Overheard recently, an enlightening conversation between my cancer-afflicted nani and her attendant Dolly, a Christian lady. Dolly was relating the story of Christ in shuddh Hindi and at one point the following sentence occurred:
“Yeshu ki ma Kumari Maryam thi. Unhone koi ganda kaam karke Yeshu ko janam nahin diya. Woh kumaari hi rahi.”
(“Jesus’s mother was the Virgin Mary. She gave birth to him without doing any dirty work.”)
On that immaculate note, season’s greetings to you all.
My friend Amit Varma just finished up his debut novel, My Friend, Sancho, which was longlisted for the Man Asian prize. It’s the tale of a Bombay crime reporter written in Amit’s typically clean style. Here’s an excerpt :
We reached the station. Thombre was waiting for me outside… His eyes were red. His hair was moist and neatly combed… “Ganguly, Hegde, hello. I was waiting for you. Exciting story, gangster hideout, police investigation, bold arrest.” Thombre often spoke in bullet points, and always in English, even though it was his third language. He would probably have been offended if we tried to chat with him in Marathi or Hindi, so we indulged him. His English skills were functional, and functional is all that matters in Bombay…
I hoped there wouldn’t be a gunfight. I hoped Thombre would quietly call us in after ten minutes, let Santosh take pictures of three handcuffed dudes and a table on which packets of cocaine had been spread out for display. Or even homeopathic powder. That would be just fine…
I was loafing about at the gym when I saw an NDTV clip flash by. Cool, I thought, they’re paying attention to their desi clientele.
Actually, it was an ESPN program about the two Indian dudes recruited for the Pirates farm team. The clip drips with condescension while a bunch of jocks make fun of how a cricketer throws a baseball.
The fiction anthology is now available online (14 of the 15 stories, that is - one was left out of the web version on the author’s request). Here’s the link. Do try to get hold of the print version though - the layout is easier on the eye and the illustrations look better.
I grew up assuming the word ‘knickers‘ was an Anglicization of the Hindi ‘nikkar.’ But it turns out they’re the 200-year-old remnants of a viral marketing campaign by a struggling New York author. (This is as far as I’ve been able to trace it, corrections welcome.)
Washington Irving, who later wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was working on a history of the Dutch in New York and came up with an innovative idea to build buzz in 1809. He took out several ads in New York papers supposedly from a hotelier looking for a historian who’d disappeared without settling his tab. The owner said he’d found a manuscript in the guest’s belongings and threatened to have it published if the bill weren’t paid. (If only getting a book published were that easy.)
The New York cops took the ad seriously and began hunting for the missing Mr. Dietrich Knickerbocker, whose Dutch surname Irving had lifted from a friend. Irving eventually finished A History of New York and published it under the ‘Knickerbocker’ pen name. It was a hit. Father Knickerbocker became a symbol of New York, just like Uncle Sam. New Yorkers were called ‘Knickerbockers,’ an ethnic caricature like the Celtics or the Redskins. It’s sort of like calling everyone in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, ‘Kapadias.’ In fact, the New York Knicks’ first logo was Father Knickerbocker dribbling a basketball.
Witnessed at the Crossword bookstore in the Select Citywalk mall, just a few minutes before a book reading by Ruskin Bond: a chirpy young TV reporter, mike in hand, asks children facile questions about Ruskin and his books:
Reporter: So tell me, isn’t it exciting that you’re GETTING TO MEET RUSKIN BOND TODAY? (She widens her eyes dramatically and simulates excitement with a series of facial contortions, clearly intended as a cue for the kids to do the same) Stoical child: oh it’s nice, but you know, my brother and I met him at a book fair just last year, so… Reporter (puts mike down, bares teeth): Look, just say you LOVE HIM and are THRILLED TO BITS about being here! All right? All right?
(Precocious child quivers briefly, complies)
Yet another instance of journalism holding up a mirror to society. I shake my head in sadness – partly because that serious-faced boy could have been me 25 years ago.
Listen to ‘Paimona Bitte,’ with lyrics and translation, by Zeb & Haniya, a rare, all-female Pakistani group and the Great Pathan Hope. It’s mournful and vaguely reminds me of Sting and the score for Moscow on the Hudson. A little too pop, but that’s the desh for ya.
Both Zeb and Haniya are ethnic Pashtuns, and their families hail from the town of Kohat in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.vThat region has, of late, become synonymous with the Taleban and al-Qaeda. “We’ve never lived there, but we do keep going back for family functions…
“It all started five years ago when we were in college in the US and starting writing songs”… The girls were then undergraduate students at Smith and Wesleyan college… That might have been that… if not for the decision to upload the songs on to the internet. “When we got back to Pakistan, we found out that some of the local FM radio stations had actually been playing them”… local musicians have also helped them out a lot in the making of the album… “It was gratifying as our music is not typical Pakistani pop.” [BBC]
In the lovingly animated The Tale of Despereaux, the princess and prince are tall, blond and Nordic while the bad guys, the rats, are introduced with a snake charmer and a swell of Middle Eastern music. I had to check the credits to make sure it wasn’t Disney.
