The best books on Bombay

Back in the late 1980s, I'd be stumped when asked to recommend one book that would provide an insight into Bombay's present and past. I usually settled for Gillian Tindall's City of Gold, a competent though workmanlike history. In the mid-1990s, Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra produced their breakthrough volume, Bombay: The Cities Within, and recommendations became easier. The quintessential Bombay book of the noughties for most people was Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, but I preferred to gift Arun Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems.

Now Katherine Boo has written a must-read book about the city, and I use the phrase 'must-read' very sparingly. The book is titled Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and you can read my review of it in Caravan magazine here.

Foreign investment, trade, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy

Amitav Ghosh's blog entry for November 5 was a review of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari. The book makes out a case against foreign investment which Ghosh accepts, with a few caveats:

"I don’t for a moment doubt that Aseem and Ashish are broadly correct in their diagnoses and prognostications – yet I do think that they paint a picture that is, in some respects, too monochrome in its darkness. Take the Information Technology sector of the Indian economy for example: this is a non-polluting, knowledge-based industry; the compensation is usually fair and the working conditions are generally safe. This sector has been a godsend for hundreds of thousands of young people and it has served to decentralize economic power in India, moving it away from its traditional locations to other towns and cities. It is also a fact that the people who run this industry are on the whole much more thoughtful and socially conscious than other industrialists. I see nothing to bemoan in the success of this sector, limited though it may be: on the contrary I think it offers much cause for celebration."

It's common knowledge that the IT sector derives its revenues almost exclusively from exports, the bulk of them coming from the United States. There's been a lot of grumbling in the US about American jobs being offshored, and many politicians on the Left favour a more protectionist system. Most Congressmen and Senators, though, feel the US must remain a broadly open market if it is to be an evangelist for lower trade barriers around the globe. There will, however, be a breaking point at some stage. It is naive to believe our IT exports will be allowed to grow indefinitely even as we retain strict barriers to imports and investment. The future of Indian information technology is dependent on a continuous process of lifting trade and investment barriers within India.

This is a connection that opponents of foreign investment in retail fail to make. Aside from the benefits and impairments that follow as a direct result of Tesco and Walmart opening supermarkets in India (and there will doubtless be impairments; those who claim kirana stores will be totally unharmed should study the battle between Tesco and small retailers in Thailand), the move is a logical step in a process that offers India gains in areas unrelated to retail.

While Amitav Ghosh sees some positives in India's experience of liberalisation, Arundhati Roy is a far more strident critic of the process, and more closely allied to Shrivastava and Kothari's monochrome black palette. Back in 2006, in a talk titled Bombay in the Age of Globalisation that was part of a conference at the Tate Modern in London, the recording of which you can listen to here, I took on a passage from Roy's book The Algebra of Infinite Justice :

"In the early days of Indian liberalisation, I was convinced that it was a sell-out to neo-imperialists. Though I do not retain that belief, there are many who do. Arundhati Roy, one of the most eloquent speakers against the twin processes of liberalisation and globalisation, has written it has resulted in 'a kind of barbaric dispossession that has few parallels in world history.' She follows this up in the same essay with the statement: 'Across the world as the free market brazenly protects western markets and forces developing countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.' Here are the statistics for the balance of trade between India and the US [PowerPoint Slide].
Trade Surplus in favour of India:
2001: 5.98 billion dollars
2002: 7.71 billion dollars
2003: 8.07 billion dollars
2004: 9.46 billion dollars
2005: 10.81 billion dollars
As you can see, India has been running a surplus, and this has grown from 5.98 billion dollars in the year 2001 to 10.81 billion dollars in 2005. A strange outcome if western markets are as protected and third world markets as open as Roy contends. But I suppose one should never let mere facts come in the way of a good theory. The book of hers I quote from was, by the way, published by Viking Penguin, which is owned by Pearson PLC, an 8 billion dollar multinational conglomerate."

Is there any country where the phrase 'do as I say, not as I do' is applicable more frequently than in India?

John Berger and the Israel Boycott

Of the intellectuals and artists who have signed on to the cultural boycott of Israel, the one I respect most is John Berger. His name is also used extensively by PACBI because he's recognised across the world, unlike all but one or two of the other signatories. Arundhati 'all multinationals are evil except those that publish my books' Roy is the other big name, but then, has anybody come across a boycott that Arundhati Roy doesn't support?
I wanted to know more about John Berger's position on the issue, and found the letter he wrote in favour of ostracising the Zionist Entity. Here it is:

"Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.
How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping for the worst, keep silent.).
How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer - a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment.
For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author’s royalties. I don’t ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example."

This is a nuanced position and one that I have no problem with. It was obviously motivated by a particular event, which gave it urgency: Israel's indiscriminate bombing of southern Lebanon in 2006. That's why Berger wrote, "Speed it of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month".
Unfortunately, John Berger hasn't always kept to his principle that the boycott's "application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment." Earlier this year, after Ian McEwan explained why he would accept the Jerusalem Prize, Berger signed a letter urging him to reconsider, and calling the Prize a "corrupt and cynical honour", "a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state".

Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower

My review of Aravind Adiga's novel Last Man in Tower has been published by CNN Go. Read it here.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the bomb blasts

I watched a bit of the Swedish adaptation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night. It was better than watching ranting anchors and ranting politicians and ranting analysts, but even so I couldn't watch more than 15 minutes. Adaptations usually employ actors who look better than their literary counterparts. It's a sensible policy, because it's easier to read about ugly people than to watch ugly people on screen for extended periods. For some reason, the Swedes decided that they would make all the Dragon Tattoo characters plainer than they are in the book. There's Larsson's hero Mikael Blomkvist, for example, a middle-aged journalist who has a mysterious power over women. For those who have not read Stieg Larsson's trilogy, it's worth knowing that the male characters are, almost all of them, rapists and murderers; Blomkvist is the very opposite. He's good with women, and quite indiscriminate in his tastes. He sleeps with every woman he meets and, unlike James Bond, doesn't even have to seduce them. Without exception, they make the first move. Reading the books, you wonder why so many women would fall for him; and watching the actor playing him makes suspension of disbelief even tougher. Maybe the actor is famous in Sweden, in which case his fame might have compensated for his lack of charm. But the director has decided to film everybody in the most unflattering light possible, so they all look corpse-grey and unsexy in the extreme.
For the English adaptation, they've apparently got James Bond playing Mikael Blomkvist. Daniel Craig will probably be pleased to ditch the seduction routines.
I guess I should say something about the explosions. One was about a kilometer from my home as the crow flies, and another about a kilometer from where I was last evening. I was leaving a Kemp's Corner bookshop when I got a message about the first blast; within a minute all phone lines were jammed. I decided to eat a sandwich in the bookshop's cafe, giving any other bombs that might have been planted time to explode. Afterward I got a cab home. The streets were calm and not very crowded.
Bombs are something we have to live with now. Obviously, like other nasty things we have to live with, such as murder and robbery, it's important to minimise the number of incidents. We haven't had any attacks for two years and a half, which I think is good going. I'll happily take one attack every two years that kills about twenty of us, and accept the risk of being one of those twenty next time round.
For those who don't know Bombay well, more than ten people die on the city's rail tracks every day. Over twenty thousand have died in the past five years hit by trains while trying to cross the tracks. Many of those could've been saved if we had a good rescue service organised. But we don't. We depend on guys living by the tracks who haul bloodied and broken bodies to hospitals, and then wait for tips from relatives of the wounded or dead.
Deaths on rail tracks are very different from deaths from terrorism, of course. The individuals took a risk by crossing the tracks, and broke the law as well. I don't want to suggest an equivalence between the two modes of dying. I'm just pointing to how atrocious our systems and infrastructure are. Considering that, and considering it isn't all that difficult to make a bomb, I'm surprised we have not had more attacks since November 2008. Also that other cities have not had more attacks. We need only look at Pakistan's current condition to understand how bad things could get.

Lennon, Imagine and Come Together

I'm late with a 70th birthday homage to John Lennon, but that's because I've been shuttling between cities too much.


Anytime there's a tribute concert or any memorial event for Lennon, there'll be hordes of people swaying and singing Imagine. I understand why. Imagine is free of inputs from Lennon's band-mates. It is a simple, moving and radical song. But its emotional impact and political message have been dampened by overuse, turning the song into a cliche (though some chap on American Idol a couple of years ago refused to sing the 'no religion' verse, reminding us of its better days). Imagine, moreover, lacks the sardonic wit that enlivened Lennon's songs and interviews.
I find Come Together from Abbey Road a good antidote to Imagine, and think of it as the most representative Lennon song (you can hear it here). Take the title, for a start. It seems to seek peace and harmony in a manner similar to Imagine, but also contains, as Lennon once pointed out, 'the other meaning'. The refrain goes, 'Come together, right now, over me'. The first two words are flower-child-y enough, but what's unusual is the imperative mood, as if we were being commanded to inculcate tolerance and liberalism. This feeling is heightened by the next phrase, 'right now'. Not only must we learn to live as one, but we are ordered to do so immediately. And then the mysterious 'over me', which doesn't have a pindownable meaning. The line starts out in one place and ends somewhere else altogether.

These are the words of the entire song:

Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say "I know you, you know me"
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

He bag production he got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me

He roller-coaster he got early warning
He got muddy water he one mojo filter
He say "One and one and one is three"
Got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see
Come together right now over me

The song's frequently interpreted as a description of Lennon, or of all four Beatles in succession, but it's pointless seeking that kind of coherence in words deliberately written as gibberish. We have the protagonist described as 'flat top' at the start, but two lines later this is transformed into 'hair down below his knee', as if a marine suddenly turned into a hippie. The protagonist doesn't come across as a winning personality: joo-joo eyeball, toejam football, monkey finger, walrus gumboot, muddy water, spinal cracker, while all largely undecipherable, certainly don't constitute attractive features. The 'feel his disease' bit more or less settles the case. What worth are we to ascribe to such a man's viewpoint?
The protagonist wants two things of us: first that we come together; second that we be free. These two desires encapsulate the contradictory nature of the freedom envisioned by sixties' counterculture. To explain what I mean, let's turn to the two sources Lennon used in creating the song. The first line is pinched from Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me, a song that also inspired Lennon's tune. Though Lennon, on McCartney's advice, slowed down the rhythm of Come Together, he was sued for plagiarism and settled out of court.



