CTRL-ALT-EGO: The Weblog of Suhit Kelkar

I finished translating about 20% of the novel.

At the author's request, I read an extract at a programme at the YB Chavan Centre. It was in honour of three women writers, including the author of 'Bhinna'.

The audience loved my work. A few arty-farty types were smirking when I first got up on stage, though, and It felt good to wipe that expression off their faces.

At the end, I got down and accepted the *gracious nods* after the programme.

If the author permits, I might put up that extract on this blog; of course, the larger extract will have to go to the professional blog I've set up on blogspot. Do visit.

I'll say it's about time.

I get to translate a novel from Marathi into English. It's called 'Bhinna'; which means 'Different', as in, people that differ from you in various ways, in opinion, condition, orientation. When the novel came out its dark story matter gave its readers a collective shudder. Then acclaim followed. It brought even more fame to its author Kavita Mahajan, already known for her innovative book 'Brra'.

The opportunity to translate her comes my way through the Antarbharati group, which sees translation as a bridge between people of different Indian languages. The very name Antarbharati could be translated as 'pan-India'. They are serious about what they do. Their honoraria are not at all token either. This works well for me, a freelancer who plan to devote myself to this work exclusively.

Ms. Mahajan had already read my translated sample. I met with her on Republic Day and she has kindly agreed to obtain the rights from the publisher. In fact she was darn kind about the whole thing; I'm relieved, because a translator-writer relationship can get very delicately poised and go on the teeter if you're careless or lacklustre.

So, no more worries left: it's a clear green signal. For a long hard struggle with words.

I'll post here regularly about my travels and troubles and travail. This blog that has changed character so often, it will again.

I haven't posted for a while now. Mainly that's been because I was involved in a for-pay documentation project: a manual for cybercafe operators. Cool, yeah? And the best part is, it's open content: take it, modify it, build upon it (and hopefully, translate it)! You'll see the download link for the manual here in good time. The other news is that I've started freelancing for the Linux For You magazine.

FOSS fans and fanatics will instantly recognise the name, while for others I might add that it is the country's premier magazine on free and open source software. I've been an avid reader, and it's nice to be on the other side too. Besides this, I recently contributed a few articles to linux.com, the international FOSS website (kinda proud of this too).

The link for my Linux for You articles is here:
http://suhitkelkar.blogspot.com
Take a look, particularly over the coming week, when I'll post all I've written so far. I intend this blog to be an archive of my for-pay writings for now. I've recently opened this blog; I've uploaded one article on it.

Also, read a couple of my linux.com stories here:

A story about how gnu/linux is used for mumbai's smart card system:
http://www.linux.com/feature/132871

A website which aims at becoming a semantic index of the web. Best part is, it originated from aapli own Mumbai!
http://www.linux.com/feature/137245


The articles linked here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 India License.

We are sitting in a bar. It is a nice place.

Have you ever wondered why beer has to taste like piss? And have you decided as I had that there was no answer, that an accepted fact like the stuffiness of shoes or the tightness of jeans is the bitterness of beer. The beer's got to be bitter; well, because. And so we pull up our sleeves and sit at the table, wincing as our jeans pinch into our crotch; isn't having a taste for a bitter taste a cerebral accomplishment?

Don't you think that with time, we even managed to build intimate manly cults around bitter beer. The 'necessary' bitterness is a metaphor for life, we said. And the bitterness of beer really became molten grunge in the memory, gilded by wistful defiant rock riffs and table thumps. And yet another batch of drinkers forgot its years of innocent questioning, though the questions were noways profound or even important.

Our bar comes straight out of British days. It could be an English pub. A ceiling high as a first-floor ceiling crossed by stout wooden beams. Comely greenish pastel paint mellowing the light. Teak tables well-kept and chairs agleam softly with regular varnish. Each table full, but not Saturday night full. A patina of tangled inchoate murmurs hangs in the bright bulblight.

On the walls we see pictures of world monuments alternating with the French windows. The place has only one wall without windows, and that's the internal one. Yet another, the one with smaller windows, has a built-in shelf parading the foreign beers on sale. New drinks are available for a new India, it implies, or at any rate an India calling itself new. We make our curious assent, partly beguiled by an exotic name. We wait, staring at our fellow drinkers.

The tables bloom with Bombay's mixed crowd. Here are Gujarathi businessmen from Fort nearby with their white shirts hanging out over black pants, clerks with timid attire and grey scratched suitcases, yuppies in relaxed-cool cut, newbie collegians in solidarity, old regulars sitting familiarly, families in private context. At a few tables women, their bosoms swaying slightly as they flick back their hair, leaving their collarbones standing out in the light and their pendants glitter.

Now our beers arrive. We look at the bottles, which have just begun breaking into a sweat. Bottle-green bottles capped with caps of such a green as was never smelted before. We get the clear message of distinction. Here is something new; we fill our glasses, decide to light up after a few inches of drink. A wise decision. Sans numbing smoke our sense of smell and tongue are at their best to receive delight. Cheers.

