Indian Writing

Some TV cameramen in Gaya apparently encouraged a man to set himself on fire. It is alleged that one cameraman soaked the man’s towel in diesel and coaxed him to light it up assuring him that it would be put out after they recorded the pictures.

TV pictures clearly showed that Mishra failed in his first bid to set himself on fire. He succeeded in his second attempt. His 14-year-old son Prabhakar said as he waited to claim his father’s body: ‘‘The media present there did not save my father.’’

From the BBC report:

Frequent sting operations and graphic news presentations are seen as having contributed to its success. But critics say news programmes often degenerate into shocking reality television-type shows.

Recently, a news channel showed the wife of a teacher in Bihar beating up a girl, who the reporter said was having an affair with her husband.

A channel also showed a man being beaten to death by a group for allegedly stealing a buffalo in northern India.

Here’s a Jan 2006 column by Rajdeep Sardesai on another immolation that was covered on television:

The latest debate on media ethics though is a little more complex. It’s been sparked off by a news story that showed a man self-immolating in the heart of Patiala. The visual images were compelling: a trader with garlands around his neck, pouring kerosene over his body, and then set himself aflame. He was surrounded by a police man, fellow-traders, the aam janta and of course, the ubiquitous camera….

I wrote about Omkara for Himal:

Apsara is an old Bombay cinema that has recently been converted into a multiplex. Garage-sized lifts bring us up to the fourth floor for Vishal Bhardwaj’s new film Omkara. Around us, parts of the building are being stripped down and reinvented to make the glossy metallic surfaces of the new Indian bazaar. Outside the rain-drenched windows are the surrounding buildings, some of them close to a hundred years old, filled with the families of migrants who have built this city. Down below, on the narrow street, are lines of waiting taxis, their black-and-yellow roofs glistening in the monsoon showers. Many of the drivers have come to Bombay from rural Uttar Pradesh, seeking a better life.

Omkara transports the audience back to the heartland of western UP, where other young men wait restlessly for life to give them a chance. Some, tired of waiting, have been drawn into a life of crime. After all, in this unforgiving landscape, a gunshot fired from a barren hillside can prevent a wedding from taking place; the man who fired the shot can return calmly to a small-town hostel to play a game of marbles; and when a posse arrives to seek him out, just one call on the cellphone can end the matter…

The rest here.

Mukul Kesavan gets effusive about Konkona Sensharma’s talent - she’s the best young Indian actress, the best Indian actress, the best Indian actor in the business. He bases this declaration on two films - Mr and Mrs Iyer and Omkara - and while I don’t agree with his dismissal of Omkara as little more than a vehicle for her work, I agree with him that she’s very talented. I also liked her in 15 Park Avenue, Titli, Amu, Page 3.

I do think he’s right when he says that

she belongs to a generation of young metropolitan Indians whose speech isn’t as conspicuously marked by their mother-tongues as that of an earlier generation of Indians was.

That’s true of all of us who grew up in cities and project sites across India, far from our ancestral roots. And Hindi, especially the Hindi of the movies and television, is everywhere. It’s one of the languages we end up speaking anyway. So the Hindi that’s spoken in Bollywood can’t be too difficult either for Vidya Balan* who (I think) grew up in Bombay, or for Konkona who, as far as I know, grew up in Cal and studied in Delhi. But Tamil? I thought Konkona made a valiant effort in Mr and Mrs Iyer but there were moments where the accent went wonky. However, what I really appreciate about her work is the effort she’s willing to put in for a role.

Picture of Konkona from Amu.

* Parineeta isn’t such a great example because it had other examples of mispronunciation - such as Lolly-ta for the Bengali Low-lita.

Ram Guha impact?

Twenty-five years after I first heard Bismillah, I was able to repay — in small measure — a debt that had by then accumulated beyond all repayment. A friend who was a high official asked me to write a piece for the press urging that M.S. Subbulakshmi and Lata Mangeshkar be awarded the Bharat Ratna. I accepted the commission, since I likewise believed that it was past time that India’s highest honour was rescued from the politicians, and returned to the artists and scholars for whom it was originally intended. However, when I wrote the article I strayed somewhat from my friend’s script, and added the names of Ravi Shankar and Bismillah Khan to the ones he had given me. All four, I am happy to say, were awarded the Bharat Ratna in due course.

The rest here.

!!!

