Boeing Boeing: This comedy is still hot

Director Glen Goei’s Asian adaptation of French classical farce Boeing-Boeing (originally written by French playwright Marc Camoletti) has worn well. It was first performed in October 2002 at Jubilee Hall, Singapore and then reprised again in 2005 at Victoria Theatre.

In its third avatar, this Wild Rice Production lives up to its raunchy reputation, and going by the audience reaction, it is already a resounding success.

The original play’s English language adaptation, translated by Beverley Cross, was first staged in London in 1962. It had a dream run of a total of seven years. The play, when it moved across the Atlantic, became a Broadway success. In 1991, the play entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most performed French play throughout the world. Is this a play or a bottle of wine?

The theme of the play—a philandering young man’s well-planned shenanigans and trickery of being betrothed to three different air hostesses at the same time and the fun and complications that such a set up leads to—seems to be a bit old now, as social ethics around marriage and romantic love have loosened even in Asia. Still, the hilarity that such a comic plot ensures finds favour with the audiences even today. The situational comedy has been so popular that even Bollywood adapted it in 2005 as Garam Masala, and hit the box office jackpot.

There is no change in terms of characters in the play. Adrian Pang plays the heartthrob Bernard and his three leading ladies are Emma Yong, Wendy Kweh and Chermaine Ang who are air hostesses with JAL, SIA and Cathay Pacific. Adrian’s English friend Robert is Daniel York and his maid Minah is Siti Khalijah.

The play’s first act, as far as I am concerned, is rather dull, with all the introductions and setting up. But right from the second act, when Adrian’s plans start to come unstuck, the play changes gear and actors come alive with their performances. The audience was in splits. I don’t remember the members of audience having so much fun during a play.

In terms of choosing devices or adapting the play to an Asian setting, this is a job well done. Emotionally vulnerable Junko’s Japanese accent, the tigress-like Singaporean air-hostess with her eye on the billionaires, and the delicate heart and hot body of the Cathay girl—all add to the mix of a heady cocktail. Pang pulls off his role as a bragging bachelor, clever with ladies and is complemented by his pal, York. Equally important is the maid played by Khalijah who causes laughter whenever she opens her mouth. The new super jumbo and the volcanic ash in Europe update the narrative with twists that eviscerate Pang’s plans.

The downside, if any, is the play’s predictability for even a first time viewer like me. Except for a handful of social and political comments (there is a line on Singapore’s democracy and a few barbs at the inflow of foreign talent and how the fear of paying maintenance to divorced wives keeps the economy stable), there is not much to make you wonder here, and there is nothing to absorb beyond the obvious on the stage, which, as you can guess anyway, heads towards a predictable denouement. There are no thought-provoking or intellectually amusing Woody Allen type monologues. Every scene is an interaction and highly verbose. Still, it works and if you want to enjoy a pure and simple comedy, this is it for you.

Catch this play at the Drama Centre Theatre, NLB, 100 Victoria Street, from 4 August to 4 September.

Parenthood and writing

There is a pram in the hallway! That prospect might scare many writers. Naipaul wanted children but never had one. Once he said, for a writer, a child born is equal to a book killed.

I am glad, in this article (The parent trap), as an example, Tracy Chevalier has answered this question exactly how I would have liked to answer it..."maybe what's in the pram – breathing, vulnerable life, hope, a present responsibility – is actually more important than good art. It might make us produce less art, but maybe it would be art with the future at its heart." (Frank Cottrell Boyce's words)

A few years ago, I decided that for me family comes first. Writing is secondary. Family cannot be allowed to suffer on account of writing. Even if it means courting failure, so be it. After all, isn't success the greatest enemy of promise? A balance is required. A writer, with his family, needs to form a truce of cooperation to create art. A lot of books in our age are unreadable because writers religiously write at least a book a year (a business model?) and don't have the time or inclination to raise a family or go and buy turnips. What kind of art will come from that kind of life? Lifeless, manufactured, arid...make your list.

I enjoyed reading this piece by Frank Cottrell Boyce on writing and parenthood:

For centuries, writers have sung the virtues of staying connected to the routine and the mundane. Real creativity should feel like a game, not a career. Having to hang out the washing or get up and make breakfast helps you remember that your "work" is actually fun. And for it to stay fun, you have to be unafraid of failure. It's very powerful to be surrounded by people who love you for something other than your work, who are unaware of the daily, painful fluctations of your reputation. I discovered recently that my youngest child thought I spent my days typing out more and more copies of my book Millions, so that everyone could have one.

Writing is a peculiar balancing act between freedom and discipline. Writers are free to spend their days doing whatever they like; but if they don't write, then they are not writers. They are on their own and so vulnerable to every distraction, whether that's drink or the Antiques Roadshow. Jonathan Franzen has said that "it is doubtful that anyone with an internet connection in his workplace is writing good fiction". Family is, of course, the most potent distraction, and probably the only distraction that makes you feel virtuous when you surrender to it.

Curfewed nights in Bangkok

After landing in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, I remembered Bangkok’s old airport that I had once transited through. Compared to Suvarnabhumi, the old one had more character, a wicked charm. The new one was huge and awesome but it looked utilitarian.

We were received by my brother-in-law who works in a regional non-profit. His office was closed due to the political unrest.

Outside, Bangkok didn’t look like a curfewed city at all. Buses, cars and taxis plied on the road. Only the trains were out of service.

As we entered the city, I began to love it. Bangkok was sprawling and chaotic but it had a beauty about it. It was what I wished Delhi and Kolkata to be—clean and functional. Bangkok has a great road and expressway network and its river is, unlike Delhi’s Jumna, navigable. Later, from my sister’s 9th floor flat, I had a great view of the city. Unlike Singapore, Bangkok is not minutely designed and manicured but it exudes a spirit of independence, a sense of wild beauty.

By this time, I was told, the protestors had been flushed out of their protesting zone. The Red Shirts’ had set fire to Bangkok’s biggest mall, Siam Paragon. On the way from the airport, I had seen the charred skeleton of the mall. Only night curfew was imposed in the city. Bangkok’s other malls were open and it was business as usual, I was told.

Next day, we set out in the morning to see the floating market (Suaq Al nahr, said an Arabic sign) at Ratchaburi. We hired a taxi and it took us more than an hour to reach the place, over one hundred kilometers west of Bangkok. Taxi to and fro cost us 2000 bahts.

The floating market is spread over an area of several kilometers, crisscrossed with canals. We hired a boat with a driver for 2000 bahts and spent nearly an hour in the market, buying things from local fruit sellers on boats. According to my wife, the experience would have been better but for the stinking water of the canal. Perhaps Western tourists, coming from sanitized places, would like that organic stink, I thought mischievously.

Next day was Sunday and we wanted to see the Grand Palace. We reached the area (that reminded me of colonial Delhi) after lunch but we were stopped at the main gate by authorities in civilian clothes. “The Palace will open at 3pm,” a burly official informed us. Since we were one hour early, the man advised us to visit Wat Po first and then come back to the palace. “We can’t, we just let our taxi go,” we protested. He hailed a tuk tuk for us and at an unbelievable fare of 20 bahts, he sent us for a ride to Wat Po and back.

At Wat Po, we admired the Reclining Buddha and took some pictures. Then the tuk tuk driver took us to an emporium of art and craft. The place had a great collection of gems and jewelry but what was most impressive was the courteous behaviour of the staff. We did some shopping there.

Finally, we returned to the Grand Palace. It was mind-blowing— sprawling, beautiful and magnificent. It offers a colourful vista of gold and silver, of shining spires, mosaic-rich columns and intricate murals. The afternoon being hot, we took a quick tour of the palace but actually to do justice to it, one needs to spend hours in the complex. Within the complex, the Wat Phra Keao, the temple of the Emerald Buddha, Chakri-Mahaprasad Hall and Amarindra Vinchai Hall are a must see for tourists.

We spent three nights in Bangkok, each night under curfew. But in the condo where we stayed, we never felt anything amiss. The city looked peaceful and calm and there were no rising columns of smoke to be seen in the skyline nor were there any wailing police sirens renting the air. But when we switched on the telly, we saw news about the unrest in Bangkok. It seemed so surreal—beyond the patina of calm was news of troublemakers that the television brought to people’s drawing rooms.

