Here, I must interrupt myself and tell you about the Angel in the Bookcase. Since the universe is twisted like a pretzel and there is no God, it so happens there are men who’re more fortunate with the ladies than other men. So too is the case with some readers and good books. I’ve been unusually lucky with books. This realization struck me early. In my sated moments as a teenager, I’d often contemplate my unexpected success in finding this or that book, and I slowly convinced myself that there was someone– the Angel in the Bookcase– watching out for me. This fanciful theory was reinforced by a rather peculiar incident which I feel compelled to also share.

I was with a friend, a fellow named Ashwin Desai who was majoring in Chemical Engg, and we were in the stacks of the college library because he wanted to locate a book on transport phenomena. The book was as likely to be in the non-existent gardening section as it was to be in the chemistry stacks. I began to hold forth on my privileged connection with the Angel in the Bookcase. He was listening somewhat humbly, and it incited me to prophetic rashness. ‘For example,’ I declared, ‘the Angel tells me your book is– here.’ I turned around and grabbed a book from the stack at random.

‘Bhenchod!’ said Ashwin, breaking the hushed silence.

It was, of course, the book he’d wanted.

So here I was in a digital library, not very different from my college stacks, faced with too many choices and too little time. I happened to remember this old story and without thinking grabbed the first pdf file I saw in the fiction section. I didn’t even bother to inspect the file.

Later, I discovered I’d downloaded Naiyar Masud’s novella Itr-e-Kafur (The Essence of Camphor).

I used to have difficulty pointing to speculative fiction that couldn’t be seen as magic realist or SF or fantasy. Now I can point to stories like Sheesha Ghat or Mar Gir (Snake Catcher).

Of course, such classifications are always arbitrary. As Sikandar Ahmad has pointed out, Masud does his best to describe his work in terms of what he does not do. For example, in an interview with Asif Farrukhi, Masud denied he works in the fantastic:

As for fantasy, I try very hard to steer clear of it. My stories are not fantasies, at least not in the sense of the fantastic. You cannot say their events don’t occur in real life.

Urdu fiction has always had a fantastic and florid turn and Masud is partly distancing his work from that tradition. One way to do so is to give up on Urdu’s fondness for ruin. Masud also resists writing story-like stories. Like many modern writers, he breaks most of the traditional rules of short fiction– for example, the rule of economy that insists every character must have a role in the story or Poe’s rule of ‘unity of mood’ or Chekhov’s rule about not mentioning things if they aren’t used and so on. But these violations, unlike those of the modernists, are not really experiments in making things anew. Novelty is the unhappy spouse of Time. The literature of unhappy spouses is usually about escape or recrimination. Masud is interested in neither.

Things happen in his stories, and what happens is always clear as well as interesting, but as in life, it’s not necessary that the events arrange into larger meaningful patterns. The events have no deeper rationale. To invoke A. K. Ramanujan invoking Davidson:

‘Actions have actors, actions express actors. Actions have reasons, actors are responsible for what they do, and character is destiny. But events happen to people. Events have no reasons, only causes. Narratives motived by karma convert all events into actions; in which everything has a reason.’ [Telling Tales, Daedalus 118(4), '89]

A.K. Ramanujan was discussing Indian folktales, but it seems to me this insight can greatly help in understanding how Masud’s fiction does what it does. Masud eschews karmic fiction; his events have causes but not reasons, his characters are not entailed by the plot and his realism is of the Kafkaesque variety but without its oppressiveness or obsession. The result is a story as infused with the possibility of possibility as camphor is with its fragrance. In most fiction, possibility gets hard-wired. The possibility of things being possible is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, effects to achieve.

Consequently, one must give up the sense of an ending. His endings often aren’t. Masud’s invented, I think, a kind of short story in which we stop reading not because we’ve reached closure but because we’ve left the chai-ki-laari, we’ve caught the bus, we’ve parted from our story-telling friend. Stories fade in Masud’s world, they don’t end.

Naiyar Masud is still around. It seems he rarely leaves Lucknow, which makes sense since the city has long celebrated the good life; Umar Memon has helpfully provided a brief biographical sketch. He writes about one short-story a year. Much of the time, he says, is spent removing what he’s written. Among other things, he’s translated Kafka’s works into Urdu, so naturally he has to be punished with the label ‘Urdu’s Kafka’. There are some similarities between the two writers, yes. Kafka also wrote stories where causality, not reason, is the governing principle. Gunther Anders remarked that Kafka’s characters are ‘people attached to a job.’ So too Masud’s characters, who are busy making perfumes, building bird cages, steering boats, fashioning glass, catching snakes. Both authors use unadorned styles, but while Kafka uses sleights of grammar to make the unreal real, Masud uses sleights of memory to make the real unreal. However, all these similarities and differences pale in face of the fundamental division between the two men: Masud’s fiction affirms possibility, while Kafka’s denies it. Perhaps this is why Kafka’s fiction leaves one in despair, while Masud’s stories, even the tragic ones, leaves one feeling exhilarated.

Muhammed Umar Memon, professor emeritus at Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of AUS, has been indefatigable in making Masud’s work available to the English speaking world. Thanks to his efforts, we have two story collections The Essence of Camphor and The Snake Catcher containing some of Masud’s best stories. The Annual had a special issue in honor of Masud, and many other stories can appeared over the years. My favorites– what day is it? Saturday? Well then, my favorites are Sheesha Ghat and Ojhal (literally, the word means ‘Invisible’ but Javaid Qazi & Memon’s translation captures the title’s spirit with ‘Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire’.

News is news only to those who haven’t heard the news. I was walking with my friend Geeta Patel who’d done herthesis work on the Urdu poet Miraji (Sanaullah Dar). I mentioned that I’d just come across this writer, Masud.

‘Oh yes, Naiyar,’ said Geeta. ‘You’ll really like his stories.’

My first feeling was outrage. Damn it woman, if you knew that, why didn’t you mention it earlier! How was it possible that it’d had taken me so long to make Masud’s acquaintance? I, who had an efficient and conscientious personal Angel! Urdu is hardly an obscure Indian dialect. How could it be that I’d read my way around this remarkable writer all these years? Who else was I missing?

Such questions are tied to the politics and economics of the subcontinent. Contemplating them leads to a certain exhaustion.

No matter. Stories find their readers. Friends, this may hardly be news to some of you, but do check out the strange and wonderful stories of Naiyer Masud.

India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD), or Hurdle, as its fondly known, is up to its usual mischief, namely: progress. This time, progress comes in the form of an amendment to Clause (2m) of the Indian Copyright Act.

