"Block!" go the weasels

"We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."

- from this morning's Hindustan Times news report on the banning of blogspot and other sites

(for more coverage of the issue in the mainstream press, see here)

Okay. You asked for it.

First of all, notice that it's not citizens who are supposed to have to defend their right to free expression, it's the government that needs to justify any steps taken to curb those freedoms. There are many, many things one could argue that we don't 'need' - books for example, or music, or theatre, or art, or museums, or malls, or television, or restaurants - many if not most of these may well be irrelevant to the cretins sitting in the DoT. That's precisely why they don't get to decide what's meaningful or not meaningful for us. The government has no role policing lifestyle or opinion or deciding what is or is not valuable for its citizens.

Second, let's be clear about why this ban is unacceptable [1] :

It doesn't work (part 1): Blocking a few sites doesn't in any meaningful way hamper communication over the Internet. Even someone as technically illiterate as I, can, with a little determination and some help from my friends, find a way to access any site I want, bans from the government notwithstanding. All a ban means, in practice, is a lot of harrassment of perfectly well-meaning people who are now forced to find ways around this meaningless ban [2].

It doesn't work (part 2): Even if, by some extreme means (such as shutting down ISPs all together) the GoI could effectively block all Internet access, is that really going to stop people from communicating with each other? Can we assume that in the days before the Internet / blogs no one was ever able to send messages to his fellow terrorist or express anti-national sentiments? Or is the government planning to take down all forms of communication? Ban newspapers, take down phone lines, stop postal services, perhaps even call out the Army to shoot down flying pigeons because some of them might be carrying anti-national messages tied to their legs?

It shouldn't work: The government's role is to attack crime, not opinion. In a free, democratic society people have a right to their point of view. We may disagree with them, but we don't censor them. If it's valid to shut down blogs because they express anti-national sentiments, can we assume that it's also valid to throw people in jail because they protest against or criticise the government? And if expressing an opinion is a crime, then why isn't holding that opinion a crime also? Why don't we start bugging people's houses to see if they are saying things against the country or the government? Why don't we drag random people off the streets and interrogate them to see if they hold anti-nationalistic sentiments. Welcome to the Orwellian world of the thought police.

It hurts everyone, not just the intended targets: Along the lines of my previous post - it is not okay to harm or punish thousands of innocent people [3] in order to attack a few miscreants. That's exactly the kind of thinking that we're trying to fight against. The whole point of terrorism is to make people afraid enough so that they can no longer go on living their normal life, no longer enjoy the freedoms that they're accustomed to. It is to force upon others the lack of liberty that you face yourself, to make them live the way you do. Taking away citizen's rights is not fighting terrorism, it's perpetuating it.

Do blogs really make a difference?: Do we really believe that seeing a post on a blog, or hearing a speech someone makes can change a perfectly well-meaning, innocent person into a terrorist? If I happen to come upon a post that expresses anti-India sentiments am I suddenly going to turn around and start planting bombs in trains or attacking other people in their houses? Of course not. The only people who are 'inspired' to action by a blog post are people who already believed or thought what the post was saying. Certainly, blogs and other means of communication may serve as effective means of coordinating / communicating between them, but unless we're willing to take out all forms of public communication entirely, there's no way to stop that.

If blogs make a difference, what about the positives: No, no, you say, reacting to that last point. You're a devoted blogger. You believe that your words are changing the world. Blog posts matter. Fair enough. But notice that for every post I've seen in the past week expressing violent or anti-India sentiments I've seen a dozen calling for peace and compassion, a dozen expressing support, solidarity or sympathy. If blogs affect how people think (and we'd certainly like to believe they do) then blocking all blogs means that we're poorer as a society because all the positive affirmation that blogs gave us is no longer possible.

Divided we fall: We're not just poorer as a society, we're also weaker. Human beings survive crisis and deal with fear through contact with other people. Isolate us and we're more vulnerable. Much has been said about the great work done right after the Bombay blasts by the folks over at Mumbai Help. That's just one example of how communication makes us stronger. If the government takes down lines of communication between people on the grounds that terrorists might use them, the only people not likely to be affected by that in a crisis are the terrorists, who, knowing that the crisis is coming will have planned for it in advance. What it will do is make it harder for us to reach out to each other in times of tragedy. What it will do is increase panic, make it easier to spread rumours, cause more fear. And that's exactly what the government should be trying to avoid.

You might say I'm exaggerating - that the ban as it stands today doesn't hamper our ability to communicate that much. Yes. But the thinking behind it is pernicious, and I'd rather make the point against it now, rather than wait till it spreads so far that it's impossible to make the point at all

It's bad for our international reputation: If there's one thing India has going for it internationally it's our reputation as a democracy, as a free society. That's not just central to our claim as a preferred economic destination, it's also our key bargaining chip in international geo-politics. Any Western power that claims to champion democracy and be against military dictatorships and other oppresive regimes, cannot run away from the fact that we are, in every sense of the word, a state that protects individual liberty and democratic principle. The bureaucrats sitting in DoT may not see the significance of blocking access to blogs, the Western media will. At a time when we need to try and push for greater Western pressure to stop political support for terrorism, the last thing we need is to be seen as a repressive state that, like China, denies its citizens free access to information and public expression

Transparency: Finally, there's the issue of transparency. It's not just that the government has blocked / banned websites, it's that they've concealed this from the public. It's been five days since the letters went out to the ISPs and I'm yet to see a clear statement from the government as to what sites are to be blocked, how long that block will last or why exactly it is deemed necessary to block them. Even if the government in its extremely finite wisdom feels that allowing blogspot access is somehow inimical to national interest, surely we, as citizens, have a right to know about it. Why should we have to piece the story together by calling our ISPs and weaving our way through a web of evasion and lies from government officials? It's obviously convenient for the government not to give us a clear decision to attack, but that's precisely what democracy is about - being transparent about government actions and answerable to the people for them.

Don't get me wrong. God forbid that I should be anti-India or say anything against our wonderful, enlightened leaders. If anything, I think the government is reacting too mildly. Think about it. We know that there are some anti-India radicals living in Bombay. The government of India has nuclear weapons. Why don't they use them to nuke the city? That way we're not just sure to kill the terrorists, we'll also be stealing a march on Pakistan. Of course a few million innocent people may die as well, but hey, if they don't like it, let them come forward afterwards and explain to us what they are missing from their lives now that they've been turned into radioactive dust.

***

I, of course, am delighted with this ban thing. After 27 years of living as a lily-livered coward, I'm finally dangerous, an anti-India radical, a public enemy. Look at me, everyone, I'm BAD!! No more being shoved aside in supermarket queues by little old ladies, no more stammering in panic when a cop pulls me over for speeding. Watch out people - I may not look like much, but I'll have you know that the world's largest democracy is scared of me. That's right, hot shot, 1 billion plus people and they all quake in fear because of what I write on my blog. So you can just stop waving that fist in my face, if you know what's good for you.

This is really exciting. I've never been dangerous before. Even babies who usually scream in fright when handed to a stranger have no compunction in pulling my hair or punching me in the nose. But no longer. Now I can finally stand up to that night club bouncer and tell him where he gets off. Now I can finally go out walking through the shadier parts of town at two am, secure in the knowledge that no one's going to mug a dangerous terrorist like me. This is what Don Corleone must have felt like. No wonder his cheeks swelled up so. The possibilities are endless. Just think about all the women who've turned me down because I was too vanilla, too harmless. Hah! I bet they're kicking themselves right about now.

As for the people who think that all this blogging of mine is a waste of time - are you reading this? I'm big, see. I can destabilise an entire country, see. That spectacled wimp Clark Kent has got nothing on me.

So there.

Notes:

[1] MSM meanwhile continues to be its usual incoherent self. The Economic Times carries the story on its front page. Awfully nice of them, and I'm genuinely grateful. But would it have killed them to write, just this once, a clear story? If you didn't know anything about the ban and read the story I swear you'd come away with the impression that DoT had banned some 17-18 sites, one of which happened to be, by mistake, MumbaiHelp, and that anyway the ban didn't matter because it was easy to get around. Except it does matter and it's not just 17 sites, it's all blogspot blogs. They do kind of make the point in the text, but for something that's the main issue here, it's kind of hidden away.

Oh, and what's with the irony of pkblogs bit. If there's an irony at all it's not that a blog to help the victims of a possibly Pakistan sponsored attack is being accessed through Pakistan, it's that even as we condemn the Pakistan government we're happily adopting their practises, forcing our citizens to take exactly the same measures that Pakistani bloggers were forced to take. If we're so opposed to the Pakistani government, you'd think we'd want to be less like them, not more.