(via Mogadalai.)

Have been listening to it for days in the car. I didn’t care for it that much the first time I saw the film, but the next time it began to make an impact. No, it doesn’t jump out of the screen and grab you the way Rehman’s music does even in a weak film like Rang de Basanti (I can’t think of anything Rehman has produced that I didn’t like, except maybe the Taal music, which has Subhash Ghai written on it as much as Rehman).

But in Omkara, right from the opening credits, Vishal Bhardwaj’s music blends seamlessly into the film… I especially like Raahat Fateh Ali Khan’s Naina (and I love the way Dolly’s voice is narrating the story of their relationship while the song ebbs and flows around her). I also like Laakad and the two dance songs Bidi and Namak.

Naguib Mahfouz died today.

From Edward Said’s essay on Mahfouz and memory:

Mahfouz is anything but a humble storyteller who haunts Cairo’s cafes and essentially works away quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and pride with which he has held to the rigour of his work for a half-century, with its refusal to concede to ordinary weakness, is at the very core of what he does as a writer. What mostly enables him to hold his astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and time are so closely intertwined is his country, Egypt itself…

(via email from Nandini)

It seems there is such an animal, and that it has been around for 25 years at least. I must have missed the memo.

There are certain books that are so similar to one another they almost beg to be grouped together. This is largely true of Indian novels. Look closely at the ones published in the past, say, 25 years, and you’ll see that they’re virtually identical, in theme if not in style and content.

For me, Midnight’s Children is indivisible from A Fine Balance, which in turn cannot be separated from A Suitable Boy. Directly or indirectly, all three books - and there are other notable examples - are concerned with the same thing: the state of Indian society in the wake of independence and partition.

Oh, right: Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Deshpande, Raj Kamal Jha, Kiran Desai, Kiran Nagarkar, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Manju Kapur, Amit Chaudhuri, Neelum Saran Gour, Samit Basu, Rupa Bajwa, and all the others are writing the same novel over and over again?

Chandra’s novel is hatke and I love it, but India’s a big country, people are writing all sorts of different novels, so please, Mr Thompson, go read some of them before lumping them all together.

(link via Amitava Kumar)

Also see Edward Champion’s post here:

Thompson also suggests that Midnight’s Children and A Fine Balance are “indivisible.” This, despite the fact that the former contains a protagonist with a highly sensitive nose and the latter does not, the former chronicles Indian history from 1910 to 1976, while the latter takes place during The Emergency between 1975 and 1977. There are infinite differences in language, characters, and plotting. But don’t tell Thompson this. So long as those brown-skinned people are banging out those novels, there isn’t a single distinction in his eyes.

Maybe it would have been better to kill the opening paragraph, says Galley Cat.

Do these guys look like… the same guy? The MM reports on Ramu’s spat with Manoj Bajpai:

The much-discussed midnight meeting between Manoj Bajpai and his erstwhile mentor Ram Gopal Varma came to a stalemate because apparently Manoj wanted to play Veeru (the part originally played by Amitabh Bachchan in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay) rather than Sambha (the role of Gabbar Singh’s main side-kick, originally played by Mac Mohan).

Except that, uh, it was Dharmendra who played Veeru, not Amitabh as the report says.

Sheesh.

And the report goes on to tell us about RGV’s final word on Manoj Bajpai not playing Sambha, which is… several paragraphs long. The point being, Mr Bajpai will not play Mr Sambha.

In which, among so many others, Kipling’s son was killed:

“John was extremely keen to join up. Like pretty much everyone else he thought it would be a short war and wanted to play his part,” said Michael Smith, a vice-president of the Kipling Society. “He went at the beginning to try and enlist on his own, but was rejected. Later he tried again, this time accompanied by his father, but again he was rejected.”

It was time to pull some strings. His father was at the height of his celebrity. The world’s youngest Nobel literary laureate, his was the authentic voice of empire, whose work beat the drum for the jingoistic spirit of the times.

Later Kipling was to write:

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied…

Also see his Recessional:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe is to act in the TV drama about the Kiplings during the War.

Chandamama. Mostly cute, sometimes weird, always fun. Started in 1947, turns sixty this year.

This is a picture of the first Chandamama cover, courtesy Rediff.

and thank you for the movies.

