Amrit Lal Nagar: Creative Inspirations

Hindi writer and playwright Amrit Lal Nagar has left an incredibly vast testimony of his creative powers expressed in works ranging from short stories to fiction, satire, memoires, plays and screenplays.

In this article, I want to focus on some insights about his creative inspirations based on his book “Jinke Saath Jiya” (My Contemporaries), published in 1973. In this book Amrit Lal Nagar ji had brought together vignettes and memoirs about important figures of the 20th century’s Hindi Literature, some of whom inspired him and others, who were his friends.

Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay

Sharat Chandra, the famous Bengali author, had died in 1938. Nagar ji wrote a vignette about him. At that time he was 22 years old. In the memoir, he wrote, “I had learned Bengali to read his books and he truly had a great influence on me”. Nagar ji had gone to meet his idol a few times.

Sharat Chandra had a house in Panibash village, about 2 miles from Devalti railway station near Hawrah, and it was there that Nagar ji went to see him during his last days. He wrote a moving account of this visit, in which he described Sharat Chandra’s deteriorating health and artistic loneliness . He concludes this account with the following words:

“To go back, after kissing his feet, as I was going to the palaki for the station, he said, “Wait Amrit, I want to show you the splendour of Roopnarayan pond”. The sky had a few stars and perhaps it was a full-moon night. He pointed towards it and said, “When the water is high and it touches my house, I love it.” Standing at the edge of pond, it was the last time that I saw that great artist.”

Surya Kant Tripathi “Nirala”

Nirala appears multiple times in different writings of this book. Nirala had died in 1961. Here I want to share a few impressions from Nagar ji’s essay from 1962, in which he had written about the first Nirala Jayanti celebrations in his village Gadhakola near Purwa town in Uttar Pradesh.

Nirala was born in a Brahmin family in Midnapore, now in Bangladesh, but had arrived in Gadhakola as a child. He grew up here, choosing to live closer to the marginalised groups and wrote some of his iconic stories regarding those persons in this house. It was here that he was tormented by the high caste rich landowners and he left it vowing to never come back.

Nagar ji writes effortlessly creating a vivid picture of different persons who had been a part of Nirala’s life when he was a poor villager, who now wished to claim a part of his glory as a renowned poet. His words express his reverence for Nirala, even while he observes the complexity of human egos and emotions. About Nirala’s closeness to the poor and the excluded he wrote:

“I started to think, why would the higher castes remember Nirala? He had never accepted their caste-superiority. He had refused their false-ideas of religion. He had listened to the voices of the poor and marginalised, fought for them and was a part of their joys and pains. That was why such a large group of his followers was a part of the procession, to show their disdain for the higher castes. I loved it. Lord Shiva has to be accompanied by his marginalised bhoot-gana.”

The Farmer Poet “Padhees”

Balbhadra Prasad Dikshit “Padhees” was Nagar ji’s contemporary and friend, famous for his poetry book “Chakkalas”.

Like Nirala above, Padhees had also chosen to move away from his Brahmin clan to become a farmer himself and to write about the lives of the poor farmers and the landless peasants in his poetry. In his book, Nagar ji dedicates a big chapter to this farmer-poet to express his own ideals of being close to the marginalised persons.

With extensive quotes from different poems of Padhees, Nagar ji’s essay explains the popularity of those words among the poor farmers because he was giving voice to the voiceless. He wrote, “Padhees’ call was like a spark to light the fire in a heap of straw. His poetry was the voice of the mute farmers of the 7 lakh villages of the country.”

Lamenting the death of Padhees at a young age, Nagari ji wrote:

“Farmer-poet Padhees was a great word-smith. Every language would be proud to have a poet like him. The beautiful, alive and heart-touching depictions of nature, villages and the village life that he presented in his Avadhi language poems would be difficult to find elsewhere … Those who had the good fortune of knowing him from close knew that he was even a far better human being.”

Jaya Shanker Prasad

Eminent Hindi writer Prasad had died in 1938, when Nagari ji was just 22 years old. Prasad was one of the early influences on the young Nagar ji.

In his essay on Prasad, Nagar ji describes the hardships he had faced when his family wealth was lost and he was crushed under the burden of debt. Yet even in those trying times, Prasad did not lose his dedication towards writing.

Nagar ji describes the lesson learned from Prasad with the following words:

“He kept his poetry hidden, he liked to keep this passion for himself. This habit meant that he kept working on his literary efforts in solitude. In Prasad’s literary journey, the stamp of this focused effort is evident. As a poet, playwright, and author of stories, books and essays, in all his different works, you can see his undivided and attentive thought-process. A creative work can be small or big, but for a serious author, they all merit equally careful attention.”

Sumitra Nandan Pant

Nagar Ji starts this vignette with Nirala in Lucknow during the 1930s. Nirala had a deep reverence for the Hindi poet Pant, and had introduced Nagar ji to his works. My favourite part of this vignette is the part when they both, Pant and Nagar ji, were in Madras (Chennai) in 1946, working with Udayshanker on his film Kalpana. This episode illustrates the source of the poet’s creativity:

“Pant ji was writing the songs for that film. He had just recovered from a long illness and often seemed lost in thoughts. There was a light in his serious face. One day, standing in the garden with his hand on my arm, he suddenly raised his head up to stare at a tree. His eyes seemed lit from inside. Clutching my arm, he said with enthusiasm, “Look my friend, the poems are raining down.” Some days after this, he started writing the poems of his book ‘Swarn Kiran’.” 

Conclusions

The sixteen portraits of contemporary authors and poets in Amrit Lal Nagar’s book “Jinke Saath Jiya”, refer to some of the iconic figures of Hindi literature of 20th century. All the portraits, while they tell about their subjects, they also throw light on their relationships with Nagar ji. They also indicate which aspects of their personality and literary efforts were perceived as significant by Nagar ji. In this sense, a critical reading of these essays provide some invaluable insights about Nagar ji, such as his admiration for those who were speaking for the poor and marginalised and fighting for their dignity.

There is so much in these essays that can be starting points for critical research on Nagar ji’s own creative works, to see how these inspirations were developed and manifested in them. For example, his admiration for some of these persons’ optimism and resilience, their knowledge of Upanishads, their respect for our cultural heritage, heritage and knowledge-systems and so on.

At the same time, one can appreciate that in these memoirs and vignettes, there is a touch of levity, humility and self-deprecation about his own creativity.

***

Notes:

1. I have translated from Hindi the different excerpts used in this write-up, trying to respect the sense of his expressions instead of making literal translations.

2. This article was published in the August 2024 issue of the magazine "DFTT" (Documentary Films & Theatrical Trust) of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), a special issue to commemorate the 108 years of Amrit Lal Nagar, edited by Savita Nagar & Rajesh Amrohi.

