The Great Coatlicue

One of the benefits of having being in a large university is the easy online access to magazines and journals. I now have free access to all essays in New York Review of Books. I check the site all the time, returning again and again to the two writers whose interpretations of world history leave me breathless, and wanting more. These are writers you’ve seen often quoted in this space: VS Naipaul and Octavio Paz.

It’s the latter’s essay, The Power of Ancient Mexican Art, that I’ll excerpting in this post. I read it first about two years ago, and it still holds me in thrall.

Paz begins the essay with a fortuitous discovery that took place in 1790, when municipal authorities were digging up the Central Square in Mexico City. They stumbled upon a colossal statue, two meters tall and two tons in weight. It was of the goddess Coatlicue, the “Lady of the Serpent Skirt”. The Viceroy ordered that the statue be taken to the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, as a “monument of America’s ancient past.” There was discomfort, however. “The Aztec idol might have rekindled ancient beliefs in the memories of the Indians and, above all, its presence in the cloisters was seen as an insult to the very idea of beauty.”

The idol was buried again, re-interred for a brief period in the early 19th century, and back it went to the earth, its presence too awe-inspiring to be bearable. It was dug up again, years after the Mexican independence movement. It changed locations a couple of times before occupying a prominent place at the famous National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Having told Coatlicue’s story, Paz then analyzes, brilliantly, how differently the statue has been perceived over the centuries:

The changing fortunes of the Coatlicue—from goddess to demon, from demon to monster, and from monster to masterpiece—illustrate the changes in our sensibility over the last four hundred years. These changes reflect the increasing secularization that characterizes the modern age. The opposition between the Aztec priest, who worshiped her as a goddess, and the Spanish friar, for whom she was a demoniacal manifestation, is not as total as it seems at first sight. For both of them the Coatlicue represented a supernatural presence, a mysterium tremendum. The difference between the eighteenth-century attitude and that of the twentieth century also betrays a similarity: the condemnation of the former and the enthusiasm of the latter both respond to a primarily intellectual and aesthetic criterion. From the end of the eighteenth century the Coatlicue abandons the magnetic realm of the supernatural in order to enter the corridors of aesthetic and anthropological speculation. She ceases to embody a crystallization of the powers of the beyond in order to become an episode in the history of mankind's beliefs. As she leaves the temple and enters the museum, there is a change in her nature if not in her appearance.

Such change in perception! And yet the magic of Coatlicue, the effect it has on those who view it, is in some sense immutable. I wonder which of the great masterpieces of our time – our buildings perhaps, or the movies or the gadgets we adore – will survive the test of time. And how will someone far in the future think of them, when he looks upon them with curiosity, and tries to understand us?
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To finish, here's one more excellent paragraph, Paz's meditation on the art of ancient societies :

Art survives the societies in which it is created. It is the visible tip of the submerged iceberg that represents every civilization. The recovery of the art of ancient Mexico has taken place in the twentieth century. First, there was archaeological and historical research: later, aesthetic comprehension. It is often said that this understanding is an illusion: what we feel, when confronted by a relief from Palenque, is not what the Maya experienced. This is true. But it is also true that our feelings and thoughts about the work are quite real. Our understanding is not an illusion: it is ambiguous. This ambiguity is present in all our views of works from other civilizations and even in our ideas about works from our own past. We are not Greeks, Chinese, or Arabs; neither can we say that we fully comprehend Romanesque or Byzantine sculpture. Our only recourse is to translate, and each of these translations, whether it be of Gothic or Egyptian art, is a metaphor, a transmutation of the original.

Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk

One of the best books I’ve read this year is Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives. The title might sound a little like a self-help manual, but the book certainly isn’t. Instead, it’s one of the most eye-opening and philosophical texts I’ve read, the sort that changes the way you think and look at things. Mlodinow presents many great ideas, and I don’t have the time to review them, but here are some quotes that I feel encapsulate Mlodinow’s main points.

“…much of the order we perceive in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.”

“Human perception, Faraday recognized, is not a direct consequence of reality but rather an act of imagination.”

“…in all aspects of our lives we encounter streaks and other peculiar patterns of success and failure. Sometimes success predominates, sometimes failure. Either way it is important in our own lives to take the long view and understand that streaks and other patterns that don’t appear random can indeed happen by pure chance. It is also important, when assessing others, to recognize that among a large group of people it would be very odd if one of them didn’t experience a long streak of successes or failures.” [Mlodinow's italics]

“The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation – the role of chance.”

Wupatki National Monument

Here's a picture that I really like - taken at the Wupatki National Monument near Flagstaff, Arizona when I visited a few years ago. These ruins are from around the 11th century, remnants of the societies of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples, specifically the Sinagua. These names might not mean much to readers: American Indian history has never been mainstream, even though there are some startling historical sites which make you think and question.


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Meanwhile, here's what's coming up soon: posts/essays on some of the travel I've done in the last year and a half. I'll write about my drive from Minnesota to Massachusetts; my trip to Chihuahua in May 2007; and to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in August 2007. The last two I have been composing in my mind for too long; now is the time (although life in general is very busy), to get them down on paper.

On the Mississippi, the American West, and some other scattered thoughts

The headwaters of the Mississippi lie in central-north Minnesota, in Itasca State Park, not far from the mysterious-sounding town of Bemidji. From this remote corner of the United States, the Mississippi, only a thin, fordable stream at its origin, winds its way around the state, gathers strength, and by the time it reaches Minneapolis and St.Paul, it looks the grand river that it is. Its meander defines the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota; further south, near St.Louis, it joins with the equally large Missouri. In fact, I’ve often wondered why the subsequent flow was attributed to the Mississippi when the Missouri’s journey, beginning in far-away Montana, is just as significant and noteworthy; if anything the Missouri travels a longer distance. The confluence of the two rivers then flows hundreds of miles south before emptying in the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana.

In Minnesota, I lived about 40 miles away from the Mississippi. The river, I was told, was a geographical marker: the deciduous forests and woodlands of Eastern United States ended with it, and the great prairie began west of it. But the Mississippi is also a cultural marker: the American West begins with the river. I feel a thrill whenever I think of this – it is a thrill that echoes the anticipation and uncertainty with which Americans would have viewed the still unexplored West in the 19th century. For it was in the first decade of that century that the Lewis and Clarke Expedition began their westward exploration from St.Louis. St.Louis, in fact, has a massive arch, a commemoration of that journey which laid the basis for the territorial expansion of America from “sea to shining sea”.

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I began my time in the United States in hot and arid Arizona in the fall of 2000. The “Wild West” stereotype – as I knew it back in India – seemed perfectly justified there: rugged landscapes; old, abandoned mining towns that have been revived for tourists today and enact famous fights (such as the OK Corral fight in Tombstone); souvenir shops that sell saddles, Stetsons and cowboy paraphernalia; and invariably some mention of Indians – Indians of a different kind of course: Navajos, Apaches, Hopis, Zunis, Pimas, and dozens of others, largely forgotten people, but who still live in remote reservations. (In fact, it was always a pleasure introducing myself in these reservations: eyebrows would arch in surprise and acknowledgment: “Oh, so you are the real Indian!”)

