contrapuntal

free associations 1

2011-06-28T22:18:00.000+01:00

writer's block is a big fat block wooden block sitting on table block block thoughts blocked clogged arteries phlegm i cannot seem to write anything about anything important is that how you even spell phlegm is this how gertrude stein wrote? Gertrude Stein! Now that's a thought. I went to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, in Paris, in UGC Danton (cinema) - I am so in awe of Danton, Demoulins and Robespierre after reading Hilary Mantel's brilliant A Place of Greater Safety that I entered the goddam cinema with something approaching reverence, but this is not the point - the point is that the cinema in which I watched Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris features in the opening credits of the film and there is something incredibly interesting about being able to watch the space in which you are sitting on a smaller space on a screen while sitting within that space: the whole can be consumed visually while sitting within the whole. You are in it, but you are also bigger than it while sitting inside it. This makes me think of Osama bin Laden having videos of himself made watching himself on TV. At what point does this kind of obsessive self-reflexiveness cease to make sense? For example, could there have been a good reason for Osama to have made videos of the dude making videos of Osama watching himself on TV? My earliest memory of a visual representation of a problem such as this comes from the first barber shop to which my Dad took me to have my hair cut. The 'waiting room', a rectangular space that must not have been larger than 6 feet by 2, contained two benches at either end behind each of which were mounted large mirrors. Facing each other, the mirrors reflected everything between them to infinity. It was the first moment in which I got the sense that the universe was very large.

After OBL

2011-05-02T23:23:00.003+01:00

Hello blog readers (are you still here?),

Sorry I've been away. My attention span over the last year shrank to the size of a Facebook status update. I am not yet twitterbrained, but it'll only take the world's first REAL twitter revolution (which has not yet happened) to convert me. Apparently punditry is about telling the world what will happen next when you haven't the faintest idea yourself, so here goes. I am:

- incredulous that Pakistan could not have known. The government is in a strange position. If it claims too much credit for the strike, it gets into trouble with homegrown Islamists and sets itself up for retaliation. If it claims not to have known anything about the strikes, it looks weak and its sovereignty meaningless. If it claims not to have known that OBL was in Abbottabad not very far away from the national Military Academy, it looks incompetent. If it keeps quiet, it looks dodgy (this is the worst option).

- concerned that India will cite this strike as precedent for its own unilateral strikes on terrorist suspects in Pakistan. This will not happen yet, but if we see another Mumbai '08, or if for some reason, the pressure to avenge Mumbai increases, something on these lines cannot be ruled out.

- disgusted by the cheering crowds in the US. I can understand the desire for retributive justice (even if I cannot condone it), but this is yet another nail in the coffin of rule of law, supposedly that great foundational Western value (gawd, I sound so quaint - but wait! so are the Geneva Conventions). A former State Department official in a BBC interview was emphatic that the death of OBL was a much better outcome than if he had been captured alive because otherwise where would he be held? how would he be tried? In other words, dude, due process is too difficult! This is a country that doesn't support international judicial tribunals, makes a fuss about trying Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in a New York court, doesn't want to treat people captured in war as prisoners of war with Geneva Convention rights, doesn't want them to be held on US territory (hence Guantanamo) so that US law and US international legal obligations do not apply to them, basically wants to create black holes so that rights of the accused/detained simply become unimaginable. Hello Mr. Carl sovereignty-as-exception Schmitt. Fuck off, basically anyone against arbitrariness since Aristotle.

- anticipating that we will soon hear defences of Guantanamo Bay and torture as a means of extracting information from detainees. If information about the courier whose movements ultimately alerted US special forces to the house in Abbottabad was in fact obtained from Guantanamo detainees as has been reported, expect philosophers to dust off their vile ticking bomb scenarios (would it be moral to torture a terrorist if you could avert a massive terrorist plot as a result?). The prototypes have been tested in classrooms - oh and in books (hello Michael The-Lesser-Evil Ignatieff - you winning in Canada?).

- amused that I am getting slightly breathless emails from students asking if the syllabus, readings and/or exam questions have changed. Er...the answer to that question is an emphatic NO. This may also be the answer to the question of whether anything in the world has really changed today, beyond Obama's re-election prospects. How much does al Qaeda matter to jehadi terrorism? As far back as 2004, Jason Burke's excellent book on the subject had already delineated three kinds of terror plots: those completely masterminded by a hardcore group called al Qaeda (e.g. the Kenya and Tanzania US embassy bombing plots); those in which the hardcore functioned as a sort of venture capitalist, providing a moderate level of funding and assistance to terror entrepreneurs who operated in relatively independent cells (e.g. 9/11); and those in which cells operated completely independently with figures like Osama in the hardcore serving as a source of ideological inspiration, but little else (e.g. Madrid). If Osama's most important role by 2004 had become that of symbolic inspiration, it is one he is well (maybe better?) positioned to play in death, given the emotive power of martyrdom. And who cares that his body was dumped in the sea? Expect shrines and relics and furtive gatherings of people at a certain compound in Abbottabad.

Osama bin Laden was not killed today. He was killed on January 14, 2011, when the people of Tunisia overthrew their dictator of 23 years in a non-violent and secular struggle; and he was killed again on February 11, 2011, when the people of Egypt did the same to Hosni Mubarak, who had not been dislodged by almost three decades of jehadi terrorist plots and all the hot air that Ayman al-Zawahiri could muster. I have this vision of Osama bin Laden banging his foot into the floor in impatience, like Rumpelstiltskin, as he watched the Arab Spring unfold on his...ok apparently he didn't have Internet. 'I was supposed to rouse the jahil masses from their slumber!' he would have yelled.

He is survived by his 51 brothers (I didn't check).

Sex and the City 2

2010-06-06T17:58:00.004+01:00

Unlike everyone else, I don't hate Sex and the City 2. This may be because unlike everyone else, I had seen nothing of the series or SATC1 before I went to see it. Forget about low or no expectations, I was blissfully unaware of what expectations it might have been appropriate to have. A New Yorker cartoon a few issues ago suggested that there were four possible ways of reviewing anything: good in a good way, bad in a bad way, good in a bad way, and bad in a good way. SATC2 falls into that last category, and it's revealing of professional critics' general cantankerousness, that none of them (or at least none of the ones I've read) have managed to extract anything of value from the film. Liza Minnelli's rendition of Beyonce's Single Ladies - only slightly less shocking than, say, finding your grandmother karaoke to Lady GaGa - ALONE makes this film unmissable. On a more serious note, the hyperdefensive postcolonials have pounced on the numerous orientalist stereotypes that the film trades on, failing to recognise the ways in which the film critiques those stereotypes in its own inimitably frothy style. Thus, even as the four girls are horrified at burqa-clad women having to lift their veils to eat french fries, Miranda is realising that her misogynistic boss who lifts his hand to stop her from speaking at meetings has trouble dealing with successful women. Carrie is literally told to shut up by a scathing (fictional) New Yorker review of her latest book, accompanied by a caricature of herself with her mouth taped shut. In these silly and blindingly obvious ways, for the first time (maybe?!), American pop culture has finally internalised the critique that third world feminists and feminists of colour have long made of white western feminism: that in its eagerness to rescue brown women from brown men halfway across the world and its superior self-positioning with respect to those women whom it unremittingly sees as victims, it misses the universality of patriarchy and its distinct manifestations in their own cultures. Indeed, far from rescuing brown women, the SATC crew are themselves rescued by brown women from an ugly confrontation featuring Samantha, condoms and lots of angry brown men. Whisked away into the privacy of female only space, C, S, C & M learn that upper-class brown women are not very different from them in the clothes that they wear or - in a wonderful moment parodying Reading Lolita in Tehran - the self-help books that they read. In a sly move, perhaps betraying the extent to which poststructuralist feminist valorations of resistance have permeated the zeitgeist, the film ends up endorsing the burqa as a device of cunning, under cover of which the feisty foursome escape the angry mob incensed by Samantha's libido. If you are a socialist feminist, there is not much in this movie for you - barring Miranda and Charlotte's one sentence incredulous admiration for women who succeed in juggling work and family without the aid of expensive childcare. But then, to expect more from a story set in the professional classes of Manhattan would be - how should I put this - stupid. To understand the disappointment of critics and SATC fans alike, I am now working my way through the series, thanks to a box-set loaned to me by N&D. Now that's what I call research.

Cahiers de Paris

2010-05-20T18:23:00.025+01:00

So I fled marking hell today. Vive l'Eurostar. Some British eurosceptic allegedly raised concerns about the construction of the Channel tunnel on the grounds that rabid dogs could make their way into England. I'm not sure who this was (google for a reference), but he's probably in power now. Anyway, I'm staying in the lovely Marais, which is delightful and quaint and Jewish and gay and untouched by Haussmann, whom I have taken a dislike to before even seeing the boulevards. (Suddenly, New Delhi is beginning to make sense: India Gate = Arch de Triomphe; Louvre = Rashtrapati Bhavan; Rajpath = Champs Elysees; Lutyens = Haussmann; Paris feels like an urban planning textbook.) But more on that later. Today, I 'se promener'd. To an English speaker, this is a weird, fussy, camp verb for an action as simple and matter of fact as walking/strolling. But in these lovely sun-dappled streets with independent stores that don't look like they're part of chains to my untutored eye (I could be so wrong), and cafes galore (most of the restaurant sits on the pavement), I am taking great pleasure in 'se promener'ing. Je me promene, Tu te promenes, Il se proment. Etc.

I am ticking things off a list. Gently, because I am coughing and sneezing far too much for comfort and thinking, disturbingly, of Mimi dying of consumption in La Boheme. Fortunately, Lemsip will save me. Also, I am determined not to tick things off lists as it violates the spirit of 'se promener'ing. Notre Dame: too touristy and not particularly impressive EXCEPT - here's a story. My father is a civil engineer and many of his buildings dot the Bangalore skyline for good or ill (although since he is not the architect, you cannot credit or blame him for the design; rather, for the fact that they are still standing.) Possibly the most tense moment of his career came when something didn't quite work out the way it needed to and the building needed some hastily erected buttresses to make sure it, well, stood. Ever since then, buttresses have acquired very stressful connotations (engineering pun intended) in my mind: afterthoughts, damage control, meant to prop up something that cannot stand on its own. Until Notre Dame, whose flying buttresses are its most dramatic and joyous architectural feature, giving the whole building the illusion of movement as if the upper storeys were reaching down to grab the lower ones and lift them off to some higher place. The irony is that the great dame's buttresses were also a panicky afterthought.

In the evening, I found myself at the Open Cafe on Rue des Archives with all the gay South Asian men in Paris. All three of them. M was giving a Mexican friend a back massage and then the Mexican suggested that he transfer his attention to me because he had to leave. I didn't think I needed a back massage but submitted anyway. It turned out that M had lived in Hackney and after many years working for an airline, had decided to set up shop in Paris as a yoga teacher. M's friend G was a fashion designer, who lived near the Louvre and worked only three days a week (rich boyfriend). G retained a camp bitchy South Delhi brattishness, making him extremely recognizable and enabling me to warm to him instantly. We decamped to a midnight Moroccan joint where we got talking to another table of boys and girls. Everyone was French and from somewhere else - Indochinois, unspecified Africaine, and E who claimed to be Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and looked like he could have been distantly related to Shashi Kapoor. We moved again to Raidd Bar, which is packed to the gills with a clientele drooling over half-naked bartenders who occasionally get more naked and take a shower in a cubicle mounted in a wall (no touching). The shower is broadcast live on screens to other parts of the bar.

***

21/5: At breakfast over a croissant and cappuccino at a street cafe in the Marais, I overheard a table of two elderly men and one woman talking animatedly (in French of course; everyone speaks French in this place, not just the sophisticated people). At one point in the conversation, one of the men banged his hand on the table and said 'Maimonides', and then he repeated this several times over in various parts of the conversation. Look, I don't live here so I don't know if people talk about Maimonides on a regular basis, but it made me happy to see that non-left bank intellectual types were talking about Maimonides (how utterly condescending of me). I have not yet made it to the left bank and, frankly, I cannot understand why anyone would name river banks right and left. It's an anti-dyslexic world out there.

The Centre Pompidou begins to be fun even before you enter it. In this city of monochromatic architectural beauty, Pompidou is a riot of colour and architectural innovation. All the functional aspects of the building (pipes, ducts, elevators, escalators) are exposed - what my father calls 'truth in architecture' - and colour coded, so that the building looks like it has been assembled by a kindergarten class under strict colouring instructions from their teacher. As it turned out, the place was full of school groups of tiny children rolling around on the floor, looking at magnificent works of modern art, scribbling on worksheets and crying 'regarde regarde!' in their perfectly formed accents. As I climbed up the escalators to the permanent exhibit on the fifth floor, I saw the Eiffel Tower by accident (which is really the best way; I always worry about iconic structures; they almost never have the desired effect in the flesh, so to speak, when you have already (deja - I love that word) consumed countless representations of them). Of course I had forgotten my camera, but I assure you it was a good moment. Lots of flying buttresses everywhere.

I saw a LOT of stuff in Pompidou over the next six hours (no I don't generally last that long, but this place is something else). All the great masters (they are almost ALL masters with the possible exception of Sonia Delaunay - in the contemporary art section on the fourth floor, the Guerrilla Girls' posters rage: 'Less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 83% of the nudes are female') Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Dali, Giacometti, Miro, Rothko, Pollock. It's striking how many of these guys get less retrained as they age - cf. Picasso's La Pisseuse, which does exactly what it says on the tin. I made a mental note to read Edward Said's book on 'late style'. Some of the work in the contemporary art section was quite subversive of the very practice of museum curating. One work in particular by Jana Sterbak entitled 'Vanitas' was utterly unforgettable. A dress made of flesh, Sterbak describes how it arouses disgust on the first day it is exhibited, when the meat is raw and smells. Gradually as it dries out and becomes more leathery, it begins to be more acceptable. Curators (and presumably the world at large) treat artists like this: the living ones are tricky, the dead much easier to handle.

The best thing about Paris is the time between things, when you sit around in cafes (interior? exterior? dans le soleil? so many choices...) and people-watch. Pompidou has a lovely great big forecourt that slopes gently upwards away from the building, so that the structure feels like it's located in the pit of a giant amphitheatre. There are lots of people lying in the sun, snacking, watching performers of varying levels of ability. The highlight today is a girl playing the didgeridoo and accompanying herself with a variety of different maracas-like instruments. She's emphatically not one of the usual drugged out white rasta types farting noises out of a pipe. In fact, she's so exceptionally good, I could imagine clubbing to this kind of thing. Behind her, a man blows gigantic soap bubbles into the air while people who look far too old to be enjoying this sort of thing run after the bubbles and burst them (I'm rooting for the bubbles). A tramp is belting out rock and roll numbers on a guitar in a voice that sounds like Bob Dylan might have if his nose had been pinched shut with a clothes peg (well, Dylan sounded like that anyway), providing much comic amusement.

I got a text from M asking if I wanted to come up to Montmartre, where he lived, to check the place out. I detest looking like a tourist when I'm doing touristy things, so of course I jumped at the chance to be shown around by a local. When I got out of the metro at Chateau Rouge, M said 'Welcome to Dalston'. The resemblance was unmistakable. (I'll skip the descriptions of vibrant immigrant communities, in the same way that I will give you no accounts of iconic monuments.) Chateau Rouge is to Montmartre what Dalston is to...no, let's try that again because there is nothing quite like Montmartre anywhere in the world. It's hilly. Lots of dramatic level differences, bridged by staircases. The houses are pretty in a paysanne sort of way - cobbled streets and ivy-covered cottages that would look perfectly humdrum if they were in the countryside, except that this is the middle of a world city. THE CATS ARE FAT. We skipped the cemetery and the tourists, although the latter were unavoidable as we neared the Sacre Couer. Which is a truly weird architectural jumble (by the way, it's superbly odd to walk around Paris and find poststructuralist terms like 'bricolage' in the names of shops: you almost expect Levi-Strauss to be sitting behind the cash register). Sacre Couer in my really humble opinion was built by Dali. It looks like a perfectly normal cathedral that was elongated, so that the domes have a shape that has no word, or no word that I know.

We walked around aimlessly, nibbling on crepes, till M spotted a white couch lying abandoned on a pavement (what we would call in London, inexplicably, flytipping). M decided he could use it in his yoga studio, which we were not far from, but couldn't be bothered hauling it there. If I had to live my life again, this is the part I would change: I offered to help him carry the couch. Those of you who know Montmartre will appreciate how difficult it can be to carry a couch, first uphill, and then down one of those famous staircases (lovely to photograph, a bitch to carry furniture up or down). Actually, none of you will understand this because those who you who know Montmartre would also be smart enough to hire movers. Needless to say Mr. fighting fit yogi picked up his end of the couch and charged ahead with me huffing and puffing in pursuit.

My 'reward' for this exertion was a 1.5 hour yoga class (my first ever). The studio is located in one of those gorgeous apartments buildings that need a paragraph of their own (this comes later). It's small (a yoga class of 15 maybe?), but was built by collapsing two ridiculously tiny apartments into one unit. One of these had an adjoining toilet, but the other - to my astonishment - did not. It would have been inhabited, M told me, by the sans papier. So they live here, in the middle of fancy, touristy Montmartre. I've always been indifferent to yoga neither expressing interest in it nor taking a position against it. Actually that's not entirely true. I've always felt unable to engage with yoga from any but one of two positions, both of which make me uncomfortable: either as ancient Indian ritual, or as faddish yuppie trend (darling, I'm so stressed I have to finish this transaction in time for yoga class at 6). But I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to be a little less pre-judgmental (you wouldn't believe that reading any of this blog, but it's true). So I gave it a shot. Imagine what Mimi might have felt like if you had put her through a yoga class somewhere in Act 3. But I have new respect. Doors have opened in my mind. And there was something poetically just about a Pakistani Muslim taking an Indian Hindu through the yoga asanas appropriate for a debutant on the loveliest street in Montmartre.

***

22/05: Somewhere in A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemmingway writes that the paintings in the Luxembourg museum 'were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.' 'I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry', he says. Unfortunately, I didn't take Hemmingway's advice when I went to the Louvre. After a late start and a heavy lunch on linguini avec des gambas dans le soleil, which made me drowsy, I made my way to the Louvre. On the way, I made the tremendously exciting discovery that ugliness exists in Paris - in the form, specifically, of the Forum des Halles. A gigantic tumour-like structure covered entirely with large mirror surfaces, this is a shopping mall that makes Mota Royal Arcade and Fifth Avenue in Bangalore look like architectural jewels. Let's just say that the International Criminal Court needs to enlarge its understanding of crimes against humanity. But its existence serves the valuable purpose of making Paris feel like a normal place, and reassuring those of us from elsewhere that the French are capable of spectacularly bad aesthetic decisions.

I don't think I was prepared for how big the Louvre was. The building is so enormous that it isn't possible to see all of it from any one vantage point. It must say something about a country that its most monumental building - in many ways the focal point of its capital city - is turned over to a celebration of culture, rather than, say, housing the head of state. The Louvre was exhaustive and exhausting and I decided to see just one gallery. Said's Orientalism begins with a reference to Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798-99, notable for its accompaniment by an army of personnel we would now call academics. For Said, this is a moment in which we can observe the Foucauldian nexus between knowledge and power: to rule them, you have to know them. So it seemed appropriate to begin with the Egyptian antiques. There are close to 20 large rooms of these alone. The wooden coffins for mummies are particularly beautiful and there is a room with scores of these lined standing up on either side of a staircase. Gigantic sphinxes and chunks of statues and temples fill some of the other rooms and - thinking back to the British Museum's comparable collection - I could only think 'pauvre pauvre l'Egypte', although this opens up complex questions about the appropriate basis for claims to cultural heritage, decisions about who is best placed to curate that heritage, etc. I missed an account of how the Louvre had come to acquire these magnificent objects, a story that would have been as interesting as those about their original use. There is another section of the Louvre that presents the history of the museum, but I suspect that something is lost when that is ghettoised into a separate gallery that the majority of visitors may not encounter. The everyday objects made me laugh because many of them looked like the junk in my great-grandmother's house - low wood and cane footstools, brooms, coir mats.

Exhausted and overwhelmed, I staggered into the blinding heat of the Jardin des Tuileries and the monumental Paris of the 1st and 8th arrondissements. This part of the city was not built for walkers without sunglasses, and as I fell into this unfortunate category on this fiercely sunny day (funny, how many of my holidays are spent wanting, and then wanting to escape, the sun), I found myself scurrying for the trees. Haussmann is not winning my love. Well, I should qualify: the boulevards are not for me, but the apartments are a different story. Please get in touch if you wish to bequeath one of your high-ceilinged first or second floor pads. Actually I'll even take one of the top three floors high up in the Mansard roofs. I gave up at Concorde, turning right, only to stagger into the equally imposing monumentality of the Eglise de la Madeleine, built on the orders of Napoleon along the lines of an ancient Greek temple to commemorate his victories, but eventually consecrated as a church by his successor Louis XVIII. You only have to know that it was once suggested that it be used as a train station, to understand how un-churchlike it looks. I figured it was time to go home.

***

23/05:

here and there

2010-05-11T12:50:00.001+01:00

In India After Gandhi, Ram Guha notes that India is Europe's past, but it is also Europe's future. He's talking about nation-building, or at least the construction of larger conglomerate identities out of a multitude of more local ones. Watching British MPs scurry around to form a government, the sentiment seems more appropriate than ever. Westminster utterly lacks the vocabulary, let alone the stomach, to deal with hung parliaments: common minimum programmes, anti-defection laws, cooperating at the centre even as you fight in the regions (witness Douglas Alexander's squeamishness about working with the SNP). I had a similar thought when everyone was up in arms at Rowan William's suggestion a few years ago that one might have to consider the introduction of shariah law in some areas of social life - a controversial suggestion no doubt, but the outcry that greeted it seemed blissfully oblivious of the fact that British imperial policy in many parts of the world was precisely to permit religious law to remain in force in many places, leaving a legacy of pluralistic 'personal law' systems in many former colonies. When the British chatterati does look more widely at modes of governance elsewhere, the frame of reference is still European. There is a virtually total historical and geographical amnesia in the public discourse about the sorts of institutional innovation that has taken place elsewhere (read: outside the white world) - innovation that is relevant because it has often taken place within institutions that attempted to closely replicate Westminster, but quickly had to adapt to govern the very different societies for which they were intended. Of course Indian parliamentary democracy leaves much to be desired, but LOOK at it - even if to criticise the way it works. Put it in your goddam comparative politics textbooks because it might just save you the trouble of reinventing the wheel.

Here's something else that irritates me. When viewers were treated to the spectre of people waiting to vote in queues snaking around polling booths and reports of voters being turned away because of time deadlines and insufficient ballot paper came flooding in, David Dimbleby shook his head in disgust and said 'this is Third World politics'. Dude, we have electronic voting machines. 600 million+ voters and we have a pretty good idea of what's going on the next morning. The hassled UK election commission official who confessed, perhaps in an unguarded moment, to a 'Victorian' electoral system was on to something. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be first mover.

2010-04-20T14:04:00.000+01:00

if the earth shakes when women are promiscuous, it stands to reason that it must erupt when lesbians become head of state.

volcano

2010-04-18T20:37:00.000+01:00

blue skies, no planes. the world before those loony wright brothers came along. here's what i want to know: why can't the US military just plug the goddam volcano? isn't this what the unilateral provision of public goods supposed to be about? oh, and the chinese are too bloody free-riding to do any of the heavy-lifting themselves. verily, a historical moment stranded between two hegemonic orders.

2010-04-12T08:26:00.000+01:00

i have a cover i have a cover i have a cover.

A Single Man

2010-04-12T00:15:00.000+01:00

The US between the end of the Second World War and 1968 brings to mind terrible and terrifying associations (Trumanesque belligerence, McCarthyism, feminist rollback), but watching A Single Man, I was reminded of how much I LOVE the aesthetic of the period. The impossibly beautiful house in which George Falconer (Colin Firth) lives with his impossibly beautiful boyfriend (Matthew Goode), the cars, the buildings, and just THINGS (pencil sharpeners, bread boxes, spectacles, doorknobs, telephones, cash registers). Firth was a revelation as the grief-stricken Falconer, hollowed out by the death of his partner - perhaps because I have only ever seen him in romantic comedies (Pride and Prejudice, Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary and Mamma Mia!). Oddly, I have a similarly one-dimensional view of Julianne Moore, who plays Falconer's friend Charley, having only ever seen her play women frustrated by the social and sexual mores of the 1950s and 60s (Far from Heaven, The Hours and now this). Other thoughts? None, because I was so busy focusing on the furniture. I have trouble with films that ooze so much aesthetic gorgeousness that they anaesthetize the pain of their narratives (remember Frida?).

