Short + Sweet Singapore

In the third week of the Short+Sweet Singapore play festival, ten plays of varying quality were staged at NAFA’s Studio Theatre. In less than two hours, audiences were treated with ten ten-minute long performances that tackled themes ranging from sex to consumerism to cultural identity and suicide.

Playwright Jerome Parisse’s Smell the Roses, directed by Candice de Rozario, tried to dissect the (non-existent) sexual life of a Singaporean couple. A few years into their marriage, Andrew and Maree had seen a near total decline in their sexual attractiveness for each other—not only a disappointment for themselves but also for Maree’s mother who wanted to be a grandmother. One day when Andrew is alone at home and helping himself with some porn on TV, his wife and mother-in-law catch him “smelling the roses”. The touch of comedy in this light-weight relationship play set the mood for the evening.

Mark Friend’s Ledge Fetish, directed by Michael Wang, took everyone by surprise because of its weird theme but it turned out to be hugely satisfying and was clearly one of the most well-written and well-performed plays of the lot. An accountant, played by Musa Fazal, has a fetish for ledges and windows of old buildings. One day he is indulging in his fetish when he is spotted in the act by a shoeshine girl, played by Julie Wee. The exchange between them takes fascinating turns, stoking the imagination of the members of the audience. Julie’s Juno-like performance and easy charm enthralled the audience.

Changing the gears was another Singapore themed-play, Sharon’s Scrumptious Pineapple Cake (Playwright: Leon Foo, Director: Sharon Lin). Two daughters reach their mother’s place with two contrasting news—one wants to divorce her husband and another wants to get married to an elderly man. The mother is at first distraught and heartbroken to hear the secrets that were brought to her and she berates her daughters at their stupid decisions. But then as they quarrel and argue, the mother gives in and acquiesces to their decisions, respecting their right to be happy in their own ways. In the acting department in this play, the mother easily takes the cake.

Ken Mizusawa’s Free Fall (directed by Geraldine Paul) deals with a dark theme: suicide. A man, driven to commit suicide by the ever-changing demands of his workplace, climbs the top of a building to “take control of his death”. But even there, he cannot commit the act in peace as he is interrupted by a student who is there to do research on suicide. The play’s premise was good but including too many characters somehow diluted its effectiveness.

Carolyn Seet’s The Bank (directed by Jamie Cant) is not a normal bank. It can also be a place of seduction. Sounds weird? But bank employee Stephanie (Jeane Raveendran) makes it deliciously believable. The Bank was like a one-character play and Jeane did well to hold the audience’s attention through her soap opera performance.

The next two plays, Are you wanting greater coverage? (playwright Raksha Mahtani and director Nur Sahirrah Safit) and Native Speaker (playwright: Dean Lundquist; Director: Muhammad Faizad Salim) tackle serious themes of identity and racism. While the first one is an exchange between a bored Chindian girl and an Indian call centre guy (who calls in from UK, short for Uttra Khand), the second one is set as an interview piece where a white man is hiring for the position of a “native speaker”. The interviewee insists that she is a native speaker. The position is closed, says the interviewer, because, it emerges, the interviewee does not look like a native speaker. A long argument follows between the two characters that explores the racist biases but it all ends with a twist in the tail—which I could guess coming.

Raksha Mahtani’s play has some clever lines but it fails to fully explore the issues of identity and culture. To be honest, there is only so much one can do in ten minutes. In that perspective, it was a commendable effort.

Verena Tay’s Imperfect Family Recipes (director: Claude Girardi) is about generation gap and old age. It had an old and infirmed character as its main protagonist who vented her feeling out through her pre-recorded monologues. I found it clever and the video’s production quality was quite good. For its sheer innovativeness of presentation, this play deserves appreciation.

Also different in presentation was Alex Broun’s Somewhere Between the Sky and the Sea (director: Rayann Condy) but the theme was trite: a lyricist torn between two beautiful women. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed it.

The last production, Permission to Use Fire (writer/director: Richard Lord) was the darkest of all the plays in this lot. A failed illusionist gets a rare gift just about when he is about the kick the game for good. Intriguing, isn’t it? You have to watch it to believe it.

In all, most of the plays were above average and if you get a chance, catch some of the good ones this Friday at the Esplanade.

More play reviews by other writers are here.

A case of exploding tongues

Apologies again, I have been away, travelling. You might have already guessed that seeing my two earlier posts: photos and a video. If you did not, no worries. Here I am.

Recently, while surfing the net, I was delighted to note that Pakistan (or UK) has given birth to another novelist (in English). This is Mohammad Hanif. His novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, has been reviewed here by William Dalrymple.

I was delighted because I happen to know Mohd Hanif--but in a twisted way (I am sure he would have forgotten it all--no one's fault). He is with BBC Urdu and if you watch BBC World, sometimes he appears with his comments on Pakistani issues. This was several years ago when I was still in India. I appeared for a test for BBC Urdu Radio and cleared a few rounds of the process. My final interview was with Mr Hanif and another gentleman who was English.

As luck would have it, I never made the final cut, primarily perhaps because at that time I did not have any newspaper or radio experience. Since then, as you might have noted, my career has taken a different turn. Perhaps I was never meant to be a Urdu journalist despite my love for the language (I love both the languages--Urdu poetry and English fiction).

But I never forgot my interviewer, Mr Hanif (I never forget anyone I've met).

So, when I read about his novel's release, I was quite pleased. The review sounds good and I look forward to reading his novel. Do let me know if you happen to read his book. Here are excerpts from Dalryple's review:

Highly praised by, among others, John Le Carre, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is quite unlike anything recently published this side of the border, and throws the gauntlet down to a new generation of Indian writers. For the first time in this part of Asia, there is now serious competition out there.

More

Sarawak on video

Pictures from my Sarawak trip, June 2008

Failure and Imagination

Sometimes a single sentence can convey a truckload of meaning:

"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."

Here's the text of the Harvard University Commencement Address by J K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, delivered on June 5, 2008.

Opium opus

Amitav Ghosh on his new novel, The Sea of Poppies ('The Ghazipur And Patna Opium Factories Together Produced The Wealth Of Britain'):

The bulk of the opium came from Bengal and Bihar, and no book has been written on it. I had to spend a lot of time in archives digging up original sources, finding letters and journals of opium traders. My description of the Ghazipur opium factory came from a chance discovery in the British Museum of a book written by the guy who was the head of the Ghazipur factory, a Scotsman. He wrote a book about it describing it in excruciating detail to serve as a tourist guide to the opium factory. The Ghazipur and Patna opium factories between them produced the wealth of Britain. It is astonishing to think of it but the Empire was really founded on opium.

It is an endearing interview. I liked this very much:

I am not someone who sought publicity or who would feel comfortable being like one of these mega celebrities. But as I always tell young writers, it's a great mistake to think there's only one pattern of doing things. The book industry is unlike, say, the car industry or the air-conditioner industry.

In the world of books, everything has to be different. It's like saris. No one buys a sari if someone else is wearing it. And similarly, no one buys a book which is like another one. It applies to writers as well. People recognise that it's the individuality of the writer that creates their works.

Talking books with Deepika Shetty

Some have just a little brush with celebrities and they think they have lived their life's worth. But some are fortunate enough to have literally gone to the level of one's dentition with a celebrity. Journalist and literary blogger Deepika Shetty is one of them. In one of her recent literary meetings in Sri Lanka, famous novelist Vikram Seth offered to publicly examine the state of her teeth. Apparently, as Nury Vitacchi puts it, at one point of the discussion, Vikram Seth told an entertaining story about a relative who was a one-armed dentis and to illustrate the challenges involved, he put his arm around the head of moderator Deepika Shetty and duly inspected her back molars.

But that is just one of Deepika's many literary brushes, so to speak.
Those who tread the literary red carpet in this part of the world--Singapore (Singapore writers festival), Ubud, Bali (Ubud writers and readers festival), Australia (Byron Bay Writers Festival) and Sri Lanka (Galle Writers Festival)--would have mostly probably already seen her in action, grilling a celebrity author or a panel of writers. In the last few years, Deepika has been actively engaged in not only moderating writers's sessions in these festivals but has also been increasingly involved in organising these literary events.

