Generally About Books

Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee - 1

2012-05-19T14:25:00.001-04:00

Gladstone Hotel

Colonial mindsets and in postcolonial times

Recently, I was with a group of writers at Gladstone’s Melody Bar, waiting for a book launch event to commence. Although all of us now live in Toronto (or in the GTA) none of us at the table had been born here. All but I had vivid memories of the city – during their visits as children, as adolescents, as young adults – of its architecture and the people.

Then one of them said something that struck a chord: these were memories of a colonial city. I could relate to that instantly. My memories of Bombay – of its architecture and its people – are largely memories of a colonial city.

That evening, I brought home a business card of Gladstone’s sale person. I was planning to hold a small get together for friends later this month, but have since abandoned that plan. The business card is beautifully designed and has a two-tone image of the hotel’s edifice; the blue backdrop gives its an old-world, ammonia-print look and feel to it.

Gladstone’s architecture in many ways reminds me of so many buildings in Bombay’s Fort along the Hornby Road between Flora Fountain and Victoria Terminus (Dadabhai Noroji Road from Hutatma Chowk to Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus).

My son who has been forced to accompany his parents on their meaningless meanderings both in Bombay and in Toronto, picked up the card and exclaimed, “This looks like some place in India;” when I asked him why, he said, “India has such buildings, too.”

Despite valiant efforts of heritage conservationists, the turn-of-the century (19th -20th) architecture in Bombay is crumbling into oblivion, as I’d imagine it is in Toronto, too. But even as colonial architecture gives way to freer forms of design, I often wonder whether colonial way of thinking has changed, or indeed, can change.

The eager and unabashed celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years of ascension to the throne, with full participation of the state, clearly shows that in Canada, where the British monarch has a constitutional presence, there is little evidence – or even a perceived need – to move away from the elaborate and antediluvian constructs of colonialism.

Despite centuries of struggle against the British rule, has Indian thinking succeeded in casting away the colonial constructs, especially in fiction. There are many examples of the residual colonialism in Indian writing in English.

In India, there has always been a general consensus (even if it isn’t articulated often nowadays) that this is because an alien language forces an alien idiom that doesn’t – cannot – describe the Indian sensibility in all its nuances, even if it succeeds in depicting the quintessence.

But how true is that?

V.S. Naipaul wryly notes in An Area of Darkness, “The feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian “language” writers. This is possible; what I read of them in translation did not encourage me to read more.” (quote taken from Salman Rushdie’s “Damme, This is the Oriental scene for you!” 1997).

The two novels that are the two sides of this discussion of the colonial and the postcolonial narratives are Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children succeeded in pulling Indian writing in English out of the miasma of colonial thinking by twisting, turning, bending and maiming the English language to an Indian idiom, an Indian way of thinking. Equally, it also substantially altered Indian sensibilities.

I’m reproducing passages from two critical studies of Rushdie and Kipling that give a deeper insight and a different perspective to our understanding of these concepts.

(continued in the post below)

Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee - 2

2012-05-19T14:19:00.002-04:00

(Continued from the post above)

In an interesting analysis of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children from a postcolonial perspective, Cathy C. Miller (Salman Rushdie’s ‘Stereoscopic Vision:’ Postcolonial Environments in Midnight’s Children) says,

“In his literature, Rushdie grapples with this issue (of authentic representation of national culture) and resists being pigeonholed to one particular culture. He refers to authenticity as “the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism” which “demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition” (Imaginary 67).

“Rushdie insists that his purpose is not to create “authentic” Indian literature but validates his position as a postcolonial writer by stressing the valuable qualities of having two countries to draw from. Growing up in a country that was greatly influenced by British rule, attending British schools, and migrating to England in his midtwenties inevitably westernized Rushdie’s perspective. But instead of viewing this “double identity” as a negative spiral into the clutches of Western colonialism, Rushdie uses it to his benefit as a form of decolonization – quite possibly he is able to see the pitfalls of Fanon’s national consciousness and culture.

“This double perspective gives him “stereoscopic vision” which allows him to simultaneously look at two societies from both the inside and the outside. Rushdie states that postcolonial Indian writers who have migrated away from India “are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’” (Imaginary 19). Because of their multiple backgrounds and experiences, writers in Rushdie’s position are able to recreate reality in a way that is directly related to their postcolonial identities. These plural identities provide them with various angles to analyze and [re]create reality within their fictions.”

(passage taken from: http://rhetoric.sdsu.edu/lore/6_1/9.0_miller.pdf)

Edward Said’s analysis of Kipling’s Kim (in ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’ Culture and Imperialism) is masterly.

Ruydard Kipling

“The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict; one purpose of the novel is in fact to show the absence of conflict once Kim is cured of his doubts, the lama of his longing for the River, and India of a few upstairs and foreign agents. That there might have been a conflict had Kipling considered India as unhappily subservient to imperialism, we can have no doubt, but he did not; for him it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England. By an equal and opposite reductiveness, if one reads Kipling not simply as an “imperialist minstrel” (which he was not) but as someone who read Frantz Fanon, met Gandhi, absorbed their lessons, and remained stubbornly unconvinced by them, one seriously distorts his context, which he refines, elaborates, and illuminates. It is crucial to remember that there were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialists world-view Kipling held, any more than there were alternatives to imperialism for Conrad, however much he recognized its evils. Kipling was therefore untroubled by the notion of an independent India, although it is true to say that his fiction (as opposed to discursive prose) incur ironies and problems of the kind encountered in Austen or Verdi and, we shall soon see, in Camus. My point is this contrapuntal reading is to emphasize and highlight the disjunctions, not to overlook or play them down.”

TOK 7 Writing the New Toronto

2012-05-10T20:56:00.002-04:00

Diaspora Dialogues released TOK 7: Writing the New Toronto yesterday at Gladstone.

TOK 7: Writing the New Toronto
below covers of TOK 1 to TOK 6

This is the last TOK of the series, and has short fiction and poems from a new bunch of emerging writers and mentors. Helen Walsh, president of Diaspora Dialogues and the editor of all the TOK books, moderated an interesting panel discussion between three mentees – Zalika Reed-Benta, James Poputsis and Yaya Yao – and two mentors – Olive Senior and Moez Surani – who are among the contributors to the new collection. The discussion was interspersed with readings by Zalika, James, and Yaya.

The TOK launches annually also serve as an alumni reunion with several mentees, some mentors, and Diaspora Dialogues staff in attendance. The indefatigable Natalie Kertes, working quietly to make sure that the launch was perfect.

The launch It’s time to get and give updates, and share notes. Leslie Shimotakahara, Joyce Wayne, Brandon Pitts were among the many friends who were at the launch.

I was in TOK 5 (in 2010) and therefore is the best of the seven books.

From 2012, the Diaspora Dialogue’s mentoring program will focus on full-length manuscripts. For more details, click here: DD 2012 Mentoring

Yaya Yao recited her poem 'where you’re going'

It’s reproduced here:

where you’re going

one ocean one
continent
from the place you were
born you are
dying, suspended
over university and elm
in February

with expert hands
chang ping aims into flesh long
needles
the tip connects to
the point opens
into the pathway and you
follow, she drapes a thin silk scarf
over your trunk
leaves the room for a
tea from timmy’s

she says to family, 3 to 5 a.m. the body
is weakest, it will happen
then, he is
tired his body is not
holding water call me
tomorrow

the path
you have taken:
shanghai to hong kong
hong kong to montreal
montreal to

toronto
parkdale to little portugal
little portugal to university and elm
university and elm to

3 a.m.
to 5 a.m. tides withdraw
from each meridian, that ocean
here to claim you, now as always in
between.

Canadian culture

2012-04-29T18:27:00.002-04:00

Recently, I attended a splendid lunch and learn discussion organised by Diaspora Dialogues where a writer (Joyce Wayne) and a literary agent (Dean Cooke) gave great insights into the process of writing fiction, and getting published.

I was there to understand the process because I, too, hope to get my novel published some day.

And I wondered whether I would be a Canadian writer or an Indian when (if) my novel is published?

I don’t know; both, I guess.

How much of a Canadian can an immigrant become, especially a first-generation immigrant. Then, what is it to be a Canadian? And, what is Canadian culture.

There are many interesting theories to these questions.

As a student of journalism at the Sheridan College in (2009), I was introduced to Canadian literature in English, and read Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” definition of Canadian culture.

“...I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature, a theme to which we shall return. It is not a terror of the danger or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values. [...]

