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.

In Lucknow, soon after discovering Naipaul, I met Nasir Abid, “the man who met Naipaul” (that is how he begins his account, Five days with V.S. Naipaul). An old bachelor, Nasir had also wished to be a writer. “To me, Naipaul was God,” he told me. Nasir, like many Lucknow wallahs, could never leave Lucknow, which he thought was the reason why he could not become a writer. His greatest achievement was showing Naipaul around the city when the famous man came to Lucknow. I was impressed by Nasir; the house full of books, no family, a collection of Western classical music. But when I met him recently, I was disturbed by the severity of his disillusion and loneliness. Naipaul had no “humanity”; not marrying was “suicide”; Lucknow was a trap. I told him that I still admired Naipaul, that I will never marry, that I am going to live in Lucknow.

In a review of A Million Mutinies Now, T.G. Vaidyanathan wrote: “Nothing in Naipaul’s book quite matches the self-reflective and biting intensity of the Lucknow pages.” In Lucknow, with Nasir singing praises of the city’s glorious heritage, Naipaul remembered the “cultural deprivation” he grew up amid in Trinidad. That is why he had first come to India, in search of the glory of Hindustan his family spoke about. Instead, he had found squalor and shame. He could not live in India; it was no place to be a writer.

“Lucknow is for leaving,” a friend said to me once. I wanted to tell him that Lucknow was impossible to leave. But I had an older Lucknow in mind, the city to which Delhi wallahs once used to come and not the other way round, as was happening now, with students going to study in Delhi colleges as soon as they finished school. In the past, you came to Lucknow and you were treated to such hospitality that you stayed. Or, like Abdul Halim Sharar, you tried your luck in various cities but “as usual” kept returning to Lucknow. The city’s greatest writer, Naiyer Masud, described himself as a “ghar-ghusna”, stayer-at-home, and shuddered at the thought of living anywhere else. Characters like Nasir were a dime a dozen in Lucknow, people who wanted to leave the city but never could. Kafka had a similar relationship with Prague, “the mother with sharp claws”.

I left Lucknow to study for an M.A. in Delhi, at JNU. Lucknow University was a cesspool; people from backward, godforsaken places studied there, and there was so much violence and politics that the girls ran away at the sight of men. I attended three classes in the three years of the B.A.; I was from an elite convent school and I despised the riff-raff at the university. But the main reason I went to Delhi was because I had been bewitched by the JNU campus: it was in a forest!

Naipaul had given me the idea that you have to make your way in the world. That you have to be in a place that allows you to be what you want to be; otherwise, you will be nothing. Delhi was the best such place in India. I lived in Delhi seven years, then I went to Europe, lived in Denmark, Holland, Wales. But I could not stop longing for Lucknow; I also realized that the journey Naipaul made from Port of Spain to Oxford was for reasons entirely different from mine. I had not grown up amid cultural deprivation; rather, I was the inheritor of a great cultural legacy. London was no more the publishing capital of the world; if anything, it was in rapid decline. The world in which Naipaul became a writer had changed too much. Now, India was the land of opportunity.

But I was not going back to Lucknow to be a famous writer. I had lost interest in worldly success. I was appalled by the way literature was being dumbed down, I did not want to deal with the publishing industry, and I saw books as just another pile on the media clutter burying us. I wished to write in peace and quiet, for a select readership, and postpone the publishing for a while. It came from an aversion I had developed against everything that can be called “media” and from a slightly different reading of Naipaul.

I had always admired Naipaul for his truthfulness, for he wrote only of his own experience. In the past few years, I had arrived at the philosophical position that there is no point in trying to imagine oneself as someone else. All your thoughts are your own, and all thoughts come from what you know. Initially, I thought that to be a writer you must have the range of experience and knowledge like Naipaul had. But I realized that whatever your experience, however limited your knowledge, you can still be a writer if you write well. It does not matter how many readers a writer has, or what he writes about, because writing is only the writer’s thoughts. If these thoughts make sense, if they have universal value or niche appeal, if readers identify with them, is secondary. What the writing does to the writer, how the writer engages with the writing, is all that matters. It is a personal, solitary activity, and a writer may or may not want to share his thoughts with others.

