RE-INTRODUCING CHAVA ROSENFARB AND 'THE TREE OF LIFE'

This post answers why, about a month ago, I deleted a post entitled INTRODUCING CHAVA ROSENFARB AND 'THE TREE OF LIFE'. Apparently, the post which included a photograph of Goldie Morgentaler, that I took at the conference, found favour with Goldie and she wanted the photograph mailed to her. She also happened to love my blog and considering how shy I am about such things, I hyperventilated and peed in my jeans…well, almost. I got this information from someone at the University who, being a former crime reporter, did not find it difficult to trace me and hence, got in touch with me. I let him send the photograph to Goldie Morgentaler but since I was afraid that word about my blog would spread to people out here, I deleted the post, changed my blog settings and url. It might appear weird but I do not want too many people to read my blog. I am uploading the post once again along with the photographs which featured in the original post.

May 8, 2009 will always be remembered as an important date in the calendar of the University of Łodz. 2009 being the 65th year of the liquidation of the Łodz Ghetto, the University was proud to have as a guest speaker at the 'Race, Religion, and Representation International Conference', Goldie Morgentaler, a Professor of American and British literature at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. She was to speak on her mother, Łodz-born Yiddish poet and novelist Chava Rosenfarb who became what many critics call the greatest Yiddish woman novelist. In addition to the many household chores a typical teenager might be expected to do, Chava put young Goldie to work, making her translate her Yiddish tales to English. Gradually, an incredible internationally-recognized mother/daughter literary and translation team developed in Yiddish and Jewish-Canadian literature. This was the first time that Goldie was visiting her mother's city.

Chava Rosenfarb, born in 1923, turned 17 the day after the infamous Litzmannstadt (Łodz) Ghetto came into being. She had begun writing poetry at the tender age of eight and continued her creative pursuit within the confines of the ghetto. There, she was soon noticed by a Yiddish literary giant who encouraged her to continue writing and introduced her to the secret and active literary circle within the ghetto. She attended secret literary workshops there, determined to become a poet and writer. Chava recorded her experiences of the ghetto life in her poetry and in her most important creative work, the trilogy, ‘The Tree of Life’, set in the ghetto. ‘The Tree of Life’ begins with a New Year’s Eve party in 1939 at the house of a famous Łodz manufacturer who has invited people from different walks of life. Life is still very normal then with no one having an inkling of what is to unfold. The second part of the trilogy is about the years 1939 to 1942 in the ghetto and the last part of the trilogy continues the story of the fictionalized individuals from 1942 until 1945. It follows the lives of twelve people, including the man who would become the Jewish leader within the ghetto. By the end of the novel, seven die and the fate of the rest are left unwritten, leaving a faint ray of hope that although scarred, they must have ultimately survived their ruthless fate. Chava wrote six novels but ‘The Tree of Life’ remains her monumental literary masterpiece. She is perhaps one of the few Holocaust survivors who has refrained from writing a memoir, feeling deeply that the creative medium of the novel would give her the opportunity to transcend history. Her characters in the novel are all fictional except the Jewish leader in the ghetto who appears in the novel as himself. Perhaps this is because he is an ambivalent character who intrigued Chava the most. The man who was known as a philanthropist before the ghetto happened, was quite the demon inside it. The rest of the cast in ‘The Tree of Life’ are combinations and permutations of people Chava met or heard of during the war years.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is that Chava shows repeatedly how Western culture lent itself to those in the ghetto as a means of escape from the constant reminder of starvation, cruelty and death. One of the characters in the novel keeps on quoting Horace soon after news of the establishment of the ghetto reaches his ears. His Latin quotes soon become a source of irritation to his family with his son finally throwing away the Horace in a fit of rage. In another episode, a school teacher is seen in her classroom teaching ‘The Tempest’ and is soon interrupted by a few SS men barging in to take away a few young boys from her class. While the teacher tries in vain to establish a sense of sanity and normalcy in an erstwhile sanctified space, her young students fail to find their inner peace in the romance of Ferdinand and Miranda which seems remote, far removed from the world of the ghetto. What is interesting is that the older generation seems to try and defy the truth by escaping into classic western literary texts, while the younger generation feels anger and disbelief at such denial.

Chava not only experienced the Łodz Ghetto first hand, but she also survived Auschwitz where her father died and Bergen-Belsen, where she might have died herself, having suffered a typhus fever. She eventually moved to Canada in 1950, having already married the future nationally-reputed abortion activist Henry Morgentaler. The urge to get her tales translated into English from Yiddish began with the realization that Yiddish would suffer a slow but inevitable and tragic death, burying along with it the creations of a dying intellectual and creative Jewry. ‘The Tree of Life’ written when Chava was 24 was translated into English in 1971(I could be mistaken here…might have been 1968-69). Years of experiences and changing worldview in between did affect the translation a bit and may have rendered the book the quality of a transcreation rather than a translation.

Goldie Morgentaler, in her plenary lecture that day, introduced a rare Yiddish literary gem and her mother, a remarkable woman of talent and fortitude. What remains to me a highpoint of the lecture was Professor Morgentaler quoting her mother as saying that Holocaust films on television can never recreate the atmosphere quite authentically because despite being visually accurate, they fail to capture the fetid smell that rose from Auschwitz.

P.S.: The photograph in colour is of Goldie Morgentaler, taken at the conference. The one below it is that of Chava Rosenfarb.