From “My Cancer”, an incredibly thoughtful blog by Leroy Sievers about his struggle with cancer:

For many of us, the outcome of this fight — and yes, it is a fight — is not going to be any surprise. The cancer, in the end, will most likely be what causes our deaths. But everyone dies. If you want to put it that way, everyone loses that one fight.

And this is a fight for which there is no shame in losing. It’s how you live, how you fight, that matters. For some people, they give it everything they have, fighting and struggling for every day. Others come to peace with what is happening, and choose not to fight any longer. There’s no right or wrong in either of those positions, or anywhere in between.

What makes any of us win, is what we do with the time we have — the same as for people that don’t have this disease. Did we try to make a difference? Try to do the right thing, especially when it wasn’t the easy thing? Did we try to leave the world a better place? Did we speak out for those with no voice? Those, to me, are the questions that determine whether or not we win, not the war with cancer, but whether or not we win in life.

Also read his partner Laurie Singer’s post for the caregiver’s perspective:

We’ve made many trips to the chemo room now. Sometimes I leave and walk the brick-lined streets of Baltimore, Stop at a bakery where they make some great cookies that have a huge chocolate drop on top — a Leroy favorite. The only good thing about being on chemo? Cookies with big chocolate drops on top move to the top of the food pyramid!

But the room and the image of him sitting there never leaves my mind. I can walk those streets, people-watch and see the world moving on. But my world is back in that room where Leroy is fighting with every healthy cell in his body to live.

There’s not a song on the iPod that can drown out that image, not a chapter in the best book that can create an escape route. Even on the other side of chemo, you never leave that room.

I know exactly what she means. Since October 2002, my mother has fought cancer off and on. She has had surgeries and several rounds of chemotherapy in her struggle with ovarian cancer. This year she had to fight a new type of cancer - soft tissue sarcoma on the leg - for which she had another surgery. She is now getting daily radiation (for another ten days) as well as chemotherapy tablets. The positive side of things - it’s very important to recognise this - is that there have been several months-long periods of remission, and her quality of life hasn’t been majorly affected so far. She reads her books, she watches movies, she goes to Matunga or has her family and friends over. With my father, she travels to spend time with my sister and brother.

But yes… even in the movie theatre, even on a vacation, even while blogging - as Laurie Singer says, even on the other side of chemo, you can never quite leave that room.

(via Magesh)

This sweet little girl has been diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) and is currently being given chemotherapy. But the risk of a relapse remains - and so she needs a bone marrow transplant. Her parents are seeking an Indian/South Asian donor to help save the life of their little girl. Please consider helping! Here’s what you can do: if you are based in the US, you can register for a bone marrow match test. It’s very simple and has no long term side effects at all. If you are based outside, you could send this message out to as many people as possible. And of course, you could pray / send good thoughts their way.

And if you are based in India and know of a testing centre, please mail me / leave a comment and I will update the details on this post.

Please help save Nirali!!

Many thanks to Polite Indian for the pointer.

Take the following statement:

It’s chic and modern to espouse equal rights for women.

And now try:

It’s chic and modern to espouse equal rights for black people.
It’s chic and modern to espouse equal rights for Indians.
It’s chic and modern to espouse equal rights for minorities.
It’s chic and modern to espouse equal rights for Dalits.

The other four statements are seen as the obvious examples of prejudice that they are. But doesn’t it amaze you that even today, a newspaper report can begin with the first statement?

No it’s NOT chic and modern to espouse equal rights for women. It’s an obligation that society wilfully ignored for too long. It’s on old, old demand - so old that it has become unfashionable in some quarters.

As for Anita Nair’s remarks about Sabarimala and tradition reported in the article? Far be it from my mind to imagine that her defence of so-called tradition may have anything to do with creating a stir for her new book.

What a pathetically snobbish, obnoxious op-ed in the Telegraph today. Sure, some people can behave peculiarly or boorishly while travelling. But the kind of elitist prejudice shown in this article by Sunanda K.Dutta-Ray is far more offensive than the body odour of the so-called hoi polloi. Some extracts:

If colour prejudice forced Indians to exercise restraint, confidence has opened the floodgates of exuberance.
…
It used to be an empty plane but for a few well-behaved chokras going to Bangkok with no luggage and returning laden with cheap contraband.
…
Such is the level of English of many flyers that I heard a Royal Brunei hostess warn another, “They don’t understand ‘vegetarian’. You must say ‘aloo-gobi!’”
…
I have filled in landing cards for countless passengers who produce their passports when asked for name and address, but never for an unlettered qualified surgeon, as Tapan Raychaudhuri, the historian, had to do. Though with a surgery degree from some Uttar Pradesh university, the woman called the entire British Isles — including Dublin where she was joining her doctor husband — “London”.
…
Field hands who have acquired an insatiable appetite for whisky and a raucous bonhomie when reborn as factory hands in Britain invite the superciliousness of British Airways crews with little other experience of Indians.

