tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16799320199800366202024-03-05T19:11:59.385-08:00Nina MartyrisArundhati Roy, Tyeb Mehta, Michael Jackson, Kipling, Rushdie, Jinnah, Leonard Cohen, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, East India Company, Namdeo Dhasal, etcNina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-56159965761450269402011-01-10T08:43:00.000-08:002011-01-10T08:43:04.563-08:00No Gates, PleaseThe Sunday Times of India<br />
January 9, 2011<br />
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Nina Martyris<br />
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In all the excitement over British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s maiden India outing, a singular lapse has been overlooked. And that is that both exhibition spaces – the NGMA in Delhi and the Mehboob Studios in Mumbai – are behind gates. This would have been perfectly all right if one or two sculptures had been placed in the public domain.<br />
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Gates are undemocratic, especially in a country where people are so easily intimidated by the structures of elitism. A whole population of workers, taxi drivers and ordinary folk outside the tiny art gallery world will never think of registering on the website as is required to visit the Mumbai show or dare step through the NGMA’s forbidding portals. <br />
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One understands that a closed space is necessary to protect some of the works and provide a meaningful viewing experience. It is also commendable that the organizers have not charged an entry fee in Mumbai and only a nominal one in Delhi. But despite this and the huge publicity, only 20,000 people have been to the two shows so far. By Indian museum-going standards this is an impressive figure but one doubts very much whether by the end of February, when the Delhi show closes, 2.75 lakh people will have trooped through. This was the record-breaking number of visitors to Kapoor’s 2009 retrospective at London's Royal Academy, and one which the organizers were hoping to surpass. <br />
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The Booker prize-winning author Aravind Adiga recently recalled a poignant episode of a Delhi rickshaw driver dropping him off at the Lodhi Gardens and then asking if he would buy him a ticket so that he could enter. Astonished, Adiga assured the man that the gardens were open to all, but the rickshaw driver remained hesitant. To him, the beautiful park was a place where the rich went and hence not for him. One can magnify that sense of disentitlement several times to get a measure of how the poor feel about entering an art gallery. <br />
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Mounting an Anish Kapoor exhibition is not only expensive and logistically challenging but the artist is also known to be extremely particular and demanding about the site and context in which his art is located. This then was the perfect opportunity to include a public space given the financial and bureaucratic resources of the organizers, the British Council and the Ministry of Culture. Between them they could easily have raised the sponsorship and permissions to arrange for exhibits, say, on a Delhi green or a Mumbai seafront. The organizers told TOI that they had indeed considered it but with a six-month planning window there simply wasn’t enough time for execution.<br />
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Whenever Kapoor has been asked to name physical and philosophical stimuli from India that have shaped his art, the sources he has mentioned have usually been drawn from the public sphere -- the lurid heaps of abir in the bazaar that inspired his pigment mountains, the magnificent Jantar Mantar in Delhi and the Elephanta caves outside Mumbai. To exclude this dramatic theatre from the India outing of an artist whose reputation had been built on and burnished by his public commissions in Chicago and England is particularly unfortunate. <br />
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V S Naipual astutely pointed out that the museum is essentially alien to the Indian experience. Indians love to touch, examine and poke at showpieces, raising concerns about the risk of a public work being vandalised. A few security arrangements could easily take care of that, and moreover, Kapoor's stainless-steel orbs and voids are hardly the noli me tangere (touch-me-not) kind. I saw his sumptuous Bean in Chicago, reflecting the soaring city skyline by turning it upside down, and half the viewing pleasure was to watch groups of children whooping around it, pulling funny faces and writing their names on its shiny surface. <br />
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Just imagine the al-fresco spectacle of one of his massive sky mirrors or concave curves or even his tall pillar of steel balloons that mimics a floating pyramid of dahi-handis. Not only would 2.75 lakh people see it in less than a week, it would have been a game changer, giving a much-needed push to urban public art. Go to any Indian city and all you will see are statues of dead men or an old military tank or kitsch. <br />
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Concurrent to the two shows in Delhi and Mumbai, London is enjoying four of Kapoor's large-scale installations at Kensington Gardens, a beautiful open green that allows Londoners of every class and ethnicity to walk around the exhibits, cuss or praise them, and most important, feel involved in the debate on public art in their city.<br />
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Anish Kapoor's lasting legacy could have been to electrify that debate in the country of his birth and boyhood. One hopes that he has something up his sleeve for the future. It would make the illusionist's passage to India a more permanent one.<br />
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(Inputs from Neelam Raaj)Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-90357064158432184292010-11-29T07:57:00.000-08:002011-05-24T13:07:43.194-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Guardian, Nov 23, 2010<br />
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<b>Obesity: India's affluent affliction</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/23/obesity-india-affluent-affliction">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/23/obesity-india-affluent-affliction</a></div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-72158037914642108872010-11-29T07:55:00.001-08:002011-05-24T13:08:08.078-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Guardian, Oct 21, 2010<br />
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India must move beyond book burning<br />
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/oct/21/india-rohinton-mistry-book">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/oct/21/india-rohinton-mistry-book</a></div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-42151554977996636252010-10-11T07:32:00.001-07:002011-05-24T13:09:22.705-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Guardian, Oct 11, 2010<br />
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Salk the Talk: India and polio<br />
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/11/india-take-responsibility-polio-eradication">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/11/india-take-responsibility-polio-eradication</a> <br />
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</a></div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-11370034982655459232010-09-24T08:30:00.000-07:002010-09-27T08:40:40.009-07:00The Klowns Vs the Klan<em>At one surreal moment, both the Nazis and the liberals, were shouting USA, USA<br />
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</em><strong>Nina Martyris</strong><br />
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I am a new immigrant to the land of Op, so fresh off the boat that I could still catch scurvy. I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, from Bombay, India, last November, and discovered that contrary to my fears, provoked mostly by hoots of laughter from my American friends when they heard that I was moving to the Bible Belt, the people of Knoxville were warm, intelligent and distressingly polite, nodding away even when they couldn’t follow my strange Indian sarcasm. <br />
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One month ago, I got my first taste of a street demonstration in the USA when I attended a rally to protest another rally. The neo-Nazis had planned theirs first to signal their support of Arizona’s immigrant profiling law. The neo-Nazis are a fellowship of like-minded people who band under names such as the White Supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, and it was the latter that made me sit up.<br />
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I found it hard to believe that something as medieval as the Klan was still around in the middle of Knoxville’s hydrangeas and dog parks. I had assumed that like slavery and thumb-screws it had been abolished and was festering underground along with P. W. Botha. I was told, however, that although no one took them seriously any more, a threadbare remnant of the bed-sheet militia still existed. So when a friend asked if I wanted to join a group of progressives gathering to protest the KKK’s latest airing of its white laundry, I jumped at the chance.<br />
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My friend told me that the white supremacists had held a similar rally earlier in the year, and that the strategy of the liberals, which they were going to repeat this time, had been to poke fun at them. Mark Twain was dead right when he said that nothing in the world can stand up to the assault of laughter. My friend said that she and others had dressed in white to parody the Klan’s livery; they had pirouetted and thrown out clouds of flour and shouted “White Flour” to mock the slogan of “White Power”. Some had dressed in jumpsuits and put lipstick on their noses to gambol like the Kool Klutz Klowns. It all sounded like a lark and I couldn’t wait for Sunday to roll up.<br />
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It turned out to be a swelteringly hot, lipstick-melting August afternoon. The KKK was to convene in front of the Old Knox County Court House, around a pair of solid old canons in the front yard. We were gathered on the sidewalk across from the guns, ready for the verbal fusillade. In the middle of the burning street, like chunks of steak too well done, were two rows of armed policemen, facing either way, in full riot gear. The street had been cordoned off. A bit pointless, I thought, given that both parties were here to spread a message, but then, censorship, like the Internet, cannot be policed.<br />
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I have to admit that I was there partially out of voyeurism, in the hope that the Klansmen would show up in their whites. Of course, I was disappointed. As it turned out, the liberals had grossly overestimated the right-wing threat, showing up with elephant guns to shoot at birds. There were around 500 of us in all manner of fancy-dress, while across the street, there were barely 60 of them. <br />
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The skinheads were half-an-hour late – Hitler would have gassed them. At about 3:30 pm, a group of nine appeared. They were not in any kind of military regalia, nor were they doing the goose step. Instead, they waddled. They were a group of men and women tending to obesity, three children in tow. One man was in a wheelchair. One woman had a baby strapped to her kangaroo style. Another woman began, unthinkingly but rather charmingly, to sway with her child to the infectious Mexican music pouring out of our speakers. These were Nazis? Guns would have looked absurd in their hands. I imagined them instead with shopping trolleys rustling with plastic bags. It was all troublingly domestic, perhaps deliberately so. They had not even set up their equipment. One man dragged a set of speakers behind him like a lawn mower. The cheeky DJ from our side of the street yelled, “Do you need some help? Our sound system is big and it's black!” And we roared with laughter.<br />
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It took another 30 minutes for all the neo-Nazis to arrive. These were more stereotypical. The men were in black or khaki fatigues with bright red swastika armbands. Several had their heads shaved but that could have been baldness not bigotry. One chap was holding his flag upside down, we shouted out that the Klan didn’t know how to read, the fellow flushed to the roots of his bald head and righted his flag, and I heard Twain's ghost cackle.<br />
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The Goebbels among them, a little man naturally, took the mike and began to rant against immigrants, Jews and communists, all of whom were denounced as filthy traitors. His tirade made me admire afresh the right to speech that the American constitution guarantees, and which really is the bedrock on which this superpower is built. While Mr. G ranted, his men stood in a straight and silent line holding their flags and “No Amnesty. Call Congress” banners. Their body language telegraphed discomfort rather than machismo. From across, we whooped, danced, laughed and clapped like we were at a mardi gras. <br />
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The Nazis were clearly outclassed. They didn't have the imagination or chutzpah that the liberals had in such abundance, nor witty slogans like "Eracism" and "El Odio Encoge Tu Pene" which means that hate will shrink your penis. The liberal rank and file was made up of professors, lawyers, doctors and students, the well-read, the well-travelled and the well-heeled. The other side, not so much. Looking at them I was reminded of a line from Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, about what happens to people who fail to hop onto the gravy train of globalization, and the resentments that build up therein. <br />
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But I came away rather disappointed that day because I didn’t get a chance to hear anything the opposition said. For two hours, each side made furious love to its microphone, reducing the protest to a crude clash of decibels. Who could outshout whom? Boom boom! Freedom of speech is meaningless without the freedom to listen, and listen, as a friend wisely pointed out, is an anagram of silent. I strained to hear what they were saying, but my ears were being blasted by bullhorns and Latino beats. Preaching to the converted hit a shrill new high. Then we were singing We Shall Overcome. We certainly overcame their sound-system. We told them to go back to Germany. We told them that we believed in deporting hatred. We told them that their grandmothers were immigrants. They told us stuff too but I don't know what exactly beyond Jews, communists and immigrants being filthy traitors.<br />
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At one point, our system began to play Martin Luther King Jr.’s moving I have a dream speech. Over the hubbub, I heard Dr King say, “All men are cremated equal”, and realized a minute later that he had said “created” and not “cremated”, though by some absurd coincidence, and given the burning heat that day, the latter was perhaps more profoundly true. I began to laugh.<br />
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And then I heard a full sentence that carried miraculously across the street without being drowned out. “You’ll are anti-American, eighty per cent of the country doesn’t want what you want.” I dismissed the anti-American accusation, after all, it was what they were being accused of too. But the second half made me think. I looked at them and I looked at the liberals, and began to wonder if any group really represented what the country wanted, if at all there was one thing that the country wanted.<br />
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Suddenly, neither side seemed real. To us, the clunky Nazis, with their embarrassing Sieg Heil salutes and tribal anger against pigmented and circumcised people, were little more than bumbling Inspector Clouseaus. But the liberals, in their clown outfits and butterfly wings and flummery, and full-blown sense of entitlement, must have come across as equally foolish caricatures of peace. Only the policemen melting in the middle looked like ordinary folk, doing their job, to hell with either side. <br />
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<br />
And yet, both sides were here to speak up for, and defend their idea of, a country they loved. Our DJ shouted out, mockingly, that both sides had two things in common – a Jewish Jesus and a Black President – but he left out love of country. <br />
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<br />
The shouting match went on and on, until at one surreal moment, the Nazis began to shout USA, USA. For the first time that afternoon, they had managed to get under the liberals' skin. There was a howl of rage from our side, and the clowns and dancers began to holler back, USA, USA. And suddenly from sidewalk to shining sidewalk, both groups were belting out the same three beloved letters, cheering on the same team in perfect unison, and while this happened, body-language on both sides changed. The Nazis became more passionate, the liberals forgot to laugh. USA, USA. The pigs and men in George Orwell's Animal Farm, voices shouting in anger, all sounding alike. And the policemen looked from Nazis to liberals and liberals to Nazis and from Nazis to liberals again, and it was impossible to tell which was which.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-80185645570009574562010-09-17T07:50:00.000-07:002010-09-27T08:41:22.329-07:00The Times of India, Oct 12, 2006<br />
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<strong>The Unique Inheritance Of Kiran Desai </strong><br />
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The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran’s intimate itch, one that she has scratched, salved and picked at for seven long years. Now it has paid off—Kiran Desai is the youngest woman to have ever won the Booker <br />
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<strong>Nina Martyris</strong><br />
