'Slumming' Takes on a Whole New Meaning

[X-Posted at SM]

Via Albert Krishna Ali at The Other India, a Guardian article about a new tourism phenomenon in India: slum tours. It's apparently a common enough practice in places like Soweto and Rio, but new to India. For 200 Rupees, tourists get a guided tour of the areas around Delhi's railway station, where a few thousand homeless children live:

The tour guide instructs visitors not to take pictures (although he makes an exception for the newspaper photographer). 'Sometimes the children don't like having cameras pointed at them, but mostly they are glad that people are interested in them,' Javed claims, adding that the friendly smiles of the tourists are more welcome than the railway policemen's wooden sticks and the revulsion of the train travellers. He hopes the trip will get a listing in the Lonely Planet guides. Nevertheless there is something a little uncomfortable about the experience -- cheerful visitors in bright holiday T-shirts gazing at profound misery. (link)

Really, what could possibly be uncomfortable about well-fed tourists paying to gawk at desperately poor children?

The author of the Guardian article is definitely skeptical about the whole thing too:

By the end of the walk, the group is beginning to feel overwhelmed by the smells of hot tar, urine and train oil. Have they found it interesting, Javed asks? One person admits to feeling a little disappointed that they weren't able to see more children in action -- picking up bottles, moving around in gangs. 'It's not like we want to peer at them in the zoo, like animals, but the point of the tour is to experience their lives,' she says. Javed says he will take the suggestion on board for future tours. . . .

Babloo, who thinks he is 10, has been living here for maybe three years. His hands are splashed white from the correction fluid that he's breathing in through his clenched left fist, and he pulls a dirty bag filled with bottles with his other hand. His life is unrelentingly bleak and he recognises this.'I don't know why people come and look at us,' he says. (link)

The tours are run by Salaam Baalak Trust, which is a small charity organization focused on caring for homeless children in Delhi. They administer first aid as well as more serious health care help for children who have AIDS or serious drug addiction problems. They also give them basic education and vocational training, and help their families where possible.

In short, SBT is in general a good organization narrowly focused on helping a group of children living in desperate straits. This program makes money for them, but clearly the money and publicity come at the potential cost of the children's dignity.

According to Give World, Salaam Baalak Trust was founded by Mira Nair in 1988 to rehabilitate the slum children she used as actors in Salaam Bombay (hence the name, "Salaam Baalak"). I haven't quite been able to figure out how the organization got from Bombay to Delhi, but as far as I can tell they are now based entirely in Delhi.

The story of the group's founding provides a second layer of irony: this is an organization that was founded using funds generated by western voyeurism of Indian poverty (Nair's film), which is now pioneering the effort to reproduce that voyeurism in a brand new format.

I wouldn't go on the tour in its present form, but perhaps I would try and volunteer to help out with this organization in some way instead. And if tourists want to do more than just take pictures of the Taj Mahal or dance on the beach at Goa, I don't see why that should be frowned upon (especially if the money is put to good use). Is there a way to do it that doesn't involve mere voyeurism?

Early Bengali Science Fiction

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

I thought I might risk going out on the limb of historical obscurities and share an article by Debjani Sengupta (PDF) I came across that talks about early Bengali science fiction writing.

The article is from the journal Sarai, which is published in Delhi. Some of the articles offer some truly impenetrable jargon -– even with writing on familiar topics (Bollywood, Call Centers, and so on). But there are also a number of well-written and informative articles on things like Parsi theater in Bombay in the 1800s that I would highly recommend.

On to Bengali science fiction. Even the fact that it existed as early as the 1880s may be a little shocking, since most studies of Bengali literature tend to center around Tagore -- who was extremely doubtful about modern technology. (Read his account of flying in an airplane here.) But the effects of the industrial revolution were being felt in urban India in the 19th century just as keenly as they were in Europe and the U.S., and at least some Indian writing reflected that. Probably the best, most enduring writing in this genre came from a single family –- Sukumar Ray (in the 1910s and 20s) and his son Satyajit Ray, who was a highly accomplished writer when he wasn't making making world class art films. But according to Sengupta the people who originated the genre in the 1880s were lesser known writers. For instance, the author mentions one Hemlal Dutta Rashashya:

Asimov’s statement that “true science fiction could not really exist until people understood the rationalism of science and began to use it with respect in their stories” is actually true for the first science fiction written in Bangla. This was Hemlal Dutta’s Rahashya (“The Mystery”) that was published in two installments in 1882 in the pictorial magazine Bigyan Darpan, brought out by Jogendra Sadhu. The story revolved around the protagonist Nagendra’s visit to a friend’s house, a mansion completely automated and where technology is deified. Automatic doorbell, burglar alarms, brushes that clean suits mechanically are some of the innovations described in the story, and the tone is of wonder at the rapid automation of human lives.

It seems a little hard to imagine people writing about electric doorbells and burglar alarms in the 1880s in Calcutta, but there you have it. (Doorbells were actually invented in 1830, so maybe it's not that shocking.)

The genre really seems to get going with Sukumar Ray, who was by all accounts highly intellectually adventurous, even in the stories intended for children. (I did a short post on him here some time ago.) Like Lewis Carroll's "Alice" stories, Sukumar Ray’s stories are full of mind-bending puzzles and language games. And it’s quite likely that he was reading British writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and especially H.G. Wells as he was writing The Diary of Heshoram Hushiar:

Sukumar Ray (1887-1923) was probably inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World when he wrote Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (“The Diary Of Heshoram Hushiar”). . . . It is a spoof on the genre because Sukumar is poking fun at the propensity of the scientist to name things, and that too in long-winded Latin words. He seems to be playing around the fact that names are arbitrarily conferred upon things by humans for their own convenience, and suggests that the name of a thing may somehow be intrinsically connected to its nature. So the first creature that Heshoram meets in the course of his journey through the Bandakush Mountains is a “gomratharium” (gomra in Bangla means someone of irritable temperament), a creature that sported a long woebegone face and an extremely cross expression. Soon the company comes upon another peculiar animal, not to be found in any textbook of natural sciences. They hear a terrible yowl, a sound between the cries of a “number of kites and owls” and find an animal “that was neither an alligator, nor a snake, nor a fish but resembled to a certain extent all three”. His howls make Heshoram name him “Chillanosaurus” (chillano means to shout). Although just an extract, Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary is quite unlike anything written even in Bangla.

The cross-linguistic word-play ("Gomratharium" and "Chillanosaurus") is something that experimental modernist writers like James Joyce were doing in Europe in the 1920s too. That he was doing this suggests both that Ray was using Bangla quite confidently, and that he expected that his readership would be bilingual enough to recognize Latinate English words like “aquarium” and “tyrannosaurus.”