The movie turns children’s book drawings into 3D models. It’s gorgeous and elegant with an understated palette, but surprisingly drowsy as a movie for the hyperactive set. The volume seemed set a third too low as an artistic choice, not a snafu.
Duke a cappella group Speak of the Devil has two desi members this year. They drafted the others as a cappella backup for the desi culture show last month, singing ‘Ghanana Ghanana‘ from Lagaan and ‘O O Jaane Jaana‘ from Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya while stripping off their kurtas in between. One of the white guys provided vocals for the hip-hop sample.
They aren’t quite Penn Masala, but hey, they’re trying.
In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin… In Gujarat… the Zahir was a tiger… In Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered thrown into the sea…
In 1832, on the outskirts of Bhuj… a magic tiger… was the perdition of all who saw it… for never afterward could a person stop thinking about it… one of those stricken people had fled to Mysore, where he had painted the image of the tiger in a palace… in the jail at Nighur, the governor showed him a cell whose floors, walls, and vaulted ceilings were covered by a drawing… of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers… it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers, and contained seas and Himalayas and armies that resembled other tigers…
… the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be a Zaheer at the same time, since a single one is capable of entrancing multitudes… The envy I felt for those whose Zahir was not a coin but a slab or marble or a tiger. How easy it is not to think of a tiger! … In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore.
In the aftermath to 11/26 we’ve seen hand-flapping desi editorials saying we should do nothing because the Pakistani civilian government has no power. We’ve seen Dubya lean on India to do nothing about its actual dirty war to preserve America’s preventive war in Afghanistan. Dubya leaned on India after the Parliament attack in ‘01, and India got the train blasts and 11/26 in return. We’ve seen the Pakistani military issue a blackmail threat that Indian action would make it pull out of its half-hearted war in the NWFP.
A strike on India’s commercial capital cannot be ignored the way the gov’t usually ignores mass bombings. Voters will not now be satisfied by rounding up random Muslims, slapping them around and declaring the case solved.
It’s the Wild West out here with a dysfunctional civilian government in Pakistan that has constantly has its decisions overruled by the mandarins in the military. It’s a classic shell game, negotiating with someone who has no actual power while refusing access to those who actually make the decisions. It’s not a matter of law enforcement being absent — the Pakistani military funded and apparently trained the jihadis who attacked Bombay, and to this day allow the LeT to openly fundraise and operate its main campus near Lahore.
On the American frontier, the way you handled bad actors in the absence of functional institutions was to either hire bounty hunters or round up a posse and go after the bad guys yourself. All the incentives for the Pakistani military point to an expansion of its dirty war in the future. The greater the level of peace between the countries, the less Pakistan needs its military, which sucks up far more of the budget than is needed by a developing nation and dominates, by some estimates, 70% of the economy through various front groups. The military is an ops function, not a growth function, like a hospital, and the better it does its job, the less you need it. So, much like the military-industrial complex in industrialized nations like the U.S., it is running a constant shell game to justify its own growth. It needs an enemy, and more-Muslim-than-thou proxy warriors present an unappetizing target compared to the larger, traditional enemy.
I’ve been helping the good people at Tehelka put together their year-end special, an anthology of short fiction. The authors we commissioned were given no brief other than the word “excess” and the result is a varied and exciting collection of pieces about (among other things): a vampire flummoxed by the system of faith prevalent in India; a pacifist vegetarian dog in South Africa; a group of people setting off from various parts of the country in an attempt to escape excess; a surgeon who likes working on cancers of the mouth and also enjoys videos of anal sex and facials; a little boy playing a mushroom in a school play. The contributors are Altaf Tyrewala, Ambarish Satwik, Amruta Patil, Anjum Hasan, Kalpish Ratna (Kalpana Swaminathan + Ishrat Syed), Manjula Padmanabhan, Mridula Koshy, Rana Dasgupta, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Ruskin Bond, Sarnath Banerjee, Sudeep Chakravarti, Sunetra Gupta, Tishani Doshi and Vivek Narayanan.
The issue will be on the stands by the 26th or 27th of this month, so do look out for it. The redoubtable Nisha Susan, who has been anchoring the special and generally bullying me into doing things I’m very bad at (brainstorming, attending meetings, calling up and speaking with people), will also put up something about it on her blog soon.
D. furnishes proof that desi in-jokes have been circulating since before the Net ever became popular. Here’s Bali Brahmbhatt’s Patel rap on vinyl, with an actual British Patel-owned cornershop circa 1989.
The things poor A.A. Gill has to do as contributing editor of Vanity Fair. Recently, he had to take a trip on the Sex and the City Tour bus and here are snippets of what he thought of the guided tour around Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte’s New York City.
