Suketu Mehta at home, from Bombay to Brooklyn

This isn't the Jewish Brooklyn of Woody Allen or the Italian Brooklyn of "Moonstruck." There are people living in Brooklyn who have no idea what stickball is, what stoop-sitting is, who the Dodgers were or why they left Brooklyn. These people play cricket in Marine Park, barbecue suckling pigs in their backyards, listen to Russian matinee idols in Brighton Beach nightclubs, and worship not Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter but Diego Maradona, an Argentine soccer player, and Sachin Tendulkar, an Indian cricket star. They are inventing their own Brooklyn, a Brooklyn their kids will be nostalgic about 20 years from now.

From Suketu Mehta's latest, an intro to the 'new Brooklyns' in the New York Times.

It's no longer Crooklyn -- crime rates have dropped dramatically, and hipsters and high income latté drinkers have come in. With 2.5 million people, it's the fourth biggest city in the United States. Out of that 2.5 million, nearly a million are immigrants.

Mehta also does a multimedia feature (also known as an audio slideshow). Another multimedia feature has the voices of writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri.

Asne Seierstad, in Baghdad and Kabul

Asne Seierstad is a journalistic superstar. Her Bookseller of Kabul is a runaway bestseller, and has been translated into a zillion languages. And her latest, A Hundred & One Days: A Baghdad Journal, will probably do pretty well too. Seierstad is a smart journalist with a literary sensibility; both of these books are structured a little bit like novels. As she says in an interview, describing her method:

I believe in literature. I wish I could have written a novel about this, because again I think the more human stories you tell, the more you can put the reader inside someone else’s head and be insightful. In order to achieve that, you can’t just use the very straightforward language of the newspaper. You have to try to find other ways. I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

I'm getting interested in this crossover between literary non-fiction (or creative non-fiction) and journalism. I've talked about it a fair bit recently with writers like Amitav Ghosh, Suketu Mehta, and Amitava Kumar. But it's not just an Indian phenomenon, as Asne Seierstad's books show.

* * *

Kabul
The Bookseller of Kabul was anthropological and reflected a really committed immersion into Afghan life, to such an extent that the narrator's own experience was was deeply buried. There are long stretches in the book -- such as the detailed accounts of marriages in an urban (but still highly tribal/patriarchal) Afghan family -- where it seemed hard to imagine that the interchanges described could have taken place with a blond Norwegian journalist looking on. Did she have a translator? Was she just sitting in the corner with a notebook while the family was negotiating the marriage of their daughter?

While the level of detail was impressive, I was somewhat annoyed by The Bookseller of Kabul for its anthropological turn. Much of the book seemed like it was written to explain aspects of Afghan culture -- especially the arranged marriage system -- to westerners. As an Indian who knows roughly how this system works, I couldn't get too horrified by the accounts of the "traffic in women" on the "marriage market." It's not a great thing, but it's a reality in many place in the world, including those parts where women are neither forced to wear Burqas in public nor stoned to death for adultery. And Seierstad's emphasis on the everyday evils of life in a patriarchal society, though carefully done, is part of a broad, almost generic, western feminist critique of the Taliban's repression of women. It's a critique of real repression, but we've seen so much of it that it's hard to get excited about yet another contribution. And Seierstad's observations on this aspect of Pashtun culture are ultimately less interesting than the much more mundane material on censorship and bookselling that she gets from "Sultan Khan" -- before, during, and after the Taliban.

In short, an impressive work, but it suffers from too much company: there have now been too many books about Afghanistan.

Baghdad
Though it also has a little too much company, Seierstad's A Hundred & One Days benefits from being a lighter and less calculated book. It's as if she is aware, this time around, that her audience knows the factual background already, so she just dives right into the story.

Up to and during the Iraq war in 2003, Seierstad stayed with the rest of the European journalists at the Hotel Palestine in downtown Baghdad, and as a result her perspective is similar to that of other (non-'embedded') western journalists' reports of the war. If the persona of Asne Seierstad was curiously excised from The Bookseller of Kabul she is all too present in this book. There are many pages detailing her struggle with the government bureaucracy under Saddam -- to maintain and extend her visa, to get access to non-approved subjects, and so on. These accounts weren't so exciting to me, along the principle of "don't write a book about the obstacles that prevented you from writing a better book." But they do lend a kind of authenticity to the book: this is the crap she had to deal with.

Once Seierstad begins to find ways to get access to the real story, One Hundred & One Days becomes a much more interesting book, mainly as a source of perspectives from ordinary Iraqis, up to the end of the 'official' war two years ago. (The real war in Iraq, of course, continues, as the Insurgents refuse to quit.) Seierstad gets many good interviews with ordinary people, assisted by her translator, 'Aliya,' who plays a major role in the narrative. Seierstad is especially good at getting the voices of Iraqi children, and through them she presents a genuinely complex picture of Iraqi sentiments. Children in oppressive regimes are the most interesting subjects: they are the most easily misled by propaganda, but they are also the only members of those societies who are still pretty much innocent or honest about their perceptions. Many adults become too terrified by political violence and jaded by the propaganda to be very responsive to events in the present.