THIS BORDER

The poem I have planned to upload is written by Dr. Bashabi Fraser who teaches at the Napier University in Edinburgh. Darby and I fell in love with it when she gave it to us on our short stay at her place. This poem is, if I am not mistaken, a part of a book entitled, 'Partition Stories' and tears still sting my eyes, every time I recollect the images.Here goes...


This Border


There was a time when you and I
Chased the same butterfly
Climbed the same stolid trees
With the fearless expertise
That children take for granted
Before their faith is daunted


Do you remember how we balanced a wheel
Down dusty paths with childish zeal
Do you remember the ripples that shivered
As we ducked and dived in our river
Do you remember what we shared
Of love and meals, and all we dared
Together - without fears
because we were one
In all those years
Before we knew that butterflies
Were free to share our separate skies
That they could cross with graceful ease
To alight on stationary trees
On either side of this strange line
That separates yours from mine
For whose existence we rely
Entirely on our inward eye
This border by whose callous side
Our inert wheel lies stultified
This border that cuts like a knife
Through the waters of our life
Slicing fluid rivers with
The absurdity of a new myth
That denies centuries
Of friendships and families
This border that now decrees
One shared past with two histories
This border that now decides
The sky between us as two skies
This border born of blood split free
Makes you my friend, my enemy.

BANGALI-NAMA

It seems appropriate in a sense that what I am about to convey in this post comes soon after my post on Chava Rosenfarb. In it I referred to Chava’s urge to translate her Yiddish works into English, which had stemmed from a painful realization that the language she was born into and grew up with was slowly dying. Professor Goldie Morgentaler mentioned in her lecture that Chava has always been a very forceful and impressive speaker. Her public lectures in Yiddish had always ensured packed halls and auditoriums. Yet, sometime in the 1970s, Chava’s lectures in Yiddish started attracting a way smaller group of audience than ever before. The reason behind this was simple. Yiddish language speakers in Canada and in the United States had dwindled in numbers. They were now speaking in the language of the land that they had adopted…or should it be the countries that had adopted them? Many of them were, in any case, second-generation Jews. Painful as it must have been for Chava, it was a truth that she would have to learn to deal with. And she did, although the sadness at the loss has not left her nor will it ever.

What is it with language, one’s ‘culture’, to put it broadly, I wonder, that makes so many of us want to preserve it zealously? And then again what is it with certain languages that completely subsume us, devour us even? But it cannot be the fault of any particular language. People, notions of identity, varying perceptions, market-driven economy and cultures, the language of pop culture, hegemony and discourse up the cool quotient of certain languages even as it dismisses the power of and the poetry in certain others.

Growing up in a middle-class Bengali family (all my references begin there), the first hegemonic onslaught that I was affected by as a four-year old was being admitted into an English medium school where for the next fourteen years I would know that English was the language my parents have paid for, for me to learn. Therefore, it was my solemn duty to learn to speak and write it as ‘propahly’ as I could. Mind you, this was not fed into my soul by my non-English speaking parents although it did become increasingly apparent that since my mother, like so many middle-class Bengali mothers at that time, suffered from a deep-seated inferiority complex because of a lack of proficiency in English, she did insist that I grow up to graduate in English. I have done that and much more, summa cum laude at that. Herein, I must add that this has in no way affected my love, respect and admiration, if I may say so, for Bangla, my mother’s tongue. I am aware of and extremely proud of my Bengali roots. In India, I would, in another life, insist on being born a Bengali again. However, I have seen so many in my own generation suffer as a result of an English education. A postcolonial hangover as it is, it has also come to mean a fear of the ‘juktakhhor’ at the school level, heebie-jeebies in the stomach before the Board results because poor grades in Bangla can ruin the aggregate, graduating to the development of the same inferiority complex, but inversely, that speaking too much Bangla instead of the preferred English makes one downmarket, and finally to a complete disregard for a language and legacy that Bangalis cannot escape. But then English education is not the only factor we can blame. With globalisation came ‘Star Plus’ and ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’. Being Anglicized was no longer enough. It was the beginning of American imperialism in India and so, Americans we would now become—with a vengeance, ‘gonna’ and ‘wanna’ soon being internalized by the new Benglish-speaking adolescents. And here, I connot help but thank Sumon Chattopadhyay, the Bangla music bands, and Rituporno Ghosh for bringing back to the urban Bengali, a sense of pride in all things 'Bangali', a sense that Bangla was as much a language of the urban Benglish elite as it was of the rural or small town Prasenjit-Rituparna-loving populace.

The next hegemonic onslaught that Bengalis in West Bengal came to suffer, was thrust upon us by Hindi. Media and money determined the rightness of things. Punjabis began being known as the only kind of Indians to the world. Karwa chauth became the in-thing to celebrate. Bollywood became synonymous with the only kind of cinema that India churned. Speaking and answering in Hindi (I am very respectful of the fact that it is my national language but there are 14 others that we forget) became the fad. Don’t get me wrong. All of these represent India. However, they alone are not representative of India. And my language of love and longing bled. From being the fifth most spoken language in the world (don’t forget the Bangladeshis), it has become the seventh most spoken language in the world. I still don’t feel threatened, though.

