Think

Goshtha-baboo’s Portrait

2011-07-12T02:16:00.001-07:00

Here is another translation

Goshtha-baboo’s portrait had come from the Englishman’s house in Kolkata. There was excitement and pandemonium in the house. The manservant, the washman, the cook and the barber called out in unison, “Rush, rush, let’s all go and see the portrait.”
Whosoever came commented, “What a lovely portrait! It has been done by an Englishman!” Sarkar-moshai, an old man, said, “The best part of it is the smile on the baboo’s face―it is as placid as he is.” On hearing this, the surprised audience commented, “Never mind, the sahib’s smile is really great!”
Uncle Bishthoo said, “The very eyes have been done in a way that demands a thousand rupees—the eyes remind one of Goshtha’s grandpa.” Twenty-one men agreed to this comment with great enthusiasm.
The washman laid down his stack of clothes and admired the portrait, “An excellent portrait. It seems that the dress has been ironed by Redho, the washman.” The barber played with his bag of razor, and said, “I have been shaving the baboo and trimming his hair for nineteen years. The style of the hair tells me that it is indeed a fine portrait. The baboo looks equally pleased when he sees his haircut in the mirror.”
The baboo’s favourite servant, Kenaram, said, “What should I say, my brother? It is such a lively portrait! I entered the room and touched the feet and then realised that what I had in front of me was not my master but a portrait!” Everybody started scrutinising the portrait, looking at every pore on the image, till the baboo came and stood by the picture. By then, all and sundry had agreed that the portrait resembled the baboo to the tee. He said, “There is a problem. They have informed me from Kolkata that this is someone else’s portrait which has mistakenly been dispatched to me. We need to return this.”
On hearing this, Sarkar-moshai said, “See, they think that they can cheat on me. The moment I looked at it I had wondered at who the frowning man with a strange smile was.” The uncle said, “See how the eyes are turned inwards. It seems as if he is on his way to the Ganges for his last rites.” Redho the washman said, “The man in the portrait is wearing his clothes in the fashion of a farmer. In all his seven lives, it seems, this man has never been able to dress properly!” The barber butted in and said, “It seems from his haircut that someone has done his hair with a sickle.” Kenaram shouted with mad rage, “The moment I stepped inside the room I thought that there was a thief inside. I was about to hit the fellow till I was told that it was our baboo’s portrait. I was in a huge mind to crush his face.”
Everybody agreed that they had known all this while that it wasn’t their baboo in the picture. After all, was the baboo’s nose so flat and were his ears like those of a duck? And, was it their baboo who was sitting, or was it a bear dancing?
― Sukumar Ray

The Tales of Abdul Majhi

2011-07-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

This is my translation of Abdul Majhir Galpo done especially for this blog

Abdul Majhi had a pointed beard, a shaven head and no moustache. I know him quite well. He would get hilsa fish and turtle eggs from the Padma for dada. He had once told me a tale.
It was the end of spring—the month of Chaitra . He had gone with his dingy, fishing in the deep waters of the Padma. Suddenly, there rose a nor’westerly. It was a terrible storm. The boat tossed and turned and almost drowned. Abdul clasped the rope between his teeth and jumped into the waters. He swam to the shore and pulled the boat back with the rope.
The story finished too quickly and I didn’t quite like it. I wish I had heard a little more about the storm. After all, the boat didn’t drown. It just got saved—how could this be a good enough tale? I kept prodding him, “And then, what happened, after that?” Finally, Abdul said, “I saw a leopard with a really big moustache. During the storm, it had gone to the village on the other side. That village was called Pakoorgunj. A sudden gust of wind pulled a tree down into the Padma. And, along with it the leopard too was flung into the river. It drifted off into the river, struggling against the high waters, and somehow managed to reach the bank and get up on its feet.
The moment I saw him, I tied a noose with my rope. The mighty beast rolled its eyes and stood in front. The swim had worked up quite an appetite in him. The moment he saw me, he rolled his deep red tongue out and started drooling. He knew a lot of folks within the village and a few outside. But he knew not who Abdullah was!
I called out to him, “Come, my dear one, come”. He lifted his fore legs up and was ready to pounce when I threw the rope at him and put the noose across his neck. He wriggled hard to free himself and the more he wriggled, the more did the noose tighten around his neck and his tongue kept rolling out.”
At this point, I got a little worried and asked, “Abdul, did he die or what?” Abdul reassured me, “Well, how could he? Even his father wouldn’t have been able to take him to the throes of death. There was a high tide in the river and would one not have to come back to Bahadoorgunj? I tied the leopard to my dingy and used his weight to pull me through a hundred miles. The moment he would start groaning, I would nudge him with my oar. In an hour and a half I could cross a distance worth fifteen. Now, if you want to know what happened after that, I would really not be able to answer.”
I said, “Well, then, now that you’ve told me about a leopard, what about a crocodile?” Abdul replied, “I’ve seen his nose popping out of the river many a times. On the sloping banks of the river when you see a crocodile warming itself on the sand, it does seem that it is guffawing in a rather ugly way. I would have fought him, had I had a gun. But, the license had gotten over a long while back. Yet, something interesting happened.
One day, Kanchi, a nomad-girl was sitting by the river and chiseling a bamboo pole with a sickle. A kid was tied beside her. From nowhere did the crocodile come and pull at the legs of the kid. It dragged the little goat into the river. The girl jumped onto the back of the crocodile and sat on it. She used her sickle to scrape off the neck of the reptile over and over again. The crocodile let go of the kid and dipped into the waters.”
I asked, “And then? What happened after that?” Abdul said, “The news of the thereafter has sunk deep into the waters of the river. Fishing it out would take some time indeed!”
Rabindranath Tagore

Love in the time of Christmas

2010-12-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

I have often wondered about why people fall in love. And, I have been told that unlike in animals, humans look for more than sex. They redefine sex as sexuality, that is, one's sexual abilities are recast as constituents of one's identity. One dresses 'up', one looks 'pretty', one is 'coy' and a host of other things. Soon even in non-sexual spaces, one gets an opportunity to express ones 'mating' behaviour. This leads to attraction and courtship and soon what is primarily sexual becomes socio-cultural. The institution of marriage is an excellent case in point. Therefore, people talk of the sense of humour, honesty, intelligence and a host of non-sexual attributes as the criterion for loving each other. In banal terms, we call them 'turn ons'. Why do we hunt for these attributes? Are we too embarrassed to admit our primary drives? Are they absolutely irrelevant in the course of 'falling in love'? I guess not.

Over a period of time human activities expand beyond hunting and gathering food, cooking, nursing family and procreating. With resources, machines and civilization we have leisure and activities that fill up our leisure. We read, watch plays, paint, play games and talk and listen to each other. Increasingly, these activities assume significance in our lives and they inform our 'basic' activities.
Soon, we replace eating and food with the notion of 'cuisine', 'work' increasingly incorporates 'play' and sex is aestheticised in art. As all of this happens, 'love' becomes a complicated affair. Or, we pretend that what is basic to be evolved!

I think we need to re-phrase the question? What sustains happiness between two people when they do not procreate? Many relationships break because people do not focus on being happy in togetherness. Instead, we build our own fairy castles in the air and look for their realization through others. Love becomes the oppressive heat of May.

Where is the love that we have lost to living, to honeymoons, fine-dining and Pattaya and Venice? O love why is so much labour lost? Let us not revel in the spirit of poor Orsino and say: "Let music be the food of love". Let us instead, learn to give, care and be happy in the 'other's' world.

