Tuesday 16 October 2007

Inspiration for John Grisham's new book

John Grisham, it seems, loves Bologna. His driver in Bologna, Luca Patuelli says that perhaps he (Luca) has inspired the new book being written by Grisham. This is according to our local newspaper called "Bologna".

Actually Grisham had already based his last book, The Broker, in Bologna. As a  recognition of his service to the tourism of the city, University of Bologna had invited him for a high profile thanks-giving in September 2005. To write "The Broker", Grisham had come to stay in Bologna for some time, for going around and checking all the details for his book.

Luca says, "He is a real nice person, does not give himself any airs."

About the insipration for Grisham's new book "Playing for Pizza" (According to Luca - personally to me this title sounds just like a pizza and a joke) that should come out in November, Luca says, "I don't know if I can say that I inspired it. However, Grisham did ask me how did I speak English so well and I told him that I was a player at the American football centre." Infact, Luca had played with Bologna Warriors first and then with Phoenix San Lazzaro. Grisham was amazed, American Football in Italy?

So they say that Luca took him to Scandiano to watch the Italian Superbowl 2007 between Lions Bergamo and Panthers Parma. However, Luca denies it, "No, that is not true. I couldn't take him to any match because at that time the season was already over."

The hero of "Playing for Pizza" is a player of the American national league, who is forced to leave USA and who accepts to play for Parma Panthers.

In my pictures below, John Grisham during his visit to Bologna University in 2005.





***

Sunday 14 October 2007

Arundhati Roy’s speech at Ferrara

Italian weekly magazine Internazionale had organised three days of meetings with journalists and writers from different countries. I had written about this experiences a couple of days ago in under "Word Worlds". This time I am going to write a little more in detail, especially what Ms. Roy said.

Arundhati Roy spoke in the round table discussion on "Literature, A world of stories: narrative and journalism" on Saturday 6 October. 2007. Other speakers at this round table were Efraim Medina Reyes (Colombia), Elif Shafak (Turkey) and Laila Lalami (Marocco) while the round table was coordinated by Italian journalist Goffredo Fofi.

Efraim, Laila and Elif spoke before Arundhati. Laila explained how American publishing houses have put her in the category of Muslim women writer from middle east and thus they expect her to write about how bad are the things for Muslim women in the middle east and they insist on putting pictures of veiled women, desert and camels on the covers of her books. (In the picture from left: Efraim, Elif, Laila, Arundhati and Goffredo).



Arundhati Roy, author, Ferrara, Italy - images by Sunil Deepak, 2007

Elif also took this theme forward by saying that islamophobia in the western world means that their identities as writers are shaped very much by these perceptions of being a Muslim and being a woman. Explaining her own growing up in different countries and continents, she said that people ask her about her roots and she feels that her roots are up in the air, that she is an upside-down tree. She concluded by reiterating her need for deciding her own themes and not to be dictated by expectations of others, “If I wish to write about a Norwegian homosexual or anything else, I will do so, to be writer does not mean that I have to restrict myself only to write on lives of Turkish women.”

Now, we come to Arundhati’s speech, but before that just a little introduction. I have long been an admirer of Ms. Roy. When I first borrowed God of the Small Things from the library in Bologna, it had already become famous as the Booker award winner. Still I couldn’t go through it. After an initial fifty pages I had given it back, unread. I had thought that her language was wonderful but that it was just too slow for me.

Finally my sister convinced me to give that book another try and I found that it was indeed true. If you stick to that book just a little bit longer, it does grip you.

About the other writings of Arundhati, I liked them as well even if sometimes I felt that she was a little bit too shrill, and sometimes she made me little uneasy. Finally about some of her recent articles, like the one on the judiciary in India that came out in Outlook about 10 days ago, I could not finish reading, because I felt that she is so busy proving her point with relentless precision that her writing has become tedious to read.

A couple of years ago, I had met her on the stairs of the business lounge at the Delhi airport. I was going down to my flight and she had just arrived. “Excuse me, are you Arundhati Roy?” I had asked her on the stairs and when she had nodded, I had asked to shake her hand and ask her for a quick picture. She had said yes and after the picture, I had run off to catch my flight.

Only when I was down in the queue for getting in the flight, I had remembered the guy with her and my rudeness. I had not even looked at him, nor said a hello to him or to ask him to be in the picture! I am sure that it must be terrible to have a famous husband or wife, so that people just ignore you, or worst, they push you away while they talk to the famous spouse. I regretted this rudeness even more after a couple of years when I found out that the guy, Pradeep Krishen had written a lovely book about trees. I love trees as well, I love learning about them and talking about them.

