Too loud a solitude

Sometime ago when I heard about Ann Morgan’s journey through the world through books, I was fascinated by the idea. Apart from the cost of the books, I can’t see another affordable and authentic way of seeing the world. Of course, it can be argued that one book or one author can’t possibly tell you all there is to tell about one country. But think of it like this: when you meet someone from a distant land on a train or bus, you’re grateful for that opportunity – at least I am – to have been able to peep into another world and other lives. You don’t think of complaining, “Hey, not fair that I only got to meet one person from xyz country?”

I have decided to follow in Morgan’s steps and for those countries that I have no idea where to look for books or authors, I will follow her even in the books she has read. I think there will be a lot of such countries.

So, Too Loud a Solitude is my first step in this world tour. It’s written by Bohumil Hrabal in Czech and translated by Michael Henry Heim. Coincidentally, there’s a thread of commonality between my choice of the book and my renewed interest in waste management: the protagonist Hanta’s job is to compact waste paper. (There are accent marks missing from his name that I know not how to reproduce.)

Of course, the last thing that Hanta wants to do is to send fine books to their death. He’s been saving books from the paper compacter throughout his career of 35 years and has ended up with a stash of nearly two tons of books at his place.

Quaint things happen in Hanta’s life. Like for instance, the misfortune of his girlfriend who always seems to get faeces on her dress at the most public of moments. Or, how the kind, absent-minded philosophy professor routinely mistakes Hanta for his employer, an older man, when he has his hat on.

I keep looking for clues to the politics and culture of a place when I’m reading fiction. In Hrabal’s book, it comes in the form of the new-age paper compacting machine and its eager attendants – the Brigade of Socialist Labor – that Hanta feels threatened by, what with its inhumane vigour and its un-reading, uncaring staff.

Hanta is scandalized to see them drinking milk at work: “But the biggest shock came when I saw the young workers shamelessly guzzling milk and soft drinks – legs spread wide, hand on hip – straight from the bottle… think of drinking milk at work when everyone knows that even a cow would rather die of thirst than touch a drop of the stuff!” But his heart breaks when he sees them put in bales and bales of books without stopping for a moment to think about the thoughts and words they crush with their machine.

Soon, he finds himself replaced with these men from the Socialist Labour group. He has nowhere to go and roams around the city, guzzling down beer after beer. Finally, he decides to compact himself in his machine with his beloved wastepaper.  

I loved what he has done here by showing capitalism under the guise of socialism. The doing away of any appreciation of art is, of course, given here, but it also shows a disconnect between even man and the machine.

To Hanta, there’s no way you can travel to Greece without having read about Aristotle or Plato or even Goethe. So relevant in our times of consumerist culture where we flit about from land to land, ticking off places from our bucket list.

There never was a greater lover of books than Hanta, for he chose to be a wastepaper handler just so he could lay his hands on books. “…just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth…”

As I read the book, I become very conscious of the fact that I too am holding a book in my hand and hope that I will never be callous enough to toss it in amidst waste paper. Hrabal renews my gratitude to authors who enable time travel, who pack their thoughts into words and share them with us, who lay bare before us beauty as well as misery. For, “real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”  

Summertime

I shook my head twice when I was reading Summertime. Was I reading a novel by J M Coetzee (in picture) or was this written about someone else? But that couldn’t be: the subject of the book shared the same name as the author.

For some time, I was lost. And one of Coetzee’s purposes was achieved. To puzzle the reader, to leaver her perplexed about his personality – is the novel autobiographical, or even taking from the truth in some places, at least? But then why would anyone want to portray himself as one having no ‘sexual presence’? And this laceration of his sexual self continues throughout the book.

Summertime, a collection of fictionalized interviews about Coetzee, is like Coetzee grabbing the reader by the neck and asking her to stop asking questions about him: what is the author like in real life? What of his sex life? What of the things he believed in? Coetzee seems to say, ‘Find the answers in my text, and not in me.’ What one writes may not necessarily be taken from the author’s life. So, even an attempt to scrutinise the author’s life for what he lets out in his work can, in a sense, let his writing down.

For, when one tells stories, one is trying to communicate with the story as a medium. There’s nothing cardinally wrong about looking for an author’s inspiration in his/her personal life: but, what’s the point? What is this obsession with knowing the source of something? Why should something be because of something, and not just exist?

I know the all-too human obsession behind knowing, of course, but Coetzee wants to snub this voyeuristic urge.

It’s also as if to compete with other descriptions of himself: by creating one himself. And, in doing that, try to dispel the aura of a ‘great writer’. What is a great writer but one who reports best her life experiences, sketches in detail the life-pictures she sees around her? So, how much credit for the ‘great writing’ should be attributed to the people in the writer’s life, to the stories she is witness to?

The book obsessively sniggers at the whole idea of ‘great’ and I do see the point of doing so. Some of our so-called literary persons would do well to read this book.

My name is Red

A more comprehensive review (and one that I liked) is here.

Am making a very, very brief note, of course:
The tussle between tradition and individuality or the attack of Western influence is at the heart of the book. So, is a murder mystery, that is weaved through till the very end.

But tradition, too, originated once perhaps as a streak of individuality and then got institutionalized. The fear that the chief royal miniaturist shows in the book towards the Western trend of portraiture, is the age-old fear against anything new that has the potential to shake up your world.

It got me thinking about the place of art in Islam. I’d love to do further reading on this. Any suggestions?

Love is a beggar on the streets

Love is a beggar on the streets!
She is not to his need -
Like the have not's creed;
Seeking what's not his,
Dreaming of eternal bliss;
She is a sucker on his wits.

Love is a cur in a deserted ditch!
Howling drearily at midnight's hour,
The Solitary wail of a bond gone sour;
Dribbling wearily for emotions gone by -
Pondering passions that were a colossal lie;
She is but now a bitch.

Love is a bonded slave!
Genuflecting at her master's caprice,
For which she must pay any price;
She can't avenge herself in rage,
She is the serf of an amorous bondage;
Where is the freedom she might crave?

Love is a merchant of pleasure!
Trading her wares in a fleeting transaction -
In the capitalists' dream of free market fruition,
Or the stagnation of the socialist paradise -
Here fidelity is an utopia vice;
Love is a use and throw treasure.

Love is a nuclear device!
She detonates a passionate fallout,
And brings mutually assured destruction about
The dispassionate soldier of the information age -
Awaiting orders for people to ravage.
Will love ever cease strife?

-- Lincoln Roy (1999)

(The magazine in which this poem was published has been lost and found too many times, and I cannot take any more risk with it. So, am recording the poem here. Image source: www.popandpolitics.com)

Annana Nenapu

Annana Nenapu is a delightful book written by Purnachandra Tejaswi about his father, Kuvempu. The book begins from the beginning, albeit that of the son, and not the father. And the many stories that Tejaswi tells us about his childhood not only reveal less-known quirks of the poet, but also are such fun to read, thanks to his cheery narrative.

For me, it was even more of a pleasure to read such springy and lively Kannada sitting in Kolkata. At times, the writer does get somewhat involved with experiences and events that are strictly not related to Kuvempu and he acknowledges such digressions. But memory is such a strange thing, isn’t it? You can’t train your mind to sterilize and compartmentalize what it sees, analyzes, and stores. Like the canvas cot that Tejaswi associates with Kuvempu in an inexplicable way.


The book also reveals Kuvempu’s views on languages, mainly Kannada and to some extent English, and his heart-warming love and respect for both. Such an attitude is hard to be found these days.

This book has been with me for quite a few years now and had become one of those books I wanted to read someday. I am glad I read it at last. I absolutely loved Tejaswi’s style. Ah, wish I could lay my hand on more of his books.

Sir.

Linc said, “Considering your capacity to cry rivers and oceans, you didn’t cry much.” And I thought, yes. Linc, who is usually much stronger than me, was breaking down every now and then, and frequently had a lost look in his eyes. How was it possible that I wasn’t reacting similarly? What stopped my tears?

It is his voice in my ears. I hear it all the time. To me, he is ever-present: in each book I read, each comma, each apostrophe that I will ever use, each sentence that I write, and re-write, for I hear his voice in my head, “Be human, be clear.” Somehow, his absence is not as strong as his presence was.

I was changed from the first day I met Jyoti Sanyal at journalism school seven years ago. He overawed me by his passion for lucid writing and also his sweep of knowledge, but I never remember being terrorized by him, as so many others do. I saw through his sound and fury quickly for the compassionate man he really was. (I realized his anger was not directed at individuals, but at the obsolete way of writing that has entrenched itself in India. He set up Clear English India in Kolkata, where I still work, to fight the evils of legalese, officialese, circumlocution and the like that plague Indian writing.)

He was fired from that school by a maniac, but Linc and I kept visiting him every week at his place in Fraser Town. It was there over cups of coffee he made that I learnt my editing. I pasted newspaper clippings on to a sheet of paper and edited on the hard copy. He corrected them with his red-ink pen. I think I still have them somewhere, must look for them. With each visit, my horizons of knowledge expanded and my love for him grew.

Sometime during those meetings, our relationship graduated from teacher-pupil to father-daughter. What fun and joy-filled moments those were! Those raunchy jokes he cracked, the anecdotes he shared, those conversations rich in information…, everything is cherished. Going back home after each visit, I remember thinking that each conversation could be the subject of a book.

My writing bloomed under his watchful eyes. About a year after I met him, he told me he saw a maturity in my writing. I felt like I’d won the Pulitzer prize. Those people who have ever been complimented by him know the weight and sincerity of those compliments. Then, one day, he told me I was among his smartest students. I simply laughed it off. That was too huge a compliment for me to handle. But he kept looking into my eyes, and said, “Yes Viju, you are.”

Just a year ago when I did a series of stories on street children for an NGO, he asked me to send it to P Sainath and get it published as a book. These are landmark moments in my life.

When he gave these compliments, I had shaken my head incredulously. But now I know I have to believe in myself and cannot look for reinforcements. He believed in me, so shall I.

He lived a simple life, and though he was associated with a business in his last years, was never really money-minded. What he loved to do was to teach and make more people convert to plain language and practise it. I hope I shall be able to further his work here at Clear English India.

You don’t meet too many great people in one lifetime, and get to know them closely and then work for them. I can’t believe my luck sometimes.

I remember you, Sir, for everything you gave me.
Continue to be the voice in my head,
and hold my hand as I write each word.
Sit here beside me as you would,
with answers to all the questions I asked.
You would say these words are unnecessary,
and would have deleted them right away from this post,
But Sir, thank you.

Nearly everything

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
Throughout the book, I kept thinking how much work Bryson must have put into this book…, the amount of reading, cross-referencing, travelling, etc., he must have subjected himself to. All to know the why and how of things. Amazing. His effort was worth each page he must have painfully ploughed through.

It starts with discussing the ‘Big Bang’, weaves its way through the many inventions and discoveries that have changed human life since, and then traces the origin of life, right up to us. Not that it answers every random question you ever thought of (my favourite, when I was a kid, was ‘Are there black flowers?’). And I don’t think it was ever meant to be.

It’s a book that should have been written long ago ideally when I was a kid. So I would read it and realise science has more to it than what my textbooks made it out to be. I didn’t hate science. I quite loved it. But when things started getting slightly complicated, say, by Class X, chemistry seemed intimidating, physics dull, and biology was full of complex diagrams I couldn’t, for the life of me, fathom. I remember my biology teacher saying that half the marks apportioned to diagrams were awarded to the drawing and half to the labeling. I always made sure I got the labeling right. I had to, else how would you know a heart from a large intestine?

Coming back to Bryson, there were some chapters, especially the ones that dwelt on the age of the earth, which did drag. Now, how would it make a difference if the earth is 9,000,000,000,000,000 million years old or if it is 9,000,000,000,000,001 million years old? I would still prefer my chicken curry hot.

I do appreciate his efforts in going behind the scenes and bringing to light very shy scientists, or sometimes even laypersons who were never credited for their insight just because they were laypersons.

The book does remind me of Shivram Karanth’s column for kids in Taranga. You could send in any question on science to Karanthajja and it would be answered in the column. I did send in my black flower question but never saw it answered :(

It also reminds me of similar attempts to popularize science by a Kannada author, whose name eludes me now. If anyone reading this can, then please let me know. He was the son of a famous poet is the other thing I can remember about him.

Hitchhiker

Vinod Joseph sent me his book Hitchhiker and asked me to review it. So, here it is:

Ebenezer, the protagonist, is a second-generation converted Christian. Pre-conversion, his family belonged to a backward caste, and was regarded untouchable. The conversion doesn’t change their social status much.

But what Ebenezer is bothered about is securing admission into a top engineering college. A couple of months before his exams, he is injured and his mother and sister killed in a caste riot, and he is unable to take the exams. His classmates go their ways, some making it to the top institutes, some not.

Ebenezer eventually fails to get into any of the top or even middle-rank engineering institutes, and enrols for a diploma in a course-vending firm, where he meets Gayatri, the daughter of a rich Hindu rightist. They later end up working together in Mumbai, and falling in love. There is the predictable uproar by Gayatri’s family, and they gradually wean her away.

Desperate to get Gayatri back, Ebenezer converts to Hinduism on an impulse. That seals his love affair, because Gayatri had always wanted him ‘just as he was.’ The Global Evangelical Church, to which his family owes allegiance, is eager to get him back, though. But Ebenezer has had enough with religion. That, now, is the summary of the story.

I came away from the book untouched, unmoved, except for the last couple of pages. Many reasons for this:
i) Too many characters, too little characterisation: People keep coming in through various stages of the book and disappearing just as fast. The story would have lost nothing if some characters weren’t there at all. Like Ebenezer’s numerous friends. Or his teachers. What happens is we end up with too many loose ends. Halfway through the book, I stopped raising eyebrows when the next character popped in and out.

Also, I hardly get to know the characters intimately, even the main ones, barring Ebenezer perhaps. What do I know about Gayatri, except that she’s Ebenezer’s lady love and is the daughter of a wealthy Hindu upper class man? How does she look like? What was their love affair like? Passionate? Platonic? Did they get to create a lot of memories together? Well, I don’t know.

ii) Imbalanced plot: Much time is spent on describing how Ebenezer and his friends are gearing up for the exams, what their dreams are, etc. Now, really, in middle-class India, don’t we know all this? And even if someone didn’t, I think the initial chapters needed some pace.

The initial chapters are filled with such detail that the lack of it in the later ones shows.

iii) Distractions: I agree it’s tempting to narrate all the stories you know. And, Vinod realizes that each of us has one. But frankly, unless you tie them all up, they are like sudden voices in the dark, which leave you unsure from which direction they came, or whether you heard them at all. Example: the death of Ebenezer’s colleague’s wife in the Gujarat riots. And the whole sub-plot about the NRI Gujarati family in UK. And various people’s rambling opinions on world events.

Though the Gujarati family was linked to Gayatri’s dad, did it help in the development of the plot? Using rich sub-plots can be great, but they need to be weaved into the story, else they stand out.

iv) Editing, or the lack of it: Did this book pass under the blue pencil at all? I don’t think so. Innumerable idiomatic, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes abound. Also, for God’s sake, why has a sans serif font been used? (Looks like Arial!!) It’s quite an effort for the eye to go through page after page of sans serif font. Use serif font when you have a lot of text - that’s the first lesson you learn in page layout.

v) Drama: Except towards the end of the story when Ebenezer converts to Hinduism, the story lacks in drama, the capacity to move, the capacity to touch. When Ebenezer’s mother and sister died, why didn’t I feel anything?

Hitchhiker does have a lot of dialogue, which is good. If some of the sub-plots were gotten rid of and some strengthened, the characters more rounded and given depth, and some technical things like editing taken care of, the story definitely has something going for it.

Vinod, thank you for sending the book, and am really sorry this took so long. Keep in touch.

Ahem

I had long given up on Amitava Ghosh's Glass Palace. I thought it was a series of events that just went on and on. I read about 10 pages and put it aside a couple of years ago.

Ghosh keeps returning to coincidences: everyone you meet and everything that happens in his books will appear again and show more meaning. It gets quite tiring sometimes. His Calcutta Chromosome is choked with such coincidences, until your head spins.

Ba alias Win Ross, whom we met on our train journey to Hubli last month, mentioned the book and said Ghosh was a great writer. So, I took up the book again, and was quite disappointed. No insights whatever.

Oh, by the way, Ba was quite a find. Since he got on at Bhubaneswar at 7 in the morning, till we got off at Hubli next day at 12 noon, we talked and talked and talked. And he's got 5,000 books in his house in Madgaon!! At least now I should make that long put-off trip. Talking to him was like travelling the world.

Meanwhile, on Singur and land acquisition, the story continues to get funnier by the day. The CPI-M without Anil Biswas seems like too many cooks. Only hope they continue to be at it. We want the broth to spoil.

Was watching the rail budget coverage on some Hindi channels yesterday. I guess they were trying to entertain (sic! on a news channel?!), but it was downright stupid. Song and dance with Laloo and Rabdi look-alikes. As broadcast people fall over themselves trying to newstain, therein might lie some hope for print.

My family and other animals

Pure delight - that's Gerald Durrel's My family and other animals. Durrel's description is exquisite. He paints very vivid pictures, and his sense of humour is unique. You never know when a laugh is creeping up on you, and then you cant stop. It's not the loud ha-ha, hee-hee kind. It's the kind that has you in knots, and you keep smiling to yourself. Of course, this was another kind of entertainment for my co-passengers in the Metro, but I said, laugh and let see.

Discovered Durrel pretty late in life, but he's marked now. Here's one of my favourite passages from My family...

"… The wedding night – or rather day – of a tortoise is not exactly inspiring…

…The incredibly heavy-handed and inexpert way the male [tortoise] would attempt to hoist himself on to the female’s shell, slipping and slithering, clawing desperately for a foothold on the shiny shields, overbalancing and almost overturning, was extremely painful to watch; the urge to go and assist the poor creature was almost overwhelming, and I had the greatest difficulty in restraining myself from interference.

Once a male was infinitely more bungling than usual, and fell down three times during the mounting, and generally behaved in such an imbecile manner I was beginning to wonder if he were going to take all summer about it… At last, more by luck than skill, he hoisted himself up… when the female obviously bored by the male’s inadequacy, moved a few steps towards a dandelion leaf. Her husband clawed wildly at her moving shell, but could get no foothold; he slipped off, teetered for a minute, and then rolled ignominiously over on to his back. This final blow seemed to be too much for him, because, instead of trying to right himself, he simple folded up in his shell and lay there mournfully. The female, meanwhile, ate the dandelion leaf."