Indian Writing

…so terrible.

The fabulous Margaret Atwood talks to Bill Moyers.

BILL MOYERS: I keep in my notebook something you said once. You wrote, “What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.”

MARGARET ATWOOD: That’s exactly right. If your government says, “Not only am I your government, but I represent the true religion,” if you disagree with it you’re not just of another faction. You’re evil.

BILL MOYERS: But you don’t imagine that could happen here?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Want to bet? Want to lay some bets as to that?

BILL MOYERS: I would never bet against Margaret Atwood.

*****

BILL MOYERS: So I come back to the question, if you could design a new human being, improving on the present model, would you eliminate the hunger for God?

MARGARET ATWOOD: I could not eliminate the hunger for God without eliminating language. I might, however, eliminate the desire to use God as a weapon. In other words, if I could I would confine the hunger for God to the personal realm so that it would not become something that people use to bash other people with.

Etta says she knew of one totally blind couple living in London. “They had a child and I went to visit them when I was a physiotherapy student, [aged] about 24. And they managed perfectly well with their child, who was about a year old. A few years before that, I met a blind woman on a train and she told me that she had five children. And she managed all of them and she did the cooking and everything. So I knew that some blind people had done it. The thing is,” she says, “you just don’t listen to sighted people because they haven’t a clue anyhow. They think, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t see.’”

The 6-foot-tall, bespectacled and soft-spoken Thakkar epitomised the quintessential Mumbaiite: he was self-made, hard working and principled. At 15, after his Class X exams, to supplement the family income hit by a father’s ailing health, he began working at a teashop in the South Mumbai locality of Dongri. He also studied Commerce at the city’s Jai Hind College.

Later, he worked as an accountant for a city tyre company, venturing into selling insurance policies from 1991. In 1995, he decided to devote himself fulltime to insurance…

A brief NYT interview with A.B.Yehoshua:

I was considered one of the most optimistic of the novelists. But now, I have to say, I have lost a great quantity of my optimism.

Which makes you a pessimist about the future of Israel? No. I have children and grandchildren.

I can be a pessimist for myself, but I have to be optimistic for them. I have to keep the spirit.

Moorish Girl on the bombing of Qana:

Despite appearances, I do not believe that this is a war between Jews and Muslims. The events unfolding at the moment really aren’t about whether you believe that it was Ismael or Isaac who was sacrificed on the altar by Abraham; it isn’t about whether you believe you should fast for one day of atonement or for thirty days of reflection; it isn’t about whether you should pray at Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa or at the Western Wall. It’s about much more prosaic things, like land and water, like guns and money. And yet, the identities color everything. The privilege of criticizing is doled out by those who see identity politics everywhere. If you’re Muslim and you decry the Israeli bombing, then it means you’re supporting Hizbollah. If you’re Jewish and you decry the Israeli bombing, then it means you’re not patriotic, and you don’t understand that the Muslims will always hate you, blah, blah, blah. I am sick of it all.

Orhan Pamuk in the IHT on the question he has heard most:

In the mid-’70s, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries in a poor non-Western country troubled by premodern problems.

There was also the suggestion that someone “as educated and cultivated as yourself” might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre gave credence to this view in the early 1970s when he said that he would not be in the business of writing novels if he were a Biafran intellectual.

In an article entitled “Bollywood Gets Real, Taking On the Modern Indian Marriage”, Anupama Chopra writes about the (so-called) “new Bollywood” of marriage and infidelity. “Increasingly realistic portrayals of marriage — happy and otherwise — are very much on the mind of Bollywood these days,” she writes, talking about Karan Johar’s splashy new film Kabhi Alvida Na Kahna and Rajat Kapoor’s Mixed Doubles.

The article has quotes by K-Jo, Kapoor, Shobhaa De (as the author of Spouse and presumably an expert on the Indian marriage) and, oddly, a neuropsychiatrist at one of the major Bombay hospitals. Er, why would you quote a neuropsychiatrist in an article about marriage - did she mean to quote a psychologist, or was she just quoting him as a married person? Here’s the paragraph in question:

The institution of marriage was radically redefined in urban India after the nation’s liberalization movement began in 1991. So much so that, as Dr. Rajesh Parikh, a neuropsychiatrist at the Jaslok Hospital and Research Center in Mumbai, put it: “The modern marriage barely reveals its lineage from the traditional marriage of decades ago. Today marriage covers the entire gamut from altered gender roles, satellite relationships, geographical separations and divorce.”

De, of course, has the last word, such as it is (she always has this talent for seeming to speak on behalf of an entire generation, even if one is never sure which one she is speaking for): “‘Mixed Doubles’ is art house. We think, ‘It’s not about us, it’s about them.’ But a Karan Johar film is definitely about us.”

A K-Jo film is about us. Especially the bit where Shahrukh lands up in a helicopter on the little old helipad at Raichand Mansion, wearing a trenchcoat and rushing in for his mom’s pooja. I sooo identified with that.