Remembering Nirmal Verma

Pratik Kanjilal pays tribute to Nirmal Verma, the Hindi writer who pioneered the Nayi Kahani movement:

The last time I met Nirmal Verma at home, he was recovering from a bout of the long illness which finally claimed him last night, at the age of 76. We were speaking of his early life, before he, along with writers like Mohan Rakesh and Kamleshwar, forged the ‘New Story’ movement in Hindi literature. ‘‘My mother said she liked my writing,’’ said Verma. ‘‘And then she asked me: But why don’t you write like Ram Kumar (the painter, and Verma’s elder brother)?’’ Even Verma’s gentlest critic could not entirely appreciate the new style he was evolving, which is now the heritage of every new writer in Hindi.

Kailash Vajpeyi writes:
There came a time after that when Nirmal Verma became more exposed to Indian tradition and he shifted his point of view. He began to believe that unless you think in a holistic way, it is impossible to be committed to any one political system or other.
We talked in those days, and he asked: but what about scepticism, which is the beginning of modernity? I said it is there in our scriptures. I asked him to go back to the Nasadiya Sukta, which begins, “When there was neither space nor time, when darkness covered darkness...” Slowly, he covered the entire span of Indian traditions. The year was 1986, I think, and he was suddenly a different man.
Quite a few people were disturbed about it, given that he had been identified as a progressive Marxist in the beginning. But it happened to many of us, who began our journey with Marxism, and then went to Existentialism, modernity, post modernity, New Left...

And Mrinal Pande writes:

As a writer, he chose to do nothing else but write. This is a risky thing to do in India, particularly for a vernacular writer. But Nirmal being Nirmal, chose to pursue a solitary career as a writer without any fuss or fanfare. Till the very end, if he discussed problems with friends, they had nothing to do with his frail heath or worldly needs. When I met him last, he talked of his tussle with his professional problems: how to surmount the central paradox of a writer’s situation, where his very creativity puts him out of touch with ordinary men and women he writes about; how to recreate in the rich fullness of Hindi, the impoverished reality of the life in small towns, without diminishing the essential dignity of his protagonists or appearing paradoxical.

From The Little Magazine, here's 'The Lost Stream', one of his short stories.

Making up your mind

Charles Fernyhough writes an essay on the brain in literature:

No professional group is more interested in the workings of the human mind than writers of fiction. Novelists as different as David Lodge, Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan have turned to the language of neuroscience in exploring venerable ideas about human experience. Even those writers without any overt interest in the mind sciences face the daily challenge of representing human consciousness on the page. The problem with mental states, for writers as much as for psychologists, is that they are unobservable. Confronted with the task of portraying the unportrayable, writers do what scientists do: they build models and reason from analogy. Writers' most powerful tool in this respect has been metaphor, the likening of mental processes to non-mental, usually physical, entities. But have these metaphors kept pace with the advances made by cognitive scientists? Can literary metaphors of mind shed light on our unspoken assumptions about what goes on in our brains?

He writes about the comparisons authors have made between the computer and the mind, but I'm disappointed that he missed out on the obvious metaphor: the human mind as a miniaturised version of the world wide web, where we replace network connections with memories and emotional responses to other people. A mind that couldn't remember its own emotional responses or remember other people any more would be the ultimate disconnected terminal. And a sluggish, fitfully working brain, with only random access to its usual mental networks and emotional content would be exactly what the Babu's computer has been like in the age after my broadband connection died. Sigh.

Editor's Notes We'll Treasure Forever

Preceding Martin Walker's pursed-lips article on Harold Pinter's anti-war, anti-US poems:

Editor's note: This article contains poetic obscenities and vulgarities.

Sublime. Truly sublime. Oh, and if Pinter's reading 'American Football (A Meditation on the Gulf War)' any time soon, the Babu plans to be there. And so does Christopher Hitchens, not.

Six Things IIPM* Could Use

(For the background on the IIPM free speech controversy, go here or here or scroll down for more posts.)



*Legal disclaimer: IIPM refers to the Indian Institute of Ponytail Management, ranked number one in its field by Split Ends magazine, recipient of the annual Scrunchy award from The Office of Unwashed Greasy Hair Shampooing (TOUGHS), and proud winner of the Dandruff and Scurf medal from The Hair Union of Gel-using Sickos (THUGS). All our faculty is drawn from the Last Chance Saloon.