You can hear the Berry song here. Lennon's 'flat-top, grooving up slowly' is a riff on lines in the third stanza:

You Can't Catch Me

I bought a brand-new air-mobile.
It' custom-made, 'twas a Flight De Ville.
With a pow'ful motor and some hideaway wings.
Push in on the button and you will get a scene.

Now you can't catch me,
Baby, you can't catch me.
'Cause if you get too close,
You know I'm gone, like a cool breeze.

New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours,
I was rollin' slow because of drizzlin' showers.
Here come a flat-top, he was movin' up with me,
Then come wavin' goodbye a little' old souped-up jitney.
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll.
Moanin' siren, 'twas a state patrol.
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn,
Bye-bye New Jersey, I' become airborne.

For Chuck Berry, freedom is simple. It means fast cars, pretty girls, money, and rock and roll. Authority might try getting in the way, but Berry's quicker, and has a vast continent in which to ride and hide.
The protagonist of Come Together is on a different trip. He 'shoots Coca Cola' and is on a roller-coaster. The suggestion is of physical stasis accompanied by neural stimulation. The rhythm, described by McCartney as 'swampy', creates the appropriate drugged mood, so different from the snappy pace of the Chuck Berry number. The title of Come Together was derived from Timothy Leary's quixotic campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary was an advocate of drug use and legalising marijuana. He joined John and Yoko at their Montreal bed-in, and asked Lennon to write a song built around his campaign slogan, 'Come together, join the party'. Lennon didn't comply, but composed the tune we know around the time Leary was jailed for drug possession. Chuck Berry, meanwhile, had finished serving a sentence for pursuing his own brand of freedom: he was jailed for violating the Mann Act, transporting an underage female across state lines. The girl in question was somewhat younger than Sweet Little Sixteen, and Berry's air-mobile obviously not quick enough to evade the flat-tops.
While Berry's view of the world has always been entirely self-centred and pleasure-driven, Leary's journey was different. He began his experiments with drugs after discovering mushrooms used as hallucinogens in ritual ceremonies among natives of South America. Mind-altering drugs, in this tradition, were supposed to be simultaneously a reaching within the self and a reaching out to others, simultaneously an individualistic and communitarian act. That's the ideal enunciated in Lennon's song: the twin injunctions of 'gotta be free' and 'come together'. But the imagery he invents, half nonsensical though it is, undercuts the possibility of reaching out while also being self-absorbed, and thus serves as a critique of himself as well as of sixties' counterculture as a whole.

After this analysis, which will doubtless be received as over-reading by many, it's time for some light relief. In 1972, Lennon and Berry appeared live on the Mike Douglas show, the only time the two greats met. Introducing his guest, Lennon made his famous comment that, "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry. Their jam session was a bit of a train wreck, obviously under-rehearsed, and not helped by Yoko Ono on Berry's left punctuating proceedings with the occasional primal scream.
You can see Lennon's introduction here, their attempt at Johnny B. Goode here, a truly catastrophic Memphis, Tennessee here. Don't miss Berry's startled response to Yoko's scream at 3.15.

Column: Tryst with Blasphemy

My latest column for Yahoo! India can be read here.

Yesterday's column for Yahoo!

My column for Yahoo! India, published yesterday.

Do not hope to hope again

Brad Pitt, who has stayed impeccably diplomatic throughout his career, grew unusually opinionated while promoting Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, in which he had a starring role. Pitt said, about the movie that gave Jews fictional revenge on Hitler, "The Second World War could still deliver more stories and films, but I believe that Quentin put a cover on that pot. With Basterds, everything that can be said to this genre has been said. The film destroys every symbol. The work is done, end of story." He went on to dismiss his Interview with the Vampire co-star Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie as “a ridiculous movie”. Pitt’s agent, immediately activating damage control mode, stated the actor had not seen Valkyrie, and suggested much had been lost in translation because the interview appeared in the German magazine, Stern.
I caught Valkyrie on its release, and found it a passable, workmanlike effort hobbled by its adherence to historical fact (we knew beforehand the plot to assassinate Hitler would fail). I viewed it again, on television, after going through the Inglourious Basterds experience, and couldn’t sit through it. Every character appeared to be a parody of himself, and scenes taut with tension in the initial screening now verged on comical. Brad Pitt’s characterisation of Tarantino’s achievement, I concluded, was perfectly accurate.


