The ‘I’ in the iPod

If one were asked to imagine how many consumer products are so exciting that they deserve books written on them, the answer would be difficult to come by.

The Sony Walkman? The Mac machine? The Mercedes Benz? A few possible contenders but are you sure?

You may not be but if you’d asked Steven Levy, Newsweek’s Senior Editor, he wouldn’t be uncertain in his choice. He would go for the iPod which he calls the “Perfect Thing.”

And not for nothing. That is the title of his book on the iPod: The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2006).

Though Farhad Manjoo, the Salon staff writer, calls it “a title that seems to skip past the boundaries of mere affection and into a land of wild-eyed cultish idolatry,” Levy’s tome on the tiny contraption provides interesting perspectives into the ways it has affected our lives.

Launched in October 2001, the iPod has become “the signature artifact (sic!) of our young century, selling more than 60 million units in its first five years.”

Impressive! And why wouldn’t it be as it seems that everyone—from George Bush in the White House to Dick Cheney in the war room to the Pope in the Vatican and down to the bloke sitting next to you in the MRT—has one.

Want more stats to impress you? Here it is. According to a 2005 survey, the iPod is more popular on American college campuses than beer. Anybody for an ad on the iPod vs. the Tiger Beer?

The post-iPod world

The post-iPod world, according to Levy, is split in two: “Those locked into iPod reveries and those griping about how they have lost contact with the cooler part of the world.”

Levy talks about the “iPod wars” in New York’s subways—“ musical sumo matches where two iPod wearers spontaneously confront each other, thrusting the screen in each other's faces with a song cue.”

Though we haven’t seen such musical machismo on Singapore’s public transports, we have surely encountered hordes of music lovers plugged away from reality with their iPods on our buses and trains.

If one were to believe Levy, one could deconstruct a person’s character by looking at his iPod playlist. “Playlist is character,” he says. Dick Cheney's iPod features the Carpenters and the Pope's has Beethoven, Chopin and podcasts from Vatican Radio. What do you make of it? Play your own shrink and wallow in the mud of “musical voyeurism”.

The iPod has not just made us musical vouyers, it has changed the way music is being made, distributed and consumed. The à la carte option in the iTunes store has changed the age-old linear experience of listening to music. Now people can buy only the good songs, and cherry-pick the music they listen to. That makes us a “skip-forward generation" in Levy’s parlance.

Not just that. Manjoo has noted how music portability of iPod like devices has changed -- for the worse -- the way engineers record music. Record labels now use a very low dynamic range when they're mastering new albums because they want to ensure that people can hear new songs in noisy settings.

However, apart from music, the iPod’s contribution to Podcasting cannot be underestimated—the process of uploading and downloading content was empowered by Apple’s player. The phenomenon is significant as, in the understating of Indian communications expert, Indrajit Banerjee, it contributes to the globalization of the local.

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman talked about it in a podcast on globalization: “…You are seeing now the power of this flat world platform for more and more individuals to upload — upload their own culture, their own story, their own music, their own styles — through blogging, through podcasting. And they’re going to be huge forces of homogenization in this flat world.”

A device for portable cocooning?

On the downside, Levy has admitted that the iPod is far from perfect: its skin is scuffable, its digital rights management is all too-confining. That is about its obvious shortcomings. What about its impact on our social lives?

In the personal sphere, the iPod has perhaps made us more alienated from each other.

Levy says that we are forming technological bubbles around us—a phenomenon termed as "mobile privatization" by sociologist Raymond Williams in 1974. The iPod has been advancing the “movement of portable cocooning that's been underway for decades”.

He further notes that when the breakthrough device in personal audio, Sony's Walkman, came in 1979, it provided us two things: escape, as it shut out the world to us, and enhancement, as it transformed our world into a soundtrack, reshaping our “perception of the crappy world around” us.

Levy believes that the iPod takes this phenomenon a huge step further: “Because it holds so much of one's music and can play back the songs with near-infinite variety, its addictiveness far exceeds that of the Walkman. Because it is more compact, it goes more places, with more ease.”

But this portable cocooning is a general truth about the Internet age. Thomas Friedman has said that technology is dividing us as much as uniting us.

Linda Stone, the technologist who once labelled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one, has remarked that we’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. “We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. ... We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise,” she said. “We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”

NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. In a globalised world where chaos, connectivity and communications are the buzz words, shutting out the rest of the world for a couple of hours a day brings some sanity to this panic planet.

Thank you for that, iPod.

Out of Gogol's Overcoat

Namesake was one movie I was waiting to watch. Last summer when I visited Kolkata, coincidently, Mira Nair too was shooting her film there. Though we never met, I was aware of this fact all the time during my stay in that city. We both were exploring the city in our own ways.

Though I hadn't read Jhumpa Lahiri's novel on which Mira's film is based (I only read it just before watching the film--which made my viewing of this film a rich experience) I was curious about the film because Mira had decided to make a film out of it--imagine putting aside projects like filming of Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist and the remaking of Munnabhai MBBS with Chris Tucker, to film Jhumpa's novel. There must be something compellingly good about it.

That apart, I am an admirer of Irfan Khan's acting. I have liked him from his television days, and his understated performances always impress me. He has a certain way of delivering his lines which I find naturalistic, non-filmy. He has a great body language. Tabu is fine--She is like the Nargis of our times. When she was making her debut with Prem (along with Anil Kapoor's brother), all we knew about her was that she was Farah's sister. I certainly did not anticipate that she would turn out to be such a good actress. Now perhaps Farah is known as Tabu's sister. Both Tabu and Kareena have surprised me, for the exact reasons, though I would admit that Kareena looks a little too glamourous for her roles. Not her fault, and I don't think she can help it.

It was interesting to see how Mira had reinvented the novel (along with her scriptwriter friend Sooni Tarapoorwalla), how she had made it more dramatic, fit for a movie experience. While the novel begins with Ashima (Tabu) starting her life in the US, a demure pregnant Bengali lady, one night making jhaal mudhi in her kitchen, the film goes for a real dramatic start. You see Ashoke Ganguly's steel box being carried by a coolie in Calcutta's Howarh station. Ashoke is on his way to Jamshedpur to spend his holidays with his grandfather. On the train, he meets a Bengali moshai--a man who had spent two years in the UK--who advises him to pack his bags and see the world. "You'll never regret it," says the gentleman. Then we see Ashoke reading Gogol's collected stories--a book miserably tattered--just as described in the novel. Soon, the train meets with an accident. Everything goes black. The scene changes. We are introduced to Calcutta in all its myriad colours and through the city we get to meet one of its charming denizens, Ashima (Tabu). Just before that we are shown fleetingly that Ashoke did not die. But how, this was not explained at that point of time. And there lies the mystery of Gogol's Overcoat (his famous short story that has been referred to again and again in the text and the film).

Why did Mira choose this event to dramatise her story? There is a reason, and we'll come to it soon.

Decades later, when Ashoke gifts Gogol's collected stories to his son, Gogol aka Nikhil (Kal Penn) on his graduation (in the novel, on one of his B'Days, if my memory serves me right), he tells him: "We have all come out of Gogol's Overcoat." And Nikhil is like, what do you mean Baba? "When you grow up, you will understand," says Ashoke.