Ok, now to come to the speech of Ms. Roy. Here are the main points:



Arundhati Roy, author, Ferrara, Italy - images by Sunil Deepak, 2007

“I understand this feeling of being .. I have a joke about it, when I read these books, I say, here is another book by CMM. CMM stands for Corporatised Moderate Muslim, it is what makes the west feel good in its interaction with the Islamic world.

I am not so sure about the space between fiction and the other kind of my writing, but none of my writing fiction or non fiction is something that comes out as a policy decision. When I had written God of the Small Things it was in 1997 and then came the booker, that was a period when we were beginning a journey in India, the Hindu nationalist right wing had come in the Government, in 1998 there was the nuclear test that was celebrated with a kind of sexual orgy of pride … at that time I was the darling of the middle classes, that I had made India proud. I saw that I had a platform, a space to raise a voice of dissent. I knew that to say something will be political, without being political I can’t say anything still to allow them to go on was something terrible for me and so I write “End of Imagination”, it was my dissent. Then suddenly we came to a world where there was so much horror… there was the Supreme court judgement about Narmada river, I travelled and saw the level of displacement and destruction that would happen. I felt that it was a story that needed a writer. There were other reports, facts and figures but how they were said did not allow for any common understanding so it was important to say this story in a way that people can understand the extent of horror..

One thing then led to another.. corporatisation, globalisation were coming in. I could see that it is going to unleash a level of violence in India that would require a battle in which writers, film makers, artists had a role to play, to fashion the elements and to explain them to people. When we were fighting for independence we did not need to explain it to people, they understood it clearly and easily. There was this coloniser and he was the bad guy. We were fighting against them. But today what is happening, how can you fight a battle when you don’t know who the enemy is? How can you fight shadows?

That is how I began into that other kind of writing.

All of us have written many times about the role of corporatisation in the media and the impact this is having on journalism but I don’t think I need to go into that with this audience. But I feel that the same thing is happening also with literature. There are huge book store chains that are deciding what kind of books will sell and they are then telling the publishing houses about the kind of books they want, what kind of covers these books should have.

When I am invited to a place, to a meeting like this I feel that I have been invited to tell you about how terrible things are in India. They are terrible but let me tell you that we never had a prime minister who owned all the media and all the book stores.. (like you had here).

When I am put into jail, my body is picked and put into the jail and I know that I am in jail but sometimes there are mind prisons also where imagination has been captured and colonised. Everything you wear is decided by some designer one season earlier. You walk past a shop window and you say ‘what a nice colour’ but the script for this choice was already written and planned in the last season, what you will think of a nice colour was decided and scripted earlier.

Along with corporatisation of media, there is corporatisation of literature as well.

There was two things that we need to talk about. One is language and the other is knowledge.
When I finished God of Small Things, I will tell this anecdote, I was on a review programme on the BBC and there were these two other persons, two British historians, on the programme with me. I hadn’t really spent much time in the west before, so I was there listening to these two men, and I couldn’t speak much because these two men were literally justifying the British Empire and I was like…even the right wing in India does not do that and they were justifying colonialism. I felt like I was a Martian come from outer space listening to them and they were saying that British culture was the defining culture of the world, Shakespeare and all. I was new to these things, I hadn’t had much interaction in such debates and they had accents.. so I didn’t know how to deal with it and I didn’t say anything. And then one of them said about me that because your book is written in English that is also a tribute to the British empire. So I said look that is like telling to children of raped parents that they are a tribute to the brutality of their fathers.

When I was growing up, I grew up where we speak Malyalam but I was forced to speak English by my own mother. I had to write ‘I will speak in English, I will speak in English..” a thousand times if I was caught speaking Malyalam by my mother. She said that this is the language that is going to get you where ever you are going to get.

So I said to that person, look it is not my tragedy is not that I hate English, I love the language but I am going to use it against you where ever I can .. and this person was almost crying, he said that he had said it as a compliment. I said that that is the trouble, you crushed a whole civilisation and did not even hear the crunch, did not hear the sound of its breaking.

