Herzog and Morris

Two of the finest minds at work. This is a dialogue as enlightening as no other. Worth visiting again and again. Herzog and Morris have such enviable chemistry that few minds as outstanding as theirs do. What marks them out as most unique is that they are the sharpest students of the idea of madness, and threaten its definition in its pursuit by their own behaviour every passing moment.

"It’s very complicated. Quite often I’m asked to describe him or categorize him, which you can’t do anyway. But to describe him—I’ve tried it a few times, and it gets more and more complicated—yes, that’s certainly one of those things, to become a bear and be the great bear actor. And he actually is on all fours and huffs at a bear, and he somehow leaves the boundaries of his attempts to become the bartender in Cheers. He leaves it way behind, and he is aspiring to something much deeper.

"I remember thinking, Yeah, if Othello had been in Hamlet’s place, and vice versa, there would be no tragedy.

"If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything. There are elements of both in documentary. There are elements of both in feature filmmaking. It’s what makes, I think, photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us."

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200803/?read=interview_herzog

Nusrat - II

"To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist," Nusrat notes with a stern, but wise smile. "One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself."

"If you sat with him and you spoke with him, you felt like you were speaking to a child. He had this attitude and wonderment about everything. He marveled at everything," Ahmed says. "If you hit a guitar chord, he would say, 'Play that again,' and then he would sing out the notes within the guitar chord. So he had this curiosity about the world."

"When he wasn't singing, he kind of shut down a bit," Brook says. "He was a quiet person who would naturally gravitate toward the corner of the room. He would talk to people, but he didn't initiate a lot of conversations, and they weren't particularly extensive."

Uski Roti

For those who have read Mohan Rakesh's powerful short story 'Uski Roti', Mani Kaul's film will not be a letdown. Though I could not make myself like 'Satah se Uthata Admi' and 'Siddheshwari', the originality of Mani's visual vocabulary is something even the most disappointed would acknowledge. For someone who had a pre-existing imagination of the dusty road, the harsh sun, numerous flies, and mud houses, having read Rakesh's vivid story, Mani's film is astoundingly fulfilling. I am not sure what Rakesh himself thought of the film, but I feel he had a reason to be proud. The film is an eccentric, pathbreaking, but sincere adaptation. Sadly, I don't think Mani's method worked in all his subsequent films, even though 'Naukar ki Kameez' worked out exceptionally well. Uski Roti, the film, is something else. Even today, after all the Bresson and Godard, its visceral texture manages to captivate you. Wonder what those who saw it in theatres, back then in 1969, felt. The film, however, also makes you wonder why not many films adapted the treasure of Hindi Literature.

I also felt Mohan Rakesh haunts the film, his absence looms over its entire length. The odd mix of sadness, anger, fear, resistance, and surrender, that his story holds in perfect tension, Mani has filled into his images. I wish to read Uski Roti again. 

http://theseventhart.info/tag/uski-roti/

A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness is a masterpiece that attends to history in a Haneke-like fashion, pushing it to the wrong side of the boundary of the frame. Not greatly impressed with his other films, even though I quite like 3 times, I found myself absolutely thrilled with this one. The film stars a young 'little Tony', perhaps the finest actor in business the world over and one of the best ever, is exquisitely shot, and makes a powerful impact.

http://www.reverseshot.com/article/city_sadness

Shaharyar

Janaab Shaharyaar sahab nahi rahe. He died yesterday, ironically the day on which many years back one of the greatest Urdu poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was born. On a lighter note, both thus had an awkward relationship to the day we now celebrate in the name of love, perhaps suggesting an unfulfilment that their poetry was soaked in.

Some of his finest poetry was used in Gaman and Umrao Jaan, two of the best albums of Hindi film music till date. Shaharyar may not stand with the best of the best in critical evaluation, but some of us lesser folks would swear by his couplets immortalized by the two films. Some of his couplets close to my heart are:

1) yaad terii kabhii dastak kabhii saragoshii se
raat ke pichhale pahar roz jagaatii hai hame.n

2) aaj bhii hai terii duurii hii udaasii kaa sabab
ye alag baat ki pahalii sii nahii.n kuchh kam hai

3) bichha.De logo.n se mulaaqaat kabhii phir hogii
dil me.n ummiid to kaafii hai yaqii.n kuchh kam hai

4) ye kis mukaam par hayaat mujh ko leke aa ga_ii
na bas Khushii pe hai jahaa.N na Gam pe iKhtiyaar hai

5) dil hai to dha.Dakane kaa bahaanaa ko_ii Dhuu.NDhe
patthar kii tarah behis-o-bejaan saa kyuu.N hai

tanhaa_ii kii ye kaun sii manzil hai rafiiqo
taa-hadd-e-nazar ek bayaabaan saa kyuu.N hai

6) jise bhii dekhiye vo apane aap me.n gum hai
zubaa.N milii hai magar ham_zubaa.N nahii.n milataa

7) tere jahaan me.n aisaa nahii.n ki pyaar na ho
jahaa.N ummiid ho is kii vahaa.N nahii.n milataa

8) justajuu jis kii thii us ko to na paayaa ham ne
is bahaane se magar dekh lii duniyaa ham ne

9) कटेगा देखिए दिन जाने किस अज़ाब के साथ
कि आज धूप नहीं निकली आफताब के साथ 

http://www.bestghazals.net/search/label/Shaharyar

Green Street Hooligans

'Green Street Hooligans' is an interesting film. A football-inert american boy's Fight-Club-style apprentice into losing oneself and surrendering the sacrality of one's body to the unbridled act of fighting without fear, for the sake of football hooliganism. Add to this madness, finding oneself a purpose on the battlefield, much like On the Waterfront, as blood comes out of one's mouth. It is a conventional feature that stereotypes the family and their functions to an avoidable degree, and ends on a real low by making it an issue of using the protagonist's realized potential to settle personal scores, but the middle of the film is worth a watch.

Gossip & News

What makes Vinod Mehta's 'Lucknow Boy' special is how it narrates as well as traverses the gap between gossip and news. While giving us a routinely cited history of his journalistic journey, he shows us how, for those who are connected to the high and mighty, there is always something newsworthy in sight as they gossip, even though not all of them wish to participate in news, become news themselves. What to make news out of is a choice the editors make, keeping in mind a vague but not entirely intangible notion of public interest which hinges the ethical axis of journalism. It is easy to dismiss the bulk of the book as gossip if you understand news to be cut out of an entirely different cloth.

