Rituparno Ghosh's Raincoat: The Impersonation of Middle-Class Life

After he won some broad recognition for Chokher Bali last year, Rituparno Ghosh is India's hottest art film director. Raincoat is his first film shot in Hindi.

Chokher Bali, based on Rabindranath Tagore's novel, was "important," but sometimes maddening to watch; one walked away more confused than anything else about the point. What is either Tagore or Ghosh trying to say about the fate of widows in traditional Hindu culture? (I admit I was more positive on the film when I first saw it a couple of months ago.)

Rituparno has also done quite a number of films in Bengali, the most well-known being perhaps Bariwali, from 1999. I have to admit I haven't seen them.

Given Ghosh's status as an art-director, and as a maker of Small Films With Dark Themes, it was shocking to see that Raincoat turned into a bit of a commercial success in India last month, momentarily edging out some big commercial blockbusters. No doubt it has more to do with Aishwariya Rai's and Ajay Devgan's names than Ghosh's, but it's still something -- Indian audiences are pretty allergic to depressing art films.

Viewers looking for more of Aishwariya in a blouseless 'traditional' sari will be disappointed; here, she's playing against type as a depressed housewife. On the other hand, both she and Devgan are forced by the minimalist scenario to demonstrate an ability to act. And they do; both put in strong performances.

The success of Raincoat is shocking, since this is also a deeply depressing film, one of the most unforgiving I can remember. The strength of it -- its watchability -- is perhaps in the film's central gimmick, which I won't give away, except to say that what we see is the impersonation of middle-class Indian life. If audiences are seeing it as poignant, it's because Ghosh points to the elusiveness of the dream of various post-liberalization middle-class status symbols (which are all enumerated in the film in a bizarre, almost ritualistic way: cell-phone, car, air-conditioning, international air travel...).

But did I like the film? Yes, but.

Worthwhile reviews:

Planet Bollywood is pretty ecstatic.

Now Running is a bit more measured; the reviewer makes some good criticisms.

Outlook India didn't like it, but then, who reads film reviews in Outlook?

Mini-Review of Rishi Rich, The Best

Rishi Rich, The Best deserves a mini-review because it is really a mini-album. It's marked for Indian release (Nupur, 2004); I found it in New Jersey.

Rishi Rich has been a madly prolific producer of desi-ish pop music in England since the late 1990s. He's most famous for his work with pop stars like Jay Sean and Craig David, as well as his studio-commissioned Bhangra remix of Britney Spears', "Me Against the Music." He also did some Punjabi 2-step music with people like Jassi Sidhu (B21) and Bally Jagpal, which has more or less been forgotten -- too bad. Rishi Rich's sensibility is really R&B more than Bhangra; there is very little by way of traditional Dhol or Tumbi in most of his music. (When it is there, as in the Britney Spears "Desi Kultcha" remix, it doesn't always add much.) I should add that Rich has also had some cross-over success in India, with tracks for movies like Hum Tum (he did the catchy, R&B title track, "U 'n' I Hum Tum"). And more Bollywood is on the way...

Rich really is a very talented R&B producer, but I've yet to hear something of his that really blew me away, in the vein of Timbaland and Aaliyah's "If your girl only knew." This Best Of CD is the Indian version of the album Rich released in England in 2002 (Simply Rich), but it's lacking some of the best songs from that release for some reason (especially "Nahin Jeena"). It's not terribly inspiring overall, and I'll just mention a couple of tracks that I hadn't heard before.

The highlight here is probably "Mainu Kaleyan Wekh Ke," which is, surprisingly, a Punjabi song in a rocksteady ska format. It takes me back to the old ska-bhangra experiments from the early 1990s, with groups like Cultural FX and the Sahotas on Multitone Records. This track is marred by vocals that aren't quite what one would want, but the kitschy euphoria of ska and the Bhangra's teasing and joi de vivre, work well together. I wish there were more of it!

Another surprise track is a 2-step anthem entirely in English, called "No One There," with the singer Veronica (who also sings on "U 'n' I Hum Tum"). It's just a catchy pop/2-step track in the vein of Daniel Bedingfield, Craig David, and about 1000 others. Rich aggressively cuts and splices the R&B style vocals (simple definition: 2-step is essentially R&B in double-time).