This clause clarifies the notion of an “infringing copy.” Hurdle decided that it would best serve the interests of desi publishers, authors and reader if the clause were amended to say:

“…a copy of a work published in any country outside India with the permission of the author of the work and imported from that country shall not be deemed to be an infringing copy.”

Right. Riveting stuff. What’s for dinner?

The Indian publishing industry, that’s what. At least, that’s what Thomas Abraham, industry veteran and Managing Director of Hachette, India suggested in his recent article in the Hindustan Times. The article is a must-read. So is the rebuttal by Pranesh Prakash, and the detailed re-rebuttal by Thomas. They are thoughtful and persuasive pieces that force one to take the issue seriously.

I’m wondering if the Ministry of HRD’s sudden enthusiasm for work is due to Obama’s recent trip to India. Terry McGraw of McGraw-Hill was one of the approx 200 CEO delegates to accompany Obama. When President Bush visited India, ostensibly to sign the US-India nuclear treaty, his delegation had included representatives from Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and Dupont. India signed off on a lot more than just a nuclear treaty (update: TA: McGraw-Hill is also opposing the amendment. Damn it. Nothing like ugly fact to ruin a beautiful conspiracy).

Thomas’ arguments convinced me he was right, and so to be fair, I’ll only present his side of things.

The crux of the matter is captured, I think, in this scenario:

“Consider this scenario: a book by author x is successful in India, but fails in the US. By the fourth month with no legal territorial protection it is dumped into India at lower prices through a distributor. This is a completely ‘legal’ purchase transaction by both seller and buyer, but is against the author’s consent and in violation of a contract that exists between author and Indian publisher. Now add remainders to the mix and multiply this exponentially with the number of new titles every year and try and imagine what the market is going to turn into.”

Thomas discusses many subtleties, and if I’ve understood his arguments correctly, he sees four major consequences:

1. Lower prices for the reader on globally distributed books.
   TA: No just the opposite actually. There will be short term spoiler pricing as undercutting happens but over the medium and long terms prices will stabilize back to present norms—it’s not really possible to function profitably on lower pricing levels. An imported thriller like Grisham or Archer sell at Rs 195-Rs 250. Remainders can’t bring these levels down any further in the long run. In the short term yes, spoiler distributors will bring in books to get those editions in.
2. A small bump in royalty income for the author but only if opportunity costs are discounted (the author could have earned greater royalties on domestic sales).
   TA: Quite a big dent actually. Because not only do you get lowered royalty on export edition, you lose your due local royalty.
3. Desi publishers will increasingly focus on India-specific books (since this reduces parallel trade).
   TA: Yes and No, because even this is not risk free. With squeezed and reduced margins desi publishers—here I include all those functioning in India not just companies of Indian ownership—will have less capital to invest in local authors the way they do now. So publishing programmes will shrink, and the ones you have you will have less money to market/promote. Local Indian authors—who also hope that they will be sold abroad—will have that diminished too, as local publishers won’t want to sell books that will come back to bite them.
4. Desi publishers compensate for the increased uncertainty by controlling risk, for e.g. by focusing on relatively sure-bets.
   TA: But there will virtually be no sure bet.

There are some similarities between Thomas’ arguments that parallel imports will stifle creativity and the arguments made by US pharmaceuticals that allowing cheap drugs to flood the market will stifle R&D. In both cases, there’s a free rider advantage for the importer. The Indian publisher (US pharma) does all the hard work of developing a native talent (a new drug), and then along comes Mexico or China or India flooding the home market with a cheap substitute. There are a few economists– notably, Horst Raff and Nicholas Schmitt– who think parallel imports could actually raise producer profits for certain industries.

That’s the question. Is the book business like any other? Pranesh doesn’t seem to think the books are any different (or at least, very different) from other consumer goods, whereas Thomas seems convinced– as anyone who’s tried to make a living selling books probably would be– that it’s a total unicorn.

I think there’s some merit to Thomas’ claim of exceptionalism for the industry. The economics of the so-called “creative industries” is strikingly different. As far as I can tell, the book business is a business in the same sense a horse is a car. It’s a business that operates in the “suicide quadrant”, namely, markets governed by high-uncertainty and low-control. Albert Greco, Clara Rodriguez and Bob Wharton remark in their recent opus that:

“Our research indicates that seven out of every ten frontlist hardbound books fail financially (that is, they do not earn enough to cover the author’s advance, and other editorial, marketing and administrative costs), 2 books break even, and 1 is a hit. Coincidentally, this is the same ratio found in the motion picture industry.”

This is true of Indian publishing too (Thomas pegs it at 80/20 rather than 90/10), so Indian publishers also survive on the basis of a few profit-makers. Typically, the foreign rights to these money makers are sold to companies in the US, UK and other English-language markets. Now, if those books find their way back to India, then the publisher’s few profit makers are suddenly not so profitable.

That said, I suspect Indian publishers won’t be quite so affected from the amendment as they think. Publishing is an odd industry partly because readers are such odd consumers. They hoard, they are impulsive, they have nutty interests, they are informed, they are passionate and they are intractable. Western publishers have a hard enough time appeasing their own odd bods.

Perhaps the debate obscures a deeper issue. Thomas mentions that there are some 17,000 registered publishers and also that there are just 450 trade bookshops.

That’s a great many fingers around a very small pizza! Good lord, where do we cram all our books? Our distribution bottlenecks already ensure that most readers will mostly see only bestsellers. And when everyone is making a living from a few dozen titles (if at that), then we’re much more vulnerable to small price differentials in those titles.

So the real challenge is not how to make a larger pie– which we must of course– but on how to make making a larger pie easier. Life in the suicide quadrant needs entrepreneurs, not businessmen. And entrepreneurs need more mechanisms for growth, not more ill-considered policies. Perhaps leapfrog tech like POD publishing and digital paper could be helpful here. So too, I suspect, fewer visits by American presidents. But most definitely, it’d be helpful if Hurdle would focus its energies on being a little less helpful.

But it’s no one’s fault. The Ramayana is simply not a story suitable for kids. It’s also not a story suitable for most adults either. Else why would south-Asians make and re-make this tale over the long centuries? Discontent is one of the great gifts of this magnificent epic. To read this tale is to be seized with the urge to re-make it. Perhaps it’s because of its deterministic hero, Lord Rama. Deterministic characters, like existential ones, offer no definite purchase, and so we find ourselves, like Sisyphus, shoulder to stone, feet on earth, pushing once more for a resolution we can never attain.

Since the Ramayana is rich in relationships, there are many ways to study Lord Rama from a psychological point of view. One of the best is R. P. Goldman’s analysisR. P. Goldman. “Ramah Sahalaksmanah: Psychological and Literary Aspects of the Composite Hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana.” Indian J. of Philosophy, Vol. 8, 1980, pp. 149-189.^† of the relationship between Lord Rama and his brother Lakshmana. I’m going to take a different track. I’m going to look at the god-king’s relationship with dharma.

