noises off

Mumbai Mirror Column

2010-12-02T11:19:00.000+05:30

This is my Mumbai Mirror column dated December 2, 2010. You can read the full text here

"A tea party is a double-faced symbol. As a social form it is a convivial occasion; but politically it has been, at least once in world history, a revolutionary act the Boston Tea Party."

Defending the indefensible

2010-10-05T22:41:00.001+05:30

Santosh Desai is a serious commentator on culture. He occupies a large number of column centimeters on the city page of the Times of India every Monday. His column goes under the slug “City City Bang Bang”. I read it regularly and enjoy it very much because Desai has a lucid prose style and ideas that you can chew on.

As columnists know through sheepish experience, banging out a column of XYZ words week after week tends, on occasion, to addle your brain. So once in a while you put two and three together and make seven, what the hell! Santosh Desai has done it this week in his defence of jugaad.

His launching pad is the CWG mess that angered us, which was, in his view, a typical over-reaction. “It is time, we thunder to ourselves as we pace the floor magisterially, it is time we stopped glorifying a trait that keeps us from striving for excellence.” The trait in question is jugaad which he defines at this point as that which helps Indians “find compromise solutions which somehow work.” Further we said, “India has changed as have its capabilities and standards. And it is imperative that we deliver world class solutions to our needs.”

Desai suggests we are missing the point completely. Why should we want world class solutions when we have jugaad which he now defines as that “unique Indian sensibility which is not only about accepting mediocrity but about seeing the world in creative new ways.” Whoa! There’s something wrong with that sentence. Does Desai really mean what it says? That “accepting mediocrity is pretty good but better than that is seeing the world in creative new ways”. Or is that a grammatical slip and he actually means “Okay, so jugaad is about accepting mediocrity (tut tut), BUT it is also about seeing the world in creative new ways?” Never mind what he really means. The thing to notice is how he slips in this “creative” bit about jugaad. How does that sit with compromise and acceptance of mediocrity?

It doesn’t. What he’s done is shift the argument away from those indefensible things to more solid ground. We can’t object to “seeing the world in creative new ways” can we? Now he confidently gives us two examples of this brand of jugaad, the homely quilt made from old saris and the Nano. I wonder what Ratan Tata would say to his pet car being described as jugaad albeit of the creative variety. I know what I say about sari quilts, under which I have slept all my life, being described as jugaad. I say you ninny, they are outcomes of enforced frugality, not of “creative new ways” of seeing the world.

In saying this I’m barking up the wrong tree, because Desai has already moved to another way of looking at jugaad. He says the purpose of jugaad is “to mediate between our need and circumstances”. We presume by “circumstances” he means limited resources. Like we make old sari quilts and the Nano because we don’t have the resources to buy new quilts and big cars.

Fine. But with this new definition Desai has scored a self goal. He has forgotten that his defence of jugaad began with the CWG. We haven’t. We point out to him that resources were hardly the problem with the CWG. The aerostat alone cost Rs 70 crore or some such, a sum that could have fed our poor for years to come. The agencies charged with producing world class facilities for the Games were given world class funds. So where was the need for jugaad? And would Desai say that the footbridge that fell, injuring 27 workers was “a compromise solution that somehow worked”, in which the word “somehow” was meant to cover damage to human life and limb?

Hammering the final nail in the coffin of honest argument, Desai now elevates jugaad to the politically ISI marked cachet, “subversive”. Thus jugaad “is the name we give to our subversive disdain for reality.” I’ve tried figuring out what “our disdain of reality” means and given up. But I cannot let subversive go so easily. What exactly did we subvert when we argued that our standards of hygiene were okay with filthy toilets, paan stains and dog paw marks on bed covers? What exactly did we subvert when we siphoned off money meant for Games Village facilities to line our pockets? How was the footbridge that fell, a subversion of the “numerator-driven view of the world”? Did we say, “Aha, you build bridges that stand; we think creatively about the world so we make bridges that fall.”

The bridge would have qualified as a piece of creative thinking, marrying need to circumstances and subverting a numerator-driven view of the world with a solution that worked, if we had built it of bamboo, one of the sturdiest building materials available to us. But we didn’t. We used standard materials and a standard design. Therefore we were bound to produce a standard bridge that served its purpose.

Desai ends his column by humouring us. If we are offended by the name jugaad he says, we are free to change it; “but it would be a shame if we were to lose this unique ability to see the world in a distinctive way.” That is the final ball up in Desai’s juggling act.

Sorry Mr Desai, it won’t wash. You’ve failed to sell us the virtues of jugaad because you’ve demonstrated through the jugaad of your column that it simply doesn’t work.

Dog in the dog house

2010-09-24T19:39:00.003+05:30

A dog has been excommunicated from the high caste quarters of Manikpur village in Morena district, north Madhya Pradesh, to the Dalit quarters beyond the village. The gram panchayat has been shocked out of its wits at the dog’s behaviour as reported by its owner Rampal Singh, a rich Rajput farmer with political connections.

The story goes that the dog was walking around his owner’s fields as dogs are wont to do. Sunita Jatav had carried lunch for her farm labourer husband as farm labourers’ wives are wont to do. The husband had finished the lunch and one roti was left over. Sunita saw the dog and invited him to have it. He politely accepted the invitation, probably assuming that one roti was as good as another. Poor dog. Evidently he had not been trained to distinguish between dalit rotis and Rajput rotis. Sunita Jatav’s roti was, like her, dalit to the core.

When Shri Rampal Singh saw what the dog had done, he went ballistic. How could his pet, fondly named Sheru, brought up as a true blue Rajput, have polluted himself so unforgivably, and in the bargain put the entire village at risk of….er, umm, I’m supposed to know what that risk is. But I’m that anti-national, anti-Hindu, westernized, educated, secular thing that’s destroying the fabric of Bharat that is not India. And so I am at sea. Anyway assuming that the dog’s deed was going to give the whole village scabies or worse, turn them into earthworms in their next birth, the only way to save themselves from either calamity was to punish the dog.

The gram panchayat got into an instant huddle and excommunicated Sheru from the village. That meant they dragged him off across the village border and tied him to a pole outside Sunita’s house, there to eat her rotis forever. Henceforth neither he, his shadow nor his pee would be allowed to corrupt the purity of the village environs.

I can see a whole old-style Bollywood movie here. Rampal Singh’s little son who has grown up with Sheru sneaks to Sunita’s hut, cuddles his “brother” and also eats Sunita’s rotis. Nobody knows what’s going on till one day he grows up and wants to marry Sunita’s fair skinned, light-eyed, lavishly coiffeured, buxom daughter and gets to make a speech about all human beings being equal for show me one who can tell the blood of a dalit from the blood of a Kshatriya. Rampal Singh, struck by the radiant obviousness of this truth, breaks into tears of remorse and everyone embraces everyone else.

One story leads to another. The excommunicated Sheru reminds me of another animal that fell foul of the law and came close to being leg-cuffed. This was the unnamed brown sow of Gogol’s "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich". She was suspected of running off with court documents that would have proved one Ivan right against the other. The problem was, the law books said nothing about how brown sows were to be punished.

In India we are lucky. We have customs. So we don’t bother about law books. Sunita has discovered this to her intense anger and shock. She’s been shuttling from one police station to another to register a case against Rampal Singh for publicly insulting her with the words, “Cobbler woman how dare you feed my dog with your roti?” She would have swallowed the insult had the gram panchayat not compounded it with the injury of slapping a Rs 15,000 fine on her for her misdemeanour.

As she sits in police stations, including the one meant to register atrocities against dalits, vainly trying to file her complaint, she must be kicking herself for not having found a happier way of disposing of her leftover roti. She could, for instance, have buried it deep in Rampal Singh’s soil, there to nourish his next crop which would then have entered his granary and from there, by natural progression, his alimentary canal without his being any the wiser. That way she could have been sitting in her hut at this very moment rocking with laughter, rather than in unhelpful police stations

As an act of subversion, this would have equaled the one that Daya Pawar describes in his autobiographical book “Baluta”. One of the village duties of the Mahars, the caste to which he belonged before he converted to Buddhism, was to play music at upper caste weddings. If their music group burst into occasional laughter without a word having been said, it was because one of them had played a juicy obscenity on his instrument against the host in a code that only they knew.

More dust in our eyes

2010-09-22T19:46:00.002+05:30

What one had feared has come to pass. The Commonwealth Games are in a sorry mess. Even taking media reports which have been so gleefully salivating over the idea of national shame with a sackful of salt, it is clear that pretty serious things have gone and are still going wrong with every aspect of the Games. It began with quadrupling budgets and major corruption to sub-standard work and a complete rout of the timeline. Now a footbridge has collapsed and strictures have been passed about the lack of cleanliness and maintenance in the Games Village apartments by the Commonwealth Games Federation.

It will take us a long, long time to forget the faces of Organising Committee members, Mr Mattoo and Mr Bhanot as they addressed the new problems thrown at them by the Press and television channels. Mr Bhanot’s was webbed with indignant lies while Mr Mattoo’s offered a serious challenge to frogs sitting on lily pads. What they said was totally unbelievable. Mr Bhanot said something like the following, in a voice that was full of irritation with people who were not getting the obvious: “See, their standards of hygiene are different from ours. That doesn’t mean we are wrong. We are right and there’s nothing wrong with the apartments. But they are complaining so we will bring the level of hygiene up to their expectations though their ideas are different from mine or yours or everybody’s.”

A sportsman on a TV talk show, offered a gloss on this outrageous statement. He said people like Mr Bhanot were used to our sportspeople being given dumps as accommodation. That’s what he meant by our standards of hygiene. E and his colleagues appear to have assumed that the same rule must be holding for sportspeople from other countries.” It’s come as a shock to Mr Bhanot that other countries expect clean, well-maintained apartments for people who run and jump and swing a raquet or two.

Mr Mattoo assured viewers implacably that they would do their best to rise to international standards. It wasn’t a major problem. When it was pointed out that a bridge collapsing and injuring 27 labourers, five of them seriosuly might be seen by many as a major problem, he nodded yes-yes, while still sitting securely on his lily pad.

One is reminded of the time Prince Philip of Britain made his famous diplomatic gaffe when he remarked that a loose screw or wire or whatever it was that he had noticed must have been the handiwork of an Indian. How shocked and angry we were then. How dare he? We who send some of the best engineering and computer brains to the UK and the USA to be held responsible for loose screws?

But bad reputations are not fabricated out of sheer malice. Prince Philip did not have a history of India-bashing. We must give him credit for simply going about his business with eyes and ears open and perhaps reading newspapers. He might be doing that even now, shaking his head and saying to his wife, “Didn’t I tell you Beth? These fellows are dangerous old eggs. Can’t deal with nuts and bolts.”

Nuts and bolts mean detail. We go for large gestures. A passing remark made by someone on a television talk show should have been grabbed and a whole new talk show built around it. This someone said that elsewhere in the world, apartments built for sportspeople at international games meets were clean, efficient and functional. No razzmatazz. What we have created apparently is 5-star accommodation. Since none of the organizing committee people were called upon to comment on this aspect of the games in any talk show, we are short on specifics. But if this is true, it will not surprise us because it would be absolutely true to type.

Today Jaipal Reddy, who heads the Group of Ministers for the Commonwealth Games, is quoted as saying the Commonwealth Games Federation is complaining “only about maintenance. The top end flats I tell you will go for a million dollars.” They have to be 5-star for him to make that claim. He also gives away the centre of focus of the Commonwealth Games. It is not the comfort of visiting teams. Right?

Mr Reddy also seems to have misread the Federation’s complaint about filthy flats. Deeply aggrieved, he says, “What the delegates want is 5-star hotel kind of maintenance. Now tell me where can we get liveried staff? We can only employ semi-skilled casual labour for these jobs.”

The complaints are not about our national obsession with stars Mr Reddy! Nor about the liveries. It’s about the work. Casual or not, workers must be fully trained for the jobs they are expected to do. If staff is hired for maintenance work, they must be trained to maintain, no?

So please stop justifying the mess. Stand up Messrs Bhanot, Mattoo and Reddy, hang your heads in shame and say a simple sorry, first to our visitors, and then to the nation.

Variations on the theme of modaks

2010-09-10T18:05:00.001+05:30

The best news about Ganeshotsav comes in soft pouches filled with coconut and jaggery called modaks. I would never dream of buying them or having them made. I have my mother’s recipe which I follow to the letter to produce a sweet that falls only 20 per cent short of the perfection she used to produce with the same recipe. The secret’s not in the words. It’s in the eyes that must judge and the hands that must mould.

These days modak flour made of fragrant rice is available with every good grocer in a Marathi manoos dominated neighbourhood. Just say “modkachi pithi” and you’ve made a beginning. My mother began by buying the right kind of rice, washing it, spreading it out to dry and getting it milled to exactly the right fineness.

If you want to make 20 modaks, scrape two normal sized coconuts. Add to the scrapings three-quarters of their volume of jaggery, mix together and cook. Consider the filling done when it has lost its runniness and come together without becoming sticky. If it does get sticky, pretend you always meant to make toffee, not modaks. Before you take the stuffing off the fire, add about 10 powdered green cardamoms, give the mixture a good stir, let its warm fragrance fill your lungs and set aside to cool.

Now for the wrapping. Take half a kilo of pithi. Measure out an equal amount in volume of water. Put the water in a thick-bottomed vessel with three teaspoons full of ghee and a dash of salt and boil. Add the pithi bit by bit to the boiling water while stirring all the time. Read that again. See? It involves both hands. But you need a third to keep the pot steady on the burner while you’re stirring. If you have help, call for it now. If not, muddle along. You’ll manage.

Once all the pithi has been absorbed into the water and become a white mass, turn the gas down to as low as it’ll go, cover the pot and wait till a good steam rises when you open the lid. Along with the steam you are rewarded with the sensuous scent of basmati. Open your ecstatically closed eyes, put the higgledy-piggledy dough in a shallow basin and go at it. Of course it’s hot. Knead it with the flat bottom of a bowl or something to save your hands for the first few minutes if it’s unbearable. Then rub the palms with ghee and water and knead, knead, knead till the dough is smooth and lumpless.

There is a special vessel to steam modaks in, but a pressure cooker without the pressure does just as well. Smear ghee in the pressure cooker vessels. Now start moulding the modaks. Apllying ghee to your palms, take a ball of dough, press the middle with your thumb to make a deep hollow. Now turn it around in the hollow of your palm pressing the sides the while to create a vertical katori. It’s like the potter turning and moulding a small pot on his wheel. Never seen that? Oh dear.

Fill the katori three-quarters full with stuffing. Pinch the sides of the katori all around and bring the flutes together at the top and pinch into a fine tapered nose. That’s what the top is called. Naak.

Stand these beauties in the ghee smeared pressure cooker vessel and staem them for seven minutes. Take out, allow them a minute or so for willingness to be lifted out of the vessel, split at the top or don’t. Spoon pure home-made ghee over them and thank me for your ticket to heaven.

And while we are on modaks I cannot resist the temptation of translating a short poem by the late Vinda Karandikar from his collection titled “Virupika” (Distortions) In the sicties when this ten line poem was written, a storm broke out of moral high-horsing and wounded sentiments that consumed tons of newsprint. Karandikar didn’t know what had hit him but kept his cool and defended his little work in the tone of a patient teacher putting kindergarten kids through the basics of education.

Here’s the poem, with some of its alliterative punch lost, but most of its wickedness in place.

Gazing upon the curved-trunked, great bodied Ganapati,
A beautiful woman,
Given to reading pornography,
Was filled with lust.

Upon which, the curved-trunked, great bodied Ganapati,
Took her quickly by her modak breasts,
Whirled her around in the sky twenty-one times
And flung her into a howling hell
Called chastity.

Staged disaster

2010-09-09T20:54:00.000+05:30

It was an extremely unusual way of spending a Sunday morning. I was on the fourth floor of the Kala Academy, Prabhadevi watching a group of some 20 women and one man, ranging in age from 18 to 70, dance. They presented three “items” in Kathak, Bharata Natyam and Odissi. They had been learning the basics of the three dance styles for three weeks and this was their passing out programme. I’d never seen anything like it in terms of enthusiasm. One woman came from Powai, another from Borivali and a third from Dahisar.

The idea for these workshops came to Nandini Krishna, the Bharata Natyam dancer when the mother of one of her students said ruefully that she herself would have to wait till her next birth to learn dance. Nandini wondered why she couldn’t be given a shot at it in this birth. So she got her friends Keka Sinha the Kathak dancer and Shubhada the Odissi dancer on board and together they began running workshops in all three styles.

Watching the workshop participants perform took me back to my own dance learning days. It was extremely difficult in those days to find authentic dance gurus in Mumbai. I went to so-called Katahk classes and so-called Manipuri classes, but nothing added up to anything substantial.

People like to believe that in those golden days everybody appreciated the classical arts unlike these gross times, when Bollywood alone dictates tastes. To that I say rubbish! And here’s my experience to prove it.

Known in school as someone who was learning classical dance, I was often called upon to perform in annual concerts. I always refused, horrified at the thought of getting up on the stage to make a spectacle of myself before my classmates. But one year the teacher refused to take no for an answer.

The day of slaughter arrived. I was in some kind of ghagra-choli outfit with abla work. A friend of a friend was on the harmonium playing a staccato lehra. This too shall pass I said to myself as I danced a few desultory tukdas and a gat, none of which made any sense to the audience. Totally dispirited, I did my last little twirl and walked off the stage to a polite sprinkling of applause.

Most unfairly the item after mine was a snake dance by Mohindra Batra (I hear he lives in silicon valley now) done to the popular tune from “Nagin”. Being a snake his costume shimmered with sequins. Being a snake his moves were sinuous. Being a snake he ended his dance spectacularly, his back bent in a deep arch, his right foot touching his forehead. The house collapsed with thunderous applause.

After Mohindra came Savithri and Radha. They were learning Bharata Natyam but they were wise enough not to dance incomprehensible things like the Alaripu. Instead, they did the famous “Appalam chappalam” dance from the 1955 film “Azad” to Lata’s and Usha’s recorded voices. They too were thunderously applauded and my humiliation was complete. Golden age of classical dance appreciation? When was that?

Religious fun and toothpaste

2010-09-09T15:12:00.001+05:30

It is festival time. Dahi handi is over. There is a middle-class view and a ground level view of this festival. The middle-class view is that politicians who hang enormous amounts of money in gold-rimmed pots hung high against the sky, are like dog masters who make their pets jump for bones. They raise their hands higher and higher till the dogs can’t jump any more and flop down, exhausted.