After Ashoke's death and Nikhil's realisation that his wife is having an affair with a French guy, Nikhil (Gogol) remembers what his father once told him. "We have all come out of Gogol's Overcoat. You will understand it when you grow up."

The film had started with Ashok's train journey, with Gogol's book in his hands, and the sudden realisation that one needed to explore the world, as opposed to what his grand father used to say: Reading books is travelling, only without moving an inch."

The film ends with Nikhil travelling on a train, realising what his father had told him about Gogol, about exploring the world. That's where's the film's beginning and end tie up beautifully, like a narrative coming full circle in its theme. The search for a name and identity, the search for life and love in an alien land, becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience too. Gogol had spent much of his life outside his land of birth, Ashoke had told Nikhil-- a fact that emphasizes the immigrant aspect of the story.

Gogol and his story, The Overcoat, also emerge as major metaphors in the film. That story had saved Ashoke's life, and that's how the entire family had come out of Gogol's Overcoat.



The movie has some very powerful scenes. I can never forget the scene when Ashima comes to know of Ashoke's death in far off Cleveland and does not how to react. Her cries outside the house, amid the bright Christmas lighting, her lonliness in the moment of her greatest grief, is as poignant as it could get. It shows the poverty of relationships in an immigrant land. In times of sadness, you need a shoulder to cry, and you find none. That is so heart-rendering, so inhumane of a society.

Irfan is brilliant in some scenes: One is when he calls Ashima from the hospital just before his death, and the other is when he insists that Ashima must say I love You to him in the Victoria Memorial park.

Some of his scenes with Kal Penn are also very good. Strangley though, in the opening credits of the film, Kal Penn's name comes first. I think it should have been in this order: Tabu, Irfan Khan, and then Kal Penn. Nevertheless, it attests to the richness of the narrative that it is difficult for one to pinpoint the protagonist of this film.

The film is well-shot. Some shots have been framed in the tradition of Satyajit Ray's. Like the shot of Ashima lying on the bed in her New York apartment. The shot is an extreme close up of half of her face, her large eye most prominent, somewhat hidden by her arm. That is classic Ray. Nitin Sawhney's background score is competent, although at times it sounded like a documentary film's scrore.

I have, however, two problems with the film.

When she was making the film, Mira wanted to make it a portrait of two cities--Calcutta and New York--as well. While she has captured the colours of Calcutta beautifully, she has not shown New York that much sympathetically. Except for the bridges and the yellow cabs, the cities have nothing in common. In terms of crowd, being cavernous and crumbling, and human interactions, the two cities come across as diametrically opposite.

The other problem that I have is with the movie's transitions. One moment a characater is in Cal, the next moment he/she is in NY. I think she wanted to keep the pace faster and didn't want to use captions like 6 months later or 12 months later. But this kind of cut-to-cut editing can leave some viewers confused. Thankully, I had read the novel, so I knew the transitions. But what about others?

These minor hiccups apart, Namesake is definitley one of Mira's best films. If you haven't seen it, you should. And if you have, please share with me what you think of it. If you have a heart, you will come crying out of the theatre. That, at least, was my experience.

Bites

1. Gastronomic divide

One day I walked into a South Indian restaurant in the central business district. It was crowded with people, all Indians, both from north and south. Not surprising as it was lunch time on a working day, and CBD is full of Indian professionals. Almost everyone was having a thali meal which included a mound of rice on a banana leaf (cut round to fit the shape of the steel plate), surrounded by eight small round steel bowls, containing spicy veggies, rasam, sambhar, curd and a sweet dish. A crisp papad lay at the top of the rice. Spoonfuls of pickles and two deep fried red chillies further bejewelled the plate. This was meal no 8. There was a long queue in front of the counter where one paid for one's order. I also joined the line.

And I began to think. Why do Indians eat such large quantities of food? If a Chinese or a Causasian here saw the amount of food on a plate here, they would say, Serious! (I know that many of them like Indian food too but that is once in a while, right?)Whereas, they eat, in contrast, very small portions of food, mostly salads, fruits, and less starchy food--which many Indians consider to be ghaas phoos.

Why is this difference in food habits? Do Indians eat such large quantities of food because they have been underfed for generations (their elite always stomached most of the food throughout history)? And the first world people eat so less because they always had plenty to eat, as they have not been at the wrong side of the colonial plunder? Although it happens in the name of healthy eating, perhaps there is some element of divine justice working here in this gastronomic divide.

When my turn came to order food, I ordered a meal no 8.

2. 'Oh, you are so sick'

I went to the Picture House to see the latest Academy Award Winning Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others (German).

I paid for my ticket at the box office but just after handing me my ticket the girl issued me a warning: 'Just a reminder, sir. Food and drinks are not allowed in the Picture House.' Thanks, I said and left for the elevator. I liked the idea of no food and drinks rule in the arthouse theatre. Most of the films running in this theatre are foreign language films. Imagine a frugal viewer's plight when he is torn between the beauty of the projected mis en scene, the fast changing subtitles, and the real-life love scene involving the couple just a few seats away from his. Why would anyone want to mix the excitement of unfolding snack packets and filling the small theatre with the smell of junk food to the already available sensory feast?

I had a corner seat. The film started well, and within minutes I had the feeling that I was living in East Germany, and was part of the friend circle of the playwright hero. The film was turning out to be extremely exciting--the writer was staging a play, his live-in actress girlfriend was being seduced by the culture minister, who wanted her all for himself and to remove his rival out of the way, he put the Stasi to watch him, the writer, day and night. One anti-state act and the writer would be put off in jail. Enter the mysterious Ulrich Mühe (he looks like Kevin Spacey, only so German) as a Stasi agent who spies on the playwright and his girlfriend. From here the film takes a different turn.

Anthony Lane of the New Yorker has written a brilliant review of the film, and since I can't better that (nor do I have the time to do that), I leave you with his review: "It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wies--ler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid- nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone."

Did you notice that sentence: "It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is." Exactly my feeling! Like a keen observer, Lane has noticed even the minutest details in the film and has extracted meaning out of them. If you read the review, you would notice, like when he says, "the meagreness of Wies-ler’s lonely dinner (a tube of something red, squeezed onto a bowl of something white)" that's really being very keen.



You must see this film if you haven't already. If for nothing, see this film for Muhe. Or for the bewitching Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). She has such a beautiful smile, so restrained, so innocent.

As the film progressed, so did the romanticism of the couple sitting a few seats away from me. Not only was the young girl doing a deep mouth to mouth to her man, after some time, she even began to straddle him. Soft giggles came from their side.

When the film finished, with Muhe clutching the novel dedicated to him by the playwright, I felt a sense of relief and accomplishment. Any film that has a writer in it as a character is so hugely satisfying to me.

As I walked towards the exit, I saw a young lady chiding a not-so-healthy looking man who was sitting after one seat next to hers in the same row, with an office bag in his lap. "You know food and drinks are not allowed in this theatre...and your bag is full of drinks...Oh, you are so sick!"

And her frail frame huffed out of the theatre. The man remained glued to his seat. I also came out of the theatre, looking for the angry young woman. I missed her in the crowd.