Lord Rama, King of Ayodhya, scion of the Solar Dynasty, husband of Sita, and for the devout, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, is idolized for his attempt to live by dharma (~duty, canons of moral law). He is considered the maryada Purushottam, the perfect man, where “perfection” is with respect to restrained and righteous conduct. In Sanskrit, the word marya denotes “limit” and maryada has the connotations of being restrained, bounded, morally bound. It’s an honorific that appreciates not only Lord Rama’s attempt to live by dharma but his tragic success in that attempt as well.

What happens to a man on such a journey?

Valmiki’s Ramayana (“Rama” + ayana/journey) provides one answer to this existential question . It is a set of seven kandas (~books), with each kanda consisting of sargas (~chapters), each in turn made up of a series of slokas (~stanzas). There’s near-unanimous agreement amongst scholars that the first and last books (Bala-kanda and Uttara-kanda) are later additions, so I’ll ignore them. And for less justifiable reasons, I shall take the text as ending just after Sita enters the fire (Baroda Critical Edition, 6-105-27, i.e. Book 6, chapter 105, verse 27).

The plot of Valmiki’s Ramayana is easily summarized. Just before his coronation as King of Ayodhya, palace politics force Lord Rama, the rightful heir, to step aside for a period of fourteen years, in favor of his brother Bharata, son of Kaikeyi, youngest and favorite wife of his father, King Dasaratha. While in exile, Lord Rama’s wife, Sita, fair, beautiful and kind-hearted, is kidnapped by Ravana, King of Lanka.The rest of the story deals with Lord Rama’s efforts to rescue his wife. He is helped in this task by a variety of characters, including his brother Lakshmana who’d accompanied him in exile, the simians Hanuman and Sugreeva, and Vibhishna (one of Ravana’s brothers). After a series of great battles, Lord Rama finally kills Ravana. Fourteen years after his exile, Lord Rama returns to Ayodhya to be crowned its rightful king. Of course, such bald summaries hardly begin to explain why the epic has cast a spell over the subcontinent for more than two thousand years. One might as well expect to understand the Iliad’s power by pondering the headline: “Area man kills another, over wife, propertyK. Ayyapa Panikkar in his book on Indian narratology thinks such summaries have folkloric value. For example, in Malayalam folklore, both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are summarized by: Penna chattu, manna chattu (‘died for a woman, died for land’).^†.”

So what is the Ramayana about? David Shulman, a great scholar of classical south-Asian literature, has this to say:

“The Ramayana is the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself; or, one might say, of an identity obscured and only occasionally, in brilliant and poignant flashes, revealed to its owner. The problem is one of forgetting and recovery, of anamnesis: the divine hero who fails to remember that he is god comes to know himself, at least for brief moments, through hearing (always from others) his story.”

Arshia Sattar echoes this idea in her translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana:

“The progressive revelation of the true identity of the man-god is one of the drivers of the story.”

But all learning is accompanied by some loss. If the Ramayana is the story of a God who realizes his divinity, then it is also the story of a man who loses what little humanity he had. A half-empty glass of water may be half-full, but an empty glass of water is merely empty of water. A pouring-in of divinity– the divine understood in its grandest, most awe-inspiring, Kierkegaardian sense– is a pouring-out of humanity. And as Kierkegaard warned us in his final work:

“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”

But rather than reduce this to a water dispute, let us consider the most obvious aspect of the Ramayana. It is a love story. Indeed, the Ramayana can be seen as a work that speaks of many different kinds of love: parental love, spousal love, brotherly love, erotic love, transgressive love. Even the work’s origin tale is rooted in a love story, a tragic one. According to legend, Valmiki was moved to compose his first poem—by tradition, Sanskrit’s first poem– after witnessing a hunter kill the male of a pair of krauncha birds lost in love-play.

This ever-present possibility of love’s loss may explain the sense of anxiety that haunts this tale. In the Ramayana, being good, even super-humanly good, buys no protection against misfortune. It’s a world where catastrophe can befall anyone, suddenly and without provocation. Now, we react to the vicissitudes of life in many different ways. Some of us may develop learned helplessness. Some may find comfort in ritual. Others may find satisfaction in small acts of defiance. Some may decide that though the world may or may not be run by traffic rules, there’s nothing to stop one from acting as if it were. Still others may opt to savor caprice itself. For Lord Rama, destined to be a king, only to be banished to a forest for fourteen years, to watch his delicate princess endure its hardships, to know his beloved brother Lakshmana also suffered on his account, and then to suffer the final humiliation of not being able to protect Sita, the solution becomes an all-consuming focus on dharma. His becomes a life shaped by necessary acts.

In Hindu mythology, dharma is personified in the form of Yama, the God of Death. This is intriguing, because as Freud pointed out in his celebrated Three Caskets essay, in myths a “symbolic substitution often travels along the path of semantic opposition.” We want to talk of X. Instead we talk of Y, where Y is in some sense an opposite of X. Love is semantically opposed to death/dharma and choice to necessity, so stories that mean to talk about the necessity of dying/dharma may talk instead of choice in love.

But Indian mythological stories are filled with men and women who reject the necessity of death; their stories tell of how they attain moksha and thus escape the cycle of birth and death. There is choice over death. Thus, stories that mean to speak about choice over death/dharma, about liberation, may speak instead of necessities in love.

Freud demonstrated that stories dealing with choice in love typically offer three choices: the lead, silver and gold caskets in the Merchant of Venice; Goneril, Regan and Cordelia in King Lear; Hera, Athena and Aphrodite in the myth of Paris; the three sisters in Cinderella; Chayavan Rishi and the Ashwini twins in the story of Sukanya, and many others. Of these three choices, two are typically false , duplicates or illusory. More importantly, they’re wrong choices. In such stories, there is a unique right answer.

In the Ramayana, all roads leads to a critical necessity. After Ravana is killed, and his brother Vibhishna installed on the throne, Lord Rama finally gets to meet Sita. But which Sita? Lord Rama also has three Sitas to consider in the familiar stranger standing before him. There is the Sita who had joined him in exile, chaste beyond doubt. There is the Sita retrieved from Ravana’s court, who will be queen and the future mother of his children. Then there is the Sita he can reject. The first two Sitas are not identical because he can keep the first only if he’s able to forget the history of the woman before him. Similarly, the last two Sitas differ because their futures differ; the third Sita will not bear his children. What would dharma do?