Vatican

2010-04-10T11:42:00.000+01:00

Religion religion every-bloody-where you look. There is an interesting similarity between the behaviour of Ratzinger, in not acting on revelations about sex abuse within the Catholic Church for the 'good of the universal Church', and that of Boutros-Boutros Ghali when he was head of a different sort of universal church. In his excellent book Eyewitness to a Genocide, Michael Barnett writes that when the UN force commander stationed in Rwanda in the early 1990s, General Romeo Dallaire, requested reinforcements upon receiving intelligence that Hutu militias were about to attack a contingent of largely Belgian peacekeepers with a view to provoking a withdrawal of international forces so as to clear the ground for a 'final solution', Boutros Ghali did not relay the request to the Security Council. Apparently, the reason he failed to do this was because he thought the request for additional troops would be denied by the permanent five - particularly the US, which having just suffered losses in Somalia (remember Black Hawk Down?), would have been loath to send more troops into an African civil war in which it had no interests - and that this in turn would undermine the credibility of the organization and BBG's own position within it. It's interesting, and to me odd, how these guys manage to weigh actual, concrete lives - now scarred or sacrificed - against some abstract notion of moral and political capital. Or perhaps they aren't utilitarians at all, making no attempt to weigh what are admittedly incommensurable values against each other. Deontologists are so much more likely to be fanatics, yes?

Canterbury

2010-04-07T21:00:00.002+01:00

I had to give a talk in Kent Law School today, so of course I wandered over to Canterbury Cathedral: head? heart? nerve centre? which organ is the best metaphor for what this place means for the Anglican Communion? The first thing to note is that (surprise, surprise) the church has made plenty of aesthetically ugly accommodations with capitalism, starting with the grotesque 1970s pastiche conference centre that is about 5 steps away from the cathedral and ending with the gift shop that is - wait for this - IN the nave! Yea, they sell buttons and badges and fridge magnets in the goddam church. On a more pleasing note (I am punning effortlessly here), the choir was hard at something that sounded like the theme music from Jaws, making the whole place feel like the belly of a giant carnivorous whale (I suppose I should say shark, but it was too big to be a shark). I was most interested in where Becket was murdered and buried in 117X. The shrine was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII in 153X (for an entertaining account of associated events, see Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall) - today the spot is marked only by a burning candle. You can also see the exact spot at which he was, um, murdered in the cathedral, as T. S. Eliot and no doubt plenty of others before him put it. Three hundred and something years later, when Henry was going mad for a male heir + younger, prettier wife, Canterbury Cathedral went from being just another church in Christendom, to being the [insert throbbing organ] of a new religion: the Anglican Communion, the foundation of which has been immortalized in the following ditty (composed presumably by a snarky Papist): 'Don't speak of the alien minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple, Is the ballocks of Henry the Eighth.' Indeed, 'ballocks' are still at the heart of a struggle within the Anglican Communion, so intense that it is threatening to tear the beast apart. As liberal churches within the communion move to ordain women and, more controversially, homosexuals, as priests, conservatives have been splitting off from these churches and allying with apparently like-minded churches in Africa to block such progressive moves at the decennial Lambeth Conference. Indeed we are now witness to the spectre of conservative dissident US Episcopalians placing themselves under the authority of African bishops (it's hard to think of any other sphere of life in which a US authority places itself under the jurisdiction of an African one). Thanks to their demographic weight, the Anglican churches in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda threaten to shift the centre of power in the worldwide Anglican Communion, perhaps relegating Canterbury to the status of a sleepy cathedral town in the not so distant future. No, this is not what I predict will happen. It's just a nice sensationalist note on which to end a blog post. As I walked out of the cathedral, I could not help but wonder that the deep structures of English Euroscepticism are evident in this much earlier split from the Continent. They want their own of everything, these aloof island people.

New York Philharmonic

2010-02-05T00:24:00.002Z

The New York Philharmonic's rendition of Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony No. 8 in B minor at the Barbican this evening really made the world stop. The first movement of this magnificent work is - how do I say this? - not like life, but life itself. Moments of such gorgeous tranquility, and then the phone rings. A parent dies. A friend kills herself. You are in the abyss, the forces close in over you and then, just when the sky is darkest, a lone oboe promises the dawn and the strings bring it closer, like an army of ants pulling away the covers. But the terror keeps coming back...

Alban Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces: There's a problem here. Not with the orchestra, which was brilliant, but with our time in which the visual has become so all-powerful and overwhelming as to have chased out the aural. All through the first two and a half movements, I could only think about Tom and Jerry or Lawrence of Arabia, so that I either saw mice scurrying into holes and cats' heads being flattened, or Bedouin tribes charging down hillsides as Peter O'Toole looked into the distant, shimmering desert. It was only when one of the percussionists brought a truly gigantic gavel-like instrument down on a hard block of wood (the programme notes warn that Berg 'takes Mahlerian transformation and exaggeration to an extreme' and the orchestra does not disappoint) that the aural finally displaced the visual so that the music occupied all of my brain.

Bliar

2010-01-29T23:49:00.000Z

I didn't expect to hear anything new when Tony Blair appeared before the Chilcott panel, but what really leapt out at me was the admission that 'the crucial thing after September the 11th is that the calculus of risk changed'. For me, this is tantamount to an admission that nothing (or nothing very much) changed on the ground. What had changed was the tolerance of Western states for the position in which they found themselves vis-a-vis Saddam. Or, to be very clear, if Saddam [why is this the only head of state we seem to be on a first name basis with?] had 5 or 50 units of unspecified WMD before 9/11, he continued to have 5 or 50 units after 9/11 (or none, actually), we continued to believe that he had 5 or 50 units, but we acted as if he had 50,000 because the notion of the posession of even 5 or 50 units by someone we had no control over had become intolerable. In addition, the government lacked the confidence that the country at large would share this risk assessment (namely, that it was ok to bomb the shit out of a country if one was unsure of what was going to happen next). Hence, the dredging up of an unrelenting stream of half-stories ranging from the alleged purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger, to alleged links with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden (who, by the way, had in 1991 offered the Saudis help to push Saddam out of Kuwait), to the alleged ability to deploy said WMD in 45 minutes. Now Tony Blair effectively tells us the discovery of these 'facts' were not crucial to his decision to go to war on Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was basically the diplomatic equivalent of a hike in risk premiums.

The other really interesting semantic distinction to emerge from the enquiry so far is that between 'lie' and 'exaggeration'. I can appreciate that a certain kind of exaggeration may not be a lie, but at some point when exaggerations become very big or the relative consequences of small and large exaggerations very disparate, the category distinction between 'lie' and 'exaggeration' collapses. BLIAR is not a spelling mistake (actually it's the way a lot of South Indians would pronounce his name anyway).

life in code

2010-01-29T15:33:00.000Z

getting out of bed is hard after a 'defeat'. and yesterday was utterly sordid. a real defeat. there is some real freudian 'civilization and its discontents' thing going on here. a chafing against society, civilization, discipline, regimes of health (food, exercise), the protestant work ethic. every 5-10 days, like clockwork, my whole being rebels against all of this - it's really quite magnificent and if i were a true poststructuralist, i would cheer - and before i know it, i am back in an ocean of bad behaviours and sin. then guilt, expiation, stability, smugness, and the fall. i am beginning to be fascinated by this. sometimes i wonder if the badness is actually functionally necessary (indulgence, reward) to maintain some sort of meta-sanity - which is to say that if i didn't indulge in it, life would be intolerable. it feels very dialectical.

on the other hand, a lot of people dont function like this. as a child, there seemed to be a certain sort of sameness to my parents' lives. i didnt observe them go through mood swings like this. it feels very adolescent. maybe some people just make their peace with civilization, and others don't. or maybe only those of us who have the luxury of spending so much fucking time thinking about ourselves, observing, analysing, feeling, talking to others about our feelings, our days, our selves, our therapists, our navels...maybe if there were kids to feed, struggles to fight for (REAL fighting, not my anodyne watching and commenting from the sidelines), partners to support...

i have to go back and write my lecture. THANK GOD i am sitting in an office and there is nothing to do but go back to writing my lecture. and the door has a glass window in it. some day i will write about how the panopticon saves us from ourselves.

coffee

2010-01-17T19:03:00.000Z

Having grown up in a coffee-growing part of India, when I first left home to take up residence in this nation of tea-drinkers, I thought Nilgiris coffee would be the single most utterly irreplaceable aspect of my diet that I was leaving behind. This prospect filled me with so much dread that I would regularly transport several kilogrammes of coffee powder halfway across the world, taking up much of my precious 23 kg luggage allowance (sometimes exceeded it, so that I once had to pay for its weight in gold). I also brought with me a stainless steel coffee filter so that I could brew the coffee in exactly the same way that I would have at home. But it never quite tasted the same. The water and milk were different, but the biggest problem was that in the 20 or so minutes that it took the coffee to percolate from the upper to the lower chamber of the filter, the decoction turned stone cold at my new Arctic latitude. Reheating decoction is a bad idea because it changes the taste, so I was forced to discover the virtues of a french press. I once saw Mysore coffee selling at £7 (then Rs. 560) for 500g in the Oxford Covered Market, but the idea of buying it at that price just seemed wrong. I'm most acutely aware that I live in an imperial metropolis when I survey the coffee sections of a local Tesco or Sainsbury, featuring coffee from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania. You really feel like you live in the centre of the world. Over last weekend and this, I discovered two delightful independent coffee shops in East London: first, Climpson & Sons at the uber-cool Broadway Market and, yesterday, Tina, We Salute You tucked away in the no-man's land between Newington Green and Dalston Kingsland (you really have to look for it in the vertex formed by Mildmay Road and King Henry's Walk; there isn't even a sign hanging outside but LOTS of people seem to know about this place; verily a marketing mystery; don't miss the egg whisk lights which are also the frontispiece for their website). Independent coffee shops in London seem to employ a disproportionate number of Australians. They also don't really care about seating. Just truly exceptional coffee. There's also something called a disloyalty card explained here, which entitles you to a free coffee from one of the world's best baristas, after you've sampled the wares of 8 of East London's best coffee houses. I haven't picked it up yet, which means I have to go back to these two in addition to visiting the other six.

pandora's box

2010-01-16T00:03:00.002Z

ಅಧ್ಯಾಪಕರು: ಕೆಳಗಿನ ಪದಗಳು ನಿಮ್ಮ ಸ್ವಂತ ವಾಕ್ಯಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಉಪಯೋಗಿಸಿರಿ. ಮದುವೆ.
ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿ: ನನಗೆ ಮದುವೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಇಚ್ಹ ಇಲ್ಲ.
ಅಧ್ಯಾಪಕರು: ಏಕೆ?
ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿ: ಏಕೆಂದರೆ ಸರ್ಕಾರ ನನ್ನ ಸಮಲಿಂಗ ಸ್ನೇಹಿತರಿಗೆ ಈ ಹಕ್ಕು ಕೊಡಲಿಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರೆ, ನನಗೂ ಇದು ಬೇಡ.
ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿ ಎರಡು: ಅಯ್ಯೋ! ನಿನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ವಾ? ಕೆಲವು ಸಮಲಿಂಗರಿಗೆ ಮದುವೆ ಬೇಕಿಲ್ಲ. ಅವರನ್ನು 'ಕ್ವ್ಯೀರ್' ಅಂತ ಕರೆಯುತ್ತಾರೆ.
ಅಧ್ಯಾಪಕರು: ಬಾಯಿ ಮುಚ್ಚು! ನಿಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರನ್ನು ಏನೋ ಹುಚ್ಚು ಹಿಡಿದಿದೆ.

2010-01-15T23:08:00.004Z

Last Sunday: ASC and I head to Vortex to hear renditions of Arabic and Sephardic jazz. Real discovery of the evening is Orquestra Mahatma, described here as one of British jazz's quirkiest groups. A combination of Latin, East European and Middle Eastern sounds. Like an evening at Barden's Boudoir that I once described as everything from Bulgaria to Baghdad (the former Ottoman empire - not inappropriate to Dalston) except all from one group. Spell-binding stage chemistry. Three utterly different individuals completely in synch with one another. Percussionist Paul Clarvis enjoys himself so much, cannot stop smiling, like a kid who's just discovered a trick and can't stop doing it. Violinist Sonia Slany (younger version of Helen Mirren) is the serious one and coaxes a sound out of her instrument that is so deep, I had to stare to make sure it was not a viola. Stuart Hall, on strings of various kinds, deadpan some of the time and really getting into it as the evening progressed. I really wanted to buy their CDs, but they didn't seem to have any around with these three performing, so am holding off till I can find 'em elsewhere. Not sure what the name's about. Reminded me of the samba school in Rio called Filhos de Gandhy - at carnival, they troop out in white clothes, bejewelled turbans and, um, tambourines and everything else that a good batteria needs. Gandhi was very visual (the clothes or lack thereof, the massive numbers, Dandi and the fistful of salt raised from the sea, charkha spinning) but he wasn't big on sound (apart from the speeches of course). On the contrary, all those fasts and days of silence suggested the very disavowal of sound. I'm amused by the noise he's inspired.

2010-01-10T12:41:00.003Z

Peter Carey is obsessed with illegality. True History of the Kelly Gang is about the Robin Hood-like figure of Ned Kelly. You know how when you know so little about something, the first things you read assume a kind of monumental importance: they become 100% of what you know about that thing, and every subsequent piece of information has to be located in relation to what you got out of that First Source. At the time I read True History, I knew almost nothing about Australia (my keywords would have been James Cook, aboriginals, Ayers Rock, Mabo v Queensland, Kylie, Neighbours...that's it. I probably wouldn't have reached 10). I had no idea why Aussie-English rivalry was so fierce (I put it down to Freud's narcissism of minor difference). For a while, everything I knew about Australia came from this one novel. Then Oscar and Lucinda, which is about two gamblers (read in Bangalore because I thought it would be nice to read something about a place that was very far away, till I almost fell off my chair when one character was described as having a gait appropriate to someone carrying piles of books on Merton Street), Theft, which is about, well, the theft of a painting. And now The Tax Inspector, which is probably the strangest of his books that I've read so far, featuring tax evasion and child abuse and general slow-burning apocalypse. I try to resist reading everything I pick up as some form of national allegory (postcolonial writers are assumed to be able to do nothing else - never the universal, only the story of their locale - cf Jameson, Ahmad) but with Carey, it's almost as if he wants you to do this. Illegality, transgression of the law - being constitutive of Australia itself - suffuses all of his books. I haven't yet read My Life as a Fake and His Illegal Self, but their very titles seem to reinforce my feeling about this.

post-bad places

2009-12-25T03:03:00.005Z

Finished Coetzee's Disgrace on the place. Spare, gut-wrenching prose. Like Waiting for the Barbarians - although maybe a little less so - he really drags you through the dust. There are no (false) silver linings. Sometimes I wonder if there is something about the continuing privilege of the white South African in there. Those who can leave have the privilege of not finding any redeeming feature in the new configuration of things. But of course he is mostly writing about the predicament of the white South African in Disgrace. The most enduring image for me in the whole book is David Lurie helping Bev Shaw treat a goat with an infected scrotum infested with white grubs. It reminded me of the horse head in Gunter Grass's Tin Drum, being eaten away by maggots. Post-apartheid South Africa, post-Nazi Germany. Something about the body having been sapped of its vitality by the rot within.

'adverse weather conditions', weddings, love, language

2009-12-22T21:56:00.005Z

One more euphemism and I will scream. Actually, I'm already screaming. The weather is not the top story in either the NYT or the Washington Post, even though the weather on the North American eastern seaboard is much worse than anything here. In fact, British weather makes the front page of the NYT in its pictures of the day section, one of which features the ongoing chaos at Kings Cross St. Pancras as the Eurostar groans to life again. It just goes to show: it's not what you get from the sky that makes the news, it's how you deal with it. Can I suggest that for its next major grant, DFID forget about the heart of darkness out there and focus on the heart of incompetence in here. Suggested project: 'Adapting to "adverse weather conditions": Learning from the Canadian experience'. Yes, money, but one gets the feeling that whatever mitigation cost-benefit analyses were made in the past, the regularity with which things are grinding to a halt as a result of the 'wrong amount' of snow suggests that something needs to change here. Why the angst? I need to get on a plane for the most important wedding of my life that is not my own (now there's a riddle for you).

***

I blog erratically. Today, mostly because I am trying to stay awake. What was your best read of 2009? Mine was probably Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys (thanks DR). I have always been fascinated by the year 1916, particularly India and Ireland in 1916. Ireland and India were the two British colonies that already had relatively well developed independence movements by the beginning of the twentieth century. Irish nationalists had been impressed by the Indian revolt of 1857 and they perceived in the Bengal famine of 1874 an echo of their own imperial history of the 1840s. Ireland in turn was a beacon for anti-colonial nationalist movements the world over, pioneering many of the techniques of agitation that would be attempted elsewhere (the term ‘boycott’, for example, comes from Captain Charles Boycott (1832-97), who was a land agent for the estate of Lord Erne in county Mayo during the Land League agitation of 1873). In 1916, the Indian nationalist movement was radicalised by the creation of the Indian Home Rule League, modelled on the Irish equivalent, by the Irish theosophist Annie Besant. Her arrest by the British government in India the following year became a cause célèbre, precipitating the convergence of different factions of the nationalist movement. Following her release, Besant became president of the Indian National Congress. Early twentieth century Dublin and Bengal were characterised by remarkably similar conversations between distinct strands of anti-colonial resistance: constitutional agitation, a vigorous and articulate cultural nationalism, mass-based passive resistance in the form of strikes and boycotts, punctuated by more sporadic acts of revolutionary terrorism and insurrection. 1916 was also the year that James Joyce and Rabindranath Tagore published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ghaire Baire respectively (in book form - both had been serialised before). For more on why you should read those two books together, see chapter 4 of my forthcoming book (yes, I'm becoming a publicity whore).

Now, O'Neill has written into the literary landscape that Joyce made famous, a love story between two boys - Jim Mack, the son of a cornershop owner, and Doyler, a half-lame worker in the city's sewage works (such as they were), both fifteen - set against the backdrop of the Easter Uprising. You don't have to be a 1916 geek to enjoy this story of love that has begun to have a name (Oscar Wilde has been tried and sentenced and everyone in this story operates in the vaguely chilling shadow of that event), but it is a name that the boys do not use for themselves. I'm tempted to say that this is a love of the inarticulate kind we saw in Brokeback Mountain, but actually this is a book that is full of language, words that mean many things, and much Irish dialect (though nowhere nearly as difficult to read as Joyce because - luckily for us English speakers - some of the central characters are from the Catholic aristocracy who, nationalist as they may be, need their Erse translated for them; fortunately, it's all done very credibly so you don't feel like O'Neill was just trying to expand his market - although it would be interesting to know if the Irish literary world has been wracked by the same angsty debates about language and audience that have been so much the lifeblood of English literature and criticism in India.) In this tumultuous time when all Irish are called upon to make a stand for God or Country and often both, it's hard not to be moved by the Joycean spirit that wraps itself around all three boys at the heart of this story. Listen to Jim Mack, who made me cry at pg. 389:

'We'll be asked to fight for Ireland, sure I know that.'
[His friend MacMurrough] 'But what is Ireland that you should want to fight for it?'
'Sure I know that too.' He raised a shoulder, his head inclined then turned: an attempt to shrug shake and nod, all the same time. When he was shy or self-conscious of something he would say, his body would often fail him. 'It's Doyler,' he said.
[MacM]: 'Doyler is your country?'
'It's silly, I know. But that's how I feel. I know Doyler will be out, and where would I be but out beside him? I don't hate the English and I don't know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I'm sure of that now. And he's my country.'
...
The boy looked up from under his lashes. The color had tipped his cheeks. 'I think a little bit of it too is yourself, MacEmm.'
[MacM]: 'Me? My gracious.'
'Though I don't suppose you'd want me fighting about it. But I don't know anybody else I could talk these things with. I used think I'd burst with all the words in my head. I can talk things now. I don't know but it's like we have a language together. It's great with the swimming, but it's better again with the talking. You're a part of my country too now, MacEmm.

I guess I have this language and I am a part of this country too. I am going to this wedding and I am going to use this language. Wish me luck.

2009-12-09T18:11:00.000Z

Buy my book.

2009-12-03T11:22:00.003Z

(picnic, lightning) in Lolita (1955), is like [Time Passes] in To the Lighthouse (1927). In both, a mother dies in parentheses.

Operation Green Hunt

2009-11-11T13:49:00.003Z

'Structural violence: that’s an imaginative vacuum. For most urban Indians, the lives of tribals and dalits has no meaning, no face, no flesh. Our books no longer write of it, our films no longer evoke it, our journalists no longer cover it. It’s not just the poverty; it’s bumping into a face of the Indian State you have never seen before: brutal, illegal, rapine, pimped out to serve the interests of a few. Unless one travels into the silent smoky hole in the heart of this country — the remote jungles of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh; the desolate corners of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Rajasthan, one cannot feel the dread of this question: How will Operation Green Hunt solve this? You might stealth-march a mythic army of COBRA commandoes into this imaginative vacuum, but how will that dissolve the “two categories of human beings” our nation has created? Operation Green Hunt may kill several hundred ‘informed revolutionaries’ and several thousand of the despairing poor who have taken up arms, but how will it address the birth of new anger — anger born out of bombing an old wound?'

Read the whole thing here.

portrait of the nation in the current conjuncture

2009-11-05T14:27:00.003Z

from this photo series

2009-10-13T23:11:00.003+01:00

The STD clinic is the contemporary manifestation of the Catholic confessional. Health advisers are the new priests. Virtue, honesty, confession - what you did, with whom, when and how - are rewarded with salvation (life, or an extended lease on it). Vice - not just the commission of it, but the failure to take responsibility for it - brings down the hellfire of STIs (all of which, incidentally, sound like Biblical cities). The discourse of medicine has replaced the discourse of religion. Of course Foucault told us this long ago. I'm off to say my hail Marys.

2009-10-06T09:05:00.001+01:00

Must go to Scotland before they start demanding visas.

2009-10-05T13:35:00.002+01:00

Peter Galbraith goes public on fraud in the Afghan elections.

a day in the life of me

2009-09-06T21:49:00.002+01:00

woke up. breakfast (toast with guava jelly, coffee). read OUP instructions. formatted 4 chapters. panicked about not having applied for copyright permissions (note to other authors: apply for permission well before you finish writing!). narrowed it down to 2 extracts. joyce estate administered by notoriously difficult grandson. don't want to get into pangas with him. edited the extract down so that it would qualify as 'insubstantial'. down to one. vikram seth. think he'll be nicer (his publisher might not be). we'll see...cleaned house, lunch, cleaned more, talked to my mum, cleaned even more, replenished coffee supply, went for a run, showered, cooked, ate, watched barkha on we the people (should we ban books - duh, no - manish tiwari always starts statement with ultra-condescending voice as if talking to lovable but demented child, then gets heated up and never stops talking; soli nice; harish salve bit irritating; nilanjana (possibly of kitabkhana fame?) wonderfully reasonable; jayashree (?) bit too relaxed for a banned author; shahid somebody who claimed credit for urging rajiv to ban satanic verses (asshole); marxist historian said all the expected things; gujarat minister said all the expected things. coffee, email, blogging. might fall asleep reading palash krishna mehrotra's eunuch park (brilliant - will write more about this soon). annoyed that 'palash krishna mehrotra was born in mumbai in 1975 and was educated at st stephen's college, delhi, the delhi school of economics and balliol college, oxford.' i feel less special with every passing day.

turd ways

2009-08-23T10:33:00.006+01:00

I have been wondering whether it might be reasonable to posit an equivalence between the BJP's recent expulsion of Jaswant Singh and the CPI(M)'s treatment of Somnath Chatterjee in the wake of his refusal to toe the party line during the July 2008 no-confidence motion in Parliament. In the former case, the BJP denied the right of a party member to exercise his constitutional right of free speech. In the latter, the CPI(M) seemed to have lost cognisance of the understanding that the Speaker is supposed to be above (beyond?) party affiliation for the duration of his tenure in that post. The CPI(M) decision upset me more because I (used to?) care more about what it does generally, and because its actions betrayed a lack of understanding of constitutional and parliamentary conventions. Most of the time I'm quite pleased to see the BJP engage in fratricide, but Indian political discourse loses something very precious every time parties suppress internal dissent and ban books. Vidya Subrahmaniam notes that the Congress has rewarded Shashi Tharoor despite his (gently) critical comments on the Nehru-Gandhis. The cynic in me wants to say that the Congress doesn't face similar issues because it has no ideology. Congressmen have long understood that they enjoy freedom of speech subject to unquestioning loyalty to the Caesarist high command.

