Marine Eye’s View of Iraq War Photographed in Occupation. 8/27-9/16, 2006

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY — U.S. Marine Corps reservist and Vassar alumnus Major Benjamin Busch has attentively photographed his two tours of duty in the Iraq War, which have spanned the 2003 invasion, an early civil organization project, and a more recent reconstruction deployment. Twenty-one of his 2005 photographs, “Occupation,” documenting the effects of the war on both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, will be exhibited Sunday, August 27, through Saturday, September 16, in the James W. Palmer Gallery of the College Center. Busch will discuss his exhibit on Thursday, September 14, at 6:00 p.m. in Taylor Hall, Room 203, followed by a reception at 7:30 p.m. in the Palmer Gallery, and both events are free and open to the public.

“Occupation” spans photographs taken from February through September 2005 in and around Ar Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Al Anwar province. “I tried to record Iraq as its past was dissolving and its future was uncertain. Photographs allow me to hold on to what I notice as I pass through time and place,” wrote Busch, a 1992 Vassar studio art graduate, in the exhibit catalogue. “I am often drawn to record fragile evidence and temporary debris for this reason. The walls will be repainted, the cloth will fade, the garbage will tear away from the wire, the people will age, and American troops will eventually withdraw, but these photographs will remain.”

More.

Photo from here.

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Fast–paced and innovative, No God in Sight captures the seething multiplicity of Bombay through the first–person accounts of an abortionist, a convert, a pregnant refugee, a gangster in hiding, a butcher, and an apathetic CEO, among others.

As the reader is hurtled from monologue to short story to anecdote, disparate lives collide in tantalizing ways. A family flees religious persecution in their village to take refuge in an urban slum; women walk the tightrope of free will and dormant violence; a father and son grant each other the relief of estrangement; and young men and women struggle to comprehend the consequences of sexual attraction. At the heart of the action is the city itself: a teeming, breathing, suffering Bombay that demands subservience and total surrender before it will sanction survival.

Insightful, ironic, and scathingly honest, No God in Sight is a brilliant debut by a talented young writer.

Altaf Tyrewala lives in Bombay and Mumbai. He has worked as a cashier, a telemarketer, a clerk, and an instructional writer. This is his first novel.

My own blurb that appears on the back-cover sounds a somewhat staid, academic note: “Kudos to Altaf Tyrewala for returning the novel to its original, glorious function: giving a name to the city’s teeming masses, turning faces into individuals.”

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Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian playwright and screenwriter who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature and was widely regarded as the Arab world’s foremost novelist, died today, Reuters and The Associated Press reported. He was 94.

More.

Read Edward Said on Mahfouz and “the cruelty of memory.”

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(Thanks, Linta!)

The crash-course in Islam is uniformly edifying, of course, as is this introductory bit of exchange in one of Paris Hilton’s closets:

Paris: That is my If-I-ever-go-to-India outfit.
Friend: Are you planning on going?
Paris: Yes… But don’t you have to, like, cover-up everything?.
Friend: You’re not allowed to show any of your hair.
Paris: Your hair?
Friend: It’s like a law.
Paris: Are you allowed to have blonde hair?
Friend: (Laughs)
Paris: If you travel there … you really have to do this?
Friend: I think so … or you’ll get shot or something.

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Do all Indians look alike? No. But those who write do. Or that is what Stephen Thompson believes. His review of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games begins with the following observation:

Here are certain books that are so similar to one another they almost beg to be grouped together. This is largely true of Indian novels. Look closely at the ones published in the past, say, 25 years, and you’ll see that they’re virtually identical, in theme if not in style and content. For me, Midnight’s Children is indivisible from A Fine Balance, which in turn cannot be separated from A Suitable Boy.

Thanks for the note, Maud, who got it from here.

For a better read on the novel, go to Jeet Thayil’s review in Outlook. Thayil, a poet of note, is full of praise for Chandra’s language:

And one of the delights, for this reader at least, is the Bambaiyya Hindi, presented without italics, explanation, or apology: the apradhis, khabaris and pocket-maars, the bhais and boys, the gullels and ghodas, the phataks and phachaks, the kutiyas, chaavvis and randis, the bibis and bhabhis, the chutiyas, maderchods and bhenchods, the bidhus, budhaus, bhadves and bhadvis, the mausambis and dudh-ki-tankis, the khaddas and golis, the langotiya yaars and bada dushmans, the dhandas and dandis, the thokos and ghochis, the gaandus, namoonas, haramis, saalis and saalas, the lauda lasoons and langda-lullas. These are words that occur so often in Bombay they can be plucked out of the city’s dirty air. But Chandra has done more. He uses them with such unerring gusto that they become celebratory, incantatory, not a code for insiders but something shared, like a song on the radio.

