Modern Bengali Music: State of Bengal and Paban Das Baul

I wanted to review a new CD by State of Bengal and Paban Das Baul, Tana Tani (Realworld), which I've been enjoying quite a bit in the past few days. (I found it in my local rock n roll record store in New Haven -- not in India!) But then I find that there is already a perfectly serviceable review of the CD at Ethnotechno, so I can skip explaining who Paban Das Baul and Sam Zaman are. I agree with the reviewer Derek that the earlier State of Bengal collaboration with Ananda Shankar was forgettable (as jam records are wont to be), and that State of Bengal's first CD, Visual Audio was not quite what it could have been.

But I don't think Derek gives Sam Zaman (the man behind SoB) the credit he's due. For one thing, Zaman gets at least one (maybe two) freebies from me for coming up with the catchiest asian drum n bass song ever, "Flight IC408." Whether or not the CDs that follow live up to the hype of that first, definitive track, is almost immaterial from a historical point of view. If someone just says the phrase, "Passengers are requested to please proceed to the aircraft," it puts me (and probably not just me) in the mood to dance, and that is Zaman's doing. Props to him.

But musicians need to keep moving forward, and I'm happy to discover that Zaman is finding his niche in this style of music. Tana Tani (Pushing-Pulling) not exactly hardcore and it's not exactly downtempo; rather, it's generally midtempo and it's groovy. Paban Das Baul pulls out some very beautiful melodies, and Zaman's production is both inventive and tasteful (he goes easy on the electronics, and allows the songs to stand as songs).

This CD should appeal to Bengali speakers especially, as I think the modernization of Bengali-language music has been overwhelmed by the flood of Punjabi beats and hip-hoppified Punjabi folk songs coming from the UK. I personally don't mind the Punjabi dominance, as I understand a lot of Punjabi, but I think there is a huge reservoir of music in other languages that is being overlooked. As this CD shows, there is certainly something very distinctive and beautiful in the Bengali folk tradition; I hope Zaman will continue to explore it. (As a side note, I should point out that the CD liner to Tana Tani has translations of the songs -- my only request is that in future they also include the literal transcriptions in Bangla.)

One of my favorite Paban Das Baul songs from his earlier CD Real Sugar (Real Sugar, with Sam Mills) is "Ore Poinkha":

You gave me no hint, o poinkha
You made a fool of me
Did you not say, O poinkha
That you had more land
Than seven ploughs could till
But when I got there
I just saw a few tail-less sheep
And nothing showing in the barn
did you not say, o poinkha
that you had a house on seven floors
But when I got there
I saw a palm leaf hut with no doors

(Kind of like I felt when I first got to grad school!) Though the mournful tone of this song is arresting, I wonder how it fits into the Baul tradition, which as I understand it is usually devotional. It's hard to interpret this song as devotional; it seems like it has more to do with an arranged marriage gone sour. Perhaps?

On the new CD, my favorite lines are from the first track, Moner Manush, translated as follows:

When you live in two lands
Keep love in your heart
When two hearts are one
You'll see so much play in the heart's lotus
If you wish to catch the man of the heart now

Paban Das Baul says
Inside good is evil
You've discerned between them
And now, hold on to subtle judgment
If you wish to catch the man of the heart now

The reference to "two lands" is not the only one amongst Paban Das Baul's songs. For instance, in the song "Tana Tani," for instance, he explicitly names London. But what it shows is that even in the midst of a quite traditional song structure -- Baul songs resemble ghazals in many ways -- there are references to displacement, to the problem of modernity.

This CD is a must for anyone interested in Indian music, traditional and modern.

New blogs: Writing Cave and Rhinestones

Check out Amrit Hallan, a copy-editor, daydreamer, and sometimes creative writer from Delhi.

Also check out Julian's blog, Rhinestones. He has been writing quite a bit lately. Julian Myers is an art theorist in San Francisco, and he is just about the smartest dude I ever had the privilege of being in a rock band with. He sometimes also writes for the art journal Frieze -- you can read his most recent review of a Vito Acconci retrospective here.

Read him like you're reading Deleuze on Johnny Rotten pills. It's not just your usual blog bloviation! Only on Rhinestones will you find quotes like the following, from the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone:

"Pregnancy is barbaric. Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species ... Moreover, childbirth hurts. And it isn't good for you. Childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. Like shitting a pumpkin."

And with that pleasant throught, I return to the photocopy machines.

A snippet of poetry from H.D.'s Trilogy

I'm preparing to teach a graduate seminar this fall on British modernism (title: "The Spirits of Modernity"). Alongside James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and Salman Rushdie, I'm planning to teach some H.D.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was actually born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania -- where my university is located. To me, she is the most interesting thing about the town (though the story about the rise and fall of Bethlehem steel is also interesting in a rather different way).

