From Scout's Squint...

Antaranga New York

2011-09-22T20:08:00.002-04:00

So here is my article from Jara Parijayee's August-September 2011 issue, reproduced by permission.

New York, up close

2011-09-04T10:21:00.004-04:00

Like all of my musings on New York, this too must be tagged with the names of both the cities I divide my existence in. This is the first page of my article in Jara Parijayee's current issue (August-September 2011), now on the stands. A scanned PDF looks infinitely better this JPEG reincarnation I made out of it, but this is all that the blog's interface would allow!

Local News

2011-05-09T19:08:00.001-04:00

I'm very happy that Sthaniya Sambaad has won the award for best feature film in the New York Indian Film Festival! So happy that I decided that that must register on the blog somehow, even if only with a two-line post! Strange coincidence that the award came on the Tagore sesquicentennial which I had been looking forward to, and that Ore grihobaasi, which is something like a refrain in the film was the song with which my training in Rabindrasangeet commenced.

Sthaniya Sambaad at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011

2011-04-25T10:52:00.000-04:00

Sthaniya Sambaad (dir. Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas, 2009), which I have blogged about here, makes a comeback to New York in 35mm film format at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011. Click here to go to Sthaniya Sambaad's page on the festival's website. I will probably not make it to the festival, and have to be content with rereading my blogpost here, written after I first watched the film last year at Tisch :)

Fake IPL player and the intellectual

2011-03-31T12:16:00.001-04:00

I wrote this post 2 years ago, during the 2009 IPL season, when the Fake IPL Player blog was a rage. I gave it a title and left it brewing, and then completely forgot all that I wanted to say in it. Since it will not assume a fuller shape, I decided to publish it as it is.

_________________________________

If bloggers could have their Kubla Khans, then this post is it for me. I am giving up in vain after trying for long to recreate what spurred me to write the title of the post, but it’s now gone forever.
The Fake IPL Player blog kept me glued to the networld like countless other cricket fans. At the same time in Calcutta, intellectuals had become extremely vocal in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, and had formed a platform that openly critiqued the state administration in West Bengal, especially in the wake of Nandigram and Singur. What connected these two happenings for me was that cricket and politics seemed to have become two arenas where onlookers/commentators/non-actors had assumed responsible agency and were speaking out in a way that was compelling attention. What has been bothering me for sometime now is the way the word intellectual (and its Bengali counterpart buddhijeebi) has been deployed in the WB press, especially in the last two years. Translation theory has now grown past the notion of the necessity of producing equivalents, and is instead more attentive to why cultural differences may make it difficult to produce equivalents in the first place. I am not here bothered about the satisfactoriness of intellectual or buddhijeebi as translations of each other. What bothers me more is the whole notion of the intellectual. Buddhijeebi literally is someone who earns his/her living by intellect. Do people who do not write poetry or direct films or act in them… not require the use of their intellect to earn their living? Or are their contributions not beneficial for society at large? The Fake IPL player blog refreshingly brought these issues up again. Though it ended with a disappointingly didactic dénouement, here was the follower of cricket reflecting on the game. Do followers of cricket qualify as intellectuals?

That thing called feeling

2011-02-28T13:37:00.002-05:00

My report on the second Commodities and Culture Leverhulme workshop held in Kolkata during 12-14 January, 2011, is now online. Read it at the network's website here

Hiatus

2011-01-15T03:54:00.000-05:00

Scout will soon make up for her dormancy. Stay tuned!

Westminster curry

2010-05-07T18:57:00.002-04:00

Can't help putting in my paisa-worth here as Westminster seems headed for coalition politics. But what's coalition politics without drama from the likes of Mamata, Lalu, Mayawati and Amma?

Things that Happen When Falling in Love

2010-04-04T19:15:00.004-04:00

This is an event I will not be able to attend, but it has left me longing for a magic carpet. So here I post it for anyone who can make it to Gateshead, UK, betwen 2 April and 20 June. SIGH! [I literally sighed as I wrote that.]

Things that Happen When Falling in Love
Installation with Video, Photographs, Sculpture & Text by Raqs Media Collective

Venue: The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Town/City: Gateshead-on-Tyne, United Kingdom
Time: Exhibition runs from 2 April – 20 June 2010

In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle (UK) were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne. These vast iconic forms were dismantled and shipped to a new life at the Bharati shipyard on the west coast of India. This narrative forms one of the starting points of a new installation - Things that Happen When Falling in Love by Raqs Media Collective.

The installation brings together words, ships and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces. It is an attempt to come to terms with the fact that we finally learn to value a history only when [we] consider its departure, its passage away from our lives.

Things that Happen When Falling in Love reveals the emotional undertow of Capitalism’s wake as it traverses continents and histories. The North East of England and the West Coast of India are drawn together experientially through industrial and geographical change. The passage of a ship bridges this transformation.

In their notes towards the making of this work, Raqs write, “Like on-shore sweethearts bidding farewell to men in sailing ships, the world watches its own histories float away. Sometimes, when finally falling in love, only the words for knowing loss and longing remain.”

Phantom of the Opera

2010-02-26T02:05:00.007-05:00

After several attempts to get tickets to what has become Broadway's longest running show, we finally got there on a very snowy evening in New York. Around 1991 or so --because I think this was just before the Gulf War--when I was searching for recordings of Pepe Jaramillo, in my enthusiasm for the piano, a shopowner in Shyambazar where I grew up, recommended Richard Clayderman. I listened to the tracks from Phantom of the Opera not knowing any more than that it was a musical. I liked the music, liked Clayderman, but still pined for Jaramillo. I haven't found more of Jaramillo than what I grew up listening to. The yearning for more of Pepe on the piano remains for I have always thought he must have been very interesting not only to listen to live, but watch. So on a day when my Facebook status update says that I am in a 'Phantom of the Opera state of mind', I must tag this post with Calcutta... like so many other posts.

Sthaniya Sambaad

2010-02-13T12:00:00.043-05:00

The makers of Sthaniya Sambaad wanted, the blurb said, to make a film on Calcutta, for they felt that somehow contemporary cinema from the region has forgotten the city, and at a time when the cityscape is changing rapidly. I realized it has been a long time since I watched a film on Calcutta, that is, one that is explicitly concerned with the city. That, and the fact that I would be getting to watch a newly made Bengali film, and Moinakda’s film, sitting in New York. I have not been his student, but Jadavpur ties beckon. Growing up as a ghoti in North Calcutta though, I have experienced only second-hand the displacement across the Bengal border that ensued with Partition—through novels, autobiographies, memoirs, history, film, and narratives of family-friends, and later, my in-laws.

As I watched the film, and tried to understand the colony’s fascination with Park Street, I realized once again how much my North Calcutta middle-class ghoti femaleness marks my sense of the city. Park Street with its bars and restaurants was for the likes of me a forbidden adult world until I earned a little money, and the placeholder of the colony’s fascination with Park Street was instead New Market and Chowringhee, where one could make periodic, chaperoned forays. Prithviraj glossed Park Street for me anew—how his friends from the colony where the film is mainly set had this thing about visiting Park Street. Park Street, New Market, Chowringhee…the white town, sahebpara as we would often hear it referred to, the colonizer’s part of Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Over the years other indices of Manichean division are becoming increasingly visible in the cityscape. My teenage having passed in the pre-mobile, pre-Barista, pre-shopping mall era, I too feel out of place nowadays in pockets of my own city. Planned housing in Calcutta in the years of my growing up meant Salt Lake; it has since come to mean these townships like New Town mushrooming around the peripheries of the city occasioning new narratives of displacement. The fact that this glitzy new Calcutta is part of our everyday lives through page three—even for readers like me at a distance—only serves to intensify the sense of disjuncture. Go towards City Centre entering Salt Lake by the inlet leading from EM Bypass into DA block: the stark contrast between the shanties and wayside shops and the Calcutta of the shopping malls strikes you immediately. I have sometimes wondered in recent years how much these changes register in cultural production from the city. In scripting the latest bit in the narrative of a particular local iteration of modernity, Sthaniya Sambaad takes up these questions head on.

Literally meaning 'local news,' the title of the film accrues a poignancy as the perspective of the displaced like Atin remains marginal to the city's narrative of development. The scene at Olypub is telling in this respect. As Atin's half-aware affection for Ananya makes him impatient to resume their search for her, city academics and intellectuals sit chatting over drinks at the table behind theirs, and who knows, probably over the very issues that are causing the likes of Atin to be displaced yet again. The film sensitively leaves a subtle gap between the subaltern and the intellectual. While Atin makes his first foray into that bit of the white town that has become a haunt for those who think alternatively, if his sensitivity resonates with the concerns of the intellectuals, his repressive Bengali middle-class sense of propriety marks his distance from them—the fact that Dipankarda is able to appreciate Atin's appraisal of Ananya's swanlike neck, and his preference for alcohol, outrage him. In nursing his secret affection for Ananya amid the noisy inanities of urban development, somewhere Atin comes close to the boy-hero in James Joyce's 'Araby'.

It was a wee bit strange to see in a film faces I know—Saswatada as music teacher, Subham Ray Chowdhury on the perch, the actor cast as Ananya’s sister, Bodhisattva Kar, Manas Ray, Shibajida at Olypub, and Bratya Basu. I am not acquainted with all of them, but know some of them from my years at Jadavpur, or through friends, or have seen them on television, or Orkut and Facebook, and one of them as a celebrity neighbour. These familiar faces also lend some more reality to the film for me while the two absurd characters, and denizens of the colony make their journeys into Park Street. Having married into a bangal family that located on Jheel Road, I have some sense of the peripherality of the colony in the film. The lanes look familiar though I don’t know Deshbandhu colony that well. And the CPM folk—as Moinak Biswas put it, during the post-screening discussion—you can’t live with them or without them, because they have become so much a part of the props.

This post has been churning in my head for a while, and now as I am writing, spring is literally erupting all over India… days after a goon associated with the Vedic Village episode has been killed. My mother-in-law is preparing for her special puja for Dol in the Jheel Road house. At Shantiniketan, Dol has begun much earlier in the morning with the prabhatpheri… khol dwar khol, laglo je dol…

28 February 2010

Baby Soda

2010-02-10T14:57:00.013-05:00

After making a trip to Manhattan only to be baulked out of watching John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984) when a screening was cancelled at the last minute, I decided to take the train back from Union Square, in the hope that the general liveliness of the milieu might enliven me. I was all the more disappointed because I had braved a big snowstorm that was forecast for later in the evening. And Union Square did live up to expectation, for there was the Baby Soda band playing lively jazz. So I stopped to take pictures on my mobile, and gave to myself one of their CDs up for sale. In the picture above, they are playing a soulful number.

Disappearing Professions in Urban India

2010-02-02T21:11:00.003-05:00

Exhibition of photographs by Clair Arni
Seagull
6-14 February 2010

From the intended muffin...

2010-01-26T14:15:00.013-05:00

I keep getting asked why I chose www.intendedmuffin.blogspot.com as the URL for this blog. I have for long thought about devoting a blogpost to the question, but have not got round to doing it. The truth is that this blog began on the same day as my baking misadventures. I had decided to use a sponge cake recipe to bake muffins, and even before they went into the oven, I knew they wouldn’t come out as intended. I began the blog as the ‘intended’ muffins baked. They finally turned out to be flat, soft but not spongy. Too soft to be cookies and not soft enough to be muffins. So depending on how you looked at them, you could call them intended muffins or accidental cookies. Since my blog was to be preoccupied with perspective, I thought 'intendedmuffins' would do very well for a name.

I am finally writing this post just after having baked my first perfect cake yesterday. It has been a long way from the intended muffins to the proper cake, with another misadventure in between, earlier this month, when I was stingy with butter. I thank my dear friend Amrita for generously sharing with me her grandmother’s tips and her own expertise, on the fine art of baking. I thank Debarati and Prithviraj for encouraging me to buy bakeware when I was hesitating. And thanks also to this recipe that I used with some modifications.

All-night reading session at Seagull

2010-01-25T08:13:00.002-05:00

Click on image below for details

Edge of Faith

2010-01-20T11:17:00.002-05:00

Exhibition at Seagull, 23 January - 2 February, 2010.
Click on image for details

Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, 15-17 January 2010

2010-01-12T18:28:00.003-05:00

This event is open to all. Please find cards below:

Book Launch: An Ethics of Betrayal, by Crystal Parikh, December 1 at 6 p.m.

2009-11-24T06:36:00.009-05:00

The Humanities Initiative
New York University
presents

An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture

by Crystal Parikh
Assistant Professor
Departments of English and Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

Discussant:
Phillip Brian Harper
Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature,
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis,
and Chair, Department of English

Venue: 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Date: December 1, 2009
Time: 6 p.m.

Reception to follow

Elaine Freedgood lecture at Princeton, November 19, 4:30 p.m.

2009-11-11T21:09:00.001-05:00

Princeton University
Victorian Colloquium
presents

Elaine Freedgood
Department of English
New York University

"Fictional Settlements:
Footnotes, Metalepsis, Imperial Design"

Thursday, November 19, 2009
4:30 pm

40 McCosh Hall
Department of English
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540

Reception to follow in Thorp Library

Remembering Meenakshi Mukherjee

2009-09-28T02:15:00.019-04:00

How do you mourn a person you have wanted to meet, because you have known her through her work, but never quite got the chance? I muse as I take a flying carpet ride uptown, expedited by the magical arrival of every train I want so that I reach the Columbia campus just in time. Somewhere near Schermerhorn, I take the wrong turn, get misguided twice, then get into the right building but onto an elevator that refuses to go up, and by the time I finally arrive, Gauri Viswanathan and Meena Alexander have already spoken. As I step into the room, Gayatri Spivak is saying a few words about Meenakshi Mukherjee. It takes me a while to realize that she means to speak later actually, and this is a little pause in between speakers, as memories seem to spill over from whatever she has planned to say when it is her turn. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Robert Young and Gayatri Spivak share their reminiscences. Spivak reads out messages from Probal Dasgupta and Supriya Chaudhuri. Mukherjee’s literary sensibility and the acuteness with which she engaged with a later generation of literary scholars who were more oriented towards theory and social science comes through in what all of them say. Taking issue with the labelling of Meenakshi Mukherjee as ‘pre-theoretical’, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out how Mukherjee’s reading of Jane Austen anticipates the argument about Antigua in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

Then everybody in the room is invited to speak in remembrance if they wish. As Rochelle Almeida and others reminisce, among them Mayurika, a former student of Meenakshi Mukherjee, now a researcher at SOAS, one gets a sense of the warmth she exuded all around her. Almeida recalls a chance meeting with Mukherjee at a conference where a long gap in the schedule threw them together, and how Mukherjee was very enthusiastic about discussing her work, while she wanted to talk about Mukherjee’s. Mukherjee had said that she thought from reading Almeida’s Originality and Imitation that it would be by a white Portuguese woman. Mukherjee, then limping badly because of an injury, required assistance in draping her heavy silk sari for the evening, and Almeida goes on to say how she came to the rescue, and how Mukherjee told everyone that she had never ever worn her sari as immaculately and that she looked like an Air India air-hostess because of Rochelle!

Mayurika is the only direct student of Meenakshi Mukherjee among those gathered, and gives us an impression of the scholar as pedagogue—hitching up her sari to sit on the teacher’s desk throughout an engaging lecture… followed by her students to her office where they were welcome at any time… caring to teach them citation styles…. Mayurika’s admiration and reverence for her professor remind me of my professor, Alo Ray’s memories of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Sujit Mukherjee as her mentors. When Mayurika talks about her teacher, it seems as though the same warmth overflows, that I could sense in Alodi towards her teachers as she spoke of them over the phone, long ago in Calcutta.

Fittingly, Spivak commences by recounting how they met for the first time in a Texas locker-room after swimming. Mukherjee recognized her as an Indian woman by the mark of the drawstring of the underskirt on her waist, and they hit it off from there. Spivak doesn't forget to add that this was after she had given Mukherjee’s first book a bad review.

I try to match the overall impression I get of a vibrant intellectual who was also very warm, gave generously of her time, and was ever appreciative of the achievements of younger scholars and her students, with my first encounter with her through her OUP edition of Pride and Prejudice that opened up questions of feminist theory for me, and later on, for my students, when I began teaching in Calcutta. I am carried back to the time when I was thrilled to watch a bunch of impressionable undergraduates getting sensitized into an understanding of the novel where the woman’s perspective was central. It was as though I had handed them a magic wand. As I get up to leave the small gathering, it seems I have come for more than myself.

Memorial Meeting for Meenakshi Mukherjee, September 25, 2009

2009-09-24T22:57:00.006-04:00

Memorial meeting for the internationally renowned feminist scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee
Date and time: September 25 at 4 p.m.
Venue: 754 Schermerhorn Extension (Institute for Research on Women and Gender seminar room), Columbia University.

Directions: The link for the campus map is http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/

Text sent by Professor Harish Trivedi of Delhi University to the Hindustan Times:

Meenakshi Mukherjee: A Rare Human Being and an Effortless Intellect

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who passed away in Hyderabad on 16 September, was one of the most innovative, inspiring and widely honoured professors of English of her generation in the country. Each one of her major books charted out a fresh field and flung open new doors of academic enquiry: The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (1971), Realism and Reality: the Novel and Society in India (1985), and The Perishable Empire (2000). For the last-named book, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for the best book of the year in English, thus becoming one of the four or five literary critics to have won it in the last fifty years. Her latest book, an intellectual biography of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), was launched in Delhi yesterday, the day after she died as fate would have it. Professor Mukherjee began her teaching career in Patna where she had been a student and where she met and married Sujit Mukherjee, one of her professors who distinguished himself no less as a scholar, translator and later academic publisher. The two were perfectly matched in temperament as well as academic inclinations and wherever they lived, their home became a warm and welcoming social and intellectual adda. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught successively at the University of Poona, Lady Shriram College, New Delhi, the newly founded University of Hyderabad, and then back in Delhi as a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In between she was also a visiting professor at Chicago, California and Texas. A whole legion of her devoted former students and colleagues are to be found all over the country as well as abroad.

Not only did her own work contribute to giving a new orientation to the discipline but she also helped build up institutions which would bring together senior and younger scholars and enable them to present their work and share ideas. For twelve years (1993-2005), she was the Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS) which under her leadership went from strength to strength, increasing its membership from under 50 to over 400. Of the major international conferences she was instrumental in organizing during this period, one was held in Shimla in 1994 and resulted in a book which she and I co-edited, Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). The other was a grander conference in Hyderabad in 2004, in which some of the most distinguished literary scholars and theorists in the world participated, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and which led to the publication of as many as three books.

A defining characteristic of Meenakshi Mukherjee both as a person and as a scholar was her simplicity. In an age of increasing scholarly jargonization and even obfuscation, no one ever had any difficulty in following whatever she spoke or wrote. But such simplicity always went hand in hand with solid and substantial scholarship and a degree of persuasiveness that more complex ways of formulation would often have failed to achieve. She said the kind of simple things that clever people do not say.

As in her work so in her life, she was the most genial and forthcoming of human beings. Her modesty, affability and quiet charm were most in evidence when she was with young researchers and teachers who had most reason to be in awe of her. She could instantly establish a rapport with them which often turned into life-long friendships. She was a rare scholar and a rarer human being.
Harish Trivedi

Hyderabad diaries

2009-09-20T00:12:00.006-04:00

15 August
Facebook on your mobile. At Shamsabad airport I suddenly realize the length of my absence from home. Dhoni seems ubiquitous in the ad spaces in a spick and span airport. Of course, it is Mahi’s Team India now. And of course, I have been away. Anything I write here can be so aptly tagged with "displacement"! Strange how arriving at a place for the first time in my life I should get a sense of having been away. Well. Imagined communities...

Surreal drive from Shamsabad airport to Miyapur. I am beginning to get the feel of Cyberabad. As we wind down the highway, the headlights flash upon rocky remnants of the Deccan and evidence of intense ongoing construction work. What must this place look like by day?

I discover later that my belongings are soaked through courtesy IndiGo’s strange luggage handling. Among them is my copy of Midnight’s Children. Ominous?

16 August
Clad in a Fab India 4-kali skirt and top, sling bag on shoulder, my hair up in a makeshift knot that frequently metamorphoses into a ponytail, the question I elicit among the women acquaintances my mother has made in the last 7 days, is whether I am married. But they are nice on the whole, and even though I look very different from locals, I feel comfortable out on the streets. The men seem courteous.
I can’t get rid of my America-acquired habit of smiling at people (all women in this case), especially if I have spoken with once. Fortunately there are no mishaps. I wonder and wonder—I never smile enough in greeting while in the US.

17 August
Getting out of the elevator, I learn the Telugu for “open” (or so I think), when a visitor/neighbour says, “tivande”.

18 August
The dosas have a different feel—soft like tissue paper. I am getting by with my Hindi thankfully. I am amazed at how much I can explain when I don’t have the word they might understand. Though I know that a horizontal shake of the head in these parts stands for the affirmative, I am flummoxed while shopping.
My little niece seems to like payesh. I will make it again another day.

19 August
Another new Telugu word: “eynkda”. It may mean “where” or “which shop”. I learn it as the woman from whom I buy onions enquires as to where I have bought tomatoes that look fresh.

20 August
My little niece, all of 8 months, is yelling “aa…aa…aa”. I try to teach her to sing. Nice sawaal-jawaab session ensues. Once I sing a note, she mimes “aa”!

Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra...

2009-09-19T23:02:00.005-04:00

A year since we watched the Martha Graham Company's Clytemnestra at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Here's a picture I found on the net.

Posing Beauty

2009-09-10T20:55:00.007-04:00

Photography exhibition
Thursday September 10, 2009, 10 am - 7 pm
Gulf + Western Gallery 721 Broadway at Waverly Pl, NY 10003
Admission free

Posing Beauty explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the internet. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty as a racialized act fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, gender, and aesthetics. In the first of four thematic sections, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the way in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last two thematic sections Objectivity vs. Subjectivity, and Codes of Beauty, invite a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. Posing Beauty problematizes our contemporary understanding of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. This exhibition features approximately 90 works drawn from public and private collections and will be accompanied by a book published by WW Norton.

Peter McDonald lectures in Calcutta

2009-09-05T22:14:00.004-04:00

CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES,
R 1 BAISHANBGHATA PATULI,
KOLKATA 700094

GENERAL SEMINAR

Dr Peter D. McDonald
Fellow and University Lecturer, St Hugh's College Oxford,

will give a talk titled

Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?

Date: Monday, 7 September, 2009
Time: 3-5 PM.
Venue: CSSSC Seminar Room, Patuli Campus

___________________________________________________
JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Lecture on 8th September, 2009 at 4 pm
Venue: AV Room, Dept of English

Dr Peter McDonald of St Hugh's College Oxford will give a talk titled
Policing Literature in Apartheid South Africa

at the AV Room, Dept of English, on Tuesday 8th September 2009 at 4pm. Some books of interest from OUP will be on sale at the venue.

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. I have examined this paradoxical situation in detail in my most recent book The Literature Police (OUP, 2009) . For the purposes of this talk, I shall set out some of the general questions it raises and consider its consequences in relation to one, internationally notorious case.

Fête de la musique, le juin 20 2009

2009-06-28T09:22:00.005-04:00

It is a sultry June afternoon in Calcutta—untypical of Calcutta though, for the monsoons having been waylaid by Aila, the city is gasping for a drop of rain—and as I find my way to the right corner of the Tolly Club lawns I spot a vibrant group of Alliance Française students belting out a lively French number. I get into the mood before I know and join in every time they sing in chorus. As the choir and soloists rehearse their numbers—French songs bien sûr, and also French translations of Bengali songs, and a popular Hollywood track—I inevitably wander off into thinking about colliding colonialisms...

What must I italicize as I write this piece? The French? The English? I don’t think in italics. I am hopelessly caught in between. I am attending this concert as a student of Alliance, after attending classes where le français is the only language one must speak, and I am trying to do that conscientiously now, for I am coming back to a French classroom after four years. But all other parts of me begin to exercise their weight(s?). Would it be status-quoist to italicize? Would it be honest not to italicize for someone interested broadly in the problematic of translation?

To take a long view of things, as Scout Finch would have said, the reason the compères for the evening are speaking ‘mainly’ in English for the benefit of the audience is nothing less than the outcome of the Seven Years War, and what it meant for Anglo-French colonialist rivalry in the Indian context. And then to think of the continuing cultural impact of colonialism. Even if the game has morphed from the five-day format to one-day to T20, cricket determined the scheduling of the event—the celebrations were advanced by a day, to ensure that the programme did not clash with the Twenty-twenty World Cup Final. The present bears so many tags for the postcolonially-minded, that I must tag this post with cricket, however un-French it might be.

Chandrika Kanade

2009-02-01T02:09:00.034-05:00

When she jerked her grey locks yelling “Begin!” to forty of us in her deep but wavering voice, and we commenced on singing “We three kings…” she seemed a formidable high-priestess of good taste. I can spell it out only now, from the vantage point of adult recollection, for what she inspired was a jumble of reactions ranging from admiration to fear during that weekly ritual called “Singing” class. When she played “Whisper a prayer in the morning…” on the upright piano, she seemed elegance personified, and the elegance and yelling seemed irreconcilable traits even to a four-year-old. And as she hurried through the corridors with her bunch of notations—some new, some tattered—I wondered if the beautiful signs on them would ever mean anything to me. They seemed attractive for they seemed to conceal all the pleasures that the sound of a piano can give. Her huge emerald ring...and then how one fine day all her hair turned jet black... those are my earliest memories of Miss Kanade, as we used to call her.

Those of us who had sisters or cousins for predecessors in school quickly learnt and told everyone else that she had been given the sobriquet “Princess Margaret” once upon a time. She had the same hairstyle as the princess in her youth, and had once performed before her. And then there was the other story of how being told “Miss, you are looking good today,” would invariably flatter her. M— told me the story, and once even greeted Miss Kanade like that as I stood by, to elicit a wave of the hand accompanied by, “ O, that’s an old compliment!” before she vanished into her room in the school building, outside which was a little board with “The Den” inscribed on it… so they say… for when I finally had the chance to check for the inscription, it was no longer there. Then there was the Sound of Music legend. Her stage-production of The Sound of Music was part of CGHS* lore, and as she taught us the songs from the film, one could tell they had a special place in her heart. As I watched her play with her heart and soul, the loose flesh of her arms jiggling at every movement, I could almost imagine her doing the same with the gracefulness of youth.

Other ‘public’ memories of Miss Kanade abound—memories of Investiture services and Founders’ Day services in the Thoburn Methodist Church on hot summer days. Who knew how one might miss the spirited intricacies of Miss Kanade’s rendition of the School Song, or the rousing notes of “Now thank we all our God” years afterwards?... And in other climes... Or even in the later years of school, when she had left. In her farewell speech she had said that people must retire and make way for others just the way furniture must be replaced from time to time. And so she went, and the pianos never sounded the same again.

Who knows with what courage, but I went to her to ask if she would teach me to play the piano. I was six years old then, and hadn’t even asked my parents. She said she would, if we bought a piano. I knew that that wasn’t possible. So I contented myself with watching Miss Kanade closely as she played while we sang, for she was grace itself as she played. She taught me without my knowing then that piano-playing was truly as much to be watched as to be listened to.

As we kept taking singing lessons from her over the years, I sometimes wondered if she remembered the little girl, one of many little girls perhaps, who had asked her for piano lessons. It was her last year in school. We were lining up near the piano as usual in groups of four for the test in singing. The other three in my group had louder voices, and I was just recovering from a bout of pharyngitis and feared being drowned out. And I was. We had to sing her favourite from The Sound of Music, “The hills are alive…” When we finished, she said, without turning, “Sing again, Durba, you weren't yourself... maybe drink a little water first?” So she associated my name with a voice!

I had fallen in love with the piano when I was about two-and-a-half-years old, when I began attending the kindergarten school everyone in our extended family went to. At both schools I attended, I would tinkle at the pianos whenever I got half the chance. And then, literally dreamt of pianos for years. I dreamt the same dream till I was about 24, till I found a way to take piano lessons without buying a piano right away. Above all, it was bliss to be able to finally play La Paloma, that my fingers had itched to learn for years.

It was about the same time that I decided to go on a trekking trip to Darjeeling with two other friends, and having heard that Miss Kanade was then teaching at Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, made up my mind to meet her, and perhaps tell her I was finally learning, even if twenty years late. MHS was founded by Emma Knowles, after whom my ‘house’ in school was also named, so all the more reason for a pilgrimage. All I ended up seeing were the impressive school precincts, for with the school closed for some reason, there was no one at the gate whom I could ask about Miss Kanade’s whereabouts. The Queen of the Hills was still pretty, and it seemed as though postcards that survived in memory from my first visit when I was four (two years before I asked Miss Kanade for piano lessons:) were leaping into life all about me, and the trek in Rimbik, and the trip as a whole, were very enjoyable. Returning to the din of Calcutta, I inquired among old friends for news of Miss Kanade for naught, and after about a year, just after coming to New York, learnt that she had passed away. So the little girl shall never tell her that she is finally playing. Or that whatever vignettes of her that survive in her memory are so vividly compelling that even if Miss Kanade never knew about it, she did teach her to play.

Gloss:
* CGHS: Calcutta Girls' High School

Free piano music for a limited time...

2008-12-30T20:39:00.004-05:00

Season's greetings! Here's a selection of piano music available for a limited time on Pianostreet, a holiday gift from the site. Enjoy! Click here to listen.

Beethoven's last piano piece found

2008-11-26T11:08:00.005-05:00

Follow this link to the news at Pianostreet.com.

Ripeness is all

2008-11-09T10:24:00.010-05:00

So the fairy tale has ended with the Prince getting out for a golden duck. When once upon a time he got his century-on-debut at Lord’s, TV screens in Calcutta went blank for an hour … some caprice of the cable networks… and we heard next day in the papers how a star was born. I was reading at the dining table that moment, and impatiently channel-surfing for news, and as I learn news of the duck from Cricinfo, I am at the dining table again, reading, but miles and seas away. Drama has forever followed the star, to the moment of retirement. In the land of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, cricketers—batsmen among them, to be precise—are no less than epic heroes. Much will be made of the first-ball duck tomorrow and forever. I would agree, canonically Eng Lit style, ripeness is all.

Nov 20 Elaine Freedgood lecture at Rutgers

2008-11-07T20:49:00.008-05:00

The talk has a webpage here

Elaine Freedgood
New York University

That People Might be Like Things and Live
Thursday, November 20, 2008
4:30 pm

Plangere Writing Center
Murray Hall 303
510 George Street, New Brunswick

Bail-out teach-in: Critical Perspectives on the Global Financial Crisis

2008-10-21T09:03:00.004-04:00

The New York University Postcolonial Colloquium presents
Bailout Teach-in: Critical Perspectives on the Global Financial Crisis
Wednesday, October 22nd
6:30pm
13-19 University Place, Room 222
Panelists:
Andrew Caplin (Economics, NYU)
Patrick Deer (English, NYU)
Ana Dopico (Comp Lit/Spanish & Portuguese, NYU)
Jean Franco (English/Comp Lit, Columbia)
Randy Martin (Art and Public Policy, NYU)
Mary Poovey (English/IHPK, NYU)
Sanjay Reddy (Economics, Barnard)
Robert Young (English/Comp Lit, NYU)
All welcome
www.nyupoco.com

One Book, Two Places

2008-08-02T16:41:00.069-04:00

One sultry September afternoon in 2001 I stopped at College Street like many other afternoons, on my way back from Jadavpur, to pick up copies of Milton criticism that I had ordered at Saha Book Company. Oldtimers know no one is Saha there. When Sahada’s concern had split into three, the man himself having to move to another corner of College Street—a sleepy lane devoid of the feel of the place—by an irony of the logic of commercial metamorphosis, no one in the other two segments any longer bore the name Saha, though all the three concerns carried it. They had split sometime in late July, and I had kept my visits restricted since then to Sahada’s new shop out of a sense of loyalty. For some secondary material I was looking for, it was Sahada who said that those books had gone to one of the other shops when they divided up the property, the one called Saha Book Company, on the other side of Presidency College, and I could ask there. So I had no choice but to order my stuff from them, but thankfully, something of Sahada still survived in that newly independent segment of the old concern, for as I was to discover that day, some characters still had it in them like him to be occasionally generous to cash-strapped college students. With Sahada, it would show as something more than just business sense, for he belongs to a generation of College Street booksellers, now passé perhaps, who would always be remembered by students and academics alike for their ability to provide books at good price. It's a pity he will never have the capital to set up a bigger bookshop and be more mainstream, and would always be frowned upon by more established booksellers for his alternative bookselling practices. When I stepped into that more-than-normally crowded bookshop that afternoon it did not seem that the experience had any chance of being memorable, for then that College Street day seemed extraordinary only in terms of the extraordinarily warm weather. I was almost praying for rain even though I knew a drop of rain from the retreating monsoons would spell trouble with so much printed matter to carry.

I still remember the crowd of new college students in the shop—regulation mob at College Street at that time of the year—shouting out titles from Calcutta University’s undergraduate syllabus, keeping the few staff on their toes, which meant they had little time for other customers. As soon as my pile on Areopagitica descended on the front desk from the mysterious mezzanine regions above, I counted out the money and prepared to leave. Turning away, I spotted on one of the shelves an Oxford volume titled Colonial and Postcolonial Literature by an unfamiliar author: Boehmer. Knowing I could not afford the expensive-looking book with what remained in my wallet after my purchases, I hesitated to ask if I could see the book, and even as I hesitated I remember marvelling at what seemed to me unusual typography on the spine—the font with which ‘Oxford’ was printed, not the usual kerned font. Following my gaze, the man at the desk—Sahada's erstwhile assistant—asked if I would like to have a look at the book. When I said I would rather come back another day for I would not be able to buy it even if I liked, he still insisted and had the book brought out by an assistant. So I watched the book emerge from their newly-made sparkling glass bookcases, drifting over a sea of unknown heads, changing hands twice before I finally held it.

In a few seconds of flipping through, I knew that this was one book to begin with for someone just making first forays into postcolonial studies. The accessibility of Boehmer’s presentation appealed instantly, and the range that that slim volume covered seemed impressive. What was even more interesting for me was that Boehmer seemed to dwell at length on the British modernists. I had just had my first sustained academic exposure to high modernist literature, and was completely swept off my feet by TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even as I quickly read a few of Boehmer’s paragraphs on them, felt terribly shaken. Something had vastly changed in those few minutes for me—I did not know how to articulate. In all the confusion of the shop and the heat rising from the ground, as it were, all I could decide was that I needed to read that book whether or not I finally agreed with Boehmer’s assessments, and I had a gut sensation that given the assymetries of book distribution, I would have to buy it to read it in Calcutta, for even if it had been published in 1995, that book wouldn’t be available right then in the libraries even in the city that calls itself the city of booklovers.

I must have flipped through the book for about fifteen minutes if not more, and to my request for reserving the book for the by-then ridiculous amount of 30 rupees (that would have left me with 8 rupees, just enough for some jhaalmuri and the bus-ride home), Sahada’s former assistant responded very generously offerring that I take the book home and pay anytime later. The price came to 620 rupees, after discount, and it was highly unusual for a small business as theirs to allow such latitude even to a regular customer. Having thanked him, I made my way through the lane towards the bus stop happy as a child. True to my fears, a torrential downpour ensued as the bus neared my stop, but I was able to shield my new acquisitions well as I hurried home.

Boehmer opened up several windows, needless to say. It hurt for a long time that modernists were such masked imperialists, and I did not know how to deal with this painful disenchantment—if I loved poco, all that was left me was to love them as one continues to love an affectionate even if ill-tempered grandparent. Boehmer’s book completely defined my experience of Conrad and Achebe, and so much else, and I still find myself going back to that little book with which it all began. I haven’t let go, nor has the book let go of me, for like a faithful, almost talismanic old map, it puts things in place when I am a little mystified, or since I have grown up a little, lets me ask questions that I can then go pursue elsewhere.

5 December 2007. The street outside is called University Place. The unwalled campus and small to medium businesses—eateries and coffee shops and photocopy joints—that have grown up around the university have a strangely Calcutta University-para feel about them, despite all differences. Following Theo d’Haen’s talk on Conrad, I know that Elleke Boehmer and Alison Donnell would speak as respondents. The talk has begun though the respondents have still not arrived. I wonder if they have cancelled, but somewhat morose, I don’t ask anyone. Two white women enter, and I know it’s them, but keep guessing who’s who till someone addresses Elleke Boehmer by name when it’s time for questions. They speak briefly after it is all over, and people get chatty over wine. I lurk around, waiting for my chance to talk. For the seemingly endless minutes I stand near her waiting, College Street floods my memory. She turns to me finally, and I ask a small question on Conrad, and after she answers, I thank her for her book, and briefly recount my first encounter with it. All I can manage to say is that I had no money to pay (nor even that I did eventually pay the bookseller—does she think he just gave it away to me?!), and that it was a very formative experience to read her, but nothing at all about how hot it was. She’s delighted to know the effect the book has had on me and wants to know where I am from, and where this encounter took place, and tells me how someone first read her book as a photocopy in Bangladesh. As we finish talking, I glance over her shoulder at the window. It's snowing. The season’s first snow in New York.

Between one June and another September...

2008-06-30T01:55:00.000-04:00

As the players lined up in an emptying stadium after what I dimly remember as the third and last one-dayer against South Africa in New Delhi, on the eve of the Indian cricket team’s departure for the tour of Australia, sometime in November 1991, the notes of Ballade pour Adeline tinkled, broken only by commentators' remarks, with the camera zeroing in on each player’s face. That was some sort of a departure from the routine post-one-dayer rituals (a departure in the choice of music too, why did Doordarshan not choose to play the more usual Theme from Shaft that they seemed to reserve for any sporting activity, especially football? Indeed, we were so used to hear that piece being played as the credits rolled after any football game was telecast, my brother and I still refer to it jokingly as “football-er bajna” and I have not heard the ballad played for any sport telecast before that day or after), and my only interest then was to catch a glimpse of the newly-drafted members of the national cricket team. Every time I use the word "national" or "Indian" before the cricket team now, I am pricked by my consciousness of how the existence of the women’s cricket team is completely subsumed by these epithets. And that consciousness then takes its turn to remind me also that time is so irredeemable. I can think like the girl I was then only with some effort, only with a very conscious desire to put away the lenses I have acquired over time or with training. But to return to the subject of this post, what was interesting for Bengalis that moment was that Sourav Ganguly and Subroto Banerjee had both found place in the squad leaving for Australia. Banerjee played for Bihar, but nevertheless was a Bengali, and a medium-fast bowler at that, and Sourav, who had blazed the domestic scene for a while, had made the cut even if at a time when his brother Snehashish looked the more probable Bengal candidate, judging by performance. If they performed well on the tour, they stood a good chance of being considered for the World Cup in Australia. So like many cricket-enthusiasts, I waited for the first glimpse of Sourav "live", and the commentators did a good job of introducing all the new faces.

The Indian batsmens’ vulnerability to the rising ball outside the off-stump, Ravi Shastri’s double hundred at Sydney, Tendulkar’s brilliant ton in the same Test, Merv Hughes’ moustache, Sourav’s lone one-day appearance on that tour, his "failure", his "attitude problems"—I assiduously kept track of the Indian summer Down Under, through Sportstar, Anandamela, not to mention the dailies, not least because the tour was a curtain-raiser of sorts for the first cricket World Cup that I would see well enough to remember. I had by then seen enough of Indian cricket to doubt if Sourav would ever again be considered, but somehow, however unjustifiably, even from the little I saw of him in press reports, it seemed that here was a gritty fellow who would not give up without a fight. For the next four years, all we heard of the Bengal Tiger was through match reports in local papers, for those were days before the current media explosion, and national aspirants, first-time or otherwise, were not likely to be interviewed by the media for every extra mile they ran.

As Ganguly walked out to bat at Lord’s four years later with India tottering, the Bengali teenager in me daydreamed that the gutsy guy would end up with a ton. As Boycott’s Prince of Calcutta gradually emerged as one of the key batsmen in the Indian side, as one of the most elegant batsmen in his day, as one of the finest players of spin, as the grittiest of captains, I wondered, would it mean anything at all to him if I ever got the chance to tell him that I believed,in 1992, however irrationally, that he would make a comeback, and in style?

And then, it was time for him to make another comeback when he got unceremoniously dropped in September 2005 as both player and captain under a cloud of bureaucratic intrigue within the BCCI. All was not quite cricket. Like his die-hard fans I believed again that he would come back, that he still had a few years to offer to cricket, that the questions about his commitment to the game were baseless, and that since he had so much to prove, he would not give up without a fight. For this stint of the Tiger’s in the wilderness, I had to keep track again through match reports, for even though the print and electronic media in India were following every pugmark he left, I was in the US, which meant keeping track of cricket only on the internet. Kiran More’s often puerile reactions during interviews by the media, Greg Chappell’s evident mishandling of individuals, and the general climate of muscle-flexing and intrigue that had set in with a change of guard in the BCCI, all seemed to suggest that Sourav had not been dropped only for cricketing reasons. The disquiet voiced occasionally by junior members of the team (promptly gagged by the BCCI who even "showcaused" Sachin Tendulkar once) seemed suggestive, to say the least. I kept track of what had become the national guessing-game and was once again inexplicably certain that the tables would turn in Sourav’s favour, or maybe more correctly, that he would turn them. And then it did happen. The Prince, now perhaps chastened by experience, and looking to only enjoy whatever cricket lay ahead of him, seemed regally reluctant to give in to interviewers’ provocations to admit even once that he had proven something. All he said was that life had come full circle.

And then one glorious year of batting followed for him, but only before he was dropped again from the ODI side. I cannot this time be optimistic about the Prince’s recall, no matter no batsman in the game has scored more runs than him in 2007, for there is an unmistakably strong current in favour of youngsters, if the simultaneous omission of Rahul Dravid should also be taken to mean something. And given the BCCI’s consistently abysmal lack of professionalism in these matters -- perhaps the current ODI captain’s too -- these senior players were not even told that these changes were being envisaged. We will never know what Sourav and Rahul must have felt, and we better not. All that followers of the game anywhere would want now is to see both of them enjoying their game in whatever form of cricket they would be playing. For the past few months I have been lax in keeping track of cricket--all the hullabaloo over IPL and ICL--and have not wondered for even once what it might mean to Sourav if I suddenly met him somewhere and told him that I believed both in 1992 and 2005 (not a teenager any more then:), that he would be back. That he would do a Zorro.

18 June 2008. I am sitting in the Clipper Lounge at Dumdum airport, courtesy a friend travelling Club World on the British Airways flight to London. In walks Nirupa Ganguly, and then, in a familiar voice I hear in Bengali, “…board bolbe na… board...” So I turn to look, and there is he, Sourav, probably filling out immigration forms for his parents and brother. I wonder if I should ask him for an autograph. Should I let him alone, or should I compel him to be Sourav Ganguly at 7 in the morning as he looks harassed tackling bureaucratic procedures? As we sit debating to ask or not to ask, a middle-aged gentleman walks almost past us, booming, “Sourav ekdom kichchhu mone korbe na, eta amar meyer jonye…” Sourav obliges with a smile, and very politely enquires after the health of his fan. Forced politesse, but I’d give full marks for such politeness under pressure. So we get up, and head straight for his table and I declare, “Onake dekhe sahosta pelam, but you are free to refuse.” He looks almost hurt, looks up from his papers, and says, “Why would I refuse?” I can’t tell him it’s got nothing to do with the myth of Lord Snooty, but rather with my good intentions to let his brief holiday from being a celebrity begin at the airport itself. And after he has signed, he asks very courteously, where I am headed to. I reply, thank him, turn away, not telling him how I always ‘knew’ he would come back.

Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real at NYU, 6-8 March, 2008

2008-02-29T23:43:00.001-05:00

Food for thought for postcolonialists/poco-sympathetics. Apathetics welcome too! Look at the amazing line-up at www.nyupoco.com. If you plan to attend, be sure to register by email (see below), and if you do not have an NYU ID, please carry a photo ID with you.

Phul phutuk na phutuk...

2007-12-21T10:35:00.008-05:00

Below I reproduce one of my perennially favourite Bangla poems. The opening lines literally translated would read "Whether flowers bloom or not / it's spring today." That gives no indication, however, how powerfully the poem is written. 'Powerfully' is the word. I've woken up thinking of the poem--quite possessed by it in fact--only to find that it has snowed heavily, and that I have actually not brought over the anthology from Calcutta, and that I don't have the poem written anywhere. So I called up a friend, all snowed up in Rochester, who first recited from memory, then called up his poetry-loving father in Calcutta to cross-check, and then sent me the poem electronically.
If the font does not display properly but you're dying to read, then you would have to download Avro Keyboard here, which actually downloads pretty fast, and is easy to use.

ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক…

সুভাষ মুখোপাধ্যায়

ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

শান বাধানো ফুটপাথে
পাথরে পা ডুবিয়ে এক কাঠ-খোট্টা গাছ
কচি কচি পাতায় পাঁজর ফাটিয়ে হাসছে

ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

আলোর চোখে কালো ঠুলি পরিয়ে
তারপর খুলে-
মৃত্যুর কোলে মানুষকে শুইয়ে দিয়ে
তারপর তুলে-
যে দিনগুলো রাস্তা দিয়ে চলে গেছে
যেন না ফেরে

গায়ে হলুদ দেওয়া বিকেলে
একটা দুটো পয়সা পেলে
যে হরবোলা ছেলেটা
কোকিল ডাকতে ডাকতে যেত
-তাকে ডেকে নিয়ে গেছে দিনগুলো

লাল কালিতে ছাপা হলদে চিঠির মত
আকাশটাকে মাথায় নিয়ে
এ গলির এক কালো কুচ্‌ছিত আইবুড়ো মেয়ে
রেলিং-এ বুক চেপে ধরে
এইসব সাতপাঁচ ভাবছিল-

ঠিক সেই সময়ে
চোখের মাথা দিয়ে
গায়ে উড়ে এসে বসল
আ মরণ! পোড়ারমুখ লক্ষ্মীছাড়া প্রজাপতি!

তারপর দড়াম করে দরজা বন্ধ হওয়ার শব্দ
অন্ধকারে মুখ চাপা দিয়ে
দড়ি পাকান সেই গাছ
তখনও হাসছে

The Stuff of Which History is Made

2007-12-19T15:04:00.001-05:00

A conversation between Carlo Ginzburg and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

I missed my chance to go to a public conversation between Carlo Ginzburg and Sanjay Subrahmanyam last November, but found this happy compensation of sorts in The Hindu.

Quasi una fantasia

2007-12-07T21:11:00.000-05:00

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or what I got looking for it

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990)

A spring evening. A large room in an old house. A woman of a certain age, dressed in black, is speaking to a young man. They have not turned on the lights. Through both windows the moonlight shines relentlessly. I forgot to mention that the Woman in Black has published two or three interesting volumes of poetry with a religious flavor. So, the Woman in Black is speaking to the Young Man:

Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!
The moon is kind – it won’t show
that my hair turned white. The moon
will turn my hair to gold again. You wouldn’t understand.
Let me come with you.

When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger,
invisible hands draw the curtains,
a ghostly finger writes forgotten words in the dust
on the piano – I don’t want to hear them. Hush.

Let me come with you
a little farther down, as far as the brickyard wall,
to the point where the road turns and the city appears
concrete and airy, whitewashed with moonlight, so indifferent and insubstantial
so positive, like metaphysics,
that finally you can believe you exist and do not exist,
that you never existed, that time with its destruction never existed.
Let me come with you.

We’ll sit for a little on the low wall, up on the hill,
and as the spring breeze blows around us
perhaps we’ll even imagine that we are flying,
because, often, and now especially, I hear the sound of my own dress
like the sound of two powerful wings opening and closing,
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your ribs, your flesh,
and when you enclose yourself within the sound of that flight
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your birds, your flesh,
and thus constricted amid the muscles of the azure air,
amid the strong nerves of the heavens,
it makes no difference whether you go or return
it makes no difference whether you go or return
and it makes no difference that my hair has turned white
(that is not my sorrow – my sorrow is
that my heart too does not turn white).
Let me come with you.

I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.

This house is haunted, it preys on me –
what I mean is, it has aged a great deal, the nails are working loose,
the portraits drop as though plunging into the void,
the plaster falls without a sound
as the dead man’s hat falls from the peg in the dark hallway
as the worn woolen glove falls from the knee of silence
or as moonbeam falls on the old, gutted armchair.

Once it too was new – not the photograph that you are starting at so dubiously –
I mean the armchair, very comfortable, you could sit in it for hours
with your eyes closed and dream whatever came into your head
– a sandy beach, smooth, wet, shining in the moonlight,
shining more than my old patent leather shoes that I send each month to the shoeshine shop on the corner,
or a fishing boat’s sail that sinks to the bottom rocked by its own breathing,
a three-cornered sail like a handkerchief folded slantwise in half only
as though it had nothing to shut up or hold fast
no reason to flutter open in farewell. I have always has a passion for handkerchiefs,
not to keep anything tied in them,
no flower seeds or camomile gathered in the fields at sunset,
nor to tie them with four knots like the caps the workers wear on the construction site across the street,
nor to dab my eyes – I’ve kept my eyesight good;
I’ve never worn glasses. A harmless idiosyncracy, handkerchiefs.

Now I fold them in quarters, in eighths, in sixteenths
to keep my fingers occupied. And now I remember
that this is how I counted the music when I went to the Odeion
with a blue pinafore and a white collar, with two blond braids
– 8,16,32,64 –
hand in hand with a small friend of mine, peachy, all light and picked flowers,
(forgive me such digressions – a bad habit) – 32, 64 – and my family rested
great hopes on my musical talent. But I was telling you about the armchair –
gutted – the rusted springs are showing, the stuffing –
I thought of sending it next door to the furniture shop,
but where’s the time and the money and the inclination – what to fix first?
I thought of throwing a sheet over it – I was afraid
of a white sheet in so much moonlight. People sat here
who dreamed great dreams, as you do and I too.
and now they rest under earth untroubled by rain or the moon.
Let me come with you.

We’ll pause for a little at the top of St. Nicholas’ marble steps,
and afterward you’ll descend and I will turn back,
having on my left side the warmth from a casual touch of your jacket
and some squares of light, too, from small neighborhood windows
and this pure white mist from the moon, like a great procession of silver swans –
and I do not fear this manifestation, for at another time
on many spring evenings I talked with God who appeared to me
clothed in the haze and glory of such a moonlight –
and many young men, more handsome even than you, I sacrificed to him –
I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight, burnt up by men’s voracious eyes and the tentative rapture of youths,
besieged by splendid bronzed bodies,
strong limbs exercising at the pool, with oars, on the track, at soccer (I pretended not to see them),
foreheads, lips and throats, knees, fingers and eyes,
chests and arms and things (and truly I did not see them)
– you know, sometimes, when you’re entranced, you forget what entranced you, the entrancement
alone is enough –
my God, what star-bright eyes, and I was lifted up to an apotheosis of disavowed stars
because, besieged thus from without and from within,
no other road was left me save only the way up or the way down. – No, it is not enough.
Let me come with you.

I know it’s very late.
Let me, because for so many years – days, nights, and crimson noons – I’ve stayed alone,
unyielding, alone and immaculate,
even in my marriage bed immaculate and alone,
writing glorious verses to lay on the knees of God,
verses that, I assure you, will endure as if chiselled in flawless marble
beyond my life and your life, well beyond. It is not enough.
Let me come with you.

This house can’t bear me anymore.
I cannot endure to bear it on my back.
You must always be careful, be careful,
to hold up the wall with the large buffet
to hold up the table with the chairs
to hold up the chairs with your hands
to place your shoulder under the hanging beam.
And the piano, like a closed black coffin. You do not dare to open it.
You have to be so careful, so careful, lest they fall, lest you fall. I cannot bear it.
Let me come with you.

This house, despite all its dead, has no intention of dying.
It insists on living with its deadon living off its dead
on living off the certainty of its death
and on still keeping house for its dead, the rotting beds and shelves.
Let me come with you.

Here, however quietly I walk through the mist of evening,
whether in slippers or barefoot,
there will be some sound: a pane of glass cracks or a mirror,
some steps are heard – not my own.
Outside, in the street, perhaps these steps are not heard –
repentance, they say, wears wooden shoes –
and if you look into this or that other mirror,
behind the dust and the cracks,
you discern – darkened and more fragmented – your face,
your face, which all your life you sought only to keep clean and whole.

The lip of the glass gleams in the moonlight
like a round razor – how can I lift it to my lips?
however much I thirst – how can I lift it – Do you see?
I am already in a mood for similes – this at least is left me,
reassuring me still that my wits are not failing.
Let me come with you.

At times, when evening descends, I have the feeling
that outside the window the bear-keeper is going by with his old heavy she-bear,
her fur full of burns and thorns,
stirring dust in the neighborhood street
a desolate cloud of dust that censes the dusk,
and the children have gone home for supper and aren’t allowed outdoors again,
even though behind the walls they divine the old bear’s passing –
and the tired bear passes in the wisdom of her solitude, not knowing wherefore and why –
she’s grown heavy, can no longer dance on her hind legs,
can’t wear her lace cap to amuse the children, the idlers, the importunate,
and all she wants is to lie down on the ground
letting them trample on her belly, playing thus her final game,
showing her dreadful power for resignation,
her indifference to the interest of others, to the rings in her lips, the compulsion of her teeth,
her indifference to pain and to lifewith the sure complicity of death –
even a slow death – her final indifference to death with the continuity and knowledge of life
which transcends her enslavement with knowledge and with action.

But who can play this game to the end?
And the bear gets up again and moves on
obedient to her leash, her rings, her teeth,
smiling with torn lips at the pennies the beautiful and unsuspecting children toss
(beautiful precisely because unsuspecting)
and saying thank you. Because bears that have grown old
can say only one thing: thank you; thank you.
Let me come with you.

This house stifles me. The kitchen especially
is like the depths of the sea. The hanging coffeepots gleam
like round, huge eyes of improbable fish,
the plates undulate slowly like medusas,
seaweed and shells catch in my hair – later I can’t pull them loose –
I can’t get back to the surface –
the tray falls silently from my hands – I sink down
and I see the bubbles from my breath rising, rising
and I try to divert myself watching them
and I wonder what someone would say who happened to be above and saw these bubbles, perhaps that someone was drowning or a diver exploring the depths?

And in fact more than a few times I’ve discovered there, in the depths of drowning,
coral and pearls and treasures of shipwrecked vessels,
unexpected encounters, past, present, and yet to come,
a confirmation almost of eternity,
a certain respite, a certain smile of immortality, as they say,
a happiness, an intoxication, inspiration even,
coral and pearls and sapphires;
only I don’t know how to give them – no, I do give them;
only I don’t know if they can take them – but still, I give them.
Let me come with you.

One moment while I get my jacket.
The way this weather’s so changeable, I must be careful.
It’s damp in the evening, and doesn’t the moon
seem to you, honestly, as if it intensifies the cold?
Let me button your shirt – how strong your chest is
– how strong the moon – the armchair, I mean – and whenever I lift the cup from the table
a hole of silence is left underneath. I place my palm over it at once
so as not to see through it – I put the cup back in its place;
and the moon’s a hole in the skull of the world – don’t look through it,
it’s a magnetic force that draws you – don’t look, don’t any of you look,
listen to what I’m telling you – you’ll fall in. This giddiness,
beautiful, ethereal – you will fall in –
the moon’s marble well,
shadows stir and mute wings, mysterious voices – don’t you hear them?

Deep, deep the fall,
deep, deep the ascent,
the airy statue enmeshed in its open wings,
deep, deep the inexorable benevolence of the silence –
trembling lights on the opposite shore, so that you sway in your own wave,
the breathing of the ocean. Beautiful, ethereal
this giddiness – be careful, you’ll fall. Don’t look at me,
for me my place is this wavering – this splendid vertigo. And so every evening
I have little headache, some dizzy spells.

Often I slip out to the pharmacy across the street for a few aspirin,
but at times I’m too tired and I stay here with my headache
and listen to the hollow sound the pipes make in the walls,
or drink some coffee, and, absentminded as usual, I forget and make two – who’ll drink the other?
It’s really funny, I leave it on the window-sill to cool
or sometimes drink them both, looking out the window at the bright green globe of the pharmacy
that’s like the green light of a silent train coming to take me away
with my handkerchiefs, my run-down shoes, my black purse, my verses,
but no suitcases – what would one do with them?
Let my come with you.

Oh, are you going? Goodnight. No, I won’t come. Goodnight.
I’ll be going myself in a little. Thank you. Because, in the end, I must
get out of this broken-down house.
I must see a bit of the city – no, not the moon –
the city with its calloused hands, the city of daily work,
the city that swears by bread and by its fist,
the city that bears all of us on its back
with our pettiness, sins, and hatreds,
our ambitions, our ignorance and our senility.
I need to hear the great footsteps of the city,
and no longer to hear your footsteps
or God’s, or my own. Goodnight.

The room grows dark. It looks as though a cloud may have covered the moon. All at once, as if someone had turned up the radio in the nearby bar, a very familiar musical phrase can be heard. Then I realize that “The Moonlight Sonata”, just the first movement, has been playing very softly through this entire scene. The Young Man will go down the hill now with an ironic and perhaps sympathetic smile on his finely chiselled lips and with a feeling of release. Just as he reaches St. Nicolas, before he goes down the marble steps, he will laugh – a loud, uncontrollable laugh. His laughter will not sound at all unseemly beneath the moon. Perhaps the only unseemly thing will be that nothing is unseemly. Soon the Young Man will fall silent, become serious, and say: “The decline of an era.” So, thoroughly calm once more, he will unbutton his shirt again and go on his way. As for the woman in black, I don’t know whether she finally did get out of the house. The moon is shining again. And in the corners of the room the shadows intensify with an intolerable regret, almost fury, not so much for the life, as for the useless confession. Can you hear? The radio plays on:

ATHENS, JUNE 1956

Reportage from Nandigram

2007-11-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

Notes on Nandigram
Bhaswati Chakravorty
The Telegraph, Kolkata Tuesday 27 November 2007

It was a day’s trip. On November 18, the Sunday before the last one, I travelled to Nandigram with a small group of people from different non-governmental organizations. We went first to the relief camp in Brajamohan Tewari Shikshaniketan, and then travelled down the road past Sonachura to Bhangaberia bridge. Some of the people who spoke to us were hesitant to be named or photographed, but many were willing that we should know their names. That seemed important to them, like a signature to all that they were saying.
Just before we left Calcutta, I met a woman from Adhikaripara, who had escaped to Calcutta. She had been one of the victims of the March 14 violence when, while at the puja where women and children had gathered, she was hit with a lathi, then had fallen choking and dazed with tear gas fumes into a field, from where she was dragged away and possibly raped by three men. She does not remember very well, but she still bleeds heavily if she tries to do any physical work.
But why was she in Calcutta? In the months after March, she and other women in the neighbouring villages, had built up small women’s groups of resistance. Now that “they”, the CPI(M), had “recaptured” the villages, she was on the run.
I asked her if they had been told that the police might use force that day at the puja. She said no one expected it; they had been told the police might come, but they would go away when they saw so many women and children. This was my first personal encounter with the enigmatic meshing of agency, consciousness, memory, victimhood and political play in Nandigram, something that would wrap itself around me more confusingly through the day.
As we approached Nandigram, we were overtaken by a heavyweight police convoy. The director-general of police, Anup Vohra, was entering Nandigram to hold a meeting in the police station. Later that evening, it was reported that the meeting had been about a change in the positions of CRPF camps; within another day, it was not so.
We saw CRPF personnel and vehicles, usually clustered in the town and around junctions with bazaars and shops on the way, and occasionally standing by the almost empty road. It felt cold on a sunny day to see a soldier standing under the thatched roof of a mud hut by the roadside, gun poised. Green fields, shady groves and shimmering ponds stretched for miles around us, and behind him, as we passed.
The vista of the enormous and beautiful school with its green grounds, familiar now to every newspaper reader and TV viewer in Bengal, opened like magic the moment our car passed through the gates in a narrow, crowded street. In spite of the twelve to thirteen hundred people who were there that morning — apart from the many men running the camp — the area looked tidy, orderly. The population there is a fluctuating one; reports say that almost half the people we may have seen there that day have gone back to their homes in the week that has followed.
In the rough estimates we were given, there were around 2,400 people taking shelter there on November 7, although the school had to be thrown open to house the hundreds running for cover on the afternoon of November 6. That night the refugees had to live on dry food, such as puffed rice, and full-fledged cooking started the day after. The state government had provided a one-time relief of 25 quintals of rice. The first three days a religious organization had provided all foodstuff except rice. Since then, meals each day were dependent on the efforts of individuals and organizations bringing foodstuff and clothes, and on the untiring efforts at collecting relief and food by a Trinamul Congress panchayat pradhan. On November 8, around 3,200 to 3,500 people had eaten in the camp, the highest number the camp had seen.
The cooking takes place in the yard behind the main building, in huge iron woks simmering on clay ovens. The cooks are men from close by, stirring, pouring and serving with almost professional steadiness the enormous amounts of food to be distributed on perfectly crafted sal plates sewn with white thread. There are tube-wells for water. In one wing of the main building is a temporary clinic, where doctors come and sit, because the health centre that had been kept going since trouble first broke is now under the control of the most recent captors. The people have taken shelter in the large classrooms, emptied of their benches, and carpeted with plastic sheets. A microphone is used to summon them to their meals.
The relief material we had taken was collected by people delegated for this particular job, one of whom wrote out a receipt. A woman with pleading eyes asked me when she would get a second sari, she was still wearing the one she had on when she came away. “You have brought saris for us?” asked another little knot of women. “But when will we get them?” One of them said that she wished we had given the saris to the local leader of her village instead of donating them centrally.
Within the appearance of order, disorder was intangible, but oppressive. Children ran about, playing, when they should have been at school. Girls of eight or ten, with babies on their hips and with adult faces, joined the women when they talked of misery, loss and fear. At the same time, the children of the school which housed the homeless could not come to class. The shelter was fragile. The Madhyamik test was due, and the principal wanted the school cleared. “We have requested him to conduct the test in the upstairs classrooms,” said one of the men. “Where will I go?” asked a terrified middle-aged woman. “My home has been broken down, it is empty. Everyone has gone I do not know where. My younger daughter’s in-laws live close by, they will not have me. And I will be killed if I go back. For 13 days I have been here and I still can’t go back.”
What about school in the 11 months that they were in their villages, when “we had control”, as one of the men said? It was irregular, said almost all the children and women we spoke to. There were bouts of shooting and rumours of trouble almost constantly, and very often, parents kept children at home. And not everyone who had escaped was in the camp. Only those who had nowhere else to go had come there. The others had gone to relatives and friends, to Calcutta, to Burdwan and Birbhum, to Jamshedpur and Ranchi, to Punjab, to Haryana.
The numbers in the camp fluctuated because many of those who went home came back, bringing with them accounts of devastation and looting, rape, fines and terror. The looting was done systematically, with van rickshaws being loaded with furniture, sometimes even with doors and windows taken off their hinges. Anyone who returned ran the risk of having his bike or bicycle taken away, if he had one, and if the looting of his home had not been completed satisfactorily. Houses had been smashed in with ‘dredgers’, we were told. “But how would you know that?” I asked. A man, who had come from Calcutta to check on his in-laws, said he had seen the machine. A woman from Satengabari joined in: “I saw one being brought over as I was running away.”
One young woman from Gokulnagar had taken shelter with her parents in Nandigram. Men with pistols had come to that house too, gone into all the rooms to see if she had brought away any of her in-laws’ “good things” from her village. They had even checked the henhouses, she said.
We found an unsettling echo later as we stood at Bhangaberia bridge talking to men who had taken shelter in Khejuri for 11 months. “Even if we have returned, what can we do?” said one. “Everything has been looted.”

Ami ekhon gan gaibo, tomadero gaite hobe... ami jokhon bolbo tokhon gaite hobe... je na gaan gaibe, tar kintu gordan jabe... baajandaaar

2007-11-14T14:05:00.001-05:00

Bhaswati Chakravorty's op-ed in The Telegraph captures very well the mood of the current protests against state-backed atrocities in Nandigram. The more I read and watch the news, the more stupefied I am. Is this Godhra revisited, or worse?

To read the article in The Telegraph's archives, click here.

From : The Telegraph, Calcutta, 13 November 2007
Sing along, or else- The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police
Bhaswati Chakravorty

Does duplicity have a face? There is no need to guess three times. To match the face, the chief minister of West Bengal has a double role besides his chieftainship: he is police minister and culture minister. He uses the police to protect his brand of culture. The sanctity of the international film festival in Calcutta has to be protected from the artists, poets, actors and film directors of Bengal, singing in pain, awareness and protest against the CPI(M)’s second devastation of Nandigram. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s lathi-wielding policemen went for artists and students because they had got too close to Nandan, where the festival is being held, beat up whomsoever their lathis found, be it a woman actor or student, loaded them in vans and shoved them into the lock-up at Lalbazar.
That is all that policemen in Bengal need to do, when they can take time off from their duties of separating couples when any aggrieved father has clout enough to engage the police to break up his offspring’s marriage. But where armed groups fire on the unarmed, demolish homes, where gunfire rages and grenades explode among groves and fields, where alternately victorious groups take turns to drive out their opponents with women, children, the old and the sick from their dwellings in a home-made war over territory, the police are absent. Or almost. The chief secretary of the state, with the home secretary by his side, had promised a credulous Bengal that all those driven out, presumably irrespective of party affiliations, would be able to return home with police protection. So there were policemen, at two spots far away from the scene — perhaps to prove that bureaucrats don’t do out-and-out lies?
The chief minister’s party knows how to use the police. They can be used as shields when members of the party cadre decide to shoot down villagers — with police help — as they did on March 14 this year. And they know how to use women and hostages as shields when they want to block the entry of CRPF vehicles — now that they are here — into the core area of the battle, so that their takeover of lost ground can be completed without interference from the law, as they did on Sunday. It is a small incongruity that a party cadre cannot order policemen about. Neither can they decide when Central forces are to be let in. The orders and decisions surely come from somewhere else?
Facts are good enough story-tellers. They show that policemen in the city cannot wait to get their hands on poets and artists because they might disrupt the chief minister’s festivities with their singing, while forces waiting to implement law and order in Nandigram are turned back to sit and twiddle their thumbs as CPI(M) cadre make their fortress safe. Apparently, the administration has curled up and died there, just where it suits the chief minister’s party. He, being a man of more parts than can be named, knows exactly when to give his fief the look and feel of a police state, and when to ask the police to look the other way. For months at a time. When North Bengal exploded in the Prashant Tamang controversy, the army was there within hours.
A senior spokesman of the CPI(M) said on Sunday that there is no more terror in Nandigram. By holy writ, obscure to all non-party creatures, partymen do not have to speak the truth, what they speak is the truth. So when CPI(M) leaders, within the government and without, keep promising a peace process in Nandigram for days before the region is overrun with party cadre, the rest of the world is duty-bound to believe them. If someone dares to suggest that they have a habit of being economical with the truth, or if someone believes them and is hideously disillusioned after the ‘action’ in Nandigram, they are damned for having failed the demands of objective truth. No protest is legitimate in the eyes of the government — as the arrests of artists show — because no one protested against the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri. That is where the CPI(M) supporters driven out of their homes had gone.
Violence is unacceptable, say the protestors, and nowhere are the sufferings of the people to be condoned. Instead of vengefully throwing Khejuri into their faces, should not the CPI(M) leaders ask themselves why the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri did not figure in the popular protests? Can it have to do with the fact that the chief minister, together with other leaders in the government, constantly talks about “ours” and “theirs” as if they were not governing West Bengal but taking part in a street fight with party thugs? Or can it be that even the foolish citizens of Bengal suspect that the homeless in Khejuri have been carefully nurtured over the months so that the place could be used to build up an arms cache and the name could be used as ammunition to discredit all protest? Or can it just be that people do not believe a word that this government or its party says? Why ask the people a question the administration, “their” administration, should answer?
Why Khejuri alone, what about “outsiders”? Those who protest are not only biased, they are blind too. Maoists have laid mines in Nandigram and two CPI(M) supporters have died. No death can go unmourned. But if ordinary people as well as intellectuals protesting on the streets find it difficult to believe in Maoists from Jharkhand, not one of whom has been identified, whose fault is that? They are as invisible as those policemen supposed to have been grievously wounded during the March 14 massacre. As for the mysterious outsiders on the “other” side, they certainly merge in well. Because the only outsiders identified so far are those in Janani Intbhanta after March 14 and Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali on November 11. All fighting for the CPI(M).
It may be that CPI(M) leaders were never told the fable of the wolf and the shepherd boy by their grandmothers. They cannot imagine that people might actually dare to disbelieve them. The CPI(M) general secretary has said at a press conference that because of an ex- parte order of the Calcutta high court, they decided to restrain themselves from sending the police there for all these months. The people are supposed to have forgotten that the high court had first asked for an immediate investigation into the circumstances of the police firing on March 14 and directed the state to ensure “the safety and well-being of all general public in the area”, then had reiterated the instructions about restoring normalcy and law and order later. But the party is happy now. According to the general secretary, the administration can move in at last. That is, the West Bengal government has got the CPI(M)’s goons to clear the way.
The government’s satisfaction is understandable: goons are good company. Better company than those intellectuals and artists, left-leaning or even party loyalists, who are taking to the streets or boycotting festivals in protest. Not only have many of them boycotted the Calcutta film festival, they have also decided not to participate in the Natyamela. While a quiet and far-from-politically-visible Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay refuses to attend a film festival seminar, an acutely ill Sumit Sarkar joins a protest rally in Delhi.
Shame can be measured in many ways. It is good of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s government to offer us such a wide range of images to choose from. An unarmed man with a gamchha round his shoulders, his legs curled up, his brains spilled by a bullet, lying on the spot he had stood minutes earlier shouting slogans against the guns that crackle across a smoky field. Or even just the once-green fields, groves, the spattering of tiled houses and occasionally running, secretive figures, blurred by shaking, uncertain cameras of people risking their lives to catch the total absence of policemen, of any shred of civilization, and the shifting colours of hatred and murder. But maybe we have grown used to those.
But there is another. The face of a gentle-spoken poet, teacher and scholar, small in build and towering in stature, gazing in through the closed gates of Lalbazar police station. Somewhere within those gates are artists and students arrested for singing. It is enough to look at his eyes.
Upon hearing that intellectuals were boycotting the film festival, the chief minister had said, “If you have the list, you can put it in a photo frame and hang it on the wall at home.” In return, he should be presented with this picture. He can look at the poet’s eyes and congratulate himself on what he has achieved.

Pianos from Scout's Town

2007-07-04T01:09:00.000-04:00

Yamaha digital pianos from Scout's town: here is a link I'm posting only because it's about pianos from Mobile, Alabama.
At this site, you could listen to some short demo tracks on the piano.

Mexicana in Greenwich Village

2007-07-03T00:16:00.000-04:00

Bamboleo, a riot of colours, just asked to be photographed! It's a pity I had only a cameraphone on me. We hit upon this Mexican eatery quite by chance, and had a merry time!

Poster on the wall

The guacamole dips were just too delicious, and whetted our appetites so much so, there were soon no more chips left.

Pouring sangria

Ornate sombrero on the wall.

Writing Politics/Writing and Politics

2007-06-19T15:11:00.001-04:00

With Salman Rushdie's being knighted and Chinua Achebe's winning the Man Booker Prize within days of each other, the postcolonial novel in English/english is again in the news. The knighthood sure has political implications, and has been promptly politicised too. The postcolonial novel is often avowedly political (Achebe's remarks about his own writing in the report linked above bear testimony) but what makes literature vulnerable in its relationship with politics is that some texts are particularly susceptible to being used for political agenda quite unthought of or unwanted by the author. Another writer whose work has been put to political cross-purposes is J.M. Coetzee. Of course that brings up once again the vexed question of authorial intention, and its place in cognitive protocols of response. At a talk show organised by The Telegraph on 9 December, 2004, in Calcutta, that I was fortunate to be able to go to, Rushdie dwelt on this troubled aspect of writing, and it seems it is worthwhile to revisit Rushdie's remarks on that occasion now. Here is Rushdie's own transcript of his talk that appeared in The Telegraph on 20 December, 2004. The punctuation seems to have been messed up in the internet version, and from a brief glimpse I can decipher that the commas, apostrophes and quotation marks have all morphed into question marks. Questions abound, for sure.

Sir Salman

2007-06-17T00:16:00.000-04:00

Some news links:
The Times of India
The Statesman
Anandabazar Patrika
Aajkaal
Bartaman

These are the only reports of Salman Rushdie's being knighted that I found in the newspapers I read regularly. I am sure there will be more reports and features soon. I am dozing off as I wonder what the implications of this royal attention to literature in chutnified English, and of Rushdie's acceptance, are. But we will hear about that in the press shortly, anyway.

Caribbean Clouds

2007-06-13T09:28:00.002-04:00

This picture is from some match in the Cricket World Cup 2007. I spotted it on NDTV or IBN or Cricinfo.

IBN news item on gay flamingos adopting

2007-06-13T00:34:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting story from IBN.

Besame Mucho

2007-06-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

Soon after I mused about the accordionist, I bumped into another very talented young Latino accordionist on the subway last Friday afternoon. He made a dramatic entry on the R train moments before it began hurtling past Prince Street station: even with half his body still outside the train, he played a loud chord all of a sudden, and seemed to revel in thus shocking commuters out of their reverie. He played a medley beginning with Besame Mucho and going on to a melody I know only from Klaus Wunderlich, and can't recall by title this instant (getting old!), one of those melodies eminently suited for the accordion. He played much little compared to what others do on the subway, no matter how skilled they are, and seemed very aware of his competence, looking around and asking for the appreciation that he was sure he deserved and would be given, not like my humble smiling hexagenarian accordionist who acknowledged even every twinkle of appreciation. I even wondered briefly if I should give him anything, before finally choosing to give because he was very obviously skilful, and easiliy belonged to the top bracket of performers I have come across in New York, and of course he was playing for money. I wonder if he played a little more and showed less awareness of his skill in his demeanour, he would have collected more money in the same compartment. Perhaps that is what New York will teach him.

Ford fiasco

2007-06-11T20:48:00.000-04:00

With Graham Ford's declension of the BCCI's offer of being the coach of the Indian team, the BCCI has again made a laughing stock of itself. While Ford may have any number of reasons for refusing the offer (the short contract, the BCCI's choosing of his support staff for him do not seem very attractive propositions, but I will not enter into those issues here), the modus operandi of the BCCI especially for the last few years has only too often left a lot to be desired, and indeed one wonders whether the position of the coach would interest capable candidates from within and outside India any more at the present moment. The BCCI's way of (unofficially?) wooing Dave Whatmore before rejecting his application, and the subsequent hullabaloo stirred up about Graham Ford, and the sudden induction of John Emburey into the race all together suggest a most unprofessional way of going about the whole business of appointing a coach, and perhaps indicate continuing internal bickerings as well. Starting with the leaked email in September 2005, the BCCI has been regularly in the news for all the wrong reasons. There are bound to be differences of opinion among any large group of people, but the recent fiascos lead one to wonder whether the board, especially in its current prescriptive mood--draconian even--about the conduct of players and coaches alike, should not also determine for itself formal procedures beyond its electoral and constitutional affairs, for going about things that it must do periodically, and preferably, without blundering: it will have to appoint a coach through a proper selection procedure once in a while, and talk to the media before and after. Just as there is a long way for the team to go to get back to winning ways, there is a lot the BCCI needs to do stop looking stupid.

Graham Ford's statement on the Kent County Cricket Club website

On the Picture

2007-06-04T18:35:00.000-04:00

Daffodils, also called 'Narcissus', seemed the logical choice after describing myself as I have. The flowers, the mirror, the camera and my reflection together stand for a preoccupation with perspective, reflection, and self-obsession. Narcissus wouldn't shrink to fit anywhere, but on this page, the whole page being HERS to fill, she will be content with a corner.

हिंदी!!!!!!

2007-06-03T20:00:00.001-04:00

हिंदी! देवनागरी!

ब्लॉगर में हिंदी में एक पंक्ति लिखकर मैं बहुत बहुत खुश हूँ! इरादा हैं कभी बंगला में भी लिखने का मौका मिल जाएगा।

For the love of blogging!

2007-06-03T11:07:00.001-04:00

I found I love my old blog too much to let go of it. And so, I have decided to keep both pages going. Too much resolve, I fear, from someone who has not been able to keep even one blog going properly!

In a Station on the Metro

2007-06-02T21:04:00.000-04:00

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

[Disclaimer: Ezra Pound's famous poem has nothing to do with this post except that both have an association with the underground railway, though in different cities. My choice of epigraph, honestly, is inspired by Pound's title rather than his lines.]

Hexagenarian, chubby-cheeked and grinning widely, he sat on a small stool, enthralling all commuters present with the Latino melodies that he played effortlessly on his piano accordion. From Besame Mucho to El Condor Pasa to La Cucaracha, he played them all with equal panache, and once obliged New Yorkers with the theme from The Godfather. In my eight months in this Mammon's den, of all the 'musicians' I have given money to, perhaps only one other man who played Latino melodies on a Spanish guitar on 116th St could vye with this man for felicity. Both, incidentally acknowledged not just the money passers-by would give them, but also their appreciative glances and nods. I was dismayed to see a "For Sale" tag on the accordion. As I embarked on the train, I faintly hoped the accordion wouldn't find buyers too soon, so that I could hear more of him. And lo! Two days later, I chanced upon him at another station, but as luck would have it, I had no money on me this time. It has been two months since then, and I have not seen him again. I only hope the accordion has gone to good hands, and my nameless artist does have another to play on, though not for the mercy of commuters.

Midwinter spring is its own season

2007-06-02T14:57:00.001-04:00

I am in the mood for Eliot today it seems. So here are some more favourite lines. With all its improved typography, Blogger isn't allowing me to indent as I want. So here is some Eliot typographically altered from the usual anthologized text.

Marina

Quis hic locus, quae

regio, quae mundi plaga?

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What water lapping the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return

O my daughter.

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place

What is this face, less clear and clearer

The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--

Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat,

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

- T. S. Eliot

2007-06-02T14:32:00.001-04:00

Evicted

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...
...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...

From "Little Gidding", Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I begin again. The decontextualised epigraph from Eliot is as much an epitaph for my earlier blog as a prologue for this one. Logging in to blog after aeons, I find so much has changed on Blogger. For a brief moment, I faintly revolt against having to gulp down all the changes Blogger wants me to accept if I want to use their space. But what would it matter? I briefly muse on possible wider consequences of Blogger urging all users to update their blogs. I just want to write, and there wouldn't be much at stake anyway. So I accede as countless others have done. And then, I am dismayed to find the template I loved so much is no longer available. I re-posted my earlier postings, simply because I was loath to lose them--they are like pieces of myself. There must be some way to retain the earlier comments too. I would love to save the comments my friends made. The only consolation is that Blogger let me keep the same title. So here am I, typing away again.

Postscript: I have added the link to my earlier blog on this page so that I don't lose my friends' comments, and the older blog itself.

2007-06-02T14:27:00.001-04:00

Another World, Another Time

“Biyer shanai jachchhe bole, chhotobelake jachchho fele,” stares at me from an 8'x10' billboard as I pass Golpark. A pensive Deepika Padukone, resplendent in bridal jewellery, a distant gaze on her kohl-rimmed wide eyes, her forehead gently resting on her bejewelled left fist… Saturday afternoons idled away looking at black and white photographs… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion over my head at the gate of Sakshigopal Mandir would devour me… my mother cuddling me in the lobby of a Benares hotel, my freshly lost incisor on the table in front... me in school uniform posing on the Victoria Memorial grounds, one sock drooping… … summer afternoons spent in coaxing the local sweetshop man for clay cups to pour milk for our kittens… poking fingers in the bellow of the harmonium while my uncle played and sang... reflecting sunlight on his face with book transperencies as he checked on the mirror if a shave was due... my brother and I busily assisting our father in repairing leaks on the roof before the monsoon set in… poking the colourful caterpillars that infested our ghaashphool in the monsoon so that they would curl up … Honking horns remind me I must pick up altered trousers on my way to my parents’ place from my in-laws’. At home, my mother has kept an album ready for me to take along to another land… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion…At night, when I hear familiar snores around me— I miss these sounds at my in-laws’— I login hoping to find my husband online. He isn’t there. I wait. I type something in a new Word document. He’s still not online. I type a few more lines, and more, and more. My blog is born.

2007-06-02T14:25:00.001-04:00

Blogger's Block?

This is the first time I am blogging in New York. I have been itching to write for a long long time and don’t know quite what has held me back. I had much more time before the semester started, and much more new in life each day than I do now. All the newness that my mind registered went into the long emails I wrote, and yet I never once tried to blog. Perhaps one needs to get used to even a new corner in a new home to think of it as suitable for personal, reflective activity, even through its fruits will be shared with others.

2007-06-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

A Beginning

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right-angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

From: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, rpt. 1995)

One of the many things Scout’s words here highlights is the existence and inevitability of competing narratives of the same event, which partly explains the reason I chose to name my blog as I have: it will inevitably represent only my version of things. Another reason that governed the christening is that this is a book very dear to me, and whenever I reread it (never in full), I am reminded of my childhood, and I thought I could have a blog that not only focuses on my present, but also my past, and the ‘pastness’ of my present.