Death of the small town

Pankaj Mishra on one of India's vanishing cultures:

Perhaps this dwindling of middle-class culture was inevitable, part of the price of "progress". A generation ago, my own parents and their peers had moved out of their restricted settings and taken up jobs in remote cities and towns. Their children are now scattered across India (and increasingly across the world). Besieged by the usual middle-class anxieties of jobs and careers, we lose touch, forgetting names and faces. Few people show up when some of these children get married or have their thread ceremonies. Deaths and funerals have turned into lonely, often desolate affairs. Two years ago, one of my uncles, who was afflicted with Alzheimer's, watched his wife bleed to death after an accident at his home in a Lucknow suburb - a fate unimaginable in the close-knit world of his childhood.

Of course, the destruction of old bonds of family and community and shared culture has been faster elsewhere, in Europe, America - even China... Still, it is hard today, 60 years after independence, not to see poignancy in the Nehruvian elite's tryst with destiny; to realise how little the makers of modern India knew of their suburban future: the high-rise apartment complexes in which they would die pining for a patch of weak wintry sun on a green lawn.

Brand India's soft power of literature

Siddhartha Deb on India's soft power of literature. Read the intro of his piece; the history described there should not be forgotten:

The relationship between Indian writers and western publishers has been in many ways a necessary collaboration, and one that does not always take the form of accepting big advances from multinational conglomerates: for instance, Arundhati Roy, in spite of the bestseller status of her novel, The God of Small Things, has published most of her essay collections with the smallest of American publishers, the radical Cambridge-based South End Press. But publication in the west has also produced a kind of dual identity for the Indian writer in English. If successful in the west, especially in the amount of noise made by the publicity machine, the Indian writer is understood to be part of Brand India, using the "soft power" of literature to consolidate the more muscular geopolitical reach of the state. Some writers play along with this, performing the role of the native informant with ease. But for others, and I believe this is what makes them attractive to publishers and readers in the west, writing is shaped by their sense of literature as an engaged art, one that interprets the world as an imperfect, unfinished place rather than one where a universal system has laid down the perfect, eternal gridwork of inequality.

I don't think, by any means, that it is only Indian writers who are working in this manner, or that they have some sort of special dispensation to do so, but they seem to have the advantage (and the drawback) of using English, at a historical moment when the west has turned its attention on India and China. It is a crossroads that offers very different alternatives to Indian writers: that of cashing it in by becoming minor entertainers for the powerful and the privileged, or that of looking for new forms and new ways of engagement with the stories that demand to be told. The upheaval we are caught up in is so vast, and so uncertain - is this the best of times? the worst? - that Indian writing has barely begun to take the measure of the conditions in which it functions.

Those days...

James Kelman recalls his early days as a writer in The Guardian:

The lack of working time was a continual source of stress, as it still is. The frustration worms its way through rage and bitterness, and can lead to breakdown, and silence. I returned to the lives, as well as the works, of writers and artists, particularly Franz Kafka.

I saw it as the fundamental and shaping struggle in each, the need to do your work in the face of the socio-economic reality. There was no place in society for your work, as with Cézanne, van Gogh and the rest. Your only requirement was to do their work. Who the fuck were they? These bastards. Who wants to do their work? Let them do it themselves, tell them to go and fuck.

Young writers seek bonds of solidarity with older generations; we look for things in common. If a writer comes to mean something to us we want to discover affinities. How did they live their life? What hardships did they endure to pursue their art? How long did it take them to write a story? Kafka did The Metamorphosis in a couple of nights. Oh, I don't believe it, no, no, for godsake, no.

Yes. Now pick yourself up, brush yourself down. Van Gogh did not even begin until he was 28. And look at Tolstoy, a hero at 22, a hero at 72. Phew.

I still found difficulty in connecting with writers who had no reason to worry about money and job security. I was prejudiced against Turgenev for years, until it dawned on me how influenced I had been by Dostoevsky's judgment, arrived at through a suicidal gambling habit. I would have sat down for a game of poker with Dostoevsky but knew I would not have enjoyed it. I aye imagined him jumping up from the table and flinging a cape round his shoulders, This is too slow, too slow! and marching out into the night.

Bergman: In search of 'that secretive light'

When acclaimed filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, died on July 30th, some remarkable obituaries were written in his memory.

I love reading well-written obits. And, by far, The Economist, in my humble opinion and within the limited range of my reading, generally does the best job in this field.

Here's how The Economist paid its homage to the great filmmaker:

Critics wondered whether there was a general message in his films. Mr Bergman sometimes denied he had one. Yet he usually found a saving moment in the misery: a selfless communication, in word or gesture, between two human beings. At the end of “Wild Strawberries” the hero, an aged professor, is belatedly reconciled with his family and his past. As the scene was filmed, Mr Bergman noted, the old actor's face “shone with secretive light as if reflected from another reality”. That secretive light, or hidden love, was just what the director had been searching for.