Dharma tells him there’s no way he can take Sita back, but when he sees her, Lord Rama has a weak moment. He knows what he has to do because he know his dharma, but he doesn’t want to do it. Of all the loves in his life, the one love he’s not inherited, stands before him. The last three chapters of the sixth book of Valmiki’s Ramayana, the Yuddha-kanda (Book of War), describe in subtle detail that all-important moment when Lord Rama has to choose.

The poet tells us that Lord Rama is simultaneously joyous, angry and miserableharṣo dainyaṃ ca roṣaśca trayaṃ rāghavamāviśat (6-102-16)^†. However, his self-control is such that the people around him– Hanuman, Sugreeva, Vibhishna, Lakshmana– detect nothing of this inner struggle, and to them Lord Rama’s face appears pitilesskalatranirapekṣaiśca iṅgitairasya dāruṇaiḥ (6-102-32)^†. They may have had their suspicions that something was not quite right. He’d made it clear to Vibhishna, who’d assumed that the couple would meet privately, that he wanted the public around. He’d also instructed Vibhishna that Sita was to bathe and adorn herself. Vibhishna must’ve understood that the meeting was to be a formal one, and not that of long-separated lovers, because when Sita expresses her eagerness to meet her husband right away, he hesitantly recommends that she follow Lord Rama’s instruction. Earlier, Lord Rama had sent Hanuman to (a) tell Sita that the brothers were well and Ravana had been killed, and (b) bring her response. It’s a curious instruction. What did Lord Rama think her response would be? Why not have Hanuman bring Sita herself? When Hanuman returns with the news that Sita was longing to meet him and suggests that he ‘ought to meet’ the ‘divine lady’, ‘the one for whose sake the war had been fought,’ it provokes in Rama a rush of incipient tears and a sudden thoughtfulnessagacchatsahasā dhyānamāsīdbāṣpapariplutaḥ (6-102-5)^†. So what does he say when his wife arrives?

The gist of Lord Rama’s speech is that he’d regained his honor with great effort, a moral effort because it’d been directed towards regaining honor, and that honor would again be lost if he accepted her as his wife, given the suspicions aroused by the circumstances of her capture and long captivity. She was free to find refuge elsewhere.

The rejected Sita chooses the fire.

Lord Rama knows of course, as do the others, that his words condemn Sita to death. His speech is constructed to leave no other choice. The brutal statement that he finds the very sight of her unbearable“dīpo netrāturasyeva pratikūlāsi me dṛḍham” (6-103-17)~ you are as unbearable to me as light is to a weak-sighted man.^†, the cold assertion that the war was not conducted for her sake, the statements that repeatedly imply that his honor is independent of hers, and the meaningless options he offers her– refuge with one of the other brothers, with Sugreeva, with Vibhishna– leaves Sita– this Sita– with no choice but to kill herself.

It is a remarkable scene, and understandably, it’s one that causes much distress in the hearts of the devoutThe seventh book, the Uttara-kanda (Book of the North) presents a harder obstacle. Prompted by a washerman’s sneering comment and reminded of dharma‘s necessities, he banishes Sita to the forest. This time, there’s no explaining away the cruelty of this action– Sita is also pregnant at the time– even though there are ways to explain that the action was just. But the devout are less troubled by the Uttara-kanda, since there’s good evidence the book is a later interpolation and may be excised. However, this option also has its difficulties, especially for the Hindutva.^†. Still, just as there are many ways to reconcile evil with God’s existence, there are many ways to reconcile Lord Rama’s public humiliation of Sita with our common notions of morality. For instance, Valmiki– if it was Valmiki– chooses to return Sita from the fire and even attaches a grotesque and thoroughly unbelievable happy ending to an otherwise tragic work. I shall take the story as ending when Sita enters the fire (Baroda Critical Edition, 6-105-27). I’m ignoring therefore the last eleven chapters of the epic.

For me, Valmiki’s decision to have Lord Rama humiliate Sita instead of accepting her with open arms reveals artistic genius. A literary work that purports to discuss ideals but avoids agitating the reader may have many virtues, but courage will not be one of them. Valmiki’s Ramayana cannot be accused of a lack of courage. To include the last eleven chapters is to make a mockery of all that the Valmiki achieves.

Valmiki’s decision also respects Lord Rama’s nature. He has lived all his life by dharma, and the unfortunate events of the last fourteen years of his life have only decreased the distance between principle and practice. Of course he loves Sita. But for the maryada Purushottam, love has its necessities. There is a virtuous context to love, and if the context changes, then the context must be set right. That is what Lord Rama proceeds to do. He finds allies, forges an army. He kills the demon king. He retrieves his lost honor. He rescues his wife. But in the times in which he lived, there was no retrieving the lost honor of his wife. She was blameless, but it wasn’t about her. Rama’s heart knew Sita would’ve killed herself than remain alive, raped and dishonored. Her existence was all the proof his heart needed, but it wasn’t about him. It was about a context that could not be corrected. Except perhaps, in death. The famous purification test of Sita is in fact a test of Lord Rama’s purity. It is a test of his commitment to dharma. She jumps in the fire, but the one who burns is Lord Rama. For the person whose ethics is based on principles, the only conflict that matters is the conflict of principles: the conflicts of the head with the head, not those of the head with the heart. The moral effort it took to go against every human impulse– to speak cruelly to his wife, to let Lakshmana gather wood for the pyre, to watch his beloved burn and to carry the memories of all these things for the rest of his days– is beyond mortals. But it is possible for Gods. It is possible for Lord Rama, who is said to have stood silently, with a face like “all-consuming time”kālāntaka ~ Yama, God of death, end of time. Inexplicably, the critical Baroda edition does not have the verse that refers to Lord Rama in this manner.^†.

This might seem like a perverse twist on morality. What sort of morality would permit anyone to burn? An iron-age morality, of course. The kind of morality we also find in the Bible or the Qu’ran. But what’s of interest here is not the content of the moral code. What is of interest is the way it is applied.

First, inclinations (personal preferences) have nothing to do with action. You act morally because it is your dharma to do so. So rather than ask: “what would I do?” the righteous asks: What would dharma do?” Second, moral considerations outweigh all non-moral considerations, especially personal and emotional considerations. Finally, considerations about particular individuals or particular situations cannot sway considerations about individuals and situations. Dharma involves abstract, impersonal and necessary considerations. As Lord Rama’s speech indicates, he doesn’t ask himself:

Should I accept Sita back into my life, given what has happened between us?

Instead, his choice has the following form:

Should a wife be accepted in such situations?

There are striking similarities between dharma and Kant’s concept of moral lawNot everyone agrees. The philosopher Purusottma Bilimoria parallels the concept of dharma with Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit, the ethical life, rather than Kant’s concept of moral law.^†. For example, duty, as Kant explained, “is the necessity of action from respect for law.” A duty is categorical imperative; if it were optional, it would not be a duty. And it doesn’t suffice not to be immoral; it is necessary to be moral.