Until late last year, Deepika was associated with two leading TV programmes in Singapore--Show Prime Time and Off The Shelves, the latter an interactive programme with authors. Deepika now works with The Starits Times.

Her job as a literary editor, mirroring her deep interest in the world of books and writers, afforded her opportunities to meet a myriad variety of writers that general people can only dream about: Shashi Tharoor, Paul Theroux, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Friedman, Alexander McCall Smith, Nury Vittachi, Chitra Banerji Divakaruni, Neil Gaiman and Suhayl Saadi to name a few.

Hailing from Chandigarh, Deepika has a masters in political science from Panjab University. She started writing book reviews for The Tribune, which paved the path for her to become a full-fledged journalist. In India, she was a journalist with the daily ‘The Times of India’ and the newsmagazine ‘India Today’ before she moved to Singapore almost a decade ago to achieve greater heights in her career.

In an exclusive interview, Deepika takes us on a fascinating journey of books and writers and tells us what it takes to engage with great literary minds like Vikram Seth and Michael Ondaatje. Excerpts:


1. You interview writers for TV and print, you engage them in intelligent discussions at writers festivals and book readings, and you blog about books regularly. In short, you live and breathe books. How did you develop such serious interest in books and writers?

DS: By not being forced to read books. My mother surrounded us with books and comics, but never pushed us to read them. School work was not to be missed, the other reading could be done on our own time. Apart from academic pains, my childhood was wonderful. My sister and I read a lot of Amar Chitra Katha, Asterix, Champak, Twinkle, a fair bit of Enid Blyton, the Schoolgirl comics, even Archie at a slightly later stage.

We spent ever summer at my grandmother’s house and it was filled with a lot of books on war strategy, conflict, war zones and a lot of literature books. The eclectic collection traced its roots to my grand-father, (Brigadier Sampuran Singh) who was a war hero (he received the Maha Vir Chakra and Vir Chakra).

Every year, we’d dust those books religiously. The dusting effort would earn us a princely sum of two rupees every week that we would save up to buy Schoolgirl comics from the Capital Book Store in Chandigarh. In addition to all those books, my Aunt had studied literature and we knew all the names even before we knew what was in the book. There was Shakespeare, Hemingway, Pearl S Buck, Anita Desai, R K Narayan and a whole lot more. But till the age of 15, I hadn’t made any serious effort to read any of their works. After my 10th Board exams, when I was liberated from the pain of having to deal with Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and veered towards Humanities something happened. I started reading. I’d spend all my spare time in the college library. If it was a holiday and the college library was open, you’d be sure to find me there. The librarian would always urge me to head back home, when it was time to lock up. I think by the time I was done with my Bachelor of Arts degree I would have read every single book the library had to offer. I’d even make recommendations for new book buys. It was great to see that be taken seriously. The journey that started at the age of 15 hasn’t showed any signs of slowing. There is always a book in my bag. I can read anywhere. In the cab, on the bus, by poolside, before lunch, after lunch – you name it. Even now, when I go back to my grandmother’s house there is a standard joke about my working towards a PhD in reading.

My late induction into the world of words is also explains why I’m a reluctant speaker when I’m asked to talk about what it takes to get children reading. Honestly, I don’t have any serious advice to give, nor am I in the business of dishing out advice. What worked for me, might not even work for my own children, so who am I to say anything? What I do believe is that reading is a love, it has to be nurtured, it can’t be forced upon you and once you’ve found it, there is no fear of ever losing it. I’ve traveled to so many places thanks to the wonderful world of books, I have made so many friends thanks to the written word. Sometimes I feel I’m in Bangladesh, other times in Sunderbans, or feeling the pain of the Biafra war, a book can do it for you. It’s an intense experience. I love watching movies too though the movie experience doesn’t have the magical impact of books. You can take your book anywhere, it can be a part of your life, you mark the lines that moved you, a couple of years later, you re-visit the places marked by the post-its and it feels like it’s time for another adventure again.

I digress a bit, but I think there is one incident worth recalling. It was while we were on a tram at the Singapore Zoo a couple of years ago. There was this young mother with her son. She was so focused on teaching her young son everything. “Look at the tree,” she’d go, “how do you spell it?” “T-R-E-E.” She even had a note-pad in which she was writing everything and spelling it out again. By the end of the short ride, she had pronounced and spelt out everything – Tiger, Lion, Monkey, Giraffe, Hippo and her son was just listening quietly. Now, that’s a sure way of killing the adventure, I thought to myself. And I think, it was an assessment that wasn’t too far off the mark. When the tram ride ended, the little boy, who couldn’t be more than five was the quietest among the bunch of noisy children. Yes, induction is important, but I’ve always felt there is a really thin line between doing it for fun, doing it your way and making the reading experience close to the academic one.

2. Singapore does not have a Book TV kind of a channel but your programme on Channel NewsAsia, Off the Shelf, comes closest to it. How did it come about?

DS: Lots of talking. Old habits die hard. I was always talking books. I was reading them all the time and I was recommending the good ones to anyone and everyone who cared to lend me an ear. One of them happened to be my former boss, Susanna Kulatissa. She possibly saw that spark somewhere and suggested I start a book on Prime Time Morning, Channel NewsAsia’s breakfast show. It didn’t happen instantly. While I’d been writing book reviews since I was 18, television was a totally different ball game.

Several things bothered me. How would I make it work? Could it be sustained on a weekly basis? Would there be enough content? Most importantly, could I really do it? Susanna would bring it up at every other weekly edit meeting and I’d hesitate. In the end, she just pushed me to the wall and set a deadline, I shall be eternally grateful for that. It took four months of work (lots of it), to get the segment off the ground. It included everything, right from thinking about the title – Off the Shelf, working out the graphics for the segment, promos, establishing contact with book publishers in Singapore and beyond, finding writers, filming. I was breathing books, every weekend saw me in a book store or filming. Then just as we were ready to flip the page, three weeks before the segment was to take off, my months of labour was lost. The entire Off the Shelf folder disappeared from the computer system, the IT experts couldn’t trace it even in the back up files. In that instant, I was shattered. I felt like the segment was destined not to take off. Those testing moments taught me several things. Not too plan too far ahead. To expect the unexpected. When the unexpected happens, to pull yourself together and get on with it. As I write this, I find it hard to believe all of that was three years ago.

The segment started with ‘The Ambassador Series’ where High Commissioners based in Singapore spoke about books that caught their attention. Many of their recommendations tipped off my reading in the months ahead. I can’t thank them enough for their attention, their time and their extended support for the segment.

3. You have interviewed scores of internationally famous writers for your TV show. Was it difficult to get guests for the show as Singapore herself does not have many writers?

DS: Initially, yes. But I found a way around it by doing phone interviews. There were several in the initial months of Off The Shelf. With Vikram Seth, Jeffrey Sachs, Chitra Banerji Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh, Tarun Tejpal, Rana Dasgupta and many others. They willingly gave their time to an untested book segment and shared so much about the writing process. Each interview was a humbling experience. There was so much more I needed to learn, miles to go, as they say. As the segment established a reputation of sorts, authors started writing to me, publicists were pitching interviews and the blank slate soon found itself transformed into an over-booked segment. It was always hard to say no, to turn down some interviews that deserved air time. But there were times when two authors happened to be in town at the same time and I had to pick one. It was heart-wrenching to say no on occasions like that. Not being able to interview some authors when they were in town is one of my deepest regrets.

4 . Writers are known to be quirky individuals. Any memorable experience of interviewing eminent writers for the show?

DS: Meeting Paul Theroux was a revelation. So much has been written about him, about his friendship with V S Naipaul, how things fell apart between the two of them. Based on what I’d read of Theroux, I had a certain image of him. He stumped me with his warmth and the fabulous stories he had to tell. His train journey from Amritsar, his efforts to re-trace some of his earlier literary efforts. In fact, we ended up chatting for 30 minutes after the interview was over, it was moments like those that made everything magically special.

Jeffrey Archer was an engaging conversationalist, he minced no words. I asked him if he was interested in the Ubud Writers Festival, prompt came the reply, “only if the organizers know I don’t come cheap.”

Investment guru Jim Rogers dished out a lot of advice off air and signed off “get them before they get hot,” he was wrapping up some advice from his book ‘Hot Commodities.’ Some authors ended up becoming friends. Kunal Basu, Elmo Jayawardena, Meira Chand, Janet de Neefe, Kiran Desai and all of it wouldn’t have happened if not for the book segment.

