Book lovers say that they have an emotional bonding with their books and they don’t prefer digital book readers. I love books; I don’t read them much but I do love them and I am possessive about them. I don’t like people taking away my books and try to get them back if I can. Still, if all the books are taken away from me and instead I am given an e-book reader in which I can digitally store all the books that I have and all the books that I can possibly read or refer to I won’t hesitate even for a single second.
I agree that books have an old world charm and nothing can compare to sitting in a cozy corner reading a beautifully written book. But books waste lots of paper. millions of trees are chopped off everyday to publish books and newspapers and paper, of course. I wouldn’t like so many trees being cut just because you “love” the feel of a real book in your hands.
As far as I know digital e-book readers are not only very easy to use they are also eco-friendly. Right now they are quite costly but I hope very soon their prices will come down. They are constantly working on developing technology that will produce near paper-thin screens so that you will feel like as if you are holding a paper and not a digital appliance. They won’t strain your eyes and you will be able to roll them and put them in your pocket.
So all those great libraries should be emptied of the priceless books they contain? I would say yes. The books begin to rot after a certain period. If they are digitally saved they will be preserved for countless future generations unless an unforeseen catastrophe destroys them. I’m not saying that we should destroy the libraries; they can still be used for reading and researching which is not possible anywhere else.
In “The Last Mughal” William Dalrymple has very beautifully described the anguish Bahadurshah Zafar goes through when he is sent to exile. Although I’m not a landless soul my ambitions keep me away from getting too attached to the soil I dwell upon. I constantly tell myself that the place is not important, what you do, how you do, is. But still, the old smells, the bygone textures and the eddies of chimerical memories still come a visiting and make me want to dive into the valleys of yore. These are momentary reveries and I generally am more interested in things that are happening or about to happen, not that have happened. So my place is where I and my family reside for the moment.
Mai sent me Taslima Nasreen’s story (it’s published in Outlook but to read it there you need to log in first — so I’ve linked to another page with the entire story), and it really breaks your heart to know how attached she is to Bengal, and how betrayed she feels. The entire feeling is summed up here:
This is my beloved India , where I have been living
and writing on secular humanism, human rights and
emancipation of women. This is also the land where I
have had to suffer and pay the price for my most
deeply held and fundamental convictions, where not a
single political party of any persuasion has spoken
out in my favor, where no non-governmental
organization, women’s rights or human rights group has
stood by me or condemned the vicious attacks launched
upon me. This is an India I have never before known.
A person cannot live where she wants to live simply because she writes and expresses herself, and some people cannot digest what she expresses. As a state we have totally failed, as a mass ideology we have totally failed because what the foreign rulers did to us we are doing it to others. I personally don’t know how it feels to be uprooted because I have never felt rooted. First of all she never wanted to leave Bangladesh — her land — and finally when she found the same smell and texture of her ancestral soil in West Bengal she was again packed off to an alien environment. For what? Disagreeing? It’s really embarrassing for a country that such a treatment is meted out to a writer due to political and extremist reactions.
Technorati Tags: taslima nasreen
Just watched Arundhati Roy’s interview in the Devil’s Advocate and she makes Karan Thapar look like a clueless teenager. It’s amazing to see the man giving silly arguments in defense of Buddhadeb for orchestrating the ouster of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata. How does he sustain his job? Karan’s point of view is that the poor chief minister had no choice left, that in order to prevent many people from losing their lives he had to send her away and withdraw the security given to her.
Arundhati rightly says that it doesn’t require rocket science to understand that the West Bengal government raked up the entire Taslima Nasreen issue just to divert attention from the Nandigram atrocities; the controversial book for which the alleged protests happened has been in the bestsellers list for the past four years in Kolkata and there have been no large-scale protests in the state. Then why all of a sudden there is so much chest beating against the book or whatever she has been writing?