Thoughts on my thirtieth birthday

2010-07-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

I have lived long and much of that has been lonely. There have been moments of immense pleasure and moments which have slipped by and have been recollected much later—sometimes with grief and mostly with happiness.
Thirty years is a long time. My grandfather, Sukanta Bhattacharya, was a poet of decent repute by the time he was eighteen. He, of course, died when he was twenty-one. Keats died when he was twenty-six and he had written his odes—the greatest specimens of lyric poetry in the English language— by that time. So had Shelley and many more.
This brings to my mind that I can no longer be particularly useful to myself and to the world around me. That in itself is not a disturbing thought. But what is discomforting is the idea that I shall continue to be so and degenerate and become more useless—for my parents, friends, employers –and that is unnerving.

But then there have been moments of unending cherish: taking my parents to the Darjeeling hills; spending a vacation in the rains with a dear friend in a mist laden forest; listening to my teacher sing live for a private audience in Darjeeling, being hosted by my teacher on several occasions, and many of those ocassions were fraught with gloom and ennui, even at half-a day’s notice; walking in the rain after I got my first job—I happily waded through water logged college street and went to meet a friend, a sixty-year old radical. I also remember walking with my father to a nearby park and sitting on a bench as someone sang Tagore’s Krishnakali Ami Tarei boli—it was a Suchitra Mitra rendition at the local community centre. I remember my first trip to Puri and the first sight of the sea. I also cherish my first sight of the mighty Kanchenjungha. I was on my way back from work. It had rained for some time and monks were playing badminton in the fresh sun. I turned around near the Governor’s House and lo! There stood the mighty Kanchenjungha. I would see it again many times but the first unexpected view has no parallel.
I have had dinner with Gopal Gandhi and lunch with the thespian Feroz Abbas Khan. I do not earn pots of money but I do decent enough. And, yes, I’ve been in love and that took me to Ram Kumar Chattopadhyay’s place and to Geeta Ghatak’s place. She sang on my friend’s request—Je ratein mor duarguli. My hair stood still. I had the privilege of being taken to Goethal’s library by Professor Rohinton Kapadia—a great teacher.
But nothing takes away from me my birthday wish—to die quietly in my bed and to die soon. I wish that my reader’s watch this lovely Colin Firth film called A Single Man. The Prufrockian idea is taken to its logical conclusion in this film. Speaking about the film and its hero George, its director says: “His inner world and his outer world are connected, and the only thing holding them together is the polishing of his shoes, the scrubbing of his fingernails, the perfect white shirt. If he let go of that, he would collapse. There is an enormous part of myself that is like that.”...

I recall reading Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees his death last night after everyone was asleep. Here is the poem, once again:
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Of Prufrock , Pattaya and Bangkok

2010-04-25T22:41:00.001-07:00

This is how my favourite English poem begins:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

The poem struck me as I came across the pane of a brothel in Pattaya. I read the invitation—a grammar-gone-awry mock Eliot stuff—and suddenly I could figure out the poem being read aloud by the city—the city of hotels, brothels, money changers , the city where the ocean’s wave comes to the road but the muck never washes away. To be able to recognize its paralysis is to be able to see—the fatigue in the legs that dance to rock-n-roll tunes, the fatigue in the hands that try to reach out to men, ugly and portly. There is this Walking Street in Pattaya—the street where Adidas and Starbucks curl up amidst the music-blaring brothels, dance-bars, and sellers of pirated DVDs (you can get your Bob Marley and Jimmy Hendrix videos for less than four dollars). From behind the neon lights, peeps this question—‘why do people come here with such compulsion?’ The answer is, unfortunately not, ‘blowing in the wind’. To quote the poem once again: ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”/ Let us go and make our visit.’ (My friend, Amit Kumar—a product manager with Pearson--has taken some soul-stirring photographs over there. You can see his photographs at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kusamit2/sets/72157623830860232/). Yet, it is not your Sonaghachhi or Har-kata-galli. Sleazy it is but without the offensive aggression of the red-light districts of Indian metropolis. The penury is invisible and unheard of. All we get to know of and hear about are ‘muttering retreats’ in ‘one-night hotels’. Yet, when they look at me there is indecision, a desire to confront and to escape simultaneously acts upon a soul that is so used to ‘the marmalade, the tea,/Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,/ Would it have been worth while,/ To have bitten off the matter with a smile,’.
We are so used to walks by the sea-shore, on the malls of the hills walled by birch, oak, and pine, that we seldom think of walking on this ‘Walking Street’ as tourism. These women, these eunuchs (they call them Lady-Boys), we have seen them all, known them all. But, the light was different and the faces more unfamiliar, more unlikely of being attractive.
‘And I have known the arms already, known them all
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]’
I ran from Walking street to first-class comforts of Dusit Thani. I sat by the pool that overlooked the Gulf of Siam. I downed a cola and walked back to my room. The sea loses its character amidst this opulent sleaze. The Amari Orchid and the Four Seasons tower over the sea. In the afternoon the sea-side restaurant throws up a continental fare. I put in the delicate chocolate mousse, a speed boat sails to the middle of the sea, a parachute unfurls and a tiny human dips into the vast ocean.
The day we went to the coral island, the sky was without a cloud and the heat was scorching. People went under the sea, they flew above the sea, they rode on scooters, drank lots of beer and I bought a parasol. ‘And, in short I was afraid’. There was no time to think, to be with ourselves. We conferred, imparted training, danced, drank, debauched, whored, bitched, politicked, shopped but there was hardly a moment, even for a second, when we were not doing any of these things. In fact, we tour with such an obsession for ‘things-to-do’ that I am prompted to ask ‘where is the leisure that we have lost in travel.’ The hotel had a lounge bar. They played music over there. The music was lovely and I ordered a drink as I heard them sing. I haven’t had a mango drink that has tasted better. It was my only ‘moment’ in Pattaya.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