5. You have also been closely associated with some of the biggest writers festival in the region, especially with those held at Ubud, Singapore, and Galle. How was the experience of meeting and talking to writers at these relatively new festivals? Can you please give us a peek behind the show, the process of organising a lit fest?

DS: Before I get to that, I’d like to talk about how my involvement at literary festivals happened. If anyone deserves credit for it, it has to be Janet de Neefe, the founder of the Ubud Writers Festival. We bumped into each other at a media conference that was organized for the Singapore Writers Festival in 2005. I was the only journalist asking questions after the speeches were done. Janet asked the PR person for an introduction and that afternoon we ended up talking for an hour and a half and we haven’t stopped since. She gave me her card, told me about her festival, how it was born, what she hoped it would achieve and I was fascinated by her commitment to use words to heal, to build bridges. Bali, which had suffered from the deadly bombings, needed to go in recovery mode and what better way to do it than through literature. I didn’t think anything would come out of our accidental meeting. The next thing I knew, Janet, the Festival Director was inviting me to her festival. She asked if I would moderate sessions at the festival. I told her doing a 10 minute segment for television was one thing, an hour long session with a live audience quite another, but I was willing to test the untested waters.

There were three sessions that were allocated to me. Then three weeks before the festival, Australian journalist Ramona Koval, who was supposed to do the one on one with Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje pulled out of the festival. Janet called me and asked if I’d do it. I still have no idea what made me say yes. Then it was lot of sleepless nights. Would I be able to pull this off? This is the Booker Prize winning author? Someone whose work I greatly admire. I finally got to meet Michael at the opening of the festival. I told him I’d never done this before. I still remember that moment, he put his hand on my shoulder, gave me him his warm smile and said, “it will be alright.” I couldn’t sleep the night before the session, I was reading, re-reading my script, my research, re-visiting some of Michael’s work, then when the moment arrived, it was time to erase all of that and get on with it. The session went beautifully. I had no idea there were some Australian festival directors in the audience. Soon, there were invites from Australia, the next year Libby Southwell, Festival Director of the Galle Literary Festival was there and she invited me for the inaugural festival in Galle. Of course, none of this would have happened, if my husband Bala wasn’t funding some of these trips, if my office wasn’t giving me permission to appear at the festivals and if my boss wasn’t convinced of the worth of bringing back stories that can only be born at a literary festival.

It’s a totally different dynamic interviewing authors in a live setting. The interviews are more relaxed. You can talk about more than just their latest book to give the audience a full insight into an author’s writing process. It’s amazing to see how different it is for different authors. Then it is the audience that makes the difference. They are always animated and one has to be aware that they often know more than you, sometimes they’ve even read more into an author’s work and could end up knowing more about a particular incident than the author does. I always look for ways to engage the audience beyond the official Q & A. It could be a reading, it could the official introduction, it could be a brief enactment of an author’s work. There are various ways of doing it, one just has to be able to gauge what an audience would like. It’s often a blink moment and over the years I’ve been fortunate to catch it.

6. Apart from these festivals in the Asia Pacific region, India too has been hosting festivals like Kitab in Bombay and the Jaipur writers festival. Do you think these festivals are fads or marketing driven events? Or have they emerged because there is a genuine love for literature in the hearts of the organisers?

DS: Since I haven’t attended Kitab or the Jaipur Writers Festival, I’m not in a position to comment on them. What I can say not just about literary festivals but about everything else in life is that anything that is done with passion, with love, with commitment, anything that is truly Dil Se will find a way of speaking for itself, it will rise above the rest, the audience will relate to it as much as the writers themselves.

Literary festivals are a great way of connecting writers with their readers. Amitav Ghosh said this to me at Ubud. “I spend the better part of my life working on my book, when I get to a festival it’s amazing to see what has resonated with the readers.” It’s almost a way of bringing the writers out of their study, to feel one with their readers. Before literary festivals, readings, book signings became the thing that they are today, what did we have to go on? A writer, his book, a critic and his or her take on it. Today, you have the entire blogosphere at your disposal, just as you choose your writers, you can choose your critics too. What I am saying is literary festivals have opened a whole new avenue for dialogue, for interaction, for healthy criticism or even for bringing your literary heroes into real life. And in this case, too much could actually be a good thing.

7. You have interviewed writers both in front of the camera (recorded) and at festivals (live). How are the two processes different?

DS :Very different. At festivals, often the writers don’t even know the cameras are rolling. They are totally at ease with themselves. The studio often has an unsettling effect. I’ve seen the best of writers clam up, looking in vastly different angles, going on for too long or not saying enough. Being in a live setting also gives you the added advantage of getting a readers reaction to what the author has said. Visually, I’ve found festival coverage a lot more interesting. And I’ve enjoyed the whole process of filming the festival, scripting the story and showing all that happened in a tightly woven television narrative.

8. What kind of preparation and research do you have to do to interview writers? What it takes to engage with minds like Michael Ondaatje, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, etc?

DS: It starts with the reading of their work. As a moderator, you’ve got to ensure you’ve read and comprehended the author’s work. At the risk of repeating myself, going with the assumption that the audience always knows more than you do. Checking and counter-checking facts. Don’t believe everything that shows up on Google. Double check the reports. Exchange emails with the authors, meet them before the session. It’s always good to know whether they want to do a reading, how you would connect the reading with a question. Prepare for it 200%, then go with the flow. Study the audience reaction while the conversation is on. You get a sense of what they want more of and what they’d like less of. Beyond the session itself, there is the other dimension of managing the Q & A.

I had a really interesting experience at the Galle Literary Festival. This was after the session with Kiran Desai. When I opened the floor up for questions, there was a sea of hands. The very first question on the ending of the book as was the second. When it came to the third question, I had to put my foot down and tell the audience that if there were any more questions about the ending of the book, they would have to talk to Kiran about it after the session. I’ve found the ending of ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ very clever. You can take what you want to take from it. Without giving too much, I said that much and added that discussing the ending wasn’t being fair to all the people who had bought the book. It was like going to a movie knowing what would happen next.

9. You not only interview writers but you are also a prolific reviewer of books as readers can gauge from you book blog, Read@Peace. What were the most stimulating reads for you in 2007? In fiction and non-fiction?

DS: I enjoyed very much ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘A Golden Age’ by Tahmima Anam, ‘Mister Pip’ by Lloyd Jones, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid, ‘The Yacoubian Building’ by Alaa al Aswany, ‘The Blood of Flowers’ by Anita Amerazzvani, ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini, ‘The Last Nizam’ by John Zubryzcki, Adib Khan’s ‘Spiral Road’, Richard Flanagan’s ‘The Unknown Terrorist,’ Christopher Merrill’s ‘Things of the Hidden God,’ Tan Twan Eng’s ‘The Gift of Rain,’ Hari Kunzru’s ‘My Revolutions,’ Anupama Chopra’s ‘King of Bollywood’ – gosh this is turning out to be the Queen of longlists. I had better resist the temptation of adding on more.

10. And who are the Asian writers to watch out for in the new year?

DS: Start that with Tahmima Anam. ‘A Golden Age’ is bound to figure prominently in the award lists. Also watch closely, Preeta Samarasan from Malaysia whose book ‘Evening is The Whole Day’ will be out next year. Chandrahas Choudhry has finished his novel. I’ll be looking out closely for that. There’s poet Tishani Doshi whose novel is expected to be out soon as well. From Singapore, look out for Balli Kaur, who won the prestigious T K Wong Fellowship. She’s currently at the University of East Anglia, in UK, working on her debut novel.

I’ll also be eagerly awaiting Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth,’ Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea of Poppies,’ Manil Suri’s ‘The Age of Shiva’ and Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something to Tell You’ and of course Kunal Basu’s collection of short stories – ‘The Japanese Wife.’

The reading’s only just begun. Here’s to flipping lots of pages in 2008.

An edited version of this interview appeared in India Se, June 2008.

Should governments talk to Al Qaeda?

Last night I got a call from BBC Radio to participate in a radio programme (World Have Your Say) on terrorism. The question for the dabate was: Should governments talk to Al Qaeda?