It is notable that Mehta's most scandalous stories throughout his career are often dismissed in the name of being speculative. It's a remarkable accusation for it sounds far more atrocious than it is. Speculation is an integral component of all creative enterprise, and journalism by all means, sits within that orbit. It is because it deals with allegedly sacred notions of truth, public interest, integrity, and justice that we often compromise its creative pursuit. Mehta's book is fascinating because it tells us how news is made, and how the newness of the news is a deceptive craft that often peels off another layer along rather traditional contours of yet another scandal.

The idea of a scandal, in this sense, predates news, thereby flouting the very claim of it being new. Mehta's finest contribution there is to make light of news as a beginning of the day energy-byte which people don't bother about thereafter. It is brilliant because as he goes about narrating a newsbased personal history that runs parallel to our national history, quoting from news that we should have read, we realize how little of that we actually remember. We scandalise ourselves once again, only to promptly forget about it. That is precisely why and how the juggernaut keeps rolling. The texture of news remains much the same, only the names keep changing. It reveals a lot about the nature of our democracy, how news scandal merely becomes a thing to consume either alongside breakfast in print, or on the dinner table in electronic form. We work out an appetite for it, only to excrete the next morning. It only gives us something or someone to resent for who we are, traversing the slippery pathway between sanity and insanity.

Kolaveri D

‎"When constant repetition of a song combines with a strongly repetitive element in its structure — as in an ad jingle — compositions such as Kolaveri Di become a subconscious tattoo in the head, almost an involuntary sensation. That is, until the next sensation emerges on the horizon.

The best thing about this entertainment universe is that it is a phonetic paradise. There is no undue pressure on the listener to understand the lyrics of a catchy Kolaveri; you can mouth the sounds and feel connected to a happening global grid. This is possible because the concept of the popular itself has become the basic language of communication in our times; in its domain particularities like Tamil or Punjabi are not very integral to the sensation of enjoyment."

 

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2882338.ece

And then I saw her..

And then I saw her. It was Joyce, unarguably. She turned and smiled at someone behind her. Catching the light, her earrings gleamed. She turned back and I panicked, I had lost her.

But she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.

I rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing pixels.

Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.

The video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her, backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with verifiable stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of hope for the future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years she would die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.

I resumed the tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience what Joyce once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous applause and the crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk alone".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary


What really drew her in she says was “the image of the TV flickering over her, that symbol of modern day communication. When you are on your own, you watch TV to connect to the world so you don’t feel completely isolated. But you are.


“Joyce was born near to where John Logie Baird had had an office in Covent Garden, in the same year that the Post Office tower was built, and she died in the shadow of the TV transmission tower. It said things to me about modern life and how we all communicate.”

Dreams of a Life is not an expose of what happened in her final days or why authorities, from the housing association she rented her flat from or utilities companies whose bills were unpaid, didn’t discover her, “ I didn’t want it to be a film about the technicality of how she died or who was to blame. I didn’t want people to look at this story and close it down. I wanted to explore the complexities of being a human being and the things we have in common.” 


“I think Joyce fell through the cracks because she never looked like anything was wrong. She never gave anything away.”

In the end, Dreams of a Life is as enigmatic as Vincent appeared to be, posing as many questions about her as it answers. “What the Leveson enquiry is showing is that people are so desperate for answers that they will make them up, rather than accept that there are maybe things in life that we cannot know. I wanted to retain that mystery in the film.” 

It also reflects back the missed chances, lost friends and broken relationships that punctuate all our lives. Despite it seeming that in an age of Facebook and Twitter, it is now impossible to disappear, Morley warns, "On Facebook people have so many ‘friends’ feeding in that does anyone notice if someone goes off? I think the old days when people had pints of milk building up outside the door there was more chance people would notice something. Now, I think we are less known.” Morley says that the effect of the story afterwards on viewers is often to go and phone people up to check how they are but that she wants the film to be about our responsibility to ourselves as much as it is to each other, “If I could do one thing it would be to give Joyce a legacy beyond this tawdry story. She wasn’t a victim. She had volition and she chose to cut herself off from people. What I want to do is draw the story closer to people and make them think. ”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8959454/Dreams-of-a-Life-interview-with-director-Carol-Morley.html

Zindagi na milegi dobara..

'Zindagi na milegi dobara' says all that it has to say in its title, actually. It is easy on the senses, pleasing bodies, virgin landscapes, attractive cars, lots of good food and liquor, seven star luxury. Lots of white, lots of green. Sky diving, Scuba diving. Penetrate the sea, penetrate the air. DCH style triplet, urban humour, a delectable Katrina Kaif who comes across as absolutely at home in Europe, and lots of tasteful style. So, what is the problem? Yes, there is love which can always turn itself into a problem. But then, it is garnished with nice little psychological blocks for each of the 'heroes'. Psychology? Perfect!

Apart from all the pop-ideology about living as if there is no tomorrow, there are two very interesting moments: one, where the psychology spoof the film is playing on you is ridiculed by the mention of 'Dr. Fraud'; two, where DD days are mocked at by calling the DD tune depressing. The former is entertaining but is conflicted by the progression of the story, but the latter is curious because I wonder anyone who actually lived the days of DD introducing films on television found the tune depressing then. To me, it is a nice quiz about how a washed-brain can do reverse-nostalgia on the past, but I am not sure. Of course like 'Ladies vs Ricky Behl', nobody does the maths for you. The only problems we have are psychological blockages. Go to Spain, then Morocco, then London; change plans; buy diamonds; drink the best; learn to live. I am reminded of Sandeep Sharma, and that unforgettable journey. But few know about that and I am in no mood for telling.

As I said the title says it all. Pleasing on the eye, nonetheless. And if you care to relax, it will give your brain a nice soothing massage.

Ready, and the rest

1) Kartik calling Kartik, 2) Murder 2, 3) Soundtrack, 4) Mujhse Fraandship Karoge, 5) Race, and 6) Ready.

First, a very annoying psychological bullshit. These days nothing sells like psychology. It touches the very limit of urban imagination of mystery, not something outside the rational but something with a inner-rationale to be figured out with the mediation of 'experts'. Second, a poor ripoff of Silence of the Lambs with some bare legs thrown in, and some poor acting. Third, another very annoying incoherent film that is as ugly as Shaitan in the first part and slightly less annoying than Black in the second. Rajeev Khandelval is such a poor actor, so clueless you want to ask him if he is lost. Fourth could compete for the worst film ever, may not win it though, people have made such shit that you can never touch the bottom. Fifth, another film where they all compete for bad acting, almost ridiculing the idea of acting itself. Cheap twists are added as if to spoof the concept of a thriller, and undermine a viewer's intelligence seriously. Sixth, however odd it may sound, was a gush of fresh air. Salman Khan and the entire cast has very good comic timing. Most of the film is very funny, some odd PJs also work. If you are to trust me, all said and done, there is nothing as reliable as good old Salman Khan. The film is loud yet compelling, there is nothing new not even some jokes, yet it is far more refreshing than all other claims of newness.