The ground level view is of a physical challenge that costs no money to face. Two months of rigorous practice helps young men (and these days women too) to stretch their bodies and understand what team spirit means. Reaching the pot is not only about winning money or helping a politician to a sear. It is about a proud display of skills for the public at large, again free of charge. The money in the pot, if won, has its uses. It goes into the mandal’s kitty to fund its social work initiatives.

What makes the dahi handi problematic is its dangerousness. Spines can and do break, destroying young lives. But broken arms and legs, it would seem, are par for the course. The father of a nine-year-old who broke his arm, confessed to a newspaper reporter that he hadn’t known the child was practising for dahi handi, but felt extremely proud to see him at the top. Mind you, it was scary when he fell, “But it was all a lot of fun”.

Fun is what it is. Religious fun. And since the festival emulates the deeds of Lord Krishna, harassing women is a natural part of the fun.

It is generally conceded that people have a right to a bit of religious fun. People who organise this brand of fun expect authorities to understand that it comes with extraordinary rights attached. With Ganeshotsav up next on the religious fun calendar, Ganesh mandals are pressing for permission to make noise in silence zones. Man-made rules cannot be granted primacy over demands made in the name of god.

One wishes gods could speak. Ganesha needs to say to his “devotees”, “Look guys, you worship me as “sukhakarta”, giver of happiness and also as “dukhaharta”, assuager of pain. As sukhakarta, I allow you your booze and song and dance. As dukhaharta, I must look after the comfort of patients in hospitals.”

Fortunately the thinking public perseveres in speaking up. As a result, ecology has now been officially elevated to the status of “a public concern”. Some of the less hubris-driven Ganeshotsav mandals have rejected mine-is-bigger-than-yours plaster of paris idols in favour of the smaller ones made of clay. But there is not enough clay to go around.

One mandal is going to solve the problem by installing a fibre glass idol which will not be immersed in the usual way but symbolically. The shastras are full of escape routes for all contingencies. This mandal has found one for symbolic immersion. However, devotees cannot be denied a road show. So the fibre glass idol will be taken in procession up to the sea, brought back unimmersed, and put away in a locked room till the following year. That way, “Pudhchya varshi lavkar ya” will happen with the turn of a key and no expenditure.

Some members of the mandal did express reservations about the idea. Would this not show disrespect towards the god? Worse, would a year under lock and key not damage the idol? A solution has been found for these concerns too. It has been decided that the idol will be brought out every Tuesday, changed into a fresh pitamber and worshipped.

Ecce Ganapati, vighnaharta, remover of obstacles, now turned into an obstacle in the path of ecological well-being. The responsibility for this sad transformation lies entirely with the long-ago leader of men, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak exhorted people to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi publicly to demonstrate the strength of our culture and our numbers to the alien ruler. Tilak’s purpose was served 63 years ago when the alien ruler finally left us to ourselves. So the question is, for whose benefit are we displaying the strength of our culture and numbers now?

In a recent letter to the editor of “Loksatta”, a man from Pune proposed that, Tilak’s purpose having been served, the public Ganapati should now be allowed to go private. Ganeshotsav is only a 60-year-old tradition. If we really love our traditions we should be happy to return to the original, non-political tradition of worshipping Ganapati exclusively in our homes.

Sure. Try telling that to the display-happy, money-worshipping, fun loving, self-above-all celebrants of Ganeshotsav mandals. They’ll use your head to crack their daily prasad coconuts on. No, we’re stuck with Tilak. The toothpaste is out of the tube and cannot be squeezed back in.

More on "Peepli [Live]"

2010-08-30T13:05:00.000+05:30

I return briefly to my post on “Peepli [Live]”. I’ve just come across an interview with Peter Brook done a few years ago, in which he was fed questions by several theatre people and critics about his work and his ideas about theatre. The very first question put to him by a theatre director was, “Given the state of political unrest in Africa, is there an appropriate theatrical response?”

I’d like to quote part of his answer to this question because he it says succinctly about plays what I was struggling to say about the film’s approach to the problem of agrarian distress. He says, “It is quite clear that when one takes any political subject straight on the nose, one is in enormous danger of simplifying what everyone knows by heart from television and newspapers. Suppose we do a play about Iraq or genocide or Aids in Africa, it is very hard not to produce stereotype reactions. The only thing political theatre can do is open up contradictions by exposing the other side of an issue. And sometimes, by taking a subject from the past, we can awaken current concerns. Every real political play contains not only vibrant criticism of a ghastly situation. It's only complete if, at the same time, it evokes the possibility of something worth living for. Otherwise grumbling simply produces grumbling.”

I may not go with the last sentiment, because grumbling has a place in a society such as ours. But when the grumble ends once again with the obvious it doesn’t get us anywhere at all. In “Peepli [Live]” the end shows Natha as a construction worker in Mumbai. The contrast between where he once belonged and where he finds himself now is underlined in bold. Tall buildings go up before him as he sits disconsolately on a heap of rubble covered in the white dust of their construction. A caption tells us that X million farmers have migrated to the cities in the last Y decades. That’s sleight of hand. All those millions didn’t come because they’d lost their lands. They came and continue to come because that’s what industrialisation is all about and also because family holdings cannot sustain growing families for ever. Even if Natha had managed to keep his land, one of his sons would have had to migrate to the city. Are we trying to turn the clock back or should we be saying there will always be people who will choose to migrate to cities and that’s fine, but there should also be an assurance of survival for those who choose to stay back and till their land.

Circumstances being what they are, Natha might be allowed to see a silver lining in his present situation; to see that working hard and sending money home for the family was a better alternative to dying so they could live. It’s not the best life but it is work. Work is dignity. It is also an escape from the clutches of the local goonda politicians.

Of the many lovely touches in the film, one is the brief dream Natha has sleeping in the hut where he’s been dumped by his tormentors. He sees himself dressed in yellow silk riding a caparisoned horse. Perhaps a more realistic waking dream about having work and being productive could have put a little light in his eyes at the end of the film. Such an end would not have destroyed the “messages” the film-makers had already communicated about our cynical media and politicians and anti-poor systems of governance. But it would have given us a less maudlin view of migrants. They are poor, sure. They are exploited, sure. But on both counts less so than in the villages they come from. They are tough, these men and women who come to work in the cities. They have clear goals in life. They don’t sit around on rubble heaps inviting people to feel sorry for them.

[Live] but not alive

2010-08-22T11:14:00.001+05:30

I saw “Peepli [Live]” two days ago. Here, first, is my head-view of the film.

My head says the film depicts the truth. How do I know that? Because I read stories and statistics about farmers’ deaths in the papers everyday and I hear television newscasters occasionally breaking news about them. It’s like breaking wind, the only way they can remain in good health they say.

My head tells me the film is right about politicians too. We read those stories too in the papers and hear television newscasters and talk show anchors etc etc.

My head tells me the film has its heart in the right place which, as all of us know, is the left place. The conditions of farmers are dire. In our entire 5,000 year cultural history we have not found a way to beat the rain at its game. In Girish Karnad’s “The Fire and the Rain”, highly placed brahmin pundits hold a huge, huge yadnya to bring rain. At the end the rain comes. So does Indra’s voice, from up above. These things happen in plays, stories, novels, myths being used as metaphors etc.

Some of us believe in the science of yadnyas. Our ancients knew things which modern man foolishly discards as blind faith. Yadnyas are performed today for rain and because we love religious shows. Since belief in ancient science is a matter of faith, we believe the yadnyas work. But they are not known to have brought rain, filled our water reservoirs or irrigated parched fields. So the farmers’ basic most serious affliction remains unaddressed. “Peepli [Live]” demonstrates that this is so.

It also demonstrates other things like the absurdity of government schemes that compensate families of farmers who have committed suicide but do nothing to prevent those suicides. While showing us such worthwhile things about our country and the way it is run, the film also entertains us with excellent dialogue, performances and robust though occasionally erratic camerawork.

Despite all of which, the film fails to engage our mind. The reason is plain. It holds up for our attention what we already know; and since we already know, the thing that is satirically displayed in the hope that the overdoing will somehow penetrate our calloused layers of information. The problem with satire is that there can be no hope of progression. Given how the film begins, we know how it will proceed and how it will end. Its predictability puts our minds to sleep.

Satire is anger’s tool and as cathartic as tears. Let us suppose for a moment that a viewer comes in with zero information baggage. He doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t watch television, doesn’t think. The film tells him all the things about farmers that he should know. If he is sympathetic, he goes away thinking, okay, but what can I do about it? If he is not, he says, wasted evening. They said it’s funny, but it’s not.

The people who are supposed to sit up and take notice, the media, politicians and administrators, have never claimed to be better than their portrayal in the film. So again, it tells them nothing that they don’t know.

Raw knowledge of how things are is not in short supply. Film-makers who wish to turn that knowledge into film must find stories that will grip our imagination, allowing us to discover a new way of looking at what we have always known. Stories as demonstrations of “reality” don’t do that.

As we stand to salute

2010-08-21T08:13:00.002+05:30

I saw Peepli [Live] yesterday evening. I have a few things to say about it but in a separate post. This one is about what inaugurates the PVR Lower Parel film experience. Their “Jana gana mana”.

We are a free country and thereby free to innovate our own national anthem. Keep more or less (very less will do) to the original score and feel free to do your own thing. At PVR they fly a plastic flag on the screen. It looks waxy and doesn’t really fly. It only kind of heaves a little. The opening line is sung by a male, the next by a female and so on till they join voices for the final crescendo, except that in this case we must coin an alternative word to crescendo which I hope will suggest itself to me as we go along.

It is as difficult to catch the quality of a voice in words as it is to catch a colour, a smell or a taste. But I will do my best.

Take a pot of honey. A fuzzy-backed bee bumbles by, spots the honey and stops off for a sip. Its throat grows dreamily sticky and sweet. Now transfer that throat to the male singer of the first line of the national anthem at PVR. Naturally, the words that slip out of it are covered in this sticky, sweet substance. But that substance is further refined by what the Indian understands as the proper voice projection to express noble sentiments. The result is an added glaze of haziness.

The second line is sung by a female. She too has been on the honey pot. But the glaze she has added to the cloying leftovers of that outing is what the Indian understands as the essential sweetness of womanhood. In the role of the essential Indian woman, this singer is called upon to add cute little trills between notes. Her coup de grace is the trill on the dying note of the last ‘jaya he’. The anthem has been so slow and sweet that your dearest desire is to run out and puke when it ends. Then you get this last little trill and you’re nailed to your place in horror.

The idea of playing the national anthem before every show is to instill in us a feeling of pride in a nation that is marching ahead, however reluctant we may be to having such a feeling instilled in us. At Edward theatre, Dhobi Talao, where Majlis held a screening of faded old FD docus about (then) Bombay, a split second before the anthem came on, the usher commanded, “Khade ho jao”. There was threat in his voice, necessary, we inferred, for the Edward regulars. I mention it here just to point out that there are people who may not think there’s much truth in the notion that our nation is marching ahead.

We at PVR are also not encouraged to think so. Rather, the picture we are given is of a nation that has taken time off to sit in a garden stringing garlands of dainty flowers while everything else runs to seed. The charitable view of PVR then could be that, far from being proof of a wimpy idea of anthems reflected in a godawful choice of voices, their “Jana gana mana” is a heart-felt comment on the state of the nation.

Image seekers

2010-08-06T18:32:00.001+05:30

I agree with Mani Shankar Aiyer in essence, although, taken as a whole, his outbursts against the Commonwealth Games sound like axe grinding. The idea I am wholeheartedly with is the need to put money and efforts into excelling in sports, making an international mark and then aspiring to host mega sports events.

One doesn’t know the process by which nations get selected as hosts for these events. Is it enough for them to thump their chests and say we can do it? Or is there a process by which their claims are examined? Are track records checked? Are there parameters against which a nation’s real rather than imagined preparedness determined? How far down the infrastructural ladder can a host nation afford to be if it is to meet deadlines? Are cultural blocks in the way of meeting deadlines such as proven corruption and inefficiency taken into account? Does someone mull over other cultural clues like the phrases by which a nation happily describes its attitudes, in our case “chalta hai” and “we are like that only”?

I have my doubts. But let’s take it from where we are. We’ve asked for this responsibility and been given it. We might even pull it off without too many noticeable glitches. To wish the event to fail as Aiyer has done, is churlish. I’d rather wish everybody involved (Kalmadi and Dikshit in particular) the very best of luck. Having said that, I must return to my original point about the mismatch between the reality and the image we are aspiring to. What will the image bring us if we manage to make a good show of the Commonwealth Games? We will be known as a country that can organise Commonwealth Games, and by extension, other international sports events. That will look good on the country’s CV. But the reality will also be up there on our CV, looking not so good.

The sports environment in India isn’t healthy. A particularly putrid stink has been in the air for the last few weeks around women’s sports. We do not have a consistent sports policy that assures promising young people the rigorous training required for international competition. Cricket is an exception. As the national mania we must leave it out of this discussion, except to point out that the body which administers it hasn’t come out of the IPL scams smelling of roses.

Saina Nehwal has triumphed because she backs her ambition with hard work, dedication, total focus and objectivity in assessing her strengths and weaknesses in the international context. Before her, her trainer Gopichand and before him Prakash Padukone shone in international badminton. Chess is the other golden feather in our cap. Then there’s tennis where there have been a few enthusing ups, neutralised somewhat by acres of plateau and several downs.

Let’s take the Olympics as a measure of where we are. Khashaba Jadhav won a bronze in 1952 at Helsinki. Milkha Singh, “the Flying Sikh” was a terror on the tracks between 1958 and 1960. He won golds right, left and centre. But when it came to the Rome Olympics in 1960, he lost his bronze in a photo finish. Twenty-four years later, another star runner, P. T. Usha, enacted the same script. It was medals galore before the Olympics and defeat by 1/100th of a second in a photo finish at Los Angeles in 1984. Then there was silence till 2008, when suddenly India won one gold in shooting (Abhinav Bindra) and two bronzes, Sushil Kumar in wrestling and Vijender Kumar in boxing. Soon after Bindra was treated shabbily by Indian selectors who didn’t see the importance of the amount of practice he had to put in to stay where he was.
Point is, we don’t really care about sports. Had we cared, we’d have been at the top more often. Look at the pool we can draw from-- 1,150,000,000 (1.15 billion) people at last count. Why then do we compete so fiercely to host mega sporting events and see them as a mark of national pride? I can think of only one answer. Because we worship false images, and we worship MONEY. We see how much of that has been slipping into committee members’ ever hungry pockets.

Good luck Jane Austen

2010-08-04T21:28:00.001+05:30

Sonam Kapoor’s sister Rhea Kapoor has produced a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma”, to be released this Friday. The publicity has started. It is nothing like what happens with films that feature the Khans or the Bachchans. The budget is probably not impressive compared to their films and, even more importantly, the film is woman-centred, which makes it just a cut above that other down-market category, the “regional” film.
However, what bothered me was not so much how women are seen by the market, but how they see themselves and their work. The headline announcing the film on page 1 of the Bombay Times, dated Monday August 2 said, “It’s chick-flick time say Anil’s daughters”.
In the story, Sonam Kapoor is quoted as saying, “It is a coming-of-age chick-flick that will appeal to women of every age and social strata.” She goes on to add, (and this statement defeats logic), “Not to forget, that it’s a Victorian love story that the guys will find equally exciting.” Does she mean guys are so soppy that they have to go back 200 years to enjoy a love story? Or does it mean, a little more cleverly, that guys are stuck in the Victorian age and will, therefore, find the story relevant?
Anyway, to return to the headline, what exactly does chick-flick mean? Let’s go to the origins of the phrase, to find out. The term originated with a certain kind of women’s writing. I’ve come across four definitions of it. One holds, rather fuzzily, that chick-lit is literature “written by women for women”. Does that mean the book jackets carry a warning that says, “Injurious to male health”? If it is proved that some men have read it, does the book lose its precious place in the category?
A certain Prof Suzanne Ferris holds that although the genre chick-lit was born in 1996 with Helen Fielding’s “The Diary of Bridget Jones”, the mothers of the genre were the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. The idea!!! Students of English Literature at college, men and women, read the Brontes and Jane Austen as seriously as they read Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. No student of English Literature has been called upon to do the same with Bridget Jones.
Amy Sohn defines chick-lit as being about women, ages 20 to 60, who can stand on their own two feet. That lets off poor Jane Austen, none of whose protagonists ever stood on their own two feet, cushioned as they were by personal fortunes. But it does not let off Charlotte Bronte whose Jane Eyre was a working woman.
The definition that describes the genre most clearly, ensuring that no work that falls outside the definition can assume the name of chick-lit, puts the main emphasis on the tone of narration. In chick-lit, says the unknown author of this definition, the tone is personal and light, like a friend confiding in you, and its defining feature is humour. That lets out the Bronte sisters too. We may accuse them of many faults, but never of humour.
Now let’s return to “Aisha”. If the makers themselves are claiming it is a chick-flick, then we may expect something giddy, giggly and soppy. So be it. But how can we make it up to Jane Austen who’ll be turning frantically in her grave? First “Bride and prejudice” and now this. Give the dead soul a break.

The me-too syndrome

2010-07-30T13:49:00.002+05:30

In his column today in Hindustan Times, Ramchandra Guha raises the question of why the HRD ministry has short-listed the following four names for the brand ambassadorship of its adult literacy programme: Nita Ambani, Supriya Sule, Kanimozhi and Priyanka Vadra. He suggests that this should be taken as a slap in the face for women because all four are nobodies in their own right. If they are anybody at all, they are merely wives or daughters of politically or financially powerful men. He proposes instead another short list, honouring the work women themselves have done—Shabana Azmi, Chanda Kochar, Kiran Mazumdar and Ela Bhatt.

I am all for Guha’s list of illustrious women, and, as he says, we could add dozens of more names to it. But the questions he asks at the end of the column are not exactly the questions in my mind. He asks, “What are the origins of this ridiculous proposal? Is it a manifestation of the feudal culture within the allegedly democratic government of India or is the handiwork of a particular individual, seeking to please the richest and the most powerful people in India?” The questions are rhetorical. Everyone knows the answers. Of course we are feudalistic. The HRD ministry can be no different. So whether it’s the whole ministry or an individual member who came up with the “ridiculous suggestion”, it must have had every member’s approval for it to get into the Press.

The question in my mind is something else. I want to know what brand ambassadors do. Since the concept belongs to marketing, a return to origins is important to see how its spin-off is expected to function. In marketing promotional models are hired to drive consumer demand for a product, service or brand. Their single most important qualification is an attractive physical appearance. They must also be literate because they are expected to provide information to prospective customers/clients face-to-face. Finally, they must be some kind of performer because they are supposed to deliver what is described as “a live experience that reflects on the product or service they are representing.” In brief, persuasion by every means is what promotional models do.