Old age, new issues

The current debate on the ageing population of Singapore and elderly care is quite timely. Between 1980 and last year, the number of people aged above 65 more than doubled to 291,000 here. By 2020, their number will be 575,000.

This problem is not limited to Singapore. Look at some of the statistics. By 2050, there will be two billion elderly people in the world — compared with 600 million today.

Singapore, which in a way is banking on the growth of Asia's two biggest economies, China and India, also needs to take into account the profile of the ageing population in these two countries. China's ageing population is the largest in the world. China will have 174 million senior citizens aged over 60 in 2010, and the number will peak in 2030 when the national population hits 1.5 billion. Similarly, about 80 million Indians — more than the entire population of Britain — are over 60 at present. This figure is projected to touch 100 million by 2013 and 198 million by 2030.

What do these figures tell us about the future of Asia? And how are these countries dealing with it?

Old age was never a problem in India. Old people always commanded respect in Indian society. Old-age homes were alien concepts and elder abuse was considered a Western problem.

Not any more. Over the years, as life expectancy increased from 41 years in 1951 to 64 years today, and after more than 1,000 old-age homes sprang up in India, neglect of parents has become an issue, so much so that the Indian government is considering making it a legal obligation for children to take care of their aged parents.

Unlike Singapore, most of India's senior citizens do not have any social security. Over 40 per cent of them live below the poverty line. On top of that, India does not offer any healthcare support system for the aged.

Add to that the sudden rise of the 300-million-strong post-liberalisation middle class. It has compounded the problem, as young people get uprooted from villages and small towns to the gleaming industrial parts of the metros, aided by an increasingly prevalent consumerist value system, lack of space in urban homes, the rise of the nuclear family and the rising cost of living in cities.

Neglect and financial and health insecurity are only a part of senior citizens' problems. Another, less talked-about, aspect is aged parents abused mentally and physically by their children. Since such abuse is not well defined in Indian society, they are hardly reported. In Mumbai alone, according to a newspaper report, there were 192 crimes against senior citizens in 2002, many resulting in death. That is, one suspects, just the tip of the iceberg.

The Indian government did not wake up to this new "old" reality until 1999 when it introduced the National Policy for Older persons. But many experts feel the policy failed to take off due to its lax implementation.

Realising the enormity of the problem, the Indian Government is considering a Parents and Senior Citizens (Welfare and Maintenance) Bill that will make it obligatory for children to care for their parents and grandparents, with a penalty to be paid if they default in their duties.

The Indian government is also planning to set up old-age homes for the destitute in each district, and will have beds reserved for them in district hospitals.

Likewise, China is also said to be creating welfare schemes for its soaring numbers of elderly.

For a country like India, Singapore is a good model, with its Maintenance of Parents Act and a Tripartite Committee on Employability of Older Workers, along with its four pillars of social security.

Some argue that legislation will not work especially in a country like India where the rule of law is not as strong as it is in Singapore. Legislation may not eliminate the problem, but is surely a major part of the solution.

As the number of "Dinks" (families with double income, no kids) rises in today's globalised economies, there is a need to create more social awareness about this problem. The Singapore debate on the elderly, therefore, becomes important as whatever steps Singapore takes in this regard will be keenly watched, and even emulated, by other Asian countries.

Singapore, too, will have to watch the Asian senior citizens scene as their ranks will swell to 705 million by 2025, fuelling a multi-billion-dollar boom in businesses catering to the elderly, such as healthcare, travel, leisure, learning and assistive technology.

Url: http://www.todayonline.com/articles/178510.asp

In Pursuit of Happiness

Today I want to talk about a few films that I've seen in the past few weeks and months. In fact, I have been wanting to write on these movies, right after watching them, so that the immediacy of the impact could be captured which tends to get dimmer with the passage of time. I guess everyone expriences this diminishing effect. And for a person like me, until I have poured it all out, the residues of the remembered images keep blocking the arteries of my fresh observation. So, let me put out some of these embers of memory, these flashes of images, these bits of sound for good.

Interestinly, all the main characters in the films I'm going to talk about are mainly pursuing happiness and the conflict arises out of the challenging circumstances that come in the way of their pursuit.

In Babel, for example, Richard and Susan (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are holidaying in Morocco, hoping to revitalise their relationship, when it all turns into a tragic experience. Their Mexican maid, back in the US, defying her employer's order, goes to her son's wedding in Mexico, triggering a sequence of heart-rendering events. In Japan, a deaf-mute girl looks for bodily pleasure but to no avail, turning the human basic instinct into a wail for a human being's basic right to happiness.

In Hannibal Rising, Hannibal seeks happiness by avenging his sister's killers, by seeking to exorcise the ghosts of his haunting memories, that might help him overcome the guilt of not being able to save his sister.

In The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris (Will Smith) struggles to achieve happiness by winning over his dehumanising poverty. In Guru, Guru (Abhishek Bachchan) is pursuing happiness by creating wealth, and in the process, clashing with the establishment.

In Rocky Balboa, Rocky (Stallone) wants happiness of heart and soul by redeeming his lost honor, in his own memory, and in the memory of his dead wife, and when the authorities refuse to give him a boxing licence, he invokes the principle of pursuit of happiness, guaranteed in the American Bill of Rights.

But happiness often comes with a twist. That's why it's spelled as "Happyness" in the Will Smith movie. We will see how happiness has a twisted tail.

I will start with Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. I watched it before the Oscars and so was quite aroused by the media buzz surrounding this film, especially focussing on Brad Pitt's acting. Initially, I was a little apprehensive about the film packaging several stories together, which has been done so many times now, so much so that even in Bollywood, filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma (Darna Mana Hai) and Mani Ratnam (Yuva, apparently inspired by Gonzalez's Amores perros) have done it in recent years. Even last year's Oscar winner Crash had a multiple narrative structure.

I will not go into the details of the movie here. Through its stories, connecting the strands to emphasize globalism, one thing leading to another, affecting lives across borders, the film seemed to make a grave point: neglecting the voice of the weak can have disastrous consquences, and sometimes, innocent and reckless acts can blow into humungous problems. That's why when the Mexican maid Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is denied permission to attend her son's wedding, she takes matters into her own hands, setting loose a sequences of terrible events leading to her own deportation from a carefully built life in America. That' why Cheiko (played by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi) takes off all her clothes before a stranger when no one hears the cries of her body. I agree that Brad Pitt has given a restrained performance, full of grace and maturity, but I guess Rinko leaves the strongest impact with her deaf mute character.

There are a few points in the narative that baffled me in terms of their relevance. For example, wWhat was the point of showing the incest angle for the Moroccan boy in Babel? What was the point of showing him masturbate before the shooting sequence? Was it to point out his machoness, a boy trying to become a man, handling of his manhood as a precursor to handling a gun? Or was it to signify a point of sexual potency (for the boy who shoots from a gun) to a counterpoint of sexual deprivation (for the Japanese girl whose father's gun is used to shoot those bullets)? And why does Santiago (Gael García Bernal) is never discussed again? What happens to him? Does he escape from the police or does he die?


