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The Perfect Back-up Plan

2012-02-06T06:58:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Hashim Badani

By Abhijit Dutta

[First published in Lonely Planet Magazine India (Feb, 2012)]

Singapore, as we all know, is lovely. Sumptuous shopping, endless gourmandizing, chic clubbing - all wrapped up in a nice little ribbon and a Vanda Miss Joaquim orchid on top. Undoubtedly, much merry can be made here and no number of days spent making it are too many.

But.

If you find yourself wondering whether you really can hot foot it to Orchard Road for the 5th day in a row, or catch yourself staring at the dizzying sprawl of roulette machines at Resorts World without a gleam in the eye, or - shock horror - can’t bring yourself to consume another plate of chicken rice, then you know it’s time for a back-up plan. At 50 minutes from Singapore and a time lag of an hour, arriving in Bintan feels a bit like time travel. The rather dramatic shift in landscape - from the geometric deformities of Marina Bay Sands to the soft sand and blue expanse of South China Sea - is almost instant. The nasi goreng you bought from Tanah Merah ferry terminal is likely still unfinished, and you have barely turned your head away from the foul image of oil tankers and cargo ships crowding Singapore’s coast that the horizon begins to swarm with islands: big islands, small islands, pretty islands, scruffy islands, islands with names and islands without, islands that look like amoebas with green mohawks and islands that form perfect teardrops. And, just like that, you are in the heart of Riau archipelago, Indonesia.

With some 3000 odd islands strewn around the south china sea, to the east of Sumatra and South of Singapore, the Riau islands (of which the Riau archipelago is a part, along with the Tudjuh archipelago and the Lingga islands) is a curious mix of uninhabited islands, hyperactive tourist hives, industrial complexes, bustling port towns, mining havens, uber chic private islands, startlingly beautiful coral reefs and waters that are known only by seafaring nomads who have lived off these wild wild waters for at least 8 centuries.

Though you can no longer tell, these islands were once the heart of Malay sultanates that ruled everything between Sumatra and Borneo. As the major thoroughfare on the lucrative spice-route, these islands became the power centre of the Malay world, with a string of sultans, overlords and western colonial powers trying to fold it into their empires or set up political capitals. Much of the attention was reserved for the largest island of the Riau archipelago - Bintan - and everybody from the Sultan of Johor-Riau (who also counted the much smaller Singapore among his many territories), the Sultan of Malacca, the Chinese, the Dutch, the British, the indigenous Bugis to even sea pirates tried to make a grab for it.

Today, more than potentates or pirates, Bintan is likely to be held ransom by tourists who arrive by the boatloads, seeking respite from Singapore. The majority of those who set foot on it will only know an overdeveloped strip on its northern coast called Lagoi Bay and spend a weekend at one of the many resort properties that line the beachfront. Each is a self contained theme destination and so the resort you pick becomes the entirety of your experience: lavish pool villas at the Banyan Tree for a luxe couples retreat, the seaside golf resorts for a boy’s day out on the 18-hole, the boisterous Club Med for extended poolside bonding with the kids, the homey Nirwana Gardens for a family reunion and the spa haven Angsana for some intense R&R. Whichever resort you choose, you will find yourself in a cocoon of sun warmed pools, extended lunches and tropical cocktails that erase all memory of stress or Singapore. Throw in some beach time, a spot of kayaking or shallow water snorkelling, maybe even a firefly spotting night tour through the Sebung river and you have no excuse to leave Lagoi Bay.

And yet, if you do decide to rouse yourself from this sunny, slothful stupor and drive out of the deceptively insular resorts enclave, there is much to soak in.

On my second day in Bintan i was headed southwards to an ubiquitous icon visible from all corners of the island. At just 360 meters above sea level, Gunung Bintan, or simply Bintan Mountain, is a squat little hill that wears a rainforest for a poncho and looks utterly huggable. Once inside, you are immediately lost in a world whose charms are entirely in its ordinariness, its lived nature. You see the forest bulge with the good stuff - mangosteens and jackfruits for the kids, numnum fruits for the pregnant woman, rattan trees to make baskets and furniture, pandan leaves to weave sleeping mats - and you know this is not a mountain you climb for the summit view. Gunung Bintan is an essential part of village life and climbing its mossy trails you become a part of it too. The steep slopes are an excuse to stop often, catch your breath, gulp some water and talk to your guide - likely a local who climbs it every other day without breaking a sweat. On your way down, join the village boys for a communal splash in the waterfall and feel happy that you have washed a few calories away.

Another 40 minutes of driving eastwards will take you to Trikora beach, the rare public beach in Bintan that reminds you that you are after all in Indonesia, and that Bintan is not merely a beachy disneyland reserved for foreigners. Locals from around Bintan have been driving down to this relatively secluded beach for years, with backpackers transiting through the island their only company. In recent years, Trikora too has seen the rise of resorts and increasingly its fishing villages and kampong huts are jostling with guesthouses and hotels, but it still remains a place where you catch some fresh air, meet the locals and stitch yourself an authentic experience. If all this sounds much too quotidian for your taste and you would much rather your back-up plan was made of something decidedly more indulgent, consider checking into one of the three private islands that lie moored around mainland Bintan. Away from the package tours and fixed itineraries, crowded pools and breakfast queues, these are some of the world’s most exclusive getaways. Nikoi Island, 8 kms off the east coast, is a breezy catamaran ride from a private jetty near Trikora village. Spread over 15 hectares of beach and rainforest, it appears out of nowhere, wearing the glittering South China Sea around its neck, and immediately convinces you that life should entirely consist of contemplating bright blue seas and drinking Yogi’s coladas with white sand shifting beneath your feet.

Yogi - private butler cum bartender cum everything you want him to be - is among the more conspicuous charms of Nikoi; his many merits include pouring much too much rum in your drinks, distracting your kids with a wildly popular treasure hunt and whittling bows and arrows out of fallen branches as instant souvenirs.

“He is part of the furniture” says Tony the Manager, pointing to Yogi’s rear (which really does look like it belongs to a rather famous bear) swinging on the arms of a deckchair shaped from driftwood. Much of the Nikoi property is built up with materials curated from nearby islands and exudes an authentic organic aura - be it the design of the 15 sea front huts that blend into the island’s texture, or the conch shell and coral decor that punctuates the place. The swimming pool is nestled amongst stunning rock formations and you get the feeling that you are tucked away in a natural cove on some secret islet. A natural cove with a bar service, of course. More than anything else, Nikoi gives you a sense of freedom, to run off and play without a care in the world. It’s the perfect break for kids growing up in cloistered urban spaces - to know clear waters and white sand, to plot their own adventures, to get lost and to never have to wear shoes.

If Nikoi is great for kids, Pulau Joyo (smaller and more intimate than Nikoi) is where the adults come to play. Handcrafted by Antony Marden, a shipping magnate who counts futuristic super yachts and island clusters among his playthings, Joyo is a private den of an island. The bar is yours to tend and, if you want, you get to pick the tunes as well, making it the perfect place for a bachelorette’s party or a debauched weekend. The island has mostly been left alone, with the only “constructions” being beach huts - all wood and alang-alang (dried grass) - and a large pavilion outfitted with antiques from flea markets around the world, including some outrageously handsome doors from Bali, a wildebeest carved from driftwood and a bewildered looking rust iron lionfish. It’s classic Survivor Chic.

Pangkil pre-dates both Nikoi and Joyo and is the original “private” island. It’s the only one among the three that you have to book out in its entirety, irrespective of numbers in the party. Despite being nearly a decade old, it remains a popular choice. Kate, an American expat living in Singapore tells me she has been back 8 times - “Pangkil is an annual affair. These kids have literally grown up here” she says, waving at a large brood absorbed in a game of handball. Admittedly, there are nice touches one can get used to: photogenic sunsets, cosy tree houses, bamboo beds and a hot donut ritual that you have got to love.

Perhaps just as ‘private’ as these is the very public island of Senggarang in west Bintan, but it’s a whole different style. A short drive from Tanjung Pinang (the capital of Bintan and it’s largest town) it is home to the tightly knit chinese minority community. Unlike the expat crowd on the private islands, it’s the locals who live it up here (and have been, for over 300 years). It’s a community that has always huddled together and despite the passage of time and the fact that they speak fluent indonesian, they retain a fiercely distinct chinese character. Even other local indonesians are infrequent visitors. The “attraction” in Senggarang is an old banyan tree strangling an equally old buddhist temple but its charms lie elsewhere. I arrive on a Sunday (“lazy day” says Natalis, my guide) and find the village brushed over with sepia tints and yellowed edges. Along a narrow sun splashed walkway that joins rows of wistful looking stilt houses, aunties with faces more gnarled than roots of a banyan tree smile toothless smiles and poke away at their open woks and tea stoves. Men play interminable rounds of chinese chess, chain smoking cheap cigarettes. We too decide to pay our respects to “lazy day” and sit down at a table beside them with our too sweet kopis and crunchy batter fried fresh fish.

From Senggarang, Natalis and i hire a sampan (fisherman’s boat) to take us through the winding Sungai Ular, a river blinkered with mangroves. Tucked away in these secluded tracts is a chinese temple no longer on the tourist itinerary. Once there, i take in the view from the courtyard and wonder why. The temple itself is ordinary and like any other buddhist temple but the view alone - leaping off as it does from the courtyard to the sea below, framing Tanjung Pinang in a palette of pastels - is worth the detour. I ask Natalis how he discovered the place and he tells me a couple of American backpackers in the late 80’s had read about it in a Lonely Planet guidebook and made him row down the Sungai Ular in its search. Seeing me surprised that this little pocket of peace should remain so off the radar, he shrugs: “no more backpackers now. Only suitcases”

I still have a few hours left before i catch my ferry back to Singapore and i decide to do a quick hop to Penyengat. A tiny island, Penyengat has more history than most of Riau. A becak ride (a bike-trishaw) around the island reveals crumbling fortresses, hollowed palaces and revered graveyards. Penyengat was once home to the powerful Riau kings and legend has it that most of the locals are royal descendants. With that thought on my mind, I tip my becak driver handsomely - after all, one must stand by his king even when the chips are down.

I finish off my trip with a coffee at Cafe Puncak, which sits perched on the highest point in Tanjung Pinang. From here, the town coalesces at your feet, the asbestos roofs of brightly colored houses creating a broad brushstroke on the riau sea. Tanjung Pinang was once a swinging city, luring sea men and traders from Singapore and around to dance away a night, to gamble and score with prostitutes. Since then, things have changed. Today Pinang has the comfort of a small town vibe, its horizons skimming over hoary villages like Senggarang, over mangroves and lost temples, and past royal relics before disappearing into silhouettes of mountains crowded with trees that will never know any landscaping. Tanjung Pinang is a reminder that you could travel far sipping coffees on rugged terraces, feet on stool, looking vacuously at the goings on of seas and rivers, reminder that travel is not always about movement.

It’s a reminder one is likely to forget the moment you clear immigration in Singapore. Back into bright lights and crowded streets there will always be much to do - things to see, places to go. But if ever it gets too much and you just want to catch your breath, you know you have the perfect back-up plan.

Writing (was) on the wall

2012-01-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

[Illustration by Kathryn Rathke; taken from The Economist's Intelligent Life blog]

"The turbulence in India this time hasn't come from foreign invasion or conquest; it has been generated from within. India cannot respond in her old way, by a further retreat into archaism. Her borrowed institutions have worked like borrowed institutions; but archaic India can provide no substitutes for press, parliament and courts. The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded old civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead"

- V S Naipaul, INDIA: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

The Break-up

2012-01-28T00:27:00.000-08:00

[Photo by Graham Turner of The Guardian; taken from an article by Andrew Anthony, published January, 2009]

By Abhijit Dutta

As if the fisticuffs between lunatic fundamentalists and indignant liberals, the roiling dissonance between the moderate muslims and the hindu right, and the heightened condescensions between lawless writers and self censoring ones weren’t enough, L’Affaire Rushdie à JLF is now threatening to sour another rather celebrated relationship - that of the No-Matter-What liberal (NMW-L) and the Not-So-Moderate muslim (NSM-M)

And if you eavesdrop on their conversation - in the corridors of Facebook or Twitter - you can hear their break-up talk.

“You are hypocrite” says the NMW-L

“But why yaar” asks the NSM-M

“What yaar - you are all ready to protest when its M F Husain but Rushdie pe baat aayi toh phat li?”

“It’s different”

“How is it different? Tell me, how is it different? He painted naked hindu goddesses and you were all for freedom of expression and what not. Now he calls Mahomet Mahound, calls his harem brothel and you have a problem? Kaisa chalega boss?”

And you know all is not well with the central provision of the social contract between the NMW-L and the NSM-M: Reciprocative Liberalism. I promise to not be offended if you promise to not be offended.

The argument is no more sophisticated than the one you may hear housewives make to each other: we eat their eid offerings, why can’t they eat my prashad. "We celebrate everything - X-mas, eid-ul-fitr, diwali, sab kuchh, why can’t they celebrate our festivals"

And it is hard to fault them: as polytheistic hindus, used to pantheons stocking up to thirty three million gods, each with their own quirks (from charsis to liars), it is a minor detail to co-opt a few more: Allah Christ, all are welcome, this way please. The failure of the Muslim to reciprocate, to stop being a spoilt, stubborn, monotheist can sometimes, understandably, be frustrating.

And so, when they do find that one soul who will have their prashad, they are immediately embraced, held up as moderates, and fireworks (Lakshmi brand, what else) set off to declare the continued good health of secular traditions.

As a nation in panic, as a nation that is increasingly finding its imagination of what India constitutes severally threatened, there is a constant need for proof of this co-mingling, this idea of religio-cultural osmosis that strings together vastly disparate peoples from “Kashmir to Kanyakumari” into an “Akhand Bharat”.

Rushdie is of course the poster boy of this - he is the right kind of muslim. He is adequately westernized (therefore accessible), exhibits nearly none of the lunacy that the word muslim brings to mind these days, and is brilliant to boot. As Ananya Kabir writes in her book The Territory of Desire, his is the “voice of the modern Indian Muslim, the liberal nationalist, celebrated at home and abroad, fluent in secular rituals and polytheistic traditions, resident in a country of influence but vocal about his ties to India”. The liberals and the secularists couldn’t possibly get a better case-in-point if they tried.

And so imagine the dismay when the NSM-M begins to quibble, begins to show discomfort, begins to use ifs and buts, looking to qualify his support.

“B...but, I support azaadi in Kashmir" blubbers the NMW-L, pleading "yaar, I am not offended even when Geelani speaks. So why won’t you stand up for freedom of speech, for Rushdie’s right to say whatever he wants?!”

The NSM-M, feeling cloistered by arguments, leaps wildly. “What if I called Sita a prostitute, what if I called Krishna a lecher--”

“yes, yes, that is your right” says the NMW-L excitedly, finally on home ground. “You can say anything, anything - I don’t mind at all. I may not agree but I don’t mind at all” He wants to add that frankly, i couldn't care less but already the NSM-M has broken down, and is now wailing that no, he can’t, he can’t - he is offended. He wants to gouge Rushdie’s eyes out, wants to throw him to dogs for insulting the Prophet (peace be upon him). It’s too deep seated, it hurts and it is not ok.

And he walks away.

The NMW-L walks away too, shaking his head, muttering under his breath “they don’t deserve only. Fucking mullahs”

Kashmir, take-2

2011-11-18T19:36:00.000-08:00

A lone shikarawalah floats in the dal lake near char chinari, Srinagar.
Photo by Sebastian Ku

By Abhijit Dutta

This piece was first published in Lonely Planet Asia (Nov-Dec, 2011)

My first memory of Kashmir is a rustle, the static of distance - or maybe disbelief – crackling up the phone connection. I was calling to book a houseboat: I pressed my ears hard into the phone, trying desperately to hear all the images I had curated over the years, from film and fiction, from poetry, and, of course, newspaper headlines. But the houseboat owner was in a hurry – he had to go for his evening prayers – and soon Kashmir became a dead ring tone.

When I arrive in Srinagar, the capital, autumn has already begun to rouge its cheeks. All the chinars have grown up, the innocent green they wear in summer replaced by a deep auburn red. Through the summer months, all of Kashmir bursts with lush verdant youth, radiant with wild blooms and glowing in the warmth of the attention it receives. Summers are when the world descends on Kashmir, lured by promises of its paradisiacal beauty: icy peaks, babbling brooks, blue blue skies, rolling meadows. Every Mughal Garden in the city, each some four hundred years old, is dusted and decked up to meet the wide eyed tourists. They coo over the bulbous tulips, they pose next to the pansies, they kiss behind the poplars. Kashmir in summer is a brazen beauty, desperately hawking its coquetry, eager to make a living for as long as it can.

Not all summers are created equal though. Last year, over 150 Kashmiris were killed in encounters with the Indian Army and the tourist season was replaced by a state of siege. It’s a confrontation that has a long history, and a complex one. At the heart of the matter is the demand for a plebiscite that allows the people of Jammu & Kashmir - India’s only Muslim majority state - to determine their political identity, including, possibly, becoming an independent nation.

It’s a demand that turned Kashmir into a site of active armed conflict for nearly two decades. Then, instead of tourists, Srinagar’s houseboats and cinemas, its lakesides and monuments, swarmed with soldiers and separatists. It was a place one only read about in newspaper headlines - lapis lazuli skies and alpine meadows pushed aside to accommodate images of curfews, crackdowns and attacks. But there is change. It’s a slow, hesitant change, much like an itchy scab beginning to form, but it’s a change that many locals welcome; for many it is their only source of livelihood. The issue, as intractable as ever, remains unsolved but the resistance is now more political than violent. Be it the number of terror linked incidents or civilian casualties, both are significantly down from the peak years. And news is getting out.

Earlier this year, in an encouraging move, Germany revised its travel advisory for Kashmir, clarifying that “foreigners are generally not direct targets of clashes”; India’s largest hotel chain, Taj, inaugurated a new property, Vivanta, to meet the demand for luxury travel; Lalit Grand Palace, the former royal palace turned five star hotel reports a healthy occupancy; and the ski resorts of Gulmarg and Sonamarg are back in favour with European travelers bored with the Alps. “In the madness of India, this really is an island of peace” says Carin Fischer, a Bavarian woman who now lives in Srinagar and runs an eco-tourism concept called ‘Trekking for Trees’ in picturesque Budgam.