A sudden meadow of taste.

A taste composed of four: a faint strawberry nosegay, followed by a surprising bitterish-sour mouthful, stretching into a chilly gulp rimmed with sour, which leaves behind a smooth-as-dawn sweetness. It is like tongue-kissing with a fairy. Open with revelation, we put down the beer glasses with a sigh, and look around the bar.

A taste-- artfully constructed as a lyric-- has communicated to us the existence of a larger world of choice, be it in quotidian refreshment or profound decision. All is in change, and perhaps for the better. Sitting in that bar on the cusp of midnight, as we call for another bottle, we grow more hopeful for the future and for ourselves.

Once upon a time you needed gifts-- G capital-- to become a superhero. You needed to extract invulnerability from mere rays of an alien sun. You needed to have a radioactive spider bite you. You needed to have the trauma of your parents' murder to uncover deep potentialities existing in you. You needed to be a psychic Martian banished to Earth because he was a slum-dweller or something. Being just really really smart didn't help. Nature, chance, or fortuitous time-warp was necessary.

You couldn't have imagined a nerd in a nifty metal armour amounting to a superhero. Iron Man? Iron Man was a new kind of superhero for his time, self-made, if you like. If you haven't, do, please, see the movie. Not for the film itself, but for the intriguing idea of the Iron Man.

Which idea is that the iron suit may be a product of genius; but for becoming a superhero you need no such talent. All Iron Man's superpowers are manufactured. By doing this he even turns his weakness, ultimate reliance on technology, to his advantage. For Tony Stark survives on technology-- the electromagnet studded in his chest reins the embedded shrapnel there from reaching his heart. From there, from feminine lifesaving technology, to an aggressive power-suit is a leap only over technical barriers.

Not everybody can make the suit though. Now this thought being realistic, most people, including cinema critics, if it occurs to them, subconsciously suppress it. Rather, the point is, in theory anybody can wear it and jet into the skies. That's the appeal of Iron Man. He is, in inversion of that well-known formulation, 'a being, not a becoming'. Iron Man bridges what marketers call an aspiration threshold by broaching the idea that whoever you are, you can _become_ a superhero, which is what most people secretly, even adults, even subconsciously, fantasise about.

But hey, you only have to wear the suit. That's it. Anyone who wears it is Iron Man. A wimp with a gun and a wino with a car license and a critic with a masturbating pen can all be little Iron Men. (Here's your suit, sir, with great power comes great responsibility, as if anyone takes that seriously, especially in the hack line.)
Cynically, it is not hard to imagine a fat banker or a software engineer with literary illusions cramming his wobbly body into such a suit.

How much soberingly poignant to think of all wingless and vulnerable humanity instead, unsheathing its artificial shell against the infinite universe, and fulfilling a destiny greater than itself, of which only a small part is space flight.

I cannot wishfully choose between these images, between ugly inevitable first and sublime other. For both are us. But I would rather choose the second.

Iron Man the upstart. He uses an idea to become greater or at least more powerful than his biological sum. In real life analogy, he would be a software billionaire who joins a club full of Old Money. He enters hallowed territory of superheroes who have natural or chance gifts, namely, where 'being, not becoming' is the rule.

But, Stan Lee vide Iron Man asks us, is Iron Man not after all a representation of the social biped in his 'human condition'? Is man not himself an upstart? The Greek hero Icarus built wings of wax and soared sunwards to meet his melting decline. Iron Man welded himself a suit. (In fact, that analogy is fairly obviously placed in the movie, perhaps so that we can detect it and sustain illusions about our intelligence.) Tony Stark's flight, his escape from the terrorist base, in his jugaad first suit, his spectacular peaking in the air above the clouds of smoke and sheer crash into the sand, there to lie dazed and exhilarated amid the wreckage of his metal sheath.

Little Iron Men all, with the good and bad?

Writing in her Vijay Tendulkar obituary, literary critic Shanta Gokhale compared the playright with the humorist PL Deshpande. To paraphrase here, she said Tendulkar was no Deshpande to chuck us under the chin and say, weren't we despite all our foibles and failings such nice sweet people after all.

            Personally, ouch; both Tendulkar and Deshpande are two of my most beloved writers; choice of reading reflects character tendencies. I must admit the remark is true. I do realise that Ms Gokhale is not comparing these two masters of two different generations; much less is she running Deshpande down. She is rather using the comparison to take a darning needle to the current Maharashtrian taste, which still lingers around an affectionate and indulgent Deshpande and despises a despairing, but equally well-wishing, Tendulkar. So it is in all cultures, and anywhere in the world. We like a man who approves of us, says that we're not beyond redemption or, better still, that nothing's wrong at all, arre, what we need is compassion and humour; we despise, or at least we avoid, someone who says to us that redemption is impossible but not as long as we're such hypocritical and self-uncritical bastards .

