A Minor Quibble (Wyatt Mason on Narayan)

I first read this Wyatt Mason piece on R.K. Narayan more than a week ago, and I didn't really have anything to say about it initially. On the whole, it's a very helpful review essay -- a nice balance of interesting quotes from different Narayan novels, as well as biographical and contextual information. The anecdote about Graham Greene is especially interesting -- Narayan's experience fits the pattern experienced by several other colonial writers from before independence: they all needed patronage from established British writers. Tagore would never have gone as far as he did without Yeats's enthusiastic support, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable would likely not have been as influential without E.M. Forster's preface.

Hopefully, Mason's essay might encourage people to go out and discover Narayan all over again, especially now that several of his major novels have been reissued with new prefaces by contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Pankaj Mishra.

But after a reader (thanks, Madhu) prompted me on Mason's essay, it occurred to me that there is one small troubling bit, which might not be so small, depending on how we read it. It's the very last paragraph of the essay:

It is through this idea—that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one—that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not—indeed, cannot—chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land,” are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things. (link)

The point about the non-development of Narayan's characters sounds right to me. But the part I find fishy is Mason's interpretation of Narayan's obsession with fate as the expression of an "Eastern existential perspective." In fact, Narayan's own personal experience of the loss of his young wife -- whom he had married against his family's wishes and against the advice of a Hindu astrologer -- might be the real culprit for his view on the impossibility of changing one's destiny. It is "Eastern" and it is "existential," but when Mason calls it "Eastern existential," he generalizes (to the cultural level) an attribute of Narayan's writing that he has already explained as a result of personal experience. Are there any Indian writers besides Narayan who share his approach to character and fate? If not, it might be more accurate to simply describe the particular comic sense of immobility as "Narayanesque."

As I said, it might just be a quibble. I still much prefer this essay to most other general accounts of Narayan I've seen, including especially Naipaul's.

Absolute Borders: Partition, Pluralism, and Indian Nationalism

Via Desipundit, I caught a link to a post by Qalandar on a recent article in the Calcutta Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan.

For those who don't know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer -- the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.

His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state -- it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.

Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it's in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:

Pakistan claims Kashmir because as a Muslim state carved out of British India it thinks it has a right to Kashmir as a Muslim majority province. Israel, as a Jewish state, wants to annex large settler blocs of Jews on the West Bank to Israel and in return would be happy to give away bits of Israel that have concentrations of Arabs. Other nations dispute or defend territory on the ground of language. Indian nationalism refused the temptation of a single collective identity; as a result, the republic it created had no way of discriminating between borders that were negotiable and those that were written in stone. Not only were its borders were colonial and therefore arbitrary, being an ideologically pluralist state it couldn't claim or trade away disputed borderlands going by the nature of the populations settled there. So it decided that every inch of its border was sacred and what it had, it held. (link)

It's an interesting thesis -- one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India's claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces seem much more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn't saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn't). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on -- and will continue to hold on -- so tenaciously.

There's more to it, but I think I'll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai.

The Ferberizers vs. the Bleeding Hearts

We're more bleeding hearts than Ferberizers, though apparently both methods of getting babies to sleep are equally effective, as long as they're used consistently.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the easiest option is preventing sleep problems in the first place, through simple parent education, whether one-on-one training, group classes or booklets. Such programs typically encourage parents to have a peaceful, consistent evening routine in which children are placed in bed “drowsy but awake” to help them develop independent sleep skills. Three well-designed randomized trials have found that the babies of parents who had such training slept significantly better than those whose parents did not. (link)

Hm, these "teach me how to get my baby to sleep classes" sound great, though I'm not sure we would actually ever go.

Meanwhile, I'm interested to know there is a whole sub-field of medicine devoted just to sleep -- sleep medicine.

Spam, Like Sin, Is Constantly Renewed (and "Digital Maoism")

The best thing I've read today is this blog post at Short Schrift:

"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."

There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.

On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all. (link)

Brilliant!

I found it accidentally while surfing for bootleg blog posts of the latest Stanley Fish column (on "career-ending gaffes"). Fish's column (found it) turns out to be not too terribly exciting, but along the way I found this blog post on the changing status of Authorship at Snarkmarket, which links to this article in Forbes on the future of the book in the age of network technology and digitization. According to Ben Vershbow, we are headed for an era of "network books," collective, Wikified editing, and "crowdsource" annotations. But it isn't necessarily going to be an era where authorship is entirely abolished. Arguably, authors are going to be more important than ever as information gets more and more confusing -- but as navigators rather than as "originators."