Language … like in India we have 18 languages and 3000 dialects. For a persons like me,.. my father is a Bengali and my mother is from south, from east Malyalam. I was born in Assam and I speak Assamese. I studied in Tamilnadu and I speak Tamil. My first husband was from Goa and I learned to speak some Konkani, and now Punjabi and so on. So what is my language? What do we mean when we are talking about language of the empires. If I write in Hindi, it will be language of the upper castes, the language of Aryans who came and conquered the indigenous people who were there. So the way I look at it is to to see what do I say in that language. What do you say in it, how do you use the language. After all a writer should not be used by the language,.. uses language. If we are talking about empires and oppression then we can go back a long way and I don’t think that we can get to the end of that journey.

The other thing I want to talk about briefly is knowledge. Today the major form of capitalism is knowledge, accumulation of knowledge is capitalism. It is what the World Bank trades in. It employs the maximum number of people to do the manipulation of knowledge, that is its real talent. Accumulation of knowledge is capitalism and it is used to oppress people.

A few years ago I had been talking about globalisation of dissent, I was talking of globalisation of resistance… I was writing with facts, figures, equipped with every kind of argument. I thought that arguments, arguing well and pushing them in a manhole (??) arguing about gender, about globalisation .. but now I have also listened to the ground, I have travelled, I have travelled to those places where resistance is taking place and I have started to feel exactly the opposite. I feel that we have been burdened by so much information that we have weakened people by all the knowledge that we want to accumulate. If we look at a resistance movement in India that had all the knowledge, that had all the arguments, that had the support all kinds of international NGOs and movements, that had the publicity and notice two things – persons are saying that I don’t want your arguments, I don’t want your publicity and media, I don’t want to go to international conferences and making projects.. I am just going to stop you from coming in here, I will die before I let you inside this space.. and some of them were able to defeat them .. I am not saying that people should go back to being local and insulated once again, but what I feel that accumulation of knowledge that ends up in NGOs and Social Forums .. every institution that we have created has been taken over by them. We need to think about being guerrilla fighters on the subject of knowledge. We need to know that even knowledge can detract.

I certainly feel that as a writer of fiction who has started to write non fiction – though some critics say that my non fiction is also fiction, but that’s another things – but I feel that I don’t need to put it all right, to argue it right, to prove the case. I feel that can also become a prison and there are other ways of fighting. Thank you.”

This transcript is from my ipod, but I was not sitting very close to the loudspeaker and there were sounds of other people sitting around me and lot of applause in between, so I missed bits and pieces of her speech. As you can see, she did talk about being too obsessed with facts, figures and al the possible arguments to prove her point and that she has decided that this way of writing can be a prison as well. I look forward to reading something more concise and less tedious from her.

There was another shorter speech from her as an answer to some questions, that I still need to transcribe. In this pseech she mentioned that she was "not writing non fiction right now", that can be interpreted to mean that she is writing fiction. That is certainly another good news.

In terms of her arguments about the language, I agree that in the language issue, it is perhaps more important what you say than the language you say it in. If she spoke in Kannada or Malyalam, probably I will not even know about her. Yet, there is another dimension of English versus other languages debates that is linked to power hierarchy. English is the language of people who can speak, who are articulate, and who have the power. If Ms. Roy was not speaking in English, no one would have invited her to speak. It is true that a rare Mahashweta Devi can get invited to speak in an international meeting but compared to writers writing in English, she is virtually unknown not just outside India, but to majority of persons in India itself.

After reading her writings, I had somehow the expectation of very precise way of speaking, and I was a little surprised by her hesitancy, by her search for words, by parts that were obviously heavy with emotions. But it was a wonderful experience. And listening to all the applause to her words, made me swell my chest with "she is a fellow-indian" kind of pride that made me feel a little ashamed.


Arundhati Roy, author, Ferrara, Italy - images by Sunil Deepak, 2007




Arundhati Roy, author, Ferrara, Italy - images by Sunil Deepak, 2007

***

Sunday 7 October 2007

Word worlds

I had planned this weekend three months ago, when I had first heard about programme of "Internazionale" conference in Ferrara. Internazionale is a strange magazine from Italian standards. Most Italian newspapers and magazines are very introverted, in the sense, their main focus is on gazing at their own belly buttons. At the most they look towards USA and to a lesser degree towards, some of the European neighbours. Rest of the world does not exist except as a stereotype or in times of disasters. Internazionale publishes only translated articles from around the world, and not just from English language magazines and it is the only magazine that I now try to read regularly, except for Hans (in Hindi).

They had announced this weekend of roundtables, meetings and debates with many of the well known journalists and writers that appear regularly in the pages of the magazine. I had made elaborate plans that started with daily train journeys to Ferrara and listening to the worlds of some of the authors that I like to read, from morning till late evenings.