[2] It's not just that the way to fight technology is not through this kind of half-baked banning but through something more sophisticated. It's also that, almost by definition, it's always going to be more difficult for the innocent to get around a blanket ban like this one, than for anyone (such as a terrorist) for whom this may truly be crucial / critical to their plans.

[3] Okay, so 'innocent' is probably a stretch applied to some of us, but you know what I mean.

The specific vs the general

In my article in Hafta today, I discuss Camus' The Just, and argue that it is important, as we think about how to respond to terrorist violence, that we preserve our own humanity, that we recognise that we are dealing with other human beings and not with abstractions or symbols.

It is tempting, when faced with an invisible enemy, to generalise - to see the actions of specific people as being representative of their religion, their nationality, their race or caste. This is violence by proxy - the usual argument is that putting 'pressure', often through violence or the threat of violence, on those we perceive to be associated with the crimes will somehow cause the crimes to stop. Over the last week I have seen variants of this argument repeated numerous times on the blogosphere (see for instance, the comments to Amit Varma's post on Comment is Free last week), many of them championing 'action' against Pakistan or against Muslims.

The argument usually made against such points of view is a practical one - violence by proxy doesn't help. Most people are quick to point to the example of Israel - as good a demonstration as any of the inability of violent measures to stem the tide of terrorism. In fact, as has often been argued, such violence only helps to fan the flames of vengeance and makes it easier for terrorist organisations to find fresh recruits. And that I think, is not just true of violent acts against particular communities. Attempts to target and marginalise particular communities in any way are always self-fulfilling - if you treat a group of people as terrorists or criminals, you increase the probability that some of them will prove you right.

What surprises me is that we would need to look beyond our borders or to historical examples to see the truth of this. After all, we ourselves have been subject to repeated violence (both from the terrorists and from Pakistan) over Kashmir. Has any of that violence made us more amenable to the idea of withdrawing from Kashmir and acknowledging it as an independent state? I think not. If violence or the threat of violence doesn't work on us, why do we think it will work on anyone else?

But as we try and argue against such violence by proxy, there is, I think a second argument to be made - a moral one. If we believe that it is justified to attack individuals based on their affiliation to a particular nation or religion as a means of putting political or social pressure on them, if we believe that it is valid, when faced with a threat to our own existence, to punish individuals without giving them due legal process or the right to defend themselves, then what exactly is our problem with the terrorists? Those are, after all, exactly the beliefs that they're operating on. In making an argument that justifies violence against those not proven to be criminals we commit ourselves to a barbaric Hobbesian world, a fight to the death, where morality and principle no longer hold any meaning and the one who 'wins' (and it will be a Pyrrhic victory) is the one who happens to have the most strength / luck.

There is no 'rational' reason why we cannot make that choice. But it is important to recognise what that choice entails - it entails choosing a world where happiness and safety become impossible, where human life as we know it loses most of its meaning. The point is not simply that attacks on innocent Muslims will achieve nothing and will only strengthen the cause of Islamic terrorists; the point is not simply that is inhuman to attack people who have no connection to these terrorist attacks, who are just as much victims as the rest of us and who have, in effect, just as much ability to stop the terrorists as anyone else (although all of those are valid points). The point is also that once we accept as a principle the idea of violence against abstract categories of people being justified, there will always be those we see as others to attack (or those who see us as others to be attacked by) - there is no end to us vs. them.

***

None of this, of course, applies to the morons who are blocking my access to blogspot. All through the weekend I kept reading about how a few ISPs had blocked blogspot blogs and despite what seemed like pretty convincing evidence I managed to believe that is was all some sort of minor glitch and that conspiracy theories involving government bans were largely overreactions. It will all blow over by Monday, I thought.

My apologies to everyone I doubted.

Now that pretty much every ISP in India seems to be blocking blogspot (which means if you're in India and reading this - thanks - I appreciate your making the effort), I don't think there's any doubt that this is some sort of government initiative (though possibly magnified out of proportion). And that makes me extremely pissed off.

At any rate, in case you haven't seen this already, do check out the Bloggers Collective Google Group. 2x3x7 will continue on blogspot for now - access through Bloglines and via pkblogs should still work. I'm still hoping this thing will blow over soon. If it doesn't, then I may decide to switch to Wordpress after all.

P.S. I don't want to push the parallel too far, but I can't help noticing that this blocking of blogs is precisely the kind of generalised action that I'm arguing against in this post. A few blogs might have objectionable content. But we don't have a means to target them. So let's go ahead and shut down all blogs, rather than trying to go after the few we want to hit. It's easier doing it this way. And who cares if thousands of other bloggers suffer? Or that this sort of incoherent action won't actually stop any really determined person from carrying on with whatever he or she was up to?

Nearer my tabloid to thee

[Inspired by this (hat-tip: Uma)]

Geeks can be gods too

He can play the stolid professor to perfection, manage to solve vector equations in five dimensions, and have a body as sleek as a whippet. He's so difficult on the mind that you can almost be forgiven for not noticing his pretty face...almost.

Men use their brains to get ahead, as has been evident from the time that Donald Trump managed to hold prime time television viewers painfully tightly to ransom with his hairstyle. But which woman (cold-blooded and all that) was smart enough not to look beyond that mop of silly hair? Apparently not many.

Female Speak

Concurs Felicity Slacker, math major at the Ivy League University of North Dakota, "Obviously flighty undergraduates don't find their brilliant professors sexy because they have too many other things on their mind. If they just started looking below his neck for a moment, instead of concentrating on the equations he was writing in chalk on the board, they would realise that their calculus professor had washboard abs. The reason most women never get there is that they're too busy trying to figure out how to get from Lemma 6 to Proposition 8", she guffaws with a come-hither look.

Though her outlook is profound, how do academics see this lack of objectification?

Just a laughing matter

Says former Professor at MIT and Physics Red Giant Maxwell Housman, "I enjoy the fact that my women students sometimes think I don't have a body. It amuses me because they don't know how much I weigh. Plus it means they don't recognise me on the beach and so aren't always asking me stupid questions about cosmic radiation in the middle of my sun tan". On a more serious note, he adds "Your answer to Question 4 is wrong, by the way. You're getting a C for the course."

Not a laughing matter

Frustrated TA Navarre Hiton has an opposing view, "It's very unfair to judge someone on their capabilities and not on their looks. I work twice as hard as most women in my class at brushing my hair to give it that soft, natural look, and to only get asked out by students who want better grades is insulting. Of course, it's nice to have that kind of petty power, but there comes a point when it should be ignored. Men need to base their sex life on their dashing good looks and not on their academic achievements."

Just anti-matter

Particle physicist Conrad Phelps, whose work on neutrons had good friend C V Bose walking the Planck is quite unperturbed by the idea of women. "I haven't really been faced with the problem of dating, the only thing I'm ever turned on by are the results from my particle accelerator. If you are brainy and obssessive, you aren't likely to be seeing anyone. Plus, if you're good at what you do, the money you make will be more important than your brains."

Psycho speak

Certified psychopath Hannibal Lecher says it's ultimately about how much flesh you can get off your victim. "Most averagely intelligent people are threatened by too much analysis and go to the gym to work out instead. Hence the real geniuses who never emerge from their labs tend to get less exercise and it can hamper the development of their triceps. Liposuction can help rid them of their puppy fat."

Geeks with greek god looks

Richard Feynman: author, physicist and former genius was once approached by Playgirl to pose nude for their centrefold. (His reply: "surely you're joking?")

Albert Einstein: Probably the world's most famous genius, was voted prom king in junior high.

Stephen Hawking: He may look like crap now, but this legendary thinker was incredibly cute as a baby.

***

In yet another demonstration of its sublime journalistic quality, The Times of India on Sunday features a review of Philip Roth's Everyman. It's a harmless enough review, pleasantly vapid, that tells you almost nothing about the book except that it's not, according to the reviewer, misogynistic (phew! what a relief - that's what I really wanted to know about the book).

The reviewer, however, makes one fatal mistake. Before he gets to the title of the book he's reviewing (Everyman) he happens to mention another Philip Roth book - The Dying Animal. Worse, he actually ends a paragraph on it.

This, of course, is enough to convince the folks at ToI that the review is actually a review of the Dying Animal, so that's what they print it as. Some kind soul even goes to the trouble of fishing out an image of the cover of The Dying Animal and putting it into the print edition of the paper. No one notices that that isn't actually the book being reviewed.

Oh, and this for a review which starts with the lines:

" At a time when so much English fiction from India is bloated and sloppy, with book editors leaving their blue pencils unsharpened, ... "

Ah, the irony.

P.S. This should be abundantly clear, but just in case - all 'facts' and people presented in the 'Geeks can be Gods too' article are entirely fictional. As I said, I was inspired by the DNA article.

Yes, but who will be the first LADY?