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Comparisons, especially between mother and daughter, are odious. And therefore irresistible. As news of Kiran Desai's literary trophy for The Inheritance Of Loss flashed across the incredulous wires, readers across the world must have thought, inevitably, of her elegant mother. Anita Desai has come within inches of the coveted prize, not once but three times in the last 26 years, each time for a novel distinguished by a rare depth and beauty. What emotions played over her when she learnt that the youngest of her four children had won a laurel that has evaded her so unfairly? The loss is the Booker's rather than that of Desai Sr, a reclusive artist who has always been wary of the blandishments of Mediastan, and who calmly advised her daughter to focus on writing and not be distracted by the gaudiness of book prizes. <br />
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Kiran Desai has dedicated her prize-winning novel to Anita Desai, and she loses no chance to acknowledge the debt she owes her mother for the unique inheritance—not one of loss, but of a fine literary tradition. For giving her, a child of displacement who has floated between East and West, a Green Card into the creative, often lonely but ultimately healing world of the writer. <br />
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Anita Desai says that both she and her daughter have drawn from a shared pool of sources and experiences, and nothing exemplifies this better than the striking similarity between the broad outline of The Inheritance of Loss and a novel penned by Anita Desai long ago in 1977, the compelling Fire On The Mountain. <br />
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Broadly this is the scaffolding of both novels: in Anita Desai's novel an embittered old woman who has spent a lifetime in the service of her family and who wants nothing more than to be left alone retires to an old house in Kasauli where she lives with her cook until her great-granddaughter is thrust on her. In Kiran Desai's novel an old judge, ossified by hate and a deep self-loathing, who wants nothing more to do with the world, retires to an old house in Kalimpong where he lives with his dog and cook until his grand-daughter is thrust on him. Both the old man and the old woman are desperate seekers of silence and both are violently forced into the chaos of the world that they have shuttered and boarded out by conscious acts of self-will. <br />
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Similar. Yet in the hands of two different writers we get two remarkably different novels. And that indeed is young Kiran's triumph—to be influenced by her mother but to have also crafted her own unique persona. Anita Desai is a quieter writer—her prose is classical, there is a Western discipline to it; she is not one to startle you with a flash of sudden flair, something which Kiran does quite often, and sometimes overdoes when it comes to her descriptions of nature and the overwhelming mist that she feels she has to metion on every other page. <br />
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The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran’s intimate itch, one that she has scratched, salved and picked doggedly for seven long years. Geographically, the novel switchblades between the kitchens of New York where the cook's son is a migrant worker and the 1980s Gorkha insurgency of Kalimpong, capturing the nativist spite of both regions. Psychologically, it gets its dynamism from the expert exploration of stasis (personified by the judge, a human cavity with his powdered face and tight mouth that hasn't cracked a smile in a century) and the redemption which comes with metamorphosis. Emotionally it gets its intimacy from the aches andthe storm of crises in the lives of the small cast of characters, and the adolescent love which consumes the orphaned Sai; she yearns for her Nepali tutor, Gyan, her ‘Momo’, who in a fit of machismo has joined the Gorkha misadventure. <br />
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To use a phrase from her novel, Desai manages to “unpick a seam of despair” in the hearts of her characters, and to do so with the unsentimental but fine eye of a surgeon. One gets the impression that the author is viewing her canvas both from a distant height and from a sympathetic crack in the wall. Sympathetic because one by one each player goes through his or her humiliation, and in almost every case the shame comes when the protective shield of class and status are stripped away by the jeers and violence of the tired, poor Gorkha men who know no other way to stake claim to a better life than through the barrel of a gun. <br />
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In India, Kiran Desai has until now not been greeted with the rapture accorded to many less talented writers, probably because of an unspoken but strong feeling that she came from literary pedigree, and therefore had to be held to a higher standard. Or maybe it was because she didn't land a monstrous advance like a Pankaj Mishra or a Vikram Chandra. Nor did it help that Salman Rushdie in his Mirrorwork anthology to celebrate 50 years of post-Independence writing chose an excerpt from her first novel Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard, provoking sniping about the favouritism of the US gharana of writing. Having Rushdie as her blurb godfather with his untrammelled praise—“Kiran Desai is a terrific writer”—has had mixed results, provoking curiosity and heightening expectation to unreal levels. It is wonderful therefore that her second novel has slain the carping.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-29619693403512570382010-07-02T12:07:00.000-07:002010-09-27T08:43:57.501-07:00Hi-FidelityThe jazz man has little use for fidelity<br />
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The jazz man has little use for fidelity<br />
His strumpet trumpet wanders wet alleys<br />
Takes what it can get<br />
Some hot scat here, a blast of brass there. <br />
Blowing home every once in a while<br />
To passionately hump the melody<br />
Who’s having a long-standing affair<br />
With the blues.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-61134334765020819722010-07-01T06:40:00.000-07:002011-05-24T13:00:41.648-07:00In which Kay Ryan Gives It Those Ones<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">US poet laureate Kay Ryan's verse is like freshly cut grass -- sharp, soft and on song. There are no big words to break your mouth or make you reach for your Oxford. Ryan is not a poet who was smelted in a writing workshop, and therefore her poetry is largely free of pretension. <br />
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<b>Nina Martyris</b><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">In an unflattering dun coat that only serves to accentuate a shoulder stoop, square glasses, and a rough haircut, US poet laureate Kay Ryan is as shorn of frill and lace as her poetry. Arsenic, though, frequently tinctures her wit and verse as was evident in March this year, when she kept a hall of students and professors at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, riveted with her refreshingly simple poems and stabs of self-deprecating humour. She spoke softly, in a pleasantly deep voice, and in a thoughtful gesture, said she would read out each poem twice so that the audience could savour it the first time and better understand it the second, adding dryly, "I'm not Milton, so we won't be here all winter."</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div>Certainly more Hobbesian than Miltonic, Ryan's poetry (seven anthologies, the latest being <i>The Niagara River</i>) is brutish but leavened by a puckish wit.There are no big words to break your mouth or make you reach for your Oxford. Ryan is not a poet who was smelted in a writing workshop and so her poetry is largely free of pretension. Occasionally, if there is a flash of peacock, as in the use of a word like "persiflage", Ryan is quick to explain and contextualise. With a deft playfulness that brings to mind the dreaded, lazy flicking of a serpent's tongue, she writes: "Born sans puff or rattle he counts on persiflage in battle. Before his flippant tongue children stiffen, dogs fall like beef cattle."<br />
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Often compared to the great Emily Dickinson, who used the dullest household objects like balls of twine and leftover sherry in goblets to convey strikingly intense emotions, Ryan's poetry, though equally rooted in everydayness, is less lyrical and more chopped up. Like freshly cut grass, her language has a quality both soft and sharp, sucked of spongy sentiment but well grooved with feeling. It gives no quarter to fat or fuzziness and its cored harshness reflects the poet's childhood years spent in the sandy embrace of the Mojave desert in California. As in the instance when she compares an alzheimered mind to a train that "uncouples, all the way back", triggering a sudden slack fear as if one has been temporarily loosened from the blessed straitjacket of memory.<br />
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Unsentimentality is her hallmark when she writing about nature, one of her favourite themes. When she doffs her cap to Darwin and his dogma of survival, she does so with a suppressed glee at the brutish laws of nature, where every entity on the food chain is both prey and predator. Sweet furry rabbits were made for coyotes to snack on, shrugs a tough little poem which she described as "awful but cheerful", so do suck it up and get on with it.<br />
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The jackrabbit is a mild herbivore<br />
grazing the desert floor,<br />
quietly abridging spring,<br />
eating the color off everything<br />
rampant-height or lower.<br />
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Rabbits are one of the things<br />
coyotes are for. One quick scream,<br />
a few quick thumps,<br />
and a whole little area<br />
shoots up blue and orange clumps.<br />
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At once morbid and life-affirming -- a rabbit has been killed so that the flowers can live -- the other pleasing aspect to the poem is its springy sense of rhyme. Rhyme, said Ryan, is such a primeval source of pleasure that if would be foolish not to employ it to sweeten language or electrify it. Comparing words that rhyme to magnets that attract one another in a hopeless and compulsive way, she said, "One of the deep pleasures that every child takes is rhyming -- table, mable, stable, the little boy bouncing in the back of a pickup truck. In the Seventies, rhyming was in terrible disfavour, in my work it was hidden...it began creeping in, it's like cheating -- a great way to create the illusion of reason, you know, rhyme and reason." She uses the sing-song innocence of rhyme to soften a savagely comic poem that deals with old age and death.<br />
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As some people age<br />
they kinden.<br />
The apertures<br />
of their eyes widen.<br />
I do not think they weaken;<br />
I think something weak strengthens<br />
until they are more and more it<br />
Like letting in heaven<br />
But other people are<br />
mussels or clams, frightened.<br />
Steam or knife blades mean open.<br />
They hear heaven and think boiled or broken.<br />
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Ryan delights in projecting herself as a queer old broad with a fondness for the bottle, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that she is dead serious about her poetry. What does your poetry do for you, she was asked by a student. "Apart from the big bucks," to loud chuckles, "it allows me access to parts of myself that I would never have access to." When a Rastafarian youth wanted to know how similar her poetry was to that of Charles Bukowski's, the poet of pimps and whores, memorably described by<i> Time </i>magazine as “the laureate of American lowlife”, she replied calmly, "We're terribly different, but our drinking habits are similar." And when the laughs had died, came the serious answer, "We both gave our lives to the word -- and the bottle.” Ryan repeatedly injected a cynical lightness into the event. After reading out a particularly depressing poem about the absurdity of despair, she poked the audience in the ribs by quoting from a light-hearted poem on Atlas, who “can’t lend a hand to Brazil without stepping on Peru”.<br />
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The session started with Ryan choosing "a cold poem" -- a nod to the wintry temperature outside -- about an obscure Danish saint, St Sebolt, who had the power to miraculously light bonfires with ice (the patron saint of global warming?). Short and staccato, 'He Lit a Fire with Icicles', like a stalactite in a cave, has the capacity to impale with its beauty. The poem, said Ryan, was dedicated to W G Sebald, a bewitching German writer who died prematurely and whose strange combination of fiction, memoir and travel (a worthy forerunner to V S Naipaul?) had a hypnotic quality. St Seblot wasn't a saint when he got married but when he said to his unsuspecting wife on their nuptial night, "Tonight we enjoy ourselves, tomorrow we are food for worms,” the young bride thought that perhaps she had married more than a mere man. <br />
<br />
He Lit a Fire with Icicles<br />
For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001<br />
<br />
This was the work<br />
of St. Sebolt, one<br />
of his miracles:<br />
he lit a fire with<br />
icicles. He struck<br />
them like a steel<br />
to flint, did St.<br />
Sebolt. It<br />
makes sense<br />
only at a certain<br />
body heat. How<br />
cold he had<br />
to get to learn<br />
that ice would<br />
burn. How cold<br />
he had to stay.<br />
When he could<br />
feel his feet<br />
he had to<br />
back away.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRxKuNGRjKy5eAqd72MlJoEZCCbwW9Azv0RD1YOQc2TbobWn77qpd-cPTW2kIDWwouk0WmDrTa2bTRpSg6H6ixPOO0dnef09ikSzoPxo_InAVgn3ALMmIrkzsT7XxM8DRmM6Q8BMNk4U0/s1600/kay-ryan.jpg" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5488944765286897570" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRxKuNGRjKy5eAqd72MlJoEZCCbwW9Azv0RD1YOQc2TbobWn77qpd-cPTW2kIDWwouk0WmDrTa2bTRpSg6H6ixPOO0dnef09ikSzoPxo_InAVgn3ALMmIrkzsT7XxM8DRmM6Q8BMNk4U0/s200/kay-ryan.jpg" style="float: right; height: 185px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 200px;" /></a>Toes curl instinctively at the last line, away from the imaginary blaze. It is this visceral reaction that Ryan achieves again and again. The poem reminded one of Jack London's masterful short story<i> To Build A Fire</i>, a promethean struggle by a man in the Yukon, to get a fire going to keep himself alive. Ryan conveys in a few lines the bone-crushing coldness of an icy wasteland, and the miraculous paradox of ice burning. Extreme cold and extreme heat punish nerve endings in the same blinding way, and could well be a wise metaphor by this daughter of the desert for love and hate, which at their most intense, are essentially one feeling.</div></div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-40243029335439221452009-10-03T11:16:00.000-07:002010-09-27T08:42:47.886-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixFb8C-DrgvzBA5s7GoWqnQr-tH3AMF3JRL3FDEFSkwbiw_ZtkTk9OIQuUs8EIKhRUVoaDI4VNSkOiTXDCOywF6KLt9riFtFN4zWu18Jx-i_PwLq4CwFzKGfqHPlfxUm_ABJzsJI45tMI/s1600-h/grass.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389216626481038466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixFb8C-DrgvzBA5s7GoWqnQr-tH3AMF3JRL3FDEFSkwbiw_ZtkTk9OIQuUs8EIKhRUVoaDI4VNSkOiTXDCOywF6KLt9riFtFN4zWu18Jx-i_PwLq4CwFzKGfqHPlfxUm_ABJzsJI45tMI/s200/grass.png" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 141px;" /></a><br />
October 2, 2009.<br />
<br />
<strong>‘An MoU on every mountain’ </strong><br />
<br />
In an exclusive and in-depth interview to The Times of India, <strong>Arundhati Roy </strong>talks about the three elephants in the Indian living room <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<strong>Nina Martyris</strong><br />
<br />
<em>Some call her a cause-monger. Others say her views are unredeemed by optimism. But award-winning writer Arundhati Roy uses polemic in a powerfully non-violent way to talk about injustices that the middle class would rather not hear about. Roy was in Mumbai to launch her latest book of essays, whose pastoral title,<strong> Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes of Democracy</strong>, contains a warning. <br />
In 1915, the year in which the Turks massacred Christian Armenians, swarms of grasshoppers swept into an Armenian village. The elders were worried, they knew this was a bad omen. And sure enough, the end came in a few months. Roy’s essays, some of which have appeared in print, point to the locust of political grasshoppers in our midst, as a warning sign that democracy’s light is failing. Excerpts from an interview</em>. <br />
<br />
<strong>In your essay on the Mumbai terror strike, you cite the emails from the Indian Mujahideen, which said that the attacks were revenge for Kashmir, Babri and Gujarat. "Things we don't want to talk about any more". These are the "elephants in the Indian living room". What in your view are the most troubling, most invisible elephants in our living rooms?</strong> <br />
<br />
To start with, we have to put on record that most Indians don’t have a living room. That having been said, the three big elephants in the room right now are: One, the military occupation of Kashmir (more than half a million soldiers in that little valley). It’s a very noisy elephant, but it’s a false noise that seeks to hide a deeper silence. The other — and there is no hierarchy of elephants here — is the continuing issue of caste and untouchability and the shamefulness of living in a society that practises this. And the third is the impending war on indigenous people and their land in the name of terrorism. <br />
The government is waging a war against the poor. In the forest areas of our country, poverty is being conflated with terrorism. The poor are being criminalised. Their lands are being handed over to mining companies. Security forces are closing in on Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Lalgarh. In Dantewara district, something like 644 villages have been emptied, several have been burnt to the ground. Most of this has been done by an insane militia, the Salwa Judum (the state-sponsored force to counter Naxalism). Some 300,000 people are off the government radar. People have just gone missing. Anyone not in the Salwa Judum police camps is being called a Maoist.<br />