The same issue of incest also intrigued me in Hannibal Rising. When Hannibal reaches France and begins to live with his aunt (Gong Li), who teaches her oriental fighting techniques, he begins to fall for her. The first crime he commits there is related to his aunt, and after kiling the butcher who had made sexual and racist remarks against his aunt, he calls it a crime of passion. I didn't see the point of this incest theme here. Do violence and incest go together? Or was it to justfy the first crime by Hannibal, giving him an immediate motive--the birth of passion along side the birth of violent tendencies in a young man.

Now coming to The Pursuit of Happyness and Guru, I found a lot of similarities between these two different films. You might say comparing these two films is pointless, I will say, let me do it. I have a point here.
Both these films are about men who want to succeed in life, break through their ranks of poverty, and make tons of money. In a way, both the films, despite a similarity in their theme, reflect the two different milieus they belong to. In The Pursuit of Happyness, the story of a man's struggle in an individualistic society, shows no back story of the main character. As he wakes up one day, we enter his life. All his struggles are personal. Like Guru, he also sometimes crosses the limits of law (not paying the cabbie, jumping the gantries in the metro, sleeping in metro public toilets, minor crimes) but these are foibles born out of his poverty. What redeems his character is the love for his son. That relationship adds another dimension to this movie, which is so endearing.

Guru starts in a much better way. Guru remembers his father telling him not to see dreams. But he did and he made them come true. From the opening scene, we know the daemonic trigger behind Guru's character and what is it that pushes him. His nature to defy authority, be it a father figure or the establishment, is established from this first scene. Guru is a powerful film; only its songs and dances interrupt the vivid and continuous dream weaved by Ratnam.

Coming to the last movie, Rocky Balboa, I loved it for its simplicity, and how cleverly Stallone has weaved together characters that the studios favour most: retired old men, unemployed people, a middle aged lady, Mexican workers, two young boys, and even a pet dog. It is a perfect cast of characters. The movie has a beautiful pace, not too slow not too fast. It is a typical feel good movie, and a fitting end to a series.

Novel writing and the Myth of Sisyphus

Two novels that I'm looking forward to read are Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Amitava Kumar's Home Products.

Professor Kumar, who is soon going to start his book promoting pilgrimage to Delhi and Bombay, has already set the ball (talking about the creative process behind his first novel) rolling with his article in The Hindu, How to Write a Novel.

Being an accomplished writer of creative non-fiction, his take on his own struggles, both internal and external, in the process of writing his novel is extremely instructive and entertaining. Entertaining because that is his art. But the piece is not just about how he came to write the novel but also how unfinished the work seemed to him each time he made an attempt to change things, to improve things:

For the next few months, I didn't write anything new. And then I returned to write two quick drafts by the following summer. It must have been around this time that I pasted in my journal a portion of a review by James Wood: the critic had narrated a story by Chekhov about an actress, Katya, who has discovered that she has no talent. She asks an older family friend for help and advice: "Tell me, what am I to do?" The man tells her he doesn't know what to do. And then, he says at last, "Let us have lunch, Katya."

Beneath the pasted note, I have made a note about endings, and how one shouldn't insist on "closure". But isn't it probable that my eye had snagged on the heroine's confession of failure at the only thing she most wants to do?

And yet, I remember being happy every time I wrote a new draft. Each time I would think that the job had been done. But it wasn't. It would never be. It is possible I wouldn't have been able to write the book if I had known this from the beginning. My diligent editor cut out more than twenty thousand words; in the months that followed, I wrote new opening and closing chapters. I felt that things were coming together nicely.

But another year would pass, and I'd go through half a dozen more drafts, before the editor and I were happy with what we had. I had never worked harder on a book before, and still a book as a finished object remains an elusive thing for me. Full of mystery and beauty, and the result of extraordinary luck.

A book as a finished object remains an elusive thing for me, he says. That is very honest, and that reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus, which for Camus, through his philosophical essay of the same title, represented man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world. Can't the situation of the absurdity of a writer's struggles be seen akin to the situation of Sisyphus, "a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to forever repeat the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again."

Professor Kumar describes how he had to rewrite and rewrite and redraft the manuscript over and over again. Hard work. So did Kiran Desai and Vikram Chandra. Each took seven years to finish their second novel.

Perhaps Prof Kumar is right when he says that each book is "the result of extraordinary luck". But what is most honorable in a writer is the struggle, the toil, he puts in to achieve that thing of beauty. In his essay's conclusion, Camus said: "The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I imagine all writers happy, including Kiran, Vikram and Kumar, practising their craft day after day, in their studies, in hotel rooms, in cafes, in libraries, and wherever else.

No More An 'Area of Darkness'?

India is no more an area of darkness (to invoke Naipaul)--with its economic rise, the west's spotlight is increasingly falling on India's literary stars, who earlier looked dimmer in the face of their brighter foreign-based counterparts.

Cathleen McCaul, writing in The Guardian's Feb 13 issue ("Subcontinental Shift") suggests that the focus of India's literary culture, for many years focussed on London and New York, might be changing now.

She writes: "India basks in the limelight of such NRIs as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, (but) their ability to portray India from abroad has been questioned."

Really? And who are the people questioning the abilities of Rushdie, Seth, Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Amitava Kumar (academic and non-fiction writer whose first novel, Home Products is due out soon), and many many others?

Cathleen parades the views of Tishani Doshi, Altaf Tyrewala, Rana Dasgupta, Jeet Thayil, Hirsh Sawhney and Nilanjana Roy to support her argument. They haven't said anywhere in the article that they find the above NRI writers to be lacking in authenticity but Cathleen seems to be concluding that there is a continental shift happening.

I think this is basically a useless debate, nevertheless very interesting. Tishani Doshi, Altaf Tyrewala, Rana Dasgupta, etc are budding writers (and I wish them the very best in their careers--they are just starting out) and they are yet to move beyond their debut works.

It is true that for a long time, successful voices in Indian writing in English have come from abroad, from the so called NRI writers. Even though, before these so so-called NRI writers, India had writers like R K Narayan and Mulkraj Anand (UK-returned), among others, who were writing from India about life in India, but the real spurt in IWE, in terms of, mind you, the western audiences and western media recognition and publishing success and prize-worthiness began with the NRI writers.

The continental shift Cathleen is talking about is largely a western phenomenon. With the success of India as an economic power, the spotlight has shifted from the west to the home barns. Those who are producing stuff in India now are also seen with admiration, their works now considered valuable for western consumption (did they find it immaterial earlier?).


What has changed, truth be told, is the way the west sees India and its homegrown talent, which is of course positive. Other than that I don't see any subcontinental or even tectonic shift. For every Tishani Doshi, Altaf Tyrewala, and Rana Dasgupta, we have had Upamany Chatterjee, I Allen Sealy, Gita Hariharan, Adil Jussawalla, Imtiyaz Dharker (and so many Bombay poets), Ruskin Bond, Khushwant Singh, Shashi Deshpande, Anurag Mathur, Shobha De, Mukul Kesavan, Kiran Nagarkar, Keki Daruwalla, Ashok Banker, Rukun Advani, Ardeshir Vakil, just to name a few. I am not even talking about Arundhati Roy who was an exception --she didn't go to any foreign university--but even far more recently, writers like Rajkamal Jha, Anita Nair, Tarun Tejpal and Rupa Bajwa, again just to name a few, have done interesting work.

The big question here is not even this subcontinental shift. It is, in fact, about how a writer's geographical location affects his writing. Is it important to live among your characters to produce that authentic fiction? Or can this be achieved with good research? And what about the writing that is done from a distance (as in the case of our NRI writers) to get that telescopic effect? How does it change the nature of captured reality in one's writing?

I think Indian writer Nayantara Sehgal has tackled this question fairly well here:

"There are no hard and fast categories that define exile, or alienness, or roots. And there is no such divide in literature. In the end, fiction can only be divided into two categories. It is either good or bad. But what distinguishes writing here from Indian writing elsewhere is simply that the home-grown writing of any country comes out of a home-grown sensibility. And that is a priceless possession, not to be given up, at least so long as there are nation-states and national literatures."

I think every writer has his own reasons to write and his motivations and inspirations might differ from other writers. If Tyrewalla feels that he can write only when he is based in India, it is fair enough for him to do so (that proximity to his characters is reflected in his work):

'I don't know how, for instance, I could write from the perspective of an imaginary butcher in a chicken shop if I wasn't also suffering the humidity like him, suffering the noise of a ghetto like him, and yet trying, like him, to think amidst this discomfort, this cacophony ... Midway through writing No God In Sight, I went to New York to be with my fiancée (now wife), hoping to continue with the novel there. I assumed I could write anywhere, that I could stretch my imagination wide enough to surmount the distance of thousands of kilometres. I was back in Mumbai in two months. It was a very expensive misadventure.'

But a writer like Rushdie felt that writing from a distance had its own peculiar effect, and perhaps, magic realism was a better vehicle to transport that effect to the realm of literature. Looking at India from a distance was like looking at it through a telescope (an angle of advantage?)-- the image was sharp and the perspective unbroken, cinemascope-like. He gave the example of a cinema screen--if you looked at it with your nose close to the screen, all you saw were grains (pixels). The farther you moved away from the screen, the clearer was the image.

In any case, Tyrewalla and Jeet Thayil (who left the US to work from India) are not the first ones to leave the west and live among their characters to create that authetic fiction. Decades ago, well-known Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay, to give an example, returned from the US after doing a creative writing course. He wanted to live among his own people, close to the characters that he wrote about (Does it matter that he chose to write in Bengali, not in English?). The same goes for great Hindi writers Hariwansh Rai Bachchan and Nirmal Verma, and almost 100 years ago, Urdu poet Iqbal who earned his PhD from Germany but returned to India. About a decade back, Amit Chaudhuri did the same.

I don't think it matters where you live or write from--what does matter is whether you can get inside the skin of your characters. It might take some research and travelling and that's what writers have been doing from ages. Naipaul travelled to Asia and Africa to write about its people and places; Somerset Maugham wrote about south East Asia and Graham Greene was a globe trotter.


But critically speaking, the jump from Rushdie to the new generation of writers, does it portray a break in traditions? Does it have a larger meaning for Indian writing? Professor Amitava Kumar thinks so (remembered place vs real people in real places?):

'That narrow road from Rushdie’s childhood would join a busier street and, with suitable special effects, explode into the teeming pages of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Like Naipaul in an extended part of A Million Mutinies Now, Mehta would show that a city is more than a sum of its parts because of its individual inhabitants and their unappeasable energies. Naipaul, Mehta, and even Chandra – unlike Rushdie, their writing about Mumbai has been based on a diligent search for material. These are works of reportage. It is crucial to grasp this break from Rushdie’s magical realism. The map that these writers unfold for us is not so much of a remembered place as of real people in real places.'

To a reader like me (critics might think differently), it does not make a difference whether the Indian story has been told from in India or from abroad. What matters to me is whether I can find a connection with the story.

And great stories have a universal appeal. Recently, Prof Amartya Sen talked about this universality quoting the great Tagore:

"... The open and welcoming attitude to departures originating elsewhere which Rabindranath Tagore articulated with compelling clarity in a letter to a friend (in a letter to Charlie Andrews in fact) in the 1920s, at the height of our struggle for national independence:"Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that the all the great glories of man are mine."

I personally think that that is a good guiding principle there--for all writers from anywhere. Every writer, no matter what he is writing about and where he is writing from, brings his own unique perspectives, and if they find a connection with our soul, we can claim it as our own, as a facet of truth that we recognize. Cathleen herself mentions that Pankaj Mishra's new book is about China and Rana Dasgupta's second novel, written from Delhi, is set in Bulgaria.

Jeet Thyil is bang on when he says that there are no boundaries between Indian writers writing from India and writers writing from abroad.

"There is no difference between non-resident and resident writers now. I see it as one body of work," he claims. "If you are a 21-year-old writer living in some little town in India and you read everything you can get your hands on and really learn your craft you have every chance of being published in New York."

But I think publishers, agents and critics will see more and more of this demarcation, and the home ground desi-label could turn out to be more profitable, more successful than ever before, and will vie for the same prestige (for many critics and readers) that was once reserved for the NRI writer.

Talk about a book without reading it?

Yes, that's possible. And here's a book on this subject that claims to teach you how to fake it.

Pierre Bayard, a Paris University literature professor, has come out with a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes. “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read?” has become a best seller, with translation rights snapped up across Europe and under negotiation in Britain and the United States:

“We are taught one way of reading,” he said. “Students are told to read the book, then to fill out a form detailing everything they have read. It’s a linear approach that serves to enshrine books. People now come up to me to describe the cultural wounds they suffered at school. ‘You have to read all of Proust.’ They were traumatized.”

“They see culture as a huge wall, as a terrifying specter of ‘knowledge,’ ” he went on. “But we intellectuals, who are avid readers, know there are many ways of reading a book. You can skim it, you can start and not finish it, you can look at the index. You learn to live with a book.”

Full text here at NYT.

Daddy is missing beti Zara

Meditation

Lonliness

Morning walk, East Coast Park, Lunar New Year

Conversations

I came across this interesting bunch of interviews in one of my favourite Indian journals, Tehelka.

The interviews separately feature two writers, Amitava Kumar and Kiran Desai, and one lit agent, I'd say the most famous for Indian writers at least, David Godwin.

I'm just pulling some quotes here from their interviews, and if the quotes pique your interest please go and read the full texts.

Immigration is not a pretty thing: Kiran Desai

There was this realisation that what my generation was going through in America was the same as what my grandparents had gone through in the UK decades earlier. Nothing had changed. Both sides like to see it as different — the US doesn’t like thinking of itself as a colonial power and Indian immigrants try and emphasise how welcome they are, but there is a lot of hypocrisy in that pretence. Immigration is not a pretty thing. It’s often very cruel. It’s just self-preservation to ignore racism in these countries.

The Arundhati Roy effect: David Godwin


I never begrudge any writer money or platform. But a much more interesting consequence of Arundhati’s success has been its impact on writing in England. Take Monica Ali. Or even writers from Africa and the Caribbean. It may sound far-fetched, but we are hearing a wider range of voices. The publishing industry has become more open minded as a consequence of Arundhati.



Bihari writers, anyone?: Amitava Kumar

I like Siddharth’s writing because it is daringly original. And Tabish is the better kind of scholar-writer that India somehow seems very good at producing.

But I doubt they would identify with the Biharis who run the kind of website you’re referring to. I certainly don’t.

