A Brief Candle

For my mother. Like the Grandiflora she was slightly flamboyant, yet elegant and simple.

Time & Life

My mother had a fairly eclectic library, which included the slight, elegantly written books of Colette and Françoise Sagan. I stumbled on this Sagan quote somewhere and forgot to bookmark it so I am not quite sure whose picture it is.

The quote itself is from "Réponses: The Autobiography of Françoise Sagan".

Daffodils

Another poem on flowers from my little notebook.

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First daffodils
she worries they will be hurt
by the hard rain


The daffodils
my wife goes after the rain
to pick me some


Three daffodils
reluctantly, she leaves one
in the garden

-Andrew Lansdown

Bougainvillea

Sorting out the carton of old jottings, photographs, diaries - practically drowning in nostalgia. Note to self - I wrote better stuff in my twenties :-). And also by the looks of it, read a lot of poetry and made a lot of notes on night visits to the IIT library. Here's a sweet one, unfortunately never noted the author (though I am fairly sure its from Indian Literature). 



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Tattered bells of scentless glory

mauve and magenta rooted

gay as gypsy rags

as abandoned as a circus

as gregarious as a crowd. 

Grandfather

Far away from home, it is not uncommon to spend parts of the day thinking of people elsewhere. Small things like a person walking down a street, sitting down to a meal, sunk in thought, asleep flit through your mind. In this way, though apart they remain close.

A long time elapsed between my mother's passing and her brother's. In the interim much had changed. Suddenly everything is ephemeral, my uncle's fall from a bus a loud announcement of impermanence and its ignorance of age.

My grandfather is in his late 80s, the oldest person I know. He is endlessly happy then filled with a moody surliness, endlessly pleasured by our existence and in this he never changes. He is seemingly eternal. Still, I began to think of age, of people passing, the world changing as it must.

What seems natural? My grandmother's passing in her 90s, my grandfather never leaving. A cousin wept when my grandmother died, I could not understand it. I spent a day thinking of my grandfather and I did. I am immensely sad even as I think the moment lies a decade away.

In this world, leaves fall, flowers bloom, seasons pass. Trees grow outside my grandfather's room. I wrote a poem on my mother, ill, supine, watching those trees. We all pass by now, staring, unseeing, through his room. My grandfather is a tree in the evening of his life.

In the infinite days of a long relationship, very few are illuminated. What is it to be 80? I cannot answer as yet. What is to be 40? To wish for eternity in those who rushed to hold you, new born, blinking at the light of day.

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Smocked & Schwarz

Smocked pendant as seen on Flickr.

and Tilleke Schwarz's subversive embroidery. Image source here.

Cheese7MonkBlinkArt

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I must admit to a sense of perverse happiness when a book like Outliers is trashed. I haven't read Malcolm Gladwell but any one who writes a book, nay a title like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking deserves not to be read. So one's eye is immediately drawn to criticism in the hope that it corks the Gladwell genie so its never seen again. Alas, in the real world, the genie is out and about and prospering.

I can imagine Outliers being popular in India. I once worked for a corporate organisation in India and I can see it's young managers lugging it from airport to airport. The book will likely appear in those banal courses thought up by HR (leadership skills, creavitivity for middle managers, finance for dummies). Just like the cheese book, the seven habits book, the monk who once owned a Ferrari book, the de Bono books and anything Tom Friedman writes. Americans seem particularly adept at writing this kind of book and Indians particularly good at consuming them.

I can't entirely define why it is that I dislike motivational books aimed at the corporate world and books that propose some grand unifying theory and are quasi scientific but in reality lack any kind of rigour (Gladwell, Friedman) given that I can ignore them. In part my dislike stems from the depressing courses tailored around these books that one was forced to attend. Depressing not just in content but depressing in how seriously these courses are taken (or at least appeared to be taken, it cannot be said that organisations appreciate anarchists and dissenters). The odd innocent also believed that the books and the courses lit the path to senior management and unimaginable wealth. It was all enough to sedate oneself with alcohol to wipe out the awfulness of the whole thing.

Even people you knew as students who aimlessly lounged around discussing philosophy or feminism or a novel late into the night morphed into terrifyingly focussed individuals who made busy, incomprehensible power point charts. In this they dropped in whatever it was that Erica, Tom or Malcolm had opined and continued to think themselves well-read.

