write2kill.in - a critique of the times

The Game Changer

admin — Tue, 29 May 2012 11:01:10 +0000

At the turn of the millennium, if 5000 copies of your book were sold, you would be a best-selling author. Then, in the next few years, the Indian publishing industry expanded by leaps and bounds. As the industry burgeoned, there was this author whose re-print runs usually exceeded 500,000. He was described by the New York Times as “the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history” and many others ascribed to him the “phenomenon” tag. The man in question, Chetan Bhagat, changed many rules of the game.

You will agree that the paragraph above is replete with clichés. You will also agree that clichés, whether you like the incontrovertible fact or not, do start as truths; and they usually do work. So have the five novels of Bhagat. If print runs and sales are to be a collative yardstick, you cannot deny that Bhagat is one of the most-read authors in this country today.

Amala Shankar: The Muse

admin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:51:05 +0000

When a marriage proposal comes from someone you can only think of as a god, it can be more than overwhelming. You wonder whether you are dreaming, and your life thereafter is just a trance. You don’t think of yourself as a dance; for, dance is life.

It was during a chance trip to Paris in the summer of 1931 with her father Akhoy Kumar Nandy, when the 11-year-old Amala met a few young men at the Exposition Coloniale where a group of Indian artists were said to be performing.

One of the older of these youngsters introduced himself to the Nandys as “Uday Shankar” and wondered if Amala would like to come home to play with his younger brother, one who was called Ravi. The boys were playing basketball when the landed; Uday’s mother Hemangini Devi noticed the little girl in a frock and took her in – she gave Amala a sari to wear. She was already part of the family.

Obit of journalist Marie Colvin, killed in Syria: Personal recollections

admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:36:34 +0000

In 2010 I was working for the Jain Group. The flagship company of the group is Jain Infrastructure. Since there was less work in Bengal, at that time, we were looking for greener pastures and I had advised my Chairman on two new green pastures. One was Sri Lanka and the other was Libiya. Both for different reasons. Sri Lanka as it had immense opportunities in infrastructure development after the death of Prabhakaran,the LTTE chief in May,2009. Libya as Colonel Gadaffi had promised his tribe that he would replace the Bedouin tent with houses for all. We did land up in the desert of Tripoli to build infrastructure.

Review of Mark Tully's Non Stop India

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:10:30 +0000

Books by Indophiles make for tedious reading. They are usually unreadable and insufferable. Much as they try not to, they are invariably condescending and take the reader on a journey of cultural tourism that Indian readers are never interested in. Such books need to be read only to ascertain what perception outsiders hold of India. Mark Tully is an exception.

Tully is no Indophile, as we know them. He was born in India and has lived and worked here for 40 years. He is probably as Indian as any of us are. Tully is also a journalist, one of the old school which believed that journalism ought to be about people.

Mark Tully’s Non Stop India, which comes 20 years after No Full Stops in India, is a classic tome of narrative non-fiction. It is not a sequel, this collection of essays takes the narrative further.

More endangered than the tiger

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:44:53 +0000

A few weeks back an incident disappeared from the news space as mysteriously and suddenly as it had appeared. The affair in question was that of a Jarawa woman being made to dance naked for the amusement of tourists in the Andamans. A video clip appeared on the website of a British newspaper and set the word “Jarawa” trending on Twitter for a couple of days. And then the concern, outrage and all traces of the news vanished into thin air.

In a 24/7 era of news bombardment, that’s bound to happen. The issue here is not about what’s right or wrong, but that of the tragedy of a people who stand in the imminent danger of being wiped off from the face of this earth – the endangered Jarawa lot. There are few who know of them and their plight; fewer give a damn about them. The Jarawas are only biding their time.

The other side...

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:57:02 +0000

The dark, dingy room from which weaver Taufeeq Ahmed operates is tell-tale. It is crammed to the last inch. There’s barely any leg space for him, leave alone his occasional visitors. The room is poorly lit, and will never provide you with a whiff of fresh air.

Taufeeq’s weather-beaten face belies his age. The thick glasses wear heavy as he leans into his loom, and he does not have to make up a face to brood. He looks every bit a man resigned to his fate. Taufeeq does not look impoverished, but he’s not making hay either. He’s subsisting.

There’s another loom in the room, one that stays squeezed in the space bang opposite Taufeeq. But this one’s deserted. No one’s used this loom for months, maybe years.

Downstairs, Taufeeq’s sibling Tariq runs a grocery shop from a room that opens out into the narrow lane outside in Srinagar’s Downtown area. Their family is one of weavers – ones who wove shahtoosh shawls. Today, Taufeeq weaves pashminas. Tariq has given up.

A common enough story

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:59:00 +0000

Minutes after I had put up a status message on Facebook saying that I was planning to pen first-hand accounts of domestic violence survivors, I was flooded with messages.

Among those who responded was my friend, Nargis Yousuf *, from Bangalore. Er, was she a victim?

No. But she had an account of someone. “Would you need the person to narrate it herself? As in, meet her?”, she asked. I thought otherwise. “But she won’t be able to speak to you here (on Facebook).”, Nargis added. So, was this person seeking anonymity? “No, it is just that she can’t be on a comp.”, she stated. The woman in question was illiterate. She was Nargis’ domestic help. My friend felt her maid had a story in her – one that needed to be told to the world.

So, here it is.

Beyond a murky encounter

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:49:49 +0000

So, one of India’s most wanted men, Mallojula Koteswara Rao a.k.a. Kishenji, has been eliminated from the Maoist theatre. There are many who are heaving a sigh of relief, there are others who argue that this is the beginning of the end of the Maoists. But arguments steeped in speculation are essentially bad arguments. They leave out the context, and are therefore myopic.

Kishenji’s death in an encounter on November 24 came even as parleys were on between the Maoists and the Trinamool Congress-led government in West Bengal. His killing was a sureshot way to ensure that the talks came to a dead end. The interlocutors trying to bring the ultras to the negotiating table put up their hands. One of the main negotiators Sujato Bhadro went on to say, “The prevailing situation in West Bengal does not allow us to carry forward the peace talks. We have expressed our helplessness and inability to the chief minister about our decision.”

The Bs of disruption

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:14:45 +0000

The word ‘democracy’ is one of the most abused in today’s world. A watch on the news front will provide you will glaring instances. Let us keep away from the villains we love to hate – politicians, bureaucrats and corporates, and look at the mess we are in from a peoples’ point of view. After all, democracy, we are told time and again, is about people.

A democracy is built on several foundation stones – that of freedom and the right to dissent being the most critical. If you don’t have freedom, all liberal catchphrases become lies. And if you are not allowed to voice or give vent to your disagreements, democracy becomes a myth.

The poverty of imagination

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:34:48 +0000

There is something perverse in the fact that the politics of poverty always brings out the poverty in the politics of the day. So when the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, told the Supreme Court about the commission’s desire to fix Rs 32 a day as the poverty line in urban India, the ensuing debate metamorphosed into all about politics.

Number-crunching, when about an emotive issue such as poverty, is less of an exercise in economics, and more of political one-upmanship. It also brings to the fore the bitter truth of whether one sees poverty as a manifestation of bad politics. Or, stay blind.