The debate had started because UK's Sir Hugh Orde, who had dealt with IRA before and who is tipped to be the top police chief of London, said that it was time governments talked to Al Qaeda. The blog notes:

He could become London’s top policeman, and he oversaw the end of the IRA , so people are taking the words of Sir Hugh Orde seriously. He’s not the only prominent figure to suggest negotiating with the architects of 9/11, and numerous atrocities from Bali to Baghdad. Tony Blair’s ex Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, thinks it’s worth a try too , as does Security Minister Lord West.

Here is the clip from the programme featuring my voice:


My point is, in addition to what you can hear in the audio clip, that if talking to the terrorists can help change the status quo, then it is not an inconceivable thing to do, as some have suggested.

And if we do that, it will change the black and white, good vs evil nature of the govt. vs terrorists equation.

It is important to understand the enemy. Much of the problem is due to ignorance--ignorance about the enemy (as well as intransigience). Ignorance leads to suspicion and suspicion leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. The CTRL+ALT+DELETE policy might not yield any better results, though no one is advocating a soft policy towards terrorists. It is time to press CTRL+SHIFT in terms of policy.

Fear breeds more fear. The atmosphere of fear-mongering, which is not very ethical, is not sustainable. So, talking to the other side, however morally baulking, sounds better than being continuously mired in the status quo of bullets, bombs, jehadi and military violence and death.

Nonetheless, as I have noted in my radio input, there are inherent problems with the attempt to deal with a hydra-headed (as opposed to being a monolith) and protean (amorphous?) outfit like Al Qaeda. Their grievances are international in nature and that perhaps demands a multilateral approach to the discussion (with them) that is being suggested and contemplated.

WCIT 2008

I have been absent from my blog for a while now. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it is said. Is it true in the case of blogging?

Anyway, for those of you who have been having cardiac arrests due to my (undeclared) leave of absence, the good news is that I am back. But there is a bad news too. I might be travelling again end of this week so a few more days of abstinence (from blogging) loom on the horizon.

Now where was I? Well, I was sort of blogging but elsewhere. I was in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) for about a week covering the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT 2008). It is the biggest event for the techies of the world--also dubbed as the Olympics of IT. The venue was KLCC.

We (my office) were the official media partners of the event and as such, I was part of the team that produced the show dailies (newspapers that are produced everyday for thousands of delegates attending the conference). In addition, I was maintaining a blog, complete with videos (check them out under Multimedia on the blog) and pictures. It was all so hectic but quite fun on the whole. I even tried podcasting and ran some trials but when the actual event kicked off, there was hardly any time to produce podcasts. Reporting, production of videos and the blog consumed all my time and energy.

The event was a great success--said to be the best ever in the history of WCIT. Among the many panel discussions, there was one that got me most excited. It was about the future of the internet. One of the panelists, a Microsoft representative, summed it up so beautifully. The internet that we have now is just the beginning, he said. It's like language has been invented but Shakespeare is yet to arrive, he said. Doesn't that make you think about the future of the net? Doesn't that sound so thrilling?

IWE: Resident writers and readers

Forgot to mention this. Not long ago, fellow blogger Monideepa sent me this piece on IWE, which appeared in a Mumbai publication. Along with some other more prominent people, she has also quoted me at length in her piece. Here is the link to the article if you are interested. Click here if you want to read the article from the start.

I guess some of the comments made in this article are interesting. What is remarkable about this piece is that it lets some new voices to sound out their concerns about what is happening in the reading and writing scene in India today.

Honest work

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first Pakistani film to be released in India, Khuda Ke Liye. According to the reports, the film has been doing well--which is a good sign as it is supposed to be a thought-provoking film ( I have not seen it yet--will have to wait for the DVD).

Writing about the film, Tavleen Singh notes in her column in The Indian Express:

What interested me most about the film was that in seeking to show Islam in a good light, it accidentally exposes the prejudices that make moderate Muslims the ideological partners of jihadis. In painting America as the villain of our times, the prejudices against the West that get exposed are no different from what Mohammad Siddique, one of London's tube bombers, said in the suicide video he made before blowing himself up. In the video, that surfaced during the trial now on in London, he describes himself as a soldier in the war against the West: 'I'm doing what I am for Islam, not, you know, for materialistic or worldly benefits.'

In Khuda Kay Liye, the prejudices against India come through as well. The hero, when he lands in Chicago, finds that his future wife does not know that Pakistan is a country. When he tries to explain where it is geographically, he mentions Iran, Afghanistan and China before coming to India. It happens that India is the only country she knows and Taj Mahal the only Indian monument she has heard of. 'We built it,' says our hero, 'we ruled India for a thousand years and Spain for 800.' As an Indian, my question is: who is we? Those who left for Pakistan or the 180 million Muslims who still live in India? If we pursue this 'we' nonsense, we must urge the Indian Government to bring back Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and Taxila. And that is only the short list.

Pedaram sultan bood. My father was a sultan. That attitude belongs to the past. But unfortunately, some people still love to live in the past's reflected glory.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the observations of Naseeruddin Shah, one of the actors in this film. He is India's one of the finest actors and has acted in this film. Why he chose to do this film? He gives a very honest account of it:

We were not fanatics, but I had been brought up in a very orthodox home. My mother’s only solace and source of pleasure was prayer. As children, we were all taught to read the Quran but not to understand it. I remember even then that as the maulvi interpreted the holy text, I thought it ridiculous. His interpretations were full of fire and brimstone and talk of kafirs doomed for hell. I had many Hindu and Christian friends, who I knew to be very good fellows, and I wondered why they must suffer while we Muslims, no matter what we did, would only suffer a mild purgatorial period before we were all accepted into a sylvan heaven. According to him, everything was haraam: music, watching films, wearing western clothes, shaving, drinking, growing hair above the lips.

All of this bothered me intensely. What is the azaan but music; what is the recitation of the Quran but music? Did our holy book really condemn our women to look like penguins, deformed and shapeless in uniform black? The maulvi had 13 children: how were they to be reared? That is what should have been worrying him instead of all his talk of the afterlife.

Those two pages I read of Khuda ke Liye hooked me. They expressed everything I felt about my religion and culture. It was neither devout nor dismissive. It was an argument for what I believed in. I said yes immediately.

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Kudos for Singapore

Singapore is geographically a very small state but it carries a significance in the world that far outweighs its geography.

Singapore is like a brand which conveys certain brand values: richness, beauty, tourist magnet, cultural diversity, peacfulness, discipline, rule of law, tech savvy, business-friendly and so on. That's why the country keeps getting kudos from different quarters.

Recently, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman praised Singapore in no uncertain terms:

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

This article was one of the top ten most read articles at the NYT website, and it stuck around in that list for a couple of day. This kind of publicity cannot be bought with money or PR. This is real, genuine, praise and a country like Singapore deserves it and more.

There is another relevant study on this topic and I quote from it here:

Singapore emerged as the top place to work and play among university students in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) grouping, a survey said.

More than half of the 2,170 undergraduates polled, or 54.3 percent, said they would "most like to work" in Singapore among the 10 Asean nations.

Malaysia was a distant second with 11.2 percent, followed by Brunei at 8.3 percent, Thailand at 7.1 percent, Vietnam at 4.7 percent and Indonesia at 2.5 percent, according to findings published in The Straits Times.

This is fantastic--and it shows how other nations can learn from Singapore, which has shown size really does not matter.

Oh, Bihar

A rising India is the flavour of the century but unfortunately all parts of India are not equally shining. Bihar is one such place—a province that has over 10% of India’s population. More than half of that population lives below the poverty line. The International Herald Tribune recently described it as “a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy”.

I was born in one of the most backward districts of such a state.

Decades ago, British writer Shiva Naipaul, the brother of Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, after his visit to Patna--Bihar’s capital—described the place as “the subcontinent’s heart of darkness”.

Perhaps that description still fits the state of Bihar. It was one of India's most mineral rich states, until a few years ago, when Jharkhand was cleaved out of. After Independence of India, as other states grew, Bihar became nearly stagnant, leading the group of India's laggard states, known as the BIMARU ('Bimaru' meaning 'sickly' in Hindi) states among the economists. The acronym Bimaru stood for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (UP).