“If we put together a few of these impressions, we may get some approach to characterising the way in which the Canadian imagination has developed in its literature. Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological “frontier” separated from one another and from their American and British sources; communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting – such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time. [...]

(Conclusion to Carl F. Klinck’s anthology Literary History of Canada – 1965)

Of course, for John RalstonSaul this is a manifestation of the “colonial mind”.

In A Fair Country, he argues:

“Even the way we represent our literature tells us something about the colonial mindset. Roy MacGregor laid this out with perfect intellectual clarity in Canadians. Why is John Richardson’s less than mediocre nineteenth-century novel Wacousta so relentlessly pushed forward as the founding statement of our sensibility? What is its message? That the nature and climate of Canada makes it a place to be feared. That the First Nations are violent and to be feared. That settlers must dominate in every way in order to assuage their fears. This deeply European view – steeped in the discomfort of the outsider – helped to set the pattern for a colonial interpretation of Canada. Ours was to be a place in which white Christians must be constantly ill at ease, uncomfortable, living far from their true civilizational inspirations. At the same, they must also imagine themselves as cut off from the gigantic, uncontrolled nature all around them. They must struggle to survive, dependent on the originality of those fortunate enough to live at the centre of great civilizations. They must marginalize, weaken, if possible destroy, the local Indian civilization. Christianity, in its various forms, would be a safe, rigid structure to protect these Europeans from this uncontrollable, frightening place. Theirs was to be what Northrop Frye called a garrison mentality – a “closely knit and beleaguered society” existing with a “deep terror in regard to nature.”

Some questions don’t have easy answers, and some answers lead to more questions.

Hindu - a novel

2012-04-23T21:48:00.000-04:00

Before he is murdered, Tatya Kamble, the main character of Sharankumar Limbale’s Marathi language novel Hindu, says,

“Why do we stay in a religion that does not allow you to enter the temple? Why do you stay in a religion that does not acknowledge your humanity? Why do you stay in a religion that does not allow you even water? A religion that forbids the treatment of humans as humans is not a religion but naked domination. A religion in which touching of unclean animals is permitted but touching of humans prohibited is not a religion but insanity. A religion that tells a group of human beings to not get education, not amass wealth, not carry arms is not a religion but a mockery of human values.”

Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s English translation of Limbale’s novel succeeds quite effortlessly in bringing the reader uncomfortably close to the exploitation that the Dalits of India face every day. It is a remarkable achievement because Limbale’s novel doesn’t follow a linear narrative, it’s a pointillist quilt that darts into different directions. It paints a grim picture of murder and injustice.

Limbale is a prominent Dalit writer and is an activist and his writing is dry and unsentimental. It’s not surprising that Hindu is unrelenting. The novel is set in rural Maharashtra – in Achalpur, but it portrays all that is wrong in India – a country that now boasts of nearly 50 billionaires but despite all the talk of double digit growth and development and prosperity, a majority of the population continue to be denied basic human rights. And this is institutionalised, without any effort to change the status quo.

Mihir Sharma, writing in India’s Business Standard, on Dr. Ambedkar’s birth anniversary (14 April) this year, gave a good perspective to the untrammeled domination of the upper castes in the Hindu society.

He says, “The Indian elite confuse its tiny, mediocre, incestuous world of networks and inherited advantage with true merit, the merit that comes from striving upwards in the night when circumstances are unfavourable. India’s privileged children go to schools where their social assumptions are unchallenged, to colleges where their parents went before them and that most of the country can’t afford, and to jobs where the networks fostered in the exclusivity of those institutions support and nourish them... In post-liberalisation India, that isn’t true at all. Our elite dominate our cultural production, as well, helping it dehumanise everyone else.”

Tatya Kamble’s son Rohit and his activist friends circulate a flyer at a community centre which triggers severe tensions in Achalpur:

“We wanted to convert to Buddhism. We still do. However, converting to a religion related to Indian culture brings about no change in our status in the eyes of the Hindus. It is for that reason that we are converting to a foreign origin religion. It is only then perhaps that the mentality to degrade us will change. We are Indians. We look like Indians. India is our motherland. Preventing our conversion means forcing us to continue living in the confines of the Hindu caste system. The Hindu religion that considers us untouchable is not acceptable to us.”

Inevitable?

Nehru’s Hero Dilip Kumar in the Life of India

2012-04-08T20:28:00.000-04:00

Last week we moved into another apartment in the same building – it has an extra room.

My wife and son gifted me with a bookshelf. They worked for four hours to assemble it. It’s my first bookshelf in Canada; I’ve unpacked books I got from India and put them in the shelf, along with some that I bought here.

Bookshelves are like a home within a home.

I arrange my books in an order that only I understand, and when I have nothing better to do (which is most of the time), I gaze at my books longingly, occasionally pulling one out and leafing through it to relive the memory of when I had first read it, or bought it.

I pulled out Lord Meghnad Desai’s Nehru’s Hero Dilip Kumar in the Life of India – quite a cumbersome title for a thoroughly enjoyable slim volume that is a memoir and a biography of one of India’s iconic movie stars.

There are many memorable biographies of Dilip Kumar; Bunny Reuben’s biography being far more comprehensive.

But what makes Lord Desai’s book unique is the linkages it creates between the concepts of nation-building in India in the 1950s, the influence of cinema and on cinema on this process, the phenomenon of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Some factoids in the book are amazing.

For instance, Dilip Kumar played a Muslim character only once in his career – Prince Salim in Mughal-E-Azam.

The bhajan in Jogan (Ghunghat Ke Pat Khol) is actually by Sant Kabir and is often erroneously attributed to Meerabai

Published in 2004, the book’s concluding chapter From Icon to Target describes the changes that have transformed India since Nehru’s death in 1964:

“...One is no longer an India; one has to be Tamil or Punjabi-speaking Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist or belonging to Other Backward Castes (OBC). Each citizen has to belong to a vote bank, have his or her agent who will trade the vote for handouts and mobilize you for morchas and public sloganeering. Paradoxically this fragmentation has deepened democracy in India rather than threatened it.

But it has also changed the nation inevitably and not necessarily for the better. Bombay, where Dilip Kumar has lived much of his life, and which is the headquarters of Hindi films (hence Bollywood) was a cosmopolitan city in the 1940s and 1950s. No single elite dominated Bombay as the Bengali cultural elite dominated Calcutta, or the Tamils dominated Madras. Bombay had as its lingua franca a bazaar-type Hindi, a vulgar tongue, much influenced by Hindu film dialogues which the local Marathi and Gujarati speakers adopted when they talked to each other or to the hundreds of Punjabis, Telugu and Tamil and Malayalam speakers, or the Kannadigas and Konkanis. There was a lively Western and Anglo Indian culture in Colaba and in Bandra. A double decker red bus would flaunt the name of its destination as RC Church. (It took me many years when I was a teenager to decipher that as Roman Catholic Church). There would be western music concerts and tea dances at the southern tip of the islands, while Gujarati Navratri celebrations in Bhuleshwar and Marathi Ganesh puja would be rampant in Girgaum and Sewri and Dadar. I watched Kathakali dancers in Matunga past midnight during South Indian festival as well as an exhibition on Bauhaus architecture in a downtown art gallery in my teenage years.

But I, like many others, agitated and marched for Bombay to be the capital of a unilingual state of Maharashtra. That was a populist, indeed a democratic decision. But the setting up of linguistic states, which Nehru fought against, but had to concede reluctantly, changed Bombay. It also changed India. We had all thought that making Bombay the capital of Maharashtra will not change its cosmopolitan character. That all of us would belong to Bombay as Bombayites and as Indians. But in Bombay and across India, identities could not remain cosmopolitan. Very soon after the creation of Maharashtra in 1960, there was the launching of the populist Shiv Sena. It claimed that Bombay belonged to the Marathi-speaking citizens of Bombay. South Indians – so-called Madrasis – were targeted first as undesirable aliens and then Muslims and sometimes Christians and so on. Shiv Sena was able to have Bombay’s name changed to Mumbai in the 1990s."

Image: http://www.printsasia.com/book/Nehru-s-Hero-Dilip-Kumar-in-the-Life-of-India-David-Puttnam-Kishwar-Ahluwalia-8174363114-9788174363114

Insanity - beyond understanding

2012-04-04T23:55:00.002-04:00

Insanity – Beyond Understanding is an eye- opener to what goes on in the world of those who are hooked to euphoria ….what takes them high, what brings them crashing down… A very descriptive “in their own words” narrative of their emotions, their lives, their fantasies, their failures…. Makes you sit back and think. At times, it is humorous and makes you have a hearty laugh. Chapters are short and self-contained making it an easy read.