#amritlalnagar #hindiwriters #hindiliterature #indianliterature

 

Knocking-Down Alice Munro

The latest issue of Outlook magazine (11 Aug.2024) in India is about the Nobel prize winner Canadian writer Alice Munro (1931-2024) controversy. After Munro's death in May this year, her daughter disclosed that when she was 9 years old, she was sexually abused by her step-father. She said that she had told it to her mother, but her mother had refused to leave her husband. This disclosure has led to the campaign which says that Munro was a terrible person and her works should be boycotted.

The magazine has different persons sharing their views about this controversy. I would also like to share a couple of my ideas about this theme.

Views in Outlook Magazine

Most views published in the magazine, take nuanced positions. For example:

Jai Arjun Singh's view is that everyone contains multitudes and asks, "is it so hard to believe that people who have done heinous things in one context are also capable - over a long lifetime - of producing thoughtful, moving art and doing it honestly?"

In the Munro controversy, the heinous act was by the step-father. I feel that painting Munro as a kind of accomplice is going too far. However, suppose Munro was a terrible person, does it mean that we erase her work? I don't think so.

Jerry Pinto mentions the universality of human flaws and says about Picasso, "He is flawed. I accept that because I am flawed. I accept his art as coming from a flawed source because there are only flawed sources." I like and understand this viewpoint better.

I think that people who point fingers at others, are often those who have their own skeletons in their cupboards.

My Views

I also think that same events can be interpreted differently. For example, some things can be seen as harmless fun or not so serious by one person and a mortal offence by another. I remember film actress Rakhi's interview about her divorce some decades ago, in which she mentioned about her husband Gulzaar's saheb's cruelty "because he wanted only freshly made warm chapati and threw it away if it was not to his satisfaction". I know some men and women who also prefer their chapatis warm, but fortunately, they don't need to divorce their spouses, they just need to get a new cook for their kitchens.

You think that I am trivialising the issue? How about ragging? Some 20 years ago, I had written a post about my ragging experiences in the medical college in 1972. I had happy memories of that experience while another of my classmates had left the college. Some even commit suicide due to ragging. BTW, my post about that ragging experience, is one of the most popular posts on this blog and it triggers a large number of persons, who continue to read it, in spite of explicit warnings about its content.

In Munro's defence, I can also say that her daughter had told about it to her mother, almost 15 years after the event. Thinking of "multitudes" inside us, and may be Munro had had some very good memories in all those years with her husband, including of many acts of kindness and empathy, and she was conflicted in her mind. I can't judge her reasons. Since Munro is dead, and can't defend herself, in the end, her daughter's is just one side of a complex story.

Finally, if we start boycotting due to all the stories about the well-known writers, artists, actors etc., we won't have any films, books and works of art left for us to admire and engage with. Maybe this is because, famous creative people undergo a lot of pressure to cross the boundaries?

Since we live in the age of aggressive self-promotion based media-celebrities, I guess many persons outraging about Munro are only looking for attention through their outrageous comments. Unfortunately, click-bait hungry portals & social media are only too happy to oblige them.

***

Sculptures & Art About Books

I love reading and as a chld I had started reading very early. There was a time when I read everything. I used to say that I will even read toilet paper if it has something written on it! I no longer try to read toilet papers, but I still read a lot. I am a part of a Booking-Readers' Group in Schio in the north-east of Italy, where I live. Finally, earlier this year I completed writing my first fiction book in Hindi.

This photo-essay is about those works of art from across the world which celebrate books and their authors.

I am starting this post with a sculpture from the Brera Museum of Conteporary Art in Milan (Italy) - it has marble statue of a young woman reading a book by the Italian sculptor Pietro Magni. (Image above)

My Favourite Authors

Most of my favourite authors from my childhood were from my father's collection of Hindi books - Krishen Chander, Nanak Singh, Shivani, Chatur Sen, Rangey Raghav, Asha Purna Devi, Bimal Mitra, Shanker, Muktibodh, and many more. Those were not books meant for children, but that did not stop me from reading them!

Growing up, I discovered English books. Then, over the last decades while living in Italy, apart from Italian writers, I have also discovered many Latin American and European writers. Through the images of this photoessay, I hope to make you think about your own favourite authors and books.

The next image in this collection is from the Innocenti building in Florence that hosts the UNICEF office and shows a boy sitting on a paper boat. I think that it wonderfully illustrates the capacity of a good book to transport you to far away lands of imagination. I don't know the artist of this sculpture.

The next image is of an unusual tower made of one hundred white coloured books by the Italian sculptor Lorenzo Perroni, who specializes in sculptures of white coloured books. I had clicked this picture during the visit of a group of American astronauts to the Sala Borsa hall in Bologna in 2011. So you can see the astronauts in the lower right corner, with people sitting on the ground in front of them and the white columns of books towards the left.

The next part of this photo-essay is divided according to countries where the pictures were taken.

America (USA)

There are two images from the Central Park in New York. The first one has a statue of Robert Burns, also known as Robbie Burns. He is considered to be the national poet of Scotland. According to the Wikipaedia, "He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish Diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature".

The second image is of a sculpture showing two characters of one of the most famous and enduring love stories of the world - Romeo and Juliet - by the British playwright William Shakespeare.

Austria

The next image is from Vienna and shows the writer and playwright Ferdinand Raimund (1790-1836) near the opera building. He is credited with a number of important books and plays in German. I find his story very tragic - bitten by a dog and afraid of a painful death due to rabies, because no treatment existed for this disease at that time, he had committed suicide at the age of 46 years. When I hear people complaining about vaccines and refusing to vaccinate their children, I would like to remind them of this story.

Belgium

The next three images are from Brussels, the capital of Belgium. The first one shows two lovers at the lake - they are Thyl and Nele, the characters of a book by the Belgian writer Charles De Coster. De Coster is considered to be the father of Belgian writing. This monument is the opera of the sculptor Charles Samuel, a fan of De Coster. The monument also has many other characters from De Coster's books on its sides - a cat, a cooking pot, a spinning rod.

The next image shows two of the principle characters (Captain Haddock and Tintin) from the iconic comic books about the adventures of a boy called Tintin. These comics were written and illustrated by the Belgian author and artist called Hergé (his real name was "Georges Remi"). Tintin is considered to be one of the most popular European comic books and these have been translated into different languages.

The third image from Brussels shows a statue of Charles Buls (also known as Karel Buls) placed in the Agoraplein square, close to the Grand Place square. According to Wikipaedia, "He was a Belgian politician and mayor of the City of Brussels. Buls was an accomplished and prolific author, not merely on educational and artistic issues but also publishing accounts of his travels abroad. Buls became Mayor of Brussels in 1881. However, along with these reforms, his most lasting achievement was the result of his opposition to the grandiose architectural schemes of King Leopold II, and the resulting preservation of old parts of Brussels. "

Brazil

The next five images are from Brazil. The first one has the bust of famous Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran in the city of Goiania. He was 12 years old when his family emigrated from Lebanon to USA. He died at 48 years and wrote in both Arabic and English. His most well known book is "The Prophet".

Many of the words of Khalil Gibran have been quoted infinite number of times and will be familiar to readers across the world. For example, you must have heard these - "If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were." Another of his quotes that I like, says - "I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers." You can check many other quotes from Gibran at Goodreads.

The next image is from Pelorihno, the old city on the hill in front of the port of Salvador do Bahia, where the well known Brazilian writer Jorge Amado lived. His house in Pelorinhno hosts a museum and shops around sell his souvenirs including his paintings showing him with a pipe in his mouth.

The next two images are from the medical college in Pelorihno, showing two ancient Greek philosophers, writers and scientists - Hippocrates and Galen.

The last image from Brazil shows the house of Cora Coralina, an Afro-Brazilian slave during Portuguese occupation, in the historic city of Goias Velho. The house is located next to the river Rio Vermelho and there is a statue of Cora standing at the window, looking over the river. Cora was a poet, who wrote about the degradation of slavery and her poems inspired hundreds of other Afro-Brazilians to seek a life of dignity.

Czech Republic

The next image of this photo-essay is from Prague and shows the statue of a women writer - Bozena Nemcova (real name "Barbora Panklova"). Writer of fairy tales and legends, she is best known for her novel Babicka (Grandmother), an autobiographical book about her childhood with her grandmother.

India

The next four images are from India. The first image has the iconic figure of poet-saint Basvanna from Basavkalyan in Karnataka, who is known for his Vachana-sahitya. According to Wikipaedia, "He spread social awareness through his poetry, popularly known as Vachanaas. Basavanna used Ishtalinga, an image of the Śiva Liṅga, to eradicate untouchability, to establish equality among all human beings and as a means to attain spiritual enlightenment. These were rational and progressive social thoughts in the twelfth century."

The next two images are from the Hindi Bhawan in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and present two important personalities from the world of Hindi literature - national poet of India, Maithili Sharan Gupt and the iconic writer Munshi Prem Chand. My aunt, Dr Savitri Sinha, was close to Maithili Sharan Gupta, affectionately called him Dadda and had written about him.

Munshi Prem Chand was the writer of many stories that I loved as a child. He was the founder-editor of Hans, a literary magazine in Hindi, that continues to be active even today.

The fourth image from India shows Nobel laureate poet, writer, playwright and freedom fighter, Rabindra Nath Tagore.

Italy

The images of writers from Italy are more numerous than all the other countries in this photo-essay. This may be because I have travelled widely in Italy. Perhaps, this has also to do with greater willingness in Italy to honour artists and writers in the public spaces.

The first three images are from the gardens of Villa Borghese park in Rome. The first image shows the Ukrainian born Russian writer and playwright Nikolai Gogol. In her book "The Namesake", Jhumpa Lahiri had paid homage to Gogol by giving his name to her hero.

The next image has the Peruvian writer Garcilaso de la Vega known as The Inca, from Villa Borghese gardens of Rome. He wrote about the Spanish colonizers of Peru. The son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, he is recognized primarily for his contributions to Inca history, culture, and society.

The third image from Villa Borghese gardens of Rome has a writer from a tiny eastern European country called Montenegro - Petar Petrovic Njegos, who was a nobleman and a poet. As the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, he is credited with modernization of his country.

The fourth image is also from Rome, from the ruins of Traiano's baths near the Colosseum, and shows the statue of Italian journalist and writer Alfredo Oriani.

The next image is from Santa Croce square in Florence and shows the most well known Italian poet Dante Alighieri, famous for his epic poem "Divine Comedy".

The next four images are from a garden near Cavour square, close to the Brera museum of art in Milan. This garden has many statues of writers, journalists, philosophers and scientists.

The first of these images shows the well known Italian journalist and newspaper editor Indro Montanelli, writing on his old typewriter. He is shown as a young man, his severe face is focused on his writing. It is a remarkable piece of art.

The next images have 3 Italian writers - Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, Gaetano Negri and the playwrite Giuseppe Giacosa from the Cavour square park in Milan.

The next image is from the city of Vicenza and it shows the writer, editor and publisher Neri Pozza. The sculpture is close to the bridge on the river Bacchiglione, just behind the famous Basilica built by Andrea Palladio. Neri Pozza is one of the reputed contemporary publishing houses in Italy, who have published the Italian translations of different Indian authors including Alka Saraogi and Anita Nair.

The last image of this photo-essay shows the statue of Irish writer James Joyce and is from the city of Trieste in the north-east of Italy. Joyce is shown walking, crossing a bridge in the centre of the city. Joyce had lived in Trieste for many years. He is famous for his books like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.

In the End

I have loved putting together this photo-essay, even though identifying the pictures for this post took me hours of going through my vast picture archives. It was frustrating that from many countries, I could not find any image related to a book or a writer or a journalist. For example, I could not find any such image from my image archives of UK or Switzerland. No country of Africa is represented in this photo-essay for the same reason.

Many countries do not put statues of writers in prominent public spaces, probably because often writers speak against their governments! Also because compared to national leaders, military persons and freedom fighters, for many countries writers and artists are not considered important enough to be remembered through art and sculpture. Finding images of art related to women writers is even more difficult - for this essay I could find only two of them.

I hope that you will enjoy going through these images and perhaps share with me your experiences of finding the statues of your favourite authors during your travels! I would love to hear about any art works related to writers and/or their books, especially from countries not represented in this post.

***

#artaboutbooks #artaboutwriters #artistsandwriters #authors #booksculptures

Writing Choices (1)

I am writing my second novel - it is in Hindi, because after trying for about 20 years, I found that I was more comfortable writing my books in Hindi. I still do not have a publishing house for my first book but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

It took me almost two and a half years to write that first book, and during that period, I rewrote it 3 times before finding a structure that I liked. It is about a young man who discovers that the woman he had thought of as his mother was not his birth-mother and then for the rest of the book he tries to find more about and locate his birth-mother.

I had a basic idea but once I started writing, new ideas came all the time, some of which I tried. The final structure of book and many of its characters and scenes, which came out in the final version, were very different from my initial ideas.

However, when I think back about the writing of my first book, I can hardly remember all those changes and the experimenting with different ideas.

It is the same with my second book. I am doing the second rewriting. It covers a long time period, more than a hundred years, and is spread across different countries. I think that I might need to do at least 2 more rewritings before I will have a proper draft. While I work on it, there are so many ideas which come to my mind and I try to incorporate some of them in my writing. 

So I have thought of occasionally noting down in this blog about my writing process. This book revolves around 4 generations of a family involved in a tea garden.

The first version of this book had alternating chapters focusing on different characters from different countries and time-periods. I wrote around 80% of it but felt that its basic premise of the story focusing on a woman of the 3rd generation was not working, it seemed kind of flat and not very exciting.

In the second version, I have grouped together the chapters according to the time-periods, to make it easier to follow. Now, its focus has shifted to 2 characters from the second and fourth generations.

I had started writing it with longer chapters and fewer voices telling the story. After writing about 70% of this version in this way, one day I changed my strategy - now the chapters are shorter and the story is told by a larger number of voices. I still have about 10% of the book to complete but I like this second approach more, though it probably has too many events all reaching their culminations in the last few chapters, so it is kind of chaotic.

