Kazuo Ishuguro and the craft of writing

"Sometimes people base their whole lives on a sincerely held belief that could be wrong. That's what my early books are about: people who think they know. But there is no Socrates figure. They are their own Socrates.

There's a passage in one of Plato's dislogues in which Socrates says that idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn't get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you have discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching."

From Kazuo Ishuguro's The Paris Review interview (Spring 2008)

How was the Remains of the Day named

I was at a writers' festival in Australia, sitting on a beach with Michael Ondaatje, Victoria Glendinning, Robert McCrum, and a Dutch writer named Judith Hertzberg. We were playing a semi-serious game of trying to find a title for my soon-to-be-completed novel. Michael Ondaatje suggested Sirloin: A Juicy Tale. It was on that level. I kept explaining that it had to do with this butler. Then Judith Hertzberg mentioned a phrase of Freud's, Tagesreste, which he used to refer to dreams, which is something like "debris of the day." When she translated it off the top of her head, it came out as "remains of the day." It seemed to me right in terms of atmosphere.

Aamir SRK unity, good for small Indian films?

Recently, Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan came on a joint platform to push for a 50-50 revenue sharing scheme to end the tussle between film producers and film exhibitors in India.

"It should be a partnership of equality. Fifty percent sharing is fair. Distributors and exhibitors have to find a way to make it a viable business within their fifty percent. Within my fifty percent I have to make it profitable," said Aamir at a press conference, according to HT.

"This is one industry and we all can survive only when each sector will earn a healthy share. We are here to find a solution to this," added Aamir.

Apart from Aamir, industry veterans like Ronnie Screwvala, Mukesh Bhatt and Karan Johar were present, among others.

See a video report here

Is it a good move for indie and small budget filmmakers in Bombay? Not necessarily, says filmmaker Hansal Mehta:

When Firaaq, Barah Aanaa, Straight and Aloo Chaat flunked their exams at the box-office, the gentlemen from the exhibition circuit, the trade-gurus, the distributors and a lot of producers suddenly spoke more openly. They said, “Look at all the trash you feed us. See how these films have failed. How can you expect better terms when you give us such content?”. Everybody rushing to pull down the often alienated, very marginalized and perennially nascent independent cinema of this country. Almost as if they were waiting for their imminent failure. They forgot about Chandni Chowk to China. They pretended that Drona did not exist. They forgot to read the writing on the wall when it came to 8×10 or Tasveer or whatever that was. They forgot about the failure of Victory. They grudgingly acknowledged DevD – only when nudged. They dismissed the success of A Wednesday as a freak case. The selective amnesia of the myopic whole was there for everyone to see.

I am sorry but independent cinema in this country is doomed. We can continue to live in hope but until we are ruled by these torch bearers of ‘content’, until we are always trampled by these messiahs of the mainstream, independent will remain an expletive. Nothing more. Nothing less.

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Sikh anger in India/Air India 182

Watch this report at CNN-IBN:

Jarnail Singh represents common man's frustration

and then watch this trailer:

The Immortals

On Amit Chaudhuri's new novel, The Immortals:

The role of the musician in India, once central and revered, has changed much in the last century. In the wake of Indian independence and the disappearance of the old princely states, the traditional sources of patronage ceased to exist. The middle class stepped in to fill that role, fundamentally altering the relationship between patron and artist. “Suddenly”, Chaudhuri explains, “people from the middle class were themselves wanting to be musicians, wanting their moment in the musical world, and using their teacher as a facilitator.” The gurus’ position in society was fundamentally altered to one of necessary obeisance, undermining their status and artists and placing them in deference to commerce. “People like Mrs Sengupta were drawn to teachers like Shyam Lal because of their talent. They would give them the respect and reverence due to a teacher, but at the same time were really dominating them because they were in a position of power.” At one point in the book, Shyam Lal puts on a conference in memory to his father in which many of his students take part. The event becomes a kind of talent show; people are interested only in their own performance. His disciples – “from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold” - have paid him as a teacher for the right to perform in public.

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I'm on Twitter now

I'm on Twitter now:

http://twitter.com/zafaranjum

Please follow me if you are on Twitter!

Umberto Eco/Kung Fu Panda

Umberto Eco in a Paris Review interview (185, Summer 2008)

“I think that comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death.”

“A secret is powerful when it is empty…as long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.”

When I read this sentence, I immediately thought of Kung Fu Panda’s (the animation film, 2008) plot premise.

The courage to be true to oneself

Play Review
The Importance of Being Earnest
Where: Drama Centre Theatre, NLB
When: 25 March – 11 April 2009

What’s in a name? What a frivolous question, you might say.

Apparently a lot. And if you don’t believe me, you have to read Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

I had an opportunity to see this masterpiece of English literature enacted on stage last week. Director Glen Goei of W!ld Rice has brought it to stage in Singapore.

Here one is tempted to ask if there’s any correlation between the sonic proximity of the two wilds—Oscar (Wilde) and (W!ld) Rice. But I know I digress.

Most play buffs would know the plot of the play. Two friends in London, Jack and Algernon, invent a brother each, by the name of Ernest, to woo two beauties, Gwendolen and Cecily. This leads to a lot of confusion and heart-burning, bringing out the class conflict in addition to romantic dilemmas, but all the conflict is resolved in the final act, after it is established how the habit of writing novels (daydreaming about becoming a famous writer—how relevant even today!) leads to the ruination of the future of a child in a perambulator. The credit of unifying all the threads of the story gone haywire goes not to a mortal but a lifeless black leather bag. So, if the play is a success, the bragging rights can well go to the bag!

To freshen up an old text (whether for stage or film) for a new audience, there’s that old trick in the book: add a twist to the tale but hey, not in a literal sense.

This is what director Glen Goei has cleverly done here with the inclusion of an all male cast (and believe me, the wit is still intact). How could one not laugh (when watching the play) when this thought itself makes one chuckle. But there is a serious background note that needs insertion here (if you don’t read play booklets, you can skip this part): In his message, the director mentions that he was inspired to stage this play when more than a year and a half ago there was a campaign launched in Singapore to repeal 377A and ‘the response from the straight as well as gay community was lukewarm’.

From that standpoint, the play becomes a celebration of the creative contribution of the gay community. “They are a source of fresh new ideas which create new energies and opportunities for this society,” he says. “Yet they are labeled criminals and many have to deny their true selves and live under the oppression of assumed identities.”

In his time, Oscar himself was such a man who dared to be different and dared to be true to himself.

Since the play’s text or plot itself is not under scrutiny here (‘an excuse for Mr Wilde’s ventriloquism), the performances and production qualities warrant an appreciation. While the acts one and two were well laid-out, it was the play’s denouement in act three that was the most dramatic. Act one was a little stretched (you don’t need such an elaborate set up these days) but perhaps eloquence, not economy of words, was the norm when the play was originally written.

For me, it was Lady Bracknell (Ivan Heng) who rescues the act one. In similarly detailed act two, it was Miss Prism (Hossan Leong) whose clever lines and style of delivery soup up the act. Chua Enlai in Gwendolen Fairfax’s role is good but predictably so. Brendon Fernandez in Algernon Moncrief’s role looks the part but is clearly mismatched against the most competent Daniel York (playing John Worthing). Gavin Yap in Cecily Cardew’s part looks the most feminine (among all the competition I would say, and this should be taken as a compliment, and is advised to be shared with Gavin’s hair stylist) but shows a schizophrenic duality in her acting—nevertheless, making it into a delightful performance. Zahim Albakri in his short but sensible role as Rev. Canon Chasuble does not look out of place.