Sitting on the lawns of Butts Clermont Houseboats, drenched in the warming autumn sun, I couldn’t agree more. Clermont sits on a part of the Dal Lake that’s far away from the madding crowds of Boulevard and Dalgate, where a thousand houseboats jostle with each other. Here your morning tea comes with the most alluring views of the Zabarvan hills, veiled in cashmere-fine mist. Sunshine runs down the slopes and jumps into the porcelain waters of the Dal for a dip, where Shikaras huddle together in twos and threes, scooping out weeds with their heart shaped oars. In the distance, the marble dome and minaret of Kashmir’s most revered shrine, Hazratbal, rises up from a clustered fishing village, reverberating still with the morning prayers that have just ended. It’s a blessed air one breathes here. No wonder the Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar chose just this spot to tutor the young George Harrison, of the Beatles, on the intricacies of ragas.

Afternoons are perfect for setting out, on foot, or in a tightly packed matador van that ply Srinagar’s streets, and explore the heart of this city. Historic Lal Chowk is ‘downtown’, and sprawled around it are the streets that belie every imagination of what Kashmir is: on M.A. Road, at the chic Coffee Arabica, cappuccinos and shawarma platters provide the perfect accompaniment to protracted political debates; across Polo view, Residency road bustles with the industrious energy of shawl sellers, dry fruit vendors, cedar wood carvers and souvenir shop owners, all willing to submit to a good bargain; around the corner, in the back lanes, the irresistible tabak mazz (skewered meat) seethes and sizzles on rows of smoky barbeque pits.

Through it all flows the labyrinthine Jhelum river, its demure waters ducking historic bridges, passing heart-achingly beautiful brick-and-timber homes, kissing the hem of grand mosques like the 14th Century Shah-i-Hamdan and Dastgir Sahib. Ancient shikarawallahs row away their days on these waters, ferrying passengers through the riverine twists and turns.

Yet, for all the charm and antiquity of Srinagar, Mughal Emperor Jehangir’s famous words – if there is a heaven on earth, it is this it is this it is this – ring truest when you leave the city behind. While the well heeled outposts of Pahalgam, Gulmarg and Sonamarg remain the biggest tourist draws, it’s the careless beauty of Khag, the poetry of Gurez, and the danger tinged beauty of Rafiabad that gives you first hints of just why Kashmir is such a special place.

I spend my last day driving out to Manasbal, a place that takes its name from the eponymous lake that flows through it. Compared to the Dal, Manasbal lake is petite, but its particular charm lies in its ability to turn color, all day long. Locals tell me of days when its waters pirouette through a vivid palette, glowing orange, grey, green, blue, and other mysterious shades.

That afternoon, the lake was a translucent green, the pine and fir trees lining its banks eagerly drinking in their reflection. Not too far from me, an old man was building a shikara. A couple of girls, maybe his daughters, stood amidst the disembodied parts of the boat, its wooden frames strewn around like jigsaw pieces. In Kashmir, the shikara, like the lakes and the rivers, is a lifeline; it will earn them bread, it will help them fish, and it will carry them across. Seeing it like this - broken but with the promise of becoming whole - I allow myself to hope a little.

Perhaps, Kashmir too will build itself a new life; perhaps it too will become whole.

Theroux on Vientiane

2011-09-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

[Another exceptional passage this. Scurrilous yes, but exceptional. For context, after washing his hands off Burma, Theroux reaches Vientiane by a boat ride across the Mekong, from Nong Khai (Thailand). This is his impression of the Laotian capital]

Vientiane is exceptional, but inconvenient. The brothels are cleaner than hotels, marijuana is cheaper than a cold glass of beer. Opium is a restful drug, the perfect thing for geriatrics, but the chromatic snooze it induces corrects fatigue; after an evening of it the last thing you want to do is sleep again. When you find beer at midnight and are sitting quietly, wondering what sort of a place this is, the waitress offers to fellate you on the spot, and you still don't know. Your eyes get accustomed to the dark and you see the waitress is naked. Without warning she jumps on the chair, pokes a cigarette into her vagina and lights it, puffing it by contracting her uterine lungs. So many sexual knacks! You could teach these people anything. There are many bars in Vientiane; the decor and the beer are the same in all of them, but the unnatural practices vary.

The only English film i could find in Vientiane was a pornographic one, and the sombre reverence of the Japanese tourists, who watched like interns in an operating theatre, filled me with despair. I shopped for presents, imagining Laotian treasures, but discovered traditional handicrafts there to include aprons, memo pads, potholders, and neckties. Neckties! I tried to take a pleasure cruise on the Mekong, but was told the river was only used by smugglers. The food was unusual. One bowl of soup i had contained whiskers, feathers, gristle, and bits of intestine cut to look like macaroni.

[Extracted from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) by Paul Theroux]

Hampi of the Other Side and a girl named Tony

2011-09-19T23:16:00.001-07:00

By Abhijit Dutta

She was the only woman on the bus. A flaming redhead, she hid her fierce blue eyes behind a sharp fringe that seemed to set fire to her face. Her seat was right at the back of the bus and she had to make her way through grinning conductors and a testicle scratching driver. I tried to give her an encouraging smile but I think in the crowd of lecherous advances, she mistook it to mean an encouragement of an entirely different kind. She scowled back.

I was on my way to Hampi, a small village in Karnataka (nearest town with bus and rail connections is Hospet; Bellary is the nearest airport), famous for its medieval ruins. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hampi was the capital of the empire of Vijayanagara (The Town of Victory) between the 14th and 16th century. Today, it is an important historical, archaeological and spiritual destination and thousands of tourists, including clamorous contingents of school students, make the trip to Hampi. But all that is on this side. I was going to the Other side of the river.

The Hampi of the guide books, the Hampi of the religious significance, the Hampi of ‘Pure Vegetarian’ (no restaurant or hotel will sell you non-veg this side of the river), the Hampi of ‘Alcohol prohibited’ ended this side of the river (Tungabhadra). The Hampi of the ‘Other Side’ was a world away from the thronging crowds of Virupaksha and Vittala temples, fervent families and generic tourists.

At one stopover for tea and toilet, I asked Tony, the girl on my bus, why she was travelling to Hampi. She scratched her stud and pushing the fringe out of her face said, “Peace.”

One of the best kept secrets of Hampi on Other Side was Arba Mystica, or, fondly, the ‘Tipi’ (a tent with a really high ceiling and Red Indian origins, etymologically speaking). Travelers celebrated the Tipi as a cult, co-owning it in spirit. While Tipi has traditional rooms, most people sleep in a communal fashion in the tent. The most adventurous of the lot, snuggle into their sleeping bags and sleep on the boulders outside. Their reward – a dazzling exhibition of the most intricate, awe inspiring designs featuring billions of sparkling stars that stand out clearly against the cold, clear December sky (Hampi is best visited between November and January. It’s punishingly hot for rest of the year). As it turned out, both Tony and I were headed there (To find the Tipi, just ask after you have crossed the river. Or look for the pointy head of the white tent).

When we reached, Tony, who had been largely uncommunicative and stone faced thus far, broke into a wide smile. In under a minute she had settled onto the bedraggled but comfortable mattresses spread out on bamboo mats, unpacked her ‘kit’ and laid out its contents: rolling paper, slim filters, and the freshest weed not just this side of the river but this side of the vindhyas.

It is true that many people come to Hampi to relive the glory of Vijayanagara Empire, to view the majestic stone sculptures of Vishnu and Ganesha, and some come simply to picnic, but there is a dedicated group who troop across to the Other Side of the river in search of Peace, or something akin to it. It is a commune with its own unstated rules and state of being. It takes a while to ease into this state – for example, electricity makes only the most fleeting appearances leaving your gadgets without charge and, in my case, distressingly disconnected; the shower arrangements, at the Tipi or the nearby Roots n‘ Rocks requires some significant getting used to as frogs and varied fauna join you in your ablutions – but when you do, it is an experience that returns you to an ancient world.

Set at the foot of a hillock and amidst a small fruit orchard – pomegrenate shrubs, guava trees, myriad weird berries – the Tipi attracts artists, musicians, wanderers, soul seekers, and adventurers who find an escape from the realities of the daily world. Every evening, as the heat gives way to a pleasanter clime, the didgeroo comes out. As its deep voice fills the tent bathed in flickering candle light splintered through wicker shades, guests gather to join in. The flute pipes in with an old nepali tune, someone extracts a pair of cymbals from the rucksack and smiles at her neighbour singing a Chilean folk song. Everyone is in harmony, every one is at peace.

The bongs are (forever) out and the deep inhalations and exhalations often attract the nomadic sadhus to the Tipi. They bring stories, exotic banter and are generally providers of great entertainment. Painters dab away at their sheets with colours, writers scribble, others industriously take to cleaning heaps of weed, and the rest lie back and soak it all in.

Food is often shared, like most things (including the bathrooms), and is clearly a highlight here. Anybody who knows Mr. Tambourine Man knows that he leaves you hungry and Radha, the Boy Friday at Arba (who manages to hold engaging and long winding conversations with travelers from 6 continents using only two evocative phrases – “Wow, Ammaaazing!” and “friend, now I try” – and this without a clue to what these mean) runs a brilliant kitchen that, among other relishes, churns out a gourmet banoffie pie. The fare is mostly continental – roast chicken (Chicken! – a close second after ‘Peace’ among reasons to cross the river) with mashed potatoes is the most ordered item – and will serve you fruits and muesli with yoghurt for breakfast. They have a juice bar and a constant supply of fresh green grape, pomegranate and other juices keeps you hydrated in the sapping heat. Quarts of vodka can also be managed.

Though the residents of the Tipi do not come to Hampi for the ruins, it is actually from this side of the river that you actually get the best views. No journey needs to be made to any ‘sunset point’; just clamber up the hillock that runs up behind Arba and you have a vantage point to see perhaps the best view on either side. The Virupaksha temple stands tall against a horizon that’s empty for miles except for groves of palm trees and lines of ruins and boulders. As you stand atop this hill staring into the setting sun and a warm silence envelops the place, Tony’s cryptic “Peace” begins to make a lot of sense. If there is anything that can top this experience, it is only the sunrise from the same spot.

As you leave the Tipi (and Tony) behind, and head back to Hampi of the ruins and on to Hospet, the closest town where the bus stand is, a giant rock winks at you, perhaps co-opting you into a real-unreal secret that will dissolve into a determination to break through to the Other Side.

Theroux on Afghanistan

2011-09-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

[Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) reminded me that once upon a time travel writing involved more than hopping from one resort to another more expensive resort and dishing out "deals". The writing is obnoxious in parts and the tone colonial. Yet, it throbs with an easy humor and is bursting with life. Despite its obsession with the uglier parts of travel, this book more than any other i have read in recent times, celebrates the joys of travel. Here is an excerpt.]

*****

Afghanistan is a nuisance. Formerly it was cheap and barbarous, and people went there to buy lumps of hashish - they would spend weeks in the filthy hotels of Herat and Kabul, staying high. But there was a military coup in 1973, and the king (who was sunning himself in Italy) was deposed. Now Afghanistan is expensive but just as barbarous as before. Even the hippies have begun to find it intolerable. The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent. I had not been there long before i regretted having changed my plans to take the southern route. True, there was a war in Baluchistan, but Baluchistan was small. I was determined to deal with Afghanistan swiftly and put that discomfort into parentheses. But it was a week before i boarded another train.

The Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier; we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran, in a hotel without a name. There was no electricity in this hotel, there was no toilet, and there was enough water for only one cup of tea apiece. Bobby and his friend, who went under the name Lopez (his real name was Morris), became frightfully happy when the Afghan in the candlelit foyer told us our bed would cost 35 cents each. Lopez asked for hashish. The Afghan said there was none. Lopez called him a 'scumbag'. The Afghan brought a piece the size of a dog's turd and we spent the rest of the evening smoking it. At about midnight a telephone rang in the darkness. Lopez said, 'if it's for me, tell them i am not here!"

On our way into Herat the next day an Afghan passenger fired his shotgun through the roof of the bus and there was a fight to determine who would pay to have the hole mended. My ears were still ringing from the explosion a day later in Herat, as I watched groups of hippies standing in the thorn bushes complaining about the exchange rate. At three o clock the next morning there was a parade down the main street of Herat, farting cornets and snare drums: it was the sort of bizarre nightmare old men have in German novels. I asked Lopez if he'd heard the parade, but he brushed my question aside. He was worried, he said; cawing like a broker, and waving his bangled wrists despairingly, he told his bad news: the dollar was quoted at fifty afghanis. 'It's a rip-off!'

I went, by bus and plane, to Kabul, via Mazar-i-Sharif. Two incidents in Kabul stay in my mind: a visit to the Kabul Insane Asylum, where i failed to gain the release of a Canadian who had been put there by mistake (he said he didn't mind staying there as long as he had a supply of chocolate bars; it was better than going back to Canada), and, later that week, passing a Pathan tent encampment and seeing a camel suddenly collapse under a great load of wood - a moment later the Pathans pounced, dismembering and skinning the poor beast. I had no wish to stay longer in Kabul. I took a bus east, to the top of the Khyber Pass. I had a train to catch there, at Landi Kotal, for Peshawar; and i dreaded missing it, because there is only one train a week, a Sunday local called the '132-Down'.

*****

Seeking Singapore, Eating Chicken Rice

2011-09-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

By Abhijit Dutta

This piece was first published by MINT LOUNGE

In Singapore, you know it’s a good place to eat when the cab driver gets off at the same hawker center as you. Not that Maxwell Road Food Centre in the Chinatown district is wanting for endorsements. Local legends aside, Anthony Bourdain has been here, and, just this May, the New York Times featured it in a list promisingly titled “10 Restaurants Worth Leaving the Ship for”.

It is an unlikely mention. On the list are such names as Selene (Santorini) and Fiskebar (Copenhagen), names that hardly conjure up images associated with a Singaporean hawker centre – mildly claustrophobic food courts bulging with the combined smells of fish balls, soy sauce and steaming noodles. Maxwell pulses with the energy of its holeinthewall stalls – over 70 of them – that are constantly clanging woks, banging cleavers and pushing plates. Rows of roasted ducks hang by their twisted necks next to nude chickens glistening with fat, as their feet are diced, salted and cooked to deep fried perfection. It all looks like its part of some exotic travel show, except the sounds, the smells and the food are all trying to invade your every pore. For those expecting to find the familiar clinical calm and aseptic hygiene of Singapore inside a hawker centre like Maxwell, it can all be a bit overwhelming. Especially, if you don’t know what you want.

I, of course, had done my research and knew exactly what I was looking for: the same stall that Bourdain drooled at and Sara Dickerman (author of the NYT article) had come in search of, the stall where celebrity chef Tetsuya Wakuda found the ‘best chili sauce in the world’, the stall that evokes national pride and inflames passions in this otherwise genteel city - Stall #10, Tian Tian Chicken Rice.

For a rather frugal dish (it really is just steamed chicken served with rice cooked in the stock and chili dip by the side), it is incredible how obsessed everyone is about chicken rice. Along with wet markets, Singlish and kopitiams (the rough equivalent of a Calcutta coffee house), chicken rice is among the few remaining Singaporean things in this country of immigrants and imports. To a question on ‘how to find the real Singapore’, a local friend had wisely quipped: “to know Singapore is to know its food – and what is food but the perfection of chicken rice!”

To be fair, even chicken rice traces its fragrant roots back to China, but only through a Hainanese immigrant named Wong Yi Guan who arrived in this southern island in the 1920s. Wong settled down to a hawker’s life selling an adaptation of a chicken and rice dish he cooked back home. He wrapped his rice balls in banana leaves and sold them for a cent each on Hylam Street. It seems to have worked out for him, for he upgraded, moving to a kopitiam down the same road. An attentive helper, Swee, learnt to make the same dish, only better, starting his own Swee Kee Chicken Rice stall on Middle Road. And thus was born Singapore’s national dish.

Today, Hylam Street is lost inside an air-conditioned mall (Bugis Junction) with faux shophouses filled with trinkets that share no history (or resemblance) with the lively Hainanese and Japanese communities that once called it their home. Swee Kee’s Chicken Rice, of course, is long gone. Stand alone hawkers and old shophouses with marble topped tables and straight-backed teakwood chairs have given way to the glam and glitter befitting a rapidly modernizing economy that counts architectural wonders/horrors such as the Skypark atop Marina Bay Sands (a ship like construction the size of four A380s) and ION Orchard as its icons.

Yet Con, on Purvis Street, is perhaps the only establishment left that can claim to have retained a slice of history that Wong and Swee lived. If you stay at the Raffles Hotel – another historic remnant that has tidied itself up to offer the packaged charms of Colonial era Singapore - Yet Con is literally across the street. Walk past the chic Garibaldi (excellent Italian wines) and Gunther’s (modern French cooking) to arrive at Yet Con’s cataract cloudy glass door with faded Chinese calligraphy, collapsible gates blocking a direct view of the duck and chicken cadavers lining its shop front.

I am the only non-local here, and I feel like I am in a scene out of a cyan tinted movie that I saw at the Singapore National Museum – about chicken rice being a bond that bridges generations. The cashier, an ancient looking man, seems terribly busy totaling up bills with his abacus. My server, who looks much younger, maybe all of 70, approaches me for my order, decides I should have the chicken rice and walks away shouting instructions to the kitchen in mandarin.

In a few minutes I am staring at the white chicken, the champagne brown rice, the casually red chili sauce, and the dark soy sauce. It tastes quite ordinary, or ‘honest and homemade’ in travel writing lingo, and I have to remind myself that 50 years ago, in a Singapore where median incomes were far far away from the current S$2400 per month, it was indeed quite special to bring home a capon, or better, an old hen, and have it with rice cooked in its rich stock. Every family had its own recipes, and though none likely tasted dramatically different, each meal was sealed with the wholesome goodness of family lore and togetherness.

Chain restaurants like Boon Tong Kee have successfully built a business model around this sentimentality. Growing from a small stall in Chinatown, it opened its first outlet in Balestier – the definitive Boon Tong Kee location – and is today the first name in casual chicken rice dining. Any day of the week, its modern air conditioned interiors welcome locals and expats alike to try its “famous” chicken rice. In purely technical terms, Boon Tong Kee is Cantonese, not Hainanese chicken rice, but the only difference I could tell was the particular succulence of the chicken.