Things were different in Minnesota, but not that different. Minnesota is strongly rooted in its immigrant Scandinavian past and its Lutheran traditions, yet it still felt like the West; it had all the feel of a land that had once been the frontier, and settled only recently (roughly a century and a half). There was, besides, still talk – in radio shows like the Prairie Home Companion, even if it was mostly jest – of cowboys on horses riding the dusty plains; and still that reminder in the names of towns (Wanamingo, Wabasha) and the small reservations that dot the state, that Indians once lived here and had been dispossessed – the Dakota, the Ojibwa, the Winnebago.

And just recently, I’ve moved east, to Massachusetts – well east of the Mississippi. I am always told the East has a lot more history. And though I’ve been here only for a week, I can see some things are different. Houses here crowd upon each other and do not have the same sprawl that I am used to. The network of roads and back roads possess a haphazardness that comes with a longer history. The towns here were formed before the United States came into existence. We’re talking 18th century here, or sometimes 17th century – still recent, I know, for those from other parts of the world, used to millennia of continuous history, but old in the American sense of the term. There are fewer reservations here and that suggests land usurpation has been more comprehensive.
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To dramatize, you could say I’ve traveled the American 19th century westward migration in reverse: from Arizona, one of the last few states to form, to Minnesota where the Mississippi originates and where the American West begins, and now to Massachusetts.

And it is symbolic that on the coast of Massachusetts, less than a three hour drive from where I am, is Plymouth, where, as many of you may know, a tenuous British colony established itself in 1620. It was the second such colony, the first being the Jamestown one in Virginia. Both were critical in that they laid the foundation for more immigration, and eventually, in a century and a half, led to the formation of the United States.

On Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A meandering review-essay

A significant caveat: I have never traveled to Africa, and therefore this is only armchair analysis. But one has to begin somewhere when one wants to engage with a topic or a region; and I do hope that whatever I read on Africa will be followed in the future with actual travel. Once I get to visit, my accounts will probably be more specific; I’ll probably be writing about a particular city or theme, rather than something as grand as the whole continent.

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Could a book have a bleaker title, a more damning indictment? The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Depths of Despair – what does it convey but gloominess, that Africa has hit rock bottom in all respects. There is good reason, one might say, for such pessimism: all the afflictions the world has seen in its entire history –starvation, totalitarianism, disease, genocide – have played themselves out in crippling fashion in Africa since Ghana’s landmark independence in 1957.

Why did things turn out this way? The answers, as always, are too complex to summarize in a few lines or even a book. European colonialism clearly played a major role, apportioning the continent according to its own whims and needs in the 19th century, creating arbitrary boundaries and forcing ethnic groups together that were not natural nations. Africa’s lack of large empires– if one ignores ancient Egypt, whose affiliations were as much Mediterranean as Nubian – meant there were no surviving institutions or an administrative framework (as existed in China and the Indian subcontinent) to mediate its encounter with Europe. And what did exist in some places broke under the weight of that infamous institution, slavery.

Consider one of the early interactions between Europe and Africa. When the Portuguese reached the mouth of the Congo as early as the 15th century, they found the sophisticated Kingdom of the Kongo, which encompassed a large area, and had an elaborate administrative system. Yet, within a hundred years, slave driving had devastated the kingdom. Slavery had existed in Congo earlier – as it had in virtually all regions of the world – but it worsened acutely as the Portuguese expanded in the New World.

(Depiction of the Kongo royalty encountering the Portuguese, from here.)

From those early times in the 15th century to the 19th, European physical presence in Africa was a faint imprint, but the demand for slaves had profound implications. The interior was largely unexplored, but played the relay role in the slave trade: supply and demand balancing out neatly, Africans as complicit in it as the Europeans.

It was only in the 19th century – with the help of so-called "journalist-explorers" like Henry Stanley, Africa’s most famous conquistador – that the interior of continent was mapped and opened for greater European control. About eight decades of colonialism later, as independence and sovereignty became the rage the world over, African nations awoke to their possibilities. But to join the modern world, one has to have the apparatus and institutions of modernity, and African nations were found lacking. Further, their leaders were faced with a most difficult task: “to weld into nations a variety of different peoples”, as Meredith puts it. The Cold War and the business of taking sides – a deadly one, whichever way you swung – wreaked havoc on many countries, Angola being a prime example. Caught in the crossfire, and betrayed by their own political elite who in rapaciousness sometimes surpassed their colonial predecessors, nations lurched from crisis to crisis. To compound the issue, Africa was saddled with one of the deadliest diseases in modern history. Even in Botswana, a successful country with little corruption and good infrastructure, approximately one in six Botswanans carries HIV.

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This, then, is the setting and context of Martin Meredith’s book, an encyclopedic digest of the politics and tragedies of Africa since 1957. From Ghana to Rwanda, from Algeria to South Africa, there is little that Meredith leaves untouched. The book inevitably chronicles a numbing sequence of mismanagements, civil wars, and cruelties. “Some 150,000 died,” he says while describing one crisis – I forget which – and moves on. Casually put, but apt: since so much has happened, numbers do not have the same impact or significance. One country blends into another; brutalities are eerily similar. As Meredith says at the beginning of the book, “Africa is a continent of great diversity but African states have much in common, especially misfortunes.”

Nevertheless, the book avoids generalities, and proceeds case by case. Beginning with Ghana in 1957, and moving chronologically on to other powerhouses – Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe – as well as covering a host of other smaller nations, Meredith reconstructs their post-independence histories. His account is strangely mixed: it sometimes reads like a dull newspaper article full of facts and figures; at other times it is insightful, expertly deconstructing famous African leaders – Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Mobutu, Thabo Mbeki – and their blunders.

Along with these piecewise narratives about nations and their trajectories, something of the larger geopolitics of Africa emerges too. When Angola slid into war, how did other countries align themselves? What were the dynamics during the Cold War? What were the consequences of America supporting Mobutu? What happened after the Rwandan genocide ended? If one is willing to patiently make the broader connections – which can get lost in a book of this size – the book is rewarding. For instance, the conflict in Rwanda did not end with the end of the genocide; it spilled over into the Congo, and continues to cause problems today. The resources of the Congo, in turn, acted like a vortex, enticing leaders of several neighboring countries – Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda among others made untold riches even as war devastated the region in the late 90s.

