May I know the title of the book that you refer to?

Offshore corporations are companies that do not do significant business in their country of incorporation. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks
Sofia.

http://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/knowledge-and-praxis-of-networks-as-a-political-project/

http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2009/01/gutless-realism-james-woods-housebroken.html

http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2008/11/04/cover.htm

http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2008/12/02/history.htm

What do you think?

Nafisa Islam

What! What! What! can be done to bring real accountability to them and stop this expectation that we have to pay for their party when we’re not even invited?

Asia Real, Ventura California

Exaclty how do mortgage backed secrutities work and how are they any different from CDO’s?From what i can piece together is that MBS’s are basically the right to the cash flow from a mortgage??So mortgage lenders would lend to person A. They would then sell that mortgage to some 3rd party. The 3rd part would sell the right to the mortage payments to so different investors after getting it rated by an agency,correct?

In the extract above it refers to “junk securities” and “shell companies’.What are those exactly?Sorry for so many questions =D.

Thanx for your time,
james

It would take too much space to explain it this sufficient detail, so I will just offer a few basics. If you have further questions, I can try to address them. I have written a bit more about this here: http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080926&fname=ali&sid=1
That piece might give you an idea of the casino capitalism that was rampant during the deregulated phase, and explain a few basic things that’ll allow the following to make more sense.

There were several regulatory “lapses” during the period that led up to the crisis. Institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been set up to buy mortgages from lending institution, thus freeing up more capital for more lending to more homeowners. In an increasingly deregulated environment, they were allowed to cut, mix, and repackage these mortgages as abstract securities, and to resell them, thus creating a largely unregulated market for fancy and risky derivatives (see below for a better explanation of this process). Lenders of subprime loans were pretty much unregulated too, since many of them weren’t even banks, but merely mortgage companies that made the loans, and then sold the mortgages to players on Wall Street. And players there were a-plenty, including a whole host of new ones called hedge funds and private equity firms, who were left alone to do as they pleased. Also, the Clinton administration (in 1999) repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that separated comercial banks and investment banks, allowing bankers to underwrite securities and sell them to investors.

But there were two MAJOR deregulatory forces that had more to do with this crisis than any other. One was the fact that investment banks were allowed to leverage their capital heavily. So for instance, for every $1 it held in capital, Morgan Stanley had $30 in debt. This allowed the financial institutions to bet heavily with borrowed money. Which was great as long as the going was good, but it magnified the losses massively when the downturn came along.

The second problem was a strange one. The government chose to look the other way on several issues of conflict of interest. Remember Enron? It had hired Arthur Anderson to audit its books, even while it retained the same company for huge consulting projects. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act fixed that but only after a major debacle, which claimed several prominent organizations. In the case of the current crisis, the securites that were created out of the mortgages (see below for an explanation I have cut-and-pasted from my other piece) became desirable only because credit rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s gave them AAA ratings. Why did they do that? Well, financial institutions that want to sell their securites hire the rating agencies for a large fee to help them convert their mortgages into securities that can be sold in the market. Shouldn’t the rating agency be an independent – maybe a government-run – organization that doesn’t have a dog in the fight?

Should the Congress have created a regulatory body when the boom was underway? Perhaps. But there was enough leeway even within the system for regulators to act in a way that might have prevented the worst of these excesses. But the administration wasn’t exactly a public-minded one, was it?

Hope this helps,
Ali

An explanation about the securities racket:
Securitization is a fancy word for the creation of fictitious products called “securities” (which are themselves based on actual assets that are expected to generate income). This is how the game was played: the get-rich-quick Wall Street crowd peddled these subprime loans that they knew very well were predatory, created a bunch of abstract securities by using the mortgage as collateral, packaged them with fancy labels called MBSs-CDOs-CMOs, persuaded credit rating agencies to attach AAA labels to some of the securities, sold these to investors, exploited accounting loopholes to create shell companies called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, and transferred the junk securities to the balance sheet of the SPVs. So by the time they were done, they had taken crappy mortgages and converted them partly into AAA securities, partly into lower rated ones, and partly into trash that was no longer on their own books (these are the various “tranches” we keep hearing about).

And Denver day 4 finds you raising the question of the intersection between poetry and discipline, or rather, poetry and management. Dedication to one’s heart or even to money requires much more than mere passion. This is all a way of life for those of us in Silicon Valley and thought I’d share something of my own recent thoughts on the subject.

http://entrepreneurialcity.blogspot.com/2008/08/la-commare-secca-1962.html

Hope you’re well out there!

http://www.jonathanraban.com/article.php?id=26

I found it while I was trying to learn a little bit more about Raban’s novel Waxwings, which I recently finished reading. In many ways I think it’s more of a 9/11 novel than Surveillance (though it’s set in 1999).

Hope you’ve had a wonderful summer, and I’m very jealous that you’re on the way to the convention….

Some of the other signatories should have known better–one wonders why/how they were so easily misled into signing a letter that essentially green-lights the CPM’s program of forced industrialization in West Bengal. It was good, nevertheless, that they issued a retraction so quickly.

When one reads the CPM’s defense of its actions in Nandigram, or the apologia offered by the likes of Vijay Prashad and Sudhanva Deshpande (google their Znet piece from some months ago), one is reminded of Stalin’s justifications for rapid industrialization in the 1930s.

“We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do this or they crush us.” That’s what he said. Granted, the CPM’s rhetoric isn’t so bellicose, but its actions certainly have been ruthless.

So the whole race/nationality question here is a red herring, methinks.

I’ve ranted about these issues on my blog: http://tinyurl.com/5c4qdz

Well, there you have it: you’re doing it, too; the operative word being “suspect”.

“The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up.”

There’s nothing in this quoted sentence of Kirn’s to suggest that he’s against the *genuinely* new, certainly. Unless you’re suggesting that JS Foer is an embodiment of the new. You can’t be, can you?

Thanks

Amit too used to have his 750 or more words every fortnight in regional paper The Telegraph till 2004, I guess. I was a regular reader, just to savour his fragile expressions.

I was a fan then. So one day when I read in The Telegraph that he was going to release his book Real Time in the evening, I jumped. I went there, to the British Council in a near empty high class street of south Kolkata. But I was refused entry since I was not a member. I was not alone. Another boy was warded off too. We returned sad, determined to meet him again.
Then I saw him, in person, sombre, in shadow, the intellectual, the feeler of things, some months later, at the Oxford Bookstore. Alas! He was only releasing his new classical CD there. He would sing khayals, not recite his prose. I went away sad, determined not to meet him again.

I’ve formed a grassroots effort to raise awareness on refugee issues in the Washington, DC area with a couple of volunteer friends. You can learn more about us at our website. We hope to organize our third film screening and discussion event this fall to focus on the Afghani refugee experience. I’d like to contact Ms. Sedika Mojadidi about her movie Kabul, Kabul. Is it possible for you to pass her contact information on to me or pass my information on to her? I would very much appreciate your help.

Many sincere thanks,
Vivian Nguyen
the.refugee.experience.series@gmail.com

You must be aware of the fact that once our country was called “sone Ki Chiriya”,to plunder our country came invaders from almost all parts of the globe,The Moughals settled to rule,a dynasty that ruled our country for centuries,sensing a rich harvest with a weak ruler came the British,again ruled our country,After the British left our country, we are being plundered once again by a new breed of invaders called the politicians,they too have established strong roots in our country to plunder it to their satisfaction.

Every politician claims that till his last drop of blood he will serve the nation,but his own blood never serves the nation,has have you ever heard that the son/daughter of some politician has joined the armed forces,no the kith and kin of politicians never like to shed their blood for the nation,but they suck the blood of the nation,you will find that the kith and kin of the politicians either become businessmen/businesswoman or follow the footsteps of their father or mother.Its for the common man to serve the nation,I had tears in my eyes when once I read in a army camp”FOR YOUR TOMMORROW WE GAVE OUR TODAY”,The supreme sacrifice of life.

Since there is a retiring age for all Government Servants their heads should also retire when reaching that age.The politicians should allowed only two elections in their life time,their retirement or two elections which ever comes first.In our country a politician wants to contest elections till his last breath.

The mother of all eveils is the State Elections /the Government formed in a state to rule, does the Government machinery collapse when the Central Government imposes Presidents Rule in some states, no it never does rather the working of the Government Officials improves during that period.There should be a competent Governor in a state to oversee the matters of the state with the help of competent officials.

The age to contest Parliament elections be raised to 35 yrs,let all citizens serve the armed forces for a minimum period of 10 yrs after their graduation.Graduates should only be allowed to contest Parliament elections.

The kith and kin of a politician be barred to contest election till his father or mother is contesting or is Member Parliament,Minimum period of 5yrs gap should be there,before for making him or her eligible.

Like MISA,COFEPOSA,POTA etc.Stringent Law should be enacted to punish corrupt Member’s of Parliament or Ministers,misusing their post for selfish gains.
Now comes a very important question ‘What will a politician do after his retirement”-Politician then will serve the Party-the People-the Nation.
With a population of over one Billion people I am sure we will have better people to serve the Nation in all respects.

Gurdeep bagga
citizen of India

PS — congrats on being shortlisted.

Every few pages you get a B&W photo of, say, Walter Mosley, Susan Sontag or Ms. Krementz’s own hubby, Kurt Vonnegut, seated desk-side with some quote underneath about Writing.

This week’s is Susan Sontag: “Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

This is the webmaster of the official Judith Freeman’s website.

Thanks for pointing is to it. Alabado seas tú.

F. The author is flat-out gorgeous.

Vijay.

I love it. Thanks for this.

How are you? cheers! Siobhan

As to Turkish agony, what I have read from Arundhati Roy’s writings is the agony of widespread apathy, and indeed, the eagerness to shed the weak and defenseless in the hurry for a promised land.

For me, anyhow, the speech seemed replete with so many insights and truths which set out the idiocies, contradictions, and tragedies of our time with a stunning clarity.

The Turkish state does not want to acknowledge that something really terrible happened early last century. Those who resurrect that discussion, are silenced. Even debates in the US Congress is being stifled in this regard. At such a time, what needs reinforcing is to keep repeating the truth to power. Instead, Arundhati Roy seems to suggest: worse things have happened elsewhere.

We have only read the Outlook account, which, as it says in the magazine, is an extract from her speech. Maybe she did, indeed, address the Turkish agony, and then drew universal parallels. But if she used Dink’s killing as an opportunity to return to her pet themes, I’d see that as a missed opportunity.