But Bihar touched its nadir in the last 20 years or so, becoming synonymous with one of its most colourful politicians, Laloo Prasad Yadav, whose fame, for reasons both good and bad, spreads from Islamabad to Harvard. Laloo Yadav, who is now India's much feted railways minister, and his wife, Rabri Devi, were Bihar's chief ministers. Between the two of them, they ruled Bihar for close to two decades. Rabri had dropped out of school after the fifth standard and had forgotten the Devanagari script in which Hindi, India's office language, is written. She learnt to write her name in office as a chief minister. While Laloo championed the cause of the low caste dalits and the minorities, he strengthened the roots of caste-based politics in the state. Bihar's economic descent and lawlessness became unparalleled in the country.

While Laloo always claimed that the centre, meaning New Delhi, India's capital, always curtailed the budget for Bihar, thus shifting the blame of under-development to the federal powers, he himself got embroiled in what came to be known as the chara ghotala (fodder scam). In the said scam, Laloo allegedly siphoned off millions of rupees meant for cattle feed to his own account. Corruption, lawlessness, economic stagnation became the second name of Bihar. For 20 years, little good news would come out of Bihar.

All this led to many unsavoury developments, including the harm it has done to the identity and dignity of its people. "Bihari" –alluding to those who belong to this state—has become a term of insult in Indian cities, a sobriquet thrown at anyone who looks poor and rustic. In the eyes of Indians outside Bihar, Laloo's shadow seemed to loom large over ordinary Biharis and perhaps they began to see Biharis as carbon copies of a corrupt and venal Laloo. For no fault of their own, this created a sense of shame even in many middle class Biharis.

If you meet anyone from India, they would proudly declare where they came from. Not the ones from Bihar. They might not even acknowledge it, as if it were a big bloat on their CV. Civil servant and novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, of English, August fame, once said rather pitifully in an interview, "I was born in Patna, I can't efface that from my history, it's in my passport."

Poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, and criminalized politics—all these have created a vicious circle trapping the Biharis in a parallax of image and reality that is difficult to disentangle.

Land of 'unwanted' migrant workers

Driven by poverty, hordes of Biharis have migrated to other richer parts of India, especially to the metros such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Today, out of a hundred million migrant workers in India, Biharis form the majority. Twenty-eight per cent of the adult male population of the state now works in projects and enterprises that stretch from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Goa to Arunachal Pradesh, wrote Prem Shankar Jha in Outlook (The Diaspora is Inside).

This high level of migration has sometimes engendered regional identity-based animosities in the host population against the poor migrants.

In February this year, for example, Biharis became victims of parochialism and regionalism in Maharashtra whose capital is Mumbai. They were targeted there, along with other northerners by party members of a regional political group, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) led by Raj Thackeray. Their crime? They were migrants working in Maharashtra, coming from states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. “Maharashtrians aren’t getting jobs or houses. Why shouldn’t we send the migrants back?” is their justification for this indentity-based politics.

This is not an isolated incident. Apart from Maharashtra, Biharis have also born the brunt of political action in places like Assam, Punjab and Haryana, from time to time. Commenting on the recent anti-Bihari developments, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray dubbed the Biharis as the unwanted lots.

Not just politicians but even Bollywood actors have got embroiled in the issue. Some actors like Nana Patekar, Salman Khan and Saijd Khan support the regional party, on the grounds that such mass migration caused problems in Mumbai, even though the general Maharashtrians have long prided themselves on their peaceful coexistence with migrants. A Bollywood actor, Nana Patekar, a Maharashtrian, supporting a signature campaign to protest a police ban on Thackeray’s public speaking, reportedly said: “There may be two opinions about his method, but the issue he raises is important and linked with the rights of Maharashtrians. If that idea is wrong, then isn’t the creation of states on linguistic basis wrong? Why seek domicile certificates? Why can’t non-Kashmiris buy land in Kashmir?” However, actors like Shahrukh Khan and Rahul Bose protested this kind of violence against the people of one's own country. You are free to live and work anywhere in the country is their argument.

Aliens in their own country?

Novelist and Oxford University professor Dr Kunal Basu (Award-winning filmmaker Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife is the title of the film based on Dr Basu’s story that is soon to release globally) was in Mumbai when he saw the dignity of a Bihari violated. Dr Basu, who is researching for his next novel set in Bihar, sent me a poignant note on the incident: “On February 3rd, I was on my way back to my hotel from a book signing event at Crosswords bookshop in Mumbai. As we passed through Dadar, the car slowed and I saw a man being beaten up by a crowd. My immediate reaction was to dash out and come to the aid of the victim. But the driver of my car speeded up, and against my remonstrations refused to stop. The man being beaten up was a Bihari and his assailants were none other than Raj's Marathas.”

What happenend in Mumabi disturbed most Biharis in and outside of India. Jawaid Iqbal, a Chicago-based software engineer and President of Bihar Cultural Association of North America wrote to me: “The recent incident in Mumbai really shocked me. How could politics go to such a cheap level where someone would go against humanity and act with such barbarity? Just take the example of the roadside vendor whose hands were chopped off by the political goons. He had nothing to do with the Thackerys or their political ups and downs. That poor fellow was simply struggling to earn bread for his family.”

As it happens, the poor and the helpless become the first target of violence. Notes Jawaid: “Most of the sufferers are poor and weak people. Did you ever hear that IT professional from Bihar were getting tortured in Mumbai? No. Because they were needed there”.

"It is the harrassment of poor and vulnerable people," said Professor Amitava Kumar, a prominent son of Bihar, a writer and critic teaching English at Vassar College in New York

Crush the stereotype, stop the joke

"No matter what their background, educational qualifications and achievemnets, the term "Bihari" is permanently tagged to all us which unfortunately carries a negative connotation in India today," says my friend Sumit Shaw, a Delhi-based young Bihari filmmaker who has worked with BBC World Service Trust. He makes ad films and now he wants to make a documentary film on Biharis, exploring why they are the butt of jokes, and at the receiving end of violent discrimination in their own country. Like many middle-class well-to-do Biharis, he is irked with the sense of shame tagged with the identity of a Bihari.

The stereotype of a poor, illiterate Bihar, migrating to an Indian cosmopolis like Mumbai, makes Biharis easy targets of political goondaism. Biharis have become vicims of stereotyping--as in the words of Dr Kunal Basu--stereotypes are monsters that are kept alive by ignorance and by the greed of politicians, and the media savours its carcass.

"The reasons for stereotyping are obvious," says Jawaid Iqbal. "Due to media bias and our own inferioty complex. If anything goes wrong in Bihar, it comes out on front pages of newspapers and if someone from Bihar achieves something or contributes to progress it never gets covered or even if it does, it gets buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. But, honestly, we can't blame the media all the time. We are responsible as well. Why do we try to hide our identity as Biharis?"

When the dignity of a Bihari is attacked, it shocks him because he is aware of a proud legacy. At one time Bihar was at the centre stage of India. India’s first kingdom emerged in Bihar. Lord Buddha, who propounded Buddhism, got enlightenment in Bihar, and under Asoka, India’s first great emperor, the new faith of peace spread its light to South-East Asia. Bihar has the honour of developing India’s first place of global learning, Nalanda University, which is now in the process of getting revived with Singapore’s leadership. When India became independent, it was the same state that gave India its first President in Dr Rajendra Prasad. This is the place that has produced worthwhile talent, both in the past and present: Writers such as Kautilya, George Orwell (born under British Raj), Renu, M J Akbar, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitava Kumar, Arvind N Das, Tabish Khair, Siddharth Chowdhury and artists such as Subodh Gupta (India's one of the top earning artists), Shatrughan Sinha, Manoj Bajpayi, Shekhar Suman, Prakash Jha and Manish Tiwary—all had their origins in Bihar. Today, Biharis can be found all over the world, and many of them are doing well. And yet, they find themselves humiliated or beaten up.

How can this stereotype change then? "To regain the pride and respect, we have to use our own resources," says Jawaid. "The main resource is the people. Lets encourage them to be educated. Education and economic empowerement go hand in hand."