While Meredith’s writing is lucid, it is devoid of the spark that the drama of personal discovery can add to such a narrative. But he probably wanted the most objective evaluation of Africa’s plight. His style is clearly that of a reporter's – Meredith was a foreign correspondent in Africa, and wrote for London Times and the Observer. His fundamental point, though, comes through very clearly: that Africa’s failure can be attributed to its leaders and politicians. His conclusion is summarized neatly by a quote of the famous Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe was writing about Nigeria, but his point applies broadly:

“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

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The book’s title – a denouement of sorts – might indicate there is little chance of the continent redeeming itself. If one looks at the conflict that erupted after Kenya’s elections last December, or the never-ending authoritarianism of Mugabe, one might be tempted to agree with such a view. But history works in strange ways; no region or people can be written off. Already a broad pan-African sensibility is emerging, spurred by the common suffering of the last century and a half. The African Union, however ineffective it may seem to external observers, is an expression of that commonness. A larger sentiment was also at work when John Kufor and Kofi Annan of Ghana attempted to mediate the crises between the sparring Kenyan leaders, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga early this year.

More importantly, Africa is better connected now – in terms of trade (though much more can be done on this front) and exchange of ideas – than ever before in history. Isolation, whether geographic or self-imposed, has been the bane of many societies. The Native Americans and the Aborigines of Australia, cut off as they were from the ideas, innovations and material goods of Europe and Asia for millennia, suffered immensely because of it. The same could be said of parts of Africa. But unlike the Native Americans, who declined in large numbers owing to European diseases, colonization and settlement and were thus unable to define their own destinies, Africans have another chance.

There is an additional aspect to this story of globalization: Already China and India are heavily engaged in Africa, and have sparked off a new scramble for its resources. To some this too is exploitation, the 21st century version, in essence similar to Europe’s plunder of Africa. China’s burgeoning presence in particular is raising some questions. But in the end, such exchanges of skills, ideas and material goods, if they happen gradually and if they are managed well – and that latter if is a big if – are mutually beneficial. Even in ancient times, the most powerful and robust societies were those that were well positioned to use the innovations of other regions. Africa will have to use its opportunity, and one feels it is the heavyweights – Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa – that will have to lead the way.

Moving places

I drive tomorrow, from the Midwest to the East Coast, to Amherst, Massachusetts, where I'll be starting an academic position at UMass. It'll be a long drive, and I probably won't have internet access for at least a week. And given the time it takes to settle down and all that, it might take longer for me to get back to blogging (I have to begin to teach as well in ten days). Until then, I ask for your patience - that is to those who regularly read this blog, however small that group might be.

Bales of hay

There is a rather specific and strange calling that I have, and it is studying and appreciating bales of hay arrayed upon farms. How odd, you might say, that I should focus on something so plebeian. But I’ve been drawn to them ever since I first noticed them on my long road trip through South Dakota last August. This past weekend, as I traveled in a wide arc through central-north and north-east Minnesota, I was mesmerized again. It helped that in this part of the state – unlike in the south where corn and soy-beans are the staple – all farms are hay farms. And August is the time that tractors run through the farms and roll the hay up into bales.

Why do I like them? Because they are large and cylindrical, grand-looking, about half my height; there’s also something in the way they are arrayed, something in the symmetry - the light brown of hay going well with the green of the grass, and the tractor trails still fresh. Driving lazily through the deserted back roads of the Fond du Lac reservation near Lake Superior, I came upon a farm with a significant number of these rolled beauties. The perimeter of the farm was lined by clumps of yellow wildflowers, and they added to the prettiness and sense of idyll. I wish I was a better picture-taker; you’ll have to do with these for now. Click on the pictures to fully appreciate - I insist: size matters and there are many details that become evident.



(The second one, I took last year, at a place in South Dakota, a hamlet really, with a double digit population.)

A peripheral fact: the roof of a gas station - opposite which I found the farm this year - had this long name, not unlike my own: Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig. This is the Chippewa Indian word that translates roughly to Fond du Lac store - the actual store, not in the picture, is to the right.

The grand travel writing of Naipaul

No one analyzes or sums up societies so swiftly and so startlingly as VS Naipaul. There is something like magic in his sweeping assessments; they are abstract, thrilling and they challenge. Naipaul's novels might be famous, but it is his travel writing that I really like.

Consider this excerpt from Among the Believers, where, from the evidence around him, Naipaul quickly summarizes Indonesia's history and how it is a country with a strong connection to its past:

To be in Jakarta was to be in a country with a sense of its past. And that past went beyond the freedom struggle and colonial times. The Dutch had ruled for more than three hundred years; Jakarta was the city they had called Batavia. But the Dutch language was nowhere to be seen. The language everywhere, in Roman letters, was Indonesian, and the roots of some of the words were Sanskrit. Jakarta itself – no longer Batavia – was a Sanskrit name, the “city of victory”. And Sanskrit, occurring so far east, caused the mind to back centuries.

The hotel [where Naipaul stayed] was known as the Borobodur Intercontinental, after the ninth-century Buddhist temple in central Java. The ground plan of that great nine-terraced temple was the basis of the hotel logo: three concentric dotted circles within five rectangles, stepped at the corners with a rippling effect. It was stamped on ashtrays; it was woven into the carpets in the elevators; it was rendered in tiles on the floor of the large pool, where the ripple of the blue water added to the ripple of the pattern.

Indonesia, like Malaysia, was a Muslim country. But the pre-Islamic past, which in Malaysia seemed to be only a matter of village customs, in Indonesia – or Java – showed as a great civilization. Islam, which had come only in the fifteenth century, was the formal faith. But the Hindu-Buddhist past, which had lasted for fourteen hundred years before that, survived in many ways – half erased, slightly mysterious, but still awesome, like Borobodur itself. And it was this past which gave Indonesians – or Javanese – the feeling of their uniqueness.

It’s a recurrent theme in Naipaul’s writing: his nostalgia for erstwhile Hindu-Buddhist glory, and his hostility to its erosion by later Islamic influences. One may or may not agree with his interpretations but the writing is remarkable. The best part of Naipaul’s travel books is his ability to combine his grand, if sometimes shaky, ideas with the stories of the numerous people he meets: a sort of merging of the abstract with the specific. Naipaul listens and questions carefully; and there is a tension in this dialogue. His own prejudices shape the narrative of the people among whom he travels, but he also steps back often and the stories stand for themselves. India: A Million Mutinies Now, written in this fashion, is in my opinion one of the best assessments of the country in recent times.

Update, Aug 11: And it appears that Naipaul is now writing a non-fiction book on Africa. He's already been to Uganda, is now in Nigeria, and plans to travel to other West African countries and South Africa. What will he have to say, I wonder. A Bend in the River is the Naipaul book I like the least - I found it quite vain and self-obsessed - but his travel pieces about Zaire and Ivory Coast in 1970s were on a different plane. It's possible that on this trip to Africa, some of his opinions about the continent will change, as his ideas of India have over the years. You'll find some of his preliminary thoughts on Nigeria in this interview with a Nigerian newspaper. It's only an interview - which is different from writing, especially in the case of Naipaul - but one still sees here that same tendency to make quick but fairly accurate assessments. (Interview link through Amitava.)

And here’s one of my older posts about Naipaul, where he discusses his methods in travel writing.