Ghosh and Litfests

A brilliant response to a cautiously written classical worldview of 'the author'. I am reminded of Steve Waugh's most brilliant remark to Brian Lara, "You walk only when it suits you!" Indeed, anyone who attends these book launches can only betray his poor wisdom by taking that classical position. But then, Ghosh belongs to that league of poor authors (Yes, poor, not ordinary. Chetan Bhagat, the mall writer, is ordinary!) who plough through words without any talent for it. His yawn-inducing unfinishable novels are, at best, diligent. That ivory tower in which he sits reflects as much of his bankruptcy as of his readers, their collective disability to understand control as an aesthetic choice. Instead of excavating an impossibility, they spit words on the page and celebrate the graffiti, minus its rebellious connotation of course. After all, it is a contract between the passed-over. Together, they form a public that imagines itself as 'the public', and like all such notions, inclusivity is hardly a concern there. Ghosh is too dependent on his ethnographic lens when setting out in search of the subjects.

But the litfests Binoo defends are not yet there, not the JLF at least. The idea may sit in harmony with popular culture but the practice is hardly up to that mark, the counterpublics are completely absent yet. What Binoo defends however is a future in the shaping, not so much its present. He is protecting something he himself is labouring with and does not want nipped in the bud. Ghosh is simply caught on the wrong foot. It is perfectly alright for him to feel uncomfortable in a litfest for it does not aid his writing, but in deriding the tamasha conceptually, he oversteps his own caution. He forgets that it is precisely because writing is now coming within the orbit of tamasha that he is celebrated by these tamashbeens. Or else, let alone smoothly penetrating into curricular line-up, he would have struggled to find readership among friends. This is already one achievement for the litfest debate. This has made possible a close scrutiny of some of the most celebrated native outsiders who champion the cause of Indian writing in English. Many of them have been found with feet of clay, and more are counting themselves.

http://www.firstpost.com/living/in-defense-of-litfests-four-reasons-amitav-ghosh-gets-it-wrong-208331.html

Love and iPod

A spam mail tells me, "If you really love someone, we have an iPod for you!" After recovering from the methods as well as objective of the digital-age persuasion, I can only wish it was the other way around.

The Pirates and their Originality

Think about Nehru Place. Perhaps India's biggest electronic market, the busiest certainly. Original and its many copies both sell alongside, legal and illegal copies both. The sales compete but mostly draw from the same source pool, connected by intercom. Permanent shops as well as makeshift ones. Frequent raids, by police as well as the corporate guys. The former take a bribe apart from the usual cut. The latter, some of them leak originals, some raid copies, both buying copies for personal use from the same shops that they raid. Boys sell and men watch. When the boys get caught, the men get them out. Nobody makes anything here, except making exchange money. A make shift economy for a makeshift people. Originals and pirates, and their several mutant forms, walking across the same pathways, short-circuiting imaginations, aspirations, and potentials. Partners in business, partners in crime. Nothing organizes them except opportunity, space, and unwritten customs. And a mysterious pirate moment which has raided upon them, and us.

Cut to Pune railway station. Late night. Police gypsies go, shutters open, chai-wallah sits outside the shop and a sizeable bunch of customers appear. They smoke, buy patties and bun-maska, eat bhurji-pao, and gossip. Police van appears. Shutters down in a flash, chai-wallah is nowhere to be found. Silence. The thela that is slow to act gets on-the-spot justice performed on him; one baton, many eggs gone. Arrive at a silent moment and ask a stray fellow, he guides you promptly, "go back in that lane, we shall get you tea". It duly arrives in a moment. A few yards away, a 'Comesum' runs busy. He has bought a costly license, he is the original. Like Apple, Microsoft, and all that. But the pirates come back. They've to survive. They must feast on the original, question its originality, and assert their own.

There is a rhythm to it, and melancholia. Feet being dragged, bodies scarred, anger and sadness all around. Play Yumeji's theme over it. Double the pace, though. There is very little time.

Foreign Land

"Maybe one day,
I'll come back, who can say?
But I've got to forget..
I'm so tired..
But not enough,
to say I'm leaving.

I'm taking you home, my love,
I'm taking you home.

I wander,
down every road,
that leads to this old ship.

One day, we'll make it home..
I promise you that, one day..
I'll take you home, my love."

Beautiful song. Extremely well shot. And that final sequence is unforgettable. Foreign Land is highly recommended viewing, bordering on compulsory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtYL5jpWlvQ&feature=share

Azad & Azaadi

Roy walked with the comrades, Verghese walked with the constitution-wallahs. Azad, in his rebuttal to Verghese went on to claim, "Your Constitution is a piece of paper that does not even have the value of a toilet paper for the vast majority of the Indian people." Predictably, the constitution struck with its extra-constitutional means and before Azad could be published, he was killed by Andhra Police in an 'encounter'. As I read his chilling letter to Outlook, I am reminded of Lasantha Wickrematunge's haunting letter 'And then they came for me...' which he had published in the newspaper he edited the day he was killed, predicting his own murder. Caravan's utterly horrifying cover story on Sri Lankan conflict is so long that I am yet to finish it, but together they raise many pertinent questions. To accuse Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Manipur of being failed states is to say that they are exceptions to the rule. Perhaps the intensity and the frequency of these accusations hides behind a more chilling question: if the state continues to fail the people, why can't people fail the state? Instead of counting the failed states, perhaps we should prepare ourselves to mourn the demise of state itself.

I am (re)initiated into this from two points: one, Vinod Mehta's account in his book, and two, Aditya Nigam's brilliant talk in JNU a few days ago. For those interested in a theoretical point of view, his compelling essay (http://criticalencounters.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/the-implosion-of-%E2%80%98the-political%E2%80%99/) may be a good point to begin.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266164

The Reader's Moment

As you finish lunch that was delicious and adequately spiced in a bustling canteen/restaurant where some talk about the trip they return from, some discuss elections and politics, some sit and observe others with the curiosity of an outsider, and many come and go, as if just passing through, as if they cannot stay away from this nerve-center. You can only wonder how all this spices up the book you read. There is a writer excavating an imaginary impossibility; there is a reader as comfortable and fulfilled as the writer in his comfortable chair, yet both discomforted by the comforts for they might compromise their 'will'. And then there is activity, exchange, a rhizomatic desire cutting through the small space, sculpting in time, what the writer wants to capture, what the reader wants to grasp. Exactly when this is established, and the spices have settled on the tongue, not too early to spoil the invited guest, not too late to upset it with laziness, the alertness of the insides shake hands with a hot cup of chai. You wish the writer had written about this blissful moment, this oh-so-perfect moment. But then, you could go and write about it too.