The condo, in the heart of Bangkok, eerily seemed like a Green Zone, with its swimming pool and tennis court on the fourth floor and salons, restaurants and massage parlours on the ground floor. So self-sufficient.

The night before we returned to Singapore, we had our first foot massage of the trip. I and my wife, sitting beside each other were being fawned over by the masseuses. We didn’t know that the foot massage would extend up to the upper thigh. On the flight back, my wife said: “The massage was good but next time we go for it, we must tell the masseuse not to move beyond the knees.”

I nodded with a smile in reply. I didn’t know when that next time would be. As we moved away from Bangkok, we hoped that complete peace would soon return to the city. This magnificent city, the city of Emerald Buddha, deserved it. And I also told myself that Bangkok was not an ordinary city: there was something about it that needed more exploration.

Back in Singapore, I remembered Bangkok as a girl to whom I had said only hello. I knew I needed to converse more with her.

Read the first part of this travel piece, Postcard from Phuket here.

Inception: Inside a Borgesian dream

Chris Nolan’s Inception could well have been written by Argentinean short story writer and poet Borges, with inputs from Freud and Jung. Formatted as an edge of the seat thriller, this film is a surrealist meditation on the nature of time, of guilt and redemption, of a father-son relationship and of the origins of our motivations and desires. The story of a heist inside the brain of an individual has been told like a philosophical riddle with a sophistication which is the hallmark of Nolan’s work, as seen before in his earlier ventures Memento and The Dark Knight.

The film starts within a labyrinthine dream, in which the main characters keep plumbing up and down the many layers of dreamworld reality. The protagonist, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), is a dream-catcher, a superb manipulator of dreams. He is the world’s best extractor of trade secrets from industrial czars. He invades their dreams and steals the secrets from their subconscious.

At the start of the film, we see Cobb washed up on a sea shore. For a moment, I thought, hey, are we back in Shutter Island? I pinched myself. No, we are in a Nolan film. After the opening sequence, the film goes into a flashback or travels to a different layer of reality, whichever way you want to see it, where the story is set up: Cobb is given a challenge by a tycoon (Ken Watanabe) to implant an idea in his business rival’s son’s mind—an act of “inception”. Due to his own past, a guilt-ravaged Cobb accepts the job to invade the subconscious of Robert Fischer junior (Cillian Murphy)—his only way of getting back to his real world, where his two children await his arrival. Hmm, shades of Audrey Neffengger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

From that point on, begins Cobb’s hero’s journey along with a set of dream manipulators, assembled from various parts of the world. The film’s third act is the final sequence, the actual act of ‘inception’, when Nolan goes completely blockbuster. The subconscious of Robert Fischer junior is a snow capped rugged landscape, that could well have been from a James Bond film, with gunfire to match.

The film’s strongest point, after the brilliant idea of ‘inception’ of course, is Cobb’s character. DiCaprio is so believable in his role, focused, determined and emotionally vulnerable. And so is Marion Cotillard who plays DiCaprio’s wife. If you could distill red wine into a female form, it would take the shape of Marion. Her sensuous vitality, her love, her idea of to-die for romance, is the emotional pivot of the movie, which defines the level of Cobb’s guilt. However, Ariadne (Ellen Page), who plays a brilliant architect of dream world landscapes, seems a bit jarring in the film—a teen among the adults. Perhaps the Juno girl was penciled in to appeal to the teen audience (you know how Hollywood hedges its bets).

The film appealingly deals with concepts of time and the nature of the subconscious, the way we dream, and so on. The film works on the premise that dream-world time and real-world time act in a different calculus. Ten hours in real life can be equivalent to a week in our dreams. There is a sequence in the final act of the movie in which a van falls off a bridge and between the van’s skidding and hitting the water, time in the dream world stretches on and a lot happens there in those few seconds.

Clever, isn’t it? But this is not entirely a novel idea. In Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad, the whole history of his family flashes before his eyes. I also could not resist remembering Prophet Mohammad’s night journey to the heavens, as described in the Quran: In the 7th century, Muhammad (PBUH) riding the mythological steed Buraq, was taken to the various heavens, to meet first the earlier prophets, including Moses and Jesus, and then God. The Buraq then transported Muhammad back to Mecca. This journey was completed at the speed of light, and between his flight to heavens and back, in our world, it took him only a few seconds—an example of real time and cosmic time calculus.

Though the film was riveting, near the end, I was looking at my watch. I had the feeling that I was playing a video game where there are characters with clear psychological profiles, there are rules of the game, and there are different levels of gaming. I won’t be surprised if the movie, after its success, is followed by video games.

Also, if I were Nolan, I would have got rid of the mysterious dream-inducing suitcase (which The Economist calls a psychic Rube Goldberg contraption) that wires the dreamers up. Did you not hear of nanotechnology and mind control Nolan? Instead of Dileep Rao (Yusuf) playing a potion maker, the alchemist, I would have made him a neuro-architect. But never mind the wires. The audiences already love this movie (even in India, Inception became the number one at the box office, beating three new Bollywood releases).

In the end, for all you know, this movie is a crime thriller. It’s all about corporate espionage, an Italian job, but at a brain level. This is a bit of a disappointment for me. Has Hollywood got bored with saving the humanity or the aliens (as we saw in Avatar)? After all that hype, Nolan, you disappointed me but I am glad you tried. This is way better than The Transformers for my ticket price.

I loved the last scene, though. When Cobb is back with his family in the real world, he spins his totem. When the spinning stops, the film is cut to the end credits. I thought that Nolan was having a joke at our expense: suckers, this was the real world and now you go back to your phony, dream world, waiting outside the theatre for you.

As I exited the multiplex, I was wondering if we and our physical world, the universe, are really parts of a maya jaal, the Hindu concept of a web of deception, a mere dream inside the head of God. What if we just don’t exist in real reality? What if we are just projections of God’s imagination? It’s an idea worth exploring, isn’t it?

Postcard from Phuket

[This is the first part of my Thailand travel notes]

A trip to Phuket and Bangkok was waiting to happen. I’ve been living in the South East Asian region for the last 5 years and yet I hadn’t travelled to these tourist clichés on the map of Thailand. Perhaps one main reason why I was not eager enough about visiting these places was their commonplaceness—everybody goes to Phuket and Thailand. From Singapore, going there is as clichéd as being a heterosexual.

I’ll give you an example. Just before I was to start for Phuket, one of my colleagues rubbed it in: “You are going to Phuket? Huh, I’ve been there twenty-five times!”

Got it?

Seriously, I guess one can’t beat the argument in the age of low cost airlines (just like you can’t beat tweeting and watching pirated DVDs—almost everybody is at it). As Naipaul has remarked, travel has become so plebian now. Tourism is so much part of our globalised lifestyle that anyone who saves a penny or two or owns the wondrous credit cards travels once or twice a year to arrogate to oneself the status of belonging to that global jet set that regularly rubs its bum on the leathery smallness of low cost short-haul flights.

So, when an opportunity (to attend a regional tech event which later on got cancelled) to visit Phuket and Bangkok arose in May this year, I said enough was enough. Even clichés needed to be struck out of my travel diary. Earnestly, tickets were booked one month in advance.

When the time to fly came, it suddenly didn’t seem like a good time to visit Thailand: The Red Shirts had been protesting against the present government in Bangkok for more than a week and one of their rogue generals had just been shot. Bangkok was under siege and the city was under partial curfew. To my chagrin, the tech event that I was supposed to attend shifted its venue from Phuket to Singapore. But I was in no mood to change my plans. Given this background, my colleagues were a bit suspicious of my sanity when they came to know that I was travelling to Thailand, and was not paying enough attention to the news.

And what was I thinking? Dude, what is the fun of travelling if it was not laced with a bit of danger? My philosophy is that travel mixed with a bit of a danger makes it an adventure. For me, the curfew and the protests did it. So, one sunny morning, off we went to Phuket on a Jet Star flight.

The Sea, The Sea

When the plane was about to land in Phuket International Airport, I looked down the window and the surface of the Andaman Sea that spread beneath us presented itself like an immobile expanse of boredom, a blue bedspread, rumpled as a grandmother’s creased cheeks.

At the immigration, the visa officer looked bored and stern. No swadika, no smile. Hello, is this Thailand, I wondered. Thankfully, visa was free (The Red Shirt’s troublemaking in Bangkok had hit tourist traffic throughout Thailand) and it straightaway meant a saving of 3000 bahts for me. I suddenly felt lucky and wallet-wise, marginally closer to Donald Trump (remember I am a journalist married to austerity, not a banker or a businessman). The queue at the immigration was small and it didn’t take much time to clear immigration and collect our luggage. I love the breeziness of small town airports!