Best for last. The passages of A Hundred & One Days that were most moving to me were the moments where Seierstad conveyed some second-hand accounts of the U.S. army's behavior during the course of the initial invasion. She reports what a journalist named 'Laurent', who seems as if he may have been embedded, tells us about the U.S. interpretation of the rules of Engagement:

They [the U.S. infantry] are petrified and shoot before they think. One day they killed two little boys who were walking on the roadside. Suddenly they were lying on the ground. One time an old man was crossing the road. The Americans shot a warning shot but he did not react. They shot again but he continued to walk on. Then they picked him off and left him lying in the road. When we arrive at a village they shoot in the air to warn people, a sign that they must go inside. If people don't react they shoot to kill. One day when we approached a village we spied several men standing next to a cluster of houses. American logic runs along these lines: 'If we shoot and they run, they are civilians.' So if they don't hide they are soldiers. Hence they shot and killed a woman in a field on the outskirts of the village. Everyone ran for cover. In other words: they were civilians. The Americans claim that fewer people are killed in this way. It is better to kill someone at once, in order to make people understand that they must stay inside, than to drive through an unknown village where someone might be a suicide bomber.

And there are more passages like this, mostly second-hand accounts via Seierstad's debriefing of embedded reporters who eventually landed up at the Hotel Palestine.

I realize the rules of engagement must be different when an army is facing the possibility of suicide bombers, and given that the Iraqis placed military assets in the midst of civilian homes and markets. But Laurent's account of the U.S. military's approach to civilians it encountered suggests a really egregious kind of stupidity. It's as if the soldiers are specifically unable to judge for themselves the potential risk of a person just walking down the street.

One more story along these lines. It's Laurent again, embedded with U.S. troops:

Today they shot at a father who was leading his son and daughter by the hand. The father was not hit but both the children were mortally wounded. The Americans just wanted to drive on, but I couldn't take it any loger. I screamed at the driver. --What the hell! You can't just drive on and let them bleed to death. I was so angry he had to stop. I got one of the cars to turn round and we drove them to a field hospital. I don't know any more -- we had to leave. I'm quite sure the little girl died, she had lost so much blood, was nearly unconscious when we got there.

And we wonder where the Insurgents are coming from...

MTV Desi: Hybridity, 'Glocalization'

Many readers have probably already heard of MTV Desi, which is set to kick off on U.S. cable channels this coming July, alongside MTV Chi (for Chinese Americans), and MTV K (for Korean Americans). Here's a thorough update on the project in the Times today.

It reads almost like an academic paper on hybridity:

MTV World's premise for these new channels was commonsensical: that young bicultural Americans have tastes different from those of youths in their ethnic homelands and therefore need, as it were, a customized MTV.

In that premise lay a confluence of academic and commercial thinking. For at least a decade, academics have explored the idea that many immigrants possess "transnational" identities. That is, aided by jet travel, technology and global commerce, they - and their children - maintain vital, current links to homelands that are never really left behind. There has been a fervent debate in intellectual circles about the "cultural space" inhabited by the children of recent immigrants and to what extent its very "hybridity" makes it a place of its own.

The new "hybrid" channels can be read as part of a pattern that began with the great globalization of MTV more than a decade ago:

When MTV began to establish channels abroad in the late 1980's, critics viewed the expansion as quintessential cultural imperialism that would homogenize youth culture worldwide. Early on, though, MTV learned that it made better business sense to be "glocal" - their motto is "think global, act local" - than to impose a wholly American cultural product. Young people, wherever they were, would watch international acts for only so long before they wanted to see something of their own. So each of MTV's international channels developed local talent and its own personality: MTV Indonesia has a call to prayer, MTV Italy has cooking shows, MTV Brazil is, visually speaking, extremely colorful and, sartorially speaking, quite bare.

Later in the article, M.I.A. is mentioned, as is the Desi rap group Karmacy. Also Kabhi Kushi, Kabhi Gham.

A couple of quick thoughts:
1. Who will get MTV Desi? Will it be on markets outside of New York? Will we have to sign up for some special package deal with the cable company? (If so, fuhgeddaboutit)

2. This channel evidently has my number culturally (and even intellectually, judging by the quotes above). If there were a channel running M.I.A., Jazzy B (a Punjabi pop star), and "Just Chill" from Pyar Maine Kyun Kiya?, I would probably have it on in the background all day.

Well, for a week at least. Currently, if you know those three references, you have to work at it a little. New bollywood numbers have cachet for ABCDs partly because it's a bit subcultural -- off the mainstream media's radar. There's a danger that having easy access to all these different genres of "desi" music might make it seem a little drab. I found it hard enough to sit through Bunty Aur Babli's "Nach Baliye" in the movie theater (it's a passable dance song but it's filmed really badly). I'm not sure I need to see it again and again.

Parineeta: A Star is Born

Well, maybe. Vidya Balan, who is the heart and soul of the new film Parineeta, has a very traditional Indian look. That is to say, she actually has 'Indian' features, in contrast to most of today's Bollywood teenyboppers. Will there be more roles for Vidya Balan?

Overall, Parineeta is as classy a Hindi film as we can expect to see this year. It has great music and nice filmic allusions, including the famous Sharmila Tagore train from Aradhana ("Mere Sapno Ki Rani"), and a brilliantly kitschy big-band number with Rekha ("Kasisi Paheli Zindgani"). It's also a thoughtful adaptation of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's novel -- nicely trimmed to maintain audience interest at two hours long. Parineeta reminds one a good deal of Devdas -- both movies are adaptations of Saratchandra novels -- but the melodrama in Parineeta is much lighter than the Devdas story. The central focus here is music, not alcoholism or 'courtesan' melodrama.