Does western literature have its own example of a Kantian ideal? I think so. Isaac Asimov’s robots operated on a Kantian model of ethics. In fact, Asimov’s remarkable robot (short) stories are studies of the limitations of such a model. His robots are faced with impossible choices, not because they don’t have emotions, but because they are driven by unbreakable principles.

Theodor Fontane’s 19th century German novel Effi Briest is another example. As the moral philosopher Dr. Julia Annas showed in her seminal paper on the subject, Baron Geert von Innstetten, the novel’s antagonist, is an almost perfect example of a Kantian ideal.

It is worth summarizing the basic story. In Fontane’s novel, Effi Briest is a pretty, impressionable, fun-loving girl married at age sixteen to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a much older man. A year and a child later, Effi finds herself bored and in need of some attention. This arrives in the form of Major Crampas, undistinguished on the whole, especially in comparison with the rich, successful and very principled Baron, but attractive to Effi on account of his attraction to her. The two have a brief but torrid affair. When Effi and her husband move to Berlin, the affair is terminated, and the adulterous experience has the effect of strengthening Effi’s willingness to settle down in her wifely duties. Six happy years pass, but then one day, the Baron accidentally discovers some of the Major’s love letters and realizes his wife is an adulteress.

The Baron thinks he loves his wife, understands why she’d strayed, is fully aware that she’s been an exemplary wife and mother for the last six years, and knows they now have a good marriage. He is not unduly worried about what society might sayDr. Marcia Baron, in her “Did Kantian Ethics kill Effi Briest?”, a critique of Dr. Annas’ essay, argues that Innstetten is concerned a great deal about what society might say. In her interpretation, Innstetten is an example of how not to interpret Kantian moral theory.^†, and harbors no jealousy of Crampas; indeed, so vast is his contempt of Crampas, Innstetten has no great desire for revenge on the man. So what does the Baron do?

He challenges Crampas to a duel, kills him, divorces Effi, turns their only daughter against her, never sees Effi again, all the while doing his best to ensure that she suffered at society’s hands. Kant’s reputation was such that it took almost two hundred years for western philosophers to move away from questioning whether such acts were moral or not and towards questioning the way Kant insisted such codes be applied. But Bernard WilliamsBernard Williams, “Persons, Character, and Morality,” in Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981.^† managed to break the spell, and since then, Michael StockerMichael Stocker, “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976). pp. 453-466.^†, John HardwigJohn Hardwig, “In Search of an Ethics of Personal Relationships,” in Person to Person, eds. G. Graham and H. LaFollette, Temple University Press, 1989.^†, Lawrence BlumLawrence Blum, “Friendship, Altruism, and Morality,” Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.^†, and other philosophers have argued, successfully I think, that to live a life in accordance with such necessities is to risk destroying the self.

As Dr. Annas says:

“Innstetten is a textbook example of Kant’s man who acts out of respect for the moral law, without or indeed against all motives that arise from one’s human nature…. If Innstetten has sought Effi’s unhappiness because of jealousy or a sense of wounded honor, we would have at once understood (whether or not we approved). But like a good Kantian he does not act for any such reason. His duel with Crampas was ‘a bit of play-acting’ inspired by no real hatred. ‘And now I must continue to play-act and send Effi away and ruin her life and mine as well.’ (p. 222). Innstetten promotes his own, and Effi’s, unhappiness out of pure duty, rising above every inclination in order to act out of pure reverence for the moral law.”

In contrast, Effi, who dies ruined and broken, but not without a measure of peace, is able to forgive her husband:

“Because he had a great deal of good in his nature and was as fine a man as anyone can be who doesn’t really love.”

This is Lord Rama’s tragedy too, I think. It’s the tragedy that girds the whole magnificent work. When a person lives a life according to impartial and abstract principles, principles that take no special account of individuals as persons, and principles that can’t see the difference between a situation and a personal situation, then it cannot but lead to the destruction of the self. Of course, Kierkegaard had seen that almost a century earlier:

“The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair, and as one in despair has lost his self, because for him everything has become necessity. He is like that king who starved to death because all his food was turned to gold.”

If Baron Geert von Innstetten is an analogue to Lord Rama, then the character of Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, the other great Indian epic, must surely stand as his polar opposite. The fundamental difference between Lord Rama and the King of the Kauravas is that Duryodhana lived his life in accordance with a personal ethics, not an impersonal one. Indifferent to dharma, headstrong, impulsive, blood-rich, first borne, brother, husband, friend to friends and enemy to enemies, Duryodhana lived by his flexible standards, not those of holy books. His relationships are driven by preference, not duty. At the end of the great battle, when he’s fatally wounded through treachery, and lies dying, thighs smashed, he’s able to contemplate his passionate life and conclude:

“Who is there more fortunate than I?”

Indeed.

Shakespeare is one of his sonnets wrote that “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” But such a love needs lovers willing to alter. It was not a compromise Lord Rama was willing to make. The Ramayana is the story of a man discovering he’s a God. Self-sufficient and indomitable, Lord Rama becomes a construct perfect unto himself. His lonely journey leads him beyond the possibility of alteration, beyond the human horizon, beyond the reach of his beloved’s plea. For such is the trajectory of Gods.

And who should know more about such impossible trajectories than Valmiki? Legend tell us that he had been a robber once, preying on travelers passing through his forest. He knew what he did was wrong, but it was more important to do right by his wife and child. He was confident that the those who benefited from the rewards of his labor would also be there to willingly share in its karmic consequences. When this faith is put to the test one day and found to be false, the shattered Valmiki renounced the world. He altered. In time, the legends say, the robber became an anthill and the anthill became a sage, and the sage, a poet. A poet who sang of love and liberation. For such is the trajectory of men.

But conquest had brought with it the conqueror’s burden: administration. No empire has ever had enough qualified citizens to run two countries at the same time. Sooner or later, an empire has to start finding, training and hiring natives. Lord Macaulay’s Minute of 1834 spelled out what the goal should be:

“…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Or less politely, wogs. Coconuts. Salman Rushdie, in his The Moor’s Last Sigh, acknowledges this bitter fruit:

“Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen!… English-medium misfits… square-peg freaks.”

Macaulay is reviled these days for his racism, but as I see it, he was only being consistent. Hadn’t the Roman empire been a good thing for Britain? Wasn’t Macaulay its living proof? Didn’t he belong to the class of persons, English in blood and color, but Roman in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect? Besides, Macaulay and his carminative Minute were less influential than people suppose. What really got British education started in India was Sir Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch of 1854. It was well reasoned, pragmatic, free of hand-wringing, and based on an idea that would probably still work in places like Afghanistan. The idea was to leave Indian education mostly to the Indians, provide partial government funding, and set up some model educational institutions. In short: self-reliance, support and standards.