Film critic David Thomson beautifully analyzes Bergman's life and work in this piece in The Guardian (I love it when he brings up this little but significant fact: Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success--that itself is such a deeply thought remark):

The way Bergman’s work and Bergman’s pain were in equation struck me early on and almost by chance. In 1957, he made Wild Strawberries, in which a great man, a professor, is going to a kind of film festival to be honoured for his career. He is Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjostrom (the pioneering figure in the Swedish film industry and Bergman’s mentor). But as he travels toward his honorary degree, so Borg dreams and remembers and feels shocked by his private failures. We can see that he is a cold man attracted to the warmth of others - and I think Bergman saw himself the same way.

Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success. I realised that it was the same “story” as a film I had seen two years earlier - Citizen Kane, in which an old man dies and has his last thoughts filled by the same grim debate: was I wretched in all my glory? Maybe all great films say the same thing.

And here's an appraisal of the filmmaker by another admired filmmaker, Shyam Benegal:

As a filmmaker what I have appreciated deeply are his brilliant scripts. He was an exceptional storyteller, his films always had very strong, powerful narratives. When I heard of the news of his passing away, I picked up The Seventh Seal (in which a knight plays a game of chess with Death) to watch it all over again. It is terribly powerful, philosophical and so wonderfully shot with such strong imagery.

He had pretty strong views on films and filmmakers. Film for him was something magical—film as dream, film as music. "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul," he said. The act of making a film, to him, was like working out your dreams. He loved Andrei Tarkovsky for that reason. Bergman created dreamscapes on celluloid. It's not as though the characters were a dream, they were all very real and rooted but engaged in existential questioning. He was also appreciative of Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman wrote that "a film is not a document, it is a dream". He looked up to Tarkovsky because he felt "he moves with naturalness in a room of dreams". Bergman thought that he himself could "creep inside" that room but only a few times. He was very critical of Antonioni. He felt Antonioni aspired to be in the same room of dreams but got "suffocated by his own tediousness".

A question of justice

Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt has emerged, for all the wrong reasons, as the poster boy for the Mumbai bomb blasts. Scores of others, the non-Bollywood type perpetrators of the crime, the ones you might have seen in Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday, have got death sentences and life imprisonments.

But some have chosen to look deeper into the issue, beyond the gloss and the mayhem:

Professor Amitava Kumar asks on his blog:

The verdicts have finally been delivered in the Bombay blasts case. Most of the guilty are in jail. But the bombings had been in response to the earlier riots, in which three times more people were killed. Why have those who were guilty of inciting violence and murder during the riots gone unpunished?

Vir Sanghvi writes on the Mumbai blast verdict in HT:

No Muslim family who lost everything in those riots received anything like justice, let alone compensation. The murderers, unrepentant to the end, were elected to high office and the policemen who facilitated the massacres were promoted. Official inquiries into the riots (such as the Srikrishna Report) were ignored. And then, after the blasts, TADA was used indiscriminately against honest and blameless Muslims.

So let’s not waste our time worrying about Indian Muslims and Al-Qaeda. Let’s stick to our own riots and our own terrorist reprisals. The Bombay blasts case shows that the bombers have been (fairly) punished. But the rioters still run free, and the victims of those massacres have found no justice.

Rather than be concerned about a few inept doctors and a couple of failed car bombs in a faraway country, let’s think about our own blasts and our own system of justice. And let’s pause to consider whether the next time a bomb goes off in Bombay we should blame Osama bin Laden or whether we should consider our own failure to provide justice to those whose families, homes and lives were destroyed in the Bombay riots.

No such thing as nonfiction

Michael Ondaatje on the influence of film on his work:

Everyone in our time is influenced by film, and TV, and iPods. I think that it influences the speed of books a great deal. I’m not sure that I’m influenced by film, even though I’m supposed to be writing scenes. It’s in the editing of my books where a scene is created. I take editing very seriously. It’s a very detailed, careful element. I think some writers don’t appreciate the microscopic craft of the editing process.

And he says this on his narrative style:

My first books, including Running in the Family were about specific people. Then, by the time of In the Skin of a Lion, I was interested in more than one narrator. There’s a quotation by John Berger in the front pages of Skin: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one”. That’s almost a political statement as well. You can’t rely on person “A” to give you the full truth of a story.

Rahul's story

Harsh Mandar in The Hindustan Times:

It was a devastating fury that raged through the young boy’s heart. It died down almost as quickly as it rose, but it was too late. By then it had already destroyed many lives. A 14-year-old domestic help working in Mumbai was so infuriated one afternoon by the obdurate refusal of his employer to pay him his accumulated wages that he impetuously picked up an iron vessel in the kitchen and smashed it on her head repeatedly. She screamed, bleeding profusely, struggled briefly, then crumpled on to the kitchen floor, motionless.

More frightened than he had ever been in his life, the boy ran out of the flat to the nearest bus stop. It was deserted. As he crouched in a corner, weeping inconsolably, the terrifying reality began to slowly seep in. He had gravely wounded a woman of means. He was absolutely alone in a strange city, with no relatives or friends to whom he could go for shelter or advice, to suggest to him a way out of his sudden horrific predicament.

His heart heaved, as he desperately missed his parents, their thatched hut, his village in Jharkhand and even their poverty. It was a dreadful mistake. He should never have come to Mumbai in the first place, however hard life was back at home. His only chance now was to return to his village, before the police discovered his crime.