Sex and the City, starring A.A. Gill
“The tour is a rambling, exhausting, discursive, self-reverential troll through downtown, and it’s rather like being trapped on a large white bus with a lot of women talking about Sex and the City. So it goes: “You remember the episode where Carrie spills the cappuccino because she’s looking after the dog and has lost the manuscript with a description of oral sex with the Russian and then oh my God she bumps into Big who she hasn’t seen since that time with the martini olives and the hemorrhoids? Well, if you look to the right, that’s the café, and it’s like oh my God bad hair dog blow job cappuccino hell. You remember that of course.” Of course they remember that. It’s like asking Taliban summer-school students if they remember the bit where Muhammad smote the gay Jews. “And if you want brunch or something, I can recommend it.”
(News) Rajini Narayan, who murdered her husband by torching his genitals, told neighbours ‘his penis should belong to me’ after learning he was cheating.
(BBC) Sri Lankan choppers flew journies low and fast at treetop height to prevent being shot down. Wild peacocks staggered from prop wash. The LTTE took many Tamils as human shields.
(WSJ) To pre-empt Obama’s Afghanistan buildup, the Taliban has said it will, for the first time, fight offensively through winter to demoralize NATO forces.
(DNA) The 11/26 controllers arranged their plan to minimize risk to the Nariman House attack. Fixated on Jews, they treated it as higher priority than the hotels.
(WaPo) Afraid the workers on a national Indian contraception hotline would be eve-teased, the boss inserted them in a large call center operation as camouflage.
(WaPo) All non-Africans on Earth can trace their origins to India, Wood says, calling the country’s history a 10,000-year epic. He calls the Mahabharata the longest poem ever written.
(NYT) PBS’ ‘The Story of India’ starts with ancient history and ends with Partition. The historian, known as the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet,’ uses excerpts from ‘Asoka’ and ‘Lagaan’ as recreations.
(CNN ‘07) SI columnist Aditi Kinkhabwala found the real-life Dr. Christmas Jones. Summer Williams is an aerospace engineer at a NASA contractor and an NFL cheerleader.
(Frontline) After 26/11, India chose to follow its traditional role of disciplinarian, in such a way as to feed Pakistan’s significant inferiority complex. Once on the backfoot, Zardari was forced to react to, rather than engage with, New Delhi.
(New Yorker) The new ‘Joy of Sex’ claims anal is taboo, but it was fair game in the 3rd century ‘Kama Sutra.’ Deodorant is no longer banned absolutely, armpit shaving is no longer ignorant vandalism, rear-entry is no longer called sex a la Negresse.
(Guardian) His mother poisoned for marrying below caste, his father ill, Raja fell into the clutches of a beggar pimp who beat him with a red-hot iron rod if he didn’t make Rs. 100/day. Now he’s a state football star. (ht: Sapna)
(Tehelka) Room is kamra in Hindi, camera in Italian. People were janta or gente. And an appropriate and ever-handy conversation filler was accha or gia. There’s even a mustachioed analogue to Anil Kapoor. (ht: Khoof)
(WaPo) Tarsem Singh’s ‘The Fall’ featured a former slave named Otta Benga as one of its larger-than-life heroes. The real-life Ota Benga was an African pygmy displayed in a monkey cage at an American zoo.
(WaPo) Crippled by a thin satellite pipe and expensive minutes, Cuban cell phone owners only text and never use voicemail. [Like the Indian habit of giving a missed call.]
(AP) The LTTE build 11-mile-long defenses: a 4’ x 6’ deep moat filled with water and unexploded grenades; an earthern berm 6’ high x 15’ deep. Rubber flip-flops lay scattered about Kilinochchi.
(LAT) ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ won the Nat’l Soc. of Film Critics award for best cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle). Best supporting actress: Hanna Schygulla for ‘The Edge of Heaven.’ Best pic: ‘Waltz with Bashir.’
(New Yorker) A Kashmiri friend realized that revolution was in the air in the ’80s when the fans booed the Indian team and carried the victorious and very puzzled West Indies captain on their shoulders.
(New Yorker) In India, the road is a commons. An Indian in America: Where were all the people selling mangos, tea, betel leaves, toys, sugar cane, and tax avoidance services?
(New Yorker) The Justice Department will likely indict 11/26 masterminds in the U.S. because Pakistan’s court system tends to ‘catch’ and release. The ISI often holds suspects for years, claims they were just found, and then have weak cases.
(ToL) A British 11/26 victim whose bedsheet rope came apart 50 ft above the ground in front of the Taj, saw Eddie Izzard come by and perform his entire minute routine in his hospital room.
(SeaTimes) He said he had to sit in the back. She said the back was safest, but Irfan said it was better by the wings. She: ‘I guess it makes sense not to be close to the engine.’ They were interrogated in the jet bridge while other passengers glared.
(NYT) Gautam Ghosh, an assistant prof at Penn, entertains his son Emilio with a hand puppet over video chat while his wife Cecilia gets ready for work in New Zealand.
(VF) CIA: Dubya didn’t get that the Pakistani Border Force was a Taliban ally and would let OBL go... Mahbubani: China played Dubya on Iraq. Clarke: It was disgusting, Rumsfeld was talking Iraq while bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and WTC.
(Guardian) LTTE leader Prabhakaran may be co-ordinating resistance to the army offensive from an air-conditioned bunker complex 30 ft below ground around Mullaitivu.
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