            Tendulkar is a genius, but it seems unlikely that Maharashtra will ever take him to its bosom, for he is too critical of it, the way it has Deshpande. Deshpande was out to entertain; a reader will read, and laugh, and feel snug, and put him away on the shelf. Which is what Deshpande intended. His illumination of the human characters is by-the-way. It will take effort to glean from Deshpande's writings his skill of peering beneath the skin, but without disgust or despair at what one finds there. For it is not obvious, Pu La's plea for kindness to others, of consuming filial interest in one's fellow-beings, one has to strive to find it, he has not spelled it out in his writings. Tendulkar has to greater extent.

            I read his 'Gidhade' recently in an English translation as 'The Vultures'. One of the scenes is where two brothers abort their sister's pregnancy to take revenge against her lover, who died of a heart attack before they could blackmail him for money over this illegimate child. Exaggeration, but why does it sound so plausible! Still, still. It's true, though, that I felt no despair at the end of Gidhade, only a sad compassion (that cliched word, eh?) and perhaps a thankfulness that I wasn't like that. Or was I? And that last 'was-I' question is the point behind this wonderful drama. By showing us lost beings, Tendulkar reminds us we're not as bad as we think, but neither are we noble.

            Now see Deshpande, with his compulsive associations-and-leagues men, and square families who live glossy-magazine lives, and the impertinent washerman who visits his movie-men customers wearing their own shirts. Quaint, no? Undoubtedly true, that Deshpande was a 'bourgeois' writer, to use the term fashionable at the time that he was criticised for being so. This was after he became famous, of course. When Bhalchandra Nemade's classic 'Kosala' (The Coccoon) came out, with its avant-garde language, the brilliant and irascible Ashok Shahane had said that Deshpande would not even be able to understand its language. As in, he was too hidebound. (To which Deshpande wrote in reply: mad boy, age by ten years and then see.)

            One can understand Ms Gokhale's despair; a society of rancid pigflesh, we bear in the sunless space between our skins and our souls, pink-naked worms. They lying breeding, cannibalising, sodomising their own selves, and we do nothing about it. And we feel no shame.

Recently had the pleasure [?] of reading my poetry in 'open mike' sessions at the Kala Ghoda festival and, later, at the 'Celebrating Poetry' day at the Prithvi Theatre.

At Prithvi, the organisers [caferati], who had also organised the reading at the Kala Ghoda festival, were sweet enough to move my name up to the top of the recital list, so that my poem would not be drowned in the bilge that inevitably floats up in  such open mikes.

This is not about chances, about opportunity,
those words the petty people say.

Aim this cocked trigger of a new year
at your own temple.

Another year. To seize or to throw away?

Why does a man do nothing himself even as he says he can do better than others? Is he afraid that he can't in fact do better? Or will it burst the little bubble of misunderstanding that sustains his soul when he discovers the true extent of his abilities? This is of course true of all of us.

Some examples are more acute than others, however. I have come across people who criticised as corrupt any journalist that wrote better than they did. I have also seen people who disguise jealousy as criticism. To complicate the [true] paradox, these people are, as someone said, deriding others for what they hate in themselves. This, again, is true of all of us.

Q: What happened when the experimental music group tried making a hip-hop song from the decoded human genome?

A: They came up with explicit lyrics.

Why did the dude buy a poultry farm?

He wanted to impress the chicks.

Ramchandra Guha's known to pull off the nearly impossible; making fresh, page-turner books from history. In doing so he has done far better than certain 'page-turner' authors (as they are called by some), you know, the ones writing bad books titled 'The Da Vinci Code' etc. (Next title: The Beethoven Code. Plot: are there really secret messages from extraterrestrials in Beethoven's notations?). Now as Mr. Guha's been in the news recently for his history of free India titled 'India after Gandhi', it would perhaps be a good time to mention an earlier work of his. Now the great merit of 'India After..' was that it was both comprehensible and comprehensive.

          Another, more pertinent merit, was that 'India..' was not just a story of how the Republic was built. It was also an enquiry, as Guha says, into what tied parts of the Republic together and whether it will stay bound that way. It was a straight history. 'A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport' could, as Mr. Guha says, be called an oblique history of (quite a bit of) India. Because sports mirror life. Because India's complicated political, communal, casteist social relations were brought into the playing field. Therefore Mr Guha has gone far beyond the boundary line. And all things in this great and complex world are connected, so is it really possible for any narrative to reflect nothing but itself? Hence the story of cricket reflects, though not as sharply as a mirror, the story of India. When independent India (or for that matter Pakistan) scored cricketing victories over the British, it was taken to be a blow in the face of imperialism. When India played Pakistan it was taken, sadly, to be war. 'A Corner..' necessarily has to be, one agrees with Mr Guha, much more than a list of batting averages and records.

          Thus the innings of Indian cricket has to start with the British Raj, more specifically the administrations of the Bombay and Madras Presidencies and others. The 'natives' learnt the game, largely in large cities such as Poona, Bombay and Lahore, by watching the 'sahibs' play. Occasionally the 'sahibs' condescended to teach a few natives to bowl at them in the nets. The 'natives' petitioned their masters for land for 'native' gymkhanas, such as the Islam Gymkhana, the PJ Hindu Gymkhana, the Parsi Gymkhana. They played in their thousands. Many Indian-British tussles took place on the mowed green as they did elsewhere. And just as venomously.

          And communalism, always a part of Indian social life, also took guard, Parsi- Hindu, Hindu-Muslim, Parsi-Muslim conflicts, as they did elsewhere, also took place on the playing field. A section of the Muslim League used cricketing analogies to advance separatist theories, secular-minded Muslims used other cricketing analogies to advance republican theories. Gandhi wanted a ban on the communal pentangular series, Jinnah didn't. The Raj, by its official recognition of Bombay's Quadrangular tournament, fomented communalism further.

          Caste came into play. Upper-caste Hindus used to block Dalit cricketers, like the following, from captaincy. India's first truly great cricketer, Baloo Palwankar, was disregarded for years and would be unknown still had Mr Guha not rediscovered him. Baloo Palwankar besides being a looming historical character is a fitting symbol for the book; he best links the book's explicit narrative, cricket, with its implicit narrative, which is a glancing look at India's history. It was Baloo Palwankar who once mediated between Gandhi and Ambedkar over the issue of separate constituencies for 'lower'-caste voters. Nobody knew much of that either. 'A Corner..' and Mr. Guha deserve praise for restoring to his rightful place a significant historical personage. One of Baloo's younger brothers, Vithal, would go on to captain the Hindu side in the Quadrangular (the Pentangular?) after much struggle and, needless to say, much politicking beyond the field.

          But in case you want cricketing colour, 'A Corner..' will offer you that too. It beguiles with its soothing portraits of cricketing scenes and olden-time cities. Cricket in the Cooperage or the terai, the bat's tap on the ball, the patter of clapping, the fielder's stomping chase, the appeal, cricketers with whiskers, 'natives' in dhotis, ladies in lace and bonnet, polo players in the background, deposed rajahs in the foreground with the viceroy. Unlike most historians, Mr Guha can paint with words; perhaps there is a novel in him somewhere, hinting at its presence through his non-fiction.

          Mr Guha has left out India's contemporary cricketing history, on the understandable grounds that people know it thoroughly already. Hence nothing much is mentioned, for example, about India's World Cup Victory, or certain persons by the names of Gavaskar, Shastri, Wadekar, Bedi, Prasanna, Chandrashekhar, Venkatraghavan. No. The names Palwankar (say it!), Nayadu, Mushtaq Ali, Ranji, Duleep are the ones you read. India's earliest international matches, against England and Australia, are described in fine detail. Lesser cricketers, who played in the Quadrangulars and Pentangulars are also mentioned.

          You don't know if 'A Corner..' can be improved upon. On the one hand, its clear and image-driven prose, on the other hand its daunting research. And its masterful, almost journalistic 'scoop': the (re?)discovery of Baloo Palwankar. This book is very like a shortish yet powerful, soft-spoken and hard-hitting, muscular but graceful batting maestro we all know. All in all, 'A Corner..' scores a ton such as we are not about to see for a long while.

I am mostly ignorant about literature; first, I lack depth, meaning thorough knowledge of the trends in novel and poetry. Second, I'm oblivious to 'technique', whatever that means. That I share such twofold ignorance with most inhabitants of the world is no consolation according to the writer Arnold Bennett. He tells us, in a little book that happened to change my life that

                                       “Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living... he who has not been 'presented to the freedom' of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear; he can't feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner. What more than anything else annoys people who know the true function of literature, and have profited thereby, is the spectacle of many thousands of individuals going about under the delusion that they are alive, when they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.”

 

          This is from the book 'Literary Taste' by, as mentioned, Arnold Bennett [1871-1931]. My copy is published by Rupa & Co., but if the book has fallen out of copyright you might find it online for free. The complete title is 'LITERARY TASTE: How to form it, with detailed instructions for collecting a complete library of English Literature.'

          'Literary Taste' is the best work I've read on the process of reading. Bennett inspires you. You want to raid the nearest library [or Project Gutenberg online] and discover the pleasures of reading. You no longer feel a vague irritation with the 'esoteric' concerns of writers or a vague jealousy at their greater sensitivity to the world.

          Moreover, you can trust Bennett. This is obvious when you open the book.

          Here, these are the chapter headings. I also include quotations from each chapter:

1.     The Aim [the quote above was taken from this]

2.     Your Particular Case

[Quote: “The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his own tongue is one of distrust... speaking generally, the classics do not afford you a pleasure commensurate with their renown.”]

3.     Why a Classic is a Classic

[“... it is by the passionate few that the renown of genius is kept alive from one generation to another.”]

4.     Where to Begin

[“There is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of 'literature in all its branches.”]

5.     How to Read a Classic

[“Let us begin experimental reading with...”]

6.     The Question of Style

[“Style cannot be distinguished from matter.”]

7.     Wrestling with an Author

[“It is a course of study that I am suggesting to you. It means a certain amount of sustained effort.”]