What are genocides? Historically, they have been about lebensraum. Often, of course, this is living space, but not always. Basically, it is a large scale way of making room — for reforms (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot), reordering (Brazilian street children, Indian Partition, Rwanda, Darfur), or economic reforms. In all cases, a large number of minds are comfortable with the idea that killing sizeable numbers is ok in “the larger interest”. I feel she makes not only an understandable point, but a central one.

How about Taslima Nasreen?

God bless America !

http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Pak-police-arrest-school-kids-for-holding-rally/238688/

Over the past week, we’ve had both the “Musharraf, bad” and the “Musharraf, not so bad” points of view represented at Sepia Mutiny. What we haven’t had is the “Musharraf is seriously weird, yo” point of v…

I have read some of your books (most recently - Bombay-London-New york. I haven’t read you novel - Home Products-yet. It is lying on my desk. Should get to it soon). Have also read your columns at various places. Was touched by a story you did about the family of a Kargil martyr.

Anyways, I was just reading this column today on Hinsutan Times about Munaf Patel - the rustic village boy of Indian Cricket and I had a feeling that you may like it :
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=1014c9dc-b0ca-4a7c-a8f3-a89d477bd773&&IsCricket=true&Headline=Deconstructing+Munaf

by the way, I am from Patna.

Nirazz

Will keep an eye on you.

In your tribute, I especially liked the point your make about libraries being able to provide a voice for the oppressed. If possible, could you make the text of your speech available? Thank you.

1. oversight by international observers for India’s nuclear reactors - vital for technical safety. I live in Mumbai.

2. shift back to peaceful use of nuclear power from weaponry. India doesn’t need really any more testing. It has enough deterence against Pakistan and China.

3. Unshackling of sanctions provides access to better technologies, a better engagement with new research, all vital in terms of safety.

The failure of Communism, the continued lack of success of socialism, show that at heart, people are individualistic, and respond to selfish motives. Socialism and communism are remain utopian. They don’t work because selfish motives lead folks at the top to become corrupt, once they are in control of allocating what others need and later, what others should need and want, and determine on behalf of others. Everything cannot be decided by a group; some delegation is always necessary, otherwise we’d have votes on every issue.

Klein underplays this aspect, and glorifies those who believe in collectivism, implying that if only we give up the capitalist model, life would be simpler and great. I grew up in socialist India; I have friends who grew up in Communist East Bloc and the former Soviet Union. Our life experiences tell us that the grass on our side wasn’t green, though it may have seemed so to Klein, who grew up in a capitalist society (Canada) and lived under the shadow of another society that celebrates only capitalism.

I’m not suggesting that the capitalist model is the best one: it does create huge inequalities and we do need other instruments for social justice. But you can redistribute wealth, not poverty; and collectivist solutions lead us towards sustainable - poverty.

Salil

Klein has it somewhat differently. She seems to find that Friedman reminded people that governments at heart, are selfish, and like doing things for self-aggrandizement. .

I would suggest a distinction between crisis and shock. In a crisis, those under duress can come together, determine the problem, the need, and begin collectively to address it.

In shock treatment, there is the shockee, who is being actively, deliberately broken down, and the shocker, who is entirely in control of the immediate situation. There is no moment of sharing the affliction, of colloquy, of concerted effort.

I’ve not read Klein’s book, but in reminding us to be vigilant toward the rhetoric of crisis and its political exploiters, an important factor for me in evaluating its import would be whether she respects the difference outlined.

In that case my sympathies to people everywhere - if they have to deal with not one, but two such individuals - Ms Roy and Ms Klein.

The Chinese character for crisis also means opportunity, and indeed, even in deeply personal situations (like love, grief, etc), a crisis presents an opportunity. Crisis compels change; crisis is the result of something having gone horribly bad, irrespective of who is responsible for having caused it. After that, one can continue with the status quo, or make a radical shift.

Are you really suggesting that the attacks on the US on 9/11 represented a false crisis? You and I would not be able to have a civilized discussion in which we disagree with one another, if the guys who sent those planes have their way. One of us, and probably both of us, would have significantly diverse and rich views separating “us” from “them” to be considered victims by them.

Friedman never butchered anybody. Stalin did, Hitler did, Pol Pot did, Pinochet did. Friedman reminded governments that people, at heart, are selfish, and like doing things for self-aggrandizement. When left free to choose, they pursue their own ends, and improve their own lives. Naomi Klein’s prescriptions place the collective as more important than an individual. I’m sorry; I disagree.

As one who claims to be critical of market-based economics, she has used publishers, marketing gimmicks, book launches, etc, with the same elan of, say, Friedman himself. She is a beneficiary of capitalism, doing quite well in the system she says she despises. Those who live in glass houses, etc…

Salil

As to the idea that true change comes from crisis, it is completely reasonable, and it has worked in every direction. When a policy has been adopted that has problems, it usually stands in place until its self contradictions make it untenable.

Please support my right of expression.

Two, the deal won’t destabilize S Asia any further than it already has. S Asian instability was at its worst when there was ambiguity about nuclear prowess and intentions. Now it is in the open. What destabilizes S Asia are rogue elements like AQ Khan.

Three, Bush may wish to isolate Iran - but which progressive would want to support a government that wants to exterminate Israel, which jails journalists, bloggers, intellectuals, trade unionists, and which, to use Rushdie’s memorable phrase, bans miniskirts and kissing?

If the left is losing credibility it is because Klein et al (I’m sad to see Chomsky and Zinn here) are so blinded by their dislike of the US, that they will be on the same side as precisely the folks who’d never let them survive if they led the countries in which they lived. I know I sound like Nick Cohen and Chris Hitchens here, but on this one, as one several other things, they’ve been more right than wrong, and the left has not been right, but wrong.

Great cricket today, from Uthappa!

Grace Paley sort of died last week. It was long and slow and coming and she persisted until the end. I went with her to sit in Rep Peter Welch’s office in Burlington in March to try to get him to vote against war funding. Grace sat next to me on a couch in his office and we took turns with other protesters reading the names of US and Iraqi dead. Grace kept asking me what people were saying because her hearing wasn’t so good anymore. A few weeks later, there was a big impeachment meeting with Welch in white River Junction and Bob and Grace were going to come. We kept looking out for them (I had just spoken with Bob the previous day and he assured me they would be there), and finally Bob arrived alone very late. He had forgotten and Grace was too tired to come.

Then she was supposed to give areading at the Norwich bookstore in March and it was cancelled due to snowstorm and re-scheduled for May. When she and Bob read, someone asked her to read her poem about spring that had been in the New Yorker that week. She read the poem in her delicious, accessible manner and when she finished she said, “I don’t know why they didn’t publish this in April. I sent it to them in plenty of time. Oh well, what do I care, they paid me for it so they can do what they want to with it.”

We had a lovely friends and family memorial at The Roth Center at Dartmouth Sunday morning. I have been so weepy about this, having spent so much time with Grace in so many different venues and been so close (as many also were), doing lots of politics and protest together. It was a beautiful event. Even Galway Kinnel came and read a poem of hers. We sang Yiddish partisan songs and freedom songs that she sang with the children in Thetford Elementary School next door and where her grandkids go to school. She has left such a space for us to fill. Always read with a laugh and wise words.

Thanks for putting her on the blog.

Love, Liz

Would strongly recommend others to read this piece not to understand Derek Walcott, but more to get insight into Naipauls view of life !!

Hope you and yours are doin’ well or better, m’fren’–

Jashn-e-Azadi-Half truths and Mental Frames

Vivek has never been to Kashmir, he knows Kashmir as any other Indian would, through biased NDTV programs or through newspapers which don’t present the true picture either. Yet somehow what he asked me surprised me. At the end of the movie he inquired from me as to why the movie did not have even a byte from Mirwaiz(in Vivek’s opinion Mirwaiz is the tallest amongst Kashmiri separatists).I had taken Vivek with me because I thought he would relieve me of some boredom sitting through a rather long monologue cum endorsement session of two hours on Shahadat and Azadi.I half knew the answer for I was seeing it for the second time.The first time I had missed some initial 20 odd minutes because I wasn’t allowed into the auditorium for I might spoil the celebration of freedom(Jashn-e-Azadi).Wonder what censorship this was?I had to produce an e-mail invitation from the respected Director to get into the hall, for his authorities were strict on anyone who chose not to obey them. Anyways that’s past now but the spirit of celebration should continue….shouldn’t it…..
I left without answering Vivek.I was far too buried in thoughts of Jashn. I took the road back to my house, not my home dear, that’s already burnt, oh, way back in 1990, the Jashn of Azadi was being celebrated by torching my home in Bagat-i-Kanipora, in the night when we were all supposed to be celebrating Janam-Ashtami in the cool climes of our homes. The morning newspaper brought news of this celebration to the refugee camp which has been my existence since. I am sure a lot of people will say Jagmohan asked Pandits to leave, even for arguments sake taking that to be true, did it give a license to Sanjay Kak’s protagonists to burn my house and desecrate my religious places. I wondered, was that the way of celebrating freedom. Maybe the director believed it was. That’s why although he sat somber on the banks of Rembyaar in Shopian (while shooting for the movie), seeing the pathetic condition of a 5th Century shrine (of Kapalmochana which was now a broken Shivling, a desecrated spring and razed Dharamshalas) he did not deem it fit to be a part of the movie.

A woman whose goat was killed by the fire that engulfed her house and cowshed was shown grieving for her goat. I wondered what would have happened to Mather and Chander, my two cows, did the spirit of celebration (Jashn-e-Azadi) consume them too, wonder whether they were Hindu or Muslim, my father bought them from one Mohd Yusuf in my village.

My wandering thoughts much like the beard of my dear friend Masood often gives me sleepless nights in exile. This was destined to be one such night. I was instantaneously reminded of the curse of Lakshmi on us, Kashmiris

“Nilamata Purana 294-96. O lord, then angry Visoka cursed Kas’mira, “O wicked one, as I have been absorbed by you today by means of falsehood and you have informed Sati about my activities, so your people will be mostly liars, possessed of impurities, hired servants and dishonoured in the worlds.”

What else explains so many gaveyards when we could have a thousand flowers blooming on the same land, I thought. What else explains Kashmiris being slaves for last 800 years? Sanjay Kak does mention our slavery of 800 years in his movie , what he however chooses not to mention is, who were the masters? Who enslaved us..he wouldn’t say? Half truths as they say can be more dangerous than complete lies. Pyare Hatash’s verses have been shown in a manner where an ordinary non Kashmiri viewer is made to believe as if he is also a protagonist of the Azadi. The translation of the couplet from Rajatarangni was wrong and again misappropriated. Calling Kalhana the chronicler of Hindu Kings was a mischief played in a subtle manner Therein lies the game of the movie maker, his adeptness at appropriating the content.