On the subject of banning books, I was pleased to note that our esteemed CM Yedyurappa has decided not to ban the book in Karnataka because (i) banning books only increases sales; (ii) no Kannadiga has been insulted in Jaswant's book (no comment on the parochialism of our freedom). On an unrelated issue, I was perplexed (but not unpleasantly) to note that Yeddy has also promised to rehabilitate the surviving descendants of Tipu Sultan. This seems to be a matter that has been in the administrative pipeline for sometime. I just wonder if the definition of 'pseudo-secularism' includes throwing crumbs to the descendants of long-dead kings even as you deny the rights of the living to express their religious identities. Burkhas became an issue in Karnataka last week when a girl in a Mangalore college was 'banned' from wearing one, setting the stage for a confrontation between Ram Sene-types masquerading as French secularists and 'Islamic' organisations taking the line that 'Muslim girls are duty bound to wear hijab'. Want to inhabit the space between? Buy my book in 2010. (Bah, middle ways again. I'm really not wedded to them. Terry Eagleton once asked, 'what's the middle way between Jews and Nazis?')

delhi

2009-08-06T19:44:00.004+01:00

i am in infrastructure nirvana. broad flat roads with many lanes, flyovers, effortless underpasses with no crazy gradient changes and zigzag dividers, leafy tree-lined avenues, roads down which it is possible to go both up and down (for those of you wondering why this is something to be grateful for, try negotiating bangalore's ever-modulating system of one-ways), a metro (as yet untried by this blogger, but knowing it exists is a great source of excitement), buses of many different kinds, we shall ignore the auto-drivers from hell (but a new supreme court-imposed quota has reportedly artificially jacked up the price of renting autos, inducing virtually all drivers to become professional extortionists to recover their investment), addresses that can be found. any comments about heat and dust will make me sound like a ruth prawer jhabvala novel, so i shall desist from making them. middle-class indians like myself, i am beginning to think, are obsessed with infrastructure. i would hazard the claim that in few other middle classes anywhere in the world do drawing room conversations routinely turn to the state of infrastructure in the city. everyone from the professional urban planner to the irate housewife has a view: on how much of a shortfall there is, how it should be made up, whose fault it is that it hasn't, and so on. decisions about which city to live in are made on the basis of who wins the infrastructure wars. the reason is quite simple: we, the rich, can buy everything except infrastructure.

1st main, 2nd cross, 3rd block, 4th phase, 5th stage, somewhere

2009-08-01T20:57:00.003+01:00

we live on 1st main, 8th cross of koramangala 4th block. sometimes i feel like writing 'turn left at the t-junction' somewhere in the address. 8th main seems to have major arterial importance in terms of people finding their bearings. i'm not sure why proper nouns have gone out of fashion in the newer parts of bangalore. it's not that we're short of celebrities. to the contrary, i suspect that we have a vast reservoir of B-grade celebrities, none of whom towers over the others enough to warrant having a major road named after them. so instead we're condemned to this naming system of numbers and building blocks. i particularly like phase and stage, because they sound so teleological - almost as if 4th phase and 5th stage are vastly improved over their predecessors, with much better amenities taking you that much closer to liberation from the cycle of digging and relaying within which most of us hapless citizens in the lower phases and stages of urban planning are trapped thanks to the wisdom and foresight of the bruhat bengaluru mahanagara palike.

continuity and change

2009-07-30T20:10:00.003+01:00

back in the city of my birth and quite vela for a change. thumbs up for the people, weather, time, sleep and FOOD; thumbs down for the roads, traffic, howling wolves at night, asshole shopkeeper who only wanted firangs in his stupid handicraft shop (please do not ever go to Habitat on Infantry Road, Bangalore 560001 - why the fuck am i shopping for handicrafts anyway: gifts for blasted firangs), OBLIGATIONS (both self- and other-imposed). not sure whether i am missing the frisson of transgression, but i could swear that the heavens opened up and a host of heavenly angels sang triumphant hosannas when newly recognised rights were vindicated (my protestant education reasserts itself strongly in this city of my birth). it's interesting what changes and what doesn't. ugly ass building up right next to the house we used to live in, almost touching my bedroom wall - such a grotesque sight. k. c. das still serves the best mishti dohi in the world and ALL the same people work there, but they've gone all international in the foyer: the name of the shop is in bengali, hindi, gujarati, kannada, tamil, telugu, hebrew, russian, chinese, arabic. koshy's is the same, even the same people (thank god - there would be no point coming back if it wasn't). the magazine man recognised me. but premier bookshop has gone and THAT has changed the landscape of the city of my birth irretrievably. this was the first bookshop i ever developed any sort of relationship with. not just me, but four generations of my family. it was down the road from the house we lived in. all the kids in the family treated it like a library, and when we did buy, we got totally random 20% discounts. i'm not sure if mr. shanbagh had a system, but he would just look at you and scribble a completely arbitrary figure on the receipt, well below the marked price. to the best of my knowledge, he never overcharged anyone, so it was never clear to me how the place ran. it had all the best books in the WORLD that were ever worth having and didn't seem to lose any business to the much bigger but less exciting gangarams or higgenbothams just around the corner. the shop itself was the most chaotic store ever known to MAN, WOMAN or SILVERFISH. you would never find anything you wanted (you had to ask mr. shanbagh, who invariably knew exactly where it was), but you often chanced upon things you didn't know you wanted. when that happened, you had to ask mr. shanbagh because if you tried to pull a book out of a PILE (this was possibly the only bookshop on the planet where, for the most part, the books were not arranged on shelves: they were piled up on the ground), so anyway, if you tried to pull a book out of a pile, thirty-seven would come crashing down and people would turn to stare at you. it would have been wonderful to see my book hidden in one of those piles, but that is not to be. a small part of the universe has shut down forever.

Reactions to Naz Foundation v. Union of India

2009-07-07T17:19:00.003+01:00

Hours after the Delhi High Court delivered its verdict, I wrote to verbalprivilege saying that this was Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas, all rolled into one. I said it without thinking very much about why I thought this, but Lawrence Liang says pretty much the same thing while putting his finger, characteristically, on why this is so:

The real success of Wade, Brown and Naz foundation can then be measured not only by their contribution to democratic ethos or the Jurisprudence that they inaugurate but by the tears that they provoke. The spontaneous outburst of emotion on the pronouncement of the Delhi High Court, the tears of joy that people had while listening to the judgment in Court hall No. 1 of the Delhi High court, or from people following it on the news, the telephone calls with people wishing each other happy Independence Day after the judgement – these are the things that legendary cases like Wade and Brown are made of. And these are all the ingredients that seemed to be present in the Naz foundation decision. When was the last time you remember crying about a constitutional decision? Naz foundation decision has also enabled the rekindling of our romance with a text whose recent career has left one a little brokenhearted – the constitution. Justice Pathak in Kesavananda Bharati says that “the constitution is not an arena of quibbling by lawyers with long persons. It is a Heritage or possession and it should be the object of your love”.

See also reactions from Vikram Raghavan and Kajal Bharadwaj. All NLS alumni, I can't resist adding. I am still crying too much to say anything vaguely dispassionate and analytical.

for NLS

2009-07-02T23:43:00.004+01:00

I have spent most of the day processing this: the Delhi High Court read down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, so that it no longer proscribes adult consensual same-sex activity. I tried writing something coherent by way of a reaction to this, but the words seemed too trite to capture the enormity of what this tiny, partial, provisional, interim legal victory means. There will be time for coherence and reflection and planning and strategy, but that time is not now, not tonight. For now, all I can do is to remember people and places that got me from self-doubt to coming out to being proud despite illegality and family shenanigans and broken relationships. And in that long long list, there is one place that comes up again and again in all sorts of guises, a place I have never been sentimental about, a place I barely invested in in the five years that I was there, but which now looms larger than life in restrospect: National Law School. This is the place that gave me - and there is really no other less old-fashioned word for it - courage. Courage to live as if the law didn't matter, which is an ironic thing for a law school to do. And I can't even construct a coherent narrative about how it did that because I was barely conscious of it at the time, but it's an itinerary that passes through gender studies circle and 'pseudoness' and late night chats and film festivals and MA's 'travelling circus' and a sociology project that I really didn't want to do but ended up being unexpectedly prescient and amicus briefs at placements that never got used (or maybe they did?!) and my gorgeous cousin MG who walked the path first and seniors like AN who politely inserted the issue at every possible opportunity and juniors like TK who showed that leadership and electoral office were not beyond our reach (I was not yet part of this 'our' being, at the time, genuinely confused but absorbing, subliminally, that it was possible to live this life without fleeing to other jurisdictions) and the amazingly straight-supporting lenjgang who were family in the darkest days after we'd graduated. Here was a place that operated like a bubble in the best possible way, almost in defiance of how the outside world thought. I am valorising it of course because it was as much a battleground as a bubble, but there was enough space for the construction of these alternative worlds in which half-thoughts lay buried that would only germinate in other times and places. At least that's how it worked for me. I was so privileged to be there and I would have been a completely different person today if I had not. It does not surprise me in the least that a significant number of counsel for the petitioners are NLS alumni. If you're reading this and can recognise anything I'm talking about, thank you for helping me.

2009-05-28T18:40:00.002+01:00

My favourite word, attached to my favourite country. No one says it like Ashis Nandy.

sirens in cities

2009-05-24T15:59:00.004+01:00

there's something both
comforting and horrific,
about how
life
goes on,
oblivious
to someone's private tragedy.

Election results

2009-05-16T09:31:00.012+01:00

22.19: Shekhar Gupta's last thought for the day: two emotions are on the rise in the world today - anti-Americanism and Islamophobia. The election results suggest that both are on the decline in the Indian electorate.

21.41: Sometimes you think you're the beleaguered voice of reason and actually millions of people are thinking the same thing with you. That is humbling.

11.47: The elaborate division-of-labour dance begins. Sonia: Manmohan will be PM; journo: what role for Rahul? Sonia: that is for the PM to decide; journo to Manmohan: what role for Rahul? Manmohan: It is my wish that he should be in the Cabinet, but I have to persuade him.

I've always thought it was good for different people to occupy the posts of head of party and head of government. It's an improvement over the Indira days when a Ceaserist figure towered over the party. Rahul recently acknowledged that he was a beneficiary of the system but wanted to democratise it. I am guessing this means things like intra-party elections, etc. It's entirely likely that if elections were held to the party leadership, Sonia or Rahul would win with Manmohan trailing a distant third. Whatever one thinks about dynastic politics, this is a dynasty that is democratically kept in place by the verdict and sentiments of the electorate.

Weber came up with typologies of authority - charismatic, bureaucratic, etc. - which were exactly what he said they were: 'ideal-types'. In reality, ideal types are combined in all sorts of interesting ways. Indian politics is the classic exemplar of charismatic authority continuing to operate within the bureaucratic structures of a modern nation-state. 'Traditional' notions of hereditary authority survive within the shell of new structures.

11.42: I can barely hear Manmohan Singh speak. Frankly, Sonia Gandhi is a better speaker; people are actually keeping quiet and listening to her.

11.39: Varun Gandhi calls Barkha live in the NDTV studio and she takes the call. Wtf??!?

11.30: Vir Sanghvi uses the word 'gobsmacked' in reaction to the DMK's performance in Tamil Nadu.

10.54: I want to say Karnataka is a bizarre place for voting for the BJP, but there are probably things going on that need to be understood rather than dismissed.

Shashi Tharoor won his seat in Thiruvananthapuram. Not bad for a plummy NRI. (There's so much hope for me.)

9.58: Jyotiraditya Scindia is a smarmy sycophantic shit for wanting Rahul Gandhi to be PM now. The better this party does, the more it behaves like a family trust. It's almost as if everyone in it thinks they deserve absolutely no credit for any of its achievements.

9.44 GMT: We only have trends, very few results, but they are looking - forget about good - they are looking astonishingly CLEAR. Right up until yesterday, the TV debates were saying this was going to be a very fractured mandate. The counting trends so far suggest that this may not be the case. Astonishing. Yesterday, I was praying that President Pratibha Patil would have the brains to make sense of the khichdi that she would be presented with. Today it looks like she just has to be able to count. As for the likely results, this looks like the Congress's best result in decades. After a full-term in power. Whatever happened to the anti-incumbency factor? And its gamble about going it alone so as to command more leverage over the allies seems to have paid off.

It will be interesting to see which way the BJP goes next. This is probably Advani's last election as leader. Does that mean Narendra Modi next? Perhaps not. This election was already his coming out moment. He campaigned in over 300 rallies all over the country. He's not the best face for the party when it comes to winning allies. The BJP probably misses Vajpayee very much today. The good news is that they were absolutely trounced in Orissa. I'm very glad Naveen Patnaik's BJD made the decision to break with them before the election over Kandhamal. I'm still not sure how they've done in Karnataka.

The Left results in West Bengal are very disappointing. I wonder if this is because of Nandigram.

In 2004, MM called me, woke me up, yelled in my ear - that's how I knew the results. She would be so pleased today.

schadenfreude of a comparativist

2009-05-12T08:13:00.004+01:00

The British Parliament is a complete shambles these days. The nadir came yesterday, when the Speaker rounded on members for talking to the press, as if the LEAK were worse than the EXPENSES. What is he smoking? But this was exactly the reaction of the political classes in India when Tehelka did its sting operation on defence deal kickbacks: kill the stinger rather than the stung. I'm glad to see that developed country parliaments can also look like a pile of shite.

JJ

2009-05-09T20:15:00.002+01:00

If you ever wanted to bury or burn me with something that would give me comfort in the hereafter, let it be A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is the only novel I have ever re-read and it is astonishing to me how something that could be set in a place and time as different as my own could have everything that I would put into my own bildungsroman: my childhood repressions, my school (albeit Protestant), my politics, my love for and rage against family, religion and country, even my most minute and trivial obsessions: 'every Tuesday, as he marched from home to the school, he read his fate in the incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him and quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the pathway and telling himself that he would be first and not first in the weekly essay (81, 1965 Penguin edition). This was me on the way to and from school: if I overtake that man before he reaches the lamp-post, I will beat BM in Maths. Can I go through an entire day without putting my foot outside a tile? As I child, I was obsessive and compulsive and almost never disorderly.

rising shining emerging

2009-04-25T21:10:00.002+01:00

A girl dies of asthma in Delhi and it hits the national headlines. A child is born dead every 4 minutes in Madhya Pradesh and...what?

India Votes (and I vote virtually)

2009-04-13T22:28:00.003+01:00

With 3 days to go before round 1, I have utterly failed in my promise to follow election coverage, so this is a late attempt to make up for that and to cast my virtual vote. It's too bad that we don't have a postal voting system (I have never been in my constituency at the appropriate time). But with 714 million voters, Indian elections are enough of a logistical nightmare without us expats demanding that the ECI cater to the sprawling diaspora.

Given that there are 1055 parties on the ballot nationwide, it's something of a relief that they have coalesced into 3 major blocs. I can't imagine any set of circumstances in which I would ever vote for the BJP, given that I am not a fascist. That's not a polemical statement - or not just a polemical statement. In an earlier post, I think I passed too superficially over the Varun Gandhi episode, but having read Siddharth Varadarajan and others on this issue, I'm glad this was taken as seriously as it was by the ECI and the Mayawati government (politically motivated or not). NDTV did an interview with Advani today (on whose isolation, see this good Tehelka piece), in which he did his best to present his kind, gentle face (gone are the days when Vajpayee was moderate and Advani extreme - now Advani looks moderate in comparison with some of the rabid hate mongers in his party). Speaking of whom, Narendra Modi showed a deep lack of historical sense in calling the Congress a 'gudiya' after his earlier lame attempt ('budiya') was shot down by Priyanka. The last person in Indian politics who was called a 'gudiya' (goongi gudiya, to be precise) was Indira. She was given that label by the Congress syndicate (how I love that word - it's almost as fearsome as Politburo) who thought she would be a pushover. Instead, she morphed into something quite different. Hopefully this is a bad omen for the BJP, although no sane person would want a Durga-like figure in the Congress or anywhere else. I'd much rather have weak non-entities than strong zealots at the helm of things.

The Third Front is difficult to talk about because it means different things in different places. In Bangalore South it means the Janata Dal (Secular) led by former Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda, whose otherwise undistinguished career as PM is perhaps best remembered for the many occasions on which he fell asleep. As leader of the JD(S), Deve Gowda has been bewilderingly disastrous, presiding over many splits in the party, at least one of which was precipitated by the action of his son allying with the BJP to bring down a Congress-led. government. Our 'mannina maga' has gone back and forth over the issue of working with the BJP, so his protestations about being both anti-BJP and anti-Congress are hard to take seriously. Basically, I can think of nothing good to say about him.

One could assume that the CPI(M) will play a primary role in shaping the programme of a potential Third Front government. And looking at their manifesto, I have to say I agree with quite a lot - particularly the sections on foreign affairs, secularism, minorities and employment and some items under 'economy'. A lot of the best things that the UPA government did (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, for example) came under pressure from social movements (MKSS) and the organised Left. And although I like to think that I do not have knee-jerk anti-US reactions - as I suspect some people in the CPI(M) do - I shared their revulsion at the spectre of India cosying up to the most egregiously rightwing and morally bankrupt US government in postwar history. Now things are different, although I am still concerned about the implications of the Indo-US Defence Framework Agreement, under which it looks like the low-end aspects of US hegemony in the Indian Ocean region have been outsourced to India. Given my professional preoccupation with foreign affairs, sometimes I do think that my political home is in the CPI(M).

But the party confuses me. Nandigram was a moment of terrific disillusionment. I think the CPI(M) sees its primary constituency as the industrial proletariat (workers inside the capitalist machine) and forgets that there is another struggle out there by people who are not yet in the machine and are trying to resist their incorporation in it. The old left is often suspicious of that kind of struggle, reading Marx in a rigidly teleological fashion. In its view (I am guessing) primitive accumulation is something that happened long ago at the beginning of the capitalist encounter (rather than a process that is continually unfolding in different places at different times through the many ways in which the commons are privatised - including under the aegis of the CPI(M) government itself). Capitalism is something everyone has to go through on the road to socialism, it thinks, and anyone who resists this is a backward looking feudal nostalgic who must be browbeaten into accepting the one true path to socialist salvation. Undoubtedly, not everyone who resists industrialisation is progressive (there are lots of backward looking feudal nostalgics in the anti-globalisation movement) which means that there is no getting around the difficult political work of separating the feudals from the progressives. But by the same token, not everyone who resists the enclosure of the commons is regressive. Basically, the CPI(M) has not found a way to connect up the struggles of the industrial proletariat with those resisting primitive accumulation, and till it does, for many of us, it looks like a Stalinist party writ small, yanking people off the land and dragging them into the machine.

Not that the Congress is any better, but this brings me to a much more prosaic reason for not voting Third Front. Which is that no matter how much I agree with the CPI(M) manifesto (and assuming I can suppress my discomfort about Nandigram), it's by no means clear how influential it will be in the Third Front. It's really quite impossible to guess what a Third Front government would do, given that this will probably be the outcome of much bargaining and negotiation amongst its many constituents. Nor can one be optimistic about how long it would last. The record (Moraji Desai, Charan Singh, V. P. Singh, Deve Gowda, I.K. Gujral) - the record is not good.

Which leaves the goongi gudiya, the dynastic dinosaur. A process of elimination. Hardly a ringing endorsement. So ideologically baggy they are all things to all people. But they are secular (except for the right fringes that flirt with soft Hindutva) and there is a left fringe that's quite social democratic. And they'll probably last, unless they have some really unreliable allies who pull the plug on them. And the dude in Bangalore South - Krishna Byre Gowda - looks decent (actually he feels frighteningly like me - he has a master's degree in international relations - gah, I am every bit as identity-focused as the caste-captive voter). I'm a bit suspicious that he doesn't actually promise anything. I did look at the independent candidate - Captain Gopinath (this will surely go down as the election of the sexy websites) - but I'm really quite sceptical of whether he can get elected without a party machine behind him. Maybe that's defeatist. So, um...ARGH!...dynasty notwithstanding (I am so crushing on Priyanka these days)...Congress it is.

Regional parties I would like to do well: RJD, SP, BSP (despite M), DMK, NCP (Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule is pretty impressive), BJD (now that he's ditched the BJP), National Conference

Regional parties I would not like to do well: Shiv Sena, Akali Dal, AIADMK, and of course the JD(S)

God this is exhausting - I give up. There are lots of parties I have no damn opinion on.

23rd London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

2009-04-02T23:39:00.006+01:00

Happily abbreviated as LLGFF. I like the way the letters line up. OK so I'm not thinking about the Indian elections 24/7, but more on that in a bit. There's a great 5 for 4 deal at the LLGFF and I lied my way into a student discount (spare me your moral outrage; or bring my rent down).

The great attraction of I Can't Think Straight was the opportunity to see two gorgeous desi women play queer roles on screen (sleaze disclaimer: I am not a straight man with pervy lesbian fantasies; in fact I have no lesbian fantasies whatsoever). Lisa Ray is usually too ethereally beautiful for the roles she plays (remember Water?). This can be a real problem, particularly if you're meant to be playing a woman brutalised by life in a widow's hostel in Varanasi. Fortunately in this film, she plays a spoilt brat (Tala) from a wealthy Palestinian family based in London, who has broken off engagements to eligible young men four times. A chance encounter with Leyla, a British Indian woman (played by Sheetal Sheth), sends her into a tizzy. Will she go through with the wedding, or will she finally follow her heart? If you're thinking serious movie about arranged marriages and clashing civilisations, you're quite wrong. This is a light hearted romantic comedy, fun to watch, but not - I think - destined to become a classic. The humour is slapstick and a bit too predictable (the mothers in both families are neurotic ogres, in the style of Hindi movie mothers-in-law; the fathers gentle and indulgent). I thought film maker Shamim Sarif was much more of a hit than her movie - something about her hilariously OTT responses to every question in the Q&A that followed the screening, delivered in deadpan style reminded me of what I liked about British humour. I suppose the humour in the film was more...South Asian. Speaking of which, although she'd tried hard to find an Arab woman to play the role of Tala, this proved to be a tough ask. No one wanted to play a lesbian role for fear of family izzat and sharaafat bullshit. The best she could come up with was a British-Arab woman who agreed to do 'light kissing in a body suit'. This was far kinkier than she'd bargained for, Sarif noted sardonically, so she eventually went with Ray and Sheth, in large part because there was no discussion about what they would and wouldn't do - indeed, no discussion about this being a 'lesbian' film at all. In response to a question about why the film was set in a very upper class milieu, she said that she wanted to undermine the notion that posh people were more progressive about this sort of thing. Right on.

Before Stonewall is a masterpiece of gay history film-making. 25 years after it premiered at the 1984 Toronto Film Festival, this is a film that still feels new and urgent. As its title suggests, it tells the stories of people who lived and loved and came out and fought before the Stonewall riots of 1969 that are usually taken to mark the birth of an explicit movement for LGBT rights. Before Stonewall is about the necessary prehistory of that moment. A lot of the film is about people's experiences of coming out in a time when they had no notion of what they were coming out as ('we didn't call it, we just did it' said one interviewee, sounding a bit like a Nike ad). The film makes some interesting arguments about the role of the world wars in opening up space for queer life mostly via the creation of homosocial spaces, given the very gendered division of war labour. There's a great interview with a woman who served in one of the women's corps. The commanding officer - one Dwight Eisenhower - had gotten word that there were more than a few lesbians in this corps and ordered its leader (for someone who teaches security studies, I have an appalling grasp of military rank names) - this interviewee - to identify said lesbians so that they could be dismissed. She replied that she would do so if the general pleased, but that she'd have to be the first to go. Ike's secretary, standing next to him, said 'If it would please the General, sir, she may be second but I would be the first.' I would like to have seen the expression on his face, but Eisenhower rescinded the order immediately. Almost no one in the film is famous, except for Allen Ginsberg and Audre Lorde. Director Greta Schiller (who was also around for a Q&A) had some interesting things to say about the process of making the film. Trawling through film archives, she found nothing under 'gay and lesbian', but tonnes of material under 'perversion', 'prostitution', 'deviance', 'transvestism'. The subaltern leaves traces in the master's archive, but never on her own terms.

Then after Before Stonewall ended, an unexpected treat: Tiny and Ruby, a half hour documentary film about two elderly black lesbians in their 70s. And not just any two - Tiny Davis, a legendary jazz trumpeter and drummer-pianist Ruby Lucas, partners of 42 years at the time the film was made. You never see old queer people on film, you never see old black queer people on film, you never ever ever see old black lesbians on film or any-bloody-where. And I have to say this again: in their 70s; one playing the trumpet, the other playing the drums. The centre of their families and communities, the life and soul of the party. This was an utterly gorgeous, moving, hilarious, inspirational portrait of people we never see.

Later in the Southbank centre, I saw a poster for an event entitled 'Foreign Trade: the House of Homosexual Culture'. The event is billed as one about queer people from all over the world who come to live in London ('What draws them here? What do they find when they arrive and what are they leaving behind? We hear from queer Londoners from every continent about their reasons for coming to the city, and about gay culture in the countries that they've come from.') And yet the publicity picture for this event - which is supposed to be about the queer international in London - prominently features the obligatory buff white man. Who are these freaks and why do they colonise every square inch of queer media? Does Naomi Woolf have to write The Beauty Myth again - perhaps with the word 'woman' replaced with 'homosexual', so that these stupid people get it? Bah. Another moment of queer rage.