I think it is a matter of shame for the State government to send a writer away just because it cannot control the rioting mobs. Don’t they feel embarrassed that they had to cite this reason in order to send her away? Precisely for this reason, no matter how much praise Narender Modi gets from the right wing writers and intellectuals, I strongly dislike him: that dude is a walking failure; instead of feeling proud of his “achievements” he should be totally depressed and he should be a liability for the BJP instead of an asset, no matter how many elections he can win for the party. If you cannot control riots then you have no business calling yourself the Chief Minister of the state. If you cannot control the law and order situation then why do you have the law and order machinery in your hand — give the control to someone who has the guts to control the mobs. The more excuses you give the sillier you sound. So it is highly moronic of the CPI(M) to say that they had to send Taslima away in order to contain the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. A capable government would both provide unbreakable security to the threatened person and contain the elements trying to incite violence.
As usual when Karan Thapar talked about all the artists and writers whose freedom of expression has been curtailed by the protesting mobs he only mentioned those artists and writers who have been targeted by the so-called “Hindu fundamentalists”; there was, intentionally of course, no mention of writers and artists who have been threatened by Muslim fundamentalists.
It doesn’t actually matter who is threatened and by whom but freedom of expression should be a fundamental right and it should be protected by the state by all means because when people are afraid to express themselves just because there could be retaliatory actions the society ceases to grow intellectually. If you don’t like something written or painted, well too bad, you can’t just go and bash up the person and destroy his or her creations and if you do you should get the maximum punishment available in the country. If you have a problem with the creation you can either create something contrary or take some legal action.
Sadly and tragically our successive governments always give in to the pressure of the mob whether it is the Gujarat riots, or the 1984 riots, or the banning of “The Satanic Verses” or the exile of M. F. Hussein or the violent protests in Vadodara. Our lazy governments, whether at the Centre or in the States, are always either going for the easier option or doing something that satisfies their political agendas.
I like what Arundhati says somewhere in the interview when Karan Thapar asks her whether it was right that Taslima removed the “objectionable” parts from what she had written, “What choice does she have? She is under the protection of the mafia, the mob.” By the mafia, the mob, she meant the government.
Technorati Tags: taslima nasreen, west bengal, arundhati roy, nandigram
For a few minutes today I saw the modern version of “Great Expectations” in the form of a movie that they were showing on TV. They had probably changed the names of the characters because Miss Havisham had some other name in the movie. but the names of Estella and Pip hadn’t been changed. When the character of Miss Havisham sees that Pip is attracted towards Estella she remarks something like, “You already love her and she will cause you great pain.”
That set me thinking, is love all about pain? There was a time when I used to think like that. I thought there was no true love without excruciating pain, without anguish, and without longing. Maybe these notions of love were a result of all the literature I was reading at that time. Whether it was Dostoyevsky, or Thomas Hardy, or Garcia, or Salman Rushdie; they all seemed to be obsessed with characters that burnt in the inferno of love; the more vehemently the fires burnt, the greater heights their loves attained. It almost sounded like the glory of martyrdom when you die for your country with a smile on your lips.
Some people believe that love should be about eternal happiness and joy: “you are at the top of the world when you are in love”, This may be true in the rarest of the rare cases, but I think that kind of love, the love that brings you eternal joy is of the spiritual kind — without physical attraction and the cutting desire to be close to the loved one.
Sure, the cosmic joy manifests during the budding times of love. You feel like dying of happiness when the sparkles of reciprocation spread all over the firmament of your love. But after the initial thrust things slow down and the law of diminishing returns gets operational and eventually every kind of great love boils down to juggling with the quotidian matters of life like earning money, cooking food, taking care of the children and paying the bills. After all Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have spent their lives rebelling against their feuding families and making love. If they hadn’t died and if they had gotten married they would have had children and all the associated problems with them; other problems take precedence over love and romance as you settle down and start a family. But I think am talking about the bookish love.
A few months ago Alka and I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel in which they showed a couple who has spent more than 35 years studying elephant behavior in various African geographical locations. They have grown old now but they are always working alone in the limitless world of humanlessness. Had there not been prodigal love between them they wouldn’t have managed so many years with each other without meeting other human beings. Of course their common passion must have acted as a binding force but still you need something more than passion to stay together for such a long time and accomplish so much, together. How many moments of love and hardship they must have shared together. Now here we can say that it is a love of eternal joy and happiness (at least it looked like that ). One of my cousins told me last year that she was thinking of getting a job because both she and her husband were getting fed up of seeing each other in the same room; they needed to get away from each other for at least some time (they both work from home I think). Theirs was a love marriage. Has the love withered, or the great love was never there and it was just an illusion or some sociological compulsion to love somebody?
The love-related pain is of two kinds: of separation and of treachery. For a few months I have been trying to read “The Count of Monte Cristo”; it is a very thick book but still, had I been able to extract enough time out of my daily routine I would have been able to finish the book, but anyway that is another subject. The protagonist of the book is framed falsely by the people who are jealous of him both for his financial success and his success in obtaining the love of his life. He is imprisoned, and no doubt he is very sad when he is taken away from his lover. But his agony breaks all bounds of reasoning when he learns that in his absence his lover doesn’t wait for him and marries the person who had falsely framed him for treason (she doesn’t know that her present husband was responsible for the sad turn of events, but it hardly matters). So she also gets included in the list of people he wants to take revenge from. The treachery of love incites both hatred and pride. Pride, for being the one who loved till his or her last breath. Hatred, for being left for another. To understand this feeling, you have to go through it. Treachery of love turns some into exceptional poets and some into psychopathic murderers.
In today’s world separation due to societal pressures, at least in educated classes, is not a great factor. Here I would quickly refer to the case of the Muslim boy who recently died in Kolkata because he was in love with a rich girl whose parents were opposed to the alliance: the boy was allegedly murdered by the city police. So such things still happen in the society but for the argument let us assume that they are not a norm and they don’t happen in the civilized world. Ranjha (the hero of a Punjabi folklore love epic written by the great Sufi poet Bulle Shah) turned into an ascetic when due to societal differences he couldn’t spend his life with Heer and eventually they both died of separation. This is where things get mixed up a bit; what causes greater agony in love? The separation due to third-party intervention or the separation due to treachery of a partner? For instance Heer and Ranjha could have spent their lives peacefully thinking that even though they were not physically close to each other they still loved each other. A great amount of strength can be derived from the fact that a person in a faraway place loves you from the bottom of his or her heart. So did Heer and Ranjha died because they couldn’t live with each other, that they couldn’t mate? Obviously they would have had sex had they gotten married because after all theirs was not a motherly, or a fatherly, or a sisterly, or a brotherly, or a friendly love and neither was it the kind of love we have for Almighty. Many people take a leaf out of these legendary love stories and take drastic steps when they fail in love. But a love that prompts you to kill yourself is not actually love; it is a craving, an obsession that drives you out of your mind and you end up killing yourself. This is a mental illness and not a romantic emotion.
So what would be true love? I think true love wouldn’t depend on getting to live with the person you love. True love is just there, irrespective of the kind of reciprocation it generates. True love lets you live a productive life even if you “fail” in love. The best example is the parental love. Okay here I am not going on a tangent; I am using the example of parental love just to drive in a point. Parental love is a love that does not depend on a return. Your parents love you just because they are your parents; they keep loving you even if you have abandoned them to the extent of calling someone else your mother or father (of course there are exceptions). As long as you are healthy and prosperous they will be satisfied (assuming the other problems don’t bother them like money or health). This you cannot say about a lover. A separation or a shift in loyalty is bound to cause lots of pain and anger. The happiness becomes a joint affair when you are in love. Your lover loses the right to be happy with another person; he or she should only be happy with you. This feeling lasts as long as you don’t get another partner who is even better than the previous one. Do you call it love? Rather it is a circumstantial feeling; it changes with the change of circumstances. True love, in its real essence, doesn’t get affected with the change of circumstances. It doesn’t matter to the true love whether the other person lives with you or with someone else, or is happy with you or with someone else. A love that doesn’t depend on togetherness can be the cause of eternal joy I think.
Sandeep on his blog dissects an article published in The Hindustan Times written by some extremely biased (or clueless, a greater possibility) historian/writer named Ramachandra Guha. My analytical writing has been living in the dumps for quite some time but Sandeep’s take on Guha’s politically and culturally confused contemplations is quite engaging.
Recently Amardeep posted his reaction to a journalist’s outburst against bloggers. The journalist says at the beginning of his article:
Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. [ link ]
Amardeep rightly says that the writer hasn’t done his research properly and hasn’t read blogs that he should have really read before drawing such immature conclusions. I’m sure the writer didn’t read Sandeep’s blog.
Why do conventional writers and journalists (most of them, not all) hold blogging with contempt or downplay it as an elite fad? There was recently another article saying that bloggers were nothing but scavengers surviving on the toils of real journalists. Actually, they don’t understand blogging, and those who do, hate it or fear it.
A blog is a communication tool, a social media tool where people can express themselves and interact with hundreds and even thousands of their readers on a regular basis. It renders voice to people who had no voice until its advent. Anybody can today have a blog and share his or her opinions, philosophies, joys and concerns. Blogging empowers you to react immediately. Have some opinion on a newspaper article or a TV program or a movie, or a book or politician? Log into your blog account and share it with your readers. Just discovered a new recipe? Write it on your blog. Got a great video clip? Share it on your blog. Anything that can be digitally published, can be published on a blog.
Blogging initiates a two-way communication, and this is something feared by journalists, MSM people, politicians, and all those who thrive on the inability to react. In pre-blogging times the most you could do was send a letter to the editor if you read something nefarious like Guha’s article. It was up to the editor to publish your letter or whether to “edit” it or not. The Hindustan Times would certainly never publish Sandeep’s letter in its present form. And even if it were published, it would only be available to the HT readers. His blog post can be read by thousands of people from all walks of live. For instance, I read it just now and I have never in my life read HT.
Blogs also jump in when the mainstream media (MSM) fails to cover relevant news. Recently Mridula highlighted an incident where a laborer’s child died due to the callousness of IIT Kanpur authorities, and I too wrote about the incident. Taking a cue from different blogs the MSM too has started highlighting the shameful incident. Similarly when Manjunath was murdered the TV channels and newspapers woke up only after the incident had been widely discussed on various blogs. Bloggers have forced many multinational companies like Dell, Sony, etc. to mend their ways. Journalists, with their limited reach, would have never been able to achieve such feats.
Instead of criticizing blogging, journalists and writers should embrace blogging to reach a wider readership.
Here you can read diverse views on blogging.
Technorati Tags: journalists, msm, blogging
This is simply awesome:
Zulm-e ulfat ki hame log saza dete hain
Kaise nadan hain sholon ko hawa dete hain
I don’t know the name of the movie but what powerful lyrics! They mean:
People persecute us for the crime of love
How ignorant that are
They just stoke the fire
Simple, but how powerfully defiant. I wish I could write something like this.
Technorati Tags: lyrics, poetry, song, hindi song, urdu poetry
Update [June 19, 2007]: Rushdie knighthood ‘justifies suicide attacks’:
The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.
“This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ’sir’ title.”
Someone should kick their ass and tell these assholes that nothing justifies suicide attacks. If they are so much repulsed by Salman Rushdie or what he has written in his book, they should come up with a counter book. They should write their own version of The Satanic Verses and let the world know what was wrong with the original book. But then that’s a tougher task than blowing up people. Any moron can blow himself or the others up.
Update ends
Salman Rushdie has been knighted. And Iran obviously has a problem with that. Ah! The Muslims of the world have been downright insulted.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to grant Britain’s highest honor to Rushdie, who wrote the controversial novel “The Satanic Verses,” was an insult to the Muslim world.
“Awarding a person who is among the most detested characters in the Islamic society is obvious proof of anti-Islamism by ranking British officials,” said Hosseini during his weekly press conference.
Read the rest of this entry »
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