Let me start by the last discussion of yesterday evening that is still relatively fresh in mind.

The theme of the discussion was the space between narrative and reporting of what is happening around the writers when they write. The question posed was, is your fiction all immagination even if you are surrounded by bombs, injustice, poverty and all those other things that ask for denouncement? The participants were Arundhati Roy from India, Efraim Medina Reys from Colombia, Elif Shafak from Turkey and Laila Lalami from Morocco. It was moderated by a too verbose Goffredo Fofi (picture below - all the pictures are by my own).



After reading many of her writings, I had imagined Arundhati Roy speaking but the real Arundhati was very different from that imagination. I am sure that if I transcribe her speech (which I can, since I recorded her speech on my Ipod, but right now I can't as I have too many other things to do) it would sound like all other speeches, full of anguish and poetry and yet listening to her was different because it also had rawness of emotions and occasional groping for the words, that is missing from written speeches.

Among other things she spoke about the meaning of writing in English for her. She also spoke briefly about Kashmir and maoists and Narmada river in India. Some bits of her speech, like talking of Indian military in Kashmir as an occupation force, made me a little uncomfortable, even if I agree that stories of what is happening in Kashmir have not been told in India. Her contention that knowledge/information, too much of it, may be stopping us from facing the issues, was intriguing, but then many of the issues that she touched upon require a lot more depth and understanding.


Elif Shafak spoke about her moving from a country to another, about her roots up in the air and about the need to write to escape from the boring reality of every day life. Laila Lalami told about the straightjacket of "Muslim women writer" and stereotypes about what non-western writers can write (Arundhati called it cooperated moderate Muslim).

Yesterday I also watched a documentary "Lest we forget" of Jason da Silva, about stories of Asians and Arabs in the aftermath of 9/11 in USA. Plain clothes men banging at the door, taking away the "suspicious looking Muslim who has been reported by a neighbour", wives and children in anxiety not knowing what is happening to their husbands and fathers, persons being deported after months of prisons without any news to their families, the film was like hammer blows about all those lives that are seen just as numbers or news-stories as long as they happen to others and that we justify so easily in terms of terrorism, law and order, security and nationhood. The story of Berny from India, with a Canadian passport, held in Chicago airport because they felt that her passport was false and sending her back to India after cutting & cancelling her passport, was scary since it touched on the very roots of our own sense of security. Right now, we may feel "oh, it is something that affects those Muslims, I am a Hindu so this does not affect me..". Once the prejudice and racial things starts, it touches everyone and every thing.

Day before yesterday there were interesting discussions about Chavez and Lula, the two faces of the left in Latin America, discussing them were Mino Carta/Brazil, Cristina Marcano/Venezuela and Ugo Pipitone/Mexico. I also liked the discussions about blogs, internet and censorship in China by Pierre Haski and the Chinese dissident student leader, Cai Chongguo (in the picture below). And the discussions by the European correspondents of newspapers living in Rome about Italy and italians.


Today is the third and the last day of this initiative and there are some nice speakers planned for the day, but I am too tired to go. I guess that I am too old to stand for hours in queues, get pushed around with huge crowds and then listen to long debates, standing up... I will like to, but my body aches.

So I will wait for the next issue of Internazionale to read it all. It will be less fun but much more comfortable!

***

Friday 29 June 2007

Body paints: Hiding the body?

Why did man decide to invent clothes? Did ancient man have a sense of shame about the human body so that certain parts were supposed to be hidden behind clothes? Probably not. Man had evolved in nature full of animals, birds, roaming around without any clothes, except for those given by the nature - the body hair of different animals that covered the body, changed colours according to the seasons.

Probably early humans evloving in the hot tropical climate of Africa, did not even need lot of body hair and thus clothes were probably invented much later, when Homo Sapiens moved towards colder climates in the north?

Another reason could be that the genitals are delicate parts of the body and evolution of human beings from being four-legged creatures like other animals to the upright walking two legged creatures, further exposed to these delicate body parts to possible injury. Thus human beings had to look for something to cover and protect these parts.

Whatever the reason, today clothes are considered necessary for human life, and when ever new tribal groups are discovered, they are taught about the need to cover themselves. Apart from the stray nudists who may rebel against this imposition of the society, we all tend to accept to cover ourselves to varying degrees. Most cultures allow men to wear lesser clothes than women.

