Travel writing in the age of social media is like using an aavin paal cover after you can afford a condom in both economic and social terms. It’s not just gross, it defeats the fucking purpose. Both as an adjective and a verb.
The case of writing about Cities, possibly, is a little less annoying. However, if you need a reason other than it being home, you should merely read Peter Taylor’s ‘A Summons to Memphis’ and not bother.
Sajjad Lone contested in the 2009 Lok Sabha Elections from Baramulla-Kupwara. The idea, predictably, was hailed by the electronic media. Separatists contesting elections, we were told, is a sign of a maturing democracy; of which, everything apparently is.
In 1963, the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution was passed in Parliament. After the debacle of 1962, when China whooped India’s ass, the Congress government had decided that separatists were evil and their demands unpatriotic. CN Annadurai, in his inimitable style, argued that the Amendment was practically aimed at one person — namely him. And his demand for Dravida Nadu. The DMK was forced to drop the demand for a sovereign Dravida Nadu and has not raised it since for both practical and legal constraints.
I don’t know how good a campaigner Meera Sanyal is . Or how good her political communication is — from what I see on TV, it sucks. She is smug and has no charisma to back that up.
Then, there is another Independent. This time, from South Madras. Sarath Babu has fallen into the familiar trap of political idealism. However, the really favorable press he’s been getting, added with a political rhetoric that goes along ‘I know what hunger is’, makes it hard to ignore him.
Of course, it’s not fashionable now to remember how MGR and M Karunanidhi faced poverty and discrimination much worse. Or how their story of artistic and political triumph is actually a change we have been handed over.
Change, by definition, is always sought. Never cherished.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s depiction of feudal order in Pakistan will shock the young in this country. And, possibly, make some of the old feel unappreciated. At least my grandfather, had he been alive, would most certainly have said, ‘I told you so’. Maybe, readers from North India belonging to parts that still haven’t carried out land reform will identify themselves with Mueenuddin’s Pakistan in an entirely different plane.
Centered around a Zamindari type family, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of short stories explores characters across the social spectrum. His portrayal of boredom amongst the rich is remarkable in its honesty. Though, one could argue, his characterization of the poor is sometimes simplistic and he does not lend them the care they deserve. As his land owning patriarch, Mr Harouni, Daniyal too seems to not be fully aware that the servants have a life outside of being servants. Their lives appear viewed from a Zamindar’s eye even when set in a first person narrative. However, the richness in detail and the author’s ability to weave an engaging tale makes the reader more forgiving.
A friend of mine tells me, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s gifted but sometimes not so taut prose is a function of Urdu. She believes Urdu is simply a better language when compared to most Indian ones. That may be true of Hindi. Or, Bengali, if Amitav Ghosh gets included[1]. However, when followed with Tobias Wolff, the difference is stark. In the other direction. Pleasures of a raw talented story teller compared with a master completely in control over writing technique.
[1] — I remembered the Englishman from Sea of Poppies who said something like ‘everyone with 2 acres of land calls himself a Raja’. That was probably the biggest foundation for a feudal structure. Then, Bengal became red.
Reasonable people understand fiction as a way of exploring life. Which explains why this category of people will not review Slumdog Millionaire. However, the obvious binary solution space of idiots who did and the rest who did not blurs a lot more when two accomplished story tellers are considered.
JM Coetzee and Philip Roth.
I do not know what it is that makes Roth American. His stories are set in Americana[1] but that is hardly a reason. So were Faulkner’s and Cheever’s and those never struck one as distinctly American. Maybe it’s his story arc that is simplistic or a world view that is self absorbed — not the characters’ but that of the author himself. Then there is the matter of prose, which is mostly very good and occasionally lazy. These are slips that most readers, and therefore I, forgive. What is jarring, I realized, is what she had nailed.
It’s not lazy prose but lazy fiction. Roth sometimes does not lend enough care to stay honest with all his characters. Like with Marcus Messner’s mother in Indignation. The otherwise wonderful book has the mother delivering a monologue of sorts to her son that is way beyond what a butcher’s wife would have said in the 50s. I was also let down a bit by the lazy prose in parts of Everyman that essentially stemmed from the author speaking for his characters.
Those two Roth books were separated in my reading order by JM Coetzee’s Slow Man. I’d agree this is not Coetzee’s best. Yet his command over lean prose made me realize something that Roth and therefore most American novelists lack. The matter-of-factness that is essential to lean prose is contributed to largely by the complexity of the society the author engages with. And grew up in. There is only so much a 300 year old society can mold a story teller into.
I loved Indignation despite Americana. It was my story, only set in a wrong place. I loved Slow Man even better. Made me want get a wife and procreate. Everyman made me worried about growing old before Slow Man had me planning for progeny. In all, women with money and a functioning uterus are invited.
[1] — I mean Americana to imply something slightly different from this. But you get that.
A banker wants to contest elections. In 2009. She’s running for national legislator promising local executive type action. And, there are bourgeois boys and girls from the Internets who want to support her.
Of course, the same people will also bemoan the way politics gets reduced to a power game when a Mulayam Singh Yadav does the same thing. Albeit, clad in a funny dress. Or, in a language and an accent they don’t think in.
The two main parties in Tamil Nadu have won assembly elections alternatively since 1991. The party in power loses elections and allies — this has been a simple rule of the state’s politics. The reason this happens and the relative merits of each party in terms of delivering on governance over the past two decades can be debated with no real conclusion. One could also argue, the AIADMK is the largest party in Tamil Nadu on the basis of its areas of influence on a standalone basis. Though, that makes little sense in a political scene that is decided by alliance arithmetic.
The situation changes quite dramatically if Lok Sabha elections are looked at. The DMK has been a member of the Union Cabinet in United Front, NDA and UPA regimes. The party has not pulled down a single government — though in typical Tamil Nadu outcomes the alliance headed by it has had close to all 40 seats. The AIADMK won Lok Sabha elections meaningfully in 1991 after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and then again to pull down the Vajpayee government. Beyond those two occasions, there has been no significant AIADMK presence in New Delhi.
It’s easy to dismiss Jaya’s failures in New Delhi by citing her fragile ego. That is simplistic and insults the intelligence of a woman who has headed the largest party in the state with some success. She, more than idiots with free Internet, should know what a huge loss of campaign funds the lack of a central ministry must have been. Especially when her main rival has been accused of raking in thousands of crores over the past decade.
Some of Jayalalitha’s failures in Delhi can be attributed to genuine election outcomes. Most opinion polls suggested the NDA would win and one can’t fully fault her for allying with the BJP in 2004. Though, it could be argued that no party in TN, if in its right mind, would ever have a pre -poll alliance with BJP. This again means, if the election calendar of the country and the state are not in-phase, there is no real way in which a Dravidian party can support the BJP even after the elections. Cases in point: the reason Jayalalitha won the 2001 assembly elections could in part be attributed to the NDA alliance of DMK. Similarly, the DMK walking out of NDA was crucial to its winning of the 2006 assembly elections. The alliances in the state work on that basis. One can either have the BJP or have the Communists and(/or) the Congress. It’s a no brainer as to which is a winning combination. Or, at least what the losing proposition certainly is.
I suspect, somewhere in all this, Jayalalitha learnt the lessons of coalition dynamics as all of us did. Possibly much earlier than anyone of us noticed she has been out of Delhi for really long. She has also been unlucky with the election calendar more than her rival. What she will now do after possibly winning the coming elections will be a lesson in realpolitik. There are no easy options even if she wins. Unless, the Congress throws out a certain Chettiar and she allies with it again.
PS: If all of TN’s 39+1 seats are therefore out of BJP’s reach for the next 10 years, one can safely assume, Rahul Gandhi will be Prime Minister in a few years.
Then, there is Sharanya Manivannan. Who read some verse at the Leather Bar. Which, apparently, was free. I was told she is macabre and shocking. She is hot as hell, that I agree with. As for the depths of darkness, I think she has achieved her pinnacle in the back pages of Metro Plus.
Most people who did not spread their legs for Sudhish Kamath will dismiss the content as apallingly fake. The form, I do not understand. Maybe, poetry is about a hot chick in a funny dress reading out shallow prose with wrong punctuation. That though, I am told, is meter.
Since Slumdogging has been given a break till the Oscar fever returns, Media and blogging now have pink. Apart from waging wars on terror, Pakistan and Australian cricket. Meanwhile, there is a discussion on the pages that no one who wears panties or pink reads. The CEC, being named Gopalaswami and preferring a darker shade, cannot not read the esteemed newspaper. The Editor-in-Chief, cannot not respond to the CEC’s pointed questions with a ramble that makes readers skip to Sudhish Kamath. Who, in turn, rejected theories that mating rituals in mammals were less predictable, citing his own example.
If one does manage to get to the Editor-in-Chief’s response to the second question, it turns out, his defense is that the CEC went ahead with his own assumptions and not The Hindu’s. Stunned by the stinging indifference to the esteem, quotes from the paper’s own assumptions have been provided as evidence to why the CEC’s assumptions based on his own previous assumptions cannot be assumed.
Enraged readers of the newspaper, have rightly been hurt by the sting to the esteem built over six decades of reading every printed word. The Reader’s Editor, meanwhile, was reported to have requested Google to help sort his email.
Mr. Gopalaswami is an able man with a great deal of administrative experience. He is well regarded in the services. But his suo motu act of adventurism, coming towards the end of his tenure as CEC, is constitutionally and democratically out of line. The Manmohan Singh government will no doubt give the CEC’s unasked opinion the quietus it deserves. But its effect will be to stir up political controversy over an institution that has done its job of conducting free, fair, and peaceful elections creditably during Mr. Gopalaswami’s tenure.
