? Even though up until two hundred years ago they would have had zilch to talk about? Is it OK for every movie where the male and female lead start out as BFFs to end with them realising their 'true' feelings for each other and riding off into the sunset together? Can they talk about their dirtiest, most intimate feelings with each other because they're privileging the person above the gender?

Yes. But much like Facebook noobs, most of us mishandle this rather new kind of relationship combination because we're still not used to it. It is very possible though, provided one knows how to navigate waters that are uncharted compared to the usual model of companionship.

Most people in intense best-friendships with someone who belongs to the other gender are the first generation of people grappling with this novel permutation. Dating, for a lot of us in this country, is a first generation exercise...and in my family likely to prevail only through my brothers' efforts. I've already embedded this phenomenon of heterosocial relationships in a particular kind of background that is sociohistorically manufactured; neither of my parents would've been allowed close-knit cross-gender socialisation and so it would be impossible to've had the privilege to have had cross-gender best-friendships.

Ceteris paribus, are there things men talk about only with men and women only with women? Sure, but that's more out of experiential empathy than anything else. In a truly close friendship you should be able to talk about anything even though you may choose not to. For example, if male-only interaction involves chauvinistic jokes, well, then I'd question the integrity of their friendships with the women in their lives (and their IQ). In this case, that homosocial interaction has already begun the insidious task of conversational segregation (which we have established to be a sign of sexual discrimination). However, if the men choose not to talk about something with their women friends because they wouldn't understand or empathise with on the level at which fellow-men would, then that makes sense. Like their baffling crush on Mickey Rourke AFTER 1990.

The three people closest to me in the whole wide world (outside of my six member family) are men. A LOT of people I know have best friends who are of the opposite sex and they seem perfectly content with this state of affairs. I think the one thing that we've all had in common with our respective friendships is that we have been attracted to our friend at some point of time for a short period, the infatuation has been acknowledged and resolved and then the friendship has been enriched and strengthened without the spectre of sexual tension haunting and weakening our rapports.

The problem that I've seen consistently over a decade and a half of being in the 'friendship' game is the pretence that sexual undercurrents simply do not exist between a straight boy and girl. Nah-uh Junior, it don't fly like that. Thanks to good ol' aforementioned copulatory imperatives, that li'l sumthin' sumthin' is going to be there until you bring it out onto the table honestly and talk about it, thus discarding centuries of totally clueless gendered upbringing. Harbouring a crush on your best friend can either lead to you marrying him, you deciding you have nothing going for the two of you except the sex or you happily realising that your fleeting biological reactions aren't worth losing his general awesomeness for many years to come, during which you will both meet other mates, bitch about them to each other occasionally and force your children to like each other.

There is absolutely no substitute for the kind of friendship a guy and a girl can have, if honest and respectful of each other and their bond. The kind of antics I can get up to with my guy pals, I cannot even dream of with doing with my girl-buddies (who are no less vital though) and cherish the kind of codependency that comes from knowing that in exchange for your (admittedly taught) womanly openness to hear them bawl, they will look the other way and stand guard honourably as you relieve yourself on an intercity highway at midnight. The quality of jokes, equal parts boy-bawdy and girl-giggly is priceless; the constant renegotiation of differentially nurtured physicality and emotionality and common individual nature provides a chemistry like nothing else does; there is an unending source of accurate information about the 'enemy' and there is always someone to take to a 'couple entry' event uptown. Lemme put it this way: you never have to worry about liking the same guy (even if your BFF is gay, in which case any man you fancy will have to choose an entire side to bat for rather than which member of the team, far less abrasive for your ego and friendship)...that's one whole can of worms thrown out right there. And I'll tell you another thing: when your love interest is an asshole, your male friends will be the first to pick up on it and warn you. The fact that they probably specialise in this kind of assholery with other women is none of your goddamn business. Case rested.

So, in a nutshell: can a man and a woman ever really be friends? Absolutely, but only if they want to. And only if they're not characters on any generic TV series entering its 4th season.

The Punch-Line

2010-08-23T08:49:00.001+05:30

meta> Have you ever found yourself scratching your head, ridding it of creatures nestled there since the last New Year bash, wondering “WTPhug!” when you see a widely acknowledged tool cracking people up? Just why the hell is everyone splitting their seams and emptying their internal organs just because s/he speaks in a barely-funny voice? There’s not even a real joke in there, fuhtheluvvaShiva! In fact, we’re pretty sure you’ve had a moment where you said something totally off-the-cuff and suddenly, were assaulted with guffaws from all corners as if you’re the de facto lead in a crappy sitcom. Again, you’ve probably wondered, “but it wasn’t that funny...” Why? Here’s where we think we’ve figured out the answer: the above situations only occur when the laughers in question are people they or you know. No, no, our theory isn’t as simple or pathetic as “they know you, so they laugh out of the kindness of their hearts”. That’s just sad. We’re saying that they laugh because their brains have accepted the exhibited sense of humour as a valid source of amusement. Take news channels: India TV isn’t going to be leading the race in terms of credibility but we’re sure most of us would believe what NDTV reports; the mind has accepted the veracity of claims made by the station. For the insufferable pedants who read Murakami in their lavvies, who will possibly be unconvinced, here’s a little something. In ancient Indian philosophic tradition, the different schools had varying requirements for belief. Each school listed what it considered proof for knowledge and accordingly, each possessed different ideas of what constituted knowledge. Similarly, if a brain has okayed a certain brand of hilarity, then that’s the way it will be for all time regarding the person expressing it. Now, for the cognitive centres to certify your wit as ‘Acceptable’ there is a process akin to college admissions, wherein your suitability for the jokee’s self and social image is gauged. This process of scanning you lasts for about fifteen minutes. Much like acceptance to college, once you’re in, you’re in. To be expelled from the ‘zone of funny’, you have to do something ridiculously drastic like be caught smoking weed in the loo. Oh wait...never mind. This brings us to the crux of this satvachan:

The Punch-Line

This is the graphic explanation of aforementioned process. With X being the amount of time being spent with the jokee and Y being the funniness of the joker, the shape plotted will emerge as a plateau, spiking up drastically within the first fifteen minutes and then flatlining till infinity.

This horizontal summation of your sustainable comic appeal is what we term ‘The Punch-Line’. The real trick is to ascend that pesky fifteen minutes with alacrity and elan, so that you’re locked in nicely by point AWESOME and remain a desirable asset in people’s personal and social schemes. Now, ask yourselves this: how many times have you hit The Punch-Line? DUE CREDIT TO: Jaideep Khare, BITS-Goa

FAQ (First Asked Question)

Anindya Shanker Mitra: You need to take into account the universal decay of information over time, owing to which, by my opinion, the point after the first 15 mins would form the peak, followed by a gradual decay upto some asymptotic value depicting the general value of funniness that you expect from a "funny" person. OK, more of a statement really. But here's our official response: This theory was co-conceived by an engineer from BITS-Goa, so we did take into account information theory and entropic decay. But when applied to general life conditions we have realised that the decline occurs only after external conditions are extremely unfavourable to the joker,in which case the asymptote (which'd denote 'potentiality') would become irrelevant - it's an extreme situation either way. The quality of jokes will invariably fluctuate but this is representative of a social percept. When using Math to explain society, one must make room for tweaking some science =)

Womance and the Femily

2010-08-23T08:47:00.001+05:30

So I'm totally drooling over Spock with a pal the other day. There's a pause and he says: "That's the ultimate bromance, man." And I open my mouth to agree when something hits me: a bromance? Like a brother-romance? The pinnacle of male homosocial relationships? That which is copiously referenced in How I Met Your Mother? Enough with the rhetorical questions already, I hear you say. A bromance is, to the uninitiated, the ultimate in man bonding. It is the closest that straight men will ever come to in their dealings with other men. It is the equivalent of a straight-male marriage, the BFF-ship to end all BFF-ships. And the examples abound: JD and Turk (Scrubs), Kirk and Spock (Star Trek), Starsky and Hutch (duh), Harry and Ron (Harry Potter), hell even Jerry and George (Seinfeld). But hang on, a bromance is a term confined to brothers, a synonym for the universal fraternity house to which all men magically belong. It's exclusively a male rapport.

Am I missing something here?

What about womance? Females share the same kind of bond, the same Three Musketeers code of friendship and the same sense of camaraderie that men do. Personal example: my two fellow bloggers and superheroines extraordinaire, Ab and Org. When we hang (and I'm mocked for this seemingly obsolete turn of phrase), I've always gotten the feeling that anything I said or did would be tolerated, protected, ridiculed to my face but never before anyone else and would actually be paid attention to with a deep mix of affection, love and the willingness to look past my many flaws. Isn't that what a bromance is? I can even crack completely inappropriate, ribald girl jokes with my coterie, rounded up by at least four other equally awesome ladies, exchange borderline romantic rejoinders and have everything accepted without excuses and apologies. There are of course traits absent in male friendships which exist in female ones, not to mention a special type of humour that women can share only with other women. I cannot be the only girl who feels this way with her gang. All women must surely respond the same way to their best friends, their femily.

And yet, one hardly hears a whisper of this in the mainstream media. Are there any truly enduring examples of female friendships in TV, books and movies? This question is the second part to the one asking where female bonding is honestly represented in all its glorious, kaleidoscopic brilliance. We have at least a million films talking about men and their friendships, - drunk, sober or high, adolescent or adult, straight or gay, black or white or brown or yellow - and practically none about female love. Don't say Thelma and Louise. I'm talking about a movie that doesn't have to end with the leads dying (*yawn* 19 year old spoiler alert), in yet another woeful dirge to female existence. I'm talking about an all-girl The Hangover or Superbad. There's no real reason why McLovin has to be a dude. Juno was probably one film that came close to hinting at that kind of youthful , 21st century affection when it showed Juno and her best friend discussing her impeding pregnancy (a quintessential girl thing).

So when will men wipe off their smug, sexist little smirks belying their belief in the fact that the only time women get together is to claw each other's fur? It's patent bullshit. And when will women get off their backsides and write awesome scripts about a group of women going on loco adventures, having illegal fun and strengthening their girl-love all the 90 minute way in? A chick flick that out-legendaries guy buddy comedies is what I'm talking about.

What say?

High Camps and Low Lives: The Case for Gunda

2010-08-23T08:46:00.002+05:30

I confess to being a fan of Bollywood schlockbusters: those awful, unholy strips of celluloid cobbled together by a sub-moronic team of 'technicians', 'artists' and possibly, an underworld financier or two. Oh come on, you know what I speak of, you sly savants of drek! You're all well-acquainted with these paragons of kitsch, these manufactories of mulch, the non plus ultra of neon...OK, I’ll put away the thesaurus now. What I meant to say was, through all of that hyperbole, that by gosh, camp is the shizzle. With the zeal of Perez Hilton and the agenda of Kim Newman, I’m gonna force y’all Bollybusters outta the closet and into the parliament of Cool to vote ‘aye’.

Just the other day I was compiling a list, on Facebook, of the top five films that I knew by heart. One of them happens to be the revered Mithun classic, Gunda. (To the pitiable ignorami, I recommend a look at TLV Prasad and Kanti Shah’s combined filmographies, a subsequent Sunday evening in and the metabolism of a bunny on crack). A friend commented on this choice, sputtering with disbelief, “But...but...I thought you had taste!” Taste? Excusez moi? Hold on there, buddy boy. Hold on, just a *generic profane interjection* minute! Where’s your sense of irony? I know just as well as anyone else that in a debate between, say, Pather Panchali and Gunda, the former would adjust its monocle, let forth a poignant aria about the simple tragicomedies of life and win the hearts of the audience, even as the latter grunted around uncertainly. BUT let’s have a proper tussle folks, an all-out, down-and-dirty bar brawl between the two: Gunda would not only own Pather Panchali five times over but fuhtheluvvaShiva, the trash talk would be insane: the kerchief-necked frat-ilicious jeers ridiculing Pather Panchali’s monogrammed blazer and loafers would be A-DOUBLE U- E some. Yeah baby!!!! Ringside seats to that one!

It is this sense of sardonic, silly and sweaty low-brow pleasure which causes a cult phenomenon in the first place. A brief overview might put things into perspective.

Almost anything that has spawned legendary appeal is either exceptionally good or excruciatingly bad. While the brilliant is often overlooked, in time it always finds its place in the pantheon of genius. The truly great will always be recognised and lauded, if not in its own time then in the time after; it represents all that is complex and confusing in our lives and worlds and as such, will be revisited by every generation and admired anew, its delights subtle and variegated, its assaults gentle and permeating. Next up is the usual fare that’s churned out all the time. In kowtowing to the gatekeepers of high culture, most well-intentioned rubbish is rejected and soon forgotten. There will be precious few lining up to remark upon these trite attempts to ‘entertain’ or laughably, ‘enlighten’. The majority of art falls into this category.

And then of course there is the really bad stuff that is rightly debunked by those in the know, but with its unabashed earnestness, wins the rest of us right over. Why d’you think Ed Wood is so the man, even today? Plan 9 from Outer Space retains the title of ‘Worst Film Ever’, with no dearth of audience at any screening. The film they made on his life, starring Johnny Depp no less, probably grossed less than his estate manages to generate annually. Uwe Boll, krapmeister Super (yeah that’s not really a word) cranks out one bilious videogame movie every year, beats up pasty European film critics in boxing rings (Youtube Raging Boll) and dares his detractors to put him out of business by soliciting petitions from them, promising to quit if they reach a million: “Nice try, Hündinnen!” Chuck Norris, Van Damme and Steven Segal represent the Holy Trinity of Tripe, with acolytes (including myself) humming their theme tunes in times of danger and unquestioningly accepting their ubermenschian abilities (Chuck Norris facts), seeming resistance to age (rent JVCD. Please.) and musical prowess (Songs from a Crystal Cave). Closer home, Mithun (His Awesomeness), Rajnikanth, Ravi Kissen and Himesh, have all managed to win our hearts, minds and internal organs.

Why, you ask? Ah, here lies the gravamen of my piece.

Coming back to the accusation of having a taste and yet knowing Gunda front-to-back, I was at first unsure of how to respond. I mean, how does one explain the concept of so-bad-its-good and the consequent affection and awe that such a quality can evoke?

Susan Sontag once said that camp cannot be deliberate. She’s right: if Gunda were to be a parody, it would have accessed a talent beyond itself: satire, and become eligible for membership in a posher club as opposed to the seedy back alley tavern it is in right now. It’s why Naked Gun is actually a decent series. Well, in my house anyway. Gunda is quite unembarrassed by itself, revelling in the doggerelled dialogues fit to make your ears shrivel up and disappear into their holes and good-natured about subjecting everyone’s retinas to imagery that makes the sensory neurons detonate. It’s all just so darn sincere that you can’t help but be mesmerised. The hypnotic effect of this film comes from its unapologetic, self-convinced braggadocio, dunked in every kind of political incorrectness and burdened by absolutely no pretensions to being at all ‘good’ or ‘artistically valuable’ in any sense. It sucks, it doesn’t know it; it sucks, you know it. So why can’t we all come together like a happy family and enjoy what we can. You know that friend you’re not sure why you’re friends with...the one who’s always calling you at 3 a.m. from a bender to tell you how much he loves you, owes you your inheritance, cracks inappropriate jokes about your female relatives and yet you get your dander up the moment anyone hints that you ditch them? This is that movie. If you’re in college and don’t have a friend at least resembling this guy, you need to get out more. If you’re in college and haven’t seen Gunda, you need to stay in more. I know it’s a bit of a catch-22 but you’ll figure it out. After all, you were smart enough to get into college in the first place. Bottomline: Gunda has no idea that it’s bad, so why should you? In its honest horrendousness lies its heart.

The second part of its appeal lies in something outside itself. Gunda is an internally sustained system of excreta but when faced with the real world, it’s an interesting foil to the prevailing socioculture. Camp confronts culture as itself, except in its worst, most exaggerated form. The godawfulness of kitsch is only superficially because it looks so bad. I remember reading Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being go on for a good chapter about how real kitsch is bad because it ignores the truth and panders to the middle-class fear of seeing real pain, darkness and suffering. Maybe. I’m not as smart as this dude, so I’m not gonna mount a disagreement in a blog, but I have this feeling that the reason kitsch or camp is really bad is because it unwittingly makes fun of bourgeois aesthetics. The more something is really bad, the more attention and perverse regard it attracts. By juxtaposing itself with what is considered the acme of high culture, it provides a ludicrous, absurd alternative to the gold standard. It is usually at least as solemn in its efforts to exist as the outstandingly good. And often, it curates some of the same themes, albeit turned on their head and dumbed down to the extremes of frivolity. The creators of camp or kitsch are completely ignorant of this of course, otherwise they’d be too clever to make it. Gunda, as anyone who saw movies in the mid-90s knows, represents the worst of life and films back then. We have a country barely heaving itself out of the economic nightmare of pre-NEP era humiliation, successive unstable governments fostering chaos across the nation and the first wave of major reactions to the products of the NEP and its cries of Globalisation-Liberalisation-Privatisation (like cable TV and foreign shoe brands). The movies were confections of blinding/deafening music videos and costumes nobody would be caught dead wearing; the high point was something like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a completely unoriginal two-hours worth of film reel devoted to much the same things as Gunda: female lead(s) popping off and being nothing more than the motive for the male lead to do anything; a lot of singing and dancing; a sexually confused ‘comedian’ and a happily ever after. OK, maybe not exactly the same things...but you get my drift. The point is that the most popular film of the same year wasn’t that much different from Gunda when you really sit down to think about it. And that is what anticultural junk is supposed to do – exhibit the stupidest facets of an era alongside the most compelling questions of its time. Unlike great works, it’s always bound by the limitations of time and space, but it does provide an effective counterpoise for the consumers of that time and space and does its job, thanks very much. There’s a pseudo-Hegelian dialectic at work here: culture, anticulture and the emergent ‘cult classic’.

In a departing salvo, here’s a brief review of Gunda that I penned a few months ago:

Obviously, Gunda is a stellar example of mid-90s social realist counter-aesthetic – it tackles heavyweight issues like small town India's growing socio-economic alienation from a newly liberalised metropolitan economy, the emasculation and infantilisation of the Indian male (as evinced by Chutia's condition) in the face of increasing female empowerment and of course, the reason Mithun Da will always be THE MAN. Also see Loha, the prequel to this work of art and indeed, copiously referenced in it, in yet another stunning example of director Kanti Shah's attempts at syncretism - making him a true post-modernist maverick. 10/10

If you take issue with my love for this movie, don’t bother to harangue me with walls. You can see further evidence for the love this film enjoys by reading reviews on IMDb or www.greatbong.net or lurking on any of the many fanclub messageboards. If they don’t convince you, you’re an idiot who doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as us loyal fans of Mithun Da and his entourage.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, in the inimitable style of Mithun Da (His Awesomeness):

“Main hoon garibon ke liye jyoti aur gundon ke liye jwala”

Move over, Robin Hood.

I'm sure most of you need not be converted and know exactly what I defend. As for the others, beg, steal or borrow your copy of this staple college fare or regret not getting the jokes. It is advisable, nay, imperative that you sit through...I mean...savour this masterpiece nonpareil, for the sake of your own education and for that of those after you. Watch Gunda, so that you can say to your grandkids that you were part of the generation that saw it first.

The Joy of Idle

2010-08-23T08:45:00.000+05:30

The other day I was reclining on the sofa, daydreaming up my Oscar speech (oh please, we've all done it) when I saw a furry streak of brown and white zip by the window. I vaulted over the sofa to the large panes and crouched down, squinting with curiosity, eager to see what peculiar little creature had chosen my ground floor apartment's perfunctory balcony for its capers. The most exquisite kitten, all shiny, sleek and self-possessed, was poised on a low ledge jutting out of the wall. Striking a patrician stance, haloed by mischief and daintily licking its tiny, delicate glove-like paws, it stayed there for a bit, stretching itself out sensuously, lolling about and smoothing its whiskers - I was captivated. Here was a feline prima donna, a queen, Felix Regina or something cool in Latin like that.

And then something else hit me - the cat was up to nothing. And so was I.

I literally was not doing anything. By 'doing' I mean the utilitarian shade of function assigned to activity. The need for usefulness to validate tasks; the necessity of result; the whole scheme of life oriented towards input, output and product. It is, in a word, disgusting. It is detrimental to the very spirit of life, a prosthetic for purpose. Or rather the Anglo-Saxon definition of purpose....the French have something romantic in lieu: the mysterious joie de vivre which perhaps the 'Angloid' world will never truly understand. Zooming in, you'll find that the Hindi word for life is a biological, pragmatic 'jeevan' derived from a somewhat austere Sanskritic world whereas the Urdu 'zindagi' combines the zest of medieval West Asian hedonism with the concept of life. But that's a discussion of another sort.

What I am perhaps most outraged by is the mechanisation of being. It is somehow blasphemous to wish for time to just be. In her wonderful book, The Art of Doing Nothing, Veronique Vienne bemoans this phenomenon of azoicity in vivid detail...I didn't perhaps recognise my own dissatisfaction with the state of things until she articulated them.

Maybe it has something to do with the slow, steady ravages of post-industrial organisation. With the advent of machines, society was whipped up into a frenzy of cogs and chains and whirrs, reordering our spaces (factories, deforestation, urbanisation etc.), our systems (hierarchy, transaction, institution etc.) and of course, the most important casualty, our time (historic and personal). While historic time is not something we directly control, personal time is our own. And the foundation of modern life, in all the ways that matter. It is this time that we must reclaim from the wards of modernity. An assembly line temporal procedure makes us little more than zombies. Timetables and to-do lists and Filofaxes are all very well. But what about afternoons spent gambolling in the garden? What about reading old letters from friends we haven't seen in years? What about poring over picture books with a cup of tea? What about doodling in bed?