On the production side, the sets (the backdrops were aesthetically appealing) and costumes are appropriate and add to the atmosphere. The music by the T’ang Quartet is first rate.

If this play’s message is about being true to oneself, the audience shows it right then and there at the end of the play—with their clapping and catcalls.

Reviewer’s note: The play’s review has been written keeping in view Wilde’s advice—“In matters of grave importance (such as reviewing this play), style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Published here: http://www.writersconnect.org/?link=The-courage-to-be-true-to-oneself.html&cat=3&id=61

On "Solo" by Rana Dasgupta

Alok Rai on Rana Dasgupta's latest novel, Solo:

The sense of a lost wholeness haunts modernism. And what is distinctive about postmodernism is a loss of that sense of loss – the loss of a framework against which the experience of loss might even be registered. This comes either in light, celebratory flavours – polymorphous perversities, the unbearable lightness of being. Or, sometimes, in darker, bewildered forms – haunted by a sense of loss, but deprived also of the freedom to mourn – the tragedy that cannot speak its name.

The odd combination of talent and pointlessness that characterises Solo seems like some kind of potlatch – the bizarre custom identified by anthropologists wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. At one level, Solo is an exploration of "failure", and contains the suggestion that it takes a lot of failure to make some signal success. It is an interesting thought, and also a curious advertisement for Dasgupta’s next book.

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I like it when Rai mentions about potlatch: the custom wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. Reminds me of the excesses of the Wall Street, and of modern lifestyle itself. The more you waste, the more you squander, the more successful you are and vice versa. If that is Dasgupta's key theme in this novel then I must say it is extremely insightful and relevant to our times.

Documentary on the Afghanistan troop surge

Today's NYT has an interesting story on a documentary film being filmed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by American filmmaker Robert Greenwald. You can see the video below this quote from the NYT:

Mr. Greenwald is showing “Rethink Afghanistan,” a skeptical view of America’s war strategies, in five parts on the Internet, with the implied hope that it will contribute to the foreign policy debate. With the first two parts of the film already online, he arrived in Afghanistan on Sunday to conduct more interviews for what he calls his first “real-time documentary.”

Mr. Greenwald is well known in some progressive circles for his films about war profiteers, Wal-Mart’s corporate practices, and the Fox News Channel. His company, Brave New Films, uses documentary expertise to mount political campaigns, including a YouTube series last year about John McCain and what the company called “the politics of hate.”

“Rethink Afghanistan” is being shaped both as a film and a campaign at the same time. Mr. Greenwald is already posting installments on the film’s Web site, RethinkAfghanistan.com, and also on YouTube. It will eventually be stitched together into a full-length feature. As he has done in the past, Mr. Greenwald will take his finished film to the public using a mixture of DVD sales and house parties. He said he also expected to receive some theatrical distribution.

Fighting terrorism with entrepreneurship

I recently got to know about a young Indian, Shahid Syed, who had done an interesting experiment in Mumbai involving female Muslim students. "I wanted to see if I can motivate Muslim youth to fall in love with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," he says. My interest was piqued and I wanted to know more about him. So, I sent him some questions.

Through his answers, Shahid tells us his own story, his journey of struggle starting from a small town in UP to Mumbai and then to America. "I did odd jobs, even ran behind coal powered rail engines to collect raw coal pieces so that my mom could use them as cooking fuel," he says. "I even entertained the idea of plying the manual rickshaw outside Farrukhabad railway station as a number of youngsters were into it."

Now with an MBA degree from an American University, Shahid is planning to do his own bit of service to his motherland. Among the many ideas that he has, the most interesting is about fighting terrorism with entrepreneurship. "When we can create fanatically dedicated Fidayeeen Saddam, Fidayeen 9/11 and Fidayeen 26/11, we can certainly create Fidayeen - i.e. intensely motivated - in Finance and Entrepreneurship," he says.

Here is the interview:

I read about your unusual entrepreneurship training project in a Mumbai college involving female Muslim students. What was it all about? How did the idea come to you?

The idea came to me in an Entrepreneurship class here in my MBA program. That class had a profound effect on me. We were asked to submit a business plan and make presentations to a committee. It was a challenge but also a whole lot of fun. I enjoyed the experience and my confidence in starting a business on my own, found strength.

And since 9/11, I had been looking for an opportunity in helping the demoralized Muslim youth, so this idea came as a blessing. I wanted to see if I can motivate Muslim youth to fall in love with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As per the Rajinder Sachar report, compared to Muslim males, Muslim females in India have a higher percentage of finishing graduation. The Muslim male dropout rate is higher and the reasons are manifold. One : The Muslim youth feels alienated and deprived of job opportunities upon graduation, and two, they want to start earning their way sooner than later. Somewhere along the line, they lose motivation to continue the efforts that a college degree demands.

In contrast, the girls continue with the studies as they ‘wait’ for a decent marriage proposal. They are assumed to have no talent that can be utilized for their own benefit and community. This also brings an imbalance as these girls later don’t find a suitable match with equal education to marry within their circles.

Do you think we can really fight "terrorism" with entrepreneurship? How?

Absolutely!

When we can create fanatically dedicated Fidayeeen Saddam, Fidayeen 9/11 and Fidayeen 26/11, we can certainly create Fidayeen - i.e. intensely motivated - in Finance and Entrepreneurship. I am sure the Muslim youngsters today are as brilliant as anywhere else. What is needed is a little guidance and the right resources – not just financially but even of motivation and encouragement.

Entrepreneurship is all about application of creativity and generation of ideas. I want to create a group of youngsters who will allow their inner creativity and brilliance to shine through.

I figured this when I made a film “Doosra Kinara” last year. The making of the film, more than the content of the film, to me, was a classical act of guerilla film making. I did everything to make sure my film gets made. I cajoled, pleaded, as I worked out solutions to my film making challenges. In this process I sought help across colors, nationalities and religious lines. People were gracious in helping, and more importantly, I ended up making some lifelong friends. In the diasporic world here in the US, there are some people who tend towards the extreme right wing of own religion, yet they joined me in making my dreams see the light of day. In the sheer interaction, we learned from each other about our – so similar! - insecurities, problems and root cause of hostilities.

The point is, when these youngsters start their entrepreneurial journey they will too realize how they must interact with other people that are different from them. There is no way an entrepreneur is going to grow, if he is going to cater to his tribe only. They will learn to develop tolerance and appreciation for other people’s point of view, as much as appreciating the money that they will earn with their own efforts.

I want them to fall in love with life, their community, their city, state, country and the world….



Did your own life so far taught you how Muslims in a country like India can come out of their pathetic socio-economic conditions?

I was 12 when my father passed away in Farrukhabad, a small town in UP. That resulted in me dropping out of school and looking for ways to support my mother in running the house. I did odd jobs, even ran behind coal powered rail engines to collect raw (un-burnt) coal pieces so that my mom could use them as cooking fuel. I sold kites from my home. When I attracted enough customers I started, making my own manjha (sort of an abrasive), that I called Shahid bhai’s manjha (now I think of it as backward integration!). I even entertained the idea of plying the manual rickshaw outside Farrukhabad railway station as a number of youngsters were into it.

My mom sent me to Mumbai to be with a relative to further my education. There again in Mumbai, I did odd jobs - fetching chai to supervising a construction site during SSC.

