Quiet Long Island vs. Flooded Bombay

Bombay had 37.1 inches of rain on Tuesday! Wow.

Here in Long Island, things are quiet, quiet, quiet. Here is the photo I took from the front door of the place where we're (temporarily) staying, late last night. It's a 30 second exposure:


It's a version of the other photos I've been posting, of Long Island Sound. The black space in the middle is water. The lights are Connecticut. Nothing is going on.

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And here is a Flickr photo I found, of the flooding in Bombay:


The trains stopped running, so people walked along the tracks to get home.
The photo is by a cat named GrayArea. Click on the picture (or here to see it in its original context. More Bombay Flickr photos here.

At some stations, even that wasn't possible. Thousands (millions?) of people were stranded.

As of now, it looks like 200 people have been killed because of the rains in Bombay, and 400+ are dead in the state of Maharashtra. It's sad -- and I have a feeling the death toll will rise once the water recedes -- but one should remember that most of us have never seen anything like this kind of rain. (New York with 37 inches of rain would have lots of problems too!)

They seem to have handled this pretty well.

8 Things About Bollywood You May Not Know

[Cross posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Writing about Bollywood is incredibly difficult for an amateur fan. Many people are mainly interested in the latest filmi news and gossip, and watch current films to see whether they liked the heroine's outfits. Rani Mukherji's colorful outfits are scrutinized closely, but the quality of the film in which the outfits appear is somehow overlooked.

Then you have the retro-hipsters and nostalgists, who note the decline of the industry from its golden era in the 1960s and 70s, when both actresses and actors were impressively plump, and everything was fabulous, in that kind of “Amitabh's pants are way too tight, but the sequins on his orange vest are oh so bright!” kind of way. Yes, I concur: dishoom, dishoom.

Some retro-bollywood fans will even argue that in the old days the films were actually objectively better, which doesn't seem terribly plausible to me. There were of course some things that were better in the high-class productions from the old days. In particular there were beautiful song lyrics (many of the writers were professional Urdu poets) and the language -– one thinks especially of 'courtesan' movies like Pakeezah -- but often it was just as bad as it is today, and for the same reasons it is often bad today: very low budgets, hurried shooting, and the privileging of star-power and profit over artistic integrity.

That said, there have been some interesting changes in the Indian film industry in the last 10-15 years, which are in my opinion worth noting and appreciating. The industry is still far from perfect, but it is evolving.

If you can't please everyone with your opinions or judgment (and I'm pretty sure I can't), you can at least offer some information. Here, I'm going from Tejaswini Ganti's excellent Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, which was just published last year on Routledge Press. Ganti is by training an anthropologist, who teaches at a university in the U.S. When she researched this book, she did extensive interviews with many people in Bollywood, including producers, stars, art directors, screenwriters, choreographers, etc. In large part, the interviews are what guide her description of the industry, not so much other people's books. (Incidentally, excerpts from her interviews with people like Ramesh Sippy, Aamir Khan, Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, screenwriter Anjum Rabali, Pooja Bhatt, and Subhash Ghai, to name just a few, are included in the final chapter of the book.) The opening chapters of Bollywood set up the industry in general terms (history, general themes, important facts), while the later chapters get into the impact of key films and key figures (especially actors and directors). The book as a whole is quite readable, in contrast to many other recent books of "film theory" on Hindi cinema that have been coming out.

Here, then, are eight things I picked up in Tejaswini Ganti's Bollywood:

1.”Bollywood” vs. “India”. You hear again and again that Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world, producing 800-1000 films a year. Actually this isn't strictly correct. It's the Indian film industry that produces that many films; Bollywood -– defined as commercial Hindi films produced in or around Bombay -– produces only about 150-200 films a year. According to Ganti, both the Telegu and Tamil film industries produce equal numbers of films (though I suspect budgets and audiences are probably smaller).

2.Taxation. Unlike in the U.S., where the film industry has always been treated by the government as a legitimate business, in India for many years, the film industry was treated as a vice, and taxed egregiously, at rates between 25 and 75 percent. This is so despite the fact that the film industry is the second largest in the country in terms of capital investment, and the fifth largest in terms of people employed.

Moreover, the tax is not just one tax, but a whole series of them, affecting the producers, distributors, and exhibitors of films. States use taxes to protect local language cinemas, and the Indian government waives taxes on films that are deemed to be especially patriotic (recently, films like Lakshya and LOC: Kargil were 'tax-free'. So the next time you see some uber-patriotic war film and wonder how Bollywood got so patriotic all of a sudden, keep in mind that there's a profit-margin in there.)

The tax situation has improved somewhat since May 1998, when the government finally granted the film industry the status of an actual “industry,” which means some alleviation of taxes, as well as smaller perks like reduced rates for electricity. However, taxes on films are still pretty high.

With all the tax, it's a wonder that the industry survived at all, especially during the deep recession in the early 1970s, when the government imposed a 250 percent tariff on imported film stock.

3. Flops. The success rate for Bollywood films is 15-20 percent a year. The vast majority of films are 'flops'. The industry survives because there is always some rich sap ready to invest in another film (see #6 below).

4. Number of Prints. The number of prints made for even big films is no more than 500 or so, including prints to be sent abroad. Compare to Hollywood, which releases big films on 3000 or more screens at once in the U.S. alone. One has to keep in mind, of course, that normal (i.e., non-multiplex) movie theaters in India are much larger than in America. A big movie theater in India can seat up to 2500 people.

