Re: I Write, Therefore I am : Sid Harth
bademiyansubhanallah
Statesman among Indian economists
If you leave it all to the market to sort out, you will not get the
best results because both prices and resource allocation need some
nudging from time to time.
As an explorer of ideas and speculative philosophy, Dasgupta has few
challengers. As pathfinders go, therefore, he stands alone.
The essay ‘Tendencies in Economic Theory’, should become compulsory
reading for all policy-advocates, if only to show that in human
affairs a certain amount of direction is not such a bad thing after
all.
The Collected Works of A. K. Dasgupta (3 Vols) OUP;
Rs 995 (each Vol)
T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan
It is impertinent to attempt to review the works of A. K. Dasgupta
(1903-92), the Senior Statesman of Indian economists. In a career that
spanned over 65 years, he taught hundreds of students and wrote many
scores of papers. He was witness, thus, not just to the flowering of
economics as a fully structured system of thought during the 20th
century, but also of economists — Indian economists, in particular.
The sheer breadth of his writings and their depth also make a ‘review’
impossible. No one person can do it. The best anyone can do,
therefore, is to pay a tribute, not just to the author but the editor
as well — his daughter, in this case — for the patience, diligence and
commitment needed to undertake such a monumental task.
Indeed, by doing no more than reading the three tributes written by
Amartya Sen, S. R. Sen and P. R. Brahmananda reproduced in Volume 1,
one emerges feeling intellectually more vigorous and proud of being
Indian.
Abundant self-confidence
Not everyone who is intellectually inclined is intellectually vigorous
as well. Even fewer have the self-confidence to write it all down.
This is especially true of, and in, the world of ideas and speculative
philosophy. As an explorer of these — and remember, he was out there
when the Indian economics tradition was just starting — Dasgupta has
few challengers. As pathfinders go, therefore, he stands alone.
It is hardly surprising, then, that he said, way back in 1960, that
“Indian economists, particularly of the older generation, have been
somewhat allergic to economic theory... this is surprising… the Indian
mind is traditionally speculative and is supposed to lend itself more
to abstraction than to crude reality.”
For almost two decades before that, he had taken it upon himself to
remedy this lamentable state of affairs.
It took a lot of self-confidence to join issues with men — and a woman
— who belonged to a small intellectual elite of the Anglo-Saxon world
who thought that their way of looking at the system of commerce,
business, finance and industry was the only acceptable way.
In those days, an idea was regarded as respectable only if it had a
British provenance. America had arrived as an economic and military
power, but intellectually it was still regarded as something of a
parvenu. Indeed, any idea to be any good had to come either from
Cambridge or Oxford. Everything else, even London, was economy class.
It was this quiet smugness that Dasgupta challenged, not frontally,
not shrilly, nor obliquely. He merely used their own analytical
techniques and showed that the same evidence, using the same framework
of thought, could be adduced to reach very different conclusions.
This was intellectual debate and challenge of the highest order. These
three volumes contain several examples of it. They may not be
everyone’s cup of tea but to those who like to exercise their brains,
they are just what the doctor ordered.
Financial prescience
Much water has flowed under the bridge since these papers were
written, and thanks to the global financial crisis economics today
stands somewhat discredited as a credible system of thought. It was
therefore a pleasant surprise to find an essay called Tendencies in
Economic Theory. It was the Presidential address at the All India
Economic Conference held in 1960.
Now that the economic orthodoxy of the last 50 years has begun to be
seriously questioned, this essay should become compulsory reading for
all policy-advocates, if only to show that in human affairs a certain
amount of direction is not such a bad thing after all because, as
Dasgupta pointed out with such prescience, “…relative prices cannot
just be left alone to take their own course, nor can the allocation of
resources be left to be regulated by the movement of relative
prices…”
The reason he gave is critically important in today’s context, namely,
that if you leave it all to the market to sort out, you will not get
the best results because both prices and resource allocation need some
nudging from time to time.
True — except that bureaucracies, which are expected to do the
nudging, are famously prone to get the timing almost invariably wrong,
erring between combinations of too little, too much, too early and too
late. Chance, therefore, very clearly plays a major role in economic
outcomes.
Role of chance
But Dasgupta — and I could well be very wrong — appears not to have
factored it in explicitly, as a factor distinct from uncertainty,
which has been worked upon more intensely than any other single aspect
of economics and that too by some of the best brains in the business.
Many economists tend to believe that there isn’t much difference
between the two, but chance is a different thing altogether.
It is stochastic, while uncertainty is a permanent state, a sort of
continuum, if you will. Sadly, chance decisions by governments play a
much larger role in determining outcomes than the uncertainty that
normal government functioning introduces.
Thus, who would have predicted on September 4, 2008, that Lehman would
go down? Yet, barely 12 days later, that single event had paralysed
the world of finance — and made economics intellectually virtually
comatose.
...and I am Sid Harth
bademiyansubhanallah
Has economics lost its way?
The triumph of mindless empiricism has seen the advent of a menace
called the policy economist. This tribe is to economics what ‘non-
state actors’ are to security.
T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan
Over the next several months, therefore, this column will argue that
economics has comprehensively lost its way. It will take the help of
the latest economics research in order to do so.
It has become commonplace to say that economists never agree on
anything. But even if the number of disagreements is directly
proportional to the number of economists, surely there must be some
common ground?
But, like the Brahmins of the Gupta period — one of whom discovered
zero, whence the name of this column — economists are today obsessed
with empirical method, rather than substance. This may not have
mattered much as long as those who do bother with substance paid some
attention to the method of logic. But, often, that too seems not to be
the case. The result is a discipline in which the only certainties are
the ones in microeconomics postulated by economists in the 19th and up
to the mid-20th century.
Why empty sum?
I have deliberately chosen ‘Empty Sum’ as the name of this column. It
sounds very similar to the better-known concept of ‘zero-sum’ from
Game Theory. But the latter has a very specific meaning and signifies
the trade-off where neither party to the trade either gains anything
or loses anything. Empty sum, in contrast, means that zero multiplied
by zero will give you zero.
You only need to look at Bramhagupta’s rules about zero to see how
closely they fit economics. And, today, as with zero, the problem with
economics remains what the ancient Greeks grappled with: What do we do
with it? Can something be a number and not a number at the same time?
Post-war economics
Economists will protest, more than somewhat shrilly, that I am making
far too many sweeping statements. That is to be expected. But, after
spending a lifetime with them, I know that in their heart of hearts
they agree that this is exactly true of most of post-war economics.
Techniques in econometrics have, of course, improved. But useful
economic theory has made virtually no progress. Much of microeconomics
stays where it was in, say, 1945, except in the matter of its dress.
And as we are seeing now, macroeconomics hasn’t gone beyond Keynes,
who published his seminal work in 1936.
My view is that the post-war period can be divided into two clear
segments. The first comes roughly up to the mid-1970s when economic
theory grew increasingly distant from real life and more-or-less
merged into advanced mathematics. The second phase was a sort of
reaction, and comprises the empiricist phase where, gradually, the
mere presence of a data set has meant that anyone who knows a little
regression can become an economist. Thought and thinking have both
exited.
The trouble with empiricists, as opposed to empiricism whose
importance can’t be denied, is that they can’t tell the difference
between correlation and causality. I once wrote an article showing how
every change of party of government in the US after 1945 has been
accompanied by a recession.
The correlation was easy to establish but causation, in either
direction, is another kettle of fish altogether. Even after having
been advised early not to fall prey to it, they make the classic post
hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) mistake.
Swings between extremes
The triumph of mindless empiricism has seen the advent of a menace
called the policy economist. This tribe is to economics what ‘non-
state actors’ are to security: guided missiles but with commercial
intent. These economists flourish in think tanks which, if you ask me,
are like those camps in Kandahar, Muridke, PoK, etc. But more about
them in the months to come.
Overall, the swings between the two extremes — of economics posturing
as physics so that it can use advanced mathematics, and data-based
vacuity which has no roots in politics, custom, institutions, law, etc
— have led the discipline into a state of meaningless tarkam and
vitarkam where scoring petty points is mistaken for scholarship and
where debate becomes an end in itself.
Let me conclude by saying that Oscar Wilde, who said that an economist
is a person who knows the price of everything but the value of none,
was wrong. Today, it is the other way round.
bademiyansubhanallah
The tragedy of economics
After more than a century of using rationality assumption as a bedrock
of their theories, economists have now begun to abandon it in order to
justify the discipline’s inability to come up with explanations that
stand the test of time.
T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan
As mentioned last week the purpose of this column is to suggest that
economists no longer quite know what they are doing as a result of
which economics has lost its way. This is proposed to be done with the
help of examples from the research in economics.
Assumptions are central to any discipline of structured thought.
Newspapers, for example, assume that readers are only interested in
reading news but not reading per se. Psychologists assume that
everyone is nuts unless proven otherwise. Historians assume that the
historical material they use is true. And so on.
Too many assumptions
Economics differs in one very important respect. It makes more
assumptions than any other discipline. One of these is (or used to be)
that people and societies act rationally, where rationality consists
mostly of consistency.
But after more than a century of using this assumption as a bedrock of
their theories economists have now begun to abandon it in order to
justify the discipline’s inability to come up with explanations that
stand the test of time.
They are not saying that people don’t behave rationally but only that
there can be no standard yardstick by which to judge an action as
rational.
Thus, even though suicide bombing is regarded as completely irrational
behaviour, to the bomber himself it appears to be the most rational
thing to do.
I might add that whether or not that is the case, suicide bombers
certainly take care of one of the most used definitions of rationality
in economics, attributed to John Muth of Chicago University, an
economist of great standing.
His definition was simple: people don’t make the same mistake twice.
With suicide bombers, of course, we never get the chance to find out
if this is true.
Back in 1997 Peter Hammond, one of the leading figures of economic
theory, had this to say in a paper that he wrote: “…rationality has
become little more than a structural consistency criterion. At the
least, it needs supplementing with other criteria that reflect
reality. Also, though there is no reason to reject rationality
hypotheses as normative criteria just because people do not behave
rationally, rationality as consistency seems so demanding that it may
not be very useful for practicable normative models either.”
Well, he is right of course. The rationality assumption was altogether
too constricting and not very much in evidence either, because people
and societies do change their minds. In other words, context was
crucial — but you will not find a single economist who will say so.
The Indian poet A K Ramanujam had an explanation for the rejection by
western thinkers, whose preferences Indian economists have adopted, of
context. In a most wonderful essay called “Is there an Indian way of
thinking?” he said absolutist principles, as opposed to contextual
ones, were the bedrock of western thought. As we shall see in my next
column, this obsession with absolutism lies at the root of the crisis
in macroeconomics today.
The abandonment of rational behaviour, without acknowledging that
rationality had to be judged in a given context, was honoured with a
Nobel prize in 2002. Daniel Kahneman who is now regarded as the father
of behavioural economics, was awarded the prize. But his explanations
were rooted in psychology, not context.
Bounded rationality
Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky basically said that you could
not disregard intuition. They “explored the psychology of intuitive
beliefs and choices and examined their bounded rationality.” They
conducted experiments using individuals and groups to validate their
theories.
Bounded rationality? What in heaven is that, pray? No one really knows
who invented the term but it is most widely attributed to another
Nobel prize winner, Herbert Simon. People, he said, don’t have the
brains to handle complex situations, so they often act in ways that
are not consistent with total rationality. In other words, people are
rational only some of the time.
The question that needs asking but which no one is asking is: by
diluting the rationality requirement, has the subject gained or lost?
Having thought about it a lot during the last two decades, I would say
that one way or another, it has not made any difference.
Therein lies the real tragedy of modern economics.
bademiyansubhanallah
bademiyansubhanallah
The Top Ten Indian Writers in English
chillibreeze writer — KAUSHIKI SANYAL
Salman Rushdie
The 1980s and 90s saw a renaissance of Indian writing in English
making the task of choosing the top ten authors of this genre
especially challenging. The renaissance was spearheaded by Salman
Rushdie with his path breaking novel Midnight’s Children in 1980. Ever
since his success, there has been a glut of Indian authors writing in
English. These contemporary writers are not confined to people living
in India, but like Rushdie, a large number of them are part of the
Indian diaspora. Earlier writers like Nirad C. Choudhuri, R.K.
Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand or Raja Rao used English in its classical
form. However, Rushdie, with his Pidgin English, signaled a new trend
in writing as well as giving voice to multicultural concerns. Although
his Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury, and
Shalimar the Clown received critical acclaim for their themes as well
as his use of magic realism, the book that generated the most
controversy was The Satanic Verses. He was accused of blasphemy by
many Muslims because of certain allegedly irreverent references to
Islam’s Prophet Mohammad. A fatwa was issued by Iran’s Ayotollah
Khomeini in 1989 calling for the execution of the author. Many
countries banned the book including India. Rushdie had to go into
hiding in U.K. Till date, Rushdie remains a hunted man with a price on
his head.
Vikram Seth
Next on the list should be Vikram Seth who produced some magnificent
works like The Golden Gate, A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music, and Two
Lives. His first book is written in verse form and chronicles the
lives of young professionals in San Francisco. But the work that
propelled him into the limelight was his second book, A Suitable Boy,
which was based in a post-independent India.
Arundhati Roy
If Rushdie’s work liberated Indian writing from the colonial
straitjacket, Arundhati’s Roy’s book, The God of Small Things,
radically changed perceptions about Indian authors with her commercial
success. She won the Booker prize and remained on the top of the New
York Times bestseller list for a long time. With her also started the
trend of large advances, hitherto unheard of among Indian writers.
Rohinton Mistry
The other authors who should be included in the list are: Rohinton
Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Shashi Tharoor, and
Upamanyu Chatterjee. Mistry’s books shed light on the issues affecting
the Parsi community in India. Although the novels are long and at
times depressing, the beauty of the books lies in their lyrical prose.
Some of his better known works include Such a Long Journey, Family
Matters, and A Fine Balance.
V.S Naipaul
One of the most enduring figures in the field and a nobel laureate,
V.S. Naipaul, is of Indian origin although he was born in Trinidad.
His prolific writing career includes works such as A House for Mr.
Biswas, India: A Wounded Civilization, An Area of Darkness, India: A
Million Mutinies Now, and A Bend in the River. Naipaul is another
writer who has courted controversy for a long time. His often scathing
commentaries on developing countries like India or the Caribbean and
his critical assessment of Muslim fundamentalism on non-Arab countries
have been subjected to harsh criticism.
Amitav Ghosh
Another respected name that should feature on a list of the top ten
contemporary Indian writers is Amitav Ghosh, who has won many
accolades including the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Prix Medicis
Etrangere of France. Although less prone to controversy, he is
responsible for producing some of the most lyrical and insightful
works on the effect of colonialism on the native people. His books
include The Circle of Reason, The Glass Palace, The Calcutta
Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri, a recent entrant into the world of Indian writers,
tackles the much-debated topic of cultural identity of Indians in a
far off land. Lahiri took the literary world by storm when her debut
book, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize
in 2000. The Namesake, her first novel, is an ambitious attempt to
chart the lives of a family of immigrants through the eyes of a young
boy. Both her books have received brickbats as well as accolades but
she deserves a mention for tackling a subject long ignored by other
Indian writers.
Shashi Tharoor
The list would be incomplete without a mention of Shashi Tharoor’s
satirical works like The Great Indian Novel and Show Business. His
latest book, India: From Midnight to Millennium, is a non-fiction
chronicle of India’s past and its projected future.
Upamanyu Chatterjee
Lastly, Upamanyu Chatterjee deserves a mention as he was one of the
first Indian authors who found success outside of India with his 1988
debut novel, English, August. His wry sense of humor and realistic
portrayal of India has given us the witty and amusing, The Mammaries
of the Welfare State. However, he hasn’t been able to replicate the
success of his debut novel with his later works, especially in the
West.
bademiyansubhanallah
DO GODMEN PROVIDE SOLACE?
Mrs. Margaret Bhatty
Rock me Guru Maharaj ji & roll me tonight
Rock me Guru Maharaj ji & say it's all right!
Two lines from a pop song from Millennium 1973 held in Houston, Texas,
where an estimated 40,000 devotees arrived from all over the world to
honour the roly-poly Child-God, Balyogeshwar, son of a celibate priest
from Hardwar. His Divine Light Mission was about to launch the
beginning of 1,000 years of peace and plenty.
Those were exciting times indeed, with the Guru cult peaking in the
USA. About 125 Indian godmen were operating in the country, with 25
big league ones establshed in oppulent ashrams in major cities.
Today many of these have been discredited, their spiritual heads
having fallen victim to their own messages. But in the beginning they
appeared as meassaiahs to a hippie generation unable to make sense of
a chaos of their own creating. Their deification of poverty, non-
attachment to material things, rebirth, karma and a lot of other
claptrap seemed to offer values unknown to a rootless society. They
raked in the money and earned themselves rolls royces, private jets,
commode seats of solid gold, and other riches dear to an Indian's
heart.
Today, what Naipaul describes as "the recurring crooked comedy" of our
godmen is by no means played out. Quite a number of hardcore
nincompoops still hang on, like so many limpets. What do these
disciples seek? And what do they get? Do godmen provide solace?
The guru cult, according to Nirad Choudhuri in his book Hinduism, is
an example of how this religion seeks to personalise an idea with
reference to the two strongest impulses that move humans - a need for
power and a need for protection. The guru-shisya bond adequately
answers this dependency need. Traditionally, a Guru is a human
incarnation to his followers. They even offer prayers and puja to his
portrait. And they follow his instructions without question. Many go
to more abject lengths of attending to his personal needs, chewing
betel nut taken from his mouth, drinking holy water stirred with his
big toe, and even swilling his morning's micturation.
Undoubtedly, they are deriving something from their self abasement.
Such symbiosis is found even in Nature where two different species
benefit from a kind of mutualism. It would be simple to enlarge on
this in facetious vein, for nothing amuses and astonishes skeptics
more than the bizarre relationships we witness between godmen and
their followers. Nevertheless, however ridiculous these appear, the
fact remains that one or both are in some way benefiting from the
bond.
Traditionally, a Guru is more than a mere guide and mentor. He is seen
as a man who has achieved remarkable "spiritual" stature. This could
mean he has an exemplary moral character. It could also mean, in
popular terms, that he is a magician with power over spirits and an
adept in occult practices and magic.
Chaudhuri describes a Guru thus: "He is always a man who has attained
to a high religious status in the world by leading a genuinely devout
life, or practising nothing better than charlatanry."
For Hindus, the godman as Guru is one who can provide them access to
the Higher Reality. There is no scientific explanation for this
supranormal level of Awareness. But it is there, and it can be tapped
as a source of Knowledge with a capital K. The chief goal of one's
search for meaning in life is the achievement of this Higher
Consciousness. Its realisation endows one with all wisdom, enabling
people like Giggling-Guru Mahesh Yogi to expound the Unified Field
Force of Vedic Science with an absolutely straight face.
Frustration with one's common lot and an inability to cope with stress
sends people in search of a Guru for solace. Psycho-analyst, Sudhir
Kakar writes: "The godman or the devotee turns his back on the
painfulness of a hard reality-experience of loss and disappointment in
close human relationships - to retreat into a world of imagination
where the unacceptable reality is sought to be replaced by an inner
one in which he can feel vigorous and powerful, no longer dependent on
others' whims. The way of the godman, the spiritual path, is then the
culturally sanctioned way to deal with frustration and depression."
In his book Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Kakar describes his
encounters with Her Holiness Mataji Nirmala Devi - the plump and
motherly godwoman challenged successfully by rationalists in Pune in
December, and earlier forced to cut short her visit to her home town,
Nagpur, for refusing to answer awkward questions about her miraculous
powers. She had to run away from Trivandrum (Kerala) also when she
tried to raise the Kundalini power of the journalists. He examines the
susceptibility of the human mind in faith healing. "The apparent
success of different healing methods based on all kinds of religious
faiths and secular ideologies compels the not improbable conclusion
that the healing power resides primarily within the patient's mind
than in the tenets of these faiths and ideologies."
He remarks on the self-image projected by people like Mataji that of a
protective mother, possessive and warm yet in control (come sit on my
lap, my head, says she). The Maharaj Charan Singh of the Radha Saomi
sect he sees as a benign patriach, while Bhagwan Rajneesh is indulgent
and encouraging of his 'children.'
This parent-child transaction is commonly found in the guru-shishya
bond. But for us skeptics the problem arises when we see such
confidence exploited by a godman resorting to fraud and conjuring. It
baffles us that hundreds honestly believe the Satya Sai Baba can
produce something out of nothing, and really materialises gold, jewels
and vibhuti by divine power. Such a guru-chela relationship is a fake.
But how impossible it proves to convince the followers of that! Their
ability to reason is jambed in a kind of mind-set. They are not
interested in knowing the truth, because knowing it will not help
fulfill their dependency needs.
I recall a mild debate that arose in our local paper on whether the
Makarajyoti at Sabarimala is genuine or not. One reader wrote in to
say the question was of no importance. "If people want to be fooled
what harm is there?"
The same could also be said of religion. But we know too much of
baneful effects of blind belief to shelve the argument so easily.
Essays on "DO GODMEN PROVIDE SOLACE?" - for and against are welcome
from the readers and other thinkers for publication in the INDIAN
SKEPTIC.
The University of Regensburg neither approves nor disapproves of the
opinions expressed here. They are solely the responsibility of the
person named below.
Gerald...@r.maus.de
Last update: 19 June 1998
bademiyansubhanallah
The portrayal of a misguided notion
6 Oct 2009, 0349 hrs IST, Mukul Sharma,
The 2007 bestseller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens, received critical acclaim from reviewers who
even compared it with Bertrand Russell’s classic anti-theist work Why
I Am Not a Christian . Religion, wrote Hitchens, is violent,
irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry, and
invested in ignorance. Guilty of misogyny, child abuse and fraud on a
monumental scale, “it is a plagiarism of a plagiarism, hearsay of a
hearsay, an illusion of an illusion.”
More specifically, he said religion misrepresents the origins of
humankind and the cosmos, demands unreasonable suppression of human
nature, inclines people to violence and blind submission to authority
and expresses hostility to free inquiry.
It’s obvious that after unleashing such violence against a belief
system adhered to or practised by over 90% of the world, Hitchens
would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the source of such belief
— God — and pronounce that, under the circumstances, He couldn’t
possibly be great by any stretch of imagination.
And right he would be. For anyone who manages to wade through the
litany of physical and mental savagery perpetrated in the name of
faith down the ages should, logically, come to the same conclusion. Is
it any wonder then that hostile reviewers (many of those too) didn’t
acknowledge this fact but instead attacked the author of shoddy
research, sloppy erudition, sly distortions, misrepresentation of
scriptures and juvenile characterisation of religious belief. Some of
this criticism was correct but completely dodged the issue enfolded in
the provocative title.
Because where Hitchens is wrong is that God — if such a thing exists,
of course — doesn’t have to be great. The mistake lies in providing
Him, Her or It with a superhuman attribute that can be equated with
comic book characters like Wonder Woman or Spiderman, forgetting in
the process that something which is capable of creating whole
universes would neither need such exaltation from a small planet nor
necessarily be honoured by it.
That same God would also have to be intimately associated with
everything happening in the cosmos including, as far as our recent
existence goes, what we perceive as good and what we think of as evil.
Turns out, all Hitchens was doing was demolishing a very simple-minded
notion with an equally simple-minded rebuttal.
bademiyansubhanallah
A Pooh sequel after 80 years
FELICIA R. LEE
A man takes the Winnie-the-Pooh book, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood,
at a London bookshop . (Reuters)
New York, Oct. 5: Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the first
authorised sequel to the A. A. Milne classic Winnie-the-Pooh books in
more than 80 years, was released today, inviting the question, “Why
now?,” as well as, “Why do it at all?”
“Some people said it shouldn’t be done, and there will still be some
of that now, this feeling that this is a gleaming jewel in the world
of children’s books and don’t mess around with it,” Michael Brown,
chairman of the Pooh Properties Trust, said of creating the sequel.
“This doesn’t damage the original stories at all, though, and allows
us to continue the stories in a world of kindness, cheerfulness,
laughter and fun.”
A less sanguine assessment came from Elizabeth Bluemle, a children’s
book author, co-owner of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne,
Vermont, and president of the Association of Booksellers for Children.
Spinoffs and sequels tend to be “thin soup”, she said in an email
message, and can keep children away from the original, better-written
books.
The new Pooh book has plenty of Pooh-related company: books, feature
films, television shows, video games, many of which stray far from
authentic Milne and are not overseen by the trust. The Walt Disney
Company holds the Pooh merchandising rights.
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, with 10 stories, is by David
Benedictus, an English writer whose work includes several novels.
Illustrations are by Mark Burgess, an English writer and illustrator
of many children’s books.
Published by Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young
Readers Group, Return has a robust first printing of 300,000 copies in
16 languages.
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
bademiyansubhanallah
A MAN OUT OF HIS TIME
- Manu Shroff was an ironist worth chuckling with
Writing on the wall
Ashok V. Desai
IG Patel is a legend. He was the chief economist in the finance
ministry in the 1960s. He left, rather than serve, a corrupt minister
Indira Gandhi appointed in the ministry. Later on, he became governor
of the Reserve Bank and director of the London School of Economics. To
cap it, he wrote some entertaining memoirs when he retired to his home
town, Gujarat.
He had a friend who also retired to Baroda, and built a house within a
stone’s throw from IG’s. This friend too was an economist, and spent
the best years of his life working in the finance ministry with IG. He
did not receive accolades like IG; in fact, he was largely unknown
except to aficionados of the finance ministry and of economic policy.
After retiring from the finance ministry, he became editor of the
Economic Times. Anyway, the liaison, not surprisingly, did not last
long.
I knew Manu Shroff since I spent some time in the 1960s in Delhi. I
was always impressed by his robust common sense and sound judgment,
and thought it went well with his low-key, unassuming personality.
Then I left for other parts of the world, and he for Bombay and
Baroda, so I did not see much of him.
I had seen virtually nothing written by him, and had assumed that this
refusal to express himself was a part of his modesty. But that was a
misjudgment. A bureaucrat writes reams in his lifetime; it is just
that it is buried in files and never sees the light of day. And there
is a convention that it must stay in files and cannot be published.
Thus it is that the wisdom of some highly intelligent people remains
buried — amongst them, Amar Nath Verma, L.K. Jha and Manu Shroff.
It would be hard to retrieve the writings of such a retiring
economist, but Deena Khatkhate has, in a labour of love, collected the
writings of Manu Shroff (Indian Economy: A Retrospective View,
Academic Foundation, 2009, Rs 295). It is disappointing but natural
that it contains nothing from Manu Shroff’s time as a bureaucrat.
Khatkhate calls it a retrospective view, but what I found remarkable
was the absence of the retrospective: there is nothing in this volume
that would throw light on what Manu Shroff thought of his time in the
finance ministry, of the economic problems he encountered while there,
why the government did what it did then, and what he thought of the
policies he helped sculpt.
That matters, not because the policies were much to boast about — I
think the years from the 1950s to the 1970s were lost decades, and
that stupid socialist dogma set India back thirty years. Nor would
they be anything to write home about; if Manu Shroff was an architect
of the disastrous policies of that time, then he might as well pass
into oblivion with the lost decades.
But he was not. He was an intelligent liberal. He was devastatingly
critical of the socialist era. This volume contains a response Manu
Shroff wrote to Deepak Nayyar’s 1993 critique of the reforms. I was
then in the finance ministry, and gave a hand in designing the
reforms. Deepak Nayyar was chief economic advisor in the finance
ministry during the 1980s. That does not mean that he was responsible
for the payments crisis of 1989-91. But he was an important member of
the team that made an ineffectual response to the crisis. Eventually,
all those who dealt with the crisis and failed, from V.P. Singh and
Chandra Shekhar down to Deepak Nayyar, were swept aside. Narasimha Rao
came in together with Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram, jettisoned
the hallowed policies of controls, and heralded the period of high
growth and increasing openness that continues till today. Being in the
government, I was gagged; but even if I had been able to, I could not
have given a better response to Deepak Nayyar. Manu Shroff summarizes
Nayyar’s attack in ten points and dissects them; in the end, nothing
is left.
I have just been to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and witnessed the
deliberations that went on there about what to do with the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and how to give them
more funds. I was disappointed but not surprised that Manu Shroff
participated in the same debates 30 years earlier, as a paper from the
1970s shows. The idea was then, and still is, that developing
countries are subject to peculiar balance of payments problems. Since
they do not produce capital goods and goods in which there are
important economies of scale, their growth is highly import-intensive.
And since they export mostly primary goods, their exports are highly
inelastic. So to develop, they need aid of two sorts. They need
temporary loans to support their balance of payments, and they need
aid for long-term investment to change their production profile. The
International Monetary Fund was designed to give the first, and the
World Bank to give the second. But giving money to developing
countries is risky, so the IMF and the World Bank cannot easily raise
money from the market. If they cannot, they must be given money by
industrial countries. Developing countries like that idea; industrial
countries do not. They meet every once in a while in nice places like
Washington and Pittsburgh, argue and then go their own way. Manu
Shroff took part in those civilized debates in the 1970s; I watched
them from the sidelines in 2009. Some things will never change.
If economists have to think and talk about such serious issues for
decades without reaching any solution, their lives must be depressing;
one might wonder why they do not commit suicide. The remedy lies in a
sense of humour. Manu Shroff had a distinctive line in irony. Take,
for instance, what he has to say about Savak Tarapore, a grey eminence
of the Reserve Bank of India: “He has been generally conservative.
Though one notices an occasional uncharacteristic boldness, which can
perhaps be ascribed to the state of ‘nivrutti’, which he enjoys like
many of us.”
Manu Shroff is essential reading for understanding the economic
history of our times; and more remarkably, it is entertaining reading.
Reading his writings, I was often struck by how similarly we thought,
and how he often put something better than I would. Then I thought,
here is a man who could have done just the reforms we did in the
1990s; perhaps he could have done them better. He could have become a
celebrity. It was just his misfortune that he was born at the wrong
time, and served the wrong government.
But I doubt if he would have looked at it that way. He would have had
no regrets. He might have taken some satisfaction in the fact that he
did his job competently and conscientiously, he might have chuckled at
some of the human follies he encountered. He does that often in this
book, and he is worth chuckling with.
bademiyansubhanallah
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
Is it merely a coincidence that some of the greatest men in the
history of Western culture were unmarried? wonders Satrujit Banerjee
Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
If you were asked to name the leading lights of Western philosophy
down the ages, the following will, without doubt, feature prominently:
Friedrich Nietzsche, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Benedict de
Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, John Locke and David
Hume. Any listing of great historians, novelists and poets of Europe
will feature Samuel Butler, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Gibbon, Oliver
Goldsmith, Washington Irving, Franz Kafka, Charles Lamb, T.E.
Lawrence, Henry James, Alexander Pope, Marcel Proust, Stendhal and
Jonathan Swift. When citing great composers of Western classical
music, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van
Beethoven can never be overlooked. Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh,
Michelangelo, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Leonardo da Vinci would
grace any shortlist of immortal painters and sculptors not only of
Europe but also of the entire world. Talking of scientists, among
household names are Nicolaus Copernicus, René Descartes, Galileo
Galilei, Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton. Now add to this already
impressive list, the economist, Adam Smith, and Giacomo Casanova —
better known as a womanizer but who authored arguably the most
authentic source of customs and norms of European social life during
the 18th century — and the entire list reads like a roll-call of the
architects of Western civilization.
Incidentally, some insist, not surprisingly, that they were all
bachelors. And if one were to take into consideration the immense
contributions of the many (ostensibly) celibate medieval monks and
theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham,
Desiderius Erasmus and Michael Servetus, who were instrumental in
dragging Europe out of the dark Age of Faith and paving the way for
the glorious Renaissance, then a clearer picture emerges of the vital
role unmarried men played in this remarkable journey.
“Woman inspires us to great things,” remarked Alexandre Dumas, “and
prevents us from achieving them.” The bitter Nietzsche considered
marriage (if not women, in general) to be a distraction from
philosophical pursuits. Many other eminent men may not have been
bachelors, but were effectively single — in the way Benjamin Franklin,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Milton, Thomas Paine or Shakespeare
remained. “Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the
public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men,” wrote
Francis Bacon, not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were. “Love is
an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” notes Goethe. “A confusion of
the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”
Some years ago, a noted Japanese researcher analysed the biographical
data of some 280 famous scientists and discovered that they all peaked
professionally in their twenties, beyond which their careers spiralled
downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in
productivity. However, those who never married remained highly
productive well into their fifties. One theory suggests that married
men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard — that is, to
attract females. More likely is the fact that they lack the time and
solitude. The polymath and eminent critic, George Steiner, observed,
“Philosophy is an unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession.
Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There
is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs Plato or a
Mme Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.”
The single life may be ideal for a Copernicus or a Sartre, but isn’t
there some truth in the old Puritan notion that the bachelor is a
menace to society? In Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human
Fertility, Germaine Greer notes that “the most threatened group in
human society, as in animal societies, is the unmated male: the
unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or
dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at
work, and he is considered a poor credit risk”. Also, there is a
school of thought which holds, with some justification, that the
female, in her dual tasks as mother and wife, plays a crucial role in
tempering the testosterone-fuelled excesses of the young male, and are
the carriers of morality and the shapers of the next generation. The
French diplomat, Talleyrand, may be one of the most versatile and
influential personalities in European history, but he is also
remembered as a womanizer. He reasoned that the married man was the
steady one: “a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
But the other common belief that men need durable ties to women to
discipline themselves for civilized life is debatable as women’s
attitude to life has changed drastically in recent times. Women now
argue that they, too, are equally in need of the good old civilizing
influence as much as the men.
It is easy to adopt an iconic view of the bachelor — a resigned cynic
or hopeless romantic, a man of infinite sorrow and sophistication, of
real or imagined conquests, or the misanthropic bar-room brawler. But,
in fact, no single image prevails. What could be more bittersweet than
the memories of unrequited love nursed by an old bachelor? Irving was
one well acquainted with this sentiment: “With married men their
amorous romance is apt to decline after marriage…but with a bachelor,
though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out
again in transient flashes.”
Times have changed, but not quite to the bachelor’s advantage. Old dad
is unable to work overtime because he has promised to run Missy to her
ballet class and Master to his football practice. He is reluctant to
leave town because the Missus has been tetchy about his too-frequent
travel, and likes to remind him that she too works, and how unfair it
is to expect her to do it all. The bachelor, by contrast, is believed
to have few responsibilities and can work as many hours as needed or
cover for his married colleagues, particularly for the much maligned
mothers on the staff.
One enduring myth holds that the bachelor is an expert on the female
sex, a legend encouraged by the married H.L. Mencken, “the sage of
Baltimore”, who affirmed that “Bachelors know more about women than
married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too”. The story further
goes that the bachelor’s married friends seldom speak of their
troubles, though their eyes betray a deep-rooted sorrow and a tragic
lonesomeness, not least due to an unfilled desire for male
companionship. “If you are afraid of loneliness,” warned the famous
Russian doctor-turned-story-teller, Anton Chekhov, “don’t marry.”
bademiyansubhanallah
At Tihar, Naxal leader writing book on dead wife
Abhishek Sharan, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, October 05, 2009
First Published: 00:39 IST(5/10/2009)
Last Updated: 00:41 IST(5/10/2009)
Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy, who is currently lodged in Tihar Jail,
has decided to write a book in the memory of his wife and comrade
Anuradha Shanbag.
On April 12 last year, his wife died due to cerebral malaria while
staying ‘underground’ at an undisclosed location in the Naxal
stronghold of Chhattisgarh.
The prison authorities have given the politburo member of the banned
CPI (Maoist) enough space by giving him a cell completely to himself.
Normally, four inmates share a cell in Tihar.
The London-educated leader’s two-room cell also has an attached
bathroom and toilet.
Superintendent Manoj Dwivedi of Sub-jail number 3 said, “Kobad Ghandy
told us that he needed space and a relative calm, which was not
possible in a typical cell for an under trial like him having four
inmates, to concentrate on writing the book.”
Acceding to his “request” on “humanitarian grounds”, the jail
administration accommodated Ghandy’s cellmates (three) to another
cell.
Shanbag, wife of 63-year-old Ghandy, who was in-charge of expanding
the party in urban areas and played a crucial role in getting
international recognition for the party, was herself a revolutionary,
as Ghandy described her to the jail officials.
He told them that she was the lone female member of the central
committee of the CPI (Maoist) and had married him in 1983.
Ghandy is expected to reminisce in his book his and Shanbag's years of
“struggle for the disempowered” in Maharashtra and Chattisgarh.
Ghandy has already been provided plain sheets of paper and writing
material, the jail superintendent said.
He has not sought any reading materials from the sub-jail’s library
though.
“Our library is very basic, meant for the semi-educated inmates that
usually abound here. It’s not for an intellectual like Ghandy who can
write a book himself, not just read them,” said Dwivedi.
He added that Ghandy does not mix much with other inmates.
“They have no time for somebody like Ghandy and call men like him
‘mental’,” he said.
Ghandy, who is afflicted with prostate cancer and cardiac problems,
has been referred to the jail’s hospital for “routine treatment” by
the doctors at Gobind Ballabh Pant Hospital.
The latter, despite Ghandy’s request, maintained that there was no
need as of now to admit him in their hospital, said the jail official.
The official said, “Ghandy alleges the Pant hospital doctors acted at
the behest of the Delhi police and fears he might be taken in police
custody by the Special Cell.”
Ghandy has been charged with provisions of the central Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Act.
chhotemianinshallah
100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
by Martin Seymour-Smith
Note: This list is in chronological order. I've gotten e-mails from
people who complain that there are too many religious books on the
list. Say what you want, but you cannot deny that religion has been
influential in human history. I'm sure that's what Seymour-Smith had
in mind.
See the Great Books FAQ for more about the Great Books and these lists
of them.
1.The I Ching
2.The Old Testament
3.The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
4.The Upanishads
5.The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
6.The Avesta
7.Analects, Confucius
8.History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
9.Works, Hippocrates
10.Works, Aristotle
11.History, Herodotus
12.The Republic, Plato
13.Elements, Euclid
14.The Dhammapada
15.Aeneid, Virgil
16.On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17.Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18.The New Testament
19.Lives, Plutarch
20.Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21.The Gospel of Truth
22.Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
23.Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24.Enneads, Plotinus
25.Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
26.The Koran
27.Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28.The Kabbalah
29.Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30.The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31.In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32.The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
33.On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34.Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35.Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36.On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
37.Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38.Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
39.The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40.Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41.The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
42.Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43.Discourse on Method, René Descartes
44.Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45.Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46.Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47.Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48.Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
49.Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
50.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51.The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
52.The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53.A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54.The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55.A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56.Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57.Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58.An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
Adam Smith
59.The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward
Gibbon
60.Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
61.Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62.Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63.Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64.An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65.An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
66.Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67.The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68.Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69.On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70.Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71.The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels
72."Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau
73.The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin
74.On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75.First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76."Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel
77.War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78.Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79.Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80.The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81.Pragmatism, William James
82.Relativity, Albert Einstein
83.The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84.Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
85.I and Thou, Martin Buber
86.The Trial, Franz Kafka
87.The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
88.The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard
Keynes
89.Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90.The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91.The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92.Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93.Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
94.Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
95.Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96.Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
98.The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99.Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao
Zedong
100.Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Seymour-Smith, Martin. 100 Most Influential Books Ever
Written. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1998. © 1998 Martin Seymour-
Smith
The content of this page may belong to the author. The transcription,
however, is the result of my research and hard work. It may not be
reposted on any Web site, newsgroup, mailing list, or other publicly
available electronic format. Please link to this page instead.
-----
First posted: December 2002
Updated: March 25, 2008
Praise? Blame? Advice? Comments? Send me your thoughts
URL: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtinfluential.html
bademiyansubhanallah
An open mind to carry oneself
Radhika Mimani
First Published : 06 Oct 2009 12:13:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 06 Oct 2009 02:18:52 PM IST
The need for self-approval is striking at times. And ‘striking’ in all
its senses. ‘Fashion is being comfortable in your own skin’, is a
rather clichéd definition. Moreover, the irony is that it has nothing
to do with those saying it. After all, who isn’t comfortable in
designer skins, when others lurk at your haute couture with jealousy?
A few evenings back at an uptown bar, my husband made a rather
startling behavioural observation under the gleam of neon lights and
sound of experimental DJ music. Every time a swanky woman entered the
lounge, heads turned and eyes stared. But the interesting part is that
this head count had more women than men. No, there is no issue of
lesbianism here (we already have an overdose of reports on it).
Women have their own reasons to look with interest at other women.
Fashion feisty that we have grown; it matters if my Gucci is better
than her Prada or her Dior outshines my Chanel. In addition, the
accompanying paraphernalia of fashion is ever growing. After all,
girls will be girls. From stilettos to hand bags, bracelets to
chandeliers (they have found their place from our ceilings to the ears
as well) it all counts. I have myself indulged in such conversations
at parties and know others do as well. Just as you take the glass to
the lips and turn around, you see another guest entering and between
the sip you mutter, “Oh! What a gauche she looks”. Suddenly there is a
glint in your eyes. The tackily dressed guest gives you a double
bonanza. Firstly, you get something to gossip about and secondly,
secretly it boosts your confidence and ego. One less to compete in
style and panache.
Funny as it may sound, we spend half a fortune for our outfits to
become conversational topics at social evenings. Well, I myself revel
in such trivialities. However, that is how our sensibility and
sensitivity have evolved. There is another interesting insight in the
fairer sex behaviour. While in her late twenties and early thirties,
basking in the prime of her youth, a woman desires to catch every
man’s fancy. The same is also true of the men folk at this age, which
is attracting the opposite sex. However, with time and age while most
men grow out of this vanity, women change their target. Now the
purpose of all embellishments and adornments is to attract every other
woman’s attention. Yes, it is somewhat conceit but gratifies us
nevertheless.
Whether you are a human rights activist, or an art aficionado, a
litterateur or a socialite, what you wear and how you wear should say
it all. And bling! Do it all with élan. Make a statement but the trick
is to do it without words. I guess it is here that style and fashion
diverge. Style defines the individual while fashion defines the
designer. Our excessive fancy and over experimentation with fashion
rather leaves us a nonentity. Stendhal, the great French writer
remarked, “Only great minds can afford simple style.” I believe it is
true because while great minds have strikingly fashionable ideas and
thoughts, we are still hankering about Fall Winter Collection 2009.
Maybe we hide our unimaginativeness behind the façade of ensembles and
accessories. Gail Rubin Bereny said, “Above all, remember that the
most important thing that you can take anywhere is not a Gucci bag or
French cut jeans; it’s an open mind.”
bademiyansubhanallah
Behind brand Booker
ANURADHA ROY
Unpredictable, arbitrary, unreliable…The Man Booker Prize may be all
that and more. Yet, for 40 years, it has unfailingly picked winners
that have staying power. Who will win it this October 6?
Market forces and media pressures …have made a competitive sport out
of literary awards, and the run-up to the Booker smells more of a
soccer game than a salon.
Photo: AP
The literary award as a competitive sport: The judges for the Man
Booker Prize (from left) John Mullan, Lucasta Miller, Chair James
Naughtie, Sue Perkins, and Michael Prodger with the shortlisted
novels.
There will be five exhausted writers in search of refuge on October 6,
2009. A sixth will be the ecstatic, just-crowned winner of this year’s
Man Booker Prize.
The practice of releasing a Booker longlist of 12 to 13 books began in
2001; after a month, it is winnowed down to a shortlist. The six
shortlisted authors have another month to wait before the prize is
announced. This month passes in a maelstrom of speculation, betting
and controversies, taut with delight and terror. Although, as 1996
winner Graham Swift said, “Prizes don’t make writers ... and writers
don’t write to win prizes,” the pressure is monstrous. This year’s
favourite, Hilary Mantel, describes her state of mind thus: “By the
time the shortlist is released you simply don’t know what to do with
yourself. You realise that, in effect, by becoming a writer you have
agreed to sit exams all your life ... the more public the process is,
the more cruel.”
When the first Booker was awarded in 1969 to P. H. Newby, the process
of choosing a winner was neither as interminable nor as public. Market
forces and media pressures in the intervening 40 years have made a
competitive sport out of literary awards, and the run-up to the Booker
smells more of a soccer game than a salon. Bookies change the stakes
every day. The judges are judged. Blogs are on fire. Authors make
provocative statements. This year, A.S. Byatt has worried that “...the
increasing appearance of ‘faction’ — mixtures of biography and
fiction, journalism and invention... feels like the appropriation of
others’ lives and privacy.” Is this an attempt to guillotine her
rival, Hilary Mantel, whose shortlisted book, Wolf, is about Henry
VIII and Cromwell? (Ironically, Byatt’s Possession, which won in 1990,
drew on the life of Robert Browning.)
Controversial
The Booker thrives on controversy, and its downfall is regularly
forecast. In previous years, columnists have railed against
shortlisted novels written “for prizes”. By this they meant less-than-
gripping novels about war/ genocide/ terrorism/racism. Jock Campbell,
who started the Booker foundation in the 1940s — initially to provide
a tax haven for his friend Ian Fleming — grumbled some years ago that
the modern literary novel needed “better story-lines”. In1996, A.N.
Wilson mourned the demise of the Booker in a newspaper article.
Columnists have claimed that the Booker no longer makes a difference
to sales. When Keri Hulme’s The Bone People was published, its print-
run was 800 copies, and one review called it a “disaster”. After it
won, it sold 34,000 copies. No longer, said journalists: the Booker
was losing its alchemic touch. Because it went year after year to
worthy novels nobody enjoyed reading, people had stopped buying
shortlisted books.
This year, one columnist has called the shortlist a “literary
staycation” — when Irish, Commonwealth and British writers are all
eligible, five of the shortlisted authors are home-grown, and
historical fiction focused on Britain dominates (see box). If Adiga’s
The White Tiger (India/ poverty/ class war) had come out this year,
where would it be? If Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (Afghanistan/
terrorism) or Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (Pakistan/ Hiroshima/
terrorism) had been published last year, they may have been guaranteed
shortlist slots. For authors, it’s the luck of the draw.
How reliable then is the Booker as branding for literary fiction? Can
it remain the Levis of the English literary world?
If anything appears consistent, it is the unpredictability of the
Booker. A Nobel for literature is given for the life’s work of a
writer, not for one book. About 160 major libraries across the world
nominate novels for the longlist of Dublin’s Impac Award. The Costa is
given in five categories, First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and
Children’s Book. The Orange Prize too has a separate First Book
category.
Arbitrary
The Booker has no categories, there is just the one big prize. (It
might be argued that this “All or Nothing” is what creates an extra
frisson.) There are no set criteria. Everything depends on the year’s
five judges, who admit that the selection process is subjective. Their
tastes, and their power-games, decide writers’ destinies. One judge,
Joanna Lumley, described the “so-called bitchy world of acting” as “a
Brownie’s tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of
publishing.”
Judges have themselves been controversial. The year Naipaul won (for
In a Free State), Malcolm Muggeridge resigned as a judge, “nauseated
and appalled” by the submissions. Kingsley Amis was shortlisted when
his wife was one of the judges. The critic James Wood recommended a
novel by Clare Messud to his fellow judges, neglecting to mention that
she was his wife. In 1993, the publisher Anthony Cheetham called the
judges “a bunch of wankers” for not shortlisting Vikram Seth’s A
Suitable Boy.
The process is arbitrary from the start: novels can be submitted for
the prize only by publishers. Authors cannot enter their own books.
Each publisher is allowed to submit two titles. (Past winners are
automatically considered, and judges can call for a few titles.)
Gossip networks claimed that Rushdie made it a contractual obligation
for his publisher to submit The Enchantress of Florence. What of
writers like Yann Martel (winner, 2002), whose The Life of Pi was a
first book? Would it even have been submitted for the prize if,
instead of a small press in Edinburgh, the book had come out from a
monolith dominated by literary superstars? Another debut, Adiga’s The
White Tiger (winner, 2008), was published by an independent press with
a small list — one reason it was submitted for the prize at all.
Test of time
Whatever its drawbacks, for 40 years, the Booker has picked novels
with staying power. All but one of the winners remain in print, when
forests of fiction are turned into paper bags. For Indians writing in
English, the Man Booker Prize is among the richest, most prestigious
prizes for which they are eligible. Apart from the prize money, film
deals can follow, publishing contracts become more lucrative, the
author’s life changes.
Exactly how transformational is the Booker? Here is Sebastian Barry,
on being shortlisted last year:
“As usual, there is no one in the house when you need to tell someone
something urgently. There is a silence and a gap and a happiness. It
is almost odd to be so happy, because a lot of literary experience is
like boxing. Once you’ve had a few KOs against you, you tend to go
quiet in the face of any possible victory. But again the Booker seems
to brush all that aside. You’re a Blakean kid again, with all your
experience perhaps, but something else again. There is a tincture of
newness, new territory, impossible good luck ...”
bademiyansubhanallah
Booker shortlist 2009
NEEL MUKHERJEE.
Short takes on this year’s nominations by novelist
A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book. Byatt visits the Edwardian era in her
complex and layered novel on the intertwined fates of two artistic
families, the Wellwoods and the Fludds, and delivers a devastating
novel about childhood and its loss. It is also a characteristically
dense Byatt novel: by the time you finish it, you have learnt
everything about the Edwardian period that there is to know.
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime. The third instalment in the trilogy of
“fictionalised memoir” that includes Boyhood and Youth, Summertime
involves an English biographer’s research into the artistically
critical years, 1972-77, of the late South African writer John
Coetzee. Playful, elusive, yet unrelentingly honest, Summertime makes
a ringing claim for the truth that only fiction can tell.
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze. Foulds’s second novel, written in
lyrical, restrained prose of near-perfection, is a deceptively slim
book about the incarceration of the 19th-century nature poet John
Clare in an asylum in Epping Forest in the late 1830s. It is also a
subtle meditation on the mysterious nature of the creative process.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Mantel’s novel about Thomas Cromwell follows
him from his shadowy origins as a blacksmith’s son in Putney to his
elevation as the indispensable right-hand man of Henry VIII. The book
ends with the death of Thomas More in 1535, so there’s a follow-up on
its way; Cromwell lived until 1540. Nothing like this book exists in
contemporary English writing: its history is so deeply inhabited, its
narration in terms of both point of view and style so utterly
original, that it animates the Tudor era miraculously.
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room. Viktor and Liesel Landauer have architect
Rainer von Abt build them a modernist masterpiece, Der Galsraum, in
Czechoslovakia. But this is the late 1930s and the Landauers flee the
country as Nazis take over their house of dreams. The whole troubled
history of the 20th century then unfolds through reflection in the
Glass Room.
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger. Waters does the ghost story in this
novel about a working-class country GP, Dr. Faraday, visiting a
patient in Hundreds Hall, the seat of the Ayres family, now fallen on
hard times. The year is 1947, the patient is a 14-year-old skivvy, and
there are inexplicable and spooky goings-on in the Georgian manor
house. Waters is scalpel-sharp in her dissection of post-war class
hierarchies and attitudes.
Neel Mukherjee is the author of the novel, Past Continuous, which own
the Crossword Award, 2009.
bademiyansubhanallah
Hilary Mantel wins Booker for 16th century tale
STAFF WRITER 10:3 HRS IST
Prasun Sonwalkar
London, Oct 7 (PTI) In a short-list bereft of Indian writers, this
year's Man Booker prize has gone to British novelist Hilary Mantel for
her gripping 16th century tale titled 'Wolf Hall'.
Mantel, 57, received 50,000 pounds as prize money last night in what
is considered one of the English-speaking world's most prestigious
literary prizes.
Indian writers such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Aravind Adiga and
Arundhati Roy have previously won the prize but this year's shortlist
did not feature any Indian.
Other writers who made the short list this year were A S Byatt, J M
Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters.
'Wolf Hall' is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas
Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.
Sid Harth
October 6, 2009...11:59 pm
Discovering Five Dials
by Raza Rumi
‘We’d love to have more people from Pakistan writing for and reading
the magazine’
It was quite soothing to come across a delightful publication entitled
Five Dials — a free, beautifully produced magazine. The current issue
available at www.fivedials.com includes a piece by the young novelist
Ali Sethi who has written a novel at an extraordinary age of 24. The
piece delves into the reaction of author once he encounters the
desolation at Shah Jamal’s shrine in Lahore.Shah Jamal’s shrine has
also been associated with the great Pappu Sain dhol wala.
I am publishing the small post on Five Dials in its own voice to make
the description of the magazine a little more familiar and immediate
than a boring review. I am grateful to Craig Taylor for helping me in
getting the introduction right.
Accessibility of Five Dials: As for new technology, Five Dials is a
very lean and flexible entity. We do not need to worry about paper
stock and production cost. Unlike Granta, we’re able to turn around
issues quickly and react to current events. (See the American election
issue, which came out days before Barack took the country.) The Five
Dials iPhone app is imminent and we have fans at Adobe who keep up
posted on what’s coming next and when that technology comes along,
we’ll be a in a good position to use it for our purposes. Most of all
we’re interested in inclusivity. I don’t care if readers use the
latest generation Blackberry or a souped up Commodore 64. They’re all
welcome.
How is Five Dials different: When we started this project I made sure
there would be no ads and no rule about publishing only Penguin
authors. Our readers are intelligent; they don’t want to subscribe to
a marketing magazine. Of course we can turn to a lot of amazing Hamish
Hamilton authors but the current issue also has contributions from
Geoff Dyer, Ellen Hinsey, Paul Davis and Lauren Elkin, none of whom
are Penguin authors. We’ve published first-time writers and writers we
like but can’t publish in book form at the moment. My favorite article
in this category was a dispatch from a young woman who grew up in the
US and Qatar and wrote about a Qatari wedding. We haven’t published a
book by her but we’ve shown interest in her as a developing writer by
placing her essay in Five Dials. So: everyone’s welcome. We’re
particularly interested in young writers from parts of the world that
demand reportage at the moment. Pakistan is a great example. We’d love
to have more people from Pakistan writing for and reading the
magazine.
Sid Harth
Give the devil its due14 Comments
I’m not the world’s greatest Times of India fan. I have frequently
been critical of many of the group’s initiatives. I opposed the shift
downmarket which influenced so many other newspapers. I was appalled
by the Times during the early years of the century when it was run by
brand managers. (Fortunately, editors seem to be back in charge
judging by the content in recent years). I remain bitterly opposed to
Medianet, which is a form of prostitution. And as a group, the Times
is petty and graceless.
But let’s give credit where credit is due. All of us who care about
newspapers and the printed word must appreciate the Times group’s
initiative in launching a Saturday paper called Crest (terrible name
though; sounds like a toothpaste) that has longer articles and aims to
provide a more intelligent alternative to the other Saturday papers.
You can argue about the quality of the first issue. I thought it was
badly let down by the design which is dull and unimaginative (page one
in particular is a disaster) for a product that is supposed to be
upmarket.
Some of the headlines were odd (only Bengalis seem to favour the word
‘frightful’ in headlines). And many of the articles had a haven’t-I-
read-this-before feeling about them.
But what you can’t argue with is this: as a concept it works.
Judging by the people I’ve spoken to, it has touched a chord with
middle class readers who have been depressed by the drop in quality in
national newspapers and who long for something that they can sink
their teeth into.
No doubt the early defects will be ironed out in the weeks ahead and
the paper will get better and better. Once that happens, it should
cause other newspaper groups to re-think their own offerings.
In particular, it should remind us that the Times group is the only
one in this country these days that has the guts and the resources to
grab an idea and run with it. The Saturday paper is one example. After
all, the idea is not new. The HT launched a Saturday paper long before
anybody else. And in the early days, under the editorship of Namita
Bhandare, it was easily the best paper in Delhi every Saturday.
Sadly, during the dark days of the Kalbag editorship, the Saturday
paper lost focus, Namita left because of her lack of respect for the
editor and the paper never quite recovered. At one stage, they even
removed the branding (though that I think was Pankaj Paul’s stupidity)
and turned it into just another daily paper.
Fortunately the new regime at the HT comprises real editors with skill
and imagination and so the Saturday paper has been relaunched with
great success. But unfortunately, the relaunch has been conducted
within the existing resources of the paper. So as good as the HT is on
Saturday is, it is not a 40-page special newspaper in the sense that
the Times of India’s offering is.
Call me biased but I would argue that page for page, the HT on
Saturday is still vastly superior to the new Times paper. However,
when readers are looking for a product that they can curl up with on
Saturdays, they want critical mass and the bulk of the Times’ new
offering will give them that.
(For those who don’t, the normal paper is still available).
Can the Times paper be a commercial success?
Frankly, I don’t know. What I do know is that it goes against the
tenets of current newspaper management. Editors are always being told
by managers that people no longer like reading, that all stories must
be very short and that light is better than substantial. If newspaper
managers had their way, then all articles would be the size of tweets.
Most newspaper managers worship the Times because they argue that the
group has redefined profitability in the industry. (They also love the
fact that the Times makes it clear that the executives are the bosses
and the journos are the minions.) I don’t know what they will make of
the new Saturday paper which totally bucks the conventional wisdom in
the industry. But I do know that because it is the Times of India,
they will have to take it seriously.
For the sake of the newspaper business I am happy to put aside all
Times versus HT rivalries and hope that the new paper does extremely
well. For many weeks I have been suggesting on this blog that there is
a new kind of reader emerging, the sort of chap who buys The
Argumentative Indian at traffic lights and who wants to use the
Internet to engage in some serious political debate. I feel that
Indian newspaper groups, run on the whole by executives who do not
like reading, are ignoring this development and wasting too much time
on the old let’s-take-it-downmarket model.
The new Times paper is a sort of test case for this view. If it does
succeed – which I think it will once it puts its editorial house in
order – then it will make all of us look at readers in a new light.
So, let’s wait and see.
Posted by Vir Sanghvi on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 8:05 pm
14 Responses to “Give the devil its due”
Anil Says:
September 29th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
There was one thing unique about TOI. The Laxman’s cartoons. Although
past his prime the common man still evokes a smile every morning !!
Anil Says:
September 29th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
MAn I woudl love to get my hands on that Saturday edition.. remidns me
of those old days when as a student I used to sit in my balcony with
those sepcial editions and a dictionary in tow. Once in a while
hurlign glance at the pretty damsel passing buy from behind the
goggles.
See the neuty of goggles you can be a peepign tom and yet come of as
someone who is too emersed in the article to notice the God’s best
creation passing by.
Since then thigns have changed and now all I get is perusal of article
on net and smoehow this doesn’t have the same touch. Somehow the cold
impersonal hello of neighbourhood ladies doesn’t feel the same as the
flirtatious gait of those damsels in Delhi. But then again I am no
longer 18 year old pretentious hunk (pardon the over-assessment)
anymore either.
Akhilesh Says:
September 30th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Dear Mr. Vir,
I guess this is what happened. You liked the concept of TOI’s Crest
edition immensely. You even liked the actual product.
But how does such a high profile former editor of HT praise anything
to do with TOI. It would be blasphemous. So you indulge in the time
tested method. First demonise almost everything that TOI stood for in
the past. Use as acerbic language as possible in a public forum to
denounce the group. And when it is established that you have
sufficiently bad mouthed the group, then only praise the latest effort
of TOI.
This way you can prove to HT owners (read Shobna Bhartia) that you
have not committed treachary and simultaneously prove to world outside
that you are a “statesmanly” editor !!
But one more question hangs in the balance : Why go to such lengths to
praise a rival paper’s initiative? Why not simply let it lie or ignore
it ?
My theory : You are no longer the editor of HT but a kind of a super
advisor ( Editorial Director). Not exactly an excutive post but I
would presume a mostly ornamental post. Like being elevated to Vice
Presidentof India from being Prime Minister !
Time to move on !. And what better than to do something that no one
has done before? Become the editor of Times of India.
And thus this praise of TOI and obvious hints that give me a chance
and I can improve the Crest edition further.
And thats why this last line in your blog : “it does succeed – which I
think it will once it puts its editorial house in order “. Guess who
can put that editorial house in order ? Obviously not the existing
fools but some one new.
Think about the epigraph that your future biographics may write :
“Vir Sanghvi the brilliant thought leader who went on to edit both the
Times of India and the Hindustan Times, two newspapers known for their
legendary rivaalry. But his talent surpassed even this vast gulf.”
Go for it Vir. I as a life time reader of TOI would love to see you
there.
Rajeev Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 2:10 am
I guess he has lost his interest in job. We may see him carrying
Rahul’s briefcase in future elections just like Rajiv Shukla.
Pankaj Says:
September 30th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
what can we expect from someone who works for HT.
TOI is a competitoer and they are not in congress’s puppet as Sanghvi
and HT/CNN-ibN are…
Stuff you!
Ishmart Alec Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
We all know that TOI and HT are not competitors in the real sense as
far as ownership pattern is concerned.
As far as TOI, journalists have a term for TOI amongst their circle
that starts with “The OLDEST ********** in India”. Need I say more.
Much of the content, as many of my editor friends proudly flaunt
thinking that i respect them, are politically motivated, blackmail by
editors, affiliations to organizations etc. That explains the
frontpage converage for modi’s pic that was really uncalled for. After
Akshardham, I fail to recollect any terrorist attack happen on Gujrat
Soil. (Pardon me if I miss out on some event). Whereas mumbai has a
calendar list of blasts. Need i say more. Demonization through mind
games is TOI’s forte.
http://mywriterkeeda.wordpress.com
DR.KAZMI Says:
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
VIR, LET ME START BY SAYING THAT I AM A FAN OF YOUR AND REGULARLY READ
YOUR COLUMS IN HT. MY REQUEST TO YOU IS TO START A BLOG ON THE
PROBLEMS FACING THE COUNTRY, AND ALSO TO WRITE MORE FREQUENTLY THAN
YOUR SUNDAY COUNTERPOINT. IF YOU CAN BRING TO LIGHT ,THE DAMAGE
SOMEONE LIKE RAJ THAKAY IS DOING TO INDIAN UNITY, HE IS ACTING LIKE
HITLER. TODAY I WAS SHOCKED TO HEAR IN THE NEWS THAT KARAN JOHAR WENT
TO HIM TO APOLOGISE FOR SAYING THE WORD BOMBAY INSTED OF MUMBAI IN HIS
MOVIE. HE SHOULD BE LOCKED BEHIND BARS, BUT UNFORTUNATELY IN OUR
COUNTRY PEOPLE LIKE MODI AND RAJ THAKRAY ARE NEVER BROUGHT TO BOOK FOR
INCITING VOILENCE. REGARDS
DR.KAZMI
ripal mehta Reply:
October 5th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
people like modi and raj?
what are you taking about ?? it seems you too have got carried away by
modi bashing of media.. no wonder your name says it all.. Shree shree
narendra modi has been elected thrice ( THRICE ) , so the people of
gujarat loves him and adore him, just because he refused to get
intimidated by media , the congress mouth piece media has gone after
him with embarassing failure, but this shameless media is stil after
him and never misses an opportunity to defame him . raj thackery is
another congress chamcha to help them garner votes. modi has never
spoken against any other language speaking people inspite of having
large marathi population in gujarat. what z the problem with you guys
huh? mr kazmi? what do you want him to do ? bash hindus? like these
congess walas does? that will make mr. modi secular? huh? have some
sense mr. kazmi …
DR.KAZMI Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY SAYING THAT MY NAME SAYS IT ALL, PLEASE
EALOBORATE. AND REGARDING MODI BEING ELECTED THRICE, EVEN HITLER WAS
ELECTED. BUT HISTORY HAS SHOWN US THAT SUCH PEOPLE ONLY BRING
DESTRUCTION TO THE COUNTRY. IT IS TIME PEOPLE LIKE YOU WAKE UP TO THE
THREAT PEOPLE LIKE MODI POSE TO OUR COUNTRY.
rhea singh Says:
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Dear Mr Sanghvi,
I am inclined to agree with you. Both the TOI and the HT are read in
my home. I find the TOI to be inferior to HT. Their daily supplement
is crude, vulgar and tasteless. After one such so called headline that
screamed Priety Zinta says ” I did rather be a bechari than a ***** “,
I went online and starting putting up my comments on their articles
and blogs - my attempts at ridiculing and shaming them a little. I
urged them to restrain - they have such a disturbing tabloid feel to
their content- all aimed at sales ofcourse. We have children at home
reading papers.
I have’nt read Crest - though it is a great idea because somewhere
they realized that people are not as dim witted as they thought.
People like to read things with a little more substance.
Where TOI scores is that online they are far easier to surf in terms
of their format. I have been a regular at their blogs simply because
the look is brighter and more clear than HT online.
I suggest you take a look and make changes because you are far
superior and would get many more viewers.
Regards,
Rhea Singh
PS- Take a look at Sherlyn Chopra’s blog at TOI. Its vulgarity would
surprise you.
Mr. K.SIngh Reply:
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Dear Ms. Rhea,
This is K.Singh. I just read your comment and totally agree with you
on the
contents and the quality of TOI. I too agree with you on the matter of
substance
which TOI perhaps cannot match up with HT and IE ( as per my opinion).
Please do read my statement which is just after you. We perhaps
missed each other’s statement by few mins. But I guess both are
talking
on the same line as I also agree with your facts which is also visible
in my
statement that TOI is more about good packaging than content.
Please do reply if you can after going through my statement as well,
I would be glad.
- Regards -
Mr. K.SIngh Says:
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Dear Mr. Sanghvi,
I really admire your views and in depth knowledge about various
tropics. I
agree that previously HT had this sort of paper and just to update you
that
even Indian Express group has been doing the same for quite sometime
now. If you can check Sunday’s edition of The Indian Express - “The
Sunday Express”
then you will see the same initiative but in a limited scale.
I would only recommend and add up to your comments that though HT &
The Indian Express
groups have been the original front runners of such initiatives but
now a days
it’s all about good packaging and branding practises. If you have a
baby exploit it
till it’s exposed enough to get attention from public. Hence, the TOI
have done the
same. They have simply segregated their baby from it’s original
parents and presented
it to the world to look at and admire. Trust me, they managed to get
the initial attention
from public.
However, such practises are missing with HT and IE. I liked when HT
did rebranding and
brought out the Delhi’s historial moments ( creation of Parliament
House - Rastrpati Bhawan
and some historical facts in written format) couple of month’s ago but
with HT that was the
only initiative I noticed after a long gap but that was along with
their own branding and completion
of certain number years celebration.
I would recommend in this compititive world their is no time to wait
and claim credits
for past. It’s still not late with HT and IE to open their eyes and
work on some of these factors
as these 2 Newspapers served India for quite a long time and are well
embedded into
our systems and known for their own contents and editorials.
I am sure you must have gone through this book but if not then will be
glad if you
can suggest management to go through it atleast and if you too can
read it ( I am sure you
must have read it but in case you missed it) and make them realise
that the business can
be run differently and by taking inititaives.
The book is : “The Blue Ocean Strategy”
-Regards-
Hemant Kapre Says:
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Dear Vir - let me begin in a pretty forthright manner. As someone
closely associated with the HT, you are scarcely expected to sing
paeans of praise for the TOI group. So, I find it hardly surprising
that you are critical of the TOI. Also the first step the TOI took
towards catering to the lowest common denominator was bringing out
that filmi supplement called Delhi Times (in Delhi) / Mumbai Times (in
Mumbai)…etc. And let me remind you that HT City was a desperate
response by the HT group to that move when it realized that it was the
LCD that was setting the cash registers ringing more often than not in
all media houses. So it sounds a bit “holier than thou” when you find
fault with the TOI on that.
Having said that, let me share that I personally prefer the Delhi HT
edition to the Delhi TOI edition (perhaps because HT city hasn’t
dumbed down to the depths that Delhi Times has). Another factor which
swings my vote in HT’s favour is Brunch. You ought to honour the
person who came up with the Brunch idea !
Mark Says:
October 7th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Vir… i respect the clarity of your mind / views. Let me repeat what
everyone knows and feels about today. The age of reading and writing,
i guess is passe. It is the time of talking over the mobile. Short
msgs., SMS-language (shorter than the telegraphic language). Grammar
has been thrown out into the dustbin. Kaam Ki Baat Chal Rahi Hai. The
pen is used only to sign “bank cheques”. So in the world of 2009, i am
sorry to say., but i say that within the next 20-25 years., print
media would be dead by 80%.
chhotemianinshallah
and Lies
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Interpreter of Maladies
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
ISBN: 9788172235024
Cover Price: Rs. 295.00
Format: Paperback
Extent: 208 pages
BOOK SUMMARY
Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant stories tell the lives of Indians in exile,
of people navigating between the strict traditions they've inherited
and the baffling New World they must encounter every day. An
interpreter guides an American family through the India of their
ancestors and hears an astonishing revelation, a young Midwestern
woman is drawn into a tantalizing affair with a married Bengali man,
the eccentric nervous Mrs Sen needs to learn to drive if she is to
keep her job minding eleven year old Eliot after school, a young
couple exchange confessions each night as they struggle to cope with
the loss of their baby and their baby and their failing marriage, and
Mr. Pirzada, whose watch is always set to Decca time, worries about
his family back in Pakistan.
Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant stories tell the lives of Indians in exile, of
people navigating between the strict traditions they've inherited and
the baffling New World they must encounter every day. An interpreter
guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and
hears an astonishing revelation, a young Midwestern woman is drawn
into a tantalizing affair with a married Bengali man, the eccentric
nervous Mrs Sen needs to learn to drive if she is to keep her job
minding eleven year old Eliot after school, a young couple exchange
confessions each night as they struggle to cope with the loss of their
baby and their baby and their failing marriage, and Mr. Pirzada, whose
watch is always set to Decca time, worries about his family back in
Pakistan.
http://www.harpercollins.co.in/MediaReview.asp?Book_Code=1336&Book_Title=Interpreter
of Maladies
chhotemianinshallah
Of Sadhus and Spinners
By: Bruce Bennett
Santosh K. Sareen
Susan Cowan
ISBN: 9788172238483
Cover Price: Rs. 295.00
Format: Paperback
Extent: 224 pages
BOOK SUMMARY
A fascinating range of encounters—mental, physical and spiritual—of
Australians with India over the past century and a half
Despite a shared history of British imperialism, and commonalities
like the English language, a democratic polity and a craze for
cricket, Australians and Indians know very little about each other. Of
Sadhus and Spinners attempts to correct this with a range of stories
that trace the chequered history of interactions between the two
nations.
From John Lang's 'The Mohammedan Mother' (1859) to Yasmine
Gooneratne's 'Masterpiece' (2002), the stories in this anthology bring
to the fore a variety of literary responses to Indo-Australian
encounters. There are stories here of Australian visitors to India and
stories about and by Indians—immigrants or temporary visitors—in
Australia.
Thoughtful, exploratory and often just wide-eyed in its observation of
strange new worlds, the anthology provides insights into an array of
fascinating cross-cultural encounters.
chhotemianinshallah
Can we judge books?
Mondy Thapar
October 06, 2009
First Published: 22:51 IST(6/10/2009)
Last Updated: 23:00 IST(6/10/2009)
By the time you read this, you’ve set off to buy Wolf Hall, Hilary
Mantel’s novel set in Tudor England, or Sarah Waters’s The Little
Stranger, a spooky story set in post-World War II England, or Adam
Foulds’s The Quickening Maze set in a mid-19th century English asylum,
or JM Coetzee’s Summertime, about a biographer researching on the late
writer JM Coetzee, or Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, set in pre-World
War II Czechoslovakia.
One of them has already won the 2009 Man Booker Award. With that will
come a two thumbs up that will convince us that his or her book is a
damn fine one. To a lesser extent, the books already shortlisted will
also be recommended reading for all of us. I have total respect for
the choice(s) made by the Booker jury. It’s still one of the best ways
to go about things — rather than the squabble between readers over
whether Ian McEwan’s 1998 Booker-winning Amsterdam is better than his
1997 non-Booker-winning Enduring Love. I have no issue with Booker
decisions, or those by juries of other awards. And no, I don’t only
read books set in my own surroundings of history or geography. Most of
my favourite books have nothing to do with India.
But I am a bit puzzled about the practice of Indian editions of books
available here — including those originally published in India — of
overwhelmingly carrying blurbs and lines of praise from foreign
reviews. The edition will have a roster from the Times, London, the
New York Times, the Independent, or other such worthy publication. The
desi lines of praise about a desi edition of even a desi book don’t
seem to matter much.
Is this because Indian readers of books in English have no clue about
what’s a good book and what’s a crap one until we are told by the
‘only real experts’ who are published in Western papers? Or is it
because our publishers know that what really matters for us desi book-
buyers is what the verdict is from London-New York.
Either way, there may be a case to try out a novel experiment: print a
smattering of blurbs from Indian reviews along with the foreign ones.
They may also be able to win the hearts and wallets of Indian book-
buyers. Who knows, maybe an Indian blurb can provide a different and
equally engaging hookline for many of us who are not necessarily
bewitched by the NYT bestseller list or other sacred recommendations.
chhotemianinshallah
ODE TO THE ART OF READING
Editor's choice
Kindred soul
Rick Gekoski is a former academic with a D.Phil in English from the
University of Oxford. He gave up his academic job to become a dealer
in rare books and manuscripts. He is also a passionate reader, and
this book brings together his reflections on some of the books that he
has read and has been influenced by at various phases of his life. The
term, “bibliomemoir”, is his own coinage but the genre is not an
unknown one. Alberto Manguel, Diana Athill and Anne Fadiman have all
excelled in this kind of writing about books and reading. The only
difference between them and Gekoski is that the latter, in keeping
with the conventions of writing memoirs, follows a strict
chronological line while writing about books and the impact they had
on his intellectual development.
After 25 years of marriage, Gekoski and his wife went through an
acrimonious divorce. One fallout of this was that his wife kept their
house and its contents. Gekoski was shocked when his wife claimed that
this included his books — a library built up over the years,
consisting of books read, marked and annotated. Gekoski initially felt
numb with shock, as if a part of him had been sawed away from him. But
after a few months, he felt a sense of release. He felt unencumbered.
With this came the realization that more than the possession of books,
what mattered was reading: “[it] has always mattered to me. I can’t
not do it, any more than I can stop eating or breathing. I can’t stop
reading without feeling anxious, and extinguished. I read, therefore I
am.” He felt that the books could not actually be taken away from him.
They were inside him, part of him. He was constituted by the books he
had read. Many, if not all, avid readers and book lovers will find in
Geksoki a kindred soul.
Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he began to understand how to
appreciate the poem; it was necessary to get oneself a different set
of lenses and critical tools than those that he had acquired in his
adolescence. It “required that one re-schooled oneself in the very art
of reading. And to do that you had to learn, too, how not to read.’’
From the US, he came up to Merton College in Oxford to ‘read’ for
D.Phil in English. This use of the word, read, was a revelation to
him. He discovered Yeats. But it was not poetry alone that held him.
