Reservations

"of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe"

- William Shakespeare, Othello, V.2

There's an episode in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, where Bessie, the middle-aged widow, decides to buy a new Ford automobile as a means of winning the affection of young Dude Lester, as well as to celebrate her own (relative) wealth. The Lester family is desparately poor, literally on the brink of starvation, so buying a new car seems more than a little frivolous, but neither Dude nor Bessie really care about the rest of the family much anyway. The car is duly bought, in what Dude and Bessie see as a glorious gesture of self-affirmation (though in fact the car dealer is laughing at them), but neither of them has any real competence when it comes to driving the car, and repairs are clearly out of the question, so that all it takes is a couple of days and a few serious accidents and their joint cluelessness has reduced a spanking new car to a shambling wreck. In the end, buying the car does no one any good - the Lester's remain piss-poor, Dude and Bessie's relationship (founded, on his side at least, purely on interest in the car) starts to sour, and the only effect of this whole fiasco is that one perfectly good automobile has been ruined beyond redemption.

Every time I think about the proposal to introduce reservations for Backward Classes in the IITs / IIMs, that's the story that comes to mind. Because that's what it amounts to - a pointlessly escapist gesture that sidesteps the real issues and leads only to the destruction of a perfectly functioning machine for the sake of winning short-term favour. Comments to my rant about this issue yesterday suggested that this was a serious issue and as such required serious discussion. I agree - except I would have thought the reasons the proposal was flawed were fairly obvious to any reasonable, right-thinking person. Just in case, though, here's my non-ranting, serious take on the issue (warning: This is a LONG post, even by my usual standards):

PART I: How do I protest thee? Let me count the ways

My biggest issue with the reservation proposal is that reservations for graduate and post-graduate courses are about treating the symptom, not the cause. Reserving 50% of all seats in the IIMs for backward classes has about as much chance of solving issues of social inequality as liberal quantities of make up have of solving measles. If BCs are underrepresented in our premier institutions, it's not because these institutions are keeping them out - the problem lies much, much earlier in the system, in the real limitations of public education at the primary level that deny children from low income households a fair shot at getting into our top schools. Giving away seats in these institutes to undeserving candidates won't solve the problem (in fact, it's questionable that the people who will get these seats are the ones who've suffered from structural constraints at all - if you made it this far, how much is being from a BC really hampering you?). So focussing efforts for affirmative action on these institutes is barking up the wrong tree.

What these reservations will achieve is the destruction of the institutions they target. That's certainly one way of achieving equality, but it's an equality of poverty, not of wealth - a clear case of pyrrhic victory if there ever was one. Remember the fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs? This new reservation policy is the equivalent of killing the goose so that a few hungry people have more to eat. The people who get 49.5% of the goose will eat well for a day or two, but the loss of value to the system will be much greater than any benefit they derive.

Before we go jumping into the negative effects of the policy, let's spend a few minutes thinking about how it will help the people it's purported to benefit - the Backward Classes. First, a policy that refocuses attention on caste, and effectively makes it a real issue in our top institutes is not doing the Backward Classes any favours. In the two years I was at WIMWI, it never occured to me to question the caste of any of my team mates, nor was it, to the best of my knowledge, a question any recruiter was concerned about. But if 50% of candidates are getting in based not on merit but on caste, what do you want to bet that it will rapidly become an issue. That kind of divisiveness is only going to harm the BCs more. In particular, as a comment on my last post pointed out, it's going to lay genuinely deserving BC candidates open to suspicion, because they'll end up getting clubbed with those who didn't deserve to make it.

But there's a more pernicious effect of these reservations on BC interests - the policy provides a convenient red herring for the government, an excuse that will allow them to do little or nothing to address the real problems of social inequality. With reservations in the IITs to point to, who's going to care about fixing primary education, for instance? From the BC perspective, accepting the sop of reservations in elite institutions is effectively like letting the government off the hook. There are real problems to be solved here, problems with the government system that the government needs to take action on - this new reservation policy is just a sly attempt to take advantage of other people's work to hide the government's own apathy.

That's even more true when you consider that structural, rule-based interventions that are imposed on people have, historically, a fairly poor record of success. The problem is two-fold. First, forcing people to do things that they're not bought in to is a losing strategy in general - it's always a mistake to underestimate the human ability to do the least possible work that will keep us out of trouble. If the students and faculty of these institutes are opposed to these reservations, if they see them as an attack on their integrity and insult to the meritocratic principles they stand for, then what are the odds that just forcing IITs and IIMs to admit people who they believe are undeserving will work? [1] . Second, even if these students meet with little or no resistance, integration into a program that they're fundamentally not competent for is not as easy as just putting them in there. If these candidates couldn't even make it in to the program, how are they going to cope with the pressure once they're inside. Who are these reservations going to benefit if they turn out a bunch of job candidates who don't match the standards of the institute? Is the government going to force top recruiters to recruit candidates based on BC status as well? Also, how will these candidates get integrated into the system? If I were a student trying to form a team to do group work (knowing how much of my grade depended on the team doing well, knowing how much grades mattered) would I want someone who didn't get in on merit on my team? If I were a recruiter who knew that the candidate who was applying to me got into the school on a quota, would I even bother interviewing him / her? [2].

My other big objection to the reservation proposal is the question of who reservations (or affirmative action) should be designed to benefit, even if we're going to take affirmative action at all. Why is caste / class the relevant basis for support anyway? Aside from the fact that a division based on caste perpetuates the very prejudices it's trying to do away with - what earthly justification can there be for providing special treatment to someone who comes from a well-to-do socio-economic background, simply because, in some long ago age, his / her ancestor was discriminated against? Supporters of such intertemporal justice may argue that we're trying to redress the wrongs of the past - but that's a cycle without end. Certainly there is a high correlation between BC status and poverty, but that's no reason to target the BCs rather than targetting the poor. Why work on an approximate indicator (especially when the benefit you're providing is so small, numerically, compared to the overall population) when you can focus your efforts on the real issue?

Finally, of course, there's the issue of the effect these reservations will have on the IITs / IIMs themselves. My contention is that they a policy of reservations will do immeasurable damage to these institutions, for the simple reason that a high quality of students is the cornerstone on which the overall value of these institutions is built. It's not just that some seats will go to less deserving candidates. Having less meritorious candidates affects all three key stakeholders in the process: faculty (would you want to teach in an institute where half of your class got in based on their caste?), recruiters (again, would you hire candidates who got in on a quota, not on merit) and students themselves (if you believe, as I do, that a big part of the learning at an IIM comes from the interaction you have with your batchmates, from the give and take of healthy competition, then how does having less competent students change that dynamic). In effect, by reserving 50% of seats in the IIMs for students from BCs, the government is setting the stage for a meteoric rise in the popularity of ISB, and the rise of other high quality private institutions to take up, over time, the mantle of the IIMs. If the IIMs have the strength and reputation they have today, it's because the best students go there. Take that away, and over time the value will flow elsewhere. One shouldn't exaggerate the economy wide effects of this shift - over time, private business schools will deliver quality every bit as good as the IIMs, but it seems a needless waste to destroy a perfectly good institution for the sake of some bogus political expedient. [3], [4]

There's also, of course, the effect on reputation. Let's face it - much of India's reputation as a nation of knowledge workers is built on the exceptional quality of people that the IIMs and IITs have churned out (even if I do say so myself). Pick a top recruiter in the US today and you'll find a bunch of IIT / IIM graduates working there. Pick a top business school and I'll show you faculty who are from one of the IITs / IIMs. The point is - these institutes have (or are beginning to have) a reputation. They're among the biggest, most successful brands that India has in the global marketplace. Dammit, the IITs are on Dilbert!! What's going to happen when we start churning out a bunch of students from these institutes who don't meet the standards expected of them? When they can't handle the analytics, can't do the math? That's not just going to hurt the reputation of the IITs, it's going to hurt India's reputation as a source of talent (and probably) as an investment destination. And that's something we can ill afford. You can argue that it's not like the candidates from the BCs are going to be complete losers. By all reasonable standards, they'll probably be good enough. And that's probably true. But the point is that reputations are not built on good enough - reputations are built on being smarter and quicker than anyone else, on being, in a word, outstanding. That's why it's important that we get the extreme right end of the tail - that's why whether you're in the top 1% or the top 5% matters. It's not about elitism, it's about how competitive the global marketplace truly is.

Part II: The Case for Affirmative Action

None of the above changes the fact that socio-economic inequality exists, and something has to be done about it. But if reservations are not the way to go about it, what is? Let's talk about that.

Let me start by saying that I'm going to frame the inequality issue as an education issue - there are obviously other ways in which inequality can be tackled, and perhaps a more community focussed approach would be better, but it seems to me that any discussion of what might conceivably replace the IIT / IIM reservation policy needs to focus on education. More specifically, it needs to ask the question - what will it take to ensure that candidates from BCs get appropriate representation in these elite institutions.