Outside, it was a bit warm. A hotel taxi was waiting for us. The taxi driver was amiable. Once inside the air-conditioned cab, I asked him a few questions and he said a lot of yeses with smiling nods. It simply meant that the conversation was flowing in only one direction—mine. It took us forty-five minutes to reach our hotel which was near Patong Beach, fifteen kilometers west of Phuket town. The road to the town was in great condition which coursed through the hill-like greenery-filled landscape of the island. My wife felt a bit pukish but I and my daughter were okay. Sporadically, the road was flanked by single-storied houses, shops and business establishments. On the way, interestingly, I saw more mosques than temples.

We had reached the airport around nine in the morning and by the time we checked into the hotel, the first thing that demanded attention was our hunger pangs—a uniformly felt family experience. I changed into shorts and a T-shirt and came down from my hotel room to recce the area for food outlets. The whole place was infested with big and small inns and hotels and western style brasseries, coffee shops, restaurants, and hawker outlets. Given the heat and lack of choices, I settled for a pepperoni pizza and some fresh fruits and beat a hasty retreat to my hotel room. A little rest and then we ordered lunch. The lunch was standard Thai food from the hotel’s kitchen: the order was misunderstood, the chicken meat was harder than usual and the portions were, maybe, let’s put it this way, good enough for ladies but not sufficient for a grown up Indian male with a moderate to good appetite.

In the afternoon, we took a stroll on Ao Patong—a three kilometer stretch of sandy beach. Some Western tourists were relaxing on chaise lounges, barbecuing their bodies or sipping their drinks under colourful parasols, a book spread on their knees. Clichés I know but what do you expect on a beach? Young couples and surfers played with the waves in the shallow waters, their smiles and laughter adding mirth to the somber sea.

On the beach, my wife thought the Andaman Sea was a bit darkish and I quickly remembered its devastating tempestuousness during the Asian tsunami. Thousands had perished. I didn’t want to think about the tragedy, so I turned my attention to my four-year old daughter. She was the happiest: she loves the sea and the sand and she rolled about in it for a while. And I thought, children were usually happy because they had little memory. I bought a fresh coconut and we shared it “as a family,” the way my daughter loves to put it.

A thin and turbaned middle aged Muslim man, with a dark beard, sat on the sand behind me. He was with a young boy. They looked straight out of a madrasa. What were they doing on the beach, I wondered. Were they enjoying the dancing waves or were they there to soak in the pleasure of beach revelers, to be in commune with them, indulging in a vicarious pleasure? How would I know? “Where are you from?” he asked me. “From Singapore,” I said, adding a wan smile. Would he ask for money, I feared. The man did not talk much. He looked rather sad. I kept an eye on him. The man and the boy left in less than half an hour. I felt a sense of relief but I immediately questioned it: why did I feel relieved? The man had every right to be there (there was a Muslim cemetery bang opposite the beach); he was like everybody else except for his dress. He could even be one of the original inhabitants of the area (this being the South of Thailand), but now he looked more alien than others there. An oddity! The image burnished in my memory, headlined, an oddity.

A little later another man came. He was a Thai. “Where are you from?” The same question. I replied. He showed me a piece of paper. He was collecting funds for Tsunami victims. I had my doubts. He could be a fraud. I apologized and waved him off. It is easy to dismiss a request when you talk to a man from behind sunglasses.

In the evening, the lights came on and the streets magically came alive with people—in cars, in tuk tuks, on scooters, on foot. There were touts everywhere: men and women asking us to buy stuff, dine at sea food joints or get massages. Every few steps, a tuk tuk driver or his agent would offer us a ride. A mini truck passed by slowly, with young boys on board in shorts mocking a Muoy Thai sparring, advertising for a super championship match in town. There was music and noise everywhere, the sheer liveliness of a place that thrived with human interaction, energizing the participants and onlookers alike. And I thought, dude, where are the protesters? Where is the unrest? Later, I saw a story in the Phuket Post (30 April- 13 May): Phuket backs the PM. “More than a thousand Phuket people delivered a handwritten letter to Go Wichai at the Provincial Hall on 19 April (hoping)…that the letter will encourage PM Abhisit (Vejjajiva) and his party not to resign and dissolve parliament…” In short, the Phuketites were for business and for normalcy.

Taking in the festiveness, we walked up to Jung Ceylon, a modern shopping complex where all your StarBucks, MacDonalds and Carrefours are. I experienced an effusive sense of relief but at the same time was struck with a sense of smallness—what a little world of brands made my mental universe. “Daddy, I want to eat junk food,” my daughter whispered in my ears when she found herself magically transported into this mini Singapore. She craved for a Burger King meal and that’s what we bought her. Surely, a guilty pleasure. We did some shopping in Robinsons and Carrefour and grabbed our dinner in the Jung Ceylon’s food court, and that’s where I made my greatest discovery: an Indian food stall named Bismillah Kitchen.

Amid all kinds of Thai food represented there, I was glad to find Indian food represented too. Also, this was the only food joint that displayed a halal sign, indicating that their food was kosher. Coming from Singapore, we were spoiled as Singapore has hundreds of halal certified food stalls and eateries. The stall was being manned by a young Pakistani man, Hassan. We ordered our dishes in Urdu and felt quite at home. The microwave-heated food was miraculously delicious (rice, dal, potato with peas and a bowl of meat with gravy; the pudina chutney was amazing) and so inexpensive that I decided to come there for all our subsequent meals. A single Burger King meal cost us about 250 bahts--and here we were getting nearly home cooked food for the whole family for just about 200 bahts. It was unbelievable.

Over the next few meals, I got to know a little bit more about Hassan. He was from Punjab and instead of venturing to Dubai or London as most of his countrymen do, he moved to Thailand. “There are lots of opportunities here,” he said. He was happy to see someone from the subcontinent. “Saheb,” he said, “I hardly see any Pakistanis come here. They seldom get out of the country.” “True,” I said, “There are reasons for it”. Then we talked about politics. “What is sad is that in Pakistan, Muslims are killing each other because of politics,” he said. Hassan was not much educated but he knew what was going on in his country.

Changing the topic, I asked him, are there a lot of Muslims in Phuket? “Oh, yes,” he said, “and they are very strong.” How, I further pressed him. “They are strong in business and they have a lot of clout.” Perhaps that explained why I saw so many mosques in Phuket.

Then he complained about a neighbouring stall owner who sold Thai food: she sold both chicken and pork and yet had the temerity to brandish a halal sign on her stall to attract Muslim tourists. “How could she do it?” Hassan said. Are you going to complain to the authorities? “No,” he said, “But next time they come on inspection, they will take action against her.”

I promised Hassan that I would write about his food stall. He was thankful. On the last day, he gave a free treat to my daughter: Milkmaid poured over a hot parantha. “Yummy,” my daughter declared.

For our remaining days in Phuket, we avoided the tourist traps and did more of the same—walking around, shopping and more family bonding over food and siestas. We even gave the Phuket Fantasia, a nightly dinner buffet with a Las Vegas-style show, a miss. Each ticket costs around 1800 bahts.

The night before we moved over to Bangkok, I took a stroll down the Soi Bangla, Patong’s liveliest party zone. The road is flanked by drinking holes and was crowded with tourists and street performers. Amid pulsating music, I could see mostly Western tourists drinking beer in bars and young girls and ladyboys pole dancing for the patrons. Some touts tried to entice me to free sex shows that I refused with my polite nods. The market-like open air atmosphere on the Bangla Road gives one a totally different experience, unlike the closed door revelry of Singapore’s Duxton Hill or Hong Kong’s Wanchai district. Good for those who like this kind of stuff.

A shorter version of this travelogue was published in The Daily Star, Dhaka.

'Love and Lust in Singapore' cover

The cover of 'Love and Lust in Singapore', which features one of my short stories, is out. It looks fabulous. The book should be in the bookstores by August/September 2010. Look out for it!

