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?

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.