1) Just what IIPM needs to further its war against bloggers. Go here and here for cocktail recipes. (Why cocktails? Because that's the weapon of choice for the dudes over at IIPM, apparently.)

2) This Wiki entry on free speech. The good souls at IIPM seem to have left this off their syllabus, but hey, it exists.

3) A one-size-fits-all legal notice.

“Wherein my client’s reputation, businesses and hairstyle, collectively referred to hereinafter as “my client’s ponytail” have been adversely and deleteriously injured by your dubious, vitiated, scurrilous, wilful, obnoxious and unfortunately accurate exercise of your right to free speech, we are now suing you for a million trillion dollars. (The firm of A Sucksena, I Sucksena, V Sucksena and U Sucksena has arrived at this figure after the most careful calculations, involving the computation of the vast advances paid to Scott Peck, Deepak Chopra, Shiv Khera, Paulo Coelho and company and bearing in mind that no such advance has yet been paid to my client, his ponytail or his chickens (hatched, unhatched or unfertilisable) and that we have no doubt you have something to do with this.
Insofar as, owing to your dubious, vitiated, scurrilous, wilful, obnoxious and unfortunately accurate exercise of your right to free speech, you have caused my client’s ponytail to shed, lose its grip, turn grey and otherwise need serious conditioning, we are extending this lawsuit which is password-protected, spellchecked and spell-checked by the firm of Potter, Weasley, Granger and Co and is guaranteed to give the recipient virtual warts, to the domains blogspot.com and blogger.com. We are equal opportunity sewers suers, and have just served a virtual copy of this lawsuit on Google.com, Technorati.com, Tim Berner-Lees and Vinton C Cerf. Eventually, everyone in the world who has ever logged on will owe us a million billion trillion dollars. “Mwahahahahahaha!, to quote the landmark Supreme Court judgement in Ponytail versus Scissors, SCJ, Vol 1 Section xviiii (b). If you have a legal response, bear in mind that any attempt to snip, shear, trim, uproot, style, fluff or otherwise tweak my client’s ponytail is grossly, contumaciously and maliciously illegal.”

4) A new capsule course for all IIPM students on Gender Sensitivity Training. The Institute hastens to reassure all applicants that they have a deep and abiding commitment to Gender Sensitivity; indeed, IIPM believes strongly that one gender, ie the non-masculine kind, is abnormally sensitive to insults of a sexual and obscene nature, and their professors will be happy to show you how to maximise and leverage that sensitivity. We regret that Professor P. Eaping Tom’s popular course, Slut 101: How To Catch Her With Her Pants Down, will not be available this year since the professor is currently on a sabbatical in a Sarkari jail on charges of voyeurism and sexual assault with battery (a standard Duracell 1.5 v that was unaccountably found in the nostrils of a buffalo--the Professor claims he and the buffalo are just good friends). However, beginner students may find the Bastards Into Trying Cheap Harassment (BITCH) forum of particular interest. We also offer advanced courses (Whore 2.5: Wankers Hitting On Respected Eves) with a special section in how to take down women who’re obviously brighter, smarter and more successful than you.

5) And, because IIPM so clearly needs it, and we love them so much, free copies of The Top Ten Mistakes Managers Make, Crisis Management for Dummies, and You Can’t Win: When to Throw in The Hand You Don’t Have.

6) Still not satisfied? Want to give till it hurts? I would have gifted IIPM a Fake Blog Generator, but clearly they have their own. Instead, how about a subscription to Splog Reporter? And if you're reading this post and you have a Certain Ponytail, you're going to love this piece by Mark Cuban on fake blogs and why they suck.

We'd REALLY like to thank the Academy!

I heard Harold Pinter reading from 'Cancer Cells' at Edinburgh a few years ago; stood in line to shake the man's hand afterwards, for the trenchant remarks he'd made criticising Blair's policy on Iraq.
Heh. That makes four Nobel laureates whose paws I've patted, which is a strange and bizarre factoid of no possible interest to anyone but the Babu.
Anyway, here's 'Cancer Cells', the first poem the newest Nobel Literature Prize winner wrote after his battle with the disease.

"Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die".
(Nurse, Royal Marsden Hospital)

They have forgotten how to die
And so extend their killing life.

I and my tumour dearly fight.
Let's hope a double death is out.

I need to see my tumour dead
A tumour which forgets to die
But plans to murder me instead.