The ugliness of the Indian male

Mukul Kesavan’s The Ugliness of the Indian Male contains a controversial proposition: that Indian males are ugly, largely because of their disgusting habits. And on what basis is this proposition made? Kesavan writes:

Let’s start with the extremities. Examine the nails of any Indian man: the cuticles will be yellow with haldi and the underside of the bitten-off tip will be spotty with accumulated dirt. When you think of where they put those nails, this is not surprising. I’ve seen respectable men conducting conversations with their index fingers two digits deep in their nostrils, digging with industrial enthusiasm. If you ever see a desi man delicately rubbing the tip of his index over the pad of his thumb, beware. Don’t do near him: he’s rolling the bogies he’s mined into little balls.

He uses those same fingers to adjust himself in public. All Indian men do this, without exception. The refined ones do it furtively, but the majority do it openly without shame or embarrassment. A famous Indian batsman does this regularly with the butt end of his bat handle under the gaze of thousands of spectators. You can’t do this and be goodlooking, you really can’t. You could be John Abraham (an exception to the ugly rule) and your looks wouldn’t survive this particular habit. And if it isn’t thumb and forefinger it’s the pinkie inserted into the ear and vibrated with manic vigor. This generally comes with eye-rolling and little oinks of pleasure. You’ll never see Indian women do this, only men. It’s an important route to ugliness.

I’ll have to confess that as an adult Indian man, I may have been guilty of some of the things stated – whether in a refined, furtive way, or publicly, I won’t reveal. But if you are enraged by this sexist claim of Kesavan’s don’t hesitate to protest. And what do Indian women have to say to this, I wonder?

I know for sure that Indian men have a lot to say about Indian women. When I was in college in Trichy - in a hostel with 400 sexually-unfulfilled, testosterone-charged guys - all sorts of depraved comments were made about the few girls who also studied with us, and who lived in a separate hostel. It was quite offensive, I must say; I can't even mention any of it. The strange thing is that not a single one of them had the courage to say anything in the company of the same girls.

So: Kesavan's view applies not only to some unclean habits, but also to what spews from the mouths of some frustrated young Indian men.

Starving billionaire

Zimbabwe's inflation problem, wittily portrayed with a smile. Picture from here. Earlier posts on Zimbabwe: 1 and 2.

Fishing pox

While traveling along the Mississippi last weekend – I refer to the portion of the river that divides Minnesota from Wisconsin, better known as the Upper Mississippi – I went briefly to a fishing spot. A number of people were casting their baits far into the river, from the sandy shore or from the wooden planks of the shanty, and striking it rich.

Just to clarify: I didn't fish myself, and only watched others fishing. What made my day that day, though, was this ominous sign at the same spot:

That, more than anything else, said something about the sense of humor of Upper Mississippians. I even thought, for a moment, that the round, terrifying eye of the fish in the sign actually winked at me.

The Hirsh Sawhney interview of Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra returns to form in this interview with Hirsh Sawhney (though this is a 2007 interview). I say return to form because Mishra has published some very dull essays in the last couple of years - long, meandering polemics on capitalism and globalization. His views remain the same, but his take on Afghanistan, his contempt for the term “war or terror”, and most insightful of all, his thoughts on how institutions of powerful nation states keep conflicts and hypocrisies going – all come together cohesively in his responses to Hirsh Sawhney's questions, and reveal a complex picture. Indian bloggers regularly lampoon Mishra – with good reason – but I think there’s good reason also to stop and listen to what he says, especially when he is in his element.

Here are Mishra's views on Afghanistan's recent history , and why things turned out the way they did there. This to me was one of the best parts of the interview:

"When you look at the recent history of Afghanistan there is, other than the Taliban, no force there trying to unify the country or to create a nation out of its patchwork of ethnic communities. Why did they emerge when they did in the mid-1990s? To ask that question we must look very closely at how Afghanistan has been dealt this terrible hand by the Soviet Union, the United States and its immediate neighbor, Pakistan. The country consisted of various tribes, a subsistence economy, agricultural communities and herders. A small educated number of people started fantasizing about modernisation. Of course, this being part of the Cold War era, they had to take sides, and they ended up siding with the Soviet Union. There were splits within the communist party in Afghanistan. Eventually, the Soviet Union intervened. Then they pushed through this very badly-conceived, oppressive programme of modernisation, put all the girls in schools and killed all the Muslims who protested. So you had a mini-genocide which is hardly ever talked about. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed during that first process of Soviet-led modernisation. Then, of course, you had resentment within these traditional tribal communities, and they threw up their own commanders and Mujahadeen leaders. The Americans, in their wisdom, decided to support these groups—the more radical ones among them. At that time radical Islam was not a threat; it was actually an ally against the Soviet Union. And then the Saudis joined in, and they had their own agenda. They wanted to be the leaders of the Islamic world, and they were feeling insecure after Khomeini had come to power in Iran. They wanted to run down Iran. So there was a confluence of interests in this thus far neglected part of the world, and what it ended up creating was a massive, amazing mess that the Taliban was left to sort out.

[...]

There was a need for the Taliban in Afghanistan at that particular moment. This has always been something we forget when we talk about anachronistic medieval eruptions. Afghans felt that they’d gone too far down the road of chaos, mayhem and random violence, and that they needed to restore some order back into the country. And that’s why the Taliban emerged, became rapidly popular and cut across ethnic loyalties. Of course, there was real oppression under the Taliban, so there was a degree of popular support when the Americans first bombed them. Forces like the Taliban are products of certain political processes set in motion by the West. Processes that create chaos and poverty instead of development, growth and progress—processes of the Cold War.

[...]

You had a pre-modern community of tribal societies, and then you had some of the most modern weapons technology available, first through the Soviet Union, and then through the Americans. I think perhaps the fact that these worlds are so fundamentally incompatible at one level, that when they clash as they did in Afghanistan, they could only have produced a 9/11. The fact that Afghanistan did not have a significant intellectual class meant that there were no mediators in the encounter between this pre-modern world and this very aggressive modern world. It was just a head-on collision, which then produced this radical Islamist ideology. Before this, people didn’t really have ideologies. People were loyal to their tribe and their regional communities, but they didn’t have these kinds of overarching ideologies that were introduced into Afghanistan by the Saudis working with the Pakistanis. So the way in which ideologies also became globalized during this period and assumed these political forms has something to do with it. I think radical Islam assumed its most political form in Afghanistan during the mid-1990s, which then attracted people like Bin Laden to it. It then became this very powerful ideology."

My blog turns 3

Yes, it’s been three years since I put up my first post. The nature of my posts, the frequency, and my focus – everything has been evolving and this will continue. In fact, I cringe sometimes when I read some of my early posts, as I am sure I’ll cringe sometime in the future when I read some of my recent writing.

I've posted with greater regularity (at an average of 4 per month, whether long or short) the last year and a half. With so many changes that are currently happening in my life – on the personal and work front: not all pleasant – I am not sure how the next year shall be. But I've enjoyed writing in this space enormously: where else but on a blog can one express one’s personality and shape one's writing the way one wants? I hope to continue.

To mark the occasion, I’ve listed some of my favorite posts from last year, by category. These include short as well as long posts.

History:
1. A review of Ramachandra Guha’s wonderful India after Gandhi
2. America’s Westward Expansion and thoughts on Wounded Knee – My longest post in the last year. It’s theme is the westward expansion of America in the 19th century and the impact on American Indian history.
3. The Ota Benga story
4. The Americas Before Columbus and The Old World: Yet another of my comparative ruminations of why world history has turned out the way it has.
5. From hunter-gatherers to farmers: Thoughts on an Economist article.
6. Resettlement of refugee farmers in Punjab after partition – Elaboration of a section in India after Gandhi.

Literature:
1. A short note Dostoevsky’s characters
2. On Willa Cather’s O Pioneers
3. Thoughts on Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building
4. On Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves

Travel and Current Affairs:
1. On China’s burgeoning presence in Africa
2. Will Mugabe of Zimbabwe stay on? – the question has been answered for now.
3. On the Nigerian movie industry, also called Nollywood
4. Short notes from a trip to Hampi
5. A trip to Lyon in France last July
6. A short post on my fascination for the Great Plains

Memoir/Levity:
1. My adventures with the Balkan dish, ajvar.
2. Mark, the janitor
3. Meelad’s nationality: About the neighbors I live with, and, a lighter look at deducing nationalities.
4. And my most recent post – My Glimpses of Hispanic America – which I haven’t given enough time yet, but which I see no harm throwing into the mix.

My readership has also gone up somewhat from last year, which is heartening. Please feel free to comment and criticize. What aspects interest you? What do you find dull? Do speak your mind. After all, readers mean the world to someone with writing aspirations.

And from past years: My blog turns 2; Blogging, almost a year on.

Framed by a Mughal motif: My first glimpses of Hispanic America

As a student at Arizona State University in Tempe, I lived in a neighborhood that consisted mostly of cheap apartments. For five of my six years there, I stayed at different points on the same curving street – Orange Street – flanked by spindly palm trees, and patches of green lawns maintained laboriously by sprinklers.

It was here that I began to understand illegal immigration from United States' porous southern border, an intensely debated national issue. In the days after I arrived (the Fall of 2000), I heard other Indian students using the term makkus to refer to Mexicans – or any Hispanic immigrants for that matter. It was mostly a derogatory term, though many used it benignly, in the same way they used gultis or gujjus. The general consensus was that one shouldn’t live in a makku area, for there would be many bike thefts and muggings (there was, of course, some truth to this assertion: even the most uncomfortable prejudices are generally well rooted in reality). But in the Phoenix metro area, immigration, illegal or otherwise, was so rampant that Indian students had no way of getting away from makkus. Indeed, the southwestern cities in the United States can sometimes seem like an extension of Mexico.

Like many others, I arrived with no idea of this. It made sense that Arizona had Mexicans – Mexico after all shared a border with the state – but of their history and culture I knew nothing. I did not even know they spoke Spanish. Later, I would develop a fascination for Mexico's explosive sixteenth century history, and begin to slowly understand the forces that made the country what it is today, but those early years as a student in Arizona, I knew very little. It was only through everyday encounters with Mexicans who worked odd jobs and were my neighbors that I formed my initial impressions.

And my strongest impression, interestingly enough, comes from the immigrants I met at Copper Kettle, the Indo-Pak restaurant in the neighborhood.

Copper Kettle was relatively cheap – five to six dollar meals – and the food, while never consistent, was occasionally excellent. It was a popular haunt for students. The interior was dark; sub-continental themed paintings and tapestries hung on the walls. There was a fatigued look to the place, and from the faint but unmistakable smell of bug spray, I felt cockroaches were teeming beneath the faded carpet.

On the wall behind the cashier’s bar, where we placed orders, was a large opening in the shape of a Mughal motif. The kitchen was partially visible through it. Framed, then, by the contours of this stylish motif – which curved elegantly on either side to converge at the top: like the dome of a mosque – were the Hispanic immigrants who worked in the kitchen, cutting onions and garlic, stirring curries and washing dishes. There was something unique and affecting about this; it remains an enduring image from my time as a student in Arizona. It is also what inspired me to write this post.

The lady who ran the restaurant was a tall, middle-aged Pakistani woman, fair-skinned, with eyes that slanted upward. She was dressed usually in a salwar-kameez. She bustled around, carrying food to tables and settling bills. She was cranky, often complaining to customers of how tortured she felt listening to the same songs that played in the restaurant for hours on end. She vented on the Hispanic busboys with a somewhat feudal air, slapping her forehead and shaking her head, upset that Jorge or Gerrardo hadn’t carried the plates out in time. They in turn stared back at her blankly. They probably did not understand a word, and this only incensed her more.

She seemed to trust Luis, though. He was even allowed to handle payments, which was surprising. I talked with Luis a bit, since he was the only one who spoke English. He was a short, dark man, always in a baseball cap, and ever ready with an endearing, gap-toothed smile. He lived a few blocks away. Like other immigrants, he worked multiple jobs. I ran into him once at Four Peaks, a popular local brewery and restaurant. It was a large, noisy place, with a lot more staff and waitresses. There, Luis seemed puny and insignificant, yet was just as cheerful. He said he worked there on Tuesdays and Thursdays while other days he was at Kettle.

_____

There were plenty of Indian restaurants within a five mile radius of the university. Since I craved incessantly for curry, I visited all of them frequently. And therefore became familiar with the Hispanics who worked at these places: the articulate, short man who worked at Delhi Palace; the guy with a troubled, brooding look, who seemed to switch Indian restaurants every two weeks; the waitress with curly hair and large glasses at the Udipi place, whom I spoke to in Tamil first – I was so certain! – and was mystified to learn later that she was Mexican.

And I can go on and on, beyond Indian restaurants: the short, stout men from the south of Mexico (or so my friend Jesus told me) who worked at construction sites, and wore striking, orange jumpers; the families who were my neighbors, whose kids rode tricycles in front of the porch; the crowds I saw at Food City, the cheapest of all grocery stores, where the bill was never more than ten dollars no matter how much I bought, and where I discovered cayenne pepper and tomatillos.

Awareness or curiosity doesn’t always come easily - how we tend to take the milieu around us for granted! So while I lived in that neighborhood for a long time, it was only after three years that I began asking some questions. Who were these people I saw each day? What had caused some of them to make the long trek across the Arizona desert, risking death by dehydration, capture by the Border Patrol and intimidation by armed gangs? Why did they not look Caucasian, though some looked almost so? What was Mexico’s history? Who were the Aztecs and the Mayans – always mentioned in reference to Mexico – and where were they now?

I know more now than I did then, but perhaps one day, I’ll be able to write a longer piece – a travel, history and current affairs piece – that ties all these questions together. For now, there’s much to learn, and lots of travel to do.

Traveling...

Am traveling currently - in India right now and it's been a busy few days - so have not been able to post as usual. Hope to be back soon, though. There's few posts I have in mind right now: a review of Martin Meredith's bleak-sounding, The Fate of Africa, which I finished recently after tarrying for a long time; thoughts on the neighborhood I lived in while a student in Arizona; and maybe some discussion of Naipaul's reading of the decline of the Vijayanagara empire (centered around Hampi), which he uses in India: A Wounded Civilization to illustrate India's complex Islamic and Hindu-Buddhist history (Naipaul's view, of course, is that the former ground out the latter, but there is more to it than just that).

But as before, I have strayed and never posted what I have promised - let's see how I hold up now.

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction

Whatever I do, I must not miss this pulp anthology of Tamil short stories. From Mukul Kesavan's Outlook India essay:

I don’t know Tamil so I can’t tell what’s been lost in translation, but the magical thing about this anthology is that I never once thought of the stories as Tamil stories. In Pritham Chakravarthy’s translations, the characters in these stories live and breathe an English that smells like a neutral ether: neither elaborately English nor annoyingly vernacular.And it’s hard to convey the delight I felt in reading time-pass fiction where the starlets, the hard-boiled detectives and the vengeful goddesses came from the world I inhabited, were mine.

There are two reasons to buy this book. One, it’s a wonderful read and, two, it’s the best-produced paperback in the history of Indian publishing. From the luridly brilliant cover (complete with gun-toting, full-breasted Tamil rose) to the colour plates, the line drawings, the perfectly judged author introductions and the high-quality paper inside, this book is an object lesson in how publishing is done.

On Loiuse Erdrich's The Plague of Doves

There’s a scene about ninety odd pages into Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves that is illustrative, in a tangential way, of what her book is about. Two of the novel’s single and middle-aged characters, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts and Geraldine, and are just beginning to know each other. They are out a boat, fishing, when something heavy tugs Geraldine’s line. They find it is a large turtle and lug it up. For some strange reason that is puzzling to Coutts, Geraldine becomes glum. Why? Because engraved on the shell of the turtle are the letters “G and R”. They stand for Geraldine and her former boyfriend Roman. Roman had caught the same turtle when he and Geraldine had been fishing a long time ago. The turtle was small then. Roman had etched the letters and set it free. He is no longer alive, but his memory has unexpectedly cropped up in the form of these engraved letters now, at beginning of a different romance in Geraldine’s life.

The theme of Erdrich’s novel is how the past perpetually influences the present in subtle and unexpected ways. Except that the past isn’t restricted the painful memory of one’s first love. In The Plague of Doves it spans three generations, and straddles the histories of two communities in North Dakota: the community of American Indians, who steadily lost their lands in the late nineteenth century and were shepherded into reservations, and the community of white immigrants who went through their own travails as they expanded westward. But the story isn’t the conflict between the two. Rather it is how their shared history – of suspicion and mistrust but also of help and interaction – has evolved and intertwined in complex ways and influenced the succeeding two generations. As Evelina Harp, who is part Ojibwe and part white and the youngest of the first person narrators in the novel, says:

“Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.”

_______

The Plague of Doves centers on the brutal killing in 1911 of a white farm family in Pluto, North Dakota. Only a seventeen-month-old baby survives. Evidence is unclear as to who is responsible, but in the rage that grips the town, three Indians are lynched by a vigilante mob. The murders and the lynching hover like a dark shadow in the decades after. The people involved in the lynching, the Indians who are lynched, the baby that is left to survive: everyone becomes part of a complex puzzle that Erdrich slowly unveils in her jagged narrative which jumps in time and perspective. Judge Coutts, whose tone is the most direct and calming of all – reflective of his character and his vocation – makes this pithy remark:

“Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.”

Consider this: Evelina Harp is the granddaughter of Mooshum, a full-blood Ojibwe, one of the four Indians who discovered the murdered farm family. Evelina has a crush on Corwin Peace whose great-grandfather, Cuthbert Peace, was one of the Indians lynched. Cuthbert’s brothers Henri and Lafayette Peace, both excellent fiddle players, helped guide Judge Coutts’s grandfather in the nineteenth century while he was prospecting on the frontier (the theme of music and how it is passed on is one of the beautiful parts of the novel). Judge Coutts, a mixed-blood himself, is interested, as I have already pointed out, in Evelina’s aunt, Geraldine. And so it goes on and on – I have revealed only the basic details. In fact, these links are so complicated and wondrous, that I often stopped to write them out and draw the genealogy myself. That is what Evelina does too in the novel:

“I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw our elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still I could not erase the questions underneath…”

While Erdrich’s many narrators meander abstractly – sometimes too abstractly for my liking – this vast all-encompassing web of connections and the unsolved case of the farm murders sustain and are the heart of the narrative. In fact, Erdrich’s plotting is so intricate that the full details become known only in the last few pages. There is no gimmickry here; everything is revealed in a matter of fact way.

Certain characterizations and moments in the novel stand out: Mooshum, the shriveled old Indian, who brings much needed humor by way of his discursions with the Catholic priest; Shamengwa, Mooshum’s brother, and a passionate fiddle player, whose story about how he began playing and found his fiddle is the most poignant in the book; and Billy Peace, whose unsettling transformation from a shy, frail young man to a monstrous, insatiable leader of a religious sect, is depicted brilliantly through the perspective of his wife, Marn Wolde.

By peopling her novel with such diverse voices and by setting it across three generations, Erdrich has written a compelling, imaginative history. It is not the sort of dreary history one finds in books by overly serious historians. Erdrich's is a beautiful, melancholy history, held together by subtle familial interconnections that lend an uncanny symmetry to it.

___

Other notes:

1. If you are curious about the title of the novel, read the first chapter in The New Yorker.

2. Erdrich runs the independent bookstore Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.

Sarkar-Raj, and unforgettable dialogues

I drove an hour and forty minutes last Saturday to watch Sarkar-Raj. The gently swaying Minnesota prairie, fed by recent rains, was lush and beautiful, and it was just as well that I enjoyed the drive. For the movie, while it had some drama and a decent plot, was disappointing. I have to agree with Namrata Joshi’s stinging critique in Outlook India:

The support cast is nothing more than a gallery of caricatures complete with a gloved hand killer straight from the Hollywood slasher films. What was the need to have him there? It’s such gimmickry that irritates. Specially in Verma’s stylistic and technical flourishes. Extreme close-ups, angular shots, monochromatic palette, loud background score, deliberately smart lines, wordplay, the constant confrontations and tension—he goes on an overkill with it all. A lovely Mumbai slang that aptly describes the film—thakeli. It’s deadbeat, dull and dreary.

The villains are pretty hackneyed in the movie. They contort their faces, smirk, act idiosyncratically, and generally try very hard to convince us they are very, very bad people. One of them – and this might well be the funniest bit of the movie, though unintentional – says something along these lines:

“Omlette banane ke liye anda phodna padta hai.” (To make an omlette one has to first break the egg.)

This profound, cryptic and richly metaphorical remark refers to Abhishek Bachchan (in the movie the son of the powerful Mumbai politician, Sarkar). Abhishek is apparently is the egg. Later the same villain makes a further remark that that bad guys will become the masala (spices) in the omlette.

What are we to make of this?

But dialogues like this are a delight too – they are so ridiculous they become the very reason one watches certain Bollywood movies. I have to confess that I regret – because of the excessive travel I’ve been doing this year – not seeing Race, which had this gem:

“Zindagi ki race me insaan ko ek saathi ki zaroorat hai.” (In the race that is life, one needs a companion.)

Oh, I’d give anything to hear this uttered on the big screen!

Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes

There’s been plenty of positive publicity for Mohammed Hanif’s new novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes. One of the novel’s main draws appears to be a delightful satirical portrait of General Zia. (Quick aside: with a moustache as funny as his, how can a despot like him not be satirized?) Some links: New York Times review here; first chapter here; and Outlook India article here where Dalrymple heralds the emergence of new Pakistani writing - what with Mohammad Aslam, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid among others coming up with excellent books.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes also finds mention in The Middle Stage with regard to a character called OBL. Who is OBL? This excerpt from the Nytimes review tells us:

The most darkly funny scene in “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” imagines a Fourth of July party in Islamabad in 1988, hosted by Arnold Raphel. The American guests dress up in flowing turbans, tribal gowns and shalwar kameez suits, by way of ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the invited guests is a young bearded Saudi known as “OBL,” who works for “Laden and Co. Constructions.” As OBL moves through the throng, various people stop to greet him and chat. Among them is the local C.I.A. chief who, after swapping a few words, bids him farewell: “Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up.”

Bhartihari's solemn dilemma

Ancient India, we are endlessly told, was very open to sexuality and its representations – the Kamasutra and this orgy from the temples of Khajuraho are oft cited. Given that Indians are more conservative now (I know, it's a broad generalization), I’ve always wondered what happened in the intermediate historical period that changed attitudes. William Dalrymple’s recent essay in NYRB gives a few insights, but it principally discusses expressions of sexuality in south India – in the Pallava and Chola eras – and in the Tantric tradition.

There are some serious thoughts in the essay and I encourage you to read it. But if you want something in the lighter vein, don't by any means miss this bit that pertains to a dilemma that a 3rd century poet, Bhartihari, faced: Should one adopt a life of austerity and asceticism, or give in to the temptations of unabashed physical lust? Bhartihari seems to have pondered the question very seriously as Dalrymple illustrates:

Classical India developed a refined and tutored sophistication about the finer points of sexuality, famously so in the Kamasutra, the principal work on love in Sanskrit literature. It has never been equaled; yet there has always been a strong tension in Hinduism between the ascetic and the sensual. The poet Bhartrihari, who probably lived in the third century AD, around the time of the composition of the Kamasutra, oscillated no less than seven times between the rigors of the monastic life and the abandon of the sensualist. "There are two paths," he wrote. "The sages' religious-devotion, which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth," and "the lusty undertaking of touching with one's palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely-limbed women, loving women with great expanses of breasts and thighs."

"Tell us decisively which we ought to attend upon," he asks in the Shringarashataka. "The sloping sides of wilderness mountains? Or the buttocks of women abounding in passion?"

Any answers?

A scene from Om Shanti Om

I found Om Shanti Om immensely entertaining. The movie was needlessly long and wallowed in precisely the sort of mushy, sentimental stuff it was trying to parody, but despite all its obvious drawbacks, it was a joy to watch – the songs and the comedy bits were wonderful.

There’s one particular scene I’ll remember and cherish for long. I’ve watched it a couple of times since, but the effect when I saw it on the big screen here in Rochester last November (yes, even this small, unheard-of Minnesota town screens Bollywood films) remains unsurpassed.

Some background: Om (Sharukh Khan) is a junior artiste in the 70s, hoping to make it big in Bollywood. He has an overpowering infatuation for Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone), the most popular actress of the time. Despite being only a chota-mota artiste Om believes, true filmi style, that they are made for each other. His mother – the quintessential, melodramatic, weepy Bollywood mom – gives him a sacred red thread with a metal band, blessed by the Sai Baba at Shirdi. Om wears this on his wrist, and, as he discovers later, these blessings do indeed help twine him with Shantipriya.

Now to the actual scene. It's the premiere of Dreamy Girl, Shantipriya’s latest film. Crowds throng at the theater where a red carpet will be rolled for the entire cast. Om is in the crowd, straining to get a glimpse of the arriving stars. He’s wearing a tacky red and black checked suit, while the others in the crowd sport more identifiable 70s style clothing: colorful bell-bottomed pants and shirt collars as large as whale fins.



Then it happens. A large limousine stops in front of the theater, and Shantipriya steps out in a pink dress. She is strikingly beautiful. Her hair is done the way Asha Parekh used to have hers done – neatly bunched around the head, adorned with sparkling jewels. Also at this point, the camera shifts to slow motion, and the melodious Aankhon me teri begins. Om is astounded by Shantipriya’s beauty, and, like dozens of others in the crowd, tentatively raises his hand to wave at her. Shantipriya waves to the crowd, acknowledging their cheers, a radiant, disarming smile on her face.

As she passes Om, the red thread (or the metal band: doesn’t really matter) on Om’s wrist somehow gets entangled in Shantipriya’s pink pallu. He is propelled forward, his hand outstretched as it trails the pallu. A few steps later, Shantipriya, oblivious up to then, feels a tug, and looks back. Her expression is one of bewilderment, before she realizes what has happened. She then smiles a knowing, killer smile, disentangles the pallu from the thread. As the security guards drag Om away, his face is one of contentment – so happy is he at having met her in this fortuitous fashion that he closes his eyes in bliss and has one hand over his heart.

What’s so special about this? What makes it wonderful? Two things: First the song, Aankhon me teri, couldn’t have been more appropriate: it matches superbly with how the scene unfolds in slow motion, and Deepika Padukone’s beauty and expressions accentuate the effect (she is impressive in the movie, especially the first half).

The second reason pertains to why Bollywood movies are a treat to watch: we indulge in a suspension of disbelief, and can completely immerse ourselves in the sentiments and the romance. As I sat in the movie hall watching the scene, I felt this strongly. I could feel too a twitter of yearning in my own heart, and I realized that the cynicism and weariness that one gathers from life could not overwhelm that thrilling, romantic moment in the movie. And I thought: aren’t feelings like this the essence of entertainment?
___

Other related posts: some extracts of a long Bollywood-like story I wrote a few years ago; and a post on Nigerian cinema, probably the most vibrant movie industry in the world after Bollywood and Hollywood, and which, not unsurprisingly, is called Nollywood.

Changes

Changed the blog template, as you will have noticed. I was away on a trip, and came back to find that all my settings in the old template had been altered. Not sure how that happened. But luckily, this new template seems to work well, so I'll stick to it.

Things have been exceptionally busy the last couple of weeks. It's been a stressful period, with changes coming up in the next couple of months. Looks at this point that I'll be moving places in the fall - east of the Mississippi for the first time. More on that later.

For now, I need to buckle down and put in some extra hours writing.

Octavio Paz on modernity

I’ve quoted Octavio Paz a couple of times, and here he is once more: this time I pick from his dense and wide-ranging Nobel speech. The theme that ties it all together all is that elusive creature, modernity. What does Paz have to say? Consider, first, his thoughts on the connection between tradition and modernity:

I am not sure whether this unexpected historical lesson has been learnt by all: between tradition and modernity there is a bridge. When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates and modernity vaporizes; when in conjunction, modernity breathes life into tradition, while the latter replies with depth and gravity.

So much in the world today is attributed to that supposed fissure between the two - and one seems to step on the foot of the other. But as Paz notes eloquently at the end of his speech, modernity is evanescent, not easily grasped; it is startling; it can use the very, very ancient to produce the new:

In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

It's a rather dramatic piece of prose - I've noticed in other essays too that Paz takes such flights - but his message couldn't have been more accurate.

Environmentalism - a worldwide secular religion

Freeman Dyson ends The Question of Global Warming - an essay in The New York Review of Books - with these passages that capture the essence of the issue:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh returns with a sprawling new novel, Sea of Poppies. Long extract here.

Thoughts on Alaa Aswany's The Yacoubian Building

While reading Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building I was reminded of Robert Altman’s movie Short Cuts. Altman is famous for his ensemble movie making, and in Short Cuts, he weaves Raymond Carver’s short stories into a web of intersecting lives. The result is an eclectic mix of personalities, each carrying his or her personal conflict, but appearing, often inadvertently and peripherally, in the trajectory of some other character. This technique, while disorienting since it shifts focus often, is able to portray a diversity and complexity not possible in more conventional methods.

In The Yacoubian Building too, Al Aswany uses a number of intertwining Egyptian characters assembled from all walks of life – the son of a doorkeeper; a rich businessman with political ambitions; a well-off elderly man with an incurable weakness for women; the daughter of a poor family, living in cramped quarters; a lonely newspaper editor yearning for a lasting relationship. All these characters are tied, one way or the other, to the Yacoubian Building in downtown Cairo: they either have their office space there, or live there, or visit the building to meet someone who lives there.

Through this cast of characters and an ever-shifting third person omniscient narrative, Alaa Aswany manages to convey the political and social changes Egypt has witnessed in the last fifty years: the move from monarchy to an authoritarian regime; the pull towards socialism and radical Islam; the struggle to eke a living amid the corruption that pervades society, where it matters who knows whom. Aswany does this not through a narration of facts, but instead through the actions, thoughts and the conflicts of the people in the novel.

Much is revealed, strikingly, through the frank sexuality that runs through the book. If we look closely, though, we see that Alaa Aswany doesn’t really dwell on the details of the lovemaking. Instead in the moments before an intimate encounter, or the contented moments after, we learn a lot about the characters – through their thoughts or the conversations they have with their partners. The author must surely believe we reveal ourselves the most when overcome with desire or when satiated.

Aswany also makes plenty of other astute observations. How, for instance, might a servant with an amputated leg cleverly use his handicap to appeal to the emotions of the most hard-hearted? (“…with a special move, suddenly bending his torso backward and pulling his worn, dirty gallabiya upward with both hands so that his truncated leg, attached to the depressingly dark-colored prosthesis, was displayed.”) How might a woman who has decided to use her body for some financial gain change in her attitudes?

“She had lost her compassion for people and thick crust of indifference had formed around her feelings – that disgust that afflicts the exhausted, the frustrated, and the perverted and prevents them from sympathizing with others. She had succeeded, after repeated attempts, in ridding herself of thoughts and feelings of remorse and buried forever the guilt that had afflicted her when she took off her dress in front of Talal and washed off his defilement, then put her hand out to him to collect ten pounds. She had become crueler, more bitter and daring, and no longer cared what the residents of the roof told one another about her reputation.”

Aswany seems especially adept at this sort of insight. The best one in the book, though, pertains to a young man, Taha, the son of the doorkeeper to the Yacoubian building.

Taha is studious and intelligent and is much better at school than the sons and daughters of more well off residents. But because of his father’s occupation – lowly in the eyes of those around him – he never gets the credit he deserves. He is looked upon condescendingly. He bears these implied insults and soldiers on, studies hard. His ambition is to become a police officer, and leave behind the life of squalor, poverty and humiliation in the Yacoubian building. He clears the required exams, and the last step – a mere formality – is to go through an interview process. He gets to the end of the interview successfully, but the presiding general, who up to then had admired Taha’s well rehearsed answers, looks through some papers, and asks him:

“Your father – what’s his profession Taha?”

“Civil servant, sir.”

“Civil servant or property guard?”

Taha is silent for a while, before he says in a low voice: “My father is a property guard, sir.”

Taha is not offered the job. He is frustrated and unable to get over it. But he eventually joins the university to study economics and political sciences. There, he meets a group of poor students of rural origin, and slowly through them gravitates towards Islam. He becomes close to Sheikh Shakir, the immensely popular leader of the Islamic political movement. Shakir becomes his spiritual mentor.

Taha is transformed after this experience. He was always religious but he is more ardent and serious now. He begins to see everybody around him in binaries: his worldview begins to absorb the absolutes of the faith. But the most striking transformation is how he feels within. He now has a dignity he never had before. Gone is the perpetual undercurrent of humiliation he felt because of his father’s occupation. One of the best passages of the book in my opinion is the following where Alaa Aswany describes this change in Taha:

“Those who knew Taha el Shazli in the past might have difficulty in recognizing him now. He has changed totally, as though he had swapped his former self for another, new one. It isn’t just a matter of Islamic dress that he has adopted in place of his Western clothes, nor of his beard, which he has let grow and which gives him a dignified and impressive appearance greater than his real age….All these are changes in appearance. Inside, however, he has been possessed by a new, powerful, bounding spirit. He has taken to walking, sitting, and speaking to people in the [Yacoubian] building in a new way. Gone forever are the old cringing humility and meekness before the residents. Now he faces them with self-confidence. He no longer cares a hoot for what they think, and he won’t put up with the least reproach or slight from them. He’s no longer interested in those small banknotes that they used to give him and which he used to save in order to buy his new things, in the first place because of his firm faith in God will provide for him and secondly because Sheikh Shakir has got him involved in the sale of religious books – small errands that he undertakes in his spare time and which bring him in a reasonable amount.”

This vital fact, this new sense of dignity we see in Taha, is not something we could have necessarily gleaned had Alaa Aswany not expressed it so well, with such clarity. The book is full of such moments, and Aswany's directness seems well rendered in Humphrey Davies’ translation. Not surprisingly The Yacoubian Building was a massive success in Egypt and now abroad as well.

Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about Aswany and his political views recently in the New York Times. Here you’ll find links to other reviews of the book. And The Yacoubian Building is now a movie as well.