It must be obvious by now that this column is about the recently completed election in the United Kingdom. Just kidding. About the obviousness, that is, not about the UK election. Few were enthused by that poll, which ended with the first hung Westminster parliament for decades, and the first coalition government since the Second World War. We had, in Gordon Brown, a candidate very difficult to like; Gordon Grey would be a more appropriate name for him. He was faced, in David Cameron, with an opponent very difficult to hate, though his privileged Eton-Oxford schooling inclined many Brits to despise him. The third party, the Liberal Democrats, were squeezed by Cameron’s move to the middle ground. Their most pressing aim remained changing the constitution to enable more Liberal Democrats to be elected in the future. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, referred to his party as, “the vanguard of the political centre-left”, a bit of an oxymoron, like calling Hrishikesh Mukherjee a revolutionary middle-of-the-road director.
Clegg and Cameron are now in a decidedly oxymoronic Conservative-Liberal alliance, their differences papered over for the time being by their uncannily similar appearance. I half-expect a scientist to announce the two were subjects of a twins-raised-apart project begun in the 1960s, which has conclusively established that ideological tendencies are not inherited traits.
India’s apathy to the election is a sign of its growing distance from the former imperial power. One cannot imagine today a scene of the sort depicted in Satyajit Ray’s masterful Charulata (itself based on Rabindranath Tagore’s semi-autobiographical novella Nastanirh), in which the Anglophile Bhupati Majumdar is so preoccupied with the tussle between Liberal Gladstone and Tory Disraeli that he fails to notice his wife Charulata’s growing romantic attachment to his younger brother Amal. I suspect, however, that the dullness of the UK election as seen from an Indian perspective was not just a function of the personalities involved, nor of India’s increasingly independent developmental trajectory, but the result of another election held eighteen months previously, the US Presidential race that ended with Barack Obama’s move to the White House. That was the Inglourious Basterds of campaigns. It put a cover on the genre of the election as spectacle. The son of a Kenyan goatherd rising to become the world’s most powerful man: who can top a narrative like that? Who can compete with those momentous speeches, that epic tussle with Hillary Clinton, the grotesque intervention of Sarah Palin, the urgent context of two wars and a financial meltdown? Most importantly, as the soaring poetry of Obama’s campaign turns into the plodding prose of administration, and as his promise of an end to partisanship gives way to the reality of a nation seemingly more divided than ever, who can once more hope to evoke hope in an electorate? Not even the most charismatic politician could possess that degree of audacity.
There is, however, a little light at the end of the tunnel. Ed Miliband shows signs of running for the leadership of the Labour party, and the man opposing him is likely to be his elder brother David. The brother-versus-brother scenario was left untouched by the American election of 2008, and promises some diverting, if meaningless, entertainment in the near future.

The column can be accessed at Yahoo! here.

St.Benjamin and I

If the world of critical theory venerates one secular saint, it is Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940), a Jewish-German philosopher who grew famous in Anglophone countries following the publication in 1968 of a volume of translated prose edited by Hannah Arendt. The book, Illuminations, contains an essay titled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which is probably the single most influential composition within the domain of the visual arts (a text of the English version is available here). I read this essay first in my teens, and it became an important touchstone for my M.Phil. thesis about the European avant-garde's relationship with technology. When my German grew sufficiently fluent, Benjamin's essay was among the first pieces of literature I read in the original, along with Kafka's The Trial. Unfortunately, those language skills have atrophied through disuse.
Over time, I have grown increasingly suspicious of the merit of Benjamin's argument, and come to believe its influence today is mostly pernicious. Last August, at a seminar coinciding with the Art Summit in Delhi, I outlined why I felt the way I did. An expanded version of that talk has recently been published as the lead essay in the latest issue of Art India magazine. It is now available online, and those interested in a 4000 word critique of vanguardism might want to take a peek here.

The Cruellest Month

With temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius up north, Facebook updates have begun quoting the opening line of T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land: April is the cruellest month.

In the poem, the line is meant ironically. It is spoken from the point of view of those who feel threatened by the awakening of spring, who prefer winter's 'forgetful snow'.

APRIL is the cruellest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Eliot plays off the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with its evocation of the sweetness of spring that inspires people to leave their homes for pilgrimages. Here are the opening lines of the Prologue (in somewhat modernised spelling, with difficult words explained in brackets):

When that April with his showers soote (sweet)
The drought of March hath pierced to the root
And bathed every vein (rootlet) in such liquor (liquid)
Of which virtúe engendered is the flower;
When Zephyrus (West Wind) eke (also) with his sweete breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath (grove & field)
The tender croppes, and the younge sun (spring sun)
Hath in the Ram (Aries) his halfe course y-run,
And smalle fowles maken melody
That sleepen (who sleep) all the night with open eye
[So pricketh them Natúre in their couráges], (spurs / spirits)
Then longen folk to go on pilgrimáges,

All this is a far cry from the oven-like plains of North India. Another misunderstood phrase frequently used in these months is 'Indian Summer'. An Indian Summer has nothing to do with India. It refers to a sudden warming of weather that is occasionally witnessed in parts of North America in October, confounding the expectations of those who assume temperatures will keep dropping through autumn. The Indians in question are Native Americans, not desis.

