What's in a face

I'm back. I've managed to fly half way across the country and back without getting blown up by someone else's toothpaste. I've recovered from post-conference hangover [1]. I'm slowly getting over the shock of having had to wear formal / semi-formal clothes, as well as the calamity of discovering that Starbucks in Atlanta close at 5 pm on Sundays (and then they wonder why the South lost the war). I've even managed to make my obligatory morning trip to the library and grab plenty of fuel to feed Veena's 2006 Booker Mela.

All of which means it's time to post again. And while I try to remember all the deep meaningful posts I meant to put up, here's a motley collection of snippets to keep the blog going.

***

One of the cool things about being a business researcher is that you never know where the next big idea is coming from. Take this whole Indra Nooyi deal, and this picture of her that's been doing the rounds of the blogosphere (hat-tip: DP and Amit Varma). In all the fanfare about her achievement and the lessons we can learn from it, everyone, it seems to me, is overlooking a key variable. The ability to have good passport photographs taken. No seriously. Go look at that picture again. Notice the neat hair, the eyes open and intelligent looking, the natural smile, the ever so slight tilt of the head. Do you or anyone you know have a picture from your past where you look even half as human? I certainly don't (as I've blogged about before)

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the ability to photograph well may be a key determinant of corporate success. It's not hard to imagine how this works. People with good passport photographs get picked for interviews over the rest of us, because they look like the kind of people the recruiter would want to work with. People like me get their resumes forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security as a safety risk. As a result people who photograph well gain more valuable and varied experience, and before you know it they're heading major multi-nationals while their less fortunate brethren are still hanging about boring other people with their baby pictures. So it's not about being a housewife, or the schools you go to, or how hard you work - it's about being able to hold your head up, say cheese with vehemence and not shut your eyes a split second before the flash goes off. If I never get to be the CEO of a billion dollar MNC, it's all the fault of the guys at Guddi Studios.

***

And speaking of the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Times informs me that airport security officials are now using facial expressions to screen for possible terrorists. The article reads:

Taking a page from Israeli airport security, the transportation agency has been experimenting with this new squad, whose members do not look for bombs, guns or knives. Instead, the assignment is to find anyone with evil intent.

The officers observed travelers’ facial expressions, body and eye movements, changes in vocal pitch and other indicators of stress or disorientation. If the officers’ suspicions were aroused, they began a casual conversation with the person, asking questions like “What did you see in Boston?” followed perhaps by “Oh, you’ve been sightseeing. What did you like best?”

The questions themselves are not significant, Mr. Robbins said. It is the way the person answers, particularly whether the person shows any sign of trying to conceal the truth.

Right. And of course there's no other reason why anyone could possibly be stressed or disoriented at an airport, airlines / airports being as super-efficient and extra courteous as they are. And clearly no passenger who wasn't a terrorist could have anything better to do than have casual conversations with random security agents. And obviously all of us like nothing better than a cosy, warm chat with someone wearing a uniform and a gun.

What annoys me about this is the way it tries to justify what is basically irrational prejudice under the guise of scientific screening. Forget all the important sounding terminology, what this process is basically saying is that we're willing to give security officials the right to harass and persecute anyone they feel like based on no evidence but their own gut instinct. Given that the decision to interpret behaviour as 'signs of trying to conceal the truth' or 'indicators of stress and disorientation' is entirely subjective and therefore not subject to review, any and every abuse of power could now be justified by saying that the victim 'looked suspicious'. Our ability to use this kind of intuition to understand other people is suspect at best. Our ability to do so in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual context where what constitutes 'normal' behaviour is highly dispersed is even more open to question. What do you want to bet that this kind of screening will greatly increase harassment of minority groups?

You could argue, of course, that if this kind of screening brings down the risk of a terrorist attack it's still worth doing. Three things. First, even if you believe that we should sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of (possibly) greater security, that's still no reason to hide behind some quasi-legitimate special program. Let's call a spade a spade and say that from now on we want security officers to have the right to selectively pick whoever they want, based on their own unquestionable judgement, and search / interrogate them in whatever way they choose. Personally, I'm against such a policy, but at least it doesn't pretend to be scientific. [2]

Second, isn't this already happening? Are we really to believe that security officials don't already use their intution while checking people? Can you imagine a security guard letting someone through even though he / she seemed to be acting suspiciously? So it's not clear to me what this program is going to achieve, except give security officials more power to bully people and make them less accountable. You might say, they'll be better trained to recognise suspicious behaviour, but personally I'm unconvinced that such training will work. Besides, if it does work, why limit it to some select officers, why not just train everyone, instead of creating some sort of special program?

Third, I'm not against screening per se. It's the subjective, non-verifiable basis of screening I object to, because it makes it impossible for the procedure to be debated or held accountable. If you were to introduce a procedure, for instance, where all men of a certain age group who had visited a particular set of countries in the last six months would be pulled aside for questioning, I might actually be okay with that, even if it meant that I would get pulled into the net. The difference is that a) we can test the statistical basis of that kind of an objective procedure better than we can that of something as nebulous as 'suspicious behaviour' b) we can hold law enforcement officers accountable - they don't just get to pick on whoever they like, they have to follow clearly defined rules and c) this makes the procedure predictable, so that the individual still has choices, albeit a more circumscribed set of them.

Meanwhile, if I tell you I'm going off for a few days and don't come back, it's probably because my flight was delayed by three hours, I couldn't get coffee, and when I refused to engage in a discussion about the book I was carrying with the flatfooted guard at the security gate I got strip-searched, interrogated and sent to Gitmo.

***

Speaking of screening, the other people who are really screwing this up are car insurance companies. In the last two weeks, I've got offers from at least four of them, all informing me that I have preferred driver status and that I should take the opportunity to lock in the historically low insurance rates.

This would be great, except that a) I don't own a car b) I don't drive, hell, I don't even have a driver's license. Whatever else being a preferred driver may or may not entail, you would think actually getting behind a wheel and driving would be pretty much a requirement. Apparently not. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

***

Finally, from my weekend reading, Kierkegaard's delightful description of a diary by Kierkegaard - absolutely essential reading for someone who enjoys blogging:

"How, then, can we explain that the diary has nevertheless acquired such a poetic flavour? The answer is not difficult; it can be explained by his poetic temperament, which is, if you will, not rich, or if you prefer, not poor enough to distinguish poetry and reality from each other. The poetic was the extra he himself brought with him. This extra was the poetic element he enjoyed in the poetic situation provided by reality; this element he took back in again in the form of poetic reflection. That was the second enjoyment, and enjoyment was what his whole life was organized around. In the first case he savoured the aesthetic element personally; in the second he savoured his own person aesthetically. In the first case the point was that he egoistically, personally, savoured what in part reality gave him and what in part he himself had impregnated reality with; in the second case his personality was volatilized and he savoured, then, the situation and himself in the situation. In the first case he was in constant need of reality as the occasion, as an element; in the second case reality was drowned in the poetic. The fruit of the first stage is thus the mood from which the diary results as the fruit of the second stage, the word 'fruit' being used in the latter case in a somewhat different sense from that in the first. The poetic is thus something he has constantly possessed by virtue of the ambiguity in which his life passed."

- Soren Kierkegaard 'The Seducer's Diary' (translation by Alastair Hannay)

[1] Discovery of the week: Spending three days on a steady diet of nothing but cheese, canapes, chocolate, alcohol and coffee can wreak serious havoc on your system.

[2] And while we're about it, how about reading people's palms to figure out if they're terrorists. Or getting everyone who goes through security to drink tea and then get special psychic forces to read the leaves? Hey, it MIGHT work. Here's to the Deparment of Homeland Tarot Readings.

Categories: CurrentAffairs, Personal, Humour, Poetry, Links

It's not the chocolate, it's germs

An article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine talks about new evidence which suggests that obesity may not be entirely due to diet or genetics, it may be due to the microbes present in our bodies.

First reaction: Yes! No more guilt! It's not my fault I'm putting on weight. It's the tiny little germs in my gut. They're the ones who don't have any self-control.

Second reaction:

But if genes or viral infection or gut microflora are involved, then for some people 3,500 calories might not equal a pound of fat, and 150 fewer calories a day might not mean they’ll lose 10 pounds in a year. As scientists continue to investigate how obese people are different, we can only hope that a side benefit will be a more largehearted understanding of what it means to be fat and how hard it is to try to become, and to remain, less fat.

You mean that because of some unicellular little git somewhere deep inside me, I now have to diet harder than thin people to lose weight? Aaarggh!!

Go read the article. I'd love to pontificate more about it, but the Ad-36 in my lower intestine has a sudden craving for well-done steak.

