Aditya Sinha on India Today's plagiarism

As far as I know, Aditya Sinha, editor-in-chief, The New Indian Express, is the only editor of a major publication to write about Aroon Purie's plagiarism in India Today recently.

An embarrassing silence has recently enveloped the Indian media regarding an act of plagiarism, probably because it’s not been committed by another journalist but by one of our most powerful media moguls, Aroon Purie. In his letter that opens the magazine India Today (but only for the Southern editions), he wrote about Rajnikanth a fortnight ago. One of the memorable lines went: “If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth (sic)”. Unfortunately, this line had already been written by Grady Hendrix and published on the American website Slate. Going by the blogs, what has irritated readers more was his “apology” in the subsequent issue which seemed more like a slap in the face, and in which he blamed the plagiarism on jet-lag. Friends who have worked for Purie say he is one of the sharpest media proprietors in India; if he forsakes humility in his attempt to put the matter behind him, then that’s his business. The real issue is that of rampant plagiarism in India and how it continues to erode the already low credibility of Indian journalism in the public eye.

I think Sinha is wrong to exonerate Purie somewhat, on the grounds that someone else committed the actual plagiarism. If Purie signed under the 'letter', he is responsible.

At any rate, other bloggers, including Niranjana - whose work has also been plagiarised by IT - have blogged about this, and in this case they've been noticed by India Today's Corporate Communications, whose generic comment has been reproduced on every website that noticed the plagiarism.


Grady Hendrix, whose article was plagiarised, has been pretty gracious about Purie's 'apology'. Some people's comments, on the other hand, have mostly taken exception to his understanding of Indian English. As if that was the point. Bah.


But it's good to see a mainstream newspaper take on the issue and contextualise it. Aditya Sinha FTW!

Two Minutes Older: Consider the Footnote

The first time I was properly introduced to a footnote, I was studying Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Arden edition. It wasn’t a thing you could ignore, because on most pages the footnotes occupied more than half the page, with scholarly references, asides on interpolations and interpretations. Reading Shakespeare that way was somewhat like reading with five books open at the same time.

Which, when you come to think of it, is exactly what reading a footnote is like: it’s an interruption but a necessary one. You’re moving along the page at a good clip and suddenly there’s a number or a symbol flagging you down for speeding and, like a slightly guilty but otherwise obedient driver, you stop to listen.

Or, if you’re like me, you might think of footnotes as half-open doors in which people are having very interesting conversations that you can’t help wanting to hear. It’s a brief and very illuminating pause on your journey.

All of which is to say that footnotes needn’t be the dry-as-dust academic device most of us think they are. Consider the number of fiction writers who have made an art form of footnotes:

J.G. Ballard’s ­­­­­­­­­­­­Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown is a book where the ‘main’ text is just one sentence long. But every word of that sentence has a footnote, with each note incrementally telling a complex story. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a single poem but the main narrative is told in the footnotes. It’s like reading Shakespeare in the Arden editions, only the footnotes are also part of the text and not merely a commentary on it.

In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Suzanna Clarke uses footnotes to provide both a history of magic and a sense that the fantastic events in the book are ‘fact’, in much the same way that someone today might make a colour photo black-and-white, as shorthand for something that is ‘authentic’ or about the past. In all these cases, both author and reader are complicit in the knowledge that the footnote, despite its claims to being ‘fact’, and an authoritative interruption, is also fiction.

Jasper Fforde takes this knowledge one step further in his Thursday Next books, where the characters in the book (who can enter and leave different fictional works) communicate with each other via a device called the footnoterphone – the urgent notes that these agents leave for each other appear as footnotes in whatever book they happen to be at that time.

If all of that sounds too complicated wait till we get to David Foster Wallace who made the footnote his own unique device*. He didn’t use footnotes in the cute way that Fforde or Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld books) do. For him, the footnote was a necessary life-line, a way to keep track of the process of thought itself, and the many implications of writing a single sentence. He footnoted his footnotes (and endnotes) and often made them into long digressions that were almost separate mini-essays.

One curious and interesting footnote I’ve recently seen is in a poem by Vivek Narayanan. The footnote appears in the last stanza** of the poem – against the last word, actually – and looks like prose but isn’t.

I’d like to consider the footnote in a different way entirely: in the poem, as in all the other instances, the footnote is a visual and non-linear device. What would its analogue be in other art forms?

Cinema, music, theatre, all being linear, can’t accommodate footnotes (unless they’re in the form of a director’s commentary found as extras on DVDs). What about paintings, though – could they have footnotes? What would they look like? What about fashion or food? Can clothes and cakes be footnoted?

I find all these possibilities very exciting and wish someone would explore them. I look forward to new and creative uses of the device. In effect, you could say, I have a footnote fetish.

__

*DFW died two years ago this month. He committed suicide by hanging himself. His suicide note might be read as a perfectly literal, perfectly macabre visualisation of the word.

**I could wish that it had not been so continuous with the poem itself but that’s just me.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express. This week they've put my column at the bottom of the page. Heh.)

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While we're on the subject of DFW, I recently read a review he wrote of an anthology of prose poetry [pdf]. In it, he calculates the square root of the book's ISBN. No, really. Plus, he's cheated his 1,000 word review most ingeniously. I wish the editors of books pages in newspapers and journals here would allow this sort of thing.

Two Minutes Older: Rama on the Sea Shore

Can't believe I forgot to post today's column! Apologies!

**

I have to confess I’m a Rama sceptic. I prefer the Mahabharata to the Ramayana. I say this with head slightly hung, because there’s no real basis for this prejudice. I haven’t read anything except Rajaji’s version for children, Chinmayananda’s Bala Ramayana, a few Amar Chitra Kathas and stories my grandmother told me when I was a child. I’ve never attended Ramkathas or Rama Navami lectures. Despite having read A.K.Ramajujan’s illuminating essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas, I have never been tempted to re-read the epic.

All of this is why I find myself still amazed that for months now I have been listening to a new version of the Ramayana. Shanta Rameshwar Rao is an educator and a writer of children’s stories. One day, she told me she’d written a version of the story for children and wanted to test drive it with a few interested people. Since I was avoiding telling my son any Rama stories, I was conscious of the gap in his education – which included addressing the less-than-perfect aspects of Rama and the epic itself. I thought this was a good opportunity to introduce him to the story while also passing the buck to someone more competent.

Since Shantamma began reading her version last December, the audience has changed, grown or been reduced, but my son and I have been steadfast listeners. Last Saturday, we reached the point in the story when Rama prepares for war. Hanuman has returned from Lanka, confirming that he’s met Sita and given her the ring. But the chapter begins in a very unwarlike way: Sugreeva is lying drunk and dreaming in his room and Lakshmana has to wake him and remind him of his promise to help Rama.

The most interesting moments in this chapter, though, describe Rama at the sea shore. Standing there, facing the sea, Rama is conscious of his godhead. He imagines he can wave his hand and command the sea to retreat so that his passage to Lanka is clear. He is all arrogance at first and rage afterwards when he realises that the sea will not obey. Sugreeva tells him he needs to pray and Rama performs penances. Still the sea is indifferent. Furious, Rama shoots into the sea the powerful arrows Vishwamitra once gave him.

The sea boils and throws up agonised and dying sea monsters – rare, wonderful creatures, described in loving detail. They come up, airing their strange eyes and tentacles and expire on the waves. It is Sugreeva, drunk and unkingly at the beginning of the chapter, who tells Rama that the sea cannot be commanded, that it is a force of nature, an entity without which we cannot survive and that all life forms are connected. He suggests that Rama, in all humility ask Samudra for help in crossing his domain.