He was influenced by Descartes and Hume and even A.J. Ayer. His
reading, as he reveals, was varied and often odd. But looking back he
discerns a pattern. He believes with Freud that nothing happens
without a reason. Reading, Gekoski tells his readers, “how we learn to
attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world. We are
made and continually transformed by what, and how, we read.’’
chhotemianinshallah
FICTIONEERING
- And the living isn’t easy
Summertime: Scenes from provincial life By J.M. Coetzee, Harvill
Secker, £8.75
Great writers have a way of arousing the most vulgar kinds of
curiosity in their hapless readers. This is partly because no truth is
too low to be the object of their steady Parnassian gaze. But there is
also the fact of the writers’ bottomless self-absorption. It is their
sublime vanity that teases these questions out of us, so that they can
then play with the answers, for the truth deserves nothing less than
the endless games of fiction. As questions go, nothing can be more
vulgar than ‘What is he like in bed?’ But I have often found myself
asking precisely this question when faced with the cold, grey ardour
of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. And Summertime has pleasured and
disconcerted me in equal measure with the directness — or seeming
directness — of the answer.
The protagonist of this book is a dead South African writer called
John Coetzee, whose English biographer, a shadowy “Mr Vincent”, is
going round the world interviewing his subject’s lovers, cousins,
colleagues and other associates. He wants to reconstruct the story of
a specific period in the life of John Coetzee from these interviews,
supplemented by the writer’s own notebook entries made intermittently
during these years. The period Vincent focuses on are the years
between 1972, when John returned to South Africa in a state of obscure
disgrace after working in England and America, and his first public
recognition in 1977, after Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country,
both of which are discussed in the Summertime interviews. This was the
time when John lived with his widowed father in the suburbs of Cape
Town; it was also the heyday of apartheid in South Africa. But
Vincent’s 2008 interview with Julia Frankl, now a therapist in Canada,
inevitably moves towards the affair she had had with John in the early
Seventies in Cape Town, when she was already married and the mother of
a child.
The love they made was adequate: he was competent, but impersonal.
There was an “autistic quality” to his operations. “I offer this not
as criticism but as a diagnosis,” Dr Frankl adds. Then she elaborates:
“Characteristically the autistic type treats other people as automata,
mysterious automata. In return he expects to be treated as a
mysterious automaton too. If you are autistic, falling in love
translates as being treated reciprocally as the inscrutable object of
the other’s desire. Two inscrutable automata having inscrutable
commerce with each other’s bodies: that was how it felt to be in bed
with John. Two separate enterprises on the go, his and mine. What his
enterprise was I can’t say, it was opaque to me. But to sum up: sex
with him lacked all thrill.” As prose, this is like Bach’s music
turning into the robotic precision of Steve Reich’s minimalist loops.
Indeed, music and sex come together in Julia’s subsequent relations
with John, and in a sharply alienating way for her, when he insists
that they “rut” to the beat of the slow movement of the Schubert
string quintet: “‘Empty your mind!’ he hissed at me. ‘Feel through the
music!’” Later, John explains to her that what it felt like to make
love in post-Bonaparte Austria could only be glimmeringly experienced
through Schubert’s music, “because the slow movement of the quintet
happens to be about fucking”. Julia’s resistance of, and lack of
response to, his post-coital sermon on “the history of feeling” bring
on “a sullen, defeated look” in John. But he refuses to fight back,
which infuriates her even more. She eventually works herself up to
throwing him out of her house that night, with his cassette player and
the Schubert tape, after throwing a plate at him: “Straight from the
heart! I said to myself. My first plate!”
Julia’s account of her sex-life with John achieves what was hitherto
unthinkable in Coetzee’s fiction, a sort of “dour comedy” that comes
from John accepting, in his inscrutable way, that he could actually be
quite funny in all his “clenched grimness” and “woodenness”. The last
two phrases are used to describe the earlier John Coetzee, protagonist
of J.M. Coetzee’s Youth, written uniformly in the third person and set
in the early Sixties in Cape Town and London. So what more are we
getting from Julia? Who is she, and who is her John? And when he
sermonizes on Schubert and sex and she screams back at him, whose
voice are we hearing? In terms of autobiographical truth, what is J.M.
Coetzee giving us, or not giving us? Are we getting more, or less,
than what we get, say, from Isherwood when he uses the
autobiographical third person in Christopher and his Kind or Kathleen
and Frank?
Following one thread in Coetzee’s writings, Summertime comes after
Boyhood and Youth, making up an autobiographical trilogy. In that
sense, it is set apart from the works of fiction with which these
three books are interspersed. Yet, beginning with Elizabeth Costello
and, most consummately, with the “ficto-facts” of Señor C’s life and
opinions in Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee has systematically broken his
reader’s trust in the identities of the many kinds of voice that
speak, are spoken through, or spoken for, in the books. So the reader
is never allowed to make a secure distinction between the truths of
the autobiographical trilogy and the fictions of the novels. No one
kind or level of representation is privileged as a more authentic
revelation of the writer’s self in being placed unequivocally outside
the artifice of his writing. The author becomes nothing more, and
nothing less, than the sum of his vanishing tricks. Vincent blandly
explains to another one of John’s lovers how, as his biographer, he
has learnt not to trust as factual record “what Coetzee writes” — “not
because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer”.
Vincent had never met or corresponded with John, yet the biography
that he is preparing to write will be “authorized” in a masterfully
upside-down sense of the word. The irony of this inversion operates as
much beyond Vincent as upon him, without quite letting the reader feel
exempted from its acute and complex treachery. In what relation, then,
does Summertime stand to Vincent’s biography and to “the third memoir”
that we learn, from Vincent, that John Coetzee was planning to write,
which was to follow Boyhood and Youth, but which “never saw the light
of day”? These are questions that arise not only in our minds as we
read the book, but its characters also seem to be increasingly uneasy
about the appropriation of their own words as these words are
transcribed from the taped interviews and read out to them by Vincent.
Readers of Coetzee will immediately begin to hear the unmistakable
cadences of his prose in the words of each of these people. It is as
if the characters also feel the sinisterness of their voices being
homogenized by the informing presence of the author as they submit to
his authority in spite of all their resistance or intransigence. As
Señor C puts it in Diary of a Bad Year, “What the great authors are
masters of is authority.”
Yet this compulsive ‘fictioneering’ does not obscure the terrible
questions that have formed the core of Coetzee’s writing. Coming back
to live in a brutal and divided country, and with a father the odour
of whose failed life was the one thing John had hoped never to have to
breathe again, was like regressing into childhood in a travesty of the
European Bildungsroman. Coetzee, in one of his rare interviews, talks
about Wordsworth as a pervasive, but silent, presence in his work. And
that solemn Wordsworthian question, “Was it for this…?” which forms
the opening chord of The Prelude, is the bleak and unheard leitmotif
that joins Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. Wordsworth had set the
gloriousness of his childhood and youth against the desolation and
banality of adulthood. For Coetzee, the terms are exactly reversed.
Can greatness be achieved out of an essential ungenerosity of spirit?
Can the relentless anatomy of a self that consistently experiences
itself as “not fully human” when confronted with the demands of love
and of human care (“Care of Wound”), can such a process of self-
examination count as integrity of soul?
Stuck at night in the middle of the Karoo, the “mournful plains” that
had wrenched his heart as a child, John recites to an uncomprehending
cousin a few lines from Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot as a sort
of bedtime story. And it is in his essay on Beckett’s fiction that
John’s creator allows himself to put in words the only thing that the
writer could let the world hold him to: “a vision of life without
consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our
only duty — inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty
nonetheless — is not to lie to ourselves.”
AVEEK SEN
chhotemianinshallah
FAMILY ROMANCES
The Wish Maker By Ali Sethi, Penguin, Rs 499
If you have been a teenager in Nineties’ India, and were bedazzled by
the nascent charms of satellite television, chances of your having
fond memories of the American television series, The Wonder Years, are
reasonably high. Set in the turbulent Sixties, its plot revolved
around the lives of some schoolkids growing up in the shadow of the
Vietnam War. The protagonist, Kevin Arnold, was a wide-eyed boy. His
best friend was the geeky Paul, and biggest crush, Winnie Cooper. A
delightful comedy about the highs and lows of adolescence, The Wonder
Years captured the essence of an era through the quietly observant
eyes of the adult Kevin, looking back on his early life with a
restrained nostalgia.
Something similar happens in Ali Sethi’s first novel. Zaki Shirazi,
the 19-year-old narrator, is visiting his family in Lahore from
America (where he attends a liberal arts college) on the occasion of
his cousin’s wedding. Although Zaki is not exactly the prodigal son,
he has returned nursing obscure hurts and cherishing flickering
memories of the days of yore. His eyes are startled by the changes
that have accrued over the life he had left behind. But, instead of
wallowing in wistfulness and melancholy, Zaki tells an absorbing tale,
sparkling with intimate, and often eccentric, details about his
extended family.
The chief delight of this book is the dispassionate tone in which Zaki
tells his story. The similarities between Zaki and Kevin are
noticeable. Both of them are loners. While Kevin’s father had been a
veteran of the Korean War, Sami Shirazi, Zaki’s father, was a pilot
with the air force, and had died in a crash a few months before Zaki
was born. Kevin’s mother, Norma, a liberal feminist, appears to be a
kindred spirit of Zaki’s mother, Zakia, a feisty journalist and
activist. So one feels pleasantly validated when Zaki finally
confesses (on page 160) that as a schoolboy in Pakistan his “favourite
programme was The Wonder Years”.
In spite of a happy enough ending, Sethi’s novel is not a feel-good
work. There are far too many grey clouds that keep swirling around the
lives of his dramatis personae. Although a great many of the 400 pages
of this book are filled with conversations, some of the most intense
moments are born out of what remains unspoken. At times, the profusion
of chattering voices may strike you as a bit mundane, but it is only
as you turn the last page that you begin to realize how the teeming
voices have grown inside your head and acquired a life surpassing
their fictional limits: many of us have known cranky teachers like
Zaki’s “arthritic old” English teacher, “who carried a ruler for
discipline and shouted ‘Don’t behave!’ when the class was rowdy”.
Zaki’s maternal grandfather, Papu, is also familiar. A later-day Mr
Bennet, Papu is in the habit of breaking into Ogden-Nash-like
limericks at dinnertime to bully his grandson: “Zaki Zaki Strong and
Able/ Take Your Elbows off the Table/ This is Not a Horse’s Stable/
But a First-Class Dining Table”.
Although Zaki has a more or less privileged upbringing (his class is
“too rich to be poor, too poor to be rich”), he is haunted by his
absent father, and feels neglected by his workaholic mother. His
closest companion is his cousin, Samar Api, growing up in the same
house with him, but emotionally more volatile than the fatherless boy.
Zaki becomes the still centre of Samar’s life, a source of
unconditional love and allegiance, ever willing to absorb all her
anxieties and disappointments. Until the time Samar is forcibly taken
away by her mother to live with her, Zaki remains the mirror into
which she looks from time to time to assuage her distress. Even when
she sets out on a wild goose chase for her love-interest, Jamal, Zaki,
the old faithful, follows close on her heels. Ever compliant with
Samar’s craziest schemes, and with a propensity to follow her
everywhere, Zaki is the perfect little lamb to Samar — although he is
far from innocent.
Samar’s absolute dependence on Zaki to help her carry out her romantic
adventures tellingly reveals the gender disparities that remain
entrenched in a conservative society: it is alright for 14-year-olds
to smoke publicly and drive flashy cars but dangerous for young girls
to step out unaccompanied. Boys will be boys, and they better behave
that way, but girls must be all things nice. So Samar and Zaki, unable
to fit into these roles, become misfits early on. The emotional costs,
it seems, are higher for Zaki, who is only semi-successful at making
friends with boys of his age. While Samar hangs out with Tara Tanvir,
a femme fatale (“the girl with a rep”), Zaki keeps an awkward distance
from the easy bonhomie of boys. He feels lost in the company of his
cousins, Isa and Moosa, who, although barely a head taller than he is,
are seasoned drinkers and smokers, both driving showy cars and
watching X-rated films. Things are no better at school, where Zaki
ends up with the Mad Hatter of the class, Kazim, gifted painter and
giver of inventive names: he calls the English teacher, Alto (after
the car), “while Dr Qazi with his henna-dyed beard was Ginger Spice”.
The episodic structure of Sethi’s novel owes to works like Middlemarch
(from which he borrows the epigraph), and its meandering journey
across generations harks back to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Although
Sethi’s touch is lighter, he covers vast stretches of time, from
Zaki’s Daadi’s life before the Partition and his mother’s avant-garde
years in Lahore, to Benazir Bhutto’s rise and fall, followed by the
coming of Nawaz Sharif, and finally, Zaki’s own life in Musharraf’s
Pakistan. The portraits that Sethi leaves us are finely-sculpted,
intimate, breathing human passions. Curiously, it is Zaki himself who
remains the most enigmatic of them all. His erotic life is charged
with oddities — a boyhood encounter with Mazri, the son of a servant;
his college roommate tells him, pointing at the bunk-bed they have to
share, “Top, bottom, whatever… your call”. But the adult Zaki never
loses his air of inscrutability. He remains the most preciously
guarded secret of his own story.
SOMAK GHOSHAL
chhotemianinshallah
Out of good books? Pick up the pen
- Jha downplays political parallels; Jogi hopes to score where Jaswant
stumbled
SANJAY K. JHA
Ajit Jogi
New Delhi, Sept. 5: If books can snuff out political careers, they can
resurrect fading politicians too.
Congress leader Ajit Jogi is bringing out a book that will underline
his loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family at a time the BJP has expelled
Jaswant Singh for his Jinnah book.
Jogi’s book, which hits the stands later this month, deals with 17
personalities who have inspired him since his childhood. The only
Indian politician among them is Rajiv Gandhi.
There was speculation in political circles that Jogi had turned
rebellious and had not included any Nehru-Gandhi to send out a
message.
Jogi is indeed a bitter man these days, having been left out of the
Congress mainstream and denied help in setting up his son’s political
career. But he cannot afford to be seen as disloyal to the Nehru-
Gandhis, from whom he drew his political sustenance.
At the fag end of his career, the wheelchair-bound former chief
minister’s only dream is to push his son into the good books of Sonia
Gandhi.
“There are reports I have deliberately left out all the members of the
family. It is a cock-and-bull story,” Jogi told The Telegraph.
“Mine is an honest book about personalities whose influence shaped my
life. How can I leave out Rajivji, who brought me into politics?
Whatever I got in life was because of Rajivji. I have great respect
for my leader Soniaji but the book is only about those who were my
inspiration in the initial days.”
He denied that Rahul Gandhi had refused to release the book. “I have
not yet asked anybody to release the book. Let it be printed first.
But I will certainly request Soniaji or Rahulji to release the book,”
he said.
The book, written in Hindi and being brought out by a Raipur
publisher, is being translated into English too. Jogi has already
authored five books in Hindi, including a collection of poems, and two
in English on the role of district collectors and the administration
of peripheral areas.
On Jogi’s list of 17, obscure commoners share space with global
personalities like Martin Luther King and former Malaysia Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Bhairo, a hunter from his native village,
tribal heroine Rani Durgawati and a little-known advocate, Rajender
Singh, make the list, which includes Greek mythological hero Achilles
and Sant Kabir.
Figuring prominently in the book is the late US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who was paralysed from waist downwards like Jogi, who
survived an accident over five years ago.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s inclusion ahead of
Indira Gandhi may raise eyebrows, but Jogi may have left Indira out
since too many members from one family might have attracted charges of
sycophancy.
Jogi says reading political meanings into the choice of heroes will be
wrong. He claims he went by his instincts, not politics. He says he
has no reason to feel disgruntled since it was Sonia who had made him
chief minister. Now, he says, seeing Rahul as Prime Minister is one of
the few dreams he has left.
chhotemianinshallah
Between the covers
Sex writing in English is coming out of the closet in India. Varuna
Verma turns the spotlight on the new books that peddle sexuality as
their USP
Amandeep Sandhu lives life with a big regret. Given a chance, the
author of Sepia Leaves would withdraw his book from the market — but
only to add a paragraph on how as a boy he held up his mother’s
undergarments to his body to feel like a woman. “This is something I
omitted from the book, and regret,” says Sandhu.
Sandhu’s 2008 book — which opens with the line, ‘Mama and Baba never
touched each other’ — is an exploration of sexual intimacies. “From
peeping into Ritu Aunty’s cupboard and finding a bagful of napkins to
watching his father pining for his mother, the book traces the boy
protagonist’s sexual discoveries,” says Sandhu.
The book’s first print is sold out — but it’s not the only tome that’s
gone to town with explicit sex. In fact, when Sandhu’s book was
released, few batted an eyelid. “No one came to me and said ‘Oh my
God’,” says the Delhi-based author who is now writing a book on
sexuality in a boys’ boarding school.
Sex writing in English is coming out of the closet in India.
Tranquebar Publishers released a book of erotica called Electric
Feather with a performance by belly dancers in the capital on
Thursday. Twelve south Asians — all writing erotica for the first time
— have contributed to the book edited by writer Ruchir Joshi. “There
is a dearth of erotic writing in English. To fill the gap, we decided
to challenge a few writers,” says Joshi.
Of course, sex writing was always around in India — right from the
time of the Kamasutra. Regional languages had writers such as Ismat
Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto whose works related to sex. But only a
few writers in English wrote about sex, and fewer still did it
explicitly. Only once in a while would a writer like Sasthi Brata,
author of My God Died Young and Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater,
explore sexuality in India.
BODY TALK : Recent books that focus on sex include (from top) Sepia
Leaves, A Pack of Lies and Ghalib At Dusk
“These were one-off books,” says Sandhya Mulchandani, who has written
extensively on sex in ancient Indian literature and a series on the
Kamasutra. “In general, Indian writers in English failed to deal with
the sexuality of their characters,” she adds.
In more recent times, there have been some heroic efforts by Khushwant
Singh and Shobhaa Dé. But while smutty sex books and railway platform
pornography have always been around, contemporary Indian writing in
English has generally been devoid of juice.
Suddenly, however, sex is not something to be ashamed of. “In India’s
new writing, sex is an integral part of a character’s life,” explains
Mulchandani, whose Kama Sutra for Women was published in 2006. Books
across genres — from thrillers to romances and chick-lit — come with a
touch of sex, she adds.
There is good reason for that. Sex is on the Internet, on cable
television, and even in magazines and journals that earlier overdosed
on politics. “It’s all around us — from the botoxed beauties of
Bollywood to TV shows and the Internet. The significance of sexuality
has shot up,” says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan.
Sex in Indian writings, experts stress, is merely a reflection of the
present. “Sex is not there for its own sake in contemporary writing.
Authors are just telling their tales, and sex, like any other human
activity, happens,” says Debbie Smith, agent in India for literary
agency Red Ink.
As old social norms break, bookshelves in India are exploding with
outpourings of erotica. Delhi-based publishing house Zubaan is
currently putting together a book on erotic stories by women writers
from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. “There has been a lot of
prudishness around sex writing in India. The more it is written about,
the less will it be associated with shame,” says Anita Roy,
commissioning editor, Zubaan Publishing.
The eternal favourite Kamasutra is being rediscovered as a book that’s
not just about impossible postures. Diplomat Pavan K. Varma’s The Art
of Making Love to a Woman looks at how the ancient sex manual explains
the female sex psyche. “The book is a contemporary take on the
Kamasutra,” says the author, India’s ambassador in Bhutan. Varma says
the first edition of his book, which was published last year, is
already sold out.
Art curator Alka Pande’s The New Age Kama Sutra for Women also
explores the book’s feminine side. “When I began writing on Indian
erotica, people thought I was a sexologist,” she recalls.
Curiously, the authors are not people who specialise in sex writing.
Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, for instance, has written a fictionalised
biography of Vatsyayana, The Ascetic of Desire. Among the contributors
to Electric Feather is Sonia Jabbar, who has so far been known for her
writings on the Kashmir conflict, and filmmaker Paromita Vohra.
Book Extract
'That very night, Eunice and Deb, eager to progress with their
passion, went to Sathyam Cinemas for a late film — one of those
Hollywood romantic comedies. Eunice had been so excited at the
prospect of being out on a date that she didn’t even bother with
popcorn or chips. She waited in the dark for Deb’s arm to find its way
across her shoulder, which it did.'
From The Delicate Predicament of Eunice de Silva by Tishani Doshi
(Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories)
Journalist Jabbar’s story The Advocate is about the sex lives of
people in a small Uttar Pradesh town. “It was a big release getting
into the head of a middle-class man and exploring sexual mores and
attitudes,” says Jabbar. Vohra’s Tourist is about a young woman and a
Bollywood star who time travel and land on a deserted island.
“Initially I had issues like what my mother would think if she read
the story. But I got over it,” says Vohra.
As Indian erotic writing takes a literary turn — these are not books
that need a brown paper cover — Tranquebar pins big hopes on the new
volume. “Sex sells. We are looking forward to huge sales for the
book,” says Renuka Chatterjee, chief editor, Tranquebar Publishers.
When Chatterjee started her career in publishing, the four-letter
synonym for sex was frowned upon. “It was either deleted or marked
with asterisks,” she remembers. That’s all in the past. “In the last
five years, writers have become very comfortable with erotic writing.
Most manuscripts we get have sex as a natural part of the story,” says
Chatterjee. Next week, Tranquebar releases Ghalib At Dusk and Other
Stories, a book by Nighat Gandhi that deals with middle class Muslim
families and has an underlying sexuality in every story. Another of
its books — Urmilla Deshpande’s A Pack of Lies — is all about sex,
drugs and music.
Sex books don’t make up a separate section in book stores any more —
it’s become a part of every storyline. In October, the Delhi-based
Tara Press will publish a collection of thriller stories by five
writers which have it all — sex, rape, mystery and investigation.
“There is always a sexual angle behind every human story,” reasons
Anuj Bahari, owner of the publishing house.
In 2005, Tara Press published Kusum Sawhney’s Ayala on incest. “Incest
was never a conversation piece in India. But once the book was out, I
was taken aback by the number of people who told me tales of sexual
encounters within the family,” recalls Sawhney. She is now writing a
book that deals with the life — including sex life — of a middle
class, married woman.
Journalist Aniruddha Bahal, whose novel Bunker 13 won the Bad Sex in
Fiction Award in 2003, says it is high time Indian authors began
treating sex as a part of life and writing. Critics might have
disapproved of Bahal’s comparison of a woman’s sex drive to a revving
Bugatti, but he is proud he put it in. “Bunker 13 has as much sex as
there is in one’s life. Indian authors are now returning to normal,
and giving sex the time and attention it deserves,” he says.
Sexologist Prakash Kothari has seen the demand for sex shoot up in
urban India. “A number of women tell me that they plan on leaving
their husband because he doesn’t have a satisfying sex drive. This was
unheard of a few years ago,” he says. Also, as the marriage age goes
up, promiscuity increases. “Since there is more sex happening, there
is more requirement of knowledge on sex,” explains Kothari.
The turn towards sex in Indian writing is evidently a part of an
overall cultural change. “As the young generation becomes blasé about
sex, it gets reflected in the writing,” says Tranquebar’s Chatterjee.
A growing publishing market in India has also broadened the writing
base. In money terms, the English book publishing market in India is
valued at Rs 6,000 crore. It’s growing by a tenth every year. “As the
market booms, books of every genre — from self-help to erotic fiction
— are finding ready publishers,” says Zubaan’s Roy.
Till a decade ago, Indian writing in English was like putting up a
sari shop for the westerner, says author Sandhu. “Back then, authors
wrote about arranged marriages, joint families, chappals and cuisine,
to attract the white man’s attention. But the new generation is
writing for the Indian reader. So they write about normal, ordinary
happenings like conversation, college life, every day angst and sex,”
he says.
For Indians, sex, clearly, is no longer only in the bedroom. It’s also
reaching every bedside reading table.
chhotemianinshallah
THIRD TIME UNLUCKY
- Rowling could have got the Carnegie Medal for the third Potter
MUKUL KESAVAN
Philip Pullman has just been awarded the Carnegie of Carnegies. The
Carnegie Medal is an annual prize for the best children’s book
published in the United Kingdom, so like the Booker of Bookers (which
Midnight’s Children won), Northern Lights, the first book of Pullman’s
trilogy, His Dark Materials, has been picked as the best of the
Carnegie winners over the prize’s entire history, which goes back
seventy years.
When someone whose work you love wins a major prize, it confirms your
trust in your readerly judgement. And when that person in his
acceptance speech says, as Pullman did, that the prize ought to have
gone to another writer (Philippa Pearce, the author of Tom’s Midnight
Garden) who is the other person you were rooting for, your cup runneth
over. Now I know that Pullman isn’t merely a wonderful novelist, he’s
also a generous and sensitive soul who likes the same books I do.
This brings me to the first thought that occurred to me after I read
about Pullman’s prize: has J.K. Rowling ever won the Carnegie Medal?
The answer to that question is no. She has been short-listed for it
more than once, but she hasn’t won it. She has won a whole boatload of
other book prizes, including the Whitbread Prize for the best
children’s book, but the librarians who vote the Carnegie Medal
haven’t picked her for their prize. Does it matter? After a zillion
copies sold in all the world’s languages, living and dead, and the
undying love of nearly all of the planet’s children (and not a few
adults, this one amongst them) we can safely say that the answer to
that question must be no.
Still, the question lingers. Who are the people who haven’t given it
to her? The Carnegie Medallist is chosen by an association of
librarians: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information
Professionals, unattractively condensed into CILIP. Any writer who
writes in English anywhere in the world is eligible, so long as the
book is published in England. The books considered for the prize are
chosen by librarians who run libraries for children: so it isn’t
publishers who enter books for the prize, but CILIP’s members who call
for them. They’ve been doing this for seventy years and have, in the
process, made the prize important enough for Pullman, who has won the
Whitbread Prize, to describe it as the biggest literary honour he has
ever received.
The children’s writers who have never won the Carnegie Medal might
give us a clue to Rowling’s exclusion. In terms of best-selling
children’s writers, Rowling is in good company: neither Enid Blyton
nor Jacqueline Wilson, both monster-sellers, ever won the prize. This
doesn’t actually tell us much because popular as they were, Blyton and
Wilson wrote like robots and no one in their right mind would have
expected them to win anything remotely like a literary prize. A loser
called Lezard (first name Nicholas) weighed in, in the Guardian
recently, to argue that Rowling wrote awful prose and produced a
string of examples from one paragraph to prove his point, where ‘said’
was clunkily qualified by an adverb: furiously, glumly, indignantly,
loftily and so on. He has a point, but the reason Rowling isn’t to be
classed with the bottom-feeders of children’s fiction like Wilson and
Blyton is that Potter’s world is imagined and furnished and named with
such intelligence and wit (at least in the first three books) that she
makes Lezard’s pickiness about her prose precious and irrelevant.
Well, irrelevant to the first three books in the saga. I think the
library gnomes at CILIP should have given Rowling the Carnegie for The
Prisoner of Azkaban (the third installment of Potter’s adventures)
which, as anyone with a smidgen of sense knows, is the outstanding
book in the series. I remember reading the first two books in quick
succession (my children and I weren’t part of the cult from the
beginning so we had two to inhale right off) and thinking, this can’t
last. So I waited for the third one, bought it in hardcover and began
reading it, first warily (because it couldn’t last) and then with
incredulous delight because not only was it every bit as good as
Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, it was both fatter and
better. Lupin/Moony is by such a distance the most attractive
character in the Potter books that I’m continuously aggrieved about
his not starring in the later books.
But I was right. It couldn’t last. The Potter books declined
alarmingly from the fourth book on. They became thicker for one. I
like fat books but in this case fat was less. Goblet of Fire was
creaky and disjointed enough but it was the Order of the Phoenix
which, retrospectively, makes the Carnegie judges seem clever and
farsighted. That novel was so broken-backed and implausible that I
couldn’t find the energy to suspend disbelief. Never has Rowling
produced a pivotal character as charmless and boring as Dolores
Umbridge. It’s the one Harry Potter movie I look forward to seeing
because it can’t be worse than the book. The decline levelled off a
bit with The Half-Blood Prince, though it wouldn’t have taken much to
be better than Order of the Phoenix.
I have a theory about why things begin to go wrong with Goblet of
Fire. The reason Prisoner of Azkaban is so good is that it keeps
Voldemort firmly off-stage. The book invokes his menace, but through
his minions. The heart of that book is a nostalgia for the intense
friendships of boyhood, Harry’s father’s boyhood, reprised by Padfoot
and Moony and Wormtail, with Harry standing in (at one point,
literally) for his father, James. Young male bonding and betrayal,
it’s wonderfully done. Then, in the fourth book, Rowling makes the
terrible mistake of wheeling Voldemort on, placing him centre-stage,
giving him a body, describing the embodiment in stupefying detail and
laying on a duel between him and Harry for good measure. Evil oughtn’t
be incarnated in a novel. Not halfway through a novel sequence anyway.
It’s nearly impossible to do and you run the grave danger of making
your readers giggle when they’re meant to be hypnotized by wickedness.
And ever since then Rowling has gone on and on about the books
becoming “darker” (by which she seems to mean snuffing out the odd
character) and the books have become a collection of arbitrary
portents that gesture enigmatically at some grand resolution. Well,
the grand resolution is at hand, and I’m not hopeful.
But subsequent loss of form can’t have been the reason for not giving
her the gong for Prisoner of Azkaban. Librarians aren’t astrologers.
And I’d argue in Rowling’s defence that she had seven novels to bat
through, where Pullman only had three and he couldn’t sustain his
magnificently imagined world into the third book of his trilogy.
Northern Lights was a masterpiece and it’s that book that won him the
Carnegie and subsequently the Carnegie of Carnegies. By the time he
finished The Subtle Knife and got to the third and final book, The
Amber Spyglass, the trilogy had become hard going. He made the same
mistake Rowling made in her fourth, only she introduced the devil and
he, carried away by his splendid loathing of Him and the Hereafter,
dragged in Angels and a divine regent, so he could have a go at God
and all his works in the flesh, so to speak. But it didn’t matter: he
had written Northern Lights and that’s better than anything Rowling or
anyone else has managed. Still Rowling managed three hits in a row, a
hattrick…the good librarians really should have given her the Carnegie
for the third.
chhotemianinshallah
A FINE BALANCE
- Wise and just, but perhaps not a sage
Driven by reason
The Scientist as Rebel By Freeman Dyson, New York Review Books, $
27.95
John Desmond Bernal, the famous British molecular biologist, was
lovingly called a ‘sage’ by his friends and colleagues. He earned the
title for his fervent support of scientific research dedicated to
serving the poor, a stand that his admirers believed ought to be
traced to his communist ideology. However, it was the same commitment
that made Bernal describe Josef Stalin as one of the greatest
scientists he ever saw!
If bias is the last attribute expected of a sage, then the modern-day
scientist who seems to qualify for that stature is Freeman John Dyson,
the 83-year-old professor emiritus at that mecca of theoretical
physics, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, US. His was a
case of a missed Nobel Prize, most certainly because of the convention
that not more than three can share the award each year. Richard
Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itro Tomonaga won the prize in 1965
for separately inventing the theory of interaction of light and
matter. But it was Dyson who showed the sublime connection among the
various formulations invented by them.
Those familiar with his commentaries on the contentious current
issues, both within and beyond science, know that his is often the
most balanced — and therefore the wisest — views on those topics. The
Scientist as Rebel, a highly readable compilation of his speeches,
essays and book reviews, most of them already printed in the New York
Review of Books, bears testimony to his wisdom.
The title of Dyson’s book is somewhat misleading; Giordano Bruno,
Galileo Galilei or Andrei Sakharov barely figure in it. Rather, while
discussing rebellion in its first chapter, he suggests that science in
the new millennium ought to rebel “against poverty and ugliness and
militarism and economic injustice”. His hero is Benjamin Franklin, who
stood for “thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more
than by passion and hatred”. If science ever stops confronting
authority, Dyson believes it won’t deserve to be pursued by our
brightest children.
Buried within science are many supremacy battles. What drives
progress, theory or experiment? Out-of-the-box ideas or new tools?
Extraneous demands or intrinsic curiosity? Dyson’s answers to all
these questions are simple: a mix of both. With his characteristic
incisive analysis, he discusses how two great theorists, Albert
Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, despite providing the best clues for
the existence of black holes, became useless bystanders as young
researchers went ahead with vigorous studies on them. According to
Dyson, historians of science often fall prey to their biases while
assessing the contributions of theorists and experimenters. He points
out that it is not right to claim that Einstein’s discovery of the
special theory of relativity was necessitated by the demand for
perfecting the time-keeping jobs. Also, while reviewing two books on
the advent of nuclear physics, he wonders how they can portray
entirely different characters as the key player in this important
drama in science.
Dyson’s penchant for unbiased assessment of the luminaries in science
is best illustrated in his defence of Edward Teller, deeply reviled
for his clamour for the hydrogen bomb and for causing the downfall of
his erstwhile boss, Oppenheimer. First, Dyson takes Alan Lightman to
task for depicting “mostly the dark side” of Teller while reviewing
his Memoirs. Second, in his own review of the same title elsewhere, he
elaborates how Teller quarrelled vehemently with older scientists but
gave generous help to young colleagues. “Those who disagreed with him
did him a grave injustice when they tried to turn him into a demon,”
Dyson signs off.
Dyson has added postscripts to almost all the articles in The
Scientist as a Rebel in order to update them. They consist of the gist
of the rejoinders that his book reviews attracted, mostly from their
authors, as well as his response to their points of view. In some
cases, he admits his errors and says they have been taken care of in
the articles now published in the book.
That brings us to an exception to this exercise in fairness. There is
no postscript to the chapter, “Religion from the Outside”, Dyson’s
take on the philosopher, Daniel C. Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the
Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The title earned rave reviews
in many publications, coming, as it did, as the first among a dozen or
so tomes published last year delineating the grip of religion on 21st-
century men and women. Dennett, a professor at Tufts University,
Massachusetts, is a diehard Darwinian when it comes to explaining
human behaviour. His plea to everyone is to come out of the spell that
religion often casts upon us.
Dyson, who calls himself a “sceptical Christian”, is a recipient of
the Templeton Prize, an honour bestowed by the trust founded by the
international investor, Sir John Templeton. The philanthropist is
known for encouraging dialogue between spirituality and science, an
idea ridiculed by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg.
Not one to consider religion a dispensable fad, Dyson has taken issue
with Dennett for having quoted a famous remark of Weinberg’s in
Breaking the Spell: “Good people will do good things, and bad people
will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes
religion.” That’s looking at religion from the outside, Dyson argues,
citing its beneficial aspects that its critics ignore. “Weinberg’s
statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth,”
he comments, “to make it the whole truth, we must add an additional
clause: ‘And for bad people to do good things — that takes religion.’”
Dennett’s long rebuttal of Dyson’s arguments has not made it to The
Scientist as Rebel. As the last chapter, “Religion from the Outside”,
may have been included in the book as it went to the press. There may
not have been time enough to add Dennett’s rejoinder, published in the
New York Review of Books one-and-a-half months after Dyson’s review
appeared in it.
If that is not the reason for its omission then we can’t call Dyson a
sage either.
PATHIK GUHA
bademiyansubhanallah
Book review: Wolf Hall
Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, October 09, 2009
First Published: 12:24 IST(9/10/2009)
Last Updated: 12:30 IST(9/10/2009)
Book: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: HarperCollins-India
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat away from disaster. If the king
dies without a male heir, the country will be destroyed by civil war.
Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of 20 years and marry Anne
Boleyn.
The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the king's
freedom destroys the pope's advisor, Cardinal Wolsey and leaves a
power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. The son of a
brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a
charmer, Cromwell breaks all rules of a rigid society in his rise to
power.
Rising from the ashes of personal disaster - Cromwell pits himself
against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy and is
ready to redraw England to his own and King Henry's desires.
Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, which wrested the 50,000 pounds Man
Booker Prize for 2009, beating a rival by a margin of one vote in a
secret ballot, explores individual psychologies with the wider
politics of Tudor England.
It is thickly populated - teeming with life, characters, locales,
action and colours of 16th century England - in the true tradition of
a historical epic. It peels back history to show that Tudor England
was a half made society. Published by HarperCollins-India, the
paperback edition of the book available in India is priced at 8.25
pounds.
The book begins with a series of family trees. Street-smart Thomas,
who ran away from home at Putney after being beaten to pulp by a
drunken Walter, is described as one "who is at home in courtroom or
waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard" as he rises through the
ranks.
He marries Liz Wykys, a divorcee and builds a home at Austin Friars in
London.
The first chapter, 'Across the Narrow Sea, Putney 1500', is a racy
account of young Thomas Cromwell's life with dad Walter. The language
is contemporary and lucid - almost like an action thriller. This is a
book that Mantel "hesitated for 20 years before writing".
The book is mammoth in scope - taking into its swathe a wide array of
characters, each more striking than the other, more scandalous and
nifty in an essentially "dog -eat-dog" medieval England, where tough
men survived by their wits. King Henry was making new history of the
heart that went against the political grain of matrimonial alliances.
Perhaps the most riveting section of the book is 'An Occult History of
Britain'.
It throws light on the barbaric ways of early England - frequent wars
and the undercurrents of viciousness that marked the rise of new power-
heads like Thomas More and subsequently Thomas Cromwell.
"Once in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who
had 33 daughters. Each of these daughters rose up in revolt and
murdered their husbands. Perplexed as to how he had bred such rebels,
but not wanting to kill his own flesh, he set them adrift on a
rudderless ship. They landed on an island shrouded in mist - and as it
had no name, the eldest of the 33 gave it her own name, Albina. The
island was home only to demons. The 33 princesses mated with the
demons and gave birth to a race of giants who in turn mated with their
mothers and gave birth to more giants."
There was no priest, no law, no churches and no way of telling the
time on Albina - the early England. The great grandson of Aeneas,
Brutus was born in Italy and was orphaned early. He fled Italy and
became the leader of a band of men who were slaves in Troy.
They were driven to Albina's coast, where they fought the giants,
defeated them and ruled till the coming of the Romans. "Whichever way
you look at it", the history of England begins with slaughter, says
Mantel.
bademiyansubhanallah
Mueller wins Nobel literature prize
Reuters
Stockholm, October 08, 2009
First Published: 18:17 IST(8/10/2009)
Last Updated: 18:54 IST(8/10/2009)
German Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born writer who produced tales of the
disenfranchised and fought for free speech, has won the 2009 Nobel
prize for literature.
The Swedish Academy, which decides the winner of the 10 million
Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize, recognized Mueller for her ability
to depict "the landscape of the dispossessed."
Mueller, whose mother was sent to a Soviet work camp for five years
and who herself was harassed by the Romanian secret police after
refusing to be an informer, made her debut in 1982 with a collection
of short stories.
That work, Niederungen, was censored in Romania. In it, and in her
book Drueckender Tango (Oppressive Tango) published two years later,
she wrote about corruption and repression in a German-speaking village
in Romania.
Her works reflect her experiences growing up in Romania under dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu, whose rule came to an end in 1989 when he was
executed.
The nationality of this year's award has been more closely watched
than usual after comments last year by former Academy Permanent
Secretary Horace Engdahl that Americans did not participate in
literature's "big dialogue."
Some had speculated that the committee might chose an American to make
up for bruised feelings.
bademiyansubhanallah
On the waterfront
Riddhi Shah, Hindustan Times
April 27, 2009
First Published: 14:40 IST(27/4/2009)
Last Updated: 20:40 IST(27/4/2009)
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer
Randomhouse | Rs 395 | PP 291
Remember the Maggi ketchup advertisement, the one with Pankaj Kapur
and Javed Jaffrey that always ended with ‘It’s different’? Admittedly,
this is not an original or a literary descriptor for a book as
inventive and creative as Geoff Dyer’s. But that’s how I feel about
his third novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
The novel, which follows protagonist Jeff Atman — a cynical and
unhappy British journalist — as he journeys across Venice and
Varanasi, is a slow, meandering story of loss, redemption and the
ultimate discovery of the ‘eternal truth’.
The recurring theme through the book is that of rebirth — of former
selves that die, and the new selves we quickly adopt, leaving behind
the old.
In he beginning, Atman (a pun on atma perhaps) is embittered, insecure
and lonely, in search only of the next free glass of Bellini and a
gram of coke. But when he meets the witty and waif-like Laura, while
on an assignment to cover the Venice Art Biennale, he is rejuvenated.
Their conversations are the stuff of Woody Allen films: (“Why, I
oughta…” “It’s funny, no one says that any more: ‘Why, I oughta’. We
should start a campaign to bring it back”. “You’re right. We
oughta”.).
And their love affair is ethereal and spellbinding, brought to life by
Dyer’s description of the tragic romance of Venice. (“He was alone
in Venice. She had gone and he had gone from Plus One to Minus One.
There was nothing to do except stroll, so he strolled through the
crowded, empty city... One moment he was in a busy, densely populated
area and then he was in completely silent streets, deserted except for
sunlight.”)
When she leaves four days later, he finds himself on the water’s edge,
unsure and unable to go on. In the second part of the book, we meet
yet another avatar of Atman. This time he’s in Varanasi to write a
travel piece, and his rebirth comes in the form of spiritual
emancipation. Instead of leaving the city after a week as planned, he
stays on interminably, being tossed, turned and remodelled by the
temples, monkeys and sadhus of Varanasi, like driftwood in the Ganga.
Eventually, Atman manages to rid himself of all desire and lets go of
the ego. The story ends, not entirely unexpectedly, on the water’s
edge. But this time around, there’s no fear, only the acceptance of
the timelessness of things.
Despite the book’s clearly metaphysical theme, this is no run-of-the
mill self-help story; instead, its spirituality — subtle, funny and
quietly self-effacing — takes you by surprise.
It is Dyer’s familiarity both with Venice’s decadent and hedonistic
art world as well as Varanasi’s decaying mysticism that lends to his
writing a rare authenticity. His prose is lyrical and delightful, if
on occasion self-serving and indulgent. At times, the free-associative
monologues become boring. You stop caring about Atman’s thoughts on
the exact colour of Laura’s underwear and just want to know what
happens next.
But it is the dialogue and self-reflection that sparkles. Dyer’s
ironic and incisive writing ought to strike a chord with the current
generation, with anyone who is caught between the polarities of
materialism and spiritualism. If you’ve experienced the life of all-
night partying and drinking, but are still seeking to the understand
the ultimate meaning of life; if you’re smart, funny and enjoy good
conversation, this book is for you.
bademiyansubhanallah
Victoria memorials
Paramita Ghosh , Hindustan Times
September 04, 2009
First Published: 23:46 IST(4/9/2009)
Last Updated: 19:33 IST(5/9/2009)
Some cities are defined by light, some by sound. Venice, poets say, is
beautiful at sunrise. The cornices and columns are more prominent.
Their silhouettes, more striking than their features. Daylight is less
kind to Calcutta, especially on those parts that make visible the
evidence of past grandeur. White & Black, an exploration of Calcutta’s
social history through text and pictures, focuses on the imperial
quarters — Dalhousie Square — and the people who live beside it.
Dalhousie is Calcutta, not Kolkata — that ungainly bastard child
birthed by Bengali chauvinism and the politics of a degenerate state.
In Calcutta, the Armenian Church was an equal landmark with Laldighi
and Victoria Memorial. There was an audience for live bands at the
Great Eastern Hotel. Nahoum’s, a Jewish patisserie, did good business
in New Market.
Grand offices, roads, arcades, as the book points out, airlifted
London, as it were, in the days of the Empire. This was the Second
City of the Raj.
The reverse couldn’t be more true. Shabbier, poorer, isolated and
cloaked by an end-of-empire melancholy, Dalhousie is now the detritus
and the drying up of West Bengal’s cosmopolitan spirit, which, to
begin with, wasn’t egalitarian and inclusive.
The book is thus a fitting museum of ‘objects’ and people, some tied
to dying professions: the solitary typist smiling wanly into the
camera in front of the court; the small-time trader for whom this city
was the city of fortune; a Marwari businessman’s old and unused family
gaddi; walls plastered with idiosyncratic graffiti; a pavilion at
Fairlie Place erected by the Nawab of Dhaka, now turned into a
makeshift kitchen.
Dalhousie, in White & Black is, however, a beautiful frieze. The
visual portrayal of decay is not quite matched by the text of Soumitra
Das, who seems to have experienced that ‘falling apart’ from the
outside.
Desmond Doig, who wrote and illustrated Calcutta An Artist’s
Impression, published by The Statesman, had found a way to make
buildings tell their own story. That way, is the way of flânerie and
anecdote. So, while we had a Mr Mukherjee telling Doig about a Raj
Bhawan bearer, who when asked about the Ceasar busts in the complex,
replied without hesitation that they were of “Calcutta’s first
memsahibs”, in Tagore Villa, a young Tagore outlined his contribution
to the family residence thus: “filling the pool with a ton of river
mud to raise lobsters.” Stories of decay need good characters. But you
have to keep asking them the right questions.
White & Black Journey to the Centre of Imperial Calcutta
Photographs: Christopher Taylor
Text: Soumitra Das
Niyogi books
Price: Rs 2,495 n pp 224
bademiyansubhanallah
All is not revealed
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
Waiting for the sequel to the Da Vinci Code? Well, The Lost Symbol is
definitely not the one.
The Lost Symbol is really an overwritten, over wrought screenplay
inside the covers of a book
The Lost Symbolis a big con. At 500-odd pages, it’s an even bigger
con. It doesn’t uncover a conspiracy, it tries to end one. It doesn’t
provoke or shatter or tease, but tries to reassure and empower. Very
nice if you are looking for some Eckhart Tolle-Paul Coelho kind of
mysticism, but is this what we want from a long and eagerly awaited
sequel to that juicy conspiracy blockbuster? A quasi-mystical, over
long feel-good adventure that set our wallets back by Rs. 500? The
reason we breathlessly went along with the plot of The Da Vinci Code
was not for the codes and symbols and chases, but for its wow-inducing
revelations as it traced a secret, alternative, hidden history of
Christian art and history, making us wonder how much could be true.
What is uncovered in The Lost Symbol is too esoteric for the reader to
be tantalised or intrigued by: Free Masons, Washington D.C. monuments
and fringe mystical religious traditions. Not exactly the kind of
shocking conspiracy material Da Vinci… was made of.
The plot of The Lost Symbol, alas, is not even pseudo history but pure
fiction; entirely a Dan Brown invention. A labyrinth of codes and
grids and symbols minus the conspiracy frisson of DVC. What excited us
in DVC was its delicious mix of history and fiction with some clever
code breaking and symbol interpreting. What this sequel reveals at the
end is rather fascinating and nice in that Dancing Wu Li Masters kind
of way, but that’s not why I — or anyone else — picked it up in the
first place.
Too long
The book becomes tiresome with some 200 pages still to go, and I
thought: what an odd thing to happen to a story that takes place in
some 24-odd hours. That lightening pace is there and yet we feel just
as dragged about as Robert Langdon on some mystical wild goose chase.
My little tip: skip the book, wait for the movie. The movie version
will nicely shrink the plot to 100 pages, and since The Lost Symbol is
really an overwritten, over wrought screenplay inside the covers of a
book, it’s best we leave it to Hollywood to perform some alchemy and
patiently transform it into entertainment.
On finishing the book, my thoughts turned to not Dan Brown or the
book, but to Sonny Mehta, chief editor at Alfred Knopf, who was one of
the first in the Doubleday editorial team to read it before it came
out. Mehta is known for spotting books that are literary, thrilling
and sensational (The Secret History, Damage, American Psycho), so
naturally we had no reason to doubt him when he pronounced the book a
“brilliant and compelling thriller”. What was he thinking?
I admit that if the book was just 250 pages it could have been a
little compelling, and you could even grant that the secret of the
Ancient Mysteries revealed in chapter 133 (it had to be 33) sparkles
with brilliant effort. (It would be worthwhile to photocopy or print
that lecture by Katherine Solomon from this last chapter and
distribute it around like an evangelical pamphlet).
Skilled storytelling
But the whole thing is too stretched; Brown shouldn’t take it for
granted that he’s taken the reader so captive. However, at 500 pages,
DVC would have still sustained our interest; Brown’s skills for
counter-twists, cliff hanging suspense, and roller coaster
storytelling is intact in the sequel but the main edifice of the book,
the Ancient Mysteries, does not sizzle and tantalise and make you go,
‘Wow, so that is what they have been hiding from us!’
For a reader to exclaim and gape in this way she has to have some
familiarity with what THAT is, or who THEY are: in the DVC it was the
Catholic Church, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Holy Grail, in The Lost
Symbol it is the Free Masons, Albrecht Durer and the Ancient
Mysteries. Who could really care what is revealed about the latter
three?
Deciphering codes concealed in Durer’s “Melancholia I” does not have
the oh-my-god thrill of uncovering secrets in “The Last Supper”. And
to top it all, the Free Masons, the book demonstrates, are not some
sinister secret society with world domination on their minds but
people with more integrity than you and me with a design to make
humans realise their greatest potential. And here I was hoping to find
something scandalous and shocking (but they are not the Church, it
would seem).
The Da Vinci Code was always a hard act to follow for anyone, even its
author, but in The Lost Symbol Brown departs further away and reverses
(undoes, some would say) everything he did in the prequel: there are
really no conspiracies, all religions know the one truth, even the
naked and tattooed villain is noble, and there really is a God —whose
identity is finally revealed here for us. The Lost Symbol may be the
book for those who were miffed by The Da Vinci Code. For those of us
who were longing to be told more faith shattering secrets and to
indulge in religious paranoia, we’ll just have to wait for the true
sequel to DVC where all will be revealed. A book, I’m beginning to
feel, is mostly a myth, a mere symbol, lost to us.
bademiyansubhanallah
Spotlight on “Ordinance Raj”
ARVIND P. DATAR
ENDANGERED CONSTITUTIONALISM — Documents of a Supreme Court Case: D.C.
Wadhwa; Published by Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics,
Pune. Distributed by Aditya Books Pvt. Ltd., 119, Vinoba Puri, Lajpat
Nagar II, New Delhi-110024. Rs. 795.
It is indeed ironical that one of the landmark judgments on
constitutional law was the result of pioneering work by an economist,
D. C. Wadhwa, a former Director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics
and Economics, Pune, who accidentally stumbled on the fact that the
constitutional provision for promulgating ordinances was being abused
in Bihar. Article 213 of the Constitution empowers the Governor of a
State to promulgate ordinances when the Legislative Assembly is not in
session. The provision is to enable the executive to enact urgent laws
through ordinances in situations where immediate action is considered
necessary. Such a law will lapse six weeks after the Legislature re-
assembled unless it is replaced by a legislative enactment. Law-
making, under the theory of separation of powers, is the preserve of
the legislature. The executive’s duty is to implement the laws.
From 1967, Bihar — and a few other States — started resorting to the
pernicious practice of re-promulgating the lapsed ordinances several
times over. As Wadhwa points out, a sugarcane ordinance was
promulgated repeatedly and kept alive for almost 14 years! Statistics
show that during 1950-66 the Bihar Legislature passed 444 Acts and the
number of ordinances promulgated was 76. During 1967-81, while the
number of Acts passed by the legislature dropped to 180, the tally of
ordinances shot up to 2014! There are cases where as many as 50
ordinances were promulgated on a single day.
It was Wadhwa who, through his book titled “Re-promulgation of
Ordinance: A fraud on the Constitution of India” (published by the
Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune), brought this
deceitful practice into the spotlight. He followed it up, in 1984,
with a writ petition in the Supreme Court. The Constitution Bench
headed by Chief Justice Bhagwati, while allowing the petition,
categorically declared that “Ordinance Raj” had no place in India and
went on to make quite a few significant observations on the ordinance-
making powers of Governors.
Compilation
The book under review, published by the Gokhale Institute as a sequel
to Wadhwa’s earlier work, is basically a compilation of the
affidavits, written submissions, and other documents that were filed
in the Supreme Court in 1984. It sharply brings out, on the one hand,
the meticulous attention Wadhwa had paid to detail in presenting his
case and, on the other, the casualness that was apparent in the
counter-affidavit filed by the Bihar government.
In a lengthy epilogue, Wadhwa criticises the Supreme Court for
permitting re-promulgation “if there is too much legislative business
in a particular session.” He rightly contends that the Constitution
does not permit any such relaxation and the Supreme Court judgment is
clearly contrary to the plain words of Article 213. If there is too
much legislative business, the remedy lies in extending the number of
days of the session and not in freely invoking the ordinance-making
powers. Indeed, in recent times there has been a drastic fall in the
number of days devoted to legislative business by Parliament and the
State Assemblies. He also points out that even after the Supreme Court
judgment, governments run by various political parties have resorted
to promulgating ordinances in a clear violation of the apex court’s
verdict and Article 213. The net result is that the legislature has
quietly surrendered its paramount power in favour of the executive.
Wadhwa goes on to suggest some amendments to the Constitution with a
view to preventing the “Ordinance Raj.”
Upendra Baxi, who has provided an excellent introduction to the
publication, laments that too much time is frittered away by the
Indian legislatures on purposes other than making laws and public
policies.
This book will be particularly useful to lawyers and students of
constitutional law for the manner in which the case was prepared and
presented before the Supreme Court. For non-lawyers, it provides
shocking evidence as to how our legislatures have betrayed their
constitutional duty and allowed the executive to encroach upon their
law-making powers.
bademiyansubhanallah
On economic reforms
S. MAHENDRA DEV
The book is a fitting tribute to Prof. Bagchi’s contribution to social
sciences
POST-REFORM DEVELOPMENT IN ASIA — Essays for Amiya Kumar Bagchi:
Edited by Manoj Kumar Sanyal, Mandira Sanyal, and Shahina Amin; Orient
Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. 3-6-752, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029. Rs. 695.
Economic reforms have influenced the development strategies in recent
decades. There have been some improvements in economic growth and
other indicators in the post-reform period.
However, there are concerns regarding poverty reduction, quantity and
quality of employment generation, human development, and inequalities
in the economy and society — rural-urban, man-woman and so on. It is
known that economic growth is only one of the means or instruments for
achieving the end — the well-being and freedoms of the people.
A festschrift volume for Prof. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, the book under
review deals with post-reform developments in Asia. Bagchi is an
eminent economist, a social scientist, and an institution-builder. His
research on various development issues is widely known. He interacted
with renowned economists and social scientists. As indicated in a
‘tribute’ to him in the volume, he acknowledged “his debt to his
teachers Maurice Dobb, R.M. Goodwin and Joan Robinson in particular”
at Trinity College. He also records his debt to Amartya Sen and
Sukhamoy Chakravorty and recalls his useful interactions with the
students of the Presidency College, Calcutta (now Kolkata).
As mentioned in the ‘preface,’ the essays are an “attempt to grapple
with the issues often raised in the development debate on whether neo-
liberal reforms in developing nations have raised poverty, food
insecurity and income inequality, hindered empowerment of women,
raised agrarian distress, reallocated resources for private
profitability as against social gain and facilitated the rise of multi-
national oligopoly.” These issues have been examined on the basis of
empirical data drawn from China, India, and Bangladesh. The volume
contains 11 essays — six on India, two on China, and one on
Bangladesh; the other two papers deal with theoretical issues.
Inequality
The papers on China focus on the inequality across regions and the
rural-urban disparities. Inequalities increased in China in spite of
rapid economic growth. Those on India have as their themes food
insecurity, growth-poverty-employment relationship, gender
discrimination in the labour market, agrarian distress caused by
withdrawal of state support to small farmers and, policy shift in
‘priority sector lending’ to the detriment of small and marginal
farmers and entrepreneurs.
One of the papers refers to the paradox of higher GDP growth, lower
poverty, and higher unemployment in the post-reform India and the
authors discuss it using the data up to 1999-2000. But if we use the
more recent 2004-05 data, the employment growth rate will be high.
Although unemployment increased, it is still less than 10 per cent.
Apart from unemployment, a basic problem in India is that of “working
poor.” People are working but at low wages, in low working conditions,
and without any social security. In other words, there is no paradox
of low poverty and high unemployment in India.
Child labour
The paper on Bangladesh revisits poverty issues in the context of
child labour. It indicates that the determinants of children’s market
work and household work will have to be examined in separate models.
The last two papers discuss an analytical framework for understanding
the issues relating to the recent rise of multi-national firms and the
rapid growth of India’s software technology.
One can differ with the methodology used and the analysis made in some
of the papers. It may be noted that the impact of economic reforms
depends on initial conditions and other factors. In general, the
international experience shows that reforms have not succeeded in
Latin America and Africa.
On the other hand, the experience of South East Asia and East Asia
with economic reforms and poverty reduction has been much better. For
example, in China, although inequalities increased, their official
data show that the poverty ratio is very low and children suffering
malnutrition is eight per cent. This does not mean that everything is
good about these regions. Countries here also suffered on account of
the financial crisis in the late 1990s. As pointed out in the book,
these countries and those in South Asia have to focus more on
inequalities, employment, poverty, human development, and other social
and economic problems apart from accelerating economic growth.
Moreover, economic reforms have given greater importance to the
financial sector as compared to the real sector. The Indian experience
with reforms over the past 18 years reveals that there have been
achievements on the growth front but inequalities widened and the
performance in terms of the quality of employment and progress in
social sector is far from satisfactory. For example, malnutrition
among children was stubborn at 45 per cent during the period
1998-2006. Fortunately, there is a growing recognition in countries
like India that an equitable or inclusive development is imperative
since the social and economic disparities are persistently high and
worsening, in spite of the higher economic growth. Compared to other
countries, India has done well in the present financial crisis because
of its cautious approach.
To conclude, this book is a significant addition to the literature on
economic reforms and a fitting tribute to Prof. Bagchi’s contribution
to social sciences.
bademiyansubhanallah
From the Blurb
Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia: Edited by David N.
Gellner; Pub. by Sage Publications India Ltd., B1/I-1, Mohan
Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 750.
Second in the series named ‘Governance, Conflict and Civic Action’,
this volume looks at civil society in the light of case studies of
different types of ethnic (communal) activism in Nepal, Sri Lanka and
India. The articles, grouped under four heads, examine the Hindu
nationalism, the Dalit activism, and the Janajati movement (in Nepal)
and seek to establish that they are driven by the same impulses — to
assert their self-respect and pride; to resist injustice, and reassess
the previously stigmatised symbols and so on. How ethnic activists
wrestle with official categorisation and the traditional practices and
strive to effect a radical change on the social, political, and
intellectual fronts is brought out effectively.
In his introduction, titled “How civil are ‘communal’ and ethno-
nationalist movements?,” David N. Gellner, who has edited the volume,
says the problem with “some ethnic activists” is that they are
“willing to act illegally and violently,” in pursuit of their goals,
especially where that appears to be the only option to obtain a
hearing. He goes on to argue that insofar as they wish to participate
in emergent global civil society, “ethnic movements will feel some
moral pressure to modify their means and compromise their ends.” If
the case of Sri Lanka shows how “polarisation can rapidly squeeze the
possibility of neutrality or even-handedness out of the public
sphere,” the case of India suggests that “pluralisam and democracy can
permit some emergence of an open civil society.”
Intellectual Property Rights in WTO and Developing Countries:
Published by Serials Publications, 4830/24, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj,
New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1450.
The subject of trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) has
always been very controversial.
The areas of intellectual property covered by the TRIPS agreement
include plant and seed varieties; micro organism; copyright and
neighbouring rights; trademarks (including services matters);
industrial designs; geographical indications; integrated circuits; and
trade secrets. For every one of them, certain norms of protection are
prescribed and a transition period is allowed for attaining these
norms. In most cases, legislations are in different stages of
formulation and implementation.
This book, which has a bunch of 32 articles, discusses the IPR-related
issues in the WTO context and insofar as they affect the developing
countries. While some of the themes are general in nature — for
example: IPRs and WTO; Impact of WTO on agricultural marketing; IPRs
and their impact on developing countries; and WTO and labour standards
— a good number of them are country-specific and often based on case
studies, with India claiming a major share. Some of the India-specific
areas that have received attention are: health infrastructure; tea
industry; small scale industries sector; women empowerment;
agriculture; edible oils; and dairy products
Sid Harth
ACORN: Flesh-Eating Machine
Or Left–Wing Conspiracy?
By Billy Wharton
09 October, 2009
Socialist WebZine
The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle
for Economic Justice
Robert Fisher, ed., Vanderbilt University Press (2009), $27.95
A flesh eating machine? A political animal? Or a far-left conspiracy?
Descriptions of ACORN vary widely, yet Robert Fisher’s The People
Shall Rule attempts to offer readers a window into America’s most
influential community organization. The volume brings together
academics and activists in what is presented as the first
comprehensive examination of the group. Overall, the articles suggest
that ACORN has managed to transcend many of the theoretical debates –
community development v. conflict politics, service v. advocacy,
movement-building v. organizational formation – which have framed
previous examinations of community organizing. ACORN, it seems, is a
hybrid organization – as willing to employ direct action as to accept
donations from real estate magnates.
Several authors point to ACORN’s federated structure as key to the
organization’s success. ACORN has managed to marry a fairly
centralized, staff-driven, national organization with relatively
autonomous member-controlled local groups. This marriage allows for a
synergistic national-local energy which is often beyond the capacities
of most locally-bound community organizations. For example, Peter
Drier argues that many community groups have scored important
victories in the struggle to secure community reinvestment programs.
Yet, “…only ACORN has used its federal structure to bundle these
accomplishments to build its political clout, organizational funding,
and constituency base.”
Political clout is precisely what Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN,
desired at the group’s origin. Even early on, Rathke argues, the group
was “not willing to simply be a power broker,” but, instead, wished to
build power in numbers for both street protest and electoral
campaigning. In addition, he sought to move away from the “episodic
and situational” character of social movements. “Movement,” he stated
firmly, “is not magic as much as muscle powering imagination and
will.” The basic rule employed to cultivate these muscles is that “if
it builds power, if it adds to the whole, then it can be done.”
Rathke’s ACORN is a “real-life, flesh eating machine that must be fed
constantly on activity and victory.”
The need for constant activity is reflected in ACORN’s stance as an
explicitly anti-idelogicial organization in the tradition of Saul
Alinsky. They must, therefore, constantly develop new campaigns inside
of often hostile historical and economic contexts. One key campaigning
opportunity was the struggle against credit redlining in low-income
communities, which developed after the Community Reinvestment Act was
passed in 1977. Weak national enforcement opened the space for
community organizing. ACORN’s versatility was on full display in anti-
redlining campaigns – serious research and political lobbying was
buttressed by locally-mobilized direct actions. Success was evident on
all levels – the organization grew and the campaign generated more
than $4 trillion in new loans for traditionally underserved
communities.
The victory against redlining was the result not only of organizing
from below, but an adaptation by financial capital from above.
Capital, it seemed, also had the capacity to respond to changing
economic situations. ACORN was therefore faced, in the 1990s, with a
social problem it helped usher in by loosening credit – predatory
lending in poor communities. Gregory Chadwick and Jan Chadwick
estimate that this practice cost victimized families more than $9.1
billion per year and led to countless bankruptcies and foreclosures.
ACORN initiated another cycle of organizing that has moderated the
predatory trends, but has yet to eliminate them.
Neoliberalism has placed other challenges before ACORN. Another case
study presented by John Atlas in his chapter entitled “The Battle of
Brooklyn,” describes describes the struggles surrounding a mega-
development project proposed in Brooklyn called the Atlantic Yards
project. Real estate magnate Bruce Ratner authored the project and
managed to secure significant concessions from NY City and State
governments using eminent domain laws to displace residents. Community
opposition developed immediately, resulting in the creation of the
Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn coalition and dissent from prominent
Democratic Party officials.
Though they seemed like a perfect fit for the opposition, ACORN’s New
York leader, Bertha Lewis, did not head to the picket line,
preferring, instead, the negotiating table with Ratner. “It’s better
to win something,” Lewis told the media, “than go into opposition and
just yell and scream and ultimately lose.” Atlas concurs, viewing the
ACORN-Ratner deal, which secured 50% affordable apartments and a
portion of living wage jobs, a successful attempt to “steer
gentrification to benefit poor and working-class residents.” Opponents
called the deal an opportunistic “sell-out” and pointed to large-scale
personal contributions made by Ratner to ACORN.
The struggle around the Atlantic Yards development is not an isolated
instance of controversy. ACORN has faced multiple internal and
external scandals of late. In 2008, newspapers reported that the
national leadership was rocked by an embezzlement scandal initiated by
a member of Rathke’s family, which led to wholesale resignations,
including the founder himself. ACORN veteran Gary Delgado viewed the
controversy as evidence of the hazards of bureaucratization on the
national level. More recently, undercover right-wing operatives
created a national media sensation by soliciting information about
concealing funds from an illegal prostitution ring. The stunt
manipulated the autonomy of ACORN’s local organizations and has led to
a significant national decrease in funding from government sources.
Yet, as Robert Fischer argues in the conclusion of this compilation,
the sheer scale of the ACORN project provides it with “…the ability to
experiment and
fail.”
The critiques mentioned above are, however, not as readily available
in The People Shall Rule as one would prefer. Most of the authors are
exceedingly friendly to ACORN – defending them from either liberal
political leanings or as a theoretical wedge in sociological debates
about community organization and social mobilization. The book would
be improved by providing space to both right and left wing criticisms
of ACORN. From the left, significant questions should be raised about
the organization’s trajectory. Its willingness to adapt to and, in the
case of both Atlantic Yards and H&R Block, partner with capitalist
corporations raises questions about how closely the organization is
integrated into the structures of neoliberal capitalism. In addition,
ACORN’s blind commitment to act as insiders in the Democratic Party is
one of many trends serving to stifle the development of significant
third party politics in the US.
Overall though, The People Shall Rule is an important first offering
into what promises to be a proliferation of studies into one of the
most significant community organizations in the country. Left-wing
activists of all stripes would do well to understand the manner in
which ACORN has harnessed a dynamic tension between local and national
organizing to carve out a place in the lives of poor and working class
communities. As neo-liberalism moves into what appears to be a period
of prolonged crisis, the strategies and structures championed by ACORN
offer lessons to be both learned and unlearned.
This article was originally published in the Socialist WebZine
***
Billy Wharton is the editor of The Socialist and the Socialist
WebZine. His articles have recently appeared in the Washington Post,
Monthly Review Webzine and The Indypendent.
bademiyansubhanallah
Asking me to behave is to insult me
Rajesh Kalra Thursday September 24, 2009
The ability of our politicians to outperform themselves on the
absurdity quotient never ceases to amaze me. As if the Congress party
was not stupid enough when its spokesperson, Jayanthi Natarajan,
slammed Tharoor for his 'holy cow' and 'cattle class' remarks as being
insensitive, the BJP has gone a step ahead, with its spokesperson,
Rajiv Pratap Rudy, claiming that had Tharoor and home minister P
Chidambaram been in service with the private sector, they would have
been sacked.
In Tharoor's case, we already know the arguments, but why on earth is
the BJP stalwart, who has made more trips to the TV studios than to
Parliament, baying for Chidu's blood? Simple, he dared to advise
Delhiites to mend their behaviour if they wanted Delhi to be called a
world-class city. By asking the citizens of the capital of this
country to behave, the home minister had insulted the common man. Holy
cow!
I completely agree with you, Rudyji. And Chidambaram did not insult
the common man alone, he also said the police vehicles jumped traffic
signals often. So he insulted the police force too, and you must
demand that the Prime Minister remove him immediately for his ministry
controls the police.
But please don't stop your demand at Tharoor and Chidambaram. A
diplomat from Mauritius recently wondered at a meeting to discuss
Commonwealth Games that he cannot figure out why people in Delhi,
indeed India, cannot drive in proper lanes. The government should send
this gent back home immediately for insulting our nation. And if you
really want to target someone big in the private sector, you could
easily latch on to the editors of some of the papers which have been
running a campaign against the boorish behaviour of Indians. In fact,
just yesterday, an English daily had listed 10 obnoxious things that
Indians do, and that included spitting and jaywalking. I would be
appalled if the owners don't sack that editor for insulting the common
man. Phew!
This is the height of absurdity, really. Both Tharoor and Chidambaram
are among the most articulate and educated folks in Indian politics,
and for a change, from them we have started getting comments that are
direct, the way they should be, without beating around the bush. If
anything, Chidambaram should have been harsher. And he also needs to
target the so called VIP class of India and ask them to behave. Ask
them to follow rules, not to behave as if they are above law.
What politicians say and do is lapped up by a lot of people,
especially the impressionable kinds. And in this brouhaha of national
pride and all else, a lot of nonsense sieves through as well. We all
want national pride, but it cannot be by overlooking the facts. Wish
all these loud mouths realise that sticking to stupid notions is
actually a bigger insult to the nation than anything else. My advice
to Rudis and Natarajans of the world would be to please look at the
future and start attacking the drawbacks that hamper this country's
growth. Indiscipline is one major drawback. If saying so is insulting
my nation, then so be it!
Rated 4.6/5 (222 Votes)
Comments:
Agree (52)
Disagree (2)
Gaurav Kaushik says:
September 24, 2009 at 03:44 PM IST
Wao, someone writes his mind. No beating around the bush and looking
ahead for India. Everyone wants India to be liked. But it need to
change
and change a lot. It is a good start.
Agree (34)
Disagree (1)
Amit Deshpande says:
September 24, 2009 at 03:59 PM IST
Bang On!
Seldom do we hear some sensible talk from the politicians and there
already are a lot of them waiting to deride the much due direct chit-
chat. Natarajan's sycophancy is much clear when she gets hurt
'thinking' that Baba was the Holy Cow!
Rudy has to oppose since he is in opposition, so he derides Chidu's
straight talk.
One thing that politicos would do well would be to reduce the
inconvenience caused to others due to their entourages blocking
traffic. We surely dont want the games sportspersons being late for
their respective games because of traffic jams.
By the way, who is in command of the games? The one responsible person
to take credit if it goes well? Surely, if all goes well miraculously
there will be hundreds to claim credit, but since everyone will push
the blame on others in case of a problem, then better get the name of
CEO of the games right now. Is it Kalmadi, Sheila Dikshit or MMS?
Agree (47)
Disagree (1)
Hanif Mohammed says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:04 PM IST
The Rudis and Jayantis are playing to the masses, so that in the event
it backfires, they are already insured !! Basic etiquette, which are
not known to most of our folks (because they deem what they do is
right), should be produced on mass level for greater awarness and
relayed on newsprint, TV and other media, and also introduced at
schools, were the children can learn and they in turn teach their
parents on what is right and wrong. We can make it happen in India, if
everyone contribute their bit, and be a responsible stake holder !!
Agree (25)
Disagree (1)
Juhi Dang says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:13 PM IST
Loved this post. Sarcasm at its best! Mr. Kalra, I just wish all these
efforts drill some sense into these big mouths!!
I wonder why Rudi and his likes have always got something silly to
crib about. If they put in this energy into raising issues which
matter to the country, I'm sure India will be a much better place to
live in.
Agree (11)
Disagree (21)
turbulence says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:20 PM IST
What a piece!
Our most educated politicians should also include this in their
agenda:
1. They should ask all the children of India to get educated before
the commonwealth games and we will have an educated India by then
2. They should ask all the police in the country to shun corruption
and before the commonwealth games we will have a corruption-free
police.
3. They should ask all the MP's to vote in the parliament as per their
conscience only and lo and behold we will never have cash for votes
scam ever again.
Anything else comes to your mind?
Agree (27)
Disagree (2)
apeksha verma says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:32 PM IST
I totally agree wid u.being the home minister of india,mr chidambram
hasn't said anything wrong.i feel that whatever mr. chidambram
addressed should be followed strictly as this is the need of the
hour.the commonwealth games are just around the corner.instead of
taking a dig at him,the whole ministry should speak in support of him
to make the games a success
Agree (11)
Disagree (4)
rachana says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:43 PM IST
It appears from your article that we are the best behaved people in
the world and that even if we are not, nobody should dare tell us
otherwise. Frankly, i feel most of us want to tell the nuisance makers
to behave, keep the boundaries and walls of our buildings clean, drive
sanely and many other things, but why does it hurt when a political
leader says it?
Agree (11)
Disagree (4)
SC Cyclone says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:52 PM IST
Thanks Rajesh, I think Rudi should stick to looking good on TV & Page
3. I always though that he was worthless and my conviction has been
reinforced. As I said in an earlier post, we sure have a front row
ticket to the Freak Show of Indian Politics/Politicians. I guess
Indian Politcs needs an urgent Blood Transfusion.
Leaving a few, the majority are not taking us or taking the Country
anywhere. What a shame...
Agree (8)
Disagree (2)
Divya Rao says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:54 PM IST
Knock on wood,sir! I hope Rudy babu takes a html line out of your blog
entry.
Agree (9)
Disagree (1)
Sachin says:
September 24, 2009 at 04:56 PM IST
Good to see a blog questioning a behavior which I have already started
assuming to be acceptable for political class...There a thousand
stupid things that 80% of our political class blabber everyday and the
only way out I find is to ignore politicians who say it and media
channels who play it over and over again for 48 hours !!!
May sanity return !
Agree (18)
Disagree (1)
Vijay Dhawan says:
September 24, 2009 at 05:00 PM IST
Rajesh, you got it!!
Decent behaviour is not common at all. Urinating where ever it pleases
them, spitting as if the world was made for this, jumping red lights
cause thats what you are supposed to do, ill treating women....man..
we have a long list and a long way to go. I think Chitambaram was
being very polite. Harsher treatment and words are required for
defaulters so that the next generation hesitates in such behaviour.
Right now all the wrong messages are being imbibed and a bit of
correct policing would help.
A stint in a disciplined force like the armed force will do a number
of citizens a lot of good!!
Chitambram sahib, go ahead and carry out your job...hum tumahre saath
hai!!
Agree (5)
Disagree (3)
Mihir says:
September 24, 2009 at 05:08 PM IST
How rude of Rudi!!
Agree (14)
Disagree (1)
Sughosh Bansal says:
September 24, 2009 at 05:11 PM IST
I once witnessed a scebe. Two young men were driving a bike at the
peak time in the wrong lane. To save them another Bike being driven in
the correct lane skidded and the driver got seriously injured. Can
Ruddy tell us who was at fault and why the person driving correctly
got injured? and this is the scene which you witness daily on the
Delhi Roads. If one has to go by Ruddy, we must dismantel all the
traffic lights forthwith and save crores of rupees. In any case these
traffic lights do not serve the purpose for which they are installed.
We should also dismantle all the loos and make a nice saving, since
the so called middle class of Delhi do not use these loos and urinate
anywhere and every where treating Delhi as Big Loo. We the Delhiites,
in the grab of middle class, have become abosultely characterless,
selfish, and non-caring for the Society.
