I think one of the most masturbatory discussions in the art world is about whether art criticism is dead. (Translation: Is anyone reading me?)

And, is “snark” a verb? More.

And, on the subject of art criticsm, Mia Fineman’s recent essay on Robert Hughes as the outsider-critic.

Renowned Hindi writer and Padmabushan awardee Kamleshwar died of a massive heart attack at the age of 75. Born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, in 1932, Kamleshwar perhaps attained national popularity as the Additional Director General.for Doordarshan when he used to appear in a popular weekly programme Parikrama, and received a much-deserved Sahitya Akademi award much later in 2003 for his book Kitney Pakistan. He wrote some 30 books and several short-story collections and scripts for ten TV serials that included popular ones such as Darpan, Ek Kahani, Chandrakanta and Yug, apart from producing and directing various TV programmes and documentaries. As a journalist, he was editor of Dainik Jagaran (1990- 92), Dainik Bhaskar (1996- 2002) and once popular but now defunct Hindi magazine Sarika, and made his mark in Bombay film industry with some memorable filmscripts such as Sara Aakash, Aandhi, Mausam, Rajnigandha, Choti Si Baat and Mr Natwarlal.

From Outlook.

I remember Kamleshwar because he told me that writers should be historians and historians writers. He was talking of the Partition when he said that. One December morning, five-six years ago, Kamleshwar told me that he had written Kitney Pakistan (How Many Pakistans?) because “I had the iron in my soul. The process of Partition has been going on from time immemorial. In the process of making people more civilized, they have become more brutal. Partition ab humme zyada manzoor nahin. Yeh neem ka ped, yeh Hindustan mein hai. Woh imli ka ped, woh Pakistan mein hai. Ek ped se chidiya udkar udhar chali gayi, uss ped se chidiya udkar idhar chali aayi. Woh chidiya kidhar ki hai?” The birds happily crossed borders between India and Pakistan, and Kamleshwar wanted writers to do the same.

I wish him lasting peace.

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LONDON: Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty has won Channel 4’s reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother and bagged an estimated 100,000 pounds in prize money. More.

Before I got bored by the chain of events, I was puzzled that one of the first riots over the insults against Shetty took place in my hometown Patna. Here is a link to a piece by Hari Kunzru that I had enjoyed reading, especially his sly ethnography of the Indian middle class, and while I’m in the mood let me supply the link to another piece which you might also already be familiar with, this one by Germaine Greer, who is slightly comical in her righteousness here, not because her politics are wrong but because her strident claim to knowledge is so very whatever-is-the-opposite-of-postcolonial.

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Then and now.

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The Nation reports that the actor Sean Penn told thousands of anti-war protesters in the U.S. capital earlier today, “In a democracy we are the deciders.”

ABC News offers this snapshot:

Standing on her toes to reach the microphone, 12-year-old Moriah Arnold told the crowd: “Now we know our leaders either lied to us or hid the truth. Because of our actions, the rest of the world sees us as a bully and a liar.”

The sixth-grader from Harvard, Mass., the youngest speaker on the National Mall stage, organized a petition drive at her school against the war.

Go to United for Peace and Justice to sign a petition for Congress.

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The latest Bookforum has a cover piece by Vivian Gornick on Susan Sontag’s late writings. Here is a link to another piece in the same issue, “What Writers Talk About When They Talk About Writing.” The essay is by Albert Mobilio, and, although this is not available in the web version, there are boxed extracts from older interviews with writers. For example, the following from a Paris Review conversation with Dorothy Parker:

Interviewer: How do you name your characters?
Parker: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.
Interviewer: Do you keep a notebook?
Parker: I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where I put the damn thing. I always say I’m going to keep one tomorrow.
Interviewer: How do you get the story down on paper?
Parker: I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewriter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.

Talking of writers talking about writing, read reports from the Jaipur literary festival here and here — and also how stories were to be found away from the festival on the streets outside .

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Watched Guru in NYC yesterday. Here are some links to what other people thought of it. I’m sure there are about 300 million better reasons for watching the film than the one I had: a character in my forthcoming novel explains that a film should be made about Dhirubhai Ambani, and I went to watch Guru to check out if Mani Ratnam’s reasons for his biopic were the same as my character’s. To an extent, they were. Alas. I say alas because what I felt very keenly while sitting in the nearly empty theater–I was the only person sitting in the theater for some time before the film started, and then a Gujarati family of three came inside and, ignoring the fifty or sixty rows of empty seats, sat down on the seats next to me–is that the film isn’t really about ambition or enterprise. It is about sentimentality. We are a nation because we can sing together, we can dance together, and most of all we can cry together.

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Art-work by Subodh Gupta

Illustration: Outlook

On 13 December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by five—some say six—heavily armed men. Why have 13 Indian intellectuals now written about the attack? Naresh Fernandes explains in Time Out Mumbai:

In their landmark book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 described a “propaganda model” of the US media in which “the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns”. It all sounded alarmingly Orwellian, but 400 pages of material – and recent evidence of how easily the US media swallowed official rationalisations for invading Iraq – make it impossible to disregard the book’s central premise.

The shallow standards set by the US media in the matter of upholding the perceived national interest have been adopted by its Indian counterparts with increasing eagerness since the dawn of so-called liberalisation in the early 1990s. That’s terrifying apparent in 13 Dec, a collection of 15 pieces by academics, activists, lawyers and journalists that examines the attack on parliament on that date in 2001. Five years later, the facts of the incident are still confusing (at its most basic, the authorities aren’t sure whether the assault was mounted by five men or six), as is the logic of the case presented by the prosecutors.

But you wouldn’t know very much about this from your daily newspapers or from the television newscasts. The Indian media fervently reported every confession made by the alleged conspirators and vociferously echoed the government’s claim that Pakistan had hatched the conspiracy to destroy the symbol of Indian democracy. All of this resulted in a little embarrassment when one of the accused men, a soft-spoken Delhi lecturer named SAR Geelani, was eventually acquitted. But another alleged participant in the plot, Mohammed Afzal, is still on death row.

Arundhati Roy sets the tone for the collection in her searing opening essay, posing 13 questions about the investigation into the attack and its implications for our democracy. She’s ably supported by powerful arguments by Praful Bidwai, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Nandita Haksar and Sonia Jabbar, among others. This is essential reading for anyone who believes that our nation consists of more than just an overheated economy.

“Some years ago, I had written that the West’s political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital….”
— Giorgio Agamben, Le Monde, 10 January, 2004

I have edited a special issue of Politics and Culture, with contributions from writers and scholars of law, media, communication, and cultural studies. I hope it serves a useful purpose in classrooms and other venues.

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