Gulon Mein Rang Bhare..

Gulo'n mein rang bhare, baad-e-naubahaar chale
chale bhi aao ki gulshan ka karobaar chale

qafas udaas hai yaaro'n, saba se kuch to kaho
kahee'n to bahr-e-khuda aaj ziqr-e-yaar chale

kabhi to subh tere kunj-e-lab se ho aagaaz
kabhi to shab sar-e-kaakul se mushqbaar chale

bada hai dard ka rishta, ye dil gareeb sahi
tumhaare naam pe aayenge ghamgusaar chale

jo hum pe guzri so guzri magar shab-e-hijraa'n
hamaare ashq teri aaqbat sanwaar chale

huzoor-e-yaar huee daftar-e-junoo'n ki talab
girah mein leke garebaan ka taar-taar chale

maqaam 'Faiz' koi raah mein jancha hi nahi'n
jo ku-e-yaar se nikle to su-e-daar chale.

Rilke III

"All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers - perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life."

Bol

Shoaib Mansoor has followed up Khuda ke Liye, a fine film in its own right, with Bol, an even better film. The unimpressive beginning and an ultra-disappointing sharp turn to neo-capitalism in the end notwithstanding, the film is exceedingly well shot, brilliantly acted, and sensitively dramatized. The support cast is exceptional and the film makes you fall in love with Lahore, the city. Atif Aslam, it turns out, is a good actor, even though his music only disappoints his otherwise rich voice. The women in the film make you say, "Yeh Lahore wale..." The boy who plays Saifi, a queer child, deserves a special mention for his exceptionally brave and adorable performance. Indeed, the film sketches a universe that smokes paradoxes of the most bizzare kind to sustain its devout affiliations, and raises alarms about something very relevant. The film is so well written it makes you stop and say 'waah..' a few times. The language carries its weight in surprising simplicity and leaves a mark. The sense of humour, culturally marked, is of the most superlative quality.

The film left me wanting to watch Pakeezah once more, and hear Rajkumar say, "Afsos ki log doodh se bhi jal jate hain.." But it also left me thinking about Asghar Wajahat's title of his famous play: 'Jis Lahore Nahi Dekhya woh jamya hi nahin..' One day, not too far from now...

Ray and Untouchability

Benegal's documentary on Ray is disappointing overall. Ray seems to be in a cocoon, uninterested in the film, the questions, anything beyond the world his films inhabited while they were being made. He comes across as an ordinary person who made some good films, who was a meticulous observer of reality but hardly an enthusiast who would interact with the mysteries of the world. There is not one moment when he goes beyond just answering a question, not one moment when he comes forward and shows initiative, excitement. He leans back and behaves as if it is Benegal's film, why-should-i-bother-about-it? Ray reflects no 'love' for cinema in general. His gestures and mannerisms are abhorrent and his matter-of-fact responses, much like his films, reveal his allergies more than his compassion for anything at all. Like Ray's cinema, Benegal too has failed to extract any warmth out of the man. The handshake has no intent in it, it only offers a reptilian, cold-blooded, untouchability.

Rilke II

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come."

"And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security... We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience... Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

"You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better... you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has be come a part of your life.

...And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words."

(Rilke, quote from his most extraordinary, most beautiful, and meaningful letter)

Somerset Maugham

"The most remarkable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating to the nerves like the pitiless clamour of the pneumatic drill.
---
"It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.
---
"He scratched his mosquito bites. He felt very short-tempered. When the rain stopped and the sun shone, it was like a hothouse, seething, humid, sultry, breathless, and you had a strange feeling that everything was growing with a savage violence. The natives, blithe and childlike by reputation, seemed then, with their tattooing an their dyed hair, to have something sinister in their appearance; and when they pattered along at your heels with their naked feet you looked back instinctively. You felt they might at any moment come behind you swiftly and thrust long knife between your shoulder blades. You could not tell what dark thoughts lurked behind their wide-set eyes. They had a little the look of ancient Egyptians painted on a temple wall, and there was about them the terror of what is immeasurably old.
---
"Please don`t bear me malice because I can`t accede to your wish," said Davidson, with a melancholy smile. "I respect you very much, doctor, and I should be sorry if you thought ill of me."

"I have no doubt you have a sufficiently good opinion of yourself to bear mine with equanimity," he retorted.
---
"He burst into a long, passionate prayer in which he implored God to have mercy on the sinful woman. Mrs. Macphail and Mrs. Davidson knelt with covered eyes. The doctor, taken by surprise, awkward and sheepish, knelt too. The missionary's prayer had a savage eloquence. He was extraordinarily moved, and as he spoke the tears ran down his cheeks. Outside, the pitiless rain fell, fell steadily, with a fierce malignity that was all too human.
--

Rain by Somerset Maugham. Such a fine fine story. There is no such thing as a delightful prose by him. Irritated, bored, and once again disappointed by Dostoevsky, I had to cleanse myself.

Death

I am not sure why but these days, as I ride across Delhi roads, I feel dangerously close to death most of the time. Death, no less. While riding elsewhere, poorer infrastructure, chaotic traffic, hence less ambitious speedometer needles ensure that the worst is often a few bruises, at times few fractures. Here in Delhi, more of Central and South, death looms large. I feel maybe half a mistake away from it; in all likelihood, not mine. This is when I've had accidents, fairly diverse kinds; I am no stranger to them, the shock followed by a long or short recovery. Still. Often after a close shave, I think of Camus, and how silly, how disgraceful, how embarrassing it would be do die on the road, crushed by a car, or having banged into a wall. My greatest regret - I don't know however - before dying could be that I am dying on the road. Wonder what was Camus'.

But then, I could burn myself as I make a cup of tea. I wear a shawl as I make it. It could catch fire and that could be it. Far more graceful, I should think, but silly nonetheless. At least the tea should not go waste. I hope the one who discovers me dead there, drinks the tea, and appreciates it. Which connects me to the point that it is tragic that those who hang themselves in a room, haunt the room for a long time. They shut down a space in the universe as they leave, they forbid others to enter it maybe without willing so. I would rather not leave an absent presence, or a ravaged automobile, but something that is a product of love and creativity. Wonder what it could be. As if we really have choices. But maybe we do. Maybe, even a road accident first enters your life, looms large, lets you think of it often before embracing you. Perhaps. What is indeed pitiable is to sit back in your automobile and not even anticipate death, let alone 'see' it coming.