How do you define a Maoist? I travelled to Orissa a few years ago, when the papers were full of the Maoist threat, but there were no Maoists then. This was what you call psyops…a way of justifying extreme police repression by calling democratic, non-violent protestors Maoist. Any kind of dissent, whether it is intellectual, violent or non-violent, everything is being crushed. It’s the Bush doctrine now. They’re going after everyone. If people are being imprisoned and tortured and called Maoists even when they aren’t, many are going to feel that it’s better to become one and put up a fight… <br />
<br />
<strong>They haven’t gone after you yet?</strong> <br />
<br />
It would be making a big international statement, which I don’t think they want right now. But they have gone after Binayak Sen, Himanshu Kumar’s Gandhian ashram in Dantewara was demolished. They are criminalising democratic space…none of us can be complacent.<br />
<br />
<strong>The Indian middle class seems quite removed from this war in India's mineral heartland. </strong><br />
<br />
Either the middle class doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, that we are heading for a police state. A large part of India already is a police state. Home minister P Chidambaram says that his vision for India is to have 85 per cent of India living in cities. That would mean 500 million people being uprooted...If your country’s growth depends solely on the displacement of millions of people, obviously you are going to have to administer that unrest. Only the police or the army can pull that off. The army seems to be a little uncomfortable about being called out against its ‘own’ people (it is quite another matter that they feel comfortable in Kashmir and the North-East). So, for now para-military forces are doing the job. Like a good colonial power, the government sends Kashmiri CRPF to the North-East and Naga battalions to Chhattisgarh — they had caused havoc there. The British used to do this on a more global scale…Indian soldiers fought in the World Wars for them. The Prime Minister gave an amazing speech a few years ago thanking the British for everything — including democracy, which we have learnt from our colonisers. <br />
<br />
<strong>The Listening to Grasshoppers essay is the transcript of the speech you gave in Turkey, in which you drew attention to how the Turks had massacred the Armenians, a Christian minority, in 1915. A few years ago when you went to Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize, you chose to talk about how the aborigines had been oppressed by the Whites. How did these audiences take to a foreign guest pricking their conscience rather pointedly on matters of national shame? </strong><br />
<br />
In the case of Turkey, where you are not even allowed to mention the Armenian genocide, there was a lot of tension in the room. (Roy was in Istanbul to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of a newspaper who was shot dead by “a child-assassin who was wearing a white cap” for writing about the genocide.) But I think what happened in both cases — Turkey and Australia— was that the audience felt that the criticism was evenhanded. (In Turkey, Roy talked about the Gujarat riots, in Australia about India’s caste system.) I didn’t come across as someone who is picking and choosing her injustices. <br />
Having said that, I would like to say that I don’t think you can break things down ‘country-wise’. The elites of the world are joining hands and forming a country of their own somewhere in the sky. After I won the Booker Prize in 1997 for <em>The God of Small Things</em>, I was the darling of the Indian middle class. And then, in 1998, the nuclear tests happened. I knew that if I said what I wanted to say it would be considered a huge betrayal by the class that I come from. But I knew that if I didn’t, I would be taking the first step towards constructing a prison around myself, a writer's prison made of cowardice, abandoning my writing, and becoming a politician. After writing on Narmada, I got a lot of flak in India, but in foreign countries I was still thought of as this feisty rebel. Then September 11 happened. I thought for a minute — but only for a minute —- now you’re going to antagonise those millions of readers of <em>The God of Small Things </em>in those countries too. But it didn't work that way. By antagonising the Indian establishment, I had come closer to millions of other people whom I wanted to be close to. A whole world of people fighting the same battle. That happened in other countries too. <em>The Algebra of Infinite Justice </em>— the piece I wrote after Sept 11 — was being read out by independent radio stations in the US. A few years later, when I went there and spoke at the Riverside Church, there were 3,000 people inside and 3,000 outside because they couldn't fit inside. So, of course, there are people who revile me, but there are also those who agree with me. There was a huge hatred for Bush after Sept 11 even within America. You can't equate anti-Americanism with being anti-Bush.<br />
<br />
<strong>When you refer to the 2002 Gujarat genocide, you are at pains to point out that the word 'genocide' has not been used loosely, even quoting the United Nations' definition. Did you do this because critics say that your language is sometimes shrill? </strong><br />
<br />
I chose to cite the definition because people do tend to use the word genocide loosely and arbitrarily. Shrill? That's a common or garden-variety right-wing accusation. Mahmood Mamdani in his book on Darfur talks about how the US establishment has used that word and why (he says genocide is not genocide, but a huge land grab triggered by drought). As for being called shrill — some criticism I wear as a badge of honour. <br />
<br />
<strong>But it's not always right-wingers who take objection. Even a liberal like Salman Rushdie went so far as to say that your comments after the Mumbai attacks, where you talked about how we could not ignore Kashmir and Gujarat, were “nauseating”. </strong><br />
<br />
Nauseating? That's a nice, un-shrill, temperate adjective wouldn't you say? On issues like ‘terrorism’, Salman Rushdie and I have major differences: Is it an insane piece of evil spinning in space or does it have a context? If Salman feels differently from me, that's okay. One of the attackers in Chabad House spoke quite openly and directly about the Babri Masjid, Kashmir and Gujarat. It was broadcast. It was not something I pulled out of my hat. I know Salman used some strong adjectives, but I don’t want to use them back. He’s a very talented writer, it’s just that we have completely different political perspectives. <br />
<br />
<strong>Perhaps the reactions to your piece were so strong because it came so soon after the attacks, when passions were running high. When terrorists are tearing into your city, people may not be in the mood to hear about how this is payback for what happened in Kashmir and Gujarat, which they feel they had nothing to do with. </strong><br />
<br />
What about when the army and the police are tearing into people in other places? What about when women are being raped and people are publicly slaughtered in places like Gujarat and even years later there's no sign of justice? In this world that moves so fast, sometimes you have to say things when it's hardest to say them. Otherwise it's too late. Even before I wrote, there were letters against me. Vinod Mehta (the editor of <em>Outlook</em>) said that I should be careful, the mood was ugly. But that's when you write, when you put your foot in the door. <br />
It was a time when the Indian media was being unbelievably irresponsible, TV channels were goading people to call for a war against Pakistan. Fortunately, the government was more mature. Shortly after the terror strikes, I was in Benares, and happened to hear an impromptu seminar on the banks of the river. A man spoke about India and its religions and cultures, and I thought to myself that from the same space from where vicious communalism can come, there can come a great wisdom. <br />
Sometimes the most rabid people calling for war, calling for Pakistan to be nuked, etc, are those who live far away, who will not have to suffer the consequences of what they're saying. You see it all the time in the Letters columns of magazines and newspapers. <br />
<br />
<strong>To return to the Maoist issue, the PM has said that the Maoist movement is India's gravest security threat.</strong> <br />
<br />
It suits the Maoists and the government to inflate the danger. It makes it easier to come down with all the force of your security apparatus. The inflation is mischievous . And it creates a situation in which every other kind of resistance is subsumed into this mad binary and dealt with as such. The most frightening thing is the criminalisation of the democratic space. You're either with us or against us. Bush is back, if he ever went away. <br />
<br />
<strong>Policemen have been killed.</strong> <br />
<br />
Policemen are being killed. People are also being killed and that's not being reported . If it is, they just say they are Maoists. You can't extract any easy moralities out of these killings. You have to look at the principle. The debate can't be about whether it is okay to kill policemen or whether it's okay to kill tribals. Obviously, it's not okay to do either. How do you rescue the situation? We have to look at why this is happening. If you are going to say Maoists are as mad as Islamists and should be liquidated, it's not going to help. It would mean liquidating hundreds of thousands. <br />
<br />
These are the poorest people of the country - they have no schools, no hospitals, no water, none of the amenities the state is supposed to provide. When the state talks about their well-being and development, it means displacement and mining. Bauxite mining in Orissa is one of the most devastating kinds of mining. To get one tonne of bauxite you have a stripping ratio of 1:13 so you have to mine 13 tonnes. You create radioactive red mud. This is dumped into rivers and belches carbon dioxide into the air. From bauxite you get alumina and then aluminum. For one tonne of aluminum you need 1,300 tonnes of water. All this for the weapons industry. Bauxite mountains are porous and function as natural water tanks that hold water and irrigate the plains. Bauxite mining is devastating a whole ecosystem . This is what the mining company Vedanta is doing. The bauxite in Niyamgiri in Orissa is called Kondolite after the Kond tribals in Orissa. <br />
<br />
There's an MoU on every mountain and river. When profits are so huge, the capacity for cruelty is also huge. <br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>In the last decade you have chosen to agitate on behalf of so many causes — anti-nuclear, Narmada, Bush's war against terror, Gujarat, Afzal Guru, terrorism, the tribal war, unlike say a Medha Patkar who is identified with the injustices of displacement. </strong><br />
<br />
Well, Medha Patkar is an activist. I am not. Wouldn't it be ridiculous for a writer to spend her whole life writing about one thing — dams, or displacement or privatization of infrastructure? In any case, if you see these things as 'causes', you're already in the wrong space. Looking at these things, trying to understand them, adds up to a way of seeing, a world-view. They are not unconnected. For example, the world spun around on its political axis at a dizzying speed after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and so much of what happened in India in the last twenty years connects with that.<br />
If you are an activist, you have to carry people with you, fulfill their expectations at the very least. As a writer, I sometimes do the opposite. I confound their expectations. I need to travel light, think my thoughts, whether or not people agree with me. I live on the edge of movements and what interests me is how the machine works. Very often, people's movements can be socially conservative but politically radical and those who are politically conservative can be socially radical. We don't have many Queer Gandhians do we? (By which I don't mean that Gandhi was always radical.) <br />
<br />
<strong>Is your next novel set in Kashmir? </strong><br />
I haven’t worked on it for a while. I can’t talk about my fiction the way I talk about my non-fiction. Not while I’m writing it at least.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-35997086930556230992009-07-09T12:14:00.000-07:002011-05-24T13:11:05.712-07:00Comment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Edit Page, The Times of India<br />
<br />
September 19, 2006<br />
<br />
<b>Leave Those Kids Alone</b> <br />
<br />
<i>Keep politics out of the classroom </i><br />
<br />
<b>Nina Martyris </b><br />
<br />
As the nation went through the paces of Teachers’ Day this year, the mood in many staffrooms was grim. A section of the academic fraternity even boycotted the celebrations and wore black armbands to protest the brutal murder of a professor by BJP-affiliated student rowdies on an Ujjain campus during college elections. Just two months ago, a senior lecturer at Mumbai’s Wilson College had his face blackened and was dragged through the streets on a distinctly fishy sexual harassment charge by Congress-affiliated student goons. <br />
<br />
Even as India strives to become an economic world power, its most fundamental civilisational block, the classroom, is under attack as is its keeper, the teacher. <br />
<a name='more'></a>The series of political degradations steadily visited upon the classroom have debilitated it both in body and spirit. The incursions have been at every level from primary school to higher educational institutions, the line of attack both surreptitious and shrill. From the fracas over saffronised and de-saffronised textbooks, the debate on the patriotic value of Vande Mataram, and finally and most worrying, the hate-filled reservations schism that has set student against student and plunged the country into a caste war, it is dangerously evident that this is not education’s finest hour. <br />
<br />
There is an elephant in the Indian classroom clad in the whitest khaddar whom we can no longer ignore: the patriot politician with his truncheon of chauvinism. As society’s first sentinel in a child’s life, it is the teacher who must be alert to this invisible agent provocateur so set on sowing the seeds of divisiveness. The patriot politician has become the unlettered but fierce custodian of Bharatiyata, a tradition he is completely ignorant of but of which he will brook no criticism. He has zeroed in on the classroom as the perfect place to plant his flag and flex muscle. <br />
<br />
The resulting sense of siege, overt in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where Hitler is held up as an exemplar in textbooks, is being progressively felt even in a state like Maharashtra, known for its culture of academic debate. That image has been grievously compromised in recent years after a number of violent attacks on professors and institutions that a craven government has winked at, worse, condoned. The nadir of cowardice was the mindless pillaging of Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute by the Sambhaji Brigade (whose parent organisation has the tacit support of Sharad Pawar) in 2004 on the specious grounds of defending Shivaji. Not only did the state do nothing, home minister R R Patil in a display of perverse justice said he would take action against historian James Laine, whose book on Shivaji had triggered the controversy. Equally dismaying was the Maharashtra Higher Secondary Board’s astonishing decision to suspend five paper-setters who had chosen a passage on the saint-poet Tukaram for an examination paper. The reference to Tukaram’s simple-mindedness offended political hoodlums who, claiming they were Warkaris or disciples of Tukaram, barged into the board office and beat up the chairman. The board bent over backwards to apologise. <br />
<br />
The growing attack on intellectuals was the subject of writer-activist Githa Hariharan’s 2003 polemical novel, In Times of Siege. In the book, Shiv Murthy, a liberal history professor, is threatened by fundamentalists of the Itihaas Suraksha Manch whose sentiments have been hurt by his writings on the 12th-century radical poet Basava, who challenged the caste system. Significantly, the attack comes not just from the fundoos who ransack Shiv’s office but also from colleagues in his department, who, like their real-life counterparts, are eager that he apologise and placate the ruffians. But in an unexpected act of courage, Shiv decides to take a stand and not be bullied by this sullen, intolerant nationalism. <br />
<br />
It is unfortunate that the state of education has sunk so low in a country whose founding fathers took utmost care to set up an integrated system where the school would be a secular temple of learning, an equal space where the best ideals and values would be coded into a child’s mind and heart to help build a modern, more rooted India. Thanks to those enlightened minds, India was truly ahead of its times: in 1947, the US still had segregation in its schools, an apartheid demolished only by the historic Brown vs Board ruling of 1954; in Israel, Arab and Jewish children still study in separate school systems sealing them off from each other’s cultures and beliefs and promoting the suspicion that comes from ignorance; while in Iran today, ‘secular and liberal’ teachers are being purged in a repressive move to impose a national Islamic identity. <br />
<br />