I think I've finally figured out why Paris Hilton exists.

Think about it - she's rich, she's clueless, she has a surname everyone recognises, she'll do or say anything to stay in the public eye.

It's obvious, isn't it? Paris Hilton is going to be President of the United States of America.

Remember, you heard it here first [1]

Guilty Secret # 29:

It took me almost a year of seeing headlines with Paris Hilton in them before I realised that she was a person. I'd always assumed that Paris Hilton was a hotel. I'd keep seeing these banners saying Paris Hilton One Night Stand / Paris Hilton Sex [2] and I'd think to myself - damn! if I ever get to Paris I know where I'm staying.

[1] Sure, you laugh now, but remember Ronald Reagan?

[2] If you just came to this site by running a google search for Paris Hilton Sex, all I can say is: your life is even sadder than mine.

I hate Wordpress (well, not any more)

No, really.

So in a fit of late night / early morning paranoia I decided to back-up 2x3x7 on Wordpress.

Big mistake. First the damn thing timed me out. Then it kept retrying. Finally, it worked, but it turns out that in the process Wordpress managed to get rid of all paragraph breaks from this blog. Which, when you consider the average length of my posts is pretty darn serious.

The good news is that all of 2x3x7 is still available in legible format here. I will now spend tomorrow (today) morning trying to get this blog back into shape. Any suggestions on how to do that would be welcome. (Apparently wordpress let's you export from it as well - anyone ever tried that?). Failing that, I might be forced to switch to Wordpress. Or continue blogging here but keep archives in Wordpress. I don't know. Right now I need sleep.

Why me?

UPDATE: Joy truly cometh in the morning. The trouble turned out to be one niggling little setting about line breaks that WP had changed and not set back. Who knew? So things have got sorted out now. My thanks to those who offered to help.

Having said that, 2x3x7 is also available on WP for now - at http://falstaff.wordpress.com - so I'm back to dithering about whether I should make the switch. Comments are welcome, as usual.

Of Geeks, Nerds and Terrorists

Just a few links from my Inbox:

"What I tell you three times is true"

- Lewis Carroll

Now that I've been told three times that I should read the Writers Against Terrorism blog, I figured I'd do what one always does with good advice - pass it on.

Go read. Some exquisite writing. Some excellent points. And a LOT of incoherent ranting. I'm told that people deal with trauma / grief in three stages - first they experience numbness and shock. Then they undergo emotional upheaval - including feelings of anger, loneliness, disbelief or denial. Finally they reach acceptance. Writers Against Terrorism is fascinating because it offers you a superb opportunity to observe all three phases in play - all at the same time.

It's also a wonderful demonstration of just why terrorism is so difficult to respond to. Everyone has a different idea about what the appropriate response should be (ranging from hawkish bluster to saintly resignation), everyone tries to apply analogies from completely different contexts - wars, natural disasters, etc. [1] and the end result is that we end up fighting each other more than anyone else. And that, surprisingly enough, is probably a good thing. Because it means we're still opinionated, stubborn and pedantic - in other words human - and haven't turned into the kind of brainwashed zombies that we're trying to fight.

So - a noble effort. Though I'm curious to see how long the enthusiasm lasts.

***

In other news, meanwhile, a reader writes in to ask me what the 'm++++' in my Geek Code stands for, seeing as it's not standard Geek Syntax. Finally, someone who noticed.

m is my own addition to the Geek Code. It stands for music. The categories are (roughly):

m++++

I've stopped talking to people because surgically removing my iPod from my ears is too painful

m+++

I spent more money on my stereo system than I did on my car / I don't own a car because with all that music in the house who wants to go anywhere?

m++

I have a CD collection that's colour coded by genre / Sometimes I just sit around running my fingers along the spines of my CDs and feel happy.

m+

I listen to music all the time in the car on my way to work / I have a subscription to Yahoo Music

m

I don't listen to music much, though sometimes I'll leave the radio playing in the background

m-

The only kind of music I listen to is the kind they play in elevators

m--

I am a Britney Spears fan

m---

I am a doorknob

m----

I am Yanni

***

And finally, the Falstaff Award for best book title of the month goes to:

Far From the Madding Gerund

The new book from the folks over at Language Log (Go UPenn!) that argues, if Slate is to be believed (I haven't read the book, though I have read the blog) that 'correct' language is language as it's generally used. We yam what we yam, and why bother with all this grammar-shammer.

Notes

[1] Let's get one thing straight people - 'War against terror' is just a catch phrase. Terrorism is not war, any more than it's a flood or an earthquake or a riot or cancer. You can't apply the same methods of engagement to terrorism as you would to a war. That's how you end up bombing innocent civilians in Baghdad, or invading Lebanon.

The Key

He was clearing out the desk in the study one Sunday afternoon when he found it. A small, silver key with an oval base and the letters JF8421 etched on it. It was lying in the middle drawer, hidden under the brown paper he'd used to line the bottom. He held it in the palm of his hand and stared at it. He couldn't think what it was a key to.

Was it the key to the drawer itself? No, it didn't fit. He tried the other drawers, then the bookshelf, then the closet in the study. No. He went around the house trying it in all the other cupboards that he never locked. It didn't belong to any of them. He took out all the keys in the house and compared it to them, thinking it might be a duplicate of something. It wasn't. He remembered that the refrigerator had a lock too and tried that. No. He pulled out his old bicycle lock from the back of his supply cupboard. No luck there.

What could it be the key to? Could someone else have left it there? Some visitor? He remembered how his friend Rajeev had come over and spent the night in his study once because his wife had thrown him out of the house. Had it really been six months ago? Could it be his? But surely he would have said something by now. They hadn't spoken in a while though. No harm checking.

Rajeev and his wife, it seemed, had settled their differences. Their son had been really ill. No, he was fine now. Quite recovered. Was spending the summer vacations with his grandparents. Rajeev and his wife were organising a picnic next weekend. Would he like to come? Great, they looked forward to seeing him. It had been a long time. What's that - a key? No, no, he hadn't left any keys behind. The whole point of that night was that his wife had taken even the keys to his own house away from him. Ha ha.

So it wasn't Rajeev's. Where did it come from then? He stared at the key again. It wasn't big enough to be the key to something important. It looked more like the key to a locker. Yes, that's what it was, a locker key. But the lockers in his gym didn't have keys. And he didn't have a locker at work. But wait, what about his old office? He used to have a locker there. Could this be the key to that locker? Had he simply forgotten to hand it in when he quit? He never used that locker anyway. He tried to remember what the key looked like.

Next day he took off early for lunch and went down to his old office (it was just a block away, after all). The receptionist was new and didn't know him. He was just trying to explain to her who he was and what he wanted there when his old boss showed up. He was even balder than he remembered, and still had that irritating accent. But he seemed less intimidating somehow. Pretty soon all his old colleagues had gathered around, telling him how he hadn't changed a bit, how he looked completely different, how he'd lost weight. It felt good. His friend Gautam, the one who'd been swearing he was going to quit for as long as he could remember, was still there. They decided to go out for lunch. Gautam updated him on all the office gossip. It seemed strange, like peering through a window into another world.

The key didn't fit though. Once he actually got there he remembered that the keys to the lockers looked completely different. He didn't know how he could have forgotten. Now what? He spent an hour in his cubicle thinking over where else that key could have come from. It was beginning to annoy him now, not knowing what the key was for. Could it be from his earlier apartment? No, he'd given all the keys to that back to the landlord, even the spares. But maybe a duplicate to the mailbox? Yes, yes, it could be.

That night he stopped by his old apartment. Or rather, where his old apartment used to be. They had torn the building down. They were building some new high rise. The entire site was surrounded by a high asbestos fence. He was shocked to see it. All his fondness for the old house came flooding back. His first apartment. All the good times he'd had there, all the memories.

He stopped by the paan walla at the corner to get a cigarette. The old man recognised him, welcomed him back with the kind of eagerness one reserves for a favourite customer. Wanted to know how he was, what he was doing these days, why he never came by the shop anymore. He told him that he'd moved out, that he lived far away now, that he'd only stopped by to see his old place - he didn't know it had been torn down. Yes, the old man nodded sagely, three months ago they started. Such a nuisance, sir, all these trucks with their dust and cement going up and down all the time. Constant traffic jams. Ruining the place, really. All the best people (like yourself, sir) moving out. Which reminds me sir, what happened to that friend of yours, the one who was always coming here with you, woh chashme walleh? Nikhil. He's in the States now, he told him. He's working there. In the i-shtates? Wah, wah, must be making lots of money no? Yes, he nodded, he was. How long since he had had contact with Nikhil? He must e-mail him once he got home.