5. Box Office totals. I've often wondered why we don't get precise box office totals for Bollywood releases the way we do in Hollywood. According to Ganti, while theaters at the main urban centers give quite specific box office numbers, the smaller centers (which also sometimes get films a little later) don't report their earnings accurately or consistently.

6. Financing. Bollywood movies are produced and financed in a completely chaotic way. Here are two paragraphs from Ganti on the decentralized, flexible Bollywood system:

The industry is neither vertically nor horizontally integrated in the manner of the major Hollywood studios or multinational entertainment conglomerates. 'Studios' within the Indian context are merely shooting spaces and not production and distribution concerns. Though there has been a move toward integration and points of convergence . . . these instances are not systemic and do not preclude others from entering the business. Essentially, the 'industry' is a very diffuse and chaotic place where anyone with large sums of money and the right contacts can make a film.

Although both the Western and the Indian press use the metaphors of factories and assembly-line production to characterize the Bombay film industry, i.e., 'Bombay's dream factories churn out hundreds of films a year,' in reality the industry is extremely decentralized and flexible and a more apt comparison would be to a start-up company financed with venture capital. Each Hindi film is made by a team of people who operate as independent contractors or freelancers and work together on a particular project rather than being permanent employees of a particular production company. Films are often financed simply on the basis of a star-cast, the germ of a story idea and a director's reputation. . . . Power resides in the stars, directors, and producers. The industry contains very few non-value-added people such as executives, lawyers, agents, professional managers, i.e., the 'suits,' who do not contribute to the actual filmmaking process. There are also no intermediaries such as casting agents, talent scouts, or agencies like ICA and William Morris.

In the absence of lawyers, Ganti notes (and Suketa Mehta corroborates much of this in his book Maximum City, which is also largely based on personal experience with prominent figures in the industry), large deals are often sealed on the basis of verbal agreements between trusted partners. The informal nature of the system also makes it a convenient haven for 'black money' –- cash investments by gangsters, who need to hide their earnings from tax collectors.

7. English. These days, many Bollywood screenplays are written in English originally. The reasons for this are many and overlapping. Here is how Ganti explains it:

While the narration of a [Bollywood] script is in Hindi or 'Hinglish' – a mix of Hindi and English prevalent among urban elites, many contemporary screenwriters first write their scripts in English and then translate the dialogues themselves into Hindi or work with a dialogue writer who is more proficient in the language. The specifics of a screenplay such as location, time of day, scene descriptions, and camera movement are always in English. The presence of English as a language of production may surprise readers, but is testament of the cosmopolitan nature of the Bombay film industry where people come from every linguistic region of India, and are not necessarily native Hindi speakers. . . . This reliance on English by screenwriters is a recent phenomenon and also signals a shift in [the screenwriters'] background. In the earlier decades of Hindi cinema, screenwriters were often Hindi or Urdu poets, playwrights, or novelists who supported their literary endeavors by working in the film industry. Today, the majority of screenwriters come not from such literary backgrounds, but from a wide range of professional as well as film industry backgrounds. (69)

The change in the kinds of people who write the films might explain why some people feel the films today are not up to the par set by the 1950s and 60s. It also explains how the Hindi dialogue in more 'urban' themed films (like Dil Chahta Hai) sometimes seems a little forced, as if everyone would be more comfortable doing the whole thing in English.

8. Synch-sound. The vast majority of Bollywood films are still dubbed. The industry is still generally using older cameras, which produce camera noise, and has never invested in creating sound-proof shooting conditions in their studios. As a result, it's still easier and more efficient for actors to dub their voices in studio after shooting. This state of affairs is unfortunate, as dubbing is sometimes adversely affects the quality of the acting and the 'production values' more generally.

This set-up also helps non-Hindi speaking actors (like the Tamilian superstar Kamal Haasan) to enter into the Hindi film industry. Conversely, it allows Hindi film actors to get into non-Hindi film industries, even if they don't speak the language. The weirdness is that in some cases, if the actors concerned can't quite get their lips around the language in question, other actors' voices might be over-dubbed for their lines. Thus, the actor who is physically on screen may have his lines vocalized by someone else, while the songs in the film are sung by yet a third person!

Audioslave and Payola

I recently bought Audioslave's new CD Out of Exile, and have been enjoying it. It's a very solid effort, though not, perhaps, quite as jawdroppingly, mindblowingly, cansmashingly, portmanteau word-makingly brilliant as the first CD from three years ago. Though Out of Exile debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts back in May, the reviews have been mixed overall, and the Audioslave fan site is pretty quiet.

Tom Morello's guitar work continues to impress, and the songs "Doesn't Remind Me" and "Man or Animal" are the real deal. The latter in particular has that particular bonecrushing, knucklebleeding quality that inspires bloggers to coin new words to express their enthusiasm. But several of the songs sound like technically proficient loud "rock," without sounding particularly personal or meaningful. Rock depends a fair bit on the Romantic image of personal struggle or vision. Here, despite Chris Cornell's well-publicized bout with addiction/rehab a couple of years ago, there isn't much that goes beyond the abstract. And the effort as a whole feels a little too "professional," which is not a good sign.

Then again, sometimes what you want is just something loud and rocking (besides Led Zeppelin) to listen to in the car, and in that vein I'm still happy with my purchase. And I would still take Audioslave or the Foo Fighers over The White Stripes and My Chemical Romance, any day.