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The Death of the Indian Dream

In a brief essay on India, Aravind Adiga gets into the heart of the matter:

... The 300 million or so Indians living in acute poverty are being crushed by inflation. If they thought washing the floors, driving the cars and cleaning the windows of the middle class would open the doors to a better life, they know now that they were wrong. With prices rising, their savings are being eaten away. Higher food and fuel prices are being driven by big changes in the global economy that look set to continue. Even the most cheerful optimist in the past decade has seen the huge divide between the haves and have-nots, but the hope has persisted that it would somehow go away. Inflation has set like cement into that divide, solidifying the gap between the two Indias. The future for the country is two futures: rosy and grim. Indian companies will buy more foreign businesses and more Indian children will starve. In economic terms, India has become neither the U.S. nor Sudan, but something in between — a Latin American republic with an entrenched class chasm. Higher levels of crime and social unrest are almost certain to follow. For years or decades to come, we will not be able to talk of one destiny for all the people of the country.

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Bengal's Balzac

When I was asked to review Rajat Das’ debut novel (Paper Boat, Flame of the Forest) I approached the offer with skepticism. Why? I had little experience of reading a novel as long as 800 pages. Believe me, I have considered Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy many times in libraries and bookstores but that novel’s heft has always come in the way of my reading pleasure (and I prefer doorstoppers from Ikea). Man, don’t get me wrong. I love Seth, I love that Golden Gate man. What a charming writer! But I am happy having read his From Heaven Lake.

Similarly, I have great respect for grandpa Leo Tolstoy. But War and Peace? That’s for a time when I feel more grown up and a little less like Anthony Bourdain—intellectually footloose, carefree, and a little less ready for suffering—of any kind. Ditto for Don Delillo’s Underworld and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (I tried the latter; it reads like well-written Bollywood kitsch).

I am one of those people who think a novel should be as long as Camus’ The Stranger. That novel is of an optimal length, a benchmark for me, apt for our attention-deficient generation. Look at some of the best loved novels by J M Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi, Bruce Chatwin, Junichiro Tanizaki and Ismail Khadare. They are not heavier than a Starbucks bagel. But they are great literature, good stuff to read. A good story is like a life well-spent: not how long it is but how good it is what matters.

You think I am just making some catty remarks, leaving my prudence in the basement of my foolish mind. But the fact of the matter is that I am trying to be honest. This brief detour of my toe-deep knowledge of literature, or my approach to reading, was warranted. I am no James Wood. Accepting one’s shallowness is humiliating but at the same time it’s liberating.

Now you know why I was so skeptical. Also, in an age when Joyce’s Ulysses is being read in twenty tweets flat, how can one save one’s brain from not developing a schizophrenia of sorts, attention divided between work, email, multimedia and social media (if you don’t believe me, read Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?). To tell you the truth, before this internet era, I was able to read Tagore’s novels. In translation. There, I have said it.

Coming to Paper Boat, my expectation was for a saga in the pre-Independence India, set in the undivided Bengal of the early 20th century. It already sounded boring because so many novels have been written tracing family histories in different parts of India. However, the novel’s title was intriguing. Paper Boat! Hmm…it sounded like a mini Titanic.

The novel claims it has been written in the Uppanyaas tradition of vernacular India—a novelty in this time of cheap thrillers and quick metro reads (though they have their own market, I admit). Clearly, here is an author with some gutsy ambition, I thought. The guy does not want an easy walk into the sunset, a rite of passage for many well-read and well-travelled Indians who find time to pen a novel or a memoir in their post-retirement days. Nothing wrong with that. Nirad Chuadhuri published his first novel when he was in his 50s.

So, with some expectation and with some trepidation, I began to read Paper Boat. I dipped in and out of it over weeks, even months (I am a slow reader and I read 3-5 novels simultaneously). What blew me away was the passion and hard work with which Rajat had put together this sprawling story. Even the language and diction that Rajat has employed in this work are in tandem with the era with which he is dealing in the plot—a pre-television era story with a pre-television era writing style. I could see his blood, sweat and sinews in the work.

In terms of plot, the story is about Nalini, a strong-minded feminist, who lives in Birat Gram. She is a beauty, a brilliant student, a fine debater: she is a perfect specimen of womanhood, flawless (that makes the character less realistic). There is a school romance, a near romp in the classroom and lots of talk among aunts and cousins about finding suitable grooms or brides. Then tragedy strikes and Nalini is on her death bed. But her daughter Rani tries to save her mother by performing an unusual feat. The story goes back and forth in time, narrating the story of Nalini, and at the same time, noting the social changes that take place in and around her in undivided Bengal.

This is a quintessentially Bengali novel: the author makes gentle observations, the characters are chatty, sometimes naughty too and there is enough intellectual banter to engage the reader.

What the novel suffers from is over-description. The novel starts with the description of the setting, the village of Birat Gram. It reminds me of Balzac. But Rajat’s Birat Gram is more complicated than Balazac’s Paris, in say, Old Goirot. Clearly, Rajat has overdone it and that richness of description, though beautiful, mars the flow of the story. The storm scene in the first part of the novel is marvelously written, but it tests one’s patience as it has been written in great detail.

This problem persists throughout the book. At one place, Rajat takes two pages to explain Bengali cuisine, and how it is different from European cuisine and so on. And here is an example of how meticulously Rajat describes a cottage: “The property was square-fenced, by razor wire in front, by brickwork at the back. The fence had horizontal rows of wires a foot apart. Columns of wooden poles, placed at intervals, took the weight of the fence. On the left, the fencing ended perpendicular to a sidewall; and on the right it ran six feet away from, and parallel to, the other side wall, ending further down at a wall that formed an L shape with the sidewall” (page 119).

Reading this passage, even a Martian would know what the writer is talking about. This level of description shows Rajat’s eye for detail but somehow it disregards the reader’s imagination.

Perhaps deliberately employed but the choice of Rajat’s narrative style makes readers like me go slow on the reading. We are used to reading novels in contemporary idioms. Read this: ‘Somnambulating to a washbasin at a far corner of the room, he splashed cool water on his recoiling face. He straightened up, to eye himself in the mirror hanging by a reluctant nail…’, page 55 (italics mine). Somnambulating? A reluctant nail? How about a shot of a reluctant tequila?

Another example: ‘To an informed, particularly from close range, mind, this gobbledygook palace was a cacophony in architectural noises,’ page 73. This stuff is deep fried in metaphors.

And this one is almost funny: ‘This aspect of her personality put the school’s code of discipline under pressure it hadn’t the hind experience to parry,’ page 92.

The novel is not just overwrought; it could have hugely improved with a healthy dose of editing (For example, ‘This lot was for those could not read…’, page 54; ‘He came to because rain, goaded by ferocious winds, was splashing his face’, page 57)– typos in the book that distracts one from the reading experience (Here is more: ‘But he not that someone’, page 59; ‘Her giggle was the single excess did not irk him spontaneously,’ page 115).

Nevertheless, despite its heft and turgidity, Rajat’s first novel is a remarkable work of fiction—it takes you on a tour of a time and a place that reads like a legend, with a cast of characters whose gentleness seem surreal in our insensitive times. Only you have to have the stomach for it.

The Taste of Rejection

I was reading some articles on John Le Carre when I came across this piece in The Guardian by Robert McCrum: Dear Mr Orwell, we regret to say ….

This is a good piece for new writers who are looking for some hope. Read it and you will stay optimistic about getting published (of course, after you have done all that needs to be done to write a good book, that is exhausted yourself in the process).

Here it goes:

Spotting new and original literary talent is not as easy as it can look with the benefit of hindsight. I can think of several well-known contemporary names whose work drifted hopelessly round literary London before finding happy homes.

There are some famous examples of books that were misunderstood or overlooked. One reader for JG Ballard's Crash wrote: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help." Someone else wrote that Norman Mailer's novel, The Deer Park, "will set publishing back by 25 years".

A classic is often a new tune and new tunes can be difficult to pick up. After a first reading of Lolita, one in-house reader wrote, in some perplexity: "The whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy ... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years."

Sometimes it is the authors who get buried by rejection. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide before A Confederacy of Dunces saw the light of day, in a massive launch (slightly helped by the manuscript's backstory) in 1980. Many other celebrated writers, including Beatrix Potter, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, Stephen King, John le Carré and James Joyce, have all experienced the bitter taste of rejection at some point in their literary careers.

This game is not, and never has been, for softies. Thirteen publishers rejected ee cummings's No Thanks, until it was finally published by his mother. On the dedication page, cummings wrote: "WITH NO THANKS TO ..." and then listed the publishers who'd turned it down.