Looking back I don’t think I did that badly…..Of course there is more to the story afterwards, but the bottom line is you dream and it will be given. Nature, Allah, God is kind to hard working good people, and this is my firm belief. There is always a road that springs up from somewhere if you have the right intention….

In Urdu it goes this way : “Neeyat saabit manzil aasan”

In the years of my growing up in India, I was witness – as everyone else – to a regular diet of Meerut, Bhiwandi, Mandal and anti-Sikh pogroms. Corruption ruled, and here, I was a mere small time jebroni, almost as if I had no role in deciding the future course of my life and the nation. My journey to the US must have begun long before I actually landed here. I recall that when I was in my final year of engineering, I wrote a short story in which the hero of the story declares “ I am either going to change the System or get out of India”.

At that point of time, I chose to get out of India. After completing my Masters in Civil Engineering, at Atlanta, Georgia, I did go back to India. This was 1992, and this was when my country welcomed me with the images of some folks dancing on the top of an abandoned 500 year old masjid and the later dance of evil that followed in my city.

Somewhere along the line, I came back here to the US, but with my heart stayed with the need to do something for the youngsters back in India, who could not avail of a better life. Worse, who believed a better life was not possible…

What are your future plans? How do you want to apply your ideas of social entrepreneurship in India?

Ideally, I would want to create entrepreneurs in India irrespective of caste, creed, religion and state of origin. However I do want to focus on a certain socioeconomic strata of our society that has been left behind. I see a lot of parallels between majority of Muslims in India and the blacks in America. In jail, there are more of them by sheer percentage, they have higher levels of illiteracy, are frustrated and prone to entertaining violent thoughts.

India is about to enter the elite club of developed nations and we cannot afford to leave a part of our population behind. We must offer an equal opportunity to our youth to excel in whatever area they chose. We need to provide them all the tools and training necessary and then surely they can show us what they are made up of.

I will be conducting the same process again in a few months. Preparations are on to take the next steps of “Threshold India”. The idea is to spread this at the grassroots, across cities with more involvement and the seeking of long term winning ideas. We plan to offer micro credit loans to those who would want to take forward their ideas in the real world. As well as tacit support in these endeavors.

Anything else you want to add?

The world today is at a threshold.

In this last decade, we have seen planes flown with the intent of harming innocent civilians, we have seen wars conducted in order to kill a perceived enemy and ‘cleanse the world’. Within nations, we have seen men and women killed by state controlled police and militia.

It’s about time we turn the page and offer history a chance to write some good stories: stories of hope, redemption and courage. It's about time we offer stories that inspire the next generation so that they can set their eyes to new horizons.

Fortunately, there are some great brains in the business that are supporting me in this endeavor. These are the people who show up in Mohallahs without a trace of hesitation, an area they would not have visited if it was not for this cause. And they are entrepreneurs/writers of repute like Piyul Mukherjee, Pia Verbic and Rashmi Bansal. Their continuous support and guidance is helping "Threshold India" sprint towards its goal with a lightning speed.

I invite you all to come and join me. Provide me with your support and your ideas, so that we can together serve the cause of creating a culture of entrepreneurship among our nextgen. After all, at the end of the day, we all have just one designation on this planet.

And that is being human….

When ‘growth’ is not good

For a narrative to work, it should have a dramatic resolution. If that is not possible, an emotional resolution is a must. I thought of this thumb rule of storytelling when I read the news today about Bernard L. Madoff’s admission in a US court that he had run a vast Ponzi scheme (US$65 billion)—a representative story of Wall Street’s ‘breathless search for profits’. His ordering to jail may provide emotional resolution to the thousands who lost their money in the Wall Street meltdown but this is definitely not a satisfying denouement.

And I’m not alone in holding this view. “…There can be no restoration of confidence in the banking system—and therefore no hope for an economic recovery—until Wall Street comes clean,” says William D. Cohan, the author of “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street” in his 11 March op-ed piece “A Tsunami of Excuses” in the New York Times. “If the executives responsible for what happened won’t step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoena-wielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be created to administer a little truth serum.”

I doubt if that’ll ever happen but the seriousness and the sincerity of Cohan’s demand cannot be questioned. The current global financial crisis, issuing from the greed of the ‘prodigals and projectors’ of the Wall Street, has attacked and weakened the very foundations of the capitalistic system—the system that underpins the globalised nature of trade and life in the world today. While for dramatic reasons the spotlight might remain on the Madoff saga for a while, the actual debate has moved on, to focus on the nature and future of capitalism itself.

The future of capitalism

“Capitalism—our ability to buy and sell, move money around as we wish, and to turn a profit by doing so—is in deep trouble,” says Professor Paul Kennedy in an article in the Financial Times.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen even argues for making changes in the capitalistic system. “The question that arises most forcefully now is not so much about the end of capitalism as about the nature of capitalism and the need for change....the crisis, no matter how unbeatable it looks today, will eventually pass, but questions about future economic systems will remain,” argues Sen in his piece in the Financial Times.

Surely, this is not the end of capitalism but the questions about the economic system are aplenty.

Peak Credit?

One of the most important questions is about credit and its scant availability (in the current scenario of credit crunch) for companies.

“Credit is the oil of the economic engine, and credit ultimately is a creation of confidence” writes management guru Ram Charan in his recent book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty (MacGraw Hill, 2009). “Until all players are confident about the intentions and strengths of the others, there can only be stagnation.”

Charan’s advice to CEOs and business leaders, in this environment, is to conserve cash. “Your focus must shift from the income statement to the balance sheet,” he says. Protecting cash flow is the most important challenge almost all companies face today whether they realise it or not.”

Clearly, the importance of cash flow and credit availability cannot be overemphasised. In the unending cycle of inputs and outputs, driven by profit motive, credit plays the god—both for the producer and the consumer. But peer inside this god and you will say, well, the devil is in the detail. Here are some figures to help you gauge the monstrosity of the credit problem.

For some years, credit growth has been surpassing the growth of economic activity. In 1980, for example, debt levels for US banks were running at 21 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). By 2007, the figure had grown to 116 per cent of GDP.

Isn’t this jump monstrous? If you thought so, what would you call this one? For the US to create its first trillion dollars took its entire history of two hundred years. To create the next trillion took the last 6 months. We are creating a trillion dollars every 6 minutes!

What kind of growth is this? Does it have any relation to the reality on earth? No wonder then that now even ordinary readers are ranting against the global monetary system. “Banks and Central Banks create money out of thin air,” complaints a reader in a blog. “When you get a loan they give you money by a tract of a pen, just like printing new notes. This is just ‘not fair’ even if the government makes it legal. Moreover, it creates profound imbalances into (sic!) the economy, by permitting people that did not produce anything before to buy goods and service. Invest without produce and save. Investments without real savings… The very basic economic law is that you produce then you save and then you consume. The way around is physically impossible. You cannot consume what you have not produced.”

Repeat of past mistakes

And what’s been the government response to the credit crisis the world over? Cut interest rates, print money, slash taxes, get credit flowing. This might work in the short term but this is not a long term response: a recipe for a W-shaped cycle of bust and boom.

“Expansionary monetary policies are the wrong medicine to solve current problems,” said Dr Doom, Dr Marc Faber, at a dialogue in Singapore in February. “They can address the symptoms of excessive credit growth, but not the cause.”

Moreover, as the US government is pumping trillions of dollars in the rescuing the banks, does anyone know who will purchase the $1,750 billion of US Treasuries to be offered to the market this year? And in 2010, then 2011? China is already saying that it is ‘worried’ about the safety of U.S. Treasuries.