When people realise that corporate life is not all that it is cracked up to be or just reach a mid-career slump, its time for an altogether different genre of books. These stress the "positive life" and at no point is melancholia and cynicism ever allowed even if experience suggests otherwise. These quasi-philosophical offerings are so pervasive that at least in India anyone over 35 appears to automatically attach themselves to some spurious spiritual enterprise.

In all cases, self improvement is the goal. In a way, there's something vaguely disturbing about all that sweating and striving to get to an ideal which does not exist. There is no greater testament to idiocy than those performance appraisals which rely on increasingly absurd indicators to map your progress, nothing more stupid than the belief that constant striving is achievement, nothing more delusional than 24/7 happiness and bliss. Existence with its eddies, whorls, its going nowhere is simply not allowed. In reality, there is no greater improvement to life than lying back and watching the world sweat and hurry by, preferably mint tea and someone else's labours (a book) in hand. Somehow I can't see myself being invited by anyone to give a powerpoint lecture on it.

Diamond Fetishism

The Atlantic reproduced a 1982 article on the marketing of diamonds, how they came to represent "forever" essentials, how tastes were led to match the diamonds available to the trade and how the trade/cartel works behind the scenes.

Though the article in the main discusses the West and Japan, some things were familiar. For one, diamonds are seen as quintessential to a Tamilian wedding, even "traditional", for the stone has a long history in the country. But I remember my great grandmother mentioning that diamond jewellery for the bride were not the norm when she was young. It would appear they became de rigeur in South India not long after they became necessary in the West. As in the article, the resale value of diamonds is widely known to be nil amongst those in India who amass jewellery as security, this doesn't lessen the desire to own them. And the popularity of "small" diamonds over the years is visible in the jewellery young Indian women wear. In fact with increasing incomes, it is not uncommon to see brides in diamond "sets" (ostensibly less gaudy than large gems, nevertheless overwhelming in their totality). There is one difference. Diamonds symbolise romance in the West i.e. the man buys it for a woman. In India, it remains dowry - a measure of how much a woman's family can afford.

Towards Autumn

This week was the first sign that summer will soon be left behind. Though I hated winter when I arrived in Sydney, autumn and winter now count as my favourite seasons. Even for someone rich in melanin like me, the summers here are intense and at times unpleasant. Yet Australian tourism will have you believe that this is the best time of the year and what's more it lasts year round. Luckily it doesn't.

The Big Wet, Skyline, Strathfield: Shiv Moulee

Autumn and winter in Sydney are mild in comparison to their northern counterparts. In spite of this, you see the familiar patterns of chilly days and nights, rain, the slow shedding of leaves, darker wardrobes, the steam from the soups of eating holes and the slow closing of the city into itself. In any event, the muting of the million watt light of the Australian summer brings a romance to the city, its dingy streets seem much improved by both wind and rain. Similarly the beaches are no longer rows of glistening bodies, the sun a vertical ray boring through your clothes. In lovely contrast is the beach at Bronte on a cold and rainy day, the sea in turmoil with a few brave souls plunged in its icy waters.

It will be the end of March before we have anything close to autumnal days yet I feel my mood much improved at its approaching.

Snippets

Two very different links today.

Not clear at this stage as to what intellectual property right has been recognised. And what kind of precedent it sets for TK protection in general.

And

Libby Brooks on the myth of menopause (see my earlier post).

Bashed and Loyal

The papers today report that Rihanna appears to have been "bitten and battered" by her boyfriend. Previously in Australia, at least two sportsmen were accused of the pleasant sport of glassing, inexplicably both girlfriends (see here and here and here) decided to stick by her man in spite of those Australia says No campaigns. Whether Rihanna does so remains to be seen.

If she does, she is likely to have a precedent in the teen set that worships her. I had long chats with my cousin on my last visit to Mumbai and it transpired that at least two girls she knew, both in their late teens, were in abusive relationships. It was hard for me to ascertain if the girls were under any kind of peer pressure to leave. I may be wrong but it seemed to be all par for the course and merely part of girl talk on the agonies of a relationship. Having a boyfriend may after all be more important than having none in the brave new India. On the other hand, if the girls were lying, it only underlines that a violent boyfriend may be the must have accessory.

Time was when it was your bai who turned up glassed. She stayed in the marriage because she didn't have any choices in a society where leaving a husband brought its own stigma. Better to be a victim than a survivor was the underlying thought. And in a number of societies, it was understood that men in love roughed up their women a bit. It happened amongst the upper classes too but was spoken of in hushed tones. Some uncle or the other would be nursing the bottle (it seems to be omnipresent in domestic violence) and kicking the wife but the surface of polite society ran smooth. Any opprobrium was discreet.

Domestic violence has been on the agenda for long enough. There has been much written, much legislation to ensure that women do not endure violence and are not stigmatised by the violence. To disabuse the notion that love equals violence. In the public forum at least violence is not tolerated - Rihanna's boy friend can expect to lose a few contracts. But its hard to predict how the woman in the relationship will respond. Children were beaten too once. Its rarer these days and were it to be public, a person can expect to be ostracised. More importantly, no child sees abuse as a form of love. But at least these few examples makes it clear that women may have 21st century relationships with the freedom it entails but the internal dynamics of the relationship dates back to a more primitive time.

PostScript: Jezebel notes that teenage girls seem to find violence OK.

Spotted on Etsy - Book Makeover

Vandalised book or the book reinvented?

I quite like it.

Image Source here.

Memories of a Pure Spring

Duong Thu Huong is a Vietnamese writer whose books have been banned in her country for her indictment of postwar Vietnam. Her book, Memories of a Pure Spring, is basically a political tract charging the Communist party for betraying its ideals or at least betraying the many people who joined the war motivated by youthful idealism. Many of these people clearly fell by the wayside as Vietnam restructured after the war and the opportunists jostled for power, in the process settling old scores. The family at the centre of the novel are one of the victims who emerge from the sacrifices of war only to find themselves marginalised and subtly persecuted. Hung is a music composer of repute who is unable to compromise with the new leadership and what they represent and Suong, his wife, is a central Vietnam girl with a golden voice who is forced to make compromises. Through them and a number of other characters, the author chronicles Hung's fall, both professionally and personally, as well as the effect of the war and its aftermath on the individual and the culture of the country. In itself, the subject of Vietnam during the war is interesting because one is subjected to so many American interpretations of the war. Hardly any from North Vietnam is available in translation. And though some of the book traverses familiar territory given that the documentation of the corruption, the absurdity and the daily compromise with truth of communist regimes is plentiful, its specificity to the Vietnamese situation is sufficiently new. But for one reason or the other I didn't find the story interesting enough, which was a pity given how much I had looked forward to reading this book. Huong is clearly a passionate person, she is imbued with the right sentiments (and not merely the correct ones required of one by the times one lives in), her heart is in the right place. For this one admires her. But the story itself is not subtle and the characters are often broad brush strokes, particularly Suong. Every point seems doubly underlined. There is much internal monologue meant to represent Hung's thoughts on all subjects (about on the level of Guru Dutt's fragile hyper emotionalism) which gets to be plain wearying. Indeed it is as if everyone is so overcome by the specificity of their feelings that both characters and author don't seem to possess ironic distance from their situation. Perhaps ironic distance is postmodern and sincerity is undervalued. But the novel does not possess the element that makes feeling transparent but lets one transcend the obvious. At one point, Hung is caught fleeing on a boat, he is not fleeing but merely caught up in the melee. Huong does not treat this as richly comic, which it is. Neither does she treat it as a single tragic and unnecessary event which presages Hung's downfall. It is just one of many incidents in a book crowded with incident. Huong is also not served well by the translation, I suspect her voice is direct, in translation it is merely banal and maudlin. The only evocative bit of the novel, for me, was the section on Hung's father and an older kind of Vietnamese life, which is not very much touched upon except to serve as a more tranquil past (it reminded me a bit of Scent of the Green Papaya).

This novel put me in mind of Half of a Yellow Sun (again by an author with her heart in the right place). In either case, I wanted to put down the book mid-way and turn to a non-fiction work on the wars in Biafra and Vietnam. The case may well be made for fictionalising one's political and social concerns for fiction is effective in illuminating the facts. But very many authors tend to take their lived experience (in Huong's case her lived experience is quite remarkable and her novel is perhaps more a roman à clef which would make it somewhat inaccessible to the foreign reader) or research and build up a body of facts and then find a tale to peg on it. Very often it doesn't work.

Books that insert actual facts into fiction fare even worse. Amitav Ghosh, for example, is a serial offender. Shadow Lines, his first novel, which uses a long buried newspaper headline as a central piece of the story, is arguably the best of his fiction because it is a spare book. Hungry Tide nearly drowned in its reams of data and Glass Palace had characters and plot that were hokum. To my mind, only one novel did an excellent job of mixing both fact and fiction, The French Lieutenant's Woman. Charles and Sarah's story is interleaved with factual accounts of Victorian life (these obviously relate to the novel) but it is first and foremost a novel - the facts serve the purpose of the novel and not vice versa. Then again, I was in my twenties when I read it and the memory may be of my own pure spring. I may feel differently if I re-read it.

A review of Duong's book here. In general, the novel seems to have been well received.

Austen Inc.

Jane Austen has much to answer for. Her novels, collectively, seem to have set the template for everything from Mills & Boon to the Date Movie to everything in between. Bad enough. But now its an industry, the unceasing juggernaut of which appears to have taken off sometime when Colin Firth, playing a one note Mr. Darcy, emerged from a lake to the collective excitement of Ms. Bennett and a few million other women. A scene, one may note in passing, that does not exist in the novel, Pride and Prejudice. Since then we have been subjected to one remake after the other of her six novels and Austen’s life is also increasingly the subject matter for some very dubious films. Predictably a new Austen film has just been announced.

I don't dislike Austen, it is hard to dislike one of the most beloved novelists writing in the English language. And it is not her fault that its the romantic template that has carried over into much subsequent fiction (and not her satire and irony, for example). But the persistence of this template well into a century in which women are no longer living a "little piece of ivory" life is inexplicable. Given the varied nature of women's lives today, its surprising that audiences repeatedly consume the same banal romance. It is not even that women's literature of the past wasn't rich and varied. In fact, one can reach right back in time and find that even writers as famous as the Eliots and Brontes are unlikely to find themselves the centre of so much current female adoration. Eliot has almost dropped off the radar given that she is drawn to the great moral and political themes of her age. The Brontes are far too untrammelled to properly fall within the genteel conventions of romantic literature. Women, it would appear, don't like weighty issues or unreasonable passion. Only Jane Eyre, a reworked Cinderella story, is any competition to the Austen industry.

So women obviously recognise themselves in Austen's novels. Even those who are old enough to not buy into the romance myth. But I am uncertain if any modern man recognises himself in the typical Austen hero. Even though Austen was read by both sexes in her time, a few centuries later it would appear that no man reads or watches adaptations of her work except under duress. No one after all can be Mr. Darcy because he is a mythical creature. And the heirs to Austen, chick-lit and chick flicks have become pejorative terms with half the population because its men are about as real as Lara Croft or the Bond girls.

Still, women like this template, no matter how unrealistic it is. Two feisty women I once met, both studying to be doctors, simply loved Austen and Darcy, in no particular order. P&P is not exactly my favourite novel partly because of its house pornography (Ms. Bennett in fact appears to fall in love with house and man). Also let's face it, Austen's world, though not her prose, is limited. So I pointed them to A Room with a View. They fell about laughing. Its true that no romantic novel with any credentials, would make a depressed railway clerk with a direct manner and lofty ideas a romantic hero. Women trade up, not down. Women like to be wooed. And A Room with a View, with its critique of class and its emphasis on the authentic emotion (which precludes societal conventions like wooing), is really a homosexual love story in disguise. My mistake.

Its not a mistake I will make again. I stay silent while all around me otherwise sensible women are watching whatever it is that is the new romantic fiction (even Sex and the City is really an Austen template updated to a specific locale in the 20th century). And feel a silent sense of vindication when others concur - witness why dudes don't read (Austen in Vampireland!) and Dowd's bemusement.

Everyone is talking about

Guerrilla Gardening.

Given that one has to coax pot plants to grow (or at least I have to), it all seems very easy. Kind of instant nature. I am sure it is nothing like that but there is a great deal of romance in reports on it and little on the actual growing and maintenance (though the site itself catalogues how it is done).

NYT on the gardeners.