For many years, people studying and teaching modernism have tended to highly value her early poems, the ones strongly marked by her association with the glamorous and fleeting "imagist" movement (see also this Amy Lowell definition). But H.D.'s career continued for many years, and she wrote many, many poems, which have been somewhat harder to classify. By the 1920s, Imagism was dead, and the writers who were associated with it had all moved on, including H.D. Feminist H.D. critics have complained that H.D.'s Imagist period is rather over-valued because of the association with Ezra Pound (a Famous Male Poet/Editor/Persona), and that much of her later work -- written without the benefit of a famous literary coterie -- has been as a result under-read.

What that story leaves out is that much of H.D.'s later work, heavily influenced by classical and ancient Egyptian mythology, is pretty obscure and difficult. Much of H.D.'s later work is also strongly marked by the influence of D.H. Lawrence, which means it is sometimes impressionistic and sweeping rather than controlled; Lawrence is big on Big Statements and small on careful plotting or characterization. (I myself prefer Lawrence early Sons and Lovers , which is less grand and more detail-oriented, over the later books.)

Consequently, some critics have simply looked at H.D. as a fascinating modern woman writer, rather than as a serious writer, or an author of poems worth learning. I agree that her life story is fascinating (open marriage; child of unknown paternity; early divorce; long-term female companion; psychoanalysis by Freud...), but I also feel that merely appreciating H.D. as a personality is hardly sufficient. One also has to look closely at the writing -- and the writing should come first.

This fall I'll be attempting to teach H.D.'s Trilogy, which was mainly written while H.D. was in England during the Second World War. It has its share of complex mythology and obscurity, but it also has some moments of profound lucidity. Here is one passage I found this afternoon, where H.D. describes the German bombardment of London as a kind of trial by fire:

. . . we pass on

to another cellar, to another sliced wall
where poor utensils show
like rare objects in a museum;

Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,

pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!):

over us, Apocryphal fire,
under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor,
slope of a pavement

where men roll, drunk with a new bewilderment,
sorcery, bedevilment:

the bone-frame was made for
no such shock knit within terror,
yet the skeleton stood up to it:

the flesh? it was melted away,
the heart burnt out, dead embers,
tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,

yet the frame held:
we passed the flame: we wonder
what saved us? what for?

Even here, there are some individual phrases that I'm not terribly fond of (why "bewilderment" AND "bedevilment"? why "bone-frame"? [a Lawrentian idiom] why rhyme "embers" and "dismembered"? [too easy]). But I think the image H.D. is aiming to get across stands.

Any thoughts on this snippet? Likes or dislikes?

Disturbing: Ngugi's return to Kenya

The Times reports that Ngugi Wa Thiong'o returned to Kenya last week for the first time in more than 20 years. Earlier he had spent time in prison for writings that were critical of the state. He also became famous/notorious amongst postcolonial critics for his decision to abandon the English language for his native Gikuyu, for ideological reasons.

Now, the respect for freedom of expression and human rights have improved. But the law and order situation has suffered. Ngugi and his family were brutally attacked in their hotel room:

On Wednesday night, while Mr. Ngugi was resting in a Nairobi apartment between speaking engagements, four robbers barged in and brutalized him, his wife and a friend. The attackers raped his wife and stole cash and jewelry as well as Mr. Ngugi's laptop computer. One of the intruders burned Mr. Ngugi's face repeatedly with a cigarette. So brazen was the attack, some Kenyans have speculated it might have been carried out by former enemies.

My sympathies for Ngugi and his family as they attempt to recover from this ghastly crime. It's almost too horrible to be real.

What if...? Independence Day issue of Outlook

This week's issue of Outlook India is dedicated to "what if x didn't happen?" columns by various well-known writers. If taken literally, exercises in counterfactual history are always dead-ends -- the only history we can reason with is the one that happened. But in this case, the various speculative essays offer a good opportunity to look again at various key historical events in post-Independence Indian history.

The first one I go to, naturally, is Amitava Kumar, who is asking "What if the Partition didn't happen?"

We would not then have had our literature of the riots. Saadat Hasan Manto would’ve remained an obscure, alcoholic scriptwriter who wouldn’t create Toba Tek Singh, who doesn’t know whether he belongs in India or Pakistan. Ritwik Ghatak might still have made masterpieces like Meghe Dhaka Tara but there would not ever be in such films the bitterness of uprooting and loss. No matter. Nothing that Manto or Ghatak did—and not a single sentence penned by Amrita Pritam, Bhisham Sahni, Jibanananda Das, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Intizar Husain, and others—can console us for the terrible brutality that became the benchmark for all the violence that we have unleashed on each other since then as a free people.

I agree with Amitava here, and I add some links for readers who may be unfamiliar with the names he rattles off so suggestively.