Alice in Wonderland

The best I can say about Tim Burton is that I prefer Mars Attacks to Independence Day. Burton's Alice In Wonderland, which should be called Return to Wonderland or Alice in Underland, is a disappointment on most fronts. It mangles the story of the Alice books into something like the Narnia tale of good battling evil. Except that Burton doesn't believe in good, so he makes it a fight between evil and less bad.
Some of the characters , like Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Cheshire Cat, are nicely imagined. But making the Mad Hatter, the Doormouse and the Rabbit into subversives determined to restore order to the land by replacing the Red Queen with the White one was never going to work.
The music stands out for its atrociousness, Burton must be tone deaf to have allowed that stuff within a mile of his film. And the special effects make you appreciate exactly what an advance Avatar constitutes. The most disappointing thing about the 8.45 pm screening we caught at INOX was the lack of kids in the auditorium. Scanning the crowd when the lights came on at the interval, I noticed just four children in a crowd of about 100. I can understand 10th graders being preoccupied with their exams, but the low attendance of youngsters, and the consequent failure of Alice In Wonderland at the Indian box-office, signals that even ten and twelve year olds these days are being made to sit home cramming text books.

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival was driven, in its initial years, by the visual arts crowd. The area's status as an arts precinct arose primarily from the many galleries around. With Chemould moving, Bodhi closing, the National Gallery of Modern Art comatose, and other dealers presumably faced with a cash crunch, the focus of the fest has changed. What installations there are seem to be sub-par. The shift away from art is a good thing. There's a substantial programme of Lit, film, theatre, dance and music to enjoy, and people are being drawn to it in unprecedented numbers. On my first visit on Sunday, Rampart Row was so jam packed, strolling casually from stall to stall was out of the question. In addition to the din, the diesel fumes from a dozen generators got to me after a while.
Most events of my interest take place in the David Sasson Library garden, site of the literature-related programme. I've attended a couple of good discussions, but they've been undercut by the sound of workers hammering away just across the road. If it's part of the Kala Ghoda committee's wonderful project to restore heritage monuments in the precinct, I wonder why they didn't shut it down for the duration of the event, or at least ask the labourers to move into the Elphinstone building.
I may have been extra-sensitive to the noise, and to the bowl of generic, over-chillied noodles I ate at All Stir Fry after listening to a panel on food writing, because I was on the verge of being hit by a fever. It has hit now.

Amitabh at the NGMA, 1998

From this morning's Times of India: "In March 1998, one evening while his father was admitted to the ICU of Breach Candy Hospital, Amitabh Bachchan recited Hindi poems by Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan before a distinguished audience for the British Council. Big B, was nervous because this was one of the first times he was doing this publicly. But it went down well. And early next morning, charged by the experience, he returned to the hospital to find his father propped up in bed waiting expectantly. “How did it go,” Dr. Harivansh Rai inquired. Good is what Amitabh replied and he actually recited his father’s poems one by one in the ICU. Dr. Harivansh Rai listened attentively. When the Big B had finished, he said, “Thank-you, now when am I going home?” Dr. Farokh Udwadia discharged him the same morning."

I was working for the British Council back in 1998 when that reading took place. It happened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, where a collection of artefacts from the British Museum collection was on display. It was Britain's contribution to celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. The show was called The Enduring Image and the British Council put together dozens of events to accompany it. One of these was a conversation between Jaya Bachchan and Tom Alter, along with a screening of the actress's first screen performance from an FTII diploma film. My boss Roopa Patel and Saryu Doshi, head of the NGMA, went to meet Ms. Bachchan at Breach Candy where, as the Times article points out, the elder Mr. Bachchan was hospitalised. During the conversation, Amitabh Bachchan came out to chat and, of his own accord, suggested he might read his father's poems. Roopa Patel and Saryu Doshi were, of course, delighted; Amitabh was then at a low point in his career, but was nevertheless India's biggest star by far.

In the course of helping arrange the event, I learned how true all stories were of the actor's professionalism. He had an assistant (Pearl?) and through her, every detail connected with the event was scrutinised and agreed upon, right up to the wording and colour of the invite. A few years later, the British Council organised an event involving Abhishek Bachchan and discovered he was rather more relaxed about such matters. That programme, if I remember correctly began over an hour behind schedule.

In Amitabh's case, it wasn't the actor's punctuality that proved a worry so much as his health. He developed flu just days before the reading, and we were informed the whole thing might have to be cancelled. We'd been inundated with requests for invitations, of course, and had set up a screen in the NGMA audiorium to accommodate the overflow. One of the most gratifying memories of that time was the fact that, despite having a number of sponsors and VIP associates to please, we kept at least half the passes for every event aside for the general public , by which I mean people responding to ads in the papers who weren't part of the Council's mailing list.

Amitabh did make it to Colaba for the programme. He walked in a little bent and covered with a shawl, seeming weak, almost unable to climb the five levels up to the rotunda where the reading was scheduled (the British Museum's security demands meant a number of exits had to be sealed, so the NGMA's tiny lift could not be utilised). After he was introduced, he walked over to the mike, and then I saw the kind of transformation I had heard of, but never previously witnessed. A spark kindled in his eyes with the first words he spoke, he summoned a store of energy from some place he'd hidden it safe from the fever's attack, and proceeded to hold three hundred people rapt with a robust, witty interpretation of his father's poems.