Within these pages, you will learn the anatomy of the selfish behavior and distorted thinking that causes the euphoric to believe that they cannot live without euphoria. You will find out, directly from the author’s experiences as a counselor, about the tragic consequences these souls inflict upon themselves and others around them. Casts of unforgettable characters are your tour guides into some of the darkest areas and compulsive behavior of an addict’s mind.

Insanity – Beyond Understanding takes readers closer than ever before into the gut wrenching, chaotic world of addicts. Author Bajeerao Patil possesses an enormous wealth of knowledge on the subject of human behavior & addiction from his over 20 years of work as an addiction counselor.

Insanity Beyond Understanding has many characters with addictive personalities. It highlights the selfish behavior, distorted thinking, the “my way or the highway” attitude of people who believe that the world revolves around them. How they refuse to be happy and how they love misery. How they are programmed to believe that they cannot live without sex. Drugs come before anything else in their lives. Once in a recovery situation how they frequently focus on developing a relationship with a “higher power” but fail to understand that without developing a relationship with themselves they cannot develop a relationship with anyone or anything else including a “higher power.” How they want to be accepted by others but refuse to accept themselves for who they are. They place their happiness in other people and material things. Immediate gratification is their sole goal. How easily they forget the consequences and pain that comes from the use of mood altering chemicals. How they live in the past or in the future, never in the present. How they worry constantly about their lives but do nothing to improve their situation. How they refuse to take responsibility for their own behavior and their tendency to blame others. How they look for shortcuts, for quick fixes, even though there are none.

Bajeerao Patil

Insanity Beyond Understanding is about plight of people who use mood altering chemicals, their struggle, their frustrations and their hardship. How some of them give up in the middle of their struggle. This book also has some characters who never give up, never quit and they become winners. The wide spread materialism in the world. How the change in family structure from close extended families to individual nuclear families impacted social life. How children grow up without good role models. How they are shunted from foster care to an orphanage, to the home of a distant relative, back to foster care, etc. Many grow up on the streets after running away and never even complete eighth grade, let alone high school or job training. A disproportionate number are physically, emotionally and sexually abused and don’t know where to turn for help. The end result, all too often, is a belief that this is normal and they inflict the same damage on their own children. It talks about never ending cycle and finally hopes for the better future.

Publisher’s website: http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/Insanity-BeyondUnderstanding.html

A few books

2012-03-29T21:42:00.000-04:00

During the last couple of months, I’ve liked these books.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Karvitz: Mordecai Richler

Duddy is a young Jew in Montreal – not yet of a legal age to enter into contracts. He is mean, arrogant, determined and without any scruples. An entrepreneur, he is always networking and turning chance meetings into opportunities, and using everyone to push ahead to fulfill his dream of buying land near a lake, because “a man without land is nothing.”

Mordecai Richler’s story of Duddy Kravitz – published in 1959 – has achieved iconic status in the world of books. Surprisingly, several books (fiction and non-fiction) published that year have gone on to attain similar iconic status. The fiction list includes The Tin Drum by Günter Grass; Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D Day by Cornelius Ryan; The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe.

Malcolm Bradbury published his first novel Eating People is Wrong and Jack Kerouac had a particularly productive year with two books (Dr. Sax, and Maggie Cassidy) and a collection of poems (Mexico City Blues).

The non-fiction list includes The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer; and The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill.

However, few, if any, books published in that year would be relevant today thematically or stylistically. Duddu Karvitz does, and that is the importance of Richler.

Pressure to Sing: Brandon Pitts

Brandon is a young poet who published his novel a month or so before this poetry collection. And as with his fiction, religion is a significant part of his poetry, too. Many poems in the collection are exquisite, and this one is my favourite:

Living Will

Marksman aims but cannot hit

The inept stumbles upon the gold mine

The dead are revived through television

Vitality given to the couch

A living will, turn off the coma

The karmic debtors are now rich

She was once young and beautiful

He was once old and fat.

Translating Partition: Editors Ravikant & Tarun K. Saint

This volume of short stories and critical commentaries on Partition literature would be an admirable companion to Stories about the Partition of India (editor: Alok Bhalla). This volume has Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Pandit Manto’s first letter to Pandit Nehru. Both Manto and Nehru were Kashmiris, and Manto wrote the letter in 1954 and it ends thus:

“You know there was a poet in our Kashmir, Ghani, who was well known as “Ghani Kashmiri.” A poet from Iran had come to visit him. The doors of his house were always open. He used to say, “What is there in my house that I should keep the doors locked? Well, I keep the doors closed when I am inside the house because I am its only asset.” The poet from Iran left his poetry notebook in the vacant house. One couplet in that notebook was incomplete. He had composed the second line, but could not do the first one. The second line ran this: “The smell of kebab is wafting from your clothes.” When the Iranian poet returned and looked in his notebook, he found the first line written there, “Has the hand of a blighted soul touched your daman?

Panditji, I am also a blighted soul. I’ve taken issue with you, because I am dedicating this book to you.”

- Sa'adat Hasan Manto

Evening of live painting with music & poetry

2012-03-24T19:33:00.001-04:00

I got to know AliAdil Khan quite by accident. He was the curator of Picture House: The Art of Bollywood – an exhibition along with Asma Arshad Mahmood last year.

Adil runs the SouthAsian Gallery of Art in Oakville.

Recently, over a bowl of Aash Reshteh soup at a Persian restaurant in downtown Toronto, we discussed many things of mutual interest - from Mahatma Gandhi to MF Husain, and Hindi movie posters to contemporary art in the subcontinent and rising religious fundamentalism.

Last week, he organised An evening of live painting with music and poetry – one of the finest cultural events I've ever attended in Canada.

Anwar Khurshid (playing the sitar) and Shahid Rassam (painting)
Both interpreted in their own media a poem on environment by Afsfaq Hussain

It was an exquisite jugalbandi of sitar by Anwar Khurshid and painting by Shahid Rassam. Ashfaq Hussain's poem set the tone for a truly memorable evening.

It revived memories of M. F. Hussain's similar experiment with Ustad Zakir Husain and Ustad Allah Rakah (tabla), and Ustad Sultan Khan (saarangi) during a cultural festival on Calicut Beach in December 1994.

Congratulations Adil!

Images: https://www.facebook.com/events/245656052191950/ & https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150741208171539&set=a.10150736715371539.452238.718366538&type=1&theater

Being Different

2012-03-24T17:57:00.000-04:00

John Kenneth Galbraith (who was an Ontarian by birth) called India a functioning anarchy. A characterisation had seemed apt when first coined – and now half a century later.

To the Western eye, and increasingly even to many Indians (especially those who live in the West), India’s chaos is dismally mind-numbing and frightening, even.

And yet, India resolutely refuses to change. There is a sense of inner serenity, peace and balance that transcends the outward turmoil as India moves slowly ahead with the grace of a Gaj Gamini (walk with the gait of a female pachyderm), oblivious of Western expectations. To many that is infuriating, and to many others that’s India's innate strength.

In his important book Being Different Rajiv Malhotra explains this phenomenon thus:

“In the West, chaos is seen as a ceaseless threat both psychologically and socially – something to be overcome by control or elimination. Psychologically, it drives the ego to become all-powerful and controlling. Socially, it creates a hegemonic impulse over those who are different. A cosmology based on unity that is synthetic and not innate is riddled with anxieties. Therefore, order must be imposed to resolve differences relating to culture, race, gender, sexual orientation and so on."

On the other hand, he asserts, “Dharmic civilizations are more relaxed and comfortable with multiplicity and ambiguity than the West. Chaos is seen as a source of creativity and dynamism. Since the ultimate reality is an integrally unified coherence, chaos is a relative phenomenon that cannot threaten or disrupt the underlying coherence of the cosmos.”

In Being Different Malhotra succeeds in walking on the razor’s edge. He discusses what are generally considered taboo ideas (especially in the West), and does so without being a chauvinist.

He challenges the generally accepted notions that western universalism is the finest way of life for human beings globally, and argues for a radically different methodology to comprehend the unique position that India occupies.

He says, “India is...(a) distinct and unified civilization with a proven ability to manage profound differences, engage creatively with various cultures, religions and philosophies, and peacefully integrate many diverse streams of humanity. These values are based on ideas about divinity, the cosmos, and humanity that stand in contrast to the fundamental assumption of Western civilisation. “

Malhotra delineates the differences between the Dharmic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism) and the Judeo-Christian traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) into four distinct categories.