Even as he laughs at a woman for calling all of Britain “London”, he dismisses her degree as being from “some Uttar Pradesh university”. And hello, what does the traveller’s “level of English” have to do with their politeness?

“Mine is, of course, a restricted world at home and even its walls are being breached,” wails the writer. Too bad, sir. Please learn to deal with it.

In Australia, the Ernie Awards for the most sexist statements. Tom Cruise was a winner:

Fresh from being dropped by his studio, Hollywood actor Tom Cruise won the celebrity Ernie, for saying the life of his partner Katie Holmes is now about being a mother. He said he was not giving her the chance to turn into another Nicole.

There were other categories:

The Media Ernie went to a Newcastle Herald journalist for the way he denigrated female space shuttle crewmembers.

Jeff Corbett wrote that, “NASA ensured there was a male engineer on board in case things went wrong.”

Michael Noer of Forbes tells you why you shouldn’t marry a career woman girl:

While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

To be clear, we’re not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a “career girl” has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year. If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble.

I’m not even going to begin on this, because the online world has already been having so much fun with this article that Forbes sneakily tried to pull it off the site, as Slate confirms.

Now they seem to have put it back along with a woman journalist’s rebuttal, such as it is.

Jack Shafer of Slate suggests that much of the article, as opposed to the headline, doesn’t really seem to insult women as much as present a gender-neutral set of findings:

Some of the sensational findings presented in the Forbes piece appear to be gender-neutral and hence don’t bait feminists at all. For instance, Noer holds that the literature indicates that “highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex,” and “individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.” So, if career women are bad marriage bets, so are career men. It’s a wash.

Except that the article is addressed to guys. That part isn’t gender-neutral, is it?

Here’s Boing Boing with the whole story of the killing of the article and its rebirth. Screenshots and all.

***

Update: Rediff summarises with customary panache and asks its readers (all of whom are male, one assumes) whether they would marry a career woman:

A recent study published in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women — even those with a ‘feminist’ outlook — are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Recent studies have also found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.

What do YOU think? Are you career woman who agrees or refutes this argument? Are you a guy who is attracted to career-oriented women? Or do you prefer a partner who is a homemaker? Tell us.

Desperate for hits, looks like.

IBN’s Rajeev Masand to Abhishek Bachchan, about (yawn-shudder-and-yawn) KANK:

Your character portrays an ideal man and perhaps an ideal husband. He is one who loves his wife unconditionally, is betrayed by her and later forgives her and embraces her as a friend.

(Except in that scene where he gets violent, breaks plates and kicks the furniture around, I daresay. )

****

And here’s Abhishek on SRK:

I am not presumptuous or precarious enough to think of myself as equal to Shah Rukh yesterday, today or tomorrow.

Precarious?

Other words that begin with P: procrastinate, perverse, persimmons, penguin, pink.

Methinks AB Jr is clearly the pineapple of politeness.

Ryszard Kapuscinski interviewed by Bill Buford. An old interview, but very worthwhile.

You know, sometimes, in describing what I do, I resort to the Latin phrase silva rerum: the forest of things. That’s my subject: the forest of things, as I’ve seen it, living and travelling in it. To capture the world, you have to penetrate it as completely as possible.

Buford:—But using story to make sense of this forest of things, to give it shape and coherence? For your writing certainly relies on narrative.

Kapuscinski: Yes, story is the beginning. It is half of the achievement. But it is not complete until you, as the writer, become part of it. As a writer, you have experienced this event on your own skin, and it is your experience, this feeling along the surface of your skin, that gives your story its coherence: it is what is at the centre of the forest of things.

…

Why am I a writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism.

This is one of the reasons why I love blogs. You read about people whose lives are so different from yours. And still they’re similar in all kinds of gimme-a-break ways.