The Stump

There used to be a tree in my garden. Down there in the far corner, where the four-foot high brick wall curves with the road. I'm not sure what kind of tree it was. There isn't much left of it now - just a gnarled stump like a dwarf's dinner table, the rings of its years rippling out in circles wobbly but concentric. Down at the post office they told me the previous owner of the place had it cut down, four, maybe five years ago. No one is quite sure why. Some people say the tree had been infected by insects of some kind and was dying. Others say it was fine and the owner just didn't like trees. He wasn't very popular in the village it seems. They speak of him with disgust.

At any rate, the tree is gone. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Sometimes, on clear days like this, when I sit at my writing desk and look out of the window all the way across to where the opposite hillside descends with a headlong rush to the valley - the scene like some Dutch landscape, bathed in sunlight - I can't help thinking that it's a good thing the tree isn't in the way to block the view. After all, it's this panorama, this sense of distance, that made me choose the house in the first place. What would be the point of living this high up and having this spectacular vista blocked by some silly tree?

But there are other times, times when, for instance, I'm sitting in the garden in the deck chair trying to read a book, one hand raised to shield my eyes from the afternoon sun, that I wish the tree was still there after all. How pleasant it would be to lie in its shade, book in hand, listening to the cool rustle of its leaves overhead while I mouthed Tennyson to myself. And there would be the birds: sweet-throated messengers, building their fragile nests in the tree's high branches, filling this lonely, hilltop garden with the pulse of life.

But birds can be a nuisance too. They'd be leaving their droppings all over the place, every now and then one of them would fly in through an open window, disturbing the calm of my house, filling its rooms with panic. And there'd be all that singing in the morning. I can't stand that. The thing is, I'm not a good sleeper. I have bad dreams. By the time I get to sleep at all, it's usually pretty late, and even then, the slightest sound is enough to wake me. Imagine a flock of birds sitting in the tree, striking up their infernal racket with the first light of day! I'd never get any peace in this house. And peace is what I'm up here for, isn't it. How am I supposed to write without it?

Just listen to me, will you? "How am I supposed to write without it." As if these words of mine, these putrid little droppings I leave on the page, really mattered. As if they were reason enough to cut down a centuries old tree, banish the birds from my garden forever. Isn't this precisely the kind of thinking I left the city to escape? The impatience of people, their arrogance. Their selfish belief that everything and everyone in the world must be shaped to their own satisfaction, their own convenience. And yet here I am, alone in my country hermitage, having abandoned the only life I know and already I'm trying to reshape the world to my own specifications. Was all my disgust with the city really only a kind of frustration then? Was I vexed by the city not because it presumed to order Nature around, but because I wasn't the one doing the ordering? No, it's not okay to cut down trees to make life easier for ourselves. It's the houses, the fences, the mass-produced, ersatz settlements that spring up like weeds in our meadows, that we should be chopping down. Not the trees. The trees foster life. Our plywood houses hold only Death.

I think I'm obsessing about this tree too much. After all, it's not as though I'm the one who had it cut down. It was already gone by the time I got here. No, that's not making excuses; that's simply stating facts. I must try and keep some perspective. What was it my therapist said about not trying to take the world's guilt upon myself? I called him about the tree. I don't have a phone up here, but I went down to the village and rang him up from there just to tell him. He told me I shouldn't think about it so much. That I should try to focus on my work. That's good advice.

The thing is, it's pretty hard to ignore, you know. I mean the stump's just sitting there, in the middle of the grass, like a boil, or an amputated limb. Every time I look at it I can't help imagining what the tree must have looked like. And then all the questions about the tree start up again.

My cousin came to visit and I told her about the tree and she said, "If it bothers you so much why don't you just have another one planted in its place?".

I could do that. It would be a nice gesture. I spoke to the gardener who comes in every Wednesday and Friday and he seemed to approve. He said that spot where the old tree was is the only one that will work, though. Which means before they can plant the new tree they'll have to completely dispose off the old one. Tear it up by its roots.

I imagine the scene. The tractor or truck or whatever it is that they'll bring straining away at the chain. The whine of its engine. And then, slowly, like a fist coming unclenched, the dead roots of the tree emerging from the soil, wrenched free from their hold of ages, from their centuries' long sleep. The gnarled and secret limbs exposed, the rotten underbelly of the stump. Do I have it in me to inflict this final indignity on the tree? Isn't it enough, that we have killed it, without digging up its skeleton and making a mockery of its age? And wouldn't this make me an accomplice of the man who first had the tree cut down, a co-conspirator, helping to cover up his crime by destroying the evidence of it?

And yet, is it so wrong to want to cast out the old to make way for the new, so wrong to clear the way for a younger life, for a fresher hope?

I can't make up my mind. I called my therapist again, and he said he thought this place was turning out to be very unhealthy for me. He asked me if I'd been writing at all, and I told him yes, I'd written a bit, but then he wanted details and I hemmed and hawed and he could tell I was lying. He wants to see me in his office next week. He thinks I may be better off living closer to the city. In an apartment in some suburb perhaps. I don't know. I've grown to like this place. Still, it does get lonely up here sometimes, with only a dead tree for company. And it's true that I'm not getting any work done. Maybe some place with more people.

The day before I head back to the city, I go out to the tree stump and sit beside it for an hour. There are a few ants crawling over it. I think they live inside it somewhere, feed on its bark. I run my hands over its sad, wrinkled skin, wondering if it can still feel my touch. "I'm sorry", I say, "there was nothing I could do".

Sometimes the choices we regret the most are the ones we didn't make.

***

P.S. Am going to be out of town the next 5-6 days (attending a conference) so may not be updating the blog. Regular blogging resumes next weekend. Try not to cut down trees in your grief. It upsets Dogmatix.


Categories: Fiction

Overkill / It's things like this that make me love my life

The cinema theatre I frequent [1] in Philly offers three types of discounts:

1) Wednesday shows are discounted by 40%

2) Afternoon matinees are discounted by 40%

3) Students get a 40% discount, except on Friday and Saturday nights.

Watching Woody Allen's Scoop this afternoon (my review here), I was eligible for all three discounts [2]. It was such a good feeling.

***

In other news, the next couple of months look pretty exciting movie-wise. Among the 'Coming Soon' trailers I watched this afternoon, was the new Depardieu-Deneuve collaboration, the Bukowski-inspired Factotum [3], and an intriguing french film called La Moustache about (apparently) a man who shaves off his moustache and finds that no one notices.

Good stuff.

[1] I was going to say patronise, but that introduces a whole other dimension, doesn't it?

[2] Obviously I only got an overall 40% discount. It would have been an even better feeling if they'd actually paid me $2 to watch the film, but that's hoping too much.

[3] Honestly, I have some reservations about this one, but hey, it's Bukowski.

Mica Lal

Embarassing Secret # 31:

As a kid growing up in India, reared on a steady diet of trashy Bollywood films, I often came across the expression 'mai ka laal' [1]. Except that the combination of a limited knowledge of the vernacular and an overheated imagination meant that I always understood this to be Mica Lal - obsidian warrior, man of pure grit.

I can see him now - a sort of mineral Eastwood - eyes like grey flint and a jaw of weathered basalt. Lips drawn back in a sneer to show the worn pebbles of his teeth. His strength was igneous, his rage volcanic. I pictured him walking along the roads, the tarmac melting to tar with the fury of his presence. I imagined him picking up handfuls of sand and crushing them to diamonds of sheer anger in his fists.

His resilience was legendary. Again and again the pickaxes of the enemy would hew him down, again and again the steamrollers of oppression would subdue and crush him. And yet at night you could see his eyes glinting with vengeance, and come morning he would be at it again, spitting curses like flecks of rock at his opponent's car, the rattle of his threats like a machine gun against the enemy's armour plating.

They said he was merciless, said he had a heart of stone, but I knew that beneath that harsh, crusty exterior lived a transparent crystal, pure and shining, reflecting love in a thousand planes.

As I grew older, and finally figured out the real expression, I have to say I was disappointed. Who was this milksop who had replaced my metamorphic superhero? What was so special about being a mother's son?

It's rare that I hear the expression used now, but when I do, I can't help feeling a twinge of nostalgia for my man of shattered earth, my chipped crusader, my boulder in arms. My Mica Lal.

[1] For non-Hindi speakers: literally, 'mother's son'. Usually used as part of a general challenge, as in "hai koi mai ka laal jo...." ("Is there a mother's son among you who will..."). The related challenge usually involved some incredibly terrifying feat, like fighting barehanded against an armed villain, wrestling with a tiger or trying to romance Hema Malini.


Categories: Whimsy

Shoot first and no one will ask questions later

Just when you thought there was no solution to the unemployment issue, US legislators come up with a sure-fire [1] way to solve the problem - just trim down the labour force by getting people to shoot each other.