This a penitent Rama does and in the most magnificent part of the chapter, Samudra rises from his underwater throne to greet Rama. He is an awe-inspiring figure, decked out in pearls and corals. Rama apologises for the destruction he has caused and Samudra blesses him and agrees to help him cross into Lanka.

Yes, this is a 21^st century, environmentally conscious version, but it’s not preachy and is unafraid of complexity. Rama’s behaviour is not only shown to be inexcusable, it is given to Sugreeva – the flawed, weak king he supported against Vali – to point out his failings to him as they stand on the seashore. We question Rama’s godliness, even his awareness of it, and what it means to be godly when it shows itself in erratic and destructive actions.

Uniquely, Shantamma takes us underwater, to briefly see the world above from a different perspective. It is a moving but clever section that makes one wonder at the actions of the entire human race.

Listening to her read, I understood the attraction of Ramkathas and the great pleasure there is in listening to stories told or read aloud, in simple language that masks great depth and interpretative power. I now appreciate the skills of the narrator who can assess the mood of her audience and interpolate her own narration with witty asides, so that one is involved and interested to the end.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

China Miéville's Kraken

Kraken by China Miéville

Pan Macmillan, UK.

Price: £17.99. pp: 481.

The review appeared today in the Sunday edition of The New Indian Express.

Billy Harrow, curator at the Natural History Museum in London, takes a group of people on a routine tour, only to find the Museum’s star attraction, a perfectly preserved giant squid (Architeuthis dux) – all eight-and-a-half metres of it in its tank –missing. More intriguing than the question of how such a large creature could have been stolen unknown, is why anyone would want to spirit away a giant squid.

Kraken reads like the whodunit it also is: Harrow is plunged into a London he does not know – one peopled by end-of-the-world cults, magicians and squid-worshippers. A mysterious arm of the Metropolitan Police, the FSRC (Fundamentalist and Sect-related Crimes), comprising of Inspector Baron and WPC Kath Collingswood, try to co-opt Harrow into a hunt for the squidnappers; as do the people of the Church of God Kraken, whose most devout member, Dane – a guard at the Museum – is Harrow’s guide and companion on his mad journey through this other London. Along the way, Harrow and Dane try to recover the disappeared squid while side-stepping the villainous Goss and Subby – surely a nod to Gaiman’s Croup and Vandemar? – and their boss, the crime lord Tattoo (who is exactly what the word says). All this, while trying to save the world from ending.

Miéville’s eighth work of fiction could so easily have been a run-of-the-mill environmental Armageddon that draws neat lines between human action and their consequences. Instead, it chooses to tell a tale about a creature from the deepest depths of the ocean and a world that will shortly end for no comprehensible reason.

It’s a departure from Miéville’s usual style. Reading a Miéville book is often a performance of patience: his difficult, baroque style both tries and rewards it in the reader. With Kraken, the writing is more casual and accessible, but no less packed with ideas. If anything, Miéville is prodigal with them, as if to say that the imagination, unlike other natural resources, can be mined in perpetuity and still be productive.

Running through the book is an argument that Miéville seems to be having with himself and his readers about metaphor and literality in science fiction and fantasy. Miéville has long held that in his writing the weird elements of the story are not just metaphoric but also literal, and that the realness of his creatures in the narrative should be accorded the respect they deserve. It’s an argument that forms the backbone of Kraken: does the squid-as-god represent something other than what it is? And what does metaphor have to do with faith – that other abstraction found in abundance in Kraken?

This semiotic tension between what something is and what it means is about the act of writing itself, and the world it conjures temporarily. At one point in the book, Harrow says as much, though about something completely different: “This has always been about writing,” he says, and it is something Miéville could be saying directly to the reader.

Perhaps no other kind of writing in recent times – barring only poetry – has had to bear the burden of what it really means more than science fiction and fantasy. Possibly as an antidote against this expectation of weighty meaningfulness, Kraken is often very funny and playful. Miéville’s register spans throwaway puns and offhand characterisations that are hilarious and sharp. There is a constant, mordant wit at play that suits the apocalyptic events in the book.

In exchange, Miéville sacrifices variety in his dialogues, so that everybody sounds alike when they speak (with the possible exception of the assassin Goss). One could argue that he more than makes up for it with the inventiveness of his plot and the ideas and characters that populate the book– one of the most memorable being the spirit of a radicalised Egyptian servant, Wati, who has escaped through the millennia into present-day London and who has unionised all the magical assistants and is leading them in a strike.

Kraken is also full of affectionate literary and pop cultural references that anybody – but most especially those born in the seventies and eighties – should thoroughly enjoy.

__


Like Aishwarya, I thought that though the book was very enjoyable, it is probably not Miéville's very best work*.

My main dissatisfaction (apart from thinking that everyone spoke the way Miéville might have written a fun-to-read take down of seasteading, or the film version of The Road) is with Dane: I thought he was a wonderful, wonderful character (whom Aishwarya thought reminded her of looked like Miéville himself - ha!) but one who was owed too much by too many people with too little explanation.

How does he know his way around the other London so well? Why are so many people willing to do him favours? When Wati can get an entire chapter to himself, why can't we get a couple of paragraphs in explanation? Dane was a soldier, we're told. That explains precisely nothing.

Anyway. Flawed though it is, it is still a fun book with plenty to remember and think about.

*Expectations certainly have a lot to do with disappointment; one wants a good author to at least match his best work without replicating its style or strategies. On the other hand, one also wants to see an author try new things even if they fail somewhat.

My interview with China last month here.

Two Minutes Older: Oulipo for the Body

Almost every woman of my grandmother’s generation that I know fasts at least once a week. Until the doctor forbade her from ever skipping a meal, my grandmother was a dedicated faster (if there’s such a word). My mother used to fast once in a while but this was a long time ago.

I have, for the most part, even less rigour and dedication than my mother though there was a one-year period in my life when I actually fasted and kept to it faithfully. I ate one meal a day, eliminating grain after mid-day and allowing myself only fruit or curd. At the time, I didn’t know that I had made myself an honorary American and if I had heard the name Atkins, it meant very little to me. For that one year, hunger sharpened my senses: I deeply enjoyed the little that I ate and I worked better than I ever had. I gave it up eventually, of course, and looking back, I see I must have been a little weird in those days.

People fast for different, often religious reasons. Denying the body certain kinds of food, sometimes between certain times of the day, on specified days of the week or month signify different things – it could be a simple act of prayer or remembrance; a penance of some kind, with the expectations of results; or simply a cleansing of the body.

Since I have very little of the kind of faith that demands any kind of sacrifice, I have recently been interested in fasting as an act of cleansing, while simultaneously being a little suspicious of it – not least because of the obsession with ‘purity’ that it seems to indicate. I am reminded of what a doctor said to me once, in total bewilderment when I went to him with an ENT infection after a jal neti gone wrong, “The body cleanses itself. Why do you need to do all this? Let your body be, no?”

Excellent advice, of course, but I know that if I let my body be, it would constantly demand to be fed chocolate and ice cream or even chocolate ice cream (with chocolate sauce). So I have decided to, only occasionally, put restraints on my body.

I take inspiration from the group of French writers, including Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais and Georges Perec among others, collectively called the Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop of potential literature). What these writers did was to set themselves random creative constraints – such as the replacing of every noun with the seventh word from it in a dictionary of the writer’s choice; or by writing in palindromes and so on. What this resulted in was a fascinating kind of writing that yet managed to escape being gimmicky. (In India, Charu Nivedita’s Zero Degree is an example of writing with severe and several constraints).

