Indian Writing

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

- W.H.Auden.

Image Henry Moore Lithograph.

It’s the Auden Centenary.

I’ve been travelling and will be on the move again from tomorrow until early next week.

Dara Modi has been waiting for Parzania to be screened in Gujarat. He hopes that the screening will help him find his missing son.

40 school students in Ahmedabad have started a roadside campaign for the film’s screening.

*****

In Salem, Tamil Nadu, a judgement in the Dharmapuri bus burning case. In February 2000, Kokilavani, Gayathri and Hemalatha, three female students of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, were burnt alive when the bus in which they were returning from a study tour was set on fire. The families of the young women waited seven years for justice.

*****

And in an apartment complex in Mumbai, a newborn girl child who wasn’t allowed to live.

This is so great. In Kalleda, Warangal, a photoblog by schoolchildren about their lives.

In Delhi, the Taklu Takli March Past in support of childhood cancer awareness.

In Mumbai, 5000 children to take part in the Terry Fox run.

…on Feb 17 at Shivaji Park, Dadar. Some details here (no time is mentioned, though), along with this picture of John Abraham, a St Bernard and a cute stray pup.

The Welfare Of Stray Dogs (WSD) has organised a Book Sale of donated new and secondhand books from February 15-17, 2007 (Thu-Sat) from 10 am to 6 pm in the compound of Vaswani Mansions, Opposite K C College, Churchgate. You can browse around and pick up books on self- help, best sellers, travel, spirituality, philosophy, fiction and non-fiction and children’s books at throw-away prices.

You can also pick-up the Stray Dog Calendar for 2007 produced by the Taj for Rs 100.

All proceeds from the book sale will go towards WSD’s sterilization and rabies prevention programme.

Via Churumuri, I read about this free residential school for children in Mysore. Churumuri has details here.

Watch this, puke, and then come back to read the rest of this post.

Here’s Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon (watch the ad, the article is worth it) about the debate between C.K.Prahlad (”Bottom of the pyramid” evangelist) and Aneel Karnani (”Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage”) . In the case of (ugh) Fair and Lovely, Prahlad thinks it gives the young woman sweeper a feeling of being empowered. Karnani disagrees, calling it (rightly) no kind of empowerment at all. Leonard writes:

The television and magazine advertisements (Karnani) describes would not last a nanosecond in Western markets, if any advertising director was suicidal enough to run them. They show depressed dark-skinned women getting progressively more light-skinned, and in the process, getting good jobs, landing boyfriends and achieving happiness.

Leonard wonders whether the example of this product alone is enough to counter Prahlad’s contention that the poor are an untapped market, etc. I’m still staring at the last paragraph in the article, though:

But there’s one thing that doesn’t get mentioned in either of Karnani’s papers or Prahalad’s rebuttal, and it’s an odd omission. Prahalad serves on the Board of Directors of HLL. Karnani’s thorough-going attack on the skin cream has to be read, in part, as a direct attack on Prahalad personally, for condoning, at some level, a marketing campaign based on pushing the message that happiness, beauty and success are dependent on having skin that is light, instead of dark.

Ooooo.

2000 km through the desert. ‘It is a journey into the unknown for us.” - Bachendri Pal, leading the first 2000 km expedition across the Great Indian Desert.

“Sports was never my cup of tea. My father asked me to play the game with my brother, just to get rid of my habit of waking up late.” - Mithali Raj, most successful captain in Indian women’s cricket.

Indian women on peace-keeping duty in Liberia.

“It’s liberating.” - Angha on bartending.

… is a little collection of poems, a compilation of the “favourite poems of famous Indians” (whatever those are).

