In Dubious Battle

or Why Arundhati Roy is a Waste of Space

The first thing that occurred to me, after I finished reading Arundhati Roy's article on the rebels in the Dantewada forest in Outlook (hat-tip: SB), was how fundamentally unconvincing the whole piece was [1]. This, it seems to me, is mostly Roy's fault. One page through the eight pages of the article it's pretty clear where Roy's sympathies lie, and those sympathies proceed to systematically undermine any credibility her article might have otherwise had.

The problem is not that Roy sympathizes with the cause of the rebels, even though that sympathy seems less about the specific problems of the people of Dantewada and more about Roy's own long-standing position against government / big business / institutions generally. The problem is that Roy seems incapable of admitting the slightest nuance into her support for the rebels. Hers in the unquestioning belief of the true zealot, and the blindness of her convictions renders her incapable of anything approaching intelligent analysis. Not only does Roy seem to enter Dantewada with an entirely uncritical perspective [2], when potential criticisms of the rebels do occur to her she provides her own justifications for their actions, without even bothering to put these criticisms to the people she is profiling. As a result, we learn what Roy thinks the rebels are thinking, rather than what they really are thinking. I can't think of a worse waste of journalistic access. The result is a piece so partisan as to be virtually propaganda.

Worse, when the rebels do tell her things, Roy seems happy to believe them without the slightest corroboration. It never seems to occur to her that there may be two sides to the stories she's being told, or that the rebels, may, in fact, be feeding her misinformation [3]. No effort is made to speak to anyone outside the rebel troops (like, say, villagers who are not part of the 'army'), nor does Roy ask any questions about how the operations of the rebels are financed, how their 'soldiers' are recruited, how decisions about attacks are made, etc. The irony here is that Roy is strident in declaring our need to be wary of official news reports about the Dantewada situation, yes she seems just as credulous when it comes to swallowing whatever she is told by the rebels.

A sense of irony, alas, is the other quality completely missing from Roy's report, a shocking omission for someone who used to write fiction. In one passage, Roy quotes a young rebel called Nilesh, describing his brother, who has become a Special Police Officer:

“He was very young,” Nilesh said, “he got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now he is stuck. He can never come back to the village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that.”

The irony, of course, is that the same description could be applied to Nilesh himself. He too is very young. He too has got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people. He too is (probably) stuck and will not be forgiven.

Again and again through the piece Roy speaks of the rebels as children, describing herself, at one point, as being "surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal". Ironically, this only serves to discredit the rebels, because it raises serious questions about whether they know what they're doing. It does not, however, as Roy seems to think, make them seem less of a threat. I don't know about you, but personally I can think of few things more dangerous than sophisticated weaponry in the hands of angry children, and if that's what the rebels are (since that's what Roy seems to make them out to be) then we have even more reason to be afraid.

(I'm particularly bewildered by Roy's account of one Kamla, whose beautiful smile receives a lot of attention in the article. As though her having a beautiful smile somehow made her less violent or dangerous.)

The larger problem, I think, is that Roy's is a curiously binary world view, a world divided into good and evil, right and wrong. (Ironically, again, this is a world view shared by no one so closely as the erstwhile Bush administration that Roy claims to despise). Since government and big corporations are evil, it must follow that whoever opposes them, by whatever means, is good, and the means themselves justified. Roy's identification of the rebels with the 'people' is automatic and unswerving - it never occurs to her that there may be more than two sides to the conflict. What reason, after all, do we have to believe that the rebels represent the interests of the people of Dantewada? They claim to do so, certainly, but so does the government, and it's not clear to me that one claim is any more legitimate than the other. Terrorists everywhere are quick to claim the people's backing - are we to accept that the Taliban speaks for the Afghan people, that the Shining Path speaks for the people of Peru, that Al Qaeda speaks for Muslims everywhere? In each of these cases, the organization in question represents itself as the people's champion, yet there is considerable reason to believe that a significant majority of the people they claim to represent consider their ideas wrong-headed and their presence a source of fear. Just because the government and big corporations are evil and oppressive (and let's say, for the moment, that they are), doesn't mean the rebels aren't as well. Just because the government and big corporations don't have the people's best interests at heart, doesn't mean the rebels do.

Understand that I'm not saying that the rebels in Dantewada are like the Taliban or Al Qaeda. I'm saying that Roy's piece provides no evidence that they're not. Nothing in her report suggests that the rebels are legitimate representatives of their people's interests. On the contrary, I'm willing to bet that you could write a piece virtually identical to Roy's article about almost any terrorist organization in the world - they're all sure to have smiling, beautiful children as recruits.

I titled this post In Dubious Battle, because reading Roy's descriptions I was reminded of nothing so much as Milton's Pandemonium:

"that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd"

- Milton, Paradise Lost Book I

To recognize this is to remember that it is easy to romanticize rebellion, easy to cast the outsider as hero. If Roy's description of the Dantewada rebellion has an almost mythic quality (and it does - reading her description of the forest celebrations I found myself imagining Friar Tuck putting in an appearance, surrounded by men in Lincoln Green), it is because she sees it through red-tinted glasses (pun intended), and that is reason to be suspicious of the veracity of her account.

In her piece, Roy attempts to justify the rebel's actions on utilitarian grounds, arguing that it is the only solution available to the 'people' because all other avenues are bound to prove unsuccessful (even though it's unclear, from her account at least, whether all other avenues have, in this particular case, been tried).

Even if one were willing to accept that there were no other options, and that violence, in such a case, is justified, one is forced to ask - is violence really a solution? What, realistically, are the odds of the rebels winning? Are they significantly better than the odds of success from more peaceful means of protest? And in the meantime, are the people of Dantewada better or worse off than they would have been without the armed rebellion? Based purely on Roy's piece, it sounds to me like the rebels have only made things worse for the people of Dantewada. On the one hand, they have undermined the potential for widespread public support that a more peaceful movement that brought the plight of the Dantewada people to public attention may have enjoyed, and compromised the efforts of any and all activists trying to further the people's interests by other means [4]. On the other hand, they have made the tribal people fair game for those who are trying to oppress them / drive them out. Roy talks a lot about genocide and Salwa Judum, but could these atrocities really exist without the sceptre of the Maoists to provide them cover? It seems to me that the Salwa Judum needs the Maoists, and that by choosing the path of violence the rebels have played straight into the hands of the very interests that seek to destroy them. This is not to suggest that Salwa Judum's actions are justified, or that the rebels have brought this on themselves. It is only to say that if realpolitik be thy plea, as Roy's is here, then it is worth considering that the rebel's path leads, realistically, to a worse outcome for their alleged people than ever before.

(There is the separate question of whether, if the rebels did somehow miraculously succeed, this would actually result in empowerment of the people. Nothing in the history of communism suggests this would be true, but never mind.)

But of course, these ideas are largely Roy's own, and there is little evidence that they are shared by the rebels themselves. In fact, from Roy's account, there is little evidence of anything resembling a larger plan in the rebel's actions. For the most part, the rebels she talks to seem to be motivated by frustration catalyzed by a need for revenge. Reprisal, indeed, seems to be the dominant theme of the article, with the motif of 'they did something bad to us, so we did something bad to them' cropping up again and again (the question of what preceded the bad thing they did is, of course, never asked). These sort of childish (children again!) he-hit-me-first protestations hardly amount to a political philosophy, much less a political agenda. It seems a travesty to call these people Maoists, when from Roy's account they seem to have little idea who Mao was or what he believed in. And it seems misguided to think of this rebellion as a 'revolution' when there seems to be little evidence of a coherent end game or of strong visionary leadership.

What emerges from Roy's account, when you read beneath her naive and breathless paeans to the wonders of the forest and the beauty of the child soldiers, is a portrait of a splinter group of disenchanted people driven to embrace violence by frustration, anger and a thirst for revenge, all cloaked in trappings usurped from the Maoist playbook. What emerges is a portrait of children indoctrinated into a way of violence through the constant repetition of a litany of evils real and imagined, without any sense of the larger issues or the true history of the communist movement [5]. But most of all, what emerges is the portrait of a writer so in love with her own indignation that she's unable to ask even the basic questions that any reasonable adult would want to raise.

If you really want to learn about Maoist rebellions, watch Woody Allen's Bananas. You'll learn about as much there as you will from Roy's piece.

[1] I lie. The first thing that occurred to me was how much like the script for Avatar the whole thing sounded. But this was a close second.

[2] I have to wonder whether her being uncritical was a factor in her getting the kind of access she did.

[3] I mean seriously. If you were a rebel organization and a celebrity reporter from a major national news magazine was coming to do a cover story on you, wouldn't you manipulate every piece of information she got to make yourself look good and your enemy look bad?

