Reflections at a Funeral

Reflections At A Funeral

The Fading Away Of A Once-Great Lingo




March 22, 2005

This morning I walked with Violeta along Lopez Cotilla through the used-book
district. I leave shortly for ten days in Ecuador and wanted something to read
on the trip. In the small English section of one stall I found a serviceable
trove: Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three, the Norton
Anthology of English Literature, Ernest Van Den Haag’s The Jewish Mystique, and
Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. These set me back by twenty-two
dollars.

Any reader of my age and reasonable intelligence might have bought the same
books. None of them is demanding. I had read the Kipling before high school,
and Berlin Diary in high school, but neither since. Yes, Shirer requires a
sophisticated vocabulary, a first-name familiarity with sentences of more than one
clause, and an attention span measured in units greater than milliseconds. In
aggregate these were once known as “being able to read.” They were expected
of the moderately cultured.

Anyone familiar with today’s young must be painfully aware that few can, or
would, read these books. For one thing, they are too impatient, perhaps having
been shaped by the flick-flick-flick of television to the point that lengthy
concentration is beyond them. For another, they lack the indefinable but
crucial background that comes of having read hundreds of books. You learn to read
fluently by reading much. You learn to appreciate a short story by having read
short stories. They haven’t.

And finally, they don’t know English. They don’t know what an indirect
object is, or the subjunctive, or why. They do not know that a word that looks
vaguely like another may mean something quite different, or that the finer shades
of meaning have their uses. They do not know that sentences have structure,
and that there is a reason for it. Without these bits of understanding they
cannot enjoy, or even notice, the language in which a story is told.

Worse, they have been taught that careful literacy is not democratic, and
that the value of a book springs from the ethnicity of the author. I am aware of
no other civilization that has regarded benightedness with irredentist
longing.

If I were to make a list of the best books I have read, and would recommend
to adults and children alike, I would begin with Winnie the Pooh and The House
at Pooh Corner. It would not be because I am in arrested development, though I
may be. It would be because the English is masterly, the limning of a magical
world adroit, and Shepherd’s drawings exquisite. But to enjoy them you need
to appreciate the language (and not be too full of yourself).

I would follow Pooh with The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass, Stalky and Company and both Jungle Books, Tom Sawyer
and Huck Finn, and The Lord of the Rings. At this point we reach the realm of
purely adult books, of which there are many thousands of excellent examples,
almost none of them written recently. The young who have read the books
suggested in the foregoing, and gorged indiscriminately on whatever the library
offers, will be ready for other fare.

Instead they will watch the Disney versions—grinning, shallow, degraded, and
stupid.

We have lost so much. When was the last time a short story appeared in a
magazine? Perhaps Harper’s or the Atlantic prints one from time to time. I don’t
know. The writing in these became so tedious that I stopped reading them. Yet
once short stories were everywhere, sparkling, varied, idiosyncratic and
sometimes eccentric, crafted by writers who knew what they were doing. And they
were read by readers who knew what they were doing. Gone. Both. Or going, at any
rate.

Poetry? Once it was vastly enjoyed by cultivated people who knew how to read
it. Of course it was produced by people who knew how to write it. Today there
is almost nothing, and what there is, shouldn’t be. How is it that the United
States, a nation of three hundred million people, with far more avenues to
learning than existed in 1600—cannot belch up a single Edmund Spenser? The entire
nation is literarily inferior to thirty men in the reeking, disease-ridden
nightmare that was Elizabeth’s London. How is this?

America was not always so. I just ordered a collection of Dorothy Parker’s
poetry and short stories, chiefly for the verse. Critics say that she hasn’t “
worn well.” I suspect that the explanation is otherwise, that critics are
idiots. This is always a good bet. She can make the language jump through hoops,
say exactly what she wants to say crisply and originally. (“What fresh hell is
this?”)

Today?

Even trivial literature used to be pretty good. In high school I discovered
Thorne Smith’s Night Life of the Gods. When it was written (copyright 1931) I
suspect that readers were expected to recognize the play on Twilight of the
Gods; it is the sort of thing that one picked up through wide and voracious
reading. Recently I got a copy through an out-of-print seller to read again. I
think it the best of his books (others being Topper, Skin and Bones, and The
Glorious Pool).

Great literature Nightlife isn’t. It is however light, amusing, imaginative,
unpretentious, and written by a writer—an uncommon circumstance these days. He
never lapses into the clanking solecisms that many professors today never
lapse out of. He uses the language instead of walking over it. I can read him
without wanting to kill something. It is froth, but good froth. This we almost no
longer have.

Is there something about modern life that makes impossible both writing and
reading beyond the level one associates with drug dealers? The same thing seems
to be happening in the other English-speaking countries. The British once
wrote graceful and polished prose, but they are barely better than Americans now.
Is it that both countries have shifted from aristocratic to proletarian
ideals? That no esthetic enterprise can survive the imposition of vulgarity by
television?

My view is that the best have at last become afraid of the worst, have lost
all confidence in themselves. A couple of times in Smith’s novels, a character
misuses a word, whereupon another corrects him. I recall that such minor
policing was common in the Fifties. The civilized seemed to regard English as
public property that the well-bred should treat with respect.

Can you imagine today saying to someone, “Lying down, not laying down”? The
consequence would be an explosion of anger in which all about would agree that
such elitism was most foully reprehensible. Onward, upward, and back into the
trees.


http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm.

Last Wish for Merchant

Last wish to come home to Bombay
AMIT ROY


London, May 25: The body of Ismail Merchant, who died today at a hospital in
London, aged 68, will probably be taken to India, a close friend said.
“That was his wish,” the friend added.
One half of the famous Merchant Ivory film partnership, which produced such
quality movies as Howard’s End, A Room With A View and Remains Of The Day,
Merchant maintained characteristically elegant apartments in Bombay (he
could never bring himself to call the city of his birth Mumbai), London and
New York.
An urbane, cultured man, who delighted in cooking for his friends — often he
charmed his leading ladies and men into taking modest fees by giving them a
meal he had prepared himself — Merchant was equally at home in India,
Britain and the US.
At heart, though, he considered himself a Bombay boy. Merchant was born
Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman on December 25, 1936, in Mumbai.
It was as producer that he was most successful. When he turned his hand to
directing, as he did with The Mystic Masseur (he did the impossible by
persuading V.S. Naipaul to give him the film rights to his novel) and Cotton
Mary, the results were modest. But he did have one success as a director —
In Custody. Most recently, he was directing his latest venture, The White
Countess, which he had shot in China.
He died in a London hospital today, surrounded by family and close friends,
his London office said.
Merchant and James Ivory, an American, made some 40 films together and won
six Oscars — four for best picture — since forming their famous partnership
in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Their hits — especially E.M. Forster adaptations like A Room With A View and
Howard’s End — helped revive the public’s taste for well-made, emotionally
literate period drama.
In an interview last year, Merchant said the films worked because they
captured great stories.
“It should be a good story — speak about a time and place that is
permanent,” he said. “It should capture something wonderful with some great
characters whether it’s set in the past or in the future.”
Fellow film producer Lord Puttnam said Merchant was an “extraordinary
talent”.
“What’s gone is a major character and a unique film producer — someone who
completely defined independence in the film industry,” he said.
Merchant has lived and worked for most of his life in the West, completing
his education at New York University where he earned his masters degree in
business administration.
Merchant’s first film was a theatrical short, The Creation Of Woman, which
was nominated in 1961 for an Academy Award and was an official entry from
the US in the Cannes Film Festival that year.
En route to the festival, Merchant met James Ivory, who agreed to form a
partnership, Merchant Ivory Productions, to make English language theatrical
features in India for the international market.
The Householder was Merchant and Ivory’s first feature- length film and the
first Indian film to be distributed worldwide by a major American company,
Columbia Pictures.
It was followed by more Indian features, all in some way funded wholly or in
part by an American studio, including Shakespeare Walla (1965), The Guru
(1969), and Bombay Talkie (1970).
The first feature film he directed, In Custody, based on a novel by Anita
Desai, and starring Shashi Kapoor, was filmed in Bhopal, India, and went on
to win national awards from the Government of India for Best Picture, Best
Actor, Best Costume and Best Production Design.
His second directing feature, The Proprietor, starred Jeanne Moreau,
Jean-Pierre Aumond and Christopher Cazenove and was filmed on location in
Paris.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050526/asp/nation/story_4788197.asp

Found In Translation

the Short Form Option Agreement does not include the date and place of publication of the original literary work. Can you provide this information urgently so that we may complete those blanks, with Cristina's permission?

Journal of a Delusional Widow

JOURNEYS
Excerpts From The Journal Of A Delusional Widow
The runner-up essay in the fourth Outlook/Picador India Non-Fiction Competition, in which the protagonist takes the picture anyway, though, later, she can't remember if it was really like that; blurry and inconstant...

TISHANI DOSHI


I. The Boy Monk


At the top of a hill, in the Chemry monastery, darkness is becoming light. In a large prayer room where the monks sit on benches and meditate, there’s a single shaft of light coming in through the crack in the ceiling. It is a broad shallow room, full of reconciliation. The light falls into it, hits the boy’s face, spreads outward. He wears prayer beads around the neck of his maroon robes, chants like the rest of them.

The boy monk has been up early, I can tell because there’s still sleep in the corners of his eyes. He looks exactly as he did when he first appeared to me after Cyrus Mazda was found at the bottom of the ocean with the body of a naked girl. I want to tell him that all the light in the room is concentrated on his face, something Cyrus told me the morning after our first night together, at breakfast in a roadside restaurant. But it would mean bringing up the city, and Cyrus, and things that never really belonged to me; things I had come to forget about.