We reached Bangkok amidst chaos: the ‘red shirts’—a party backed by a guy called Thaksin (moneyed and shady—like many such leaders in Asia and Africa) who lives in exile and controls a rebellion that supports election, democracy and is against the military backed ruler Abhisit—who is supported by the yellow-shirts, a group of wealthy Thais who support the king, aristocracy, opulence and economic liberalism.
Thailand is a kingdom—a monarchy. Its kings are named after the Hindu mythical god Rama. In fact, the ancient kingdom is called Ayuththya—a name that reminds one of Ayoddhya.
One must not miss the Grand Palace while one is in Bangkok. We made it in a couple of attempts. And, with protests brewing and a flight to catch we did the entire thing in a couple of hours. But, it is a marvelous palace. The galleries are spectacular with the stories of Ramayana painted on walls, the garuda is carved on the panels of the palace, the Emerald Buddha—whose clothes vary in length with the seasons and only the king has the right to dress the god—is one of the finest sights of the palace. The architecture of the palace temples combines—Kampuchean, Thai, and Sinhalese style.
I find people more interesting than places and hence I apologize for the hurried description of the palace. (Tip: do not change money inside the palace—the rates are pretty bad and do not take a guide. If you are in a group one of the members can take the audio guide and talk to the rest. If you are alone, the guide is a sheer waste. Most Thais can’t speak half-decent English and trying to understand them in scorching heat can be very irritating). Though, I must admit that the Wat Arun (Wat is Thai for ‘temple’) by the Chao Praya river is more impressive and the Maha Bodhi temple near the palce more serene. The Wat Arun looks over the sky-train and sky-scraper graced city. Its garudas stand guard as ships and boats sail on the river, as coups unfold and shoppers gather. To me it embodied power and serenity, grandeur and spirituality. The souvenir shops are quite nice and worth a visit.
The cruise on a motor-boat on the Chao-Praya may not be as romantic as cruising in Venetian canals, but where else would you find alligators, coffee shops and floating markets in one go. Where else would you see ordinary lives intersecting with high-rises and Buddhist temples? The river is the proverbial melting-pot. Ordinary people prefer it to avoid the traffic jam in the city and tourists travel on colourful canoes. A couple of hours ride would cost you around thirty dollars.
In the evenings we sauntered into the Soan Lum night market. It is a great place for ‘dining out’. Tables are laid out in the open and over glasses of beer (or whatever is your poison) you can see t-shirts, jeans, bags selling out. It is less crowded than Gariahat or Sarojini Nagar and the stuff has more quality. But, there are cheaper places to shop: the weekend market is one. The real thing to do here is to enjoy a drink, chat for long-hours, let the evening breeze seep into your senses…. A T-shirt read: "God made grass and man made booze. Who do you trust?"
A nation that worships its king practices extreme consumerist irreverence. And, its revolutions are as much about partying, dancing and smoking pot as they are about things like democracy and elections! Viva Bakhtin, viva!!
My friends could not but get into the milieu. Bengalis after all. They danced, smoked, made friends and earned souvenirs. It was fun. It was at the shopping district of Pratunam. It was after shopping was done. The lady-boys stood and watched, someone made quick money selling fruits. People made calls from their phones and found our way for us. Nice people. We closed the day with street food and foot massage.
The Suvarnabhumi airport is nothing like what you have seen in India. There are walking corridors, incredibly cheap liquor shops, and you are hardly frisked. In fact you do not even need a tag for your hand-baggage! As usual, the Jet Airways staff hardly spoke English. A couple of friends missed their flight: checking-in LCD TVs took too long!
As we arrived in India, news travelled that twenty-odd protestors had been killed in Bangkok.

Kayastha Pathshala

2009-12-17T04:16:00.000-08:00

In India, and especially in Bengal and the hills of Nainital, Simla and Mussoorie and the capital of Delhi, there is a great degree of nostalgia that veers around our alma-maters. The colonial institutions with their European collonades, white-skinned Indophile teachers and their illustrous alumni become a reference point in our careers—right from getting a job to a wife. The more local institutions face neglect. While reading on the history of Allahabad, and while talking to a few UP-ites who have been taught by luminaries like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Durgananda Sinha, I stumbled upon this institution called the Kayastha Pathshala College. Founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Kayastha Pathshala was, to begin with, a school. A leading lawyer of Oudh, Munshi Kali Prasad Kulbhaskar, had established the school in 1873. It was born out of a zeal to position the kayasthas on a platform equivalent to that of the Bramhins. Such was Kali Prasad’s zeal that when he died in 1886, he left his estate for the benefit of the Pathshala. In 1895, it became an intermediate college. One of its early principals was the great Bengal-Renaissance gentleman, Ramananda Chatterjee. Chatterjee was an alumnus of the St.Xavier’s College in Calcutta. He moved to Allahabad in 1895—the very year Kayastha Pathshala had become an intermediate college. Ramananda Chatterjee would later go on to establish the Modern Review—a magazine that operated out of Calcutta. One of his students at the college was Narmadeshwar Upadhyaya—a member of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Narmadeshwar, a lawyer by profession, wrote almost Dickensian prose. One can sample his writing by picking up The Last Bungalow: writings on Allahabad (ed.) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
Perhaps the most well known student of the Kayastha Pathshala was Harivansh Rai Bachchan. (Bachchan did his PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. His guide was T.R.Henn and his research was on W.B.Yeats.) In his autobiography, Bachchan writes—‘Education in the Kayastha Pathshala was not a matter of academic study: attention was paid to character building…’. Elsewhere he writes: “Moving from the Unchamandi School to the Kayastha Pathshala High School was like moving from a pigeon-coop into the open air…..there were expansive grass lawns and maidans to play on…and for each subject there were separate teachers who would come to class at the hour shown on the time table.”
Vande Materam was the assembly song in the Pathshala. It had established its credentials as a nationalist institute quite early. Sociologically, the kayasthas are an intermediate caste given to clerical and literary pursuits. This was a caste that was best equipped to negotiate with the English on issues of power through the subterfuge of co-operation. The mutineer's radicalism was fraught with problems caste and religion. In fact, western education came to the plains of northern India only after the mutiny of 1857 had been quelled, Oudh and Agra had been united under a single province that would be called the United Provinces. The Kayastha Pathshala and the trust that ran this great educational endeavour ensured that Northern India made the essential transition in its politics from the feudal to the bourgeoisie. The baniyas and the kayasthas joined hands in Allahabad and Lucknow (unlike in Bihar where they rarely inter-married) and the Agarwalas and the Sinhas and Saxenas took the Indian middle class of Northern India to be the rulers of post-independence India. In fact the Kayastha Pathshala was the breeding ground of bhadralok (genteel) intellectual-ism that survived outside ninteenth century Calcutta. I do not agree with the many western sociologists like Christophe Jafferlot and Susan Baily that the Kayastha Pathshala was a casteist ghetto that functioned within the larger circumference of Hindu revivalist aspirations. I believe that the individual geniuses of its faculty and alumni are easily missed if such an analysis is allowed to acquire precedence over the more romantic history that needs to be preserved. The kayasthas were nationalist Hindus and both in Lucknow and Allahabad they ran publishing houses, educational institutes and newspapers, wrote poetry, and taught generations to come—tehzeeb. Interestingly, in 1916 there was a deliberation for separate representation for Hindus and Muslims in the United Provinces. While the Kashmiri Bramhins, Tej Sapru and Motilal Nehru supported separate representation, Kayasthas from eastern part of the UP also supported the bill. While it is easy to dub the oppsers as communal (and Brijnandan Prasad, was indeed communal) it is difficult to understand why Gokul Prasad who was a trustee of the Kayastha Pathshala needed to vote against the bill. He did not fear Muslim majority in the bar—many of his clients must have been Mohameddans. He was a member of the Hindu Sabha but to the extent that a trader or a lawyer could be—it was a social group that reaped professional rewards. I have a feeling that he did not want to dispute the leader of the group and had hardly any significant stake in the debate.

The first president of the Kayastha Pathshala trust was Munshi Hanuman Prasad. Hanuman Prasad belonged to that generation of self-made men who reminded us of the Renaissance gentlemen of sixteenth century. He had given up his job at the court of the Maharajah of Beneras following his differences with the ruler. He came to Agra and became a lawyer. When the court was established in Allahabad in 1866, he moved to Allahabad. Hanuman Prasad, learnt English when he was forty-five! Gokul Prasad was his grandson. He was the last honorary Vice-Chancellor of Allahabad University and before that a towering judge of the Allahabad High Court. (It was difficult in those days for non-Europeans to rise so high and natives with extraordinary judisprudence were allowed such positions). Another illustrous member of the same family was Munshi Ambika Prasad, whose saintly demeanor is legend in the annals of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Munshi Ambika Prasad also served as the President of Kayastha Pathshala.
I shall end my post by talking of one Dr Tara Chand, who was the principal of the Kayastha Pathshala College in the 1920s. Rajeshwar Dayal, who was an illustrous civil servant, a member of the family to which Ravi Dayal—the great publisher who first published Amitav Ghosh and had brought academic publishing to Indian shores as the managing director of Oxford University Press, India—belonged, and who most importantly was Dag Hammerskjold’s special representative to Congo on behalf of the United Nations was Tara Chand’s student at the Kayastha Pathshala. Dayal, with his upper class origins hated his Kaystha Pathshala. In his autobiography, A Life in our Times, he writes of his intermediate college: “There was an air of langour and neglect about everything”. Yet, as he survived his intermediate in science barely managing a second class and went on to study at the Kayastha Pathshala University College he seemed to love his alma mater. He writes: ‘Dr. Tara Chand had moved over to be the head of the college. The new college attracted good students and athletes and soon acquired a fine reputation.” Tara Chand had his D.Phill from Oxford. He was scholar par excellance. In his work called Influence of Islam in Indian Culture , this enthusiastic scholar and educationist writes: “Indian culture is synthetic in character. It comprehends ideas of different orders. …. It eternally seeks to find a unity for the heterogenous elements which make up its totality. At worst its attempts end up in a mechanical juxtaposition, at best they succeed in evolving an organic system.” Tara Chand, an early-twentieth-century scholar, had a rare insight.