However, there was a severe shortage of British instructors. So that might explain why when Ralph T. H. Griffith joined the Indian Education Service in 1853, the twenty-seven year old Sanskrit scholar was almost immediately sentenced to be Professor of English Literature at the venerable Government Sanskrit College in Benares, India. Indeed, six months into the job, they made him headmaster of the associated school, and in 1861, the principal of the college itself. It was a position he was to hold for the next twenty-three years.

It was during this tenure that Griffith finished translating the first six books of Valmiki’s Ramayana from Sanskrit into English. The seventh and final book is a later addition to the canon (so is the first) and this he only abridged. The complete work appeared in 1870, published by E. J. Lazarus & Co. in Benares, and Trubner & Co in London. There had been an earlier effort in 1806 by the missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman, but they had only managed to translate the first two volumes. Thus, Griffith had produced the first complete English translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Translations are acts of courage. As Victor Hugo noted:

“When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself.”

Hugo was talking about native receptions to translated foreign works, but it applies equally well to native receptions to foreigners translating native works. In the literary magazines of the period, the Griffith Ramayana is often referred to as “a spirited translation,” a compliment to be sure, but for a horse, not a translation. It’s not insignificant that Voltaire mocked “spirited translators”:

“…[their] spirit and ability consist in substituting a modern variety or peculiarity for an ancient one, to the utter confusion of all unity of time, place, and character; leaving the mind of the reader bewildered as in a masquerade, crowded and confused with ancient and modern costumes.”

But Griffith’s achievement should not be underestimated. He’d had to translate some 24,000 slokas. A sloka is a Sanskrit verse and consists of thirty-two syllables, arranged either as a sixteen-syllable couplet or four eight-syllable hemistiches. The Iliad and Odyssey combined have some 27,000 lines, thus making the Ramayana roughly twice as long. Furthermore, a Sanskrit verse can be as gnarly as a one-liner Perl hack. It’s a language that takes a coder’s pride in Oulipo-type exercises. Gorresio‘s Italian translation (1850) and August von Schlegel‘s German translation (1829) could and did act as guides, but when it came to translating the slokas to English, Griffith was on his own.

So how does his work fare? if we think of it as Griffith’s Ramayana, then the work is not much of a success. It is merely an adequate translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana and a fine example of that curious Victorian animal: the past’s head joined to future’s butt. This is the animal that Voltaire mocked. But if we think of the text as the Griffith Ramayana, a member of the class of inspired Ramayanas, then it’s a marvelous thing indeed. Technically, the two texts are one and the same, but the difference in perceptions does makes a difference in our appreciation.

The Griffith Ramayana is a literary work, not a scholarly one. The wonderful Princeton translation (by Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, Sheldon Pollack and Barend van Nooten) is what a scholarly translation looks like. Scholarly works can get dated, literary works only go out of style. Scholars translate so as to ease their epistemological discomfort. Griffith translated so as to ease his aesthetic discomfort. Occasionally, Valmiki’s verses shows a bit too much leg for Griffith, and the translated verses therefore show too little. He also gets some things seriously wrong. For example, he has a section entitled “The Rape of Sita” when it should be “The Abduction of Sita.” What does Griffith say in anticipation of such bloopers? In the preface, he wrote:

“My first object has been to reproduce the original poem as faithfully as circumstances permit me to do. For this purpose I have preferred verse to prose. The translations of the Iliad by Chapman and Worsley– nay, even by translators of far inferior poetical powers– are, I think, much more Homeric than any literal prose rendering can possibly be. In the latter we may find the ‘disjecti membra poetae,’ but all the form and the life are gone, for ‘the interpenetration of matter and manner constitute the very soul of poetry.’ I have but seldom allowed myself to amplify or to condense, or omit apparently needless repetitions, but have attempted rather to give the poet as he is than to represent him as European taste might prefer him to be. Comparisons, therefore, which to English readers will appear vulgar or rediculous [sic] have been left unaltered, and long passages of unutterable tediousness re-appear in my version with, probably, their tediousness enhanced.”

Ignoring Griffith’s low opinion of his own work (not to mention the misreading of its essential nature), I completely agree with his decision to stick with verse. The few prose translations I’ve read lack the emotional savors of the original text. Unfortunately, Griffith decided to use iambic tetrameter, a distressing decision for those scarred by the memory of Gladys Hotchkiss belting out “Hernando’s Hideway.” I kept hearing an “Ole!” after every four lines. The manic insistence on rhyming also leads Griffith to make bad choices. For example:

On the bare earth the lady sank,
And trembling from their presence shrank
Like a strayed fawn, when night is dark,
And hungry wolves around her bark.

Barking wolves? Surely, it should be “howl”? But no, if rhyme needs wolves to bark, so they shall. Incidentally, in the original verse (at least in the Baroda Critical Edition of Valmiki’s Ramayana), a trembling Sita shrinks into herself (5.25.5: “sītā viśantīvā ṅgamā tmanaḥ”), and not onto the bare earth. This would seem to be an error, but Sita is born of the Earth, so Griffith’s translation is correct with respect to myth and metaphor. A poet’s choice, of course, not a scholar’s.

Another problem with iambic tetrameter is pacing. Everything has to fit within the “da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM” scheme, and there’s often a sense that a line could use an extra “da DUM.” Griffith remarks how he has no intention of chopping off a finger to improve the hand, but I wish he’d added a finger every so often. He also reveals a near-compulsive fondness for inversions and possessive nouns (“virtue’s brow,” “kingdom’s bound,” “ascetic’s weed’). After a while it can get on one’s nerves.

But there’s magnificence too. Consider this stanza which describes the death of Ravana at the hands of Lord Rama:

“Upon his string the hero laid
An arrow, like a snake that hissed.
…
‘Twas feathered with the rushing wind;
The glowing sun and fire combined
To the keen point their splendour lent;
The shaft, ethereal element,
By Meru’s hill and Mandar, pride
of mountains, had its weight supplied.
He laid it on the twisted cord,
He turned the point at Lanka’s lord,
And swift the limb-dividing dart
Pierced the huge chest and cleft the heart,
And dead he fell upon the plain
Like Vritra by the Thunderer slain.”

Compare the above with the following one, a description by Tennyson, also a rector’s son, of Mordred’s death at the hand of King Arthur:

…then Modred smote his liege
Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword
Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur
Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.”