The Florida law, which served as a model for the others, gives people the right to use deadly force against intruders entering their homes. They no longer need to prove that they feared for their safety, only that the person they killed had intruded unlawfully and forcefully. The law also extends this principle to vehicles.

In addition, the law does away with an earlier requirement that a person attacked in a public place must retreat if possible. Now, that same person, in the law’s words, “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” The law also forbids the arrest, detention or prosecution of the people covered by the law, and it prohibits civil suits against them.

The complete NY Times piece here.

So the next time you're taking a taxi, make sure you ask the driver whether you can get in very, very politely.

Oh, and does this mean that when the irritating aunty-ji from next door comes visiting in the middle of the final movement of Beethoven's 9th, I'm legally permitted to shoot her? (Are cyanide-tipped bullets okay?)

Notice meanwhile, that the right to shoot someone for intruding on your property is limited to people's homes. Unlawfully and forcefully entering someone else's country is presumably still acceptable.

Coming up: Other things the Texas legislature is considering allowing you to shoot people for:

a) Drinking soya lattes

b) Driving a Volkswagen

c) Using the phrase 'Due process'

d) Using the phrase 'It's okay, I'll walk.'

e) Voting Democrat

f) Being in Dick Cheney's sights

g) Evolving.


[1] Pun intended


Categories: CurrentAffairs

A small eternity

Now that the rain has finally stopped, I sit by the window, listen to the slow drip of water from the leaves of the palm trees. It is good to be back in Bombay in time for the monsoon.

From my fourth floor window, I watch the fishmonger pass by, his voice like a ragged tear in the fabric of my Sunday calm. In this newlywashed morning even his cry seems clean, unbloodied.

On his head he carries a basket loaded with fish. As I watch, a first shaft of sunlight breaks through the clouds and the scales of the fish gleam silver.

Seeing his thin, barechested form plodding along under the weight of that reflected radiance, I think of the history that walks unnoticed through our streets. Of the glory of our lost kings, our vanished empires. Of all the discarded and broken crowns lying at the bottom of the sea.

He turns the corner and disappears. I am left with only this empty road, its surface still slick with the morning's showers.

***

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

- Louis MacNeice, 'Sunday Morning'

Categories: Whimsy

Love by numbers

Why is it that we are so afraid of love? So fearful to let it master us, so desperate to possess it, control it, own it for ourselves? That we feel the need to cage it like some wild animal, trap it in limits of definition and role, classify and label it, force upon it our arbitrary categories? Why is it so hard for us to believe that a human being may simply cherish or care for another that we insist on defining a relationship to go with the feeling, that we insist on locating the emotion on a map, on what Vikram Seth calls "the mesh of reference"?

Is it just that in an age obsessed with menus, with choices, with the drop-down box, we have turned even love into a multiple choice question? "How do you feel about this person? Are you a) a friend b) a lover c) a brother or d) a father". What about none of the above? What about Other (please specify)? What about feelings that are open-ended?

Or is it that we have been so poisoned by reason, by our quest for explicability, that the apprehension of another human being in his or her specificity has become impossible for us, and that we can only love people (as we may only hate them) by converting them into abstractions, into the idea of the other rather than the other itself? That having to face up to the reality of who the other person is, to their infinite humanity, is more than we are capable of, so that just as we must ignore what is human about someone to hate him or her, we must also ignore the details of the person we care for, in order to love them? Is this why we give names to our feelings - because we cannot experience them unless they are made intelligible to us, like a child who cannot eat his dinner unless it is cut into bite sized pieces?

Or is it more than an existential choice - is it, perhaps, an aesthetic one? Is our will to definition a way of mythologising the people we live with, of converting them, not only into ideas, but also into ideals? In classifying people into roles vis a vis ourselves, are we perhaps disguising the weaknesses we do not want to see in them, excusing ourselves from paying attention to these flaws, or justifying our own compromise in accepting these shortcomings, if only because of our desperate need not to be alone?

And if so, where does this search for perfection come from? Why must we require those we love to be flawless? Most lovers I know will insist that their beloveds are paragons. Yet even if this were true (and not sheer delusion) what would be the virtue in it? Surely the real achievement is to care for someone not because they are perfect but inspite of their imperfections? Not for their qualities but for their faults? A love that celebrates the perfection of the beloved is a trophy love, one that is more interested in showing off its own 'achievement' than in the enjoyment of its object. If we see relationships as something more than a path to status, why must we pretend that the other person is not silly or immature or ugly or unversed in order to acknowledge that that we care for his or her welfare? Why must we judge people in order to love them? (Or, for that matter, why must we limit ourselves to a single individual and evaluate him / her in his / her entirety, rather than seeking out what is worth loving in a multiplicity of people?)

Or is this need to define, to retreat into a kind of social shorthand, simply a recognition of our own inadequacy? Do we recognise that we have neither the energy nor the imagination to constantly innovate and renew our relationships? That, in Blake-ian terms, we must reason and compare simply because we cannot create? That we are merely players, and need our set scripts - we cannot invent, we can only enact?

Or perhaps the truth is that we could create, but that we need guidelines to ratify our creations. Without the benchmarks of stereotypes, we have no way to judge the affection of others or be judged for our own affections. Do we then lapse into these set relationship roles only because the way to communicate and prove our feelings to one another is by classifying them?

Or, finally, is this desire of ours for relationships that are easily translatable simply a pragmatic recognition of the mutability of the feeling, of the ephemeral nature of its intensity? Because we know that the strength of our emotions will not last, because we see them turning into a lie even as we experience them, we are therefore driven to capture them forever in the snap-shot of a word that we can place on our mantelpiece, display proudly to others? That we freeze frame ourselves into language as a way to deny the wrinkles and weakness that all our feelings are heir to, hoping to use these classifications of ours as a means to both memory and denial?

Isn't it strange that we, as mortals, should despair so over the transience of our feelings for each other? That we should so long to believe in eternity, in permanence, that we would betray the truth of our feelings to their cause, giving the name of 'relationship' to what are, after all, only stray instances of mutual sympathy, occasional accidents of connection. That we should sacrifice the perfection of the moment to the slow decay of forever.

Kierkegaard writes:

"As everyone knows, there are insects which die in the moment of fertilization. Thus it is with all joy, life's supreme and most voluptuous moment of pleasure is attended by death."

Why then do we continue to cling to the ridiculous notion that the ideal is something that we must hold on to? Why does it depress us to recognise that perfection does not last, and that what is ideal today could be cloying tomorrow? This is where regret comes from - a sorrow over the loss of something we treasured, that fails to recognise that even had we held on to it it would have changed, turned sour.

If we are ever to achieve happiness as human beings, if we are ever to attain satisfaction, we must recognise that the most beautiful, most perfect experiences are those that do not last and cannot be repeated, and that we can only truly enjoy them by not trying to repeat them. They are precious precisely because they are unique and unrepeatable.

It follows that the categories we impose on ourselves - all this talk of boyfriends / girlfriends, of friends and lovers and siblings - is pointless, because the real meaning of our contact with other people lies in the connection we have already experienced, and in trying to resurrect that emotion by assigning it the mask of some relationship we are only setting ourselves up for failure.

Auden writes:

"Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Live vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost."

Exactly. Love domesticated, tied to the leash of some relationship, is no longer the proud animal we admired for its strength and freedom. Love tamed is a shabby pet, good for company on lonely nights, but incapable of the hunt and therefore of independent survival.

(Okay, okay, so I know I'm rambling. But I'm in the mood to ramble. Plus I've got to the point where conversations with my friends about their love-lives - I, of course, don't have one - seem to revolve almost entirely around the politics of 'relationships' rather than the poetry of feelings. And that annoys and depresses me. So there.)

Categories: Universe, Whimsy

The Snows of Mount Doom

Responses to yesterday's post about the Hemingway challenge made me think of my favourite take on Hemingway's style - this one:

The Lord of the Rings, by Ernest Hemingway

Frodo Baggins looked at the ring. The ring was round. It was a good ring. The hole at the heart of the ring was also round. The hole was clean and pure. The hole at the heart of the ring had an emptiness in it that made Frodo Baggins remember the big skies of the Shire when his father had taken him out and taught him to tear the heads off the small, furred things that walked there, even though he hated blood in those days and the stink of the blood was always part of the emptiness for him then and ever after.

Frodo Baggins could put the ring on his finger now. The stink of the blood and the hole and the emptiness could never leave him now. Frodo Baggins looked at the ash-heap slopes of Mordor and remembered the Cuban orc who had kept the ash on his cigar all the way to the end. The orc just drew on the cigar and smoked the cigar calmly and kept the ash in a long gray finger, a hard finger, right to the moment that the Rangers beat hit to death with clubs. He was mucho orco, the Cuban.