Agree (20)
Disagree (1)
Kavitha Kanaparthi says:
September 24, 2009 at 05:14 PM IST
By God ki Kasam, what manners are you talking about? Aren't we in the
land of spit everywhere, pee just about in all corners, and pick your
nose, scratch yourself without a care in the world.? What with all
those firm customs should we do about some silly pedestrian crossing,
lane jumping, and calling holy cows, 'holy cows'!
Seriously, a friend of mine videotaped a Indian H1 worker in
Washington, on a Red line service, picking his nose through three
station stops. Why be offended? He just an Indian on a different soil.
When some of us step up to ask people not to litter when we witness
it, we are told, 'well, we are in India', not Singapore, or US! You
get it, don't you? Indians aren't supposed to follow rules, behave
decent, and wait their turn in line, nor should they be grooming
themselves at home, but in public. If they did, it would make them un-
Indian I suppose.
I read that Mrs.Gandhi took the time to meet with Mr.Tharoor, and gave
him friendly advise on being an good Indian Leader. Don't call holy
cows 'holy cows'. That would make him a bad politician. I was thrilled
when Mr.Tharoor took office, and over the last year saw Mr.Chidambaram
conduct himself with dignity, and loved his talk when on TV.
Moral of my story: none - Be a sensible sensitive Indian, and you will
live happily without offending your neighbors (don't mind the trash
they will heap in front of your house), and so on and so forth.
Agree (12)
Disagree (3)
lmsharma says:
September 24, 2009 at 05:28 PM IST
Dear Sir,
Indian politicians have loud mouth and false practice. They leave no
stone unturned to make a political capital out of even good issues. Be
it anybody. They will always comment upon things that can fetch them
votes but will certainly hesitate on making statements of mass
interest. How many of our politicians have raised their voice against
the killings of innocent boys and girls in Haryana. Hundreds of young
girls have disappeared in Haryana only for showing their brave face to
marry boys of their own choice. To tell such people to behave is taken
as an insult. Honour killings are common in Punjab. Still living in
dark ages! To speak anything on national interest is taken as an
offence in this country. We have a sense of false pride only to hide
our weaknesses. As we are living in an age of globalization all our
weakness will be exposed to the world. A petty man with a political
backing will not hesitate in parking his car /motorcycle in the middle
of the road, and if requested not do so please, he is up in arms. An
Indian driving an expensive car, riding an expensive motorcycle will
never forget to spit on the road, not caring about the discomfort
caused to other person. Not only this he will use high mercury beam at
night so that he can drive safely and the other person goes into a
ditch/ KHUDAA We are Indians don’t tell/teach us to behave. It harms
our national pride! A bus driver will take heavy booze and drive at
night, least caring about the lives of sixty odd people at his
disposal. We will use highest irritating sound pressure horns only to
cause uneasiness to others. Not a only this, they believe that by
honking the traffic congestion will clear. We are Indians please don’t
tell us good things of life.
Agree (3)
Disagree (1)
Amar Nath says:
September 24, 2009 at 06:05 PM IST
nice sensible post. its hight time someone talks straight abt
ourselves especially when we have a big event like commonwealth games
around the corner. not taht we will correct ourselves overnight but at
least we would be able to appreciate the criticism that will naturally
come from other countries following the games!
we will at least then think abt it at least instead of shouting hoarse
abt being looked down because we are brown, blah blah blah..
Kalra go on..
Agree (5)
Disagree (1)
S Roy says:
September 24, 2009 at 06:09 PM IST
The Delhi Govt / NGOs should start educational programs for adults on
TV at prime time in Hindi. Subjects : How not to behave boorishly, ie
picking nose,not shaving, spitting, scratching of goolies/backside in
public, going the wrong way in a one way street, honking, jumping
traffic lights, crossing the white line at stops, overtaking from the
wrong side, jaywalking. In fact the traffic police should conduct
drives on decent acceptable behaviour on roads. I am sure many
students/NGOs/middle class volunteers will help them out. The worst
offenders are the illiterate migrants from neighbouring states, and
these can be corrected by sustained drumming through TV and fines by
the police. These measures should work, we still have a year's time
Agree (6)
Disagree (0)
Kamlesh says:
September 24, 2009 at 07:45 PM IST
Delhi is most indiciplined city among all metro in india.Delhi is
first crime capital of india then national capital.Delhi may be in top
position in Rape crime.You name a crime in india and delhi will figure
in that.The Coments of PC are 101 % true
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Rakesh Bhalla says:
September 24, 2009 at 07:53 PM IST
We must not let the actions or words of others determine our
responses. Magnanimous people make the choice to respond to the
indignities of others based upon their own principles and their own
value system rather than their moods or anger.
We hope atleast we won,t see any fish market in the parliament. All
members of parliament will behave in a proper way. Because the world
media is watching us.
Thanks
Agree (7)
Disagree (1)
Sharda Bhargav - Confiscated Soul says:
September 24, 2009 at 07:55 PM IST
Let us pray that good sense prevails on all concerned and Delhi
becomes a city of international standards. Delhites will have to
exihibit their prowess to achieve this.
Agree (5)
Disagree (9)
MANOJ KUMAR SINGH says:
September 24, 2009 at 08:06 PM IST
So dear Rajesh,we Indians are quite indisciplined.95 percent of us
drive insanely,spitting here and there and behave indecently.And even
after that those highly educated,most sincere, well disciplined and
foreign degreeholder Chidus and Tharoors are our leaders.They are the
representatives of us, one billion cattles.They give us sermons,teach
us but never try to do their jobs.They are the government but will
never enforce the law.They are absolutely right that we are cattles
and that's why they are our leaders.
Agree (6)
Disagree (1)
manish says:
September 24, 2009 at 08:23 PM IST
in complete agreement with you.
BJP has always taken potshots at astute people of congress which are
by the very few in number.
and has sufferd. they insulted an honest man like manmohan singh and
they suffered loss.. now they are at it again.
I wonder why Mr. RUDI is still the spokesperson of the party. HE LOST
ELECTION THIS TIME JUST FOR INFO GUYS. so he was fired by public.
leave apart mr chidu. LOOSER RUDI
Agree (3)
Disagree (1)
Yash says:
September 24, 2009 at 09:29 PM IST
It is alright to tell people from time to time to
behave in public places, but the bottom line is unless the laws are
enforced people will always take the short cut. Even in the advanced
and rich
countries it is the enforcement of laws that force people to obey and
follow the rules, otherwise the basic human tendency is always to do
the most convenient. The discipline that we see in the western culture
has evolved first through enforcement which over a period of time has
given the people a sense of civic responsibilities. So let's put the
laws into good use for everyone and see how attitudes and civic sense
will start changing.
Agree (3)
Disagree (9)
Loyal Congress says:
September 24, 2009 at 09:33 PM IST
Just nonsense as usual!! Times of India bloggers have it easy (sri
M.J. Akbar not included). Just make up some nonsense against Congress
Party and people give 4.6/5.0. More outrageous the better!!
Fortunately, these people are not real Indians and Congress keeps
winning!!
Rajesh Kalra saw nothing wrong in Tharoor's Cattle Class comment about
common man but offended by Chidambaram's comments??? Obviouly, since
Tharoor also called the Congress people Holy Cows, it is a OK! Isn't
it Mr. Kalra??
Chidambaram is right and Tharoor was wrong!!!
Agree (3)
Disagree (1)
Suresh Kumar says:
September 24, 2009 at 10:31 PM IST
Mr.Kalra's remarks echoes the Indian's syndrome "I know" Chidambaram
has spoken the truth and there is nothing wrong in his remarks.
Agree (7)
Disagree (0)
Prem Nizar Hameed says:
September 24, 2009 at 10:35 PM IST
Frankly speaking, you hit the nail on the head. Congrats, Rajesh ji.
Our constitution guarantees our fundamental rights. We scream and
fight for them every now and then. At the same time our constitution
prescribes our fundamental duties. We will conveniently keep these in
the refrigerator. This is the main problem we have. We have to
recognize our fundamental duties and invoke them as and when they
become necessary. We have to introspect before we criticize someone.
If the politicians practice a small fraction of what they preach, our
India would have been the best in the world. It does not mean that all
will live like naked fakirs in the name of austerity. In Singapore if
somebody spits or litters anything on the street, the authority will
immediately impose a fine irrespective of status symbols. When we go
to abroad, we will be advised to respect the law of the land we visit.
But we ignore the same on our own land. Cleansing, like charity,
should begin at home. I think every week some one has to write an
article to teach discipline to our politicians and irresponsible
citizens. We are still yielding to our self-praise just to keep on
singing: saare jahaanse achcha hindustaan HAMAARA. We have to impress
others by way of our good and disciplined living. Then that will make
others sing on us: saare jahaanse achcha hindustan TUMHAARA. That will
be much better and more acceptable precedence.
Agree (7)
Disagree (0)
Yeshwant says:
September 24, 2009 at 10:39 PM IST
All those in power must not only advise people on importance of
discipline, but must set a good example themselves and follow the
rules. A tourist from abroad mentioned that India must be producing a
lot of paint, used for 'zebra crossings or marking the lanes because
no vehicle stops on the STOP Line or follows a lane system. India is
one of the few developing(?) countries where pedestrians cannot use
the zebra crossings to cross the roads. Do the users of vehicles ever
walk or cross the roads. The policeman at the crossings is not
interested in assisting the pedestians but more concerned about the
vehicles donning the red light on top, to salute. Not realising that
the occupant of the car is in his own world! Well, in Chennai even the
foot-paths are done away with , the excuse being that pedestrians walk
on the roads!. These are only a few observations made, where immediate
remedial action needs to be taken. Even God cannot help a pedestrian.
Agree (7)
Disagree (0)
S. Sen says:
September 24, 2009 at 10:42 PM IST
There is absolutely nothing wrong in asking Delhites, or for that
matter, all Indians, to behave. But, we all knew what the response
would be. Remember how much noise we made after an Australian player
mentioned India as a 3rd world country? The world, not just the West,
thinks of India, at best, as a semi-civilized country and I believe
they are absolutely right.
A country where all the sports grounds are covered with fences to
protect the players, like a zoo, except that the animals are here
watching, cannot be considered civilized. Even with these fences and
so much security we still see matches are abandoned due to public
interference. Common people have too much respect for their own
religions but all it teaches is intolerance and hatred towards others.
A huge portion of the population can hardly get to survive their day-
to-day lives but they'd easily cause blood-shed if they hear anything
against their "god" or even "prophet".
Ironically this God of theirs treats them no better than animals and
they continue to struggle just to survive. Most unfortunate thing is
probably that there are many many degree-holders too in this gang and
considered "educated" by the less privileged population, yet, these
people hardly understand the true meaning of education and promote
hatred and violence towards people of other gender/class/caste/
religion.
Until mutual respect of gender/class/caste is restored in most parts
of the country, religion is made nothing more important than a hobby
and true education, which is the ability to think unbiased, is
provided, we will never be really civilized. And I fear this day is at
least few centuries ahead.
Agree (10)
Disagree (0)
Saurabh says:
September 24, 2009 at 11:50 PM IST
We Indians do lack social etiquette...its high time we improve
ourselves
Agree (3)
Disagree (8)
Jay says:
September 25, 2009 at 12:12 AM IST
Is it wrong for the home minister to call out the police who break the
law and jump signals? The author is worried about the bruised ego of
the abusers of power? What nonsense is this? Does Times of India
actually pay these idiots? There was a time when this magazine
represented good values of journalism!!!
Agree (2)
Disagree (1)
Siddharth Bhattacharya says:
September 25, 2009 at 01:11 AM IST
Even the common man's reaction to Tharoor's remark was abysmal. What
makes us think we are unflawed, and that anyone can't ask us to
improve, I don't get it. People are used to shutting their ears on
ways of improvement, until it gets totally offensive forcing them to
introspect. And then they come with their fundamental rights, stating
right to choice, right to freedom etc. I wonder when we Indians will
start understanding our duties, rather than just relishing our
rights.
Agree (3)
Disagree (3)
Vikram says:
September 25, 2009 at 01:22 AM IST
Wish there were people like you in charge instead of our politicians.
India would be a better country.
Agree (4)
Disagree (1)
N.K.Vijayan says:
September 25, 2009 at 06:01 AM IST
Well said Mr. Rajesh Kalra. Only wish loud mouth Natarajans and Rudies
read and try to understand your messasge. No that will not happen as
Politicians live for the day and future of the country or good of the
people are foreign to them.
Novertheless, Mr. Rajesh please continue to write and you have our
full understanding and support.
Once again heartfelt thanks to you.
Agree (3)
Disagree (12)
Indian says:
September 25, 2009 at 09:31 AM IST
Simply crap write up from an author who has lost touch with ground
realities ...Rather than blaming citizens Mr Chidambram should first
focus on improving Police efficiency & remove corruption( which is a
gift given to country by his masters). How can you ask people to be
civilized when they dont have access to basic amenities. This me me
attitude in indian junta comes because of that .. ..when things are
scarce people will never be nice or well behaved....why do we so much
of commotion at all places simply bcos if we wait then some one other
will grab it and we will be left with nothing..in western world people
are patient coz they know things are available in plenty...need not
worry that it may get over and they will have to return back empty
handed
So rather tahn blaming public it would be nice if Mr Chidambram first
takes necessary actions to provide basic amenities, effective policing
and law enforcement and effective goverenance. Once you have proper
enforcement of law things will fallin place automatically..
Jai Hind
Agree (4)
Disagree (0)
Rajiv says:
September 25, 2009 at 09:49 AM IST
We need people like Tharoor in the public offices more than ever. I
only wish he was a given a portfolio where he could make larger
impact. Nonetheless it is a good start.
We keep on comparing India's growth with China and other competing
countries. Do we realise what is holding us back. Yes, may be it is
resources, technology and so on. What is certain is our way of
working. The level of indiscipline in the general behaviour as well as
work is certainly one that is holding us back. Standing behind the
stop line at red lights is the simplest thing. It seems it is a matter
of pride to cross the zebra crossing. Yes, ofcourse, we are closer to
our destination 15 kms away by 2 meters. Big Deal! The rule is simple
for us. Public property is our property. Do we really treat it as if
it is our own. I am sure we could grow at a much faster pace just by
accepting rules and meding our behaviour in public. We are proud
Indians and India will be proud of us if we start respecting the
nation! Bring the nation before ourselves! Small changes could make a
big contribution.
Let us do it today. Be our own critic and change. We do not need
outsiders to show where we need to improve it. We know it very well.
Just accept the change! It is time we club our rights with our duties.
Let us make a better India! Sounds cliche but cannot resist to say,
Yes we Can!
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
Shrikant says:
September 25, 2009 at 10:23 AM IST
When will Indian's 'HUM NAHI SUDHARENGE' attitude change or will it
ever?
Agree (5)
Disagree (1)
Amit Saxena says:
September 25, 2009 at 10:36 AM IST
Dear Rajesh....there is nothing wrong whatever P Chitambram said...he
is very much right and he is the type of politician who asked us to
behave properly so we guys must realized that we are wrong in stead of
showing wrong attitude...he is very old to us ...so take his
advise.....
Agree (2)
Disagree (1)
Bobby says:
September 25, 2009 at 11:23 AM IST
Talking of litter and garbage, I would ask each and every person to
look around them as to what is missing in our own country that makes
it uglier in comparison to foreign countries, and its just litter.
Control your littering habit, please think even a small mint wraper
adds to the garbage, so pcoket it, dont throw it right away, dispose
off when u see a dustbin. Is it so hard? No, its just common sense.
As for traffic rules, honestly, I really wonder myself, why, why why
why, whats the harm in following lanes? what is the reluctance in not
following it, is beyond my comprehension.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
M.Govindarajan says:
September 25, 2009 at 12:03 PM IST
Blaming politicians for anything and everything has become a culture
here. No doubt they behave badly. But what politicians have done to
the Nation by way of Indiscipline and corruption is far less than
those slapped on the Nation by Indian Business magnets and
industrialists etc., with the tacit support of the very
politicians.The former is exposed by media while the latter goes
unreported. We, Indians, of late, are becoming less and less tolerant
even on well-meaning comments.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Kaushik Ghosh says:
September 25, 2009 at 01:23 PM IST
This kind of behavior makes it difficult to spread some good words. If
the home minister gives some good advice to for the betterment of
people, then we should attack him. What do you encourage? we should
continue to behave in the same way e.g. littering everywhere,
urinating all over the city walls, spitting in stairs. Will this help
us to build a strong India. For Gods sake try to understand where we
are wrong and improve. If some one points a mistake, not necessarily
it should be taken as insult.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
harryv says:
September 25, 2009 at 02:29 PM IST
indians deserve to be whipped in to shape. Or other countries will see
how our people relieve themselves on the road and kids doing their
morning business along the railway tracks. Oh well, no point in hiding
it - we elect such people to Parliament. It would be pretty
interesting to move these people to Parliament house and have them
line up in front of our esteemed law makers and do the doo doo
Agree (1)
Disagree (1)
Swami says:
September 25, 2009 at 02:54 PM IST
On the face of it, Chidambaram's remarks appear sensible, but he is
leading a privileged life. In no developed country is the life of a
common so different from the life of a minister. He should try to
navigate the traffic like a commoner just once and then he will
realise the stress that people are under. Its easy to preach from a
position of comfort and if he really cares, do something about it.
Install adequate public toilets that are clean, hygenic and safe to
start with. People will automatically stop peeing on the roads.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
AJ says:
September 25, 2009 at 03:52 PM IST
I think there can not be possibly any reason, as justification, for
traffic light jumping, and not driving in lanes. Not the lack of
infrastructure, lack of facilities kind of arguments. Yes, good
policing would surely eliminate these instances. And thats what needs
to be done.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
E. D'Souza says:
September 25, 2009 at 04:25 PM IST
“Spare the rod and spoil the child” Most of the Indians behave like
spoilt children because they know there are no strict punishments for
the offenders. Even if there are punishments people know that they can
get away by paying few bucks to the police or any law enforcement
officers. There are millions of Indian workers working in the Gulf
countries who dare to throw even a cigarette butt or an empty soft
drink can on the road in these countries because they are aware of the
harsh punishments and hefty fines they will be handed down if they are
caught littering the public places or violating the law, as a result
Indians have a good reputations of respecting the law of the land, but
these very people when they come to their own country on holiday or
vacation, overnight all their discipline and attitude changes and they
indulge in their old habits of littering the public property at their
will and wish because they know it is their country and they can do
anything and even if they are caught they can get away with it. Unless
there are on the spot fines and punishments like those in the gulf
countries or in Singapore, no amount of polite sermons will penetrate
our heads because old habits die hard and when one is spared the rod
then old habits never die in him or her
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Babu says:
September 25, 2009 at 04:59 PM IST
This article is well written without any inhibitions. Hope such
articles will bring about a change in the country. As said by the
author, Chidambaram and Shasi Tharoor are brilliant and few amongst
the elite group of ministers who talks sense. Looking forward to
another good article from you like MJ Akbar,Anil Dharker to name a
few.
Agree (12)
Disagree (0)
debdeep says:
September 25, 2009 at 05:25 PM IST
Wait a sec, Kalra. It's not about Chidu or Congress or insulting the
common man. Answer these questions 1st.
1. In which city would you find cars jumping red lights because,
there's no cop to watch ?
2. In which city would you find bigger cars putting the squeeze on
smaller cars /bikes to get the right of way?
3. In which city would you find fair-skinned sharp-featured dudes and
babes talking of NorthEasterners as Chinkies, South Indians as Darkies
and stopping people from certain regions entry to restaurants and
nightclubs ? Does the Urban Pind incident ring a bell ?
There's something perverse about the Punjabi-Haryanvi culture that
teaches machismo and short-cut-finding at the expense of basic civic
sense.Talk to any Indian about a what makes up a typical Delhi-ite;
you'll get 3 words 'arrogant','looking for shortcuts', and 'power-
hungry-without-having-the-cojones-for it'.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Rakesh Gupta says:
September 25, 2009 at 05:46 PM IST
It happenned only once that a very crowded crossing saw all the
vehicles standing behibd the stopline at KHASA KOTHI Jaipur.I was
talking to the person on the next vehicle beside me that it is good to
see this today.
PLEASE DO BELIEVE:The police cop standing was shouting and whistling
that please come ahead(cross the line)on top of his voice and he was
unhappy that nobody was coming forward.
I happenned to cross the next intersection on YELLOW LIGHT not red and
they caught me and I paid the fine because somebody was waiting at the
Hospiotal on emergency.I requested the officer here to please arrange
better training so that policewallahs do not ask us to cross the
STOPLINE for sure.
Agree (2)
Disagree (2)
vijay daniel says:
September 25, 2009 at 06:03 PM IST
North indians in general and Delhiites in particular are the most
arrogant, boorish, uncultured, uncouth, ill mannered people in the
world.South indians are more disciplined and law abiding. My greatest
fear is these north indians like Biharis and Delhiites will infiltrate
in large numbers into our cities and turn this into another Delhi,
where merit counts for nothing and the car you drive and the name
droppings count for everything.Chennai would have been the best
choice.Chidambaram must be appalled by the behaviour of Delhiites,
coming as he does from Chennai.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Reshma says:
September 25, 2009 at 06:37 PM IST
Kudos Rajesh... Once again you have hit the nail on the head. Once
again I feel that you have put into words all that I feel when I see
the depths to which our country is falling.. We are a nation capable
of much much more, but the "kuch bhi chalta hai attitude" will be our
downfall if we dont get over it.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
indian says:
September 25, 2009 at 11:07 PM IST
Yeah, so be it. Indians want more such insults to behave in a way the
rest of the world behaves.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
indian says:
September 25, 2009 at 11:11 PM IST
I soooo agree with Vikram's comment.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Shavan Bhattacharjee says:
September 26, 2009 at 01:07 AM IST
Though I don't live in Delhi, I wonder why single out Delhi alone. Its
the same story in Mumbai, Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai etc etc.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Parry says:
September 26, 2009 at 10:15 AM IST
Decent people are always buried under the pressure of uneducated
political gundas. They pretend to be developing the country; yet do
nothing for it. When someone complains, they go ballistic saying, "How
dare you mock our Country. I am a proud indian and cannot tolerate
this slander!" Mr. Proud Indian, it's time to do something so that you
can call yourself proud. This fake display of patriotism which is so
rampant across our country is sickening. Many of our people who have a
"chalta hai" attitude are like this. Overly patriotic, yet the worst
in doing anything useful. In fact, they are the ones who deteriorate
the country,.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
RAJIV MEHTA says:
September 26, 2009 at 03:50 PM IST
One does not learn good manners because of the Commonwealth games.You
learn and follow them because that is important for the person
concerned,the family and the nation.One does not behave only when
important guests are visiting.
We Indians do lack in manners and common civil sense.It is high time
we learn and teach our kids the importance of it.The games will be
over by this time next year but the life will go on.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
D Lakhanpal says:
September 26, 2009 at 04:14 PM IST
Great.. and congratulations...How I wish this wonderful note could be
made available to every school in the country...trust soon we shall
have a network of all educational institutions at the click of a mouse
so that such observations can be posted on their notice boards or may
perhaps be read out loudly in the morning assembly...
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Education Management says:
September 26, 2009 at 04:37 PM IST
Delhi is most indiciplined city among all metro in india.Delhi is
first crime capital of india then national capital.Delhi may be in top
position in Rape crime.You name a crime in india and delhi will figure
in that.The Coments of PC are 101 % true
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Rama0073 says:
September 26, 2009 at 10:29 PM IST
Why are you beating around bushes about BJP. You are trying to deviate
from the basic point that we as a country need to know how to behave
and also the police need to be more patient and less corrupt. So in
making Rudy & BJP in general a scapegoat is sucky part of your
article.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Indian from Singapore says:
September 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM IST
While it is absolutely true that Indians in general and Delhiwallahs
in particular are not rule minded we should also note that there is no
punishment for breaking rules. Red signals are broken with impunity
because the downside is limited. There is no penalty. 90% of times
there will be no cops to stop them. Also because when one driver
breaks the rule the others have to follow. Otherwise they will be hit
by other cars. That creates the chaos. Finally, the roads are
inadequate, poorly maintained, not marked and signals work sometimes.
If the infrastructure is much better and policing effective things
should be better. The one bad apple can be taken out. Otherwise why do
the same Indians behave well outside their country.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Niki says:
September 28, 2009 at 01:31 PM IST
Hahahahahahaha..... Man, you are brilliant! :-)
you should be punished as well ;-)
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
oppandey says:
October 08, 2009 at 07:37 PM IST
kya baat hai.....humne sab kuch dekh liya hai...
bademiyansubhanallah
Being a democracy, we care for the common man; China doesn't
Rajesh Kalra Thursday October 08, 2009
Respected Shri. Manmohan Singh Ji,
Greetings!
I write to compliment you on the great work being done by your
government to ensure that Delhi provides the most memorable
Commonwealth Games in history in 2010. But before I continue, let me
first establish my credentials as an objective person so that you take
me seriously.
I have already earned the wrath of some of those who work closely with
you towards making Delhi a great place by suggesting in a blog post
that Delhi is unfit (as against being unprepared) for the games and
that you should scrub them. But before you think I am some sort of an
agent propped up by the once ruling, and now fast diminishing even as
an opposition, BJP, I would draw your attention towards the other
piece I did, where I supported P Chidambaram, for calling a spade a
spade, i.e., calling the undisciplined Delhites, just that,
undisciplined, and that unless they change their ways, Delhi will not
be able to present itself as an international city.
And now that my objectivity is established, Sir, let me get down to
the real substance of my letter.
I, along with a lot of those who work in this city, have been rather
bemused at huge adverts in city papers yesterday that since the
delegates from all the Commonwealth nations would be on an inspection
tour of the various venues to be used during the games, please avoid
the routes to be taken by them from morning till evening.
Today I also learnt that these 200 odd delegates are being provided
free passage on these routes, i.e., traffic will be stopped on all
sides for them to go through unhindered. What a thoughtful idea!
But I have a question, especially now, in this season of austerity,
when all your Very Important Persons (VIPs) have turned Very Austere
Persons (VAPs). Where was the need to waste money on such
advertisements? Honestly, you are doing a great job in any case of
training the people of Delhi to wait endlessly in traffic jams day in
and day out.
Ask anyone who travels within the city, especially through those
dreaded VIP err VAP areas of Delhi. The traffic movement is entirely
at the whims of these VAPs. Just last evening, my colleague Sumit
Gulati and I were driving back home when about a km from the traffic
light near the VAP area, there was abnormal traffic built up for no
apparent reason, even as it flowed freely on the other side. We waited
and fretted and got scratched by other motorists for a good 30 minutes
before the suspense lifted. We saw one Z+ category VAP go past with
his full retinue of pilot and escorts et al. So, what the great
traffic police had done was that instead of making it inconvenient for
the VAP, they blocked traffic on one side completely so that the
direction in which the protected gent had to proceed could move
freely. You see, if it allowed the other side to move too, it would
block those who want to turn right on the VIP route, creating a
potential block.
But let me come back to this delegation visit, PM sir. Please look at
the map of the areas affected that the advert wants motorists to
avoid. It is virtually the entire city. Wouldn’t you be better off by
declaring it a holiday? Believe me, the savings that accrue to the
nation by not working would be greater. Imagine the savings on fuel,
the establishment costs in the offices with subsidised canteens, air-
conditioning, electricity, transportation, and so on.
And Sir, this is just the delegates that number a mere 200, I wonder
what you would do when thousands of athletes and officials have to
move around the city during the games? You would really do well to
declare a holiday through the game's duration.
The other day BBC called me from London to discuss Delhi's
preparedness for the games and also wanted to know if we look at China
as competition. I told them clearly we cannot compare ourselves, for
we are a democracy and we care for the common man where as China
doesn't. Am I not right, Sir?
Thanking you.
Warmest regards
Rajesh Kalra
Comments(70)
Rated 4.7/5 (159 Votes)
Comments:
Agree (14)
Disagree (3)
mihir says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:20 PM IST
Mr.Kalra - well said!
I wonder if they will take the delegates past Delhi Gate - or would
that be too much of an issue?
Agree (16)
Disagree (3)
Antonio says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:27 PM IST
A very good article Mr.Karla.Cheers!!
Telling the general public to avoid the major arterial roads of the
city on a working day certainly defies logic.A holiday would certainly
have been a much better option.But tell me was the China reference
even necessary?
Agree (10)
Disagree (1)
Feroz Khan says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:30 PM IST
Nice thought ,i think it should be a national holiday so that we also
can participate.
Agree (20)
Disagree (19)
yxd says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:38 PM IST
I do not think you know how common chinese to think about this issue.
You said your country care about common people, why so many people
still live in BPL, why so many children die within 24 hours after
birth. It is funny to such you are a democracy while let so many peole
live miseraly.
Agree (16)
Disagree (5)
Bharat says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:41 PM IST
Ha ha, I like it... :)
Absolutely true... no comparison to China. Infact Delhi is not even
comparable to few other cities in India.
What a waste of an opportunity !!!
Agree (12)
Disagree (2)
Aveeshkar says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:49 PM IST
Well said . . . international games like the CWG have been arranged in
many countries before , but unfortunately in ours , this is what they
are making the public go through !
Well Done - World's Largest Democracy ! ! !
Agree (9)
Disagree (1)
VIJAY PAL SALWAN says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:51 PM IST
Well Said Mr. Kalra,
Respected PM Ji, You must take a promising step towards Mr. Kalra's
suggestion.
Agree (10)
Disagree (0)
Jaysheel says:
October 08, 2009 at 03:56 PM IST
BRILLIANT
And Super Last line...
So True
Agree (5)
Disagree (2)
Nandinii says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:00 PM IST
Absolutely agree Mr.Kalra. Why Delhi all the time for any games or
major events. Is India only Delhi? Major portion of export earnings
come from lesser known towns and cities also from below the Vindyas
and Satpuras. Lets next time provide employment and opportunities to
these lesser blessed towns and cities down south. Lets make the
outside world look at India beyond Delhi or Dilli, Mumbai or Chennai.
Agree (4)
Disagree (0)
Piyali says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:07 PM IST
Nice post. Knowing some of the babus with their egg-headed decisions,
it just may be a national holiday! Mr PM: I hope you read this
Agree (5)
Disagree (0)
rohit garg says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:21 PM IST
There is something about Delhi. The CM doesn’t shy away from
saying sorry on front of being way out of schedule of CWG prep. But
would that suffice for the total failure of the government
machinery ??
Not only traffic problems but there are many issues which need urgent
attention.
New Delhi was lashed with heavy rains last month which continued for
five to six hours. The heavy rain exposed the Govt's preparedness to
deal with it. Despite tall claims by the Municipal Corporation of
Delhi (MCD), the city life was thrown out of gear leading to total
chaos. The red lights stopped working at many places resulting in long
traffic jams. Because of the poor drainage system, the roads were
water-logged for several hours adding to the inconvenience.
New Delhi has acute shortage of power and water. Almost all areas
suffer from power cuts and an errant water supply. Is it realistically
possible to hold Commonwealth Games without electricity and water? The
answer is a big NO.
The big question is: Is India ready for Commonwealth Games? Do we have
a system in place which would ensure that India successfully host the
mega sporting event and come out of it with flying colours?
If this is the way we are going to welcome our guests in CWG, then i
dont know with what impression of India, in their heart we'll end up..
Agree (6)
Disagree (1)
rahul says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:28 PM IST
Man, this article really rocked. I really hope that sonia gandhi and
the so called gandhi scion gets to read this. I would love to slap
those people for their comment on "austerity" in the recent
times. Pathetic excuses for each and every problem has become a glory
point of the government.
Agree (8)
Disagree (1)
rahul says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:36 PM IST
If you see closely at traffic advisory : It says CITIZENS FIRST !!!
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Nimit Agarwal says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:40 PM IST
Hello Kalra sir,
Its a well thought and well written piece sir.
With this letter, you have touched upon on a very important aspect
i.e. how will they manage the city when hundreds of athletes will be
in the city. The government should restructure their plans so that no
inconvenience is caused either to the participants nor to the general
public at large.
Agree (4)
Disagree (0)
Amit Deshpande says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:42 PM IST
Very well said once again...
That's the grouse we have to face in India. If you talk against the
govt. then you are an opposition man or else you are a sycophant of
the governing.
Rajesh Kalra as ever, has given a wonderful unbiased viewpoint of the
situation yet again. Keeping fingers crossed that the Games go through
without a hitch. Yes, for once I want to believe that, miracles do
happen.
I wonder what the delegation of our ex-sportsperson would be feeling
at the unpreparedness, who fought an emotionally charged debate when
Delhi won the bid to host CWG.
Sir Gavaskar and other dignitaries of the delegate, the government has
let you down, once again. The nation apologises.
Once again I want to ask, who is the CEO of the Games? the one
responsible individual who would want to take credit 'if' the Games go
well, we do not want blame game if things fail.
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Anant Khirbat says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:44 PM IST
Great article Kalra Sahab. I hope our VIPs, VAPs and PM read this
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Sanjay Vasudeva says:
October 08, 2009 at 04:58 PM IST
Wonderful..I really wonder how would Saadi uncouth Delhi handle these
games.. I remember Asiad was a wonderful experience and was always
proud of the fact that all the paraphernelia for the games was erected
in 18 months straight.. But a lot has changed in Delhi Since then..the
roads and people's mind have gone narrower... with so much work going
on...It would really be a Miracle that we can host the games.. I would
want to feel the same Pride again in Being a Delhite
Agree (8)
Disagree (0)
Sharda Bhargav - The Confiscated Soul says:
October 08, 2009 at 05:07 PM IST
Very touching piece. The emotional elements about Indian government's
care for common people is praiseworthy.
The delegates must have been mighty happy to have unobstructed drive
on Delhi roads contrary to their belief.
Thinking the smoothness of traffic, they may not get caught in the web
of our eternal unpreparedness.
Organizers need to be congratulated for projecting positive progeny.
Aam aadmi looks askance.
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
DB says:
October 08, 2009 at 05:18 PM IST
You really told BBC that! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ...
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Nagabhushanam G says:
October 08, 2009 at 05:19 PM IST
Sir what u have said is absolutely right.
It's better to declare a Holiday to Delhi.
Oh God this holiday is for only just 200 officials
What when all the officials,athletes,international media,delegates
comes..Then I think even a holiday won't be sufficient may be a month
Delhi comes to stand still.Off course our VAP's are so busy in
uplifting the life of common man....Hope at least on day our PM sir
would read this..
Thank you sir
Agree (1)
Disagree (1)
Rakesh says:
October 08, 2009 at 05:48 PM IST
I beleive this is being done just to get a good feedback from these
delegates (who will get a chanse to see deserted road and would never
come to realise how badly managed is the traffic in Delhi). Government
wants to leave a good first impression and they definetly would do
some thing similar during the games..pls be prepared!!!
Agree (4)
Disagree (1)
Sachin says:
October 08, 2009 at 06:16 PM IST
Ahh....There goes my Tax money in the non sensible advertisements, yet
again...on serious note there are some very useful points in this
article:
1. Unpreparedness for CW games
2. No regard for common person by authorities
3. Waste of Fuel because of bad infrastructure/planning/technology.
4. Waste of Tax Payers money.
5. And more ...
TOI should have a section in print media wherein it publishes its most
popular blog entries...I guess political leaders are more sensitive to
prin media than E-Media.
Agree (13)
Disagree (10)
A Chinese says:
October 08, 2009 at 06:23 PM IST
Declaring yourself as a democracy system does not mean you are a
democratic country. Only when the majority behave in a democratic
manner, than can we say a democratic society is in the making.
However, to behave in a democratic ways needs a lot of preconditions,
either for individuals or for a country. Others, it is more like a
joke! The latest version of Human Development Report released just
this week shows clearly who care more about people!
Agree (2)
Disagree (6)
gag says:
October 08, 2009 at 06:26 PM IST
I am surprised to see from NDTV that the India government did this
just for a CMG group! if it had been the president of USA, maybe, the
whole country will stop for that!!
Agree (15)
Disagree (2)
P.S.Narayanan says:
October 08, 2009 at 06:49 PM IST
It is not a fact that China does not care for its citizens. While
India looses each minute 4 kids due to malnutrition, we are kite
flying this ten day tamasha called CW Games. China took care of
education, healthcare, food and sanitation of its people before
organising Olympic Games. A Democratic nation does not deprive the
majority its basic minimum needs even after 6 decades of free rule.
India is any thing except democracy.
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
Anurag Gupta says:
October 08, 2009 at 07:28 PM IST
This road-avoidance reminds me of inspection days at school. Our
teachers repeatedly asked us to come in clean, neat, ironed school-
uniform with the tie properly knotted. The inspector has to be greeted
in an energetic voice. Our notebooks have to be neatly covered in gray
paper with appropriate labels. And lastly, we should not loiter around
in playgrounds or near the "chana bhatura" stall.
I used to take a sick leave on those inspection days!
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Pals says:
October 08, 2009 at 07:29 PM IST
Superb article !!
I wish it reaches its destination.
Agree (7)
Disagree (6)
Lienboi Haokip says:
October 08, 2009 at 07:32 PM IST
Indian Babus care for the common people?..are you kidding me? come on
don't you try to judge anything by sitting at your comfort room. Go,
travel around Bharat and see yourself what is happening and how the
common people live in the remote areas. When the Capital city looks so
precarious, do you ever think, the conditions of the remote and widest
areas of Bharat be more better? Sometimes i wonder, If the common
people living in the remote areas have any right in the so-called the
largest Democratic country. Only the people from Mainland Indians and
those living in the city may enjoy their rights fully, but if you are
thinking you are living in a democratic country, try to do something
for your hapless people in the remote areas rather than writing
anything without any experience in your comfort room. This is what
most of the Indian writers do and they'd never focus the plights of
the majority common people.
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
Gopi says:
October 08, 2009 at 08:09 PM IST
Sarcastic punch line at the end drives home the irony! Very good.
Agree (8)
Disagree (0)
Dev says:
October 08, 2009 at 08:18 PM IST
The BBC started all this comparison spree between India and China, and
your paper picked it up for feel good effect. At least China makes
good on its promise of providing its people a better quality of life
in return for them handing over control in all aspects to the
Government. But Indians are being taken for a ride by their Government
who don't provide ANYTHING but take back a lot through corruption.
Agree (10)
Disagree (11)
Nikhil says:
October 08, 2009 at 08:27 PM IST
@A Chinese
Stop killing innocent Buddhists and Tibetans first and then talk about
HDR reports. While we're at it, stop adding lead paint on toys and
milk to kill little kids world over.
Also, might wanna note that China doesn't exactly go out leaking all
info about their country to such reports. Good lick figuring out what
actually goes in there.
Now coming back to my lovely Delhi. I just love the pathetic comments
from "fellow Indians". Instead of actually supporting the
"CAPITAL" of this country these people are busy talking
online everywhere (even on international forums) about how Delhi is
unfit to host games. You are all just model deshbhakts aren't ya? Well
how about you all STFU and remember that Delhi is still the best metro
esp. without the influence of shitty Bollywood industry so far (we
also don't have retard speech like bombay guys).
All these people talking about Delhi being unfit cause of attitude and
whatnot should remember that people from YOUR states come here to live
a better life, not other way around (most of the times). Stay in your
own damn states and stop populating Delhi with your ignorance if you
can't even support this city while living here.. forget the part about
it being national capital.
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
Prof. Ramesh Sinha, Freelancer says:
October 08, 2009 at 09:26 PM IST
Rajesh Kalra possesses value of recognising humanity at every statge
as a result of which his present blog in form of an open letter to the
prime minister Manmohan Singh is there. His efforts to present true
picture of citizens particularly the Delhiites at the moment when
entire government machinery is busy in making the Commonwealth games
grand success. I personally request the PM to take his views seriously
and guide the SAI for championing the cause of sports and athletics.
No need to say that under his competent stewardship the organisers
would come upto the expectation so that we retain decorum and degnity
before hundreds of athlets particpating from all over the commonwealth
nations.
Agree (8)
Disagree (0)
VB says:
October 08, 2009 at 09:35 PM IST
Nice piece, Mr. Kalra. It's a pity it won't penetrate the extremely
thick hides of our politicians, though.
As for the comments by some of your Chinese readers: Whatever else may
be China's achievements, they have achieved one thing in 60 years of
communist rule---they have made sure that their people don't get a
joke anymore. It's obvious that they have taken your last para
literally, and are assuming that you have adversely compared China
with India. Now we're faced with a philosophical question: is it
better to be able to laugh at politicians while living in misery
(India), or is it better to live reasonably well, but without the
freedom to laugh at politicians or even the ability to understand a
joke (China)?
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
Shail says:
October 08, 2009 at 09:44 PM IST
@Nikhil..
I too love Delhi and have been there lot many times and can see the
reason why the Government plans to impose this traffic bar and i
totaly support this event...but with due respect to all your emotional
outburst against fellow indians 'wanting a better life'..let me state
that Delhi(or for that matter any other metro in India) is not the
domain of a few select individuls and iam sure that your father or
forefathers had come to delhi once upon a time for the 'want of a
better life'..and i think that right to want a better life exists for
all indians...ever heard something called urbanization???
Agree (6)
Disagree (0)
lmsharma says:
October 08, 2009 at 09:45 PM IST
Dear Sir,
A lovely write-up!
We can not hide our weaknesses. We have been doing so, for the last
sixty years. Democracy is not an excuse to be weak and corrupt. We
have different standard for the poor, the rich and the politically
well connected people. What message is sent to the common man when the
entire state and central machinery is pressed into action only to
search a CM of a state! On the other hand in a similar chopper
accident few years ago no such courage was shown by the central
government. GARIB AOUR BE SAHARA ADMI KI KOON SUNTA HAI! YE DESH AUR
SARKAR SIRF PAISE WALON KO SUNTA HAI, MUSEBAT PAR NE PAR GARIB ADMI
DOO ASUN BAHA LETA HAI AUR CHOOP BAIT JAATAA HAI.. The curse and
robbery of common man will not let this country grow. The day this
country starts showing concern to common mans grief, it will start
progressing. It is imprudent to think to be at par with China. China
is far, far ahead of India. It hardly matters about the type of
government so long as common mans problems are solved. Look the way
our politicians are enjoying at the cost of tax payer! And there is no
accountability, no probity, no transparency and no duty towards
nation. Everybody is looting this country.Our politicians are thugs of
the highest order. 18 brave commandos killed in Maharashtra! Who cares?
They only put on white dress but z black in their deeds.. One such
minister had to leave the central cabinet only because he was busy in
changing dresses after dresses, when it was time to be at the site of
disaster. His deputy was busy in birthday celebrations. This is the
accountability of our leaders. They feel it to be below their dignity
to live in government accommodation. No one can top us in corruption.
Learn something from China and Israel.
Agree (8)
Disagree (12)
A Chinese says:
October 08, 2009 at 10:29 PM IST
@Nikhil: Please stop killing the poor fighters in Assam, Manipur,
J&K, Orison, CHantisgarth and many other states, stop burning down
Christian Churches, stop killing the infants through chronic
starvation, stop selling wives and bonded laborers, before you can
talk about democracy. Again, please read books on what is democracy
before you can talk and practice it. What you are doing is not
democracy at all. Please do not fool youself. It is only Demo-crazy (a
collective mental illness).
Agree (5)
Disagree (4)
hortense vaughan says:
October 08, 2009 at 10:46 PM IST
With your babus and chatral hai attitude the CWG are bound to be a
disaster. Why dont you cancel the CWG or employ the Chinese to
organise it for you after all they performed pretty well responding to
last years horrific earthquake and did an admirable job at the last
Olympics.
If you used the IAF's helicopters to move the 200 odd delegates then
there would not have been been a reason to disrupt the normal Delhi
traffic;better cancel before it becomes too much of an embarrassment..
Agree (4)
Disagree (0)
bala srinivasan says:
October 08, 2009 at 11:08 PM IST
I beg to defer completely.this comparison is totally undefendable
simply because the facts are glaringly point in the opposit
direction.we indians in general may be because of british
indoctrination of three hundred years still have the
"servant" or "coolie"mentality to the extent we
treat our helpers as such.look at all the newly rising subdivisions
advertising "servant quarters".until that mind set is there
in DELHI or INDIA we will always be "BROWN SAHIBS" and have
discriminating&definetly NOT CARING our fellow INDIANS.we have to
start,atleast make a sincere attempt at scrubbing ourselves of that
stupid british vestige mentality to be proud CARING INDIANS.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
varsha says:
October 08, 2009 at 11:13 PM IST
a brilliant sarcasm.. I hope the govt gets the message..
Agree (5)
Disagree (3)
Capitalist says:
October 08, 2009 at 11:53 PM IST
China reference does apply here and may have nothing to do with them
valuing people less. In China, when people see this notice, they would
sincerely leave home before dawn and will not return until dark (I was
told, never been to China)! Call it discipline, training or that they
ask "what can I do for my country". India has people like
you, asking "what can I take from Manmohan Singh today?".
People will mock, moan and complain just like you're doing here in the
article. I'm not saying you should not but that's what Indians are
accustomed to. I'm an American and if it makes you feel any better,
we're exactly like you inspite of the fact that government tries hard
to please aam admi here!
In all seriousness, Indian Government is within reason to limit the
traffic to put the guests away from danger and to (lesser extent) save
themselves time. The solution obviously is more roads in Delhi. In
absence of those roads, I don't see why government should not break-
away from the austerity drive and advertise inconvenience people. In
our country, we do the same for VVIPs but we have much nicer road
network and hence the disruption is less.
As far as your comment to BBC goes, it is of cheap taste and
definitely fits your character Mr. Kalra! If it was China, you would
be in jail! So, cherish your freedom. Be a good journalist and
criticize your government, but be constructive. As we say it here in
USA, with freedom comes responsibility.
Agree (2)
Disagree (0)
Abhishek says:
October 08, 2009 at 11:55 PM IST
I guess you are partially right. I believe the problem is that
everyone part of the traffic is responsible for the current situation.
Unless we start using the public transport and reduce/limit the usage
of own transport nothing would imrpove. Problem is that some of us who
do realize this take the initiative and to some extent succeed to
execute the idea but soon realize its not enough to make the change.
We still see, fellow citizen abuse the resources and soon gets
frustrated enough to give up. I guess whats needed is little more
patience for this 'educated' group and little penalties for abusers
from the side of the government.
As for the VIP's or VAP's ... well these are leaders we chose, who by
bookish definition of the word leader, should selflessly work for our
betterment. Its irritating to see them create nusiance ( be it a lil
thing as traffic jams or their involvement in scams ...or inefficiency
to summarize) and hence we complain. Efficient or not, I guess we got
to repect the authority we have entitled them with. They are the
representatives of our country and I guess they should be entitled to
little perks.
My Point is, its easy to crib to complain about everything, but is
quite hard to provide the solution. Lets be the part of the
constructive group and rather present with some solutions rather than
complaining alone.
Agree (7)
Disagree (0)
An American Perspective says:
October 09, 2009 at 02:31 AM IST
@VB
As an expat living in Beijing, I can assure you that you are wrong on
many counts. The problem isn't that the Chinese cannot understand a
joke. I know and work with many Chinese in my life and they are
generally happy people and tell plenty of jokes themselves. Contrary
to your belief the Chinese criticize and laugh at their politicians as
well. However, these days the people are generally content and proud
of the direction their country is heading in. Hu Jintao has an 80%
approval rating and is generally well liked by the common people
because he has drastically improved their day to day lives.
The way the last sentence is worded in the article, the BBC reporter
probably took the words literally instead of understanding it as
sarcasm as it was intended. Alas, the Indian sense of humor and
Western humor are not compatible.
Agree (7)
Disagree (5)
Shashank says:
October 09, 2009 at 06:54 AM IST
Have you been to China ? Its a great country with happy people, great
infrastructure, great history and a better tomorrow as compared to
India. Indian Government has zero accountability for the things they
do...If thats caring...why the hell we feel otherwise...
Agree (0)
Disagree (1)
Jayesh says:
October 09, 2009 at 07:56 AM IST
It's sad to see so many people completely missing the satire in the
China comment...to these people, "Please grow a sense of
humour" :)
Agree (4)
Disagree (5)
manish says:
October 09, 2009 at 09:11 AM IST
@nikhil first of all you are sick.get a doctor
@ a chinese , well thanks for suggestion. But we need not learn things
from you guys. We have democracy and so all are free to express things
so in most of the times it leads to mess. What mr kalra(exercising his
freedom of speech) said was example of buerocratic people considering
themselves above ordinary trust me china is very much the same. the
only difference is that you guys accept whatever bestowed upon you and
don't oppose and we indians discuss it at large and finally look for a
way which is democratically fine with most of us. So we live in a
messy country but yes we have free valus and culture. We don't wish to
be like you you guys simply dancing happily beacause of all the FDI
and FII's but remember you guys started 20 years ahead of us that's
why you are ahead. india is still a nascent economy but very much at
the place where you were last 10 years ago infact if you check
relativly we almost beat you so don't jump the gun about india. And
once again thanks for suggestion it showed in some sense you cared as
if.
To mr. kalra well written article nicely put up. but i think this
situation is same all over the world in fact in mumbai things are
same. So i would like to blame it on politician as well poor
infrastructre and with fingers crossed i hope things will change.
Let's hope people love this article and this letter reaches PMO
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
naro says:
October 09, 2009 at 10:10 AM IST
Yes,I wrote in a scathing remake when the news item about the road
block hit the online publication(of course TOI didn't print it) and I
am writing to express my extreme displeasure at the foolishness of
setting up these roadblocks. I also asked how the Delhi govt. is going
to deal with the additional traffice during the Games?Blocking roads
is never a solution.They are not going to declare the Games a public
holiday for Delhi and issue 'no travel' advisory all over te city are
they?The city is not going to come to a standstill for the Games, the
daily chores and office will function as always.So, how is the govt
going to deal with that?Is it a 'wait and see'this time too after?
after all we do have the'dekha jayega' attitude.
The remedy is to construct properly planned roads and an efficient
public transport system(busses, metro and yes autos too!). Efficiency
of the public transport system will encourge the public to use it
regularly thus eliminating the need to choke the roads with private
vehicles. Another very important aspect should be employment of
efficiently trained and expert drivers for these vehicles.
This are all not impossible tasks.It may takes 4-5 yeras but if the
government approaches this in a systematic manner it can be done
successfully(This could've been achieved if Delhi had started on this
task the year the city bagged the Games!)
Also, instead of blamming the govt. for all the ills in the country,
it is better advised that the public becomes more aware of their
rights and duties and thus induce the babudom and politicians to be
more accountable of their actions and decisions.after all, this is a
government of the people,for the people and by the people so they are
accoutnable to us-the people.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
CJ says:
October 09, 2009 at 11:03 AM IST
Well two substantive points in the post. The democratic institutions
have completely failed the common man and our cities are obvious
examples of these
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Roshmi Gupta says:
October 09, 2009 at 11:05 AM IST
Dear yxd,
You seem to have missed the point and the sarcasm! Mr Kalra, is trying
to say that the government does NOT care about the common man.Same
goes for the other readers who have jumped up with descriptions of the
common man's suffering at the hands of babudom.
Agree (1)
Disagree (2)
indian says:
October 09, 2009 at 11:18 AM IST
""""CITIZEN'S
FIRST"""".........very true and honest statement
from the Delhi police.... Motto of Delhi Police and Government.. 1.We
rip Citizen's first. 2. We harm Citizen's first. 3. We put every blame
on Citizen's first. 4. We take money from Citizen's first ( and then
we might work)............ This Citizen's First list can go
on...............
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Sharad kapur says:
October 09, 2009 at 11:54 AM IST
Rajesh you have outperformed this time. Did u really say that to the
BBC. I am imagining the tone in which it must have been said. It is
almost mischievous, yet enjoyable. Well done! Hope the stupid
politicians get this in the joke form as straight things go over their
heads.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Kirhore Jingan says:
October 09, 2009 at 11:56 AM IST
Haha! Rajesh, well said, but if our bullheads will understand this is
a big if! hey, do let us know where we can read/see/hear the BBC
stuff!
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Manoj Ghildiyal "manu" says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:07 PM IST
Sarcastic Shot by Mr. Rajesh Kalra. When I hear/ read something
related to CWG’s inadequate preparation I smitten by a fear of
stigma on Delhi’s dignity. Albeit, your letter is a brilliant
sarcasm, but I really like the pukka solution provided that during CWG
Govt. should declare holiday, this way we (aam aadmi) can contribute
too. Otherwise, it would be very frustrating for us to stuck in an
endless traffic jam.
Moreover, media is not allowed to talk to the delegates so nothing
concrete is coming about the CWG preparations. This is nothing but to
conceal that Delhi is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed
state in terms of organizing CWG. It’s been 7 yrs since India
bagged the honor to organizing CWG in Delhi. What are we doing? What a
‘Sluggish Sarkari System’ we have? But this is not the
right question at this point in time, because it will stimulate
nothing but a pure blame game.
I am pretty sure that there has been and will be loads of loop-holes
in the preparation of CWG. At the 11th hour, I am sure they will
finish all the things in holus-bolus. So the end products will
definitely be hogwash and this all will lead to nothing but a flop
show. But the biggest irony is nobody is aware that who is the
director of the show? Is it Mr. Kalmadi, Mrs. Dixit, Builders,
Organizers or finally Mr. PM?
Nutshell, Mr. PM has to form an instant adhoc committee and on the
basis of its report he needs to make the action plan. If you come
across a need to chuck Mr. Kalmadi out or Mrs. Dixit out from the
Project you need to do it at the earliest and assign the
responsibility to other person (e.g. Mr. Sridharan-DMRC, Mr. Nilekani-
UIDAI) we don’t have crunch of talented people in our country
they are ready to unleash their forte. I know the route to CWG is very
topsy-turvy as now only 364 days to go, but we have to accomplish it,
at this juncture I can simply suggest, if you want to sustain the
dignity, pride and glory of India, WAKE UP Mr. Singh !!!
"Manu Ghildiyal"
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Nair says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:21 PM IST
The hiccups would likely begin at the IGI Airport itself. Is it ready
for the influx of officials, athletes and spectators who will descend
on Delhi in Oct 2010? Are Delhiites, in particular, and Indians, in
general, ready to make sacrifices to make the CWG a success? How
willing are we to forgo some of our daily comforts and tweak daily
routines for the benefit of others, especially foreigners? Can Delhi
car owners stomach travelling by public transport for 2 weeks? Perhaps
the state govt could consider introducing staggered work and school
hours (or starting these earlier/later based on events' schedules) for
the duration of the Games. This may not eliminate traffic congestion
at peak hours, but would prevent an already bad situation from getting
worse. Holding an event of this magnitude requires the host city and
its residents to make some temporary allowances and sacrifices, so as
to project a gracious image and reap some benefit from the event. Mr
Kalra's tongue-in-cheek dig at China will probably be lost in
translation. Still, one cannot dismiss or ignore the efforts China and
her citizens put into hosting an even bigger event in '08 - the
Olympic Games. By all accounts, and any measure, they did an admirable
job, whatever their reputation for human rights may be.
Agree (6)
Disagree (6)
A Indian says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:35 PM IST
@ A CHINESE
Please stop
* The genocide that is going in TIBET, XINJIANG and other parts of
China
* Brutal Killing of Chinese who are fighting for freedom and are being
executed for merely talking against the state
* Selling fake goods to the world and INDIA. Many goods sold in India
are fakes and of poor quality like toys, mobiles (completely third
rate and which bursts at a mere press of button), medicines, etc
* Selling chemical tainted products like Milk products, toys, mobiles,
etc.
* Labeling your sub standard medicines as MADE IN INDIA and selling
them in African nations.
* Persecuting FALUN GONG sect and harassing their members.
* Persecuting Christian priests and people across China and razing
their churches
* Stop selling third rate cheap labour subsidized by your Government
* Stop building inferior quality infra projects like schools, etc that
collapsed in the quake.
* Selling your wives and having more than one woman as wives in
secret.
* Many more,,,,,,,,,,,,
India has been a democracy since time immemorial unlike yours which
has a history of persecution and killings. Reading books on democracy
is not reqd for we are naturally democratic unlike you people who can
hardly pronounce the word DEMOCRACY like u do.
So PLEASE STOP living in a world of fake illusions (like your fake
products) and come to ground reality. Stop floating in a world of
illogical beliefs. Your One party state is a Mobo-crazy (a collective
mental disease) that comes from ruling like a MOB.
Agree (4)
Disagree (2)
AP says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:50 PM IST
To hell with CWG 2010.. I want to debate the last line of your
article.. Do we really care for our common man???? .. our comman man
lives below poverty line whereas in China poverty is fast decreasing
and prosperity is reaching millions.. Now this is taking care of
common man not boasting every now and then that we are a democracy so
we care for our people... tht BS sir BS served with hot kebabs if u
like but BS it is after all!!
Agree (6)
Disagree (3)
JAKE says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:54 PM IST
@ HORTENSE VAUGHAN
Ha, the traitor is back again. Eating Indian food, the traitor is
licking Chinese boots. No scruples and no morals. Vaughan will even
desert his wife and his family plus parents for CHINA.
When people are there, anything will be a disaster for u are a devil
in a sheep’s garb. Ok, Hortense, as u say, we will cancel the
CWG and employ Chinese, but they will only do construction work and
clean our streets. And u can also join them. If the CHInese responded
to the earthquake, so too we have to the floods and tsunamis.
The thing is cancellation can be done if scums like u are not there in
India and if shameless perverts like u are kicked out then the country
will work well. It is people like u who are an embrassment not only to
India, but the whole of mankind and it will be better if u are lynched
and then executed. The whole world will be better off….
Agree (5)
Disagree (5)
JJ says:
October 09, 2009 at 12:54 PM IST
Please dont comapre to us with China, I think they are far better than
us. We dont treat any women/poor with respect. WE SIMPLY DOES NOT
RESPECT ANYBODY IN ANYWAY expect he have money or power. ITS PITY THIS
SO CALLED DEMOCRACY DOES NOT EVEN TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE FOR THEIR
HEALTH ALSO.
PITTY ON US INDIANS
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan says:
October 09, 2009 at 01:39 PM IST
Telling the general public to avoid the major arterial roads of the
city on a working day certainly defies logic.A holiday would certainly
have been a much better option.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
rohit says:
October 09, 2009 at 01:49 PM IST
Yeah. The reference of China was unnecessary , really.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Yawwn says:
October 09, 2009 at 03:01 PM IST
Really.... This is crap. Commonwealth games will last for a few days
and it will be over. Stop discussing it! Whatever impression we
could've given to the world, we've lost the opportunity to build it.
it's too late now. Look... stop getting paranoid. Nothing will happen
during the games. Life will go on as usual in Delhi. It's a matter of
a few days. Nothing can ever improve in India and nothing ever
will.Going totally against Rajesh Kalra's thing. I'm saying,
"Chalta Hai". I don't give a crap anymore.
Agree (3)
Disagree (0)
dud_mumbai says:
October 09, 2009 at 04:27 PM IST
@shashank....we all know about the rule over there in chaina.the
author concluded with a sarcasm so take it that way only.
@nandini...you took it in a wrong way too.its not just delhi,its india
in general which is not capable of organizing the event of such an
arrant repute. If its not even delhi or mumbai then which city else
could do this in india.The post has been written to feel ashamed of
the present situation and analyze it rather than fighting for your
very OWN city.
@Mr Kalra..well I am already a great fan of your writing as well as
analyzing skills. But there is more than what meets to the eye. I
think India is putting efforts towards globalization despite this poor
scenario. So we should rather appreciate it( and i mean it...its not a
metaphor) and help india get going. If china is doing great its also
because of its people and I need not explain that as you know that
already.
Last but not least a great post and great analysis.
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Amit Virdi says:
October 09, 2009 at 05:10 PM IST
Very well said!
I wonder what does "Citizens" in the tagline of Delhi Police
means! How can they even think about such taglines?
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Bobby says:
October 09, 2009 at 09:29 PM IST
I would use a Hindi sentence to describe this piece... "Kya
Kataksh maaraa hai aapne"
I find only one problem with such highlighting of issues, that why
cant I read it normally, just like a normal article, why do I have
this blood boiling up feeling whenever I read such stuff.
Agree (1)
Disagree (1)
Karan says:
October 09, 2009 at 10:44 PM IST
haha It is most funny to read the comments from the Chinese and Indian
Communists who dont realize that your punchline is sarcastic... Idiots
abound...we may be a corrupt and uncouth city but atleast we can
understand a joke...unlike some of these idiots commenting on your
post. I agree that Delhi is unprepared but that is by design. You see,
the faster and more hectic and chaotic this thing gets, the more
opportunity there will be for the babus to khao paisa. Khao Khao ,
Delhi is the mother of these bureaucrats and they sell her every day
like a prostitute. Oh and one more thing , despite all this and more,
we are still better than China (no joke)
Agree (1)
Disagree (1)
Karan says:
October 09, 2009 at 10:49 PM IST
THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MISSED THE SATIRE/JOKE ARE CHINESE IN DISGUISE.
THEY CANT SPEAK ENGLISH SO THEY DONT UNDERSTAND SARCASM. CHINESE
TAKING INDIAN NAMES. IM SURPRISED THEIR GOVERNMENT EVEN LETS THEM
VISIT THIS WEBSITE. ARENT MOST WEBSITES BANNED IN CHINA?
Agree (0)
Disagree (1)
Pavan says:
October 10, 2009 at 12:05 AM IST
For the uninitiated "Respected Shri.,Ji,Sir,Thanking you.
Warmest regards, compliment you on the great work ,What a thoughtful
idea,Wouldn’t you be better off by declaring it a holiday, we
care for the common man" are all Sarcastic !!
We have got our own desi Colbert!!!
Agree (0)
Disagree (0)
Wahaha says:
October 10, 2009 at 12:23 AM IST
we care for the common man where as China doesn't.
____________________________
Is it true that a servant in Mumbai have to work 7 days a week,
otherwise no one will hire her ?
What you said is as funny as it can be.
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Juhi says:
October 10, 2009 at 01:01 PM IST
Haha.. I love it.. Satire at its best! I just hope this reaches the
right ears. Mr PM - what do you think??
And why are my Chinese friends getting offended? I think now this
website will be banned in China.. lol..
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
Tariq says:
October 11, 2009 at 12:31 AM IST
hey guys u all just keep the mouth shut ..instead of wirting useless
comments.race china and be like china .it is internally strong and
internationally powerful not like india and indians just a$$ kissers
of the west and USA. we indians are open minded only towards thte
western's thought not to others as long as we are like that will never
lead the world ...back is our fate...wake up and smell the
coffee..okiess
Agree (1)
Disagree (0)
tariq says:
October 11, 2009 at 12:43 AM IST
hey dont u indians understand one thing indians citizens everywhere in
the world are devalued and not respected by others as u see nowadays
in Eu.and USA ..whereas Chineses are treated properly we have never
heared an attack on chinese in the USA...it is pretty clear thte world
degrade us so much ...?????why can any one of u answer...dont tell me
they are jealous of our success coz Chin and Chinese are more
successful than us..........OK..LOL
bademiyansubhanallah
Vedic spirituality loses out in times of dishonesty
M J Akbar Sunday September 13, 2009
It is common knowledge that the best way to argue your case in Delhi
is through a suitcase. The capital's punters can neither control their
laughter nor restrain their envy at the news that you can find your
way to 44 acres of prime land in Marxist Bengal through an ayurvedic
massage. Napoleon remarked that an army marches on its stomach.
Lenin's Bengali army also marches on its stomach, as long as it is
prostrate.
While corruption in rising India has moved with internet speed into
the 21st century, Kolkata's deals are still in the Vedic age. Land
worth Rs 20 crores was, it seems, handed over to promoters of a
cottage-style resort called Vedic Village on the edge of Bengal's
capital for just Rs 1 crore. The process began in 1997; the promoters
added to their expanse by purchasing adjoining plots from villagers
through the usual means of a cheque placed in one hand while the other
arm was being twisted. It took a disputed football match on August 23
this year for rural anger to explode into arson: this is Bengal. Facts
began to rise from the ashes. The police discovered a cache of arms in
the sylvan peace of Vedic spirituality, although 'discovery' might be
too optimistic a word. There is little that the Calcutta Police does
not know, even if there is little that it does about what it does
know.
The acquired land included wakf property. The good news, then, is that
Bengali corruption is transparently secular. The names involved -
Abdur Rezzak Mollah, Manabendra Mukherjee (ministers in severe need of
ayurvedic treatment), promoter Rajkishore Modi, Rashid Ali Mondal,
Sibnath Banerjee, Nuruddin Gazi - are a hymn to Hindu-Muslim
brotherhood. Greed is clearly the most powerful antidote to
communalism: Death to capitalism! Long live greed! Greed is also non-
partisan. An MLA from Mamata Banerjee's party has also been named,
which might explain her silence. Trinamool and CPI(M) finally agree on
something. Even Ms Banerjee, a spartan if ever there was one, cannot
contest elections from the straw tower of an ashram.
Unsurprisingly, the local media, which for a decade had no time for
investigations of its own, gave maximum play to ministerial ayurvedic
treatment. Was the issue, then, greed or hypocrisy? In Delhi, where
few claim to be paragons of personal virtue, the spa-story would have
been a snigger on a news cycle. In Kolkata, it has wafted through
innumerable conversations with that sardonic twitch that only a
Bengali can manage to perfection.
Indian Marxists are trapped in a systemic flaw: hyper-honesty is
inconsistent with ''bourgeois democracy''. The cost of a Lok Sabha
election now runs into multiple millions. Political parties are not
profit-earning corporations. Their overhand collections are a
miniscule proportion of need; the balance is met by underhand
arrangements. The CPI(M) tries a finesse through institutional
collection, but even this needs middlemen. Money is a trading
currency; there has to be a trade. Ministers get involved. Is it any
surprise if this nexus extends to a periodic back-rub? Land is
repeatedly at the centre of Bengal's controversies because traditional
industry has been driven into the doldrums between stagnant management
and self-centred unions. Since new arrivals like IT czars will not
ladle out cash, the only value left to exploit is land. Land belongs
either to institutions that can be manipulated, or insecure villagers
who can be bullied into temptation.
Corruption is the preferred means of the get-rich-quick lobby (if the
poor were corrupt, they would not remain poor). But is greed the only
motivation? Greed is not India-specific. The extent of our venality
may have a supplementary reason. We are, by temperament, a short-cut
people. We do not like waiting for due process, whether in a project
or towards a destination. Indian corruption could well find an
explanation in Indian traffic. We instinctively seek a faster way,
whether on a cow-clogged country lane or an incomplete super highway.
The Indian driver does not believe in the sober limitations of take;
he is a devotee of overtake. Cars do not create traffic jams; drivers
with hyper libidos do.
The long cut is demeaning to the Indian ego. A Delhiwallah measures
his importance by the number of short cuts he has wangled. A favour is
a measure of both the benefactor's value and the beneficiary's
influence. Some people wait till the last minute only to prove that
time will wait for them.
The system creates hurdles since it knows that short-cutters will pay
to cross them. Bribes feed the system; the system therefore knits a
framework for bribes. A hundred rupees to a traffic cop climbs towards
millions at the top. If you are really lucky, the ayurvedic massage
comes free.
Comments(32)
Rated 4.5/5 (79 Votes)
Comments:
Agree (24)
Disagree (2)
Ali Khan says:
September 13, 2009 at 03:30 AM IST
Very True, Corruption Rules India. Politicians are the master planners
of organised land grabbing/puchasing after that they make it a Prime
Land and Auction it for Multiplexes, Housing, Model Cities, Golf
Cources etc., and earn Huge Money. Common Man is the Loser and
Builders and Rich businessmen are the prime gainers. This is Harsh
Reality of Indian Democracy!!!
Agree (17)
Disagree (4)
B. K.Chatterjee says:
September 13, 2009 at 04:23 AM IST
Excellent write up,& I would rate it as 5 of 5. However it is not a
new phenomenon. Long time back German mathematician turned philosopher
SPENGLER in his monumental book "Decline of the West" has argued quite
convincingly that modern Democracy is to a large extent based on MONEY
paid by vested interests which slowly but steadily eats its soul and
ultimately makes it a stooge in its hand.
Unfortunately no better system is known or devised so far and we have
to live with it.
Agree (8)
Disagree (5)
MUBARAK PATEL says:
September 13, 2009 at 06:13 AM IST
Politician people in India are greedy and corrupt.
Moreover, India is in footsteps of America now
where lobbying system is prevalent. Today, money
is everything in India. With money in their mind
uppermost,people have lost moral values of the
past. By hook or by crook, people want to make
money. Bribes and corruption are the order of the day. Ayurvedic
system makes use of "JUNGLEE PLANTS AND TREE LEAVES" that is why it is
"FREE".
All Indian politicians should be made to drink
bitter AYURVEDIC MEDICINE to bring them to senses.
Agree (10)
Disagree (1)
L.k.balasubramanian. says:
September 13, 2009 at 06:28 AM IST
Greed is the grease that keeps the wheels of the State, economy,
politics, and society moving in India and elsewhere.Chanakya saw it in
4th century B.C. Akbar bhai seesit in 20th century.In Russia and
China, it exists. In USA, it permeates every level ofpower points,
from mayors to corporate heads. So who can save us? Perhaps God!
Agree (10)
Disagree (1)
Saratchandran says:
September 13, 2009 at 06:54 AM IST
Most of the places in the world, the bribe and corruption of officials
with power is seen as evil and disgraceful while in India it is simply
a matter of fact and a well oiled way of life. God's places like
temples, churches and mosques, all have collection pots that people
happily pay up to get the blessing. The next level of power in their
lives are the politicians and they apply the same philosophy of
pleasing the powerful to get the blessings!! There is no regret of
remorse in doing so! Believe it or not!!
Agree (9)
Disagree (5)
az says:
September 13, 2009 at 11:15 AM IST
it is my dream that journalist's like you should contest
elections..indian polity needs fresh air
Agree (4)
Disagree (3)
Nitesh says:
September 13, 2009 at 12:29 PM IST
Very rightly said. The two warring rivals in the political are in fact
two sides of the same coin when it comes to filling their pockets by
suppressing poor. Corruption has got so much into the system that it
now drives India.
The example of traffic jam has been very aptly given to show Indian
psyche. We cannot wait for a car to pass before our car. We cannot
wait for our turn to buy a movie ticket. We cannot wait for the
traffic light to go green. We always try to save our time and instead
end on wasting our and other people's time as well and nation's time
as a whole.
Agree (11)
Disagree (39)
Kevin D Souza says:
September 13, 2009 at 12:53 PM IST
This is as outdated as the Koran Akbarr Saab, you are right. You can
easily say that the whole process is as much backward as if it was
done by some Muslims in an Islamic country. C'mon, Hindus this is the
21st Century, let us not behave like dark age Muslims.
Agree (3)
Disagree (2)
N Somnath says:
September 13, 2009 at 03:01 PM IST
Many thanks to Mr Akbar. Truth spoken clearly in few words. There will
be corruption you can't expect to fully eliminate as it is driven by
'greed'. Rather than blaming politician we need to deal with it. India
needs:
1) Independent and transparent administration
2) Fair and fast justice at every level
3) Accountability at every level
Agree (11)
Disagree (1)
S C Vaid says:
September 13, 2009 at 03:16 PM IST
India is a big tree having beautiful leaves and flowers, attractive
branches, seemingly solid stem. But all this with decaying roots. We
the people, wish to bribe to get our illegal and unauthorised jobs
done at enhanced, unaccounted cost. This situation amuses a number of
govt servants and they unhesitatingly connive to take advantage, to
amass whatever possible. The greed is becoming unlimited in absence of
any deterrent legal action against economic criminals. There is no
shame even in compromising national security. Foreign countries enjoy
these conditions having Indian money stashed with them. Political
leadership must get automatically sensitized to honestly retract
country, and progress towards clean administration to put us on path
of REAL growth.
Agree (15)
Disagree (12)
George Blaney says:
September 13, 2009 at 04:16 PM IST
Shame on you MJ Akbar for using 'Vedic' in a noun form to generate a
cognitive consonance and association with the Hindu faith. I expected
from you. But again, you prove that under the name of 'secularism',
Moslems like you take to the pen ONLY to deginerate and demean the
richness of Bharath Matha and its culture. As a Westerner, I am amazed
by the breadth and depth of Hindoo philosophy, which pales in
comparision to the "you are born in sin and we shall redeem you"
Christian claims and "no one but us are pure" Moslem mysoginist
activism.
You have no business demeaning a tradition and culture that is the
soul of Bharath Matha, and the only saving light for humanity. Ashrams
are not straw towers. You should look closer to your own faith, which
till date destroys humanity in the name of "God". Or, shall we say,
"Moslem spirituality loses out in times of terrorism".
Agree (14)
Disagree (10)
George B says:
September 13, 2009 at 04:18 PM IST
Shame on you MJ Akbar for using 'Vedic' in a noun form to generate a
cognitive consonance and association with the Hindu faith. I expected
from you. But again, you prove that under the name of 'secularism',
Moslems like you take to the pen ONLY to deginerate and demean the
richness of Bharath Matha and its culture. As a Westerner, I am amazed
by the breadth and depth of Hindoo philosophy, which pales in
comparision to the "you are born in sin and we shall redeem you"
Christian claims and "no one but us are pure" Moslem mysoginist
activism.
You have no business demeaning a tradition and culture that is the
soul of Bharath Matha, and the only saving light for humanity. Ashrams
are not straw towers. You should look closer to your own faith, which
till date destroys humanity in the name of "God". Or, shall we say,
"Moslem spirituality loses out in times of terrorism".
Agree (3)
Disagree (3)
lakhinder singh says:
September 13, 2009 at 04:43 PM IST
superb article. M J Akbar has once again shown that he is the clearest
commentator on the Indian scene.
Agree (2)
Disagree (2)
Dib Maitra Jakarta says:
September 13, 2009 at 05:18 PM IST
This is, as usual, an excellent expose - typical of MJA.
Please add a column for email, so I may share his writing with others,
Agree (3)
Disagree (2)
Dayanand Balse says:
September 13, 2009 at 07:29 PM IST
Truly the Corrupt rule the roost. They can even "influence" private
Swiss/Leichenstein bankers.These bankers have now declared that there
are no "corrupt money accounts" with them , while we know that the
money stashed away thus is upwards of $1500 billion!
Agree (2)
Disagree (2)
S. K. Raghav says:
September 13, 2009 at 07:51 PM IST
Mr. Akbar has stated the truth in its naked form. We Indians talk all
about morality, spirituality and denounce worldly acquisitions, saying
money is hand's dirt : " hath ka mail hai". But in practise we either
keep mum like the proverbial 3 monkeys of Mahatma Gandhi or lay
prostrate before those who have accumulated illgotten wealth to the
extent of being filthy rich. Unless the people asks such corrupt
people as to how they have accumulated the illgotten acquisitions,
nothing is going to improve, because the Government agencies have
their own limitations, besides being easy prey of these corrupt
predators.