I also went, again perhaps unsurprisingly, to the piece by Mark Tully ("What if there was no Operation Bluestar?"). The key paragraph in the essay is this one:

So even if there had been no Operation Bluestar, it’s difficult to see how Indira Gandhi could have avoided putting her life at risk. But putting her life at risk didn’t necessarily mean she would have been killed. If she had not ignored the advice to remove all Sikhs from her bodyguards or if her assassins’ plot had been foiled, Indira Gandhi would not have died on October 31, 1984. India’s immediate history would then have been very different. The massacre of Sikhs that followed her assassination would not have occurred. But what about the longer term? What about India now, would it be very different? I am not so sure. At the time many prophesied that Bluestar and those massacres would achieve Bhindranwale’s ambition of driving a permanent wedge between Sikhs and Hindus. They have not. There were plenty of Cassandras who prophesied that after Indira no one else would be able to hold India together. They too have proved false prophets.

He is probably right here. Even if Indira Gandhi had taken alternative measures to respond to Bhindranwale (and assuming she took some measures), it's unlikely that things would have come out much differently than they have.

Finally, I liked Arvind Rajagopal's "What if Doordarshan [India's state TV channel] hadn't telecast the Ramayana?" This telecast, which occurred in 1987, was an earth-shaking event in Indian mass-culture. It strengthened the convictions of the leaders of the Hindu right that India was ripe for a new religious movement, and definitely softened the earth a little more for the Ramjanambhoomi [Ram's birthplace/Ayodhya] movement. But Rajagopal, as a film and TV critic, is right to object that TV popularity does not in itself constitute a mass movement:

There’s existed for some time an illusion that ‘Hinduism’ could unite people, that it could bring an ancient civilisation together again, make it great once more. The Ramayan’s extraordinary appeal helped move this illusion out of RSS shakhas and ivory tower discussions, and translate it into a set of campaign tactics. The temporary success of those tactics was read, by the advocates of political Hinduism, as confirming the truth of their philosophy.

A technological phenomenon was mistaken for a political one. An audience congregating around TV sets at home is not a movement. A broadcast is conceived as one-way communication; politics by contrast, is two-way communication, a dialogue leading to collective change. The Ramayan broadcast could have been treated like a dialogue, but was simply treated as proof of India’s Hindu identity. Were audiences saying something the BJP did not want to hear? Few people saw Hindu pride as the chief message. For audiences, Ram rajya was a message of democracy and equality, contrasted with the inhumanity and injustice they saw around them. Gandhi used the term Ram rajya in a similar way during the independence movement. But under the BJP, Ram rajya was reduced to a war against rakshasas.

I agree with this. Many media-oriented critics of Indian society often cite the TV Ramayana's popularity that India is a hopelessly religious society. But popularity doesn't say anything about how people were interpreting what they saw. Moreover, it doesn't prove very much about political sentiments.

Rajagopal also makes an interesting point when he suggests that things might have been different if Doordarshan had chosen to broadcast the Mahabharata first, rather than the Ramayana. For the two are very different kinds of epics, with rather contradictory implications for Indian society:

The Mahabharat was screened after the Ramayan, to even bigger audiences. Its message, however, is very different. There are few rakshasas in the Mahabharat. Instead there is a Hindu joint family engaged in a ruinous civil war. Its characters are of a royal lineage, or have unparalleled qualities of strength or beauty. But each is ultimately alone. No identity, no religion or dynasty can save them. Each has to find the path of virtue, however difficult it may be. That is the lesson of this epic.

A.R. Rahman sighting in New York

It was a blah weekend, so we decided to go to the city on Sunday afternoon for the India Day Parade. Though it kept threatening to rain, the parade was pretty successful -- maybe 20,000 to 30,000 people there, and lots of floats.

The highlight was getting to stand across the street from A.R. Rahman.

My new camera, ordinarily quite good on shots of individual people or big landscapes, was only giving me blurry shots of the crowd from 100 feet away. Thus, Rahman is blurry. Sorry... I'm very much an amateur photographer.

Anyway, in this image he is singing his song "Vande Mataram/Maa Tujhe Salaam" acapella. He has a powerful voice; the crowd was momentarily rapt.

After the parade ended we hung out at the "cultural program" for a little while, but it was pretty dull. The booths were all for uninteresting things, like the State Bank of India, or ISKCON temples.

I saw a flyer about something happening at a SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection) booth, which got me momentarily excited. But then I couldn't find any SAMAR booth!

Margaret Atwood on Orhan Pamuk: Secularism in Turkey

Margaret Atwood reviews Orhan Pamuk's new novel in the New York Times.

For those of you who haven't read Pamuk's work, I would recommend it along the lines of Borges or perhaps (more specifically) Italo Calvino. The Pamuk novels I've read (My Name is Red and The White Castle) have dizzying reflexivity and a kind of floating allegorical structure -- where one isn't sure about the line between symbol and referent. If Pamuk has had any overriding concern, beneath the labyrinthine narrative play, it has probably been the line between self and other. In The White Castle, this line is also the line between east and west, Turkey and Europe. Though Pamuk is talking about a concern that many others share, his approach is obscure enough that Atwood's suggestion that Pamuk ought to become more famous is unlikely to be borne out anytime soon.