The magnum opus (sorry for my description, but I am yet to see a longer documentary, probably verbosity is a virtue with Kak) has its own figures for dead and exiled. The movie says two hundred Kashmiri Pandits killed and one lakh sixty thousand exiled. The first images that flashed in front of my eyes when these numbers were shown on the screen were of Brijlal(my father’s best friend) and Choti. Brijlal (a driver in Dept. of Agriculture) and his wife Choti were tied to a jeep in their native village and then dragged till dead. When we received their bodies they were chopped into small pieces as if someone had just brought meat from a butcher. Blood still was fresh in some of their veins as it had reddened the body bag in which we received them. What way to celebrate Azadi??? Kudos to the Robin Hoods who did this, kudos to the director for endorsing their way of celebration, sickness and creativity comes in such mental frames, I never knew. Beware… a lot of modern day Neros are around the corner.

When I asked Sanjay Kak the source of these figures he said he had obtained these from some Joint Secretary in MHA, New Delhi. The movie director being a respected man, I had no doubts that he had got them from GoI. When I asked him what’s the source of his figures, one hundred thousand killed in Kashmir since 1990, he strangely had no GoI statistics to support his figures. Who believes GoI anyway? I have received a reply to an RTI saying only 16455 civilians have been killed in Kashmir since 1990.Now who would believe that. If GoI would have been sacred as Kak wants us to selectively believe, we wouldn’t have the movie in the first place.

We have Yasin Malik as a lead character in the movie, someone around whom the movie revolves,(a savior, a Gandhian ,an ex-terrorist in new attire all rolled into one),giving us sermons, telling us how he treads the path of non-violence. There are flashes of Azam Inquilabi and Syed Ali Shah Geelani (as patriarchs) but it conveniently skirts other separatist leaders, leading anyone to speculate whether the self styled Che Guvera’s of today (based in Delhi) are keen to project Yasin Malik alone as a leader of the masses or is there more to it. His presence at the first screening raised a lot of eye-brows and the discussions revolved more around Yasin Malik than the movie itself, with heckled audience putting him in a fix over his past but then as they say ” Every saint has a past, every thief a future”. The lead character says India wants to impose Brahmanical Imperialism in Kashmir. Does our lead character even know the meaning of the term ”Brahman” or was that a borrowed metaphor from Arundhati Roy, which he did not understand but knew how to use.

One of the flashes in the movie says ”Kashmir is the most militarized region in the valley” Maybe it is. I remember as a kid once we saw a Policeman in our village. We literally walked around him to see what he looks like. For all of us he was an alien who had somehow fallen off his spaceship and landed at our village. It was a quite a sight for all of us and some fun too. What then explains the presence of army and para-military forces in the same village when till 1989 it hadn’t even seen a proper policeman. The movie does not mention why the army had to be placed there after 1989.Isnt it imperative for a film maker to show a complete picture and not half truths.

While I was almost sobbing at the images of graveyards, I was reminded of Abdul Sattar Ranjoor who was not allowed to be buried in the village graveyard by Sanjay Kak’s Robin Hoods’. The movie once again fails to present a balanced point of view and seems more like a mouth piece or propaganda machinery at work. It simply fails to take into account any divergent view from the agenda that the director (or whoever influences him) had set to. How else does one explain that no other point of view is reflected in the movie. Who can argue against the fact that a large section of the masses want Aazadi but it would be equally foolish to believe that no other point of view exists. Again half truths come to fore with consummate ease.

This wasn’t a movie on Pandits that’s what Sanjay Kak wrote to me. We can understand that, knowing well what and whom it is about. Wouldn’t it have been better if Pandits were simply not mentioned in the movie than have a falsified and intentionally biased version of Pandits’ pain and sufferings through a minute and a half screen appearance of their abandoned houses.It seemed like intentionally rubbing salt to their wounds. What also comes to fore is the lack of knowledge about the issue on which he has made the movie. His self hatred is clearly visible in the movie, he believes that Pandits have been unfair to Muslims during the Dogra rule. Maybe it is not entirely incorrect, but when I confronted him on his knowledge of Medieval Kashmir (when Hindus were persecuted), the same was found wanting. I cannot imagine writing a column without delving deep into the subject, but then Sanjay Kak is a different person, he can make a movie on Kashmir without even reading basic texts. A good documentary does not take sides, it simply documents and presents facts as they are, the director is never seen to be either endorsing or negating what he shows. When Sanjay Kak explains the meaning and essence of the term Shahadat, the swell of adrenalin is clearly audible in his voice, that’s when he moves from being a film director to an invisible but strong spokesperson of his concept of what constitutes the celebration of Azadi. To prove his point of view he has even borrowed footages which make it look exactly like the sexed up Power Point presentation that USA made to UN as their premise for attacking Iraq.

History is replete with neo converts going that extra mile to prove which side of their bread is buttered but I believe the Director wants to walk all through the Safar-e-Azadi(similar sounding names….wonder who directs whom)to prove his loyalty to the only leader of Kashmir, Yasin Malik.

While her landmark performance in that homemade video suggests a certain mastery of craft, Paris excels not in the theatre, recording studio or even on the runway, where she would hardly stand out from the other skinny blondes.

So, what explains her vast notoriety?

It may be that some people admire her because she’s everything they aren’t — rich, thin, blond, well-connected — while others despise her for the same reasons. Still others may simply enjoy watching someone so privileged act like trailer trash.

Whatever the case, she is on our minds much more than Aristotle, Einstein and most of our relatives.

http://www.todayonline.com/articles/197197.asp

But that is an old world thinking I subscribe to, too. You wanna be a writer, write then, read before that of course, learn from that. As I mentions in Zafar’s blog (comments) perhaps all it can teach - the teaching courses) are how to be a little bit smart about getting published.

I created the blog for Second Chance Employment Services because I know women that needed help and recieved assistance from this organization regardless of their race
or socioeconomics. All women can become victims of domestic violence and this is a worthwhile cause. Their website is: http://www.scesnet.org

Their offices are:

Washington, DC
818 18th St. N.W., Suite 420
Washington, D.C. 20006

PHONE: 202-331-7451
TOLL-FREE: 888-331-7451
FAX: 202-331-7428

New York City
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God Bless Ludy Green, President and Founder, for making a difference!

Just wanted to ask, may I also publish this poem on my blog???

And on a lighter note - well, sometimes you need a palate cleanser. Makes you all the more happier to find a kebab joint.

Munira
London

It’s easier to call Hitchens a racist than to face up to this very real problem, because we might have to examine some of our own myopia and biases.

Munira
London

Where and when did this Britain exist? And for whom? Both the threat and the threatened are heavily imagined…with sad consequences for Britain’s ‘multicultural’ youth.

See more here:
http://www.passtheroti.com/?p=333

Best;

Salil

The ink fingerprint of someone being processed by the prison system is a useful image here, and a lasting one. But what if Cho Seung-Hui’s writing had been completely bland, or even accomplished, with no hints of his potential to harm? In that case, would we have found (or manufactured) some hint in his writing anyway, all in a struggled effort to impose a narrative that helps us navigate something unthinkable?

(and three cheers for reader-responsive blogging

You have the eye of Lynxeus, you can spot an unusual sentence as you circle 30,000 feet above it, easily discerning the pink wet toilet tissue from the nutritious liver of Prometheus.

http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0713,harvey,76165,10.html

Sincerely,
Carolyn

Yet by noticing it, Kumar instantly conveys so many messages about the relative positions of the two characters: that the woman is conservative and middle-class, that the young man is a stranger to her and that she is uneasy but not afraid by his presence at her door. It’s a fragment of visual poetry which, like the best documentary films, allows us to forget the camera, lights and sound recordist, so that we enter the situation unaware of the craft that has brought us there.
The narrative shifts back and forth between small-town Bihar and the big city—specifically Bombay-Delhi. Binod is the main actor in this drama, but three members of his family share the stage with him: his father Baba, his father’s sister-turned-politician Bua, and Bua’s son, the colourful jailbird Rabinder. The cousin spends much of the novel’s pages behind bars, yet dominates the story with his larger-than-life presence. He is more passionate, more vital and ultimately more successful than Binod. But this book isn’t about cousin rivalry, sizzling romance, dazzling success or terrifying despair. It’s about the adrenaline rush of humdrum survival eked out within the casually chaotic, blood-drenched mobocracy of today’s India.

The novel is shot through with cinematic moments. I have many favourites but one sharp-etched in memory is the journey in a hired jeep through the streets of a small hamlet during a power cut. “In the vivid darkness of the night, their presence was an intrusion. Lives had been carefully constituted…around a routine of darkness…. Again and again, they surprised people who were eating or resting. Women turned their faces away and men shaded their eyes….”

Kumar’s credentials as a non-fiction writer stand him in good stead: real-life events and real names enter the novel with unselfconscious ease. Laloo Prasad Yadav and Ajay Devgan, Bill Clinton and 9/11—they’re all there and many others besides—but this book is about the supporting cast, not the stars. Binod yearns to write a workable screenplay for (fictional) Bollywood director Vikas Dhar, but he can’t make himself turn tricks for the industry. His own love of classic cinema, for elegance and honesty over cheap melodrama makes it painful. His father was once a documentary filmmaker, who used to make the flickering black-and-white films in which footage of smiling peasants winnowing wheat were once the absolute image of Eternal India.

Binod’s vision is at once lyrical and dispassionate. He sees the filth and corruption that define the lives of so many millions of citizens, including members of his own family, but he neither winces nor retreats into fantasy. He holds the camera of his heart steady as he teaches us to see the truth with our moral compass intact, and yet not hate what we see.

thanks of listening (if you are)/ Yuva

thanks

Glad you got it done. I am still working on draft # 3.

I have been a regular, albeit quiet, reader of your blog. And when my wife chanced upon your lead piece in The Hindu Literary Review, she mumbled (through a mouthful of poha): “Isn’t this the person we met?”

Yes, it is. And while I hack away at the book I think I’m writing, this piece provides a modicum of high octane fuel. Thank you. I’m looking forward to reading the novel. Nice cover art, btw.

Hope you’ve been doing well, otherwise.

It reminds me of what I know of Nazi attempts at normalization. When I visited Sachsenshausen, I was surprised to see the homes of the camp’s guards so close to the fence. They would even go home for lunch with their wife and children before returning to, what became for them, just another job. Everyone tries so hard to be able to say, “No, we’re not committing horrible crimes, we’re just doing our jobs.”

Perhaps the stories will start coming from those who have been displaced but still hold fond memories, who have seen more than what Patna/Bihar became in the 90s.