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Today I learned that Audioslave's record company Sony BMG, has admitted to 'Payola'-type practices -- effectively, bribing radio stations to play their label's songs with money for radio station giveaways, free electronics, and vacation packages for DJs. One of the bands (but by no means the only band) Sony was trying to promote in particular in this particular scandal was Audioslave.

It's a surprising twist, to say the least, for a band whose guitarist is an outspoken socialist and anti-war activist, formerly of the radical/revolutionary band Rage Against the Machine. Payola, the peak of corruption in an otherwise blithely capitalist entertainment industry, does not exactly jive with the philosophy behind Morello and Tanakian's Axis of Justice...

There is no indication that Audioslave was itself involved with the Payola scandal. But still, it's got to be a little bit embarrassing when your record label sends around emails like this to commercial radio stations: ""WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."

The Lights of Connecticut

On clear nights, you can see the lights of Connecticut across Long Island Sound. They're about 20 miles away, and there are more people there than it looks. On the left is probably Bridgeport, a city of 150,000 people.

And here it is again, zoomed and color-rebalanced (i.e., with Photoshop):



The lights of the Connecticut shoreline look nice at night. But up close are traffic-choked Route 95, fancy suburban shopping malls, and old industrial cities all decaying at the core. It's supposed to be the wealthiest state in the United States, but you wouldn't know it from looking at Bridgeport (probably the lights on the left).

Long Island is also full of people, but the North Shore is somehow quiet. The roads are clogged, but they don't go to anywhere in particular, only deeper into the island. In this part of the island, no one seems to make anything, just pizza, fried fish, and ice cream. And the rocky little beach is so narrow that at high tide it disappears entirely. The only thing out here worth speaking of, the only thing that seems permanent, is the water. Oh, and the smell of burning charcoal in the evenings, and the little bugs that crawl over everything.

We'll be here for a few weeks, on a working vacation; expect more pictures occasionally.

Tagore in America (Sepia Mutiny guest post)

I'm guest posting at Sepia Mutiny, just to test the waters a little.

Kind of crazy to start off there with a long post about something historical, but Tagore's visits to the U.S. are an interesting story to me. This is the kind of thing that I know about as an English professor that most people probably won't know. Here's the opening of the post:

You might not know that Rabindranath Tagore’s first sustained experience of America was not New York or San Francisco, but the farming/university town of Urbana, Illinois. He went there in 1912, to visit his son Rathindranath, studying at the University of Illinois. Father Rabindranath had wanted his son not to study literature or the arts at a place like Oxford or Cambridge (or London, as Rabindranath himself had done), but rather agricultural science in the service of what Tagore hoped would turn into a program for village development.

You might expect this small-town Illinois experience in 1913 to have been a lesson in culture shock for the cosmopolitan (soon to be world-famous) Tagore, who just a few weeks earlier had been dining with the cream of the crop in literary London. But no, Tagore fit right in, impressing the local Unitarians and making friends as he would do wherever he went in those years. He quickly moved from Urbana to Chicago, where he was a hit with the literati there, and from Chicago he started getting invitations to lecture at some major universities, which he accepted.

Tagore actually made five trips to the US, starting in 1912, and ending in 1930, according to his biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, in their excellent (but out of print!) book Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. (Note: Their book is the source for most of the information in this post.) By looking at those trips in particular, we can get a rather different image of the man than the aristocratic ‘Gurudev’ that most people know. Tagore came to America, first, to visit his son (who did not stay long), then to raise money for his new university at Shantiniketan. But above all, he came to argue with Americans about American business, industry, and war. What he said and how it was received tells an interesting story about both Tagore and the U.S. in those days.

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1. The Mystic

In his early visits to the U.S., Tagore presented himself as a mystic poet and a philosopher, and was received by rapt audiences at packed lectures, standing-room only, at dozens of U.S. universities. But it's tricky: in his lectures in the U.S. (especially in the second go-round, in 1916-17), Tagore did present a kind of mysticism, mainly as a response to modern political repression. Tagore was deeply critical of the British "machine" in India, even if he wasn't quite a nationalist (not after the failure of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal). In his later visits, though some of this mystical language remained in his speeches, Tagore spoke quite directly about current events, and criticized British and American policies quite specifically. He also got into some fights with people in the American print-media (for instance, when a reviewer made a comment about his views on Indian child marriage), and wrote copious 'letters to the editor' when newspapers misquoted or misunderstood his ideas. As this image of Tagore took hold, he became much less popular than earlier -– but he nevertheless showed he could hold his own quite well.

2. '$700 Per Scold'

By his second trip in 1916, Tagore was a Nobel Laureate and a worldwide literary star. He was booked for lectures in twenty-five American cities, many of them at university campuses. He gave talks organized by a professional lecture agency associated with his publisher (Macmillan), and received impressively hefty fees ($700-$1000 a pop – a huge sum in those days). He was lecturing, essentially, against western materialism and for a kind of universal spiritual awareness. There was of course an irony in getting paid very well for criticizing materialism, and the Minneapolis Tribune called him on it:

Half-way through the tour the Minneapolis Tribune called Tagore 'the best business man who ever came to us out of India': he had managed to scold Americans at $700 per scold' while pleading with them 'at $700 per plead'. (Dutta and Robinson, 204)

(Of course, Tagore wasn't scolding Americans for his own benefit. By this point he had begun planning for his university at Shanitiniketan, and all of the money he earned would go to that cause.)

