I was 16 or 17 when I watched the performance of “Giddh”, a Hindi adaptation of Tendulkar’s play “Gidhade” (The Vultures). The abuse that I saw being exchanged between a father and his sons was shocking. So was the naked language of the marketplace, and even the brothel, being used to describe human relations. It was like a slap on the face of all genteel pretensions that I had so far associated with theatre. Drama was no longer about putting make-up and delivering romantic lines. Tendulkar showed me for the first time that real drama was dirty.

But the unique mix of feudal violence, impotence, and rage that has always for me characterised Tendulkar’s work acquired a critical force on celluloid. In Benegal’s “Nishant” and then, even more powerfully, in Nihalani’s “Aakrosh” and “Ardha Satya”, Tendulkar’s anger flowered into a thing of terrible beauty.

If realism was your religion, Tendulkar would always be one of your gods. When I was working on my last book, a novel about a Bihari journalist named Binod who was writing a film-script, I imagined a scene that had my protagonist paying tribute to Tendulkar’s searing vision. This was about three years ago. And then, six months later, one January day, I happened to be in Mumbai. I called up Tendulkar.

My Tendulkar obituary appears in today’s Hindu.

vijay-tendulkar-obituary-literary-review-amitava-kumar

Act! Organize. It’s boring but do it, the world ends if you don’t.

And as long as I have slipped and am offering advice, here’s some more: Don’t smoke, are you crazy? Don’t take drugs, aren’t there enough chemicals in your shampoo and your apples and your air and your antihistamine, don’t drink it makes you sloppy, don’t drive an SUV are you crazy, don’t make deals with the devil don’t even do lunch with the devil don’t even take his phone calls; he wants you to write a screenplay for him and he wants to give you NOTES.

We had our commencement ceremony the other day. I didn’t wear those robes or march after having sat sweating under the sun. Only drank the champagne that had been poured in clear plastic glasses by the college catering staff, and then shook hands with the parents of my lovely students milling about under the giant tree in front of the library. Champagne sparkles in such a nice way in the May sunlight. The new graduates looked so happy. It was a gorgeous event. The next day at a faculty party my host said that the best commencement address at Vassar in recent years was by Tony Kushner. Indeed, it was. I just read it on the Vassar website and recommend it to all.

Here’s the link to the published version in The Nation.

tony-kushner-vassar-commencement

Hay-on-Wye police station is a modest, friendly, 1960s bungalow. A notice stuck to the reception desk invites visitors to a charity car boot sale; notices inform the curious about Peregrine Watch and warn the reckless off drink-driving. It was into these peaceful environs that Guardian columnist George Monbiot materialised, politely to inform the officer that he intends to make a citizen’s arrest at the festival tonight. The intended object is John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, on the grounds that there is “prima facie evidence” that the former US under-secretary of state for arms control is “guilty of war crimes”. Behaving as if Monbiot was reporting a lost mobile phone, the officer admirably took the explanation of Nuremberg principles this and UN charter that in his stride, and promised to “pass the matter on to Brecon”. An unusual visit? “We get a variety of inquiries in this police station,” returned the unruffled officer.

A diary entry from the Hay Festival. Brilliant!

More here and here.

Of readers’ inquiries about the relationship between autobiography and invention in his work, Kureishi said: “It’s such a dull question. And then people always want to know what time you get up, or whether you write with the window closed, or what your desk looks like.”

My man Hanif Kureishi cuts through the crap at the Guardian Hay Festival.

People often write to ask me about creative writing courses. In the future, I think, I’m just going to quote Hanif: “The writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice.”

And this comes live from Fox news!

(I want a teleprompter in my class.)

(H/t, Babu Subramaniam)

For a special culinary journey into–burp!–postcolonial mirth, click here.

(H/t: Asad Haider)

[Hillary Clinton’s] most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”

Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”

The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies — from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions — but felt powerless to influence them.