During the crisis, governments have to choose between a rock and a hard place, said Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, in an interview in the Financial Times. But a long term solution has to be found, he emphasised.

Is there a long-term solution then? Yes, there is.

Go for smart growth

“For the first time since World War II, global growth is forecast to turn negative—and that's an optimistic forecast, relative to the possibility of a global lost decade,” says Umair Haque, director of Havas Media Lab, an innovation advisory company. “Today's leaders are plugging dikes, bailing out industries and banks as they fail. Yet, what negative global growth suggests is that the problem is of a different order: that we have reached the boundaries of a kind of growth.” Umair’s manifesto for smart growth is worth reading.

Obviously, with the changing circumstances, and in the face of the gawking absurdities of our growth model, we ought to respond to the crisis with a paradigmatic shift. Call it smart growth (Haque) or humane capitalism (Sen) or less selfish capitalism (Richard Layard), its time has come. The sooner we set about figuring it out and implementing it the better, for we are running against time.

(First published in MIA Asia blog)

Review: Past Caring

“Say something nice,” demands one of the characters in the play Past Caring. Saying nice things matters for human beings. But it becomes the first causality when people start discriminating against other people, when they begin to celebrate their differences for all the wrong reasons—resulting in racism, denial of justice and exploitation. That is one of the principal themes of Past Caring, the most recent production from Necessary Stage. The play is written and directed by the award-winning Playwright-Director team of Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan. It is inspired by a poem written by Australian writer Henry Lawson.

The play is an ambitious take on serious themes (adoption, racism, displacement, abandonment, family, territories) and the story encompasses Singapore and Australia, exploring the subject with a stereoscopic vision. There are three main episodes in the drama: the opening one is set during the Second Great War, another one is set in the 1970s and the episode in between deals with the present.

Four main actors Leroy Parsons (Australia), Glynis Angell (Australia), Siti Khalijah (Singapore) and Sukania Venugopal (Malaysia) play a clutch of characters who expose the cracks in the two societies. The tracks include an Indian teacher in Australia distraught by a racist experience and the condescending attitude of an Australian colleague, an Indian mother with her adopted Chinese daughter who is abandoned during the Japanese attack and rivalry and eventual relationship between a Singaporean Malay student and an aboriginal student at an Australian university. There also is an episode that takes the tension, if you will, into the skies—it is a funny one where two flight attendants of ‘rival’ airlines exchange some charming repartees.

Within 70 minutes of playtime, the scene of action moves back and forth between Australia and Singapore, between the past and the present, enmeshed within a narrative that plays out so smoothly, without giving one the jolt of disconnect. That clearly shows the mastery of Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan who have structured the sequences so flawlessly. Except for the first fifteen-twenty minutes when one takes a bit of time to soak in the minimalist atmosphere and the introduction to the play’s themes, the acts unfold with such convincing speed that one is left in a tailspin of breathlessness, not able to predict when the final moment comes.

Apart from the very capable actors, the multimedia work by artists Loo Zihan (Singapore) and Kim Lawler (Australia) make one at times feel as if one were watching a piece of creative non-fiction (can you say that for a play?). Their pieces provide the hard support to the fluid acting of the quartet. Their works’ contemporariness and significance cannot be overemphasized—it even has a track of interviews with Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore where their struggles are documented. Be it a migrant labourer or a maid, their situation has been portrayed with a humaneness that warms the cockles of one’s heart.

Tony Yap’s physical dance initially seems out of place but soon he makes you accept his presence. As the play moves on, his choreography provides a counterpoint to the story in a fusion of complementariness. Films have background score. Tony Yap’s choreography becomes the background score of Past Caring. His last act amazingly gives closure to the line of a story that can happen only in a play.

The four main actors are extremely talented. They have given a riveting performance but they excel only when they are in the skin of a particular character. Their acting is spontaneous and if there was any ad libbing anywhere, the improvisation did not show.

When people say something nice, it gives a release to an inner, incipient tension. That is what happens in the play which is buoyed by a positive spirit, the spirit that wins in the end.

If politics is the art of the possible, Past Caring stretches the possibilities of drama, successfully tackling serious themes that keep hounding our societies in different garbs. Standing ovation guys!

Details

Dates: From 25 February to 8 March 2009
Wed 25 Feb - Sat 28 Feb 2009 and Thurs 5 Mar - Sat 7 Mar, 8pm
Sat 28 Feb - Sun 1 Mar 2009 and Sat 7 Mar - Sun 8 Mar 2009, 3pm

Venue: The Necessary Stage Black Box
Tickets: $27, $22

Making sense of ‘packaged’ terrorism

Book Review
Packaging Terrorism: Co-opting the News for Politics and Profit by Susan D. Moeller, 2009: Wiley-Blackwell.

If you are thinking why we are talking about a book on the media coverage of terrorism in a space like this one, let me tell you one thing upfront: One, because this is a rare and important book and two, because terrorism, no matter where you are and what your profession is, can claim you as a victim.

Also, we have witnessed routinely how Internet-savvy terrorism has become of late: terrorism sites host beheading videos and broadcast threats of attack, terrorists abuse social networks and chat rooms for recruitments, and they use applications such as Google Earth for planning attacks (as seen in last year’s Mumbai attacks). Terrorists have been successfully using the new media to imbed fear into our hearts through our eyeballs.

The larger truth is that terrorism is the politics of our times. And like politics, even if you are not interested in it, it is interested in you.

The grand narrative of our times

Every era has its own grand narrative. Ours has been, at least for the last decade or so, terrorism. Before that, Kennedy’s and Reagan’s era was about the cold war, Clinton’s about globalisation and WTO and until recently, George W. Bush’s of global terrorism and the ‘war on terror’.

This grand narrative, however, is taking yet another new direction under president Barack Obama. The express reckoning is that the global financial crisis is a greater threat to the USA than terrorism. It is an even bigger threat to the United States' national security than the al Qaeda terrorist network or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, said retired admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence, in his first appearance before the US Congress.

While the shift from terror to finance is still happening, it is a good time to look at the ogre of terrorism that has been the bane of our life and times. And if you haven’t ever thought about how the media brings the ‘news’ of terrorism to us, Dr Moeller’s book can be an eye opener. She is the director of the International Centre for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, College Park, US. If you are afraid the book will be a dry read, you are in for a surprise. The book is not jargon-heavy, is divided into short chapters and uses a lot of examples to establish claims and observations.

Packaging terrorism for our consumption

The book is about a very simple idea. “The idea is this: that it’s not the acts of terrorism that most matter in the post-9/11 world,” writes Dr Moeller in her introduction, “it’s what we are told to think about the acts of terror. Politicians tell us what to think. The media tells us what to think. Even terrorists tell us what to think. They all want to attract our attention…They all have agendas. They all are packaging terrorism for our consumption. We are the audience for all those disparate actors.”

So, in a nutshell, this book is about how to make sense of the ‘packaged’ terrorism that is thrown at us from time to time—from New York, London, Madrid, Kabul, Bali and Bombay.

Chapter by chapter, Dr Moeller builds up the gory picture of terrorism and its manipulation—by terrorists, politicians and media barons. She begins with the basics such as what is terrorism, how 9/11 happened, how president Bush and his ‘vulcans’ (Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz) crafted the war on terror—a label for their unilateralist and interventionist foreign policy goals, and how the American (and the copycat global) media responded.