I would recommend Parineeta, especially to readers who don't watch many Hindi films. It might help a little if you know how fabulous Rekha was in her hey-day, but it's not required.

(Sidenote: An interesting article on the 'Devdas phenomenon' is at the University of Iowa. And Poonam Arora has written a serious, scholarly article on "Devdas, India's Emasculated Hero: Sadomasochism and Colonialism")

Protoceratops or Griffin; Mastodon or Titan

Interesting tidbit from the History Channel, while watching a show called "Ancient Monster Hunters." I thought it would be a bit of fun, but it turned out to be something quite serious:

The folklorist Adrienne Mayor has written a book called The First Fossil Hunters, about the ancient Greek interest in large bones. They thought of them as the bones of 'heroes,' but modern paleontology suggests they were actually fossils -- generally of giant Mastodons, whose femurs could easily be mistaken for the bones of giant humans.

Many of the ancient Greek myths of Titans and the like might be semi-logical imaginings based on the partial skeletons they themselves found around the Aegean.

Also, the myth of the Griffin -- with the head of a ferocious beaked raptor and body of a lion -- may have been based on the fossils of a dinosaur called Protoceratops. Scythian traders in the 6th-8th centuries BCE saw the fossils in what were known as the 'Altian mountains' (sp?), and Greek travelers brought the idea of this ferocious beast back to Greece, and into Greek mythology (where Griffins play an important role in guarding the mountains where Prometheus would be described as experiencing eternal torment in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound). The idea that griffins guarded gold came into being because the same mountains where those fossils are visible were also places known for surface gold deposits.

It's an elegant way to make sense of some aspects of Greek mythology. Mayor believes their myths are to a large extent based on real artifacts they found and collected, not purely on superstition or fantasy. Though Lucretius and Aristotle are silent on the bones, later writers like Phlegon do mention them quite a bit. And until recently archeologists generally threw out "curious" bones discovered at digs, though quite a number of them have noted finding oddly shaped, large bones at many major excavations over the course of two centuries of digging. The hard evidence is slim, but Mayor has found the remains of what is probably a Mastodon femur at the Acropolis of a contemporary excavation of a smaller Greek town.

You can read a few pages of the book at Amazon.

Not everyone is impressed with Mayor. Her formal training is very minimal, and The First Fossil Hunters is apparently more a book of arguments than it is a scholarly work of archeology. Here is a respectful but critical review of Mayor's book from the Journal of American Folklore.

Disclaimer: I know nothing substantial about anything in this post, from archeology to ancient Greek mythology... just a little pseudo-scientific timepass...

Taxis and Globalization: Biju Mathew on ROS

Did you know that most of the Punjabi taxi drivers in New York are from Jalandhar? Radio Open Source has a great interview with Biju Mathew, an Indian taxi organizer in New York. He has written a book called Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, which you can get here.

This interview, I'm afraid, is much more interesting than the interview I was on last week. The most interesting part is actually not the cultural niceties (Jalandhar and so on), but the economic issues. Because of the changing dynamics of the New York economy as well as the taxi/medallion system itself, it's no longer very common for drivers to use driving a cab as a way to save money so they can get into other kinds of work.

You can listen to the Audio stream or download the MP3 for your Ipod here. In addition to Mathew, they have some interesting taxi drivers on the phone, including a dude from Ghana, a Pakistani, and some others.

Nice Country We Got Here

I know this has been covered elsewhere, but I wanted to highlight some passages from this story in the New York Times about the Bangladeshi girl who was just deported. She was initially detained on suspicion of involvement in terrorism, but then deported for her parents' visa violation.

She got flagged for stuff she said on some Internet chat rooms. A former FBI agent has raised questions about the efficacy of using FBI resources to chase down a bunch of idle Internet chatter:

Mike German, who left the bureau a year ago after a long career chasing homegrown terror suspects, said that the agency's new emphasis on collecting intelligence rather than criminal evidence has opened the door to more investigations that go "in the wrong direction."

"If all these chat rooms are being monitored, and we're running down all these people because of what they're saying in chat rooms, then these are resources we're not using on real threats," said Mr. German, who has publicly complained that F.B.I. management problems impeded terror investigations after 9/11.

The stress on intelligence increases the agency's demands for secrecy, to protect its sources. And secrecy, he said, leads to abuses of power.

"Perhaps the government has some incredibly incriminating piece of information and saved us from a terrible act of violence; it would make everybody feel better to know it," he said. "Conversely, if they did something wrong, the public needs to know that."

Well, the government can't be said to have done anything (legally) wrong in this case. They are always within their rights to deport people who have overstayed their visas, and there's no point complaining about that.

But why instigate terrorist investigations on teenagers who have shown no disposition to violence? The government's own psychologist in the case "concluded she [Tashnuba] was neither homicidal nor suicidal." What the DHS is doing is, on their own admission, preemptive crime-fighting. "Preemptive" sounds good, but it's unconstitutional (unless you have visa problems).