The schoolteacher must set the nation’s moral compass and undo the prejudices that a child may have picked up from the environment around. After all, the school is the first social laboratory that a child steps into after the familiar womb of his family, and any orientations and mindsets learned here are learned for life. Generations of Indian students who have been blessed with good teachers in progressive, enlightened schools where, for example, the Lord’s Prayer was taught alongside a Sanskrit shloka, and Diwali, Christmas and Id all celebrated with a shared togetherness, know the immeasurable worth of an inclusive, liberal schooling. This is where the fight against terrorism really begins, the good fight in which there are no losers and the only one capable of kneading this spectacularly diverse country together. It is this intangible heritage that should underpin every syllabus, and one that we must protect and preserve.</div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-66942101349872714402009-07-02T23:17:00.000-07:002011-05-24T13:11:40.786-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1jHu95fvbJ49nsbBQRucMhjrqu81IhVGPJHfAkdMZR_z2LgGNfjcW1iyn9N_fZOXzQkCe7pX_STGNWWQnpkaJk_Kk1oMs6NI_AiA3aCaU9uuWmULh69zjqgJxZLWxuWdY-m4g2Fn9EwM/s1600-h/mahishasura.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5355392762030767458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1jHu95fvbJ49nsbBQRucMhjrqu81IhVGPJHfAkdMZR_z2LgGNfjcW1iyn9N_fZOXzQkCe7pX_STGNWWQnpkaJk_Kk1oMs6NI_AiA3aCaU9uuWmULh69zjqgJxZLWxuWdY-m4g2Fn9EwM/s200/mahishasura.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 178px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Tyeb Mehta, hope over hype</b><br />
<br />
The Times of India, July 2, 2009<br />
<br />
Nina Martyris<br />
<br />
Tyeb Mehta, one of India’s finest painters who courted only his canvas and recoiled from the blandishments of the media and the market—though both pursued him—passed away in a Mumbai hospital in the early hours of Thursday morning on July 2. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
The 84-year-old artist was born in Kapadwanj, Gujarat, but lived in Mumbai for most of his life apart from brief but crucially important spells in London, New York and Shantiniketan. Long debilitated by a weak heart, he spent the last few months inching forward in his Lokhandwala flat with the assistance of a walker and found it an effort even to converse with the friends who dropped in to see how he was doing.<br />
<br />
Poor health was one of destiny’s more underhand blows, given that it was only in the winter of his days that Tyeb’s work was given the financial recompense that is the due of all good art. The turning point came in 2002 when a vibrant triptych called Celebration sold at Christie’s for Rs 1.5 crore. This was the first time an Indian painting had crossed the crore mark, and it made for a historic sale. A few years later in 2005, Mahishasura, a muscular work in which Durga grapples with the demon buffalo went for $1.5 million, again the first Indian painting to murder the million-dollar mark. It was another matter altogether that the auction money did not reach him since both paintings were re-sales and fattened only their owners, but the glittering prices did wonders for his equity and esteem. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiftGoh8m3OYrWLauJpiXx32l9DXUH5JfoFoqsZn4JNlwIjjJWmVInXx9tCSlbaMfEp9SuUWcXKzuJz8nIlWO2n5NOBJ3Ab88RlI5oHzDJMjBGv3nxIDRzoRBo6YUmsOQnfCbeX1IV8USg/s1600-h/tyeb3.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5354225583091770834" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiftGoh8m3OYrWLauJpiXx32l9DXUH5JfoFoqsZn4JNlwIjjJWmVInXx9tCSlbaMfEp9SuUWcXKzuJz8nIlWO2n5NOBJ3Ab88RlI5oHzDJMjBGv3nxIDRzoRBo6YUmsOQnfCbeX1IV8USg/s200/tyeb3.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 138px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
It would, however, gravely belittle both man and artist merely to use a string of zeroes, no matter how dazzling, as a measure of his excellence and commitment to the ideals of equality and freedom. When Tyeb was 22, India was partitioned, and so was his street. He could not cross from Mohammed Ali Road to his workplace, Famous Studios, then located at Tardeo. In the quickening bloodlust, he saw a young man being lynched and this horrifying little scene haunted him all his life. “The crowd beat him to death and smashed his head with stones,’’ he said in an interview to art critic Nancy Adajania for the book Tyeb Mehta—Ideas Images Exchanges. “I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me today. I am paralysed by the sight of blood, violence of any kind, even shouting...’’<br />
<br />
Suffering was a giant theme that Tyeb confronted relentlessly and the pain of the human condition howls forth from his works like a long and silent Munchian scream. The influence of Picasso, Matisse, Bacon and Kandinsky is evident in Tyeb’s oeuvre, and Kandinsky’s chaos-control conflict is manifest in his solid planes of colour embedded with falling figures, lolling breasts, wounded flesh and bloodied mouths.<br />
<br />
Many of the protagonists in Tyeb’s work—the rickshaw puller, the trussed bull, Kali—are rooted in autobiography: a vacation spent with his grandmother in Calcutta gave birth to the rickshaw puller. And after he shot footage at a Bandra abbatoir for a documentary Koodal (Tamil for ‘meeting point’; the film won a Filmfare Critics award), the vision of a bull bound and broken on the floor tormented him. Kali, powerful and dangerous, fascinated him, and he once said that he lived with the idea for three years before he had the courage to pick up a stick of red chalk and draw the first frightening images of a maw glutted with blood, a tongue thrusting out for more. Tyeb drew many Kalis, always choosing soft and lumpish contours for her body which had a nameless menace to them.<br />
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One of the most definitive leaps that Tyeb made as an artist—the introduction of the diagonal in his paintings—was the result of an accident. In 1969, he thought he had hit a dead end, and in a flounce of frustration he flung a black streak across his canvas. Then, as the jagged drama of the diagonal hit him, he knew he had made a breakthrough, for the slanting gash was the visual equivalent of the biblical verb ‘cleave’ that at once joins and divides.<br />
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M F Husain, whose association with Tyeb Mehta goes back to the time when they were both art students at the Sir JJ School of Art and members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay, has called him “the greatest figurative painter in our time, better than anyone else—and that includes myself’’. The other artist whom Husain singled out as “the greatest abstractionist in our time’’ was V S Gaitonde, who spent his last days alone and unsung in his Delhi flat, a blank canvas staring mutely at him. Until the very last, Gaitonde struggled to paint, just like Tyeb—-who, according to his wife and mainstay Sakina-—clutched at his brushes and tubes of paint and wanted nothing more than to return from hospital to the warm and healing embrace of his studio.</div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-5741791463022028642009-06-30T05:56:00.000-07:002011-05-24T13:12:51.576-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhmgrZG5XP4KghyzD6tPTDJ71rek36aRaEbOZH4_t4FukokmK0PsvEno2EudqJZNYfDTQ30Lv42wx_lvtbBumqluQefpmDGmfeLDhiVxH2knoZM_qRdEckvjRyjhXYV0zGN6WeHm1Pf-g/s1600-h/mj.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353108214239091234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhmgrZG5XP4KghyzD6tPTDJ71rek36aRaEbOZH4_t4FukokmK0PsvEno2EudqJZNYfDTQ30Lv42wx_lvtbBumqluQefpmDGmfeLDhiVxH2knoZM_qRdEckvjRyjhXYV0zGN6WeHm1Pf-g/s200/mj.gif" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 1px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 1px;" /></a><br />
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June 27, 2009<br />
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<b>When Michael moonwalked in Mumbai </b><br />
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<i>Rewind to November 1, 1996: Michael Jackson burst forth from a spaceship. Swung from a crane. And used Bal Thackeray’s toilet </i><br />
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<b>Nina Martyris</b><br />
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The man with the most expensive crotch in the world visited India only once, when he came to Mumbai for a spectacular concert, the likes of which the city had never seen before and has not seen since. That was in the year 1996, when Mumbai was still the undisputed destination for Western gigs, when the 10.00 pm loudspeaker deadline had not yet been cast in iron, when Raj Thackeray was still a Sainik, and a brand of potato chips called Ruffles was all the rage. The Andheri Sports Complex was crackling with empty packets on the morning after the November 1 concert. Chips, snorted a young reporter, after any other concert it would have been joints. <br />
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The Michael Jackson visitation is remembered as much for the electric way in which the star blew the 50,000-strong crowd away with his music and dazzling sleight of bones as for engendering what is arguably one of Bal Thackeray’s most famous quotes —“He used my toilet" — after the singer called on him at his Bandra residence on his way from the airport.<br />
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Mumbai was under the Shiv Sena-BJP's watch in that year and the MJ show soon found itself absurdly enmeshed in the local politics of the city. The saffron ranks were neatly riven into two — the Sena, with Raj Thackeray in the lead, was starry eyed about the concert, having reached an agreement that Rs 4 crore of the proceeds would go to an employment co-operative for local youth. In the words of The Economist, MJ could not have bought himself “a better insurance policy’’. But the RSS and BJP were very grumpy that tax exemption of Rs 11 crore had been bestowed on a thrusting pelvis. Quit cribbing, Bal Thackeray told the RSS, if you haven’t protested ads for bras as being un-Indian, hold your peace now. Nervous about what he would say next, the BJP quickly shut up and said it had no problem with the show.<br />
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Thackeray’s younger brother Ramesh also threatened to commit suicide because the Jackson concert had been allowed at the Sports Complex while his own plans for a dandia raas in support of an AIDS charity had not. No one paid him too much attention either, except for an anonymous caller who threatened to shoot him if he dared disrupt the show.<br />
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As November 1 approached, the anticipation reached fever pitch, with every detail of MJ’s vegetarian regimen (masala dosa and orange juice) and luggage (three Russian aircraft of hardware and flummery like a four-poster bed and lamposts) being reported. The media, which was much more cynical then than it is today, was caught between being worshipful and snide. Unsavoury child abuse allegations had already soiled those spangled gloves, and as one correspondent wrote, “We heard someone say, ‘I wonder if he’ll say— ‘I am vegetarian but can I have two young Indian boys for breakfast’."<br />
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Reporters outpunned each other. TOI said ponderously that “with joint police commissioners and deputy commissioners busy at the ‘thriller’ show, the ‘smooth criminals’ may have had a day’’. The Times-Mode poll interviewed 323 people, threefourths of whom promptly declared that they would rather listen to Lata than Michael. A senior columnist wrote that it was no wonder that Thackeray liked him because he was a ‘Jackson-of-the-soil’ and that Mumbai’s builders loved him because he had so effectively captured their unique brand of ethics with his song, “It don’t matter if it’s Black or White.’’<br />
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But all this melted away when the boneless showman appeared on stage. The cheapest ticket was Rs 1,500 and the most expensive Rs 15,000, and devotees had poured in from all over India to catch the action. For more than an hour the crowd waited, clapping patiently through the opening acts of Bally Sagoo and Sharon Prabhakar. Then, a helicopter circled overhead, twice, and shone a beam down, and girls began to scream and demand that their nervous boyfriends hoist them onto their shoulders. This was Jackson’s HIStory tour and the screen flashed images of the Buddha, Gandhi and Mandela until a voice announced ‘Touchdown’ and a spaceship burst onto the stage. It was a <i>deus ex machina</i> moment with a glittering figure emerging in a spacesuit and tongues of flame exploding all around. “Michael, Michael,’’ chanted the throng as he flung highpitched <i>bon mots </i>of ‘Love ya’ and ‘Sabse Pyara Hindustan’ towards them.<br />
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Rapidly, he burnt his way through <i>Billy Jean</i>, <i>Thriller</i>, <i>Black or White <i>and</i> Dangerous</i>. During <i>Smooth Criminal</i>, a massive white screen pulled down, and a silhouette of Jackson moonwalked, flipped and strutted on it. Easily the most riveting moment came in <i>Earth Song</i>, when a giant crane lifted Jackson into the air and rotated above the crowd. With his body arching out in a taut semi-circle, he screamed out the lyrics to a sea of uplifted faces, among them Sunil Gavaskar, Govinda, Bappi Lahiri,Prabhudeva, the Thackerays, chief minister Manohar Joshi and moral cop Pramod Navalkar.<br />
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Next day, the newspapers were awash with alliteration. It was almost as if the city’s new name was bending itself for headlines which grandly announced, ‘Mumbai Moonwalks With Michael’ and ‘Michael Mania Moves Mumbai’.</div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-45283020750273179732008-10-16T02:50:00.000-07:002008-10-16T02:58:55.396-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhINd1YNRSKGCM1wmhKwqFCTDMaYj6S042_8hJVrjMtUUAFxmjHRW8D5Rxen-XkMdPUcnwseCd10g_QLUSNCfRLzKJQtOt3CHnMEI56zbJqWQJeKIySwwRFSFVrIr2kuuzyTuJv-8vgDHQ/s1600-h/tigernovel.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhINd1YNRSKGCM1wmhKwqFCTDMaYj6S042_8hJVrjMtUUAFxmjHRW8D5Rxen-XkMdPUcnwseCd10g_QLUSNCfRLzKJQtOt3CHnMEI56zbJqWQJeKIySwwRFSFVrIr2kuuzyTuJv-8vgDHQ/s200/tigernovel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257689019210092466" /></a><br /><br />The Times of India, October 16, 2008<br /><br /><strong>The sword is sharper </strong><br /> <br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />The one ambition of the arriviste hero of this harsh novel is simply this: not to sink into the sucking mud of the Ganga. Driven by an almost deranged desire to escape from the India of Darkness to the India of Light, Balram Halwai heads towards the coal bowl of Dhanbad, and ultimately Delhi, escaping a rotting armpit called Laxmangarh, where the "sewage glistens" and the women wait behind doors to fall on the salaries of their returning migrant husbands like "wildcats on a slab of flesh". In the local school, where the teacher is a lying, thieving bully, a visiting inspector gives Balram the name White Tiger, the rarest of the rare, the only boy in a classroom of underfed dunces to identify the photograph of the Great Socialist, the politician who is an even bigger lying, thieving bully.<br /><br />Balram escapes but carries with him a wound that never heals. The death by tuberculosis of his rickshaw-puller father eats into him, informing his every action and final act of madness. He is determined to be a man with a "big belly", not a man with a "small belly" like his father was. Behind the wheel of a Honda City, the White Tiger soon realises that he has exchanged one zoo for another. He is employed as a driver by the Stork, the man who owns the strip of river that flows by his village, and is ordered to drive his son Ashok, who has returned from America with his Christian wife, Pinky, who, for all her short hair, has a conscience.<br /><br />Despite his fancy wage and uniform, Balram knows that he is still imprisoned in the coop with other roosters awaiting slaughter. Slaughter must be fought with slaughter, and blood stains his flight to freedom. Like Salman Rushdie's <em>Shalimar the Clown, The White Tiger</em> opens with murder. Most foul or fair is the larger question that the reader must answer, and it is this complex, aching morality that underpins the novel.<br /><br />This is Adiga's first work of fiction and the leap from journalist (he worked with TIME Magazine) to writer, though successfully made, is not completely convincing. The constant ranting against the darkness seems more the writer's upper-middle-class outrage than the hero's own. The first half of the novel is riveting, and has a page-turning intensity, but the grip slackens and by the end the writer seems to have lost his cunning. <br /><br />Where <em>The White Tiger </em>does succeed forcibly is its savage portrayal of India Unshining, and the depressing betrayal of the wretched of the earth by a system that dares call itself a welfare state. As dodgy tax deals are cut between the Stork and the Great Socialist whose goons pulverise a rickshaw puller for daring to vote, the public continues to obsess over the elections "like enunchs discussing the Kama Sutra''. Ashok, who is just back from the land of the free, and who is sickened by the bribing and spitting and bad roads, is no different__beneath the veneer throbs a zamindar, weak and cruel.<br /><br />But more than an indictment of the venality of the old rural rich and their urban offspring, the penumbra of menace that encircles this novel is that of revolution and the flowering of Naxalism. Foreigners and others staggered by the poverty of India always marvel at the lack of crime, the absence of insurrection. Why hasn't the guillotine been sharpened so far, when there is no bread in one India and only cake in the other? What would happen if a million Balram Halwais awoke to the fact that the meek usually do not inherit the earth, and were to rise in rebellion? That confection would be red and sticky.<br /><br />Richer still is the twisting irony of the thoughts that flow through Balram's mind as he sits in his Bangalore office beneath the scattered light of a chandelier__for all Bharat's evils, he knows in his gut that brown men and yellow men will rule the world, for the white man has been finished by buggery, drug abuse and talking on the mobile phone. The Balram Halwais will be the human hoardings of superpowerdom. India will shine, but not before the white tigers have had their kill.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-509484499315313362008-07-30T08:28:00.000-07:002008-08-02T01:45:38.702-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTvhCZpAK7i2FKnFb0VMZrrTdCOn3ovocRl_gpePyTwSPCxvG0Fm-kn_A14MsfU_lf-TVU_BHbVeaw-fAm55nQ_JfAUlR0NlGCB_vwWGCpD3p88eeHfNyHQqt8i9qetPi9Nuwwmp_XbfI/s1600-h/midnight.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTvhCZpAK7i2FKnFb0VMZrrTdCOn3ovocRl_gpePyTwSPCxvG0Fm-kn_A14MsfU_lf-TVU_BHbVeaw-fAm55nQ_JfAUlR0NlGCB_vwWGCpD3p88eeHfNyHQqt8i9qetPi9Nuwwmp_XbfI/s200/midnight.