Just the idea of being idle terrifies most of us. It's taboo to even mention the desire to not be busy. Busy doing what? I think the irony is that most attempts to be busy arise from a notion that somehow, if we could just get so-and-so task out of the way, we'd be free. Must freedom to loaf be some sort of reward for having worked the rest of the time? Does ticking off 'Laundry', 'Homework' and 'Grocery' entitle us to laze? If so, I confess surprise at such premium being placed on doing nothing, when in fact it is considered sacrilege, a downright violation of the principle of cyber-age ethic, to even contemplate it. It's like some kind of Mobius strip of collective consciousness, conditioned by an eerily WASP-ish enculturation. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to examine the excessive influence of the USA's Caucasian/Puritan influence in the mix of all this newly discovered 21st century 'global civilisation'. Of course, I don't advocate that everyone put in for an allowance from the government (and in our case I believe that's still a Directive Principle, so suck it up) but there has to be some kind of balance in quality of lifestyle. Otherwise, it's just a sham to go through these motions, without any sense of revelry, which is what the experience of life should be.

Things of beauty are indeed a joy forever. The kitten I observed for almost an hour is a perfect example. Or look at art, which compels us to relinquish our strict ritual of inventorying 'the point'. And then there are lovely, strappy shoes and gift shop windows and cricket memorabilia and in my case, stationery (and stationeries). To feast on frivolity is forbidden. To linger is a privilege one must fight for. And yet, man and woman's love affair with the useless is legend. And there is the attendant need to indulge in the useless - stretches and corridors of vacant moments, just waiting to be occupied with silliness and facetious fun. By gosh, there are whole industries built around the human need to be unemployed!

Forget pretty objects, just the knowledge of one's ability to do nothing suffices. How many of us have experienced the sudden, soda-pop thrill of completing an assignment and then realising that we have nothing else to keep us from stretching out on the porch. Even despite Facebook, TV, SMS and home entertainment, there are so many times when all one wants to do is be a cat: traipse around, alight anywhere, think about the zaniest things, maybe snarl at people who won't let us do this. Licking oneself is not something everyone does, I'm sure, but hey - whatever rocks your boat man.

So, the next time you have a many-foot long list of errands you need to run, sabotage yourself. Make sure you don't do a few things on that post-it. It could be the really insignificant things, the ones it probably wouldn't hurt to put off for a couple of days. In the Gen Y craze to not let it pile up, don't let yourself become Stepford. The dishes in the sink can wait a few hours, go enjoy the balmy summer evening outside with your lover. Even if you do the dishes, something else will come up as soon as you're done, so go now. Create opportunities to be surprised by 'nothing moments', allow them to occur and sneak up on you and then exploit them. Admire the Manolos you can't afford, smell crisp handmade paper it's probably not worth your pocket money to buy, watch cats, hatch plans, feel grass, heal yourself.

Do nothing. And let nothing do you in.

- Kamayani Sharma

And She's Hot Also

2010-08-23T08:43:00.001+05:30

Anorexic books and 19th century kooks: Part One

2010-08-23T08:37:00.004+05:30

We haven't reviewed any books on our blog yet, so that is one cherry Imma have to pop this time. When on holiday, it is sometimes difficult to summon the rigour required to savour a really good literary work. The indolence and general languor that vacations from college are characterised by impede the contemplative reading of a good book, I find. So I thought I would pick up a couple of slim volumes that I could devote the whole month to, rather than steamroller through a thick tome that I would not be able to even comment on after I was done. I came across this interesting press called Hesperus, which specialises in publishing little-known books by famous writers or famous books by little-known writers, the only requirement being that they be less than 100 pages in length.It's like talking to an idiot...you get to feel really smart in a very short period of time.

So I picked up a collection of three short stories by Emile Zola titled after one of the three, For a Night of Love, and a relatively obscure little gem by Nikoli Leskov called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and while I enjoyed reading both of them, I absolutely LOVED the latter which chilled me to the marrow of my bones.

Zola's work is a cross-sectional view of 19th century French society, cut from the cloth of psychological realism and moral negotiations that formed Europe's intellectual tapestry back then. His magisterial command of literary flow and the paperweight of detail cast the tales in a shoulder-shrugging, tell-it-like-it-is mould. The cynic, the romantic and the humourist are all displayed in each of these tales, though not perhaps with equal panache.

The eponymous story is the best, a "silent opera" about our eternal need for freedom and the fetters we willingly wear for a chance to procure it. The protagonist, Julien, has loved his neighbour Therese for a very long time and is finally granted an opportunity to win her....at the expense of his humanity. Contrast creates the narrative - his shy, ugly man to her vivacious, beautiful woman; his bourgeois genteelness versus her aristocratic frivolity; his mild, artistic temper against her cruel, sadistic whimsy; his pure, unconditional adoration as opposed to her ugly, self-serving condescension - and builds up to the final Faustian conflict between inner peace of goodness and the definitions of freedom we are socialised to accept.

Love is the bridge between the self and the other; throughout most of the story, Julien rarely leaves his virginal rooms, content to play his flute and admire Therese through her window perfectly positioned opposite his own, only gaining entry to her hitherto forbidden house when his love achieves value in the eyes of his paramour. He enters her den of vice only because of his deep ardour for her. Her bedroom is the paradise he seeks and the hell he achieves. The meanings accorded to space and the imagery of inside and outside is repeated and made powerful in establishing the climax when the decaying Julien is exposed to the justice and judgement of the outside world, vulnerable to the vast expanse of the seemingly tranquil outskirts of his town. He is alone and yet he is condemned. He is an outcast of his own self, represented by the suburban abode that nestled his quietly passionate heart. And it is here, just outside the world that had succoured him all his life and which he has forsaken, that his love is defiled by his abandonment of that very man who loved at all.

The bridge on the river, which bookends the story, is thus an apt metaphor for the link between tainted desire and the demise of the spirit that fuels it - a Wagnerian Liebestod where love is twinned with its half sister, death. Righteous devotion has led to ignoble doom. If love is the key to an unshackled existence, Julien has only chained himself further. He loves but remains unloved; he has bound himself, without hope of liberation and thrown his soul at the feet of the indifferent object of his affection. In the evilness of Therese's quarters, Julien has chosen his fate. To not have love returned is punishment in life; to participate in its desecration is suicide. Julien will never attain freedom and he must confront his bondage in the hostile outdoors, relinquishing his chaste chambers of goodness forever. It is a death that is both literal and symbolic in its irony, as Julien escapes the confines of his little dwelling only to be weighed down in the boundless open by his irreversible decision to love.

After this brilliant premiere, one would expect the other two stories to be as good. Sadly, they are a massive step down, despite Zola's zingers. Nantas is essentially a slightly intellectual, male Harlequin romance and is too simplistic and sexist to view seriously. Despite Night's rich-girl-next-door theme, there is none of the complexity and nuance that made Julien's story so poignant and potent. The heroine's hauteur, that made Therese such a formidable villain, is a misogynist characterisation here, in abeyance as the hero's worth increases and unable to breathe life into the stereotypical female lead. This, in turn, robs Nantas' motivation to succeed of the fire that the reader is meant to see. What could have been an interesting look at sexual dynamics and social tensions and sexual tensions and social dynamics becomes a paint-by-numbers blueprint of a not terribly riveting pulpy read. Fasting is an improvement, its baroque comedy invoking the provincial storytelling heritage of rural France and striking a vaguely, pleasantly Gallic note of saucy licence and the underlying spoof of institutional mores. In juxtaposing the earthy voluptuousness of physical appetite with the spiritual hunger for faith and wonder, Zola teases the reader's expectations before reversing the roles of their partakers while embroidering his yarn with mundane mumblings of its little baroness lead. It is a ghost of something Balzac might have dredged out and published and as satisfying as a good meal, fulfilling when one is at it but nothing terribly memorable.

I most remember Zola's name for his fantastic defence of victimised Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, in his incendiary letter, J'Accuse (can't find a translated link but this a good version of events). His one-man crusade for justice and the security of freedom remains his definitive contribution to the world and informs his less hortatory work - through windows and across pulpits, as men and women, for love, death, god and greed, we humans barter and fight ultimately for that one great need - the liberty to own our selves.

Small Town Girl

2010-07-31T02:28:00.001+05:30

Actually, this is a bit belated. I meant to post this earlier but forgot about it halfway through writing it. This is probably going to be one of the simplest posts I have ever put up, and the one I am most emotional about in some ways. I thought it would be appropriate to post this now in light of the Indian cricket team's captain gettin' hitched in a city that frequently gets confused with Darjeeling (NO clue why). I was also thinking about how my friends from Pune sometimes find it so hard to comprehend why I want to go back "because it's so much funner/cooler/cleaner here!" Often, I feel very alienated even when conversing with many of my Puneri friends and have now concluded that this has not so much to do with geography (since we all speak English) but with the way classes are constituted so differently in bigger and smaller towns. What the average Puneri knew in 7th standard took about 4 more years to reach the average Doonite. At least that's my direct experience of the stark divide between a modern metro and a tier 2 town that still seems trapped in a bygone era. So, without further ado, here goes.

*

I am sitting near the drippy drone of the cooler, it's punctuating the still June evening with its liquid monotone and gentle whirr. It isn't muggy here like it was in Pune, the scorch is dry and slightly prickly. But it's five o' clock and the vague whiff of damp earth and moist grass sidles over to my starved nose - the sky will rip open its thunder-jacket soon and let forth a torrent of rain, a benevolent favourite uncle. I can already sense his advent, the swelling shadows in the west, floating towards me imperiously, a palanquin of clouds carrying the June shower I desperately need and miss. And then, just like that, the cloud-carriage is here and the raindrops all alight in one go, thundering and booming out a tempestuous symphony, sliding down on electric zig-zags of lightning and whooshing by on mighty currents of air. This is the rain of my hometown. Himalayan and cool and lovely. I allow myself to be drenched. Each drop seems to carry the weight of a memory, cooling my brow with its kisses.

I go to college in a fairly big city, a college town on the prosperous Western coast, one which has a cosmopolitan milieu and all the socio-psychological trappings of a large, populous bustling settlement. I love it there but you know...I will never quite feel at home, the way I do here on these familiar streets that sneak around the expanding town like secret passageways, surprise empty old roads and creep up on the main highways. The circuits of the city are embedded in my memory and as I walk down these roads where my family has lived for generations, I feel a peace of belonging I know I will never be able to replicate elsewhere. I can wander around these Victorian vicinities in the early evening, with the facades of the houses, some robust with action, some locked up for years, guarding me and my way. I can be a careless flaneur in a time long ago.

There are the neighbours waving at me from the house next door, we have shared the colony for three generations and I call them all mamiji and mamaji, affecting a kinship that has nothing to do with blood. There is the old paan shop on the corner, old man D would let me crouch under the table when we played hide and seek as seven year olds. He died four years ago, taking with him a part of my childhood. The flour mill facing the main road has everyone in the neighbourhood stop by for ten minutes at different times of the day to glean gossip, crushing betel and spitting paan as they hitch up their imaginary petticoats, middle-aged paunchy men, and ladies returning from grocery shopping before dark.The house opposite mine is shut up now; there used to be two families residing there when I was growing up. It is a wizened abode, asleep with the somnolence of disuse and desolation, a forgotten relative that once sheltered laughter and tears and blood and sweat. It is bricked with stories.

The main road leading up to the old city is a fudge of cars and scooters, trying to slither by serially...there isn't even space to squeeze in a pedestrian any more. The main road is actually just one straight line cutting hastily through the centre of the city all the way to Mussoorie, narrower than a Vestal Virgin and with shops profilerating like bunnies on both sides. I am faintly repulsed by this intrusion of modern life into my idyllic nest. I decide to take the backroads, marvelling at how a huge sedan can actually turn a tiny corner and vanish into a mousehole of an alley, just like that! Blink and you miss it. It's like something from a Miyazaki movie. The medieval part of Dehradun looms large; the city's roots are intricated in this genteel ghetto, with the 18th century palace-temple of Guru Ram Rai, the fabled founder, hallmarking the heart of Doon, his camp or the Hindi 'dera' forever marking our small space as his. History groggily awakens to greet me and mumbles something about Dronacharya, the Great Teacher in the Mahabharat, having hung out here back in the day. I pay my respects at the palace, cup my hands to receive the Lord's largess and feel the dusty, pebbly stings on my sole as I shuffle out.

There is the language I thirst for. The word-lover and verbal jester in me feels maimed in a land where my lingual gymnastics, punnery and grammar games have no takers. I may be an Anglophone by education, but I remain first and foremost a speaker and appreciator of Hindi. I always say that English is my lover but Hindi is my husband...I can have the most passionate love affair with the Anglo-Saxon/Latin beauty as I split my infinitives and subordinate my clauses but it's the staid, steady earthy rhythms of Khariboli I return to time and again. It's not just the play I miss, it's the cultural jokes and codes and folk wisdom enmeshed in the tongue of my ancestors. It's a record of prima posteriori knowledge (is that a phrase? I don't know but it best describes the immediate information of cultural data one is exposed to). It is the ad libbed couplets of random sagacity thrown around while walking with a friend, it's the tradition of tehzeeb and refinement of manner when speaking even in comfortable company, it's the interiority of experience one is invited to share just by uttering a single word whether it's the full range of philosophic meaning or the slice of a social nicety. I don't know quite what...a password, a punchline...it's so much all at once.

Dehradun does not have a multiplex, something I often get made fun of for. I don't mind. I know that it's a sign of the linear, Euronormative model of economic progress and development. I would like to bracket that entire sentence within inverted commas because I can only chuckle bitterly when I see the forests around Doon being uprooted to make way for these tired institutions of a hyperreal post-globalised society. I am not a green queen but even critiques of this pattern of capitalist metastasizing seem moot and dull now. I shall simply say that my friends in Pune may snigger when they hear I only watched dubbed English films in a single-screen till I was 14, but I would fiercely guard the appropriation of the uniqueness of my space by the monsters of Mammon. I would care that my city did not look exactly like every other city, like an organism that has been cloned and stunted. I am OK with watching Sitara Jung: Humshaklon ka Hamlaa (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones) if it means I get to keep Paltan Bazaar and Astley Hall. If it means I get to drink a Rs. 10 coffee at the Buffet than a Rs. 100 one at Barista.

I go to meet relatives just on the main road behind my house. People flit in and out, it's visiting hours in the evening, people popping in for chai, namkeen and what's up with ____. Old North Indian houses, with courtyards for women now being used as common areas for everyone. And I am there, in my jeans and t-shirt, looking so out of place as I munch on my homemade biscuits. There's the aunt of the guy who owns the flour mill near my house, 70 and sweet, doddering in with her umbrella and then the middle-aged couple from up the road who just sent their son off to medical school in Delhi. And a myriad of other people, a steady stream of visitors. I keep repeating what I am doing in Pune.

Why Philosophy? How old are you? Will you think of marriage once you graduate next year? We will find you a nice boy. Where will you apply for Masters? Go abroad, like my daughter. Where are your parents these days? How is your mausi? It goes on. Most people cannot place me at all, a dorky, pale creature chomping cookies in a corner. Then I am introduced as my mother's daughter. Glimmers of recognition light up in every eye and a collective sound of 'aah' bundles up relics of half-remembered images and conversations from the museums of their memories and casts them into the sunset of the courtyard.

"I remember your mother," I suddenly feel a warmth unfurling inside me, "So beautiful. When she got married, I was there. Saw her grow up, that one. You have her smile."

And that's all I need. In this town, I am not Kamayani Sharma. I am not 'the girl from Dehradun who studies philosophy at Fergusson College and lives on F.C. Road and do you know she is in her second year and won't be here after two more years.' I am my mum's little girl, the youngest of my clan, the Sharma kid who lives down the road. I have a permanent address, an unchanging identity. I fit in beautifully, a piece in the puzzle, a stitch in the tapestry, a permanent fixture. These are my people, who attached themselves to me years before I was even born and the roots of that association have already penetrated so deep that they will anchor my sense of self for a lifetime. My house has hosted people for almost a century and today those people host me in their houses when I come back, the scion of an old Brahmin family tracing itself back decades and decades and decades. I feel like I will always have the key to this city, no matter how far I go and how long I am away. I will be welcomed into the bosom of Dehradun with masala chai and a gentle joke.

Pune will always have that special place in my heart as the city I made my own home in and built myself in, in many ways, but it is here, in Dehradun, in the shade of gnarled lychee trees, breathing in the aroma of incense veiling the bulb-lit main road with its patchwork of little shops that start closing up at 7.30 for dinner, greeting the postman on his way back after lunch, telling the shopkeeper when my brother will be back for vacation, relaxing in the drizzle as I tramp around the main city with its British remnants of architecture, getting some momo at the stalls downtown just before it gets too dark, standing on the roof and seeing Mussoorie twinkle...

It is here, in Dehradun, where my great-grandmother taught the girls of the city, where my handsome grandfather wedded and brought home my exquisite grandmother from her small U.P. town, where my mother learnt to climb trees and garden and discovered her inner botany-nerd, where my father lost his dog, Tipu, in the streets and found his passion for books in the second-hand market, where he came to call on her brother and fell in love with her, where my brother was born and later, came of age, and where I experienced almost all my significant firsts.

Pune has my life, my head, much of my loyalty. But Dehradun has my heart. And, as I have come to realise after years of living away, it always will.

My Sins Against Gender Stereotypes: It's a Boy-Girl Thing

2010-07-06T01:10:00.002+05:30

My friend Swayambhu linked me to a post on his blog, to forward a meme of sorts. Bloggers are meant to compile a list of things they've done or said that are not something that society expects of their gender. So here goes, a very, very personal inventory of so-called guyness:

1. I have kissed a girl

2. I have truly shown capitalism what I thought of it outside a commercial building's elevator at night.

3. I have cropped my hair extremely short (a lotta girls have done this, so not that rare but still goes against the hair-as-markers-of-fertility paradigm)

4. I have been (sorta) punched in the face

5. I have defended a dude's honour

6. I have made jokes so dirty that my male friends blushed like new brides

7. I like hanging out in hardware and home appliance stores (even though I am clueless about most of the things in the former).

8. You should see the man-shirts I wear most of the time
9. Boxers. Not the dogs.
10. Has anybody heard me swear? Construction worker from U.P. backwaters, I have been told
11. A crush on Javier Bardem (no really, every guy I know has walked out of the theatre not remembering what Penelope Cruz or Scarlett Johansson look like)

So...Vikrant, Veda, Anupama... what do you guys think? Any other bloggers who stumble upon this, please feel free to continue the meme! :)

Everything Old Is New Again

2010-04-16T05:48:00.002+05:30

Every once in a while, the *serious* schola' in me gets to feel smug, superior and downright Gollum about her 'preciousss' smartassery. Being an undergrad means that you know precisely nothing even as the patina of college education convinces everyone that your parents' money is being well spent. There are not a lot of moments of that spark of recognition of an idea that had once hatched in your novice mind. When they do happen, you tend to cling to them like mould to your textbooks.

So about a year ago, in this post: about India's historicity (scroll down to second point after the Israel-Palestine issue), I had put forth a few questions that had sprung up in my mind about the nature of the Indian mind's evolution. I had mentioned even then that I knew that those questions weren't necessarily even novel or anything but when you're 19 and wide-eyed, everything seems so much more complex. Well, I had the good fortune of being directed towards reading Dr. Gyan Prakash and I began with an essay of his that tackles this issue head-on. It's contextual, placed in the battleground of Victorian scientism, but sorts out some of the chief puzzles I had been playing around with back then and am a little closer to assembling thanks to Dr. Prakash's work. I have realised that this particular intellectual bubblegum has been stuck in my mind for too long a time for me to get rid of it without resolving the problem. As a step in that direction, I have reworked Dr. Prakash's luminous, The Image of the Archaic, an essay I read in a collection on the colonial history of Indian science (as part of a liberal arts class), to summarise and make clearer what I consider a fundamental question of our times.

(P.S. The headings are all directly from his essay).

The Image of the Archaic by Gyan Prakash: A Study

According to me, this essay can be renamed The Birth of Modern India in the Laboratory of the Raj. In this article, Dr. Prakash tries to show how Victorian science and revivalist Hindu hubris coalesced to form the consciousness of India. I will undertake a rewriting of his essay from my perspective to highlight the salience of the major points and summarise the essence of his basic notion of the modern nation-state of India being spawned by the conflict between Eastern lore and Western science during the 19^th century.

With an anecdotal coverage of the tussle between proto-Hindutva and Westernised interpretations of the Vedas, (somewhat) resolved by resort to the great Max Müller, the dissonance between prescriptions of Western history and the realities of the Indian past is laid bare. This dissonance is even more apparent against the backdrop of science and its evolution in specific environments of culture and ideas. The chief purpose of the essay is put forth lucidly: how Western science created the modern Indian nation and how a Western model of historicity cannot chronicle this development cogently.

Unlike the Hegelian organicity that defines Occidental history, a neat relay race of events and ideas that cause one effect that causes another and so on, the linearity of existence is completely challenged by the Indian mind and moment. An irruptive model is required to explain the characteristics of our timeline and record the disjunction that became the most salient feature of our record. Instead of the past naturally maturing into the present, the past barged into the current imagination with cultural baggage that it thrust upon everyone in the country, a child forced to behave like an adult.