Tagore was, not surprisingly, speaking out against militarism a great deal during this lecture series (you can get a flavor for his perspective in the lectures collected in Nationalism). Here he was lucky in his timing; he managed to leave for home just before the U.S. entered World War I.

On his third trip in 1920, Tagore stayed primarily in New York, trying to raise money from wealthy American industrialists. This trip was a failure, in large part because many of the wealthy men he met – people like J.P Morgan -– were involved in businesses that in one way or another depended on dealings with the British empire, and were leery of helping out anyone who was speaking out against it. As Rathindranath put it in a letter, "It was easier for us to speak out against the British Empire in England than in America." And there were signs that the earlier intense curiosity Tagore's presence inspired had worn thin. Perhaps America was a different place in 1920 than it had been before the War, or perhaps (as Dutta and Robinson suggest), fashions had merely changed.

Fortunately, Tagore came to depend less and less on the mysticism and other-worldliness that characterized his early years. As he gained experience, his political critiques of American capitalism became more specific and targeted, less like the vast generalizations about eastern and western 'civilization' of 1917, and more on the order of international power politics.

[We're skipping Tagore's fourth brief trip to the U.S., as not much of consequence transpired, except that he was harassed by immigration at the Canadian border. (Nothing changes, eh?) He also made some statements to the press about the ghastly book by Katherine Mayo called Mother India, which was then a huge bestseller in the U.S. Mayo's book offers that other old myth of India: poor, backwards, savage.]

3. Arguing with America

Tagore's final trip to the U.S. in 1930 was, by comparison to the intermediate visits in the 1920s, a definite success. Though he still took every opportunity to scold western militarism and American business practices (while politely requesting American money for his university), Tagore got invites to all the right parties:

Apart from [Tagore's] striking looks and personality, India was in the news because of Gandhi, and Tagore's [sympathetic] attitude to Soviet Russia had aroused curiosity; probably too, editors realized that this would be Tagore's last visit. In the sixty-seven days Tagore was in the USA, the New York Times ran twenty-one reports on him, including two interviews and a beautiful photograph of him with Einstein, captioned 'A mathematician and a mystic meet in Manhattan.' He was given a private interview with President Hoover, introduced by the British ambassador (a strange contrast with British official behaviour in 1917-1918. When Tagore once more spoke at Carnegie Hall in New York, which held 4000 people, thousands had to be turned away. A dance performance was given at the Broadway Theater by Ruth St. Denis as a benefit for Shantiniketan; Tagore appeared on stage introduced by his admirer Will Durant. There were exhibitions of his paintings in New York and Boston, to which Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote an interesting introduction. (Dutta and Robinson, 298)

On this final visit, Tagore was more careful than earlier about how he posed his critique of western civilization. But he was still ready to dish it:

At a dinner in New York in his honour . . . in the presence of Franklin Roosevelt, the governor of New York, Sinclair Lewis, the latest Nobel laureate in literature . . . and five hundred others, Tagore said: 'The age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science. But you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate with this gift. A great portion of the world suffers from your civilization.' At Carnegie Hall a week later, he went even further. As always he expressed admiration for the ideals of liberty and self-expression of the West at the close of the nineteenth century, but he deplored its failure to live up to them in the East, in particular the failure of Americans to recognize the appeal of India to be free. 'Our appeal does not reach you, because you respond only to the appeal of power.' Japan appealed to you and you answered because she was able to prove she would make herself as obnoxious as you can.' This remark 'elicited considerable laughter and hand-clapping', according to the New York Times (Dutta and Robinson, 300-301)

Reading this account today provokes several thoughts.

It's important to keep in mind that Tagore was not a life-long nationalist figure. He was responding to the situation, and making his critique in language which he thought his listeners would understand. If someone with the Tagore's aristocratic demeanor were around today, he would be talking about very different kinds of issues, and doing it differently. Hopefully, he would be aware that talk of "civilizations" is generally oversimplified and counterproductive. But he made his point: Tagore's aim was criticize an unjust practice (colonialism) and an international system (the League of Nations) which was thoroughly unsympathetic to the plight of colonized people in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Moreover, he was – in the halls of American power -- pointing out how badly the international system was, even on its own terms, utterly failing.

In some respects, it's surprising how similar America today is to the America of the 1910s and 20s. There is something very typical about the media frenzy that accompanied his first major lecture tour, the dud of his intervening visits, and finally the glamor (with dignity) he managed to get on his last visit there in 1930. He had weathered the initial clamor and the subsequent backlash, and had ended up as a kind of "opinionated celebrity."

Of course, being a "celebrity" rather than an actual political organizer or a committed philosopher has its limits, and it's hard to say whether Tagore's visits to the U.S. had any lasting impact in the American imagination. Certainly, the self-translated Gitanjali has pretty much always been in print, though it has few champions amongst serious literary critics. (These days, Tagore's novels in Bangla are read much more closely; some, like Gora, have been newly translated.) However, though Tagore's literary reputation was generally in decline in the west in his later years, it always remained high in India (where Tagore's “Jana Gana Mana” was adopted as the national anthem), and particularly in Bengal (where 'Rabindra Sangeet' remains incredibly popular and influential). But for all the work fundraising, Shantiniketan suffered for a long while, never quite becoming the site of worldly enlightenment Tagore had hoped for (Visva-Bharati University prospers today). Finally, Tagore's point about the U.S. only recognizing an opposing perspective when backed up by force seems as true today as it was then. At the very least, it seems clear that Tagore knew the American media beast for what it was, and found a way to work with it without compromising himself.