But what to do about the key though? Could it have been the key to tha mailbox that had now been destroyed? A key without a lock, then, of no use to anyone. Somehow, the more he thought about it that night, the more he doubted it. No, this was the key to something else. He just knew it.

Finally, reluctantly, he decided to call her. They hadn't spoken since the break-up. A part of him said it was a stupid reason to call - some unidentified key - she would think he was making an excuse, that he was checking up on her, or maybe even that he wanted to get back together with her.There was bound to be misunderstanding. Better not to call. But the riddle of the key just wouldn't go away. He'd tried putting it back in the drawer where it came from and forgetting about it, he'd tried watching TV, reading the new Roth, listening to music. But he couldn't get it out of his mind.

He called her. She recognised his voice instantly. Some things hadn't changed. There were the awkward 'how are you's' to begin with. The innocuous little 'so, what's new?' like a bridge thrown over a seething river of questions, all desperate to be asked. She was fine. She was seeing someone new. He was a banker too, it seemed - some habits die hard. He told her how he'd been travelling. Slowly, the conversation thawed. Yes, she'd been to see the new play too. Alyque Padamsee HAD seriously lost it. Had he heard about the poetry reading at the British Council? She was thinking about going for it. Did she remember the last reading they'd been for, the one where the poet described the countryside as being the place where cows moo? She laughed. Of course she did. And how about that interminable poem of hers, the one about making mango pickle as a metaphor for memory. Like that hadn't been done before. What was she reading? Yes, Carver was amazing, wasn't he?....

It felt like old times, talking to her this way. He had that warm, singing sensation inside him again. Not that he was still in love with her or anything. No, no, that was all over. Still, that didn't mean they couldn't be friends. He wondered why he'd been hesitating to call her.

Towards the end of the conversation he brought up the key. Explained how he'd found it, how he couldn't figure out where it belonged, how he thought maybe it was hers, something she'd left behind when she moved out. She said she didn't think so. It wasn't likely was it - she'd never kept any of her stuff in that drawer. Still, maybe a duplicate. She'd check. Would call him back later in the week to let him know.

So that was that. Somehow he didn't think the key would turn out to be hers after all. He suspected she'd just said she'd check to give her an excuse to call back. Where did that leave him? He couldn't think of anyone elsethe key could belong to. Could it have been the previous occupant's? Maybe they'd just left it in the drawer and he'd put the brown paper over it without noticing? No, he remembered going through the house opening every drawer to make sure there was nothing in them. He would have found it then. This key was definitely his.

Staring at it long after midnight, it began to seem to him that this was no ordinary key, but something supernatural - an apparition, a metaphor. Perhaps the secret of the key was that there was no lock to it, perhaps in every universe there was a key that was just a key, in and for itself, that would open nothing. The opposite of a skeleton key - a key that would fit no lock. But why should it magically appear to him? And why now?

He was being silly. This was just an everyday key with a lock of its own. He was actually fairly sure he knew what it was a key to, he just couldn't seem to remember. Was there a reason he couldn't remember? Was he repressing the memory of what that key opened? Was he afraid of what lay behind what the key kept locked? Somewhere out there was a lock that this key fit into and he had to find it. What had he forgotten? What was he missing?

Dis-credited

Dhoomketu asked for this one. Literally.

Guy calls you up. Knows your name. Wants to sell you a credit card. (see details in Dhoomketu's post)

Ten Ways to answer the call:


1) The come-on: "What's your name? Oooh, that's such a strong, masculine name. So, tell me, what colour underwear are you wearing?"

2) The friend-who-can't-be-fooled approach: "Arrey yaar, Dhoomketu, kyon mazaak kar raha hai re? [1] You think I don't recognise your voice. Come off it."

3) The talking-on-cellphone-while-driving approach: "Yes, yes, I'd definitely like a cre...oh shit! AAAAAAAA! *sound of squealing brakes. Cell phone switches off*

4) The Tom Cruise Approach: "Tell me, are you at all familiar with Scientology?..."

5) The manic-depressive approach: "What's the point of a credit card? What's the point of anything? My life is meaningless. I'm going to throw myself out of my 22nd floor window now. Goodbye."

6) The Capt. Haddock approach: "No! This is not Cutts the Butcher!"

7) The check-out-the-competition approach: "ABN Amro credit card? Who would want that? Let me tell you about the Citibank Credit Card that I market. You give 0% APR. We give -0.5% APR. You give flexible credit limits. We don't believe in credit limits at all..."

8) The flight-risk approach: "Sure I'll take a credit card. Could you have it delivered to the airport by tomorrow morning though? The international terminal. My flight for Botswana leaves at 8:00 in the morning. Oh, and ask whoever's coming not to use my name but to ask for Mr. Dhoomketu. I'm travelling under a false passport you see."

9) The Harry and Walter approach: "Ah, so you work for a bank do you? Good, good. So, tell me, is it a liquid bank. Do you keep a lot of cash reserves? Take an average branch. What's that? Your main branch in on Barakhamba Road? Fine, let's take that one. On an average day, what kind of cash would that branch hold? Would it be in the safe or with the cashiers? Is the bank safe? How many guards do you have posted? Are they armed? When do they come off duty?"

10) The certified pothead approach: "What did you say the credit limit was again? Let's see, that would mean...three whole weeks of dope. Wow! Yes, yes, I want the card"

Bonus: The Pankaj Mishra approach: "How can you offer me a credit card at a time like this? Don't you know that the average Indian still earns barely a dollar a day and that we haven't moved at all on the Human Development Index? Don't you realise that communal tensions are on the rise and any day now the communists are going to be voted to power? The faster you credit card companies stop believing your own myths, and offering these western temptations to consumers, the better it'll be."

[1] Translation: Dhoomketu, old chum, what are you kidding around for?

11th July 2006

How shall we answer such hatred?

How shall we stitch together,
Word by careful word,
This torn page?

It is not a question
Of condemnation
Or forgiveness –
We have strength enough for neither.

Nor is it simply a matter
Of measuring the wounds
And adding them all up.

Statistics will not help us now.
We cannot hope to understand
What is inherently senseless.
We can only try to acknowledge
The truth of it,
Bear witness to it,
The way the negative bears witness to the image.

We can only try
Not to turn away.

And yet there can be no doubt of our judgement here:
For the windows of our city
Shake with outrage,
And against such horror
Even the light is defiance.

We are afraid, yes,
But fear too is an affirmation –
The trembling of leaves
That denies the wind.

If our silence has been shattered
So that we no longer recognise ourselves in it;
If our very shadows
Have turned to ghosts;
Do you really think we shall let this defeat us?
Do you really think we shall give in
So easily?

No, tonight we shall find no comfort
In our own safety,
But live, in our imagination,
In a stranger’s house,
In a stranger’s place.

Except that there are no strangers now,
For the spilling of our common blood
Make us all family –
What we feel in these first moments
Is not sympathy,
But the grief of our own loss.

Time will mend all, we are told.
But Time cannot dismantle the explosions,
Or undo the pain;
Time can help us to forget,
But do we really want to?

It is up to us to retain
Our diminished humanity;
Up to us to recognise
That Death is not a visitor
We would wish on any other.

It is up to us to defuse
The anger ticking away inside us,
Waiting to explode.

It comes down to this then:
That we dare neither heal our wounds
Nor celebrate them;
That we can no longer tell
Relief from guilt,
Hope from complicity,
Moving on from desertion;

That our very need for prayer
Makes God impossible.

It comes down to this:
That the familiar ways are lost,
And the route back to peace
Is long and difficult.
It will be some time, at least,
Before all of us
Are safely home.

What can I do, in times like these, but write?

This post in special appreciation of the efforts of the folks at Mumbai Help, who did an amazing job last night of helping people get in touch with their loved ones.

In memory of those killed in the bomb blasts today

Ifs and Butts

And so, to the now (in)famous Zinedine headbutt.

Personally, I laughed myself silly watching re-runs of the thing on TV, and continue to maintain that it was an act of comic genius (as I argue in the comments here). I mean, can you imagine a wackier and more unpredictable way of ending a career? It's positively inspirational. The day I finally get my PhD my advisor had better be wearing a sternum guard.

I'm even more amused by the reaction of Zidane fans. First, there's this whole racial sledging thing. Everywhere I look people are going around speculating on what Materazzi must have said to Zidane to provoke the headbutt. Aside from the fact that at this point this is all unproven hearsay (even if Zidane does finally come through with a statement, I don't see any reason why we have to take his word against Materazzi's), I'm amazed that anyone would think that anything Materazzi might have said was justification for Zidane's actions. The argument is not, as some people have suggested, that Zidane should not have reacted because it was the World Cup Final and he had a critical role to play. The argument is that, outside of Dharmendra movies and Shiv Sena Headquarters, it is not okay to respond to things you percieve as insulting with physical violence. That argument applies as much to Zidane as it does to the rioters protesting the Danish cartoons or the 'desecration' of Mrs. Thackeray's statue. Physically assaulting someone on the playing field because they say something insulting is behaviour better suited to eight year olds. In a civilised society we don't responds to words with fists. Or headbutts.[1]

I'm also amused by the convenient fiction (implicit in much of the moaning about Zidane's actions) that Zidane's exit was the reason the French side lost the match. It's certainly a wonderful face saving device, isn't it? The fiction writer in me is almost tempted to speculate that maybe the very purpose of the headbutt was to get Zidane sent off so the French would have a ready excuse for losing.

Finally, I can't help being a little curious about the headbutt per se. Who responds to insults with headbutts? Punches, yes. Kicks, possibly. But headbutts? Is this a cultural thing? Are there societies out there where the headbutt is the ubiquitous form of social assault? Do people actually go around saying "Say one more word and I'll headbutt you in the sternum"? Are there martial arts movies where the hero and villain fight by exchanging headbutts? Has Zidane watched too many Animal Planet specials on the mating rituals of antelopes?

Or was Zidane, perhaps, concerned about using his hands in a football game? Because THAT would be a foul?

[1] The desire to escape being insulted is, of course, the principle reason that the French don't speak anything but their own language - that way they don't know what the English are saying about them. You could always try insulting a Frenchman in French, but the odds that you'll actually pronounce it right are so low that it's not a serious threat.

Boldly going where this man has never gone before

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere, Veena goes on a trip to Yellowstone and (as requested) writes a "long, rambling Falstaffian post" about it.

Now I can retire in peace, knowing that my legacy will live on.

Are we there yet?

Okay, so I can't resist having my two-bit say about Pankaj Mishra's Op-Ed piece in the NY Times

For the record, there's a lot that Mishra says that I agree with. My biggest problem with the piece is Mishra's inability to articulate, to others or to himself, just what it is he's opposing. Implicit in Mishra's arguments, there are, I think, at least 4 different claims that have been made about India:

1. The liberalisation and globalisation reforms of the early 90's have been beneficial for India - leading to a spurt in growth and improved standards of living for at least some sections of the population.

2. India is fast emerging as an important global player economically - both as an important market for MNCs as well as a pool for talent and services.

3. India is well on its way to becoming the world's dominant economic superpower

4. India's development has been broad-based and this century will see the majority of Indians enjoying lifestyles comparable to those in the West.

These are, in my mind, four very different claims - the links between which are tenuous at best. I personally happen to believe, for instance, that the first two are true, but that the last two are not.

What amused me the most about Mishra's article is that he starts of by taking exception to the claim that India is a capitalist success story and argues against this by showing that the vast majority of people are still poor. Huh? Since when has capitalism been about prosperity for the masses? Everything that Mishra says in his story actually suggest to me that India is the quintessential capitalist success story - where the elite bourgeois amass large amounts of wealth while the common people continue to live in deplorable conditions.

At any rate. Here are the things that Mishra is saying (or at least, I think he's saying, or trying to say) that I agree with:

1) The belief that large majorities of Indians will someday enjoy standards of living comparable to those enjoyed by people in the West is highly questionable, if not entirely untenable. Just given the sheer size of the population involved, the levels of growth and resources required to make that come true simply don't exist.

2) The benefits of India's growth in the last decade and a half have gone disproportionately to a small minority of Indians. Therefore, claims in the popular media about India's development (e.g. India Shining) are premature and excessively optimistic. Unless serious thought is given to the very real issues facing India - both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of equity - these inequalities will perpetuate, and absent institutional efforts to enhance social welfare, they are unlikely to be 'naturally' overcome.

3) In the absence of equitable growth, income disparities between the rich and the poor will become more glaring and social unrest will increase over time. Worse, given India's democratic context, the lack of equitable distribution of benefits will make it difficult to create strong political support for further reforms. Until the common people see a tangible pay-off from the liberalisation to themselves, they will continue to vote based on issues other than economic performance, and if the masses don't care about it then the government won't either.

4) Given all that, there's good reason to be more cautious about India's potential. India is far from well-set on the path to being an important global superpower. It's too early to be celebrating India's rise to global dominance.

Notice that none of the above implies any of the following:

1) That India would somehow have been better off by sticking to its pre-reform regime. There is no case, in any of this, for turning back reforms. The reforms have led to real growth - that the growth has been uneven is, at best, cause to reflect more closely on the welfare implications of some of the changes made. The fact that some people are getting richer while the majority remains poor doesn't mean that development won't eventually spread - if anything, high incomes and therefore high savings may well be critical to the accumulation of capital needed for rapid growth. We certainly need to think about how the disparities created by that shall be managed, and how the growth achieved will eventually be funneled into real development, but that's no reason to dismiss the growth that has been achieved. That at least some sections of population are enjoying dramatically greater prosperity is an achievement, and cause enough for some celebration, however guarded.

2) That India can only play an important role in the global economy if it achieves broad-based development. Or that India becoming a key global player will necessary mean prosperity for all its people. This would be nice, of course, but it's not, in my view, strictly necessary. I think Mishra is ignoring the sheer size of India, and exaggerating the unsustainability of unequal growth. It's not hard to imagine an India where 5% of the population has extremely prosperous life-style while the remaining 95% remains little better off than they were originally. Yet that 5% alone could make India a key player in the global marketplace.

Understand that I'm not saying that such a scenario is desirable. Only that there's no basis for Mishra's assertion that India's emergence as a key global player is contradicted by its poor performance on human development indicators. India is large enough to be a key global player even without development for all.

3) Echoing point 1 above, there's no reason to believe that creating more broad-based development will require state intervention of the kind associated with the pre-1991 days. That government policy has a key role to play in ensuring the sustainability of India's development is unequivocal, and that government spending is required to make development more equitable is certainly true. But none of that implies a return to a system where the government hijacks the role of the market and sets up inefficient and bureacratic monopolies to 'serve' the people. There is no reason why the government can't intervene through the market to aid in the redistribution of wealth. And there's a vast difference between the kind of clean, deregulated policy we need to let the market operate and the kind of policy that tries to replace and manage the market, which is what we've traditionally had.

Of course, Mishra isn't necessarily saying that we should return to the old days or that the reforms are bad either. But it's a pity that he doesn't really articulate what he thinks the right answer is, leaving the door open for people to assume that a return to the pre-reform days is what he's advocating.

Overall then, Mishra makes, I think, a convincing case for why India isn't a superpower yet and why it's yet to be proven that it ever will be. And in doing so, raises important and relevant questions about the distribution of growth and the challenges of growing inequity. What he doesn't give us is any reason to believe that the changes over the last 15 years are in any way inimical to India's chances of becoming an important global player. Saying we still have a long way to go isn't the same thing as saying we haven't made any progress. Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean there isn't some truth to it.

P.S. Mishra also says some exceedingly silly things about communist parties being voted to power, US nuclear policy towards India being driven by rich Indian-Americans and India not being able to serve as a counterweight to Iran and China because it trades with them. I'm just going to ignore all that, as not being worth comment. Notice though that if India can't be a counterweight against Iran and China because it gets oil from the former and trades with the latter, then one wonders how the US can possibly be opposed to Iran and China to begin with.

White Goddess, Green Eyes

Don't you just love it when poets get peevish?

Take Robert Graves. At some point, some woman (I'm guessing it must have been Laura Riding, though I'm not sure) goes and leaves him to marry some other guy. So what does Graves do? He goes ahead and writes a whole bunch of poems about how women hook up with undeserving men.

First we get this:

Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel
On whom she can rely
To pay her cab-fare, run a steaming bath,
Poultice her bruised eye;

Will not at first, whether for shame or caution,
Her difficulty disclose;
Until he draws a cheque book from his plumage,
Asking how much she owes;

(Breakfast in bed: coffee and marmalade,
Toasts, eggs, orange-juice,
After a long, sound sleep - the first since when? -
And no word of abuse.)

Loves him less than only her saint-like mother,
Promises to repay
His loans and most seraphic thoughtfulness
A million-fold one day.

Beauty grows plump, renews her broken courage
And, borrowing ink and pen,
Writes a news-letter to the evil angel
(Her first gay act since when?):

The fiend who beats, betrays and sponges on her,
Persuades her white is black,
Flaunts verpertilian wings and cloven hoof;
And soon will fetch her back.

Virtue, good angel, is its own reward:
Your guineas were well spent.
But would you to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment?

- 'Beauty in Trouble'

(As an aside, do you think we'll ever be able to read the word gay in its original sense again?)

Next Graves writes:

A perverse habit of cat-goddesses -
Even the blackest of them, black as coals
Save for a new moon blazing on each breast,
With coral tongues and beryl eyes like lamps,
Long-legged, pacing three by three in nines -
This obstinate habit is to yield themselves,
In verisimilar love-ecstasies,
To tatter-eared and slinking alley-toms
No less below the common run of cats
Than they above it; which they do not for spite,
To provoke jealousy - not the least abashed
By such gross-headed, rabbit coloured litters
As soon they shall be happy to desert.

- 'Cat-goddesses'

And finally, just in case that was too subtle for you:

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.

- 'A Slice of Wedding Cake'

Phew! Talk about Petulant Pterodactyls.

On a separate note, we're thinking about running a series of poetry by people better known for their prose over at Poi-tre. Trouble is, there's a whole bunch of people on the cusp about whom I can't make up my mind. So I'm leaving it open to readers of this blog. What would you say would be the primary classification of each of the people listed below - Poet / Prose Writer:

1. Robert Graves
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. Thomas Hardy
4. Rudyard Kipling
5. Lewis Carroll

Mittal-urgy

Will everyone please get over the Mittal Deal? Or at least explain to me what all the exuberance is about?

To begin with, I'm sick to the teeth of the press going to town about how this is somehow a victory for India. You expect idiocy like that from the imbeciles at the ToI, but last week's India Today (which I had the misfortune of glancing through - forgive me, I was bored) has Anand Mahindra telling us how the merger "proves the tenacity of Indian entrepreneurs globally and will raise the aspiration levels." And, of course, politicians like Chidambram and Kamal Nath rah-rahing about how they're so proud. Huh? Will someone tell me in what way Mittal is representative of Indian entrepreneurs, or of the health of the Indian Economy? Is the money for the deal coming from India? Not as far as I know. Is Mittal Steel primarily an Indian company? Not unless the nationality of a company is decided by the origins of its founder, in which case the Vikings are probably the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, or, if you go back far enough, all companies are African. Are we likely to see a spate of other Indian entrepreneurs pulling off deals as large as Arcelor-Mittal? I can't think of a single one. Then why is Mittal's success reason for India to feel proud and celebrate?

More to the point, is it a success at all? Empirical research on M&A over decades now has generally found that returns to acquirers are marginal or negative. This is especially true when the acquisition is hostile and contested - the general argument is that competitive bidding tends to drive up the price of the target, until the price finally paid equals, if not exceeds, the value of the target to the acquirer. This is the familiar winner's curse - the person who bids too much wins the auction, but gets no profit from his purchase. A number of researchers have suggested that escalation of commitment plays a large part in this - once acquirers are publicly committed to a deal and have invested time, money and reputation in it, they are reluctant to back out and may continue to bid even after it ceases to be profitable for them, especially if the initial context is uncertain (see, for instance, Haunschild, Davis-Blake and Fichman, Org. Science, 1994 and Puranam, Powell and Singh).

Could this apply to the Mittal-Arcelor deal? We know that the deal was hotly contested, with Severstal being brought in to resist the Mittal bid. The New York Times (June 26th) article about the deal says:

Arcelor's foot-dragging led to other concessions from Mittal as well. The offer that was agreed to is nearly 40 percent higher than Mittal's initial offer in January. That bid was 27 percent higher than Arcelor's stock price at the time. The current offer also represents a hefty premium to Mittal's last bid of about 36 euros a share, and to Arcelor's last trading price of 35.02 euros a share.

The report also says that in getting the deal completed "Mittal made several concessions, including his family's voting rights".

None of that is conclusive, of course. I'm the last person to trust the NY Times' take on business issues, and I certainly haven't looked at the Arcelor-Mittal deal in any detail. It's possible therefore that there are huge synergies to be had here that outweigh the premium Mittal is paying (what kind of value multiples would that imply I wonder? And how would they compare to multiples for other steel companies?). It's possible, given Mittal's considerable reputation for turnarounds that he can make Arcelor yield high enough profits to justify the valuation he's put on it. Maybe this is, in fact, a good deal to have made. But prima facie at least, the evidence would suggest the opposite. Everything I read about the deal suggests to me that it's actually the Arcelor shareholders who are the winners here - that Arcelor has successfully used a number of classic defensive tactics to negotiate itself an extremely sweet deal from Mittal. And while it's possible that I'm wrong (I don't claim to understand global steel) I think it would be interesting if we were to see a discussion of why exactly this deal is a real success for the Mittals, rather than empty tom-toming of the fact that the deal got made. Not all deals are worth making.

One last thought on Mittal as the great Indian success story. Assuming for a minute that in some bizarre way Mittal is actually representative of India, how much of a paragon is Mittal Steel really? How much should we aspire to emulate him? Research on corporate governance in family businesses has generally found that heir-controlled firms tend to destroy shareholder value (see, for instance, Amit and Villalonga) . In fact, Morck, Stangeland and Yeung have argued that a large proportion of a country's wealth being tied up in the hands of billionaire heirs may actually slow GDP growth. The abstract to their article reads:

The basic finding of this paper is that countries in which billionaire heirs' wealth is large relative to G.D.P. grow more slowly than other countries at similar levels of development, while countries in which selfmade entrepreneur billionaire wealth is large relative to G.D.P. grow more rapidly than other countries at similar levels of development. We consider several explanations for this finding. First, old wealth may entrench poor management and control pyramids may distort their incentives. Second, a sharply skewed wealth distribution may create market power in capital markets causing inefficiency. Third, entrenched billionaires have a vested interest in preserving the value of old capital and thus in slowing creative destruction. Fourth, old money becomes entrenched through control of the political system, and most especially by rearing barriers to capital mobility. In contrast, substantial self-made billionaires' wealth is observed where such forces are ineffectual and creative destruction occurs.

Yet we've all seen the picture of LN Mittal and his son grinning away after the Arcelor deal, and the Economic Times informs me today that Mittal's 25 year old daughter is on the board of directors. Again, I don't know anything about the Mittal children. For all I know they may in fact be the most competent people for the roles they play within Mittal Steel. Still, given the empirical evidence on value destruction by heirs, it does make you wonder.

The Order of the Purple Tomato

On the morning of 7th July, 2006, while engaged in vicious hand to hand combat with a particularly recalcitrant cabbage, Field Housewife D.W. Falstaff suffered grevious injury to the cuticle of his left middle finger. Despite being severely disabled and suffering heavy loss of blood, Field Housewife Falstaff continued to engage with the enemy, who eventually succumbed. Field Housewife Falstaff then went on to set a glorious example to his other fingers by further attacking, peeling and eventually destroying two potatoes, a bunch of beans and one particularly devastating onion that had eluded capture for weeks. For his gallantry, his courage around the kitchen fire, and for service above and beyond the call of subzi, Field Housewife Falstaff is post-prandially awarded the Order of the Purple Tomato.

*Applause*

Translation: I cut my finger chopping vegetables this morning and am trying to go easy on the typing. So more later.

P.S. : And then people say that women shouldn't be given hazardous front-line roles.

Gene who?

I'm fascinated by old poetry anthologies. It's both interesting and deeply humbling to read something that purports to be a collection of classics from its time and discover how much literary 'taste' has changed over the years, and how differently we (or at least I) view things today from the way we did, say, 50 years ago.

Take this collection called the Pocket Book of Modern Verse edited by Oscar Williams and first published in 1954, that I bought a while ago and am in the process of leafing through again. It claims to be an anthology of the best 'modern' poems published in the 100 years from 1855 - 1954, starting from Whitman and going all the way up to Ted Hughes. The reason I bought it, the reason I'm re-reading it, is because it offers a view of the development of poetry from the 1850s to the 1950s that is in many ways strikingly different from the one I typically carry around in my head. If I were to put together an anthology of poetry from that period, it would look very, very different.

Not that there wouldn't be some overlap. Some things simply cannot be argued with - Whitman's Song of Myself, Hopkins' sonnets, Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, cummings's somewhere I have never travelled - all these would find a place in practically any anthology of the period, as they do here. And to give Williams' credit, he does a fine job, in my opinion, of picking poems by Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson and W.H. Auden. Most of the usual favourites are there, plus a few poems that are less well known, but equally deserving.

It's when you get beyond the obvious, that Williams selections grow startling. The anthology includes exactly one William Carlos Williams poem - this thing called The Yachts - but we have long sections devoted to Vachel Lindsay, W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and James Joyce. Even Herman Melville gets more space than W.C.Williams. More, in a book supposedly dedicated to 'modern' poetry, we have long selections from Thomas Hardy, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter de la Mare and A.E. Housman.

As we get closer to the editor's contemporaries matters only get more baffling. First, one is now treated to a bunch of names that I, at any rate, have never heard of. I mean seriously, has anyone ever read any of the following: Gene Derwood, Julian Symons, F.T. Prince, Joseph Bennett, Dustan Thompson or Frederick Mortimer Clapp? Okay, so some of them have only one or two poems included, but even so the book puts them on equal footing with Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara and William Empson. Allen Tate doesn't just get Ode to the Confederate Dead, he gets a section as long as Ezra Pound's all too himself. Edith Sitwell doesn't just get Still falls the Rain, she gets half a dozen poems. And you finally discover that Richard Eberhardt did, in fact, write something other than the Groundhog and the Fury of the Aerial Bombardment. Oh, and there's the 10 page long section of Oscar Williams' own poems, about which the less said the better.

Understand, I'm not saying that these poets don't deserve to be there (though, actually, in the case of both Oscar Williams and Edith Sitwell, I am saying that - their poems are, frankly, unreadable). I certainly don't claim to be an expert on early 20th century poetry, and am in no real position to judge (even assuming objective judgement were possible) the relative merits of different poets from that era. I just think it's interesting that so many of the poets that Oscar Williams clearly saw as being seminal to his time have faded into relative obscurity in a mere 50 years, while others, whom he ignores completely (Langston Hughes isn't included, for instance), continue to delight us. So much for verse being immortal.

And it isn't just the selection of poets that seems strange. It's also the poems that Williams chooses to include. Take Yeats. We get some of the usual anthology pieces - The Second Coming, When you are Old and Grey, Sailing to Byzantium, Lake Isles of Innisfree. But no Leda and the Swan, no Byzantium, no Among School Children, no Easter, 1916. Instead we get A Bronze Head, John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore, The Three Bushes and Politics. The Wallace Stevens selection includes The Idea of Order at Key West and Sunday Morning, but it also includes The Woman That Had More Babies Than That, The President Ordains the Bee to Be and On an Old Horn. Again, I'm not saying these are bad poems (I'm not sure Wallace Stevens wrote a bad poem in his life) but it's surprising to me that they are the poems anyone would pick as being the 'best' / most representative of their respective poet's work.

Of course, one could argue that this is just Williams' bias and he has a right to his opinion, etc. etc. I'm not disputing that. But I think it's more generally true that anthologies, especially old anthologies, always surprise me with what they decide to include and what they choose to leave out. And that, for me, is a big part of what makes them worth reading.

Now if I can only find a selection of Gene Derwood's verse in my library.

The Fantasy

Rajesh had a fantasy. It wasn't lewd or vulgar or anything. In fact, you could say it was almost genteel. Rajesh's dream was that one day he would wake up to the sound of a woman crying in the next room. He would go over to investigate and find a beautiful stranger, lying in bed, crying her eyes out. Seeing her distraught, he would take her in his arms, console her, lull her gently to sleep. They would lie together through the night, she breathing calmly by his side, he watching over her while she slept. Then, when the night was over, he would slip away.

And that was it. There would be no words spoken, no communication of any kind. They would never see each other again. And there certainly would be no sex - no, not even a harmless little kiss. It would be a night of absolute intimacy with a total stranger.

Rajesh was very fond of this fantasy. He thought it demonstrated maturity and refinement. Not for him the lurid porn-inspired threesomes of his classmates. Never mind that they laughed at him when he told them about his dream. They were just hormonal, over-sexed teenagers, that was all. What would they know about sensitivity, about the meeting of souls? A woman would understand. A woman would appreciate the spiritual fragility of Rajesh's dream. After all, weren't all the magazines always saying how much women wanted to be held?

The trouble, it turned out, was that very few women want to be held by total strangers. As time passed, Rajesh began to see the flaw in his fantasy. How do you get a strange woman to let you sleep in the room next to her, ready to come to her rescue should she suddenly start crying in the night? The easiest thing to do, of course, would be to get into a relationship. Sooner or later the opportunity to hold her through the night would doubtless come up. And after all, wasn't that how all his other male friends were getting their fantasies fulfilled? Getting into a relationship with a girl and then cajoling her to cooperate in whatever obscene scenario they had in mind?

Except that the whole point of Rajesh's fantasy was that it had to be with a stranger. In his head he could already hear the things his fantasy woman would tell her girlfriends the next morning. About how kind he'd been, how generous, how protective. Like a true knight-errant. No, she would tell her amazed listeners, he never tried to make a pass at me, not once. Her friends wouldn't believe it. Were there still guys like that? He would be a legend.

It wouldn't work if the girl wasn't a stranger though. What was the big deal about comforting your steady girlfriend through the night? She'd probably just take it for granted.

At first he tried hanging out in singles bars, trying to spot women who looked particularly miserable. Like they'd just got some bad news and were trying to drown their sorrows in drink. This didn't go well. Either the women were convinced he was just trying to take advantage of their unhappiness (which he was, though not in the way they thought), and turned away from him in scorn. Or they actually took to him, in which case they cheered up and soon became animated and flirtatious without any signs of the depression that had drawn him to them in the first place.

Rajesh was a good looking guy, he was intelligent, he was a good talker. He sensed instinctively that he could have taken a number of these women to bed. But what was the point? That wasn't what he was looking for. A couple of times he tried explaining to the women he hooked up with that he emphatically did NOT want to have sex with them. One woman told him to get lost, wanted to know what he was doing in a straight bar anyway. The other slapped him.

Who would have thought it would be so difficult not to have sex with a woman? In desperation, Rajesh decided to compromise and tried going the relationship route. After all, it wasn't every boyfriend who was that tender, that supportive. His first girlfriend couldn't sleep if someone was watching her. His second girlfriend, whom he first met at a party sitting by the pool and crying, turned out to be a surprisingly positive and optimistic person (her grandmother had died the night he met her) and after six months of waiting for her to have another breakdown of some sort he dumped her. His third girlfriend he tried taking into his confidence - explaining to her, at the end of their third date, what he wanted. She immediately wanted to know why he didn't want to sleep with her. Was she that unattractive? He finally had to have sex with her just to convince her that he didn't think she was ugly.

By this point, Rajesh was starting to lose hope. Gradually, as the years passed, and an endless lifetime of unconsoling nights stretched out in front of him, he decided that his fantasy was just that - an idle dream. It was never going to come true. At 30, defeated, he got married. The first few times his wife cried in bed he held very tenderly, kissed away her tears. It felt good. After a while, though, her tears were mostly about things he had done (or hadn't done) and he started to get irritated. What the hell was her problem anyway? Everyone had troubles. Didn't he go through hell at work? Why was she always carrying on like this? Weeping away over the smallest thing?

He decided that his trying to console her was only encouraging her. Maybe if he ignored her when she cried she would stop doing it. So now when he felt her sobbing in the bed next to him he simply turned his back to her, pulled a pillow over his head, and dreamt again of that perfect stranger, the one he'd never managed to meet, the one who'd have a real reason to cry and would deserve to be comforted.

Decades passed. Rajesh got divorced and his wife got the kids so he went back to living alone. He never remarried. Sometimes in the night he would wake up thinking he heard someone cry. But there was no one. He told himself it was all those years when the children were young that had done this to him. But in his heart of hearts he knew it was her, his fantasy woman, whom he was listening for.

Then, one day, at a conference in London, it happened. It was late - a little past one in the morning. He was walking down the corridor to his hotel room, a little drunk, when he heard the sound of someone crying. It was coming from Room no 462. He listened for a while to see if he could make out any other voices. There were none. There was just the heartbreaking sound of a woman weeping alone. It was exactly what he'd always dreamed of. Gathering his courage, he knocked. A minute later the door opened a crack and a tear-stained face peeped out. God, she was gorgeous. Or would have been, except for the tears. Couldn't be a day over 25. He felt strangely elated, and also terribly frightened. "Oh, I'm sorry. I was just passing by and I heard...that is to say...I just thought...look, are you all right?".

Five minutes later, he was inside the room, listening patiently as she told him the old, familiar story - a boyfriend, high school sweetheart, getting married in three months, just called to say goodnight, a woman answered, been going on for months, she didn't know, never going to forgive him - and he saying, "there, there" and helping her get her shoes off and tucking her into bed and putting his arm around her and leaning her head against his shoulder and plying her with tissues. And then, when she was finally asleep, easing her gently onto the pillow, turning off the lights, and sitting in a chair by her side watching her, the soft fall and swell of her breathing.

He waited till it was 6:30 by his watch, and then slipped away to his room. Too excited to even think about sleep, he shaved, showered, packed. He was catching the noon flight back home. He felt elated. He felt like singing. Finally! After all those years of waiting, his fantasy had come true. He wondered who he could tell about it, who would understand. There must be someone.