Let me also say at the outset that I'm going to focus on the economically backward only. Retribution for past wrongs doesn't interest me. Only equality of opportunity in the present.

Right then. The first step to getting kids from economically backward households into elite institutions is fixing the primary school system. If memory serves, some 50% of all kids who enter the municipal school system in Bombay drop out before the age of 14. Those who remain are stuck in schools whose quality (generally speaking) is abysmal - in my work with municipal schools [5] I repeatedly came up on students in Class IV or V in English Medium schools who effectively couldn't speak a word of English (that is, they could read it off a blackboard by rote, but had no ability to manage even the most basic conversations in the language). Compare that to the command of English that a kid at one of the top schools in the city has by the time he's in Class V and you begin to see why children from less privileged backgrounds almost never make it to the elite institutions. (Obviously, this is not entirely the fault of the school - the fact that many of these kids live in appaling conditions and have parents who are poorly educated, if not illiterate, means that they have no external support either).

What can we do to fix the primary school system? First, we need greater accountability of government schools. That will mean having some sort of a standardised testing service that will allow us to draw meaningful comparisons between school results and also enable us to track the performance of children over time. The Board exams obviously don't cut it because a) they're too late in the system and b) they're fairly noisy measures anyway. Having better performance scores will mean two things. First, it will give parents a good measure of their children's relative performance and will allow us to encourage the kind of community engagement that is going to be critical to making public schools more accountable. It will also lay the groundwork for a more rigorous system of reward and punishment. It's not simply that the government system lacks resources. It's also that there are really no incentive systems in place - or those that exist exist to stifle innovation and change. [6]

Second, we need to find ways to encourage greater private sector participation in primary education for less priviliged children. Private-public collaboration could play a big role in helping to upgrade the system - if it doesn't today, at least part of the blame lies with the lack of government effort to foster and support such initiative. Sure, there are 'adoption' schemes. But these tend to focus on infrastructural inputs (painting of buildings, book / stationery donations, water coolers), whereas the real lacunae are usually elsewhere - in student teacher ratios, in the lack of teaching aids, in an outdated syllabus taught by arcane methods. A number of NGOs have tried to intervene more directly into the quality of education:Pratham's Balsakhi program; Akanksha works with municipal schools in Bombay and Pune, Aseema in Bombay, Akshara and the Azim Premji Foundation in Bangalore [7]. But most of them, from what I know, have had to spend time and effort in convincing the government to let them help, and more time and more effort managing the interaction with the local officials. There's a lot the government could do to enable greater participation by the private sector in these areas: more explicit collaboration policies and process, a cleaner chain of command, greater willingness to talk about changes in teaching methods, support for volunteerism by private groups in schools. In the US, Teach for America puts over 3,000 volunteers in over a 1,000 needy schools today. Obviously much of the initiative for projects like that must come from the private sector. But there's a lot the government could do to simplify and encourage such efforts. The US is hardly the world's benchmark for formative education (unless you're one of those people who believe that having your child run the constant risk of getting shot will help build character), but you have to wonder how many of the initiatives discussed on sites like the NEA could be applicable (with appropriate changes) to India. What, for instance, are the pros and cons of charter schools? What would it take to make them work in India?

But will fixing the basic school system be enough? Perhaps if we're talking about getting kids from these communities into college (though that would be a big step right now). But to make it to an IIT / IIM you're probably going to need more. After all, how many mid-quality private schools manage to send students to these institutes. Then what chance do government schools have?

The answer then, has to include some institutional means of providing children from less priviliged backgrounds the support they need to make it to the top schools. Institutions like the Prep for Prep program in the US. Prep for Prep provides intensive support for high potential children from backward communities - giving them the opportunities they need to make it to top colleges in the country. Does it work? Go look here. That's over 200 students currently enrolled in Ivy League schools. There are no reservations for these kids, no free tickets because they happen to belong to a certain community. These kids came from the most backward of communities (in some cases literally from ghettoes) and made it to the top colleges in the world on their own steam. That's development.

In 2004, Akanksha started a similar program with a selection of their own students, in an attempt to give truly high potential kids the opportunities they would never get otherwise. The program (called Learning to Lead) helps integrate them into better quality private schools, provides extensive tuition support as well as intensive personal development sessions during the summer months to work on other elements of their personality. It's a really small program, and the jury's still out on whether it's going to work, but the point is that it is possible to intervene in the quest for social equality by building capabilities and helping children from economically backward communities to earn their place at the top.

I'm not saying for a minute that the Prep for Prep model is the right one for India (though it might be). I'm saying that if the goverment wants to intervene and help the children of the backward classes get into top institutes then they need to focus on balancing out the sources of the inequalities, not their consequences. By spending time discussing newspapers and current affairs with the Learning to Lead children, by reading Wizard of Oz with them, we're trying to replicate through the program what these kids are missing in their home lives. And that's how the government needs to think about it. Maybe the answer is to provide financial support for candidates from BCs to attend training classes for IIT and other entrance exams. How that's to be managed is a knotty issue, and whether it's a good use of taxpayer money is debatable. But it's certainly better than force-fitting them into institutions they don't belong in.

These are complex issues, and no blog post I could conceive off would answer all of them. The point is: Real development comes from building new institutions, not hijacking old ones. If we really want to make a difference to social inequality, we need to find institutional solutions and processes that are focussed on that problem, and attempt to attack it at its roots. Obviously, those kind of initiatives are a lot harder to design and implement than the parasitic option of reservations. Which is why the government is always going to try to fob us off with more seats for a handful of people in a small fraction of the country's schools. That's exactly what we mustn't let them get away with.

Part III: The Problem of Human Costs

One last section. There's obviously more to the debate here than plain logic. There's also emotion. There's all this talk about justice, about what's fair and what isn't. I could argue that you have to be excessively naive to be an adult and still believe that the world is fair. I could argue that whoever the current system may or may not be unfair to, reservations almost certainly are unfair to those who get left out of the top schools despite being better qualified for them.

I'm not going to. Instead I'm going to tell you a story. In the summer of 2004, I had the unenviable task of being one of 5 people who sat on a panel and decided which kids would get to be part of the Akanksha Learning to Lead program. We had a shortlist of some 40 odd kids to choose from - kids carefully selected from among Akanksha's overall population, representing the cream of our children. That meant that these were all kids who had done exceedingly well in their formal schools, plus they were seen as stars in their Akanksha centres (meaning that they were confident, outgoing, intelligent, etc.), plus many of them had shown signs of other talents - they were dancers and actresses and painters and singers. They were all also from economically backward homes, of course, their parents (who we also met as part of the interview process) were housemaids, drivers, pavement vendors, magazine sellers on intersections, or just plain unemployed. In the course of two days we had to narrow that list down to the 10 kids who would make it to the program, because that's all we had the resources to handle.

Those two days were among the worst, most traumatic days of my life. On the second day, after the discussions were over and the final list had been drawn out, I went home and sat in a darkened room and cried thinking about what I'd done. Then I went out and got very drunk.

How do you pick between children? How do you decide, based on a twenty minute interaction with a 13 year old which of them has 'enough' potential and which of them doesn't? I had no illusions about what I was doing. In making the call to exclude a child from the program, I was robbing him or her of the one decent chance he or she would ever have to make a quantum leap into a different world. These were really, really smart children - many of them smarter than the kids I knew back in school when I was their age, the kids who ended up in good colleges and good jobs because they were going to the right schools, had the support of their families. The Akanksha children we ended up rejecting deserved every chance the world could give them and then some. It frustrated me that I didn't have that chance to give, and it hurt me that I was the one who had to help make that decision.

Could we have not made that decision, though? Could we have simply put all the kids we wanted into the program, on the logic that they were victims of social injustice and therefore deserved it? No, we couldn't. The reality was that we had limited resources - one teacher, one small room to run the program in, limited funding. The reality was we were starting a new project and didn't know how it was going to work out. The reality was that what we needed most of all was for the project to work, because if that failed then no one would get any opportunities in the future, and even the kids we put through the program wouldn't really benefit from it. We picked the 10 kids we thought were most deserving because that was the only way we could make the project deliver anything to anyone. It was hard, it was unfair, but it was the best we could do.

The point is that we live in a society, in a nation, where resources are constrained, where opportunities are limited. It's tempting (and easy) to put too much weight on the system, to try to get it to do too much. But that kind of sentimentality helps no one - it serves only to destroy what opportunities there are. The best we can do is to try not to increase the unfairness further, to give everyone the best shot we can but play no favourites, and to hope that if the opportunites we currently have deliver, we'll be in a better position to do more down the line. We're never going to be able to fix everything that's wrong. Let's at least try not to ruin what's right.