The boy monk belongs here with these peaceful vibrations and hypnotic thangkas, this starkness of air. He alone is illuminated, sitting with a halo of light around his perfectly shaped head. He does not see me kneeling by the open door with the morning fallen around me like bits of fragile broken butterfly wing. I haven’t learned how to dress for the mountains. I wear bulky jackets, gloves, woolly caps, socks, heavy boots. I cover every inch of skin and am still cold. I’ve scoured the markets in Leh looking for things that will keep me warmest, not bothering to bargain with the shopkeepers because I’m in love with their faces, just as I’m in love with the boy monk. I want to tell them that I’ve come from the sea and am a stranger in their high place of snow peaks, glaciers and valleys.

I wake every morning with pinpricks at my temples to see the sun rise from between the mountains exactly like the pictures I used to make in kindergarten: the mountain, a giant improbable M, and in between, a careful semi-circle of orange-yellow crayon-streaked light extending out of the picture onto the wooden table. I watch the mountains change from grey to pink to startling white, getting sharper and sharper as the light increases. It seems they are watching me too, expecting me to be able to move them, scale them, jump and conquer them. The overwhelming size of them makes me wistful for the petty foothills of grass, the landscape of my own pictures with a solitary farmer and his oxen ploughing his paddy fields, where the hills are always brown, small, climbable; not the Himalayas, not wintered.

Outside the monastery it is bright. The day has come down with big swooping arms to cast light onto the barren fields, the mountains beyond, the tops of houses. I want to be there now, in those mountains in the distance of Stok, where it is all snow-strewn, snow-capped, snow-laden; somewhere so far and remote I’ll be able to lose all my ideas. Instead, I start walking slowly back to the jeep, leaving the boy monk to his prayers. I must get into town where Sid is waiting to take me on my first expedition.

Bahadur, the driver, is standing with his back to the monastery rolling pebbles in the palm of his hand. Before walking over to him, I wrap my scarf tighter around my neck and turn to take one last look at the boy monk to make sure he’s still there. He has risen and is walking toward me. He appears to be floating across the floor all the way outside to where I’m standing, watching him. The other monks are lost in prayer, they don’t hear him leave.

I know the boy monk has come for penance because he woke up dreaming of me. He has come to soften his body and cleanse his mind.

"Sister," he says, "I dreamed of you last night.

"I know," I say.

"You have come to ask me something sister? You’ve been wanting to ask me something for a long time. Don’t come to me for guidance. I can give you none."

"How did you come to have such a sweet face?" I ask.

The boy monk smiles. He is not shy or baffled or uncomfortable. "Sister, I am your means to paramita. Paramita is to cross over to the Other Shore."

I want to tell him my reasons for coming here, how I have searched for him everywhere and found only the hollow empty resonance of maroon air to swallow me. I want him to explain things to me, because there is all this soaring inexplicable need.

"Consider your body sister," he says, still smiling. "Think of its impurity. Think of misuse. Knowing that both its pain and its delight are alike causes of suffering, how can you indulge in its desires? That is what you have come to find out about, isn’t it? Desire and suffering and action."

There is a small shard of dawn still inside me. I’ve been saving it especially for this. I’ve been carrying it around in my breast. Not just this morning’s dawn—all the mornings since I arrived here. I’ve been collecting their warmth, the rose hues, so I can save myself.

"What are you telling me?" I ask. "Why are you telling me this, here, outside this room of reconciliation? See the way the light shines down on your face? See how it is only me that sees you, how they cannot see me, those close-eyed monks chanting their prayers. How is it they don’t see me? How is it that when I’m alone I see you, I hear and speak to you, and now I can even touch you?"

"You see this light sister?" the boy monk says, words coming off his lips like waves. "Make of yourself a light. Consider your body. Consider the mind. Consider the light. The whole world of delusion is nothing but a shadow caused by the mind."

"You are not a shadow," I scream, thinking by now the monks must have raised their heads. Surely I have shattered something: glass, window, wooden shaft. "You cannot be a shadow," I say again, softer.

The boy monk turns to leave me and goes back to the room, to the monks and the tanghkas on the wall. He is not a shadow, he is not real, he is not unreal. I dreamed of him last night too. I didn’t tell him, but he appeared in my sleep; dark and colourful, and it felt like a love affair. He had spoken of the mind; how powerful it was to shape and mould. "Our one chance of purity," he’d said. Of becoming Buddha. It’s the same mind from which maya is born. Delusion. The same mind from which the world of enlightenment begins.

I’d woken up in my empty bed with the shape of his body beside me.

***

II. The Panorama Guest House


The first morning I wake up with a headache and dreams of tiger trekking in Patagonia, landing amidst bald mountains covered in patchy snow, furious wind.

Sid had warned me of the dreams. He’d given me all the precautions for altitude sickness. No moving, no walking, nothing more than necessary, small sips of water. We are 11,500 feet high up in Leh. We’ll go for a slow walk later in the morning to get some air into me. At the top of the hill there will be a group of Japanese tourists trying to figure out the exact angle at which to capture the entire stupa into their camera frame.

After Sid leaves I feel so tired I think my legs will open out and be sucked into the ground. The room is small with two single beds, white sheets, and warm red blankets rolled up at the bottom. Extra blankets, extra cost. Don’t forget to unplug the electric blanket. There are no pictures on the walls. White walls. Two chairs and a small round table by the window. A whole wall of complete glass with white wooden panels.

Outside there are mountain ranges I don’t yet know the names of, brown terraced lands, two hill donkeys settled in the mud, rows of poplars and willow, a lake. There’s so much light coming in through the curtains, through the windows. Sun-drenched windows.


The woman I call Kim knocks on the door with kava, the Kashmiri tea that people drink here with hints of dried fruit and cinnamon. The women of the Panorama Guest House treat me like a child. Here’s your kava, here’s your lunch, here are your clean clothes, here, what have you done with your skin? They come with questions, looking at my bottles of creams and ointments to preserve the moisture in the skin. Their faces are wizened and streaked with lines, beautifully charged pink cheeks. None of this will do, they say, looking at my city accoutrements. They know I have come to forget. They are not even mildly curious of my life or the place I belong to. It’s the same with Sid. It’s as if they know they live in the most spectacular corner of the world. So when you come here, it doesn’t matter what you left behind, you stand with your mouth open. Because these are mountains, they can fill anything up.

The first morning there is a little boy in a checked shirt and green shorts riding his bicycle around the lake ringing his bell constantly. He has no shoes, no slippers, nothing on his feet. I wonder about his toes being chilly. Perhaps he is used to it. The colour of his skin is brown—nut brown, mud, sand, chocolate, biscuit, bone, bitter—all over his arms and neck and legs. Burnt brown. Out of his face, shiny bright button eyes, not mischievous like most little boys’ eyes; like the lake, changing from turquoise to deep green, calm and glossy. I have seen so many children since coming here. They are all red-cheeked from the strong mountain sun, bright-eyed, earnest. They shine in their scruffy clothes and calloused hands. They are little snowmen sliding along, leaving light behind them.

***


III. The Beginning Of The Journey To The School At The End Of The World

The drive to Pangong Tso is treacherous. It is March in Ladakh and everything is frozen: the lakes and rivers, the small beads that hang to mountain trees, the people and their meagre huts, the sturdy animals. Everything seems frozen into a landscape of unforgiving ice. We are in two jeeps—one with the three Israelis and the other the local contingent, which I have become a part of.

I sit in the back with Bahadur, man of many professions: sherpa, driver, cameraman, travel-agent, yak-rearer. He is young and old, I can’t decide which. Today, driving toward the high pass of Chang-La, he looks ancient, like he’s done this many times before and will guide me through any difficulty. Sid sits in front with the burly Sikh from Delhi, the boss of this whole outfit, who has come to facilitate the journey for the Israelis with their proposals and promises of money, both of which are important commodities in this moon-land, little Tibet, Shangri La. Bahadur is the kind of man who would make a good lover but a terrible husband. His eyes flit over things with apparent casualness, but he’s always observing, always keeping records. He smiles at me now, revealing a lower jaw of broken teeth.

Before we start climbing we must pass through the village of Thiksey, famous for its huge monasteries that cover entire mountain ridges. Beyond Thiksey there is nothing but mountain, which rise like huge walls of undulating snow, bleak colossal desert. We must drive for 160 kilometres before reaching Pangong Tso.The Sikh thinks we should break the journey and spend the night in Tang-tse which lies comfortably in the floor of a valley. It is cold, very cold up here. The three men have decided to become my guardians for whatever reason; they must think I need protection.

A sham astrologer around the Ooty lake once told me that I would always be surrounded by love, by people wanting to love and do things for me, that it would be my responsibility to accept or reject this love. For some reason, this sham prophecy has taken root inside me. He also told me that a great sorrow would come to me at a time when a great sorrow was coming upon the world, and I would have to find the world in order to ease myself. By this I think he meant that I would have to make my apologies to God and let him into my life. "You may be young and beautiful now," he’d said, "but you do not know yet, that to look upon the face of God is more beautiful than anything you’ll ever see, more beautiful than any mirror or reflection."


I remember those prophecies gathering strength in my subterranean caverns, making the long journey back home to find Cyrus fallen asleep in front of the television with all the lights still burning. I sneaked into his body that night, lifted his arms and shifted the air in the cavity of his torso so I could be accommodated somewhere in the great vastness within him. I whispered all my stories that ran like rivers into the great blue ocean of his body. We lay like that all night on the couch like a pair of mating butterflies. In the morning I waited for him to carry me up to the height of a fir tree like the male Monarch butterfly, after a session of love-making, is meant to do. Instead, he left me fluttering with all the grey of a dying bush, taking the whimpering dog outside so they could both relieve themselves.