A little more:

Instead, after two weeks of frantic inquiries by her parents, The New York Times learned that Tashnuba was one of two girls being held, officially on their parents' immigration violations, but actually for questioning by F.B.I.'s Joint Terrorism Task Force. According to a government document provided to The Times by a federal official, the F.B.I. asserted that the girls presented "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." The document cited no evidence. And in background interviews, federal officials were quick to play down the case as soon as reporters called, characterizing the investigation as a pre-emptive move against potential candidates for recruitment, not the disruption of a plot.

By then agents had seized Tashnuba's diary, schoolwork and phone book -- and the computer she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed. From her account of the agents' questions, and comments by a government official who reviewed a report about the F.B.I.'s grounds for suspicion, it appears that Tashnuba's interest in the speeches became the lens that colored everything else about her life.

Veering between "nice and awful," she said, up to three agents at a time pressed her about possible terrorist ties among her friends, and what they saw as suspicious tendencies in her schoolwork, like class notes about suicide. She said they even criticized the austere décor of the bedroom she shared with her 10-year-old sister.

"The F.B.I. tried to say I didn't have a life -- like, I wasn't the typical teenager," Tashnuba said bitterly, fingering her long Muslim dress. "They thought I was anti-American because I didn't want to compromise, but in my high-school ethics class we had Communists, Democrats, Republicans, Gothics -- all types. In all our classes, we were told, 'You speak up, you give your opinion, and you defend it.'"

She's wrong, and her high school ethics teacher was wrong: if you're a Muslim teenager, you don't have freedom of speech in the United States. You don't have your own opinion, and if you do, you don't defend it.

One consolation: at least they didn't torture her.

An essay on Ulysses

In honor of Bloomsday, here (PDF) is a short, unpublished essay on the theme of fat in Ulysses. (See the post at The Valve for some more details.)

Last year's Bloomsday (100) was all hype. This year's will be all 'substance', if I have anything to say about it.

Killing 'Democracy' in order to save it

No, not another rant about what goes on at Guantanamo Bay, though that would be a worthy topic.

Rather, it's about Microsoft, which is forbidding Chinese bloggers on MSN Spaces in China from using words like "Democracy," "Freedom," and "Taiwan Independence" in the titles of their blogs. The idea is to reduce the flags that appear to Beijing censors, and reduce the chances that the service will be banned entirely in China.

I like it -- it's reverse Orwell. You use double-speak not to silence freedom, but to ensure it.

In Defense of Coldplay (only, not so much the new album)

Jon Pareles' recent critical review of Coldplay's new album X&Y in the New York Times has so much praise of the band in it that it's hard to see what he doesn't like. (Or perhaps, it's easy to see what he doesn't like, but it's hard to believe that he means it.)

For starters:

Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.

It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.

This all seems true. Perfect pop melodies, and a hook in every song. It's why Coldplay is one of the few bands where people want the whole CD, not just the single from the radio.

Many bands have beautiful melodies -- the Doves, Engineers (a new band), and Elbow (a relatively obscure band), and Clinic all come to mind as comparable sounding bands who should be better known than they are. Then there's the old dinosaur called Radiohead, of course. And singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith and Rufus Wainwright are in the same folder in my feeling-melodic hard drive (though they have little in common with Coldplay musically, and both certainly supersede Coldplay in terms of originality). But nearly all of the names just mentioned have a tendency to get too arty after a certain point in their careers. I can appreciate Radiohead's recent CDs, but I can't listen to them more than twice. I listen to Clinic and the Doves much more, but only certain songs (for instance, Clinic's "For the Wars" off of Walking With Thee); there are several tracks that don't quite seem to go anywhere on all of these bands' albums.

What serious music critics don't like about Coldplay is precisely what I do like. Every song has structure: chorus, verse, bridge. Every song, that is, is a song. Pareles suggests that it might be a bit too robotic ("anything that distracts from the musical drama"), but I think of it -- again, in the pop idiom -- as well-focused writing and production. They know what they are trying to do, and they do it.

Pareles does make a valid criticism of Chris Martin's over-use of falsetto:

Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them -- in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic -- he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup.

I have to accept this as a legitimate criticism. It's a predictable part of the show, and as such, the surprise of it has worn off. Still, I've tried to get my voice to do that falsetto, and it simply won't go there. Am I alone? How many men can do that with their voices? Chris Martin has a great voice, maudlin falsetto included. Why begrudge him the attempt to show it off?

On to the lyrics:

And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.

Here I think that Jon Pareles has it exactly backwards, at least on the first two CDs (X&Y does tend a bit more towards self-indulgence than the earlier albums did). Chris Martin's lyrical restraint is in fact one of the best things about Coldplay's first two albums, Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head. The lyrics are simple, but even when they express very familiar feelings, they tend towards an intriguing abstraction. Take the hit "Yellow," which everyone is sick of hearing, even me. But here are the first two verses:

Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah, they were all yellow.

I came along,
I wrote a song for you,
And all the things you do,
And it was called "Yellow."

Yellow? (Read the rest of the lyrics here.) It's an almost-annoyingly simple song, with a melody that can quickly become cloying. But the lyrics remain just a little bit elusive, in a way that over-the-top love songs don't often manage to do (it's much less obvious than U2's "One", for instance). The saving grace is that word "yellow," which has no fixed referent that is evident to the listener. Especially with the reflexivity of the second verse, this is the exact opposite of self-indulgence or self-involvement. It's almost entirely impersonal.

Another example, from a song expressing a very different kind of feeling, is "A Rush of Blood to the Head," from the second album. Here are the opening verses:

He said I'm gonna buy this place and burn it down
I'm gonna put it six feet underground
He said "I'm gonna buy this place and watch it fall
Stand here beside me baby in the crumbling walls

Oh I'm gonna buy this place and start a fire
Stand here until I fill all your heart's desires
Because I'm gonna buy this place and see it burn
Do back the things it did to you in return

He said I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war
If you can tell me something worth fighting for
Oh and I'm gonna buy this place that's what I said
Blame it upon a rush of blood to the head

This being the album Coldplay released not long after 9/11, one has to presume a connection to terrorism. Interestingly, what Coldplay is doing is not a "give peace a chance" type of message. It's more psychological: a song about the sociopathic kind of anger that sometimes leads young men to commit Acts of Violence Against Society. But it's not only about that, as the line "I'm gonna buy this place" ties the impulse to violence to the urge to dominate and subjugate, attributes as essential to American Capitalism as they are to acts of terrorism. Even Coldplay's political references are carefully controlled -- and just complex enough to be interesting.

Many other Coldplay songs fall in these parameters. They work out a good balance: all of it feels real, but not much of it is directly personal or socially overt. (There are no songs called "I love you Gwyneth," for instance.) If we're talking about self-pity, self-indulgence, and general emo-overload, a much better culprit would be Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst sure has a lot to say about his ex-girlfriends!

Two more paragraphs from Pareles full of criticisms that turn out to be compliments, and I'll quit:

Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."

On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.

Though Pareles means this as a set-up for his final takedown of what he calls Coldplay's "hokum," he manages to pinpoint some of Coldplay's greatest strengths along the way. Did anyone hear "Clocks" and not feel some admiration for the writer and the musicians who came up with it? And I don't think Coldplay's extremely studied production values necessarily represents the absence of "any glimmer of human frailty." It could just as easily be described as craftsmanship and care.

We did a lot of driving this past weekend, and got a good earful of X&Y. It's decent and listenable. It's especially heartening that they're sticking with pop, not getting into experimental art-rock or electronics (they are thinking more U2 and less Radiohead, which is fine by me). Still, the production is much more dense with instrumentation, louder and less intimate-sounding. The music sounds less personal -- more radio-friendly? -- and the shadings of U2's guitar and Pink Floyd production effects are sometimes a bit too obvious for my taste.

Despite its flaws X&Y shows that Coldplay know how to make an album that sounds like Coldplay, which is exactly what I was asking for. So sue me!

Kiran Ahluwalia @ Joe's Pub

Sometimes my life is just one endless debate over hybridity/fusion. Last night was the latest chapter, with Kiran Ahluwalia's CD release performance at Joe's Pub in New York.

Ahluwalia sings Ghazals and Punjabi folk songs, mainly in a traditional style. (According to her website, she studied the art of Ghazal for several years in Hyderabad with a teacher named Vithal Rao, "one of the last living court musicians of the Nizam (King) of Hyderabad.") She has a remarkable, strong, unique voice. For that alone, I strongly recommend her music.

The difference -- and perhaps, the controversy -- is in her band, which includes western guitar and bass, and has a bit of a jazz sensibility. There is also just a hint of jazz in Ahluwalia's voice in some tracks. Nothing too obvious, but it's there in her live rendition of songs like "Rabh da Roop" (the CD version is a little different -- more "asli"). A traditional Punjabi version might really play up the melodrama of the song ("My friend, I have found my love/ but lost myself./ The intoxication of my passion/ overwhelmed me/ and I lost myself."). But in Ahluwalia's rendition it still comes across as just a little playful.

I have to admit that I like the lightness. I have a few ghazal CDs -- mainly Jagjit & Chitra and Pankaj Udhas -- but I don't listen to them often anymore. Ghazals can be heavy, and slow -- lugubrious, even. While a cynic might say that Ahluwalia has a jazz guitarist because it makes the music more legible to Americans and ABCDs, one could just as easily say that it brings the rhythm up, and makes things more lively. (And while I'm at it, I should point out there's plenty of fusion happening in India itself right now -- listen, for instance, to the great debut CD from Rabbi Sher-Gil.)

Not everyone likes what Ahluwalia is doing. I ran into a couple of old friends at the show -- both ABCDs. They said they didn't especially like the fusion elements; somehow it made the music seem a little light. One quip that stuck in my mind was their sense that the fusion wasn't "necessary," and I can see what they mean. You could sing ghazals the way Jagjit & Chitra do it, or do Punjabi songs the way someone like Abida Parveen sings them (or indeed, the way Jagjit & Chitra did, on occasion). In traditional renditions, you hear strong emotion, and voices straining with longing at every note. But Ahluwalia never quite goes there. She sings her songs the way western folk singers might sing their songs -- with feeling, but with a certain restraint that comes, I suspect, from a commitment to technical precision: it's more important that I hit every note just right, than it is that you believe that I'm really feeling the emotion of this song right now.