Now in adult literacy, the information part is easy. You are telling grown-up men and women the tremendous advantages that will accrue to them if they learn their letters. Nita Ambani is eloquent on the blah-blah aspects of social good. She said in a guest column for Businessworld on 16 May, 2008, “Philanthropy in the Indian context is an extension of our age-old belief in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, wherein we regard the world as a family. All the men and women are thus our brethren. Of course, today we have moved well beyond this philosophical definition. For what we do in the name of philanthropy isn’t born only out of love of humanity. It also stems from our efforts to address the biggest problem humanity has created for itself — the increasing gap between the rich and the poor.” One may rely on her then to produce some equally impressive fluff to sell adult literacy.

But what will she do with the questions that are bound to follow in a face to face encounter? What will she say to Gangamma from Dharavi who asks, “I work the whole day in four houses and come home late evening to cook and take my husband’s beatings. So where’s the time to study letters?”

Will Nita Ambani say, “Oh dear! You work in four houses? I don’t even work in mine so I’m in no position really to answer your question. So sorry.”

What will she say to Sakina from Malvani who says, “The only time I have to myself is when the whole family is asleep. But I’ll need light to learn letters. And that Anil Ambani is charging us so much for electricity, we don’t switch on our lights only.”

Will Nita Ambani sniff up her brand new nose and say, “He’s like that only, that Anil.” Will that bring Savitri anywhere near books?
Let me turn for a moment from this depressing prospect to Dr Madhav Chavan’s NGO Pratham. Chavan left his job to become part of Maharashtra’s adult literacy campaign of the late eighties. Now he concentrates on children’s education. Pratham has also appointed a brand ambassador, Anupam Kher. From him we know clearly what he will do as a brand ambassador. He says he’ll leverage his media image to “augment Pratham’s fund-raising capacity.”
That’s a very useful thing to do and celebrities are extremely useful in doing that kind of thing. But an NGO is in constant need of funds and so needs a celebrity. Does the HRD ministry need funds? Aren’t we paying taxes? And aren’t we also coughing up something called education cess? Where’s all that money going?
No, it’s not money that the HRD ministry is looking for. It’s looking for a with-it image. In marketing, their syndrome is called “me-too”. When your mind is too impoverished to think up a new idea, you just pinch one from the next person, colour it blue or pink and market it as “the new way to a new you”. Brand ambassadors are today’s concept, and an eminently pinchable concept too. Narendra Modi’s got Bachchan (paid ambassador though he is) for Gujarat tourism. Let’s have one for adult literacy. It’ll like make adult literacy like really sexy. Way to go baby!

Private space public eye

2010-07-24T21:34:00.002+05:30

The horrendous Jalgaon affair tells us how phoney our moral protests against nudity are. A nude in a painting brings every member of the moral police out onto the street. But when news got around that a real live woman was stripped and paraded through a village in Jalgaon district, villagers were able to take the sight with obvious enjoyment and not a single member of the Sree Ram Sene or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or the Shiv Sena or the Bajrang Dal protested or even mildly condemned the terrible act. The terrible act is part of our morality. This is how we’ve punished our women since the time the Kauravs attempted to disrobe Draupadi.

In this little village, a widow was rumoured to be having an affair with a village official. This was ostensibly unacceptable to the village. A conspiracy was hatched and a large group of villagers barged into her home, found the couple together, dragged them out, stripped them, beat them up and paraded them naked through the village.

The case was discussed on a Marathi news channel. Abrogating the right to decide what is moral and immoral and the right to punish the allegedly immoral has become common practice in the country. A retired member of the judiciary called upon by the channel to comment, pointed out that there were enough cultural-political formations in the country who had demonstrated the impunity with which you could take law into your hands as long as the cause was religion, culture or morality. A mob is never punished, however heinous the offence. Who has been punished for crimes committed during the post Babri Masjid demolition riots and the Gujarat pogrom? Why then would ordinary people not feel tempted to experience the heady sense of power that comes with judging and punishing your fellows?

Ironically one of the panelists on the discussion was a prominent leader of the Shiv Sena, Ms Neelam Gorhe. It was strange to hear her speak in an even voice about how wrong it was for people to take the law into their hands. But she had done her work as a political leader. She had made inquiries in the village and discovered an unsuspected angle of the case that the anchor knew nothing about. She revealed that the men who led the action against the couple were not the usual moral police types. They only wore that garb for the impunity it gave them. They were angry with the woman because she had refused to give them what she was giving her paramour. They wanted a piece of the pie so to say.

At frequent intervals during the discussion, a picture popped up on the screen which showed two people, blurred to hide their identities, sitting on the ground trussed up, surrounded by sniggering villagers enjoying the show. Somebody took that picture while they were being humiliated and mercilessly beaten. The ethical problem that news photographers once faced, is never discussed in this age of 24X7 news channels. Somebody took that picture. He was there. The only difference between him and the laughing, sniggering villagers was that they were looking at the scene with the naked eye while he was looking at it through a lens.

Did the picture add to our understanding of what had happened? No. Did it add to our sense of shame? It did, because it implicated us in the passive watching of this horrifying incident along with the villagers and the photographer.

Deities on Dalal Street

2010-07-19T21:01:00.000+05:30

The extent to which we turn our gods into materialistic human beings, came home to me with a news item I came across on page 1 of the most widely read Marathi daily in Pune, “Sakal”. This is how it went:

“Mumbai, 16 July:

The Ganapati Panchayatan Sansthan Trust, set up by the Raja of Sangli, administers five deities—Ganapati, Chintamaneshwari Dev, Chintamaneshwari Devi, Suryanarayan Dev and Laxminaryayan Dev. The income-tax department has issued pan cards in the names of all five deities. The Trust believed that since the law permitted deities to acquire property and the income-tax department had issued pan-cards to all five deities administered by the Trust, the law would also allow them to invest in shares. With this in mind, the Trust applied to the Karur Vaishya Bank to open demat accounts in their names. But the Bank turned down the request. In pursuance of their request, the Trust then filed a plea in the High Court. However, the NSDL, which governs demat accounts, submitted that according to the law, only Trusts that were registered as Public had the right to acquire shares in the name of deities. Private Trusts could acquire shares only in the name of Trustees and not the deities.

The case was heard today by Justice P. B. Muzumdar and Justice Rajendra Sawant. The question that bothered the bench was this. Since anybody could open a demat account in the name of deities and commit fraud, who was to be held responsible for it? The Bench therefore suggested that some responsible member of the Trust should be nominated to accept responsibility for managing the deities’ demat accounts.

The suggestion of the bench was vetoed in toto by the NSDL which stuck to its stand that deities could not be allowed to have demat accounts in their names. Explaining their stand to the Trust, the bench pointed out that the buying and selling of shares required a particular kind of skill which deities did not and could not be expected to possess. Consequently, the bench regretfully rejected the plea filed by the Trust.”

Forget demat accounts. One didn’t even know deities were issued pan cards. The idea has set off a whole chain of puerile posers in my head, beginning with how deities would answer mandatory questions about their names, middle names, surnames and fathers’ names without which nothing can be opened or closed in banks?

In defence of the brinjal

2010-07-14T19:29:00.001+05:30

I notice that Genetically Modified Foods have made a comeback on the news front. It is reported that the European Commission which had blanket banned the stuff is now toying with the idea of allowing its member states to decide what they want to do about it. It appears that scientific evidence is piling up in favour of these technologically interfered with foods and who are we, the non-scientific community, to question such evidence?

Jairam Ramesh will again be in a quandary. Because newspaper editors are saying we can’t lag behind Europe. We mustn’t appear to be anti-science. The last time he was put in a spot, he got away by h’mming first and hawing later, which gave television newscasters and talk show anchors much scope for debate.

I was never personally involved with the debate. Brinjals are not a hot favorite in my family so their future shape, colour, taste and side-effects are things not likely to exercise its mind. But in a distant kind of way, I was on the side of the non-interference with Nature brigade. It was an instinctive, uninformed reaction but there it is. This is not to say that I am not open to being convinced that stuff like BT brinjals will be the best thing that happened to our poor suicide-prone farmers.

However, when this great debate was on I did get caught in a verbal imbroglio that had to do with the electronic media’s ignorance about an important part of the issue, viz, the pronunciation of the veggie’s name. I reproduce here the situation in which the debate took place and the twists and turns that it took in the hope that it will reach the ears of TV newscasters and help them mend their mistake in future discussions.

The debate began in the middle of a small lunch of old and new retired members of the department of English, Elphinstone College. One side of the dining table was engaged in a discussion about whether they got Rs 260 or Rs 288.30 per month as salary (when they got it at all) in those misty old days of yore, and about which year it was when the gap between this and the Rs 450 that the much envied lecturers at private colleges used to get closed with a bang and government college salaries galloped way ahead of the field. It was a low-volume discussion into which a voice from the other end of the table made indignant ingress. "Will someone please tell me how "brinjal" is pronounced?"

I shall have to resort to dramatic dialogue from this point on to give readers a sense of the quick, razor sharp exchanges that followed. In keeping with much modern playwriting, debaters will be named after their states of mind or as plain numbers.

Indignant: I mean how have we always pronounced brinjal?

Everybody together: Brinjol of course!

Voice one: Except when it is preceded by BT on television. Then it is "brinjle"

Indignant: That’s just what I’m angry about. Why? I mean why? If it's always been brinjol and I've always pronounced it brinjol, why should it suddenly become this thing called brinjle?

Everybody: Absolutely.

Indignant: So then?

(Stumped silence)

Voice two: It's Anglo-Indian

Voice three: It comes from the Portuguese.

Voice four: That's not Anglo-Indian.

Voice five: When did the Portuguese eat enough brinjols to influence the Brits with their pronunciation?

Voice one: They lived in Bombay. Bassein and all.

Voice two: The French call it aubergine, you know. Never never brinjol.

Voice four: Exactly.

Indignant: Never mind the French. And never mind the Portuguese. Have we not always called it brinjol?

Everybody: We have.

Voice five: But the Americans never say brinjol. For them it is....

Everybody:…eggplant.

Voice five: You've taken the very word out of my mouth. Eggplant.

Indignant: So where is binjle coming from is what I want to know. It’s not in any of my dictionaries.

Voice three: I told you it’s from the Portuguese.

Voice four: What's with you and the Portuguese? Why are you promoting them here?

Voice one: Perhaps we should look it up.

Indignant: I’m telling you I did. I was so disturbed. All my life I've called the darned things brinjols and suddenly they're brinjles. But imagine, they are not in Daniel Jones nor in Websters!

Voice five: You should have looked in Hobson Jobson

Voice four: (to Six who has been silent) You know the origin of that don't you?

Voice six: Of brinjols?

Voice four: Of Hobson Jobson.

Voice six: (Vaguely) Yes. Ya Hasan! Ya Husain!

(Stumped silence)

Three voices together: What's the connection?

Voice One: With brinjols?

Voice Two: With Hobson Jobson. I mean where's the connection between Ya Hasan Ya Hussain and Hobson Jobson?

Voice Six: Muslims chant Ya Hasan Ya Husain during Mohurram.

Three voices together: So? What's the connection?

Voice Four: The Brits heard Ya Hasan Ya Husain as Hobson Jobson.

Voice three: See? The Brits have defective ears and defective tongues. They must have misheard and mispronounced the Portuguese original as brinjols.

Indignant: Well we took our pronunciations, for better or worse, from those defective tongues. Where does going back to originals get us?

Everybody (more or less): Nowhere in particular.

Voice One: Perhaps I could help. You say you consulted Daniel Jones and Websters. What about Oxford?

Everybody: Ah Oxford.

The debate petered out inconclusively. But since I was Voice One, I felt obliged to follow up on my suggestion. I came home and looked up my Concise Oxford. And this is what I turned up.

Brinjal: (Pronounced brinjol as in "saw". Alternatively brinjol as in "hot"). The word comes from Portuguese "berinjela" which comes from the Arabic "al-badinjan".

“Brinjle” doesn’t even get a look in. I hope TV newscasters will do a dumb vegetable the favour of calling it by its right name when they next discuss the pros and cons of Genetically Modified Foods.

Of wet shoes and daft journalists

2010-07-07T10:36:00.001+05:30

Morning walks during the monsoon are exhilarating for two reasons. The air has been washed clean of smells and pollutants so you can actually breathe without thinking you’re killing yourself. And you meet fewer of your species along the way. Some don’t want to risk slipping; some don’t want to get wet; some simply don’t want to get out of bed (I presume). The result is, you’re walking peacefully along deserted paths humming a jaunty ditty while the rain beats down on your umbrella. You are in a state of bliss.

But. Yes, there’s always a but to spoil life’s pleasures. Water is collecting in your shoes which are now going squelch-squelch instead of tic-toc. Back home, you stand them up against a wall under the fan hoping they will be dry for the following morning’s walk. They aren’t, not the next day nor the next nor the next.

On the third day last week, my friend Nandu dropped in. He looked at my wet shoes propped soggily up against the wall and said that’s no way to dry shoes. You must stuff them with balls of paper to absorb the water. I promptly did what he said and it worked.

But the story doesn’t end there. One discovery always leads to another. My second discovery was that Bombay Times which otherwise lies around the house in its pristine folds, makes excellent stuffing paper. I figure the secret’s not just the newsprint, because that’s common to all papers. It’s the extra porous fluff that goes into BT that makes it doubly absorbent.

Now, when I picked up a copy of BT to stuff my shoes, I noticed my young friend Durga Jasraj hugging her mother Madhura on the back page. Durga and I were together in an old Marathi television series called “Paul Khuna” directed by Amol Palekar and we’ve been fond of each other ever since. Not wanting to stuff her into my shoes, I tore her out to catch up with her later.

This is what the copy said. It said that there was this unnamed musical event at which Jagjit Singh, Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma and a whole lot of other luminaries from the music world were present along with Madhura, Pt Jasraj’s “wonderful wife” and Durga their “beautiful daughter”. So? Normally there’s no “so?” to gossip snippets. These people were there and here’s the pic is all there is to it.

But this story had more. The dissembling reporter goes on to say “So taken aback were we by this confluence of talent that in our reportage of the event we wrongly mentioned Madhura as Jagjit Singh’s wife and Durga as his daughter.” So? That kind of booboo is wholly and utterly expected from the ingénue reporters who don’t know the top of a tabla from the back end of an elephant but charge into musical events, pencils at the ready.

What’s amusing is the phrasing of the apology that follows all the buttery piffle. It goes “We sincerely apologise to the two illustrious musical families for the confusion caused.” Confusion? Caused by you? Like Jagjit Singh’s wife said to him, rolling pin in hand, “When did all this happen, hanh?” And friends called up Durga demanding that she reveal forthwith who her real father was?

Dear BT chumps, you’re like Francis Bacon’s little fly which sat on a mighty carriage wheel and said, “What a dust do I raise”. Believe me, the Jagjit Singhs and Jasrajs know who is who. All you needed to say was, “We regret our error”. But if habit compelled you to add colour, here’s what you could have said: “What we have long suspected, has now been conclusively proved. We are irrevocably daft. We apologise sincerely for this error and for all future errors that we will inevitably make in our long and eventful careers as journalists.”

Spell-check

2010-06-25T22:48:00.001+05:30

Sorry to go on and on about the Thackerays, but I have to get this idea off my chest. This has to do with the phonetic problem of transcribing Indian names accurately into the Roman script.

Let me take my own family name as an example. I spell it GOKHALE, thereby creating a problem. What’s the A doing there? Answer: It is there because we are pedantic. By inserting it after KH, we are saying KH is a fully pronounced consonant. Without the A, we will mislead people into thinking that the KH and the LE make a joint consonant.

Great, wonderful in theory. But see the confusion it causes in practice.

Way back in the year dot, I was being interviewed for a seat at Bristol University. Three polite gentlemen sat before me on the other side of a wide table. One of them inclined his head and said, “Please sit down Miss Gokhale”, pronouncing it like Go-pale. Natural mistake given a certain rule in English spelling that has no exceptions (as far as I know), which says E after a consonant means the previous vowel is to be pronounced as it is in the alphabet.

I would have let it pass had the gentleman not smiled and inquired, “That is the way you pronounce your name, I hope?” Even then I could have nodded and said yes. But instead I said helpfully, “No, it’s Go-kha-le.” I thought separating the syllables thus would make the role of A clear. Despite which, the second gentleman said, “Oh yes, of course, I can see that now.” Then very carefully he tried it out. “Miss Go-khaa-le”, he said, bringing Hindi food into my middle. He too made the mistake of asking politely if he had got it right. Again I could have smiled brightly and said of course you have. And again I did not. I did worse. I said, “No, but that’s okay. I don’t mind.” I meant to sound kind and forgiving. But I ended up sounding patronising--to three men who’d done doctorates in heavy-duty Eng Lit issues from colleges in Oxford and Cambridge.

They guffawed at their gaffes and one of them said self-disparagingly, British as ever, “The English tongue finds it difficult to get around anything more challenging than fish and chips.” The others shook their heads and said “Oh dear oh dear, we must work on this,” while I said to myself, “There goes my seat.”

But I got it.

Anyway, all this is to explain that our insistence on transcribing a full, as against a half consonant in the Roman script makes for social embarrassment in England. Thackeray has escaped it by not going to England at all. But his name is very closely connected with English soil.

Let me pull his name apart to demonstrate how. People generally use A to indicate a full consonant. Thackeray uses an E instead. No problem. People generally use an E for the end vowel. He chooses to transcribe it as AY as in DAY or SAY. Fair enough. Each to his own. We are a tolerant nation and all that. But why doesn’t he transcribe the central consonant of his name with a K? Why “CK”?

Ah! That’s where my little idea comes in. My theory is that he chose to spell his name like Thackeray the 19^th century British novelist, creator of the earliest upwardly mobile anti-heroine in English literature, Becky (Rebecca) Sharpe of “Vanity Fair”, because of a deeply felt kinship.

Just look at the similarities. The Brit Thackeray was a journalist. Our Thackeray began his journey into political prominence with a magazine called “Marmik”. The Brit Thackeray was a humourist. He wrote for “Punch”. Our Thackeray was (some people think “is”) a humourist. “Marmik” was a jokey magazine. The Brit Thackeray was a caricaturist. Our Thackeray was also one. That’s how he got his cartooning job with the Free Press Journal. Now, think of the Brit Thackeray’s first name, William. Shortened to Billy doesn’t it come close to Bal? Two consonants in common.

There, unfortunately, the similarities end and our great misfortunes begin. The Brit Thackeray’s middle name was an invitation, MAKEPEACE. He was WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY when fully unfurled. Our Thackeray was thrilled to cosy up to his first and last names; but when he came to the invitation in the middle…

Complete the above sentence and send to this blog. The person who sends in the best entry will be rewarded with a free tour of Matoshree and the chance to touch Balasaheb’s feet.