And his name has to be Vijay.

Apparently GM’s ad is just one of SEVERAL new marketing campaigns centered around using suicide as a tool of humor. I’m not really sure if this indicates that we’re becoming more *depressed* as a society, or just that we’re becoming desensitized to misery. Either way, it doesn’t bode well.

My own reaction is sorrow. Not at the insensitivity (after all, it only takes a morning’s work at an ad agency to make a more sensitive version of the same narrative). The insensitivity can be quickly fixed.

I’m sorrowful at the cruelty on display–the idea that the poor are fodder for laughter, the idea that the sword of Damocles that hangs over workers is normal and laughable, that joblessness is something that happens to people who are not “obsessed with quality.”

It doesn’t matter who was laid off by GM recently or not. The culture at large has a taste for blood sport and cruelty–this ad was an expression of that illness. This is what mere outrage cannot address.

It was an interesting portrayal, though. It seemed that it wasn’t the loss of its job that depressed it so, but that plus the fact that it kept seeing GMs all over, having lost his part in the process of their creation. I can’t help drawing parallels between that mentality and that of the farmers in Grapes of Wrath. They were forced off their land and now find themselves in beautiful and growing areas, and if they are “lucky” then they get to pick the fruits of other people’s labor. A depressing situation, and at least in the book, we have seen people give up when faced with it.

Whether or not that should be the basis of a commercial is another matter entirely.

But, ultimately, I suppose I disagree with Wood and Kumar. The film’s reach exceeded its grasp– a noble failure.

Sincerely,
Carolyn

Part 1

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=80900

Part 2:

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=80899

SB

It is better than 99% of the stuff that passes for art history in the academy. Of course, the academy holds its nose at this kind of writing: writing that doesn’t pretend to objectivity or “Kunstwissenschaft.”

I envy your students (my only worry is that, in having too much too read, they might risk not reading deeply enough).

And since you are including films for City, it occured to me that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Paromita Vora’s Q2P would also be good films to include.

Just stumbled upon your blog.. dont ask how.. its the world wide web!

Wonder if you remember me.. i worked at the British Council with Chandrika, and on the release of your book Husband of a Fanatic!

Am in London presently.. kabhi idhar se rukh ho, tho bataiyega.

shipra

It was fucking disgusting.

Really, I’d rather go back to stoic-faced doordarshan journalism.

I have some sympathy with the suggestion of a “literary” novelist slumming it by writing crime, but I also note with interest Jeet Thayil’s comments. Almost every commentator has singled out Chandra’s use of Bombay argot. As I have written on my blog, I look forward to it.

And now, to drop out of the discussion for a while and start reading the novel!
========================

Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

I did think Inarritu’s “Amores Perros” was something special.

How are you doing ? Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.Nice to read your views on the interview in
BS and the fact that people do recognise you as a Bihari.

Accha laga sun ke

Take care Bhai …

I’m very much looking forward to “Home Products.” Great title! The vague warmth of “home,” the callous sheen of “products.”

nice illustraions on the site link. i’m trying to decide which one i like best: the downward dog or the forward bend. something about football-shaped heads trapped between all those flowing lines…no, actually! i like shavasana! the chap’s hair is all on end, like he’s seen some terrifying things while playing dead.

I haven’t read more about the book, and I haven’t read the book, so i can’t say too much more, but from the little i’ve read about his work, he sounds like either a liberal elitist who doesn’t understand that race matters, or a conservative dressed in liberals’ clothes, pushing forward a distraction from addressing race.

How or what that is does not matter. What matters is that Swami sees them over here, in India and Malgudi, and Indians are not over there in Europe, no Malgudian was sovereign or searching in England.

I think that is what it means.

Colonial expansiveness?

Or an imaginative engagment with the world and parameters from which they arise that allows them to transcend them?

Or both?

I wonder, what’s twisting the professionals’ knickers? They of all people shouldn’t be so humorless about this thing. More to the point, I’d have hoped that they’d be more open to the workings of the collective unconscious, how life can give the image to one, and the punch line to another.

God shares his gifts, you sad clowns.

Or, if we really want to scold, we can do it the Banville way, and demolish the novel on aesthetic grounds.

No doubt some genius will soon show that Heaney has a three-word sequence that also occurs in a Wordsworth poem. Bah!

Lovely. I expressed a similar sentiment a few months ago in writing of:

“Whales passing
through the eye of a needle, this life,
this life that’s flanked
by eternities.”

And that, itself, was (I now see) a subconscious echo of Nabokov’s formulation at the beginning of “Speak, Memory”:

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Prabhakar Kumar Awasthi*, H.N.Singh**
Mahesh Chandra Tiwari ***

Department of Geography*, Department of Physics**
Rajya Sabha Secretariate ***

R.S.S. (P.G.) College, Pilakhuwa, Ghaziabad (U.P.), India.
Parliament House, New Delhi ***

(E-mail- awasthi_pra@yahoo.com)
pawasthi@solar.Stanford.EDU

Abstract

A true Son of Bharat (India), Mulk Raj Anand wrote this prose poem in 1934 when India was under the British rule. Son of this motherland, HE was crying because every child has lost their Mother in the Fair of British rule. Everything was there in front of the child’s eye except Mother. That was really the crucial time where Literature has to play its role silently but effectively. So, Mulk Raj Anand took this challenge and he successfully established the deep relationship between Child and Mother (The Son and The Motherland) in his poetic story ‘The Lost Child’ for a great noble cause. Dr. Anand has not merely taken Social, Geographical and Political approaches in this short story but he very well used the phenomenon of physical science and has taken the full liberty in the field of Literature and used it as a strongest tool against the Colonialism. In this paper an attempt has been made to open a new avenue in the field of English literature with a view of natural philosophy as Physics and Geography for Research purposes. Here we have carved a deep relationship of Mother Earth and its progenies as birth right of every individual, covering west and east from a Global point of view to maintain the harmony of love and peace on the canvass of Humanity.

John Company recruited its soldiers for the Carnatic wars from Tilangana and the native recruits were addressed as Tilangas. Later Avadh supplied majority of Company soldiers but the appellation continued in currency and was interchangeably used with Purbias-the Easterners (read foreigners). The unbecoming behavior of sepoys, who came to Delhi in search of a leader to head the rebellion, got embedded in the memory of its inhabitants.

Colonial school of historiography has consumed reams on manufacturing and projecting Hindu-Muslim hiatus a phenomenon of pre-colonial India. Syncretism being the hallmark of Indian history and culture and White Mughals were the living testimony to this assertion. No one is as good as Dalrymple in recreating the life and times of these whites who showed no qualms in mixing with the natives. Author should have explored the social background of these early company recruits to explain the friendly attitude towards natives. It is of interest to note that most of them were from Scotland& Ireland – underdeveloped parst of then England. Life in the cantonment, Delhi’s bazaars and even the food habits of Indian and British find authentic mention in the book. The most amusing is the account of innumerable gastronomical gourmet laid on the dinner table of English Sahibs and their routine of consuming six meals a day.

Life in the fort, daily routine of emperor and especially evening Mushairas were described to their last detail. The affairs of concubines with courtiers were very embarrassing for the aging and ailing emperor indicated that the sunset of Mughal dynasty was just round the corner. Moneylenders seizing Mirza Shah Rukh to recover their debts and helpless Emperor did not take any retaliatory action testifies that he was nearly reduced to nullity. The thefts committed by salatins highlighted their impecunious life. Money arranged from the moneylenders of city by the chief Eunuch Mebob Ali, the confidant of Zinat Mahal, for the marriage of her only son Jawan Bakth and the grand marriage procession that gave us the glimpse of the grandeur and scale of the weddings of Mughal Royalty and author’s penchant for nuance and detail makes it a fascinating reading.

One is charmed to read the graphic accounts of the life of Delhi’s leading family of white Mughals –the Skinners. The famous editor of pro British Delhi Gazette, Mr.Wagentrieber, was the son-in-law of James Skinner who’s English according to Fanny Eden, who interviewed him, was stilted and ungrammatical. The interesting parallels in the lives of Zafar and Thomas Metcalf could convince you that their fate was under the spell of the same ominous celestial configuration. Death of his daughter-in-law in spooky circumstances, Theo’s wife, is like a chapter of Ghost stories of Raj by Ruskin Bond.

Did you know that Zafar used different pen name-Shuaq-e- Rang (passionate) for his writings in Braj Basha and Punjabi? The legendary rivalry of Zauq and Ghalib must have given an extra sting to Mirza’s poetry and he could not hide his jealousy and annoyance for Emperor being partisan in favour of less versatile Ustad-Zauq. Mirza’s meager annual income of Rs750/- his share of the family pension- was insufficient to sustain and maintain even a semblance of the life style expected of Mughal nobility. The death of Mirza Fakhru-the heir apparent who was Ghalib’s disciple and annexation of Avadh from where he was getting Rs 500/- annual stipend - augmented his financial difficulties. Life of Mirza was a reflection of the life of Mughal elite of the period. His sharp observations of his sojourn at Calcutta , his pride preventing him to take up a teaching job in Delhi College, his disgust with Tilangas and brutalities of British all were weaved into the narrative to convey the first hand account by one of the most agile minds of the times marked by chaos and mayhem.

It is understandable that ailing Zafar was disinterested in his trial but Zafar’s ignorance to differentiate between Persians & Russians when asked about his intrigue with the former is indeed baffling. Jawan Bakht the most adorable son of Zafar trading secrets about his mother’s treasure and passing on incriminating evidences against emperor for mere 100 cheroots. There is no two saying that the royal scion showed no ability and dignity to inherit the empire. The termite of decay had completely engulfed the mighty Mughal Empire once the envy of its contemporaries.

After the capture of Zafar from Humayun Tomb by Col. Hudson, fond of Urdu poetry, shot a couplet- dam dame me dam nahi khair maango jahan ki / ab ho chuki talwar hindustan ki. Zafar retorted back with an immortal verse – jab talaq rahegi hindiyon mein boo imaan ki / tab talaq chalegi tage British pe talwar Hindustan ki.( As long as there is a drop of conscience left among Indians they continue to fight British). Except the chance omission of this small but important incident the book is the most authentic account of life and times of Zafar.

Dalrymple has earned the berth in the exclusive club of historians who can write history with an absorbing narrative and spare the reader being subjected to dull and dry narrative. Going by author’s own admission that he could explore only ten percent of the material at his disposal, including hitherto unexplored mutiny papers, we can expect that the next edition will be richer in terms of empirical data and analysis. Publisher should have considered releasing paper back edition for Indian readers too as they have done oversees.