Sukumar's son Satyajit was also quite playful with language in the short stories he wrote. His famous “Professor Shanku” (or “Shonku") stories are full of gadgets and devices with exotic names:

Satyajit Ray created Professor Shanku in 1961. The first SF featuring this eccentric hero was written for the magazine Sandesh and was called Byomjatrir Diary (“The Diary of the Space Traveller”). All thirty-eight complete and two incomplete diaries (the last one came out in 1992) narrate the fantastic world of Shanku’s adventures, inventions and travels. Most of these stories are more than science fiction. They are also travelogues, fantasy tales, tales of adventure and romance. . . . His sense of humour makes him peculiarly human and his list of inventions is impressive. Anhihiline, Miracural, Omniscope, Snuffgun, Mangorange, Camerapid, Linguagraph -– the list is long and impressive. Some are drugs, some gadgets, some machines, but they all have human purposes and use.

There is a joyful self-deprecating quality to Professor Shanku, as seen in his early attempts to build a rocket for space travel:

The first [rocket] that he had built was unsuccessful and had come down on his neighbour Abinashbabu’s radish patch. Abinashbabu had no sympathy for Shanku; science and scientists made him yawn. He would come up to Shanku and urge him to set off the rocket for Diwali so that the neighbourhood children could be suitably entertained. Shanku wants to punish this levity and drops his latest invention in his guest’s tea. This is a small pill, made after the fashion of the Jimbhranastra described in the Mahabharata. This pill does not only make one yawn, it makes one see nightmares. Before giving a dose to his neighbour, Shanku had tried a quarter bit on himself. In the morning, half of his beard had turned grey from the effect of his dreams. Shanku’s world is a real world, a human world. In his preparations for the space journey he has decided to take his cat Newton with him. For that he has invented a fish-pill. "Today I tested the fish-pill by leaving it next to a piece of fish. Newton ate the pill. No more problems! Now all I have to do is make his suit and helmet."

Ok, maybe the nightmare pill is a little bit on the darker side, but at least he tried it out on himself before dosing his neighbor. And the fish-pill that would allow him to take his cat along in outer space is a nice touch.

More Professor Shanku definitions are at the >Professor Shanku Wikipedia page:

Miracurall -- a drug capsule that cures any ailment except common cold

Annihillin -- a pistol that simply annihilates any living thing. It does not work on non living things.

Shankoplane -- A small plane capable of vertical take-off and landing and magnificent mileage

Shankolite - the alloy by which shankoplane was made

Omniscope - a combination of telescope and microscope

Air-conditioning pill - a capsule that keeps the body temperature normal in extremes of climate.

Somnolin - a sleeping pill that will work in any condition

I love the idea of a miracle pill that cures everything except the common cold. The A/C pill would probably also come in handy right about now in Delhi (where the temperature is 43.5 degrees C).

The question that comes up for me in looking at this material is first of all surprise that it’s talked about so little with reference to modern Indian literature. The 'serious' figures like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore (in Bangla), and Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan (in English) are the names that tend to get referenced from before 1945. And after 1945, most literary critics have been interested in writers who dealt with political themes in their works -- the independence struggle, partition, wars, corruption, and so on. That Indian writers were also interested in space travel, the automation of everyday life, and robotics from an early point suggests that the literary scene was richer than most people think. Most of the Bengali science fiction in Sengupta's article is oriented to children, but it's clearly quite sophisticated -- entertaining for many adults in some of the same ways J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter is today.

[UPDATE: See a follow-up post here]

Fun With The Reviewers: Deepa Mehta's Water

You might have decided to skip this one, perhaps on the basis of Sajit's negative review on Sepia Mutiny from a couple of months ago. Or you might go with the positive reviews in half a dozen respectable newspapers (and USA Today) as well as the 88% reviewer approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and risk your $9.50 to support a highly respected Desi filmmaker. Personally, I plan to go see it.

Meanwhile I've been surprised by some culturally clueless and simply inaccurate comments from reviewers.

1. First, the hands-down most facile, offensive, goofy comment I've seen in any movie review this year comes from "Metromix," affiliated with the Chicago Tribune. At the tail end of an almost laughably abbreviated summary, the reviewer tries to gear up readers for the film with a fashion-oriented tagline: "Bonus: Gear up for that summer 'do: The widows all have buzz cuts."

"The widows all have buzz cuts." Wow. That one sentence couples the triviality of the film review business with a shocking level of ignorance. I know these folks have short deadlines for copy, but could they at least look up something on the subject of Hindu mourning rituals before publishing a review of a film on Hindu widows?

On the other hand, it might be offensive, but at least "All the widows have buzz cuts" is pithy and sharp -- the kind of outlandish thing you expect the "naughty" character in a Salman Rushdie novel to say.

2. Fundamentalism or Tradition?

Another oddity from some of the reviews is the abuse of the word "fundamentalist." "Fundamentalism" is pretty appropriate if you're referring to what happened in 2000, when RSS goons with the support of the UP government attacked Deepa Mehta's set in Benares, destroying her equipment. (The NDA government did nothing to punish any of the offenders; many people involved in the protests were party leaders and relatives of government ministers.) But "fundamentalist" isn't quite accurate to describe the setting of the film:

There is a tradition within fundamentalist Hinduism that when a woman is widowed, she has three options: (1) to throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre, (2) to marry his brother (if he has one and it is permitted by the family), or (3) to live in poverty in a group home for widows. Although Water transpires in 1938, an endnote indicates that this practice has not been entirely abolished in India. (link)

The reviewer flings around the word "fundamentalist" with abandon, but it's sloppy. The word doesn't fit the context of widowhood in 1930s India at all: "traditional Hinduism" or "Hindu custom" are phrases that would be more appropriate.

3. Who said anything about Sati?>

Check out these lines from the Washington Post review:

The subject is the issue of "widow wastage." Possibly no term exists in English to convey the cultural tradition; it's a kind of continuation, by less fiery means, of sati, the practice of immolating a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. As writer-director Deepa Mehta dramatizes it, when a man dies, his widow is a financial burden to all. Thus she is consigned to an ashram, a kind of rooming house/prison for widows. (link)

Huh? There is a kind of logical connection here -- widows' ashrams and Sati are both troubling, archaic practices -- but they are still two very different traditions with different symbolic meanings.

4. Depends on what your definition of "is" is>

The New York Times ran a somewhat unusual story about Water earlier this week, "Film Ignites The Wrath of Hindu Fundamentalists." Though the title suggests the controversy is occurring in the present, the actual article refers again to the sacking of Mehta's set in Benares in 2000. There is no current controversy over the film in India, because the film hasn't been released there.

Water is scheduled for a limited release in India (90 screens) in July, and there may well be are more protests, riots, or theater burnings (as in Mehta's earlier film Fire, 1996). This time I hope the central government won't just stand by and let "mob censorship" take its mindless toll.

Samrat Upadhyay and the Nepali Present Tense

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Readers interested in what has been happening in Nepal recently might find Samrat Upadhyay's The Royal Ghosts a worthwhile read.