From time to time, literary journalists have fun anonymously submitting badly typed copies of first chapters by Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf, invariably scoring a near universal rejection. According to one biographer, Samuel Beckett kept a neat, handwritten list of the 42 publishers who rejected Murphy in his wallet for years. Beckett said that he kept the list because it comforted him to know that so many people were wrong about his writing. In Worstward Ho, he coined the perfect credo for the literary world: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

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Sex and the city: David's departure

Today I stumbled upon Ashok Banker's blog (one of my favorite blogs) and was shocked to read one of his blog entries: Falling Down: A Goliath Named David

I could not believe what I read about David Davidar--that he had been sacked by Penguin Canada over a sexual harassment case. A couple of years back, I had interviewed David when his second novel had come out and had also met him during a lit fest in Singapore. It was difficult to believe that a man of his stature would do what has been alleged against him by one of his former employees. The allegations and the lawsuit are disgraceful and it remains to be seen how David fights the charges “vigorously”.

Here's John Barber's story from The Globe and Mail, Canada:

A former employee of Penguin Canada has launched a $523,000 lawsuit alleging that company CEO David Davidar sexually harassed her repeatedly over the past three years, culminating in outright assault at the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall, and that she was fired after complaining to superiors about Davidar’s “twisted treatment” of her.

Lisa Rundle of Toronto, former director of digital publishing and foreign rights for Penguin Canada, is claiming damages of $423,000 from Penguin for wrongful dismissal and the “harsh, vindictive and malicious fashion” with which it allegedly treated her following her complaints against Mr. Davidar. She is also seeking damages of $100,000 against Mr. Davidar personally.

The allegations were made in a statement of claim filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on June 9, the day after Penguin Group chairman John Makinson and Mr. Davidar jointly announced the latter’s decision to leave one of the top jobs in the international company. They have not been proven in court and Mr. Davidar has not yet filed his defence.

In response, the former executive issued a statement Friday afternoon denying the harassment charges – but acknowledging that neither he nor Mr. Makinson had revealed the full story surrounding his departure earlier this week. “At Penguin’s request, I agreed to publicly state that my departure was voluntary,” he wrote. “The truth is that a former colleague accused me of sexual harassment and Penguin terminated my employment.”

Mr. Davidar said he intends to fight the charges “vigorously,” but declined to make further comments.

Here is the Canadian publishing industry reaction on David's departure.

Killing us softly

I may sound like an alarmist but these days I see more and more deadly headlines. No, I am not talking about the regular deaths in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan or even the storming of aid flotillas to Gaza. I am talking about cancer and dying birds and electromagnetic radiation (EMR) causing cancer.

Give me a minute and I will explain it all.

Recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that cancer deaths could double by 2030. Cancer could claim 13.3 million lives a year by 2030, the WHO cancer research agency has said, almost double the 7.6 million deaths from the illness in 2008. In the US, according to one New York Times columnist, 41 per cent of Americans have cancer. Isn’t this an alarmingly high percentage? The question is: why is it so high?

Next, there have been headlines about the birds and the bees: parrots dying in Australia, peacocks falling dead in north India and bees expiring in some parts of the Himalayas. According to the study by a young Indian scientist, VP Sharma, a drastic decrease was observed in the brood area and egg-laying rate per day of the queen bee in hives exposed to EMR. He also found a reduction in the pollen-carrying and returning ability of the bees. This somewhat corroborates the University of Leeds study that found an 80 per cent decline in bee diversity, from 1980 levels, in over 100 sites across the UK and the Netherlands.

I agree this is a lot of morbid news. All this might be happening for a variety of reasons which could be environment or food or radiation-related.

But the next thing I am going to talk about is definitely about radiation—a by-product of the high-tech life that we are addicted to—and its hazards. And where is this radiation coming from? From innocent looking devices such as our cell phones and the cell phone towers that help in ‘connecting people’.

Kill zones

In the wake of a man dying of exposure to radioactive waste in New Delhi, India’s investigative newspaper, Tehelka, did studies on electromagnetic radiation in New Delhi and Mumbai, two of India’s biggest cities. The studies found radiation levels in the two cities over and beyond the safe limits in scores of locations in each city.

According to the newspaper, cell radiation is slow poison. Effects begin with fatigue and could end in cancer. It is near fatal for ones with pacemakers. For normal people, the effects can start with a headache to a tumour in 8-10 years.

The Tehelka EMR survey of 100 spots across New Delhi revealed that close to four-fifths of New Delhi is living in unsafe radiation zones. The newspaper says: “Only a fifth of Delhi lives and works in a safe zone and that is almost entirely the VVIP zone. This situation has come about because the authorities allowed illegal cell towers to mushroom all over Delhi, by not doing a thing about it.”

Further, 40 of the 100 spots surveyed in Delhi have extreme anomaly in radiation levels. Tehelka notes: “These are high risk zones, where the EMR was up to seven times or more than the safe limit. At times, the readings were so high that the instrument used to measure them stopped doing so. Thirty-one spots were unsafe zones and nine were borderline. Only 20 spots were within the safe limits.”

Because of the dangerous levels of radiation, the October Commonwealth Games in New Delhi could be the most radiation-filled ever, Tehelka concludes.

The situation is worse in Mumbai. Tehelka, with the help of Cogent EMR Solutions, surveyed EMR levels in 115 spots across Mumbai. The Mumbai results are even more shocking than New Delhi. “Well over nine-tenths of Mumbai is living in areas ranging from borderline radiation to extreme anomaly,” the paper reports. “Only four-fifths of Delhi fell into these categories. Less than a tenth of Mumbai is safe.”

In Mumbai, 70 of the 115 spots have “extreme anomaly” in radiation levels. This means, the paper explains, the levels are close to seven times the safe limit. These are high risk areas. The readings were so high at times that the device used to measure the radiation, a High Frequency Analyser, could not record the radiation anymore. Over 60 per cent of the spots surveyed fall into this category.

Thankfully, Tehelka’s study has prompted the Delhi High Court to constitute a high-level panel to ascertain if cell towers are a health hazard. The court has asked the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the telecom ministry to form the committee of technical and medical experts, NGOs, cellular associations, and public-spirited persons. The committee is to submit its report on the harmful effects of radiation within three months, Tehelka has said.

I am sure the government agencies in Southeast Asia are mindful of the harmful effects of EMR on their citizens. Unfortunately, I have not seen any third party running independent EMR tests in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong. I just hope things are not as bad here as they are in New Delhi and Mumbai.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/killing-us-softly

Sex and the City 2

Last Sunday I was so bored I decided to watch a movie in a proper theatre. Between Shrek 4 and some other kiddish or Chinese movies running at Shaw Plaza, I opted for Sex and the City 2. I thought at least there would be some comic lines. And of course, Sarah Jessica Parker.

There were none. Or at least not to my taste. Watching Sarah on a small screen and seeing her so up close on a big screen are two different matters. Within the first ten minutes, the romance was killed for me. As of jokes, they were pallid, disappointing.

The film is half formulaic crap and half an ad for Abu Dhabi. Here, in the film's title, City 2 means Abu Dhabi (which means City 1 was New York). If there will be a City 3, I can predict it will happen somewhere else.

First up, since when "Haan Ji" is Arabic for Yes? It is a Hindustani word. I don't know the exact Arabci word for it. It would be nice to know who fooled the writer/director of this movie (was it the Indian waiter, Gaurav?). Any way, it does not matter to the American audience if this was Hindi or Arabic. It was all exotic for them.

And the way the girls seemed to be impressed with Abu Dhabi was unbelievable. These were girls from New York, not from some goadforsaken hick town.

The film is full of stereotypes: a liberal New York where gay marriages are celebrated is pitted against a conservative Arab society. Half the film happens in Abu Dhabi and you are given a good touristy view of the place, with visits to the Souk and all. And at one point, a character in the film even cheekily mentions that Dubai is now dead and it is Abu Dhabi that is the new Middle East.

And for the film's plot, there is much ado about a kiss and a big breasted nanny who turns out to be a damp squib.

It is not a movie to be enjoyed on the big screen. For all its bling power, it still comes across like a made-for-TV product.

'There is no such thing in America as an independent press': Upton Sinclair

Now that the Washington Post company has put its loss-making weekly The Newsweek on the chopping block (any buyers?), I am uncannily reminded of Upton Sinclair. The man was a walking talking company--novelist, essayist, polemicist, activist, politician and what not. He also won a Pulitzer.