“If one can find the right poems, quoting someone else can be as much an expression of one’s deeper self as anything one can write oneself,” writes Amartya Sen in his foreword to the book. The collection reveals a few predictable choices and some interesting ones; it also produces some odd combinations of “famous Indians”. Here are 86 poems, from Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”, chosen by Kiran Bedi, to Saahir Ludhianvi’s “Intezaar”, chosen by Yash Chopra. Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” is the favourite poem of - if you ever wondered what they could have in common - Mulk Raj Anand, Vishwanathan Anand, and Karan Johar. And a whole bunch of people, including Aamir Khan, Rahul Bajaj, Aruna Roy, Prannoy Roy, Mallika Sarabhai, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Kavita Krishnamurthy, and more, have chosen Tagore’s “Where the mind is without fear”. Other anthology favourites include “The Road Not Taken” (Azim Premji, Harsh Goenka, Uday Kotak, Vindi Banga); “Ulysses” (Fareed Zakaria’s choice) and “If” (Rahul Dravid, with four more celebrities). Tarun Das selects Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” (”You can’t run away”). The Dalai Lama picks “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” from the eight-century Buddhist Master Shantideva:

For as long as space endures, and for as long as all living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world.

Leela Samson chooses “Under One Small Star” by Wislawa Szymborska:

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

The whole thing here.

Naseeruddin Shah chooses “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” for being “the first poem I ever memorised (as a punishment)… It had something to do with my becoming an actor.” Jehangir Sabavala chooses a sonnet by Dom Moraes dedicated to him (”These landscapes have the colours of absence.”) For others, it helps when poetry runs in the family: Shabana Azmi chooses Kaifi Azmi’s hauntingly lovely “Meri Aawaz Suno, Pyaar Ka Raaz Suno”, while Amitabh chooses Harivanshrai Bachchan’s “Kya Bhooloon, Kya Yaad Karoon?” And Sachin Tendulkar chooses the rather sweet “Sachin” by Ramesh Tendulkar:

Perhaps, maybe because of you,
But cricket to me,
Dear Sachin, is no more a game, but a poem
A lyrical poem!

Poems in Indian languages other than English are presented in their original languages as well as in translation, except for one poem from Tagore chosen by Pandit Ravi Shankar without what Amartya Sen calls “the compromise of translation”. Sen adds, “There is also some delicious irony in finding such a marvellous example of graceful parochialism by the most universalist of our great musicians.”

Sonal Mansingh selects a poem by Narsinh Mehta: “Whatever is ordained by the Lord”, while Anna Hazare chooses “Jana Gana Mana”. The collection ends with Pandit Bhimsen Joshi’s choice, G.D.Madgulkar’s “On the Banks of the Indrayani”:

On the banks of the Indrayani
In God’s Aalandi
Is the samadhi of Dnyaneshwar…

Amartya Sen’s foreword emphasises the cause for which the book has been put together:

To celebrate India’s current success in globalised technology without looking into the imaginative developments that have made this success possible is to miss out a critically important link. Kaifi Azmi’s message about children holding ‘the future in their hands’ is a huge vision, of which some parts are easily seen (like internet cafes right across the country), while other parts have remained obscure and neglected, in great need for a fuller understanding and cultivation (like transforming our ‘country of first boys’ into a nation where every child receives a decent education).

A sweet little collection. Please do consider supporting the effort, as royalties from the book will go to CRY and the cause of child rights. More details about the book here.

The English translation of Beedi Jalaile, the hit song from Omkara, has been doing the rounds on email. Thanks to A~, MJ, and NR, for forwarding it to me. Here’s a sample, verbatim:

DAAN DOONG DUDUNG D AAN DOONG DUDUNG……

NOT GLASS
NOT STOLE
COLD AIR IS ALSO AGAINST US
MOTHER IN LAW
NOT GLASS
NOT STOLE
COLD AIR IS ALSO AGAINST
MOTHER IN LAW

ITS SO CHILLY TAKE SOMEBODY’S QUILT GO AND TAKE FIRE FROM NEIGHBORS STOVE
TAKE FIRE FROM NEIGHBORS STOVE
LIT UP THE CIGGI FROM LIVER OH LOVER
THERE IS LOT OF FIRE IN THE LIVER
DAAN DOONG DUDUNG DAAN DOONG DUDUNG…

And yes, “jigar” is the Hindi word for liver. And who knew that the brilliantly susurrating ’sassuri’ actually referred to m-i-ls?

At Voices India.