Upadhyay is a Nepali who teaches at a university in the U.S. He is, I think, the only Nepali publishing his fiction in the U.S. at present. Though his stories as a rule tend to focus more on personal issues and relationships than on poitics, in this latest book of stories he has for the first time tackled the effect the "Maobadis"(Maoists) have had on Nepali life. Even here the treatment of the ongoing civil war is a little bit oblique: these are middle-class, urban, Kathmandu stories, and the violence that ravages countryside is as far away from the metropolitan consciousnes as Delhi is from the tribal regions of Bihar.

For example. Pitamber, the protagonist of "A Refugee" reminds me a little of the father-figure in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey: a good father=figure who has, in his do-gooding, perhaps bitten off more than he can chew. He volunteers his house as a refuge for a poor woman from the country and her daughter, who had lost most of their family to Maoist violence. They are traumatized, and are somewhat of an awkward fit in Pitamber's middle class household. Pitamber has to manage his unruly teenage son and also fend off gossip that perhaps he's taken a "second wife." (As someone says in another story, "This is Nepal. It doesn't take anything for people to start talking here.")

The climate is one of constant fear and anxiety. The Maobadis are casually cursed by nearly all the city-dwellers, but still people look around cautiously before they say anything -- in case the wrong people might be listening. Pitamber himself is barely keeping it together, and soon it's his own unexpected violence that is troubling him:

Someone murmured in agreement, but a voice from behind Pitamber sid, 'What are you saying? Our revolution has arrived! These [Maobadis] are our heroes!.'



'Heroes?' Pitamber swiveled around. 'Who said that?'



Someone pointed to a boy of about nineteen,and Pitamber lurched toward him and grabbed his shirt collar. 'What did you say?' He could feel the pulse in his own throat as he slapped the boy hard on the right cheek. Encouraged by the slap, other men now crowed around the boy, shoving him, punching him, shaking him. 'I wasn't being serious,' the boy screamed. 'I didn't mean it!' He began pleading for mercy.



His throad still pulsing, Pitamber walked away. He couldn't believe how fast his hand had flown, how thoughtlessly he'd struck the boy.

The move from big, ominous political questions to issues close to home is a common turn in many of these stories. Ultimately, Pitamber has to deal with the consequences of his own actions (which get worse as the story goes forward), since he can do nothing about the conflict between Maoists and the Army that is tearing apart his country.

Though "A Refugee" is the story where the engagement with the Maoist insurgency is most directly referenced, the best story in the collection might be "The Royal Ghosts," which is set immediately following the shocking murder-suicide of the Nepali royal family in June 2001. (Interestingly, it's not the first time in Nepali history that a royal family has massacred itself. As is discussed in the story, the Ranas came into power on the heels of the Kot Parba massacre in 1846.)

In terms of writing style, I would compare Upadhyay to Rohinton Mistry: simple, straightforward storytelling.

Links: Asafoetida Attacks, Broken Toys, and Authenticity Angst

1. Jhumpa Lahiri's latest, in the New Yorker. I know some will read this and complain that she's doing a version of what she's already done in the short stories in The Interpreter of Maladies. But I don't think her material is necessarily spent as of yet. Also, the second person address gives the story a somewhat different feel. And anyway, Lahiri's almost miraculous precision is always impressive to me.

2. Nadeem Aslam has a blistering personal essay in Granta about growing up with fundamentalists in his family. These folks were so extreme in their hatred of idolatry, they routinely broke even children's toys. Aslam also has some interesting reflections on linguistic alienation that hit close to home for me as well:

I have read widely in Arabic literature, beginning, yes, with the Thousand Nights and A Night. I have read the Qur'an several times as an adult, and of course there are the novels of the magnificent Naguib Mahfouz; pre-Islamic pagan poetry; the fables of Kalila wa Dimna; extracts from a sorcerer's manual from eleventh-century Spain; the wounded and wounding lines of Mahmoud Darwish. But I have read them all in English, silently in my study. The aural connection was severed long ago.

3. Asafoetida attack! Jai Arjun has a hilarious (and needless to say, negative) review of the new Aishwariya Rai film Mistress of Spices. How this pleasurable takedown relates to our discussion of negative reviewing from a couple of weeks ago, I have no idea.

4. And I randomly came across this interesting personal reflection on "authenticity" in India Currents magazine. A young woman (an NRI) meets a Tibetan woman and a white woman in an American grocery store. While everyone (including the woman herself) assumes that she "knows" the Himalayas because she is ethnically Indian, it turns out that the Tibetan is the granddaughter of Tenzing Norgay, the first person to climb Mt. Everest.

The Sadhu and the Shor Birds

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny, where I am on again as a regular blogger.]

[Also, the following is part of a little series I'm doing -- postmodern Sadhu stories; see another effort here.]

Sadhu liked to sit on the porch of his son's new house and write poetry, but lately he was finding it difficult. The problem was a group of noisy birds that lived in the trees behind their house. They gathered in the trees and bushes and seemed to do nothing but chatter, not in quiet, birdly chirps, but angry squawks. Most of the time Sadhu couldn't even see the birds, as they seemed never to move from their respective perches in the trees, so sitting on the porch was a little like diving into pit of greasy wrestlers. Sometimes this pleased the Sadhu, as it reminded him vaguely of India -- the loud voices of the street hawkers arguing with customers over a few paise in his home town of Maramari. But he had heard that type of argument rarely since leaving India fifteen years ago, and now it had begun to seem abrasive and somewhat troubling. And anyway, that type of marketplace arguing usually ended in a sale, and the restoration of good will. But these birds squawked and squawked with an endless amount of stamina, which was almost mechanical in its regularity.

Every so often (mainly at dawn and dusk), Sadhu would see the barking birds making small movements in the trees behind the house. Some birds, he saw, had bright saffron beaks, while others had a sort of greenish hue. A few, he noticed, had little blue feather tufts on the tops of their heads and a black crop below the lower mandible that looked almost like beards. Quite a number of birds had pronounced red and blue feathers on their breasts, graced with small white flecks. Most strangely of all, some of the birds seemed to be confused, and wear different colors depending on the time of the day or month. But even with their myriad differences, as far as Sadhu could tell, the birds all emitted exactly the same type of sound: a loud, angry, and utterly tuneless squawk.

As a young man, Sadhu had had aspirations of becoming a famous writer, like R.K. Narayan. In his school-days, he and his friends had been fiercely competitive in sending their poems and stories to literary magazines and the local newspaper, The Maramari Daily. Some had been successful, and one or two had actually tried to pursue the writing life, but in vain. Eventually, they had all grown up, gotten regular jobs, and married. Sadhu himself had worked as an Inspector (eventually Chief Inspector) for the State Government of Jagrah for nearly twenty-five years. Upon retiring, he came to live in suburban Shpilkes, Pa., with his son and his daughter-in-law. They had recently moved to a house with a porch, which Sadhu happily claimed for himself.