Okay. Forget about it. Let me end this macabre post by mentioning something more pleasant. One of the most entertaining instances in Lucknow Boy is that of an English media man, known for his wit all his life. His grave has it engraved on it: "I told you I was not well." I am not saying that, not right now.

Arundhati

‎"But we continue sailing on our Titanic as it tilts slowly into the darkened sea. The deckhands panic. Those with cheaper tickets have begun to be washed away. But in the banquet halls, the music plays on. The only signs of trouble are slightly slanting waiters, the kebabs and canapés sliding to one side of their silver trays, the somewhat exaggerated sloshing of the wine in the crystal wine glasses. The rich are comforted by the knowledge that the lifeboats on the deck are reserved for club class passengers. The tragedy is that they are probably right."

Nusrat

"Boondon ki paayal bajee,
Suni kisi ne bhi nahin.

Khud se kahi jo kahee,
Kahee kisi se bhi nahin.

Bheegne ko man tarasega kab tak..
Chandni mein aansoo chamkega kab tak..

Sawanaya..
nahin barse, aur naahi jaaye.."

Bandit Queen is perhaps the finest film music album after the arrival of RD, and easily one of the best ever. "Shahenshah-e-Qawwali" has composed such soul-stirring music, which can make you shiver in awe and joy at the same time. This song, in particular, is Nusrat Saheb's gift to mankind. I wonder who wrote such fine words. No source on the web mentions the lyricist. If anyone happens to know, please share.

There will never be another like Nusrat. His is the voice with all possible voices rolling in it. He contained an entire universe in his being, the cosmology of lyricism in his song, could evoke multiple moods and emotions with every rise and fall of his breath. One wonders why he had to die at 48, and one keeps wondering..

Make it a dark night and surrender yourself honestly to love that is lost..
He will come and sing for you, a song you shall never foget.

The Hyderabad School

Such a brilliant tribute to the ultimate mystery of Indian Cricket. Gower is a fair comparison. So is DeSilva. The logic-defying skill that they all possessed, rarely lasts as long as it did with Laxman. He was platinum-class while he had that 'touch'. For me, his signature innings has to be 178 @Sydney, where he so effortlessly bettered Sachin, who was fighting a historical battle of his own. He flew like a river, over stones of all sizes, untroubled, unconcerned even. 281 was nearly as silken, but we had our moods tense, we had a battle on our hands. Not Laxman, he batted like he did during 178, 167, and all those.

I'd say he belonged to that league which contains till date the most stylish and the most beautiful batsman India has produced apart from Sachin: Azhar. We try not to take his name for many other reasons, but when Azhar flowed, nothing else mattered. He was a bit of VVS and a bit of Sachin, the most sublime blend of the two tendencies, but then everyone has his own Sachin. That partnership with Sachin against a raging Donald at Durban. Such memories! I hope Laxman goes away, soon as possible. This is a cruel world. It ends every beautiful journey in such agony. In Azhar's case, such an odd mix of horror, anger, disappointment, and embarrassment. But I often think of him with extreme fondness. It is a fan's fondness. I've seen him bat like no-one did, no-one could. I can't forget him. Wonder if Azhar and VVS ever had a significant partnership. That would be something. A lovely assignment, to weave those two memories together, to have them bat alongside each other. Like, Warne to Bradman. This could be more joy. Fragile and beautiful. Every moment's worth!

Lev Manovich

Q.
You seem to be different from a typical academic: you maintain your own Web site; you established your international reputation by publishing online rather than in traditional academic journals; and you obviously care about fashion, as can be judged from your personal appearance.
A.
This is all true. Growing up in Soviet Union in the 1970s made me distrustful of all official communication channels and taught me how to work around them. So when I saw Mosaic (the first Web browser) in 1993, a light bulb went in my head. I immediately set up my own Web site and also started to actively contribute to the emerging Web culture of mailing lists and online journals. I love real-time nature of Web discussions! Academics journals are fine; but you have to wait a year or two before your article appears in print; and just seven people read a typical academic article on the average. Instead, I can write something today, post it online and get feedback from the readers the same day.
As far as fashion is concerned, I am interested in tracking where culture is going. We can look at art, architecture or popular music, but I find that fashion is best in reflecting changing cultural sensibility quickly. Plus, I love to shop!

(Lev Manovich in a SELF-interview for MIT Press)

Lucknow Boy

Vinod Mehta's 'Lucknow Boy' not only tells the most fascinating tale of Indian print media, its evolution from a newsbreaking estate to a powerbroking one, from a textual to a design and style mode, from political separations to political openness accommodated within the same space, often with Mehta as an important agent of a change waiting to occur. It also tells us how the rich and powerful made and manipulated news and information in a country struggling to decentralize its power structure. Demolishing some of the most respectable names that few would like to tarnish, Mehta lived up to his reputation of the most sacked editor of India. There is a dryness to his humour that reminds me of Somerset Maugham. There are also revealations about his own and others' personal lives that I am not sure we have a precedent to deliver. He quotes from letters, newspaper columns, editorials, and conversations, offering to us the opportunity to stare directly into the eyes of the utterances that turned a corner. Halfway through the book, I am as pleased with it as I've been with any. Not only did he live in interesting times, he made his times far more interesting.

If news is something someone somewhere does not want to read, Mehta's book is true to his trade. Few who have found a mention in it would be pleased to read it. But even they would acknowledge that Mehta has been kinder to them than he could/should have been.

Herzog

"I have asked myself why am I different from, let's say, most of the Americans who have goals in life and who strive for happiness. The 'right ' to happiness is even in their Declaration of Independence. I keep on asking myself why I do not care so much about happiness. I simply do not have goals in life. Rather, I have goals in existence. I would make a very clear distinction between the two, and I hope that makes sense to you.

"We would rave and rant about questions which have bothered me for a long time, such as immovable positions within the universe. It is easy to relate this to three-dimensional spaces: if you hang yourself by the neck in your attic, and somebody finds your body dangling, what would this person need to do to fix you in a completely immobile position? Answer: one more rope from your ankles down to the floor to prevent you from swinging and one more from your belt to a wall in order to prevent you from spinning around your axis. But how many ropes would be necessary to fix yourself in a totally immovable position within the universe?