It's a step short of "Digital Maoism," a concept which was defined here and discussed in this New York Times article.

Hopes for Peace in Nepal

Since the big changes occurred in Nepal this past summer, the longstanding conflict there between Maoist insurgents and the government has ceased, as a "Comprehensive Peace Agreement" (CPA) has been signed. The Maoists have agreed to lay down arms and stay in camps where they will be monitored by international observers. The system they've come up to ensure both parties abide by the agreement seems a little far-fetched, but perhaps workable:

Under a novel agreement with the government and the United Nations, they are to deposit their weapons in padlocked containers at each of the cantonments like this one. They will hold the keys, but their gun closets will be closely watched. Floodlights will shine each night. Surveillance cameras and burglar alarms will be installed.



For the sake of at least symbolic reciprocity, the Nepalese Army has promised to keep an equal number of its soldiers in their barracks.



An initial team of 35 United Nations monitors is expected to trickle in by the end of the year to oversee the Maoist and the army barracks alike, followed by an assessment team to determine the final size of the United Nations mission. (link)

This seems like an awfully fragile system. Though Nepal's 10 year old conflict is a little different from civil conflicts in other parts of the world -- as I understand it, it's not rooted in ethnic differences, so it may be easier to heal -- it seems hard to imagine this method working for very long. Will the symbolic deposition of the King and the advent of a permanent democratic government be enough of a change to bring the country back together after 10 years of civil war?

In the short run, ironically, the Maoists have lots of new recruits hanging around at the new camps. But it's unclear whether the new kids are there because they support the ideology, or because they hope the newly legitimized Maoists might have work for them:

Up the road in the village, among the old men sitting and soaking in the last of the day’s sun, the question of new recruits inspired churlish laughter. Of course these are new recruits, they said, and you can easily tell them from the old-timers. The new ones know nothing, one old man said. The new ones cannot tell the difference between where to defecate and where to bathe, another said. That inspired howls of laughter.



The troops who have gathered here for now rely on the hospitality of the local people. The old man, Ananda Gyawali, introduced one 19-year-old, Krishna Acharya, as a distant relative. The young man is illiterate and came a couple of weeks ago from a village far away to throw his lot in with the Maoists. He claimed to have joined the rebels a year ago.



The boy came only because he thought the Maoists would give him a job, he said, adding, “Poverty is to blame for this.” (link)

Meanwhile, many Royalists loyal to King Gyanendra have begun buying property in places like India and Singapore. A major garment factory in Kathmandu has shut down for reasons that seem linked to the changes. And there have even been some protests against the Maoists in the Kathmandu Valley, who seem more powerful than ever at this point.

Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: Shades of Naipaul

A translation of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture has been posted at the Nobelprize.org website -- and it's pretty good. If you're one of the (many) people out there who's a bit skeptical about Pamuk, or haven't had a chance to read his stuff, the speech might be an encouragement.

The speech actually reminds me a lot of Naipaul in some places -- especially as Pamuk talks about his youthful anxiety about being from what was seen as a marginal, provincial place for a writer. There are also shades of Naipaul in Pamuk's way of meditating on his father's interest in literature and writing. Like Naipaul, Pamuk's father had literary pretentions, and indeed, the frame for the speech is Pamuk's consideration of the briefcase in which his father kept his notebooks.

Near the beginning of the speech, there is a kind of writers' manifesto, which has a nice rhythm to it in Maureen Freely's translation:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

There is also a passage where Pamuk expresses concerns quite similar to those dealt with by postcolonial writers in the Anglophone tradition. Turkey can't be thought of as "postcolonial," but in the following paragraph Pamuk describes anxieties that many "poco" writers -- Naipaul probably chief among them -- have also expressed:

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was 'not in the centre'. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father's library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul's books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world's otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn't just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father's suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Nabokov: Butterflies, Darwin, Mimesis

From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ("Don't eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. "Natural Selection," in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of "the struggle for life" when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

My students, I was happy to see, were a little shocked that someone with Nabokov's way of seeing things would say something that might even remotely be construed as Intelligent Design-ish. And indeed, Darwinian natural selection, as I understand it, does have a fine explanation for the "miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior": any mutant variety that doesn't exhibit a perfect imitation is going to get eaten. And if you have enough random-pattern butterflies getting eaten over time, eventually a strain that has a slightly better design is going to come around and not get eaten.