I believe the comparison tilts in Griffith’s favor. Nor is this passage a unique instance. Read with an appreciative frame of mind, the work confirms what Anne Dacier (1647-1720) claimed in her preface to the Illiad: “a translation that tries above all to save the spirit, does not fail to keep the letter, even where it takes the greatest liberties.” Literary critics should take the Griffith Ramayana more seriously.

An Englishman went up a subcontinent and came down an Indian. Ralph Griffith, a lifelong bachelor, a rector’s son from Wiltshire, a harmless aglet on colonialism’s boot, managed to take an ancient Sanskrit love poem and make it his own. Unlike von Schlegel, he was able to avoid the contempt for the Other that so often accompanies familiarity. This is all the more remarkable considering that the Sepoy “Mutiny” of 1857 had drawn a permanent, and perhaps inevitable, line between conqueror and conquered. By the time Griffith was appointed director of public instruction of the North-west provinces in 1878, Charles Wood’s educational guidelines had become policy. But though policy was strong, the flesh was weak. Weather, loneliness, alcoholism, isolation, homesickness, low salaries, language problems, tropical diseases and, if I’ve judged the expressions of just-landed tourists correctly, sheer terror, all wrecked havoc on the men and women who were to implement the policy. However, Griffith seems to have thrived.

Upon retirement in 1885, Griffith moved in with his brother Frank’s family, and spent the next twenty-one years in the cool hills of Niligiri, translating the Vedas. Personally, I consider it a pity he didn’t spend the time on more literary texts. There were a great many other Sanskrit works left to translate– some three thousand years worth– but then again, there comes a time when every pen must be set down. At the age of eighty, some fifty years after he’d first arrived in India, never to return to England, Ralph T. H. Griffith died on November 7, 1906. Only a few weeks earlier, Mahatma Gandhi– then just Mohandas– had launched a non-violence movement in South Africa. In June, the Lusitania had set sail on its maiden voyage. Albert Einstein had published the theory of special relativity, solved the mystery of the photoelectric effect, provided a theoretical explanation for Brownian motion and demonstrated the equivalence of matter and energy. Hitler was 17 years old. In seven years time, Rabindranath Tagore would become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature. There were movies, heavier-than-air flight, phonographs and submarines. It would be a remarkable century. And Ralph T. H. Griffith, one of those suspended human bridges between Us and Them, between Now and Then, between Give and Take, had helped make it happen.

Lately though, I’ve begun to notice that faith is not enough. I still visit the temples, still stroll the aisles, still probe and prod various books, and still settle in the smelly sofas to sample my stash of possibles. But actually buy a book? God, no! In my last visit to the local B&N, I sampled Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity and was seized with the urge to buy it. Did I? No. Jeff Vandermeer’s gorgeous Steampunk anthology? No. Heileman and Halperin’s Game Change? No. Michael Pollan’s Food Rules? No. Johnson and Kwak’s 13 Bankers? Thirteen times, no. Good books, even great books: still no.

The reason, obviously, is that it no longer makes economic sense to buy books in bookstores. Why the hell would I pay $19.25 for Goldratt’s The Choice when I can get a nice used copy for $7, including S&H, from Bookfinder? So what if it’s used? All books eventually become mulch anyway; used copies merely get there mulch faster. And when Kindle/Apple finally unclasp their DRM legs and allow readers to have their way with content, physical bookstores will make even less economic sense. In a world where you can get a book the minute it’s released (and when quantum clouds become a reality, perhaps even before it is written), Books is everywhere.

Compare this with the traditional model. A book is released. Hooray. A week or so later, it’s sent to distributors. The crates are unloaded, stacked, stashed and carved into smaller cartons to be trucked, along with similar items, to wholesalers/smaller-distributors (~1-2 months). This process repeats until a few copies finally end up in bookstores (~1-5 months). Two weeks to three months later, if the book doesn’t do well, it’ll be sent back, modesty compromised, back to the publisher. Who then pulps it. Camera pullback. The next crateload of books is seen leaving the publisher’s warehouse. Cycle of life, African drums. Brilliant.

It’s a suicidal business model. Johannes Gutenberg died broke, and publishers haven’t had much luck since. So why do they persist in the worship of such a ball-buster God? Eugene Schwartz, in a great numbers-rich article on book distribution, offers one answer:

One might ask what motivates people to keep this complex system going. After all, although a lot of cash may flow through, it usually takes its time and leaves behind relatively modest portions, if any. As to why we’re in this business and why we persist, Miller [one of the experts] explains, ‘To have a bookstore is part of the American Dream. It is a form of self-expression.’

Right. Like makeup, body piercings, and tattoos.

Truth is, physical bookstores have basically become brick & mortar display screens. They have exceptional resolution, cool 3-D features, terrific affordance, and are totally immersive. What you see is what you can get. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. What you get is what you see. Want that 1948 Chemistry solutions to the Cochin Board Exams? Asimov’s annotated guide to Don Juan? Well, if wishes were horses, then why aren’t you riding the net, Quixote? Bookstores may be one of those in-between inventions. Like Egyptian multiplication. We’re not giving up on multiplication any time soon, but there are better ways now.

If bookstores are to survive, they may need to charge for the service they are really selling: the atmosphere. Bookstores may need to become Lookstores. Talk to any Books worshiper, and you’ll hear the same shiny-eyed theme: “I love browsing in bookstores.” Exactly. Browsing. As in, grazing but not paying for the grass. Because grass is now everywhere, we cows will no longer buy grass from a grass-store. Bookstores might as well get used to it.

Keith Swenson thinks that in the future bookstores might become mini-printing presses; that would handle the problem of what-you-get-is-what-you-see. Maybe. I suppose you could buy books at a Lookstore, but it’ll be expensive, as all unit jobs must be. I see them more as lifestyle places. We’ll hang around lookstores for the same reason people hang around churches and art galleries. It’s an alternative to cock fighting. It’s classy. It’s superior. It’s fun. It’s a great place to take your kid, show them the ropes, stuff them with bagels and madras coffee, and acquaint them with all the troublemakers in history. Most were never able to move more than a few volumes, but that sufficed to move the world. Those who believe in Books take that on faith. And as faiths go, perhaps it’s not an ignoble one.

Needless to say, the American school system is also a mess. I can write “needless to say” now, but I remember a time when this would’ve been news to me. Until I arrived in the States, I’d been under the impression that John Dewey had designed the American school to be along the lines of a Jihadist’s promised heaven. Though I’m more clued in, it was still astonishing to listen to Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of Education, outline in a C-SPAN interview the sheer intractability of the problem.