"During the Second World War, Joseph Goebbels gave a rather laconic order to all cameramen at the front: 'The German soldier always attacks from left to right.' That was it, no further explanation. Sure enough, if you take a look at old newsreels, you will discover that the Germans always advance from the left to the right of the screen. There was some logic to this when Germany attacked Russia, as Russia lies east of
Germany, but what about the war against France? But again, in the newsreels of the invasion westwards into Europe, the German forces are seen to attack from left to right. Goebbels' trick is still used today. You just have to look at television commercials, a couple of which I screened during my talk. I think that the question we need to ask ourselves is this: why does the direction of their movement make the soldiers look so victorious, so optimistic? Some people have argued that we read and write from left to right, which could be the reason why such a movement will be perceived as harmonic . But how does it work in the Arab world, where people write from right to left? There must be something within us, some hidden law. What it is, I cannot say. I just know that it exists."

(Werner Herzog, whose ruthless intelligence and sheer conviction to the mysterious will that shapes 'our universe', remains matchless.)

Rushdie and Pankaj Misra

"In 1999, Salma Rushdie released his eleventh book, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Pankaj Mishra wrote around 1800 word word review. He produced a ferocious notice (in Outlook magazine) tearing into the novel.

A couple of years ago, my friend William Dalrymple hosted a lunch at his farmhouse in Gurgaon for Salman and Padma Lakshmi, then still married. My wife and I were invited. I promptly accepted because I was keen to explain to Salman that neither I nor Outlook harboured any hostility towards him. He was courteous but cool. I thought I should bring up Pankajs review and emphasise that it reflected only the critics personal opinion.

'About the 1700- word review, Salman, I hope you don't hold it against me,'I blurted jokingly.

'1700 words? 1740 words,'he corrected angrily.

Instinctively, I realised it was futile to pursue the rapprochement.

I do not know many writers of global eminence, but among the few I do, Salman Rushdie tops the list of authors ultrasensitive to criticism, mild or severe. It was just about okay for him to get into a spat with John le Carre or John Updike, but who were we, a piddling New Delhi journal printed out of Safdarjung Enclave! In the British, European and American literary firmament, Salman Rushdie is simultaneously respected and ( gently) mocked. The Sunday Times ( London), played up a story of how Mr Rushdie tried to pick up a girl reading a book in the park. When she rejected his pass, he told her, 'Don't you know who I am? I am the famous writer Salman Rushdie.'The additional information did not impress the lady, who turned out to be a journalist. Naturally, she went to town on the incident. Outlooks books editor Sheela Reddy used the item in her Bibliofile column. Salman, who did not protest to the Sunday Times , was incensed that we had the temerity to publicise his romantic rebuff." (Lucknow Boy)

‎"Rushdie has done a lot of this kind of writing, which is easy to do but hard to read, and which has spawned among Indian writers in English several easy imitations--novels blithely liberated from such considerations as economy, structure, suspense, irony, plausibility of events, coherence of character, psychological motivation, narrative transitions, in short, everything that makes the novel an art form."

‎"The chief points, as once elaborated by Rushdie, of this peculiar strategy inspired by Gunter Grass are: 'Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloodyminded. Argue with the world.'"

‎"It is now beginning to seem as if Rushdie cannot define himself as a writer or intellectual except through extremities, by smashing some frame or other. "Something in me wants the dreadful," goes one ominous confession in The Ground Beneath her Feet, "wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios." It is almost as if Rushdie has to continually re-enact the petulant bad-boy daredevilry of eating, as once described in an essay, a ham sandwich to prove one's 'newfound atheism'."

‎"Rushdie went on to recommend world travel for all writers and claimed that 'Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address.' (The trouble with this-quite apart from the little-or-nothing hedge-as well as with many other of Rushdie's aphorisms, is that they sound equally valid when turned upside down)."

‎"What's interesting here is that Rushdie's uncontrollable urge to denounce both the idea and praxis of 'belonging' invariably leads him back to India ('that place obsessed by place, belonging-to-your-place'), to which he has announced his farewell in, and after, almost every book he has published. ('And so farewell, my country,' goes yet another valedictory dirge in the new novel, 'I go-I hunt-alone'). At the same time he stakes an oddly proprietorial claim over India in the West ("India," he recently told the LA Times, "is like my kid sister"); and the number of expertspeak assertions beginning 'In India it is often said....' continues to grow in recent books, where leave-taking itself is a subject-or, more accurately, an occasion for reiterating one more time the general unsuitability of India for people wanting to get reborn, remade etc."

‎"Such crude and witless buffoonery is indeed how the Indian chi-chi class-which serves as 'India' in Rushdie's fiction-responds to the unwashed masses staking a claim to political power.But the embarrassment we feel while reading this is mostly on the writer's behalf. The strong blast of Malabar Hill snobbery hints at a writer not in control of his writing self, of indeed someone who has been overpowered by it."

"With its banal obsessions and empty bombast, its pseudo-characters and non-events, its fundamental shapelessness and incoherence, The Ground Beneath Her Feet does little more than echo the great noise of the modern world; and in doing so it not only ceases to be literature but invites scrutiny as an alarming new kind of anti-literature."

"The bloodyminded narrator who tries to do too much now makes even Midnight's Children hard going. To read the novel now is to read it without the excitement and novelty of finding the narrative techniques of Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez adapted to India; and it is to realise that the problems of Rushdie as a novelist since then have been the problems of a novelist unable to break away from his own imitations and imitators. In later novels, where Rushdie was still trying to pull off the same big stylistic coup of Midnight's Children, social setting, character, and human connections were subordinated to big poster-bright themes: the ordeal of immigration, the death of the past, the encounter between the East and the West, the human condition, and that kind of thing. In Shame, he first assumed the now familiar tone ('May I interpose a few words here...') and inaugurated the tub-thumping ('I, too, know something of this immigrant business... Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth'), which makes it hard now to recall, beyond the controversial bits, anything of The Satanic Verses, or The Moor's Last Sigh: they were miscellanies rather than novels, with authorial homilies on various problems faced by mankind filling up the hollow centre. The Ground Beneath her Feet rounds off the process: here, the authorial homilies are the centre, and everything else-story, characters, drama-has come to resemble aborted sublimations of the storyteller's obsessions, his prejudices and biases. "

‎"All this is basically adolescent stuff. The simple fact hardly ever occurs to Rushdie: that expatriation to the West and its giddy existential freedoms is a luxury few people can afford; and that most people have no choice but to stay within the many frontiers they know from birth. If the lack of nuance makes you uneasy, you feel acute discomfort when the expatriate's glee over having successfully crossed frontiers and flown away degenerates into something like contempt, even hostility, for the people he has left behind him."       