I tried to deflect the conversation onto his real substantive point here, which is that for Nabokov art requires a kind of heroic, almost obsessive attention to mimesis. You put way more effort into representing the world in your art than your predator (or reader) is likely to ever notice. The art comes from the excess, which is, like the butterfly that looks like a leaf with "grub-bored holes," also always in some sense deceptive ("an intricate enchantment and deception"). If art is both mimetic and deceptive, perhaps Nabokov is trying to say that mimesis itself is always deceptive. You make a butterfly that looks amazingly like a leaf, but you don't attempt to clone the genetic structure of the leaf itself. Indeed, in some sense you don't care about the leaf per se (i.e., reality) at all.

Munnabhai beats the rap, mostly

Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt (star of the Munnabhai movies) has been acquitted on the terrorism charge that's been on his head since 1993. The judge did find him guilty of illegal possession of arms, but it appears that charge is much less of a concern: though he may still do years of prison time, according to the New York Times, Dutt's family and friends are celebrating.

Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:

Mumbai was engulfed in riots as the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya in December 1992. The resulting riots claimed hundreds of lives and it is during this time that Sanjay Dutt claims to have asked his under world friends to provide him with a fire arm for protection. He however had not conveyed to police any threats to his life.



As per the CBI case filed in a TADA court Abu Salem and his men went to Dutt's house on January 16, 1993 and gave him three AK-56 rifles, 25 hand grenades, one 9 mm pistol and cartridges. He returned two AK-56 rifles, hand grenades and cartridges to Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora but kept one AK-56 rifle with himself. (link)

Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt's purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt's supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it's fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it's also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn't actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn't it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?

I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem's involvement disturbing, it's hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)

Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about "Gandhi-giri" being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma -- they both did lots of jail time.

Mahmood the Atheist

Mahmood Farooqui is among the bloggers signed on to a new group blog project called Kafila, which I discovered via DesiPundit. (Other names on the roster include Shivam Vij, the omnipresent progressive blogger/journalist, and Nivedita Menon, a well-known, Delhi-based sociologist).

For his first post at Kafila, Farooqui reprints an essay he had recently published in Tehelka, on the uncomfortable position he finds himself in as a secular -- indeed, atheist -- Muslim intellectual in today's India. The place to start might be where he lays his cards on the table:

Let me explain my locus. I am an atheist, I follow none of the Islamic taboos, but I live in a locality in the capital that can only be called a ghetto. I lived here for five years, when I was a student, when I was very self-consciously opposed to the Indian Muslim stereotype. I had grown up on Chandamama and Nandan, Holi was my favourite festival, Karna my hero, Shiva the great God, Hinduism a highly tolerant religion and I had dreams of attaining martyrdom fighting Pakistan. I was studying history and detested medieval Muslim rulers; I would expatiate on the reasons why Islam had trouble with modernity; I admired Naipaul and Rushdie; supported Mushirul Hasan during the Satanic Verses controversy — a novel I deeply admire in spite of its undoubted blasphemies — and I detested many things about Indian Muslims, except, predictably, Urdu literature and Sufism. I was, in short, a model Hinduised-Indian-Muslim, who always put India before Islam. I was desperate to leave Okhla. (link)

Okhla is a predominantly Muslim suburb (slum?) in south Delhi; Mahmood Farooqui has written a little more about life there in this article.

Tellingly, Farooqui had trouble leaving Okhla for Delhi's posher (predominantly Hindu/Sikh) neighborhoods:

But I am now back in Okhla, arguing simultaneously for the legitimacy of difference and the fact of a universal human. Between the self-hatred of my youth and the current uneasiness with my earlier positions lies, possibly, a series of adult defeats — perhaps they have dulled my passions and my hatreds. However now I have, you could say, chosen to live here, after a series of eliminations — Defence Colony, Greater Kailash-I, Jangpura — on grounds of my being Muslim and/or not having a company lease. But, crucially, I came here because I was sickened by South Delhi and because I was incipiently aware of Okhla’s hospitableness. (link)

When he says "eliminations," he means he was denied a lease -- at least some of the time -- because of his Muslim name. What happens to Farooqui as he tries to leave Okhla is a reflection of the double-bind he faces as he tries to balance his social identiy and background with a self-critical attachment to the idea of modern India as a nation. He fits in uneasily in Okhla, surrounded by conservative Muslim neighbors. But mainstream society isn't very encouraging, and as a result the pull of his social loyalites remains alive:

More than this, however, my views, in conformity with the rest of the academic world, about the virtues of egalitarianism, liberty and a democratic welfare state are now far less uncomplicated than they were in my youth. I still search for vestiges of the narrative of liberty in Islamic pasts, I continue to valourise streams of pluralism in Muslim sultanates and extol those Indian Muslims of the past who were ecumenical and tolerant. I would still challenge descriptions of the medieval past that underline forced conversions or bemoan the second-class treatment of Hindus. If I do not have much truck with Islam, why then do I continue to search for narratives of tolerance in the Islamic past? Why do I smart when Vajpayee says that there is trouble and violence wherever Muslims live? Why is my attitude to Islam so defensive? (link)

In this essay (you should really read the whole thing), Farooqui doesn't really come upon any answers to the double-bind he faces, but it is a remarkably forthright and careful attempt to articulate the problem of minority belonging -- which isn't so different from minority belonging in other national contexts.

* * *
More Mahmood Farooqui links:

Recent articles in Mid-Day

More articles in Mid-Day

Articles in Outlook

Amit Varma's post on a controversy regarding a possible instance of plagiarism in a book review Farooqui wrote.

The World Is High, Not Flat

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the first in a series of articles about an illegal prescription drug network that was busted in 2005, as part of Operation Cyber Chase. The ringleaders of the network were the Bansals, a family based in India, though part of the business was run out of a warehouse in Queens.

Here's how the business worked:

Akhil [Bansal] oversaw the family's North American operations, shipping roughly 75,000 pills a day via UPS. In a little more than a year, the network had smuggled 11 million prescription tablets to more than 60,000 American addresses, an operation that grossed at least $8 million. These numbers did not include the steroids or the kilo shipments of the tranquilizer ketamine, a club drug called "Special K."

The family's Internet business represented a dark slice of the global economy so new, and so widespread, that national governments were still struggling to understand it, let alone police it.

Laws were vague, outdated, inconsistent. Technology - new medicines and ways to deliver them - was outpacing regulation. (link)

Unlike Operation Meth Merchant, where a number of the defendants pleaded guilty because they were going to be deported anyway, these guys clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was definitely illegal. In contrast to Operation Meth Merchant, where Indian store clerks were disporportionately targeted, I'm not at all bothered at the take-down of the Bansals -- they deserve to be in jail. Rather, it's an intriguing case study that shows yet again how India's entry into the globalized, internet-based economy goes well beyond the rosy picture suggested by talk of outsourcing and call centers.

At the same time, I don't think the Bansals are especially "evil" (as in, immoral) for smuggling imitation prescription drugs, though it's definitely dangerous for these drugs to be floating around. (According to NPR, at least one person died after purchasing drugs from an unregulated website based in Mexico.) If anything, the Bansals are evil because their business was based on spam, which wreaks havoc with email and is the bane of many a blogger's existence. (Indeed, I have been the victim of comment spam from just this sort of company, as I mentioned last week.)

At its peak, the drug network was a multimillion dollar business. Akhil Bansal, who was 26 at the time he was arrested, was doing an MBA at Temple. According to the Inquirer, he had about $400,000 in his checking account. The DEA had been investigating the case for five months, and cooperated extensively with Indian police in Delhi and Agra (where the Bansals have a second house) to bring down the family.

The Inquirer has created a special website for the series, go.philly.com/drugnet. You might want to check back to the site over the next few days to see what happens to Akhil Bansal and family after the DEA gets ahold of them. [Update: See part 2 of the story here.]

More links: USDOJ press release (PDF)

DEA Article summarizing the drug ring and the arrests made, all around the world.

Article in Temple News

NPR coverage

"My Kind of Exile": The Silencing of Tenzin Tsundue

Via DesiPundit, I came across a string of news articles and posts on Tenzin Tsundue, a talented activist poet and essayist of Tibetan extraction; in 2001 he won the Picador Outlook Non-Fiction essay prize for this moving piece of work. Tsundue was also born on Indian soil, and is therefore Indian in somewhat the same sense as I consider myself American. But with a difference: Tsundue's people, the many thousands of Tibetans who have taken refuge in India, are effectively denationalized. They aren't full Indian citizens (though legally they ought to be), and they can't go back to a home country that doesn't exist anymore.