The Father's Son

2010-06-25T14:45:00.001+05:30

The arrival of a new political menace on the Mumbai scene is heralded by two events. The first is a show of muscle power on the streets designed to make citizens’ lives maximally difficult or even impossible. The second is the appearance of hoardings congratulating the menace on having added one more year to his life.

This is to announce the arrival of our new political menace—NITESH RANE, son of, (or should I say scion of?) Shri Narayan Rane, erstwhile Shiv Sena man, then rebel Congressman, presently subdued Congressman, but raring to be something more volcanic. Nitesh Rane, besides running petrol pumps, hotels, beer bars and whatever else that has come to him by way of silver spoons in the mouth, has now also gone on to earn his own spurs. We are not privy to the rites of passage that a young tough is put through before he is let out on to the streets of Mumbai; but one surmises that his elders will certify him an honoured member of the tribe now that he has distinguished himself in his first stint at street service.

Nitesh Rane took this test on Tuesday the 22nd of June and came out with flying colours. His three-year-old outfit, Swabhiman, made it to the front pages of every city newspaper for putting such a huge spoke in the rumbling wheels of the city that the city stalled and came to a halt for one whole day. All Nitesh had to do was to say to his men, “Go get them Rufus” or its equivalent in Sindhudurg-Chembur lingo, and off they bounded and smashed up 200 autos and taxis. The remaining one lakh ricks and 55,000 taxis ran off the roads and hid.

The entrenched union leaders whom we have learned to live with, claimed not to have called the strike. “Why would we,” they argued, aggrieved, “when the government had already set the date for talks on the fare hike we were asking for?” So when the strike happened, they were left with their mouths open. The venerable A. L. Quadros had to shut even that when the Shiv Sena’s Mumbai Taxi Chalak Malak Sena asked the gathered media who the hell he was to be asked to speak for taximen? Quadros didn’t even twirl his considerably weighty whiskers in answer to that question. He simply turned tail and walked away.

But it was Nitesh Rane who had won the day. The following day the Press carried his utterly reasonable statement on the previous day’s victory. His aim had never been, he said, to inconvenience the public (had someone been insensitive enough to suspect him of that?) No, No, No. All he had wanted to do was to help the poor rickshawallas whose numbers his union commanded. Since this was said with an admirably straight face and justifiable pride, the Press quoted him without comment. He has thus lived up to the name of his outfit, SWABHIMAN. Pride in self.

As I said earlier, two events mark the rise of a political menace. With not a single taxi or rickshaw on the roads on Tuesday, Nitesh Rane has vaulted clear over the first bar; and the proof of this triumph is in the birthday greetings. They congratulate him, their “dashing, dynamic saheb” (yes, he’s already that! We live in fast moving times) on growing up by one year on June 23. As for us, we must now find a way of living with this added dash and dynamism on our streets!

Conundrums

2010-06-23T19:06:00.001+05:30

Last week a young couple came to invite me to their wedding and stayed to discuss problems that were troubling them. The young man was disturbed by the effect Raj Thackeray’s anti-north Indian campaign had done to his north Indian friends. One story in particular had depressed him.

A good friend, a quiet, hard-working, non-drinking, non-partying type, living as a tenant in a flat in Dombivali, was suddenly told to quit his flat because the remaining seven tenants, all Marathis, didn’t want a bhaiyya in their midst. The landlord had been very happy with this young man for the four years he had stayed in the flat, but said he was helpless in the face of the other tenants’ antagonism. The young man was rushing off for a shoot when the tenants’ delegation visited. He asked them for time. The tenants said nothing doing. Go. The young man had no choice. He packed his stuff, made an SOS call to a friend and moved in temporarily with him.

After this incident, the tension between my young friend and his north Indian friends has become palpable. “When I join them at our usual haunt, they fall silent. When I invited them to my wedding, they looked at the invitation card, saw it was in Marathi and became hostile. How do I deal with this?”

I said if his north Indian friends did not distinguish between him and Raj Thackeray’s mobs, they would only help him in his dangerous work. “But the tenants in my friend’s building weren’t part of Thackeray’s mobs,” he said. “They had been pretty friendly earlier. I tell you, the poison has got into ordinary Marathi people. Can’t we do something about it?”

I had no solution to offer.

My young friend’s fiancée has a problem that ties in with the old gender issue that’s been thrown up yet again with the suave David Davidar being accused of sexual harassment. His statement expresses deep regret at the hurt he has caused his wife (thanks Tiger Woods), but claims that his ‘flirtations’ were consensual. We gather from blogs by women that problems like this occur in organisations where informal friendships between bosses and employees are part of the work culture. Trouble starts when women realise that what began as a friendship was being subtly pushed towards flirtation. The women admit frankly that they enjoy the friendships, but begin to get uncomfortable when they change colour. The line between the one and the other is so blurred that before they know it, they’ve played into the man’s hand. This explains why their protests come so late in the day.

My young friend’s fiancée is a friendly young software programmer who works in Mantralaya. She was the first of the breed to be hired, and is full of justified pride in her profession. Gradually over time she has realised that her male colleagues are not impressed by her professional qualifications. They see her only and exclusively as a young female, who may be ogled, told risqué jokes and humiliated with innuendos about how she got her job.

“Do they know,” she asked with tears in her eyes, “what battles I had to fight with my family and community to be allowed to do this professional course? Do they not see how good I am at my job? Why do my clothes matter to them more than my work? I wear what I’m wearing now, a simple salwar-kameez. Is there something wrong with that? What angers me is that it isn’t just the older men who have this attitude, but men my age as well. How do I deal with this constant harassment? What do I do when I’m told a dirty joke that embarrasses me? If I show I’m embarrassed they are tickled. If I pretend I’m not embarrassed they are happy again because they can then whisper amongst themselves that I’m a ‘bold’ girl. I really don’t know how to deal with this.”

The conundrum is similar, though less destructive in its outcome, to the rape victim’s. If she screams it excites the rapist. If she doesn’t scream, she is supposed to have consented to rape.

“Don’t your women colleagues support and advise you?” I asked. Her smile now was really sad. “They have submitted to this kind of harassment themselves. One of them said it’ll stop once I’m married.”

That of course is patently untrue.

Imagined image

2010-06-18T18:30:00.003+05:30

This is a real laugh. When I say our country is bizarre I mean it is seriously bizarre because of stuff like this.

Organisations, governmental, non-governmental, whichever, are supposed to have eyes and ears and hands and mouths just like us. But whereas our eyes can see what our hands are doing and our ears can hear what our mouths are saying, our civic caretaker, the BMC, appears to be severely challenged in this respect.

This morning I see a huge picture in one of the five newspapers I depress myself with everyday, of a woman in a blue kameez and yellow dupatta swiping her card at a machine. Another woman beyond her is doing the same. The caption gives us to understand that these are BMC employees in a mad rush to get home. The news that accompanies the pic goes (in a nutshell) “Tut tut; that’s very naughty”. Apparently these women are leaving office a full half-an-hour before “the stipulated time”. It’s not happening only on the day this photograph was taken. It is happening everyday.

Unnamed BMC officials are deeply annoyed. They’ve announced punitive action. First, no increments. Next, termination of service.

I’m laughing hard, really hard at this. Didn’t we think BMC employees left work early (like their brothers and sisters in Mantralaya) because they didn’t think there was work to be done in the first place? That, even more radically, they didn’t turn up for work at all because moonlighting added more zeros to their already fat incomes? And that these indeed were the distinguishing marks of the BMC employee? In fact, I was quite convinced that these practices were cleared at the interview stage itself, before employees were hired: “Repeat after me: I submit humbly to BMC’s long-established work culture. I shall keep my hands free of work at all times and at the same time, keep them well-oiled for the pursuit of lucre.” Stamp, stamp, stamp, hired!

But the unnamed BMC officials quoted in the news report don’t seem to see it that way. They complain that early leavers are costing the corporation a loss of 58,000 man hours per day, at half an hour per head, and (excuse me while I roll on the floor), “affecting the BMC’s work culture and tarnishing its image”!

Image for heaven’s sake! Like the BMC is listed repeatedly as one of our most corrupt organisations? Like its employees sit on files, not chairs at the workplace and “misplace” said files the moment their contents begin to irritate their backsides? Like they treat octroi as a golden egg laying goose in their back yards or…need I go on?

As I pick myself off the floor, irony strikes. Our contractor who is doing some knocking and plastering work on our old building because it’s been leaking for years and peepul trees have been growing out of its back, calls to say there are some BMC chaps downstairs asking for 5,000 rupees because we are repairing our building and can you spare the cash? Never in my entire considerably long life, have I bribed. If this had been my personal work, I still would not have done so. But my 96-year-old upstairs neighbour has been worrying herself sick about the leaky walls falling in on her with the monsoon setting in.

I fished out the required 5,000 rupees from my emergency fund and handed it over to the contractor in utter humiliation. I watched the oily transaction from my verandah. The recipients of the booty were four strapping young men, smartly dressed, one in a fancy jerkin. They pocketed 4000 rupees and gave the contractor a receipt for 1000 rupees—a fine for some obscure rule they must have accused him of breaking. I am now part of the system.

BMC take a bow. Your image shines bright and clear. When a beggar puts his hand out to us, we tell him moralistically to work, not beg. When your men put their hands out to us, we dare not utter the word work. We simply pay up.

Curly dreams

2010-06-16T17:53:00.000+05:30

Hair has been on my mind for some time. Every time I see a young woman swinging a plasticky sheet of it around her face in any one of the ten thousand ads we see on TV for hair oil, shampoo, hair colour, conditioner and whatever else, I think of my generation’s aspirations. They were not for glossy straight hair. They were for waves.

Waves could be lightly secured on both sides of a centre or side parting with clips made to look like butterflies, strawberries or ladybirds. They could be tied in two bunches on either side of the head with pink or red satin ribbons. They could be trained into the most envied thing of all: ringlets.

Belinda down the street wore ringlets. At school there was Sherry of the plump pink cheeks, and ringlets that bobbed deliciously up and down. None of us wore our hair short so we could never compete with either of them. But hope wasn’t dead. We could leave long brushes of hair loose at the end of our plaits and turn those into ringlets.

Every now and again a hopeful straight-haired friend would excitedly pour into our avid ears yet another secret for making ringlets; and yet again we’d go home in high spirits to try it out and return to school with our obdurate brushes still straight as brooms. I remember one of these secrets even now. You had to coil your plait end brushes tightly around a shoelace, twist them into little knots, then dip the knots in tea dregs and sleep on them. Next morning when you undid the shoelaces, hey presto there they were, your dream ringlets. Well, as I said, it was always, hey presto, there are your brushes again.

Ringlets, we decided, were unattainable. But waves? Surely those could be managed? My model for wavy hair was Nalini Chitre, the late poet Dilip Chitre’s cousin. All his three cousins were blessed with curls, but the other two had frizz. While this was infinitely more respectable than straight hair, one would turn to it only if waves failed.

In those days an older cousin of mine from Nasik was staying with us. She was indefatigable in her determination to make waves. Earlier she would do what many still do---make tiny plaits on hair washing day and be blessed with a frizz in the evening. It lasted for a couple of days and then wore out. But those two days were Saturday and Sunday, important days because she had a boyfriend nobody knew about. When she announced that she wanted to marry him, her father, my uncle, hauled her back to Nashik where she found her next boyfriend and eloped!

Anyway, when this cousin had no time to make tiny plaits on hair washing day, she pushed her hair up into a series of ridges around her head and pinned them down with long bobby pins. This trick produced results. I tried it out a couple of times but for god’s sake, how could I waste weekend mornings on elusive things like waves when exciting games were being played downstairs on the street?

Meanwhile, my craze for curls had got around the neighbourhood. It prompted the Pereiras downstairs to do an amazing thing. One of them worked for the Army and Navy Store in Fort, and he got me a home perm set for my 11th birthday. It had blue bone shaped curlers, squares of tissue paper, rubber bands and two bottles of liquid. My mother frowned at the liquids. “Chemicals!” she said and put them out of bounds.

For a couple of years after that, I would meticulously lay tissue paper squares at the ends of equally divided strands of hair, wind them up on the blue curlers and secure them round my head with rubber bands. But without the curling liquids all I got, when I let down my hair, was zigzags, which even I, blinded by hope, could not call curls.

This precious home perm set was called Toni. It was advertised famously by a pair of twins with glossy curls. The copy went, “Which twin has the Toni?” Who cared? I knew I was never going to have it. So go away. Get lost!

Where the dirt is

2010-06-13T15:30:00.001+05:30

I’d simply asked, “What are all those policemen doing out there?” They were standing with their van at the corner of my street where taxis normally wait. That’s why I’d had to walk in the opposite direction to find a cab. How was I to know that my simple question, muttered almost to myself, would act like a starter’s gun on my cabbie?

He was off.

“What do you think they’re doing?” he shot back. “Waiting to make money of course.
That’s how they are. If you’re just next to your house and think you can do a quick turn without bothering about the red signal, they are right there with open palms ready to fleece you. Now tell me aunty, did you ever see so many policemen out on the roads in your time? You make the smallest mistake and your pocket grows light. They make a mistake, and your pocket grows light again.”

Thereafter he was like a one-person show of “Where the Dirt is”. The curtain fell only when it had to—at the end of my journey. One story must serve as an example of the many he told.

He had had a new ration card made. It came with his name spelt wrong. He objected. The ration officer said if you want it corrected, you’ll have to make an affidavit. “Now a man working 12 hours a day to feed himself and his family—where does he have the time for lawyers and courts? The man says to himself I’ll have to pay those bastards anyway; so why not pay this one and head back to work? That’s how it is. I paid the bastard and the name was corrected. 200 rupees for two minutes’ work.”

For him, only one person had stood out like a shining beacon in all this murk. Indira Gandhi. “Now there was a woman who had guts, who had will power and who had our love. We would line up at Mahim when her car passed by. We would wave and she would wave back. Like this (both hands off the wheel, oh mi gawd!) These days, do we know or even care who goes where in those long cars with lights? Why don’t we care? Because they’re all gutter ke chuhe. She was a sherni.” He turned to flash a perfect 10 smile at me. A bike swerved into our path and sped on.

Next moment the smile curdled with intense contempt. “Baburao Mane, Shiv Sena man,” he spat out. “You don’t know him? You’ll see him walking around on our street. I asked him once to recommend me for a job. He suggests one that would get me Rs 50 a day. I said to him I don’t have a big enough almirah to put that in saab. I’m a driver. Talk 4000 rupees a month and I’ll listen. He shouts at me. Says get out, go find yourself a job. I say sure I’ll get out. But you watch it. You’re going to be on the street one day. And that’s where he is now. In his place? Eknath Gaekwad.”

After a moment’s pause, he turned around to deliver his punch line. No words. Just a mean and malevolent “Heh heh heh”!

Of nests and diving bombs

2010-06-11T10:10:00.000+05:30

Suddenly the house crow—the Corvus splendens-- has become a subject of intense interest for me. It always seems to have been so to poets, painters, playwrights and philosophers. It goes as far back as Sant Dnyaneshwar whose lyric on the crow, “Pail to gay kau kokatahe” has been immortalised by Lata Mangeshkar in her brother Hridaynath’s composition. “Fly away crow, I will gild your feet in gold” sings the poet. And then again “I’ll make a curd-rice mould and bring it to your mouth”.
Kau and chiu are the eternal pair in children’s stories. They are invoked by mothers too, feeding morsels of food to reluctant infants: “This one is for kau. This one is for chiu.”
There’s Shafaat Khan’s play “Bambai ke kawwe” built around the power crows enjoy in Hindu funeral rites. Of the many blackly comic scenes in Satish Alekar’s “Mahanirvan”, one of the funniest is two sons with rice balls fighting for the attention of a single crow to bring ultimate release to their respective fathers’ troubled souls.
R. K. Laxman held an entire show of penciled and crayoned crows in all their moods and postures. They were sharp, shrewd creatures with cocked heads and slanted looks. Gieve Patel has done a few crows, scavengers, feasting on messy dead rats on roads. But he’s done one that’s different. “Crow with egg”. This fellow stands in the very centre of the picture frame balancing an egg on his beak, a consummate performer, commanding us to stop, look and admire.
Years ago I too became an admirer of the crow for a brief while when one of the species took to sitting at my window watching me write. It is flattering to get attention, even when it comes from a creature which has just been scraping human secretions off the street. I was almost on the point of consolidating our relationship by naming my friend the Thane of Cawdor when he stopped coming. I bet he went to sit at Shobhaa De’s window. Had he expected me to offer him moulds of curd-rice and gild his feet with gold? You never know where birds will get their ideas. Anyhow that was the end of my close encounter with crows.
Till recently, when one of them dived at my head and left it stunned for a good hour-and-a-half. What was that? What did I do? I was only looking out of my verandah window passing time. There was another attack the following day when I was trying to unhook a hanging potted plant from one corner of the verandah to carry it to the other, where the afternoon sun was slanting in.
Friends had suddenly turned foes. Someone said I shouldn’t take it so personally. They’d probably built a nest in the tree outside the verandah. I said, “So?”
I found the answer to that “so” when I Googled “House crow”. Amongst all the knowns listed there, I discovered this (to me) unknown: “Breeding pairs will repeatedly dive bomb humans near the nest.” Ah!
Only personal experience tells you how long breeding lasts. The eggs were laid in April, five in all. Mrs Crow sat and sat and sat on them and managed to extract two kids towards the middle of May. The fledglings were grey wisps of something like feathers back then. By end May we could see their hungry beaks poking out of the nest. We thought we could clean our windows now without being attacked. We were mistaken. Our cleaning hands were clawed.
The little ones are now old enough to hop around on the branches nearest to the nest. They’ve grown sleek while our windows have grown grimy. Try to clean them even now and zoop, a black bomb comes diving down.
I wait impatiently for the baby crows to take to the skies. And yet there is fear. Forget the grime on my windows; will these little creatures, whose birth and growth I’ve been watching for over two months, be safe in those wide open skies with no mummy-daddy watching over them?

Words against meaning

2010-06-08T18:14:00.001+05:30

Two years ago I translated Prabhakar Barve’s book “Kora Canvas” from Marathi into English. I knew even as I was doing it, that the translation wasn’t working in English. The original is too full of repetitions and circumlocutions. The artist strives too hard to express the inexpressible, making reading and trying to understand the text tedious. The English language doesn’t take too kindly to descriptive stuff about the inner lives of artists and to home grown mysticism. These things sound just fine in Marathi because the language reflects a culture that thinks, feels and writes that way. In English the same sounds fluffy and uncomfortably sentimental.