 

Why we don't speak ill of the Dead

‎"I was saddened to read that Khushwant Singh passed away in his sleep last week. What a quiet end for so loud a man. How the gods mocked the mocking…. As Khushwant once said, the obituary is the best place to tell the truth for dead men file libel suits. (An agnostic to the end he didn’t believe in the Resurrection.)"

Dhiren Ganguly's early obituary of Khushwant Singh, latter's intense anger with it, followed by the former's early death at 31 in a car accident, followed by Khushwant Singh's obituary to Dhiren, who he claimed, was dead in fact, makes for a strange reading. There is black humour in it, indistinguishable blended with true wit, honest and sincere criticism, topped by an irony that the heavens always retain the choice to unleash. Disturbing and chilling, to an extent, amusing and intelligent nonetheless.

Signs in a Wasteland

The good thing about living close to a stretch of wasteland is that some of the mightiest birds are constantly hovering over you, opening their wings' span and reveling in their glorious flight. When the sun shines bright and you lie under it facing the neat blue sky, you become earth, the kites become water as they flow across, air separates you and fire unites you. For a water sign, perhaps, it is an inversion of the self, an observation of the self from outside.

Theses on Philosophy of Cricket

STUNNING Theses on the Philosophy of Test Cricket. The Essay I wish I had written, left me speechless, gasping for breath --

"The good news is that, for digital immigrants - people who grew up without these stimuli - a few weeks away will allow the brain to return to normal. But digital natives - those who've always known the internet and smartphones - might be forever different. Before the age of 20, there's a significant amount of pruning of the synapses. The generation coming of age now might have permanently changed its brains. Studies show humans are losing some ability to interpret facial cues. What's next? Will people one day be unable to read a novel? Or, say, watch a five-day sporting event?

"When the clock was invented, there was no minute hand. Nobody really needed minutes until around 1700. The modern wristwatch was invented in about 1820. What happened in between? The Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, people needed to be at work on time. Minutes mattered. Now seconds matter. So we check our email every few moments, even feeling phantom vibrations in our pocket - like pain in an amputated limb - wondering what we're missing, even as we're doing something we profess to love.

"In the first cricket book ever printed, he tells me, the author was already lamenting things that had been lost...'This goes back a long time. And now it takes the form of: will Test cricket survive? There's this anxiety about losing that link with the past. And the anxiety is greater than the actual threat. It's very English, that anxiety. It has to do with the English experience of modernity and paradox. This was the first modern nation. And precisely because of that, there are a number of emotional attachments to the pre-modern.'

"Bowling a cricket ball and the invention of the spinning jenny, the machine that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, happened at the same time. So much changed so quickly, and cricket becoming the national sport was a response to that change. In a world where time suddenly governed lives, sportsmen played a game that lasted five days. The game was dying from the moment it was born. In some ways, it was created to die, a symbolic martyr for a world crushed by the minute hand.

"The game was an island of pre-Industrial England. Even people who disagree about almost everything else can agree on this: if Test cricket is threatened, so too is our collective depth... When Marqusee describes the pleasure of attending a Test match, he lingers on the way he's able to think. In the white spaces. I think about the silence at Lord's, and I understand. Test cricket is different from the rest of the world because it was designed to be.

"I like the idea I can go to a sporting match and bring my own mood," Marqusee says, "and not have it spoon-fed moment by moment. The mood isn't pre-determined or pre-packaged. You create the mood. It almost means cricket requires complex meanings because there is more interacting with the spectator's mind. That horrifies the professional entertainment industry. You know, dead air. But it's freedom for the spectator. Not everything is being pushed on us. We get the chance to let our minds free. It's not demanding. It's not shrill. It's meditative."

http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/549101.html

Haath Chhoote Bhi Toh..

‎"Jisne pairon ke nishaan bhi nahi chhode peechhe
Us musafir ka pata bhi nahin poochha karte"

Chai II

Many of my male friends are excellent cooks within a limited set of options, often their wives are remarkable cooks themselves, Kanika in particular. Among the female friends, there is a lot to be desired. Much sound and fury about food with a highly disproportionate sense of distinction in the simplest of matters, however rich in language and knowledge of indicators, often erring on the side of abundant, foreign, and overwhelming, with little appreciation of subtle and simple.

While it may seem to be a gendered observation, it is merely empirical within a small social set, yet as painted by a sexist imagination as you would like to accuse me of. Also, it must not overlook the possibility of an overall shift in the suggested direction, regardless of the gender. Still, to the extent that the observation is valid, it marks an interest shift of equations, for better or worse.

Where am I located on this map? I perform rather miserably on the cooking index, I've concluded. Though I would like to think on the axis of discernment, I should be located way outside the zone of embarrassment, I would not know. I only consider myself blessed with the talent for making a rather good cup of tea, which pleases me beyond any limits. Nowhere near Anurag Verma however, who makes the best tea in the world that my footsteps have known. But I've successfully learned a trick or two, the taste of today's morning tea suggested to me.

The Turkish Antigone

For me, Antigone is to theatre what Marie is to biscuits, stuff of the passed-over in the matters of taste. The Turks, however, did a remarkable production of the former, so rich in lights and sound design, so simple yet notable in its stagecraft, delivered with such control and impact, and studded with so brilliant performances, that it made even Antigone tolerable. Marie is yet to be redeemed however. Maybe the Turks have an acceptable version of that?

Rilke I

"But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road.

...It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?"

Self Conversation

‎"To converse is to listen, not only to what is said, but also to what is not said - this is an ethical move and not a pragmatic one such as for more efficient communication and so on...To converse is to understand language as something more than it representations in the spoken and written mode - and this awareness about language is again not knowledge about language but an orientation towards language, an orientation that can be characterised as ethical."

Homecoming

There's much to be said about being addressed by your own name in a territory you no longer inhabit, a space that should have long since forgotten you considering the pace at which time travels these days, but does not, for some reason. It makes you feel you made a mark, left a scratch on the endless stairway. Amidst the threat of the familiar, and the disappointment of the unfamiliar, a knowing smile fades in through the mist, spiced with a pleasant surprise, garnished with a warm tone, enveloping you in a warm hug.

In a world where all entries are far better guarded than exits - flashing in red, inviting with an assured formality - there is no greater joy than to inhabit a space that is punctuated by genuine warmth, that delicately holds time for you, and is always willing for a delayed intercourse. Home - that space you leave in the morning - have in the meanwhile become storage bins with a growing appetite, no longer capable of holding the doorknob, leave aside the time itself. The search for those warm and open spaces, therefore, has never been more frantic. I'm glad to have known a few, and inhabited their low-security margins.

