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?

nonsenseterse

Rhymania is an old affliction with me. I am told told we learn to rhyme much before we manage to deliver sophisticated prose. There is no good reason to disbelieve the axiom, if I were to go by personal example. With yet another calender year approaching, and the prospects of my becoming famous or notorious remaining equally dim, I propose to inflict you with some more self-indulgence, as if you are not saturated already. Here goes an eight line summary of my life and attitude. Happy new year in advance everyone. May you all make yourselves happy and smiling the way you want others to make you happy and smiling.

In the rear of my heart,

jostles plenty of muck and dirt,

with a few floating drops of kindness left,

after half a life devoted to ideas' theft.

You are a bright idea,

i say stay away from me,

or i'll go get all the trivia,

and rustle them into ecstacy!

Once again

Here's another song in my clumsy translation. This one is slighltly more untranslatable than the earlier two. That is for the simple reason that this is a Chandrabindu song. I have been living out of Bengal for far too long to sense properly their popularity but I must confess right away that these guys write great lyrics. All their lyrics are witty and sensitive at the same time, a combination I started to feel the Bengalis had lost forever before I came across Chandrabindu a year and a half ago. In terms of tunes alone, they are not the best thing to have happened to Bengali music in the last century. When it comes to lyrics,however, they are right up there with the very best. This particular piece is a soft, lilting ballad called Eita Tomar Gaan or This is your song. You will get many versions of this song all over the net. Therefore, I have not bothered to attach a link. The following is my translated version. As usual, I'll feel good if you like it. If you don't, I'll try again or wait for your translation. Better still, we'll both enjoy the lyrics anyway.

Your song

This one’s for you dear, you skim in
Like moonbeams during power cuts, in the din,
like dollops of sunny rays bathing my room
I open windows, just out of a fever, you loom.

Waters deep down, crystal clear,
of the lake over there,
Reflecting the happy rays,
On lazy Holidays,
sparkles so calming,
I gift you this soft, little leaf,
Wrapped so tenderly by this red sheaf,
This scrapbook of mine, here.


This one’s for you, you the tender
Ache on lips only just unlocked, you are
The lone little bird, lost in thought,
Before the deep-unfurling waters, caught
Unawares; Let me gift you the warmth
Of caressing this romance of leisure


This is your song, for I send you mate
smell of your sari whipping the rainlashes wet,
thirsty cloudlets suckling in pleasure,
I stand satiated, no more tunes to set.

trans-lesson

Tagore is therapeutic to most Bengalis and I am no exception. I have been listening to many Tagore songs lately, and they help me cope in general. This particular one, and I am attaching the link below, I have been very carefully listening for the past few days and trying to understand. Needless to say, each session is opening out new heights and depths. I think this is the best possible version of the song and I suppose you'd like it too, in case you have not heard this version already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHD9L8wmNnM&feature=related

As has become my wont in recent months, I diffidently attempted a translation. There are a few versions available on the net but they are all uniformly verbose. I am aware of the Sahitya Academy trnslations but have not read them. I am sure they are going to be less syrupy than these amateur versions on the net. Anyway, here goes my version. Read if you like. Or skip if it does not interest you. I had fun doing it and that is good enough for me.

Shudhu Jaoa Asa

Merely keeping to the flow,
Back and forth,
Day and night,
In happiness and sorrow.


Merely a glance,
Or a caress, a warm embrace,
That last, craving look,
Eyes moist, that trance,
Then lets off the hook
More daring wishes,
Leaving by the wayside,
This one little chance.


Dreams so many, but
with wings Clipped,
even sincere efforts
see ends undercut.
A broken, lone, boat
Amid the vast sea float,
Emotions voices seek,
attempt, struggle, turn meek.


Hearts, with tales still untold,
The tryst not climaxed yet,
Grope, in fear and anticipation old,
For hope; love only in half they get.

Redeeming the system

I must begin with a disaclaimer. Searing honsety and absolute fealty to truth under all circuamstances are not my forte. I go by the axiom that rules must be followed unless you see others breaking them blantantly, and truth must be ahhered to unless it seriously impedes a positive and desirable outcome, individually as well as collectively. That is why I find myself somewhat uncomfortable with the moral position, far too often taken in public debates, that you cannot criticize anyone if you yourself have once committed anologous mistakes. I think this is a hideously arrogant ploy on the part of opinion leaders to maintain their monopoly, and deny new, more robust voices an adequate platform. Therefore, I begin with thanking the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who once famously said that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. The following is a story of an encounter between me and a couple of other men I met yesterday at New Delhi Railway station. I begin with a description of the circumstances under which we met and then proceed to raise some questions and conclude with a reaffirmation of my faith in the system. I believe that if the system has not worked to our satisfaction, it his because we have failed to make it work. Correspondingly, if it is to work successfully, it is us who must come forward and contribute our bit, faithfully and regularly.

I had to drop a friend to the New Delhi station in time for him to board the Howrah Rajdhani express which leaves at five in the evening. We left campus at three thrity and by regular standrads would have reached the station by fifteen past four. I know these calculations well because I have myself boarded this particular train several times in the recent past.

Yesterday, however, turned out to be an irregular day. It was the birthday of Indira Gandhi, one of our former Prime Ministers, and since the party to which she belonged is in power now, many of her devotees who also happen to be important minsiters, fanned out in all directions to garland her statues and sing her praises in public all over the city. These leaders must not be faulted, for the constutitution of almost all political parties in India is such that if they don't do this, they stand to lose their power and authority. Now since these eminences cannot travel alone as their lives as ministers are deemed more valuable than yours or mine. They are therefore protected round the clock by a mighty entourage of vehicles and armed personnel of various levels of competence. A solitary entourage of this sort is good enough to block the traffic of all the roads it travels through for several minutes and yesterday we have had several of them on the road, all along the day, non stop. Together, they nearly brought the city to halt, and kept it that way.

If that was not bad enough, some other political leaders, ones who belong to other parties, had chosen to organize their own party. They had felt that the present government has not been doing much to improve the lot of peasants, especially the sugarcane farmers. They called upon the sugarcane farmers from various corners of the country to descend upon the streets of the capital and shout slogans, in order possibly to make their resentments pierce the eardrums of the deaf government. It is appropriate, these opposition leaders worked out, that such a grand show of their strength is staged on the birth anniversary of the second tallest leader ever of the ruling party.

There we ordinary mortals were then, sandwitched between the devil and the deep sea. Mercifully, we had hired the services of a most spirited youthful autorickshaw driver. He said he had been driving autos for the past twelve years, ever since he wrote his school final examinations at fifteen, and swore that he would somehow take us to the station by five. He moved in and out of several alleys and bylanes, braved at least eight roadblocks, and somehow made it to the station with exactly five minutes to spare.

Now Howrah Rajdhani departs from platform number eleven and the heroic autorickshaw driver had dropped us at the entrance of the Ajmeri Gate side of the station. Those familiar with the architecture of the station would know that we still had at least three to four minutes of full fledged running ahead of us, apart from the climb up the stairs. This was, in short, an emergency, and between three of us, we had to carry four reasonably heavy suitcases and travelbags.

We did make it to the right compartment, with only about twenty odd seconds left for the train to whistle off. It is on our way back that we, that is, a junior and I, were intercepted by these two gentlemen. More on the meeting will follow.

Maoists, train hijack, Bhagat Singh, death:a few questions

This is going to be a note partly on popular history and partly on popular politics. Let me correct myself at the outset and replace the term popular with populist. I shall present an incident that has happened yesterday and present, through making some observations on its coverage in the media, a critique of both populist history and populist politics in as practiced in india today. Broadly speaking, it is also a commentary on the irresponsibility of the media, both print and electronic.

Earlier this morning I had been listening to a programme in the most popular FM radio channel in New Delhi. This programme, to give the devil his due, generally airs good songs, interspersed by mostly mindless remarks by its two presenters. It so happened today that they flew into a rage about the hijacking of a Delhi bound Bhubaneswar Rajdhani express by a band of bow and arrow wielding traibals near Jhargram in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, admittedly a stronghold of Maoists.

They compared this episode with the Kakory conspiracy case, where Bhagat Singh and his associates waylaid a train carrying huge amounts of money collected from people as revenues to the state, and made off with a few iron chests conatining substantial cash. They said that this latter act was one of great patriotism and must not be confused with the dastardly conduct of these unpatriotic tribals who persecute their own people. They kept harping on this diffrenece, invoking 'nationalism' and 'patriotism' to sanctify and distinguish one robbery from another. I was struck by this simple equation of nationalism and patriotism. Even in Hindi they have two separate words for these two terms-jatiyatawad/rashtriyatawad and deshbhakti respectively. I know for a fact that practically all decent schoolteachers do spell out the conceptual difference between them with care. May be you go to a different school to become the most popular deejays in Delhi. I wonder how you can annoint Gandhi the father of your nation and in the same breath rationalize a violent train robbery. More importantly, how do you call one train robbery a protest and another a robbery, especially when both are admittedly targetted against the perceived atrocities of an arguably arbitrary state? Is the so called analytical difference then tethered only to the seats of power and authority? If you happen to belong to the ruling class, then protesters are train robbers and if you do not belong to the ruling class, then train robbers are protesters. Are we going to ask our people to consume this simple a potion?

This is a rhetorical question, but one whose time has come. My question therefore is how we are going to resolve this central methodological contradiction of Indian nation state sponsored nationalism. It appears as though this debate has already been decided by everyone except yokels like yours truly. Don't just think about it, the preachers appear to scream, aren't we paid to teach you the right thing after all?

The deejays then proceeded, I think rightly so, to an impromptu quiz question, asking the audience to name the place where this great train robbery took place. As a clue, they said that a certain kind of kebabs are named after this place. I was very closely attending to their intersting chitchats, and trying to follow the kind of popular nationalist narrative that they were evidently trying to construct and wanted their their listeners to consume.

What is this narrative like? It implies, to exapnd on the point I made above, that robbing a train is good if it is carrying money to be used for the benefit of foreigners in a narrowly ethnic sense. Correspondigly, it demands that no means of public transport, least of all Rajdhani expresses and aeroplanes, may be halted for any reason whatsoever as long as it carries people belonging to the same nation-state as the protesters.

It is time to spoil this juvenile party now. What exactly does this uncritical and uninformed celebration of ethnic nationalism mean to communicate to its peddlers and consumers? This idea of nationalism is precisely what the ruling classes of the post independence Indian nation state wish its 'citizens' to obey without question. Do please read Indivar Kamtekar's wonderfully penetrating piece 'the Fables of Nationalism' if you want to know more. I have neither his elegant language nor his disarming candour and so would stop short of giving you a summary unless you have failed to locate the piece.

To everyone who bothers to read nonsensewares, I have a simple request. Please take some time out to think about this issue. It is an issue that has profound implications on the ongoing debate about the role of history in our life and conduct. Of late I have been observing an alrming trend among our youths to pay no heed to history. They think history is a chain with which we are handcuffed, as Salman Rushdie memorably wrote long ago. In this confusion some clerver people and commentators have spotted an opportunity to make quick bucks, posing as readymade retailers of populist history. The two smart rjays are probably unwitting victims of this lifestyle disease but its more glamourous victims include some of the most famous and readable contemporary non fiction prose writers in this country. These latter write more often for popular media, dishing out wonderfully uncomplicated versions of what they ordain as history. They can afford to do so, for they write lucid prose, lit up by smart metaphors and even smarter turns of phrase.I admire their prose, spellbound by its ironic blend of linguistic mastery and average scholarship. In this day and age of packaging, substance has been forced to take a backseat, if not altogether unseated. I live with the hope that this too shall pass, and I shall live to see a brighter tomorrow.

anger management

Anger and hatred do not come to me very easily. This is one of the major reasons of whatever little good I have done in life and also of the failures that I have successfully accomplished. I believe anger makes one lose one's sense of proportion and commit mistakes. Since I cannot handle anger, I normally stay away from it.

Anger, like atom bomb, is more effective when it is a potential. Others must somehow be made to see that you might just get angry someday. It is the threat that even a quiet chap can sometime fly off the handle that brings people around. But this resource must not be abused, and used very very sparingly. What is the need to burst up in flames when a firm stare or a wave of hand can do?

It worked today. A senior who normally works under another senior got a chance to officiate for a while. This officiting senior promptly got down to showing everybody who the new boss is, for the time being, that is. I was instructed, in the name of a very senior official, to carry out a task that is normally reserved for some other, specific, individuals, none of whom was absent. In response, I tried to reason but was repreatedly told that the instruction came from this other senior person.

Now till a year or two ago I used to take all this lying down since I had this fear of losing such as losing money, losing face and so on. These days I have stopped bothering about such profound things since I know that these things are only partly determined by my actions, no matter how much sincerity I invest in performing them.

Things have changed since. Once I saw that reasoning with this person won't take me very far, I decided to the next logical thing. This was a bit of a bold decision because this other senior is pretty high up in the pecking order. Fortunately, I had no problem in reching this senior's office and securing an appointment. This was in itself a matter of some chance but the lady luck was in my favour this time. On being asked politely whether my senior was directed by by him to ask me to do someone else's job, he flatly replied that he had no knowldge of this fiat and that he would be fine if I continued doing the jobs normally allotted to me. He was in fact generous enough to offer to give my immediate senior a piece of his mind on this issue. But I had no intention to pick up a fight with anyone, least of all with an immediate senior.

Clear in my head and no longer angry at receiving an arbitrary order from someone who I think does not know how to handle authority very well, I politely approached the colleagues who normally handle the job concerened, suggesting them to conitnue with the present arrangemnt till further orders from above.

I strongly feel my immediate senior should not have dragged this super senior official into such a small affair as asking a junior to do a job that's slightly unfit for him. Does this mean that this senior actually knew that the idea was not exactly above board? May be that is why it was felt necessary to invoke the authority of a super senior, to preempt any protest from my side, that is. I am not writing this to show the public my fiery conscience and all that. Rubbish. I know who I am and I don't want public support or opprobrium, thank you very much. But I liked the way I was able to channelize my anger into the something not so deplorable, if not constructive. I have to thank my immediate colleagues who sensed at once that I was getting disoriented and took me out for a cup of tea and spoke to me softly, quietining me down. They have never seen me angry and they did not like what they saw. I know only too well that I cannot manage anger. That is why I just dread it. It unsettles you majorly. Today, however, I learnt a crucial lesson. If people around you offer a little help and you are able to channelize it into the right directions, anger often proves productive in very interesting ways.