Chatterbox at the Mandarin Orchard takes off from where Boon Tong Kee tries to go. At S$25 a pop, this is the most expensive chicken rice you will find on the island, which in itself justifies trying it out. Being a sucker for street side authenticity, I am bored by its non greasy flavours and pretentious presentation (it’s chicken rice for godsake!) but in its defense, it does have a legion of fans who swear by its taste (and its location – the heart of Orchard Road).

My personal favourite turns out to be Wee Nam Kee chicken rice house in Novena. In most places, your chicken rice comes with an incidental bowl of clear soup and in most places it is terribly bland. At Wee Nam Kee, it’s a full bodied divinity coursing with untold flavours. Also, the bed of sesame sauce in which the steamed chicken arrives is a welcome change from the regular light soy sauce elsewhere. The rice is visibly rich with chicken fat, which is how I am sure Wong and Swee meant it to be.

Polishing of my nth plate of chicken rice this week, I come to the conclusion that as Singapore sifts through its history, selectively preserving and obliterating, the continued popularity of chicken rice is really an act of resistance. Where rapidly changing demographics, particularly the influx of expats and foreign workers, is changing the face of this city, the ability of a rice ball to get everyone to buy into – and bite into – it, offers hope that Singapore might yet save its soul. If that means I must order another one, so be it.

Curfewed Letters

2011-08-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

A street near Kashmir University, Srinagar, where the autumnal chinar burns daily

By Abhijit Dutta

[This article was first published on Outlookindia.com]

“Kum se kum baat toh ho sakti thi” says Kashmiri writer Naseem Shafaie wistfully when I pose her the questions Mirza Waheed and Basharat Peer, along with several others, raised recently to argue against the idea of a Literature Festival in Kashmir.

Waheed and Peer have been the most visible voices of a movement that led to the cancellation of the proposed festival, the Harud Literature Festival, which was to be held in Srinagar later this month. Their argument, as articulated in an Open Letter, is that to host a literary festival in a place like Kashmir, where there is an atmosphere of repression and free speech is curfewed, is a “travesty”. Moreover, they feel, such a festival can be used to “falsely assert the existence of basic freedoms, even as they are denied to larger sections of the population” The original letter had 14 signatories, but support quickly grew and by the time news of cancellation came, more than 200 people, including scholar Mridu Rai, journalist Gautam Navlakha and filmmaker Sanjay Kak, had signed it.

The final cancellation came in the wake of a Facebook group that called for boycott of the festival – a few of its 5000 odd members even hinting at violent consequences - because of a rumor suggesting Salman Rushdie was invited (he never was, say organizers). And while none of the original signatories to the Open Letter were members of this group (in fact, the original letter never specifically calls for a boycott), the final decision of the organizers had much to do with the dissent that had built up since the first news about the festival came out.

Much of the brouhaha has been concentrated on the use of the word "apolitical" by the festival advisor, author Namita Gokhale, to describe the event. In a Guardian article that reported on the controversy, Waheed had wondered “So what would I do if I was there? What would I read? Every page I have written is political”

When I ask Gokhale (who is just back from the Edinburgh Book Festival where she co-chaired sessions with Waheed) about this, she is irritated. “I have already clarified this many times, you can google it” she says, adding “all I meant was that the stance of the organizers is ‘apolitical’”

Perhaps Gokhale’s clarification hasn’t received the extent of attention that the opinions of her detractors have because, besides being the centrepiece of their argument, it continues to bother people at large. Wasim Khalid, a Srinagar based journalist says “Literature is a reflection of life. But our life is full of pain, full of politics, full of suffering. We have only seen grenades, we have only seen crackdowns, we have only seen killings and militants…our memories are filled with that…politics is part of our life…how can you ignore it? If you talk politics, you will have to talk of occupation, if you talk about occupation you will have to talk of India, if you talk of India you have to talk about human rights violation…human rights violation, occupation won’t look good for India”

As far as Gokhale (or Shafaie) is concerned, they did not have any problems with this at all. In fact, they expected authors like Basharat Peer, Mirza Waheed and Anjum Zamarud Habib (author of recently published Prisoner No. 100) to narrate the Valley’s pain and suffering in sessions they had planned, like “The Silenced Voice: Creativity and Dissent” and “jail diaries” among others. That these popular authors instead chose to “abdicate” this responsibility and discouraged others from attending has disappointed them. Sanjoy Roy, producer of the event, insists that the idea was to invite speakers “from across the divide”, including people such as journalist Iftikhar Gilani, son-in-law of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has written about his days in Tihar jail.

But writers, researchers and journalists who supported the line of reasoning forwarded by Peer, Waheed & Co. have questioned a number of ‘details’. Like, the choice of venue. They argue that Kashmir University, which had been identified as one of the official venues of the festival, is a site of ongoing suppression of freedoms (students can’t form a student union for example, and there is permanent presence of military on campus) and therefore antithetical to the spirit in which such a literary festival should be held.

To this Gokhale has an intellectual response - “there is no ideal space in the whole world. There are no neutral spaces” – but Shafaie offers a more simple suggestion. “So, why don’t they come as advisors and suggest a different venue? Why stay away?” she asks.

Why stay away indeed. The general response to this has been that the ‘protesters’ fear that a well attended literature festival will become a mere tokenism that the State can appropriate as a symbol of normalcy, proof that “all was well”, when clearly it wasn’t. Besides the recent discovery of over 2000 unidentified bodies in mass graves, fake encounters and attacks on journalists continue to be routinely under-reported in mainstream India media.

A major criticism of this approach has been that the antidote to ‘silence’ is not more silence, but greater discussion and louder noise. A second dissatisfaction, more mumbled than shouted out loud, is that the same authors who abstained from Harud Lit Fest think nothing of appearing at Jaipur, at Edinburgh, and other big name festivals to talk about the same issues. There is resentment that while they can access international platforms to share their work, they are snatching away an opportunity for local writers writing in Kashmiri, Dogri and Urdu.

“I have read Mirza’s book. Has he read mine?” asks Shafaie, who says that she has had several writers from the Valley, as well as from Jammu, call her to express their disappointment at the cancellation.

I ask Gokhale how she sees this confrontation shaping the future. “The only confrontation is between good writing and bad writing” she insists. “Whether this festival happens or not, whether I remain associated with it or not, good writing will continue to happen, good books will continue to be published. But I believe there is a greater need for dialogue within the literary community. If Basharat and Mirza put together a festival, I will support it”

Whether or not Peer and Waheed will take on this onerous task remains to be seen. For now, Kashmir will have to find another way to pour its heart out.

ARABIA

2011-07-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

I move my body meat smell next to yours,
Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours-
Sex tropics as a way to not be dead.
I don't know who we are except in bed.

- Frederick Seidel [the Paris Review. 197]

Q&A

2011-07-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

If Joan Osborne had asked What If God (of Small Things) Was One of Us, we would have had to answer "her name would be Arundhati Roy"

In this interview, Roy, as usual, asks all the right questions, And for asking them she is the Great One. But as to answers she is just like any one of us - clueless.

Diagnosis

2011-07-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

"Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world and largely incurable"

- Tom Nairn ( Break up of Britain ), quoted in Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Gallery

2011-06-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

Is to exhibit to be an exhibitionist?

SINGAPORE: See More

2011-03-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

[THIS FEATURE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MARCH 2011 ISSUE OF LONELY PLANET MAGAZINE INDIA]

To a travel writer, few things can be as disconcerting as being asked to write about Singapore. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a wonderful little island and its merits are immediately evident. Trains run on time, traffic jams are a rarity, queues move at a trot, and everything works. It’s incredibly safe too - you can be a single girl drunk out of her skull and be roaming around in skimpy underpants and you still wouldn’t need to look over your shoulders. And its cleanliness is stuff of legend.

And yet, there are cities that you travel to and there are cities that you visit as a tourist. And Singapore has always been the definition of a tourist destination with its picture perfect amusement parks (Resorts World, Universal Studios), manmade beaches (Sentosa, Siloso), organized conclaves of clubbing (Clarke Quay), neon lit shopping paradisos (Orchard Road) and more recently, casinos; one of which – the Skypark atop Sands - with its ‘ship on top’ construction has come to define the Singapore skyline. All very pleasant distractions, but umm…not really the stuff of great travel stories.

So when I found myself stuck in Singapore with a deadline, I decided to try and “rediscover” the city. That’s it! I will scratch out everything that Singapore is famous for and lose myself in the city.

Easier said than done. How does one get lost in a city where there is a map of everything…directions to everywhere? How does one look past the flawless façade and discover a darker, a more exciting underbelly? How do I get Singapore to open up to me?

I begin with the museums. In any other city of the world – Rome, London, Berlin, Delhi – history spills out on the streets. In Singapore, a city that has been in a tearing hurry to reinvent and renovate since the day it was independent, history is more difficult to dig up. And so the museums are a great starting point for the traveler who wants to believe that Singapore is not merely a giant shopping mall after all.

Stepping into the history gallery of the National Museum of Singapore is nothing short of revelatory. To get here, I had to walk down roads that boast of glitzy high rises not even ten summers old and now, without warning, I find myself hurled 700 hundred years back to a port city called Temasek. It’s a lost world, whispering stories of Singapura (Sanskrit for Lion City) on high quality speakers and giant LCD screens. On my audio guide, I hear of epic battles, between kingdoms of Siam (Thailand) and Java (Indonesia), I hear of intrigue and Portugese invasions, and I hear the sinking sounds of an island fading into obscurity. This is 1613.

Singapore’s modern history starts only around 1819 when an English man named Raffles threw caution to the air, and set about getting Singapore into the folds of the British India Empire in a region that was dominated by the Dutch. Today, the name ‘Sir Stamford Raffles’, resonates in more than half a dozen a landmarks, the most famous being the elegant Raffles Hotel. His most lasting legacy, however, is that of cultivating a destination that embraces trade. If today Singapore attracts the world’s corporations and businessmen due to its low entry barriers and lower taxation, the mid 1820’s saw traders from around the archipelago flock to this port city that – uniquely - did not collect duties. In many ways these arrivals also set the tone for Singapore’s multi ethnic, multi cultural future.

Despite all the good that Raffles & Co. did to this island, by the time the 1940’s rolled around, anti colonial sentiment was in the ascent. The Japanese had conquered the island for nearly three years during WWII and the failure of the British to defend the local population still rankled. It would be just a matter of time when Singapore would throw off its colonial coat and chalk its name on the list of independent nations.

As it happens, independence came to Singapore twice. As you make your way through the 1959-60 section of the gallery, and old box style television sets replay the footage of a zestful Lee Kuan Yew, you hear the persuasive arguments of why the recently independent colony needs to merge into Malaya and be part of a greater Federation of Malaysia. He succeeded and the merger took place, but within two years racial tensions between ethnic Malays and the Chinese in Singapore had escalated to the point of no return. Food shortages, inflation, riots and anti-communist conspiracies reached a crescendo and, finally, Malaysia spat out its southernmost state. On 9th August, 1965, a teary eyed Lee declared to the world a sovereign, independent Republic of Singapore.

In the history of nations, 45 years is a mere breath. But Singapore was in a hurry. By the turn of the century, Singapore had become the toast of the world, despite significant handicaps when it began. It had nearly no resources – human, material or natural – and faced severe challenges in housing, education, water supply and Defence capabilities. And yet, today, it has a muscular presence in the region’s financial play, is the hub of multinationals from every country on every continent, and features regularly at the top of lists and indices that rank cities as best to live in or the greatest.

More striking than its success though is the precision with which it achieved this metamorphosis. Each step in its journey from a sleepy tropical island with traditional kampong (rural) way of life to an air conditioned nation that boasts of first world lifestyles was a deliberate choice. Housing, for example.

Walk any distance in Singapore today and you are likely to come across concrete high rises with rooms that repeat itself in a pattern, vertically and sideways. These are the Housing Development Board (HDB) flats that accommodate over 85% of Singaporeans. Beginning in 1960 and continuing through to the 80’s, the HDB forcefully acquired kampong land across the island, ending an era and forever changing the face of the city. Out of swamps, plantations, huts and villages grew this jungle of concrete. The kampongs now exist almost entirely in sepia tinted memories of grandmothers who talk of days when sunshine was for the taking and not held ransom by the gigantic cranes and skeletal constructions.

I want to travel back in time, to the sixties and seventies, to see the original Singapore, to see it breathe and sweat, and so I make my way to Pulau Ubin, one of the last remaining kampongs of Singapore. Old style bumboats, belching black smoke and leaking oil, fill in as time machines.

Standing on Ubin, it is hard to believe ‘Singapore’ is a 10-minute ferry away. You cycle past small huts reminiscent of Marquez’s Macondo, breathing a lazy tropical air, kissed every now and then by a gust of breeze. I had watched with disbelief a documentary at the Museum that referred to Indian milkmen who would bring their cows to the doorsteps and sell still-warm milk fresh from the udder. In Ubin, away from the shelves at Carrefour and Cold Storage that are thick with imports, this seems possible.

Coming back to the mainland after a day spent on Ubin, I despair as I walk past geometric horrors like Orchard Central and Ion Orchard, architectural inventions that have been lauded as “unique and progressive urban design” and are the “next level in retail experience”. I want to scream.

There is a trap door for escape though. Seconds away from the futuristic foibles of Orchard, on a sidewalk that leads past Peranakan Place, is Emerald Hill. Here, the metal and neon light give way to softly lit terrace houses. The achingly beautiful Chinese baroque architecture is an instant balm to the soul, transporting you to another era, in another world. The original owner of Emerald Hill was an Englishman named Cuppage, who received the Hill as a permanent grant in 1845 for his 5000-tree nutmeg plantation. Over the century, the property gave way to individual terrace houses and housed the city’s wealthy peranakans (of Chinese origin, but Malay in spirit and culture). Today, few of these houses open their doors every night to discerning customers, who delight in their antique facades and flaking interiors.

Que Pasa is perhaps the most beautiful, its insides stacked up high with vintage wine bottles, wooden barrels and other oddities. It takes you out of Singapore, into the taverns of yore in Spain, in France.

Being in places like these, make you think that the nicest places in Singapore are those that don’t remind you of Singapore. Is there really a Singaporean Singapore; an essence that is entirely local? If it exists, it is difficult to find.

In part due to the scars from the Malay merger experience, Singapore has always fought shy of being seen to promote any ethnic or immigrant group. It downplays any single signature, pushing each to their individual corners, even as it proudly declares its diversity. English is the national language though Mandarin is spoken the most. HDB flats are allocated in line with carefully decided racial representation policies. And the media is strictly monitored to prevent any writing that inflames ethnic sentiments.

This large scale social engineering has meant that the influence of any one culture on the others is limited and they remain segregated across the city as Indian (Tamil), Chinese, Malay, or Ang Mo (caucasian) quarters

True to the Indian identity worldwide, Little India is instantly recognizable by the unsurpassed filth, chaos and culture that mark it. Perhaps the most ubiquitous and well known of all Little India landmarks is the famous Mustafa Shopping Centre, a must visit destination for the resident Indian community in hunt for desi spices and cheap wares. Mustafa has managed to expand its clientele beyond Indian to the Chinese and Malay, and even the Ang Mos, with its ridiculously discounted prices on anything and everything. Down Racecourse and Serangoon roads, you will find the shoppers give way to worshippers making their way to one of the many elaborate temple structures that look no different from their counterparts in South India (or Matunga, in Mumbai, for that matter). The Srinivas Perumal temple, is perhaps the oldest (1885) and exudes that familiar ash and incense fragrance. Oppositve the temple stands the equally iconic Lukshmi Srinavasan restaurant that serves the best podi masala dosa in town and is a byword for a satisfying meal among the Indian expat community craving home food. Completing the geography of Little India are areas like Desker Road and Rowell Road, one of the city’s most hard core red light areas. On Sundays, you can walk down the footpaths to see clusters of migrant labourers, glistening with sweat and smelling of grime, lustily staring at the scantily clad women on show behind collapsible gates of the whorehouses.

Given their history, the Chinese are more evenly spread out through the city and are perhaps the most visible ‘face’ of the city. But with the influx of foreigners, even this once dominant segment is becoming a ‘quarter’. Only in places like Toa Payoh do you find the resolutely Chinese character of the city with wrinkled aunties, bent over with age, garrulously going about their day’s business and bemoaning the glory days when Singapore was ‘theirs’. Today, the Chinese influence is limited primarily to food, the KTV culture (literally “Karaoke TV” but synonymous with middle aged Chinese men and money girls) and a generation of youth pejoratively called ah-beng and ah-lians who blast thumping techno music from the cars, wear flashy clothes and camp in video game parlours all night long.

Kampong Glam and Paya Lebar are home to the Malay population, which includes a large number of muslims. The streets (like Joo Chiat) wear an unfurbished look, images reminiscent of Singapore in the eighties and early nineties. There are malls here too, but compared to its descendants, they seem objects of art and history, to be preserved in amber. Every year during Ramadan, the whole place bursts into frenetic activity with evenings filled with orgiastic displays of foods, all smoking and sizzling in front of your eyes, mostly deep fried, entirely unhealthy and divine to taste.

Beyond these ethnic quarters there are also places that house the invisible city. Walk past the “girls” in Geylang serai, and venture into Aljunied and Macpherson and you begin to see the grit and tar of Singapore, where the pictures get grainier, the skin breaks, and the blemishes begin to show. Take the train to Joo Koon and Boon Lay and inhale the smell of migrant labourers, on the back of whom this city is building and rebuilding itself. These are sights and smells that don’t have an access card to the dream city. They are the shadows and the sub text.

Standing at the Boon Lay MRT station, a far cry from the one at Orchard, I begin to wonder how the different groups reconcile themselves to the idea of a one size fits all Singapore. I have heard cab drivers mutter with disgust about too many foreigners in the national football team. I have seen the eyes of construction workers follow young couples loaded with branded merchandise. I have been in an argument with a Singaporean who told me “you Indians take our jobs, our children have to go to Australia” Could all of these conversations come together to erupt in protests, in criticism, in demands?

Such thoughts are not approved by the government. The road to 21st century glitz goes past a greater degree of control than is usually considered healthy. It’s a deal that the government has made with its citizens: ever increasing material comfort for the majority in exchange for minimum engagement with its politics and its policies.

