Marlon Brando, unlike other Hollywood heavyweights such as Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, never made a movie in Southasia. What a shame that Sri Lanka, for instance, wasn’t chosen as the location of Apocalypse Now instead of the Philippines! (more…)
A fake bin Laden provides some laughs along with a sharp comment on the “war on terror”, the media, and US policy on Afghanistan.
By Laxmi Murthy
A spoof about the US ‘war on terror’, the Pakistani desperation to emigrate and a satirical take on the media’s obsession with ‘Breaking News’ could go badly wrong in hands that excel in slapstick or melodrama. But right from the disclaimer about resemblance to any person living or dead being purely ‘coincidental’, director Abhishek Sharma pulls it off, tongue firmly in cheek. The pun in the title which could be read as ‘Without you, Laden’, or ‘Your bin Laden’. Onward, smart acting and witty dialogues effortlessly steer the film through potential minefields, quite literally. (more…)
One of the misfortunes of having an intellectual sympathy for the political Right in India is that one automatically finds oneself in the company of unbecoming Hindu goons, be they online or in the field. As legitimate political activity in India is set on a default left-liberal setting, it is in the normal order of things quite problematic to find a desi political animal to engage with who is possessed of a sense of public service and a strong sense of national identity.
The ones who do represent the aforementioned themes and other programmes dear to the heart of the Indian political animal often also couple these admirable political sentiments with quite a nasty anti-cosmopolitanism, not to mention a general distaste for Muslims. The latest brouhaha over a 95-year-old Indian painter’s decision to accept Qatari citizenship is a case in point. Without going into the stultifying details of this non-controversy, it is possible to illustrate the dilemma faced by the urban nationalist. On the one hand, there is the establishment media with all its shrillness busy bestowing titles of greatness upon Mr. Hussain, on the other, we have the cyber crusaders intent on punishing the nonagenarian for his treachery. Can you be a man of the Right and refuse to rain abuse on M.F. Hussain? For a child of that Indo-Persian synthesis called Hindustan and an advocate of assertive political action, this can cause a fair degree of cognitive dissonance.
If the choice is between urban cosmopolitanism however – a distinctly apolitical concern – and a movement that promises vigorous and ambitious national reform, the political animal ought to waste little time.
In an India that does not maintain a conscious commitment to the secularism that was so dear to her founding father, the only meaningful political-reformist impulses are to be found within that broad church called the Hindu movement. There is little doubt that the secularist project held enough promise to animate independent India’s Oxbridge-educated nation builders and for that matter, much of the professional elite. The vision of a progressive, religion-blind, postcolonial power was surely an attractive one for the champagne socialist. However, the democratising impulse inherent to Nehru’s nation building project ensured that a genuine commitment to secularism was gradually overwhelmed by the parochialism that comes naturally to a feudal society such as India. Nehru’s all-encompassing pan-Indian vision was to founder dreadfully on the rocks of region, religion and caste. Secularism in India means little more than being nice to Muslims and Christians. Although this is an admirable sentiment, it surely cannot form the basis of a comprehensive national philosophy.
The history of independent India’s politics is the history of the Congress ceding the nation-building imperative to the political Right. Why this has happened is a matter of debate. Perhaps the Congress, post-1947 really was a facade built around the gigantic political personality of Nehru and once he went, so did the fire of his guiding philosophy. One can scarcely accuse his daughter and her heirs of having much of a political Weltanschauung. Perhaps it can be accounted for by the vigorous activism of the Hindu right and the religiosity of the Hindu masses that in another era, Gandhi used to great effect.
Two points are clear though: India is a nation that still needs building and because the secularist project has run out of steam and fails to inspire the desi political animal, the only prescriptions for audacious political renewal are to be found in proposals put forth by modernisers from within the Hindu camp. There may be passionate men and women with an avowed commitment to Indian secularism residing in Delhi and Bombay who would contend the latter claim. What they fail to realise however is that they expend so much energy in fighting off the march of the Right and its pernicious agendas that they have little time to indulge in visions of societal renewal and meaningful political engagement. Machiavelli’s ideal of the political animal – one who sought the fulfilment and the glory that comes from the creation and maintenance by common endeavour of a strong and well-governed social whole – seems lost in the mediocre soap opera that is Indian politics.