Kayastha Pathshala intermediate college and university college along with The Pioneer, The Indian Press, and the Allahabad University laid the foundations of what was called the Oxford of the East—Allahabad. Yes, Allahabad is not just about the Nehrus and the Kumbh Mela (which is also a nineteenth century practice). It is also not so much about the Bachchans as it is about these instituions of learning and knowledge bearing.

2009-11-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a friend’s chat line……..

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
William Butler Yeats

The poem is built around many binaries: many/one; leaves/root/; sway/wither; lying/truth.The central image is that of a flowering tree, with many leaves. But, it is also a fluid image—the tree changes from its full bloom ‘youth’ of ‘many’ flowers and leaves to a ‘withering’ state of ‘one’-ness. The speaker asserts that there is only one kind of truth and to reach that truth one needs to experience ‘withering’. We know that leaves wither and so do the flowers. The ‘tree’ as such has its identity from these embellishments. But, ‘death’ comes when the root withers. And, this is the irony or ambiguity that any reading of the poem must negotiate—how can the ‘truth’ symbolizing ‘root’, which is a source of nourishment for a tree, be associated with death or withering? The ‘self’ is defined by its many attributes—the professional and the personal. (the leaves help in photosynthesis and basic survival while the flowers carry out the reproductive responsibility). With age sets in withering. One no longer sways and one is no longer defined by the many. It is at this point that the poem runs out of correspondences. (tree-human: : leaves-professional attributes: : flowers-sexual/personal attributes: : youth-a tree in full bloom) What is the exact human correspondence of the ‘root’? The answer is a vague thing called ‘truth’—a term whose significance is cemented by invoking the ‘lying days of youth’. What was the lie? And, who was the liar? The expression—‘lying days of my youth’ is an adjectival phrase. ‘Lying’ is an act (and in a stand-alone situation it is a verb) but grammatically, it qualifies the noun, ‘days’ which belongs to another noun, ‘youth’. So, ‘truth’ stands against ‘the days of youth’ which are ‘lying’ in nature. Commonsense has it that ‘old age’ stands against ‘youth’. Hence, is ‘truth’ an equivalent of ‘old age’? But, epistemologically truth is the implicit state of knowledge when ‘lying’ flourishes. It is like the root that remains deep in the soil while the leaves and the flowers flourish. It is what sustains the plant, gaining nourishment from the soil. It is therefore that Yeats writes: ‘…the root is one;/Through all the lying days of my youth’. In fact, the normal grammatical syntax would be: ‘I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun through all the lying days of my youth’. The inversion connects the ‘root’, as the singular and all-pervasive thing, via the connective ‘through’ to the ‘lying’ days. In old age one comes to realize that the ‘root’ was there all along and that one never paid attention to it. Then, one realizes the ‘truth’ which is the ‘root’ or the all pervasive-ness of the ‘root’. In other words, the ‘truth’ does not have the so-called human equivalent because there is no single truth that applies to all humanity. What sustains us and remains unseen even as it is within us unlike leaves and flowers that grow on us can be discovered only when one has withered and nears death. The image of the tree stands not to supply us with exact equivalents, but, as a process of arriving at the truth. The tree discovers its roots only as it nears its end. This tragedy becomes the message of the poem. The ‘tragedy’ like that of Macbeth’s is the delay of the arrival of truth.(Recall Macbeth’s final solliloquy where he claims that ‘life is a tale told by an idiot..’and then connect it to the witche’s prognosis—‘fair is foul and foul is fair’—that was made to him even before he set on his mayhem and progrom.) The reason why we are denied an exact human equivalent of the ‘root’ is because that is not the point of the poem. The point of the poem is in the pain of the discovery—‘Now I may wither into the truth’. The verb, ‘may’ conveys a sense of leisure at the speaker’s disposal. It also conveys the sense of permission. Life now permits the speaker his moment of discovery. But, the expression ‘wither into the truth’ underlies that the withering is a kind of a journey. The negativity is moderated by the assurance of the truth and its nourishing quality—the ‘root’. But, I refuse to accept that there is any sense of fulfilment. The nature of modernist truth is that it lies in a ‘heap of broken images’, in the poet ‘shoring his fragments’. One can arrive at the truth only by withering into it. The irony that one withers into a knowledge of the source of nourishment does not imply that there is redemption even as one approaches death. If a tree dies it cannot possibly ‘wither to the root’. What remains is the pain of ignorance and this pain is the ‘truth.’ In tragedy there is no redemption—there is only the re-cognition of pain. Therein lies the difference between ordinary morbidity and tragic anagnorisis. The greatness of this poem is that it enacts a tragedy in four lines.

Many thanks to Aakash for setting me on this train of thought and to my teacher Partho Mukherjee for having taught me the meaning of tragedy. And, thanks to my teacher, Suvro Chatterjee, for imploring me to write, again.

