Colour blind

Every incident is a colour, and adds colour to your life too. In that sense, every day of your life is colourful, some you like, others you don't and yet others you don't fancy.

My days are either full of events or eventful or sometimes both. Today was both. I read a bluegreen mail from a deep purple person first thing in the morning, and was led, almost instinctively in response, to write a deep aquamarine one. Then up popped a soft yellow boy, who always tells me what he calls black humour laced tales, but I invariably find them wildly turquoise.

Post a quick chat with a sky coloured almost twin over the phone over some selfish business, I received a sms from this exquisitely soft chocolate boy that there is a music concert happening at another part of the town. Yet another sms, this time from a solidly grey friend enquiring if we could catch up, I had to respond negatively for I was already on my way to the concert.

I am right now afflicted by the sleepy, smoky, silvery grey turning towards nothingly black. Tomorrow morning will begin with the egg yolky yellow of course.

white yellow bright

Informal, consequential fights, many more,

regular, coming so far, so funny, so sore

limbs you don't know why still

turns only too ready to climb uphill.

On the rocks, out of the box, nowhere,

spaces into the known unknown layer

of a golden dipping silhouette, you groped,

in trance, as sense sensually sloped,

somnolent in the wake,

into dances that refused to fake

a sensibility you see with pricks

turning black or white with tricks

pulling body and mind together;

you went up light as a feather,

and down like rough weather,

with no direction to find, you flew

riding a floating joy, long overdue.

Intermittent, spasmodic your way,

with fear of nothing holding sway,

twisting, turning, whistling, whipping

shrieking, shunting, grunting, sweeping,

purple patches in your trail, softly home

dewy eyed, left aside, a little gnome.

Two ideas of history

I have not written on academic issues on my blog till date. That is for the simple reason that I do not want my blog to remain academic, that is, irrelevant. Professional academics, particularly social scientists, have a tendency to take themselves too seriously, conveniently glossing over the fact that that too few people actually read their works. They get fat salaries and perks, attend fancy conferences and fetishize a concept called peer review. I call it conceit of expertise.

Good works, I strongly believe, communicates to a range of readers. I shall try to illustrate this point with an example of two ideas on, and of, history prevalent in Bengal in early twentieth century. One of them was eventually taken up by the academia and glorified as more desirable and the other, although subsequently discarded to some extent, has again been picked up, mercifully, in recent times by the academics.

Let us begin with the one that has been championed by the mainstream academia for the better part of the twentieth century. You find a most lucid exposition of this method in Nirad Chaudhury's autobiography. This is the classical liberal method which assumes that the subject of history should ideally be political in the statist sense of the term such as the rise and fall of colonialism and nationalism. Second, methodologically, it assumes as though the writer of history actually stands outside history, like an observer walking by a river and watching the ebb and tide of time flow, without himself being influenced by the currents in any way whatsoever. Third, it focuses on the exceptional, and the definitive, at the cost of the uneventful and the everyday. Finally, it takes the truth claim of history very seriously, hoping that if the historian can, hypothetically speaking, leave all her biases out, the truth about the past can be reconstructed in an authentic manner.

I was under the impression that this positivist notion of history was perhaps the only one available in early twentieth century Bengal. It so turns out that I was horribly wrong. Advaita Mallabarman, the author of Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A river called Titas) operated with a very different idea of history, one that is very close to what we call social history today. It is so powerful that I am tempted to translate the whole paragraph.

" Titas is a rather commonplace rivulet. It finds mention in no book of history, nor in any account of the rise and fall of dynasties. The blood of two warring parties has never tainted the calm waters of Titas. But is it really true that Titas has no history?

Titas indeed provides no material for treatises that swells one's chest in pride. However, many histories of maternal affection,fraternal warmth and the love of womenfolks, remain buried along its banks. Some of us are aware of these histories, most are not. Yet these histories are true. Titas' banks have seen many tales of humanity and inhumanity unfold along their length. The traces of these histories have lost themselves in the sands of time, superseded perhaps by new waves of stories piled up by Titas herself. The old tales, however, remain dormant within the deeper recesses of Titas. She may or may not decide to open them up for public display. The public may not even want to see them open up. But remain they do. They cannot be inscribed on banana leaves or papers, but remain engraved on a far more durable register. These histories are eternal, as secret as the truth but as sensitive as the wind. Who says the banks of Titas are bereft of history?"

I am not capable of bringing out even half of the force with which Mallabarman articulates a whole new notion of social history in this paragraph. Ritwik Ghatak, the filmmaker, made a whole movie based on the book and you'll do well to see it for yourself. The lyricism of the work is not even my focus here. I rather want to draw your attention to the kind of histories Mallabarman is talking about. Histories of affection, of fraternity, of love and of everyday life, of the people who do not take part in wars and stay far away from the fields of war and politics. Histories of emotion, in other words, and histories buried in layers, waiting to be dug out, heard out, not with institutional knowledge but with empathy and sensitivity of a friend, or a brother, or lover or a son.

The difference between these two ideas of history, and of doing history, could not have been atarker. Interesting isn't it, this process of these two entirely opposite versions of history vying for the attention of the informed Bengali mind in the early twentieth century and eventually one of them taking over the institutionalized academia, and the other being discarded for good? The positivist has clearly pushed the empathetic out of the professional academia that certifies what history, and history writing, is all about.

I do not have the knowledge nor the space to present a comprehensive account of this process. However, the end result has been there for all of us to see. We academics have turned ourselves into retailers of historical truths. I am ashamed of this painful legacy. Thankfully during the last few years some of my seniors have realized this and are trying to return to the empathetic. In doing so, however, they tend to uncritically discard the positivist and the factual altogether. I wonder whether we do not need a more balanced negotiation between the empathetic and the positivist. Let us wait and see how, and to what extent, they learn to live with each other.

One book I want to read tomorrow

Rukun Advani is the most unsung prose stylist in India. A few months ago I had said this to one of my most favourite teachers, who is also a good friend of Rukun Advani, and it is time I said this in public. It took me many years to get hold of a copy of Beethoven among the cows, but I have alsways followed his column Loose Cannon, thanks to the delightful chance that I was living in South India those days. To all those to whom Rukun Advani sounds like a rather unfamiliar name, I suggest go get hold of a copy of Betthoven among the cows or come borrow it from me, and then I am sure there will not remain much to disagree. This is a most delightfully all over the place kind of a novel, one that celebrates the autonomy and rootedness of the human mind at the same time. I am in no mood to write a review of the book for I started this post for a very different reason.

I have lately come to know he published a small book called History from Above and Below, taking uproariously funny potshots at some of the high priests of the postmodern and postcolonial school of thought in relation to history of India in colonial times, who incidenatlly also happen to be mostly Bengali, and generally based in the US of A. This is one book I want to read right now. If any one of you out there have a copy or know anybody who does, please let me know at the earliest, as they say. If you suggest I go to a bookshop first, let me confess that that has not yielded any positive result, yet. I am ceratinly dumb, but not totally. So, all out there, help me get hold of the book please.

three uplifting experiences

Today is a perfectly cold day here in Delhi. The kind of day that forces you to stay indoors and go out only for works you can no longer put off. As is my wont, I finished some paperworks for which today was the last possible day. Mercifully, people at my center and school know my nerdy ways well enough to tolerate my tantrums, so much so that they now laugh at it, more than I do myself. It is for these compassionate men and women that I still survive in this perfectly systematic world with my systematically unsystematized character and conducts, and I cannot thank them enough. You must meet the staff at my perfectly filmi center and you'll wonder how these people can be so efficient and still smile so much, and why they have not yet kicked me out for good.

We are made to stand in a queue only once in six months. A pity because it is in the queue today that I met Mr. Sujit Bose. Mr. Bose has a spine disorder of some kind, making him unable to keep standing for long. Surprisingly, nobody noticed his difficulty and he kept fidgeting but not even once asked or tried to break the queue. Gallery player that I am, I decided to hold his hand and take him right up to the fees counter, asking the prettily dressed girls to make way for him to clear his dues, which to their credit, they did. The clerks, too, cooperated, and Mr. Bose's job was done in a minute and he was free to go. On his way back, Mr. Bose pressed my hand warmly and thanked, but I forgot to ask him for his phone number. In the bargain, I almost missed a chance to make a new friend and demand to be called over for lunch, for I love my food more than anything else. Mercifully though, I have seen, in his papers, the address of his home and rest assured I am going to drop uninvited one of these days. You see I have no other option to tap him anyway, and I don't much care for manners. This self trumpeting is not so much to advertise my public spiritedness, but to ask everyone else to call me over for lunch. Now what is so wrong with that? I can't cook well, so I beg to be treated with good food, and am even ready to pay for it. By the time you all become disgusted with my relentless requests, I'll have learnt to cook, I promise.

Two more such incidents followed, one after another. I had a look at Times of India, and came across a most heartwarming piece of news. The residents of a village called Tajnagar near Gurgaon has bulit, entirely at their own expense, a whole railway station. They failed to persuade the railways authorities to install a station and had to walk or cycle six long miles to reach the nearest railway station. Two years ago they decided enough is enough and these humble agriculturists pulled in as much as 21 lakhs of Rupess and it took two years to build this new monument of love for themselves. The railways most readily agreed to halt seven trains to and fro at this new station with effect from next week.

I was deeply moved by the story, and am glad that Times of India is highlighting these achievements of ordinary men and women. We in India have a tendency to blame everything that is wrong with us to the government and politicians and do nothing for ourselves. The welfare state is a great idea and it must deliver. However, we just cannot wait for the state to do everything for those who can jolly well do it themselves. There is a word for it-entrepreneurship as also enterprise. This model does not pick a fight with the state, nor does it spare it relevant criticism. However, it is also ready to share the state's burden, and it is high time the more enlightened and enterprising among us start emulating the example of these humble farmers. They have much more to teach us in humility and enterprise than our schools and colleges and friends and so on. They teach us common sense and doabilty. They teach us to have faith in ourselves. I plan to visit Tajnagar shortly and those of you who are interested please join me. We owe these men and women a warm tribute.

Finally, in the evening I discovered a wonderfully calm and exciting song from the 1971 Hindi movie Anubhav-Koi Chup ke aake sapna shulake mujhko jaagaake bole main aa raha hoon. Geeta Dutt, Gulzaar, Kanu Ray-a combination that most of us have not heard much about but then it is never too late to get to know good things, isn't it? The song captures-let me borrow from Naipaul-an enigma of arrival, in a very different sense of course. It is melodious, soft, silken, exceedingly nostalgic and yet full of anticipation, promise yet somewhere very firmly controlled and regulated according to a rhyme and rhythm that I cannot fully comprehend but only sense from a distance, transfixed. The tune is relaxed, slow but but not sloth, and intensely sensual, and I have only rarely come across such self assured, relaxed sensuality, something that openly avows desire yet knows that desire for its own sake can also be a lovely desire, without its necessary culmination into the possession of the desired objective. It's this celebration of the desire of the moment, this unbridled longing for the lost and the promised at the same time, that I find nobody voices better than Geeta Dutt. With Asha Bhosle it is unabashed joy, and with Lata Mangeshkar it is pure serenity, but neither gives me the complexity that Geeta Dutt's voice does. I wonder why Guru and Geeta Dutt could not pull together. To me they look like a match made in heaven!

I'll now tell you why. Heaven only makes matches, we make them work here on earth. Be that as it may, I wonder what links up these three sublime experiences of mine today. One, they gave me joy and taught me that we can do many things that we never thought we are capable of, if and when the situation so demands. We are all essentially extraordinary people, we can build railway stations and sing into being experiences and emotions that sometimes the best and the most famous in the business cannot. They teach me to celebrate being myself. I say they made it such a warm day today.

class, grace and innovation

In India, truth, lie, justice and so much besides is decided at the instance of the urban, upper middle class, English speaking opinion makers who run the media industry, both print and electronic. This class of articulates consider it their natural right to teach us everything, including manners. In other words, they deem it their divinely ordained mission to civilize us lesser mortals who, evidently for them, do not know how to behave. They have a model before them that they swear by, and every other model of human behavior they consider not only unacceptable, but downright disgraceful.

This morning I read a column by Vir Sanghvi, where he describes the behavior of the makers of Three Idiots, the hugely successful recent Hindi movie as disgraceful. These men had happened to mention the name of Chetan Bhagat, the writer whose book they have adapted for the screenplay, at the very end of the credits. Traditionally, says, Sanghvi, Hollywood movies mention the name of the writer at the beginning of the credits. Since India is going to be a superpower in the foreseeable future, and Hindi movie industry some kind of a successor of Hollywood, producers, directors and actors must emulate the Hollywood paradigm of grace and class.

I beg to disagree. Sanghvi fails to distinguish between form and content. He forecasts that in content of the Hindi movies are going to replace the global leadereship of Hollywood, perhaps in terms of viewership preference etc. It may or may not come true. I say it may not for the simple reason that these movies are not made in English and this point is self-explanatory.

But he wants the leaders of the Hindi movie industry to behave as gracefully as the heavyweights of Holloywood, as exemplified in the practice of naming the writer in the beginning of the credits, in case of adaptations, irrespective of the degree of sameness or variance from the original novel. If the name of the author comes at the end, says Sangvi, it reeks of pettiness. In other words, in form he would like the Hindi movie mandarins to emulate their Hollywood counterparts.

Let me declare, like Sanghvi, that I hold no brief for either of the parties involved in the controversy. As befitting a nobody, I have never met or spoken to the parties involved in the controversy. I have, however, read the book and found it rather ordinary and seen the movie, finding it reasonably above the ordinary but nothing remotely approaching greatness.

However, if you follow the message the movie seeks to send out, I find the behavior of its makers completely in sync with the spirit of the movie. The movie, as I read it, wishes to make the simple point that it is not necessary to follow a set of prescribed rules that has delivered success and wealth to many. The idea of what is the right way success and wealth is at the heart of all contention in the movie. The core tension that sustains the movie is between a way of learning that collapses learning with pleasure, and one that collapses learning with pain, to put it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, the book, no matter what it is worth and how popular it has become, has not much to say on that very fundamental debate, although it does say much about the pitfalls of the latter. It does of course deal in detail with the human side of the lives of IIT students, with great compassion and sensitivity. It says that they are also ordinary human beings like most of us.

Paradoxically, it is the very success of this book that allowed Bhagat to quit his job as a banker and devote himself completely to writing. In a way, then, it has been a cathartic experience for Bhagat as an individual, setting him free to do what he really wanted to do all his life. I suggest the movie probably draws more from Bhagat's own life than from his book, and I am not talking about details and settings here. I am talking about more fundamental issues.

I have nothing to say about the extent of fidelity or deviation from the novel for that is not the issue here. It is about the nature of deviation. I suggest that that the spirit of the movie is not indebted to the book. It does talk about life at IIT (or Imperial College of Engineering, note the name please) but it talks much more, and more essentially, about an alternative that sets you free.

Likewise, Hindi movie industry, if it is to ever, even hypothetically, take over the mantle of the leading movie making industry in the world, it will have to do so on the basis of its difference, and not similarity, with Hollywood. This difference must not confine itself to content alone, but embrace form as well, or rewrite the content of the form. I suggest Hindi movie industry start a new practice, one where the position of the author's name in the credits shall be decided on the basis of the spiritual, and not physical, similarity with the book. This can be done, as Sangvi rightly observes, without prejudice to the copyright laws. It need not involve prior consent of the author as long as his copyright privileges are not violated.

3 Idiots is after all about redefining the content of the word idiot. Sanghvi, interestingly, reverts to the conventional meaning of the word in the last sentence of his piece. This is not an accident. I suggest we request him to agree to allow us the content of words like grace or class as well. There has to be other models of graceful or classy behavior than calling others nitwits in print, which Sanghvi does so gleefully. As far as his report of Chopra's misbehavior is concerned, he says Chopra had publicly asked a journalist to shut up, challenging him whether he had read the book. The concerned journalist may be a lady too, for all I know, due to my lack of regular attention to television news. I leave it to the rest of you to wonder whether an instance of bad behavior is best responded to by a counter instance of equally bad behavior. Incidentally, Sanghvi waxes so eloquent about Hollywood people like Danny Boyle becoming magnanimous on his Oscar night and so on. Interestingly, this spirit has not rubbed off on Sanghvi as he sat down to deliver a verdict on grace, class or lack thereof in the characters of the three key people behind the movie. Journalists in India do not like anyone else to sit down on judgement about their grace or lack thereof. After all, they are out there to civilize us and tell us what is good for us and our country. How dare a non journalist raise his voice? So what if he has made a good, popular movie? It is alright if journalists judge movies and movie makers, but how dare a movie maker goes ahead to judge the credentials of a journalist?

It is not about grace at all, it is about the media's right to decide my life for me, and your life for you. Do you know for whom the bell tolls now?