It’s not as much thought control as it’s thwarting of thought. The shopping malls, monsters wrought from metal, have been designed to draw you in, suck your brains out, fill your shopping carts, and spit you back onto the streets. If you do wake up from your retail reverie, there is always food to shut you up with. Hawker centres – organized, often air conditioned, street food – are often credited as Singapore’s most distinct cultural signature and are strewn across the city. Newton and Maxwell Hawker Centres are two of the oldest and the most highly rated. Drown under the gourmand pleasures of melt in your mouth chilli crab and barbequed tiger prawns, aromatic bowls of laksa and smoking satay sticks. Writing about dining in Singapore, a New York Times article quoted a local food critic as saying “Food is the purest democracy we have”. Indeed.

Often freedom is in structure. You just want to know that there is space for dissent, a space where you don’t have to lower your voice or seek permission to speak (you really do need permits to speak at a public place). A space where artists can say, write, paint, sing and enact the things they feel about and not worry about consequences. Places that feel free – not just from a political Big Brother but also of the suffocating presence of Corporations and chain outlets and global brands. Every great city has its share of “indie” outlets that put up at least the token resistance; these are the spaces that give a city its character.

It’s a relief then to find that this space, however small, exists in Singapore too. Substation, an independent contemporary arts centre, sits in the heart of the city on Armenian Street. It supports critical thought and has an active calendar that presents everything from poetry readings to theatre to short films and visual art. Sinema at Old School showcase experimental films on a state of the art projection and sound system. More than just a cinema it’s a place where directors, writers, photographers, and critics come to hang. At Food03, a café-gallery-forum on Rowell road, menus declare “No GST, No Service Charge, No frozen food, No microwave”. Upstairs there are working studios for artists. At Papa Palheta, Dennis and his partner Leon are trying to create a café that really means it when they say fair-trade. Books Actually is a bookshop that in its tiny structure holds more gems than all the Kinokuniyas and Borders put together. Here you will find critical literature on Singapore as well as obscure books by well known authors. It literally has stairwells full of authentic Singaporean literature and you can pass days and weeks just sitting on its typewriter lined stairs reading.

Despite my reservations, I am surprised. How on earth does Singapore keep its secrets so well? Is it Singapore that keeps its guard up or is it the tourists who refuse to travel? Yes, Singapore is incredibly easy to navigate, but is that good enough reason for travelers to be lazy? To shirk their responsibility to explore, to penetrate the city a little bit deeper?

It is true that you see what you want to see. For Singapore, all you need is to want to see more.

Book Review: The Collaborator

2011-02-20T22:17:00.001-08:00

THE COLLABORATOR BY MIRZA WAHEED (PENGUIN|VIKING, FEB 2011)

[This piece has also been published at Counter Currents]

First seventy pages into The Collaborator, I begin to dread the inevitable. Mirza Waheed, it seems, will not veer from the trodden path. We have seen this before: the before and after story of Kashmir, the fall of paradise to something worse than hell. It’s all there: the familiar snow clad mountains, babbling brooks, blue blue skies, greener meadows and the innocence of childhood spent amidst such idyllic scapes. All of this set to Rafi’s timeless melodies. Tum mujhe yun bhula na paoge.

Soon enough, the scene dissolves to gruesome torture, to disappearances and death. But Waheed has already warned us. His tale begins with one Captain Kadian of the Indian Army, purveyor of death, destruction and despicability. The protagonist, who remains nameless (suggesting perhaps that this fictional tale of Nowgam, a Kashmiri town set near the LoC can be of any other town, that the story of this boy, could be of any other), is in the Captain’s employment to retrieve Identity Cards off corpses deposited into a sort of death-field where yellow flowers grow between the legs of mutilated bodies. Poignantly, this was once where our protagonist and his four friends – all of whom went sarhad paar - played cricket.

I was ready to give up.

And yet, just a few turns of page later, Waheed settles into his story and you finally begin to enter uncharted territory. The rhetoric drops off along the margins and it is this boy’s deliberations of to cross or not to cross that takes centrestage.

For all its lack of “action”, this internal struggle of a boy left flummoxed by the world around, of which the relevant aspect is simply that his best friend went across without telling him, is the most gripping. Yes, there is the usual talk of Azaadi, and who did what to who, but the most tender passages are of this boy, who’s strongest motivation to go across seems to be his loneliness, a biting feeling of being left behind. It is in these pages that Waheed creates the most powerful images and draws us in. We don’t resist.

The Collaborator forces obvious comparisons with Basharat Peer’s 2008 memoir, Curfewed Night. In terms of genre, The Collaborator is ostensibly fiction. But it is impossible to read it, treat it as that. And this to my mind is its greatest failing. The telling is much too literal and is too much of a reportage to fly as great fiction. Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown(2005) and Jaspreet Singh’s Chef(2010), both of which use the devastation of Kashmir as a backdrop to more intricate stories of human failings and feelings are definitely better works of literature than The Collaborator. And yet, Waheed's book is perhaps more important.

And this is really the nub of the issue. Should we treat books coming out of Kashmir only as accounts of victimhood, as documentaries, or should we look at them first as literature? To me, the first option reeks of a misplaced sense of pity, an act of charity, and most offensively patronizing. And taking this approach would do great injustice to Kashmiri artists and their art.

I must admit however that my Kashmiri friends, at this moment, are simply happy to hear their own –long suppressed – voices coming out. To them, at this stage perhaps, it matters little how Kashmir’s literary output stacks up as long as it tells the stories that they have lived for the past two decades. For now, it is simply their story, told by them.

Basharat Peer created a stir in 2008 with his memoir primarily because we were hearing the story of Kashmir in a voice that – for the first time - sounded Kashmiri. He was narrating a lived history. It was a clear break from a tradition where each of Kashmir’s celebrated chroniclers in modern history – from Walter Lawrence (The Valley of Kashmir) to Tyndale Biscoe (Light and Shade), from Michael Palin (Himalaya) to Justine Hardy (In the Valley of Mist) – have been outsiders. There are still others not worth mentioning, like Vikram Chandra’s Srinagar Conspiracy, who have added to this list of ‘narrative of others’. Yes, there is a tribe of editor-journalists like MJ Akbar (Beyond the Vale) and Prem Shankar Jha (Kashmir 1947) who have written historical accounts of the Valley but they were restrained, India-friendly, balanced recounting of a situation that has always needed more heart to narrate.

Waheed’s biggest achievement is that he continues the journey Peer (and in many ways, Agha Shahid Ali) began. Between them they have successfully paved the way for resident Kashmiris,too many of whom feel numbed by the conflict, to yet again hope in the power of words, in stories and song, to find the first outlines of redress. I look forward to the day when i read of Kashmir in Sajad Malik's cartoons, Muzamil Jaleel's no frills honest voice or Merajuddin's film rolls.

Importantly too, Waheed reminds us that Kashmir has a voice of its own. It is a voice that is framed independently of Pakistan and India. In his closing pages the protagonist stares at his handiwork – an ablaze field of corpses – and thinks:

To hell with them all, to hell with the Indian, to hell with the killer dogs they send here in their millions to prey on us, to hell with all this swarming Army here, to hell with the Pakistanis. To hell with the Line of Control, to hell with Kadian and his Mehrotra Sir, to hell with India, to hell with Pakistan, to hell with Jihad, and to hell with, to burning, smouldering hell with everything! It must all end. It must all, all end.

For as long as India and Pakistan remain obdurately compulsive about their theoretical, rhetorical, positions on Kashmir, perhaps it is only in narratives like Waheed’s The Collaborator, that Kashmir will find independence.

The idea of home

2010-11-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

The idea of home is slippery. I try to grasp its meaning every now and then but invariably I have to accept defeat.

In story and song, in my mother’s phone calls, in the postal address on my letters, in the key to my door, in fragments of my childhood…in all of these, it is tempting to find home. Yet, can I claim any of these to be my home?

Is home merely a memory? And must it always be given over to nostalgia to be grasped. Must home be a romantic notion of a life lived, a childhood spent, friends lost, pets remembered? Or can home be a constant, copying my moves, matching me stride for stride, caring only for me and not the scene outside.

Can the idea of home shrug off the burden of windows and what it once framed? Can home forever be a new place? Can home forever be one place? Can home be anything but a place? A space?

Is the idea of home, merely an idea? Can I imagine a home or must it be realized, hours to the day, through itch and ache, in private nooks and blind corners? When one dreams of home, what does one dream of?

It’s true that such questions come only to those who have no home, even less an idea of it.

In Memory of 202, Asia House, K G Marg, New Delhi - 110001

2010-11-23T01:47:00.001-08:00

Our childhoods are frozen memories that brook no alteration. Entire lives are lived in denial of cupboards that suddenly stop being too tall…or porridge that reneged its mum made taste. Our childhoods are the proof that the world has betrayed us. Nothing was ever supposed to change; the blue chair in that corner, father in the other. Mum in that sari, surrounded by that smell. That red mark on that wall, that crack that has always showed, the switch that would never work, the lizard that always stuck to that tubelight.

Our childhoods are fossils trapped in time; the home that bore witness, the museum. If we must accept that we no longer own our past, let the museum remain as its imprint. Let the home, with its bricks and distemper, its fences and furniture, hold each memory for posterity. Let each artifact of a foregone life stay frozen…stay there.

What of museums that only knows tenants and no owners. Houses on rent…homes on rent? A childhood gone with the lapse of a lease agreement? Childhoods robbed, hustled for the next months rent? Or can you forever own a house if you lived your childhood there. Shouldn’t a law be passed, amendments made to the statutes…To Pimp A House Where A Child Grew Up Is Now Prohibited By Law. The Rightful Owner Of A House Is The Child Who Saw The World Through Its Windows.

As if.

Vindication

2010-07-24T23:22:00.001-07:00

“I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses. ”

- Umberto Eco in 2008 Paris Review interview

News, Views and Analysis

2010-07-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

"Why what's happened to your tail?" he said in Surprise.

"What has happened to it?" said Eeyore.

"It isn't there!"

"Are you sure?"

"Well either a tail is there or it isn't there. You can't make a mistake about it, and yours isn't there."

"Then what is?"

"Nothing"

"Let's have a look," said Eyeore and he turned slowly to the place where his tail had been a little while ago, and then finding that he couldn't catch it up, he turned round the other way, until he came back to where he was at first, and then he put his head down and looked between his front legs, and at last he said, with a long, sad sigh, "i believe you're right"

- From the chapter 'In Which Eeyore loses a tail and Pooh finds one' of Winnie-the-Pooh

A missed beat

2010-06-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong,
consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died of self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.

- Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi

The (truant) God of Middle Things

2010-06-02T22:10:00.004-07:00

[This piece has also been published at OUTLOOK, Greater Kashmir and Counter Currents ]

After giving Those Ones to the Indian state, Arundhati Roy is sticking it to the (not so) Great Indian Middle Class.

Speaking at a sweaty gathering of adoring followers in Mumbai, specifically a meeting called by the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) on The War Against People, Arundhati spoke eloquently (but alas, not too elegantly, as she wiped her brow, her face, her nose and her mouth repeatedly, even joking, “it looks as though i am uncomfortable with my politics...i am not, it's just hot here!”) about the alienation of the middle class that is disconnected from the real world of insurrections and revolutions or, to quote her, “seceded to outer space”

She spoke for about an hour and after Gautam Navlakha. Gautam had, in his customary style, thumped the lectern and called us all hypocrites who refused to look the truth in the face (truth being the War that the Indian government is waging against its Own People). He had quoted all the Facts, thrilling the audience with the Shock and Awe tactics of Statistics that proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that we were sitting amidst debris of a democracy that never was and that across the length and breadth of the country, the Indian state had unleashed a systematic program of structural violence and iniquity. We nodded in sympathetic agreement, marveling at his passion, his emotion.

Arundhati followed, in a beautifully crumpled white saree with golden border, in the tradition of Keralite couture, and a coiled roll of jasmine flowers in her abundant bun. She had entered the auditorium (her arrival pre-announced by a well meaning flunk who said “Arundhati Roy paanch minute mein padhaar rahi hai”) preceded by exactly the same flotilla of photographers that signal the arrival of a major bollywood star (I say this from experience; having organized multiple press conferences involving major A List actors and actresses of today, I can confirm that their FQ – Flashbulb Quotient – is not a patch on Arundhati’s). She walked to the dais and sat down, patiently waiting out a polite minute where photographers hungrily clicked at – in – her face, before appreciatively nodding at the man who waved them back to their seats. The photographers, who knew better, and probably had to also run to another event where Katrina or Kareena or Kajol or someothersuch would also sashay down a carpet, promptly left. A few, stayed.

These few surprised me. At first. They stood, to the right of the stage, pointing their cameras, like guns at the ready, at Gautam. It took me a while to realize that while Gautam’s voice choked with anger, while his fingers curled into tight fisticuffs ready to strike a fatal blow to all of us in the audience who have no sense of outrage against the protracted war – 63 years. 63! – that the government has been waging against its people, those dedicated photographers were mesmerized by Arundhati thoughtfully chewing on the nib of her pen (which, I think, Gautam had lent her at the beginning of the conference).

They could have as well waited for Arundhati to finally take the stage, or the lectern to be precise, with a substantial load of papers and one notably voluminous book; she gave them many such moments.

As someone who had travelled roughly 30 kilometres (one way) to see her (and I mean, see her) she was quite a pleasure. I was pleasantly surprised to find that she looks exactly the way she looks on youtube i.e. very beautiful. Those who came to hear her also got their money’s worth. She spoke with a light touch, offering turns of phrases and neologisms that tickled us and made us giggle. I was disappointed to note that some of the turns were not so new or neo(“they call it the maoist corridor, we call it the MOUist corridor”), like her many books that are ‘compilations’ of what she has said previously, but then she came up with a couple that were refreshingly original (as in, I haven’t heard them before): “they ask me if I condemn the violence…as if we are all in a Condemnation Industry where we must buy stocks to prove our membership”, or the equally clever: “biodiversity of insurrection”

In broader, thematic terms, Both Gautam Navlakha and Arundhati Roy said pretty much what they have said before; in fact, the whole room had gone to this god forsaken non airconditioned cubby hole of a marathi pressroom only so they could hear them say things they have been saying forever. In that sense, it reminded me of the enthusiasm of my friends who enjoy going to Iron Maiden concerts. They have heard all the songs already, they have practically memorized them and even bought the collector edition special dvds but still they drool at the thought of going to see them in flesh. And Arundhati in flesh is far more enchanting than anyMaiden.

At the end of the speeches, the audience was asked if we had any questions. We did. One elderly gentleman complained “but it’s human nature to be greedy. What can I do”; Arundhati counseled him to hope and go on and make a change or some such. The gentleman repeated, “but what can I do?” Arundhati thought, then stuttered before coming back with “oh, I don’t know, I am sure you have some skill”. The room erupted with laughter and no one heard the old man bleat for the third time “but what can I do?”

Another young man said something rapidly, paraphrasing Arundhati and Gautam into one line accusations. Arundhati, charming Arundhati, had this to say (with a smile, with a smile): “you sound just like a Gond adivasi from the jungles of Dandkaranya”

I had been itching for a while and decided to take my heart into my mouth and ask a question. By some miracle of fate the microphone landed up in my hand and I stood up. Others, whom the miracle had sidestepped, now, in true rebel form, took matters in their own hands and screamed their questions out. And I waited, mike in hand, for my turn.

Eventually, it came. And I began, “Arundhati…”

I had wanted to say that name. Me to her. Arundhati. With a frown on her face, she looked around the room to attach voice to face. I waited till she located me before I continued. And then I asked my question.

“Arundhati, you talked about the media being bought out, or being a little slow (she had. I imagine she meant Sagarika Ghose, Arnab Silly Gooseswami, Barkha and Co.). Most of us in this room agree. In this room, we patiently hear you say all the things that you are unable to complete when you are in the studios of the English news channels who ask you if you condemn violence, who present you as an alien voice. It is only in fora like these, where everybody agrees with everybody, that we have a space for what you have to say…do you fear that we are painting ourselves into a corner where the mainstream continues with life without having to be discomfited by voices like yours because they find it entirely alien?”

I cited an article I had read in the morning by Vir Sanghvi.

“Vir Sanghvi wrote an article, where I think he meant to be kind to you but he basically talked about how dissent is important and gave examples of American civil society criticizing the American government during the heights of Vietnam war to basically fit you into a chair for dissent. This is frustrating to me because this basically means that we can now wave you aside to this chair, a chair we know where to put in the room, instead of being provoked and prodded into asking questions”

I realized that I had spoken for too long and meekly, thudding heart et al, sat down. I didn’t take notes so I am a bit reticent to put her response within quotation marks but this is what she said in effect: The fear of painting yourself into a corner only arises if your world is colaba causeway and airport lounges, which is what I imagine Vir Sanghvi’s life is. The world of television studios and middle class is a minority. Those fighting the order are the majority. We are a “major majority”. It doesn’t matter what the middle class thinks. It is in fact the middle class that has allowed this soggy mess to come about with their “commonplace dreams”. I think it is the middle class that has waged the most successful secessionist movement and “seceded to outer space”. I don’t care how popular I am, I am not in a popularity contest, I am not standing in an election. I have chosen my side. If you are on this side, great, if not, fine.

She said more and she said it all very convincingly, or so I suppose, for there was immediate applause. I had a few questions to what she had said but some Dr. Shetty was already screaming the room down with his vision for the new social world order.

When I had asked my question, it was a facetious one. I mean, I was more interested in Arundhati answer my question than having an answer. Also, I was aware that I was posing a question which was, as they say, leading, for if you flip my question one could say that there is no alternative but to keep trying, to keep sharing, to keep growing the tribe of believers.

I would have been happy if she had said that. She didn’t. Instead she said, she is the majority and that the middle class doesn’t matter and that the middleclass was to her what the Maoists were to Chidambaram.

I also know that the appropriate reaction to this is to agree. After all it is well known that the middle class is apathetic, it doesn’t vote, it’s fond of comfort and would like to access luxury. And yet, and yet.

Strangely enough, hearing Arundhati rail against the poor sods who qualify to be middle class, I felt resentful. Why must the Middle Class always be the bugger boy of all sides? The government screws the Middle Class by making them pay more taxes (because others don’t pay any at all), assign them the back breaking work of actually running the economy that they are so proud of. Arundhati dismisses them from her vision of the new world order by scoffing at their commonplace dreams and slow minds that are awash with capitalist, consumerist beliefs.