8.     System in Reading

[“Stand defiantly on your own two feet, and do not excuse yourself to yourself. You do not exist in order to honour literature by becoming an encyclopaedia of literature. Literature exists for your service.”]

9.     Verse

[“Poetry can exist authentically either in prose or verse. Give him poetry concealed in prose and there is a chance that, taken off his guard, he will appreciate it. But show him a page of verse, and he will be ready to send for a policeman.”]

10.  Broad Counsels

[“Most good books have begun by causing anger which disguised itself as contempt.”

11.  An English Library: Period I

12.  An English Library: Period II

13.  An English Library: Period III

14.  An English Library: Period IV

14a. Appendix

15. Mental Stocktaking

[“... if a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and definitely thinking about what he has read as he has spent in reading, he is simply insulting his author.”]

 

Bennett died in 1931. So a lot of modern literature and all of contemporary literature finds no mention in his book. But the period he covers contains most of the works necessary to illuminate our lives. Moreover, modern and contemporary literature may not be intelligible to eyes inexperienced in the classics.

I found in this book a love of enlightenment and a belief in the inevitable victory of rationality over darkness. Bennett saw the 1848 French Revolution, and I think some of its spirit sits in this book. The rest of the book's fervour comes from a love of beauty.

I hope it is excusable- this vanity of mine in attempting a book review- and my even greater vanity in reviewing a text on history, which is not my subject- and, at that, a vanity so colossal that I pick out Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution [1789 to 1848], one of the most significant history books on the planet. It covers the period of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, two momentous moments largely responsible for most that is dark and light in our modern society. In other words, this book is a medical report of the bloody and womb-ripping birth of a scary brave new reality; that replaced the feudal world of kings, serfs and religious tyranny with a slightly better world. This new world would have more political freedom, yes but also, yes, unchained capitalistic greed- it was a world of 'The Rights of Men', but also a world in which the labouring arm was reduced to a machine, a world, yes, where talent met with its rewards but where man's link with the land was severed; a world where the middle class rose and the poor suffered, and in places such as Ireland, died of epidemic hunger. A world where the guillotine drank its heady draughts, possibly the bloodiest age, until a few megalomaniacs released an even greater flood of blood upon the twentieth century. Possibly the greatest age of art yet in the human story. A world of men who dreamed of universal liberty-equality-fraternity, a dream that we need.

The French and Industrial Revolutions; two volcanoes that spewed forth, in all its beauty and horror, modernity.

Needless to say, Age of Revolution is indispensable for anyone aspiring to be a well-informed human.

A pity, then, that it's a filthily written book.

As much as Hobsbawm is a great historian, he is a bad writer. For example: the first paragraph of the preface contains the word 'insofar' thrice. And here is a sample sentence [p.140], god forgive me:

'The Orthodox Montenegrins, never subdued, fought the Turks; but with equal zest they fought the unbelieving Catholic Albanians and the unbelieving, but solidly Slav, Moslem Bosnians.'

Did you get that at the first read? I didn't. Here is another example, from the same paragraph, and it's a long paragraph: 'There is little in the early history of mountain rebellion in the Western Balkans to suggest that the local Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and others would not in the early nineteenth century have been satisfied with the sort of non-national autonomous principality which a powerful satrap, Ali Pasha 'the Lion of Jannina' (1741-1822), for a time set up in Epirus.'

I am tempted to write the foulest of insults rather than copy down these hideous sentences, sentences that show how clever, insightful and robotic their author is, apart from being the worst writer I've ever seen in print. I call myself an intelligent, insightful, intuitive man; it took me over a year and four unsuccessful tries to finish and [partly] understand Age of Revolution. Not because the subject matter was hard; that's there. But Hobsbawm is the most inept man to ever manhandle a pen.

History isn't supposed to read like this, and the historian is a storyteller, and history is a story, and he must tell it lucidly. Above all history is a human drama, and the historian must not neglect its characters. Hobsbawm mentions Napoleon; but a sketch of Napoleon's personality or soul does not come through and is in fact not even attempted. There is [I think] only one quote from Marx, whom otherwise Hobsbawm praises as a great mind. Where, Mr Hobsbawm, is the French revolutionary, Danton's, immortal speech where he says, 'To conquer we have to dare, to dare again, always to dare!' This sussuration of a moment was the sound of history being made. And where is the romance of those times, where is the flavour of that great age of art where lived such giants as Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Dickens, Austen, Balzac and Hugo? You speak of poets such as Pushkin and Wordsworth [quoted once, only where he wrote directly of the French Revn.], and neglect their actual work. Had you quoted them, it would have solaced the reader, as your book otherwise fails to do. Your book has all the facts, but where is the steep beauty of that age? Mostly, not in your book; a reader is not tempted to go and listen to The Magic Flute to 'get it' or read Old Goriot after reading you; your book does not inspire, as a book of this kind must. An advanced reader like myself finds it hard to fend off the verbal mutations you've spawned; an aspiring newbie would stand no chance. He would have to spend two years giving battle on the 300-odd pages you've mis-written, and then it would still be a doubtful victory. That's the pity about your book; it is very important and very very hard to read. You cannot be said to have succeeded if your aim really was to write for '[...] the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going.'

Mr Hobsbawm, you hampered and caused my personal growth; I cannot thank you enough and I'll never forgive you.

Hobsbawm should have had this book ghostwritten; he would have performed a great service to mankind. Who, like Hobsbawm, is afflicted by vanity; but much of which does not possess his talent, which demands self-denial from him.

Most modern novels make our dark world darker. They tell us that people are pathetic, the world is pointless, life is an accident and there is no hope. 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy is the greatest antidote to such views. It shows persuasively how even what we have left is precious and worth saving.
  
Nature is dead. A worldwide cataclysm has killed all plants and animals on earth. The remaining animals and living plants have been eaten by the survivors, hungry, straggly, reduced to feral foragers and predators. Now gangs of these people have formed to hunt other people for food. Everything is gone, governments, the printed word, all the moorings of civilisation.

A father and his child are fleeing across this land from the latest snowstorm. The father has tuberculosis growing in his lungs and two bullets in his revolver. The bullets are their only hopes against the gangs; against torture and rape, against indignity. The man teaches his boy how to put the revolver muzzle in his mouth and pull the trigger.

South they go, towards the sea. And what if the storm follows them, and they have no place to run to, nowhere except the cold and unalive water? What then? The man and the boy do not know. They do not think so far. They cannot afford to. Besides the storm is advancing and there is nowhere else to go but south. They must go south or freeze to death now. This, incidentally, is all that is left of the American dream-- to prolong life for some more time, to move towards uncertain goals.

Onwards, through a landscape of dead trees that are toppling over, one by one, and corpses of people dried to mummies in their homes, or dangling in the wind from nooses like dried fruit from the dessicated trees, onwards, foraging through abandoned houses for anything digestible, onwards, onwards, hiding from the cannibal punks in the dead jungles of the roadside or in the houses with the dead. Onwards, fearing other people and longing for human presence.

Onwards, into cold nights the man spends in happy wistful dreams-- a sign of death, he believes. It means you've given up, he says, when the good dreams arrive. The son has not given up yet. His dreams are bad. The father tries to protect his son's soul from the surroundings. What you put in your head, he tells the boy, stays there forever. It's already there, the boy says. Some mornings, the man looks at his son and wonders if he is a good father.

An image: they reach a plundered department store and there's still a can of coca cola in the prone and disembowelled dispenser machine. The father gives it to his son; he wants to see him drink it. He wants him to have a small taste of a gone world.

Once, after going hungry for five days, they reach an inhabited house with a store of food. A cannibal gang lives here. The father and the son argue that stealing is ok when you're starving and have no other choice. So they steal some food. They also do not rescue the people they find imprisoned by the gang for food. The man knows it's too risky. The boy is heartbroken.

Later, in another incident, they meet an old man and the son shares their food with him. The father wonders why the boy is still kind.

This is because, even in this hellworld, the man and his son are struggling not only to stay alive, but also to remain human. This makes them noble and perhaps brave. They are dirty but not pathetic, they are foragers but not scurrying rodents.
And, as the man tells his son, they are the good guys. They do not give up. Onwards; south to the sea.

Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (Pulitzer Prize winner, 2007) is one of the greatest novels ever written. The world it describes is earth after a catastrophe caused by global warming. There is plenty more plot to it than the bare and incomplete outline I've revealed. Besides, describing a novel and experiencing it is different. It is all the difference between seeing a moss patterned on a rock and taking a photograph of it. This novel, that is filled with dead landscapes and rotting bodies, in fact stresses the beauty of life mainly through the two protagonists and whispers harrowingly for its preservation. The beauty of being human, that is, being able to feel love and compassion and dignity, all this is worth saving. We must lose our cynicism and greed. That is perhaps the most important and poignant 'subliminal message', if you want a 'message', of this novel. Partly, the greatness of 'The Road' is that its 'message', which from other lips would sound banal, sentimental or fake, rings true.

But 'The Road' is a novel, and so it has some other themes too. It is an enquiry into * how we experience the flow of time * the American Dream and the meaningfulness of our goals * and what being human means: how much of it is innate and how much a result of civilisation and education. * Lastly, God is the word most seldom mentioned in 'The Road'. The protagonists, I think, do not talk about God; if they do, it is only a line in passing. Why is that? Is McCarthy saying that we do not have to be children of the same god, that we do not have to be children of god-- period-- to love each other? This is a very general description of the themes; they assume very definite natures within the novel.
Amateur's opinion: I think 'The Road' is an 'American novel', and acknowledges American literary heritages both in theme and style. I can detect the influence of Faulkner in the language of 'The Road', but there are certainly others; these, I haven't read.

