Naipaul’s example

A Noble Man

I came to know of V.S. Naipaul through a profile done by Tarun Tejpal in Outlook magazine, The Last Emperor. Tejpal wrote it like a man possessed — it certainly cast a spell on me — and it still is the best piece I have read on Naipaul. There was also an interview in which Naipaul said that he got the writing ambition from his father: “Or rather, I took up his example; I took up his example”. I immediately went to a library to get A House for Mr Biswas.

Another article on Naipaul appeared soon, this time by T.G. Vaidyanathan in The Hindu Literary Review, titled The Writer’s Writer. And then, suddenly, I started seeing Naipaul’s name everywhere. Those were days when cyber cafes were few, TV channels were few, but newspapers and magazines were aplenty. I wonder if that was the time when the Indian media started celebrating Naipaul. It was the year 1998.

I was a young man in Lucknow with dreams of becoming a literary writer. The more I read of Naipaul, the more I identified with him. I had grown up in a similar maternal grandparents’ household, I had a similar father who wished to do extraordinary things, and I had a similar ambition — of not pursuing any profession except writing. I, too, disdained most of the world; I was born almost on the same date; and I was also a Brahmin with a father from east U.P. Besides, so much of Naipaul’s character, his attitude, was in me. Like him, I felt marked — “I am going to be either a big success or an unheard-of failure.”

Like Eklavya, I chose Naipaul as my guru. The Nobel may have been given to him for being an annalist of the destiny of empires and narrator of the history of the vanquished, to me his distinction lay in that he wrote about the writer. No one else has written so insightfully about the process of writing, the struggle and ambition to be a writer, the experience of being a writer. He stood for not what a writer does but what a writer is. Naipaul’s devotion to literature is heroic; his chronicling of the devotion inspiring. I did not really choose to be his disciple; if you wished to be a writer and if you read Naipaul, you just fell at his feet.

7 Khoon Maaf: First Impressions

Pact with the devil

I am not in India, so I could not go see Vishal Bharadwaj’s new film in a theatre; instead, I have braved through a bad cam rip, dark and often inaudible, superimposed with voices and shadows of people watching the film. Of the little that I was able to make out, I have formed some impressions that might significantly alter when I see a better print.

I wish I had seen in a cinema hall the hunt for a man-eating panther; the part set in Kashmir;  the Darling song; the dwarf’s duel with Major Neil Nitin Mukesh; the ghostly killing of Vronsky. The songs, especially ‘Girje ka gajar sunte ho Yeshu?’, are still tolling in my head. Wasiullah, dressed like Ghalib, reciting poetry that Hindi cinema hasn’t heard since the days of Sahir. Only Gulzar saab’s songs and Vishal Bharadwaj’s dialogues can match the genius of Ruskin Bond’s writing. 7 Khoon Maaf is to cinema what literature is to writing: its highest, purest form.

No gimmick, no allowance for commercial viability; 7 Khoon Maaf resolutely defends the creative artist’s claim on the universality of his vision. The story, the telling of the story, is enough to draw interest; you take the audience for granted, for you know the audience, you know that some stories will always find listeners because audiences change, the nature of audiences does not. The creative artist then devotes himself to his craft: polishing material, raising it to the highest level, creating a thing of beauty, a joy forever. In times when marketing inanities are overruning the world, such painstaking craft and self-assurance in the artist is priceless.

The Fall of Berlin

 

A more profound thing has fallen in Berlin than the wall. The brief time I was in the city was enough to notice that the ideas which had produced what Chomsky has called “the absolute peak of western civilization” are no more. Berlin is still very much a city of power and high culture, but it is floundering. The foundation on which its glory was built has been eroded by winds of change. The reich, the empire, now elicits no more than mockery, its memory confined to lavish museums or hinted at by the majestic, mostly official buildings. The new Berlin is a design of corporations, with their ugly glass buildings – an imported, standardised architecture, no different than Singapore’s – and an urbanism of wide roads with gleaming cars, while the rest has fallen to punks and hipsters, a subculture of immigrants and alternative arts that has turned its back on the past. Let me trace the decline of this once great city.

Nationalism came very late to Germany. Divided between kingdoms of mainly Prussia and Austria, its many important cities differing widely in language, religion and political affiliation, Germany began to be controlled from Berlin only after Bismarck forged Prussian hegemony in the late 19th century. But this lack of nationalism had allowed a variety of cultures to flourish

Long Live! Peepli [Live]

"Isi liye Iraq pe giraye gaye itne bum hain"

It may be about suicide, but Peepli [Live] is a film that makes life worth living, at least for me, a lover of cinema and an admirer of intelligence. Also, because I come from Lucknow, I understand better the film’s language and sensibility; and because I have worked in the Delhi news media, I appreciate more the authenticity of its depiction of the media. Certain other things make the film personally appealing: my familiarity with Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, with Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain’s dastan-goi, and that I identify closely with the film’s worldview. But all these make Peepli only a personal favourite; the point is, that it is superb cinema.

Let me first briefly explain what I mean by superb cinema. A lot of nonsense is passed off as great cinema — Godard, Kubrick, Lars von Trier, the list is endless. Playing with camera angles, narrative structure, lighting, is all right — one must experiment with form; but to turn cinema simply into a technique of filming (or special effects, as in Hollywood these days) is to forget that you have to say something intelligent and true. Secondly, a film that wants to be seen widely must be accessible; it should not be so self indulgent that it doesn’t make common sense. Third characteristic: cinema must be true to the culture it comes from. Ambitious cinema aspires to large themes and a world audience, but unless a man understands his own world he cannot understand another’s. Know thyself and you know everyone. What makes a work of art universal and timeless is that it takes up one example — a character, a situation, a story — and holds it up as a mirror for everyone else to see themselves in it.

Like flowing water, the honesty of Peepli [Live] finds its way to its audience. Using dialects — one for the newsroom, another for the villagers, yet another for those interested in images — it weaves a language that transcends its nuances. The wit of the dialogues will only be fully enjoyed by those who know the language, but the message — that the modern world needs to be confronted, resisted — is sharp and pointed. The film proves the adage that to be simple is the most difficult art. Its humour is both earthy and refined, the story is both tragedy and comedy, the satire on the news media is also introspective: when the OB vans leave at the end, you can sense the filmmakers’ own unease. It is a film with a lot of difficult questions and no answers except an appeal to be reflexive, to be dissenting. In its celebration of a rustic language, its loving picturisation of the countryside — climaxing in the haunting last scene when the camera starts withdrawing from Nattha’s house, the images in rhythm with a single-instrument plaintive melody, and the voice of Nageen Tanvir, Habib Tanvir’s daughter (where else could she have got such voice from), suddenly ringing out like an epiphany: Ekar ka bharosa, Chola Maati ke, Ram — the film battles for a world that is being destroyed by modernity.

Yet, this world, this way of life, this language, is powerless and destitute. Politicians won’t save it, bureaucrats certainly won’t (High Courts neither). The media? Here some hope is held out by the local journalist Rakesh, the film’s sanest voice, and his tragic death only heightens the catharsis: the man who breaks Nattha’s story, headlining it “A Declaration of Death”, dies in stead of Nattha. But his ambition to be a famous journalist had already died: when Hori’s body, already a skeleton, is found in the ditch of his own digging, and nobody cares even for the irony, Rakesh grasps the meaninglessness of it all. He is the most intelligent guy in the film, analytical and witty — his shayari is political, his swearing angry — and he is a quintessential journalist: an instinct for the big story, a talent for writing, an attitude of enquiry. When he gets disillusioned, it is the final indictment of journalism. He dies trying to save Nattha; his is a sacrifice. It is also a reminder of how endangered such a journalist is.

Nandita Malik in action

Re-creation

Pushkar is a refuge you want to return to occasionally

(Photo by Roger Bella)

The priest at Pushkar’s Brahma temple was pretty unemployed, the sole sanctum sanctorum of the creator of the Hindu universe filled with a handful of people, three of them white. The prasad was cheap and good, and beggars few and far between. Pushkar was supposed to be a holy place, a centre of pilgrimage, but the poster art — strung on walls and shops — often came close to blasphemy, and I found inside a flower a Brahma in the form of a shaven sardar, mounted legs akimbo on a four-legged half-human. Then there were cubic paintings of Kali by the artist Kikasso, and yogis, sadhus and hippies were all portrayed with thick-smoke spewing chillums.

(photo by Maciej Dakowicz)

At a small shrine to Shiva in the middle of a busy crossroads were an elderly sadhu and a young chela in saffron wraparounds. The chela had been in “Pushkar-Raj” for just two months, but this 3-km radius space between Aravalli hills was on the back of his hand. Moistening the ganja before filling it into the baansuri (flute) — as he called the chillum — he let out a cosmological insight: water will do its work first, only then will fire take over. His guru nodded approvingly, and displayed his much larger chillum to establish his experience in such elemental matters. I was impressed.

Unlike Banaras, removed from Delhi, colourfully insular, Pushkar is a place to go spend a week in. The sunset is magical over the lake, and on the ghats someone is playing either the ektara or drums or singing folk poetry. The bazaar is bristling with tourists and colourful locals selling curious of marble and ivory. Just outside are gardens laden with Pushkar’s famous roses, and the expansive sandy maidan, where the camel fair is held, is right beside the main market. Inside the lanes, especially in winters, is a quietness that is heart-warming. Everything is close to each other, and all’s peaceful. You hardly notice the police, but there has been a string of cases of rapes of foreign tourists, and maybe my masculinity was behind the oversight.

A brief haven for outsiders, a place to stay and write a book. That’s Pushkar: go, be alone, come back.

Free speech and its discontents

Free speech is an idea barely understood, let alone practiced. Rajiv GV explains why Taslima Nasreen’s persecution stems from deep roots

(Cartoons of Prophet Mohammad published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 under the headline ‘Face of Muhammad’)

In December of 1978, Robert Faurisson, a Professor of literature at the University of Lyon, wrote a short article titled ‘The Problem of the Gas Chambers’ or ‘The Rumor of Auschwitz’, in France’s respected daily Le Monde. In the article Faurisson argued that the much written about gas chambers in Germany were never used and also denied the existence of the systematic murder of Jews. The article, predictably, stirred France out of its torpor and caused considerable outrage among intellectual circles worldwide. Later, in the face of continuous threats, Faurisson was removed from his academic position at the French university.
Subsequently, in the fall of 1979, American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky signed a petition over the Faurisson affair. The petition strongly condemned the campaign to silence Faurisson and urged the concerned authorities in Fance to protect Faurisson’s right to freedom of expression and speech.
The petition infuriated many French intellectuals who felt that the petition never raised the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false and slammed Chomsky for signing it.
Chomsky, in response to the criticism, later wrote an essay titled ‘Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression’, in which he attacked his critics for failing to respect the principle of freedom of speech.
Chomsky wrote:
“…Even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi — such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.”
Chomsky’s second provocation, this time in the form of an essay, invited more vicious invective from the French intelligentsia. But Chomsky, a man who practiced what he preached, remained unfazed and stood his ground.
The Faurission affair was an old wound, an old outrage. A fuming democracy and its myopic intellectuals in their collective rage had seriously undercut the democratic culture by denying an elementary right.
It’s been more than 20 years since the Faurisson affair, but new battles involving the right to free speech continue to erupt across the world.

(Sita sitting on Ravana’s thigh in a painting by MF Husain)

The provocateur who happens to be caught up in the latest tussle involving freedom of expression and respecting sentiments is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. The writer was shunted out of Kolkata by the CPI(M) after street riots erupted over her writings on November 21 last year. The Indian government has since then kept Nasreen in a ‘safe house’ in New Delhi.

The dissident’s dissident

Avram Noam Chomsky (pronounced ‘Khomsky’ in the original Yiddish), didn’t just discover generative grammar, he has given dissent an unshakeable dignity, an almost generative, life-like power.

‘Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population — to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.’

‘Of course it’s extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there’s no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you’re bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them “pathological.” On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them “normal.” But it’s just as pathological. It’s just the pathology of the general society.’

(For the best collection of links to material by Chomsky, visit ZNet)

Twenty20

Keeping it simple, sticking to basics over chicanery can see you through in cricket’s latest circus, says Vikrant 

Test of nerves

The brainchild of Stuart Robertson – Twenty20 – had to weather incessant criticism by the connoisseurs of the game before the ICC gave it the go-ahead as the shortest version of international cricket. So much so that even the respective boards didn’t prod their stalwarts to be a part of the extravaganza, if they chose to watch the world cup from their living rooms.

As the ‘circus’ began, the format was subjected to microscopic examination, its finishes tickled the most dead nerves and received rave reviews from the fraternity. You bet, players like Tendulkar, Ganguly, Youhana, Murali (though Murali cited health concerns) and the likes must be ruing the lost chance.

Mermaid

From an island of memory, Geeta leaps into the river of forgetfulness.

Wait for the morning,
and give grace another chance.
I know, I know,
once bitten is twice shy,
a million bitten is a million bitter;
but step another step.
See how nestled in its black mother’s breast,
the white morning waits to arise.
Do not think of woes,
or wallow in pity, despair and loss…
I have always kept my promises,
So said the saint,
after cigarettes and coffee.
So, I awaited the next journey,
Sleeping on the feet of the next door.
I readied my feet in broken dreams.
All the doors are me,
all the rooms are mine,
and the corridors echo forever
with my steps.
And what are my moments,
but rivers flowing through
old lands.
Look those immortal ghosts,
talking to me,
carrying me to a place uknown.
There is something still to be found,
and to vanish forever in it.
But, I`ll walk tomorrow,
for now,
it’s time for rest.
For forgetting.
And I jump into hay from abandoned palaces,
I play in the rivers.

(Painting by Jamil Naqsh, Blue Woman with Dove)

Naqsh

Pakistani painter Jamil Naqsh. Pigeons I. 1989.

Watercolor on paper.