My friends might have a point about the "necessity" of fusion in the formal sense. But in a more practical sense, they're definitely wrong. Without the fusion element, there is no to arrange a CD debut performance at an elite venue like Joe's Pub. Without fusion, also, you don't get a major record contract with a prominent World Music label, and you don't get a room full of sophisticated New Yorkers (half of the audience was non-Indian) loving your music. To put it quite directly, without fusion, there is no way Kiran Ahluwalia and her band could get paid like professional musicians at an early phase in their career.

I myself only heard of Kiran Ahluwalia on Tuesday, listening to WNYC's "Soundcheck" as I was driving somewhere. You can listen to the show here. (She comes in at 26:30; the first half of the show is a Canadian band called The Dears.)

[Incidentally, I had a similar debate with my cousin last year, when we went to see Vishal Vaid at the same venue. See that post here]

Speaking of MP3s: Beethoven at the BBC

Downloadable Beethoven symphonies at the BBC. How dope is that.

MP3 file, from Radio Open Source w/YT

The MP3 of the radio interview with Amitav Ghosh is here, at the wonderful Internet Archive.

I would also recommend the conversation on the same program the following night, with Professor Kim Scheppele, on putting the recent referenda on the EU Constitution in perspective. She's worked with the Afghanis as a consultant on their constitution, and is going to be working with the Iraqis this summer during their Constitutional Assembly.

You can also find all of the other downloadable episodes of Radio Open Source that have made it through the Internet Archive's cue by doing a search for "Christopher Lydon" at their site. Thus far it looks like 5 episodes of the show in all are available. (Incidentally, their search engine is a little screwy; you get different results if you run the search multiple times!)

Book Meme (the buck stops here)

Kitabkhana had tagged me last week to do this book meme thing. Someone else did too, recently, though I can't quite figure out who.

I'm going to do it, but -- bad luck! -- I'm going to break the chain, and refrain from tagging anyone else. (If you would like to do a meme inspired by this one, send me an email or drop me a comment, and I will retro-actively tag you.)

1. Total Number of books you own

No idea. I got married two years ago, which means in addition to my office full of books, my study at home full of books, and a living room with a fair number of books, my wife's books are there -- most of them on a large bookshelf in the bedroom. So in addition to predictable titles like Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, John Hawley's Sati: The Blessing and the Curse, and Michael Walzer's On Toleration, for all practical purposes I now also posses a rather intimidating shelf of books called things like Data Structures Using C and C++, Local Area High Speed Networks, and ATM & MPLS Theory & Application. Top that, eclectic readers!

2. Last Book I Bought

I'm not sure which I bought more recently -- Andrea Levy's Small Island or a massive anthology called Theory's Empire (to be discussed shortly on The Valve).

When I bought the Levy, I also picked up a small pile of books from the "extras" bin ($5) at the Barnes & Noble near where I live: Jasper Fiorde's The Eyre Affair (heard it was funny), Anthony Arthur's Literary Feuds (I love me some literary feuds), Peter Gay's Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks, and a biography of Flaubert by Geoffrey Wall.

Like Hurree of Kitabkhana, I evidently buy books by the bushel.

3. Last Book I Read

On Sunday and Monday I re-read Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, as part of preparing for what turned out to be a very brief role in a radio conversation with Ghosh Monday evening. The book stands up to a second reading, though this time I noticed that I was much more interested in Ghosh's use of science and religion -- the dolphins and Bon Bibi -- than I was in the lives and loves of the main characters. No complaints on that, though: I am in very good shape if I find myself at a cocktail party talking to a Cetologist anytime soon.

Last week, with great difficulty, I worked my way through William E. Connelly's Why I Am Not A Secularist, a book I should have read two years ago. (I tried earlier, but I couldn't follow the argument.) He makes some really good points, even if I ultimately disagree with him (and Talal Asad). I may do a blog post on this at some point to spell out what I mean a bit more.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me

I'm going to limit this to "five books that were important to me when I was in college." Otherwise, readers are likely to be treated to a long list of obscure works of literary criticism. (I'll save that list for "Book Meme: Pedantry Edition," which will undoubtedly be going around next month)

A. Midnight's Children was the inspiration for my undergraduate thesis (on Salman Rushdie). Though it wasn't assigned to me it was the experience of developing a comprehensive argument about this book that gave me the confidence to try for graduate school in literature. Else, I would have ended up in grad school in biology, or law school, or writing computer software... Daaamn youuuuu Ruuuuuuuuuushdiiiiiie!!! [in my best Charlton Heston voice]

B. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse I got my first "A+" at Cornell for a paper I wrote on this novel. I subsequently lost the paper, but Woolf made so much sense to me that I had this novel more or less in ready memory for many years. It was still pretty much fresh when I read it again to teach during my first semester as a professor. When I first read it, the book opened up a world. The second time was quite different: it was my feeling of loyalty to Woolf's philosophical framework that inspired me to get my act together as a teacher during an otherwise very difficult semester. (9/11 was in the air; I was paranoid and depressed.)