His influential 1906 novel, The Jungle, changed the face of the meatpacking industry in the USA in the early 20th century, finally leading to the establishment of the FDA. Now apparently FDA is controlled by food company lobbyists (read works of Eric Schlosser, of The Fast Food Nation fame).

Anyway, has the mainstream media really changed in the last 100 years? Is Newsweek dying because there are no readers for it, or is it that the powers that be have media like Google and Yahoo to do what Newsweek and Time did for them for 70-80 years or so (that is to chaperon public opinion).

Here are some quotes from Sinclair on the US media and journalists that still seem relevant:

It happens, curiously enough, that I have met socially half a dozen members of the [Los Angeles] Times staff. They are cynical worldlings, doing a work which they despise, and doing it because they believe that life is a matter of "dog eat dog." I met the lady, Alma Whitaker, who had written the account of my Friday Morning Club lecture. She had enjoyed the lecture, she said, but afterwards had gone to the managing editor and inquired how I was to be handled; she took it for granted that I would understand this, and would regard it tolerantly. I explained to her the embarrassments of an author in relation to an unpaid grocer's bill. As a result of what she had written about me, I had not been invited by any other woman's club in Southern California.

Also I met one of the high editors of the Times, an important personage whom they feature. Talking about the question of journalistic integrity, he said: "Sinclair, it has been so long since I have written anything that I believed that I don't think I would know the sensation."

My answer was: "I have been writing on public questions for twenty years, and I can say that I have never written a single word that I did not believe."

Sinclair on page 400 of The Brass Check:

As I have said, I know several of the men and women who help to edit [The Los Angeles Times]. These men and women will read this book, and I now request the general public to step outside for a few moments, while I address these editors privately. I speak, not in my own voice, but in that of an old-time journalist, venerated in his day, John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune. He is answering, at a banquet of his fellow editors, the toast: "An Independent Press":

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to writes (sic) his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with--others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things--and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press."

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

Man Asia Literary Prize rules changed

The Man Asian Literary Prize today announced a new format, opening it to all novels by Asian writers published in English each year. The cash value of the prize will increase to USD 30,000.

The Man Asian Literary Prize will now be awarded to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year. In the past, the prize awarded USD 10,000 to the best Asian novel not yet published in English. With this new format, the prize will be the first of its kind to recognise the best English works each year by Asian authors and aims to significantly raise international awareness and appreciation of Asian literature.

Announcing the changes, the chairman of the board of the Asian Literary Prize, Professor David Parker of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “For the past three years, the Man Asian Literary Prize has been very successful at opening a new window for the world onto Asian writing that had yet to appear in English.

“ However, it can be a long time before winning novels are published and enjoyed by the reading public, a good example being the 2008 winner, the brilliant novel Ilustrado written by the Filipino, Miguel Syjuco, which has only just been published.

“The new format of the Man Asian Literary Prize will allow the literary community, media and general public to be fully involved in reading, discussing and comparing the books which the judges are considering, and will consolidate its position as the world’s leading prize for pan-Asian literature published in English.”

Under the new rules, publishers will be responsible for entries and will be entitled to each submit two novels by August 31 each year. Entry forms will be available from May 2010.

For the 2010 prize, judges will select a long list of 10-15 novels in December 2010, which will be pared down to a short list of about five or six in February 2011. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Hong Kong in March 2011.

The Man Asian Literary Prize covers 27 countries and special administrative regions stretching from Afghanistan to Japan. Details of the new rules and more information on the prize can be found at www.manasianliteraryprize.org.

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George Orwell's 'Animal Farm': Not 'Just for Laughs'

George Orwell’s two seminal works of fiction, Animal Farm and 1984, were written in a tumultuous time. Animal Farm, published in 1945, was written as a Stalinist era dystopian allegory which made Orwell famous in the post-war world. 1984, published in 1949, another dystopian work of fiction, documented totalitarianism and its methods of controlling people—perpetual war, government surveillance and mind control.

Today, these two works of Orwell are more relevant than they ever were. If you take the Chomskyian view, not much has changed—only the Stalinist regime has changed to late capitalism, where the rule of the pigs has transmogrified into the rule of the corporate oligarchs—the war on terror is perpetual, technology is enabling the government to track their citizens with ever greater ease and corporate media plays as the mind controlling arm of the rulers. Democratic socialism (that Orwell subscribed to) is dead.

At such a time, when W!ld Rice chose to stage Animal Farm (adapted by Ian Wooldridge) to kick off its 10th anniversary celebrations, the expectations ran high. Would it echo the siege of our times? Would it mirror the globalised utopia that we live in today—trapped in our consumerism and relative powerlessness?

The good news is that the production lives up to the expectations. The adaptation has been well localized and it leaves the audience in no doubt that the play speaks to them about their own everyday reality (work hard, pay the rent-seekers, and work harder—a slippery slope of never making enough, never having enough). To establish this connection, there are hints galore and you don’t have to be too discerning to spot them.

The writer (Orwell and Wooldridge) and director (Ivan Heng) make us take ample note of the fact that tyranny is the fate of human beings. No matter how many times they overthrow a tyrant, there will always be a new tyrant who will rise from their ranks. Revolutions spring in our breasts the hope for a new future and every time, after the war has been won, blood has been shed, sacrifices have been made, this optimism is crushed by a new tyrant, rising like a phoenix in a new avatar, necessitating another revolution. There is no escape from this human fate—the cycle of revolution and tyranny.

There is also a comment on the role of organized religion (which is ironically so Marxist): Moses the Raven keeps referring to the Sugarcandy Mountain. I wish this oblique reference to a life of perpetual happiness in the heaven could have been made more direct and contemporary. Like in the scene where Squealer distributes the apples among the sheep (audience) and calls them organic produce. That is contemporization and it is wholesome.

The plot, as it were, is faithful to the book and the characters are selfsame—Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, Squealer and so on. The actors have played their part so convincingly that you forget they are playing animals and that they are talking about things that are familiar to your bone. Pam Oei as Squealer gets the most laughs but then at times the play falls in the danger of skidding into the realm of comedy (as in a skit—in satire, we must remember, the desire for social change remains underlined). Lim Yu-Beng as the sinister Napoleon is impressive. Gani Abdul Karim as Boxer is believable but it is Benjamin (sorry, missed the actor’s name but the guy who plays the donkey) who takes the cake for me.

The static set of the Manor Farm is a bit simple, even boring. However, the music by the man in white Jenson Koh nicely complements it. In a particular scene, I like it when he walks on to the stage and creates a storm with his drum sticks. Bravo! I also like the ‘Who let the dogs out’ part—it gives the play a cool contemporary feel, sutures it to our present times (why did I think of Abu Gharaib when that song played on?).

As David Hare has said recently, in Stalinist Russia, the most powerful protest you could make was to stage Hamlet. In our globalised land, it could well be George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Full marks to the cast and crew of Animal Farm for this powerful and timely production. It’s a must see for anyone who has a taste for reality.

When: 21 APRIL – 08 MAY 2010

Where: DRAMA CENTRE THEATRE, SINGAPORE

iPads in Singapore

From my official tech blog:

Last week, we ran an IDG story about Apple’s iPads selling well in Asia ahead of the official launch. The report mentioned that iPad appeared to be selling well in Asia despite the fact that Apple's official overseas launch wasn’t until the end of May.

The report was filed from Taipei. It said that the popular iPad was on sale at two stores near the main electronics bazaar in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan.

Well, it turns out that Singapore is not that far behind Taipei in terms of iPad sales. This is not surprising at all because Singaporeans are gadget lovers anyway. Not too long ago, they had displayed their love for Apple’s products with serpentine queues when iPhone was first launched by SingTel here.

Personally speaking, it was only last week when I first saw an iPad in Singapore. I was attending a publishing workshop when I spotted an Indian entrepreneur, Manish Dhingra, director of Mediology, playing with the device. Naturally, many from the crowd, including myself, were interested to have a look at it, something that Manish graciously offered.

“I got it in the US,” he told me. Manish happened to be in the States when the iPad was launched and luckily he could secure a piece for himself before the stores ran out of the supplies (perhaps you know that iPads are manufactured in China).