It is certain, though, that 'The Road' follows a modern and fashionable literary style: short sparse paragraphs separated by blank lines. This kind of writing creates snippety or fade-in and fade-out scenes linked by pauses. I would have expected this style to be edgy or angsted, but here it enhances poignancy. Secondly, the style creates a heaviness and stillness of time, which is essential for the starkness of existence depicted in the novel. Though spare, the writing style brings to us the dull ruminative rumble of distant storms or the eerie non-noise of the dead towns.

'The Road' is a beauty-ful work. McCarthy's great achievement is to create beauty out of the materials of horror. He does not scar the reader permanently with the novel's harrowing images. The reader finishes the book with a positive feeling of poignancy and empathy and beauty. As McCarthy says in a memorable line: 'What you put in your head stays there forever.' He has put the genuinely noblest of emotions in our heads. This is one of the greatest ethics of a writer, and one of the greatest human kindnesses.

This is a profile I wrote of Y D Phadke, who is acclaimed as a historian. The version here is the original, unedited, as-I-wrote-it copy. It has appeared in modified form in the Indian Express.


After four hours talking Y D Phadke’s voice begins to clot. But his fingers still twitch and swing into their extraordinary gestures, long thin fingers with a restless electricity in them. The listener imagines that when the last flesh has melted off the bony fingers they will still be writing, sewing past and present with a pen.

Phadke says softly, looking at something beyond the wall of his drawing room, “Sometimes a hobby becomes an obsession.” The historian has written about seventy books— he has lost count— on a slew of subjects from the history of nineteenth century Maharashtra, to the Indian constitution, to the Right to Information, to the history of reservations for castes. He has written the Marathi biographies of Subhash Chandra Bose and Bal Gangadhar Tilak in novelistic form. Seven or eight of his books have been in English; the rest in Marathi. Phadke has also written numerous editorials and profiles of people for newspapers. And one compilation of short stories; most of them written during his school days in his birthplace Solapur where a paisa would buy him a cinema ticket.

Now 77, thin and confined to his home in Bandra, Phadke is busy on his saga spanning a series of books on the history of 20th century Maharashtra. Five books of the series have already seen print, chronicling till 1960. He is now finishing his tale of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, at the conclusion of which the state of Bombay was split into Marathi-speaking Maharashtra and Gujarathi-speaking Gujarat, and Bombay became the capital of Maharashtra. In the year of the movement’s conclusion, 1960, 105 agitators lost their lives to the bullets of their own state government at Mumbai’s Flora Fountain. (A sculpture and a flame stand in their memory at Flora Fountain, which itself was renamed Hutatma Chowk.)

Previous accounts of the movement, written by certain leaders of the movement and others, exist. But they are incomplete, Phadke says, because the writers did not have access to the correspondence of their political opponents. And the few historians to attempt the subject were not given permission by key leaders to read their letters.

Except Phadke.

His body of previous work, huge, had won him the admiration of leaders of various stripes. Phadke could access the records of Hindu nationalists and Congressmen equally. He also had the benefit of perspective from his earlier work: for example, he had interviewed Morarji Desai, who was chief minister of Maharashtra during the movement and who had ordered the Flora Fountain firing.

The movement has a cast of characters still in public memory: the novelist and playwright Prahlad Keshav Atre, freedom fighter ‘Senapati’ P M Bapat, movement founder Keshavrao Jedhe. And of course, one of Phadke’s mentors, ‘Prabodhankar’ Keshav Thackeray, father to Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray (Phadke on the Thackeray father and son: “Prabodhankar Thackeray could sway a hostile audience. He had a thoughtful and researching bent of mind, which he (Bal Thackeray) lacks.”
What he has yet to write, Phadke said, is what happened after the movement. What were the fortunes of Maharashtra, economically, politically, socially? He plans to write this part differently: instead of a single narrative, he plans to split it into three: one on economic developments, one on social and the remaining on political developments.

And what then? He cannot say. There are always interesting characters standing out on the plains of the narrative, spinoff subjects require separate chronicling.

And health is a concern. The grand old man of Maharashtra’s history is precisely that: old. Along the way he has survived three heart attacks and undergone an angioplasty. His current concern is his back: he has a problem with his spine but cannot be treated because of his age- weakened bones.

But while he can write, he will. There is always a passion, an obsession, that wants to be fulfilled, that urges the body on.

Phadke’s pen began at the nineteenth century and has crossed into the latter part of the twentieth century, and is drawing close to the ever-shifting seam where the present becomes the past. Pity that the seam will be forever beyond reach.

At the recent BMC polls (like countless previous ones) voters received marks of indelible ink on a finger of their left hand when they visited their local polling booths. This was so that noone could sneak in and vote a second time.

My friends all got nice little dots on their fingers. I got a splodge instead, it looks like the symptom of a skin disease. Moreover, it is the exact shade of purple that disgusts me. 

This is what I get for my loyalty to the republic. Indian democracy has failed.