Embodied Knowing versus History-centrism
Integral Unity versus Synthetic Unity
Anxiety over Chaos versus Comfort with Complexity and Ambiguity
Cultural Digestion versus Sanskrit Non-Translatables

It is the last argument – about cultural digestion versus Sanskrit Non-Translatables is sure to raise heckles especially among Indians living in the West because he strongly advocates for the retention of the distinctions between the two traditions. In the recent past, similar issues have generated serious and ceaseless debates, for instance (Aseem Shukla versus Deepak Chopra on Yoga that continues to rage; Malhotra, too, has contributed to it: Christian Yoga).

Malhotra says, “Western scholars and westernized Indians are accustomed to translating and mapping dharmic concepts and perspectives onto Western frameworks, thereby enriching and perhaps even renewing the Western ‘host’ culture into which they are assimilated. One does not say of a tiger’s kill that both tiger and prey are ‘changed for the better’ by digestion, or that the two kinds of animals have ‘flowed into one another’ to produce a better one. Rather, the food of the tiger becomes a part of the tiger’s body, breaking down and obliterating, in the process, the digested animal.”

Beware of Pity

2012-03-10T18:36:00.001-05:00

Stefan Zweig

Once a year my mother comes to visit us, and we reminisce about my father. Her visit last week was especially poignant because an aunt (my father’s cousin) had died in India in the preceding week.

Last week, I also read a review of biographies of Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig (by Allan Massie. Read the review here: Standpoint.) and I remembered my father.

He had insisted that I should read Zweig’s Beware of Pity. At that time, I was unwilling to do so because I was at an age where I couldn't imagine liking anything that he recommended.

Surprisingly, I absolutely adored the novel. It’s a straightforward tragedy – of a soldier’s compassion for a paraplegic being misunderstood by her for love. Many years after I read it, the novel was reissued as a Penguin paperback in the 1980s. I have a copy in Bombay.

Zweig was a German Jew who had to flee Austria in 1934 in the wake of Nazism’s ascendancy. He wrote Beware of Pity while in exile (1939), and committed suicide with his second wife in 1942 in Brazil.

Wikipedia notes that Zweig “had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture.” (I also learnt that the novel was turned into a movie in 1946).

In his review, Massie succinctly captures this despair.

“Writing in the Spectator in May 1989, G.M. Tamas, Hungarian philosopher, journalist, dissident, and briefly, after the collapse of Communism, a member of parliament, wrote about central Europe's "dark secret": "a universe of culture was destroyed." That culture was German and Jewish, and its destruction was the work of the two "industrious mass-murderers", Hitler and Stalin. Hitler exterminated the Jews, even though "the Jews, almost everywhere, were to all intents and purposes a peculiar German ethnic group", originally speaking Yiddish, a German dialect, but understanding, enjoying and ultimately transforming literary German. Then in 1945-46 Stalin murdered or expelled the Germans, and central Europe was bereft. Without the Germans and the Jews, Tamas wrote, "our supposed ‘common culture' does not make sense, and never will".

Image: http://trewisms.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/zweig2.jpg

Book Extract: The Reading List

2012-02-26T11:46:00.000-05:00

Leslie Shimotakahara

Leslie Shimotakahara is a young, disenchanted English professor struggling to revive her childhood love of reading. Her father Jack, recently retired from a high-powered corporate job, finally has time to take up reading books for pleasure. The Reading List tells the story of Leslie’s return home to Toronto to rethink her life and decide what to do next. At the same time, she bonds with her dad over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few. But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever. Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career?

Excerpts from The Reading List.

Reprinted with the permission of Variety Crossing Press.

“Poplar or cherry?” Daddy said. He slid a brochure across the table.

I stared at the caskets, so solid and heavy, and something about the ruffled satin lining in Pepto-Bismol pink made me giggle. Is that the wall Granny would want to stare at for all eternity?

Daddy had spent the past three days meeting with funeral home directors, comparison shopping, planning ahead for the inevitable. At least it gave him something to do.

“It’s big business.” He flipped open his laptop to show me a website.

What balls these people had. Who charges $39.95 to light a memorial candle? The website was full of ways to activate your PayPal account, buy services, and even avoid going to the funeral altogether, while appeasing your guilt.

Daddy smiled grudgingly. “Absolutely recession-proof.”

“You should have gone into the funeral business.”

“Oh, yeah. Can you see me with old ladies crying on my shoulder?”

We continued joking, but something about the whole thing really got to me. Spending all this money and the person being honoured wasn’t even around to enjoy it.

“I’d rather just go the way of Addie Bundren,” I said.

Daddy looked at me blankly.

I explained that Addie Bundren is the cranky old matriarch at the centre of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The novel begins on the eve of her death, as her son, Cash, is making her casket, sawing and sanding boards. All her kids – Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman – are crowded around her bedside watching her die, just like we were all hovering around Granny. After her death, they pack her into the casket and load the whole thing into a horse-drawn buggy to make an epic journey across the land to Jefferson, Mississippi, where Addie wishes to be buried with her own people, rather than by her husband’s side.

“A homemade casket,” Daddy said, shaking his head.

“You should read it.”

“Maybe I will.”

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that much more is at stake than just an eccentric lady’s dying wish. Addie Bundren wants to be alone. Alone in death. To put the final nail in the coffin of a life lived in solitude and despair.

An image of Granny being carted away by horse and buggy popped into my head. She was no less a strange, impenetrable woman.

A few days later, I was revising the syllabus for my Modern American Literature course (just in case I needed it for next year). Last year I’d deluded myself that undergrads could handle Absalom! Absalom! What had I been thinking? Even Faulkner scholars are baffled by what he was up to in telling the legendary story of Thomas Sutpen, in flashbacks by multiple narrators whose accounts fail to match up. The reader is left guessing about who Thomas Sutpen really was.

My course evaluations reflected just how much the students loved the novel (I’d finally forced myself to read through the pile). “What was Faulkner on when he wrote that crap?” wrote one kid. “Half the time I didn’t even know who’s speaking – everything blended together like a bizarre dream.”

Since I would have to teach a Faulkner novel (what’s an Am Lit class without Faulkner?), I figured As I Lay Dying was a better bet. Although the novel is told from fifteen different perspectives, at least it’s always clear who’s speaking; each chapter is titled with the name of the speaker. And the plot is simple, deceptively simple. At first glance, you wonder why Faulkner is spilling so much ink over an old lady’s death.

But Addie Bundren gradually draws you in. She has shameful secrets at the core of her being. As soon as she dies, the neighbours are all gossiping about how quickly the Bundrens pack her up and cart her off.

I wondered if Granny’s neighbours were talking about Daddy. They must have seen him packing boxes at her house.

Despite Daddy’s show of wanting to get her death over with, however, I could tell that deep down he was astonished it was happening at all. I could see it in his childlike air, his petulant gaze, the way he stomped around the house. In a way, he reminded me of Vardaman, Addie’s youngest son. After her death, Vardaman bursts into the barn; the warm, rank smells envelop him and mix with the smell of his own vomit and tears and everything seems very close and suffocating. The little boy is so overwhelmed that he wants to lash out at something, anything, “You kilt my maw!” burning at the back of his throat.

Yet racing through the dust and striking the horses can’t make it better, can’t bring his mother back.

Learning to Live Again: Translator's note

2012-02-19T23:32:00.000-05:00

By Sumedha Raiker-Mhatre

It was a rewarding experience to bring the Muktangan story in English, orginally written in Marathi. Muktangan is a recognised de-addiction center which has done pioneering work in the rehabilitation of drug and alcohol addicts.

It is a path-breaking experiment that was initiated by Dr Sunanda and Anil Awachat 25 years ago in the city of Pune. While Dr Sunanda is no more, Muktangan continues with its de-addiction experiments. This book is a tribute to the difficult journey of a de-addiction center.

It details the forces that pulled it apart at times; it also zeroes in on the positive energy that stopped it from closing down. It is also an inspiring guidebook for any rehabilitaiton center or grassroots organistion that thrives on community participation.

It is a book, written by none else but the founder of the institution, Anil Awachat, who remains at the core of the activity to this day. His daughter Mukta Puntambekar leads the organisation from the front.

Muktangan is a brand in itself, ISO-certified, professionally run by doctors and community workers alike. It is a formula that presupposes the co-operation of the addict and the addict's family, thereby placing the human being at the center of the five-week medical treatment.

The book mirrors an organisation that took on the establishment. It is a record of a struggle against an apathetic state government, the uncaring drug manufacturers, the pushy liquor lobby, the indifferent social set up, the corrupt bureaucracy and the unresponsive funding agencies.