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A figurative painter with an understated touch, Liu Xiaodong (born 1963 in Liaoning province, China) is one of China’s leading and most passionate artists. He has found a way to chronicle—without cynicism—what might be called the psychic landscape of a society in transition.

The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong features five large scale oil paintings that focus on China’s massive Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangzi River. Under construction since 1994, the Three Gorges Dam is the biggest building project undertaken in China since the Great Wall, and will be the world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Yet the dam, scheduled for completion in 2009, has stirred intense worldwide debate, both for its environmental and social impact on the land and population along the river.

In 2003 Liu began working on a series of mostly large canvases in which the massive Three Gorges Dam serves as an allegory of the spiritual cost of material progress. Documenting an extraordinary moment in Chinese history, the monumental artworks presented in The Three Gorges Project poignantly address the project’s equally significant physical and social impact on the region and its population.

Above text and image from here.

Considered one of the members of the early Cynical Realism movement, Liu is recognized for his depictions of alienation and social discord. Married to another neo-realist painter, Yu Hong, Liu depicts in oil paintings such as Smoker (2000) the changing face of Chinese society. Based in Beijing and teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Liu has exhibited in countries like France, the USA, Australia, Japan and Germany. His solo exhibitions include the eponymous exhibition at LOFT Gallery in Paris, France, 2001, and 2001’s Liu Xiaodong 1990-2000, at the Central Institute of Fine Arts, Beijing. His group exhibitions also include the 1992 China’s New Art: Post-1989, and the 1997, 47th Venice Biennial, Italy, amongst many others.

Above text and image from here.

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Shekhar Gupta pays homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan who passed away recently. This is a tribute not only to Khan saheb’s art (”Khan Saheb’s was a talent worthy of Bharat Ratna and immortality”) and the kind of person he was (”You could touch his innocence with bare hands in the heavy monsoon air”) but also to what might for some represent the passing away of the ideal Indian Muslim:

Why did Khan Saheb not migrate to Pakistan with Partition? “Arre, will I ever leave my Benares?” he asked. “I went to Pakistan for a few hours,” he said, “just to be able to say I’ve been there. I knew I would never last there.” And what is so special about Benares, his glorified slum of a haveli in a grandly named Bharat Ratna Ustad Bismillah Khan Street that had more potholes than footholds, and more heaps of chicken entrails from nearby meat shops, than garbage heaps from homes? “My temples are here,” he said, “Balaji and Mangala Gauri.” Without them, he asked, how would he make any music? As a Muslim he could not go inside the temples. But, so what? “I would just go behind the temples and touch the wall from outside. You bring gangajal, you can go inside to offer it, but I can just as well touch the stone from outside. It’s the same. I just have to put my hand to them.”

We want our Muslims to be half-Hindus. Gupta doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say that Indian Muslims have bought into an alien notion of global jihad. He argues the opposite. In fact, he goes on to say that when even when some Indian Muslims engage in terrorist acts, they are doing so not in support of some pan-Islamic cause but only as an attack on our secular nationalism.

I don’t share this optimism. Neither about those Muslims, nor about our secular nationalism. Actually, people like the great Bismillah Khan would, in relative terms, be exceptions–among Muslims and certainly among Hindus. We might all live together as an unavoidable strategy of survival but the gracious and accomodating world that was Khan saheb’s is increasingly alien to us. Our problems on that front, as Gupta rightly remarks, are entirely indigenous, and our solutions too will have to be that. In that picture, the villain is not only the Muslim who wants to tear apart the fabric that someone like Khan saheb wore naturally, as if it were a shawl; it will have to include the faces of men who’re guilty of having incited murder in our midst, men like Lal Krishna Advani and Balasaheb Thackeray.

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Vikram Chandra, the author of Sacred Games, in conversation with Jai Arjun Singh, tells the following story:

Many of the supposedly bad people I met were actively religious, thoughtful about their lives and like anyone else they want to have a structured existence. There was this hitman, for instance, a highly rated shooter, who was a yoga-doing vegetarian. And he said to me, “Agar main meat khaata hoon, dimag garam ho jaata hai jabki thanda rahna chahiye.” (”When I eat meat, my mind gets hot, it doesn’t stay cool like it should.”) He also kept saying to us, “Why are you writing a book on the underworld? You should investigate life’s big problems, the big issues facing us all.”