Media response to the War on Terror

“The media responded as directed—and as they always have at the start of a national crisis,” writers Dr Moeller. “At the end of October 2001, the then CNN chairman Walter Isaacson wrote a memo to his staff members that ordered them to balance the broadcast images of civilian devastation in Afghanistan with reminders of the American lives lost at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.” And thus began, according to Moeller, the beginning of a misleading media spin on the war on terror. “Isaacson was wrong,” she argues. “The American public deserved to know more about the casualties and hardship in Afghanistan. The public needed to know more about the meaning and the effect of the president co-opting 9/11 and co-opting the patriotic, broad-based interest in responding through a ‘War on Terror’.”

After examining the genesis of the ‘War on Terror’, Dr Moeller brings under her microscope various media-related issues that underlie the reporting on terrorism. Some examples: use of the umbrella words and phrases such as ‘terrorist’, ‘madrassa’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’, defining terrorism, why news standards matter, and the politics of media coverage.

“Over and over, time and again, my centre’s studies revealed that the victims of terrorism rarely appear in the stories about it,” she says. “Media cover international affairs through the lens of their own country’s foreign policy—especially as articulated by its leadership.” Think of last year’s Mumbai terror attacks and how quickly it became an India and Pakistan issue, and how the media in the two countries adopted nationalistic agendas in reporting and discussing the attacks.

Citizen journalism and terrorism

With a rich cache of examples, the book traces a variety of developments in the media sector that arose while covering terrorism. One of the most fascinating aspects of these developments is the rise of citizen journalism, especially photos and videos, that came from citizens as well as professional photographers that were much discussed, many achieving iconic status. Perhaps blogs were invented just for this—when the mainstream media became shy of covering something or could not reach some areas, bloggers stepped in (remember the Baghdad blogger?) to fill the void. Very recently, the pain and suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza would not have come out in the open had it not been for the bloggers in Gaza and Israel who wrote the accounts of loss online when Israel had embargoed the foreign media in Gaza in its three weeks’ assault early this year.

The brave new world of murders and restrictions

With terrorism rampant in the world, what is most disturbing is the governments’ control (and thus manipulation) on the media coverage of the theatre of operations—in terms of restricting access to the war zones (embed restrictions) or killing of journalists. Consider these facts:

• Among the first killed by the Hutus during the genocide in Rwanda were 14 local journalists.

• How many people know that for the past decade Algeria has been ravaged by war that has left an estimated 100,000 dead? Not many, because both sides in that conflict have taken turns murdering journalists: 60 at last count. Same in Chechnya.

• Many don’t seem to be noticing that there is less and less coverage of the war in Iraq. By the summer of 2008, noted the New York Times, there were only half a dozen Western photographers covering the country, even though 150,000 American and 4,100 British troops remained engaged there. Why? Because of the “danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war.”

To ensure free and fair coverage of terrorism, the priority must be to build civil societies, including media, from inside out and the ground up, suggests the author. In conclusion, she says that we need to move beyond spin, ask questions because we don’t have all the answers, and evaluate what we are being told. “We need a vibrant, spirited, diverse, and pluralistic media at home and around the world,” she says.

To deal with the global curse of terrorism, the media needs to rise above all kinds of boundaries and re-evaluate their exceptionalism. Dr Moeller aptly recalls Dr Martin Luther King’s message: “A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.” (‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’, 1967).

“If we do not act,” added Dr King for action, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. Now let us begin.”

Even though it seems to be too late, can we still begin now?

Published first as my blog entry at www.mis-asia.com

Guest blog post: If I were an Indian Hindu

I am honoured to publish this guest blog post from my friend, philosopher and guide, Amir Ullah Khan, who is an eminent Indian economist and author of many books. He wrote this article as a companion piece to one of my earlier pieces, If I were an Indian Hindu:

I think it is the idea of India that has killed the spirit of India. Nationalism came to roost in the deadly nineties and submerged all those wonderfully diverse identities that constituted a loose country filled with several diversities. If I were an Indian Hindu, I wouldn’t think differently. Because the community I belong to is the middle aged urban India, with rural roots, someone who has played cricket when young and watches movies whenever possible. I am also a Muslim.

I have not met any Hindu Indian till date. My friends from Hyderabad were quite local in their language, tastes and mindsets. They spoke a delightfully cute mix of Telugu, English and Urdu that they still speak. They did not understand the ways of the North Indian outsider and they positively disliked Hindi as a language. The only Hindi element enjoyed by all were the angry young films that came from Bombay then and appealed to the sentiments of the left leaning youth studying Technology at Osmania University and having firm opinions on the pernicious US influence on Nicaragua and Libya. We all saw a number of communal riots starting 1979 and ending in 1989. The reason, we argued was a weak police force and a one upmanship within the dominant Congress party. The moment a one man dominated party called the Telugu Desam came, communal riots were history and the same police force was now impartial and equally insensitive to all.

Then I moved to Gujarat, now famous for its state sponsored murder of a couple of thousand Muslims during the one week of murder and mayhem in the year 2002. The Gujarat of the late eighties was quite the opposite. All my friends then were just emerging from adolescence and had recently found freedom through consuming alcohol. Gujarat denied them this liberty as it was, and continues to be, a prohibition state. Their liquor came usually from police stations where the constable made some money selling confiscated bottles at exactly double the Maximum Retail price printed (In India there is this strange regulation that makes manufacturers declare the maximum price on labels). If the police did not have stocks, the underworld did and was recommended by the local police station. The Gujarat underworld was kin to the more powerful ones in neighbouring Bombay and was usually Muslim, who did not drink themselves, but were always to be relied upon by the thirsty students of management in Gujarat then. There existed a healthy respect and brotherhood that defied any potential divide that would come up later.

My third set of friends was the civil servants that would soon run India’s bureaucracy. We were all training to be government servants in the early nineties. Most students there couldn’t care less, despite the fact that the Babri masjid had just been demolished. Almost everyone was worried about the state she would be allotted to and would do anything, including convenient marriages, to go to a good state. The Indian civil service remains delightfully provincial in this regard and bureaucracy that gets allotted to difficult provinces in India suffers all life. Almost everyone wanted to avoid Gujarat, Orissa, Kerala and the North East. In the search of a good posting and at the beginning of a career, no one really cared about being communal or nationalist.

Then I moved to Delhi and knew there was a change that was taking place quietly. We were all growing up. And I realized that I had changed. The transition from a simple small town life to a relatively well off big city existence now started alienating me from all my earlier fraternities. School friends had been forgotten, college mates were all in the US, the business school fraternity was really busy and the bureaucratic batch mates had spread far and wide. Suddenly there were no roots any more. Around me, in the nineties, the concept of India was gaining ground. What was a vague romantic notion was now becoming concretized. People were doing what they had never felt the need to before – defining their Indianness. In this quest, there was a serious problem – India was never a nation, so there were no parameters or benchmarks. Therefore some took the easy route of defining what was not Indian and then proving that that was not what they were. Hindi became important and by now the Bombay talkies had taken Hindi to all corners of the country and made almost all parts understand the language. Television and its opera helped do this at lesser cost.

Now a pan India Hindu identity was emerging and noticing the fault lines that were sometimes defined as Sikh, sometimes as Muslim and now Christian. History and historical mistakes were now being studied by ideology driven neo converts to the concept of India. Violence spread as the state watched in confusion. How could it strike at people who were proclaiming their love for the country? Is someone who claims to be protecting local interests, local culture and language a patriot or an irrational maniac? But all this is an aberration, and I continue to think so despite the sad news on communalisation that keeps coming in every now and then. I met most of my friends this year again in various twenty year, fifteen year and ten year re unions. They were all the same. Nothing had changed. We laughed and ate, shared anecdotes and pulled each other’s legs. The India as I remember it from the last century lives on.

The author is an economist and the director of India Development Foundation, Gurgaon, India.

Bend it like Balli

Just writing something end of the day or being affirmed by the recognition of a fellowship, being recognized by fellow writers and critics, that is very humbling and it makes me feel like I am doing something worthwhile, says Balli Jaswal, the youngest winner of the David T K Wong Fellowship, in a tête-à-tête with Zafar Anjum, editor of Writers Connect.

I was facing a very unusual dilemma when one evening last November I found myself walking to the Arts House to interview Balli Jaswal. While I was curious to meet Balli, who is a young journalist and a first-time novelist, I was not sure how to engage her in a meaningful discussion.

The reason for my dilemma was this: for most writers interviewed, one has the benefit of reading the subject’s works (novels, essays, stories, journalistic pieces, poems) in advance to help form an opinion. In Balli’s case what she has been working on (a sample of that text, not available to me, won her the 2007 David T K Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, UK) is not in the public domain yet; at the same time, her winning of the prestigious fellowship establishes her credentials as a ‘writer’ beyond doubt and the potential she embodies as a successful future writer.

That’s why when I met the vivacious Balli, I started with a very basic question—one that sprang from my mind with a tinge of Naipaulian determinism and determination: When did she ‘decide’ to become a writer?

“I don’t know if I ever decided it,” Balli said, attentively noticing the nuances of the word ‘decide’ that I had used in my question. “I think it occurred to me as something that I was good at doing, something I really enjoyed doing …I just kept doing…”

“I don’t think I can still be defined as a writer,” she said putting the matter to rest.

At one level, Balli had stated the absolute truth. Her first book was yet to be out (Naipaul once said that he did not think he had become a writer until he had published five books). At another level, she was being humble. Like the past David T K Wong Fellowship winners (Balli is the youngest winner), she too has been marked, destined for a literary stardom.

The making of a writer

Balli had a childhood that spanned across many countries in Asia, including Japan, Russia, the Philippines and Singapore. That experience, of living and growing in many cities, of dealing with people of different cultures, informed her ways of seeing the world. “I gathered a realization that communication is very different for me than other people,” she said. “The word, the language that you choose becomes very important (in a multicultural setting). You tend to listen to dialogue differently.”

Out of this body of experience, according to her, schooling in Singapore played a significant role. “Schooling in international schools, writing competitions in Singapore really honed that drive for writing,” she said.

After schooling, Balli decided to pursue her dreams of becoming a writer. Not everyone agreed that this was a good move. Nevertheless, she carried on and got to study creative writing in the USA at Hollins University and George Mason University. In fact, she ended up attending the same creative writing course (at Hollins University) that was attended by Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai.

But did the creative writing programme really help her? “I think more than anything it gave me confidence,” she said. “It gave me some affirmation that what I was writing was important. You do a lot more criticism than writing and you tend to learn what other people are doing right and wrong. So that sort of training was important for me to become a writer.”

But not everybody is fortunate enough to study creative writing. Can such unfortunate people still become writers, I meant to ask her. “As long as you instill that discipline (of writing) for yourself and have a community that you can turn to and have a sense of confidence in your writing, you can do it,” she said.

“It can never hurt you to be in a creative writing programme,” she added matter-of-factly. “Even out of your assignment you get a volume of work, even if it is crap that you don’t want to look at again.”

Winning the fellowship

After finishing her creative writing course, Balli returned to Singapore to work on her first novel, When Amrit Returns. She also took up a teaching assignment. That’s when she was awarded the 2007 T K Wong Fellowship.

“I was in complete shock,” she said on her getting the fellowship. “And I was just elated. It was exactly what I wanted or needed. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I think it is the highlight of my life.”

Balli said that when she was shortlisted for the fellowship, she thought ok, she had got that far. “But when I got it, that was really beyond my expectation,” she said.

The fellowship took her to the University of East Anglia (UEA) for about one year. “It was an interesting experience,” she said recounting her experience. “I had just a vast amount of time all of a sudden. Before that I had been teaching in Singapore. Very busy all the time. Didn’t have much time to write as anyone with a full time job would. And suddenly I had the entire day, the whole day to sit and write and I knew I was prone to freezing up – OMG what do I do now. So I tried to work myself out of that a lot. I took it one day at a time which I realized it was a good step to take.”

But there also was a downside to the experience. “It was a very isolating experience in a lot of ways,” she said. “That is the nature of that kind of position I guess.”

During her time at UEA, apart from writing, she also got to meet other students doing their Masters. “They were really nice” she said. She also had a mentor who was supposed to guide her. “But it was a flexible relationship,” she added.

In UK, most of the time she was working on her book. Between breakfast and lunch, she cooked her own meals. She used to sketch out what she was going to write in the day, know where to start and know where to stop. “I tried to churn out something everyday,” she said. “I thought it was important to do.”

An Indian writer?

Taking a break from writing related questions, I asked her how she saw herself, what kind of writer she thought she was. Did she think she was an Indian writer or a Singaporean writer or a hyphenated one?

“The writing that I do I can’t just call it Indian writing,” she said. “It is not based in India but my characters are mostly Indian. I am a Singaporean Indian writer who wrote the only Singapore Indian book so far and hopefully there will be more so I will be in the company of others who have done the same thing. If not, I would like to be described as an immigrant writer.”

Whatever way publishers and critics will pigeonhole Balli in the hierarchy of writers, she is certainly interested in the stories of immigration like many of her contemporary expat Indian writers. “I am very interested in the background of immigration and how it is represented in literature and how multiculturalism shakes that landscape,” she said. “I have been an immigrant in so many different contexts.”

Balli also likes to explore issues of cultural isolation. “You can be a part of a culture and be still outside it,” she said.

In the same vein, she finds language very interesting, how in different ways language is used and how people perceive language.

Her first novel

The conversation now veered towards a new topic: Balli’s first novel, When Amrit Returns. “It takes place between the late 60s and the early 90s,” she said about the temporal setting of her work in progress. “It centres around the life of a Punjabi family in Singapore whose lives start to unravel when their youngest daughter changes and goes missing. That is the first part of the book. Physically she comes back but mentally she is not all there. From any reader’s point of view it is quite clear that she has a mental illness. But the family does not recognize it as such because they are still rooted in tradition. Singapore becomes third world to first very rapidly in that timeframe bit people don’t catch up with that. So, they think she is not well raised or she is possessed. And even when they realize that she has a mental illness they don’t want to deal with it because of the taboos surrounding it. But there is a twist in the end” (she laughs).

“In a lot of ways, Singaporeans have lost their homeland. I left Singapore for nine months and when I can back, there were new buildings. My parents who were born here also talk about the loss of their homeland. They lived in very different circumstances than they are living now.”

Many interviewers and readers would want to know how other writers or their writings have influenced a budding writer. I am no different, so I asked Balli about her favourite writers. I tend to like books than writers, was her reply. Fair enough, I thought. Then she took some names. On top of her list is the Indian writer (who now lives in Canada) Rohington Mistry. “If he wrote the phone book, I would read it,” she said about Mistry. She waxed eloquent about Satnam Sanghera’s biography of his mother (the best biog I have ever read), wowed about Margaret Attwood’s Cat’s Eye and raved about Yiyun Li’s short stories.

Towards the end of the interview, I again took Balli to the elemental question—what did she feel about her journey so far, what did it all mean to her? Her reply showed the depth of her understanding of the state of being a writer. “Just writing something end of the day or being affirmed by the recognition of a fellowship, being recognized by fellow writers and critics, that is very humbling and that makes me feel like I am doing something worthwhile,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t refuse a huge advance” she said with laughter that I will always remember her for.

Enter the world of Tamil Pulp

Book Review

Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction
Selected and Translated by Prathim K. Chakravarthy
Edited by Rakesh Khanna
Blaft Publications Pvt. Ltd, Chennai
366 pages
US$ 17.95

Growing up in India in the 1970s and 80s, like millions of fellow Indians, I too was exposed to pulp fiction in Hindi and Urdu. It was sometimes in high school when the transition from reading funny comics and magazines like Suman Saurav and Parag to Hindi and Urdu detective potboilers and crime magazines took place. Unlike watching masala Bollywood films that have always been accepted on their own terms, reading pulp was always a secret activity. It provided a guilty pleasure.

While I remained in tune with the developments in the pulp fiction arena in North India’s two principal languages, I was unaware of its cousins in the Southern India because of the linguistic divide between North India and South India. Thanks to Blaft Publications of Chennai, I recently got the opportunity to a taste the Southern fare in a good dollop in the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction that came out last year.

The anthology has stories by 10 of the India’s best-selling Tamil authors, which have been translated into English for the first time. The stores featured in this 366 page anthology include from authors such as Rajesh Kumar, Ramanichandran, Subha, Pattukkottai Prabhakar, Indra Sounder Rajan, Pushpa Thangadorai, Vidya Subramaniam, Tamilvanan, Brajanand V.K. and Resaki.

When I sampled some of the stories in this collection, I realized how the pulp fiction writing in the two Indian languages (Hindi and Tamil) was similar. The collection is a significant addition to Indian writing not just because of its pleasure quotient, but also because, as the translator notes in his introduction, “this book is an attempt to claim the status of ‘literature’ for a huge body of writing that has rarely if ever made it into an academic library, despite having been produced for nearly a century.”

The stories in this anthology have all the hallmark elements of pulp fiction—suspense, murders, detectives, police inspectors, mad scientists, murderous robots, lovers and prostitutes, and plots sprinkled with a fair amount of titillation. The stories have interesting plots; even the titles are so interesting—Hurricane Vij, Matchstick Number One, Silicon Hearts, Tokyo Rose—just to mention a few. When you read them you can see that some of the stories such as Matchstick Number One and Tokyo Rose could have easily been made into Tamil masala capers.

Apart from the stories, one of the most interesting aspects of this collection is the author introductions. For example, the author Subha (Hurricane Vij) is the nom de plume of not one but two authors: Suresh and Balakrishnan. They have been writing together since their school days and together have co-authored more than 600 long and short novels. Similarly, the writer of the story Matchstick Number One, Rajesh Kumar, may well be the world’s most prolific living writer of fiction—he has written and published more than 1250 novels and over 2000 short stories. Unbelievable, isn’t it?

I immensely enjoyed reading the stories in this collection. If you ever loved pulp fiction in any Indian language, you should not miss this anthology.

Book of the year for the Wall Street bunglers, and you

Whether you are a winner or a loser, Ashish Jaiswal’s True Dummy should be on your reading desk

True Dummy
A Fable of Existence
By Ashish Jaiswal
Publisher - Rupa & Co.
Paperback - 247 pages

When I started reading Ashish Jaiswal’s debut novel, True Dummy, I was hoping to read something familiar—and I mean it not as a compliment but a complaint that I hold against most Indian writers. The first few pages seemed to read like a pastoral with its bucolic charm or a tale from a small town. Is it another Slumdog Millionaire set in the mountains, I wondered. Village life, mountains, valley of flowers, rivers, small boys, Ammas, shopkeepers, minstrels—was Ashish treading on the Ruskin Bond territory?

Turned out it was no Ruskin Bond, no Slumdog Millionaire, but more Paulo Coehlo, and more Luck by Chance, perhaps even deeper than them.

Honestly speaking, the narrative might not grab you from the start—I had to struggle a bit (which happens with most novels I try to read) and keep the faith. Paragraph after paragraph failed to make me suspend my disbelief (you might have a different experience—every reader brings his own experiences to a text) but there came moments when I recognized the wisdom of the writer, the genuine observations of an extraordinary mind, the imagination of an adroit narrator.

As I kept on reading beyond the first few chapters, I was defeated in all my expectations—soon I was on a heroic journey along with the protagonist of the novel who starts out to seek fame and fortune in this world like most underdogs. He fails by all standards, even his own. And then he succeeds, not realizing what he was doing—until we are shown an unfinished piece of the puzzle.

Like a skillful magician, Ashish creates a mirror of the world (a mayanagri, if you will) in the novel where our basic human motivations and failings are reflected in a stripped down version—as if in a TV show, a la Chocolate Factory, where we all come seeking fame or riches, to be the next American Idol or the next superstar or the next whatever. And we fail: “I wanted to be the most famous and found myself amidst faces that nobody cared to notice. Nervous faces, cowardly faces, depressed faces…faces that said at the first look that they were born to lose.” Sounds familiar? There you go.

Ashish’s novel is so different in many senses. Though he lives in Oxford, UK, pursuing a DPhil from the University of Oxford, his work has been brought out by an Indian publisher. The novel’s title itself is so uncommon (I am talking in terms of the usual stuff that we see coming out of the Indian writing in English stable): the title is intriguing and yet has a refreshing allure about it, not reminding you of the Red Bulls, The Boat in the Mangrove and The Bride of Sitapur (all made up titles) type of commonplace titles.

Ashish’s novel may not be a great literary work (perhaps he did not even attempt to achieve any literary greatness in his work) with its many cardboard characters, uncomplicated and trick-less language and a straight narrative structure, it has great potential to be turned into a video game, with the Rings and its crooked tail and its three gates—MoneyGate, PowerGate and FameGate. Or it could be the next Slumgdog Millionaire meets The Lawrence of Arabia. Are the UTVs and the Warner Brothers listening?

Ashish’s tale might be Indian in tone and setting, but in terms of its ethos and message, this is a universal book (even the characters’ names such as Geoga and Verona are translation friendly). And so insightful, you might want to re-evaluate your approach to life after you have read it. If you are successful in life, you might see your success differently after reading True Dummy. If are a failure, you might feel otherwise about yourself. You may be inspired to do what the protagonist does in the novel.

If you like to read a book full of pearls of wisdom or quotable quotes, I bet this is the book for you. There are some dialogues or observations that you may want to note down in your diary. How about this one: “A fallback plan is for people who walk backwards, hence they all end up where they start.” A good quote for a film poster, with the Rings and all that, nahi? Or how about this one: “If a person has to tell what he does, then probably he does not do anything worth telling.” You find it cheesy? New age humbug? (Humm, are you a snooty high-brow lit reader?). Never mind. Salim-Javed would have liked it.

On a serious note, I strongly recommend this book to all those guys at the Wall Street and the big banks who have created a huge mess in our world, to the Bernie Madoffs and the B. Ramalinga Rajus of the world—it could be a good read in prison. At the same time, I think this book should be read by our ambitious youth, from Chandni Chowk to China to Connecticut, who ought to know what is truly valuable in life.

Elegy/John Updike

Yesterday I was in a theatre watching Elegy, based on Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. At one point I cried when Penelope Cruz broke the news of her advanced stage cancer to her lit professor/writer/lover Ben Kingsley.

