Salman Rushdie’s new book

The review of Salman Rushdie’s new book Shalimar the Clown can be read here (via Moorish Girl). The reviewer has made an interesting note at the end:

The Swedes won’t dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.

So true!

Bestial encounters I

Although I make it a point not to read more than one books at a time (out of respect for the book I’m reading), while reading The Brothers Karamazov, also I’ve started reading The Queen of Elephants (the book is missing at Amazon). Actually due to my often reluctant bowels, I end up spending lots of precious time sitting on the potty seat. I’ve decided to utilize the time constructively. Taking along The Brothers Karamazov would have been difficult due to its massive size, so I chose The Queen of Elephants as it is of a much leaner constitution. The book talks a lot about elephant conservation in India. In this post I’m not going to talk about the book though. I’m going to talk about the various calamitous animal encounters I have had in my life despite the fact that I have an inveterate love for the animal species.

The encounters are going to appear in series and the first part I have already published a long time back. Since it was more than one-and-a-half years ago, I’m posting it again:

When I was living with my grandparents (my dad’s parents) in Ambala, there used to be a big, open ground in front of the house. On the left side of the sandy ground there was a shallow pond where cows and buffaloes used to come to beat the heat. Since it’s the buffaloes that like to wallow in wet mud and water, cows used to mostly graze on the thick grass around the pond.

Across the pond there was a road – rarely used by automobiles and mostly used by bullock carts and cycle-rickshaws – and across the road there were some government quarters surrounded by very high concrete walls. The land around these walls, due to its low level and massive trees, used to be damper and cooler compared to other areas surrounding the pond. Most of the cows and bulls used to congregate there. Since they used to sit across the pond (the pond was at least 200 meters wide), and the buffaloes only came there when they were herded by their owners, our side of the ground used to remain relatively cattle-free. This meant we could play there without running the risk of getting trampled in an un-anticipated stampede.

At around eight in the evening, almost every day, I used to go to the empty ground and stand there for a while, beside the perpetually unlit electric pole. In those days I used to walk with a custom-made wooden stick with a broad base – it was much later when I started using the elbow crutches. Being a very small town (a former British army cantonment), it used to be quiet very early in the evening.

From where I stood, the houses, with their dim, yellow lights, looked forlorn and faraway. As usual, a tinge of loneliness impregnated my mood and I wished I was with my parents and sisters who were very far away, in Delhi. This used to be my way of getting in touch with them. Around that pole, enveloped in the darkness of nature, away from the houses and the noises, I could orchestrate my own fantasies of being in Delhi. That darkness provided me the isolation I craved for the whole day because I could never relate to people I stayed with. I preferred that isolation. I was alone, I was on my own. Away from all those noises and smells and surroundings that reeked of alienation and homelessness. Compared to them, I used to find the moon, the stars and the occasional shooting stars friendly and intimate. I knew they were not exclusive to that place. I knew exactly at that moment they shone over Delhi, too.

I had been standing there for more than twenty minutes. I knew that soon my grandmother would notice my absence and come outside to call me inside. About to turn around, I heard a rumbling. I felt vibrations beneath my feet and their intensity grew by milliseconds. Under the moonlight, I saw a big cloud of dust rising from the side of the pond. Amidst the deafening sound, I heard a few human screams and before I could realize what was happening, I saw tens of cows tempestuously running around me with their tails raised high. It was like the whole of nature had gone mad within seconds. It happened so suddenly that I didn’t even feel scared for a while. That’s it, I thought. Very soon a cow or a bull would run into me and I’ll be on the ground and then there would be just me and their hooves. Everything – the stars, the moon, the shooting stars, the loneliness, the isolation, the darkness, my parents and sisters, Delhi – everything would be gone.

I didn’t move an inch away from the pole. Whether it was instinctive or conscious, somehow I knew the cows were aware of the pole, and no matter how agitated they were no cow would collide with the pole. I would only fall if they just brush-passed from my side, throwing me on the ground with their bulging stomachs. Nonetheless, my body kept growing stiffer and stiffer with fear and I knew sooner or later I would loose balance and fall on my own.