But that might change if what she says about the new book is true. It seems like Pamuk's new novel Snow is more pointedly addressing the cultural/political impasse (over "secularism") in contemporary Turkish society more than the earlier books. Here's a representative paragraph from Atwood's review:

For instance, the town's newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem ''Snow.'' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called ''Snow'' and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ''Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'' And sure enough, inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he's been in years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ''Snow.'' Before you know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ''My Fatherland or My Head Scarf.'' As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience.

I will probably have to go pick this up in hardcover.

Bad and mediocre movies recently viewed in transit and otherwise

All of the below is made possible by the fact that most intercontinental flights on reputable airlines now feature personal video screens with many movie choices. On Swiss Air, there were something like 15 possible choices, even in Economy class. My pulse quickens at the sheer cornucopia of crap that must be available in Business or First!

On the way to India I was relatively good -- I partook mainly of several cups of airplane coffee and "serious" vacation reading suitable for an erstwhile English professor. I was so good I actually eschewed the viewing of any movies at all, in favor of hacking all the way through Hari Kunzru's new novel Transmission -- which I enjoyed, but didn't like (if you know what I mean). I also got a good start on Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a novel in the tradition of Foucault's Pendulum, A.S. Byatt, etc. The Tartt (which I later finished during a night of fitful jetlag in Ladakh) I liked, but didn't enjoy.

However, on the way back from India I was quite sick. I kept having these bouts of nausea that made reading anything further impossible.

The only thing to do in such a situation is to indulge in airline movie overdose. Between Europe and India, most airlines now have Indian food (over-spiced and generally dry), as well as the option of some recent Indian movies. The schlock is going global!

Aetbaar. Bipasha Basu is curvaceous. She has a few more pounds on her than most of her peers; you could say she's defying the Hindi film industry's trend to Aguilerian skinniness. But the feminist statement entailed in looking like you weigh more than 80 pounds is lost in a hackneyed plot of about an homme fatale boyfriend, which prominently emphasizes the dangers of pre-marital sex and the centrality of family responsibilities. My favorite line in the Planet Bollywood review is: "John Abraham is convincing as the maniac but he doesn’t ooze with an amazing impression." Yes, if only he oozed with more of an amazing impression, this might have been better. I still haven't seen Bipasha's earlier film Jism; perhaps I will bring it along on my next nausea-filled transcontinental movie-fest. (However, I did see Raaz -- pretty much watchable)

The Story of the Weeping Camel. Since when do airlines have Mongolian art movies amidst all the forgettable Ben Stiller screwball comedies? This is a Mongolian art movie about camel parenting. I'm serious: the dramatic tension in the film is whether the mommy camel will decide to acknowledge its colt and begin to mother it properly. Ultimately, the villagers decide to call in a violinist to perform a Hoos ceremony to attempt to reconcile mommy camel and baby camel. This film should be of interest to anthropologists and two-humped Mongolian camel fans. I watched all 90 minutes of this thing.

The Girl Next Door. The premise of this sleazy movie is a brazenly misogynist one: porn stars secretly want to be monogamous suburban sweethearts, even as they continue to dress like porn stars. This movie crosses the line into exploitation at numerous points, and yet tries to keeps its formula teen-romantic "heart of gold" somehow intact (one review wretchedly referred to it as a "sex-soaked teen comedy that actually has a heart"). The musical choices are equally crass. I was furious that a film of such low calibre should be allowed access to Elliot Smith's archive, though I was moderately impressed that they used N.E.R.D.'s "Lapdance" at the prom scene. Normally you would expect them to go to a chart-topper like Lil Jon for the prom.

Starsky and Hutch. I fell asleep after half an hour; I would have probably enjoyed Anchorman more. I don't think anyone on the Airbus actually watched this big pile of suck; I think it was just included in the selection because Ben Stiller is to airplane movies what plastic forks are to airplane food. Ben Stiller is the semi-charming, semi-handsome face whose semi-boring laughter guides 10 million air-travelers to their respective destinations, whether the destination is Jeddah or Jakarta or Jamaica. Ben Stiller's semi-gigantic nose is a metaphor for air-travel itself, in all its slightly uncomfortable, hemmed-in blandness.

Hidalgo. (Alternate title: Raiders of the Lost Pile of Suck; Scott Weinberg called it "Dances With Seabiscuit of Arabia"). Suffice it to say, neither the horse nor the clueless blond American Befriender of Arab Despots (Viggo Mortensen) did much for my nausea -- I had to run to the loo with a certain trusy paper bag in the middle of this one for a bit of duty-free. When I came back, I changed the channel, so I never found out how the whole epic running horsie/conquest of foreign peoples/conquest of woman thing turned out. I do remember something about: 1) guilt for involvement in the genocidal Indian wars, 2) affection for an oriental princess with a vaguely Hispanic accent (shades of Maria Montez's Arabian Nights all over again!), and 3) poor, poor Omar Sharif, who is still stooping to Hollywood whenever it comes calling with the latest racist formula film.

The Ladykillers. When the Coen brothers miss, they really miss. Intolerable Cruelty -- so cynical it's boring; The Man Who Wasn't There -- just plain boring. And this film is a completely unfunny disaster of a heist comedy. It might have worked better without the 'modern' 'hippety-hop' elements, though I did appreciate the little reference to A Tribe Called Quest's "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo." It would certainly have worked better without Marlon Wayans.

Hellboy. Ok, this is not an airplane movie but a rental. Though it's a little cheesy, I have to admit I found the story quite gripping -- the thickly Gothic/Lovecraftian tone gives the storyline some nice symbolic complexity and weight. I especially liked the bit about Hellboy's horns, which he normally keeps filed down so as to fit into the human world a bit better, but which also play an interesting iconic function later in the story. Also good are the villains, particularly the "Rasputin" character. I've never read Mike Mignola's comics; now I'm a little curious.

Thanks for good times, SwissAir.

The Opacity of the Indian Media: Police Abuses

One thing that became apparent to me while in India over the last couple of weeks is that I don't understand how the Indian media works. News seems to follow an order that doesn't quite make sense. What are editors thinking? Seemingly big stories covered by media outlets abroad relating to India are often skipped, whereas seemnigly obscure sensationalistic stories (current titles: "Sex, Skin & 9/11"; "Osama Likes Donkeys, Not Mobiles") get big play.

In the past week, there was a major expose of the Indian police's routine use of torture in the Washington Post. It appeared following the death of Rajeev Sharma, who was killed in police custody recently following an accusation of theft. The Post comes up with the amazing statistic that there were "1,307 reported deaths in police and judicial custody in India in 2002."

That's 1300 deaths. Abu Ghraib pales in comparison (even if one grants that some small percentage of that number may be death by natural causes). And if you add in all the people who were injured through torture, but who have never filed a complaint, the amount of violence inflicted by the police in the name of "justice" comes to boggle the mind.

Also, today in the BBC, I noticed an incident in Assam where a woman was taken from her house by police and then summarily shot.

References to police excesses just don't seem to show up in the Indian media very often. Say what you will about the western media's lopsided coverage of the Indian subcontinent, I have to say I found this one Washington Post article more substantive than 2 weeks of reading the Times of India while actually in India.

New blog -- Sepiamutiny; also Reihan Salam

These guys have only been around for a few days, but they are already looking formidable. Go, Sepia.

They also point me to Reihan Salam, a former TNR researcher currently guest-blogging for Daniel Drezner. His quixotic review of the quixotic Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is hilarious and smart, capped by this paragraph:

I’ve long struggled to get over my burning hatred for the Irish, the Greeks, and the Armenians. No, no, I’m kidding. I love the Irish, the Greeks, and the Armenians. I mean, I’ve had problems with individuals Greeks, but there are just as many Greeks, if not far more Greeks, I love dearly. I loved Middlesex (a two-sittings read)! Also Maria Menounos (obviously) and, in a spirit of gender equity, the late, lamented Telly Savalas. (You’ll notice that the “Stunningly Gorgeous Crescent,” like “The Democratic Crescent,” starts in the Mediterranean rim. I won’t specify where it goes from there for fear of alienating the stiletto-wielding “newsies” who wait outside of my office and threaten to steal my lunch money.) As for the Irish, it’s not that I dislike them, but I do resent this notion that the Irish are singularly, faultlessly delightful, and I imagine many Irish would agree. You’re as likely to get mugged and beaten in Ireland as anywhere else in Western Europe, and rest assured, you won’t be beaten with a magical shillelagh. (Wait, wait. It seems that Mischa Barton, whom we have to thank for "less bling, more elegance," is Irish. Do with this information as you will.) What about the Welsh? I’ll bet they have colorful folk traditions, and yet they get diddly, apart from a reputation as untrustworthy and shiftless when it comes to honoring agreements. Honestly, I love Armenians and threw them in for no reason at all. They get a bum rap, and have had a rough time historically. I wouldn’t wish the Turks or the Reds as imperialist aggressors on any ethnonational collectivity.

Read the whole thing.

Vacation notes: Ladakh, Lakshya, Bombay, Delhi...

A busy two weeks in India -- too much to summarize even for this practiced bloviator.

I didn't take a laptop, but I found that an old-fashioned paper notebook served pretty well as a vehicle for note-taking. I did take a new digital camera, which I wanted for the mountain images of Ladakh as well as city scenery in Bombay. There are a lot of good photos; expect a photo-essay sometime soon.