Where exactly is the inner life of an artist located? In “Kora Canvas” it is in the “mun”. Now here’s a word designed to give the translator her worst nightmares. In Molesworth’s Marathi into English dictionary which I most often use for its reliability (it doesn’t pass up on difficult words as some other dictionaries do), the word could have any of the following five meanings:

1) The mind; the seat of judgement, reflection, reasoning, memory etc
2) The heart; the seat of the sentiments, passions and the affections
3) The conscience or moral sense
4) Consciousness
5) The will or determining faculty.

Realising the problem this list is likely to create for a person who is straining to understand the meaning of the word, Mr Molesworth gives generous advice. Choose whichever meaning fits the context, he says.

Easier said than done. Usage has never bothered with meanings neatly separated into compartments. In popular and literary usage, “mun” leaks through Mr Molesworth’s pigeon holes to combine heart and soul in one context and mind and heart in another, with a hint of imagination thrown in for good measure. There lies the rub for translators, a breed that Mr Molesworth knows nothing of.

It is strange how inter-connections get made when you happen to be working on two independent things at the same time. While I’m editing the ninth chapter of “Kora Canvas” provisionally entitled “Sensibility” because the original title could also be translated as “Awareness” or “Percipience”, I am also reading Zeami on No theatre and the idea of “yugen”, and an essay on Japanese aesthetics.

“Yugen” cannot be translated in a single word. It connotes the world of the invisible that lies beyond reality. The original Chinese meaning of the word was, to be so mysteriously faint and profound as to be beyond human perception and understanding. This is the kind of space Barve often tries to enter but with the wrong tools.

The essay on Japanese aesthetics goes into equally untranslatable concepts like “mono no aware”, which might be understood to mean “empathy with things in their transience”. Barve writes about once having been so intensely absorbed in the image of a yellow leaf that had fallen on a wet, black road that it kept recurring in his work. Surely a mono no aware response?

Barve also writes about occasionally feeling profoundly solitary and lonely. He accepts the state and lives with it until it passes. But there have been occasions he says, when the feeling has given birth to a creative idea. This is like the idea of “sabi” which suggests both the subjective sadness of solitariness and the objective ‘is’ness of it. This duality is perfectly expressed in the following haiku:

Solitary now —
Standing amidst the blossoms
Is a cypress tree.

At one point, Barve speaks of a dense darkness that descends on him, seeming to fill the entire void of his rib cage. He accepts this state too and lives with it. Sometimes, magically, out of the darkness arises an image of incredible clarity. Patina, darkness, and what they can reveal, are ideas that imbue Japanese aesthetics.

The mysterious beauty of darkness is the subject of Junichiro Tanizaki’s gem of a monograph, “In Praise of Shadows”. My favourite passage is the one that describes his experience of drinking soup from a lacquer bowl. Lacquer bowls have dark interiors. “What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish.; but the palms sense the gentle movement of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation.” It is not the thing itself but our awareness of it that creates the thing and the beauty of the thing. Barve attempts to suggest this too in “Sensibility”.

In his afterword, the translator of “In Praise of Shadows”, Thomas J Harper, cites Susan Sontag's explanation of why she chose to write “Notes on Camp” in the style she did. “To snare a sensibility in words.....one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.”

This is perhaps what Barve too should have done in “Kora Canvas”. He did the reverse. He constructed these essays from the jottings he used to make in his diary.

As an artist, Barve locates his shapes and forms with sensitive precision in the picture space. In "Kora Canvas", he repeatedly asserts that it is only when forms are placed in a coherent relationship with space in the picture frame, that meaning is made. In literature too, suggestion rather than overwrought description makes for greater significance.

Had Barve known as the Japanese do (or did) that certain concepts cannot be over-explained, and had he written "Kora Canvas" "nimbly and tentatively" rather than in long-winded adjective-heavy passages, we'd have had a better chance of reaching his "mun". The style in which it is written stalls us and leaves us groping for meaning.

noise ahoy!

2010-06-02T15:27:00.001+05:30

If you are one of those who flips the page contemptuously at the sight of fish, crabs and scorpions crawling over two columns of newsprint, with the reigning pundit telling you that he sees much hope for your business today or love is in the air for you or watch that pothole your sign is full of accidents, and if you happen to be a BEST commuter to boot, it’s time to be deeply depressed. The BEST has designs on your peace of mind.

The news is that the BES & T Undertaking plans to install two 22-inch LCD screens in every bus in its fleet to give you news updates, information on branded goods, automated announcements about the next bus stop, tips from Tarla Dalal on eating right and, hrrmph, astrology readings by Bejan Daruwalla.

It appears that there’s a set-up called the Visual Interactive Transit Entertainment System which is going to supply us with the above-mentioned noisy goodies. Did hordes of commuters sit in dharna outside BEST house when we weren’t looking, clamouring for information on branded products and tips on sensible eating? No. BEST in its very own infinite wisdom has decided we are a pack of uninformed dolts who need to be enlightened on our way to work. In fact one news report makes the BEST plan out to be a form of social service. It seems the venerable undertaking is sadly aware that the way commuters rush around, they are left with no time to sit and stare at their newspapers and/or TV sets. This leads to severe information deprivation. The 22 inch LCD screens per bus are the undertaking’s humble contribution towards creating a more informed citizen.

I’m thinking back to my days of bus travel from Shivaji Park to VT (oops! I mean CST). I particularly remember a fellow commuter who would regularly fall asleep at Sayani Road and wake up with the smell of fish at Crawford Market, all set for the day ahead. What this gentleman was deprived of was not information but sleep. Will today’s victims of sleep deprivation, common to most commuters, be able to sleep through Tarlaben telling them not to eat fried foods, Daruwalla telling them not to fall into potholes and a seductive baritone telling them it’s oh so cool to wear glares that will cost them half of next month’s salary?

Those days I composed most of my Tuesday columns for the late and profoundly lamented “Evening News” en route to the office because, what I was deprived of at home, was time. The columns got composed despite the thunder and clatter and honking of traffic outside because you knew the noise wasn’t maliciously directed at you. But now BEST plans to customise whole wavelengths of noise specially for you, and you can’t jump out of the window because you want to get to work in one piece.

Yes, it’s bad news. But there are two silver linings you can hold on to. The BEST plan can materialise only if the BEST committee approves of it; and experience tells us that where there’s a committee, there’s a roadblock. More good news. Currently the committee is in a sulk for which the official reason is that there’s been some breach of contract by Interactive-what’s-their-name. But actually the committee’s pissed off because the Interactive people went to press before the committee had officially approved the commuter information plan.

The second silver lining is for plebeians. The toffs who ride in air-conditioned buses are going to get the first experimental blast of information. Let’s rub our hands in glee. For who knows? Electronic stuff is tricky. It simply may not work in the AC buses and the whole thing will be called off. Plans involving crores have failed, so why not this? Or, equally reliably, someone will breach some other contract. They do it all the time. Either way, we plebeians will be saved.

If success takes the silver out of both linings, there’s a third that we can make available to ourselves. I’ve just been to the dictionary to find out what “interactive” means. It has a very promising meaning. In electronic devices it means a two-way flow of information in which the giver of the said info responds to the user’s input. Now just assume-- I’m not inciting us-- but just assume our input is a couple of well-aimed stones? The response would have to be silence, na?

Beauty? My foot!

2010-06-01T18:50:00.004+05:30

It's just a fortnight under a year since I last published a post. It's been a year of excessive work. At the end of a hard day of writing for other people, there was neither time nor inclination to write for oneself. Now, with a respite that looks like lasting at least till the end of the year (unless I open my stupid trap and say yes to yet another back-breaking assignment), I'm back to blogging. And it's Shivaji Park once again.

A few months ago, suddenly, workmen started digging up the walkers' track that runs along the periphery of the park. Did someone tell us this was going to happen? Hey, which country did that question come from? Not ours for sure. We are a country of jabberers; but ask us to part with information that's going to affect people's daily lives vitally, and we are like clams suffering from a particularly bad bout of lockjaw.

But one takes life as it comes, and we did. So everyone who was used to walking on the walkers' track, poured out onto the pavement where many like me walk. Thereafter it was constantly bang, dash, bump, trip, excuse me, sorry, damn and grrr around the park. Not pleasant first thing in the morning. And worse because they called the whole exercise "beautification".

Now this beautification plan included a couple of friezes near one of the park entrances showing Shivaji Maharaj being coronated etc. Okay, why not? If you're a Marathi, you are morally obliged to find the idea beautiful.

However, as everybody knows, there's a pair of cousins in politics who don't see eye to eye on anything; and when it comes to Shivaji Park and the great warrior king after whom it is named, they fervently believe their respective parties hold the exclusive title deed to both. When their eyes lock over these properties, they get so severely crossed that only the whites show, the pupils deserting their sockets in sheer fury. So, with one cousin doing Shivaji friezes, the other had to cry foul. Being smart, he took care to cry foul legally.

That is how the public came to hear about how the entire beautification project was commissioned by the BMC, ruled by the Shivaji frieze party, without calling for tenders. This made some residents of Shivaji Park very angry. They upped and filed a PIL calling for a stay on the entire project. A stay was duly brought. Only Shivaji Maharaj's coronation frieze managed to wriggle free of the embargo by virtue of its requiring only a few finishing touches. These done, Bal Thackeray was able to unveil it as scheduled, on May 1, Maharashtra's 50th happy birthday. Whether the frieze adds to the beauty of Shivaji Park or not is not under debate right now.

What's under debate is the rest of the "beautification" work. The stay has stayed that work for what feels like 18 aeons. So what do we have now? We have the track along the western flank of the park fully paved. Halfway down the north end, the paving gives way to a dug up stretch. Round the corner on the east, as well as along the south, some stretches are piled with rubble, others are under sackcloth, and still others are half paved with some paving blocks still scattered around waiting for the stay to be lifted. As a result, walkers who cannot entirely give up their inner track habit, do a kind of slalom in and out from track to pavement and back. Where they come out is where we go into the bang, dash, bump, grrr routine.

The most beautiful part of this beautification story is the parapet. The BMC's idea of beautifying a parapet has always been to paint its stone sides in regulation yellow, blue and red. That has been done. In addition, the top of the parapet has been painted green. Now, if BMC had spent just a few minutes at Shivaji Park observing walker behaviour, they'd have noticed that people sit on the parapet after their walks for a chinwag (and occasionally jalebis and ganthias) with friends. So the thing to do would have been to paint the parapet at the dead of night with paint that would dry in two hours flat. This they didn't do with the result that hopeful parapet sitters spread sheets of newspaper on the wet paint to prevent their posteriors from going green. Today the parapet offers an interesting archive of local, national and world news of the time in four languages.

The current situation is something like this. The chaps who commissioned the beautification work without calling for tenders are sitting at their desks swilling tea or killing flies; the filers of the PIL are happy atop their moral high horse; the judges in their wigs (do they still wear them?) have blissfully forgotten to unstay the stay; and the public that wants nothing more than to walk for its health, is frothing unhealthily at the mouth wondering which of the above to clobber to get the action going.

Happy b'day Raj

2009-06-13T12:47:00.001+05:30

We are a culture of excess. I'm the 'n'th cultural commentator to say so; and for the 'n'th time I adduce the following observations to support the statement:

1) When our temple walls are carved, we see no wall, just carvings
2) When our brides dress, we see no bride, just costumes and ornaments
3) When politicians are garlanded, we see no politician, just garlands
4) When wedding cars are decorated, the driver sees no road, just an extravagant floral burst on the bonnet.

In keeping with the above, Raj Thackeray's supporters started putting up hoardings greeting their leader on his birthday 6 days before the great event, which is tomorrow. Tomorrow, he will grow up by a whole year. That's 365 days. Amazing! One can understand his supporters' hurry to get there first. It's like a Parsi wedding. You scramble for your place, put one end of your bottom on one end of a chair, then look triumphantly at others left walking dejectedly back to their frilled tables.

So the vantage points around the Thackeray residence have filled up fast--the mouth to his lane, the traffic island down the road, and of course Shivaji Park. By tomorrow, we shall see no road, park or traffic island, just hoards and hoards of hoardings.

The early birds got the best places of course--the ones at the mouth of his gully. They will greet him first as he drives out. Then, if he turns right, he will see six separate effusions (at present count), ranged jauntily around the traffic island, waiting excitedly to catch his eye. One of them rhymes: "A newly-created Maharashtra is what Shree (God) desires/ An almighty Raj is what Maharashtra desires." If Raj turns left instead of right as he very well might if he wants to walk his dogs in the park, he will see a line of jubilant greetings that go right round the circumference of the park.

Though one picture is said to be equal to a thousand words, the pictures on the hoardings reveal nothing of Thackeray's plans for the navanirmiti of this State. The tale they tell is mixed. He laughs his head off in one. In another his reflecting shades carry the image of dozens of tiny people all looking up at him. In a third, he has a threatening "we-will-not-tolerate-outsiders" look. But in a fourth he wears an "aggabai" expression with matching gesture. In this gesture typical of Marathi women caught by surprise, the fingers of one hand are laid lightly against the cheek, the eyes are opened wide and a coyish smile hides an incipient "Oh?"

If I were a Raj Thackeray supporter, I would find the greatest reassurance in the picture where the fingers of both his hands are entwined and held against the chin in vacant or in pensive mood. Those of us who have read their Wordsworth, know that such a mood occurs when poets have just returned from seeing a host of golden daffodils. The said daffodils will later flash upon the poet's inward eye, bringing him bliss. Raj Thackeray is not a poet but a visionary. When he falls into a vacant or a pensive mood, surely it is because his inward eye shows him expanding fields of daffodils reaching all the way to the horizon and covering every inch of ground in Maharashtra? After all, that is Shree's desire.

Speaking of god's desire for man's political advancement, I come to the most recent example of excess. The brothers Reddy of Bellary, Karnataka, have donated a 42 crore rupee crown of gold and diamonds to Lord Venkateshwara of Tirupathi. At present they own mines; but what they ardently desire is to occupy the throne of Karnataka. A television channel invited one of the temple priests from Tirupathi to explain the Reddys' action. Rather unfair of the channel, but the priest answered gamely, it's dharma. When the anchors appeared unconvinced, he offered another answer. It's faith he said. The anchors then pressed him with the loaded question, "Such excess in the time of recession," they asked. The priest said yes, it is faith.

Those of lesser faith than the Reddys, be warned. With 42 crore rupees of dharma sitting on his head, Lord Venkateshwara is not going to turn his head, or even his eyes in our direction. We might as well save our diamonds till the assembly elections are over. Once one of the Reddys becomes Chief Minister of Karnataka, we will be free to apply for our minor boons.

The sacred thread and the pav

2009-05-12T17:56:00.002+05:30

I'm on my morning walk. A man in his mid-forties is walking with his son. The son's around eight years old. His head bears testimony to his thread ceremony having been performed a couple of weeks ago. Right now his hair's like a crew around a circular oasis of longer hair.

Most boys these days refuse to have their heads shaved in what we used to call the puri-chamcha cut. (The chamcha was the long tuft hanging out of the circle of hair.) They don't mind the ceremony itself because it makes them heroes for a day, brings them gifts and is denied to their sisters. I'm not sure they know that it is also denied to a whole caste of people called shudras as well. The sacred thread makes my young co-walker my social superior. His thread is a mark of his exclusivity. It makes him dwija, twice born, while I, my sisters and my shudra brothers remain once born. Those who have transgressed against this law have been punished. See what happened to Shambuka in the Ramayan when he dared to recite the vedas. But the British came and spoiled it all. Ignoring the laws of the land, they threw education open to everybody, thread or no thread. And see where it has brought us. As a dalit and a woman, Mayawati is twice once-born; and she is aspiring to be our Prime Minister!

To come back to my young co-walker, here's this boy adorned with marks of exclusivity, and there's his father who's just received a call on his mobile. "What?" he shouts, sounding irritated. "Pav? You want me to pick up pav? How many?"

Oops! Does the man know he is about to do spectacular religious splits in footing it to an Irani's for pav with a son who has just been anointed dwija? In the bad old times of the British, the pav was the Hindu's most feared pollutant. Missionaries were supposed to have garnered their easiest souls back then. All they had to do was fling a pav into the village well and out went the entire village from the Hindu fold. The moment the villagers drank from the well, they became instant Christians. The Marathi verb for such automatic conversions was "batane", which means, "to be polluted, rendered unfit for social intercourse."

How things have changed! By an expedient turn of events, while the thread ceremony is still going strong, the pav has lost its powers of pollution. Today it stands as a proud emblem of the Hindu Hriday Samrat's economic agenda. It is the wrapping that goes around the hallowed Shiv Vada, filling the stomachs and pockets of the Marathi (Hindu) manus. So who's afraid of changing times?

Bank clerk to hero with a little help from Shivaji

2009-04-20T14:48:00.002+05:30

I finally saw "Mee Shivaji Raje Bhosale boltoy". I had to find out what the buzz was all about. A 3.5 crore budget, three times the norm for Marathi films, people whistling, flinging money at the screen, booked out shows.

Lovely. But on what premise is this success based? On the premise that Marathis have been, and are being, wronged in their own State, particularly in its capital, Mumbai. The representative victim is one totally unbelievable character called Dinkar Bhosale. He is a bank clerk. Not the type we know who doesn't look up while you're standing before his window for a quarter of an hour and when he does, it's like you're a worm deserving to be crushed but he's saddled with this unreasonable job of being at your service.

This bank clerk gets shouted at, abused, ridiculed and pushed around by everybody from the Kolin in the fish market and Gujarati shirt shop owner to his South Indian boss and Marathi wife. He's also taken for a ride by other Marathis--BMC engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and of course, the police because they are all in the pay of one Gujarati builder-cum-goonda, Ghosalia

Bhosale has a daughter who's 'n' times smarter than him. But when she auditions for a film she gets rejected because she's a Marathi. The director is of the opinion that a Marathi name in Hindi films is very down-market! If at that moment names like Nalini Jaywant, Shobhana, Nutan and Tanuja Samarth, Smita Patil, Urmila Matondkar and Madhuri Dixit whiz through your mind, let them whiz on. Forty years of political rhetoric have made the wronged man image of the Marathi manus a deeply cherished one.

The point of creating an unbelievable loser like Bhosale (till now I'd thought Devdas was the bench mark) is to show that Marathis are to blame for their plight. And the point of showing they are to blame for their plight is to show how they can recover their rights by giving it back as good as they get and putting the corrupt to shame. The point of burdening the totally inept, inadequate, unprepared Bhosale with the job of taking on the world is to bring Shivaji into the picture. It is his power alone that can put iron into Bhosale's (an by implication, other Marathis') jelly spine. All pepped up, Bhosale sallies forth. The corrupt cringe in the light of his moral fire. He delivers thundering speeches (clever dialogue by Sanjay Pawar); and when push comes to shove, he uses Shivaji's Bhavani sword (alleged to be in England) to wound the last bastion of the corrupt--Ghosalia. All the Marathis who've been bribed by him have already returned his petis and khokas in abject shame, and thumped their chests, echoing Bhosale's slogan "I'm proud to be a Maharashtrian". Bhosale is a public hero.

