Indian Writing

Eighteen baby pandas in Southwest China will move out into their nursery in a few days. Help to give them names!

Shanta Gokhale writes about Padatik’s Ho Sakta Hai…:

What holds the scenes together is the emotional thread of love, loss and absence that runs through them. Structurally they are held by the rhythm, produced by single-actor scenes alternating with two-actor scenes, each brought to a peremptory end with the striking of the wind chimes. The language, light as a feather, tough, sparse or richly resonant, contains them like a net of elastic. In a couple of scenes it becomes a sharp weapon in the hands of the characters, who tear themselves apart with it, till they stand before us bare and bleeding.

Two rhino calves found a new home at Manas yesterday after being transported there from the Kaziranga sanctuary. More here.

Image: Albrecht Durer’s 1515 woodcut, from Wikipedia.

Noted Hindi writer Kamleshwar died last week.

From Gulzar’s tribute:

Kamleshwar’s scenes and descriptions were so visual that many a times, I was compelled to make an entire film merely after reading one line. I remember when I was reading one of his most recent and beautiful works, Kitne Pakistan, I had underlined so many sentences that were potential short stories or film material. There is a description where a handkerchief falls off the bridge; I always used to tell him that I could write a complete short story on this one line only.

Amitava Kumar has a post here.

A.J.Thomas on the recent translation of Kamleshwar’s novel Kitne Pakistan.

…at Udavum Karangal.

What they do. How to get involved.

The final few days of the Mumbai Festival this weekend. A~ and I are going out of town, but we’ll be back on Sunday evening and I hope to see Padatik’s Hindi play Ho Sakta Hai Do Aadmi Do Kursiyaan at the Ravindra Natya Mandir. Shows at 5:30 and 8:30 pm, 75 minutes long, written and directed by Vinay Sharma, with Shakil Khan and Vinay Sharma in the cast.

Also on Sunday, at 6 pm in The Readers’ Shop (address 1 / 2, Crystal Co-op. Hsg. Scty., Next to Santacruz Police Station, Juhu Road, Santacruz West) is a Vikalp screening of the film Aamakaar directed by Surabhi Sharma.

Short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker:

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” videotapes that my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia, who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry.

It is the season of the jhadi patti rang bhoomi, and P.Sainath watches a play in Vidarbha:

It was well past midnight when the farmer said he was fed up with the way things were going. He could not take it any more, he told us. A farmer’s life was not worth living. It was pretty cold by this time. Yet no one budged and you could feel the tension in the air. The play is called atma hatya (suicide) and we were part of an audience of 6,000 watching transfixed at that late hour. Theatre may be struggling to survive in the metros, but here in rural Vidharbha, it thrives. This is the season of jhadi patti rang bhoomi. Which loosely translates as “theatre of the jungle belt.”

Everybody is part of it. “We have farmers, tailors, painters and vendors in our plays,” says Ghulam Sufi of the Venkatesh natya mandali that is staging Atma Hatya. “That’s one reason why it resonates so much with ordinary people.” Mr. Sufi plays tabla for the 60-member troupe. We watched him do that — and saw him dash off in between to don make up and do a swift cameo in the play. The main carpenter of the troupe whom we had seen at work earlier also made an appearance on the rotating stage he had set up that afternoon.

Sarbari Sinha travels to Ghodamara in the Sundarbans:

We were going to see the sinking island, the tiny five-square-kilometre piece of land wrapped by the Hooghly and Baratala rivers as they flow into the sea in the western part of the Sundarban delta in West Bengal. We were going to the land of the `hungry tide’, to witness the great human tragedy of homes and farmlands washed away by rivers and creeks that carry the salty waters of the sea they flow into. It was only a four-hour journey from Kolkata, by bus up to Kakdwip and then by boat to the Ghodamara (pronounced `ghoramara’, with the tongue rolling over the first `r’ sound) island; but it seemed to take us several worlds away.