But Prof Amitava Kumar has different view on trying to protest at the business of steretyping Biharis: "I disagree with people who fulminate about stereotyping because they are often the successful ones and don't want to be mistaken for an illiterate, uncultured person," he says. "I don't feel any need to participate in that protest. I think it is more honest to take note of, and if you are able, to help alter the really bad situation in Bihar. Asserting Bihari pride is a middle-class act. People with good means wanting a greater share of the cake. It doesn't interest me. Because the Biharis who are getting the stick shoved up their asses by the Shiv Sena goons aren't really crying for pride. They're crying for justice. Under the rule of law what is mine give it to me!"

Agrees Bihar's most well known director and producer in Bollywood, Prakash Jha, but in a different sense, who is quite optimistic about developments in Bihar. He says: "It's (Bihar's image) already changing. Economic activities are happening in Bihar, infrastructure building in on, the new governmnet in Bihar which has come in has done great things. Eventually it will be the economic and instututional activities that will make the difference. Biharis are already studying in colleges and universities outside Bihar. Once the infrastructure is there it will change. It is aready changing, we don't have to do anything."

Dr Kunal Basu also thinks that Biharis deserve respect and dignity like all other Indians, without showing any signs of success. He says, "Bihar and Biharis need no 'showcasing' of success, as with the rest of us, they deserve respect."

Bihar is everybody's problem

Whatever the feelings, the reality on the ground does not look that rosy. While the southern Indian states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have forged ahead with their silicon valleys, industries and foreign investments, Bihar has stagnated, partly along with UP, MP and Rajasthan. The International Herald Tribune (IHT) recently reported that the World Bank lent Bihar government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. And in a joke of surreal proportions, economists are questioning the current Bihar government's tall claims of economic achievements (Economic Survey for 2006-07) of hitting a 16 % Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate, almost double the national average growth rate. How could a state, which had its GDP growth in the negative, suddenly comeback with such fantastically high development figures, they are rightly asking.

But the glass can be seen as half full as well. In a sense, aren't the migrant Biharis contributors to the success of other states, at least partially?

Perhaps Bihar’s time will come too with the right leadership and progress. India took decades to shrug off its image of the land of snake charmers until she unleashed her own army of IIT and IIM professionals and her Tatas and Mittals. And Bihar must come up, as an economically backward Bihar, with about 10 per cent of India’s population, is simply not in the interest of a booming India. India must heed to what some said in a report in The International Herald Tribune: “If you think Bihar is not your problem, it will become your problem.”

The most optimistic is the Oxford don, Dr Basu. "Make no mistakes, Bihar isn't a backward state, it's a frontline state where the battle for India's future and the battle for democracy is being waged," he says. "From Gandhi to Jayprakash Narayan, the wave has always started in Bihar then lapped up on the shores of Delhi. For the last decade it's here that the caste armies have met their match, where large landowners have seen the fear of daylight struck into them, where violence has been met with resistance."

Meanwhile, I am asking my friend Sumit to make that film on Biharis—it might prove to be a little step in clearing the cobwebs of parochialism in the country.

An edited version of this article appears in today's Singapore newspaper, The Weekend Today.

A new blog

A little news to break. I have started a new blog on wordpress. It is called Techlightenment.

I did not choose the name. The credit goes to one of my creative colleagues.

BTW, I have found wordpress to be quite cool.

The new blog is on technology. You can say it is my official avatar. In that blog, I look at the human and social side of information technology and science in general.

Do check it out. The latest post there is on blogging in Bollywood. Does it interest you?

Also wrote a piece on the blogging boom in Asia:

When Dilbert predicted that everyone will be a reporter in the future, he was not wide off the mark. That was in 1997 when Scot Adam’s The Dilbert Future came out.

Fast forward to 2008. Almost everyone has become a reporter. Look at the number of blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter accounts) today. Or count the number of people making wiki entries.

Not sure? Here are the numbers. Technorati tracks nearly 70 million blogs on a daily basis. 120, 000 blogs are being created every day. Wikipedia recently reached a milestone of 10 million entries, surpassing the 42,000 of its online competitor, Encarta.

All this writing and posting online is not just pure fad. There is some money attached to it too. In 2006, the total revenue for the top 50,000 blogs was US$500 million.

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A big spot of bother

I came across this brilliant article in the NYT Why Bother? on climate change and what we can do about it.

I think the way the climate is changing (rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice and rising sea levels) and the impact we are seeing on the global food production patterns (droughts causing a food crisis) is nothing short of a calamity. I think we are already into the third world war. An expert recently said in a report in a Singapore paper that the food crisis is more dangerous than terrorism. The Economist calls it the silent tsunami, and it has some figues to support its claim.

The magazine also says that elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies. Let's not talk about democracies and get distracted here.

But what are we doing about it (compared to what we are doing about terrorism)? Hardly anthing. We are just going on as usual. It's business as usual. People are increasing their carbon footrints. Evermore number of people are travelling in jets (Travelling has become so plebian, Naipaul has said). In the developing economies, as the ranks of the middle class are increasing, people are eating more meat and buying more cars, burning more fossil fuels. Tata's Nano car will contribute to it.

Even developed countries are adding to their energy consumption bills. A small country like Singapore, for example, has increased its electricity consumption by 78% between 1995 and 2007. The reason: Greater ownership of electronic appliances and gadgets. In 1998, about 58% of households owned an air-conditioner compared to 72% in 2003.

The people in the developing countries say, those who had never tasted the pleasure of creature comforts, never owned a car before, never had a lavish lifestyle (conspicuous consumption) will complain that now that it is my turn to have fun, you are talking about climate change to spoil it. I don't give a damn. Let me have my fun. Fair enough, one could say.

But does it mean the onus of bringing the earth temperatures down lies with the people of the developed world alone?

People in the developed countries are aware of this expectation but will this realisation save any trees. The writer of the Why Bother? piece says it succintly:

Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

Gandhi said that there is enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed in his planet. All faiths teach us the lessons of parsimony and contentment. Greed creates its own problems and we are seeing the outcome now.

Paul Krugman, in his recent column, Running Out of Planet to Exploit, asks:

Last week, oil hit $117. It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

Won't it?

So what can be done? While the responsible amongst us can change our light bulbs (thanks to Al Gore), grow our gardens, eat less meat or travel in public transports, the governments need to intervene with rules as they do while tackling terrorism (most people need rules to stay in the queue, for the greater common good). For example, penalise for excess use of energy. Why should petrol be subsidised in poorer countries to enable people to drive cars? In Singapore, petrol is about $2 a litre, nearly same as a 1 litre bottle of packaged drinking water. Does it make any sense? Make things better. For example, make public transport (an unconvenient truth?) convenient and sexier. Better still--encourage telecommuting to work.

One hope is digital nomadism (is it hope or will it be our only choice?). It will cut travel costs. Ensure less need for office spaces. But sure enough, it will need greener gadgets too. So, green IT is good.

The man and the myth

In my office, I ofter discuss Naipaul with one of our editors. He also likes Naipaul's works and we agree that there are very few writers left like him in the world (It was he who sent me this gleefully written I-told-you-so type of piece by Paul Theroux when I was in Sydney. Have you read it?)

What we don't agree with is what he did to his wife and the kind of sexual life he led. On my part, I tend to empathize with what Naupaul has gone through. Could he write as freely and as brilliantly as he did without making those visits to the brothels in London or having a sexual companion or a paramour? Didn't he need a release of his sexual urges when none might have been available to him (remember, his wife was ailing)? These visits apparently, when revealed in a magazine interview, hurt his wife Patricia the most, hurtling her down to the abyss of sadness and early death from cancer.

Everyman fashions his own morality and Naipaul chose his own. Primarily that's his business. But now that it has come into public debate after the biography's publication, we have been forced to discuss it.

This is my theory on the matter.

Naipaul was not a rock star or a film personality. I guess a serious and brooding writer like him wouldn't have attracted a bevy of screaming girls to do whatever he wanted to do with them (If you don't believe me, ask Shekhar Kapoor). And let us say, even if he had a few of them, it would have been taxing and time consuming for him to pursue them for carnal reasons. However abominable it is, Naipaul's visits to the prostitutes would have been less time consuming and emotionally taxing for him, freeing him to devote his time and attention to writing. I guess Marquez also lived in brothels when he was young. And Ghalib was besotted with a domini. Was he doing something new and completely unheard of thing in this case? I guess not.

Another interesting review on the book.