3/4: Two movies about activist mayors who conduct gay weddings against the odds. The juxtaposition of these films foregrounds a stark difference in the sources of pressure for change in different countries. In the US, the federal government is of course against gay marriage, with the pressure for legalisation coming from the bottom-up. In Spain, the state is in favour, with the opposition coming from conservative mayors - except, remarkably, in the tiny and otherwise traditional town of Campillo (50 inhabitants). Campillo is an endearing documentary, at the centre of which is its sweet and almost child-like gay mayor who has managed to win the affections of its very rustic people. Of the two movies, this one felt less compelling - perhaps because of the lack of representation of any opposition to what the mayor was doing. Conversations with local inhabitants about their mayor and his proactive stance on gay marriage alternate with scenes of life in the town, which make clear that it is a very small and rural place. Everyone seems to be very supportive and if there is social disapproval, the movie only hints at it (when asked what the most difficult aspect of making the film was, the director unhesitatingly replied 'finding a lesbian couple who were willing to be filmed getting married').

Social and political battles take centre-stage in One Summer in New Paltz, which is told in the style of a fairy tale. There once was a land with a king who had the most powerful army the world had ever seen, but who never felt safe. Just when he thought the people were going to kick him off the throne, he tried to distract them by promising to change the constitution to make it impossible for gay people to marry. But a revolt was brewing in a small town in the hills. You know the plot. It's a very simple and powerful story, made especially poignant by the scores of queer couples of all shapes, sizes, genders and colours who just want their love for each other to be socially affirmed in the ways that straight people take for granted - and a 26 year old straight kid who happens to be mayor of the town and feels so strongly that they cannot be denied this right that he conducts their weddings at great political and personal risk to himself. When the state puts an end to this with criminal charges and a restraining order, a local priest and a mayor in a neighbouring town (respectively lesbian and gay) eagerly take on the task of solemnizing gay weddings. A grassroots civil disobedience movement had begun. There are a couple of memorable scenes. In one, a group of clergy from different religious denominations conduct weddings on the steps of New York City Hall and also read in unison a kind of protest litany, which is very stirring. I loved in particular the two women rabbis, one of whom joyfully says 'by the authority vested in me by the state of New York to conduct any wedding except this one...' to the sound of much laughter and applause. The other scene that stuck in my mind was of the 'God hates fags' lot protesting outside the church in New Paltz. There's a queer-supportive counter protest on the other side of the road and what's really striking is that both sides are singing patriotic songs and hymns at each other (God Bless America etc.) - it's a great scene because it demonstrates just how versatile and, well, empty our most cherished political concepts are, so amenable to being infused with whatever content we want to give them at any given moment. I got home to an email in my inbox saying that the Iowa Supreme Court legalised gay marriage today. I'm beginning to feel that although we're losing many individual battles, we're winning the war.

Indian elections

2009-03-28T21:39:00.002Z

I am election watching with a vengeance. Expect little else on this blog for the next few weeks. First, to get the non-issue of the week out of the way: Varun Gandhi. Don't mistake me - I think hate speech has to be taken seriously and dealt with appropriately. But I also think there is a danger in giving someone who, for all practical purposes is a non-entity in Indian politics, too much importance. I think it's silly for the media (NDTV), for instance, to be describing him as a 'martyr for the saffron cause'. This is exactly the kind of attention he craves and giving it to him only provides further incentives for rabid and incendiary rhetoric. Frankly, I do not think Maneka and Varun Gandhi hold views on religion and politics that are very different from those held by the Congress party. At the root of this is not fundamental political and ideological differences but a family feud. We know that after Sanjay's death, there was a very public falling out in which Maneka was basically shown the door. It's not clear whether the feud was with Indira or Sonia. Maneka has recently indicated that it was Sonia who was behind her expulsion from the family (and conversely has spoken rather fondly about Indira). But why the formidable Indira would have been so easily manipulated by her elder daughter-in-law is something of a mystery. I don't think the details are very important. My point is simply that the search for an alternative political home - first in the VP Singh government and later in the BJP - was motivated more by a sense of grievance against the Rajiv branch of the family than by any sense of genuine political disagreement. Varun's membership of the BJP is epiphenomenal, merely a superstructural dimension of a disagreement of which family rivalry is the base. These people need therapy; not an alternative political platform from which to wreak their vengeances.

2009-03-13T16:33:00.002Z

Sometimes, Jon Stewart is like Noam Chomsky with a TV show. Watch the interview with Jim Cramer, who spends most of his time whingeing like a baby.

Nawaz Sharif

2009-02-26T12:45:00.002Z

The Pakistan Supreme Court has just banned the Sharif brothers from holding elected office as a result of previous criminal convictions. One of the most intriguing aspects of this situation, apart from the fact that it has messed up elements of a crisis simulation exercise we are holding at the 'United Nations', is that whatever Zardari's role in the verdict, PM Gilani has bemoaned the decision as 'unfortunate for the prospects of democracy'. And take a look at Nawaz's curious reaction to the verdict:

Holding President Zardari personally responsible for the disqualification verdict, he spared the Pakistan People’s Party of any blame. ‘The PPP as a party cannot be held responsible for the deeds of Asif Ali Zardari, who has shattered all the dreams about prosperous and democratic Pakistan as envisaged in the Charter of Democracy,’ he said.

In other thoughts, Dawn has a very sexy new website. Someone needs to tell the Hindu to sack its webmaster.

Diplomatic diary

2009-02-13T19:45:00.002Z

Rumour has it that this is out in the February 2009 issue of Outlook Traveller. I can't tell because there's no web version.

For someone who works in a school of diplomacy, I got off to an amateurish start. ‘I’m sorry I took so long! They questioned me so much at immigration. Do you know my housemate was interrogated in Cairo by the Mukhabarat and…ouch!’. My friend SK, whom I had travelled to Damascus to visit, pinched me quietly and hard, looking straight ahead as we settled into the backseat of her hired car for the long drive into the city. ‘Don’t talk about the Mukhabarat in Syria’, she said firmly later on, referring to the dreaded intelligence agency that is a standard feature of the political landscape in authoritarian Middle Eastern states. ‘I don’t know what my driver’s sympathies are. And don’t use the ‘I’ word here.’ ‘The ‘I’ word?’, I ask puzzled. ‘India?’ SK shakes her head. ‘Iran? Iraq?’ SK rolls her eyes, exasperated. ‘Israel, you idiot’, she hisses. ‘Have you ever visited Occupied Palestine?’, I recalled my visa form asking, as a penny dropped somewhere in the inner recesses of my naïve brain. In a few days I would become good at this, deriving much pleasure in taking caution to ridiculous lengths as SK and I communicated through notes (to evade the bugging equipment in her flat, we told ourselves), making sure that our astute analyses of the day’s events were shredded before they settled into the bottom of her kitchen waste. The truth is that Syria, evil axis membership notwithstanding, is an astonishingly safe and welcoming place—if you have no political agenda.

SK worked her contacts to arrange a guide to help me find my bearings in Damascus. I waited nervously at the rendezvous point, trying hard to look unobtrusive and casual despite the numerous security personnel whom I was convinced were glaring at me as they walked past. The trouble is that hanging out in Syria feels a bit like being in a Cold War movie. There is a decidedly Second World feel to the place, evident most particularly in the models of cars on the roads and the big Soviet-style concrete monstrosities that line the main boulevards, many adorned with pictures of the former President Hafez al-Assad or his ophthalmologist son Bashar, the current incumbent.

Every visitor to Damascus is told that it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world and because we’re sluts for superlatives, everybody tends to head for the oldest part of this oldest city. The grandest way to enter the old city is via Souk Hamidiye, a long two-storey high covered arcade, whose ceiling is pockmarked with tiny holes. Irregular sunbeams intersect with solid shafts of light streaming in from the upper windows to produce an effect that is very beautiful, but if you look up you will be flattened by the crowds. The souk culminates in a great square, within which stands the magnificent Umayyad mosque, on a site that has been considered sacred for over three thousand years. One half of a gigantic triangular stone pediment sitting on three columns hints at the presence of the Roman temple to Jupiter that once stood here. The mosque itself is an oasis of calm at the very heart of the otherwise frenzied old city, an architectural symphony of marbled courtyards, Corinthian columns and golden mosaics.

Directly behind the Umayyad in a line of shops selling carpets, antiques and everything else that people come to Middle Eastern bazaars for, sits Al Nawfara. It calls itself a coffee shop, but Damascenes will tell you that it is a great deal more. Frequented by locals, expats and tourists alike, Nawfara is where you go when you have no plan in the old city. SK has a European diplomat friend, who is something of a fixture in the place (she thinks he is a spy). He either has a lot of time on his hands, or Nawfara is where everything is transacted. The tables are packed close and the walls feature an assortment of kitsch—Arabic calligraphy, David Beckham, Syrian tourism posters, Bashar, a man in a sombrero serenading a woman in a flouncy tinsel gown. On one of the many evenings I found myself sipping dark Arabic coffee here, a stern-looking storyteller wearing a red fez cap sat on a high chair and read out of a sombre book (the Arabian Nights, I was later told). He raised his voice now and then and suddenly slammed a sword I had not noticed down on the arms of his chair. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he made the children laugh.

In Aleppo I decided to stay at the Baron Hotel, for no other reason than the fact that T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Agatha Christie and a string of other celebrities had once been its guests. If hotels had twinning programmes, the Baron’s partner would be a decrepit colonial club in India. It features that deeply familiar combination of lovely dark wood furniture and cheap plastic ketchup bottles and napkin holders. Here too the colonials have left behind unpaid bills that the postcolonials have dutifully framed in glass. The staff run the place with an air of deep condescension, as if they were performing a public service. And you will need to take your own 60 watt bulbs. A vintage poster in the corridor outside my room advertises a journey from London to Baghdad in eight days on the Simplon Orient Express & Taurus Express, whose watchwords are, apparently, ‘Safety, Rapidity, Economy.’

If the Umayyad is the centrepiece of Damascus, the citadel is the unmistakable heart of Aleppo. It is a spectacular structure, rising high above the city on a mound, surrounded by a deep moat and impressive fortifications. The drawbridge stands on a series of dizzyingly high, narrow arches of gradually increasing height, and leads into a set of twisting passages fitted with gigantic doors at every turn. This is clever because it means that there is no single door facing the moat that might have presented an easy target for a good battering ram. The citadel contains some impressive sights, the most breathtaking of which is the throne room with its ornate ceiling and inlaid chandeliers set in an octagonal dome with stained glass windows. Don’t miss the holes in the floor, through which soldiers would have been able to pour boiling oil onto invading armies trying to make their way in through the impossible passages below.

The prettiest part of Aleppo is Jdaide, the old Christian and Armenian quarter. Unlike in neighbouring Turkey, the Armenian church here can fearlessly commemorate that community’s genocide. The nearby Maronite church with its distinctive green steeples testifies to the diverse confessional mosaic of this city. Jdaide is also home to Aleppo’s hippest restaurants and boutique hotels. It was while I was walking through its narrow walled streets that I was accosted by Mr. Iskender. He appeared quite suddenly as I studied a map, and asked if I needed help. Before I had a chance to refuse he was walking me around Jdaide, pointing out the best places to buy the famed Aleppo sweets and soaps. Round, middle-aged, with a Hercule Poirot moustache, he spoke very good English. He had studied something in Brighton for a couple of months many years ago and was pleased to have encountered in me, a visitor from England. But he had also travelled extensively in Eastern Europe. Learning languages seems to have been something of a hobby, for he spoke Russian and Polish (the latter learnt in two ten-month stints in Poland). And intriguingly, he seemed to want to talk about politics. First he talked about the Americans in Iraq, then the troubles in Lebanon, and slowly, very slowly, as if he were circling cautiously around the difficult subjects that were closest to his heart, testing the waters, seeing how I would react, he began to bemoan the fact that Arab dictators held on to power for too long and only ever handed over to their sons. ‘You know how it is…’ he trailed off vaguely. I was intrigued, but wary. Who was this man? Where was his shop? Did he have a shop? Was he some sort of government minder trying to test me? Or a dissident, trying to make conversation with a ‘safe’ person? I would never know. But SK had trained me well and my paranoia antennae were on full alert. ‘Where do you get your news?’ I asked noncommittally. As our little tour came to an end, I was preparing for the inevitable demand for some outlandish fee. But Mr. Iskender merely pointed out where the best cafes were, wished me well with a quick handshake and melted back into the by-lanes of Jdaide.

On my last morning in the Baron as I breakfasted alone in its gloomy splendour, a man walked up to me and said very confidently, ‘I am on page 339 of your guidebook and I can take you to the Dead Cities.’ The excursion proved to be an excellent way to end my trip to Aleppo. The monastery of St. Simeon is a perfect ruin—derelict enough to look historically genuine, but preserved enough to give visitors a good sense of what fifth century Byzantine architecture might have looked like. At its centre stands the rump of what was once a pillar on which, legend has it, the ascetic St. Simeon spent the last forty two years of his life. On a clear day when the sky is an azure blue, you can look out across the dry scrub valleys over a landscape that can only be described as biblical.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-31T12:55:00.001Z

There were moments when Slumdog Millionaire swept me away. Everything good that has been said about its cinematography is true, and the A. R. Rehman soundtrack with more than a few numbers by the incredible M.I.A. makes watching this film a memorable experience.

The two brothers at the heart of the story are played by three sets of actors as they grow up. The youngest are the best, worthy successors to the cast of Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay. But there is a horribly jarring moment when the next pair, playing the adolescent Jamal and Salim turn up on screen sounding like they were enrolled at Cathedral, played tennis at the Willingdon and had NRI cousins. The truly puzzling thing is that they have not yet made some Cinderella ascent up the socio-economic ladder because they are still orphaned street kids doing what we are meant to think of as long, gruelling shifts in the kitchen of a restaurant somewhere in Mumbai.

The most unforgiveable aspect of this film is its complete, utter and total inattention to language, to the fact that English is an Indian language but one that is spoken with varying degrees of fluency, and different cadences, accents and intonations in different class locations. (This is something that is incredibly difficult to capture on film, although Nandita Das's Firaaq comes close to doing it best, particularly in the way the upper-middle class characters move from Gujrati to English in mid-sentence).

Now I'm quite prepared to be told a rags-to-riches story that explains how two kids from a slum acquired these markers of class distinction in their adolescence - indeed that is the real story here, not how one of them won a game show after he started speaking English like, well, like me. OK Mr. sociology lecturer, I can hear you say, consider for a moment that Danny Boyle may have been trying to pay tribute to Bollywood, where everything is possible on screen. Possibly, and indeed that offers a way in which to enjoy this film (I loved Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge for exactly that reason). But having heard Boyle claim in a BBC interview that he was perturbed by the description of his latest work as a 'feel good' film and had made it in the best tradition of British realism, I struggle to see this as Bollywood in English (a la Gurinder Chadha's disastrous Bride and Prejudice). And even Bollywood for all its escapism, doesn't violate class rules without some account - however strained - of social mobility. By the time I had accustomed myself to the Cathedral School brats playing grown-up games in the abandoned Tulip Star hotel, they had grown up again - this time morphing into (at least one) British Born Confused Desi struggling to suppress his natural accent on a trip home to his Indian relatives.

You cannot mess with English in India, particularly in a Mumbai slum. Surprisingly, books have managed this much better. Surprising because of course they don't have the luxury of subtitles or dubbing. There have been three big Bombay books with slum plots in the recent past: Gregory Roberts's Shantaram, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Of these, the credibility and integrity of the first two are aided by the fact that they are memoirs/travelogues by English-speaking visitors (or in the case of Mehta, returning natives) to the city. Even when characters who would not normally speak English do so in these accounts, we are prepared to accept that given the intermediation of the English-speaking author-as-reporter. Perhaps also the very medium of written text regularly places greater demands on the imagination, so that we are more willing to suspend disbelief, as compared to cinema which we expect (I expect?) to be more 'real'. But Chandra's Sacred Games is a masterpiece in this regard, in its ability to put English in the mouths of those who would not speak it without violating the reader's sense of credibility. Part of the trick here is his skilful peppering of dialogue with Hindi, Marathi and Punjabi words - untranslated, but so clearly embedded in a context that would allow a non-speaker of these languages to guess at their meaning. Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies attempts a similar multilinguality - multiple Englishes, but also Bhojpuri - although there is a great deal more explicit translation in his text. I am reminded here also of Peter Carey's resolute refusal to translate Australian slang in his novels (no one told me what a chevy was when I was growing up reading American novels, he once shot back at a questioner at Hay-on-Wye). English translations of work by the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o also regularly contain untranslated Gikuyu words, whose meaning has to be guessed from context. But even whatever one loses in momentary incomprehension in these works is more than compensated for by the experience of being immersed in a place as it is - not translated for the foreign reader.

Danny Boyle has it much easier. He could so easily have made a film mostly in Hindi. But Slumdog leaves you with the feeling that after the first few scenes, he got tired of working with actors in another language and took the easy (for him) route. Unfortunately this makes things difficult for an audience, struggling to reconcile what they know about a place with what he tells them. The tragedy of this film is that it begins in a blaze of promise and then leaves you shaking your head in disbelief, desperately willing the characters onward on their incredible journey, but knowing that when you leave the theatre the world will look the same.

inauguration day

2009-01-20T18:14:00.006Z

i am glad i was alive today. the best pictures were not of him. the best words were not his. they came from the incredulous little old ladies of birmingham, alabama, who could barely believe what they were seeing. one managed to whisper, tears streaming down her face, of segregation and the marches and dogs and colored fountains and the klan and lynchings and colored toilets and bussing and fighting to go to school. goodbye to all that.

PS - if you listen very carefully, aretha tells someone to shut up towards the end of the song. brilliant!

Gaza II: the ground invasion

2009-01-06T08:52:00.012Z

13/01: An Amnesty researcher apears to suggest that higher precision capabilities bring with them a higher level of a duty of care.

They have extremely sophisticated missiles that can be guided to a moving car and they choose to use other weapons or decide to drop a bomb on a house knowing that there were women and children inside. These are very, very clear breaches of international law.

***

8/01: An Israeli writes of how he was shocked to learn that the government has allowed in humanitarian aid as a way of fending off international pressure to stop the assault: 'Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them.'

Any hope that the silver lining in the current crisis might have been a hastily forged unity among the Palestinian factions is belied by this account of how Hamas is continuing its crackdown on Fatah members, in addition to executing collaborators and 'common criminals'.

It was chilling and disturbing to hear the Israeli Ambassador to the UK on BBC Hardtalk, contrast what he seemed to regard as the hellish fanatical Gaza with the prosperous booming West Bank. Listening to him, it became increasingly clear that this is Israel's game plan. In public, Israel denies that it wants to bring about regime change, insisting only that it wants rocket firing to stop. But sometimes spokespersons slip up and suggest much more maximalist designs: the elimination of Hamas - either ontologically (they simply don't exist any more) or by rendering them politically irrelevant via the discontent of the people of Gaza (who, it is hoped, will restore their allegiance to Fatah - which the Israelis now speak of as if it were a model interlocutor).

I really have no sense of what is happening in the West Bank. I was disturbed to hear, from dear S, of reports that there had been minuscule protests in Ramallah. There could be many reasons for this. People may simply be too preoccupied with the imperatives of life to have the luxury of protest. Or Fatah may be actively discouraging any meaningful expressions of solidarity. But it boggles the mind to think the Fatah may actually be pleased by the decimation of Hamas. I think I have a very naive view of national liberation politics in which I assume that despite all their differences, the factions in the liberation struggle manage to forge a tactical alliance till the big goal has been achieved. Then they fall upon each other to share the spoils of victory. In the case of Palestine, the big goal has not been achieved. Instead, Oslo heralded a sort of half-victory, or what Edward Said (I think) called, much more cynically, the right to kill mosquitoes and collect garbage in an archipelago of bantustans. Which is what leaves me incredulous: *this* is what they are fighting over?

But perhaps that is a misstatement of the situation. Perhaps running the PA is enough of a prize, enough of an incentive to engender this sort of infighting and disunity. After all, even before the carrot of the quasi-governmental authority of the PA was dangled before the liberation movement, there had been much infighting between factions. Arafat was able to triumph in that struggle through a combination of ruthlessness and cunning. (Unfortunately he seemed to believe that the skills that served him so well in the liberation struggle could also be useful in government - hence the encouragement of factionalism and his own position as a sort of Caesarist figure who was indispensable, could mediate, take final decisions. The result was chaotic, incompetent, clientilistic government. This is all *very* familiar stuff. The tragedy of Palestine is that it happened too early. Before the prize was won.)

There are other things to be depressed about: UNRWA has suspended aid operations in Gaza, and the ICRC reports a horrible incident in which four children were found abandoned and crying near the dead body of their mother.

And I have had more stray thoughts about the laws of war. It's well known that Katyusha and Qassam rockets are crude weapons that cannot be targeted at anything. Hamas fires them in the full knowledge that they will hit civilian installations, but it doesn't - can't - target anything in particular because these weapons aren't guided projectiles. It is therefore incorrect to suggest, as Israeli spokespeople have been saying, that 'Hamas targets our kindergartens'. Again, it's worth repeating that while kindergartens have been hit, it's wrong to say that they have been targeted. Israel on the other hand has sophisticated technology that enables it to punch in GPS coordinates before firing. The UN says that it reported the coordinates of all its facilities, and they have still been hit. Given this great discrepancy in technological capability, it seems to me that Israel bears a higher degree of moral culpability for civilian deaths because it has a greater capacity to avoid them. If you think this is a spurious argument, I would appreciate being told. It's possible that anger has sent my moral compass spinning out of control.

***

7/01: Hugo Chavez is the first head of state to have lodged a decisive public protest against this.

If Israel thinks that our suffering from this siege will make us hate Hamas, they are wrong.

***

6/01:

21.21: THIS is absolutely despicable. Even if Israel thinks Hamas is cynically positioning its fighters behind human shields in civilian locations, it cannot be right under any moral framework to go ahead and bomb those locations in the full knowledge that there are civilians there, and then to simply say 'It's Hamas's fault'. This is not 'collateral damage'. There is an intentionality and a certainty to these acts that puts them closer to wanton murder. I am aware of the doctrine of double effect, which just war theorists will no doubt use to justify these acts. But I think this incident dramatises everything that is sickening about the very doctrine.

*

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the toppling of a democratically elected government (by another democratically elected government - it will be interesting to see how democratic peace theorists worm their way out of this one). It looks like Israeli objectives are hardening even during the course of the campaign.

I have been wondering about the marketing of this campaign: Tzipi Livni is of course in the forefront, as is Avital Liebowich. It's interesting how the Israelis tend to trot out blonde blue-eyed US/European accented spokespeople to explain their utterly reasonable actions to the world (e.g. the Australian accented Mark Regev). When was the last time you saw Mizrahim representing Israel on international TV? See here for more on the gendered marketing of the IDF (sexy women on the English website, praying men on the Hebrew website).

***

5/01: Joseph Massad on ei on the long history of Israeli-Arab collaboration, of which the Gaza massacre is only the latest episode. Why have we heard nothing out of Mahmoud Abbas and the PA?

'When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel.'

2009-01-05T15:57:00.002Z

In case you're wondering why I didn't turn up at school, I'm in a sort of no man's land between ill and well. And blogging is about the only thing I can do lying on my side. I hope you're all going to the Gaza demos.

time out: che

2009-01-04T22:33:00.005Z

The only other film I've seen Benicio del Toro in is Traffic, and it was only when I got home that I realised that like Che, it had also been directed by Steven Soderbergh. There are some striking parallels between the two films. Both are about the relationship between the US and a Latin American country - Mexico in Traffic and Cuba in Che. In both films, the director uses a light filter to distinguish the action in different settings. In Traffic, Mexico looks like a normal place, while the US scenes are shot with tungsten film with no filter, for a cold monochromatic blue feel. In Che, Cuba looks like a normal place, with the US scenes all shot in black and white with a vintage feel to them as if you were looking at old newsreel. I think this is about more than simply distinguishing story lines to help the viewer along. It's no coincidence that the US looks like an artificial, manipulated place in both films, with the other location coming across as warmer, multicoloured, human. The point is perspectival: from the perspective of Mexico/Cuba, this is how the US looks.

del Toro is fabulous. This is an older Che than Gael Garcia Bernal in The Motorcycle Diaries, but somehow also a more credible one. It's possible to see how someone like this (warm, humane, cold, ruthless, driven, dedicated) could have become one of the leading ideologues of one of the world's most successful revolutions. I like that scenes are often accompanied by a voiceover reading from Che's writing on guerrilla war, demonstrating that warfare of this kind is not only a military activity but also a political and intellectual one. Perhaps the line that stays with me most through the whole film is his reply to a reporter's question: what is the one quality that a revolutionary should have? Answer: love. (I'd highly recommend the section on Che in Robert Young's magisterial Postcolonialism: an historical introduction.)

Che is a deely polarising figure and there will inevitably be reviewers who think that the film is too sympathetic to him. I don't think the film sets out to provide a disassionate balance sheet. It's more like an immersion experience: what was it like to be in the Cuban foco? What sort of person joined it and why? And once you did, what did you need to do to win?

Oh and I love that the best actor award at Cannes, which del Toro won, is called the Prix d'interpretation masculin.

Gaza

2009-01-02T13:38:00.002Z

3/01: Karma Nabulsi on life in Gaza these days. Journalists, lecturers, professors of phonetics. All burying their dead. This is a Gaza we never see. People like us.

***

2/01: Yea, happy new year. An intriguing piece on ei that suggests that the real Israeli objective in Gaza is to coopt Hamas and to get it to collude with Israel in the same way that Fatah does.

In practice that would mean taming Hamas rather than crushing it. Whereas Israel is trying to build up Fatah in the West Bank with carrots, it is using the current slaughter in Gaza as a big stick with which to beat Hamas into compliance.
...
Israel apparently hopes to persuade the Hamas leadership, as it did Arafat for a while, that its best interests are served by cooperating with Israel. The message is: forget about your popular mandate to resist the occupation and concentrate instead on remaining in power with our help.

This sort of makes sense to me. That Israel is not aiming at the all-out destruction of Hamas is suggested by the weird phrases it uses to describe the objectives of its current campaign - e.g. 'changing the security situation in southern Israel'.

Israeli human rights organisations are recording harm caused to civilians on this blog, which is beginning to read like a roster of war crimes. Photographic evidence from B'Tselem of the IDF's inability to distinguish between rockets and oxygen cylinders (which, presumably, are desperately needed in hospitals?).

Did you hear Tzipi Livni on TV saying 'there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza'? Sara Roy, writing in the LRB, on the situation in Gaza: not enough food, cooking gas, banknotes, power, diesel, water, sewage treatment. 'How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel?', she asks. What is the definition of a humanitarian crisis?

***

31/12: If you have been missing Palestinian or Palestinian-friendly perspectives on the current crisis, go to The Electronic Intifada. If you read one thing today, let it be this searing indictment of Fatah, Arab governments, and yes even Hamas.

...unnamed sources close to Abbas have been leaking to The Jerusalem Post that if the Hamas government in Gaza falls, PA forces could step into the breach. [5] These are the same forces which the Post revealed earlier this month were "taught over and over again" that they were not being trained to "learn to fight against the Israeli occupation." Rather, according to US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who is overseeing the training of the new PA security forces, it was to focus on "the lawless elements within Palestinian society" (i.e., Hamas). [6] This revelation is hardly surprising and confirms reports over the past year in the US, Israeli, and Arab press of complicity between PA forces with Israel, the US, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to topple the Hamas government and destroy its militia. It is also consistent with the actions of these forces in the PA-ruled West Bank, where Hamas members have been rounded up and arrested with frequent accusations of torture and at least one reported death in custody.
...
Nor has Hamas offered a viable alternative for most Palestinians and they are not blameless in this murderous assault. Their rule of Gaza bears all the hallmarks of their Fatah predecessors: long on rhetoric and short on achievement. Moreover, Hamas has behaved precisely as Fatah did in Gaza during the Oslo period and as it currently does in the West Bank, including arresting and torturing political opponents. Indeed, Hamas has been saved from its own myopia by the ruthlessness of those aligned against it, as the siege has provided the movement with a convenient excuse for its shortcomings. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, Hamas' exiled leader Khaled Meshaal called for a "third intifada." As has been demonstrated repeatedly in Palestinian history an intifada without a unified leadership or a strategy is doomed to fail with dire consequences for the future. Merely calling for an intifada is not the same as planning and preparing for one. If Hamas is to be a viable alternative to Abbas, it must decide if it will continue to adopt the policies and rhetoric of past Palestinian leaders where every failure is an achievement and every disastrous defeat a victory. Otherwise, they have similarly sacrificed their people on the rocks and shoals of tired slogans and empty promises.

So, an updated list of Israeli objectives might look something like this:

1. Destroy Hamas militarily
2. Hope (stupidly) that Fatah will step into the resulting political vacuum
3. Look good for the elections.
4. Exorcise the ghosts of Lebanon, 2006.

Who advises these people?

More Gideon Levy, speaking truth into what feels like a void where no one seems to be listening:

Our finest young men are attacking Gaza now. Good boys from good homes are doing bad things. Most of them are eloquent, impressive, self-confident, often even highly principled in their own eyes, and on Black Saturday dozens of them set out to bomb some of the targets in our "target bank" for the Gaza Strip.

They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead. They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel's weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories. They dropped hundreds of bombs out of blue skies free of all resistance.

***

30/12: Remember Olmert's temporary lapse into sanity? Why do people in government, Mossad, Shin Bet start to sound reasonable in retirement, or on the verge thereof?

Yossi Alpher, a former official at Mossad and a military commentator...was critical of the tough economic blockade Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip in recent years, limiting imports to humanitarian supplies and preventing all exports, a policy that has all but wiped out private industry and brought Gaza's economy to collapse. "The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results," he said. "It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment."

He said that in future Israel would have to choose either to recognise Hamas was around to stay and to talk to the movement, however unpalatable that might be for most Israelis, or to fully reoccupy the Gaza Strip, topple Hamas and bear all the costs involved.

I can't yet tell whether this crisis will cement some sort of unity between Fatah and Hamas. In some bits of this report, the West Bank sounds a world away, almost as if the reality of a 3-state solution were sinking in.

***

18.02: Everything about this war is so depressingly familiar, so predictable, so in accordance with a script you have seen before. You almost know beforehand that Gideon Levy is going to say the most courageous, sensible things. And that few in power are going to listen to him.

More clarity on Israeli objectives. I'm going to update the shopping list as I go along.

1. Destroy Hamas militarily, even if you strengthen them politically.

2. Look good for the elections. (If the current Defence Minister and the current Foreign Minister are going to be leading rival parties into the election, are they going to sing from the same songsheet over the next few weeks? Or are we going to hear contrasting versions of what-I-said-should-have-been-done when the campaigning begins?)

3. Exorcise the ghosts of the 2006 defeat in Lebanon; signal to enemies that Israel is not a paper tiger. (Of course Israel runs all the same risks this time around, though the 'lesson' of 2006 it seems to have learned is that it needs to be more ruthless.)

On a different note, perhaps I was too harsh on the international press earlier. There are some strong pieces in the Independent - Fisk as always, and Johann Hari, whose piece seems to corroborate Amira Hass's claim that there are people in Hamas who accept the existence of Israel:

According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, "told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms." Diskin explained that Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet – high with election fever and eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.

The core of the situation has been starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad. He says that while Hamas militants – like much of the Israeli right-wing – dream of driving their opponents away, "they have recognised this ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future." Instead, "they are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967." They are aware that this means they "will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals" – and towards a long-term peace based on compromise.

Why isn't someone writing this in 10-foot high letters outside Whitehall and the White House? Instead, we get these nauseating mealy-mouthed statements appealing for restraint on both sides.

***

13:46: Israeli objectives seem utterly illogical to me. Even as Israel decimates Hamas as a military force (something it is doing an excellent job of), it strengthens it as a political force. Or it creates the space for something much more monstrous.

As usual, Ha'aretz bravely publishes opinion that one could not dream of reading in the stupid, supine international press. Read this column by Tom Segev; and Amira Hass actually tells us something important that no one is bothering to mention: Israel's policy of assassination has targeted Hamas politicians who accept the two-state solution. So much for the argument that Hamas (all of it) does not recognise the existence of Israel, that there is no one to talk to, and all those usual canards.

***

I am sickened by the nakedly opportunistic behaviour of Israeli politicians. Everyone to the left of Likud wants to look tough on security for the February elections, and bludgeoning Gaza into oblivion is a good way of demonstrating this. Otherwise, it is unclear why Israel thinks this particular assault? attack? massacre? is going to decisively end rocket attacks on Sderot and other cities in the south.

The university, a television station, a mosque, the Interior Ministry - nothing, it seems, is off limits. I don't understand why police stations are being attacked (and of course police stations are going to be in the midst of civilian areas; where else are they supposed to be?) Tzipi Livni has the gall to say Palestinian civilians should leave places where Hamas officials and fighters are known to be located. Gaza is 41 km long and 6-12 km wide. Exactly which part of it is safe and devoid of an official presence?

The international media should stop using Orwellian language like 'disengagement' and 'truce' because these have never been realities in Gaza. The Israelis pulled out their military, but the territory has been blockaded for over 18 months, a democratically elected government has been boycotted. The plan has been to starve people into submission, so that they turn against Hamas and possibly back to what was beginning to be seen as the incompetent, corrupt and collaborationist Fatah. This is a policy of state terrorism, because like the non-state terrorism that is unfailingly brought to our attention, it ignores the distinction between combatants and non-combatants; it indulges in mass collective civilian punishment with a view to achieving political objectives.

Most worryingly from the broader geopolitical point of view, statements made by the various local actors and regional powers in response to this crisis fall into that familiar pattern reinforcing the great divide in Middle Eastern politics between Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria and the March 8 alliance in Lebanon on the one hand, and the US, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Fatah and the March 14 alliance in Lebanon on the other.

Southbank

2008-12-29T00:12:00.003Z

The flu has claimed two weeks of my life. I think I've tended to use the word 'flu' very loosely. I now understand it as an illness in its own right that warrants the grandiloquent four syllabled in-flu-en-za. I have new respect and understanding and loathing for this disease, which killed more people in 1918 than the First World War.

Today was my first excursion into the World, and to cheer myself up I decided to go to the unfailingly uplifting Southbank. I like Southbank a lot. There's something very petulant about the architecture of that stretch of public buildings on the, well, south bank of the river, just north of Waterloo station. I can just picture a bunch of gung-ho postwar labour councillors saying let's be really gutsy and annoying and pour vast amounts of concrete on the riverbank and build really hulking monstrosities in which Everything can be Art. The Hayward Gallery even has a restaurant called Concrete, which features a pink neon light-lined concrete mixer at its entrance. And the semi-subterranean skateboarding arena permanently covered in graffiti seems so purpose-built, so planned, as to suggest a meeting somewhere in pre-Thatcherite Britain featuring earnest councillors allocating money for 'youth culture'.

Today, I went to see the Andy Warhol exhibition Other Voices, Other Rooms, named after a novel written by Truman Capote, who was one of his favourite authors. Predictably, it was weird and brilliant and very colourful. The truth is that I went because I wanted to BUY prints for two empty frames in my bathroom. I feel rather less guilty about the frankly consumerist impulse because I think Warhol would have rather liked this. I wouldn't think this about someone like, say, Rothko, who was so particular about how he was displayed that he is probably turning in his grave on account of the ways in which his images have been manipulated and replicated on all sorts of surfaces and objects. But Warhol is a brand that wants to be everywhere, on everything. I was looking for the prints of Marilyn Monroe and Mao and Jackie Kennedy and flowers, but instead I settled for postcards of Warhol himself. This too he would have liked, because he was obsessed with himself and his image. The publicity material said that Warhol wanted to demystify art so that it looked like anyone could have done it. I think that's a very curious motivation. I can see that there is something wonderful in creating art out of the everyday, the quotidian, the banal. But Warhol was so obsessed with publicity and fame that the last thing he would have wanted was for everyone to be able to do what he did. Actually, his films are so avant garde, so underground, so weird, that there is little danger of this ever happening.

The great thing about Southbank is that you're always spoiled for choice. After Warhol, I just happened to walk by the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the right time to catch the fabulous Puppini Sisters live. If you ever go to the QEH and find that tickets have sold out, stand in the ticket returns queue. You have a very good chance of getting something because 'sold out' almost never means that. The show had the lamest cover act ever. A man stood on the stage playing CDs for an eternity. He drank water from a plastic bottle, sang along occasionally and generally did a terrible job of assuring people that everything was ok. However, the wait was well worth it. The Puppini Sisters do close three-part harmony and excel at making everything, including Crazy in Love, sound like interwar Berlin cabaret. Here's the remix. They have a great band (bass guitar, drummer, double bass) and very good stage chemistry, humour, cheek! The encore was Walk Like an Egyptian.

2008-12-27T11:52:00.001Z

a moment of liberation through the fog of flu. i have the opening, the first page. finally, after all these years. the secret of good writing is to say what you *really* think.

home

2008-12-17T15:52:00.002Z

Reading Susan Sontag's 'On Regarding the Pain of Others' today, I was reminded of that famous line: to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. Arundhati Roy criticises the framing of the Mumbai terror attacks as India's 9/11 and insists on including in the picture everything that we love to forget: Hindu terrorism, Indian nationals involved in terror attacks, innocent people accused of terrorism, the Indian army training terrorist proxies in neighbouring states, and those three elephants in the room - Kashmir, Gujarat and Babri Masjid.

November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

another good israeli film, plus more

2008-12-16T00:10:00.006Z

Hiam Abbass (The Visitor) is in danger of being typecast. In Etz Limon (The Lemon Tree), she plays another stoic Arab woman. But perhaps it is a sign of our times that all the available roles these days for Arab women of a certain age demand stoicism. At any rate, it is a role she plays exceedingly well, this time as a middle-aged Palestinian widow - Salma Zidane - who has the dubious privilege of being neighbour to the Israeli Defence Minister, a smarmy hypocritical character (who, as things stand, could belong to any of the major three parties). Israel's (yes, that's his name) secret service posse has got it into their heads that Salma's lemon grove, which borders his property, poses a threat to the DM as it could serve as cover for anyone wanting to assassinate him. They decide that the grove needs to be cut down. Salma isn't going to take this lying down. She has inherited the grove from her father and has lovingly tended it over the years, with the help of an old family retainer. With her husband dead and her children away or inattentive, it's all she has. The stage is set for a David and Goliath style confrontation between Salma and Israel, in which she takes him to court - all the way, in fact, to Israel's Supreme court - aided by her feisty, rakish lawyer Ziad.

The metaphors and symbols in the film are hard to miss - a boundary dispute, arguments over security, encroachment, and eventually a monstrous wall that is an ugly blot on everyone's landscape and leaves no one feeling safe. Whatever prior political views you come to this film with, you're likely to sympathise with the stoic (there really is no other word), long-suffering Salma. But what makes Etz Limon work is its interest in complicating simplistic landscapes of good and evil. Salma faces a great deal of resistance from her own community - from people who think there are bigger problems than a lemon grove, and more ominously from community elders who seek to snuff out any signs of romance between herself and Ziad. And Israel's wife, wracked with guilt over their inability to be good neighbours to a seemingly harmless Palestinian woman, thinks that sometimes Israel knows no limits. The clever device of giving her husband the same name as the country, means that it's never very clear to us, the audience, whether her frustrations are personal or political or both. I found myself urging her on, wanting her to push her rebellion further and I wondered at the director's unwillingness to make her do more than she does. But that is, I suspect, what makes the film real. For more on director Eran Riklis and his collaboration with Palestinian co-writer Suha Arraf, and of course Israeli-Arab (or should I be saying Palestinian Israeli?) Hiam Abbass, see here.

Jonathan Freedland offers a depressing overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in today's Guardian. Forget about the two state-solution he says, we are beginning to see four states. But when the going gets tough, sometimes it's best to raise the negotiation stakes. If Israelis are becoming increasingly resigned to the status quo and a weak and disunited Palestine can offer nothing that Israel wants, perhaps the only meaningful carrot that can induce Israel to make the necessary hard concessions is the promise of a comprehensive solution to conflict in the region - what David Milliband has been calling a 23-state solution.

In a way, this is similar to what the ICG has been urging the US to do in Iraq. The only way to get Iran and Syria to cooperate in Iraq, it has been saying, is to address the other, non-Iraq related issues that these countries are concerned about, in a manner that goes some way towards recognising their vital interests (something that the US will find difficult and unpalatable). It is a counter-intuitive approach to breaking negotiating deadlock: increase the numbers of actors involved, increase the issues, complicate the agenda - all with a view to striking bargains on a host of other, unrelated issues, that will induce the parties to make the concessions you want on the issues you care about the most.

And since I have gone from Israel to Iraq, I cannot resist linking to Patrick Cockburn's reading of the status of forces agreement in Iraq as a case of unconditional US surrender. I am not so sanguine. The US does non-territorial empire better than anyone else. Sami Ramadani writes that the now (in)famous Iraqi shoe-thrower is a secular, socialist Guevarista who has become a new, non-sectarian symbol of the Iraqi resistance. A text message this morning informed me that while some Iraqis think that he is a hero and should be freed, most think he deserves his jail sentence because he missed.

this is N16/E8: pictures, words, sound, light

2008-12-14T22:49:00.005Z

seeing as the united nations is in recess, there has been time for other things. On friday, my first experience of ska, which sounds like caribbean jazz. at barden's boudoir, which continues to surprise and delight with its utterly random and unexpected line-up of little known and unheralded acts. friday segued into some kind of balkan pop/rock, music that could truly have been from anywhere between bulgaria and baghdad and therefore utterly fitting in dalston, seeing as those far-flung locations were united by the turks.

on saturday, tombstone tales and boothill ballads at the funky arcola theatre. best described as 'graveyard cabaret', this turned out to be a terrifically entertaining evening of stories, music, song, dance and interactive brawling that resurrects the tragic, romantic, comic and downright bizarre inhabitants of the cemetery of the 19th century silver mining town of tombstone, arizona. expect to be seduced, executed and made to sing along by this incredibly talented cast of actors. the arcola is a truly yummy asset to this neighbourhood. its exposed brick walls remind me a bit of the almeida in islington, but the almeida has begun to feel big and swish and established in a way that the arcola is decidedly not. here too there is a turkish connection via its founder, mehmet ergen, who started it up in an abandoned shirt factory on the unprepossessing arcola street (just around the corner from golden scissors).

and several days ago, the very much more depressing but nonetheless brilliant waltz with bashir (now no longer) showing at the rio. as an animated film set in the middle east, comparisons with persepolis are inevitable, but the animation in waltz seems to do a great deal more, functioning as a sort of metaphor for the games that memory plays with us, the haziness, unreliability and sometimes wilful amnesia that tends to surround traumatic events such as those that make up the 1982 war between israel and lebanon. perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the movie is its soundtrack, which often depicts horrific violence to the strains of classical music or army songs with lyrics such as 'today i bombed beirut' sung in the kind of banal, cheerful mode that seems more appropriate to campfires or schoolyards. one connection with persepolis is this role of music, particularly western rock music/metal, serving as a kind of anaesthetic or cocoon in which characters wrap themselves, as if to insulate themselves from the horrors in which they are (sometimes) forced participants. somewhere along the way, the animation morphs into real footage of the events at shabra and shatila. all of the characters in the film, israelis who have served in the IDF, refer to these events as 'the massacres'. somehow, this film feels like a more important and forthright document than the kahan commission report, which held the then israeli defence minister, ariel sharon, personally responsible for permitting the lebanese christian phalangists to murder hundreds, possibly thousands, of palestinian refugees.

2008-12-01T19:21:00.007Z

I thought it would be a good idea for Indian readers of this blog to get a sense of a typical day in Pakistan, so here goes: 28 dead in sectarian violence in Karachi, security forces battle militants in Bajaur (9 dead), a gunbattle in Bannu between security forces and theTaliban leaves 11 dead, security forces had to intervene in a clash involving rockets and automatic weapons between two groups of the Marri tribe in Kohlu (3 dead), and those are just from the top stories in the Dawn. On a good day.

Clearly this is a government battling multiple forces on multiple fronts that can barely hold itself together. Launching or threatening to launch attacks on Pakistani soil at this time is going to divert the government's attention from the battle in Waziristan against the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Any attempt to weaken the Pakistani government at this time risks creating a massive black hole of a failed state from the border with India all the way to Iran. Sounds like a jihadi wet dream.

Fortunately, saner voices seem to be prevailing in South Block. The key sentence is:

India’s response, [sources] said, would distinguish between the government of Pakistan, whose President Asif Ali Zardari came on Indian television last night and promised to co-operate, and organisations or agencies alleged to be involved in a terror network.

But here's a snapshot of the internal debate within the Congress (is it my imagination or is only The Telegraph reporting the really important stuff?):

The CWC hawks suggested snapping of diplomatic ties with Pakistan, ending trade, and even calling off the bus service. Some wondered aloud about a military option, provoking an angry response from Pranab.

The foreign minister reminded the gathering about some “basics”, such as that India and Pakistan were nuclear nations and any “adventurism” would draw global attention. The meeting left it to Manmohan to decide on all diplomatic and military options.

CWC members said the party needed to be aggressive since every leader realised how the Congress was losing face and credibility.

Thumbs up to Pranab; thumbs down to the hawks (by all accounts this includes Rahul Gandhi) who clearly simply want to put on an aggressive show for the 'something must be done' brigade, regardless of the consequences for interstate relations and the global struggle against jihadi militancy (my euphemisms for GWOT are becoming increasingly unsatisfactory).

Oh and for every Simi, there's a Sharmila Tagore (watch the whole thing). This whole 'Enough is Enough' campaign is all very well, but the anger needs to be channeled into something productive. Not war-mongering and communal tension.

where now for India-Pakistan?

2008-11-30T21:11:00.004Z

Watched the latest episode of NDTV's 'We the People'. Some of the militaristic bullshit that the audience is spouting is seriously disturbing. Leading the pack is the fabulously deranged Simi Garewal, who thinks that the fact that the US has not experienced a major terrorist attack since 9/11 suggests that we should follow its example and 'carpet bomb' those areas of Pakistan in which terrorist camps are located. She also suggests that a camera crew be taken to the Four Seasons hotel: look down at the slums below, she says, and tell me what flag they are flying. They are not flying the flag of the Congress, they are not flying the flag of the Shiv Sena or the BJP. They are flying the flag of Pakistan. This was the moment at which the programme descended into chaos as one member of the audience wisely (if somewhat shrilly, but who can blame him?) pointed out that people like Simi were the problem. Fortunately, Simi Garewal is not widely regarded as an expert in foreign policy. Nonetheless, what was disturbing was the applause that her remarks generated. One can hardly blame politicians for sounding hawkish when there seems to be a bottom-up demand for such posturing.

Explaining why this is wrong requires a brief history lesson. For most of its post-independence existence, as a relatively weak state in a rough geopolitical neighbourhood, Pakistan has relied on proxies to do its dirty work: the mujahideen in Afghanistan to put in place a government of its choosing that would (i) stop irritating Pakistan by fomenting Pashtun nationalism; (ii) provide 'strategic depth' west of the Indus, giving the Pakistani army space in which to regroup in the event of an invasion by India. The other set of proxies that it relied on were a host of jihadi groups in Kashmir, who could engage the Indian state in a grinding, low-intensity war that would have a better chance of wearing it down than a short, sharp inter-state conflict that Pakistan would inevitably lose.

With 9/11, key elements of the Pakistani establishment (read: Musharraf and the technocrats) re-evaluated these long-standing policies. The increasing Talibanisation of politics in Pakistan's northwest frontier and sectarian warfare in the cities were ample evidence that the chickens of Cold War policy were coming home to roost. US pressure on Pakistan to cooperate in the 'war on terror' constituted a final and decisive push to reverse the old policies.

The problem is that states do not speak with one voice, and weak states even less so. The fragility of Pakistan's ruling elite (Musharraf and even more, Zardari) means that these reversals of policy cannot be stamped decisively on the apparatus of state as a whole. The very uncertainty of their hold on power makes it difficult for them to root out renegade elements and rotten veins in the army and the ISI. This in turn exacerbates India's lingering mistrust, despite frequent protestations of cooperation and clean hands by those in Pakistan who claim that they are in charge.

A belligerent Indian response to this situation would make it even more difficult for moderate Pakistani elites to crack down on jihadi elements within the Pakistani state and society. The Pakistani state has rendered itself deeply unpopular in the eyes of its own people whenever it has appeared to be engaged in counterinsurgency/counterterrorism operations at the behest of an external actor such as the US. This will hold even truer if the demand comes from India. A belligerent India, pointing an accusing finger at the entirety of the Pakistani state and threatening to bomb the shit out of it might satisfy rightwing hotheads in India. But rather than strengthening the moderates in Pakistan, it will compel them to shift rightwards and make common cause with extremists against the 'Indian threat', thereby losing the goodwill of even the most cooperative elements of the Pakistani state.

Should India feel the need to engage in coercive diplomacy (surrender the people we want for questioning, or else...) it needs to do this very discreetly. Its public diplomacy should be all about making common cause with Pakistan. This shouldn't be difficult to do. The facts speak for themselves. If news reports are to be believed, RDX caches in some of the Taj rooms suggest a plot to blow up the hotel in what would appear to be an imitation of the spectacularly successful attack on the Marriott at Islamabad. Islamabad and Mumbai are twins in tragedy. We feel your pain, we should be saying. Whether we can move beyond the rhetoric to begin sharing intelligence and cooperating in more meaningful ways in counterterrorism operations will depend on whether the deep and long-running mistrust between our intelligence agencies can be overcome.

In the meanwhile, here's a concrete policy proposal: tell Simi to shut up.