Now Sadhu was an old man, and all his old writerly aspirations were gone. What remained was simply his love of language, and the pressing need -- which grew more acute as he grew older -- to record his experience of the world. He felt he wanted to write to make the life he had lived meaningful, to tell his story. He didn't think at all of publishing any of his poems, only of the pleasure of writing them.

The first poem he wrote on the porch of this new house was the story of his childhood and the frightening death of his older sister in the famine of 1943. It was so beautiful to him, so strange and true, that he almost couldn't believe it had come from his own pen. (The birds were still relatively quiet then, and didn't impinge on his thinking.) In a strange fit of elation at his accomplishment, he tore it out of his speckled notebook, and threw it into the grass. And he was surprised to find that a bird came out of the trees almost immediately, looked at it for a moment, and then pecked at it. Then another bird came out, and another. Soon, a half dozen birds were inspecting the now tattered page, pecking it with their beaks and tearing it with their sharp little claws. Sadhu was aghast, but strangely excited at the ruckus his poem had created.

From that day on, to spite the birds in the trees and perhaps also to challenge them, Sadhu had gotten in the habit of writing his poems and then simply reciting them to the trees in a loud voice. Though it was a relief to have a kind of audience for the poems, each of which was precious to him, the practice of reciting only seemed to excite the birds and make them more and more angry. At first it was exciting (if slightly odd), but now Sadhu felt he couldn't write at all, because of the deafening din it would almost certainly provoke.

On one particularly frustrating Saturday morning, his grandson came out with his little video game toy to "hang out" with his "grandpa" outside (surely he had been encouraged to do so by his mother, who worried too much).

"What's the matter, grandpa?" the boy asked.

"It's just my 'shor' birds, beta."

"Shore birds? Like, they're from the ocean?"

"No, beta, shor, meaning noisy. These birds are very noisy. See, listen." He pointed to the trees, and the birds, obligingly, squawked a little louder. But the boy looked nonplussed.

"So why don't you go inside?"

"I can't write my poems inside."

"So why don't you get an Ipod?"

"What is "Ipaad"? Is that your toy, beta? I don't think..."

"No, grandpa. An Ipod plays music so you don't have to listen to those birds! Here, Dad made me put some Indian songs on it for the car..." The boy pulled a little white toy out of the pockets of his very baggy pants. He showed Sadhu how to use the device, and fitted the earbuds in his ears.

The mellifluous sound of Jagjit Singh's voice filled Sadhu's ears, and as he stared at the trees, containing those now barely audible birds, he exhaled in deep relief. It wasn't silence, but it was beauty, and it would be enough: he could think; he could write. This little toy (for he could not think of it as anything but a toy) would help him leave behind the pointless squabbling of the multi-colored birds in the trees.

It was far from perfect, but Sadhu was confident he had the space he needed to write his poems, and tell the story that was his alone to tell. To whom they would be addressed he still did not know.

[Update: Perhaps I was a little too subtle. Hint: think of blogging]

Songs To Grade Papers By

The lifestyle of a humanities academic is generally pretty good. You get a flexible schedule, and lots of time "off" (i.e., to read, do research, and worry constantly about the progress of your career!). And needless to say, you definitely don't have to spend all your days "in a little cubicle" (caution: music).

But one of the hardest parts is grading at the end of the year. The weather is nice, lots of things are happening, and motivation is hard to come by. My fascination with electronic music seems to have blown over, and these days I tend to turn to pop music, especially vanilla-flavored indie rock and upbeat pop anthems. Here are some of the highlights on my playlist lately:

1. Seu Jorge, "Rebel Rebel." The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was a surealist metafilm rather than a movie. Its most arresting image (after Waris Singh Ahluwalia swimming underwater with a camera, of course) was Seu Jorge doing covers of David Bowie with an acoustic guitar at more or less completely random moments. The Bowie covers are so good, they've released a CD of just those songs, The Life Aquatic Sessions. "A must for all people who like acoustic Afro-Brazilian covers of British classic rock in Portuguese." Three of these songs can be listened to here.

2. Belle and Sebastian, "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying." A classic, whose relevance at this time of the year speaks for itself.

3. Aqualung, "Brighter Than Sunshine." I'm not quite sure about Aqualung as a whole, but this song has that nice emo, pop-anthemic sound. (Might be a little too syrupy for some people.) You can listen to it here.

4. Rufus Wainwright, "Instant Pleasure." From the lyrics:

You in the traffic for all eternity
How could that speed be where you want to be?
Said don't you really want instant pleasure
Instant pleasure, instant pleasure

Ouch, that hits a little close to home. Still, an immensely entertaining song. (Not that I'm endorsing everything he says here!)

If you're looking for an instant Rufus Wainwright fix, try "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" at his Myspace page.

5. Snow Patrol, "Open Your Eyes." More anthemic pop. Some songs at Myspace (not this one, unfortunately). They are on the same British label that Belle and Sebastian are on.

6. The Decemberists, "The Legionnaire's Lament." This is the greatest Paris song in the English language, bar none. (And yes, I'm including "April in Paris," which has to consider itself to have been bumped.) This song makes me nostalgic for a century I didn't live in (the 19th), and for a series of bloody continental wars I never fought in. You can hear some of The Decemberists here.

7. The Spinto Band, "Oh Mandy." You can listen to this triumphant, euphoric bit of power pop here.

8. Michael Stipe and Chris Martin, "In the Sun." This is a song Stipe wrote in response to Hurricane Katrina. It's brilliant -- as good as the best downtempo songs REM ever recorded. Proceeds from the sales on Itunes go to the relief effort, so it's well worth your $.99. Start here.

9. Allen Toussaint, "Yes We Can Can." Speaking of Hurricane Katrina, I gather this funky rhythm and blues song (think 1960s rhythm and blues, not contemporary R&B) has become a bit of a New Orleans anthem. I think it's a good anthem for lots of things, actually. Incidentally, I first heard about Toussaint on NPR.

* * *
What's the best song on your playlist this week?

Hanif Kureishi on his writing process, and the Brit-Asian Arts Scene

Hanif Kureishi has a piece in last Saturday's Guardian called "Fear and Paranoia." It's a series of reflections on the occasion of the revival of "Borderline," a play he wrote 25 years ago.

Kureishi has lately been a rather inconsistent writer (I haven't liked his recent novels much), but he was a vital part of the emergence of a progressive British-Asian literary 'voice' in the 1980s. This piece is a kind of memoir of those times, and includes some historical background information -- about the Southall Riots, the threat posed by the National Front, and Kureishi's own ambitions as a young, progressively-minded writer.

One part that caught my eye involves Kureishi's account of how he wrote "Borderline," which aimed to document the voices and struggle of the South Asian community in Britain in the late 1970s. But the content of the play may be less interesting to us today than the writing process Kureishi describes:

The play did get written. It also got rewritten. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I'd had too "pure" a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn't a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I rewrote as we rehearsed; I rewrote as we played it around the country; I rewrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I'd worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to rewrite on set.