In 2002, Tsundue got attention in the Indian and international media when he took advantage of a construction ladder and climbed the outside of a fourteen story building (Express Towers) directly facing the Oberoi Towers in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The Chinese Premier was in town, and when he and his delegation arrived at their posh, high-rise hotel, they were undoubtedly chagrined to see Tsundue in the building directly across, unfurling a 30 foot "Free Tibet" banner stitched together entirely out of Chinese flags. (More details)

One of the interesting comments Tsundue made at that time was in response to the danger he faced as hotel security officials were threatening to drop a materials lift above his head on him, when he refused to come down: "'I did not worry about the threat being carried out, knowing that I was in India and not in China,' he said."

Telling words; are they true? The Indian government has recently placed a restraining order on Tsundue in connection with Hu Jintao's coming visit to India (see Nitin Pai's outraged post on this). Tsundue has been ordered not to leave Dharmsala during the Chinese Premier's visit -- on threat of deportation to Tibet! It's understandable that the Indian government would want to protect the Chinese delegation from intrusive protesters, but I think Tsundue ought to have the right to go to Delhi and express his opposition to the Chinese occupation, especially since we know that Tsundue and other Tibetans will do so peacefully. India may be worlds away from China on matters of personal freedom and respect for human rights, but as this case shows, it's still far from perfect.

One other thing: Nitin points out that the Indian news-media has yet to pick up this story. I did find something on "Telugu Portal," but otherwise it's mainly newspapers in places like Malaysia that are covering the story. Shouldn't the Indian media at least be reporting this story?

Update: More coverage is starting to appear. Also check out this new article by Tenzin Tsundue on the current status of Tibet in the evolving Indo-Chinese relationship.

Quoted in Salon

I was quoted in Salon.com yesterday in a short piece on the "macaca" question by Andrew Leonard. He makes some good points, and the comments on the article are also worthwhile (well, some of them).

Technical Question: Spam comments

Here's a question for the blog-tech savvy: is there any way to stop spam comments in Blogger? I added a "captcha" check to the comment box some weeks ago, but it doesn't seem to have slowed down the spammers at all. Are other people dealing with the same spammers I've been afflicted by?

After two and a half years I'm finally thinking of switching to a different blog service. These days I only have maybe 2 solid hours a week to sit at my blog, and I'd prefer to use that time actually writing!

Macacas, Youtube, and the Question of Respect

Though I live in Pennsylvania (and voted for Bob Casey & Joe Sestak), the big Senatorial race for me was really in Virginia. As most readers know, during the summer, George Allen called S.R. Sidarth, a young worker in his opponent's campaign, "macaca." He didn't seem concerned that the same person happened to be carrying a video camera, and probably didn't imagine that the event being filmed would immediately be seen by millions on news shows, talk shows, and of course, on video sharing sites like Youtube (go ahead, watch the video again, you know you want to). It's possible that this will go down as the first "Youtube" election, just as 2004 was the first "blogged" election -- though notably, the blogosphere (dominated by liberal blogs) didn't seem to make a difference in the outcome of 2004, and I'm sure it's an open question as to whether Youtube had any real impact in the tight Senate races in places like Virginia and Montana.

"Macaca" was one of those strange insults you don't know what to do with at first. As with many ethnic slurs, it was unclear at first that it even was a slur (remember rat-eater?), since it isn't a word commonly used to describe (or insult) people from the Indian subcontinent. That isn't really new; ethnic slurs thrive on ignorance, and often misdescribe the people they are aimed at.

As people looked up various possible definitions of the word macaca, they discovered that none of them are complimentary. Like most South Asians in the U.S. (see Abhi's post at Sepia Mutiny, and the reactions to it), I immediately registered "macaca" as an insult, though I wasn't surprised that many others didn't see it that way. Eventually the mainstream consensus seemed to be that it was in fact an ethnic insult, and the next question for most South Asians was, "will this matter to anyone?" Will anyone else be as offended by this as we are? More is at stake in that question than first appears. Behind it is a deep anxiety about acceptance and integration, about being equally valued and respected in American society. Everyone is on board (usually) if a public figure makes a remark that could be construed as hostile to other, more settled minority groups -- the hostile response to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade this summer was essentially unequivocal. And Trent Lott's political career was derailed by a comment relating to Jim Crow. But are Virginians, and Americans in general, going to care about "macaca," and share a sense of grievance with a newer, smaller, and less visible minority community? As the macaca story gathered steam, there was almost a sigh of relief as the answer appeared to be "yes." And now, if Jim Webb's slim lead holds following a probable recount in the coming days, it will be hard not to see it as a decisive factor in the election.