Now, more than ever, in a country that has been fed the same half-truths about India, I feel the urge to proclaim that I am ‘Bangali’ first, Indian later. I find it funny when Bengalis are called parochial because so many Bengalis I know, feel a sense of pride in their ‘un-Bengali’-ness. How I wish it were the other way around!...because what we have is so good, that it will be a pity to callously lose it all. What we need perhaps as Bengalis is the smartening up of our image, not by just going pub-hopping and disco-hopping, or by spending precious hours in metal-and-glass shopping malls, sporting brands but by shedding our legendary ‘aloshyo’, and ‘nyakamo’, by not trying desperately to become what we are not, by rediscovering beauty and significance in our liberal Bengali culture, by speaking and using the language and every time with immense pride, in reading more and showing off less and, by realizing and accepting humbly that there is no greater knowledge than the one which tells us that we are, ultimately,where we come from.

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Interesting. Very interesting. The divorce rate in Poland is very high. However, this is hardly interesting. What is is the fact that during the communist years the rate was rather low. Ask why? Arre baba, divorce hoyega to ghar chorke kahan jayega?? One flat per family. No place to move out to, so stay put and stay married. This reminds me of a line I read somewhere, 'I am dead but I am home.'

WHERE TROUBLES MELTED LIKE LEMON DROPS

We were having this conversation the other day about growing up in the 80s in middle-class Bengali families and it was so comforting to discover that the children of the 80s had certain common features in their lives that locked them together in a very special bond. Darby and I set out to recall what bound us together though we were unaware of each other's existence then and two unforgettable memories came up tops.

1) Our love for 'Camlin Flora' and 'Apsara Beauty' pencils,the first all white with pink flowers spiralling up and down as you twirled one in your chubby hand; the other mysterious, dark, alluring, evocative of power with its glistening black body and its flaming red blob on the top. I do admit that their names were as cocky as they can get. For some odd reason such pencils were never bought for us. Perhaps they were more expensive than the boring red-and-black striped 'Nataraj' pencils that we got, rationed and doled out to us, even as we broke them, lost them or schemed to lose them in order that we may be given the priceless floral 'Camlin Flora' or the attitude-flaunting black 'Apsara'.

2) Our love for 'Gold Spot',...our liquid desire for all things twisted, tangerine and tangy. O what divine pleasure the mere thought of being allowed to buy one only once in a blue moon! As children we could only hope for 'Limca', the lesser of the two evils but 'Gold Spot' was a big no-no for it was supposed to be detrimental to our oral hygiene, our overall health. But, if we were really lucky, if we had not pestured our Moms to distraction, we would sometimes, on liquid gold summer afternoons, win the prized bottle of liquid gold. I can still see ourselves,my friends and I, chubby little kids, mothers' little cherubs, sipping at our drinks, gleefully aware that with each sip, our tongues would change colour. What fun then to stick them out at each other, comparing whose was the tangier. Though occasionally we pined for a bottle of 'Thums Up', that was truly off limits,...bottles of carbonated pleasure for thirsty adult souls. I remember how while playing I once pretended to be the grown up sophisticate, pouring 'Thums Up' into a tumbler and believing for a brief playful moment that it was my glass of wine.

Those were the days, my friends, of living with minor childhood deprivations, of crying into fluffy pillows for requests turned down, and of occasionally waking up to find some long forgotten wish fulfilled. We are a humbler, happier generation for we know the pleasures that a mammoth fifty rupees can buy. We are children of no lesser God and our childhood of frocks and 'check-shirts'... a place from long ago where troubles melted like lemon drops.

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Gosh! The things people come up with. I am obviously referring to the image above.

OF BAUBLES, BEAUTY AND PENETRATING STARES

The train of thought in this post follows something that happened in the supermarket this afternoon—something that has become a regular occurrence in my life. For too long (and yes, I have already started complaining) the only people who have checked me out on the streets, at bus-stops, at supermarkets, once upon a time at the university, and even at my workplaces, have been women. The only exception to this is, of course, Darby (and a couple of insignificant others) and even that is not much of a consolation since Darby is seriously myopic. This basically means that I have to get really close to him for him to see me, let alone appreciate what he sees. And then again, I have no qualms in admitting that I am a ‘certain kind’ of beauty. I could look attractive, but only from…a distance.

Coming back to what I had begun with, I have always wondered why the f… do women stare at me when I walk in to a room or pass by them? I am not a Penelope Cruz in the beauty department and I dress ‘boring’. I recall an afternoon years ago. K and I were walking all the way towards the Arts building in the JU campus, passing by the numerous engineering departments. Seeing the girls looking at us and hardly finding a guy doing the same, the exasperated K had commented that the scene defied all the norms of social behaviour between men and women. She pointed out that one, it was impossible to believe that all the guys around were discussing serious stuff and, therefore, two new birds in the midst had not created a stir and, two, if they were really talking serious stuff, were we then trying to conclude that the girls had nothing better to do but show interest in us? Well, down the years I do not find this scene surprising anymore. Men check out women all the time, covertly and overtly. Women check out men…covertly and, these days, pretty much overtly as well and women also check out women.