I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk to people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious - some taking place over a number of days - and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. I was shocked at how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.

There are two things that seem worth repeating here. One is Kureishi's humility as an aspiring playwright -- rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. The other is his discovery of the value of "hearing strangers talk," which seems important. Another way of saying it is: young writers, you may have a lot to say, but you'll be more interesting when you learn to get outside of yourself.

The second part of the piece gets into the decline of 1980s political theater and the rise of Islamism, which for Kureishi destroyed the vibe:

During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.

I hear you, and nicely put. And I might add that the rise of strong religion hasn't just been a problem in the Muslim community.

Note: I wrote a post on Sepia Mutiny last summer inspired by another Guardian column from Kureishi. It covers some similar ground.

A Balanced Take on Kaavya Viswanathan/Opal Mehta

(Note: I had to resist the impulse to title this post something goofy like "How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Rich, Got Caught, and Got a Licking." This is one of those book titles that almost begs for parody; if you have good ones, I'm always game to hear them.)

This take by Ann Hulbert in Slate on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal seemed to strike the right note:

The darker moral of her story seems to be that if you succeed by packaging, you can expect to fail by packaging, too—and you alone, not your packagers, will pay the price. McCafferty's publisher, Steve Ross of Crown, has rejected as "disingenuous and troubling" Viswanathan's apology for her "unintentional and unconscious" borrowings from two McCafferty books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, that she says she read and loved in high school. He's right, it doesn't sound like the whole story. I don't mean simply to let Viswanathan off the hook, but her own book—indeed, its very copyright line, Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan—suggests a broader culture of adult-mediated promotion and strategizing at work. It's a culture, as her novel itself shows, that might well leave a teenager very confused about what counts as originality—even a teenager who can write knowingly about just that confusion. In fact, perhaps being able to write so knowingly about derivative self-invention is a recipe for being ripe to succumb to it. Viswanathan may not be a victim, exactly—she's too willing for that—but she is only one of many players here.

Lots of good points there. Above all, I agree with Hulbert's suspicion that there's more to it than just Kaavya Viswanathan screwing up. (This article in today's Times supports Hulbert's conjecture.)

* * *

There's also another interesting article in Slate by Joshua Foer, on the relationship between plagiarism and memory, which brings up the phenomenon of "cryptomnesia":

Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory's depths. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" when he wrote "My Sweet Lord." He had just forgotten he'd ever heard it. And when a young Helen Keller cribbed from Margaret Canby's "The Frost Fairies" in her story "The Frost King," Canby herself said, "Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism; it is a wonderful feat of memory." Keller claimed she was forever after terrified. "I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book," she wrote. "It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read become the very substance and texture of my mind."

Psychologists label this kind of inadvertent appropriation cryptomnesia, and have captured the phenomenon in the laboratory. In one study, researchers had subjects play Boggle against a computer and then afterward try to recreate a list of the words they themselves found. Far more often then expected, the researchers found that their subjects would claim words found by the computer opponent as their own. Even if cryptomnesia is a real memory glitch that happens to all of us from time to time, however, it's hard to figure how it could lead to the involuntary swiping of 29 different passages.

Hm, if I were Kaavya Viswanathan, I might claim cryptomnesia!

More on the Immigration Desk Hassle

This is sort of a follow-up to my post earlier in the week on Tunku Varadarajan, Amartya Sen, and racial profiling.

From the Times:

But a business traveler from Germany got my attention when he described what travel to the United States could be like these days. "At the airport, I was questioned very rudely for 20 minutes," he said. " 'Who are you?' 'What are you doing here?' Before unification, I was treated better at the checkpoints going into East Germany."

Whoa. What do we make of a foreign business traveler comparing his arrival in the United States with a pass through the surly gantlet at Checkpoint Charlie before the wall came down?

One thing became clear at this year's tourism council meeting, after all the happy proclamations about travel's global economic impact (leisure and business travel will account for more than $3 trillion in direct spending worldwide this year, for example). We have a problem, and Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, addressed it in a speech to more than 500 representatives from the world's travel industry.

"The U.S. share of international travel has dropped double digits since 2000, and 35 percent since 1992," he said. "Meanwhile, the global travel market is growing by leaps and bounds."

One reason to treat travelers with respect and dignity that isn't talked about much is pure economics, and it looks like the U.S. is already losing on that front.

The other thing: if even German businessmen feel hassled at the immigration desk, you know there is a real problem.

Trans-speciation: From Margaret Cavendish to China Miéville

[cross-posted at The Valve]

The best thing in China Miéville's The Scar is the character Tanner Sack. Tanner is a prisoner from New Crobuzon (think: London), who is on board the Terpsichoria en route to a slave colony (think: Australia). The ship is hijacked by a particularly terrifying group of pirates from the outlaw city called Armada.

Tanner is a Remade, a person who has had involuntary surgery to reconstruct his body in hybrid form. The Remade are either part-animal or part-machine (one character in The Scar has the upper-body of a human woman attached to a coal-powered iron engine, and tank treads instead of legs).

In the anarchic environs of Armada, Tanner Sack learns to use the tentacles that had been implanted on him as a punishment constructively, and comes to think of himself, positively, as a water-bound being. Eventually, he comes to the realization that to really express himself fully he must in fact have a further operation, and become fully amphibian:

Tanner had thought about it for a long time.

His coming to terms with the sea felt like a long, drawn-out birth. Every day he spent more time below, and the water felt better against him. His new limbs had adapted completely, were as strong and almost as prehensile as his arms and hands.

He had seen with envy how Bastard John the dolphin policed his watch, passing through the brine with unique motion (as he swept in to punish some slacking worker with a brutal butting); and had watched as cray from their half-sunk ships (suspendedat the point of being lost, pickled in time) or the unclear menfish from Bask riding launched themselves into the sea, uncontained by harnessing or chains.

When he left the sea, Tanner felt his tentacles hang heavy and uncomfortable. But when he was below, in his harness, his leather and brass, he felt tethered and constrained. He wanted to swim free, across and up into the light and even, yes, even down, into the cold and silent darkness.

The language here reminds one of the language one sometimes sees with people in the real world who are transgendered: it's only as a person of the opposite gender that they can really feel able to express themselves fully. In some sense, Miéville's marvelous (and, I would add, original) interest in the Remade in The Scar is a way of thinking about the liberating possibilities of radical body modification.

Tanner's desire to have his Remade attributes enhanced in order to achieve full amphibian status is also, in the world Miéville has created, an act of radical political subversion. In New Crobuzon, to be Remade is to be branded forever as a criminal by a sadistic polity, and to be effectively condemned to life as a slave. In Armada, the Remade aren't strange; they are, in a kind of utopian reversal, encouraged to contribute to the society in whatever way their modifications might allow. It's an expression of Miéville's utopian (socialist/Marxist) politics.

But there is a bit of an ambiguity there, as the Remade who didn't choose their form remain in some sense fixed by the bodies that were given them as punishment. And as a floating city composed of boats soldered together, wandering nomadically through the open ocean, Armada isn't a place where personal freedoms in the contemporary liberal sense are necessarily paramount. And indeed, the central plot of The Scar revolves around an attempt by the part of the rulers of Armada to assume absolute authority. At base, there is a tension in Miéville's novel between what I would call functionalist and expressivist ideas about the Remade. With Tanner Sack, Miéville seems to be favoring the expressivist side. But functionalism (a kind of authoritarianism) is perhaps still the dominant in Armada.

* * *

In more specifically biological terms, the trans-speciated status of the Remade reverses the social Darwinism of The Island of Dr. Moreau, where this kind of trans-speciational surgery was an artificial way of forcing animals to climb the evolutionary ladder. In Miéville's utopic vision, trans-speciation enables human beings to enter into multiple evolutionary lines -- and experience life as part octopus or part dolphin (or, in one of the novel's most disturbing chapters, part mosquito).

If Moreau is biologically modernist in the sense that it promotes a concept of evolution that is strictly linear and teleological, perhaps The Scar is postmodernist in that it aims towards a kind of wild multiplicity. (It also calls up the phrase Gilles Deleuze uses -- "becoming-animal" -- though I will leave it to readers who understand Deleuzian thinking to draw connections between D/G and Miéville.)

An important difference between H.G. Wells and Miéville's respective novels might be the presence of natural hybrids in Miéville. In Wells, the monstrosities are purely surgical (and then disciplinary and social) creations.

* * *

A colleague who is an 18th century-ist was reading The Scar along with me, and suggested that there might also be a strong parallel between The Scar and the 17th century utopian text by Margaret Cavendish called The Blazing World (1666), which is about a human woman who is kidnapped by a man who loved her (but was "beneath her station"), and taken out to sea. The boat is taken across the ocean in a freak storm, and the men all freeze to death as the ship is brought towards the North Pole. But the lady is rescued by strange bear-men, and brought to see the Emperor, who is so impressed with her that he marries her and makes her Empress. Here is the passage from The Blazing World where the parallels to The Scar seem most apparent:

The rest of the inhabitants of that world, were men of several different sorts, shapes, figures, dispositions, and humors, as I have already made mention heretofore; some were bear-men, some worm-men, som fish- or mear-men, otherwise called sirens; some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men, some geese-men, some spider-men, some lice-men, some fox-men, some ape-men, some jackdaw-men, some magpie-men, some parrot-men, some satyrs, some giants, and many more, which I cannot all remember; and of these several sorts of men, each followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species, which the Empress encourage them in, especially those that had applied themselves to the study of several arts and sciences; for they were as ingenious and witty in the invention of profitable and useful arts, as we are in our world, nay, more; and to that end she erected schools, and founded several societies. The bear-men were to be her experimental philosophers, the ape-men her chemists, the satyrs her Galenic physicians, the fox-men her politicans, the spider- and lice-men her mathematicians, the jackdaw-, magpie- and parrot-men her orators and logicians, the giants her architects, etc. But before all things, she having got a sovereign power from the Emperor over all the world, desired to be informed of the manner of their religion and government, and to that end she called the priests and statesmen, to give her an account of either. Of the statesmen she enquired, first, why they had so few laws? To which they answered, that many laws made many divisions, which most commonly did breed factions, and at last break out in open wars. Next, she asked why they preferred the monarchical form of government before any other? They answered, that as it was natural for one body fo have but one head, so it was natural for a politic body to have but one governor; and that a commonwealth, which had many governors was like a monster with many heads

Perhaps you see where this is going. Margaret Cavendish was a supporter of Monarchy during an era when questions about political authority and the divine right of kings was pretty urgent (I would welcome further comments on Cavendish's politics from those who know more than I). And her interest in the hybrid beings of the Blazing World is in some sense a functionalist one in support of a monarchialist vision: everyone in their place, with the Queen/Empress at the head.

But there is a kind of ambiguity or confusion here too, invoked at the end of the paragraph above. If she's so insistent on imagining a world where a sane monarch rules rather than the parliamentary "monster with many heads," why then populate her world with beings that would ordinarily be seen as monstrous? It seems like the hybrid animal/people she proposes are meant to follow their "natural" function, but notice that the jobs she gives them are more or less arbitrarily connected to the real-world personalities of those animals ("lice-men" are mathematicians?). And it can't escape our notice that a woman who was abducted in a patriarchal system in the real world has, in the Blazing World, been made an Empress -- again, defying "nature."

It's the reverse of the political ambiguity in Miéville. And yet, since both utopic visions contain contradictions that seem to nullify their primary arguments, they end up looking strangely parallel. The colleague who introduced this connection to me says she thinks The Scar and The Blazing World are closer to each other than to The Island of Dr. Moreau, and I agree.

* * *

Some final things:

--An edited excerpt of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World can be found here.

--I suppose we could also discuss how the role of the Remade in The Scar differs from that in Miéville's Perdido Street Station.

--Or we could talk about the history of fantastic sightings in colonial travel narratives (and the literary texts they inspired (as in Shakespeare's Othello: "anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders").

What the End of a Monarchy Looks Like: Nepal Links

Obviously, these protests are different. Last week, King Gyanendra of Nepal conceded he would have to "return power to the people," and reinstitute the Parliamentary republic that he suspended more than a year ago. No one was satisfied; it looks to me like the 'Kingdom' of Nepal is in its last days.

A quick introduction: as I understand it, Gyanendra's primary motive in assuming absolute power last year was to give him more leverage to fight the Maoists in the Nepali countryside. Wikipedia indicates that the Maoists control 70% of the country's territory. Since Nepal has some very sparsely populated regions, that statistic may not be quite as bad as it sounds (i.e., it accounts for a relatively small percentage of the population), but it's not good. 13,000 people have died in the civil war with the Maoists over the past decade.

In the past three weeks, millions of Nepalis have taken to the streets to agitate for democracy. A Seven Party Alliance (SPA) has been formed, whose primary goal is to remove the king. The protestors have been met with harsh repressive measures, that leading to 15 deaths, and as many as 5000 injured (including quite a number in protests that occurred over the weekend, after the king's announcement). The King's choice to use aggressive policing has probably further weakened any remaining popular support he may have.

I've been trying to explore some Nepali media to get somewhat of an inside look at what's going on there. What do the protestors really want? I gather the democracy parties are collaborating with the Maoists -- do they have a plan for what happens after the king is deposed?

1. The starting point for me here is Global Voices Online, which has a link-filled post here.

2. They link to a blog called Democracy for Nepal, where I read a post suggesting that the leader with the most stature, and who may be a popular choice to take over as President, is Girjia Koirala. (Another name often mentioned is the leader of another party, Madhav Nepal.)