Despite all the travails and tribulations, the book is celebratory in spirit. It is a free exchange of experiences that make or break rehabilitation set ups in India. In a country where such rehab centers have a poor death rate, the Muktangan story is uplifting. It underlines the power of one.

For an organisation that started with a donation by Marathi litterateur P L Deshpande, Muktangan has grown in all directions. It has diversified its energies in many sectors, including Internet Deaddiction. It has 23 counseling centers in and around Pune. There is a separate cell catering to women addicts.

But the translation of this book is not rewarding just because of its popular success. In fact, Dr Awachat's Afterword states that he is not proud of the achievements. “We do not boast of these diversifications, as a corporate firm would have bragged about its rising growth graph.”

Muktangan works towards a drug-free society, which would necessitate the conversion of Muktangan rehabilitation center into a cultural center. That is what makes the book special. The experience of presenting it for a wider audience is therefore even more exciting.

The mention of Dr Anil Awachat's co-operation in the translation is imperative. He was available 24/7 during the translation process, checking every page, every detail meticulously, No wonder the translation got over in less than three months.

See below for extract from the book

Book Extract: Learning to Live Again

2012-02-19T11:51:00.000-05:00

Sumedha Raikar

Learning to Live Again
Story of a de-addiction center
Author: Anil Awachat
Translator: Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre
Pages: 192
Price: Indian Rupees 200
Publisher: Samkaleen Prakshan

Extract from Chapter 8
(Specially keeping in view the cross-cultural audience of Generally About Books)

Follow-up and sharing

Patients who are brought to Muktangan against their wishes usually go into denial mode. They have a peculiar way of reacting to the charges of alcoholism or drug abuse leveled against them. The initial dialogue with such people follows a predictable pattern.

They start with a complete negation of the truth, “No, no never! I have never touched liquor!” When we remind them of complaints from their near ones, they say, and quite calmly, “Just a little bit, that too just once in a while.” When told that they are known to be habitual drinkers, the reaction becomes aggressive. “Who doesn’t drink in this world?

The whole world consumes liquor. Why target me? I don’t even trouble others, I just drink and come home and sleep.” To this we tell them, “Not really, you beat up your wife regularly every night.” After this patients become confrontational and some use foul language.

During the process of de-addiction, we console our patients by telling them that their lies and pretences stem from their compulsive alcoholism. “You are not lying. It is your liquor which compels you to mouth these lines.” These patients have a much focused approach to life. Liquor is their prime interest. Those who don’t drink cannot be their friends. Similarly, those who oppose drinking are barred. They remain deaf to any advice against alcoholism.

Drug addicts are even worse than alcoholics. They are never ready to move from their neighborhood, because they are not sure of a steady supply of drugs in the new place. There was one drug addict who reluctantly went to Aurangabad for a family wedding. He carried his stock along, but the supplies did not last and he started scouring the city for the fixed dose. When he could not find what he was looking for, he came back to Mumbai without informing the relatives. Unable to cope with the internal pressures, he could not be bothered about the problems he was creating for his host.

In Mumbai, the drug addicts know exactly where to get their stuff. One addict told me, “Go to any railway station at any point in time and you will get what you want. There will be someone waiting to sell that stock. These peddlers know our faces very well. They come close and ask a question.” It is interesting how they can identify their customer. Actually it is not very difficult to spot an addict – a skinny frame, dark circles around the eyes, black lips, etc. These characteristic features catch the eye immediately.

Interested? Read More: Learning to Live Again

The Shoe Project

2012-02-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

Last August I went to India for a month – my first trip after I came to Canada.

I had a long list of stuff to buy, and on the top of the list was ‘Buy shoes from Bata’.

I belong to a generation that grew up before the big four global shoe brands (Nike, Adidas, Reebok and Puma) came to dominate the minds of consumers.

I’ve only wore Bata shoes (or sandals).

In Canada, I could get everything I wanted but no Bata shoes.

In India, where market segmentation is multilayered, Bata is still a powerful brand.

When I was growing up, Bata was such a huge brand that during the socialist phase in India (in the 1970s), there was even a song in a Hindi movie about flour being made available in a Bata shop – flour in Hindi is ata, and rhymes with Bata.

(Bata ki dukan par bhi ata mile ga a rare Rafi-Kishore duet from the 1978 Heeralal Pannalal).

During our first month in Canada, we took a sightseeing tour of downtown Toronto and saw the Bata Shoe Museum from the outside.

I made a mental note to visit the museum, but visiting museums is one of those things that forever remain on the ‘must do’ lists.

Then, I heard about the Shoe Project from my friend Yoko.

Novelist and short story writer Katherine Govier, who has worked for many years with newcomers to Canada, was spearheading an initiative for the Bata Shoe museum.

The Shoe Project is a collection of memoirs of women immigrants about the shoes they wore (or brought with them) when they came to Canada.

The project started last fall when “Katherine met with twelve women, ages eighteen to sixty, who came to Canada from the Ukraine to Japan and many places in between...(O)ver tea and cookies the group discussed writing and immigration. Each woman found that she had a shoe-inspired tale. By the end each member had written a personal essay and provided the footwear to match.”

The exhibition came about when Katherine met Elizabeth Semmelhack, Senior Curator of the Bata Shoe Museum; Elizabeth “had long considered doing an exhibition featuring the shoes that brought people to Canada.”

Last week, the Shoe Project was officially unveiled.

And I finally visited the Bata Shoe Museum to see the Shoe Project – it is an absolutely fascinating exhibition.

Contributing writers to the Shoe Project

There are 12 stories by immigrant women from across the world.

They are by Filiz Dogan from Turkey, Maryam Nabavinijad from Iran, Sayuri Takatsuki from Japan, Gabi Veras from Brazil, Tanaz Bhathena from India, Elizabeth Meneses Del Castillo from Colombia, Miliete Selemon from Eritrea, Teenaz Javat from India & Pakistan, Freweini Berhane from Eritrea, Nada Sesar-Raffay from Croatia, and Tanya Andrenyuk from Ukraine.

Teenaz Javat and Tanaz Bhathena (both Parsis and both originally from Mumbai) read their shoe memoirs.

The exhibition has become possible thanks to a generosity of an anonymous donor.

I also met Sonja Bata, the force behind the museum that was started in Toronto in 1995.

Read more about the Shoe Project here: The Shoe Project

Read more about the Bata Shoe Museum here: Bata Shoe Museum

Read more about Katherine Govier here: Katherine Govier

Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151283174910105&set=oa.382013625147425&type=1&theater

Dickens bicentennial

2012-02-04T18:50:00.001-05:00

Estella & Pip: Great Expectations

Who else but the BBC would do a program on Charles Dickens to commemorate the bicentennial of English language’s greatest author?

(The bicentennial is on February 7. And this is the omnibus site for the celebrations: Dickens 2012).

This afternoon, the BBC World Service, had a 30-minute discussion on Dickens’ best novel – Great Expectations. (To listen to the program, click here: Dickens on BBC)

The program had a live audience and panelists from Kenya and India, besides England, of course.

Sambudha Sen, Professor of English, University of Delhi, suggested that Dickens is today more relevant in the developing societies such as Delhi and Kolkata than to London, or any other city in the developed world.

He argued that the societies in the developing world are going through a churn that reflects Dickensian drama in the everyday existence of its people.

On the other hand, the societies in the developed world have homogenised almost completely and have little left of their 19th century milieu, especially after nearly a century of the welfare state.

That is true at so many different levels. For instance, the ongoing Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai – which is a celebration Mumbai’s unique cosmopolitan identity – is holding a Tributeto Dickens film festival that will show some of the classic Dickens novels turned into films by master filmmakers.

And the lineup includes Great Expectations (1946, Dir: DavidLean), Pickwick Papers (1952, Dir: Noel Langly), Nicholas Nickelby (2002, Dir:Douglas McGrath), Oliver Twist (2005, Dir: Roman Polanski).

The festival will culminate in conversation on A Tale of Two Cities between British author Craig Taylor and Indian academic Dr. Mitra Mukherjee-Parikh.

Unfortunately, there are many events being planned to commemorate the bicentennial in Toronto, at least nothing on the net. A Charles Dickens Tribute Concert by the Counterpoint Community Orchestra is scheduled on Saturday March 3, 2012. Here is the link to the concert. Counterpoint.

Dickens is my favourite author and Great Expectation my favourite Dickens novel. I’ve written on several occasions on this blog about Dickens. (Read previous entries here: Dickens on GAB). I’ll be a good time to thank a dear friend – Pranav Joshi – for gifting me the novel at an age when I could read it as any other book, and not as a classic of English literature, which it is.