Dr. Ravitch had the resigned calmness of a Xerxes who’s just turned his back on a pile of burning boats. Which is understandable, since she has done just that. Her radical turnaround from being a staunch proponent of No Child Left Behind to being a staunch opponent has attracted a great deal of controversy. After decades of a thumbs up position on making teachers legally accountable for student performance, standardized performance measures, introducing market-choice in school systems, and emphasis on science and mathematics, she’s flipped her thumb in the other direction.

And for a very good reason. She believes none of these solutions really solve the basic problem of modern education, namely: how and what to teach millions of students– differing widely in abilities, backgrounds and interests– what they need to know as adults? In fact she believes the proposed solutions, ranging from the Mastery Learning movement through CRL, OODM, COMP, PSI, STPSTR, ACiE, RSST, STM to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), have only made the problem that much more intractable. She doesn’t see any quick fixes either. As she wrote in a recent LA Times article:

“There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea — a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.”

She may be right. But even if there is no magic solution, perhaps there is a magic question. It’s familiar to computer scientists because it’s the heart and soul of the analysis of algorithms. The magic question is this: compared to what?

So TV is too violent. Compared to what? Der Struwwelpeter? So the world is getting worse. Compared to what? Venus? So the American school system is in terrible shape. Compared to what? The Congolese system? The French? The Indian? The Japanese? The Australian? The Canadian?

The answer, most likely, is that the American system is getting worse in comparison to some idealized notion of itself. Thus in 2008, 35% of the nation’s schools were labeled ‘failing schools’, where failure was judged according the NCLB criterion of showing steady increase in the percentage of students meeting competency standards in grades 3 through 8. NCLB has set a target of 100% by the year 2014; that is, by the year 2014, 100% of the students at a school, in grades 3 through 8, are expected to obtain 200 points or more in the NJ-ASK tests. As Dr. Ravitch remarks dryly in a WSJ article,

“This was not my vision of good education.”

To my mind, the difficulties with school education have always had a model– a ghastly but elegant reflection– in grammar instruction. The teaching of grammar has always been a source of grief, for educators as well for students. Kids enter school knowing how to talk, and they leave with the same general expertise, but in between they’re bludgeoned, coaxed, coerced, cajoled, and bombarded with attempts to teach them grammar. These attempts generally do no harm, and they generally do no good. The famous (notorious) conclusion of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer in 1963 on grammar instruction, the result of a commissioned study by the National Council of Teachers of English, is brutally honest:

“In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing.”

Hence experts are coming around to the idea that as far as improving writing instruction is concerned, stuffing kids with more grammar is not the solution. As Rei Noguchi has so carefully discussed, a better strategy might be to teach them a minimal grammar specifically designed to aid in writing.

Ditto perhaps, for schools and education. As far as educating kids is concerned, perhaps less schooling, not more, might be the answer. Do we really need to treat kids like disposable flash drives? Do we really need to fill their heads with random crap like the periodic table, Snell’s law and twelve times seven? Do they really need to know what’s the latent point of ice? Does it really matter if they believe “deciduous” is what’s left behind after you’ve made a decision? Do we really need to burn some six hours per day per student for a period of some twelve years– 30,000 hours per life– to teach stuff they’ll need rarely, apply incompetently, and forget rapidly?

If we want students to be curious, independent, rational and decent human beings, then a good first step might be to find and encourage teachers who are those very things. And a good second step would be not to take the first one too seriously. There’s that scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High where Jeff Spicoli, the stoned surfer kid, has pizza delivered in Mr. Hand’s class:

Mr. Hand: Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?
Jeff Spicoli: Learning about Cuba, and having some food.

Spicoli may be an academic failure, the kind of kid NCLB is determined, blast them, not to leave behind. But for me, trapped as I was in a Dante-inspired hell-hole of an Indian school, Spicoli’s chutzpah, fearless attitude toward authority, self-sufficiency and awareness of the things that made him happy, represented the quintessence of what an American education was all about.

A few weeks back, Sprout Inc sent me a Dear John letter:

“One of the toughest decisions that a start-up faces is where to focus its efforts and resources. Sprout Builder was our first product and has always been near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, we value the customers who have gotten us to where we are today. However…”

However, kiss our ass. Or words to that effect. Sprout Inc. has decided, it seems, to “focus on our enterprise product lines.” Individual accounts would now cost $3,000 per year. Opt out and everybody who’d helped spread your sprout would see an empty space on their pages. Sprout Inc called this “sunsetting the SproutBuilder.” Early adopters, poor artists, orphaned children, lost pets etc. were all to be turned out into the dying light. Night had fallen, the orcs were on their way, and so sad, so sad. It was all very sad, terribly sad, and no one was sadder than Sprout Inc. I’ve never seen Gmail cry, and believe me, it’s an unnerving sight.

Sprout Inc.’s decision shows every sign of a Mr. Gekko behind the scenes. There is a Mr. Gekko behind the scenes of course. Several of them, no doubt. By now, the original founder is probably nothing more than a living writing desk for the firm’s venture capitalists. VCs, unlike business people, are pragmatists. VCs typically don’t like tools; they like products. VCs typically don’t understand people, social media, long tails, the power of free and all that crap; they understand enterprises. And they definitely don’t care how a story began; they only care how it ends. Here they see it ending in an IPO and an interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, or La Belle Pout Sans Mercy, as she’s known on Wall Street.

Sprout Inc could have done the classy thing and kept the old accounts alive. It doesn’t cost much to store a few flash files per user. What it would gained in good will would have more than offset the few gigabytes of storage. I imagine people would have been happy as long as they didn’t lose the work they had already created. Well, fcuk you too, Sprout.

At first I worried. I was raised by UNIX. Our tribe prefers not to pay for software. There was no way I could square Mr. Gekko’ new prices with my conscience. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. RIA tools, like SproutBuilder, are fast becoming a commodity. And with the release of Adobe’s AIR platform last year, Sprout Inc can soon expect to have nothing more than first-mover’s advantage. Already, there are plenty of alternatives. There’s SlideRocket. The company seems to think it’s in the slide-making business and it too is cloud-based, but there’s a standalone version and the you don’t have to make slides. Sliderocket also allows you to export your work, something Sprout Inc deliberately decided not to let their clients do. There’s Adobe’s Flash Catalyst. It is expensive (~$700), but then again, it’s not $3,000/year. Nor is it cloud-based. There’s Wix, designed, as far as I can tell, for and by clowns. But such a company will never go IPO, so users are probably be safe for another year before the org runs through its venture capital. And finally, there’s SwishMax, a sort of poorer cousin to Adobe. It’s a standalone tool, the learning curve is not too steep (~1 week, a few eeks), and it’s a lot more powerful than SproutBuilder. It took me about a week to replicate my widget in SwishMax, and the results are, well, here: