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.

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River to River - Festival 2020

River to River (RtoR) film festival was started by Selvaggia Velo in Florence (Italy) in 2001. It was the first festival entirely dedicated to Indian films held outside India. For many years, while living in Bologna, which is not far from Florence, I regularly visited this festival. Some years ago, we shifted to Schio, about 350 km to the north of Florence, so participating in this festival became difficult for me. However, the December 2020 edition of RtoR was held online due to the on-going Covid-19 pandemic. This gave me an opportunity watch some of the festival films. (Below a still from "Berlin to Bombay", one of the films in the festival)

My main interest was in watching documentary and short films in the festival. Thus, I watched only one full-length feature film - Kadakh. This post is to share a few impressions about some of the films which I liked in this festival.

Kadakh

Kadakh was the opening film of the festival, directed by Rajat Kapoor. It is a black comedy centred around a dead body in an upper-middle class drawing room in Mumbai, which is full of guests for a Diwali party.

Sunil (Ranvir Shorey) is the owner of the house while the dead guy is Raghav, husband of his office colleague Chhaya, with whom he is having an affair. Raghav has discovered their affair and comes to talk to Sunil. He is trying to be mature about it, but continues to get too angry to control himself and during one such loss-of-control moments, shoots himself. Soon Sunil's wife (Manasi Multani) comes back home and finds her husband with Raghav's corpse in their drawing room. He confesses his affair but there is no time to deal with the marital infidelity as they know that soon their guests for the Diwali party are going to arrive. So the husband and wife hide the dead body in a box, cover it with tapestry and get ready to welcome the guests.

The guests include Chayya, the wife of the dead man. You can imagine the comic-horror kind of mixed tension which drives this film. The last part of the movie is its most cynical and damning part, with the whole gang of friends (except Chaya, who has left) helping Sunil in getting rid of the dead body. When the film was ending, I almost expected it to show the whole lot going to the chautha (funeral) ceremony of the poor guy and express condolences to the widow.

I do not like the genre of dark comedy, but the film is well made and well-acted. All the actors are good. I especially liked Manasi Multani, who plays Sunil's wife Malti and Palomi Ghosh, who plays Chhaya. I also thought the guy playing Raghav (Chandrachoor Rai) was good in his brief role.

The Newly Weds, short film (5 min.) by Prataya Saha

You can watch this short film on YouTube. The film has a young man (Mahesh Gowda) and his wife (Suvin Valson) and it looks at the way they relate to each other, mediated by technology. When together, they hardly talk to each other and their eyes are constantly on their mobile phones and laptop screens. At night, a laptop stays in the bed between them. However, they expresses their love in the messages they write to each other, in which they open their hearts.

The tiny film presents the role of tech in a young couple's life as a kind of caricature. I felt that it could have been more relatable as a depiction of a long-married couple who does not have much left to say to each other. It felt a bit unrealistic for a young newly married couple, because it seemed to ignore their need for physical touch and sex. Their messages express a yearning, which is inexplicably missing from their real lives.

Berlin to Bombay, documentary film, 51 min. by Marco Hulser

For me, Berlin to Bombay was the most enjoyable film of the festival. It is the story of an Indian origin boy Abu Chaka Khan, raised in Berlin (Germany) and his fascination for the world of Bollywood. Abu works in a restaurant but his dream is to go and act in Bollywood. He does not want to work in German films where he can only play Indian or Pakistani roles - he prefers the idea of Bollywood heroes with their songs and dances.

He makes and sends his videos for auditions to India but when they do not get him any offers, he goes to Mumbai. The film shows him trying to negotiate his way through the barriers surrounding its film world, full of people who are waiting for bakras like him, selling them dreams and taking their money. Abu pays but finds himself playing an extra in a film. After his dreams crash against the hard realities of the Bollywood, Abu comes back to Berlin and to his restaurant.

Though film's storyline is an old theme, Abu has an expressive face and he comes across very well with his ingenuity, hope and dreams.

While the film ended, I was thinking of today's YouTube and TikTok stars. Now, people with dreams of making it in Bollywood, have some alternative pathways to become famous, even if that fame does not last very long. I think that I would like to watch a similar documentary exploring the worlds of the YouTube-TikTok stars.

The GesheMa is Born, Documentary, 56 min., by Malati Rao

Geshe Ma is the title of a learned Buddhist nun who has reached the highest level of religious knowledge. Rao's documentary is a glimpse into the hidden world of Buddhist nuns. I liked it because it showed a world which was unfamiliar to me.

Though ancient Buddhism spoke of nuns, modern Buddhism did not have nuns. It was Dalai Lama who had established the first nuns' order some 40 years ago. He had also proposed allowing the nuns to study religious books. This idea was discussed in the international council of Buddhist leaders from different countries, but some countries were against the changes. Finally in 2012, it was accepted that the nuns could study to become the learned teachers (Geshe).

The film follows a group of nuns in a monastery in Nepal who became the first group of women admitted to the Buddhist theological studies. The film focuses on the story of Namdol Phuntsok, who had earned the top marks in these studies and received the title of Geshe Ma in 2016.

The film moves forward and backward in time, with some interviews and unobtrusive observation of the lives of the Buddhist nuns. They talk about the setting up of the first nunnery. It looks at their celibate lives, their shaving of heads and their determined animation during theological discussions, where a raised leg-movement and clapping of hands in stereotypical gestures, looked like a dance to me.

GesheMa Namdol talks about her childhood and her family's opposition to her idea of becoming a nun, her desire for studying the Buddhist religious texts and how they must argue and debate their ideas and defend them against questions. The film concludes with the group of the nuns holding the coveted yellow head-dresses in their hands, which are a visible sign of their learning, walking in the room full of monks. They all don those yellow head-dresses, signifying a new beginning of the role of the women leadership in Buddhism.

Buddha of the Chadar, 28 Min. by Jean Whitaker

This film can also be watched on internet. It is about a father and son from Ladakh making a long winter journey on the frozen Zanskar River - a route known as the Chadar. They carry a heavy gold-plated statue of Buddha, which they plan to offer to a Buddhist monastery located at the top of the hill near their village.

The film brings out the solitude and difficulties of the long journey on the frozen river surrounded by beautiful snow-covered mountains. It also shows the on-going construction of a new road by the Indian Border Road Organisation, so that in future, the Zanskar valley will also be connected through a road and it should be possible to complete that same journey in a vehicle.

The film has beautiful photography and makes you reflect on the human urge to choose a tough journey as a part of a spiritual quest.

Silence in the Wind, 13 min. by Gautam Baruah and Ballav Prajnyan

This short film is about a father remembering his son, his desire to see him married and his initial rejection when he discovers that his son is gay. His initial reaction is of rejection. Then he remembers the day when his young son had risked drowning in the river and his desperation. The memory of that desperation helps him to say to his son that he does not understand but he will accept.

It is a beautiful film.

The Ashram Children, 67 min., by Jonathan Ofek

India is seen as the land of spirituality. It has many famous gurus with their ashrams, and followers coming from all over the world to seek their guidance. This film shows a hidden aspect of this spiritual quest - the feelings of the expat children about those Gurus.

The director of this film, Jonathan is from Israel and he feels scarred by his childhood experiences in an ashram in India. He feels that it was a cult which had gripped his parents. His parents, especially his mother, do not take his complaints very seriously - for her, it was not a cult and she was only going to the ashram for some months every year.

She tells him that he could have told her that he did not want to go and she would not have forced him. However, Jonathan feels that saying no was not easy for him, because he had grown up inside that experience from early childhood. The whole issue of obedience to the Guru in the ashram was experienced by him as something absolute, he had learned to not question anything and was afraid to express himself.

During the film, Jonathan goes to look for other expatriate children that he had met and known in the ashram during his childhood. Most of them agree with him that their childhood experiences of the ashram were negative for them. Most of them, now grown-ups, try to hide this part of their past lives and do not talk about it. One of these guys also talks about the hypocrisy of the Guru, who taught the lessons of detachment and spirituality to his followers, but also loved wearing gold, luxury watches, and using costly perfumes.

This film forced me to see how the spirituality-and-guru industry of India can be perceived by young children who are pulled in to this experience by their parents. I had never thought about it before in these terms. For me, many of the ashrams and their jet setting Gurus, who run their spirituality businesses like money-making exercises, are persons who profit from human frailties. At the same time, I believe that some of the non-commercial persons can be great spiritual teachers.

Conclusions

There were some other short and documentary films from the festival which I had watched but they were similar in terms of themes and treatment to others that I had seen earlier, so I am not writing about those.

In the past RtoR festival had been an opportunity for me to meet and talk to persons from the world of Indian films - persons like Onir, Rahul Bose, Aparna Sen and even Amitabh Bachchan. That was no longer possible with an online festival. I hope that in future, after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, River to River festival will continue to offer the possibility of online participation.

Making (Some) Sense of Concept Art

My first encounter with Conceptual Art was in the Kochi Biennale of Art, and it left me a little confused. Since then I have been to some other art biennales and I continue to be surprised by the popularity and apparent little-sense of this art.

Contemporary art, as displayed in the Biennales, has many works related to digital elaboration, photography, sound and video, which leave me perplexed - not because they are not art but because each of them has their own festivals and events, so I am not sure why would art biennales devote so much space to them. However, it is concept art which often leaves me feeling as a kind of idiot who can't get its point. For example, the image below has one of the works from a Kochi Biennale, which left me pulling on my fragile white hairs.

However, I am not the only one who feels confused by such art. For example, the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith in his recent book The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, has one of the characters talking about the Turner Prize (a prestigious British award for contemporary art, which has been often given to works of concept art), which expresses my feelings very eloquently:

Angus was unrepentant. “I have little time for the Turner Prize,” he said. “I have no taste for its pretentiousness. I dislike the way it is awarded to people who cannot paint, draw, nor sculpt.” His eyes widened; he became slightly red, his breathing shallow - all fairly typical reactions provoked by the Turner Prize in those of sound artistic judgment. “You are not an artist if you merely make a video about paint drying or pile a few objets trouvés in a heap. You just aren’t.”Domenica shrugged. “Calm down,” she said. “Installations make us look at the world in a different way. They must have some artistic merit. They challenge us. ...”

Recently I read a book on contemporary art by Will Gompertz, which gave me some understanding about the origins of concept art and why it leaves me cold.

Origins of Concept Art

Will Gompertz in his book "What are you looking at - Strange Story of 15o Years of Modern Art" (2012) explains the origins of Concept Art with a story about Marcel DuChamp, whom he calls the father of "Concept Art" and who had pioneered the concept art movement with his work "The Fountain" in 1917 (which was a urinal he had bought in a shop):

After buying the urinal Duchamp takes it to his studio. He lays the heavy porcelain object on its back and turns it around, so it appears to be upside down. He then signs and dates it in black paint on the left-hand side of its outer rim, with the pseudonym “R. Mutt 1917.” His work is nearly done. There is only one more job remaining: he needs to give his urinal a name. He chooses Fountain. What had been, just a few hours beforehand, a nondescript, ubiquitous urinal has, by dint of Duchamp’s actions, become a work of art.At least it had in Duchamp’s mind. He believed he had invented a new form of sculpture: one where an artist could select any pre-existing mass-produced object with no obvious aesthetic merit, and by freeing it from its functional purpose—in other words making it useless—and by giving it a name and changing the context and angle from which it would normally be seen, turn it into a de facto artwork. He called this new form of art-making a “readymade”: a sculpture that was already made.Marcel Duchamp caused the decisive rupture from tradition and forced a re-evaluation of what could and should be considered art. Before Duchamp’s provocative intervention, art was something man-made, typically of aesthetic, technical and intellectual merit, which had been mounted in a frame and hung on a wall, or presented on a plinth to look splendid. ...

Some Examples of Modern Art

Let me start with my top-10 list of some examples of concept art, which perplex me. I will start with the ones which I felt were very different from the classical canons of art but which I accepted as a kind of art. The first was an installation by Bob Gransma from a Kochi Biennale - in this, the artist had made a gigantic slab of concrete to be placed inside a dug up area. I think that it expressed the ideas of disruption, destruction, and the fragility of life.

The next image has a work of Yuko Mori from a Kochi Biennale. It had metal rings on a metal stand with wires going down. I think that it was accompanied by a sound and video installation. It expressed the influence of mechanised world on the human life and people who spend their lives in factories repeating same gestures the whole day, every day.

The next image is of a work by Hassan Sharif from a Venice Biennale. It had a collection of bent aluminium spoons amidst a jumble of black plastic cords. It made me think of all the waste that we produce in our daily lives. It also reminded me of people hoarding stuff like wires, cords and bags in their cupboards because they might need them one day.

To conclude this part, I have another image from a Kochi Biennale which had a toilet by Dia Mehta Bhupal. It was also about urinals, like Du Champ's famous urinal which had started the Concept Art movement. However, the colours and designs used by the artist in this work changed the space into art and was the one which I liked most in this group.

Borderline Art

Next are 2 examples of concept art, which I felt were more borderline - I am still able to see them as a work of art but I am really not convinced about it. The first image is of a work by Takahiro Iwasaki and has some books arranged on a table, along with some coloured wires coming out of some of them.

The second one is an installation of B. V. Suresh from a Kochi Biennale, which was accompanied by sound and video effects.

The Lazy Artist?

The final 2 examples of Concept Art are the ones which I found most problematic. The first was a work by an Indian artist from the Kochi Biennale - it had the trash from a building construction arranged in the centre of a room.

The second example below was in the Israel pavillion in a Venice Biennale - I won't even try to describe it.

Conclusions

I agree that all the works presented above, can make us reflect and may be, see the world in a different way but I am not always sure if there was some art in them. If the art is just in a concept in the artist's head, then how do we decide who is an artist and who is not? All of us have concepts in our heads, who gets to decide if my concept is artistic? The guy who made the art by sticking a banana on a board? Or is it art, because some guy with more money than brain, bought that banana-board for a million dollars? It somehow reminds me of the story about the king's invisible clothes.

In his book, Gompertz asks "Such works are often entertaining, even thought-provoking, but are they art?" His answer is "Yes. They are. Because that is their intention, their sole purpose, and the grounds upon which we are being asked to judge them. The difference being that they are operating in an area of modern art that is first and foremost about ideas, not so much the creation of a physical object: hence conceptual art. But that doesn’t give artists the right to serve up any old rubbish."

Perhaps I lack certain qualities for proper art appreciation, but I wish that the biennale curators do not dedicate so much space to Concept Art. While we areat it, I would like that the space given to video and digital art installations should also be limited.

The last image of this post (above) is an installation by Kaushik Mukhopadhayay from a Kochi Biennale - he has used old thrown away stuff to make a delightful mechanical installation - it means that art can come out of garbage, but there is a difference between making art from rubbish and serving up rubbish as art.

Let me conclude this post with another quote from Gompertz -

In my opinion the best place to start when it comes to appreciating and enjoying modern and contemporary art is not to decide whether it’s any good or not, but to understand how it evolved from Leonardo’s classicism to today’s pickled sharks and unmade beds. As with most seemingly impenetrable subjects, art is like a game; all you really need to know is the basic rules and regulations for the once baffling to start making some sense.

This last quote from Gompertz does not really convince me - I don't think that art should be about learning the rules of some game. However, if you want to understand some of the most important art movements of late 19th and 20th century, read this Gompertz book - it is one of the best that I have read on this theme.

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Religions For The 21st Century

Some weeks ago, I had a discussion with a friend about differences between Shamanism and Buddhism. I think that analysing religions to look for their differences is not such a useful approach in today's world. In the eastern traditions, usually the different religious philosophies are seen as different streams of the same river, and there is not a strong focus on analysing their differences. I think this way of looking at religions answers better the religious-spiritual needs of today.

While humanity needs a spiritual dimension, the practical ways in which this need is expressed through religions depends upon the social, cultural, economic and technological context of the societies. Thus, it is inevitable that in the new millennium, along with our changing societies, our religions will also change.

This post is a speculation about what humanity needs from religions in the 21st century.

Religious Harmony

Like the different human species, the religious beliefs are also in continuous evolution. In the recent history, our different religions, especially the more orthodox religious ideas, have been one of the root causes of conflicts. In the medieval period, there were some attempts to come up with universal religions, which proposed unification of the different religious ideas. Baha'i religion in Persia and Deen-e-Ilahi by the Mughal king Akbar in India were examples of these unifying religions, but they had a limited impact because they were adopted by few persons, though Baha'i religion continues to thrive even today in a few countries.

Today, while we have some large radical and orthodox religious groups, many more persons identify themselves as "Atheists" or non-believers. A large number of persons, who formally belonged to a religion, define themselves as "spiritual and not religious". Many others, while belonging to one religious tradition, pick and adopt specific ideas of other religions.

The pace of changes in the last one century and in the first decades of the present century, related to the technology and our understanding of the universe, has been unprecedented. When technology can give us the answers we need, we don't need to rely on the benevolence of Gods. So, some believe that in today's world we do not need any religions, because technology can provide all the answers. However, the mysteries of life, consciousness and death remain and every new child-birth and a death forces us to think about these mysteries, thus humanity's search for spirituality also persists.

Science and Spirituality

I grew up in a family in India which was sceptical about our religion (Hinduism) and about the claims of different Gurus. Many persons in our extended family and among our friends share this view of Hinduism. However, I have met many persons who do not share this sceptical view of religion, they have no doubts about their faith. I recognise that faith does not need any scientific proof but personally for me, finding some kind of scientific rationale for the spirituality is important.

There are 2 kinds of technological developments, knowledge and understandings, which influence my spiritual beliefs:

(1) The first is our knowledge about the place of humanity in the Cosmos: We live on a tiny planet surrounded by billions of stars of our galaxy, and there are millions of other galaxies, each with billions of stars. The Cosmos is so big that even if we could travel at the speed of the light, hundreds of our life-times will not be enough to see even a tiny proportion of those worlds. This vastness of the universe is almost impossible to comprehend for me.

Even if among the billions of stars in each galaxy there can be only one planet which has life, there must be millions of planets with some life in the Cosmos. To believe that there is a human-like deity or an elderly father-like God looking after this unimaginably enormous universe made of trillions of stars and planets in millions of galaxies, who is observing each of us human beings living on our tiny planet and is keeping an account of the good or the bad things we do in our tiny lives, seems implausible to me. I can't imagine a God who has to look after millions of galaxies, worrying about things like if the people are going to the churches or mosques or temples to pray to him regularly or if women on earth are modest and covering their heads and bodies - these seem like ideas of men to control the others.

This understanding of the vastness of the universe leads me to believe that there is no personal God and instead the spirituality is something different. I think that prophets and all our ideas about the different Gods and Goddesses are metaphorical representations of the divine. Their stories and their teachings cannot be taken literally or in absolute terms, they need to be seen in their historical contexts, as answers to the human need for understanding the mysteries of birth, consciousness and death.

(2) The second development is our increasing understanding of the micro-cosmos through quantum physics: we still do not have a proper understanding of the quantum world which focuses on the laws governing the microscopic Cosmos hidden inside each particle of the universe. In that Cosmos also there are billions of sub-atomic particles circling other particles in an infinite number of galaxies of atoms and molecules. In this quantum world, the laws of the ordinary physics do not work, so that the sub-atomic particles can be at more than one place at the same time and the act of observation changes the nature of the observed sub-atomic particles.

To be honest, I don't understand most of it. At the same time, whatever I do understand, reminds of some of the concepts and discussions in the Hindu Upanishads about the nature of reality, probably because I am more familiar with those concepts and ideas. This world of quantum physics leads me to an understanding of God as the universal energy or a universal consciousness that underlies our atoms and molecules of all organic and inorganic worlds.

I like this idea of the divine as the universal energy with different levels of consciousness that moves the sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules of billions of stars spread out over millions of galaxies. It unites all our universe and at the same time, leaves us free to use our intelligence to live our lives filled with a significance and meanings that we want to give to it. In this sense, I believe that God is the universal energy inside each of us and in everything surrounding us.

Religions for the 21st Century

In this world of increasing scientific understanding and technological progress, our religious beliefs face the challenges of reconciling science and technology with the ideas of spirituality. Different people deal with this challenge differently. While many individuals born in families with strong religious beliefs might share those beliefs, but many of those will question those beliefs as they grow up and as they find those beliefs limiting their life-choices. Many of us would form our own beliefs about the sacred.

The social media innovations allow us to find groups of people who share our niche beliefs and we can become part of their communities. Thus I think that the fragmentation of religious beliefs will increase exponentially over the next decades and the trend of picking and adopting aspects of different religions which resonate with us would become stronger with time.

This does not mean that persons believing in traditional religions are going to disappear. There is a subgroup of population, which finds a sense of security in specific and even rigid religious norms, and I don't think that subgroup is going to disappear anytime soon - probably with greater religious choices, these orthodox subgroups will also become stronger.

Among the leaders of traditional religions, those persons who can break-off from religious orthodoxy and can speak to the whole humanity, such as Pope Francis and Dalai Lama, will probably find even greater prominence in future.

The technical progress is increasing our sense of individual rights. Therefore, I think that the ideas of human rights are going to play an important role in our acceptance of religions in the 21st century. I think that issues such as equality of genders, rights of persons to choose their sexual orientations, the right to join or leave a religion, the right to live together with the person of our choice with or without marriage, the right to have a family of our choice and the right to die with dignity are all going to be basic starting points for the acceptance of religions of future.

Conclusions

These are my speculations about the future of religions in the world. I am sure that my views are influenced by my biases - those of growing up in a family sceptical about religions, those of being a part of a multi-religious family, those of reading Upanishads and those of my work-experience in the field of human rights.

However, I am aware that history does not move in straight lines. It goes up and down, sometimes it takes two steps back before moving ahead. Looking at the conditions of specific religions might make us feel that instead of the changes I have speculated above, some religions are going in the inverse direction - towards rigidity, greater orthodoxy and a substantial denial of human rights. However, I believe that overall direction of history is different and sooner or later, all religions will join that direction, where the rights of individuals will be stronger than the rights of collective religious groups.

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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!

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Bonsai & the Life in the Plants

Last month I visited a Bonsai exhibition at the Jaquard gardens of Schio. The sight of tiny plants looking like a miniature version of full-grown trees reminded me of a nature-visit in Bologna some years ago. This post is about two different ways of thinking about the life-forces in the plants. At the same time, it is also a reflection about the relationship between humans and nature.

Indian Ideas About Nature

Let me start briefly with some of my ideas about nature, which are influenced by my growing up in India. Hinduism is full of Gods and Goddesses, each of whom is linked with an animal and a plant species. There are many mythological stories that teach one to respect all the beings as a part of the respect for the sacred.

There are different stories linked with plants in the Hindu mythology. Like the story of the sacred Tulsi plant (Indian Basil), which represents a pious prostitute. Thus, people believe that this plant should not be kept inside the house, but must be planted in the courtyard where the families can pray to it at dawn and sunset by lighting a lamp near it. The 1960's Hindi film Parakh had one of my all time favourite songs, Mere Man ke diye (The lamp of my heart), in which Sadhana lights a lamp and prays to Tulsi plant. According to Ayurveda, Tulsi is an important medicinal plant. Such myths and sacred stories, are ways to remind the communities about the importance of different species of plants and animals, and to safeguard the biodiversity.

I remember my grand-mother once telling me to not to pluck the leaves of a plant at night because "the plant was sleeping". I think that such a way of thinking illustrates the popular understandings of life in the plants among Indians. While in the cities, people have a more transactional ideas about nature (for example, that it is good for breathing and well-being, it is relaxing and stress-busting), in the smaller towns and villages of India, I feel that there is still a lot of respect and traditional knowledge about these ancient understandings of nature.

Bonsai Plants

Literally the term Bonsai means "planted in a vase". The aim of growing a Bonsai is to create a realistic representation of nature through a miniature tree.

An exhibition of Bonsai plants was held at the beautiful 19th century Jaquard garden in the centre of Schio. It is a small garden but is very beautiful, with an old theatre and a green-house. The exhibition presented the plants grown by the Bonsai students of Schio under their teacher Dr. Ennio Santacatterina.

I spoke to Ennio to understand about Bonsai. He explained that he had discovered his passion for Bonsai after his retirement. His school is a part of the Bonsai Art School and its classes are held in a local plant shop called Garden Schio.

Ennio sees Bonsai as a part of the Zen traditions from Japan, in which it is fundamental to understand kamae, the basic and essential nature and characteristics of each plant. He cites the Bonsai guru Aba Kurakichi and says, "We must conserve all the specificities of the nature of each plant because Bonsai is a life-art." This means that each plant will develop according to its own characteristics and the Bonsai-maker must know how to enhance its individuality and highlight its beauty by selecting the appropriate style, branches and spaces.

I think that it means that a Bonsai is not created but rather it is nurtured, grown and gently guided. It is an exercise in mindfulness, in which the Bonsai-maker searches for a connection with the plant through silence and meditation, to understand its nature and develops a vision of how it should grow. Then, with patience and mindfulness, the maker helps the plant to achieve that vision.

Free-Growing Nature

While Bonsai speaks the language of Zen, meditation and mindfulness for creating a connection with plants, it seems as if the plant is moulded into an idealised vision of how it should look. It reminded me of another encounter about plants - in 2011, I had an opportunity to meet Mr. Marco Colombari, a gardener and plant-lover from Bologna, who had some very radical ideas about the plants.

Marco had guided us in the discovery of a forest, talking to us about how to observe and "see" the plants. A century ago, this forest was an "aviculture centre", an area for developing and growing different species of birds. Then it had become a hunting laboratory and a honeybee cultivation centre. In the 1980s, surrounded by multi-story apartment buildings, this area was supposed to be used for building more condominiums. However, the local residents had started a campaign to save it as a natural area. It is now managed by an association called Oasi dei Saperi (The Knowledge Oasis), which promotes it as a site for the conservation of biodiversity. It is known as the Forest of St. Anna and is located in the Corticella area of Bologna.

Marco's point was that every plant is a living being and has its own characteristics. He felt that people decide about planting trees and plants without really thinking about those natural characteristics. Thus, every time we cut the branches of a tree for making it fit into our urban landscaping, it is like closing an animal or a bird inside a cage. In the forest, he had shown us parts of the trees where the branches had been cut, making us look at the seeping liquids from the cut surfaces and drawing parallels with injured animals.

Besides the natural forest, St. Anna Forest also has some other areas including a botanical garden for growing medicinal herbs, a small pond which was used in the past for jute production and a group of ash trees with old artificial nests which were used for keeping birds when it was an aviculture centre.

Some Reflections

Listening to Marco had a very strong impact on me. Reflecting on his words and coupled with the philosophy in the Indian sacred books of Upanishads, I feel that it is the same life-force flowing inside the trees and plants which flows in every living being.

How do I reconcile this understanding with our daily business of living? There is a proverb in Hindi which says "If the horse becomes the friend of the grass, what would it eat?" I think that this proverb sums up the basic dilemma of our life - the impossibility of avoiding violence, if we wish to live.

Thus, I think that all life in the world is inter-connected and there is no way we can avoid eating other life forms, till the time comes for us to die when we return back to the earth, turn into our basic elements and become a part of the never-ending cycle of life, death and decay. To me it means respecting nature and all forms of life, which I translate as avoiding giving unnecessary suffering to my fellow creatures. Thus, I feel that individuals can decide if they wish to eat meat or they prefer to be vegetarian or vegan - it is a matter of choice linked with personal convictions.

However, I think that keeping animals to be used for their meat (chicken, ducks, sheep and cows) in narrow spaces, which do not allow them to move, and making them eat food laced with hormones and antibiotics so that they can fatten quickly, or hurting them unnecessarily, are wrong.

It means being kind to the animals and birds that we keep as pets. It means, taking care of the nature so that our biodiversity is maintained and strengthened. It means that if we have a zoo or a circus, we shall ensure dignified spaces for keeping the animals and treat them with care. I think that zoos and wild-life parks can play an important role in saving species close to extinction and in teaching young people about the importance of safeguarding nature and biodiversity.

Some people would completely separate humans from other animals because they see all human-animal interactions as basically evil and unwelcome for the animals. They are against keeping pet animals, they don't like zoos, they do not want any experiments involving animals - I feel that it is an extreme view and does not help the animals or the nature.

I hope that science and technology would soon progress so that one day we can have all kinds of food, including meat and fish, grown in cell-cultures. In the meantime, I would like more humane conditions for the animals we keep for meat.

Conclusions

Coming back to the plants, does making the plants grow as miniaturised Bonsai trees means that the plants are being forced into unnecessary suffering? Probably Marco Colombari would say yes. I don't think so. I feel that Bonsai practice, by helping us to seek a connection with the plants through mindfulness and meditation, is another path to recognising the importance of nature.

The evolution has made different life-forms co-dependent on each other. We have biomes inside each of us, made of billions of bacteria and viruses - every time we are ill and take medicines, we are killing millions of them. Life, death and decay are a part of a never-ending cycle going around us all the time and there is no way we can say that we don't want to be a part of this cycle.

This reflection about the life in the plants, makes me think of Shiva, the Hindu God who controls the never-ending cycles of creation and destruction in the universe. I think that Shiva is a metaphor of the life and death which connects together all the organic and inorganic matter of the universe. It is the life-force moving the particles composing the atoms, which combine to make the molecules of different elements, the building-bricks of everything in the universe. Life and death are illusions, because those atoms and the forces moving their particles, they do not die and will continue to combine and create new forms all the time.

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Merry Christmas Or Seasons' Greetings?

A few days ago, one morning I read two articles which made me reflect on the two different ways in which multi-cultural and multi-religious societies can look at inter-faith dialogue, respect and harmony.

In this post, I am going to talk about these 2 different ways of looking at religious differences and what we need to do for living with a diversity of beliefs.
The Two Articles

Let me start with the 2 articles which had stimulated this reflection. The first was an article in a recent issue of Readers' Digest magazine. Actually it was not an article but a snippet under the heading "Your True Stories". I am transcribing that snippet here:

Last December, a young lady ringing up my purchases greeted me with an enthusiastic Merry Christmas!” I was not offended, but I am a Muslim, and at the time I was wearing a beautiful headscarf in a manner identifying my spiritual convictions. I responded, “Happy birthday!” At first, she was taken aback, but then she nodded and laughed good-naturedly, acknowledging my point. I smiled back at her and said, “Merry Christmas to you.”

The second was an editorial in the Indian newspaper Hindustan Times, written by Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, under the title "In Memory of Frontier Gandhi, a Plea for Justice for Faisal Khan". It mentioned the story of Khan Abdul Gaffar from Peshawar, now in Pakistan, and his organisation called Khudai Khidmatgar, which worked for promoting Hindu and Muslim unity. Khan Abdul Gaffar was also known as Frontier Gandhi and I have memories of meeting him as a child in Delhi in early 1960s at the home of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, the charismatic leader of the India's Socialist Party. This article is about a person from Delhi, Mr. Faisal Khan, who has an organisation in India inspired from the ideals of Frontier Gandhi. It described Faisal with the following words:

Faisal Khan has striven without pause for two goals — communal harmony and relief for the neediest. He is also a wonderful singer of the Tulsi Ramayan. Hindus of all types, from venerated guru to college students, have been charmed by his rendering of the Ramayan’s verses. Keen, as part of his efforts towards harmony, to identify with the traditions of his Hindu friends, Khan, along with associates, recently performed the much-valued Braj Parikrama. On the last day of this 84-km yatra, they went to Mathura’s Nand Baba Mandir, where they were courteously received by the priest.
Reading these 2 articles, made me reflect about the two approaches to inter-faith harmony.

Multicultural Approach to Inter-faith Harmony

I think that first article represents the multi-cultural approach to inter-faith harmony, which arose in UK or perhaps in Western Europe. Now this approach seems to be common in the West (Europe, USA and Australia). It is slowly making inroads even in countries like India, at least among some academic and activist groups. It asks individuals to respect the diversity of religions of others, by not offending them by involving them in things related to other religions. Thus, if we are Christians, it says that we should not have overt signs celebrating Christmas or Easter in public spaces and schools. If we have to greet people we do not know, we should use generic terms like "seasons' greetings" and to not "merry Christmas", for not offending non-Christians. People who believe in this approach, talk of tolerance and respect for other religions.

If we believe in this approach to inter-religious relations for harmony, then if we are Muslims, we won't make Eid or Ramazan greetings to the non-Muslims and if we are Hindus, we would greet only other Hindus on our festivals.

Indian Approach to Inter-faith Harmony

When I grew up in India, our approach to diversity of religions was different. While in school, we had holidays for the festivals of all the religions. Since early childhood, I was used to meeting persons of different religions among neighbours, friends and in public spaces.

Over the years, we lived in different houses, where we had as neighbours families of different religions. Even at home, among the socialist friends of my father who visited us included persons of different religions. During our travels, I had stayed at the homes of family friends of different religions.

When I think of those years, it is remarkable that I can't remember ever thinking about the diversity of religions of all those encounters in India. I had been familiar with news of riots and religious riots, but somehow they had no real bearing with my relationships with persons of different religions. My first actual encounter with the underlining of and impact of diversity of religions happened in Italy, when a high school student asked me if I believed in Madonna. I had told him that I was a Hindu. He did not know any Hindu but he knew about protestants and that question was his way of reassuring himself that I did not deny the sacredness of Madonna. When I told him that I respected Madonna, he was reassured.

The basic understanding governing the multi-religious relationships in the India of my childhood was that all religions are about the one and the same God. Therefore, festivals of all the religions belonged to everyone. Having school holidays for all those festivals reinforced that feeling. So it meant, waking up at early morning to go out and stand on the side of the street to wait for Prabhat Pheri of the Sikh when they celebrated their Gurupurab. It meant wishing everyone Eid Mubarak and eating the sweet sewaiyan, that our neighbour Irene brought to our home. It meant going with my Catholic friend to the midnight mass in the Cathedral on the Christmas eve. It meant going into Buddhist temple to pray to Buddha. And, it meant, saying Happy Diwali to everyone and offering them sweets to celebrate the Hindu festivals.

In that India of my childhood, the idea of "tolerance" in reference to other religions, would have been kind of insulting, because we were expected to share the joy and sacredness of each religion and not just "tolerate" them

Which Approach Do You Prefer?

I think that with some exceptions, increasingly the modern world is going towards less orthodox religious beliefs. A large number of my friends and members of my extended family in India, do pray in temples and homes, but they are equally respectful of other religions. There are four inter-religious couples among my cousins' families. My own family is also inter-religious. With time, I expect that religious diversity in our family is only going to increase. This means that we shall have more occasions for celebrating festivals and also picking and choosing some aspects of ideas and practices of other religions in our daily lives. This seems to be in line with the ideas of inter-religious harmony with which I had grown up in India.

It is true however, that even in India, I feel that compared to my childhood, today many groups of persons are more polarised in terms of religions. Though a lot of persons continue to value respecting and sharing among persons of different religions, those with polarised thinking speak louder and dominate many forums. Fortunately, India continues to have a lot of mixed religious spaces formed by inter-mixing of persons of different religions.

I think that the ideas of multi-culturalism approach to inter-religious relations in Europe and America, which are focused on "not offending those of other religions", are a result of increased encounters after the second world war and due to a globalised world, between the more secularised and less religious populations in the West with more conservative minorities, often immigrants, who feel that they need to hold on to their specific identities, for not getting lost in their new lands. Thus, I feel that it is an expression of cultural anxiety.

In many ways, these inter-cultural encounters are also shaped by identity politics and ways of reading all relationships in terms of dominance and oppression. Perhaps historians can tell us from the experiences of the past, how such encounters between people of different cultures can evolve and resolve?

Which of these two approaches to inter-religious harmony do you prefer?

Conclusions

From the way I talk about the Indian way of looking at the diversity of religions, it must be obvious that I prefer this approach to inter-faith harmony. At the same time, after my travels across different countries and encounters with a diversity of religions and cultures, I must acknowledge that many persons feel threatened or at least uncomfortable if they have to accept close contact with other religions. I try to respect their diffidence, though I must confess that I can't really understand their anxieties.

I also try that I continue to deal with persons of different religions in my way. I go rarely to the mass in a church, but when I do, I am happy to bow my head and pray. I am not very religious, and while visiting temples, churches, gurudwaras and sufi dargahs, I try to feel the sacredness of their ambience and prayers. I also wish Eid Mubarak or Merry Christmas or Happy Deewali or Happy Navroz, to all my friends at the festival times without worrying if they are Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian or Sikh. However, if I know that a person does not appreciate receiving greetings for festivals of other religions, I try to be respectful of their choice.

I know that we live in polarised times. For whatever reasons, some people have become more aware of religious differences and at least some of them, do not wish to celebrate the festivals of others or to visit the others' prayer places. At the same time, I often find many persons who think about different religions like me, they are happy to listen to religious ideas of others and do not get offended by religious differences.

Personally, while each one of us is secure in his or her own religion, I would prefer a world of acceptance, respect and joy towards all religions. I know that it is an utopia, but I like utopias.

A final note about Mr. Faisal Khan mentioned above: I have read that Mr. Khan was arrested on 2nd November 2020 for offering namaz in the courtyard of a Hindu temple in India, though it was the temple priest who had suggested to Mr. Khan to pray there. I think that a Muslim singing Ramcharit Manas and praying in a Hindu temple can happen only in India because of this approach to inter-religious harmony that I am talking about. It is an embodiment of the Indic thinking which sees different religions as paths to the same God.

I hope and pray that better sense will prevail and Mr. Faisal Khan can be released.

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