This is a nice post. And this:

Later on, my last job of the night, I took a middle-aged heavyset guy to Glendale, Queens. The entire ride there we talked about the rising price of gas and he explained to me in complicated detail the mechanics of our economy and how gas prices were going to exceed people’s need for the stuff and eventually prices would go down, etc, etc.

After a while, he asked if I was a student. I get asked this one a lot since I look a lot younger than my 30 years. I said no. Then he asked, “Well do you do something else besides driving the cab?” I’ve learned over the past few years that people really like it if you’re doing something else. They don’t like to hear that you’re just a cab driver, they want you to be working towards something.

I’ve started to tell people different things, but a lot of times I just give some vague, weird, embarrassed answer like, “I guess I’m trying to be a writer these days,” or something like that. Sometimes I’ll even tell them about the blog, but most often not…

And I wish Mumbai cabbies had fundraisers like this.

(via The Sheila Variations)

How glorious to return to the internet with one of the best things I’ve read lately - Martha Nussbaum’s devastating review of Harvey C. Mansfield’s book Manliness. Many thanks, Elizabeth, for the email!!

To Nussbaum,

it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones — especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher’s pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates’s heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?

Just read the whole thing - I read it and laughed, and then read it again, and laughed again… Poor Mansfield. One almost feels sorry for him.

Almost.

Nussbaum takes on the John Wayne nursery-school of thought to point out what feminism is about:

What feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are no sex-based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes of basic political and social functioning.

Read the whole thing, Nussbaum is her at her lucid, acerbic best.

Elizabeth links to Mansfield’s letter in reply, such as it is.

She also links to another classic - Said’s 2001 evisceration of Samuel Huntington.

And via the incomparable Arts and Letters Daily, I offer you yet another - Nussbaum on Judith Butler.

Enjoy!

I’m still without internet, but in homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan, here is a link to an interview with Shekhar Gupta. The questions aren’t the greatest, but listen to the Ustad:

Let me tell you I have very little to say, if it’s to talk nonsense. I don’t know anything but music; if you ask about that, I can say many things.

• You must practice for hours on end.

Oh endlessly. These temples of ours in Benaras—Balaji and Mangala Gauri—Balaji is a little lower, you have to go down the stairs, but Mangala Gauri is at a height. I don’t visit them nowadays; but the stones are the same, aren’t they? You bring gangajal, you go inside to offer it—but the stones outside are just the same. All you need to do is put your hand to them.

• And where you place your hand, music and the heart become one.

Yes, yes—just put your hand there and what joy you’ll feel. You can’t see it though, I’m afraid, it’s not something to be seen.

…

Is there no joy in music—is it all to be this foolishness? There is beauty in my voice—I could sing, and after a while there would be tears in your eyes.

…

• When India became independent, you performed at the Red Fort. Could you tell us about that?

How can I tell you about it? I can’t express those feelings. I performed at the Red Fort—I went inside, there was a stage set up and it was a thrilling experience. But what exactly happened, who was there, I can’t recall.

• You have seen so much of the world. You were born in 1914, when the First World War was on; you’ve also seen the Second World War, India’s Independence—the whole world has changed. But at this time, what’s happening in the world, violence, terrorism—what do you feel about it all?

Nothing. Tell me, how many people are there in Hindustan?

• More than a hundred crores.

Everyone has a mind, right? Everyone thinks differently. Each one of them can’t be good, there will have to be some who will do bad.

…

• What is your message now for the country?

I would say only this: all is still not lost. If you dedicate yourself to what you learn, if you practise it sincerely, you will lose all fear of what may befall you.

• You can forget all your troubles in music?

Things will happen around you, and you will stop minding them. It happens to me. I was waiting for you before the interview. That’s alright. But I will not play for any and everyone. It takes two hours for me to tune this, and then it plays the way I want it to. It won’t be that I’ll wish it to do one thing and it will do something else. No. I will tell it what to do and it will do just what I say.

Benares photo from Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito. Courtesy DVD Beaver.

Prayers for his health. Update (21 August 2006): Farewell.

