Adventures in Semantics

The other day, I asked my son if he would like to attend a theatre workshop.

“What’s that?” he asked me.

“Well, you do a lot of fun things, and you get to act in a play,” I replied, feeling slightly guilty about neglecting his extra-curricular activities in the interests of free play.

“I’m already a good actor,” he boasted.

“Really? How come?”

“I can make acting rockets and acting pizzas.”

Right. This is all my fault. In his earliest years, I remember saying something was ‘acting this’ or ‘acting that’, to indicate that which is pretend, or not-real. I thought that sliding from that into ‘acting’ as ‘mimesis’ would be natural and painless. Wrong.

“You remember those ads you see on TV?” I asked him.

He looked blank. Joy and sorrow battled in my bosom. I was glad he didn’t watch enough TV to know almost by instinct, which ads I was talking about; at the same time, I wondered if I was putting him at a disadvantage; which kid these days doesn't knwo what acting is?!

“Like, when you see the ads for biscuits or chewing gum, after Tom and Jerry.”

Ah. Light shines.

“You know the kids in those ads? They’re your age, pretty much, and they’re acting. Someone tells them, eat this and look very happy, and they do it, even though they might not actually be feeling very happy.

“Or someone asks a boy to run and act as if he trips and falls. And even though there was nothing to make him trip, he acted as if something made him trip. You understand?”

He lay silent while digesting this significant difference between what was just pretend play (using an empty pichkari as an ‘acting-rocket’) and what was a pretence that was no different from ‘real’. In his mind, the play he indulged in was clearly make-believe. The word ‘acting’ stood in for something without any blurring of categories (unlike an acting Prime Minister, who stands in for the real thing, in very real ways!).

On the other hand, ‘acting’ in a play, or being a part of a theatre workshop, was fraught with much danger. If someone was supposed to ‘act’ sad, and managed to look like they were about to cry, how could he not be sad? How come the feeling in the one who watches this ‘acting’ is also so real?

I don't know when or how he will figure this out, but for now, he is very clear that theatre is not for him.

Oscar Morning

Quick notes from the tv room:

Didn't realise it was Oscar morning! Was all ready to do yoga when I realised the papers ere unusually full of Oscar news. You know what they say about blinding light.

Talking about which, this year, the Oscars are supposedly all 'green'. No, not Al Gore (though they're that too) but all green. What does that mean, really? That the stage is ill lit? Or that they use recycled bulbs? Whatever.

Ennio Morricone has just won the Lifetime Achievement Award. I loved the look of concentration on the audience's face, as it strained to understand what he was saying. As if a frown would somehow make Italian more comprehensible.

Gwynneth Paltrow's hair. What was with the one strand that kept swishing scross her face? And why is it called static electricity when, clearly, things don't stay static under its influence?

This is the first year that I haven't seen a single major nominated film. Not even Water. No, wait! I've seen Pirates of the Carribean and it won best sound editing and visual effects. Ha!

More later in the form of updates.

And the winner is...

...all sorts of people, some of whom I voted for, others for whom I didn't.

But faith in humanity restored by wins for 2x3x7 and no -- I can't actually say any other win restored any tissues. But I do wish there was some way this young man had won.

All results here.

God the Artist

Heh! More Sinfest here.

written on the body

Something that I've been thinking about for a while now, is the ways in which a viewer studies a still image, and how s/he understands what is viewed. A title is often a handle a viewer can grasp to decode the image; but more usually the image lies somewhere beyond the realm of easily verbalised 'meanings'.

Which is why I found these images fascinating, because the use of the written word is central to the image itself. That both these images use languages I don't personally read or understand, does not make their use less powerful.

"Family Tree" (2001) © Zhang Huan.

Lalla Essaydi from "Converging Territories"No. 10

Just checked and saw that the Zhang Huan pictures were in the wrong order! No idea how that happened; apologies. Since I was restructuring that, I thought I may as well change the size of the Essaydi image.

Images via (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography, a blog that I follow with great interest.

Happy New Year

Even if you are not Chinese.

See, the way I see it is, you've got to wish other people a Happy New Year on the following occassions: 1) 1st January 2) Chinese New Year 3) Onam 4) Baisakhi/Tamil New Year/Gudi Padwa and 5) one other random day in the year to signify one's understanding that every day is a bright new day which also coincidentally happens to be the beginning of the rest of one's life. This is so that one can sink into characteristic moroseness for the rest of the year, having done one's duty with stoicism and selflessness.

So, to all Pigs and other animals, in celebration...

...a story!

*

In one of the lesser-known legends, it once happened that the animals of the Chinese Zodiac had had enough of the adjectival abuse they were subject to. Snake was particularly bitter about being referred to as Treacherous Snake.

Dragon’s protest was a matter of form because there was something grand about being addressed as Fire-breathing Dragon.

Black Sheep, Greedy Pig, Mangy Dog and Snivelly Rat (along with Treacherous Snake) were the leaders, though there was no one to whom they could complain. Dark Horse and Mighty Ox were aristocratically aloof which annoyed the others.

Animals like Rabbit didn’t have any adjectives they wanted to lose. In fact, they’d have gladly exchanged their anonymity for notoriety.

That New Year, the animals decided to go to an old woman who, naturally, lived in a cave on an island in the middle of a misty lake way up North. After many arduous adventures they arrived at last at the old woman’s door—if a cave can be said to have a door.

The woman, annoyed at having been woken up, came out brandishing a lethal weapon unknown to man or beast, which she instantly flung at them. The Animals retreated, cowering. When they turned around, the woman had gone.

But their burdensome adjectives, golden, red and emerald, lay like prize pelts and the Animals slowly came back and started picking them up.

That is how Dark Horse became Black Horse, and Greedy Pig was now Fire-breathing Pig. Snivelly and Treacherous exchanged titles, and Rabbit became Mighty. No one was really happy, of course, except perhaps Horse, who, though he missed the mystery of being a Dark Horse, was quite content with being a neutral Black.

(this was written for the Kala Ghoda thingy last year).

'What but tall tales'

Auden's centenary coming up on the 21st, and celebrations have begun at various places. Reading 'The Truest Poetry Is The Most Feigning' on Poitre, I was struck by the closing lines of the poem:

What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

I'm amazed by the ease with which the four lines flow, and the complexity they contain within the deceptive simplicity. The craft is not so much in the rhymes, but in the leaps it induces in the imagination to make the connections between a 'lying nature', the telling of 'tall tales, the luck of verbal playing' that leads to a statement whose truth is so seductive and layered: 'that love, or truth in any serious sense, like orthodoxy, is a reticence'.

It would appear that love, or truth can only be revealed by the elaborate embellishment of the things that surround it; that the thing itself can only be indicated but never said, expect with reticence.

And celebrating the centenary with a poem, is Todd Swift. This is how it begins. It is, as Todd says in his post, an early draft:

Auden In Snow

I’d love you until the snow turned black and white,
And history melted into a photograph. You come

Towards me, now no bigger than a thumb, coated
As shabbily as Delmore Schwartz, down some

Nameless New York street, from dive to blizzard,
Your face that familiar map of crumpled age,

As if your face was a torn out page manhandled
By a child with a distaste for verse circa 1930-1960;

The rest of the poem here.

Impressions: Baby Haldar

“Don’t you find it tiring being asked the same questions again and again?” I asked Baby Haldar. We were sitting in the lobby of our hotel. This was the day after her conversation with Urvashi Butalia, presumably similar to the one they had in Jaipur and in countless other places.

“No,” Baby said. “I get asked the same questions, but for the people who ask, it is the first time. I always try and find something to say that I have not said before.”

Baby was waiting for some relatives to come and meet her, before she left for the University to meet a group of domestic workers. We were all about to leave for the morning session. Baby would follow later. “Will you be all right,” Urvashi asked, but it didn’t need asking. Baby sat on the sofa in the lobby and waited, not getting impatient or restless (as I would undoubtedly have been) or even slightly worried. She was totally calm.

The most fascinating thing about Baby is her self-confidence. I found her way of answering questions, sitting amongst a crowd of people she did not know, who were talking in a language she did not understand, utterly magnificent. Which is not to say she was indifferent; far from it. During her talk, there were moments of clear emotion: when she spoke about her mother, for instance. Or when someone said to her, “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear about your book; to which she asked, eyes sparkling, “Pease tell me how happy. I also want to know!”

Urvashi, while talking about one aspect of the book, A Life Less Ordinary, said that one of the things that struck her about Baby’s writing was the matter-of-fact way she talked about violence or abuse: this happened, we went there, he broke my arm. As a feminist and a publisher, Urvashi said, she was struck anew by the ways in which violence was so much a part of Baby’s daily life that it was no longer a question of becoming inured to it; violence was undifferentiated from other aspects of her life.

I haven’t read the book as yet, but in light of the conversation and from what I saw of her, I’m wondering how such a contrast is possible. Someone else asked her if she didn’t feel any anger. To which she replied that had she been angry, she would probably not have been able to write. And I can believe it, though one has got used to the contrary view: that anger impels creativity, or ignites ideas; is, in some way, activity-generating.

Philosophically, I can understand the view that anger is to be let go of, that it is fundamentally destructive. But I also always believed that it is something one understood intellectually, something one never actually practised. The sense I got of Baby was that she really did have no anger in her. I wondered what the cost to herself was, to arrive at this position. Urvashi said that one of the narrative devices Baby often uses is to start speaking of herself in the third person, in times of acute emotional stress. This was, of course, not said in answer to my unvoiced wondering, so it really explains nothing.

Is Baby merely lucky? Is it happy chance that her employer encouraged her to write and passed on the results to people who might have been able to help in getting it noticed? Are other domestic workers’ lives any different? Probably not. But Baby is writing, and they aren’t. And I find that extraordinary.

Yesterday, I spoke to someone who had read the book, and she said that what was really interesting about Baby’s book was the way in which she told her story, as a story. “We know how to tell stories because we are used to hearing them,” she said, implying that even autobiographies can be artfully told, because we are used to hearing narratives structured in particular ways.

But I haven’t read the book. So I can’t be impressed by her writing abilities. I’m still trying to find out what I found amazing about the girl.

Watch That Space

Amit has moved here and taken with him (as contributors to one section of the site) Jai, Chandrahas, Falstaff, Prufrock Two, Nilanjana, Sonia and KM, among others.

Mock Turtle wonders how Falstaff will fight the urge to write 'negative things about stuff we don’t like' - one of the caveats on Amit's new blog, all in the interests of joyousness, upliftment and sexiness. Falstaff has vowed to disagree on Momus.

Neela, in the meanwhile, is bitterly convinced that all she will get in Raveout is 'an overdose of Sartre, Kafka, some unknown Israeli author and a few suicidal Eastern European filmmakers in there'.

Awaiting further developments with great interest, enthu and eagerness.

Watch that space.

Old Deuteronomy

Or more likely, one of his numerous progeny!

I was prowling around looking for a cyber cafe (which I never found) and found this fellow sunning himself. He was too lazy to move and I suppose because I was not standing in the way of the sun, he tolerated me.

On the same road, to the left of the frame, was a gate with a sign saying:

Mrs. Patwardhan, M.A. Tum-te-tum (Gold Medalist)

Tuitions for

GRE, SAT, ABC, DEF, ETC.,

Class X, XII

I love gold medalists. Wish I'd taken a photograph of that sign. But it's now on the list of opportunities lost.

Separate post on that coming up.