But I remember how to die
Though all my witnesses are dead.
But I remember what they said
Of tumours which would render them
As blind and dumb as they had been
Before the birth of that disease
Which brought the tumour into play.

The black cells will dry up and die
Or sing with joy and have their way.
They breed so quietly night and day,
You never know, they never say.

Harold Pinter, March 2002

We'd like to thank the Academy...

...for breaking its code of omerta and offering some sort of gossip.
First, the Academy delayed the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature by a week, sparking off rumours that its members had agreed to disagree.

(This is always a difficult decision: "Vargas Llosa?" "Na, too famous..." "Kundera?" "Na, it'll look like we're bowing down to the pressure exerted by a reading public incredulous that we hadn't given it to him before." "Okay, Rushdie?" "Na, we forgot to support him during the fatwa, remember? We'll look like we're apologising..." "Philip Roth?" "We-ell..great writer, but I have to say no. Never been able to eat liver since I read Portnoy's Complaint, still hold that against him." "I thought it was his narrator who held liver against his..." "Never mind. Don't we have any obscure poets on the list?" "Plenty!" "Great, then we hold them in reserve. Unless someone wants to ruin our record by giving the Prize to someone who really, really deserves it?" (Raucous laughter.) "Didn't think so.")

Then Knut Ahlund woke up to the fact that Elfriede Jelinek had won the Nobel last year and resigned, this year, a little late off the mark, but who cares?

Then there was the whole sea of Pamuk speculation.

And as of two minutes ago, the Academy redeemed itself as far as I'm concerned. Harold Pinter is the new Nobel Literature Laureate. I'm going out to celebrate; updates later.

Free speech and IIPM

For the background to this post, please read this.

Or consider this. A youth magazine runs a standard feature checking out the very tall claims made by an institute that offers high-priced management degrees. The claims don’t check out; the magazine prints its findings. The institute sues the magazine. It sues the magazine’s editor. Vicious and obscene comments pop up on her blog. A set of fake blogs praising the institute appear from nowhere. Another blogger comments on the institute and, substantiating his rhetoric, calls its claims “crap”. He gets sued. Then the institute complains to the organisation he works for about the posts he’s made in his personal capacity; then it threatens that its students will burn the laptops provided by that organisation. Gaurav Sabnis, the blogger in question, decides to quit rather than cause his organisation more grief—or back down on his posts.

This is what IIPM wants.
A ban on any criticism, however valid, of its claims, its facilities, and the worth of the degrees it provides. It doesn’t want students evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want a student magazine evaluating any of this. It doesn’t want bloggers evaluating any of this.

And I’m thinking, for an institute that’s supposed to specialise in management, they haven’t done a very good job, have they?
Because until Bansal was barracked on her blog by a bunch of perverts, until she and JAM had lawsuits chucked at them, until Sabnis was sent legal notices and then forced to choose between his job and his beliefs, the truth is that I didn’t really think much about IIPM or what they stood for or their claims or whether they were any good.
Now I’m very, very interested. And so is DesiPundit, who's been holding the reins of the campaign for free speech. And India Uncut. And the whole bunch of Indian bloggers named in DesiPundit's post.
Now we really do want to know what makes IIPM tick. And what makes it think it’s going to get away with using bluster, force and blackmail to shut down the right of every Indian citizen to discuss, dissect and, occasionally, dismiss a public institution.
Gaurav Sabnis didn’t lose his job because he’d done anything wrong. All he did was to call IIPM on its claims and suggest you really might want to look at its claims very hard before you applied for admission or sent your kids there.
He didn’t lose his job because his organisation told him they couldn’t deal with the pressure, even though it was clear that IBM was worried about where this was heading: IIPM’s threats weren’t, shall we say, on the level that constitutes a civilised discussion.
He lost his job because a bully said, I’m going to twist your arm till you take down those posts, because I don’t like what you said, and most of all because I can. And Gaurav’s response was to see to it that IBM didn’t get hurt, and to say, No, you can’t. I won’t let you.
I know how much anger this issue is going to raise. I know that some of our responses are going to be off the wall, I know that it takes considerable restraint to keep the rant nice and pure and invective-free.
But in the end, there are just two things to remember. One is that every citizen of this country has a right to express his opinion, that IIPM is trying to shut down free speech, and that it would be very, very nice if every blogger from India saw to it that we made their job that much harder for them.
And the second is that Gaurav Sabnis is standing up for his principles in one of the hardest ways any of us can. Give him all the support you can provide. IIPM doesn’t just owe him an apology; it owes him his life back.