All's well that ends well. Bhosale's daughter opts out of the Hindi film world and does the safe thing-- she signs three Marathi films. With the signing amount she gets, her father fulfills his son's long-cherished dream of owning a bike. Fairy tale over.

Who are we when we are Indians?

2009-03-22T08:07:00.002+05:30

A couple of people we know have made the strangest critical comment on Sooni Taraporewala's "Little Zizou". They're not saying it didn't amuse them or the script leaked or the cameraman didn't know which way to point his camera or the performances were like something from the annual school concert. If they'd said any of those things, we could have written them off as idiotic/prejudiced/mentally challenged etc. But they are saying something much more fundamental. "We've had too many Parsi films. Why make another?"

It worries me that two otherwise sensible people feel this way about films made at intervals of roughly ten years. We saw "Khatta Meetha" in 1978 and "Pestonjee" in 1988. "Being Cyrus" came 16 years later in 2005. "Percy" was made a year after "Pestonjee" but never released. None of these films was documenting "the Parsi way of life", which might have gotten a little tedious by film number five. They all told stories which is what feature films are supposed to do. "Khatta Meetha", was a delightful comedy centred around an elderly man and woman looking for companionship with each other but finding the going tough with hostile offspring. "Being Cyrus" was a dark film that ended in murder. How could they be lumped together as "Parsi" films? Have we been so taken in by the suggestion that Hindi films with their concocted tales of men and women located in nowhere land, are "national", making any film revolving around a specifically located Indian regional or even ethnographic?

Who or what is Indian is not a new problem. It dates back to Raja Ravi Varma, a strong influence on Hindi films. He addressed the problem of Indianness head on when he submitted a batch of ten paintings to the International Exhibition of the World Columbian Order in Chicago in 1893. One of them, "Galaxy of musicians", shows eleven women dressed in regional costumes playing a variety of instruments. While their costumes are regional, their faces are "Indian", which means their skin is fair, noses straight and narrow, foreheads high, chins pointed, hair straight and postures modest. This was probably the first visual representation of what we mean by "variety in diversity".

The national/regional divide in films is best illustrated by Nishikant Kamat's "Mumbai Meri Jaan". Though Mumbai is its location, Kamat's characters do not belong specifically to any of the communities that inhabit the metropolis. The Soha Ali Khan character is Rupika or Ruchika Joshi. Joshi is a Marathi surname but it can also be Gujarat, or UPian. We don't know which community Kay Kay Menon the Muslim hater belongs to. He is plain Suresh. But Madhavan is Nikhil Agarwal. Agarwals come from the north, so they are "Indian". In short, when a Marathi film maker makes a film in Hindi, he is persuaded that his characters will be acceptable as "Indians" only if they are not seen as belonging to any other place but the north. "Indian" audiences may not relate to characters called Chavan or Screwala or Subramaniam. It's like upwardly mobile PIOs in America. They call themselves things lime "Bobby" to enable their names to slip easily off American tongues. When they have children they call them Neel if it's a boy and Maya if it's a girl.

So there you have it. Unity in diversity is all about assimilation.

Toughening juniors by killing

2009-03-13T13:01:00.001+05:30

They say ragging is just a bit of fun. They say it helps seniors to know juniors. They say it toughens juniors. They say post-ragging the ragger and the ragged enter into a benign friendship that can last a lifetime. So they say. Then we hear of suicides and deaths which are not called murders because the seniors were only brutally beating up a junior and it was ridiculous of the junior to go and die. S/he should have known it was just a bit of fun.

Typically, fathers and mothers to whom youngsters like Aman Kachroo, the latest fatality of ragging, complain, later say, "We never thought that it was so serious." Young brides tortured for dowry by their in-laws, also complain. But they are sent back after "patch-ups" to die by fire or hanging. Why do parents not take their children's life-and-death problems seriously? I suspect it is because of the huge amounts of money they have spent on getting them admitted to college or married. Unable to bring themselves to write off those costs, they end up writing off their children.

The point to take note of here is that dowry is part of our culture. Ragging isn't. It is part of our colonial legacy. Yet ragging is tolerated when other colonial legacies are aggressively questioned because it fits in with our feudalism. Those who have social/economic/political power are expected to use it to torture/exploit/kill the weak. Ragging follows the same principle.

I remember an incident from decades ago that has stuck in my memory to this day. The daughter of a family friend came home from her first term of college in Baroda full of happiness at how she and her gang had tortured a new girl in their dormitory so consistently every night that she had left the college. They hadn't liked the girl for the amount of oil she put in her hair.

Here's an account that I wrote home of my first day in a Hall of Residence at Bristol University. Having described how freshers get invited by turn to high table so that the staff get to know them and then to the junior high table so that the seniors get to know them, I go on to describe the post-dinner meet freshers were invited to in a senior student's room. All the seniors in our annexe came for coffee and biscuits. Amidst much joking, laughter and horseplay, "the seniors told us exactly how to manipulate things if we were in trouble. We are expected to be in by 10.30 p m on weekdays and 11 at weekends. In case we were late, we were told which window was always open to get in through. If it happened to be closed, we were told which balcony was the easiest to climb!"

In feudal terms, I was the weakest of the freshers. I was the wrong skin colour and race. I was also thinner than the others. I was perfect material for raggers to pick on. But I felt instantly included and went on to make many friends amongst the seniors.

That repressive thing called family name

2009-03-09T16:06:00.000+05:30

A mother whose son was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was a teen, recently sent me stuff that he had written about his experiences in life and in mental health institutions. She wanted my opinion on the quality of the writing and its publishability. I found the writing fascinating and advised her to show it to a couple of publishers who specialise in first person accounts of this kind.

A few days ago I heard back from her. One of the two publishers she had approached, had shown an interest in publishing the book. I said I was happy to hear that. She said she would call me again to discuss something else.

She called me yesterday. After some hesitation she revealed that the family was against the book being published in the son's name. The furthest they were willing to go was to allow him to use his first name only. She asked me what I thought they should do.
I asked her what she thought they should do. She said they could publish it under his first name. I asked her what he thought of this idea. She said he was keen to have his full name on it.

Then she went into a monologue. Why should the family object to that? It is his name, the only one he has and he has a complete right over it. The monologue stopped on a longish pause. Then she said quietly, "I suppose I'll have to fight this one out with my family. It is nobody's fault that he turned out the way he is. Not ours, but certainly not his."

Her voice was strong as she said this. But it broke when she told me that even her doctor daughter, settled in the US, did not support her on this. Not too many years ago the mother had fought bitterly with the family for this daughter's right to marry the man of her choice. And all she could say now to her mother was, "I'm against his using the family name. But do as you like. I'm not concerned. I carry another family's name now."

When Pamuk speaks

2009-03-08T18:05:00.003+05:30

I went to hear Orhan Pamuk at the British Council on the 5th. I expected it to be a stimulating evening. It was that and more. The "more" came during the brief Q and A session, which revealed us to ourselves.

I have read Pamuk's "Snow". It isn't a book you can zip through. It tells a difficult tale. It isn't trying to amuse its readers. There's no attempt to touch the emotions. No psychological insights into characters that will help you to understand and thus empathise with them. It attempts to engage you not with the problems of the individual, but with a religio-political situation that stretches across two continents, impinging on and influencing every action of the citizens of Turkey from choice of dress to choice of friends, coffee bars, plays.

In conversation with Sunil Sethi, Pamuk spoke about the sources and methods of his writing, described his brief encounter with architectural studies, his early wish to paint and his ultimate decision to write. At one point Sethi offered an encapsulated analysis of Pamuk's major preoccupations and approach and asked him to comment. Interlocutors do this to establish their credentials. They are saying I have made a long and deep study of your work and since I have a sharp mind, I have arrived at this very clever interpretation of all your novels put together. Such a person's credentials are only partly established if the writer acquiesces with his analysis. What puts the cherry on the cake is if the writer looks at him with admiration for his perspicacity, nods vigorously and says, "That's it. Nobody has put it so well before."

Pamuk disagreed with where Sethi had put the empahsis on analysing his preoccupations and then went on to say that he himself did not know what he had written till a few years after the event. By then he would have heard and read varied takes on his novel and through them he began to see what he had actually written. "And then," he chortled, "then I teach my novel to my students".

Then came the Q and A.

Question one (not verbatim--I wasn't taking notes): "What do you think of the problems Indian writers in English face in writing about Indian themes?"
(Gloss: our overweening self-importance in thinking that any writer who visits our country needs to have given careful thought to our writers' problems. One also suspects that the gentleman who asked was prompted by Pamuk's white skin to forget that he didn't write in English himself, and would not feel any natural sympathy for those who did)

Pamuk answered succinctly. There is a language we speak with our grandmothers and grocers and that is the language we write in. So I write in Turkish. But there is also a language of communication. English is that language across cultures. So I am happy to be translated into English. As for the problems of Indian writers, I really have no opinion because yours is a very complex country with complex problems.

Question two (again not verbatim): You value your solitude greatly Mr Pamuk. But today writers are forced to be out in the market. How then do you hold on to your solitude?
(Gloss: We writers live in a rarefied, ethereal space. Ever since dirty lucre stepped onto the scene, we're being hauled kicking and screaming into the bazaar)

Mr Pamuk: Oh I enjoy being at events like this as much as I want my solitude. I wouldn't want to be at such events everyday, and I wouldn't want to have solitude everyday. When some of my colleagues complain about the world intruding on their work I tell them not to access their email and to unplug their telephones.

Now, my question to myself is this: Why was I so astonished at his candour? Why was I so taken up by the fact that he had laughed at himself? Why was I so relieved that he had de-romanticised, de-mystified his writing?

Short answer: Because we ourselves practice several forms of hypocrisy of which the common element is, not to tell it as it is. Because where I particularly come from, the Marathi cultural space, to laugh at yourself or at somebody else whose achievements are many and of a high order, is to demean her/him/yourself. It is to lose social/historical height. It is to declare your own lack of cultural gravitas.

Example: Paresh Mokashi's film "Harishchandrachi factory", a fictionalised account of how Dadasaheb Phalke made the first Indian silent film, was not as much as considered for a nomination in any category of the recently declared Zee Gaurav Awards, because it had dared make the audience laugh at the whimsicalities of a man who was one of the tallest idols enshrined in the Marathi mind. The jury who judged the film didn't notice that the very form in which the film was made itself constituted the finest tribute that a contemporary film-maker could offer Phalke. Nor did it notice the poignancy that underlay every scene that made us laugh. Such subtleties are beyond us. We go by rules of thumb. Laughter equals mockery. Tears equal fine sentiment.

The brown man's burden

2009-03-07T08:55:00.001+05:30

I want to pick holes. It's a task right after my heart. I hold Tarun Tejpal in some respect. He is brave, writes acerbically though sometimes too self-consciously about important issues, and always has a well-defined viewpoint, which he puts out there without mincing words. But this time I'm going to pick holes.

In his essay, "The Missionary Position" in Tehelka dated Saturday 7 March 2009, Tejpal makes "Slumdog Millionaire" and its cheerleaders his target. But every time he thinks he's scored a hit, he misses. Here are a few statements I have problems with in the very first two paragraphs.

1) "Slumdog Millionaire is one more representation of India as the white man sees it, not as we do."

Is the film a 'representation of India'? Does it even set out to be that? Can anybody presume to "represent" such a vast and complex country in a single two-hour film?

I haven't seen the film, but from what I've read, it appears to be no more than a sentimental story (originally written by a brown man, not white) set in Mumbai, with Mumbai characters and Mumbai locations. To my mind that does not, cannot, amount to a 'representation' of India.

Who are these "we" Mr Tejpal refers to? Do "we" have a single view of India? Some "we's" thought Satyajit Ray misrepresented India in "Pather Panchali". Some thought Vijay Tendulkar misrepresented India in "Ghashiram Kotwal". Those "we's" tried their best not to let either film or play out of the country. Yet both Satyajit Ray and Vijay Tendulkar were brown men.

Several "we's" think an entire tribe of Hindi film makers have misrepresented India scandalously and with impunity for years. In Jakarta, a young giggling couple asked me if all the young boys and girls in India dance and sing in parks, on mountain slopes and in the streets. Jakarta was then in love with "Kuch kuch hota hai". I told them it happens in films only. In real life young people are not even allowed to fall in love with each other, leave alone sing and dance together in public.

2) "It's worthwhile to remember we did not tell an Indian story and force the world to recognise it. They told us an Indian story and forced us to applaud it."

Here "we" has changed identity. Now "we" are presumably Indian fiction writers and film-makers. 'They' are presumably western fiction writers and film-makers. Tejpal himself has written fiction. Did he do so to force particular responses? Story-tellers don't do that, do they? Their hope is mostly to entertain their readers/viewers with a good old yarn and occasionally to engage their attention with a perspective they think they have gained on the material or philosophical problems of our world. If they can stimulate thought and feeling in their readers/viewers, they are happy.

But that is not what Mr. Tejpal means, though I wish he'd say plainly what he means. What he seems to be implying here is that, by giving Slumdog so many Oscars, the west forced our hands together in applause. He sniffs a conspiracy there. A huddle of men and women across two continents sat together and, with malicious glints in their eyes said, we shall give all awards, BAFTA, Oscars, Globe, the lot, to "Slumdog Millionaire" to put India down. How neurotic can you get?

3) (This one is long and colourful) "A bit like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who declared from behind the musketry of the colonial conqueror that a 'single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. Looking up a long barrel with gunpowder at its end, we quietly acquiesced. Quietly turned our backs on hundreds of classical and medieval texts [a long list follows]. And having acquiesced in our classification by another--ill-informed at that--proceeded to spend the next nearly 200 years hunting for approval."

When Macaulay said what he said, more than ninety per cent of "us" didn't even have a choice between acquiescing and turning our backs on our own great writers and thinkers because we were barred from reading and writing. Sanskrit was the tongue of brahmins. When our bhakti saints dared write commentaries on some of our epics in prakrit, the brahmins tormented them, ostracised them, flung their songs into rivers. But even then, we passed our epics down orally from generation to generation and sang the bhakti saints' songs while we tilled our land, skinned carcasses, pressed oil, worked at our bellows and looms and struggled to survive. We were lucky that people like Mahatma Jotiba Phule, influenced by the white man, opened schools for us. Even then, the upper castes threw cowdung at us and our teachers because the 'great thinkers of the past' like Manu, had created categories of human beings in which we and our mothers were placed alongside cattle. Those who couldn't do the jobs we did, learned Macaulay's English to survive. They went to democratic institutions called universities which the white man set up. There they were given the opportunity to study both Shakespeare and Kalidas.

Tarun Tejpal hasn't liked "Slumdog Millionnaire". He thinks it is implausible. Fine. He thinks it's a specious story. That too is fine. But by locating it in Macaulay's cultural-political space, he has produced a ridiculously specious post-colonial argument that stinks of academic populism.

Bling is the thing

2009-03-01T20:05:00.004+05:30

My paper tells me that a certain British gentleman by the name of Geoff Chapman is appalled that the beggar mafia in Mumbai might be maiming children to increase their begging power. He found that piece of information in an article in a British tabloid whose headline went: "The real Slumdog Millionaires: Behind the cinema fantasy, mafia gangs are deliberately crippling children for profit."

One of the nightmares of mothers whose children go missing is this--if it's a girl she's going to be sold into prostitution; if it's a boy he's going to be maimed for begging. It's almost a relief then to get that call for ransom which may eventually mean getting back the child's battered body but which might miraculously mean, the child's safe return.

Mr Chapman is associated with charities that campaign against child abuse. In our case, he must have seen how useless such a campaign would be. So he's taken the route our harassed, exploited, cheated rustics take. He has written to our PM asking him if it is indeed true that children are crippled for begging.

We must assume that this is the first our PM has ever heard of such a thing. For his office has passed Mr Chapman's query down through the usual chain to the Maharashtra Government for follow-up action. It'll be a while before Mr Chapman hears back from the PM, because what the Maharashtra government intends doing is probe his "allegations".

But the probe, at the end of which the government will in all likelihood find the shining truth that no beggar mafia operates in this heartless way in the State, might itself take a little longer than expected because it will have to take its place in a growing line of probes. The Bombay High Court has demanded to know from the government why so many minor girls in the State's ashramshalas are returning home pregnant. There's a long-pending probe into severe malnutrition among children below five which needs to be put on a war footing. Then there are probes due into why schools in our villages have no teachers, blackboards, drinking water and toilets and into who eats the nutritious food meant for schoolchildren under the government's free meals programme. There's another probe pending into why public health centres in villages have no medicines, or doctors for that matter.

In time the government will give itself that quaint thing called a "clean chit". In its answer to Mr Chapman, it will mention that there's a remand home in Mumbai in a place called Dongri where little beggars without arms are incarcerated along with delinquents of various descriptions for counseling. One might wonder what they get told --that it was wrong to have allowed themselves to be kidnapped and maimed?

Such counseling must also have come the way of those two wretched youngsters who were picked up by our efficient police despite their piteous wails that they weren't beggars or vagrants but schoolboys from families who paid their fees. You will remember how long it took for the parents to tear through red tape to get back their sons. The way into Dongri is quick. The way out is not.

But hush. We will not tell Mr Chapman these things. Not only because we are patriots and would never do such a thing; but because it would not be fair to burden him with the responsibility of such knowledge.