My plan is to finish this version, read it and then decide if I prefer it with longer chapters and fewer voices or shorter chapters with more voices.

While writing, sometimes some characters suddenly take form, come alive and become more complex, sometimes asking for greater space in the story. For example, some old photographs taken in 1930-1940s played a key role in the story in the first version. In this second version, I have a French guy as the photographer and a few scenes with him. Then, a few days ago, while going for a walk, I thought about that French guy and I felt that he is an interesting character and thus, it is possible that he will have a bigger role in the third version.

I love writing my book. For a few hours every day I get lost in the worlds of my characters and their stories. It is an amazing feeling.

*****

#authorsunil #sunildeepak #sunil_book #writingprocess

Four Books from 2021

It has been some time since I wanted to write about a few books, and now I had four of them to talk about. The four books I wanted to talk about are - "Away with the Penguins" by Hazel Prior, "Bonnie Jack" by Ian Hamilton, "City of Vengeance" by D. V. Bishop and "The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict" by Trenton Lee Stewart. They are very different books, they belong to different genre but they also had something in common - I finished all of them without leaving them aside for days and without skipping any parts! Unfortunately, as the years pass, I tend to get bored with books very easily and I either leave them halfway or skip parts of them. It happens even with the books of authors whom I used to love till recently.

I wonder if it could be due to an over-consumption of books? I have been reading every day since I was 6-7 years old - without reading, my day seems incomplete. I read mainly in English, Hindi and Italian but at times I have read in French and Portuguese as well. There was a time when I read everything and used to think that if they had printed something on the toilet paper, probably I would have read that too. But lately, I get tired of most books very easily and they need to have something special to keep me going.

Warning - Spoiler alert - If you want to read any of these 4 books, be aware that this post may have some minor spoilers. If you hate the spoilers, perhaps you will be better off reading these books and then come here to check why I liked them!

Away with the Penguins by Hazel Prior

The best way to classify this book will be to call it a "feel-good" book. It is an optimistic book in which everything ends well, including an old lady who end up in a scientific laboratory in the North Pole.
It is the story of Veronica McCreedy, a rich old lady, who is disappointed by the meeting with her long-lost weed-smoking and loser-looking grandson, and who then decides to leave her inheritance for the welfare of penguins. However, before making the final decision about her testament, she wants to be sure that penguin research is useful, so she decides to verify it personally by visiting the arctic laboratory involved in doing penguin research.

It is a simple book with some twists. It made me smile and even laugh occasionally, and most important, it kept me engaged. I liked the characters of the old lady as well as that of her grandson.

In some way this book reminded me of the Italian film "Quo Vado?" with the actor Checco Zalone, which I had seen a couple of years ago. I like Checco Zalone and his films. So if you like reading "Away with the Penguins", you might follow it up with watching "Quo Vado?" of Checco Zalone, which does not have penguins and is about the Italian obsession with a permanent job contract in some state office - it was partly located in a scientific laboratory in the Arctic.

Bonnie Jack by Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton is a Canadian mystery writer. However "Bonnie Jack" is not a mystery book, instead it is inspired by the real story of his father. It is about a boy called Jack in Dublin Ireland, who is taken one day to a cinema hall by his mother and sister and while he watches the film, his mother and sister go to the toilet and never come back. The abandoned boy is adopted by an American couple and leaves Ireland. Many decades later, when he is a rich man and father of grown-up children, he decides to go back to Ireland to look for his sister and his mother.

Back in Ireland, Jack meets his sister and finds out that their mother is dead. He also finds out that when he was abandoned, his mother was pregnant and later, she had twins. She had run away from an alcoholic and violent husband. He also meets his father, who is still alcoholic and violent.

In the book, he does not like the person his elder sister has grown up to be - she is bitter, lonely and poor. Instead, he becomes good friends with his twin siblings and decides to ignore and not have any contact with that sister. I did not like it that he decides to ignore his sister, who was as much a victim as he was, though in a different way. She also had to live with the guilt of having abandoned her boy brother.

It has been a few months that I had read this book and every time I think of it, I feel a little angry at him, for not trying to build a relationship with that sister or at least be kind to her. So while I liked this book, it is here in this list because it is struck in my throat like a fish-bone. Every time I think about it, I feel bad about Jack's sister. Since it is based on a real story, I can't seem to let it go.

City of Vengeance by D. V. Bishop

It is a historical fiction book set in the renaissance-period Florence. The book is about the 3 men of the Medici family - Alessandro, Lorenzino and Cosimo. The history books say that Alessandro was killed on the day of epiphany, 6 January 1537. When I used to live in Bologna, I had been to Florence numerous times and loved visiting that city. In those days, I had heard the story about Alessandro while visiting the Medici buildings. However, Bishop's book brings to life the Florence of that period through two murder mysteries about a Jewish money-lender and a transvestite young man, who are killed in two separate incidents.

Thus, the book focuses on what it meant to be Jewish and to be gay in medieval Florence. The two murders are connected to the conspiracy for the killing of Alessandro de Medici, but the focus of the story is the investigation by Captain Cesare Aldo, who is charged with finding the killer of the Jew moneylender, while he tries to hide that he is gay and in love with a Jewish doctor.

It was a very interesting read - I finished the second half of this book in one long sitting, staying awake till late night. Knowing the places described in the book and having heard the story of murder of Alessandro de Medici, made it a wonderful history lesson, while enjoying it as a murder mystery.

Looking at Florence and the reign of Alessandro de Medici, under the benevolent hand of the Pope and fears of popular uprising of those who want the republic on one hand, and seeing the city through the eyes of the poor and marginalised including the prostitutes and gays, gives an understanding of the political machinations of that period which is impossible in the dry tomes of history. I am not sure if it is very accurate, but it is certainly interesting.

I wish there was a Hindi writer who could write about the Indian history in the way Bishop has written "City of Vengeance". There were 2 historical books in Hindi, which I had read this year - "Akbar" by Shazi Zaman (translated from English) and "Maurya Samrat" by Rajendra Mohan Bhatnagar, but TBH, I didn't find them very engaging.

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

This is a fantasy book for young people. I don't like fantasy books and I don't read books for teenagers, so actually I was not even supposed to open it, much less read it. However, I liked its title very much and started reading it without checking for more information about it. It has a crisp and clean writing style, which caught me straightaway. It is supposed to be the prequel of a series of books, which already have 3-4 books in it. Mr. Nicholas Benedict is shown as an old man in those books while in this book, it shows him as a young boy and is about how he became the venerable Nicholas Benedict of the later books.

I liked the lesson which this book gave against bullying and also about using intellect to fight the bullies. After finishing it, I was tempted to read the other books of this series, but I am not sure if I would do it.

If you have a teenager and you need to buy a gift for him/her, I strongly recommend this book. Try to buy it some days in advance and read it before giving it away. It is a real pleasure.

To Conclude

This year, I had also liked reading a couple of thriller and adventure books, though I can't seem to remember their names or their authors. That happens to me often with thriller and action books - I read them happily, but a few days later, I forget them.

This year, I had heard a lot of praise for the book "Fresh Water for Flowers" by the French author Valerie Perrin. It was an ok kind of book but I was bored by parts of it and I had skipped them. I had also read about the Icelandic writer Ragnar Jonasson, but I have found his books to be too slow moving for my taste in mystery books. I have to thank our local library in Schio, which gives me an opportunity to read so many new writers and their books.

At the end of 2021, I am looking for suggestions about Hindi writers, that I can try reading in 2022. As I wrote above, I would love to find good historical fiction books in Hindi, like the books written by Rangey Raghav, Chatursen or even Narendra Kohli, in the post-independence period in India. So if there are any Hindi writers with good books on historical-fiction, do share information about them  in the comments below.

I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that this Covid-19 epidemic will not stop me from visiting India in 2022 and buying some Hindi books! While I am happy to order English and Italian books online (if I can't find them in our local library), but somehow I don't like to order Hindi books online - for buying them I like visiting the bookshops!

I like the idea of writing about the books which I liked, as a way of remembering that experience. During my life, I must have read hundreds, if not at least a couple of thousands of them and yet if you ask me, I may be able to tell you only about 30-40 of them. I like this idea of trying to remember the books I had read decades ago and see what I can come up with - may be I will write a post about it as well.

*****

#bookreviews #booksilikedin2021 #trentonleestewart #dvbishop #ianhamilton #hazelprior 

Venice the City of Water

Chiara Carminati is an Italian poet, translator and author of children's books. On 21st March, it was the World Poetry Day. To celebrate it, our city Schio promoted "Poetry gifts" by sharing poems through some WhatsApp groups. I am part of a local reading group called Lettori in Circolo (Readers in a Circle), which took part in this initiative. Thus, I received some poems, which included one of Carminati's poems called, "A Venezia" (In Venice).

This brief post is about Carminati's poem. I share my translation of this poem and a few thoughts about the feelings it evoked in me. This year (2021) is 1600th anniversary of the foundation of Venice in 421 CE. Thus, this post is dedicated to this beautiful floating town which I love to visit and which is not very far from Schio.

"A Venezia" - A Poem by Chiara Carminati

Nella città d’acqua, in lontananza
paiono pennelli sottili
le punte dei campanili.
Così ciotole di un pittore
rovesciate con eleganza
sono le cupole delle chiese
nella città d’acqua, in lontananza.

Meaning of the Poem:

It is a short and sweet poem. I am not a poet and not a proper translator, however I wanted to share it:

"In the city of water, in the distance
looking like thin brushes
the tips of the bell-towers.
As the painter's bowls
overturned elegantly
are the domes of churches
in the city of water, in the distance."

Feelings Evoked by This Poem

Venice is usually full of tourists. There are times when the crowds are so thick that it is difficult to find a quiet place where you can soak in the quiet atmosphere of this magical town. To experience the quiet and the almost surreal beauty of Venice you need to visit it in autumn or winter. I liked this poem because it captures that special feeling of Venice on a quiet foggy morning.

Venice is full of artists and painters - people who sit on the banks of canals with their sketch books and easels, intent on drawing and painting, while others, holding stacks of paintings look for tourists to sell them. This poem alludes to all of them by looking at the floating city as the working instruments of a water-colour painter - its bell-towers as brushes and its church-domes reflected in the waters as overturned bowls of colours.

Conclusions

I love reading in Italian but I usually avoid reading Italian poems - I have difficulties in appreciating them most of the time, probably because reading and feeling the emotions of poems requires a different kind of relationship with the language. For the same reason, I have difficulties in appreciating English poems. I can appreciate them intellectually but I don't have the emotional connection with them - for that, I need my poems to be in Hindi or Urdu. However, occasionally I come across poems like this one by Chiara Carminati which connects with something deeper inside me and creates magic. (I think that I like this poem so much, also because I love water-colour paintings). 

If you understand Italian and want to read more poems which were shared during our "Poetry Gifts" initiative, you can find them at the Leggere a Schio blog managed by our local library.

***

Women & Friends - A Book Review

Some months ago I had read an article in The New Scientist about an App for the mobile phones which can help you to keep in contact with your friends and remember their birthdays and children's names. While reading it, I had thought that it must be a dystopian world where you had to be reminded about such things. Our friends are people we really like, without whom our lives are incomplete - if we don't see them or hear from them for some time, we miss them. So I thought that we don't need Apps to remind us about them.

Perhaps the problem is more about whom do we consider as a friend? According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the human beings can have at the most 150 friends, out of which not more than 15 can be called "close friends" and less than 5 can be "intimate friends".

This reflection about friendships was provoked by a book called "Miss Benson's Beetles" by the British author Rachel Joyce. The book is about two very different women, who embark on a journey in the early 1950s from England to the other end of the world in New Caledonia in the south-west Pacific.

The Joyce's book is about being a woman in a world dominated by men, and it is also a book about a female-bonding. This post is about this book and is also about friendships.

Two Women Friends Genre

Two women on a road trip or a journey, with elements of female solidarity and friendship, where the journey leads to an understanding about the self, can be considered as a specific genre. Some months ago, I had written a post about the book "Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier, which was on the same theme. Often discussions about this theme veer towards the film "Thelma and Louise" which is probably the most well-known work in the genre. They have a common structure. Often the two women are very different and that adds an element of challenge to their bonding, and acts as a point of tension in the story.

In India we say that all possible story-plots have been already described in the Mahabharata. Good writers can take a plot and add something unique to it. Rachel Joyce also has that knack - within the genre of "two women on a journey", she adds her own dimensions, which make for a wonderfully told story.

Miss Benson's Beetle

Miss Benson, the heroine of the book is not the kind of person who gets to play an important role in the stories. She is closer to fifty, a spinster, tall and big, and without much grace. Mrs. Pretty, the second woman of the book is younger, with curves and hair dyed yellow, with a hint of dyslexia, who tends to end up with the wrong kind of men. Both are running away from something and thus embark on a journey to New Caledonia, a French territory located in south-west Pacific.

In the beginning, Miss Benson can hardly bear to be with the constantly talking Mrs. Pretty and is determined to replace her with someone better suited to be her assistant. Instead, the events force the two women to be together and to face different adventures in their search for the gold-coloured beetle hiding in a tropical forest at the top of mountain.

The different situations force the women to face ever-new difficulties, and finding ways to overcome them. In the process, they learn to accept themselves and each other. Joyce writes the characters of the two women with sympathy and humour. It makes you laugh, even while you sympathise with their terrible situations.

Joyce has a way with words which I loved. For example, Barbara, the maid in the house of Miss Benson's aunts' is described as someone who "took all instruction as a personal affront." At another place, Miss Benson and Mrs. Pretty are described as "a brown ostrich coupled with a pink-hatted canary". When the ship leaves the port, "It wasn’t just the ship that had been unmoored. It was her entire sense of herself." Mrs. Pretty's suitcases look like "coffins for baby dinosaurs" while the light plays across the mountains "like emotion on a human face".

Here is how she describes them after they reach New Caledonia:

French. Another problem. Everywhere she went she heard words and sounds she didn’t understand. Vowels that ran like small motors, tongues purring, explosive combinations of consonants. She tried the everyday phrases in the guidebook, and no one had a clue what she was talking about. If anything, they looked concerned. She had no idea how to get it right.Fortunately, Enid had a flair for communicating in a foreign language that took everyone by surprise, including speakers of foreign languages. She didn’t give a damn about getting it right. She got the hang of basic words like fromage and café au lait, as well as scarabée for beetle, and the minute she got stuck, she mimed. “Bon shoor!” she would yell. “Have you seen un gold scarabée?” Or “Do you know un mountain dans le shape of un wisdom tooth?” She flapped her arms like wings; she pretended she had a great big beetle stomach; she even showed people her back molars.

However, it is through a marginal character, a woman called Freya who works in the natural history museum and appears towards the end of the book, that Joyce explains how she sees the place of women in professional spaces dominated by men, which really struck me:

She didn’t know why but she had a feeling they were the work of another woman. Maybe it was just her fantasy. She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family - she couldn’t even hold down a relationship - and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got.And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had - and, again, this was her own choice - missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings.  

I greatly enjoyed reading Miss Benson's Beetle. Lately, I have problems with fiction books - most of the time, I get bored with them after a few pages - even with thrillers and mysteries. It was consoling to finally find a book in which I could lose myself. After a long time, here was a book that I tried to read slowly so that the pleasure of reading it could last longer.

That does not mean that I don't have anything critical to say about it. My biggest criticism of the book is about its lack of any local characters from New Caledonia because its world is exclusively colonial. I don't recall any of the local characters having a name, unless we can consider the local dog as a character. Giving names to persons is to recognise their humanity and it felt strange to me that with all Miss Benson's empathy, the people of New Caledonia were only nameless waiters, policeman or the shanty town kids, even when she lives with them for months.

Miss Benson explains how she sees the world at one point in the book - unless something is named and classified by a British institution, it does not exist:

“No, Mrs. Pretty. A thing doesn’t exist until it has been caught and presented to the Natural History Museum. Once the Natural History Museum has accepted the beetle, and read my descriptions and notes, and found that it is genuinely a new specimen, it will be given a name. And then it will exist.”

I felt that this was a completely colonial way of reading the world. The locals might have known about those beetles for hundreds of years, they might have their myths and stories about them, but the beetles were only "discovered" when Miss Benson would write to her museum in Britain about it and obviously she can name them after her father!

Since in early 1950s, the world was still largely colonial and as far as I know, New Caledonia is still a French territory, so probably we can justify this way of seeing the world as being realistic for those characters. Yet, the enlightened Miss Benson could have been a little more aware of other cultures and people. Anyway, it is a minor squabble and this lack of sensitivity towards the locals and their culture, did not really affect my enjoyment of the book.

Fiction books are imaginary worlds which the authors make seem like real. While the first 3/4th of the book has some semblance of realism, the last one fourth of the book turns into a fable. There is even an Avatar like scene with psychedelic colours, flowers and golden insects. Generally, I don't like fantasy books. However, in this book, by the time this part came, I was already in love with the two characters, and was relieved that they were spared additional challenges and the story could have an emotionally satisfying ending.

Female Bonding versus Male Bonding

The book also made me reflect on the differences between female bonding and male bonding. I have seen some films on male bonding during a journey, but I feel that is completely different from the kind of relationships between women depicted in Miss Benson's Beetle or in Remarkable Creatures. This particular genre of stories where excluded persons, whom life has bypassed or mistreated, one older and the other younger, and their relationship developing over the course of the story, does not seem to work for men. Scenes like the one in Miss Benson's Beetle, where after taking a nude bath in a forest pond, the younger woman lies down with her head on the thighs of the older woman, would have got a stronger sexual connotation with men, while in the book, it seemed more like an expression of tenderness and solidarity.

The relationship between Miss Benson and Mrs. Pretty develops through moments of being vulnerable and acceptance of tenderness. I don't think that we men are much open to being vulnerable or accepting tenderness, especially from other guys. Thus, a book about male road-trip story of self-discovery would probably have a very different feel.

Books about male bonding are those based in male-only schools, in ships with an all male crew and in some stories about wars. There are also stories like the Brokeback Mountain, which are more about gay love. In term of texture and characterisations, they are very different from these female-bonding stories. If you know of any other kind of good books which have male bonding between two very different men as a theme and are not about gay love, I would like to know about it - do let me know.

Conclusions

I had just finished reading this book, when I found that by coincidence, our reading group has decided to read another book by Rachel Joyce - "The incredible pilgrimage of Harold Fry". I am looking forward to reading that.

In the meantime, I recommend - do read Miss Benson's Beetle - I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did!

***

Lessons of Life from Adam Smith

Adam Smith is considered to be the father of liberal capitalism and free markets. His book "The Wealth of Nations" is considered as one of the most influential books on economics. Smith had written another book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", which is hardly remembered today, which was about human nature and how to live a fulfilling life. Russ Roberts' book "How Adam Smith can change your life" is a reflection and analysis of this lesser known book of Smith.

This post is about the book "How Adam Smith can change your life - An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness". The book is full of interesting insights about human nature and why we behave the way we do. In this post I am going to focus on only 2 ideas of this book.

Self-Deception & Confirmation Bias

According to Smith, human beings are self-centred. For us our own life problems are much more important compared to big tragedies befalling humanity in some far away place.Human beings also have a big capacity for self-deception, sometimes unconsciously, so that we find an excuse to do things without listening to the voice of our self-conscience. Russ writes about this self-deception:

Rather than see ourselves as we truly are, we see ourselves as we would like to be. Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge. We like to fool ourselves. 

When we behave in selfish and self-serving ways, sometimes we even justify it by saying that we did it for altruistic reasons, to help others. We describe our selfish actions in selfless language. According to Smith, we do this not only to convince others but also to convince ourselves, so that we can continue to hold a positive image of ourselves in our minds. According to Smith, our behaviour sometimes falls short of our ideals not because we’re bad people and not because our self-interest outweighs our benevolence, but because of what is called the "confirmation bias" - we don’t realize that we’re not living up to our ideals.

A modern name for Smith’s insights about self-deception is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias happens when we filter reality through our biases, ignoring evidence that challenges or refutes what we believe and eagerly accepting evidence that confirms what we believe. ... Another modern name for the challenge of understanding our complex world with any precision comes from Nassim Taleb—the narrative fallacy. We like narratives that follow a nice, clean pattern. Evidence that fits the narrative is noted after the fact. Other evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative is discarded.  
Among the persons offering advice motivated by self-interest and camouflaged as altruism, there are some examples of doctors, which brought to my mind many instances of distorted private medical services. For example, private nursing homes have much higher rates of Caesarean section instead of normal deliveries. Heart specialists in private hospitals advise much higher numbers of coronary artery bypass operations. I believe that this is a mechanism of self-deception, so that we doctors convince ourselves that we are not doing it for money but these operations are for benefiting those persons. However, this is not just about doctors, it is true for all kinds of professionals and private businesses. They don't see themselves as dishonest, many of them may be convinced that they do it to help others.