C. Deleuze-Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. It seems strange given that I never talk about Deleuze-Guattari, but the explosive freedom of their theoretical method lit a fire in my brain when I was 19. I think I might summarize it like this: Deleuze and Guattari argue that all established methods for understanding the human role in the material world -- from Descartes to Freud -- are wrong, expressions of a kind of philosophical totalitarianism. What you need is a completely different, rigorously anti-authoritarian basis for knowledge, based on a non-object they call the "body without organs." Deleuze/Guattari are responsible for a slew of theoretical buzzwords that people still play with, such as the "rhizome," the "nomad," "deterritorialization," the "smooth and the striated," and "molar/molecular" [as a political metaphor]. It all sounds cool, until you try and explain any of the terms to someone who is not a "theorist." I now find the "body without organs" to incoherent (or at least, useless), and I believe all of the other Deleuzian terms are expressible in simpler terms.

D. Plato's The Republic. This was an inspiration, but in rather the opposite manner from Anti-Oedipus. I took a course in the Comp. Lit. department on something to do with philosophy and literature. The Professor, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, was an elderly woman of a rather conservative bent, who was often a little frustrated by the small band of political radicals (myself included) that landed up in her class. We wanted to talk about communism, feminism, and Lacanian interpretations of the Allegory of the Cave. She wanted us to interpret the book. Through her demand that we be rigorous, I really learned a fair bit about how to read Plato.

E. Octavia Butler's Bloodchild. It's still my favorite work of science fiction. Icky, yes. But brilliant.

Tag Five People And Have Them Do This On Their Blogs.

No, I refuse. But again, if you would like to do one of these, let me know (send me the link), and I will retro-actively tag you.

Follow-up From Yesterday: Thoughts on India, Iraq, Globalization, and "Empire"

Well, I did my best with my two minutes of radio fame. [Update: a downloadable MP3 is here]

In response to the question "What is the message from India," I said that there is no one message. India is way too complicated for that to even be a very productive question. It depends where you look, how you look, and who you talk to. I wish I would have had time to say a bit more:

For instance, for India’s poor, globalization has been of little consequence. The poorest segments of Indian society are still by and large without access to reliable electricity, clean water, education, or medical care. India’s per capita income is still $2,600 in purchasing power, according to the UNDP. The country is ranked 127th in the world in the UNDP’s development index. Adult literacy is at 60% according to the Indian census. And while there has been some progress, there’s no question that the sheer numbers of people who are living in conditions of poverty should be of grave concern to people all over the world.

Dilip D’Souza has reported on this in many of his stories in the Indian media. He’s been especially compelling on the plight of the people who live in the shantytowns of Bombay/Mumbai -– where something like half of the city live in illegal tenements that are routinely torn down by city authorities (only to be immediately rebuilt). A staggering number of people spend their entire lives in abysmal circumstances. (A sense of the surreal life of the chawls is also quite prevalent in Maximum City.)

We can perhaps blame some of these failures on western policies regarding India, but I don’t think it’s really sufficient. A much bigger factor has been the government’s lack of responsiveness, and its lack of vision about how to address the problems that are internal to India.

* * * * * *
But that's not the only story, and I think it's a mistake to only dwell on the negative. (The tenor of last night's conversation drifted in that direction.) I tried to offer some slightly more upbeat comments... here's what I should have said:

There is a new confidence, a new passion for entrepreneurialism in many different fields. Obviously the best known of these is the high tech industry -– computers, software, the internet. But you also see it happening in fields such as medicine, biotechnology, even space exploration. And of course you see it in literature, with a new crop of writers that is doing pretty amazing work writing in India itself.

The old idea that a well-educated person with talent and ambition had to leave India in order to get anywhere is fading. There is a trend where a small number of people who emigrated some years ago are actually returning to India to start businesses, or manage the Indian offices for major multinational corporations. The numbers of this reverse drain ("brain gain") are relatively small, but I suspect it will pick up, and have some long-term benefits for India’s talent pool.

There’s been some talk that because much of the work created in recent years via globalization is "back-office" work –- call-centers, for example -– the benefits for India will end up being quite limited. The sociologiest Vijay Prashad has even used the expression "high tech coolies" to suggest that while people who work at various kinds of outsourcing jobs are very well paid relative to the national average, they are essentially doing menial work that Americans don’t really want to do. There is a danger of that happening, but it seems to me that the picture is much more complicated than that, and I think Prashad has been mistaken in using that term. The call center phenomenon is only part of it. More and more of the outsourcing work is high quality employment. Companies like Microsoft and Intel increasingly depend on Indian programmers not just to write the basic code, but to develop large components of their fundamental products.

It is increasingly possible for middle class people in India to have very fulfilling careers in India itself, doing work that is at once challenging and meaningful, and where they themselves have a sense of command over their own destinies. It’s a major change from the era when office jobs were men sat, drank chai, and took bribes -- where not much of substance got done, and where ambition and innovation were stifled at every turn. Some of that culture is still there (one continues to hear complaints about India's Ocean of Red Tape), but a growing number of Indians in the current generation are fed up with it.

But again, it's a mistake to get carried away with optimism. The other set of problems -- those linked to poverty -- still remain. Since the government is unlikely to imagine any new way of dealing with entrenched problems, I have some hope that the younger generation will start to think beyond themselves, and use the new ethos that is emerging to improve the greater common good in ways that will benefit India’s large populations of both urban and rural poor. I would love to see an entrepeneurial attitude to fighting illiteracy and unemployment.

In short, though some people are worried about Western Imperialism, what is going to be more important in the long run is what Indians can do for themselves.