Reviewing Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS - THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF V.S. NAIPAUL, Sunil Khilnani does a great job of analysing the work:

The result is gripping, magnificent—a triumph of the biographer's art. Patrick French's book peers unblinkingly at the dark, destructive energies that have sustained Naipaul's creativity. It counts and counts again the human—womanly—cost of Naipaul's drive to make himself and his work, and yet fully accords him, as a writer, his due.

It is not easy to make sense of Naipaul's life and work. Sprawled across four continents (the Caribbean and South America, England, India, Africa) it spans the eras of colonial rule, the struggle against that rule, the early decades of nationalist hopes and the brutal subsequent betrayals. What is so striking about Naipaul is how, out of this unprecedented diversity of experience, he has created and sustained a cohesive vision of the world—turning himself in the process from a 'regional' novelist of Caribbean street life to a maker of 'global' literature. On what authority did he ground his grand perspective—the fearless dissections of anti-colonialism, the future of Africa, the Muslim world—of civilisation itself? By labouring, in his own version, to be a disciplined writer, he proclaimed his fidelity to one enterprise: pen, pad, desk; nothing else.

French, through mastery over his materials and sources, restores to the purist tableau the messy stirring life—the mess that made the myth, and the books, possible. French weaves his myth-puncturing subtly into the narrative, knocking off Naipaul's poses one by one. Here, more crudely than French would want to note them, are at least half dozen that he addresses.

The conlusion may seem harsh yet it humanizes Naipaul's achievements:

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding—while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control—and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them.

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For God's sake

Khuda Ke Liye. For God's Sake. This Pakistani film is making waves in India and abroad:

Of all the flattering headlines that greeted the release this month of the first Pakistani film shown in India in four decades, one stuck in the mind of its director, Shoaib Mansoor.

“We didn’t know that Pakistan had such good houses,” the headline said, Mr. Mansoor recalled in an interview here.

It was a striking reminder of how little people in India know about their neighbors across the border.

For 43 years no Pakistan-made film had been distributed commercially to movie theaters in India until the opening here of Mr. Mansoor’s movie, “Khuda Kay Liye” (“In the Name of God”). That absence has contributed to widespread ignorance in India about contemporary Pakistan, a country set apart by such entrenched political hostility that few Indians have visited it.

The release of the film, which broke all box office records in Pakistan last year, was hailed here as a significant moment in the slowly progressing India-Pakistan peace talks.

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O Kolkata!

Though I always go to my hometown in northern India through Delhi, this time I wanted to chart a different route: I wanted to go via Kolkata. The temptation was to make a brief stopover in that great city before moving on to my final destination, a little known small town in Bihar.

I had been to Kolkata once before. Then, I was just a gawky high school kid and the memories of that visit had faded over the years. More than a decade later, time’s myriad illusions had stirred the desire to see the “City of Joy” once again; the urge to experience this city as an awakened adult was simply overwhelming. I had seen and vicariously experienced the city through so many Hindi and Bengali films.

One night I landed with my wife at the Netaji Subhash Bose International Airport, despite knowing that a madly hot May was not the right season for visiting Kolkata. Its humble airport welcomed the weary travelers who, while fighting off the midnight yawns, were still trying to come to terms with the spartan ambience after having experienced the flashy Changi airport in Singapore. The immigration queue was not very long but the loquacious officers took their own sweet time, asking a number of relevant and irrelevant questions. “Welcome to the land of argumentative Indians!” I told myself. I felt I was home.

As we ambled off to the baggage claim area, a number of people, most probably the airport staff, came forward to help us with the trolleys. They were wearing official identity badges. “You need a trolley, sir?” one of them asked. I got suspicious as I saw trolleys lined up near the carousel. Since when was the airport staff supposed to help passengers with trolleys? Saying “no thanks” with a polite smile, I helped myself with a trolley, and carried on with my luggage. We chose to declare nothing at the customs (green channel) as we were not carrying anything contraband or beyond the prescribed limit, though I was apprehensive if the customs officials would want to see my camcorder or laptop receipts. I was well prepared in any case.

After exiting the arrival hall, I exchanged some dollars at a lousy rate. Moments later, heat and anger began to go north in my head. Since I had booked the hotel room from the next day only, we were supposed to spend the night at the airport. I looked around the airport lounge, bought a bottle of mineral water of a dubious brand, helped myself with a cup of coffee, and got tired all right within half an hour. Morning was still a couple of hours away. Though we had been advised not to venture out of the airport past midnight, I began to think of ways to get out from there to the comfort of a hotel room. My hotel was about an hour’s drive from the airport. Going there now was out of question. I had to find a quick alternative for spending the night comfortably.

When I shared my harmless thoughts with the shopkeeper who had sold me the overpriced water bottle, he pointed me towards the airport manager. A portly man in his late 40s, the manager readily agreed to help me. He made a phone call and asked me if I was ready to pay about a thousand rupees for a night. “How is this place?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry, it is a good place to stay; sometimes, even I stay there,” he said with a wink, assuring me of proper comfort. And I thought I heard him say, “Even I have a stake in there.” While I was lost in the world of indecisiveness, his voice nudged my senses awake. “If you say yes now, they will send you a cab in five minutes,” he added, his betel juice-smeared lips curling into a question mark. Like all good-natured Indian husbands, I demanded a minute from him to confer with my wife.

Ten minutes later we were inside a Maruti van. Unobtrusively, while I conferred with my spouse, the manager had managed to squeeze in one more unfortunate shelter-seeker, an academician from some northeastern state university. We could do nothing but practice tolerance in this matter. Notwithstanding my wife’s protests, I had opted for this deal, and now in the dead of the night while the taxi maneuvered through the deserted roads of Kolkata’s suburbia with a stranger as a co-passenger, I was muttering obscenities to myself. It seemed as if I had invited myself to a nice mugging session in the city of ploy.

After about fifteen minutes of rash driving, the taxi pulled over in front of a three-story building in a godforsaken cul-de-sac. One look at the building and I thought, “Gosh, who would know if we were to be killed here.” However, I reigned in my negativism to face the bellboy–receptionist duo of the hotel. The 20-something bellboy, who surprised me with his Bhojpuri-stained Hindi in the Bengali heartland, picked up our bags. The receptionist, a boy barely out of his teens, made me sign on a register. “You know the rate here, right?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “The manager told me.”

I got our luggage inside the room. The room was homely with a double bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table. The attached bathroom had a noisy exit fan. The air-conditioner and the television worked fine. We started preparing to retire for the night. Next morning we had an overpriced breakfast from the hotel’s kitchen. The quality of the food was not better than that of the typical roadside eateries but considering it the taste of India, we gave it our best shot, only hoping that our digestive powers would be strong enough to support this assault. After paying the bill, we hired a taxi and started for the next hotel in Kolkata’s heart.

This journey, from the suburbs of Kolkata to its heart in Park Street, dashed all our romantic dreams about the city. What we had in our mind was the elegance of a city that we had seen in films like Jagte Raho and Do Beegha Zameen. Though we had seen the more contemporary Ronald Joffe’s City of Joy, we believed the city depicted in the film was the inner city, the poverty-ridden slum side of Kolkata. We were sure that there would be a counterpoint to that, a more contemporaneous twenty-first century side of it. But what we saw in those two hours, and later over the next few days, was completely heartbreaking. If one could describe it with a single underpinning motif, the most befitting would be the soot-filled benighted belly of a dilapidated cobweb-infested haveli, crumbling, dying, and in shambles. What we saw was a gut wrenching theater of human and material degradation. Even the Kolkata of my last visit, the fleeting images of the city that I had in my memory, seemed much more attractive than the one I was seeing and experiencing now. In hindsight, years ago the Kolkata I saw was still the big metropolis for me because then I was coming to her from a nondescript mofussil town in northern India. Age, experience, and travel had changed my perspective.