2008-11-30T16:24:00.002Z

'"The Indian Jewish identity is the only one that hasn't been created by persecution," he said. "We've never felt scared. This is the first time we've been made to feel like Jews." That, to me, has been among the most tragic casualties of this terrorist attack. In a barrage of grenades and bullets, a part of the Indian dream that's 2,500 years old has now been buried in a pile of bloody concrete shards.'

Another reason I am shaking with rage. The full story here (H/t, Amitava Kumar).

2008-11-29T18:07:00.002Z

This time, I can't do anguish, breast-beating, or sheer expressions of horror. There's enough of that going on. Be angry at the Lashkar by all means, but spare some for the twats we elect to run things.

Praveen Swami outlines the staggering intelligence failures that enabled these events. The Government of India had access to intelligence that suggested that Lashkar-e-Taiba was planning attacks from the sea on the western seaboard. Here's the horrifically important banal stuff:

'Based on these warnings, New Delhi moved to step up coastal counter-infiltration measures. In its 2007-2008 Annual Report, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs detailed the measures put in place for “strengthening coastal security arrangements, to check infiltration.” In liaison with the nine coastal States and Union Territories, it said, funds had been earmarked to set up “73 coastal police stations which will be equipped with 204 boats, 153 jeeps and 312 motorcycles for mobility on coast and in close coastal waters. The coastal police stations will also have a marine police with personnel trained in maritime activities.”

Precise figures are unavailable, but officials in three States told The Hindu that progress in realising the scheme was painfully slow. Both Maharashtra and Gujarat inaugurated over a dozen coastal police stations over the last year, but neither State set up a trained marine police. Fewer than a dozen new boats were made available to the two police forces. Without sophisticated surveillance equipment fitted on board, their use for counter-infiltration work was at best rudimentary. And while the Intelligence Bureau received sanction for hiring small numbers of new personnel to man new costal surveillance stations last year, it got neither boats nor observation equipment.'

And there were staggering operational failures. NDTV has just reported that the NSG has no dedicated aircraft to ferry commandos to sites where they might be needed. Instead, they had to wait for a plane to be made available and did the last leg of their journey by bus. BY BUS!

Moving on. Every life lost everywhere is equally significant and equally worthy of commemoration. But it took Shyam Benegal to ask Barkha Dutt why the media were focusing relentlessly on the victims at the Taj (and, to a lesser extent, the Oberoi). What about those who lost their lives at VT? Are they to remain faceless?, he asked. A chastened Barkha acknowledges that there seems to be a class dimension to the solidarity and empathy we are expressing.

The gold medal for bullshit goes to Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga for his memorialisation of the attack on the Taj:

One of the differences between India and other countries is that a lot of our civic space is contained within the five-star hotels. They have a different function here for us, they are places where marriages happen, where people of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee.

Is he fucking nuts?

Mumbai: why?

2008-11-27T21:51:00.006Z

Mumbai is no stranger to mass terror, but there is something different about the outrage that began unfolding on the night of November 26, 2008. Although motives are difficult to discern with any precision through the clouds of speculation, allegation and jihadi propaganda that swirl around such incidents, previous instances of terror are thought to have been motivated by decidedly local considerations. The March 1993 serial bomb blasts in which 13 bombs exploded virtually simultaneously in key buildings all over the city, were widely believed to have been carried out in retaliation for the massacre of Muslims in the riots that engulfed the city in December '92 / January '93, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya . Likewise the August 2003 car bombs which killed more than 50 people, and the July 2006 commuter train bombings which left over 200 dead, were thought to have been executed in revenge for the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. And there have of course been scores of terrorist incidents that have been linked to long-running separatist movements in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and elsewhere.

The latest fidayeen-style attack diverges from this pattern in some key respects. Although the vast majority of those killed were Indians, a number of the targets (the Taj and Oberoi hotels, Café Leopold, Nariman House) appear to have been chosen for the fact that they were frequented by business and tourist travellers from abroad. The group responsible for the attack (a little known outfit calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen) sent an email to Indian media organisations declaring that 'this attack is a reaction to those actions that Hindus have been carrying out since 1947'. 'Hindus now give up thinking that martyring of Muslims' mosques, weakening Muslims' economic conditions through riots, and putting educated youths in prison will weaken the confidence. No, not at any cost…' it says, signing off, somewhat oddly, as the Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan, as if to distinguish its alleged provenance in the Indian city of Hyderabad from a city of the same name in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Despite these apparently local grievances, as the media have repeated ad nauseum, these were also attacks against international targets. Eyewitnesses report that the gunmen in the hotels were particularly interested in people with British and US passports. Café Leopold is a favourite haunt of Western backpackers and local bohemia. And Nariman House was the location of the local office of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish movement.

Jihadi rhetoric has typically distinguished between the 'far enemy' (the US, Israel or the 'West' more generally) and the 'near enemy' (a designation that usually refers to Muslim 'apostate' governments and other local targets). The curious mixture of targets evidenced in the words and deeds of the Deccan Mujahideen suggests a relatively novel conflation of India (described very pointedly in Hindu majoritarian terms) with the 'far enemy'. Why has this happened, and why has it happened now?

It cannot merely be a coincidence of timing that an attack like this occurs at a time when India has decisively overturned its historic post-independence policy of non-alignment and edged ever closer into the US strategic embrace. The recently concluded Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement is only the latest in a series of moves that suggest the emergence of a strategic alliance. In recognition of India's strategic value (read: its potential utility in balancing China), the US has effectively legitimised India's possession of nuclear weapons by negotiating an agreement whereby it becomes the only nuclear NPT non-signatory in the world to be permitted to engage in international civilian nuclear commerce. India's quid pro quo for this special treatment is only beginning to become evident, in the form of a foreign policy that is steadily less independent (exhibit 1: India's obliging vote against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency, reversing a historic and principled stand against a world of 'nuclear apartheid' divided into nuclear haves and have-nots). The nuclear deal is only one element, albeit an important one, in this emerging alliance. Less commented on, but perhaps more far-reaching, is the India-US Defence Framework Agreement, under which the two countries have promised to enter into hitherto unprecedented levels of military cooperation. As the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan has reported, the agreement reflects the Bush administration's desire to outsource some of the lower-end aspects of security management in Asia to India (peacekeeping, search and rescue operations, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, etc.), thereby freeing itself to concentrate its resources on high-end fighting missions. In return, the agreement goes some way towards satiating India's thirst for advanced military technology. Indeed the sale of US military technology to India enables 'interoperability' between the two militaries, satisfying the objectives of both parties.

These seismic shifts in India's foreign policy alignment are no longer merely the stuff of discussion between foreign office mandarins or elite coffee table conversation. In July 2008, the Left parties withdrew parliamentary support to the ruling Congress party as an expression of their opposition to the nuclear deal with the US, precipitating a crisis in which for the first time, a national government teetered on the verge of collapse on an issue of foreign policy. You might describe this, depending on your politics, as the moment in which foreign policy was democratised or made populist. But even before this, these events seem to have registered on the jihadi consciousness as confirmation that India had joined what they have long described as the 'Crusader-Zionist alliance'. In June 2007, an organisation calling itself 'al-Qaeda in India' delivered a CD to the Srinagar-based Current News Service. It featured the usual masked man reading a statement, part of which read as follows: 'America was trying to equip India with sophisticated arms and nuclear capability and Allah had already warned the Muslims against this unholy nexus among the infidels against the Muslims. America, Israel and other western nations in collaboration with India were trying to divide Kashmir to gain hegemony in the region and set up military bases in this region. We declare Jihad against India.'

Whether or not the statement was made by the 'real' al-Qaeda, the remnants of which are probably holed up in the Waziristan region of northwest Pakistan, or emanated from an autonomous group that was merely claiming the 'brand' is not my concern here. Nor is the rather confused political analysis of the statement itself. What is significant is that the Government of India is increasingly seen not merely as an agent of local oppression against Muslims in places like Kashmir and Assam. Rather, it is perceived as a strategic partner in the global configuration of power that jihad attacks.

There may be reasons to welcome India's growing profile in international affairs, but those of us who do, would do well to remember that greater power inevitably breeds greater resentment. In our rush to curry favour with the US, we would be foolish to neglect the costs of being seen to be too close to a deeply resented actor on the world stage. This doesn't mean that we should let al-Qaeda dictate our foreign policy. But it should caution us that our quest for greater power in the world and the means by which we are currently pursuing it do not seem to be delivering greater security for the Indian people.

Policy analysts have a deplorable tendency to interpret crises in ways that reinforce their worldviews: there's nothing like a disaster to say 'I told you so!'. And perhaps I am guilty of the same, in that the current crisis merely serves to confirm my already considerable misgivings about the direction of Indian foreign policy. There is a sense in which I could be very wrong, but it is not one that should give anyone cause for comfort. Some of the most astute observers of contemporary global jihad (Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad) have suggested that it cannot be understood in political terms at all. If political acts are distinguished by a sort of means-ends rationality in which the act is intended as an instrument to achieve a particular vision of society, global jihad no longer demonstrates this, if it ever did. Its purveyors have no coherent vision of a utopia they seek to construct, they are not concerned with the creation of political parties, revolutions, ideological states or collective modes of solidarity of any sort. Rather, acts of jihad are conceived as demonstrations of faith performed for God by an individual, as individual ethical acts rather than collective political ones. The modern jihadi is animated by a volatile mixture of emotions and experiences: an existential angst familiar to twenty-somethings the world over, an alienation from the societies in which they live, and a disillusionment with the metanarratives and certainties of the traditional organisations of political Islam. It is a heady cocktail, not hugely dissimilar to the emptiness and disenchantment that leads young people in the developed world to abandon organised party politics in search of individual, ethical ways of 'doing good', in movements against globalisation or for the environment, aided by the tools of globalisation. An understanding of global jihad as ethical rather than political is infinitely more troubling: if it isn't about politics, it is hard to see what politicians can do.

Yet even if we cannot adequately describe the motivations of those who feel compelled to end their lives in orgies of death and destruction, in the secular and materialistic categories of western political science, there is a great deal that the state can and should be doing to protect its citizens from acts of wanton murder. Perhaps the most distressing stories that have come out of this tragedy are those of staggering intelligence failures: Praveen Swami writes of intelligence briefings, only half-acted upon, that suggested that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba was planning attacks from the sea on India's western seaboard. News channels have been commenting on operational failures, one of which seems to have been that the heroic commandos of the National Security Guard possessed no dedicated aircraft that could have ferried them swiftly to the sites of attack. Be angry at the terrorists by all means, but spare some of your outrage for the great big lumbering Indian state which has, yet again, been caught napping.

modified 30 November 2008

2008-11-26T21:59:00.001Z

how the FUCK is cafe leopold supposed to defend itself?

2008-11-06T16:53:00.004Z

The wise Alice Walker's advice to President-elect Obama.

Oh and prop 8 can go to hell. This morning I woke up thinking there could be a gay President, in my lifetime. But in the meantime, there is work to be done. See this excellent piece in the Nation, which helps make sense of the fact that '70 percent of African-Americans voted Yes on 8, as did 53 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asians', without making the racist claim that non-white people are inherently and inescapably homophobic.

2008-11-05T04:35:00.000Z

Nous sommes tous americains.

election day

2008-11-04T12:56:00.004Z

There have been many moments in this presidential race when I have felt rather alienated from the excitement. By the time I came around to supporting him, tentatively it has to be said, Oxford was already swept up in a tidal wave of Obamamania. I was/am irritated by the facile assumptions that a Democratic victory would change everything for the better - a view that neglects the bipartisan consensus on a lot of the bullshit that forms a kind of bedrock for US foreign policy (leader of Free World etc.). I am concerned that with all the excitement over individual agents, we lose sight of structural constraints - the pathways that leaders are locked into by previous decisions - thereby setting ourselves up for immense and inevitable disappointment. I was ambivalent about the extent to which I should attempt to influence, in my own small way, the electoral process of a sovereign state: yes it affects me too, but participation seems like acquiescence in its imperial overlordship (what did anti-colonial nationalists do everytime there was an election in Westminster? lobby? fundraise? sit on the sidelines?). And a very tiny part of me is, frankly, terrified by the prospect of an Obama victory: what happens when tremendous power is harnessed to tremendous legitimacy? The only thing worse than an unpopular emperor is a popular one.

But when all the caveats are made and reservations entered, when I have worked through my Gramscian intellectual pessimism and gotten around to thinking from another place in my head, the hugeness of the moment is blindingly obvious. If Obama wins (and I say if because I am worried about the illegal aunt, the Bradley effect, faulty voting machines, weary voters, bad weather, a terrorist attack, swiftboats, hanging chads, Supreme Court judges, an act of fricking God) - if Obama won, many things will not change and in some ways everything will change. These days when I read Martin Luther King's words, I hear Obama's voice. This is, quite simply, a moment of renewal for the nation, a chance to deepen its democracy. Please, even if the queues are four hours long today, vote Obama.

Problem with the Olympics? Shut up and go to an independent bookstore you silly twit

2008-10-22T08:09:00.004+01:00

Ugh, I am so furious about Iain Sinclair not being allowed to speak in Hackney because of his previous criticism of Olympics 'regeneration', that I wrote to the Mayor. This is what I said:

'I write to register my protest at the recent 'disinvitation' of Iain Sinclair from an event at Stoke Newington library, where he was to speak about his forthcoming book on Hackney. The idea that Hackney Council should not host events at which controversial opinions are aired strikes me as ludicrous. How, in the view of the Council, is democracy supposed to work if issues of public interest cannot be discussed in public spaces? What public interest is served by driving dissent into private spaces?

Why does the Council think that the mere hosting of an event on its premises would amount to an endorsement of the views expressed? Does Hackney Council endorse every single opinion expressed in every single book that it stocks on its library shelves? Does the Council seriously think that people are so - what is the right word here? - daft, that they would assume from a few critical words spoken at an event held within the precincts of the council library, that Hackney Council has suddenly changed its mind about hosting the Olympics in 2012?

During the recently concluded Beijing Olympics, it was not uncommon to hear a certain barbed appreciation of the Chinese government's efforts from voices in the British establishment (both government and media): 'they managed to run a great show because they're a totalitarian government'. Hasn't the British government taken hypocrisy to new heights by criticising the Chinese government for its record on human rights but suppressing exactly the sames sorts of dissent at home?

As a resident of Hackney, I am particularly appalled by the thought that the £82 I am expected to cough up every month in these times of ever increasing financial difficulty might be used to run council services in a propagandistic fashion.

I look forward to having this curious decision explained to me a bit more persuasively than it has been so far. Or better still, reversed.

Best wishes,
***** ***

The issue has been taken up by bloggers galore. I decided to use the word 'curious' in the last sentence because I am trying to speak like the English - as in 'what a curious lack of judgment' = 'what bullshit'. You also have to use words like 'appalled' instead of disgusted, revolted, or puke-choked. Although one good English word is gobsmacked. Maybe I should have said gobsmacked.

______________

The mayor writes back: (comments anyone?)

Dear Mr Rao

Re: Iain Sinclair

Thank you for your email regarding the above matter.

Iain Sinclair is well known as an author who has expressed controversial opinions on local issues. A decision was taken to withdraw an invitation to launch his forthcoming book in a Hackney library, as a result of his recently published, largely negative comments about regeneration in the borough and the 2012 Olympic Games.

The Council is working hard to create a thriving new neighbourhood at Hackney Wick, including affordable new homes, business space, sports facilities and green spaces. The Council views the 2012 Games as an opportunity to regenerate and revitalise this area of Hackney, and therefore does not wish to be seen to support or condone views contradictory to these aims, such as those of Mr Sinclair.

I wish to emphasise that in no way is the Council seeking to ban Mr Sinclair’s book, prevent it from being stocked in Hackney libraries once published, nor is it fettering free speech. The matter was one of whether it was right for the Council to be actively promoting such views when not part of a balanced debate.

The Council recognises there are various views on the 2012 Games, and is not seeking to curtail free speech or freedom of opinion within Hackney. Indeed the Council welcomes public discussion on such matters and has not just taken part but helped organise debates on these very issues with different sides making contributions, both for and against. However, that in no way describes a “one-sided” commercial book launch in a public library that could easily be misconstrued as an endorsement by the local authority of the writer’s views.

The Council was never against Mr Sinclair launching his book in the borough and were always happy to suggest suitable Hackney venues to his publishers. I understand that Mr Sinclair has now chosen to launch his title in Pages of Hackney, the borough’s latest and recently opened independent bookshop.

In addition, the Council is writing to Mr Sinclair’s publisher to invite him to speak at an alternative event next year. This will be held at a Council venue, with the exact format and date to be decided, but unlike the promotional book launch it will present a balance of different views.

Yours sincerely

Jules Pipe
Mayor of Hackney

culture shock

2008-10-10T13:24:00.002+01:00

exiting the lecture theatre, i am greeted by a wall of sound: salsa in the foyer. outside, students yell into megaphones about the credit crunch.

2008-09-26T08:50:00.002+01:00

the jordanian news anchor, the development consultant from mumbai, the west point cadet, the greek woman from shanghai, the palestinian employee of OCHA, the british recruiter from brussels, the american in togo, the canadian-french-singaporean educated graduate student, the boy from oxford (not me). the united nations have arrived.

crystal ball

2008-09-22T21:27:00.003+01:00

I am glad to see that someone is responding to ongoing developments in Pakistan with humour (thanks to dear S for the link). I am very depressed about Pakistan. There have been no major attacks by al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia for at least the last couple of years and the network has been severely weakened in Iraq. But the key front in the 'war on terror' has now moved to Pakistan, at a time when its military is more unpopular (domestically) than it has probably ever been in its history and its civilian administration is led by a powerful crook whom almost nobody trusts. Benazir might have been able to hold things together, but Asif Zardari certainly cannot. I am not one to look into crystal balls, but my sense is that things will get a lot worse in places like the Swat valley. There will be no formal secessions, just long, grinding counterinsurgency that leaves no victors. Two things will happen, are beginning to happen. (i) US counter-insurgency operations will increasingly violate Pakistani sovereignty, making it ever more difficult for any administration in Islamabad to cooperate with the US (this will hold equally true, perhaps more true, for an Obama administration). (ii) The US will increasingly begin to see India as the key stable partner in the region. As Pakistan implodes, the US will become ever more serious about military cooperation with India, with a view to containing the festering sore of Islamic radicalism in the region. The most important dimensions of the developing Indo-US relationship are not those which concern civilian nuclear cooperation, but the less discussed side agreements on military cooperation and interoperability, which will pave the way for India to become a key regional military ally in a way that is reminscent of Pakistan's role during the Cold War. The irony will be that in the 'war on terror', India will be the new Pakistan.

2008-09-17T18:29:00.003+01:00

In these days of mind-bogglingly bizarre news, this was a rare bright spot: not the 10 best or worst places to be gay, but the five most improved places for gay tolerance. Look who heads the list. Of course if you were a woman, Delhi continues to be one of the most stifling and life-threatening places on the planet.

this is N16

2008-09-14T01:24:00.004+01:00

The book is getting written and in the meanwhile, I am shamed into working by the abundance of talent around me. Just heard the Don Weller Quartet at the Vortex Jazz Club, which is down the road from me. At £12, tickets seemed a bit too pricey for Dalston, but the music was smooth and sexy and sophisticated and the audience intently appreciative (but have you ever noticed how real jazz afficionados don't dance?). The quartet comprised three grizzly old men and a BOY playing what i usually consider the old man instrument - the double bass. Jazz is the new sound of my life. Goes well with wooden floors and period features. Am mining dear S's old CDs - Ella and Louis Armstrong and Bebel Gilberto and Getz & Gilberto and Marlene Dietrich are all getting a good hearing. Saw The Duchess at the Rio a couple of days ago. The Guardian review seemed to think it made Georgiana look simpering and victimised and took all the politics out of her. I think I agree, though I felt for the character - all the characters as a matter of fact, including the manically misogynistic duke played by Ralph Fiennes who seemed as much a victim of the social codes of his time. The Rio is a fabulous art deco cinema with a big curved ceiling that makes you feel like you are sitting inside a gigantic clam. I have to pinch myself to believe this is all on my doorstep. I think I'm going to give up on my LoveFilm membership. It livened up the evenings in the old life, but somehow doesn't seem necessary anymore. Entertainment is becoming public. Almost no one in my new gym (populated entirely by Caribbean, Turkish and East European men and costing £20 something per month, if you have an annual membership) carries an iPod, and the communal music is played really loud. It's a great basic place - just a big room with a corrugated iron roof, but packed with equipment and full of very friendly people, including some who talk to you and spot for you when they think you need their help, without your asking (this has never happened to me before!). And the great thing about living in an Afro-Caribbean area is that you no longer have to buy latin music - you simply have to fling your windows open most days. Saw Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray at Sadler's Wells last weekend (ok this is outside N16, but only slightly). As these pictures and videos will attest, the show gets 5* for gorgeous eye candy. The first thing that needs to be said is that Richard Winsor in his underwear makes the audience lean forward in a collective gasp, wanting to reach out and hold his luscious perfect butt. This funky contemporary reworking of Oscar Wilde's obviously timeless narrative, re-set in the London fashion world (it's so ironic that these gorgeous people are probably playing themselves), will make anyone who has never watched ballet before a regular. It's hedonistic, dark, nihilistic, beautiful and self-combusts in a ball of white heat. Watch this if you like boys, Bourne, dancing or Oscar. I'm drunk on this neighbourhood.

this is N16

2008-08-27T22:14:00.003+01:00

The barber spoke no English, but fortunately one of the other three did and translated for me. Scissors, no clippers, short on the sides and back, longer on top. The same instructions I have given barbers since I was old enough to get my hair cut without adult supervision. There was one little boy in the salon who was clearly too young to be there on his own, but his shy smile suggested either that he knew the barbers or found the whole exercise of having his hair cut extremely amusing. He got to sit on a plank of wood that raised him to a manageable height for the translating barber and was also covered with a special yellow kiddy bib with cartoon characters. I've never been good at instructions for barbers. Some want clipper numbers and I can never remember whether the lower numbers mean shorter hair or the other way around. Others seem satisfied with less exact descriptions of length, but some demand a bewildering array of specifications - shape, depth, texture, straightness or lack thereof. With my Turkish dude, I was having trouble getting across the bare minimum. Once he took my glasses off, I couldn't even keep track of what he was doing visually. Everyone else in the salon was Turkish, except for a one-armed black guy - but he was getting his head shaved completely, so his linguistic abilities didn't seem particularly relevant. My head is dunked forward into a basin and warm water run through my hair, shampooed, massaged, toweled dry. There is something very sensuous about having your hair washed in the middle of a working day. I think it's the feeling of droplets of water trickling down your earlobes and neck when the rest of you is fully clothed. It doesn't seem right somehow, deliciously transgressive, out of place. My dude begins working furiously on my hair and goes on for quite a while. No conversation (obviously), just his hands gently and firmly pushing my head this way and that. Shave? No. I think he's finished and get up to go, but he smacks me back into the chair. Out comes a razor and he takes the hair off the nape of my neck and from behind my ears. Then he fishes out a little agarbati-like wick, lights it and SINGES THE HAIR OFF MY EARS. At first I smile because of the novelty of this method of hair removal, but then it gets fucking scary. This has got to be in violation of some EU health and safety directive, I think. Doesn't Turkey want to join the EU? But he's done before I can contemplate my petition to the ECJ. Next he fishes out a pair of scissors and clips away at stray nasal hair. What next? Trim my pubes? Back into the basin for another shampoo and towelling. Upright again. Blow dry and comb. The razor is fished out again and slapped against the comb so that every eager little hair poking out of my head in the wrong places gets the chop. So much has been done, that I'm not sure what I have left (the glasses are still off). Next, before I can refuse, wax. Just a little to mess things up a bit. He squeezes a few drops of aftershave onto his hands, rubs them together and slaps my face. OUCH! {tingle} A few jets of manly perfume in all the right places, towels removed and I am ready to go. £13. Whew, relief. Almost exactly the same as the non-concessionary rate in Oxford. I put on my glasses. He's got it exactly right. Something has been gained in translation. I walk out of the salon smelling like India (specifically like the Hamaam/Lifebuoy demographic).

[To judge the results, come to my party on Friday. And if you want the same, you'll find this place on Stoke Newington Road, on the right if you're heading north, just after Arcola St. I'll go back and find out the name of the place tomorrow.]

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

2008-08-24T11:49:00.003+01:00

The departure of one Pakistani dictator seemed as good a time as any to read a novel about the end of another. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a rollicking good read, a blackly comic political thriller about the plot to assassinate General Zia. Or rather the multiple, intersecting, but essentially quite distinct plots. Even though I was only 10 when Zia died, I remember him as a BAD MAN who was often in the news. It wasn't just that he was the dictator of a country on the wrong side of our border, it was his slicked back hair with its sinister centre parting, his droopy snake-like eyes, the thin wiry mustache and the gleaming white teeth, all of which morphed into something half feline and half reptilean. He would have made an ideal Hindi movie villain with no make up at all. In the novel, Zia isn't the cruel sadistic character of my childhood imagination, but a fanatical, deranged and slightly ridiculous man. There are some unforgettable scenes that capture some of the high farce of the Cold War - fundraising balls in Texas for the Afghan jihad; Osama bin Laden attending a fancy dress party at the US Ambassador's residence in Islamabad dressed in a suit; Zia bending over for a rectal examination from the Saudi royal physician, his face on his desk between the flags of Pakistan and the Pakistani army (Pakistan getting fucked by Saudi money?). And throughout, the narrative superbly conjures up that mixture of intrigue, sycophancy and instability that has been the stuff of Pakistani politics for too long. Move over Shame, this is the new best novel about Pakistan.

2008-08-19T15:55:00.000+01:00

the sheer fucking gorgeousness of the olympics.

2008-08-08T10:42:00.000+01:00

signing out from oxford. i am sad.

the single best thing I have blogged ever

2008-08-05T09:57:00.004+01:00

Pranitha, an 18 year old girl from my ancestral village is going to the Olympics to represent India in the archery event. RDF is run by my family. And the story was written by my sister.

so much to do, so little time

2008-07-25T12:12:00.002+01:00

no guts, no glory -
52 locations, 52 days.
what problem? no problem.

- Mira Nair's mantra, while making the amazing Salaam Bombay

Indo-US Nuclear deal

2008-07-22T13:46:00.013+01:00

22/07: This is not a time for blogging. Only live TV can show you what Vinod Mehta calls the 'cattle market out there'. Far from being depressed, I am taking a a sort of nihlistic pleasure in watching how low our elected representatives can sink. No words are being minced, euphemisms have been thrown out of the window. 25 crores is the going rate for an MP's vote, and while we are used to hearing these things, now MPs are rushing to the well of the house with wads of cash as evidence that they have been bribed.

Shekhar Gupta: if someone high up in the JMM scandal (remember? we have been here before. so many times.) if someone high up in the JMM scandal had gone to jail, this would not have happened.

When I was a kid and read news reports of Parliamentary proceedings (I did not do this often) or heard that 'MPs rushed to the well of the House', I used to think that there was a well on the grounds of Parliament and that the MPs were threatening to commit suicide by jumping into it if their demands were not met. This seemed entirely plausible to me and in the highest traditions of Gandhian self-sacrifice. Alas, I thought too highly of them.

14:15 - feeling slightly better. Watching MPs trying to make themselves heard over the din of chanting, protesting fellow members is actually quite a moving and riveting sight (when they talk sense). Mehbooba Mufti gave up in frustration, but Omar Abdullah was actually pretty good (even though I think I disagree with his position on the deal) - supports the deal and distances himself from both the Left (who arrogate to themselves the position of being the only defenders of Muslims/secularism, he says) and the BJP (regrets that he did not resign after Gujarat, when he was a minister in the NDA govt. I should have listened to my conscience, he says.). He will be one to watch.

14:27 - Salman Khursheed says some things are legitimate inducements for votes (projects for constituencies, cabinet positions), and other things are not (cash).

What is becoming very clear is that the debate in Parliament today is not about the deal. It's too much of a coincidence that everybody who is against the deal just happens to be in favour of early elections. This is already about the next elections and all positions are being taken with that larger(?) aim in mind.

14:34 - Manmohan Singh looks like a sphinx.

14:41 - overwhelming mood of cynicism in the NDTV studio. All the panelists are laughing wryly at the amounts of money involved. This is all stage managed by the opposition to make the vote look tainted, Jayanti Natarajan insists. Why have the alleged bribe amounts dropped?someone asks. Maybe because once the opposition realised that the UPA was winning, the asking amounts for support reduced. So they decided to stage manage with 1 crore instead of 25. Nice.

14:59 - HOW DOES THE FUCKING COUNTRY GET RUN IF THE MPS BEHAVE LIKE THIS?! Poor Somnath Chatterjee...

15:02 - 253 in favour, 230-something against, 50-something slips have to be counted for the final tally. Manmohan manages a flat smile, but it's not over till the fat lady (poor Somnath) sings.

15:12 - It looks like the UPA has won; but something intangible has been lost today in that image of wads of cash being waved around in the Lok Sabha. Signing out for today.

***

21/07: The trust vote in Parliament is today. *Massive* horse trading not-s0-behind the scenes. Fali Nariman says no one cares about the merits of the issue at hand. Watch Indian politics get as ugly as it is possible to get.

***

14/07: India's ability to take 'corrective measures' in the event of a fuel supply cutoff is guaranteed by the IAEA agreement, but this possibility is mentioned only in the preamble. Preambles are not legally binding (if they were, the wonderful preamble to the NPT would have ensured global nuclear disarmament long ago). The action is all in Article 32.

***

11/07: interview with Advani in which he clarifies that the BJP welcomes the strategic relationship with the US, but is concerned more narrowly with the implications of the Hyde Act.

***

9/07: apologies for the fragmented blogging. I am trying to piece together some understanding of this earth shatteringly important issue that I have come to rather belatedly. This is the text of the Left Front's letter to the GoI. As I understand it, at the heart of the nuclear deal is the promise of fuel in return for acceptance of inspections (IAEA safeguards). The Left seems to be worried that although fuel supplies can be withdrawn for a number of reasons (under the US's Hyde Act), under the terms of the agreement, India is obliged to accept IAEA oversight in perpetuity - thereby opening up the possibility of a situation in which it is under 'safeguards' but has no fuel. This seems to be the thrust of the 5 questions it has put to GoI. One procedural issue is that the government has refused to release the text of the IAEA agreement even to its partners providing support in Parliament. It claims that its hands are bound by the IAEA, which prohibits release of the statement till it has been circulated to all of its board members. But how can Parliaments check their executives, if they have no idea what they are doing? (11/07: Today's Hindu editorial says that the government's claim about IAEA procedure is false and that GoI has been showing 'paranoic non-transparency' over this issue since March 2005.)

***

For the first time ever in the history of independent India, the GoI is threatened with collapse on an issue of foreign policy as the Left withdraws the support of its 59 MPs. The Samajwadi Party has offered to vote with the government, but even its 39 MPs will leave the government 8 short of a majority. Other parties have offered support, potentially staving off collapse - but this is far from certain. For one thing, not all SP members seem to be on board. Intriguingly, there is talk of its Muslim MPs being against the nuclear deal (something Mulayam has strenuously denied): (i) is this true? or are the usual suspects drumming up charges of 'anti-patriotism'? (ii) even if it were, what is the basis of this opposition? (probably that an Indo-US agreement places India firmly in some sort of global anti-Muslim camp) Not much comment about this in the press. Yet. For more on what happens next go here.

Some shred of democracy preserved in virtue of the fact that GoI will not go to the IAEA before it wins a confidence motion in Parliament. Pranab Mukherjee's voice tightens at the end of this statement, but he concludes in remarkably good temper, thanking the Left for having extended its support for the last 4 years against 'the communal forces'.

Brinda Karat is 'puzzled and perplexed'. The nuclear deal is a key opening up India to US hegemonic designs, she says. Is the Left staring at political isolation? We are not isolated from our principles and the working people of this country, she says.

who is Manthara?

2008-07-19T19:24:00.004+01:00

Looking forward to the move to the city, but also slightly intimidated by it. Reading Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air has provided an odd sort of comfort:

To be modern...is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.

Entranced by his dialectical exploration of the relationship between modernisation and modernism in the work of Faust, Marx, Baudelaire, and a slew of great Russians whom I have now vowed to read, I could not pass up the chance to hear him deliver the Southbank Centre Lecture entitled 'Comedy in New York After 9/11: Immigration and Gentrification'. In comparison with the book, which is breathtakingly fertile and wonderfully readable even if you haven't read the texts he is working with (he makes you want to read them), the lecture was rather more casual, impressionistic, almost off the cuff. As a speaker, Berman manages to be both erudite and endearing, establishing an almost instant rapport with the audience and providing much amusement with his slightly distracted and absent minded asides. The talk focused on comedies of the city: 'Sex and the City' as a comedy of gentrification and 'You Don't Mess with the Zohan' as a comedy of immigration. As ever, Berman exuded a kind of liberal, humane Marxism - one that embraces the entire range of human experience and inclination, including those that sometimes prove inconvenient for theory. In one revealing aside, he dwelt at length on the relationship between shopping and happiness, departing from orthodox Marxist critiques of commodification and consumerism and suggesting that shopping and commerce created public spaces in which people encountered one another, that the satisfaction of needs and desires did in fact bring happiness, and that even if most of the commodities on offer were trash, the very process of sifting the worthy from the forgettable was in itself a form of bildung. In keeping with the title of his lecture, I wanted to ask him what, if anything, the ongoing furore over the most recent cover of the New Yorker revealed about the possibilities for satire as well as for humour across race lines in post-9/11 New York. But alas, I didn't get the chance.

***

Went to the British Library's free exhibition on the Ramayana. This is an exhibition of illustrated manuscripts, commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (1628-52) in Rajasthan. The carefully selected and arranged manuscripts provide as complete an account of this 2000+ year old epic as one could possibly get in a couple of hours. Some things about this story, which was first told to me by my great-grandmother and which I first encountered in print in the pages of Kamala Subramaniam's telling of it, struck me for the first time. The two pivotal events of the narrative are Rama's banishment to the forest and Sita's abduction by Ravana. Both are triggered by the actions of women, and in both cases women from the very margins of society. When the old king Dasaratha is all set to name his eldest son Rama as his heir, one of the younger of his three senior queens - Kaikeyi - overcome by jealousy, prevails upon him to banish Rama to the forest for 14 years and to name her son Bharata to succeed him. I'm not entirely clear what sort of hold Kaikeyi has on Dasaratha, but she in turn is influenced by her maid Manthara, who poisons her mind with the suggestion that Bharata's life would be in danger if Rama became king. Bharata is disgusted by these machinations on his behalf and bitterly reproaches and repudiates his mother; Kaikeyi in turn blames Manthara, and in a rage, Bharata's younger brother Shatrughna tramples on Manthara and drags her around the palace by her hair until he is dissuaded by Bharata with the reminder that Rama would have condemned such vengeful behaviour. So who is Manthara and why does she push Kaikeyi to do something she might never have done? Is she simply looking out for the best interests of her perhaps not-very-worldly-wise mistress? Does she have an agenda of her own? What could it be? If Bharata had become king, Manthara, as PA to the queen mother would have held a position of great power and influence. But what did she hope to do with it? Was she just greedy, seduced by how tantalisingly close a woman of low stature could get to the very heart of power? Was she in it for herself? Or were her ambitions more political? Or, as is usually the case, both?

The second pivotal event is that Sita is abducted from forest exile by the demon king Ravana. But this in turn is provoked by an incident in which Ravana's sister, the rakshasi Surpanakha, propositions Rama, who, instead of brushing her off like a gentleman, cuts off her nose. Surpanakha appeals to her brother Ravana to avenge this insult. And then all hell breaks loose. On trying to find out more about Surpanakha, it turns out that there are multiple accounts of what she was trying to do. In one, she actually desires revenge on Ravana for having killed their grandmother and uncle, and sets up the encounter with Rama, knowing full well that Rama is the only true match for Ravana. And see also this entry on Manthara, which though frustratingly brief, suggests that she may have been set up by Indra.

In the epic war that follows, there is much that is recognisable - good old balance of power politics (Rama makes an alliance with the monkey king Sugriva, agreeing to help him recover his throne from his usurper brother Bali in return for help against Ravana; Ravana's better brother Vibhishana joins the good side - so the axes of confrontation aren't entirely or even largely familial or tribal or ethnic), guerrilla warfare (particularly in the scenes depicting monkeys attacking the enormous Kumbhakarna - good guerrillas v. bad despotic centralised power), interference and sovereign acts of recognition and de-recognition (Rama's declaration of Vibhishana as the true king of Lanka), etc.

And finally running through the story like a stuck record, there is Rama's uniquely annoying personality - a mixture of piety and moralism and self-mortification, matched only perhaps by the equally insufferable Yudhishtira in the Mahabharata - which if you ever encountered in real life would in all probability make you want to scream. There are many stages at which wrongs can be righted, bad things can be undone, Bharata says forget about my mother, come back home and rule the kingdom, etc. But Rama refuses, citing the absolute imperative of a parent's command (a command, it should be noted, that the parent himself regrets almost immediately and seeks to rescind), demonstrating an obstinacy and inflexibility that makes me want to smack him. On greater reflection, I realise that this annoying personality trait is written into the character to illustrate an important philosophical tendency - that of the rigid deontologist, unleavened by the logic of consequences, prudence or anything else. Kant may have been equally annoying in real life, much as I like him in text. (But why like Kant and dislike Rama? Maybe because Rama shows you what Kant might require in a determinate situation, suggesting in turn that something that looks great in ideal theory might end up looking deeply unattractive in the non-ideal world. disclaimer: obviously there is no one-to-one correspondence between Rama and Kant; many aspects of their thought and behaviour are simply incommensurable; but in my hazy philosophical mental map, they're vaguely kindred souls.)

***

Why do we believe what we believe? This was the underlying theme of Gautam Raja's The Invisible River, which premiered in the UK at the Theatrescience India in London festival this week. A government doctor in Allahabad is waging a host of losing battles - against villages and industries upstream who dump their waste in the mighty Ganga, generating the cholera epidemics that he must fight against in his professional capacity; against his fervently religious mother who sees the river as holy and purifying and whose dying wish is to be cremated on a sandalwood pyre by its banks and to have her ashes scattered in the sangam. A scientist from Bangalore is in Allahabad to collect water samples from the river to study the behaviour of the mysterious bacteriophages that appear to break down organic matter, thereby potentially providing scientific vindication for the popular belief in the river's purity. An intrepid pujari plies his trade by the banks of the river, tending the faithful and bantering good naturedly with the sceptics. A politician (brilliantly played by Sukhi Aiyar in a marvellous conflation of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mayawati) shrewdly exploits every idea on offer to mobilise her political base. As they rub up against each other along the banks of the Ganga, the characters challenge but also reinforce each others' beliefs in intriguing ways. I was particularly struck by the way the religious characters seemed oddly pleased by the newfound scientific vindication for beliefs that they had long held; but I wondered if the rationalist characters also developed a new appreciation for irrational or non-rational belief systems. It's something I've wondered about in the context of the interest that pharmaceutical companies have evinced in indigenous knowledge as a shortcut to product development - that knowledge has still to be put through the meatgrinder of scientific verification before it is considered reliable and marketable, but do those technicians in white labcoats look at indigenous witch doctors any differently once their practices have been appropriated? Or are they still seen as essentially irrational and superstitious, trapped in age-old structures of unreflective blind belief? As a story, I thought GR accomplished a much more skillful bringing together of this microcosm of modern India - much better than, say, the bus in Mr. & Mrs. Iyer which, serendipitously and pretty incredibly, just happened to bring together every shade of religious belief in India in the context of a communal riot. I thought this was a thought-provoking script because it got beyond the usual cliched juxtapositions of software engineers and bullock carts to think about the ways in which those different worlds relate to each other.

Apu Trilogy

2008-07-05T22:05:00.004+01:00

Have only seen the first two parts so far. In Pather Panchali, the scene of Durga, Apu and the dog running behind the mithaiwala, all four figures reflected in the stream, has got to be one of the most excrutiatingly perfect cinematic moments ever, one that would simply not have looked half as good in colour. The pivotal scene in Aparajito is one in which Apu decides he wants to go to school. Having impressed a burly mustachioed schools inspector with his vocabulary and ability to read, he is soon taken under the wing of the headmaster, who encourages his voracious appetite for learning. In a spiel that is reminiscent of Tagore (although the films are based on novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay), he says

I have many books here. If you don't read such books, you cannot broaden your mind. We may live in a remote corner of Bengal...but that does not mean that our outlook should be narrow. This book is about the North Pole. From this book anyone can learn about the aurora borealis or the Eskimos. This is about Livingstone's travels. You can learn about Africa. This is the story of inventions. Here are biographies of scientists: Galileo, Archimedes, Newton, Faraday...

In the next scene, Apu is eagerly explaining to his long-suffering mother that the moon goes around the earth and the earth around the sun, and shortly thereafter he startles her by running around the courtyard yelling 'Africa! Africa!', in face paint and a grass skirt and carrying a makeshift spear and shield (this is Africa in the eyes of Bengal, via Livingstone). But exposure to the world also means rebellion at home. By the end of his secondary school career, Apu wants to go to college in Calcutta, much against the wishes of his mother, and their confrontation over this issue concludes with the camera panning towards a lamp left on the verandah of their hut and the globe that Apu's headmaster has given him, standing in the circle cast by its light - both symbols of Enlightenment that tear Apu, tragically, away from his responsibilities at home.

the lure of the east...

2008-07-01T22:05:00.007+01:00

...is a yummy exhibition of British Orientalist painting currently on at the Tate. The exhibition brings together some of the best of (mostly) 19th century British art portraying the Middle East. It is arranged thematically into six rooms: portraits, genre & gender, the holy city (not just Jerusalem), harem & home, the Orient in perspective and a room of maps that traces electronically on a gigantic tracking screen, the journeys of 4 itinerants (of whom I can only remember Byron) against a larger macro-historical picture of the waxing and waning fortunes of the Ottoman empire.

Each of the rooms contains some stunning pieces, but I will only mention those that particularly did it for me. Portraits is full of Europeans (sometimes the artist himself) dressed as Orientals. Evidently this was done for many reasons - to soften up interlocutors in political and commercial transactions by trying to impress them with efforts to fit in, to signify allegiance to the peoples of the East, to imply authority as representer of the Orient, etc. TE Lawrence (who looks extremely worried in the single portrait there is of him) apparently did so on orders from Feisel, to demonstrate his respect for the Arabs. He also did this at Versailles to signify his continuing solidarity. And there is of course the famous one of Byron in Albanian clothes, his ruby lips looking as pouty as ever.

The undoubted genius of this exhibition is JF Lewis, whom I had never heard of till yesterday. I am not usually a fan of realistic art, but Lewis's work is almost photographic. No I would go further - sometimes the sense of depth is so fantastic, that bits of the painting leap out at you in 3D (look at the watermelon slices in the bottom right hand corner of 'The Bezestein Bazaar of El Khan Khalil, Cairo'). There is another fabulous one called 'The Doubtful Coin', in which a seraff is shown examining a coin closely, while two women lean towards him expectantly, waiting for his verdict. Other onlookers in the bazaar manifest varying degrees of curiosity - some amused, some sceptical, others bored, and there is also a donkey. Meyda Yegenoglu's comment (I am a big fan of her article entitled 'Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in a Globalising World') alongside the painting said something about the trope of fraud in Western conceptions of the Orient. But after a while , the political marginalia in the exhibition began to annoy me. Looking at another JF Lewis (last one I promise) - 'The Commentator of the Koran: Interior of a Royal Tomb, Bursa, Asia Minor, 1869' (see second last picture on this blog page) - which portrays a scholar transcribing from the Koran in the semi-shade of his perch in a royal tomb, surrounded by rich drapery (oh just look at the damn picture) - there is something about the treatment of this subject that is so empathetic in the sense that the painter seems to endorse what the subject is doing, he seems to acknowledge the scholar's wisdom and the essential worth of his task, that I saw only knowledge and no power. I could not really see how representations of this kind were an exercise in power (unless one reads the entire corpus as saying: this is what 'Oriental' learning looks like - it nearly always takes the form of rote learning from classical sources, nothing new has happened, or ever happens, and however aesthetically beautiful, this is essentially a static culture. One never sees anyone inventing anything, in the way that one might in, say, Italian Renaissance art - ok I'm going out on a limb here, I don't actually know). But so mesmerised was I by the picture itself, that these parenthetical thoughts didn't occur to me at the time. Only knowledge and an appreciation of knowledge, no power.

One final realist masterpiece that I must rhapsodise about (this one in the Holy City section) is Gustav Bauernfeind's 'Entrance to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 1886', depicting a tense standoff between Jewish pilgrims being turned away by Muslim gatekeepers (plus ca change?!) - the light in this one is ethereal, stunning, I was looking around to see if there was technological hankypanky, but no - it's in the painting.

The most interesting thing about the Harem and Home section - apart from the Arthur Melville, 'An Arab Interior, 1881', which furnishes the cover image of the exhibition and was also the cover of an edition of Edward Said's Orientalism - is the stark distinction between European male and female artists' representations of Oriental harems. The men almost uniformly depict this as a decadent, sensuous space of captive female sexuality in which the women lie around all day waiting for the master to come and conjugate (verbs?). The single painting by a woman - or maybe there were more that I didn't quite pick up on - (Henriette Brown, 'A Visit: Harem Interior, Constantinople, 1860') could not have been more different. Here the women are fully clothed and appear to be hanging out with each other and there's a child somewhere in the picture. It looks like a normal day in. The explanation for these dramatically contrasting representations is that as more European women travelled to the Orient, they were the ones who actually had access to harems - by virtue of their sex - and could portray them for what they were (ok this is the point at which Foucauldians will shudder, but it has to be said about Said that while he had his moments of excessive indebtedness to Foucault, he does actually uphold the notion that some representations are true and others false (compare pages 272 and 326 of the 1995 Penguin edition of the O book).

Oh, and on the way out, Frank Dicksee's 'Leila, 1892' - plump, ripe, dressed in red. 'This one usually hangs in Jeddah', a well-dressed man sniggered to his friend.

where I am going

2008-07-01T00:37:00.002+01:00

The first thing i noticed as soon as i got out of the train station was a signpost to the public library, which is called the CLR James library. This was, in itself, a good sign. The high street is overwhelmingly Turkish. Turkish restaurants every 10 steps serving lamahcun and kebabs, Turkish food stalls, Turkish newsagents, Turkish banks, Turkish travel agents, Turkish hairdressers, Turkish (em/im)migration assistance offices, even a soon-to-open Turkish hamaam. Apparently there are also enough Kurds around for the local cinema (3 minutes' walk) to have a Kurdish film festival, in addition to their Turkish one of course. Most of the people on the street today seemed to be Afro-Caribbean, and the local bookstore (2.5 minutes' walk) specialises in Black writing (there is a tiny section entitled 'Western views'); the cafe is Jamaican. Wikipedia reports that Jews and lesbians are also to be found here in large numbers. This is not a fancy high street. It's a lot like the yet-to-be-gentrified middle section of Cowley Road. There are no fancy coffee shops full of Macbook users. These can be found about 10 minutes away in the sort of Islingtonesque trendy barland called Stoke Newington Church Street. But because I am a latte-sipping fill-in-the-appropriate-noun, I should note that such cappuccino as is available can be had for 1 quid - which is just as well, because the one thing I am not going to have much of in this next phase is money; I am really beginning to identify with those poorly paid clerks in mid-19th century Russian novels. But there are *lots* of food stalls and the famous Ridley Road open-air market serving 'every fruit and vegetable you could possibly want...mangoes' (said my landlord, searching for the fruit I must have looked like I was most in need of), in addition to the obligatory Tesco Expresses, laundromats and dry cleaners, wedding photographers, mobile phone unlockers, cheap gyms in serious competition with one another (one for men over a certain BMI only), really everything one could possibly want. I want my new life now!

Zimbabwe

2008-06-29T23:07:00.003+01:00

Listen to John Sentamu and Desmond Tutu, voices of reason, pleading for non-recognition of Mugabe's government, downgrading of diplomatic representation, snapping of trade, business and air links and a general ratcheting up of pressure in all ways possible. One rumour that seems to be doing the rounds is that Mugabe is waiting to turn 85 (something that will happen in February 2009), so as to be immune from potential prosecution for crimes against humanity at the Hague.

I can't help thinking of Julius Nyerere pleading with African states in December 1978, as Idi Amin began massacring and expelling his own people, and shortly before Tanzania's eventual invasion of Uganda: '...there is a strange habit in Africa: an African leader, so long as he is an African, can kill Africans just as he pleases, and you cannot say anything. If Amin was white, we would have passed many resolutions against him. But he is black and blackness is a licence to kill Africans.' Senatmu makes very much the same sort of argument, reminding the world that if this were Ian Smith, there would have been no doubt about the need for punitive action. Mbeki is such a goddamn lame-duck loser, how can he not see what an insult this is to the legacy of African and Third World liberation movements?

why you should read this blog

2008-06-07T16:21:00.005+01:00

I clearly have my finger on the pulse. Sadly (I will justify 'sadly' in a future post), I think talk of a joint ticket will founder on the issue of succession. Hillary won't accept the VP slot unless Barack promises to be a one term President. If he served for 2 terms as President with her as VP, she would be told old to stand for the nomination in 2016; she would probably lose even if she did because voters would be sick of her; and even if she won the nomination, she would probably lose the election because voters would be sick of the Democrats. Given those considerations, a Blair/Brown type deal scribbled on a napkin in Dianne Feinstein's home looks unlikely. And yes, I do think all concerned are thinking that far ahead.

2008-04-12T16:24:00.002+01:00

This, in the NYT, actually made me tear up. Can you miss a place before you've even left it? It's sort of like the flip side of feeling nostalgia for a time you've never been in.