About the image: Pip and Estella Walking in the Garden by Charles Green c. 1877 7.6 x 4.6 inches Dickens's Great Expectations, Gadshill Edition. These plates have neither captions nor pages, being inserted into the text. The Annotated Dickens provides the following caption, which is not in the original Gadshill Edition: "Estella walking in the garden at Satis House: her other hand lightly touched my shoulder as we walked" (Ch. 29). Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/green/5.html

Kayt Burgess wins 3-Day Novel contest

2012-01-30T23:29:00.002-05:00

Kayt Burgess

Announcing the winner of the 34th International 3-Day Novel contest

Grand prize winner: Heidegger Stairwell by Kayt Burgess of Aurora, Ontario

About the Author

Kayt Burgess is a writer, artist, opera singer and musician. She studied classical music at the University of Western Ontario and earned her Master’s degree in creative writing from Bath Spa University in the UK. Kayt was born in Manitouwadge, Ontario, grew up in Elliot Lake and now lives near Toronto after stints in New Zealand, England and Scotland.Heidegger Stairwell is her first novel. It will be released by 3-Day Books in September 2012.

About the Book

Music journalist Evan Strocker has almost finished a memoir chronicling his time with Heidegger Stairwell, an indie-rock legend from small-town Ontario whose members he has known his whole life. But the band thinks he’s left a little too much of himself on the page—allowing his experiences as a transgender man and his complicated romance with the lead guitarist eclipse the story of the group’s dramatic rise and fall. Through graphic notes and colourful marginalia, the musicians weigh in on their friend’s version of the truth, and fight to put their own testimony on the record. As Strocker’s manuscript finally comes together, both band and writer are forced to face a shocking new event that will once again change their fortunes.

Second prize winner: Street Dogs by Brandon Hobson

Brandon Hobson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing atOklahoma State University. His fiction has appeared in NOON, New York Tyrant, Puerto del Sol, Narrative Magazine, Web Conjunctionsand elsewhere. He lives in Hennessey, Oklahoma, with his wife and son.

Third prize winner: She felt like velvet by Karen Cressman

Karen Cressman is a marketing writer with a fascination for all things Alice In Wonderland. She is currently developing three novels-in-progress and, of course, dreaming up plots for the next 3-Day Novel Contest. She lives with her husband in Brampton, Ontario.

Our Top-10 Runners-Up

Full Moon Rules by Lenore Butcher of Woodstock, Ontario

Alice’s Adventures Through a Very Big Mirror by Victoria Dunn of Ottawa, Ontario

Darius to the Max by Cathi Radner Castrio of Argyle, New York

Not by Terry Leeder of Oakville, Ontario

Rounds Down Range by J.L. Myer of Tulsa, Oklahoma

Half of No by Kari Pilgrim of Brooklyn, New York

Happily Destroyed by Evan Purcell of Bullhead City, Arizona

Deadfall by Rachel Slansky of San Francisco, California

Lords of Ironfire by Rudy Thauberger of Vancouver, British Columbia

Banquet of Consequences by Anderson Todd of Toronto, Ontario

http://www.3daynovel.com/2012/01/30/announcing-the-winners-of-the-34th-annual-international-3-day-novel-contest/

In support of Salman Rushdie

2012-01-20T23:57:00.004-05:00

Salman Rushdie was invited to the Jaipur literature festival, but the rector of India’s leading Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom of Deoband objected to his presence. Many Muslims have found Rushdie’s Satanic Verses offensive.

India was among the first countries to ban the novel – the ban hasn’t been lifted till now.

William Dalrymple, writer and one of the festival organiser, said in a statement, "Salman is a writer of enormous breadth. His … passionate engagement with Indian Islamic history shows he is far removed from the Islamophobe of myth. This is a great tragedy, and we hope he will be able to come back again in the future."

The Guardian (London, England) reported:

Salman Rushdie pulls out of Jaipur literary festival overassassination fears

“On Friday, the British Indian writer Hari Kunzru caused further upset by reading a section from The Satanic Verses, which remains banned in India. Further attempts by writers to read from the book were stopped by organisers.

"Willy, Sanjoy: why did this happen?", Rushdie later asked Dalrymple and the festival's producer, Sanjoy Roy, protesting against their decision to prevent further readings from the banned work...

Indian officials told the Guardian they feared action by groups run by Dawood Ibrahim, a well-known crime boss living in exile, who they believe is closely linked to the Pakistani security establishment. Security experts, however, described the idea of killers being dispatched by organised criminals to kill the author as "extremely far-fetched.

The struggling Indian government, led by the centre-left Congress party, has made no public statement on the row. There are major state elections in the coming weeks in which the votes of Muslim communities will play a critical role. The festival's organiser, (Sanjoy) Roy, said there was a need in India "to question … why we continue as a nation to succumb to one pressure or another." "This is a huge problem for Indian democracy," Roy said.

As a mark of solidarity with Rushdie, Generally About Books is reproducing an extract from Satanic Verses.

The extract is taken from About.com (http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/a/me080930.htm)

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God’s will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. It is right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills à la god. Flattered them: you will be the instrument of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the halos, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they’ll play you a happy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behind-their-own-eyes. Of whyatm as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers… angels, they don’t have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit, to dissent.

I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.

Me?

[…] His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won’t answer to that here; nor, though he’s well aware of what they call him, to his nickname in Jahilia down below—he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney. [Coney Mountain in Rushdie’s rendering is a pun on many levels, and a reference to Mount Hira, where Muhammad is supposed to have had his first Koranic “revelation.”] Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym: Mhound.

That’s him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his hot mountain in the Hijaz. The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.”

Understanding Gandhi

2012-01-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

I recently read Tariq Ali’s brilliant piece in Viewpoint (“an activist alternative to the corporate-mainstream media”) on Saadat Hasan Manto, unarguably, South Asia’s best chronicler of the horrors of the subcontinent’s Partition in 1947.

Ali’s piece (Manto & ‘1947’) is a mix of the polemical and the personal, in which he adroitly combines personal history, opinion, translations of poems by Faiz and Sahir to profile Manto and contextualise his continuing relevance to South Asian societies in present times.

Non-partisan historians generally accept Ali’s analyses of the causes of the Partition and its fallout five-and-a-half decades later in South Asia.

He states, “Nehru and Jinnah were both shaken by the orgy of barbarism (of Partition riots). It offended all their instincts. But it was Mahatama Gandhi who paid the ultimate price. For defending the right to live of innocent Muslims in post-Partition India he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a fundamentalist Hindu fanatic. Godse was hanged, but two decades later, Godse’s brother told Channel Four that he regretted nothing. What happened had to happen.

“That past now rots in the present and threatens to further poison the future. The political heirs of the hanged Godse are shoving aside the children of Nehru and Gandhi. The poisonous fog of the religious world has enveloped politics. History, unlike the poets and writers of the sub-continent, is not usually prone to sentiment.”

I was reminded of another interpretation of the dichotomy between the ideas of Gandhi and Godse by Ashis Nandy.

Traditionally, most historians have misconstrued (perhaps deliberately) Gandhi as a liberal secularist not much different from Nehru, which is not to say that Gandhi was an illiberal fundamentalist. But there is a fundamental difference between Gandhi and Nehru and Gandhi defies attempts at such compartmentalisation of people and ideas into mutually exclusive and opposing categories.

Nandy gives a penetrating insight in this dichotomy between Gandhi and Godse (Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural Critique of the West from Traditions, Tyranny and Utopia Essays in Politics of Awareness – A VeryPopular Exile, Oxford India Paperbacks).

Nandy notes, “Gandhi died, almost necessarily, at the hands of one who represented the modern world and sought a secular-scientific orientation to statecraft. The young assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, supposedly a religious fanatic, gave a spirited last speech in court before the death sentence was passed on him. It was essentially a fervent, rationalist, modern plea to recognise the dangers Gandhi posed to the growth of the modern state in India and to the conduct of ‘normal’ politics along the lines of Professor Henry Kissinger would have approved of. The plea invoked interesting reactions. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, called Godse an insane killer who did not know what he had done. Yet, Nehru’s government banned Godse’s last testament lest others should find it too sane. The government knew that it was Godse who was seeking the secular solution, Gandhi the religious.”