Adapted to my fast, which I see as Oulipo for the body, this opens the doors of constraint and I can choose between all kinds of temporary eating taboos. The ‘no salt’, ‘no grain’, ‘no dairy’ fasts are all old hat, as are the ‘only juices’ or ‘only single vegetables a day’ ones. What if I considered a green day fast (only green vegetables, moong dal, peas, etc. If someone could really produce green eggs and ham without artificial food colouring, I could consider that permissible) or one where I’m allowed to eat only what I have grown in my garden?

In fact, combined with Ayurvedic or other alternative medicines’ theories about food and the body, there are infinite variations that could make fasting as much an art as cooking and certainly a better one than salad-carving.

I see my Oulipo Fast as non-discriminatory in all matters except that of food, though if someone wanted to fast only, for instance, on major festival days, I would consider it an entirely reasonable constraint.

There is a caveat, though: a fast is not the same as a diet. It is effective precisely because it is short-lived, and has nothing to do with result-oriented motivations such as losing weight, gaining a spouse or attaining the lotus feet of one’s chosen god.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Knowing How The World Isn’t: A Conversation with China Miéville

But look at Marx's argument in Capital: 'What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.' In other words, human productive activity is predicated on a consciousness of the not-real. You have to know how the world isn't in order to transform it.

In the real world, the not-real separates into the possible, not yet possible and never possible, but you can't always be sure of those distinctions in your mind. You might set out to do a task without being certain whether it's possible or not--what you are sure of is that the desired effect is not-real when you start.
                                                                        China Miéville in The Socialist Review
[Issue 88 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Autumn 2000 Copyright © International Socialism.]


 
China Miéville has just won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for a record third time, for The City and the City, the previous two wins being for Perdido Street Station and Iron Council.

Not entirely for that reason, the first few questions are entirely about The City and the City. If you haven’t read it and intend to, you should skip to the later questions, after the End Spoiler alert.

Excerpts from this interview can be found in today’s New Indian Express.

**SPOILER ALERT**               **SPOILER ALERT**                 **SPOILER ALERT**
 
Sridala Swami:  In The City and the City Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space. They remind me of an imperfectly silvered mirror, with degrees of visibility and totality – you use the words ‘crosshatching’, ‘totality’ and ‘alterity’ – but what was most intriguing was that these boundaries between the cities seem unchanging and stable, though each city within its own boundaries appears to change shape over time. Could you talk about how you imagined the cities along their borders?

China Miéville:  OK, well, this is tricky because we're somewhat into spoiler territory, so I'll preface this by saying that in my ideal world no one would know anything about any books, especially this one, before starting to read them/it. That warning said, the book is, deliberately of course, somewhat vague about the details, because it's not the kind of thing that Borlu would, on the whole, be interested in mentioning. And any book in which there is an ambiguity is - whatever anyone including the author thinks - structured by that ambiguity.

That is to say that questions along the lines of 'Were there really ghosts in Turn of the Screw?' or some similar attempt to collapse super-positional uncertainties within a text which is structured by those certainties strikes me as a very odd thing to ask. There is no 'real' truth - it's a text. All of which said, I have a very clear idea myself of how the world of Ul Qoma and Beszel work. In my head, the best way to imagine it is to draw a city on a piece of tracing paper, then draw another city of similar dimensions on another piece of tracing paper, then put them both down on top of each other on a map. Where there's only one city visible, that's a total area (alter to the other). Where they overlap, these are crosshatches. And these are juridical, social, ideological, cultural, conceptual categories. No less real for that, but not fuzzy physics or magic.

SS:  In the book the past is allowed no purchase on the present. But the book has two kinds of pasts: the kind that, in crime fiction, leads to explanations at the end; and the other – of the archaeological dig in Ul Qoma and the artefacts found there – that might or might not explain the schism between the cities. This past explicates nothing in the present of the story. We’re left with no neat reasons for why the cities are the way they are. How did this evolve while you were writing the book?

China Miéville:  Because I wanted something that was very defining of the situation in the background - without the odd archaeology, there would be no digs, and therefore no setting and no story - but concretely doesn't impinge on the events at the level of 'meaning', any more than the theft of some Crown Jewels from the Tower of London would necessarily involve an exposition of the history of the Koh-i-Noor in a thriller about that theft. It might, of course, but the narrative doesn't have to go there explicitly, even though that history is shading the setup. It's also because I wanted the idea of a very obvious logic, but a logic that one can't decode, as underlying the cities. Hence the sense, I hope, isn't that it's chaos or random, but that it's impenetrable.

Again I'm always a little taken aback when people ask me 'Why are the cities like they are?' My answers go 
between: 'There are no cities,' to 'I'm not telling you,' to 'Who cares?' 

'There are no cities' in the sense of 'ceci n'est pas un pipe' - it's a story.

SS:  The book is primarily crime fiction; and like all crime fiction it asks: what is the crime and what would justice looks like. Unlike most crime novels,* though, here it’s a question that is still largely unresolved at the end of the book.

China Miéville:  I'm not sure, though I'd love to take credit for staggering originality, that it is 'unlike most crime novels', to be honest. I think these days it's not uncommon to ask whether the 'solution' to the crime and the assertion of justice are, in fact, co-terminous. Lots of 'gritty' crime (stupid adjective, but you know what I mean), from Noir onwards at least, if not before, make quite a lot of play of the still-extant forces that structure the background. Or someone like Patricia Highsmith questioning the whole paradigm from within. There's often a rather hollow feeling to the 'triumph'. I'm very open to being persuaded I'm wrong about that, but I think the idea that at the solution of the crime, 'justice' is asserted only describes one particular, and particularly conservative, iteration of crime fiction.

However! One thing I like a lot about your question is that it distinguishes between what I might think and what Tyador might think. Tyador is a career policeman. I am not. He lives in Beszel. I do not. He is 
 non-existent. I am not etc.

SS: I ask because there is a very formal structure to the end - the confession elicited etc. that seems to imply a tying up of the knots.

China Miéville:  Yes, it's a highly, highly formalistic book. I know some readers have complained that the crime aspect is 'formulaic' or pedestrian or whatever. And I think few things are less edifying than writers trying to argue back against critics: it may be that I just didn't do a good enough job. I accept that. All I can do is offer up the thinking behind it - which was that I wanted to write an extremely traditional crime novel, a police procedural with complete fidelity to all the tropes and protocols of the procedural, that 'obeyed the rules' and 'didn't cheat' – in the lovely vernacular of crime readers – but that was also part of another literary tradition (weird, spec, sf, whatever).

By 'I accept that' I mean 'I hate and lament that if it's the case' - I just mean I'm not going to say to people 'you haven't understood me'. Even when they don't understand me.

SS:  Some of the most intriguing people I was hoping to see more of in the book but who only got a passing mention were the ‘insiles’. Could you talk about them, about the use and origin of the word?

China Miéville: The origin of the word was simple: it's an inversion of 'exile'. Someone who leaves their country. In the novel these are people who leave their country without leaving the physical space it inhabits, but entering a new space. They get out by going in. Insile. Simple. A new juridical/social space, I mean.

SS:  It's been used in the context of South Africa during apartheid.

China Miéville:  Insile? Has it? I didn't know.

SS:  Yes. Those of the ANC who didn't leave as exiles, but resisted from within.

China Miéville:  Wow. Well, I'm pleased to hear it.

SS:  Returning briefly to Breach: To commit breach knowingly is to commit a profoundly radical act of seeing/awakening that is both political and philosophical. How do you reconcile this with it also being fundamentally an exercise of power?

China Miéville:  I don't think any reconciliation is required, is it? I mean, that's the case with all sorts of acts of seeing etc in the real world. Plus which I think that 'fundamentally' there, while I don't think it's wrong, risks being as obfuscatory as clarificatory without a little more unpacking. I mean, it's an exercise of power - but also a mistake, also a risk. And also, and this was important to me, something that happens all the time. 

One of the things that I think sometimes isn't talked about enough, in the context of taboos, is how they are often broken in the day-to-day all the time. All the bloody time, in various ways. One of the (many) problems with the traditional anthropological method is that it relies so much on 'informants' ,that cultures are often reduced, or simplified, to their most discursively explicit levels. Rules etc. Those are real and very important - but so is the fact that they are often not honoured, and those transgressions aren't just pathologies, they're constitutive of society, just as much as the rules.

One of my favourite anthropological anecdotes was in a book where the 'informant' (god that's an imperial term, isn't it?) explained to the anthropologist that it was taboo to have sex with a menstruating woman. 'So you'd never do it?' says the anth. 'No,' says informant. 'Never?' 'Absolutely not.' Pause. Long pause. 'I mean,' informant continues in a  more relaxed voice, 'I mean, you can, I mean you sort of shouldn't but it's not the end of the world, I mean, you know, you're only human', etc.

So one thing with TC&TC is that the rules of breach are both absolutely constitutive and defining and so on - and are also (as the text makes clear) broken in little ways all the time. All the time.

SS:  The characters in the book, but most especially Tyador Borlú, negotiate several languages with differing degrees of success. There’s a very strong sense that conversations have been ‘translated’. What strategies did you use to give each language a unique voice and what blocks did you run into?

China Miéville:  I'm very pleased you think so. One of the things I did was read a lot of Eastern European fiction in translation, and I wanted to give the book the slightly odd, not-exactly-stilted but somewhat dissonant linguistic sense that even very good translations have - I wanted it to read like a text translated into English from Besz. Bruno Schulz. Kafka. Alfred Kubin. Jellinek. (Not just 'Eastern' European, obviously).

And for the languages, I just thought about clumps of phonemes that would be common in each language, and gave the grammar a little thought - just enough to make the tenor of the conversations reasonably systematic - in that the mistakes people make will often be shared across different speakers of the same language.

SS:  [Stanislaw] Lem also?

China Miéville:  Hmmm, Lem - interesting. I hadn't thought about it - I don't recall being particularly aware of that quality of the translations in the ones I read - it was particularly the Schulz/Kafka/Kubin axis I was aware of. Having said which I think you may well be onto something, because I realised very late, much after I'd finished, that one of the subterranean influences, that I'd forgotten at a conscious level but I'm sure was there, was my favourite Lem book, 'The Investigation', which is, of course, a police procedural. If of a highly odd kind. I know he wasn't sure about it, thought it didn't quite work, but I think it's absolutely amazing.

SS:  He wasn't sure about the success of the book or its translation?

China Miéville:  As I recall (I'm no expert), he didn't think the book was successful in his own terms. He didn't regard it as one of his best. I read it years ago, and wasn't thinking about it at a conscious level as I wrote - but wtf does one's consciousness know?

**END SPOILERS**

**END SPOILERS**


SS:  Moving away from TC &TC now: One story that I return to often in Looking for Jake and Other Stories is ‘Familiar’. It starts out as a creation story, as a sort-of performance of magic, but it’s really a story of evolution. There’s sentience, then a gradual accumulation of what is useful and the discarding of what is not (it’s also a fantastic idea to have a creature that is made of trash also generate it). How do you create your monsters? And can there be monsters without humans?

China Miéville:  I'm glad you like that story. It's one of my absolute favourites, and it doesn't get as much attention as some of the others. (I don't mean that to sound whining! I'm just glad you noticed it.) 

How do I create my monsters? At its basic, super-simple level, I think the Ur-Monster is the chimera, in the sense that it is a composite creature. The head of X, the body of Y (plus or minus the tail of Z). That's why the game Exquisite Corpse is so important for me (though I always think of it with its cheerfully vulgar English name, Heads Bodies & Legs). So at its simplest, my monsters, like most, are shoved-together composites. But - as with the Familiar - there are others. Teratogenesis is the easiest thing in the world, really - extend, change, tweak, add, subtract, exaggerate some detail or other of an existing thing, and you have a 
monster.

And can they exist without humans? I'm not sure I understand the epistemological base of the question! Do you mean, at a conceptual level, is the concept 'monster' indelibly linked to that 'human' (often elided with insider/citizen/goodie, etc)? Absolutely. But one of the joys of the monster is that, at the level of pop culture in particular, they also, with a kind of winning pulp prometheanism, demand a kind of naive literalism, as well as their inevitable (and delightful) metaphoric resonances.

I have no clue if that answers your question, sorry.

SS:  I did mean conceptually. It used to be my big problem reading SFF when I was a kid - the inability to conceive of anything truly inhuman. I guess I made my peace with that.

China Miéville:  Well, to be fair, that's a genuine and I think completely insoluble dilemma. I would say that pretty much if you can think something up, ipso facto its thinkable and therefore not really alien. The best you can do is play games with that, fail and fail better. In the Bas-Lag books the Weaver(s) is/are the only monsters that are in any way 'really' alien - and of course even that's a hedge. You can only imply real alienness - the closer you get to it, the more you're thinking it, the less alien, etc.

SS:  Bas-Lag now. The Remades are tragic and horrifying examples of the abuse of power. I couldn’t help thinking of Serafini’s drawings in the Codex Serafinianus in this context which is a kind of prosthetic aesthetic: it’s violent but fascinating. You’ve said you’re very conflicted about Serafini. How?

China Miéville:  Well there's a couple of things there. First of all, there are, I think, some assumptions bound up in the phrase 'abuse of power' which I'm not sure I'd agree with. Certainly to do that would be a terrible use of certain types of power - but it is also grotesquely apposite for other types of power. What about the power of the slaveholder? I'm sure you've read descriptions of the punishments for slaves in the plantations and in the Caribbean? I don't mean 'just' whipping or death - I mean the utterly incredible breathtaking baroque sadisms of enforced coprophagy, sexual degradation, bestial interventions of an incredible inventiveness. Now, was that 'abuse' of power? It was abuse, certainly, but abuse of people, not of power, which, in that context, depended precisely on such barbarities. 

In other words, I don't really believe in some abstract thing called 'power' - it seems to me unhelpful to think that a four-year-old hitting a three-year-old in a nursery is exercising something meaningfully related, even if mediatedly, to the exploitation of women, or slaves, or whatever.

(sorry, I got carried away)...

SS:  Yes. You're right. I meant just 'abuse'.

China Miéville:  So it seems to me that much social power is predicated precisely on cruelties at least as unspeakable as remaking. My point is that the phrase 'abuse of power' often exonerates power.

Ya, sorry, I'm making a bit of a meal of this.

SS:  No no, it was a badly thought-out phrase.

China Miéville:  Well it's very common, and it pressed a button, because at its most vulgar level that conception underlies much of the talk about 'human nature' and 'natural human cruelty' as 'explaining' specifics of social oppression etc. At its more theoretically trendy level, you could see it in much Foucauldian conceptions of 'power'. WTF is 'power'??

Anyway. Serafini...I guess for me my hesitation is put very well by the writer Shelley Jackson, who said, “I've always been a bit suspicious of it. I guess because I love what it’s based on—the old alchemical etchings—and though I understand them no better than I understand this, I admire their earnestness. I love how a thing that looks so fantastical and poetic arises out of quotidian impulses. The Codex just seems so much more self-conscious, and artsy and illustratory. There’s something coy about it.”

When I read it I think I gasped, because she'd expressed perfectly something that had been evading my language, a hesitation in my own reaction.

SS: Buñuel said to Jean-Claude Carrière once: ‘the imagination is a muscle that needs to be exercised.’ In this context, could you talk about the use, reuse/recasting and discarding of ideas? (You use – or re-use – ideas in different ways in your books: the Familiar from Jake is seen in both the binjas and the unbrellas of Un Lun Dun. The moving streets of ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’ might be found in The City and The City.)

China Miéville:  You're quite right. This is a hard question to answer. Give me 30 seconds to compose my thoughts.

Well, here's the thing. Certain of my ideas and predilections change over time - others are remarkably consistent. (I mean utterly. I have pictures I drew when I was 4, and they are of exactly what I draw now.) The problem is as a writer, you can't just keep saying the same thing, or investigating the same things, but at the same time you have to talk about the stuff that genuinely moves and intrigues you, and you can't manufacture false fascinations. That creates a bind. I will never, ever tire of: octopuses; underwater monsters; monsters in general; rubbish/garbage/rejectamenta; people on roofs; people under cities; cities; etc etc. 

Now, what do you do with that? Well, one thing you can and should do, I think, is try to tweak them and investigate them differently in different books. But another thing you can - and, to my chagrin, should - do is retire certain fascinations (also words, linguistic tics, etc), because they can with incredible ease become kitsch. Our own fascinations teeter on the edge of kitsch - or, if you just don't care and keep indulging them despite knowing you're becoming a parody of yourself, camp. I don't want that to happen. The title 'The City & The City' was almost camp - so I'm a 'city writer', am I? Try this. But it's a risky joke and I wouldn't want to do it too often.

So you have to know when to shut up about things, even if you want not to. I guess it's the same as knowing when to shut up about your stamp collection or early LP fascination or whatever in real life, even if you still love it.

My partner helps with this. There is a category of Things You Can't Have Any More. Some are obvious - moonlight, stars - or in a genre iteration, vampires, steampunk, zombies. It doesn't mean you don't like them - quite the opposite! Because you like them you need to know when to rein it in. And sometimes we'll chat and she might say, 'you can't have X any more' about one of my preferred Things. Or I might. Or both.
Maybe in a few years one might be able to have it again. When the dust has cleared. I don't know. 

I think we all teeter on the edge of being parodies of ourselves all the time.

SS:  In your Marxism 07 talk on ‘Marxism and Rubbish’, you ended by saying, “It is precisely because we so abhor the reality of the world as a rubbish tip that socialists should import the insurgent rubbish of art. And that is my Rejectamentalist Manifesto.”  It's been three years since then. Has anything changed in your formulation?

China Miéville: Well, the 'rejectamentalist manifesto' is several things - it was, as you say, the conclusion to a talk I gave at Marxism 07, it's the name of my online scrapbook (I pusillanimously abjure the name 'blog', not out of despite, but because the rm isn't really worthy of it), and it's a project taking shape in my head that may or may not - I hope will - be born one day. 

So - that formulation stands, not because that's my final word on rejectamenta or rubbish or anything else, but because in and of itself it's a formulation I'm perfectly happy with. 

SS:  Ursula le Guin once said that she returned to Earthsea after a long time and found the place changed, so she had to write Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. Does that happen with you? If you returned to Bas-Lag now, would you find it different?

China Miéville:  Well I have to be honest - I am not a writer who likes the formulation like 'finds it changed', or 'discovered that my characters were this or that' - I don't like, and don't identify with, that 'shamanic' conception of the writer that underpins it, that you are a mere channel or conduit for something outside your control. I'm not casting aspersions on those who experience it that way - but that's not at all how it is for me (I have certain issues with it that would take a long time to expand on).

So it's not a question of 'finding' things different - but it is perfectly true that I notice things about the stuff I've done before, the settings, the world, the books, that look different in a different light, and sometimes that means coming back and answering yourself. (Le Guin did it to extraordinary effect and with amazing and impressive politics and rigour with Earthsea, of course).

That's already happened, and I'm sure it'll happen again. I like Perdido Street Station very much - but I realised that though Remaking was obviously 'bad' in that book, and that though my sympathy was clearly 'with' the Remade, I hadn't given any of them any voice. So the following book involved going into the head of one Remade in particular, and Iron Council tried to talk about a collectivity, a politics, of those voices and subjectivities. It's not in any way a repudiation of what goes before, but it's an argument with, a development of, oneself. And at the level of the depiction of culture it was always important to me that Bas-Lag wasn't a static world. 25-30 years have passed between PSS and IC, and the city of New Crobuzon is very different. For specific reasons. Its politics have shifted.

If/when I go back, both its politics, and my own relation to that setting, will have developed again.

SS: You wrote Between Equal Rights several years ago. Will you return, at some point, to non-fiction - theoretical and book-length?

China Miéville: I sincerely hope so. It's something I intend to do, and I'm working on two ideas now. The problem is finding time. I'm dreadful, dreadful, at doing more than one thing at once. To my everlasting, growing regret. But yes. The spirit is willing and eager. 

SS:  About your forthcoming book**, Kraken: It isn’t in any way a response to Margaret Atwood’s accusation that all sci-fi is about ‘talking squids in outer space’, is it?

China Miéville:  It predates my awareness of the remark! Plus there's no space. Plus it's already been done. By many writers. Ken Macleod et al. Plus I was already rude about that in The Nation. Having said all of which - yeah, why not?

SS:  What did you enjoy most about writing Kraken?

China Miéville:  What I most enjoyed writing in the novel - from various candidates - was the section describing the afterworld life and radicalisation of a magic servant. For various reasons, some of this book was very hard to write - that chapter was a delight, and came very easily.

Kraken  wasn't my original title, but it ties in unexpectedly and humorously with the release of Clash of the Titans - which is, btw, an astoundingly terrible, incoherent and misogynist film, which also apropos of bugger all imports what appears to be a Sadhu and his followers largely so as to riff off the racist visual cliché of jabbering & threatening 'natives'. But anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. If you like giant squid and eschatological cults it might be to your taste. It also, for anyone hunting out specific India references, has some mentions of Kerala in it and to kalaripayattu, and the Urumi, the world's most amazing weapon. Which FTW, and for which thank you.'
__________________
*I see how this could be confusing. To my mind, there’s a very clear distinction between the whodunit/procedural, noir and spy stories that come under the broad rubric of ‘crime fiction’. TC&TC is a procedural, no matter how noir-ish and atmospheric it seems. To the extent that it’s faithful to the genre – and it is, right up to the dénouement – the finding of the criminal is synonymous with justice being done. But the story doesn’t end with the dénouement and to say why I think there is no resolution, much ambiguity and many, many unanswered questions would be a spoiler of at least a 7.8 magnitude. Either that, or I have only read very, very conservative crime fiction.*** Go read the book and decide.

**At the time of the conversation. Right now, of course, the book's out in the UK. 

***This also reminds me that I owe (some of) you guys a post on P.D. James and John le Carré.

Two Minutes Older: 01 May

Help me with a title here!


Back in the early 90s our college union was a bit of a joke. Many of my friends were a part of it so I didn’t laugh but the fact was our college union wasn’t really a union; they didn’t organise strikes or make strong demands. They didn’t set themselves up against any establishment. Half the students didn’t even know there was a union. Those that did didn’t really know what it was there for.

My college’s union was apolitical and took great pride in it – indeed, owed its existence to this fact. It existed in a cosy relationship with a nearly-maternal establishment and concerned itself with things like better food in the canteen and more parking space for students’ cars.

I was reminded of this when a friend recently said on Facebook that there ought to be a union for book reviewers. (I’m still not sure how serious she was.) Do I agree? You bet I do! Just as film technicians have associations that negotiate with producers on their behalf, I’m in favour of freelance writers organising themselves to ensure there’s some kind of accountability regarding payments and schedules.

As you may have guessed, I think unions are a pretty red hot idea.

Recently, though, I’ve been amused at the middle class’s enthusiastic adoption of tactics they’ve traditionally complained about. Remember the pilots’ strike last year for better wages? I wonder how many of those same airlines staff were annoyed about hartals by, say, the Narmada Bachao Andolan back in the day, and how it was creating traffic jams and making them late for work.

Or consider Resident Welfare Associations. I’m glad that they exist, and are recognised, and have the ability to negotiate with the government and the municipality about water, sewage, garbage disposal etc. But I wonder if they’d also associate themselves equally enthusiastically with the Domestic Workers’ Trade Unions in their cities.

What are the odds? They’re more likely to crib about how it’s so hard to get ‘affordable help’ and how they’re all – if they can read but even if they can’t – moving into supermarket jobs where they get paid a lot for doing very little.
And – taking a little detour here – don’t you just love the words we use to describe domestic workers? ‘Help’? A woman who gets up at some unearthly hour to cook her family’s meal and send her kids off to school so she can come in to work at 8 am, is ‘helping’ out?  That other word, ‘maid’, to describe domestic workers is surely wistful: it turns them into discreet, genteel, almost feudal creatures, instead of the harassed, often resentful and certainly more vocal women they really are. The ugliest, most blunt appellation is, needless to say, ‘servant’ – it’s both politically incorrect and unapologetic about it.

Unorganised labourers, such as domestic workers, are some of the most exploited people today. It’s a well-known litany: hard physical work, no food or stale food, cut wages for one reason or another, abrupt dismissals, and loans leading into debts. One illness could destabilise the domestic worker’s life for many years.
The minimum wages for a domestic worker in Andhra Pradesh as of December 2007 is a laughable Rs. 12.50 and hour and Rs. 2,600 per month. We’re not even talking about medical benefits or paid leave here. Under the circumstances, I’m amazed at how unblushingly we complain about our domestic troubles.

Last year, the morning after Diwali, there were several empty shells lying around, the remains of those large crackers that splash across the sky in bursts of red and gold. Curious, I picked one up to see if there was a price tag. There was: it said MRP. Rs.1,200. Two of those more or less make one domestic worker’s monthly pay. That’s irony carrying a bludgeon.

So while I’m happy that the word ‘union’ is no longer entirely a dirty word for the middle class, I wish we could find a way to be equally supportive of those who might not have even considered unionising but will benefit enormously if they do. There’s another word people used to use that we could re-learn: it’s called ‘solidarity’. 

__________


Extra! From Infochange!

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Two Minutes Older: Being Watched

“We develop in the child a desire for truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement,” the flyer for yet another international school says. Further down the same page, in bold red, is what the school is advertising as a Unique Feature. I am sceptical, because under Sport, they have claimed to offer carom facilities to the students. And chess. (Why did they leave out book cricket, I wonder?) Maybe this unique feature really means the children will have a bedside lamp so they don’t have to spend a fortune on batteries for their torch?

I find I'm wrong.

Unique Feature: We intend to set up CCTVs and web cams so that parents can see their children online from offices or houses, during day care hours. The intention is that the parent may be reassured of the child’s well being and also provide a platform for the parents to actually view their child learn and socialise.

This is so many kinds of wrong that I am thankful to see this is, so far, only an intention. Maybe prospective parents will be as outraged as I am and this surveillance of under-18s will come to nothing?

On the other hand, who knows about parents these days? Though Facebook’s terms of service say only those who are 18 years and over can use the social networking site, I find many children as young as nine on it. They get around this by providing a false date of birth.

Parents go through some traumas about whether to allow their children access to or forbid them from entering the virtual world. But once they’ve caved and allowed their minor children into social networking or other forms of interaction online, I don’t think any parent is going to jump through too many ethical hoops before s/he decides to ‘supervise’.

It’s a flexible word: it could mean anything from adding your child as a friend on Facebook to checking their email, to following their every move online because you’re really worried about stalkers and other online predators. It appears that even with children, privacy must be sacrificed to safety.

Once the necessity of something is acknowledged, it becomes easier to be persuaded about the means. Terror threats? Of course our malls and stores and airports need to be watched. Naturally, streets and stations, ATMs and hotels should have CCTVs. Of course we need to be x-rayed. You think it’ll help if every single thing about me – including my biometrics, where I’ve travelled and how many bank accounts I have – is accessible with one identification (such as the UID)? Sure! If you assure me it’s for my own good.

As adults living in a fearful world that looks increasingly like something Philip K. Dick might have dreamt up, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some kind of perverse vengefulness at work here: we’re watched all the time. Why not our children? It is for their own safety. For their own good.

What could surveillance possibly add to the school experience? What are they going to do – haul up the chalk-thrower? suspend the one who passes notes? send emails home complaining that so-and-so was caught sneaking coffee into her milk during breakfast and they have the footage to prove it? Can it be that parents and teachers think this is a good way to prevent child abuse, assault and so on? (Have they watched Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha?)

Any ‘truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement’ the students of this school might attain is likely to be false because they’re too busy trying to be someone else for the camera. Isn’t adolescent self-consciousness bad enough without this?

I might be overreacting. But it’s been thought of and that is sufficient for the idea to gain traction some day. It won’t take much to convince us that our trust in our children must be backed by evidence. Or to believe that the world is a complicated and dangerous place, and schools no less so, and that such measures are necessary.

The power that adults wield over children is vast enough. The least we can give them is some privacy in which to come into their own selves in their own time.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

**
Won't be accessing mail for a few days now. Will respond to comments when I return.

Two Minutes Older: I Know What To Do This Summer

April rolls around and a sizeable portion of the country wonders what to do with the summer. One slice of those with disposable incomes and children scouts around for summer camps, swimming lessons and any manner of activity that will ensure the continued absence of their offspring for a part of the day. Others – also with disposable incomes but with children optional – begin to look for vacation cool-spots.

Vacations once meant the inevitable trip to what is sometimes still called ‘the native place’. This usually meant dusty train journeys sometimes followed by bus journeys to places like Mettur, Kancheepuram, Kumbakonam or plain old Chennai. Once in a rare while, it meant exotic places such as Kashmir or Rajasthan.

Maybe it’s because these exotic vacations were always attended by disasters such as flat tyres, missed flights and bookings that we found cancelled just as we gratefully collapsed in the hotel lobby, that I am now a very jittery and reluctant traveller. I don’t travel if I can help it and I am puzzled by this passion Indians suddenly have to see every place on this planet before it is either submerged by the sea, or destroyed by war, natural disaster, disease or plain old economic development.

It hardly needs to be said that travel of a certain touristy kind is partially responsible for the disappearance of whatever it is the traveller has come to see: those swirling mists now carry not the scent of pines or eucalyptus but of garbage; that ancient temple will always tell you that Ravi loves Sujata (whatever the current state of their relationship may be) and the ads promise you that everywhere you go will be just like where you left.

The seasoned traveller takes these paradoxes in her stride but I am not one of them. Of late, I find more things to offend me and make me indignant about the consumption of places and people. In the documentary film, Jashn-e-Azadi by Sanjay Kak, one sequence shows a bunch of people posing with army jawans, sometimes with guns slung awkwardly over their shoulders, sometimes with borrowed army caps, but always with big, happy grins on their faces. Are they really unmindful of what it means to pose for those kinds of photographs in present-day Kashmir?

I can’t decide if vacationers are especially good at wilful blindness or if it’s just me who is morbidly sensitive. I suppose it depends on why one travels. If travel is one way of enlarging one’s experience then surely the traveller must engage with the place at also the human level? Places aren’t just mountains and sea or food and handicrafts.

When I think of the chattering busloads standing on the suicide points scattered across the hill stations of this country or bargaining hard over a mekhla-chador or bastar toy, or even making a mini-pradakshana around the swimsuit-clad woman lying on a beach in Goa, I can’t help remembering Pablo Neruda’s sprawling, incantatory poem, ‘Spain in our Hearts’. The last section of the poem, ‘I Explain A Few Things’, sets up a series of questions the speaker of the poem is supposedly asked: “You will ask: and where are the lilacs?/ And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?/ And the rain that often struck/ your words filling them/ with holes and birds”. The answer, after a several detours, is stirring and unforgettable:

Come and see the blood in the streets,

Come and see

The blood in the streets,

Come and see the blood

In the streets!

The inevitable question, if one does see the blood in the streets is, it possible to be unaffected and continue to look for beauty or peace or the gods or the past or whatever it is one is looking for, as if nothing were happening now? Where can one safely travel without being crass or insensitive?

Since I don’t particularly want to wring my hands in public, let me also confess that I don’t have answers to these questions.

What is clear to me is that I won’t be going anywhere this summer. Instead, I will travel with a remote and a bowl of murmura. If there’s no electricity, there’s always a stack of books to hand. 

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Two Minutes Older: Vegetable Love

One weekend afternoon as I was cooking, the oil ran out. I upturned the whole tin and waited for it to give up what oil it had left, drop by slow drop. As each drop gathered at the rim, backlit by the window in front of me, I started having semi-apocalyptic visions.

I thought of what it took to make even this much oil. It occurred to me that I, who laughed at those old jokes about where milk comes from (answer, according to the spoilt brat in the joke: the supermarket), did not know what it took to make the couple of litres of oil that we used every month. Whatever the process, I knew it used a lot of energy.

As I stood with upended tin of oil, the electricity went off and my visions scaled themselves up from semi- to full-blown apocalyptic ones. What if the world had no more electricity? What would we do for cooking oil? What would it take for us to produce a spoonful of oil for one meal’s tadka?

Field, oil seeds, planting, watering (without the benefit of pumps), harvesting, pressing – I felt exhausted just thinking about it and I wasn’t even taking into account the months of waiting we would have to endure in between all the hectic activity described above.

The waiting seemed to me the most exciting and frustrating part. A few months earlier, my son had planted the eye of a potato in our garden and every day he would drag my mother and me out to monitor its progress. As long as it was sprouting and growing visibly, it was clear that much was happening out of sight and below the ground. Once the leaves achieved a uniform greenness and height, however, he no longer knew how to tell if the potatoes were ready to harvest or not.

“Shall we pull it up to see how big it is?” I asked.

Naturally, I did not expect to be taken seriously. But I didn’t think my son would curl his lip at me either. This was the same boy, who, just a few months before, had thought that burying a body was a good way of preserving it so that we could take it out from time to time to remind ourselves about how it used to look when alive.

 Children grow up so fast, I thought to myself and we sighed at how long it was taking for the potatoes to grow. Three weeks later, unable to bear the suspense any longer, we harvested the potatoes.

This is what we got: five teeny, miniscule white and skinless potatoes. We fried them (while giving thanks that we could just go and buy oil instead of making it) and thought philosophical thoughts in the few seconds it took us to consume the result.

Since that time, I have been paying more attention to process in the natural world. I’d like to be able to say I sleep better because of this new-found enthusiasm for all things cyclical, but that would be going too far.

Let’s just say, it’s soothing to see the seasons change – to enjoy the rain of leaves in spring before the flowers come, to collect the flowers when they fall, to dry and powder them so that there’s natural colour for next year’s Holi, like a memory preserved and then relived*. It is even possible to welcome the thought of summer just because it brings with the heat the promise of watermelons, aam panna and khus sherbet.

There’s also a sense of anticipation and contentment that owes everything to the time it takes for things to happen. This is what Andrew Marvell must have meant by ‘vegetable love’ in his poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ He, of course, was urgently wooing his beloved so for him time was a wingèd chariot hurrying near. We’re in no rush here, even though we may sometimes be impatient.

Every time we eat a papaya from our garden or spend an afternoon shaking down gooseberries from the tree and argue about whether to eat them up or pickle them, I consider not just the day but the whole year seized.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

*Just so you know: epic fail. We forgot we left the flowers out to dry and when we returned from a week-long trip, they were burnt brown. 

__

Bonus photo, found on Jenny Davidson's blog and saved in that choking feedreader I've talked about for nearly a year for just such a contingency.

Two Minutes Older: Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

For the last three months, I have avoided all talk about the one subject that is on the minds of even – if reports about human chains or suicide are to be believed – school children: I am talking about Telangana.

Then nearly a month ago, a friend visited. He was doing a project on federalism and wanted to research the Telangana movement. Having arranged all kinds of meetings for him, I thought it only right that I also be present as he spoke to lawyers, ideologues, students, activists, bloggers, dissenters and experts of all kinds including the friends I had gathered together at a dinner one evening. As he conversed with these people, I watched from the sidelines, occasionally asking a question or two to demonstrate that I was actually listening.

On the basis of this very scientific collection of narratives, I now have an opinion on Telangana that I am going to share with you.

The way I see it, Telangana is like Akira Kurosawa’s film, Rashomon. If you haven’t seen the film and know nothing about it, it is a complicated story-within-a-story. As the film begins, two people relate the events that took place a few days before. Their story is about a travelling samurai and his wife who are waylaid by a bandit. The wife might have been raped and the samurai is certainly left for dead and is found by a woodcutter, who is one of the two narrators of the story.

The film itself is a reconstruction of the central events, at the trial following the murder of the samurai, by four people: the bandit, the wife, the spirit of the dead samurai and the woodcutter. In each narrative, each of the characters displays different motivations and events play out slightly differently each time. It is not clear who one is supposed to believe or why.

The parallel is obvious. Listening to each of the people we spoke to, it was clear that everyone believed passionately in their perspective. There were those who believed in the spontaneous and democratic nature of the Telangana movement, its history and necessity. Some talked of the cynical wheeling and dealing that was taking place behind the scenes. For some the protests were a performance and the visible players were merely puppets for others holding the strings and biding their time. Others were convinced that statehood was one way of making sure that a different set of people got to make money. There were some who had travelled and spoken to people in every district of the Telangana region, and who told us of the different and differing smaller agendas that had brought people together under the umbrella of statehood.

Every one of those narratives only made the picture more perplexing. The comparison with Rashomon also made it clear to me that what I hear depends not just on who is saying it but who they think they are saying it to.

They did not know it, but at least one of those listening was (and remains) a resolute fence-sitter. Since no one has so far considered such a perspective on an important issue, I am here to offer it (unasked).

A year or so ago, another friend sent a link to a YouTube video. Since so much wisdom is to be found on the internet, I followed it like the sheep I am and found something called The Complaints Choir. The Complaints Choir is a group of people who gather together and sing out their complaints in perfect harmony. In the video I watched, they sang about toilet paper, jobs and neighbours.

In the spirit of providing a dose of humour to overheating sensibilities, here is my contribution to the Telangana issue: just as human chains and protests have their value in the political process, I suggest that getting things off one’s chest in song is equally invaluable.

I propose that those for and against Telangana get together and make a list of complaints they want to sing. They can rehearse until the Telangana Complaints Choir achieves vocal harmony even if they agree on nothing else. All the resulting levels of irony will make Rashomon seem like a simple story for children.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

__

Yes, it's a not very serious take on Telangana. There will be another post to talk about other things that came up in those conversations we had.

Two Minutes Older: Eating for Shiva*

The year began, not with festivities, but with a festival. Every year my mother announces Thiruvathirai, and every year I stop myself from asking, ‘What’s that?” This time, to remind myself what the festival was about, I said to my mother, “Why don’t you tell the kid the story?”

So she told my son the story of Nandanar: how the 8^th century outcaste farmer wanted to see Shiva at the Chidambaram temple in the month of Margazhi (Dec-Jan); how he was told he couldn’t go until all the work in the field was done; how he managed to go despite all the work and as he stood outside the temple – being a dalit – he could see nothing because of the Nandi blocking his view of the lord.

The story goes that Nandanar was in tears at being unable to see Shiva. In Gopalakrishna Bharati’s Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Nandanar says,

Are you not the ever compassionate Lord?

Untouchable as I am, may I not serve you?

To be there to witness your dance of supreme bliss

may I not come to you?

Shiva, touched by the man’s bhakti, asks Nandi to move so that he is visible to his devotee.

The high-born folk are abashed and awed in equal measure, and Nandanar’s fame precedes him everywhere. (I don’t know if this meant that he thereafter had help tilling the field or if those things remained status quo – because stories like these end with the arrival of the god, who invariably remains strong and silent on such matters)**.

To celebrate this, we eat kali and kootu.

I have to say that this story annoys me. Setting aside the politics of turning a story of injustice into one of spirituality, I resent having to eat a dish that is half sweet, half savoury and wholly an ordeal on the palate. For one thing, there’s the taste of gud and coconut in the kali. It isn’t as sweet as sakkaraipongal but it isn’t like regular pongal either. In the kootu, the taste of sweet potatoes battles with the beans and the peas with the pumpkins. Brought together, they make the tongue shiver and produce in me as many conflicting emotions as the story of Nandanar and the Arudra Darsanam at Chidambaram.

Everyone knows that festivals are an excuse to eat things that are seasonal, hard to make and digest and that keep women in the kitchen for most of the day. Usually the things we eat on these occasions are passed off as the favourite food of this or that god: butter, sheedai, kozhakattai and such. Someone please tell me whose favourite food this is: Shiva’s? Nandanar’s? Or Nandi’s?

I have a theory that Thiruvathirai kali and kootu are meant to reflect the complexity of the story. After all, it is not a simple story of faith and reward. Mixed up in it is the question of boundaries, of who is kept out and who does the keeping out; and of who ‘deserves’ the favour of god. Show me a dalit who celebrates Thiruvathirai as a triumph against established order. Depending on where you’re coming from, Nandanar has either circumvented an unjust convention to directly commune with his god or he has been tricked into thinking that the barriers have been removed, when really he’s still standing where he’s been ordered to.

The dish is equally complex and disturbing to the taste. What it produces is not comfort or pleasure. There are too many different tastes and textures, too many conflicting sensations, too many ingredients that don’t get along with each other. It requires a sophistication that I don’t yet have to transform this discomfort into something that I see as not just palatable but enjoyable. It is an uneasy dish that celebrates a disturbing story.

Every year, I try my best to like it and every year I fail better at it. For now, I have decided to live with the taste. In fact, I think I might even experiment with it: I wonder what would happen if, next year, we added karela to the kootu? I think it might add the one taste that was missing.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

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* I will retain my own titles to these pieces; I'm not too sure about the ones they think up for the paper.

** In Sekizhar's version, the Nandi doesn't move at all. What happens is, Nandanar comes into Chidambaram hesitantly, doubting his own worthiness to see Shiva. Shiva arranges for Nandanar to be 'purified' by a fire and becomes resplendently Brahmin before he gets to be one with his god. See.

Two Minutes Older: Bread upon the Waters

As the last year drew to an end, I was taught a lesson by my son and his friends. I am, in general, averse to being edified in this manner and was more astonished than pleased. But I have now decided that this is the proper way to begin the new year: with a shiny new can-do spirit back-lit with a halo of faith in human kindness.

This is how it happened: I had taken my son to visit his friends, two girls whom he has known almost from the hour of their – and his – birth. It hardly needs to be said that they spend a lot of time together. Usually their mother or I visit each other and chat, while the children go off somewhere to play by themselves. On this occasion, about two weeks ago, they decided to give us front row seats to a game of Hide and Seek.

It’s a game I hate, especially in its local variation called ‘Dhappa’, where the ‘den’ can practically pass on the title to her next of kin, with the way the rules are arranged. I loathe the game because I spent my childhood being the den. Under the circumstances, I was disposed to sympathise with my son, who drew the short straw.

He counted to fifty then started to hunt. Soon, he found the other two and I felt a glow of pride. Then they started to quarrel gently: it was the turn of the older of the two girls to be the den. She groaned (as who wouldn’t) and said she hated being ‘It’. The youngest quickly said that she would be the den instead, since she was the youngest. My son claimed the youngest had actually reached the wall before he did and so he should once again be the den.

I don’t know where they got this selfless gene from. Not from me, I can assure you. (Also, I was slightly shocked at all this lying for a good cause.)

While the children spent the rest of the afternoon inventing new ways in which to lose in order to benefit their friends, I chewed my nails down to the quick trying to figure this one out. The moral of the story – if you could call it either a moral or a story – seemed to be that people surrounding you should be made happy no matter what and that your happiness was closely tied to theirs.

With this very provisional conclusion in hand, I further realised that, applied to my life, this amounts to casting my bread upon the waters in the most profligate way, in the hope that it what I send out will be returned to me tenfold.

It seemed like a good resolution to make for the new year and one, moreover, that I could, with a little effort, actually keep. Of course, it depends on what I send out into the world: even the mildest and most well-meaning bread could return toxic and slightly soggy, given the quality of the water these days. This means that I will have to be full of whimsy or good humour or some other quality I will find very difficult to sustain, just so these things can be multiplied. I will do it because I don’t know how to do it and that always works best for me.

What this means for you is, in exchange for two minutes of your life every fortnight, you get a little bit of unpredictability which, as everyone knows, is Fun. And as that learned sage, Dr. Seuss, said long ago, ‘it’s fun to have fun but you have to know how’.

This column might talk about poetry or films; it might rant or talk about education. There might be trees in it or reptiles. Right now, it is hard to say. As I have said elsewhere in introduction, I am deeply committed to doing nothing and hope to persuade you to join me in my commitment (after all, when world leaders at Copenhagen can do it, why can’t I?)

So here’s the first consignment of bread. I shall wait for the cake. And you should know that I like chocolate best.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)