Dak Bungalow at Satoli

2009-04-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

We hadn't slept well for three nights, our colleagues were partying at Goa, and the heat was slowly growing on us. Driving at night on a route that none had explored (I had crossed that on a bus, half asleep, twice) was not the greatest idea. But, Jai insisted that he would pull it off. Subramanyam and Uday from IBM expressed confidence and I sat beside Jai to keep him awake as lorries came rushing at us on a dusty, potholed highway(?). The strectch between Gajraula and Moradabad was dangerous. That is to say the least. It was also beautiful. We stopped at Rahi Masoom Reza's Adha Gaon--Gangoli. It was a full moon night and after a few spells of spring rains, it was nippy. The mango orchards were shrouded in white light, the Ganga flowed quietly as the remnants of a Ramnavami mela looked on. The car's stereo played Iqbal Bano's rendition of Faiz's Hum dekhenge, and Piyush Mishra's Yeh Duniya (Gulaal)
We reached Moradabad at around three in the morning. It was tea time. As steaming cups were emptied, we decided that we were not going via Kaladhungi and Nainital. We drove atraight to Rampur and from then on the road was a breeze. (By the way, the stretch between Delhi and Gajraula too is fantastic). Early in the morning, after some more tea at Haldwani, we crossed a small jungle. Pheasants flew past as a cold breeze hit us. We stopped to take the freshness in.
I went to the backseat as Uday came over to the front. I dozed off. The car screeched to a halt in front of a dazzling lake. Crisp sun and yellow leaves sparkled. Bhimtal. I had never seen it to be so beautiful. Boy, New England could now run a marathon for its reputation. We splashed the lake water on our face. And,we drove on. By the way, our destination is Satoli, near Mukteswar. We were to put up at Pradeep and Subha's place over there. They have leased a 1905 Class 1 dakbungalow (Indians and dogs not allowed kind)and run a homestay. Pradeep and Subha work for Aarohi--an NGO that works for education, livelihood, healthcare, and water supply over there. Started by Sushil and Una (Sushil is still alive; he is a doctor. But, Una Mansingh--his wife--has passed away. They had started working with Chirag which is an inititaive of Kanhaia Kishan Lal. Chirag works for solar energy and education. Kanhai Kishan lives in a splendid estate, a few miles above Satoli. His place is called Sitla. His is a huge place, with lovely cottages,and apple, plum, cherry and starwberry orchards that overlook a huge Himalayan range.) Aarohi is now Pradeep's baby as well.
After Bhimtal we reached Bhowali--the gateway of Kumaon. Here we took the longer and more picteresque road to Satoli. In other words we eschewed the Ramgarh route and travelled via Khairna. Ramgarh is also dotted with lovely cottages including one of a Bengali FRCS doctor. And, the roads--ain't they lovely. The river warbling by, the cascades from the hills and the road is perfect to a fault. Uday and Jai had an ale-break at Khairon. From Khairon, one road climbs up to Mukteswar while the other which is across a bridge, goes towards Almora and Kausani. After Khairon we drove for another thirty minutes and came to Subha and Pradeep's
Peora Dak Bungalow. What a view of Trishul, Nanda Devi, Pnachchulli and the rest!! Subha made us lovely Darjeeling tea and served some great lunch. We clicked our cameras. Then it was sleeping time. Our colleague Debjani-di had travelled almost on the same route to reach Ashish's resort at Sonapani--some 5 kilometres off Satoli. She phoned in the evening. Pradeep lit a bonfire in the garden and served Guranj wine, rum, vodka, and juices. All of it was on the house. In the evening, Subha made lovely tawa rotis and echorer dalna. We were also served potatoes with thyme and rosemary. A Kumaoni peda was our dessert. Next morning we had breakfast with pakoda's, homemade apricot jam, bread and eggs scrambled with mixed herbs. After that we went to Almora. Climbed up a mountain slope and rested amidst the pine trees. Admired Kumaoni girls as well. In the evening we went to see Debjani-di. She had come with her husband, a friend's family, and another friend who is single. The last one, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, had a bad cold. Dwaipayan-da is a PhD from Cambridge, has taught for nine years at the JNU and now is a teacher at Partha Chatterjee's Centre Studies in Social Sciences. He is a political scientist! And, a great fun to be with. 'Bong' to the core, he is susceptible to catching a cold, intellectual conversations, and jokes. He is great to look at and of course a leftist. The sky darkened and it looked ominous. Now, Ashish's resort is a good two kilometres downhill from the car-park. We had to climb a mud trail. There was no light. And, leopards aren't a myth. They are fond of dogs, and haven't ruled out humans for dinner. Well, supported by the torch of my cell phone we walked back. Sorry, we ran.
At dinner, Subha made some pullao. Pradeep told us tales o'th' hills. We slept on bay windows, and old fashioned beds. There is a fireplace in the room and the wooden arches are imposing. Next day Dwaipayan-da, Daman Singh and his wife and their dog, ruled out walking to Mukteswar. Debjani-di and Jai insisted on the walk. I joined Dwaipayan-da and suggested that we walk from Corbett's home in Mukteswar to a rock face from where there is a seven and a half thousand feet drop to the valley. Castigated as cowardly Bongs and unSardarly Sardars we drove up to Mukteswar on an Innova. Much of Mukteswar is the property of the Indian Vetenirary Research Institute. There too we have a first class dakbungalow. It runs as a tea shop. We did walk up to the rock face. Debjani-di and Jai wanted to do rapelling. We dissuaded them. The equipment and the trainers looked spooky and amateurish. They settled for some firefoxing. Mad that they are!
We lunched at Ashis's resort. We were his guests. But, Jai and I never liked the place. Too pretentious and definetely not value for money.
At Pradeep's we spent our last night at Satoli. The snow mountains were under cloud cover. Subha served strawberries with cream. Pradeep showed us photographs of his son's visit. In the evening Ann Mukherjee had come from Sitla. We heard stories of this English lady who had married a Bengali ad-guru and was now a octogenerian widow. I told stories of my visit to Kishan Lal's estate. (This was when Jai and Debjani-di were climbing.) Stories of wind-chime, and tea-not-being-offered were told. Subbu and Uday had packed off from Almora--they had client meetings to attend. We missed those spirited souls.

Next morning we packed off with promises to return soon. I bought some herbs from Aarohi and have already tried hash browns with them. By the way, Subha makes lovely aloo-tikki burgers. If Macdonald's has put you off the burger try hers. You won't regret.
We drove downhill via Kaladhungi. The heat was unbearable. It seemed that Corbett was on fire. The riot of colours, the sun blazing down our neck...it was ghastly. And, the torture continues in myraid other forms. We are still driving downhill from that heaven of a place called Peora Dakbungalow.

To climb up-hill call Pradeep Gupta at 09719816154

Reading The Trouble with Harry

2009-04-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

I recently got to see Hitchcock’s ‘pastoral’—The Trouble with Harry. Set in the fall, this film has the idyllic countryside of Vermont as its setting. But, it is dark and disturbing as we discover guilt, passion, ruthless and idiosyncratic law, foppery and elegance in a heady but well controlled mix. It is a re-telling of the myth of fall in an Eden-like world. It is also the repository of Quixotic humour. Finally, it is banal and candid and challenges every bit of old-world virtue.

The camera pans over a canvas as the credits are listed. It could well be the metaphor for the canvas of the artist in the film—Sam. The camera tracks across the stunning Vermont landscape before coming to a jolt as it focuses on the red blotch on the socks of dead Harry. We generally focus on the face of the corpse—Hitchcock’s aim is to shock with the unusual and he succeeds very well.
Sam’s art seldom sells and he couldn’t care less. The film itself bombed in the United States. Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance in the film when Sam’s prospective customer examines his paintings. The connection is that Sam is Hitchcock’s persona in the film. He connects all the characters, but he has nothing to ‘do’ with Harry. Sam is the ‘outsider’ in the film—the artist who objectively treats his subject but puts his passion in his craft or artistry. The film’s dénouement is achieved as Sam gives up his dispassionate pose and admits his subjective interest in the lives and fates of the characters. The point that Hitchcock makes is that artistic objectivity is dangerous and even in a funny and Quixotic way can compromise human society. Sam, makes a remark quite early in the film—he wishes to paint Jennifer Rogers nude. Nude painting is expected to reveal, objectively, the beauty of the human form. It is a slapstick remark by the standards of 1955 and runs contrary to the film’s New England landscape. The Edenic is challenged by the carnal as well as the human. The character of Sam reminds you of Rope where crime has no purpose and is secured by male-bonding of the most pathological sort. Women are slighted and family bonding demeaned. Murder is almost linked to art—hiding it cleverly is like the artist’s scheme of concealing artistry in his masterpiece. Here, in Trouble with Harry, objectivity is also portrayed as dangerous. Sam, in search of autumnal colours, bumps into the corpse of Harry. He sees it as a model for his ‘sketch’ (he later argues with the Deputy Sheriff over this point—he insists that what the cop calls a ‘painting’ is actually a ‘sketch’. This might seem funny but there is indeed a point to be made—Sam is pretending to be an objective artist when he has actually lost his objectivity as he is in love with Jennifer Rogers and wishes to marry her. This is a self-conscious joke that he brilliantly pulls off.) The sketch later becomes a piece of evidence that could incriminate the two couples. Sam, as already discussed, reverts back to his earlier self to avoid arrest. Objectivity is useful only in a scientist—the doctor is interested in diagnosing the cause of Harry’s death. He doesn’t care a whit more. This saves the couples. But, recall that when he bumps into the corpse twice he doesn’t even care to find out what he exactly bumps into as he is lost in reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 116. It is a sonnet which is ostensibly about love that is unrequited and yet claims to remain steadfast even as the beloved has moved when it ‘remover finds’. The steadfastness is evident and is towards art if not a human being. The ‘art’ in question is that of the sonnet. Yet, ‘art’ fails to teach him to recognize, instinctively, ‘death’—the very corollary of life. The film’s central irony lies in the fact that the objective artist/scientist, much like the film-maker, is instrumental in shaping its destiny. But, the film also critiques the objective pose and ridicules it. The doctor resolves a moral problem—it absolves a woman of the guilt of being a murderer. But, legally the characters had already got themselves in the clear. Physical evidence had been destroyed and tampered with great ingenuity. Law could do very little. In fact, the film condemns all sorts of coldness—Harry’s and the Sherriff’s as well. Harry, would have never have had to resort to the passionate excesses had he not been cold and indifferent to Jennifer in the first place.