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229838758006489538" /></a><br /><strong>One more bouquet for Saleem</strong><br /><br />The Times of India, Sunday Review, July 20, 2008<br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />As trophies go, the Best of Booker that Midnight's Children recently won wasn't the most compelling. Many felt that there was a sameness to the award title--after all, the book has already been adequately feted with the Booker Prize in 1981 and the prestigious Booker of Bookers in 1993, and further, this new prize had arrived via the rather banal passage of the SMS vote. One even wondered snarkily whether the voters were from the same constituency of tiresomely patriotic Indians who had voted Amitabh Bachchan as Star of the Millennium in the BBC poll and ensured that the Taj Mahal was one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, a racket floated by a businessman in Switzerland. <br /> <br />Since praise for this tour de force novel has long lost its bite through repetition, it was left to the author Salman Rushdie to water the wilting laurel wreath. He did so through a simple pre-recorded acceptance message when he said that it was a wonderful alternative to have his real children (his two sons Zafar and Milan) accept the award instead of his imaginary ones. And with this casual, jokey reference, one was sucked back suddenly and helplessly to the epic world of Midnight's Children, with its array of characters so crazy that they had to be human, its mad plotlines plucked straight from the purple heart of Hindi cinema, and above all, for the readers of this city, its glorious rooting in childhood memory.<br /> <br />George Orwell rightly said that none of our memories come to us virgin, and in this book, Rushdie's Bombay is one that is endearingly tainted by nostalgia. It is a Bombay that he recreates as cosmopolitan and embracing and eccentric and that he always references as different from the Bombay of today where the "political gangs are all Hindu and the criminal gangs all Muslim". This, even though we know that in that unforgiving August of 1947, Bombay was insulated neither from the bigotry and hate nor the consequences of a bloody border freshly drawn. It was a dark place even then, where Gandhi's murderers met and plotted, where Sadat Hasan Manto had to leave his employment at Bombay Talkies because he feared for his safety, where India's best-selling artist Tyeb Mehta saw one man slaughter another because each prayed to a different God. Rushdie is no political ingénue-–in fact, his knowledge of history is remarkable – and so this roseate celebration of a lost childhood is even more touching.<br /><br />To return to the author's mention of his "imaginary children", while his accomplished pen has given us a whole brood--Virgin Ironpants in Shame, the ultra-fast-growing Moraes Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh, the doll-fixated Prof Solanka in Fury, and Shalimar, the bestotted, psychotic assassin in Shalimar the Clown, it would be safe to say that the character who has really stayed with us, and whom we carry around in our hearts, is his first-born imaginary offspring, Saleem. Saleem Sinai, the snot-nosed, cucumber-nosed. know-all narrator of Midnight's Children, whose life swings between exultation and suffering, for he has been "handcuffed to history", a coupling determined by his time of birth, midnight on August 15, 1947, when "clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting".<br /><br />For a writer as gifted as Rushdie, and for one who names Dickens as a shaping influence, one of the most disappointing aspects to his writing has been his inability to create memorable characters. In an interview he gave a few years ago to Hari Kunzru, Rushdie said that Dickens placed big grotesque characters against a meticulously observed background, and that he had tried to learn this literary conceit from him. Somehow this has not happened. If one is asked to reel off from the top of one's head, some of his most memorable creations, only those intimate with his books would be able to name names. These characters have not become part of popular discourse the way that personas like Oliver Twist, Mr Bumble, Scrooge or Fagin have, or if one is to cite from popular fiction, the way a Sherlock Holmes or a Dumbledore or even a Mr Goon has. Salmeen Sinai comes close. We experience his pain and share his passion, despite the ridiculous caricature that he is and his infuriatingly jalebi way of telling a story. Perhaps this is because through Saleem's narrative of his family's life -- his parents, grandparents, friends and loves – we come as close as we can to peering into Rushdie's past and the watering hole of his imagination.<br /><br />Saleem is not Salman (although he marries a Padma) and Saleem's grandfather Dr Aadam Aziz is not him too, but there is a touching prescience at work here. In the opening pages of Midnight's Children, Dr Aziz while bending down on his prayer mat, bumps his nose on a hard tussock of earth. His nose bleeds and his eyes water and he decides then and there that never again will be bow before God or man. "This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history."<br /><br />Battered by a fatwa and one femme fatale too many, Sir Salman would have some understanding of this.Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-27748844769153541662008-06-17T04:36:00.000-07:002008-06-17T04:46:12.954-07:00Reading Bond by torchlight, under the covers<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQi6aXvOR5HtpuAqZkk91MLPokLDlKqzUVwBh9y8YyZj9tfpVdKy-xD08x1NnyeXAFTteqVR1JSjuI6uRsN0JZxzCJpGHDAMbRnHdXY57qHaZlcIluNFXAxtm-nSNyV1YRVl8yqbcf60g/s1600-h/sebastian-faulks-an_675347e.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQi6aXvOR5HtpuAqZkk91MLPokLDlKqzUVwBh9y8YyZj9tfpVdKy-xD08x1NnyeXAFTteqVR1JSjuI6uRsN0JZxzCJpGHDAMbRnHdXY57qHaZlcIluNFXAxtm-nSNyV1YRVl8yqbcf60g/s200/sebastian-faulks-an_675347e.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212815359511036834" /></a><br /><br />The Times of India, June 9, 2008<br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />Mumbai: The new James Bond book, written by British novelist Sebastian Faulks in perilously taut prose, has a special Mumbai connection. Faulks, who was commissioned to write the new caper in the centenary year of Ian Fleming, the man who created the suave English spy, has dedicated Devil May Care to two people: to Fleming himself and to “Fali Vakeel, who, when he and I were schoolboys, first introduced me to Bond’’. <br /><br />Vakeel is sitting at the quietly lit bar at the Oberoi’s Opium Den where bankers and their credit cards are easily parted. A compact 55-year-old with a terribly polite manner and a remarkable ability to speak in full sentences complete with long dashes and semi colons, he indulgently goes through the parody of ordering a round of dry martinis, shaken not stirred. This affectionate nod is lost on the deferential barman but helps set the mood for the interview. <br /><br />When Fali was ten years old, he was packed off to England to prep school, a rite of passage for Malabar Hill Parsi schoolboys at the time. At the “uncomfortably cold and brutish school’’, the curly haired Sebastian Faulks and Fali Vakeel became friends. <br /><br />“Although I made many friends, many of them were friends for survival. Sebastian was clearly a cut above—intelligent, bright, he had a certain class. We were together for three years, and at 13 he went to Wellington and I to Rugby,’’ begins Vakeel. “After that, I got into London University—I was too precocious for Oxford—but chose to return to Bombay, to Elphinstone College, and then I went into advertising.’’ <br /><br />Now executive director of Lowe India, the country’s biggest or second-biggest ad firm after JWT depending on whom you talk to, Vakeel has been faithful to the profession except for one “brief and regrettable foray into accountancy, which was kind of like having a camel screw a poodle, and I’m not quite sure who was who’’. <br /><br /> At the Elsstree prep school at Berkshire, a lasting friendship was forged over Casino Royale, From Russia With Love and Live and Let Die. Young Fali had smuggled his father’s copies from Bombay into school, and the two boys read them eagerly under the sheets by torchlight. “The school was Calvinist and cold but Bond was always in Istanbul, Nice, Russia. While there were deeply unattractive males in the changing room, Bond was bonking Tatiana Romanova, and while we were eating boiled cabbage, Bond was drinking martinis. He was the perfect antidote to our lives.’’ <br /><br />The boys lost touch. Vakeel occasionally read about Faulks’s growing fame and the success of his book, Birdsong. Sometimes on a visit to London, he wondered whether he should wander in to a Waterstone’s or a Hatchett’s and catch up with Sebastian signing books there, but he never did. Then, one day in 2004, forty years after they had last met, an e-mail popped up in his inbox re-establishing contact. “It was quite spooky, really, because at that time I was just finishing his book, On Green Dolphin Street,’’ he says. “It turned out that he had googled me to find out where I was. A month later, I had dinner at his Notting Hill home with him and his wife, Veronica, who I must add, on the evening of the book launch, looked better than any Bond girl.’’ <br /><br />After Faulks was chosen by the Fleming estate for the coveted commission that many novelists would have killed for—with a stiletto if need be—he broke the news to Vakeel in a suitably clandestine way. “I was having a drink with them when he firmly shut the door of his sitting room and said he had been asked to do this book. I said, amazing. Later, on e-mail, he asked if I would be appalled if he dedicated the book to me. I replied that I would have to be a retard brain donor if I had to be appalled. Why on earth would I be?’’ <br /><br />Devil May Care has been praised for its spareness of style and authentic atmosphere. It opens with Bond in Rome on a three-month break to clear his head and reclaim his life. He is listless, a burnt-out case, repelled by his own reflection; his cummerbund still fits but is afraid that his mind is running to fat. He has been warned to stay off alcohol. And then, of course, things happen. <br /><br />Vakeel enjoyed the book, describing it as “high on adrenalin and very sexy’’. “I continue to love Bond,’’ he says. “I’m talking about the books mind you, not the new films where it’s all about exploding arse holes and parachutes coming out of breasts. The books have a great sense of place. You can almost smell Istanbul, smell the girls’ shampoo. And, of course, Bond is every man’s fantasy—sex without commitment. Fleming once said that his books are positioned somewhere between the solar plexus and the knees. In boarding school, these books were an escape from a life of lumpy porridge and fish which smelt of extremely old underwear.’’ He pauses, and adds with a sense of fairness, “Mind you, that was boarding school food then. Today, it’s probably like Frangipani.’’Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-25869740828676994212008-03-31T02:15:00.000-07:002008-03-31T03:28:42.705-07:00Adding clay, subtracting stone<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjDZwJW6s8HMg0z3KTqPnYdw__ttPsv1AGGa1RoMnjfts6FVXQPY_kOt5389IA151tu_TJPnUzTGrOui2duIwDGGewl9H0KaeJ5BfxvJeAlgfUe3JF9GYv1hT5QMLt_ciE32Us7jY0DoU/s1600-h/dhruv.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjDZwJW6s8HMg0z3KTqPnYdw__ttPsv1AGGa1RoMnjfts6FVXQPY_kOt5389IA151tu_TJPnUzTGrOui2duIwDGGewl9H0KaeJ5BfxvJeAlgfUe3JF9GYv1hT5QMLt_ciE32Us7jY0DoU/s200/dhruv.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183833282419867122" /></a><br />The Times of India, March 31<br /><br />Nina Martyris meets <strong>Dhruva Mistry</strong>, the sculptor who has held only one job in his life<br /><br />Initially reticent, he gradually warms to the flame. As the conversation with Dhruva Mistry progresses, you learn to watch out for his dry-as-tinder remarks, delivered quietly with an anticipatory glee. His observations have a sharp edge to them but a pleasing snap as well. Alas, the more interesting ones are made off the record.<br /> <br />The Baroda-based Mistry is visiting Mumbai as the Artist of Focus at the Harmony Art show, an annual exhibition helmed by Tina Ambani, now in its 13th year.<br /> <br />With his sparse grey hair, unremarkable spectacles, and quiet clothes that would meld obediently into the linoleum decor of any corporate pit, Mistry is a far throw from the stereotype of sculptor as wildhaired, rumpled maverick attacking huge cubes of stone. <br /><br />Beneath that HR-friendly exterior, naturally, a fierce individualism thumps alongside an idealism whose edges have been singed with cynicism. A devotee of the Gandhian prescription of self-knowledge and self-sufficiency, he has held only one job in his life—as Dean of Fine Arts at Baroda’s M S University (1999 to 2002). He resigned in two years repelled by a system which considered it kosher for diploma holders to lecture to postgraduates and where a government-anointed stooge demanded the respect due to a savant. <br /><br />Which is why when Mistry happened to meet another victim of the system, Verghese Amul Kurien, at an airport, a remark by the milk cooperative visionary sloshed in his head. Kurien had said, “The biggest hurdle in the way of India’s development is the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats are the biggest employed trade union in the country.’’ <br /><br />At the Harmony show, 29 of his works—paintings and sculpture—are on display but all of them are from the last ten years of his career. Given that the 1957-born sculptor (“You can say I am running 51 or 51 run-out, it doesn’t matter’’) has been at it for at least 30 years, the selection does not track his evolution from lusciously formed figures to a more distorted, abstract idiom. But that is how he wanted it. <br /><br />What the exhibition does showcase is diversity, the unifying factor of Mistry’s vast oeuvre.From the unforgiving hardness of stone to the craven softness of chalk, from <br />fashionable fibre-glass and polished stainless steel to rusty metal and good old wood, Mistry has worked with a distractingly varied range. Perhaps this is only natural for the boy who started out with anything he could lay his hands on—paper, wood, twigs and leaves assembled with the glue from the neem trees in his village of Kanjari. <br /><br />“The material varies but the goal doesn’t,’’ he says. “I choose the best material depending on what I want to say. With clay you add things; with stone you subtract; with steel you add and subtract or weld; you use alabaster if you want a just-before-glass look; bronze is an expensive medium given the labour and metal costs.’’ <br /><br />Superlatives are scrupulously absent from Mistry’s opinions as is the sweeping pronouncement. He is wary of big anthems like freedom of expression, and adds wearily that few are ready to acquaint themselves with the nitty gritty of the problem. For instance, he says, Chandramohan, the Baroda art student who was arrested for his exam submission of a cross with a commode below and a goddess berthing a full-grown man, was a print-maker and had no business submitting an installation in the first place. And while he has no patience for puffed-up custodians of culture with their tilaks and cellphones, he is as unimpressed by liberals who dismiss him as an old-fashioned stickler for rules. <br /><br />Encomia like “great artist’’ and “genius’’ are abstained from. “I don’t think any artist should go through what Husain is going through,’’ he says in response to how a great artist like Husain has been hounded out of his own country. “We are more a thrashing democracy than a thriving one.’’ As are judgmentalisms such as “young artists are being ruined by all that auction money’’. “Matisse came from a well-off background, that did not diminish anything, in fact the subjects of his paintings are at ease, at repose. So being commercially successful doesn’t make art good or bad.” <br /><br />“To appreciate art you don’t have to be a critic—even a good journalist can do the job.” He cites Hemingway’s gripping reportage of the bullfights, told in spare prose with no flesh on the bone. “But you must remain a spectator. Art, like bullfighting is a gory business.” He adds wickedly after a pause, “I can use many other adjectives to describe the art scene.”Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-14009471641289262432008-03-03T03:23:00.000-08:002008-03-31T00:19:55.411-07:00Remember Nikki Gandhi Bedi?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnFygHvQoo4jPkzQWVv01DY4kEyNciY1sSNEIcc3zvRYyjvCsE712F86tq-tMGOXVF62Q_nwNpZQY4g3UA6gdPK6yo6Qr9FJ44sG44EcGUelbvAmBiRN6NJNwFaPW2S8Fg7mW8iqELibA/s1600-h/ni.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnFygHvQoo4jPkzQWVv01DY4kEyNciY1sSNEIcc3zvRYyjvCsE712F86tq-tMGOXVF62Q_nwNpZQY4g3UA6gdPK6yo6Qr9FJ44sG44EcGUelbvAmBiRN6NJNwFaPW2S8Fg7mW8iqELibA/s200/ni.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173477118838596946" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuoDLTymo5gvrRasIuymnLuYeT-sbNr-7xpaTO4_qeqD2wbRlqNU-AWlTeZ_qRCRYq7nUgcYECXUFxFOzH8MLDj1lqoXDoI8FduqDoPqPE985H2XKDr0ZY1864j1nPjfQQ6lM4llR7lvE/s1600-h/ni.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuoDLTymo5gvrRasIuymnLuYeT-sbNr-7xpaTO4_qeqD2wbRlqNU-AWlTeZ_qRCRYq7nUgcYECXUFxFOzH8MLDj1lqoXDoI8FduqDoPqPE985H2XKDr0ZY1864j1nPjfQQ6lM4llR7lvE/s200/ni.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173476427348862274" /></a><br />The Sunday Times of India, Times Review, March 2, 2008<br /><br />Nina Martyris meets her in a rehab called time<br /><br />Nikki Bedi is vacationing in Mumbai after an epic gap of two long years during which so much has happened. Ex-husband Kabir Bedi has acquired a new girlfriend, schoolmate Elizabeth Hurley has married a chiselled Bombay mannequin, and there are far too many Indian blondes around now. The diminutive 41-year-old, with the loud, cut-glass diction of a British chat show host, has taken these scattered changes in her stride—Kabir’s girlfriend, Parveen, is described with gushing warmth as “simply fantastic”, the fake blondes are dissed, eyes rolling, as “declassé”, Liz Hurley doesn’t trigger any early schoolroom memories. <br /><br />On a February morning that has no redeeming winter nip, Nikki has set out from the Intercontinental Hotel for her power walk. By eight o’clock it is boiling but she has already rounded the salty curve of the seafront and conquered the steep shoulder of Walkeshwar to finally halt at a deeply personal public shrine, a standardissue shiny black municipal plaque etched in gold lettering with the name Sumant Moolgaokar Chowk. <br /><br />Her late grandfather—the legendary Tata chief after whom it is rumoured the Sumo was named—lived at Mayfair Apartments, easily one of Malabar Hill’s most distinguished addresses. This is where the young Nikki spent her holidays, chasing cousins and siblings up and down the broad corridors, while Dadu with his Hasselblad and meticulous eye captured it all on film. Nikki is in Mumbai this time to “water her roots”. She has spent the afternoon in Juhu with Kabir and Parveen, and his daughter Pooja Bedi and her children (there’s a lot of watering going on here). <br /><br />She asks permission to light up a Gudang Garam, throwing in that she had given up in May and should probably give up again. Life in Birmingham is demanding. She runs a radio show (Asian Network) and a TV show (Desi DNA), and this means reading at least three books a week, watching two films, and if there’s a band on the show, downloading and listening to all their music, “legally, may I add”. She is obsessive compulsive when it comes to research, she says, and though she has a team, prefers to do the slog herself. There is a research ban on Wikipedia for its sometimes dodgy information—for instance, on her page, her first husband Sunil Vijaykar is described as an economist, when in fact he is a food stylist or, at a stretch, a food economist. And when she googles, she does a “reverse google”, beginning on Page 9 rather than Page 1 because that’s how you’re more likely to get some obscure nugget. <br /><br />This thoroughness was self-evident at the benighted Kitab Festival where she stood in quite expertly for several anchors who had pulled out, and had only a day or two to read a minor pile of books before interviewing authors Indra Sinha, Matthew d’Ancona, Sarfraz Manzoor and Julian West in a back-to-back Sunday session. In a stylishly quiet hessain dress with glittery paisley detail and skyscraper croc shoes, and wired on endless cups of coffee, she was sharp as a tack, friendly, and did her best to lighten what would otherwise have turned into a graveyard shift. When Sarfraz, who has written a book on growing up Muslim in Britain, commented on the curious mix of tradition and broadmindedness in India, citing that while there is a shaadi.com, there is also a secondshaadi.com for the divorced, she slipped in ingenuously, “And what about thirdshaadi.com for people like me?” <br /><br />On her shows back home, she has what she calls a Total Fat Ban. “No, it’s not to do with people of different sizes. It’s a Fatuous Ban. So I will never have Paris Hilton on the show, and Posh Spice is out too.” They typify “celebutard ephemera”, retarded celebrities who live for their 15 seconds of limelight. The other thing she doesn’t like while on air is to be told when to stop asking risqué questions. “I don’t like being censored either,” she says firmly, and now one can feel the ghosts of Nikki Tonight beginning to circle. “I don’t like being safe. It doesn’t make for good TV.” <br /><br />Many years ago when she interviewed Bal Thackeray on Bombay Chat, she asked him if he was anti-Muslim ( he was protesting the green coat of paint on Bandra Station, his reply was unclear and later he drew a cartoon sketch of her eyes); when Tisco’s Russi Mody boasted that he had seen Winston Chruchill naked, she asked, “So was he well hung?” (the answer was yes); Omar Sharif was asked if his Egyptian actress wife had had a cliterectomy (the answer was yes, in drawling bass) and followed up with, “And what did it look like?” (“I knew I was crossing the line there, but I am a gynaecologist’s daughter, so there was some medical interest...’)<br /><br />She was much younger in 1995, and politically gauche, when Nikki Tonight went on air on Star World, “to fire counter-culture missiles into people’s living rooms”. She asked her guest, gay rights activist and journalist Ashok Row Kavi, why he was still stuck editing Bombay Dost when his colleagues had all moved on to bigger newspapers, and Ashok grumbled on about how, years ago, he had written an article for the Illustrated Weekly where he had called Gandhi a “b***** Bania”, and “that irresponsible bugger Khushwant Singh printed it and screwed my career” (at which point, she says, she gasped and laughed at the Khushwant reference). Since it was a reminiscence, the editors in Hong Kong didn’t think that it was remarkable enough to expunge, and focused their energies on editing out other broad hints that the guest had dropped about the sexuality of several actors, industrialists and politicians that would have had them libelled out. Then the show was aired. <br /><br />“My driver came to me the next morning, shocked, with a Gujarati paper that had my picture next to Gandhi’s with the offending quote printed. He thought I had said it. I was monstored by the press. Tushar Gandhi led the charge. I needed to have bodyguards and was advised to leave the country before TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) was used against me. Rupert Murdoch had gagged me, so I couldn’t give my side of the story and say that I had laughed at the Khushwant Singh bit and not at what had been said about Gandhi. But I suppose we were manna for the media and I was the foreign hand (her mother is British). I couldn’t come back to Bombay for years.” <br /><br />This black farce reached its nadir when Ashok Row Kavi was beaten up, not for the Gandhi bit but for saying on the show that “Sharmila Tagore’s wig had boochies (lice) in it or something”. If the show were to go on air now, says Nikki, in today’s post-lib, liberal Mumbai, no one would bat an eyelid. Sadly, that’s not true.<br /><br /><script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"><br /></script><br /><script type="text/javascript"><br />_uacct = "UA-4002167-1";<br />urchinTracker();<br /></script>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-61366885009459310322007-12-10T06:06:00.000-08:002008-03-31T02:02:18.202-07:00The Sounds of Isolation<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnuN3UCcLzUcOX9KwtquS_zIPX_42W6YPAKxq8-qbZc1i0mp4f4CYQBsTQb-JKQyFEmfK4Spo7NQmkCbwxgC1tF0JjWCQK__T5zcDvT7EyUPKY5I4Rg_a7MvPfJgtwW4i_pel6tAUiJJE/s1600-h/ani.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnuN3UCcLzUcOX9KwtquS_zIPX_42W6YPAKxq8-qbZc1i0mp4f4CYQBsTQb-JKQyFEmfK4Spo7NQmkCbwxgC1tF0JjWCQK__T5zcDvT7EyUPKY5I4Rg_a7MvPfJgtwW4i_pel6tAUiJJE/s200/ani.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142346224557975810" /></a><br />The Sunday Times of India, Times Review, December 9, 2007<br /><br />Nina Martyris meets Anita Desai, whom Salman Rushdie calls ‘the Jane Austen of the Indian English novel’ <br /><br />Her red silk sari has a soft-spoken rustle to it, the pallu wrapped around to ward off the aggressive air-conditioning. The hair is neatly parted, plaited and coiled into a bun, the slippers are soft, flat and no-nonsense. And just as in her books there is at once about her an air of quiet observation and immense reserve. It is like a cordon sanitaire that wards off the intrusive question and clumsy attempt at flattery. In Anita Desai’s distilled world, there are no shortcuts to friendship or fine writing. <br /><br />Seated in the clear light of day in a quiet corner at the Taj Land’s End in Bandra, Desai sips on a fresh lime soda, leaves the parrot-green wasabi nuts untouched and smiles at the lovely irony of it all: in the post-literate era, a 70-year-old Indian author being put up in a five-star hotel and given the treatment, all nine yards of it. The world has indeed turned. The same Indian author who as a young writer was turned away by journalism (“They had never heard of interns in those days”) and by the few publishing houses of the time (“It’s such a discouraging scene, they told me, why do you want to join and get even more discouraged?”). <br /><br />The previous evening, Desai had been taken by her publishers to a big new bookshop in Andheri. “It was in a mall,’’ she says with the faintest wisp of comic disbelief at the grand commercial turn Mumbai has taken. “Well, not too many people turned up for the reading but those who did had read my books and knew my work, so it was nice.’’ <br /><br />Forty-four years ago when her first book <em>Cry, The Peacock </em>was published by Peter Owen, a small English publisher who liked to look out for idiosyncratic writing, she was paid 300 pounds. A Romanian imprint which wanted to translate it paid her all of ten pounds. “No one was interested in Indian-English writing then,’’ she says, “so we wrote in a complete sense of isolation. There was no community, only the rumour that Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan were writing. The publishers of the time were interested chiefly in bringing out reprints of foreign authors. The people too wanted to read the real thing, they didn’t want to read us. So one wrote for oneself.’’ <br /><br />The lid was blow off that isolation in 1981 when Salman Rushdie’s magnificent <em>Midnight’s Children</em> burst on the scene. “It was a terribly important book and its success gave a whole generation the confidence to write in English, and ask for big royalties,’’ says Desai. “But I do wish Indian authors didn’t all try to write a Salman Rushdie kind of book. We need to get that out of our system. Right now, in my hotel room, I’m reading a book by Rana Dasgupta called <em>Tokyo Cancelled</em>, and it’s written in an original way which is so refreshing.’’ <br /><br />Desai, who teaches creative writing at MIT, lives in New York in a quiet house by the Hudson Bay. Through the day, daughter Kiran writes upstairs and looks out at the hills, Anita works downstairs in her study. For the past year she has had to spend many days alone, what with Kiran jetsetting around the world after her Booker prize for The Inheritance Of Loss. “She never dreamt she’d see so much of the world in a year,” says her mother, who has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. “When she came back she was half her size, she had lost so much weight. She was so relieved when this year’s Booker prize was announced. She said now they’ll have someone new to chase.’’ <br /><br />Desai is in India for a number of reasons, all good. To start with, she has been made a lifetime fellow of the Sahitya Akademi, one of the few writers in English to have been accorded this honour. In order to mark the occasion, three of her best works have been reprinted—<em>Clear Light Of Day, Baumgartner’s Bombay </em>and <em>In Custody</em> with introductions by Kamila Shamsie, Suketu Mehta and Salman Rushdie respectively. And since we live in an age when awards, books, and films fuse and feed off one another, the luminous Merchant-Ivory film based on the third book, <em>In Custody</em>, has been re-released. It is a deeply moving film that scopes out the relationship between a famous decadent Urdu poet and a young devotee that captures at once the grandeur and grot of a florid, fading language, but when Desai first saw it many years ago, she was taken aback by how different it was from her own deathbed-of-Udru scene. Her world, she said, was grey, dull and dirty, not splendoured with colour. <br /><br />Rushdie calls Desai “the Jane Austen of the Indian novel” for the acuity with which she perceives the minutiae of a housewife’s world. Her canvas is always a miniature one, the references to the momentous events of history always oblique. But although she is an extraordinarily gifted writer, Desai has never triggered the kind of electric celebrity rush that crackles in the wake of a Vikram Seth, an Amitav Ghosh or an Arundhati Roy. Some complain that her books are too weighted and grave, too stiff with descriptions of jacaranda and cicadas and scented spider lilies and koels. But those who stay with the prose and savour its spare bones come away enriched by the sharpness of her observation of human nature. She has the power to convey, in a few bracing words, a person’s character in Dickensian fashion. Take for example the descriptions of the faces of two separate characters: ‘Dr Biswas had a very honest face, she decided, painfully honest, like a peeled vegetable.’ ‘(The neighbour) had a face that was both sanctimonious and martial, like a hatchet in the hands of a fanatic.’ <br /><br />It is this unerring visual sense sucked of sentimentality that has given us so many unforgettable characters: Baumgartner, the German Jew in Mumbai, a cold, warty lump of a man who loves cats; Nur, the sluggish old poet who, at the prospect of money, opens one eye as if he had spotted a particularly tasty fly; Lotte, whose mouth is a tunnel of red from which might issue a trill or a howl; Ila Das with her shudder-inducing voice, her cracked tennis shoes, Christianity and poverty; and above all, the steely tall Nanda Kaul, erect on a hill in Kasauli, who wants to be left alone, to shut the world out. But like the twin towers, she is engulfed by devastation. <br /><br />In most of Desai’s books, the opening lines hint at the quickening shadows beyond. Isolation is the thread that slips like a ghost through her novels, her protagonists hunger for it. Inevitably this cherished isolation is invaded, either by strangers or well-meaning busybodies or the blind hounds of history. A German Jew, a Muslim in old Delhi. The marching and the shooting. The shooting and the killing. The killing and the killing and the killing.<br /><br /><script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"><br /></script><br /><script type="text/javascript"><br />_uacct = "UA-4002167-1";<br />urchinTracker();<br /></script>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-37001765174046805122007-12-03T04:36:00.000-08:002008-03-31T02:04:38.709-07:00Mowgli Azam<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8_G-fcTbWDcKQ2eARGv6q9rl3yr3Y8V66QLsMc0OXAfPrAcbCG70R_ejXd57-mBBBNdbhZLFYB1YW9LURauOhKDMBc2oVJDgaiQvOWq4Z91aAKZ44Fn9oNUmqtOULS6DypWNNFTyvz_U/s1600-h/mowglybaloodrawing-web.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8_G-fcTbWDcKQ2eARGv6q9rl3yr3Y8V66QLsMc0OXAfPrAcbCG70R_ejXd57-mBBBNdbhZLFYB1YW9LURauOhKDMBc2oVJDgaiQvOWq4Z91aAKZ44Fn9oNUmqtOULS6DypWNNFTyvz_U/s200/mowglybaloodrawing-web.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140360755666315490" /></a><br />The Times of India, June 11, 2003, Snapshot<br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />Just as Bethlehem has been exalted by the birth of a baby in a manger two thousand years ago, the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai derives its historical heft from the fact that it was the cradle of the unofficial laureate of the empire, Rudyard Kipling.<br /><br />Kipling, whose writings on India, it is said, bridged the gap between India and Britain more effectively than the Suez Canal, was born in the JJ compound in 1865, the year in which Mumbai's cotton boom had been teased to an impossible frenzy, turning the city into a powerhouse through which, to paraphrase a Kipling line, a thousand mills roared.<br /><br />Babies have an unscripted way of stealing the show and Rudyard, or Ruddy baba as he was known, has appropriated the J.J. spotlight by the sheer fact of being birthed there. He will always be numero uno on the J.J. roster even though the only prints he ever left behind were the pug marks of the first five years of his childhood before being despatched, as was the expat tradition of the time, to the cravated confines of England. Away from his parents, ayah, household and city, he was miserable.<br /><br />Despite the fact that the writer's connection with this city was more or less severed after these early years,Mumbai is loath to jettison its Kipling connection, treasuring above all, the ode where he thanks providence for allowing him to be born not in some wild rocky outcrop but in "no mean city" between the palms and the sea. In the poem, Bombay (as the city was known then) is described as 'Mother of Cities to me', a tribute which would logically make Kipling Mumbai's mowgli, or mulga, for official son-of-the-soil status.<br /><br />But although this line is usually quoted when Kipling's Mumbai connection is recalled, frankly, it is a poor indicator of the emotional bond the boy shared with his birthplace. If one wants really to get an inkling of how that long journey across the seas turned him from "believer to beliefless", the story begging to be read is 'Ba Ba Black Sheep'.<br /><br />It is a heart-breaking tale of a little boy Punch who has to leave Mumbai from Apollo Bunder in a P&O ship that makes him so seasick that he declares, "When I come back to Bombay.. I will come in a broom-gharri." The seasickness is only a prelude to the misery ahead when Punch is left with a disciplinarian aunt (who he initially confuses for a white ayah) who dislikes him, beats him and calls him Black Sheep. So, the last line of the nursery rhyme is altered—And none for the little boy who lives down the lane.<br /><br />Critics have often commented on the strange dichotomy in Kipling's writing—on the one hand he was imperialism's chief pom-pom waver, the man who talked of the white man's burden.On the other, he shared an almost organic connection with this heathen burden and its traditions, complexity and richness. Salman Rushdie called it a conflict between two personas—Kipling Sahib and Ruddy baba. The latter sensibility, was shaped, most definitely in Mumbai.<br /><br />It is as if his ghost is revisiting Mumbai in a broom-gharri now, for if you look around it is truly Kipling season, what with the recent bungalow brouhaha and Jungle <em>Book II </em>running in theatres across the city, and Mr Sher Khan himself putting in a real appearance by leaving a pug mark in Tungareshwar outside Bombay.<br /><br />But evidence that the feeling of ownership really runs deep burbled forth last week when the students of J.J. rallied to protect what is popularly perceived as the poet's bungalow. Although city historians are at pains to point out that the original bungalow has long been pulled down, this factoid has few takers for nostalgia is remarkably free of the underpinnings of fact. Nostalgia has been leveraged to great effect—it has roused an otherwise moribund campus to action.<br /><br />Once upon a time India's premier art school, J.J. has long lost its lustre, with an apathetic student body, no dean at its head and the famous bungalow uninhabited. But now, hearteningly, the voice of protest is splattering forth through posters and sitins. Ruddy, or so it would appear, has provided a much-needed rudder.<br /><br /><em>(This weekly column aims to capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind.)<br /></em><br /><br /><script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"><br /></script><br /><script type="text/javascript"><br />_uacct = "UA-4002167-1";<br />urchinTracker();<br /></script>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-71291081690771752602007-12-02T23:12:00.000-08:002007-12-03T00:17:34.150-08:00From Ruddy baba to Kipling sahib<div><br /><br /><div align="justify">The Sunday Times of India, December 2</div><br /><div align="justify"><br /><strong>Nina Martyris</strong> meets Charles Allen who was in Mumbai to promote his new book on Rudyard Kipling, "that most awkard, most contentious son of Bombay"<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT5iAuQN4kdamQRaQiLWDNyucsJvQzdBKmxSKSG2Qp7URfJ25eWhyphenhyphenHgAd3b9iIP8Dwlx0jl9YDvTPKXdd-1ejrx3rKA1HifpOiQNaTwyIBE9Us0kZ0JFQYFfw3JUiN76ZaEWiOPzRCyHk/s1600-r/kipling.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139645802525321378" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOPX4JPx4ndb0oH0ornWawk5PwW3eaGrSbDe-M5ARgvr5z8xv-U1t2_nfhSKtFLwy6uLlv6rzfAHVY7c8TUQfF-kN9v27vj71CKqJxKCZQGjxpKL7MzDan-X-9bVpmSgftmEpEIUmVp-A/s200/kipling.jpg" border="0" /></a>As a boy in public school in England, Charles Allen was asked as part of a classroom assignment to choose his favourite poem. Having been born in British India (Cawnpore), lived for seven years in Bihar and Assam, and grown up in a house walled with Rudyard Kipling's novels, he happily picked the barrack ballad Gunga Din.</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />One of Kipling's most popular poems, Gunga Din reeks of the Raj. It narrates in rhyme the story of a poor bhisti or water carrier who throws his life away to save an out-and-out racist British Tommy who, after mocking the bhisti through the poem for being a 'heathen' and a 'grinnin', gruntin' fool, finally bestows the grating tribute, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />Charles's choice of poem earned him a rebuke and a detention. "The teacher thought I was trying to be sarcastic, that I had no taste,'' he says, blue eyes still widening with traces of surprise. "You know, at that time in Britain everyone was terribly conscious of the evils of colonialism and were therefore extra mindful of India's feelings.''</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />Indians would be rather bemused by the English schoolmarm's extraordinary sensitivity, given that Gunga Din continues to be declaimed here with relish at the annual elocution contest. But perhaps the teacher was not all that way out either, for in the post-Independence years, Kipling was viewed as an ultraright sahib whose early thoughts on Hinduism, the Congress, and the Bengali Babu in particular (effeminate, oily, giggling) were startlingly offensive.</div><br /><div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1dTDwAvJBOI9MGLE46gKQb2N_QXKitw1lPpybayDpTnvUc_Ib8HxDtljgxz-6Aqv_bR1gDFKH0MFBTyL2xrybMHuk3WvnRtk11oODj5rixlOyFKsfHOStkK8YId4u7QAy41uCskdqL4s/s1600-r/mowgli.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139657403231987906" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqshUNnnzgW-_3HcdhqUrehrL2nVhTDC0QuGGD-ym80-qR4UDBGE1NZnrl3Yd5T9u5a6ii-_fECxKRIrRYk_9TYDy9tJsVOy-0xs4fVOGnw6CresHo_4LXmFgV_BxP2Vk8ZNXzmQpYCnw/s200/mowgli.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />But therein lies the rub, for as later writers who rehabilitated the misunderstood Rudyard are anxious to point out, Kipling was a formidable paradox__Salman Rushdie calls it the dichotomy between Ruddy Baba and Kipling Sahib. "I call it the Good Kipling and the Bad Kipling,'' says Allen. "He was the ultimate shape shifter. On the one hand, an arch-colonialist, on the other, a passionate India lover who made a special trip to Bombay to see his childhood ayah and who gave the world the beloved man-cub Mowgli and the great spiritual adventure, Kim. I think of Kim as a very pro-Hindu, pro-Buddhist book''. According to some sources the name Mowgli is a corrupted form of the Marathi '<em>mulga</em>' or boy, which Ruddy's ayahs must have addressed him as in Bombay.</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />A veteran India hand, who has written almost 20 books on India including the memorable oral history tract, <em>Plane Tales From The Raj</em>, Allen was in Mumbai to release his new book. <em>Kipling Sahib</em> is an exploration of the India chapters__Ruddy's first six years in Bombay where his father Lockwood was dean at the new Sir JJ School of Art, and his return as a teenager who is anxious, neurotic and so rude that he's thrown out of the club three times. Lahore, though, where Lockwood was stationed at the Mayo School, was a city that drew the young Kipling like moth to flame. He was utterly taken by Islam which he thought of a manly, clear-cut religion. "And he also loved wandering through the red-light quarter, he was 17 and his hormones were raging,'' laughs Allen. "He had great affection for the whore.''</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />But his experience of Allahabad where he joined the <em>Civil and Military Gazette</em> (a newspaper owned by Allen's grandfather) was painfully different. Still shattered by the Great Uprising, the predominantly Hindu city was hostile and closed to the English, and Kipling despised it. Writing with pace and an eye for detail, Allen takes the reader through the dramatic turning point when Kipling goes from hating India to falling in love with it, after he is unspeakably moved by a servant's unflinching loyalty to him when he is stricken with cholera.</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />Speaking at the JJ School, Allen clarified, to the disappointment of the students, that the charming green-gabled Kipling Cottage on campus was not the house in which "this most awkward, most contentious son of Bombay was born''. He was almost certainly born at the same spot but under a much humbler roof__"you could call it a jhopri or a pandal or a little shed,'' says Allen. "You see, in 1865, when he was born, Bombay was only just beginning to be built into one of the grand cities of Asia. The JJ building did not exist as we see it today, nor did any of these other huge buildings. Alice, Ruddy's mother, complained that in the monsoon the mud floor in their shack turned slushy and sprouted fungus and mushrooms.''</div><br /><div align="justify"><br />From his extensive research, in which he was helped by Mumbai historian Sharada Dwivedi, Allen says that while Ruddy shared a rapport with his father__the little boy used to run into sculpture class and pelt the students with lumps of clay__his interaction with Alice seemed more limited. "It was a feature of British India to dump the children with the ayahs,'' says Allen. "All we hear about Alice is her going out to a dinner party or coming back from a ride. I think she was a neglectful mother. And the proof of that is that Kipling's best writing is about orphan boys. Mowgli and Kim are both brought up by surrogate parents. And, of course, the most harrowing thing to happen to young Ruddy was to be thrown out of Eden and sent back at the age of six to England where he was miserable. Decades later, as a family man in America when his daughter Josephine died and the shutters came down, someone asked Kipling what he wanted to do. He replied, "I don't want to do anything, I want to go back to Bombay.'' </div><strong></strong></div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-24734406419761491172007-08-20T07:16:00.001-07:002007-08-25T02:23:10.947-07:00When legends changed hands<span style="font-size:85%;">THE TIMES REVIEW, AUGUST 19, 2007</span><br /><div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2TYt0FGDPQu5kmYlShFqi7veSBn7c7reLvBeYLMc-Pvn1Dqs52r40p-azr2m4gD2n16SO3Ht_Tp3UzLJ65_QXfmeSLxPFezeJtEeA9Yn-o5TGz_sCzub9iV_fUECJa7sqNgcqzBzsTk/s1600-h/Rev_jinnah_2col.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100788095022523042" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2TYt0FGDPQu5kmYlShFqi7veSBn7c7reLvBeYLMc-Pvn1Dqs52r40p-azr2m4gD2n16SO3Ht_Tp3UzLJ65_QXfmeSLxPFezeJtEeA9Yn-o5TGz_sCzub9iV_fUECJa7sqNgcqzBzsTk/s320/Rev_jinnah_2col.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />During Partition, many Muslim legends like Manto had to flee India but this was compensated by Hindu greats who fled Pakistan, writes <strong>Nina Martyris</strong><br /><br />Leave now and return when the madness passes. It was this injunction, so sane then, so naïve now, that made thousands leave their homes for new homelands born under the drip of a knife. They never returned, of course, except in meaningless form, such as the grand old man of cinema A K Hangal going back decades later as part of an Indo-Pak peace delegation only to find that "nobody in Karachi remembered me". Others like Sadat Hasan Manto, the bard of Bombay, who relished the decadent glitter of the film world as much as the low life, did not survive the betrayal of the city turning on him. Manto said that he began to die the minute he left Bombay. He carried it around like a wound, and in his last years in Lahore, drunk and displaced in a mint-new Islamic state that tried him for obscenity, his singularity epitomised the irony of his most famous character Toba Tek Singh, a lunatic trapped in a No Man's Land.<br /><br />In that great and tragic human exchange, Bombay and Lahore, like every other big city and town in the northern part of the subcontinent, were permanently altered, their kindness and bigotry simultaneously put to the test. Lahore, then a thriving centre of the cinema world, lost its lifeblood, as Hindu actors, directors and writers, among them B R Chopra and Pran, fled by train, plane and on foot, leaving behind the mess of homes and films unfinished on the floor. Bombay Beautiful, as Gandhi often called it, was the receptacle of this exodus of talent, though the loss of Manto alone was a debit that the sleight of account books could not balance. Employed as a scriptwriter by Bombay Talkies, then co-owned by Ashok Kumar, Manto watched in growing fear as the mood in the city darkened. The studio, which had many Muslim employees, received hate mail from Hindus saying they would set fire to the premises, a threat which Ashok Kumar pooh-poohed, calling it a passing madness. "However, it never went away, this madness," wrote Manto. "Instead, as time passed, it became more and more virulent."<br /><br />Before he, his wife and two children joined the human caravan out of the city, which included many elite Muslim families such as that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Manto met in Bombay a man who had made the journey in reverse. B D Garga, one of India's finest film historians, whose scholarly books on cinema have enlightened audiences in India and Europe, was a Hindu in Lahore. Before Partition, Garga was already in Bombay in the employ of the famous director V Shantaram but had returned to Lahore to work on a film. There, when the madness took over, a man clutching a knife that he had used and not bothered to clean, made a terrified Garga and his Muslim cook recite the kalma to prove they were not kafirs. Thanks to his fluency in Urdu, Garga passed the test, but it broke him. "I was certain that I would be able to return to Lahore one day," says Garga on email from Goa. "That this did not happen was heartbreaking. The senes of loss is hard to describe it is associated with so many memories – of streets, trees, friends, food etc."<br /><br />Days later, he too was part of the caravan, getting on to a plane and flying to the safety of a Hindu city, Bombay, which had never defined itself by any religion except money. Garga called on a bitter Manto who offered him a drink, which, it being four o'clock in the afternoon, Garga refused. The meeting is recounted in the foreword to Garga's book The Art of Cinema. Manto complained bitterly about how the management of Bombay Talkies had fired all its Muslim employees. "Wishing to cut short Manto's painful monologue, Garga asked what he had been writing of late and Manto, with a blank expression on his face, replied: 'My pen does not move on the page these days.'<br /><br />Unable to afford a plane ticket was a tailor in a Karachi jail. Hangal was told that unless he left for India, he would remain in jail. With his wife, son and twenty rupees, he boarded a steamer. "I was a communist and had IPTA friends in Bombay who came to Bhaucha Dhakka to pick me up. We stayed for some time in this fellow's house and sometimes in that fellow's house." A Kashmiri Pandit – his wife was Kamala Nehru's cousin – Hangal had defied his father and refused to work for the British, learning cutting to support himself. Even today at 90, after 200 films, 60 plays and a Padma Bhushan, the old actor is inordinately proud of his "scientific cutting skills" and the enviably high salary of Rs 500 it had earned him. In the 1930s, in Delhi, Hangal had cut khaddar suits for C F Andrews ("Have you heard of him?") and Bhulabhai Desai, and in Bombay, before he became famous in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, he had a little shop at Crawford Market, where among other things, he cut a suit for Pratapsingh Rane, who went on to become chief minister of Goa. "Many years later he saw me in Goa and he was very happy."<br /><br />The director of Mughal-e-Azam, K Asif, also started out as a tailor – although as film writer Mihir Bose says in his book Bollywood A History, "He was keener on the ladies rather than making dresses for them." Asif did not leave for Pakistan, but the financier of his film, a Jinnah sympathiser, did, derailing a project that was to suffer monumental delay. Who did leave, albeit briefly, is the man after whom a bus stop in Bandra, Mehboob Studio, is named. Mehboob Khan, a Gujarati Muslim, crossed the border only to return, although no one really knows why. Bose writes that Mehboob came back to find that his studio had been declared evacuee property but managed to pull strings, get it back, and go on to make his Nehruvian classics, Andaz and Mother India.<br /><br />Who did not return was the legendary singer Noor Jehan, who Manto said "had a voice like crystal", and whose departure created a vacuum that Lata Mangeshkar ably filled. Some film historians say that if Noor Jehan, who could both act and sing and whose baby wails were supposedly on pitch, had stayed, Hindi cinema might have gone down a different path, but others like Feroze Rangoonwala feel that she left because "there was no scope for her in India, her last few films like Village Girl had not done well, and Pakistan was always like a mirage holding out great hope". In Pakistan, where she had a legion following, she was given the title Mallika-e-Tarranum, which means Queen of Melody, a title that her friend "Latto" enjoys here, and who, according to Bose, spent many happy hours on the phone with Noor, singing songs and recalling the old days, before the madness.</div>Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-17556026917901260322007-07-06T03:18:00.000-07:002007-08-20T10:41:30.201-07:00How Israel copes with terror<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRQvvdCjT7sIzQRQwfQDSOJ3P8u_hZ_zs6WEc-sVZoVMrSU-7XgaVfY1LAw4uJ5yvZf7yFDcUnS4YyTl1VgpAeFg2rZJOi_We4o_j-fFBZ__jA3o2PMEdEw0AVMb9slNHujwKKzm7H8As/s1600-h/getimage.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5084034288985069778" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRQvvdCjT7sIzQRQwfQDSOJ3P8u_hZ_zs6WEc-sVZoVMrSU-7XgaVfY1LAw4uJ5yvZf7yFDcUnS4YyTl1VgpAeFg2rZJOi_We4o_j-fFBZ__jA3o2PMEdEw0AVMb9slNHujwKKzm7H8As/s320/getimage.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />The Sunday Times of India, July 23, 2006<br /><br /><strong>After the Mumbai blasts, a TV anchor asked, ‘Should India go the Israel way?’ An Israeli pioneer in the study of stress has an unexpected answer </strong><br /><br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />Last week in Jerusalem, we were drawn by the warmly lit window of a Chinese restaurant tucked away on fashionable Ben Yehuda Street. The door was inhospitably bolted from within, but a sign assured us that it was open. We rang the bell. A waiter answered, gave us the once-over and asked us in. Then began the routine procedure: Any weapons? A gun? Could he check our bags? Did we have an ID? Once we had been seated and profuse apologies proffered, the prickly reception receded as the table disappeared beneath platters of chicken and shitake mushrooms.<br /><br />Inquisitions at restaurants and frisking at malls are de rigeur in this security-obsessed country, intensified since March 2002, after the harsh spike in suicide bombings announcing the second Intifada. Every week then delivered images of bombs and body parts. Therapists from the government’s Psychological Services, on constant call, rushed from one bereaved family to another as grief managers and safety-valves for anger.<br /><br />As the attacks escalated, Ultra Orthodox Jews began an unsqueamish service called Zaka, arriving at the bomb-site within minutes to piece together shattered bodies and enable a dignified burial. Sudden death lurked in the simple act of grabbing a quick coffee. That heightened fear has ebbed — psychologists say that the initial human response to terror is a pervasive fear, which is gradually replaced by defiance and a determination to go on.<br /><br />Coping with terrorism is now programmed into Israel’s genetic code. An anti-terror eco-system marries Bluetooth espionage with native intelligence and a vigilante citizenry which has learned the terrible price of ignoring an innocuous schoolbag. There are still between 10 and 20 warnings of terrorist intention every day. This daily jangle of alarm bells translates into hypersecurity, with guards poking through boots and back seats like dentists probing for cavities. This comes with its own problems. The authorities might claim that everyone is equally suspect regardless of the shape of his nose or quantum of facial hair, but local Arabs are fighting mad about racial profiling.<br /><br />Even someone as venerable as Ziad Abu Zayyad, a minister in the Arafat government and now an editor, tells of the humiliation of being ordered to surrender his keys to a young Israeli soldier, probably a fresh migrant from Europe or Africa, and have his car frisked in Jerusalem, the city of his forefathers. Zayyad’s feeling of debasement and anger articulates that of the Palestinian people. A community in crisis thrust into the arms of extremism by historical circumstance and its own cynical leadership. “All the violence you see now is a symptom of Israeli occupation,” Zayyad continues, referring to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, a state based on biblical entitlement, sanctioned by the UN, and catalysed by the Holocaust.<br /><br />To understand what the world believes to be Israel’s unbridled belligerence in dealing with its situation, academics summon their favourite word, ‘existential’. Eniat Wilf, a foreign policy expert, says that two ideas underpin Israel—the first is its pre-ordained journey through catastrophe and redemption, the second is a sense of existential fear, the legacy of 3,000 years of invasion and persecution which culminated in the Nazi gas chamber. “There is a feeling that any moment all this, everything, can disappear,” says Wilf. Iranian president Ahmadenijad played these fears like a violin with his “wiping Israel from the map” rhetoric.<br /><br />“When we read the rhetoric of Ahmadenijad or Naserallah (the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon), I see the same powerful ideas that I see in Hitler. My children have a grandmother with a number on her arm,” says Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki went to a Jerusalem restaurant and thought nothing of the young man who entered with a guitar strapped to his back. Within minutes, Arnold and his wife had become members of a club they didn’t want to belong to — the Victims of Terror.<br /><br />“To be a victim of terror is not romantic, not beautiful, not transcendental, not heroic,” says Arnold. “It is not like going to a movie that has an end. By being merciful to terror we are being intolerably cruel to ourselves. When victims of terror meet, the obsessive interest is not to kill Arabs, but to find ways to ensure that our grief does not cripple our children.”<br /><br />Dr Nazmi Al-Jubeh, a moderate Palestinian, attempts an explanation. “They are starving in Gaza,” he says. “There is no employment, nothing. All they do is bring children into this world and become suicide bombers. Mentally they are in siege. They have no plans when they reach 22, so they think the best is to become a martyr, get a picture on the wall or in the paper.” Both Al-Jubeh and Zayyad condemn the extremism of Hamas, but are equally clear that Israeli tanks will only worsen, never solve. And many Israelis know this too. Despite the barbed wire, the espionage, the military might, terrorism has not been defeated.<br /><br />Moderate voices on both sides say that the redemption lies in dialogue, and they quote the words of the prophet Isaiah, often cited by Israel’s founding father Chaim Weizmann, “Zion shall be redeemed with justice.”<br /><br />After the Mumbai blasts, a TV channel asked: “Should India go the Israel way?” Should our tolerance level be zero? Listen to the wisdom of Shlomo Breznitz, the 70-year-old professor who in 1979, started the world’s first institute to study the impact of stress on the nervous system, in Haifa. “Israel is the natural laboratory to do research,” he says drily. “I would gladly give up this advantage for a little peace of mind.” An old India hand, he continues, “One thing that Israel can learn from India is patience. Today, the role of your country as a large democracy presenting this patience to the world is very important. Please do not ever lose this.”Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-28519333437291094312007-07-06T03:11:00.000-07:002007-07-06T03:14:06.507-07:00‘No phoney stuff. I go up on stage and sing’The Times of India, December 17, 2005<br /><br /><strong>The Blues Ain’t About A Hound Dog Crying All The Time, Says Buddy Guy </strong><br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />Mumbai: Buddy Guy is in India looking for a cheekbone connection. “There are high cheekbones in my family and my grandma said they must come from somewhere, must be from India. So here I am. I’ve flown all that long way—and I don’t do that no more—for just one night,’’ he says. <br /><br />If you find that out of the way, get this. “Get gold. You’re going to India. Get gold,’’ he was told in Chicago. “And by someone I don’t even know that well,’’ he laughs. <br /><br />India as the land of high cheekbones and gold is a refreshing change from India as a land of curry and spiritualism. One doubts whether Buddy will have time to go pottering in Zaveri Bazaar, but he does have an Indian fondness for the yellow metal. One finger is adorned with a glittering oblong, the size of a small TV, with ‘Blues’ written on it (“Just like BB’s but he didn’t have Blues on his’’), the other has a whopper with his initials (“just like BB’s but mine’s BG’’). These are complemented by a jangle of chains and a bracelet that has ‘Nothing But Blues’ scrawled in a million diamonds. <br /><br />The legendary guitarist is a year shy of 70. After four decades of praise, sales, grandchildren who don’t quite believe their grandpa can play so well, and other buntings—he’s got Grammies, rolled into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, taught Jimi Hendrix a couple of tricks, jammed with Muddy Waters and B B King, and got a special hosanna from a fan called Eric Clapton—he still puts it out like he’s on stage for the first time. <br /><br />“I hope you’re coming for the show. I’m going to kill ‘em,’’ he says, ever the showman. He’s hoping to “kill ‘em’’ with a sitar adapted to be played standing up (you can hear it in his cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’), but his harried managers have not yet been able to produce one. Even the sitar-guitar is a deviation for a musician who has shunned musical gizmos and relied on the oldest technology available —the wizardry of his two hands. <br /><br />“I don’t believe in no phoney stuff like lip syncing,’’ he says. “When I go on stage I sing. We grew up in a time when there was no television. We just had to go on stage and play, and that’s what I’m going to do.’’ <br /><br />Buddy is a name conjoined with the blues, but there’s a history here. Chess Records, his first label, fought with him because they didn’t think it was an entertainer’s name “They wanted me to add King to it, but I said no. I didn’t want to ride on B B’s name.’’ So he stuck to Buddy just like Muddy Waters stuck to the name given him by his grandma who had to scrub him clean of Mississippi delta. <br /><br />Eric Clapton has called Buddy the greatest guitarist alive. But Clapton’s commercial and popular success far outstrips his. Does that give him the blues? “Okay,’’ says Guy, in the manner of one setting the record straight. “On the street, 10,000 people will recognise Eric Clapton, only one will recognise me. That’s okay. I never did let anything like that affect me. When I started out they told me that the blues was too loud and all that crap, but I’m still having fun.’’ <br /><br />Fun is fundamental. The one myth he’s keen to dispel is that the blues is about a hound dog crying all the time. “It’s about being happy, having fun,’’ he says, it’s about forgetting your sorrow in song. Mumbai will find out first hand tonight when he plays his two favourites, Damned Right I’ve Got The Blues and Mustang Sally. <br /> Buddy Guy is widely known as the best exponent of the Chicago Blues. So you ask him if musicians from the Windy City have a special sound. “I never found out what Chicago Blues means,’’ he says. “It came up in the sixties. People were trying to capitalise on music. They came up with Chicago and Memphis and Motown and all that. At that time we were all just playing one thing, M-U-S-I-C. Soul, jazz, the blues—it’s all the same. It’s music.’’Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-84695580113927682092007-07-03T03:47:00.000-07:002007-07-03T11:24:38.977-07:00Malegaon to Mauritius: On the trail of 1857The Times of India, May 10, 2007<br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br />The gleaming towers of Singapore are a far remove from the squalor of Malegaon, but a common historical thread runs through both, as it does through habitats as diverse as Mauritius and Jabalpur, the powerloom townships of Malegaon and Bhiwandi and the Muslim quarters of Madanpura and Mominpura in Mumbai. <br /><br />All the above-mentioned were destinations for the refugees of 1857. They came by bullock-cart and boat, by train and on foot, fleeing not only the revenge of the Company’s armies but, in many cases, the feudal oppression of the old order. <br /><br />In the aftermath of the May Rising, when additional forces of British troops had been hurriedly despatched from England, the retrieval of the northern plains was executed without mercy. The main targets of the suppression were the Muslim ulema, weavers and peasants, since the British blamed them for being the masterminds behind the revolt, but the fury of the advancing armies was so terrible that no one was left unscathed and sometimes entire villages were set ablaze. Families of weavers fled from Azamgarh, Maunath Bhanjan, Mau Aima, Mubarakpur, Barabanki, Allahabad, Lucknow, Benaras, Kanpur, Tanda, Faizabad and Basti, all of them heading for the old Bombay-Agra Road which snaked down to the Deccan. <br /><br />Along the way, the refugees sought protection in domains loyal to the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Maheshwar, on the banks of the Narmada and a seat of power for the Holkar dynasty, was a major stop. The then ruler Ahilyabai allowed a large workforce to settle down in her territory. Further down the road came Burhanpur, a fertile belt close to the Tapi river, and then on to Dhule, Jalgaon and Malegaon in northern Maharashtra. <br /><br />Bhiwandi, where the road nearly ended, proved to be a promised land of sorts, with its healthy economy and railway line running all the way to Bombay. Some families even moved into the heart of the city, to Madanpura and Mominpura, which in fact gets its name from the Momin weavers of Uttar Pradesh. <br /><br />Mauritius, at that time, was a plantation colony under the British and in need of sugarcane labour. The flow of indentured labour intensified after the revolt. Migration figures are not recorded, but a Mauritian family that had migrated from Bhojpur, has records of a ship crammed with more than 500 Bhojpuris, embarking from the Kerala coast. <br /><br />Writer Amaresh Misra, in his soon-to-bepublished book War of Civilisations: India 1857 points out that this Bhojpuri provenance manifests itself in popular culture. “The local language in Mauritius, Creole, is a patois of French with notes of Bhojpuri—for example, in the song ‘Hamre avion mein chal jo’ or the other common usage for ‘I love you’, ‘Je t’aime va’, where a ‘va’ is added in the way that Bhojpuri speakers say riskva or chalva,’’ he says. <br /><br />Misra’s research also throws light on the migration to Singapore in 1859, when about 600 families from Gorakhpur fled to Siwan in Bihar, and on to Darbhanga and then to Calcutta. “The minister of Darbhanga financed their trip to Singapore,’’ says Misra. “In Singapore, the refugees stayed with the boat people of Malay origin, called the Orang laut. It was only years later that they got jobs as labourers and were given plots in Kampong Glam, in the eastern part of the island. Their descendants still live there. Many are still classified as working class, but others have broken out and live in the better parts of town.’’Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1679932019980036620.post-12509685681341005492007-07-03T03:35:00.000-07:002007-07-18T00:05:51.164-07:00Mumbai's Mangal and Other Mutinies<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjAi-qAXGx5Tq2n_f5Mgkx9t55XonTh_QUXdhu3LO-KH2ddFeVwXrdg217U9NaBr-sJtoeued_XAs-dh0flnETvMSEBjBFa8Ag2chV_edQWonkP_7A_trb4yYTsXZEZDd4ZbJNYTJb7M/s1600-h/getimage.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjAi-qAXGx5Tq2n_f5Mgkx9t55XonTh_QUXdhu3LO-KH2ddFeVwXrdg217U9NaBr-sJtoeued_XAs-dh0flnETvMSEBjBFa8Ag2chV_edQWonkP_7A_trb4yYTsXZEZDd4ZbJNYTJb7M/s320/getimage.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5088428979309859970" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja8rI69WUy2l_Ywpj1VL7pFu-E4fnZqk2G7S27zQ66XG3dtjNTuTYvMCUJGkQthloCfu5PpLd_jKNXi46_iCdV8rDWEY_0dg2NQ1LyiUd6qVpX7G2TDTkcgCt2fcarSpmMz_3caZfNPh8/s1600-h/getimage1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja8rI69WUy2l_Ywpj1VL7pFu-E4fnZqk2G7S27zQ66XG3dtjNTuTYvMCUJGkQthloCfu5PpLd_jKNXi46_iCdV8rDWEY_0dg2NQ1LyiUd6qVpX7G2TDTkcgCt2fcarSpmMz_3caZfNPh8/s320/getimage1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5088428979309859986" /></a><br />The Times of India, May 10, 2007<br />150th anniversary of the Great Indian Uprising<br /><br />Nina Martyris<br /><br /><strong>When The North Was Consumed By Violence, Mumbai And Its Surroundings Were Calm—But Not Untouched</strong><br /><br />Mumbai’s role in the 1857 mutiny can best be described as modest, but it would be unfair to say that this bustling port town with its mercantile survivor instinct was completely untouched by the slash and burn. <br /><br />As a city with commerce in its veins, Bombay reacted characteristically to the news of the Rising: its stock market bucked. Wrote Karl Marx, who covered the mutiny for the New York Tribune, long distance from London, “An immediate panic seized the native capitalists, very large sums were withdrawn from the banks, Government securities proved almost unsalable, and hoarding to a great extent commenced, not only in Bombay but in its environs also.’’ <br /><br />Apart from this wholly natural reflex action, there were at least two sensational mutiny-related events that shook the native town to its foundations. The first was a grim cautionary lesson to prospective mutineers, handed out by the maverick police chief of the time, Charles Forjett, who ordered that two sepoys be tied to mouth of cannon and blown to bits. The other, was the charge of sedition brought against the wealthiest and most distinguished Hindu businessman of the time, the Maharashtrian banker Jagannath Shankarshet, who was implicated in a conspiracy despite enjoying the trust of the Governor Lord Elphinstone himself. In the case of Shankarshet, Forjett was once again to play a crucial role, but this time it was to exonerate not explode. <br /><br />His swarthy complexion and black hair suggesting parentage that was not all British, Forjett was fluent in the local language, an expert at disguise, and often walked the streets to eavesdrop on conversations to get a sense of trouble brewing. This grassroots intelligence rarely failed him, and during the mutiny months he was more than ever on his guard. Writes historian M D David, “So tense was the atmosphere that when rumours of an outbreak of the mutiny swept the city many Europeans of Colaba fled their homes seeking shelter in the ships in the harbour, returning only when the rumours were dispelled.” <br /><br />It came to Forjett’s keen ears that there was growing disaffection in the infantry and that surreptitious meetings were being held in the home of one Ganga Prasad. Blacked up and in native dress, Forjett is said to have stolen to the house in Sonapur (near Marine Lines) and heard, through a breach in the wall, the group plotting a Diwali attack on the firangis. <br /><br />Forjett moved swiftly. He had two men, whom he described as the ‘ring-leaders’ arrested. The sepoys were court martialled at Fort St George and pronounced guilty. On October 15, at 4.30 pm on the Esplanade, the two conspirators, the strapping Drill Havaldar Sayed Hussein of the Marine Battalion and Sepoy Mangal Guddrea of the 10th Native Indian Regiment, were trussed with their backs to two cannon. The findings of the court were read out, the order delivered in a thundering voice, and as David writes, “There was a sharp report, a sudden flash of fire and when the clouds of smoke blew away there lay scattered the bloody remnants of the two men.” <br /><br />The macabre execution took place in front of packed crowds, both Indian and European, and was Forjett’s way of broadcasting the message that any dissent would be dealt with in similar fashion. <br /><br />History came round full circle a whole century later, when in Independent India, the Esplanade was renamed Azad Maidan to memorialise the numerous freedom speeches made here by Mahatma Gandhi and others. Unwittingly, but fittingly, the re-naming tributes Mumbai’s martyrs of the First War of Independence, its very own Mangal. <br /><br />In those times, the practice of blowing up criminals was reserved for the most depraved atrocities. When Muslim sepoys in Delhi killed a cow and wanted to turn their swords on the kafir population, the normally mild emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, issued an order that if any cows were killed or Hindus touched, the culprits would be tied to a cannon and blown up. This order is said to have kept Delhi’s Hindu population safe. <br /><br />Meanwhile in Mumbai, there were rumblings from the hinterland. From Pune came reports of placards being strung up declaring that all Europeans should be murdered and Rs 5,000 offered as reward for the Governor’s head. The man behind this move was supposedly the Peshwa, Nana Saheb, and Jaganath Shankarshet was accused of being in cahoots with him. Shankarshet protested he was being framed by European vested interests. The story of his implication and the consternation it caused is told is great detail in Gangadhar Gadgil’s biographical novel Prarambh. Forjett, who was in charge of the investigation, came to the conclusion that Shankarshet was not guilty. <br /><br />But Amaresh Misra’s book on 1857, which will soon be published, says that Shankarshet was in police custody for 11 days and even hints at ill-treatment. Says Misra, “In a family memoir, Baburao Paradkar, a descendant of Shankarshet, says that his forefather was in Forjett’s custody, and that when he came out we all knew that ‘unke saath durvivhar hua hai’. In fact, the truth is that Shankarshet was very much in touch with Nana Saheb, and Forjett did find some incriminating documents, but there was a compromise and things were worked out.’’Nina Martyrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09401282205194855782noreply@blogger.com3