Notes

[1] I don't actually know how this works, btw. What do you mean by reserving seats? How does that tie in to the interview process? Do I need 50% of all candidates I interview to be from BCs. Or do I actually have to admit them?

[2] Another interesting question - can recruiters and place com insist that admission status (merit / quota) be provided on your CV during placement?

[3] I should say that I'm focussing this post mostly on the IIMs because that's an environment I understand. I suspect the fall out for the IITs may be somewhat different, if for no other reason than the infrastructure needed to have a top-notch engineering college vs. a business school.

[4] Obviously, there's an element of personal stake / nostalgia here. Even if the nation as a whole isn't harmed because private institutions take over from the IIMs, I would hate to see the IIMs go down, if only for sentimental reasons.

[5] Throughout the rest of this post, I'm going to be drawing heavily on my work with the Akanksha Foundation, which I worked with for 8 months in 2004. That's not because I think Akanksha's is the only, or even the best way to go about dealing with these issues (this is not a plug for Akanksha - though it's an organisation I personally support), but only because that's the bit I'm most familiar with.

[6] A lot of people talk about how teachers in the public school system are apathetic and disinterested. But if you think about it, given how little incentive the system gives them to do anything, it's actually quite a testament to their intrinsic motivation and commitment that anything gets taught in government schools at all. In my experience, most government staff members in the school system are, in fact, fairly sincere about what they do. It's just that the system requires them to do more than just their jobs to make a difference, it requires them to show special iniative - and that's usually asking for too much. (Obviously, I'm generalising hugely here)

[7] These projects all have very different scope and objectives, but the basic idea behind them is the same - the best place to make an impact on the problem of education for less priviliged children, other things being equal is within the government school system itself.

Categories: CurrentAffairs, Life, Personal

Backward Bending

If you've so much as ventured near the blogosphere in the last 72 hours, chances are you've caught some discussion on Arjun Singh's plan to reserve 50% of seats in the IIMs and IITs for the backward classes (BCs). There's been much outrage over the issue - many, many bloggers have argued that the policy is flawed and unethical and will serve little purpose but to effectively destroy the handful of high quality educational institutions that we've somehow managed to create. That if the government really wants to help the Backward Classes they should focus on primary and secondary education, so that children from these classes can get access to better quality education and be put on a level playing field for competitive exams. Anything else is just blind populism [1].

Personally, I think these critics are missing the bigger picture. How do a few decades of sustained economic growth, of growing international competitiveness matter, when there are centuries of wrongs to be righted? Why bother with something as arcane as development when there are moral principles to be corrupted? So what if destroying the best educational institutions in the country sets us back in the global war for talent, surely that's better than letting all these rich upper class types get away with the hypothetical crimes that their great grandfathers committed? What does the destruction of the IITs and the IIMs matter - it's not like they were set up to provide education, you know, that's just something that happened along the way. No, the real reason we have the IITs and the IIMs is in order to serve as instruments of social justice - it doesn't matter how little an IIT / IIM education comes to be valued, as long as the backward classes get full access to it.

And besides, the BJP got to destroy the Babri Masjid, we have to come up with something more harmful than that, don't we?

No, if there is reason to fault Arjun Singh & co. it's only because they're not taking this reservation thing far enough. I mean, if you are trying to give people things they don't deserve for no better reason than the fact that their forefathers were discriminated against, then why put them through all this bother of attending classes and working for grades. Why not just give them 50% of all bank accounts? Rename the RBI the Reservation Bank of India? That way at least you'd just be redistributing the pie, not destroying it [2]. From each according to his ability, to each according to his family's need in 1836. In fact, come to think of it, why should BCs have to work at all? What about their right to laze about at home watching daytime soaps. Why not pass a law requiring 50% of all housewife positions to be reserved for BCs, irrespective of gender?

And why stop at money? If we are going around keeping 50% of everything aside for the BCs, how about other, more basic stuff. I propose that we reserve 50% of all trouser legs for BCs. Nothing like walking together cheek to cheek to inspire some real inter-caste bonding. And how about sex? Why should all these random Bollywood starlets get to choose who they confer sexual favours on? I say we reserve 50% of all such favours for the Backward Classes. Oh, and music, what about music? How about a ruling that restricts the B side of every tape to songs written exclusively for the BCs. Upper caste swine trying to listen to tapes will just have to get to the end of side A and rewind all the way back. That'll teach them to let their grandfathers be Zamindars.

Come, come, you'll say. All this is hardly practical. Perhaps. But I still think that the government is wrong to pick on just the IITs and IIMs. What we need I feel, is a more comprehensive No Behind Left Behind policy, that will ensure that wherever there's a seat, 50% of all assholes filling it will come from the Backward Classes. Here are some specific proposals that the minister may want to consider:

1. 50% reservation in all cinema theatres

Who are we kidding? Getting into an IIM is a piece of cake compared to getting tickets for the first show of the new blockbuster at PVR. I propose that 50% of all seats in all movie halls be reserved for BCs. Further, in a show of solidarity, 50% of all rear stall and balcony seats be reserved for front stall ticket holders.

2. 50% reservation in all car pools

Why should these damned Zamindars get to ride about in their cars with their families, while the BCs have to walk? I propose that the back-seats of all cars be henceforward reserved for the exclusive use of the BCs. Any card-carrying member of a backward class should be able to halt any passing vehicle and climb into the back-seat. To commemorate this landmark legislation, we should rename the BCs the BDCs - the Backseat Driving Classes.

3. 50% reservation in all public and private lavatories

50% of all stalls in lavatories across the country to be reserved for BCs. A special seat to be reserved in all lavatories for the exclusive use of Arjun Singh, because he's so full of it.

4. Reservation in India Fashion Week

The entire left side of the ramp during India Fashion Week to be reserved, so that 50% of all future wardrobe malfunctions will be available only to Arjun Singh and his cronies. After all, that's the closest they're going to get to seeing a half naked woman in their entire lives.

5. 50% reservation in the Electric Chair

50% of all criminals executed using the Electric Chair to be from the BCs. A great opportunity to redress the shocking wrongs of the past.

6. 50% of all seats at your table in the restaurant...

...to be reserved for Backward Classes. Thus giving a whole new meaning to the phrase dinner reservation.

7. 50% reservations in all sit-down strikes

50% of all places in sit-down strikes to be reserved for the Backward Classes. Upper Caste scum trying to protest this legislation are allowed to stand however.

8. 50% of all dogs trained to 'sit' to be owned by BCs

A critical first step to establishing a more cordial 'handshake' between dog owners of different castes.

9. 50% of all furniture sales to be made to BCs

A bold move to strike at the very root of the problem. Possibly called the Chair and Chair Alike policy.

10. And finally, 50% of all seats not reserved for BCs to be reserved for BCs.

After all, these are seats that BCs don't have a fair chance of getting into on a purely competitive basis, do they? So let's reserve 50% of them. And then let's reserve 50% of the 50% that's left. And 50% of that. And you know what, we could keep doing this for every election in the foreseeable future. (Apparently it's a principle of something called Ma-them-at-ics. One of those things I didn't bother to study because I knew I'd get a reserved seat anyway). Hurrah! Who needs the Nehruvian legacy anymore. Permanent power, here I come. What's that? They've given my seat away to some illiterate farmer because he happened to be from a BC [3]. NNNOOOO!!!

P.S.

If you're against the reservations and think I'm being too flippant: Okay, okay, I know it's not funny. I know it's a serious issue. Believe me, I'm mad. If you really want to know how I feel go see the last two minutes of Planet of the Apes - the bit where Charlton Heston goes "Damn you! Damn you!".

If you're for the reservations and are offended: All I can say is, notice how the post is entirely consistent with the new policy. I personally have reservations about exactly 49.5% of the jokes in it.

Notes:

1. The other thing I wonder about is, even if it's just a cheap political trick, is it a cheap political trick that will work? I mean, if you're a starving and oppressed Dalit farmer somewhere in Eastern U.P. do you really care that some fat businessman's son with a fake BC certificate is now going to be able to get into the country's premier institute?

2. That sort of redistribution is supposedly already happening, btw. It's this thing called taxes. And god knows they're close enough to 49.5% already.

3. Actually, come to think of it, that's not a bad idea. If there's one position that we can safely reserve for the Backward Classes without running the risk of ending up with someone less competent, it's Arjun Singh's position in cabinet.


Categories: Rant, CurrentAffairs

Lost in translations

There's nothing quite like the Old Masters, is there?

Among the chief pleasures of my lazy Saturday was the April issue of Poetry, which is dedicated to translations, and features original poems by such stalwarts as Rilke, Borges, Szymborska, Seferis, Brecht and Ghalib (in a lovely little translation by R. Parthasarthy [1]) , as well as poets I probably should have heard of given the poems included here - the 8th century Japanese poet Yakamochi and the Swahili poet Sayyid Abdalla Bin Ali Bin Nasir ("Or think of dust that tumbles in the light / At the moment daybreak fills the window; / Who approaches it and tries to seize it / Finds nothing in his fist").