Soon the entire ground was covered with a thick cloud of dust and I could only see the cows that came very close. There was only this numbing sound of their hooves hitting the ground mixed with their fierce breathing and a slight tremble in the ground.

Then something happened that I’d always remember. I felt a wet nudge on my elbow. A black cow stood by my side – on my right side, on the opposite side of the houses. She couldn’t stand still because the other stampeding cows kept brushing against her from everywhere. After a few seconds she moved forward and came and stood in front of me. Her stomach touched my body and I was sandwiched between the pole and that cow. Is she planning to crush me? I thought. Being very small, my face rubbed against her stomach. Her warm smell filled my nostrils and it became hard to breathe. I had never been that near to a cow, although all our neighbors had at least one cow each. I wanted to push her away but didn’t want to make her angry. The other cows kept pushing her or bumping into her but she never moved even an inch. She had either completely blocked my view or I had closed my eyes – I could only hear the running cows

I don’t know for how long we stood there. Finally the sound subsided and within a couple of moments, the only sound I could hear was my grandmother and Badri Chacha (our elderly neighbor) screaming in the same pitch. Since it was dark and there was lots of dust in the air, they could not see us.

Suddenly I heard Babdri Chacha’s exclamation, “There you are Kali! I thought you had run away with other cows.” His face appeared above the cow’s back and then I noticed the cow had a broken rope around her neck. “And bibi here’s your grandson too, standing behind Kali, Allah!!” he screamed in the same vein.

“Kali?!” I silently exclaimed.

He hushed the cow towards the houses and stood beaming in front of me while I saw the round figure of my grandmother appearing amidst the settling dust. She was saying so much with such a speed that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I simply collapsed when she hugged me. When I came back to my senses, Badri Chacha was carrying me on his shoulder and a small crowd, along with my crying grandmother, was following us. The cow quietly stood under the tree in front of his house, looking at the procession with her shiny dark eyes. How couldn’t I recognize Kali? I thought.

I hope they don’t think I’m dead, I thought. “Kali saved me,” I said loudly when he placed me on a cot in front of our house. Everybody surrounded us while my grandmother sat beside me and tried to clean my hair and face with her chunni.

Badri Chacha proudly told everybody how he had found Kali standing in front of me. She had somehow broken her tether and ran to me. Many rushed to her to pat her back and agitated her in the process. She would have run or hit someone had not Badri Chacha grabbed her rope in time. He hugged her while my grandmother profusely thanked her as if she were talking to a human.

Nobody had an idea what had incited those cows. Plans were drawn to get those stray cows removed next morning. I didn’t want that to happen, and I knew by morning they would not have (accept for my grandparents of course) the required motivation.

When everybody had gone inside, I quietly went to Kali. Badri Chacha was sitting in front of his house and smoking his hukka. He saw me standing near Kali and shook his head, grinning. I touched her head when she stretched her neck. In the darkness, I could only see the outline, and her big, shiny eyes.

“Thank you Kali,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you there. It was dark and there were so many cows.”

Many a time I had chatted with Badri Chacha while he fed Kali. Sometimes he let me feed her while he stood on guard. Kali was a new cow. He had bought her at a cattle fair a couple of weeks ago so nobody knew what nature she had.

She snorted gently and tapped the ground. Since cows can be unpredictable, I had never been allowed to go near her or for that matter any other cow without an adult’s presence. After spending some time with her, I walked back home. Before going inside, I turned back and looked at the pole that was standing in the middle of the ground. Then I looked up and saw the moon and the stars. Knowing my grandmother, I knew my quiet evenings were gone for at least a few weeks.

About consciousness

Consciousness is a state of being aware. Consciousness is a state where you can make decisions based on certain influences. You are conscious when you are aware of, you are cognitive of your surroundings, you are aware of your own thoughts, and you are aware of the implications of yours and others’ actions.