Ladakh

The highlight of Ladakh for me were the steps one climbs to reach the Buddhist monasteries (Gompas) and Stupas. I don't have a strong intellectual understanding or personal connection to Buddhism, and the natural terrain of Ladakh is so severe that the idea of climbing any mountains without some significant planning and/or training is a little ludicrous. Climbing the man-made steps to the mountain-side monastaries was, almost accidentally, a way for us to connect to the landscape of Ladakh -- just driving to the top of a mountain doesn't cut it. The steps also connect one to the Buddhist context, since climbing 600+ steps at 13,000 feet above sea level requires a kind of meditative persistence & concentration. You reach the top of the steps, you go into the temple for a look at the statues of Buddha or Guru Padmasambhava (the founder of Tibetan Buddhism), and then you sit out on the edge of the terrace for an hour to look around. And breathe!

Also interesting are the strong ties to Tibet everywhere. Ladakh is very much in India, but in terms of language, ethnicity, and religion it feels like an entirely different country. It has a proud legacy of dynastic sovereigns (the Namgyal dynasty) and an identification with Tibet that only really came to an end in 1841, when the area was conquered by the Dogras (and indirectly, by Sikhs, as the [Hindu] Dogras were vassals to Ranjit Singh). Since then, Ladakh has been part of "India," though much of the region was taken and then later relinquished by China in the war of 1962. (Some areas in the eastern mountains are actually still held by China.) Beyond language and religion, Ladakhis have a more material connection to Tibet: there are thousands of Tibetan exiles living in Ladakh, in large, permanent refugee 'camps'. The local Tibetans we occasionally talked to, as well as many of the foreign tourists who come to Ladakh, fervently believe that Tibet will one day be free. (I can't share their optimism, though I sympathize with their hopes: knowing what I know about the ways China has forcibly integrated Tibet, it has always seemed to me like a lost cause.)

Due to the proximity to both China and Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir, the area is thick with military personnel. There are army camps everywhere; at six AM you large contingents of soldiers out for their formal morning run. And as you drive up through the mountains to various remote locations you run across more military vehicles than you do tourists. I was initially intimidated by this aspect of Ladakh, but I relaxed a bit when I realized that only a few of the army guys walking around were armed (somehow the presence of too many assault rifles makes me a little uneasy). Also, I had a chance to climb 500+ steps to a small hilltop shrine with some friendly Sikh soldiers we met at Gurudwara Pattar Sahib (east of Leh), and somehow after that I didn't feel the same sense of distaste for the military I -- as a veteran U.S. war protestor -- usually have.

Mostly, these guys just deal with extreme cold and extremely dangerous mountain conditions. At the Siachen Glacier, where the soldiers I met were stationed 6 months of every year, temperatures go down to -50 centigrade. If you fall into a crevasse, there's no Vertical Limit type rescue -- they have to just leave you there. Indeed, the soldiers said that helicopters don't even fly above 17,000 feet, which means that you're basically beyond help throughout much of the higher regions of Ladakh.

Of course, these are roughly the same kinds of soldiers who in 1999 had to try and expel members of the Pakistan army and (presumably) Kashmiri militias who had crossed the line of control and started shelling the Leh-Srinigar road. I didn't ask these soldiers whether they had seen any action in Kargil, but everywhere in Ladakh you see signs of it. New roads are being built to reduce the strategic value of the road in question. And at the Gurudwara there were memorial plaques to Sikh soldiers killed in various J&K conflicts. I was surprised to see quite a few dead in Operation Vijay (1999) as well as Operation Rakshak (1999-2001). Incidentally, the former action is loosely represented in the recent film Lakshya, which I'll talk about a little below.

The last thing to mention about Ladakh is that it is crammed full of foreign tourists in numbers I have never seen in any other tourist site in India (including Manali, which gets its share of foreign tourists). Mainly because of the attraction of Tibetan Buddhism, I think, several thousand Europeans (moreso than Americans) come to Ladakh in the summer and stay, sometimes for several months. This really became apparent at the Ladakh Festival of World Music, which was a free festival held on the "Polo Ground" in Leh. We went there for the second night, and were shocked to see between 5,000 and 10,000 people hanging out and listening to various musical acts for several hours at a time. Probably close to half of the people there were from abroad. The organizers of the concert were Australian musicians who now live in Ladakh year-round.

The advantage for people considering Ladakh as part of a (first) visit to India is that it is relatively user-friendly -- lots of locals know a little English, and cyber-cafes and international phone booths are widely prevalent. The disadvantage, which is a problem at any place where there are too many tourists, is that many tourists never really have to engage the local culture on any terms other than their own.