Vikram Kumar

With reference to Rummy’s kitsch, here is a pearl that the kitschy warriors did not heed themselves.

“Regimes without checks and balances are prone to grave miscalculations.” __ Donald Rumsfeld, September 10, 2003

What, I wonder, are the four sites I would like to see?

Once I receive it, I will check to see how favorable your portrayal of the Sitting President is, and I will report back to you.

All the best for you novel.

The biggest bomb-blast case (Mumbai blasts - 1993) is being decided now after 13-14 years of trial by the court of first instance. One does not know how many years the appeal courts will take.

What happened to Harshad Mehta cases? He died in 2001 and a large number of cases are yet in the trial stage (against other accused persons of course).

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

“… to free each word on the page from the inevitable politics that that has on its breath the smell “like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.”…:Sorry, but what does that mean, Yaar.

I suggest, Amardeep takes his point beyond the ridiculous- Why should he not write a book called ” Just An Average Muslim Bloke Investigating A Corparate Scandal in South Carolina”. you know it seems that you guys really missed the point( didn’t you ,Mr. Husband of a F, say “good point”. Were you being serious AK?

See the point is you have to make it a serious point- just hanging around won’t help. When a Syriana is made one should think what would have happened if the Main character had been a Muslim. And if that does not sound ridiculous, maybe it really is not funny.

Best.You know sometimes i feel this kind of humour, like in your post, is nothing but cynicism laced in wit. A.

In it, he says, “Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.”

(and entirely on another note, we appear to have at least one friend in common–husain!)

sridala

Btw, a whole lot of the Mughal elite perished at Delhi. One was a famousancestor of a currently famous songwriter.

“The second argument of ‘sending out a wrong message’ is intimately tied up with assumptions of Afzal’s guilt. Television shows are full of people indignantly proclaiming Afzal to be a terrorist and the mastermind of the Parliament attack. Both are patently false. The investigating agencies and the prosecution named three masterminds: Maulana Masood Azhar, chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the prisoner exchanged for the IC-814 hostages; Ghazi Baba, the alleged chief of Jaish operations in J&K; and Tariq Ahmed, a Kashmiri. The Supreme Court acknowledged that Afzal was neither the mastermind nor the executor of the Parliament attack, and that it had no direct evidence, but only circumstantial evidence to prove Afzal’s guilt as a conspirator. The Parliament attack was a serious and unprecedented crime and Afzal’s sensational arrest two days after the attack, his trial, and subsequent debates on the death sentence all serve to divert attention away from the crime itself…”

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1822302,00120001.htm

A topic that Gurcharan Das has dwelt with, at length. There will be no simple explanations as to why this is so. Part of it lies with the lack of incentives in India for innovation (lack of research institutes, lack of angel-investors, lack of a “tinkering culture” (as Das put it), and arguably, the colonial baggage. As a manager in a technology company who deals with engineers from four different countries (US, Germany, India and China), I do notice considerable differences between each.

But both Mishra and Wang miss the larger point. It is not the nature of free markets that are enablers for the vehicles of totalitarianism, urban corruption, and mass displacement. Mass displacement of rural-to-urban has occured in the US at the turn of the last century. We have to remember that subsistence farming is not sustainable due to technological changes. A more informative discussion was done in this PBS documentary (based on Yergins magnificent book). See this.
Specifically, the link of rule of law in free markets is disussed in detail in the course of a magnificent interview with Dr.Hernando De Soto. The transcripts and the video are here.

Until now every country and culture had their own definition of success and modernity, and it was not always evaluated in monetary terms.

You have correctly pointed out we have a dilema related to how we wish to define success. If we embrace other countries and cultures ideas of success and modernity, we will also be copying and adapting their methods.

The real question is, what do we want, and why?

Kiran Desai, daughter of the famous author Anita Desai, has won the Man Booker prize. According to the Beeb, Desai lived in India until the age of 15, then moved to England to continue her education and now lives in the US. She has become the youngest …

And, of course, Chaudhuri’s own writing is evidence of the non-triumphalist strain in Indian writing in English.

Also, the discussion of the “expansion of the torture-able class” was a unique perspective I had never before heard. The theory that arguably arbitrary lines we have drawn about who is torture-able and who is not are blurring was refreshing in a very twisted way. I call it refreshing because the “expansion of the torture-able class” as I interpreted it implicates blame, and I feel blame is due here. Widening the definition of war crimes or of acts that merit toruture allows torture as an institution to expand, legitimize, and become a fixture. When I read the phrase “enhanced interrogation” in Jamie’s response, the euphemism jumped out at me. I wondered how we could continue calling torture this and executing the reality of torture without blaming someone.

I did find the interview questions acutely annoying, but then so is most maintream Indian media coverage of bisexuality, perhaps even more annoying than the coverage of homosexuality.

Kudos to Vikram Seth and all supporters of the anti-377 petition, regardless of their sexual orientation or lack thereof.

Amitava, I was glad to see your name on that list. The letter gave a jolt of hope and pride to a lot of people, if the joyful hullaballo in the inbox that weekend was anything to go by.

and Teju: Seth has already had that kind of impact, I think, as has his mother’s forthright discussion of his bisexuality in her memoir (and i believe in TV interviews relating to same). But this greater candor will certainly help even more.

“I don’t subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and some of the short stories, there’s a lot of … slightly … garbage…The new one [Terrorist] is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do.”

Pot, kettle, etc.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1884027,00.html

(Click to enlarge. Via Amitava Kumar) The culture of a nation is driven to a large extent by its leadership. If politicians can invoke divisive and offensive religious and cultural code words to buy elections, why can’t businessmen do the

But WTF are you trying to say?

As for Reddy, careful there, Amitava. She might someday refuse to share a stage with you!

I have read both your interventions with great interest. As a critic I can only be glad that both of you have equally expressed your views on the matter through this blog. I believe, this is the most significant point to be made.
Folowing the same argumentative esprit, you could have accepted that Mr. Kumar be present to your lecture so that a discussion might have been heard. In your unwillingness to share the stage with him, and I have to say, in his agreeing to accept this, you have both refused critical engagement. What a pity.

I seriously doubt that Mr Kumar would find Rushdie likening his work to an Amul butter ad or a Bollywood movie to be subtle criticism. Get over yourself.

And honestly, someone called Maya posted a few lines from a poem - ‘They will not come back….etc.’ and the self-conscious angst-ing was too painful to read.

I used to agree with views like the one Kumar expresses, and I do agree that Rushdie’s ‘celebrity’ may overshadow other lesser known Indian writers, but is that really Rushdie’s fault? And people who truly know and love Indian lit value other writers along with him, so really the only people who experience the whole ‘Rushdie is God’ syndrome are people who don’t know South Asian literature very well.

It’s great that you read so widely and study post colonial theory. I recommend Kumar’s HUSBAND OF A FANATIC. Because you value “big stories,” it’s good to get a few more under your belt before making further claims about young Indian writers engaged in subtle dialogue with important writers like Rushdie.

You are NOT God. If you’re famous, please learn to accept these things with either or both of these:
1. Humour
2. Humility

I understand #2 is difficult for you–evidence, your comment–but #1 isn’t too hard a task.

But I must say that often young Indian writers who discuss, debate, extend on and try to ‘defy’ the Salman’s Shadow Myth (and here comes that annoying postcolonial bit) often serve to reinforce it.

Many people see Rushdie as belonging to ‘world’ literature rather than Indian literature. The fact that he is a yardstick for other writers reflects less on his celebrity status and more on the quality of his writing. I used to think the way you do and I haven’t always loved all of his work that I’ve read (Fury, for example)…but I do feel that your essay was more disrespectful than you think.

Likening a magic realist style of writing to an Amul butter ad takes Rushdie’s expressive, exuberant style of writing and makes it appear like a commercial ’safe’ product which doesn’t take any risks. I think there are enough commercial literary works out there - chick lit, fantasy - without implying that Rushdie belongs there.

I do understand your point about academic writing, but some of the best writers work with a wider perspective. Margaret Atwood might seem presumptious in rewriting fairy tales and Greek mythology. Toni Morrison’s later works are more abstract than her earlier novels.

I like quieter, more subtle writing too but I don’t see this as better than Rushdie’s style, just different. Reading your comments on him remind me of the state of ‘Rushdie-itis’ that the writer himself described in an anthology of Indian writing that he edited.

We need people to tell small stories, but we also need some to tell the big ones too.

Internet II allows us to communicate past the earlier walls, but when I see such needless controversies (or a storm in a tea cup - in old English), I wonder if all that Internet II has brought has been an unmixed blessing. To use an Indian English expression, The “blitz-i-zation’ of the literary is complete.

No, we do not care much about your planned introduction to Mr.Rushdie at Vassar, and may I add, the bit about Indian films at the beginning tells us that the impressions you carry about India are probably from the late 80s to the mid 90s, post which we didn’t really have too many of those hero vanquishing villain type of movies to justify your stereotyping.

It is perfectly acceptable that Mr. Rushdie refused to share a stage with you. I don’t see why you are throwing a tantrum on your blog about it. I wonder if the old adage about failed writers becoming critics holds true in your case.

I do not believe that Rushdie’s shadow looms large over Indian writing. Writers like Seth have comfortably found other unique voices to tell their stories in, and have equally well managed to carve rich literary identities for themselves.
~mohit.kishore@gmail

But I also don’t outrage is Amitava’s point here exactly. In The Satanic Verses, Zeeny Vakil has a great line when she says, “Battle lines are being drawn in India today, religious versus secular. Better you choose which side you are on.” (Inexact quote)

While this isn’t “battle lines” exactly, the incident does seem to me to be evidence of lines being drawn — and here it is Salman Rushdie who is drawing them.

These words are not of humility, they are words of a very proud man. If Mr.Kumars account had left any doubt, Mr. Rushidi reply certainly erased them completely.

Mr. Rushdie can certainly be proud of his work and contribution to english literature, but a bit of humility wouldn’t have done him any harm. To belittle a writer for writing a critique on his work does not go well with the stature of Mr. Rushdie.

“Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honor is humility.”—Proverbs 18:12.

I am an admirer of your work. I agree with you that, technically speaking, a threat (such a threat to “cancel a visit to Vassar”) is different from a statement of preference (”I was unwilling to share a stage with you”). I think you are right to insist that it not be interpreted as a threat, since such a threat was never made, and since it is an important procedural difference. Any lawyer would agree with you.

I can almost picture you saying this, and I think it might come off as a little petty, although in this case, I don’t think this is about pettiness. I think this is as much about public perception as anything else. You have a certain image in the public, and people are going with that. The British accent of yours doesn’t help. In the “court” of public opinion, people are not likely to be as careful, or interested, in drawing careful distinctions. May I suggest with all due respect that this be taken offline?

i don’t think mr.khomeini would’ve shared a stage with you if you had written about him either.

why are you unwilling to share a ramp with mr.kumar?