* * * * * *
Speaking of Empire, I’m not convinced that it’s appropriate to talk about American imperialism or "American empire" in the context of India. There are certain disturbing parallels between the recent Iraq war and the British Raj -– Ghosh has written about them, in the New Yorker (an article that is available at his website) but for me it’s not really a strong point for historical comparison -- it's more like a historical metaphor.

And I was a little disappointed that Amitav Ghosh seems to be essentially where he was at the start of the recent Iraq invasion. Here is how he opened the essay from the March 2003 New Yorker:

During the past few months, much has been said and written on the subject of a "new American empire." This term, however, is a misnomer. If the Iraq war is to be seen as a kind of imperial venture, then the project is neither new nor purely American. What President Bush likes to call the "coalition of the willing" is dominated, after all, by America, Britain, and Australia - three English-speaking countries whose allegiances are rooted not just in a shared culture and common institutions but also in a shared history of territorial expansion. Seen in this light, the alignment is only the newest phase in the evolution of the most potent political force of the last two centuries: the Anglophone empire.

I am an Indian, and my history has been shaped as much by the institutions of this empire as by a long tradition of struggle against them. Now I live in New York; for me, the September 11th attacks and their aftermath were filled with disquieting historical resonances. I was vividly reminded, for example, of the Indian uprising of 1857, an event known to the British as the Great Indian Mutiny. That year, in Kanpur, a busy trading junction beside the Ganges, several hundred defenseless British civilians, including women and children, were cut down in an orgy of blood lust by Indians loyal to a local potentate, Nana Sahib. Many of the Indians involved in the rebellion were erstwhile soldiers of the empire who had been seized by nihilistic ideas. The rebels' methods were so extreme that Indian moderates were torn between sympathy, revulsion, and fear. Many Indians chose to distance themselves from the uprising. Others went so far as to join hands with the British in the two violent years that followed the rebellion. A similar process is clearly under way in today's Middle East, where Islamist fundamentalism has inflamed some Arabs while alienating others.

The phrase "shock and awe," used by the United States military to describe the initial aerial attack on Baghdad, provided another reminder of the 1857 uprising in India. In the aftermath of the mutiny, the British mounted a campaign to create terror and awe among rebel forces throughout the Indian subcontinent. The road from Kanpur to Allahabad was lined with the corpses of Indian soldiers who had been hanged; there were public displays of rebels being shot from cannons. British soldiers sacked cities across the north of India. The instruments of state were deployed in such a way as to reward allies and punish areas and populations that had supported the rebels. The effects of these policies were felt for generations and can, arguably, still be observed in the disparities that divide, say, the relatively affluent region of Punjab and the impoverished state of Bihar.

The right and wrong of the British actions are not at issue here. Nor do I want to overstate the analogy to the present circumstances; the "coalition of the willing" is clearly not going to use nineteenth-century methods in Iraq. I want, rather, to pose a question that is not articulated often enough: Do such acts of power work? Many believe that displays of military might are always erased or offset by countervailing forces of resistance. But those who are accustomed to the exercise of power know otherwise. They know that power can be used to redirect the forces of resistance.

It's a very nicely written opening, but is it still a relevant metaphor for the current situation? At best, this is a caution for Americans on the verge of war. In the conversation on the radio last night, Ghosh followed up by alluding to Gandhi, and reminding us that freedom can't be instilled at gunpoint. All of which was said, correctly, by many on the left in the build-up to war. But I don't think it's a useful sentiment two years later; some things have changed. Like the Democratic presidential candidates in the last election, we need to apply ourselves to the new reality; we cannot effectively 'run' against a war that has already happened. I believe that in some fundamental sense we have to find a way to accept the American occupation, though we can continue to draw attention to the potential for further exploitation of the Iraqi people.

How to read what is happening in Iraq today is a vexed question. It does seem that the new government is slowly establishing itself, and there are some hints that the insurgents are slowly being rounded up. Do we really believe that a stable Iraqi government can't survive the inevitable withdrawal of American forces? And would we still call then this an exercise in "Imperialism"? Since I do believe that US troops will withdraw in the next 2-3 years, I don't think the term is applicable in the territorial sense. The US will, admittedly, begin to demand economic privileges from the new Iraqi government with regards to access to oil, but that is an economic relationship. It's an exploitative relationship, and not a good thing for ordinary Iraqis (or, for that matter, for ordinary Americans). But we should employ a different word to describe it.

Getting back to India. Christopher Lydon asked me why there hasn't been more outrage about America's Iraq adventure in the postcolonial world.

What I said was, some Indians did in fact protest this war -- Ghosh's piece in the New Yorker certainly had an impact, for instance. But these days most of India's intellectuals are, correctly, more concerned with the problems that preoccupy India itself than they are with George Bush's latest follies. It's a classic American fallacy to think that everyone in the world is worried just about America!

What I should have said was something along these lines: there is in fact a great deal of diversity of thought in India about this war, and the best attitude for India to take in response. Some might see it as a naked display of American super-dominance on the geopolitical stage, built on lies, and a deeply corrupt enterprise from start to finish. (Oh wait, that's how I see it...) But others in India's new generation would take a more pragmatic stance: We weren't happy that you started this war, but now that you have, is there any way I can make money out of it?