Dr. Prakash supplements this notion of an irruptive model with what he calls the anteriority of the past, where the hoary days of yore become an antechamber of ideological relics, breaking down the door to spill into the present. This artificial repetition of time in the understanding of those living the present, this anteriority, denies the natural link between past and present and instead dresses up the present in the garb of the past. It also then becomes a unifying picture of a common past, at which diverse groups can convene in a crowd of legacy inheritors – the space for a nation is thus created in the looming shadow of this beautiful reconstruction of a broken reality.

Within the existing framework of Western historiography, it is only by constructing a nation that any kind of parity with the dominant power could be achieved by the dominated peoples, else they were doomed to withdrawal into a devolved state of nativism, unable to use their indigenous abstractions against the imperialist consumption of the alien occupant.

This construction essentially called for a reconstruction.

A reconstruction allowed the exotic codes of the ancient codas to be translated into the familiar ones of the present in the language of science. But this language had to be transacted carefully through the epistemic agents of Bacon and the Vedas to explain all socio-cultural items. This science was to be a Western science with Sanskrit (and thus Brahminical Hindu) labels. The Indian past was equivalent to the Western present but the Indian present was nowhere near as mighty as the Western present. There was an overarching sense of having lost an ancestral greatness, despite its sudden recovery and this inability to conceive the modern Indian nation without experiencing a feeling of failure is ironically what created it. Modern India rose from the imaginary ashes of antique India.

The Search for Hindu Universality

‘Shaping and shaped by...Hindu revivalism, the expression of modernity of the Indian nation in the science of the ancient Hindus became a pervasive and enduring feature of the nationalist imagination.’

The rallying point of neo-Vedic science was the new generator of nationalism. This was a Hindu history we were reclaiming and that too, a Brahminical one.

There was Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who denounced the exploitation and suppression with which the upper castes had polluted the truth of the Vedas. He called for an expurgation of the Vedas from ignorance and Brahmin malaise. How to do this? By transplanting the text and interpretations of the Vedas from the traditional domain of transcendental absolutism granted by Mimamsaka theory into the Western arena of sceptic experimentalism. His stance was one of justifying everything in the Vedas by Western scientific explanations, to set at ease the educated Indian and English mind. To further establish the supremacy and authority of the Hindu canon to depict the modernity of Indian thought and announce its glorious return, he extended the ambit of his scientific Vedantism to the actual lifestyle of Hindus. Even rites and rituals could be rationalised within a scientific sphere. The Aryan treasurers of Indian intellect had an answer for every doubt.

Then, later, when the Arya Samaj had bifurcated, there emerged Gurudatta Vidyarthi. He was a hardliner who debunked the entire exercise of Orientalism by deeming Vedic texts to be philosophical rather than mythological, abstract rather than concrete and stating that the way in which they were being approached by Western scholars was completely wrong. Not only were they confusing the realm of complex ideas with that of lowly fables but they were linguistically ill-equipped to be handling the majesty of the scriptures. Their mistranslations changed the meaning of entire treatises, according to Vidyarthi, who claimed deva to mean ‘process’, not ‘deity’ and relocated the meaning of vayu from its place as an antagonistic representation of the irreconcilability of science and religion (wind-god) to an example of a religious term that has scientific meanings (atmosphere).

The problem with both these viewpoints is that of forcing one canon to collide with the analytical tools of another. They both dismantle the structure of Mimamsaka knowledge theory which had midwifed the ideas they use to vindicate their positions. Both then proceed to attack the Occidental knowledge theory from which they derive the basis of their arguments for those ideas. There is a strange dual destruction here: Dayanand drags Vedic discourse into territory circumscribed by Greek logic and European methodology to prove to Europeans that we had the same ideas first; Vidyarthi asserts the eternalism of the Vedic theories before being forced to acknowledge and immediately dismiss the progressivism that led European science to spawn those theories.

Therefore, Dr. Prakash shows how, in attempting to position Hindu science as universal, its propagators had to perform the absurd feat of simultaneously negating and affirming its source and current location.

Hindu science and the modern nation

As shown in the preceding part of his essay, Dr. Prakash goes onto talk about this overwhelming need to universalise and legitimise Hindu thought by revaluating and retrieving the past of Hindu science so that the Indian consciousness could be cast onto something concrete and acceptable – the idea of the nation.

Three people particularly stand out in this project of nation-building. There were two Bengali historians of science: Brajendranath Seal, who wrote The Positive Sciences of the Hindus on the olden Hindu scientific method and Prafulla Chandra Ray, who wrote A History of Hindu Chemistry to show that Hindu chemistry was a valid experimental science in its own right, apart from any Greek influence. While Seal sought to analogise the ancient Indian with Greek classicism, Ray was unconcerned with any equations and was more descriptive, speaking of such inherently Hindu socio-scientific phenomena like the nexus between hallucinogens (drugs) and deity worship, an odd mesh of religion and alchemy that took a specific form in our enduring pagan traditions.

Also noteworthy was G. Srinivas Murti who spoke of Ayurveda’s congruence with and difference from Western medicine based on their definitions of ‘philosophy’ which the West equates with theory and the East with lifestyle. Thus, Ayurveda’s philosophical-religious foundation strengthens, rather than weakens it. While being revivalist, Murti negotiated with the West by accepting the need for observational instruments and medical terminology but maintained that Ayurveda was essentially untranslatable.

Recovering the lost nation

An after-the-fact authorisation of an already-assumed presence delayed the creation of a nation. There was a disavowal of Puranic lore, an affirmation of ‘Golden Age’ Aryanism imported to daily Hindu life by Saraswati and Vidyarthi. Rituals and rites were plucked from their theological nurturing grounds and attacked in domains of empirical proof and reason. We have seen how the continuous approval of the West was being solicited by enacting dramas of destruction and rebuilding that led to the gradual fomentation of the new Indian nation, postponed thanks to these necessary theoretical theatrics.

P.C. Ray quoted ancient alchemists to ‘the flower of youth’ of a nation not yet formed. This is Derrida’s ‘fabulous retroactivity’ where the present is being composed even as it has already been assumed to be in existence when constructing the tools being used to create it. As Ray lectured to those youngsters that day, a nation that he had already achieved in his mind was formed right before him. This is the temporal conversation between past and present being conducted in the concurrent narrative of myth-making. This is the story of the present being told in the past and that of the past being told in the present, with little indication as to which is which.

“Stereotypes were modes of the existence of the Hindu nation…invented in the present but dressed in the garb of the past, the representation of the Vedas as the cultural text of the Indian nation instituted itself through…mischaracterizations." Dr. Prakash returns to his idea of disowning the actuality of organic past (the Puranas) and replacing it with a reconsidered, newly interpreted version of that past by overwriting it with freshly comprehended anterior motifs (scientific Vedantism). “The structure of emergence as reemergence required that the great Hindu past decay and degenerate, not evolve and progress…so that (history) could be regenerated.” The real old had to be alienated to make room for a prosthetic one, so that India could be imagined as a nation from this angst of otherness.

Nation and Negotiation

As has already been mentioned by Dr. Prakash, Hegel’s idea of a linear history did not accommodate colonial, non-Western peoples’ history. Thus the Hindu mind bargained with Western historiography to chart its way in their tropes by relabelling traditions and scripting new India in old books. The interruption of the classical scientific acme by Puranic ignorance and Brahminical excess led to decline in modern times. Nehru chronicled this loss in Discovery of India, with a secular spin, and tried to recover India from its past.

The competition of parallel time-systems denied Indian chronology the chance to be uninterrupted and normal but was crucial in the emergence of a fractured identity, fissured by the crisis of discord between these competing historical realities, one organic and native, the other fabricated and national. As Dr. Prakash conclude so eloquently, “Locating Hindu science as the culture of the nation…was a difficult and contentious struggle to establish identity in difference. The Hindu intelligentsia waged this struggle by distorting and stereotyping otherness, by using the fabricated memory of loss to myth and superstition to stage the recovery of Hindu science…What Hindu intellectuals claimed was nothing less than the right of Indians to the autonomy, authority and universality of their national culture.”

“BOSS, KYA PICTURE BANAYEE HAI…”: WHY LSD IS A ‘GAME-CHANGER’ (YES WE KNOW INDIAN EXPRESS HAS USED THIS. BUT WE THOUGHT OF IT FIRST. ISH.)

2010-03-24T14:12:00.002+05:30

In the soon-to-be-immortal words of Loki Local, LSD ne Hindi cinema ko “kali se phool banaya”. In the more forgettable words of our good friend, Junkie Jaggu, “Fuck doood, fucking awesome movie. Man. Dood.” And then, reigning prom king of the Indi-indie film partay, Anurag Kashyap calls it a ‘game-changer’ (we know this because we were at FTII’s Golden Jubilee celebrations when he said it. ’Coz that’s how we roll yo *snaps fingers*). You still have some stray status-updates of dissent on Facebook though, and to them we say: “DON’T TOUCH BABY.”

Why are the public and the media, the PVR multiplexes and the Chhayadeep single-screens, the atmosphere and the noosphere abuzz and a-blog with ecstatic praise for Dibakar Banerjee’s deft distortion of the private and the public? Well, to begin with, he has catapulted this entire exercise of simulated situations called ‘motion pictures’ into the uncomfortable terrain of ‘real life’. Just look at the aesthetic of the movie: yeah yeah, we know, you’ve had people coming out of theatres in 1985 talking of catching the fictional band, Spinal Tap, live; the Dogme gang up North has had success with their experiments in playing with fiction and non-fiction; you’ve even had our own The President is Coming last year – but what’s next? LSD isn’t a mockumentary and it isn’t fiction garbed as reality. You do have people citing the barely-comparable Sex, Lies and Videotape, but that hasn’t necessarily aged well. And as for Paranormal Activity...what was the point of that awful film apart from loud noises and cheap thrills? There may even be a dozen examples left of the Prime Meridian, for all we care, but (a) if they’re obscure enough for us to have to dredge them out from the lowest circle of IMDb hell then they’re clearly not worth mentioning and (b) we are culturally warranted to create our own, very unique version of this sort of cinema, which remains unprecedented and which cannot be overstated enough when you see how Mr. Banerjee tackles his project. A non-Indian film, even if it uses this technique, cannot unpack the ideas LSD does with such insight into the heart of the New Indian Middle Class.

Why is this film being lauded as the One, being hailed as the radical reinventer of our mainstream canon? LSD is pushing our sensibilities and apprehensions into the deep end of the pool and smirking wickedly as we splash around. Hell, dirty as it sounds, LSD is doing to Bollywood’s filmic language what the novel did to literature: pinning it up against the wall and making it come so hard and so fast that it won’t ever forget the experience. And that’s just the sex.

The image becomes the protagonist in this film. And not just any image, but an organic, natural one, that is not beholden to the narrative manipulations or structural imprisonment of conventional fictive cinema. And that’s why it’s not just ‘realistic’ but ‘real’. Notice the unconscious camera placements and movements, serving not any ‘story’ trussed up in three acts but the unknown simultaneity that binds both the watchers and participants in this movie-within-a-movie. This recursive formalism heightens the veritable immediacy of the film and throws off the audience with its candour. Mr. Banerjee uses form to criticise form, mounting a sort of house-of-mirrors self awareness to his composition that allows the actor-characters and, by extension, the viewers, to reflect what unfolds on the screen onto their private experiences and fears.

The way our global visual culture has evolved over the past decade, with an aneurismal obsession with bombarding our generation with pictures, there has been a visible decline in the actual value of the picture as a cultural-epistemic unit. There’s just so many of them around – Photoshopped, airbrushed, edited, sliced and skewered – that this dissonant negotiation between the apparent ‘truth’ of an image and its infinite replications and representations of reality makes sceptics of us all. What happens to Godard’s declaration that cinema is truth 24 times per second? Whose truth?

Remember that other game-changer, Pather Panchali’s iconic train sequence and the virgin delight that the characters and vicariously, the audience, experience on seeing the steam engine chug past. And now recall the CCTV footage of the supermarket in LSD, mundane, bland and evoking nothing but jaded interest. Where is that gush of spontaneous response? These hyper-real depictions, this post-modernist ennui of our times have caused an indifference and nonchalance forming the prelude to the mass voyeurism we keep complaining about. If everything ‘acceptable’ to the public gaze has already been seen, what’s left to pop the corn for? Other people’s lives, emotions and secrets? So, in half a century, we basically go from wide-eyed, chaste little gaspers – “Ooh train.” – to bored slutterbugs who yawn at everything – “Boobs. Big deal.” If that isn’t turning the most basic unit of cinema on its head, then we don’t know what is. And if that isn’t radical enough for you, what is?

This isn’t a ‘movie’ in any traditional sense, this is what’s happening in your actual public spaces, in your supermarkets and schools and neighbourhoods. And that’s why it’s scary. It’s also why it’s hilarious, the satiric texture of the film establishing a knowing, nudge-wink, remember-that-time-when bond with the audience and deepening the humour to nocturnal shades as it punches you in the face when you least expect it to. The film lampoons the very premium that ‘film’ has acquired in our lives of late.

What’s interesting about this whole ‘democratisation’ of vision is that everyone from the Ram Leela crowd to the South Bombay lot can access this film on multiple levels, once again indicating how our collective consciousness has become bound by communion with a unified popular memory, clasped by the common experience of Doordarshan, sensational news channels, MMS scandals and the ‘po-mo palimpsest’ that our globalised-liberalised-privatised era has forged.

The interconnectivity of the three films and the characterisation of multiple perspectives imitate the unwitting, self-contained drama of daily life as well as their all-too-possible cinematised climaxes, which never seem forced. A character like pseudo-MBA Adarsh is one that both the Chhayadeep crowd (that probably aspires towards him) and the multiplex entourage (that mocks him at dinner parties) can understand and place in their schemas, while watching the film. The opening sequence showing a garish advertisement of DVDs is something everyone who has ever rented Moser Baer is familiar with and we can rejoice together in that single reference, that stands for so much in our joint imagination. One big happy family? More like one big happy dysfunctional family.

The Indian-ness, the socio-political background of LSD, respecting the fact that it was made at a particular point in time, becomes very important in this entire probe into why exactly it’s such an important, rule-shattering, groundbreaking piece of post-capitalist grit. Talking to your favourite filmmaker, as if he were God, a comically free-market subversion of that most personal act of praying; videotaping yourself bumping uglies with your girlfriend at your workplace (on a camera that wouldn’t have existed in a less paranoid era) and trapping your exploiter on film even as you do the deed, for the nation to savour on TV, capsizes everything we like to believe about our society. Our nation has reorganised itself in an economic context that prides itself on privileging individual enterprise above all.

What you have then is a confused civilisational chaos of Nietzschian disdain for communal morality, at odds with our historic orientation in a way that it isn’t for the West, a self-perpetuating ‘me want’ consumerist circumscription and a power structure that solidifies itself on specious grounds of this so-called individual enterprise. You worship celebrities because you want to grow up to be them and accrue the social, political and financial resources they possess. You dishonour your relationship at the altar of a quick buck because you’re being paid to do it for someone else’s entertainment and profit. Class abuse (that has always existed) mutates into an exploitation of this feeling of entitlement that undercuts our indoctrination in the ways of this post-capitalist life-system

We, naive, middle class kids who’ve seen our family fortunes expand considerably even as we were just growing up, have been weaned on a diet of ubersexual music videos and reality television and now...well, now, we have come of age. And it behoves our cultural expressions to do the same. Very simply, this is the first film that ticks all those boxes for us Indians. We cannot compare this film to any other because it isn’t making generic, one-size-fits-all points or importing foreign syntax to add to our grammar. It is diagnosing our very Indian malaises, and while they may apply to the world, the angle of repose remains our own. This has happened at a specific juncture in our history, has happened to us in a manner specific to us and our traditions and nobody but an Indian can document this trauma on screen.

And yet, we’re panicking as we confront our slippery grasp on these monumental changes our generation is going through. As a friend pointed out, the audience was flummoxed between giggling one moment and being numbed with dread the next. What is this nervous vacillation, so similar to the way we react to episodes in our own lives? Is this dismantling of emotional categories as part of the phenomenological experience of cinema not something eerily intriguing? We cannot neatly premeditate, slot and label our responses or answers to the questions Mr. Banerjee poses. Are we a bunch of sick minds, preying on the vulnerability of fellow (wo)man? Or are we finally blowing open the lid on an evolutionary secret encoding our need for surveillance and display? Are we a nation of perverts who get off on porno verite? LSD represents a cinema of discomfiture and inconvenience. It’s about damn time.

THE UNBEARABLE RIGHTNESS OF AGREEING: THE SECOND MOMENT IN KANT’S ANALYTIC OF THE BEAUTIFUL

2010-01-31T22:40:00.003+05:30

The following paper focuses on the second moment of Immanuel Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, itself in turn the first section of the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement, which opens The Critique of Judgement. My aim is not ambitious; I merely wish to explain why, according to Kant, canary wine is not something all of us may like but the beauty of a rose garden is apparent to everyone. My objective is to unpack Kant’s notion of consensus of taste. This paper is mostly reflective and more of a rough guide to the Second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful.

The second moment of the Analytic of Beauty concerns itself with the Judgement of Taste in terms of ‘quantity’, or rather, consensus. To recapitulate what had gone before in the First Moment of Quality, I shall just briefly delineate the three major notions we encounter and grapple with in the course of his thesis: agreeability, which appertains to sensations and how they affect us, the good, which pertains to concepts and how we process them and finally, aesthetic which is what he strives to explain in this seminal work. The first facet of beauty that Kant had explained in the First Moment was disinterest on part of the perceiver. If something is sensually rewarding, it is agreeable; if something sates us intellectually (or practically, as in the case of morality), it is good but detached regard without any investment in what is being regarded, is true beauty. Now, without further ado, I shall move onto my central theme of probing deeper into the second feature of beauty: that it must be universally agreed upon. I shall proceed in the same sequence as the text.

The first part of this thesis is that the beautiful is that which, apart from concepts, is represented as the Object of a universal delight.

Here Kant makes a very important distinction between the logical and the aesthetic predicate. In terms of concept, an object exists in a definite cognizable manner which is perceived and processed psychologically. This concept offers no pleasure or displeasure to the perceiver. However, in terms of aesthetic, an object is comprehended as a representation constructed by the subject. Since beauty must be disinterested, it is natural that the person who considers something beautiful has no motive for calling it that and so he/she presumes an unmatched freedom in experiencing beauty. There is nothing specific to that person about this freedom, nothing that makes it exclusive to him/her since he/she has nothing invested in calling something beautiful. Therefore, he or she assumes that the same perception of beauty is apparent to everyone else, thus laying the foundation for beauty’s claim to subjective universality.

The second part of the thesis is a comparison of the beautiful with the agreeable and the good by means of the above characteristic.

Here is where we shall speak of the promised canary wine! Now, Kant juxtaposes his three favourite ideas of the agreeable, the good and the beautiful and explains how the function of universality mutates from one to the other. Basically, the agreeable has its estimation embedded in sensory reactions, the good in cerebral reactions and the beautiful in spontaneous, unschooled emotional reactions. So to say “I like canary wine” just means that I enjoy the taste of canary wine. To say “honesty is good” is a purely mental assessment which I make after an analysis of the term, no matter how subconscious. On the other hand, to be moved to tears when Mozart is being played is something which disarms me completely; I step outside of my sensory and cognitive systems, even if momentarily, and enter a transcendental realm of pure response to the object of beauty. In fact, that’s when I declare it beautiful and attribute this adjective to the object of my regard, rather than affixing it my private reaction to it; that’s when I demand that everyone accept this beauty as a property of the object itself.

But, and this brings us to the third aspect of Kant’s thesis, in a judgement of taste – the universality of delight is only represented as subjective.

Judgement of taste is of two sorts, says Kant: one called the taste of sense, which uses a private code and another called taste of reflection, which uses the language of public discourse. Both are concerned with aesthetic evaluations of objects represented to us affecting our state of pleasure or displeasure. These aesthetic evaluations have nothing to do with the object, as we have seen in the first part of the thesis; they are not logical appraisals but aesthetic ones. They are not logical appraisals because they cannot be tagged onto any particular concept and so, they have no relation whatsoever to the object in and of itself. The latter, aesthetic appraisals are a peculiar breed because they conceive beauty and the object as completely exclusive and instead encumber the poor subjects, us perceivers, with the onus of realizing and defending the honour of the beautiful! It’s like the object is that favourite pet who doesn’t care whether it’s beautiful or not but everyone in the family would demand everyone to say that is.

Furthermore, according to Kant, going from the logical to the aesthetic is impossible but the converse does work out in a certain manner. He says, ‘In their logical quantity, all judgements of taste are singular judgements…. Yet by taking the singular representation of the object of the judgement of taste, and by comparison converting it into a concept according to the conditions determining that judgement, we can arrive at a logically universal judgement.’ For example, I may consider this podium beautiful, which is a purely aesthetic judgement (if a somewhat strange one) but if I were to then generalize and say all podiums are beautiful it immediately converts the aesthetic particular into a conceptual universal which can be apprehended rationally.

The implication of this is that the concept itself cannot provide us with any rule or principle to proclaim some standard beauty. No reason nor example nor logical method or proof can persuade us to call something beautiful until we decide for ourselves through the privilege of our own regard. And despite such conditions for esteeming something so highly aesthetically pleasant, we expect everyone we know to be in absolute concurrence with us. This is a behavior unique to the human culture of grasping beauty, as absurd as it may seem. I shall quote Kant once again here, to articulate this interesting phenomenon: The judgement of taste itself does not postulate the agreement of everyone (for it is only competent for a logically universal judgement to do this, in that it is able to bring forward reasons); it only imputes this agreement to everyone, as an instance of the rule in respect of which it looks for confirmation, not from concepts, but from the concurrence of others. The universal voice is, therefore, only an idea… contemplated…in judgement.