Artists have always tried to critically look at the social costumes and question them through their art. One such artist who questions the need for wearing clothes is Joanne Gair. Gair has become famous for her body painting, where she paints the clothes over nude bodies, giving the illusion that the person is wearing clothes. Here is sample of the art by Joanne Gair.

About 10 or 15 years ago, an Indian actress, Pooja Bhatt, had also posed for a magazine cover wearing just body art and that had raised a scandal. I personally admire such persons who dare to provoke the society into questioning the seemingly unbreakable and rigid social costumes.

Here some of my pictures of body paints from the cultural events (mainly the Par Tot summer festival parade and the GLBTI pride parades) in Bologna (Italy) - (Note: images have been updated in 2013):

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Painted bodies, cultural events, Bologna Italy - images by Sunil Deepak 2005-2013

Did you like my collection of body-paint images? I hope that you will be inspired by these images and then use your imagination to come with new variations in body paint to give shape to your desires.

***

Friday 20 April 2007

Mercy killing

A friend sent this to me and I think that it is worth sharing:

We were talking about life and death.

I said to her, "Don't let me live like a vegetable, completely dependent upon a machine, getting fed from a bottle. If I ever come to that state, switch off all those machines and remove the bottle..."

She got up, switched off the TV and the computer and took away my beer bottle....

***

Saturday 24 February 2007

Home: Manju Kapur

During the last trip to India, I had bought Manju Kapur's new book, "Home". I had earlier read her "Difficult daughters" and liked it.

Kapur's book is set in Karol Bagh area of Delhi in nineteen sixties and seventies. That was one reason, why I wanted to read this book as I had grown up in the same area and I could identify with some of the characters of the book very easily. In that sense the book does not disappoint. Once I started reading it, I could only stop when I had finished it. Reading words like "Ajmal Khan Road" or the descriptions of sari shops in Karol Bagh, evoked quick images of real places and persons that I had known.



The book is about the Banwari Lal family. The shop owner Banwari Lal, his sons Yashpal and Pyarelal and their wives and children and it explores the world of joint families. This world of joint families is not the large happy make-believe families of Suraj Barjatya films. It is a world trying to grapple with complexities of adjusting your aspirations and individualities with those of the others inside closed walls of the house, facing challenges of generational changes, trying to accomodate growing children in narrow personal spaces and even narrower working spaces.

This world of joint families does have altruistic elders, a mutual support system and intimacy that makes joint family living such a pleasure and a pain, but the book does not dwell much on these aspects, it rather focuses on tensions and rivalaries, almost a Darwinian struggle of finding your own space for catching the sunlight and growing up, escaping the shadows of the others, who came before you or who have more rights than you.

The book has a large set of characters, the patriarch, his wife, two sons, their wives and children, a dead daughter and her family etc. The first part of the book focuses on a few of these characters, esepcially on Sona, married to the elder son Yashpal and her sister, Rupa, married to a teacher, Prem Nath. Sona, beautiful, insecure and anxious can't have children while younger brother Pyarelal's ordinary looking wife Sushila quickly has the required sons, Ajay and Vijay. Ten years after the marriage finally Sona has a daughter, Nisha and then a son, Raju.

Death of Banwari Lal's daughter and their decision to take the daughter's son, Vicky in the house with them and Vicky's relationship with Sona, is the subject of the first part of the book. Sona, childless at that time, is expected to take care of Vicky. Vicky's adolescence and his first sexual experiments with his young cousin, Nisha make the family send Nisha to live with her childless aunt, Rupa. Nisha grows up and falls in love with a boy of another caste, and when the family finds out about it, this relationship is quickly snubbed out. Manglik Nisha can't find a husband and remains a spinster in the house, till she decides to set up her own business of making readymade clothes. Success of this business coincides with her marriage to a childless widower and the book ends with her pregnancy and the decision to leave the readymade clothes business.

In terms of characterisations, Kapur paints with a large brush with expressionist brush-strokes, giving a few details here and there and leaving you to fill in the rest from your own imagination. Except for Sona and Rupa, and to a lesser extent, Vicky, Yashpal and Banwari Lal, all other characters in the first part of the book remain shadowy figures. For example, Pyarelal and his wife Sushila, are cardboard characters, there is nothing distinctive about them that you can remember after finishing reading the book. In the same way, the second half of the book concentrates on Nisha, excluding almost everyone else. This helps you to focus on the main story of the book, even as it creates a feeling of dis-satisfaction about other persons in the book.

So compared to another large family story like "A Suitable Boy" by Vikran Seth, here family is just a setting and the story still remains limited to a few main characters and is not a proper joint family saga.