Nor are the translators of these poems any less illustrious. W.S. Merwin puts in an appearance, translating Hadrian, and Heaney weighs in with an exquisite translation of Pangur Ban. The indefatigable pair of Pevear and Volokhonsky, are around as well, trying their hand at poetry for a change. And W.D. Snodgrass crows about 'translating' a lovely poem from Romanian - a language he doesn't speak ("When I'm asked how can anyone translate a poem from a language they don't know, I tell them not to learn the language. You can't, really. Get to know the people. You really can."). But for sheer name-dropping pleasure the pick of the lot is this poem - Richard Wilbur's version of a sonnet written for Edgar Allen Poe's tombstone by the virtually untranslatable Mallarme:

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven - O, endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.

- Richard Wilbur

Not that all the poems in the issue are by the strictly venerable. The issue also provides an intriguing introduction to relatively more recent poets whose work sounds well worth exploring, including Bangladeshi poet Ruby Rahman and Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic. And finally, to select just one more poem from a wonderful selection, here's Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever:

Written on a slat of a railway car:

If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life's own path until it's gone
somewhere in a fog and can't be seen -

if someone should find these pearls
let him know how - cool, aloof - they lit up
the eighteen-year old, impatient heart
of the Paris dancing girl, Marie.

Now, dragged through unknown Poland -
I'm throwing my pearls through the grate.

If they're found by a young man -
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they're found by a girl -
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they're found by an old man -
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.

- Abraham Sutzkever (trans. by Jacqueline Osherow)

Plus, of course, while we are talking about the old masters, here's Charles Simic on the new collection of unpublished work by Elizabeth Bishop in the New York Review of Books. I personally have had my reservations about the correctness of publishing these archives - I mean, it's not as though Bishop didn't have the opportunity to publish them herself; if she chose to leave them out, if she decided they weren't good enough and she didn't want her name associated with them, then is it really fair to invade her privacy and second-guess her wishes? Simic, however, makes a good case for the book - quoting extensively from selections that would be incredible by any reasonable standard (which is to say, by any standard except Bishop's own). I've already done my little faux-rant about these poems of Bishop's. Suffice to say that just reading the "It is marvellous to wake up together" poem and being told that Bishop didn't consider it good enough (while I would give almost anything to write something that good) only provided further evidence of the meaningless of my existence. Sigh.

***

And speaking of Old Masters, do also read Arthur Schlesinger's piece on History in the NYRB. It's not freely available on the Net, unfortunately, but Schlesigner essentially starts by arguing that the pursuit of History is a losing battle - the definitive history of Mankind can never be told and every generation reimagines its own history, bringing to it "the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age". Some reflections on the changing views on the Civil War as well as a brief discussion of the legacy of Andrew Jackson later, Schlesinger concludes by speaking of the role of History in contemporary public (political) debate. He writes:

"History is the best antidote to illusions of omnipotence and omniscience. It should forever remind us of the limitations of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary interests into moral absolutes. It should lead us to a profound and chastening sense of our frailty as human beings— to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly demonstrated, that the future will outwit all our certitudes and that the possibilities of history are far richer and more various than the human intellect is likely to conceive.

A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to live with the temptations and tragedy of power. Since we are condemned as a nation to be a superpower, let a growing sense of history temper and civilize our use of that power.

Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity—the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat—fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests at stake. Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity."

Good stuff.

***

Oh, and one final quote from this weekend's catching up on periodicals (I can't resist). This from George Saunders hilarious Shouts and Murmurs piece in the current New Yorker:

"I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics. In my day, lyrics were used to express real emotion, like the emotion of being totally stoned and trying to talk this totally stoned chick into sleeping with you in the name of love, which lasted forever, if only you held on to your dreams."

Notes

[1] Parthasarthy also contributes this Sanskrit Gem

Categories: Poetry, CurrentAffairs

The Evening News

Blown by the wind, the newspaper skids along the pavement, lands on his shoes. Its sudden arrival startles him. He starts back as if attacked, sags with relief to see it is only a scrap of paper. Then annoyance takes over. All this trash lying around on the streets! He kicks the paper away, dismisses it. Assumes the air of one who would never stoop to notice such trifles.

But the newspaper is not to be so easily denied. Persistent as a bird that has been shooed away from its kill, it circles back, spirals in the gusts of the passing traffic to land on his feet again. This time he is prepared for it (air of nonchalance notwithstanding, he has been watching its progress out of the corner of his eye). Seeing it close in on him, he shuffles back discreetly, tries to get out of its way. The newspaper is not put off by this. It follows him shamelessly, clinging to his feet like some importunate disciple.

By now he is starting to grow irritated. He looks around to see if anyone else is watching. No one seems to nave noticed this little by-play of his. Good. He kicks the newspaper harder this time, and in the opposite direction, hoping that the force of the blow and the draught of the passing cars will carry it away.

But again the newspaper proves more resilient. This time it's the wind that brings it back, spreading it out in its flight and wrapping it around his leg. The familiarity of this makes him shudder. He shakes his leg free violently, contemplates his enemy as it lies there before him.

He is beginning to feel harassed. He is beginning to feel as if he is the victim of some obscure prank, as though the malign intelligence of the city is laughing at him. He tries to be rational. He tells himself that it's just a fluke, just bad luck. But there is a strange guilt in his heart now. What would someone watching him say? Would they not think that he had done something to encourage the paper? That he had a special bond with it (perhaps he was the one who had thrown it away, and it was coming back to haunt him, like a newsprint ghost)? That he must somehow deserve what was happening to him?

He looks around again. No, no one is watching. But is it really possible that they have noticed nothing. Or are they just being polite? Looking away to spare him his embarassment? Will no one show even the slightest sympathy for him? Looking around at the grey, tired faces waiting at the bus stop, he feels an overwhelming urge for human contact. Just a quick glance from a stranger, a rueful acknowledgement of his predicament, a sign that the other understands, is willing to laugh about it together.

Gathering up all the dignity he can muster, he walks slowly to the other end of the bus stop, pretending to strain forward to look for an approaching bus, but really trying to put as much distance between himself and the newspaper, which seems (mercifully) to be staying where it is, as if dismayed by his last rebuttal.

It doesn't take long to recover though. Watching it out of the corner of his eye, he sees it starting to move again, advancing in sudden spurts at first, then settling into a slow crawl. There can be no doubt about it now. It is making straight for him. Squirming forward on its belly, trying to creep up on him silently, take him by surprise. Snaking its way effortlessly through the feet of the other people waiting, swerving a little when one or two try to kick it, but undettered from its eventual purpose.

Why? Why is it picking on him this way? Why this obsession, as though the world were trying to take revenge on him by wrapping its news around his feet? Can't anyone else see what is happening here, won't anyone else help?

As he watches the scrap draw nearer and nearer, he feels himself suffocating with expectation, with the fascination of the hunted. The strain is getting too much for him. He has to break out of this, has to escape. Abruptly he turns and starts to walk away. He steps off the sidewalk, runs across the street. Never mind what people will think. It's only three blocks to the next bus stop. He will catch the bus from there. He will be safe.

Behind him, the newspaper, caught by a sudden gust, swirls about in a triumphant spiral. Cackles softly to itself.

Categories: Fiction

The Time of the Daffodils

"And the daffodils looked lovely today"

- The Cranberries, 'Daffodil Lament'

It's daffodil season in Philadelphia. Cherry blossoms line the avenues, lie scattered on the pavement. The trees have turned a delicate green, tentative as a piano, light as a touch. And in the flower bed outside my office, the daffodils have raised their brassy heads, triumphant as trumpets.

In general, I'm not a big fan of daffodils. Maybe it's the association with Wordsworth. Maybe its because, as flowers, daffodils have never struck me as being particularly appealing - they're too loudmouthed for me, too blonde; every time I look at one it makes me think of old gramophones. Give me poppies, with the secret desire in their hearts. Give me the hearty optimism of sunflowers, the elegance of carnations, the fluted poetry of orchids. Give me gladioli with their royal crests. Give me the new rose, curling infinitely in upon itself.

But I digress. If the daffodils today moved me, it wasn't because of their inherent beauty (none of that "tossing their heads in sprightly dance" stuff), it was because they seemed, in their insistence, like urgent phone calls from the Spring, to let me know she was on her way. Walking back home today, surrounded by all this newly budding life, I felt a lightness that went beyond the shedding of winter coats, beyond the sensation of air on exposed throat, on naked hands. I felt a renewal as vivid as daffodils.

Welcome, Persephone. It's good to have you back.

Categories: Whimsy

The Fugitive Resentment in your Eyes

Diary Entry. March 24th, 2006.

People are always talking about love at first sight. Of that instant recognition between strangers, of the way your eyes meet across a crowded room and you know in an instant that he or she is right for you. This notion of instantaneous attraction is central to our mythology of desire: "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" Christopher Marlowe writes; "Lovers at first sight, in love for ever" Sinatra sings.

But what about the other way round? What about that moment when you look across the table at a loved one and know with a terrible clarity that it's over? What about that premonition? That certainty? The shock of the moment like an X-ray, turning all your dreams of the future transparent, showing you the bones of the emptiness that lies behind. Dickinson writes: "Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn / indicative that suns go down: / the notice to the startled grass / that darkness is about to pass".

Oh, you'll deny it to yourself, of course. Shrug it off. Pretend you never thought it. For weeks, months, maybe even years, you'll continue to live the lie, like the skin of a bruised plum that keeps its lustre, even as the pulp grows rotten within. There'll be that long, slow process of disengagement, the creeping arguments that become ever more frequent, ever more bitter; the increasing sense of alienation, the desperate attempts to remind yourself what it is about the other person that makes you love them. (Empson writes: "Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills / 'Tis not the effort nor the failure tires / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.")

But sooner or later, when the final quarrel is done with, when your friends and family have finally been told and the one line explanations for what went wrong concocted, you will look back on the course of your relationship and know, with complete clarity, the day, the hour, when things started to go wrong. The first time you knew.

How much of this is just self-fulfilling prophecy? How much of this is just that seed of suspicion, which, once planted, corrupts everything else? How much of this is just our ridiculous need to be right, even at the cost of our own happiness. (Hughes writes: "It must have taken supernatural greed / To corner all the meat in the world / Even from your own hunger").

How much of this is just a trick of memory - so that we remember only the prophecies that turn out right, and conveniently forget those that we get wrong?

And what if we are just misreading the whole thing? God knows we're wrong often enough about love at first sight. So that the person we imagined was the paragon of our dreams turns out to be psychotic or dim-witted, selfish or just plain boring. If we can be mistaken there, why not here? Is it better to bear the slings and arrows of a relationship that seems increasingly outrageous, or by opposing end them?

Do you believe in love at last sight?

Do you want to?

***

I'm no longer sure what it is we were arguing about. I have some vague memory of it being something to do with Hemingway's women. Something banal and obvious like that. She was arguing (if I remember it right) that the reason women in Hemingway's novels are always two-dimensional was because he was a raging misogynist. Women threatened him, made him nervous. That's why he retreated into the security of violence. Hence the bull-fights, the hunting, the obsession with guns and war. Hence the mythologising of isolation. Just a lonely old Bluebeard who couldn't get any. My argument (which she stubbornly refused to see) was that all of that was true, but it was only a symptom of a larger masculine persona that Hemingway was trying to identify with. That Hemingway's novels were misogynistic because they were celebrations of a unique sub-culture of macho-ness which was, in its essence, a reaction to the threat presented by the growing power of the feminine. It wasn't Hemingway who was in retreat, it was the American male, and Hemingway, scenting a story, just went along for the ride. But why did he choose to deify that culture, if he didn't subscribe to it? she argued. Because it was there and someone had to write about it and it needed a language and a style all its own and Hemingway had it. What else did you want him to do? Write about the metrosexuals of the day, the swinging urban crowd? Fitzgerald already had that beat covered.

At any rate, we argued. We quarrelled. We fought. Voices were raised,then died out completely as an endless silence gripped the telephone, coiled itself around the receiver like a snake around its prey. It was strange. Early on, when the silence was just a pause, a break in the conversation, a drawing back, it would have been easy to change the topic, switch to talking about something else. But then the silence got longer and longer and the stakes kept rising proportionally. Soon the silence had lasted so long that almost anything you said would seem like a comedown, like a sacrilege. And of course, the stronger that feeling got, the longer the silence lasted.

We finally made it through the conversation though. Eventually I said something, she responded. We exchanged some platitudes, picking carefully around the the argument we'd just had, like a nurse cutting the cloth away from the edge of the wound - our very hesitation leaving the unspoken words more exposed. We signed off quickly. We were both relieved.

Once I was off the phone, my conscience started to gnaw at me though. What had I been arguing for anyway? It's not like I even like Hemingway. And I totally agree that he couldn't write a decent female character to save his life. Not even all those nurses (heh). So why then was I fighting about it? I considered calling her back. No. She'd been mad. I could tell from her voice. Better to wait till morning. Let it all calm down.

When she called, it took me by surprise. I hadn't expected that. I'd always assumed I would be the one to make amends. But here she was calling. Picking up the phone, I readied myself to be the bigger person, prepared myself to make amends. "I'm sorry", I said, "it's been a long day. I shouldn't have taken it out on you." But even as I said it, I could feel my irritation creeping back. What the hell was I apologising for anyway? It's not like it was all my fault. She was shouting at me too, you know. And she was the one who was wrong. She was the one who kept insisting that Hemingway didn't understand women, event though I'd never even denied that at all. Hell, I'd never denied that he was a woman-hater. Only that he became that way because he ended up relating too closely to the culture he was trying to portray. Like a method actor, only in print. Why couldn't she see that? Why wouldn't she listen?

All this time I'd been on the phone with her - trying to sound contrite, trying to be considerate. Then she said something about how "I was always making these stupid arguments". Stupid? ME? All my good intentions melted away. I was mad again. With great effort I restrained myself from saying something cutting. "Why don't we just talk about this tomorrow", I said. "I'm tired. I need to sleep." We both knew that was a lie.

Since then she hasn't called. And I haven't called her. It's been two weeks.

I'm not really sure why I haven't called. I could have. I know I've wanted to. I guess at first I was afraid that she'd still be mad and we'd end up going through the same loop again. Then, when a few days had passed I got to thinking - well, I said I was sorry, didn't I? I never heard her say that. Why should I cop the blame for all this? I said I was sorry. If she wants to accept my apology, wants to apologise to me in turn, let her call me back. Otherwise to hell with it. I've got my dignity. I don't need this.

That lasted about three days. All of this week though, I've been thinking I'll call her but I've kept putting it off. I don't know why. It's not that I'm angry anymore, or even that I want to make the point that it wasn't all my fault. I'm willing to take the blame for this (or at least I think I am) if it means being able to hear her voice again. I miss her.

I think the reason I haven't called is because I know how easy it would be for her to say the wrong thing if I did call, and for me to say the wrong thing back and for things to just go downhill from there. I know how that works. The delicate mechanism of these make-up conversations, so easily jammed, so easily turned awry. If that happens, if we start arguing again, then it'll really be over. There's no coming back from that. It'll establish a pattern - a groove that we'll keep falling back into, like a skipping CD that can't seem to move beyond the place it's stuck in. As long as I don't call her and we don't have another fight there's still hope. A diminishing hope, true. But hope. That's what I'm trying to cling to now. That's all I have left.

Why doesn't she call I wonder? Is she still mad at me? Or is it just that she doesn't care? Maybe I'm just imagining all this, maybe nothing's happened, we're not in trouble, maybe she's just been busy. No, come on, it's been two weeks. Maybe she's happy about this - maybe she's been wanting to get out of our relationship for a long time and now that she's found an excuse she's just using it to her advantage. Maybe she's seeing someone else. If that's the case there isn't much point in my calling her, is there?

I sit on the floor, re-reading my old diary entries, staring at the phone. Wishing she'd call. Please call, I whisper, when the silence of my room assures me that no one is listening.

Please call.

Categories: Fiction, Life

All these people that you mention

Okay, to be honest, I'd planned to make that post two days ago the last in the Rock series. Except that then I realised that technically, technically, I'd only put up six posts in the series. And while I could always use the "On the seventh day He rested" argument, it felt like a seventh post was due. Plus looking back over the six posts I went into panic thinking of all the great songs that I'd missed out on [1].

So here's what I decided to do. I went through my iTunes, pulled out all the songs that I love but haven't mentioned so far and put them in a playlist. Then I sat down to write a post about them. No connection, no theme, just songs that at some point or the other have captivated me, songs that remain a part of the essential soundtrack of my life [2]:

1. Leonard Cohen: Suzanne

The first time I heard Suzanne it was on a tape of Joan Baez [3] songs that I'd inherited from someone. I was 14. It wasn't long before the tape broke / warped / generally became unplayable (as tapes are wont to do) and for the next ten years I didn't own a copy of Suzanne, never heard it even once. And yet the song stayed with me, the memory of it clear in my head, its visionary poetry hardwired into my head, so that the first time I read Plath's 'Full Fathom Five' (or, for that matter, the first time I read John:21) I found myself humming it, and even now it's hard for me to read a poem / book about sailing without "all men shall be sailors then / Until the sea shall free them" popping into my head.

2. Radiohead: Creep

Before I turned into an insufferable classical snob (and for a while afterwards), Creep was a secret anthem of mine. Secret because it was also the anthem of every other red-blooded teenage male in high school. How could you not love a song that expressed so well that sense of tortured alienation, that feeling of existing in a state of grace you didn't deserve. We knew instinctively, even then, that we weren't going to be gifted or lucky or goodlooking. That nobody was going give us special treatment, that women weren't going to like us, that even if, by some fluke, things started going well for us, we'd succeed in f***ing them up for ourselves. And Radiohead knew that with us. There's something about the sound of this song, one half of it sad and resigned, the other crying out in anguish (the way the guitar sputters once, twice, before it explodes) that makes it one of my favourite songs to be depressed to. Even today.

P.S. Not to be missed: this wonderful animated version of the song (hat tip: heh heh)

3. Chuck Berry: Johnny B Goode

I'd have a soft spot for Chuck Berry ever since I discovered that some of my favourite Beatles songs were originally Chuck Berry compositions. The way I see it, if Lennon and McCartney are picking your songs to do covers of, you've got to be pretty incredible. Johnny B Goode is one of those ubiquitous rock songs that you can't help but fall in love with. No matter how rock evolves in the years to come, you know that someone, somewhere will be "playing Johnny B Goode tonight."

4. The Cranberries: Dreams

There's something about the momentum of Dreams that is entirely addictive. Something about its rhythm that simply drives you, propels you. It's a quality that's common to much of the Cranberries music (I'm a huge fan, btw - in case you haven't figured that out yet) but Dreams was the first of their songs I ever heard and it simply took my breath away. Of course, that haunting, lilting, aria-like solo at the end probably has a lot to do with the way I feel about the song, but all in all, I've always thought of Dreams as the kind of song that you just let yourself fall into, the kind of song that just carries you along with it. Kind of like a dream.

5. David Bowie: Space Oddity

Every now and then, you'll come across a rock song that is as good as a movie. That packs in enough plot development, creates enough images in your head, to make the experience of listening to it positively cinematic. The best example of a song like that I can think of is Dylan's Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, but Bowie's Space Oddity is a pretty close second (It would be first, except I'm suspicous of how much of it's cinematic quality comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey). I love the flat, mechanical starting, the incredible sense of distance created by that first "Ground Control to Major Tom", the way the music then rises and rises, lifting into a stratosphere of sound ("the stars look very different TODAAAAAYYY"), the alteration of the cold metallic voice of Ground Control with Major Tom's more plainitive human tone, and the incredible poignancy of that final "Can you hear me Major Tom?".

6. Grateful Dead: Ripple

I'm not in general a huge Grateful Dead fan. There's a lot of their music that I like, but I've always had the sneaky suspicion that to truly appreciate the Dead you had to be there. The first time I heard American Beauty though, I spent two whole days listening to nothing but Ripple, falling in love with its exquisite gentleness, the way the music so vividly mimics the sensation of the slightest of tremors moving across the water's skin. "If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine / And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung". Exactly.

7. Janis Joplin: Me and My Bobby McGee

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." There's something prophetic and visionary in Joplin's Me and My Bobby McGee. Something that transcends the glorious epiphany of that voice, the purity of that moment where Janis starts from a simple ta-da-da-dada-da and lifts the song into pure frenzy. Something that reminds me of Kerouac, of Burroughs. I've always had the greatest admiration for Joplin's voice, but I can't help feeling that a lot of the time her music doesn't match up [4]. Here, though, it's all exactly right and you can HEAR the difference. Listening to Janis sing "Nothing, that's all that Bobby left me" while you're driving to the airport to spend another week or month or year away from home can leave you in tears. And that's good enough for me.

8. Dire Straits: Romeo and Juliet

The thing about Mark Knopfler is - you listen to the first line of his songs, and you know you're hooked. The first time I heard Romeo and Juliet was driving to college in a friend's car, and the minute Knopfler was done singing that bit in the first line about streets of serenade I knew this was a song I was going to spend a LOT of time listening to.

What I love about Romeo and Juliet is the way it gets the balance between humour and passion just right, counterpointing all that "You can fall for chains of silver / You can fall for chains of gold" stuff with "Romeo, ya, you know I used to have a scene with him". It's the way Knopfler and co manage to actually pull of the bathos that amazes me (in general, when it comes to Shakespeare I'm something of a purist - which makes it only more incredible that I don't outright want to murder them for writing the song). You would have to be deaf not to be charmed by this song - by its snappy rhythm, by the sheer fluidity of its wordplay, by the way the guitar comes rippling in to fill the silence after that last "Juliieeet" in the chorus.

9. Metallica: Nothing Else Matters

From the lighthearted to the obsessively dark. It's hard for me to pick a favourite Metallica song. Their music remains a revelation to me - it's unbelievable to me that anything can combine so effortlessly the sense of darkness gathering, of menace lurking in the shadows, with an almost crystalline purity of song. I used to be one of those people who thought Metal was just about noise. Metallica taught me that the opposite is true - it's about finding something real, something you can hold on to, in all that noise. Metallica's music is like the gleam of a metal chain catching the starlight on a moonless night, like the diffused glow of the moon lighting up the bleakness of a cloudbank. It's about finding beauty in the midst of anxiety, in the midst of depression. It's about beauty. And nothing else matters.

10. The Who: Baba O Riley

We all know how it starts. The tinny sound of the synthesisers beating out their little fugue. Then the guitar breaks in with its familiar tum-tumtum rhythm. Then the drums explode. And before you know it you're in the middle of a full-fledged rock song. Except the synths are still there, still rippling away in endless variation, like a tripping teenager off by himself in the middle of a really loud party. And then, just when you think you've got the song figured out, there's the shout of "They're all wasted" and suddenly it's a completely different song, one that builds into endless momentum, achieving at its peak, the kind of lyrical intensity you never expect to hear outside of L Subramaniam concerts. The last minute and half of Baba O Riley must be among the most ecstatic episodes in popular music (outside of every single Shakti album, of course). Incredible stuff.

11. Counting Crows: Round Here

"Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the difference of white on white". You hear a line like that, and you just know you're listening to Counting Crows. The thing with Counting Crows is, most of the time I have no idea what they're talking about (and I'm not sure they do either) but it's amazing how individual lines in their songs manage to sound just right, manage to connect. ("I dream I never know anyone at the part and I'm always the host"). Round Here just happens to be the song that does that more often than the others (though I was tempted to give the honour to A Long December instead). How can you not love a song about people who "roar just like lions / but are sacrificed just like lambs" a song whose most triumphant vision of adulthood is of a place where "we're never sent to bed early / nobody makes us wait / round here we stay up very very very very late"

12. Kula Shaker: Govinda

A morning scene. The cry of peacocks, the chirping of birds. A distinctly South Asian voice singing. A tabla. And lyrics that go: "Govinda jai jai / Gopala jai jai / Radha ramana hari / Govinda jai jai". Wait, this is a rock song?

It is. The first time I heard Kula Shaker singing Govinda, I almost fell over laughing. Then I discovered - to my horror - that the song simply wouldn't get out of my head. I found myself singing it under my breath, causing people to wonder if I were going through some sort of mystic religious experience. Just to explain to them (and myself) what the appeal of the song was, I had to listen to it again. And again. Until now it's ended up on my post as one of my favourite songs. If there is a god (especially a naughty little indigo one) he's probably laughing himself silly right about now.

13. Joan Baez (Bob Dylan): Farewell Angelina

There are a lot of Dylan songs that Baez sings, IMHO, better than Dylan himself [5]. Farewell Angelina tops that list. Included on Dylan's Bootleg Series, Farewell Angelina is just one of many, many pleasant sounding songs that Dylan's written. It's only when Baez sings it, in that heartbreaking voice, that you realise the truth: Farewell Angelina is poetry incarnate - a glorious ballad that conjures up incredible images of a nation torn by war, a soldier's farewell that would have made the old bards proud.

14. Neil Diamond: I'm a believer.

Dad, this one's for you.

When I was a kid growing up, my Dad had this whole repertoire of songs that he remembered exactly one line of, and would burst into, completely out of the blue and usually off key, as his way of creating excitement. It was an endearing thing to do, but it ended up souring me on most of the songs he sang (I've never been able to stand Elvis' 'In the Ghetto' for instance, you only have to get to that first "cold and grey Chicago morning" line and I've tuned out). Plus which I never managed to share his passion for Neil Diamond.

So it was shock to me when, all those years later, I heard 'I'm a believer' on the Shrek soundtrack and realised that I actually liked the song. Liked it so much, in fact, that I went around for days humming it, shouting "Then I saw her face" in a sort of stacatto burst that seemed, when I thought about it, scarily familiar (though, of course, I was doing this strictly in the privacy of my own room).

There's something almost unbearably upbeat about I'm a believer. It's so cheerfully silly a song, so artlessly optimistic, that trying to critique it would be like kicking a puppy. Then before you know it you're singing along to it, revelling in the rhyming of 'face' and 'trace', the happy accident of 'leave her' coming so quickly after 'believer', playing air drums to the head over heels tumbling descent of the notes that come right after the chorus. And before you know it, you're a believer too.

15. Led Zeppelin: Misty Mountain Hop

Let me try and put this as simply as I can: Led Zeppelin is, for me, the quintessential sound of rock. If I had to define rock for someone who'd never heard it, I would just hand him or her that fabulous fourth album and leave it at that. It's the combination of the pounding, addictive beat, the soaring, electrifying guitar work, the screaming, breathtaking voice. People watch me listening to LZ on my headphones and think I'm nodding along to the music. But half the time what I'm really doing is thinking to myself: yes. That's precisely how rock is supposed to sound. Yes. Yes.

Misty Mountain Hop is just a random draw. I could have picked Stairway to Heaven, but that's a little too hackneyed, even for a post as blatantly nostalgic as this one. I could have picked Battle of Evermore, but then I'd have to get into the whole Tolkien thing. I could have picked Tangerine or Heartbreaker or Friends or...you get the idea. I picked Misty Mountain Hop because aside from the fact that it's a great song and as representative of Zeppelin's work as anything is ever going to be, it also features one of my all-time favourite moments in rock music, one of those moments that defines for me the essence of what Rock is about. It's the point where the song goes "Take a good look at your face and describe what you see" in a sort of dark chant and Plant comes back screaming "And tell me, tell me, tell me do you liiike it". What better note than that to end a week of rock posts on.

Notes

[1] One other song I realised I missed out on was in the post that talked about songs I connected with poems. The one I missed was Billy Joel's The Downeaster 'Alexa' which always reminds me of Robert Lowell's Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket.

[2] Of course, you have to understand that much of the soundtrack of my life is made up of people I've already blogged about this week: Dylan, Mitchell, S&G, the Beatles. These are just the ones I couldn't really get to, but can't not mention at all.

[3] I've never been able to decide whether I like the Baez version of this song or the Cohen version. They're both stunning though.

[4] To see what I mean, just listen to her singing Summertime. It's incredible that she can take a Gershwin song, lift it so out of context, and make it entirely her own. If you think about the other people who've sung Summertime - a veritable who's who of jazz greats - the fact that her version of it still comes pretty close to top of my list is saying a LOT.

[5] This is not, as some friends of mine seem to think, always true. There are a whole bunch of Dylan songs where I prefer the Dylan version: Forever Young, for instance, or I shall be released, or Blowin' in the Wind. And even with stuff like It's all over now Baby Blue it's a tough call (I'd put the Baez version of Simple Twist of Fate over the Dylan version, but only because of that glorious bit where Baez imitates Dylan - the most stunning musical mimicry I know of, after Ella's take on Armstrong on Basin Street Blues).

Categories: Music, Personal

Walking the tight rope

Some days I just hate other people. Their obtuseness, their self-righteousness, their insistence of taking everything personally, their refusal to discuss things in abstract, logical terms, their complete inability to LISTEN. And I don't just mean random people on the blogosphere. I mean friends and family. There are days, like today, when it seems to me that the only purpose other people serve in my life is to muddy the clarity of my days with trivialities, with sentimentality, with all this flotsam of emotion. How much sweeter the solitary life seems on these occasions. To be able to read, or write poetry, or listen to music without being drawn into the inconsequential mess that other people make of their lives, their piffling preoccupation with jobs and money and clothes and houses and children and relationships and food. As if all of that mattered. As if anything mattered at all - except maybe that feeling of absolute peace, that sense of having briefly glimpsed an untroubled perfection - that one can only find in art and intellect, and only alone. Wordsworth called it "the bliss of solitude". How right he was.

It's on days like these that the idea of renunciation, the notion of sanyas, the vision of Thoreau's exquisite Walden begins to seem incredibly appealing. Because the point of Walden, to me, is not about the questionable economics or the bucolic nature worship - it's the breaking free, the leaving of the quotidian behind. All through my teens I was the most anti-social person imaginable - I had barely 2-3 friends, I never went to parties or interacted with people my own age outside of school, I spent the bulk of my life locked away in my room reading or listening to music. Over the years I've become more social (though most people would still consider me fairly withdrawn), and have generally come to see that there might actually be something to this interaction thing, but on days like today I bitterly regret having ever abandoned my cocoon and wish that I could go back to it. "I was serenely independent and content before we met / Surely I could always be that way again" Higgins sings in My Fair Lady. There are times when I am dismayed by my own desire for human contact, by my inability to be the closed off person I used to be. [1]

But isn't that closer to the truth, though? Isn't it true that what I hate about these interactions with other people is the way they hold up a mirror to the things about myself that I find most unattractive? That they serve to remind me that I, for all my talk about the purity of the intellect and the search for the absolute through art am just as petty, just as self-aggrandising, just as spiritually weak as everyone else? That I'm just as prone to be in denial, just as susceptible to cognitive dissonance and the attribution error? Is it not the recognition that I too can be this dense, this stubborn, this ridiculous that frightens me, makes me turn away from other people? And isn't this fear itself, a kind of defensiveness - isn't what's really scaring me the idea that sometimes, just sometimes, they may be right?

What truly annoys me about my interaction with others is the way my own emotions betray me, the way I find myself becoming defensive or angry or envious inspite of all my principles, all my resolve, all my best intent. It isn't just that other people distract me, it's that I, knowing full well that they are nothing but a distraction, still let them get to me, let them distract and diffuse me, crave these contacts that make me less than I believe I could be. Is this what Kundera meant by the unbearable lightness of being? "Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them" goes my favourite part of Tagore's Geetanjali. Exactly.

At the very beginning of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche tells the story of a rope dancer who is making his way across the high wire when a buffoon comes up behind him, and jumps over him with a loud yell, sending him plunging to his death. In my quest to be more than I am, to advance even one tottering step closer to the Superman, other people are the buffoons who send me plumetting off the thin wire of my own certainty. There are times when I hate them for this, times I complain bitterly about having to put up with them. But deep inside I know that the person I'm really disappointed with is myself - for letting them make me lose my balance, for letting them make me fall. The day I manage to ignore other people the way I want to, the day I manage to experience them as irrelevant instead of just thinking of them that way, will be a truly great day for me.

[1] Somebody asked me in the comments to yesterday's post what I have against marriage. Does this answer your question? If talking to people for a few hours, even people I genuinely like, can make me this unhappy, can you imagine what having to live with someone else will do?

Categories: Personal, Rant, Life

The Times they were Changin'

Long, long time ago, before grunge and punk and metal turned rock into the soundtrack of personal angst, before drugs were self-destructive and sex wasn't inextricably linked to violence (sex wasn't even sex, actually, it was free love - a concept tinged with hopless nostalgia in our HIV-positive world) Rock was about overthrowing the establishment, about freedom and Flower Power, about the rebellion of a generation, about Revolution. But it was a Revolution fuelled not so much by ideology as by attitude, its politics fuelled by vision and feeling more than by tactics or realpolitik. "You might say I'm a dreamer" Lennon sang. He was. But back in the 60's there was no contradiction between being a dreamer and being an agent of change [1].

Politics, then, is the real third in the Trinity of Rock (the other two being drugs and sex [2]) - growing up in the shadow of the Bomb and the everpresent threat of the draft [3] a generation of folk / rock artists wrote songs of protest and outrage, songs that became, for a tiny instant in history, the conscience of a generation, its moral compass [4]. We all know these songs. Plain, unadorned, often acoustic, they are products of a terrible sincerity, children of an idealism that we, in our more complicated age, end up either scoffing at [5] or treasuring with nostalgia. Yet to do either is to miss the point of these songs, their threadbare courage, their overwhelming optimism. "And I dreamed I saw the bombers / Riding shotgun in the sky / They were turning into butterflies / Above our nation" Joni Mitchell sings - and such is the power of that voice and the feeling behind it, that you end up almost believing it, end up almost believing in the youthful dream that faith is everything, that indignation will change the world, that all you need is love. What W.H. Auden said of poetry is true of these songs as well: they make nothing happen, but they survive as a way of happening, a mouth. Because no matter what you may think of the naivete of their sentiments or the incoherence of the arguments they made, you have to admit that the people who sang these songs had their heart in the right place.

I'm not going to bother with the numbers this time. But here are some of my favourite memories of protest songs through the ages:

Pete Seeger: Those glorious renditions of Turn, Turn, Turn; We Shall Overcome and the Crow on the Cradle.

Woodstock: Country Joe McDonald singing the I-feel-I'm-fixing-to-die rag (with the F*** cheer to start with), Richie Havens singing Handsome Johnny, Joan Baez singing Joe Hill; and, of course, Hendrix squealing his way through the Star Spangled Banner

Lou Reed: "Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I'll piss on 'em / That's what the statue of bigotry says". The streetsmartness of the anger, the irony laid on with an ten-inch switchblade knife. "Have you ever felt rage in your heart?"

Tracy Chapman: Subcity. Across the Lines. Behind the Wall. Talkin' about a revolution.

The Cranberries: The indignation on Zombie. War Child. The Icicle Melts.

Joni Mitchell: The Fiddle and The Drum. "And so once again / America my friend / And so once again / You are fighting us all / And when we ask you why / You raise your sticks and cry / And we fall"

Joan Baez: Where do I start? So much of what Baez sings are songs of protest: The Prison Trilogy, The Partisan, Song of Bangladesh Las Madres Cansadas, No Nos Moveran, Where's My Apple Pie, Johnny I hardly knew ya, Sagt Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind, Pauvre Ruteboeuf. One single set of concert recordings from 1975 features: Turn me Around, Natalia (about Russian poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya [6]) , Ballad of Saccho & Vanzetti (that haunting line about how "only silence is shame") and Joe Hill. You could argue (with considerable justification) that Baez's idealism is unfocussed and childish, an exercise in protest for the sake of protest. What continues to amaze me, though, is the level of engagement. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where the songs that young people sang along to at concerts were songs about the oppression of poets in Russia or the torture of students in Bangladesh, songs about prison reform or against war? [7]

My favourite Baez protest song, btw, is the incredible 21 minute long Where are you now, my son? Recorded in Hanoi in December 1972, Where are you now, my son? is much more than a song, it's a travelogue into the depths of the Vietnam War. Baez intersperses the stanzas of the song (sung as only she could sing them) with sound recordings of the episodes that inspired the lyrics. We hear bombs exploding in the streets of Hanoi, the rattle of anti-aircraft fire, hushed conversations from bomb shelters, the sound of people crying, the song of local folk singers, and most priceless of all - the sound of Baez singing Silent Night to a frightened group of people on Christmas Day, her voice almost drowned out by the explosions of US bombs almost directly overhead. Agha Shahid Ali writes: "Yes, he is here / He who, people said /could dissolve bombs / in mid-air // when he played Beethoven" ('Eurydice'). Baez's voice doesn't quite manage to do that, but as a metaphor for the way in which the songs of her generation stood in opposition to the grim political realities of their time, I can think of no finer example.

And finally, of course, there's Dylan. Dylan singing Blowin' in the Wind. Dylan singing A Hard Rain's A-gonna fall. Dylan singing Hurricane. Dylan singing Chimes of Freedom and Oxford Town and The Times they are a-changin' and The Death of Emmett Till and Only a pawn in their game and With God on our Side and North Country Blues and Dignity.

What made me think about Dylan's more political side (and ultimately led to this post) was reading two news stories on the Blogosphere over the last couple of weeks. This one about Meher Bhargav (via Desi Pundit) and the ongoing story of Abhishek Kasliwal (which Amit Varma helped remind me of). Both stories made me think of the same Dylan song: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll ("You who philosophise disgrace / And criticize all fears / Take the rag away from your face / For now ain't the time for your tears"). Dylan's point in that song is simple: The fact that there are people out there who think they can leverage their wealth / political clout / social position to avoid the consequences of their crimes is no reason to get upset. It's only when their belief proves to be true, if the justice system lets them get away with (literally) murder, that we have cause to protest, cause to worry, cause to feel ashamed. Democracy is not about belief in people, it's about a belief in the People. That's quite a perspective to find casually scattered about in what is, arguably, one of the greatest albums ever made.

Notes

[1] Remember Martin Luther King?

[2] Sex, politics and drugs - Creator, Preserver, Destroyer? Not quite.

[3] One of the reasons I think Americans today find it easier to be more apathetic, even complacent about US military policy is that (9/11 notwithstanding) the threat of actual harm to US civilians is so much lower today than it was in the 1960s. Though on the varying impact of the Cold War on national culture, see Tony Judt's piece in last month's NYRB.

[4] I can't help thinking of Zoyd Wheeler in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland.

[5] See, for instance, Tom Lehrer's brilliant take on the folk song army.

[6] A poet I've never read, but who also makes an appearance in Adrienne Rich's Leaflets:

"we will relive this over and over

the banners torn
from our hands
blood flowing
a great jagged torn place
in the silence of complicity

that much at least
we did here"

- 'For a Russian Poet'

[7] Of course, there are plenty of rock artists out there today (Bono springs to mind) who are actively involved in social causes - the point is they're not singing about it. Whatever happened to the artist's belief in the redemptive power of art? What was it Auden said: "With the farming of a verse / Make a vineyard of the curse / Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress".

N.B. : I'm pretty sure there are plenty of songs I've missed (I just thought of S&G's versions of Silent Night, Last Night I had the Strangest Dream, He was my brother and The Sun is Burning, for instance). And the Stones singing Paint it Black. And there's always Springsteen. But that's what the comments section is for. And by now, you know the drill.


Categories: Music

Out of the blue

Sunday afternoon in Riverside Park. The river stretching itself out at our feet like a yawning cat. The slow lap of waves from vanished speedboats. The sky a sincere azure, the sun beating down so bright that we feel warm even in our T-shirts. All around us, the people of New York are walking their dogs [1], riding their bikes, jogging, rollerblading, skateboarding, walking, kissing or indulging in any one of the dozens of other pasttimes by which the advent of the Spring is routinely celebrated. My friends and I have our own form of worship. It's called 'leaning back in a park bench soaking up the sun' [2].

Out of the corner of my eye, I see two Cessnas winging their way over the river, looking like slow dragonflies. It occurs to me that what we need to make this afternoon perfect (other than a cooler full of ice cold beer) is a good dogfight. You know. Not the sort of thing where actual people get hurt / killed, of course, but the sort of thing you would find in Biggles, or in cartoons. The Rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, the explosion of flame in the front plane's right engine, the smoke billowing black and ugly from the plane as it somersaults in the air, plunges in a clean, breathless curve towards the water. The splash of it hitting the water, then the slow sinking of the wreckage, the tail the last to go, as though the drowning plane were some sort of exotic whale. The parachute blossoming over the Jersey skyline like a flower (I did say no one would get hurt, didn't I?). The dark streak of smoke across the sky, as menacing as a fake eyebrow. After all, what's a glorious day without a little gunfire?

Sometimes I scare myself.

P.S. A long-ish weekend in NYC later[3], I'm back. I know I still have a couple of posts due to finish off Rock week, and those will be up shortly, but I couldn't resist this one.

Notes:

[1] Why in God's name would anyone keep a dog in Manhattan? I mean, okay, so I don't see the point of keeping a dog in general (hell I don't see the point of getting married - and at least a wife is less likely to chew your slippers and pee all over your carpet - though with the arranged marriage market the way it is you never know) but why would you do this in Manhattan where most people have to take out a mortgage on their first born just to be able to afford a crummy little shoebox of a studio in Gramercy? You either end up with one of these tiny little lapdogs that look like rats on prozac, or with some monstrously big German Shepherd type dog that has to suffer the dumb misery of being locked away in a shoe-box sized apartment the bulk of its natural life. And these people call themselves animal lovers!

[2] Okay, so that's not a particularly imaginative name. But hey, it was supposed to be a lazy Sunday.

[3] A fun trip, that included, among other delightful activities, copious hours listening to Carnatic Vocal or watching Tarkovsky (it's so great to have friends who understand that spending three and a half hours watching soulful Russian angst is the perfect way to spend a fun Saturday); even more copious hours spent waiting to get a table at Cafe Lalo, wishing you had thought to wear your 'I'm here for the desserts, not because I'm some dumb-ass tourist in love with Meg Ryan' T-shirt (in the time it took us to get a table, we managed to a) grab a drink at a nearby bar b) walk all over the upper West side, checking out apartment buildings and c) have a relaxed sushi dinner; and the wait to get a table was the quick part, it was once we got in that the service really slowed down - a glacier could have got across the room to take our order faster than the wait staff); and the intense embarassment of sitting next to M while she explained to the staff at the nice Italian restaurant that yes, she did want to sully the finely crafted flavours of their delicious pasta by bathing it in marinara sauce, thus ensuring that she is now officially a target for the Cosa Nostra (MR: don't say I didn't warn you if you wake up one morning and find the collar of your favourite Brooks Brothers shirt hanging from your bedpost).

Categories: Whimsy