Later he read from In The Afternoon of Time, Rupert Snell's recently released translation of Harivansh Rai Bachchan's autobiography. For this, he sat down. The platform we'd built proved too low for people at the back to retain a good view of him. The gallery itself grew uncomfortably warm, the NGMA's air-conditioning not having been designed to cool hundreds of people on a single level for an extended period. Despite all of this, not more than two or three people left during the 90 minute reading.

On Monday he is scheduled to read in Bandra, as part of the Times of India's India-Pakistan peace initiative. Though the event is in Bandra Fort, a public space, entry is by invitation only.

Update: The Bombay Times article mentioned 'invitation only', but there are passes available to members of the public, which can be picked up from the Times building and a location in Andheri.

Man of the Year

The title of this post is, I'm afraid, deceptive. It refers to one of Arun Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems. Published in 2004, shortly before Kolatkar's death, Kala Ghoda Poems is the best collection of Bombay-related verse in English. Man of the Year returns to me every December 31st.

Man of the Year

1.
Here I stand at this street corner,
leaning on the shoulder of a bright red pillar-box
at a drunken angle,

a foolish grin on my face,
an empty half-pint bottle of rum in my pocket,
a cracker up my arse.

listening to an old Elvis number
(Santa Claus is back in town)
coming out of a record shop.

And I feel like dancing in the street
-- but I can't.
I'm incapable of such knee-jerk reactions:

they've stuffed me
a little too tight for comfort, I guess,
Like a forked sausage.

Head full of cottonwool,
sawdust in my gloves and socks,
a bellyful of shredded old newspapers.

2.
Actually, I'm a pretty solid kind of guy.
Underneath my faded jeans,
export surplus extra large sporty jacket,

and a hat straight out of Marlboro country,
you'll find
that my head is sewn on real tight.

Take away my dashing
rainbow-coloured muffler (it's from Chor Bazar)
and you'll see what I mean.

There are thirty stitches round my neck.
Here,
you can count them if you wish.

3.
It's such a lovely morning in December
and it feels so good
just to be alive and standing here,

as if I had all the time in the world,
and watching the beautiful girls of Bombay
go by in a steady stream,

to their typewriters, switchboards, computers,
as to the impatient arms
of their waiting lovers.

But nobody knows better than I
that time
is one thing I'm running out of fast,

and my one regret is going to be this:
to leave this world
so full of girls I never kissed.

Malati, Niloufer, Anjali, Shanta,
Alpana, Kalpana, Shirin, Zarine, Sylvia, Maria,
Harlene, Yasmin, Nina, Kamala, Mona, Lopa;

I love you one and all,
and wish I could kiss a long goodbye
to each of you, individually.

4.
Inside the pillar-box,
new year greeting cards are smooching
in the permissive dark.

I hear them billing and cooing,
sighing and moaning,
as if there's no tomorrow.

They nestle against each other
in the zero gravity of pure love and affection
where all laws break down,

in the no-man's-land
between the sender and the receiver,
betraying both.

One last fling before each goes
primly to its rightful receiver,
with clean ivory-card conscience.

5.
I was a pretty unremarkable year,
all in all; and will,
no doubt, be left out of history books,

with no revolutions, wars, genocides,
no disasters, natural or otherwise,
to remember me by.

Nothing much happened, except,
that the Himalayas rose by another inch,
fewer flamingoes came to Kutch,

and the leaning tower of Pisa leaned
a little further out
by another 1.29 millimeters,

the Danube poured
two hundred and three cubic kilometers
of fresh water into the Black Sea,

the hole in the ozone layer widened,
the earth became poorer
by two thousand seven hundred plant species.

I did not resolve any conflicts,
or presume to solve any
of the perennial questions of philosophy.

There were no technological breakthroughs,
no big leaps;
just a lot of hopping around on one foot.

No new ideas.
A lot of old ones served with a sizzle,
with plenty of spice to mask the rotten smell.

The good news, on the other hand,
is that schoolboys
and girls will not have to memorize me.

Who got the Nobel for literature?
Who the Booker?
Who won the cup at Wimbledon?

And who did Time magazine pick
as the Man of the Year?
I have already forgotten.

6. Envoi
As paper trumpets blare and toot,
as sirens wail and foghorns hoot,
and as churchbells toll all around me

-- I wish a happy new year to you all.

Breathing fire, coughing smoke,
spitting ash,
as firecrackers burst inside my pants

-- I wish a happy new year to you all.

As all my buttons pop,
my chest opens and lungs collapse,
as a feather of flame starts eating my hat

-- I wish a happy new year to you all.

As the Rajabai Tower cranes its neck
to see me reduced to a smudge on the road,
and bursts into a joyous song

-- I wish a happy new year t


Kala Ghoda Poems appears to be unavailable online, but Arun Kolatkar's previous book of poems in English (he also published in Marathi), the award-winning Jejuri has recently been reissued by New York Review Books Classics, and can be purchased through Amazon here.

Eleven poems from Jejuri have been transcribed here, and explanatory notes added for those unfamiliar with the pilgrimage site.