Nandy adds, “It is a measure of the success of modern science in India that his ultra-Hindu, Brahmanic assassin accused Gandhi of bringing in anti-scientific ideas like soul force and morality into politics. Nathuram Godse claimed that he had unwittingly to kill Gandhi on behalf of the modern world, especially on behalf of modern ideas of statecraft and rationality, so that the newborn Indian nation could survive. One of Godse’s last wishes was to take the appeal against the death sentence passed on him for killing Gandhi to the Privy Council in Britain – still the highest court of appeal for India in 1948 – so that the world could judge his action impartially. He felt that the modern world would give him a better hearing than the superstitious, effeminate, Hindu admirers of Gandhi in India.”

Image: http://www.text-blog.net/mahatma-gandhi/

Cook / Book

2012-01-05T22:46:00.000-05:00

Sang Kim

I envy those who cook, and I envy those who write fiction.

I can’t cook, and I struggle every morning with my fiction writing.

I compensate for my deficiencies in the culinary arts by loving my food, and constantly experimenting.

My love for food is in inverse proportion to my ability to cook. I love food, I don’t cook.

Over the last three years and some months in Toronto, I've have developed a palate for cuisines I couldn't possibly have imagined I’d ever eat when I was in India.

Primarily, this is because I didn’t even know they existed, or had read about them only in Vir Sanghvi’s food columns when I was in India.

I had Moroccan Tajine at a restaurant in downtown Toronto not too long ago. My friend told me that the meat was optional, but I did the right thing having it with meat. It added substantially to the taste and the aroma.

Tajine is a North African delicacy that gets its name from the earthen vessel in which it is made – not unlike the traditional method of cooking the masterpiece of Gujarati delicacy – the Undhiyu.

A few days ago, I had the Iranian Shole Zard – a delicacy that I’m convinced is a divine concoction that humans only accidentally discovered.

Some time ago, a group of friends had warm Japanese sake in small clay cups and we sat on wooden benches enjoying deep fried oysters with three kinds of sauce.

I compensate for my deficiencies in creative writing (and every day I discover new ones) by enjoying good writing, especially good literature.

Whenever I meet someone who is a natural at both cooking and writing, all I really want to do is just go back to bed, and never get up.

And I make it a point to acknowledge their talents.

I recently discovered that MG Vassanji, the two times Giller winner, is also an accomplished chef – his Hyderabadi-style eggplant recipe is as magnificent as his prose.

Jasmine D'Costa makes exquisite chicken biryani.

That brings me to my friend Sang Kim.

Every time I meet Sang, I feel completely inferior.

He’s everything that I want to be and will probably never be.

This is how he describes himself on his Facebook page: “Author, Playwright, Social Entrepreneur, Restaurateur, Accidental Chef.”

He is also the Co-Director of the Small Press of Toronto (SPoT), a bi-annual book fair at various venues throughout Toronto.

Last month, I visited the fall edition of the SPoT fair to meet Sheniz Janmohamed, Doyali Farah Islam and Ava Homa.

I met Sang. too.

And he gave me yet another reason to crawl back to bed and hide.

He stood in the middle of the book fair, completely oblivious of his surroundings, and recited first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

In case you don’t know, that’s one long poem!

I was stunned; as, I’m sure, were Sheniz and Ava.

He later wrote to me, “One of my life's goals is to memorize all 10 Elegies - they say EVERYTHING.”

Sang also told me that he was working on a book and a television project called Cook / Book where he'll be interviewing Toronto writers in their kitchens and cook together.

Acclaimed novelists Katherine Govier, Austin Clarke and Joy Kogawa, have confirmed their participation in the project.

I believe Sang has also convinced Ava Homa to be a part of the project.

It’s a book worth waiting for.

Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150730419885534&set=a.10150354283735534.594165.718330533&type=3&theater

Adrift

2011-12-31T10:38:00.003-05:00

There is a timeless quality to a quietly flowing stream.

It encapsulates time in one free-flowing moment – the continuously flowing water has the past, the present, and the future all subsumed into one perpetual motion.

Loren Edizel

This also true for our lives where the overlap of the past, the present and the future is an everyday occurrence.

One seldom sees this seamless continuity in any narrative piece.

Loren Edizel’s Adrift (Tsar) is like that stream – it doesn’t categorises life in to distinct compartments of the earlier, the now and the then.

It weaves the stories of the characters in the novel in an uneven, overlapping, non-linear and multidimensional narrative that is at once breathtaking and profound.

The novel is about John, who is a new immigrant in Montreal, working the graveyard shift in a hospital.

He seems mysterious because he aloof and alone. In reality he is like anyone else who is new to Canada and has done a night shift survival job.

In the bitterly cold nights, when one battles to stay awake, imagination can be a dangerous thing – it’s better to make it work for you can work (as John does) rather than letting it harm you.

Also, one prefers to keep the baggage of the past to oneself, and avoids small chatter about the past one has left behind. You come to a new land to restart your life, not to re-live your past.

In so many different ways, the novel redefines loneliness – no man (woman) is ever lonely in the mind – every moment in one’s life is a confluence of all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.

The novel is also about the unceasing little tragedies that make up our lives – melancholy is the generally prevailing norm in everyone’s life.

A gentle reminder that while we may all be happy (briefly) in our different ways, when it comes to gloom there isn't much to distinguish between yours and mine.

Adrift is one of the best novels I’ve read in 2011.

Image (Author's photo): http://www.levantineheritage.com/achiev2.htm

Oh! Calcutta

2011-12-15T20:32:00.000-05:00

I’ve never quite figured out what is it that creates a bond between a city and its inhabitants. The bond has a distinctly paradoxical dimension because it’s at once intangible and palpable.

The bond develops into a lifelong sense of belonging and gives an identity to the inhabitant – I’m a Torontonian. I used to me a Bombayite (or, the better sounding Mumbaikar).

Howrah Bridge

Even the most liberal-minded amongst us tend to become a bit jingoistic about our cities and compare them to other cities that we visit – and always feel infinitely superior about it.

When I lived in Bombay, and visited other cities in India, or even outside India, I always felt that my Bombay was incomparable.

It's an emotional thing. So, while I definitely love Toronto more than I love Bombay, I still feel that Toronto doesn’t measure up to that magnificent island city on the eastern end of the Arabian Sea.

Bombay is in so many ways similar to that other amazing city on the western coast of the Atlantic – New York City – the undisputed capital of the world.

Every time I’ve been to the US, I made it a point visit New York – to live and breathe for some time the sheer vibrancy, sassiness, audacity, impudence of a city that defines freedom, expression, energy.

Chowringhee

I think Delhi is like Washington DC, Bombay is like New York, Chicago is like well, not quite any other city I’ve visited, although some parts of downtown Chicago do remind me of downtown Toronto, perhaps because both cities are beside a giant water body erroneously called a lake.

And then there’s Calcutta – quite unlike any other city in the world.

For reasons that are known to many who know me (and therefore entirely unnecessary to reiterate), I’ve had a long and enduring relationship with Calcutta – a city I first visited in 1977 and then several times from the late 1980s to mid-1990s.

It’s a city that makes you fall in love – with itself and with its people and with the Hoogly and the hand pulled raft boats, with the majestic cantilever Howrah Bridge (Shakti Samanta’s Amar Prem, Mani Ratnam’s Yuva), with the imposing Victoria Memorial and the sprawling Maidans, the Eden Gardens, the rusty trams and the gleaming metro, the decaying buildings and the smoke-belching Ambassador taxis, New Market, K.C. Das, Flury’s, Chowringhee, the Puja.

But my relationship with Calcutta is not merely because of my personal connection, it’s a city that is important to anyone who is interested in postcolonial phenomenon because Calcutta defined colonial Bengal, which in turn defined modern Indian sensibilities (G.K. Gokhale’s famous quip: “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.”).

Writers' Building

Bengal’s influence has been and remains ubiquitous in all spheres of human endeavour – from politics (a wide variety – my choice: Jyoti Basu), economics (Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Amartya Sen), literature (Rabindranath Tagore), the arts (my personal favourites: Jamini Roy in the past and Bikash Bhattacharya more recent), movies (Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwick Ghatak in the past…Rituparno Ghosh now), religion (my favourite: Ramkrishna Paramhansa), activism (Raja Ram Mohan Roy) to journalism (M.J. Akbar). And this, as everyone will agree, is only an illustrative list.

For me Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar and Shankar’s Chowringhee are the two artistic interpretations that capture the true character of Calcutta’s identity.

And somehow, for me it’ll never be Kolkata.

Recently, after a gap of many years I had an opportunity to return to the Bengali milieu with Tagore aficionados in Toronto at a Tagore film festival organised by Kathleen and Joseph O'Connell of the U of T and saw Rituparno Ghosh's interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore's Noukadubi, Satyajit Rai's documentary on Tagore, Shey by Buddhadeb Dasgupta.