The result is an interesting textural tension. On the bottom is the "smooth" (legato) texture of 2-step/R&B. On top are rough edges and angular, staccato melodic recombinations designed by the producer.

Link: the BBC bio of Rishi Rich

Tim Burke on Ward Churchill. And, irresponsible postcolonialism

Tim Burke makes some interesting points about Ward Churchill, who was in the news last week after his inexcusable and stupid statements about the 9/11 victims ("little Eichmanns") came to light before a scheduled talk at Hamilton College. Tim Burke argues that Churchill has made quite a career out of that way of thinking. Moreover, a fair number of our left-leaning colleagues subscribe to the mode of thinking that led Churchill to say what he said, even if nearly no one would actually follow that mode of thinking (i.e., "identity politics") to its extreme conclusions. Here's Burke:

I stress very strongly, not the left at large or overall. It’s a very small tradition of anticolonial, pseudo-nationalist radicalism that eclectically and often incoherently grabs what it needs from Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and even conservative thought now and again (though often in unacknowledged ways).

It is also a tradition that is completely unable to face its own contradictions. Churchill’s much-cited remarks on 9/11 are an indication, for example, of the underlying moral incoherence of his writing (and writing like his). The principles that are used to value some lives (Iraqi babies dying under sanctions) and not others (people in the World Trade Center) have no underlying ethical or moral foundation: they’re purely historicist and instrumental. The original sin of modernity is seen as the expansion of the West; it is perceived as a kind of singularity that utterly destroyed or erased historical experience to that point. The only moral vector, the only capacity to act immorally or to commit evil, descends from that original sin. If you’re associated by social structure with that expansion, you are bad. If you are a victim of it, you are good.

This perspective on history and contemporary global politics is incapable of explaining its own existence. How is it possible to value life in a world produced by the expansion of the West, even the lives of the victims of colonialism? What are the sources, in a purely historicist account of ethics, of a belief in the sanctity of human cultures, or a belief that it is wrong to colonize or practice what Churchill would call genocide? Churchill, like others who write within his intellectual tradition, has no way to explain the genesis of his own political and ethical position. He can in fragmented ways claim an authenticity rooted in Native American traditions—but if it is possible today in the here and now to construct and disseminate a whole ethical practice founded in those traditions, then his claim of genocidal eradication by the West is clearly is false. If on the other hand, the West contains within it the seeds of its own critique, then the expansion of the West is itself a much more complicated phenomena than it would appear to be in Churchill’s writing.

Sorry for the very long quote, but the four paragraphs hang together.

Much of what is wrong in Churchill is also present -- and also wrong -- in the more radical exponents of postcolonial theory. There is a kind of forgetting of the origins of terms which make the critique possible, and a disregard for the fact that the "West contains within it the seeds of its own critique" (I think Burke is echoing Edward Said's essay on Conrad here, in Culture And Imperialism). Tim's point is that a system of values that is universal, or nearly so -- is both necessary and inevitable (in theory, they would say it's "always already" involved).

One of the things I've been trying to think about, both in my book on secularism (sadly, still languishing without a publisher!), as well as in what will perhaps be my next project, is the possibility of thinking about a historical (rather than "theoretical") critique of colonialism, with something like a liberal, humanist lens.

It's really not that easy to do. If you believe that colonial modernity was indeed a kind of original sin, there is precious little to stop you from justifying resistance to it using what I would call immoral means (i.e., terrorism). A certain way of reading Foucault also leads one to this place...

If you disagree, you are left in an uncomfortable position somewhat akin to the Zamindar (landowner) Nikhil, in Tagore's The Home and the World. You accept the potential benefits of colonization (incidentally, this might apply to the current situation in Iraq), while also aspiring to end colonialism as a political and military strategy of the dominant powers.

But in wanting both things at once you also run the risk -- again, like Nikhil -- of undermining the basis of your own authority. You have your humanism, but to a great extent you lose your politics.

[Still thinking about these issues... criticism welcomed...]

Word usage in the President's SOTU

Word usage in this year's SOTU, according to a DailyKos commenter.

must - 29
security - 29
make - 23
year - 22
freedom - 19
social - 18
people - 18
country - 18
american - 17
nation - 16
terror - 16
new - 16
congress - 15
worker - 15
america - 15
world - 14
govern - 14
because - 14
benefit - 14
every - 13
retire - 13
system - 13
account - 13
iraq - 13
help - 13
time - 12
economy - 11
reform - 11
work - 11
peace - 11
women - 11
tax - 10
great - 10
terrorist - 10
responsible - 10

nothin':

abu ghraib - 0
torture - 0
gay - 0
abortion - 0
private - 0
privatize - 0
Guantanano - 0
Chalabi - 0
crisis - 0
Sudan-0
tsunami-0
mandate-0
poverty-0

Somebody also caught him with a split-infinitive: "judges have a duty to faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench."

To which another commentor responds: "It is always good to faithfully split an infinitive although this is not exactly a place where no one has boldly gone before."

Even Reason is a bit critical of Ayn Rand

It's the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth.

Yeah, well. With the exception of Daniel Drezner, Libertarians don't make much sense to me. To put it simply, I think we need the authority of the state. It protects minorities, takes charge of social welfare, and regulates business practices. In India, rampant statism did lead to corruption ("License Raj") and also a stagnant environment for business as well as the world of arts and ideas. But it also created the framework for a democratic, generally peaceful, modern society. To the extent that the Indian government is inefficient, that is true because the government is actually too weak (as in under-funded), rather than too strong.

I can understand why many Indians (especially those involved in the high tech industry) want to see less government involvement and regulation. But if the goal is to follow the model of the western democracies, then one can't ignore the fact that those societies are all welfare states with high income tax rates (and high enforcement of those taxes), as well as massive government bureaucracies. The skyline of New York City was built on Unionized Labor, property tax, and building codes and inspections. Capitalism too, but carefully regulated capitalism. It's capitalism checked by the concepts of social contracts, constitutional law, and civil rights.

Thus, I can't get excited about Ayn Rand's centenary, the way many Indian bloggers are (see AnarCapLib). Yazad links to a number of paeans to Rand that have come out in the past couple of days. Certainly, Rand's life story is intriguing -- she lived through the Bolshevik revolution personally, before she came to the U.S.

But I have to say that I prefer the NYT's critical version of Rand to the Cato Institute's.

And I'm pleasantly surprised that even an editor for the Libertarian magazine Reason has some critical things to say about Rand's legacy on today's Day to Day.

A few photos from a mini-holiday: Vieques

A few photos from last weekend, mostly from Vieques and the El Yunque rainforest. And here are the rest of my Flickr photos (I'm enjoying the cool tags, blog-friendliness, and searchability).

I meant to write about the experience, but I've been having trouble putting ideas together. So here's a quick list of happy memories:

1) Tropical sun on the skin. You need it periodically. It's like dropping butter onto a hot pan, perfect chemical joy. Heat isn't enough, nor is the ocean; what you need is the direct contact with sun itself.

2) You do strange things on vacation, which you would never do at home. Like asking for favors from strangers when you planned something rather poorly, or the taxi doesn't show up. Or: eating improbable food (i.e., coconut bread stuffed with cheese and guava).

3) Being in a Spanish-speaking place is exhilarating and frustrating, especially if you only had two years of education in the language in junior high school. The basic grammar is there, but the vocabulary is pathetic. Luckily, many words overlap with English, and my accent is good owing to the similarity of Spanish's "t" "d" and "r" sounds to Hindi. Overall, it's just about enough to get basic directions and maybe order food from a roadside stand. But it's sorely lacking when you're trying to explain the difference between Sikhism and Islam to a Jibara peasant-type, who speaks no English. The only headway I could make was "Indiano."

My favorite word from this past weekend was disfrutar: enjoy the fruits of your disfruta. Also, in Puerto Rico especially, I like hearing Reggaeton everywhere; it seems like Reggaeton has completely taken over street music in San Juan. Hip hop is declining.

4) Snorkeling off of Vieques. Strange fish. A puffer?

5) Moss in the rain forest.

6) Scrabble in a cabana by the beach. Geeky, yes. But why not?

7) Taking the $2 ferry and listening to the local men singing Puerto Rican romantic ballads.

8) A break from all the usual crap.

UPDATE: I didn't take this photo, but we did pass this spot outside of Camp Garcia. The military is gone, but protest signs from two years ago are still up.

How Comment Spam Works

One hears a lot about the comment spam problem, especially for people who are on Moveable Type (pre-MT 3.0) and WordPress. I haven't heard about whether it's a problem with Blogger as well, or with third-party comment applications like HaloScan. If not, I presume it soon will be, for anyone with open comments.

This article in the UK Register (which I came across through Kaush, who has been forced to close down comments on his blog) explains what Comment Spammers are trying to do (improve search engine rankings), and how they do it: PHP scripts and Open Proxies (meaning, unprotected servers on the internet). The Open Proxies allow them to mask their IP addresses to get around blocks, and they say they don't use hijacked PCs to spread spam the way email spammers do. It was also interesting to me to learn why blog spammers turned to this technique -- the old 'link farms' became obsolete after Google's search algorithm learned to spot "nepotistic" linking (the "Florida Update," as it is called for some mysterious reason).

Many of the blogs I read now have "captcha" tests, to make sure that human beings are posting comments, not spammers. But even captcha tests, according to this interview, can be solved (something about Unix's curl command...). Yikes.

When I grow up, I want to be a Feuilletonist

John Holbo's latest complex (theoretical!) playful polemic against literary Theory is pretty formidable. I'm not quite sure I get how it all comes together, but I enjoyed learning about the plague of "feuilletonists" in 19th century print culture, the Glass Bead Game, and some beautiful quotes about unbelievable triviality, like this one:

The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures ... in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.

Holbo also makes a throwaway comment a little before dropping the above gem, which I take to be a metaphor for his take on the current culture of Literary Theory:

What follows sounds very much like one of those NYT MLA-bashing pieces. (But also like a description of the blogosphere, no? And much that is printed in the NY Times.)

MLA-bashing, yes. The blogosphere, quite likely. But what stopped me here was the extension of the feuilletonist franchise all the way to the NYT, which I read in quite a different way from the way I read the others.

Now, the NYT has its problems, but I'm troubled by an argument that frames the failings of literary theory, the blog world, and the mainstream print-media via the same metaphor. Holbo seems to say that we're all essentially playing the same game -- throwing around a bit of fluff, and calling it intelligence -- albeit at different registers.

I would argue that these spheres are structurally pretty different. Theory's problem, if it has just one problem, has something more to do with its strange vacuum-like quality; we spend a great deal of time worrying over the epigrammatic phrases found in a half-dozen books. Theory at its worst sucks language into a vortex of paranoid reasoning ("paranoid" in Eve Sedgwick's sense). The problems of the established and the 'informal' electronic media (blogs) are somewhat the opposite -- one sees a flood of low-level chatter, summarial generalizations, speculations, "information," and semi-rigorous argument. Theory is vertical and so forbiddingly structured that everyone in it is a kind of imposter. The print-media, in contrast, is (again, only at its worst) utterly structureless, a kind of protoplasmic soup.

Aren't there alternatives? Literary theory, for instance, could be a little less "high," a little less steep -- lower case "t." And as for the newspaper, I think there already is a fair amount of serious journalism out there (think: Sy Hersh vs. Tom Friedman). Perhaps it's just a matter of knowing how to filter out the bad kind of feuilletonist chatter...

The "Absentees" Who Were Still Present

We're all used to hearing about Palestinian terrorist bombings and Israeli military incursions. In contrast, this type of action -- a land-grab -- doesn't kill anyone; it doesn't even affect a great many people. All that is destroyed is goodwill, if there is any left.

Israel has ordered an urgent review of the seizure of thousands of acres of land from Palestinian farmers, who were cut off from their ancient olive groves by the separation barrier built in the West Bank.

Menachem Mazuz, Israel’s Attorney-General, admitted yesterday that the policy of seizing land in east Jerusalem from so-called "absentees" had been approved secretly by Cabinet ministers last summer without his consent. The review was made public in a letter from Mr Mazuz to a lawyer representing some of the farmers”.

Hundreds of farmers in Bethlehem have been unable to tend their olive groves and citrus orchards because of the electric fence that cuts through their land. In November they were told that the land had been seized for the expansion of Jewish settlements.

"How are we absent?" Jonny Atik, a 55-year-old farmer, asked as he surveyed his eight acres of inaccessible fields just metres away yesterday.

Book Coolie, Hobson-Jobson, and Daljit Nagra

A friend of mine (a virtual friend, I guess) from England has recently started his own blog, which he's calling Book Coolie.

It's kind of odd that the Indian book blog world is so densely populated with "Babus," "Sepoys," and "Coolies"! I am seriously considering starting an anonymous blog with a similar title to keep up with the exploding Hobson-Jobson blog scene. Maybe "The Madd Hatterr"? (A reference to the late, great G.V. Desani... This site has some quotes from Desani's All About H. Hatterr).

I haven't read all of Book Coolie's posts yet, but I wanted to pass along one of his links, about the Brit-Asian poet Daljit Nagra, whose "Look We Have Coming to Dover" alludes to Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach. Nagra's "Dover" recently won a British poetry award for best single poem.

The climax of Arnold's poem is:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In Nagra's hands, it is:

Imagine my love and I,
and our sundry others, blared in the cash
of our beeswax'd cars, our crash clothes,
free, as we sip from an unparasol'd table
babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia.

Tom Wolfe goes geopolitical

Tom Wolfe, most recently in the news for "award-winning" (ahem!) I Am Charlotte Simmons, compares George W. Bush's inaugural address to Teddy Roosevelt, who put forth his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to Congress a century ago. (In the Times)

The language in the two addresses is surprisingly similar. But most interesting are the snippets of American history Wolfe pulls out, including this bit:

Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to President James Monroe's famous doctrine of 1823 proclaimed that not only did America have the right, à la Monroe, to block European attempts to re-colonize any of the Western Hemisphere, it also had the right to take over and shape up any nation in the hemisphere guilty of "chronic wrongdoing" or uncivilized behavior that left it "impotent," powerless to defend itself against aggressors from the Other Hemisphere, meaning mainly England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

The immediate problem was that the Dominican Republic had just reneged on millions in European loans so flagrantly that an Italian warship had turned up just off the harbor of Santo Domingo. Roosevelt sent the Navy down to frighten off the Italians and all other snarling Europeans. Then the United States took over the Dominican customs operations and debt management and by and by the whole country, eventually sending in the military to run the place. We didn't hesitate to occupy Haiti and Nicaragua, either.

From 1823 to 1904, to 2005. Of course, the Monroe Doctrine, in its specific geographic sense, ceased to be a meaningful term after the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (hemispheres ceased to matter). But Wolfe cites historians who've argued that the doctrine remained alive after all through the 1950s, 70s, and 80s, as the U.S. sponsored paramilitary interventions throughout Latin America to choke the spread of anything that smelled like Communism: everything from the Bay of Pigs, to the Iran-Contra affair, to the assasination of Che Guevara.

Wolfe suggests Bush's mission in Iraq resembles yet another extension of the life of a classic bit of American political philosophy, which has now gone global. But is he right? Isn't this really something quite new, dressed up perhaps in the familiar garb of Liberty, Democracy, and the "Shining City on the Hill"?

I see an assertion of political and military dominance for its own sake, not a defensive geopolitical strategy in a world of competing colonial military powers. The U.S. no longer has competition where war is concerned...

On Wendy Doniger

I've been away for a few days in Vieques -- a place where it was very difficult to get cell-phone reception, let alone blog.

I might write on that experience soon, and also explain why it's appropriate to take a mini-holiday in the still-overwhelming second week of the term. For now, a link from Tyler: a review of Wendy Doniger's latest book in the New York Times. Only one paragraph actually talks about the book, and that is this one:

Such is the spirit of wry playfulness that can be found in Ms. Doniger's work, and certainly throughout this new book, which almost gleefully catalogs myths and movies and plots about characters who disguise themselves as themselves. There is Hermione in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale," who pretends to be a dead woman pretending to be a live woman. There is Kim Novak's character in Hitchcock's "Vertigo," who is covered with so many self-reflexive masks that only at the end does James Stewart see the awful truth. And there are Indian stories of Shiva and his wife, Parvati, whose identities refract over multiple incarnations. Through it all are hints of sexuality misdirected and redirected, sexuality that tricks or reveals.

That's it; the new book doesn't seem to elicit a lot of attention or direct interest. In fact, the reviewer devotes the remainder of the review to Wendy Doniger's encounters with the self-appointed Defender of Hinduism, Mr. Rajiv Malhotra.

(I've written on Malhotra's anti-Doniger crusade a couple of times (start here, if interested)

Covering the Distance: Nilanjana Roy on South Asian writers

Via Chapati Mystery and Moorish Girl, Nilanjana Roy's column in the Business-Standard about South Asian writers. Most of her column is what I would call measured praise. She gets down to business at the end, however.

There is more than a little truth in what she's saying, but I still think her claims fall apart under close scrutiny. I'm going to take a slightly different tack than Sepoy does, however, when he defends English-language South Asian fiction from what he calls the "gallows of authenticity." (Sepoy has a way with words!)

My interest is in the overlapping question of narratorial "distance" that Roy refers to toward the end of her piece.

Bajwa, Suri and Swarup appropriate the lives of people whom they do not understand; unlike Bibhutibhushan, who lived Apu’s life of deprivation in the city and the village, unlike Mulk Raj Anand, who saw at first hand what the humiliations of an untouchable encompassed, they are at a remove from their subjects.

Yes, that's true about Bajwa and Suri (I haven't read Swarup, so I can't say). They are at some distance from their subjects. In Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop, it's a real problem -- one senses she has more in common with the wealthy clients in the novel than with the lower middle-class sari seller who is her protagonist. (I still rather enjoyed reading the book, except perhaps for the ill-conceived ending.)

But it's also true of every preceding generation of Indian writers, especially those who have tried to represent the perspectives of non-elite Indians. Mulk Raj Anand may have seen the humiliations of untouchability, but he was not an untouchable himself. Moreover, he himself wrote in English, was inspired by British modernism, and got started only after spending time abroad. He was as much inflicted by 'distance' as the more recent writers Roy names.

To continue:

Monica Ali does a more sophisticated version of the same thing, using a journalist’s techniques and a ham playwright’s voice when she employs pidgin English to convey the pathos of a Bangladeshi woman’s letters from the village to a luckier relative abroad. This does not make their novels any less entertaining, in the cases of Bajwa and Swarup, or any less well-written, in the case of Monica Ali and Manil Suri. But it does set up a constant, low-level interference that prevents an astute reader from engaging with their novels at a deeper level.

The pidgin English in Brick Lane is troubling at first. But it quickly becomes clear that Ali isn't using it to represent a person who writes poorly in English. Rather, the character of the sister (Hasina) in the novel writes poorly in Bengali. The pidgin is not necessarily a comment on an uneducated women's command of English so much as it is an attempt to represent a character whose literacy is limited. Obviously, Ali is quite different from her character Hasina -- we wouldn't have this novel if that weren't the case -- but given the social conditions of Hasina's life in Dhaka, the use of Pidgin seems appropriate. It is in keeping with Ali's realism, and it is far from disrespectful.

In my view Roy's reference to a "deeper level" of engagement with the South Asian fiction she mentions is a red herring. There is no "deeper level"; there are merely story, characters, and language.

In a nutshell: all writers, Desi and non-desi, deal with the problem of distance from their subjects. Good writers convince us that they've crossed that distance. Less talented (or less experienced) writers leave room for us to question the gap.

Condi as Hegelian

I took some heat via email over my "grudging respect" for Condoleezza Rice's performance at her confirmation hearings last week; most of my friends & colleagues don't want to give an inch where this woman is concerned.

I can understand that. I'm bitter too -- the Democratic Party just graduated from the third to the fourth circle of Hell. But I also think one needs to keep in mind Condi's immense ambition and her talents as a political operator... At the very least, it's a matter of knowing one's enemy.

Anyway, here is yet another reading of Condi by Jeffrey Hurf in the New Republic. Hurf feels Condi's philosophy of history resembles that of Hegel, and that is troubling to him. Rice made this statement:

I said yesterday, Senator, we've made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been very good. Some of them have not been very good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I'm sure. I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment but in how it all adds up. And that's just strongly the way I feel about big historical changes."

And Hurf argues that this is Hegelian for the following reason:

In his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that history was a slaughter bench on which the happiness of individuals was sacrificed. (He also claimed that the course of history comprised the teleological unfolding of God's plan on earth at whose endpoint all human beings would be free, an idea that also appears to have some supporters in Washington.) The achievement of freedom, or in the case of the communists, the classless society, justified the sacrifices on the path to its perfection--as if such perfection could not, in the end, have come about without those sacrifices. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II, communist apologists, including sophisticated French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the victory of 1945 either justified or sent into oblivion the horrors and crimes of the Stalin years. Stalin's decision to sign the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler and his refusal to recognize the imminence of the Nazi invasion were blunders of unprecedented proportions that contributed to the capture of three million Soviet prisoners of war in 1941, two million of whom died. If the Soviet regime had been a democracy, Joseph Stalin would have been quickly ousted from office, just as Neville Chamberlain was defeated following the failure of his appeasement policy. Yet in 1945, in the glow of victory, Stalin was presented as a great genius whose wise decisions in the end worked out. Fidel Castro captured this communist faith in the redeeming power of history in one pithy phrase: "History will absolve me."

I'm much more sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre than Hurf is, but maybe he has a point about the differential political fates of Chamberlain (whose deceptions in the House of Commons led to the downfall of his government) and Stalin (who was never held accountable for his mistakes -- or his crimes).

But the difference between George W. Bush and Neville Chamberlain is that, while it was clear at the moment that Chamberlain's policies weren't working, it's by no means been made clear to the American public that George Bush's war didn't work (and won't work). When Condoleezza Rice talks about history, she doesn't mean it the way Castro or even Hegel meant it. What she means is, "History will absolve us, because we will write it ourselves."

Music Challenge

Sutton issued me a challenge.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer.
17 Gibabytes. That's a lot, or at least it seems like it to me. I have somewhere in the range of 2000 CDs in my collection. It's an absurd amount, but I forgive myself: many of them are used (somewhat cheaper), bought cheaply from Indian music stores (definitely cheaper), or bought in India (very cheap).

2. The CD you last bought is:
I blogged it two weeks ago: Friction, Mehsopuria, Bally Sagoo. I also bought a deep house compilation called Bargrooves pretty recently, which has been getting a fair amount of play at chez Singh. And I've been planning to buy the Lascivious Biddies' Get Lucky from their website at some point soon.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
I had MTV on when I was getting ready this morning. The last song I remember before turning it off was Destiny's Child's, "Soldier," which is frighteningly post-feminist in outlook (lyrics), but also frighteningly catchy ("the devil has all the best tunes").

Still, what happened to "Independent Woman"? Oh well, guess that was a fad. Still, you've got to give it to Beyoncé.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

This is tough; I listen to a lot of music, and I could as easily put 50 songs here as 5. I'll pick a few songs sort of at random, cheating a little by referring to multiple versions of the same song:

1. "Chura Liya," with Asha Bhosle singing, Bally Sagoo's reggae remix. Major Hindi film-song nostalgia. A couple of similar songs could go in this slot, but this one best represents my particular tastes and sensibilities. It doesn't take much to get me to start singing along, in or (more likely) out of tune.

2. John Cale's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Shameless post-Christian, negative theological melodrama. Somehow the Cale version gets me more than Cohen's version, or the Rufus Wainwright version that was used in Shrek.


3. Any version of the jazz standard "Tenderly," but especially the old Sarah Vaughn version, and the more recent jazz/deep house version by the San Francisco group Soulstice.

4. Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah," either the old Frank Sinatra/Bing Crosby version, or the Iggy Pop/Deborah Harry version from Red, Hot + Blue. Always a good way to get a party started, even if it's just a party in one's own mind.

5. The Pixies, "Subbacultcha." I've been listening to the Pixies a bit lately. Even though I missed their reunion tour, some of my friends went to some of their shows, and they've kind of been on my mind.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons), and why?

No time for why, so here's three people I can think of who might be into this:

G. Zombie
Anjali Taneja
Julian Myers