What we saw now was depressing: mad traffic, air pollution, decades-old public transport vehicles in various stages of decay. The majority of the people looked so miserable and tired. We hardly saw anyone smiling. There were tobacco shops every few meters, and at times, I saw many ill-clad minors (child laborers) freely smoking. Huge hoardings could be seen on roadsides. Any available white space had either political slogans written over it or some form of graffiti adorned it. The only uplifting thing visible amid all the chaos and decrepitude was the resilience of the members of the Bengali middle class, especially their womenfolk. They were able to maintain their dignity, which seemed so out of place and miraculous despite being trapped in this dystopia of squalor and despair. One of the images that has stayed with me, even after so many months of the journey, is that of a sari-clad calm young woman who was on her way to somewhere in a rickshaw, while people all around her, on bicycles and motorbikes, and in buses and three-wheelers, were howling and hollering about in a traffic jam. Her placidity, with more signs of cheerfulness than of resignation, was such a jarring sight, but it was enough to uplift our spirits.

The taxi driver dropped us at Hotel Akash Ganga. I had reserved rooms in this hotel online from Singapore. I looked at the hotel and I did not see any reason to regret my decision to stay there.

“Give me twenty rupees extra sir, besides the meter fare,” the taxi driver pleaded, breaking my reverie. When he saw the “what for?” expression in my eyes, he immediately added, “You saw the traffic sir, and you saw how with great difficulty I brought you here.” I was too exasperated to want to pick a fight with him, and so, I handed him the money and checked into the hotel.

In the next few days, to cut a long story short, whatever we saw and wherever we went, our impression about this decaying metropolis did not improve dramatically. No wonder people had been calling Kolkata a dying city. The disappointment was not about the people per se. Many of them, during our interaction, were quite civil, even gentle. The taxi drivers were not rude despite driving their old rickety Ambassador cars, except during the evenings or after nightfall; tired after a day’s work, they might refuse to go to a particular location. But they were not cheats and most charged the fare by the meter. That’s a wonderful mark of discipline and civility.

In fact, the gloom arose more from seeing the crushing poverty all around and seeing the ill-maintained buildings and pathetic civic infrastructure in the city than anything else. It seemed that Kolkata had stopped changing with the times. It felt as if the city existed in a time warp; while other cities had progressed and moved on, Kolkata with its colonial elegance had stopped in its tracks, and whatever beauty it possessed had been washed out of it over the decades.

We went through a harrowing experience in the famous New Market. As soon as we landed there, a posse of dalals (middlemen) landed on us, leading us into shops in the market, promising us to fetch the moon and get us the best bargains. Strangely, they carried empty baskets with them and wore badges. When I asked them, I was told that the empty baskets were symbols of their trade. It was so difficult to get rid of them. Even if you got rid of them, they recognized you and later would taunt you for not engaging them for your shopping.

Apart from shopping and traveling, eating was another area where we exercised caution. Most of the roadside eateries were only poorly maintained and they served passable food. Kolkata has, however, many interesting restaurants that serve excellent Bengali food. Bengali sweets are famous and are found aplenty throughout the city. Every street has plenty of teashops and cafes but sanitation is wanting except in branded cafes such as the Baristas.

The “City of Palaces” also boasts of imposing attractions such as the Howrah Bridge and the Victoria Memorial, a memorial built with Jodhpuri white marble for Queen Victoria. The latter looked so cheerless and desolate that for a moment I thought it had fallen into disuse. When we finally entered its sprawling premises—entry was free—we were not allowed to shoot with our camcorders. Moreover, a signboard announced that carrying “plastic bags inside” was banned. I was carrying two plastic shopping bags but thankfully no one stopped me. We strolled around the monument, marveling at its architectural splendor. We could also spot some young couples, locked in embraces in various poses of intimacy, on the benches by the pond or hiding behind the hedges. Lovers in all cities, be it in Delhi’s Lodi Gardens or in Colombo’s Botanical Gardens, exhibit the same behavior. Love, like death, is a great leveler. It almost always finds for itself the same physical expressions, no matter when or where.

Though Bengalis are known for their humorous banter, I could experience none whatsoever during my stay in Kolkata. Perhaps I would have experienced it had I interacted with Kolkata’s artists, intellectuals, painters, and writers. However, one funny little incident took place just a day before our return. It was early morning and I was standing near the North Eastern Railways reservation office. I was reading and deleting some old SMSes from my mobile phone when a middle-aged man, clad in kurta and dhoti, walked up to me and stood next to me, and began looking down at my mobile phone. I kept doing what I was doing for some time but at the same time this man standing next to me without any care in the world intrigued me. He stood there as if he were my friend. Running out of patience, soon I asked him, “What is the matter, man? What do you want?” He replied, as nonchalantly as one could imagine, “Nothing. I’m just looking.” Even then he did not move. He walked off, maybe disgustedly, only when I angrily pocketed my phone.

For a moment, I was annoyed by this stranger’s intrusion but was also amused at his attitude. This man, most probably a Bihari laborer, found a mobile phone such an object of his attention in this day and age in a metropolis like Kolkata! I hope he did not have any criminal motives, but this incident said a lot about the city. I had never experienced anything like this in any other city—such a thing would be normal in a rural market but not in a city.

On my way back, as I reflected, Kolkata in sweltering May came across as a city whose elites had either deserted it or who lived a secluded life in complete isolation from the city’s hoi polloi. It seemed like a city that was strewn with the half-lived lives of listless laborers and dispirited merchants. It was as if those who carried the cultural legacy of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray had vanished into the soot-filled benighted belly of this dilapidated cobweb-infested crumbling haveli of a city.

Sidebar
Kolkata Coda: Reasons for Optimism?

“Where were the privileged Kolkatans?” I had wondered during my stay in the city. “Are they mourning for their beloved city? Or, are they busy silently shaping a new city.” I got my answer when, away from the City on the Hoohgly, I began reading newspaper reports about the rise of a new Kolkata. Salt Lake’s Sector V, for example, is bursting with 55,000 people crowding 6.5 million square feet of call centers and BPOs. A new township called Rajarhat is also coming up fast, with gleaming office towers, malls, and apartment blocks. Reports suggest that like Delhi’s fast-developing suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida, this new Kolkata’s citizens, too, have a whole new lifestyle: nightlife, 24-hour bars, and all that jazz.

The prospects look great. The West Bengal government is determined to be India’s third-biggest IT state by 2010. Tata Consultancy Services is going to grow its center in Kolkata from 7000 to 20,000 over the next three years. The government is handing out an “employment generation subsidy” of Rs. 20,000 for each recruit that an employer trains, grooms, and develops. To name just another initiative, The India Design Centre plans to get into making VLSI (very large-scale integration) microprocessors.

Ah, so Kolkata is forever.

I wish I could have also seen this new “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” Kolkata. However, will Tagore’s rain song (Brishti pore tapur-tupur, Node elo ban, Shib-thakurer biye holo, Tin konya daan?) still sound so romantic in this new city? I doubt it, but who knows? The present-day Bengalis might have gotten tired of all this nostalgia.

Published in Khabar (April 2008), Atlanta, USA

Surfing Salman

While Salman Rushdie is back in the news for his new nubile girlfriend, a fierce battle has been raging in the lit pages of newspapers, praising or tearing apart his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence.

Here's a lowdown on the reviews so far. Good or bad. Take your pick.

But I want to talk about this particular review.

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal did a review of the novel in Tehelka. The review was so skewed with wrong historical allusions that it made Salil Tripathi write a counter review. Quite fun:

The problem with Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's review of Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is precisely that: he (Dhaliwal, not Rushdie) has trouble with history. In his world, the Mughal dynasty has its origins in the India of the 11th century, after a succession of assaults. This can only be accepted if one accepts a fairly stereotypical view — that all Muslims are alike. Indeed, India was attacked by a wide range of Islamic rulers, from the time of the invasions of Muhammad Ghori — with Iltutmish setting up the first Mamluk dynasty in 1206, followed by Khilji, Tughlaq, Saeed, and Lodhi in 1526, when the Lodhis gave way to Babar. But these rulers were as Mughal as the ones found in Hollywood.

My point here is not to provide a history lesson on the dynasties of Delhi. But it is fair to expect a critic to know beyond a broad-brush Far Pavilions or Bhowani Junction-type view of Indian history that most British students are exposed to. As a British Asian, one suspects that's the exposure Dhaliwal had. (I know a bit about this, being a parent of two boys at a London school).

Read it all here.

Welcome to the make up...

Hi, sorry, I have been away for sometime now. Have been busy working and travelling. I am currently in Sydney. So enjoy the sights with me. Will tell you more when I am back in Singapore. Tell me if you liked the pics.