Sid drives quietly, without comment. He keeps turning back to see if the Israelis are following. One of them is a photo-journalist. He stops every five minutes to take pictures. The burly Sikh thinks himself a keen photographer too, although his equipment is rather basic, an automatic point and shoot.

"Stand in the photo no? Otherwise it will be empty."

I struggle out of the car and hobble over to the edge of a frozen river with my furry cap and goggles to keep the glare off. I feel ridiculous, but I stand anyway, complying. Once in a while I beg Sid to join me. He saunters over, placing one hand over my shoulder. The Sikh takes the picture and I feel things loosening under my feet. There is knowledge here; either with Bahadur or the Sikh or with Sid, one of my three protectors, but no one is giving me any answers. I have come to forget. I keep telling myself this. This is not about journeying into myself, finding peace, calm, nothing like that. I have no such illusions.

At the village of Thiksey, we stop for lunch. Slices of bread with nuggets of hard cheese, roasted almonds from the bazaar in Leh in newspaper cones, chocolate. This is the only food we’ve packed. We don’t expect to have a cooked meal till evening in Tang-tse where hopefully one of the hospitable villagers will give us some dal and rice, or boiling water which we can use to make our cup of soup or noodles.

The house we will stay in later that night is basic. There are only two rooms: one for the Israelis, and one for the burly Sikh and me. Bahadur and Sid will go somewhere else to sleep. They have friends in every village. I saw Sid talking to one of the local bright-faced girls with burnished cheeks with a look that showed he knew her well. I don’t like the idea of sharing a room with the burly Sikh as I don’t know him at all, but nothing matters when it’s -20 degrees C and you’re sheathed in seven layers of material.Even I couldn’t reach my hands under the layers separating my skin from cloth to touch myself.

We leave our camping gear in our rooms and head back to the jeeps for the upward climb to Pangong Tso which is the world’s highest brackish lake at over 14,000 feet above sea level. While we drive, I note down signposts and things I see in my journal.

I have to remove the glove of my right hand to write. I do this quickly, and as the jeep lurches forward to avoid blocks of ice and stone, my fingers lose control, making deep scars across the page like those of a child learning to write.
War memorials to commemorate the soldiers who lost their lives in the Indo-China war of 1962


Army bunkers and trenches

Pashmina sheep, long tailed yaks

Don’t be a gama in the land of the lama

I sleep. I always sleep on long car journeys. I dream we’re driving through rough landscape. Suddenly, all kinds of animals begin to appear—elephants, leopards, a tigress with her cubs. It’s magical at first, to watch them coming out of the mountains, but then they keep appearing, closer and closer to the jeep, their coats lustreless and deflated. The leopards hang at the windows with frothy mouths. They are hungry and thirsty and they don’t know it yet, but it’s the end of the world.

The Sikh wakes me up when we reach Chang La Pass, which he informs me is the third highest motorable pass in the world.

"I thought you might want to put that down in your notebook too," he says, smiling like a fat cumulonimbus cloud.

"Also," he continues, "you know that Pangong Tso is divided between Ladakh and Tibet, so actually only 150 kilometres of the lake belongs to India, the remaining 100 kilometres belongs to China. In 1684, the treaty of Tingmosgang was signed between the King of Ladakh and the Regent of Tibet."

"I see," I say, wanting to ask if he knows anything of the animals with the frothing mouths; which country do they belong to, and how are they going to save themselves from the unending thirst?

At Chang La we alight to take pictures and to have tea and biscuits with the Assamese regiment who are currently stationed there. The burly Sikh is ex-army, so he’s well known by the people of this area. In these politically sensitive places with issues of border control, permits and passes, it is good to maintain cordial relations with the authorities. The captain of the Assamese regiment is a handsome man; dark, with the skin of a smoothened walnut. He stands in his smart uniform, his boots and polished medals, his cap, his gloved hands. He extends his gloved hands for a handshake, not in the least taken aback by the presence of a woman among this motley crew of men. He invites us into the sparse bunker, pours out steaming hot tea into little cups and passes a plate of ginger biscuits around. He speaks only to the Sikh. Colonel, he calls him. They speak in Hindi. I catch only strands of it because I’m not really paying attention; the Israelis are talking Hebrew among themselves, and Sid is outside standing by a line of fluttering prayer flags looking beyond them to the giant walls of white. I re-tie the laces on my boots and remove my ridiculous fluffy cap to show the Assamese man that underneath, after all, I am a woman. I eat my biscuits and drink the tea which is fast cooling. I join Sid outside and we take pictures of the temple on the side of the road. It is a Hindu temple with a simple idol of Vishnu inside. I don’t go inside. I don’t feel compelled to go into places of worship like I used to. There were times when I would seek out the sanctuary of a quiet church or cathedral in the early hours of the morning, to sit on one of the benches and look up at the roof of stained glass. There was a church in Germany, in Mainz, a church full of brilliant blue glass—Chagall’s—where I thought it would be a fine thing to believe in something. Sometimes I visited the Jain temples just to observe the priests with their covered mouths walking about on their soft feet, making sure not to kill anything. Somewhere, between one quietness and the next, was my entire unknown family; there was my dead limestone-quarrier organist grandfather, and my live insomniac grandfather.

They were speaking to each other in unknown languages, both holding God by the scruff of the neck. They had something in their palms but wouldn’t let me see what it was. Here, on top of this lonely mountain peak, I thought I might like to go into this anonymous shrine to place something at the feet of the God; a flower, or a biscuit crumb, but I had nothing save my notebook and pen. It was enough to stand in the freezing cold and watch the shape of Sid against the fluttering flags.


The Assamese captain gives us permission to drive further along to Pangong Tso. The Sikh climbs in happily to drive the last stretch. He asks me if I know any Hindi songs and won’t I sing for them?

"No, No," I tell him. "Not my strong point," and turn back to the window. The Assamese man is still standing by the bright yellow sign that says Chang La Pass—17,525 feet. He’s waving his hand at us while his eyes are turning into creases, tiny slices of the moon as a sudden gust of wind blows over us all.

***

IV. Under False Skies


At Pangong Tso there is a school. I remember only this. A school with seven children and a frozen lake caught between two countries. I remember the burly Sikh offering me the wheel and me, cautiously moving over the ice, trying not to think of the dormant lake below, the living water that in summer turns seven separate colours of blue and green. The Israelis drive recklessly, testing the traction on their tyres. Sid pulls me aside to show me the mountains behind which lie Tibet, the land he is supposed to know. He shows me the garnet hills and promises to find my laughter hiding in the red heart of one of those stones. There must have been more, but I remember only the school.

It was a rectangular room with windows and no roof, almost like a dollhouse set against the starkness with the dolls sitting outside the house rather than inside. They were lined up against the wall; seven children—six boys, one girl. The schoolmaster stood beside them with a pathetic wooden ruler in his hands. The children’s heads were bent over their slates and in their hands they held pieces of chalk. They were leaning against the crumbling wall of their schoolroom in dirty torn sweaters and bare feet. I went up to the lone girl among the boys and tried to take a picture of her face: the girl looked up at me and scowled. I asked the schoolmaster how these children got to be here. There didn’t seem to be anything in sight; no village, no town, just this lake, these mountains, this ramshackle building. Where did the children appear from? The schoolmaster told me that they walked miles and miles from their villages to get here. Their parents were simple people who wanted to educate their children. Himself? He was from Delhi, here on a temporary teaching assignment. Soon, he would return, another teacher may come. It works this way, he said.

There was nothing inside the classroom—no board, no chairs, no desks. In fact, it was an empty room without even a roof to shelter them from the wind. In this bitter cold, the children sat with their fingers and toes and ears open to the cold. I watched them sitting in a row, saying nothing.

In my school there had been such dreadful heat. There had been school uniforms and socks and shoes and march-pasts in the suicidal sun of April mornings. There had been heat strokes and letters from family doctors excusing girls from exercise due to weak constitutions. There had been power cuts in the afternoons between maths and chemistry when our stomachs were full of rice and lime juice and raw tamarinds, when the fans stopped whirring and the sound of teachers faded into one long drone of a faraway aeroplane. There had been note-passing and book cricket, attempts to keep the drooping lids open. There had been only the promise of monsoon when we could rip off our socks and shoes and go squelching in the puddles only to get home and have our mothers tut-tut at the mud-splattered bloomers where we’d hitched up our skirts. There had been all that dreadful heat and only the dreams of ice-cold drinks or the rare ice-cream after school to take us through the day. There were water bottles lined up with the school bags along the shelf, class monitors with special badges, graffiti desks with brown-papered books lined up in neat towers for all the subjects of the day. There were pencil boxes with sharpener, eraser, ruler, pen, pencil, ready for use. There were geometry boxes and dissection kits for special days.

I want to take a picture of all this, of the school house with the windows through which you can see the world’s highest brackish lake and the mountains of two different countries. But mostly, of this lone determined girl scowling at me, writing her three times tables. The children have their heads down, too shy to show me their dirty faces and runny noses, but I take the picture anyway. Later, I can’t remember if it was really like that; blurry and inconstant. If the air and the mountains and the snow all merged to become the lake, if Sid putting pebbles in my pockets from the garnet hills was anything. If the boy monk was really coming toward us laughing at the solid solemn snow. If he raised those tender arms like wings of a red dragon. If we watched him and were silenced by him.


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After getting a Master's in poetry from Johns Hopkins University, Tishani Doshi moved to London where she worked in publishing. She received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001, and has since shifted base to Chennai where she writes, travels, and dances. She is currently in the midst of completing her first novel, a collection of short stories, and Muttiah Murlitharan's biography.

