Indian Writing

Wim Wenders on “A Soul for Europe”:

The whole “American Dream”
is really an invention of cinema,
and it is now being dreamed by the whole world.

I don’t want to discredit this,
but merely ask the question,
“Who is dreaming the European Dream?”
Or better: How are we encouraged to dream it?

A concrete, current example just occurred to me:
In the next 2 months or so,
some 20, 30, or even 50 million Europeans
will watch one and the same film.
It started the other day:
every channel up and down,
every programme and news show,
- and I’ve been surfing TV stations throughout Europe -
reported at large on a film premiere in London.
As you have probably guessed already,
all the racket was about James Bond,
that knightly British gentleman,
who has been saving the world from disaster for the last forty years….

The rest here.

Peter Singer writes about veal calves and breeding pigs being prevented from turning around freely or extending their limbs in their cages.

I’m reminded of the Goregaon dairy buffaloes. They spend most of their lives confined in cramped spaces. Many of them died of drowning in the floods of 26 July 2005 because they were tied to the posts and unable to swim to safety.

“It’s a question I often get — how do you make trade-offs? When you have to make trade-offs, pushing anyone below the threshold on some major capability, the first thing you should say is this is a tragic situation, something that should not have happened.”

From an interview with Martha Nussbaum in The Hindu.

Richard McGill Murphy on playing a British soldier in the dramatisation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Naya Kanun”:

Manto’s soldier embodies colonial arrogance, which is more or less the opposite of the cultural sensitivity that I tried to maintain in my everyday life as an ethnographer. As a tall white man, I looked the part, and the costume was easy: jodhpurs, riding boots, a white linen shirt, and a swagger stick. But at first, I found it difficult to really get inside my character. In rehearsals, the director would urge me to act more arrogant. “Remember, you’re a sahib,” she would say. “These people are your servants!” She encouraged me to ad lib abuses such as “you bloody insolent black bastard,” which started rolling off my tongue with alarming fluency as the rehearsals progressed…

Murphy’s translation of Toba Tek Singh here.

Last year, the Uttaranchal Power Corporation signed up 400 rural women to handle the billing of electricity meters. Revenues have increased, and the company CMD is a happy man: “I am absolutely delighted. We had not planned to engage women in repair and maintenance. But they are so good that nobody can stop them from spreading their wings.”

The idea of employing rural women flashed during a “frustrating and tiring” trip to Uttarkashi a year ago, he said. “We had gone to inaugurate a 33 KV substation. The gram panchayat head kept grumbling — ‘we never got our electricity bills, the line faults are never repaired and the local electrician is forever drunk.’”

Just then, the electrician sauntered in, Verma recounted, and true to complaints, he was totally sloshed in the afternoon.

“That is the problem with men. They are addicted to alcohol, never respond to complaints. We were not getting any payments, the bills were not being delivered… In short, both the department and the consumers were unhappy.” Hassled and at his wit’s end, Verma toyed with possible solutions on his way back.

That was when the idea struck. The first woman who signed up was a widow, Razia Begum, who was trained to read meters and distribute bills at Rs 6 per connection. When she made Rs 2,000 in two months — enough to feed her family — word spread and the women came flocking.

“Learning to read meters was not a problem. I could do it very efficiently in just three days,” said Pushpa Chauhan, a meter reader from Uttarkashi.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker on the creations of Walt Disney:

We have all been children, and many of us have children of our own; in the twenty-first century, that puts us squarely in Disney’s debt. We may resent that state of affairs, but to no avail. Although I can open Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and start to read, in my ear the boom of Phil Harris—Disney’s own choice for the voice of Baloo—is already starting to kick in, blaring “The Bare Necessities” and drowning the original text. Cruella De Vil is my archetype of the knife-thin diva, with a lunatic’s burning eyes. (In the words of Ward Kimball, who worked for Walt over many years, “Almost all of his villains were either women or cats.”) As for Mary Poppins, the gratifying standout of Disney’s final years, she demonstrated his preternatural, Prospero-like knack for conjuring a spirit from thin air (Julie Andrews was nothing like the Mary of the novels) and persuading us that she had always been around. She is the least witchy of his dominatrices, and in her prescription for the pleasures of industry she comes close to the appeal of Disney himself:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun;
You find the fun, and—snap—
The job’s a game!

The work ethic transmuted, with a click of the fingers, into a lark: what better alchemy for an America ineluctably on the rise?

Ian Lockwood walks the path of an Ayyappa pilgrim:

Pilgrims going towards the temple carried the conspicuous irumudi offerings on their heads. Chants of “Swamiye Ayyappa” mixed in with the mournful call of a pair of crested serpent eagles (Spilornis cheela) circling above. The path entered the forest edge abruptly and I was happy to have the shade on this very bright day. Terminalia species and other large trees cast deep shadows over the broad pilgrim’s path. Bright coloured scarlet minivets (Pericrocotus flammeus) flittered in the high canopy, unmindful of the many humans moving like large ants on the path….

Sounds like an amazing experience. But as women between the ages of ten and fifty aren’t permitted at the temple (oh well, I’ve written about this before), it’ll be a long time before I can think of doing the journey for myself. Meanwhile, for Lockwood, the journey is the destination.

Picture Frontline.

When 40 tonnes of poisonous gas spread over the sleeping city.

“Mothers didn’t know their children had died, children didn’t know their mothers had died and men didn’t know their whole families had died.”

The BBC reports here. Pictures documenting the tragedy here and here and here. Please note: they are not easy to look at.

22 years later. Rediff’s 2004 report here. The campaign for Bhopal here.

Bhopal survivor Sunil Kumar (20 July 1971 - 26 July 2006) lost his parents, two brothers and three sisters in that one night. On Sunil’s suicide 22 years later, here:

“We found you in your flat, dangling from the ceiling fan. You left a note saying that when you made the decision to end your life you were completely in your senses. You had bathed and dressed in clean clothes. You, who rarely wore t-shirts, had put one on especially for this final farewell. It said NO MORE BHOPALS.”

Picture: Burial of an unknown child, Bhopal, 1984 - Raghu Rai.

Short story by Andrew O’Hagan in the Guardian:

I am 14 today. In the morning I help a neighbour with his stall on the road to Blantyre. He sells tomatoes and charcoal, chewing gum and glass bottles of Krazy Kool. Very soon I want to be a pilot, but I know this means I must go back to school. My brother James Matenje is two years younger than me and he wants to be a lawyer. There is something wrong with his left eye and my mother, when she was alive, said that this should not halt the progress of a good lawyer. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” she used to say. “Yet with your one eye James you will see far.”

The rest here.