The tasks facing the desi political animal then, are certainly not straightforward but necessary. He must utilise the energies unleashed by the right to create an atmosphere conducive to su-raj or good government. In practical terms this means committing oneself to policy affairs. In more normative terms, it means emphasising the political will and the ideological tenacity that comes naturally to overtly political movements. In the end, an Indian committed to political renewal has only one natural home, the Right, warts and all.
–Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi
I eat god,
I drink god,
I sleep on god…
It is the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival and Girish Karnad, who is supposed to give the keynote lecture, along with heavyweights like Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., are missing in action. They are possibly lost in the Delhi fog, or the traffic, or maybe they didn’t even depart their home cities and countries in the first place. The roads, you know, says one of the organizers. Apparently this is a good enough explanation and the crowd asks no questions and asks for no explanations—we start off the day with a remarkably serene and unhurried shift to readings of Kabir instead. The day is beautiful, the sky is blue, there are long runners in pink, yellow and orange fabrics above our head and two dhol-players are causing a tremendous ruckus and making us all feel invigorated. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is on stage and goes from Kabir to Arun Kolatkar with effortless ease. And that is why, instead of a lecture on “Entertaining India”, we are listening to a lovely poem that eats god and sleeps on god and talks about how the poet hopes his mother-in-law (plus all his other in-laws) would drop dead so he could be alone with his lover.
So starts the day. I have never heard of Arun Kolatkar but I am ready, at the end of the reading, to run out and buy his book. The bookstore is full of books by the authors who are present at the event, but first a writer should look around and check out the people who are present—a colorful assortment of women and men dressed in drop-dead gorgeous Indian fabrics, and where the Westerners look rather plain and pale unless they invested in some Indian fabrics and trinkets. No doubt the place is teeming with literary celebs—the problem with spotting them is that everyone looks the part, right down to little girls who carry their books around like devoted readers and writers. I spot is a group of local Jaipurians who are looking at the schedule with deep concentration. I savor this scene for a while—locals immersed deeply in their own literary event.
Then a minute later I realize why people are concentrating so hard on the schedule—basically, half the speakers are absent, there has been a drastic change of plans and nothing is going according to schedule. The people who have arrived early are asked to be on panels, and before long I find myself listening to Vikram Chandra (scheduled to present on the last day) talking about his latest book about the underworld, as well as the banality of evil. He talks about criminals and murderers that he met. The most horrific thing that he came to learn, he said, was that most people who did these terrible things were ordinary people like you and me. They were not monsters. They were religious, god fearing men who kept shrines at the back of their homes, and yet they were able to commit horrific acts that the ones that occurred during Partition. “The frightening thing is to realize that the people who are murderers and criminals are not so different from us,” he said. “There’s two degree of separation between criminals and people in the audience.” I had met Vickram Chandra when he was teaching at the Breadloaf Conference in 2002. I noticed that eight years in the United States seem to have trained him to become more charitable to the world than condition of the rest of the world allowed for.
Claire Tomalin (scheduled to speak on Saturday) gave her talk on Jane Austen promptly and with joy. There is nothing more delightful than a Jane Austen scholar who loves the writer and treats her with the greatest respect. Claire talked about the conditions of Austen’s life—her poverty, her lack of money, her lack of publishing success, her ten years of depression and being unable to write—all of which added up to a literary phenomenon. Austen talked about taboo topics that other writers didn’t touch, she said. Tomalin gave her talk with humor and intelligence, and the audience responded in kind. Jane Austen appeared to be required reading for women in India, from the questions—half of the questioners also insisted that Claire MUST see “Bride and Prejudice”, which was the final word on the book. Claire insisted, politely but firmly, that she did not see these adaptations. ““Bride and Prejudice” made me realize a lot of things I hadn’t learnt from the book,” gushed one reader enthusiastically. I belched. One reader, however, did add an interesting tidbid—Austen’s horrid Mrs.Norris had been reincarnated as a cat in Harry Potter.