In the presence of such great intellectual cannons it is difficult to argue that all of middle class was not middle class to begin with. Many were poor. Very very poor. And they chose a specific response - they did the best they could to keep their necks above water. Is it entirely inconceivable that just as Circumstance forced the hand of the Maoists to take to guns, of some farmers to take to suicide, the specific circumstances that the Middle Classes found themselves in forced them to willingly submit themselves as grist to the mills of our Corporate State?

But never mind that. Let’s labour on what Arundhati said about popularity. I don’t care about popularity; I am not in a popularity contest.

I won’t question whether that is true because that gets into murky land of motive. However, to pretend that the mainstream media, with its paid for news and slow minds, is not a relevant universe is to contradict herself.

To the hapless man who had asked what he can do, Arundhati had said “we all do what we can. I am a writer, so I write….”

She is a writer. So she writes. Who does she write for? Who is the audience? Where does she publish? Do her exclusive 32 page essays appear in the monthly magazines published out of Dantewada (scribbled, one would imagine, in blood, on tendu leaves) or does it appear in magazines to the said middle class, who forks out the Rs. 20 that the essay costs? Would seminars like these, where she enters with a phalanx of photographers, where adoring fans (yes, fans. One woman, dressed in a blue cotton saree with tribal print, said breathlessly: I just want to touch her feet) wait with bated breath, attract anyone at all if she wasn’t popular? As a writer, to make any change at all, she needs to be read! Guess who, in this country of a billion, can read? The first name begins with an ‘M’ and the second with ‘C’.

Curse be on me to suggest that the tribals of Dantewada or Bijapur or Kaliganagar or anywhere else are not currently subject of the state’s great (and greatly unjust) fury. My rant is, don’t dismiss the Middle Class, co-opt it. Let the middle class express outrage; it is an assumption that everyone in the middle class will shut out the world outside and count their savings. It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand. When Arundhati and Gautam can so eloquently argue that not every Kashmiri is a terrorist, that not every tribal is a maoist, why is it so difficult to understand that not all Middle Classists is hopelessly slothful and devoid of intellect? How is it possible to talk about the “biodiversity” of the insurrection and then promptly exclude 300 million people, many of whom feel deeply about these issues, many who can make significant contributions to changing public opinions, to changing policy?

I can already hear Arundhati’s silken voice admonish me. This middle class that I talk about is a hegemonic mass of upper caste hindu Brahmins (inexplicably, in this rarefied world of rebellion, all Hindus are Brahmins) who are all invested in the current order and can only hinder change. Off with their heads, she might as well say.

The middle class, like the Maoists, like the tribals, like the Kashmiris, like the Nagas, like the Manipuris, are invested merely in their survival. Their “commonplace dreams” comprises of dignity, some security for the future and, dare they hope, for some respect, of also sitting on the dais, not always looking up.

For this they have adopted a path of least resistance. Have they willy nilly acquiesced in a greater act of violence, of a War Against Its People? Maybe. Is the answer to that to say they don’t need to be engaged with, spoken to, persuaded, made to see an alter reality? Maybe. But equally, maybe not.

The middle class is teeming with just as much, or more, biodiversity as the insurrection that Arundhati speaks of. The Middle Class contributes the largest number of academicians, intellectuals, readers and media consumers. She accurately mentioned that even within the broad bandwidth of resistance groups, there is much conflict, and even hatred. Why then is it so difficult to imagine that within this poorly defined and much maligned mass of the Middle Class there is scope for imagination, for romance. Arundhati spoke of the romance she finds in the poorest of the poor standing up to the might of the state. Is it possible that she might also see the romance of a numbed, dead of flesh mass come alive in solidarity for their countrymen; is it possible to dream (for she is big on dreaming) that the secessionist Middle Class may accede to the greater Romantic state that she is the Sovereign ruler of?

Is the Middle Class more intransigent, more intractable than the Maoists or the Militants that one tries to understand and empathize with? If truly the current order needs to be overthrown and a new way of life be sown in, is it not imperative that the 300 million people who have been currently marked as enemy of the insurrection be part of an “inclusive agenda”? Is it not important or relevant to identify narratives and stories that speak to this brow beaten, generation weathered class that has only traded in sweat and labour and meekly accepted its due as decided by the rulers and to inspire them with a vision that they can participate in? Or is it sufficient to mock them, berate them, declare them as the enemy of the state, of the major majority, and consign them to the farthest corners of the imagination? And if Arundhati and Gautam want to say Yes to that, then is that not a War Against It’s Own People?

END

P.S: The profusion of words that begin with capitalized letters are to indicate my underlying affection for Arundhati, in spite of what this article may otherwise suggest.

Archaeology

2010-05-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

how happy is the blameless vestal's lot
the world forgetting by the world forgot
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
each prayer accepted each wish resigned

alexander pope

Henry Miller on Obscenity

2010-05-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

"Words, words - what is there to fear in them? Or in ideas? Supposing they are revolting, are we cowards? Haven't we faced all manner of things, haven't we been on the edge of destruction time and again through war, disease, pestilence, famine? What are we threatened with by the exaggerated use of obscenity? What is the danger?"

- Extracted from a 1961 interview published in The Paris Review

The Extermination of Poetry

2010-05-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

'joy?' cried Boris, with unpleasant emphasis. 'You borrow everything you say from other people; you don't see anything for yourself. Is your father joyful since he lost his leg and everything he worked for? Did the independent nation thank him after it had sucked out everything he had? The truth is there in your own household, and you cannot see it: nations are steel boilers pitching madly with our soft flesh inside. I cannot think of anything that was not much better when we were just a territory in the empire, scratching our backsides for entertainment. And it will not be better again until we have abolished this Bulgaria, and all the other killing machines.'

'And for this you'll give up your violin? said Ulrich. 'You are an idiot.'

- from SOLO by Rana Dasgupta (Harper Collins)

This is for you

2010-04-04T01:44:00.001-07:00

Jelly 292

Did you say you like tonics
With cheese and silver
The flute plays only in winters
And you drift when you're at ease
I wish i could make it smooth
Silk and a little uncouth

Before there was Chetan Bhagat or Phungsuk Wangdu, there was Japhy Snyder and Ray Smith

2010-01-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

We pushed the bike down past the various college hangouts and cafeterias and looked into Robbies's to see if we knew anybody. Alvah was in there, working his part time job as busyboy. Japhy and I were kind of outlandish looking on the campus in our old clothes infact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle class non identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to heat the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. "All these people," said Japhy, "they all got white tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom. " He had a million idea, he had 'em all.

- The Dharma Bums , Jack Kerouac

Cameron's apology note to the world

2010-01-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

After hearing about it endlessly from friends and strangers, i saw Avatar.

I had gone in expecting a lavish movie, Cameron style, with big bold special effects and never before seen visual imagery that stretched the imagination. I had seen the trailers, read the reviews and even been to the film's website so i had a pretty clear image of what it had to offer. The same old let's save the world routine packaged in 3D. After 3 Idiots last week, this seemed reasonable.

I don't know about never before, but yeah sure, it was kinda pretty. Throw in that many colors against a bed of green, bring back mountains and clouds and flowers and furry little white things floating all around...of course it looked good.

But that's not what i left the theatre with. Instead, I walked out with the most expensive (~$300 Million) apology note tendered by America in its history.

The references are anything but oblique. There is napalm and vietnam ("let's gas them"), afganistan ("it's some sort of a shock and awe campaign"), and iraq ("we will fight terror with terror"). There is also violation of the kyoto protocol, the mindless pursuit of natural resources (oil, diamonds), the cultural imperialist agenda ("let's teach them english"), the hubris of being the world's largest military power (too many dialogues for this one) and a subcutaneous racism that exists beyond the we are so diverse agenda (did you notice the black guy nodding at the security briefing at the end when he talks of removing the nabi race). There may be more that i did not pick up on. Like the whole science thing and engineering nature for petty commercials gains etc.

the characters too are really caricatures. Parker Selfridge, an unlikely man in every single way to head such a mission, bears a strong resemblance to the silly man who preceded Obama and the all muscle no heart Colonel Miles Quaritch is almost a Rumsfeld lookalike.

It's quite sweet this attempt for most parts. I mean someone like James Cameron comes along, after 10 years, and dishes up a film that says American government (never the people) is an idiot and a rather destructive idiot at that. You almost want to give the guy a hug, if not an Oscar, which he will get anyway, aplenty.

And yet. And yet.

The people of the nature are always wide eyed, naked, naive, connected to their inner selves and are tribal in their way of life. The hula-hu dance and occult practices being just two of the signs of such a life. A little bit of africa, a little of India and a little of ASEAN - voilar, you have an avatar ready to cast in a film.

Add the whole White Messiah (white man comes and saves the natives from the white man) angle. A piece by NYTs David Brooks has been syndicated globally and he makes the point that "benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains"

Then there is the denouement. Almost as a concession to the use of the white messih trick (imagine having to digest Tsutey flying the big red bird by himself and using the lame marine as a sidekick - shock! horror!) the white man doesn't go back. he stays. he is resuscitated back to life, in his avatar, not by high end brain transmuting capsules built over millions of dollars of research but by the tree mother Eywa. And so happily ever after.

So, yes, the apology note has its margin notes and ink spots but it's such a leap from the days of, say, Independence Day. Remember the black (Will smith) and white (jeff goldblum) guy going out and saving the world. There was only america (black for a diverse, accepting america) and the bad guys. And the POTUS was a good man.

Avatar captures a sentiment...yes it's a rubbish film and has raked in millions (unlike Danny Boyle, Cameron can hardly be expected to donate this to Pandora's reconstruction)...but to have Americans pay to sit through a 3 hour long chastisement is an idea that appeals to me.

The question is once the credits roll, would they want another avatar for themselves?

Who's the real Idiot?

2010-01-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Just came home after watching 3 Idiots. Yes, i did look for Bhagat's credit at the end and found it.

Here is the thing. Would i have remembered a writing credit - Bhagat's or Abhijat's - if there was no controversy?

I was at a Crossword store this morning and couldn't help noticing the prominent display accorded to FPS. It had the same 4 column set up that's usually reserved for new launches or booker winners. For the 20 minutes i was there, 5 people bought the book. The salesgirl efficiently informed that 2 States was the new book by him. 2 out of the 5 also bought 2 states. Not too bad, huh.

Aamir Khan resorted to roaming the streets of Varanasi dressed as a buffoon and they distributed the same video to all channels. Imagine the work involved. Shoot with Aamir in outdoor locations, go back to the editing table, snip, post produce, release and then employ a PR machine to distribute it to the news channels. Isn't it simpler to sit in one location - say, noida - get all the cameras there and do a bit of name calling. Voila, it's Breaking News.

Even better, a never seen screenwriter (only because screenwriters rarely are) has his mug broadcast, his back patted and his name taken for hours on end on national television. Even if they had put his name in the credits, right at the beginning, even before Aamir's or even before Mukesh Ambani's (did anyone notice?) would you know the name Abhijat Joshi?

Even Before 3 Idiots went on the floors Aamir was a legend, Chetan Bhagat more famous than V S Naipaul, Hirani the director of a cult called Munnabhai and Vinod Chopra a rather rich man. Does anyone really care about the placement of the credit? Well, now a whole nation does. And so we look for Bhagat's name even though a million other names (shown at the start or the very end) escape us.

Lest we forget, Mr. Bhagat went to business school. And he is a banker. And 3 idiots PR office could hardly leak a scandalous affair between kareena Kapoor and Aamir Khan. Is it really so difficult to imagine a controversy designed for television?

It's funny how i am the one who feels like an idiot. Do you?

Mazaak

2009-03-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

In 1920s, when the support for fascist politics was spreading rapidly across Italy, a conscientious fascist party worker was on a mission to enlist more workers. One day, he was seen arguing with a rural socialist about why he should convert.

"How can I" said the potential recruit, "join your party? My father was a socialist, my grandfather was a socialist. I cannot really join the fascist party!"

"What kind of an argument is this" said the fascist recruiter, reasonably enough. "What would you have done", he asked the rural socialist, "if your father had been a murderer and your grandfather had also been a murderer? What would you have done then?"

"Ah, then" said the potential recruit, "then of course, i would have joined the Fascist Party"

(Extracted from Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen)

A gentle reminder

2009-03-23T04:42:00.001-07:00

Nations and Peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves - Ben Okri

touche

2009-03-22T02:58:00.000-07:00

You want proof that the sun exists, so you stay up/All night talking about it. Finally you sleep/As the sun comes up.

Jelaluddin Balkhi ‘Rumi’

सन्डे Profundity

2009-02-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

Experience is merely bias.

Through the train window

2009-01-31T02:33:00.002-08:00

The relentless yellow of the mustard fields engraved itself on my mind. Even as the bright canary yellow gave way to the pregnant green, waiting for the right time to join the mustard mob, and the green to the stoic brown of fallow land beyond, the yellow lingered on. Much like a memory, or a companion lost but never forgotten, the squares and rectangles of floral sunshine raced alongside my train, an independent spirit that carried with it the promise of a smile, a little warmth and, perhaps, peace.

In Transit.

2009-01-22T01:51:00.000-08:00

22.01.09

I write this post from the tarmac facing SATS lounge at Changi Airport. The sky, as the singapore skies are wont to be, is a fierce blue with even the clouds exhibiting a steely demeanour. I have a glass of Chardonnay to my left and my passport with boarding pass sits next to it. On my right, my humble nokia 5310, buzzing a few seconds ago with my mother's voice all the way from Salt Lake city (of Kolkata, not Calif.), is quiet except for the sporadic tune that alerts me to a new message. The last one was from a colleague in Senegal. We both work with the government to increase penetration of diapers in developing countries.

On a day not too different from today - fierce blue skies and tufts of cloud that sit shy and keep to themselves - i was in Hampi, karnataka. I had sat there, on a puffy mattress with a ragged cover, sipping a concoction of light tea liquor spiced with cinnamon, basil, cilantro, clove and honey. I did this several times through the day, for 5 days. The only things i did in between to interrupt this routine was to climb a few boulders to catch a glimpse of the sun going about its daily task of rising and dropping off.

Arba Mystika, the place where i thus vegetated, did not have electricity for most parts of the day. My phone ran out of charge in the first 12 hours. This did not matter so much because i had no network the moment i crossed the river.

(They just announced my flight. So i will have to continue this at a later date. I reach Mumbai at around 11:00 p.m. IST and will be back at the domestic airport at 5:00 a.m. to catch the 5:40 Jet to Jaipur. I will be back home sometime after midnight tomorrow.)

To be continue...

29.01.09

It's been a few days since i last wrote. The thought that i began this post with is now fuzzy. I am not sure what is it that i exactly wanted to say, except, perhaps, to express the kinetic disequilibrium that had built up inside me.

For the last few days, i have fallen into a routine. And when i say routine, I mean it. R-O-U-T-I-N-E. My body, currently, is at rest or at engaged in predictable activity. This pretty much has the same effect on me that foregoing sexual activity for a prolonged period might have on a 23 year old boy. It makes me edgy and numb at the same time.

It also raises questions. Many questions. Some of these i will think about when i am stuck in traffic, on my way to somewhere. Others will occupy my attention when i am fixated on the pot (yet, in motion, in a manner of speaking) or when i have the briefest of seconds that allow me a moment of silence and solitude.

Yes, i am confident that the questions will come. The answers, i fear, will remain in transit.

Touche

2008-09-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." - Salvador Dali

Fursht Prishze

2008-09-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

Said the green man with the silver thistle down hair "What is beauty for, I should like to know, if not to stand as a visible sign of one's superiority to everyone else?"

- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Sock

2008-09-13T05:32:00.000-07:00

Everyday love is devoid of most things that one associates with the notion of LOVE. It’s bereft of the loud heartbeats, the perspiration of anticipation, the tremulous rendezvous, the Agony-Ecstasy rollercoaster, and such other things. In its stead, everyday love becomes a mere background fact, a context. The text that plays out against this backdrop is connected only through the prior assumption, the notion of a constant love. The influence of the context is limited to providing cursory justifications, to providing ready answers that hard reasoning may have significant issues with. One, often, is in love today because s/he was in love yesterday. And nothing has changed between yesterday and today so why question the validity of the backdrop.

Yet, that is precisely the thing about changes. Often, it creeps up unnoticed. Imagine the nostalgic disbelief of a mother of a 10 year old who chances upon a sock she knit a decade back. “How he has grown” she murmurs. She knew exactly how of course but the sock brought it into focus for her. She will shortly slip back into the reverie of everyday life, watching the child grow and making the exact same observation another decade later at the nuptials of the child.

That is much the case of everyday love. As a practice, it is never in sharp focus. But then something happens – a sock appears – and for a few moments one is forced to step and back and consider. The consideration will rarely lead to any form of action but it may allow for the dawning of a certain realization, make way for a greater awareness…of self, and of the set where life and love is playing out.

And then, with the passing of time, the sock will again be forgotten.

Universe on a needle

2008-07-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

He was away fighting at the frontier. Among snow peaks and sand bags, bullets and barbwire, he counted every second to the day he would return. She ached for his touch through endless hours of mundane routine, scratched out the dates with her red ball point pen, and waited by the telephone for the chance call to come.

Today, they meet. He has run over the sequence of events a million times in his mind as the truck wound its way down the hills and his fellows sang victory songs and drank with abandon. She would be waiting, in a demure yellow cotton sari, in the inside room. He would walk in, his boots announcing his entrance ahead of him. Her heart beats would quicken with the memory of all those moments where she lived in fear, in doubt, in pain...all of it about to be erased. He will stand, his strong legs a little apart, his bulging but bruised arms spread wide open in the manner he had seen so many heroes stand in the friday night hindi films screened at the camp. She will run in to him, maybe sobbing a little, and melt. His arms will hold her tight as her head nestles under his chin and against his manly chest. Slowly, she will raise her face, her big black eyes hiding behind a veil of clear tears and then...

No time now for imagination. He has reached and is standing at the door. He rings the doorbell and a few seconds pass before she opens the door. And then, for a moment, time stands still. He doesn’t spread his arms, she doesn’t run in, there is no bone crushing hug, no lipstick smudging kiss. For a few seconds, they just gaze at each other, letting each pore, each tissue, each cell in their body feel the separation of months through this denial of gratification. They hold out, hurting, aching, through this moment of visceral ecstasy. And in those eternal seconds, they find their essence, their united soul. It’s a moment, a moment of precision, of perfection…and for that moment, the universe dances on the tip of a needle.

~

From under the White Blanket

2008-07-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

Sit

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

~ Vikram Seth

Frozen

2008-07-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

A strain
Of music, of musing
A color
Across the sky, at the corner of an eye
A smudge
On a drunken night, for a quiet fight
A smile
Through a fenced border, behind a moonless night
A little love
Tonight.

City Architecture

2008-07-06T05:26:00.001-07:00

TOWN HALL, MUMBAI

Architecturally, Bombay is one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere. It had the misfortune to develop during, what was, perhaps, the darkest period of all architectural history. Most of its public buildings were designed between 1860 and 1900. It is hardly necessary for me to expatiate and comment. All that need be said has been said perfectly in the guide-book; then, let the guide-book speak. The Presidential Secretariat, we are told, is in 'the Venetian Gothic style'. The University Hall (Completed 1874), which is 'in the French Decorated style of the fifteenth century', rubs shoulders with the 'Early English' law courts (opened in 1879). The University Library, harking back to an earlier century than the Hall, is 'in the style of 'fourteenth century Gothic'. The Old General Post Office 'was designed in the medieval style by Mr. Trubshawe.' (Mr. Trubshawe was cautiously unspecific.) The Telegraph Office (date not mentioned, but my knowledge of architecture fashions makes me inclined to a rather later epoch) is 'Romanesque.' The Victoria Station, of which the style is 'Italian Gothic with certain oriental modifications in the domes,' confronts the Municipal Building, in which, 'the oriental feeling introduced in to the Gothic architecture has a pleasing effect.' More frankly oriental are the Gateway of India ('based on the work of the sixteenth century in Gujarat') and the Prince of Wales Museum ('based on the Indian work of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Presidency.') The architecture of the Hotel Majestic and the Taj Mahal Hotel is not described in the guide book. It is a remissness; they deserve description. The Majestic is more wildly Mohammedan than anything that the most orthodox of Great Mughals ever dreamed of, and the gigantic Taj combines the style of the South Kensington Natural History Museum with that of an Indian pavillion at an International Exhibition. After an hour passed among these treasures of modern architecture, I took a cab, and in mere self defence drove to the Town Hall, which is a quiet, late Georgian affair, built in the thirties. Long and Low, with its flight of steps, its central pediment, its Doric colonnade, it has an air of calm and quiet decency. Among so many architectural cads and pretentious bounders, it is almost the only gentleman. In Bombay, it seems as good as the Parthenon.

- Excerpted from JESTING PILATE The Diary of A Journey BY ALDOUS HUXLEY. First published in 1926 by CHATTO & WINDUS, LONDON.

So have you found love?

2008-04-08T00:13:00.000-07:00

I am currently trying for lover. Love is a moon away.

God Bless

2008-03-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

Some minds are like concrete - thoroughly mixed up and permanently set.

- Sign outside St. Michael's Church, Mahim

Mithya review

2008-02-10T07:03:00.000-08:00

Mithya comes from a stable that had clever written on it all over. The names associated with the film demarcated it from the rest of the friday riff raff from the day the first trailer hit. This was a film made by sensible, sensitive, clever people who are like a breath of fresh air in the tripe that is mainstream bollywood.

As the cold cold breeze that has taken Mumbai by surprise blasted my face as i came out of the theatre on saturday afternoon, i wondered what was missing. I liked the film. It kept its promise of being clever, of being quirky, of being trade markedly different. Rajat Kapoor kept his promise of a thinking script, Ranvir Shorey reassured us that he was talented, Neha Dhupia reassured us she was not, Vinay Pathak made us laugh...everything met expectations. Yet...

Mithya is a smart film and that, unfortunately, turns out to be its biggest failing. The film is in love with itself, it does not engage me, move me. It's a sterile piece of work - like artifacts in museums that you appreciate from the distance of fibreglass but promptly forget as you move on. It's like poetry that is beautiful because its aim is to be beautiful poetry than to actually say something. The form beats the shit out of content in Mithya.

To be fair, there is a plot. A struggling actor (Ranvir Shorey)in Mumbai is witness to a gang shootout and gets embroiled in a series of events that rends his ordinary life of daily struggle into an extraordinary sketch of existential questions on identity and choice. One gets the "point" of the film very early on and from then on the film begins to struggle because the twists and turns are predictable. No one complains against this predictibility as intellectual films that are making a point do not have the onerous task of keeping the audience engaged and on the edge.

In the first half, Rajat Kapoor creates some deft character sketches. Sonam, a newcomer in Bollywood who has got the break through her underworld sugardaddy, is a charming character study with touches of Goddard. Brijendra Kala's sidekick is a seasoned sketch of a flunk who asserts and grovels alternately but is always unquestioningly loyal to the big bosses. Harsh Chhaya is memorable in his personification of the brother of the don...in fact his character gets space to play out as he reacts to a mindboggling set of altered circumstances.

And then there is Ranvir Shorey as VK. Understated, effective, and accurate. He is also the best symbol of Mithya's fall. One is left applauding Shorey for his acting prowess but not moved by it. One doesnt want to save him or cry with him, it is left at the level of an intelligent performance.

The biggest disappointment, shockingly, is Naseeruddin Shah. His portrayal as the backstabbing right hand is tired, cliched and packs no punch.

The second half is indecisive and begins to drag. The twists and turns that follow seem like second thoughts and seem like an intellectual exercise in scripting ends.

Dont get me wrong. Mithya is a nice film - a film that you should definitely watch. It is refreshing, quirky, intelligent and different. It is all the things that you would expect a Rajat kapoor film to be about but unlike his acing venture Bheja Fry it stops short of being pathbreaking.And that is the tragedy of Mithya - the idea of what it could have been.

A Formal Declaration of Love

2008-01-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

~fish fingers~jute wallet~cinnamon peeler~fine art~subtitles~journeys~blankets~nail clipper~jamrool~herbal tea~making scenes~5a.m.~being strung~tickets~escalators~orange coffee~footpath arguments~bengali household tales~chocolate boat~breakfast~breakfasts~airconditioned buses~making love~infinity~wow~tinted glass~empty tracks~melancholy~

The Scandal

2008-01-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

A 'conclusion' is what we must resist. For as long as meaning is deferred, we have hope. Once tied down, once final, once concluded we are doomed to the tyranny of either/or. Till the next rupture.

...

2008-01-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

...If the relation to the other presupposes an infinite seperation, an infinite interruption where the face appears, what happens, where and to whom does it happen, when another interruption comes at death to hollow out even more infinitely this first separation, a rending interruption at the heart of interruption itself?

- Derrida, referring to Emmanuel Levina's death

The World is Really Simple...

2007-12-10T01:20:00.000-08:00

...living in it, sometimes, is not

tired

2007-12-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

a light throb
a slight ache
a muffled yawn
a slurred syllable
a faulty step
a blank face

..............

nothingness.

बड़ा film

2007-12-05T02:41:00.000-08:00

I was recently offered a bada film. a perfectly shady looking man smelling of boiled cabbage, gutkha and bidi smoke sidled up to me, lowered his voice and asked me with great intent and deliberation "aap bada film mein kaam karenge?"

I was curious to say the least. Though amusement was fighting to be the top note, my face was straighter than george michael and i had the appropriate agog, alert look on my face that a struggling actor should presumably have. In fact, being the clever boi that i am, i immediately dragged T. into it introduced her as my agent. Hell, she looks the part. A spreadeagled walk, a booming voice, amply visible assets, killer kohl eyes, she played the vampish agent to the superstar with elan and grace.

The man seemed a little daunted with T.'s piercing questioning.

Aur kaun hai? Paisa kitna hai? Kya role hai? Banner kaunsa hai? Director kaun hai?
Kitne din ka kaam hai? kaunsa studio? so on and so forth.

Haltingly the cabbage-gutkha-bidi combine told us that it featured kareena, rani and riteish. It was a side role with no money (accha karenge to paisa bhi mil sakta hai, he assured T.)and that he didnt know the name of the director.

Hmmmm.

Tahira sized him up with a gaze that would have a wilted a thousand nubile nymphets. And then firmly declared - "Yeh Hero hain (pointing at yours truly), role bhi hero ka hi karenge"

The guy looked at me with a bleating look in his eyes as T. continued to stare him down with a gaze that would have made Nadira in Aan look like a simp...all i could do was frantically search for my shades in my backpack and put them on for that hero look. That done T. and I stormed out on the street and hailed an auto.

I must admit that it was a little disconcerting to be rejected by an autoguy immediately after T. had declared my hero status to the world

****
p.s: T. a.k.a Nath is tired of Hero (i.e. Me) not getting roles worth his mettle and has now gone ahead and cast him in the cult Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The result will be on display at the NCPA Experimental on the 13th of december, 7:00 p.m. onwards.

Listing
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Directed By: Tahira Nath; Starring: Aman Uppal, Tahira Nath, Mrunmayee Lagoo, Abhijit Dutta; Production: Labanya, Skand, Neha
Curtain Raiser: 5th Dec, Prithvi Theatre, Juhu
Premiere Show: 13th Dec, NCPA Experimental, Nariman Point, 7:00 p.m. onwards
More shows: 1st and 2nd January, 2008, Prithvi Theatre, Juhu

K

2007-11-08T00:03:00.000-08:00

"Do you think you are Franz Kafka reborn?"

My father is given to making what one may refer to as "big deal" of most things in life. His current curiosity regarding my real identity was prompted by an innocent and innocuous reply that i had sent him.

'please send me the details by tomorrow' he texted.
'k' i texted back.

My father is 63 and he finds himself unable to resign to shortcodes and shorter codes that is the current communication paradigm. He had valiantly negotiated the arguably tortuous ways of the world wide web (an apt expression, he thought) and the parallel language of SMS (to my "cnt cll 2dy wll do tomo" he replies "your message was corrupted. please send it to us again.") and was quiet proud of the fact. He would send back all caps OK. TAKE CARE. to my 'tc.gnite' and write back emails once in a while and all was hunky dory.

it was quite comfortable really. we had a good thing going. He began to frame questions that could be answered with monosyllabic constructions.

"Did you have your medicines"
"No reply"
"Have your medicines"
"ok"
"why havent you called. mom is worried. if you are busy call tomorrow"
"ok"

Then one day :-

"Have you paid your loan amount for this month?"
Yes
"Send me the details tomorrow"
"k"

There was no response for almost 5 hours and none was expected. As far i was concerned, the matter was over. And then.

"As If it wasnt enough to move out of home and work in a far away city to earn money, which is primarily spent on jumping around with scantily clad girls in dimly lit rooms filled with bad people who do unspeakable things like drink alcohol, instead of making time for a 30 second phonecall to your poor parents back home who broke their back and made all sorts of sacrifices to raise you, now we have to make do with 'K'? 'K'???! Do you think you are Franz Kafka Reborn?"

This man deserved the SMS Nobel. He probably needed surgery of the thumb. But more importantly i was touched. No, i was shaken and thoroughly stirred. Avalanche of guilt happened. even little homesickness happened.

i did not reply to his message. I called.

The Roadtrip Algorhythm

2007-05-30T22:08:00.001-07:00

Get in a car
Play the music
Up the speed
Take a turn
Look out
See the blur
Diversion
reverse
Speedbreaker
Stop the car
Step on the gas
Crash & burn

2007-05-30T04:51:00.001-07:00

never read old mails.

kind wishes

2007-04-16T01:07:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday Vivek.

Journeys

2007-04-15T03:19:00.000-07:00

I must at once proceed to Paris, and kill two guilty women and an innocent man. After that, it would of course be incumbent on me to commit suicide - Hector Berlioz

In the land of...

2007-04-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

...indiscernible hum of muted voices, dryness of the air-conditioned silence, the dull drip of the coffeemachine, the click-shut of electronic exits, the minutes of 10 hour long meetings...

everthing is efficient, everyone is effective.

sigh.

dissonance

2007-03-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

ye mahalo, ye takhto, ye taajon kee duniyaan
ye insaan ke dushman samaajon kee duniyaan
ye daulat ke bhukhe rawaajon kee duniyaan
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

har yek jism ghaayal har yek ruh pyaasee
nigaaho mein ulazan dilon mein udaasee
ye duniyaan hain yaa aalama-ye-badahawaasee
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

jahaa yek khilaunaa hai, insaan kee hasatee
ye basatee hain murda paraston kee basatee
yahaa par to jeewan se maut sasatee
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

jawaanee bhatakatee hain badakaar ban kar
jawaan jism sajate hain baajaar banakar
yahaa pyaar hotaa hain wyaapaar banakar
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

ye duniyaan jahaa aadamee kuchh naheen hai
wafaa kuchh nahee, dosatee kuchh naheen hai
yahaa pyaar kee kadr hee kuchh naheen hai
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

jalaa do ise, foonk daalo ye duniyaan
mere saamane se hataa lo ye duniyaan
tumhaaree hain tum hee sanbhaalo ye duniyaan
ye duniyaan agar mil bhee jaaye to kyaa hai

- Sahil Ludhianvi, Pyaasa , 1957

[for lyrics in devnagari- http://www.geetmanjusha.com/hindi/lyrics/536.html]

Punchline - II

2007-02-14T05:49:00.000-08:00

"Aisa koi saga nahin, jisko humne thaga nahin"
-(On the signboard of Thaggu ke Laddoo, a popular sweetshop in Kanpur)

Punchline

2007-02-03T02:46:00.000-08:00

"If you don't eat, we will both starve"

- Outside a restaurant in Nazirabad

Haiku in a godown

2007-02-02T04:59:00.000-08:00

Road from Banbury
a man spilled from his car
dead eyes full of rain

The case for organised retail

2007-01-25T07:27:00.000-08:00

If you are not well versed with some notion of the above mentioned topic, I congratulate you. It has been impossible to escape audience, if not participation itself, in discussions surrounding the pros, cons, and possibilities of organised retail. At every forum, be they be the precocious school debates or industry body conferences, statistics and views have been dumped with the same efficiency as the chinese dump their produce. Every body and their aunts have a view. And those few that don't, or don't want to, have to literally shut themselves out from literate existence to escape.

Thus, i am sure that, you my very literate and well informed reader, would be well versed with the case for organised retail, as also the case against it. Rest assure, i will not repeat a single line of thought that you may have heard. However, i do have a point to make. In the favour of organised retail.

The point however is not economic. It is civic. And it is simply this. The spread of organised retail enables the spread of civic sense. Let me explain.

One of the biggest malaise affecting Indian streets, is the Indian male's propensity to pass urine in a canine-like manner. We tend to use pillars, walls, narrow bylanes, shrubs, dirt tracks, anything and everything that comes in way. There is complete social sanction for this activity. Proabably because it is more a need than a pleasure. It is said that the heart listens to no one. The same can be said for the Bladder. We can go only that far without heeding its voice.

To expect people to not relieve themsleves is unrealistic. And unnatural. The logical solution to this problem is to build adequate toilets along high streets that allows men to relieve themselves without defacing property. However, this is easier said than done.Infrastructure is a weakpoint with the government and such a large project is bound to get delayed by atleast a couple of centuries. Till then we can only expect the pile of human excrement and urine to pile up along our national highways. With the way airport crowd and traffic is increasing, i wouldnt be surprised if even runways, tarmacs and such like also begins to see men excercising their right to be light.

Also, building open toilets on streets would look uglier than the stray rivulet of urine running aground. Also, the public toilets, the few that exist, are in such bad shape and smell that one would still end up passing water outside it.

The Answer? - Organised Retail.

Imagine, glittery shops and malls coming up in a chain. Each retail outlet, or atleast the every second outlet, has a nice, clean, fragrant loo where one can not only urinate and defecate but wash hands too. This is the single biggest contribution of chains like McDonalds. Every time i need to pee, i know there is one around. And may the chain grow. Obesity is a little price to pay for keeping the city clean, dont you think?

And even retail outlets could benefit. Use the space that all men stare so hard at in the loos to advertise their own or somebody else's products. We have started branding all spaces, why let this private arena go waste when concentration is at your command (with a little strategic planning, of course).

In fact, i believe this reason alone is enough for the government to raise the cap in FDI in retail. Just put in a clause. If the foreign partner bears the cost of putting in a minimum of 15 urinals per 1500 sq. feet of space that they plan to build and operate in, then that amount of investment would be discounted from the percentage ceiling.

Win-win, i believe is the term they use.

the moon tonight...like a freshly cut fingernail

2006-12-24T22:06:00.000-08:00

Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category, a dimension that opens out into solitude. Moreover, it is an inherent suffering, as if we had two epidermises and the one underneath rebelled and shrank back from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is a part of the alloy that lays the foundation, in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self - Memoirs, Pablo Neruda

The tyranny of rhyme

2006-12-16T05:41:00.000-08:00

Take some basil and thyme
a pinch of salt and a dash of lime
add some dirt, a little grime
and leave it for sometime

That will be, One Dollar and one Dime.

As orange turned red and the dust rose

2006-12-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

The banal holds within it the bombast

Acknowledgement

2006-12-06T22:50:00.000-08:00

For words consume themselves
I must refrain from arson
The flame will remain
Scattered ashes

On a sunday morning

2006-12-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

kismat se zyada aur waqt se pehle kuch nahi milta
- The boy from chamba

What is it with being relevant

2006-11-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

It is such a senseless tyranny! Everything you do in life has to conform to this bloody diktat of relevance. If you try having a conversation where your response is not logically connected to what the other person has just said, you are immediately rebuked with "that's not relevant".

This notion of relevance, i find, is rather irrelevant. Relevance has managed to permeate and fuse with that other paragon of 'the-world-as-it-should-be' - 'Logic' - with the result that one is constantly in 'Mode-desperate' to attain the exalted status of relevance.

Irrelevance has always been painted a hue darker than plague. This, i think, signals the end of the world. Also, that it is really cold in Chandigarh.

There you go. C'mon, admit it. You just thought, 'how is that at all relevant?' And, why pray, should it "refer to the matter at hand" (word web def. of Relevance). It crossed my mind at that moment and to that extent it is a truer thought than anything else i would have written or articulated at that point of the passage.

Relevance is too conscious. And therefore utterly crass. It is always an effort and consequently a manufacture. Shouldnt we celebrate something that is genuine, spontaneous and real than something which is a construction?

Construction, too often, reeks of boundaries. Boundaries in turn smack of comfort zones. And aren't comfort zones sweetened death traps? Have we lost all appetite for fresh air. Has acclimatization to carbon dioxide made us allergic to oxygen? And if it has, should we not attempt to remove the musty covers and take a sniff. Should we not throw caution to the skies and revel in the warmth of irrelevance?

I think Martin Dahanukar Bloodsystem did a very good job with Sunderbans.

Liberte. Equalite. Farternite

2006-11-29T00:33:00.000-08:00

The male itch (and the resultant scratch) has been (ironically) the butt of too many jokes. The itch has been scratched to its last details and the species-Male has been analysed using this one shred of symptom. Tomes, most published as one pagers with pictures in women's magazines, have been written about how and why the itch and the scratch is the definitive indicator to understanding men (and putting them down).

What is never written or talked about is the female itch. Does it exist? Does it produce a sensation desirous of a scratch? Or does it lie quietly under the suppression of social norms like its cousins the Female fart, the Female belch, the Female snot,...

There is a strong logic that suggests that indeed is the case. Like with the cousins, it is obvious that the strong reactions are generated by a situation of envy wherein the Female is unable to extend her hard won liberation to the realm of such mundane matters as flatus and eructations. So she fights. Not to liberate herself, but to impose the norm of repression on the Male.

This we must resist. And the path of resistance, i believe, lies in discovering the female itch. This is because of the peculiar nature of the itch. Like women, it is a nagging, demanding, insistent presence. It needs attention here and now. Unlike flatus which you can avoid by rushing to the loo or even just masterfully flexing the right muscles in the right places or a loud burp that you can simply obstruct behind a 'kerchief, the itch goes nowhere and can hide nowhere till its taken care of.

The itch is also a master of paradox. The very loophole, i suspect, women use. When you scratch your itch, along with the pleasurable sensation and concentration of mind it brings about, it also introduces the need to itch harder and faster. And when you respond, its bounds away to elevated levels in scratch-o-meter and you are left playing catch-up. It only stops when you stop - which you do if someone's around or have to urgently attend to something. And this is exactly what women do. They side-step the first scratch itself, thereby disappointing the itch and making it subside.

If, somehow, the female itch could be identified, and more importantly, scratched, i genuinely believe we would move to a more gender-equal world. It would signal the beginning of true liberation of women, where they are not only free from the banalities of the Male but also of the female. And for once, the liberation will be joint. Imagine the Male and the Female, sitting together by the fire, nursing tender intimacies, enjoing the pleasures of the mutual itch & scratch, reaching a joint climax, anything unlike they have experienced before.

Like they say, Scratch & Win.

Where are the cats bhai?

2006-11-23T23:03:00.000-08:00

Dressing Plague with platinum
dazzling bangles, buboes below
Nina Ricci, fetid breath, contagion
Run for your life
marathon or half,
sponsored, with prizes
smile- dissolving dentures
rats racing
goodnight and goodluck.

On the way, by the by

2006-11-17T05:19:00.000-08:00

Hope is a bitch
or
Yeh Umeed badi kambakht cheez hai

FYI

2006-11-17T05:13:00.000-08:00

Coming Soon.

Border Dispute (K'taka Bandh today)

2006-10-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

To be sure he's a "Man", the male must see to it that the female be clearly a "Woman", the opposite of a "Man", that is, the female must act like a faggot.

- Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto

randomning

2006-10-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

I had first come across The Theory of Sunk Cost some 7 years back when Mrs. Rekha Sharma (“26 years young in this profession”) wagged her finger at us and made us read the definition out loud. A common enough theory, net-net it suggests that sometimes it is profitable (easier??) to continue a loss making business because the alternative seems to be more expensive. In a strictly economic sense, this is quite demonstratable and defensible: you have invested in plant and machinery (fixed cost) and have to pay interest on the loan amount you borrowed to pay for it and therefore it makes sense to earn some “contribution” from sale of finished goods that you produce rather than stopping production completely. Not very different from the notion of “something is better than nothing” if you come to think of it.

As with several other theories and laws of nature expounded in a cross-section of subjects, we tend to incorporate the underlying philosophies therein into how we function as human beings. All too often, this behavior or that would be attributed to one or more of Newton’s Laws or Pareto’s principle or the theory of diminishing returns or some such. A theory that has recently caught my eye, one that i think has an equal claim to a position of eminence at the high table of Theories That Explain Everything And Their Aunts is 'The Theory of Sunk Cost'.

This is particularly true of behavior exhibited by people in relationships. By people trapped in stagnant relationships. Sometimes they are aware of the stagnancy and sometimes they are not. In either case, the inherent romance seems to be woven around this theory. Call it habit, call it inability to escape, call it inability to admit to oneself that this relationship isn’t what it is being made out to be, call it anything you will but it is the tendency to continue to play the role simply because you played it yesterday and the day before that…and somewhere in the subconscious lurks the quasi-logic that so much have already gone into it, so lets puts some more in and make it work…

As the list of relationships where I see this at work keeps growing, if not by leaps and bounds, then steadily enough, I wonder what it is in clinging-on that makes the world go-around. Why this immense attraction to continuity, this morbid fascination for comfort zones? Why such strong and complete resistance to uprooting and starting from scratch. Why can’t we deal with loss instead of insisting that we must compound it and in the struggle find solace and satiation? Why do we have to insist on Something? What does the world have against Nothing.

As far as I can see, Nothing is a far more honest way of book-keeping. To want to create Something out of the prevailing Nothing (sometimes going to the extent of denying the existence of Nothing) is as bad as fudging your balance sheets – juggling numbers to keep shareholders happy while in reality you make losses that cripple you.

Maybe I am being cynical...maybe you should too.

Displacement

2006-10-01T02:37:00.000-07:00

FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2006

seems like yesterday....oh fine so it doesnt...anyways, this is deja vu time. just did a displacement post the other day and its time to be displaced all over again...and a lot has happened in this one and half months...so much so that instead of writing about it in a post i change the name of this blog and its description ...i am a leetle sad. trying to philosophise and look at the metaphorical side of things ...but not entirely successful...does a new life await me?..my limited experience says that nothing is ever really new...like the greimasean scholar once said, all stories have been told...we can only hope reinvent the telling...anyways, plots are always interesting....so without further ado, lets wait with bated breath and see what the morn brings...

(from my 'ex' - blog)

Come end of week, I will be displaced, yet again. For the 4th time since the beginning of this year, to be precise. The thing is I should be getting used to this business...not put down roots if only to sidestep the process of uprooting...but i seem to be completely incapable of doing that.

So I spend my time vacillating between looking forward to a new place where i can be solitary, focus on myself, up my reading, work out, not drink, not philander, and defnitely not fornicate indiscriminately. I fantasise about this transformation, a bit like 'The Monk who sold his Ferrari' but i am more interested in becoming this irresistible swan when i am done with my 8 month stint and come back to bangalore.

Then almost imperceptibly i slip in to visions of complete inability to deal with my new environment, missing targets, falling sick, being lonely, going on a drinking binge, getting robbed, acquire a terribly dark complexion and generally be wasted, in the not-so-nice sense.

I know that reality will probably be somewhere in between. Much more mundane, sane even. Soon enough, the urgencies of getting rent receipts, saying byes, packing will take over and even before i know it, i will be waking upto a new sun.

I guess i will start with the packing...don't want to pay for excess baggage now, do we...

apropos nothing in particular

2006-09-11T02:50:00.000-07:00

"a crowd is untruth"
- Jelinek

The Paradox of Possibilities

2006-09-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

Dusk marries dawn

as night and noon elope

in the wandering twilight

I am left with one shard of hope

My sustenance, my solution, my salivating soul

live a little more, go a little farther just to grope

in dustbins and trashcans

in ditches and dykes

in memories and desperate dreams

The bell remains unrung

the phone remains unsung.

Noon returns with Night

a failed romance weeps in the shadow of twilight

Dusk and dawn sigh

as possibilities die.

Mismatched in heaven?

2006-09-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

What is it with relationships and the obsession to match? Why do the high priests and priestesses of love - the love gurus - expound the virtues of matching? Why is it so important that my taste in books (or dogs or cinema or music or apparel or size of genitalia) match my partners? In fact, so dominant is this philosophy of match that any romantic union is eponymously christened "the match". Anyone who contributes to this holy/unholy union is
crowned "the match maker".

Is it, to take a freudian tack, a consequence of a childhood littered with references to matching? As early as our potty training days we were schooled to recognise matching pairs: of socks, of shoes, of nightsuits, of building blocks, of jumbled words in different columns...

While that may have been a response of generations used to the comfort zone of convention where anything that did not match was an aberration, it is difficult to understand why we must extend this philosophy into the personal realm of relationships. Not any relationships, but romantic relationships.

We seem completely unbothered by the fact that we have unmatched mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, cousins...even husbands (as long as they are arranged for) but we are all hot and bothered about getting a good match (literally and figuratively) when it comes to romantic partners chosen for ourselves.

You might say it is because that is one realm that is left for us to "choose". But i am going to argue that that is not so. This business of matching has been prevalent for so long that it is now genetically coded into our brains...like now we are used to thinking fair is beautiful, and this appreciation is not a cognitive process, it is spontaneous, instinctual, natural and anything else Roget might say it is. This is true for many reactions which have transcended logic or active cognition and become one of them things you say "just like that" when asked why.

Much like our revulsion for anything that is not up our alley. We are turned off by people, instinctually, who have interests that are widely different from ours. If i like subtlety and sophistication and this loud mouth who thinks pink goes with green comes along, I am likely to throw up.

Or, in a less dramatic sense, you find someone you just plain and simple like but have hardly anything in common you are likely to go into long and deep thoughts of whether he/she is the right person. Of course we know by experience that mutually exclusive personalities and interests are not the be all and end all of a lasting relationship. Yet we persist in glorifying this aspect.

What will it take, and how long, for two jagged edges, two rough fits, two mismatches to fall in love and not think twice about it?

Sic

2006-08-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

"Friends are such bastards"
- (the last) Aureliano Buendia in Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Strangers

2006-08-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

For some time now, I have been grappling with the notion of 'strangers'. It is one of those things that tend to get defined by what it is not rather than what it is per se. That which is not familiar, does not cross us in the regular patterns of our life, is not within the boundaries of immediate comprehension...

Applied to people, strangeness comes with a lot of social baggage. Remember Mother telling you not to talk to strangers? Some, like Sinatra, saw the erotic value of this forbidden act and penned a song that struck a chord with little boys who were not little anymore and who wondered 'what if'. Strangers are people with the color of the night marking them. Strangers are nameless, often faceless. Strangers are moments stolen out of an ordinary day and life and filed away as a memory. Strangers are potential prostitutes, one night stands, murderers and occasionally, lovers. Strangers are about hesitation...about shifty glances and unasked questions, about half smiles and the unknown.

What if you were paid to seek out strangers (not prostitutes, not one night stands, not murderers, not lovers) and talk to them as if you were old friends. To ask them about the most private things in their lives in the first half hour you meet them. Not just to ask but to record what they say. To make them feel, for that one hour, that this was a conversation that started somewhere, maybe here, maybe somewhere else, and one that will go on the next time we meet. And then to walk away without a look back, never to see them again.

Well, I am paid to do exactly that.

In the past 20 days, i have met people, a lot of them, with whom i have had the most animated, the most intimate conversations that i can't imagine having with some of my closest friends. And these are people i would not take a second look at if they passed me by otherwise or even if i did, would instantly declare as "not my type".

It is one thing to come across a stranger (i.e. someone you havent met before) and start talking about a common observation, trait or anything else but quite another to set out every morning and seek them out and then systematically, over and over again, find out their life stories.

It's a capsule in time, with a clear start and end. At the end of each conversation, the tape recorder is switched off, we shake hands and i say thank you. And we are strangers again.

Maybe then Strangeness is not about familiarity. In the couple of hours that i spend with them i am supplied with details intricate and intimate enough to make them more than familiar. I know their entire family histories, sexual histories, intellectual histories and any other history one can imagine. I know their favourite color, worst nightmare, fondest dream, deepest desire et al.

Is the fact that i am not a part of their life and vice versa that makes us strangers? Do you need a relationship to escape the stranger status. Is there then two universes - one of labels (relationships) and other of Strangers?

In which case, why is it that i often find my relationships devoid of notions of the same notness that marks out a stranger? And why is it that in these hours of daily routine i find a level of comfort, ease, familiarity, interest, and sometimes even affection, that is definitive of a Relationship?

Strange. Very Strange...

A Portrait of Success

2006-08-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

Clink, chink,
wink, kink
Razzle, dazzle
Big egos, big breasts
Aroma candles, stale breath
Head, aches
Longing, long, belong
Wretch, retch
Wheels, deals

Orgasm.

tilism-e-hoshruba

2006-08-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

...it's not enough to say that there is a river of magic. There is a river of magic and there is blood flowing. The river of magic is the boundary between two tilisms, a hidden tilism and a visible tilism. On that river of blood, there is a bridge of smoke. On the bridge of smoke, two lions are standing, guarding the bridge at either ends. On that bridge of smoke, there is a three tier building composed of smoke. In the first tier, there are fairies with pipes and horns in their mouths. In the second tier, the fairies have bowlfuls of pearls which they are throwing into the river and the fish in the river have it in their mouths. In the third tier, huge grand men are standing, naked to the waist, fighting with swords. Their blood is spilling over into the river, and that's why it's called the river of blood.

Excerpted from an interview with mahmoud Farooqui on his work with dastan goi, a lost art of epic urdu story telling, published in The Man*.

*Thanks S. for recommending the mag.

superhuman/inhuman

2006-08-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

It took only a couple of days to turn me into a bombayphile. As a 21 year old tasting freedom with a big S for the first time in my life bombay was everything they said it was. I stood on marine drive, made out under the rocks of bandstand, fell in love with the sea breeze, got used to breathing armpit odour (among other things) as a matter of course in local trains, learnt how not to care whether the sun was going down or up, also to brush off opinions of other people....it was like finding my own little neverland.

That was then. A year passed and i am here again. Only for a week this time. And so much has changed. Or maybe i have.

I dont know whether i genuinely missed it or willingly chose to ignore it. Whatever it was, this time the stench of mumbai - a rotting, festering, defecating city with patches of cheap colored gold paper hanging on - hit me across my face.

Criticising mumbai is almost a heinous crime. There is this creature called "The Spirit of Mumbai" which is a blanket thing everyone throws at you when you try to discuss it. But this is not about going to work after the city has been bombed (like you had a choice sweetheart - after you have survived bombs you need to survive hunger) or walking back when the rains got under the carpeting in your office (again, such choices!!). This is not about the things that the universe has conspired to flail mumbai to death just to test the famed mumbaikars spirit.

Indeed there is a conspiracy. There is a conspiracy by the mumbaikar herself. To not care. To be bindaas. And its not always a good thing.

Mumbai, it seems, has mastered the art of being selective. Selective memories, selective spaces, selective hands, selective lives. Its pockmarked...there is this dungheap with tiny pockets of escape...famed pocketsthese - prithvi theatre, five star clubs like Marriots Enigma (Which, personally think sucks big time) and Insomnia, Nariman Point, Phoenix Mills, Bandra Kurla Complex...there are more. In between however there is this ocean of inhuman existences. Everybody sees it and nobody does.

These parallel universes of surrealism is not the problem. It is the ability to traverse and straddle these different universes that is scary. The chasms are widening furiously and it might just implode tomorrow. No amount of RDX or "Spirit" will be able to rescue it.

I know i am saying nothing new but i belive what is new in this that i am exclaiming. I am telling you about my shock. People in mumbai dont get shocked. And contrary to what the morning newspaper might lead you to believe, this is the tragedy of mumbai.

Mumbai could have been a great city. If only the mumbaikar was a little more human.

Usage and Attiudes

2006-08-03T00:19:00.000-07:00

i dont mind being used. just don't use and throw. Recycle.

Run

2006-08-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

If the assumption of femininity or the assumption of masculinity proceeds through the accomplishment of an always tenuous heterosexuality, we might understand the force of this accomplishment as the mandating of the abandonment of homosexual attachments or, perhaps more trenchantly, the preemption of the possibility of homosexual attachment, a certain foreclosure of possibility that produces a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss.

Indeed, to accept this view, we must begin with the presupposition that masculine and feminine are not dispositions, as Freud sometimes argues, but accomplishments, ones that emerge in tandem with the achievement of heterosexuality. Here Freud articulates a cultural logic whereby gender is achieved and stabilized through the heterosexual positioning, and where the threats to heterosexuality thus become threats to gender itself. Thus the identification (a melancholic identification, according to Freud) contains within it both the prohibition and the desire, and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis; within this matrix, homosexual desire panics gender.

Becoming a ‘man’ within this logic requires a repudiation of femininity, but also a repudiation that becomes a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and hence, perhaps also, its fundamental ambivalence. Indeed, the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants the woman he would never be; in fact he wouldn’t be caught dead being her, thus he wants her. She is at once his repudiated identification. One of the most anxious aims of his desire will be to elaborate the difference between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install that proof. This will be a wanting haunted by a dread of being what it wants, a wanting that will also always be a kind of dread; and precisely because what is repudiated and hence lost is preserved as a repudiated identification, this desire will be an attempt to overcome an identification that can never be complete.

Indeed, he will not identify with her, and he will not desire another man, and so that refusal to desire, that sacrifice of desire under the force of prohibition, will incorporate the homosexuality as an identification with masculinity.

But this masculinity will be haunted by the love it cannot grieve.

(extracted from melancholy gender, Judith)

Metaphors.

2006-07-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

The Metaphor intends to extract instant meaning. To that extent it abstracts the essence of the construction and expresses it through a new paradigm of internalised meanings.The notion of metaphoricity as a contamination suggests that reduction is involved. Is that because metaphors sometime serve as a shortcut to meanings? If that, then is this shortcut, this "reduced" construction, a perverted meaning?The Metaphor does an excellent job of communicating the self present truth which is why we instantly recognise it and reach out for it. Isnt it therefore a perpetrator of sloth where we are happy with having identified the nature of one truth through the lens of another and give up all intentions of understanding the glory of a potentially new truth in light of itself. Do metaphors then, actually, take away meaning rather than lend to the understanding of it?

Blink

2006-07-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

There seems to be some debate on whether bloggers (or people who blog, to be more polite) should stick to expressing their views 'general stuff'. This, ostensibly, is such matter as those concern society, politics, culture, law and combinations there of (socio-cultural, geo-politics etc.). They should not, the view goes, talk about mundane things like what they did in their lunch break or what problems they are having in their relationships. Naturally, there is a view that neatly oppose this. Vice Versa would, i think, rather cogently put the entire stream of consciousness of this school of thought.

It's a crossfire i find myself trapped in. I have always maintained a private blog where i spill the beans on the most private of emotions where the delectable duality of public anonymity helps me get a few cheap thrills. I starte this blog with the intention to stick to general commentaries primarily because i believe world leaders would do good to patiently go through all that i think. I do not wish to deprive other souls of the articulations that i put forth either, so here it is put, free for all.

But lately i have turned to outpourings that can hardly be called socio-politico-cultural or any other mouthfull combination of heavy sounding subjects. And i have been feeling a tad guilty. Should i continue to be 'personal' or should i be strictly relevant to the world at large. I dont have a solution but having said this out loud, i believe i have done my bit.

Much like any other blog post. Having put it in corporeal font on text windows one is rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment. And sometimes this feeling, with the robustness of thin air holding it up, can be all that matters.

career goal

2006-07-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

i would love to be a writer...it's just that i can't stand the paperwork

off the record

2006-07-20T02:59:00.000-07:00

formal declarations of love
dead of night
crime committed

day after day
but not the day after
heartbroken

fish fingers upma rains scenes
too much onions
a very good night

Blogpost

2006-07-20T02:58:00.000-07:00

Heard blogging has been banned. Checkin.

Russell on Advertising

2006-07-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

I want to say in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised dimunition of work.

First of all, what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.. Usually two opposit kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two oranised bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing i.e. of advertising.

- excerpt from Russel's In Praise of Idleness

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/humftp/E-text/Russell/praise.htm

The Joke

2006-06-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

A beggar's loyal client of many years started to reduce the generosities. From 10 rupees in one year it declined to 5 in the next and further to Rs. 2. The beggar decided to take stock and confronted the donor.

The donor could hardly hide his embarrassment as he tried to explain. From the happy situation where he had to feed only one mouth -his own- it went to two when he got married. The further reduction in alms, he explained, came when the first child offered. He looked at the beggar looking for empathy.

The beggar was instead quite angry. He chided him saying, "but sir, this is mighty criminal. How can you use my money to subsidise your family?"

Those who shit, clean it better

2006-05-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

Two books i read recently made a rather compelling argument. One was The Affluent Society by Galbraith and the other Veblen's Theory of Leisure Class. Not the least of their charms is the manner in which they are written - sparkling wit, biting humour and a cogency that grabs you by your balls.

The main themes that they deal with are how productive capacities are being wasted to serve artifical wants (or produced wants) leading to a nil effect on the economic problem. As brainwashed as we are with the necessity of wants (whichever, whatever), it would be difficult to dismiss these books too easily...for one, both demonstrate conspiciuous consumption (the phamous 'keeping up with the joneses') to be directly linked to the debilitating effects on disparites (poor grows poorer, rich richer).

Advertising and 'salesmanship' (1958 term for marketing i am guessing; people then called a spade a spade) have come under particular attack primarily because they are ostensibly the process by which these artificial wants are made dangerously real leading to destruction through diversion of productive capacities.

As much as i find myself swayed by these superbly informed criticism of advertising and marketing, it is difficult to ignore the fact that neither gives us the confort of solutions. Yes disparities are increasing, yes advertising is resulting in a problematic reallocation of resource, but whats the way out? surely not to ban advertisements or impose restrictions on production of goods aimed at the leisure class? And even if it is the solution, can we realistically expect this change to take place within our lifetime?

On the other hand, within the evolving framework of marketing and managment one sees a lot of scope (ok, fine, some scope) for innovative mechanisms for reducing the debilitating effects of selective development.

It is important here to understand that traditional economics (even non-keynesian) talk a lot about the role of the government in terms of regulation development. But empirical evidence proves the limitation of traditional economic presumtptions about taxation as a redristibutive tool or public expenditure on health, education etc. So it makes sense to look at private sector to undo the damage that some say it has created...in other words, clean up your own shit. The good part is, this track actually goes somehwere.

Take cause marketing for example. Admittedly not the newest thing i have said this week but it calls for closer scrutiny. Cause marketing was motivated by the desire to humanise consumption. Not very different from charity dinners and fund raisers. Purchase (typically of goods that do not fall into necessities in the malthusian sense) was promoted by linking profit with sacrifice. A lot of companies benefitted but there were hardly anything sustainable that came of it.

But recent programs like P&G's Shiksha, HLLs Project Saraswati, among others seem to have arrived at long term models of sharing profit (redistributing income, directly, tangibly) and contributing to development. This is arguably much better than a system of taxation in a country that is ruled by a sickening set of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. Image is of prime importance for these private companies and you can rest assure that they will do a good job, if only for PR.

The recent boom in carbon trading (a rather expensive guilt reduction mechanism for multinations who harm the environment) also demonstrates that it is possible to make big companied clean up their own shit...in fact it is a process that retains some hope (the governments shit is too much and too stinking for anyone to be going near it).

I will do a post dedicated to both of the above and more marketing schemes that address issues of development and redistribution, but right now i just want to end this with an open invitation to brainstorm about potentially long term sustainable and profitable marketing schemes that can reduce the yawning chasms.

Do post your comments.

Arundhati Roy on Democracy, Now

2006-05-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

Link to transcript of interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250

Narmada again

2006-05-24T02:38:00.000-07:00

Narmada is back in news. No, no, the genocide is still on track, nothing is being done about it. The damn thing is still going to go up and drown a few millions here and there. It takes much more to make news.

The reason is Aamir Khan. The poor guy is being "taught a lesson" by the powers that be in gujarat for showing up at Jantar Mantar and saying silly things like people should be resettled and rehabilitated. The multiplex association of gujarat have decided that the people of gujarat do not want such anti-gujarat folks to be singing songs in a theatre near them.

Well, well, it's a democracy after all, and everyone, including multiplex association members, have a right to think what they wish to.

And frankly i do not think depriving the people of gujarat the pleasure of viewing Aamir and Kajol "for the first time ever" will cause any serious damage. People who make lots of money will make a little less; consumers will have to reallocate their entertainment budget leading to another film - maybe a local gujarati film - being declared a hit (and if it is a gujarati film, maybe some rich patel will rush to produce a film and hire spot boys from the local area - the ones that have migrated from the valley due to the displacement; Dr. Pangloss, you were so right!!!) or they will save the amount. If they do save, aggregate savings of gujarat should significantly go up (there are a lot of multiplexes, where a lot of tickets are sold) which should lead to more money piling up in the banks. Banks facing liquidity crises due to the yo-yoing stock market can then draw on these funds. The other scenario is that those one screen theatre of yores unable to handle competition will find more benjis in gorgeous sarees swishing into their theatres.

Either ways, it aint too bad. If for nothing else but bringing back Narmada in the news. With media's ADD syndrome getting worse by the hourly bulletin, we need freaks of nature and ideology like Modi and his progeny to bring back media attention before it goes scampering off too far.

Happy birthday Bob

2006-05-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

27% reservations for OBCs to be rolled out in 2007. General seats to be increased.

hunky dory.

status quo.

dead hope.

We live in a political world,
Wisdom is thrown into jail,
It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell
Leaving no one to pick up a trail.

On Merit

2006-05-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

There is a new buzzword in town. And what a word...it has got everyone (well almost) rallying around...those who love it are willing to lay down their lives (or at least their current jobs) for it and those who are on the other side are careful to not step on its toe. Its above question, beyond argument.

Nobody is interested to define merit or where it stems from. Who sits on judgement of merit, and how does he judge. Is it entirely too difficult to imagine that a society where social opportunities have for aeons gone only to a certain segment of the populace will also define merit, structurally, in a manner that suits and abets their development (and excludes others)? Is it sacrilege to question the source of merit - what goes into being meritorious? Should we not look at the correlation of test results and merit?

In a rather interesting book called The Chosen Ones, Ivy league universities are revealed to be guilty of charges similar to those that i am implying. Below is the link to The Economist's review of the book.

Maybe somebody will be inspired to ask a few questions.

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5213394

comments, Reserved

2006-05-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

Between the milling masses of young, anxious faces, interspersed with men in uniforms, lathis, water canons, the odd mustachioed man from the ‘other side’, and the live links from studios to young field reporters and the constant blabbering, bickering that primetime discussions dish out, it seems that all hope of a debate (in the original sense of that word), where the common man with no vested interests can get a sense of the multifarious issues in this extremely complicated piece of social argument, is steadily receding.

And because it is complicated, it is easy to reduce it to simplistic abstractions (pro reservations = anti merit; anti reservation = upper class angst) by anyone who has an interest to protect and a point to make. And therein lies the danger.

Let’s start with a few facts.

This is not, as many banners carried by the anti-reservation protesters claimed, by any stretch of imagination, a “Fight for Equality”. To say that is to display utter naïveté about India’s social history. It is important to admit at the very beginning that there has been a systematic isolation – social, cultural, intellectual, political - of certain castes in India that have been in most cases inhuman. Lack of education opportunities and crippling economic status is only an aspect of this isolation. Thus, comments such as “…but we support economic reservation” is to conveniently sideline the issue of social justice and grudge any significantly proportionate redress. Neither should the stray incidents of members of backward castes “infiltrating” general seats (often a prominent argument made by anti –reservation protesters) be taken too seriously. Percentage representation of SC/ST/OBCs among total number of literates with technical degrees or diplomas equivalent to degree or post graduate remains less than 5% in all cases (in some as low 0.3%). The percentage representation of Scheduled Castes, despite several constitutional guarantees as well as reservation policies, remains as low as 3% (1998) in Class I government service.

Obviously, there is an urgent need to introduce schemes and policies that will be able to undo the ravages of the past. The question is, are reservations the best way to address this issue?

Again, let’s get the facts first. Affirmative action or positive discrimination is constitutionally mandated. Article 15 of the Constitution of India prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, caste, sex or place of birth with the proviso (Clause 4) that nothing in Article 15 (or Article 19, Clause 2, which talks about denial of admission based on grounds of religion, caste etc.) “shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.” To this, the current parliament has added an amendment (Constitution 93^rd Amendment, 2005; passed by both houses and signed by President Kalam on January 20^th of this year) stating (continuing from Clause 4 of Article 15) “…in so far as such special provisions relate to their admission to educational institutions including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the State, other than the minority educational institutions referred to in clause (1) of article 30.".

Therefore, sentiments like “27.5% is already there but 50% is too much” need to be exposed for what they are. This disturbing assumption of a natural title – a right - to seats in higher education by non SC/ST/OBCs reveals an underlying feeling of “can give this much, and no more”. It needs to be made very clear that there is no “giving”, or favours involved here.

However, it is important, having arrived at this juncture, to not hastily jump to the conclusion that this is an argument to prove reservations are good and that they should be implemented forthwith (which they will be irrespective of what you or I think). Whether “such special provisions” (as mentioned in the 93^rd Amendment, 2005) need be quotas is a point that may reasonably be debated. As Dipankar Gupta, a reasonably respected sociologist of the JNU, pointed out to a rather dense television anchor, affirmative action does not start and end with quotas.

Reservations, and we must be specific here, in institutes of higher education (and there are institutes beyond the AIIMS’, IIMs and the IITs, though admittedly these are the strongest bones of contention) are needed, (a) because opportunities have been limited and so it is now time to reverse the malaise and (b) because entrance exams in the better institutes are skewed to test skills that put the social background of members at a particular disadvantage.

Let’s examine (b) first. To avoid generalizations, let’s take the example of the IIM entrance exam (incidentally used by 50 odd other institutes) – the Common Admission Test (or CAT). Reason for choosing CAT is that it is a test for which (b) is most valid.

The common admission test, conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management, tests the following:

Verbal Ability
Reading comprehension
Quantitative Reasoning
Logical Reasoning
Data Interpretation

To simply put this, it is really a test of English and Math. Even the math section is in English. And here maybe, is the real thing. Higher education in India, particularly management education, is dominated by the English speaking class. This is obviously linked to caste.

English education has forever been associated with public schools most of which are expensive and located in big cities. Apart from the question of formal training in English (or for that any subject), membership to a particular caste and environment determines your interactions with society. This is not merely a matter of economics. CAT tests English of a significantly difficult level (it involves assimilating diverse passages on topics ranging from Philosophy to arcane agricultural procedures as well as identifying idioms and sorting parajumbles; all this in around 40 minutes) that is exceedingly difficult to master for someone subjected to the kind of sustained isolation that these castes have had. Often, anti reservation protesters point out to a freak incident of success in an extremely downtrodden family. This is obviously unfair. When the handicap is so clear, it becomes even more important to institute policies to support the merit that obviously exists at the lower strata, than to use this as an evidence to withdraw help. Thus language (used here in a larger historical socio-cultural sense) becomes the first barrier.

In fact, the order of English tested in CAT is so high that even “upper castes” find the going tough. The remedy: coaching classes.

Thanks to the success of IIM alumni the CAT today attracts anywhere between 1.5-1.75 lakhs applicants. The competition is fierce. And to see you through it all is the neighbourhood coaching centre. One of the biggest ancillary industries to have sprung up around entrance exams, the Preparatory coaching ‘industry’ is almost half a thousand crores big. This is separate from the organized trade of selling pirated books, notes, test papers etc.

The admission to a leading coaching institute like Career Launcher or IMS can cost up to Rupees 20000-25000. Again the concentration of these institutes is skewed towards cities. There are other small shops that have opened up everywhere, including smaller towns that charge 30-50% of what the biggies charge but even this may prove to be a hindrance to joining as a lot of families can’t even afford that.

Thus there is both a social, as well as an economic disadvantage, and there can be no arguments about this. What can however be argued upon is the choice of the quota system as the panacea for all ills.

Two relevant tests for the quota system, according to me, are logical consistency and sustainability. Let’s look at logical consistency first.

If reservations are indeed the solution, and the honorable members of the parliament are convinced of its merits to undo all the ills that the caste system has wrought on Indian society, it might be worthwhile to argue for more quotas. Dalit women have suffered more than dalit men. Will the parliament implement a quota for them to ensure representation in proportion to their population? Will they introduce a quota to help uplift the status of the children of sex workers? The sad truth of Indian society is that it has at several points in history persecuted various sections of its inhabitants. To identify certain as backward castes and others as not is to deny the reality that in India, backwardness has been rooted in much more than just caste.

Furthermore, the government of India, in accordance with its own proclamations and the various constitutional provisions, show the same alacrity to implement political reservation to undo deep rooted social malaise. After all, isn’t political representation the ultimate form of social justice? However it seems futile to expect affirmative action in the form of quotas from a parliament, from successive parliaments, that have failed miserably to pass the 33% Women’s reservation bill. In fact, in Aug 2003, The Hindu quoted Mr. Shivraj Patil as saying that there were “ apprehensions that with 33 per cent of seats reserved for women and 22.5 per cent reserved for SC/STs, the number of general "open" seats should not fall below 50 per cent.”

This reference to the duplicity of our ruling elite is not frivolous because this issue is grounded in the games of electoral politics. Implementing quotas is the easiest thing that the legislature can do to address the pervasive ills that have been pointed out. While the crying need is for addressing this in a broad based manner (primary education; innovative schemes), such limited and patently ineffective schemes (quotas) have been used as shortcuts to gain favour with the votebanks. It must be remembered that oppressed and backward castes are more active as voters than the English speaking upper castes in cities.

It must be stated here that reservations have empirically proven to be ineffective. The abysmal representation of SC/STs after 50 years of reservations hints at what we all know already. That these quotas are misused, fake certificates are obtained by upper castes, the seats are not filled due to only a fraction of the candidates meeting eligibility criteria etc. Even within the backward castes, there is a richer section that tends to hog these opportunities (typically through political contacts). And this is the problem with reservations. It doesn’t solve anything. Beyond the handful (and the seats in education are severely limited and to maintain quality there should be no drastic increase in the number) who do benefit from the reservations, majority of those belonging to the backward and oppressed castes will continue to languish and suffer historical inequalities.

Apart from not benefiting the backward castes in any sustainable sense, it actually creates problems. It dooms Indian society to be divided forever. Imagine, post the current protests, what will be the nature of interaction between SC/ST/OBCs and the general category students. One fears a veritable witch hunt in colleges. Also, the OBC candidate will be now suspected forever of poorer merit and throughout his life (Definitely college life) will be plagued with the “quota” tag which is an insult to the merit.

SOLUTIONS

At the end of the day we need to look for solutions and not cover-ups. In solutions too, there are categories. There is the ideal solution and then there are the immediately practicable ones.

The ideal solution and one must ultimately move to this, is drastically improved infrastructure for backward and oppressed castes w.r.t to primary education where the standards are of the highest order. This may require policies on taxation, innovative resource allocation, and generally greater effort and focus on the part of the government.

As for the immediately practicable solutions, here are a few suggestions.

Instead of quotas, use a lower percentile for entry. For example, if the cut-off is, say, 99.96 percentile, SC/ST/OBC candidates maybe allowed entry at 90 percentile. However, they will be put through a remedial year funded by the government to help them cope with studies. The funds may be subsidized my withdrawing financial subsidies (which are significant currently) to students in the general category who don’t need it (financial institutions are only all too ready to dish out loans to them).
Government should also introduce wholly subsidized coaching institutes. Any student from the backward castes wishing to enroll will have full government funding. However, economic status of the candidate will play an important role here. Benefits should not accrue to the creamy layer.
Government should tie up with NGOs to provide free resources and materials for these students.
Government should mandate companies, as part of their CSR, to adopt a certain number of students for supporting their higher education. The candidates can apply to the government.
Institutes like the IIMs should have a larger multiple of calls at the interview stage for OBC candidates (for e.g, if it is 5 calls for 1 seat, then additional 2 calls maybe made exclusively for OBC candidates)
Newer testing mechanisms can be explored beyond the standard English-math combination to judge merit.

These suggestions are given more to make the point that getting stuck with pro/anti positions is to rob the issue of its gravity. It is high time affirmative action was taken more seriously and interpreted with the depth intended in the constitution of India.