But Rahul had no money, therefore he could not board a bus. Instead, he alternately ran and walked as fast as he could, breathless and panting, his heart beating against his breast, to the train station. There were barely minutes left for the train to depart, when a police inspector identified him, and he was bundled into a jeep and driven to the police station. The petrified boy put up no resistance, and told them truthfully all that had happened. “The sethani is dead. You will have to go to jail,” they told him. “You have destroyed your life. There is nothing that anyone can do for you.”

Read the full text here.

A flower for every bullet?

Some thoughts on Muslims and global terror. Not mine but of others. But how well they echo those of mine and of many others:

From Prof Amitava Kumar's blog who quotes Gandhi in this excerpt:

Will someone fax the following quote from Gandhi, on p. 70 of the galleys, to Washington DC:

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Here's a quote from Indian journalist Burkha Dutt's article on Mohammad Haneef (thanks again Prof Kumar):

...And yet, an innocent man continues to be held in solitary confinement with the ludicrous explanation that the solitude is actually designed to give him more ‘privacy’. Haneef has eloquently argued his own innocence, describing himself as a “Muslim with moderate views” who believes that “every drop of blood is human”. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard still goes on to declare grandly that he is “not uncomfortable” with the young doctor’s continued detention our outrage is spontaneous and entirely legitimate.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy on the Lal Masjid (Pakistan) shootout:

What explains the explosive growth of this phenomenon?
Imperial America's policies in the Muslim world are usually held to blame. But its brutalities elsewhere have been far greater. In tiny Vietnam, the Americans had killed more than one million people. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese did not invest in explosive vests and belts. Today if one could wipe America off the map of the world with a wet cloth, mullah-led fanaticism will not disappear. I have often asked those of our students at Quaid-e-Azam University who toe the Lal Masjid line why, if they are so concerned about the fate of Muslims, they did not join the many demonstrations organized by their professors in 2003/4 against the immoral US invasion of Iraq. The question leaves them unfazed. For them the greater sin is for women to walk around bare faced, or the very notion that they could be considered the equal of men.

M J Akbar in his column, Byline:

Five years ago, there was only one terrorist in Iraq: Saddam Hussein. He terrorized his people, perhaps the worst form of terrorism. There was one reason for anger five years ago. Who can count how many reasons jostle for attention in a young person's mind after four years of war, mayhem and occupation? Four million Iraqis have been displaced; the demographic equivalent in India would be more than 200 million uprooted. That is the scale of the human disaster. No one has an accurate count of the Iraqi dead. Bush spends a quarter million dollars a minute on just the war in Iraq. Read that again, it isn't a mistake: A quarter million dollars every minute. That bill doesn't include the costs in Afghanistan. Even the British appetite for Bush has ebbed, with a Cabinet minister saying that British policy will not be joined at the hip to Washington. British casualties are now approaching the rate suffered in World War II. And only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of Anglo-American troops.

Whatever the cause, such are the effects. As Paul Wood, defense correspondent for British television's Today program, said on Friday, "Who wants to be the last man to die for a lost cause?" A newspaper is life distilled into still life. If the siege we mentioned is global, then perhaps a good checkpoint is a global newspaper through which we might ponder the mysteries of cause and effect.

The top of the front page of the July 12 edition is a moving photograph of a woman, her head bowed beyond sight, her tears hidden in the cusp of an anguished hand, sobbing on the coffin of a lost son or husband, one of the over 8,000 Muslims massacred by Serbs in Srebrenica twelve years ago, during the ethnic cleansing that began on July 11, 1995. They have just identified a fresh lot of 465 victims.

Where is one of the principal leaders of this genocide, a mass murderer called Gen. Ratko Mladic. If you want to chat with him, down at the nearest cafe. If you are the European Union or America, then he becomes invisible. He cannot be found.

Below this picture is the story of Lal Masjid, a citadel of paranoia, xenophobia and terrorism masquerading as a mosque and madrasa. There are no Christians or Serbs in this battle in Pakistan, which has taken at least a hundred lives. This is a war between different attitudes to faith. And this is proof that terrorism is a fire that can also burn the hand of those who feed it.

And, here's a great piece on this issue by Saaed Naqvi:

The Muslim elite in Delhi and Oudh had been decimated during 1857. Globally, they were smashed when the Ottoman empire was liquidated in the wake of World War I. None of that was on TV. But in March ’91, Muslims in particular saw with their own eyes the defeat and humiliation of a Muslim state, Iraq, with roots in one of the world’s great civilisations. Then followed the two "intifadas", the four-year-long brutalisation of Bosnian Muslims, Srebrenica, rape camps, the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, the continuing occupation of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, desecration of the holiest of shrines in Samara—and all on live TV.
Any wonder, then, that the Muslim world is in a state of rage? Just as the workers of the world had nothing to lose but their chains, a section of Muslims feel they have nothing to lose but their daily humiliations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza etc. This is the way it comes across to them, riveted as they are on a diet of live TV. But responses of the world’s Muslims vary. Indian Muslims belong to an exceptional category for a simple reason: the world’s second largest Muslim population has the good fortune to operate in a multicultural, secular democracy. Remember, a massive demonstration at Ramlila grounds thwarted US President George Bush from addressing a joint session of Parliament. The vent of democracy keeps Indian Muslims from terrorism.

Can the oppressed of the world learn some Gandhigiri and put an end to this circle of violence? What about sending a bouquet of flower to the oppressor for every dead body? A flower for every bullet? Can we do it anywhere and everywhere? Let us bury all hatred and violence under the unbearable lightness of the flower power? You think it is not possible? Gandhi showed us how to do it nearly a century ago.

Filming: A Love Story

It seems that Indian novelists (in this case all NRIs) are turning their attention to the issue of communalism in India, among other themes.

Sujit Saraf deals with it in his admired work of fiction, The Peacock Throne. So, does David Davidar in his recent novel, The Solitude of Emperors (this one is mainly focused on communalism). Now, Tabish Khair's Filming is said to be on this theme too, though the story is situated in pre-Bollywood Bombay.

Here's Navtej Sarna's take on Filming: A Love Story.

Tabish Khair’s Filming draws a unique connection between photography and barbed wire: both inventions, intended to freeze movement, were perfected in the year 1880. In many ways, the rest of the novel is the story—romantic, tragic, bloody—of how these two inventions played out in India. The story of how still images began to flicker on white screens in dusty villages and then started to move, then to talk and sing—first in black and white, then in scintillating, money-churning, record-breaking colour. And of how barbed wire was stretched across the subcontinent, to separate and to secure, and how its sharp points killed unsuspecting souls or left deep wounds in those who got past, their identities in shreds—wounds that continued to ache decades later, at the memory of a song, or a childhood caper, or a youthful love.

And here's an interview with Khair where he discusses issues of hybridism and exile. Here's an interesting quote from him on writers:

Actually, I feel that the attention Indian writers get occasionally is greatly over-rated in India. Even in terms of prizes and advances, Indian writers corner only a very small fraction of the global market. Rushdie and Naipaul are not really 'Indian' in any case, and even they are not among the global bestsellers like Rowlings and Dan Brown: the pomp and spectacle they invite is due to the literary quality of their work. So I am not too worried. Finally, as a writer, you have to decide for yourself whether you want to sip cocktails in five-star bashes, or slog away in the loneliness of your study.

Turning of tables

Nayan Chanda, the author of Bound Together, argues in this Tehelka interview that the story of globalization has come full circle for India.

If you look at the history of how the world has been connected since the Tigris-Euphrates and Indus valley civilisations, India was at the heart of globalisation in the first 2,000 years of history. It was the first to develop the use of cotton and was the only exporter of cotton textile for centuries. Then Indian artisans developed the skill of turning hard matter into beautiful jewellery, which was exported to Mesopotamia. Even in the 11th century, European and Arab traders collected ivory from East Africa and shipped it to India to be transformed into artefacts before shipping it to Europe — it was being outsourced. Then Indians learned to turn sugarcane juice into granular sugar and India was the world’s only supplier of sugar till it was taken to the Carribean islands. This dominance persisted till the Industrial Revolution knocked India off the pedestal — which was propelled to a large degree by the British desire not to spend silver bullion buying Indian cotton textiles. They tried weaving their own cloth, but couldn’t match India’s cheap labour. This pushed them to invent labour-saving devices and steam power and textile mills, which rang the death-knell of Indian weavers. William Bentinck — Governor General of India in 1835 — wrote a confidential memo to London in which he said, “The Indian plains are bleached white with the bones of weavers.” These were victims of globalisation in the mid-19th century. But they recovered. Indian weavers learnt to dye and print beautiful designs. By the end of the 19th century, India had climbed back to being the number two producer of textile.

The astute Chanda, who is editor of YaleGlobal online, carries on his argument in this essay in The Outlook:

If the 'discovery' of the monsoon wind by traders brought an increasing number of buyers for Indian spices and textiles, a new monsoon wind in the shape of fibre-optic cables opened the pathway for exporting Indian brainware and services. The collapsing cost of transportation and communication has also enabled US corporations to cut costs by offshoring production to China and outsourcing backoffice functions, say, to India. While offshoring of production has forced thousands of blue-collar jobs to switch to other lower-paid jobs without too much protest, outsourcing of a much smaller number of white-collar jobs abroad has produced a disproportionately stronger reaction. In fact, the word outsourcing has replaced 'globalisation' as a fearful term for an influential US middle class. Not surprisingly, outsourcing will be a hot button issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

So, what are the implications of this globalization for Asia and the West, in a scenario in which the West is aging fast and young talents from Asia are flooding its job market, the dollar's value is dipping, and a war on terror is bleeding America and others. Here's Chanda's take:

Unlike Indian weavers in the nineteenth century who suffered silently, out of sight of the world, those affected by globalisation today can lobby their parliamentary representatives and go on television. A globalised media has become a dandy tool to denounce globalisation. The time when winners could ignore losers in the globalisation process is gone forever.

In less eloquent terms, what does it mean? Confrontation between the once rich West and fast getting-rich Asia? I posed this question to Professor S L Rao. This is his take on this subject:

Regarding outsourcing, the idea is that technological prowess will keep pushing the developed economies to greater heights. As people are displaced, the services sector will boom and that will keep people happily employed. The menial;work of manufacturing simple products and giving low level services will come to the developing countries. The catch is if developing countries can develop technologically and move speedily up the value chain in both products and services like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have done. That will force the present developed countries to think again. In any case I see the future years narrowing differentials between countries.

What's your take on this issue?

Faith and globalization

Nayan Chanda, the author of Bound Together, reflectively says in this Tehelka interview:

At one point, I asked myself, what would have been the tallest man-made building that the first light of January 1, 1000 would have fallen on? I found it would have been the Borobudur temple in Java, a Buddhist temple built in 849 ad. Buddha was born 2,000 miles away but had inspired people to build this massive temple — I saw it as a temple of globalisation. Asking questions around this led me to pinpoint the four broad categories of actors who left home carrying goods and ideas to become catalysts across the globe: traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors.

Cardiff de Alejo Garcia describes his experience of seeing the Angkor Vat temples in Cambodia for the first time (in Smithsonian Magazine):

I had come to the temples of Angkor prepared, having read about their archaeology and history and learned of their immense size and intricate detail. The mystery of why an early Khmer civilization chose to abandon the temples in the mid-15th century, after building them during a period of more than 500 years, intrigued me. So too did the tales of travelers who "discovered" Angkor in the centuries that followed, some of whom thought they had stumbled across a lost city founded by Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire—until finally, in the 1860s, the French explorer Henri Mouhot reintroduced the temples to the world with his ink drawings and the postmortem publication of his journal, Travels in Siam, Cambodia, and Laos.

But on that first morning I realized that such knowledge was unnecessary to appreciate this remarkable achievement of architecture and human ambition. There are few places in the world where one feels proud to be a member of the human race, and one of these is certainly Angkor," wrote the late Italian author Tiziano Terzani. "There is no need to know that for the builders every detail had a particular meaning. One does not need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu to understand. You need only let yourself go...

The Darjeeling Limited

Intrigued by the poster? Here's the dope.

Wes Anderson's road movie The Darjeeling Limited is about three brothers on a quest in India. It will be distributed by Fox Searchlight. The movie will open the New York Film Festival.

Following the death of their father and disappearance of their mother, three American brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) take a journey through the vibrant and sensual landscapes of India to re-forge family bonds. The journey comes in a form of a train trip, all set up by the oldest brother, Francis (Wilson), who wishes to reconnect with his siblings. But when their behavior causes them to be kicked off the train, they are forced to learn much more about themselves and India than they ever expected.

I don't exactly remember the title but someone in Bollywood is also making a film with Darjeeling in the title. BTW, Satyajit Ray also made a film in Darjeeling, called Kanchenjungha. Apparently, Wes' movie is dedicated to his hero Ray:

The shooting of the movie took place mostly in India, the country which Anderson only knew through the work of filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Anderson is an admirer of Ray and considers him an inspiration for all of his past projects. But it is not only Anderson that finds Ray's work special; Ray is considered India's most important director, was voted the 25th greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly and won a special lifetime achievement award at the 1992 Academy Awards. While many Americans never heard of Satyajit Ray or his work, Anderson stated that Darjeeling Limited is a dedication to his hero.

Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai

The meteoric rise of India and China—two great, geographically and historically connected nations—in the last two decades or so has rekindled the interest of other nations in these two countries. All nations (or their bottom-line minding corporations) want to do business with India and China.

Well and good.

But what about India and China themselves? Are they interested in each other? And how much?

In terms of doing business with each other, they are definitely talking to each other. Coming back from a recent trip to China, Indian journalist Saeed Naqvi noted that India’s bilateral trade with China, only $5 billion in ’03, will have touched $34 billion next year.

Interestingly, contrary to what China’s giant size and manufacturing scale would suggest, China’s trade balance against India is only $4 billion. It means that between the two neighbours, the game, at least in trade terms, is not that much skewed.

But is that enough?

Can’t there be more than mere trade between India and China, the two giant nations who are fulfilling the prophecy that the 21st century will be the century of Asia?

Looking back, centuries ago, India and China were the world’s leading civilizations. This was much before the flourishing of the Christian and the Islamic worlds. In those centuries, there were great exchanges taking place between India and China. Descriptions of China’s famous silk are found in classical Sanskrit literature. Buddhism traveled to China and became a widely followed religion. Chinese scholars traveled to India (especially to the University in Nalanda, present day Bihar in India) in search of knowledge and enlightenment. Indian scholars and mathematicians were invited to china by the Chinese emperors. Some of them occupied the highest positions in China’s scientific institutions.

Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen has written extensively on this subject. In his seminal book, The Argumentative Indian, he has thrown great light on this shared past of India and China, and how time has come full circle to enable these nations to once again live up to their past cultural and scientific glory.

Professor Sen was in Singapore last week (July 13) to chair the inaugural meeting of the Nalanda Mentor Group. This group, established by India and Singapore governments, wants to revive the famed Nalanda University as a centre for learning and inter-faith dialogue.

Speaking to a group of Indians in a talk organized by Singapore’s India Club (July 13), Professor Sen said that India and China should learn a few things from each other. “I want India to learn from China’s health and hygiene policies and I want China to learn democracy and public reasoning from India,” he said. (I’m quoting from memory as I did not take notes during the talk)

If the two nations were so close together, in culture and business, for centuries, why haven’t they tried in the last half a century to revive their relationship in a way that would befit these two civilizations?

Even I don’t have an answer to that question, said Professor Sen. Tracing back the relationship between India and China after India’s independence, he said that the problems started during the time of Nehru itself. He also mentioned that foreign powers might also have been involved in “poisoning” the relationship between the two countries. Professor Sen mentioned that case of the Indian airplane (Indian Princess) that was hired to transport the Chinese delegation to the Bandung Summit which had crashed killing all the Chinese members of the delegation and the only survivors were the pilots and crew members who were Indians.

I did not know about this incident as it was before my time. So, I googled about it and found out. The Time magazine reported on April 25, 1955 (Crash Report) that the Chinese side blamed the American secret service and Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan?) for this disaster.

Commenting on the Indian government, while Professor Sen appreciated its policies, he also expressed his disappointment with regard to India’s foreign policy. He cited the case of Burma. India had a moral stand on Burma but due to trade with China, he said, India had sacrificed its moral stand and succumbed to the Chinese pressure.

I hope, on the whole, a revived Nalanda University will emerge as the symbol of India and China’s renewed and reinvigorated relationship. I am sure that under Professor Sen’s enlightened guidance, it will not be reduced to just a token of the past memories.

King Khan

King Khan is here, there and everywhere, especially now when his next release Chak De India is ready to hit the theaters in August.

I am not very keen on sports movies and was rather surprised to know that Shahrukh Khan (SRK) was doing a hockey movie with Ab Tak Chhappan Shimit Amin.

Now I have seen the promos (see the video above and below) and can see why. It looks like a clever movie, targeted at the youth of India, with a huge all India appeal (there are 16 new actresses of all zaat, biradari and municipality of India). There is SRK in the lead. And there is London in it (if I'm not wrong). How can this film not succeed at the box office, both at home and abroad?


Isn't this guy, SRK, clever? Anupama Chopra, his biographer, vouches for it and reveals how influential SRK has been for Bollywood and for Hindi cinema:

... SRK is fiercely intelligent. He reveals only what he chooses to reveal. He will only tell you what he wants you to know. There are spaces in his life in which someone like me would never be admitted...

I think SRK has shaped Bollywood enormously. I think his presence and the work he did with Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra structured 90s Bollywood. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaayenge was a watershed moment in terms of the overseas market, stories and how characters were shaped. Then he picked up Karan Johar who was Aditya's assistant director and they did Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which was another watershed moment. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai transformed the style, the costumes, the look of Hindi films. Shah Rukh is the face of New Bollywood. When I first started reporting on Bollywood even in the early 90s, most of the directors were men in their 50s. It was still a cottage industry and quite unprofessional. SRK and the directors he worked with had a lot to do with changing that.

When literature meets art...

...it gets rescued! That is true at least sometimes.

Don't believe me? Here's an example.

When mainstream publishers rejected his novel as too literary, Tom McCarthy turned to the art world. It took success in the US to make them come running.

Literature and art have always looked to one another when they want to reinvigorate themselves. Surrealism developed through an extended dialogue between the two forms. Futurism did the same, and the fallout from its image-derived concrete poetry on these shores led to Vorticism, which in turn, through Pound and Eliot, shaped modern poetry.

Nowadays, though, the traffic seems to flow one way only. While artists and curators still draw inspiration from writers, publishing has dumbed itself down. Marketing departments, not editors, rule the roost. Whereas a host of important art venues receive regular core-funding from the Arts Council, and are consequently able to support work that is not necessarily commercial, no such boon is accorded publishers wanting to promote challenging writing. Even in market terms, the playing field is uneven: where the UK art market is driven by no more than 50 very well-informed collectors, every schmoe is a book buyer. The point is elitist, and possibly reactionary, but true. When lowest-common-denominator logic dictates editorial policy, bookshops fill up with the literary equivalent of Athena posters.

Read the full text here.

Can Kollywood do a Bollywood?

Weekend • July 14, 2007

Zafar Anjum

RECENTLY, Outlook, one of India's top news weeklies, did a cover story on how South India has stolen a march over the North by almost all indicators of development in the past 60 years.

The only territory (so to speak) that remains unbeaten from the great South Indian wave is Bollywood, that world-famous Hindi film industry based in Mumbai in Maharashtra state.

But can this situation remain unchanged?

After all, the South, too, has a thriving film industry in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The most successful of these southern Indian film industries is Kollywood, the Tamil film industry which is concentrated in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

In terms of industry size, Kollywood (about 150 films per year, annual turnover of about US$500 million, or $758 million) is only second to Bollywood (about 250 to 300 films per year, annual turnover of more than US$1 billion).

Like Bollywood, Kollywood too has big-name film stars, big budget producers and big-time hits.

After Bollywood films, Tamil films have the widest overseas distribution, especially in Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia.

Some Tamil films (Rajinikanth's Muthu, for example) have markets even in countries like Japan, South Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom. Big-budget Tamil films such as Chandramukhi, Anniyan, and Sivaji: The Boss are getting simultaneously released in the major foreign markets.

The most recent example is the success of Rajinikanth's Sivaji: The Boss in the overseas market. In Malaysia, the crowd went mad and sabotaged a theatre for a delay in showing the film.

In UK alone, Sivaji collected 13.6 million rupees ($513,000) showing on 12 screens on its opening weekend, in contrast with the much-hyped Bollywood film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which only collected nearly Rs 23 million, despite being shown on 47 screens.

Of course, Rajinikanth is more of an exception. After all, he is India's highest-paid actor, commanding fees in the range of 200 million to 300 million rupees per film, many times higher than the fees commanded by Bollywood superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan.

In terms of star power, if Bollywood has Amitabh, Ashkay and the three Khans, Kollywood too has Rajinikanth, Kamal Hasan, Vijay, Surya and Vikram.

So, can Kollywood surpass Bollywood in the future? Or if that is too ambitious, can Kollywood do a Bollywood in terms of gaining international recognition and presence?

Gitesh Pandya, the editor of United States-based BoxofficeGuru.com and a film commentator on CNN, told Today: "Tamil cinema definitely has a large built-in fan base around the world. Rajinikanth's latest film proved how big an audience the right film can generate.

"However, it will need to take a few more major steps before reaching the level of Bollywood.

"The top stars need to raise their profile with non-Tamil moviegoers and the films need better distribution in markets like the US and UK. Here in the US, it is relatively easy to find Bollywood films in the major cities, but Tamil films play in fewer theatres and lack the same marketing and distribution push."

Mr Pandya is bang on target.

Like Bollywood, Kollywood has a good base of a Tamil-speaking diaspora (about 10 million Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils) spread around the world, with an audience that spans Sri Lanka, UK, US, Canada, Italy and South-east Asia.

But this market is still not as big as Bollywood's. The latter's foreign market, at 30 million, is thrice the size of Kollywood's.

Apart from this, other factors have also worked against Kollywood in its attempts to raise its international profile a la Bollywood.

Bollywood, from the beginning, has had pan- Indian and crossover appeal. Its movies have been popular in Asia, the Middle East, Russia and even Africa for a long time now. Despite the language barrier, its unique, often melodramatic narrative style, wrapped in its song-and-dance drama format, has appealed to people worldwide.

The other good thing that has happened with Bollywood is that it has learnt how to ride on the success of the Indian diaspora, supported by banks and Indian business bodies like the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

After the Indian economy's liberalisation in the 1990s, India's film exports surged as the Bollywood film-makers began to tailor their narratives with the Indian diaspora in mind. This move has paid off handsomely. The result is that the Indian film industry — which incorporates the output from all of India, including from regional industries like the Tamil, Telugu and Bengali film sectors — is now worth about $4.5 billion.

The pack is, of course, led by Hindi films from Bollywood.

With the Indian diaspora growing in number and influence, all major countries want Bollywood at their doorstep. And what better way to welcome Bollywood than to let it host its annual IIFA Awards, which has been held in London, Johannesburg, Amsterdam and Singapore, among others.

If Kollywood wants to raise its profile internationally, it, too, has to go the Bollywood route: Fashion narratives that appeal to a larger audience (including the non-Tamil Indian diaspora), promote the films worldwide, and make their stars more visible.

Kollywood has woken up to this idea ... just a bit late in the day. But the signs are good. Tamil film- makers such as Shankar, P Vasu and Mani Ratnam are crafting such movies. Shankar's Anniyan was dubbed in Hindi and French, among other languages. Rajinikanth plays a successful non-resident Indian in his smash hit film Sivaji. You get the drift of things?

Also, the inaugural International Tamil Film Awards ceremony is being held in Singapore this Saturday. That is a step in the right direction.

Clearly, the Tamil film industry also wants to come closer to its international viewers through such events. And why not? It can only mean better business for Kollywood.

Published in Weekend Today dated July 14.

Writers, get a second life!

After Margaret Atwood's magic pen and book launches with author videos, here's a new trick of the trade:

Over the next few weeks - to celebrate and, yes, promote his new novel Spook Country - we're planning a range of William Gibson activities in Second Life; we're screening his fine and strange movie No Maps for These Territories; there's a competition to design an avatar for the man himself; we're giving away shipping containers packed with Gibson goodies and at the beginning of August, William Gibson himself will be coming into Second Life to read from Spook Country and answer questions.

By the way, William Gibson invented the word cyberspace in his seminal novel Neuromancer in 1984.

Spooked? Get your chills here.

Naipaul's take on India's new fissures

V S Naipaul's diagnosis of a new India's new fissures in Tehelka:

The English-knowing population of India has increased by leaps and bounds. And it is more than a matter of language now. Independent India has new money; and the world has opened up and given English-speaking Indians new ideas of possibility, new ideas about what they might do, and where they might go. These people, put in a very broad way, yearn for the United States and green cards. There has risen a fracture between them and the more local people who might be called temple-goers. They have always been a part of India, the temple-goers. But the new success of India makes them more assertive and they set the teeth of the green card people on edge. This fracture, seemingly only a cultural matter, a matter of taste, has begun to define some aspects of political life... It is very strange.

Read the full text here.

The hands that feed...

Photo: Zafar Anjum, National Botanic Gardens, Singapore, June 2007

Talk Singapore

In his blog, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur asks an interesting question: All of us have heard about scientists saying we use only 10% of our brains. So what is the other 90% doing?

Gossiping, he says.

Ninety percent of our brain is reserved for an art that we are fast losing in our hurried daily lives—the art of gossip.

This observation was very much in display when I first arrived in Singapore three years ago.

Singapore came across as a 'silent' city, a ghost town, despite all its progress and efficiency.

The entire city looked like a well-organised library, if you will, with proper indexing for each shelf, and a big sign hovering over in every reading room: Silence Please!

All the hustle and bustle of commuting was observed in silence. In the elevators, people observed a deathly silence, looking down on the floor or looking away from each other. In offices, people paid attention to their work and barely talked, let alone gossip.

If achieving human silence were the apogee of the civilizational process, then Singapore had perfected it.

After all, the Western civilization had taken centuries trying to get people to shut up. Alexander the Great’s armies were mesmerized to see him read a letter from his mother silently—because he alone knew how. After the dawn of Christianity, the ability not to vocalize, not to talk, was admired for centuries.

Silence was not just an achievement, it was a heavenly experience.

Didn’t Confucius say, in reply to his pupils’ enquiry of his request to not speak, “Heaven does not speak. Look at how productive it is.”

But this was a huge contrast from my home country: the land of "argumentative" Indians. There, every hour of work was compensated with fifteen minutes of discussion on the latest cricket match or Bollywood.

And all this talking didn’t do the Indians any harm. It has rather resulted in a flourishing culture of democratic media, literature and cinema. Now you should know why India has thousands of newspapers, hundreds of news channels and an army of writers and filmmakers, some of whom have gone all over the world winning some big awards.

Conversely, a highly successful Singapore made me wonder: Why is this prosperous nation wrapped in such a deafening silence? What has taken the conversation away from them? And what is the psychological toll of this silence?

It is not that silence is engraved in the genes of Singaporeans. As journalist Ravi Veloo has noted elsewhere, Singapore's best ideas were birthed by conversation and debate: a nation of tenants (Singapore's immigrants) threw out the landlords (the British) and this overthrowing had its genesis in the revolutionary conversations that Lew Kuan Yew and his friends had had in the UK while studying there.

So, where has that conversation vanished now?

Forget those ground-breaking conversations. There's not even that small talk. If a stranger uttered as much as a hello to a Singaporean or wished her a good day, she would have a culture shock. How? Why?

I think it can all be pinned down to two major factors: ease of living and a general sense of self-censorship.

It is like what Shekhar Kapur feels about London: “…there is an ease of living, an addiction to security, a secure tomorrow, a secure future - that is almost cloying.”

In that sense, Singapore is like London. The government does so much for its people that there is nothing left for them to figure out on their own. They are born into this life of ease, where each step has been planned for them to follow, and they snugly fit into this lifestyle. Just follow la! That mantra leaves little room for them to be creative and questioning. And all talks start with questions, big or small. The innocent 'how are yous' can lead to a great conversation.

Then there's too much emphasis on political correctness. That stifles many a conversation right in the beginning.

That brings us to the other factor of censorship or rather self-censorship. Many of the interesting topics of conversation lie outside the so called "OB markers". Interestingly, this censorship may not have come from the government--people inflict it upon themselves. And that's it. They won't cross the unseen line. Result? No conversation.

I asked one of my Singaporean colleagues this question. Why don't people talk here?

It's all about attitude, she said. Youngsters don't talk because it is considered so ‘uncool’. You do your own thing--listen to your ipod, read your books, do your own stuff.

On the other hand, she explained, the office culture here is such that talking tantamounts to negligence of work. If you are seen to be talking often, you are marked as an unserious employee.

And which Singaporean would run the risk of earning that label? Because of the constant inflow of "foreign talent" they are too scared to upset their bosses even at a miniscule level lest they should get "replaced" by a cheap but efficient foreign worker--their carefully planned installment-based life might come unstuck.

But that's not the complete picture. Another form of conversation does exist here.

It exists in the chat rooms, forums and the blogosphere.

A digital, not a verbal, form of conversation. An image that is a befitting metaphor for a high-tech nation.

But is that same as a live, face to face conversation? I don’t think so.

In a face to face conversation, there is physical closeness. It makes us feel less isolated as humans. Also, it is a “responsible” conversation as we cannot hide behind the anonymity of chat rooms and forums.

And what is the implication of this lack of face to face conversation, talk and gossiping?

Again I am tempted to quote Kapur as he puts it so succinctly: “The ability to gossip is the ability to indulge in a sense of humour. We lose that and we are lost.”

We are human beings, not dolphins. We need to talk, gossip, tell each other our stories. In fact, American novelist Henry James went to the extent of saying that conversations, exchanges of words, are all that matters.

All nations are talking. Singaporeans too need to talk or they will get lost in the babble of the humanity at large. Not a pretty choice for an otherwise proud nation, right?

An edited version of this piece appeared in The Weekend Today on July 7, 2007.

Update: Here's a reader's comments on my piece that appeared in Today.