Lakshya after visiting Ladakh

After getting back from Ladakh, we went to see Farhan Akhtar's film Lakshya ("Goal") at the Liberty theater in Bombay. It's no longer a new film (it's been out for nearly two months), but the theater was still quite full for a 9:30 pm show -- seems like this film has been a success, at least in the metros. I was initially a little distressed that before the film started the audience was requested to stand for the playing of the Indian national anthem, but my brother-in-law informed me that this has actually become standard at the movie theaters, at least in Bombay (is it a new thing? I don't remember it at the theaters I went to in Delhi in the summer of 2003). One might grumble about fascism, etc., but perhaps one shouldn't forget that the same requirement exists at all U.S. sporting events!

The other oddity about military films like Laskhya and last year's disastrous (and endless) LOC: Kargil is that by taking an explicitly patriotic and pro-military stance they gain a special tax-free status. This means that tickets are slightly cheaper than other films. Perhaps this taints their commercial success (where relevant; LOC: Kargil was, I believe, a flop)?

Lakshya is entirely filmed in Ladakh, and indeed, we recognized several of Akhtar's big panoramic shots as places we had visited. It's not a great film -- it's essentially an Indian army recruiting film -- but there are some good parts, including Hrithik Roshan's loopy hip hop dance sequence in "Mein Aisa Kyon Hu?" as well as the nicely shot 'rock climbing' sequence before the big finale. The battle sequences are also good in that they are spatially coherent and essentially logical (this is in contrast to the previous generation of Indian war films -- epitomized by Border -- where battles seemed to be oriented around large, meaningless explosions and displays of heroism devoid of strategic consequence). Unfortunately, even these improved battle scenes are still richly packed with cliches like the standard slo-mo "you killed my buddy, now I yell loudly and shoooooot at youuuuu!!!!" shot.

In my view, the film is mainly worth watching for the landscapes. Watch it, and decide whether you want to go to Ladakh or not. (Probably you will decide to go.)

Delhi

Even in monsoon season, Delhi is too hot (still around 100 degrees in the afternoon -- down from 110-120 in April-May). Bombay is much more temperate at this time of year, especially if you happen to stay in a place that has a good sea-breeze, as my in-laws' government flat in Malabar Hill does. But Delhi has some advantages here and there. One such is that the shopping is better than in Bombay -- things are a little cheaper, and there seems to be a better variety in a lot of the big markets than what you see in Bombay. I'm not sure exactly why that is, since there is certainly a large constituency in Bombay with disposable income. My best speculation is that it has to do with space and real estate costs; you simply have more display room and lower rents in Delhi. Needless to say, we did a fair bit of shopping (and eating) around Connaught Place, Janpath, Dilli Haat, and at the Defence Colony market. Every year, the big markets in Delhi seem to resemble western malls a little more. But don't worry about 'westernization' -- the number of Sari/Salwar Kameez shops in Delhi still outnumbers McDonald's and Pizza Hut by a ratio of something like 3000 to 1. Also: as soon as you leave the air-conditioned coolness of an upscale store (such as the music chain Planet M), you are back on streets with rickshaws, energetic pedestrian and automobile chaos, and the occasional wandering cow. And still no Starbucks, though a local copy-cat chain called Barista has, in the past two years, appeared in upscale markets at a rate that is rather alarming.

The point is: if the greatest specter of the globalization of consumer goods is the homogenization of public space, in India it is still basically a non-issue. A much bigger concern, in my view, is what traffic congestion seems to be doing to the quality of life of many middle-class people in the big metros. Most people I talked to seemed to be spending 2-3 hours a day just getting to and from work! Forget overpriced coffee: nothing kills your spirit like a lifetime of traffic jams, cars honking, wasted gasoline, and senseless pollution. Maybe the Delhi metro will make a difference here, once the key "Yellow" line opens up (i.e., the one that will go through Connaught Place) next year. But right now, things look grim everywhere you turn. Bombay is also bad; Bangalore, apparently, is brutal.

Bombay

Bombay is damn big, and we were a little tired after wheezing in high-altitude Ladakh and sweating in high-humidity Delhi. So we spent a lot of time just hanging around napping and eating. We still did a few things:

Oddly (for me), Arjun Appadurai was giving a lecture at the National College of Performing Arts, a small campus at Nariman Point, in the shadow of the gleaming Oberoi/Hilton Hotel and the Air India Tower. It was an interesting affair -- more on that later, perhaps. We also wandered up and down Marine Drive a bunch of times, went to the "Art Plaza" (Jehangir Art Gallery), the Bandra Bandstand, an electronics "grey" market called Heera Panna (full of Chinese knock-offs of high-end gadgets), and a Sikh Gurdwara on the seventh floor of an office building. We also, of course, went to Crossword bookstore, where I picked up Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, among several other books. (I started reading it yesterday: pretty good!)

Then, the long flight home, an endless stop-over in the Zurich airport, long immigration lines at JFK (where, thanks to new bureaucratic niceties, you now have to wait for more than three hours if you're not a U.S. citizen), and finally the long commuter train back to New Haven. After nearly 30 hours in transit and only fitful sleep, we reached a level of tiredness where we were nodding off every time we sat down somewhere for five minutes.