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But did "macaca" really make a difference? One CNN pundit suggested, based on exit polls, that "macaca" may well not have been finally as important to voters as issues such as the war in Iraq -- 56% of voters said they did not think George Allen was a racist. But it's hard to argue with the huge swing in the polls that followed the initial comment -- even if in the end, exit poll results suggest that other issues may have been more prevalent in voters' minds. In a race as close as this, it did make a difference.

There was a bit of gallows humor following the "macaca" gaffe that the use of racial slurs might actually help George Allen, but that turned out to be totally false: Virginia is changing. There are now a decent number of South Asians in Virginia -- 77,000 -- and a significant subset of them are voting American citizens. Assuming that the vast majority were voting for Webb, there are certainly enough desis there to have affected the final tally of the election in Webb's favor (if the current 3000 vote margin holds after a recount). Other stats: according to the U.S. census in 2000, 4.3 percent of Virginia's population is Asian. And close to 600,000 Virginia residents (8.5 percent, with a total state population of 7 million) are foreign born, well above the national average. Virginia is looking less like the "southern firewall," and more like a mid-Atlantic state like Pennsylvania or Maryland. Urban counties are very blue, suburban counties will be purple (currently leaning blue), and the sparsely populated rural counties will be very red.

The Illusionist vs. The Prestige

Note: I don't think there are many spoilers in the following, though there are "meta-spoilers" -- concepts that become apparent after one watches these films. If you don't want your thought-space cluttered and you intend to see these films, you may want to skip this post.

Both movies are actually pretty good, which is to say, entertaining. "The Illusionist" has a fairy tale quality and the merits of simplicity; its dominant metaphor is the illusionary quality of cinema. "The Prestige" is more complex and discursive; it's ruled by the metaphor of electricity -- which is to say, invisible power. Christopher Nolan's film gives a critic much more to chew on, both in terms of its myriad plot twists and concealments, and in terms of the self-reflexivity of its dialogue. "The Prestige" is the kind of film Slavoj Zizek would enjoy, while "The Illusionist" is the kind of film Sigmund Freud would enjoy.

In magic, the magician is like a therapist. The audience comes to him to be told that there is in fact still mystery in the world, or at least technical skill so good it passes for mystery. (Even if everyone in the audience knows it's a trick, a sense of mystery attaches itself to the magician, the performer, who makes the sleight-of-hand seem believable.) This is therapeutic because "we" want to believe in the existence of mysteries, or at least we did at one point in the recent past (modernity). The magician is like a priest, who trades not so much on his audience's faith but on his audience's desire -- even unconscious desire -- that the trick be "real."

These metaphors are the films' subjects. The two films are actually quite different when it comes to how they frame the performance of magic. "The Illusionist" aligns itself with the magician-hero, and amplifies the mystery of Edward Norton's invocation of ghosts--before deflating the mystery at the end. "The Prestige," on the other hand, proceeds by indirection (like a magician itself), and gives many indications along the way that its purpose is to show the work "behind the scenes" of magic. The disappearing bird trick is explained, and it turns out to be ghastly: when the magician waves a sheet and then puts his hand down on a flat table where, moments before, a live bird fluttered, he has actually collapsed the cage into the table and killed the bird. The bird that appears, "magically," in his hand a moment later, is in fact an identical bird, his "brother," as a distraught child says at one point. The bird becomes a sacrifice -- something the magician must destroy to give his audience the illusion it wants. By showing us the trick, the film distances itself from from the performance, which "The Illusionist" avoids doing. But as the ending of "The Prestige" is approached (and I won't give it away), the film reverses itself, and comes to embrace the aura of "magic" it had earlier been debunking, and it does so, surprisingly, using the idiom of science itself -- Nikola Tesla in his latter years.

Which brings us to the present moment, which it might be convenient to call "postmodernity." Now we happily use IMac's and drive fancy GPS enabled cars (note: not me), and have only the faintest idea of how they work. We might know the components, but we have neither the technical capability nor any particular interest in knowing how the machines around us are engineered. We're in a bubble of technical illusions, but we have little to no sense of "mystery" as a result. If in modernity electricity was mysterious ("invisible power"), in postmodernity the functions and devices it enables are merely there. We could extend this to the films themselves, or more specifically the gap between the films' subjects and the films as we experience them at the present moment: the magicians are mystifiers in modernity (who seem to want to resist it, but in fact depend on it entirely -- cinema, electricity), but films about modern magicians are mystifiers in postmodernity. They show us illusions of illusion, and we still want (unconsciously, perhaps) to believe they're real, or at least, "real."