It was an absolutely splendid experience.

Then, during the last week, I read Kwai-Yun Li’s The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories (Tsar). Kwai is from Calcutta’s Chinatown and her stories are set in the city.

It revived my memories of Calcutta, and with that revival of memories also a disturbing realisation – that the local Chinese population never quite figured in all my encounters and memories of Calcutta, which seems to strange because they’re quite unmistakably a part of the city.

What’s more, I’ve had one of the biggest dinners of my life at a Chinese eatery on Calcutta’s Park Street.

Kawi’s essay A Brief History of Chinese in Calcutta talks of the steady decline of the Chinese population. This is a collection of heart-warming stories of human beings no different than anyone else in Calcutta, and yet treated differently, neglected and forgotten.

It made me realise that we see only what we want to see, and in the way we want to see. Also, I doubt if I’d ever have become as aware of the different minorities that make our world and societies had I not become a part of a minority myself as a Torontonian.

Images: Sketches of Calcutta: by Sameer Biswas

Book Cover: http://www.kwaiyunli.com/publications.htm

Tagore profile: http://samarjitroy.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html

Lantana Strangling Ixora

2011-12-07T20:40:00.001-05:00

The Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is an influential organisation that helps shape the Indian Government’s policies on the Indian Diaspora. It has presence all over the world and has a special significance for the Indian Diaspora, more so in North America.

Its e-newsletter is a much-awaited monthly bulletin that gives a roundup of activities of the Indian Diaspora across the world; preoccupied with policy matters, it doesn't usually have any significant mention about culture, and almost never about poetry.

However, the December e-newsletter that I got earlier this week surprised me.

It had a whole paragraph on my friend Sasenarine Persaud (Sase).

“Guyanese born PIO Dr. Sasenarine Persaud has released his most recent collection of poems titled Lantana Strangling Ixora. The poems provide a ready metaphor for the consciousness of the Americas overcoming that of India in the Americas – the main streaming and divesting of yoga from its Hindu origins being the most visible manifestation. This collection ranges widely in its geographical and historical concerns, from Canada to Guyana to India and places in between, exploring the contradictions in our lives: familial influences, terrorism, literature, politics, race, and the power of language and representation.”

I met Sase in the strangest of circumstances. He was attending the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts (FSALA-11) and I was to pick him up from the airport.

But a misreading of flight schedules resulted in two participants reaching Toronto almost simultaneously from different places and at different terminals.

I couldn’t go to pick him, but met him a day later at the festival and we turned friends instantly.

Sase has an easy charm and wears his creativity quite lightly.

His collection of poems Lantana Strangling Ixora (published by TSAR) was released during the festival, and he read a few poems from his new collection.

I particularly liked this one:

Marco Polo at Rama-Sethu.

Silken threads known

before his journey

to the Emperor’s court

recording on that passage

Rama’s bridge across the ocean

from Tamil Nadu to Lanka

Raghu’s vanaar army – how inebriated

can you be if monkeys talk

in an underwater crocodile wife’s

yearning for monkey-liver soup

to cure an ailment: man shooting

too much breeze with another

must be curbed – building a stone

causeway to confront Ravana –

You do not negotiate with terrorists.

Lantana Strangling Ixora – the poem that gives the collection its name has stunning imagery.

Lantana is a South American flower and Ixora is an Asian flower; Sase is a Guyanese of Indian descent.

Lantana Strangling Ixora

There were times in the morning

we questioned the bloom

of the previous evening, watering

cana lilies, clearing the live oak

acorns from our white wrought-iron bench

How do ripe plantains smell?

Like ripe bananas. You could laugh

until after dinner. I will hold

Radhakrishnan’s interpretations of the Upanishads

until you snap on the ceiling fan

And we swirl on the sheets of a different seeking

scented like lilacs in a north-of-Toronto park

or in the Arnold Arboretum. If you conjure

a dead British poet with the same last name

would you be wrong? American literature

Or flowers in a Florida garden

are all we need to know except

if “papa” is hunting in the “Green Hills of Africa”

or Buck is observing Chinese. You drift

off into a naked sleep where snores sing

And a mouth that has taught us Kali’s secrets

falls open to accommodate blocked passages

or water the definition of a flower cluster

or the naming of a southern plant: datura

as prickly as that morning when the alarm

failed to startle sexed sleep and you are hurried

For a meeting and we barely have time

to glance at the golden marigolds—left foot

right foot brake and accelerate through amber

lights impatient with ancient drivers gaping

At dew on the St. Augustine grass and the aroused

ficus leaves, a replica of Rama’s arrow tips, and

we barely have time to see lantana strangling ixora

Image: TSAR Books

Lingering Tide and Other Stories

2011-12-02T06:13:00.001-05:00

Latha Vishwanathan’s Lingering Tide and Other Stories is an endearing collection of short stories.

Lata takes us to places that are mostly homely, but get lonely and forlorn as we get know them better. It’s a world that we wouldn't want to leave once we’re in because it’s where we meet people who’re like us and yet quite different and distinct, and they stay with us a long time; long after you’ve read the book.

It’s a world of cloistered neighbourhoods; of a lovable though tragic character of Ammini (Brittle), who savours peanut brittle. This seemingly inexplicable addiction, when explained later in the story, leaves us with a lump larger than a brittle in the throat, and one that refuses to melt.

In Eclipse, we meet Divya, the flexible wife and mother who is eager to and therefore successful in adjusting to a new life in Canada. Her husband, Sharma, a maestro of sorts, is unable to make the transition; and is reduced to watch his world transform radically from the sidelines. Suddenly, the difference in age between the not-so-young wife and the old husband becomes an unbridgeable and an ever-widening chasm, and he wonders, “Why had he not seen this, her agility spanning continents, skipping oceans?”

Lata Vishwanathan

These stories are of people in India, North America, East Asia, and one that is of a young alchemist in medieval India, who is an expert at making rose attar. Each milieu as carefully crafted as the characters.

In Lingering Tide, the time difference between India and the US is described thus: “The hours Surya struggles to fill in India have yet to be born in America.” Or Sharma’s brother in Eclipse, experiencing the vastness of Canada for the first time, observes, “Isn’t it odd; I haven’t seen so much of the sky at one time.”

The coming of age of girls is described with subtlety and tenderness. In Bat Soup, Robona’s sister describes her thus: “Sitah noticed how Robona walked since she turned sixteen. She wound her sarong tightly, pulling at the edges before tucking in. Then when she walked, she swayed just a little, thighs brushing, small tight buttocks seesawing; so glad to be alive.”

At the Fall launch of TSAR books, Latha read an excerpt from Cool Wedding; a poignant and hilarious story of an immigrant housewife, writing a letter to her sister.

Here’s a sample from that story:

“You will not believe the competition in America. What with all the smart Chinese children. Thank God for the Americans. Without them, how will our children shine in America? I, personally, am very glad about the one child only per couple in China. Wish the Chinese in America would also take it up.”

You can buy the book here: TSAR

Images: TSAR Publications

Yusuf and the Lotus Flower

2011-11-25T19:40:00.001-05:00

Guest Post by Leo Paradela

The launch of Doyali Farah Islam's first book of poetry was a delightful one. Her verses echoed the melodic voice of the poet as she stood in an ever-so lovely bright red dress before her happy guests as she read several selections from her book Yusuf and the Lotus Flower.

Doyali Farah Islam

Her delicate words lead us through mystical passages filled with invisible threads of her soul drawing the anxious listener to the core of her world of graceful and spiritual richness. Her intricate yet bold poems came as a reminder to all who heard her that GOD is one among all – Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, or any other are all alike in the worship of the Supreme Deity.

Through images from the Qur'an, Doyali managed to unite us all and serve as a gentle reminder of humanity's oneness as we all embark, during our earthly journey, on our search for the soul, the divine, the deeply wise, and the deeply spiritual reason for our being.

We are all one in our greatness as we are all one in our nothingness.

Yet our one common denominator remains the lightness of our existence during the brief time we are given to discover sacred that lies deeply within our hearts.

To put it in Doyali's own words,

"I will crawl up the trellis now,

a salient rose,

and leave the air fragrant

just for your presence".

Indeed, Doyali, with your lovely and sublime verses, you have done exactly that!

Thank you and much success in your future!

Very Sincerely,

Leo Paradela

Leo Paradela is a poet. His collection of poems Hearts & Souls was published in 2011

Follow Doyali's blog: www.doyalifarahislam.com