I don’t write to furnish a better image of a place or a person. Writing for me is a way of finding out what is hidden from the world. All declarations of superiority are also symptoms of real inferiority. I know what is inferior in myself. I want to be honest about it.

Slow Man

I have been wanting to note down a few things for myself, for the sake of my own memory--by saying this, what I mean is I don't want to bore you dear reader.

Call me a slow man if you will because I have been very slow in updating my blog--in fact, this is my first entry in the new year. Not just that, I did not even have time to read some of my favourite blogs. Life has been quite hectic in the new year. Most of it is related with work, and apart from work, all my time goes in attending to my daughter who demands, and rightly so, my company when I am home. The cat-loving Naipaul has famously said that every child born is a book killed. The equation, for me, is heavier on the side of the child.

At work I am learning new things (Please don't get wrong ideas by the look of the accompanying image--it relates to the next para on a Tv show). It gives me some satisfaction, and sort of balances off what I am missing otherwise.

Once I come home from office, around midnight, I have my supper, which goes well with watching programmes on BBC, CNN or the Big Boss reality show on Sony TV (that's an Indian channel, and Big Boss is the Indian version of UK's Big Brother show). I have been following the show since day 1 and have seen people come and go. It could all be contrived but it shows you various dimensions of human emotions.

Last night I also saw Kaun Banega Crorepati, hosted by Shahrukh Khan who has replaced Mr Amitabh Bachchan. Much ink has been spilled over the rivalry between these two showbiz people but I guess Mr Bachchan bowed out because of ill health and there is no rivalry between them as far as KBC is concerned. Most of it is media fluff.

Not much happening on the reading front too. Enjoyed reading, quite slowly though, J M Coetzee's Slow Man. It is a beautifully told story of an Australian photographer who becomes an amputee after an accident and develops feelings for his European (immigrant) nurse. Everything goes on fine in the story, until Elizabeth Costello, a novelist, barges into the life of the amputee with the aim to use his life story as her next novel's material. The intrusion is at first irritating but then you learn to live with her, just as the hero of the novel does, and she keeps company until the very end, making the hero ponderous on various aspects of life (the human condition, Arjun?).

The novel has some interesting discussions on issues of immigration, old age, nostalgia, history and culture. At one point, the nurse's son steals a rare historical photograph of early Australian miners from the protagonist's collection (which has immense heritage value) and superimposes his father's face on one of the ancient miners: an act of giving one's family (a newly immigrant people) an old history or inventing a past in a new place to reclaim a non-existent ancestry, something that would justify the new immigrant's existence in the new land, among the natives. This is just the kind of novel I love.

Also finished the last few pages of Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism. I had started reading it several months ago and could not endure Bhupi's unending chase for Sarupa after reading the first 8 or 9 chapters. Turns out that I was quite close to the climax, so thankfully I did not miss it. Bhupi not only gets to sleep with the sizzling Sarupa but also fathers her child. Well done Bhupi! I'd say the novel is not that bad as some critics judged it when it had come out--it fulfills its promise, fulfills the mission it sets out to achieve. Bhupi gets to mate Sarupa and that's it--mission accomplished! What more do you want from a novel like this? There are some interesting gems strewn around but I am not in a mood to quote them here.

Now I'm reading Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. The narrative's chunkiness may be an innovation but it posed a problem for me. So I'm reading it randomly from here and there--not a great way to read a novel. Whatever I have read so far is brilliant, and deserves every bit of the hype. It is straight from the gut, written with a feel from the ground.

On the cinema front, could catch a few good films. While Lage Raho Munnabhai did not appear as refreshing as its first part, I was bowled over by Blood Diamond and Apocalypto. While Blood Diamond was a fine piece of journalism meeting acting and action in Africa, Apocalypto took me to a different world, in the 16th century America. It makes a very clear point that makes immense sense to me: Fear is a disease and a community would perish if it allows fear enter its soul. This is, on the other hand, a great adventure film, sans the ILM kind of computer graphics. Good fun.

Meanwhile my friend and fellow blogger Deepika travelled to Sri Lanka to be a part of the Galle Lit Fest, and she has come back with some interesting stories and reflections, including a brilliant piece on Kiran Desai. Here is her report and here is the interview.

In India, another friend and fellow blogger Jai Arjun Singh travelled to Jaipur to hobnob with some celebrated Indian writers. Here are his insightful reports.

The XYZs of gender testing

She crossed the finishing line at Doha with distinction but failed in the battle of the sexes, figuratively speaking.
Twenty-five-year-old Santhi Soundarajan, an athlete from India, was stripped of the silver medal she won in the 800 metres women's finals at the 15th Doha Asian Games after failing a gender verification test. But what exactly does a gender test mean?
Gender testing is not as simple as lowering one's skirts. It is a complicated issue, which even the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) regards as not "completely resolved". The International Amateur Athletic Federation, the previous avatar of the International Association of Athletics Federations, introduced gender-verification testing in 1966 to deter males from competing with females in sports.
According to the IAAF policy paper on gender verification, prepared by the IAAF Medical and Anti-doping Commission 2006, the first such test involved "crude" and "perhaps humiliating physical examinations".
This was followed by a method of determining "sex" chromatin through a buccal (oral) smear examination. But even this left too many uncertainties. For example, normally a woman has a pair of X chromosomes, and a man has an X and a Y chromosome, but there can be genetic abnormalities such as XO (known as the Turner's Syndrome), XXY (the Klinefelter's Syndrome) or XYY (the Supermale Syndrome).
Because of these uncertainties, the chromatin test was abandoned, first by IAAF in 1991 and, since the Sydney 2000 Games, by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Ever since, says the IAAF position paper, "a search has continued for an acceptable and equitable solution" to determine the gender of a sportsperson when challenged by a competitor.
Meanwhile, both the IOC and IAAF are working on a "consensus document" as a guide to dealing with cases of gender verification.
The basic position is that this kind of test is not mandatory, but can be carried out if officials want it or a rival team protests. Such cases cannot be resolved through laboratory-based sex determination alone, and a team of doctors — including a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, internal medicine specialist and expert on gender/transgender issues — should examine the athlete.
IAAF holds that if an athlete undergoes sex change operations and appropriate hormone replacement therapy before puberty, then the athlete is allowed to compete as a female. If such procedures are conducted after the onset of puberty, the athlete has to wait two years for an evaluation.
According to Ms Santhi's parents, the 25-year-old athlete has yet to reach puberty. So, will it affect her career if she opts for appropriate hormone therapy? Will she have to wait for two years and seek a review by an expert panel following surgery and hormone therapy? All this is not clear yet.
Ms Santhi's ordeal started on Dec 9 when a gender test was carried out soon after her win. According to CNN-IBN, she apparently failed the polymerase chain reaction test, which identifies the actual genetic make-up of a person.
Since Ms Santhi's test results have yet to be made public, it is not clear if her gender verification test was comprehensive, as advised by IOC and IAAF. The BBC reported: "It is not clear how she failed the test at the Asian Games in Doha."
Interestingly, Ms Santhi failed a gender verification test two years ago when she applied for a job at the Indian Railways. However, she cleared this test at the Asian track and field championship in South Korea last year, where she won the silver in the 800m.
Can a person's gender change? Could Ms Santhi be a "he" in 2004, "she" in the games last year, and "he" again in Doha? There is no conclusive answer for now.
This controversy has also brought into focus the role of the Athletics Federation of India, which selected Ms Santhi to compete at Doha despite knowing about her disqualification for the railways job.
Though the Indian Olympic Association has decided to hold an inquiry into the issue, there is a pressing need to demystify the gender test at all levels, and find a conclusive scientific solution to the entire process. Six years into the 21st century, it is unacceptable that sportspersons and countries should suffer from such "confusing", ex post facto embarrassments.