A writer is someone who writes. It is not necessary to be published because you don’t need a certificate from others to prove to yourself what you are. There is a general fallacy that you are what the world thinks you are. Everyone indeed wants to be acknowledged for what they claim to be, but if you think of it logically, the acknowledgement makes not much of a difference, for unless you know yourself, the world will only confuse you by telling you a hundred different things. And if you really want to be a writer, all that you should do is write. Your experience is all the material you need, your knowledge of the language all your tools. After that, it is up to you whether you want to publish your writing or burn it.

We live in times when acknowledgement has become the key to our existence: I am known, therefore I am. We wish to be part of the world that we see in the media, do things that will be talked about, or talk about things that people are talking about, especially on the Internet. But we forget that what we know of ourselves at the deepest level will never be known to others; certain aspects of the self cannot be shared: we cannot dream someone else’s dreams, feel someone else’s sensations. Writing is the only medium that allows you to record your thoughts exactly as they are — you don’t have to translate them into drawing or music, you don’t have to act or dance them out, and you need nothing more than a pen and paper. Writing down one’s thoughts is especially useful if you want to study yourself. Writing for someone else means that you are trying to communicate, but you can only communicate what is common to you and him, what will make sense to him. The world is full of people. With most of them one has nothing in common; one might want to avoid the riff-raff, rather. But because everything is now so globalised we think we can communicate with everyone. It is a good time for social people but a writer is a solitary creature. The spotlight can scare him.

I am stressing the solitary nature of writing because it is not a performative art, and because it is about thoughts — only the person thinking the thoughts knows what they are. The writer tries to make sense of the weird feelings and ideas inside him by writing them into sentences (because they make sense) or poetry (which evokes images, sounds, sensations). Whether you construct a narrative or an argument, you have to deal with your own thoughts. You publish the writing not out of an urge to communicate but because you think it has a larger value. Unless, of course, you want to, like Naipaul, earn your living through the writing.

The problem is, in these times when everything has been professionalised and commercialised, one doesn’t want the writing to be treated like a commodity, or even a craft (think of the creative writing courses!). One does not want to be part of the media circus that the publishing industry has become. Every writer wishes to see his work printed in a book, but these days the writer feels a sense of trepidation. So many books are published, so much trash. You fear that your book will be lost in the heap, will be subjected to the same idiotic critics, sold in those obnoxious shopping malls. Writing is like a child to the writer; how do I send it out in the big bad world all alone.

I took up Naipaul’s example as a writer, but I have no wish to match his experience. I cannot travel to all continents and talk to thousands of people. I have no opinion about the world except that it has become too intrusive. I need privacy, I need only a few friends and loved ones who are there in Lucknow. I am interested in things like rivers and ghosts, and I will write of them. Neither do I have to ask them anything, nor are they worried about how I represent them. It is not what a writer thinks that is important, but whether he thinks well. I certainly think well and all I have to do is write down what I think as clearly and interestingly as I can. Whether a reader agrees with me is not for me to decide.

Finally, a Naipaul quote that is often misunderstood: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” This is supposed to mean that in the eyes of the world you can be nothing and therefore have no place in it. But Naipaul is clearly putting the responsibility on the man to not allow himself to become nothing; the world has nothing to do with it. The world is what it is, that is all. Whatever you have to become, you have to become in it; instead of changing the world so that it can accommodate you, you have to find a place for yourself in it. If you want to be a writer, then write; don’t let the world stop you.

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 intriguing plot is only a peg to hang the larger picture; the murders are a narrative hook, a spell cast on the audience to keep them bewitched till the end. The hypnotised audience will then see what you show, and Vishal shows us some magic that we cinephiles always craved. The film’s mood builds up into ominous, foreboding bleakness; then it falls into the abyss of disillusion; and finally it slips into a mystic affirmation of life and death. Relieving the persistent sadness are moments of humour, adventure, passion. Susanna’s relationships are attempts to fill the emptiness she feels is overwhelming her; it is because she is aware of the emptiness that she can kill her husbands. Her heart is broken because the world is not for her. She cannot find peace anywhere; every happiness and hope is temporary; everything ends in tragedy. So she seeks diversions, hopes against hope, learns to live on small mercies. And once she discovers that she can keep changing her husbands, that she can play several roles, live different lives, she pounces on the opportunity.