Kapur uses fairly simple language. There is hardly a phrase in the book that you stop to re-read to savour the words construction or profound ideas. Her language is just a tool to tell the story.

There are a few episodes of sex scattered throughout the book. Though it is still does not reach the level of explicit sex in the Harold Robbbins or Sidney Sheldon books written more than thirty years ago, but compared to the staid world of women writers of Indian literature (I confess that I still haven't read anything by Shobha De!), it does seem daring.

Vicky's violence on young Nisha or Nisha's own experience with her fumbling boyfriend, both are explicit enough to make us understand why her character feels and behaves the way she does. Another sex scene between Rupa and Premnath, does not serve the story in any way but it makes the two characters more real. The book throws in an occasional "chutiya" in colloquial way, probably for authenticity.

Overall, the book is a good read, even if I had liked "Difficult daughters" much more. Once you finish it, it does not leave any strong characters in your mind, rather it is all about persons who were shaped by their destinies and they could do little to fight it or to shape it in their own ways. So, after a few days of reading the book you will just remember that it was a good read, but may forget the characters and the story.

***

Monday 5 February 2007

Coffee art

Italians prefer their coffee in small cups. In a bar you can ask for an espresso, at home you make it with moca, but you drink it in small cups. Small amount of concentrated coffee with strong aroma.

Italian coffee, image by Sunil Deepak


Friends from India when they first try it, they think that it must be really strong. "It is like poison", one of my friends had said. But actually it is supposed to be strong only in the flavour and much low on caffeine than those long glasses of watery brew you get in USA.

If you wish for higher dose of caffeine, you can ask for a lungo (longer) or if you are in Rome, you can ask for Alto (higher) but don't expect a larger cup. It would be still in a small cup. If in espresso, you got about 3 cm of coffee for a lungo, you may get about 5 cm. An amount that you can drink in a gulp.

In real good bars, they would bring the cup of espresso with an equally small glass of water. You are supposed to drink water and clean your mouth before tasting your coffee so that full flavour can be felt.

Italians forced to live abroad, often say that the thing they miss most is their coffee in small cups and friends and family members coming to meet them are requested to bring bags of Italian coffee for the moca.

Some people prefer macchiato (pronounced makkiato, means spotted or marked), where you add just just a dash of foamy milk or cream. Macchiato can also be an art form, as you can see from these art coffee cups from the Thai coffee website Roytawan. You can use the different colours, textures and consistencies of milk, cream, foam, coffee and choclate powder to make designs in your coffee cups.

***

Thursday 18 January 2007

Invisible threads

My wife says that potato chips are bound to each other by an invisible thread. If you pick up one, the next one comes up automatically. Perhaps, thoughts are the same. Only that, one thought leads to another completely different. Thus, thinking in terms of potato chips, potato chip leads to a jalebi, that goes to a samosa and so on!

As I pedal my bicycle in the morning to the work, most of the time riding the bicycle and negotiating the traffic happens in automatic mode and my mind meanders in different directions. I am convinced that some of those ideas are terrific but the problem is that by the time I reach office and want to write them down, I can't remember most of them!

That is how it was this morning. I was pedalling furiously. Behind our house, they are cutting deep gashes in the green fields. A new road is going to come up there. Further ahead, a new access to the highway is flattening the existing hills and building new hills. Even further, the railway tracks are being moved so that the high speed train lines can be put in their place. Our part of the city is changing face!

The side effect is that the road is full of dust and with the strong humidity in the night, every morning my bicycle wheels raise up drops of dusty glue that sticks to my pants.

And I was thinking about the Anarchytect post I had read in the morning about buildings, spaces, layouts. For a lot of things, I realise that I am very superficial. Buildings are part of those things. I mean, a building is a building, full stop. Thinking of spaces as something alive, that you mould and shape like dough for making chapattis, seems kind of strange. Seeing the landscape around our house changing in front of us, I know it is true but I still keep on believing that the landscape is something physical, fixed, unchangeable, so why think about it!

Another of these things is art. I mean, you watch a nice painting and instinctively you know whether you like it or not. What need is there to dissect it, analyse it?

You are wrong of course, you just need to read the Hindi article of Om Thanvi on Starry Nights of Van Gogh in MOMA in New York to understand how wrong you are. There are eleven stars he writes. The bottom most star, its luminous white contrasting with the wonderful yellow of the moon is probably the morning star that Van Gogh saw from the window of his sanatorium and wrote about it to Theo, his brother. The spire of the church in the background is more like the Dutch churches of Van Gogh's childhood and not the French churches surrounding his sanatorium. The cypress tree in the left rising up like a peacock feather, is it a death wish? Van Gogh did die a few months after making this painting.





Once you read that article of Om Thanvi, it changes the way you look at this painting. It is no longer a question of if you like it or not, you can understand it and see things that you did not see earlier.

Suddenly my thoughts about starry nights and Van Gogh were interrupted by a new song in my earphones. I religiously put on my ipod when I start from my home but I hardly ever remember the songs I have heard during the journeys. But this song was great and different. Ajnabi Shehar it is called and it is from Jaaneman, I found out later. The singer, perhaps Sonu Nigam, sounded just like Rafi did in those wonderful songs from a film called Jhuk Gaya Aasman! It had came out in 1968 and had music by Shanker Jaikishen and had Rajendra Kumar and Saira Banu in it. Not that I liked Rajendra Kumar or Saira banu. There is no rational explanation for this jump from Ajnabi Shaher to Jhuk Gaya Aasman, but that's how thought are. Unpredictable and irrational.

What was the story of JGA like? It had something to do with death. I thought furiously, weaving the bicycle between cars stuck in a traffic jam. Rajendra Kumar dies in it, but then comes back. Actually there were two Rajendra Kumars. One poor and nice, in love with Saira Banu. The other rich and bad. The bad one was supposed to die but by mistake, Yama kills the young and poor. By the time they realise the mistake, his body has been cremated or whatever, so the good one goes in the body of the bad one. I had seen it on a black and white TV in the prehistoric days of Indian TV.

JGA had same story as of the Warren Beatty film, Paradise lost or can wait or something like that! This last bit of knowledge is fairly recent that Bollywood had started copying long time ago. But JGA had lovely songs and this song from Jaaneman reminded me of it - except that it is better, having strange interludes between the stanzas, changing the music styles completely each time.

While trying to think of the Jhuk Gaya Aasman songs, I braked in front of a truck of leaves-collectors in the park, that was blocking the path. By now all the trees in the park are naked with skinny arms and the beautiful golden, yellow, kathai, burnt siena of autumn leaves has been replaced by a rotting mass on the ground that sticks to your shoes and to bicycle wheels, making a squashing sucking sound as you walk on it. The leaves-collectors looked like ghost-busters from the film of the same name, with a motor in their backpack and holding thick tubes blowing hissing air like giant earthworms, pushing the sticky gooey mass towards the suction pump of the truck. Leaves-ghost-busters they are, picking up dead leaves, I thought.

Can trees have ghosts too? I had arrived in the office and so the question remained unanswered and like the last dream of the morning, it also slowly dissipated into nothingness.

***

Wednesday 17 January 2007

Exploring madness

Recently I saw the "Exploring Madness", a series of short films by Dr. Parvez Imam. He is a doctor and a documentary film maker. The films are very brief, each lasting 3-4 minutes only.

The one I liked most was where he tells about women who are brought to a mental health hospital and left there by the family. Often, the families give a wrong address to the hospital, so that they can not be traced. After a few months, when the women are cured or are better, they want to go back to their homes, but the law does not allow persons treated for mental health problems to go out alone. Their only way to go out of the hospital is if some family member comes to accompany them. For many of them, no one ever comes to take them back so they are doomed to wait in the mental hospitals for ever. It was heart rending in the film to listen to the women who kept on saying, she had two children and she wanted to go back to her family.

I appreciated that the film respects the privacy of persons it interviews. And I liked the briefness of films. Even in their briefness, they make a clear point and touch the heart. I think that it requires a deep understanding of the theme and a strong empathy, to come up with something like this.

In the film, a lawyer tells about the Indian laws relating to mental illness. In India, if you are declared mentally ill, you lose all your civil rights, including the right to vote or to marry. For the law, it is justifiable reason for asking for a divorce. So like those women doomed to eternal wait for the families to come back and take them, there are many other areas of human rights violations of persons with mental health problems.

However, you can be cured of mental illness. Often mental illnesses are cyclical in nature, so there are periods when you are better. Doesn't the law allow you to regain your civil rights once the doctor treating you has certified that you are better? That sounds very cruel and unfair!

While watching the film I remembered some episodes from a period of life, that I had almost forgotten. It was the time when I was a PG student in anaesthesia at Willingdon hospital (or the Dr Ram Manohar Lohia hospital) in Delhi. Some times there were calls from the mental health unit accross the Tal Katora road and sometimes, I did go there to provide anaesthesia for persons receiving electric shocks (ECT). As shocks also produce convulsions in the body, through anaesthesia, you can relax the muscles so that they don't get hurt or pains afterwards.

I was thinking that in those days, I had never stopped on the way to look around in the mental health unit. It was only rushing to the ECT room and back. Perhaps, just the sight of ECT scared me so much that I didn't want to think about it?

At that time, I did not know that many organisations of "survivors of psychiatric services" are fighting against ECT, they feel that it is inhuman treatment and not useful. However, the textbooks of medicines continue to teach students about usefulness of ECT in certain conditions.

***

Tuesday 16 January 2007

The Indian Way: Living in multi-cultural, multi-religious societies

The lady smiled at me. She was one of those culturally aware kinds who want to be sensitive to persons of other cultures. "I know you are not a Christian, but at least I can wish you for a happy new year." Meaning, she will not offend me by wishing me "Merry christmas"!

I guess that it is the western way of thinking that likes things to be neatly divided and separated and put into neat labelled boxes. Thus people with different religions and expected behaviours, the politically correct things to say about them, all are stored in those boxes. There is no place for ambiguity or confusion there.

Europe needs to respond and adapt to the multi-cultural societies, legacies of its colonial past, accelerated by growing globalisation and hordes of desperates who flee from underdeveloped world in makeshift boats to land on Spanish or Italian coasts, or crossing in from Eastern Europe. The European society, even with some differences between the Roman Catholics and the different protestant chruches, had long been uniform culturally, leaving aside some minorities. It is still groping for answers about how to deal with multiculturism imposed on it by the emigrants.

And so, for not offending the non Christians, some say, no more public lighting and displays for Christmas. Others like the lady above, feel that respecting other religions means not mentioning anything about your own religion to others.

Co-habitation between religions in India

I was thinking about the contrast of such thinking from my own growing up experience in India. For Gurupurab, I knew that the prabhat-feri passed very early in the morning, so I would wake up early to get my dose of kacchi lassi from the truck that came down from the Gurudwara, temple of the Sikhs.

Coming out from a Hindu temple, we did not ask people if they were Hindu, Muslim or Sikh before offering them a bit of prasad.

When Irene, our neighbour came with the plate of sweet seewiyan for Idd, we were taught to say, "Idd mubarak".

In the morning, when I saw Sajid bhai I would say Salaam Valekum and he would answer with a namastey. For the midnight mass of Christmas, more than once I went to the Cathedral near Gol Dakhana in Delhi and when everyone else around made the sign of cross, I also did. It was just another way of ringing the temple bell.

Religious ambiguity, the smudged confines between different religions, is part of Indian identity. By venturing in the other religions, by embracing them, by celebrating them you didn't loose your own identity.

Western preoccupation with neat separate categories

Perhaps that is part of Indian system of logic, I am asking myself. We have a particular way of thinking that does not seek the clean separate boxes with neat labels, so dear to the western thinking?

Sometime ago, I was reading a book that talked about a census carried out under British in early 1900s. During the census, a huge number of persons in Punjab had declared themselves to be Hindu-Sikhs. No, you can't be a Hindu-Sikh, you have to be either Hindu or Sikh, choose one, they were told. It laid the grounds for creating divisions among Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab, the book claimed.

Perhaps, the British did have a clear strategy for dividing and ruling India or perhaps this was just a by-product of western way of thinking that does not accept ambiguity that we seem to embrace?

In a world that is dominated by great conflicts between the three monotheistic religions Christians, Jews and Muslims, I sense that we are moving towards polarisations. Everyone seems closed in their own boundaries with common spaces bounded by rules that they call "tollerance and respect for all religions". To me, it seems a way of saying, I believe that I am superior, my religion is better, but I will not waste my time in telling you about it, so just lets not talk about it.

The way forward

This polarised way of thinking is seeping in India as well, by well meaning persons. Unfortunately.

But I think that there are lot of merits in our Indian way of reasoning, that does not call for "tollerance and respect", it calls for "embracing and acceptance" of the other.

We don't need to stop public displays of joy at Christmas, we need to extend it to other religions, so that we can celebrate festivals of others, like we celebrate our own.

May be western way of logical, rational thought, that prefers clean unambiguous answers is good for somethings like science and information technology, while our own Indian confused, inclusive, ambiguous way is better for other things, especially about religions and about living together!

***

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