Let's get it out of the way first: Happy New Year. There is much to see. This is not a night like others; when only the police, journalists and rapists are out and about. The sleek set looking sleeker tonight, like an ooze amber sparkled with plastic crumbs and pearls and lego bricks, leather straps and steel nails, is flocking to places where the night is coloured neon. It pulses in concrete oases against the lonely and disturbing night, and perhaps one may forget it for a few hours. And today of course it is new year's eve, and besides something must be celebrated in these terrorising times.

Is one celebration different from others? Is the act of celebration different from its occasion? No questions tonight, please.

There is a large crowd, watched over by a constable in case someone panics at the thought of not being admitted to a bar and lets loose a few fists. Agitation for celebration. A satyagraha for trance. Abhorrence to nonviolence allright, but what if there's a riot if people don't get to raise a toast at twelve midnight, that fulcrum-time, the hinge on which the old year flips over forever.

So far the people are bearing up. They are chatting away the wait, their teeth showing white now and then, often surrounded by the red shimmer of lipstick. Cruel red flowers with white cores. Everybody is crowded together almost touching and yet the crowd is textured by the invisible boundaries between its various groups. A boy and a girl join the wait in postures of display. The boy is dressed in a blazer, the girl in a dress tight and hanging like a stage curtain above the knees. The boy's hair is meticulously sculpted into kitsch complexity. The girl's plump legs are alarmingly pale as if they were covered not by skin but underskin. Everyone is dressed differently. There are baaad bikers with black bandannas, people dressed like Latino gangsters (one guy is even wearing a hat) all in all, a polyphony of clothing that is accepted without surprise. You are in, the message is, as long as you're cool. The latest fashion in facial hair: thin beards that barely trace the lines of the jaw.

There's a burger joint nearby. Two girls are sitting on the bench outside the place the bench with Ronald McDonald. (Incidentally, what do you think Mr McDonald feels when children sit on the bench? Paternal instinct.) The man accompanying the girls is talking to the cellphone, and as he speaks he casually runs his hand down the plaster-of-paris figurine's shirtfront all the way down.

Most of the women in the nearby crowd are wearing short dresses (oh those thighs) usually black. But none of the dresses are cocktail dresses. Their skirthems are looser and fluttery. The alpha males in the groups dislike the attention the girls are getting. Little do they know this is professional curiosity, journalistic meticulousness with the aim of describing the scene. Let us leave with chins disdainfully cocked. The public has many misconceptions about the media.

Many things are futile. Never mind where all this is happening. What does the name of the place matter, this scene is happening all across the town. Hands are poised towards liquored glasses. At home a religious type is almost certainly reaching towards the aarti platter. A calender is blushing under obsessive glances. The planets are herded and coralled like cattle by rampaging astrologers. Lips are tingling to seam the old year with the new.

Twelve midnight is a few score minutes away. And the fag end of the crowd is restive. Will they usher in the new year outside in a queue?

I am tired of saying 'looked up this or that on wikipedia'.

So, here's a coinage

Verb: 'wikipedal'
Usage: I wikipedalled Botswana today.

Is your indecision final? Did you find out you were God? Finally, and this is a seriously old vex, would you rather be in Goa?
Beware: answering these questions will reveal your stand on the current trend of 'message t-shirts', plain roundneck t-shirts printed with slogans either on the back or the front or both places. Most of these are self-deprecatory slogans, and are therefore pretty truthful: they characterise the t-shirt wearer as an irresponsible, indecisive (see above), politically unaware blockhead. We like the quality of self-criticism in other people.
(Incidentally, the previous sentence would make for a really good t-shirt message, except that a good t-shirt message should be short and easy to understand for the brainless.)
BTW, whatever happened to the 'make love not war' t-shirts? The answer is that times have a-changed, that the slogan, like the attitude, has faded in time. What we've got now is superficiality and purposelessness and myth-lessness and confusedness and fracture. The poor messages are simply reflecting the spirit of their age.
Speaking of the spirit of the age, its manifestations can be as spooky as a ghost sometimes. A friend the other day, a chain smoker, was wearing a t-shirt called 'smoking is a dying art' (the slogan is accompanied by the picture of a skeletal hand holding a burning cigarette). He was smoking the whole evening.
Nearly everyone's wearing a message t-shirt these days, and it might conceivably become a cottage industry. When the fad ends, or changes, the cottage t-shirtmakers will claim government subsidies for the struggling sector. But before that, the trend will run its consumeristic gamut: t-shirt spaces will be rented and bought by mobile operators, builders, fairness-cream manufacturers, Hindi soap opera peddlers, and newspapers in Bori Bunder and Lower Parel. There will be electronically wired t-shirts which change their slogans every few hours. And the Advertising Standards Council will appoint a special committee to monitor this new medium. The Shiv Sena will demand that t-shirt slogans be printed in Marathi as well as English, and blacken (or whiten, according to t-shirt colour) t-shirts with solely English messages.
Occasionally, some genuinely luminous soul or blatant poseur will wear a t-shirt with a couplet on it: or perhaps an Urdu couplet. And you'll look, as beauty walks past you in the throng, and forget the luxury of righteous indignation.