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20050510&fname=tishanidoshi&sid=1&pn=6

Murder Art and City Lives

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/news/story.jsp?story=637992

Murder, art and city lives impress judges of non-fiction
By Arifa Akbar
Published : 13 May 2005


Three first-time authors have found themselves on the shortlist of Britain's richest non-fiction prize.

The new talent, half of the six-person shortlist for the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, includes an Indian-born writer's journey through Bombay and topics from addiction to 19th-century grave robbery.

Sue MacGregor, the chairman of the judges and a broadcaster, said she was impressed that three first-time writers had made it into the shortlist for the first time in the competition's seven-year history.

"We did not even realise they were first-time writers until we were at the final conclusion, which maybe tells you we were looking for freshness. But that does not mean the other three on the shortlist are not just as fantastic. The selection of such high-quality writing perhaps points to the way some bits of non-fiction are going," she said. "We have murder, intrigue, high art and impassioned portraits of two of the world's greatest cities."

Alexander Masters, who worked at a homeless shelter in Cambridge, traced the history of a homeless drug addict called Stuart Shorter inStuart: A Life Backwards, starting from his untimely death, spells in prison, suicide attempts and post-office robberies as an adult to the childhood sexual abuse he suffered from his brother and a care worker.

Sarah Wise, another first-time writer, wrote what the writer Peter Ackroyd called in his review of the work "an indispensible read" about a circle of grave robbers in 1831 who supplied anatomy schools with fresh "examples" for dissection.

Wise, who has worked a freelance journalist and was awarded an MA in Victorian studies in 1996, based her historical study on the controversial case that came to be known as The Italian Boy, which is also the book's title.

Suketu Mehta, a journalist who lives in New York, based his first book, Maximum City, on a trip to Bombay, where he grew up, after a 21-year absence. He weaves his own personal tale within the stories of the colourful characters he meets. Maximum City, which won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize in March, was described by Salman Rushdie as the "the best book yet written about that great ruined metropolis".

Jonathan Coe was given a place on the shortlist for his long-awaited biography of B S Johnson, an avant garde writer during the Sixties and early Seventies whose creations included a book with holes cut through the pages and a novel in unbound chapters so the reader could define its chronology. The London-based writer, who has won prizes for his novels What a Carve Up!, House of Sleep and The Closed Circle, traces B S Johnson's life through papers he left behind when he committed suicide at the age of 40 in 1973, and on interviews with friends.

Hilary Spurling's two-volume biography of the painter Henri Matisse, Matisse the Master, has been fêted by reviewers and was the basis of an exhibition, currently showing at the Royal Academy of Arts, reassessing Matisse's work. She spent 15 years researching the biography using hitherto closed family archives to uncover the complicated character who bears little relation to his popular image.

The last nominated book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, translated from Turkish, focuses on the history of the city mixed with personal reminiscences by the author, Orhan Pamuk, whose has lived there for five decades. It was described by The Observer as an "enchanting elegy".

The judging panel includes Marcus du Sautoy, the mathematician, Andrew Holgate, deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times, Maria Misra, the historian, and John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor. MacGregor said the panel was looking for brilliant writing as well as a well-researched piece of non-fiction.

The winner of the prize - won last year by Anna Funder, another first-time author, for Stasiland, a study of the Stasi secret police in East Germany - will be announced at a ceremony on 14 June. There were two first-time authors in the 2003 shortlist, Olivia Judson with Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation and Edgar Vincent, for his biography on Horatio Nelson, Nelson: Love and Fame.

The shortlist

MATISSE THE MASTER, by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton)

The second part of the Matisse biography, following The Unknown Matisse, which was published in 1998.

Spurling, 65, spent 15 years researching and writing the two-volume biography and her access to hitherto closed family archives enabled her to uncover a character who bears little relation to his popular image.

STUART: A LIFE BACKWARDS, by Alexander Masters (Fourth Estate)

The troubled story of the life of Stuart Shorter, a homeless man whom Masters met at a hostel in Cambridge where he worked. Stuart's poignant story includes alcoholism, drug addiction and sexual abuse by his brother.

MAXIMUM CITY: A CITY LOST AND FOUND, by Suketu Mehta (Review)

Indian-born Mehta, another first-time novelist, writes about his return to Bombay with his young family after 21 years' absence, capturing the essence of a city where "the greatest luxury of all is solitude". Mehta weaves his own story within the lives of the individuals he meets.

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES OF A CITY, by Orhan Pamuk (Faber & Faber)

Pamuk mingles personal memoir with cultural history in this exploration of Istanbul, his home for 50 years. He revisits the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of his childhood, his daydreams and pastimes and his own family's secrets.

LIKE A FIERY ELEPHANT: THE STORY OF B S JOHNSON, by Jonathan Coe (Picador)

A biography based on unique access to papers left by the novelist B S Johnson, who committed suicide in 1973 and whose innovations included a book with holes cut through it and a novel published in a box so that its unbound chapters could be read in any order.

THE ITALIAN BOY: MURDER AND GRAVE-ROBBERY IN 1830s LONDON, by Sarah Wise (Jonathan Cape)

First-time novelist Wise tells the fascinating story of a police investigation in 1831 which uncovered a ring of body-snatchers who were supplying anatomy schools with "examples" for dissection.

Home > Enjoyment > Books > News

Star Wars Raises Questions on US POlicy

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0517-07.htm


Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the Associated Press

'Star Wars' Raises Questions on US Policy
by David Germain


Without Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11" at the Cannes Film Festival this
time, it was left to George Lucas and "Star Wars" to pique European ire over
the state of world relations and the United States' role in it.

Lucas' themes of democracy on the skids and a ruler preaching war to
preserve the peace predate "Star Wars: Episode III < Revenge of the Sith" by
almost 30 years. Yet viewers Sunday < and Lucas himself < noted similarities
between the final chapter of his sci-fi saga and our own troubled times.



The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq
now are unbelievable.

George Lucas
Cannes audiences made blunt comparisons between "Revenge of the Sith" < the
story of Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side and the rise of an emperor
through warmongering < to President Bush's war on terrorism and the invasion
of Iraq.

Two lines from the movie especially resonated:

"This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause," bemoans Padme Amidala
(Natalie Portman) as the galactic Senate cheers dictator-in-waiting
Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) while he announces a crusade against the Jedi.

"If you're not with me, then you're my enemy," Hayden Christensen's Anakin <
soon to become villain Darth Vader < tells former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi
(Ewan McGregor). The line echoes Bush's international ultimatum after the
Sept. 11 attacks, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

"That quote is almost a perfect citation of Bush," said Liam Engle, a
23-year-old French-American aspiring filmmaker. "Plus, you've got a
politician trying to increase his power to wage a phony war."

Though the plot was written years ago, "the anti-Bush diatribe is clearly
there," Engle said.

The film opens Wednesday in parts of Europe and Thursday in the United
States and many other countries. At the Cannes premiere Sunday night, actors
in white stormtrooper costumes paraded up and down the red carpet as guests
strolled in, while an orchestra played the "Star Wars" theme.

Lucas said he patterned his story after historical transformations from
freedom to fascism, never figuring when he started his prequel trilogy in
the late 1990s that current events might parallel his space fantasy.

"As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this
close. So it's just one of those recurring things," Lucas said at a Cannes
news conference. "I hope this doesn't come true in our country.

"Maybe the film will waken people to the situation," Lucas joked.

That comment echoes Moore's rhetoric at Cannes last year, when his anti-Bush
documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the festival's top honor.

Unlike Moore, whose Cannes visit came off like an anybody-but-Bush campaign
stop, Lucas never mentioned the president by name but was eager to speak his
mind on U.S. policy in Iraq, careful again to note that he created the story
long before the Bush-led occupation there.

"When I wrote it, Iraq didn't exist," Lucas said, laughing.

"We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass
destruction. We didn't think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going
after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam.
... The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in
Iraq now are unbelievable."

The prequel trilogy is based on a back-story outline Lucas created in the
mid-1970s for the original three "Star Wars" movies, so the themes
percolated out of the Vietnam War and the Nixon-Watergate era, he said.

Lucas began researching how democracies can turn into dictatorships with
full consent of the electorate.

In ancient Rome, "why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and
give the government to his nephew?" Lucas said. "Why did France after they
got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to
Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany and Hitler.

"You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into
a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with
the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more
control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly
because everybody's squabbling, there's corruption."

© 2005 The Associated Press

Hate Speech on the other Line

Hate Speech On the Other Line
BY JOHN P. AVLON
May 10, 2005

"Faith, Family and Freedom" - I'm in favor of them. And I'd sure be steamed if these American values were hijacked by some special interest in a crass attempt to profit from politics and people's fears. But, lo and behold, little is sacred in an era where the culture wars have graduated from grassroots skirmishes to organized armies. Not even your long-distance calling plan is safe in the ideological crossfire.

For example, a San Francisco-based company called "Working Assets" offers long-distance carrier service that donates a percentage of each customer's bill to groups such as Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU. The company claims to have raised $47 million for these organizations over the past two decades. With so much activist cash available via unorthodox political outreach, it was only a matter of time until conservative organizations used the same strategy. That time has apparently arrived.

It was in late December 2004 when New York-based comedian Eugene Mirman first received a phone-call from a nonprofit organization called "Faith, Family and Freedom," asking if he opposed gay marriage and then offering to switch his long-distance service to a "Christian-based telephone carrier" identified as United American Technologies out of Oklahoma.

It turns out that Mr. Mirman had donated $50 to the presidential campaign of Alan Keyes in 2000. His name was consequently added to a conservative database. Amused and a bit disturbed, he recorded the subsequent solicitations, and added the tapes to his stand-up act. Excerpts of the transcripts speak for themselves.

After the call reaches a person they are prompted to press "1" if they oppose gay marriage. A holding message says "Please do not hang up ... This information will describe how the ACLU and gays are getting gay marriage in every state." The operator then enters the conversation:

Operator: Did you press 1 to oppose same sex marriages?
Mr. Mirman: Oh, I pressed it, yes.
Operator: Okay, that's great to hear. And are you against same sex marriages?
Mr. Mirman: Well, I want to destroy it, yes.
Operator: Okay. That's great to hear... -
Mr. Mirman: Like the fist of God we will smash them!
Operator: Exactly.

In another recorded conversation, the operator describes United American Technologies as "the only carrier that is taking an active stand against same sex marriages and hardcore child pornography."

Mr. Mirman sensibly interjects, "I think all child pornography is hardcore. I don't think there's non-hardcore child pornography." He then asks "AT&T sponsors child pornography?" The operator clarifies by saying "No. No, that's MCI."

Mr. Mirman: MCI has hardcore child pornography?
Operator: Yes, they are. They have a pedophile Web site for men who love boys. It's a Montr顬 based Web site....
Mr. Mirman: And so MCI basically has a child pornography ring?
Operator: That's correct.
Mr. Mirman: What about the others? What does Verizon do?
Operator: Okay. Verizon, what they do is they train their employees to accept the gay and lesbian lifestyle.
Mr. Mirman: They try to turn their employees gay?
Operator: No, no. They train their employees to accept it.

Mr. Mirman coaxes out the absurdity of the script, but he's no left-wing activist with an axe to grind. Born in Russia, he explains, "My problem isn't with people of faith having certain convictions and wanting their money to support those convictions; it's with a phone company surreptitiously exploiting people's beliefs and fears for revenue. To have a nonprofit call people on your behalf and imply that MCI makes money from the rape of children and that God hates your competitors, I think, is inappropriate."

That's certainly one word for it. A call to United American Technologies shed further light on the fund-raising scheme. I spoke to Carl Thompson, a senior consultant whose son-in-law Tom Anderson is CEO of the year-old company. He told me that 2,000 people a month were switching as a result of the calls and was forthright in admitting that "our main thing is calling against the gay and lesbian lifestyle." "We're not concerned about offending people who don't agree with us on these issues," he said.

More complicated was the arrangement he described with the "Faith Family and Freedom" 527 organization that had been placing the calls. The fund was created and maintained by the 33-year-old Republican floor leader of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Lance Cargill. The funding arrangement, as both men described it, was that a percentage of the profits from each caller who switched would be directed back into the 527's coffers to pay for conservative political campaigns. This is a hate-speech-fueled food chain between a company professing faith and a political action fund.

Mr. Thompson said that both parties agreed to the script, a charge that Mr. Cargill denies. Mr. Cargill stated that the calls had been recently stopped because of complaints from folks who "didn't appreciate the phone calls," but other organizations continue to place calls on United American Technologies' behalf. This is a rare glimpse into the divide-to-conquer world of grassroots political activists in an age of poisonous partisanship. Some argue that left-wing groups like Working Assets created the environment that right-wing groups are now exploiting. But whatever the genesis, the result is the absurd and ugly state of our domestic politics, where an eye-for-an-eye threatens to leave everyone blind.

John P. Avlon is a columnist and associate editor of the New York Sun, former chief speechwriter for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and author of the new softcover Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics (Random House, 2005). Contact him at javlon@nysun.com

Reprinted by permission of Avlon's press agent, Jay Blocher

Posted by Kevin at May 10, 2005 10:11 AM

The Seven BAsic Plots

Once Upon a Time
Reviewed by Denis Dutton

Sunday, May 8, 2005; Page BW08
THE SEVEN BASIC PLOTS
Why We Tell Stories

By Christopher Booker. Continuum. 728 pp. $34.95
In the summer of 1975, moviegoers flocked to see the story of a predatory shark terrorizing a little Long Island resort. The film told of how three brave men go to sea in a small boat and, after a bloody climax in which they kill the monster, return peace and security to their town -- not unlike, Christopher Booker observes, a tale enjoyed by Saxons dressed in animal skins, huddled around a fire some 1,200 years earlier. Beowulf also features a town terrorized by a monster, Grendel, who lives in a nearby lake and tears his victims to pieces. Again, the hero Beowulf returns peace to his town after a bloody climax in which the monster is slain.
Such echoes have impelled Booker to chart what he regards as the seven plots on which all literature is built. Beowulf and "Jaws" follow the first and most basic of his plots, "Overcoming the Monster." It is found in countless stories from The Epic of Gilgamesh and "Little Red Riding Hood" to James Bond films such as "Dr. No." This tale of conflict typically recounts the hero's ordeals and an escape from death, ending with a community or the world itself saved from evil.
Booker's second plot is "Rags to Riches." He places in this category "Cinderella," "The Ugly Duckling," David Copperfield and other stories that tell of modest, downtrodden characters whose special talents or beauty are at last revealed to the world for a happy ending.
Next in Booker's taxonomy is "the Quest," which features a hero, normally joined by sidekicks, traveling the world and fighting to overcome evil and secure a priceless treasure (or in the case of Odysseus, wife and hearth). The hero not only gains the treasure he seeks, but also the girl, and they end as king and queen. Related to this is Booker's fourth category, "Voyage and Return," exemplified by Robinson Crusoe , Alice in Wonderland and The Time Machine . The protagonist leaves normal experience to enter an alien world, returning after what often amounts to a thrilling escape.
In "Comedy," Booker suggests, confusion reigns until at last the hero and heroine are united in love. "Tragedy" portrays human overreaching and its terrible consequences. The last of the plots of his initial list is "Rebirth," which centers on characters such as Dickens's Scrooge, Snow White and Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov. To this useful system he unexpectedly adds two more plots: "Rebellion" to cover the likes of 1984 and "Mystery" for the recent invention of the detective novel.
Booker, a British columnist who was founding editor of Private Eye, possesses a remarkable ability to retell stories. His prose is a model of clarity, and his lively enthusiasm for fictions of every description is infectious. He covers Greek and Roman literature, fairy tales, European novels and plays, Arabic and Japanese tales, Native American folk tales, and movies from the silent era on. He is an especially adept guide through the twists and characters of Wagner's operas. His artfully entertaining summaries jogged many warm memories of half-forgotten novels and films.
I wish that an equal amount of pleasure could be derived from the psychology on which he bases his hypothesis. Booker has been working on this project for 34 years, and his quaint psychological starting point sadly shows its age. He believes that Carl Jung's theory of archetypes and self-realization can explain story patterns. Alas, Jung serves him poorly.
Malevolent characters, for example, are constantly described by Booker as selfish "Dark Figures" who symbolize overweening egotism. (Booker is from a generation of critics who used to think that simply identifying a symbol in literature can explain anything you please.) In Jungian terms, the dark power of the ego is the source of all evil, along with another of Booker's favorite Jungian ideas, the denial of the villain's "inner feminine."
Granted, egotism may explain the wickedness of someone like Edmund in "King Lear." But Grendel? The shark in "Jaws"? Oedipus is arguably a more egotistical character than Iago, who in his devious cruelty is still far more evil. The malevolence of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the Cyclops in The Odyssey lies not in their egotism. These creatures just have a perfectly natural taste for mammalian flesh. They are frightening, dramatic threats, to be sure, but not symbols of anything human. Sometimes in fiction, as Freud might have said, a monster is just a monster.

In Booker's account, denying your "inner feminine" is bad news, and all evildoers, including Lady Macbeth, are guilty of it. Not only do such Jungian clichés wear thin, they get in the way of adequate interpretation. Having seduced so many women and killed the father of one, Don Giovanni will "never develop his inner feminine" and act with the strength of a mature man, according to Booker. This ignores a most piquant feature of Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto: The Don stubbornly stands up to the Commendatore's ghost at the opera's end and is pulled down to hell on account of it.
Booker's discussion of what he calls "the Rule of Three" reveals his obsessive, self-confirming method. From the three questions of Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood to Lear's three daughters, sets of three are ubiquitous in literature, Booker claims. "Once we become aware of the archetypal significance of three in storytelling," he explains, "we can see it everywhere, expressed in all sorts of different ways, large and small."

Sure, and anyone who studies the personality types of astrology will see Virgos and Scorpios everywhere too. Relations among three, four or five characters in a narrative enable more dramatic possibilities than relations between two. This is a matter of ordinary logic, not literary criticism. The "archetype of three," as he calls it, is no archetype at all, though he contrives to find it where it is plainly absent. Scylla and Charybdis may look like two dangers to you and me, but the middle way between them actually makes, as Booker explains, three possibilities for Odysseus, thus saving his Rule of Three. That Jane Eyre spends three days running across the moors "conveys to us, by a kind of symbolic shorthand, just how tortuous and difficult" her escape is. But why three? If Jane had spent five days on the moors, or 40 days, she'd have been even more tuckered out. And while there are three bears, three chairs and three bowls of porridge in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," there are actually four characters. The story would better support Booker's theory were it "Goldilocks and the Two Bears." But, like astrologers, he is not keen to consider negative evidence.
The first thinker to tackle Booker's topic was Aristotle. Write a story about a character, Aristotle showed, and you face only so many logical alternatives. In tragedy, for instance, either bad things will happen to a good person (unjust and repugnant) or bad things happen to a bad person (just, but boring). Or good things happen to a bad person (unjust again). Tragedy needs bad things to happen to a basically good but flawed person: Though he may not have deserved his awful fate, Oedipus was asking for it.
In the same rational spirit, Aristotle works out dramatic relations: A conflict between strangers or natural enemies is of little concern to us. What arouses interest is a hate-filled struggle between people who ought to love each other -- the mother who murders her children to punish her husband, or two brothers who fight to the death. Aristotle knew this for the drama of his age as much as soap-opera writers know it today.
Booker has not discovered archetypes, hard-wired blueprints, for story plots, though he has identified the deep themes that fascinate us in fictions. Here's an analogy: Survey the architectural layout of most people's homes and you will find persistent patterns in the variety. Bedrooms are separated from kitchens. Kitchens are close to dining rooms. Front doors do not open onto children's bedrooms or bathrooms.
Are these patterns Jungian room-plan archetypes? Hardly. Life calls for logical separations of rooms where families can sleep, cook, store shoes, bathe and watch TV. Room patterns follow not from mental imprints, but from the functions of the rooms themselves, which in turn follow from our ordinary living habits.
So it is with stories. The basic situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, hard-wired interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice and adversity. These values counted as much in the Pleistocene era as today, which is why evolutionary psychologists study them intensively. Our fictions are populated with character-types relevant to these themes: beautiful young women, handsome strong men, courageous leaders, children needing protection, wise old people. Add to this threats and obstacles to the fulfillment of love and fortune, including both bad luck and villains, and you have the makings of literature. Story plots are not unconscious archetypes, but follow, as Aristotle realized, from human interests and the logic of what is possible.
Booker ends his 700-page treatise with a diatribe against literature of the past two centuries. Modern fiction has "lost the plot," he argues. Moby-Dick initially may look like a heroic Overcoming the Monster tale, but in the end we do not know who is more evil, Captain Ahab or the whale who kills him. While the ambiguities of modernism trouble Booker, some of his readers will be even more disturbed to find "E.T." and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies extravagantly lauded in a book that disparages the complex moral pessimism of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the achievement of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past , which he dismisses as "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling."
Fail though it might in its ambition to offer a single key to literature, The Seven Basic Plots is nevertheless one of the most diverting works on storytelling I've ever encountered. Pity about the Jung, but there's no denying the charm of Booker's twice-told tales. ·
Denis Dutton edits the journal Philosophy and Literature and the Web site Arts & Letters Daily.

THE East as Career

THE EAST AS CAREER
- Transfiguring the mundane
Telling Tales Amit Chaudhuri Life Itself Concluded
amitchaudhuri@hotmail.com


What does the “exotic” in “Are you exoticizing your subject for a Western audience?” — a question asked indefatigably of Indians who write in English — what does the word mean, or in which sense is it meant? Dictionaries will give you a range of meanings, such as “foreign” (where “foreign” is usually “tropical”) and “strange” and even “bizarre”. But the dictionaries’ interpretations are almost entirely positive; the exotic has to do with a certain kind of allure, the allure of the strange and faraway. They still haven’t taken into account the post-Saidian registers of the word, by which it has become a habitual term with which to count the spiritual costs of colonialism: “inauthentic” and “falsified” are still not options among their list of meanings. The word’s stock had never been very high, but its reputation has declined in the way the reputation of “picturesque” had earlier; although the latter never transcended its status of being a minor aesthetic term into becoming the populist catchphrase that the former has become.
Said, of course, feels compelled to use the word in the first page of Orientalism, where he notes that a French journalist, on “a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976…wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to the Orient of Chauteaubriand and Nerval.’” For the European, for the French journalist, to mourn the demise of this Orient was natural, for, as Said goes on to say, this Orient “was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes…Now it was disappearing” — in the Middle East, especially, as the French journalist saw it, into the tragic mess of contemporary history. In a salutary reminder, characteristic of Said both in his study and his political work, the reader is told of the simple but, till then, often ignored, irony of the fact that the Orient was also a real place, even in the time of Chauteaubriand and Nerval; that, even then, “Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering”; however, “the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate”.
Characteristic, too, of Said in much of his literary critical work (his political writings and activism are almost a compensation for this), is, as he fleetingly admits himself, his own study’s turning away from the Oriental, except in his or her itinerary in European texts, and from the Oriental representation of the Orient. This — the Orient’s representation of itself — is presumably what the “almost” in “the Orient was almost a European invention” refers to, and also suppresses; that the Orient, in modernity, is not only an European invention, but also an Oriental one, an invention that has presumably created and occupied an intellectual, cultural and political space far larger and more important than its European counterpart. The book about the Oriental invention — and I mean that word in both senses, as “creative” and “spurious” production — of the Orient is still to be written; for now, we have to be content with that “almost”. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his Provincializing Europe, wryly observes that a literary commentator, while describing the provenances of Midnight’s Children, its mixture of “Western” and “Eastern” elements, makes specific references to what she considers the Western resources of Rushdie’s novel (The Tin Drum, Tristram Shandy etc), but refers to the Eastern ones only in blurred and general categories: “Indian legends, films and literature”. Chakrabarty gives this sort of critical viewpoint a hilarious definition: “asymmetric ignorance”. While one should hesitate before ascribing to Said an ignorance of modern Oriental cultural traditions, that “almost” in his sentence certainly constitutes an asymmetry — an asymmetry whose logic he pursues implicitly but quite relentlessly in his study.
What does this asymmetry mean to our understanding — our specifically Said-inflected understanding — of the “exotic”? In the sense that we use the term today, the “exotic” doesn’t just mean “foreign”, but a commodification of the foreign: an intrinsic part of the “production” of the East that Orientalism entails, and which is, crucially, made possible by the spread of capitalism and of markets. When the person in the audience asks the Indian writer in English about exoticization, he means to say that the writer is a sort of deracinated Oriental who, in an act of betrayal, has become involved in the production of the Orient. We’ve inherited the Saidian asymmetry along with the Saidian critique; it leads us to believe that Oriental and, for our purposes, Indian history was a bucolic zone untouched by the market until, probably, the Indian novelist in English came along; that the Orient has been in a state of nature in the last two hundred years, translated into the realm of production and consumption only by Western writers and entrepreneurs. And in this way, we exoticize exocitization itself, making it impossibly foreign to, and distant from, ourselves.
A glance at the cultural history of our modernity, however, tells us that we’ve been “producing” the Orient, and exoticizing it, for a very long time; that the exotic has been a necessary, perhaps indispensable, constituent of our self-expression and political identity, as given voice to in popular culture, in calendar prints, oleographs, the “mythologicals” of early Hindi cinema, as well as the lavish visions of Indian history in the latter — these are the signatures of the cultural and political world of the anonymous; a “production” of the East more challenging or significant than anything the word, “Orientalism” can hope to encapsulate, and part of whose inheritance, as seen in the core of kitsch in the BJP’s version of Hindutva, is ambiguous.
A certain sort of middle-class flirtation with the exotic goes back to the formation of our modernity: in some of the works of, say, Abanindranath, or those of Ravi Varma and, later, Hemen Majumdar. But the Indian production of the exotic is also important — far more so than its Western counterpart — to canonical artists like the filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, as something they define their art against: what’s stifling to the young apprentice director in 1948, in an essay called “What is Wrong with Indian Films?”, is not his burden as a post-colonial, but his burden as a modern — the presence, on all sides, of a powerful home-grown “exotic” in cinema, what he calls elsewhere the “mythologicals and devotionals” that “provide the staple fare for the majority of Bengal’s film public”.
This “production” of the East has already quite a long history in India, he notes dourly in 1948: “Meanwhile, ‘studios sprang up,’ to quote an American writer in Screenwriter, ‘even in such unlikely lands as India and China.’ One may note in passing that this springing up has been happening in India for nearly forty years.” The call to turn away from this home-grown production is quasi-religious, Vivekananda-like: “The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears.”
“Life itself”: this brings us to the second part of what’s so problematic about the recent history of the term “exotic” in our country. When Ray speaks of “life” and the “raw material” of life, he’s speaking of a refutation of the spectacular that comprises the exotic, in favour of the mundane, the everyday, and the transfiguration of the mundane. The crucial role of that transfiguration informs his directive to the filmmaker to “keep his eyes open, and his ears”: the words not only echo Vivekananda, but Tagore, who, in a song invoking the givens of nature — light, air, grass — says, “kaan petechhi, chokh melechhi [I have pricked up my ear, I have gazed upon]”.
That transfiguration involves a making foreign or strange the “raw material” of the commonplace; what the Russian Formalist, Victor Shklovsky, called “defamiliarization”, but what is beyond a formal device, and a particular vision of art’s relationship to “life”. Tagore defines it at the conclusion of the same song: “janaar majhe ajaanare korechhi sandhaan [I’ve gone looking for the unknown in the midst of the known]”. The “raw material” of estrangement, for the modern artist, is as much light, grass, air, as it is the dross that surrounds us: verandahs, advertisement hoardings, waiting rooms, pincushions, paperweights.
All these, in a process both elusive and fundamental to art, are made new and distant — but, in India, critical language, especially in English, has for some time lacked a vocabulary with which to engage with this transformation and its contexts and questions. Even much of the bafflement that attended Ray’s early and middle work in India, and the complaint that he lacked political content, has to do with the inability to understand the defamiliarized in art. Today, I notice that the notion of the exotic is used by lay reader and critic alike with the delicacy of a battering ram to demolish, in one blow, both the act of bad faith and the workings of the unfamiliar. We still work within limited, and limiting, paradigms in our dealings with strangeness.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050515/asp/opinion/story_4731295.asp

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THE Childcatcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has been voted the
scariest character in children's literature, it was revealed yesterday.
The pale-faced baddie is familiar to millions through the 1968 hit film in
which, played by Robert Helpmann, he steals away children in the fantasy
land of Vulgaria.
The thin-faced thief polled one-third of the votes in a survey by the online
bookseller Amazon. The top female villain and overall runner-up was Cruella
De Vil from 101 Dalmatians. She grabbed just over 10 per cent of the votes.
Other scary characters were the Oliver Twist bully Bill Sikes, who came
third, and Harry Potter's arch-nemesis, Voldemort.
Amazon's product manager, Wendy Snowdon, said it seemed that villains who
committed crimes against small children and cute puppies were the most
inexcusable to children.
"They are the very stuff of nightmares. Genuinely scary villains stick with
us from the first time we read the book as a child," she said.
Ms Snowdon said the villains that people found most scary were usually from
works at least 20 years old, although some did change through generations.
She said people over 50 found Bill Sikes and Gollum from Lord of the Rings
"creepy".
The under-21s found characters such as the Grand High Witch from The Witches
or Voldemort from Harry Potter particularly terrifying.
There was also a difference between the sexes.
Men found the mythical literary characters such as Gollum, and The White
Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe scary.
But women found the bullies such as Bill Sikes twice as frightening as the
men.
Other fearsome children's villains that ranked in the top ten included the
Wicked Stepmother from Snow White, the evil Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl'
s Matilda and the dreaded Captain Hook, from Peter Pan.

What Women Write

http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-east-connecting-may2005-womens-writing.htm

What Women Write


British Council India launches a new website


Last month British Council India launched a new website, www.womenswriting.com, dedicated to women’s writing from South Asia. The website develops the work begun in February 2003, when in New Delhi we hosted the South Asian Women Writers Conference (www.uksawwc.org), and proposes a virtual space for women’s writing from across the region. Ritu Menon, publisher of Women Unlimited and Chair of the South Asian Women Writers Conference, lays out for Connecting the context for women’s writing in this region and the dire need for a safe space in which women can be read

“Ask anyone about censorship and whether there’s any in India, and they’ll say, ‘No, not really. We’re not like Bangladesh or Pakistan; we have freedom of speech, it’s a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.’

In a way, they are right. There is very little formal censorship in India. By the state that is. But if this is so, why are we increasingly having to be ‘careful’, to be mindful of what we say? Is it because street censorship has usurped the power of the state and taken it upon itself to police people’s expression? Or is it because, as writer Mridula Garg says pithily, ‘the more regressive the state, the more aggressive the mob’? Perhaps, as Nabaneeta Dev Sen puts it, ‘free speech belongs to the mainstream’, and if you are on the margins, or if yours is the voice of dissent, your speech is censored.

All three - being heard, being seen and being able to communicate - are about breaking the silence that still surrounds a great deal of women’s expression. India has 18 official languages, and women write in all of them but they remain invisible outside their own language areas. Women have been raising their voices against all kinds of censorship - by families, by political parties, by the market and by cultural and social mores. They have talked about state censorship and street censorship; about censoring oneself and being censored by those who object to what they say - but they have mostly been voices in the wilderness.

People will say that this is an exaggeration, that women’s writing is everywhere, filling the bookshelves, spilling over in libraries. Yet consider this: the literary establishment and the market-place are primarily male, and the commonest complaint by women is that they are seldom taken seriously by critics or reviewers. At best, they are patronised. The literary and commercial worlds may well treat women as an homogeneous group, but women themselves write alone, enter the market alone and are usually in competition with each other because most decisions are still made by men.

In South Asia, readers rarely get to read writers from each other’s countries - or even our own, frankly - because they have not been translated into a common language, because communication between our countries is practically non-existent, and because access to each others’ books, periodicals or newspapers is extremely difficult.

And yet, when we do come together in dialogues and animated discussions, we know we can speak in many tongues, across languages and regions. Is English a power language, overshadowing all others in South Asia? Is there such a thing as “women’s” writing? Do women write mostly about the domestic and the private, and men about the worldly and the public? Writing about sex seems to be okay, but not about sexual politics! Can women use abusive language when they write? Probably not. Yet breaking the language taboo is an important part of breaking the silence. “We endure,” says Nabaneeta Dev Sen. “But when we endure and still write, we are at our most subversive…because in patriarchal societies, writing is a subversive activity.”

"Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in a woman," says Lear over Cordelia's corpse, but when she was alive and speaking truth to power, he would not listen to a word she said. American writer and activist Meredith Tax says, “In our lifetime women have spoken up to all the crazy old King Lears, challenging their power and folly, and have had the extraordinary, transfiguring experience of hearing our collective female voice raised in political expression of our demands and interests. But, despite all our talk of female agency, few feminist organisations work explicitly on questions of voice. The subject has neither been theorised sufficiently, nor got adequate attention in terms of funding and programmes. It is easy enough to pity a victim and develop programmes to help her, but a woman whose voice is raised, whether in complaint or song, is nobody's victim. She is, at least potentially, a revolutionary agent, hard to control and intrinsically disruptive of established arrangements and conventional thought.”

The www.womenswriting.com site will contain the work of 20 women writers, set to grow by the same number every 3 months, monthly reviews of new writing, news and events in literature in South Asia and the UK, links to relevant organisations in the UK and South Asia who are supportive of women’s writing and a password-protected bulletin board where women writers can share their thoughts, concerns and ideas. The website is edited by Mini Krishnan and Rakshanda Jalil, who helped launch the website in Delhi on 24 March. The evening also celebrated the first results of a new joint venture between Zubaan and Penguin Books India to extend to women’s writing a vital national and international distribution network.For more information on the project, please contact alice.cicolini@in.britishcouncil.org

Salman Rushdie on Transforming INformation

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1466565,00.html

Comment

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The power of love

Salman Rushdie on how literature can transform information into gold

Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian

A butterfly flaps its wings in India and we feel the breeze on our cheeks in New York. A throat is cleared somewhere in Africa and in California there's an answering cough. Everything that happens affects something else. Books come into the world and the world is not what it was before those books came into it. The same can be said of babies or diseases.
Books come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives and those books become parts of the way we see our lives, we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours, they become ours.

Love does this, hate does not. To hate a book is only to confirm to oneself what one already knows, or thinks one knows. But the power of books to inspire both love and hate is an indication of their ability to make alterations in the fabric of what is.

Writing names the world, and the power of description should not be underestimated. Literature remembers its religious origins and some of those first stories of sky-gods and sea-gods not only became the source of an ocean of stories that flowed from them but also served as the foundations of the world into which they, the myths, were born. There would have been little blood sacrifice in Latin America or ancient Greece if it had not been for the gods. Iphigenia would have lived, and Clytemnestra would have had no need to murder Agamemnon, and the entire story of the House of Atreus would have been different; bad for the history of the theatre, no doubt, but good in many ways for the family concerned.

Writing invented the gods and was a game the gods themselves played, and the consequences of that writing, holy writ, are still working themselves out today, which just shows that the demonstrable fictionality of fiction does nothing to lessen its power especially if you call it the truth. But writing broke away from the gods and in that rupture much of its power was lost. Prophecy is no longer the game, except for futurologists, but then futurology is fiction too, it can be defined as the art of being wrong about the future. For the rest of us, the proper study of mankind is Man. We have no priests; we can appeal to no ultimate arbiter though there are critics among us who would claim such a role for themselves.

In spite of this, fiction does retain the occasional surprising ability to initiate social change. Here is the fugitive slave Eliza running from Simon Legree. Here is Wackford Squeers, savage head of Dotheboys Hall. Here is Oliver Twist asking for more. Here is a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead, bringing books back into the lives of a generation that was forgetting how to read. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed attitudes towards slavery and Charles Dickens's portraits of child poverty inspired legal reforms and JK Rowling changed the culture of childhood, making millions of boys and girls look forward to 800-page novels, and improbably popularising vibrating broomsticks and boarding schools. On the opening night of Death of a Salesman the head of Gimbel's department store rushed from the theatre vowing not to fire his own, ageing Willy Lomans.

In this age of information overkill literature can still bring the human news, the hearts-and-minds news. The poetry of Milosz, and Herbert and Syzmborska and Zagajewski, has done much to create the consciousness, to say nothing of the conscience, of those great poets' times and places. The same may be said of Heaney, Brodsky, Walcott. Nuruddin Farah, so long an exile from Somalia, has carried Somalia in his heart these many years and written it into being, brought into the world's sight that Somalia to which the world might otherwise have remained blind. From China, from Japan, from Cuba, from Iran, literature brings information, the base metal of information, transmuted into the gold of art, and our knowledge of the world is forever altered by such transformational alchemy.

The old idea of the intellectual as the one who speaks truth to power is still an idea worth holding on to. Tyrants fear the truth of books because it's a truth that's in hock to nobody, it's a single artist's unfettered vision of the world. They fear it even more because it's incomplete, because the act of reading completes it, so that the book's truth is slightly different in each reader's different inner world, and these are the true revolutions of literature, these invisible, intimate communions of strangers, these tiny revolutions inside each reader's imagination, and the enemies of the imagination, politburos, ayatollahs, all the different goon squads of gods and power, want to shut these revolutions down, and can't. Not even the author of a book can know exactly what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects, and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.

Literature is a loose cannon. This is a very

Why I Read (Reprise)

Why I Read (reprise)
Was re-reading Burton's The Arabian Nights on the grounds that I'd rather get my porn from a 19th century explorer's attempts at translation than the boring sleaze on television, and found myself hijacked by the footnotes.

Here's Burton on the institution of the Hammam:
"I have noted the popular practice amongst men as well as women, of hiring the Hammam for private parties and picnicking in it during the greater part of the day. In this tale the bath would belong to the public, and it was a mere freak of the bride to bathe with her bridegroom. Respectable people do not."

And on the subject of the whole roasted stuffed camel, he introduces the unwelcome suggestion that most beasts treated in this manner would have been roadkill:
"This is a favourite Badawi dish, but too expensive unless some accident happen to the animal. Old camel is much like bull-beef, but the young meat is excellent, althought not relished by Europeans because, like strange fish, it has no recognised flavour.... There is an old idea in Europe that the maniacal vengeance of the Arab is increased by eating this flesh; the beast is certainly vindictive enough; but a furious and frantic vengefulness characterises the North American Indian who never saw a camel."

Burton was no bowdleriser of the text, though he recognised the tendency and the necessity in others:
"It is an unpleasant fact that almost all of the poetry of Hafiz is addressed to youths... Sa'di, the 'Persian Moralist', begins one of the tales, 'A certain learned man fell in love with the beautiful son of a blacksmith', which Gladwin, translating for the general, necessarily changed to 'daughter'."

Several of his footnotes go into precise detail over how much interest may be charged, the distinction between the Jewish and the Moslem (sic) methods of circumcision, the nature and temperament of the Arab horse, and the exact nature of the paradisical tree that supplied every want.

Occasionally, he wields the footnote as a weapon of literary criticism:
"To my surprise, I read in Mr Redhouse's 'Mesnevi': 'Arafat, the mount where the victims are slaughtered by the pilgrims.' The ignorance is phenomenal. Did Mr Redhouse never read Burckhardt or Burton?"

And there are five volumes of The Arabian Nights that I have never in my lifetime opened, and that I must go off and read, starting, in tribute to Burton, from the bottom of the page up. Happiness is a warm footnote.
www.kitabkhanablogspot.com

Raymona Chandler to the Rescue

Raymona Chandler to the rescue
Otto Penzler, dean of mystery-writing in America,
flaps his sexist lip(link via Sarah Weinman):
“The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a recipe, or take care of cats,” he says. “Cozies are not serious literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There are wonderful exceptions, of course—P.D. James, Ruth Rendell.”

So if Raymond Chandler had been Raymona, would The Long Goodbye have read like this?

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers, so drunk that he had gotten all the ingredients to Miss Stella's Mystery Cake mixed up. The secret ingredient is tomato, lots of it. I knew that. But then I knew that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Terry Lennox didn't.
The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one....You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other. I know the feeling. I've been in a Walmart or two during discount sale season myself.
There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink (you can get two for the price of one at Macy's) that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can…
The drunk promptly slid off the seat and landed on the blacktop on the seat of his pants....I got him under the arms and got him up on his feet.
'Thank you so very much," he said politely.
The girl slid under the wheel. "He gets so goddam English when he's loaded," she said in a stainless-steel voice. "Thanks for catching him."
"I'll get him in the back of the car," I said.
"I'm terribly sorry. I'm late for an engagement." She let the clutch in and the Rolls started to glide. "He's just a lost dog," she added with a cool smile. "Perhaps you can find a home for him. He's housebroken--more or less." You couldn't say the same for the cat that was shedding orange fur all over her blue mink. "Here, Kitty," I said politely. The girl turned up the frost on the smile. "Her name," she said in a voice that would have made a Glaser stainless-steel knife seem blunt, "is Princess Wuffles."

www.kitabkhanablogspot.com

Pather Pancheli 50

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=30&theme=&usrsess=1&id=75884

Pather Panchali 50
Arup K De

THE story of the making of Pather Panchali, the all-time masterpiece that
established Satyajit Ray's reputation for being "one of the greatest and
most sublime filmmakers to emerge in the fifties" at one stroke, is well
documented. Ray was toying with the idea of quitting a lucrative job for a
career in cinema when he met the French-born American director Jean Renoir,
who came to Kolkata in 1949 to look for locations to shoot The River.
Meeting Renoir was an immediate experience that encouraged Ray to take the
plunge in filmmaking.
It was not until his 1967 tour of the USA that Ray got a chance to watch The
River, shot entirely in Bengal with a partly Indian cast. The screening
over, both Renoir and Ray were invited to the stage. "Ray owes a lot to
Renoir," said the introducer. But Renoir said, "I don't think Ray owes me
anything. I think he had it in his blood. Though he is very young, he is the
father of Indian cinema," he said.
The idea of filming Pather Panchali took shape while Ray did the
illustrations for Aam Antir Bhepu, a children's edition of Bibhuti Bhusan
Ban-dyopadhyay's classic novel, about the growing up of a wonder-struck
child in rural Bengal. In 1950, Ray went to London with wife Bijoya for a
five-month stay. He wrote the screenplay of Pather Panchali on his way back
on the ship.
"I produced a book of wash drawings describing the scenario of the film,"
said Ray in an interview with the London-based Bengali author Sasthi Brata.
"But none of the producers from top down wanted to know. They all said, you
cannot work on location, you cannot shoot in the rain, you cannot do this,
you cannot do that." Finally he started to shoot on his own.
The shooting of Pather Panchali, which continued fitfully over a period of
nearly two years, started in October 1953, in a field filled with autumnal
kash flowers, near Shaktigarh in West Bengal's Nadia district. The initial
funds - which they soon ran out of - were raised by pawning Ray's rare music
albums and his wife's jewellery, and borrowing Rs 20000 from Rana & Dutta.
Bela Sen put Ray in touch with West Bengal chief minister Dr BC Roy, who
arranged financial assistance to complete the film.
Ray had to edit the film at breakneck speed to meet the American deadline
for the New York world premiere in April 1955, four months before its
domestic release. The world premiere of Pather Panchali at New York's Museum
of Modern Art took the Ame-ricans by storm. They had little idea about
India, far less of Indian films. Ray's portrayal of an impoverished village
family with all its simplicity, lyricism and pathos was a wholly new and
overwhelming experience. The film had an eight-month run at a commercial
theatre in New York. Looking back, Ray wrote in 1982, "I watched the
audience surge out of the theatre, bleary-eyed and visibly shaken. An hour
or so later, in the small hours, came the morning edition of The New York
Times. It carried Bosley Crowther's review of my film. Crowther was the
doyen of New York critics, with power to make or mar a film's prospects as a
saleable commodity. He was unmoved by Pather Panchali. In fact, he said the
film was so amateurish that it would hardly pass for a rough cut in
Hollywood."
Jay Carr made amends after Ray's death. "It will be the Apu trilogy for
which Ray will be best remembered," Carr wrote in The Boston Globe.
"Attacked by a New York Times review as loose and listless and unlikely to
pass as a rough cut in Hollywood, the lovingly inscribed Pather Panchali
rem-ains a landmark in humanist cinema," he added.
Pather Panchali would surely have disappeared by now had Satyajit Ray Film
and Study Collection (Ray FASC) of the University of California Santa Cruz
(UCSC) not taken the initiative to restore its negative. Dilip Basu,
founder-director of the Ray FASC, came to Kolkata in December 1992 with
David Shepard, a film conservationist of world renown, to survey the
condition of Ray's films.
Shepard, who examined the negatives of Pather Panchali and many other Ray
classics, wrote in his report: "The original negative [of Pather Pan-chali]
is in poor condition. Each reel has many tears in the picture area, patched
either with cell overlays or with mylar tape, and in many reels bits of lost
footage have been replaced with blank spacer. Three of the 12 reels have
considerably deteriorated from the 'vinegar syndrome'. Seve-ral reels
contain copy negative sections replacing previously-damaged scenes of the
original negative. The negative has been 'fotoguarded' and this process,
which cannot be removed, has sealed in some damage. Restoration of this film
will require a second image source."
Basu and Shepard thought the negative lying at a London laboratory could be
used as a "second image source". But a mysterious fire at the lab burned the
negatives of Pather Panchali and five other Ray films soon thereafter. So,
in case of Pather Panchali, the restorers in the USA had to work not from
the original negative but, as Basu said, from good quality positive print
and from the inter-positive that was made in 1968 for the Pune National Film
Archive in India. The restored print is preserved by the Ray FASC in
sub-zero temperature at the climate-controlled vault of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.
The organisers of the Cannes Film Festival, which awarded Pather Panchali
the best human document prize in 1956, will pay a tribute to Ray on 12 May
this year to mark the golden jubilee of the making of the movie. The
restored print of Pather Panchali would be borrowed from the Academy for
screening at Cannes. Luminaries from the world film community, including the
Academy's president Frank Pierson, will attend the screening. The festival
will also show Renoir's The River, restored recently, on the same day as yet
another Cannes classic, presumably to underscore the links between two great
masters of world cinema.
The Ray FASC has its own plans as well to celebrate 50 years of Pather
Panchali. In July, informed Basu, some restored Ray classics, including
Pather Panchali, would be shown at the Delhi Asian Film Festival. There will
be an anniversary screening in Kolkata on 25 August, the day Pather Panchali
was first shown in town. The year-long Pather Panchali tour will end in
October in the Silicon Valley, USA where it will be shown at the
newly-repaired California Theatre in San Jose.
By his own admission, Ray, a city-bred man, discovered rural Bengal while
making Pather Panchali, which, in its turn, helped the world discover India.
Ray was India's cultural ambassador, who, after Tagore, built a new bridge
between the East and the West. The secret of Pather Panchali lies in its
power to "capture both that is unique in the Indian experience and that
which is universal," to borrow the words of Audrey Hepburn, who introduced
Ray and his works at the Oscar award ceremony on 30 March, 1992.
"I never imagined that any of my films, especially Pather Panchali, would be
shown throughout this country [the USA] or in other countries," Ray said in
1982 to the American film journalist Dan Georgakas. "The fact that they have
is an indication that if you are able to portray universal feelings,
universal relations, emotions and characters, you can cross certain barriers
and reach out to others, even non-Bengalis."

The author edits Salt Lake Post, a news-fortnightly published in Kolkata