Ok, so it's not an inspiring story of total triumph (but how many of those do we have?). The story of Tagore in America is still instructive, and I think we've seen versions of it again –- with the rapid rise and quick declines in popularity of various self-help "gurus," and perhaps even Arundhati Roy. (If you benefit by exoticization, prepare to spend your life in a cage of well-lit irrelevance.) After his first two trips, I believe, Tagore realized how he was being used, and worked to find a different, more honest way to speak to America.

Tagore was the first Indian writer to really succeed on a global stage not as a curiosity or show-piece, but on the strength of his ideas and his writings. He did a lot to overcome western misconceptions about Indians, even if he did (especially early on) play into some western stereotypes of mystic India. He also probably helped fight the dominant racism of the time, partly by example and partly by his specific political ideas and positions.

More on Tagore:

Another article on Tagore's experience in the U.S.

Articles at Parabaas (including some in Bangla)

Nobel Prize page

Amartya Sen, Tagore and His India

Competing Predictions for the Collapse of Podcasting

There is sort of a debate between Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution and Mark Cuban (i.e., of Broadcast.com and now the impressively loudmouthed owner of the Dallas Mavericks) over the future of podcasting.

Cuban thinks it will flame out the way independent streaming radio did in the late 1990s; he should know, as he was involved in that era. But Tyler Cowen thinks the transition will have to do with the way the technology develops. He mentions that a big factor will be search portals:

Some people find blogs through Google, but most find them (I suspect) through other blogs. Podcasting may not work this way. The relative returns to "portal podcasts" will be lower than for portal blogs. Glenn Reynolds can read and process material faster than most people, but no one can hear a two-minute comedy routine in much less than two minutes (no need to write me about speeding up the tape, cutting out the dead space, etc., you get the point). So you won't find good podcasts through other podcasts to the same degree, since it is harder to serve as an effective portal. The sorting will work less well, and the categories will be harder to describe and communicate. Advertising will matter more, and institutions such as iTunes will have more influence over selection and content. Podcasting will be more in hock to MSM than are blogs.

One thing he doesn't mention is the possibility of Google or Microsoft devising audio search engines using voice recognition. I gather from friends in the industry that a lot of people are working on this, though I don't know how far along the development is. If a working version is released in the next year or so, podcasting could have more life in it than people think.

Ideally, that kind of search technology would also be incorporated into MP3 players, so you could search your own voice MP3/podcast collections in the manner of Google Desktop Search. Currently whatever content is stored in my MP3s is in a kind of black hole.

Cowen's last point about the role of the MSM seems right on. I have to admit, despite my hype-ridden posts on podcasting from a few months ago, I'm hardly listening to podcasts these days. The only one I consistently listen to is BBC4's In Our Time, because the topics are so ambitious and interesting (they are, however, currently on hiatus until September). I also listen to a fair amount of Radio Open Source, perhaps not surprisingly. Both are part of the mainstream media.

(Hint: check out their recent discussion of "Integration and extremism of Muslims in Europe" with Peter Berger and Reza Aslan.)

(Another thing: still no desi podcasts, as far as I know. I do get a fair number of people coming to this site looking for "Hindi podcast" or "Indian podcast"; sorry, not yet)

The Argumentative Indian: Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen's new book of essays looks like a must-get. Here is the way The Guardian sets up their review:

Every year, the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan, the tiny university town 100-odd miles from Calcutta. In Santiniketan, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, can be seen on a bicycle, friendly and unassuming, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted in the country in which he grew up; he is deeply engaged with its concerns.
There can, then, be few people better equipped than this Lamont University Professor at Harvard to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world.

In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India's history.

Bet you didn't know that bit about him going to Santiniketan every year? There is a nice article from a 1999 issue of Frontline about it.

Unfortunately, Amazon is saying that the U.S. release date isn't until October. You might be able to buy it straight from Amazon UK; I'm not 100% sure it will work, though. In India, it looks like the book is available for Rs. 650 from Penguin.

Red Algae and Jumping Bluefish

At least, I think it's algae. It doesn't quite look like the rhodophyta in this picture. But some of the images here are similar.

Here is a close up:



I guess I just don't know the beach very well. Yesterday we saw "jumping bluefish" out in Long Island Sound; the fishermen were out in force. Still, until someone explained to me what those little puddles and flecks out in the water signified, I was clueless there too.

Intentionalism vs. Textualism--why Literary Criticism matters for the Supreme Court

Stanley Fish, proving he is still very much a legal & literary critical mind to be reckoned with:

If interpreting the Constitution - as opposed to rewriting it - is what you want to do, you are necessarily an "intentionalist," someone who is trying to figure out what the framers had in mind. Intentionalism is not a style of interpretation, it is another name for interpretation itself.

Think about it: if interpreting a document is to be a rational act, if its exercise is to have a goal and a way of assessing progress toward that goal, then it must have an object to aim at, and the only candidate for that object is the author's intention. What other candidate could there be?

One answer to this question has been given by Justice Antonin Scalia and others under the rubric of "textualism." Textualists insist that what an interpreter seeks to establish is the meaning of the text as it exists apart from anyone's intention. According to Justice Scalia, it is what is "said," not what is "meant," that is "the object of our inquiry."

And then a little later:

Justice Scalia has it backwards: if you're not looking for what is meant, the notion of something being said or written is incoherent. Intention is not something added to language; it is what must already be assumed if what are otherwise mere physical phenomena (rocks or scratch marks) are to be experienced as language. Intention comes first; language, and with it the possibility of meaning, second. And this means that there can be no "textualist" method, because there is no object - no text without writerly intention - to which would-be textualists could be faithful.