One the same blog, there is a post about the central role of the army in all of this:

Many top brass have sent out feelers to Delhi that if the seven party alliance will play the game, they will ally with the alliance to get rid of the king and fight the Maoists. The army is going to come under the parliament. The parliament may order the army to keep at war, or declare peace. The army does not get to strike any kind of a bargain beforehand. The parliament will command the army. The alliance will give orders to the army. That is how it will happen.

Of course, the author is just speculating here. But it's an important point: protestors get things in motion, but for better or worse it's going to be the army that forces the king to go (and that will dictate how it goes down).

3. United We Blog. This site has some great photographs from the protests, as well as some detailed accounts of what is happening where:

4. Samudaya.org is a news magazine with a number of interesting articles from the past three weeks. Here, an author suggests that the stridency of the current protests may reflect the disproportionate presence of Maoists.

And here is a pretty forceful manifesto, addressed as an open letter to King Gyanendra. (A bit strident for my taste.) And some pictures (warning: some of them are graphic).

5. The Kathmandu Times Here is part of a biting Op-Ed from the Kathmandu Times, in response to the King's statement last Friday:

Currently, Nepal stands at a crossroads. On the right side of it is a new Nepal where people are fully sovereign; insurgency is resolved and the Maoists join the political mainstream; the state is restructured to accommodate the disfranchised populace; and the society makes a peaceful transition towards prosperity. On the wrong side of it is the status quo, where the fundamental issue of sovereignty remains unresolved; the Maoist insurgency continues; state, under the direct control of the king, remains unitary and unwilling to address the issue of widespread exclusion. As Nepal has entered the final stage of the labor pain, the international community, unfortunately, seems to be supportive of the status quo. The international community's euphoric reaction to Friday's royal address is ludicrous, to say the least. It also shows how shallow is their reading of Nepali history and how far removed they are from the present ground reality. The foreign envoys' suggestion to the parties to break with the rebels and to take the royal offer is fraught with two serious problems.

First, it does not address the Maoist insurgency, the main problem of the day. Breaking with the Maoists at this point in time and rejecting their legitimate demand for a constituent assembly means more bloodshed and more chaos for several years to come. Second, it denies the Nepali people their sovereign rights to decide --- through peaceful means --- the future of monarchy. Between three to four million people, who have already hit the streets nationwide, demanding the election to the constituent assembly, didn't suddenly wake up one fine morning and said that they wanted to do away with the monarchy. These people have a painful memory of their history where monarchy has played, time and again, with Nepali people's democratic aspirations. King Tribhuvan failed to live up to his promise of constituent assembly elections in the 1950s. Then, King Mahendra dismissed the first democratically elected government in December 1960. King Birendra gave in to the demands of democracy only after dozens of Nepalis shed blood in 1990. Again in 2004, King Gyanendra sacked the elected government and in 2005 seized absolute power, jailed the political leaders and gagged the press.

6. India's role. Last week, envoys from India went to Nepal to see the king.

India had apparently promised support to Gyanendra if he conceded his absolute power and restored the constitutional monarchy. So after he made the announcement on Friday, within a few minutes the Indian government issued a statement in support of the "twin pillar" policy.

But apparently they didn't anticipate the degree to which popular opinion has solidified against the king. The center was forced to issue a second statement, indicating that they now support whatever form of government the people of Nepal select.

It's a terrible diplomatic miscalculation, but perhaps a predictable one, since Nepal has 'made do' with a monarchy for quite a long time. With terrible poverty and underdevelopment, it seems pretty easy to see why so many Nepalis now want to try something different.

* * * * *
Note: If anyone can suggest further educational links, I would be grateful. I'm still in the learning phase of my reading about what is happening in Nepal.

Tunku Varadarajan: on Amartya Sen, Racial Profiling

With his weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan is among the most successful Indian journalists working in the U.S. (the only one I can think of who is more influential is Somini Sengupta at the New York Times).

Varadarajan's column is on "Taste," but he has on occasion talked politics, and not surprisingly (this is the WSJ) he leans conservative. Last summer he wrote a column arguing in favor of racial profiling to catch terrorists (here). I didn't find it compelling: racial profiling doesn't make sense to me as a law enforcement strategy. It is, as many many people have pointed out, unconstitutional. It is also ineffective, because terrorists are likely to make an effort to not look like terrorists if they try something on airplanes again. And there are many people sympathetic to the aims of various terrorist groups who do not have Muslims names or Arab, Persian, or South Asian ethnicity. I'm not talking about when brown-skinned men (i.e., people who look like me) are given a little extra scrutiny in the security line at airports. It isn't really a violation of my rights if the screener stops the belt to really stare down my copy of Vikram Seth's Two Lives for a full 30 seconds through the X-Ray. Nor does it put me out especially if the secondary screener gets a little overzealous with the wand.

What crosses the line are intentional administrative policies: unjustified blacklists, or pulling people off planes merely because they look suspicious or they're reading books about Islam. Or detaining 15 year old girls for six weeks because they frequent "Jihad" chatrooms (this happened). Or putting asylum-seekers in immigration detention (aka "jail") for upwards of three years before giving them a fair hearing (this happens relatively often). And so on.

By all accounts what happened to Amartya Sen a few years ago at a London airport fits the description of "extra scrutiny" rather than profiling. Sen records the incident in his new book Identity and Violence; here is Varadarajan's condensed version of the event from this week's column:

Mr. Sen, now a professor at Harvard, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to the field of welfare economics. He has a CV so seriously good that everyone, surely, knows of his being (in his previous post) the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the apex of the British academic pyramid. Everyone, that is, except a British immigration official at Heathrow Airport a few years ago who, on looking at Mr. Sen's Indian passport and then at his home address on the immigration form--"Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge"--asked whether Mr. Sen was a close friend of the Master. This question made Mr. Sen enter into a private contemplation, rather self-indulgent in the circumstances, of whether "I could claim to be a friend of myself." As the seconds ticked away without answer, the immigration officer asked whether there was an "irregularity" with Mr. Sen's immigration status. And can you blame the man? Yet Mr. Sen--in his amused-but-chippy recall of the episode--says that the encounter was "a reminder, if one were needed, that identity can be a complicated matter." Well of course it can, professor. But in the 700-odd years of its existence, Cambridge had never before had a nonwhite head of college. Cannot immigration officers be just as empirical as economists?

Surely Varadarajan must be aware how precarious his argument is here. He is actually suggesting that it's appropriate for Amartya Sen to be asked about "irregularities" in his immigration status simply because the official can't envision him as a Cambridge Don.

Again, this isn't exactly racial profiling in the formal sense. Sen wasn't denied re-entry, or carted off to some room in handcuffs for 48 hours (like, for instance, the world-famous filmmaker Jafar Panahi). And judging from the passage from Varadarajan's column above, he wasn't particularly upset about the incident. But Varadarajan's tone does bother me: "And can you blame the man?" "Cannot immigration officials be as empirical as economists?" Yes, I can blame the man. With those rhetorical questions, it's as if Varadarajan is nodding to his white readership's prejudices, and legitimating them at his own expense: "I could see how you might think that -- we all look the same, isn't it?" It's a rather sad posture.