IIPM and Gaurav Sabnis: the background

Many of you in the Indian blogosphere already know what's been happening with Gaurav Sabnis, Rashmi Bansal and IIPM. For those of you who don't, Amit Varma has a summary at India Uncut. Otherwise, here's a brief rundown on what happened:

The background

It started off innocuously. JAM Mag, aimed at teenagers and college students, has a regular feature called MBA Corner. Some months ago, it evaluated IIPM, the institute run by Arindam Chaudhuri, which claims to be one of the top ten B-schools in India. JAM’s correspondent discovered that the rankings IIPM used in its ad were taken from the Outlook-C fore rankings in 2003. The C fore website says: “IIPM has been removed from ranking as we received serious complaints about the veracity of information given by them.” JAM asked: “So how can IIPM continue using these rankings, AFTER they’ve been removed from them?” JAM also reported that many of IIPM's other claims were dubious, to say the least.
In June, Rashmi Bansal, who edits and publishes JAM, mentioned the story on her blog, Youth Curry. Among the responses it drew were two vitriolic responses from people who seemed to have fake IDs; one said she was an IIPM student, the other called himself Real Gaurav Sabnis, referring to another blogger who had also posted about IIPM.
In August, Gaurav Sabnis, who runs Vantage Point, posted about IIPM. He wrote:
“You all must have seen full-page IIPM ads in all national dailies, asking student to "dare to dream beyond the IIMs". If one went by the ads, one could be forgiven for thinking that IIPM is the institute with the best possible infrastructure, faculty, and placements in the country.
Scratch a bit and you realise what a load of crap it all is.”
Quoting, mind you, from the company’s own ads, he noted:
“At the end of every IIPM ad, there is a fine print which goes -
IIPM conducts its own programmes in Planning & Entrepreneurship (a non professional course) and does not teach any foreign institute’s courses... The MBA/BBA degrees are conferred by IMI, Europe and is internationally renowned and does not come under the purview of AICTE, UGC or other state acts.
Which means the so-called MBAs from IIPM are not even MBAs."

On 6th October, Sabnis received, and posted, a “legal notice” from IIPM that had him almost falling off his chair laughing.
(I particularly liked the lawyer’s demand that Sabnis “Refrain in the future from releasing any news item containing IIPM's reference without the prior explicit written approval of IIPM.” Wow. So now colleges get to censor their own news? Even the PM can't do that!)
On October 10, Sabnis posted. IIPM had been in touch again. IIPM, incidentally, has very serious marketing muscle. It appears it's not shy about using it.
In response to Sabnis' posts about IIPM, posts in which he’d raised very legitimate questions about the institute’s claims and functioning, guess what IIPM had done? They’d gone after his employer, IBM.
Writes Sabnis: “But apparently, the Dean of IIPM wrote [a senior colleague at IBM] a mail saying that the IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted, then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes, that's right. Burn laptops!”
His superiors and colleagues at IBM didn’t ask him to remove the posts. They didn’t ask him to resign. But Gaurav, faced with a pretty serious dilemma, thought it through and made his decision. He didn’t want to remove the posts; as a citizen, he felt he had the right to comment on the functioning of an institution of learning. Nor did he want to drag IBM, an organisation that had treated him well, into this ugly mess. So, he quit his job.

And the winner is..Banville?

I'm sorry, but I have to agree with Tibor Fischer's opinion of The Sea: "A lot of lovely language but no novel," he wrote in his review.
According to The Guardian, John Sutherland, chairman of the Booker jury, broke a deadlock between Banville and Ishiguro by casting his vote for the Irish writer.
In another year, I might have understood the decision, even applauded; Banville deserves a Booker win, he is one of the few writers left today who's not scared of depth, one of those who keeps you company in the dark hours.
But this year? With McEwan, Coetzee and Rushdie already elbowed off a list bursting with an abundance of talent? With Barnes' Arthur and George, one of the best things he's written, and Zadie Smith's hilarious On Beauty, with Ali Smith's complex, moving The Accidental, with Ishiguro's deeply sad look at cloning in Never Let Me Go, you pick what's not even Banville's best novel?
Oh well. Go read The Sea anyway, or read a short interview with Banville. Or read a really, really long one that's worth your time--Mark Sarvas did the interviewing.