Everyday Actions Creating Civilization

The second idea from Smith that I want to touch in this post, is about small or minor actions by each of us, which taken alone are insignificant, but combined with similar actions of millions of other persons, together create the norms of our societies. Russ calls it this process, the "Emergent Order".

The economist Milton Friedman captured this strange paradox of small effects amounting to something significant when he said about supply and demand that the sum of negligible forces need not be negligible. So while my demand for apples has no impact on the price of apples, our demands all together, along with the decisions of suppliers, are what determine the price of apples. Not the greed of the grocer down the street, not my desire to get a good deal, but all our interactions together. And even though any one apple eater has no measurable or noticeable effect on the price, because she contributes an insignificant portion of the total demand for apples, apple eaters as a group have a very significant effect.Thus, Smith says that with our individual choices can lead to important social outcomes and this is how we create our society including our norms about morality, mutual trust and civilized behaviour.

This part of the book stimulated me to think about the kind of societies we are creating today. I think that when we choose our leaders and celebrities who behave in a certain way, they amplify the actions of their followers and thus determine the civilizational norms of our society. Through social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, these followers amplify their messages and gain strength from each other. The confirmation bias helps them to not see or listen to anything which does not fit in with their ideas. Thus, people with different ideas on the left and right of political spectrum, remain in their own circles and increasingly express themselves in ruthless and brutal terms, unable to see that they are mirror images of what they wish to fight.

At the same time, there is increasing acceptance of more extreme ideas. For example, when the news came about the sinking of a boat full of emigrants, some persons who are against emigrants, wrote on Twitter that it was good for feeding the fish. I think that this kind of thinking goes beyond being against emigrants - such ideas denote psychopath personalities. Thus, we creating societies where such expressions are acceptable, and persons can openly express such opinions without feeling ashamed about them. Across the world we have many political leaders, who encourage such ideas, sometimes using religions to justify them.

Conclusions

Adam Smith had written his book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" in the mid-18th century and the original book is not so easy to read. Russ Roberts' book "How Adam Smith can change your life - An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness" explains its ideas in an easier to understand manner. As you can see from my reflections above, these ideas from 18th century are still valid and have much to teach us. I think that Russ Robert's book is one of the more interesting books I have read recently.

*****

#adamsmith #russroberts #bookreview

Writers and Celebrities: Times Lit Fest

I was back in Mehboob studios in Mumbai after forty years. This time it was for the Times Literary Festival. It was a day of listening to writers and journalists as well as to two Bollywood celebrities - Kangana Ranaut and Karan Johar.

Nothing looked the same at the Mehboob Studios, starting from the entrance gate. Forty years ago, we had been stopped at the gate by the guard wanting to know who were we meeting. Inside we had been wide-eyed with wonder as we had seen the Bollywood stars of that era - Ashok Kumar, Jitendra, Navin Nischol and Prema Narayan. Except for Jitendra, who is known as father of Ekta Kapoor, probably people today won't even know the names of those other persons. For the Lit Fest, the studio halls were converted into discussion rooms and though there were a film actor and a film director, there were no film sets or shootings going on.

I had come to Mumbai for the launch of the new film of Sujoy Ghosh - Kahaani 2. Along with the well known Vidya Balan and Arjun Rampal, the film also has the film debut of my niece Manini Chadha, who plays the wife of Arjun Rampal in the film. If you have seen the film, do tell me if you remember Manini and how did you like her!

My Mumbai days were hectic - apart from the literary festival and the launch of Kahaani 2, it was a time for family reunions, as well as, some work meetings related to a research project. However, this post is only about my impressions from the Times Lit Fest.

Arguing About Politics - State of Democracy in India

My morning started with the two well known journalists, Rajdeep Sardesai and Tavleen Singh. It was good to see both of them in person but in terms of what they were saying, both seemed to reiterate what they write every day in their columns. Which means that Sardesai was more critical of Modi while Singh was more critical of the liberal-left.

Talking about the state of democracy in India, Singh said that it was a democracy without justice as even serious criminal cases of murder and rape dragged for twenty years. She also felt that the inability to ensure decent education for the children and minimal health services for the citizens were failures of the Indian democracy.

Sardesai said that there were limited choices for the democracy in India as we are only asked to choose between Congress, a family-owned private limited party, or a street populist like Kejriwal or a demagogue like Modi. He also felt that over the past few years, media has also failed to stand up to the Government.

Singh felt that media had been co-opted by the Government immediately after independence of India when Nehru had offered government houses and other perks to big journalists who had accepted those perks. When you are taking benefits from the government, how can you criticise anything, she asked.

In another session in the afternoon, I listened once again to Sardesai and Singh. This time they were accompanied by two more journalists - Jyoti Malhotra and Kumar Kekar. In this session, Sardesai became more emotional, complaining about the pressure of the Modi government on the media houses and how this is affecting journalism.

Kekar also joined in the criticism of Modi by raising the issue of 2002 Gujarat riots and claiming that Modi Government has suppressed the new book "Gujarat files" of Rana Ayyub. (I am not sure about the suppression of Ayyub's book as I saw it displayed in a book shop at the Mumbai airport. It seems to be a best seller.)

Singh asked why media continues to focus only on Modi, forgetting the other riots in India such as the riots against Sikhs in 1984 and the infamous Maliana killing of 42 youth.

Overall, this session was like listening to one of the debates that they have on the Indian TV channels on most evenings, without anything new in it.

Equality, Liberty and Sexuality

I was looking forward to this session on alternate sexualities and it did not disappoint. The session had three well known persons - French author Charles Dantzig, Isreali author Gil Hovav and Indo-German artist Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar. It was moderated by Vikram Doctor.

Vikram Doctor started the session by talking about the rise of nationalism and the power gained by conservative right wing persons/parties in different parts of the world, asking if this is going to create new challenges for persons of alternate sexualities.

Charles Dantzig explained that it is not correct to equate political right wing persons with sexual conservatives. For example, Marine Le Pen has many gay friends and many French gays support right wing parties in France because they are afraid of Arab immigrants. Even the other rising figure of French right, Francois Fillon had started his career with support from an important gay parliamentarian.

He felt that perhaps more public hypocrisy and restraint was needed and that he had been shocked by the kind of backward things said by people against same-sex marriage law in France.

Gil Hovav supported Dantzig's position by explaining that in Israel, in spite of the right conservative parties which are in power and gay marriages are not legal, the government and society are very accepting towards alternate sexualities. He lives with his companion, his former commander in the department of Israeli intelligence, with their daughter, who is biological daughter of his companion with a Lesbian friend. The Israeli society is very accepting and they have not faced any kind of prejudices.

