(A Short) Song of Myself

There are things I've failed to link to and - by some miracle, since I seem to be blogging again - here are a couple of things I've been doing.

Some time in the summer, Janice Pariat asked me to send her some poems, there: irreverence, so she could curate six poets' works for Poetry at Sangam's July issue. Because I haven't really been writing much, it was a struggle to find anything that was unpublished, much less truly irreverent. I sent her something anyway, and here they are: 'Untitled' and 'Three False Starts and a Conclusion'.

Earlier even, in the year, I was one of the poets participating in the Poets Translating Poets marathon that the Goethe Institut had been doing since 2015. In February, the carnival made a pit stop in Hyderabad, bringing German poets Sylvia Geist and Tom Schulz, as well as Jeet Thayil (Hyderabad was where the anglophone English poets were going to meet the German poets). 

We worked for four days translating each others' poems and it was intense and for me a little bit scary, never having translated anything before. But as the days went on, it was also very energising.*

Once that part was over and the readings happened at Kala Ghoda in Feb, it all subsided for a bit, though we knew there was more in the pipeline.

That happens now. Since the summer, poets have been travelling to Germany, to literature festivals where they read with the poets they've translated and been translated by.

This is one of the four readings I'll be doing in Germany is September. There are others in Dresden, Leipzig, and - after Berlin - Hamburg.**

(All things considered, I've stretched out a very short song into a long one.)

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*In my usual fashion, I assumed this was a signal that I would be unusually productive in my own writing. I never learn.

**Needless to say, if any one reading this is going to be in Germany between the 14th and the 23rd of Sept, mail me! 

Not Who but How to Move the Cheese

In Monday morning frivolity, this entire thread on cheese and the replies that follow (which I am still reading), for your delectation.

But first, here's the problem:

For complicated / irrelevant reasons a friend has suddenly acquired 18 pounds of Red Leicester cheese. It is good quality. However (again, complicated reasons) the cheese must be moved, used or transformed into something else within the next 72 hours or so.

My friend lives mostly on his own, so can't have a cheese party, and does not want the neighbors finding out about this cheese anyway so cannot invite them. He can't eat it all in this time for health reasons (18 pounds). There are no food banks nearby he can donate to, and moving the cheese is problematic anyway (though not impossible). He can cook, though not to a great extent. It would be a shame for this cheese to just be disposed of; what else could he do with it? Are there recipes that can use up 18 pounds of cheese and transform it into (preferably) foodstuff that are not cheese-centric?

Via the amazing Aisha, who is off in Ireland watching Mohenjo Daro (and is also probably looking through cartons of papers).

Suddenly there are links

Hello. It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long time. There are things I've been reading and liking on twitter and then I thought of this place so here are links to things.

1. Bezwada Wilson, who won the Magsaysay Award recently, in an interview with Business Standard (behind the paywall, unfortunately. I'm not even sure how I managed to read the whole thing, but I did, via someone on twitter) strongly critical of the PM and the Guajarat Govt and it's police. Words to the effect of how the PM saying 'don't shoot them, shoot me' is silly theatrics because the ruling party, being a majority, should be perfectly capable of making sure the rule of law is obeyed. He also talks about the protests in Una, among other things.

2. Madhusree Mukerjee's review of Sonia Faleiro's 13 Men. Faleiro's book is an investigation into the reported gang rape of an adivasi girl in Subalpur. Mukerjee, who also investigated the event in depth, has several critiques to make of Faleiro's book.

As it happens, I have also investigated the case at length, and studied the available documents in their original script (English and Bengali). I concluded, however, that the official story, which is also Faleiro’s, is about as believable as the tiger story in Life of Pi. It’s such a thrilling story, though – such a perfect fit with mainstream notions of rural primitivism, which we, as the ‘modern’ and the ‘enlightened’, are striving to eradicate – that it effortlessly assumes the mantle of truth. A rape may have indeed taken place (it is hard to know for sure) but the evidence adduced to convict all 13 men, and even more significantly, to condemn systems of justice that are crucial to adivasi identity and autonomy, is exceedingly thin. In what follows I will tell both stories, including some evidence that Faleiro left out, and let the reader decide whether justice has been served or ravished.

3. Arul Mani, entertaining as always, on Brahman Naman (a film I should watch, I think). It's the kind of writing that still needs some kind of a long form blog platform, thank god. No tweeting or tumbling this kind of a piece.

This, we find, is Ash, a girl whose braces seem to glint only to reflect how dazzled she is with Naman. Her face is forever a flower opening out in mute offering. In these opening moments she is framed in the humiliations of the gaze that the boys direct at her. Being interested and available is one disability. Being quite unlike the more pneumatic creatures who gallop in slo-mo through their imagination is her other disability.

And yet this derisory gaze is a bit of a red herring. The same camera is ambiguous about whether the crucial answer that wins them the quiz (Mills and Boon) comes from Naman, or from her.  She is a trouper, and does not let being whacked aside like a rubber ball deter her from trying again. The film eventually allows us to step aside and see her as she is.

This rara avis of those benighted times we shall call the pioneer-hudugi. Who stood out not because she wore shady matching-matching outfits as she zipped past on a Kinetic, but because she was expert at ignoring pecking orders, and scaling walls, real and metaphorical, in those very outfits. I have known several, and learnt, slowly, to treasure and admire the superior fire that they carried within. Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy plays exactly such a pioneer-hudugi to note-perfection, reaching deep to find awkwardness and a kind of raw grace. Her Ash wears the wrong clothes, sourced from the wrong regional language films, and says the wrong things (‘It’s an honour to quiz with you, Naman.’) but brings dil [20] and a sure sense of self to the small job of climbing out of the well that the disdain of the boy-talent in her world consigns her to. The film is as much about her as it is about Brahman Naman.

 Also, there are a million footnotes.

4. After ages and ages, Adoor Gopalakrishnan has a new film, Pinneyum. In an interview today in the Hindu, he is asked if he watches new films. And he says:

Only if they have something special. I don’t have the patience or time to sit through most of them.

Mm hmm.

4. Oh,ok. Looks like that's it for now. There were other things but those are to say and not to link to, so that's another post. 

5. ETA: Oooh! Via Nilanjana, this essay on Saki by one of my favourite contemporary children's writers, Katherine Rundell (If you haven't read Rooftoppers and The Wolf Wilder, rectify this immediately). This is probably the heart of Rundell's essay:

To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin. There have been many attempts in the last hundred years to re-create that specific Saki feeling; the pleasures of laying waste to convention combined with the quickening promise of something wilder in its stead. Nobody has yet managed it entirely, but in the pursuit of Saki a great deal of gleeful choler has been produced. If you were feeling ungenerous, you might compare the writing of an introduction to an animal marking out territory (the same could be said of writing essays for literary publications), and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ring through the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, but Wodehouse turns his raw material into something far gentler than Saki did; there is kindness in Saki but not sweetness, and in a truly Sakian Wodehouse story, Bertie would be trapped under a piece of vintage furniture and torn apart by the dog Bartholomew. Coward and Saki do both give off-kilter advice, and they are at their most archetypal when laying down the law. Coward renders schoolboy humour urbane: ‘Never trust a man with short legs; his brains are too near his bottom.’ Saki is calmly outlandish: ‘Never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.’ The work in Coward’s quips is audible; in Saki’s it is undetectable. As with Donne, Nabokov and Spark, the mechanisms of wit are unseen and so inimitable.  

Oh, an Tipu Sultan's man-eating mechanical tiger puts in an appearance.