More On Dan Brown: Spoiler Alert

My short review of The Lost Symbol gave away little of the plot, but if you plan to read the book, this post might reveal more than you want to know.
The villain of the piece is a maniacal killer named Ma'lakh, who has kidnapped Peter Solomon, the head of one of the most prominent families in the United States. Brown's symbologist hero, Robert Langdon, wants to do what he can to save Solomon, one of his closest friends, but a high ranking CIA officer named Inoue Sato who heads the operation against Ma'lakh has other things on her mind. She insists Solomon's life is trivial compared to the damage Ma'lakh might do to the nation's security with a weapon he posseses. Every time she shows characters what this weapon, they immediately accept her perspective.
The potentially disastrous weapon, when revealed, is this: Ma'lakh ascended to the top ranks of the Freemasons and, while doing so, shot secret ceremonies in which prominent Americans participated. If he sends that video file to media outlets, it has potential to undermine the US government.
Apart from the fact that this matter would come under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the CIA (there's a reason Brown needs it to be the CIA, but I won't get into that here), the video recording did not occur on government property, infringed no national security laws, and harmed no individual. Yet, preventing its dissemination it is taken to be more important than saving the life of a US citizen.
I'm certain the book's assumptions will disturb those who seek to protect First Amendment freedoms. On the other hand, The Lost Symbol will heal relations with one constituency Brown has previously offended: Christians. Not the literalists, but certainly those of a spiritualist bent, of whom there are millions in the US.

Dan Brown's, 'The Lost Symbol'

Dan Brown's latest novel has a lame title and limps out of the blocks before gathering speed and confidence. The book displays all the elements we associate with the author of The Da Vinci Code: a plot that unfolds in an extremely compressed time-span, cutting between multiple locations; chapter endings that keep the reader hooked and turning the pages; secrets buried, literally and figuratively, for centuries; a secret society with powerful members; a security chief with an agenda; a giant, beast-like killer with a fondness for self-mortification; a hero turned fugitive; mystical symbols hidden in plain view inside familiar monuments; and cyphers waiting to be cracked by the protagonist and his accomplished, good-looking female partner.
The novel reaches a climax around page 380 with a shocking passage in which Brown raises his mediocre descriptive skill a few notches above anything he has published previously. At this point, The Lost Symbol is transformed into something more than an enjoyable reworking of a successful formula. I won't disappoint you with details of what happens in the subsequent 130 odd pages. The book itself does a pretty good job of that (disappointing you, that is).

Benazir and Imran

In the mid-nineties, as Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto became implacable foes, I wondered what their relationship had been like when both were at Oxford. Benazir was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, and Khan attended Keble, housed in a red-brick neo-Gothic building down the street from LMH. There weren't many Pakistanis in Oxford in the early 1970s. Bhutto and Khan, as the two most prominent, must have met frequently, but they never spoke about those days after they became political foes.
I imagined a soap opera situation in which the prime minister's daughter and the young sports hero briefly became lovers before going their own way, only to end up on opposite sides of a political divide two decades later.
Now, a new biography of Imran Khan suggests that the two were, indeed, romantically involved. The actual evidence provided by the author Christopher Sandford appears pretty weak. He told the Daily Mail, "for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of giggling and blushing whenever they appeared together in public," and added: "It also seems fair to say that the relationship was "sexual", in the sense that it could only have existed between a man and a woman. The reason some supposed it went further was because, to quote one Oxford friend: 'Imran slept with everyone.'"
Imran has already denied there was anything romantic, let alone sexual, between Benazir and himself. This hasn't stopped the Times of India from headlining its article: 'Imran, Benazir had a roaring affair at Oxford'. Notice the quote marks, though nobody has said anything of the sort. Interesting how the relationship mutates from, 'they giggled and blushed' to, 'it was sexual in the sense it could only have existed between a man and woman', to 'roaring affair'.

The Half-Blood Prince Movie

I found two reasons to like the Half-Blood Prince film and two to dislike it. To consider the good things first, the movie is a joy to look at. I could watch it again just to stare at individual scenes, ignoring the storyline while marveling at the seamless combination of camerawork, set design and digital effects. The classical pace allows one the luxury of absorbing some detail before frames are whisked away.
One's enjoyment is enhanced by some fine acting. The cream of British actors has appeared in this series, though not all of them performed as admirably as one would have hoped (Kenneth Branagh and his ex-wife Emma Thomson were notable disappointments. Helena Bonham Carter isn't great, but I believe she was over-rated in her early days anyway). In Half-Blood Prince, Jim Broadbent makes a brilliant addition to the cast as Professor Slughorn, Michael Gambon finally puts his stamp on the role of Professor Dumbledore and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin makes a sinister young Tom Riddle.
The downers? They involve the adaptation from book to screen. There's far too much time devoted to developing romances; those bits weren't much fun in the books and get really tedious in the film. The second peculiar decision is to leave out the final battle. The reasoning, apparently, is that the Battle of Hogwarts in the final episode would then seem like a repetition. That's an unbelievably stupid way of thinking. The fight at the end of HBP is tiny in scale compared to the final battle. It is important because it offers some tiny release after Dumbledore's death.
I've said I liked the film's pacing, but it desperately needed some action at the end.