Then we went on to see Geoff Dyer and Amit Chowdari, moderated by Amitav Kumar, talk about “Visible Cities”. Geoff talked about his latest book on Venice and Benaras, and read a short chapter about a monkey who steals a man’s sunglasses in Varanashi and holds it hostage, while the man tries to get it back from him by bribing him with bananas. All would have been well and good and we’d have thought it was just a good piece of comedy if he’d not read about how the monkey could “evolve” (be careful with that word, writers!) as a species if he gave back the sunglasses, and if he didn’t, he’d always be a monkey. Then he talked about “history”, just a line or two but enough for an audience member to wonder if he didn’t know, as a smart man of the twenty-first century, how colonial culture categorized Third World peoples as “monkeys”…Hmmm… this bit of monkeying around was possibly smart of him, or maybe it wasn’t. Not in a tent full of people who are too aware of post-colonial criticism. Amit Chowdari read about Calcutta—a beautiful and evocative piece. Then he referred to Susan Sontag’s “Under the Sign of Saturn,” and how Walter Benjamin had talked about how he was a man born under this sign, therefore he never finished any of his projects, and this was the line she’s picked up and written her essay on. A literary throwaway aside, kind of like strolling through the streets of an old city as a flaneur.
The afternoon ended in the front lawn with the delightful Mr. Alexander Mc.Call Smith talking about his “#1 Detective Agency” and how he came up with this idea. He and William Dalrymple, who was interviewing him, had a good laugh at the expense of the Scots, who apparently indignantly protested the ten thousand pounds allocated by the Scottish government for the festival—the money, suggested the critics, could have been better spent on fighting illiteracy in Scotland. “There are actually Scottish secret agents out there in the audience, dressed in kilts, trying to keep track of this money. They think we don’t see them, but we do,” chucked the writer, as he burst out in a fit of laughter.
Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com and www.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com
The winter is slowly deepening. As the misty mornings get nippier and nights arrive soon after you have wound up lunch, there is another noticeable phenomenon in Kathmandu. Cleavages go under cover. No, not the ones on top generally to be seen on the female of the species. The other ones, on the posterior, the universal cleavages. Both men and women, (all young, mind you), sport butt cleavage exposing, or, in other words, low-rise jeans through the year. Belts in this scheme of things, are not utilised to hitch up recalcitrant pants, but as accessories meant to accentuate the cleavages they help reveal.
The Nepali frame (at risk of making communal statements, and at great risk of unifying the Limbu, Rai, Newari, Sherpa, Tamang and Gurung ethnicities) seems eminently suitable to the showing of the derriere. Low slung jeans, one will be forgiven for assuming, was custom-made to this part of the world (and Korea, of course). Unlike the heavy-bottomed frame found south of the Vindhyas, the slim-hipped body is a perfect show-case for the ever-sliding garment. And having slipped, therein lies the true measure of élan: does the wearer desperately hitch it up, or nonchalantly let it lie, exposing undergarments (of varying griminess, laciness or thong-ness, as the case may be). But come winter, and jackets and pullovers, no less a statement of style, cover up the nether regions, quite literally. No more alluring glimpses of derrieres peeking out of waist bands trotting down the streets; in supermarkets reaching for the hair oil on the top shelf; on courier delivery men who lurk around offices in their helmets (the disguise is useful protection against routine insults about mysteriously vanished parcels); hanging out of micro buses (the lowest of low rise jeans are the uniform of microbus assistants, whose job it is dangerously dangle out the door and hustle passengers, and sometimes innocent passersby who happen to be near the door).
Cleavages of all kinds are undoubtedly tantalising, the “what lies beneath” being the subject of romantic fantasy and lewd speculation. But butt cleavages are, one learns, not mere raunch. They are a political statement, no less. “Saggin’ pants”, so named because of pants that, well…sag, low enough to reveal underwear, a norm in prisons in the West where belts are not allowed due to potential violence towards others or oneself, including the threat of suicide. Prison-style meshes well with counter-culture, with low-rise pants allowing the display of, not only varying amounts of underwear, but also tattoos, piercings and the like.
Going back to the heavy-bottomed youth South of the Vindhyas – how do they express their rebellion, or in this case, their butt cleavages? Certainly, would not the balmy climes be more conducive to such display? And undoubtedly, permitting an ample belly to sag comfortably over the waist of low rise pants is way preferable to the button of normal jeans digging into one’s middle. The more common body-type down under is curvaceous, lending itself to drapes – saris and dhotis- that can be equally revealing, but are conveniently adjustable, unlike low-rise jeans that would demand punishing diets and exercise regimens from generous-hipped and rounded-thighed but fashion-conscious youth. Unless trendy pants are designed for these bodies (akin to the designer lines custom built for African-American females, which incidentally, are a perfect fit for narrow-waisted, big hipped individuals), cleavage-revelations will have to be conducted from behind georgette saris.
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