This year the Kala Ghoda Festival runs from February 4 to 11. See Caferati for details of contests including SMS poetry, Flash Fiction, Graphic Flash and a Poetry Slam. All submissions must be in by midnight, Feb 4!

There’s also a fiction writing workshop, and it has a blog!

Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw this week, aged 74.

Here’s an old interview of his, on writing about suffering. And this, from an interview by Bill Buford:

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.

I am supposed to hold my little sister tightly by the hand. We can’t get lost, my mother warns. But I sense, even without her saying it, that the world has suddenly become dangerous, foreign and evil, and that one must be on one’s guard. I walk with my sister next to the horse-drawn wagon; it is a simple wooden cart lined with hay, and high up on the hay, on a linen sheet, lies my grandfather. He is paralysed and cannot move. When an air raid starts, the panicked crowd, until then patiently trudging along, dives for the shelter of the ditches, hides in the bushes, drops down in the potato fields. On the empty, deserted road only the wagon remains, and on it my grandfather. He sees the planes coming towards him, sees them abruptly descending, sees them taking aim at the abandoned wagon, sees the fire of the on-board guns, hears the roar of the machines over his head. When the planes vanish, we return to the wagon and mother wipes my grandfather’s perspiring face. Sometimes there are air raids several times a day. After each one, sweat trickles down my grandfather’s exhausted face.

We find ourselves in an increasingly bleak landscape. There is smoke along the distant horizon, we pass empty settlements, lonely, burned-out houses. We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned implements of war, bombed out railway stations, overturned cars. It smells of gunpowder, of burnt things, of rotting meat. We encounter dead horses everywhere. The horse—a large, defenceless animal—doesn’t know how to hide; during a bombardment it stands motionless, awaiting death. There are dead horses in the roads, in ditches, in the fields a bit further out. They lie there with their legs up in the air, as if shaking their hooves at the world. I don’t see dead people anywhere; they are quickly buried. Only the horses—black, bay, piebald, chestnut—lie where they stood, as if this were not a human war but a war of horses; as if it were they who had waged among themselves a battle to the death and were its only victims…

Should we regard Kapuściński’s end product as journalism? Should we give Kapuściński a bye but castigate Stephen Glass, who defrauded the New Republic and other publications by doing a similar thing on a grosser scale? Do we cut Kapuściński slack because he was better at observing, imagining, and writing than Glass, and had the good sense to write from exotic places? Exactly how is Kapuściński different from James Frey in practice if not in execution?

After all, unlike newspaper stories, literary journalism seeks to make or ‘conjure up’ a broader reality—to bring us into a world. This isn’t news of the who-what-when-how-why variety, but news of the kind that V.S. Naipaul said only the novel can deliver—news that resonates with the potency of its presentation. Strictly segregating fact from fiction hobbles literary journalists unnecessarily.

No, it’s not a great film - but through the tragedy of one family, it asks us to imagine the violence that rocked Gujarat in February 2002. Thirteen-year old Azhar went missing in the Gulbarg Society violence.

“My daughter Binaifer was holding Azhar when they set the house on fire,” Rupa recalls adding that as they started running away from the house, she fell down. “My daughter tried to pick me up and in the confusion, let go of Azhar,” she adds. “I was shouting and asking them to run, Azhar too ran along,” Rupa recalls, adding that once her daughter let him go, the family never again saw him. “Our eyes were blinded by the smoke and we couldn’t see properly at that time,” she says. Azhar, who was a student of Amrut High School, Shahibaugh Cantonment, was all of 13 years then.

The Matchpia project was started to save one life.

Matchpia has now recruited over 30,000 potential donors of South Asian origin within the US. Apart from Pia, fifteen patients will be able to go into transplants every year for the next ten years.