It will be easier to see how he gets the above paragraph from the preceding ones if you read the whole piece.

Two small thoughts: 1) See, you don't need to write like Derrida to make a decent point about language, texts, and interpretation. (And see, the Times might even publish it.)

2) Unfortunately for all of us, the level of discussion around the appointment for Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement on the US Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") is likely to be a lot less intellectually serious. If there is any substantial, consequential discussion at all, that is.

Incidentally, Sean McCann has a much more critical response to the Fish column at The Valve.

Pleasantly surprised; Essays on Orissa, Tagore, and Social Constructionism

I said I was willing to be pleasantly surprised: I am. It looks like the Tarapore Reactor is in business.

I'm actually a little surprised by all the pomp and finery of this visit -- the state dinner (only Bush's fifth, in his five years in office), the formal photographs, and so on. I wonder if there is some kind of geopolitical explanation, or whether the White House simply thinks the photos will come in handy in terms of drawing contributions from Indian American Republicans in the next go-round.

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Sunil Laxman has a very nice essay on his experiences as a tourist in Orissa up, which includes a funny story about being hijacked by a temple priest, who first blesses him and then curses him out when the requisite fee isn't forthcoming.

Sharleen Mondal has an essay on the status of women in Tagore's The Home and the World at a Livejournal site. It is a work in progress; she is looking for suggestions in preparation for an upcoming conference. The part that is most interesting to me is the question of Tagore's "nationalism." On the one hand, in the late 1910s he wrote a series of essays (in English) that are fiercely critical of nationalism. But earlier books (pre-Swadeshi movement) are enthusiastic about it, and even later I think Tagore is invested in an idea of the autonomy of Indian culture, if not political nationalism as it was practiced by his peers. The Home and the World (1915) is ambivalent about it, but he (via Nikhil) nevertheless recognizes the inevitability of this new (destructive) kind of politics.

A graduate student blogger (in social sciences?) named Genealogy Spice has a really interesting discussion of social constructionism up. (It's a couple of weeks old, but better late than never...) It's very thoughtful and carefully written.

I tend to be pretty critical of this approach to things, but not so much because it is somehow obviously or intrinsically wrong. Rather, I think it simply limits the kinds of questions you can ask. Most writers who adhere to social constructionism tend to write essays that simply prove it all over again, showing that a given social group or cultural concept is not as fixed as people seem to think it is.

It is possible to question social constructionism without being either a conservative or a Marxist (or a Marxist conservative! I know a couple of these...). In the social sciences at least, I tend to get much more interested in a scholar's work if she has some fresh empirical data (or in anthropology, field work) guiding her conclusions.

The Turban Adds a Couple of Inches

(Reuters photo)

Possible caption: "Remember, here in America, you always have to look right before crossing, because that's where we drive."

Others?

A Jamaican Writer, Vandana Shiva, Mao-Kruschev, and more

First, a thought: the global media made a very big deal last week about the bombings in London, which killed 55 people. And it was appropriate, as it was a terrible thing to have happened in a city many reporters as well as readers know and love.

But it's worth considering that 71 people died on Saturday in a suicide bombing in Iraq, when a man strapped to explosives decided to detonate them. He decided to do it while standing beneath a fuel truck in the midst of heavy traffic, in an urban area: everything burned.

It's understandable that it's a smaller story than London; 8000 Iraqi civilians were killed by Insurgents in the past 10 months, and the western media has long since given up on talking about it. Same for the politicians, who see this as bad publicity: as far as I know, neither George Bush nor Tony Blair have bothered to make a statement about this most recent attack. Still, the victims of this Iraq bombing -- all civilians, as far as I can tell -- deserve a moment of sympathy.

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That said, here are three links:

1. Book Coolie has a guest essay by Jamaican poet and novelist Geoffrey Philp, on the author's relationship to standard English and patois. It's well worth a read -- an impressive step forward for Coolie's blog.

2. Via CultureCat, a link to an article by eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. Here is a sample:

If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then this does not contribute to GDP, and so does not contribute towards ‘growth’. People are therefore perceived as poor if they eat the food they have grown rather than commercially produced and distributed processed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made form ecologically adapted natural materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics. Yet sustenance living, which the rich West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life.

I don't know. I see what she's saying, but lately I find this type of anti-development argument really irritating. Poor people are generally well aware of their poverty; it's not just Jeffrey Sachs' invention.

Also, I would rather support efforts to achieve Jeffrey Sachs' "achievable" solutions than worry endlessly about who caused the damage to begin with, as Vandana Shiva does in this piece. Righteous anger about colonialism got people like Robert Mugabe and Kwame Nkrumah into positions of power. It did not help them govern justly or competently once they were there.

(Intriguingly, according to this blogger, in his new book The End Of Poverty Sachs actually argues that sweatshops can be a good thing in developing nations! I've yet to read the book, so maybe I will comment more on this later.)

3. There's a new biography of Mao Tse-Tung that talks about a secret pact between the USSR and China in 1962. China would support Kruschev's plan to deploy missiles in Cuba if the USSR would support Mao's invasion of India.

Both events (the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1962 India-China war) took place within five days of each other. The book is called Mao: The Unknown Story, and the author is Jung Chang.

I hope this tidbit is going in the next Dan Brown novel too...