Agree (1)
Disagree (2)
AP says:
September 13, 2009 at 08:22 PM IST
India's corruption started with pretended austerity and legal gridlock
created by India's ruelers over 60 years. The fact that political
perties are not funded by common people but only by businesses--that
too in a clandistinal manner(how stupid can our lawmakers be?)-- has
perptuated the culture of corruption. The Hindu ethos of "why spend
the money" has to change.
Agree (3)
Disagree (2)
Health Fitness says:
September 13, 2009 at 09:06 PM IST
Very rightly said. The two warring rivals in the political are in fact
two sides of the same coin when it comes to filling their pockets by
suppressing poor. Corruption has got so much into the system that it
now drives India.
Agree (3)
Disagree (4)
ISHRAT HUSAIN says:
September 14, 2009 at 01:17 AM IST
The existence of corruption at most of the levels of Indian life is
not a great disclosure unless it comes up with a solution,so to me any
discussion or debate ,not coming with a solution is, mere another
discussion.It would be appreciatve if it takes that route.
Agree (3)
Disagree (1)
debdeep says:
September 14, 2009 at 02:29 AM IST
Mr Akbar,we are all old enough to understand that corruption is a part
of the Indian pysche, and will last as our ethnicity exists on the
planet. The only way we can optimize/harness the tendency for
shortcuts is via strong governance and quick addressals. Post
Nandigram, Buddha's government has shown absolute decision paralysis.
The rot in the system cannot be wished away, yet it cannot be any
excuse for an absence of executive decision on Singur, Lalgarh and
finally, Vedic village and related land acquisitions. I guess, a
strong, extra-legal, cadre-muscle-power response to the 3 Ms- The
Maoist-Mamata-Muslim vote bogey would have established some order
that's the need of the hour, albeit via an undemocratic process. Mr
Akbar, we need Infosys and Wipro in Bengal, not only for the high-
skilled who have been compelled to migrate to the South, but for the
subsidiary/support industries those 2 firms might generate, with the
resultant employment of the semi-skilled. With 2 premier IT firms
coming in, it would have been a huge branding exercize for WB.Chances
are that heavy industry might follow, and that would have resulted in
a bigger subsidiary industry growth. Too bad the CPI-M's cigarette-
smoke filled brain failed to look beyond the current political
embarassments of being caught in land-scams to these long-term
opportunities, and never tried to use West Bengal's most abundant
asset to its advantage. Corruption will stay; that should not put a
stay on land-allocation to industries.
Agree (4)
Disagree (1)
MKU says:
September 14, 2009 at 03:31 AM IST
Your prophecy of any given issue has always been nonpareil. Rightly
said, ascendancy of 'corruption' in our country is not prerogative of
any single party- not anymore. Sadly, it has become the ethos of our
modern India which goes beyond common man’s wit. Whether it’s
ayurvedic massage or twitched arms-nothing actually makes nous. Is it
the fate of morality in hands of turpitudes? This issue of our warped
leadership is definitely not new to us, but what is more excruciating
is this ‘monster’ is now rigging our homes, our day to day living -
unfortunately our children are growing-up in this culture. They don’t
know if life could be any different than what it is now. The question
is can we really turn the situation??
Agree (3)
Disagree (3)
ssmoorthy says:
September 14, 2009 at 03:52 AM IST
Vedic spirituality has been losing for long time.Vedantic philosophy
is prevalent as t5he people do not care whom they elect.Who cares
which politician is corrupt?As every one is corrupt.Who cares an IAS
officer was from the bottom of his class,or the engineer or doctor
went private schools and by corrupting the examiners passed the tests
and became qualified.There are no national examinations or standards
and controls.So why worry?Calta hi!
Agree (7)
Disagree (6)
khalid hilal says:
September 14, 2009 at 05:25 AM IST
ok, Kevin, for you - muslims are from the Dark Ages, fine, then you
should NOT wake up and use tens of benefits like the Islamic Finance
which is the next IN thing that every Finance Minister is sheepishly
agreeing to in times of this Economic Crisis..
Pls go ahead and take that loan at a high interest rate- the mordern
individual you are!! And yes, pls continue to advocate how NOT to give
the barbaric "capital punishment" to the politicians who rape your
country and go scott free and then sit and complain how the "system
needs to change"
I pity confused lots like you lol
Agree (2)
Disagree (2)
Raviraj Hosur says:
September 14, 2009 at 08:05 AM IST
Fantastic analysis. Very truly said MJ Akbarji. Politicians &
political parties are only interested in MONEY. Corruption is the only
way to get rich quickly. Religion is used by them to garner votes
rather than work for the poor.
Agree (2)
Disagree (3)
A. Whig says:
September 14, 2009 at 11:29 AM IST
Very well written but with sinister intentions. Notice the single
lines where Mr. MJ Akbar, a Muslim, cannot conceal his feelings "The
acquired land included wakf property", however no such proof is given
in this write-up. The heart-burn is in the age-old Islamic / Muslim
mentality that "come what may, we will not let go of anything that has
been stamped Islamic / Muslim", and here the heart-burn is not
grounded into any proof. How cleverly Mr. MJ Akbar is "Silent" on the
hooliganism and rampant destruction by the local land-shark, a
hooligan reported to employ muscle strength to serve his goals. Dear
Sir, can we have a line or two about this person also. Nah !! because
he is a Muslim. Incidentally this guy was also supplying guards /
security / goons (whatever suits you to call them) for the very Vedic
Village. and ... and ... and .. (deliberately repeated) what incident
caused the whole episode ... a football match lost by the team of this
local goon ... incidentally a Muslim. So, in India, if 2 people fight
and a Muslim is found guilty then some (like Mr. MJ Akbar) start
looking elsewhere, make a long and short story about known problems in
the society to link them with that incident, thus defending the
perpetrator by terming it a social uprising, and if a Hindu is at
fault (even if apparently) .. lo!!, behold!!! .. this is communal
hate, deliberately done, its an act to subjugate poor minorities of
India (What ?? I think Muslims in India are the most pampered
minorities in the world ... in fact the records of Muslim-major
nations towards minorities in their states are horrifically poor).
Dear Mr. MJ Akbar, I await an article by you upholding Taslima Nasreen
for her mighty pen against Islamic-borne social evils ... hope you
will rise up to the cause.
Agree (3)
Disagree (1)
Sharda Bhargav says:
September 14, 2009 at 02:05 PM IST
Sir,
Corruption must be curbed and crushed so that no one owns any
undeserved money. In the eyes of the world we should be able to
proudly say that we belong the Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic
Republic of India, which is most safe, secure and corruption free.
Possible, yes.
Agree (1)
Disagree (1)
Gopal Chintakayala says:
September 14, 2009 at 06:32 PM IST
It is said "prostitution is as old as Himalayas.Even prostitutes have
their rules and stipulations.One of the rules is not allow another
customer when she is entertaining one.But in case of politicians there
is no such distinction between and politics.But with a disstinctioni.e
politicians entertain not one but two, threes at one time and there is
time limit for the activity.It appears, one of the reasons for them to
prefer for staying in 5 star hotels, is that such operations can not
be conducted at home.( for give,this is not intended to hurt any one)
The paradox is Our leaders are now after the assumed black meney in
Swiss Bank"s, but they would not talk of unaccounted and black money
they have in our country which is believed to be twice the amount that
is supposed to be in Swiss banks.Be that as it may,Due to opening up
economy,we now get American apples, Middle east countries spirits,
Chinese toys of course swine flu.lot of motor cars polluting both air,
water and on the other hand nearly 70% of the people do not have
access to potable water, 30% of are still below poverty line ( the
percentage is constant since 1950.They are allowed to cross the line
as they from the solid vote bank to the ruling party. All in good
faith and malice towards none.Bharat Mata ki jai.
Agree (0)
Disagree (3)
RAMESH AGARWAL says:
September 14, 2009 at 08:08 PM IST
CORRUPTION IS RAMPHART IN INDIA AND WITH THE FREE ECONOMY AS MONEY IS
POURING IN SO THE DESIRE OF POLITICIANS AND BEAUROCRATS. THAT IS HOW
THEY WERE ABLE TO DEPOSIT SO MUCH MONEY AS BLACK MONEY IN SWISS AND
OTHER FOREIGN BANKS.IT IS NORMAL THI G IN INDIA TO GET EVERYTHING DONE
BY MONEY EVEN JUSTICE AND WINNING TRUST VOTE AS WAS DONE ON 22ND JULY
IN OUR PARLIAMENT. SEE HOW LALOO, MAYAWATI, MULAYAM AND FAMILY HAVE
AMASSED WEALTH AND COULD NOT BE PROSECUTED DUE TO
POLITICALCONSIDERATION. THE STORY OF WB IS NOT SURPRISING AND IS
NORMAL IN OURCOUNTRY.EVEN MEDIA IS TOO BIASED AND WHY THEY ARE DOING
SO COULD NOT BEEXPLAINED. THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS CORRUPT AND MORE
INFLUENCIAL YOU ARE EASY TO MANAGE EVEN OUR POLICE, CBI AND SECURITY
AGENCIES ARE INFLUENCED THAT IS WHY IT IS INCREASING. THERE IS NO
REMEADY TO REMOVE THIS AND WE WILL CONTINUE LIVE IN SAME SITUATION.
Agree (2)
Disagree (2)
SAMEER says:
September 15, 2009 at 12:42 AM IST
This blog reminded me of a famous Govinda Song.
IT HAPPENS ONLY IN INDIA!!!!! LOL
Agree (0)
Disagree (2)
JSingh says:
September 15, 2009 at 08:31 AM IST
The lack of transparency is a major contribution to the corruption and
also We do not make our Politician accountable for their action.
Corrupt Politicians are suspended or removed from their government
position for their misbehavior but still remains a key personnels to
support their party working behind the scene because Parties are not
ready to the risk the creation of new party by the suspended persons.
I think Election Commissioner should come up with some creative ideas
to make it difficult for any Tom, Dick and Harry to create a new
party. Simple rule like the suspended corrupt person should be
refrained from campaigning and creating the party for at least 4 years
can be helpful. We need to make Politicians accountable for their
action.
Agree (0)
Disagree (1)
aditya says:
September 15, 2009 at 04:36 PM IST
its difficult but humourous and strike to the point article. we are
fooled because we want to be by the politicians. should we really
blame them for what they do? but i appreciate the courage the author
has to strike the left(the Left), the right and the centre(the centre)
and take pride to be presented by such people
Agree (0)
Disagree (1)
RY Deshpande says:
September 17, 2009 at 05:49 AM IST
It is often said that democratic system and corruption are
interlinked. Yet there are national differences. In India it has
become a national habit, a second nature. We have won political
freedom but freedom from things ignoble and degrading is a long
battle. India cannot make true progress unless this is won. This is
possible only if those who are conscious of things can come forward
and work for the country. To awaken to the true character of India and
to live in it is the only solution possible. It cannot be a mass
movement; it has to be a movement carried by the pioneers. Whence
shall come these pioneers? Whence did the freedom fighters come?
Whence did the bringers of Indian renaissance come? From among those
few who love the country more than themselves and those who are
willing to do sacrifice for the sake of the country.
chhotemianinshallah
Where do our literary awards fail?
Antara Dev Sen
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 22:33 IST
Hilary Mantel has won the Man Booker Prize. Of course you knew that.
It is in all the papers today and anyway, you knew she was the
bookies' favourite. Er, no, you had not really heard of her before,
but of course you know all about her now and are looking forward to
reading Wolf Hall, the novel that got her the award. Read it already?
Gosh.
All the shortlisted authors too? Got some from abroad, you say? Oh
yes, internet shopping is such a joy. Well, you really are quite a
bookworm, aren't you?
And Kunwar Narain? Which of his works do you like the most? No, not RK
Narayan, Kunwar Narain. Er, well, he writes in Hindi, but has been
translated. Not a novelist, no, a poet, primarily. A remarkable poet,
one of our literary masters. Oh no, he isn't on the Booker list. And
will never be on it, frankly. That's a different ball game.
But on Tuesday evening, far away from London's Guildhall, where the
Booker ceremony was being held, in a very different literary award
ceremony held in Parliament House, Delhi, Kunwar Narain received the
Jnanpith Award from President Pratibha Patil. The award had been
announced earlier, this was the presentation ceremony. There had been
months to introduce one of India's finest poets to those who don't
read Hindi or don't read literature. But like with every Indian
literary award, this time too we did nothing to educate the
uninitiated.
The Jnanpith is India's highest literary award. And it very often goes
to a deserving candidate. This is primarily because, unlike the
Sahitya Akademi awards, which celebrate India's linguistic diversity
and struggle to find an awardee from each language every year, the
Jnanpith prioritises merit over linguistic representation. But of
course there is petty politics -- as is evident in the fact that it
took so long for Kunwar Narain, 82, to win the award that has gone to
far lesser writers before him.
That's not odd. A culture of almost sarkari secrecy and ad hoc-ism
dims our literary awards. We never know who are in the running, who
the judges are, or the nominees; we cannot judge the verdict. So they
just announce a winner and we say, oh, really? And dissolve in
happiness or raise an eyebrow.
That's it. Later, we may or may not know who the judges were, and
through hushed rumours and hot gossip may or may not get to know more
about the nominees and the process of selection. But we are never a
part of the excitement, never engaged, we are shut out till we
passively receive the final news.
There is a lot our literary awards can learn from the Booker. It
stimulates interest in not just the winner but all the serious
contenders for the prize. They give out information continuously,
keeping the readers -- the potential consumers -- informed at every
step.
The long list of 13 was released in July. Then in September the
shortlist of six was announced a whole month before announcing the
final winner. This build-up helps not just to sell the books in the
running, but also creates an interest in literature and authors that
is unfortunately dwindling worldwide. Remember the excitement of
following Aravind Adiga every step of the way to his victory last
year?
Curiously, our literary awards have no such fervour. Not even the
Jnanpith, which is from The Times of India family or the Saraswati
Samman and Vyas Samman which are from The Hindustan Times family can
generate it. Surely they need no lessons in marketing.
And they clearly know the importance of literature in creating a more
informed, perceptive and just society. If they, along with the sarkari
Sahitya Akademi Awards, can only make their award processes more
'reader-friendly', it would go a long way in strengthening our own
literatures and cultural values.
The writer is editor, The Little Magazine
chhotemianinshallah
The unbearable heaviness of the Nobel
Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi October 13, 2009, 0:16 IST
Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has been a fierce
critic of Ceausescu’s regime in Romania. She is highly regarded in
Europe’s academic circles. She had received over 20 literary awards,
including the IMPAC, before winning the Nobel this year. And I must
confess an unliterary complaint: having read only two of her books,
The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, I have about as much
enthusiasm for reading her as I do for swimming through a pool of cold
porridge.
The Nobel Prize in literature is administered by the Swedish Academy,
the process of selection is rigorous, and the shortlist of candidates
would usually begin at about 25 names and then be whittled down to
roughly five, before a winner is chosen. In a recent interview, Per
Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee, revealed
that an author’s name would often come up for consideration for
several years before a nomination finally found acceptance. All of
this is imbued with gravitas, but none of this explains why the Prize
should be taken as seriously as it is, except for the fact of its
longevity.
The Prize’s track record over the first 30 years of its inception,
from 1901 to 1930, was dubious at best, with a smattering of the
Yeatses, Kiplings and Shaws making up for a score of now-forgotten
writers (Mommsen, Hamsun, Spitteler — names no longer read, even in
their home countries). It redeemed itself somewhat between the 1940s
and the 1980s, yielding at least a reasonable reading list of authors
whose works have endured the passage of time. In the last two decades,
the Prize seems determined to make political points and shine a light
on the obscure.
An uncharitable critic might detect the undertow of an anxiety that
Europe might be losing its influence, that the great writers who were
undiscovered by the British and the Americans (and a handful of
Indians) would sink into obscurity, taking part of the history of
Europe with them. What else might explain recent awards to Imre
Kertesz, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and now Herta
Müller? And there’s a sense of drift with some other choices: Dario Fo
and Doris Lessing, for instance, may have deserved their Nobel nods,
but both received the laurel long after their respective works had
ceased to exert a once-powerful influence.
It is not that these are writers of no merit: truly bad writers don’t
make it to the shortlist. In different ways, Le Clezio, Jelinek,
Kertesz and Müller have made their contributions to literature and
literary history. Consider this, perhaps, evidence of this critic’s
poor taste and judgement, when I say that reading their works has not
convinced me that these are writers who will last, or whose works I am
astonished and pleased to discover. Perhaps pleasure is a frivolous
thing to want from the Nobel Prize; perhaps its august list of writers
is prescriptive, a judgement handed down from a great height to us
lesser mortals, an injunction to go forth and have our minds improved.
It is frivolous to complain, as I do having read two of Müller’s books
and all that is available of Le Clezio, Jelinek and Kertesz in
translation, that they bring me no enjoyment as a reader. And yet I
find that enjoyment is important to me, personally, as a reader, and
that in the last two decades, I have had little of that from the
Nobel.
The Nobel in literature has been awarded for over a century now; the
Man Booker International has made just three awards since 2005. The
Nobel is administered by the venerable academicians of the Swedish
Academy, a committee that rarely changes the composition of its
members. The Man Booker International has a shifting list of judges,
chosen from among contemporary writers every award season: it is peer-
driven, with all the benefits and faults this entails. The first of
its three awards went to Ismail Kadare, whose works found a new and
newly loyal readership; the second to Chinua Achebe, opening up his
work to readers who were beginning to forget him, and the culture he
came from; and the third to Alice Munro, establishing the worth of the
short story as a literary genre in its own right.
If the Man Booker continues in this vein, it will outstrip an
increasingly insular Nobel literature award in the next decade as the
prize to watch. Until we get there, though, I have to locate and find
the remaining works of Herta Müller. Perhaps reading her will be a
voyage of discovery and wonder, but I suspect this will be more like
trying to read the Wodehouse-created authoress so admired by Bertie
Wooster and Lady Florence Craye, author of Spindrift. That book, says
Wooster, went down “like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging
foreheads round Bloomsbury way”, but he, like this critic, had a
plebeian soul and remained unmoved by her craft.
chhotemianinshallah
Pulp fiction
Overleaf
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi October 10, 2009, 0:59 IST
Above the pulp-line — but the exact boundaries are impossible to draw
— lies the world of erotica, of sexual writing with literary
pretensions or genuine claims,” writes George Steiner in Language and
Silence, a collection of his essays dating from the 1950s and 1960s.
“This world is much larger than is commonly realized.” (Below the pulp-
line, of course, is plain pornography.) There is much more of this
kind of writing than one might be aware of, Steiner says, because
little of it is published or disseminated. “[T]here is hardly a major
writer of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries who has not, at some
point in his career, be it in earnest or in the deeper earnest of
jest, produced a pornographic work”.
A glimpse of this heaving but silent world is afforded to us Indians
in a collection, assembled by Ruchir Joshi for Tranquebar Press, of
short, allegedly erotic new fiction by 13 South Asian writers. (An
interview with Joshi was carried on this page two weeks ago.) Several
are big names. But even among the experienced writers, Steiner’s “pulp-
line” is not marked — the contributions range from pornography with
the barest slip of narrative (Samit Basu) to psychological games
(Niven Govinden) to the deftly sensual and oddly lingering (Rana
Dasgupta). As to whether there’s any literature in this collection,
well, I’m old-fashioned about things like that.
Steiner begins by pointing out that “Despite all the lyric or obsessed
cant about the boundless varieties and dynamics of sex, the actual sum
of possible gestures, consummations, and imaginings is drastically
limited.” In other words, there’s little truly new to say about the
sex act itself, whether the description is set in elite or lumpen
prose. Those very few writers who do manage to “enlarge our actual
compass of sexual awareness” — including, Steiner says, Dostoevsky,
Proust, Mann and Nabokov — do so by other means than that of
describing the sex itself.
“After fifty pages of ‘hardening nipples’, ‘softly opening thighs’ and
‘hot rivers’ flowing in and out of the ecstatic anatomy,” writes
Steiner in anguish, “the spirit cries out, not in hypocritical
outrage, not because I am a poor Square throttling my libido, but in
pure, nauseous boredom. Even fornication can’t be as dull, as
hopelessly predictable as all that!”
Boy, do I agree. If you’re going to read anything but the best, take
it in small doses. Steiner’s essay was occasioned by the publication
of The Olympia Reader, a collection of extracts from various books
published by Maurice Girodias in the 1950s. Girodias ran the Olympia
Press in Paris, which was in its time the foremost publisher of
quality porn — porn with pretensions. Some of his contributors were or
became stars. Girodias was the first to recognise Nabokov’s Lolita as
something special, J P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, some works of Jean
Genet, and so on.
One other who essayed on the basis of Girodias’s collection at roughly
the same time was Gore Vidal, the brilliant American whose notoriety
was at least partly based on his terrific promiscuity. In his essay
“On Pornography”, Vidal writes that “Mr. Girodias’s sampler should
provide future sociologists with a fair idea of what sex was like at
the dawn of the age of science.” Before, “sex was a dirty business
since bodies stank and why should any truly fastidious person want to
compound the filth of his own body’s corruption with that of another?”
Modern sanitation and medicine took the risk out of sex (this was pre-
AIDS), so Americans’ real and imagined sexual lives could come a mite
closer to alignment.
Now that middle-class Indians can count on reasonable sanitation and
medical care, is our sexual universe opening up? Is hypocrisy easing?
Is Ruchir Joshi’s book a sign of the times? Yes, perhaps, and yet...
its overwhelming banality suggests that our sexual imagination is
still impoverished. Perhaps we’re still at the talking stage: the
doing, the literature, may or may not follow.
chhotemianinshallah
Graphic novel on maths a bestseller
AFP 14 October 2009, 12:07am IST
ATHENS: Mathematics theory hardly sounds like comic book material, but
a pioneering Greek graphic novel on maths in early 20th century Europe
has become an unlikely hit, grabbing best-seller spots at online
bookshop Amazon.
“Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth” tracks the battle of
mathematical minds — often against madness — before the invention of
the computer. The narrator and hero of the book is none other than
British philosopher, logician and pacifist Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970).
Running at more than 300 pages, it chronicles Russell’s tortuous quest
for the foundations of mathematics, and his search for logic as a
shield from the insanity that consumed other members of his family.
The story takes in his relations with thinkers and mathematical giants
of the era, two of his four marriages, and his hidden feelings for the
young wife of fellow mathematician Alfred North Whitehead.
The microcosm of great minds is played against the backdrop of broader
events in Europe, as the rise of Nazism directly threatens some of the
protagonists. “We wanted a narrator and Russell was ideal,” said
writer Apostolos Doxiadis, who co-authored the story with computer
science professor Christos Papadimitriou at the University of
California, Berkeley.
Crafting the unlikely novel took seven years, from discussions between
the creators to five years of scripting, drawing and colouring. The
aim of Logicomix is “to tell a fascinating story about the history of
ideas” says Doxiadis
chhotemianinshallah
Combat training on camping trip: Laden secrets out
ANI 13 October 2009, 12:24am IST
NEW YORK: After years of hiding and social ostracisation, the wife and
son of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden have come out with a no-holds
barred book that reveals quite candidly the harsh life the family led
under the gaze and zealous Islamic authority of the terror kingpin.
According to the New York Post, Osama bin Laden’s first wife, Najwa
and fourth son Omar reveal in the forthcoming book titled “Growing Up
bin Laden” how on one night in Khartoum, Sudan, bin Laden decided to
take his family — four wives, 14 children — on a camping trip.
They said he drove into the desert, found an isolated spot, made his
oldest sons dig ditches in the sand, long enough to fit each person,
and told them to be be gallant and not think about foxes or snakes, as
he was of the view that there was a war coming between Muslims and the
Western infidels, and this was a form of training for greater
hardships.
“You must “ he says. “Challenging trials are coming to us. Each child,
including a few 1- and 2-year-olds, lies in a hollow. There is no
water or food. As night falls, a child’s voice whispers in the
darkness, “I’m cold.” “Cover yourself with dirt or grass,” bin Laden
snaps. “You will be warm under what nature provides.”
Najwa, who remains married to Laden, but now lives apart from him in
an undisclosed Middle Eastern location, with her fourth son — of 11
children — Omar. Najwa says that “It’s a world where women are never
allowed outside the house, 12-year-old daughters are married off to 30-
year-old al-Qaida fighters, pet dogs are used for target practice and
the biggest household fight is over whether Islam allows
refrigerators.”
She neither defends nor lashes out at Osama, as she says that
terrorism is what he does for a living, and that all she does is worry
about keeping his house in order. The book reveals a terrorist leader
who is embarrassed easily, obsessed with a long-dead father, terrified
of women, and thinks of his children as nothing more than cannon
fodder
bademiyansubhanallah
The ease of being Gurcharan Das
HINDOL SENGUPTA
Author, columnist and former corporate czar, Gurcharan Das on his
latest book and his attempt to understand society’s moral failures
through the Mahabharata.
“This is an answer that the investment bankers, who tipped the world
into this crisis of capitalism, might ponder over.”
Photo: K. Pichumani
Destiny of Dharma: Gurcharan Das. .
If Gurcharan Das was a Mahabharata character, perhaps he would be
Bhisma; his early retirement as the celebrated CEO Proctor and Gamble
India to turn full-time author, almost a willing renunciation of the
capitalist kingdom and crown. Naturally sagac ious, he is a mild man,
who speaks sometimes with Vajpayeesque pauses, and fits the mould of
the benevolent teacher, the thinker of many things, the interpreter of
memories.
His Jor Bagh home in pleasantly leafy south Delhi is that of the
gentleman at leisure, adequately oak-and-book lined, with deep dark
sofas and customary lovable, if desultory, dog.
On Satyam
Last time I met him amid the Jaipur literature festival, with the
shadow of Amitabh Bachchan seeping out as it were from the crumbling
haveli in the background, Das spoke about Ramalinga Raju’s
Dhritarashtra-like failing.
He was, Das had said about the beleaguered Satyam boss, just unable to
recognise his mistakes and the errors of those closest to him. In fact
his book begins with the role of Raju in Satyam.
“I had met Raju 10 years earlier. I had looked him in the eye and I
had seen sincerity, competence and great purpose… why should a person
of palpable achievement, who lacked nothing in life, turn to crime?”
The search of the answer brought him to the Mahabharata and The
Difficulty of Being Good. The idea which took best-selling author Das
(his India Unbound had been widely sold and translated and even filmed
by the BBC) to the University of Chicago to study Sanskrit texts to
the Regenstein Library where he “interrogated” the epic, cheered on by
Sanskrit scholars like Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger, the latter
telling him, “Reading Sanskrit is good for the soul.”
The right thing
If his last book was trying to understand the core values, the
metaphysics as it happens, of artha or wealth, this time retelling the
Mahabharata was his solitary search for the idea of dharma — of how
doing and then failing to do, the right thing, changes the world.
Last time I met him in winter-consoled Jaipur, in the aftermath of a
shocked India Inc post-Satyam, Das was tossing his big idea; it is not
the larger evil flaws society but the minor theft, the small sins that
is eating away the fabric of India. It is no so much the Satyams that
kill India, he had told me. It is the petty bribes, the illicit
donations, the baksheesh culture. The Difficulty of Being Good then is
Das’ way of trying to understand the world and its sins and of dharma,
as the great epic of retribution and retelling understood it.
Through the Mahabharata, Das is attempting to understand the moral
failure of society, how “the country (is) turning middle class
alongside the most appalling governance”.
The tale of warring brothers, destined to fight the greatest battle of
all times, was also telling him about the intricacies of world — from
a collapsing Wall Street to the one topic we were also, naturally,
destined to amble onto India’s very own warring brothers, the
Ambanis.
“It is envy, you see, that is at the root. Anil’s Duryodhana-like envy
for his brother and there always has been such conflict of jealousy,
pride, envy between brothers,” said Das, nodding his head sadly.
We spoke of whether Anil Ambani also has what Das calls Karna’s status
anxiety and how the battle between brothers is always a case of
intertwined, conflicting egos, personalities and histories. “There is
pride and envy and factions in this (the Ambani) battle,” said Das.
“It is all in the Mahabharata.”
Missing morals
In the interim period between the Dhitrarashtra-Raju and Duryodhana-
Anil, Das finished The Difficulty of Being Good, called a “tour de
force” by Nandan Nilekani, an attempt to understand the mystery of our
missing morals.
As he read the Mahabharata, “intrigued by its boast: What is here is
found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere”, Das says he also
realised that the epic is the perfect textbook for these troubled
times. Take Wall Street, for instance. If only, says Das, the Wall
Street bankers would have acted like Yudhishthira, saying his immortal
words, “I act because I must.”
“It was,” writes Das, “the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma.
This is an answer that the investment bankers, who tipped the world
into this crisis of capitalism, might ponder over.”
The big lesson, smiled Das beatifically, is that “the ferocious
competition of interests and passions that Duryodhana exemplifies is a
feature of the free market and it can be corrosive”.
Choosing the right way
“Since it is in man’s nature to want more, one learns to live with
human imperfection, and one seeks regulation that not only tames the
Duryodhanas but also rewards dharma-like behaviour in the market.”
His book is about the idea of good and bad, as he calls it “the subtle
art of dharma”, of how choosing to do the right thing is tricky and
often traumatic, yet, in doing the right thing, in following the
destiny of dharma lies the future and fate of our race. That’s why,
says Das, we all must do what we are destined to do — act according to
our dharma.
His, of course, as he would say, was to stop worrying about
oscillating market shares of soaps and shampoos and discover the
tantalising pulse of his country.
Hindol Sengupta is Associate Editor, UTVi
chhotemianinshallah
Columns&programId=1073755417&contentId=6077948
Going for the jugular -
Illustration: Bhaskarana
WICKED WORD
By V.S. Jayaschandran
Elizabeth Blackburn was asleep when she got the Nobel Prize call on
October 5. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, full of joy. That was
natural—the Old English word dream meant joy. The Old English word for
dream was swefn, which is the same as Sanskrit swapna. Their root,
swep-no, meant sleep. Greeks pronounced swep-no as hypnos, just as
Iranians pronounced the Sanskrit soma as homa.
The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the word hypnotism in 1843,
long after Franz Mesmer died. Mesmerism was considered black magic
until an Indian monk in Paris, Abbe Faria, published a book on lucid
sleep in 1819. His native Goa has an arresting bronze sculpture of him
mesmerising a woman.
Faria led a battalion in the French Revolution and spent years in
jail. He used yoga in his psychological research. His father was a
master of yoga and mind control. Yoga means union or yoke. Veins in
the neck are called jugular because they pass under jugulum, the yoke-
shaped collarbone. Yoga gets under covers in conjugal, but if you
listen hard you won’t miss the “jug jug to dirty ears”.
The tele-yoga teacher Baba Ramdev boasts he will cure mankind of all
diseases in 20 years. His disciples bought a Scottish island last
month to build a yoga centre. Scotsmen in kilts doing the headstand
will make a pretty picture. Looking up, they could go bananas. A true
Scotsman wears nothing under the kilt. Sergeants in Scottish regiments
enforced the no-undies rule, and checked under kilts with a long-
handled mirror. Guards at hotel gates use such mirrors to check under
vehicles for bombs. Terrorism can spell the end of miniskirts.
Ramdev swears by the vedas. Veda is related to the Latin videre (to
see, to know). So are wit, vision, video and voyeur. After a conquest
in 47 BC, Julius Caesar wrote: veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I
conquered. Young men plagued by premature release change the word
order and lament, “I saw, I came….”
The Chinese on the border are going for the jugular, but India takes
reporters to task. It has denied reports of incursions with a rare
vehemence. But don’t fault China for giving Kashmiris paper visa,
ignoring Indian passports. Visa was originally known as charta (paper)
visa. America is eager to shoehorn itself into Kashmir. Bill Clinton
failed to become US special envoy to Kashmir, but depend on the pants
dropper to use his good orifices. The Organisation of Islamic
Countries has appointed a special envoy for Kashmir. In literature,
envoy is a message at the end of a poem. In the envoy to ‘The Clerk’s
Tale’, Chaucer advises women: “Ever wag your tongues like the
windmill.” Envoys are good at it.
In The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria helps the hero discover a
treasure. Alexandre Dumas did not mention his Indian origins in the
novel. Dumas did odd things. One winter evening, he allowed the
novelist Roger de Beauvoir to join him and his wife, Ida, in bed, just
to keep warm. Writes a historian: “In the morning Alexandre woke up
first, looked at the two traitors, and then addressed de Beauvoir,
‘Shall two old friends quarrel about a woman, even when she’s a lawful
wife? That would be stupid,’ and seizing his friend’s hand across
Ida’s sleeping form, he added: ‘Let us become reconciled like the
ancient Romans—on this public square.’”
Sharing a bed was a fine way of courtship in Scotland. No young Scot
took his girlfriend out for a date. He simply asked her parents to let
him share her bed at night. They went to bed fully clothed. Parents
tucked the girl in a sack, leaving only the hands and face free for
exploration. This was known as bundling, which should gladden modern
marketing strategists. But keep an eye on the border—the Americans and
the Chinese might do some bundling to turn up the heat on Pakistan.
chhotemianinshallah
Columns&programId=1073755417&contentId=6020928
Count your cash cows -
Illustration: Hadimani
WICKED WORD
By V.S. Jayaschandran
Goblins in Harry Potter speak gobbledygook. Others cannot understand
their lingo. India’s nuclear mandarins speak in tongues about the
“failure” of Pokhran II. Nobody can make sense of their glossolalia.
Bombay-born British educator Frederic Farrar coined the word
glossolalia in 1879. American legislator Maury Maverick coined
gobbledygook to twit bureaucratese. He did it in a wartime memo in
1944, threatening in jest to shoot anyone using words like activation
and implementation.
His grandfather Samuel Maverick was more famous. His name yielded the
word maverick. This Texas engineer did not brand the calves in his
cattle ranch. So other ranchers called unbranded calves maverick.
Later, maverick came to mean ‘masterless’ and then ‘unconventional
person’.
Shashi Tharoor is a maverick calf in politics. He tweeted in jest
about the government’s austerity drive. He said he would travel
“cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows”. The prattle
class was pleased, but hidebound Congressmen demanded his head.
‘Hidebound’ originally indicated skinny cattle with the ribs and
backbones sticking out.
Cattle class is economy class for the British and coach class for
Americans. Sailors called it steerage—the lowest deck, full of foul
air. It was slightly better than the cargo hold. Steerage got its name
from rudder ropes that veined the deck. Almost half the 2,566
passengers of the Titanic travelled cattle class.
James Cameron writes in Titanic film script: “Steerage passengers, in
their coarse wool and tweeds, queue up in moveable barriers like
cattle in a chute. A health officer examines their heads one by one,
checking the scalp and eyelashes for lice.” Two unruly boys and their
uncouth father shove past Rose’s fiancé, the uber-rich Cal. “Steerage
swine!” says Cal, iceberg-cold. “Apparently he missed his annual
bath.”
Manmohan Singh saw no sting in Tharoor’s tweet. The capitalist
economist knows the value of cattle. The word cattle comes from Latin
capitale, meaning property. As cattle moved, it was moveable property.
This meaning survives in the legal term ‘goods and chattels’. Chattel
was cattle in French.
Cattle represented the wealth of ancient migrants. Romans called their
domestic animals pecu. Indians called theirs pasu. Pecu produced the
words pecuniary (relating to money) and peculiar. Peculiar meant
private property in the form of cattle. The Jews were known as
Peculiar People—God’s chosen people, who owned private property and
had money. For many Jews, money-lending was heaven.
The government has asked IIMs and IITs to increase fees. This should
make cattle burp in satisfaction. The word fee comes from the Old
German fihu, meaning cattle. Some Harvard professors had a cattle perk—
they could graze their cows on the university campus. Professor Harvey
Cox, author of The Secular City, took that privilege on September 10.
He took a cow to his retirement party in Harvard. The English cow is a
clone of the Sanskrit gau, though gau sounds hoarse like deep-throated
Tharoor.
Sonia Gandhi knows that Italy (Viteliu) means land of cattle. The
Latin word for calf is vitulus. Sonia flew cattle class from Delhi to
Mumbai on September 14. Don’t connect her with Tharoor’s “holy cows”—
unless he had ‘sacred cows’ in mind. Holy Cow is just an interjection,
a swearword like Holy Mackerel. A sacred cow is something or someone
you can’t question.
The Sacred Band was an elite unit in the Theban army. Alexander
annihilated them. The Sacred Band consisted of 150 pairs of gay
lovers. Thebans theorised that lovers would stick by each other in
crunch time and battle hard. It was like the commando buddy system.
Buddy has a queer past. The word originated as butty (workmate) in
coalmines, where miners worked in close proximity, butt to butt.
chhotemianinshallah
Columns&programId=1073755417&contentId=5959708
A hot dog on a leash -
Illustration: Bhaskaran
WICKED WORD
By V.S. Jayaschandran
A tin trunk held everything Nripen Chakraborty owned. He lived in a
single room and was chief minister for ten years. George Fernandes
washed his own clothes in a bucket even when he was defence minister.
A half-naked fakir washes a long piece of white cloth in a river in
the film Gandhi. He lets the cloth slip from his fingers and float
towards a woman in rags. He looks away so that she can take it without
embarrassment. “Her lips almost part in a tiny smile of thanks,” reads
the screenplay. Gandhi’s eyes narrow with pain.
S.M. Krishna lived for months in a Maurya Sheraton suite costing the
earth. He took the trouble for his love of simplicity—sheraton is a
furniture style noted for its simplicity. Pranab Mukherjee, who
ejected him, hardly knows the root of austerity. The word austere,
meaning dry, was originally used to describe brandy, not ‘Gandy’.
Krishna said he would make “private arrangements” to continue living
in luxury. He spoke like a stoic, a philosopher with the stiff upper
lip. The word stoic comes from Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch in
Athens where stoics taught endurance.
The Painted Porch had frescos of the battle of Marathon. More than
stoics, ascetics were associated with Marathon. Ascetics were Greek
athletes who trained hard for gymnastic competitions. They followed
rigorous self-discipline. The word ascetic later came to mean a monk
who showed such rigour. Shashi Tharoor, who camped in the Taj Mahal
hotel, declined to live in the Kerala House because it offered no
privacy or gym. He no doubt knows that ancients who went to gyms
trained naked, showing off their privates. Gymnos means naked in
Greek.
Gymnosophists were naked philosophers the Greeks sighted in India
after Alexander’s invasion. These were mainly Digambara (sky-clad)
Jain monks. The invaders would have paid attention to gymnosophists’
danglers. The Greeks knew how to restrain their own privates. Their
athletes tied a leather strap to the foreskin to stop the penis from
dangling during competitions. The other end of the strap was tied
round the base. Baring the glans, even by accident, was considered
inelegant.
The foreskin restraint was called kynodesme, meaning dog on a leash.
Kynikos means doglike. This word evolved into English cynic. Cynics
were a school of philosophers noted for their sneering sarcasm. While
sneering, they tended to bare their teeth like snarling dogs. Their
gymnasium in Athens was known as the Grey Dog. The anti-Naxalite
Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh are all teeth and no leash.
The cynic Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and slighted Alexander, was
an exhibitionist. He fondled himself in public, saying, “If only I
could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” The Japanese call male
masturbation senzui—it means a hundred rubs. They call the female
variety manzumi, meaning ten thousand rubs. The arithmetic could be
faulty, but women take a longer time than men.
The book Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, has such words and
expressions from different languages. In Japanese, Bakku-shan is a
girl who looks good from behind but not so from the front. Zaftig in
German is a buxom woman full of juice (zaf means sap). Don’t expect
the frau to dote on die toten hosen—the dead trousers—meaning a boring
place or an impotent man. She would rather chase Italians adept at
carezza. Carezza is marathon sex, coitus prolongatus, avoiding
emission.
Fijians call unfaithful husbands vori vori (ball ball). Large corn
flour balls swim in this thick soup. Sops that German philanderers
offer to pacify their suspicious wives are called dragon fodder. The
dragon sniffing at the Arunachal border is itching for trouble. The
best way to provoke Chinese brass hats is to send them green hats. If
you tell a Chinese that he wears a green hat, you imply that his wife
is cheating on him. A hard hat is a helmet. Helmet also means glans,
the private red hat.
chhotemianinshallah
Columns&programId=1073755417&contentId=5931968
To hell with size zero -
Illustration: Hadimani
THE SEXES
By Shobhaa De
Sandra Bullock happens to be one of Hollywood’s more intelligent and
accomplished actors. Audiences love her playing a tough cop or the
female boss from hell. That has always been her positioning. “Bullock
has ‘b@#*s of steel,” declare her admirers in awe. It is true. She has
built her rock solid career on roles that emphasise her ‘macho’
appeal. So, if such a high profile star starts shouting from the
rooftops that she “wants boobs” as she can’t wait to become a ‘sex
object’, one should understand the irony built into the remark. Of
course, she’s joking! At least, one hopes she is! After Bullock went
on and on about how disappointing it was that her brains were in her
butt, and not in her boobs, she was asked about opting for silicon
implants. She gushed she was entirely open to the idea, and stated she
was shopping around for enough silicon to qualify as a legit, honest
to goodness bimbo with bumps in the right places. I thought it would
end there. She’d made her point, and could we just get back to her
next movie, please?
Now comes a fresh set of quotes about Bullock’s liposuction fixation!
When a journo asked her the secret of her toned body, she confessed it
was “loads and loads of lipo”. Maybe she and her publicist have
jointly decided it’s cool to talk down on the subject and make a
monumental joke out of the current obsession for the Body Beautiful.
But you know what, Ms Bullock? These sorts of send-ups tend to bite
back. Fans take star quotes at face value and may not possess the
requisite intelligence/sense of humour to laugh over these clever
remarks. Unless of course Sandra is not jesting in the first place! Oh
dear!
In our own context, our sense of humour is distinctly different. I
watched Quick Gun Murugan and realised I was the only person in a
largely empty cinema hall who was laughing at Mango Dolly’s double
entendres. Mango Dolly is played by the luscious Rambha in a Dolly
Parton-style blond wig (cleavage to match). Since the entire movie is
a spoof (not that funny, alas!), Rambha’s cheesy lines as she tries to
seduce the hero, come off sounding slightly ridiculous instead of
tongue-in-cheek. Our audiences cannot handle this sort of broad
comedy.
Rambha fell flat on her face along with the rest of the cast. Why? Her
gangster’s moll portrayal played against the stereotype. The big
difference between a Rakhi Sawant declaring her (plastic) assets in
print and a Sandra Bullock lamenting the absence of hers, is not the
same thing. Rakhi’s silicon boosters are used blatantly to further
objectify her sex appeal. Sandra mocks society’s pathetic hang-up on
women’s bodies.
A couple of years earlier, our trusting fans were brainwashed by
Kareena Kapoor into embracing size zero. They were weaned away from
their earlier fascination with the heroine's curves. Bollywood
depended heavily on padded bras before the advent of silicon. And no
matter how generously endowed the leading lady may have been, it was
mandatory to fill her brassiere with enough cotton wool to stuff a
sofa.
When a producer said he wanted his heroine to look ‘healthy’, it meant
just one thing and the costume department swiftly got the message—pump
up the bra. Today, our leading ladies give countless interviews on
drastic weight loss programmes constructed by personal trainers so as
to conform to the latest gay director’s notion of a desirable female
form (strictly no curves!). Poor Rani Mukherjee is resembling a
dehydrated prune in her new release all because of that bloody diet
she was put onto. We want our curves back—cellulite and all! We want
the old fashioned ‘healthy’ heroine running around trees with body
parts jiggling in time with her wriggling. To hell with size zero.
Thank you, Sandra Bullock for providing a much-needed debate on the
subject. Rambha rocks, I say. Mind it!
chhotemianinshallah
Columns&programId=1073755417&contentId=5841648
Go on a leather hunt -
Illustration: Bhaskaran
WICKED WORD
By V.S. jayaschandran
Calicut gave English the word calico, and Kashmir yielded cashmere.
Machilipatnam, once known as Masulipatnam, perhaps supplied the word
muslin. Cambric cotton from Cambrai in France gave them stiff
competition. Levi Strauss took canvas cloth from Genoa in Italy to
pitch tents in America. The cloth from Genoa came to be called jeans.
The cloth he took from Nimes in France, called serge de Nimes, became
denims. English has hundreds of such words derived from names of
places. These are called toponyms.
Michigan bankroll, a toponym, is a bundle of notes with real currency
only at the top and the bottom. The CBI trapped Sarabjot Singh with
such bundles. A Chinese compliment is a polite interest in others’
views when one has already made up one’s mind. Note how Beijing seeks
to build strategic trust with New Delhi, when a Chinese think-tank
wants India balkanised into 20 to 30 countries.
Aamir Khan is producing a loose motion picture, Delhi Belly. But it
may well be a story of love in the time of cholera, not just
traveller’s diarrhoea. Delhi belly initiates visitors to the capital’s
culinary cruelties. Mexican two-step is another name for alimentary
canal unplugged. It compels the sufferer to leap to the loo.
“I gotta go pee, I want to go home,” whimpers Yolanda, the restaurant
robbing woman, in Pulp Fiction. She is in a Mexican stand-off, an
impasse of three or more people holding guns to one another’s head.
The director Tarantino stages yet another Mexican stand-off in his
latest film, the queerly spelt Inglourious Basterds.
A Mexican raise is a promotion with no increase in pay. An Irishman’s
rise is less pay for doing the same job. Irish toothache is something
swollen—either an erection or a pregnancy. Tata honcho R.
Gopalakrishnan keeps a toothbrush handy. “I brush after every meal,”
he said at the IIT Kharagpur convocation on August 8. He picked up the
habit while working for a toothpaste company, he told a friend. “Thank
God you don’t work for a condom company!” the friend exclaimed.
Brushing teeth after a meal is fine, but putting on a condom after the
act requires ingenuity.
Condoms were invented not to control birth, but as protection against
private infections. They were made of cloth, animal skin or intestine.
French letter originated from such sheath. A French tickler was of the
ribbed kind. The church ripped condoms and promoted Vatican roulette.
This rhythm method of contraception is a hit and miss game. If you
lose it you get life. If you lose playing Russian roulette you get
death.
Rome’s fears over condoms are not altogether unfounded. In 2001,
doctors in Meerut found a condom in a 27-year-old schoolteacher’s
lungs. After pulling it out, they wrote in a medical journal:
“Retrospectively, both the husband and wife accepted to having
undergone a fellatio. They could recollect that the condom had
loosened during the act, and at that time the lady had also
experienced an episode of sneezing and coughing.”
France boasts a village named Condom. The word does not mean
contraceptive in French. The river Baise flows by it. If you say baise
in French, you are asking for sex.
Condoms are taboo in the Amish commune called Intercourse in
Pennsylvania. A tour of the state could be stimulating. After Zipdown,
you can spend time in Ballplay or Lickdale, go for Intercourse, reach
Climax and then Yocumtown. Hillary Clinton’s office is in Foggy Bottom
in Washington, DC, but S.M. Krishna skipped Mount Buggery in
Australia. In England, one can stroll through Butt Hole Road in South
Yorkshire, and Sluts Hole Lane in Norfolk. Belgium has Labia, and
Russia is proud of its Vagina in Kurgan city.
Germany has two touchy-feely towns, Petting and Titting. Near Petting
is an Austrian town whose name is pronounced as Foocking but written
with a ‘u’ instead of the double ‘o’. Tourists love stealing the name
board.
Sid Harth
"Digi-novel" combines book, movie and website
Wed Sep 2, 2009 5:42pm IST
By Michelle Nichols
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Is it a book? Is it a movie? Is it a website?
Actually it's all three.
Anthony Zuiker, creator of the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" U.S.
television series, is releasing what he calls a "digi-novel" combining
all three media -- and giving a jolt to traditional book publishing.
Zuiker has created "Level 26," a crime novel that also invites readers
to log on to a website about every 20 pages using a special code to
watch a "cyber-bridge" -- a three-minute film clip tied to the story.
Starting next Tuesday, readers can buy the book, visit the website,
log in to watch the "cyber-bridges," read, discuss and contribute to
the story.
"Just doing one thing great is not going to sustain business," he
said. "The future of business in terms of entertainment will have to
be the convergence of different mediums. So we did that -- publishing,
movies and a website."
He said he did not believe the digi-novel would ever replace
traditional publishing, but said the business did need a shot in the
arm.
"They need content creators like myself to come in the industry and
say, 'Hey, let's try things this way,'" he said.
Zuiker put together a 60-page outline for the novel, which was written
by Duane Swierczynski, and wrote and directed the "cyber-bridges." He
said the book could be read without watching the "cyber-bridges."
GADGETS CHANGE READING LANDSCAPE
Zuiker said the United States was infatuated with technology and it
had become such a permanent part of people's lives that more
entertainment choices were needed.
Increasingly, people are reading books on electronic readers like
Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony Corp's Reader.
Those devices don't play videos, so "Level 26" readers still need to
log on to the Internet on a different device. Apple Inc is said to be
developing a touchscreen tablet, which some analysts envision as a
multimedia device that could play videos.
Zuiker said people's attention span was becoming shorter and shorter
and that it was important to give people more options on how they
consumed entertainment and books.
"Every TV show in the next five, 10 years will have a comprehensive
microsite or website that continue the experience beyond the one-hour
television to keep engaging viewers 24/7," he said. "Just watching
television for one specific hour a week ... that's not going to be a
sustainable model going forward."
"I wanted to bring all the best in publishing, in a motion picture, in
a website and converge all three into one experience," he said.
"And when the book finished and the bridges finished, I wanted the
experience to continue online and in a social community."
Zuiker said he came up with the idea for the "digi-novel" during a
three-month TV writers strike in 2007/08.
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
bademiyansubhanallah
Claudio Magris awarded Peace Prize of German bookseller association
www.chinaview.cn 2009-10-19 10:19:43
Writer Claudio Magris (2nd R) smiles as he receives the applause from
the audience as he is awarded the Peace Prize of the German bookseller
association during a ceremony at Paul's church (Paulskirche) in
Frankfurt, October 18, 2009. The Peace Prize (Friedenspreis des
deutschen Buchhandels) of the German bookseller association is known
as one of the most prestigious prizes for literature worldwide.
(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Writer Claudio Magris receives the Peace Prize from German bookseller
association Chairman Gottfried Honnefelder during a ceremony at Paul's
church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, October 18, 2009. (Xinhua/Reuters
Photo)
Writer Claudio Magris (L) receives the Peace Prize from German
bookseller association Chairman Gottfried Honnefelder during a
ceremony at Paul's church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, October 18,
2009. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Writer Claudio Magris speaks after receiving the Peace Prize from
German bookseller association Chairman Gottfried Honnefelder during a
ceremony at Paul's church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, October 18,
2009. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Writer Claudio Magris smiles before he is awarded the Peace Prize of
the German bookseller association during a ceremony at Paul's church
(Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, October 18, 2009. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Writer Claudio Magris looks up before he is awarded the Peace Prize of
the German bookseller association during a ceremony at Paul's church
(Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, October 18, 2009.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
chhotemianinshallah
That Year Is Almost Here
By Paul Gray;Anne Hopkins/New York;John Saar/London Monday, Nov. 28,
1983Print Email Reprints Digg Facebook
But George Orwell's message for 1984 is bigger than Big Brother
He thought it was "a good idea ruined," that futuristic fable he had
planned on calling The Last Man in Europe. But he was always
pessimistic about his own writing. This time the gloom was deepened by
illness. His tuberculosis had worsened. The task of typing and
revising the manuscript had broken him physically. He lay in a
sanatorium bed when his book was published, in June 1949; the name
that appeared on its cover was Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Come Jan. 1, the fictional date of George Orwell's final and most
famous book becomes fact at last. It is a looking-glass anniversary, a
remembrance of things future, and an accidental one at that. Orwell's
manuscript, which has just resurfaced after years in a private
collection, reveals that the author had considered both 1980 and 1982
for the time of his story. So what is about to happen might have
occurred two or four years earlier, or not at all; had he stuck to The
Last Man in Europe, there would have been no occasion to commemorate.
Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston
Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War
with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is
constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps
changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old
newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the
official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to
make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished.
Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-
way telescreens; posters everywhere proclaim BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU. Suddenly, Smith commits a thoughtcrime: "Down with Big Brother."
He also begins a love affair with Julia, a co-worker at his office,
another heinous offense. The Junior Anti-Sex League indoctrinates the
virtue of celibacy; procreation will soon be carried on solely through
artificial insemination ("artsem," in Newspeak). All personal loyalty
belongs to the Party. Winston and Julia are caught by the Thought
Police and hauled off to the Ministry of Love. He is relentlessly
tortured, then taken to Room 101, where his worst fear has been
readied by interrogators. As a cage bearing a rat is being pushed
toward his face, he begs that this punishment be inflicted on Julia
instead. This betrayal eliminates the last trace of his integrity. He
has become a good Party Member.
For all its readers, for the countless millions who have heard of Big
Brother and the estimated year of his arrival, this New Year's Day
offers some unsettling moments: that glimpse of the new calendar, the
first chance to write 1984 in a diary or on a letter or check. Orwell
spelled his title out, a practice followed in the first editions: the
book had a name, like Utopia or Leviathan, not a date. But the
shorthand 1984 also gained wide currency. And those four neutral
integers, fused so long in the public consciousness, have acquired the
shimmering, brutal power of the hieroglyph.
What does it stand for? That question and the imminence of the
Orwellian year have galvanized a small army of professors, critics and
writers, journalists, pundits, social scientists, politicians and
professional doomsters; hardly anyone paid for thinking out loud seems
able to resist the temptation to play with Orwell's numbers. The game
began in earnest last January and could, thanks to crowded conditions,
easily extend into 1985. The action takes different forms: an
apparently endless round of academic seminars and symposiums, coast to
coast, from Manhattan College to Stanford; a swelling stream of
magazine articles ("On the Brink of 1984") and books (1984 Revisited:
Totalitarianism in Our Century); a CBS documentary last June anchored
by Walter Cronkite, plus some six hours of TV programming to be shown
in England.
A new 17-volume edition of Orwell's complete works will be published
next year in the U.S. and England. A wax figure of the author is to be
installed at Madame Tussaud's in London at the end of December.
Science-fiction buffs discussed the father of Big Brother in Antwerp
this fall. Futurists look forward to gathering for the same purpose in
Washington next June, well after the separate Orwell festivities
planned by the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress. By
then hearings scheduled by a House Judiciary subcommittee on "1984:
Civil Liberties and the National Security State" will be completed.
Orwell experts jetting from one gala to another can keep track of the
time through "The 1984 Calendar" ($10.95), the inspiration of two
Michigan State graduates. Billed as "a day-by-day history of the
increasing erosion of civil liberties in the U.S.," it measures 17 in.
by 34 in. and features black-and-white photographs of U.S. Government
buildings (the IRS, FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and of police
riot squads and jail cells. Each date is annotated with one or more
reminders, trivial as well as grim, of the loss of freedom; few may
recall that on Aug. 1, 1973, the Washington Post reported a private
investigation launched by the Nixon White House on the Smothers
brothers. Can Doublethink T shirts and Big Brother barbecue aprons be
far behind?
This snowballing imprecision has been in progress for almost a decade.
Author Anthony Burgess recalls teaching in the U.S. at various times
in the 1970s. "American college students have said, 'Like 1984, man,'
when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a
little reading." Now merely mentioning the date can convey muzzy
criticism of whatever the speaker happens to dislike: advertising,
computers, beeper phones, freeways and domed stadiums.
Such verbal knee jerks might be dismissed as harmless. But they never
were by Orwell. "The slovenliness of our language," he wrote in 1946,
"makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." And it is a
surpassing irony that the title Orwell made famous has become a
symptom of the very sloppiness he deplored: what he called a
"Meaningless Word," a ramshackle abstraction inviting everyone to come
in and stop thinking for a while.
"Happy 1984." This concludes a New York Times editorial criticizing
the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the "Orwellian arguments" for it
given by the Reagan Administration. The implication is clumsy but
clear: Nineteen Eighty-Four and its author stand behind the Times's
position. But a week or so earlier, the same newspaper's Op-Ed page
ran a defense of the Grenada action by Neo-Conservative Norman
Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. And Podhoretz had by then firmly
claimed Orwell for his camp of disillusioned liberals: "I believe he
[Orwell] would have been a neo-conservative if he were alive today."
The impulse to hold Orwell's coat while sending his ghost out to
battle now seems pandemic. A writer in the liberal Roman Catholic
journal Commonweal proclaims: "Orwell, if he were alive today, would
make a worthy opponent for the multinational corporation. He could
have made an idea and a book on 'organization man' stand up and sing."
The conservative National Review concludes an essay on Orwell with
cosmic theatrics: "The forces of darkness have huge armies, a bigger
and better arsenal, liberation movements, and the whores' allegiance.
The forces of light have Orwell on their side and draw strength from
it." On the other side of the barricades, the radlib Village Voice
waves a special issue devoted to Orwell and his year. One headline:
CHRONICLES OF A DECENT MAN.
Before Orwell's name becomes as muddled and mythologized as Nineteen
Eighty-Four, the testimony of personal friends who would not have
dreamed of predicting his views, on any subject, might be heeded. "I
understood him up to a point," says Author V.S. Pritchett. "It was
hard to define him because just when you had fixed on a view, he would
contradict it." Novelist Julian Symons remembers "a quality of
perversity" in Orwell: "He had a characteristic directness which upset
people and made him a lot of enemies." Malcolm Muggeridge recalls a
man "who utterly despised intellectuals and people he used to refer
to, scornfully, as wearing sandals. And yet he was an intellectual."
He was also many other things: an astute critic of literature and
popular culture, a journalist who turned political writing into an art
form, the finest English essayist of his century. Those who know of
him only as a grand bogey, a synonym for some terror that may go bump
in the Western night, hardly know him at all. He made it his business
to tell the truth at a time when many contemporaries believed that
history had ordained the lie. Yet the very name that is now so often
invoked, vaguely and in vain, is a fiction.
Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India, where his father Richard
worked as a civil servant for the British Empire. Not long afterward,
Eric's mother took him and his older sister Marjorie back to England,
a common domestic arrangement at the time; India was fine as a place
for husbands to work, but children were to be brought up in the
homeland. Richard Blair joined his family during his infrequent
leaves. A younger sister Avril was born when Eric was five.
Orwell looked back harshly on the "shabby genteel" class inhabited by
his parents and their friends: "Practically the whole family income
goes in keeping up appearances." Unlike most who rebel from the worlds
of their childhood, Eric became hypercritical of himself as well; his
behavior during his early years, his adult memories of this period,
both convey the peculiar sense that he considered himself not good
enough for a style of life he disliked. The Blairs kept up appearances
by enrolling their son, at reduced tuition, in St. Cyprian's, an
institution that rigorously prepared boys for the great public
schools. Eric, 8, was caned for bed wetting: the place encouraged him
to feel unworthy. "I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was
unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt, I was an
unattractive boy."
Jacintha Buddicom, now 82, who met and became friends with Eric Blair
during his school vacations, disputes this self-portrait: "The
business about how unpopular he was was a lot of nonsense, a fairy
story." He fished and hunted, kept pet guinea pigs and roamed the
Oxfordshire countryside. But Jacintha did not see him at St.
Cyprian's. Critic Cyril Connolly, who was his classmate, would later
remember that Eric "felt bitterly that he was taken on at reduced fees
because he might win the school a scholarship; he saw this as a
humiliation, but it was really a compliment." The prickly youth did,
in fact, earn a scholarship to Eton, winning praise for himself and
his school. Yet his account of leaving St. Cyprian's hardly reflects a
sense of triumph: "Failure, failure, failure—failure behind me,
failure ahead of me—that was by far the deepest conviction that I
carried away."
He may not have felt like this at the time; an older man wrote these
words in an essay, in a world drastically altered. But Eric's conduct
at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way
through 4½ years at the apex of English secondary education, growing
tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his
favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells),
contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly
in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or
Cambridge without a scholarship, and Eric's academic performance
ensured that no scholarship would be offered.
The lack of university training left him at a dead end in England. The
professions, even the higher reaches of the civil service, were
closed. It also made Eric an outsider to his friends and classmates,
those Etonians who were going on to do great things in government and
the arts. So he chose the course his father had taken and left the
country; he joined the Imperial Indian Police and was dispatched to
keep order among the colonial subjects in Burma.
Two of his greatest essays were to be wrenched from the five years he
spent there. A Hanging (1931) records both the execution of a Hindu
man and the writer's revulsion at the event: "It is curious, but till
that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle
I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short
when it is in full tide." Shooting an Elephant (1936) portrays "the
dirty work of Empire at close quarters." A rampaging elephant in
Moulmein has killed a native, and the people expect the policeman to
do something: "Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in
front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the
piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by
the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that
when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he
destroys."
He returned to England after five years and resigned his commission.
"He had changed," his friend Jacintha recalls. "He seemed more aloof,
an unhappy sort of stranger. Whatever happened to him in Burma must
have embittered him very much." Blair described the feeling he brought
home as "an intolerable sense of guilt." He had been a petty tyrant in
the service of what he saw as a vast system of exploitation. He could
recognize in the flogged Burmese troublemakers a likeness to himself
as a schoolboy, whipped and cowed by the same imperious forces. A
childhood conviction had been confirmed: his place was with the
oppressed.
Over the next ten years, he undertook the quixotic journey that would
make him famous, under a new name and an altered identity. The first
step was to tell his appalled parents that he wanted to be a writer;
the next was to become one. That proved harder. He took a cheap room
in London and spent hours each day at his typewriter, tapping out the
kind of story that began "Inside the park, the crocuses were
out . . ." At night, he began "tramping," haunting the slums,
occasionally taking a bed in lodginghouses for the destitute, hoping
that his Etonian accent would not give him away: "What I profoundly
wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the
respectable world altogether."
Bohemianism did not attract him. He went to Paris in the late 1920s
and found it "invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students,
dilettanti, sightseers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has
probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called
artists must actually have outnumbered the working population . . ."
He took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, a member of the
working population 13 hours a day.
Urgently he kept struggling to become a novelist, but the sketches he
wrote about his flophouse experiences became his first book. He knew
that the seamy life depicted in Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) would unnerve and embarrass his parents, so he told his agent
that he did not want the book published under his own name: "As a
pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc. is P.S. Burton, but
if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about
Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favor George
Orwell." George, the patron saint of England, plus Orwell, a river
that Eric Blair had known when young: the choice suggested the buried
patriotism of a disaffected subject.
By this time the conviction that something was terribly wrong in his
native land had begun to obsess him. Eric Blair had experienced
injustice and poverty; George Orwell began to look for their causes.
The change was not entirely voluntary. He wrote and published novels,
and tried to pursue the kind of literary career that had been
traditional in England since the 18th century. But the urge to stand
witness to his times nagged him out of seclusion: "In a peaceful age I
might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have
remained unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been
forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer."
A publisher asked him to go to the north of England and report on the
plight of miners and factory workers unemployed in the drift of the
Depression. Orwell spent two months early in 1936 among these people,
not drunks and derelicts this time but victims of economic forces
beyond their understanding or control. The first half of The Road to
Wigan Pier recounts some of their stories. The second half tells
Orwell's.
It is an astonishing document: a call for socialism to wipe out the
inequalities of capitalism and class, coupled with a stinging
indictment of contemporary Socialists: "One sometimes gets the
impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw toward
them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-
wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist
in England." Orwell not only sensed the distaste that unemployed
miners would feel for such studied eccentricities, he shared the
feeling. He also perceived something that was to reverberate in
political writings for half a century: ascendant leftist theories
threatened to replace one form of tyranny with another. "The truth is
that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not
mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate
themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we,' the clever ones, are
going to impose upon 'them,' the Lower Orders."
He had scarcely written these words when he met their reality headon.
A few months after marrying Eileen O'Shaughnessy, 30, an Oxford
graduate who was working for an advanced degree in psychology in
London, Orwell went to Spain. The attempt by Generalissimo Francisco
Franco to topple an elected left-wing government had led to civil war.
Orwell could not pass up the chance to see "democracy standing up to
Fascism at last." He arrived in Barcelona at the end of 1936 and found
a city being run by the underdogs: "It was the first time that I had
ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle."
Orwell was enchanted, "breathing the air of equality." A hotel manager
scolded him for offering a tip to an elevator operator; barbers posted
anarchist placards by their chairs announcing that they were no longer
slaves. The signs of class he so detested in his own country had
disappeared: "Except for a small number of women and foreigners there
were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough
working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the
militia uniform. There was much in it that I did not understand, in
some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a
state of affairs worth fighting for."
He recounted his odyssey in Homage to Catalonia (1938). He joined a
local militia unit and marched into trouble. Franco's troops fired at
him, as expected; they were the enemy. But while recuperating from a
bullet wound in the throat, Orwell learned that Communists in the
Spanish government had outlawed the loose alliance of radicals he had
joined in the struggle against Franco. The independent workers'
stronghold in Barcelona was not, apparently, what Madrid or Moscow had
in mind. Suddenly Orwell and his colleagues-at-arms were being called
fascists, Franco's hired killers, by the Communist papers in Spain and
Europe. Purges and reprisals began in Barcelona. Released from the
hospital, Orwell was forced into hiding and then out of the country.
His journey from exhilaration to exile took six months.
Spain left definitive marks on Orwell's character; all the political
writing he did after escaping the civil war was sharpened by his keen
sense of betrayal. He had seen the future, and it worked far too well;
the world was being staked out by mirror-image tyrannies equally
ruthless in stamping out the individual. The workers in Barcelona had
been punished by the Communists for the crime of being unorthodox;
they became, until suppressed, a more important enemy than Franco.
Back home in England, Orwell read accounts of the events in Spain and
realized that he was being fed hogwash: "I saw great battles reported
where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds
of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced
as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired
hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories." This phenomenon
frightened him, he wrote, "because it often gives me the feeling that
the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."
Orwell devoted the rest of his life to arresting this process, against
formidable odds. He took on not only Nazis and Stalinists and all
advocates of the expedient lie but the solipsism of much modern
philosophy and literature. Theories that reality is simply the spider
web of word spinners left him aghast; that way lay the dictatorship of
the speaker and, ultimately, the abstract, ominous slogans of Nineteen
Eighty-Four: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
The first and best defense against such totalitarian gibberish, Orwell
argued, is common sense. A person with a basic understanding of what
the words freedom and slavery actually mean must reject a sentence
that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do
with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete
object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the
thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find
the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises
treachery: "When you think of something abstract you are more inclined
to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to
prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job
for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning."
There was nothing donnish about Orwell's interest in language. He
realized that the manipulation of speech could be every bit as deadly
as the bearing of arms. He reminded all who would listen that Hitler
had risen to power in Germany through persuasion; that Stalin had
obscured massive crimes through the smokescreen of invective. He also
warned, on the eve of World War II, that matters could deteriorate:
"The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are
something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the
past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least
resisted, because of 'human nature,' which as a matter of course
desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature'
is constant . . . The radio, press-censorship, standardized education
and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a
science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how
successful it will be."
Still, Orwell never allowed this innate pessimism to overwhelm his
talent or his energies. With Europe flaring into war, he took time
from his political comments to write essays on Charles Dickens, Henry
Miller and the literary and social merits of English boys' magazines.
Oddly, these are the pieces that have aged the least. It is as if
survival depended on the small things, like childhood pleasures, and
not the large things, like war.
During the war, Orwell and his wife lived in London. Cyril Connolly
recalled: "He felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs,
the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of
rising revolutionary temper." By then Orwell had become something of a
celebrated eccentric, that gaunt Etonian who dressed like a working
man (corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his
cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer
before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such
terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally
metamorphosed into George Orwell; the mask had become the man. Money
was still scarce; his books had made him well known but not solvent.
He turned out columns for Tribune, a weekly organ of the non-Communist
British left, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC's Eastern Service
to India and Southeast Asia. He also wrote Animal Farm.
This slight fable, scarcely longer than a short story, was Orwell's
favorite among his works; it led directly back to his first, heady
days in Barcelona. The abused, overworked animals rebel against the
rule of the exploiting farmer, Mr. Jones; but the workers' paradise is
soon commandeered and betrayed by a pig who bears more than a fleeting
resemblance to Joseph Stalin. His credo: "All animals are equal, but
some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm was rejected by
more than a dozen publishers in England and the U.S. The clear anti-
Soviet parody bothered many of them. After all, the U.S.S.R. was an
ally in the crusade against Hitler. But the publishers who finally
accepted the book were amply rewarded; it has sold dependably for
nearly 40 years.
Orwell's wife died in 1945, during surgery for uterine tumors. The
widower was 41, tubercular, and left with an infant son, Richard,
recently adopted. Loneliness, the responsibility of a child and the
prospect of his own death drove him to propose marriage to a series of
flabbergasted women. He wrote one, after two meetings, "You are young
and healthy, and you deserve somebody better than me: on the other
hand if you don't find such a person, and if you think of yourself as
essentially a widow, then you might do worse—i.e., supposing I am not
actually disgusting to you." Unsurprisingly, she declined the offer.
The success of Animal Farm at last brought Orwell some financial
relief; he could afford to cut back on his journalism and devote more
time to his next novel. He took a house on Jura, a windy, remote
island off the western coast of Scotland. There, growing more ill each
day, he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He lived only seven months after its publication, long enough to
realize that his book was becoming enormously successful and widely
misunderstood. He attempted a note of clarification: "My recent novel
is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labor
Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions
to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been
partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the
kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe
(allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that
something resembling it could arrive." Few listened, trusting the
title and the tale, not the teller.
Orwell did not view Nineteen Eighty-Four as his last will and
testament, a Swiftian condemnation of humanity, as some, including
Connolly, have claimed ("He was a dying man and he knew it").
Muggeridge remembers his last conversation with Orwell: "He said, 'I
have some more books to write.' " Soon afterward, he married Sonia
Brownell, a beautiful woman 15 years his junior, in his hospital room.
T.O. Fyvel, another friend, recalls Orwell's saying, "When one is
married, one has more reason to live." He died three months later, on
Jan. 21, 1950.
Where did he stand, finally? He called himself "a man of the left,"
realizing that most of his allies shied away from or repudiated his
maverick views. In fact, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have
long been embraced by the right as anti-revolutionary tracts. Yet such
terms shift with time; what was left 20 years ago could be mainstream
now and reactionary by 2001, or vice versa. Orwell's work has proved
itself, with some exceptions, grounded on bedrock.
His four published novels before Animal Farm are readable but minor
performances. His women characters are particularly stiff and
lifeless. He was not an imposing political theorist; his strength lay
in recognizing problems, not in propounding detailed solutions.
His greatest accomplishment was to remind people that they could think
for themselves, at a time in this century when humanity seemed to
prefer taking marching orders. He steadfastly valued ideals over
ideology. He tried to strike a correct socialist attitude toward
Dickens, and could not quite pull it off: "His whole 'message' is one
that looks at first glance like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent." But the sentiment, he
concluded, "is not such a platitude as it sounds." Indeed, for all the
pessimism attributed to him posthumously, Orwell had an abiding,
almost pious faith in the ability of that fragile, querulous species,
humankind, to correct its deficiencies by the most radical process of
all: thinking. In The Road to Wigan Pier he expressed the belief that
"economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no
sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly
matters." "Political chaos," he continued to stress, "is connected
with the decay of language . . . one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end." To that end, Orwell
devoted his life. His work endures, as lucid and vigorous as the day
it was written. The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is
not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty-Four—but
as a man of letters, who wanted to change the world by changing the
word. A word that surely requires alteration today has been misused
since the '50s. The author's name is not a synonym for
totalitarianism. It is in fact the spirit that fights the worst
tendencies in politics and society by using a fundamental sense of
decency—Orwellian, in the best sense of the word.
—By Paul Gray.
Reported by Anne Hopkins/New York and John Saar/London
bademiyansubhanallah
October 28, 2009...7:52 am
The Bible of Militant Atheism
by Aasem Bakhshi
Contrary to the mainstream religious belief, incredulity and
skepticism regarding the ultimate nature of truth, existence of God
and eschatological claims of scripture is not an entirely modern
phenomenon. In his famous thought experiment Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Ibn
Tufayl the famous Muslim philosopher of 12th century Spain,
aesthetically described discovery of God as the “joy without lapse,
unending bliss, infinite rapture and delight” and inability to find
Him as “infinite torture”. The curious and always speculative
protagonist of the fable remains incessantly engaged between
cosmological antinomies such as those put forward by contests between
classical Greek eternalism and scriptural creationism; or the ones
related to human origins such as spontaneous generation
(understandably so, considering the scientific milieu of 12th century)
or simple creationism as proposed by orthodox religion.
Ibn Tufayl’s classic as well as other such theologically flavored
thought experiments of pre-modern period, for instance Avicenna’s
“Floating Man”, can be characteristically distinguished from modernist
discourse in three important ways: their peculiar guarded speculative
approach towards theology, the careful selection of premises mostly
leading towards theistic conclusions and most importantly aesthetics
of literary exposition.
There were of course exceptions raising more formal agnostic queries
regarding nature of God, for example the physician Zakariya Razi and
Avicenna himself; however these undertakings, even though penned by
intellectuals who were primarily scientists did not go as far as to
purport an outright rejection of faith. In modern times, the western
philosophical tradition having roots in enlightenment, especially Kant
and Hume, provided basis for a scientific endeavor that gave rise to
more formal and popular agnosticism – and indirectly atheism – whose
main proponents were among logicians, paleontologists and physicists
whose writings while popularizing science as it was never done before
in the history of scientific culture, also extended the domain of
science to purely philosophical realms including metaphysics, ethics
and theology. Yet, the religion was never presented so
antagonistically in opposition to reason as it is done so remarkably
by Richard Dawkins in God Delusion.
Based upon extreme scientific naturalism, Dawkins’ thesis casts the
proposition that atheism is a natural consequence of human evolution.
All kind of religious faith, being impossible to be vindicated
empirically, is necessarily dissonant with reason. Religion, as
interpreted by Dawkins, is at the the root of much that is going wrong
in the world. Moreover, the idea of God in human consciousness can be
explained away as a naturally evolved impulse to believe in an
omniscient and omnipotent entity, an indulgence which is byproduct of
“something useful” or simply speaking an error in the grand
evolutionary process.
Unlike some of his predecessors, for instance Thomas Huxley, Bertrand
Russell and Stephen. J. Gould, who chose to describe themselves as
agnostics rather than atheists, Dawkins does not accept the idea that
outright atheism is simply dogmatic due to its unwarranted
metaphysical claims about the non-existence of God without enough
empirical evidence. Therefore, religion and science does not belong to
two “non-overlapping magisteria” – a term coined by Gould – limited to
their respective domains. Consequently, any question or claim related
to existence of God should be strictly considered a scientific
question; simply, because it cannot circumvent other cosmological
queries concerning origins of human life and universe.