Roger Cohen’s piece in the Times, comparing Obama and Clinton, favorably cites David Singh Grewal’s Network Power.

As you might have heard by now, Obama says his sensibility was partially shaped by the writings of Philip Roth. Jeffrey Goldberg, who heard it first, had set up a reader-contest: “In a couple of pithy sentences, tell us what the first 100 days of a Roth-influenced Obama presidency would look like. I’ll post the best responses. First prize is a piece of liver.” Some days ago, Goldberg put up the entry sent in by the anonymous winner:

“An Obama presidency,” said Murray to me then, shaking that maned head, that maned Newark head that had seen him through the riots, the fires, the lobotomizing of a city’s heart, a head that now embraced within its unusually wide span the trochaic hopes of a Kenyan-Kansan who might, but just might, if all went well and he nailed that Chappaqua succubus to the ground, he was thinking then, get that heart back again. “What a thing that would be, kiddo, what a thing to see a black kid come up that way, a black kid I tell you, a black kid in that Oval Office, a black kid, ‘cause you know as well as I do it’s only a black kid can make us proud again, take us back to making things again, put our people in the factories again, make us proud just to craft a pair of goddamn gloves again and don’t tell me he won’t do it, kiddo, you know as well as I do he will, because he can, yes he can, and he will, he will,” Murray swore. That was 2008, May I think it was, the last time I saw Murray alive, a year to the day before he came coffined back to Dover, shamed in life and death, with the blood of eleven Iraqi schoolchildren on his hands.

The only writer-critic who is good at this sort of thing is James Wood. Here is his parody of Zadie Smith.

A poem by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Is it starting to rain?
Did the check bounce?
Are we out of coffee?
Is this going to hurt?
Could you lose your job?
Did the glass break?
Was the baggage misrouted?
Will this go on my record?
Are you missing much money?
Was anyone injured?
Is the traffic heavy?
Do I have to remove my clothes?
Will it leave a scar?
Must you go?
Will this be in the papers?
Is my time up already?
Are we seeing the understudy?
Will it affect my eyesight?
Did all the books burn?
Are you still smoking?
Is the bone broken?
Will I have to put him to sleep?
Was the car totaled?
Am I responsible for these charges?
Are you contagious?
Will we have to wait long?
Is the runway icy?
Was the gun loaded?
Could this cause side effects?
Do you know who betrayed you?
Is the wound infected?
Are we lost?
Will it get any worse?

“Afraid So” by Jeanne Marie Beaumont from Curious Conduct. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004.

Curious are the workings of history and governments, the relations between the sexes, the behavior of animals, the life of objects, the labors of art, and the transformations of the imagination. In exploring these subjects, Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s poems in Curious Conduct pursue and develop their own mode of investigation, a way into their subjects whether it be by interrogation, time travel, anthropomorphism or other conductive strategies.

Watch a video reporting on the exploitation and protest of Indian immigrant workers

Support the Indian Guest Workers on Day 8 of Hunger Strike!

After Hurricane Katrina, billions of dollars poured into the Gulf Coast region to rebuild. Signal International used these funds to enrich themselves by using the exploitive “guest worker” visas and corrupt recruiters to hire workers.

Some of the welders and pipe-fitters who were brought to the Gulf Coast to work in what amounts to modern-day slavery have taken a courageous stand for justice. On May 14, five of the workers went on
hunger strike demanding they be granted permission to stay in the U.S. while their case against their exploitative employer goes through the courts. They want to be granted continued presence in the U.S., and
they’re asking that the U.S. Congress hold hearings on the abuses of the guest worker program.

With the hunger strike entering its second week, at least 5 more workers join the hunger strike today, while allies across the U.S. and in India fast in solidarity with the strikers.

You can help! Please urge your Representatives in Congress to sign onto a letter calling for them to remain in the U.S. and to hold hearings on Signal International.

Also go here

(Hat-tip, Liz Blum)