This morning when I opened the pages of the newspaper, I read about the death of John Updike. He died of cancer. I loved John's non-fiction, especially his book reviews and essays. I read some of his novels but did not enjoy them. The language he used was so beautiful I could never reach the story. More than his, I assume it was my limitation.

On an unrelated note, I read this story on self-publishers in the NYT that says what I have always maintained:

The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.

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Indians in Singapore

From my cover story, Singapore Se, published in Khabar, Atlanta, USA:

Can you name a country which is the richest in its region, with Indians forming less than 10 percent of its population, and yet it has an Indian president, many Indian cabinet ministers and a thriving professional class of Indians with their own global glossies and radio stations?

It is not Dubai. It is Singapore.

That’s why it didn’t seem odd when I was recently chatting about Singapore’s Indian diaspora—new and old—with some American students in a café on Orchard Road (Singapore’s famous strip of upscale malls). These students from a college in Indiana were in Singapore to conduct research on the Indian diaspora in the island state. Why did they choose Singapore for their study? Because it is the microcosm of the Indian diaspora in a globalized city state in all its hues and colors—old and new, rich and poor, from all regions of India, and representing more or less all cultures and religions of India.

Here is a succinct description of the Indian diaspora’s situation in Singapore. This is a diaspora whose story might not have been narrated to the world, but it is a story of grit and hard work and of final triumph that needs to be broadcast and celebrated.

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How to talk about books you haven’t read

Thank God, most people don’t read books. Imagine how drab a conversation would be if it were only about books—unless those involved were writers or literature students. At least in Singapore, what I have seen during my MRT train rides or on buses is not very intellectually threatening—most people either read The Bible or self-help guides or get-rich-quick books, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad kind of books. Looking at the titles of these books, you know these are not garrulous folks—they want some peace of mind and soul or want to get ahead in life. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you happen to find yourself in an unpleasant situation (with a pleasant person, let us say a person of the opposite sex you can’t ignore or a person of power you have to make a deal with) of talking about a book that you haven’t read, worry not. There is help. There are ways to come out of the situation unscathed, even sounding impressive and intelligent.

You don’t believe it. Roger that. Neither did I in the first place.

But this piece of reassuring wisdom came to me during the last happy holidays season when I hit upon a book by Pierre Bayard. It is called How to talk about books you haven’t read. Yes, you read it right. That is the title of the book. I had read a review of the book in The New York Times sometime ago but hadn’t had the opportunity to lay my hands on the book until now. I read it and I was convinced.

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The curious case of B. Ramalinga Raju

Confessing fraud in his letter to the board of Satyam, Satyam Computer’s founder and chairman B. Ramalinga Raju wrote: “It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.”

The allusion to a tiger in this sentence reminded me of last year’s Booker prize winning novel, The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, a fellow Indian writer. Through his novel as well as author interviews, Adiga postulates that only through two ways can a poor man rise above his rank in India’s current socio-economic system: crime and politics.

How interesting to note that Raju uses the same vehicle of tiger—a symbol of turbo-charged unstoppable growth—to convey what he was dealing with! Juxtapose it with Balram, The White Tiger, the lead character in Adiga’s novel. The narrative shows the contrast between India’s rise as a modern global economy and the crime-fuelled ambitions of Balram who escapes rural poverty to seek a destiny of riches.

But the relationship between the real Raju and the fictional Balram ends here. Unlike Balram, Raju did not exactly come from a poor family. After his father migrated to the state capital Hyderabad from his ancestral village Garagaparru, he started buying land in the city. Raju was sent to Ohio in the US to study business. He came back to help his father in the construction business. Raju grew the business, achieved great success, finally diversifying into textiles and even software—now he was firmly saddled on ‘the tiger’. Tax holidays and India’s outsourcing boom helped Satyam, that was started with 20 employees in 1987, to become India’s fourth largest outsourcer.

But Raju was not happy with the number four status. He wanted to be number one. And that desire to become the numero uno in his field—by hook or by crook—caused his ultimate downfall.

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A moment for India's powerless

Even amid the darkness that surrounds us, the news that Slumdog Millionaire has won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and its director Danny Boyle the directing award for the film has cheered me up.

Slumdog is a fascinating film--the story is not new for Hindi film viewers but the way the movie has been shot and directed (the narrative structure itself) is what makes it different from other films. I saw the film side by side with Mira Nair's similar-themed Salaam Bombay, and the effect was stunning (though I admit that Boyle's take is more uplifting and perhaps Bollywoodesque). It takes a lot of courage to make a film on an unglamorous subject--the story of two Muslim boys from Bombay's slums, who are orphaned in a communal riot--and how one of them grows up to become a millionaire through a TV show--at the cost of the sacrifice of his namazi but criminal and trigger happy elder brother. Boyle had the guts and the wit to make a movie like Slumdog Millionaire. Bollywood's filmmakers should take a lesson from this win.

The Satyam scandal

Hear me in a special podcast discussing the Satyam scandal that has rocked India's corporate world with IDC's Philip Carter and Springboard Research's Dane Anderson.

Go here

Or copy and paste this url in your browser:
www.mis-asia.com/__data/assets/file/0018/134901/Satyam_podcast_edited090109.mp3

The art of war

From my mis-asia.com blog:

If you have been following the unfortunate Israel-Gaza conflict, you might have seen a video on YouTube in which several ‘Hamas’ (Palestinians) members are seen loading ‘short-range rockets’ into a truck moments before a massive explosion. According to media reports, this video, uploaded by a member of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on YouTube, is the most viewed IDF video on the channel. It has been watched more than 360,000 times.

You get what you see, right? Not exactly. According to an investigation by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the rockets seen in the video were not rockets but gas canisters; the victims were not members of Hamas but civilians moving welding equipment after their workshop had been damaged in the Israeli air strikes.

Chances are that you have not heard about B’Tselem or its investigation on the above-mentioned episode. And that precisely is the point.

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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Isreal enters Gaza

Welcome to a new year, 2009!

But how new is this new year? It sounds very much like the last year or worse. Even before the old year could be rung out, Israel started pounding Gaza--and this was carried out along with a massive Israeli PR exercise. The corporate media the world over, accustomed to bite the easy crumbs of information handed out by the PR companies, reported what was obvious PR shit. However, some commentators were brave enough to have delved a little deeper into the issue.

Israel has been saying that its aerial bombings of Gaza were provoked by Hamas' Qassam rockets. Hamas is definitely wrong in shooting the rockets, even during a truce period. But is that the entire truth? According to Sara Roy (London Review of Books), it is not:

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

According to Tariq Ali (The Guardian, UK), the Israeli attacks on Gaza are motivated by political goals:

The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.

Add to the big picture of motives and goals Israel's military-security-industrial complex's need to demonstrate the effectiveness of its weapons, the surgical precision of its bombings. The Israeli military gloated how in about 3 minutes it was able to bombard multiple locations in Gaza. The footage will help establish Israel's arms industry's effectiveness to its customers and would-be customers--Israel is the world's 4th largest arms supplier now. And in a recent interview to the New Yorker magazine, Naomi Klein, the author of Shock Doctrine, clearly told how Israel's commitment to the peace process has been compromised by its security industry.

Also, sometimes I have this suspicion that Israel wants to incite Hezbollah and finally Iran to take part in this war and finish the Neocon agenda before Bush's final departure. Let us see how it all turns out but the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is appalling.