The universal voice is thus totally aconceptual and inhered in the judgement of taste itself in that by making said judgement we automatically demand consensus. The disinterested delight bubbling forth from ourselves is what we reflexively desire, demand, require to be spilling forth in everyone’s hearts and spirits.

The final portion of this moment of quantity of tasteful judgement involves Investigation of the question of the relative priority in a judgement of taste of the feeling of pleasure and the estimating of the object.

Kant asks: ‘Is it aesthetically by sensation and our mere internal sense? Or is it intellectually by consciousness of our intentional activity in bringing these powers into play?’ and proceeds to make a case for the former. Essentially, if we speak of a subjective universality by divorcing concept and object from the region of judgement of taste, we must concede that the subjective representation of the object must in some sense be homogenous or uniform, since the object itself is of no concern. This representation is what all the psychological and emotional ramifications will convene towards as the common point of reference to the multitude of subjects. Furthermore, the imagination must muster all the intuitions or sensual possibilities and understanding must unite the idea of the object, for us to collectively recognize and cognize it in exactly the same manner to give rise to the ‘general validity’ that Kant has already spoken of. This is the state of free play of cognitive faculties, according to him. This mental state of ‘free play’ provides the communal vocabulary we need to exchange our joint aesthetic experience and we know of man’s social life as being vital enough to provide the context for this exchange.

What exactly is this much talked-about free play? Kant lays it before us thus: ‘The quickening of both faculties (imagination and understanding) to an indefinite, but yet, thanks to the given representation, harmonious activity, such as belongs to cognition generally, is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste.’ He adds, ‘A representation which is singular and independent of comparison with other representations, and, being such, yet accords with the conditions of the universality that is the general concern of understanding, is one that brings the cognitive faculties into that proportionate accord which we require for all cognition and which we therefore deem valid for every one who is so constituted as to judge by means of understanding and sense conjointly (i.e., for every man).’ This last means that a unique object made available to us to assess imputes (thanks to the inherent universal voice that the third part of the thesis is devoted to) concurrence of subjective opinion by causing the two major cognitive apparati – imagination and understanding – to reach harmony, an agreement of their own. And thus, we have ‘general validity’. To answer his own question of which came first, the pleasure or the perusal…he most certainly sides with perusal, the regard, the judgement itself. This sets into motion the psychological procedures necessary to appreciate the natural response to beauty, which, as Kant says, every human must agree with.

And so I conclude my nascent probe into what Immanuel Kant means when he talks of a world where everyone agrees that a tiger is a beautiful creature, even if we can’t all quite bring ourselves to have that extra sip of canary wine!

Deja View: Greg Brady grew up to be Pete Sampras

2009-11-17T01:47:00.001+05:30

Film Review: Q2P

2009-10-15T18:14:00.005+05:30

Q2P was a film screened for those of us pursuing the Certificate in Women and Development, made by a lady called Paromita Vohra and winner of awards at several international documentary festivals and the like. Here's a review of this interesting project, which I urge everyone to see.

“To pee or not to be pee, that is the question.” I am quite sure Hamlet would have found this a more pressing concern had he been a woman living in 21st century India. Or so Paromita Vohra’s beguiling look at the national state of public lavatories in Q2P would have us believe. The film charts an incisive map through the cities of Mumbai and Delhi, from the citadels of the elite to the backwater slums, harnessing perspectives across class, caste and gender. How the urban Indian woman navigates public space through the simple act of processing metabolic waste– this is the question the film asks and attempts to answer. We see that the answer takes three forms: control of women by society and state; sexualisation of female biology and the corrosive effect of caste and class.

The film begins on a very interesting note – when asked why women shouldn’t be urinating in the open like men, the bunch of males questioned giggled and answered that it was a contravention of culture and a matter of shame. Apparently, using the world as your lavvy is only disgraceful if you’re a girl. This sentiment ties into a more pervasive issue of how the biology of the female is perceived in the social imagination. It is seen as something to be hidden away, to be locked up and not really seen as an actual functioning human body. This is but one step in dehumanising the woman in the popular domain and a mostly informal, cultural one at that. Surely, one expects a historically patriarchal milieu to be grudging in its permission of public space to the hitherto-oppressed sex. However, what is really saddening is how the government promotes this reluctance to grant women their rightful position in the outside world.

The female architect interviewed in the film emphasised this subtle campaign being waged by the state itself to marginalise women by investing almost no money in the development of public facilities which, as has just been noted, is required unconditionally for women as it is not for men. Government schools for girls did not have restrooms till the longest period, causing girls to go home every time they needed to use the bathroom and creating a disruptive classroom environment. It was only funding from places like the Total Literacy Campaign that have allowed female students the luxury of a loo at school. Most of the teachers in such schools are women and they too do not have access to decent toilets, something they have stoically accepted. The government does not seem to care about its female citizens at all. So, on the one hand we see how the male status quo refuses to acknowledge the female as a real human and ushers her away from the streets when she exhibits signs of life and on the other hand, we encounter the masculine State unable to or unwilling to provide the necessary solution to the woman to resist this forceful eviction from the streets.

Even as Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh, quoted figures: ‘700 million people using public toilets’, one wondered how many of those could be females. The kind of responses some of the officials had to give regarding female loos were absurd, such as the contention that women must pay because they don’t go as many times as men. As a colleague pointed out during discussion, perhaps the women don’t go as much as men because of reasons of hygiene, payment and embarrassment. Indeed, some of the women interviewed in a vocational class admitted as much – it was slightly humiliating to be seen walking into a urinal because of the implicit assumption of what you were going to do there and how insanitary such places are.

Underlying this is also an undercurrent of how the thought of a woman using a urinal has very sexual aspects, a sidebar to the idea of shame and negation of the woman’s biology explored before. There was a very graphic clip depicting female genitalia and how the urinary and reproductive loci overlap and therefore become a nexus of socio-political combat in gender relations, especially given the history of this ‘war’. A young Muslim woman and her mother speaking about using the community toilet in their slum mentioned how they would not go alone or were only comfortable when their men guarded their virtue at these perceived locations of female vulnerability. A brief look at the ‘Stay Out All Night’ campaign highlighted how the safety of urban women, sexual harassment outside the home and making public spheres more feminine and woman-friendly, even through something as basic as providing toilets, are all interconnected. The need to invite women to make the city their comfort zone is pressing and involves making available to them civic amenities that men take for granted. Even the lingual secrecy surrounding the notion of a woman relieving herself is mentioned – at one point, the curator of India’s Toilet Museum narrated the story of how, during the Georgian era, ‘admiring the roses’ became a code-phrase among women, for answering nature’s call!

Cutting through the gender disparity, are of course the twin terrors of caste and class. As the health supervisor of one of Delhi’s more plush areas called forth the two token women in his brigade of toilet cleaners (whom he till then had not bothered to even acknowledge), others confirmed that the scrubbers of these fancy powder-rooms belonged to a particular low caste community called the Balmikis. For generations, their sole occupation was cleaning up after upper castes and they continue to do so even today in posh urban locales across Northern India. Not made permanent employees despite ploughing through a 240 hour work week for three years, the women had accepted their lot and the fact that they themselves, ironically, would have to urinate in the MDC’s urinals. The suppression here is of both gender and caste and through the lens of their vocation in the context of this film, one could see so clearly and starkly the burdens of the low-caste woman in this country. They occupy the dirtiest inches of the public space and are mistreated all the more for it. And this urges one to wonder even more about the space politics of class in India – in the group discussion someone pointed out, pertinently, that as urban middle-class women perhaps we could even avail of cleaner, safer toilet facilities in a certain kind of space created for urban middle-class people, like a coffee shop or a hotel. But what about our lower-class sisters? The issue is not one of simply using the toilet obviously; that is merely a metaphor for the increasingly pernicious problems of class invading our social fabric. Where are the spaces for the lower classes and the lower castes?

Ms Vohra, through this film, seems to have wanted to address some deep-seated problems in urban public space vis-a-vis gender equality. Through the seemingly odd entry point of sanitation she has endeavoured to dissect the male-female tensions in India and, to some extent, has succeeded in surprising many of us out of our stupor. The theme is so unusual that plenty of people would be curious about the film and have their eyes opened in the process. However, I did get the feeling that a lot of areas were only hinted at and not fleshed out enough. For example, two areas where I felt like a little more exposition would have been helpful were: (a) the government’s official stand on failing to provide strategically situated, sanitary facilities for women, especially as it would have been in sharp relief to the state of government schools where storerooms are converted into girls’ loos and (b) a comparative study of the marked differences in Mumbai and Delhi in terms of how they treat their women as a way to comment on the immense cultural divide between the two cities and the kind of gender constitutions they represent as the two Northern and Southern metropolises. Also, to anchor the film in a particular viewpoint, it would be relevant to note that Ms Vohra was backed by PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research) and financed by the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD). The former is an organisation devoted to creating and disseminating knowledge about urban studies from both a national and global standpoint, which would explain the focus of the film on two big cities as well as their exploration through indigenous lens of caste and class as well as more international inklings of state and citizen. The probe into such a gaping hole in the developmental infrastructure of India and how sexist it really is seems to have found agreement in a programme that aims to offer solutions to such harrowing lacunas in civic systems.

Q2P is a film that we were not only fortunate enough to be shown as part of our curriculum but also very germane to the kind of discourse our syllabus encourages. It’s not only an educational film in the sense that we ‘learn’ something but also in the sense that it recommends looking at everything around us in a more analytical manner to catch what we have missed all this while. In so many years of living in India, many of us probably didn’t think about something as basic as access to a loo and how its lack actively hampers our dominion in the public arena. But now that the film has gotten most of us questioning the world around us, it is probable that we will notice other such chauvinistic treatments of our constructed environment and do our best to challenge them. As part of the Women and Development course’s mission to sensitise us to gender issues and break conditioning, Q2P has been very successful and enlightening. I was glad I got the chance to view it and that it got the chance to expand my view.

Man, Woman, Sheep, Blink: Social Construction of Gender

2009-09-24T19:42:00.014+05:30

I think it's pertinent to note here that this essay is part of some assignments I am required to do for a certificate course on Women and Development I'm taking in my second year. Thus the nature of argument and presentation is slightly more academic. =)

When I was little, I loved listening to bedtime stories. As she tucked me into bed, my mother would narrate to me fairytales. Her nightly routine consisted of the usual suspects – Snow White, Cinderella and that quintessential parable of male-sanctioned “gender polity”, Little Red Riding Hood. It took me most of my adolescence to really look back and understand the hidden meanings in all of these apparently innocuous yarns and when I began to realise exactly why Beauty and the Beast was inappropriate for a seven year old, I knew that I was onto something a bit more relevant to my personal evolution. Whenever I am called upon to think about feminism, I find myself returning to memories associated with hearing this bedtime folklore and trying to place my upbringing and development somewhere in the psycho-social pattern that emerges.

I grew up in, theoretically, the best kind of environment Indian society can offer a young woman – an upper middle class, progressive and liberal North Indian Brahmin household. This identity carries with it all kinds of social, political and intellectual burdens which become heavier when one has only X chromosomes. My family, thankfully, is different from most and has a history of very educated women and feminist patriarchs (a seemingly oxymoronic but apt term in the Indian context). Nevertheless, I have observed at close quarters some problems that exist with belonging to this particular subset of our social structure: (1)one is expected to be smart enough to graduate medical school but not smart enough to make decisions about one’s sex life; (2) one must ace every exam possible but not be intimidating to marital prospects; (3)one must vote against right-wing fundamentalism and yet treat widows like lepers and (4)of course, talking about women’s rights is the norm, as long as one can be quietly complicit in dowry transactions. From a personal perspective, I have seen that the gender issues which make screaming headlines everyday in the newspapers are rampant in this stratum – female foeticide, domestic abuse, property right violations – the only caveat is that they remain muted. The so-called education and enlightenment that the bourgeoisie lay claim to have rarely been apparent to me, in almost two decades of having been a member of the ‘privileged’.

A tomboy, I was ridiculed for wearing jeans and trousers instead of flouncy frocks. A nerd, I was mocked for reading too much. An aggressive, strong-willed girl, I was told to tone down my behaviour. I often wondered how much of this unsolicited advice would have been given to my brother, a decade older and ever a champion of women’s rights like my father. It was because of two staunchly egalitarian men raising me that I was taught to question this ossified screed which dictated to me what I should or should not do. What I have since realised about this part of my childhood is that every kid, at some point, asks “Why?” when ordered to do something that is unnatural to him or her or is stopped from doing something that comes easily to him or her. If the answer is “Because.” and this is hammered enough into his or her brain, the conditioning will consume rational impulses. And I have found that many people from my own station in society have been transformed into gender-restrained robots, so this is clearly not only an issue of wealth and opportunity on a macro level but also one of values and teachings which parents foster. Sure, I was given Barbies because I asked for them but I also got a cricket set for my fourth birthday. There’s also the matter of kanjak, a ritual puja conducted on ashtami and navami, in North India, wherein prepubescent girls are deified. I was invited throughout my childhood to my neighbours’ homes and for the longest time, I thought this to be a beautiful tradition representative of the oldest goddess-worshipping religion in the world, until one day it hit me that the moment a girl starts menstruating, she is excluded from these festivities and is no longer worshipped. As if her value is tarnished the moment she becomes a sexual being. Where a man is idolised for his virility, as the glorification of Shiva’s phallus would attest to, women are denigrated for their sexuality. I am quite sure that I will not be sending my daughter to be a part of this exercise in discrimination.

When I entered middle school, I became a passionate quizzer, an interest I retain till today. At all the quizzes I went to, I would be the only or one of the only girls representing a school and those experiences helped me comprehend many nuances of inter-sexual relations which I can anticipate even today. Being the only girl at a predominantly male gathering isolates you immediately and puts you at a disadvantage that is abiding; these are the same little boys who are going to grow up and run companies or head projects which little girls are going to grow up and be part of. The only difference is that the boys are 99.9% likelier to make decisions, also regarding the girls. The element of power imbalance reinforced by gender-based socialisation cannot be overstated, as I’ve found even in college – a boy spending hours with a male professor is not scrutinised the way a girl would be. Given the fact that a professor is more likely to be male, this puts the girl in a serious quandary. Is that fair? Another thing that changed once I hit puberty was that my ovaries were to decide when I could meet God. The word ‘period’ was taboo and we girls were barred from participating in religion during our monthly flux. I find this absurd and oppressive, much like the kanjak puja, because the idea that a biological function necessary to keep the human race alive is somehow impure does not make sense at all.

The summer I was 13, I became a woman. Before reading Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay on the female intellectual, A Room of One’s Own, I am not sure I had known what femininity was. I had been cognisant only of the ideals of womanhood imposed upon me by patriarchy and had had my definitions of intelligence decided only by men. Woolf’s brilliant treatise not only championed the cause of the neglected female mind (her example of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister dying in penury despite being as great a genius as her brother is arresting) but was a successful reconciliation of polarities of gender. As I became older, culture and sexuality became integers in my mental make-up, just like in any other teenager. Between listening to all-female bands like Bikini Kill and watching staple men-penned sitcoms of the ’90s on the one hand and occasionally chagrining my family by riding pillion with boys in my neighbourhood on the other, I understood something crucial about the way men and women are treated differently in this and any other country – if you’re female, intellect is only good up to a point, a sense of humour is mostly frowned upon and good Indian girls only interact with boys whom their parents select for them to talk to. Even Bollywood films and television showed andronormative depictions of life, with men as active beings who ‘do’ and women as passive beings who ‘are’ only in relation to the men. I discovered that it was OK for boys to crack chauvinistic jokes about girls but not OK for a girl to come up with bawdy puns. A boy among a group of girls was merely mocked a little whereas a girl would be held answerable for her character.

And now, finally, in college, there is another set of pressures separate from institutional tweaks but as pervasive. Throughout school, despite many other sexist procedures, I at least didn’t feel like the education system favoured men over women. In the asexual, government-prescribed confines of class 1 to 12, one didn’t feel threatened by the need to prove anything outside of an exam hall. In university, however, the process of tutoring goes much beyond the classroom and so becomes problematic when confronted with real world factors of gender differences in lifestyles, perceptions and modes of thought. To speak up too much in the wrong class has you branded a harridan, whereas there is no word in the popular dictionary for a man who will not let go of a topic. Basically, if a girl is too opinionated, she’s a shrew who must be tamed whereas a boy doing it is a cerebrally stimulated young man. And then there are the social dramas of undergraduate life which find eloquent expression in the battle of the sexes being fought on campus – I find my appeal being measured not in terms of my IQ but by the kind of clothes I wear to flaunt my ‘femininity’ and whether or not I shave my legs. To show up boys in class or debates earns you no admirers and in fact has you slotted as ‘undateable’, even though not opening your mouth accords you the unenviable title of ‘bimbo’. The double standard and hypocrisy is stifling – a girl must be able to wear a skirt and construct an intelligent opinion, while also finding everything the man sitting across her says smart and funny. That’s the only way she can get a boyfriend and thus validate herself. I won’t pretend I am ‘above’ this sort of insecure self-doubt but I must pause to question how this same sense of worth, or lack thereof, is being reinforced in my male counterparts. Do they also have to wake up sweating about becoming ‘old cat gentlemen’? Are they slowly but steadily discouraged from being public about their brains to make someone else feel better? Are they forced to perform regular rites on their bodies to make it pleasing for someone else? The worst part is that girls have internalised this as being acceptable and never stop to think why they should be giving in to any of these ideas. When they do realise, they hesitate to act on it because they are such a minority. Of course, all this is for those girls who are permitted to even realise that they have a functional libido; for most in the middle classes, it’s one step from childhood to marriage, a negation of an entire stage of development.

Now, we all know about the opportunities denied to women that men have access to and in fact, I have mentioned them in the previous paragraph but there is another point of view that needs to temper this fact. Having seen my decade-older brother grow up at home, go off to college and then work, I have a fair idea of the kind of enculturation he was exposed to. At home, it wasn’t different from how I was raised but obviously, outside the limits of our clan, the way he has made his way in the world has been very different from the way I have. And in fact, despite all the benefits that men enjoy which I have already juxtaposed with those women don’t, I was surprised at some of the complaints that even boys have about the way they are brought up in our patriarchal system built up on a lot of pseudo-machismo. There are more expectations from him as the only male of our generation.

When he decided to quit his job at a top firm to start his own enterprise, the rate at which eyebrows shot up and mouths gasped was staggering. As the sole son, he had no business placing his own happiness above that of the family’s and doing something he wanted to do. What about providing for the folks? What about the life plan which dictated that he father progeny by his twenty sixth year? Never mind that my parents supported and helped fund his venture and have no craving for legacy-bearing toddlers any time soon. The very idea of the patrilineal family is on shaky ground now, with the nuclear unit being unable to sustain this obsession with a male child even as property rights for daughters remain under constant inspection.

The fact that my brother likes to keep his apartment clean, cook a meal for himself and knows basic skin care is something that is brought up as being ‘metrosexual’. Why can’t a guy do those things without being labelled anything? After all, John Abraham and Matthew Fox are extremely virile men who use facewash. Can it not be a heterosexual male wish to be organised, well-fed and acne-free? When he was much younger, he was made fun of by his friends for being sensitive, crying at a film or two, because expressing emotion is emasculating, so they were taught. It was a good thing he excelled at sports throughout his teens and university years; else he’d probably have had a very difficult time finding male friends. Somehow a repressed inner life is seen as the hallmark of being a man and it’s possibly only now, in Gen Y, that we see men unafraid to exhibit their feelings.

And today, all these boys who grew up to be successful, intelligent men are expected to wait till their parents select a nice, ‘convent-educated’ girl for them to get married to. Here, at least in genteel upper class circles, both men and women are evaluated by the same rubric: they must retain their virginity till marriage. While everyone has the right to make their choice, it’s a bit naive to expect men and women in this day and age to blindly fall in line with a way of thinking rooted in what seems to be a primitive attempt to control human nature.When talking about how class constitutes gender roles, it is very difficult to navigate the peculiarities of the hierarchy. The distinctions in raising boys and girls that I have mentioned previously hold true across all strata of Indian society, along with some which are unique to the lifestyles and amount of access to resources that each class enjoys.

The girl who had been employed by us to scour utensils was a couple of years older than I. At twelve, she got married. This means that her construction of gender began and ended with male-dominated and male-oriented decisions about her life, retrieved from and further buttressing the historical family configuration that has remained more or less embedded in a feudal past, even with all the outward trappings of modernity. She was betrothed while still in diapers, coerced into a physical ‘relationship’ with a boy in her early teens, had birthed a couple of sons by the time she hit the legal age for marriage and was raising those sons to continue the ancestral cycle throughout her third decade. The fact that she was working was of no significance to her since her income was to be controlled by her father, then husband, then sons.

She had a good understanding of what it meant to be a daughter, a wife, a daughter-in-law and a mother but absolutely no notion of what it meant to be a woman. Her femaleness was centred on and peripheral to the overpowering maleness of the family-focussed societal scheme. She never even got to take part in the creation of her gender. For one such as she, all my fancy abstractions of third wave campaigning are ludicrous. Lucky to have been allowed to have been born, even education is a distant dream for her and abuse of all kinds is an expected onus. Not that these harsh realities are confined to lower income groups but redressal is unlikelier to be sought or received. Where my biggest problem is that I am not considered seriously enough, she is not considered at all. She is an un-woman, teetering on the edge of being an un-person.

Then on the other end of the class spectrum, there are the millionaires. Overpaid and underworked, I find that they are too ignorant and self-absorbed to apprehend the effects of their frivolity. Belonging to a class which has everything in excess, one would assume that they would be conscientious about their choices. Instead you find a certain sort of strain emerging from our social topography - the Prep School Princesses, many of whom I have encountered growing up in a city where boarding schools abounded. These are the women who have always had chauffeured cars at their beck and call, use daddy’s credit card to stock up on shoes, go to college only so they can be educated enough to make a respectable match with some other super-rich father’s little boy and then dutifully follow in their mother’s footsteps as proper, docile, supportive little wives. They are analogous to the financially gifted class all over the world. Their (de)composition of themselves as women is skewed, limited and quite honestly, their own fault. Instead of utilising the freedoms available to them to dismantle the obstructive monolith of patriarchy, they are happy to pay obeisance to it. Blinkers on, they follow the trajectory planned out for them by centuries of men by buying into the frothy, flimsy ‘feminine’ virtues extolled by those men. In their bejewelled nests atop the social food chain, they are content with discarding the ideals of womanhood they must recover and rescue through knowledge and awareness. They prefer the less painful path of no resistance wherein, plied with conceptions of what proper young women should do, they can luxuriate in their sedative routines, facsimiled from generation to generation.

In creating their personas, they select those facets which would make them socially desirable, leading to all kinds of manifestations – be it dumbing themselves down or developing dysfunctional attitudes in their dealings with males. The ultimate result is the deliberate negation of organic and fluid femininity in favour of a twisted, prosthetic one. That they would reject the bounty of womanhood, with all the tools to nurture it, is mystifying. Especially when contrasted with the woman on the opposite end of the class continuum. Their brand of un-woman is much more complex and troubling than the latter’s, mostly because they give the lie to this belief that the more educated and less monetarily challenged we are, the faster we will move towards bridging the gender gap.

Thus, I conclude my views on social construction of gender by returning to the fairytale. Be it impoverished Cinderella or bold Beauty or Sleeping Beauty or even the Princes and Kings, the problems of gender remain varied and tenacious. It is only by changing the way we circumscribe our parenting styles in terms of gender and modulate the rearing of our sons and daughters with more sensitivity towards the issue of bias, that we can truly begin to narrow the chasm between chromosomes X and Y.

WTF??? Riot Grrrl and Beastie Boy?

2009-07-24T12:07:00.005+05:30

ADAM HOROVITZ (BEASTIE BOYS) & KATHLEEN HANNA (BIKINI KILL, LE TIGRE)

OK, so the woman who fronts Bikini Kill and jumpstarts third wave feminism with her 'radical' womanliness grows up to marry the man responsible for putting out a record that basically tells underdeveloped frat-boys that Girls are for cleaning up after them and shagging.

Eh. I guess it was all for the better: apparently Ad-Rock is more feminist than Gloria Steinem now.

And cute couple. I suppose.

Mr. G's Misadventure

2009-05-02T20:12:00.002+05:30

Dear Varun Gandhi

Why did they unhand ye?

Now you're falling off stages

But not needing bandages

(except for your piehole

which spews much vitriol).

It's kinda annoying

to hear you jawing.

We wish you'd been injured;

While you were being cured

There would sukh-shaanti be ho-ing.

Stray Sigh

2009-04-22T08:03:00.001+05:30

Somewhere in the darkest corner of memory live the great crimes of humanity. They feed off the basest impulses of our race and scramble to the surface in times of spiritual anarchy, when our collective souls are unable to understand them. They repeat themselves over and over again, through the ages. And the terrible, tragic curse of the human condition is the knowledge of our own ancient, inescapable savagery.

Have time. Will loaf.

2009-04-01T23:29:00.002+05:30

Transcript: Obama, Medvedev Deliver Remarks on Nuclear Weapons Reduction

SPEAKERS: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT DMITRY MEDVEDEV

[*] PRESIDENT OBAMA: Let me just make a brief comment. I am very grateful to President Medvedev for taking the time to visit with me today. I'm particularly gratified because prior to the meeting our respective teams had worked together and had developed a series of approaches to areas of common interest that I think present great promise.

So here's the thing: I know Dmitry here is a Vlad's tool but I won't knock it. Before we pretend we're buddies, we've had our subordinate agents of realpolitik (see: bitches) have a go with each other to decide what tripe we can actually spout before people and get away with.

As I've said in the past, I think that over the last several years the relationship between our two countries has been allowed to drift. And what I believe we've begun today is a very constructive dialogue that will allow us to work on issues of mutual interest, like the reduction of nuclear weapons and the strengthening of our nonproliferation treaties; our mutual interest in dealing with terrorism and extremism that threatens both countries; our mutual interest in economic stability and restoring growth around the world; our mutual interest in promoting peace and stability in areas like the Middle East.

It's been a while since we hung out, ya know, as friends and stuff. I mean not that I'd hang out with Mitya. Hey, this isn't 'Brokeback Mountain 2: The Kremlin Cowboys' but...um...anyway so yeah we'll figure out how to monopolise the nuke nook in Asia and Europe (see that's the best bit about these schmos extending across two continents); feign an interest in bombs outside the USA while secretly gloating everytime those Ruskies jump at small noises and pretend that pure capitalism is awesome even as I play the governmental equivalent of Rocco Siffreddi to the country (he pumps 'em like I do). Also, on that whole Middle East thing: guys, guys, the Arabs are cool and stuff. I'm not George...I actually know that Arabs and Persians are totally different ethnic groups. But where's my paycheck coming from? The American public you say? Well, if by that you mean the folks who got ol' Ben back in the Knesset then yeah the "American public".

So I am very encouraged by the leadership of the President. I'm very grateful that he has taken the time to visit. I am especially excited about the fact that the President extended an invitation for me to visit Moscow to build on some of the areas that we discussed on today. And I have agreed to visit Moscow in July, which we both agreed was a better time than January to visit.

OK, we all know Mitya's not the most original guy around . Cut the fella some slack. It's hard work cleaning up after Vlad, God bless him. Best part about this whole deal is me getting to pop into Moscow over the summer...what a relief. Washington's gonna be boiling and the girls could use some educational excursions. That's why I pulled the old 'strategic time' card. Poor bugger doesn't know he's being had.

And my hope is that given the constructive conversations that we've had today, the joint statements that we will beissuing both on reductions of nuclear arsenals, as well as a range of other areas of interest, that what we're seeing today is the beginning of new progress in the U.S.-Russian relations. And I think that President Medvedev's leadership is -- has been critical in allowing that progress to take place.

I want to be able to fly Aeroflot whenever I damn well want to, is what I'm saying.

So thank you very much.

PRESIDENT MEDVEDEV: (As translated.) I would like to sincerely thank President Obama for this opportunity to meet him and to meet this time in person. And, indeed, we had an opportunity to compare our views on the current relations and current situation in the world. And we had an opportunity to agree upon certain common values that we need to foster in our relations, and provide for further areas for cooperation in progression of our relations.

These are Vlad's notes but it's not like I'm all that dependent really. This Barack chap's alright...we're on the same wavelength. Or so he thinks *snigger*

I can only agree that the relations between our countries have been adrift over the past years. As President Obama has said, they were drifting, and drifting in some wrong directions. They were degrading, to some extent. That is why we believe that since such a situation was not to the benefit of the United States or Russia Federation, to say nothing about the global situation, we believe that the time has come to reset our relations, as it was said, and to open a new page in progression in the development of our common situation.

Damn these new speeches for these Yankees! Everyone starts bitching about Bush in the opening salvo. Funny thing is that poor moron probably couldn't even extend USSR (United States for Southern Republicans? Haha, I can crack inside-jokes too, Yakov Smirnoff) fuhgedabout 'degrading' relations.PAHAHAHAHAHA. Moronozhy.

Indeed, it was said that we are prepared to cooperate further in such areas as the nonproliferation of WMDs, limitation of strategic weapons, countering terrorism, and improving economic and financial situation and the overall economic situation in the world. It is important to note that there are many points on which we can work. And indeed there are far more points in which we can -- where we can come closer, where we can work, rather than those points on which we have differences. Thus, by bringing our positions closer we can attain significant progress and, much more importantly, further our achievements.

In America, you spew bullshit. In Russia, bullshit spews you.

I share the view of President Obama who said that our teams have worked really well in preparation of this meeting, and the declarations, the two declarations, which we are adopting are just another proof of that. And those are a declaration on the strategic weapons, and the declaration on the general framework of relations between Russia and the United States, which set good grounds for our further interaction.

Russians – totally bigger than Yankees. 'The general framework of relations between Russia and the United States' was decided at the US Open in 2000 when that nice Marat Safin thrashed that Sampras fellow. *Blows raspberry*

We will be very glad to host President Obama, to greet him in Moscow in July. Indeed, July is the warmest time in Russia and in Moscow, and I believe that will be exactly the feature of the talks and relations we are going to enjoy during that period in Moscow. And of course we have set out certain objectives and certain goals and tasks we need to work through in order to get better prepared for this meeting. And indeed I am convinced that is a good opportunity for this interaction.

Hell yeah January is a bad time. Fuckin' Napoleon couldn't make it...and he tried in June. Eh Yankees...bet he wants to sight-see. I like that bit about it being warm and our talks being warm. Who writes this brilliant crap? I'm promoting the lot of 'em!Oh wait, first I'll have to implant a CCTV in the office to find out who it is. Note to self.

Well, indeed, so we are convinced that we'll continue successfully our contacts, in particular today, where we were not only discussing international issues or bilateral items of interaction; we were also discussing education, which probably not everybody -- where we have come to an understanding that we're reading the same textbooks while in these subjects. And this will set us further for interaction. After this meeting, I am far more optimistic about the successful development of our relations, and would like to thank President Obama for this opportunity.

Yada yada. Something about textbooks. OK, they're all looking at me now. I'd better shut up. VLAAAAAD!!!

Ode to the other Mr G

2009-03-27T06:48:00.001+05:30

Dear Varun Gandhi
Your speeches are dandy
As long as you drivel
In a manner more civil
You're asking for a fatwa
O pin-up of Hindutva
Begone with yer chaff
Or your career graph
Khatm hovey in a fullstop-wa.

The Morality of Fandom?

2009-03-05T15:27:00.005+05:30

So on the 20th of last month (clearly, NOT the sprightliest blogger on the web) I attended a concert.

One of my favourite bands, Goldspot, had come to town and obviously I was all pumped, really excited, irritating the hell out of everybody as I plugged them ad nauseum...in short, I was being a complete fan. The joke was that half the crowd that ultimately turned up at Hard Rock Cafe that evening had been dragooned into coming by yours truly. OK, I know at least 9 people who were only there because of me...I should probably get a commission for this sort of thing. They earned almost 5 grand just because of my constant rhapsodies in Savera...hmmm. Note to self indeed. Grad school would be so much more affordable, just in case plans of world domination don't come through. The Verbaliser approves. Konichiwa...

So anyway, this post is not meant to be a retelling of what went on that night. It was great fun - naturally, I lurved the music and knew all the songs, didn't blink for an hour and a half yada yada. There were also attempts by certain individuals in the audience to flash the lead singer (who is Indian-born by the way - very acchha baccha type, so I'm not sure why one would flash him. Not that he is at all unattractive but seriously, the guy had a pooja string around his wrist) and so on and so forth. The point of this log is to consider the meaning of 'fandom' and certain moral implications that arise from this status. Yes, I am very bored and I like to pretend I am smarter than I am. Tell me something I don't know.

I define 'fan' as someone who is an ardent admirer of a phenomenon. He/she views the phenomenon as positive and enjoys participating in it in his/her maximum capacity. Like all socio-cultural ascriptions, the status of a fan inheres certain behaviour (falling under the discipline of psychology), a role and some duties.

So what, one might ask, is or should be the moral role of a fan and the ethics of discharging those duties we speak of?

(1) A fan must spread the word
There's nothing moral about liking a band per se...it's an aesthetic evaluation, not an ethical one; but within the domain of moral obligation, I think it's legit to contend that by not furthering the chances of the object of your fandom, you are impeding its/their popularity or the spread of that phenomenon, which if you assess it to be worthy of approval, cannot be a good thing teleologically. You are
(a)depriving others from the nonmoral goodness of the phenomenon and
(b)hampering the acquistion of more approval by the phenomenon.

So really, I was just being a good fan while boring people in Savera.

(2)A fan should have a well-defined focus
All too often, there has been a misplaced devotion on the part of certain people, much to the chagrin of those of us who actually revere a phenomenon. Now, let's take the example of Goldspot and the *ahem* ladies who were trying to catch Mr. Khosla's attention by virtue of their 'natural wit and charm' ifyaknowhadimean. Clearly, they weren't there for the music. To one enthusiastic about their songcraft, this is highly annoying. However, that is secondary. If you say you're a fan of Goldspot and then come to lech at Mr. Khosla (an aesthetic enjoyment of a different sort and a totally legitimate activity in and of itself - unless you get a restraining order) then you're, in essence, lying: there is an inconsistency between what you claim and what is the truth. That is surely morally suspect. If you just come out and admit what you're really a fan of, it would save us all some vexation and hassle, not to mention equip us with a healthy expectation of antics people will get up to at gigs.

(3) A fan should have honest reasons for claiming fandom
This is sort of a corollary to (2). It deals with the idea of lying. In formal logic, you'll probably find a million different ways of putting this. Anyhoo, within the realm of deontic theory too you can find many reasons why lying is a bad idea. If Kafka makes you look smart and that's why you read him -
(a) Welcome to peer-pressure, you tool and
(b) Uh...you suck.

(b), in my case, directly follows from (a), since I too was a teenage sheep. See, (b) is exactly why it is morally wrong to pursue something for reasons apart from those of pure admiration, which is the crux of fandom. You discredit the phenomenon in question and violate the fundament of fanship: loving something for what it is. Your moral duty of unconditional loyalty unto the phenomenon is rendered hollow. The nonmoral considerations like the actual goodness or value of the phenomenon is immaterial to this discussion.

Even on the level of aretaic ethics, or moral value, you come off as incredibly disingenuous; you place a greater premium on being perceived a certain way than on genuine interest in something/someone. This means that you're
(a) using the someone/something a means to boost your ego or achieve popularity or whatever (somewhere Kant is tsk tsking) and
(b) you think lying is better than not lying, if it means serving your purpose or 'lying is good'. Only if one is an ethical egoist will this pass muster but in that case, one loses the right of moral arbitration, even in the context of fanhood. Anything you do will be for your own happiness and not for the phenomenon, something that is very difficult to understand given the selfless (too heavy a word but I couldn't think of any other) nature of 'being a fan'. The idea of beneficence which morality upholds - one's duty towards the good of others and in this case, for the phenomenon you adore - is disabled under the ethical egoist interpretation of fandom. It cancels out pretty much all other requirements of fanhood. Like...

(4) A fan must not sabotage the success of what/whom they admire
All stalkers are ethical egoist fans. See how that combination ends? End of story.

Also, the sustained ultrasonic shrieks that teenyboppers delight in go a long way towards some decent artists not being not taken seriously by those of us with taste. The kind of fans one attracts is a reflection of one's work. Tags: flashing (I have been scarred for life), sub-moronic speech, stalking (doesn't include long-distance...er...updates). You're being a jerk, morally, if you actively stop the guys you like from being liked by more people . Think of this as a corollary to (1). It's teleological a-holery.

(5) A fan should respect the hierarchy of fandom in a given social situation
If you have liked Coldplay for a month and I have liked them for a decade, I am the bigger fan.

If you know less than zilch about Coldplay and I know everything about them, I am the bigger fan.

If you have heard the Top 40 entry by Coldplay and I know their obscurest tracks, I am the bigger fan.

You encroach on my territory without permission. That's a moral issue. You won't believe the number of people I have argued with about this. The arguments are like: 'You don't own them' or 'Who're you to decide?'. OK, point taken. BUT I have a case for those of us who are sick of discovering awesomeness and then having the glory snatched away by low-culture idiots. While I would not withhold information about something I am a fan of, since it would go against (1) and (4), I think it is unfair to expect me to share space with you on the ladder of fandom. Look at the Golden Principle: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. The appeal to empathy usually makes people realise how wrong they are here and they stop fencing with me.

However, you'll always have people who beg the question or just plain don't agree. Now, I know that they are absolutely correct when they say that since so-and-so is not my property, I am not technically in any capacity to grant permission to other people. But here's the thing: there's something to be said for industry of fanship. And on this is contingent my case for gradation of fanship. It's hard work being a fan, frankly. If I were a PhD and placed on the same rung, educationally (not intellectually since that's a very problematic word here), as a 10th standard pass janitor, I would have a problem with that. I have worked hard to earn a doctorate and to undermine all that in favour of a very absurd (and yes, I think pure communism is absurd) notion of equality, is unjust. The principle of justice is the very foundation of morality. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Marxist interpretations of fanship ain't cool man.

(6) A fan cannot be blindly loyal (you know who you are)
I like Kant's categorical imperative because of its unambiguity. The funda is: don't endorse something unless you can universalise it. If I say stealing is wrong, it's wrong for everyone, in any situation, no exceptions. From the moral point of view, being a fan involves a duty unto the phenomenon. I am going to go out on a deontological limb here and posit that if something that the phenomenon commits is morally wrong according to your categorical imperative, you cannot then defend that action. Period. I've actually had someone counter this with "But then you're saying that throwing phones is wrong for the majority of the population which makes it a utilitarian argument." The great thing about Kant is his gift of moral autonomy to the individual. I make a perfectly valid deontological statement when I say: "Throwing phones at people is wrong." Then, whether it's Russell Crowe (looking at you, Artiekins) who does it or my neighbour, I'm making a uniform judgement. It's morally indefensible. You can remain a fan and satisfy personal notions of unconditional loyalty but you will have to accept the wrongness of the action.

And that, ladies and gen'lemen, is why I enjoy the feeling of being a morally good fan.

Lat-uh biatches.

Oh Gawd

2009-03-05T14:30:00.004+05:30

I attended a three day lecture on Christian philosophy. Obviously, I was just a sponge soaking everything in, not having much knowledge of the subject. There's a whole bunch of questions raging in my mind though and I see that as a good thing because now I will probe deeper into those topics.

However, a colleague asked our guest lecturer something which, while rather basic and old, prompted speculation that would have otherwise escaped me.

My colleague is a believer. A friend challenged her belief by talking about how God is merely a construct of human imagination. Animals, he said, don't believe in any supernatural entity so why should we assume that he/she/it exists. Of course, the problem with this argument is that animals are hardly a yardstick for any kind of ontological assessment. Beasts do not think on the level humans do...they, for example, have no notion of value (moral or nonmoral), no concept of logic and so on and so forth. The response to this can be that value and logic are also human creations and therefore to set a premium on everything humans devise is a very anthropocentric perspective to adopt. Fair enough. Dogs are colourblind. Does that mean colour does not exist? Physics has shown this to be untrue - the wavelengths of light are just beyond the perception iof dogs, just as certain phenomena exceed the limits of human cognition. Comment?

My speculation (and believe me, that's just what it is) was more a take-off from what this person said: that God is a human construct. Of course, that's true to some extent. Edith Hamilton, the revered mythologist, mentioned a little something which I'm going to use to grapple with this predicament. Ancient Western civilisation, let's say the Greeks, humanised their Gods to a degree that almost robbed them of their divinity. The Greek pantheon consisted of entities who warred, revelled, fell prey to all sorts of 'baser' emotions with alarming frequency. Also, they were granted immunity from all consequences of their numerous misdeeds. The sunny, Mediterranean mirth of their culture combined with the prosperity and aristocratic dominance of the Classical era probably had something to do with this interpretation of God. The Norse myths, by contrast, depict deities who know that they are doomed - in the final battle between the Gods and their enemies, the Giants, they are destined to fail. Kinda depressing, of course but consider the natural conditions which spawned this mythology...in the dark, gloomy, frigid lands of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, wrangling with hardships everyday, the Norse accepted this pessimistic outlook and transferred it to that most abiding cultural meme - religion.

With this relativism almost essential to the idea of God, I found myself wondering if the Christian abstraction of God - omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient - was but an inevitable conclusion to Plato's 'world of ideas'. Obsessed as he was with the a priori and its infusions of Pythagorean geometry, it is no surprise that the concept of 'perfection' became so intrinsic to his philosophy. The thought that there are things which exist outside of our realm of experience that are flawless, ideal - this is what possibly ultimately led to the 'perfect' Christian God. Someone brought up a very pertinent point; if God is perfect, why would he/she/it need to create the world? Action implies need. Why would a perfect being 'need' anything? Self-sufficiency is one the prerequisites for perfection.

Moving on to more personal territory...my Facebook profile proclaims me to be a 'rabidly-practising Hindu'. I am sometimes asked what this is all about (is it a sneaky ploy to suck up to the Shiv Sena since I'm a Northie living in Maharashtra? Yeah right). The answer is a bit of an oxbow lake: it started off as a tongue-in-cheek dig at fundamentalism. Now there's an element of truth in it, ever since I've taken up philosophy. I don't think I mean Hindu purely in terms of religion, seeing as it didn't even consider itself one until it came into contact with other faiths much, much later. For the longest time, Hinduism was all people in my part of the world knew. It was a lifestyle, a prevalent identity - the sanatan dharm. To truly 'be' something, you have to 'not be' something else and I suppose it was after a long period of time, when Buddhism, Jainism and then Islam, Christianity etc. made their way to the subcontinent, that people really thought, "Oh but I'm NOT that. Ipso facto, I must be this."

Somehow, people assume I'm an atheist...I have gotten this a LOT, too much for me to overlook it. Like if you're an LAC liberal, you've dustbinned the Divine. But I really don't think religion is the most intelligent way of expressing iconoclasm, if that indeed is what people expect of my 'personality type'. And I grew up in a fairly traditional religious context...I don't yet feel the need to dispense with it for some misplaced sense of rebellion. What I AM a little worried about is the changing nature of religious Hinduism and the accompanying sense of insularity. Maybe my rabidity is a reaction to that? Plus, Pune has got to be the world's most Hindu city and Fergusson, the second most Hindu college (after S.P. College naturellement: see 1st paragraph here).

Lastly, on a light note: people, stop saying you're 'spiritual, not religious', quickly followed by that insufferable look of having it all figured out. What the phug does that sentence even mean??????

2009-03-02T11:49:00.004+05:30

A good friend's take on something I've considered important for a while now...the last comment is mine.

It's been a while but this Thursday I attended a two hour lecture on 'Globalisation and Intercultural Compatibilities' which reminded me of the point I'd made here.

http://just-sidding.blogspot.com/2007/08/societys-attitude-towards-social.html

Conversations in Savera: Part I

2009-02-13T15:25:00.003+05:30

A series of lectures on the philosophy of Islam is taking place in our third year class as part of their course on Philosophy of Religion. I ended up attending them this week and yesterday, at tea with our guest lecturer from Pune University, an Iranian scholar with a great deal of intelligence and knowledge, ended up having a very interesting discussion on the intermingling of history and religion.

First of all, Islamic ideology is anchored very much in Ancient Greek tradition. Now, this is a fact. But I have three problems with this contention that I’m being unable to resolve. I don’t say that the problems are even legitimate; maybe they are issues that have long since been taken care of by scholars. It’s just that as a new student of the subject, I cannot really wrap my head around these problems.

(1)The Mycenaean civilisation that lasted from about 1400-1200 CE was immediately followed by a period congruent to the medieval Dark Ages in Europe: there was collapse of civilisation, haphazard socio-political shudders characterised by tribalism and all manner of zigzag migrations, among other things. The Greeks post 800 CE, when they emerged from this period of more or less no chronicle, obviously lost all sense of a collective past. They did not remember the Bronze Age. The Homeric hymns, composed sometime between 1200 and 800 CE, were seen as some sort of record but it’s a bit odd that the Greeks, having sustained organism of a culture, even if it wasn’t attached to anything concrete in their minds, would reconstruct an entire religion and lifestyle based on the myths and stories contained in Homer’s works. My question is simply that how did Archaic Greece receive transmission of the Mycenaean religion and reform their own perception of god?

(2)Following forth from (1), there is the confusion I have regarding the retention of linear eschatology in Archaic Greece and its subsequent percolation into Abrahamic religions. This view of the afterlife was indicated strongly in Homer but for the Archaic Greeks to sustain it seems slightly incongruent with the prevalence of Orphic religions which viewed the world as a wheel, much in the vein of Eastern philosophy. Did ‘judgement’ enter the Homeric notion of afterlife? As far as I’ve read it was far from vital to it. And how did the linear eschatology then dominate the cyclic one?

(3) Classical Greece had a rather egalitarian concept of clergy in that ordinary men were entrusted with the task of religious rituals, and yet Islam does have a very neatly ordered hierarchy of religious performance. I want to understand how the democratic religious influence of Greece was mitigated in Islam.

There are a few other things that we discussed and that have stuck with me which I find particularly noteworthy:

(1)The Israel-Palestine issue:

(a)The arrangement of Judaism around orthopraxy, manifested as ‘the temple’ which they remain unable to fully reclaim
(b)The orthodox Muslim religious compulsion (holy duty) to thwart reclamation of the Jewish temple, in essence debarring the latter from fully returning to their Faith as underscored in their doctrine.
(c)The inextricability of religion and politics in the Middle East
(d)The political arrogance of Zionism which divested a whole populace of a country on grounds that are specious in practical terms and troubling in moral ones
(e)The repeated suppression and systematic assault on Jewish people throughout history that has led them to have a deep-seated complex, especially vis-a-vis their practice of their religion. Now that they have a country of their own, do they know how to handle this new found power?
(f)Palestinians still live like refugees in their own part of the world, which they were sharing with Jews all those millennia ago, the time period which Jews speak of when they lay claim to the land. Will they always remain ‘the others’ in their own space?
(g)Is the definition of Islam as explained by Hamas and Hezbollah being propogandised and forced upon Muslims all over the world, cornering them almost and depriving them of the right to form their own image of Islam? In that sense are Hamas and Hezbollah more dangerous for Islam than even Israel?
(h)Is there a solution to this problem at all?

(2)Is Indian thought ‘anti-historical’ (a phrase used by our guest lecturer)? It’s very interesting to trace Indian philosophy because it defies any serious chronology. Ancient India had a whole flourishing milieu of thinkers and then...well, that’s about it, until now maybe. But even now we’re mostly recovering elements of the past instead of really producing thinkers. We have a gaping vacuum of public intellectualism across a very, very long period of time. And that makes Indian ideological consciousness a very funny thing. It’s part of the reason, for example, that I think Hindus really believe they follow exactly the same religion as their foreparents all those years ago. I’d like to return to that first bit about Mycenae and how it left nebulous traces on the psyche of its descendants (if that’s what they really were...it’s contentious, biologically/culturally). In a sense 21st century Indians and especially Hindus are struggling with that lacuna. And that’s part of the new Hindu problem. But that’s a whole other can of worms. Remaining on this issue of anti-historicity, there’s a bit in Hesse’s The Journey to the East where he talks about history being a matrix of events which we make sense of by assigning roles like ‘hero’ and villain’. If that be the case then, for example, the Ramayana would be comprehended by us through those conceptual binoculars: Ravana becomes the villain and Rama the hero. But my problem with this lies in the very ahistoricity of Indian conceptualism. Why should we assume that the ancients saw Ravana as the villain and Rama as the hero? There’s too much psychological complexity in the Ramayana for this Western two-pronged tool of probation to explain anything for us. This binary preoccupation is an import from the British, a residue of the Raj. Precisely because we have no works on our ancient texts in the period between their time and ours, and that’s a helluva long period, we are succumbing to a style of analysis that is inorganic. All descants on our old books have been post-colonial and I personally think this is problematic.

(3)Finally, on the conjoint nature of religion and politics, I’m making a connection between the 1st Commandment: ‘Thou shalt worship no God but me’ (a recurring edict in Abrahamic religions...Islam has a similar statement to make in Arabic) and this bit in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed where Kirilov says how it is the Gods of a people which decide its destiny as suppressors or suppressed. If the whole world had one God there would be no fragmentation of land. And that struck me as being a very morally loaded, Christianity soaked thing to say, a conclusion I draw knowing Dostoevsky’s religious passion. But what does this mean today? How has the meaning of this monotheistic mania changed to fit our times?

This lecture series is turning out to be really stimulating. I shall keep you posted. (That’s me talking to myself, since nobody reads the blog).

How Dark is this Knight?: A Coup D'Oeil At Batman Through The Lens of Moral Philosophy

2009-01-27T14:39:00.007+05:30

THE JOKER IS NIETZSCHE IN DISGUISE

It’s very telling that the first time we confront the deformed, deranged archvillain of this film, he is ripping off a mask and snarling, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stranger.” Now, this is an open nod to Friedrich Nietzsche who famously stated, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” One could dismiss this similarity of phrase as clever wordplay. I shall opt for mining deeper though, in light of the Joker’s face-offs with Batman later in the movie, which echo Nietzsche completely.

Before launching into an exposition of this complex point of view, let me acquaint you with the concept of ethical egoism which I believe to be the root of the Joker’s moral dysfunction. Ethical egoism is the doctrine that believes that every moral action of ours is aimed at our own happiness. The Joker certainly fits this criterion, in a complicated sort of way. While it’s obvious that he cares little about anything, he doesn’t seem to attach an awful lot of importance to himself either; he enjoys being pummelled and pulped. Then again, he may simply be a masochist and in that case, his happiness lies in his own pain. He is very interested in knowing the identity of Batman, a childish curiosity which a maniac like him takes to murderous, sadistic extremes when he ominously threatens to kill everyone in Gotham City until he finds out. Here, we see that his ego manifests itself in his fancy for a bit of information and leads him to map wayward, zigzag blueprints of mayhem.

If I were to get more Freudian, I could probably contend that the Joker is more id-driven than ego-driven, since he answers only to his primal urge of causing havoc. But I would caution the audience against this judgement for the simple reason that the Joker’s actions, despite his very vocal aversion to idea of a Plan, are too strategic to be discounted as propelled by mere animal instinct. They are thought out and mired in his desires to be taken as a force to contend with (the very chilling, “I’m not a freak” lingers with the audience long after the moment) and in his repeated rancour against a very mysterious past – no man who references his history that much can be beyond narcissism and an obsession with the self. There is a very ego-fuelled wish for revenge, respect and power in the Joker which lends itself perfectly to Nietzsche’s creeds. It provides the perfect basis for the ‘Will to Power’ that he became so well known for. The gist of the creed is that all organisms strive towards increasing their power, a drive secondary even to that of continuing their species. The fundament of this theory is that the ultimate purpose of all action is the assertion of supremacy over everyone else. All organisms evolve with a view to dominating weaker ones and eliminating them in the struggle for survival so that they can prevail upon the established order as the conquering being, a thesis that is perfectly congruent with the idea of ethical egoism insofar as the objective is maximisation of one’s own lust for power. Without further repetition of this ethical egoist springboard, I dive into how the Joker can be a clown doppelganger for Nietzsche.

At the police station, when he is being interrogated by our hero, the Joker is miffed by Batman’s righteous indignation, pouncing on him with an accusation that he is allowing himself to be bound by the moral fritter of a society that is fickle and shallow. “Don’t talk like one of them, you’re not!” He says very clearly that this morality that Gotham (or indeed any other city in any other time or place) flaunts with such vehemence is flawed and built for the mediocre, banal masses. Their ethical code is constructed to rein in brilliant men like himself and Batman; to conform to their self-righteous strictures of conduct is to accept the defeat of their own greatness in the face of such herd mentality. He likens the ethics of the city to a bad joke, “to be dropped at the first sign of trouble.” The Joker insists that Gotham doesn’t care about Batman and just uses him to keep itself safe: he hits upon the eternal loneliness of the ubermensch, Nietzsche’s famous superman, to be forever isolated from the plebeian mechanics of lower morality, unable to reconcile him/herself to it and yet unable to completely disassociate from the society s/he emerges to tower above. In fact, in a perverse fashion, the Joker is a sort of superman and towards the end of the film Batman says as much, mocking him when his plans fail – “you’re alone.”

Then, there is the Joker’s eloquent speech to Harvey Dent, in the hospital: “I’m a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.” He goes on about the downside of scheming and then hands Harvey a gun with the caveat, “Introduce a little anarchy.” Now, interestingly, Nietzsche never really expounds upon the social context in which his ubermensch would arise but Mencken, a scholar on Nietzsche, has an interesting if not widely accepted theory on this which aligns itself beautifully with the Joker’s moral predispositions. Since Nietszche’s superman is the physically strongest and mentally fittest member of a given group who is to dominate all others without regard to scruple or scripture – these, after all, are handcuffs of petty, limited, inferior beings – the only way in which he/she could realize him/herself and establish supremacy would be in a state of socio-economic chaos.

Ultimately though, the Joker contradicts his own claims and concocts the much-reviled Scheme at the film’s climax. In his attempt to deconstruct everyone else’s spirit, his own carefully constructed plan comes apart. He is too damaged to care, though, about his inconsistencies and disappointments, having already been an ‘agent of chaos’ to Dent, who he has manipulated and made into a hardened criminal sociopath. There is no doubt here that the Joker was very, very serious in his attempt to ‘watch the world burn’, as Alfred might say. Why so serious? We can now speculate that perhaps his sense of justice centred entirely on pandemonium...disorder, for him, meant fairness since no rules meant no breaking of them.

HARVEY DENT: DUDE, WHERE’S MY MORALITY?

It is hard to decode the moral DNA of a man like Harvey Dent, who by the end of the film, is two men. And the schism between good and bad in his heart becomes his driving force. I classify him as a schizophrenic teleologist precisely because of the 360 degree turn he takes from being Gotham’s White Knight to becoming the city’s disfigured gun-happy nemesis. A teleologist is basically someone who believes that all moral obligations are governed by the ends. The result of an action should be the reason for doing or not doing it. There are two sides to this coin – one can be an ethical egoist, who, as I explained earlier looks to further his/her own good or one can be a utilitarian who looks to increase the amount of good in the world over the amount of evil. Harvey Dent with his trick coin, proved himself rather extreme on both counts.

In this sense, Dent starts off as a utilitarian – someone who believes that being moral means effecting the greatest possible good in every ethical exercise. He’s a wholesome, upright District Attorney whose sole reason to live seems to be the welfare of his city. He has distanced his ego from his great love for Gotham: he defends a vigilante like Batman despite the fact that, in essence, the caped crusader challenges Dent’s authority and competence in Gotham; he throws himself wholeheartedly into the role of Batman himself when called upon, and takes pride in his life being threatened by crime syndicates, seeing it as proof that he is protecting his fellow citizens efficiently. How noble! Of course, his utilitarian orientation is slightly skewed by his love for Rachel and his desire to protect her as well as, perhaps, the awareness that he is doing the right thing which salves his superego, which is what Freud called the ‘conscience’. But then, he is human, and to expect any more selflessness from him is too excessive a demand. In fact one might say Dent pulls a double whammy and is both an Act-Utilitarian and a Rule-Utilitarian. These concepts are pretty basic: the former does things that promote the greater good and the latter devises rules which do. Harvey not only does things to maximise the greatest good for the greatest number of people, a position congruent with that of John Stuart Mill, who was a qualitative utilitarian, but believes in promoting laws and rules that also do this, an imperative for the condition of justice. I would go as far as to say that his obsession with justice, which forms the platform of any legitimate rule-utilitarian stance, is what finally undoes him. His insistence: “I make my own luck” is his refusal to accept anything but the principle of doing what’s best for everyone involved and his autonomy over creating that situation of justice. This pivotal element of Harvey’s ideology gets turned on its head thanks to the Joker’s machinations.

Rachel dies and his face is burnt. Maimed and divested of the love of his life, Dent falls prey to guilt, contempt for the world and of course...the Joker. He devolves into an ethical egoist. An ethical egoist is the polar opposite of a utilitarian. He/she believes that whatever promotes his/her greatest good is the right thing to do. Dent certainly becomes preoccupied with revenge and stops caring about Gotham, which he feels betrayed by. His modus operandi revolves around avenging Rachel’s death and killing everyone that he holds responsible for his misadventure. These are classic traits of an ethical egoist, which are further fanned by the Joker visiting Harvey in hospital and encouraging his tendency towards indiscriminate violence. Of course, Harvey being Harvey, becoming an agent of chaos doesn’t exactly make sense to him the way it does to the Joker and so he uses his private demons to justify his streak of psychosis. His love for justice, too, has dissipated. Towards the end, when he says, “the only morality in a cruel world is chance”, he is sacrificing his idealistic notions of universal justice...the well-being of everyone...for a precarious code based on random occurrence, like the flipping of a coin. He resonates 17th century French aphorist La Rochefoucauld’s sentiments: ‘Chance and caprice rule the world’.

BRUCE WAYNE: VIGILANTE WARRIOR OR SPOILT BRAT?

The last of the triptych, Batman is too complex a creature to assess in so short a span of time. I shall say just a few pertinent words on what I perceive to be his ethical landscape. The only reason he seems to be running around in a bat suit is to exorcise his childhood monsters. A Freudian interpretation would be that his development has been arrested in an earlier stage of his maturation thanks to seeing his parents being killed before his eyes. The attendant psychological problems this assumes cause moral dysfunction of a very deep-seated nature. I, for one, refuse to believe that a young man as damaged as Bruce Wayne can be a poster-child for an intact moral compass. Having said that, it would be callous to disparage his commitment to his goal of cleaning up the streets of Gotham as the whim of an affluent psycho. Let us explore the possibilities of his moral dimensions.

Let’s start with rule-deontology, which states that as long as a rule identifies and addresses exceptions and is ranked in an order of priority, it can be a guiding principle for moral conduct. He could be a rule-deontologist: he has one fixed rule – that he will not kill. And shockingly, given the circumstances he has been pushed to, he sticks to it. Amusingly, in the interrogation scene, when the Joker provokes him into a response, he confesses that he’s considering breaking that rule. Now this rule precludes all exceptions and comes into conflict with no other, so it can be the defining ethical tenet of Wayne’s career as Batman. No hierarchy is needed, nor any statement of exemption. And so far, Wayne has managed the considerably laudable task of aligning his prima facie obligation with his actual duty. Of course, this is exactly why he’s a fictional character.

Next emerges the applicability of teleology, which is again true on counts of both: ethical egoism and ethical universalism, the latter of which I’ll come to in a bit. Bruce certainly satisfies the criteria for an ethical egoist, in fits and spurts though. Sometimes, he’s almost normal, when he harbours boyish dreams of leading a regular life with Rachel and wishes to be rid of his nocturnal persona so he can pursue his own ambitions in lieu of Gotham’s. “Y’know that day...when Gotham would no longer need Batman, it’s coming...” he says to Rachel at the balcony, childish eagerness radiating off his usually cynical mien. He is clearly thinking only of himself and what he wants. Through most of the film, he is keen to play the hero because he finally sees an end to that facade and glimpses the possibility of not bearing Gotham’s burden – hardly an altruistic thought. He is so eager to shove his mantle off onto Harvey’s shoulders that he is almost blind to his own importance and value in the big picture. He ostensibly decides to stop being Batman so the lives of innocents will be spared. But in all this, there is a selfish objective: he does not want blood on his hands. The greater good for everyone will in fact be his continuing as Batman, to combat the problem at its root and rescue Gotham once and for all, from its diseased underbelly. He would be a true utilitarian if he thus promoted the ultimate ‘greater good’ by, as Alfred puts it, ‘enduring’ and letting the immediate deficits of good occur so that he can plug the very source of evil by retaining Batman. In fact, here is where my biggest problem with him enters into the equation: his point of view is not necessarily ‘moral’ in the real sense of the term. Of course, the big debate about what moral obligation is, rages in philosophical circles even today but I choose to take Professor Frankena’s definition of combining the principle of beneficence with that of justice. Bruce Wayne wants both of these for Gotham – he wishes to cause an excess of good over evil in the lives of Gotham’s residents, invoking the principle of beneficence, and also wants all its citizens to lead equally good lives, thus invoking justice. Here, what I mean by ‘good’ is nonmorally ‘good’ i.e. healthy, safe, happy.

But the reason he wants this is not as noble as he would have us believe and that is really where the moral backbone of Mr. Wayne is brought into question. The reason he wants to be a guardian angel is anchored not in his love for Gotham but in the murder of his own parents by an unnamed thug. It’s intriguing to note that even in the original comic books, Bruce Wayne never discovers who his parents’ killer was. If he had, he would’ve probably gone and shot him. End of story. He would’ve been Harvey Dent. He would have been an out and out ethical egoist. But here, with the anonymity of the criminal and his homogeneity with the general criminal population of Gotham, Batman will never know who he is. As a sort of therapy, to cope with his internal struggle to accept his parents’ murder, Bruce decides to target every criminal, as a way of exacting revenge on the one who shot his mother and father, hoping perhaps in the back of his mind that he may have avenged them by accident if not by design. So it’s a twist of circumstance and self-imposed punishment that forces Wayne to go out and be ‘moral’, be ‘ethical’ everyday...to be a utilitarian and promote the common good. I will not say he does it to feel good about himself, he does genuinely care about Gotham, but I take issue with where his morality originates from. His moral point of view, which is independent of concern for others and which is so unique to his personal tragedy that it cannot be universalised, is not the desirable moral viewpoint, in my opinion. Kant, with his emphasis on universalisability or mass applicability of morality, would certainly agree with me. And most moral theorists would concede that coming as it does from a perspective steeped in psychological unrest, his morality is deviant, if finally conducive to the balance of good over evil. In fact, I might add here as a sidebar that I think that even his interpretation of justice with its guerrilla overtones and vigilantism is non-conformist and untraditional, for this reason of deviance, because it is evolved from a sense of ethics that is very askew.

However, in the end, I would like to think that Bruce Wayne is something of a hero; he is a more or less noble soul with the concerns of the world on his mind. He comes through as an ethical universalist, the best sort of utilitarian, for a universalist is one who cares so much about others that he puts them above himself constantly. In spite of his all-too-human tendency to succumb, sometimes, to the lure of an ordinary, happy life or his inescapable mental past, Bruce Wayne, no matter how reluctantly, has always chosen the good of everyone else. His heroism may be of an unconventional kind, his efforts towards being moral may be hampered by his humanity and his motives may not always be the purest but I adhere to my position that he is as much of an ethical universalist as it is possible to be as the vanguard of a city smothered by a scrum of crime and iniquity. When he takes Harvey’s crimes upon himself to protect his memory as a champion of good in the consciousness of Gotham; when he preserves her spirit by inviting her censure and revulsion, when he repeatedly puts his life, soul and self in peril, he transcends the constrictions that bind ordinary people. In a sense he is the anti-ubermensch – a great man so consumed by the morality of the masses, that he sacrifices himself to preserve it.

Heraclitus and Buddha Deathmatch!

2009-01-13T03:07:00.011+05:30

So I had to present this paper today in the world's most dangerous Brahmin college, S.P. College. They use the Devanagari script like a weapon. Sweet people though, they had a cupcake and two rounds of tea and a swell lunch and everything. I spoke. And was cross-questioned by this old guy from Pune University who looked like a dwarf-Gandalf. I have a morbid and inexplicable fear of dwarves by the way. The guy scowled and Scotland Yarded everyone, didn't compliment a single speaker...I was shit scared. He asked me two questions, of which one I was able to answer somewhat and for the other, I squeaked some bullshit out. He was benign in the end though, just nodded, then grinned and told me my paper was very interesting. Score. I got the LotR lookalike gig happening faster than you can...well finish the last film at any rate.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: This paper was worked on like crazy and accepted in a totally new avatar at the Indian Philosophy Congress in October 2009. The revised version shall be available soon, so disregard this.

BUDDHA AND HERACLITUS ON CHANGE

This paper traces the similar roots of Buddha’s pacifism and Heraclitus’ militarism in the unique conception that everything is in a state of permanent flux. Both Heraclitus and Buddha belonged to the sixth century, were of noble birth and began to seek the truth fairly early on, having given up their patrician provenance. And yet, distinctions between them abound: for one, Heraclitus was endowed with the title of ‘The Obscure’ and Buddha was celebrated for his unprecedented accessibility to the masses.

I have divided my comparisons into a basic juxtaposition of their ontology erupting from the view of change, followed by the resulting eschatology and have touched upon their inherent implications. The ethics of Buddhism and Heracliteanism would be the obvious gauges to measure the divide most accurately. In the simplest terms, my goal has been to put before you what I perceive to be the evolution of their philosophy from ‘CHANGE’ to ‘WAR/PEACE’.

Let’s take a look at their ideas of CHANGE.

Buddha’s most important postulate in this context is that of Dependent Origination or Paticcasamuppada. He called this the dhamma and gave it prime importance in his system of thought. By itself, this notion inheres two other concepts: that of karma and that of sorrow, articulated as dvadashanidan. But I shall return to them a little later. For now, I’ll focus on this eloquent grasp of conditional causation. His idea of impermanence is best understood as a denial of constancy and an acknowledgement of continuity. Everything is because of what was before it, a series or vitni that reconciles becoming and not becoming (patubhavo-uppado). He talks of transitive causation – one state transmits its paccayasatti or causal energy to a newly conceived spatio-temporal embryo. The Buddhist cosmology arranges itself around the following world-process: a state becoming another state by transference of cause i.e. by informing it with a ceaseless throb. The preceding state energises the inner motivation to exist, in the succeeding state. Furthermore, he emphasised necessity alone to be the driving force behind this causality - in fact, the karmic theory takes off from here. On that note, we must glance at the symmetry of this theory which underlies all of Buddhist doctrine – the present is the effect of the past and will cause the future. Coming back to necessity, necessary succession is the name of the game. The limitations are those of being reliant on conditions – the thing is as long as the conditions remain and ceases to be as soon as the conditions exhaust. This positivism gave rise to the Eight Fold Path or dukhanirodamarga. A last sidebar that I shall take up later is that of Buddha’s association of momentariness, rather than just impermanence, with human consciousness. Interestingly, that all is in a state of flux or samtana, is explained by the use of metaphors of a stream and a flame, both of which would plug Buddhist thought into the Heraclitean socket quite perfectly, echoed as they are in the latter.

But that doesn’t happen as neatly as we’d think.

Heraclitus’ famous but misquoted and thus misinterpreted pronouncement that ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow’ of course utilises the symbol of flowing water much like the stream image was used by Buddha. But of course, there’s much more to it. First of all, Heraclitus’ whole outlook towards impermanence involves seriated causation as we see in the statement: ‘All things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares.’ There is a cause and an antecedent effect, a bland succession rather than any transfer of ‘cause’ itself; clearly a more wholesale transmutation is being spoken about. It is an external sequence of occurrence and consequence. Transmutation is one extreme where one material manifestation is converted into another. The insinuation of constancy, absent in Buddha lingers here. I shall elaborate on that in a bit. Another sentence confirms this: ‘The turnings of fire: first sea, and of sea half is earth, half fireburst. is liquefied as sea and measured into the same proportion as it had before it became earth.’ Fire, of course, is the Heraclitean rudiment, ‘the want and surfeit’. Equilibrium and conservation of cosmic elements seem to be imperative here but these protean hints do not reach closure as they do in the full-blooded theory of universal justice that is karmic law. Returning to the river and keeping in mind the two ideas of seriation and transmutation, here is an intriguing reading of the enigmatic quote. The translations used here are of Markovich and in a philosopher as dependent on language as Heraclitus was, they can alter the meanings completely. According to Markovich, the quote would really imply retention of ‘constancy’ within the cycle of change, how reality can exist only by transforming. Impermanence becomes crucial for stability and aligns itself perfectly with the aforementioned equilibrium asserted in the idea of transmutation. The second vital aspect of Heraclitus’ flux system is that of the unity of opposites which follows from the dynamism in his previous positions: ‘Collections: wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things.’ The tension between opposites is what gives rise to the Reality. From their conflict is synthesised the cosmos – transmutation or change applies itself rigorously in this perspective. The opposites can co-exist and the preponderance of the correlatives would determine what ultimately prevails at different times and spaces, night or day/warm or cold, thus locking in the change-constancy trope of Heraclitus. Fire is a logical motif of his theory, with it embodying this synthesis. This whole blueprint ends up in the construction of the logos, which has been the Western point of view for the past 2500 years and of which I shall speak presently.

Now to put side by side the important satellite concepts which will organise the skeletons of the respective ontological theories of change and lead to the eschatological contentions. These can be summed up as ‘strife is justice’ in case of Heraclitus and karma in that of Buddha. Let us see how we can bridge the conceptions of change with the divergent opinions of the Final Right.

Starting with Buddha, we must return briefly to the topic of sorrow. It plays a central role in Buddhist doctrine and its elimination has been the basis of Buddhism’s appeal among the hoi-polloi. The knowledge of the Four Noble Truths culminates in enlightenment and consequent termination of the causal chain which generates misery for humankind. The new birth is not then caused and liberation is achieved. Heraclitus, however, makes no special mention of sorrow in his musings. This also precludes any cogitation on rebirth or transmigration and therefore no talk of emancipation. The next point of difference is the Buddhist negation of the soul or anatta vada. Admitting a soul is inconsistent with the Buddhist creed of conditional existence and universal change. Instead there is the momentary state of consciousness – ksanika vada – an aggregate or sanghati of sensations and thoughts which forms a self-complex. Heraclitus views the soul as the moral and cognitive focus of life. His quote: ‘Souls should strive to rise above the private world of the sleeping to the common world of the waking’ plants the soul in the middle of his logos, encouraging it towards Reason. He correlates elements with qualities of the soul and urges increments reductions accordingly. Finally, there is the quasi-nihilism of the Buddhists which believes everything to be transitory and our false belief in its realness to be the cause of all suffering. Material things are only sensory data and attributes without any underlying unity, they say. The logos, embedded in the constancy-change trope mentioned earlier, bringing together corresponding opposites in one Law endorses pluralism and is again expressed in copious pyrrhic metaphors by Heraclitus, rendering it a definite materialist overtone.

Finally, coming to the eschatological implications this common theme of change, we find logical conclusions to both Buddhist and Heraclitean ideologies. The karmic theory is the supreme principle which balances cause and effect perfectly. It is the internal need to be caused and to cause i.e. to change. Under its aegis, nothing is uncaused and naught causeless. Its foreground is the acknowledgement of misery, the scientific purge thereof, the denial of the self and the equations of the transitory and the unreal. Coupled with the prescriptive Eight Fold Path, karma takes Buddhism’s elementary theory of change – dependent origination – to the level of achieving liberation from causal human suffering. Heraclitus, on the other hand, speaks of conflict as the highest law, which gives rise even to the logos. The natural transmutations and elemental modulations are the very essence of the clash from which erupts the One. He says: ‘War is father of all and king of all’.

I am not very conversant with the ethics of Buddhism and Heraclitus gives it almost negligible space. On the basis of my reading on change and its attendant issues, I would assume Buddhist ethics to be derived from the annata vada or negation of soul. Since the ego is annihilated, it is obvious that the self is uninvolved in any moral device thought of by Buddhists. This would indicate a detached, near-deontological notion of morality with an element of ‘right for the sake of right’. Right and wrong are moral judgements which would need the validation of karma: the cause must effect – whatever maintains this principle would then be ‘right’ and whatever doesn’t, wrong. It would be wrong to impose western ethical apparati like the egoism-universalism continuum onto Buddhist creeds so I’m consciously staving off teleological advances here. I shall pursue this strain further and return with a more complete understanding of their ethics. Heraclitus’ ethics I have more margin for guesswork in. Assuming strife to be justice, and accepting perhaps, as Frankena (that moral philosophy stud muffin) would say, justice to be a prerequisite for ‘right’, one might conclude that anything cause strife would be right. However, I think ‘strife’ shouldn’t be interpreted in the negative sense but in the more classical sense of dynamic tension. Then perhaps teleology could assert itself here and demand that whatever results in the greatest amount of dynamic tension or change or conflict would be what is morally right. What would imbalance things would then be ‘right’ but only insofar as the imbalance generates a concrete unity of balance. I somehow see this line of thought veering dangerously close to anarchist terrain though. I shall return to this too, after much research.

Thus we find the Oriental quest for what the Buddhists termed nibbana or eternal internal peace and the Occidental need for external domination by appeal to the Word being anchored in much the same idea. 4000 miles apart, an Indian prince sitting under a tree and a misanthrope who had denounced all Hellenic intellect, shaped the way the world would think forevermore.

Bibliography

1. Datta and Chattejee's Introduction to Indian Philosophy, pp. 116-139

2. Hiriyanna's Outline of Indian Philosophy, pp. 138-147

3.Radhakrishnan's History of Indian Philosophy, Volume I, pp. 365-382, p. 410-417, p.440-446

4.Copleston's A History of Philosophy: Greece and Rome, pp. 38-46

5.Edmund. J. Mill's article, The Buddhism in Heraclitus, The Buddhist Review, Vol 11:1, pp. 269-279

6.Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Heraclitus

Mrs. Dalloway

2008-12-18T00:43:00.002+05:30

Having finished the book, I'm using Prof. Encke's (Facebooked) questions to think about different aspects of the novel...it's a very sloppy version of an assignment but hey, at least I'm trying.

The thematic significance of Woolf’s narrative seems to be the languidness of that one summer’s day when so many people, interconnected directly and indirectly, cross paths in the flesh and in their minds. The lackadaisical tempo of Mrs. Dalloway indicates the general stupor in which the protagonists live their lives out. Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic obsessions, Peter Walsh’s nostalgic preoccupations, Septimus Smith’s psychosis and so on, every character seems to be sleepwalking around London, involved entirely in their own selves, pasts and futures. This somnolent narcissism Woolf renders by imbuing her beautiful, incisive prose with an element of lethargy.

Of the figures or metaphors that most seem to illuminate her style, the one that stuck in my mind the most was that which accentuated this feeling of restless, long-accrued contemplation: the image of her characters reclining on sofas and couches is recurrent and stark. There is a nod here to the post-War abundance of time and a certain need to think about the present. Clarissa, Septimus, Lady Bruton, Peter…at some point, they all curl up and cogitate. In fact, this may sound silly, but according to me, this is the most telling image also because there is a hint of the psychoanalysis stereotype – the patient lying on the doctor’s couch – pioneered by Freud. It is interesting to note this because the Woolfs, Virginia and Leonard, were the first publishers of Freud in English and she seems to have been greatly influenced by his work. A damaged, broken country arranged on cushions seems an appropriate picture of Woolf’s crumbling British Empire.

And then there are the windows and the stairs…the architecture of the mind and soul. Many of the characters repeatedly look out the window, especially Clarissa, whether she is imagining the life of a wizened neighbour (as Woolf herself is wont to do), perhaps projecting her anxieties about aging femininity onto her or recalling a moment in her past that mirrors the merry summer sunshine outside. And, while I’m unable to pinpoint them now, there are a few other times when a character uses the window to ‘look out’ (or look within?). Septimus’ suicide on the stairs and Clarissa’s ascent up to her room convince me somewhat that there is intent to depict age and time through the use of a staircase. Even Elizabeth climbs up the steps of the double-decker, mulling over her options on the cusp of adulthood. To interpret each instance painstakingly would be pedantic and Woolf would not be so abstruse as to construct books out of minutiae but according to me, the profusion of windows and stairs was for a reason.

One more observation, of the top of my head, was the repetition of the colour green, especially with regard to the attire of women. I am not 100% sure of everyone who ended up wearing green, but I distinctly recall Septimus’ one-time crush, Isabel Pole, Clarissa, Elizabeth...all of them were accoutred in verdant hues in the novel.

I am sure there are other motifs that I have ignored or forgotten. But this is what I thought of the ones I did remember.

A master of characterisation, Woolf switched adroitly among the many characters in her novel, often almost imperceptibly. She uses all sorts of unique devices to accomplish her rendition of such remarkable empathy – there is the usage of the mysterious motorcar in the market to spark of a multitude of psychological reactions among the populace, of the skywriting plane to unite the whole of London in its regard, and then the very filmic methods of tracking shots, flashbacks and montages. But best of all, of course, is her penetrating insight into how other people function. While novels before her tended to be overtly scientific and treated characters rather like zoological specimens to be observed and labelled, Woolf led the charge in the advent of the famous ‘stream of consciousness’ method of achieving character. Again, this is analogous to Freud’s ‘free association’ and therefore the modernist movement itself, which was almost defined by Woolf and Joyce, is entrenched in psychological exposition.

Because of this reason, her characters are rich in detail and have very distinct voices. Their inner monologues are concerned with very different contexts and cares. Take for example, how Clarissa’s menopausal melancholy leads her to question her former love, her marital bliss, her feeling of infibulation and her hopes for her daughter, among other things. She is centred around her home, but that home and that husband, Richard, is in many ways a metonym for England. She is the lynchpin of public and private post-War ‘Angliana’, poised to create new meanings for it. In that sense, her character’s voice is mired in political overtones. There is a very distinct female structure of language used when Clarissa is at the forefront, more ecumenical and inclusive. On the other hand, Peter’s musings run the gamut of jealousy, thwarted ambition, moral conflict and a certain egocentricism. He is by far the most puerile of the three, a self-styled failure with too much pride and too little to now fall back on. He is intelligent, no doubt, but his tendency to self-defeat and/or do things impulsively have made his nature rather inconstant and frivolous. This is not to say that women are less selfish than men, but simply that when juxtaposing Peter and Clarissa’s very distinctive voices, one finds all sorts of astute observations not only in the polity of gender, sexuality, propriety, even socio-cultural anthropology but also a sense of them being very different people. Through Rezia’s desperate immigrant wife and genteel young Septimus’ shellshocked brain again, for example, we can extrapolate two very different sorts of experiences of the time without devolving into stereotypes.

The manner in which Woolf sketched out her characters is stunning – that we should feel like them all, and that everyone should coexist in exactly the same moment in time and space on such a wildly different spectrum of experience.

Obama? Ooh bummer...

2008-11-07T01:39:00.004+05:30

Yeah, you read right. Yes indeed, as an Indian, I cannot endorse Mr. Obama's presidency. Hey, I like the guy. He's a nice enough bloke and I'm sure that he's sweet and stuff. But I'm not American. And I care about whether he's good for my country. He doesn't seem to be.

There are people who contradict this by mentioning how good he would be in the long run. What 'long run'? The USA's economy (and consequently the world's economy) would stabilise in the so-called long run anyway...it doesn't need Mr. Obama's populist, protectionist policies to do that. India's IT industry is going to take a nosedive if he plugs outsourcing. Besides, he's extremely anti-free trade (which is surprising given that he's a liberal) as his record in the Senate testifies. This conflicts with India's interests in both the short and long run. Our exports are going to bring in much less if he greenlights those subsidies to American farmers that he has been promising. Ultimately, we are actually going to be facing an employment crisis in our service sector PLUS incurring huge losses on income from exports. HOW is that helping us regain equilibrium? In the 'long run', the imbalance HAS to be corrected ANYWAY...it's common sense economics. What im saying is that Mr. Obama isnt the one setting any grand machine into motion which will miraculously stop the global meltdown. In the short run, it's harming us, not helping us. And in the long run the result will be exactly the same: the world economy will take a couple of years to get back on track but it's inevitable. Endorsing Mr. Obama for that is plain silly. If anything, his approach is a great reason NOT to, if you arent American.

Everyone's been rejoicing about how he wouldn't intervene in the affairs of other countries as much as erstwhile supercop, Mr. Bush. But Mr. Obama has hinted taking up the Kashmir issue with seriousness. How is Kashmir USA's business? We do not require an American 'resolution', even a pacifist one; at the end of the day, the intent of any busybodying by the USA is its own profit. And the fact that Mr. Obama made a special mention of a problem that is not America's rankles, especially with the memory of America's last few 'resolutions' so fresh. The Iran situtation is going to remain at an impasse; Mr. Obama would never cross Israel in any event. Like that needs to be said. This, by the way, also continues the deadlock between Israel and Palestine (+ the whole Arab world natch). Sounds like fun. We've already been forced to sell out Iran before when we were browbeaten into opposing its civilian nuclear program. Iran and India are natural allies with shared concerns as developing countries in emerging markets and political polarities. Mr. Obama is only the next in the line of many anti-Iran American presidents. Once again, he only exacerbates the troubled dynamics of the subcontinent and the Middle East instead of assuaging them. Then there's Russia, with which the USA's Cold War has been practically rekindled (if it ever truly died down in the first place). With the USA's stance on Iran and Russia remaining hostile, so will the climate in Asia.

I hate George Bush as much as the next person but confusing the 'Bush vs. Rest of the World' debate with the Democrats vs. Republicans one, especially in the context of the 2008 presidential election, is misplaced. Mr. Bush doesnt represent the 2008 Republican Party. He represents Bush. Not that I would have voted for the conservatives if I were American, but to give Senator McCain his due, he was actually quite left-wing on a lot of issues. And infinitely better for India. No US president is going to repeat Mr. Bush's mistakes and invite the ire of the world upon him/herself all over again. We needn't have worried about any more invasions, if that was being proferred as any kind of argument. Besides, who's to say that Mr. Obama will not be as bad, perhaps just in a more expedient disguise?

The way I see it, Mr. Obama is an excellent President for the USA. But India shouldn't be so quick to celebrate but wait, watch and then see which way the wind blows.

Of Roads and Infants

2008-09-30T01:13:00.004+05:30

PATHER PANCHALI (1955)

Starring Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Subir Banerjee, Uma Dasgupta, Chunibala Devi
Directed by Satyajit Ray
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 1 hour 55 minutes
Country: India

The opening strains of Satyajit Ray’s finest creation are enough to draw you into '20s rural Bengal. Set to Ravi Shankar’s music, the image of the little girl, Durga, racing through the orchard, clutching stolen guavas to her chest and scuttling home, is vivid and sets the tone for the fluidity of the film.

Considered one of the best movies ever made, Pather Panchali’s appeal lies partly in its depiction of life in an Indian village, a neorealist document of simple hopes and poignant failures and partly, perhaps, in the resonance of its universal themes of the loss of innocence and the challenges of trivial human ordeals. The exotic and the familiar are so beautifully melded into one compelling visual feast that it is not surprising that Ray was lauded so eagerly at Cannes in 1956. It is easy to see the film’s roots entwined around de Sica’s moving post-War vignettes, most notably Bicycle Thieves, with its child protagonists and staccato ‘happenings’.

The first part of a Bildungsroman trilogy based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s characters, Pather Panchali unfurls the context of its male lead, Apu – the senile great aunt, the naively optimistic father, the cautious, stoic mother, tomboy sister Durga, and finally, the bucolic countryside that he calls home. There are charming bursts of irreverence – a kitten being sat on, a hilarious pantomime, a Pied Piper-esque sweetseller whom the children trail (a beautiful piece of cinematography, with the rag-tag brigade simultaneously silhouetted against the woody shade and reflected in the lake) and Apu and Durga’s antics.

But all is not sunshine.

The burden of adulthood and maturity, seen to its fitting conclusion in Apur Sansar, is hinted at repeatedly: Apu’s mother bearing the brunt of Durga’s misdeeds; her constant admonitions of the ancient aunt; Apu’s father’s disproportionate zeal at landing employment; even the schoolmaster’s hypocritical indignation at Apu’s classmate…all make for a muddle of grown-up grapples with the world’s expectations of them, even if that world is confined to Apu’s hamlet. The scene in which Apu’s mother breaks down after being humiliated by the neighbour who accuses Durga of theft is painful to watch. The ensuing violence is unexpected and so visceral that the audience is left shocked. This story of peaceful villagers could not have such aggression! (There is an earlier bit when the headmaster thwacks Apu’s friend with a scale but it is more digestible, perhaps because of his authority).

Then there is the caprice of childhood and its return in old age, expressed in Durga’s regular pilfering of fruit from the neighbour’s orchard for her great aunt, the bratty crone who revels in this sliver of attention. Her death is abrupt and almost comical, a lapse of life before the two siblings. When juxtaposed with Durga’s demise later in the movie, which is expected and built up to, it pits the pent-up existentialist anxiety of human life confronted suddenly with its mortality against the tragedy of life ending all too soon. The scenes preceding Durga’s death are slightly ham-fisted, the melodramatic shaking of doors, thunder and lightning releasing some of the required tension much too early and leaving one discontented when she did finally die.

Two strands of imagery are outstanding though – one is the iconic train scene which follows Apu and Durga’s spat. A miffed Durga flounces off in anger, disappearing into the fields. When a contrite Apu finally finds her, the children forget their quarrel in the thrill of chasing after and savouring the awesome appearance of a locomotive. The bare zest to see is captured at once completely in the joy of the two kids. But at the same time there is a margin in the consumption of this experience that lets the audience not just connect with the wonderment of yokels but participate in their act of seeing as if for the first time. The train becomes a collective tool of entry into the (seemingly) virginal lives of the characters.

The stolen beads are the other source of denouement – Durga’s mischief, her mother’s embarrassment and consequent cruelty and Apu’s ultimate recovery of them after Durga’s death become a chain from innocence to maturity. Once again, the scene in which Apu realises Durga’s crime, we see something akin to Bruno’s disenchantment in the final scene of Bicycle Thieves. Apu is no longer a child.

Apu’s parents are not the same either. Durga’s death devastates them and in their grief, and with the father’s newfound appliance of his Brahmin status elsewhere, they decide to leave for Benaras. The end, where Apu and his parents are crouched inside their cart, in the direction of new lives signals the termination of Apu’s idyllic infancy. The city beckons. And he must soon contend with adolescence. But that’s another story.

L’ENFANT/THE CHILD (2005)

Starring Jeremie Renier, Deborah Francois, Jeremie Segard
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Country: France

It’s interesting that the Dardenne brothers named their latest masterpiece The Child. The story is indeed about one, but the audience is unsure which one. The titular infant in his blue hoodie isn’t so much a character as a metaphor for Bruno’s (Jeremie Renier) own juvenility and churlishness. When his girlfriend, Sonia (Deborah Francois) gives birth to their son, Jimmy Nikolas, Bruno is taken aback even though he had known it was coming obviously. He is unprepared, indifferent and quite the mercenary blackheart throughout the film. He has brought a son into a world he himself has helped ruin and cannot survive in. All he cares about his hard cash, not hugs and kisses from his nine day old little boy. He is presented as an unfortunate, wretched petty criminal in deep debt and deeper cocoons of apathy and shallow, sickening strands of materialism. The film is cyclic and stark, showing through the dingy, dank streets of a city almost always billed as romantic, Paris, the moral state of this pathetic man. The romance of young love and holding one’s own child in one’s hands is underscored and later overshadowed by the despicable deeds of the protagonist.

Bruno’s redemption lies not so much in his spiritual reform but in his emotional odyssey as he, a child himself, grips the harsh, haunting realities of a decrepit existence. His association with Steve, a fourteen year old co-delinquent and his overt reliance on and ultimate salvation through him, brings out his mental infancy as he copes, in his own miserable way with a murky sequence of lessons taught by a boy much younger but perhaps wiser than him.

Sonia’s initial delight at having Jimmy and talking endlessly about his recognition at the city hall to an uninterested Bruno is mirrored in how later Bruno continues to seek fake forgiveness from Sonia.

Her knocking on his door in the beginning of the film and not finding him signifies his disinterest in the whole affair of a woman he claims to love having his baby. Later he does the same - repetitive, jarring knocks on a door she refuses to answer, showing her steely resolve to have nothing to do with him.

A scene in which Bruno, pram by his side, rubs his sneakers in the mud and jumps again and again onto a wall to imprint the muddy sneaker sole marks onto it, shows how the baby, serene, sage watches quietly as his 20 year old father implants his childish antics on graffiti strewn cement slabs.

Bruno does many things that make us hate him. In fact he is a first class twit throughout most of the film. But therein lies the genius of the brothers…they compel you to see everything from the mind of a man born and brought up with a dubious value system, wasting his life on the brink of a cliff. His own mother cares little for him in the one poignant scene he is with her in. The window into his revolting soul is smudgy and silly-sinister with a very thin comic subtext sleeping beneath the heavy covers of the film. Bruno is sad, horrible, hateful, and irredeemable. But he is a child.

Indophile?

2008-09-30T01:10:00.004+05:30

A vital part of me belongs to my heritage and country. Without them, I would be lost. I realise that it is a rather clichéd claim to make, affixing one’s personal identity with one’s culture, but I also feel that, as an Indian teenager who came of age in the early 21st century, my perspectives on issues of nation, individuality and shared legacy are cast in unique shades. India has been the single most important factor in shaping me as a person and moulding me as a thinker.

As a poet, although I try to remain detached from geographic allegiance, I find myself repeatedly weaving into my work elements of Indian thought, mythology and socio-politics. It is an unconscious assertion of all I know of the world. To navigate the traffic of world ideology and still be able to allow my distinct ethnic or cultural experience to inform and, indeed, define my creations speaks volumes about the influence India has had on me.

This extends to another facet of myself. In college, I wish to pursue philosophy and having come from a land where the very beginnings of knowledge lie, it is no surprise that a great deal of impetus for my pursuit of the subject comes from the spiritual environment that I hail from. A palimpsest of races, their religions, doctrines and perspectives, India has long been a place where people seek answers. Ancient Indian literature is, of course, known to be replete with some of the finest treatises on philosophy but I have not so much been driven to understand the universe within the stuffy confines of a library but outside, in the bustle of everyday Indian life. As a budding philosopher, there can be no better place to anchor oneself.

As a passionate cineaste who easily devours serious film journals, books on film theory and even popular magazines with equal gusto, it is nice to know that a lot of my compatriots join me in this obsession. Be it garish Bollywood musicals or the sensitive cinema of Satyajit Ray, India governs a panoply of artistic visions and voices and to be privileged with this range of opinions on screen has shaped my own ambitions to make films some day. Having had access to such a multitude of stories, narratives, outlooks and statements, I’ve evolved with a very wholesome sense of expression.

India has made me think and feel; it has encouraged me to create and project; it has celebrated my individuality and inculcated in me passion, compassion, righteousness and a drive to be part of the international community by learning from, and contributing to, the rest of the world. India has made me who I am.

Something about books

2008-09-30T01:07:00.002+05:30

Having read Benjamin’s essay on the concept of a library, I, who at this stage in my personal evolution cannot aspire to write anything so grave, wanted to jot down a list of books that changed my world.

The summer I was 13, I became a woman. Before reading Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay on the female intellectual, A Room of One’s Own, I am not sure I had known what femininity was. I had been cognisant only of the ideals of womanhood imposed upon me by patriarchy and had had my definitions of intelligence decided only by men. Woolf’s brilliant treatise not only championed the cause of the neglected female mind (her example of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister dying in penury despite being as great a genius as her brother is arresting) but was a successful reconciliation of polarities of gender, perceptions of thinkers through history and the physique of literariness. As a young woman passionate about the written word, this book was instrumental in shaping my thoughts.

In popular culture, the name Fyodor Dostoyevsky has always been associated with sophistication and, indeed, often with pretentiousness on the part of all of us who want to show off a bit! When I first read Crime and Punishment, it was more in the spirit of a challenge to myself, to see if I could get through the book and ‘get’ it. By the time I finished however, my attitude towards literature and life had changed considerably. I was so consumed by the narrative and the character of Raskolnikov (an almost perverse infatuation with both the character and the crime, so to speak) that I authored a paper on the political nature of the book for a Literature class. Although we only study English short stories in my class and I have never formally studied Political Science or Russian history, my teacher made an exception and graded me for internal assessment on the basis of that paper.

I never thought that I’d find comic relief in 19th century French literature but Honore de Balzac’s Droll Stories had me in splits. Before reading that bunch of bawdy, rollicking pastoral vignettes, I had never reflected upon the nature of comedy as a cultural creation. Just like everyone who came of age in the first decade of the 21st century, the sitcom syndrome of television was very much a part of my teenage years, but a more academic analysis of what was funny and why had never occurred to me. While I am no scholar on the subject even today, the Gallic humour I discovered within the pages of the book urged me to think more about it, for example, I found myself contrasting the texture of jokes and japes on the Continent – broad and delightfully vulgar – with Anglo-Saxon attributes of wit, irony and sarcasm. As someone who likes making people laugh, I was glad to delve deeper into the reasons why I sometimes managed to.

One very slim book that I read only a few weeks ago was Herman Hesse’s The Journey to the East and I must admit the reason I was keen on it was partly because I was so buried beneath the weight of schoolwork that I had no time to peruse anything longer than that. However, short as it may have been, it was certainly quite compendious in its contents. Even aside from the issues of enlightenment, heroism and imagination that it explored, the languor and whimsy with which the book was written was charming. The virtues of subtlety and brevity in prose became apparent to me for the first time. And I felt a bit foolish because in the end I took the same amount of time to finish it as I would have taken if I’d chosen a longer book.

If Hesse taught me a bit about prose, Vikram Seth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez taught me prose-in-poetry and poetry-in-prose respectively. The former’s tour de force, The Golden Gate, not only stunned me as a reader but compelled me as a poet to take upon myself a similar task. Having written a 16-chapter novel in the same style, the Onegin sonnets, I owe allegiance to the book that inspired me in the first place. Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude really made sense to me in the final paragraph and I experienced a unique, magnificent sense of closure and completion that no other novel has really been able to grant me. The exquisite ending was, of course, a progression of a story that was melancholy, haunting, absurd and tragic and it had a lasting effect on me because of this mesh of emotions it inspired. That I was able to feel everything as if I were right there is testimony to the mesmerising poetic rhythm of the work and the way it was woven in. I also learnt the value of translation because I realised that had it not been for the deftness of Gregory Rabassa, none of this pleasure, that could only be derived from language, would be available to me.

Finally as a nod to my childhood, I must mention Eloise McGraw’s The Moorchild and Nina Bawden’s Humbug as personal favourites that helped me cope with the world as a kid. Like a lot of children, I was a bit of an outsider and in both these books, I found kindred spirits in the form of the protagonists – one of more fantastical origins, being half-fairy and belonging to medieval England while the other a modern London girl who is unable to fit into her family. To have vague, fictional allies was enough to help me through some rough patches before my first decade was over and for that, I am grateful to them.

That’s that then. Some of these weren’t what I’d expected to include when I began the list but I now realise how important my bibliomania has affected the way I look at the world and how I have learnt to grapple with it.

Something about the movies

2008-09-30T01:02:00.002+05:30

The last scene of Vittorio di Sica’s 1949 classic, The Bicycle Thieves has been seared into my mind ever since I saw the film almost five years ago. That final tragic sequence – the father’s near-arrest, the child’s look of confusion and despair and then finally, them both being consumed by the milling crowd – made an indelible impression upon me.

I had been a film lover much before viewing Ladri di Biciclette, to use its original title, but never before had my reaction to a film been so strong. I was profoundly moved by it on a number of levels. I had never seen anything quite so visceral and profound despite such simplicity. The candour with which it had been composed, each scene so stark and organic, was what captivated me initially. So this is what Rome must have looked like just after Mussolini, I found myself thinking, marvelling at the documentary-like cinema verite quality of the film. I later discovered that it was a definitive example of the Italian Neorealist movement and that all the actors had been literally picked up from the streets and asked to ‘be in a movie’. That fact alone had ensured the honest eloquence that so impressed me.

Although my copy of the film did have subtitles, less than ten minutes into the film, I started ignoring them. The images were so powerful, so universal and so complete, that they did not need translation at all. In fact, there was an almost lyrical quality to the film which, as a poet, I found very accessible. Poetry and cinema are both visual media although this is not often recognised immediately in the latter. The ability to see everything before focussing the camera or putting pen to paper is common to both. The poet in me finally grasped the similarities that had evaded me for so long. I had not seen a great many foreign films before but this was the one that became for me the epitome of cinema, which truly made me understand what the term ‘motion picture’ meant. Words were not the domain of this particular form of expression, only pictures were. It was at that moment that I began to realise that, while I’d found my metier in the world of words, a part of me needed to revel in silence. Thoughtful silence, engrossing silence but silence all the same. Moving pictures fulfilled those terms. It was after viewing Ladri that my ambition to pursue filmmaking blossomed. And once the background of how the film was made, in an independent, maverick style on the streets of Italy, I knew that even the dull logistical aspects weren’t beyond my reach. I could do this.

And then of course, was the film’s impact on me as a person. The poignancy of the tale, so basic – “man and son attempt to retrieve a stolen bicycle over one afternoon” – and yet so complex in its assumptions of the various facets of the human condition, had never before been conveyed to me so beautifully. There were wry comic touches such as when an old man in a church, obviously a good-for-nothing blackguard, hastens to hide when the man and his son suspect him and then give him a good chase. And then there was a vicarious feeling of dismay when one sees the little boy’s face as he transforms into a man, aware at last of his father’s humanness.

At the cusp of adolescence myself, I began to see the world with much more consciousness of its harshness and slowly developed a storyteller’s empathy, replacing cold intellectual understanding. I found myself often wondering, as I rocked to and fro on public transportation, what kind of life the person next to me must have. My sense of reaction to the plight of others was heightened immensely by this exposure to the dirty and yet, entirely acceptable underbelly of life.

Despite the decades that have rolled by since its release, Ladri has managed to embrace and explain, through a single slice-of-life episode, many dilemmas that have always plagued humans. I was affected by its unapologetic portrayal of the kind of thing that happens all the time to many people, being inadvertently punished and humiliated for someone’s else’s crime. I had recently been inducted into a study of philosophy and found that the questions about morality, destiny and justice posed in the film cast my nascent knowledge into sharp relief. A viewing of the film not only encouraged my sense of responsibility and sympathy towards my society but also enhanced my cerebral passions.

The Bicycle Thieves has been seen my millions of people over more than fifty years and remains a beloved fixture in ‘All-Time Greatest Films’ lists and yet its meaning to me has been extremely personal and deep. A singular piece of art, it has inspired, moved, improved and awed me; it has taught me that great vision knows no barriers, whether they are of space or time, and that it is not the stolen bicycles that matter in life but the recognition of our follies and the love of those around us to forgive them.

Quizzing as an Olympic sport?

2008-09-30T00:59:00.003+05:30

I participated in my first one-question quiz at seven. It had something to do with rocks and I randomly picked an answer. I was right. That was my first life lesson – you needn’t ‘know it all’. At 17, I can safely say that quizzing is a vastly underrated competitive sport, a microcosm of all the skills and experiences one is likely to need in the Real World and of course, an exercise in abject masochism. The adrenaline rush just before a question is asked; the feeling of trepidation as if your brain is on auto-pilot; the nervous anticipation when none of the other teams know an answer that you do and the flurry of neural activity that ignites your mind during the speed rounds – these are the reasons I love quizzing, have done it throughout my high school career and derive great personal satisfaction from that purest of possessions – knowledge.

We Don't Need No Nuclear Treaty

2008-08-27T01:13:00.006+05:30

Everyone knows the history behind the nuclear deal - it was one of those grand, widely televised moments in our collective national consciousness, when we became aware of our power and significance in the world. But if we pause this eloquent clip we've been playing in our minds, of Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh mid-handshake, and analyse this potent moment, we will realise that our country does not need this treaty, this crudely hyped, controversy-ridden bone being offered us, a giant in the global arena, threatening to split parliament and country and ultimately bringing us laughable returns.

First and most devastating of all would be the deprioritisation of our thorium-centric program, which is the one true hope we have, of long-term, sustainable and most vitally, indigenous nuclear power. After all, 25% of the world's thorium is mined right here, in our own backyard! This would make it the obvious candidate for meeting our energy needs. But strangely, all attention seems to be fixed on the 'Indo-US nuclear treaty', which would actually enslave us to the uranium-based nuclear cycle, thanks to its adherence to rules of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, which controls nuclear trade in the interests of uranium producers. How is that even logical!?! To critics who talk about how it'll take a couple of decades to get the thorium program truly going, one might ask whether such impatience to meet energy needs is a tad misplaced.

After all, nuclear energy makes up only 3% of India's energy mix. The current deficit of 20000 Mw that this treaty aims to be able to make up for could not only be covered but actually exceeded simply by

(a) Using non conventional sources of energy, which in full employment combination would surpass the expected potential contribution of nuclear energy. *Let's not
forget that India's stands 4th globally in electricity production from wind - a stellar 7500 MW per year.*

and

(b) By energy conservation programs, a contention unambiguously supported in a 2003 study by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII). By simply lowering our energy consumption per unit of GDP, Indian industries can save 20-30% of their total energy.

In 20 yeara, nuclear energy will make up only 10% of India's energy mix. Currently, we produce 8000 MW per year from wind alone. By 2030, 25% of our energy will be renewable. And come on, solar energy? 1% of our landmass meets 100% of our needs? That's the best statistic I have ever heard!

In fact, even international consultancy Dalberg analysed the viability of the deal and concluded that the returns did not warrant the investment.

And this brings me to the key point of industry versus populace - who actually benefits from this treaty. We have politicians harping on and on about how all civilian energy needs are going to just disappear the moment India signs the dotted line but actually a ludicrously low percentage of India will get, quite literally, 'empowered' thanks to American realpolitik. The divide between urban industrial and rural requirements for energy is shocking. Even if we aggressively expand and employ our entire nuclear energy potential, less than a fifth of the country will benefit.

So who will benefit?

Nobody seems to be bothered about what the United States is getting out of this deal. Now, I realise that they deserve an equal advantage in terms of what they can achieve by offering India so much, like, golly, making us de facto members of the nuclear club though nobody here has ever seen what the NPT even looks like. We get dual -use nuclear technology and imported nuke fuel. Now the catch is, we don't get it for free. Over the next decade, the USA earns, effectively, 15-20 billion dollars from orders being placed with their companies by India, to build its 10 nuclear reactors. So it's a classic case of foreign capitalists feeding off our third world vulnerabilities. Let's not forget the consequent chain of supply and demand of cheap raw materials and labour and bulk purchases from Uncle Sam...it reminds one of, oh I don't know, imperialism? Compromise of economic and political sovereignty?

Before you think I'm getting too dramatic for my own good, consider this: one of the terms India agrees to by signing the treaty is separation of civil and military nuclear reactors. Why? I mean it's a logistical nightmare and it's astronomically expensive. It would mar Research and Development of our weapons systems and production of fuel for nuclear deterrents. But in order to comply with the demands of the US senate and, by extension, the IAEA, that we place 14 of our 22 nuclear reactors under their inspection, we must. We also forfeit secrecy over any future thermal or breeder reactors or domestically built plants. We sign the Fissile Materials Cut-Off Treaty that shall restrict our hard water supply and uranium enrichment program. We become subject to the Additional Protocol clause in the treaty which is a fancy way of sanctioning extremely intrusive probes into our nuclear program. The only thing more fun than this seems to be a visit to the the dentist.

Even apart from all the dry technicalities, the deal makes a joke of our political liberties. Certain governments are looking to control the geopolitics of South East Asia. India is being set up almost in conflict with China, with the latter's longstanding coolness with western governments serving as a catalyst for further deterioration of Indo-China camraderie. Last year, India was literally blackmailed into voting against Iran's nuclear program, despite the fact that the two are in talks to build a transcontinental natural gas pipeline. I am no analyst but something tells me that selling out a fellow NAM member to appease a dominant power should not be part of this country's foreign policy.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I do not wish to make sweeping statements about the future of India, nor would I want to vilify the powers that be for doing what they think is right to prepare for that future. I do, however, question the wisdom of giving up so much for such nebulous returns, when we can achieve everything we want to, all by ourselves.

Ex Bloggo

2008-08-26T23:48:00.005+05:30

Here are a bunch of articles and write-ups from my first blog, which was the aforementioned exercise in self-indulgence. I'm pasting links to the 25 entries I'm not embarrassed by, chronologically. And that's all there remains of it.

13/03/06 - She (a very 'properrrr' piece on feminism that I had to write for a local)
13/03/06 - 11 Things I Know About Rom-Coms
30/03/06 - Right after I saw Munich
2/10/06 - The Tube
3/10/06 - Ein Krush
17/10/06 - The 10 Commandments of Watching a Movie With Your Parents
17/11/06 - A long winded and clearly not very spot-on analysis of The Departed
18/11/06 - The shill I've been giving my parents for years
5/01/07 - Wee! Lists and fictional men, two of my favourite pastimes.
8/01/07 - The RTI and the press: the nexus
11/1/07 - Fischer Price (TM) My First Intellectual Jack-Off
22/1/07 - Entomophilia (look it up ya lazy bums)
8/3/07 - The Two Best Mainstream American Comedies of 2007
9/4/07 - Fear
26/4/07 - I'm screwed up 'coz of Ma and Pa (but I still adore 'em natch)
23/05/07 - A hasty scribble on American Psycho, mainly because I keep getting into chatroom brawls with semi-literate arses
14/09/07 - I EFFIN' LOVE THE IT CROWD
17/09/07 - Meh to HP 7, wayyyyy to Atonement
21/09/07 - J'accuse! The French Government says 'Glib-erty, Inequality, For Eternity'
2/10/07 - Don't love thy neighbour if it's latitude and longitude are 38*00'N and 97*00'W respectively
2/10/07 - No, I cannot spell videogames but yes, I just reviewed Halo 3
5/10/07 - I know people can't stand history. And I don't get it.

~Om~