An Unusual Keynote Address

The feminist blogger BitchPhD was recently invited to give a keynote address at a Women's Studies conference as her blogging persona. It's a brilliant turn for pseudonymous blogging, and in a way makes perfect sense given the content of her talk (which she quite graciously posts in its entirety).

There was a little surprise for me:

A few months into the blog, Amardeep Singh, who keeps a blog of his own, said in passing somewhere that he didn’t want to know who Bitch was, because he preferred to see her as “everycolleague,” and I think that’s right. In the real world, the line between private and public thoughts, especially in the workplace, is fairly definite, if not always clear. But--and of course this is a feminist statement--that line is a false one: after all, professionals are people, and while everyone plays different roles at different times, all those roles are played by one person. Bitch exists to cover up my anxiety about the blurring of my own personal, professional and (as things evolved) political opinions; but because she isn’t a real person, she can be all those things at once.

Well, let me amend that. Part of my argument, of course, is that real people are all those things at once. What I mean to say is that the social structures we’re working and living in define “work” and “life,” or “personal” and “political,” like “private” and “public,” as separate spheres. So it can be very difficult to talk about these categories together, because we’re used to thinking of them as conceptually separate, even if we realize that in our own lives and stories, they overlap. As a persona rather than a person, Bitch *demonstrates* the overlap as well as talking about it, and I suspect that on some level that’s a big part of the blog’s popularity. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, to have the same blog linked by both mommy bloggers and the big boy political blogs. Which are, of course, virtually all written by boys--but that’s a different issue.

I'm pretty sure the phrase she's referring to is one that I left in a comment thread on one of her posts, so the fact that it stayed in her mind a year and a half later is pleasantly surprising. Anyway, enough about me: go read the talk.

As for the point she's making about how she can transgress public and private boundaries, it's important -- and it's something you can do on a pseudonymous blog that isn't advisable on a 'real name' blog. With your real name on the sidebar, you can cross that line at times to talk about personal matters, but you have to tread carefully -- to protect both your career and your family.

The larger question might be something like: how can we redraw the line, so that personal life choices and family obligations can be seen as legitimate (as in, non-stigmatized), publicly marked factors in an academic career? (An example of it in action: my own university faculty is currently considering a proposal to require that all faculty who have a child before tenure extend their tenure clocks. This proposal has both advantages and disadvantages...)

In the comments, someone compares her argument about how the personal impinges on the public/professional to a speech by the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers. And here is BitchPhd's response:

There's . . . a major rhetorical difference between an argument that essentially throws up its hands and says "we can't change the reality that people make these choices" (Summers) and an argument that says "given that these choices are reality, we need to change the system" (me).

That seems like a really good way to imagine the effect activist pseudonymous blogging might have.

How to Review a Book? A Desi Book Blog Debate

Jai Arjun, Sonia Faleiro, and Chandrahas are having an interesting debate over the ethics and form of a good book review, here, here, and here (and I would recommend you read in that order).

Let's start with Chandrahas's takedown of Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldiers, which is compelling, witty, and awfully snarky:

Here is how a cold wind blows around Zia: "It tore at him, slipped inside his trouser legs, groped at his crotch, ferreted in his armpits and careened into his lungs." This establishes only that the writer knows many verbs and body parts; as a sentence in a novel it is risible. There is nothing very significant about the wind groping at Zia's crotch; one loses faith in a writer if his powers of discrimination are so poor and his emphases so illogical. Here is the best analogy Nagarkar can find to dramatise a particular mental state of his protagonist: "Zia became a rod of uranium-238, inflammable with self-loathing and spite." Elsewhere Nagarkar provides, "There was a manhole in his soul, and he had fallen into it." Who can countenance work like this?

Oh my God, the "manhole in his soul": sounds like Trent Reznor on an off day, I might add. You'll get no argument from me -- that sounds pretty awful.

Then onto Sonia Faleiro, who gives her stamp of approval to Chandrahas and also adds her own philosophy of what qualifies one to write a review, which is in a way tied to ethics:

Because the bottom line is this: You don't review books merely because you like to read. Or because you want free books, a byline, or an outlet for your creative writing. You do it because you understand the history and context of literature, because if asked to explain even one word of praise or condemnation in your review, you can point to the specific piece of prose in the book being reviewed, to back your statement; and because it's a skill you're continuously sharpening. And you certainly never ever review a book written by a friend. Ever.

And Jai Arjun has a nuanced rebuttal, which focuses less on ethics and more on reviewing as an act of writing. He says that though he writes reviews to spec for money, he actually sort of prefers the free-form writing one can do on one's blog. And he doesn't just want to see an opinion about a book, but some evidence of a complex, personal reaction in a review:

Increasingly, it’s this type of introspective “selective review” that I’m becoming more interested in (even as I continue to write the more conventional, comprehensive types for my livelihood). Essentially, I think of a review as a very personal, subjective thing – useful more for providing a new insight, a new way of looking at a book, than to lay down the final, authoritative word on it. (It always comes as a surprise to my friends when I say this, but I don’t believe people should base their book-reading decisions on reviews. I think it’s often more productive to read a good review after you’ve read the book.) And much as I admire, even envy, the writing of many reviewers who have firm opinions and express those opinions extremely well, I’m not very comfortable with reviews that are not, at least to some extent, open-ended.

The idealistic reviewer. I agree with all of this, though I think it really probably applies more to the kind of extended reviews one might find in The New Yorker than to the kinds of reviews that work in your average daily newspaper (whether in India or the U.S.).

Jai continues:

This has logically led to another change in my approach to reviewing: a growing reluctance to write about a book if I haven’t got at least something strongly positive out of it. I dunno, I’m just not that interested in writing negative reviews anymore. I’m no longer as excited by the opportunities they proffer for being clever . . . and on the whole it isn’t worth my time and effort. Too much time would already have been wasted on the book (even if I abandoned it halfway through).

I like this, though I would have to say that a good snarky takedown (or even better, parody) of a spectacularly bad book can be immensely entertaining for a reader. I wouldn't countenance it for a young writer, or with a sincere book that perhaps simply goes awry in some way. But with overhyped celebrity authors and literary dinosaurs, why not let loose? I don't think, in this case, that Kiran Nagarkar qualifies as either overhyped or a dinosaur -- so as much as I think Chandrahas is compelling, I give the edge to Jai Arjun's idealism.

This whole debate echoes, in a certain way, the debate between Sven Birkerts and Dale Peck over 'hatchet jobs' that went down in 2004 (start here).

And finally, if you have no idea who Kiran Nagarkar is, try this piece by Nilanjana Roy. She introduces Nagarkar (and she likes the book that Chandrahas pans, though she only talks about it for two paragraphs at the end).