Irony abounds in the film. Arnie, the son of Jennifer Rogers is a shrewd child who can bargain hard for muffins and a lot more. He will not part with the rabbit until he has had his muffins. He is the very antithesis of childhood innocence, the Biblical myth of the lamb that Blake uses in his Songs of Innocence. Arnie, and his confusion over the nomenclatures of time—‘tomorrow’ is his ‘yesterday’—becomes the alibi for the couples. Again, in the conniving camaraderie between the naval captain and the artist is the ironical partnership between the game-hunter whose pleasure lies in mindless poaching and the creative human being who seeks to eternalize life’s colours. The passion of the cold and heartless Harry brings trouble to the quiet Boston village while the artist’s sacrificing of his disinterested poise leads to its resolution. The only piece of art that Sam’s buyer misses out becomes the source of a great complexity in the plot. Sam’s artistic skill is important to the film not because he is a Picasso or a Dali, but because he uses it to save someone from charges of murder. The underlying message is that art is important only when it is linked to life. The price that Sam quotes for his work is actually social good. Hitchcock, comes up with a very socialist and Christian message even as he upholds artistic idiosyncrasy and independence.
Mistaken notions and identities give rise to the ironies in this film. Sam connives with Captain Wiles because Captain Wiles believes that he had killed Harry. Captain Wiles confides about his guilt to Ivy Gravely. Ivy herself believes that she had killed Harry as he tried to ‘rape’ her and she hit him with her shoe’s heel. To atone her guilt she invites Wiles to a coy date over muffins and tea. Had she not had this mistaken notion the couple would have never met and never fallen in love. The relationship between Jennifer and sam cements as Sam discusses Wily’s crime with her only to let Jennifer ‘confess’ hers. Crime breeds very strange but warm and beautiful love affairs. The greatest irony is of course that no one in this idyllic country is overtly disturbed by a murder. It is as if nothing has happened. Even as the people are comical in their attitude, it does remind one of the strange indifference in Rope. Again, the sharp and candid dialogue in this film is remarkable. It does not suit a pastoral romance at all. It approximates the frank banality of Frenzy and Vertigo. Hitchcock had this great habit of destabilizing established social myths. In Shadow of a Doubt—the myth of the happy American family is questioned by him. The treatment of pastoral love in this film is also similarly done. The final frame of the film reads—The trouble with Harry is over. It too is ironic in import. It could well mean that the film is over as it could that the ‘trouble’—the legal scare that the death had caused is over.

We must remember that so many people had so easily acknowledged that they had killed Harry because they had no idea as to what it takes to murder someone. They lived in a village far removed from practical cares. They could confess murder over cups of tea. The film is all about discovering what ‘crime’ is and what it takes to cover it up. In other words, the narrative traces the journey of four human beings through a discovery of what crime and criminal action is. They have hidden bodies, told lies, tampered with evidence, created alibi and manipulated witnesses—all are classic steps that a seasoned criminal would take when he commits a murder. The irony is that all this becomes a mock drill. Harry, after all, died of a heart attack.

2009-01-09T05:21:00.001-08:00

Recently, given the responsibility of commissioning a textbook on the history of modern Europe (covering, roughly, the period between the French Revolution and the end of the Second World War) , I decided to spruce up my reading of the subject. I had to meet authors who had degrees from Ivy League universities and I couldn’t afford to prove myself to be a dud. Well, I did read a little and found out something interesting. Napoleon was, apart from being ambitious, a rather caustic character. His view of liberty, for one, is entertaining: ‘Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.’ Elsewhere he muses: ‘Liberty means a good civil code. The only thing modern nations car for is property’1
The point is that even the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ made by the post-revolution French National Assembly declared that ‘…social distinctions may be based only upon general usefulness’. It does not define ‘general usefulness’ but did admit in the seventeenth declaration that ‘property is a sacred and inviolable right’. Interestingly enough very few of us know that simultaneous to the declaration of the Rights of Man there was a Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Anyone interested in knowing about this can pick up and read The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), pp 124-129. I found it more radical and passionate than most of the bull shit that a literature student encounters in his post-grad classes.

The Versailles Peace Treaty, we all know, sowed the seeds of the Second War. But, few care to read it. While the treaty put the entire blame of the war on Germany, extracting costs from it for all damages, it did little to blame greedy and lousy nations like Britain. It declared—‘Germany renounces in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all her rights and titles over her oversea possessions’. It gave Germany fifteen years to ruin itself sufficiently. After that, it promised to withdraw. However, it also declared that child labour needs to be abolished and that ‘labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce’. It accepted ‘The right of association for all lawful purposes by the employed as well as the by the employers.’ Lenin, we know, did not think much of the First World War and Soviet Union did not participate in it. (This disappointed a socialist called Mussolini greatly and turned him into what we know he was.) He decried this war as a capitalists’ war scourging for colonial booty. However, this declaration already shows the effect of the Russian Revolution: it acknowledges labour rights and concludes that—‘Each state should have due regard to the equitable economic treatment of all workers.’ The League of Nations did not respect it, the Great depression was inevitable. So was the Second World War, the fall of Churchill and the British Empire.

I can go on with my litany. The point is that the study of history in our country is lacking in that it disregards research and reading of historical documents and sources. It emphasizes rote learning and trusting secondary opinion as holy-speak. Thus, we grow up with half-baked ideas and politically biased summaries. I do not speak of obscure sources or pedantic thesis. Read, the freely available ones and know for yourself.

Rocket Science

2008-12-29T04:22:00.000-08:00

The enmity between India and Pakistan is at a new high: nice time to have a cricket match—advertising will earn lots of money and beat recession. On the other hand, the press which has had nothing to report but lay-offs has increased readership. War stories and cries sell like hot pancakes on cold Christmas days. So, this war-mongering is good. It will also cause fears of scarcity and shoot prices up. There will be collateral damages like the Bengal famine, and Hiroshima. But, we will tide over recession via cricket matches and war-on-television. Mad mullahs versus an economist will be fantastic! The latter’s daughters do plenty of weird things like history teaching in India and civil liberties in America (she dares not do the same in India—no one wants an embarrassed daddy!). They’d get first hand experience on how parts of India become archaeological curios and civil liberty disasters.