Matchpia is now on a recruitment drive in India. More here. The registration process is harmless, involving only a small amount of blood being drawn. In fact, the initial testing process requires no blood, as saliva is taken from the mouth via cotton swabs. The sample is typed for a match and if successful, the donor will be asked to donate stem cells extracted from their blood. All donors are entered into a registry for possible future matching.

Please participate if you can. Please spread the word!

P.Sainath writes about former beedi industry workers who now travel to villages in search of work.

This search takes them from moffusil towns — Tiroda is a tehsil headquarters — to toil as agricultural labour in the villages almost every day of their lives. Spending up to 20 hours away from home daily…

Many of the women live five or more kilometres from the railway station. “So we have to be up by 4 a.m.,” says Buribai. “We finish all our work and walk to the station by seven.” That’s when the train comes in and we clamber on with the group that will go to Salwa in rural Nagpur. The 76-km journey takes two hours. On the platform and in the train are more women, weary-eyed, hungry, half-asleep. Most sit on the floor of the crowded train, leaning against the carriage wall, trying to snatch some sleep before their station arrives.

“We will reach home at 11 p.m.,” says Revantabai. “We sleep by midnight. And start all over again at 4 a.m. the next morning. I have not seen my six-year-old awake in a long time.” Then she laughs: “Some of the much younger children may not recognise their mothers when they do see them.” Their children have either dropped out of school because they cannot afford it. Or perform poorly there. “There is no one at home to watch or help,” points out Buribai. And some of the youngsters are themselves doing any work they find.

An all-women team of India’s CRPF is travelling to Liberia on UN peacekeeping duty.

From Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase”.

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk amongst themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else…

…for cancer and other diseases? Interesting article in the Scientific American here. And here is the M.D.Andersen page on Turmeric and Curcumin.

“I had thought I’d have so much to tell the family when I meet them, but now when I am actually meeting them, I can’t say anything.” Naseeruddin Shah on meeting the Modys, whose story is retold in Parzania.

A fourteen-year old boy in Calcutta dies of internal injuries after being beaten by his father during TT practice.

A Class VII student is forced to stand in class every day for three months. He spends his six hours at school standing through the day, in addition to the one-kilometre walk from home and back.

Too early in life, children are under pressure to get into the right playschools…

Barry O’Brien writes a letter to children:

My mother made it a point to declare to anyone remotely close to the family what she wanted her three sons to be: one should join the armed forces to save the country; one should become a priest, to save the soul; and one a doctor, to save the body. Every time she said it, she made sure that the three of us were within hearing distance. It wasn’t just a dream; she made it her mission and spent countless hours on her prayer-bones in our local parish. What she didn’t do was make my father a co-conspirator, force her plans down our throats, and make us live her dream.

Today, when she looks around and sees that, professionally, none of her sons came remotely close to fulfilling her dream, I am sure she is not disheartened, or, worse still, completely shattered. She seems very happy that as parents, they allowed us to be ourselves. That’s what made us happy; and what made us happy, made them happy.

My young friends, you will be pleased to know that there were, are and always will be many parents like mine. But the sad truth is that there are so many parents these days who have chosen the wrong four-letter word to be the centre-point of their relationship with their children: fear…

As the years roll on, the ‘my-beta-will-bat-like-Sachin-and-my-beti-will-play-like-Sania’ syndrome takes over. For parents who have dreams of an indoor nature, it’s the ‘my-child-is-an-Einstein’ syndrome that fills their empty minds. It’s about time we, as parents, realized that our children are all little champs, as precious as Sachin, Sania or Einstein were to their parents. It’s about time we realized that our children are all special, and specially good at something; and that ‘something’ isn’t always what we want them to be good at; but it’s that ‘something’, and that ‘something’ only, that will keep them happy and contented throughout their lives.

“For me its always, you know its like drinking at the well. Every so often you have to come to the well to drink.”

And here’s NDTV’s Barkha Dutt talking to Rushdie. First question: “Is your wife here with you?” *

*Update: (See comment section below) It appears that this is an excerpt from the NDTV interview, and not how it starts. This wasn’t clear from the NDTV website, and I hadn’t seen the TV interview, hence the mix-up. Apologies for the confusion!

…is a disappointment. Okay, I wasn’t expecting Nayagan again, or Iruvar, but still I wasn’t prepared for this poorly scripted effort. I came out of the cinema hall feeling so underwhelmed that I couldn’t imagine watching the film again. And I usually see Mani Ratnam films several times over. Among the many things that are just not right about Guru, the filming itself is lazy: for instance, if Aishwarya is meant to be dancing in a Gujarat village, why pick a location that is so obviously not rural Gujarat? And surely period is more than putting Abhishek Bachchan in a beret. As for the song sequences set to Rehman’s (admittedly uneven) music, they are sooo clumsy, especially after stuff like “Chaiyya Chaiyya” in (the otherwise ordinary) Dil Se or “Anjaani Anjaana” in Yuva … Which is sad, because “Tere Bina” is one of the best things Rehman has done.

From Zadie Smith’s superb essay on writers and writing:

A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar. This is why the talented reader understands George Saunders to be as much a realist as Tolstoy, Henry James as much an experimentalist as George Perec. Great styles represent the interface of “world” and “I”, and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides. Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

We visited the Golden Temple this weekend. More later about our Amritsar trip, including the buffaloes at Mrs Bhandari’s guest house, the colourful Lohri kites in the sky, the lassi at Bharawan da Dhaba, the shopping for Papar-Warian, the dancing at Wagah, the night show of Mani Ratnam’s Guru in the “Family” section of the New Rialto, and the late-night cycle rickshaw ride back to the Cantonment…

Dayita Datta writes about The Collected Essays of Salim Ali, recently published by Permanent Black:

Even a general reader will find much to learn from his essays on “Mystery Birds of India”, on vanished species — from the Jerdon’s Courser and Forest Spotted Owlet (both since rediscovered), to the Pink Headed Duck (still officially extinct). Or the 1977 paper for the Food and Agricultural Organization on “The Role of Birds in Agriculture and Forestry”, where he warned of the harmful consequences of drastic measures to control birds deemed ‘pests’ without proper investigation of their role in the overall ecology — and gave the now famous example of the eradication of sparrows in China. (In the context of the precipitous drop in vulture population in India, this is a salutary article, which deserves to be widely disseminated.)

Another series of articles he did on the Mughal emperors’ interest in nature can be read and enjoyed by all. There are also delights such as the text of the Maulana Azad Memorial lecture, 1978, delivered to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations: “Bird Study in India: its History and its Importance.” Who but Salim Ali could begin a talk to such an august body by recalling a humorous vignette of the great Maulana’s relationship with the sparrows which shared his prison cell during his long incarceration during the Quit India movement? Even a report like “Flamingo City Revisited” has a touch of his puckish humour — describing an uncomfortable camel ride over the Rann of Kutch, he wrote, “One had the curious feeling of suddenly being transported from the ship of the desert to a ship on the ocean!”

It is a freezing winter night on the streets of Delhi. Through the swirling smog, on pavements, side streets, road dividers, under bridges, in subways, shop fronts and lofts of staircases, in railway platforms and bus stations, one can dimly make out the huddled forms of sleeping children…

I asked Ratul who was the finest adult he knew. He did not hesitate. It was Obhra bhai, a pickpocket in the New Delhi station. I must confess to have been startled by his choice. Ratul explained: “He protects us from older bullies, buys medicines for us when we are sick, and discourages us when we inhale solution and other drugs. ‘I was on this platform since I was younger than you,’ he tells us. ‘I know this world. If you take to drugs, you will never escape to a better
life. You will die here. I will not let this happen to you.’”

There are winter nights when all of us drive past the huddled forms of children sleeping on the streets without a thought, let alone a word of love or dreams for the children’s future. I realise then that Ratul was probably right when he chose the pick-pocket over all of us.