It is believed in many thought segments that consciousness takes place at the soul level, and not at the biological, the intellectual level. Biology and the intellect go as far as our life, but soul transcends the boundary of life and death — it is independent of the body. This implies that consciousness too is independent of the body. A good example is, your consciousness of your own existence. Assuming you are of an averagely sound mind, your perception of yourself relative to your circumstance is mostly well-defined. At any stage you can view yourself from a distance and be conscious of your presence. Of course this consciousness is clouded by your own knowledge of yourself in particular and the world in general. You view yourself according to the sum total of your achievements and failures, and how you evaluate yourself vis-? -vis the others you take into account.

Consciousness is also about taking decisions. You may call it an “inactive” consciousness if decisions are absent from the event of consciousness. Merely being conscious of something doesn’t matter much. What matters is, how you handle the ifs of your consciousness. For instance, if you are conscious of the dangers lurking around, you try to place yourself in a safer environment. Then this becomes “active” consciousness. This active consciousness is present in all living beings, down till the single-celled organisms. Animals are conscious of their hunger (you may call it “instinct”), they are conscious of finding the food, and if they find the food they are conscious of eating it. Consciousness in humans, on the other hand, is manifest at a more evolved level in the sense that we are conscious about the consciousness itself and then we act or modify our act accordingly. Our consciousness is more piquantly decisive.

So is nature conscious? Or does it act upon certain laws set forth at the inception of existence? This could be interesting because it is not yet known. We only know nature within the streams of our current knowledge, and our current knowledge tells us that nature is governed by certain laws. Why does a storm occur? We know it happens when the wind moves from a high-pressure area to a low pressure area with great force. It always happens this way, it has been happening this way since eternity and it happens across the universe. Does nature have a say in it? What if some day nature decides that the wind shouldn’t flow according to the pressure variations? What if the wind goes from low-pressure to high-pressure (I know there might be no wind to go anywhere in the low-pressure area — it’s hypothetical, just to make a point), or neither to low-pressure nor to high-pressure but in some other, random direction? Well, in such a conscious nature the universe itself might collapse because it can only survive due to certain, “unconscious” laws that it has to follow in order to survive. Nature is a colossal conglomeration of well-defined laws. If it is conscious, nature at best is conscious in an “inactive” state.

For all we know, consciousness might be shaped as many times as there are conscious beings alive at this very moment, wherever they are, in whatever part of the universe (or some other place or dimension if it exists) because we all see the world according to our own views. And herein lies the beauty of consciousness because this fact renders it limitless, infinite, and precisely this is the reason why philosophers throughout the history have never been able to come up with a concrete definition of consciousness.

Books, a long time back

As I learned to read quite late (well after my 10th year), my thirst to read books had reached a prodigal proportion by the time I could flip pages and understand what beautiful thoughts were contained in there. I can still remember the first few books that I read. The first book that comes to my memory was a Hindi book of short stories for children — Bahut din huai, which means, A long time back. There were a few stories from The Mahabharata including the one in which the Kauravas hatch a plan to burn the Pandavas alive. One story was of Gautam Buddha. I found the book so fascinating that I read it many times. All the stories seemed beautiful, ancient, and hence, melancholic. I was directly interacting with people who had existed thousands of years ago. They were mythical, a few of them were even demonic, but they instilled in me a craving to plunge into those times and be with them. Still when I think of that book, I’m imbrued with surrealistic longing.

The next book that comes to my mind is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was read (translated in Hindi) to the class by a substitute teacher with a phenomenally theatrical perspicacity. It was an abridged version of the original classic, but the macabre tale was narrated in such a spectacular manner that the teacher who had come to take care of our class for just twenty days ended up spending her next twenty years in our school: we just wouldn’t let any other teacher teach us. So naturally it was the first book I took from my class library (we had miniature libraries in individual classes) once I was capable of reading it. Some day I’ll write about our class library. I’ll also some day write about the teacher mentioned above, because it was she who forcibly made me read English books during my various recalcitrant phases.