Surely “I threatened to cancel my visit to Vassar if you were involved with it” and “I was unwilling to share a stage with you” are not that far apart. If your reasons for one are convincing, they hold for the other as well, no? Your second clarification is fair enough, but your first is trivial.

And as this might be the only chance I get to address you, let me take the liberty of going off-topic to ask: Did it hurt when you saw “Boom”?

Ouch, no?

He cut you out of his Vassar appearance, not for libel, not for slander, but because you made a reasoned critique of his work. For him to show up here now and accuse you of taking this public, well, that’s a bit rich.

My attention has been drawn to your website, where you claim that I threatened to cancel my visit to Vassar if you were involved with it. This is inaccurate. At no time did I threaten anything of the sort. I did indeed tell the organizer, Joanne Long, that I was unwilling to share a stage with you, and, after she had read what you have written about me in the past, she understood why I would have that view, and asked you to stand down. It might have been more dignified of you to leave this matter private, but as you have chosen not to do so, you ought at least to strive for accuracy in your reporting of it.

It is not for me to comment on your many disparaging remarks about my work, but allow me to make one other correction of fact. You write:

>

If you had done the most minimal amount of homework, you would have known that my “concern for Indian democracy,” far from being “entirely absent,” had led me to make a feature-length tv documentary film, The Riddle of Midnight, whose long climactic sequence, centered around a moving testimony by a Sikh widow of the massacres, resulted in the Indian government pressurising Channel 4 in Britain not to run the programme — pressure which, I’m happy to say, they resisted. It is odd, to put it mildly, to be accused of indifference to a cause which one has, in fact, passionately taken up.

Yours sincerely,

Salman Rushdie.

a movie career alongside colin firth?

Amitava Kumar is currently at Vassar College, and Salman Rushdie was recently scheduled to be a guest speaker. (My own university had him come speak about four years ago.) Amitava, as an accomplished critic and essayist, was suggested by the college to…

A certain seven-year-old Atul and i are informally collecting knowledge of other ‘Atuls’. So far we have the first-name only greeter at the department store, Gawande, and now Dodiya. One day soon, we’ll find pencils, key tags, and other knick-knacks emblazoned with ‘Atul’ at the airport store–in the meantime, i guess we’ll just keep looking

I suspect the Brits might use it, but the Americans won’t. At least not without altering it, or undercutting its power with a border or additional text, etc.

Have you noticed the very different sensibilities in cover design in the US and the UK, Amitava? The American book designer seems a lot more eager to rely on cliche than her/his British counterpart.

“As I walked across Central Park yesterday evening, I was suddenly seized with a feeling of grief which expressed itself as vertigo. I wanted to sit on a bench, but I wasn’t close to one, and there weren’t any trees near at hand against which I could lean.”

More here:
http://www.oncaesura.com/journal/1339/vertigo

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

There’s a goog longish piece somewhere on the joke under Communism (ah, that sounds almost like a political opinion, “the joke under Communism”). The LRB, perhaps, or the NYRB. I’ll let you know if I find it.

My favorite is of the guy who gets fed up waiting in line for bread and says, “Enough of this. This suffering is unbearable. I’m going to go kill Stalin!” And off he goes, angrily clutching a pistol.

He returns three hours later. “Damn this country,” he says, “the line over there is even longer!”

‘Mediayug’ invited you all to write on serious issues of media. This is for the good cause of concern.We are only here to give a new breath to the news media. Hope you all sensed the deterioration of character,vision and space.

Send your articles and views on : mediayug@gmail.com

Mediayug
A dedication
www.mediayug.blogspot.com

Apart from the appreciation, Thomson has also noted a few things in the review that are interesting (and could be debatable):

“Chandra spent a lot of time researching his book. He hung out with police officers as well as members of the criminal fraternity. But has all the hard work paid off? Not entirely. The novel excites and exasperates in equal measure. The problem for Chandra is that he wants to have his cake and eat it. He wants to write a crime caper and still be ‘literary’. Hence all the flowery language and endless digressions which do nothing but slow down what is otherwise a very engrossing story. The pace of the book is further hampered by an infuriating tendency to give potted histories to even the most minor characters. And then there’s the problem of the two protagonists. In the end, they just don’t ring true. Sartaj Singh must be the most self-aware policeman that ever drew breath, while Ganesh Gaitonde, a career criminal with no formal education, gives much too eloquent an account of his rise to power.”

And read this one: “All in all, this is a very patchy read. At the heart of the book is a very clever detective yarn which any crime writer would be proud of, but Chandra surrounds it with so much verbiage you could scream. Oh for a bit of judicious editing. At 900 pages, the book is too long. Chandra may have departed from the typical Indian novel in terms of subject matter, but when it comes to length, he reveals himself to be every bit the traditionalist. Sacred Games, alas, is the poorer because of this.”

We live in the most intolerant of times. This is part of why Professor Zidane’s short course in headbutting proved so popular. It was violence, pure and simple, unscripted, unsanitized. And it resonated with the man on the street, the same man who secretly cheered when Slick Willy got blown in the Oval Office.

Predictably, the media called Zidane a “madman”!

It’s both: they have short term money by sucking up to the 10 Janpath, but they know it won’t last long, so they are increasing their readership by making the site free again. To have it paid - that too at rates higher than print subscription - was an insane idea anyway.

Yes, I can see the “obssessive negativity” bit:)

One of his most endearing features is his extreme crankiness towards the anodyne Garrison Keillor (of Praire Home Companion fame), and towards all middling tendencies in poetry. There is a deliciously malicious essay by Kleinzahler on the subject.

Google Kleinzahler and Keillor, you should come up with the piece.

I think it should be considered a wonderful thing (if it’s true, which I doubt). Literature might help him open his tiny little mind just a bit. Doesn’t mean he’s using the book as a manual on how to treat others.

Next on my reading list is Lolita, and I certainly wouldn’t want people assuming I’m using it as a guidebook!

Prof, you’re hilarious. But I may well adopt this provocative style in the course I teach in the Fall. And I guarantee someone will say to me, “Oh chill out, it’s just art, you don’t need to bring politics into it.”

http://ontheface.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/7/20/2142505.html

“How is it I am still alive? I’ll tell you I’m alive because there’s a temporary shortage of death. This is said with a grin, which is on the far side of a longing for normalcy, for an ordinary life.

Everywhere one goes in Palestine - even in rural areas - one finds oneself amongst rubble, picking a way through, round and over it. At a checkpoint, around some greenhouses which lorries can no longer reach, along any street, going to any rendezvous.

The rubble is of houses, roads and the debris of daily lives. There’s scarcely a Palestinian family that has not been forced during the last half century to flee from somewhere, just as there’s scarcely a town in which buildings are not regularly bulldozed by the occupying army.”

This is all true. But, what about Israel? As a country in constant war, where is its rubble? As one that turns the lives of others into rubble, how has it kept itself pristine? The rubble is carried inside. “Asymmetrical death tolls” is just another fancy word for murder. Twenty of theirs for every one of ours is no way to live.

And what was said in jest about the US- that it had been abused as a child- becomes grimly true about its Jewish ally, this petulant, desperate and lawless nation.

The accumulation of karmic rubble must be very difficult for Jewish people of conscience, even more difficult, I imagine, than it is to be an American citizen these days.

There is no sphere of life that is safe from the internet, not even in India. As proof, I bring you paan.com the website of Bombay’s most famous brick-and-mortar paanvala [via Amitava Kumar]. He’s probably the city’s most famous paanw…

Reading Naipaul and Coetzee is absorbing despite this ‘writing about writing’ precisely because it is about the contemplation of the gaps between the writers eye and the world that allows them to measure their own consciousness and awareness of life – the rumination on that space becomes the subject. When you write, you write yourself into life, you create a self, and then you consider that self; the act of writing is the act of living and existing, the act becomes the subject.

This can be worrying, because it inevitably turns towards a degree of internal meditation that leads to a sense of debilitation and the abyss – Naipaul’s ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, a novel (amongst other things) about writing, engages with this dark anomie and obliterating self-absorption. (Remember the aspiring writer Mr Biswas and his mental collapse too). Interestingly, Naipaul has been a writer simultaneously introspective and obsessed with the writer’s life and the process of finding ‘self’ through creating literature, whilst also being a writer concerned with external analysis in the broadest terms – a writer engaged in the world through his non-fiction, the writer in the world, listening, gleaning, analysing.

When you consider his work bearing this in mind there appears to be a tension between the internal and external impulse, and the depths (heights?) Naipaul reaches may have something to do with this; simultaneously torpor and movement as he contextualises himself and this inner consideration within the frame of history and the material world. This is why he is so compelling. See also the protagonist of ‘Half a Life’ and ‘Magic Seeds’ – they are novels about debilitation, incapacity, accidie in the face of the world, about a man unable to act and create his own self. Can you see this in Coetzee too? On a certain level, this becomes metaphor for existence and life itself, the writing and finding of form, the gap between stillness and action.

Ultimately I think writers come to a point in which they must stare at their hands and some of the most interesting literature turns on this contemplation – even Beckett’s sense of the futility of language/life may be partly related to this.

Or maybe not, I don’t know, I really need to stop thinking about these things and do some work.

A, check out this feature: http://www.frizzylogic.org/archives/000967.html

Rebecca’s comment puts forward a lucid thought: utterance is vulnerable. I wonder, also, if people are getting less patient with intricate argument. Is the span of attention is decreasing? Have so many ever expressed such an abundance of opinions? And have those opinions ever been so open to caricature?

Ours will be remembered as an age, not of wisdom, but of opinion!

Arundhati Roy is doing important work, in my opinion, but much of the power to shape discourse is in the hands of those who oppose her. Of course, her shrillness facilitates the opposition to her efforts.

Going with Rebecca’s concept: I’d say that the fact that aspects of Roy’s arguments are so easy to malign is very much beside the point.

What falsehood would that be? Do you believe that the true source of the photograph uncovers the “fact of this falsehood”? What do you think?

After reading a recent post on Prufrock’s Page where he laments “…why is it that publications here can’t think beyond Bollywood when it comes to putting people on the cover? Man’s World has Esha Deol; Maxim has Amrita Arora; Marie Claire has Preity Zinta; why, even Good Housekeeping has Hrithik and Rakesh Roshan. What next, Rakhi Sawant on the cover of India Today? Not so unthinkable, actually…”

Is this a portent of the gradual dumbing-down that has affected the U.S.?

