Indian Writing

The August issue of Himal is up. Much to linger over, including Sukumar Muralidharan’s essay on the ToI strategy:

..by 1994 the TOI had long since internalised the most significant rule of competition. Simply put, the advertiser was king, and the readership, no longer a burden to be borne, a distant abstraction with little immediacy to the newspaper except as a shopping entity..

The irony is that the threat to security from censorious religious groups is the threat they themselves pose. It is hard to understand why the religious groups responsible for fomenting riots against offensive works are not being prosecuted, and in their places are writers, artists and filmmakers.

It is impossible to believe that a city with real heart would allow 60 percent of its residents (that’s more than seven million people) to live in slums. If India’s most affluent city really had a soul, it would not countenance the inequalities that allow children in the shanties to grow up malnourished…

And this piece by me on some of the documentaries on the city, most recently Madhushree Datta’s “Seven Islands and a Metro”:

One image from Datta’s film comes to mind, that of small, stamp-sized photographs floating in water. Although perhaps a clunky image, it is all the more evocative after the recent train blasts in Bombay. Life seems so fragile in this city by the sea, where six million people travel in the suburban trains every day, clinging on by their fingers, occasionally falling, some dying while crossing the tracks. Inside the cars, they travel tightly packed – some become friends, singing bhajans, sharing intimate family stories, even cutting vegetables. When there is a crisis, they rush to help each other. Other days, the moment they separate, they atomise into the city, as people of different classes, genders, ethnicities, eating habits, smells and stories.