The approach of Dawkins is rightly expressed as militant atheism by
many intellectuals as he is in favor of dismantling all practical
religion and every procedure that facilitates or establishes basis for
its survival. As explained succinctly by Karen Armstrong in her new
book The Case for God, the approach taken by Dawkins has a peculiar
reductionist tendency which is remarkably similar to religious
extremists as each considers the other as the “epitome of evil”. In
both discourses, oversimplifications and gross generalizations
necessitate wrong premises, ultimately bringing out the absolute worst
of the other; no wonder therefore, why Dawkins invoke the likes of Ibn
Warraq and Christopher Hitchens to argue that a tolerant and
respectable view of religion is equally reprehensible for all the
wrongs committed by religious extremists. Indeed, the superficiality
of logical analysis in such discourses does not demand intellectually
laborious critique as similarities are not hard to draw.
The nature of God, as understood by Dawkins to present his case
against religion, is vulgarly anthropomorphic. The reader is almost
duped into believing that all theists, irrespective of the particular
creed they ascribe to, believe in some kind of spirit out there; a
kind of superhuman entity which Dawkins pejoratively equates with
Russell’s ‘Cosmic Teapot’ or ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’. The idea of
universal symbolism towards some transcendent ineffable entity beyond
the capacity of vocation of language seems alien to Dawkins’
naturalist preoccupancy. The religious belief, therefore, as he
vociferously advocates, is something stupid, naive and incapable to be
hold by an intelligent and unbiased rational being.
Due to his proclivity towards oversimplification in matters
metaphysical, Dawkins seems to advertently disregard the inherent
ineradicability of unknowing in the nature of acquired religious
truth. He does not acknowledge the fact that no theist claims
explicitly that he is in possession of the ultimate sacred truth,
except the reductionism loving religious extremists. The scripture
itself closes the door on such kind of claim by contending that “there
is nothing like the likeness of Him“. All we have are symbols pointing
towards the nature of ultimate truth concerning God and sundry
eschatological issues.
Probably due to his aphilosophical bent, Dawkins is apparently unable
to comprehend that for a theist, there is beauty in this astonishment;
a sense of awe that tends to make him humbly aware regarding the
degree of obscurity of his own self in the macrocosm. But he would at
least agree that science, no matter how much it achieves in reducing
complexity that surrounds us, also shares this sense of awe with
religion as it also had to consistently rely on an act of faith.
On this particular note, conjuring probability model to disregard the
so-called God hypothesis is outrageously strange. Dawkins’ conclusion
that “God almost certainly does not exist” cannot be philosophically
taken as a knowledge producing utterance unless ‘probability’ is taken
as synonymous for ‘truth’; a subtle yet important point, that was
profoundly framed by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific
Discovery:
…we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as
a ’system of hypothesis’; that is to say, as a system of guesses or
anticipation which in principle cannot be justified but with which we
work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never
justified in saying that we know that they are ‘true’ or ‘more or less
certain’ or even ‘probable’”.
Because of strict evolutionary perspective that he sets up for
himself, it was incumbent for Dawkins to give some kind of Darwinian
origins to morality. Ultimately entailing the biological evolution of
human intellect, this is perhaps the crassest assertion of the book;
amounting to claim that our ancestors were less capable or probably
less intellectually equipped to be objective in apprehending the
ultimate reality. As Iqbal mentions in his second lecture on nature of
religious experience, any such view regarding intellect being a
product of evolution would “bring science into conflict with its own
objective principle of investigation”. To find an appropriate
expression of this conflict, he quotes Wildon Carr:
If intellect is a product of evolution the whole mechanistic concept
of the nature and origin of life is absurd, and the principle that
science has adopted must clearly be revised [...] How can the
intellect, a mode of apprehending reality, be itself an evolution of
something which only exists as an abstraction of that mode of
apprehending, which is the intellect? If intellect is an evolution of
life, then the concept of the life which can evolve intellect as a
particular mode of apprehending reality must be the concept of a more
concrete activity than that of any abstract mechanical movement which
the intellect can present to itself by analyzing its apprehended
content.
Dawkins wishes to portray the book as a consciousness raiser of sorts:
regarding atheism being more reasonable than agnosticism, religion
being the root of all evil, religious education being equal to child
abuse, religion and morality being completely uncorrelated and atheism
being an objective conclusion not to be ashamed of rather the only
rational position one can possibly hold with a sense of pride. I think
some of the aims were partially achieved, especially raising the
atheist pride by providing a kind of polemicist manual to hold
tightly.
But perhaps the real strength of the book lies in questioning the
innermost religious convictions of the people who are equally awed by
the respective magisteria of religion and science and want to bridge
gaps. Regarding the kind of evidence that would convince him regarding
the existence of God, Bertrand Russell once replied that if a voice
from the sky would reveal to him each and every thing that is going to
happen in next few hours and that would eventually happen also, he may
consider the possibility of existence of God. I sincerely doubt that
even in the face of such evidence, Richard Dawkins would even come
close in considering the truthfulness of God hypothesis. To borrow the
quip that he himself quotes in the book, he does not merely believe in
non-existence of God, he knows.
3 Comments
SV
October 28, 2009 at 3:15 pm
“But he would at least agree that science, no matter how much it
achieves in reducing complexity that surrounds us, also shares this
sense of awe with religion as it also had to consistently rely on an
act of faith.”
What does this mean?
Bloody Civilian
October 28, 2009 at 5:50 pm
SV
i suspect it’s a case of confusing the role of ’serendipity’ in
science with ‘an act of faith’. a (successful) scientist catches any
fruits of ’serendipity’ in a net made of dedicated effort and strict
objectivity. scientists running naked in the street shouting eureka
makes good copy, though.
just like ’serendipity’ may incorrectly be confused with ‘faith’,
‘dedication’ has similarities with ‘devotion’, and there cannot be
true objectiviy without humility… hence the scientisit’s ‘religious
experience’.. to use another figure of speech.
Raza Rumi
October 28, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Aasem, thanks for this brilliant post. Please write more for PTH and
we desperately need diversity here..
cheers
RR
chhotemianinshallah
Atanu Dey on India's Development
Atanu Dey
Location: Mumbai, India
A Collection of #UnlikelyIndianBooks
Oct. 29 2009 - 02:26 pm
A little over a week ago I came across #unlikelyindianbooks on
twitter. It was an interesting meme, as its contagious spread
testifies. It appears that it was started by someone with the twitter
handle "jhunjhunwala".
Just for the heck of it, I present a selection from the several
hundreds out there. I read some of them so that you don't have to.
These are pretty good by my reckoning although they may not be the
best. In any case, your mileage may vary. I start off with a few by
yours truly (identified by "AD") -- this being my blog, I have that
prerogative :)
(AD) "The Dangerous Insanity of Dynastic Rule in a Democracy" by Rahul
Gandhi
(AD)"Jawaharlal Nehru: The Great Visionary, Nation Builder, and
Statesman" by Atanu Dey
(AD) "Honesty is the Best Policy: Compilation of Essays by Indian
Politicians". Foreword by Laloo Yadav.
"Saare Jahaan Se Acchaa Hindustan Hamara" by Arundhati Roy
"Vande Mataram" by Prakash & Brinda Karat
"Basic research techniques for Journalists" by Sagarika Ghose
"Aagey Dukaan, Peechay Makaan" by Kishore Biyani
"The Are of Nepotism" with a foreword by Rahul Gandhi
"Learning Italian the Easy Way" by Manmohan Singh
"Social Hyperactivism" by Arundhati Roy
"Das and Capital: Why Bengal Needs Capitalism" by Jyoti Basu
"Nano Technology" by Mamata Banerjee
"Ethical Journalism" by Barkha Dutt
"Frugality and Responsible Public Administration" by Mayawati
"Intra-party Democracy" Co-authored by Karunanidhi, Bal Thakeray,
Sonia Gandhi, Farooq Abdullah, Deve Gowda, Mayawati, et al.
"The Evils of Caste-based Reservations" by D. Raja
"How to Cook Books" by Ramalinga Raju.
"Pragmatic Thinking for Dummies" by BJP
"How to Win Elections" by BJP
"Celebrating Valentines Day" by Pravin Togadia.
“It's Y-O-U!” by Young ‘mobile’ Indians
“Birth Control” by Laloo & Rabri Yadav
"Merit, The Only Criteria" by Arjun Singh
"The Pub-hopper's Guide to Mangalore" by Mutalik
"The Life & Times of a Sanyasi" by Vijay Mallya
"You Can Win" by LK Advani
"My Great Grandfather and That English Woman" by Rahul Gandhi
"Consistency and Stability in the Indian Education System" by Kapil
Sibal
"His Master's Voice: An Autobiography" by Dr Manmohan Singh
"How to Win a Loksabha Elections" by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
OK, enough is enough.
by atanu-dey-blog
on 10/29/2009 05:33 pm
Oldtimer, what can I do!
There are tons of great books out there and I am a very slow reader.
Anyway, I will add the ones you recommended to the growing pile.
by Oldtimer
on 10/29/2009 05:10 pm
Your taste in books is not bad, but you obviously haven't tried the
best. Here they are:
"The Communist Bowdlerization of Indian History", By Romila Thapar
"Prophets on Canvas: Islamic Iconography Down The Ages", from The
School of Fine Arts, Deoband Seminary
"News is Sacrosanct; Advertising Can Wait", Times of India
Publications
"A Darwinian Basis for Evangelism", Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn and Ted
Haggard
Please also read these much-acclaimed papers published in well-known
academic journals:
"The Pitfalls of Nasal Intonations in Musical Art", Himesh Reshamayya
"Unveiling The Role of Sartorial Modesty in 21st Century Film-Making",
Rakhi Sawant
"Sport and Expletives: A Language Primer for Bowlers and Batsmen",
Harbhajan Singh
chhotemianinshallah
Pamphlets for the People
No. 11
Deity and Design
by Chapman Cohen
The Pioneer Press
The one certain thing about the history of the human intellect is that
it runs, from ignorance to knowledge. Man begins knowing nothing of
his own nature or of the nature of the world in which he is living. He
continues acquiring a little knowledge here and there, with his vision
broadening and his understanding deepening as his knowledge increases.
Had man commenced with but a very small fraction of the knowledge he
now possesses, the present state of the human mind would be very
different from what it is. But the method by which knowledge is
acquired is of the slowest. It is by way of what is called trial and
error. Blunders are made rapidly, to be corrected slowly; some of the
most primitive errors are not, on a general scale, corrected even to-
day. Man begins by believing, on what appears to be sound evidence,
that the earth is flat, only to discover later that it is a sphere. He
believes the sky to be a solid something and the heavenly bodies but a
short distance away. His conclusions about himself are as
fantastically wrong as those he makes about the world at large. He
mistakes the nature of the diseases from which he suffers, and the
causes of the things in which he delights. He is as ignorant of the
nature of birth as he is of the cause of death. Thousands of
generations pass before he takes the first faltering steps along the
road of verifiable knowledge, and hundreds of thousands of generations
have not sufficed to wipe out from the human intellect the influence
of man's primitive blunders.
Prominent among these primitive misunderstandings is the belief that
man is surrounded by hosts of mysterious ghostly agencies that are
afterwards given human form. These ghostly beings form the raw
material from which the gods of the various religions are made, and
they flourish best where knowledge is least. Of this there can be no
question. Atheism, the absence of belief in gods, is a comparatively
late phenomenon in history. It is the belief in gods that begins by
being universal. And even among civilized peoples it is the least
enlightened who are most certain about the existence of the gods. The
religions scientist or philosopher says: "I believe "; the ignorant
believer says: " I know."
Now it would indeed be strange if primitive man was right on the one
thing concerning which exact knowledge is not to be gained, and wrong
about all other things on which knowledge has either been, or bids
fair to be, won. All civilized peoples reject the world-theories that
the savage first formulates. Is it credible that with regard to gods
he was at once and unmistakably correct? It is useless saying that we
do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in
essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be
traced to the earliest stages of human history. We have changed the
names of the gods and their characteristics; we even worship them in a
way that is often different from the primitive way; but there is an
unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive
peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but
we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate
the theories he built upon that world.
In this pamphlet I am not concerned with all the so-called evidences
that are put forth to prove the existence of a God. I say "so called
evidences," because they are not grounds upon which the belief in God
rests; they are mere excuses why that belief should be retained.
Ninety per cent. of believers in God would not understand these
"proofs." Roman Catholic propagandists lately, as one of the
advertisements of the Church, have been booming the arguments in favor
of a God as stated by Thomas Aquinas. But they usually preface their
exposition -- which is very often questionable -- by the warning that
the subject is difficult to understand. In the case of Roman Catholics
I think we might well raise the percentage of those who do not
understand the arguments to ninety-five per cent. In any case these
metaphysical, mathematical, and philosophic arguments do not furnish
the grounds upon which anyone believes in God. They are, as I have
just said, nothing more than excuses framed for the purpose of hanging
on to it. The belief in God is here because it is part of our social
inheritance. We are born into an environment in which each newcomer
finds the belief in God established, backed up by powerful
institutions, with an army of trained advocates committed to its
defence and to the destruction of everything that tends to weaken the
belief. And behind all are the countless generations during which the
belief in God lived on man's ignorance and fear. In spite of the
alleged "proofs" of the existence of God, belief in him, or it, does
not grow in strength or certainty. These proofs do not prevent the
number of avowed disbelievers increasing to such an extent that,
whereas after Christians proclaiming for several generations that
Atheism -- real Atheism -- does not exist, the defenders of godism are
now shrieking against the growing number of Atheists, and there is a
call to the religious world to enter upon a crusade against Atheism.
The stage in which heresy meant little more than all exchange of one
god for another has passed. It has become a case of acceptance or
rejection of the idea of God, and the growth is with those who reject.
This is not the way in which proofs, real proofs, operate. A theory
may have to battle long for general or growing acceptance, but it
grows provided it can produce evidence in its support. A hypothesis is
stated, challenged, discussed, and finally rejected or accepted. On
the question of the hypothesis of God the longer it is discussed the
less it is believed. No wonder that the ideal attitude of the
completely religious should be "on the knee," with eyes closed and
mouths full of nothing but petitions and grossly fulsome praise. That
is also the reason why every religions organization in the world is so
keen upon capturing the child. The cry is: "If we lose the child we
lose everything" -- which is another way of saying that if we cannot
implant a belief in God before the child is old enough to understand
something of what it is being told, the belief may have to be given up
altogether. Keep the idea of God away from the child and it will grow
up an Atheist. If there is a God, the evidence for his existence must
be found in this world. We cannot start with another world and work
back to this one. That is why the argument from design in nature is
really fundamental to the belief in deity. It is implied in every
argument in favor of Theism, although nowadays, in its simplest and
most honest form, it is not so popular as it was. But to ordinary men
and women it is still the decisive piece of evidence in favor of the
existence of a God. And when ordinary men and women cease to believe
in God, the class of religious philosophers who spend their time
seeing by what subtleties of thought and tricks of language they can
make the belief in deity appear intellectually respectable will cease
to function.
But let it be observed that we are concerned with the existence of God
only. We are not concerned with whether he is good or bad; whether his
alleged designs are commendable or not. One often finds people saying
they cannot believe there is a God because the works of nature are not
cast in a benevolent mould. That has nothing to do with the essential
issue, and proves only that Theists cannot claim a monopoly of
defective logic. We are concerned with whether nature, in whole, or in
part, shows any evidence of design.
My case is, first, the argument is fallacious in its structure;
second, it assumes all that it sets out to prove, and begs the whole
question by the language employed; and, third, the case against design
in nature is, not merely that the evidence is inadequate, but that the
evidence produced is completely irrelevant. If the same kind of
evidence were produced in a court of law, there is not a judge in the
country who would not dismiss it as having nothing whatever to do with
the question at issue. I do not say that the argument from design, as
stated, fails to convince; I say that it is impossible to produce any
kind of evidence that could persuade an impartial mind to believe in
it. The argument from design professes to be one from analogy. John
Stuart Mill, himself without a belief in God, thought the argument to
be of a genuinely scientific character. The present Dean of St.
Paul's, Dr Matthews, says that "the argument from design employs ideas
which everyone possesses and thinks he understands; and, moreover, it
seems evident to the simplest intelligence that if God exists he must
be doing something, and therefore must be pursuing some ends and
carrying out some purpose." (The Purpose of God, p. 13.) And Immanuel
Kant said the argument from design was the, oldest, the clearest and
the best adapted to ordinary human reason. But as Kant proceeded to
smash the argument into smithereens, it is evident that he had not
very flattering opinion of the quality of the reason displayed by the
ordinary man.
But what is professedly an argument from analogy turns out to offer no
analogy at all. A popular Non-conformist preacher, Dr. Leslie
Weatherhead, whose book, Why do Men Suffer? might be taken as a fine
text-book of religious foolishness, repeats the old argument that if
we were to find a number of letters so arranged that they formed words
we should infer design in the arrangement. Agreed, but that is
obviously because we know that letters and words and the arrangement
of words are due to the design of man. The argument here is from
experience. We infer that a certain conjunction of signs are designed
because we know beforehand that such things are designed. But in the
case of nature we have no such experience on which to build. We do not
know that natural objects are made, we know of no one who makes
natural objects. More, the very division of objects into natural and
artificial is all admission that natural objects are not, prima facie,
products of design at all. To constitute an analogy we need to have
the same knowledge that natural objects are manufactured as we have
that man's works are manufactured. Design is not found in nature; it
is assumed. As Kant says, reason admires a wonder created by itself.
The Theist cannot move a step in his endeavor to prove design in
nature without being guilty of the plainest of logical blunders. It is
illustrated in the very language employed. Thus, Dr. Matthews cites a
Roman Catholic priest as saying, "The adaptation of means to ends is
an evident sign of an intelligent cause. Now nature offers on every
side instances of adaptations of means to ends, hence it follows that
nature is the work of an intelligent cause." Dr. Matthews does not
like this way of putting the case, but his own reasoning shows that he
is objecting more to the argument being stated plainly and concisely
rather than to its substance. Nowadays it is dangerous to make one's
religious reasoning so plain that everyone can understand the language
used.
Consider. Nature, we are told, shows endless adaptations of means to
ends. But nature shows nothing of the kind -- or, at least, that is
the point to be proved, and it must not be taken for granted. If
nature is full of adaptation of means to ends, then there is nothing
further about which to dispute. For adaptation means the conscious
adjustment of things or conditions to a desired consummation. To adapt
a thing is to make it fit to do this or that, to serve this or that
purpose. We adapt our conduct to the occasion, our language to the
person we are addressing, planks of wood to the purpose we have in
mind, and so forth. So, of course, if nature displays an adaptation of
means to ends, then the case for an adapter is established.
But nature shows nothing of the kind. What nature provides is
processes and results. That and nothing more. The structure of an
animal and its relation to its environment, the outcome of a chemical
combination, the falling of rain, the elevation of a mountain, these
things, with all other natural phenomena, do not show an adaptation of
means to ends, they show simply a process and its result. Nature
exhibits the universal phenomenon of causation, and that is all.
Processes and results looked like adaptations of means to ends so long
as the, movements of nature were believed to be the expression of the
will of the gods. Bat when natural phenomena are regarded as the
inevitable product of the properties of existence, such terms as
"means" and "ends" are at best misleading, and in actual practice
often deliberately dishonest. The situation was well expressed by the
late W.H. Mallock, --
"When we consider the movements of the starry heavens to-day, instead
of feeling it to be wonderful that these are absolutely regular, we
should feel it to be wonderful if they were ever anything else. We
realize that the stars are not bodies which, unless they are made to
move uniformly, would be floating in space motionless, or moving
across it in random courses. We realize that they are bodies which,
unless they moved uniformly, would not be bodies at all, and would
exist neither in movement nor in rest. We realize that order, instead
of being the marvel of the universe, is the indispensable condition of
its existence -- that it is a physical platitude, not a divine
paradox."
But there are still many who continue to marvel at the wisdom of God
in so planning the universe that big rivers run by great towns, and
that death comes at the end of life instead of in the middle of it.
Divest the pleas of such men as the Rev. Dr. Matthews of their semi-
philosophic jargon, reduce his illustrations to homely similes, and he
is marveling at the wisdom of God who so planned things that the two
extremities of a Piece of wood should come at the ends instead of in
the middle.
The trick is, after all, obvious. The Theist takes terms that can
apply to sentient life alone, and applies them to the universe at
large. He talks about means, that is, the deliberate planning to
achieve certain ends, and then says that as there are means there must
be ends. Having, unperceived, placed the rabbit in the hat, he is able
to bring it forth to the admiration of his audience. The so-called
adaptation of means to ends -- property, the relation of processes to
results -- is not something that can be picked out from phenomena as a
whole as an illustration of divine wisdom; it is an expression of a
universal truism. The product implies the process because it is the
sum of the power of the factors expressed by it. It is a physical, a
chemical, a biological platitude. I have hitherto followed the lines
marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a
"mind" behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it
is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this "mind."
I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is
the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can
get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and
deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world
as we know it, and deduce God from the world. And we can only do this
by likening the universe as a product that has come into existence as
part of the design of God, much as a table or a wireless-set comes
into existence as part of the, planning of a human "mind." But the
conditions for doing this do not exist, and it is remarkable that in
many cases critics of the design argument should so often have
criticized it as though it were inconclusive. But the true line of
criticism, the criticism that is absolutely fatal to the design
argument is that there is no logical possibility of deducing design
from a study of natural phenomena. And there is no other direction in
which we can look for proof. The Theist has never yet managed to
produce a case for design which upon examination might not rightly be
dismissed as irrelevant to the point at issue.
In what way can we set about proving that a thing is a product of
design? We cannot do this by showing that a process ends in a result,
because every process ends in a result, and in every case the result
is an expression of the process. If I throw a brick, it matters not
whether the brick hits a man on the head and kills him, or if it
breaks a window, or merely falls to the ground without hurting anyone
or anything. In each case the distance the brick travels, the force of
the impact on the head, the window, or the ground, remains the same,
and not the most exact knowledge of these factors would enable anyone
to say whether the result following the throwing of the brick was
designed or not. Shakespeare is credited with having written a play
called King Lear. But whether Shakespeare sat down with the deliberate
intention of writing Lear, or whether the astral body of Bacon, or
someone else, took possession of the body of Shakespeare during the
writing of Lear, makes no difference whatever to the result. Again, an
attendant on a sick man is handling a number of bottles, some of which
contain medicine, others a deadly poison. Instead of giving his
patient the medicine, the poison is administered and the patient dies.
An inquest is held, and whether the poison was given deliberately, or,
as we say, by accident, there is the same sequence of cause and
effect, of process and result. So one might multiply the illustrations
indefinitely. No one observing the sequences could possibly say
whether any of these unmistakable results were designed or not. One
cannot in any of these cases logically infer design. The material for
such a decision is not present.
Yet in each of these cases named we could prove design by producing
evidence of intention. If when throwing the brick I intended to kill
the man, I am guilty of murder. If I intend to poison, I am also
guilty of murder. If there existed in the mind of Shakespeare a
conception of the plan of Lear before writing, and if the play carried
out that intention, then the play was designed. In every case the
essential fact, without a knowledge of which it is impossible
logically to assume design, is a knowledge of intention. We must know
what was intended, and we must then compare the result with the
intention, and note the measure of agreement that exists between the
two. It is not enough to say that one man threw the brick, and that,
if it had not been thrown, the other would not have been killed. It is
not enough to say if the poison had not been given the patient would
not have died. And it certainly is not enough to argue that the course
of events can be traced from the time the brick left the hands of the
first man until it struck the second one. That, as I have said,
remains true in any case. The law is insistent that in such cases the
intent must be established; and in this matter the law acts with
scientific and philosophic Wisdom. Now in all the cases mentioned, and
they are, of course, merely "samples from bulk," we look for design
because we know that men do write plays. men do poison other men, and
men do throw things at each other, with the purpose of inflicting
bodily injury. We are using what is known, as a means of tackling, for
the time being, the unknown. But our knowledge of world-builders, or
universe designers, is not on all-fours with the cases named. We know
nothing whatever about them, and therefore cannot reason from what is
known to what is unknown in the hopes of including the unknown in the
category of the known.
Second, assuming there to be a God, we have no means of knowing what
his intentions were when he made the world -- assuming that also. We
cannot know what his intention was, and we contrast that intention
with the result. On the known facts, assuming God to exist, we have no
means of deciding whether the world we have is part of his design or
not. He might have set about creating and intended something
different. You Cannot, in short, start with a physical, with a natural
fact, and reach intention. Yet if we are to prove purpose we must
begin with intention, and having a knowledge of that see how far the
product agrees with the design. It is the marriage of a psychical fact
with a physical one that alone can demonstrate intention, or design.
Mere agreement of the "end" with the "means" proves nothing at all.
The end is the means brought to fruition. The fundamental objection to
the argument from design is that it is completely irrelevant.
The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design
in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God.
Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to
believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a
conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then
say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because
certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is
an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains
nothing. if I may quote from my book, Theism, or Atheism: --
"To warrant a logical belief in design, in nature, three things are
essential. First, one must assume that God exists. Second, one must
take it for granted that one has a knowledge of the intention in the
mind of the deity before the alleged design is brought into existence.
Finally, one must be able to compare the result with the intention and
demonstrate their agreement. But the impossibility of knowing the
first two is apparent. And without the first two the third is of no
value whatever. For we, have no means of reaching the first except
through the third. And until we get to the first we cannot make use of
the third. We are thus in a hopeless impasse. No examination of nature
call lead back to God because we lack the necessary starting point.
All the volumes that have been written and all the sermons that have
been preached depicting the wisdom of organic structures are so much
waste of time and breath. They prove nothing, and can prove nothing.
They assume at the beginning all they require at the end. Their God is
not something reached by way of inference, it is something assumed at
the very outset."
Finally, if there be a designing mind behind or in nature, then we
have a right to expect unity. The products of the design should, so to
speak, dovetail into each other. A plan implies this. A gun so
designed as to kill the one who fired it and the one at whom it was
aimed would be evidence only of the action of a lunatic or a criminal.
When we say we find evidence of a design we at least imply the
presence of an element of unity. What do we find? Taking the animal
world as a whole, what strikes the observer, even the religious
observer, is the fact of the antagonisms existing in nature. These are
so obvious that religions opinion invented a devil in order to account
for them. And one of the arguments used by religious people to justify
the belief in a future life is that God has created another world in
which the injustices and blunders of this life may be corrected.
For his case the Theist Requires co-operative action in nature. That
does exist among the social animals, but only as regards the
individuals within the group, and even there in a very imperfect form.
But taking animal life, I do not know of any instance where it can
truthfully be said that different species of animals are designed so
as to help each other. It is probable that some exceptions to this
might be found in the relations between insects and flowers, but the
animal world certainly provides none. The carnivora not only live on
the herbivore, but they live, when and where they can, on each other.
And God, if we may use Theistic language, prepares for this, by, on
the one hand, so equipping the one that it may often seize its prey,
and the other, that it may often escape. And when we speak of a
creation that brings an animal into greater harmony with its
environment, it must not be forgotten that the greater harmony, the
perfection of the "adaptation" at which the Theist is lost in
admiration, is often the condition of the destruction of other
animals. If each were equally well adapted one of the competing
species would die out. If, therefore, we are to look for design in
nature we can, at most, see only the manifestations of a mind that
takes a delight in destroying on the one hand what has been built upon
the other.
There, is also the myriads of parasites, as clear evidence of design
as an anything, that live by the infection and the destruction of
forms of life "higher" than their own. Of the number of animals born
only a very small proportion can ever hope to reach maturity. If we
reckon the number of spermatozoa that are "created" then the number of
those that live are ridiculously small. The number would be one in
millions.
Is there any difference when we come to man? With profound egotism the
Theist argues that the process of evolution is justified because it
has produced him. But with both structure and feeling there is the
same suicidal fact before us. Of the human structure it would seem
that for every step man has, taken away from mere animal nature God
has laid a trap and provided a penalty. If man will walk upright then
he must be prepared for a greater liability to hernia. If he will live
in cities he must pay the price in a greater liability to
tuberculosis. If he will leave his animal brothers behind him, he must
bear reminders of them in the shape of a useless coating of hair that
helps to contract various diseases, A rudimentary second stomach that
provides the occasion for appendicitis, rudimentary "wisdom teeth"
that give a chance for mental disease. It has been calculated that man
carries about with him over one hundred rudimentary structures, each
absorbing energy and giving nothing in return.
So one might go on. Nature taken from the point of view most favorable
to the Theist gives us no picture of unified design. Put aside the
impossibility of providing a logical case for the inferring of design
in nature, it remains that the only conception we can have of a
designer is, as W.H. Mallock, a staunch Roman Catholic, has said, that
of "a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster ...
kicking his heels in the sky, not perhaps bent on mischief, but
indifferent to the fact that he is causing it."
Issued for the Secular Society Limited, and
Printed and Published, by
The Pioneer Press (G.W. Foote & Co., Ltd.)
2 & 3, Furnival Street, London, E.C.4,
England
Pamphlets for the People
By Chapman Cohen
(The purpose of this series is to give a bird's-eye view of the
bearing of Freethought on numerous theological, sociological and
ethical questions.)
1. Did Jesus Christ Ever Exist?
2. Morality Without God.
3. What is the Use of Prayer?
4. Christianity and Woman.
5. Must We Have a Religion?
6. The Devil.
7. What is Freethought?
8. Gods and Their Makers.
9. Giving 'em Hell.
10. The Church's Fight for the Child.
11. Deity and Design.
12. What is the Use of a Future Life?
13. Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.
14. Freethought and the Child.
15. Agnosticism or ... ?
16. Atheism.
17. Christianity And Slavery.
chhotemianinshallah
Morality Without God
by Chapman Cohen
Home to: Positive Atheism
I.
Christianity is what is called a "revealed" religion. That is, God
himself revealed that religion to man. In other religions man sought
God -- some god -- and eventually found him, or thought he did. In the
case of Christianity God sought man and revealed himself to him. The
revelation, judging by after events, was not very well done, for
although a book made its appearance that was said to have been
dictated or inspired by God so that man might know his will, yet ever
since mankind has been in some doubt as to what God meant when he said
it. Evidently God's way of making himself known by a revelation is not
above criticism. There seems a want of sense in giving man a
revelation he could not understand. It is like lecturing in Greek to
an audience that understands nothing but Dutch.
What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole
structure of physical science was built up very gradually and
tentatively by man. He did not teach man geology, or astronomy, or
chemistry, or biology. He did not teach him how to overcome disease,
or its nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or how to
develop a wild grass into a life-nourishing wheat. He did not teach
man how to drain a marsh or how to dig a canal so that it might carry
water where it was needed. He did not teach him arithmetic or
mathematics. He taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no
revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine, or the
aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the wireless. All these
and a thousand other things which we regard as indispensable, and
without which civilization would be impossible, man had to discover
for himself. There is not a Christian parson who would to-day say that
God gave these things to man. That, perhaps, is not quite true. Some
of the clergy will say that God gave everything to man inasmuch as he
let him find them out. But at any rate none of these things I have
named is said to have been revealed to man. He had to discover or
invent the lot. And in inventing them or discovering them he behaved
just as he might have behaved had he never heard of God at all.
What was there left for God to give man? Well, it is said, he gave him
morality. He gave man the ten commandments. He told him he must not
steal, he must not commit murder, he must not bear false witness; he
told children they must honor their fathers and mothers, but somehow
he forgot the very necessary lesson that parents ought also to honor
their children. He mixed up with these things the command that people
ought to honor him, and he was more insistent upon that than upon
anything else. Not to honor him was the one unforgivable crime. But,
and this is the important thing, while there is no need for an
inspired arithmetic or an inspired geometry, while there is no
inspired chemistry or geology, there had to be, apparently, and
inspired morality, because without God moral laws would be without
authority, and decency would disappear from human society.
Now that, put bluntly, lies behind the common statement that morality
depends upon religious belief. It is not always put quite so plainly
as I have put it -- very absurd things are seldom put plainly -- but
it is put very plainly by the man in the street and by the
professional evangelist. It is also put in another way by those people
who delight in telling us what blackguards they were till Christ got
hold of them, and it is put in expensive volumes in which Christian
writers and preachers wrap up the statement in such a way that to the
unwary it looks as though there must be something in it, and at least
it is sufficiently unintelligible to look as though it were good sound
theological philosophy.
Is the theory inherently credible? Consider what it means. Are we to
believe that if we had never received a revelation from God, or even
if there were no belief in God, a mother would never have learned to
love her child, men and women would never have loved each other, men
would never have placed any value upon honesty or truthfulness or
loyalty? After all we have seen an animal mother caring for its young,
even to the extent of risking its life for it. We have seen animals
defend each other from a common enemy and join together in running
down prey for a common meal. There is a courting time for animals,
there is a mating time, and there is a time however brief when the
animal family of male, female and young exist. All this happened to
the animals without God. Why should man have to receive a revelation
before he could reach the moral stage of the higher animal life?
Broadly, then, the assertion that morality would never have existed
for human beings without belief in a God or without a revelation from
God is equal to saying that man alone should have never discovered the
value of being honest and truthful or loyal. He would not even have
had such terms as good and bad in his vocabulary, for the use of those
words implies moral judgement, and there would have been no such thing
-- at least, so we are told.
I am putting the issue very plainly, because it is only by avoiding
plain speech that the Christian can "get away" with his monstrous and
foolish propositions. I am saying in plain words what has been said by
thousands upon thousands of preachers since Paul laid down the
principle that if there was no resurrection from the dead, "let's eat
and drink for to-morrow we die".
Sometimes the theory I have been stating is put in a way that throws a
flood of light on the orthodox conception of morality. It is so
glaringly absurd to say that without religion man would not know right
from wrong, that it is given a very slight covering in the expression,
"destroy religion and you remove all moral restraints". Restraints!
That expression is indeed a revelation. To the orthodox Christian
morality stands for no more than a series of restraints, and
restraints are unpleasant things, because they prevent a man from
doing what he would like to do. It is acting in defiance of one's
impulses that makes one conscious of "restraints". A pickpocket in a
crowd is restrained by the knowledge that there is a policeman at his
elbow. A burglar is restrained from breaking into an house by hearing
the footsteps of a policeman. Each refrains from doing as he would
like to do because he is conscious of restraints. It may be God; it
may be a policeman. God is an unsleeping policeman -- I do not say an
unbribable one, because the amount of money given to his
representatives every year, the churches that are built or endowed in
the hopes of "getting right with God", totals a very considerable
sum.
From this point of view, what are called moral rules are treated much
as one may treat the regulation that one must not buy chocolates after
a certain hour in the evening. The order is submitted to because of
"sanctions" that may be applied if you do not. So to the type of
Christian with whom we are dealing the question of right or wrong is
entirely one of coercion from without. If he disobeys he may be
punished, if not here, then hereafter. He asks, "Why should a man
impose restraints on himself if there is no future life in which to be
rewarded or punished? Why not enjoy oneself and be done with it?" On
this view a drunkard may keep sober from Monday morning till Friday
night on the promise of a good "drunk" on Saturday. But in the absence
of this prospect he may say, paraphrasing St. Paul, "If there be no
getting drunk on Saturday, why should we keep sober from Monday to
Friday? If there is to be no drunkenness on Saturday, then let us get
drunk while we may, for the day cometh when there will be no getting
drunk at all".
But all this is quite wrong. The ordinary man is not conscious of
restraint when he behaves himself in a decent manner. A mother is not
conscious of restraint when she devotes herself to nursing her sick
child, or goes out to work to supply it with food. A man who is left
in the house of a friend is not conscious of restraint when he
refrains from pocketing the silver, or when he does not steal a purse
that has been left on the mantlepiece. A person sent to the bank to
cash a check does not feel any restraint because he returns with the
money. The man who is conscious of a restraint when he does a decent
action is not a "good" man at all. He is a potential criminal who does
not commit a crime only because he is afraid of being caught. And when
he is caught, the similarity of the Christian frightened into outward
decency and the detected pickpocket with the policeman's hand on his
shoulder is made the more exact by the cry of, "O Lord be merciful to
me a miserable sinner", in the one case, and "It's a fair cop" in the
other.
The religious theory of morality simply will not do. It turns what is
fundamentally simple into a "mystery", and then elevates the mystery
into a foolish dogma. It talks at large of the problem of evil, when
outside theology no such problem exists. The problem of evil is that
of reconciling the existence of wrong with that of an all-wise and all-
good God. It is the idea of God that introduces the conundrum. The
moral problem is not how does man manage to do wrong, but how does he
find out what is right? When a boy is learning to ride a bicycle, the
problem is not how to fall off, but how to keep on. We can fall off
without any practice. So with so many opportunities of doing the wrong
thing the moral problem is how did man come to hit on the right one,
and to make the treading of the right road to some extent automatic?
But in the philosophy of orthodox Christianity man is a potential
criminal, kept from actual criminality only from fear of punishment or
the expectation of reward in a future life. If the Christian teacher
of morals does not actually mean this when he says that without the
belief in God no such thing as "moral values" exists, and that if
there is no after-life where rewards and punishments follow, moral
practice would not endure, then he is more than mistaken; he is a
deliberate liar. Fortunately for the world, Christians, lay and
clerical, are better than their creed.
II.
We are back again with the old and simple issue of the natural versus
the supernatural. This is one of the oldest divisions in human
thought, and there is no logical compromise between them. Morality
either has its foundations in the natural or in the supernatural. In
asserting the first alternative I do not mean to imply that there is a
morality in nature at large. There is not. Nature takes no more heed
of our moral rules and judgements than it does of our tastes in art or
literature. A man is not blessed with good health because he is an
example of lofty morality, nor is he burdened with disease because he
is a criminal in thought and act. Nature is neither moral or immoral.
Such terms are applicable only when there is conscious action to a
given end. Nature is amoral, that is, it is without morality. The
common saying that nature "punishes" us or "rewards" us for this or
that is merely a picturesque way of stating certain things; it has no
literal relation to actual fact. In nature there are no rewards or
punishments, there are only actions and consequences. We benefit if we
act in one way; we suffer if we act in another. That is the natural
fact; there is no ethical quality in natural happenings. Laws of
morals are human creations; they are on all fours with "laws" of
science -- that is, they are generalizations from experience.
So morality existed in fact long before it was defined or described in
theory. Man did not first discover the laws of physiology in order to
realize the need for eating or breathing, to digest food or to inhale
oxygen. Nor did the rules, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal,
etc., first make stealing and killing wrong. A moral law makes
explicit in theory what is implicit in fact. The fact creates the
rule; it is not the rule that creates the fact.
Non-recognition of this simple truth is mainly responsible for the
rubbish that is served up by so many teachers of ethics, and also for
the unintelligent attack on ethics by those who, because they are,
often enough, dissatisfied with existing standards of moral values,
feel justified in denouncing moral values altogether. As we shall see
later, moral rules stand to human society pretty well as laws of
physiology do to the individual organism. They constitute the
physiology of social life, with the distinction that whatever rules we
have must be modified in form from time to time to meet changing
circumstances.
Let us feel our way gradually, and in as simple a manner as possible.
We begin with the meaning of two words, "good" and "bad". What is
their significance? There are many religious writers and many of those
who aim at founding a religion of ethics -- as though the association
of religion with moral teaching had not already done sufficient harm
in the world -- who speak of certain actions as being good in
themselves, and who profess a worship of the "Good" as though it were
a substitute for "God". There are others who puff themselves out with
a particularly foolish passage from Tennyson that to follow right
because it's right "were wisdom in the scorn of consequence", and
there is a very misleading sentence cited from the philosopher,
Immanuel Kant, expressing his "awe" at man's moral sense. We should
always be on our guard when the sayings of great men become very
popular. It is long odds that they embody something that is not very
wise, or that its wisdom has been lost in the popularization.
It should be very obvious that it is the height of stupidity to do
things in "scorn and consequence", since it is the consequences of
actions that give them their quality of goodness or badness. If
getting drunk made people happier, better, and wiser, would anyone
consider drunkenness a bad thing? In such circumstances the moral rule
would be, "Blessed is he that gets drunk", and the more drunken he
was, the better the man. If we can picture any actions that are
without consequences, they would not come within the scope of morals
at all.
The first point to remember is that there is no such thing as good in
the abstract. A thing is good in relation to its consequences, or as
it realizes the end at which we are aiming. Tennyson was talking
nonsense. These ethical and religious philosophers who "blather" about
the "reality" of good in itself, are talking nonsense. It is not
possible to do right in scorn of consequences because it is the
consequences that make the action either good or bad. It may be
unpleasant or dangerous to do what is right, and we admire the one who
does right in such circumstances, but this does not affect our
standard.
It must also be remembered when we are seeking a natural basis for
morals, that -- if the teleological language may be permitted --
nature requires but one thing of all living creatures. This is
efficiency. The "moral" quality of this efficiency does not matter in
the least. A Church without a lightning conductor is at a disadvantage
with a brothel that possesses one. A man who risks his life in a good
cause has, other things equal, no advantage over a man who risks his
life in a bad one. Leave on one side this matter of efficiency and
there is not the slightest attention paid to anything that we consider
morally worthy in the organism that survives.
Finally, efficiency in the case of living beings is to be expressed in
terms of adaption to environment, a fish to water, an air-breathing
animal to land, a carnivorous animal to its capacity to stalk its
prey, a vegetable feeder to qualities that enable it to escape the
attack of the carnivora, and so forth. An animal survives as it is
able to adapt itself, or as it becomes adapted to its environment. It
is well to bear in mind this principle of efficiency, because while
what constitutes efficiency varies from time to time, the fact of its
being the main condition determining survival remains true whether we
are dealing with organic structure or with mental life.
Now if we take ethical terminology, it is plain that the language used
implies a relation and one of a very definite kind. The part of the
environment to which these terms are related is that of other and like
individuals. Kindness, truthfulness, justice, mercy, honesty, etc.,
all imply this. A man by himself -- if we can picture such a thing --
could not be kind; there would be no one to whom to be kind. He could
not be truthful; there would be none to whom he could tell a lie. He
could not be honest, or generous, or loyal; there would be none to
whom these qualities would have any application. Every moral quality
implies the existence of a group of which an individual is a member.
And as the group enlarges so moral qualities take on a wider
application. But this cardinal fact, that ethical qualities, whether
they be good or bad, have no significance apart from group life,
remains constant throughout.
Now let us revert to man as a theoretically solitary animal, a
condition that has nowhere existed, for the sociality of man is only a
stage in advance of the gregariousness of the animal world from which
man has descended. But as an animal he must develop certain habits and
tastes in order to merely exist. Somehow man must usually avoid doing
things that threaten his existence. Even in matters of food he must
develop a taste for things which preserve life and a distaste for
things that destroy it; and, as a matter of fact, there are a number
of capacities developed in the body that automatically offer
protection in the case of food against things that are too injurious
to life. But it is quite obvious that if a man developed a taste for
prussic acid, such a taste would not become hereditary.
Human life, in line with animal life in general, has to develop not
merely a dislike for such things as threaten life, but also a liking
for thier opposite. The development of this capacity means that in the
long run the actions which promote pleasure, and those which preserve
life, roughly coincide. This is the foundation and the evolutionary
basis of the theory of Utilitarianism, or one may say, of Neo-
utilitarianism.
But man never does exist as an individual only, one that is fighting
for his own hand, and whose thoughts and tendencies are consciously or
unconsciously concerned only with his own welfare. Man is always a
member of a group, and the mere fact of living with others imposes in
the individual a kind of discipline that gives a definite direction to
the character of his development. The law of life is, that to live an
organism must be adapted to its environment, and the important part of
the environment here is that formed by one's fellow-beings. The
adaption need not be perfect, any more than that the food one eats
need be of the most nutritious kind. But just as the food eaten must
contain enough nutrition to maintain life, so conduct must be such as
to maintain some kind of harmony between and individual and the rest
of the group to which he belongs. If an individual's nature is such
that he will not or cannot adapt himself to his fellows then he is, in
one stage of civilization, killed off, and in another he is subjected
to pains and penalties, and various kinds of restraints that keep his
antisocial tendencies in check. There is a selective process in all
societies, and even more rigid in low societies than in the higher
ones, in which those ill-adapted to the common life of the group are
placed at a disadvantage even in procreating their own kind.
And side by side with this process of selection within the group there
is going on another eliminative process on a larger scale in the
contest of group with group. A group in which the members show little
signs of a common action of loyalty to each other, is most likely to
be subjugated, or wiped out and replaced by a group in which the
cohesion is greater and the subordination of purely individualistic
tendencies to the welfare of the whole is greater.
The nature of the process by which man becomes a moral animal is
therefore given when we say that man is a social animal. Social life
is in itself a kind of discipline, a training which fits a man to work
with his fellows, to live with them, and to their mutual advantage.
There are rules of the social game which the individual must observe
if he is to live as a member of the tribe. Man is not usually
conscious of the discipline he is undergoing, but neither is any
animal conscious of the process of the forces which adapt it to its
environment. The moralizing of man is never a conscious process, but
it is a recognizable process nonetheless.
It may also be noted that the rules of this social game are enforced
with greater strictness in primitive societies than is the case with
later ones. It is quite a mistake to think of the live of savages as
free, and that of civilized man as being bound down by social and
legal rules. Quite the opposite is the case. The life of uncivilized
man is bound by customs, by taboos, that leave room for but little
initiative, and which to a civilized man would be intolerable.
But from the earliest times there is always going on a discipline that
tends to eliminate the ill-adapted to social life. Real participation
in social life means more than an abstention from injurious acts, it
involves a positive contribution to the life of the whole. A type of
behaviour that is not in harmony with the general social
characteristics of the groups sets up an irritation much as a foreign
substances does when introduced to the tissues of an organism. Thus we
have on the one hand, a discipline that forces conformity with the
social structure, and on the other hand a revolutionary tendency
making for further improvement.
There are still other factors that have to be noted of we are properly
to appreciate the forces that go to mould character and to establish a
settled moral code. To a growing extent the environment to which the
human being has to adapt himself is one of ideas and ideals. There are
certain ideals of truthfulness, loyalty, obedience, kindness, etc.,
which surround one from the very moment of birth. The society which
gives him the language he speaks and the stored-up knowledge it
possesses, also provides him with ideals by which he is more or less
compelled to guide his life.
There are endless differences in the form of these social ideals, but
they are of the same mental texture, from the taboo of the savage to
the "old school tie".
The last phase of this moral adaption is that which takes place
between groups. From the limited family group to which moral
obligations are due, we advance to the tribe, from thence to the group
of tribes that constitute the nation, and then to a stage into which
we are now entering that of the relations between nations, a state
wherein in its complete form, there is an extension of moral duties to
the whole of humanity.
But wherever and whenever we take it, the substance of morality is
that of an adaption of feelings and ideas to the human group, and to
the animal group so far as they can be said to enter into some form of
relationship with us. There is no alteration in the fundamental
character of morality. Its keynote is always, as I have said,
efficiency, but it is an efficiency, the nature of which is determined
by the relations existing between groups of human beings.
If what has been said is rightly apprehended, it will be understood
what is meant by saying that moral laws are to the social group
exactly what laws of physiology are to the individual organism. There
is nothing to cause wonder or mystification about moral laws; they
express the physiology of social life. It is these laws that are
manifested in practice long before they are expressed in set terms.
Human conduct, whether expressed in life or formulated in "laws",
represents the conditions that make social life possible and
profitable. It is this recognition that forms the science of morality
and the creation of conditions that favour the performance of
desirable actions and the development of desirable feelings
constitutes the art of morality.
Finally, in the development of morality as elsewhere, nature creates
very little that is absolutely new. It works up again what already
exists. That is the path of all evolution. Feelings of right and wrong
are gradually expanded from the group to the tribe, from the tribe to
the nation, and from the nation to the whole of human society. The
human environment to which man has to adapt himself becomes even
wider. "My neighbour" ceases to express itself in relation to those
immediately surrounding me, begins to extend to all with whom I have
any relations whatsoever. It is that stage we are now entering, and
much of the struggle going on in the world is due to the attempts to
adapt the feeling already there to its wider environment. The world is
in the pangs of childbirth. Whether civilization will survive those
pangs remains to be seen, but the nature of the process is
unmistakable to those who understand the past, and are able to apply
its lessons to the present and the future.
There is, then, nothing mysterious about the fact of morality. There
is no more need for supernaturalism here than there is room for it in
any of the arts and sciences. Morality is a natural fact; it is not
created by the formulation of "laws"; these only express its existence
and our sense of value. The moral feeling creates the moral law; not
the other way about. Morality has nothing to do with God; it has
nothing to do with a future life. Its sphere of application and
operation is in this world; its authority is derived from the common
sense of mankind and is born of the necessities of corporate life. In
this matter, as in others, man is thrown back upon himself and if the
process of development is a slow one there is the comforting
reflection that the growth of knowledge and of understanding has
placed within our reach the power to make human life a far greater and
better thing. If we will!!
chhotemianinshallah
The Meaning and Value of Freethought
by Chapman Cohen
I will commence with a definition. Freethought may be defined as the
rejection of authority in matters of opinion. It sets the persuasion
of fact against the coercion of force. A Freethinker is one who forms
his own opinions on the facts as he sees them. Right or wrong, his
opinions are his own. He is a voice, not an echo.
Historically, freethought has become identified with the rejection of
religious doctrines. This is because it is from the side of religion
that the impulse to intolerance has come. Human society is born in the
shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy
is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the
independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the
threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even to-day it is from the
religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes.
Religion is the last thing man will civilise.
Considerable progress was made in the old Greek and Roman
civilisations in the way of establishing freedom of thought. Neither
had anything in the shape of a sacred book warning men not to eat of
the Tree of Knowledge, and, in Greece particularly, every question of
religion, ethics, science and philosophy was discussed with the
freedom that Europe subsequently lost and has never altogether
regained. Indeed if it were possible to revive an Athenian of, say,
the time of Socrates and place him in the centre of Europe at any date
from the 5th to the 16th century, and if he had seen the prison, the
stake and the torture chamber being used to prevent criticisms of
religion, he would have thought that the world had been overtaken with
an epidemic of insanity.
The intellectual freedom of Europe died with the establishment of the
Christian Church. Bible in hand, the Church met every new idea with a
"Thus saith the Lord." On the ruins of the ancient civilisation, she
placed the flag on an interested dogmatism, and opened one of the most
hideous chapters in the history of mankind. Enquiry was forbidden,
freedom of speech was taboo, a premium was offered for cowardice and
hypocrisy, a tax was placed upon intellectual sincerity. Intolerance
became a virtue and persecution a habit.
Nothing more demoralising has ever existed. Where religious heresy was
concerned, no man could feel himself safe. In the name of religions, a
man was taught to denounce his neighbour, a wife her husband, a child
its parent. The Church went further, and made man a policeman over
himself, until men feared to think, lest they should be led to doubt.
The thinker was everywhere suspect. The credulous fool was held up as
the model of religious perfection. It was the vilest system the world
has ever known.
In prohibiting the free play of ideas the Church struck at the
foundation of progress. Throughout the whole of animate nature
variation is one of the conditions of development. The opposite
process is elimination, by which unfavorable or undesirable variations
are weeded out. The Church adopted the latter policy. Every variation
against its teaching was crushed. It imposed conformity on all with
the result of achieving stagnation -- and worse. A sheep-like attitude
was inculcated, and where men are trained like sheep they share the
fate of sheep -- they are sheared and eaten.
Had a bench of Bishops existed amongst our simian ancestors, the human
race would never have arisen. The first variations toward a more human
type would have been crushed as a blasphemous innovation.
In the history of every institution where is a time when it has to
face the challenge of new knowledge. The man who makes this challenge
is an asset of great social value. He compels us to something like a
mental stocktaking, to get rid of unusable goods and to restock on
better lines. The greatest need of to-day is to create an environment
that is completely hospitable to new ideas.
The vote spreads political power over a wide area but carries no
guarantee of its right use. All can read, but reading without the
critical habit is of but small value. The Press flashes its lightning,
and the mass of the public are without a conductor that will protect
them from its dangers. There never was a time when there was greater
need for independent thinking than there is to-day. Unfortunately,
fifteen centuries of Christian rule have made intolerance of
unorthodox opinions fatally common.
In Christian mythology, it is noted that man's primal sin was an act
of disobedience. He ate of the Tree of Knowledge, and the Gods cannot
forgive that offense; yet knowledge is the greatest need of mankind.
It is that which has raised him from savagery to civilisation. It is
that which makes him more than the equal of the Gods. It lifts him
above them. But you cannot acquire sound knowledge without the courage
to examine, modify and reject what is already established. This is a
painful and troublesome process; but the pain is that of a new birth,
the trouble that if clearing away things that have outlived their
utility.
Freethought, then, claims the fullest possible freedom of thought,
speech, publication and action. It asks for these, not as luxuries,
but as necessities; it asks not for their toleration, but for their
encouragement. They must be the unquestioned and inalienable rights in
a society where men and women can exist with dignity and self-
respect.
chhotemianinshallah
Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science
The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York
Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in
Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also
appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical
Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with
the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One
has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand
spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the
motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however
exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are
the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and
belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will
suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the
birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild
beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence
understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the
human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on
whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one
tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and
offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from
generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed
toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear.
This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the
formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a
mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a
hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a
privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines
priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the
latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste
make common cause in their own interests.
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of
religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human
communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love,
and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God.
This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and
punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's
outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human
race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied
longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or
moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the
religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New
Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the
peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development
from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples'
lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear
and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a
prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all
religions are a varying blend of both types, with this
differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion
of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their
conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional
endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any
considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of
religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is
rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling.
It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is
entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic
conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the
sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature
and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a
sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single
significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already
appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms
of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned
especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a
much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this
kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived
in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings
are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age
that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious
feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as
atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like
Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one
another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to
another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no
theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and
science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are
receptive to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion
very different from the usual one. When one views the matter
historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as
irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who
is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of
causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who
interferes in the course of events - provided, of course, that he
takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for
the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion.
A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple
reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and
internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more
than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes.
Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the
charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually
on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis
is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be
restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought
science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain that
the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for
scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and,
above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical
science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the
emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the
immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the
rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it
but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and
Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor
in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose
acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its
practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the
mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown
the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and
through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar
ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and
given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of
countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man
such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this
materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only
profoundly religious people.
Science and Religion
Return to Top
This article appears in Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, pp.41 - 49. The
first section is taken from an address at Princeton Theological
Seminary, May 19, 1939. It was published in Out of My Later Years, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1950. The second section is from Science,
Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on
Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic
Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.
1.
During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely
held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and
belief. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time
that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that
did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to
be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of
education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school,
as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that
end exclusively.
One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the rationalistic
standpoint expressed in such crass form; for any sensible man would
see at once how one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it
is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly, if one wants to
clear up one's mind as to its nature.
It is true that convictions can best be supported with experience and
clear thinking. On this point one must agree unreservedly with the
extreme rationalist. The weak point of his conception is, however,
this, that those convictions which are necessary and determinant for
our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid
scientific way.
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts
are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward
such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is
capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle
the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it
is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door
directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most
complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that
what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge
provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain
ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must
come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the
view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the
setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge
of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting
as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value
of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face,
therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our
existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part
in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone
realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be
useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes
clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking
cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make
clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in
the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most
important function which religion has to perform in the social life of
man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental
ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one
can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful
traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments
of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living,
without its being necessary to find justification for their existence.
They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation,
through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to
justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to
us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal
which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but
which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If
one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely
at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and
responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his
powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.
There is no room in this for the divinization of a nation, of a class,
let alone of an individual. Are we not all children of one father, as
it is said in religious language? Indeed, even the divinization of
humanity, as an abstract totality, would not be in the spirit of that
ideal. It is only to the individual that a soul is given. And the high
destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to
impose himself in any other way.
If one looks at the substance rather than at the form, then one can
take these words as expressing also the fundamental democratic
position. The true democrat can worship his nation as little as can
the man who is religious, in our sense of the term.
What, then, in all this, is the function of education and of the
school? They should help the young person to grow up in such a spirit
that these fundamental principles should be to him as the air which he
breathes. Teaching alone cannot do that.
If one holds these high principles clearly before one's eyes, and
compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it appears
glaringly that civilized mankind finds itself at present in grave
danger, In the totalitarian states it is the rulers themselves who
strive actually to destroy that spirit of humanity. In less threatened
parts it is nationalism and intolerance, as well as the oppression of
the individuals by economic means, which threaten to choke these most
precious traditions.
A realization of how great is the danger is spreading, however, among
thinking people, and there is much search for means with which to meet
the danger--means in the field of national and international politics,
of legislation, or organization in general. Such efforts are, no
doubt, greatly needed. Yet the ancients knew something- which we seem
to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they
have not behind them a living spirit. But if the longing for the
achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we
not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for
translating it into deeds.
II.
Return to Top
It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we
understand by science. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring
together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of
this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible. To put it
boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence
by the process of conceptualization. But when asking myself what
religion is I cannot think of the answer so easily. And even after
finding an answer which may satisfy me at this particular moment, I
still remain convinced that I can never under any circumstances bring
together, even to a slight extent, the thoughts of all those who have
given this question serious consideration.
At first, then, instead of asking what religion is I should prefer to
ask what characterizes the aspirations of a person who gives me the
impression of being religious: a person who is religiously enlightened
appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated
himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied
with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of
their superpersonalvalue. It seems to me that what is important is the
force of this superpersonal content and the depth of the conviction
concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any
attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for
otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as
religious personalities. Accordingly, a religious person is devout in
the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of
those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are
capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity and
matter-of-factness as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-
old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of
these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their
effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these
definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For
science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and
outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.
Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human
thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and
relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-
known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be
ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been
described.
For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on
the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible.
This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of
science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the
doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand,
representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at
fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of
scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition
to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.
Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are
clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between
the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though
religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless,
learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will
contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science
can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the
aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling,
however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also
belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for
the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to
reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound
faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without
religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Though I have asserted above that in truth a legitimate conflict
between religion and science cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify
this assertion once again on an essential point, with reference to the
actual content of historical religions. This qualification has to do
with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind's
spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image,
who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at
any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the
disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and
prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a
sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic
character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the
Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their
wishes.
Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an
omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord
man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it
is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand,
there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which
have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if
this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human
action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is
also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible
for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving
out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing
judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and
righteousness ascribed to Him?
The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of
religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God. It is
the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the
reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For
these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is
required--not proven. It is mainly a program, and faith in the
possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on
partial successes. But hardly anyone could be found who would deny
these partial successes and ascribe them to human self-deception. The
fact that on the basis of such laws we are able to predict the
temporal behavior of phenomena in certain domains with great precision
and certainty is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the modern
man, even though he may have grasped very little of the contents of
those laws. He need only consider that planetary courses within the
solar system may be calculated in advance with great exactitude on the
basis of a limited number of simple laws. In a similar way, though not
with the same precision, it is possible to calculate in advance the
mode of operation of an electric motor, a transmission system, or of a
wireless apparatus, even when dealing with a novel development.
To be sure, when the number of factors coming into play in a
phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases
fails us. One need only think of the weather, in which case prediction
even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless no one doubts
that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal
components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are
beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors
in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.
We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining
within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to
sense at least the rule of fixed necessity. One need only think of the
systematic order in heredity, and in the effect of poisons, as for
instance alcohol, on the behavior of organic beings. What is still
lacking here is a grasp of connections of profound generality, but not
a knowledge of order in itself.
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the
firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side
of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him
neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an
independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a
personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted,
in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take
refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been
able to set foot.
But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the
representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal.
For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but
only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with
incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical
good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the
doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and
hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.
In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces
which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an
incomparably more worthy task. (This thought is convincingly presented
in Herbert Samuel's book, Belief and Action.) After religious teachers
accomplish the refining process indicated they will surely recognize
with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound
by scientific knowledge.
If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as
possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears,
scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense. Although
it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which
permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only
aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the
smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.
It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold
that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely
this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a
prey to illusions. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of
successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence
for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the
understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the
shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that
humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in
existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to
man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the
highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only
purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism
but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our
understanding of life.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more
certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not
lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith,
but through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe
that the priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to
his lofty educational mission.
Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?
Return to Top
A response to a greeting sent by the Liberal Ministers' Club of New
York City. Published in The Christian Register, June, 1948. Published
in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1954.
Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion
and science? Can religion be superseded by science? The answers to
these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable
dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet, in my own mind there can be
no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only
lead to a negative answer. What complicates the solution, however, is
the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by
"science," they are likely to differ on the meaning of "religion."
As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical
thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our
sensual experiences." Science, in the immediate, produces knowledge
and, indirectly, means of action. It leads to methodical action if
definite goals are set up in advance. For the function of setting up
goals and passing statements of value transcends its domain. While it
is true that science, to the extent of its grasp of causative
connections, may reach important conclusions as to the compatibility
and incompatibility of goals and evaluations, the independent and
fundamental definitions regarding goals and values remain beyond
science's reach.
As regards religion, on the other hand, one is generally agreed that
it deals with goals and evaluations and, in general, with the
emotional foundation of human thinking and acting, as far as these are
not predetermined by the inalterable hereditary disposition of the
human species. Religion is concerned with man's attitude toward nature
at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and
communal life, and with mutual human relationship. These ideals
religion attempts to attain by exerting an educational influence on
tradition and through the development and promulgation of certain
easily accessible thoughts and narratives (epics and myths) which are
apt to influence evaluation and action along the lines of the accepted
ideals.
It is this mythical, or rather this symbolic, content of the religious
traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This
occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically
fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science.
Thus, it is of vital importance for the preservation of true religion
that such conflicts be avoided when they arise from subjects which, in
fact, are not really essential for the pursuance of the religious
aims.
When we consider the various existing religions as to their essential
substance, that is, divested of their myths, they do not seem to me to
differ as basically from each other as the proponents of the
"relativistic" or conventional theory wish us to believe. And this is
by no means surprising. For the moral attitudes of a people that is
supported by religion need always aim at preserving and promoting the
sanity and vitality of the community and its individuals, since
otherwise this community is bound to perish. A people that were to
honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable,
indeed, to subsist for very long.
When confronted with a specific case, however, it is no easy task to
determine clearly what is desirable and what should be eschewed, just
as we find it difficult to decide what exactly it is that makes good
painting or good music. It is something that may be felt intuitively
more easily than rationally comprehended. Likewise, the great moral
teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of
living. In addition to the most elementary precepts directly motivated
by the preservation of life and the sparing of unnecessary suffering,
there are others to which, although they are apparently not quite
commensurable to the basic precepts, we nevertheless attach
considerable imporcance. Should truth, for instance, be sought
unconditionally even where its attainment and its accessibility to all
would entail heavy sacrifices in toil and happiness? There are many
such questions which, from a rational vantage point, cannot easily be
answered or cannot be answered at all. Yet, I do not think that the so-
called "relativistic" viewpoint is correct, not even when dealing with
the more subtle moral decisions.
When considering the actual living conditions of presentday civilized
humanity from the standpoint of even the most elementary religious
commands, one is bound to experience a feeling of deep and painful
disappointment at what one sees. For while religion prescribes
brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the
actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra.
Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding
principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of
one's fellow. men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school
and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation,
conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive
and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear
of rejection.
There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is
necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such
views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby
that religious teachings are utopian ideals and unsuited to afford
guidance in human affairs. The study of the social patterns in certain
so-called primitive cultures, however, seems to have made it
sufficiently evident that such a defeatist view is wholly unwarranted.
Whoever is concerned with this problem, a crucial one in the study of
religion as such, is advised to read the description of the Pueblo
Indians in Ruth Benedict's book, Patterns of Culture. Under the
hardest living conditions, this tribe has apparently accomplished the
difficult task of delivering its people from the scourge of
competitive spirit and of fostering in it a temperate, cooperative
conduct of life, free of external pressure and without any curtailment
of happiness.
The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence
of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our
predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked. While
it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from
religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe
the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued
with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is
something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for
knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one
and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by
Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they wouid hardly have been capable
of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his
greatest achievements.
chhotemianinshallah
China and America: the economic Odd Couple
Stephen Roach provides some useful, counterintuitive insights into the
economic relationship between America and China, but too often uses
the term ‘global imbalance’ as a euphemism for ‘US decline’.
by Sean Collins
In recent years there has been much debate among economists about the
so-called ‘global imbalances’, mainly between the US and East Asia,
especially China.
On one side, America has been consuming more than it has been
producing, importing more than it has been exporting, and borrowing
rather than rely on internal savings to pay for it all. On the other
side, China has been producing more than it has been consuming,
exporting more than it has been importing, and lending to the US
through purchases of US government debt and other means. It is
certainly odd that China, a still-developing and relatively poor
country, has been effectively subsidising and keeping afloat the US,
the world’s largest and richest economy.
The US-China economic relationship has assumed greater salience with
the financial and economic crisis. China’s capital flows to the US
allowed for low interest rates in America, which underpinned the
housing boom and bust and which, in turn, triggered the broader
financial unravelling. The recession has reduced both America’s trade
deficit and China’s surplus, but the imbalance still exists. Many
wonder if the crisis will lead to an adjustment, and in particular
whether China will continue to purchase American debt and other
financial assets. The recent summit of the G20 nations in Pittsburgh
included a call for global economic imbalances (which are wider and
more complex than just US and China) to be addressed.
In 2002, Stephen Roach began to identify the significance of the
global economic imbalances, making him one of the first to do so.
Roach, the former chief economist at Morgan Stanley and now the head
of the investment bank’s Asia subsidiary, has long argued that the
arrangement is problematic and ultimately unsustainable. Now, as the
global imbalances are an important topic in policy circles, Roach has
published The Next Asia, a collection of articles written between 2006
and mid-2009. The book’s title is in fact somewhat misleading: it is
really more about China than Asia generally, and focuses on the
economic ties between China and the US.
For many years, Roach argued that the US is the main force behind the
imbalance. In The Next Asia he refers to Asia’s export-led growth as
‘a second-order bubble – in effect, a derivative of the one in US
consumption’. This perspective aligns him with the so-called ‘money
glut’ school of thought (1). The money-glut theorists see low interest
rates in the US as the driving force behind the imbalances. Roach
certainly lays a large part of the blame on the Federal Reserve under
its former head Alan Greenspan. The Fed, according to Roach, was ‘led
by market libertarians who condoned an insidious succession of asset
bubbles and ignored its regulatory responsibility in an era of
unprecedented financial engineering and excess leverage’.
“The Chinese economy’s reliance on exports is one-sided and
unsustainable, says Roach”
This understanding leads Roach to criticise US officials for seeking
protectionist trade measures against China, or demanding that China
make changes, such as letting the Chinese yuan increase in value
versus the dollar. The US should not scapegoat China when its own
house is not in order, Roach argues, citing in particular America’s
low domestic savings. If anything, the US should be thanking China,
for without its large purchases of dollar-based assets, US interest
rates would have to be higher to attract buyers.
When the discussion of global imbalances first emerged earlier this
decade, the ‘money glut’ outlook was the predominant explanation.
However, in a 2005 speech, BenBernanke (who became chairman of the
Federal Reserve) turned the issue on its head (2). Bernanke argued
that the primary cause of the imbalances was excess savings in Asia –
a so-called ‘savings glut’. China in particular produces more than it
consumes, and surplus funds make their way into Western capital
markets. China’s state policy of pegging the yuan to the dollar –
which then requires China to purchase dollar-based assets to maintain
– is cited as evidence that the imbalance is the result of Chinese
‘manipulation’ rather than a natural outcome of financial flows. From
this point of view, the onus for reform is on China and Asia
generally, not the US, which has effectively been doing the world a
service by absorbing the surplus funds.
Roach’s earlier pieces in the book are critical of Bernanke and other
‘savings glut’ theorists. In a 2006 article, he says that Bernanke’s
speech ‘downplayed America’s role in fostering the problem – unchecked
structural budget deficits, a plunge in the income-based savings rate
of US households, and a record consumer debt binge’. Moreover,
according to Roach,Bernanke’s critique failed to appreciate that China
is still a developing country, one that mixes both state and private
ownership and has a fragmented financial system: ‘The Fed chairman is
offering advice as if China was a fully functioning market-based
system – perfectly capable of achieving policy traction with the
traditional instruments of monetary and currency policies. Nothing
could be further from the truth.’
But as we follow the development of Roach’s arguments in The Next
Asia, we find a subtle shift in his views over time. He increasingly
characterises the relationship between the US and China as ‘symbiosis’
rather than pinning most of the blame on the US. Instead, he sees both
countries contributing to the imbalances. The Chinese economy’s
reliance on exports is one-sided and unsustainable, he argues. Roach
says China is desperately in need of reforms to boost internal
consumption. For example, he recommends that the Chinese state
overhaul welfare assistance, providing retirement and health benefits,
so that households do not undertake ‘precautionary savings’ and
instead spend its income.
Roach is initially optimistic about China’s ability and willingness to
carry out the kind of reforms he suggests. He gains confidence from
the statement made by WenJiabao , China’s premier, to the National
People’s Congress in March 2007, that China’s economy was increasingly
‘unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, and unsustainable’. But over
time, as it becomes clear that China is not implementing Roach’s
favoured reforms, his frustration mounts. In near-exasperation he
writes: ‘There are worrisome signs that China just doesn’t get it and
that it is clinging to antiquated policy and economic growth
strategies.’
Roach believes the crisis has the potential to be a ‘wake up’ call for
China and Asia generally. But he despairs that China’s response to the
crisis appears to be more of the same: for instance, he describes
China’s massive $585billion stimulus (which at 13 per cent of its GDP
is more than twice the impact of the US stimulus package) as an
‘infrastructure programme’ that bolsters the existing investment in
production and exports, while ‘little is being done to stimulate the
Chinese consumer’.
“Roach believes the crisis has the potential to be a ‘wake up’ call
for China and Asia generally”
In an article in the Financial Times following publication of his
book, Roach evaluates the crisis responses globally and concludes:
‘Far from rebalancing, an unbalanced world again appears to be
compounding existing imbalances.’ (3) The Pittsburgh summit adopted
the goal of ‘sustained and balanced growth’, but Roach argues that
this is an empty statement that lacks an enforcement mechanism.
Roach is an astute observer of global trends, and The Next Asia is
full of insights. Today, when many economists and policymakers are
focused on emergency measures and financial reforms, Roach provides a
useful counterweight, stressing that there are underlying structural
problems that need to be addressed. And compared to those who
superficially focus on the financial sphere, and pin the blame for the
crisis on greedy bankers, complex financial instruments or lax
regulators, his emphasis on global imbalances gets closer to the
point.
But Roach goes too far when he describes these imbalances as ‘the root
cause of the current crisis and recession’; they are a symptom rather
than a cause. The real issue underneath the imbalances – which Roach
and most other participants in the debate overlook – is the decline of
productive industry in the US. As a recent report byCrossBorderCapital
found, US profitability has been falling for some time, in contrast to
China and other parts of Asia (4). The discussion of ‘imbalances’
usually refers to who is borrowing (the US) and who is lending
(China); or who is consuming (the US) and who is not (China). But the
fundamental ‘imbalance’ is between who is creating new value in
productive industries (China) and who is relying on credit to cover up
for a lack of dynamism (the US). Overall, the term ‘imbalance’ is too
much of a euphemism for what should really be called US decline.
Roach’s calls for China to reform are also problematic. As mentioned,
he bemoans China’s lack of action on the reform front, but he never
seeks to try to explain this inactivity. He displays a lack of
curiosity to try to find out why China never gets around to promoting
consumption. It leads to no re-evaluation of China’s interests, or the
barriers to reform.
There are in fact a number of good reasons behind China’s reluctance
to change, some of which Roach himself points to, but never fully
develops. For instance, the build-up of currency reserves among Asian
nations was a response to the late Nineties financial crisis in that
region. Countries whose debt was denominated in dollars found that it
ballooned when the value of their currencies fell; in response, many
Asian nations vowed ‘never again’ and built up dollar reserves and
relied more on internal savings. China was not a victim of this
process, but it learned from observing what happened to its
neighbours, and also began loading up on dollars.
Likewise, there is a rational basis for Chinese purchases of US
Treasury securities, even though there are relatively low returns from
such investments. Specifically, such purchases support China’s dollar
reserves and provide a relatively liquid form of investment (as
opposed to foreign direct investment, such as buying assets or
investing in companies, which requires a longer commitment). Moreover,
there is a geopolitical dimension, which many economists overlook or
downplay. China is essentially a statusquo power rather than a
challenger, a country that seeks to grow within the context of a US-
led world order. The Chinese government is certainly aware that a
drastic withdrawal of investment in the US could upset the foundation
of that order, to China’s detriment.
“China is still a rising industrial power, and it would be
understandable if it ignored the West’s calls to be more like it”
In a recent discussion of his book on the website of Foreign Policy
magazine, Roach says ‘the shift to internal demand is really Beijing’s
only option’ (5). Not really. By ‘internal demand’ Roach means
consumption. If the US consumer will no longer buy imports from China,
then China must create new consumers at home. But this emphasis on
personal consumption is myopic. As the examples of industrialising
Britain and America show, profitable growth creates its own demand; in
particular, from new surplus being spent on the next round of
investment, or businesses buying from other businesses. In both the
British and American examples, personal consumption eventually rose,
but it was secondary to business consumption. In neither case did
governments adopt policies to provide special boosts to personal
consumption.
Indeed, when Roach calls upon China to prop up consumer spending and
shift the economy away from industry and towards services, from the
‘quantity to quality dimension of the growth experience’, he sounds
like he wants China to embrace the policies that the US and other
Western countries have adopted to offset industrial decline. The West
may need to deploy such strategies after decades
ofdeindustrialisation , but China is still a rising industrial power,
and it would be quite understandable if it ignored the West’s calls to
be more like it.
It is clear that Roach disagrees with those in the US and elsewhere
who blame China solely for today’s economic problems. Perhaps the most
passionate passages in The Next Asia are his testimonies before
Congress, where he bluntly tells American politicians they are wrong
to scapegoat China: ‘By going after China, you in the Congress are
playing with fire.’ And it’s also clear that his concept of
‘symbiosis’ is meant to be even-handed. But his neutral-sounding,
‘both need to look in the mirror’ framework ultimately overstates
China’s problems and underestimates America’s weakness. And his
assumption that the goal of economic policy should be ‘global
balance’, rather than the dynamic growth of productive industry, leads
Roach down the same path as the US officials he criticises – lecturing
China.