Crossing the Nuclear Threshold: India/US

According to Somini Sengupta at the NYT, perhaps the biggest issue on the table next week with the PM's visit to the US will be nuclear energy technology. I don't expect Manmohan Singh to come away from Washington with much... but I'm always willing to be pleasantly surprised.

According to Sengupta, India is currently on George Bush's good side:

Relations between the countries warmed considerably after Sept. 11, 2001, with joint warfare exercises and Washington's offer of fighter planes for the Indian Air Force. A defense pact signed in June promised joint weapons production and multinational peacekeeping operations.

The United States is India's largest trading partner, and Washington has welcomed India's new patent law restricting production of low-cost Indian-made generic drugs and an "open skies" agreement intended to draw American airline companies to a booming Indian market.

In a telling snapshot of Indian perceptions, a survey commissioned by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in June found that Indians were singular in the world for having a positive view of United States policy.

Ah the drug patents and the airlines again. The drug patents reforms infuriated the Left a couple of months ago, but now it might come in handy in terms of confidence-building with the business-minded White House. I've also heard reference to that bit about Indians being more sympathetic to the Iraq war than everyone else in the world, but I still don't understand it. (And I am, frankly, a little skeptical.)

Then again, with the current climate in Washington, it seems hard to imagine how it would be politically feasible to talk about nuclear technology given the missing WMD scandal that's erupted since the Iraq war, and the ongoing WMD suspicions associated with Iran's nuclear energy program.

Is it possible to help a country like India with nuclear energy technology -- so as to facilitate the building of much-needed power plants -- without getting into technology that might be used for weapons? What is the overlap exactly? (And if there is no overlap, why does everyone think Iran is building nuclear weapons when they say they are simply working on power plants?)

The Ideology of Sarkar

"Sarkar" means "government," so it's no surprise that the trailers to Ram Gopal Varma's latest gangster film (along with the image above) allude directly to politics. With taglines like "There is no good and evil, only power," and "When the system fails, a power will rise..." Varma is marketing a gangster film that seems to be channeling Nietzsche.

He also wants to remind you that he's perfectly aware of the fact that he's ripping off The Godfather, so he takes the rather unusual measure of announcing it at the opening of the film with another on-screen quote: "This is my tribute to The Godfather" (as if Varma has done anything but that since Satya!). Still, this film is unusual because it is explicitly a double-adaptation, blending two mythic backgrounds into one image of absolute power. "Sarkar" is played, of course, by Amitabh Bachchan, here even more impassive and bloated than he is in the other fifteen films in which we've already seen him this year.

Sarkar is really not a very great film (last year's Indian gangster movies were better, especially Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth, and Ab Tak Chappan), though Varma's double-adaptation plays interesting games with its sources, including the career of the real life political figure it is (loosely) about, Bal Thackeray, as well as of course the Corleone family in The Godfather.

The Fantasy of Absolute Power in an era of confusing democracy

First of all, why is Puzo's idea of Vito Corleone so attractive? Corleone is a civilized gangster, to whom loyalty must nevertheless be absolute. He is a family man, with strong, almost indissoluble, blood ties -- but who makes exceptions to add in people who are either not family or not Sicilian (i.e., Tom Hagen, "Consiglieri"). The Godfather is, in short, an iconic patriarch, whose absolute honor, loyalty, and authority is the hallmark of his effectiveness as a leader. He's a superman, a savior, and the paragon of capitalism: Jesus Christ in a tux, stepping out of a stretch limo.

People fantasize about such figures when more modern modes of doing business or politics seem to be leading nowhere, when the vagaries of the political process lead to a disputatious and demoralized public.

In the 1970s and early 80s, this was undeniably the case in both India and the United States. It's no accident that The Godfather was released as a film in 1972, after 8 years of indecisive leadership over the war Vietnam and the direction of American democracy. With Vito Corleone and his war-veteran son Michael (though it was an earlier war, the parallel is not an accident), there is no protracted war for control of the mafia -- no pathetic "peace with dignity." Everything is decided via a show of overwhelming force, which requires that the Son, Michael, murder all enemies at once, including his own brother.

A similar failure of governance opened the way to the emergence of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, led by Bal Thackeray. With Bal Thackeray, there were no pieties about reform, inter-ethnic harmony, or Nehruvian secularism. There were just decisions: caps on non-Marathis in city government, restrictions on non-Marathis getting government contracts, Marathi as the official language, the renaming of everything, and so on and so on. The big difference between Thackeray's political power and a gangster's power -- a distinction Varma ignores in the film -- is that Thackeray's power was always strongly supported by millions of working class and lower-middle class Marathis.

Thackeray's populism was also tied to the event for which his actions cannot be forgiven or simply 'understood' as doing what a political Boss Has To Do to stay on top in Bombay. I'm referring of course to Thackeray's well-documented role in fomenting the riots of 1992. Varma's attempt at making a slick gangster movie has no space for this aspect of Thackeray's evil, and in fact reverses it by throwing in a plot involving a Muslim terrorist smuggling in bombs from Dubai (who is in league, improbably, with an evil, cigarette-smoking "Swami" who is out to get Sarkar). It is a truly perverse rendition of reality to take a man involved in the deaths of thousands of innocent people and turn him into a vigilante fighter of terrorism, as Varma does in Sarkar.

Fortunately, Bal Thackeray is on his last legs, and his political machine is faltering. His son Uddhav is no Michael Corleone -- more like Puzo's "Fredo" (soon to be exiled to Vegas) Without Bal Thackeray's charismatic presence, it's questionable whether the Shiv Sena will continue to be a force in Mumbai in the next political cycle.