Recently, my teacher and I walked into an eatery on Lodhi road in Delhi. A sales guy couldn’t spell ‘black forest’. We were bemused. But, the nation isn’t. We mourn job losses of ‘executives’ in retails. What would they have done if they didn’t have these jobs in the first place? Or what prompted entrepreneurs to employ these people? There was a surge in demand and quality had to be compromised to meet it. This is a simple answer that does not make me happy. I feel that the idea was to open up stores and staff them with uneducated and cheap labour. The idea is to not just make lots of money but to keep the bottom line fat. So, when demands fall my revenue dips but my margins continue to remain healthy. I invest less and make less money but I’m not in the red. My marginal cost and marginal revenue continue to be equal. In other words, I am still maximizing profits. This continues till my cost cutting makes me dysfunctional or till marginal cost and revenue both become zero. On the other hand this example makes us understand that all the employees in the information industry were uneducated too. Naryanamurthy, himself acknowledges that. In an interview he says--: I have no doubt at all that free trade is extremely important for poor countries to create more and more jobs. When we talk of free trade, it is free trade not just in India, it is free trade in G7 countries, free trade in G15, free trade all over. The key question we have to ask is what does a country have to offer, and what does a country have to sell in the global market? The moment we have something that we produce better than anybody else at the most competitive price in the global market, as long as there is free trade, then that country can sell those products in the global market, obtain global currency, and then import the best product at the best prices to fulfil its other needs. So free trade is good; there is no doubt at all.

But the assumption is that every country has something to offer in the global marketplace. Unless I have something to offer in the global marketplace, then free trade is not good for me, and I will blame others who believe in free trade. So the question that every doubting country has to address on a very urgent basis is: Have we something to offer the world at the best price? Have we something of the best quality at the best price? And that is a much more difficult question to answer rather than saying that free trade is bad for the world. But free trade is not bad for the world at all.

... At different points of time in different sections of the economy, different sectors of the industry, different countries will have competition at one thing. At one point in time China had computers; Japan had computers and radios. Even today, for example, when I go home I have a General Electric fridge, I open [it] and then I see Pepsi. I see so many of these things. My computers in this company, for example, we import $50 million worth of technology from the U.S. every year. The point is simply this. Indian computer manufacturers, Indian soft drink manufacturers will say, "Why do you drink Pepsi?" or "Why do you buy computers from outside India?" India must have some strength in certain products. United States today has the best strength in terms of computer technology, and everybody will buy the U.S. technology, but that's the best technology at the best prices. The question that we have to ask is what is it that I can bring to the global market at the best price, something that is considered the best in the world? That's the only way it works.1

The point is that in India we are very good at producing cheap labour. We still do not make great computers, fridges, or even colas. We produce graduates who know enough to sell their labour cheaply but not sufficient to claim first-world wages. So, all those who face lay-offs need to remember that their education is not indispensable. What can be duplicated easily and had at lower rates is definitely not high-quality specialized stuff. Rocket scientists are made of sterner stuff.

References

1 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_narayanamurthy.html#1

Premchand’s Ramlila and Joyce’s Araby: A Comparative Reading

2008-11-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

Joyce’s Araby foregrounds, via the medium of the short fiction, a kind of psychological insight and use of symbolism that would soon become the genre’s mainstay. Storytelling, after Dubliners, would be more mimetic, symbolic (bringing to use classical myth as subtext), and less likely to discussing events in someone’s life. Direct narration of events would be replaced by dense psychological moments. (Like the description of a boy, love struck and lonely, clasping his hands and probably genitals, listening to the sound of rain drops pattering on the grass outside his room and he feels that they are like needles impinging on his skin and senses.) Few years later, the technique would be taken to a greater height of complexity by T S Eliot in The Wasteland. Cultural and psychological space would become like the cursed and barren kingdom of the Fisher king in the Arthurian legend: the mad poet in search of shanti would be described as ‘shoring his fragments against the ruins’.

Premchand, rooted and committed to social reality of the villages and small towns of his era, could explore psychological complexities through a way of narration that is less symbolic and more direct; he would use a style that would not make us question the authenticity of the ‘dramatized narrator’ (an expression lent to us by Wayne C Booth in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction) as we are expected to when we read Araby. In Ramlila, for instance, as we progress with the story, we are told that the narrator does not think much of the Ramlila festival in Kashi for the one in his village was as colourful and more fun. Soon, we discover that the disenchantment is born out of nostalgia as he is now a retired man who has been pensioned off. He has fathered sons and worked to feed and get them married. In Araby, the boy is never seen to grow old. His disillusioned narrative, full of Biblical symbols that re-tell the story of Genesis and the Quest of the Holy Grail in a misogynistic fashion, constantly overlaps youthful romantic exasperation with a matured man’s sense of decadence that pervades his atmosphere. Expressions like ‘my foolish blood’ co-exist with ‘her name was like a prayer to my lips’.

Yet, Ramlila like Araby tells the story of growing up and disillusionment; both use the motif of the religious festival where evil triumphs over good and tell us how the festival becomes the occasion of epiphanic revelation of reality that subverts the cultural memory of mythical heroism and goodness. If the young boy in Araby journeys to the occidental fair imagining himself to be the Arthurian knight in search of the Grail; Premchand’s narrator enjoys his proximity to the mythical hero Ram. The father in Ramlila would find his counterpart in the drunken uncle of Araby who turns out to be a spoilsport and also a representative of a decadent gerontocracy. If Araby has been read as a precursor to Joyce’s classic bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the first-person narrator in Ramlila, much like Premchand lives in Beneras. The flirtatious women in Araby could be read as the counterpart of the tawaif in Premchand’s story.

The richness of Premchand’s story comes from its economy of style, its spare use of symbolism and yet the deep and subtle psychological ramifications that it brings out. Recall, that the story had begun with a sense of fondness for the Ramlila festivities in his village; he even privileges it over the more glossy and glitzy events of Kashi, that is, Beneras. The story ends with the narrator in tears, a mellow satisfaction of seeing off a friend with a couple of annas as fare for the road. The disillusionment has not been the expected one: that the mythical hero Ram turned out to be penurious or that he did not recognize his friend during the brief moment of glory as Ram. It came from the action of his father who could pay gold coins to a courtesan and not an artist who had entertained the spiritual needs of a whole community. He says, Us din se pitaji par se meri shraddha uth gayi. His respect for his father was lost on that very day. The perversity of a feudal lord, a government employee, and a businessman is placed against the innocent love and admiration that the narrator has for a friend and artist. While the older men respond to sexual gestures, the narrator is aroused by the sheer power of performance. But, what contributes to the complexity of this apparently simple story of growing-up is the way such a bitter memory is overpowered by fond nostalgia for the same experience.Discovering hatred for ones father cannot be explained away by merely citing Freudian theory; it is too strong an emotion to forget. If Ramlila has been the source of such strong and bitter emotions, one needs to understand the reason for renewed attachment to it. The fact that he has been a father himself is not explanation enough. I believe that there was something more enduring in the festival itself that has lingered on and more strongly than the sentiments of resentment.