[4] The other reason I titled this piece In Dubious Battle was in homage to Steinbeck's lovely novel of the same name, which deals with another group of communist workers trying to win rights for workers. Unlike the rebels, however, the means they employ do not involve using guns and explosives. Now there's a set of communist activists I'd wholeheartedly support.

[5] This is, of course, the modus operandi of terrorist organizations everywhere. It is, indeed, how Hindutva recruits its most violent followers. Take a close look at the footage of the Babri Masjid demolition and you're sure to find plenty of children with beautiful smiles.

Murder most foul

Just got back from an evening at the Guthrie that easily counts as the worst performance of Macbeth I've ever been subjected to. The kindest interpretation of what I watched tonight is that Joe Dowling, taking Act V Scene V to heart, decided that the best way to do Macbeth was to hire a couple of poor players, have them strut and fret upon the stage for a couple of hours with as much sound and fury as possible, and hope that the whole thing would signify, if not nothing, then as little as possible. If such was his intention, he succeeded admirably.

Easily the worst offender in this night's travesty was Erik Heger, whose turn as Macbeth combined gratuitous overacting with bizarre line readings to reach lows of incompetence many a high school wannabe could not achieve. The result was a performance that betrayed not the slightest glimmer of insight into Macbeth's psyche, while managing to obscure the power and flow of Shakespeare's poetry - no mean feat when one is playing Macbeth. I know the play was advertised as including graphic violence, but I didn't realize it was the language itself that was to be so butchered. Mr Heger, the playbill informs me, has performed in a number of popular soaps; I suggest he restrict his future career to daytime television and not sully the stage attempting Shakespeare again.

While Mr. Heger's performance was particularly cringe-worthy, the rest of the show wasn't much better. It didn't help that, for reasons known only to them, the company decided to restrict the play to a two-hour performance without intermission [1,2]. The upshot of this was that large swathes of the text had to be cut - including, for instance, about a third of Act IV Scene I [3] - and what remained was often delivered at such break-neck speed as to make it not only unintelligible to anyone not already familiar with the script, but also entirely inauthentic. Are we really to believe that all the tangled phrases of Act I Scene V trip lightly off the tongues of Lord and Lady Macbeth? These are words to be savored, phrases to be wrenched from the writhing pit of inner turmoil. Not lines to be rattled off with the speed of a waitress reciting the day's specials.

The one bright spot in this general wreck was Robert Berdahl's performance as Macduff, which rose cleanly above the mediocrity around him, so that the one scene in the entire play charged with genuine emotion was Act IV Scene III. It's fitting then, that the best description of tonight's performance can be found in the words of Macduff upon discovering Duncan's murdered corpse:

MACDUFF

O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!

MACBETH LENNOX

What's the matter

MACDUFF

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

[1] I suppose that in itself should have tipped me off - a performance of Macbeth in two hours could hardly be anything but botched.

[2] In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about the 2 hours / no intermission thing. On the one hand, its shortness was the one mercy the performance afforded. On the other, if there had been an intermission I could have walked out and salvaged some part of my evening.

[3] What perverse, tone-deaf idiot chooses to cut, of all things, the full list of the cauldron's ingredients, Hecate's entire role and Macbeth's glorious speech as he enters the witches' lair?

The mindlessness of strangers

You know, the more time I spend in the company of strangers, the more I despair for the future of the species. There's just no getting away from it - people are weird.

Take the woman sitting next to me at the concert on Friday, who sat through Anthony Ross' encore with a scissor in hand, trimming her nails. Yes, actually trimming her nails while the cellist was playing [1]!

Or the woman at the ballet yesterday [2] who decided that since her ticket said Row 20 Seat 4, she was obviously in the first seat in row 24 (because 20+4=24, see!).

Or the person sitting behind me in the bus this afternoon, saying this to an acquaintance she ran into on the bus (and speaking, needless to say, really, really loud):

"I have to confess I keep going back there just for him. I can't help it. I really want him. He's so delicious. I know it's silly. I know I have to stop. But, I mean, I'm not doing any harm am I? I mean, it's not like I'm stalking him or anything. I just keep showing up there to see him. To be honest, I've known for some time that he's into boys. You know. And that just makes me sad. I keep thinking maybe he'll get over it and notice me. I know it's silly. I really have to stop, don't I?"

[acquaintance, who has been maintaining an embarrassed silence through this outpouring, says something noncommittal]

"Yes, I know. I will. It's just that I've never felt the kind of passion I feel for him for anyone else. But then, passion can turn bad too, you know. But I don't think that's happening to me. I just need to stop myself from going there. But he's so attractive..."

I'm NOT exaggerating. Promise.

[1] Okay, said encore consisted of a fairly uninspired rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow [3], so it wasn't exactly the highpoint of the evening, but still.

[2] The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premiering their new ballet - Moulin Rouge. All in all, an exquisite performance. The fact that it kept slipping into bathos probably has more to do with the fact that I'm not a big fan of traditional ballet than anything else.

[3] Which is a nice enough song, but playing it after Schumann is like serving Hershey bars after a wine tasting.

Il Viaggio a Reims

In other news, I just got back from one of the worst opera performances I've ever seen. The Curtis Opera Theatre's production of Rossini's Il Viaggio a Reims.

Part of the problem, of course, was that it was Rossini (and mediocre Rossini at that) - which meant that the music was trite, uninspired and repetitive and all the characters sounded exactly like each other. But I was expecting that. What I wasn't expecting was a campy, sophomoric production comprised entirely of the kind of overdone slapstick that only below average high school students could possibly find amusing. I mean seriously, compared to this stuff the Austin Powers films would have seemed witty and sophisticated [1].

Which was a shame because if you closed your eyes and ignored the shenanigans on stage there was some real talent on display. Allison Sanders brought power and soul to her role as Marchesa Melibea, Evan Hughes (who was spectacular as Don Giovanni earlier this year) continued to impress and Elizabeth Reiter sang an exquisite Corinna. None of that really mattered though, because the silliness on stage entirely eclipsed any musical merit the production may have had.

[1] Which didn't stop the woman sitting next to me from squealing with hysterical laughter every 30 seconds or so - a fact that no doubt contributed to my annoyance with the performance.

Pet Peeve # 67

Musicians who insist on talking about the piece they're going to play before they play it. [1]

Special pet peeve:

Musicians who not only insist on talking about the piece they're going to play before they play it, but then say things like, "words can't do justice to the beauty of the piece - I think the only real way to describe it is to play it for you" Duh!

Was at a recital by Jose Franch-Ballester yesterday - he's a talented clarinetist, but he insisted on subjecting us to the most annoying inanities before every piece, and then had the nerve to ask why no one was applauding his 'introductions'. Some people just can't take a hint.

[1] This is especially true of classical musicians - if you're a jazz artist talking about a piece you've composed that's one thing, but do I really need someone to stand there and tell me how Brahms was a great composer?

The Further Adventures of Hark! DaButt

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, on the sprawling planet of Massomedia, there lived a princess named Hark! DaButt. Hark! DaButt was the heir to the throne of the kingdom of Enditivy, as well as being an accomplished trumpet blower and a follower of the TRPsichorean muse. All the people of the kingdom loved their princess who they thought was beautiful and brave and so very clever.

Well, almost all. One small, indomitable group of galling citizens continued to hold out against Hark! DaButt's considerable charm. This rebel group, who called themselves 'globbers' and feared only the Skype falling on their heads, were always criticizing the princess, claiming she was hysterical, unprofessional and generally insensitive. These accusations hurt the princess deeply. Many a night did she spend shedding inky tears into her crocodile skin pillow. It wasn't that she thought the criticisms were valid (how could they be? She was a Princess, with Chelpark Blue blood in her veins - she could do nothing wrong), nor that she was an insecure, vengeful little minx who couldn't take criticism. It was just that she felt these criticisms were an affront to the dignity of Enditivy, and therefore had to be punished.

One day, when Her Shrillness was out playing in the garden, she spotted a globber lurking in the shrubbery. Quick as a newsflash, she had the globber captured by her guards, and brought him before the High Council. When the High Council told her that no, she couldn't have his head cut off (only her cousin, the Red Queen, could use that head line), she proceeded to whine and pout until the poor globber agreed to issue a public apology for the things he'd said about her and promised never to say anything bad about her again. This made Hark! DaButt very happy because:

a) bringing a months old comment out of total obscurity and making it a source of renewed outrage was obviously the best way to silence criticism

b) going to the trouble of hauling a globber before the High Council for some throwaway comment was a sure way of saying that the globbers were inconsequential people to whom she, Hark! DaButt, paid no attention

c) wording the apology in proper legal terms would make it obvious to every one that the globber's apology was sincerely meant; no one could possibly imagine that she had forced it out of him

d) by striking out against one globber she had effectively silenced their entire community, who would never again dare to criticize her, because the prospect of having to issue an official apology if they were caught would really, really scare them

e) using the resources of her vast kingdom to pick on one poor defenseless globber was a classy act that was sure to make people admire her all the more

(Did I mention that Hark! DaButt was a little delusional?)