Published in Today

Sam's Story

What is the nature of war? How does it affect your life even if it rages on and kills people hundreds of miles away from where you live? Can war’s futility be overemphasised?

Complex questions like these underpin the seemingly simple narrative of Elmo Jayawardena’s debut novel, Sam’s Story.

The novel’s comic façade and the charming simplicity of the text hide the dual core of anti-war and anti-racial prejudice messages that form the only turbulence in this smooth flight of imagination.

The novel is a first person account of a young, unlettered village boy, who is arbitrarily named Sam by Madam Martell of Colombo whom he served briefly as a houseboy. The story is set in the twilight years of the last century.

From a Sri Lankan village steeped in utter poverty, Sam comes to work in the River House, and comes to love both the house and its inhabitants.

He likes his friendly master, the Big Boss, who pilots an aerobblane, admires the lady of the house who is generous with food, and loves their two children, especially the boy, who come for vacations from their school in a far away place.

In the river house he is put to do what most poor people do in rich people’s houses: sweep the garden, water the flowerbeds and the lawn, wash the cars, open and close the gate when the cars come and go, feed the dogs and switch on and switch off the house and garden lights. This makes Sam an errand boy and gardener because there are others who do the other, more important jobs: Leandro, the cook, who is the ‘other kind’ and has a big room to himself and Janet, the housemaid, who is also from the ‘other kind’.

Who is this other kind? “The kind that made war, and killed soldiers and threw bombs at our leaders,” defines Sam.

“I didn’t like them,” says Sam upfront about Leandro and Janet. The boy, narrator of this tale, is generally naïve but he clearly knows what moves him and what irks him. “If I knew I had to work with their kind, I would not have come to the river house. But I was here; I couldn’t go back, nothing to go back to in the village.”

In an otherwise likeable set up, Sam has to put up with these two from the ‘other kind,’ his bete noir. They constantly remind him of the racial war their ‘kind’ was raging in the villages and killing the state’s soldiers. Their presence makes him a virtual pawn in the war and he feels to be under enemy fire all the time between Leandro, the vocal enemy, and Janet, the silent type enemy.

Sam didn’t like Leandro’s stupid war talk—“this Elam and tiger business”:

“It was about the war where his people were fighting my people and about cutting the country into two and such things. I didn’t know enough to talk back to him. Leandro knew everything. He knew who died and where the bombs exploded. He knew how many died and who shot whom and why? He even knew who was going to die. I mean which one among our leaders was going to be killed.”

As if that wasn’t chilling enough knowledge for Sam, he had to contend with more of Leandro’s patent exultation in violence against Sam’s people: “He would listen to the radio carefully and the come running to taunt me…Leandro would strut about his kitchen like a peacock and relate the news stories with pride, as if he himself had killed the hundred…Then he would run and tell Janet. It always ended with Leandro giving his chicken laugh.”

Despite his naivety, Sam understands the crux of the problem, the politics behind Leandro’s hatred for his ilk: “I think this war had split way beyond the leaders who were planning and the soldiers who were fighting. It had even made stupid cooks like Leandro hate stupid gardeners like me. It was a matter of what kind you belonged to—you always hated the other kind.”

Elmo has shown, through this kind of hatred among the man on the street, the level of rottenness in the country’s society.

Sam’s best friends in the river house are not humans. They are the two pet dogs of the family, Bhurus (actually Brutus) and Lena. And why are they his best friends? “Bhurus and Lena were my best friends. They didn’t throw bombs. They didn’t kill any people.”

Once Sam’s story is on the roll, the plot gets stalled in a way until the end, and the narrative in between becomes a collage, a mosaic of character studies seen through the eyes of Sammy boy.

Nevertheless, it is interesting, especially its myriad light moments held together by Sam’s bucolic humour. Otherwise, the narrative’s jet engines slow down. Those looking for a racy war novel here are in for a disappointment.

The cadence of the story is rhythmic and repetitive, echoing the rural storytelling tradition of the country. One wouldn’t expect an unlettered narrator to wax eloquent like the narrator of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, also a novel on divide in society (casteism in this case) and loss.

War is futile. Sam and Leandro realise this when the images of war’s violence cease to become mere images on the television screen. They get completely disillusioned with the hoopla of war. Leandro changes for good: “I don’t think Leandro wants to join the fighting any more. He was very sad. I don’t think he wants to have anything to do with the war after what happened to the river house.”

That is one of the most humanising moments in the novel—Sam and Leandro sharing the same pain, forgetting the divide of race and politics. Their loss becomes common now. It circumvents their divide, makes it pointless.

Sam’s Story also demonstrates the helplessness of the poor, and even the rich, who don’t choose to be party to conflicts and yet suffer its consequences.

Sam’s boss, who wanted no part of the war, pays the price for being at the wrong place in the wrong time. His innocence, his non-partisan attitude does no good to him. He used to say: “That war is purely political, to fulfil the empty ambitions of our leaders…It is a war for the rich to get more rich and for the poor to die.”

This cannot be truer than in the present time, and it holds water not just for the war in Sri Lanka but for all the wars that are ravaging our world today. And who would know it more intimately than an aeroplane pilot after 911 and the recent Heathrow bomb plot? That pilot is none other than Captain Elmo, the creator of Sam and his heart-touching story.

If you get a chance to pick up Sam’s Story, then please do. A smooth flight is assured. So, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and enjoy your flight.
-----------------------------------------------------

Sam’s Story, published by Vijitha Yapa Publications in Sri Lanka (1991) and Marshall Cavendish in Singapore, was awarded the prestigious Graetian Award in 2001 for the best literary work in English in Sri Lanka.

Captain Elmo Jayawardena writes novels when he is not flying jets for Singapore Airlines or working for his charitable foundation, AFLAC. For a detailed biography of Capt Elmo, please see this post by MediaCorp journalist Deepika Shetty.

I write because...

This year's literature Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk is a much admired writer. Honestly, I am yet to read most of his work. The only one I had tried so far in the early months of this year, without any idea of his forthcoming Nobel win, was My Name is Red. It is cited as one of Pamuk's best novels.

Over the years, whatever little reading I have done, I have realised that some works, even if they are much admired, don't work well in translation with readers like me. That's why while others enjoy works in translation, I often don't.

I tried reading My Name is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı) but lost interest after page 50 or so. I give a book enough attention, time and effort until I am convinced it is not for me, at least for that particular time in my life. So I abandon it. I don't care what others think of me. I read for my own pleasure, and my instruction.

Will try again to read some of his other works in the coming months.

I liked one of the passages from his Nobel lecture:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

I guess these lines echo the sentiments of most writers. If anyone asks you why do you write refer him/her to these lines of Pamuk.

How to move out of the line of fire

JULY 15, 2001 was a remarkable day in the history of India-Pakistan relations. Pakistan's President Parvez Musharraf was on his maiden visit to India. He was to meet India's then Prime Minister A V Vajpayee the next day in Agra and issue a joint statement which would mark a thaw in relations between the two estranged neighbours.

Delhi was steeped in a discernible excitement and the 24-hour TV news channels went into overdrive speculating on what was going to result from this summit.

The two leaders met in Agra but the "Agra Declaration" was never signed. General Musharraf abruptly left India. A historic moment passed without being grasped.

What followed was an "eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation" between India and Pakistan on the border in 2002. Notwithstanding Gen Musharraf's overtures for "peace" with India on numerous occasions later on, not much progress was made and, after 911, his focus switched to the war on terror with his friend, United States President George W Bush.

Now that the clouds of war are on the wane and he has written a self-congratulatory autobiography, In the Line of Fire, after beating Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Gen Musharraf has once again turned his attention to resolving the issue of Kashmir, a territory claimed by both India and Pakistan.

In an interview earlier this month with New Delhi Television (NDTV), he gave a "four-point solution" to solving the Kashmir dispute, which includes a phased withdrawal of troops and self-governance for locals.

The news made international headlines.Truth be told, there is hardly anything new in his purported "four-point solution".

Published in Today, Dec 18

Read the full text here.

In search of international success?

Reading the interview with Yiyun Li in The Guardian made me think more about the regime in China and the flight of the Chinese students to the USA (strangely about Indian students to the USA too), and much less about literature and short story writing.

Though I am yet to sample any of her stories, I am sure she makes a great impact as a writer, going from the kind of awards she has got and the kind of strides she has made in the literary world (apart from the letters of recommendation she has got from the likes of Rushdie and the editor of The New Yorker). Her story comes off as a success story of an immigrant who has achieved recognition in her field. Instead of a writer, it could have been the case study of a person from any other profession: metallurgy, nuclear physics, hydraulics, genetic engineering.

So what has she made me think about China?

The point I am going to make will only make sense to you when you compare it with India's case. The big picture in this context is this: The Indians and the Chinese make the highest number of foreign students in the USA.

From her interview, and after reading many accounts and reports, it seems that the Chinese flock to the USA (or any other developed country) for higher studies more for reasons of escaping the authoritarian regime at home than for anything else. Of course, making it to the USA is anybody's dream from poorer and less freer societies. Of course, Getting rich is glorious, as the Maoist slogan goes. That inspiration is always there. So the dream of success is there but I guess those who make it to the USA to settle down there for good make a good number (majority) of Chinese migrants.

This is understandable in the case of the Chinese. But what about the Indians? India is a democracy, there is freedom, all sorts of facilities are there--IITs and IIMs and so many other good institutions for many many decades. The why do members of the Indian elite flock to the USA for settling down there? What repression/system failure are they escaping from? While many are returning now, the majority of them still want to remain in the land of the opportunity.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong here. I also suspect that many Indians would not buy this line of argument. But does it not strike you that the Indians, more than the Chinese, go to the US to get degrees and then settle down there? All my friends who went to the land of Uncle Sam have no intention of returning to India. Many have taken American citizenship and have married into the local community.

I never looked at these numbers, thousands of Indian and Chinese students, from two opposite socio-political system, immigrating to USA and other Western countries in search of suceess, in this light before.

We know what is lacking in China. But what about India? The Indian brain drain started a little after Independence. Since then, we might not have much else but we had plenty of freedom. So what caused the Indian brain drain? Nehru's socialism? But that was then. What accounts for this current outflow of students from a shining liberalised India?

And here is a relevant qrote. Arguing for allowing FDI in the education sector in India, economist Bibek Debroy writes (OPEN EDUCATION TO FDI TO REVERSE BRAIN DRAIN) in Tehelka: "First, with 1,20,000 Indian students going abroad annually, the annual foreign exchange outgo is $4 billion. If FDI entry leads to supply-side improvements, not only will this foreign exchange outflow be saved, there may even be some inflow, because students from elsewhere may come to India."

Clearly the problem is there. But for many Indians admitting even this, that there's this problem with the shining India, might be problematic.

Perhaps what is fuelling this exodus is the pursuit of success. Now homegrown success is not enough. International success is the authentic success. This perhaps cannot be more true in a globalized world. Getting success with an international label--a Penguin, a Random House, a Columbia Pictures, a Luis Vuitton-- is being more successful, being more recognizable than getting success with any of the big label's local variants, or much worse, with local brands. Everybody wants to be on the big billboard, beating the 'mini successful' crowd back home at the game of Warholean fifteen seconds of fame.

Is this the whole truth or there is something else behind the dream of super-size-me success and a Staffordean wives' lifestyle?

David Foster Wallace on Borges

Ever wondered what makes Borges' stories Borgesian?

I love Borgesian tales and that's why when I came across this review of Borges' biography in the NYT recently by David Foster Wallace, I loved to make a note of it. Here I am sharing it with you:

"This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it."

The General and his labyrinth

I am not very fond of political biographies. Most of my spare time goes to reading fiction or literary non-fiction. But I could scarcely believe my indulgence when I started reading General Parvez Musharraf’s autobiography, In The Line of Fire.


Despite its heavyweight theme, clichés and superfluity, it is written like a racy thriller. It starts with a violent beginning, a suicide attack on the President of Pakistan, and then like a flashback, portrays the journey of the man who was the target of the suicide attack.

At that time, when I started reading this book, I was between a novel and a political science book but the General’s opus wrested my attention so much that I had to keep everything aside. Even the eagerly awaited Bond flick Casino Royale had to wait for a week.

Every night I found myself delving deep into the world of this Delhi-born little Muslim boy who had migrated to Pakistan with his parents at the time of the sub-continent’s partition, who spent part of his childhood in Turkey, speaking a fluent Turkish like any other local Turkish boy of his age, was known as a dadageer (a bold, awe-inspiring person, more like a bully) amongst his peers, didn’t do as well in his studies as his bright elder brother and who ended up in the army. The boy turned into a soldier of promise who was destined to end the phase of “sham democracy” in Pakistan and save his country from the brink of disaster, from imploding as a failed state.

Too good to be true? But that's how the General has written his biography, which many have alluded to as "selective hagiography". At times, it looks like a justification palimpsest from this formidable ruler, who needs a crash course in humility; at others, it looks like his manifesto, especially the last few chapters of the book, on why Pakistan and the world needs him in the age of terror.

It makes sense, in a way. During the cold war, Pakistan was (still is) the ally state of USA in South Asia, a bulwark in the region. Now that China is emerging as the new super power, Pakistan is still useful as a bulwark state for China in an India-dominated region.

Hagiography or self-laudatory spiel, the book opens a window into the life of a military general, who once was in love with a Bengali girl, who rues over the unjust legacies from a painful partition, who broke down on the vivisection of Pakistan into Bangladesh and who vilifies India for her treacherous role in that separation.

Whatever the critics say, the book, it seems, has served its purpose. It is doing brisk business and his allies are impressed with his frankness, especially with the details of how he has played the role of a faithful ally in the war on terror.