Really, there are so many kinds of stares that one woman gives another, the sly glances, the sniggering looks, the awestruck stares…the works. I have always been particularly fond of stare no. 25. This usually comes from the matronly of the species, their knit brows a clear proof of their disapproval of any girl who does not strut the appropriate hemline or neckline. They are the ones who have never quite liked Zeenat Aman, don’t like Bipasha and are, even after so many years, undecided about Rekha. As much as I have been fond of stare no. 25, it has often proved to be my undoing. Stare no. 1 is the most common—the ‘you-check-me-out-as-I-check-you-out’ stare. This stare is usually seen at bus-stops. Imagine the following situation. Two PYTs come from two different directions and wait at the same stop, each eyeing the other with superhuman skill, taking in every detail—from the baubles around the other’s neck to the handbags and shoes. Even as they rate each other on aesthetics, either drawing inspiration or drawing flak, their eyes suffer due to intense staring from the corner of their eyes at the fashionable objects on display. This harmless ocular gymnastics continues until an even more interesting subject interposes itself between the two. The question is…can women really prevent themselves from checking out other women? I would say no. Why? I have no clue. I haven’t really asked any of my boyfriends but I am curious. Do men check out other members of their species in the same manner? Does a man actually remember what his male colleague wore to a Friday night party? I don't know a single man who remembers what his girlfriend or wife wore to a party. And here something else comes to mind. Ages ago, on an episode of ‘Koffee with Karan’ (Oh, I can see that intellect sparkling in the distance!) Mallika Sherawat seemed to have elicited despise-ridden-snorts from Karan Johar because she had actually taken the time out to observe and rate Bongo Bips’s butts as the best in the industry. I wonder how I come up with such fascinating and intellectually brilliant examples! Ignore what this ridiculous episode highlights on the surface. Scratch beneath the surface and you will find a man making defamatory suggestions about a woman who has always/already been considered by both the chauvinists and feminists in India as ‘loose’. Poor woman! She was merely answering an apparently innocuous question that was posed to her by a man who keeps asking the male guests on his show about their favourite sexual fantasies. It is such a pity that in the case of most men, their minds are often found unnecessarily located below their belts.

And now, confession time. This could sound really weird but I love women and I love beautiful women even more. I am unabashed about it. I check out beautiful women all the time—an entirely asexual enterprise that I voluntarily undertake because every time I take in a woman’s beauty, I celebrate women and whatever there is to being a woman, including our fondness for accessories. I won’t lie. I have a pronounced weakness for the likes of Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, Juliette Binoche and Liv Tyler. But I would be unfair if I do not add that women of all shapes, sizes and ethnicity attract my attention more than the men do and yup, it is possible for women to check out men without having sex on their minds. On a lighter note but with a heavy heart I must admit why I added that last bit in the previous sentence. It is a case of sour grapes, you see. The cute men I do check out turn out to be (although I am completely devoted to Darby) either taken, or married and if not so, most definitely gay. Darby dearest, does this ring a bell?

OF SMOKING LOUNGES, BARCELONA AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

The Frankfurt Airport like many other airports around the world, I presume, has what I would call, smoking lounges. Actually they look like small glass cubby-holes where smokers go in to smoke (what else, you dirty minds?). After making that nine-hour journey from Kolkata, awake throughout the night watching three films—one after the other--and listening to two howling babies and later, I presume, their howling parents, we badly needed to, well, have a smoke each. So, in we went in one of the cubbies. We had our silk cuts all right but no lighter. This was offered to us by a woman who also sweetly offered us the information that she was from Spain. Don’t ask me how but till that point it wasn’t really difficult to figure out what she was saying. I said that we were from India and it was kind of funny, because, as we smoked, we struck up a conversation, although a brief one, without understanding each other’s language. I told her that I had watched ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ on the flight and catching the name Barcelona she seemed pleased, indicating to us in gestures and in Espaniol that(perhaps)she lived a little distance away from Barcelona. We thanked her for the lighter. She too kept saying, ‘muchas gracias’, for heaven knows what reason and then we parted ways. The whole incident was kind of ‘feel-good’. It warmed the cockles of my heart to think that two perfect strangers could oddly communicate with each other, each without comprehending the other, in a country not their own, and yet feel part of the same flowing sea of humanity.

As I recalled the episode later, I was struck by the grip that the politics of language has over us. What if I had met this lady in a wholly different set of circumstances? What if I had met her to tell her, without being understood, that I was in trouble and needed help? What if she had only managed to figure out that I was in trouble and not what my trouble exactly was? And this scenario can actually play itself out any day, perfectly within the limits of probability, between two people who do not speak each other’s language. Think of the Tamil version of the film ‘Roja’. An illiterate village girl from Tamil Nadu is searching desperately for her husband in Kashmir and speaking to an Army Officer who fails to understand her plea, let alone its intensity, just because she speaks Tamil. In fact, this aspect of the politics of language is absolutely lost in the Hindi version of the film. It was a crime to dub the film in Hindi.

When people back home ask me if I am facing too much of a problem in Poland because I do not know Polish, I tell them that I feel exactly the same problem here as I would face in any other non-Bangla speaking state in my country. They don’t seem convinced but it really is quite true. I am as safe or as insecure in Poland as I would be, say, in Nagaland!

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Came across this poem in a novel by Alan Titchmarsh and I simply cannot resist quoting this in my post. I will not be cremated but I do want loved ones to remember these lines while remembering me at my funeral. Here goes…
‘Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry:
I am not there. I did not die.’