In any case, the globber apologised, the princess went back to blowing her own trumpet, and the kingdom of Enditivy moved on, like a slow dinosaur with Hark! DaButt as its pea-sized brain.

The End.

Entirely Voluntary Notice (No, really!)

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to person or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. In particular, this story has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with a certain TV channel's treatment of a certain blogger. I, Falstaff, have always admired said TV channel for the diligence with which it manages to stay just within the law and its courageous defiance of anything resembling taste. Further, I have absolutely no criticism to offer of their star reporter, a woman I have always respected for her...for her....errr...a woman I have always respected.

A Tale of Two Ads / At Stake - 2

Overheard in Philly this weekend:

Ad 1: A woman discusses which candidate is the right choice for women. Compares and contrasts McCain and Obama's policies - pointing out that Obama offers tax relief for working women and is pro-choice while McCain opposes equal pay for women and wants to take away their right to choose. Therefore arrives at conclusion that Obama is the better choice.

Ad 2: A man says that ever since he heard Obama talk about bitter people clinging to guns and religion he's known that he (Obama) just doesn't get 'us'. Because "We love our God. And we love our guns that have been handed down to us by our grandfathers." And since Obama doesn't understand this, you should vote for McCain. [Note that nothing is actually said about McCain - you should vote for him purely because he's not Obama]

And there you have it.

With the election less than 24 hours away (for which, thank FSM! I don't think I can take another week of this) it seems to me that what is at stake in this election is not just the future of US government policy, but also the nature of campaigning in US elections to come. What is horrifying to me about the prospect of a McCain-Palin win (unlikely as it may seem) is that a victory for them now would be a victory for a campaign run on lies, misdirection, character assassination and appeals to bigotry; a victory that would make the Rove-ian playbook the standard for decades to come. If Obama loses this one, who in his right mind is ever going to try fighting an election on issues or substantive arguments again?

Remember the old Lincoln saw about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time? The catch with that assertion has always been that you don't need to fool all of the people all of the time - you just need to fool enough of the people enough of the time. And if McCain does manage to win tomorrow then that is exactly what the GOP will have done [1].

Here's hoping that doesn't happen.

***

Meanwhile, the award for the WTF statement of the day goes to Doug Mackinnon, and his preemptive griping about media bias:

"This person reasoned that the pressure within the news business to diversify and be politically correct means more minorities, women and young people are being hired. And young and ethnically diverse reporters and editors go easier on candidates who look more like them, are closer to their age or represent their ideal of a presidential candidate."

This is ridiculous at so many levels I don't know where to start. First, can we assume that before the news business was under pressure "to diversify and be politically correct", they only hired old people? Second, can we take it that going easy on people they like is a characteristic only of young and ethnically diverse reporters - middle-aged white men, by contrast, are never biased? Third, if young people, women and minorities (in other words everyone but old white men) are all predisposed to like Obama, mightn't that have something to do with his popularity, rather than 'media bias'? Fourth, are we to assume that the way to correct the liberal media bias is for newspapers to stop hiring young and ethnically diverse reporters and editors? Fifth, can we assume that the only reason the news business would hire women, minorities or young people is to be politically correct, since these groups couldn't possibly have anything worthwhile to contribute otherwise. And finally, notice Mr. Mackinnon's extreme weasliness of putting this idea out there by ascribing it to someone else and not bothering to comment on whether he agrees / disagrees.

Two minutes with Joyce and Dostoevsky

Via the New Yorker's Book Bench, I came across this article on a San Fran writer's conference by someone called BS Prakash (the initials are prophetic) who claims to be India's ambassador to Brazil - an article so cringe-inducing it makes you wonder what the good folks at the Book Bench were doing surfing Rediff, of all godforsaken corners of the Internet.

I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Prakash's excessive use of cultural stereotypes (xenophobia is the term the Book Bench uses, which is harsh, but not inaccurate), the quaintness of his 'discoveries' (they actually try to teach writing! imagine that!) or just the overall fuddy-duddiness of his point of view. Nor am I going to comment on the irony of bemoaning the 'American' obsession with publication when the last decade has seen a virtually unchecked proliferation of writers on the Indian publishing scene, the vast majority of whom could frankly do with some lessons in basic writing. And as for Mr. Prakash's chances of ever producing great literature - let's not even go there.

No, what I'm going to focus on, for the moment is the following claim:

You are told that your first chapter, first page, first sentence should be such so as to captivate the reader in two minutes. That is the test. It is another matter that Dostoevsky or James Joyce would have flunked this test and would never have got published

Would Joyce and / or Dostoevsky really have failed this test? I don't know about you, but I would certainly want to keep reading a book if it opened like this:

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face."

or like this:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

or this, for that matter:

"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."

and if you think about it, it's hard to imagine a book more amenable to a two-minute pitch than Ulysses:

Q: So, young man, what's your book about?

A: Well, it's an epic of the everyday: a re-imagining of the Odyssey in which I use the central themes and motifs from Homer's work to tell the story of an ordinary Dublin day from a cross-section of perspectives, using internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness techniques to explore the thoughts, perceptions and memories of ordinary people. The overall structure of the book emulates that of the Odyssey, but every chapter is an exercise in a distinctive style or form - so for instance, one chapter parodies romance novels, another uses a question-and-answer form, a third is written as a play.

See what I mean?

Or, for that matter, how's this for an engaging one-line summary:

My novel tells the story of a young man who murders an elderly moneylender and is then terrified that he won't be punished for his crime, because this would imply that there really is no God.

Mis-conduct / with conductors like these who needs an audience?

You know how I'm always complaining about people annoying me at concerts?

Well, I was at this concert today - a performance of Bach's Mass in B minor [1] by this ensemble called the Vox Ama Deus - and I thought for once things were going to turn out right. Two people who seemed to be from the UPenn music faculty on my right and a nice middle-aged lady with impeccable taste [2] on my left. A few kids in the audience, true, but far away and seemingly well behaved. No couples liable to start making out in the middle of a movement. No obvious snorers. All in all, the signs seemed propitious.

The concert started. Intermission came and went and still no one had annoyed me. Finally, we were in the home stretch - the Agnus Dei - I figured nothing bad could happen now.

And then, just as I was starting to relax, the conductor, the BLOODY CONDUCTOR breaks off the performance in BETWEEN MOVEMENTS to deliver some sanctimonious little homily about 'Our Lord Jesus Christ' who died on the cross so we could be saved, and 'Our Brave Soldiers in Iraq' and on and on and on - five minutes of pure blah which not only bored the ears off the entire audience but, more to the point, destroyed all the carefully created momentum of Bach's Mass, so that when he finally got around to playing the final movement it was pretty much impossible to step back into the music. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who would do that to Bach doesn't deserve to be an usher, let alone a conductor. If there is a God, Valentin Radu will be struck by lightning on his way home tonight (thus making him a conductor of an entirely different sort).

I don't know who this Valentin Radu guy is, but if he really feels so strong a need for a soapbox I suggest he join politics or becomes a school principal or something. Anything but a musician. Oh, and Mr. Radu, if you're reading this (which I very much doubt) the whole prima donna I-am-so-moved-by-the-music-I'm-going-to-stand-there-with-my-eyes-closed-for-five-minutes-after-the-end act? Not cool. If you want to go in for cheap histrionics like that, I suggest you get yourself a rock band.

Notes

[1] My fourth concert featuring Bach in a week. Life has been busy.

[2] By which I mean that she agreed with me that the violin soloist (Thomas DiSarlo) was atrocious, the soprano (Bonnie Hoke) mediocre, the flautist (Colin St. Martin) superb and the mezzo soprano (Jody Kidwell) sublime. I don't usually strike up conversations with people at concerts, but when the person sitting next to you claps for the same people you do and, more to the point, stops clapping for the same people you do, some conversation seems in order.

Civil Parenthood

[Warning: long and pontificating post. So much for my new emphasis on brevity]

Reading Sridala's post over at Ultraviolet this morning made me think about the whole vexed question of parents in society - the conflict between a parent's natural enthusiasm for his / her child and the desire of those of us who aren't interested in children not to have the little tykes inflicted on us. [1]

Because let's face it - new parents are annoying. They prattle, they gush. Not only do they have a seemingly infinite store of stories about their little brats, they are usually incapable of recognizing that other people have little or no interest in these stories (or in the babies themselves) and are quick to take offense at the first sign of disinterest. Worse, they often insist on bringing their baby along with them, so that it can disrupt all civilized proceedings in the general vicinity. We've all seen them - parents who bring their babies to parties, restaurants, concerts, flights, movies, offices, etc. - and then, instead of being suitably ashamed when junior disturbs everyone around, seem to think it's their right to inflict their baby on us, and are surprised when we turn away.