The Hollywoodification of Bertolt Brecht

2009-02-27T18:05:00.002+05:30

A few days ago I saw Fritz Lang's 1943 film "Hangmen also die". Bertolt Brecht is credited with scripting it. He is called 'Bert' Brecht in the titles. The great American gobbling trick. Gobble up identities. Gobble up cultures. Turn names from trousers into briefs.
The film keeps you riveted to your seat. The script is wound up tight. You don't notice the holes because you're catapulted over them. You are kept in suspense because you want to be in suspense--the delicious pleasure of not knowing when you are certain you'll soon know.
The acting is abominable. Brian Donlevy, as the assassin of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reich protector of German-occupied Prague is a non-starter. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters who parachuted down from a British plane. Keeping to its formula, Hollywood has replaced those proud and passionate fighters with a single hero. Fair enough. But why cast someone who walks and talks like a sleepwalker and is about as expressive as a smooth slate on which no word was every written? Aiding and abetting him is another blank slate, Anna Lee, who plays the daughter of a hostage. Her single expression for all emotions from fear to love is an open mouth and popping eyes.
But let's return to the script. Mr Brecht, was that really your doing? How could you have turned a people's fight into the heroics of a single individual? How could you have allowed his worth to outweigh the lives of the 400 hostages, all members of the resistance, who went to their deaths to keep him alive?
I turned to Brecht himself for an answer and found it on page 259 of his "Journals 1934-1955". Below is one of his many entries on writing for the film.
16 OCT 42
Not a bad week, that: Stalingrad held out, Wilkie in Chunking demanded a second front. US planes joined the attack on Germany--and Wexley and I are working 'to the best of our talents and ability' on the script of TRUST THE PEOPLE (our title). Just now, right before the shooting, Lang hauled poor Wexley into his office and screamed at him behind closed doors that he wants to make a 'Hollywood picture' and shits on scenes that show the people etc. The change in the man, once $700,000 is in the offing, is remarkable. He sits with all the airs of a dictator and old movie hand behind his boss-desk, collecting 'surprises', little bits of suspense, tawdry sentimental touches and falsehoods and takes 'licenses' for the box-office. For an hour or two--I am naturally condensing this--as I sit in my treacherously pretty garden and force myself to read a detective story, I feel the disappointment and terror of the intellectual worker who sees the product of his labours snatched away and mutilated."
Poor Mr Brecht. You should have known this would happen when they called you Bert. Anyway, the good news was that the money you earned from "Hangmen also die", enabled you to write "The Visions of Simone Machard", "Schweik in the Second World War" and your adaptation of John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi". Not your best plays perhaps, but all yours, nevertheless.

Swimming pool tales

2009-02-19T12:09:00.002+05:30

Shivaji Park was being swept inside out today by a posse of some dozen fluorescent orange jacketed sweepers. The dust flew from the south end of the Park to settle in the west and from the west to settle in the north. Once the sweepers had got the dust to migrate and settle, Shivaji Park was able to breathe without a kerchief to its nose.

The occasion for such meticulous cleanliness was major. Mananiya Uddhavsahebji Balasahebji Thackerayji is scheduled to open the renovated Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Olympic Swimming Pool today. The pool has been closed for at least four years. Just as everybody thought BMC, which runs the pool, was making secret plans to sell off the land to yet another mall-maker, here was a hoarding with father Thackeray and son Thackeray, announcing its re-opening.

The MGMO was said to be the first olympic size swimming pool in Asia or something equally impressive. At least four generations of Shivaji Parkites and their neighbours have swum in its chlorine-scented blue-tiled depths. Being eminently affordable, its surface was always a knobbly carpet of bobbing heads.

My own relationship with water has never been cosy. Father once took us on a month-long learn-to-swim holiday in Pune. I saw intrepid Pune matrons leap into the Tilak talav clad in nine-yard saris. I saw toddlers splash around happily in the Law College swimming pool where Father took us for morning lessons. But nothing convinced me that water didn't pull you down and keep you under till there was no reason to come up. So while my athletic younger sister took to the water like a fish, I stood on the edge every day, muttering one-two-three and doing nothing about it.

One day two hefty arms picked me up from behind and threw me in. I came up gasping and stared incredulously at grandfather Mandke, a neighbour, who'd done the deed. He laughed and told my father that's the way to do it. I never spoke to him again but I was in the water. Too late. By the time I had dared to lift my feet off the swimming pool floor while holding on to the bar for dear life, the holiday was over.

Back home, I was enrolled in the evening ladies' batch at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Olympic Swimming Pool. We were taught to the accompaniment of hit songs. "Yeh raat yeh chaandni phir kahan" etc. Talat Mehmood sounding like the ripples on the water.

My coach was a gentleman (?) called Mr Bathena. He put me through a rudimentary breast stroke and then decided to teach me the butterfly stroke. He told my parents that I was made for this complex stroke. I realised soon enough what I was made for. I was made for touching in three different places. The breast stroke and freestyle offered touch opportunities in only one place-- the stomach.

Fear of water had disappeared. Fear of man took over. I don't remember what excuse I gave my parents for wanting to quit. Whatever it was, it was not the truth.

If I'm pushed into water now (only pools; seas pull you down and keep you under etc) I'm sure I'll get by with the crude breast stroke Mr Bathena was kind enough to teach me before progressing to more ambitious plans. But I don't think I want to be tested.

Adiga's tiger: more brown than white

2009-02-18T16:36:00.001+05:30

I finished reading "The White Tiger" yesterday. It took me a long time to get through. I should thank Adiga for that. His book didn't keep me away from my responsibilities. I dread books that take me into such deep waters that I don't want to surface unless forced out--The Sea of Poppies. I also dread books that are written in such compelling prose, with such blinding wit and blazing anger that you are ignited--The Case of Exploding Mangoes. In both cases I lose all sense of time, commitments, assignments, eating, drinking. I spend every minute I can spare and cannot spare, reading, and that's not good for me.

"The White Tiger"? It was like dipping your toes at the edge of a brown pond, looking at a flat surface with no streaks of darting life within. I would read a few pages during breaks in the 9 o'clock news and that seemed enough for any given day. There were days when I didn't even do that, upset by some infelicity in the writing, lack of rhythm in a line, absence of feeling for people, places, words.

I don't care a rotten fig about the subject of the novel. People are frothing at the mouth about showing India "in a bad light". They didn't want "Pather Panchali" to go to Cannes for the same treacherous crime. That was, what--50 years ago. And the "bad light" of reality still hasn't turned brighter. Whose fault is that? Anyway, every culture has a dark underside. Ours just happens to be of such impressive proportions that it comes up over the sides to look in over the topside. What I do care about is my time. Why did I feel obliged to spend so much of it with a man called Balram Halwai who puts himself in such an unconvincing nutshell right at the start that it should have acted as a warning? "In terms of formal education, I maybe somewhere lacking. I never finished school, to put it bluntly. Who cares! I haven't read many books, but I've read all the ones that count. I know by heart the works of the four greatest poets of all time--Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib and a fourth fellow whose name I forget. I am a self-taught entrepreneur."

I have heard cabbies from the Darkness. They speak at great length as they drive, and they all have sweet, poetic tongues. Every fourth sentence they speak is a muhawara that brings wafting into the musty insides of their cabs a direct whiff of their soil. And look at Balram Halwai's self-introduction--clunky and graceless. Not a sign of that grand manner prompted by a self-image that rises high above cabbying.

I felt obliged to read about this man because his creator was awarded the GREAT BOOKER PRIZE. AWE!!!!

Anyway I'm done with him now. I doubt if a single word, line, scene or character of this badly constructed, superficially observed novel is going to stay with me. Aravind Adiga, you need to pull up your socks for the next one, mate. Underside or Overside, try to look beneath surfaces. That's where you'll find life.

PS: It's such a relief to be writing a blog. If I were reviewing "The White Tiger", I would have gone looking with a magnifying glass for "good things to say" about it. I am obsessed with being balanced, with the need to be kind. I am pathologically incapable of stripping writers, playwrights, directors, actors down to their chaddis for the grave sins they commit against their art. We are all of us fallible aren't we?

Dirty old man

2009-02-18T16:32:00.002+05:30

A prestigious school in our vicinity is headed by a principal who touches girls. I'd heard about this a couple of years ago from one of the teachers. I had asked her then, is this a known thing? Do other teachers know about it? She'd said yes, they all knew. I'd said, and he is still the principal of the school? She said yes he is. I said how? Why? She said you know how it is. Some teachers are his bootlickers. Those who aren't, still don't want to rock the boat. And finally these things happen behind closed doors. It'll be his word against ours. His word against the word of girls who've been touched, I asked. She widened her eyes and said oh the girls won't speak. They'd be too scared. He's the principal after all and their future is in his hands.

It was a conversation that had lodged in my mind like a little worm. Last week the mother of a girl who goes to the school was having lunch with me. I asked her, is it true that the school principal touches girls? She said yes he does. I said you know about this. Yes, she said. So what have you done to protect your daughter, I asked. Have you complained? She said a mother of a girl who had been touched had called her and a dozen other mothers about the problem. They had decided to get together and decide on a plan. On the day of the meeting only my lunch guest was present. What could just the two of us do, she asked. What indeed!

This morning I was talking to the grandmother of a girl who attends the school. I asked her if she knew about the principal. She said of course I've known about it for years. I said so what have you done? She said I mentioned it to my son. He told her if she's every called to the principal's room to take a friend along. Oh, I said. And suppose he puts his hands on both girls? She shuddered at the idea and said that's why I'm so worried. Someone should send an anonymous letter to the Trustees. Or someone should tell this man's wife. But why can parents not get together and complain, I said. I don't think it's always a good idea to be confrontationist, she said. A roundabout way is often more effective. So has "someone" taken a roundabout route, I asked. I should talk to my son again, she said.

I am appalled. The principal of this elite school has got away for years with his illicit pleasures and those who should care most for their children's welfare, the parents, sit like scared mice in their dark little holes. The shocking thing is that these parents are some of the most influential people in our society--CEOs and suchlikes. If they chose to speak out, the media and all its uncles would be on the principal's tail. So what kind of fear is it that clams them up?

Muthalik's mother

2009-02-09T23:58:00.004+05:30

I don't think the Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury, understands the majority of women in our country. This is obvious from her latest utterance on the matter of Pramod Muthalik and his values. "I wonder how his mother raised him," Ms Chowdhury sniffed the other day. "We'll have to ask her where he gets this attitude."

We can imagine what Muthalik's mother will say to Ms Chowdhury in answer to that one. It could be any of the following: "Raised him? He raised himself. You think I had the time for it?" Or "He takes after his father. His father used to beat me even if I peeped out of the back door". Or "Women should be women. They shouldn't behave like men." Or, "My mother always said, teach a girl books and one day she'll cut your nose." Or "Such girls can do what they like in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Dilli. Not in Mangalore. We are good, clean, decent people here. We respect our elders. Pramod would have beaten up his younger sisters if they had stepped inside a pub, wouldn't he? These girls were like his sisters. He taught them a lesson for their own good and I'm very proud of him."

Where would that leave Ms Chowdhury?

The March of the Backwards

2009-02-07T18:08:00.003+05:30

For all those who want to know in what proportion of religion, caste and community we the people of Maharashtra are divided, here are the numbers from the mouth of the horse-- Mr Chhagan Bhujbal, our back again deputy chief minister. The figures appeared on the front page of "Loksatta", in a report about a non-Maratha delegation's visit to Bhujbal to protest against the Maratha demand for reservation. (Yes, the Marathas are demanding reservations in education, jobs and politics, based on the claim that they are as Backward as your oil-presser, your weaver and your gardener. The trouble of course is that in India you have to be born Backward, the way you have to be born brahmin, adivasi or dalit. You can't claim Backwardness just by being backward.)

So here are the figures that came as a non-sequitur to a delegation member's whimper, "If some other people (read Marathas) are asking for 25 per cent of the 27 per cent OBC quota, are the OBCs, who count for 54 per cent of the population, to remain satisfied with only 2 per cent of the reservations?" Bhujbal's reply, "Basically it is wrong to suppose that OBCs form only 54 per cent of the population. OBCs form 54 per cent (sic), scheduled castes and tribes 20 per cent, Muslims 14 per cent. That makes 85 per cent (sic). The remaining 15 per cent are poor brahmins, Christians and others."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but those numbers add up to 103. So either Maharashtra has an XL pie or somebody's going to be diddled out of 3 per cent reservations. Anyway, this is how the demand progressed.

As a start, Vinayak Mete set his boys on Kumar Ketkar, the editor of Loksatta, because he'd had had the temerity to suggest in a front page article, that a statue of Shivaji in the middle of the Arabian Sea, should not be of prime concern to a State that was full of suicidal farmers and malnourished children. To Ketkar, the fact that this statue was going to be taller even than the Statue of Liberty, appeared to have counted for nothing.

Vinayak Mete got his pictures in the papers all right. This gave him the confidence to ride out into the countryside astride Shivaji's horse, awakening a sense of grievance amongst the Marathas. At the end of the road show, he appeared on huge arches spanning three entrances to Shivaji Park. He stood tall, in immaculate white, on the left hand panel of every arch, nicely balancing Shivaji Maharaj on the other side. His call to fellow Marathas was straight from the heart: "If you are indeed Shivaji's heirs, then this is the time to forget all differences, political, social and economic. Give up one day, just this one day for the future, welfare and asmita of the Marathas, by coming to Shivaji Park in your lakhs." Mercifully for the much abused Shivaji Park, they only came in their thousands.Unfazed, Mete delivered his ultimatum to the government. Concede that we are Backward, give us the reservations we demand, or be damned.

Today was the deadline Mete gave the government. I have scanned all the papers. Do we see pictures of the gathering of stones, the unsheathing of swords? Not a sign. All the newsprint has been swallowed up by that rank outsider Pramod Muthalik of Mangalore. But we must beware. A voice once raised is not so easily silenced. Vinayak Mete's sword now joins other swords that already hang over our heads--the MNS's newly sharpened one and the Shiv Sena's antique Bhavani being the most active. You never know when any one of these will fall and behead the peace we are struggling so constantly to maintain.

Sermons as assault

2009-01-27T15:29:00.000+05:30

Yesterday was the first Monday on which I switched on the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa programme on Zee Marathi and became gradually depressed. In fact I was so depressed that I turned off the sound for a very long time and then only turned it on when the children were singing. I could not bear this ultimate adult aggression on the five young children whose only fault is that they are wonderful singers.

The Sa Re Ga Ma Pa programme in all its avatars has been a milch cow for Zee. Marathis love music. And everybody loves children. So this edition of the programme in particular has garnered viewers from every corner of the country and the world. Monday and Tuesday nights have become very special. You can see that on the mornings that follow, when walkers round Shivaji Park animatedly discuss the previous night's performances.

Over the last couple of months, the children's popularity has zoomed so high that they have become something of an "item". They are invited as a group to all kinds of dos to sing and be blessed. Zee must be very happy with the publicity it gets. The organisers must be happy because, if the li'l champs are singing, crowds will automatically come. And the parents? It's difficult to say. Some might have reservations; but they go along. We aren't used to standing up to money power even on behalf of our children. However, there must be some parents at least who believe that their children are fortunate to be getting all this "exposure". Zee is repeatedly thanked by them for running the programme, forgetting that Zee is living off their children! Two shows ago I noticed that all five children looked under the weather. For the first time ever, they sang below par.

All along, the judges have admonished the children against letting their success go to their heads. "You are terrific singers and all that but we would like to tell you and your parents that this should not be allowed to interfere with your childhood. You must guard that." Oh yes? Then why was an assault launched on their childhood last night?

It was Republic Day. Time to celebrate what India means and can be made to mean. Time to admire our Constitution which has given us rights which many the world over do not have. But that was not what the children were allowed to celebrate. They were not given the right to sing their own favourites to celebrate the day. They sang songs about Shivaji and soldiers who die fighting for the country. They were taught these songs by Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar who sat between the judges and gave a lengthy exegesis on every song that was sung. Mothers of army and air force men were special invitees to the show. They were called upon to speak about why their sons had chosen to join the armed forces and how they had dealt with their death when it occurred. The little singers stood beside the anchor for the entire length of every speech that was delivered. Our children are trained for adult preaching. They are also trained in self-preservation devices. But all the same, I'd like to pass on one that I used pretty effectively during such crises in my childhood. I'd recite the last stanza of Jabberwocky to myself, making "it" stand for the tormentor of the moment:
One, two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went gallumphing back.

red fruit tree

2009-01-26T18:50:00.000+05:30

In October 2007, I caught a red blur out of the corner of my right eye that made me stop and look. My exact location at the time was the north face of Shivaji Park a few hundred metres from Scouts Pavilion on the left and Barista on the right. I stopped on the very first round of my two-round daily morning walk around Shivaji Park. Stopping in the middle of your walk, if it's a health habit rather than a pastime, is a bad idea. But I stopped, and looked, and found that the red blur came from a tree that was hung with fruit the colour of a parrot's beak.

As I stood staring, other walkers stopped to stare. None of us had noticed the tree before though it looked many years old and must have been around for years. It was tall and handsome and didn't look like the sort that shed its leaves any time of the year. But it wasn't the kind that would catch your attention in a line of trees either. But that red fruit was something else.

Eager to know what it was called, I called up my botanist major (40 years ago, First Class, University of Bombay) niece. It's a tall, well-built tree with of long, deep green leaves hanging in clusters of six and fat fruit as large as tennis balls hanging behind the clusters, I told her and waited for her to throw a Latin name at me. My niece hummed and hawed and then said, "Oh?"

I drew a similar blank on Google. Perhaps I didn't know the key words that would get me the information I was looking for--namely the name of the tree, its origins, it's...Anyway what I was looking forward to now was future developments. I watched the red fruit grow black, then split, while still hanging on the tree. At some point the fruit must have fallen off; because one morning it wasn't there.

A new year dawned and now I waited to see the flowers. A rough calculation based on the mango suggested that there would be roughly three months between flowering and fruiting. So if I had seen the fruit in October, the early buds must have appeared in March or April. They didn't, not in March or April 2008, nor any of the months that followed. Then suddenly in September 2008, I spotted small green fruit hanging on the tree. I reported this to my niece. She observed, cryptically, "The fruit must be the flower." It was my turn to say "Oh"?

So okay, that's Nature's way, I told myself; but why chase a miracle for information? The idea was to wait for the magic of that red to happen again. I waited and looked and waited and looked. People asked me what I was looking at. I told them, "You see the green fruit on that tree? It'll soon turn as red as a parrot's beak."

I'm not sure if they were impressed by the prospect. But through October, November and December they kept inquiring kindly after the colour of the fruit. It had remained obdurately green. It is green even now as January ends. I'm not going to ask my niece why. I now believe the fruit will stay green for 12 years and burst suddenly into colour one fine morning. October 2007 was the last time it happened. October 2017 will be the next. I will wait.

