Indian Writing

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.