Via Moorishgirl, this Washington Post op-ed by someone who worked as a contract interrogaor in Iraq in early 2004:

Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is… It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Graphic writing at the new edition of Words without Borders!

“She’s a very simple girl, very traditional. She’s also very domesticated.”

What a word.

Think again!

…to this group of self-confessed chauvinistic Japanese men who are now working hard to save their marriages…

(via email from Veena)

- Sharanya Manivannan points me to news about Paula Gunn Allen who was recuperating from radiation treatment for lung cancer when a fire destroyed her possessions. Details here.

“Snowflakes, leaves, humans, plants, raindrops, stars, molecules, microscopic entities all come in communities. The singular cannot in reality exist.” - Paula Gunn Allen.

- Here is a review of a new memoir about cancer including the history and science of the disease.

Sidney Farber’s refusal to stop injecting crude folic acid antagonists into children with leukemia at Boston Children’s Hospital in the late 1940s seems cruel — the horrific side effects made his colleagues demand that he stop and let the children die in peace — but Wishart makes it clear that without Farber’s coldheartedness, we would not have modern chemotherapy. The unpleasant truth of medical progress is that other people have suffered so that we may not.

- Meanwhile, Ian Healy is told that it’s not funny to trivialize breast cancer research.

- Farewell, Angela King.

- New developments in cancer care in Kolkata.

- Cancer survivors in Chennai.

- A hospice in Sri Lanka.

A lower court had apparently held that a sex worker could not be called an ‘honest woman’, and that her testimony as witness in a murder case was therefore unreliable.

Fortunately the High Court, quashing the lower court ruling, has upheld her testimony.

which I saw at the Kala Ghoda Festival yesterday. Derek Malcolm calls the film “a model of how, without prejudice or compromise, a film-maker can illuminate history and tell us how we repeat the same mistakes.” A brief exchange from the film, courtesy IMDB:

Col. Mathieu: What were they saying in Paris yesterday?
Journalist: Nothing. Sartre’s written another article.
Col. Mathieu: Will you kindly explain to me why the Sartres are always born on the other side?
Journalist: So you like Sartre, Colonel?
Col. Mathieu: Not really, but I like him even less as an adversary.

Read about the film here and here and here.

at the Kala Ghoda Festival today. From Ritwik Ghatak’s thoughts on the film: (from Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema)

The story has a ramshackle car as its central character. This very fact threw up so many plastic and dynamic potentialities. I could always fall back upon mechanical speed- what with opportunities of bringing in the time-honoured mechanism of the chase and hair-breadth escapes and breakdowns at judiciously chosen moments!

..We had to work with the poorest possible materials and that, too, on a shoe-string budget. This film threw us a challenge at every step. Every shot taken was every shot achieved. This seemed to me to be really invigorating. It is a situation in which one curses oneself at every step and likes it.

The part where Jagaddal climbs up the hill, slowly, painfully… I loved that best about the film.

The Wikinovel from Penguin. Called… A Million Penguins.

Though I haven’t seen Deepa Mehta’s film Water yet, I am aware that John Abraham plays a young follower of Gandhi named Narayan. But uh, I was baffled by this line at the end of Roger Ebert’s review of the film:

The character name “Narayan” is a reminder of R. K. Narayan, the novelist whose works are delightful human comedies about life in India.

The schedule is finally up on the site!!!

Via email from Paromita Vohra, a note about the screening of her film Q2P at the Tricontinental Film Festival, Mumbai on 4 February at 4:30 pm, at the NCPA, Nariman Point:

Q2P
Documentary, Digital Video, 54 min., English/Hindi

“Look at the toilet, see the city”

Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and finds…public toilets… not enough of them.

As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape and the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space. We meet whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

Festival schedule here.

Rajmohan Gandhi on his grandfather:

“When I went to the Poona detention camp, where my grandmother lay dying, Gandhiji was there; again, there was that atmosphere, even though they were behind barbed wires. We needed a lot of police permission to be able to get inside the place, but then you instinctively felt that power resided inside those barbed wires, not outside them.”