Sean Collins is a writer based in New York.
Stephen Roach on the Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New
Globalization, by Stephen Roach, is published by John Wiley & Son.
(Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
(1) Daniel Ben-Ami provides a very useful discussion of the different
explanations for the global imbalances. See A balancing act, Fund
Strategy, 17 August 2009
(2) ‘The global savings glut and the US current account deficit,’
March 2005 speech
(3) ‘An unbalanced world is again compounding its imbalances,’
Financial Times, 7 October 2009
(4) CrossBorderCapital, ‘Re-thinking emerging markets – another look
at the next twenty years,’ Emerging Markets, May 2009
(5) ‘No turning back for The Next Asia,’ foreignpolicy.com, 8 October
2009
Books discussed:
Stephen Roach on the Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New
Globalization, by Stephen Roach
October 2009
Why pedagogy is in peril
The anti-smoking ‘truth regime’ that cannot be questioned
Farewell, Norman Levitt
The drawn-out decay of the capitalist class
Seeing Sweden through the eyes of Stieg Larsson
Cooking up a new theory of evolution
State intervention is no substitute for innovation
A book to set democratic alarm bells ringing
spiked, Signet House, 49-51 Farringdon Road, London, EC1M 3JP Tel:
+44 (0)207 40 40 470 Email: email spiked
© spiked 2000-2009 All rights reserved.
chhotemianinshallah
Why pedagogy is in peril
Frank Furedi, author of the new book Wasted: Why Education Isn’t
Educating, talks to Jennie Bristow about the politicisation of
education and the crisis of adult authority.
by Jennie Bristow
Everyone has a view on the crisis of education.
Cover illustration by
Jan Bowman
Politicians point the finger at outdated attitudes, mess about with
the curriculum, prescribe new teaching methods and seek to involve
parents in the project of schooling. Teachers blame interfering
politicians alongside parents who don’t discipline their children or
help them with their homework; parents blame teachers for being too
hard or too soft on children, too modern or too traditional.
Classically trained university professors bemoan the annual intake of
students who can barely read a book, write a sentence or formulate an
equation, while employers castigate schools for turning out young
people who lack the basic life skills necessary for the world of work.
Even for somebody like me, born into a family of educators and with
two young children embarking on their all-important schooldays, all
this educational angst can get a bit tedious. Do we really need
another book on the subject? What could Frank Furedi say about
education that has not already been thought and said?
“Formal education is the process by which society transmits its values
and intellectual legacy to the younger generation”
‘All the big debates about pedagogy – how children learn to read,
whether English literature is superior to media studies, whether
history teachers should focus on the Napoleonic wars or the Holocaust
– all these are really secondary issues’, says Furedi. ‘Yes, these
questions are important, but how well any teaching method works
depends on the recognition that education is an intergenerational
dynamic, which relies on the assumption of adult authority. Today, we
have an inability to give meaning to education because we struggle to
give meaning to adulthood. My book Wasted is an attempt to understand
that fundamental problem.’
The struggle to give meaning to adulthood is expressed in a number of
familiar ways. From parents struggling to know how to tell a two-year-
old to behave to teachers feeling threatened by ‘violent’ four-year-
olds and politicians threatening parents of truanting teenagers with
jail, discipline is one area of life that used to be taken for granted
but has now become an endless source of conflict and anxiety. The fact
that it is now questioned whether adults have the moral right to
discipline children in the way they see fit, and that their attempts
to do so are met with scrutiny and contestation, is a stark example of
the way that the very assumption of adult authority has been thrown
into question both at school and at home.
A related trend is that which Furedi terms ‘socialisation in reverse’.
Socialisation, he notes, ‘is the process through which children are
prepared for the world ahead of them’. This is a responsibility that
‘is carried out by adults at home and their communities, and in the
formal setting of the school’. Today, however, this intergenerational
responsibility is being usurped by a new breed of professionals, so-
called experts ‘who transmit values by directly targeting children’.
Parents will be only too aware of the way that children now come home
armed with advice for their parents about how to eat healthily and
recycle their rubbish correctly, while teachers find their own
authority on this front trumped by specialist interlopers who
parachute into schools to teach pupils about sex, drugs and ‘life
skills’.
Furedi’s seminal 2001 book Paranoid Parenting highlighted the grave
consequences of the devaluation of adult authority for the role played
by parents and the extent to which they are accorded autonomy in their
private family lives. In Wasted, he explores the meaning of this
infantilising trend for teachers, and for the project of education as
a whole. Teachers will identify with the everyday frustration and
humiliation that arise from such practices as having their discipline
techniques closely monitored and questioned, or finding themselves
interviewed by pupils on the grounds that the children should be
‘given a voice’ in deciding which staff the school recruits. But such
practices are only symptoms of the process by which the core idea of
education as a transaction carried out between generations has been
called into question.
Formal education is the process by which society transmits its values
and its intellectual legacy to the younger generation. Drawing on the
work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, Furedi argues that ‘it is
through education that society both preserves and renews itself’. It
is for this reason that a traditional, liberal education has been an
essentially conservative project, designed to teach children what is
known, thought and agreed upon, rather than attempting to challenge
the received wisdom. ‘The conserving function of education is not an
attempt to indoctrinate children into conservatism – it is about
giving them the resources to create a new world’, explains Furedi.
Only when children are taught about the world as it is, by an
authoritative source, can they develop the knowledge and critical
faculties necessary to shape their world as adults. In this sense, a
conservative education should be understood as the necessary
foundation for a generation that is capable both of transforming
society and holding it together.
One result of the devaluation of adult authority is that ‘the proper
relationship between education and society has been turned upside
down’, and ‘education is used as the site where the unresolved issues
of public life can be pursued’. As adults are infantilised and
children are treated as mini-grown-ups whose voice must be expressed
and heard on every matter from the content of the curriculum to the
attributes of their teachers, education becomes viewed as a place
where political debates can and should take place. As Furedi argues:
“If learning is something that people can do at any point in their
lives, what’s so special about what teachers do?”
‘In public life, politicians and policymakers play it safe and tend to
avoid substantive issues and serious debate. But often problems that
are avoided in the domain of politics appear as a subject for the
school curriculum. So the problem of political apathy and
disengagement is accepted as a fact of life in public life only to
reappear in the form of citizenship education in schools. Solving
problems and changing attitudes is assigned to the institutions of
education.’
In this respect, the politicisation of education has gathered pace in
recent years as politics and public life have become exhausted. Modern
society’s retreat from politics, from the notion that we have choices
about how to organise our existence, was examined in Furedi’s 2005
book Politics of Fear. One key consequence of the discrediting of
political authority is that those who seek to manage society
increasingly do so by attempting to manipulate pre-political relations
of authority: those that exist within education, and the family.
This is a dangerous process, argues Furedi, because all forms of
authority in society draw upon the basic relationship between adults
and children. The authority of parents has historically been
considered paramount, not because politicians of the past had a
particularly elevated view of parents or respect for their autonomy,
but because childrearing was understood as the one area of life where
natural necessity forces adults to protect children. So while
established relations of authority have historically been contested in
the name of democracy, freedom or science, and these have had largely
progressive consequences, pre-political forms of authority were
generally perceived as areas in which reformers meddled at their
peril. But as Furedi explains, over the past 50 years or so this
assumption has come unstuck: what has increasingly been contested is
not one or another particular form of authority, but ‘the authority of
authority itself’.
This is sharply revealed by the extent to which the authority of
adults – parents and teachers – over children in everyday life is
blithely challenged by parenting experts peddling tips on toddler-
taming, or educational consultants training teachers in the use of
‘motivational techniques’ that rely upon flattery rather than
authority to encourage the child to pay attention. Today, says Furedi,
‘society has become as uncomfortable with the authority of parents and
teachers as it was with the absolute monarch of the eighteenth
century’. But unlike rebellion against inherited privilege, there is
no positive or democratising outcome to our present-day discomfort
with the authority of adults: its consequence will be further
confusion, where ‘the lines between generations become very arbitrary,
and the process of socialising generations is incomplete’.
Furedi is currently focusing his work around the historical evolution
of authority relations, as part of an attempt to understand the way
that society responds to problems when it lacks clarity and meaning
about its own purpose. With Wasted, Furedi considers that he has
finished the first phase in this programme of work – and in this
respect the book could be read as one that is not really about
education at all. But the coherence of the book’s focus on the
intergenerational dynamic of education provides the basis for
demystifying some of the specific debates and initiatives about
education that worry and perplex many parents and teachers.
For example, once the importance of society renewing itself through
the education of its young is appreciated, some of the problems with
the contemporary mantra of ‘lifelong learning’ become easier to
understand. While it is true, and right, that people learn things
informally in the course of their lives and that intellectual
development does not stop at the age of 18, the politicised promotion
of ‘lifelong learning’ as an educational endeavour that exists on a
par with schooling implicitly devalues both the role of adult teachers
and the importance of formal education. If learning is seen to be
something that people just do at any point in their lives, what is so
special about the job that teachers do – and why should we insist that
children leave school with qualifications at all? As with the vogue to
redefine headteachers as ‘lead learners’, and to talk about the
importance of ‘teaching and learning’ in one breath, the educator is
robbed of his or her status and equated with the pupil who has
‘learning skills’. No wonder good, authoritative teachers are finding
themselves insulted and turned off by their erstwhile profession.
“Therapeutic education takes emotions out of their historical context
and promotes dogmatic rules about acceptable feelings”
The therapeutic turn that education has taken in recent years, where
managing children’s feelings and behaviour has come to be seen as
being of paramount importance, has caused some consternation – but
little direct objection. Partly, this is because it is difficult to
oppose such initiatives as ‘happiness education’ without becoming
caricatured in a ridiculous counter-position: that it is fine for
children to be unhappy, for example, or that teachers should stick to
dry facts about maths and leave the emotional side of life for the
home. But as Furedi explains, the distinction is not between taking
children’s emotions seriously or not: it is between a proper
appreciation of academic education and a de-intellectualised form of
therapeutic education.
‘A good school will make every effort to attend to the moral,
spiritual and emotional needs of a child, and good teachers recognise
that the cultivation of the intellect is linked inextricably to the
education of a child’s disposition and behaviour’, he says. The way in
which schools have traditionally ‘educated the emotions’ is through
the arts, introducing children to a world in which the human condition
is explored and certain norms of feelings and behaviour promoted. By
contrast, the anti-academic approach taken by therapeutic education
takes emotions out of their human, historical context and promotes
narrow, dogmatic rules about acceptable and unacceptable feelings and
behaviour.
When education is understood as a process by which the values and
intellectual legacy of society are transmitted to its young, the
significance of the subject-based curriculum becomes more profound. If
the teaching of literature is superseded by literacy skills, or the
teaching of science becomes a vehicle for ethical debates rather than
practical experiments or the acquisition of the scientific method,
children are not merely being taught the same thing by other means.
The fragmentation and politicisation of the curriculum represents a
defensiveness about the cultural achievements of the past, and a
reluctance to transmit even the awareness of society’s intellectual
heritage to its children.
Every time politicians fiddle with the school curriculum, or insist on
schools following the latest ‘new idea’, they demonstrate their
willingness to dump centuries of knowledge, creativity and thought for
the sake of political expediency. What is ‘wasted’ as a consequence of
the philistine policy churn of educational reform is not just the
potential of young children to appreciate the gains of the past in
order to transcend them, but human history itself.
Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, published by
Societas in 2009) (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) She edits the
website Parents With Attitude and is speaking in the session Standing
up to Supernanny: why we need a Parents’ Liberation Movement at the
Battle of Ideas festival, 1 November 2009.
Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, by Frank Furedi, is published
by Continuum on 29 October 2009. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) To
see the media discussion provoked by the book, go to Frank Furedi’s
website here.
chhotemianinshallah
Farewell, Norman Levitt
With the passing of Norman Levitt, a rigorous defender of scientific
truth against the relativism and cowardice of the ‘academic left’, we
have lost a modern Enlightenment hero.
by Stuart Derbyshire
Norman Levitt died from complications related to heart failure this
past weekend (24 October). He was professor of mathematics at Rutgers
University and a friend of spiked. He wrote some excellent articles
and essays for spiked and some angry letters, too – which is just the
kind of friend spiked welcomes.
His 1994 book, Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels
with Science, co-authored with Paul Gross, caused a minor sensation
(1). Levitt and Gross noted the disconcerting rise of what they called
the ‘academic left’ and particularly the hatred that the academic left
directed against science. They saw the hatred of the academic left as
not just stemming from a distrust of how science has been abused – to
justify the Holocaust, build nuclear weapons and so forth – but also
from hostility towards the very structure of how science is done and
communicated. Thus the academic left openly attack the content of
science and question the very foundation of scientific belief.
Under the banner of feminism and anti-racism the academic left attack
science for being poisoned by sexism, racism and a vicious cultural
imperialism. The very pursuit of scientific knowledge is a form of
aggression against minorities and other cultures, they believe.
Handily, having adopted this highly dubious and negative stance
against science, the academic left is liberated from the grubby and
difficult task of actual scientific study. Scientific knowledge must
be wrong and can thus be discarded without any further study. Any
attack on the academic left for their determined self-imposed
ignorance is brushed off by their presumed moral authority that
guarantees the validity of their critique. As Levitt and Gross wrote:
‘Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual
crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled
themselves with a simple problem in static; essays that make knowing
reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognise, much
less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about
the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who
have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they
take lowers blood pressure.’ (Higher Superstition)
The hostility and ignorance of the academic left were an enormous
irritation to Levitt because he viewed science as the crowning glory
of intellectual endeavour and the only means by which we can properly
interrogate and understand the world around us. Abandoning science,
and maybe giving it a good hiding to boot, doesn’t just desecrate a
technical exercise in understanding; it also undermines the
possibility of human freedom. Science increases the scope for human
action because it makes new things possible. Science gives us new
options to solve problems. Of course, we may use science to create
rather than solve problems, since how we use science is political not
scientific – but to condemn the entire exercise is to condemn
humanity. Without science we are condemned to continued ignorance and
mysticism.
Most famously, the publication of Higher Superstition triggered Alan
Sokal to submit his joke paper, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards
a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, to the journal
Social Text. The paper was published despite, or maybe because of, its
call to end ‘the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony
over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarised briefly
as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are
independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a
whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws;
and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and
tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective”
procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-
called) scientific method.’ (2)
The publication of Sokal’s paper – which came to be known as ‘the
Sokal hoax’ – caused an international storm. More importantly, it
provided a punctuation mark for Levitt’s argument regarding the sheer
audacity of the academic left and their tendency to go along with any
pitiful drivel so long as science was admonished. It also earned
Levitt some prestigious enemies amongst the social constructionists,
including Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of
Warwick in England, who just happened to have an article in the same
edition of Social Text as Sokal… Fuller has not forgiven Levitt even
in death (3). Levitt, I’m sure, would not care less.
Levitt was brilliant at uncovering attacks on science made under the
guise of ‘democratisation’. He rightly pointed to the absurdity of
advocating teaching intelligent design or creationism alongside
evolution in American schools. Many on the academic left, and Steve
Fuller, support this campaign on ‘democratic’ grounds. Levitt
correctly observed that teaching creation as science whitewashes the
rigours of science and threatens to reduce science to a popularity
contest about belief.
His distaste for the use and abuse of populism by the academic left
possibly explains why Levitt was keen on the idea of insulating
science from the influence of public opinion. That, I believe, was an
error. Only by engaging schools, and the public, on the need for
teaching evolution as a science can the argument against creationism
in schools be won. If Levitt were alive today he would doubtless now
be typing an angry letter to spiked explaining his public engagements
promoting the teaching of evolution in schools. The world has lost a
fierce defender of science and a modern Enlightenment hero.
Stuart Derbyshire is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University
of Birmingham. He will be speaking in the debate Nudge Nudge, Nag Nag:
the New Politics of Behaviour at the Battle of Ideas festival on
Sunday 1 November at the Royal College of Art in London.
(1) Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with
Science, Paul Gross & Norman Levitt, John Hopkins University Press,
1994
(2) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Alan D Sokal, Social Text, Spring/
Summer 1996
(3) Norman Levitt RIP, Steve Fuller, 28 October 2009
chhotemianinshallah
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Brendan O’Neill
Why they love to hate Mother Teresa
The radical-atheist assaults on the late sister of Calcutta are the
intellectual equivalent of mugging an old woman.
You know how some cowardly muggers target little old ladies because
they’re usually slow, frail and unlikely to fight back? Well, the
exact same dynamic, though in intellectual rather than bag-grabbing
terms, can be seen in the radical-atheist assaults on Mother Teresa.
Attacking the wrinkled, hunched-over sister of Calcutta, accusing her
of being a goggle-eyed fanatic and a mad and disgusting celebrator of
poverty, is the atheistic equivalent of mugging an old woman. And a
dead one, to boot. These anti-Teresa tirades reveal far more about the
bluster of contemporary atheism than they do anything surprising about
the antics of old Catholic women.
Hating Mother Teresa has become a de rigueur dinner-party prejudice.
As the Vatican speeds up its canonisation of Teresa, having already
beatified her in 2003, feminists, atheists and liberal commentators
are engaging in games of Teresa-denouncing one-upmanship, to see who
can slate her in the shrillest, most outrageous terms. She was a
‘charlatan’ and a ‘master of her own mythology’, said Ian O’Doherty in
the Irish Independent last week. No, she was a ‘wicked
fundamentalist’, said a feminist contributor to a BBC TV debate last
weekend. In fact she was a ‘disgusting fraud and a hypocrite’, says a
columnist for the UK Independent, and ‘if there is a hell, Mother
Teresa is already there’.
Much of this Teresa-baiting springs from the work of arch atheist
Christopher Hitchens. In his 1995 book The Missionary Position,
Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a ‘religious fundamentalist, a
political operative, a primitive sermoniser and an accomplice of
worldly secular powers’. He exposed her backward beliefs on poverty –
it is ‘beautiful’, she said, and the poor should embrace it – and her
shoulder-rubbing with dictators and other dodgy individuals. She
should never have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Hitchens
said, or granted audiences with US presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill
Clinton, because she is little more than an ‘untouchable in the mental
universe of the mediocre and the credulous’.
Of course, much of the criticism is justified. I am an atheist who has
no truck with Mother Teresa and her kind. Having been schooled by nuns
who thought Mother Teresa was the best thing since sliced bread (and
thus that her patronising pieties were a better thing for poor people
to live on than actual sliced bread), I have suffered my fair share of
BS about this woman’s saintly wonderfulness. But why is atheistic
criticism aimed so squarely at Mother Teresa these days, rather than,
say, at the Vatican itself, or at other religious leaders like the
Dalai Lama or Bishop Desmond Tutu?
Mother Teresa is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only
religious leader to have sipped tea with dictators or to have been
more interested in promoting her self-image than in seriously helping
poor people. The Dalai Lama has done adverts for Apple, for Buddha’s
sake, and once guest-edited French Vogue, which I don’t think is a
widely read publication in the poorer parts of his homeland of Tibet.
Teresa is also not the only religious figure to have bigged-up poverty
as beautiful and life-affirming. Ever since Jesus wandered around
Palestine in rags and described riches as ‘thorns’ which ‘choke up the
good seed’, Christians have promoted poverty as something godly.
Mother Teresa’s celebration of poverty in Calcutta sprang not only
from her own religious fanaticism, but also from the dire social and
economic conditions in that city: like so many Christians before her,
she was effectively adding a religious gloss to a social reality,
which is not a nice thing to do but it doesn’t mean she was somehow to
blame for poverty.
No, the reason Teresa has been elevated by radical atheists above
everyone else in the League Of Evil Religious Crackpots is because
she’s an easy target. Today’s New Atheists, more interested in getting
their religion-hating rocks off than in actually Enlightening anyone,
love crusading against Teresa because she indulged in a so-
unsophisticated and foreign form of Christianity. Religion in the
Third World, with its old-fashioned figureheads and its sometimes
desperate adherents, makes for a far easier, and far more fun, target
than the subtle religious practices of modern Western society. For
today’s campaigning atheists, the sight of a little old woman in an
off-white habit providing hammocks for poor, wide-eyed Indians is too
bizarre and backward to let pass by. And lacking the intellectual
faculties and old-style atheistic humanity to explain such practices,
they merely mock them, denounce them, laugh at them over their £3
lattes.
Indeed, much of the Teresa-baiting is aimed not at the woman herself,
but at her thick and gullible followers. Hitchens described his book
about Mother Teresa as an argument ‘not with a deceiver but with the
deceived’, her ‘credulous and uncritical’ followers. ‘In the gradual
manufacture of an illusion, the conjuror is only the instrument of the
audience’, he said. A favourable review of Hitchens’ book, written
while Mother Teresa was still alive in 1996, said ‘one can only be
appalled by the lack of intellectual sophistication of her admirers
who hold her in such high esteem and who seize upon her every asinine
comment as a sign of her astuteness and philosophical depth’. This is
not a serious or intellectual dismantling of the meaning, impact and
structures of religion; it is fundamentally fun-poking at dumb
Indians.
The ongoing war on Mother Teresa reveals what lies at the heart of the
New Atheism. A million miles from the humanistic atheism of Marx,
Darwin and others, today’s screechy anti-God squad is more interested
in hectoring the religious – those stupid believers in anything they
are told – than it is in creating an Enlightened culture that might
give people something else, something more profound, to think about
and contribute to. Darwin, the hero of so many of today’s New
Atheists, refused to partake in cheap Christianity-bashing, believing
that ‘direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly
any effect on the public – and freedom of thought is best promoted by
the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance
of science’. Today, lacking any serious attachment to freedom of
thought or any belief in their ability to illuminate men’s minds,
gradually or otherwise, the New Atheists not only spend their whole
time directly attacking Christianity, but take aim at its crudest
forms.
The lack of Enlightened thinking in the mugging of Mother Teresa can
be seen in the way campaigning atheists seek to replace Teresa’s
backward beliefs with their own. So one critic attacks Teresa’s
opposition to contraception and abortion on the basis that it inflamed
one of the alleged great evils of our age: overpopulation.
‘Overpopulation is one of the factors that can lead to war, [and
therefore] Mother Teresa’s opposition to any effective limitation on
the growth of population [implicated] her in war rather than peace.’
This is a battle of misanthropies. Where Teresa held to the
misanthropic belief that women should be forced to take every
conception to term, the Teresa-bashers believe that unchecked
population growth – whisper it: too many black and brown babies –
gives rise to madness and mayhem. One side seeks to limit poor
people’s choices, the other demonises poor people’s breeding habits as
the harbinger of doom.
In their cheap assaults on Teresa and fundamentalist religion,
campaigning atheists completely overlook, yet again, some of the more
powerful backward trends in our society. Take the celebration of
poverty. At a time when wealthy Westerners buy Fairtrade chocolate and
fruit because they love the thought of eating earthy stuff produced by
back-broken Africans, at a time when buzzphrases like ‘sustainable
development’ are used to justify hard labour over economic progress in
the Third World, and at a time when we are frequently told by greens
that our greedy habits of consumption are bringing about the fiery and
flood-ridden end of the world, it seems pretty clear that the Mother
Teresa-style celebration of poverty has not a patch on the
contemporary secular elevation of the eco-life. Today’s mainstream,
insidious and grotesque justifications for non-progress in the poverty-
stricken Third World make Mother Teresa’s sermons look like the silly
ramblings of a daft old nun.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement
– Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by
Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) This article was
first published in forth magazine in Dublin.
Previously on spiked
Stuart Derbyshire reviewed Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?.
Nathalie Rothschild refused to jump on the atheist bus. Catholic
atheist’ Michael Fitzpatrick was repelled by Richard Dawkins’ book,
The God Delusion, and critiqued the secular intellectuals who are
baiting the devout. Dolan Cummings wanted to be counted out of
atheism’s creed. Neil Davenport argued that it’s not the devout who
are the real enemies of reason. Or read more at spiked issue Religion.
chhotemianinshallah
Stuart Derbyshire
Mother Teresa and the ‘me, me, me’ culture
The new book Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? shows that the nun was
as ruthless as any other celeb in protecting her public image.
Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?, Gezim Alpion, Select Books,
British edition 2007.
Mother Teresa is arguably the most famous religious icon of the late
twentieth century. Her legacy and work continue to generate huge
levels of debate and interest. Gezim Alpion’s book Mother Teresa:
Saint or Celebrity?, which seeks to address the nature of her fame,
celebrity and devotion to faith, is unique in locating the appeal of
Mother Teresa within today’s broader celebrity culture. He also
provides previously unknown and quite striking information about her
personal life.
For Alpion, celebrity culture is a modern form of religion and Mother
Teresa was the ultimate religious celebrity of the modern era. Unlike
the many saints recognised by the Catholic Church, Mother Teresa’s
apparent sanctity took root and flourished during her lifetime. Her
beatification in 2003, just six years after her death, propelled her
further towards actual sainthood. Alpion points out that the
beatification of such a contemporary figure was as much a consequence
of her growing stardom as it was of her devoted religious practice.
The Indian media took an interest in Mother Teresa from the early
1950s, not long after she had set up her mission within the slums of
Calcutta. Here was a white, Western, Roman Catholic nun showing
compassion and providing support for those typically impoverished and
abandoned by the old class-conscious and caste-ridden Indian society.
Mother Teresa was used to highlight the new, tolerant and welcoming
India that was imagined to be born from independence and the
separation from Pakistan in 1947.
Mother Teresa was noticed by the American Catholic media apparatus
towards the end of the 1950s, and her usefulness to political
campaigns was also gradually exported around the world. By the 1980s
she was a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan’s attempts to curb
abortion, and she also urged the relatives of those who lost their
lives in the Bhopal disaster of 1984 to forgive Union Carbide, which
was widely held to be responsible for the disaster.
It was Mother Teresa’s encounter with British journalist Malcolm
Muggeridge in the late 1960s which brought her to the attention of a
global mass audience. Muggeridge first interviewed her by telephone in
1968 and subsequently shot a documentary of her life in Calcutta in
1969. His book, Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of
Calcutta, was published in 1971. Muggeridge was originally sceptical
towards Mother Teresa, yet when he returned from filming he was
zealous in his promotion of her, amply demonstrated by his efforts to
spread the news of the ‘miracle’ that occurred while making the
documentary. Muggeridge says in his book that filming inside the Home
for the Dying Destitute, which Mother Teresa had founded in Kalighat
in 1952, was problematic because of poor light. The film crew shot
some footage but expected it to be useless. When the footage was
processed in London, however, they were pleasantly surprised that the
film was impressively well lit. While the cameraman put it down to the
performance of the new Kodak film he had used that day, Muggeridge
offered an entirely different explanation: ‘It’s divine light! It’s
Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy.’
Muggeridge did his best to spread news of this ‘miracle’, much to the
tireless amusement of his and Mother Teresa’s critics. But Muggeridge
was perhaps not simply ‘under the spell’ of Mother Teresa, as it is
usually explained. He was, at least partly, playing the role he had
been handed by Mother Teresa herself. His early tele-conversation with
Mother Teresa had provoked global interest and had given new impetus
to his journalistic and writing career. He had every reason to be
grateful to Mother Teresa and to maintain her saintly image.
Like other celebrities, Mother Teresa was remarkably keen to keep her
private life private, rarely ever saying anything about her childhood
and her immediate family. In his book, Muggeridge honours her wish to
say nothing of her early years or to provide any true biographical
details. This is a peculiar agreement from an investigative
journalist. He justified the lack of biographical detail by suggesting
Mother Teresa had no biography; she merely lived within and for
others.
Muggeridge was one of many would-be biographers who were denied access
to Mother Teresa’s early years. Her efforts at safeguarding her past
and her private details from investigation were ruthless. She
studiously avoided discussing any such details with her many aspiring
biographers, and maintained editorial control over almost all the
written material. Those who wrote about her life endorsed this
censorship, either because they didn’t want to jeopardise the obvious
career benefits of writing about Mother Teresa or because they had a
painfully sycophantic attachment to their subject.
It wasn’t just her early years that were protected; Mother Teresa
successfully guarded almost all controversial aspects of her life from
public discussion. Between 1946 and 1948, for example, she entered
into a protracted argument with her convent over her proposal to leave
the convent and work on her own in Calcutta. During this time she kept
a diary and a long correspondence with Father Van Exem. When she later
achieved her aims she destroyed her diary and pursued Van Exam for
several years in an effort to have him return her letters. Eventually
he conceded, and Mother Teresa destroyed the letters, too.
It is not entirely clear why she did this. One possibility is that she
wanted to protect the myth that she had set up the order of the
Missionaries of Charity entirely alone, and the diary and letters
would have revealed critical help from many priests and from her
convent. Another possibility is that she wanted to protect the image
of the church and her relationship with it. Whatever the reason, her
actions expose a remarkable single-minded focus to protect her growing
international reputation and image.
Alpion laments that a proper biography of Mother Teresa is still to be
written: ‘Thus far…in spite of some serious attempts to offer an
informed and impartial picture of this famous woman, attempts which
have intensified especially after her death in 1997, it would be
impossible to claim that any book has succeeded in giving us the
“complete” and the “real” Mother Teresa. Perhaps, such a book will
never be written. Perhaps, such a book cannot be written. And there
are people who obviously believe that such a book should not be
written.’
Since Mother Teresa often had the final say on what should and should
not go into the numerous books devoted to her, and since she routinely
avoided any discussion of her early life and motivations, the many
‘biographies’ of her life routinely fail to provide any true insights
into what made her tick. There is nothing that reveals her character,
her life. Also, past biographies have been shamefully lax with regard
to those factual details of her early life that are publicly
available. Several biographies, for example, misquote her birthday and
according to various different biographers Mother Teresa was born in
Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Yugoslavia. In part, these
misidentifications of her birthplace reflect various attempts by
several Balkan states to appropriate Mother Teresa into their history
and folklore. There is still considerable competition over the legacy
of Mother Teresa within the Balkans.
But the lax attitude towards biographical facts also reflects a
sycophantic approach to Mother Teresa, an indulgence of the myth that
she was born into the hands of religion by a purely, other-worldly
religious calling. Alpion argues that allowing this view to propagate
is the biggest failing of past biographies, and perhaps the biggest
victory of Mother Teresa in her ceaseless attempts at controlling and
protecting her celebrity image.
Alpion’s important contribution to the literature on Mother Teresa is
to reveal that she was almost certainly motivated to enter the mission
by the death of her father, Nikolle Bojaxhiu. He died at the age of 45
in mysterious circumstances. A known and vocal supporter of Albanian
independence, he was almost certainly poisoned by Serbian opponents.
Mother Teresa, then known by her Christian name of Agnes, was nine
years old and she struggled to cope with the loss. Rather than any
religious teaching as a child or a calling as an adult, it was this
loss that turned Agnes Bojaxhiu into Mother Teresa. Unable to
reconcile the loss of her father, Agnes turned to Jesus as a father
figure who would never abandon her. This childish retreat into
religious certainty stayed with her throughout her life, yet, partly
to protect the image of Mother Teresa and partly to protect Agnes from
the pain, the details surrounding her early life were walled off from
public scrutiny.
This kind of revelation has the power to change the popular image of
Mother Teresa, and Alpion intends his investigation to be accessible
by a broad audience. Unfortunately, the first part of the book has a
finger-waving quality to it as Alpion laments the ‘tabloid journalism’
of other Teresa scholars and the lack of understanding of the Balkans.
It’s all a bit grinding, especially as Alpion provides standard-issue
prejudice against the Serbs as the creators of every modern problem in
the Balkans.
Nevertheless, readers who can get past the somewhat pompous and turgid
start will find some striking information with quite uncomfortable
implications for supporters of Mother Teresa. Her devotion to Jesus
was a personal attempt to deal with grief, and her dedication to the
poor of Calcutta part of her effort towards self-salvation. Similar to
many celebrity figures, it was all about me, me, me. This puts her
work into a whole new and rather less flattering light.
Stuart Derbyshire is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University
of Birmingham, England.
chhotemianinshallah
Nathalie Rothschild
All aboard the atheist bus? No thanks
The plastering of God-doubting adverts on buses and trains captures
the preachy attitude of the New Atheists.
Waiting for the bus in the freezing cold on your way to work, would
the thought that there probably is no God bring a smile to your face?
That’s what British comedy writer and creator of the ‘atheist bus
campaign’, Ariane Sherine, hopes. She and a bunch of celebrity God-
deniers hope that their advertising drive, launched yesterday on buses
across Britain and on the London Underground, will encourage people to
‘come out’ as atheists. Apparently being non-religious today carries
with it a social stigma akin to homosexuality before the 1960s. Their
ads declare: ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy
your life.’
When Sherine saw a bus ad last summer with the Bible quote ‘When the
son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’, she was not
amused. When she followed the web link accompanying the quote from
Luke, she was positively alarmed. The website, jesussaid.org, warns
that those who reject the anointed one’s musings will face the wrath
of God and all the unpleasantness that entails, including torment in
hell.
Rather than succumbing to a sudden urge to throw herself under the
bus, Sherine sought guidance from that secular arbiter of right and
wrong, the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA
informed the comedienne that the Advertising Standards Code – which
with its 10 sections of do’s and don’ts reads like a modern-day
version of the ten commandments – does not prohibit advertising
religious messages. Then, Sherine had a revelation. The brewer
Carlsberg famously claims in its ads that its lager is ‘probably the
best beer in the world’, so she, a devout atheist, should surely be
allowed to claim that ‘there’s probably no God’. Under the influence
of Carlsberg, Sherine decided to pen an article for the Guardian,
urging fellow godless travellers to donate a fiver towards a counter-
ad campaign on London’s red ‘bendy buses’.
Atheism advert displayed on the side of a bus in Sheffield.There was a
flurry of excitement around ‘the atheist bus campaign’, with nearly
1,000 individuals pledging money to counter what they saw as a pro-
religion bias in the advertising world. The British Humanist
Association (BHA) agreed to administer donations, and the
distinguished British scientist and bestselling author of The God
Delusion, Professor Richard Dawkins, agreed to match all contributions
up to £5,500. In the end, the fundraising drive raised more than
£140,000.
Observant London commuters will notice a web address at the bottom of
the ads, to atheistcampaign.org – a rather slick and colourful
website, adorned with pretty flowers and links to other God-unfriendly
sites.
There will also be 1,000 advertisements on the London Underground from
next Monday and on a pair of LCD screens on Oxford Street. The posters
will have quotes from famous figures, including Albert Einstein,
Douglas Adams, Katharine Hepburn and Emily Dickinson. The organisers
say these have been selected because they endorse atheism or at least
express scepticism about the existence of God.
The atheist gospel has spread across the world, inspiring similar
campaigns in Barcelona, Italy and Australia, though it fell through in
Oz when the country’s biggest outdoor advertising company rejected
posters with slogans such as ‘Atheism – sleep in on Sunday mornings’.
Across the Atlantic, fellow atheist travellers have jumped onboard the
atheist bus campaign, too, with the American Humanist Association
(AHA) launching its own ads last month. Before the holiday season, the
rather uncatchy slogan ‘Why believe in god? Just be good for goodness’
sake’ could be seen on buses across Washington, DC. The AHA, too, has
a website (whybelieveingod.org) which apparently crashed twice – not
because of divine intervention, but because of the huge media flurry
around the campaign leading to a sudden, high volume of visitors to
the site.
The question is, why do humanists feel the need to preach the
(probable) non-existence of the Lord to the commuting masses of
London, Washington and beyond? After all, ours has been hailed as a
godless age and the influence of religion is at a low ebb. The past
couple of years have seen a steady stream of anti-religious books,
many of which have topped bestseller lists on both sides of the
Atlantic, by a range of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists. The
most prominent of them – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris
and Christopher Hitchens – are now referred to collectively as ‘The
New Atheists’. They have launched a zealous, no-holds-barred attack,
not so much on God, as on the devout.
Dawkins, for example, demonstrates convincingly in The God Delusion
that Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather than the Book of Genesis,
provides the plausible answers to the emergence of human life on
Earth. But as his books, as well as his television documentaries The
Root of All Evil? and The Enemies of Reason, have shown, in Dawkins’
mind, preachers and charlatans would not form such a threat to
rational thinking if it weren’t for the gullible masses that
apparently so easily fall for their quackery.
It is true that the forces of unreason are still very much in play
today – as the widespread popularity of New Ageism, continuous
environmental doomsday mongering and the salience of pseudo-scientific
scare stories demonstrate. Yet the New Atheists on the one hand seem
unable to explain just why religion continues to play an important
role for many in the twenty-first century. (Dawkins for instance takes
an ahistorical approach in explaining the continuing existence of
religion through evolutionary psychology.) And on the other hand, they
do not recognise that the celebrities, commentators, politicians and
others who warn daily of climate chaos being visited upon Mother Earth
are simply preaching a secular version of Kingdom Come – and,
paradoxically, many of them would not hesitate to dismiss religious
people as backward Bible-bashers. Hitchens, in his book God is Not
Great, talks about ‘heat death’ as a result of global warming, while
denouncing religious ‘visions of apocalypse’.
It seems that the New Atheists, their fans at the British and American
Humanist Associations, and others who fear the popularity of god, fall
back on religion-bashing rather than trying to convince others that
there is merit in their own secular values. Really what irks them
about the religious is that they have a grand vision and are committed
to live by it – something that is sorely lacking in society at large.
Sherine, writing in the Guardian, says that ‘there’s no doubt that
advertising can be effective, and religious advertising works
particularly well on those who are vulnerable, frightening them into
believing’. This assertion really brings out what is behind the
atheist bus message: the secularists believe they must take it upon
themselves to shine a guiding light and steer the easily-duped masses
away from the darkness of unreason. The atheist campaigners, rather
than trying to engage with the public, are simply preaching at us.
Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.
Previously on spiked ‘Catholic atheist’ Michael Fitzpatrick was
repelled by Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, and critiqued the
secular intellectuals who are baiting the devout. Dolan Cummings
wanted to be counted out of atheism’s creed. Neil Davenport argued
that it’s not the devout who are the real enemies of reason. Or read
more at spiked issue Religion.
spiked, Signet House, 49-51 Farringdon Road, London, EC1M 3JP Tel: +44
chhotemianinshallah
Michael Fitzpatrick
The Dawkins delusion
'Catholic atheist' Michael Fitzpatrick finds himself repelled by
Richard Dawkins' crass and prejudiced polemic against religion.
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Bantam, 2006.
There is an old Irish joke, retold here by Richard Dawkins, about
somebody in Northern Ireland who responded to a survey question about
religious affiliation by declaring himself an atheist. ‘Would that be
a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?’ came the insistent reply.
Faced with a similar inquiry, I would be obliged to declare myself a
Catholic atheist. By this I mean that I am an atheist by conviction,
but a Catholic by upbringing and tribal affiliation.
I know that some people raised as Catholics blame the Church of Rome
for their difficulties in later life, nourishing a particularly
degenerate literary genre. As a child taught by nuns and brothers, I
endured a fair amount of pious claptrap and casual corporal punishment
and some inappropriate sexual interest. But any detriment suffered was
far outweighed by a sound education and by exposure to a rich cultural
heritage – of art and music, scripture and ritual. For this I retain
gratitude, affection and respect.
Though as an atheist I feel I should welcome Dawkins’ diatribe against
religion, as a Catholic atheist, I find myself repelled by his crass
polemic – and I am not alone (1). In his comments on Catholicism,
Dawkins reveals a combination of old-fashioned Protestant anti-Popery
with the fashionable contempt of the liberal intelligentsia for any
kind of religious faith. Thus he refers to the ‘semi-permanent state
of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human
frailty and less than normal intelligence’ (p167). Discussing the
consequences of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, he suggests that
‘horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less
than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the
child up Catholic in the first place’ (p317). These are statements of
such unmitigated prejudice – and indeed absurdity – that it is
shocking to find them in a serious book by a reputable author.
Dawkins’ patrician scorn for all forms of religion leads him to miss
the essential point. Religious faith cannot be dismissed as a
manifestation (or as a cause) of psychopathology or stupidity.
Religion, in Marx’s words, is ‘the fantastic realisation of the human
essence because the human essence has no true reality’ (2). It is ‘the
self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not found
himself or has already lost himself again’. In a world in which human
beings are estranged from themselves and from others and lack control
over their own destiny, they seek refuge and consolation in the
worship of divine forces. Religion provides a distraction, an alibi,
an evasion, an abdication of responsibility. The persistence of
religion poses a range of specific historical and political questions
which Dawkins’ resolutely ahistorical approach does not even begin to
answer.
Where he sticks close to the terrain of science with which he is
familiar, Dawkins is at his most convincing. He shows that God is a
much more improbable hypothesis for the origin of the universe than a
scientific, materialist theory. He confirms that Darwin’s theory of
evolution provides a more plausible account of the emergence of human
life on Earth than the Book of Genesis. Yet his attempt to deploy
evolutionary psychology to explain the continuing salience of
religious faith in the twenty-first century is as unconvincing to me
as I found Brother Alpheus’ exposition of Aquinas’ five proofs of the
existence of God when I was 13. When Dawkins reduces diverse political
conflicts – in Northern Ireland, in Israel, in the former Yugoslavia –
to religious causes, he reveals the vacuity of his ahistorical
approach (while confirming popular prejudices). When he seeks to
explain the terrorist outrages of 9/11 and 7/7 in terms of ‘Islamic
fundamentalism’ he obscures the more important determinants of these
events in the ideology of multiculturalism (part of the liberal
consensus regarded by Dawkins as the pinnacle of evolutionary
progress).
The most curious feature of Dawkins’ crusade against religion is that
it is mounted at a time when the social influence of religion is at a
low ebb. In the USA, Dawkins follows liberals in grossly exaggerating
the influence of the religious right as a way of avoiding any
reflection on the lack of popular appeal of their own agenda. In the
UK, Dawkins concentrates his fire on one school in Gateshead where
creationism has crept on to the curriculum (allowing him to sneer at
Peter Vardy, the vulgar ‘car salesman’ millionaire who has bankrolled
the school). Yet, while he happily tilts at windmills, Dawkins ignores
much more influential currents of irrationality – such as the cult of
environmentalism – which has a far greater influence on the national
curriculum than notions of ‘intelligent design’.
While Dawkins can readily identify common features between South
Pacific cargo cults and the Christian churches, he seems oblivious to
the religious themes of the environmental movement. Just like
evangelical Christians, environmentalists preach a ‘repent, the end is
nigh’ message. The movement has its own John the Baptist – George
Monbiot – who has come out of the desert (well, Oxfordshire) to warn
us of the imminent danger of hellfire (in the form of global warming)
if we do not repent and embrace his doctrines of austerity and
restraint (3). Beware – the rough beast of the apocalypse is slouching
towards Bethlehem to be born!
Far from challenging the pervasive influence of this bleak outlook,
Dawkins goes so far as to endorse the abjectly anti-humanist theories
of Peter Singer, one of the movement’s most fundamentalist apostles
(4). Though this movement’s promotion of the anti-scientific
‘precautionary principle’ constitutes a greater threat to scientific
experimentation than the pathetic attempt of a few evangelicals to
return the teaching of biology to the Old Testament, it is entirely
ignored by Oxford’s professor ‘for the public understanding of
science’. While university theology departments are in decline,
courses in various schools of ‘alternative health’ (which share only a
foundation in pre-scientific thought) have grown apace in recent years
– but Dawkins is too busy berating the bishops to notice.
In the turbulent years before the First World War, Jewish anarchists
in London’s East End provoked riots by picketing the synagogue in
Brick Lane on holy days, baiting the faithful while they fasted, by
publicly eating ham sandwiches (5). In a similarly self-indulgent
fashion, Dawkins seems to revel in causing offence to the devout. But
this sort of posturing against religion does nothing to challenge the
roots of religious faith. The Brick Lane synagogue was built as a
Christian church and is now a mosque: while much else has changed
around it, it is clear that the need for religious worship endures.
‘Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long
as he does not revolve around himself.’ (6)
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is published by Bantam Books (buy
this book from Amazon(UK)).
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is a GP and author of MMR and Autism: What
Parents Need to Know (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
(1) Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’, London Review of
Books, 19 October 2006
(2) Karl Marx, Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, 1844
(3) George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, Allen Lane,
2006; see James Heartfield’s review on spiked: A secular version of
kingdom come
(4) See The new priesthood of the kitchen, by Michael Fitzpatrick
(5) William J Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, Five Leaves, 2004
(6) Karl Marx, Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, 1844
chhotemianinshallah
Baiting the devout
It is because secular intellectuals have lost their own belief in
progress and liberation that they are turning venomously on those who
retain a vision of the good society: the religious.
by Michael Fitzpatrick
When I first came across Christopher Hitchens’ diatribe against Mother
Teresa I enjoyed its knockabout exposure of this unctuous old fraud
and her preposterous celebrity networking (1). But I increasingly
found myself wondering why it was that such an able polemicist of the
old left had been reduced to taking on such a trivial and demeaning
target. The question ‘Why bother?’ returned with greater insistency
when I discovered the recent flurry of popular anti-religious books by
a range of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists (Sam Harris,
Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, who are now referred to collectively
as ‘The New Atheists’), to which Hitchens has now added his own
contribution: God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (2).
Readers of these books will learn little about religion; they are much
more revealing about their authors’ own insecurities. Lacking much
knowledge of religious faith, its contemporary critics focus on its
superficial aspects and extreme manifestations (notably, Christian and
Islamic fundamentalism). Once-influential radicals, now condemned to
the margins of society, tend to exaggerate the importance of religious
authorities, who in reality have little more legitimacy than the
politicians who patronise them, in the (often mistaken) belief that
they provide links to the masses. Having lost their own belief in
progress and liberation, secular intellectuals are irked by their
encounters with people who, on whatever basis, retain a vision of the
good society and a commitment to realising it. They clearly feel
rebuked by the undaunted practice of those who have not given up.
Indeed, in their own state of confusion and demoralisation, old
radicals give too much credit to religion, in this respect, and
furthermore, they often misinterpret as religious fervour popular
affiliations that are largely pragmatic and instrumental.
Moving from his childhood alienation from conventional Christianity to
his adult disillusionment with Marxism, Hitchens leaves little doubt
that this book is not so much about religion as about himself. His
current state of bewilderment is profound. On one page he confesses
that his ‘own secular faith has been shaken and discarded’, only to
tell us a couple of pages later that he has ‘not quite abandoned’
Marxism. He admits that ‘those of us who had sought a rational
alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably
dogmatic’. Hitchens here makes a conventional nod towards the
ascendancy of Stalinism (though this was a terminus that many of us,
including Hitchens himself, never accepted). However, this statement
could also serve as a characterisation of his personal apostasy -
culminating in his notoriously dogmatic endorsement of Western
military intervention in Iraq.
“Environmentalism is the most influential ‘cult of death’ in
contemporary society”
In trying to explain the failure of the quest for an alternative to
religion, Hitchens retreats into the sort of sociobiological notions
favoured by some of his fellow anti-religious propagandists: ‘What
else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close
cousins of chimpanzees?’ In his foray on to the terrain - and the
temporal scale - of the neo-Darwinians, Hitchens moves further from
his leftist traditions. Marxism was rooted in the present, and in its
concern for the proximate transformation of society, it sought social
and historical explanations and political solutions. By contrast,
theorists of evolution work in the disciplines of biology, geology and
cosmology: the scope of humanity is diminished by adopting a cosmic
timescale and emphasising the contingent character of the emergence of
human life and the prospect of its ultimate disappearance. ‘Probably
the most daunting task that we face, as partly rational animals with
adrenal glands that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too
small, is the contemplation of our own relative weight in the scheme
of things’, writes Hitchens.
Hitchens is so taken with this formulation that it appears twice in
his book, leading to the sombre reflection that ‘the awareness that
our death is coming and will be succeeded by the death of the species
and the heat death of the universe is scant comfort’.
Here we find what the youthful Hitchens would have called ‘a
contradiction’. On the one hand, he endorses the misanthropic notions
of environmentalism: the cosmic insignificance of humanity, the
constraints of biology and the prospect of planetary climatic doom. On
the other hand, he saves some of his harshest condemnations of
religions for the way they ‘look forward to the destruction of the
world’. He has nothing but ‘contempt and suspicion for those who
beguile themselves and terrify others with horrific visions of
apocalypse’. Yet he appears oblivious to the fact that by far the most
influential ‘cult of death’ in contemporary society is not to be found
in mainstream denominations or even in millenarian sects, but in the
all-pervasive environmentalist movement with its eager anticipation of
diverse global ecological catastrophes. Indeed, ‘heat death of the
universe’ is pure ‘hell-fire’ bombast.
“‘The criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth’, said
Marx”
In his introduction, Hitchens complains - rightly - that Marx’s famous
statement that religion is ‘the opium of the people’ has generally
been misquoted and taken out of context. Yet Hitchens, too, has missed
a key point about these historic paragraphs written by Marx in 1844
when he was still in his mid-twenties. Marx believed that once the
true nature of religion as spiritual compensation for social
alienation had been revealed, it had been exposed as a secondary
phenomenon dependent on socioeconomic circumstances and therefore
merited no further independent criticism: ‘The criticism of heaven
turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the
criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of
politics.’ (3) Hence, in his subsequent theoretical and political
writings over nearly 40 years, he rarely returned to the subject.
Given the recent anti-religious convergence of old Marxists and neo-
Darwinians, it is interesting to note that Darwin shared Marx’s
disdain for baiting the devout. In the early 1880s, Marx’s shady son-
in-law, the radical atheist Edward Aveling, sought Darwin’s
endorsement for a book on evolutionary theory he was editing (4). In
his fascinating account of this episode, the late Stephen J Gould
records the terms in which Darwin, who ‘understood Aveling’s
opportunism and cared little for his anti-religious militancy’,
explained his refusal:
‘It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments
against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the
public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual
illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion,
and I have confined myself to science.’
What a pity that the followers of Marx and Darwin have not followed
their wise example.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need
to Know (buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA) and The Tyranny
of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle (buy this book from
Amazon UK or Amazon USA).
God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens
was published by Atlantic. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK))
(1) The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice,
Christopher Hitchens, 1995
(2) The Dawkins delusion, by Michael Fitzpatrick; The New Atheists, by
Ronald Aronson, The Nation, 7 June 2007
(3) Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl
Marx
(4) ‘The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving Evolution’s
Oddest Coupling’ in I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural
History by Stephen Jay Gould, 2002, pp113-129
chhotemianinshallah
‘I was the greatest writer of the twentieth century’
Colin Wilson, one of the original Angry Young Men, talks to spiked
about the time Kingsley Amis tried to kill him, glimpsing Marilyn
Monroe's tits, and why he's so cocky.
by Brendan O’Neill
The Biblical line turned cheesy cliché – ‘How the mighty have fallen!’
– could have been written for Colin Wilson.
In 1956, when he was a 24-year-old, floppy-haired, black polo-neck
wearing self-proclaimed genius – the closest thing Britain had to its
very own beatnik – his first book, The Outsider, was published to
heady critical acclaim. A collection of essays that explored the
psyche of ‘the outsider’ through the works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre,
Hemingway, Nietzsche and others, the book propelled the precocious
Leicester-born working-class-boy-done-good to the kind of celebrity
status which is today reserved for footballers and footballers’ wives.
He was lauded in the broadsheets. When his father-in-law, wielding a
horsewhip, knocked on the door of Wilson’s London home and threatened
to give him a jolly good thrashing (the father-in-law thought Wilson
was a ‘queer’ and a pervert who had corrupted his nice middle-class
daughter) it made the tabloids. Imagine an up’n’coming writer knocking
Kerry Katona from her drink- and drug-based pedestal on the front page
of the Sun nowadays. Fat chance.
Wilson and John Osborne – whose play Look Back in Anger opened at the
Royal Court in London in the same month The Outsider was published –
were hailed as the founding members of a new literary movement: the
Angry Young Men. These young turks, with their novels and plays about
the grittier side of life in postwar Britain, lit a fire under the
arse of the fey and quirky Noël Coward-dominated literary scene.
Wilson became a celeb and literary London swooned around him. Except
Kingsley Amis, who tried to murder him. At a literary do, Amis spotted
Wilson standing on a balcony and said: ‘There’s that bugger Wilson.
I’m going to push him off.’ He was held back by a fellow partygoer.
Marilyn Monroe had a fleeting crush on him, or so Wilson hints. He
tells me he met her backstage at a London production of Arthur
Miller’s A View from the Bridge (‘her tight dress kept slipping down
over her tits’, he tells me) and he was surprised to find there was a
‘connection’. Monroe clasped Wilson’s hand when their party escaped
through the crowds thronging outside the theatre into their waiting
cars.
He even found himself taking a piss alongside Aldous Huxley. Both were
attending a lunch at the Athenaeum in London when they bumped into
each other (not literally, one hopes) at the urinals. ‘I never thought
I would take a pee at the side of Aldous Huxley’, said the yoof-ish
writer from up north. Huxley replied: ‘That’s what I thought when I
once found myself standing beside King George V at a urinal.’ Wilson
laughs as he tells me the story, still tickled pink by his WC run-in
with Huxley 50 years after the fact.
“Kingsley Amis had phobias of flying, folk dancing and hailing a cab”
Twenty-four and not bad-looking; his debut book, a bestseller on both
sides of the Atlantic, hailed as ‘truly astounding’ (Philip Toynbee)
and a harbinger of ‘the most exciting literary movement since the
Romantics’, and who were certainly more fun than the modernists: the
Angry Young Men; Marilyn fluttering her lashes and Huxley chatting
with him as they slashed…. It wasn’t at all bad for a young man from
Leicester who left school at 16, never darkened the door of a
university, and who worked in factories and shops and slept rough on a
golf course in Chetworth before finally hitting the big time with The
Outsider in what he remembers as a ‘long hot summer of 1956’.
And then it all went horribly wrong.
His second book Religion and the Rebel, a sequel to The Outsider
published in October 1957, was mauled. Toynbee, who had been so
favourable of The Outsider, called it a ‘rubbish bin’. Time magazine
said it revealed that Wilson was not a young genius after all, but a
‘scrambled egghead’ (1). Wilson fled London for Cornwall. As the
Fifties fizzled out the media got bored with the Angry Young Men.
Osborne, whose play Look Back in Anger spawned the AYM tag, had become
a laughing stock by the end of ‘the angry decade’ (2). His play The
World of Paul Slickey – an, er, musical satire about gossip columnists
that debuted in London in 1959 – was booed by the audience, whose
members included John Gielgud and Noël Coward (perhaps Coward was
secretly pleased that the AYM, who had swept aside his drawing-room
dramas with their kitchen-sink realism, were not so impressive after
all). Angry audience members chased Osborne down Charing Cross Road
screaming ‘bloody rubbish!’, forcing the petrified playwright to leap
into a cab to make his escape. It was anger turned against the
‘Angries’.
Aside from Alan Sillitoe and Doris Lessing, not many of the AYM
fulfilled their potential. In Wilson’s telling: Osborne ended up
bankrupt in Shropshire and was forced to sponge money from the Royal
Literary Fund to get his dodgy teeth fixed; Amis, whose comedic novel
Lucky Jim (1954) was considered a precursor to the AYM movement,
became a red-eyed alco and an anti-humanist with a penchant for
walking around with his flies undone, and was incapacitated by his
phobias of flying, folk dancing, hailing a cab and various other
things; John Braine, author of the still-breathtaking novel Room at
the Top (1957), also turned to booze and became ‘downright stupid’,
Wilson says.
And as for Wilson himself: despite writing more than 100 books over
the past five decades, he never repeated the success of The Outsider.
He’s now best known for his strange interests and habits and for
insisting that he is a genius rather than actually being one. As Lynn
Barber said in a barbed piece for the Observer in 2004, reviewing
Wilson’s autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose: ‘In 1956, The
Outsider made him an overnight sensation, but ever since Wilson has
been an outsider himself – a knicker fetishist, a social misfit and
the author of 100 books that even his publisher didn’t want. He hopes
his autobiography will finally convince the world of his
greatness.’ (3) Ouch.
Now 76, Wilson is back with a new book, The Angry Years: The Rise and
Fall of the Angry Young Men. Yet again he’s received a mauling from
some critics, but not all – ‘the prose is flatter than a cartoon cat
hitting a wall’, said the Telegraph; it’s ‘sour grapes’, said the
Spectator. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a punchy, record-
straightening, grave-spitting account of the ‘Angries’ and their
successes and failures. Has he mellowed? Has he become less angry? Has
he got over the idea that he’s up there with Shakespeare in the genius
stakes? Not a bit of it. ‘I was the greatest writer of the twentieth
century’, he tells me. And he’s serious.
* * *
Wilson says he wrote this colourful and personal history of the AYM
partly in response to Humphrey Carpenter’s 2002 book The Angry Young
Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. ‘What an absolute shit’, says
Wilson of Carpenter. ‘He drove the knife into my back as deeply as he
could.’ (Clearly Wilson doesn’t mind speaking ill of the dead:
Carpenter died of heart failure in 2005.) He tells me that in the
early 2000s he invited Carpenter to Cornwall (yes, 50 years on, Wilson
is still there – and yes he’s still married to the nice middle-class
girl of the horsewhip-wielding parentage) so that Carpenter could
interview him for the book. He gave Carpenter ‘a very nice meal and we
drank a very old bottle of wine’. And yet Carpenter had actually
already written his book, including a pretty cutting chapter about
Wilson, and apparently only wanted to meet Wilson to confirm what he
had already committed to paper. ‘The total shit.’
What’s more, Carpenter’s book was ‘lightweight and unobjective’, says
Wilson, in which ‘an influential literary movement was dismissed as a
“comedy” of the Fifties’. Where Carpenter was agnostic over whether
the AYM were actually a proper movement or just a ‘comic bunch of
boozers and fornicators’ (4), in The Angry Years Wilson seeks to place
the AYM in their historical context. He even compares them to great
Enlightenment thinkers whose words inspired revolutions. The angry
movement ‘was based on a real political protest that hoped to get
something done, to change things as Rousseau and Cobbett and Godwin
had wanted to change things’, he writes (5). Take a character like Joe
Lampton, the brilliantly ambitious, womanising hero of John Braine’s
Room at the Top: Wilson writes that such characters ‘expressed the
spirit of rebellion that had kicked and struggled since Rousseau, and
had finally brought about the French Revolution’ (6).
“The Angry Young Man was a label-dodging entity, an indefinable rebel”
That is why Wilson thinks the AYM are far more interesting, and
important, than the middle-class satirists who followed them – the
Oxbridge poshos who, in the 1960s, made the satirical theatre show
Beyond the Fringe and TV series That Was The Week That Was, winning
widespread praise for ‘daring’ to mock the monarchy and stuffy Tory
politicians. In truth, they were riding on the duffel coat-tails of
the properly daring AYM, says Wilson: those working-class or lower
middle-class authors who had already given a very large two-finger
salute to the powers-that-be (the ‘swivel-eyed gets’ who rule over us,
as one of Alan Sillitoe’s characters described them) in the angry
decade of the 1950s. ‘[The AYM] deserve to be taken more seriously
than satirists who fire their arrows and then duck’, says Wilson.
So, the AYM: a funny bunch of wild-haired drinkers who also happened
to write, or rebels in the mould of Rousseau? I think the truth is
somewhere in the middle of Carpenter’s take and Wilson’s view. I have
long been a fan of the AYM, especially Alan Sillitoe and John Braine.
Carpenter – whose rather ripping tale of the AYM is better than the
unforgiving Wilson will allow – is right that these writers were not,
strictly speaking, a movement. Sillitoe, for example, never considered
himself an ‘AYM’; neither did Doris Lessing (or she didn’t consider
herself an ‘AYW’, one should say). Yet Wilson is also right that the
rise (and fall) of various different authors who, for the first time,
wrote about working in factories and offices, getting drunk, fighting
and fucking, thieving and vomiting, revealed something about social
and political shifts in the 1950s.
Here was a new group of writers, many of them from working-class
backgrounds, who felt dislocated from the traditional values of their
parents and society at large: most of them too young to have fought in
the Second World War, they did not feel part of the postwar
‘victorious’ society, the idea that Britons should be ‘happy and
grateful and dutiful’ to their saviours in authority (7). At the same
time, the AYM were suspicious of the alternative: communism. Some of
the AYM, most notably Lessing, had been members of the Communist
Party, but they became disillusioned following the Stalinists’
crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 – the same year that Wilson
and Osborne swept on to the British literary scene and the AYM were
born (8). In Chicken Soup with Barley, the 1958 play by the EastEnd-
born AYM Arnold Wesker, the young hero turns against his family’s long
commitment to communism after the Hungarian Uprising, angrily saying
to his mother: ‘You didn’t tell me there were any doubts.’ (9) This
sense of the AYM rejecting both tradition and communism is personified
in Arthur Seaton, the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving hero
of Sillitoe’s 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He says:
‘I am me and nobody else; and whatever they say I am, that’s what I am
not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.’ (10) His
stirring words – which recently formed the title of the Arctic
Monkeys’ first album – perfectly captured the Angry Young Man as a
label-dodging entity, an indefinable rebel who couldn’t give much of a
stuff for the bastards at the top or the sell-outs agitating for
change from below.
Indeed, for all Wilson’s grand and admirable comparisons between the
AYM and earlier writers who inspired revolutions, in truth the most
striking thing about the cast of characters created by the Angries is
that their rebellions are of the individualistic and experimental
variety rather than having any revolutionary bent. It’s notable that,
although Seaton is pissed off about the conditions in his factory, and
flirts with the idea of becoming a Red, his rebellion takes place
outside of the world of work – primarily in the pub and the bedroom.
He is a ‘bloody billygoat trying to screw the world…because it’s
trying to do the same to me’. When he is not pursuing ‘his rebellion
against the rules of love, or distilling them with the rules of war,
there was still the vast crushing power of government against which to
lean his white-skinned bony shoulder, a thousand of its laws to be
ignored and therefore broken’ (11). He’s one man taking on the world.
In Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), the heroine Anna flirts with
communism, but it is her flirting with men – her sexual swagger – that
really marks her out as a rebel (12).
Joe Lampton, the cocky red-blooded hero of Braine’s Room at the Top,
simply wants to get to the top of the ladder and make a bloody good
living – even if that means bedding the boss’s daughter. Hence the
title of the novel, which comes from the adage: ‘There’s plenty of
room at the top.’ As Braine said of his character Lampton: ‘Joe
doesn’t want to do away with the class system. But he would say that
from now on it’s achievement that counts. It shouldn’t matter who your
father was.’ (13)
“Today, angry young men have their bollocks removed by the
authorities”
If there is an historical context to the AYM, it is the crisis of
tradition coupled with left disillusionment that emerged in the
decades after the Second World War. The literary creations of the AYM,
disrespectful of the powers-that-be and wary of Stalinists, made their
own rebellion: breaking rules, sleeping around, blowing their
disposable income on drink and fags and gifts for their mistresses.
And if anyone tried to claim them – whether it was the Borstal screws
trying to whip the rebellious Smith into shape in Sillitoe’s The
Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959) or the left claiming
that Braine’s Joe Lampton was a class rebel – then the AYM’s response
was: ‘Whatever you say I am, that’s what I am not.’
This helps explain why the AYM have such an enduring appeal,
influencing the Mods of the Sixties, the more destructive punks of the
Seventies, social realist writers and filmmakers in the Eighties, and
the New Scottish Wave of gritty fiction in the Nineties: in a time of
political flux, the AYM seem to have set the standard for individual
rebellion, for a kicking against the pricks by angry or ambitious
young people who want more from life, but are not entirely sure how to
go about getting it. The AYM can be seen as an early expression of
what has now become, unfortunately, cynicism with politics and the
idea of change. Where the AYM rebelliously declared ‘Don’t let the
bastards grind you down’, today’s AYM – that’s Apathetic Young Men –
are more likely to simply shrug: ‘They’re all bastards….’
* * *
The surviving Angries can still make others angry – and that’s
especially true of Wilson. Why do you get people’s backs up? ‘I am a
writer of ideas and they find that difficult’, he says, sounding 24
and precocious again. One thing reviewers dislike about The Angry
Years is its brutal edge. No detail is spared. We’re told that Kenneth
Tynan, the famous literary critic whose early praise for Osborne
helped to give birth to the AYM, was a fan of spanking: he took out a
lifetime subscription to National Bottom, a magazine ‘which dealt
exclusively with events in and around the anus’. Samuel Beckett was
‘pathologically shy and anti-social’ and wrote ‘dreary rubbish’,
writes Wilson. Other writers are drunks and losers with not a decent
idea to their name (14).
The other thing the literary set dislike about Wilson is his
(admittedly bizarre) self-conviction that he is a genius of twentieth-
century literature, when in fact he will likely be remembered for one
book only: The Outsider. ‘What they don’t understand’, he says, ‘is
that if you come from my kind of background, a working-class
background in the Forties and Fifties, then you have to be quite
arrogant to get ahead. Unlike them, I was not born into writing. I
would never have escaped Leicester and become a writer unless I truly
believed and convinced myself I was one of the greats.’ He has a
point, actually. The working-class-done-good have always needed a
measure of arrogance – of self-belief bordering on cockiness – in
order to smash their way into cultural or literary worlds or the
boardrooms of big business.
For all his faults, we could probably do with a bit more Wilson-style
cockiness around today. If the Fifties were ‘the angry years’ then the
Noughties are ‘the anti-angry years’. Where the AYM celebrated the
anger of ambitious young men and women, today the authorities put
loudmouth youths on anger management courses. Instructions on how to
control your anger are dished out in schools, colleges and workplaces
(15). The sexual experimentation of the AYM (and AYW) would today be
denounced as ‘too risky’. Weekend boozing, an activity beloved of
Arthur Seaton, is now denounced as ‘binge drinking’, and as of next
weekend you won’t be able to light up a fag in any pub in England.
Today, an AYM or AYW would not last very long before having their
bollocks removed by the swivel-eyed gets.
Wilson credits John Braine with turning around a 200-year-long ‘Age of
Defeat’ with the publication of Room at the Top in 1957. Where serious
fiction had been dominated for decades by ‘defeated men’ whose working
premise was ‘you can’t win’, Braine created a character, Joe Lampton,
who was ‘an intelligent hero whose outlook was cheerful and positive’,
writes Wilson (16). It is high praise indeed, and almost deserved (but
then, as a Braine fan, I would say that). The question is: where are
the new Joe Lamptons who will rail against today’s anti-angry Age of
Restraint?
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men by Colin
Wilson was published by Robson Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK))
(1) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
(2) The Angry Decade, Kenneth Allsop, 1958
(3) ‘Now they will realise that I am a genius’, Observer, 30 May 2004
(4) Not raging but clowning, Observer, 1 September 2002
(5) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
(6) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
(7) The Angry Young Men, Humphrey Carpenter, Allen Lane, 2002
(8) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
(9) Chicken Soup with Barley was revived at the Tricycle Theatre in
London in 2005. Read a review here.
(10) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe, 1958. See
Brendan O’Neill’s interview with Sillitoe in LM magazine here.
(11) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe, 1958. See
Brendan O’Neill’s interview with Sillitoe in LM magazine here.
(12) See Chapter 8 of The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books,
2007
(13) See the Preface to The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books,
2007
(14) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
(15) See The anti-angry brigade, by Brendan O’Neill, Spectator, 23
October 2004
(16) The Angry Years, Colin Wilson, Robson Books, 2007
chhotemianinshallah
Neil Davenport
Let's unveil the real enemies of reason
Famed atheist Richard Dawkins’ latest TV attack on tarot-readers and
the mystic-obsessed masses lets some far more dangerous irrationalists
off the hook.
After taking on organised religion in his TV show The Root of All
Evil? in January 2006, the distinguished British scientist Professor
Richard Dawkins challenged other irrational systems of thought in The
Enemies of Reason on Channel 4 last night. His target this time?
Astrologists and clairvoyants, among others.
Dawkins’ complaint is that the horoscopes published in newspapers, and
those mediums seeking to ‘speak to the dead’, are not only misleading
the public – they are actually undermining the very foundations of
Enlightenment civilisation. In order to protect the gullible masses
from these forces, he set out to expose mystic peddlers as cranks and
charlatans and, it seems, to hoist his own books up the bestseller
lists.
But does Dawkins’ proposed ‘Brave New World’ lead a shining path
towards true enlightenment? Or in his rush to denounce ‘non-evidence
based’ fads and thinking, is he in danger of throwing out a dimension
of humanity that cannot solely be reduced to mathematical
calculations?
On the surface, at least, Dawkins’ protestations that religion and
astrology and palm reading are not based in provable facts or reason
are agreeable enough. Indeed, the spiritualists, mediums and New Age
faith healers that were featured on last night’s programme came across
either as deluded or as sly hustlers. Their transparent gibberish
certainly should not be defended or indulged. And yet, they are not a
mortal danger to others; nor are they ‘wreckers of civilisation’, as
Dawkins hysterically suggests. For Dawkins, however, it is not only
the mystics who are beyond the rational pale – so, too, are those
casual horoscope readers and séance attendees, who were effectively
branded as contemptible fools.
In reality, it was Dawkins who came across as shockingly naïve. The
programme also showed that he possesses the sense of humour of a
wooden chair leg.
In debunking astrology, Dawkins adopted a tone of ‘this will be big
news for you, sunshine’, as if the average TV viewer is a complete
dunce who had previously believed everything he read in his horoscope.
Dawkins’ revelation that astrology is impossible to prove, and that
the predictions published in newspapers don’t, you know, have any real
bearing on your day-to-day life, would only be shocking to a five-year-
old.
When he conducted a random survey of Londoners, asking them to outline
their sun sign’s characteristics, we were meant to see how the idiot
public has internalised today’s rampant mysticism. Wrong. What Dawkins
failed to see is that most respondents were giggling as they said
things like: ‘I’m a Leo. I’m meant to spend too much money but possess
leadership skills.’ They weren’t actually taking it seriously, instead
laughing as they listed their star sign’s endearingly daft character
traits. Many of the respondents said that horoscopes are a load of
nonsense.
For the most part, when people do say ‘oh, it’s because I’m a typical
Scorpio’, they are being tongue-in-cheek, and making a throwaway
comment that is only intended to communicate a widely recognisable
character trait to another person. Incredibly, even that banal and
harmless saying ‘touch wood for luck’ was cited as evidence by Dawkins
that we have all gone mad for mysticism. He clearly needs to get out
more.
The trouble is that even when he does get out more, his reductive
approach to humanity means he cannot seem to get beyond his rehearsed
‘these people are stupid’ outlook. So Dawkins approached a meeting
held by a spiritualist medium as if he were carrying out a study of
primitive anthropology. Anyone with a semblance of understanding of
human behaviour will appreciate that séances are usually populated by
lonely, desperate pensioners seeking connections with this world as
much as the ‘next world’. The fact that Dawkins met people who
described themselves as regular attendees at the spiritual meeting
suggested that most of them see it as a social get-together rather
than anything truly mystical.
It took the engaging illusionist Derren Brown to provide some half-
decent insights into why people dabble in hocus-pocus. Brown openly
says he uses psychology and wordplay to trick people into believing
all sorts of things. And his punters mostly know this, but still go
along with his tricks to be amused, entertained or just baffled. It’s
similar to the pitch you get on BBC3’s The Real Hustle, where
experienced scammers and tricksters perform confidence tricks on
people in bars and hotels. The only difference is that, on Derren
Brown’s TV shows and The Real Hustle, there isn’t a professor in the
background denouncing everyone as stupid and superstitious.
Contemporary hi-tech irrationality is definitely a problem. For
example, the idea that long-distance air travel should be banned on
the basis of a belief that CO2 emissions = global warming doesn’t
stand up to rational calculations or proof. How would cutting back on
air travel make much of a difference, when aviation only contributes
about three per cent of global CO2 emissions? Cutting back our carbon
in order to ‘save the world’ is also a form of superstition. Or why
not investigate the tidal waves of doomsday scenarios that also have
no basis in reality or science - such as the headlines that were
common a year ago, which claimed that ‘150 million expected to die
from bird flu’? These outbursts of official irrationality have a
potentially more destructive impact on society than a handful of camp
astrologers and mediums.
To be fair to Dawkins, Enemies of Reason gets better. In the second
episode, which will be broadcast next week, Dawkins attacks
alternative medicines, quack remedies and the irrational MMR vaccine
panic. He’s absolutely right to point out that there is still no
evidence that MMR jabs cause autism in children, but that the panic
about an MMR-autism link has had a detrimental impact on medicine and
society: for a start, we’ve seen the re-emergence of measles for the
first time in years.
In this area of medical science, Dawkins is on solid ground. And yet,
his understanding of the relationship between science and society is
skewed. As a humanist rationalist, I would welcome the development of
scientific enquiry to advance our understanding of the natural world
and improve the quality of our lives in the process. And Dawkins is
almost inspiring when he reels off the triumphs of scientific
discoveries and achievements over the past 300 years. But he is on
somewhat shakier territory when he tries to boil social progress down
to such narrow, technical innovations.
Science alone was not responsible for generating more free time for
humans in the modern era. The expansion of the productive forces, and
the development of a greater capacity to create more life-sustaining
resources in less time, were also key to this advancement. Yet Dawkins
only seems able to conceptualise science as acting alone and outside
of wider social developments. Thus he tends to ignore how human-
centred political thought helped to throw off the shackles of
mysticism and tradition and enable scientific enquiry to flourish. To
attribute social progress to the work of diligent scientists reveals
an outlook that is notably disengaged from the workings of society.
Unfortunately, Dawkins isn’t the only commentator who falls into this
trap today.
Consider the recent attack on humanities A-level subjects such as
English literature, history and sociology. Many bemoan the fact that
while science take-up is declining, these ‘easier’ humanities subjects
are becoming more popular. Behind some of this discussion, there lies
a hostility towards non-instrumental enquiries into understanding
human existence, and our relationships with each other and with
society more broadly. Previously, the humanities were considered to be
a cornerstone of a humanist education; now they are looked upon as a
bit flighty and not really useful to understanding the world. In
truth, the towering figures of literature, from Proust to Dostoyevsky,
have also, alongside the scientists, shed dazzling light on to the
human condition. Dawkins and others seem unable to understand that
some things - love, sexual infatuation, mortality, beauty, existential
angst - cannot be measured by a set of scales or a measuring tape. We
are not, whatever Dawkins might think, merely biological beings.
The real irony of Dawkins’ angry attack on the mystical masses is that
his brand of thinking is actually not under threat; rather, its time
has come. Why else would anyone give this charisma-free professor
primetime TV slots? Last night’s programme was less a celebration of
science than an elevation of scientism, the idea that ‘evidence-based
calculations’ should be the organising principle for human society.