And so we asked him: “Listen, it’s obvious that you think about all these big things, so how can you justify taking money from someone and putting a bullet through the head of someone you don’t even know?” And he replied: “Woh kya hai, upar wale ne uski maut likhi hai aur mera role hai usko maut dena. Main toh natak mein apna role ada kar raha hoon.” (”God has decided he has to die and my role is to bring him Death. So I’m just playing my part in the grand scheme.”)

Essentially, you see, he’s taking the Arjuna position, which is very clever.

I began reading the book today and was immediately struck by the reportorial or observed quality of the writing. (In fact, shades of Suketu Mehta there.) It is detailed and feels real. That is the meat. The sauce comes from the narrative charm, though kick is more like it, the steady desire to keep the reader interested in what is happening on every single page. (Will it last the remaining 850 pages?)

P.S. I also enjoyed reading this interview with Chandra on the Tehelka website. (Tehelka stories are available online once again! Either they have come into money, or they just weren’t getting any.) One of the points that Chandra has been making in his interviews is that there are deep or abstract narrative structures that exercise a particular hold on us. Perhaps. Another question also needs to be asked: is it only the form of the narrative or is it also the cast of the character? I have in mind the hit-man. How come he has emerged as our philosopher of choice? This is more than simply a question of whether he should or he shouldn’t. It can’t be only about the recycling of the noir aesthetic. I believe it has more to do with the fact that a part of us believes that thought or morality has made us impotent. We are passive. We are confused. The hit-man isn’t. His words are as direct as a bullet.

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August Kleinzahler writes in the London Review of Books about the coverage in the U.S. of the war in Lebanon. Here is what he says about the New York Times:

There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of the important news is to be found in the Times, usually below the fold. It says, among other things, that 58 per cent of Americans want the US to mind its own business in the Lebanon conflict. I’ll give you an unofficial poll that you can take to the bank and cash: if you walk into most any ginmill in the US outside New York, LA, San Francisco, Austin etc, and not a few ginmills inside them, and the subject of the Lebanon war comes up, some sage in the corner with a baseball cap and a Bud will volunteer: ‘I hope the cocksuckers all kill each other.’

On the front page of another issue of the Times was the stock tragic Arab refugee shot of a distraught Lebanese woman in an abaya holding a terrified child. I tell you what the Times is not going to run. They’re not going to run a big colour photo above the fold on the front page of a pretty, light-skinned young Lebanese woman in Prada shoes, Diesel jeans and a Dolce & Gabbana blouse with an arm blown off or half her face missing.

The media have been selling this war like a sporting event: ‘Hizbullah fire 105 rockets into Haifa and northern Israel, killing four and wounding 18, while the Israelis struck Sidon and Tyre, launching 48 bombing sorties against suspected Hizbullah positions with “some reports of civilian casualties”.’ The audience becomes addicted to narratives, digestible narratives. No news organisation is going to meet its quarterly market projections by shoving political and moral quandaries down the throats of its audience.

I thought that the biographical note was also interesting:
“August Kleinzahler, a poet, wrote about the Bush presidential candidacy for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiel in 2000, but was terminated because of ‘obsessive negativity’ on the subject.”

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This photograph of a smiling policeman, displaying for the press a cache of captured goods, appeared in our national newspapers on April 14, 1993. The man in this photograph is Tikaram S Bhal, who at that time was the superintendent of police, Alibaug. The Times of India said that an “arms haul was reported from Walavati area of Srivardhan late yesterday evening. Twenty-five projectiles and seventeen pipe bombs and ammunition were recovered from the creek. Combing operations were going on…” In its greater zeal, Navshakti claimed that the materials recovered by the police were to be used to demolish Bal Thackeray’s home.

Walavati village is about 160 km south of Mumbai. The RDX used in the serial blasts the previous month had been brought to India by Tiger Memon’s men on those very shores. It took four days for the police to realise that the “projectiles” they had found were actually parts of textile machinery and were called bobbins or twist-blockers.

These are the opening paragraphs of my journalistic report published in the latest Time Out Mumbai. (The complete piece is available to online subscribers of the magazine.)

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