Imagining others

2008-04-11T00:48:00.002+01:00

Watch this. This one is funny, given popular conceptions that the two have of each other (remember 'nous sommes tous americains', then crap, then freedom fries).

London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

2008-04-04T00:14:00.005+01:00

Saw Parvez Sharma's A Jihad for Love. Incredibly moving. A film about queer Muslims who are trying to reconcile their sexuality and their faith. We social scientists use these conveniently ambiguous verbs like 'reconcile' and 'negotiate' all the time in ways that conceal the pain and trauma that lurks behind them. There is a fleeting shot in the film where one of the subjects, the gay South African imam Mohsin Hendricks (who spoke briefly after the screening) is trying to feed a seagull. The bird refuses to take the food from his hand, so he has to leave it on a rock and move back a bit. Only then does the gull begin to peck at the food. The shot is about 3 seconds long, but it could serve as a metaphor of sorts for the film as a whole. Edwin Cameron, who is one of my all-time heroes, once said to me: 'you've told your parents, now it's their problem.' He was wrong, I think. By telling them, it had become a shared problem - unless of course I didn't want to have anything to do with them ever again. But I didn't want to go down that route. Reconciliation, in my experience, is a mutually unsatisfying experience in which neither party to the transaction is completely happy with the outcome. Neither feels like they live in a world that is entirely to their liking, but both realise that their mutual unhappiness at not having entirely gotten their way is probably dwarfed by the misery that might result from mutual obstinacy.

There is another incredibly moving scene featuring a lesbian couple who live in Egypt. One partner is clearly having a very difficult time coming to terms with her sexuality as a believing Muslim. She and her partner buy a religious law book of some sort and look up its provisions on same-sex intercourse, only to find that lesbianism isn't explicitly mentioned as warranting punishment because it doesn't involve penetration (this is the point at which I want to say, but what about...) All that would happen, apparently, was that the women would be chastised. She is upset. I wish I were punished for it, she says, because it makes me feel so guilty. I wondered if there was a subtext to this: I exist dammit, put me in the book.

This is a really important film to watch, particularly at a time when queer Muslims are caught between the condescension and outright racism of 'white queers saving brown queers from brown homophobes' (you have to footnote me, with apologies - or thanks rather - to Spivak) and the homophobia of self-appointed leaders of the Muslim community. You can be both queer and Muslim, this film says. It is a difficult space to inhabit, but just by virtue of having made this film, that space has become less lonely. (I cannot resist a little parochial hurrah for the former NDTV reporter (I think?) who made this.) PS - I really don't feel like deconstructing.

And Spider Lilies by out Taiwanese lesbian director Zero Chou. Two girls: Jade, cute, back to school type, struts her stuff on a soft porn webcam; Takeko, *exquisite*, works in a tattoo parlour (her clients are these tough, mean looking men covered in - what else - tattoos; I love the scene where she works on a guy for a couple of minutes and then tells him to buzz off because Jade has arrived). Jade wants a particular tattoo (spider lilies) that only Takeko has. There is an incredibly poignant reason Takeko has it, so Jade's request opens up a well of sadness in Takeko's life. Things begin to head in the direction of disaster, and...I refuse to spoil the plot. This is a sad, happy, sweet, endearing, beautiful film that, oddly, manages to let East Asia look like a normal place instead of some parallel universe in which late capitalism does bizarre things to peoples' hair. (Maybe I've been watching the wrong kinds of films.)

Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937

2008-03-30T23:03:00.007+01:00

Went to this yummy exhibition on Wednesday, in the bowels of the architecturally confused British Library (I thought it looked like a brick kiln; my friend KH thinks the forecourt looks like Tiananmen Square; but the totalitarian tropes apart, it's a good people-spotting venue). The exhibition is a fascinating introduction to the major 'isms' of the Avant Garde - Dadaism (which I first discovered through Poile Sengupta's unfathomable Collages - but Dadaism just is like that), Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism. Walking through this exhibition, it's hard to believe that some of this stuff is almost a hundred years old. The idioms are still with us, and we seem to aspire to many of the same horizons - the rejection of tradition, the interest in abstraction, the impulse to render strange, the tendency to distort reality for emotional impact. Other elements appear extremely dated in a postmodern age: e.g. the more totalising manifestos seeking an aesthetic that embraced all aspects of life including literature, music, art, food and sex (one incredibly suggestive photograph features two cooks presenting some rather phallic and breast-like creations). KH was reminded of St. Catz in Oxford, where the designer Arne Jacobsen designed virtually everything, down to forks for left-handed diners; I could just be making this up, but I think there are regulations about the sorts of curtains you can hang in your room, as heterogeneity on this score is thought to vitiate the appearance of the glass-fronted main building. Talk about totalising.

The emphasis in the exhibition was on the printed face of the avant garde, so we saw lots of pamphlets, posters, books, magazines, manifestos, artist's books and photo books - although there was also film and sound poetry. Much of the exhibition was organised by city, with a concerted attempt to enlarge the avant garde canon beyond Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Vienna to include lesser known centres such as London (featuring, prominently, Wyndham Lewis). Paris did of course occupy pride of place - a huge display right in the middle of the room exhibiting, among other things, a shiver-down-spine-inducing manuscript of Finnegan's Wake, a first edition of Hemmingway's something-I-can't-remember [In Another Country?], something else by Gertrude Stein with a big board telling us about her who's who literary salon [mental note to read Two Lives, recently gifted to me by dear S]. Other memorable exhibits included a cubist map of the world distorting the continents in line with Cubism's preoccupations. Remember that Reagan-era map with its gigantic Cuba and Nicaragua? This one virtually eliminated Britain and North America (except for Alaska and Labrador) and blew up the Easter Islands, reflecting the cubists' interest in native [I suppose the word today would be 'indigenous'] art. The map also shows only two cities in the world, one of which is Paris [damn I can't remember the other, so dazzled was I by the islands].

I missed politics. It was always there, hovering below the surface of everything, but it wasn't easy to discern the specific political allegiances of different exponents of the avant garde from the exhibits on display and the information provided about them. As suggested above, some seemed totalising in their intent (and totalitarian in their effect), others suggested anarchist sympathies, and a not inconsiderable number were fascist. The versatility of the politics of the avant garde is also suggested by the very different sorts of enemies that it made. The Stalinists banned it in the Soviet Union, permitting only socialist realism. The Nazis identified it with Communism and held exhibitions comparing Aryan culture with 'Degenerate' Art and Music before destroying the latter (a pamphlet produced for the music exhibition features an ape-like figure playing a saxophone and appears to posit an equivalent degree of degeneracy between black and Jewish music). Visitors were told all this at the end, but for the most part, you had to read the politics of specific exhibits for yourself. Or maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the writing.

PS - the fascinating thing about brick kilns is that they are made of the very things that they make. As are libraries.

stream of consciousness discoveries

2008-03-27T17:59:00.004Z

Sarkozy's visit to the UK monopolises the front pages of all newspapers today (the tabloid version of today's Independent screams 'Iraq implodes as Shia fight Shia', but offers us a view of Carla Bruni's legs as its cover photograph; shame on them). Anyway, in an idle moment of listening to the French national anthem, marvelling at its grandeur, and wondering what other national anthems were as 'grand', I looked up the Soviet national anthem at the suggestion of verbalprivilege. And went into a state of shock. Because I was essentially listening to Pet Shop Boys' Go West. As a kid who (uncharacteristically) knew all the lyrics to this song, I had no sense of its complexity and multilayeredness. And watching the video now again after all these years, I'm not sure whether it is a case of straightforward Cold War propaganda as the words suggest (Go West, life is peaceful there, etc.), with the deeply ironic twist of being sung to basically the same tune as the Soviet national anthem. Or whether it is positing some sort of dialectical resolution of the contradiction between capitalism and communism, with all that Soviet iconography (red stars and gymnasts marching in formation) in New York, with the irony being turned in equal measure against the US: in this America, the Statue of Liberty is black, for crying out loud (which she does). And maybe, because the band is gay, Go West (like 'Go west, young man') is an exhoration to gay men to leave the rest of the US and go to California, bastion of gay liberation. The Wikipedia entry, which I swear I didn't read till this point in the blog post, suggests an additional layer: the spectre of AIDS hanging over the song, with the teams of gymnasts ascending the stairs towards their queer utopia signifying the huge numbers of young men dying of AIDS. I have been sleepwalking through life.

2008-03-27T11:19:00.000Z

Third sex officially recognised in Tamil Nadu.

on being south indian (or, on having a massive chip on my very worn shoulder)

2008-03-22T18:24:00.006Z

I'm getting a little fed up of books by eminent Indian social scientists that invariably turn to Bengal for their empirical meat. After 4 and something years in graduate school, I have this vision of a Bengal teeming with social scientists discussing Marx, Dostoyevsky, or genealogies of modernity at coffee shops or second hand book stores on streets named after writers, while all around them bhadralok and bhadramahila scurry to and fro on their bourgeois itineraries, with idle subalterns watching stealthily from between cracks in buildings. None of this has been vindicated by trips to Kolkata, although that's probably my fault (Calcutta is always on the way to somewhere else - Sikkim, Bhutan, etc.) As far as books go, Dipesh Chakrabarty's excellent Provincializing Europe is no exception ('The second part of the book concentrates on the history of educated Bengalis', p. 19). Ch. 7 ('Adda: A History of Sociality') is a must read for anyone interested in the geography of Calcutta's intellectual life. As the title promises, it is a delightful exposition of 'adda', essentially a space for long, informal and unrigorous conversation, a central institution of Bengali life. Not being Bengali, or a resident of Bengal, I am consumed with envy at his description of this vibrant intellectual practice, till he poses the question of when coffeehouses began to act as major sites for literary addas. This is pleasing as far as the competitive stakes between cities are concerned, because it is one area in which Bangalore is not lacking - even if many joints that claim the status of coffeehouses are terrifically anodyne. Here is Chakrabarty on the appearance of coffeehouses in Calcutta:

The big coffeehouses were started by the Indian Coffee Expansion Board as a way of marketing coffee to a city that belonged - and still does - predominantly to tea drinkers. However, the practice of drinking coffee...was introduced into the Bengali culture of Calcutta in the 1930s by the immigrant southerners (the Bengali word dakshini refers to people from the south - Tamilnad, Kerala, Andhra, and so on) in the city who set up small eating places around Ballygunge about this time (p. 202).

Us southerners - we usually get one word, even though we speak such different languages. Languages that are as distinct from each other as Bengali is from Marathi. And yet we are 'Madrasis' to the Mumbaikars, 'Dravida' in the national anthem (written by a famous Bengali) and 'dakshini' to the Bengalis. And even when this Bengali takes the trouble to disaggregate us into our constituent communities - Tamilnad, Kerala, Andhra - it is left to that weighty 'and so on' to contain within it, unmentioned, subsumed, forgotten , THE BIGGEST GODDAMN COFFEE GROWING STATE IN THE COUNTRY.

As I hope readers will recognise, this isn't really a serious criticism of Chakrabarty. I think the book overflows with fascinating insights. But it only reinforces my impression of the very skewed, Bengal-heavy nature of Indian historiography, which has tended to leave the rest of the subcontinent understudied, undertheorised. That 'modernity' appears later elsewhere shouldn't really be an excuse. Chakrabarty is too careful and sophisticated a writer to suggest that his observations about Bengal are applicable anywhere else, but reflecting on what I know of the field as a whole, I cannot help thinking that Indian historiography might benefit from a work entitled Provincializing Bengal.

Small traces

2008-02-17T00:10:00.004Z

I have never been much of an afficionado of the genre that is sometimes called 'fantasy' (although a friend of mine argues persuasively that all fiction is 'fantasy'). But Pan's Labyrinth is set in a real place and a real time. I have always been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War - a hopeful, if tragic, time of progressive internationalism and meaningful solidarity. The film is set in 1944: the Civil War has officially ended, Spain has officially been neutral through World War 2 although it has become something of a proxy battleground for the two sides in that conflict, but here in some forgotten corner of the country, guerrillas in the mountains continue to battle Franco's troops. Ofelia's mother has just married an impossibly brutish Captain in the army, the kind who shoots first and asks questions later, and in a particularly gruesome scene, stitches a gash in his cheek after it has been slit by a woman he is interrogating. Ofelia tries to escape the ugliness around her by entering into a fairytale world, but one that she finds to be equally full of trials and tribulations. I experienced a mounting sense of expectation that the two worlds would intersect at some point, but this is far too real a film to let that happen: Ofelia's private world of grasshoppers turned fairies, monstrous toads, trolls and cadavers is resolutely her own, no one else is aware of it. In the public world of Franco's Spain, one anarchist asks what if we can't win?; at least we'll make things harder for the bastards, his friend replies. The Captain's beautiful and brave housekeeper Mercedes, who has been surreptitiously carrying supplies to the guerrillas, says, when caught, that she has been able to get away with a great deal because being a woman made her invisible. And of Ofelia, whose blood sanctifies the altar which is the gateway to the underworld and establishes her once again as the Princess Moanna, of Ofelia...

...it is said that the Princess returned to her father's kingdom,
That she reigned there with justice and a kind heart for many centuries,
That she was loved by her people,
And that she left behind small traces of her time on earth,
visible only to those who know where to look.

Pan's Labyrinth is an ode to the vanquished subaltern.

2008-02-06T11:03:00.001Z

My 2 favourite statistics from last night: (i) Obama is winning almost as much of the white male vote as Clinton; (ii) a slightly higher percentage of people think Clinton would make a better Commander-in-Chief.

Obama v. Clinton

2008-02-04T23:04:00.000Z

Unlike many people I know, I am actually agonising about this one. I favour Obama, on balance, but the scales are pretty close in my view. I am interested only in a small subset of issues that most Americans will be concerned about: foreign policy. Here, 3 issues seem to be most important - security, energy and climate change, and the economy - and of course all three are connected in some important ways. Obama seems unambiguously better than Clinton on security, an issue on which I feel most able to take a position. I am pleased, but not overly impressed, by his early anti-war stance, as I think it relatively easier for an Illinois state senator representing a predominantly antiwar district to vote against the war, than for the senator from New York. But I am enthused by his declaration of intent to negotiate with the leaders of 'rogue' states as a matter of priority, and by his determination not only to get the US out of Iraq but to change the mindset that got it there in the first place. Conversely, I am dismayed by Clinton's decision to vote to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organisation. Obama's politics represents a fundamentally novel way for the US to relate to what it perceives as threats in the world; Clinton's is a continuation of US policy since 1979. My friend DB, who works for the Clinton campaign, argues that she needs to adopt a hardline stance because she is a woman. But that is hardly an explanation that offers solace. She will not miraculously stop feeling the need to be hardline once she becomes President, and indeed the record of first-time women leaders in many countries offers little comfort on this score. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi may have adopted the hawkish positions they did on many issues precisely because they felt the need to compensate for gender. Clinton actually seems to have the opposite problem - she is perceived as too cold and calculating and actually seems to benefit from occasional demonstrations of femininity (I feel weird writing this, but I'm talking about the electorate - specifically New Hampshire - not myself). So she is lucky not to have the usual female problem and she needs to recognise this and drop the hawkish posturing (there are of course moments when she does - e.g. references to the end of cowboy diplomacy, multilateralism etc. but as with all Democrats, it is never very clear whether the commitment to multilateralism is principled or instrumental, a cheaper way of getting done what the US wants).

Both candidates have said positive, if vague, things about climate change, although Clinton has coupled this with the need to reduce dependence on foreign oil (I think that effectively means the need to reduce dependence on oil, period, even though the US does have large reserves of its own). I am not enough of an economist to know which candidate is better on those issues, although Clinton's proposals seem more fully worked out and her health care plan seems to offer more comprehensive coverage. Mandatory health insurance seems to move the US closer to an NHS-type system, which I think would be a good thing. Again, NOT an expert on this stuff - my views are based on a very impressionistic understanding of the sound bytes.

Some things about Obama worry me - the astonishing number of 'present' votes, as opposed to yes or no (that most of these were in the state senate is again no cause for comfort). I am genuinely moved by the soaring rhetoric, but anyone who promises to end the genocide in Darfur, close Guantanamo Bay and guarantee access to life-saving drugs in Africa in one sentence is perhaps getting a little carried away (at least two of those issues do not strike me as being resolvable by the US acting alone).

On rhetoric v. managerialism, I think those who prefer one to the other forget that the US President is both a head of state and a head of government. In a head of state, people want someone who can rise above and transcend partisan differences and unite across party lines, someone who can offer people a better vision of themselves and move them enough to walk towards it. In a head of government, people want someone who can translate those lofty promises into real change, someone who can manouevre proposals past the bewilderingly large number of veto points in the US political system, someone who can manage a vast and sprawling bureaucracy without allowing unaccountable and competing centres of authority to proliferate in dark corners. This is why the choice is not self-evident.

On electability, I do not think either candidate has a clear advantage v. McCain. Clinton could lose because she is a polarising figure and may not attract independent voters (which McCain has a proven ability to do). Obama may lose because there are still a significant number of white folks who do not want to see an African American (even half an African American) become President.

Which brings us to identity politics. This cannot just be about identity politics, I keep telling myself, the issues have to matter a great deal more. If it were just about identity politics then Condoleezza Rice would be my wet dream. I do not have wet dreams thinking about Condoleezza Rice. I am appalled by the thought of Condoleezza Rice as President. So this cannot just be about identity politics. And yet, and yet...

Some part of me wants Hilary to be President more than Barack. Because, I think, there is a greater recognition of the social construction of race, in the US and the world, than there is a recognition of the social construction of gender (think about the academy, although that is never a great barometer for society at large: constructivist views of race are now standard unless you are James Watson, but Judith Butler acolytes still tend to be seen as a somewhat eccentric lot). You will not find a single interview in all the election coverage so far of an African American who says 'I am not ready for an African American President', and yet I have seen interviews with women who say 'I am not ready for a female President; I want a man to look after me.' Tragic. Some part of me wants Hillary to become President because in my own life, gender has been an immeasurably greater source of trouble than race, and because I think the demonstration effect of a female US President would be immense (demonstration effects don't require their symbols to actually do anything for their identity constituencies - of course that helps, but their power comes in large part from symbolising a possibility, smashing a ceiling, defying stereotypes, demonstrating by example). Hillary is not the perfect woman, but no one will be.

And what about that other demonstration effect? In a country founded on slavery, torn apart by Civil War, brought together by the Reconstruction amendments, only to have those chipped away or put into cold storage by Jim Crow, till 1964. 1964 is yesterday, India is 17 years old, my parents are alive, the 1960s are living memory and black people can't vote. Those little old black ladies who queued for hours to hear Barack speak and then voted for him - they couldn't vote for anyone till the 1960s and now they actually get to vote for a black man. And, whatever Bill Clinton might say, white people are voting for this black man. And so what if, as DB says (complicated argument follows, veracity of which I cannot vouch for), they're upper-middle class while folk who can use their vote to expiate their liberal guilt because they already have health insurance, while working class white people vote for Hillary because they need what she promises. So what if the white vote is a guilt vote? (I don't believe it is, but so what if it is?) Maybe this nation does need a huge collective act of atonement from white people for what they did to black people. If Barack takes the oath of office in January 2009, the US will be a giant step closer to Martin Luther King's dream.

So Obama is ahead in my calculus, but not by much. Damn. Why couldn't Condoleezza Rice be nicer?

Benazir

2007-12-27T17:55:00.000Z

Benazir is dead. I have to keep saying it to believe it. I am reminded of two days in my life. I was 6 years old when Indira Gandhi was shot. I remember being very sad, despite my awareness that people in my family didn't really like her. I felt like the principal of a school, a very big school, had been killed. My parents had to go out somewhere that day and I thought this highly inappropriate. Not that their presence could have compensated for the loss of this gigantic maternal authority figure but at least they should have stuck around to try, I thought. I was 13 when Rajiv Gandhi was killed - like Benazir - on an election campaign trail by a suicide bomber. I had just been to Delhi for the first time ever and we were returning home via Hyderabad. There was a strange air of inevitability about this one, of the sort that surrounds every Kennedy family tragedy. They killed him, just like his mother. 'They' were yet another disgruntled group who didn't like something that had been done to them. Now older, jaded, more politically aware, I am no less shocked by today's events. One does not have to be an admirer of Benazir to think of what has happened today as an unqualifiedly horrific event. Impossible to make sense of, but of course eminently rational in the minds of those who planned and executed it. How can one make sense of this except to try to grasp at the various strands that constitute this moment? The loss of life. The inevitable, searing, private grief felt by loved ones. The public grief that is already on display. The concerns for Pakistan's stability, the prospects for its democracy, the goddamn 'war on terror'. The loss of life. Is this also politics, but merely a politics by particularly terrifying means? Or is this an act to end politics by people who do not want politics? And if it is, how and when do people, societies, begin to appreciate the inescabaility of politics? Is this some sort of stage through which we South Asians must pass, full of charismatic families and feudal-style murder and intrigue, before we can emerge into the cold Weberian dawn of bureaucratic rationality when elites will rotate as surely and smoothly as the seasons?

the other India

2007-11-11T17:30:00.000Z

Frontline reports on the violence in Nandigram between the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh (Land Eviction Resistance) Committee and the CPI(M). (Is the Left Front easing the pressure on the government over the nuclear deal because it thinks its election prospects are threatened by the situation in Nandigram?)

150,000 farmer suicides from 1997-2005, concentrated in Karnataka, AP, Maharashtra, MP, Kerala. Suicides as a whole rose nationally in this period by 23%, those by farmers by 52%.

eye on Pakistan

2007-11-11T11:25:00.000Z

(update 11/11): Benazir finally supports the CJ, although The Observer continues to see the BB-Musharraf confrontation as a set-piece drama in which each is still trying to play ball with the other. BB of course has almost as much reason as Musharraf not to want a powerful, independent Supreme Court that might declare unconstitutional the so-called National Reconciliation Ordinance (which drops cases against her). I didn't realise how much the new provisional constitution clipped the wings of the judiciary - apparently it insists that no court should be able to issue decrees against 'the President, Prime Minister or any authority designated by the President'.

George W. Bush has declared that Musharraf is the best President for Pakistan, but then he's always had a knack for saying the right thing at the right time. The NYT speculates that the reconstituted SC will rubber-stamp the General's election, after which he will take off his uniform and everyone will live happily till the next declaration of martial law. (PS - why does Jane Perlez have to use the phrase 'dance of veils' to describe BB's moves vis-a-vis Musharraf, in this otherwise excellent profile of the woman who calls herself chairperson for life of the PPP? There is some juicy stuff in here: (i) she hates competition in the party - e.g. Aitzaz Ahsan; (ii) she once said of her husband Asif Zardari: 'Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan'.

Hasan Suroor provides a roundup of British media reactions in The Hindu. Official British reaction has closely mirrored the American line, he writes, demonstrating how closely British foreign policy remains tied to America even in the supposedly less slavishly pro-U.S., post-Blair era. Most of the British press, except for The Times, thinks this is a terrible idea. 'There are fears that by continuing to prop up an unpopular leader, the West could very well lose Pakistan as an ally and end up fuelling the already deep-seated anti-West sentiment in that country.' Is anyone thinking of Reza Shah Pahlavi, Ayatollah Khomeini and 1979?

It's very clear that the US/UK reaction has focused solely on what serves Western interests, rather than what is good for Pakistan and its people. India has been quiet, but we too react in accordance with our interests - there's nothing remarkable about that. We've made some noises about wanting to see democracy restored, but actually we rather like Musharraf - under him, official Pakistani support for Kashmiri militants has dried up (not least because Pakistan is now preoccupied with militancy along its western border) and relations with India have improved considerably. More broadly, although we don't trust the Pakistani military, there is a sense that when Pakistan is ruled by the military, we can talk directly to the institution that matters. With a civilian ruler, you never know if what you see is what you're going to get.

***

(update 9/11): Benazir's choices: power-sharing or clean break.

***

Benazir keeps saying 'he promised me he would take off his uniform in November', like a jilted fuck-buddy. I don't say this flippantly. That is the appropriate metaphor.

BBC offers a good quick roundup of the views of the key interest groups on the current situation, and some persuasive speculation on why a coup against Musharraf seems unlikely at the present time.

Harish Khare on why India should not look smugly at Bangladesh and Pakistan. We are not immune to the ills of idioms of confrontation pushed too far, corrupt politicians who throw the democratic process into disrepute, meddlesome army officers who pride themselves on their reputations for honesty and efficiency, overzealous judges who exceed their remit, external powers who seek increasingly to interfere in our affairs. There, but for the grace of God, goes us.

Anyway, hum dekhenge.

2007-10-29T14:50:00.001Z

123 watch

2007-10-24T18:26:00.000+01:00

Hmmm...the government may not fall over the nuclear deal after all. If you are feeling as clueless as I have been about the implications of the 123 deal, you can do worse than visit Siddharth Varadarajan's excellent blog. See in particular, this wide-ranging interview on the state of Indo-US relations. Reactions when I have the time...