Frodo Baggins looked at the ring and the hole and smelled the sulfur smell that came from the vent in the mountain. There were scorched black bushes round the vent. The vent was like the cleft of the old whore at the Prancing Pony on the night that the Black Riders came. Frodo Baggins reached in his pouch and took out the flask of good grappa there and filled his mouth and swallowed the grappa. She was mucha puta, the old whore.

Frodo Baggins could spit again so he spat hard, once. He took the ring and threw it into the vent.

The earth moved.

From Alternative Author's Versions of the Lord of the Rings. Do check out the Joyce, Lynn and Jay and Ian Fleming versions as well.

An Unknown Master

From last week's issue of the New Yorker - this incredible short story by Alberto Mendez (translation of Wikipedia profile here), a Spanish writer I'd never heard of before and who has, apparently, never been published in English before. (Dammit!)

“Violence and pain, rage and weakness eventually blend into a religion of survival, a ritual of hope, in which killer and killed, victim and executioner intone the same psalm; already we speak only the language of the sword or the language of the wound.”

Absolutely brilliant stuff. Go read.

***

In other links, this ad for participation in a research study (courtesy: JAP). I especially love the bit about being 'rigorous'. It's research like this that makes me wish I could make a more active contribution to science.

Categories: Links

Half a dozen

Saw this the other day (via Shoe-fiend) - a link to the Hemingway Challenge. A short story in six words. Since I've never been able to resist a challenge, here goes:

1.

His letter arrived, signed with bulletholes.

2.

Afterwards, even the roses were bloodstained.

3.

"What? You call that a ring?!"

4.

She's five. He likes them young.

5.

"Heads." "Right. It'll be decapitation then."

6.

His cyanide pill was a placebo.

P.S. My apologies for the slightly macabre tone of these stories (?). It is the Hemingway challenge after all. Is bullfight one word or two, I wonder?

Categories: Fiction

Famous Poems Abbreviated

I'm back. Well, almost. Still trying to recover from 14 hour long flight back to the US, and catch up on six week's worth of spam, magazines and e-mail. While I get all that cleared up, though, here, from the Humour Issue of 'Peotry' is the always delightful X. J. Kennedy:

Famous Poems Abbreviated

1

Of man's first disobedience and its fruit
Scripture has told. No need to follow suit.

2

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Blue and lonesome, missed my dearie.
Would I find her? Any hope?
Quoth the raven six times, "Nope."

3

Whoosh! - hear the Sea of Faith's withdrawing roar?
So baby, let's make love tonight, not war.

5

Whose woods these are I think I know.
Shall I just sack out in the snow
And freeze? Naaaa, guess I'd better go.

- X. J. Kennedy

[yes, I skipped number 4]

Kennedy also contributes the incredible 'More foolish things remind me of you' - set to a tune that will be instantly recognisable to jazz lovers. An extract:

Theses on archetypes in rapster's lyrics,
Menus describing hash in panegyrics,
Cheap vases aping Mings -
Pretentious things
Remind me of you.
Loud slurping noises from the next apartment,
A critic's lecture on what Hitler's art meant,
Dead snakes the tomcat brings -
Disquieting things
Remind me of you.

Brilliant.

Also, from the same issue, don't miss Dean Young's take on Sean Penn and Billy Collins' take on Irish poetry.

P.S. The prize for inspired abbreviated versions goes, of course, to Wendy Cope, for her version of the Wasteland.



Categories: Humour, Poetry

Fair, though hardly lovely

[Just a quick post. Regular blogging will resume Wednesday. Though you can check out my views on Omkara here]

A friend sent me this link to a petition to Unilever criticising Fair & Lovely and asking (I think) that they stop equating fairness with beauty in their advertisements. The petition reads:

This is a petition to Unilever to recognize the socially detrimental impacts of obsession with physical fairness. Unilever currently markets a product called 'Fair and Lovely' which in its advertising and product information equates fairness with beauty. Even if the product reflects an already existing social belief among people that fairer skin is an indicator of better physical appearance, a company making a product supporting such a notion and making money out of it is socially irresponsible, and treading a racially discriminatory line. If the product should continue to be sold, it should desist from comparing fairness with goodlooks overtly in its title. In fact, a company of Unilever's international range of products and revenues should not be selling such a product at all.

You can go sign it here.

Personally, I have my reservations about the petition. The idea that fairness somehow equals beauty is one that I don't understand, and I recognise the quasi-racist attitude that underlies that assumption, but I'm not sure that this petition makes too much sense.

First, attacking Unilever for prevailing social attitudes is a little like attacking the cart because it led the horse down the wrong road. While it's probably true that Unilever's advertising contributes to the strengthening of the perceived importance of fairness, it's hardly the root cause of that attitude, and if we start attacking advertising that is 'socially irresponsible' because it uses social attitudes that we disapprove of to sell its products, then we'd pretty much have to shut down 80% of ads on TV. And do we really believe that if Unilever stopped advertising Fair and Lovely the way it currently does, the market for such products would die? It feels unfair to be penalising Levers for doing a good job with a sales campaign. [1]

Second, even if Unilever is contributing to the propagation of a socially harmful message, why shouldn't they? They're not forcing anyone to buy anything. They're not spreading pollution or destroying the environment. They're not selling a product that is toxic in any way. Ideas, however unattractive, are not crimes. Who, exactly, is being harmed by Unilever's campaign, and how? It's not Unilever's job to reform social values, it's their job to make as much money for their shareholders as they can, and that's what they're doing.

Third, I'm not sure why Fair and Lovely is so much worse than any other cosmetic product in the market. If we are protesting something, why wouldn't we protest the idea that physical appearance is a valid measure of human worth - that good looking people (women) are somehow better than those who are less beautiful. If it's okay to emphasise the importance of physical beauty, and create products that glorify stereotypical images of what 'beautiful' is, then I don't see why making fair skin a part of that description is such a bad thing. Why is it okay to argue that redder lips make you more beautiful, but not that fairer skin makes you lovely? How is Fair and Lovely any worse than eyeliner or lipstick?

Fourth, I don't know why we would want to control an individual's subjective opinion on physical attractiveness. If people choose to believe that fair is beautiful, that's their loss. I don't know why we, as a society would want to force a politically correct aesthetic judgement on them. The line between discrimination and opinion is a thin one, but there is a difference. I have the right to decide who or what I find beautiful and why; though I don't have the right to discriminate against people on the basis of this in a professional space. I'm welcome to think my fair-skinned co-worker is really ugly, as long as it doesn't affect how I deal with her at work.

Fifth, what is the petition actually asking for? It seems to demand that Unilever sell the product without equating fairness with beauty. I'm not sure how this is to be done. For one thing, the brand name itself connects fairness to beauty, and I can't imagine Unilever giving up a brand like Fair and Lovely just to send a more politically correct message. Also, even if they were to make the message less explicit, who would they be fooling? Suppose they said "use our cream and it'll make you fairer, not lovelier, necessarily, just fairer". Would that really help? What other reason is there for buying a bleaching cream, except to (supposedly) improve your appearance? If the argument is that fairness should not be considered a positive quality at all, and that we as a society should attack companies to make this attitude go away, then the logical way is to argue that bleaching creams themselves be made unavailable, not that their advertising not talk about beauty and fairness in the same breath.

Don't misunderstand me. I agree whole-heartedly that the preference for fair skin is shockingly bad aesthetics and that Unilever's participation in supporting that attitude is despicable. But there's a difference between having no respect for someone and accusing him of doing something wrong. Unilever's error is one of taste and 'decency', not one of ethics.

[1] It's rare enough that they do this. Take the Sunsilk Gang of Girls promotion. Can anyone think of a more clueless marketing strategy? Were these folks asleep in 2000 when all these 'Websites for Women' popped up and went bust in a matter of months? And even if the Sunsilk folks manage to create a community of giggly teenagers online, why would this lead to higher sales of Sunsilk products? How many people actually participate in online communities (is it really a significant portion of their target market)? What do consumers look for in picking a shampoo brand (is 'this brand has a cool lifestyle portal' really a key criteria)? Who in the household makes the purchase decision (is it really the teenager sitting on her computer chatting away about boyfriends)?

at fides et ingeni benigna vena est

Is it just me, or do other people like reading poems in languages they don't understand?

I know it sounds strange, but there's something fascinating about poetry in a foreign language - listening to the pure rhythm of the words, unalloyed with meaning, spotting a familiar word here or there and trying to imagine the rest. It's such fun, for instance, reading Neruda in the original. Or Paz. Or Rilke.