Waiting for Booker

In the last few hours of breathless anticipation and gossip before the Booker Prize announcement is made, I'm guessing this is what it feels like to be a Nominee:

CONTENDER ONE (feted novelist, but first-time nominee suffering from pre-Booker nerves): (giving up) Nothing to be done.

CONTENDER TWO (shortlist veteran, never won the prize yet):
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. The Kiriyama Pacific-Rim, the Pricks Femina, the Betty Trask. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to CONTENDER ONE.) So there you are again.

CONTENDER ONE:
Am I?

CONTENDER TWO (to Contender Three, who won the Booker many years ago but hasn't won since):
I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

CONTENDER ONE (sourly, the critics have been comparing her novel unfavourably with Contender Three's "elegant, soaring symphony on the soul-stirring necessity of apathy"):
Me too.

CONTENDER THREE (brimming with bonhomie, he wants to win the Booker again but on the other hand his advance for this book knocked Contender Two's $$$s to flinders):
Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.

CONTENDER TWO:
(irritably). Not now, not now.

CONTENDER ONE (eyeing Contender Three, speculating on the quantity of champagne already quaffed [considerable] and whether or not he boffed the comeliest of the Booker judges, who happens to be a man, but that's beside the point [he did, way back when the longlist came out--Contender Three is, after all, a veteran at these things]):
(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

CONTENDER THREE (winking, nudging and generally gesturing in the direction of London's ponciest hotel, if you look closely you'll see he's indicating the Presidential Suite):
In a ditch.

CONTENDER TWO (not experienced enough to have boffed Booker judges himself, but certainly experienced enough to Get It):
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?

CONTENDER THREE (Indicating a broad cluster of critics gossiping in the corner, leaving it open to Contenders One and Two whether he's boffed them as well [actually, only one, but it didn't work out too well, he wasn't on form, and she gave him a bad review in, and out, of bed]):
(without gesture). Over there.

CONTENDER ONE (who still treats critics with awe, poor dear, she'll know better in a few years):
And they didn't beat you?

CONTENDER THREE:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

CONTENDER TWO (affecting boredom, as behoves a man whose book was called an honourable failure by six critics from different papers on the same day):
The same lot as usual?

CONTENDER THREE:
The same? I don't know.

(Beckettian silence. It could have been a Kafkaesque silence, but it changed its mind at the last moment. The three Contenders eye one another with furtive but distinct hatred. Contender One wants to be a Booker-winning author, like Contender Three; Contender Three rather fears the judges might give it to Contender Two out of pity this year; and Contender Two knows that Contender One's sales after the shortlist announcement were much higher than his.)

Enter Boy, timidly. He halts.
BOY:
Mister . . . ?

CONTENDERS ONE AND TWO (eagerly):
Yes.

CONTENDER THREE:
What do you want?

CONTENDER TWO (realising he may have been a tad over-eager):
Approach!

The Boy does not move.

CONTENDER THREE:
(forcibly). Approach when you're told, can't you?
The Boy advances timidly, halts.

CONTENDER TWO:
What is it?
BOY:
Mr. Booker . . .

CONTENDER ONE (asserting herself, she's let these patriarchal sods run the conversation far too long):
Obviously . . . (Pause.) Approach.
CONTENDER THREE:
(violently, this may be his last chance to win the bloody thing again, he has writer's block with the new book). Will you approach! (The Boy advances timidly.) What kept you so late?

CONTENDER TWO:
You have a message from Mr. Booker?
BOY:
Yes Sir.

BOY:
Mr. Booker—

CONTENDER THREE:
I've seen you before, haven't I?
CONTENDERS ONE AND TWO (violently)
Shut up!

CONTENDER TWO (muttering)
Words, words. (Pause.) Speak.

Silence.

BOY:
(in a rush). Mr. Booker told me to tell you there won't be a prize this evening but surely tomorrow.

Silence.

CONTENDER THREE:
Tomorrow?

BOY:
Yes sir.

(It begins to dawn on all three contenders that Someone Else has won, one of those outrageous Dark Horses who's always on the shortlist for humorous effect.)

CONTENDER ONE:
It's not worthwhile now.

Silence.

CONTENDER TWO:
No, it's not worthwhile now.

Silence.

CONTENDER ONE (to CONTENDERS TWO AND THREE):
Er. Your trousers are down.

CONTENDER TWO and CONTENDER THREE:
That's so the press knows where to aim when they kick us in the pants tomorrow.


CONTENDER THREE:
Well, shall we go?

CONTENDER ONE:
Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

The loneliness of the long distance reader

Lynne Freed does a lovely piece on 'Reading, Writing and Leaving Home':

"What I did take on faith in this story [The Water Babies], however-and in so many other stories fed to South African children when I was growing up-was that, contrary to what was true in my world, small white boys could be made to work for a living (girls, too-to wit the many tales of English waifs dressed in rags, who skivvied all day and were then consigned to freezing London attics to pray and shiver through the night). Also that snow fell at Christmastime, that there were fires rather than flower arrangements in fireplaces, and that hedgehogs, toads, foxes, and moles-not monkeys, snakes, and iguanas, the urban animals of my childhood-were the sorts of creatures which, in fiction, would stand up on their hind legs, don clothing, and sally forth into a story.
More than this, I believed that these strange customs and creatures were more real than those of the world I lived in, and far more worthy of fiction. The real world of my childhood-a large subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, with beaches and bush and sugarcane and steaming heat, a strict Anglican girls' school, massive family gatherings on Friday nights and Jewish holidays, and then my parents' theatre world, the plays my mother directed, my father learning his lines every evening in the bath, both of them off to rehearsal night after night, leaving the next episode of her story for me to listen to on a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder-this world did not exist, not even peripherally, in the literature available to me. Nor did I think that it should."

Pankaj on Rushdie

Pankaj Mishra does a nice job in the NYRB of separating what Rushdie meant to do with Shalimar from what he actually did. Read the whole essay here:

"The fictional world created by Shalimar the Clown also often resembles the slick, swift virtual reality of a video game or TV commercial. Nevertheless, Rushdie's political engagement with his material keeps open the possibility of more intellectual satisfactions. As he said in a recent interview, he is determined to make his fiction do "something that newspapers can't do, which is to allow the reader to enter imaginatively into realities that would otherwise be alien to them."...

..."There is much material here for a novelist interested in exploring why many Muslims on the threshold of the modern world embrace ideological violence. Instead, Rushdie places his Kashmiri characters in a pastoral idyll. In his fictional village, people appear to do little more than cook thirty-six-course banquets and put on plays and dances. Wearing their hybridity on their sleeves, they often sound like professors in American cultural studies departments. As Boonyi's Hindu father puts it,
Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and act in a Mughal— that is to say Muslim—garden, to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita.... Who tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we can eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes.
Strangely, Boonyi's father evokes this politically correct Kashmir in 1947—the year in which the maharajah launched a harsh crackdown on a Muslim-led opposition, and his Hindu police massacred thousands of Muslims to the south of the Kashmir valley. None of Rushdie's Kashmiri characters seems to be aware of these tumultuous events, although Boonyi's mother can speak of "sexual politics" and the "emancipation of women" and Shalimar in his Kashmiri village appears to be as enraged as a character in a Godard film by the American bombing of Vietnam. More puzzlingly, although Rushdie makes much of Kashmir's "merging of faiths," his Muslim-dominated village has no mosque, and though Muslims revere Hindu gods, neither they nor their Hindu compatriots spare any time for Allah."

Things I should've linked to...

...much, much earlier.

Prospect's poll on the world's top public intellectuals.

The CJR interview with Suketu Mehta:

"I was a messenger between worlds. My currency was really stories.
When you go into the trains of Bombay, it’s like an Arabian Nights of stories. Everybody is telling the most incredible stories, real, unreal, surreal. So all you have to do is go to Bombay and listen and you’ll find. People are also more open about telling stories and listening to stories in Bombay than in the great cities of the West."

Rahul Bhatia's post on the Asiatic Library:

"There were no librarians, just filing cabinets to help you find your way around. A bit disconcerting if you think about it, especially when the secretary (of the library, as opposed to Miss Paulomi, who takes notes and files her nails all day) says to you 'we've got everything,' with an emphasis on everything. Everything? I ask, mouth slightly agape. Everything, he repeats, shutting his eyes in conclusion.
The shelves are dusty, and I find (to my delight) that books such as 'Two days in Cairo' or 'A journey into the interiors of Africa' have very few spellbound. I remove one such and it nearly falls apart, its glue having lost its stickiness. The pages are brown, with a darker brown creeping across words on some pages, and dust flies up when I flip through the book. There are shelves and more shelves full of these books. Shelves that will need a ladder, shelves that will take years to explore. I decide to join this library."

This piece, on How Not To Do Chicklit, for the Indian blogger who's promised me that her forthcoming chicklit epic will break all the rules--and baby, she's going to keep that promise, judging by her blog. The Duck will tell you who she is as soon as she's ready to tell you who she is.

In the LRB, Andrew O'Hagan writes about driving down to New Orleans with Terry and Sam:

"The Red Cross had warned Sam and Terry that it was dangerous to drive in those areas without a military escort. One of the humvees had been shot at earlier that day. But the military men up at the command centre didn’t want to escort the boys: they didn’t think it was their job. It appeared that no one had bothered to establish a chain of command between the Red Cross and the military, so the people, such as Sam and Terry, who were delivering aid were expected to take their own risks and only help people they felt they could trust.
That night, the dark in Gulfport seemed darker than the dark of anywhere else. Electricity was still only minimally available and the stars looked down with keen eyes. Terry’s gouty ankle had grown to the size of a small planet, and he slept out in the open air at the back of the truck, stretched out on a long toolbox, his leg hoisted higher than the rest of him and pointing at the stars. Sam fell asleep in the driver’s seat with the broken walkie-talkie tight in his hand."

Freeman Dyson writes about Richard Feynman for the NYRB. It's an erudite piece, and it's frivolous to pick out this story, but also kind of irresistible:

"He was particularly concerned that teachers using the manuals might penalize children who came up with original ways of solving problems. This actually happened many years later when Michelle [Richard Feynman's daughter] was in high school and was penalized for going off the beaten track to solve an algebra problem. When Feynman went to the school to complain, the teacher accused him of knowing nothing about math."

And here's Uma MD's prize-winning essay on secularism (congratulations, Uma!):

"What could be left of this country's soul when it has been dying like this, bit by bleeding bit? After such horrors, what forgiveness? And how we will be judged, not only by our children but by the children of all those who died because the State failed to act? Today, twenty-one years after the Delhi riots, it seems - as Walter Benjamin said, quoting Kafka - that oh, there is hope – an infinite amount of hope – but not for us."

"Without hope and without despair"

(Courtesy Amit) Raymond Carver's 1981 essay on the principles of the short story is up at the Prospect site.

"The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things—like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes."

Sartaj Singh, eight years on

"As Sartaj stood up they watched him apprehensively... They were a nice old pair, handsome and fine-drawn and cultured, but he had no regret for inflicting fear on them. It was what his job required of him, this distance from the rest of the world, their wariness of him, it was inevitable and necessary and he knew that very often it was this very thing that made it possible for him to grasp the truth, to see the secret and fix it, forever. Usually he thought nothing of it, never needed to, but today the click of the lock brought with it a bitter little bubble of loneliness in his mouth."


(Vikram Chandra, Love and Longing in Bombay)

So it's taken eight years, but the Babu's second favourite cop is back. (The Babu's favourite cop is beating the crap out of assorted baddies somewhere in the North-East. No one's writing about him, and I think he prefers it that way.) Vikram Chandra just picked up a million-dollar deal for his 1,225-page book, where the action shifts between Sartaj's story and the story of a Bombay bhai.
Sartaj first showed up in Kama, a long short story in Chandra's second book, Love and Longing in Bombay, and he packed quite a punch: he solved a murder to his satisfaction, dealt in cynical fashion with the corruption in his service, got divorced, had the longest farewell fuck in Indian literary history, and told us what 'alakataka' was.
I know that it's the million dollars that's got everyone going, but if you're looking for an excuse to read Chandra, here's his classic essay on The Cult of Authenticity.

No offence, ET

This is the first verse of the poem the human race wants to send into space:

look at your hands
your beautiful useful hands
you're not an ape
you're not a parrot
you're not a slow loris
or a smart missile
you're human

('Human Beings', Adrian Mitchell)

And this is currently the Babu's all-time favourite culturally sensitive quote:
"When it goes into space and it's read by aliens, I'd hate for them to think that it's anti alternative life forms," says Mitchell.

Nom d'un nom

This is the only news story you'll ever read in which Dante and a Major Kuppepadav alias Friar Maxim Rosario feature in the same sentence.