Toy Story 3

The term Reality Distortion Field was coined to describe the effect Steve Jobs had on workers at Apple; the phrase has come to be used for the slavish praise garnered in the media by Apple products. After watching Toy Story 3, I'm wondering if Pixar, Jobs' other brainchild, generates a distortion field of its own. What else could explain the adoring reviews received by what is a well-crafted but rather tedious sequel?
Here's the plot: Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the cast are locked away now that their owner Andy is a teenager. Before leaving for college, he decides to put his beloved toys in the attic, but they end up being donated to a day care center. Now the toys have to escape and get back to Andy. The lost-and-found theme was done much better in Finding Nemo, which also had a far richer visual texture, as did Up and Wall-E. Pixar is now in sequelitis mode, with Cars 2 and Monsters Inc. 2 on the way. I think Toy Story 3 might be looked upon in the future as the moment when the studio lost its verve.

Museums, Mansions and Money

My latest Yahoo! India column, uploaded a few hours ago, can be read here.

Phantom Project

The world's tallest residential building is here! Or so billboards around the city claim. The tower is called World One, is 117 storeys high, and is owned by the Lodha Group. Look around Bombay's skyline, though, and you won't spot anything close to a 1500 foot high building. The Lodha Group's website doesn't so much as mention World One. What gives?
It seems the builder doesn't have necessary permissions to build the record breaking high rise, nor money enough to see it through. Those hoardings are meant to attract advance bookings and private equity interest to fund the project. The address of World One is said to be Upper Worli. But Upper Worli, as I recall, is the figment of the imagination of admen whose offices moved to Lower Parel a decade ago, and who claimed half-jokingly to have shifted to Upper Worli to shrug off Lower Parel's downmarket associations.
We have, then, a building that doesn't exist, in a neighbourhood that doesn't exist, funded by money that doesn't exist. If you possess a few extra crores, this phantom project might be where you want to sink them.

Swisscom uses Gandhi

Spreading goodness has never been so easy, the ad for Blackberry on Swisscom reads.

Back to chaos

I returned yesterday after a week spent in Zurich, which, for good reason, is regularly ranked as one of the world's best cities in quality of life surveys. I was rushing about from morning to night each day, but never felt as exhausted as I did within half an hour of stepping back in Bombay. That was partly because of the hometown's hot embrace, its noise and crowds. Mostly, though, it was because of its dysfunctional systems. In the past, obstacles to progress used to make themselves apparent right after one stepped out of the plane. Now, immigration and customs are painless, but the nasty stuff starts outside the airport.
To begin with, there's no public transport option. The taximen's union will ensure it stays that way. To prevent taxis from cheating customers, the administration has set up a system of pre-paying the fare, which means you end up shelling out in advance the amount the driver would have extracted from you on top of the meter fare.
There's a long line for booking a cab, after which you go out and hunt for the vehicle carrying the license plate number listed on your bill. Quite often, you don't find it, because the driver's left or the cab's hiding in some inaccessible corner, in which case you have to go back and stand in line again for another number.
Luckily I found my guy easily, but two minutes into the ride he stopped and crossed the road to stand in another line, some kind of police verification procedure. Beggars have found this an opportune spot to harry passengers. Soon after the driver returned, we encountered that other Bombay specialty, the 11pm traffic jam.
I can see the objections starting to form. Switzerland has fewer people than Bombay. Its banks use secrecy laws to make money from corrupt government officials in nations like India. Oh, and it gave women the vote after we did. None of this alters the shock of going from one of the world's most livable cities to one of its least habitable.

Update, 22 June: Today, taxis are on strike. Will be fun for tourists flying in to Bombay late at night: no train, no bus, no cab, no rickshaw.

Where Three Dream Cross

I caught Where Three Dreams Cross, a show of 150 years of sub-continental photography, in Winterthur, Switzerland, where it has traveled after opening at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The curatorial argument is that this is India / Pakistan / Bangladesh as seen by locals rather than westerners, and therefore, implicitly, a more authentic portrait of the place.

I find the argument patently false. There’s a picture, for instance, of three poor women standing on an incline, taken by an Indian or Bangladeshi (I failed to make notes, will annotate the post after I get back to Bombay) in 2003 which could easily have been captured by an Orientalist Brit in 1903. Conversely, Henri Cartier-Bresson, for all the baneful influence he had on future generations of Indian photogs, crafted revelatory images of India.

The most obvious difference between Indian and European uses of photography is found in the painted photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decorative aesthetic of the subcontinent is on full view here, but to say that is to step into Orientalist clichés.

The trick, then, is to avoid statement, because any statement is a trap. The Indian photographer who did this best was Raghubir Singh. He used every cliché about India -- crowds, colours, ambassador cars, monsoon rains -- but his images evade all stereotypes. Part of the reason why he manages this is the way he deploys figures across the frame, so there isn’t one centre that can harden into statement or symbol. India has interesting intrinsic qualities that are also crucial to the imperialist discourse of difference / otherness / exoticism critiqued by post-colonial theory. The subject matter from which both are extracted is identical. It doesn’t matter if the photographer is Indian or European, as soon as his or her images become statements, they can be interpreted as ‘problematic’ arguments about the subcontinent. Raghubir Singh managed consistently to produce pictures that are fascinating artifacts without being manifest propositions.

The fact that his work (he's represented in the show by four or five images), while invariably well regarded, has been virtually ignored by post-colonial theorists indicates to me that these theorists don’t really desire what the curators of Three Dreams Cross want to highlight, namely a different way of seeing, so much as an opposed way of seeing, though such an approach is doomed to fall into the same pattern of clichés as that which it contests.

I have got a bit side-tracked from Three Dreams Cross, and might say more about the show itself later. What disappointed me most was that I’d seen pretty much every image in the past five years. The show is arranged thematically rather than chronologically of geographically, which was a wise decision. The themes are: Portrait, Performance, Family, Body Politic and Street. In Winterthur, the first three of these are contained in the museum’s main building. They’re probably the most interesting bits for Europeans, but I found these sections tedious. The show picked up in the annex, where The Body Politic and The Street reside.

A quibble about the title, derived from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday: the dreams of the three nations are never shown to cross during the course of the show. There’s good reason for that, of course, because when the dreams have crossed it hasn’t been in a convivial fashion, and the last thing the curators want is to focus on political conflict (that would be giving in to western media perception). If the dreams have been prevented from crossing, though, why put anything about intersections in the title?

Zurich

Zurich’s a far more interesting city than Geneva, the only Swiss town I’ve been to previously. It has steeply steepled churches and squares dominated by drinking water fountains emerging from carved stone pillars. There’s a lot of stone carving everywhere, sandstone, I think; seems to be a strong Swiss tradition. The typical plaque on buildings in the old town reads something like this: The original edifice dates from the 12th century, XYZ lived here between 1550 and 1580, the building was extensively modified in 1872, and has been on the heritage list since 1965. I suppose that’s the kind of history you get when you haven’t been at war for centuries.

The river around which the town is clumped is frighteningly clean: you can see the stones on the bed in water fifteen feet deep. Definitely fine for swimming, probably fine for drinking. I recall punting trips on the Cherwell at the end of which my entire arm, onto which a few drops splashed each time I raised the pole, would break out in a rash.

The weather’s been drippy, but the sun came out for five minutes while I was sitting outdoors in a café on Monday, and the trees took the opportunity to release a load of pollen into the air. Within an hour I was sniffing and sneezing and reaching for the anti-histamines. Luckily the stuff didn't turn me into a zombie for the day. I could pay attention to art around, and there was plenty that deserved careful attention.

I’m in Switzerland courtesy of Pro Helvetia, which has sponsored a week’s trip centred on Art Basel, the world’s most important art fair. I will blog about the fair when I have some free time, probably next week. Apart from two days spent in Basel, we're being taken to museums in Zurich, Glarus, Winterthur, Aaarau, Bern and Geneva. It's a packed schedule, but promises to be rewarding.

Column: Tryst with Blasphemy

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

The Two Ashleys

Ashley Tellis is a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He looks like this.

Ashley Tellis is also an academic who got his Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge and has had several run-ins with educational institutions in India because of his advocacy of gay rights. He looks like this.


The second Ashley was a classmate of mine in Elphinstone College. He has just been dismissed from his probation at IIT, Hyderabad. The Times of India, reporting the story, used a photograph of the first Ashley. It was a mistake that had to happen, something I was avidly awaiting. I was hoping it would take the form of a mash-up created by a reporter after googling the name. Something like, "Foreign affairs pundit and gay activist Ashley Tellis met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday"...
The photograph's been removed from the article to which I've linked, and the Times epaper has deleted the entire story. Is that allowed? Don't newspapers have an obligation to keep their digital archive intact, errors and all?
For those who happen to get the Bombay edition of the Times, the story's on page 15.

UPDATE: The Mirror repeats the Times of India's error in its Bloggers' Park column, and so far has not taken the pic off its website.

Thoughts on Bhopal

The TV channels have worked themselves into a lather about Warren Anderson, and I don't see why. The then Chairman of Union Carbide need never have stepped on Indian soil after the gas leak. He obviously came with some deal having been struck in advance. Even without such a deal, he'd have been bailed after a few days of custody.
It's always convenient to blame the foreigners. So what if the Bhopal plant was entirely under Indian management, as required by Indian law? So what if we don't yet know what triggered the leak? So what if we've put no measures in place to cope with another such accident?
We've never been too fussed about safety. I remember being part of a crew filming a corporate documentary a few years ago. The person assigned to help us was from the safety department. His primary job during the shoot was ensuring that everyone in the frame had hard hats on. As soon as the camera stopped rolling, the hats would come off.
What sense does it make to press charges of culpable homicide when what happened was clearly negligence? Criminal negligence, no doubt, but nonetheless negligence. Unless, of course, we accept the Union Carbide theory that it was sabotage.
Intention is central to culpability. Absent an intent to kill, it makes no sense to put people away for ten years, even if their negligence resulted in 10,000 deaths. The problem lies not with the sentence but the delay in getting to this point. It has made India an international laughing stock.
The other issue relates to the compensation of 470 million dollars. I don't believe it was such a trivial amount as is being made out. The government should've accepted the initial offer of 350 million dollars and used it to build health care centres, and disbursed it quickly to victims. Instead it demanded over 3 billion and finally had to accept the 350 million plus interest. And after it got the 470 million, it kept most of it in a bank account, like it would do any good there.
It's true Exxon paid more for the Exxon Valdez leak. But that was in the United States. It makes no sense to demand we be treated on par with the US in such matters. People earn more in the US, they will naturally be compensated in accordance with their earning power.
We deal with such disparities all the time. When I write for a foreign publication, I get paid significantly more than when I write for an Indian one. Time Out, London would pay me far more for an article than Time Out, Delhi. That's just the way it is. It would be stupid of me to ask for equity in payments here in India. Union Carbide's multinational status didn't oblige it to pay the same to Indians that it would to Americans. If such conditions were laid down, no foreign companies would come to India in the first place.