There were two celebrations on the fateful day. One was the Ramlila itself. The other one was dance of the courtesan. The second led to a denial of the first. Let us work out a schema—Ramlila: Innocence::Nautch:Experience::Good:Evil::Son:Father. The triumph of Ram over the evil Ravana that the Ramlila symbolically conveys is denied by the commercial and carnal interests of the Chaudhary and the father of the narrator. (In fact the triumvirate of the Chaudhary, the Daroga and the Baniya, that silences the actor, carries the Marxist symbolism of the feudal, the bureaucratic, and the businessman working in cohorts against the proletarian artist. In Araby Irish politics is nonexistent. Here is probably the major difference between the modernist in South-Asia and in the West.) The act of giving a couple of annas to the actor, who played the role of Ram and earned money for the feudal-patron, is an attempt to fight for the mythical-hero and also the friend. This is what the Ramlila of childhood offered: a chance to be Ram. It is a role played in silence and oblivion but a role that the ‘real-Rama’ acknowledges. It fills his eyes with tears and heart with satisfaction—Unhe vida karke lauta, to meri ankhein sajal thi; par hriday anand se ubhra huwa tha. As he has moved on in life, Ramlila has acquired more colour and more glitz. Yet, here, he can never be friends with Ram; he can never win over the Ravana, even if that meant that the villain was his own father. Therein lay his pleasure and the source of all his fond nostalgia. Premchand invests in the narrator’s entry into puberty (when defying the father-figure is common) with social and cultural values. This is what distinguishes man from monkey; the artist from the munshi.

Delhi at the Jama Masjid and Lodi Gardens

2008-11-18T05:04:00.000-08:00

Purana Quila and Jama Masjid

2008-11-18T04:49:00.000-08:00

A kid ran after a ball at the Purana Quila. A few men enjoyed their siesta at the grand mosque. Pigeons flew, a man meditated, women gossiped.
It was a mellow afternoon at the Jama Masjid. Hordes of foreigners, believers, and touts made good holiday and money. My little camera either gave too much depth or too little of the colour and the mood that was there. Yet, here is a modest attempt for a city that I silently admire.

Shimla

2008-10-30T02:33:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1958, my father came to Shimla with his sister and nephew and nieces. It was summer and the season of apples. They walked till chhota Shimla and Jackoo hills and so many other places. And of course, they stayed at the Kalibari. Those were the days when rickshaws pulled by men were seen on the mall and the Ridge.

Twenty years later he came with my mother and a group of friends. They stayed at the Kalibari once again and walked all the way to Jackoo hill; my mother was not impressed. It was the year of the floods and they quickly moved to Manali. That was a couple of years before I was born.

Fifty years later, last Sunday, he again went to Shimla. This time I was around and his family was complete. He has been to Shimla when he went to school, he was in Shimla when was young and strong, he now went to Shimla--slightly weak, and very old. It indeed has been a pilgrimage. Bengalis have made similar routine out of Darjeeling and Puri; Shimla is indeed a little strange place for such a feat. I feel that he has also been lucky.

We stayed near the Mall, and in a hotel. Kalibari was visited once and casually. The room was well appointed and pricey. Life indeed had turned a full circle. He had come with a Roliflex in '58, in 1978 he carried a Minolta SRT101, and this time around I used a Canon Powershot. He loved sipping the tea at the Sarkari-tourist-department run cafe on the Ridge and watching children on horseback. We didn't go to Jackoo hill or Chhota Shimla but we went to Fagu, Naldera and Kufri. He did not climb any mountain slope but quietly sat for coffee at Fagu and waited for my mother as she limped and struggled to get out of the tourist bus. They were happy and tired. After a long and a lonely while--I was at peace.

Ten years that shook my world

2008-10-06T21:50:00.000-07:00

I spent ten years in Kolkata. When I came, it was known as Calcutta. One day, much to the chagrin of many (and that includes good ol' Fr Pat Eaton, sj) it changed to 'Kolkata'. I came here in summer; it was April, the 'cruelest month'. Thrust into Park Street, this country-oaf from Durgapur was both amazed and confused. There were so many lonely walks on Short Street, Harrington Street, Hungerford Street. Then there was this friend of mine--Swagatam. Both of us soon delved into Kantian noumena, Heiddeger and Kierkergaard. While most of my friends gunned for the IITs and the medical colleges, we spent hours at Nandan. Nothing great was achieved. I still had to negotiate cruel hours in stranded trains, messy Sealdah in the rains, running from one bus to another. There were girls from Loreto, and Birla High on the tube. One of them, was ravishing. I was particularly jealous of a St Joseph's boy who managed a cosy fifteen minutes with her, everyday. Later, he came to my college and soon dropped out. He stayed close by in Barrackpore. I am told that he is into some business in Singapore. He didn't have the girl, but, did he care?
Swagatam died on 13 January, 2004. He was killed by a bus driver who drove over him. Swagatm and I had chatted, cried and been tortured by the world. He was a wonderful boy. Yes, a boy he was. When did they allow him to grow into manhood? To hell with Calcutta and its rowdy, hooligans like cadre-driven society.
Did the city care for me? I doubt it. After college, where I learnt a lesson that I've kept very close to my heart, getting into the finest University was a breeze. Yes, where was I? On lessons learnt. In this city the 'system' is much bigger than the individual. No matter how good you are, it is going to cut you down to the size of a Bantu. The university, the board, teachers, all of them would set the standards of mediocrity and then ask you to beat nincompoops. Mugging answers, rote learning critical surveys, and writing fancy long winded English was more important than being original, imaginative and crisp. Of course I look back to college with affection. I wouldn't have learnt how to read poetry had it not been for Bertram Da Silva, I would not have read with passion and zeal for performance if it hadn't been for Partho Mukherjee. And, who could forget the dedication, steady hard work, and the gentlemanly warmth that Professor Kapadia had.
The amazing interiors of Goethals Library, reading a dusty cloth covered book--tattered at many ends--at the National Library, as the November sun mellowed upon the dust on the teak of the table, was something that Calcutta offered with ample happiness. So was the smell of jasmine flowers I bought for someone at Rashbehari, while she was schooled in Rabindrasangeet. We walked, softly, as summer eased into rains, through Garcha, Dover Lane ,Hazra....
If Hussain’s does Hyderabad proud, we have our Foreign Publishers' on the Grand Hotel arcade. Babuda, would always have the odd book, and he could make you buy it. Ashis Bhattacahrya has been known as Babu to many Calcuttans. He has a credit system for those wrinkled, frowning and bemused intellectuals who avoid or abhor credit cards. He can sell academic hardbacks like no one else can. And, it has always been a delight talking to him. Conversation would be a mix of adulation, criticism, and the banal. I bought my RSC Shakespeare from him and he favoured me with a good discount. Warm regards for Babu-da
The old British Council, on 5 Theatre Road, was also a pleasure. It had cane chairs, a nice cafe, and long umbrellas for rainy days.
I watched films at Metro and Globe and preferred them to Priya. The multiplexes are such an abuse of cinema-going! The Dharamtullah halls were all dirty, didn't make much money, but, the day they turned Lighthouse to a shopping mall I was angry. That was plain uncultured and the Bong-middle-class Chief Minister couldn't care less. However, I do love the rejuvenated Coffee House on Central Avenue. Though, the micro-wave heated pakoras are a bit disappointing.
The day I got my job at Orient Longman, I walked all the way, in rain, from my office at Chandni Chowk to Coffee House on College Street. I met a friend of mine; he was well past sixty and a radical--Professor Pranab Nayak. I would also not forget Kanchankumar Mukherjee and Rabinbabu. We shared a cup of black coffee and listened to stories of a generation murdered and dragged down the drains by Indira Gandhi's stooges. And, the communists-in-power exonerated all that. I wrote for a magazine called Ikshan. Long live the revolution of the Bengali gentleman!! De la grande Mephistophilis. Yak Yak
I left for Delhi ten summers after I'd come. I had fallen in love, gone to the University, taught at colleges, hated the mediocrity and the middle class that is so typical of the city. Once on the train, I realised I hadn't taken my ticket! Did the city not want me to leave? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

2008-10-03T02:15:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Sorry for the goof up, but it seems that I've unwittingly deleted my first post! I will be back with it shortly.