Being a gay or a lesbian is also not a issue in the Israeli armed forces where all are expected to do service, while in France, the army is more anti-gay.

Gil also spoke about the Palestinian issue by saying that he completely supports the right to freedom of the Palestinians. He agreed that the persons with alternate sexualities face a lot of difficulties in the Palestinian society and many of them prefer to live in Israel, but he feels that right to sexual freedom is less important than the right to freedom of the Palestinian people.

Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar said that like gays and lesbians, even for the women, it is difficult to say if they are margainlised by conservative regimes since many women play an active role in these right wing parties. It is the same in India, where women play an active role in the oppression of other women, for example, mothers-in-law in the families. It is more about patriarchal mindsets then about the parties and more dialogues are needed on these issues starting from the schools.

Katharina also said that expressing love in public by persons of same sex is threatening to public because it forces them to confront their own sexuality. The changing society threatens notions of masculinity and patriarchy and thus there is rage among young men. While she feels that the percentage of rapes is higher in Europe than it is in India, here the rapes are more vicious and violent because there is much more rage among young men in India than there is in Europe.

I enjoyed this session very much, it was very thought-provoking. My only complaint was that for the one hour or shorter sessions, they should not have more than 2 speakers since it is difficult to give sufficient time to more persons.

Jonathan Clements, Pallavi Aiyar and Kangana Ranaut

Both Clements and Aiyar are travel writers, writing about Asia. Clements has written exclusively about China and he feels that knowing the local language and a deep knowledge of local culture is necessary to write about a country. His interest in China came at an early age since his father was part of a band, which played in a Chinese restaurant. "Whichever place in the world I visit, I always stay in the Chinatowns", he explained.

Aiyar, on the other hand, writes from a more external point of view without getting too much mixed up with local cultures. She was in the US when she first went to visit her Spanish husband in China and it hooked her, resulting in her first book. Since then she has written about other Asian countries.

Aiyar raised up the issue of the country stereotypes that dominate media. For example, in 2008 during the Olympics in Beijing, the foreign media wrote extensively about the pollution in the city. Two years later, in 2010 when the commonwealth games were held in Delhi, though the city's pollution was as bad as in Beijing, no one ever wrote about it, focusing instead on women oppression and rapes.

I found this session a little boring. My disinterest was probably also because I have not read either of them. So I left their session half-way to go and listen to the bollywood star Kangana Ranaut.

Kangana, being a Bollywood celebrity, had her own session in a big hall, full of people. She was being interviewed by journalist Manu Joseph. She is very articulate. However, the hall was too crowded and I thought that I had already read so much about her views in the newspaper and magazine interviews, so after five minutes, I decided to give it a miss.

The Ethical Slut

This was another session related to sexuality, asking if polyamory is the answer to our promiscuous instinct. The short answer to this question was "No", though the different persons present in this session came to that conclusion very differently.

There were 3 persons in this session – Dossie Easton, Barbara Ascher and Hoshang Merchant. It was moderated by Pragya Tiwari. Both Dossie and Barbara were a kind of therapist-counsellor-spiritual writers kind of persons while Hoshang, is a more rebel poet, looking from his role as a gay activist.

It was not a good combination of persons, because Hoshang clearly did not agree with many of things the other two were saying and came out a bit too strongly. The other two seemed a bit unsure of how to deal with him. Each of them had a lot of interesting things to share and merited their own separate sessions, grouping them together like that did not allow enough space for any of them. It was not a dialogue between them but rather a conflict, till Hoshang decided to leave the stage.

The discussions touched on ideas of romantic love and how these initiated in Europe in medieval period and later came to be seen as universal. Hoshang felt that the ideas of romantic love originated among gay poets and was later taken over by heterosexuals, who began to question if gays can experience romantic love or if they are just sexually promiscuous.

Another area of discussion was instinct versus culture and the possibilities of learning new ways of thinking and controlling the instincts. Regarding polyamory and the ideas of having multiple romantic/sexual partners, the discussions also touched on the role played by jealousy.

I was not satisfied with this session because it did not give me enough time to listen to the views of the three speakers. However, after the Lit Fest, I looked for and bought Dossie Easton’s book “The ethical slut”, because I want to read more about her ideas. I have already read some of the works of Hoshang.

Devi and Demon

I was really looking forward to this session, hoping to hear some stimulating discussion. Arshia Sattar has translated Ramayan while Amruta Patil had done a graphic novel on Mahabharat. Thus the session was organised to focus on the figures of goddesses and demons in these two books and was coordinated by Devdutt Pattanaik.

Pattanaik started the session by talking about the contraposition between the ideas of hermit versus householder in the Indian philosophy and how these two books look at these two ideas.

The session was a little disappointing since both Arshia and Amruta were unable to point towards any new facets of the Devi/Demon characters from the two books. Amruta did talk about a relatively unknown character of Mahabharat, Satyawati, but she was not able to express it in an interesting way. Similarly, Arshia talked about the Shakuntala story but it lacked the spark. The most interesting part of their discussion was about the figures of Mriga (deer) hunting in the two epics.

Both Arshia and Amruta emphasised the need to look at the context of the two epics rather than jumping to conclusions about the motivations and actions of specific characters. For example, Arshia talked about Ram and the difficult choices he makes throughout his life, while grappling with the responsibilities of his public role leading to the negation of his personal desires.

Compared to Arshia and Amruta, Pattanaik was a much more interesting and articulate speaker, but his role in the session was limited.

Loneliness of Men and Women

Before leaving the Lit Fest, I also went to the session of Karan Johar who was interviewed by Jitesh Pillai. Like the Kangana Ranaut session, this was also in the big hall and was full of people. As usual, Johar was very articulate and also seemed sincere in sharing his thoughts and angst. However, most of it was not new since he had already spoken about these things in his numerous interviews in magazines and newspapers.

Others

Among others, I also saw William Dalrymple, Ramchandra Guha and Sudhir Kakkar.

I briefly listened to an Australian Aboriginal poet, Lionel Fogarty, in a session moderated by Ranjit Hoskote.

Conclusions

Overall the festival was a good occasion to see many persons whose works I have read and admired. In terms of new ideas and discussions, there was not so much and the quality was uneven, however that is inevitable in the events of this kind.

It was a bit sad to think that the literature festival organised by one of the most important publication groups of India had not even one big Indian literature figure and no one from the world of Indian languages. Probably after Mahashweta Devi, we do not have any towering literary figures in India any more. Is it because our society today is all about superficial fun-and-having-a-good-time, and there is no time to stop and worry about literature which does not bring any money or power?

It was not possible to participate in all the sessions. For example, I would have loved to attend Devdutt Pattanaik’s session “Is God a boy or a girl? And what about Devil?” I would have also loved to listen to Ram Chandra Guha on history as it happens and history in hindsight. But these sessions were planned too late in the afternoon for me, as I had some other engagements.

However, as a result of the festival, I am planning to read the works of two authors that I have not read before, Gil Hovav and Dossie Easton. So I can say that it was a worthwhile experience.

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