Second thoughts on "Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe"

2009-01-24T11:58:00.000+05:30

In 1967 when Tendulkar's "Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe" was first staged, critics instantly saw in it a lift from Friedrich Durrenmatt's novella "The Dangerous Game". While admitting that he had indeed been influenced by the novella, Tendulkar subtly demolished the idea of his play being a straight lift by mentioning, in the preface to the published script, a few other sources that had influenced him--a real life incident for instance, when he had shown a theatre group the way to a community hall where they were scheduled to present a mock trial, just as Samant does in his play. He also cited a poem by Shirish Pai which gave him the character of his protagonist Leela Benare along with the film "We're no angels", Acharya Atre's play "Dr Lagoo" and the time plays of J. B. Priestley. This said, he went on to aver that "the core of this play and the life that is reflected in it, belong one hundred per cent to our society".
I couldn't agree with him more. "Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe" could not have been conceived and performed on any other soil but this, and by nobody else but Tendulkar, who has consistently let down his female protagonists as he lets down Leela Benare here..
The climax of "Shantata ..." presents the moral world-view of the Indian male, expressed in the overheated speeches of Sukhatme and Kashikar who are playing the counsel for the prosecution and the judge respectively in Benare's mock trial. The speeches are all about the sanctity of motherhood and the danger that free (and therefore easy) women like Benare spell for society.
When I first saw the play forty years ago, I remember thinking vaguely that Tendulkar understood the plight of women in our society. But now I think otherwise. Tendulkar had no real understanding of women. In putting women in situations where their vulnerability was maximally on display, he claimed he was only reflecting reality. Which reality? Reality is not some kind of objective phenomenon out there that remains unaltered, whoever the observer. Like a photographer, a writer too frames just that slice of reality out of the whole that interests him or serves his purpose. What a writer excludes from that slice tells us as much about his purpose as what he includes.
I propose that what Tendulkar includes and excludes in "Shantata Court Chalu Ahe", suggests that he is not really interested in Benare's reality. He is more interested in the reality of middle-class society vis-a-vis socially constructed gender roles. As a progressive writer, he is filled with revulsion by the moral power they put into the hands of narrow little men and women. The mock trial is thus a re-enactment of the village or caste panchayat meetings we read of everyday which sentence women to brutal, humiliating punishments for contravening community and caste rules.
The mock trial is a reflection of that. But Tendulkar does grave injustice to Leela Benare by not allowing her to speak out against the rabid shredding of her character by the court. If this is indeed a "mock" trial, and she is "the accused", she would have to make a statement. If the mock has become real, and everybody is giving vent to their actual feelings, then she too should have the opportunity to do so. But neither of these things happens. What happens is an internal monologue, one of the best-known in Marathi dramatic literature, but external silence. Her silence confirms her "guilt". The predators shrug the whole thing off as "just a game" while Leela Benare sobs uncontrollably, her spirit broken.
In her introduction to "Vijay Tendulkar: Five Plays", an Oxford University Press publication, Arundhati Banerjee makes a significant comparison between Nora's last speech and Benare's monologue. She points out that Benare's monologue "lacks the note of protest that characterises the speech of Ibsen's heroine. It is more a self-justification than an attack on society's hypocrisies. It is poignant, sensitive and highlights the vulnerability of women in our society."
Nora admits to her crime, but while doing so, she also puts her finger on the social forces that drove her to it. This new awareness of what she is vis-a-vis the world, gives her something precious that she has never had before, that she hadn't even dreamt she had a right to -- self-esteem. Benare on the other hand, whose self-esteem is already shaky when the play starts, loses it completely when she allows the court to corner her into admitting that she has "sinned". All she can say in that famous internal monologue is that her private life is her own business. Others have nothing to do with it.
But they do, don't they? Our society has everything to do with the lives of women, particularly single women. Indira Sant's devastatingly funny/angry poem "Ekti" (Woman Alone) tells us how much the world concerns itself with who the single woman is, where she comes from, where she goes, with whom she goes, why she laughs and why she cries.
Sant's abstraction of the single woman continues to live in the face of the world's interference. Tendulkar's heroine attempts suicide. That is the reality he has chosen to reflect.

the hungry world

2009-01-17T22:13:00.002+05:30

The interdependencies of global life boggle the mind. Last year, climate change and extreme weather led to poor harvests in major grain growing countries like Australia. Concern for the environment combined with complex political issues drove America to turn millions of acres of wheat, maize and other crops to produce bio-fuel for cars. Shortage of food gave traders in sub-Saharan Africa the chance to intensify the shortage by hoarding grain. Food riots broke out elsewhere in the developing world, leading to political instability. FAO reports that 2008 saw the biggest rise in malnutrition. Then recession stepped in and the World Food Programme was forced to take severe cuts. So the world's hungry will now be hungrier.

Around the time these reports came in, I happened to be reading "Aydaan", the memoirs of dalit writer and activist Urmila Pawar. Though she grew up barefoot and occasionally unwashed, her parents somehow always managed to put two square meals in her and her siblings' stomachs. But hunger was a permanent condition of her community. ("Will hunger-fires forge a poem? Will music die in the fire of hunger?" asks the poet Namdeo Dhasal.) Mothers, ever resourceful, found a way to satisfy the hunger of their wailing children. Pawar tells us how it was done. The mother gave the child a scrap of coarse grain bread, difficult to chew, and asked her/him to "dip" bits of it in an empty cooking pot as accompaniment. Magically the child's hunger was satisfied.

Another technique that one of Pawar's readers told her about was to feed a bawling child in the usual way but with an empty hand. The child opens its mouth and closes it with every "mouthful". After a while the child stops crying. I have no explanation for the effectiveness of the "empty hand" technique except to hazard the guess that no child, however hungry, has the lung power to cry for ever. But I have found an explanation for the effectiveness of the "empty pot" technique, thanks to Dr Yash Paul of PGI Chandigarh. We must remember here that a piece of coarse grain bhakri is a very slow thing to eat.

Dr Yash Paul, whose patients are well-fed, advises them to spend 15 to 20 minutes eating one chapati, and 50 minutes over a whole meal of cereals, veggies, dal and salad. Slow eating gives the satiety centre in the brain time to suppress the hunger centre, producing a feeling of fullness before you reach out for a second helping. The result is loss of weight and decreased risk of heart disease.

That's not all. There's an added bonus to the "Yash India Technique" which should fetch Dr Paul a Padma Shri at least. He has discovered that slow eating controls "the Alpha Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone and Malonyl COA expression, thus reducing the stress hormone in the body, which in turn leads to lesser darkening or decreased melanin deposition in the body". In plain words, this means our national dream is realised. We come up with "a clearer and fairer complexion in two to three months". Dr Paul now awaits an international patent for the technique.

If our poor had time to spare from foraging for food, they too could get a patent on their centuries-old techniques for beating hunger. This would be at least as useful in today's world as the "Yash India Technique" for the over-fed.

The shit fields of Raigad

2009-01-15T14:54:00.002+05:30

There's a particular kind of madness in our public life that allows carts to be put before horses. The latest example is the recently scrapped "Liberate Raigad from the hagandari" campaign.

"Hagandari" may be translated as "shit valley", though Moleswoth's Marathi-English dictionary puts it in a more roundabout way as "A place of general resort for the disburdening of nature".

Those who have some acquaintance with village life in Maharashtra, know that there are places on the outskirts of villages marked for the disburdening of nature. In recent times, we have seen two village-based Marathi films, "Valu" and "Dhudgus" in which villagers go singly or in groups to disburden nature, carrying what are known as "tumbrel-s". These are empty provision canisters to which wire handles have been attached for convenient carrying of water. There is no water on tap in hagandaris.

Middle-class urban people are squeamish about this part of village life. It falls outside our poetic imagination of rusticity. An aunt of mine hated "Valu" because it showed the village priest bound off to the hagandari after every meal because he couldn't resist having helping upon helping of his wife's spicy chutney. My aunt didn't think that was funny. Nor did the priest's wife, as it happens.

To return to Raigad, one fine day a bunch of government officials (or maybe there was just one powerful one) decided to liberate their district from this shameful practice. On this particularly creative day in their lives they even thought of an effective way to do so. It doesn't matter that the idea was lifted from "Lage raho Munnabhai". What mattered was that they weren't planning to beat the shit out of people as government officials tend to do--you know, simply send havaldars to people's homes with lathis and people shit their pants within four walls leaving hagandaris spic and span. No. Their plan was to use the womanpower at their command to do it with flowers. Anganwadi workers from villages selected for the pilot project were to be the angels of cleanliness.

This was how the plan was executed. Anganwadi workers got up at four in the morning, trudged to the hagandari approach road with flowers and a loaded camera. They said "Good morning" to all prospective disburdeners of nature, handed over a flower to each and took a snap, politely requesting her/him to look out for their mugs in the papers the following day. The same routine was repeated after working hours. By the time the women returned home, they had no time left for their housewifely duties. This caused much domestic rage, proving that working women are like dholkis, to be beaten at both ends.

It was the domestic crisis in the selected villages that stirred the local branch of a trade union to lodge a protest. The campaign was cut short. The cart has been stored away. Long live the hagandari. But two questions remain. Are these creative officials looking at the possibility of providing the village with some horses? Like are they planning to build public toilets for the villagers' convenience? Or are we to assume that toilets exist but villagers still insist on disburdening nature in the open in order to keep the toilets clean?

Question number two. What did the villagers do while the campaign was on? Did they find that flowers were an effective way of stopping up the passages of nature? I see some horticultural entrepreneurship possibilities there.

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Narayan Rane plays the game

2009-01-09T10:45:00.002+05:30

For a little while back then, in those terrible days post 26th November, we, the people, held centre stage. Politicians, their hearing deadened by years of accumulated ear-wax, had to call in professional ear-wax removers--there are still some left in the working class areas of this shining city--to 'do the needful'. Ears clear, they heard us calling for their heads. Those heads did not fall instantly. They were screwed on too tight. It is a well-known practice amongst politicians to have mechanics attend to their nuts and bolts every morning and tanners to give them a special treatment that makes their skins look human on the outside while they acquire rhinocerotic qualities on the inside.

So we had our moment back then when we were centre stage, shouting "Enough is enough. We want to be safe. We want change." We got change. The Chief Minister resigned with bad grace. The Home Minister resigned without ever understanding why people found his reaction about small ills befalling big cities so shocking. He thought the statement had a nice balance about it--bade bade sheher in the first half, balanced by chhote chhote hadse in the second.

What we got in exchange for Vilasrao and R R were Ashok Chavan, of the supposedly clean image, and Chhagan Bhujbal of the supposedly unclean one. Ashok Chavan's image has since been questioned while Bhujbal's image has remained stable.

We the people have now been pushed to where they the politicians think we belong--off-stage, looking on. And what we see on the political stage is the old national game of Changing Hands (with its sub-games such as hand-in-glove, hand-in-hand, hand-in-pocket etc). This is how the game is played. The players stand in pairs holding hands. When the whistle goes each one quickly lets go of the hand he is holding and snatches one that looks stronger. But the man with the stronger hand had earlier held this one's hand and wishes to have a different hand experience so he snatches his hand out of player 1s to attach himself to player 3. This upsets player 4 who had not only hoped to hold player 3's hand but also to sneak his spare hand into player 1's hand without the referee noticing and thus emerge winner. Left without any hand to hold, the player who thought he would be the winner is out. Yes. He's out.

Narayan Rane is out. And he is sulking. I recall an old children's rhyme that was meant to put sulkers in a good mood. It went (translation from Marathi mine with certain liberties taken to overcome problems that are too complex to go into here) "Pussy cat is sulking, sitting in a nook. There comes her husband, she giggles khukhukkhuk." Versions of this rhyme are now being chanted to Narayanrao but he has still not gone beyond the first "khuk" which he hopes will be interpreted by the media as a contemptuous cough rather than the beginning of a giggle.

Expectedly, nobody is chanting any rhymes to us. Our time is over. We ensured that it would be, because we thought changing ministers was the answer to our problems. That change had a cathartic effect. A catharsis brings about temporary relief accompanied by loss of accumulated steam. Had we retained some of that steam, we could have used it to push for a sustained public debate on our electoral system. If that can be changed, much will change. Else everything remains essentially the same.

shiva in the nude

2009-01-09T00:18:00.001+05:30

The terrain around writers and artist has become like a minefield. Every time they take a step this way or that in the fond belief that they are free to do so, they risk having that very idea blow up in their face.

The Times of India dated January 6, 2009, carried a report on its front page headlined, "Artist faces heat for depicting 'nude Shiva' ". On January 5, eight activists of an organisation that styles itself Hindu Janajagruti Samiti--they do not go around the country protesting against dowry, child marriage and female foeticide-- barged into Jehangir Art Gallery and "forcefully" removed a painting of a nude Shiva from Delhi-based artist Nitai Das's show. As if that was not enough to satisfy their lust for moral power, they forced him to remove four other paintings of nudes.

Jehangir Art Gallery has a waiting list that is several years long. Artists from all over the country wait patiently for their precious one-week show to happen. They expect connoisseurs to come and appreciate their work, collectors to buy it. They do not expect some sidey organisation that has taken upon itself the mission of 'saving' our culture, to storm in and start disrupting the show.

The frustrating thing about the Times of India report was that the reporter had not felt the need to ask the gallery what its security was doing while Das was being terrorised in this fashion? Was it not the gallery's responsibility to intervene on his behalf and show the intruders off its premises for misbehaviour? Or does its responsibility end with hiring out its space and collecting rent for it?

Instead of asking the gallery the crucial question about its responsibility, the reporter did something that was completely useless. She asked a couple of artists for their quotes on the issue. The 'who, where, why and how' of reporting has been junked by today's journalists. The solid information that these questions once provided has been replaced by these ubiquitous quotes. So Jogen Chowdhury said the following: "What is the nakedness of Shiva whose lingam is worshipped everyday by devotees? People have no understanding. The government should come in to protect artists."

Guess what the Janajagruti people would say to that if they were interested in verbal argument? They would say, of course we worship lingams. But lingams are in temples where everything is sacred. Moreover, they are not attached to Shiva's body. That makes them abstract symbols and therefore inoffensive.

Atul Dodiya's quote on the other hand, lands us in a patch of quick sand. "I'm all for freedom of expression," he is quoted as saying, "as long as the intent of the artist is not to provoke." How do we gauge the intent of the artist? Which authority can be relied upon to tell us exactly what s/he intended at the time of painting? Or do we put the artist, Das for instance, through a narco test to find out if he intended to provoke us, or more specifically the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, when he painted his nude Shiva? The Janajagruti people will say, why bother with all that when we have a simpler and less expensive test? The proof of the artist's intention lies in how we feel. If we feel provoked, the artist must have intended to provoke.

The disturbing thing in this case is that not a single voice was raised in protest against it. It was not too long ago that artists came out in full force against the BJP and VHP for having a fine arts student of M S University, Chandra Mohan, put behind bars for offending them with "derogatory" pictures of Vishnu, Durga and Jesus. Are we too tired now to protest? Have we begun to accept attacks on artists as part of the system, just as we have come to accept corruption as part of the system? If so, the next step might very well be that we will practise self-censorship in order to avoid trouble.

This happened recently in the case of an exhibition of modern art that was taken around Maharashtra with the express purpose of acquainting the general public with the history of modern art. Yet, after some deliberation, one of the most important figures in this history was left out of the show. M. F. Husain. There could not have been a more resounding victory for cultural terrorists than this.

How difficult it is to be faithful!

2009-01-02T05:35:00.001+05:30

I've been asked to review a translation of Urmila Pawar's Sahitya Akademi Award winning autobiography, "Aydaan", which I will do; but meanwhile, here is something I'll not have the space for there.

Aydaan is a generic term for all kinds of containers woven out of cane. Practitioners of skills like these belong to particular communities. Urmila Pawar belongs to the Mahar community of Maharashtra, the community from which Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar rose to become a leader of dalits. Pawar grew up in the rugged hills of the Konkan. That is where she begins the story of her life.

I've read the original book in Marathi. It is a powerful narrative that throws the deprivation of Pawar's people in our face in a language that challenges our squeamish sensibilities. The middle-class squirms because it sees its carefully nurtured ideas of what constitutes decency, shredded to bits. Pawar's fellow dalits squirmed when the book was published because a woman had dared to reveal the gender divisions within the community that made women the further exploited amongst the worst exploited of our country. "Untouchable" is not a word or concept that the civilised world finds easy to understand.

It is such a narrative as this that the translator has attempted to present to the non-Marathi reader. The failure of the attempt is what I want to comment on.

Translation is no longer a question of simply doing. It has become a subject of academic study and theorising.I must admit that I have never occupied myself with the study of translation theory. I go by the utterly unacademic principle of trying to convey the voice of the author as well as I possibly can, to a readership that cannot hear it in the original. This is a huge responsibility which takes days and days of struggle with single words, phrases and lines to fulfill. It is not only the dictionary meaning of words that should concern you. You must listen to their sound, comprehend the associations they carry,get a sense of their texture, tone and rhythm. Most importantly, the translator must forget herself. Like an actor does with a character, she must enter the skin of the writer in order to see and feel the way that person sees and feels. That is what keeping faith with the original means.

Constance Garnett who laboured so long and hard over her translations of the Russian greats--we are all indebted to her because it was through her that many of us first discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevski--did them a service which was also a disservice. She sanitised them in order not to offend Victorian sensibilities.

Vladimir Nabokov in his essay "The art of translation", lists three crimes that translators are prone to commit: "The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and is thus excusable. The next step to hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; ...The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion, as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days."

I wouldn't go so far as to recommend such a severe punishement for the translator of "Aydaan" (I consider her translation of the title as "The Weave of my Life", particularly felicitous), but I would say with certainty that she has committed all three crimes Nabakov lists and one more. She has turned a pithy, punchy 271 page book into a 320 page book because she could not find crisp enough equivalents for the Marathi in English.

All of Nabokov's three translation crimes are present in the following sentence, for example, occurring towards the beginning of the book. The line that should have read, "You press on to the top of the Mirjole hill onto the flat plateau where the sky rests, with the tall, massive jambhul tree rising against it", becomes "After climbing atop the hill of Mirjole, we would step onto the plateau, where there was a huge jamun tree, so tall that its top almost touched the sky."

Crime one, inaccuracy. The jambhul tree does not "almost touch the sky". It stands against the sky, indicating, along with the word tall, its impressive height.

Crime two, skipping words, ideas, etc. What happened here to the sky that "rests" on the plateau? That idea has simply disappeared.

Crime three, patting things into a shape that falls in with conventions. The translator replaces the breathless pace of the original with a more sedate pace. Also translating "jambhul" as "jamun" is wrong. There is no equivalent for the Marathi jambhul tree in English. So, in accordance with general practice,the original word should have been retained and, if necessary, explained in a glossary. Why translate the word into another language that is as much Greek and Latin to the intended reader as the original? Does our national language cross international borders when it doesn't even cross those within the country?

As for sanitisation of the text, here is the best example. A line that should read, "Come on you brats. There's one more hill to go. You want to pee or shit, go do it now, or you'll shit your pants climbing." This becomes, "Come on kids, we still have to climb one more hill. If you want to pass water and stuff, do it now. Otherwise you will do it in your knickers while climbing the hill."

"Pass water"? The last time someone did that was probably half a century ago.

The introduction to "The Weave of my life" talks about the empowerment of women. Those who believe in women's empowerment should not themselves deprive women of their language. Language is power. When Urmila Pawar talks of peeing and shitting, she is using the words her people used, knowing full well that they are not seen as "polite" words in "polite" society, particularly when used by women. That she does so, that she shows us her people's lives as they are, without apology, is her power. And she must be allowed to keep it, even in translation.