Ranking Harry Potter

To mark the release of the film version of the Half Blood Prince, here's my ranking of J.K. Rowling's seven volume series. I haven't looked at any of the books since reading the final line of The Deathly Hallows, and am putting these thoughts down without refreshing my memory.

Volume 1: The Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone.
Rank: 3
A fascinating new world is created, the ways of witches and wizards described for the first time, the pace is fast and the adventure exciting. What more could you ask from a kids' book?

Volume 2: The Chamber of Secrets.
Rank: 5
Surely Dumbledore or somebody else ought to have figured out there was a basilisk in the pipes.

Volume 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban
Rank: 1
For the first time, a hint that this is more than a really good series of novels for children. Darkness descends on Hogwarts thanks to the Ringwraiths, sorry, Dementors. There's real emotion, fear and joy, a connection forged between past and present. Supplementing the caricature Hagrid we get the complex Lupin. And the revelation that solves the mystery of Sirius Black's actions is excellent.

Volume 4: The Goblet of Fire
Rank: 4
J.K.Rowling turns self-indulgent, but because Harry is by now a global phenomenon, no editor is going to tell the author to cut out the flab. Quidditch is a silly game (the golden snitch too important to the outcome) and the prolonged description of the World Cup tedious. Patches of excellent writing, though, like the view Harry gets, through the pensieve, of his father harassing Snape. The mudblood and house slave controversies bring contemporary politics into the equation.

Volume 5: The Order of the Phoenix
Rank: 7
This massive book, the longest in the series, need not have been written at all. It adds virtually nothing to the plot. The publishers probably realised this one was a turkey, and created huge quantities of hype about the death of a character close to Harry.

Volume 6: The Half Blood Prince
Rank: 2
A wonderful return to form, from an adult's viewpoint. The horcruxes bring the plot back on track, while Dumbledore's past is fleshed out movingly.

Volume 7: The Deathly Hallows
Rank: 6
This might seem an unfair rank for a book that advances the action in so many directions and then brings all the narrative threads together. Nevertheless, the stakes at the end are always much greater than at the start, and Deathly Hallows does not rise to the expectations generated by years of waiting. The scenes in the countryside are dreary; Rowling, who had problems with battles earlier, doesn't improve during the attack of Hogwarts; and the climax involving a horcrux in the Room of Requirement is extremely disappointing for those enamoured of the mystery.

Bloomsday

Today, June 16, is known to fans of James Joyce as Bloomsday, the day on which the entire action of Joyce's Ulysses takes place. The day is named after the book's central character, Leopold Bloom. Each year on June 16, Joyce enthusiasts from across the world collect in Dublin to celebrate the revolutionary novel: attending readings, visiting sites connected with the plot, and downing quantities of Guiness in pubs mentioned in the book.
I've wanted to make the pilgrimage since my teens, but haven't got round to doing it even in the era of Ryanair. With each passing year, there are fewer locations left intact from 1904. The pace of erosion has quickened in the past decade, during which Ireland leapt to the front rank of Europe's economies. The Celtic tiger may have been wounded by the current recession, but I suspect the mentality of the Irish has changed for ever. Having been exporters of humans for centuries, they've had to adapt to a substantial influx of immigrants. One Irishwoman I know described her wonder at her first sight of a black man walking down the street where she lived. She'd studied in England, so black people in and of themselves were familiar enough; the man just seemed incongruous in the context of her neighbourhood. Within a few years, she said, such sights became commonplace.
There were a few outsiders in Joyce's time as well, and he made one of them the hero of his greatest work. I call Leopold Bloom a hero, but for Joyce's early readers he was exactly the opposite; a man approaching middle age, of no particular academic or financial distinction, a cuckold, a Jew. Surely the comparison with Homer's epic hero, Odysseus / Ulysses, had to be ironic, an indication of how debased modern life was in comparison with the Hellenic past. It was only as the decades passed that readers began to understand how wise, ingenious and tolerant Bloom was, and how much of himself Joyce had put into his protagonist.
There was a second reason for the misinterpretation of Bloom as a butt of irony, aside from him having none of the common attributes of a heroic figure. Joyce's first published novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had focussed on his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen reappeared in Ulysses, and it was easy to assume that he remained a kind of mouthpiece for Joyce. In fact, the author was much more distanced from his character by this time.
There's no doubt that Stephen is more entertaining than Bloom. He brims with learning and is always ready with witty quotes and incisive interpretations. Early in the book he says something I find particularly perceptive. During a conversation about religious belief, an Englishman called Haines says, "You are your own master, it seems to me".
Stephen replies he is the servant of two masters, an English and an Italian.
Haines, puzzled, asks what he mean by Italian.
Stephen says he's speaking of the imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Joyce idolised Parnell, a Protestant who led the Irish nationalist movement before it was riven by sectarianism. The biggest mistake the nationalists made was to see in the catholic church a refuge from the imperial state, or a locus of protest against it. They were merely choosing one harsh master instead of another. That kind of reductive thinking has infected most 'liberation' movements in the past century. When I see Muslim feminists donning hijab as a protest against neo-colonialism, I say to myself, 'I wish they'd read Ulysses carefully'. Which is strange because the novel is considered one of the most apolitical ever written.