“Mamu used to do his riyaz (practice) at the temple of Balaji (an avtaar of Vishnu) for 18 years. He told me to do the same thing. I would begin my riyaz at the mandir at 7 pm and end at 11 pm during which time I usually played four ragas. After a year and half, Mamu told me, ‘if you see anything just don’t talk about it’. One night as I was playing, deep in meditation, I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine and incense. I thought it was aroma of Ganges. But the scent got more powerful. I opened my eyes - and when I speak about it I still get goose flesh - when I opened my eyes, there was Balaji standing right next to me, kamandal in hand, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside. Nobody was allowed to enter when I did my riyaz. He said ‘play, son’. But I was in cold sweat. I stopped playing.”

“He smiled, and disappeared. I unlocked the door. I thought a faqir may have come in. I took a lantern and searched all streets. They were empty. I ran home, ate quickly and slept. Mamu had understood what had happened. But he teased me, pretending he knew nothing, But as I blurted out the experience, Mamu slapped me, because he had asked me earlier not to talk about anything that might happen to me. Then he kissed me and asked me to go and buy vegetables. Mamu always told me ‘never look back, keep going forward’. Even now I go to Balaji’s mandir alone, at night and play all by myself. When I play before others, in my heart I’m listening to my gurus. In my heart, they clap for me at the appropriate time.”

More here. Picture courtesy Sawf.org.

For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there in the grey world of Asoka
And Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha.
I am weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gave a moment’s peace–Banalata Sen from Natore.

Her hair was like an ancient darkling night in Vidisa,
Her face, the craftsmanship of Sravasti. As the helmsman,
His rudder broken, far out upon the sea adrift,
Sees the grass-green land of a cinnamon isle, just so
Through darkness I saw her. Said she, “Where have you been so long?”
And raised her bird’s nest-like-like eyes–Banalata Sen from Natore.

At day’s end, like hush of dew
Comes evening. A hawk wipes the scent of sunlight fom its wings.
When earth’s colors fade and some pale design is sketched,
Then glimmering fireflies paint in the story.
All birds come home, all rivers, all of this life’s tasks finished.
Only darkness remains, as I sit there face to face with Banalata Sen.

- by Jibanananda Das. Trans. Clinton B. Seely

More here.

…says Gunter Grass. As a 17-year old, he was drafted into the Waffen SS in the last stage of the war. Until this announcement, his version was that

in October 1944 he was drafted into an antiaircraft unit near Danzig, now the Polish port of Gdansk, where he was born in 1927; that he was wounded in April 1945; and that the following month he was captured by American forces, who held him prisoner until April 1946. Further, he had always admitted a share of guilt for the past.

“I belonged to the Hitler Youth, and I believed in its aims up to the end of the war,�? he told The New York Times in an interview in 2000.

But in his new autobiography, “Peeling the Onion,�? he explains that, when he was 15, eager to escape his family, he volunteered to join the submarine fleet but was rejected. Two years later he was drafted into the army, and, he writes, when he arrived in Dresden he discovered he had been assigned to the 10th SS Panzer Division, known as Frundsberg.

While he claims never to have fired a shot, Mr. Grass admits that at the time he saw nothing wrong with the Waffen SS and that he understood the truth about Hitler’s genocidal policies only during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

Is it a betrayal of memory, or more? Keep in mind that Grass was six years old in 1933 when Hitler first came to power. Here’s Rushdie’s defence. And John Irving.

But the silence is baffling in the face of Grass’s own themes. Mark Sarvas points out that a reassessment of Grass’s legacy is called for:

We’re not suggesting - as some commentors seem to think - that he should be punished for youthful mistakes or for having been a Nazi (although it’s scarcely a fait accompli that he shouldn’t). We are saying that the sheer, naked, breathtaking hypocrisy here is inarguable. This cuts to the heart of what one requires of one’s moral exemplars, self-appointed or otherwise. A certain amount of consistency seems a minimum; at the other extreme, being outrightly two-faced for a period of 60 years seems ample grounds to merit reassessment of Grass’ place.

Grass’s Nobel lecture might be a good place to start:

The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end. Only then could post-war literature in German justify applying the generally valid “To Be Continued …” to itself and its descendants; only then could the wound be kept open and the much desired and prescribed forgetting be reversed with a steadfast “Once upon a time”

…

Left to my own devices, I would have followed the laws of aesthetics and been perfectly happy to seek my place in texts droll and harmless.

But that was not to be. There were extenuating circumstances: mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history. The more I shovelled, the more it grew. It simply could not be ignored. Besides, I come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to everything that drives a writer from book to book – common ambition, the fear of boredom, the mechanisms of egocentricity – I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated.