1.
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – being drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands, tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images. Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me? What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky. He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me? Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore?
2.
Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody - the Surgeon of all Surgeons - is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north-eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neons blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Bhopal, Bengal Politics, Al Gore, Way To Go
As I listened to the verdict of a Bhopal Court in connection with the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy on TV yesterday night, I felt a surge of rage rocking my body: all the more heightened by the pictures of Raghu Rai taken a day after the incident had happened converting Bhopal into a city of death. The verdict sounded so bizarre, absurd and out of proportion that I felt like doing something dramatic and equally insane to match its banality. Political democracy works on the fundamental premise of the existence of a nation-state, which is an aggregate of its institutions. When these institutions become subservient to corporate interests repeatedly by design one cannot help concluding that political democracy is a failed idea, rather an idea that was essentially designed as a long-term cloak / veil to shadow the true interests of its original thinkers: patrons of free-market economy who later on became ruthless colonialists and much later, imperialists. What do you do to a group of well-bred and educated people responsible for the crime of killing over 20,000 people; maiming 100,000 people; creating genetic disorder to many (to be transferred congenitally to generations to come), and caused irreversible damage to the environment and ecology of a city beyond repair; and further that invisible cluster of people who are responsible for letting the former group go scot-free? Does this question sound as if it was transported out of a revenge thriller? It makes me laugh to think that the original petitioners (activists out of victim communities) in the case were not even allowed to enter the Court yesterday and Section 144 was imposed around the Court premises in apprehension of reprisals from activists and victim groups! Most of them were seen crying after the verdict was out.
What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.
Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.
I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?
What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.
Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.
I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Underground
1.
What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.
Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?
Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.
I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.
The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.
Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.
Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.
Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.
Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.
What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.
Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?
Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.
I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.
The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.
Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.
Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.
Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.
Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.
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