During the workshop itself, one of my colleagues mentioned that some people were selling iPads through online forums in Singapore. They were selling the pieces with marked up prices. For example, the 16GB (without wi-fi) iPad should be available for around S$700 (US$499). It was being sold for S$1,500 and above! And people were snapping them up!

iPads at Mustafa

This Monday, my colleague Allan surprised me when he told me that he was getting his iPad from Mustafa. Mustafa, if you don’t know, is a very well-known 24 hours Indian specialty superstore in Little India, Singapore’s famous district for everything Indian. I thought Allan was joking. How could Mustafa be selling iPads? Was it even allowed?

A little later, a triumphant Allan returned with his black iPad. “I got it at Mustafa,” he preened. “Mustafa had imported around 70 pieces and now I think they are down to 3.” I’m sure it would all be gone by now, I thought as I was talking to him.

Allan’s wasn’t a bad deal. He got the 16GB wi-fi iPad for S$1,089 all right. Compared to the exorbitant rates being charged elsewhere, this is not a bad rate.

I did a little more research. Apparently, the iPad is being sold at many more places in the Lion City: Sim Lim Square, Far East Plaza, Lucky Plaza, Funan IT Mall, and City Square Mall. Moreover, some enterprising Singaporeans are selling new iPads shipped from the US on eBay. Naturally, they are charging a premium rate for them.

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Which principle do you follow?

Read this (from a Noam Chomsky interview) and think for a moment:

There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”

This is a nice interview and as ever Chomsky's views are thought-provoking. Even before discovering Chomsky, I was a skeptic. Where do you find yourself? Ask yourself that question. Here is more advice from the intellectual: “I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”

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Operation Green Hunt

I had difficulty sleeping the night I read this account of Arundhati Roy's meeting with the Naxals/Maoists in the forests of Dandakaranya (Walking with the comrades, The Outlook). The Government of India has unleashed or is to unleash, as reports indicate, Operation Green Hunt to 'contain' the 'Maoist insurgency' in India's red corridor.

The report lays bare the truth behind the so called 'Maoist insurgency' in India. Roy, a writer and activist, has done what self-respecting Indian journalists should have done years ago. But probably the Maoists would not have trusted the representatives of India's corporate media, so they might not have succeeded in getting what Roy has got in her report. With every new piece, Roy is pushing the envelop further -- and I am talking about 'the piece' purely as a writer of daring. (I expected something similar from gutsy writers like Pankaj Mishra and Amitava Kumar but where are they? Prof. Kumar has written a book on terrorism but I don't hear much about Mishraji.)

Roy's piece was simply hair-raising: one the one hand, she came across as a brave writer, a woman among armed strangers, comrades, deep in the forests, talking to them, living among them, walking on for hours without food or shelter, eating chutney of red ants, sleeping under start-studded skies in jhillis. It all came across as a romantic adventure, and I felt it difficult to suppress my guilty pleasure in reading the account as a romance.

But at the same time, I was feeling ashamed and angry. Ashamed, because it was about some of my own people, people of my country, who the government wanted to crush because they came in the way of 'progress.' I felt anger because I felt powerless to stop the Operation Green Hunt, the intention of the government of India to crush the revolt of the tribals. Government should find a solution by talking to the oppressed who have taken up arms when they have no other way of defending themselves.

Here is something from the article that I wanted to copy down as a reminder. It rings so true:

By institutionalising injustice in the way that it does, the Indian State has turned this country into a tinderbox of massive unrest. The government is quite wrong if it thinks that by carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ to render the CPI (Maoist) ‘headless’, it will end the violence. On the contrary, the violence will spread and intensify, and the government will have nobody to talk to.

Then I read some of the comments posted by readers. I liked this one a lot:

Before I make this comment let me make this clear - I love my country India as much as anyone else. This is to make sure that I am not labelled anti-India as is done to anyone who speaks on its weaknesses these days. The Indian parliamentary democracy is rotten to the core. The election process is a sham, an eyewash in the name of democracy. Yes, the people do vote - more than the Americans do - but it is like selecting the least rotten potatoes from a sackful of rotten potatoes. It serves no purpose - the looters reach the parliament and start the loot of this nation. They pass every bill except the ones the citizens want them to pass - foremost being a strict anti-corruption bill. Now, some will say it is rotten but it is the best option for us. How on earth can a rotten item be the best option? Some say it will take time to improve the system but with the same breath they say India is a mature democracy. So, if a mature democracy has an immature system, isn't something wrong somewhere? "Chalta hai" is not just a cliched expression - it is a cancer that we all are affected with, which we all falsely believe to be our symbol of nationalism. Helpless at the functioning of the system, we say "chalta hai, hamara desh phir bhi achha hai". Yes, we can ask the tribals to fight elections but do we know that fighting elections is a multicrore business transaction? A few IIT people decided enough was enough and formed a party and decided to fight the elections. As was inevitable, they lost their deposits in the election and the party is no more heard of! If educated folks can't "fight the fight" of elections do we believe that uneducated innocent tribals stand a chance? The system has effectively driven this point into the minds of the masses - especially the middle-class - that to speak against the system is to speak against the nation, which is NOT. The nation is much more important than the system. The system can be changed several times to improve the nation. If one really loves the country, one must be willing to analyse every aspect of the system.
Reader Man
Kolkata, India

http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738

Do you have any thoughts on this issue?

Theatre Review: Model citizens

I’ve not seen all the plays that Director Alvin Tan and Playwright Haresh Sharma have done together in the last 20 years but amongst the ones that I have seen, “Model Citizens” is one of their best—honest, direct and biting.

Weaving the plot around a crisis—the stabbing of a Member of Parliament (MP) in this case—the play exposes the angst of Singaporeans that often remains hidden from the public gaze or is seldom discussed.

With an all female cast (Goh Guat Kian, Siti Khalijah and Karen Tan), the writer-director duo tells a story that shows how women in a society like Singapore’s are affected by actions that men take. In a way, they want change in their lives but they are trapped in situations that are not of their making—they are silent sufferers in a system that seemingly has turned against their own.

Take, for example, the MP’s wife. She used to teach science in Mandarin in a school. She is not comfortable with English as a medium of instruction. But that’s exactly what happens when the government changes it policy. As a result, she can’t teach in school anymore. She marries the politician whom she had met in college and becomes a tai tai. She wanted to have more than two children but then again the law changed. The government said, have less children. As a model wife of a parliamentarian, she had to gag her desires.

She misses her roots and she wants to go to China but at one point she admits that even China has changed now. There is no escape for her from this life of boredom: an existential angst. An entrapment. She wonders if there is any point to return to China as Singapore might, in her cognition, one day become the capital of China.

The Indonesian maid’s character, played by Siti Khalijah, is the most developed character of the play. She has a different agenda. Coming from a poor country, her escape lies in attaining the Singapore passport. She wants to ensnare a Singapore man and then take Singapore citizenship—her guarantee of escape from the eternal grind of poverty and hopelessness. For this, she is ready to go to any length. She leads a dual life: by day she is a docile maid, by night she is a raunchy sex worker. Her lover, a cleaner, stabs the MP in a public meeting when his plea for help to allow him to marry a foreign domestic maid falls on deaf ears. He is then sent to an asylum, facing a long jail term. Her dreams of marrying the man come to an end. But she tries her best to help him—for her own selfish reasons.

Khalijah has played her role with dexterity. The only gratuitous scene is perhaps the one where she forces upon herself a miscarriage—but for that I think I should blame Haresh. What was he trying to evoke—the inherent dangers of being a prostitute?

The maid has a great relationship with her husbandless boss who treats her like a sister. The boss has lost her son and she does not even know why she lost him. She keeps remembering her son which is natural. At one point she complains about her children—how did I create such monsters—and then she keeps on fondly remembering the son. That was perhaps the only instance of a loose wire in the play; the whole thing was a bit unclear in the dialogues.

However, this is a very controlled play and showcases the maturity of the writer. The dialogues are crisp and biting. The three actors have done a fantastic job. I loved the structure of the play which starts with a crisis and then moves back in time, only to come back to the present moment and move the story forward to, unfortunately, a melodramatic ending.

Among other things, the play shows a clear disconnect between a ‘master class’ of rulers and the HDB-dwellers of the prosperous city-state—the ruling class being insensitive to the needs of the downtrodden, all in the name of progress and development, and controlling their destinies by perennially moving the levers of laws. What Haresh and Alvin seem to suggest here is that in the current set-up, the only way to become a model citizen is to join the system and enjoy the fringe benefits of belonging. It would be akin to killing oneself from inside but that is the price one has to pay for the luxury of belonging.