Since I started reading when I was quite old and since I could already speak Hindi, and to an extent English with some degree of ease, learning to read was a rapid process. Within six months I was reading detective novels in Hindi and The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys and other books in English. I no longer had to pretend reading books (another story) but could actually read them.

Those were the times of detective pocket books in Hindi. Pulp fiction authors did a brisk business writing two to three books almost every month. They were mostly hackneyed, run-of-the-mill sorts but I devoured them like anything. In fact the seeds of writing were sowed during the lazy June afternoons when everybody in the house slept and I read the detective novels under the infernal shadow of the tree in front of our balcony. There was another friend of mine who briefly shared with me the passion for reading and writing but as he grew up, he not only developed other friendships, he also abandoned the literary passion. Together we almost planned around fifty ineffably bloodcurdling plots that would have revolutionized the then contemporary detective fiction genre.

It was very easy to get new books to read. We could easily rent the books at 25-paise-a-day and I could read two books in a day sometimes especially during the holidays.

Sadly, these days I observe children as well as adults least interested in reading books. People wrongly attribute this insouciance towards books to busy lifestyle and the television. I think this is not purely correct. Books require a basic level of intelligence that lacks these days and this amply gets manifested in the crass plagiarism of old Hindi songs. To understand books, you need to know words and to know words, you need to invest your time in learning them. You also need patience. These two attributes seem to be commodities in scant supply. Books also require internal silence that again is missing amidst us.

My current reading

Right now I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky — one of my favorite authors. At this moment it reads like a religious discourse on morality and Christianity, and with 1000+ pages, I have no idea how I’ll write about this book. There is another book that solely talks about how this book should be interpreted!

For sex-related problems

In the morning while going through the newspaper I came across the following helplines in case you have sex-related problems:

• NAZ FOUNDATION
  Phone: 26563929
• SUMAITRI
  Phone: 23710763
• SANJIVANI
  Phone: 26864488, 24311918
• HELPING HAND
  Phone: 9811009227

The last one — Helping Hand — particularly caught my fancy :-).

Where are the voices?

For months now the acclaimed Bangladeshi authoress Taslima Nasreen has been trying to get Indian citizenship and so far has gotten no positive response from the Indian government. In an article (the website, sadly, doesn’t like the Mozilla browser) in the Hindi newspaper Denik Jagran, Balbir Punj of the BJP has rightly asked what sort of a secularism is it? Although he is a Jansanghi pseudo-intellectual and has his own political agenda in raking up the issue, he has a point.

This reminds me, where’s the writers’ lobby? Where are the crusaders who cry horse over the human rights issues? Is everybody taciturn because Ms. Tasleem is not liked by the Muslims and anything anti-Muslim is not politically correct in the current socio-political scenario? Some prominent activists were conspicuous in the capital recently when a Muslim professor was allegedly targeted by the State.

Well, this is not a question of being pro-Muslim or anti-Muslim: whatever is right is right, whatever is wrong is wrong. It’s a shame that the so-called intellectuals in the country have failed to rise to the occasion.

Tango Charlie

Day before yesterday we saw Tango Charlie — one of the very few genuine movies made on the lives of terribly under-appreciated Indian soldiers. Although there is no dearth of soldier-centric movies but most of them indulge in rhetoric and jingoism and portray soldiers as either viciously evil or inimitable martyrs. They are never portrayed as normal human beings living normal lives.

This movie is about a young soldier (played by Bobby Deol) with the code name Tango Charlie. The entire movie is in sort of a flashback, through the diary of Tango Charlie that is mischievously read by the two rescue pilots (played by stiff Sanjay Dutt and Sunil Shetty) who extract him from the snow, badly injured.

The movie begins with the posting of Tango Charlie in the dangerously treacherous wilderness of the far eastern Indian states where the Bodo militia have waged a war against the Indian government. This is a ruthless terrain where every mistake can cost you your life, and death can be so terrible that you begin to dread your next breath. The Bodos are shown as ruthless killers who don’t think twice before killing even their own people. Here he meets his officer (played by Ajay Devgan) and they both develop a long-lasting bond.

They show some disturbing graphics: the Bodo leader disembowels the captured soldier (who is in his teens), blasts both the knees with bullets and leaves him tied to the trunk of the tree. The soldier wails in pain, but the other soldiers cannot ease him because they know the Bodos are waiting to ambush them. It was heart-wrenching. In fact they were so realistic that at one point we wanted to stop the movie and see some other movie. But this is what an average soldier faces, and this is why I detest nationalistic violence. The character of Ajay Devgan very rightly says that when soldiers die during such combats, there is short news in some remote column of the newspaper — people read the news and then move on to other stuff. Our soldiers have to walk on a two-edged sword — they not only have to deal with a ruthless enemy, they are also targeted by the human rights activists. I remember an incident that was narrated to us by our fauji uncle. He had been posted in Nagaland. Once they found bodiless heads of three Sikh soldiers hanging from the tree branches. The long hair of their heads had been tied to the branches by the Naga militants. The entire platoon went mad with rage. At that point it would have been insane to tell them to practice discretion and not orchestrate a retributive bloodbath.

Fortunately the movie is neither Pakistan-centric nor China centric, although in the end there is a Fidayeen attack. There is no soldier dying while trying to hoist a flag chanting Bharat Mata ki jai!. Most of the time they are dealing with the internal strife like the Godhra riots, the Naxalite problem in West Bengal and some south Indian terrorists. The dialogues are very simple and down to earth. The village life of Tango Charlie seems clichéd with his jocular friends and a comedian future father-in-lay but all in all, the romantic scenes are unpretentious as well as cute. I’m not aware of how the movie did in theatres but we really liked it.

Fakirs in Punjab

This post here has some whacky profiles of fakirs in Punjab. Visiting fakirs isn’t a latest fad elevated to the limelight by tens of religion channels doing the rounds. At least as far as I remember, fakirs and sadhus have been conducting brisk business since the time immemorial.

Even I contemplate becoming a sadhu sometimes: they are so rich and so many rich women visit them.

Living To Tell The Tale

By Gabriel García Márquez

Finally I completed Living To Tell The Tale yesterday and I must say it ended abruptly. It might disconcert a less aware reader who does not know that the book is a part of a series of autobiographical books Garcia plans to get published. If you don’t practice a little patience you might cast the book aside and move on to some other book. I remember going through the same experience when I was reading Albert Camus’s The Plague. Again and again I abandoned reading it; it took me some two months to get interested in it but once I did, it was worth my while all till the last page.

Contrary to what I had mentioned in a previous post, I hadn’t lost the book. In fact it was lying right in the drawer of the table where I work. I took it as a good sign and resumed reading the book with a renewed vigor. “Renewed vigor” doesn’t mean I embarked upon a marathon reading binge and devoured the book in two days. It took me more than three weeks to complete the remaining part.

If I haven’t mentioned it already, the story begins with Garcia’s journey with his mother to his native place where his mother wants to sell the old house to get some money. Garcia calls this journey historic because the idea of working on a novel came to him during this journey. Garcia was so poor that he had to borrow the fare from a friend who could only give him 6 pesos of the 10 pesos he had asked for.

In the fermenting heat of the Colombian countryside they both travel from Barranquilla (where he worked for the newspaper ‘El Heraldo’) over a putrid waterway to the parental village of Aracataca, and hence moves forward the narrative. Although the novel has been written in typical Garcia style with his penchant for quixotic depiction of (‘this thing had a lifelong impact…’ appear quite too often throughout the breath and length of the novel) plebeian events, it is quite different from his other books I have read. It reads less of a novel and more of a personal journal. There are too many names and too many places and too many incidents that might seem extraordinary to him but trite to a reader. But then of course if it is Garcia even his visit to the toilet is something worth reading just for the sake of reading a phenomenal writer of our creativity-starved times.

Garcia was born in March 1927 to Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio, who had courted telegraphically (if I remember correctly) for years and then tied the knot against the wishes of Luisa’s family.

Garcia brings up his overwhelming poverty with a stark sense of casualness again and again as poverty dominated his way of life till the end of the novel. His family was so poor that meeting both the ends used to be difficult sometimes. But he doesn’t get emotional anywhere in the novel. Only at one place I feel an indifferent despondency:

I realized only then that I had not had anything to eat or drink since my meagre breakfast in Barranquilla. My legs were giving way because of hunger, but I would have been content if the landlady had taken my suitcase and allowed me to sleep in the hotel that one night, even if it was on the armchair in the sitting room. The watchman laughed at my innocence.

The argument seemed so legitimate to me that I sat on a bench in the Parque de Bolívar, on the other side of the street, and waited for my friends to arrive, not bothering anyone.

Garcia, as most writers, was an avid reader. He would hire cheap rooms, even in brothels, to read great books by great writers even at the time when he hadn’t seriously decided to become a writer. In fact this almost pushed me to the precipice of literary depression: if such a great writer read so much just to understand and learn how various writers wrote, how can I ever claim that I can write sufficiently well? He had an amazing environment to blossom into the person he became. Despite the interminable poverty (which sometimes seems inexplicable, especially when he wrote so much for the newspaper and the magazine he worked for), he single-mindedly pursued his passion for reading and writing.

It was a sexually, hyperactive society where Garcia grew up. His father had children from all the places, and even Garcia himself defied death in order to satisfy the nocturnal cravings of his groins. He writes about visiting brothels and sleeping with prostitutes as casually as going to the nearest joint and buying soda ice-cream. No wonder he had had two bouts of gonorrhoea by the time he was 23. Once he almost got shot by the husband of a lady with whom he was caught in bed in his birthday suit.

There were so many people at that time who were passionate about poetry, literature and journalism. Most of his close friends were journalists and writers and they often got together at various places to discuss prodigal poets and writers such as Naruda, William Faulkner, Homer, etc. It almost sounds like the classical era of Socrates and Plato when young men congregated in the evening to talk about philosophy, religion, economy, literature and politics. They didn’t have money to eat and cloth themselves, but they had plenty of literature to read and good songs to sing and carouse.

The socio-political environment of Colombia left an indelible mark on Garcia’s personality. The country seemed to be in a perpetual turmoil and this too was a reason why the circle of poverty was impossible to breach. More than 200,000 people perished during the long civil war. Government censorship never allowed Garcia and his friends to write the way they wanted to write and this taught them an extremely valuable lesson: convey your message even if it appears in an expurgated form. He nowhere glorifies his inner fears (he suffered from debilitating nightmares and writer’s blocks) and angst but while chronicling the memoirs, he almost segues into the realms of the unreal, and then he cannot resist the magical realism he is known to have pioneered. Many of his memories consist of people who seem to be the chimerical phantoms of a nebulous world. Amazingly he can recollect almost all the names of those people.

He worked resiliently and with great determination to earn a living as a writer, and this is amplified here:

I did not earn a centavo except with the typewriter, and this seems more meritorious than one might think, because the first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.

The unpredictable torrents of his vicissitudes took him from one place to another, but wherever he landed, he carved out a place for himself.

Although you won’t enjoy the book as much as you must have enjoyed his other books that intermittently dabble with exotic surrealism, if you really want to get an insight into the tumultuous life of this exceptional writer, I highly recommend it.

My intention here is not to summarize the entire book. These are just my thoughts — random as well as organized. Had I read more books (I’m trying to do that now) my review would have been more analytical.