More letters to come soon.

Late style is a mystery. Those who have perfected a complex art often seek a new challenge in simpler forms, in repetition, in childish dissonances. It’s there in Yeats, it’s there in Eliot, and in Beckett, as different as these three are. It’s there in music, too: the “trite” melodies of late Beethoven and Schubert, the nursery rhymes of their buddy St John Coltrane of Philly.

Age, the familiarity with all the old arguments, the having run around the block, the burden of laurels, brings something unexpected: a treasuring of the long-abandoned babblings of infancy. Not sloppy, not casual. Rather: rebirth.

[Thanks. Made the correction. AK]

I could actually rotate my eyes left and right and preen over my shoulders, one was a green orb with fork and nasty tongue out, and one purple, smirking on the other side. Just as I would be ushered by these mini bodyguards into hell I guess.

Leaving aside the politics of Australian cricket, I think one reason for this is that South Asians are still a small migrant group in Australia. East Asians are more prevalent, constituting 4% of the population. South Asians are half of that. However, these numbers are increasing and our current major donor groups are India and China. It’s still pretty pathetic though that there are few non-Anglo Celtic players in the team.

In Chennai, cow dung-water mix is plastered over movie posters to keep cows from grazing on the cinema posters!

There is now also a petition:
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/558

—-

Well, Wole Soyinka was a hero to us in those years, in that part of the world. The prestige came first, that impossibly high profile for a writer in a society that didn’t do much reading. A writer as great as the generals who were at the time busy looting the national treasuries. We spilled out onto the streets in 1986, celebrating Soyinka’s Nobel Prize as if we had won the World Cup or come to the sudden but long-awaited end of a Civil War.

Only later did he begin to exist to some of us as a literary figure: “The Man Died,” his prison memoir; “A Shuttle in the Crypt,” which were poems from the same dark age; “Ake,” the childhood memoir that is his best known book in the West but not in Nigeria; and, above all, the collected plays, in two volumes, in those severe-looking dark blue Oxford University Press paperbacks.

Soyinka was, foremost, a playwright. “The Lion and the Jewel,” a funny (and, in retrospect, misogynistic litte play), bejewelled many a high school theater arts program. It shares something of the energy of “The Taming of the Shrew.” It was Soyinka’s first play.

Soyinka’s best and best known play also has a Shakespearean spirit about it. “Death and the King’s Horseman,” to date the best thing I’ve read out of Africa, luxuriates in the language and ritual of the Yoruba, and brings that reality into an unforgettably strange English. It is a truly monumental play, based on a historical event in colonial Nigeria, and reminiscent in equal parts of “King Lear” (the furious inventiveness of the language), “Oedipus Rex” (the inexorable and tragic mood) and “Madame Butterfly” (with whom it shares certain plot elements and, especially in the figure of the colonial officer, characterizations).

Soyinka’s other plays delved into the mysteries of Yoruba religion. He was obsessed with myths, forests, rituals. He wasn’t famed for lightness of touch.

To youngsters of my generation, Soyinka represented a kind of extreme of what was possible in terms of literary ambition. Being Yoruba, being Ijebu for that matter, was no barrier to entering the rarified world of literature.

That’s why it seems to me just a little sad that Soyinka’s wholly political now. It’s strange that he isn’t making new work (of a literary cast: his polemical essays have continued to be published in a steady stream), and it’s even stranger that he doesn’t seem to have a particularly active relationship with his past work, in terms of facilitating the production of his plays, or leading theatre workshops, or doing book reviews, or giving literary lectures. The well seems to have dried up about twenty-years ago, as if the Nobel proved his point and freed him for other pursuits.

He is utterly consumed by the Nigerian political situation. In his writings now, a lot of the old strengths are gone: the love for the pungent detail, the rootedness in Yoruba mythos and ritual, the bizarre flights of poetical fancy. What remains now is the hot anger that sustained him through the years of military dictatorship, as well as his language: ostentatious and clotted as it ever was. In “Death and the King’s Horseman,” the Baroque density of words suited his subject. But Soyinka’s continuing inability to resist the lure of four and five syllable words, his love of Latinate constructions and rare words in all situations (regardless of suitability) is by now a total irritant to me.

Why is it that the Master, in his dotage, has come to sound exactly like the pompous dictionary-wielding village schoolteacher that he took such delight in skewering in his very first play? His example has poisoned the literary style of many a Nigerian to this day: no one in Nigerian journalism uses a simple Anglo-Saxon word when a Latinate monstrosity would do. No one says “join” when they can launch “amalgamation.” I’d love to go up in a helicopter and drop reams of Orwell’s essay on the masses of Lagos.

To those who wish to experience Soyinka’s genius and impish wit at its best, I’d recommend “Ake,” the memoir of his childhood. There, the subject matter seems to have freed him into what (for him) is the very rarest of literary virtues: simplicity.

Orwell (”Politics and the English Language”) and Naipaul (see Tejpal’s chapter in “The Humour and the Pity”) were both here already but, as any college teacher would agree, the rules bear repeating.

The fact that both Orwell and Naipaul were so strongly influenced by Maugham makes me want to seek his work out, especially his non-fiction. Have you read him?

It would be better if the star rating were not such a prominent part of the page, and better still if it didn’t exist at all. It’s juvenile, and it’s very open to fraud and vendettas.

Fwiw, I have had my share of unfair amazon reviews, but when I was accused of plagiarism on amazon.co.uk , which is something else, I signed on as me and put the story straight - which is always something that you could do to answer the poison on Pamuk.

Wasn’t he the one who wrote “Michael K’s Diary”? Pure cotton candy…

“Nothing in common but blood”–but shouldn’t that be quite a lot? Perhaps its a simple ABCD way of understanding how to return home to a place where I’ve stayed for 10-day trips 6 times.

A certain oblique writing that seems the only way to confront the unconfrontable. What can we say about war or torture, about the suffering of others, that doesn’t insult by its sheer inadequacy?

On the other hand, when you’re dealing with an audience as obtuse as, say, the US government, directness has its value. These people understand nothing that’s not at full volume (this is why Colbert had to be unsubtle), but even that is usually not enough. The struggle continues.

By the way, I saw Pamuk talk at PEN World Voices. His moral courage as well as his enthusiasm for literary work shone through. Undoubtedly a future contender for the Nobel.

You so eloquently write about the disappointment of Rekha (oops! it’s numerologically correct Raekha). Have you ever thought of so eloquently promoting Bihar, the place you were born and where you spent much of your childhood? It is pity to see people like you who rant about problems rather than help find a solution. And the plight of Bihar that you are talking about is basically a legacy of people like you who so easily forget their motherland after making it big.

How much time have you spent in Bihar in recent times? Forget those occasional one-day trips to Bettiah and telling about the darkness through articles in newspapers. I’m sure you haven’t seen much of Bihar. And you are commenting on what’s wrong with Bihar! Whatever few visits you make to Bihar, it is with your eyes closed. You look for darkness rather than light. I think you have become habituated to live in darkness filled with artificial glitter. Go visit Bihar with open eyes and you will see a lot of positive things that you will never ever find in any other part of the world.

It is fine there is no shopping mall worth mentioning in Bihar. Neither there is a grand multiplex nor any IT park. But my dear Amitava, do you have Shahi Litchi or litti or sattu or Malda aam, or makhana in US where you live? Do you ever smell the aroma of rain drenched soil that’s so unique to this part of land (remember that saundha smell)? Do you have tilkut and til ka ladoo in US? Do you have Hazipur ka kela in US? Do you have Holi and Dassehra celebrated with same gusto in US? And don’t worry about multiplexes, shopping malls, and IT parks. Within a few years you will see them in towns of Bihar because not every Bihari is like you. There are people, highly qualified and successful, who are silently burning mid-night oil to bring back the lost glory of Bihar. And trust me that day is not far. You will see it in your lifetime.

It would have been much more worthwhile and productive if you would have used your creative talents in helping Bihar regain its lost image. But you are perhaps not the son of the soil. And who cares for your frequent rant? No body that matters.

Regards,
Mayank Krishna

The story on the other side of the fence (or wall) is slightly different. Every morning, kids are taught yoga there. Some karate classes too. Although they must be charging money for it, I do see a lot of slum kids learning these skills for free. Something positive to start my day as I jog around the park.

There are pigs inside the park too. But no Harvard sign.

Bihar has gone through a very difficult phase during the last 15 years or so. Time enough to frustrate a whole generation of kids. Things are changing. Changes are taking place on the macro level, there is expectancy in the air and rejuvenation in the ranks of people working for its amelioration. Just give it some time.

I hope that next time Rekha lands in Patna, she can feel the glow and warmth of people who chose to stay here and do whatever little they could to make it a better place to live.
She need not worry about satellite images of Bihar , this part of India is arguably one of continuously living regions of the world and will survive itself, despite being Bihar.

Cheers,

I’ve had the pleasure of sharing some thoughts on economics and social issues with IC kumar sir and he’s indeed a great Human being.

Now coming back to the comments of “Raekha Prasad in her piece: “There is not a shopping mall, IT park or call centre in sight. So low, in fact, is the state’s consumption of electricity that satellite images of Bihar, taken at night, show it as the heart of India’s darkness.

I somehow feel pity for folks like Reakha for their ignorance ,ineptitude and insensitivity towards the social realities in Bihar.It’s time people like Reakha realise that they do no good to serve the cause of the state by paiting a dismal picture of the state.They must realise that the issue of development is not confined to the images of call centre,multiplex and shopping malls.

Infact she really cant expect much as our state has many sons of soils like her father who desert their motherland in search of greener pastures.

Would really love to know your comments on this

I wonder why Orissa, with social and economic indicators as bad if not worse, does not suffer from similar a stereotype.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually searched for “sex” and, believe me, I’ve seen a bit of internet smut in my time.

It’s tempting to draw conclusions from the google trends results though.

Often we forget that lots of Internet content is consumed without Google. For eg: 90% of the content i read is regularly bookmarked pages or through RSS reader

your sensitivity, sir, is well put and well taken.

I don’t really feel that this issue is as complicated as some folks on the “blogosphere” (oh, groan, is that really a word now?) are making it out to be. This is a young girl who was out for quick fame and a quick buck, and she’s not really a writer and not really invested in any sort of creative process–if she was, she wouldn’t have done what she did. As a writer yourself, I’m surprised that you are finding it difficult to figure out how to react to this. I personally would be grotesquely offended if I were a published, working writer and some brat lifted my work and attempted to pass it off as her own.

And Little, Brown is to blame for this as well–seriously now, who gives a high-schooler a two book contract? I mean…what? Even before this plagarism thing broke I had read reviews and plot summaries of the book and my first thought was “Huh, wow, it sounds like the movie ‘Mean Girls’, except the heroine is desi and instead of infiltrating a clique, she wants to get into Harvard…” I haven’t read the book, but pretty much every review/commentary I’ve read about it (pre-and-post Crimson story) sort of confirms my assessment. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry too much about having an original take on this subject, considering that there wasn’t even a glimmer of originality in her book to begin with. (And now plagarism on top of cliche…how sad.)

Used copies of the recalled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, the $21.95 debut novel from Kaavya Viswanathan may be bought on the web for $495.

In its final week of shop sales the book sold some 3,000 copies, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan.

Visnawathan’s book, is said to have sold more than 12,000 copies total.

The original deal was for two books; but Little, Brown has cancelled the second book and declared that a revised edition of Opal will not be reissued.

all three of them are wonderful.

Heh heh. It’s easy to forget that, all his recent self-parody notwithstanding, Rushdie has a marvellous way with a pun. Coca-colonisation is another favorite of mine.

Or just use bugmenot.com!

Lovely poem.

It was great to see you today (as usual)!

good night,
c

The obsession of the publishing world with locating the ‘authentic’ can lead to art that is clunky with ‘explanation’ and is preoccupied with social issues to a degree that is almost neurotic, is self-righteous and stands there panting for attention. It can also seriously circumscribe the imaginative life. It can lead to posturing - which is fine in a writer if he wants to play the role but is disastrous when it bleeds into the writing itself.

I don’t think first time novels should have to bear the burden of being representative of anything other than their own selves – authenticity in writing emerges from something almost intangible – it has to do with the originality and coherence and unique rhetoric of a work. Reducing Asian or black writers to the role of oracles who must bring the news from amongst the coolies in the ghetto is expecting the wrong thing both of a writer and their art.

Some of this is just the crudity of the publishing world – pumping up novels with hype and expectation to differentiate them in the market. What it does for the truest appreciation of individual works can only be guessed at. But it may not do justice to the writer and their work.

Hap, the end of your comment puts me in mind of a poem about lupins from Seamus Heaney’s last collection, “Electric Light,” which contains the lines:

They stood. And stood for something, Just by standing. In waiting.

and

Sifting lightness and small jittery promise.

I do enjoy this blog’s elightening forays into the visual arts.

Milk weed, also prominent along upstate New York roads, is enigmatic and comely. It solicits squeezing. The pod is filled with a creamy white ooze that remains on your hand for a long time. Unlike the cars that stopped for you, the milkweed was passive and had no agenda. It stood beside you, filled with promise.

Great picture too!

1. Amitava. 2. Vik. 3. Long time!

1. Re: Your Blog.
2. “ego-google”
2(a) doppelganger
(b) (Upstart poker player U.K.)

Stumble-Upon
Scanning>Skimming>Sorting
Content> Seriality> Consecutiveness> “Narrative”?

So here’s a short account of my odd fascination and the “mania” with lists. In 2002 I was running a never quite weekly arts salon called The Wednesday Circle. The last Wednesday Circle of that year the conceptual topic was listing. Amazon provided a place in the machine to experiment with this. (By coincidence a close friend from high school, now a projects developer at Amazon, helped design this Listmania feature, but that more accounts for my continuation as a tool of this tool rather than why I got started). As you well know academics signal to each other through citations, academics sometimes read bibliographies for pleasure, and we modern bibliophiles read more bookshelves than books. Some virtues of lists, and the ideal use of Listmania: The connections are somewhat more open than in a narrative. Good list should be short and rely on simple juxtaposition rather than any claim to encyclopedic authority or completeness. Virtue of listmania is its non-narrative character, not taste-making posture (which is instead represented by the Amazon feature “so you’d like to). “So you’d like to…” [So you’d like to join the be a post-colonial connoisseur of Louis Lamour disabilities of those thrown from horses.]” That’s more like an instruction manual or a claim to expertise. [Though I have put together some “syllabi” though without support text]. Also I’m not into the countdown thing or the David Letterman “top ten” hierarchy, which is not really a hierarchy at all, but just the set-up for a punchline.

Instead, lists as:

compilation
cataloging
indexing
piling
logging
miscellany
shorthand
juxtaposition

Lists are best when more democratic and slightly maniacal. On that note: it is worth defending “net neutrality,” see MoveOn.org’s campaign.

Some list-related activities

1. Look over to bookshelves and assign to a random row a project or significance.
2. Request a Full account of every book overdue book at the library
3. See Hanna Darboven’s Culture Work at DIA- Beacon (temporarily closed)
4. Save receipts from special or random occasions.
5. Daniel Spoerri’s Anecdoted Topography of Chance

take care,
vk

“I am the Walrus” by the Beatles.

Duh.

Click this link for a parody on Cheney’s canned bird hunts
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/03/bye_bye_birdie.html

Click the link below to hear Bush talk on Global warming!

http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1147

His energetic writing still charms and entertains when he’s writing about writers (”literary criticism” doesn’t quite seem the right word for it), and he’s a notable memoirist.

But his recent failure at fiction is indicative, I think, of wider failures in speculative writing in our time. The fidelity to genre is one thing- this form of Austen’s continues to creak along in the most unlikely way- and I wonder not so much that the novel isn’t dead as that other forms aren’t being born in a way that matches our experience. Do we blame the publishers for not championing genre-busters? Do we blame the MFA programs for churning out adjective-addled clones?

This problem of form is perhaps related to my chief objection to Amis story: simply put, the subject seems vulgar to me. It’s exactly the same reaction I had to the synopsis of Safran Foer’s most recent book (or, for that matter, his first). The inherent drama of the material is placed as a substitute for true imaginative work.

Is it too demanding to want work that interrogates the human condition? Must we settle for subject ripped from the headlines? I’ll say it again- it’s vulgar to look directly at this atrocity- and in hands like Amis’s, hands that cannot help but make a thing into a plaything, it’s doubly vulgar. This is right up there with the film of Flight 93.

In the company of Sebald or Coetzee, what one gets are indirect glances, and somehow, what comes across in this elliptical technique is the true enormity and horror of the human condition. There are a few younger writers carrying on this work, but they are by no means among the most celebrated practitioners at work today.

I agree, Philip Gourevitch’s book is golden.

Amit Chaudhuri managed to capture so perfectly some of the anthropological peculiarities of Oxford-grad-student life that it’s unnerving to read. As if the novel is peeking over your shoulder, and into your head.

Having said that, it’s fun to see the expression on Lord Naipaul’s face when a gawping 21-year-old rookie reporter asks him at the Magic Seeds launch, “Sir, have you written any other books?”

I think this captures something essential. And, to a certain extent, it’s also something rare. It’s what, for example, Salman Rushdie is unable to do. And, in a different way (as these two are not usually thought of as similar writers), it’s also beyond Jhumpa Lahiri’s powers. They are more likely to go for the “velvety brown Bruno Magli men’s Ashton calfskin that his mother’s brother Vatul had bought for him at the Nordstroms during that unseasonably cold September when blah blah blah.” And that’s exactly where they fail, in this incessant and fatuous particularity.

Naipaul would just say, “the old shoes.” Coetzee too.

And that (among many other such choices) is where they succeed, and strike us as “realistic.”

It strikes me just now that, in writing about the phenomenology of perception, Heidegger’s example was Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old shoes!

All we hear is “Instapundit” this and “Daily Kos” that. If book blogs are under discussion, it’s the same three or four semi-famous ones, over and over.

And yet, there are thousands of well-written blogs with hundreds of thousands of daily readers, most with a non-commercial or political brief. This blog is a good example of that. Amardeep’s another. Mine (back when I blogged) was yet another. But, by their very waywardness, such enterprises seem to be doomed to (relative) neglect: they can’t be packaged, they’re not “selling” anything, so they are not useful to the mainstream media. But for the Alabama housewife who’s looking for the writings and drawings of fellow gardeners, or for the San Francisco college student who wants to read about the adventures of a professional cellist in England, such blogs are vital and deeply meaningful.

And, I daresay, such blogs may in the future also be the sites of substantial literary innovations.

As for me, I like many other contemporary critics. Among them are James Wood, Jonathan Yardley, Frank Kermode and Pankaj Mishra.

And what does ‘tenured radical’ mean? That’s the proverbial pot and kettle. Lott is listed as ‘professor’ - i.e. tenured - at UVA. Similarly, you are listed as a professor at Vassar. So what’s your point?

This difficult, contrary man that they so delight in pillorying has gifts of attention and observation that are given to only a very few in each generation. But all you ever hear is, “He dissed James! He insulted Dickens!” And this is mostly from people who wouldn’t deign to read James or Dickens.

Naipaul doesn’t need defenders, but something should be said for the honest, personal and combative interaction with literature. And you’ve said it here.

(the Der Speigel interview, which is a great read, is here, & some lengthier comments of mine on it and related coverage are here)

True, that “entirely forgotten.” Most of all by the supporters and cheerleaders of the dam.

For one thing, electricity was never the main reason for the Sardar Sarovar dam, and the electricity it is supposed to generate is a small and decreasing fraction of the benefits from it.

For another thing, if dam authorities truly want to “irrigate drought areas” of Gujarat, why are they not doing it right away? Why, for example, was it that the first major thing they did with Narmada water was to feed it into the dry Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad just before the December 2002 elections? Filling the Sabarmati was never part of the plans for the Sardar Sarovar.

As for “NGO”s donating money to “relocated masses” … there’s so much wrong here, I don’t know where to start. For one thing, there isn’t that kind of money. For another, this is hardly the job of a NGO. For a third, the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal itself, while making plans for the dams in the late ’70s, specifically ruled out handing out money as compensation, observing that it tends to ruin the displaced people’s lives even more, and laid down that R&R should be land for land. (It’s a different matter that MP, for one, has announced that they have no land and are trying to change the NWDT Award to go back to cash).

I could go on, but perhaps I’ll do the shameless plug and ask you to take a look at my book The Narmada Dammed.

Send me a note, please?

NGO now sit around and celebrate their 20 years of fighting against the dam. Its rubbish really. Can’t the NGO, for all the money they have thrown in into organizing and raising awareness for the issue, themselves donated that money to the relocated masses? Talk about inefficiency: an NGO(essentially being run as a corporation with their work serving as marketing) is only prolonging the suffering of the relocated victims.

I KNOW, I am looking at it from a simplist viewpoint; however, the NGOs fighting Narmada dam have achieved nothing in the past 20 years and instead wasted resources which they could have donated to better the lives of those relocated.