Dates:
3 – 6 & 11 – 13 March 2010, 8pm
6 – 7 & 13 – 14 March 2010, 3pm

Venue:
The Necessary Stage Black Box
278 Marine Parade Road
#B1-02 Marine Parade Community Building
Singapore 449282

Tickets are available at all SISTIC authorised agents, via the hotline at 6348 5555 or online at www.sistic.com

Hussain’s master stroke

When news broke that India’s pre-eminent painter M F Hussain has traded his Indian passport for a Qatari one, many in India got a shock. On Facebook and Twitter, in newspapers and TV studios, people expressed their sadness and displeasure at Hussain’s decision. But many, including some non-resident Indians, even rejoiced. Good riddance, they said.

The itinerant painter has been in self-exile since 1996 after being hounded by the right-wing outfits for his nude paintings of Hindu deities. Frail, at 95, Hussain changes his citizenship. The man could die any day. So what’s the big deal?

In his last days, Hussain chooses to die as a Qatari, not as an Indian. That is the big deal.

To me, Hussain’s relinquishing his Indian citizenship is nothing less than a national shame, a slap across the face of those Indians who have become so smug in their new-found material success that they have abandoned all regard for freedom of speech or for the larger freedoms constitutionally ensured for citizens in a liberal democracy. And a slap across the face of those who have silently supported them.

It is also a slap across the face of the Indian government that has shown progressive incapability of safeguarding any of its guarantees to the citizen. As Indian journalist Sadanand Menon has noted elsewhere, this has resulted from “democratic deficit,” a Chomskian term for describing the fatal inability of institutions within a democratic state to contribute positively towards sustaining democratic principles. As Menon has written, “caught between daily threats to his life and freedom on the one hand and an impotent state unable to guarantee his protection on the other,” Hussain chose to live abroad in self-imposed exile.

“I still love India. But India doesn’t need me. I am saying this with deep pain in heart,” Husain told Gulf Madhyamam in an interview.

Hussain wanted to return to India. He even apologized to those who might have been offended by his paintings. But the apology was never accepted, the hounding never stopped, the threat persisted. “When Sangh Parivar outfits targeted me, all kept silent. No one, including political leadership, artists or intellectuals came forward to speak for me. But I know the fact that 90 per cent of the people of India love me. They are with me,” Hussain said.

There a political argument (Brain Barry) that says that in democratic politics, it is better to be lucky than to be powerful. Hussain had neither luck nor power on his side.

“A painter at 90 deserves to be in his home—painting his canvas,” Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul of the Delhi High Court said in a judgment in 2008, quashing a bunch of cases against Hussain.

Hussain was not allowed to return home. Some he changed his home.

The lunatic fringe wins again

In Hussain’s abdication of his Indian citizenship, the lunatic fringe has won again—the same lunatic fringe that has become the de facto DNA of Indianness, the defining element of a fast-globalizing nation whose bottom feels the pinch only when it experiences an economic hurt. These are the same people who call Arundhati Roy a “slut” because she speaks for the rights of the tribals and the minorities. These are the same people who return Narendra Modi to power after watching over the massacre of several thousand Indians (minorities in this case). These are the same people who dance to the tune of the Thackerays in Mumbai, and beat up and even kill other Indians—Indians hailing from other states or Indians belonging to linguistic or religious minorities. A shade different, but they are the same people who kick up a storm whenever a Taslima Nasreen writes against the Islamic obscurantists.

And many are silent spectators or their tacit supporters. Just look at the reality that obtains in India today. According to Father Cedric Prakash, a human rights activist, a Muslim today, in Ahmedabad, cannot buy a house or own a shop in the western up-market part of the city. Muslims are mostly confined to ghettoes and they live in fear and insecurity—this is the same state that has Modi at the helm, who was touted as prime ministerial material by the likes of the Ambani and Tata and who has a superstar like Amitabh Bachchan to represent the state as its brand ambassador. I hear the same about Mumbai where even well-known film actors such as Shabana Azmi and Emraan Hashmi have been reportedly denied apartment purchases in posh areas.

Every time the lunatic fringe has mounted its attack, it has succeeded, be it the demolition of the Babri Masjid or the Guajarat massacre—without the fear of being punished. Today, this lunatic fringe seems to be more powerful than the court and the constitution, the government or its hallowed institutions. If it were not so, why would the injustices continue in a country that calls itself a functional democracy and derides Pakistan for being a failed state?

If Hussain’s decision signifies anything, it is this: India, a secular democracy envisioned by Gandhi and Nehru, is a failed state today. Hussain prefers a non-democratic state like Qatar to a so-called democratic India because what is the use of a democracy and a secular system that does not exist anywhere but on paper only, run by a “master class”, which has, in Menon’s words, successfully violated every principle of democratic politics. “I enjoy complete freedom in Qatar. Now Qatar is my place. Here no one controls my freedom of expression. I am very happy here,” the painter said.

The biggest culprit is the failure of the state to check the rise of the lunatic fringe and to inculcate the right secular and liberal values in its citizens. Nehru believed that communalism will die its own natural death when scientific and technological education is imparted and scientific temper cultivated. In the RSS schools, children are taught that Islam was spread in India by shedding rivers of blood. What will be the values and mindset of such children?

By abandoning the state’s education system to rot, generations of children have been raised with biased views against the minorities—so will the state stand up and take the blame for jettisoning its duty of shaping the value system of its citizens? If you don’t understand where I’m coming from, simply visit Singapore or meet Lee Kwan Yew. How could he raise a prosperous nation of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic citizens? What values did he foster and promote in the citizenry? For, to quote Russell Hardan, a New York University professor of politics, “it would be wrong in the shibboleth of our time, to say that the institutions could be neutral, that is, that they would have no effect on what values people sought. A massively coercive religious state could have great impact on individual values as seems to be shown by the cases of Iran under the Ayatollas, and of Afghanistan under the Taliban…An individual immersed in a licentious society can find it difficult to sustain personal adherence to a rigidly religious or moralistic value system. Some value systems therefore seem likely to require specific institutional supports, and it is prima facie false to suppose that any institution can be neutral with respect to all values or value systems.” (How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 200; p.97.)

The Indian hypocrisy

Yet, in the long run nothing will happen. After bemoaning Hussain’s decision, everything will continue as it. The liberals would move on to the next issue. For the rest, there is no shame, there is no awakening. The sectarian value system will perpetuate unless the state intervenes.

As such, the future of secularism seems to be dark in India as long as the liberalism, that is by and large common in the elite, also gets bedded down in the consciousness of the children of the poor, who go to the god forsaken government schools, who read vernacular or newspapers with biased political views or are harnessed by a criminalized political system for vote-bank politics.

As Asghar Ali Engineer, a prominent Islamic scholar and an activist for inter-faith harmony, says in one of his essays, since most of the key posts in administration, in teaching and in policing, are held by upper-caste Hindu officers, many of whom are under the influence of the RSS ideology, the implementation of secular values and secular spirit of Constitution appears to be wanting.

Though Engineer does not feel that the future of secularism (in India) is despairing in any way, I disagree. If Hussain’s decision has shown anything, it is this. I would love to be proved wrong, but it seems that the road to true secularism, along with a clean and effective law and order system in India, is a long way off.

As for those who choose to remain silent, let them remember this: there are collective implications of individual liberty.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Asia Sentinel on 4 March 2010.

Also appeared in The Daily Star, Dhaka.

Postscript: After this article was published, many readers wrote to me how bigoted I came across as a writer.

I appreciate their point of view.

The following is for the readers who wrote to me:

Let me tell you that you have every right to be offended by Hussain's paintings.

Many people don't understand my perspective. I may not like Hussain's paintings for any number of reasons, including religious reasons. But nothing gives me the right to thrash him up, or not allow him to function or work in his own country. I would drag him to court if he offended me. Same with Rushdie or the Danish cartoonist--if I didn't agree with them, I would take them to court. But nothing gives me the right to attack these artists outside the court of law. Courts were invented to resolve disputes in a civilized way. That's all I am saying. Implementation of rule of law and equality before law is all I'm asking for. That will save everyone's rights. India's Constitution is secular, and once rule of law is firmly established in India, secularism will come into play too.