All that is absolutely irrelevant. Except to wonder, how apt that quote of Richard Hofstadter is in another context.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged. In a large and striking measure the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale.

P Sainath detailed the context here. That the largest media house in the country banned admission of the existence of underprivileged is an astonishing case for political and social analysis.

Interesting though is how long it takes some. Stunning really, if that’s 5 years of internet time and still some distance to go. Or is that time? Stunniger is confidently sounding off after the idea of doing that died many years ago. Especially when anyone who has never set foot inside a Law School can type Article 368 on the Internets and find that one of the conditions for an ammendment is,

the provisions of this article, the amendment shall also require to be ratified by the Legislature of not less than one half of the States by resolution to that effect passed by those Legislatures before the Bill making provision for such amendment is presented to the President for assent

The question one will appreciate these louts answering is: why are the regional parties from the Gangetic plain alone in opposing this ammendment? After all, the biggest parties to draw their strengths primarily from a lower caste politics are regional parties from the south. Oh wait. Got it. So we have a first-past the pole system! See, I should be more condescending.

One more thing. Varma boy is reformed. He even gets recursion and WTF.

I had never really understood what art meant thus far and it appears this must be art. It’s a sad thing that I did not understand the movie fully. Or even enough. The cast did not convince me and I thought the dialogues were a bit shallow given the enormity of the scope. But all of that is really besides the point. The Blind River is phenomenal because it uses the visual medium to portray existential trauma and I have never seen Hollywood do justice to the audio-visual experience that movies are meant to be. Clever dialogues, good looking people and reasonable/ good acting make us forget/ignore that. Here is a talking mirror.

Watch The Blind River. I recommend it.

[1] — Not even that. The director seems to be asking us: Okay, you have had sex. Now what?

Turns out, there is a name for that gap . And a story too. Bernard Lietaer calls it the 11th Round Parable.

Michael Thomas understands this well enough to use it as a narrative technique in Man Gone Down. Its good parts being good makes the reader extend benefits of bad prose to the possibly schizophrenic narrator. The book is filled with such vanity stemming from the author’s hubris that I was fondly reminded of this blog. Even the slightest hint at being aware of one’s own limits and attempting to use it as a technique to move forward is charming in any setting. [1]

The narrator of Man Gone Down is an average man. He is black. Or brown, as he calls himself. He is vain, whines all the time and has a sense of victim-hood that makes him spew conspiracy theories like  many other black men. He is Barrack Obama with the negro dialect he chooses; without the ambition or a black wife.

Postmodern construct juxtaposed with racial identity does make for an interesting clash.  However there is the risk of it turning cliched and mediocre — which is where Michael Thomas turns the narrative on its head. He employs a technique where the younger and non-sober narrator living as a social experiment that precedes postmodernism is articulate, violent, lazy and confused. Better still the souring of the dream in that setting is still an idea and not a condition. Which makes for riveting prose within that construct. And Thomas handles the trap of the next layer by letting the narrator be the ennui that his prose threatens to become (and does). That’s either lame or brilliant. Or neither. Depending on which side of Maanga you are on.

[1] - Maybe I am biased.

We may have had trouble defining the previous decade, but the next must be really easy. Any that follows one where the mediocre got famous always is. Whatever one tries, one will suck at it. Because someone worse had tried it already.

Two mediocre books on this topic, written in this period, come to mind. Hence the proof.

]]> http://themaanga.com/2010/01/11/regression-toward-the-mean/feed/ http://themaanga.com/2010/01/10/rti-wants-your-ass/ http://themaanga.com/2010/01/10/rti-wants-your-ass/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:29:03 +0000 Nilakantan Rajaraman http://themaanga.com/?p=1012 Unless one is Hendrick Hertzberg, one cannot make a reasonable case for the raison d’être of government being “doing something” as opposed to “prevent the worst thing being done”. Political discourse at all levels, one could argue, is some variation of this dichotomy.

Independent India achieved that equilibrium by virtue of government inefficiency. The middle classes outside television studios get that instantly and rarely question it. Which is why, those within discuss Tharoor instead of wondering how their tax returns will be on my hands soon. This only gets uglier,

Mr. Gandhi rejected the grounds cited by them, arguing that the claim to privacy was not a universal right applicable to all humans in all circumstances. The Right to Information had been codified, and in a conflict between privacy claims and the Right to Information, the latter must prevail. He held that filing tax returns was a statutory obligation and must be treated as a public activity open to scrutiny. As a tax assessee had already provided information to the state as part of his or her legal duties, its disclosure to “another person cannot be construed as an unwarranted invasion of privacy of the individual.”

Spartacus never had these many people. Be prepared and stock up on K-Y Jelly, dear boys and girls.

1996 is not even that far away. If John Edwards had died in 2009, one can be reasonably sure Amit Varma would have written an year end tribute. If Joe Liberman had, not so much. But Jack Kemp did and we did not hear at all from Amits. And Jack Kemp was not an obscure one-term senator from North Carolina who plagiarized random European communists to deliver one speech. He instead ran against a person who’d plagiarized better in 1988 and won the bid in 2008. Before that, he’d been a member of the House of Representatives for nearly two decades and a football star at the AFL (Okay, the NFL had him as a third string quaterback and dumped him. And he ended up lucky as bored millionaires decided to challenge the NFL just then). The point is, he had way more accomplishments than John Edwards or Sarah Palin. Kemp was also an anti-tax fiscal conservative who randomly spouted supply side economics he did not understand, the kind Amits claim to love anyway.

Web 2.0 makes initiation into most aspects ridiculously simple and my fear is, that takes the charm away for those who can actually charm. Eventually.

Is there anyone else who wants this? Just in case.