He ran into her in the lobby. She looked much better now - more composed, and infinitely more beautiful. But the meeting was all wrong. It wasn't supposed to happen that way. He shrugged aside her embarassed thanks. It was nothing, he said. Any gentleman would have done it. Only too glad to help. Hurriedly brushing her off he turned back to the reception counter to finish checking out.

Behind him, he could hear her talking to a friend. They had come down to breakfast together. They were talking about him! His ears pricked up. "And he never tried to come on to you? You're sure? Didn't try to feel you up or ANYTHING? Maybe when you were asleep? These lecherous old men are the worst, you know". Good. Good. "No, no, nothing like that". Here it comes. "Just look at him - he's clearly past all that. I doubt even Viagra would help him now."

At the counter, Rajesh cried out in shock and dropped his pen to the floor.

Further evidence that my life is a joke

One of my closest friends is getting married. I decide to write her a poem for the occasion. Casting about for a suitable metaphor, I come up with the idea of comparing the months leading up to the wedding to a river. I pack in a whole bunch of water images - talk about springs, and streams, and rivers and waves, etc. etc.

So what happens? Bombay, where my friend lives and is getting married, gets flooded. What's the bet that she's going to appreciate a poem that compares her wedding to large, flowing body of water now?

Gah!

Wedding

for S., who gets married today. Wishing her every happiness.

The Wedding

“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…”

- Hart Crane, ‘Voyages’

Every wedding is an afterthought.

The real choice begins elsewhere:
In some inaccessible cavern of the heart
Where love melts like a slow glacier
And two springs of Yes flow
Into the mutual valley,
Join in a silver kiss.

The decision
A singing stream,
Pure as water.

All else is descent:
Waterfalls of joy
Tempt the precipice into approval,
Cascades of feeling
Overleap the most obdurate stones;
And the light dances like butterflies
Over the acknowledged river
Making tributaries of friends,
Turning gravity to resolution.

Then onward, to where the world
Is measured in horizons,
And distance, breathless with its own daring,
Opens its arms in welcome.

Who would have thought
The journey to togetherness
Would take them so far?

Past forests of doubt
That finger them as they pass,
Past fields ripening slowly
To autumn promises,
And cities of tradition and detail
Whose traffic of questions
Leaves them muddied,
Unclear.

Silted with days,
They outgrow the speed of their beginnings,
Meander patiently
Through this unyielding landscape,
Clinging only to their intent
And to the slow drift of their daydreams,
Lazy as boats.

And then, at last,
The private fanning into public,
The delta of this final ceremony,
Where the soft lapping of their hearts
Is lost amid a larger roar,
And the seagulls wheel over them
Like blessings,
And they empty themselves
Into a more endless adventure,
To the loud acclaim of the waves.

Every wedding is an afterthought.
We celebrate
The end of anticipation,
The beginning of promise.

- 4th July 2006

How do you like them apples?

The thing that makes apples worth eating is not the taste but the crunch in your head when you bite into one. The electricity of it tingling your teeth.

A mouth-sized patch of white is revealed. Surrounded on all sides by scarlet, its shocked flesh speaks of innocence, of the sort of sharp numbness that gives way, eventually, to pain. For a moment you feel strangely guilty. Then, resolved on your villiany, you take another bite, then another. There is a sense of violation in tearing into this juicy, vulnerable flesh, such as you get with no other fruit. You exult in your rebellion, content to lose a hundred Edens for this crime you are now committed to.

Nor is it possible, even if you so wished it, to make amends for that first defilement. Abandoned, the apple grows melancholy, rusts to a soggy reddish-brown. Only apples that are eaten young, when they are still crisp and hopeful, are spared this decrepitude.

And then there is the core, of course. Other fruit have pits - small, self-enclosed worlds that reject you completely. But the core of the apple is approximate at best, and is a hideous thing, gnawed and savaged, a white skeleton from whose sockets black pips peer like sightless eyes.

And yet for all that, the apple remains one of our favourite fruits, a mainstay of our cultural mythology. We name our computers and our record companies after it. We replace our face with it in paintings. We place it in our eyes, in our throats. Schoolchildren in Cliche, Ohio carry one to school everyday and place it on their teacher's desk.

Is it perhaps that we see in the apple's polished thick-skinness, in the zest with which it responds to the idea of death, in the desolation of its swift and certain decay, an echo of our own selves? In biting down to the very core of the apple, are we not perhaps seeking our own inner being, or at least trying to salvage the most that we can out of our increasingly eaten away lives? And shall we then not have compassion for the bruised, the damaged apples, the apples with the worm in the centre, the apples growing slowly rotten at the bottom of the barrel? Shall we not pick them first and save what we can from them? Shall we not express our solidarity for these damaged brothers of ours, if only by making them into jam?

Of Temples and Heritage

Okay, I promise this will be my last holier-than-thou, let's-talk-about-feminism-and-patriarchy post for a while. But I can't resist the temptation to comment on this whole Sabarimala thing which has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere (posts on it here, here and here, and the DP link to the first two here).

The Sabarimala temple does not allow women between the ages 10 and 50 to enter. Supposedly, this has to do with the fact that this is the age when women are menstruating and may therefore make the temple unclean. Ya, right.

A number of people have written posts on the issue, expressing indignation at such blatant discrimination and demanding that women be let in.

Let me start by going over the points that have been made already that I agree with:

a) The practise is discriminatory
b) There is no case for providing support from government funds to such an institution. The government should not support such discriminatory practices.
c) To the extent that the temple is a private body, however, it should have the right to admit whomsoever it pleases. Government regulation to force a private institution to admit people it doesn't want is unwarranted. That's how you end up with a police state
d) That said, people obviously retain the right to boycott the temple, and to encourage others to boycott it as well

So far, so good. The bit I have trouble with is the contention that we should be working towards helping women gain access to the temple. I see this as somewhat wrong-headed. I think the trouble is that most people are assuming that entry to the temple is a privilege in itself, and should therefore be made available to all, irrespective of gender. Implicit in that is the assumption that there is a 'heritage of the temple' and there is 'patriarchal discrimination' and the two are distinct entities and that we should work towards getting the former without the latter.

Personally, I see no reason to assume that patriarchy is seperable from organised religion. Established institutions are inherently embedded in existing power structures, and tend to perpetuate them. Differences in status and consequent exclusion is what these institutions exist on and for. It would be convenient, of course, if we could pick those parts of our heritage that we happen to like, and leave out those parts that we don't - but given the interdependencies between them it's not clear that that is feasible. Also, taking that approach begs the question - what parts of the heritage are 'desirable' and what parts are not and who's to decide which ones we retain and discard. The trouble with accepting that 'heritage' is valuable in itself, is that it leaves the door open for people to argue that all sorts of discriminatory practices are part of their 'heritage'. [1]

A number of people have compared the Sabarimala temple to an elite club. I think that's accurate. Let's ask ourselves why elite clubs are valued. They are valued because not everyone can get into them, so that being a member of one makes you feel special. They are a privilege precisely because they keep some people out. How much of Sabarimala temple's importance, its holiness, comes from the fact that it keeps women out? Why is it a 'privilege' to be able to pray to your chosen diety in Sabarimala rather than anywhere else? Precisely because not everyone can. Exclusion is fundamental to the purpose of Sabarimala - which is why no right-thinking man or woman, no human being who believes in equality and dignity for all, should want to go there.

Let's not fall into the trap of believing in some golden heritage that we are only now being deprived of - feudal social institutions were always about discrimination and inequality. Let's not blindly assume that the only way to build a new social order is to force the old institutions to adapt - the creation of new institutions is both possible and desirable. Let's not fall prey to the slave mentality of craving acceptance from those who despise us and would like to see us humbled. Much has been said about the 'logic' of why women between 10 and 50 are not allowed in. Are we really naive enough to believe that this is about menstruation, and not about power? What do you want to bet that every time a woman demands to get in and is turned away the priests at the temple exult in their own self-importance? And why would you want to be part of a congregation and a social system that was so demeaning to women?

As long as we continue to ratify traditional inequalities by paying lip-service to the institutions that are an inherent part of them, our ability to wage a war against discrimination is severely compromised. The way to destroy an elitist institution is to create an alternative egalitarian institution and encourage people to shun the old one. The way to defeat discrimination at Sabrimala is not to insist that women be let in on sufferance, it is to reject outright the importance of Sabrimala as a temple, and to actively encourage both women and men to pray elsewhere. Only when praying at a temple as discriminatory as Sabrimala becomes not a privilege but a matter of shame, will we truly have won the battle against discrimination.


[1] The point is more general, of course. It's ridiculous how much discrimination continues to be justified in the name of tradition. The amazing thing about this is that people arguing against the discrimination are actually willing to engage in the debate on what is or is not traditional or part of our culture, without asking the more basic question - how is the fact that it's traditional any justification for its continuation in the future?