Or, for that matter, this:

Musis amicus tristitiam et metus
tradam protervis in mare Crecitum
portare ventis, quis sub Arcto
rex gelidae metuatur orae,

quid Tiridaten terreat, unice
securus. o quae fontibus integris
gaudes, apricos necte flores,
necte meo Lamiae coronam.

Piplei dulcis! nil sine te mei
prosunt honores: hunc fidibus novis,
hunc Lesbio sacrare plectro
teque tuasque decet sorores.

- Horace. Odes 1.XXVI

I'm giving the translation below, in case you're interested, but seriously - read it. Can't you just hear the rhythm of that first line? Or feel the richness of "apricos necte flores, necte meo Lamiae coronam"? Or the rousing call of "Piplei dulcis!"?

Translation (by Patrick Bronte):

To the wave and the wind, while the muses are kind,
My cares and my sorrows I'll fling;
Nor e'er with the question will trouble my mind
Of the snow-covered north, who is king:
Or what is the dread, o'er the Parthian's head -
That the shades of misfortune may bring.

O, Goddess divine, the first of the Nine,
Who lovest the fountain clear,
A garland of spring's sweetest offering twine
For the brows of my Lamia dear,
Since oh! without Thee honour to me
Nor pleasure nor profit can bear!

Thou and they sisters, his praises to sing,
Once more awaken the Lesbian string!

P.S. Am going to be travelling the next few days, so may not be updating my blog. See you next week.

Delayed

The train was late. Again. The garbled voice on the public address system didn't say how long it would be, it just said it was 'delayed'. That sounded ominous. He cursed under his breath. Every minute spent stuck here on the platform would make it more difficult, he knew. That was the trouble with living out in the suburbs - all you got was one train every hour and even that never showed up on time. He wondered what the trouble was with this one. Probably the usual story. Some commuter shuttle being given priority over this regional line.

Maybe it was something more exotic though. Maybe there'd been an accident of some sort. Maybe some poor soul had thrown himself under the train. It happened every few weeks. They would all read about it in the paper the next morning.

He toyed with the idea of buying a paper to kill the time. No, what was the point? There would be nothing of interest, and besides he had very little money now - he'd set out with barely enough. He poked around in his pockets and found a half eaten packet of M&Ms. It was all he had eaten today. He just hadn't got around to it. He pulled out the packet and emptied the last few pieces into his palm. Popped them all into his mouth in one go, as though they were medicine. Something about the sweet taste of the chocolate in his mouth sickened him, set his teeth on edge. He crumpled the now empty packet in his fist, threw it angrily into the bin.

Almost ten minutes late now. He could feel the anxiety building up inside him, the restlessness like an itching between his shoulders, driving him forward. He walked to the end of the platform, peered down the track, as though hoping to conjure the train up. Still no sign. No fresh announcements either. Come on, come on, how long was this going to take? He walked up and down the platform, swearing under his breath. That wouldn't do. People were starting to stare. He mustn't draw attention to himself - not now - that was the worst thing he could do. He turned around and looked the old biddies who were watching him in the eye. He gave them a polite smile - half apologetic, half frustrated. The smile of a man who is ashamed to have lost his temper but hopes you understand why. Then he turned around and walked to the end of the platform again.

Sixteen minutes and counting. Suddenly, the loudspeaker crackled into action. The train was coming! It would be here soon. Right. One final check in his pockets to make sure the paper was still there. He could see the train now, the engine rounding the curve by the river, approaching the station with an air of barely concealed impatience. Behind him he could hear the other passengers stirring. Papers were being folded, bags were being lifted off the ground. There was a sense of anticipation in the air. He didn't look around though. His eyes were fixed on the train, willing it to come faster, willing it to arrive. It had to be this one, he knew. It had to be now.

He waited until the front of the engine had almost reached the platform. Then, with a quick rush forward, he threw himself in its path.

[Hat-tip to Shoe-fiend, whose post two weeks ago vaguely inspired this]

A spammer in the works

Okay, now I know that I've moved to China.

First the government goes around blocking websites and wants me to show id at cybercafes. Now I'm getting Chinese spam.

No, seriously, for the last three days, all the mail in my Gmail spam folder has been in Chinese. Is this happening to anyone else? I'm starting to get a little worried here. There's something about the idea that one billion people out there might want me to buy cheaper prescription medication that makes me very afraid.

Not that I know what the mails say, of course. (For a script based on symbols, it's suprisingly hard to figure out the words for 'penis enlargement' in Mandarin) For all I know there is some desperate political dissident out there sending me top-secret military information at the risk of his / her life, and I just keep deleting it. Or, even more critically, it could be the recipe for the perfect egg salad.

***

As I've grown older, the spam I get has matured with me. At first, all I would get were mails promising to restore my virility. Then at some point those stopped coming and I started getting offers for mortgages and credit instead. Now all I seem to get are offers for cheaper prescription medication.

Do these spammers know something that I don't? Does the fact that I never get ads for viagra substitutes any more mean that even the spam community has figured out that I'm never going to get a date again?

I don't know what I resent most - the implication that I'm a sex-crazed maniac with really tiny equipment, the insinuation that I'm a financial deadbeat with a two digit credit rating and no conceivable hope of ever finding employment, or the suggestion that I'm a geriatric old man who's way past the point where he has to worry about either of the other two. [1]

***

And speaking of spam in Gmail, have you ever noticed how when you go to the spam folder you always get these links to food products made out of spam (my folder currently shows a link to a recipe for Spam Primavera)? Shouldn't someone have figured out by now that when people click on this folder they're talking about a different kind of spam[2]? Somewhere in outer Elbonia there are a bunch of marketing executives trying to figure out why nobody will buy their spam burgers, despite the fact that their ad gets 156,230,492 views a day.

Notes

[1] Needless to say, none of those are true.

[2] Alternatively, of course, there may be people who actually are so fond of eating spam that they have a seperate folder for it. I'm sure they must be wondering why people keep sending them all these messages for penile implants. We don't want a bigger c*ck, they probably reply, we like our meat canned and pre-cooked, thanks.

Maximum Silly

Of all the intensely silly things said and written about the Mumbai blasts, Suketu Mehta's essay in last week's issue of TIME (which I just got around to reading) has to be about the silliest.

Mehta starts with an anecdote about a stockbroker wounded in the bombing who receives a visit from Manmohan Singh in hospital and takes the opportunity to praise the prime minister for economic reforms. Huh? Okay, let's say this actually happened, and isn't a story someone made up because it sounds good. Is it anything like a mainstream reaction? Were the majority of Mumbai's citizens sitting around their homes on Tuesday night thinking, sure we got bombed, sure the economic reforms process seems to have come to a complete standstill, but because Manmohan Singh helped liberalise India's economy 15 years ago, we should all feel grateful? Come on. Mehta writes:

"In any other city, if the leader of the nation were to come to the sickbed of a person grievously wounded by a terrorist bombing, the first thought in the victim's head would probably not be to praise the leader's economic policy. But for the young broker—and for most of those wounded in the Bombay blasts...the admiration arises from the main reason why they live in Bombay: to make money."

Maybe I just talk to the wrong people, but I sincerely doubt that the first thought in most victim's heads was to praise their leader's economic policy. We weren't all sitting around Tuesday night thinking - but at least we're making a lot of money. And that, on the whole, is something I'm thankful for.

But it gets worse. Having talked about how Mumbai is the 'golden songbird' (who says these things?[1]) Mehta goes on to gripe about the Reader's Digest survey which says that Mumbai is one of the rudest cities in the world. So important a point does he think this, that he dedicates a good quarter of his essay to cribbing about how people don't understand the civic spirit of Mumbai.

For God's sake - two hundred people just died. Is how rude the Reader's Digest thinks the city is really our top concern right now? Who reads the Readers Digest anyway? Who cares what they think? Are we really so desperate for external affirmation that the most critical thing we see coming out of the bombings is that it refutes the Reader's Digest survey [2]? Personally, I can't think of anything more trivial. Mehta writes:

"Readers Digest's editors should now eat the July issue of their magazine, page by page"

Get over it already.

Mehta then goes on to give us the usual cliches about India's democratic, tolerant heritage - Sikh Prime Minister, Muslim President, Italian Catholic head of the ruling coalition - the standard shorthand. But all this wonderful communal harmony is not the reason that Bombay didn't break into riots. No sir. According to Mehta, it's because the city recognises that rioting is bad for business. Does anyone else think this is being overly cynical? Is the reason we're all tolerant and civic-minded really because we all want to make more money? And if that's true, is it really reason to celebrate? Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think that a good part of the reason people behave decently is because they are fundamentally decent, not because they've done the math and figured out the exact loss, in basis points, that starting a riot will cause.

Finally, just so that you don't think that he's being too self-congratulatory - Mehta comes up with a litany of Bombay's problems - condition of roads, lack of sanitation and water supply, which he concludes with the observation:

"Perhaps this horrific tragedy will powerfully focus the government on the problems of the country's galloping urbanization, and the dire need to invest in infrastructure."

Huh? So because some terrorists bombed a local train, the government's suddenly going to wake up to the fact that millions of Mumbai's people live in inhuman slum conditions? Would someone care to explain the logic of this to me? Does anyone else happen to believe this?

There's a scene in Asterix and the Cauldron, where Asterix and Obelix are taking part in an 'experimental' play, and the director tells Obelix that when called upon he should just walk forward and say the first thing that comes into his head (Obelix's statement - "These Romans are crazy" - lands the director in prison, waiting to be fed to the lions). Someone should tell Mr. Mehta that such random free association is not a good technique to use while writing an article for the international press about Mumbai's reactions to the blast. His piece is meandering, irrelevant, petty and at least from what I've heard or read, a gross misrepresentation of the general public reaction to the blasts. I've been trying to get my hands on Mehta's book - Maximum City - for a while now, but if this is what it reads like then I'm going to stop looking.

Notes

[1] Well, Mehta for one. He's so fond of calling Bombay the 'songbird' that he does it four times in a one page article. Once was bad enough, but four times? Shudder!

[2] Which it doesn't actually - there's no contradiction between people being generally rude and coming together to help in a genuine crisis. I don't think that Bombay is a particularly rude city - I think it's largely a function of what patterns of behaviour you see as being standard etiquette - but the fact that people helped others after a bombing doesn't mean that they aren't generally rude to each other.

Two unfinished thoughts

According to legend, so swift and skilful a swordsman was mighty Achilles that when he brought his sword down upon the head of his enemy, the skull clave instantly and the victim never had the chance to know that he had been killed, the very thought of death in his brain being split into two.

(55 words)

Paying the Piper

I never did finish the series about my career in theatre did I? (No, NOT my career in theatrics - that's far from over).

My first ever performance was in a school Annual Day production of The Pied Piper. The play itself went something like this (you all know the story):

Scene 1: Townspeople (children dressed up in 'grown up' clothes) enter stage right. Mill about pretending to have conversations with each other. Rats (children dressed up in oversize brown overalls with black whiskers painted on them) enter stage left. Charge at townspeople. Townspeople run away in fright.

Scene 2: Scene opens to find Mayor and his cronies sitting on a table stage centre. Pied Piper enters stage left and is begged to help with the rat problem. Pied Piper agrees and goes off to fight cri...errr..rodents. Mayor sits at table and thinks about what he wants for dinner. (okay, okay, I made that last bit up - but I was trying to add a touch of realism)

Scene 3: Flute music plays. Enter Pied Piper stage right, holding pipe to lips and skipping. Enter rats from various corners of the stage, and begin skipping behind Piper. Skipping continues until end of track.

Scene 4: As in Scene 2. Pied Piper enters and demands to be paid. Mayor scoffs at him. Pied Piper exits in anger and forgets to look back.

Scene 5: As in Scene 3. Different flute music. Pied Piper enters, pipes, skips. Children (children) enter and begin skipping after him. After Piper and children exit stage right, Townspeople come on and mime crying.

Finis.

I was the Mayor. It was a demanding role. I had to wear a bow-tie. I had to wear about 4 kgs of make-up. In Scene 2 I had to look all haggard and humbly implore the Piper to take on the rats, quiet desperation bleeding from my voice. In Scene 4 I had to do my officious 'have your people call my people' act and say "No, we shall not pay you your money. Now Go!" and then join with my yes-men (I had yes-men - everyone in class had to have a role, you see) in an evil laugh.

It's a heavy responsibility being Mayor. Especially when you're 7. It's not just the tangled affairs of the State, it's also that you're trying to kick the guy sitting next to you under the table without having any of the 2,000 people watching you (or, more importantly, your teacher) notice. Or the knowledge that half your citizenry is wearing their elder sibling's clothes. Uneasy lies the head that wears the silly top hat.

The play was a success. Oh, there was the usual healthy name-calling between us and the other acts, and some of the more fastidious members of the cast complained about the oversize rats running amok in the green room, but on the whole a good time was had by all. And audience reaction, of course, was spectacular. None of this business of people getting up when the thing was over, putting on their coats and slinking off to try and remember where they'd parked their cars. When was the last time you went to a Broadway performance where after the show the audience came backstage, picked up the performers in their arms, hugged them, took pictures of them in their costumes and promised them double, even triple scoops of icecream on their way home? See what I mean?

Needless to say, my own performance was exceptionally well received. The critics (consisting of my parents and two pairs of random aunty and uncles) were unanimous in their praise. Particular mention was made of the realistic way in which I angrily dismissed the Piper when he insisted on payment - somebody said they could almost hear my teeth chattering in outrage. I didn't bother to point out to them that my teeth were chattering because it was November, were were on an outdoor stage, I was in my shirtsleeves and there was a wind blowing.

***

Thinking back on it now, the whole story seems wildly improbable. I mean the parts where the rats scamper out and follow the piper is fine. You have only to look at Britney Spears fans to know that even subhuman intelligences can be attracted to some sorts of sounds. But who in their right minds would think that being stuck with the task of permanently babysitting a whole town's worth of kids could be seen as a victory?! Obviously whoever wrote this tale had never met a real child in his or her life.

There's this whole business of having the children follow the Piper, for starters. Children don't just meekly follow you. Think about the number of bags full of toys you would have to carry with you. Think about the first aid. Try to picture the Piper and his entourage trying to cross a street. Some kid at the back wanders off or stands still in the middle of the road. The Piper goes back to get him. When he turns around having collected this kid, he realises that the other kids have followed him into the street because he was still playing his damn pipe. So now he has to get them turned around again (not an easy thing to do if all you can do is play your pipe and lead). This could take hours.

And think about the number of toilet breaks on the way. Think about the time it would take to order a meal at the wayside inn. Think about hundreds of shrill little voices asking you "Are we there yet?"

I've always wondered if there was a Mrs. Piper. You can imagine the scene. Pied Piper walks into his house. Stands about in the corridor looking sheepish. Mrs. Piper asks him how the job went. He says, "Oh fine! fine! Well, almost. The thing is, honey, they wouldn't pay me any actual money, but don't worry, I've managed to get along all their children instead. Don't look at me like that. They won't be any bother. They'll just sleep on every available surface and swiftly eat us out of hearth and home."

Ah, you say, but the whole point is that he was trying to teach the townspeople a lesson, get back at them for their meanness, as it were. Oh he was, was he? Some lesson. Here's a townload of people all of whom have magically got someone else to take care of their kids, and now have legitimate reason to procreate on overdrive. What do you want to bet that there were some serious orgies in Hamelin that month?

Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as extremely unlikely. Let's face it, the Piper was either a) a kind of medieval Michael Jackson b) a slave trader c) a cannibal or d) short-sighted and couldn't tell the difference between rats and children.

On a separate note, isn't it a good thing that we don't know what tune the Piper was actually playing? Some idiot would almost certainly have made it into a ringtone, and before you know it you'd have people wandering about city with their cellphones ringing, being followed by other people's children. And you thought Himesh What's-his-name was a menace.

A few requests

Everyday I tell myself that I'm going to stop blogging about this censorship issue and move on to other stuff. And then everyday I read stuff on the Net or in the MSM that makes me indignant enough so I have to blog about.

So. A final set of requests to everyone discussing / debating the ban (and tomorrow, I really, truly will move on):

1) It's not a blog ban:

Can we all please stop saying that the government is banning blogs? If there's one thing this whole incident has made abundantly clear it's that the GoI can't tell a blog from bloodwurst. The GoI is banning websites. If you're reading this, you probably a blogger yourself and don't see much difference, but to most people, who haven't heard of blogs, they're not the same thing. And we need to emphasise that we're trying to protect the freedom of the Internet, not of blogs:

a) I'm tired of hearing the 'how does it matter - blogs never say anything worthwhile anyway' argument. Aside from the fact that we don't make laws that distinguish between people on the basis of their intrinsic worth (can you imagine, for example, a legislation that said it was okay to murder someone as long as they weren't really contributing that much to society), it's useful to remember that the GoI doesn't think / know that it's blocking a bunch of 'trivial' blogs that no one reads. They think (apparently) that they're blocking radical websites that have the power to influence millions. There is nothing in the censorship system of the government that says they're going to make trade-offs between the perceived importance of a site and its harmful content. They'll block anything. They'll block the entire Internet if they feel it's necessary. The way things stand today they have the right to do that. So we're not fighting to protect our right to blog. We're fighting for our right to have free access to the Internet.

b) If there's any hope of winning this battle at all, it's if we can make a community larger than just bloggers understand what government censorship means. And saying the government is banning blogs is entirely counterproductive to that end. Most Internet subscribers don't know what blogs are. Saying the government is banning blogs rather than websites is like saying the government is banning voodoo rather than saying the government is banning religion. The fact that the popular perception of this action is that it's about banning blogs is, frankly, largely our own fault, but let's at least try and communicate to a wider audience what's really at stake here.

As far as I'm concerned, the 'best' thing that could happen at this point is if we could somehow get the CERT-IN to ban shaadi.com. Or Google. Then people might begin to realise what we're fighting about.

2) Free speech is not about sufferance:

I'm tired of everyone, including those who support free speech, acting as though free speech means you just let people have their say and spread whatever message they like without doing anything about it. Of course not. Free speech simply means that you don't stop them from having their say. It certainly doesn't mean that you sit around and do nothing about it. If you don't agree with them, you attack them mercilessly for what they're saying. You tell them why you think they're mistaken. You expose, assuming you can, the flaws in their logic, the inaccuracy of their facts. You prove them wrong. Nobody's saying you have to let them get away with it. Nobody's saying you need to like them or accept them or even be polite to them. All we're saying is that you don't suppress them from saying what they want.

I don't understand why we're so afraid of propaganda. If we were afraid of the truth, and wanted to stop that from spreading, I could understand that. Not accept it, but understand it. But why does propaganda frighten us so much that we feel we have to stop it? If the messages we want to block are so self-evidently wrong, shouldn't we be able to publicly demonstrate that? And if we can't demonstrate it, then what right do we have to ban them? [1]

3) Exit Sandman:

Can we please stop making up hypothetical terrorist websites to combat? I'm not a five year old child. I refuse to be scared by some mysterious bogeyman that no one's ever actually seen but is so horrific and frightening that the whole nation could be destabilised by it. So far, all I've seen is a list of 17 websites, none of which seem to me to pose any threat to national security. From now on, I refuse to deal in abstractions of 'dangerous sites' - if you think censorship is needed, show me an actual site that you think should be banned, tell me what it actually says and explain to me why you feel not banning it will put the security of the nation at risk. Quasi-mystical discussions of all the horrifying propaganda spewing sites that must be out there don't interest me.

4) No, you DON'T support free speech:

Can we please stop saying things like "I support free speech, but...". No, I'm sorry, you don't. If you believe that it's okay for the government to have the power to block any website they choose without providing information about what sites were banned and why, and without having to prove the need for those sites to be banned before they ban them, then you DO NOT support free speech. At least have the courage / conviction to accept that.

5) It's NOT just 17 sites:

Finally, I'm sick of people saying "We know the sites the government has blocked - it's that list of 17". No, actually we don't. We know (finally) some small subset of the sites the government has blocked. But by the government's own admission, they've been issuing orders like this one for a long time now. For all we know they may have issued a second notice on the 13th of July. For all we know they may have issued a dozen notices since. For all we know there might be thousands of websites that they've blocked before this that we don't know about. No, I'm not being paranoid (for a change!). I'm simply saying that as long as we don't have a complete list of all the sites that the government has ever blocked, we have no way of assessing the extent of censorship that the government is practising. So please, stop shooting off your mouth about 'how does it matter if the government blocks a few harmful sites' because you don't know (any more than I do) how many sites the government has blocked or what they contained.

P.S. To clarify - I'm not saying that it would be okay if the GoI were only banning blogs or had only banned 17 sites. Banning anything in this way is unacceptable. But it's important to recognise that the situation is much worse than that.

Notes

[1] I'll go a step further - if we want to fight these 'anti-social' elements (and believe that it's okay to make concessions on principles for that, as those who support banning clearly do) why not use propaganda ourselves? If 'they' can spread lies that will get people to hate decent fellow citizens, despite the fact that they're underground, despite the fact that they have little or no broad-based support, why can't 'we' spread lies that will make all these impressionable people hate them, when we're in a majority and control all of mass media? You'd think it would be easier. (You'll say - but that's lying! Sure. But how come you're willing to sacrifice the rights of ordinary citizens to fight terror, but won't tell a few lies of your own about these alleged hate-mongers?)

Monkey Business

So the government finally came up with the list of sites that it asked the ISPs to block. You can find the list, as well as a scanned version of the original fax here.

Many people have commented on the complete idiocy of the sites blocked (see Shivam Vij's rediff article here, and the Curious Gawker's take here), and wondered what the government was thinking - some have even questioned the authenticity of the document. [1] The document itself provides no clue as to why these sites are to be blocked - saying simply that it has been decided to block them. Is the government telling us the full story?

Certainly not. Here, in a Falstaff exclusive [2] is the account of what really happened:

In the aftermath of the blasts in Bombay, the Centre for Random Excursions into Territories on the INternet (CRET-IN) came under heavy pressure from the government to find and block websites that were spreading communal hatred and anti-India propaganda. That these websites existed was self-evident - after all, no one had ever heard of communal violence before the Internet came along. But how to find these sites? After days of assidious searching, CRET-IN officials were forced to admit that they couldn't find a single site with objectionable content. What were they to do now? A crisis of this dimension hadn't hit CRET-IN since the time, six months after their formation, that someone had pointed out to them that running about with long brushes and getting rid of the spiders that lurked in the corners of government offices was not what 'cleaning up the web' meant. (Apparently they needed some new fangled device called a com-pu-ter.)

Faced with this new dilemma, the head of CRET-IN, Gulshan Wry, was suddenly struck by a brain wave. These anti-social elements were inhuman, weren't they? Perhaps they communicated on some frequency invisible to ordinary, well-meaning citizens. Perhaps what looked like a perfectly innocent and fairly boring blog to the patriotic employees of CRET-IN was actually a hotbed of malicious propaganda [3]. Yes, that must be it.

But how to identify such sites? Mr. Wry's first thought was that they should get in some terrorists and have them search for these blogs. When he proposed this to the government, it was pointed out to him that a) the government wasn't capable of catching terrorists, which is why they needed Mr. Wry to block websites in the first place and b) the whole point of the ban was to keep terrorists from seeing these sites, not give them a convenient terminal to look for them.

But Mr. Wry was not to be daunted by so minor a setback. His brain churning away like a washing machine on 'spin', Mr. Wry came up with his next innovative proposal. If we are looking for SIMI-an intelligence, he said, why not use monkeys? They're certainly subhuman enough. Where Mr. Wry got this idea is unclear. Perhaps his ten year old daughter told him how, in Elizabethan England, they employed thousands of monkeys to come up with something called Shakespeare. Perhaps he happened to pass by the blog of the dangerous subversive Peter Griffin and saw a quote about the Internet and monkeys. Perhaps the HR manager of CRET-IN pointed out the outsourcing opportunity presented by the large number of langurs who hang around outside government offices. At any rate, the idea was warmly greeted by the upper echelons, and a troop of 22 monkeys was swiftly recruited for this task.

Once it had been established that the monkeys could touch type (a feat that astonished the employees of CRET-IN), each monkey was given the task of generating more or less random strings of letters. The strings that each monkey typed were consolidated on a page creating, eventually, a 22 page report of suspect configurations. From this, CRET-IN researchers painstakingly culled out the strings that could possibly be part of the URL of a website. For example, suppose the monkey had typed prncskmbly - CRET-IN researchers instantly realised that the prncs was a phonetic reference to the word princess. The kmbly bit proved harder, but eventually, through concentrated semantic analysis and a high-end data mining process called GOOGLE-ing, CRET-IN codebreakers were able to decipher this as kimberly. A search for princess + kimberly pointed the analysts to princesskimberly.blogspot.com - which was clearly a site devoted to attacking the Indian people, cleverly disguised to look like the blog of a bored american teenager (oh! the fiendishness of these antisocial elements).

Similar analysis on all strings yielded a total of 17 such sites. Of course, many of the strings were found to be pure gibberish. In fact, many of the monkeys weren't able to come up with even a single subversive site. One of them however, managed to come up with as many as three. This monkey is now being paid top bananas and is rumoured to be the next head of DoT.

At any rate, it was through this highly advanced and sophisticated process that the list finally sent to the ISPs for blockage was arrived at.

Citizens of India, don't you feel much safer, knowing that your government is fast becoming so technology savvy? Gone are the days when important government decisions were taken by deferring them to the judgement of the eminent philosopher, political theorist and parrot, Mithu, who could be found outside the government's offices picking out cards with key decisions on them and chewing on mustard seeds. Clearly our government has moved on to higher forms of 'intelligence'. Let's all commemorate the incredible work done by these dedicated watchdogs, without whose tireless efforts the Internet would almost certainly have gone ape by now.

Disclaimer: This story, like all stories about the Government, is a work of fiction. Any similarity to people living or dead from the neck up is purely coincidental, though, you have to admit, fairly scary.

P.S. As Peter says, it's time to give ourselves a teeny-tiny pat on the back. And to thank all the people who've worked really hard over the past week to bring and keep this issue in the public eye. A big thank you to the folks behind the google group and the wiki as well as to all the other bloggers who've helped make a big noise about this.

P.P.S. It's not like the government always makes things worse, you know. The ToI reports that the government AIDS cell has put in a petition to legalise homosexuality in India. What was it T.S. Eliot said about doing the right thing for the wrong reason?

Notes

[1] Though that, of course, is not the real issue - even if these sites had been truly subversive, it's not clear that we should be censoring them.

[2] Rajdeep Sardesai, eat my dust.

[3] Needless to say, when I look at these sites I see only the same boring things that the CRET-IN employees see - thus proving that I too am a good, patriotic citizen. What do you see?

On Censorship

(Okay, this is my last post on this whole blog ban thing, I promise):

Now that the government has finally acknowledged (or has it?) that it 'didn't mean' to block all of blogspot and is busy trying to shift the blame onto ISPs, we've inevitably arrived at the question of whether censorship of any sites whatsoever is justified.

From what I've seen on the blogosphere, there are two broad camps here - those who believe that all censorship is wrong, and those who feel that some things may genuinely have to be censored, in 'national interest'.

On the whole, I'm with the first camp. I remain unconvinced that the expression of opinion, any opinion, constitutes grounds for punitive action. Efforts to police opinion, have in my view, only two effects, both inimical. First, they drive differences of opinion underground, isolating those with deviant opinions from the larger stream of social thought and reducing the chances of dealing with them in an effective manner. Second, they lead to the stifling of innovation and creativity and negatively impact the richness of social dialogue. Notice also, as I argue in my earlier post, that it's a short step from policing expressed opinion to policing thought, and from there to the complete cessation of all rights and liberties.

But there is a second and less extreme point to be made against those who feel that censorship may, in some cases, be justified. The key thing to remember, I think, is that saying that some sites may need to be censored is not the same thing as saying that some officious bureaucrat sitting in his office should have the blanket power to block any site he likes without having to provide any explanation or be held accountable in any meaningful way. Censorship per se need not be inconsistent with democracy, censorship based on Gulshan Rai's personal whims certainly is.

Living in a free state does not mean that you can do or say anything you like. It does mean, however, that the onus is on the government to prove that what you're doing is harmful to society and against the nation's laws, that that contention needs to be ratified by the judiciary before action can be taken against you, and that it must be possible for citizens to hold the government accountable for their actions - which is only possible if information on censorship decisions is provided in a transparent and timely manner.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume that there are websites that are genuinely detrimental to national security / interest (though for my part I can't imagine what these would be) and that it is, in fact, feasible to ban access to them (which I'm unconvinced of). Should the DoT be able to send a confidential notice to ISPs asking them to ban the site? Absolutely not. If there is any banning to be done, the process should, at the very least:

a) Need to be approved by the judiciary
b) Involve giving the owner of the accused site the right to defend himself / herself
c) Have the provision for site owners to sue the government for wrongful censorship if it is shown that their sites were unfairly blocked
d) Have proceedings that are made freely available to the public - including public documentation of exactly what sites are to be blocked, why, who is going to block them and whether such blockage is feasible.

A system where the executive arm of the government arbitrarily decides what sites it wants to block and simply goes ahead and blocks them, without informing the general public of what they're banning and why, is unacceptable.

The point is this - if you believe (as I do not) that the government action in blocking even a handful of websites is justified, you need to do better than say - some websites may be dangerous. The mere fact that their might be websites inimical to national interest does not imply that we should blindly take everything the government tells us on trust, any more than the existence of criminals implies that the police should have the right to throw anyone they want in jail. Even if websites are to be banned, we need evidence that so drastic a step was taken only after the websites in question were given a fair trial and after due democratic process was followed.

Let's not give the government the benefit of the doubt

I've said this elsewhere, (see comments) but:

Why are we assuming that this block is inadvertent? We don't actually know that. All we know is that the government gave some instructions to ISP providers and as a result we can no longer access any blogspot blogs. We don't know exactly what those instructions were or why they were given. We've received no official statement from the government telling us that they meant to block only one or two particular blogs. Why are we then buying into this fiction about how the government only wanted to block a few blogs and the ISPs went ahead and blocked the entire domain because they were lazy / clueless? Because the MSM says so? Come on. We know better than to believe them.

I'm not saying that the inadvertent story couldn't be true or isn't true necessarily. I'm just saying that we have no reason to believe that it's true. Maybe the government did mean to block all blogs. Maybe they don't want their citizens to have access to blogs at all. Maybe they do know what they're doing and actually want to block a million sites, not 12 or 17 or whatever.

Look, I know we're all used to the idea that the government is well-meaning but incompetent. But I think we need to be careful about not carrying that assumption too far. One, it leaves us vulnerable to being taken advantage of by the government - as long as we continue to assume that they mean well, they can get away with all sorts of violations without having to answer for them. Two, accepting that the government inadvertently blocked all blogs is letting them off the hook easy. Even if it's true, why should we, the victims of this ban, apologise for them? From a negotiation standpoint, that's just weakening our own side. If the ban is a mistake, let the government come out and admit it. Better yet, let them fix it so we can get access to our blogs again (well, okay, we have access, but I mean access without having to remember to go through pkblogs or starting Tor or whatever). Where the hell did this "forgive them, they know not what they do" story come from?

Frankly, I'm sick to death of seeing unsubstantiated speculation published as fact in the mainstream media. As far as I'm concerned, I'm assuming that the ban is deliberate and well thought out - that the government of India has willingly and knowingly and without any official explanation banned its citizens from accessing millions of websites. And that's what I'm going to believe until the government tells me any different.

(Okay, okay, I'm going to stop ranting about this and move on. Soon.)

Update 1:

Just saw this in the Hindustan Times.

Dr Gulshan Rai, director of the Computer Emergency Response Team, the apex organisation under the IT Ministry responsible for the nation's cyber-security, told HT: "There's no attempt to block www.blogspot.com from our side. The order issued by the DoT has four blogs hosted on Blogspot.com. The order didn't ask the whole site to be banned."

Two things. First, this is the same Gulshan Rai who, two days ago, was telling us how "somebody must have blocked some sites" and he couldn't say anything about it. Who's to say what he might 'remember' when his memory comes back further. Maybe he'll finally be able to recall blocking blogspot as a whole.

Second, it is not okay for the government to say - oh, this is not what we intended so it's not our problem. Whether they meant it or not, it's the government directive that has caused Blogspot and other blogs to be blocked, so it's their job to fix what they've screwed up.

Frankly, I don't blame the ISPs. With a government this illogical and this incoherent, there's just no point in taking risks. Who's to say that people like Rai won't turn around tomorrow and accuse them of not carrying out orders and shut them down? This is exactly why we need to have all censorship orders made public - so that everyone, including the ISPs, can be clear on just what the government has ordered and why.

Update 2:

In an interview to AFP, our the indomitable Gulshan Rai had this to say:

"I have seen the government order. Only two webblogs -- pyjamaeditors.blogspot.com and exposingtheleft.blogspot.com have been been blocked," Gulshan Rai, head of cyber security agency Computer Emergency Response Team, told AFP.

Quite amazing, when you consider that he just told Hindustan Times that there were four blogspot sites. You'd think if the man was going to lie he'd at least be smart enough to get his story straight first.

K

"there can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today's interrogation, there is a great organization at work. An organization which not only employs corrupt warders, oafish Inspectors, and Examining Magistrates of whom the best that can be said is that they recognize their own limitations, but also has at its disposal a judicial hierarchy of high, indeed of the highest rank, with an indispensable and numerous retinue of servants, clerks, police, and other assistants, perhaps even hangmen, I do not shrink from that word. And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them..."

- Franz Kafka, The Trial

In my previous post on the blog ban I said that books may be irrelevant to the folks at DoT, implying that they were a bunch of illiterate morons.

I take that back.

Thinking about it, it suddenly occured to me why this scenario with the ban seems so familiar. The government takes action against you. You don't know what you're accused of, who is accusing you, what you can do to defend / clear yourself, whether you're even the person accused or there's been some horrible bureaucratic mistake. You run around desperately trying to get some information but you can't get a clear picture of what's happening. Your entire existence is on the line, but you have no clue what is expected of you or what you can do about it. Your only contact is with a bunch of shady agents who seem to know as little about it as you.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's the plot to the Trial.

Now I wonder. Is it possible, just possible, that someone in the DoT has read their Kafka?