The trouble, I think, is that society inflates the importance of babies to the point where they come to seem almost sacred. It's natural for parents to be excited about their children, but when that excitement comes at the cost of self-reflection it becomes a problem. Because the cult of the Baby is sacrosanct, new parents seldom feel the need to make conversation about their babies interesting - they presume that everyone will share their enthusiasm anyway. Worse, being a parent becomes a means of self-definition - an easy route to approval and status that tempts people (especially those who have little else to say for themselves) into projecting themselves primarily as parents at the cost of everything else they are or could be.

The fall-out of all this is a negative reaction from those of us who don't much care for babies / children. If we tend to treat new parents with scorn, it's simply in reaction to the privileges they seem to be arrogating to themselves. If we act as though a new parent is no longer the person he / she used to be, and must be incapable of intelligent conversation, it's because bitter experience has taught us that this is often the case, and the risk of finding ourselves trapped in a 'baby' conversation with no polite way out makes us prefer the stereotype to honest inquiry. If we refuse to have anything to do with a person who has a baby on his / her arm, it's because we resent having the mewling and puking little monster inflicted on us.

Of course, the downside to this is that a lot of bathwater gets thrown out with the baby (sorry, couldn't resist). Even parents who may actually want to talk about things other than their children find themselves cut off from all other conversation - trapped in the counter-presumption of their role as parents. Sridala describes this as new parents becoming "a ghetto unto themselves" but I think it's more like the formation of two opposing camps. After all, being a non-parent can be a fairly ghetto-ising experience as well.

The solution, I think, is what I will call civil parenting. Parents need to stop assuming that we're all interested in their children, or are willing to tolerate / make sacrifices for them. They need to stop taking it for granted that people will be overjoyed to hear about their baby or to be in the presence of said baby (I won't even start on the whole practice of thrusting infants into one's face - as though one were judging a contest for bonny babies). They need to accept that people have the right to say that they don't want to hear their baby stories or that they don't want their baby around. Having a baby is kind of like smoking - you're welcome to do it if you want to, but you shouldn't force other people into passive parenting.

Does this mean that parents must necessarily give up on having a social life for the time their children are too young to be left alone? Certainly not. First, there are always baby-sitters, there's always the option of one person staying at home while the other goes out (and I really mean one person - I DO NOT mean the mother stays at home while the father goes out).

More importantly, though, there's nothing that stops new parents from sharing their enthusiasm over their kids with those who are genuinely interested. Sridala writes that she found herself "vowing to never inflict my private and necessary absorption with motherhood on anyone else." Nothing so extreme is called for. All you need is to vow never to share your p. and n. absorption with anyone who's likely to see to as an infliction. Sridala's post talks about the whole phenomenon of 'mombloggers'. As the popularity of these bloggers bears testament, there is a whole world of people out there who are interested in babies and enjoy talking about them. Hell, they may even be a majority. So finding people to share your newfound fascination with shouldn't be hard.

I think a good parallel is with poetry. Many of us feel what I can only describe as a 'private and necessary' absorption with poetry (remember Yeats: "I have no child / I have nothing but a book"). Yet we don't automatically assume that everyone we speak to will share our enthusiasm. And we certainly don't expect that it will be okay for us to start reading our poems aloud at any and all social gatherings and expect other people to shut up and listen. And if people tell us they don't care for poetry we don't take it personally. In short, we don't experience a sense of entitlement from being poetry lovers. Instead, we seek out people who are interested in poetry and share that part of ourselves with them. We organize / attend poetry readings. We start blogs that talk about poetry or join online discussions about it. And we don't give up on friends of ours who don't care about poetry. We respect their disinterest and talk to them about other things. What we need is a similar maturity when it comes to children.

The 'momblogs' (a term I dislike, btw, it's both reductive and sexist) are a good example of civil parenting, actually. I rarely read any of them, but I think it's great that they're out there. Not just because they serve as a community for people who are interested in discussing children, but because as a clearly demarcated and identified space, they have the courtesy to signal to those of us who may not be interested that we should stay away. They aren't a ghetto - they're simply a suburb - one where I personally wouldn't want to live, though I'm happy to visit and glad to know people who do.

The usual crib one hears from parents when they're asked not to inflict their children on society at large and limit their parenting activities to select company, runs along the lines of "but why should we have to pay the cost / suffer for being parents" [2]. Three things:

First, parents should 'pay the cost' of being parents because it's their decision to become parents in the first place. Presumably, if you've chosen to be a parent, it's because you see some benefit in having the little tykes around (though what this might be I confess I couldn't say) so it seems little to ask that you make some sacrifices for what is, to you, a privilege. (I realize, of course, that for many people parenthood is more a reflex undertaking than a considered choice, but I don't see why I should suffer for their poor foresight). If anything, the question should be the other way around - why should those of us who don't have children have to pay for other people's decision to have some.

Second, and more importantly, as Sridala's post points out, the costs of not being a civil parent can be high as well. In a society where parents are seen as Parents and little else, new parents can end up missing out on many other aspects of life. The greater the parents' ability to behave cooperatively and respect the preferences of non-parents, the less the scorn and resistance they're likely to face, and the greater their access to a life outside of the parental role. Building a society where being a parent isn't the focus of a new parent's life is good for everyone. The 'cost' of being a civil parent may well be that you get to keep the friends who would avoid you otherwise.

Third, this is an argument for defining boundaries, not for allocating costs. Remember Coase? To the extent that the presence of children in the public space represents a situation akin to the tragedy of the commons, who bears the cost will depend on how society allocates 'rights' over that space. And given the numerical majority of parents and the overall superstructure of parenting as a good, the chances are that those rights will go to parents, not to non-parents. All I'm suggesting here is that we make the allocation of those rights explicit, so that those of us who want to avoid children can do so. I'm perfectly willing to pay, say, 15-20% more on an air-ticket for the comfort of knowing that there won't be any children under 12 on the flight. I'd be happy if there were restaurants that kept children out, even if eating there meant I paid a premium. And I don't mind in the slightest if parties I'm invited to are overflowing with children and babies, as long as I know this in advance so I can simply not go. The trouble with the way our society is right now is simply that it's considered unacceptable to not like babies - most parents would be offended if I told them I wasn't going to come to their party because their children would be there. And that's just silly.

Bottomline: If you show up at a party with a few month old baby in tow, you should expect to have people treat you as nothing more than a baby-producer, and have people who don't like babies avoid you. This doesn't mean that people are judging you, simply that they're refusing to allow you to inflict your parenthood on them. It's not you who is being victimized, it's they who are refusing to be. And if you want to keep their friendship you need to respect that.

Notes:

[1] Of course, Sridala's post isn't only, or even primarily, about parental roles. But as I said in my comment to that post, her points about gender stereotypes around parenting I entirely agree with. It's ridiculous and unfair how mothers get saddled with a disproportionate amount of the scorn, guilt, career pressure and social isolation that comes with being a parent.

[2] The other old chestnut is, of course, the categorical imperative argument - someone has to have children so that humanity can go on, etc. etc. If you're thinking of trying that one here are my views on arguments like that

[3] Finally, if you want my real views on proud parents, see here.

Why me?

Seriously, what is it with psychos sitting next to me in concerts?

First on Friday, at the performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra, I end up sitting next to the two people in the entire auditorium (and this is the Verizon hall we're talking about - this thing seats some gazillion people) who decide that they simply have to leave in the middle of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. So they come in, listen to the performance for all of the 20 minutes or so it takes to get through the first movement and then decide to leave. And of course they're sitting in the center of the row so they have to pass a dozen people to get out. And naturally it takes them all of the fifteen second pause between movements to decide that they're leaving so that they're start walking only after the second (slow) movement has started. And obviously they have bulky coats and jingly purses and clicking heels so that they make the maximum possible noise leaving. Aarggh!!

And then yesterday, at a recital by mezzo-soprano Monica Groop I have to be the one sitting behind the guy who's either stoned or drunk or both. The concert starts. Ms. Groop gets to the third quatrain of Schubert's Suleika I, and this guy's already snoring. And he has a snore like a poorly oiled buzz saw. Fortunately he also has a companion with sharp elbows, so he doesn't snore for long, but every five minutes or so he'll nod off and start snoring again.

Finally, today I'm at a performance by the Guarneri Quartet. This time the people sitting next to me are this nice old couple - the kind who look like they're season subscribers. At last, I think, fellow music lovers. Any lingering doubts I might have had are dispelled in the first half, where they behave beautifully. Intermission passes. The Quartet comes out and starts playing Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Major Op 130. And the woman next to me - this little old lady who looks like she couldn't hurt a fly, but, it turns out is really the devil in disguise - starts tearing up her program. I'm not kidding. There she is, going shrrrrkkk! shrrrkkkk!, ripping out the pages right in the middle of that glorious Adagio ma non troppo opening.