(Incidentally, there is an interesting controversy about the Dubai terrorism plot in the film, which has led the film to be banned in the UAE. See this)

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Anti-feminism
The other defining event playing into the myth of The Godfather was the rise of feminism, which good Godfathers naturally dismiss with a gesture ("we don't discuss business in front of the women"). Threatening the code of masculine power, in The Godfather Puzo has Vito's son Michael go off to college, where he marries a WASP girlfriend ("Kay") with modern ideas. Michael is sympathetic to feminism and modernity, and frustrated with his family's backwardness, though he eventually dismisses all of it too at the end of the story (brilliantly filmed by Coppola: Michael closes the door on a bewildered and terrified Kay, to discuss Family Business with his father's henchmen).

Some of that anti-feminism is also at play in Sarkar, though here the 'outside' influence is America. Katrina Kaif (with markedly 'Anglo' features; see my post on Parineeta) plays the NRI girlfriend who simply doesn't understand the ways of the Family. What Varma does with this is pretty formulaic: the hero rejecting the 'modern girl' in favor of the 'traditional Indian wife' (here played by Kajol's sister Tanisha!) is a universal theme in Bollywood films.

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Character actors
Ram Gopal Varma has always good at finding memorable character actors -- people like Rajpal Yadav (the bumbling anti-hero in Mein Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, and a ubiquitous 'comic relief' presence otherwise), as well as many idiosynratic gangsters. Here we have "Silver Mani," a stuttering Tamilian (an odd choice for an ally for Sarkar, considering the Shiv Sena's notorious anti-South Indian rhetoric in the 1970s). Also quite memorable in Sarkar is the glowering "Chander," whose role as Sarkar's enforcer is similar to the "Luca Brasi" character in The Godfather. Tough as steel.

Also great is the 'evil Swami' character, complete with huge glasses, crazy hair, and the afore-mentioned cigarette. Where does he get these guys?

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The Bachchan factor
Amitabh Bachchan is incredibly boring to watch. Varma spends endless hours with close-ups on his star, which go absolutely nowhere. Actors like Brando and Pacino use this blank space and fill it with power -- a hint of menace, the snarl of contempt -- but Bachchan simply seems to be staring off into space, looking vaguely constipated. Fast-forward, yaar. Please fast-forward.

Abhishek is a little better. As with Yuva, he has an interesting darkness about him that differentiates him from the current generation of bland male stars (i.e., the ultra-bland Saif Ali Khan). That darkness is emblematized by his beard, which has generally been considered taboo for lead actors in Bollywood. Bearded, snarling Abhishek was interesting in Yuva, where he had a pronounced vulnerability that had to do with class resentment and insecurity. But this is a smaller role and a lesser film, and that edgy potential isn't doing much here. It won't be long before Abhishek is cast in thousands upon thousands of crap roles like his father (and probably the beard will not last long).

Ah well. There is still hope is for the character actors -- the 'sideys' -- of whom I can never get enough. (Rewind!) Ramu-bhai, please give us more cigarette smoking swamis with sinister smiles. I've had enough of these tired Bollywood stars.

(Ok, wishful thinking. I'm sure I'll be back at the Indian multiplex in North Bergen in a week or two...)

UPDATE: Thanks to Aswin for the link to the Frontline article by Uma Dasgupta about Ram Gopal Varma's gangster trilogy.

Since posting, I also came across (via Feedster) an interesting article by Sudhish Kamath (from an article published in The Hindu, I believe), comparing The Godfather to Sarkar, with additional reference to Mani Ratnam's Tamil adaptation, Nayakan. Pretty good reading.

PM Manmohan Singh's address at Oxford

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave an address at his alma mater Oxford last week. Here's the most interesting quote, I think:

The economics we learnt at Oxford in the 1950s was also marked by optimism about the economic prospects for the post-War and post-colonial world. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the focus of development economics shifted to concerns about the limits to growth. There was considerable doubt about the benefits of international trade for developing countries. I must confess that when I returned home to India, I was struck by the deep distrust of the world displayed by many of my countrymen. We were overwhelmed by the legacy of our immediate past. Not just by the perceived negative consequences of British imperial rule, but also by the sense that we were left out in the cold by the Cold War.

There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income. However, what is significant about the Indo-British relationship is the fact that despite the economic impact of colonial rule, the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, even at the time of our Independence, was relaxed and, I may even say, benign.

This was best exemplified by the exchange that Mahatma Gandhi had here at Oxford in 1931 when he met members of the Raleigh Club and the Indian Majlis. The Mahatma was in England then for the Round Table Conference and during its recess, he spent two weekends at the home of A.D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol. At this meeting, the Mahatma was asked: "How far would you cut India off from the Empire?" His reply was precise - "From the Empire, entirely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve." He added, "The British Empire is an Empire only because of India. The Emperorship must go and I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows. But it must be a partnership on equal terms." This remarkable statement by the Mahatma has defined the basis of our relationship with Britain.

Yes, that is a surprisingly generous thing for Gandhi to have said in 1931. I also liked the point about India's mistrust of the outside world, and was a little shocked by the stats about the country's economic shrinkage between 1700 and 1950 (perhaps more accurate to describe it as 'non-growth').

Word has it that Manmohan Singh will be addressing the U.S. Congress early next week (he is currently heading to Washington to meet with President Bush).

Go, blue.