HOW THE AUTHORS OF 'OPAL MEHTA'-S GET FAMOUS, GET INFAMOUS AND GET OSTRACISED FOR LIFE

Wining and dining at S.D.’s was the fun stuff that it always is—a lot of good food with alchohol and conversation, both of which just ceased to flow. Darby and I met A.di for the first time and I have to say this. I have never seen anyone wear such a crisp white shirt before. I would even a few days ago take pride in mine but I abdicate the throne. Moving away from such frivolous sartorial details, let me type my impression of A.di, someone I’d love to be in touch with. She is one vocal, feisty and fun woman. She is an ex-colleague of S.D.’s and we had already heard so many good things about her. S.D. had told us in detail the effort and vigour that A.di would put in everything she did at the hell-hole of a university they both taught in. But she just ‘had to’ leave the place the moment she had the opportunity for it seems she couldn’t have survived there. And I don’t blame her. One might ask “why not stay there and fight the system?” but the survivors there who make any sense confess that with the ‘crab mentality’ abounding there, no decent or honest work gets done. And that has been the case for over 15 years. A.di now stays in New Zealand with her husband and son. She has successfully completed a creative writing course, one of the best in that country and plans to devote herself to full-time writing. She seems to be indebted to her former workplace for two reasons—1)one because it has taught her that good people are the same all over the world and bad people are the same all over the world, too, and 2) had it not been for her terrifying work experience there, she wouldn’t have discovered the writer in her. Incidentally, it has left such an indelible impression on her creative mind that her dissertation is an impish campus novel. She is currently working on getting her work published in India and I hope she tastes success.

Our free flowing discussion that day covered as diverse topics as the current absurd questioning by Heathrow Airport officials of Indians they presumably think might tell them something about the Mumbai terror attacks(guffaw!), the increasingly democratic tendency seen in the selection of Rhodes Scholars in the recent years, a Jewish friend of A.D.’s who is a devout believer and a homosexual simultaneously, how he tries reconciling these contraries in his life, and plagiarism. I learned a couple of things. Supposedly, Indians and Koreans are the most notorious when it comes to plagiarising. I am not surprised that Indians make it somewhere to the top of that list because poor us! We do not even understand the concept of plagisrising and how serious its implications can be, precisely because a majority of us go through the entire grind of education in our country (even higher education) through the tried and tested method of ‘rote and mug’. Koreans, I was informed, apparently take the cake. Whereas tutorials in India often ensure that the same material is produced by all their beneficiaries in examinations, where even university professors are guilty of writing lectures where they ‘harmlessly’ lift from other sources, in Korea, the best essay adjudged by a teacher in a language class is copied by all the students as per the instructions of the teacher!!! This, my friends, is the norm there. I don’t know which is worse. And then we talk about brain drain and how the best are leaving India for greener pastures. Have we ever pondered over the fact that may be not all, but so many leave their own homeland because their efforts are wasted in the by lanes of redtapism and because their best work goes unappreciated in their own land? People are too busy celebrating mediocrity and accepting lack of originality time and again in almost all spheres of life to bother about the ones we lose to foreign shores.Brain drain is happening every day all around us in our country—in our homes, in seats of learning, at workplaces, in election booths. And I call it brain drain because I find all around me a culture that ingrains in its followers a tendency not to question, a perverse desire to nip doubts in their buds without letting them grow, without quashing them with reason and convincing logic. I feel responsible as a teacher to ask my students to think, to analyse, to question and not accept anything or anyone at face value. And if I have failed in fulfilling this moral duty, I have failed to do my job.
P.S. I must make one point clear about this post. I do not think at all that Kaavya Vishwanathan was oblivious to the fact that hers was a case of blatant plagiarism. What I was referring to is academic plagiarism in classroom notes and answers found in tests. Students in India find framing answers by lifting passages from critics a completely innocuous exercise.

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Somehow I feel so proud to be an average Indian today. I learned a little while ago that Major Unnikrishnan's father refused to let the Kerala Chief Minister inside his house. And yesterday, Karkare's wife refused Narendra Modi's offer of a crore. The average Indian needs to stand up for his/her dignity as a human being, even if that means merely humiliating the representatives they had chosen to electoral power and who have repeatedly failed them.

CITIZENSPEAK

I feel sorry for the Congress pre-elections. I feel sorry for Ratan Tata post-Nandigram-Singur. 2008 has been unkind to them. But, though down, they are not quite out.

What about the 183 who have died? What about their families? What about the hundreds of others who will recover from their injuries but suffer from the trauma for the rest of their lives? What about the millions in a nation who will feel helplessness and fear every time they step out of their homes or lock their doors at night? What about our security forces that will have to expend time, effort and money to replace the 14 who have laid down their lives in the line of duty? What about them? What about you and me—the Bihari, the Mumbaikar, the Bangalorean, the Delhite—who waited 60 long hours for a nightmare to end and who are living with a lurking fear that it may begin again any day?

You and me—we are no intelligence experts, we are no ministers deciding on the defence budget. We are merely India’s citizens who can speak up and demand our right to feel empowered. I want to feel empowered with the knowledge that my India gives me the right to be safe in any place of the country, with the knowledge that I can have Muslim friends visiting my home without being suspected, with the knowledge that no Chief Minister will offer my family a measly crore for the loss of a dear one, with the knowledge that 25 misguided, crazed young men at a time will never again make life come to a standstill.

I do not know for sure where that power will come from. I may sound naïve when I say that I have a nebulous hope that the power might just come from you and me…from our shedding our deceiving belief that it cannot happen to us, from our shedding our apathy to take the time to look around, stay alert and reach out to all who may need us to stand by them, from our decision never, just never to let go.

Sanjana Kapoor was right when she said that this is not a war for in a war you know who you are up against. Here we are in the dark, groping for answers that will hardly help. It just might be impossible to win this battle but we need to pledge our solidarity against these forces of the dark. The sad truth is that, after all, it is a reality we will have to learn to grapple with. It is a matter of our survival—yours, mine and every Indian’s.

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

It has been impossible to watch television in the last two days and not wonder what is real and what virtual. For it is playing out like a video game in Mumbai, even as we try and fail to really comprehend the enormity of it all.

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesen't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

SEPULCHRAL

As terror rips apart Mumbai, I cannot help but recall a scene from the movie ‘Match Point’ where a murdered woman returns to haunt the murderer, asking him why she had to be killed when the target was someone else. The accused nonchalantly says something to the effect that when the cause is important, innocent bystanders are killed as history has shown us so many times. Innocent bystanders—Mumbaikars—no longer need to show their resilience. It is time not to move on but to fight back. Don’t be resilient. Break down to become whole again. Even as I say this, my words ring hollow. Only when our own suffer, do we realize what it means to be innocent bystanders. I feel anger and helplessness, and yet hopeful as I recall Shelley:

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND(Act IV)
Demogorgon:
This the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for heaven’s despotism,
And conquest is dragged captive through the deep;
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
And if with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! Is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SEXY

Let me begin by saying that I am not apologetic about the title of this post. It might sound a trifle decadent, but read on. This post comes after some newspaper reading and televiewing this November. I am referring to an article in ‘Grazia’, two articles in ‘The Telegraph’ supplementaries and last Sunday’s ‘Ghosh and Co.’ on Star Jalshaa. All of them have compelled me to embark on this agenda — to speak up for women who are more than a sum of the trite and stereotypical notions that men have of them. And why the need for such an agenda? Nothing more than to put up a small albeit desperately required fight against popular ideas that are basically a lot of hogwash.

I have nothing against the articles or the television programme in question because finally all of them have raised pertinent questions. Well, no more beating about the bush.

The October issue of ‘Grazia’ informed me about something I have observed for quite some time now. Men do not ‘fancy’ funny women. According to the results of a research led by Dr. Rod Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, along with several academics from the University of Massachusetts and McMaster University, Ontario, while men like the odd joke coming from a woman, the do not ‘fancy’ women who are proficient at tickling their ribs (literal meaning to be ignored). They’d rather that the women they date or wed form an adoring audience when the men choose to be humorous. But women delivering clever witticisms and impromptu punch lines are a big no. Men think of comedy as a male prerogative. So, while there are stand-up comediennes who are quite popular, they are often perceived as ‘mannish’ and therefore, not sexually desirable. The research revealed that some men even perceive such women to be lesbians. Ellen DeGeneres has conclusively solved the problem for herself (of course, assuming that she faced any) by being an out-of-the-closet lesbian. I wonder whether, in turn, her being gay and in the media glare have not aided such perceptions to take root in the minds of many. And I cannot help but feel sorry for all those comediennes who are funny and straight. If finding Mr. Right is anywhere on their to-do list, they could be rueing the day they chose their profession.

Speaking of lesbians leads me to refer to an article in yesterday’s ‘The Telegraph’(7 Days). Supposedly mainstream Hindi cinema has finally had the guts to portray a gay relationship—in ‘Dostana’. Let us not forget that it is a sham one portrayed by two ‘macho’ men from filmdom who are confirmed heterosexuals in real life. Good for them. Precisely because, therefore, I do not see brickbats flying towards them from our moral and cultural police. However, while gay relationships could be gaining acceptance on the big screen in India, portrayal of women in same-sex relationships in mainstram Hindi films have more to do with sleaze and titillation than with reality. ‘Girlfriend’ and ‘Men Not Allowed’ are case in points and ‘Fire’, released in 1998, had to die an untimely death after protests from anti-gay activists. Lesson to be learnt—a majority of the women in India are still sexually oppressed and so, doubly marginalized lesbians cannot suddenly find their place under the sun. Can they? They are at best—not to be spoken of, and at worst—hussies.

What about men who are androgynous, who flutter eyelids and move their hands in the air while talking as only women are expected to do? They are the butts of incessant ridicule and objects of ‘tamasha’—all stemming from years of social conditioning and a deep-seated belief that boys just don’t cry. And hence Rituparno Ghosh’s OTT lashing out at the mimic in radio jockey Mir. A learned colleague I have is given the same treatment behind his back by his own co-workers. No wonder he refuses to share the same lounge with them. A point to be noted is that when it comes to tomboyish girls and ‘mannish’ women, they are not so much the objects of laughter as they are women who need to be taught to get in touch with their feminine side in order to become more acceptable and thus sexually desirable to men. Real life abounds with many such cases and so can literature or reel life be far behind? Think Aparna Sen’s character in Ray’s ‘Shamaapti’(adapted from Tagore), think Konkona Sen Sharma’s character in ‘Aaja Nachle’, think Amrita Arora’s character in ‘Main Hoon Na’(way more recent examples)—all reminiscent of girl novels of yore that harped on the importance of femininity in women as a means to their success in domestic and social life.It is still about pandering to men and their idea of the ideal wife, mother and whore. And yet we say, the times…they are a changing!

Finally, coming to the article that was published in ‘The Telegraph’(T2) sometime early this month, I realize that the idea it had tried to put forth reflects India today and the way the country has reawakened to sex. The article was about how impressionable children and adolescents in India, because of easy access to television programmes like ‘Splitsvilla’ and ‘The Big Boss’ with quite an undeniable amount of sexual content in them, are no longer children in the true sense. I could not have agreed more. My experience as a teacher reinforces this view day in and day out. I do not just deal with raging hormones, I deal with youngsters, especially girls, who have not yet learned to quell a spasm of nerves before an insignificant class assessment and yet who won’t bat an eyelid before unbuttoning a button or two in class or on their way to tuitions to grab the attention of older boys because, if you are not sexually attractive and wily from twelve or thirteen, you are very likely to grow up into undesirable ‘behenjis’ and then wouldn’t life become quite meaningless?

In the day and age where youth and physical beauty are celebrated more than merit and intellect, where the Priyanka Chopras and Lindsay Lohans are regarded as role models for girls rather than the Marie Curies and Margaret Thatchers, girls in a largely patriarchal world learn at quite a tender age the importance of being sexy.

AD-LIB

Recently overheard during lunchtime at an academic seminar:
Getting a PhD these days is like wearing a pair of trousers. If you don’t wear/get one, you are noticed and if you wear/get one, you are not.

THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES

Don’t be deceived into imagining that this post has anything to do with Charles Lamb’s poem of the same name or with nostalgia as such. In fact, I do not intend to romanticize the ‘characters’ I met on 10th November—members of the audience at the Second Nobel Laureates’ Lecture, delivered by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer at Town Hall. The event was organised by the Union Ministry for External Affairs (scope for enough entertainment there—what with Pranab Mukherjee’s done-to-death English accent). Gordimer was to deliver a talk on Witness Literature—‘Witness: The Inward Journey’.

I will not dwell on the lecture, because that is not my intention in the first place and because Gordimer’s lecture was thought-provoking only in the lamest way possible, if at all. It did not move or provoke a thought in me and I will type the reason soon enough. It was not even insightful. She spoke on the social responsibility of the writer and although relevant, it was hackneyed to my ears (YAWN!). Three years of preparing for the dreaded ‘essay’ at the undergrads (English) will do that to anyone. From Czeslaw Milosz to Sartre and Heidegger, she mentioned all kinds of writers and philosophers but the lecture was not, I am sorry to say, Nobel Laureate material.

Having said this, I have to concede that public lectures are not designed to be too cerebral or obscure and why should they be? They are meant for even the average man and not just hard-nosed, armchair intellectuals. In this case, a lecture by a nobel laureate did ensure the presence of the usual bespectacled academics, students, bureaucrats and the ‘halo-ed’, enthusiastic, ‘aantel’ Calcuttans, those self-imposed and self-appointed denizens of ‘Intelligentsia’ who always manage to gatecrash at all such public lectures and gatherings.

In fact, they do a good job of hopping from such lectures and seminars to film and theatre festivals. Their happy hunting grounds include The Academy of Fine Arts, Nandan, Rabindra Sadan and the Kolkata Book Fair. (I am sure there are other such hallowed grounds that I cannot think of at this point.). They are vocal—nay, vociferous. God help us! Give them a microphone and they will be heard. They are chronic sufferers of ‘mike-itis’—a psychosomatic disorder they share with both small-time and big-time politicians and self-important Malvolios of the society. Speaking of Malvolio, I feel compelled to think that ‘mike-itis’ stems from a poor sense of self, from years of knowledge the sufferer has that perhaps he will never quite make the cut. Numerous such specimens graced the occasion I have mentioned and as usual provided me with ample entertainment.

At the end of the lecture Gordimer took five questions, three of them coming from the ‘specimens’ whom I have described. Predictably, all three questions from them left the more discerning audience speechless or annoyed or in various stages of trying to suppress laughter. One had chosen to ask Gordimer whether the 31-year domination of the ruling party in West Bengal was not similar to apartheid? There was a not-so-veiled reference to the Singur-Nandigram issue and ‘atrocities in the name of development'. Gordimer’s quip, only apparently nonchalant: ‘That is your problem’. Isn’t it just a bit too much to expect someone from South Africa, albeit a well-read and much-travelled nobel laureate to know about the political cacophony of a state in India, let alone give pat answers?

And it was not just for the questions that were out of context, it was in the manner of grabbing the microphone, in not letting go of an opportunity to speak aloud and in shouting ‘Madam, Madam, Madam…’ incessantly until heard that the Calcutta ‘aantel’ cut a sorry figure. The ‘cultural capital’ of India must have made a dismal impression on the State guest. I want to make my stand clear. I have nothing against ‘aantels’ but an elitist at heart, I have a problem with anyone who tries too hard to prove what one can never be. ‘Aantlami’ is an art that the French and the Bengalis have had quite a reputation for. But what now goes by the name of ‘aantlami’ in Bengal today does not have that touch of class, that refinement which most intellectuals of yore cared for. Counter culture attacks shock me and I do not care for them any longer for 1) I am way past my rebellious teens and 2) I am too opinionated at 32.

I seem to have repeatedly digressed—in fact, I have rambled on in this post. Perhaps I am still reeling under the effect of that evening which has left me at a loss for precision. I will make two more observations before I conclude. The discerning audience choose never to ask questions in any public lecture. I really do not know why but it is a safer stance than asking foolish questions, I suppose. And as for their faces being familiar, I’ll say that is was the nth number of time that I bumped into them and vice versa—at such places and for such reasons. The same goes for the poor ‘aantels’.

I have seen all these people—the ‘old familiar faces’—as many times as they have seen me. That leaves me wondering—if they have given me as much thought as I have given them, how do they categorize me? Ugh!

TO BOOKS, BIBLIOPHILES AND BONDING

I picked up an old issue of Reader's Digest while sorting out a bookshelf this morning. The very first article I chose to read was about a family's immense love for books- so much so that they were facing severe space crunches,trying to accommodate a few hundred new books (they actually love reading their books). Though I do not relate to their problem, as of now, I can identify with their fondness for books which they lovingly refer to as 'family'.



My earliest memory of books is of big, fat, musty volumes filling up the bookshelves in my parents' modest apartment - the standard RABINDRA RACHANABALI, SHARAT RACHANABALI, BANKIM RACHANABALI,SHARADINDU-S AND SUNIL GANGOPADHYAY-S, with a few English classics (old Penguin editions) thrown in for good measure. What amazed me as a child was the huge number of gargantuan medical texts (my father and brother are doctors) that lay piled up on my brother's bed and on our living room couch during weekdays when my brother would be away. This meant that when guests visited, I had to jump into action, pronto, taking the books off the couch and onto my bed. There were strict instructions not to keep the books on the floor for that would mean heresy, tantamount to a violation of the House of God.



I do not remember the first book I read all by myself for pleasure but by age ten, I got used to the fact that they would be the only kind of gifts my father would buy for me. Soon I became a voracious reader, only too willing to wolf down a smorgasboard of delectable tales, whenever served. From AAM AANTIR BHEPUand CHAANDER PAANHAR to FAMOUS FIVEs and LITTLE WOMEN, it was a journey undertaken for sheer delight. Without my realizing, Apu, Durga, Julian, George, Jo and Beth had become my best friends, my only friends. Don't feel sorry for me on this account for I feel a bond with them that has lasted over the years, a bond that, I am not sorry to say, has outdone many others in loyalty. It would be unfair if I do not mention here a certain Mr. D. Sen, bookseller, who gave me new books on the sly, not taking a penny but only the promise that I would return them in impeccable condition after having read them. Or my high school English teacher, Mrs. Una Jones who catered to my unusually large appetite for books from her personal collection. From my adolescence to adulthood, books have found new friends for me. Happy exchanges of books with classmates during recesses at school left me enlightened and richer without my having to spend a rupee. I recall how intensely and desperately we kept looking for Heathcliff in real life for years and how it crushed our souls to know that Heathcliff and we were better off in our separate worlds. I recall how we discussed our waiting to lay our hands on 'Lolita' - a forbidden fruit in our teens. I remember raging debates in college over the aptness of the decision to give Arundhati Roy the Booker, debates about who was the better writer -Saramago or Coetzee, about who had more enduring appeal - Holmes, Poirot or Feluda. I have lost touch with so many of my friends from those years but I feel connected whenever I go through the books that had brought us together.


During my final year in college, a very dear Professor had invited some of us to her house. The lasting impression of that visit that I brought back home was of her huge library, overflowing with hardbound classics and paperbound pulp. I made a decision that day. I didn't know who I would eventually become or what I would do in life but I would most certainly and lovingly set up a personal library at home. I have managed to do that, buying, reading and preserving books over the years with a gusto that I rarely show for any other activity.I too love my books like 'family', I get paranoid when I have to lend them, I leaf through them ever so delicately, they act as touch-therapists when I am under the weather and I promise them ever so often that they will have new companions in new bookshelves. I have revisited many of them a number of times and I am happy to say that they have not tired me. No wonder then that I have not taken to e-books that don't quite seem made for personal use and collection.



Meanwhile, my father continues to buy books for me and I can never thank him enough for the best gifts ever.

IT'S DD TIME AGAIN!

durga pujo came and went this year without creating much of a ripple in Joan's world.shopping had been completed long ago,keeping in mind a lazy pre-pujo trip rather than the pujo itself.meeting friends during the festive days was an impossibility, what with most of them out of town.so the four days were reserved for some really quiet time spent at home, catching up on good ol' Doordarshan.the ironic part was that Joan planned to revisit Doordarshan on a DVD player.so she did, watching eight vcds filled with deliciously simple televised episodes of R.K. Narayan's 'MALGUDI DAYS'-simple indian life at its best!depicting an imaginary everyman's land where humour and pathos play hand in hand, a postman is as rich as an advocate is as rich as a schoolboy in matters of the heart,where wisdom comes from a life lived rather than places visited and books read, where sambhar-rice,chhach and nimbu ka aachar are good enough for a feast and Gross Domestic Happiness is of greater significance than Gross Domestic Product. if only globalisation did not bombard our lives..! how would it affect the average indian? gucci hobo bags in shopping malls would lack import or not register instant recognition and instead grandma's tales would continue to colour quiet nights.would it be all that undesirable?
times have changed. people have moved on. Doordarshan has given way, in the collective indian imagination, to dozens of private channels telecasting blingy tearjerkers, glitz and glamour.Joan hasn't changed much. in a quiet neighbourhood of kolkata she still yearns for HUMLOG, HONI-ANHONI,KATHA SAGAR, YEH JO HAI ZINDAGI and UDAAN.

VANITY!

i realized something today. i am vain. or why else would i wish to create a blog of my own and share my posts with others? it stems from a deep-rooted sense of vanity, my friends! one could argue that blogging is a technologically savvy way of maintaining a diary. i don't buy that. people don't maintain diaries to let other people peep into their private/personal worlds. they do that more often for self-introspection, as a matter of habit or even for practising handwriting (lame as this sounds), if you please...not because they are vain. i am blogging because i feel important enough to myself to let my thoughts and opinions be known. so i'm vain. there, i've said it. clip my wings if you will.