I can't wait to see what the seating charts will throw up for the Philadelphia Orchestra concert I'm attending day after tomorrow. Probably a prestidigitator, or a guy with pockets full of fireworks.

Musical Chairs

Another weekend, another idiotic article in the NY Times. In a recent op-ed piece, Daniel J. Levitin argues that classical music audiences should be allowed to dance, sing, and generally participate in concerts - citing such spectacularly relevant examples as Ludacris and U2 concerts in his defense.

Dr. Levitin should stick to hip-hop.

Even coming from an academic, this is a ludicrously impractical suggestion. As anyone who's been to a concert knows, the worst thing about live classical music is the audience - between the lovebirds whispering sweet nothings in front of you, the fat lady snoring five seats away, the guy with the hacking cough in the back row and the 243 people who think that the longer you draw out the process of opening a crinkly lozenge wrapper the less annoying it is (not true, people!) it's hard enough to appreciate the beauty of the music when the audience is supposedly silent. Imagine if they had carte blanche to make all the noise they wanted! Never mind the ridiculous image of row upon row of 60 year olds trying to keep up with the percussion in Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, can you even begin to conceive of the god awful ruckus this would create? How many people would actually be able to hear the music with all this humming and stomping going on (and by music, I don't mean just the overall rhythm or the general tune, I mean the sound of each instrument clear and distinct)? And what about the slow movements? If we're going to let audiences go wild in the more strident pieces, how do we ensure that they stay quiet in the softer ones?

Ironically, Dr. Levitin himself provides the best evidence against his suggestion. Speaking of the naturalness of wanting to dance and sing along when listening to music, Dr. Levitin cites the example of little children, "swaying and shouting and generally participating whenever they feel like it". Have you ever been to a concert where someone had brought little children? They are the most annoying thing ever. They whine, they chatter, they shout in their shrill, high-pitched voices. Typically, they lose interest the moment the music gets even slightly soft / subtle and then they sit about fidgeting in their seats and loudly asking their parents when they can go. I'm opposed to the death penalty, but if bringing little children to classical music concerts were made a criminal offense I might consider changing my mind. And this is the golden example that Dr. Levitin would have the rest of us embrace. Tchah!

Don't get me wrong. I totally empathize with the urge to get up and dance listening to say, the final movement of Beethoven's 7th. But that's why we have stereo systems: so we can indulge ourselves - leap, twirl, wave our hands around, play air-piano or air-conduct - all in the privacy of our own homes. Would it be great if you could do the same thing at a live concert? Sure, if you were the only person allowed to do it. If everyone did it, everyone would be worse off.

As for music as a community activity - sure - but that's what we have nightclubs for, so people can relive their atavistic tribal past [1]. I don't go to concerts to be part of some community, or to commemorate some primal ritual I read about in Anthropology 101, I go to concerts for the music, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some stupid theory get between me and Mozart [2].
And if we really want to resurrect old customs in order to bring us closer to our roots why don't we start with something less objectionable. Like head-hunting, for example.

***

Meanwhile, over at Slate, Erik Tarloff has a listener's guide to telling the difference between Mozart and Haydn. Amusing stuff, if only for the way Tarloff bends over backwards to try not to be too partial to Mozart and doesn't really succeed. Also, see the end of the article for a whole new (to me) perspective on Haydn.

[1] There's no reason, of course, the nightclubs shouldn't play more classical music - in fact, I have the perfect piece for any dance floor - the Dies Irae from Karl Jenkin's Requiem. If Dr. Levitin seriously wants more people dancing to Bolero, that's what he should be arguing for.

[2] Fortunately, I think there's little risk of anyone taking Dr. Levitin seriously. Which is the only explanation I can imagine for him writing this in the first place - it's easy to be provocative when you know your views are inconsequential (it's the principle this blog runs on); that, or the man's been OD ing on Schoenberg.

If it's Hip, Fast and Furious, Is It Journalism?

I know I've blogged about this before, but seriously, why is it so hard for the NY Times to turn out a news story about India that doesn't degenerate into misrepresentation, ridiculous stereotyping and general incoherence?

So India wins some new-fangled cricket tournament. Fine, whatever. This is not a hard story to write.

Para 1: "Cricket fans on the subcontinent were jubilant today as....Twenty20[1]...blah blah".

Para 2: New format - change from one day matches, which themselves were shortened form of test matches - 20-over format talked about for a while - (weren't there some earlier attempts to do something similar).

Para 3: Well received - hope will be more popular format - quotes from cricketers on how they feel about it? (note to self: if current team is not reachable, find retired cricketers and ask) - purists?

Para 4: Context of win - Cricket in the popular imagination - status of cricketers - yet, World Cup, etc. - excitement that Indian team actually won something - how much of popular reaction to this new form is biased by that?

Para 5: (Closing) Exciting new phase for cricket? Maybe, maybe not. Fireworks in New Delhi for now anyway.

There. Cheesy, true, but as simple as falling off a log.

Instead, we get this grotesque mockery of a piece from Somini Sengupta, who doesn't seem to have seen a cricket match since 1972 and apparently figures that just because she's writing a piece about cricket is no reason to leave out all the other tidbits she's been collecting for stories she's never going to get around to doing now.

Look, I have no interest in cricket and haven't watched a cricket match in ten years, but even I know that cricket does not consist of "gentleman players" distinguishing themselves in "white trousers and knit vests" in a "customary" five day match. Ms. Sengupta is contrasting this new format with a caricature of cricket that resembles the modern game about as much as life in England today resembles the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

But that, frankly, is the least of her crimes. The really appalling bits are the ones that involve 'deep exploration of the Indian psyche'. So we're told that one of the gifts of this "new face of Indian cricket" is

"to present, for the first time, a powerfully athletic presence on the pitch. Athleticism has never been associated with Indian cricket, nor with Indians in general, and that has been a chip on the shoulder of Indian manhood."

Wtf? Not only am I supposed to have spent the last 28 years of my life feeling insecure about my manhood because I'm Indian and Indians are not athletic (why don't they tell you this stuff in school?), I can now stop feeling conflicted about it, not because I've got any fitter, but because some unshaven troglodyte can swing a piece of wood. Joy. I wonder what Indian manhood is going to do the next time the Indian cricket team gets trounced, which should take, oh, about two weeks? Ms. Sengupta attributes this opinion to one Rajdeep Sardesai [2] and "other cricket watchers" (whatever that means), but even if they actually said this, is it really so hard to see how completely ridiculous the statement is?

It gets worse. We're then told that

"The average age on the 11-man Indian lineup was about 23, and on the Pakistani team just under 25. That reflected two disproportionately young nations: the median age in India is about 24, and in Pakistan, 19."

Huh? Again, I know nothing about cricket, but I would think most cricket teams would tend to be fairly young - with average ages in the sub-25 range, completely independent of the demographic profile of the country they were drawn from. Surely it would be more relevant to tell us how the average ages of the Indian and Pakistani teams compare to the average age of other nations participating in the tournament? Or with the average age of the one-day sides of these two countries.

My favorite part, though, is this:

"It was impossible for the cricket-watching audience, which today excludes very few Indians, not to seize on the metaphors that Twenty20 offers for the changes sweeping the country, like the rise of small-town working class India and the fading of the old cricket decorum itself."

Really? So in a population of (purportedly) one billion viewers there wasn't a single one who was just enjoying the game for the sport itself? No, no, they were all sitting there thinking "What a lovely shot! Soaring straight into the stands! What a glorious metaphor for the rise of the Sensex". Or "Look, look, that boy from Ranchi hit another four! Don't Class A towns rock?". And just why was it "impossible" for them "not to seize on the metaphor"? What if they tried really, really hard? And will someone please explain to me how Twenty20 is a 'metaphor' for the fading of the old cricket decorum? Or for that matter how the fading of the old cricket decorum is a "change sweeping the country"?

The next paragraph achieves even greater incoherence:

"Much was made of the fact that the captain, Mr. Dhoni, grew up in an uncelebrated eastern city called Ranchi. The batsman S. Sreesanth, it was said, defied cricket manners by being unusually aggressive. The bowler Joginder Sharma was celebrated as the son of a small shopkeeper who could afford to buy no more than a cloth ball for his son."

I'm not even going to ask what "uncelebrated" means. Or what "cricket manners" are, or what being "unusually aggressive" consists of, or by whom "it was said". Or why Ms. Sengupta needs to say both "defied cricket manners" and "unusually aggressive" - surely each by itself would be enough? But I'd love for someone to tell me what sentence two has to do with sentences one and three. The latter are about cricketer's background, the former is (supposedly) about their behavior. Is there a reason why those two themes need to alternate? Twelve-year olds can write better than this.