Ishq

Ab lafz-o-bayaan sab khatam huye,
Ab lafz-o-bayaan ka kaam nahin.
Ab ishq hai khud paigham apna,
Aur ishq ka kuchh paigham nahin.

Zaltzman II

As always, Zaltzman has the wittiest things to say about the Sydney disaster.

"..thanks to some fine batting by Clarke, Ponting and Hussey, and some minimum-intensity cricket by an Indian team that, just a very-long-seeming year ago, was ranked No. 1 in Tests (and about to embark on a victorious World Cup campaign).

All summits must be descended from. Preferably with due care and attention. As a Test team, however, India have tobogganed back to base camp at alarming velocity, like an over-excited Edmund Hillary desperate to get home to tell his mummy about how he had just conquered that really big mountain that she had promised him a new bicycle for climbing.

"As Hussey and Clarke helped themselves to some of the least challenging runs of their long careers on day three, against opponents playing with the fierce and unrelenting intensity of a three-day-old bowl of half-eaten porridge, it was hard to be optimistic.

"Clarke, as captain, had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join Bradman by declaring when he was one run short of his triple-hundred, in the ultimate cricketing self-prank. It would have been worth it just to see the look on his team-mates’ faces."

Joys of Lucknow V

1) At a Handicraft shop in Lucknow, we ask for the price of a shawl. The attendant manning the counter lifts his chin up holding the heavy lower lip slightly outwards and says, "Sadhe saat sau!" The other attendant interprets the rather difficult sound as 750/-. I raise a doubt claiming he might have meant 450/- (sadhe chaar sau). Within a second, the first attendant let his precious paan ki gilauri go down his throat, and clarified, "Sadhe saat sau!" Then, after a brief pause, he muttered, "Chaar rupaye ka nuksaan kara diya apne," lamenting the loss of the gilauri. Amidst a burst of laughter all around, I reminded him, "Teen sau rupaye bachane ke liye, apne..." Easily, the high point of the last day of a horrible year.

 

2) This hard-working and mild-mannered old man sat there in Hazratganj on a cold night making beautiful wire-bicycles in various sizes. The largest one costs only 50 rupees.

 

3) As I ventured into the soul-stirring freshness of Lucknow ki gilauri right after visiting once again the mesmerizing and unique monument of Sibtainabad ka Imambada, walking along the busy Hazratganj street, a girl, looking reasonably pretty through her helmet, stopped me to ask where the parking was. I raised my chin and held the by-now-voluminous juice of the gilauri within my lower jaw, thought for a minute whether I should go into the details, then deciding against it, only said, "age hai." She paused for a while, stayed confused, then added that she was wondering if this (there were a few scooters parked right there) was parking itself. Knowing that it wasn't, I repeated the routine, thought about my ten-rupee investment, thought about the gentleman from the handicraft shop, considered telling her exactly where the parking was, yet privileged the joys of the gilauri, repeating myself, "age hai!" She gave me what could be identified as a dirty look. I have to be more generous to myself. As she stood confused waiting for the place to turn into a parking, annoyed with my 'type' that I didn't look like, I couldn't control a smile that mysteriously turned into a laughter. I turned back and raised my hand apologizing through gestures, but didn't let the gilauri go waste

2011

2011 was a year of loss, disappointment, incomplete promises, traumatic journeys, betrayal, unpleasant surprises, terrible uncertainties, and endless loneliness. Possibly the worst year of my life, it will take some time to know however. There was sadness and tragedy all around, and a lingering bad taste on the tongue. It was a year of spiritual recapitulation and material bankruptcy. Every handshake was marked by the slimy touch of melancholia. Every smile that greeted me was tired and laboured. Every place where I arrived was angry and exhausted, on the verge of breaking down but hanging on. I wish I could say it was a year to forget, but there are things I must remember too. Every journey I made ended on a middle note, neither here nor there.

Thank God there was some good Test Cricket and some new friends to make. Thank God this is not the last year of my life, that I can live to overwrite the mess I've inherited from this year. Even though this year provided precious little, there is much to live for, much to re-work, re-assess, re-search. After all, the great man is still playing. What bigger inspiration there could be! May you all have a wonderful "new" year.

Salman and Stardom II

At a Barber's shop today while getting a diligent trim, Barber says he would like to go to a film for the new year. I ask him which one, enquiring further whether he would go for SRK's Don 2. He said he didn't watch too many films but the only star he liked was Salman, "Usko ghamand nahin hai. Baaki sab ghamandi hain!" That is a telling statement. While the middle classes love their stars topped with style and arrogance, the subalterns often stick to those old values. It is not without reason that Salman is all over the city, often placed alongside Katrina Kaif. His films give the single-screens an overwhelmingly large share of profits and are the biggest occasions on the entertainment calendar of North India. I don't care if he is nasty in real life, I find it touching that in him, millions still find a star with the heart of gold. Because after all, it is not about him, it is about them.

Lucknow?

Jis Lucknow nahin dekhya woh jamya hi nahi!

Another Shot at Divinity

After all, centuries are a cut-off that turns a good knock into a great one, for those who devour statistics. So this one, 73 at MCG, shall be remembered as an ordinary knock, And that is a pity. Because this was an exemplary knock. The quality of those shots remains unparalleled among all that I've seen. It is not without reason that people, for the lack of words and comprehension, accuse Him of divinity. How you take it depends on how you understand divinity. For me, divinity is a note one hits in the middle of a performance, when one becomes something that cannot be explained in ordinary human terms, it is when something exceeds all possibilities rationally considered thus far. It is the note that is awarded with divine sanction, we feel, for there is no other way in which it could have been reached. The only other man I've seen hitting that note is Nusrat Saheb. How else do you explain the tastelessness, the pointlessness, the banality of everything one is assaulted with right after He departs.

He makes our hearts race in a manner totally unfamiliar, he brings us on our edges for we fear we may lose sight of Him soon. That someone is able to trap him leg before or whatever is our shared loss for nothing else matters. Even if we watch Him for an hour, we've seen something special, something that exceeds our cosmic logic. Today, as He batted alongside another legend, Dravid, and made him look like a plebeian, an ordinary clerk working through deliveries like files, I could not help but think of the moment before the war of Mahabharat, when Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna. Sachin brings us to the limits of our imaginations, overpowers us with sheer awe in the same manner, I feel. Bradman, with his now alleged technique like that of Inzy, might have climbed the peak of averages, I don't think he could even attempt a trek to the base camp of the mountain atop which Sachin reveals Himself, once in a while. It is not always that he is there, you can see it only if you sit through a long spell. Those who've had the same vision would perhaps agree with me.