Susanna is, however, Bond’s character. The film is Vishal’s, and he peoples it with his own characters. Susanna’s household staff reminds you of a set of witches in one scene, which I think is because of the fascination with witchcraft that Vishal has in common with Bond, Shakespeare, Poe and other such figures, though Ram Gopal Varma is certainly not one of them; Varma is a superstitious ignoramus in comparison. Vishal’s literary sensibility, coupled with Gulzar’s, also lies behind Wasiullah’s sexual sadism, which is the sadism of a refined intellect trapped in a lustful body. The rage against the body is a philosopher’s specialty, and Susanna, when she is old and wise and tired of the body, returns to the whirling dance of the mystic that she had danced with Wasiullah.

It is with the figure of Christ that the film ends, Susanna’s seventh husband. She has killed Christ, too, by being human; she is among those who put Christ on the Cross because his message of love was unreal, impossible. He asked too much of men and women; he made tall claims; he chose martyrdom. Susanna only helped him die, but it filled her with guilt, and she seeks his forgiveness.

7 Khoon Maaf is a reflective film in which each moment, each event, is delved into to unearth some pearl of joy, wisdom or love. It is a film that demands attention, patience, intelligence. That the film critics have not been able to understand it is natural, for they are utterly devoid of these abilities. They complain that Susanna is not etched out in detail. They have no idea that little details — like Susanna’s fondness for liquor — are what the story is all about. A woman who kills seven husbands — what else is there to etch?

When I heard Vivaan Shah’s voice, commenting on the rocker Jimmy’s voice, I thought it was Imaad Shah’s. That Naseeruddin Shah’s sons possess a similar voice is one of the little revelations of the film. Just as the Christian theme in Ruskin Bond’s writing came as a surprise. The film is about many things, not just a racy narrative that keeps viewers hooked; as I mentioned, the plot is enough for that. The story gives Vishal an opportunity to expand his themes, to pace the scenes variously, to knit music into the film’s fabric; the songs are one of the building blocks, almost part of the screenplay, Gulzar’s lyrics merging with Bond’s story. But the two rock songs are a disgrace. Vishal should, if better sense prevails, put a halt to these experiments and nurture what is his own special talent.

7 Khoon Maaf is consummate filmmaking, cinema that aspires to high culture. Only Vishal among the current filmmakers is capable of disdaining commercial pressures, though his next film on Chetan Bhagat’s book with Shah Rukh Khan seems a bad idea. But the world is coming to pieces; I can only be grateful for a film like 7 Khoon Maaf; as long as there are small mercies, the world can be lived with.

Susanna's six husbands

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, and each German city had vied to achieve greater refinement in music, literature, theatre, philosophy, academia. So when nationalism came, Germany suddenly emerged as the nation with the greatest cultural wealth. The consciousness of this high civilization impelled its kings to create grander architecture and to attempt an overseas empire. The defeat in the First World War was like the crushing of a youthful dream, and the rage and humiliation was channeled by Hitler. Germany was no ordinary nation, Hitler reminded the people; it was destined for a glory that had no precedent, an empire unimagined by any country. Jews were a blot on the Aryan race, the impediment that had hindered Germany, and had to be removed. Thus Hitler carried on his three-pronged strategy: imperial territory, extermination of Jews, and building German pride – especially through architecture.

The shame of the Nazi past, which wouldn’t have been there had Hitler won, has turned Germany away from grand ideas more than any other country. Its government has chosen to rebuild the economy through big industry – automobiles and so on – and its people have lost trust in politicians. Germany has turned its gaze within in introspection, allowing France and England to surge ahead in positions of world influence – Germany cannot even get a Security Council seat. But the obsession to rebuild its pride through its economy, while keeping politics at bay, has created a culture of big money on the one hand – the slick infrastructure, the jazzy markets – and a seemingly hedonistic, radical youth culture that stands only for its own, individual freedom. These two cultures are both contradictory and complementary: rock bands screaming against a mechanical society, for example. Berlin is full of cultural, art events happening every day: plays, films, exhibitions, art installations, and, above all, music. But all these are just rants, mocking the absurdities of modern life and calling for a secession from them. Bereft of vision, offering cults rather than a larger humanism, they represent the descent of a society into impotence. This rage, this confusion spills out in racism, hooliganism, petty crime. The more the society surrenders control to a few corporations, the more the people cry foul. Berlin turns into a magnet for idlers, drifters, people looking only to have a good time.

For all the crimes of colonialism, Europe once had ideas to inspire the world, a civilization that was attractive not just because of its power but because of its enlightened rationality, humanism and culture. A Nehru or Ataturk could follow Europe’s example despite the colonial past. Now, young Germans would hardly read Kant or hear Beethoven. Indians and Turks would find in Berlin economic opportunity, and there are plenty of Indians and Turks looking for it, but absolutely no intellectual guidance, no nobility of ideas, no benchmark of human worth. Berlin is a moral and intellectual wasteland. VS Naipaul once called Europe “a place of mocking glories”. Berlin is the capital of this place.

To see the old regal buildings, to visit the museums and see the great wealth, refinement and craft produced in this country, to see old photographs of Berlin – people dressed elegantly, the streets flanked by beautiful houses, trams jostling with horse carriages, crowds of hundreds of thousands listening admiringly to a public speech – or even to witness the Berlin Philharmonic rehearsing at the grand concert hall in Gendarmenmarkt, an area where French Huguenots were given refuge by Frederick the Great – is to feel sorry for the city. All around are huge abandoned factories, dreary housing, poor immigrants, buildings that seem more appropriate to the Third World. Apart from the historic core of the city, there is nothing of beauty. Even the zoo and the large Tiergarten park date from the 19th century. It is as if, after Hitler, all conception of grandeur ended. The famed street art of Berlin turned out to be pathetic; the only word for the paintings at the East Side Gallery, a relic of the Berlin Wall preserved for tourists, is juvenile. There was an especially dumb figure of Superman, symbolizing the pervasive American pop spirit in the city’s street “art”, which is no more than the patterns emerging out of randomly sprayed colour, often accompanied by pop slogans or, simply, names.

Prague turned out to be quite a contrast to Berlin. It is not commercially as important, and has been saved from being overrun by corporations, though showrooms of large consumer brands have ruined quite a bit of the old world charm. Nevertheless, the entire old part of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the government has invested in preservation. Prague also seemed to have retained some of its Bohemian spirit, and there was none of Berlin’s business-like air of power and money. It was still a rather quaint, cozy place with lots of open fun – merry music on streets, smooching couples, people dressed up in motley – unlike the closed-door clubs and squats of Berlin, the aggressively dressed punks, the irritating Bosnian young women with their infants begging for 50 cents. Prague also felt more humane and noble, because of its old Jewish area and synagogues, the memory of its Jews’ slaughter by the Germans, and the spirit of Kafka that seems to guard over the city.

Berlin, as the most powerful city of continental Europe, is a symbol of hollowness and decadence. The achievements of the past mock the confusion of the present – over immigrants, America, loss of culture. The power built on economic prosperity is constantly under threat, and the confidence that came from leading the world is no more. There is a clear generational divide: the old trying to preserve their power, the young disillusioned and searching for an alternative. The only hope seems to lie in a reassertion of past glories, of Europe using the challenge from Islam or Asian economies to get together and fight for its civilization. It is not something that will win Europe many admirers or followers, but it can rejuvenate the continent. The time of leading the world, of showing the way, is, however, certainly past. Come to Berlin and see.

"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

Rakesh is just a part of the film’s craft. Each character is a worldview in itself, the contrast most apparent between the good-for-nothing Nattha and his tirelessly working wife Dhaniya. The news media, however, function like a herd. Danish Husain plays the archetypal editor-in-chief, and his use of the word “lalaji” to refer to the channel’s owner is straight out of Hindi media phraseology. Both Kumar Deepak and Nandita Malik are savvy performers, whatever the difference in their “class”. The village folk are simple but more various: Nattha’s mother, Amma, is peerless, but so is Hori; the idle ganja-smoking friends of Budhiya are far removed from the busy-in-machinations local politicians; Budhiya is much more talkative than Nattha. The village, for all its limitedness and lack of opportunity, offers a palette to sketch different portraits, unlike the city full of identical skyscrapers where politicians and bureaucrats and journalists are merely what they are supposed to be. “We are journalists, this is what we do,” as Nandita Malik explains in exasperation to Rakesh.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benjamin wrote, is to produce something that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art”. There is a scene where Mahmood Farooqui, playing a Communist leader, declares, “Hum har baat ka khandan karte hain (We deny everything that’s been said)”. Peepli [Live] is revolutionary in its insistence that we take a relook at everything. That we turn our gaze away from relentless media images and look around. There is no room for sentimentality or romanticism; there is nothing to prevent the city’s insidious conquest of the village. The Natthas will not be saved unless a radical re-imagining takes place. This cannot come from the village, it has to come from the city, for not only does it have the power, it is also more in need of introspection. The media, especially, stand dehumanised. The film’s audience is the citywallah, for the filmmakers know that cinema has become a multiplex event (“cinema is no longer a mass medium”, Mahmood Farooqui said recently). And yet, so authentic is the village in the film, the nuances of language so rustic, that it could only have been made by someone intimately familiar with the Hindi heartland. I personally think that only a UP Muslim (or perhaps a Bhopal one) could have made such a film, for only UP Muslims have that ear for language and the breadth of social interaction that can include the most refined aristocracy as well as the wretched of the earth. Perhaps it has something to do with Islam; a Brahmin will studiously avoid familiarity with a Dalit, for example. But this is only a guess.

Such intelligent, erudite and brave cinema is rare to find. There are so many memorable moments in the film, so many crackling dialogues and strong characters and wonderful imagery, that it is difficult to choose. So I’ll pick just one scene and then conclude. After returning disappointed from MLA Bhai Thakur’s house, where they get to learn of the Rs one-lakh scheme to farmers who commit suicide, Budhiya and Nattha sit down for a smoke (I have watched the film three times, but every time Raghubir Yadav surprised me when it turns out that he has lit two beedis together). Budhiya recalls the severe beating by their father, and Nattha says in such an artless manner, “Bahut jor se maarat rahe oo” (He used to beat very hard) that Budhiya looks at him and realizes what a worthless simpleton his brother is. Then Budhiya begins to cry and claim that it is better to die than to let go of the ancestral land. Nattha takes the cue and says he will be the one to kill himself. Budhiya quickly agrees, creating the suspicion that keeps growing through the film, that Budhiya is sacrificing Nattha for his own gain. Does Budhiya also fancy Dhaniya? The suggestion is left tantalising, provoking our baser instincts. In the end, however, when Budhiya returns home and Dhaniya brings him water, and they sit side by side lamenting their poverty, one realizes that there is nothing going on between them, that this is still a rather innocent world where everyone knows his place and does not transgress it. The sight of Nattha at a construction site in what looks like Gurgaon, is the defining image of a man uprooted from his place. Does the film betray a certain nostalgia? I think it does.

Nattha and Budhiya

October 17, 2010

(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.

(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.
While the sickening drama involving Taslima, the CPI(M) and the UPA government played out in the media last year, a section of the Muslim lunatic fringe took to streets and invaded television studious to denounce her writings and asked the Centre to throw her out of the country. The UPA government, after shifting the blame on CPI(M) for a while, finally succumbed and asked Taslima to refrain from hurting the sentiments.
External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee promised to ‘shelter’ Nasreen, but urged her to ‘refrain from activities and expressions’ that may hurt the sentiments of Indian people.
Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi went a step further. He asked Nasreen to apologise to the Muslims with folded hands for her writings.
Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference, invited to participate in a debate on the issue by a TV channel, bluntly asked Taslima to desist writing such inflammatory prose as it would lead to law and order problems.
On November 30, 2007, when in the face of unrelenting mental trauma, Taslima Nasreen finally crumbled and agreed to expunge controversial portions from her biography Dwikhandita, a victory was claimed.
As in the case of the Faurisson affair, this sordid saga once again demonstrated an unacknowledged fact that the concept of freedom of expression is barely understood, let alone practiced.
Speaking in an interview to Karan Thapar over the Taslima issue, Arundhati Roy raised some significant points which are worth reproducing here. On being asked whether freedom of speech was an absolute freedom, ‘without any limitations’, Roy said that personally she held the view that freedom of expression is something ‘that should have no caveats, for the simple reason that in a place where there are so many contending beliefs, so many conflicting things, only the powerful will then decide what those caveats should be…’
Later in the interview, When asked to comment on the view that Taslima had offended beliefs held sacred by many Indians, Roy said she didn’t believe that ‘a writer like Taslima Nasreen can undermine the dignity of ten million people.’ ‘Who is she?’ Roy went on, ‘she is not a scholar of Islam’.
‘Dwikhandito has not been translated into English but let’s just assume that what she said was stupid and insulting to Islam. But you have to be prepared to be insulted by something that insignificant,’ observed Roy.
Leaving no room for ambiguity, Roy said that without the ‘right to offend’, the right to freedom of expression has no meaning.
In subscribing to the ‘right to offend’ view, Roy was echoing what Noam Chomsky had forcefully asserted in an interview with the journalist John Pilger. That ‘if we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.’
Indeed it is abhorring to witness the continuous and unabashed selective-use of such a precious right.
The editor of the UK media watchdog, MediaLens, which won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award for 2007, when requested to comment on freedom of speech, wrote that, ‘A heavy burden of proof is always on the people arguing against free speech in any given instance because the consequences of suppressing that freedom may well be extremely grave (it’s a very slippery slope, obviously). So if an argument was merely provocative and puerile, then it would be very difficult to argue that it should be suppressed. After all, one can argue that it’s not really the words that are doing the harm, but the uncontrolled, angry reaction of the people allowing themselves to be provoked.’
Clearly, insult to ‘sentiments’, one’s ‘tastes’ are not sufficient grounds on which right to free speech can be curtailed. The real test, the extraordinary reason, that might necessitate a surrenering of the right might be irrefutable proof of criminal violence. Barring such a powerful reason, any other complaint might prove to be insufficient to call for curtailment of the right.
It would be appropriate to conclude by recalling another famous, but old, rumble which had a famous philosopher in the eye of a major storm in the US.
In 1940, British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s appointment to teach at the College of the City of New York(CCNY) was contested and the complainant took the matter to court to stall the move.
An enraged NY court viciously attacked Russell for his views on morality and education and issued a stinging rebuke to the CCNY’s board for trying to appoint a controversial figure like Russell. Worried by the unhealthy impact Russell and his views might have over the students, the court voided his appointment.
The issue found echo in the US media and a New York Times editorial disapproved of Russell’s actions and criticised him for not retiring after the row had erupted. Russell, replying to the NY Times editorial, bitterly wrote to the paper that he had not backed off as it would mean surrendering to the will of powerful groups.
“In a democracy it is necessary that people learn to endure having their sentiments outraged,” wrote Russell.
It would be invaluable to remember Russell’s dictum the next time somebody’s sentiments are outraged.

‘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)

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.

Seeing through the lens, there’s more to Twenty20 than meets the eye. Some of it is even contrary to the popular beliefs. First and most incredibly, the pressure is on the batsman and not the bowler. Picture this: a run-a-ball fifty is snubbed as an anchor innings while an economy rate of even 10 an over is allowed to pass without scrutiny.

Secondly, Twenty20 and spinners were not supposed to fit in the same bracket. The stats aver otherwise. Daniel Vettori single and ‘left’-handedly steered his team to the semi-finals. Harbhajan Singh has had more than a decent outing. Needless to mention the exploits of Shahid Afridi and Sanath Jayasuriya.

Thirdly, it is a long enough game, averaging 15 wickets per match. This implies that specialists have limited utility. All-rounders, particularly those who can wield a bat, can turn it on for a side. Albie Morkel is one who has maimed the English bowling and dealt acceptable efforts with the leather. Misbah ul haq (against India as well) and Shoaib Malik versus Australia demonstrated that it is not all about slam-banging. Keeping it simple, sticking to basics over chicanery can see your side through.

The all-important question — the future of cricket — still begs an answer. The instant cricket’s potential to instil assurance amongst pygmy cricketing nations that they can dislodge the mighty teams, promises to amplify its popularity. So, if the circus is the panacea for world cricket, so be it.  

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)

Pakistani painter Jamil Naqsh. Pigeons I. 1989.

Watercolor on paper.