This makes Dawkins less radical than he likes to think, because
scientism is actually in the ascendant. Today’s ‘carbon footprint’
calculations use scientism to lend bogus authority to the climate
change doom-mongers. Smoking and drinking bans are often justified on
the basis of calculating the costs they cause to the National Health
Service. The education system is increasingly judged on cost-effective
criteria, based on student attendance, retention and pass rates.
Far from being a lone maverick, Dawkins’ emphasis on the importance of
evidence-based calculations dovetails nicely with the political
class’s narrow managerialism. At the same time, his tut-tutting about
apparently irrational activities such as gambling, dowsing and séances
has a whiff of New Labour’s ‘stop this nonsense!’ politics of
behaviour. Dawkins’ lab-coated hectoring is profoundly conservative:
denying the importance of meaning and purpose behind human action,
even actions that appear irrational, leads to a naturalisation of the
human subject as merely biological rather than social in character.
I would argue that the ‘enemies of reason’ today are not so much the
cranky mystics offering cut-price tarot card readings, but rather the
more powerful peddlers of doomsday scenarios and health panics that
have minimal foundations in fact. It would have been better if Dawkins
had concentrated his unblinking gaze on those irrationalists.
Unfortunately, by championing scientism as a model for society, rather
than hailing open-ended science as a tool for humanity, Dawkins has
ended up contributing to today’s dead hand of instrumentalism,
philistinism and presentism.
Neil Davenport (Gemini) is a freelance writer and politics lecturer
based in London.
Previously on spiked
Neil Davenport said Richard Dawkins’ TV series, The Root of All
Evil?’, gave atheist humanism a bad name. ‘Catholic atheist’ Michael
Fitzpatrick was repelled by Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, and
critiqued the secular intellectuals who are baiting the devout. Mark
Vernon thought Dawkins could learn a thing or two from a humbler
‘Darwinian bulldog’. Or read more at spiked issues Religion and TV.
chhotemianinshallah
Mark Vernon
Thomas Henry Huxley: a better bulldog
An agnostic ex-vicar says Richard Dawkins could learn a thing or two
from a humbler 'Darwinian bulldog' of the 1860s.
Richard Dawkins has published a rant against religion. He could learn
much from an earlier Darwinian bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley.
In 1869, Thomas Henry Huxley coined a new term. With the publication
of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 10 years earlier, this
brilliant Victorian anatomist and zoologist became one of its
staunchest defenders. He approved of his sobriquet, ‘Darwin’s
bulldog’. It earned him one of the most famous putdowns in the
skirmishes following the publication of the groundbreaking book. In
1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, son of the anti-slavery campaigner,
had enquired of Huxley whether he was ‘related to an ape on his
grandfather’s or grandmother’s side?’ Huxley’s reply was equally
withering. He said he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than
a man who substituted ridicule for science.
Today’s Darwinian bulldog is Richard Dawkins. The parallels between
him and Huxley are striking. But although both are passionate
advocates of evolution, and have made distinctive contributions to the
theory, Dawkin’s new book, The God Delusion, shows Huxley to be
different in one key respect. In a word: God. For while Huxley, too,
hoped that science would scotch the mysteries and authority that he
believed Christianity perpetuated to the detriment of human progress,
he knew that science itself was not the final answer. The term he
coined in 1869 is one now frequently forgotten in the tussle between
science and religion. It is the word agnosticism.
His neologism was meant as a rebuke to all ‘gnostics’ who dogmatically
present their beliefs as truth. He wrote: ‘In matters of the
intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not
demonstrated or demonstrable.’ This is important because it expresses
an intellectual humility. With respect to science, it acknowledges
that when it comes to the big questions in life, what science has
established ‘amounts at present to very little’ – Huxley’s words –
compared with the wisdom of, say, history and literature. With respect
to religion, it acknowledges the ethical idealism of the life of
faith: Huxley was theologian enough to realise that the question of
God was one on which he had to remain a committed agnostic.
Dawkins is not an agnostic. In the new book he is a proselytising
atheist. And he tries to claim Huxley for his own, saying he would
have become an atheist in time. This does Huxley a grave disservice.
He was a man who went to no lesser length than inventing a word to
capture his position. And though the word agnostic has come commonly
to mean something of a shrug of the shoulders today, it was not at all
meant by him in that way; rather, it was a rebuke.
Three accusations are often made against Dawkins – that he is an
atheistic fundamentalist, a scientific absolutist, and intolerant.
They are serious accusations that he vehemently denies. Can his
predecessor, the Victorian bulldog, help us decide?
The charge of fundamentalism is that he substitutes the religious
fundamentalist’s convictions with atheistic equivalents. For example,
the religious fundamentalist says that indisputably there is a God.
Dawkins believes that it is beyond dispute that there is not a God. Or
whereas the fundamentalist turns to the presumed inerrant truths of a
holy book to find meaning, Dawkins turns to a secular ‘book of life’ –
decoded DNA – to find indisputable purpose, namely that we are here to
propagate genes.
In The God Delusion he claims not to be a fundamentalist atheist,
arguing that he would change his opinions given proof, something the
true fundamentalist would not do. But the proof is already available:
God’s existence or non-existence is not demonstrable; God just ain’t
that kind of thing. Any number of rigorous scientists – and
sophisticated theologians – could tell him that. Indeed, buried in the
middle of the book is an important admission: ‘God almost certainty
does not exist.’ Note the ‘almost’. In other words, agnosticism is the
scientific position to hold. If he were not a fundamentalist, he would
not be an atheist, let alone one so powerfully evangelical. He would
be an eloquent agnostic.
The charge of scientific absolutism follows on from this. In short, he
is drawn to the belief that science will ultimately answer all
questions worth asking. He puts it this way: ‘I am thrilled to be
alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of
understanding. Even better we may eventually discover that there are
no limits.’ It is the ‘even better’ that reveals the absolutism. It
marks the point at which Dawkins’ advocacy becomes not only
intellectually faulty, but dangerous – on two counts. It undermines
wonder at creation. And, as wonder weakens, it creates a vacuum that
is filled by hubris.
Again, Dawkins claims that he can be filled with as much wonder as
anyone, when listening to Schubert or seeing a sunset. But while his
wonder may leave him open-mouthed, what it does not do is evoke a
sense of the limits of science. Rather, he thinks that the reason
human beings find sounds and sunsets so moving lies within the domain
of evolutionary theory; they must have some adaptive advantage. As he
has written elsewhere: ‘As scientists, and biological scientists, it’s
up to us to explain [feelings of awe], and I expect that one day we
shall.’
Darwin adopted the word agnostic to describe himself: although he lost
faith in formal religious structures, he remained conscious of forces
beyond human knowledge. And that other giant of modern science, Albert
Einstein, thought similarly. Science convinced him that behind the
laws of the universe is manifest ‘spirit vastly superior to that of
man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel
humble’. Dawkins’ scientific absolutism is dangerous because it
undermines such a sense of piety towards the world. He toys with a
fantasy of unlimited understanding that in the wrong context or the
wrong hands can easily become a fantasy of complete control.
One is forced to conclude that the primary driver behind Dawkins’ book
is not a concern for truth, as he declares, but a passionate
intolerance of the religious worldview. The Richard Dawkins Foundation
for Reason and Science, his new venture launched this autumn,
compounds the sense that he has been overcome by a zealotry at odds
with the Enlightenment values to which Huxley and others, before and
since, aspired.
For example, the Foundation will campaign against the teaching of
creationism – which is fair enough, except that it is the moral
vacuity of Darwinian absolutism that the families who want their
children to learn of creationism fear, as much as evolution itself:
militant atheism only compounds that fear and will strengthen the
creationists’ case, not undermine it.
Alternatively, the Foundation wants to raise consciousness of the
‘immorality’ of ‘branding’ young children with the religion of their
parents – except that this aim smacks of the same social engineering
that would insert the clumsy hand of government between parents and
their children. It says a lot about the illiberality behind Dawkin’s
proselytising brand of atheism.
Dawkins accuses believers of having minds ‘hijacked by religion’.
Replace the word religion with science, and he could be writing about
himself. Intolerance leads him to fundamentalist rhetoric. He is
entitled to his opinion. But it is time to claim the debate back from
the extremists – scientific or religious. What would be progressive
would be a revival of the humanly richer, intellectually humbler and
socially tolerant terrain of the committed agnostic.
Mark Vernon is author of Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life,
published by Palgrave Macmillan. AMAZON. Visit his website here.
chhotemianinshallah
Brendan O’Neill
The New Atheists’ Easter message? ‘Grow up or die’
Religulous, Bill Maher’s religion-baiting documentary, confirms what
modern atheists hate most about religion: its humancentricity.
Twenty-five years ago this weekend, I was called on to do the job that
every altar boy dreads: the Stations of the Cross.
It takes place on Good Friday and involves following the priest around
the church as he stops at each of the 14 Stations, explains what it
depicts, says a prayer or two, stands in silence, and then moves on.
Wearing sweat-inducing red-and-white vestments, carrying a
ridiculously heavy gold candle that dripped hot wax on to my
fingertips, and battered by sniggers from schoolfriends and looks of
thin-lipped fury from my parents if I so much as looked like I might
yawn, by the time I got to the ninth Station (‘Jesus falls for the
third time’) I knew how He must have felt.
The editor as an altar boy.This Easter, as an atheistic editor rather
than God-fearin’ altar boy, I’ve had to endure something even more
bottom-numbingly dull, hectoring and pious than those Stations, and
without even the promise of redemption that is contained in the
phantom ‘Fifteenth Station of the Cross’ (which is very occasionally
included in some Catholic churches’ décor: ‘Jesus rises from the
dead’): that is, I watched Religulous. In a cinema in Covent Garden.
In my free time. Surrounded by people who, I’m convinced, were not
really laughing at the jokes (there weren’t any) but rather were
audibly guffawing as a way of sending smug signals to one another: ‘I
hate religion, too!’
I felt far more preached at by American comedian Bill Maher’s road
movie-style atheistic documentary than I did by that priest who made
me follow him around the church like a candle-carrying muppet a
quarter of a century ago. Religulous – a hilarious mixture of the
words ‘religious’ and ‘ridiculous’! – confirms what today’s shrill
opponents of religion, variously described as ‘New Atheists’,
‘Darwin’s pitbulls’ or ‘Dawkinites’, really hate about religion: its
humancentricity. Never mind its authoritarianism or obscurantism, it
is its treatment of man as special – as more than a biological being;
as capable of rapture; as having, in the words of Genesis, ‘dominion
over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other
living thing that moves on the Earth’ – that really gets their goat.
Religulous goes for laughs so cheap they would be judged too
downmarket for the bargain bucket at Poundland. Maher travels around
America and Europe – more accurately: he visits Alabama, home of crazy
Christians, and Amsterdam, home of crazy Muslims – to try to discover
why people are so stupid that they turn to religion. He visits a
Creationism Museum where exhibits include animatronic Stone-Age
children playing with animatronic dinosaurs. He goes to an admittedly
scary Holy Land Theme Park in Florida where you can walk around
Palestine as it looked 2,000 years ago, only peopled by white
Americans in smocks selling religious tat rather than Arabs selling
sheep or myrrh. He tries to convince Jesus of Florida, an all-singing,
all-dancing Fabio lookalike who is crucified once a day in the Passion
Show, that He – the real JC – never actually existed.
Sometimes Maher thinks being offensive is the same thing as being
funny and clever. He interviews a perfectly reasonable Muslim
spokeswoman in Amsterdam, who says that most Muslims are not violent
and that Mohammed Bouyeri – the nutjob who killed anti-Islamist Dutch
filmmaker Theo van Gogh – was a rarity. How does Maher respond? By
interspersing her words with images of things exploding in Iraq. Or it
might be Afghanistan. It’s some crazy place where Muslims blow things
up. It’s the kind of thing which, if the Sun did it (which, notably,
it doesn’t anymore), Ken Livingstone would haul it before that Pontius
Pilate of contemporary public debate: the Commission for Racial
Equality. Yet when a New Atheist does it, it’s funny apparently, even
insightful, the kind of thing that makes PC cinemagoers in Covent
Garden think: ‘You know what, Muslims are crazy!’
Maher also interviews the imam of a mosque. Halfway through the
interview, the imam receives a text message on his mobile phone and
the filmmakers flash up subtitles imagining what it might say: ‘Ur
orders are: kill that infidel Bill Maher :-)’ Now, I must admit, this
was quite funny, but it’s about as good as the film gets and it
doesn’t explain the accolades it has been receiving, such as from the
British reviewer who said it would make people ‘engage their brains
while choking back tears of laughter’ and might even transform the ‘po-
faced right-wing Christians who still believe God Loves America and
vote accordingly’ (1).
In fact, and ironically, those po-faced Yanks, the spectre in every
good liberal’s nightmares, would probably enjoy the bits of the film
that show Muslims as loons who, in Maher’s seemingly Bush-inspired
words, might create a future ‘decimated by the effects of religion-
inspired nuclear terrorism’ (2). Actually, scrap that: the Bushies in
fact tip-toed around Islam, frequently describing it as a ‘religion of
peace’; it is good, liberal, Democratic-supporting, NPR-patronising,
God-doubtin’ media men like Maher, backed by big atheist players in
DC, NYC and trendy parts of London, who now depict Islam (alongside
Christianity, of course) as the potential destroyer of the world. What
a bizarre turnaround. What a striking insight into the ugly prejudices
that can spring from an atheism built more on fear and sneering than,
in Darwin’s words, on the subtle promotion of ‘freedom of thought’ and
the ‘gradual illumination of men’s minds’ (3).
Maher’s aim is to bring religious people crashing back down to Earth.
He does this by mocking their grandiose claims and arguing that, in
reality, man is nothing special; in fact, he’s a bit shit. In contrast
to the ‘arrogant certitude’ of religionists, Maher describes himself
as ‘humbly’ agnostic. ‘Doubt is humble’, he says, ‘and that’s what man
needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of
getting shit dead wrong’. The real reason he despises Christianity and
Islam (he’s a bit softer on the Jews) is because they propagate
stories that present mankind as having been created for some purpose,
as having a special role to play on the planet and in history, when in
truth, says Maher, mankind is a fuck-up that continually ‘gets shit
wrong’ and has ‘spawned so much lunacy and destruction’.
Maher shows how depressingly biological, even bovine, the New Atheism
is, and how stultifyingly soul-destroying The Science can become in
the hands of political activism. To counter the wacky Christians’
claim that mankind is profound and has some relationship with a
‘higher being’, he enlists DNA and human-gene experts to tell us that,
in fact, we’re a collection of cell-like data, much like any other
animal. He describes religious belief itself as a ‘neurological
disorder’, a warping of our animalistic internal grey matter (4).
After interviewing a very strange ‘former homosexual’ who now runs a
Christian Conversion Ministry to make other gay people straight, Maher
talks to a scientific expert who claims to have discovered the ‘gay
gene’. See, says Maher, gayness is really a genetic trait and thus not
susceptible to manipulation by Christian homophobes. Here, he
unwittingly exposes how a gene-obsessed view of human nature and
behaviour can be even more backward than the religious outlook. At
least that bit of the Bible which describes homosexuality as an
‘abomination’ that should be avoided by all men recognises the
elements of choice, consciousness, desire, attraction and temptation
contained within human sexual relationships; in the New Atheist, DNA-
sprayed view of mankind, sexuality springs from a pre-programmed gene
and is simply a biological instinct, like going to the toilet. Well,
we are merely ‘the close cousins of chimpanzees’, as that other New
Atheist Christopher Hitchens argued in his book God Is Not Great, and
just as male chimps sometimes fondle and fuck each other, so do male
humans (5).
Having disabused viewers of the idea that mankind is anything more
than a bundle of genes (presumably Maher was born with the Unfunny
Gene), he then argues that the central problem with religion is that
it is distracting us from the real threat facing the planet: no, not
Satan coming to destroy it with hellfire, but, er, manmade global
warming coming to destroy it with hellfire. Without even a whiff of
irony – and I am not making this up – Maher concludes the film by
giving a sermon on a mount in Jerusalem in which he talks about
climate change and war and terrorism and religious craziness, and says
that as a result of these things ‘the world could actually come to an
end’. Humankind must ‘grow up or die’. Here, he echoes other vocal New
Atheists who talk about manmade apocalypse: Hitchens talks about the
coming ‘heat death of the universe’, while Justin Keating of the
Humanist Association of Ireland says, Revelations-style, ‘As never
before, the survival of humankind is threatened. The source of the
threat is human action [destroying the environment].’ (6)
Indeed, Keating says the Bible is ‘wicked’ because, in talking about
man’s ‘dominion’ over nature, it is a ‘validation for all those who
believe in the cult of more growth and more consumption… For two
millennia, Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived by this teaching.
In that period scientific advances in agriculture and medicine have
given us a world not peopled by the pair in the Garden of Eden, but by
something between six and seven billion and growing. We are deforming
the Earth.’ (7) So religion puts too much faith in humanity, gives us
too much credence, is too humanist, when in fact, say ‘the humanists’,
mankind should be more meek and accepting of our role as, well,
animals, living in ‘symbiotic harmony with our surroundings’ (8).
Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
‘Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as
he does not revolve around himself’, said Marx (9). Many of the great
atheists of old recognised that religious stories – of some ‘great
man’ who created us, of our inner souls, of a future paradise – were
attempts by individuals to envision humanity’s greatness at a time
when it seemed impossible, or at least very difficult, to make that
greatness a reality on Earth. Religious belief sprung from our
alienation from our own humanity. The New Atheism represents something
far, far worse: alienation from the very idea that mankind is special
or distinct or rapturous or purposeful; hence it viciously attacks
those who still propagate stories about higher purpose or superhuman
gods: the religious. I would far rather go back to the little church
in north London this weekend and listen to the priest talk about
‘love’ and ‘redemption’ than watch or read or listen to any more
shrill New Atheist propaganda.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. His
satire on the green movement - Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other
Eco-Dilemmas - is published by Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from
Amazon(UK).)
Read on:
spiked-issue: Film
Watch the trailer for Religulous below:
(1) Why right-wing Christians need to see Religulous, Guardian, 21
October 2008
(2) Religulous: Memorable Quotes, Internet Movie Database
(3) See Rational Atheism: An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett,
Harris and Hitchens, Rational Atheism, 19 August 2007
(4) Religulous: Memorable Quotes, Internet Movie Database
(5) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher
Hitchens, Twelve Books, 2007
(6) ‘The Greening of Humanism’, Justin Keating, Humanism Ireland,
January-February 2009
(7) ‘The Greening of Humanism’, Justin Keating, Humanism Ireland,
January-February 2009
(8) ‘The Greening of Humanism’, Justin Keating, Humanism Ireland,
January-February 2009
(9) See Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right by
Karl Marx at Marxists.org
bademiyansubhanallah
BOOKWATCH
Bottoms up
BY ANITA JOSHUA
Happy Hours: The Penguin Book of Cocktails, Bhaichand Patel, Penguin,
Rs. 499.
Barrister Bhaichand Patel draws on his hours behind the bar as a
bartender to put together this heady array of cocktails that opens up
a whole new range of possibilities for the tipplers while engaging the
teetotaller. In fact, he has thrown in some mocktails for
teetotallers; convinced as he is that innovative blends of various
beverages and garnishes make a more interesting drink to nurse than
say a non-alcoholic beer.
Given that social drinking is picking up in India, this book could be
a godsend for those who need to entertain but don’t know where to
start. Patel gets down to the basics; right from the essentials for a
bar, the kind of glasses that go best with different drinks, how to
measure, shake, stir or blend a drink… Besides listing over 600
cocktail recipes, Patel throws in briefs on the origins of each
alcohol, scans the Indian market to rate the brands available here,
lists the dos and don’ts, and provides tips on how to choose wine in
view of the Indian market just opening up. For good measure, he throws
in a chapter on local brews including bhang and toddy and some
hangover cures; thereby turning this book into yet another essential
for a well-stocked bar.
Sangh liturgy
By Anita Joshua
India Battles to Win, Tarun Vijay, Rupa,
Rs. 495
Curiously, the brief introduction of Tarun Vijay on the jacket of his
book India Battles to Win makes no mention of his stint as editor of
Panchajanya — the weekly magazine of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang h.
Wonder why or is it a candid admission on the part of the author and
publisher that this linkage could affect sales of the book given that
India has demonstrated its preference for `secularism’, a word the RSS
is allergic to.
Admittedly, Vijay acknowledges his Sangh links in the acknowledgements
but that’s a section most people ignore unless the author is a
celebrity. Be that as it may, the book is a reiteration of the RSS
line; viewing everything that has happened in India through the prism
of religion and lamenting the inability of Hindus to think and act as
one collective against the wrongs that have been done to the majority
community in the name of secularism.
For anyone familiar with literature that has come out of the saffron
stables, this book repeats the litany of complaints against the Indian
State which is seen as soft on terror because it is yet to hang Afzal
Guru, an accused in the Parliament attack case; appeases minorities
while going after Hindu godmen and women; celebrates M.F. Husain just
because he denigrates goddesses…
Lyrics with a life of their own By Anita Joshua
100 Lyrics, Gulzar (translated by Sunjoy Shekhar), Penguin, Rs. 499.
100 Lyrics, Gulzar’s collection of songs in translation, shows him
penning something — seemingly poetry — with the Oscar he bagged for
his song “Jai Ho”s in the film “Slumdog Millionaire” on his side.
Surely, the Oscar — he’s the first Indian lyricist to ever bag one —
is not his only claim to fame. His lyrics — be it the maiden “Mora
gora ang lai le”, “Musafir hoon yaaro”, “Humne dekhi hain un aankhon
ki mehekti khushboo” or “Naam gum jayega” — still play on radio
programmes decades after they were first heard while the Oscar-winning
number seems to have dropped off the charts.
This is the first time Gulzar’s come out with a compilation of his
lyrics and poetry; having religiously kept them separate. His
curiosity piqued by Sting’s observation in his book of lyrics that
music and lyrics are dependent on each other, Gulzar “undressed” his
lyrics to find that they survived on their own and in some cases took
the form of poetry.
Translated into English by Sunjoy Shekhar, this bilingual venture
could prove a delight for all those who like to sing these evergreen
numbers but fumble for the words. And, to lend it wider appeal, Gulzar
has thrown in some anecdotes related to the making of some of the
songs; switching in his meanderings from English to Hindi to Urdu with
equal ease.
bademiyansubhanallah
Comic history
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi October 31, 2009, 0:50 IST
I think of Asterix as a comic version of wily Odysseus,” says the
brilliant translator Anthea Bell of the subject of her best-known
work, the Gaulish warrior whose village, forever frozen in 50 BCE,
still holds out against Julius Caesar’s Roman legions. Frankly JC
doesn’t have a chance of completing his conquest of Gaul so long as
Asterix and the rest of the villagers can count on the magic potion
brewed by the druid Getafix, which gives them supernatural strength.
Obelix, Asterix’s best friend, doesn’t need any potion at all —
because he fell into a cauldron of it when he was a baby. Obelix loves
beating up Romans.
I’m sure you know all this — you’re probably perfectly familiar with
René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s masterpieces. You may even be
alarmingly nerdy about them — a surprising number of people break into
noises from Asterix and his Francophone fellow, Hergé’s Tintin, at the
mildest provocation. Captain Haddock’s “Billions of blue blistering
barnacles!” is virtually the nerd signature tune, as might be the
Obelixian “These Romans are crazy!” followed by the “toc-toc-toc” of
finger hitting forehead.
But that Bell quote at the top of this column indicates that there’s
something else going on, something longer-term and deeper-rooted than
spunky Gauls and cloddish Romans locked in a comic embrace for the
entertainment of moderns. That something is history — French history.
Neither Goscinny nor Uderzo was native French — one’s parents were
Polish-Jewish and the other’s Italian — but both responded to the
times. Asterix first appeared in the French comics magazine Pilote in
October 1959 (which makes him 50 years old this month). In an essay on
the translation of Asterix, Anthea Bell writes: “Originally the idea
was to make Asterix a genuinely heroic Gaul — a huge hunk of a
warrior. Then René Goscinny thought it would be more amusing to make
him small and weedy in appearance, apparently insignificant but in
fact very cunning, and Albert Uderzo then came up with the idea of his
inseparable friend Obelix who is indeed big and enormously strong, but
is far from bright, and endearingly childlike.”
So the conventional hero gave way to unconventional ones. It was an
apt and timely choice. In the 1960s, when Asterix was already famous,
Charles de Gaulle was president and France was on its way to some sort
of rebirth after the humiliations of the Second World War. In their
determination to protect their own identity and uniqueness against the
forces of uniformity and the rest of the world, for the French the
idea of one village keeping its independence against an empire was
extraordinarily resonant.
“[In] the same way as all British children know about William the
Conqueror and 1066 and all that,” writes Bell, “every French child’s
first history book is supposed to begin with a remark about ‘Our
ancestors the Gauls’. Their ancestors the Gauls were brave and noble
and... stood up to Julius Caesar and his invading Roman army.”
Goscinny had aimed to gently poke fun at the French self-image, but
the affectionate caricature turned out to be all too resonant.
Elsewhere, Bell writes that “all of us in [Western] Europe enjoy
making anachronistic fun of the past”. Not Indians. Our history is
still dreadfully current, . Who would an Indian Asterix be? Which
invader could we safely pick to lampoon, as Goscinny-Uderzo did the
Romans? Not the Turks and Mongols: too risky. Not the Europeans: they
hired Indians to fight for them. Corporations against tribals? Not
funny. Communalists against secularists? Heavy-handed, and overly
metaphorical. The only safe choice is some version of Porus against
Alexander’s Greeks — but that has little resonance today.
Nor do we have the sense of irony that comes from a settled
relationship with our own past. Without that, in fact, irony has no
foundation, and without irony humour remains more or less weak,
shallow and short-lived. We can’t have an Indian Asterix because it
won’t be funny.
bademiyansubhanallah
Swede ending
Jai Arjun Singh / New Delhi October 31, 2009, 0:48 IST
The third book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy brings an epic
series to a very gratifying close. Unfortunately, writes Jai Arjun
Singh, it all really does end here.
“It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands
that there were many pages to go, many adventures to share” — critic
Roger Ebert on J R R Tolkien’s bulky Lord of the Rings
An epic series usually follows a trajectory that leads from the small
picture to the large; the first book tends to be relatively intimate,
establishing the key characters and their immediate setting, and then,
as the series proceeds, a fuller, grander canvas unfolds. Which first-
time reader, encountering Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday
celebrations in the cosy Shire, can possibly anticipate Sauron’s
forbidding wasteland of Mordor, much less the vast mythological
landscape of the Silmarillion?
Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy has played
out in much the same way, and now, with the publication of the English
translation of The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest we have the full
picture in front of us at last. I turned the last page of this book
feeling deep satisfaction as well as melancholy, the latter emotion
heightened by the knowledge that there will be no more sequels
(Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after completing the three
manuscripts, totaling nearly 2,000 pages) — unless it turns out that
the publishers have been withholding information from us!
The first book in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, began
as a standard-issue thriller, centering on the investigation of a 40-
year-old murder, but soon journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his research-
assistant Lisbeth Salander (a.k.a. the girl with the dragon tattoo)
discovered that this was a fragment of a much larger puzzle involving
ritualistic killings and a trend of violence towards helpless women
immigrants. Some of the darker undercurrents of life in contemporary
Sweden stood to be uncovered, including corruption and sleaze in big
corporations, and the limp-wristed collusion of financial journalists.
The enigmatic, startlingly efficient Salander was the most interesting
character in this novel, but her back-story really took centrestage in
the second book The Girl who Played with Fire, which was even more
ambitious in the range of subjects it covered — the story involved an
extensive exposé of the Swedish sex-trafficking industry, the murder
of the enterprising young writer who was to carry it out, and the
revelation of a connection with Salander’s early life. The girl who
played with fire was now officially in the eye of the storm.
The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up at exactly the point
where its predecessor dramatically ended, with Salander, a bullet
lodged in her head, admitted in the critical care unit of a hospital.
Though soon out of danger, she is still a suspect in three murders and
a high-profile trial awaits. Meanwhile, Blomkvist — who isn’t allowed
to meet her in hospital — must work against time to unearth the
details of an elaborate cover-up by a clandestine organisation within
the innermost circle of the Swedish secret police. Parallel stories
involve the activities of an aged former “spook” named Gullberg, and
the professional life of Blomkvist’s best friend and former Millennium
editor Erika Berger as she tries to cope with a high-stress new job as
editor-in-chief at a daily newspaper. All these strands are adeptly
brought together.
Larsson’s novels are very detailed and full of information about the
workings of, for example, magazine and newspaper journalism, the
police force and big business (to this list, we can now add the
morally ambiguous world of spies, their activities so shadowy that
they are often hidden even from the upper echelons of government). In
fact, it’s possible to offer the mild criticism that the books are too
detailed, sometimes to the extent of being flabby. Some of this
probably has to do with the circumstances of their publication: if
Larsson had lived to discuss them with his editor, I think some of the
deadwood would have been eliminated. (Much as I enjoyed the first two
books, more than once I got the impression that Larsson had written
the manuscripts mainly for his own pleasure, not yet concerned with
tightening them for publication; and that his publishers, excited by
their potential, had rushed the process after his death.)
Happily, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is more compact than
its immediate predecessor, and a genuine page-turner all the way
through. After establishing the background in the initial chapters, it
kicks into maximum gear once Blomkvist (somewhat implausibly) manages
to smuggle in a hand-held computer — along with Internet access — to
the incarcerated Salander (who, as we already know, is an expert
hacker with an army of anonymous online contacts). This is where the
book really delivers: once Salander has that computer, she is as
omnipotent as Salman Khan in Wanted. There’s nothing she can’t
achieve, and a point arrives, around three-fourths of the way through
this 600-page novel, when the reader realises with a warm flush of
excitement that everything is going to turn out all right, that the
bad guys are going to get their comeuppance and that they’ll never
know what hit them.
You might think that such an epiphany would be detrimental to the
effect of a thriller, but this isn’t the case here: the suspense in
this book isn’t so much a matter of what will happen but how it will
happen. Besides, with a character as moody and anti-social as
Salander, you can be sure that things will never be allowed to get too
comfortable or cheery. She’s a compelling protagonist, and it’s a pity
that we won’t get to see the further twists in her complex
relationship with Blomkvist. On the other hand, perhaps the strength
of the Millennium books will lie in their not being extended into an
endless, ultimately compromised series. Three novels aren’t usually
enough to secure an author’s place in genre-fiction history, but this
is what Larsson has achieved, years after his passing.
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Penguin India
Pages: 576
Price: Rs 499
bademiyansubhanallah
Everyday shenanigans
Neha Bhatt / New Delhi October 24, 2009, 0:47 IST
An anthology has its pros and cons: while, in a carefully chosen
collection, literary works can complement each other, or stand out on
their individual merit, in an inconsistent compilation even the good
ones tend to go to waste. It’s a pity, then, that the more competent
artists in the comics collaborative When Kulbhushan Met Stockli may
not get their due.
A glossy compilation of 10 graphic stories by Swiss and Indian comic
book artists, When Kulbhushan Met Stockli at first glance holds
promise.
An introduction explains the premise: a group of Swiss artists were
brought to India to take in the sights and sounds, while their Indian
counterparts (some of who may be familiar: Samit Basu, Anindya Roy,
Orijit Sen), roamed the Alps. Each documented their own experiences.
A sneak preview of the artists’ work was displayed last year in Delhi,
and the slides on show — cheeky and insightful — promised something
interesting. The artists, who expanded their observations into full-
fledged stories for this anthology, were given but one restriction: to
avoid regular travel documentation, and to stay away from the banal
touristy hassles of diarrhoea, pickpockets, taking the wrong tram, and
so on.
Several stories fall into the exact trap they were asked to avoid. “A
Shortcut to India” by Andrea Caprez and Christoph Schuler, for
instance, is downright naive and mundane, illustrating the “dust-
covered cars” in Delhi, the “piercing” traffic noise and the delicious-
smelling dhabas that result in the urgent need for “Imodium, the
universal remedy of Europeans journeying in Asia.”
It doesn’t get better when one reads Kati Rickenbach’s “No Water in O-
Block” — do I need to spell this one out?
At the risk of sounding biased, the work of the Indian comic artists
seems far superior. Delivered in a part-fictional, part-experiential
format, several of them weave their observations into their fiction.
Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s “The Lost Ticket” is a neat piece of work, told
through a mix of narratives: playful poetry, straight prose and
illustration, and bubble-style comic strips. Samit Basu’s detective
story, complemented by Ashish Padlekar’s artwork, is engaging (but for
the painful font size).
Unfortunately for them, the standard set in the book is not high;
examples of real humour are few and far between, a sense of adventure
and perceptiveness even rarer, and the Swiss artists who journeyed to
India for this purpose seem too uninspired to rise above mundane,
pedestrian observations that add no real value to the book. Their
straightforward travelogue-style reportage of everyday shenanigans —
potholes and plumber worries, mehendi wallas and STD/PCO/ISD booths —
make you wish they had dug just a little deeper.
WHEN KULBHUSHAN MET STOCKLI
Editor: Anindya Roy
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: 272
Price: Rs 699
bademiyansubhanallah
Clues to a qila
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi October 24, 2009, 0:44 IST
Madhulika Liddle liked historical detective fiction so much that she
created an amateur sleuth for Mughal Delhi. She tells Rrishi Raote how
she did it.
In Muzaffar Jang, first-time novelist (but award-winning short-story
writer) Madhulika Liddle has invented a new kind of character for
Indian historical fiction — the amateur detective. Muzaffar follows in
an old tradition, as Liddle reveals when she describes her reading
tastes. He is a maverick in Shahjahan’s capital: an aristocrat with
friends in low places. When one lowly friend is wrongly accused of the
murder of a wealthy tax inspector in the Lal Qila, Muzaffar swings
into action and puts himself in harm’s way.
What did you have to read in order to write this story?
Lots and lots of historical detective fiction. There’s this series on
a [medieval] Irish nun called Sister Fidelma by Peter Tremayne. She’s
a princess, a lawyer and a nun — it’s quite interesting. Then there is
Judge Dee, set in medieval China [by Robert van Gulik]. Brother
Cadfael of course [by Ellis Peters], who’s the historical detective.
Another nun is a Russian called Sister Pelagia, by Boris Akunin. He
had another detective [set in late Tsarist Russia] who’s a statesman
and official called Erast Fandorin. There’s Falco in ancient Rome [by
Lindsey Davis]. Quite a lot of people — in fact, that was one of the
reasons why I wanted to create a Mughal detective. There are
detectives from all over the world but no Mughal detectives.
Why, in an imperial city, does your story stay away from the court?
I chose somebody outside of that because I think the court has been a
little done to death in popular culture at least — Mughal-e-Azam!
Everybody is clued in to the emperor and the wives and so on. I wanted
to explore for myself what lay outside the court. I wanted to go into
what the city was like.
How well is the 17th-century city known to us?
You can’t really see very much of it now. What remains are the major
monuments, the Jama Masjid, Fatehpuri Masjid. The houses where people
lived, the katras and kuchas and galis, that has changed a lot. In
Shahjahan’s time the material used to construct houses was actually
very fragile — they used bricks and mud. It doesn’t last. So what we
see today is more 18th-century and 19th-century. A lot of the
buildings are post-1857. It’s interesting to try and find out how it
was.
There are some accounts of European travellers who came to Delhi at
that time... Even though they concentrate mainly on the court,
describing and sometimes inventing what was happening, they did go
into the city and talk a little bit about that, so you do get an idea.
What was your process in writing this mystery novel?
I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, so I just went on writing
and the plot developed along the way — which meant that I had to keep
going back and saying “This doesn’t fit,” or that I needed to insert a
clue over here. Now I’m writing a series of Muzaffar Jang short
stories. For those I first create an outline of what was the crime,
who are the characters involved, what are the clues, so I have that
sorted out in my mind. I use this software called Free Mind — you can
create your bubbles of characters and who’s connected to whom and
stuff like that.
What was the first plot element?
The fact that all these [provincial] princelings were part of this
empire, yet not. They were sending monies to the Treasury and also
trying to emulate what they saw in Delhi. But they didn’t have the
money to do that, so they basically bled their tenants dry. All the
money from the tenants was not sent on to the Treasury. So they were
having to bribe officials at the centre to keep that hidden. That
struck me as an idea, why can’t we use this as a pivot for a story?
We don’t learn much about Muzaffar himself. Tell us something about
him known only to you.
He has this thing for independent women, for women who use their
heads. It’s going to be there in the next novel. And he’s very fond of
birds, because I am. There’s one story in which one of the important
clues is related to birds.
What else do you do?
I write travel stuff, I blog about old cinema, and I do my research
because there’s lots out there about Mughal India. I keep sifting
through stuff in the hope that something might spark off an idea.
THE ENGLISHMAN’S CAMEO
A MUGHAL MURDER MYSTERY
Author: Madhulika Liddle
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 300
Price: Rs 295
bademiyansubhanallah
Vidal, withal
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi October 24, 2009, 0:00 IST
A year or two ago Gore Vidal was expected at the Jaipur Literature
Festival, and was scheduled to make one appearance in Delhi. I was all
ready to arrive early and stick my hand out to have it shaken by the
master. There must have been many others with similar aspirations. But
in the event Gore cancelled his trip to India.
It’s forgiveable: he’s old now (he turned 84 this month). I suspect,
however, that I’ve missed my chance to see the great man in the flesh.
Old does not mean mellow — far from it. Vidal still reaches out from
his wheelchair, through profiles written on him by various Western
journalists, to refresh the stale and circular discourse on current
affairs and the multiple crises afflicting our leading superpower with
statements of surprising force and even, sometimes, viciousness.
Lately there has been a small flood of such articles and interviews,
because Vidal has a new book out. It is not a novel or collection of
essays, the two forms in which he excels, but a picture book, a
“visual memoir” of his life, containing photographs, letters,
manuscripts and so on. It is titled Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s
Glare (Abrams, $40) — a remarkably un-euphonious title from a writer
who liked single-word titles.
Not only does Vidal himself figure in this picture book — and he was
an uncommonly goodlooking young man — so do the many famous men and
women of mid-century America whom Vidal knew personally. The Kennedys,
John and Jackie, Eleanor Roosevelt, the playwright Tennessee Williams,
the writer Jack Kerouac, movie stars like Paul Newman and Joanna
Woodward, ballet dancers, politicians and so on — the list is long.
That radiant generation (or two) is more or less extinct, but Vidal
remains, carrying his many memories. He put many of those memories
into his entertaining and impressive memoir, Palimpsest (Andre
Deutsch, 1995), which turned out to be more about the people he lived,
worked, partied and had sex with than about Vidal himself. Yet
something of his peculiar combination of blazing wit and vulnerability
could be sensed.
“Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his
fading life, but for his country,” wrote Johann Hari, portentously, in
a recent profile for the UK Independent. Further on in the same piece
Hari quoted from the diaries of Kenneth Tynan, a theatre critic and
friend of Vidal’s: “What superb and seamless armour he wears, as
befits one for whom life is a permanent battle for (social and
intellectual) supremacy... Gore could never surrender (ie, expose)
himself to anyone.”
Those are two sides of the many-sided Vidal. Tynan knew Vidal in his
glory days. Those who write about Vidal now tend to fixate on the
first side: that of the novelist and part-time politician (Vidal’s
grandfather was an Oklahoma senator and he himself contested one
election) as participant in and observer of the great affairs and
chief personalities of his time — that is, when they’re not referring
to his being (mostly) homosexual.
Vidal himself helps the journalists along, recently by giving them
robust copy about how Barack Obama has turned out a failure (that made
the headlines) and how America as an empire is doomed. It’s not so
much pessimism as glee — Vidal was never a proponent of war and has
always been mistrustful of the methods by which his nation is run.
Even though he’s old and cranky, there’s such an aura around Vidal
that his words still shake people.
But nobody seems able to represent Vidal quite as the reader sees him,
as, indeed, a palimpsest of complexity, humour, depth and shallowness.
I, for one, read his novels as if they were non-fiction, because
that’s the kind of writer, and man, Vidal is — too good to be false.
bademiyansubhanallah
Author, impresario
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi October 17, 2009, 19:50 IST
Any book that William Dalrymple writes is likely to be a bestseller,
including his latest. Rrishi Raote watches the salesman at work.
Gaanja? I didn’t see any gaanja, did you? I’ve never seen the stuff in
my life!” says William Dalrymple, uproariously. I only asked because
he was describing the celebrations at home after his grand book launch
the previous evening, an event which included a performance by a small
group of Bauls — Bauls who are friends of Dalrymple’s and currently
lodged in a neat beige tent pitched on his lawn. Like many mystics,
Bauls are known to smoke gaanja.
“We chatted with the Bauls, we had Baul khana and we drank whisky.
Truth be told, the Bauls drank Old Monk. No academic text on the Bauls
mentions the important role that Old Monk plays in inspiring the Bauls
to new heights of musical brilliance.” A round of culture, after a
bout with the culturati.
At the launch, after the Bauls a theyyam troupe from Kerala took the
stage. The lead dancer, a man named Hari Das, wore an elaborate
costume and his face was painted to identify the god who had possessed
him and enabled him to perform. A trio of drummers kept up a cracking
pace. It really was a riveting experience, like pouring magic
fertiliser on one’s pagan roots. At one point the possessed dancer
stepped off the stage and danced down the aisle, scattering spectators
and photographers with every twirl.
Glancing towards the wings just then, I saw a memorable sight. There
was Dalrymple in his crumpled kurta, half-hidden behind a towering
poster of the cover of his book — and he was beaming and rocking with
glee.
“What were you thinking at that moment?” I ask now, in the bright
morning light.
“I loved the whole thing,” he says, not quite answering my question.
“So much so that it carried on here afterwards. None of us got to bed
till 2:30.”
Well, if I were the author I’d have been thinking: what a fantastic
and useful stunt.
It may have been called a book launch, but this was more like a high-
quality variety show with Dalrymple acting as host and impresario,
reading aloud portions from his new book between each section. Nine
Lives is about religious experience at the extreme end of the vast
spectrum of faith in South Asia, encompassing Hinduism, Jainism,
Buddhism and Islam.
What’s more, “What you saw last night was round two of what is going
to be, on and off, a year-long book tour and spectacular,” Dalrymple
says. He just spent two weeks in England on a schedule packed with
similar events — a Sufi troupe from Pakistan also took part — and
after India the caravan will move on to Pakistan, and, next year, to
Europe and the USA. I’ve never heard of such an ambitious publicity
exercise for a book.
Why this? I ask. “Partly I think book tours can be quite lonely,” says
Dalrymple, all the while stroking his pet cockatoo, a beautiful white
bird named Albinia (as it happens Alice Albinia, the expert young
travel writer who published a book last year on the Indus river, is a
cousin, so it’s a family name) who can be seen alongside her master on
newspaper pages across the land. “If you’re even quite a moderately
successful international author, a book tour can easily take a year.”
His fellow performers, he says, “are all old friends and we all
thought it would be very nice to promote all our things
simultaneously”.
Of the friends, Paban Das Baul, who led the Baul singers, has a new
album out; so does Susheela Raman, the smoky-voiced British Tamil
singer who wraps up the show with a modernised sung version of ancient
Tamil Thevaram poetry (she gets all the cheers); and Mimlu Sen, who
was Dalrymple’s interpreter with the Bauls, will see her own book
(Baulsphere) published in the UK next year. The publicity may be
useful to them, but Dalrymple remains the headliner.
In mock-marketing speech he adds, “The synergies have worked.” Whereas
a bookshop reading might attract 200 people in the UK, he says, “In a
music venue you’re pulling in everybody else’s crowds as well as your
own, and you might get 2,000. It’s more fun and the publishers love
it.”
Isn’t it rather expensive? “In the Barbican [in London, where they
performed on September 25] we sold 3,500 tickets — we sold out. And
everyone was paying 25 quid. Now we didn’t do much of that, but it
pays for itself, and it’s just much more fun than four scholars
sitting on a panel and picking each other’s books apart.”
And where did he get the idea? “I did a documentary on Sufi music four
years ago called Sufi Soul [for the BBC’s Channel 4]. The guy who
directed it, Simon Broughton, is a music impresario as well as a
filmmaker, and he got all the Sufis to the Barbican, which coincided
with the television release of the film — and it sold out. So we have
a precedent.
“This particular group, though, we got to know each other and saw how
we could integrate music and literature at the Jaipur Literature
Festival,” which Dalrymple co-founded in 2006. “Susheela and Paban are
virtually our house band there. There’s a human link in Sam Mills,
Susheela’s husband, who was Paban’s producer.”
Complicated, but clear. “We may end up hating each other by the end of
the year,” Dalrymple says, “but so far it’s been good fun and made
good business sense.”
Primed for scepticism from Indian reviewers (“Of all the subjects you
can tackle in this country, there’s no subject which is more
surrounded by minefields of cliché, of Orientalism” than mystics and
religion), he adds, in what sounds like another dig at academics, “I
make my living from books. I don’t have a stipend going” — nor, he
says, a university house and pension. “If you have bad reviews, you
die as a critically acclaimed writer, but any writer who lives by his
writing has to promote his books. Plus, it’s hard. I sit in this room
without going out at all for the five months of the final draft. I’m
just writing, writing, writing and frankly I’d like to get out of it
after that!”
No problem with critical acclaim in the UK, I remind him — there, Nine
Lives has fallen on reviewers like rain on parched earth.
“The context I think in the UK was that travel writing used to be a
huge thing,” Dalrymple says. “I was very lucky that my first book, In
Xanadu, caught that wave.” In the last year or so he himself has
written frequently for the British papers on travel writing and the
last, vanishing generation of great travel writers — Bruce Chatwin,
Colin Thubron, Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark and his friend Patrick
Leigh Fermor, among others. More recently, he wrote a 4,000-word essay
in the Guardian (“Home Truths on Abroad”, September 19) on the past
and future of travel writing, suggesting that rather than the travel
narratives of the past, in a world weary of superficial travel, the
new travel writing (and here he paraphrases the young travel writer
Rory Stewart) “is that where an informed observer roots and immerses
himself in one place, commiting time to get to know a place and its
languages”. He quotes Thubron: “A good travel writer can give you the
warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people’s existence
that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any
other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in
communications, there is still no substitute.”
And indeed, the reviewers have agreed. But the fact is, Dalrymple led
them in that opinion. “As a writer, when you’re launching a book you
sort of try to sow seeds for reviewers, and that Guardian piece was
definitely trying to set the ground,” he says.
One aspect of the response which he doesn’t appear to have picked up
on immediately is a recognition that his nine lives — the life stories
of the nine South Asian mystics and practitioners he narrates in this
book — offer a mild but welcome antidote to the consumer focus of the
modern economy, a reminder that there are still significant spaces,
albeit few and shrinking, where the logic of the market and the
mainstream do not wholly apply.
But, of course, the notion was at the core of Dalrymple’s purpose in
this book, if tilted in a slightly different direction: “This is not a
theory I air in the book” — where there is virtually no theorising at
all — “but I think it’s true that the small cults, the devatas, the
regional variants of the epics... are dying out. Mainstream Vaishnava
cults are taking over from village goddesses, Tantric cults, mother
goddesses, Devi cults, and you’re getting new, standard, urbanised
national gods — Rama, Krishna. The same is true of Islam today, where
you’re getting a Wahhabised, textual, middle-class Islam which is
suspicious and hostile to local saints that have been the warp and
woof of Indian Islam since the 12th century.”
There’s plenty of warp and woof in the book. Dalrymple’s technique,
uncharacteristically, was to absent himself. “The very deliberate task
I set myself in this book was to be a mirror and reflect, not to be a
judge handing out sentences or marks. It’s always been my way as a
writer to let people say their own things and if you disapprove of
something only to show your disapproval by letting them hang
themselves with their own rope, so to speak.” The technique works
admirably with each of these tremendous characters with their hard-won
lives, but leaves the collection as a whole without a common thread of
argument. It is superb narrative journalism, but it doesn’t quite make
a book.
The other thing Dalrymple forgets, or ignores, is that the writer is
never absent. Even a mirror presents a reversed image, after all. He
accessed these nine life stories through interpreters — “Show me any
person who speaks Tibetan, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, various
Rajasthani dialects,” he says, justifiably — yet doesn’t properly
account for the multiple filters these stories have passed through
before arriving under the reader’s eyes. At any rate, this creative
and pathbreaking publicity tour will put Dalrymple back at front and
centre once again and redress his supposed absence from the pages of
his book.
NINE LIVES: IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED IN MODERN INDIA
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: xvi + 288
Price: Rs 499
bademiyansubhanallah
Godfather Nxt
Kishore Singh / New Delhi October 17, 2009, 0:08 IST
When Immacolata Borelli decides to spill the beans on her family, she
stirs up a hornets nest more powerful than even the Mafia. For the
Borellis are Camorra, a network of criminal clans who control fiefdoms
in Naples, levying their commissions, or charges, or taxes with all
the legitimacy of warlords. Only they’re nastier, scavenging clans who
grow in power through exploitation and ugly death.
The Borellis reign over Forcella, using fear as their whip, their writ
building up their coffers not on custodianship but on control. And now
Immacolata, a third generation Borelli, is in police custody of her
own volition, bent upon giving evidence against her siblings, parents
and grandparents. But she has reckoned without the revenge of
betrayal: Will they let her spill the beans when, even from jail, they
pull the marionette strings that control the district over which they
rule? And how will the other Camorra react — in support of those who
are their own, or viciously as they prepare to fight for control over
one more district to add to their own?
Immacolata, though, has not reckoned on swift vengeance. Already, her
death has been ordained by the Camorra as their trusted headhunter,
Salvatore, seeks retribution. Nor has she thought that the boyfriend
with whom she had a brief but passionate tryst in London, will follow
her to Italy, looking for her, and becoming another pawn in the
Borelli game that must end in vengeance. Eddie Deacon, regular guy,
“loser” even, finds hidden strengths in himself, but is kidnapped,
beaten, almost killed. As cops and detectives and negotiators gather
round for the final assault, Salvatore unleashes his brutality against
the enemies of the Camorra.An exciting thriller that pulls no punches,
The Collaborator is a worthy successor to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
Take a bow, Gerald Seymour.
THE COLLABORATOR
Author: Gerald Seymour
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 474
Price: Rs 295
bademiyansubhanallah
Making sense of an interesting phase in state politics
RAMAKRISHNA UPADHYA
broadening and deepening democracy: political innovation in karnataka
E Raghavan & James Manor Routledge, 2009, pp 292, Rs 750
Senior reporters of daily newspapers generally have a ringside view of
the political developments that shape the affairs of a state or a
country. It may be as routine as the press conference of a bureaucrat
or a minister or an opposition leader and as humdrum as it often gets.
But there are also occasions when reporters become witnesses to the
unfolding of a dramatic event or a sequence of events, which they
capture vividly for the benefit of the readers.
But a reporter working for a daily, has endless deadlines to grapple
with and he may not be able to fathom the nuances of the events fully.
Also, it may take months for the development to unravel itself in full
measure. A keen political observer with academic training, however,
can dissect the developments more meticulously and find a pattern over
a period of time and put them in proper perspective. Senior journalist
E Raghavan and accomplished writer James Manor have combined to
produce a fascinating account of an interesting phase of Karnataka’s
politics in their book Broadening and Deepening of Democracy.
Though Indian democracy is over six decades old, there are very few
scholarly works examining the evolution of the governments and the
impact they have made on the lives of the people. There are even less
accounts of the functioning of the state governments in a country as
large as India.
Manor, who is a professor at the University of London, has already
published three books that focus entirely or in part on Karnataka and
is, therefore, no stranger to the socio-political history of the
state. Manor and Raghavan, who closely followed the political
developments for over two decades since 1972, have critically examined
the role of two of the three chief ministers D Devaraj Urs, R Gundu
Rao and Ramakrishna Hegde in shaping or more precisely, giving a
dramatic twist to the state’s politics and social life in this
region.
As the writers explain in great detail, with innumerable anecdotes
that make very absorbing reading, Urs and Hegde contributed a great
deal in their different ways to the broadening of democracy in
Karnataka. The changes they brought about, fighting against
considerable odds, have rightly given them an iconic status in Indian
political history. Having displayed political acumen and vision which
transformed Karnataka during their tenures, both Urs and Hegde desired
and deserved a role at the national level when they were still in
their prime, but circumstances and personalities ‘conspired’ to deny
them the honour.
The battles that Devaraj Urs as chief minister (1972-80) fought to
break the monopoly of powerful castes, while single-mindedly pursuing
social engineering, as also the land reforms that he pushed through in
the teeth of opposition, made him out as a leader with strong belief
and commitment. The authors also rightly note that in a way Urs was
responsible for ‘institutionalising’ political corruption, which has
now grown exponentially.
Ramakrishna Hegde, who became chief minister (1983-88) by ‘chance,’
tried to change the political discourse by propagating ‘value-based
politics’, but ultimately became a victim of his own hypocrisy. His
greatest contributions were decentralisation of power to the village
level and democratised sharing of responsibilities in the Cabinet,
which threw up a new crop of leaders. The challenges he faced were
less daunting than what Urs did, and as the authors note, he lacked
Urs’ killer instinct.
One fails to understand why, while dealing with these two giants, a
‘pygmy’ like Gundu Rao gets so much of attention in the book. The only
explanation could be that Rao happens to be a chronological link and
offers quite a contrast. This book is a must read for all students of
evolution of politics.
bademiyansubhanallah
November 22, 2009
A communication guide
By Ashish Joshi
Speaking English Effectively, Krishna Mohan & NP Singh, Macmillan
Publishers India Ltd, Pp 235, Rs 145.00
Spoken English is extensively used in business, industry, government
research and education for day-to-day dealings. It is also an
instrument of intellectual discussion and social interaction among the
members of the educated class. To achieve success in one’s career,
particularly in a country like India with many languages and dialects,
it is necessary to acquire the ability to speak English effectively as
it serves as a link language. The British statesman Gladstone had
aptly remarked, "Many a professional man now in obscurity might have
risen to the highest rank if he had been far-seeing enough to train
his voice."
Though spoken English finds a place in the English language syllabi of
many universities and is also included in the training and executive
development programmes of institutions, its teaching leaves much to be
desired. One of the main reasons is the paucity of relevant and
adequate practice material and detailed guidance on how to use it
effectively. The authors claim that this book is designed to meet this
need.
The book covers the technique of acquiring a correct pronunciation as
well as the art of public speaking. The text has been divided into two
parts. Part one discusses the fundamentals of speech production and
the principles of public speaking. Part two contains practice
material, which has been divided into 116 units and arranged in six
chapters, each concentrating on a set of specific skills required at a
particular phase of development. Every unit begins with a note, giving
practical units and providing the proper context, wherever necessary,
to help the learner use the material with success.
The authors suggest ways of organising one’s speech. They say when
wanting to make a speech, we should first determine how we are going
to handle the three fundamental parts of a speech, namely, the
introduction, the body and the conclusion. This way the ideas fall
automatically into place and follow each other logically. They say
that the body of the speech should contain the main parts and help in
deciding in what order to present them. A lot will depend on how you
unfold the ideas, with the points you have made to serve as points on
which to expound your statements.
The book caters to specific needs and requirements of learners of
English as a second language and also provides numerous specimens,
examples and illustrations.
(Macmillan Publishers India Ltd, 2/10, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New
Delhi-110 002.)
bademiyansubhanallah
November 22, 2009
Bookmark
An ex-cop on internal security
By Manju Gupta
India in Turmoil, Ved Marwah, Rupa & Co., Pp 352, Rs. 395.00
Written by a Police Commissioner of Delhi, DG of the NSG, Special
Secretary for Internal Security and four-time Governor, this book is a
deeply reflective account of the internal security challenges faced by
India, the history and the possibilities for dealing with them. Their
importance cannot be overestimated.
The internal security situation in India today is "worse than at any
time since Independence," says Shri Marwah. The country is being torn
apart by conflicts of all kinds. At the time of Partition in 1947,
communal riots between the Hindus and the Muslims were the core
problem with all other security threats, except in the Naga hills,
were of minor proportions. Thus Pt Nehru could handle the various
issues without much difficulty as they did not pose a serious threat
to the country’s unity and integrity. However, today, conflicts are
erupting dime a dozen, ranging from ethnic violence in the north-east
to communal violence in other parts of the country. "What is worse,
many of these conflicts enjoy the tacit, if not open, support of the
ruling parties," points out Shri Marwah. His sorrow is that the
‘divide and rule’ policy appears to be the order of the day and an
increasingly divided polity is finding it difficult to cope with them.
He considers the threat to India’s unity and integrity not just from
the border-states in the north-east and Jammu & Kashmir, but fears a
threat to India’s heartland by communal violence and Left extremism
like never witnessed before. He complains that while the terrorists
and insurgent groups are multiplying, "New Delhi appears to be
preoccupied with political intrigues and wheeling-dealing."
Since Shri Marwah knows the police best, his criticism of the
country’s control and management seems justified. He feels that those
in intelligence shortchange their "customers" by delivering them
intelligence only of the PMO or some such ‘useless body’. Those high-
minded officers, who tackle militancy, irrespective of danger or their
ethnicity, are often brutally murdered - like the assassination of IG
Police (Mizoram) GS Arya in a police station in 1975; the killing of
DIG AS Atwal outside the Golden Temple where his body lay for hours
while the state government waited for permission from the ‘scheming’
Union Home Ministry to investigate it and the killing of SHO, Maisooma
PS, whose body lay unclaimed until dumped at the police station by
militants. Shri Marwah finds that the entire system has "broken".
He describes how insurgency can be fought more effectively in many
parts of India but wonders if there really is any mechanism to fight
militancy in Jammu & Kashmir, in the north-east, in Andhra Pradesh, in
Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Bihar! The only success he speaks of
glowingly is that of Mizoram where the counter-insurgency and
induction of Laldenga into the parliamentary system proved worthwhile.
Shri Marwah sounds right when he says that counter-insurgency in the
hands of the State is calamitous as it wakes up only after the
violence has become unmanageable.
Written with a deep sense of anguish but fearlessly and warmly, the
author makes an eloquent case for the fact that if the State does not
act early in a crisis, it ends up getting trapped in a vicious circle
of its own making. He calls for a combination of clarity, decisiveness
and nuance for dealing with the multiple crises India is facing. This
book is worth reading, especially by administrators and those in
charge of the country’s security.
(Rupa & Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110 002.)
bademiyansubhanallah
November 22, 2009
A quest to find yourself
The Magic of Awakening: 111 Answers on Life and Living, Sirshree,
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, Pp 165, Rs 199.00
This book in question-and-answer format is introduced to make you
"find yourself, know yourself and ultimately be yourself," so that you
reach a state of pure consciousness, the existential experience of
being the source of silence! The author believes that the primary aim
of man is to attain and be established in this state and then share
his experience with others.
Human beings have the ability to communicate their feelings and
thoughts to others through speech. But some thoughts which are too
esoteric to be spoken are communicated only through silence. Through
experience, feelings, thoughts, speech and silence, we learn about
something extraordinary within us that makes us feel good when we hear
about it, meditate on it and experience it. What is it? What is this
truth that lies within us? Have you been able to see through the
mystery of life?
New events in life occur to give us the opportunity to evolve. They
come for our betterment. However, spiritual progress is not visible to
the eye. But by reading some of the examples one may move ahead on the
path of spiritual progress. Sirshree says the purpose of life is
‘life’ itself. The meaning of life "is the inner experience within
each of us, termed self, Allah, God, Ishwar, Lord, etc. It is the
living (sentient) consciousness within, due to this body being alive
and moving." The fact though is that the body is a dead entity, a
corpse. It is insentient, says the author. The body moves only because
of the self (consciousness), the living entity within us. That is why
only life has value. Therefore, let life return into life. When the
life in a body returns to life, it is called self-realisation. "The
goal of life is life"; it means that the purpose of life is to achieve
self-realisation and be stabilised in that experience; that is, self-
stabilisation.
Sirshree, founder of the Tejgyan Foundation, tells us how to awaken
and feel the magic within. It was his spiritual quest, which began
about 30 years ago, that led him on a journey through various schools
of thought and different practices of meditation. He says, "All the
paths that lead to the truth begin differently but end in the same way
- with understanding. Understanding is the whole thinking…listening to
this understanding is enough."
This is a book meant for those who are spiritually enlightened or hope
to be so.
-MG
(Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi-110 017.)
bademiyansubhanallah
November 22, 2009
Bookmark
The enigma of Ahmedinejad
By Jayant Patel
Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran’s Radical Leader, Kasra Naji,
Viva Books Pvt Ltd, Pp 298, Rs 395.00
Soon after the Mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected
President in June 2005, anxiety replaced election fever among the
Iranians. They wondered what to make of the scruffy, austere, Islamic
fundamentalist, the son of a blacksmith, who had confounded experts
and non-experts alike to win a landslide victory. Many had new jokes
to relate about the man whom they feared would ban short-sleeved
shirts for men, force women to don the all-enveloping chador,
segregate men and women in all public areas, keep on and on about
Islamic martyrs and generally make life more difficult for Iranians by
imposing an even stricter interpretation of Islam than that which
already prevailed.
Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? What drives him? What has formed him? To
whom, if anyone, does he answer?
Mahmoud was born in a small sleepy town of Aradan on the northern edge
of the salt desert of Central Iran on October 28, 1956 as the fourth
of seven children. "Life was difficult for our family and my birth
made it more difficult," wrote Ahmadinejad years later in his
presidential weblog. Aradan, about two hours’ drive southeast of
Tehran, gave up many of its sons to the war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Ahmadinejad also has written, "I was born to a poor family in a remote
village at a time when affluence meant dignity, and living in a city
was the height of sophistication."
Initially he studied in a government school but later shifted to a
private one when his father’s fortune improved. While studying in the
university, the Revolution against the Shah disrupted Ahmadinejad’s
studies. There were daily demonstrations calling for overthrow of the
Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini had moved from Najaf to Paris. On February
11, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed a government, proclaiming the
Islamic Republic and replacing more than 2,500 years of monarchy in
Iran. Ahmadinejad set up the Islamic Society of Students at his
university. He gradually emerged as a leading student activist
supporting pro-Khomeini Islamists at his university. For him there
were exciting times. From a humble background he now suddenly found
himself embroiled in a full-scale revolution and in touch with
Ayatollah Khomeini’s inner circle. But he could not escape the
machinations of the Western media when on June 29, 2005, only five
days after his election as President, he found himself being accused
of being a terrorist.
It is here that the author, an internationally acclaimed journalist, a
native Persian new settled in London and who spent years in Iran
interviewing friends, family and colleagues of the firebrand
Ahmadinejad, draws a far more compelling picture of the protagonist
than any offered so far. While documenting the often bizarre behaviour
of the President, with his visions of the hidden Imam and diatribes
against Israel, he also shows him to be full of contradictions - a
strange and complex man, once gripped by apocalyptic beliefs, yet
capable of switching spiritual allegiance in the quest of power; a man
fighting street battles in the name of Ayatollah Khomeini during the
revolution and described by former army comrades as a "coward’; a man
brazen enough to invite the German Chancellor to join him in an anti-
Jewish alliance and yet a sophisticate to win the political support of
the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard.
Taking us through the shadowy corridors of power, the author shows us
the plots, passions and personalities that will influence
Ahmadinejad’s next move while the world waits with abated breath. On
reading this book, one feels that the not so well known, not so
popular and not so visible Ahmadinejad is much more of a force to be
reckoned with than the mere bogeyman conjured up the USA.
(Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 4737/23 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New
Delhi-110002.)
chhotemianinshallah
Recognising each other
TABISH KHAIR
Sharing the same cultural and historical complex ought to make Indian
writers in English more receptive to each others’ work. Its absence is
a hurdle to developing a sustained writing tradition.
Indian English writing needs to look at itself, if it wants to
establish what is still lacking: a solid platform of evaluation...
Photos: K. Murali Kumar, Shanker Chakravarty, Ap, AFP, S. Arneja, K.
Bhagya Prakash.
Shared ethos: The making of a canon…(Clockwise from top left) Amitav
Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Amit Chaudhuri
and Kiran Desai.
Lists of books tend to depress me. They either contain unreadable
bestsellers, most of them written by Dan Brown, or they reflect the
inane and often illiterate prejudices of people who need to paste
reviews on Amazon. As such the list put out by the literary magazine
Wasafiri to celebrate its 25th anniversary was pleasantly surprising:
25 authors were asked to list one book each, published in the past 25
years, which they considered highly influential and significant. Each
of the books listed was worth reading, which is more than what can be
said of most lists and surveys of books.
At least six Indian English writers were asked, and only two of them
nominated an Indian book. Hirsh Sawhney listed the excellent Aag ka
Dariya (River of Fire) by Qurratulain Hyder, in a brave and necessary
effort to speak up for Indian literatures not written in English, and
I listed Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, though I have for many
years critiqued both the Western reception of writers like Rushdie and
various elements in Rushdie’s brilliant but problematic oeuvre. Like
Hirsh, I was tempted to go for a non-English text.
Question of familiarity
As I wrote in my piece for Wasafiri, in the 1997 anthology of the
‘best’ of Indian writing that he co-edited, Rushdie had briskly
dismissed Indian writing in languages other than English. He had not
advanced the reasonable argument that it was impossible to know (let
alone select between) so many languages, but the less plausible
implication that English fiction was simply better. In choosing The
Satanic Verses as one of the important books of the last 25 years, I
was consciously leaving out books — in the three other languages
(Hindi, Urdu and Danish) I have some knowledge of — that could have
competed for the honour. But to name them, in an English journal
published from the West, appeared less vital to me, for, they would
not be familiar to most readers of (even) Wasafiri regardless of how
many other readers might swear by them.
Hence, it had to be Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) for me: a
baggy monster of a novel, brilliant in some parts, self-absorbed and
gimmicky in other parts, a book of “metamorphosis, hauntings,
memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes”,
as The Times had put it. It is a novel that could only have been
written by someone from a Muslim background. It is also a novel that
could only have been written by someone immersed in Western ways of
seeing Islam.
One can love it or hate it — personally I feel a position in between
is the clearest indicator of sanity in today’s world — but one cannot
ignore it. Perhaps one could have, if a certain Ayatollah Khomeini had
not urged the ‘faithful’ to murder the author, if bans (the first in
India) had not been imposed or contemplated, if mobs had not gone on
rampage and the author into hiding, if the ‘liberal West’ had not
chosen (mostly) to use the conflict to consolidate its own need for a
devilish Other, the previous incumbents (Soviets/communists) having
recently disappeared with the Berlin Wall. How many novels become
History? This one did. How many novels lead to deaths — of supporters
and detractors? This one did.
Truly unfinished
And strangely enough, how many novels remain unfinished in the
troubled impact of their texts and paratexts? This one remains
thoroughly unfinished. The inability of critics on all sides to relate
to The Satanic Verses is inadvertently revealed by all but a couple of
texts written about it. This inability points to a future that is yet
to emerge from the cloud of unanswered questions surrounding The
Satanic Verses: is blasphemy a vehicle of truth; what relation does
freedom of speech have to cultural dominance in an unequal world; how
can we distinguish between a jealous God and an abstract principle
which craves similar sacrifices; are Western nations, with their
‘cultural’ Christianities, really secular; does our capability to
denounce pre-Capitalist structures of power rest on a matching
blindness to the employment of Capitalist structures of power? There
are many other questions, some raised by Rushdie, some against him. We
will be lucky if they are answered in the next 25 years.
That is what I argued, overcoming my distaste of aspects of Rushdie’s
writings in order to do justice to the socio-historical impact of his
book. At the time I listed the book, I was not aware that I would be
the only Indian English writer listing a ‘fellow’ Indian English
writer. For, Amit Chaudhury listed Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems,
Indra Sinha listed Nabokov’s Lolita, Sujata Bhatt listed Marquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude, Daljit Nagra listed Seamus Heaney’s North,
and Sukhdev Sandhu listed Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman
Mao. All are brilliant books, and three of them I would rank above The
Satanic Verses as literature in my own private list, though I would be
unwilling to allot them as much ‘influence’ (with the possible
exception of Marquez in a purely literary context). After all, The
Satanic Verses continues to throw echoes into our time and space, both
for believers and unbelievers, defenders and attackers, moderates and
extremists. Every year at least one new — much inferior — The Satanic
Verses is spawned by some writer in some corner of the world, and the
whole drama re-run in some other corner. Influence, to my mind, cannot
be limited to the literary.
But what surprises me is the fact that other Indian English writers
find it so difficult to relate to other Indian English texts. I do not
believe in Indian English writing as a genre, and yet, surely,
cultural and related matters ought to slant a reader towards texts
from his or her own cultural and historical complex? This seems to be
indicated by the Caribbean writers on Wasafiri’s list, who mostly
chose other (excellent) Caribbean texts. But not us Indian writers in
English! Is this so because India (and its diaspora) contains so many
disparities that Indian English writers cannot see themselves
reflected in other Indian writers? But that also applies to my
relation to Rushdie’s oeuvre or Hirsh Sawhney’s to Qurratulain Hyder’s
River of Fire: we come from backgrounds which hold little in common
with the writers of the texts we finally chose. And yet, Rushdie, with
all the quirks and irritants of his oeuvre, and Hyder too, inevitably
echo more in my ears than Marquez and Bishop and Nabokov (with all
their brilliance) can.
Common phenomenon
This claim to complex cultural echoes shared within a socio-historical
context is by no means confined to Indian or postcolonial writing.
After all, it was used just a few days ago to explain the award of the
(Swedish) Nobel Prize to yet another European writer. “If you are
European, (it is) easier to relate to European literature,” Peter
Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told The
Associated Press.
Perhaps one can argue that Indian writing in English remains admirably
un-clannish. This is good. What is bad is that its lack of self-
attention aborts the kind of independent critical discourse without
which a sustained writing tradition can not arise. Indian English
writing needs to look at itself, if it wants to establish what is
still lacking: a solid platform of evaluation that would be connected
by bridges to the world, but will not come stamped ‘Made in the West’.
At the moment, this is largely lacking — or reduced, when it appears,
to some kind of a nationalist simplification. Indian texts in English
are not necessarily too varied, but it appears that Indian writers in
English find it difficult to recognise each other.
chhotemianinshallah
Interview
Anecdotes of loss and desire
MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY
Alain de Botton, Heathrow airport’s first writer-in-residence, on what
it was like to sit in Terminal 5 and watch life unfold in one of the
nerve centres of the modern world, the airport…
Alain de Botton: In the midst of arrivals and departures…
Writer Alain de Botton needs no introduction. His books have been
bestsellers in 30 countries, covering travel, architecture and
literature. His essayistic books have been described as a “philosophy
of everyday life”. In summer 2009, de Botton was appointed London
Heathrow Airport’s first Writer-in-Residence (a world first) and wrote
a book about his experiences, “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow
Diary”, which attempts to capture the “inner workings” of one of the
world’s busiest airports. In de Botton’s words, the airport is where
you can see in action all the big themes that we otherwise know just
as abstractions: the power of technology, globalisation, the
environmental debate, consumerism, the frenzy of the modern workplace
and the dreams of travel. The first 10,000 copies are distributed for
free to Heathrow passengers. Excerpts from an exclusive e-mail
interview…
A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, 2009, Alain de Botton,
Profile Books, p.112, £8.99.
Heathrow wanted a writer-in-residence. How did you see yourself fit
in?
It was rare and unusual for a gigantic corporation like BAA, the
owners of Heathrow, to have any time for a writer. I responded with an
open mind to their invitation to come and spend a week, observing and
writing about Heathrow. The deal we struck was that I should be able
to speak to anyone about anything, and publish my words without
interference. They took a gulp, but agreed.
Critics would say it’s publicity for Heathrow, but would you say it’s
a new literary experiment…
It was a fascinating assignment. The real problem with airports is
that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane and tend not to
look around at our surroundings. And yet airports definitely reward a
second look — they are the imaginative centres of the modern world.
You sat at Terminal 5 and watched the world pass by. Your words
appeared on a screen behind. How was the experience?
The setting was certainly rich in distractions. Every few minutes, a
voice would make an announcement, for example, attempting to reunite a
Mrs Barker, recently arrived from Frankfurt… For most passengers, I
was simply a terminal employee and therefore a useful source of
information on finding the customs desk or the cash machine. Those who
realised my role found it more appropriate to consider the desk as an
opportunity for confessions. I was approached by a man embarking on
what he wryly termed the holiday of a lifetime to Bali with his wife,
who was months away from succumbing to an incurable brain cancer.
Another man explained that he had been visiting his family in London,
but that he had a second one in Los Angeles who was ignorant of the
first. He had five children and two mothers-in-law but his face bore
none of the strains of his itinerary.
There were more permanent members of the terminal. My closest
associate was Ana-Marie, the cleaner of my section of the check-in
area, who wished very much to be in my book and often came to talk to
me about the possibility, though when I suggested that she could
without difficulty be included, she became troubled and insisted that
she would have to have her real name and features disguised, for she
had disappointed too many people back in Transylvania, where she had
as a young woman come at the top of her class in the conservatoire and
was widely thought to have achieved renown abroad as a classical
singer.
The presence of a writer occasionally raised expectations that
something dramatic might be on the verge of occurring, the sort of
thing that one might read about in a novel. My explanation that I was
merely looking around, and required nothing more extraordinary of the
airport than that it continue to operate much as it did every other
day of the year, was sometimes greeted with disappointment … My
notebooks grew thick with anecdotes of loss, desire and expectation,
snapshots of travellers’ souls on their way to the skies.
Aviation in literature is not exactly new…What do we see new in A Week
At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary?
What makes good literature isn’t so much the novelty of the subject
matter, as the approach. I have gone for a digressive, thoughtful,
personally-flavoured essayistic style which will hopefully appeal to
anyone who likes this sort of thing.
There was the riveting television series “Airport”, about life at
Heathrow. What are the themes in your “assignment”?
Television does things in a very particular way; and when it covers
airports, it tends always to head for obvious conflict. For me, the
challenge was to capture atmosphere and mood. For example, not long
into my stay, evening became my favourite time at the airport. By
eight, most of the choppy short-haul European traffic had come and
gone. The majority of the passengers left in the terminal at this hour
were booked on one or another of the flights that departed every
evening for the East, unbeknownst to most of the households of north-
west London which they crossed en route for Singapore, Seoul, Hong
Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangkok.
There was a lonely atmosphere but, unusually, it felt pleasant for
being so general …
… Because the arrival of night typically pulls us back towards the
hearth, there seemed something especially brave and admirable about
those travellers who were preparing to entrust themselves to the
darkness, to be carried in a craft navigated by instruments alone and
to surrender to sleep, finally, only over Azerbaijan or the Kalahari
Desert.
“Airport” had star characters like Jeremy Spake and Michelle Harris,
the Terminal Duty officer to name two. Any similarities in your work?
My star character is the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. When I
went to meet him, I had come to the conclusion that though Mr. Walsh
was the CEO of one of the world’s largest airlines, it would be wholly
unfair of me to treat him like a businessman … Considered
collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation has never in its
history shown a profit. It seemed no less absurd to evaluate an
airline according to its profit-and-loss statement than to judge a
great poet by his or her royalty statements. In order to understand
such things properly, I concluded that society would have to learn to
look at airlines as one might consider a work of art.
The air links between the UK and India go back a long way. Is there
any characterisation based on passenger traffic from this part of the
world?
I meet up with a family flying to Mumbai. They go into the faith room
to light a candle to Ganesh though they are prevented from doing so by
airline regulations. I was interested in their approach to technology.
They were utterly scientific people, inhabitants of super-modernity,
and yet they saw nothing wrong with paying homage to an ancient deity,
just in case!
Heathrow has had its share of well-publicised chaos, particularly with
baggage handling. How incident-free was your stay?
There was just the ordinary chaos of terminal life. Three people died
when I was there. That’s a normal number for a week. One Cathay
Pacific dug his wheels into the grass next to the taxi way. An Olympic
airlines took the wrong turning on to a runway. Nothing fatal ... just
ordinary human error.
chhotemianinshallah
Poetics
Remembering Faiz
RAKESH MANI
For the 25th anniversary of the death of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, invoking his
persona and poetry.
Of Urdu poetry’s timeless greats, different poets are remembered for
different things. While Mirza Ghalib is famous for his pining and
pathos, Allama Iqbal for his patriotism, fervour and elevation to the
status of Pakistan’s national poe t, Faiz Ahmed Faiz is still
remembered as a revolutionary on the 25th anniversary of his death. He
was a humanist in the best sense of the word, and his poetry was free
of any racial or religious prejudice.
Young poet
At every gathering he drew large crowds and his poetry made him the
centre of attention. His genius was recognized early, and he was drawn
into the charmed circles of Lahore’s Aesthetes Club and later, the
Progressive Writers Movement. A poet right from his teenage years, he
delivered this striking couplet at his very first mushaira, or poetic
gathering, in Sialkot where he was studying for his Bachelors degree:
Lab bandh hain Saaqi, meree aankhon ko pilaa
Woh jaam jo minnatkash-e-sehba nahin hota
[O Saaqi, my lips are sealed. Let my eyes take a sip
Of that wine without drawing to ask for it]
After Masters Degrees in English and Arabic literature, he became
progressively more involved with the Communist Party. Like many of his
contemporaries, Faiz’s politics was greatly influenced by the
Bolshevik Revolution.
It was around this time that he met Alys. She had come to India to
marry a Sikh gentleman to whom she had been engaged while he was at
Sandhurst. Finding that he was already engaged to someone else, a
heart-broken Alys married Faiz, and bore him two daughters: Saleema
and Muneeza. Saleema married the noted Lahore professor and playwright
Shoaib Hashmi, and became an artist in her own right. At the behest of
the Communist Party, Faiz then served in the British Army’s
Information department in World War II. The Communists had changed
their stand on the war, from opposing it to then supporting Allied
action after the USSR was attacked by the Germans. His final posting
saw him heading the propaganda department in Singapore. Soon after his
discharge, the Subcontinent was ravaged by Partition.
The horrors of that bloody vivisection left Faiz deeply troubled and,
although he decided to stay on in Lahore, he refused to accept the
distinctions between the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In
Lahore, he distinguished himself as a journalist and edited the
Pakistan Times as well as the Adab-e-Latif and Lail-o-Nihar. But an
iconoclastic leftist and an apostate were not easy things to be in
newly independent Pakistan. He was soon charged with treason and
imprisoned for complicity in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. But
Faiz’s years at Hyderabad Jail brought out some of the greatest poetry
he ever wrote. Dast-e-Saba and Zindaan-Nama, two of his most acclaimed
works, were produced during this period. He continued to write poetry
through the 70s and early 80s and won the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lotus
Award and several honorary doctorates. Now a doyen of the literary
scene, he became a thorn in the side of the military government and
outraged orthodox society by denying God openly.
Inconsistencies
But there were many grave incongruities in his personality. He
championed the cause of the poor and disenfranchised through his
poetry, but enjoyed the life of a wealthy man with a penchant for fine
Scotches. He believed passionately in communism, but fraternized
easily with the social and industrial elite. President Ayub Khan
decided that the best way to destroy Faiz’s spirit was to give him
power. He appointed him President of the National Council of Arts and
gave him a state bungalow. Soon Faiz succumbed to the ease of life and
the pleasures of the bottle. In a chilling last poem, it seemed as
though he had a premonition of his death:
Ajal key haath koee aa rahaa hai parwaanah
Na janney aaj kee fehrist mein raqam kya hai
[Death has some ordinance in its hand,
Alas, I don’t know whose names are on the list today]
Rakesh Mani is a 2009 Teach For India Fellow. He can be reached at
rakes...@gmail.com
chhotemianinshallah
Endpaper
The nun’s tale
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
Dalrymple’s austere and exciting book on nine astonishing religious
lives opens with a moving story that should kindle interest in
Jainism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is the first mainstream account of contemporary Jainism to emerge
from a widely read and admired literary journalist such as the author
of The Last Mughal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Accounts of the sacred: Now Dalrymple joins other literary journalists
curious about the transcendent.
“No, no: sallekhana is not suicide,” says the young Jain nun
emphatically to William Dalrymple, referring to the ritual fast to the
death. “But you are still choosing to end your life,” the writer
argues. A little later, she responds with a smile, saying: “You have
to understand that for us death is full of excitement.”
Dalrymple first spots Prasannamati Mataji bounding past the other
pilgrims on the steps of the Vindhyagiri hill in Sravanabelagola, and
is struck that such a slender, beautiful woman was a Digambara mataji,
the severest of all ascetics in India.
“As she climbed,” he writes, “she gently wiped each step with the fan
in order to make sure she didn’t stand on, hurt or kill a single
living creature on her ascent of the hill.” More than intrigued, he
seeks an audience with her, and asks to tell her story.
First glimpse
Even to remark that her life and example is moving, radiant, awe-
inspiring and holy is not to say enough about Prasannamati, her
incomparable courage and compassion reflecting those of her Jain
brother and sisters. Dalrymple himself is humbled, and records her
story without artifice. What struck me about this first tale in Nine
Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is that it is the first
mainstream account of contemporary Jainism to emerge from a widely
read and admired literary journalist such as the author of The Last
Mughal. And this means this is the first glimpse many readers across
several countries and cultures will have of this little written and
talked about faith.
There’s so much on Buddhism, practically nothing on Jainism. In
bookstores, if you’re lucky you’ll come across a couple of basic books
on Jainism published by a Jain foundation, but nothing like the range
of books and writers on Buddhism. (Innumerable biographies of the
Buddha, none of Mahavira; so much is made of Emperor Ashoka’s change
of heart, little of Emperor Chandragupata Maurya embracing Jainism and
his atonement of a self-imposed fast to the death). For more rigorous
and deep accounts of Jainism you’ll have to look to academic writing;
of which there is also very little.
Which is why the “Nun’s Tale” in Nine Lives is important: it could
inspire other literary journalists to explore Jainism, startle young
people to examine the faith, provoke discussion among the book’s
readers on its uncompromising vision of non-violence to all beings,
and kindle new interest in Jainism among seekers. But most of all, I’m
hoping that through Prasannamati’s life, Jainism’s ancient and deeply
held dharma of not harming a single creature, great or small, will
shame and move us into renouncing any kind of harm or violence to
animals; especially the slaughter of animals for food, sport and
fashion.
Born into wealth, she met a Jain monk at 13 and joined the sangha a
year later. Her parents were shocked and thought the fervour would
wear off, but realised she was serious when, at the time of beginning
diksha, she sat still as her beautiful long hair was plucked one by
one, until she was bald. The ritual took fours hours and was very
painful, and she could not help crying. Later, as an adult monk having
completed diksha, the ritual was repeated, but as required, she had to
pluck each hair herself. Jain nuns travel with a companion, and she
had made a dear friend in Prayogamati.
For 20 years they walked the path of the Tirthankaras. “Walking is
very important to us Jains,” she observes, “The Buddha was enlightened
while sitting under a tree, but our great Tirthankara, Mahavira, was
enlightened while walking. We believe that walking is an important
part of our tapasya.” And then, quite, suddenly, her friend becomes
very ill. It was then that Prayogamti expressed her desire to embrace
sallekhana, fasting till death. For the first year of the fast, in
2004, she gradually reduced her food. After a year of this, it was
only a little juice and some mung dal and, every day, she ate a little
less.
Usually, points out Prasannamati, sallekhana is peaceful but because
of her friend’s illness it had become painful. In her last days, she
completely stopped eating. “It was very peaceful at the end,” says
Prasannamati. And then there came upon her a deep sadness and
loneliness: for the first time in twenty years she was without a
friend and companion. She wept bitterly, her guruji frowned but she
could not stop herself. The day after her friend was cremated, she
took off: “It was the first time as a nun I had ever walked anywhere
alone.”
Sympathetic but clear ear
The reader and the author are startled when she discloses that now she
too is on the path of sallekhana. Dalrymple tells her story with a
sympathetic but clear ear: you sense his admiration for the nun, even
as he writes that Jainism is a strange, austere and harsh religion.
The accounts of the sacred that I am always drawn most to are those by
literary journalists curious about the transcendent: Peter Matthiessen
and his Zen journals, Rudy Wurlitzer’s travelogue of sacred places,
Winifred Gallagher’s lives of 10 spiritual geniuses, Pico Iyer’s
personal history of the Dalai Lama, and Pankaj Mishra’s literary
biography of the Buddha. And now Dalrymple’s austere, piercing, and
exciting book on nine astonishing religious lives.
chhotemianinshallah
Second Thoughts
Of the inconstant heart
BY NAVTEJ SARNA
The Good Soldier is a novel about brittle social graces that mask
savage hatreds.
Three weeks to read two hundred some pages, but that’s the kind of
book it is. The Good Soldier - A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford
has the unhurried cadence of the beginning of the twentieth century
when readers could ind ulge themselves, say on a ship journey, reading
on the deck all afternoon before it was time to go down to their
cabins, open their steamer trunks and dress for dinner. But let me not
give you the impression that it is one of those placid books, a tale
of idyllic romances or generational family feuds. It is a true tale of
passion, a headlong dive into the mysterious depths of the human
heart, layered with contradictions, riven with inconstancies.
Emotional complexities
A few crucial words about the author: Born Ford Hermann Heuffer, Ford
produced a large number of books of all sorts (he described himself as
“mad about writing”) and edited literary magazines that supported the
work of writers like his friend Joseph Conrad, Hardy, and Joyce. It
was on his 40th birthday in 1913 that he started The Good Soldier “to
show what I could do”, intending it to be his last book. And show them
he did, producing a classic that has often been described as a perfect
novel, a masterpiece of a narrative in which every sentence needs to
be read twice to check for hidden traps, insinuations, hints and
deceptions. In his personal life, Ford was indecisive and emotionally
complicated. While his wife refused to grant him divorce, he lurched
from one love affair to another- the novelist Violet Hunt was followed
by the painter Stella Bowen and then by the writer Jean Rhys. His
fickle nature and unreliability in matters of the heart clearly seeped
into The Good Soldier.
At first sight the story is simple enough: The American narrator,
Dowell and his wife Florence meet another wealthy English couple -
Edward and Leonora - who are so obviously “good people”- at a German
spa and strike up a close friendship. Their “intimacy was like a
minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every
possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table
we unanimously should choose…”. Florence and Edward are both
supposedly suffering from weak hearts. When finally they both die not,
as we learn later, from their so called weak hearts but by committing
suicide, Dowell is told by Leonora, who has known all along, that the
two had an affair for nine long years. Dowell then begins to unravel
the whole wretched reality, almost reluctantly, as if he would rather
not know. His intention is to do it calmly, as if he is “at one side
of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul”
opposite him. But very soon he begins to bumble as the facts seem to
come upon him even as he tells the story. The graceful surface cracks
open and out pours all the slime of deception. Good graces hide
terrible hatreds, relationships are blackmail, love is a lie and
sentiment is just selfishness. His wife never really had a weak heart;
she invented it to keep him from the marital bed since day one,
reducing him to a lifelong nurse. The perfectly social English couple
hasn’t spoken to each other in private for years. The good soldier,
Edward, appears to the naïve Dowell as “a hardworking, sentimental and
efficient professional man” and seems to approach each of his many
love affairs with a deep passion and duty, but is actually quite
merciless in these matters. And his cold and seemingly “normal” wife,
when she finds she has finally lost him forever, pushes him over the
edge so that he cuts his own throat with a small penknife.
Torn narrator
Dowell is the ultimate epitome of “the unreliable narrator” in
fiction. He keeps to no chronology. He rushes back and forth over time
and place as memories assail him or as revelations occur, leaving in
his wake an “intricate tangle of references and cross-references” as
he tells the “saddest story I have ever heard.” But this is not
something he has “heard” (though Ford maintained that it was indeed
something he had heard) but a huge deception that he has actually
lived through. And ultimately one realizes that the narrator is
confused, lost, torn and bleeding. (“I don’t know. I know nothing. I
am very tired.”) Still unable to put blame where it belongs, he
concludes that the “passionate, the headstrong and the too truthful
are condemned to suicide and madness” while the “normal, the virtuous
and the slightly deceitful” can flourish.
And towards the end of this carefully constructed though seemingly
confused dark tale of human passions emerges the plaintive plea that
seems to be as much of the narrator’s as that of Ford himself: “Is
there any terrestrial paradise where amidst the whispering of the
olive leaves, people can be with whom they like and take their ease in
shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us
good people……broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives,
periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?
Who the devil knows?”
E-mail: navtej...@gmail.com Website: www.navtejsarna.com
chhotemianinshallah
TRIBUTE
Enduring monuments
VIJAY NAIR
The last week of October always revives the memory of two immortal
poets: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ambiguity lies in the literary gems penned by him that owes to her
and the luminous poems she wrote that wouldn’t have been possible
without his encouragement.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The doomed relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath continues to
hold morbid fascination for their admirers across the world. There
have always been two distinct camps owing allegiance to each of them.
The discord between the fans and admirers of the two has not even
spared the grave of the unfortunate Plath. It has been repeatedly
desecrated by her grief-crazed fans who did not want Hughes’s name on
it along with hers. After she killed herself, Hughes was to bear the
cross of being “her husband” for the rest of his life although many
critics consider him to be the more superior poet.
Scathing criticism
Plath’s suicide coincided with the rise of feminism in the west.
Because so many of her poems were scathing criticisms of domesticity
and motherhood, she became an icon for the movement. This further
contributed to the hysteria against Hughes. Germaine Greer was to
confess later, “Ted Hughes existed to be punished — we had lost a
heroine and we needed to blame someone, and there was Ted.” Plath had
a history of depression and attempted suicide numerous times even
before Hughes came into her life. In her poem “Lady Lazarus” written a
year and a half before her death, she documented her failed trysts:
“I am only thirty./And like the cat I have nine times to die./This is
Number Three./What a trash/To annihilate each decade.”
Her unfortunate history did little to dispel the anger against Hughes.
What further turned the tide against him was that within a few years
of Plath’s death, Assia Wevill, the woman who had caused the breakdown
of their marriage, committed suicide after murdering the daughter she
had with Hughes. There have been speculations that Hughes’s mother
died of shock after learning about the deaths of his mistress and her
daughter. Hughes had faced universal condemnation and notoriety after
Plath’s suicide. The shock of another two lives being lost over her
son was too much for the ailing woman.
Stoic silence
Hughes maintained a stoic silence in the face of the recurring
allegations that he drove his wife to her death. Barely a year after
the tragedy his mistress inflicted on herself and their daughter, he
married again, a nurse, who played mother to the two children he had
with Plath and put up with his life-long philandering. Much as we love
his poetry, it is difficult to condone the inhuman side Hughes seemed
to display towards the women in his life.
The ambiguity lies in the literary gems penned by him that owes to her
and the luminous poems she wrote that wouldn’t have been possible
without his encouragement. In the early part of their marriage, she
had long non-productive spells of writing. A kind of literary
collaboration made home in their togetherness where she took on the
responsibility of typing his works and sending them to publishers
while he seemed to have helped her whenever she was stuck. One of her
early masterpieces came about because of the intervention from him.
“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,/White as a
knuckle and terribly upset./It drags the sea after it like a dark
crime; it is quiet/With the O-gape of complete despair.” (The Moon and
the Yew Tree, Sylvia Plath)
At her best
The separation from Hughes may have done irrevocable damage to Plath’s
self-esteem as a woman and a wife; but it went on to enrich her
productivity. She was clearly at her best when dogged by misery. In
her depression over the betrayal, she was averaging three poems a day.
When she sought closure for the two relationships that were to define
the course of her life and her poetry, with her father who died when
she has only eight and the husband who left her devastated, her rage
spilled out in “Daddy,” one of the most potent poems to be ever
written.
“There’s a stake in your fat black heart/And the villagers never liked
you./They are dancing and stamping on you./They always knew it was
you./Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” (Daddy, Sylvia Plath)
Partial redemption
Hughes partially redeemed himself by putting his promising career on
hold for a number of years after her death, editing and bringing out a
volume of her collected poems that introduced a much more mature voice
than the world had met in her first and only collection of poems to be
published when she was still alive.
There is evidence to suggest he wrote poems dedicated to her every
year on her birthday after she died. He brought them out in a
collection of 88 poems “Birthday Letters,” shortly before his own
death.
“It’s at night/Sometimes I drive through. I just find/Myself driving
through, going slow, simply/Roaming in my own darkness, pondering/What
you did. Nearly always/I glimpse you — at some crossing,/Staring
upwards, lost, sixty year old.” (The City, Ted Hughes)
The personal lives of Hughes and Plath would always be up there for
public scrutiny. What matters to lovers of poetry however is that
these two creative souls completed each other in their lives and
deaths in ways outside the construct of conventional morality. The
poems they wrote because they had each other are enduring literary
monuments to outlive all the negativity they brought to their personal
relatedness.
Anniversaries
For those interested in literary trivia, Plath’s birth anniversary and
Hughes’ death anniversary fall just a day apart on October 27 and
October 28 respectively.
chhotemianinshallah
Contemporary classics
New books in Old series
PARVATHI NAYAR
A look at two novels — The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by
Swedish author Stieg Larsson and And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer —
that bring the spotlight back onto two very different modern
publishing sensations…
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Larsson’s books are powered by a very old-fashioned belief in a moral
imperative to bring bad guys to justice, but whose stories are played
out in a very-modern arena…
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Steig Larsson, Maclehose Press,
p.602, price not stated.
Such trusted philosophers as Iron Maiden and Def Leppard have assured
us that only the good die young, which unfortunately proved to be a
spot-on prediction in the case of two writers who are posthumously
hitting current headlines.
Douglas Adams, who died at 49, created a world that helped us make
sense of the one in which we live with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy quintet; now a sixth book And Another Thing has been added to
that galaxy by Eoin Colfer, creator of the Artemis Fowl series.
Swedish author Stieg Larsson died at age 50 before his Millennium
trilogy became an international publishing sensation; the last of the
series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is newly released.
Technically, Hornet’s Nest can be enjoyed on its own. However, that
would be a pretty daft choice as the prior two books are also complex,
compellingly written yarns. Added bonus: Larsson’s extremely large
dramatis personae make sense when you begin at the beginning with The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, which
have apparently sold more than 15 million copies.
Strong characterisation
At the heart of the trilogy is the eponymous “Girl” of the titles:
pierced and tattooed neo-punk Lisbeth Salander, one of the most
unusual literary heroines in recent times. She is many contradictory
things: recalcitrant loner, brilliant computer hacker, borderline
autistic-savant, a maladjusted misfit with bisexual tendencies and a
strong sense of justice. The diminutive Salander responds ferociously
to violence and injustice; she can — when necessary — rout strong men
many times her size.
Hornet’s Nest picks up from where the previous book ended. Salander
continues to be prime suspect in three murders that led to a nation-
wide manhunt — even while she is fighting for her life in a hospital
from multiple gunshot wounds, including a bullet lodged in the brain.
In the same hospital lies Alexander Zalachenko, the former Russian
defector with a deeply twisted connection to Salander; members of the
Swedish police can, and do, go to terrible lengths to protect his
terrible secrets. Meanwhile campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist —
one of Salander’s few friends — ropes in his colleagues at Millennium
magazine to work on her behalf.
The book unfolds from the multiple perspectives of journalists,
Sweden’s secret police Sapo, politicians, doctors, lawyers, criminals
and law enforcers to eventually lay bare the insidious network that
has ensnared Salander in its web. Larsson likes detail and the trilogy
clocks in at well over 1800 pages. Every character inhabiting Hornet’s
Nest’s very Nordic world is lavishly described. Yet, ingeniously, all
this information never once hampers the plot’s forward momentum.
Hornet’s Nest sees a reinforcement of the trilogy’s themes such as
high-level corruption, the violence that men do to women, and the
State’s tendency to ignore or cover up these crimes, leading to grave
injustices. In Larsson’s worldview — as epitomised by Blomkvist —
words have power. There are bad guys who need to be uncovered by
investigative reporters and conscientious law enforcers — and
punished.
Unique series
The ‘unputdownable’ trilogy is neither high literature nor a simple
thriller that’s just one among the recent wave of Nordic crime
detection. Larsson has created something quite unique — books powered
by that very old-fashioned belief in a moral imperative to bring bad
guys to justice, but whose stories are played out in the very-modern
arena of computer hackers, violent crime and sexually/intellectually
liberated women.
The books are an obvious extension of Larsson’s own life as a
crusading journalist who was anti-fascist and feminist; he was the
editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine Expo, and regarded as an
expert on right-wing extremist and Nazi organisations. The tragedy of
the author’s death due to stress and overwork has only enhanced the
mythical status of Millennium.
On a lighter note, death isn’t an end, if And Another Thing is to be
believed: “There is no such thing as an ending, or a beginning for
that matter, everything is middle.” We’re certainly in the middle of
some major passing-the-baton activity where literary icons are
concerned. Take Hundred Acre Wood’s Winnie the Pooh, bloodsucking
Dracula or suave James Bond: their creators are long dead but new —
sanctioned — writers are taking over these “franchises” and invading
the bookstores.
And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer, Michael Joseph, p.340, Rs. 399.
Attempting the impossible
A Hitchhiker reboot seemed an impossible task, since Adams had got rid
of most of his protagonists — and Earth itself — in Mostly Harmless,
the last of his Hitchhiker books. But when entrusted with the mission,
Eoin Colfer seemed to have taken the iconic, all-purpose advice of the
Guide — “Don’t Panic!" — to heart. Using such devices as multiple
universes, infinite improbability drives — and a green alien called
Wowbagger — he pulls off the literary sleight-of-hand of resurrecting
the old crew.
We are back to hitchhiking in And Another Thing with two-headed
intergalactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox (who appears minus one
head), depressed earthman Arthur Dent, crusading Trillian, sanguine
Betelguesean Ford Prefect, and sulky teenager Random Dent. Wowbagger,
the immortal green alien whose aim in life is to insult every creature
in the universe in alphabetical order transforms from a minor
character in previous books to a major player.
Wowbagger is bored-to-death by life but can’t actually die. Zaphod
blithely promises to have him killed by the god Thor — which
introduces Asgard, the country of the Norse Gods, and its inhabitants
into the Hitchhiker universe. Other plot strands revolve around the
bemused Arthur’s attempts to connect with his petulant daughter
Random, the actual “last” colony of Earthlings, and a slightly
lacklustre romance between Wowbagger and Trillian.
Colfer’s own publicly-expressed reverence for the original has
certainly won many fans over. Cleverly, his book stays true to the
spirit of Adams’s weird and wacky world of pan galactic gargle
blasters and off-the-wall humour, without attempting to blindly
replicate it. Thing is nicely droll in parts, as in the Guide Notes
scattered through the narrative that offer entertaining if useless
trivia. For example, the Note on Zaphod’s spaceship Heart of Gold
informs us that the spaceship “was so essentially cool that one look
at its brochure could skip a teenage male a couple of decades into the
future, straight into the middle of his own mid-life crisis.”
Discordant notes
Yet some of the Notes feel forced, and this is the underlying hitch:
that the eccentricities of a character or the silliness of a situation
can feel determinedly bizarre rather than spontaneously absurd. It
might seem like nitpicking, but the subversive joy of Adam’s creation
lay in its acknowledgement that the universe is arbitrary; that
nothing is determined so we might as well celebrate life’s illogical
randomness; and that there probably is a better answer to the meaning
of life than 42.
Adams’s original Hitchhiker’s Guide pulled off the often-opposing
goals of being both cult and part of mainstream culture. There seemed
little need — other than a commercial one — in trying to add to it. In
fairness, though, the last book of the Douglas quintet wasn’t quite up
to par. Douglas himself is supposed to have described Mostly Harmless
as “a very bleak book”, adding that he “would love to finish
Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note”. In that Colfer succeeds —
he brings favourite characters back to life in a wittily written tome
that reminds us that Hitchhiker’s Guide was the best bang since the
Big One. Froody.
bademiyansubhanallah
India divided over inter-regional marriages: Chetan Bhagat
Monday, 23 November 2009 10:46
Bangalore, Nov 23 (IANS) One of India's bestselling authors Chetan
Bhagat feels that non-acceptance of and resistance towards inter-
regional or inter-religious marriages in modern India 'shows how
divided our country is'.
According to the author, who was here last weekend to promote his
latest book '2 States - the story of my marriage', said: 'The refusal
to acknowledge inter-regional and inter-religious relationships
depicts how divided a nation we are'.
His latest book focuses on a couple who belong to two different
regions of the country. The book is inspired by his own personal
story. Bhagat is a Punjabi married to a Tamil Brahmin.
The author says the book is about national integration through the
medium of inter- regional marriages. 'The book wouldn't have happened
if I had not married a South Indian.'
'The book is not about a boy and a girl's love story. It takes only 20
percent effort to meet the girl; the rest, 80 percent of the effort,
goes into convincing the parents to marry the girl of your choice.'
However, Bhagat told his fans that the book was not a 'typical love
story with troubles', but a book with loads of fun and interesting
observation on 'love and marriage'.
The promotion of the book was attended by hundreds of avid readers and
was followed by a panel discussion on Indian marriages.
'Even today inter-regional marriages are a big deal,' smiled Bhagat,
accompanied by wife Anusha.
'I don't believe India has moved on. I think only 10-15 people have.
Inter-regional and religious marriages are the best way to bring
national integration,' Bhagat said.
All the panelists, including Bhagat's wife, asked the young audience
to follow their hearts.
'Although it was a tough decision to make, we succeeded ultimately.
Initially when we were financially not very sound, we had to go
through a difficult time, but the problems settled down. Yes, my
mother-in-law is still recovering from our decision,' said Tabu, a
Muslim married to a Brahmin.
'Stick to what your heart tells you and know exactly what you are up
to. One's happiness is more important and once it is achieved, others
will come around,' said Harathi Reddy, a successful entrepreneur, and
a panelist at the discussion. She is married to a man seven years
younger.
An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and
Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, Bhagat's debut novel
'Five Point Someone-What not to do at IIT,' which was released in
2004, is a fun-filled look inside the campus of India's most
prestigious engineering college. The book made him a popular author
overnight.
Thereafter followed his two other bestseller books, 'One Night@ the
Call Centre', based on young employees of call centres and 'The Three
Mistakes of My Life', a book which looks into the issues of cricket,
communalism and politics.
With his simplistic writing and minute observation on daily life,
Bhagat's books are popular as they talk about modern India and the
challenges faced by youngsters.
Talking about his writing skills, which have often been criticized by
experts for being 'too simple', Chetan said he found using simple
language which everyone understood most satisfying.
'I was informed that children in Bastar, a remote Naxal infested
village in northern India, are reading my book because they find it
easy to understand. This makes me most satisfied as I can connect to
people this way,' the author said.
Sid Harth
The veil: Identity or modesty?
A.G. NOORANI
Deoband’s fatwa on the veil may be dismissed. But not the issues the
veil has raised, especially in Europe, the U.S. and indeed in South
Asia.
BY now Deoband’s fatwas have become predictable for their narrowness
of outlook and a theology which has little concern with reason or, at
times, even with learning. Its fatwa on the veil may be dismissed. But
not the issue the veil has raised; especially in Europe, the United
States and indeed in South Asia.
The Economist of October 17, 2009, reported the debate in Egypt, which
has been raging for a century: “The veil has been put off and on as
fast as hemlines in Paris have gone up and down.” By the 1970s most
women had thrown it off. But it has crept back as a wave of
religiosity prompted many to embrace a more distinctively Muslim look.
Is the veil, then, a symbol of identity or a protection of modesty?
Faced with the onslaught, women adopt a variety of the symbolic attire
from the black niqab, which covers the face leaving just a bit for the
eyes, to “lighter novelties such as a colourful Spanish-style scarf
wrapped around hair tied in a bun”.
In October, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Cairo’s 1,000-year-old
Islamic University, Sheikh Tantawi, lost his temper when he saw an 11-
year-old student at a girl’s school wearing the niqab. He ordered her
immediately to remove it and issued a blanket order banning it in all
the girls’ schools. The reason he gave is noteworthy: “[T]he full face-
covering is an innovation that represents too extreme an
interpretation of Islamic modesty.” Islam does not prescribe the
niqab. It is an “innovation” by some Muslims who reacted to Western
influences in fashion as a “return” to the faith and an assertion of
Muslim identity. The Religious Affairs Ministry of Egypt will be
printing a leaflet called “Niqab: Custom not Worship”.
This is not enough. The crucial question remains to be answered.
Precisely what does the Quran say on this subject? Marnia Lazreg is
Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Centre and Hunter College, City
University of New York. The sub-title of her work is “Open Letters to
Muslim Women”.
She has interviewed women widely and done careful research. “In my
previously published work, I have consistently objected to the manner
in which Muslim women have been portrayed in books as well as the
media”. On the one hand, they have been represented as oppressed by
their religion, typically understood as being fundamentally inimical
to women’s social progress. From this perspective, the veil has
traditionally been discussed as the most tangible sign of women’s
oppression. “On the other hand, Muslim women have been described as
the weakest link in Muslim societies, which should be targeted for
political propaganda aimed at killing two birds with one stone showing
that Islam is a backward and misogynous religion, and underscoring the
callousness or cruelty of the men who use Islam for political aims.
Such a view made it acceptable to hail the war launched against
Afghanistan in 2001 as a war of ‘liberation’ of women. Subsequently,
the American-sponsored constitutions of both Afghanistan and Iraq were
lauded as protecting the ‘rights’ of women in spite of evidence to the
contrary. In this context, any Muslim woman who takes cheap shots at
Islam and crudely indicts Muslim cultures is perceived as speaking the
truth and is elevated to stardom.” Witness the empty-headed but
raucous Milsi of the Netherlands and Nagi of Canada. Neither is known
for learning.
In India, any Muslim who denounces Islam or Muslims becomes a hero,
and not only in the eyes of the Sangh Parivar. The soft-secularist or,
if you prefer, the soft Sanghi shares the approach. The author was
born to a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Algieria,
and is proud of her heritage.
Relevant to all
She decided to write these letters to women whose religion is Islam
and who either have taken up the veil or are thinking or wearing it.
However, writing about women necessarily means writing about men. “To
many in the Muslim world, well-meaning individuals beleaguered by
geopolitical events, these letters may seem pointless. But perhaps
such individuals need to resolve the apparently unimportant issue of
veiling before they can defend themselves more effectively. These
letters are also relevant to all people, women and men, seeking to
understand the human experience. I have reached a point in my life
when I can no longer keep quiet about an issue, the veil, that has in
recent years been so politicised that it threatens to shape and
distort the identity of young women and girls throughout the Muslim
world as well as in Europe and North America.”
In France, the state passed a law (referred to as laicite) on March
17, 2004, denying young French Muslim women the right to attend the
public schools if they wear headscarves. Turkey reinforced a long-
standing prohibition against veiling in public educational
institutions and compels faculty members to report and expel from
their classes female students wearing headscarves. The Recep Tayyip
Erdogan government’s attempt to remove the ban on headscarves in the
spring of 2008 threw Turkey into turmoil. The attempt was overturned
by the Turkish High Court as unconstitutional. The veil has become
politicised.
The author holds that “the religious texts lack clarity and
determinacy in the matter”. Shunning extremist positions, her letters
are an invitation to reflection based on the Quranic texts: “Quranic
words referring to women’s proper attire have been interpreted and
translated in various ways that add to the instability of meaning.
Nevertheless, at present, four words are commonly used to refer to
major styles of veiling: hijab, jilbab, niqab, and khimar. The hijab
has emerged as the standardised form of veiling across the Muslim
world, coexisting with local styles. It comprises a headscarf wrapped
in more or less intricate ways covering the neck but not the face,
atop a long skirt, long baggy pants, or combination of both. Often the
hijab is reduced to a headscarf draped around head and neck, worn over
any modern style of dress. The jilbab consists of a long garment
covering the body, a headscarf, thick socks worn with flat shoes
(usually sandals), and gloves. Frequently, a black face cover (niqab)
is added to the jilbab, primarily by women affiliated with a specific
Islamist movement such as the Salafi (or adherents to a conservative
interpretation of Islam). Khimar today refers to a specific way of
executing a head cover that usually hugs the head tightly and cascades
over neck and shoulders in a cape-like fashion.”
What the Quran says
AMR NABIL/AP
In Cairo, Egypt, students wearing the face-covering veil, known as the
“niqab”, walk with another wearing the “khimar”, on October 8. Sheikh
Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Cairo’s 1,000-year-old Islamic
University, issued a blanket order that month banning the “niqab” in
all girls’ schools. The reason he gave: “The full face-covering is an
innovation that represents too extreme an interpretation of Islamic
modesty.”
What the Quran says deserves quotation in full: “And tell the
believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of
their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils
over their bosoms and not to reveal their adornment save to their own
husbands or fathers or husbands’ fathers, or their sons or their
husbands’ sons, or their brothers’ sons or sisters’ sons, or their
women or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour, or children
who know naught of women’s nakedness. And let them not stamp their
feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment. And turn unto
Allah together, O believers, in order that ye may succeed.”
The references Prof. Marnia Lazreg cites are important: Sura 24.31.
The Glorious Quran, text and explanatory trans, Muhammad Marmaduke
Pickthall (Islamic Call Society: Socialist People’s Ar ab Jamahiriya,
n.d.). “I am using this old translation because it denotes the
translator’s desire to be ‘modest’ in translating the word furuj, or
pudents, and represents a standard rendition of the original.
Contemporary male advocates of veiling also use ‘modesty’ in the
translation of this sura. See Muhammad Sharif Chaudhry, Women’s Rights
in Islam (New Delhi; Adam 2008), Ahmed Ali translates furuj as
‘private parts’. See Al-Quran: A Contemporary Translation by Ahmed Ali
(Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1993).”
Interestingly men too are exhorted in the Quran to protect their
pudenda (also translated as “modesty”). “However, this exhortation has
not given rise to multiple interpretations, nor has it been used to
conflate dress with moral character, as has been the case with women.”
Sura 24-30 enjoins the believing men to lower their gaze and “be
modest”.
Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, a 19th century reformer, defined modesty as
an individual’s restraint from evil deeds. The author poses questions
few dare to ask and demands answers. “If a woman conceals her breasts
and legs but leaves her face bare, is she less desirable to a man?
What if a man is attracted to a woman’s eyes or lips more than to her
breasts or legs? If one agrees that men’s desire floats from one part
of a woman’s body to another, there is no way a woman can be
‘protected’ from it. Men’s desire is the root cause of veils that
cover the body and face, such as the Afghan burqa-veils that
obliterate a woman’s physical self. She must bear the body she was
born with, just as a convict must bear the ball and chain. Concealment
of the body is thus a form of punishment as well as an apology for
having been born female, when it is not a means of redemption.”
She points out that while “it is commonly understood that an ‘older’
woman may discard her veil rather than wear it, the text of the sura
shows otherwise: ‘As for women past the age of child bearing, who have
no hope of marriage, there is no harm if they take off their (outer)
garment, but in such a way as that they do not display their charms.
But if they avoid this, it would be better for them. God is all
hearing and all knowing.’” (Sura 24.60). But commentators do not quite
agree on its precise meaning.
Al Azhar University acknowledged that poor women are not under the
obligation to wear the veil or refrain from work outside the home.
Many a woman took to the veil to escape sexual harassment, which is
the subject of an entire chapter. Often, advocates of veiling ground
their view that it protects women in the following sura: “Oh Prophet,
tell your wives and daughters, and the women of the faithful to draw
their wraps a little over them. They will thus be recognised and no
harm will come to them. God is forgiving and kind.” The veil in Muslim
society is clearly not a symbol of identity; nor is there a clear
injunction in its support.
Irrefutable assertion
Prof. Lazrag’s assertion cannot be refuted. In Islam the hijab is not
a pillar of faith. “Nowhere in the Quran is there an indication that
the veil is a condition of a woman’s acceptance of her faith.” She
constantly draws on her interview with Muslim women to make her point
and to demonstrate the havoc religious bigotry and ignorance have
caused in the lives of Muslim women. The last chapter on “Why women
should not wear the veil” sums up the author’s views. They are based
on Islamic teachings, as well as the history of Muslims. “The history
of Muslim societies is fraught with instances when women wore no veil
without there being much ado. The veil rose and fell depending on
local political circumstances. Its evolution mirrored women’s changed
perceptions of themselves…. The current revival of the veil, often in
a style imported from Egypt (a headscarf and long overcoat) coincided
with a failed development policy, a civil war that pitted the
government against a radical and splintered Islamist movement, and the
emergence of an intraregional movement of cultural identity inflicted
by geopolitical events. What goes on in Baghdad and Cairo, Washington,
D.C., and Paris has resonance in Algiers, Rabat or Amman. In the
history of domination, resistance, and protest in Middle Eastern
societies, the veil has been an enduring symbol and fertile ground for
dramatising political ideologies.”
In the Shah’s Iran the veil was used by women as a form of protest. In
Khomeni’s Iran it became an oppressive mandate from men to women.
“Unlike religious prescriptions pertaining to dogma, the veil is a
historical, if not the most historical, exhortation and therefore
amenable to change. It carried no heretical connotation or penalty.
Going out without it is not a prohibition, as usury or drinking
alcohol is. This explains why nineteenth century Muslim reformists
called for improvements in women’s social lives – largely held back by
veiling. However, even the most liberal among them fell short of
declaring the veil a non-religious practice in its essence. In 1879
Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani warned his contemporaries ‘that you should not
ignore that it is impossible for us to emerge from stupidity, from the
prison of humiliation and distress, and the depths of weakness and
ignominy as long as women are deprived of rights and ignorant of their
duties, for they are the moths from whom will come elementary
education and primary morality.”
The veil should not be glorified. It retards women’s progress in
society especially at the work place and in public offices. Advocates
as well as opponents of the veil cite the West in support of these
views, albeit for opposing reasons.
Freedom to choose
The author’s conclusions, based on case studies, are sound. “Modesty
is neither secured nor enhanced by the veil. If chastity is the flip
side of modesty, the veil is no guarantee for it either, it lies
instead with a woman’s conscious decision to manage her sexuality
according to her conception of herself in awareness of the social
forces (whether religious or mundane) that seek to wrest from her the
moral autonomy necessary for her to make that decision. Similarly, the
veil is no protection from sexual harassment. In reality, it may even
stimulate more harassment as a number of men are not sure that a woman
is not wearing a veil because she is seeking greater freedom from her
family rather than out of religious conviction. Besides, men
themselves may be ambivalent about the religious status of the veil;
they may not see it as an impediment to making sexual advance to a
woman or even committing rape. For example, a veiled Saudi woman was
raped as she was sitting in a car with a former boyfriend.
Nevertheless, the reveiling trend acutely poses the question of a
woman’s agency, her freedom to choose.”
The West’s repression will be counterproductive. “A woman veiling
herself in Paris is making a statement about her place in French
society that has refused to treat her as a full-fledged citizen; it
perceives her as ‘allogenic’ and permanently marked as an ‘immigrant’
no matter the depth of her French roots. The veil for this woman
signifies the appropriation of a sign that has been so politicised as
to mean the rejection of French society. To the use of French culture
as a weapon with which she was bludgeoned, this woman uses an equally
powerful cultural weapon to defend herself. By the same token, she
finds comfort in acknowledging and assuming her Islamic heritage,
which she may have repressed for the sake of assimilation into the
dominant value system of her society. She revels in her new visibility
as a wearer of a reviled custom. A woman veiling herself in New York
also makes a statement about the positivity of her culture in a social
climate strained by the Iraq and Afghan wars.”
The veil’s revival is part of the revivalist fervour of the last three
decades. Women face a political as well as intellectual challenge.
They have to fight the recent trends as well as the perversions of
centuries past. “Ultimately there is no compelling justification for
veiling, not even faith. For it, too, needs to confront the power
nexus that sustains the repetition of the history of the veil. No one
is entitled to turn the veil into a political flag, and no one should
derive satisfaction from its removal except women themselves.”
Sid Harth
BOOKS
Elusive homeland
BISWAMOY PATI
Papiya Ghosh’s book examines the way the process of Partition unfurled
in colonial Bihar.
THIS book has been published posthumously, after the author’s brutal
murder in December 2006. It marks a sensitive attempt to visibilise
the muhajirs, or migrants, who were caught between the borders that
were created when India was partitioned in 1947. Papiya Ghosh has
looked up a variety of sources, including Urdu and Hindustani
material. The author’s basic approach is to interrogate the “received
wisdom” relating to complex historical phenomena, which include
nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the homogenising tendencies
associated with both the “Indian nation” and the “Muslims”. Further,
by taking up crucial complexities that include class, caste and
gender, the author problematises these categories and takes the reader
to fascinating areas of social history.
Most studies on Partition focus on the Punjab and Bengal side of the
story. Joya Chatterji’s recent book The Spoils of Partition (2007)
brilliantly delineates the manner in which Partition impacted the
lives of people when the “maps” of the two nations – India and
Pakistan – were drawn and the bankruptcy of the Congress governments
in West Bengal and at the Centre, while negotiating the first two
decades after Independence. By taking up colonial Bihar, just about 10
per cent of the population of which was Muslim, and examining the way
the process of Partition unfurled there, Papiya Ghosh makes a major
addition to existing scholarship.
In a very imaginative fashion, the author delineates the perceptions
of Bihari Muslims. She questions the centrality of the argument that
identities are premised on religion alone. Here she examines the
relevance of other alternative possibilities, such as the association
of identities with region, as in the case of the muhajirs and the
labouring poor. While developing her arguments, she illustrates
certain specificities of colonial Bihar and its “Muslims” and mentions
the diverse interactions that took place in a volatile context. She
examines the features that are often blurred, such as the functioning
of the Congress, which led to a serious sense of alienation among the
Muslims.
Polarised identity
Papiya Ghosh develops her argument by mentioning the Congress’
association with the Hindu Mahasabha and with Bihar’s landed sections.
These obviously undermined its capability to retain the support of the
Muslim masses. Electoral politics, especially of the 1940s,
contributed to a transformation of the Congress’ identity into a
“Hindu party” in Bihar, she argues. In fact, as historians such as
Joya Chatterji tell us, this trend is applicable to Bengal (and even
Orissa, which had a very low percentage of Muslim population). This
distinct Hindu identity and the fact that it was controlled to a
significant extent by the landed sections made the Congress rather
insensitive to the insecurities of Muslims in Bihar.
Papiya Ghosh also refers to the emergence of the Muslim League and the
Socialists which challenged the Congress and its politics in Bihar.
However, it was perhaps the Kisan Sabha that posed the most serious
challenge to it. The power of the Kisan Sabha and the peasant
struggles made the Congress adopt a supplementary draft, which
advocated the abolition of the zamindari system in Orissa, in its
election manifesto for the 1937 elections. Nevertheless, zamindari
interests that were upheld by leading Congressmen in Bihar, including
Rajendra Prasad [India’s first President], scuttled this move. Papiya
Ghosh discusses the political implications of this process. Besides,
she also shows how even the insignificant efforts of the Congress
ministry vis-a-vis land reforms alienated it from the Muslim League
over the 1938-39 period.
Looking at the picture holistically, Papiya Ghosh illustrates how
these features together made it possible for the Islamic identity to
be constructed as a homogeneous entity that seemed to remain
uncomplicated by problems such as class, language or region. Here, she
refers to the major role of the 1946 riots in Bihar, which created a
whole range of what she identifies as sub-texts that remained vibrant
right until July 1947. Thus, in many ways, the post-riots context
provided “solutions”, such as the exchange of population that marked
Partition.
As she puts it through her methodical research, these features made
both the Ulema and Pakistan relevant. The author discusses the way in
which these complexities triggered a “search” for a “homeland” outside
Bihar. It saw the origin of the identification with East Pakistan.
Nevertheless, the value of Papiya Ghosh’s work is that it tells us how
this process was contested by the Momin Conference – which had its
support base among poor Muslims – even in the volatile context of the
late 1940s.
Interestingly, while it began to question the exploitation of Momins
by Muslim zamindars, it shifted to the political arithmetic of numbers
to counter the homogenisation efforts that were being made about the
“community” and assert itself on the basis of numbers. It argued that
Islam was not in danger and saw the Pakistan “promise” as a
diversionary tactic. In fact, it described the Muslim League as a body
that was not the sole custodian of Islam in the country.
It was also extremely critical of the Congress, which had agreed to
the retrograde step of partitioning of the country. Its condemnation
of the Congress seems particularly striking; the Congress was
described not only as “antinational” but also as being responsible for
putting Muslims in a “very difficult and awkward situation” (page 107)
by accepting the idea of partitioning the country.
Hindu Mahasabha’s role
THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Congress leaders Rajendra Prasad (right) and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
in Patna. The author says that the Congress’ association with the
Hindu Mahasabha and with Bihar’s landed sections undermined its
capability to retain the support of the Muslim masses.
Papiya Ghosh takes up the question of the Hindu Mahasabha and its
place in Bihar’s political domain for a serious analysis towards the
end of the book. Perhaps this reflects the mature historian that she
was, since the logic of the process clearly leads to this theme.
Besides incorporating the body of existing research, she also dips
into the materials relating to colonial Bihar. She is as skilful here
in drawing out the often blurred connections between the Congress
leadership in Bihar – including that of Rajendra Prasad – and the
Hindu Mahasabha.
Coupled with this was the Congress’ close association with the
landlords, which acted as a drawbridge between divisive politics and
the landed interests. This provided the ideological and political
basis for the drive of the Hindu Mahasabha to homogenise Hindus. Here
Papiya Ghosh not only refers to its standard phraseology of “Hindu
Civil Rights” and the theme of “abducted” Hindu women but also
mentions the (mis)appropriation of Census figures relating to the
Chotanagpur tract, which meant locating the tribal people as Hindus.
The author is clear about how the diversities of colonial Bihar saw
this process being contested as well. Here she refers to features such
as caste, peasant movements, and the predominantly tribal tract of
Chotanagpur, which proved to be stumbling blocks in the homogenisation
agenda of the Hindu Mahasabha.
Papiya Ghosh did not live to complete the book. Nevertheless, the plan
for the last chapter, which is included in the Introduction, would
have been a significant contribution. Here she had planned to re-
assess the meaning of the “two-nation” theory “on the ground during
the last 50 years” (page xxix). This would have told us about the
2,000,000 Biharis living in the 66 refugee camps spread across
Bangladesh since 1971. It is in this context that the author perhaps
included a poem (at the beginning of the book) often recited by
muhajirs:
Watan tha to azadi dhoondta thaa,
Ab azad hoon to watan dhoondta hoon.
(When there was a country I searched for freedom. Now I am free, but
have to search for a country).
Copyright © 2009, Frontline.
Sid Harth
BOOKS
Neighbour’s memoir
A.G. NOORANI
M.P. Koirala died a much misunderstood man in 1997. His recollections
are interesting and useful.
INDIA cannot be always in the wrong goes the retort and it is a valid
one. But it misses the glaring fact that India has been locked in
dispute with every single neighbour. Forget Pakistan and China, what
of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal?
It is Nepal that has borne the brunt of India’s Big Brother attitude.
In 1990, as External Affairs Minister, I.K. Gujral, author of the
Gujral Doctrine, secretly proposed a treaty to the king, who was then
resisting a popular upheaval, which was worse than the treaty of 1950.
Jawaharlal Nehru had called it obsolete in 1955. Nepal has been
clamouring for its review. India has been dragging its feet.
The text is published in an excellent work (Dynamics of Foreign Policy
and Law: A Study of Indo-Nepal Relations; Oxford; pages 253-257) by
the Nepali scholar Surya P. Subodi, Professor of International Law,
University of Leeds. It is published also in an invaluable collection
of documents by the scholarly compiler Avtar Singh Bhasin in Nepal-
India, Nepal-China Relations 1947-2005 (Geetika Publishers; Volume 1;
pages 1311-1315).
Himal Books, publishers of the truly South Asian monthly Himal, have
published the memoirs of M.P. Koirala, thanks to Ganesh Raj Sharma,
who was entrusted the task of seeing them in print by Koirala’s widow,
Manju. His son Kamal Prasad and Sharma were classmates at the Banaras
Hindu University. Koirala had submitted an earlier draft to a “reputed
New Delhi publisher”, who scandalously, “reported that he had lost
it”.
Koirala wrote again and was able to complete his life-story up to the
point of his appointment as Prime Minister in 1951, at the age of 39.
His more popular brother B.P. Koirala was passed over, and differences
arose between them. B.P. became Prime Minister in the first elected
government in 1959. Ganesh Raj Sharma also arranged publication of
B.P. Koirala’s memoirs Atmabittanta, which Himal Books published in
2001.
THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at a state banquet given in his honour
by King Mahendra and the Queen of Nepal in Kathmandu on June 11, 1959.
At the extreme right is Prime Minister B.P. Koirala.
The two volumes must be read together. They reveal how Nehru
shepherded Nepal’s transition to a democracy and became involved as
mediator between the brothers and between the brothers and the king.
They reveal not only his own notions of relations between the two
countries but record how successive Indian Ambassadors behaved as if
they were New Delhi’s viceroys. This charge was levelled also against
J.N. Dixit when he was High Commissioner to Sri Lanka.
Unpublished documents
M.P. Koirala died a much misunderstood man in 1997. His recollections
are interesting and useful. One half of the book comprises appendices
of unpublished documents, beginning with the minutes of talks between
Nehru, M.P. Koirala and Ganesh Man Singh in New Delhi on May 28, 1947.
The meeting was arranged by Aruna Asaf Ali and Mir Mushtaque Ahmad.
The last document is of 1990. A good few are in Hindi. One wishes they
had been translated into English.
For quite some time, Nehru prevented Nepal from establishing
diplomatic relations with other countries and even prevailed on
Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai not to send an Ambassador to
Kathmandu, warning him that if he did the United States would follow
suit. In this, as on much else in foreign policy, Nehru followed
British policies, not seldom rather clumsily. He reminded Koirala on
April 25, 1952, that India and Nepal had “agreed” that “in regard to
foreign matters there will be every attempt at coordination”.
N.B. Shah, Nepal’s Ambassador to India, wrote to Koirala on October 5,
1954: “Re: Our negotiations with China, the Government of India feels
that we should cautiously proceed in the matter and be in close
consultation with the Government of India. They do not believe the
Chinese government thoroughly. American charge de affairs Mr Kennedy
asked me about the reported negotiations between China and Nepal and I
had assured him very tactfully that nothing will be done against the
American interest as U.K., U.S.A., France and Burma besides India are
our allies and friends. But the Foreign Minister’s foolish outburst
and statements place me here in a very awkward position… I request you
not to allow the Foreign Minister to make boring statement prior to
Cabinet’s approval. Nepal and Nepal’s problems are proving to be too
ticklish for India, an object of sympathy to some and ridicule to
others. Top circles in Delhi look rather worried about affairs in
Nepal.
“The Kashmir issue will be taken to the Security Council and India is
going to be sharply criticised. Ceylon is not in complete agreement
with Indian Foreign policy. Goa’s handling by India has aligned the
Western bloc against India. Panditji, I am told, is much worried and
upset with the international developments in spite of his best efforts
to ease the world tension. Indian opinion is inclined to think that
one wrong step by India and India will be torn to pieces by the
American power bloc. I am also doing spade work with diplomats whom I
am courting to decipher by groups for supporting out application to
U.N.O. membership when it comes. I was advised by some of these
friends that our case study should, this time, be sponsored by Britain
and not by India. Because Britain today is more acceptable to the
majority of U.N.O. members than India.”
Nationalism and worse have affected most Indian writings on Nepal,
winning the court historian rich rewards.
Sid Harth
BOOKS
An epic struggle
V. VENKATESAN
Inspiring lessons from a public-interest legal battle, partly won in
1986, as recorded by the petitioner himself.
RARELY would one expect the findings of an incidental research into a
drab and dry subject to aid and inspire the campaign for the defence
of the Constitution and what it stands for. This book is a
demonstration of how such a thing actually happened.
The power conferred on the Governor/President to issue ordinances is
an emergency power for taking immediate action at a time when the
legislature/Parliament is not in session. The life of an ordinance
cannot exceed seven and a half months unless it is replaced by an Act
of the legislature/ Parliament or disapproved by a resolution of the
legislature/Parliament before the expiry of that period.
The life of an ordinance is limited because it is contrary to all
democratic norms that the executive should have the power to make a
law. That is why the Constitution provides that the ordinance shall
cease to operate on the expiration of six weeks from the date of
assembling of the legislature. If the provisions of the ordinance are
to be continued in force, this time should be sufficient for the
legislature to pass the necessary Act. Re-promulgation of a similar
ordinance, before the first one expires, in the event of failure to
pass an Act to replace it by the legislature, therefore, is against
the scheme of the Constitution.
The author of this book, Dr. D.C. Wadhwa, Emeritus Professor and
formerly Professor and Director, Gokhale Institute of Politics and
Economics, Pune, began his research into the re-promulgation of
ordinances by State governments almost by accident. In 1979, he
started working on a book on the agrarian structure in Bihar since
1793, when Permanent Settlement was introduced in the Presidency of
Bengal, which included the present States of Bihar and Jharkhand as
well.
As a part of that study, he began to research the Chota Nagpur Tenancy
Act of 1908. He then found that an amendment to this Act was made
three or four times in a year through ordinances. He collected all the
amending ordinances and found to his dismay that they were all
identical.
The deeper he delved into the subject, the more shocking the
phenomenon appeared to him. He was convinced that the Governors of
Bihar had been committing a fraud on the Constitution of India since
1967 when they started promulgating ordinances. He soon kept aside his
work on agrarian structure in Bihar and began to write a book, which
he completed in 1983, entitled Re-promulgation of Ordinances: A Fraud
on the Constitution of India.
The book revealed that the Governor of Bihar promulgated 256
ordinances between 1967 and 1981 and all these were kept alive for
periods ranging between one and 14 years by re-promulgation from time
to time. Out of these, 69 were re-promulgated several times and kept
alive with the prior permission of the President of India. The book,
which was widely acclaimed for its contribution to the rule of law and
legal awareness, soon convinced the author that he must file a writ
petition in the Supreme Court challenging the practice of re-
promulgation of ordinances. The book was part of his petition. The
response of the State of Bihar to the petition was hardly convincing.
The result was the judgment, by the Supreme Court’s five-Judge
Constitution Bench, in Dr. D.C. Wadhwa v. State of Bihar, delivered by
the then Chief Justice of India, P.N. Bhagwati, on December 20, 1986.
The court disapproved of the ordinance raj, and struck down one such
re-promulgated ordinance that was still in operation in Bihar.
The court declared the practice of re-promulgation of ordinances
illegal, unconstitutional and a fraud on the Constitution, but carved
out an exception to Article 213. This article imposes an absolute time
limit (expiry of six weeks from the reassembly of the legislature) for
an ordinance during which it must be replaced by an Act of the
legislature. The court held that there might have been situations
where the Governor would legitimately find it necessary to re-
promulgate an ordinance, because the legislature would not have had
sufficient time to replace it with an Act.
Continuing struggle
RAVEENDRAN/ AFP
A demonstration with a symbolic jail against the passing of the
Prevention of Terrorism (Second) Ordinance, in New Delhi in November
2001.
The book, under review, is a sequel to Re-promulgation of Ordinances
and enlightens the reader on several aspects of Wadhwa’s epic
struggle, which is still not over, because of the Supreme Court’s less-
than-satisfactory judgment in 1986.
Much of what the book contains is legal history through meticulous
documentation of the progress of the case in the Supreme Court right
from Wadhwa’s writ petition, to counter-affidavits, rejoinders,
written submissions and the judgment. A casual reader who has no
inclination to go through these documents will, however, find Wadhwa’s
Preface and the Epilogue useful to understand the huge obstacles he
had to cross to fight this case.
Legal academic Upendra Baxi’s Introduction is a bonus. Those who are
likely to complain that the data assembled in the book are not an easy
read may well listen to Baxi: “Whoever said that the archives of state
lawlessness must remain a galloping, unputdownable-type narrative?”
The sheer exasperation that a public interest litigation (PIL)
petitioner would suffer to get the court to hear the petition is not
easy to recount. Wadhwa filed his petition on January 16, 1984. The
five-Judge Constitution Bench heard his petition only on November 19,
1986. The intervening period was full of suspense about the date when
the case would be actually heard by the court, and marked by frequent
adjournments, rather generously granted to counsel representing State
governments by the court. That it necessitated frequent, and
unavoidable, visits from Pune to the capital by Wadhwa, imposing on
him undue financial burden, not to mention the trauma of an anxious
litigant, was never a matter of concern for the court.
As Baxi explains: “This work demonstrates that while the court has
assumed powers by issuing open invitations to citizens to come before
it to correct all the excesses of power threatening democratic values
and rule of law, it has refused, over the years, to consistently
assume a matching responsibility. A citizen activating the social
action jurisdiction of the court soon learns how arduous and hapless
the enterprise is or can become.”
In particular, Baxi draws attention to page 64 of the book which
documents the bizarre movement of the listing of the case, which can
only be compared with the game of snakes and ladders. Wadhwa’s case
was listed 37 times before it was actually heard by the Bench. Baxi
asks: “If a social action petitioner had to attend the court on each
of the 37 (actually a lot more) occasions – in this case coming from
Pune to New Delhi – you can imagine the sacrifice of talent, time and
money expected by the Supreme Court of India of a citizen pursuing the
constitutional adventure of restoring elementary norms of civilised
legality in India!”
The Supreme Court in this case directed the Bihar government to pay Rs.
10,000 to Wadhwa towards the cost of his petition. Calling it a cruel
constitutional joke, Baxi suggests that the court should have taken
judicial notice of the costs of travel, residence and related
expenses, apart from the mental agony involved in an altruistic
constitutional pursuit. He exclaims that while the state attorneys are
fully taken care of at the cost of public exchequer in deviously
defending manifest illegalities, a social action petitioner is
summoned to sacrifice a good deal in the pursuit of an uncertain
constitutional result.
AJIT KUMAR/AP
L.K. Advani, who as Union Home Minister, was the author of the first-
ever re-promulgation of an ordinance – on December 30, 2001 – by the
Central government.
Baxi states that the Supreme Court remains too lenient concerning the
timing of submission of affidavits by state counsel and the standards
of argumentation therein offered. By doing so, the court endorses in
effect the conversion of social action litigation into an adversarial
mode, he cautions.
The Supreme Court’s judgment in this case would doubtless find its
place in the list of the court’s many disappointing judgments. Baxi
puts it succinctly: “The decision in this case offers a symbolic
victory for the citizen; but the victory remains only and merely
such....The Supreme Court exercised a hortative or advisory
jurisdiction.” According to him, the court could have issued a
directive explicitly prohibiting the practice of re-promulgation of
ordinances after the period of six weeks from the reassembly of the
legislature, as is mandatory under Article 213(2)(a), but it did not.
“In a context where a state has usurped unconstitutionally the power
of the elected representatives of the people, the Supreme Court
remains content to develop a jurisprudence of prayer...and with
fervent appeals summoning an errant executive to the path of
constitutional rectitude,” he says.
Baxi warns the reader against entertaining any sense of complacency.
One does not quite know, he says, pending further empirical studies
whether ordinance raj-type practices of governance have abated;
inveterate political habits die hard. Baxi suggests that the overall
message of Wadhwa’s profound work remains much wider: Indian
legislatures far too disproportionately dedicate their precious time
to purposes other than making laws and public policies.
Wadhwa, in his epilogue, rightly disagrees with the court over its
limited justification for the re-promulgation of an ordinance. He says
that if the time at the disposal of the legislature in a particular
session is short, the solution does not lie in the re-promulgation of
an ordinance but it lies in extending the duration of a session of the
legislature.
Wadhwa’s epilogue is also useful to record for posterity the hypocrisy
of former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani. On December 22, 1983, as
the Leader of the Opposition, Advani initiated a debate in the Rajya
Sabha through a calling attention motion on Wadhwa’s book. During this
debate, Advani described re-promulgation of ordinances as politically
immoral and as a fraud on the Constitution, and sought an assurance
from the then Home Minister that in all cases thereafter the President
would withhold his assent and refuse to give permission for re-
promulgation of ordinances. He also led a walkout by his partymen
because of the Minister’s reluctance to give such an assurance to the
House.
However, as the Union Home Minister, Advani was the author of the
first-ever re-promulgation of an ordinance – on December 30, 2001 – by
the Central government. On that day, the Prevention of Terrorism
(Second) Ordinance, 2001 was promulgated to ensure the continuity of
the earlier POTO, which was about to lapse, because of the inability
of the government to secure the requisite support for its Bill to
replace the ordinance in the Rajya Sabha.
Clearly, the then government made political use of its non-existent
power to re-promulgate an ordinance – a situation not contemplated by
the Supreme Court in its judgment in the Wadhwa case. The author
quotes from the judgment: “The power to promulgate an ordinance is
essentially a power to be used to meet an extraordinary situation and
it cannot be allowed to be perverted to serve political ends.”
It is high time the Supreme Court reviewed its own decision in this
case so as to leave no ambiguities in the interpretation of its
judgment. Parliament, in its turn, must heed Wadhwa’s specific
proposals outlined in this book, to amend the Constitution in order to
rule out re-promulgation of an ordinance in any situation.
bademiyansubhanallah
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Disempowerment of a majority
In these times of secular fundamentalism, this book is a courageous
effort to trace the political disempowerment of the Hindus in the
Indian polity over the last 130 years, write KR Phanda and Prafull
Goradia
Eclipse Of The Hindu Nation: Gandhi And His Freedom Struggle
Author: Radha Rajan
Publisher: New Age Publishers
Price: Rs 495
For Radha Rajan to write of Gandhi as the hero of the epical eclipse
of the Hindu rashtra, at a time when Dr Manmohan Singh’s “Muslim
First” raj is on the ascendant and secular fundamentalism is on the
rise is courageous. In 1919, Gandhi put his stamp on the
fundamentalism to follow by presiding over the Khilafat Movement for
retaining the decadent Sultan of Turkey as the Caliph of all Islam.
Even Mohammed Ali Jinnah opposed the Movement. Who could help the
Hindu when his supremo for the next three decades was more pro-Islamic
than the founder of the Muslim homeland?
Here is Rajan’s thesis on the Hindu eclipse: “This work attempts to
trace the origins and the trajectory of Indian polity over the last
130 years, culminating in the de-Hinduisation of the polity and
political disempowering of the Hindus. Gandhi stepped into a vacuum
created by Aurobindo’s abdication of political responsibility….
“The end of colonial rule in 1947, while it ceded state power to the
Hindus who then comprised 87.22% of the population did not however put
in place a self-conscious Hindu state. Contrary to the conventions of
world history, India alone after a decisive end of Muslim and White
Christian rule in 1947, failed to establish a state reflecting the
religion, culture and civilisational ethos of its majority populace.
This was also the religion and culture of the soil, adhered to by the
native populace, unlike the situation in the North America, Australia,
New Zealand and Islamic countries, where all traces of pre-Islamic and
pre-Christian faiths have been wiped out....
“In India alone, post-1947 a polity and state emerged, powered by what
came to be called Nehruvian secularism, actively hostile to the
majority populace, a state which effectively de-Hinduised all public
spaces, de-Hinduised the content and character of the polity, and
politically disempowered the Hindus.... Gandhi’s endowment to the
fledgling nation-state.”
It was bitterly ironical that Gandhi inaugurated his political career
by writing Ram Raj. He also wrote Hind Swaraj which Rajan calls
Christian Ramrajya. She reiterates how Gandhi, helped by Jawaharlal
Nehru, prevented the establishment of a Hindu rashtra after the
British handed over power on August 15, 1947. It was a golden
opportunity that came the Hindu way after centuries of alien rule,
first Muslim and then British. Instead of empowering the Hindus, these
Congress giants did their best to obliterate their political identity.
The Gandhian legacy sustained the Muslim identity in the garb of
minority and rubbed out the Hindu in the name of pluralism. While
minority demands were ensconced as fundamental rights Hindu needs were
enumerated as directive principles of policy which did not have to be
implemented indefinitely.
Despite his Hindu posturing, Gandhi ignored the elementary fact that
for the Hindu, state power was more necessary than to communities
inspired by the Semitic religions — Judaism, Christianity or Islam.
Apart from scriptures, these religions are social ideologies with
Islam also being a political manifesto. Being 15 per cent of the
Indian population, Muslims have retained their personal laws. The
community knows how to flex its muscles; state power is welcome but
not essential for its well being.
The Hindu is a virtual opposite. Even after so many years of BJP rule,
Hindu middle class families are finding it difficult to keep residing
in Kalupur, Dariapur, Jamalpur and many other parts of the walled city
of Ahmedabad. Muslim families here only need to acquire one or two
flats in a mansion. Thereafter, their lifestyle pushes their Hindu
neighbours out of the locality. Eventually, these become ghettos which
even the police cannot penetrate. This may seem relatively trivial but
it constitutes an assault on the sovereignty of the Indian state
built, in the words of Rajan, on Nehruvian secularism.
Many wonder why Gandhi aggravated the Hindu agony instead of trying to
help his community? Maybe he was so bitterly anti-British that
teaching them a lesson was his overwhelming priority. It is useful to
recall the several humiliations he suffered at the hands of the
rulers. The first was at Rajkot where young prince Bhavsingh had
removed some state jewels from the treasury. The blame fell on
Gandhi’s elder brother Laxmidas, chief minister of the small princely
state. In his student days in London Gandhi had met Mr Ollivant who
had since become the resident commissioner. When he sought to
influence the gentleman in favour of his brother, the Englishman,
annoyed at Gandhi’s extra legal persistence, called his door-keeper
and had him thrown out physically.
In 1896 Gandhi took his family to South Africa. When their ship
reached Durban, some hot-headed Europeans prevented Indians from
disembarking for fear that Asians were flooding the employment market.
Gandhi was their particular target. After the authorities rescued him
and his family from the ship, he was whipped and beaten unconscious.
Another humiliation came at Pietermaritzburg where Gandhi was thrown
out of the train because he was an Asian travelling by first class
which was presumably meant only for the whites.
Whether these were the causes, the fact is that Gandhi was anti-
British and his understanding of affairs was often simplistic. For
example, since the British practised ‘divide and rule’ he thought he
would ‘unite and fight’, which meant Hindu-Muslim unity at any cost.
How little Gandhi understood the Muslim mind was illustrated by
Maulana Mohammad Ali, his right hand man in the Khilafat, who publicly
stated: “However pure Mr Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to
me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Mussalman....”
Again, Annie Besant, an Irish lady, former President of the Congress,
condemned the Moplah riots of 1921 as utterly shameful (600 Hindus
were killed, hundreds raped, and 2500 forcibly converted to Islam).
She asked Gandhi to go and see with his own eyes the ghastly horrors.
Sir Sankaran Nair, member of the Viceroy’s Council wrote: “For sheer
brutality on women, I do not remember anything in history to match the
Malabar rebellion.” On the issue Gandhi said they were doing their
religious duty. During the Kohat riots too many a Hindu was killed and
more women abducted. But to Gandhi the Muslims were justified whereas
the Hindus of Kohat were cowards. At the second Round Table Conference
in 1931 he nonchalantly stated that Hindu-Muslim disputes were coeval
with British rule. There were hardly any disputes before the British
came and they will cease after they leave.
Yet Dr BR Ambedkar felt: “Such is the record of Hindu-Muslim
relationship from 1920 to 1940. Placed side by side with the frantic
efforts made by Mr Gandhi to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity, the
record makes most painful and heart-rending reading. It would not be
much exaggeration to say that it is a record of twenty years of civil
war between the Hindus and the Muslims in India, interrupted by brief
intervals of armed peace.”
The less Gandhi understood the Muslims, the more he exploited the
Hindus because he knew them and their weaknesses like the back of his
palm. To support not only Muslims but also Pakistan after Partition,
he blackmailed the Government of India into transferring Rs 55 crore
to Karachi even though Pakistan had invaded Kashmir. To assuage his
political frustration, he did not hesitate to politically eclipse the
Hindus in their own country. This is the burden of Radha Rajan’s
courageous book.
In a vicarious but forceful statement, Gandhi’s son Ramdas endorsed
the author 62 years in anticipation. His letter is quoted: “Your life
has become a curse for the Hindu jati.” Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, who
was upset, asked Gandhi: “What do you propose to do about it?” The
reply was: “I want to fight it out with my life. I would not allow the
Mussalmans to crawl on the streets in India. They must walk with self-
respect.”
bademiyansubhanallah
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Indian Police: At the crossroads
This book deals with various aspects of police reforms in India and
calls for a ‘megadigm shift’ for the police system to attune it to
democratic principles and a marketing framework, writes NK Singh
Policing: Reinvention Strategies In A Marketing Framework
Author: Rohit Choudhary
Publisher: Sage
Price: Rs 395
The book under review is a well-documented approach to the subject of
policing. The author, a senior police officer serving in Punjab, talks
of reinventing strategies for policing in a “marketing framework,”
achievable through a “megadigm” shift in the way the Indian police
system works. Rohit Choudhary duly brings to bear on the subject his
long experience in the services.
Choudhary does not exaggerate in saying “the present day Indian
Policeman is generally viewed by the public with the same loathing as
were his imperial predecessors. However, the authority wielded by the
policemen has diminished considerably over time.” Unfortunately, the
law makers of independent India have not been able to change Lord
Macaulay’s law when it comes to letting confessions of crime/ guilt to
policemen be admissible in court. The courts would rather trust a
Customs or an Enforcement Directorate officer than a policeman.
Successive efforts at police reforms have failed because of various
factors. The rulers of independent India would like to continue the
colonial system of manipulating the police, a reason why progress has
been tardy on the 1977 National Police Commission (NPC) report, a
document the author makes extensive use of. The truth is that even
today the Indian police are expected to operate under the archaic 1861
Act of British India.
Indeed, the Indian police is at the threshold of a new era. But I
disagree with the author who ascribes this to liberalisation,
globalisation and market forces. The yearning for police reforms
started much before the onset of a market economy. Choudhary is also
factually incorrect in linking, by implication, the Supreme Court
order of September 22, 2006 to this new environment. That order was
the outcome of a writ petition in the Supreme Court under article 32
of the Constitution, filed by Prakash Singh, former DG BSF and your
humble self on April 17, 1996, and the order came after a decade of
hard work with the help of some eminent lawyers and citizens. Powerful
support also came from the National Human Rights Commission and NGOs
like the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. Reports submitted by
the Ribeiro, Padmanabhaiah and Soli Sorabjee Committees gave useful
inputs (the last one provided a new draft for the Police Act).
The SC order, in essence, laid down the ground rules for internal
autonomy for the police, insulating it from the corrupt influence of
the political class, provided necessary safeguards and checks on
arbitrary use of power both by the rulers and the policemen and also
the necessary independent redressal machinery to ensure that — all
aimed to make the police accountable to the law and the people.
Unfortunately State Governments, which have the requisite authority,
are most reluctant to implement them.
Choudhary then proceeds to identify the new challenges the Indian
police is likely to face with the implementation of the above
mentioned SC order. In his “recommendations” he draws heavily from his
study of management and public policy both in India and the US.
Functional autonomy of the police, he says, would dictate a shift of
power from the top managers to “front line officers”, meaning greater
power to the constabulary. He talks of a “participating management” to
redress management delays. He highlights with disapproval the
existence of 12 ranks in the services saying, “some of these layers
only add to delays, clashes and rigidity in functioning.” Indeed true.
Citing the NPC report he says quality can be improved “even within the
existing strength of the civil police by larger numbers at the middle
level … offset by somewhat smaller numbers at the lower levels of
constables.”
Choudhary then dwells on the “unethical practices” in the police which
have eroded public faith, something vital for the effectiveness and
legitimacy of the police. He lists the “pitfalls in taking the routes
of extra-judicial methods” like third degree torture. He says, “an
equally important duty to ensure that the guilty are punished is the
duty of the policemen to see that the persons suspected of the crimes
are not deprived of their constitutional rights.” The author is at
pains to describe how these “extra-judicial methods”, far from helping
society are ultimately counter-productive. He provides reasons why the
police must “shun the use of extra-judicial methods to meet the ends
of perceived justice.” The real remedy, he feels, lies in amending the
rules and procedures to bring them in sync with the times as
recommended by the NPC.
There is also a section on the “culture of integrity and ethical
behaviour” and the extent to which individuals matter. Choudhary says
performance appraisal and training are as crucial as the aims, vision
and mission for which the police must work. Community policing is
touched upon followed by issues like cost, resources, effectiveness,
response and politics. For effective policing, individual officers are
vital as the day-to-day contact between the police and the public is
the focal point of public relations. The author says nothing affects
people’s perception of the police more than the quality of service
they receive from individual officers — at the police station, the
enquiry desk, on the telephone.
As for the political class, the author feels the police do not trust
politicians, deeming them to be narrow interest seekers, constituency
builders with little concern for the rule of law, dishonest and
irresponsible. On their part, politicians feel the police are
highhanded, self-seeking, pliable and corrupt. While this may be
right, it is only true for a section of politicians and the police. If
politicians develop stakes in providing their people with good
policing there is space for mutual respect and understanding between
the two.
Indeed, the author does take up various aspects of reforms and calls
for a “megadigm shift for the Indian police” to attune the police to
the principle that they derive their power from the public and must be
held accountable to them through regulatory bodies like police boards,
complaints authorities and state security commissions. In this context
the author talks of “marketing the police” which would help their
“reinvention”.
-- The writer is ex-Joint Director, CBI & former DG, BPR&D. He is at
present President, Samata Party