Finally, I must make special mention of the line "Twenty20 was accompanied by cheerleaders wearing what resembled sports bras". First, what is something that resembles a sports bra? Can you buy them in stores? At what point do they stop resembling sports bras and actually become sports bras? I'm not being flippant, really. I'm genuinely curious. After all, these are weighty issues, probably allegorical of the uplift of India's poor and / or a long-standing chip on the shoulder of Indian womanhood. Second, was there a particular kind of garment these women were wearing, or did they just put on anything that struck them as resembling a sports bra? Third, were they really "cheerleaders" or were they just cheering fans?

Look, I understand that journalists get tough deadlines and don't have the luxury of doing as much research as they would like to. I get that they may have no interest in cricket and be bored and bewildered by having to write about it. Hell, I empathize. But that doesn't excuse writing this ridiculously bad - poorly structured, sloppily edited and full of non sequiturs and hyperbole. And it doesn't excuse propounding some half-baked theory or unsubstantiated generalization and passing it off as fact. This piece reads like it belongs in the Delhi Times. And it's a shame that people who know nothing about cricket or India are going to read it and come away with an even more warped understanding of both than they started with.

Notes

[1] By the way, Twenty20? Most uninspired name ever.

[2] And that's another thing - why is it that whenever the NY Times interviews people in India for 'public opinion' they always seem to find the loopiest fruitcakes? It is so difficult to find someone capable of offering an intelligent, lucid point of view? I don't know who this Sardesai character is, but someone should make him stay back after school and write "I shall not use shopworn cliches, such as the names of daytime soaps I watched in my hormone soaked adolescent days, in interviews with the international press" 500 times with a blunt pencil.

The Snake-Charmer Effect

What is it about the NY Times that makes perfectly rational, intelligent people produce little more than misrepresentations and grotesque caricatures when they write about India?

I've always had a reasonable amount of respect for Ramachandra Guha. I read India After Gandhi a couple of months back and thought it was interesting and insightful; not quite as objective a historical account as I might have hoped for (and to his credit, Guha acknowledges this in his introduction), but a book I would recommend to a friend.

Except then he goes and produces this piece of blithering idiocy for the NYT. Never mind the stereotyping (all Punjabi landlords are crooks who steal electricity from their tenants in order to fill their Swiss bank accounts), or the exaggeration (you have to go to America and hang out with Pakistanis if you want to meet a Muslim), and let's not even start on how Guha's idiotic paranoia, or his dreams about his Pakistani friend, are at all relevant here. What makes this piece ridiculous is the implication that the BJP and the forces of communalism get their primary support from rich Punjabi immigrants looking to overcome their insecurities about the future. Ya, right. Because Delhi has always been a stronghold of the BJP. Because all the people attacking the Babri Masjid or rioting in Gujarat were clearly fat Punjabi landlords. Because unemployment, lack of economic opportunity for young people and the feelings of insecurity and emasculation those produce are not what Hindutva is designed to channel, directing the frustration and inadequacy of upper class youth against a convenient Other - no, no, not at all! it's successful landlords with Swiss bank accounts who are really frustrated and insecure. Sheesh.

If an American journalist had lived in India for 6 months and written this I would have considered it sloppy. Coming from Guha, it is criminally obtuse. He might as well have added a paragraph about how the VHP is actually a group of unemployed fakirs who've forgotten how to do the rope trick and are taking their frustration out on innocent Muslims. Oh, wait, that must be next year's August 15th 'thought piece'.

The Good, the Bad and the plain Dumb

Okay, so I may have finally watched the worst Western ever made.

Set in the snowbound mountains of the semi-old West, The Great Silence is the story of what seems like the entire male population of Northern Utah, who have had a price put on their heads (presumably on account of their wooden acting and god-awful fake american accents) and are now being mercilessly hunted by a gang of...errr...make that one ruthless bounty hunter. Into this mayhem of gunsmoke, desperate men and overacting women in low-cut dresses, comes Silence, a grim-eyed, steely jawed gunfighter who shall prove the champion of justice in this wild and barren land, wreaking six-shooter havoc on the evil bounty hunters [1]. Silence's general motto is to shoot first (though always in self-defense - a trick he manages by letting the other guy point a gun at him and then beating him at the draw) and not talk at all, which seems like a pretty cool idea until you realize that this means that bystanders have to fill you in on the story and explain what Silence was trying to say or do - all in the most grotesquely self-conscious dialog since Ben Hur. This is worse than a Spaghetti Western. It's more like what you end up with when you get a trained pasta chef to make grits.

Why was I watching it in the first place, you ask? Because it stars (and this is what makes the grown cine-fan in me want to break down and cry) Klaus Kinski and Jean-Louis Trintignant. That, to me, is more star power than Ocean's 13.

And what a sheer, senseless waste of talent it is. To be fair, Kinski does fine as a deranged psychopathic bounty hunter (aptly called Loco) - it's a role the man could sleepwalk through, and he delivers a performance that looks like a poor man's version of his role in Cobra Verde [2]. Trintignant, on the other hand, is hopelessly miscast as Silence. I mean, seriously, who makes a film with Trintignant in it where the man gets no dialog and is expected to stand around looking lethal (which, in his case, mostly means looking unshaven). Aaargghh!

[1] Why the gang of 'bandits' don't just kill off the bounty hunters (whom they seem to outnumber 10 to 1) is not clear. There's some talk about it ruining their chances for an amnesty, but such scruples don't seem to stop Silence much, and besides, you can't tell me that they couldn't just have the bounty hunters 'disappear'.

[2] This, of course, has its own problems - mostly because the plot repeatedly involves people believing Loco when he says he'll let them live and then being surprised / betrayed when he kills them after all. Never mind that you'd think they would figure this out eventually, can you seriously imagine anyone in his right mind taking one look at this man and thinking "he seems like a regular guy, I think I'll trust him with my life". Come on.

Setting your teeth on edge

Dentists are sadists - it's the only explanation for them. What sort of person makes polite conversation while he's got three different probes stuck in your mouth, one of them holding down your tongue? Actually, what sort of person thinks having someone lying flat on his back in a chair while you scrape off little bits of his teeth with a drill is a social opportunity? Whiiirrrrr. Whiinnnnnnne. "Spit. Rinse. So where you do you live in the US. Philadelphia? Oh, I have a tau-ji there. Open mouth. Wider please." Whirrrrr.

I don't know what the selection criteria for dentistry are, but I'm sure they involve kicking small puppies and sticking pins into dolls with studied vehemence.

Plus there's the pessimism. I mean okay, so I can see how spending your life staring into other people's mouths might sour your outlook on life. You might turn into an alcoholic, say, or tell your wife there was not point in buying new shoes because the world will end tomorrow (not that this will work), or get your children to do extra chemistry homework. But you'd think that within the narrow confines of the upper and lower jaw you'd be suitably jaded, having seen it all before.

But no - show me a dentist and I'll show you a doomsday prophet in waiting. Look, cavities happen. I'm not proud of them or anything, but I think two cavities in 28 years is not an unreasonable number. To listen to my dentist though what I've got is less a cavity and more a wormhole in the space-time continuum located on my left second molar. If not instantly plugged, this ghastly aperture will bring forth strange monsters from the Lower Dimensions, thus placing the very survival of the Milky Way in jeopardy. Only our hero, armed with the all-powerful ionoresinomercurocomposite (tooth coloured, imported from Germany) can protect us from imminent interstellar collapse. Aren't we lucky I came to him when I did?

Not of course, that this means there's any real hope for my teeth. So what if my teeth have served me unexceptionably so far, stolidly munching their way through substances chewy, frozen or rare. So what if they haven't yet caused anyone to recoil in horror, and have even been praised (admittedly only by short-sighted great aunts) as constituting a 'charming' smile. All this, in the great Vedic tradition, is Maya. The truth is that the condition of my teeth is APPALLING. SIMPLY APPALLING. If I don't instantly have four different types of surgery, all of which have been conveniently invented in the last three years and all of which (it just so happens) our friendly dentist is an expert in, then: "thousands, no millions of little creatures will eat their way right down to the base of your jaw, your gums will droop and fester like decaying lilies, your nerves will get infected and send volcanoes of pain gushing through your skull, eventually your bones will rot like corpses in a charnel, your jaw will sag, invisible worms will run through your root canals and after all your teeth fall out (as they inevitably will) you will be left looking like an old man with a slobbering maw of a mouth and drool dripping from your lips and no one, no one, will ever have sex with you again. MWAHAHAHA!" (Okay, he didn't actually say MWAHAHAHA, but it was implied). Just listening to the average dentist describe what could go wrong with your teeth is like taking anatomy lessons with Jack the Ripper.

But, of course, dentists are also our premier philosophers. They're the originators of a school of thought called dental determinism. According to this ideology, Man is responsible for his own downfall and must endure both overwhelming guilt and excruciating pain for his sins, even though his sins are inevitable and cannot be put off under any circumstances. Take the whole process of tooth cleaning. My dentist tells me I must have my teeth cleaned every six months. This, I am told, is crucial to removing plaque deposits that, if left unchecked will cause "millions of little creatures", etc. etc. These plaque deposits are, unambiguously, MY FAULT. I have allowed them to develop (presumably because I so enjoy spending long hours in a dentists chair having poke-y things scraping against my teeth) by not taking proper care (what this might consist of is rarely specified, though it unfailingly involves spending long hours in communion with your toothbrush and a piece of dental floss, preferably after you give up your job). To drive home this point my obliging dentist actually scrapes together a tiny crumb of deposit and makes me touch it, as though it were an exhibit in a petting zoo, just to prove that he's not making all this up.

Falstaff: "Okay, so does this mean if I do take proper care of my teeth I don't have to go through this cleaning thing every six months?"

Dentist: "No, absolutely not. Cleaning every six months is essential, because plaque deposits always build up."

Falstaff: "What, even if one takes care of one's teeth properly?"

Dentist: "Yes."

Falstaff: "Even if one brushes one's teeth, say, six times a day?"

Dentist: "Yes."

Falstaff: "With sandpaper?"

Dentist: *looking confused* "Cleaning every six months is always necessary."

Falstaff: "So these plaque deposits would have happened no matter what I did?"

Dentist: "Yes."

Falstaff (switching into full Perry Mason mode): "So the fact that I have them doesn't actually prove that I'm not caring for my teeth properly."

Dentist (reluctantly): "No. But it's really important to take good care of your teeth. Because if you don't millions of little creatures..."

Falstaff: "So is there any way one can prevent plaque deposits from accumulating?

Dentist: "Not really. Not if you're going to eat."

He doesn't actually say so, but I get the feeling my dentist would be happier if I gave up eating entirely. Okay, so it would mean I would starve and die a fairly painful and hideous death. But at least my teeth would stay perfectly preserved, which, as everyone knows, is the important thing.

P.S. A previous rant on dentists (which I discovered only after I wrote this piece) here.

Pale Parabolas of Joy

Have been reading a lot of poetry by Indian poets recently (mostly because being in India means I have better access to it). Some good stuff - Ranjit Hoskote's New and Selected, an interesting if slightly too-clever collection by Vivek Narayanan, and a set of poems by Amit Chaudhuri that just go to show that life is not fair (I mean really - it's not enough that the man can sing and write the most exquisite prose - he has to turn out to be a poet too?).

But perhaps most entertaining of all has been an anthology called Confronting Love edited by Jerry Pinto and Arundhathi Subramaniam (Penguin 2005). Confronting Love is entertaining for two reasons. First, because it includes some truly gorgeous and relatively obscure poems - mostly by the usual suspects - the kind of poems you've read before but never fully appreciated because you were always focused on other, better poems in their original collection. Thus you get Shahid from The Half-Inch Himalayas:

"Meticulous,
your furniture neatly arranged for death,

you sharpened your knife
on the moon's surface,
polished it with lunatic silver.

You were kind,
reciting poetry in a drunk tongue.
I thought: At last!

Now I loiter in and out
of your memory,

speaking to you wherever I go.

I'm reduced to my poverties

and you to a restless dream
from another country

where the sea is the most expensive blue. "

- Agha Shahid Ali, 'Leaving your City'

or Sujata Bhatt from Point No Point:

"Who speaks of the green coconut uterus
the muscles sliding, a deeper undertow
and the green coconut milk that seals
her well, yet flows so she is wet
from his softest touch?"

- Sujata Bhatt 'White Asparagus'

There's also a delicious, if not entirely relevant Kolatkar, a half-brilliant Ramanujan and a Tara Patel poem called 'Request' that I've always been inexplicably fond of.

But the second thing that makes Confronting Love so entertaining (though I fear unintentionally so) is the amount of really bad poetry it contains. In their Introduction, the editors claim they've actively looked for unfamiliar, less-anthologized poems. While I'm all for breaking away from anthologies, I can't help feeling that a lot of what they've ended up with is so trite, so cringe-worthy that it should scarcely have been published in the first place, let alone included in an anthology. Reading much of Confronting Love leaves you stuck between chortling at the puerile absurdity of the writing and wincing in near-horror over how anyone who writes like this can call themselves a poet.

Take, for instance, these lines from Rukmini Bhaya Nair's Usage (one of the worst poems in the anthology):

"Among your secret thoughts, of which such
Quantities exist, some spill, one's about touch.

Because the form's thickened you called 'petite'
And my arms, on the inside, turned to putty

The swan-shape of my neck, once a single span
Now quite escapes this measure of your hand.

Before I did, you noticed new lines cut me up
In the rough contours of an unfamiliar map.

Therefore these minefields are dangerous,
Memory may blow us up like enemies, strangers.

If all we remember, is a firm bend of thigh
And the toss of limbs, we could fight shy.

- Rukmini Bhaya Nair, 'Usage'

Forget the disastrous and childish end-rhymes. Forget the sheer tone-deafness of writing a line like "My arms, on the inside, turned to putty". Forget the gratuitous cliches (what exactly is a 'swan-shape' neck? and why would a lover measure the thickness of his beloved's neck with his hands? What is she, Porphyria?). Would someone care to explain to me the punctuation here? "If all we remember" comma "is a firm bend of thigh / And the toss of limbs" comma "we could fight shy." Huh? And "Before I did, you noticed" ? Groan!

It gets worse. We're then treated to Dinyar Godrej's 'Kiwi Fruit' which reads:

"Our love was like kiwi fruit
you gave me that I in the kitchen
the secret sharer, partook."

Can you imagine anything half-decent coming out of an opening like that? I can't.

The poem goes on to speak of "the same quotidian covering / of plain brownpaper as our lives / were then" and how "Now there is only languor / between assignments and the boredom / of expectancy." I particularly love "quotidian covering of plain brownpaper". As opposed, doubtless, to quotidian coverings of fancy brownpaper. Or extraordinary coverings of plain brownpaper.

Then there's Marilyn Noronha, sounding like Emily Dickinson at the age of three:

"There is one comfort now,
I don't fear death.

At worst, it will be
an undisturbed repose
and I am very tired,
God knows.

At best it will mean happiness
that I have never known.
If I am with you, once more,
it will mean going home."

- Marilyn Noronha, 'There is one comfort'

Never mind the banality of the idea or the complete absence of originality - whether in thought, image or language. What cracks me up every time is the "God knows" at the end of the second stanza. It's so complete an anticlimax as to be practically bathetic. For Ms. Noronha's sake I hope she wrote this poem as a spoof, because that's what it undeniably is.

But the award for the worst poem of the lot goes unequivocally to this howlingly bad piece by Menka Shivdasani, which I reproduce in its entirety:

"'How come your hair is so silky?'
the black musician asked, and she,
half-asleep, said Hong Kong was full of gloss
and sometimes the place got in your hair.

He was a professional, and they were playing
games with each other, fine-tuned notes
on silken skin. 'The trouble,' he said,
'is you're too sensitive,' and drew
music from the guitar strings on her head.

It was when he got to the bass
that something changed.
Later, he asked, anxious: 'Did you,
baby, did you?' for at a crucial moment,
there were silences he didn't expect.

'I always come quietly,' she told him,
not adding, 'I always go quietly too.'"

- Menka Shivdasani, 'Bass Notes'

Can you imagine anything more hideously juvenile? I'm reminded of being back in high school and having to read poems for my school magazine by hormone-crazed adolescents who'd never read poetry, had just discovered sex, and thought their ability to use 'come' in a play of words made them clever [1]. I mean seriously, if someone made that quip about Hong Kong getting in your hair in a random conversation I would break into groans. Reading it in a poem is physically sickening. And "Later he asked, anxious: 'Did you, / baby, did you?' for at a crucial moment / there were silences he didn't expect"? Tchah!

Don't get me wrong - Confronting Love is not a book you should avoid (though you're probably better off skimming it in the bookstore than actually buying it), on the contrary it's a book you must read, if only to remind yourself of just how hilarious truly god-awful poetry can be, as well as to wallow in nostalgia for what passed for poetry among us when we were 15.

[1] If you were one of the people whose poems I rejected for my school / college magazine, I apologize. Apparently they really were great poems and if only you'd had M/s. Pinto and Subramaniam as your editors instead of me, you could have been one of India's most celebrated poets by now.

Kripya Prateeksha Karen

There's a point in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night where he points out that people, in general, have no repose.

Nowhere is this more evident, in my experience, than in the waiting room of a government office.

I was at the Indian embassy at New York this weekend, getting my passport renewed. The website says the time for depositing applications is from 9.15 to 12.15, so I, being my smugly punctual self, show up at exactly 9.12. I'll beat the rush, I think, then discover the milling hordes that have got there before me. I feel like stout Cortez when they told him about Balboa. Ah, well.

I walk over to the guy handing out little pink chits (this takes some ingenuity; the notice at the entrance says you need to turn left for passport renewal, so of course the guy handing out queue numbers is sitting on the far right, hiding behind a big unmarked desk - it wouldn't do if he were easily spottable now would it?). I get my number. I then eye the line of ten people or so standing at the entrance of the passport renewal section. I ask him what they're waiting for. Nothing, he tells me, there's really no reason to be queuing up. Just as I suspected [1]. I walk past the queue and enter the waiting area. I check the number flashing on screen against the number in my hand. There are some 35 people ahead of me. Sigh. I find myself a desk to perch on. I put Metallica on my iPod and turn up the volume [2]. I pull out the book I'm reading - Camus' Resistance, Rebellion and Death - and proceed to read.

Five minutes later I look up and realise everyone's staring at me. Evidently I'm guilty of a serious faux pas. Using the time waiting in a government office productively is an unpatriotic act. Actually relaxing while you're doing it is practically an act of terrorism. Hoary old uncle-jis are shaking their heads at the sight of such westernised decadence, such blatant disregard for Our Indian Culture.

The RIGHT way to wait in a government office, as strenuosly demonstrated by dozens of people around me, is this:

First, take all and any official looking papers you might have and hold them in your hand in a folder / envelope. Better yet, if you can find a polythene bag from a Karol Bagh saree house, put all your papers in that and hold that in your hand.

Next, stand as close to the application window as you can without actually standing in front of it. Be sure to leave just enough space so that an anorexic twelve year old can squeeze past you to the window while holding her breath - you don't want to be in the way or anything - but no more. You never know what invisible forces might be lying in wait, trying to steal your place in the non-line. Your position in this crowd is important, and you must prove yourself worthy of it. Hold a tense posture at all times. Stare intently at the screen on the off-chance that they've gone and changed the number system overnight and 94 now comes right after 81. If someone calls you on your cellphone, tell him you're really busy and can't talk now, but will call him back later (unless, of course, it's a friend / distant cousin, in which case feel free to have a conversation with him standing right there; make sure to talk loudly though, other people will naturally want to know about Tau-ji's operayshun).

Once you've perfected your stressed out pose, be sure to pay careful attention to everything that gets said at the actual counter. Never mind that the person submitting his application isn't talking to you and that you can't see the papers he / she has handed in. As a concerned citizen it's your duty to follow every detail of the case and make an independent decision on its merits and demerits. That's what democracy is about. If you feel the person is wrong and is wasting the official's time shake your head in sage disgust. If you feel the person is right and is being treated unfairly by the passport office, nod your head in vigorous support. If you find his / her case particularly moving, don't be afraid to go up and tell him / her so. Don't worry about holding up the line. Feel free to stand at the window trading complaints about the passport office. Sympathy for your fellow-sufferers is very important to building a spirit of national integration.

Just to be clear though - on no account should all this result in your being better prepared when you actually get to the window. Under no circumstances must you open your folder and take the time to put your papers in order. That's what the window is for, after all. Nor should you assume that anything the person behind the counter says to anyone else (or anything written on, say, an official notice board) has any relevance to you. It may be part of some elaborate practical joke. And besides, you're special - there must be separate guidelines for people like you.

When the blessed time arrives and you do get to the window, here's what you should do. First, remember that the person behind the counter may look like a sweet middle-aged lady, but she is NOT a human being and must under no circumstances be treated with courtesy. You wouldn't say 'good morning' or 'please' or 'thank you' to an airline stewardess, would you? Well, this is the same thing.

Next, always be sure to explain, in a loud, clear voice, what you're doing there. Sure, it's the counter for passport renewal, but that doesn't mean that everyone who comes there wants to get their passport renewed. Who knows what other people might be standing here trying to do. Best to explain the situation first (ideally starting with your birth, and taking it slowly from there) just so there's no confusion.

Once you've got that out of the way and are quite sure the lady behind the counter understands what you're there for, open your magic polythene bag, fish around in it for at least one minute (careful, not too fast bringing things out of the bag now, you don't want to depressurise too quickly and end up with the bends) then pull out your form [3] and hand it over. Just the form, mind you. It's way too early to hand over any of the documentation that goes with it. A good passport application is like foreplay. You have to make it last. Wait for the lady behind the counter to ask for your old passport, photocopies of your visa documents, etc. Make sure you spend at least two minutes rummaging around in your bag for each one, just to build up that sense of suspense. See if she notices that you haven't signed the form - it's a good sign if she does. Once you've got past that you're practically in a relationship. Now you can feel comfortable explaining how you had no idea that when they said 'Paste a Passport Photo Here" they actually wanted you to paste a passport photo there. Of course you've got a passport photo. Rummage, rummage. See, here it is. You just don't have any gum. Oh, look, a glue stick. The joys of modern technology. What's that? Three more pictures. Yes, yes, of course you have those too. Rummage, rummage. One. Rummage, rummage. Two. Rummage, Rummage. Three. There.

What's that? All done now? But when should you come back to collect it? At 4.30? But when at 4.30? What if you come before 4.30? What if you come at 4.31? Will your passport turn into a pumpkin? Where should you come back to? Here? This window? Will the same person be behind the counter? Can someone else come to collect it for you? (you must ask this - even if you plan to come yourself - it's always good to know). Is she absolutely certain you'll get it today. Promise? God promise?

Right then, 4.30. Accha, okay. Oh, but madam, I also wanted to give in an application for my son. Yes, madam, my six year old son. He's right here, madam. Tinku beta, yahaan aao. Rummage. Repeat.

And these are just the general instructions. There are also the special instructions for people with wives, families, etc.

1) There is no playing ground more conducive to a child's physical and mental development than a crowded room full of strangers. If you're bringing your five year old brat along with you (mostly because you're too cheap to hire a sitter), be sure to let it romp around running into other people. Do not encourage it to apologise when it does so. This would be 'talking to strangers' - a definite no, no. On the other hand, encourage your brat to get in plenty of loud shouting in order to improve its lung power. Standing on the other side of the room from your brat and talking to it from there is a good strategy for this.

2) Under no circumstances must a woman be allowed to fill up her own form. Women can't fill forms. It's a biological fact. It's not their fault - it's just that their brains are smaller. This is why you must be protective and fill up their forms for them. It may seem, at times, that they actually understand the form better and the suggestions they make make sense, but this is misleading. If a woman is saying it, it's almost certain to be wrong, even if what she's saying coincides with the written instructions. Ignore her and trust your own instincts. Should it turn out that you're wrong, notice that the person behind the counter is a woman too, and clearly doesn't know what she's doing.

Ideally, you should do all the talking at the counter, even if the application is for your girlfriend / wife / sister / daughter. If that's not possible, and you absolutely have to let her talk, be sure to stand close behind her, expressing your willingness to muscle in at any moment and protecting her from the Evil Eye of Other Men. This is the true Indian way, as laid out in Upanishad 4 subclause 32 G.

3) A similar principle applies when dealing with your children. Never mind if your Raju is a hulking 6 foot something twenty-year old. Just because he has a college education doesn't mean he's capable of filling out a simple form. If you feel you have to let him do it for himself (because otherwise how will he learn) be sure to find at least four mistakes in what he does. And again, make sure that when you get to the counter it's you that does the talking, not him.

4) Any and all instructions you receive from the lady behind the counter are merely tentative, and not to be taken too seriously. Say, for instance, that she tells you that your passport will only be available after a week. This doesn't mean that it will actually be available after a week. She probably just said it because she wanted to see what it would sound like. It might be ready the same day. Or the day after that. Best to come back every day and stand in line to make sure. Oh, and when it turns out that she really did mean a week and your passport isn't ready, be sure to complain bitterly about being forced to come to the embassy everyday. Be sure to spend at least five minutes arguing about this at the window. Remember, it's your right as a citizen to get proper service.

Only after you've followed these instructions to the letter will you qualify as true citizen of India and have truly earned the passport you collect between 4.30 and 5.15 pm (be sure to check all the details in this before you leave the window, btw. Twice).

As for the guy with the headphones and the book who - amazingly - seems to have got his new passport too? Chhi! chhi! This is what comes of living in a permissive society.

Notes:

[1] Isn't it amazing how people will join a queue just because it's there. It's the one thing Beckett gets wrong in Waiting for Godot. If it ever really happened, what's the bet that Vladimir and Estragon would be standing in line?

[2] I'm not in general a huge metal fan, but I find that standing in a crowded place with metal blaring from your headphones means that people give you more personal space. Plus it's the most reliable way to drown out all conversation around you.

[3] This is the New York Consulate Passport Renewal form. Not to be confused with the Washington DC Consulate Passport Renewal form - which looks different and has different documentation requirements. Apparently, what you need to be a bona fide Indian citizen depends on where you live.