Enough: we ordered pizza (a little coming-home ritual of mine), checked our email, and slept.

Two weeks off (going to Ladakh); Also, celebrating 10,000 hits

My 10K Run -- and it only took 4 months!

In the next day or two I will cross 10,000 hits on Sitemeter. It's pretty cool, though I'm not exactly popping out the champagne (if I ever reach 1 million, maybe then).

I'm happy because I've been averaging 140 hits a day for the past few weeks. But unlike blogs that actually have 140 unique readers per day, there are probably only between 20 and 40 actual regular readers of this blog -- most people come to this site through Google. My biggest 'hits' have been, oddly enough, "Manmohan Singh" and "George Orwell Fahrenheit 9/11". Why would Google rank my site highly on these? I'm still not sure, though I have a theory that referring to the topic in the title of the post (in Blogger it becomes the title of the file) and posting quickly helped. Other popular posts have been "Wendy Doniger," "Operation Bluestar," "Meera Nanda," and "V.S. Naipaul, Farrukh Dhondy, and William Dalrymple." I've personally been happy with my posts on stuff like: Postcolonial FAQ, Fugazi, Brazilian Dance Music, and the film Yuva. But almost no one comes to my site looking for those things -- too bad.

I want to say thank you to the people who've commented on this site, who have put me on blogrolls, and who have linked to me on occasion. Here's a short list (I may be forgetting some people. If so, forgive me):

Brey
Sharleen Mondal
The Weblog
Anjali Taneja/ To the Teeth
Kumar (the friendly Kashmiri Kumar, now in the midwest somewhere)
Scott McLemee
Shashwati Talukdar
P. Kerim Friedman/ Keywords
Chuck Tryon
Not Really Indian
Tyler Curtain/ Bentkid
Timothy Burke
Michael Bérubé
Dan Green
Greg Perry
Sutton Stokes
Apostropher
Erin O'Connor
Ophelia Benson/Butterflies & Wheels
Joanne Jacobs
The blog formerly known as Jivha
Little Professor / Miriam Burstein
Kitabkhana
Bala Subra/ Lost In Media
All About George
Yves Etheart
Mikaela Reid

Oh, and thanks also to all the people who have sent supportive emails in response to this blog. You know who you are.

On Vacation

We're going to India for a couple of weeks. The highlight will undoubtedly be Ladakh (more links here, here, here). It's in eastern Jammu & Kashmir, and one of the major centers of Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet and Ithaca, New York (little joke there). I'm looking forward to it mainly because it will be completely and totally different from the (lately) drab eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.

But Delhi and Bombay are also always fun: books are cheap, music is plentiful, food is fantastic, and I have a new camera to play with.

Cheers, everyone.

On High Tech workers returning to India

In the New York Times, Amy Waldman's latest is on high-tech workers returning to gated communities, uninterrupted power, and various California-type amenities in Bangalore.

It generally rings true, though statistically I think it's still a pretty small phenomenon. And despite the attendant oddities (some of which are explored in the article), I think it's definitely a net gainer for the Indian economy and India's cultural integration into the rest of the world.

Best Bakery Retrial in India; problems in the Criminal Justice system

The "Best Bakery" case is being retried outside of Gujurat. The Christian Science Monitor has a good story on it. You should read the whole thing, but the following stood out to me:

The first trial, held in May 2003 in the state of Gujarat, where the massacre took place, ended in the acquittal of all 21 of the accused rioters after the victims changed their testimony. The Indian Supreme Court last April ordered a retrial out of state, calling state officials "modern-day Neros" for ignoring the complaints of witnesses that they had been politically harassed and pressured to change their testimony by police and state officials.

The opportunity for another trial in this cornerstone case is seen here as an important chance to resolve a major irritant in Hindu- Muslim relations and a chance to chip away at the pervasive problem of witness tampering in the Indian justice system."This case has been a kind of systematic failure of the Indian legal system," says Teesta Setalwad, a human rights activist who led the effort to get the case a second hearing. "This has been a symbol, hopefully, to revive the criminal justice system in India."

In a country where prosecutors win violent criminal cases only 4 percent of the time, some dramatic reforms are required, Ms. Setalwad says. "In India, we have failed (in providing justice.) Trials take 10 years to finish. Witnesses turn hostile and change their testimony. The whole system needs to change."

Earlier, I was mocked for coming up with some odd ideas for getting better results from the Indian criminal justice system (I had suggested the central government use helicopters to videotape communal incidents that police are incapable or unwilling to stop). And maybe the idea was a little silly.

But with statistics like that (4 percent conviction rate on violent crimes, 10 years to complete a trial), I think even really radical solutions deserve a hearing.

Apostrophic Alignment Index

This is what I hoped would happen.

It would be great to start a cultural index Wiki. But I have no idea how Wiki works, or how to start one. 

(Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself)