Notes on Joyful Militancy

Dear reader,

Once upon a time, around five years ago methinks, I came across the review of a book whose words seem to jump off the screen straight into my zehn. As was and is the ways of my online meanderings, I knew then I would come back and dwell on the review, get the book, read it, revel in it, and, all those new link resolutions were made, and I moved to the other click. (I can almost see B. raise his brows, placarding between them, bookmark, bookmark.) After some time, when I tried to retrace my path, I found no breadcrumbs, the ether had licked them up clean. I tried all the left sites, Jacobin, New Left Review, and what nots, but could not find this review, and I had forgotten the name of the book. The years passed.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across one of those context-less quotes shared by someone in Instagram, and it promptly jumped off the screen straight into my zehn. (I still don’t get the idea of pulling out quotes from a book without context and making a picture out of it, but that’s another rant.) I whooped – it was the book; cue yaadon ki baraat soundtrack, I could have recognised those words anywhere, and when I saw the cover (I mean, look at that cover — it says so much) I knew the search was complete.

The book is ‘Joyful Militancy’, building thriving resistance in toxic times by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman. It is one of those books I made highlights of extensively, because every now and then there would be a paragraph that I would find myself agreeing with, and wanting to discuss with others.

The authors start by acknowledging the general mood of despair around, “we are encouraged to spend more time touching our screens than the people we love; it is easier for many of us to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” There is a sense of inevitability about capitalism; if not this then what? A lot of the novels I read recently too adopt what I started to think of as the ‘capitalism, whattodo shrug’ (a longer letter coming soon about these novels). The plots of these books are as diverse as they are, revolving around the tyranny of social media performativity, class struggles, and the avarice of billionnaires, but underlying all of them is this sense of, yes, all this is bad, but ‘capitalism whattodo shrug’.

Obviously, the authors of Joyful Militancy and those they write about, want to go beyond the ‘capitalism whattodo shrug’, and here, they introduce some concepts that occur through the book. If ever someday, there is that promised book club, I hope each of these terms would have their own discussion sessions.

First is the idea of joy. The authors make a distinction between joy and happiness, which I can’t go into in detail, for you must read the book, so that we can discuss in the someday book club. Here’s a glimpse though, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, whom the authors quote, “Happiness is a sort of ridiculous thing we’re all supposed to chase like dogs chasing cars that suggests there’s some sort of steady well-being… you can feel confident, you can feel loved, but I think joy flashes up at moments and then you have other important things to attend to. Happiness — the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche — is somewhat overrated.” That last phrase, the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche is something I wanted to underline repeatedly, which the blasted screen would not give me the satisfaction of. It is something people have spoken about in different ways, in different contexts that it almost feels like a banal observation. Even though you have 1.5 million followers, why, like Gulzar said, ‘itne log hain, phir tanha kyon ho’? When you can order anything you want at the click of a button, why do you scroll endlessly, and then throw the phone away, irritated?

I have thought of it as an incalculable friction — we need that friction to feel that we are alive; like when you struggle with a paragraph, and when you hit on that phrasing, it comes as this kick; something joyful. When you take a stand, on the street, in your home, in your workplace, and there’s that moment of transgression. When you sit with a friend you have known for years and they tease you about something silly. I could go on, but in all these interactions, you need to get out of that insulated room with wall-to-wall carpeting. The authors come up with different interpetations and examples to illustrate what they mean by joy, an active passion, a process of transformation, the erotic, and so on, and I found one word particularly of note, sentipensar, ‘the conviction that you cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking’. Then the authors talk of militancy, which is usually associated with combative aggression, but they unpack its different layers, as an active, fertile and transformative process. The authors do not take the easy way of giving easy definitions to these terms, rather, they talk of different imaginations of that word, and what it could mean and stand for, and in doing so, also push for continuing that process.

The authors then speak of how the basis of any social movement is a sense of friendship and community, and the attendant prickly problems of trust and solidarity that accompany any such community space. For there is always the question of power, the location of people, their conditioning, and their own personal idiosyncracies. All of which complicated by the context of capitalism and other oppressive structures such movements are embedded in. All these pressures could result in what the authors term ‘rigid radicalism’, where the rules of who is in and out become rigid, where the same processes that are being critiqued get reproduced, and unintentionally, the same relationships that made us sick get reproduced (paraphrasing a quote by Zainab Amadahy in the book).

Then comes the paragraph that every time does the zehn jump, “There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant apprehension of errots and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media with the highs of being liked and hte lows of being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naive and condescension feels right. We can sense its emergence at certain times, when we feel the need to perform in certain ways, hate the right things, and make the right gestures. Above all, it is hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.”

The authors term this phenomenon ‘rigid radicalism’, ‘a fixed way of being, and a way of fixing’. Don’t worry, there is no prescription of what to do about it; the authors are careful to not go down that route. There isn’t a binary too — for instance, ‘calling in‘ is not framed as an opposite of ‘calling out’. There isn’t a senseless free for all approach to say whatever anyone wants, however they want, because oppressive structures are real. They also speak about their own fears — even in writing this, they will be dismissed as too naive, too woo-woo, too oppressive, and add that this fear (performative? performing?) also imposes self-censorship. What I found valuable is that they share insights of different people involved in varied movements, and so there is a plurality of voices and ideas, people speak from their own experience, and there’s an underlying texture of care, they do not speak in the language of accusing and punishing, rather more in the register of transformative justice.

I shall pause here, for I don’t think I have yet absorbed all the ideas that come after to provide a summary or a key highlights sort of ending. I also think it makes more sense for you to engage with the material without any such preludes; you can then sift it from the lens of your own experiences. I also hope for a similar book in the Indian context. I shall leave you with these lines, which I wanted to underline again and again:

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today. – Malcolm X”

The middle-aged newsletter

It was one of those muggy Chennai nights. My friend N. and I were at a restaurant and we bumped into a younger person we both knew. They were pleasantly buzzed, having just finished a few rounds with some friends, as were we. They chatted with both of us for a while, and as we all decided to leave, we realised – their home was a bit far away, but they had not made any plans on how to get back. My friend and I took it upon ourselves to figure out ways to make sure they got home safe. The younger person seemed to be a believer with a touching faith that the universe would hail a cab.

“We were never that young,” another friend often says. It is true. My childhood. There was a school play involving royalty, the teacher took one long look at me and said, I cannot be a princess – perhaps, a queen – there was something of an adult even in that child. My early 20s. My friends and I are returning from a trek, exhausted, in the train. I am the one who keeps wide awake to make sure we get down at the right station, while A. snoozes, her head on my shoulder cushion. Continue in the 20s. Everyone is drunk and happy in a friend’s house. Someone feels hungry. I rummage through the shelves and cook up a tomato bhaath.

Now that I am actually middle-aged, it feels like a relief. From being precociously middle-aged, now I am actually that. Somehow, that feels like cause for celebration. Like yay, the graph of my age and head have finally intersected. And so, to mark this occasion, I plan to start a newsletter – the middle-aged newsletter.

–

“Great Hornbill”, Folio from the Shah Jahan Album recto: ca. 1540; verso: ca. 1615–20
Painting by Mansur . From Met museum’s open collection.
Recently, I was introduced to the hornbill, and since then I have been fascinated by this bird. When researchers from Mysore studied seed dispersal, they found that the hornbills were the most effective, and can disperse up to 13 km. Hornbills have this booming laugh, which I found was so endearing – like this friend who unmindful of where they are cackle up.

Since the beginning of the lockdown, I started blogging. It stemmed from a need to go back to a longer form, slow down and dwell with ideas awhile. I started writing during the heydays of Livejournal, and that longer form has always been a source of both solace and sense. Of course, social media took over, and for awhile, there was confusion in 140 characters. Eventually, I had to come back home.

As no one comes to a blog to read, and a newsletter seems like a way of delivering a blog to an inbox, it makes sense to do a newsletter. (Incidentally, as I was mulling over this idea a few days ago when I turned 40, Roxane Gay declared that she is starting her own newsletter, and spoke about how she enjoyed blogs – tiny flutters of sympatico khushi happened.)

What will this newsletter have? It will focus on writing – something I have done awhile now, writing for newspapers, journals, and the occasional book. It will be about intangibles, what can never be measured, like ideas in books, our relationship with music, the games we play, and the love we all seek (see, when you are middle-aged, you can say sappy things and sound wise). It will never be a ‘must-read’ newsletter or a critical take – there are others who do that, and do that so well. This is a newsletter for when you have the time, inclination, and the quietude. There will be 30 newsletters to begin with – even Bach was sure you would go to sleep after 30 variations.

So, friend, if you are interested and don’t mind this intrusion into your time and mailbox, tell me, and let’s begin a conversation.

Dheere, dheere

Dheere dheere re mana

Dheere sab kuch hoi

Maali seenche sau ghada

Rut aaye, phal hoye

I came across this couplet from Indu (one more added to the endless list of what I am grateful to her for). And somehow it has become an amulet. I have to warn you that this is one of those personal posts – of interest to no one else except the writer. Consider yourself duly notified.

A friend who has this on and off relationship with dating apps was recently telling me about Richard Feynman. Apparently, the physicist used to say to his dates, let’s dispense with the dance of trying to know and woo each other, and just get to the act. Why can’t it be that simple, my friend asked. I haha-ed, you know that type, all sound no funny. It was as if the unstated goal of the whole process was sex, which began when people began to take their clothes off. What about what comes before?

In the sequel to the ‘Name of the Wind’ which is a disappointment in too many ways to be listed, there is one sequence where the hero is in the court of a powerful nobleman. A courtier visits the hero with a package – it is a game. The old courtier invites the hero to play, and they do, and as they do, they chat about court intrigue and unspoken rumours. After a few weeks, the courtier stops playing the game, and the hero says, just when I was beginning to get good at it. And the courtier says, then what’s the point – it never was about winning.

Learning about game design, I slowly realised what is important is the ludic element, the play. The rest is all optional. I think my aspiring to be Feynman friend subscribed to a narrow definition of a game – the one that comes with a payoff at the end. A win.

Dee has dimples and has a life that’s like a whirlwind. Where normal people try to do two things, Dee insists she can do twelve. And she manages to do ten, which is quite remarkable in itself. One day, when Dee was visiting, I was trying to observe her as she scurried around from one task to another, she said, ok, I have an hour before I need to go meet that person, so let’s decide what to talk about. I was a bit confused. What? I asked. She, who was pursuing a PhD, said she did not want to waste time with me and so we had to talk about something that was important. I remember laughing, and she laughed too, and waited. No, we didn’t chat about important things, but Dee never stops trying.

Whenever I think of that urgency, a keen consciousness that time is passing by and not enough is being done, I think of Dee and I think of Jeet, ‘Aisa lag raha hai ki kuch galat ho raha ho, jaise ki koi train chut rahi ho’. This anxiety that streaks like black across the day’s lilac.

We want to make sure we catch that train. We have a plan, we have an agenda – a clear ordered list of what to do and what to achieve, is something that drives all my interactions with my colleagues these days. When we used to meet and work with each other, there were asides, stories, and drivel, completely inessential to the stuff of productive work, but like oxygen to a social being. With timed zoom calls, everyone starts with the agenda and ends with it. Lingering after the clock has struck the hour feels like Cinderella will turn from a paragon of efficiency to a pumpkin.

Somewhere, I want to be a pumpkin. I want to just sit there, my green curves ripening to yellow. I want to remain unmoved, let time wash over me like a gentle breeze, unmarked and unremarked. At these moments of wanting to be pumpkin like, I think of the couplet, Dheere dheere.

There was a time before clocks, you know? I am reading a book called ‘Einstein’s clocks, Poincare’s Maps’ and I have been reading that book for a long while now. I read a few pages and stop and then pick up the thread a week or so later. The author is absorbed with the idea of how people became obsessed with measuring time, precisely calibrating and coordinating clocks across oceans and continents.

I am more curious about how they managed before? There was an era when when at home, they saw a time, and in the train station the clock showed another – they were not synced. Marking time on a clock was understood to be a human enterprise, which now seems like a natural phenomenon like hurricanes or hummingbirds.

And so, unmarking time is also, to me, a human enterprise. One that the pumpkin in me favours. Dheere, dheere

Those secret mallu desires

When I was perhaps 15, I realised that I lived inside an invisible fence. I never stepped out of that fence, in fact, I made sure that the edge of my pavadai didn’t flutter near that boundary. I lived like what that character in Somerset Maugham’s book decided his life was: “Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.” When you think about it, it is a stunning idea – no one told me don’t do a, b, c, d, e at every instance. But somehow, this amorphous cloud called conditioning ensured that it rained on any mildly rebellious parade.

It changed, thankfully, and for that, I must thank my Mallu friends.

Take A. She would not do anything herself, but would prod me. Say, she wanted to eat paan (it was forbidden by her mother, I think. There were so many such rules, it is easy to get confused who put what paabandi). And the streetside paan shops seemed to have an invisible sign that said ‘Only Men’. One day, on one of our walks, as we approached a paan shop, I said, chalo, I’ll get this paan. And I trooped ahead, in my aunty salwar kameez, and oiled choti, and asked for two paans. She quickly ran away to the other side of the street.

A. was the one who had a doubt on how to say ‘gaandu’, and what exact part of the human anatomy did it refer to. I remember agitatedly discussing it with her on the road, the newly opened Zunka Bhakar stand nearby, when I think I loudly insisted ‘gaandu’ (with the correct enunciation). A man leisurely riding his bicycle almost toppled. We didn’t know how to explain we were not calling out to him, and so, we both ran away.

N taught me to speak about sex, periods, and all things related to genitalia without shame. N said she had an older sister who would talk about all if it to a younger N, and so, she never associated chee-chee-thoo-thoo with such subjects (I am fully in awe of her older sister). I discussed questions like can you swim during your period (answer is yes, the water pressure keeps the flow at bay) and other intimate questions. And she once said how others too have remarked this about her – that how easy it is to discuss such subjects, and I felt a bit sad – not many have an N. in their lives.

I was someone who could not withstand the p of peer pressure, and this includes pressure from people who are not even my peers. Strangers can make me do things. Once, for a college fest, I was with a group of peers trying to get others to sign up for something, I don’t quite remember. G stood in a corner, and I went and told her, toh, I’ll add your name? She said no. I nodded – it was a ritual. Someone says no, I don’t want that samosa, you insist, and then they take one more. It is polite to refuse at least once, we have been taught that. I smiled and said, come on, it will be fun. She said no. Now I got a bit worried as this whole thing was going off script. I said, ok ok, I’ll just go ahead and add your name. She said, can’t you get it? I said no. Then I got it. I was a bit awed, but I understood. I am still in awe. For if you have seen that video, people will do anything to conform; to not feel odd. If in a waiting room, they see others stand up when a bell goes off, even if no one is there in the room, they will stand up, assuming there’s an unwritten group rule they need to adhere to. It is hard for anyone to say, no, I disagree and stand out, for that is a petrifying condition. G did. She said no often. She taught me to at least try.

Reading Nisha’s book, I thought of all these Mallu women in my life, and I was a bit chuffed. It was a satisfying feeling, the kind that balloons from your belly after rice meals. Reading the book also feels like that – the world will be ok. There are Mallus around.

Those tempting myths

Many moons ago, I was in a college in Bandra for a festival and Shyam Benegal was there to speak about his cinema. He said, as a child, he remembered seeing a movie (perhaps it was Sholay – I can’t remember that detail), and his mother wept watching it. And he was stunned – how could someone make my mother weep? What power is this? And he was smitten with cinema, and perhaps a bit covetous the art’s power over someone. Recently, watching Sense8, a character, who is also in the movies speaks of a similar scene – about how an actor made his mother and aunts cry. And how that made him want to be an actor – I thought, hey, hey, you should compare notes with Shyam Benegal. And at the same time, I was a tiny bit suspicious – is this like one of those easy cinema origin myths?

Sense8 Season 2

Let me tell you about another myth – Vilayat Khan was traveling through a forest when a group of bandits accosted him. The bandits said, give us your wealth. And Vilayat Khan said, all I have is my sitar and my music. And so, he plays for the bandits. At the end of it, moved and in tears, they gift him an emerald the size of a mynah’s egg – lootne aaye the, khud lut gaye. On hearing Namita Devidayal speak of this (she wrote the Sixth String of Vilayat Khan), Saba Dwan chipped in and said that while researching for her book (actually, tome) Tawaifnaama, she had come across the exact same story, but with another protagonist.

In classical music, you keep hearing similar stories of artistic greatness. Annapoorna Devi, the daughter of Allauddin Khan, was a master of the Surbahar. That’s an instrument more demanding than the Sitar, which is what her first partner, Ravishankar was famous for. The stories of how Annapoorna Devi and her reclusive artistry are well known. One of her students in an interview spoke about how inexplicably, when she would practice, the room would suddenly be suffused with the scent of sandalwood. I was always intrigued by that scene – a woman immersed in her practise, and suddenly, the unmistakable scent of something so rare filling the air.

And interestingly, I came across the same story in Tawaifnaama. Sadabahar is a legendary musician, and sometimes when she practised, the room would, you guessed it, fill with the scents of sandalwood.

Now, I don’t know whether that’s what happens when you have art that speaks to another plane altogether. Or whether certain vibrations have the power to change the olfactory state of nearby molecules. Or if it is all fiction, a parable of greatness, to both shock and edify. I find myself vacillating between wanting to believe in all three.

Thoda show, thoda tale

Recently something quite astounding happened, but ‘astounding’ is an adjective. So, a bit of show before the tale.

—

The book launch was in an art gallery, which was a house tucked away in a residential neighbourhood. The backyard (yes, a house in the middle of the city with a backyard) had some chai, biscuits. On the dais were many women and one man. The person who edited the anthology on technology and the city, a woman, started asking questions to each of the contributors. The women who contributed spoke. Research for four years, extensive photographic documentation, scores of interviews – as each woman spoke, their measured answers drew deep from the well of their work. They were earnest, self-critical, acknowledged their shortcomings, and engaged with the discomfort they had with their material and their position.

Then came the man’s turn, he with a shock of salt and pepper curls. He smiled, and spoke of his contribution. He had made identity cards of famous dead leaders. I waited, and realised that’s it, that was the Tweet. Oh, you could download it, if you liked, it is all digital and interactive these days, he winked. And it is all meta, anyway.

The man used one of the Indian leaders chart images for the identity cards.

The women around smiled, a bit. He was playing the truant schoolboy in the guise of the ironic artist, and they had to indulge him. I then realised, this relationship humour has with power is like the wife joke. When you are not holding anything tight, you can parry with punchlines.

—

One day, when I was in school, perhaps, this was ninth standard, one of our teachers hadn’t come to class. We were all chattering, and a class of around 70 chattering could constitute a commotion. The Principal, whose office was some doors away, trooped in. Who is the teacher? She thundered. One boy starts, “De…” and then shut up. The entire class did a smothered giggle. As mean children (and as all children are, we were reasonably nasty), we had named this teacher ‘Dedh foot’ and none of us recalled his real name for a beat or two. The Principal, a malayalee, thundered, waving her hand, “So what if the teacher has not come? Only your kai has to do the talking.” I was one of the many in class, who smother-giggled.

Growing up in Indian cities, the language I think and emote in is khichdi. It is this soul satifying mix of English, Mumbaiyya-Hindi, Tamil, and a tadka of Marathi, Malayalam, and now a side dish of Kannada. But this khichdi has a problem.

A., a childhood friend, who only spoke in English, decided to use Malayalam as punctuation. In a quest for her roots, she had begun to watch Malayalam movies. And she wistfully said, she wanted to enjoy the comedy. She realised that she didn’t get many of the references, and the naadu evada comedy seemed so unattainable.

Khichdi’s relationship with humour was like sex education in our schools – it wasn’t funny but we giggled anyway. But, my childhood was a long time ago. So, when AIB did their roast a year or so ago, I was curious – had khichdi matured to have a relationship with humour? One doesn’t know yet, because it felt like AIB had tried to peep through the keyhole, quite unsuccessfully at that. Their humour was the equivalent of saying ‘fuck’ in the drawing room to startle the adults, and giggling about it.

—

A few days ago, something astounding happened. I discovered humour unshackled by framing of a certain kind of power – not just the anti-thesis of the wife joke, but the creation of a universe where the wife joke is rendered meaningless. And I discovered humour that was the khichdi, cooked perfectly in 3-seetis – the flavour had seeped in, blended, and it tasted like home. I read Nisha Susan’s, The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.

And such an astounding book, needs a three-part review. This was Part 1.

Happy birthday, S.

Dear S,

You told me to suggest some books for you to read, as you will be turning 30 soon. I have no clue why that is a prompt for books, but then I don’t wish to tilt at the windmills of your mind (or anyone’s for that matter, but your’s especially). As you are far away, and these times don’t allow hugs, I am just going to tell you about books that feel like one.

We have spoken a lot about the idea of the ‘good girl’, the expectations around it, both from within and outside. How do people come to know what’s being good, and the things we do to feel good (interpret it however you like). When someone says, be better, they are asking you to be good-er, for good, better, best, and a question then is, is being good about yourself, or about the world, or about how you are perceived in this world, or how you want to be perceived?

‘How to be good’ is this delightful and dark book by Nick Hornby. Katie tries to be good, works hard, and cares for the planet. Her husband writes the angriest man in town letters in the local newspaper. And then something happens – he decides to be good. And then what happens, is what the book is about.

I love those books which make you laugh, and horrified that you are laughing at this at a meta level, and Nick Hornby does that. So well. ‘About a boy’ was the first book I read of his, and there too I horror-laughed many a time. It is a genre called ladlit, a companion to chicklit, and as highbrow is something not to aspire for either in literature or life, let’s not bother about such classifications (given our mutual love for 90s Bollywood songs, I think we can dispense with such classifications altogether).

What makes a book high literature or pulp? P., a friend I made during my journalism days, and I once spoke of how the absence of plot, and how that is sometimes a mark of how a book is considered high literature. We both then laughed and decided we will stay firm in our love for both plot and writing.

A book I read recently that does both exceedingly well, while threading in politics and power structures, is the Broken Earth trilogy. The protagonist is in her 40s, so you have some time to go before you can feel comfortable in her worn out shoes. She is in search of her daughter. And the world could end, but not in the way you think.

Talking about age, I was trying to think what I read at the time I turned 30. Yes, yes, it was a long time ago, don’t snigger. And the book that comes to mind is about age and ageing – ‘An artist of the floating world’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in Japan. I can recall a gentleness that flows through Ishiguro’s writing, and it smells of bread soaked in soy sauce. By which, I mean, he is an immigrant, someone who can claim to two cultures. And so, he has a distinct flavour to his writing. And the story – about this ageing artist who grapples with the mores of a changed society – is as layered and subtle as anything Japanese.

I still haven’t read Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the day’, though I did read ‘Never let me go’, and didn’t watch the movie. I savoured both the books – as I said, it wraps you in this cloud, and your view of the world is blurry – you don’t know whether you are crying or if it is the cloud.

Speaking of Japanese novels, I read Banana Yoshimoto’s N.P before I read her famous work, Kitchen. N.P is about an author who has committed suicide, leaving an unfinished work. I remember reading it in a train, most probably the Chennai-Bangalore Shatabdi. And I remember desperately wanting to be in a less public place, somewhere I could be alone with the book. It felt like a communing of sorts – I don’t think I can explain that feeling.

Many Japanese authors I have read write about artists. Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, or Masks by Fumiko Enchi. I have this tremendous affection for artists – and yes, I mean affection for, not attraction to (though, I guess that’s part of it too). Before, an artist for me was associated with the craft – are they a musician, a painter, a dancer, or a poet. And now, an artist is about someone who manages to brave in moments, and confront their selves and reveal it to the world. I feel such people are precious. The beginnings of my affection for such artists came from Salman Rushdie’s ‘Ground Beneath Her Feet’. A famous singer has disappeared in an avalanche. A photographer narrates her story, and of her lover. Even as I type this, I tear up, because something about the book, the time I read it, that fearsome passion, unmaad, doomed love between Vina and Ormuz – all of it in Rushdie’s decadent prose.

“But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.“

And the book is about music, and that’s the part I always felt Rushdie didn’t understand fully. I loved Rushdie’s writing, and I use the word love as it is meant to be used. At one point I read every word he wrote, I scrounged for more of his writing, writing about his writing, be it non-fiction or memoir. And then, suddenly, I stopped. And it is Rushdie’s writing, not the man – I had no desire to meet or know him. And somewhere, I felt, he didn’t understand music.

I think writing about music is hard. Or perhaps, a reader like me, expects writing about music to be somehow entangled with music itself – and music is what came before writing. Pure sound, the point where thought begins – how do you write about that which is essentially about losing capacity for coherent thought?

On that slightly dissatisfied note, I shall close this letter. The sun has settled behind some clouds, and slowly the light will leach out of the trees, and turning them into black and white snapshots. I will go make some tea, and as there’s some milk, it will be brewed with ginger and some spiced jaggery. I hope we can share a cup soon.

Happy birthday.

ps: I feel dissatisfied because I want to tell you about other books. Maybe another letter in some time?

Clawing me softly

Alice in Wonderland is a whacko tale – it has layers. The meanings are slanted, and so there are hints and nothing is fixed. Ambiguous is perhaps the word I seek. And given literary theory’s love for what lies beneath, folks have read it as a trippy tale of drugs or illicit sexual desire. Alice by Christina Henry is about a darker tale of Alice, one where she has memories of a rabbit, blood, and is now in an asylum.

The cover was what drew my attention. It was in a bookstore in a land faraway, and this cover, and that of others in the series had such a singular look, a saturnine appeal.

I was intrigued, for there was always this potential in Alice – wonderland can quickly twist in to a dark hole of terrors. A stranger luring a child into a dark warren where treats await – it is meant to be a scary beginning. Perhaps, most children’s tales have that potential for darkness. Children’s rhymes in English have the most morbid subjects – beginning with the plague in ring-o roses (right, the pandemic is never off one’s mind). Twisting markers of innocence and happy, shiny, childhood – a fun fair, a doll, a rhyme – these are not new territories in literature.

China Mieville’s short story of horror, ‘The ball room’ in his collection ‘Looking for Jake and other stories’ is set in a children’s play area. One of Agatha Christie’s books confounds you because you never expect that a child could be the killer. I realised just now that many of Christie’s books of murder and evil have children’s rhymes as their titles and woven into the plot. One I cannot forget, though I don’t remember which story it is. I think the cruelty of that act – locking someone up inside a box wedged itself inside my teenage head –

“A-hunting we will go.

A-hunting we will go.

We’ll catch a fox, and put him in a box, and never let him go.”

Sometimes I am tempted to think that this ‘innocence of children’ is a necessary fiction for adults.

So, coming back to Alice, it seemed like such an intriguing premise that despite my aversion to horror I wanted to read it. And it was underwhelming. For starters, the book has what I would call the ‘Signs’ problem – the movie made by Manoj Shyamalan. In the movie, they keep referring to aliens and are terrorised by it. I too was, till they actually showed the aliens – it then became a bit funny. I think your head is capable of conjuring much more terror than reality, and so hints of possibilities fuels that imagination more than a material referent.

In Alice, every character Alice meets, be it the Walrus, the Caterpillar, or the Cheshire Cat all are evil, with a capital E and they do Bad things. If things had been kept in the realm of hints and whispers – then the tension could have been sustained. But the author chooses to show, and what then I realised is how inured I am to such fictitious imagined horrors, for reality has proven to be worse, much worse.

Newspapers have scared me more than what the author tries to show. Perhaps, some of it has also to do with Tamil cinema. Now, Tamil cinema has a villain entry scene – and each movie competes with the other to show how much more evil their villain is. I wait for that scene with some sort of twisted anticipation – what will he do? Would he chop off someone’s little finger with a rusty saw, or drill into someone’s eye and splatter lots of blood on white veshti? As Tamil cinema takes its torture porn seriously (I still remember this scene where this guy fights with a piece of glass wedged in his foot – excruciating it is to watch), and so Alice’s Evil villains seem more like middling henchmen on their way to retirement

Why Daevabad feels like Delaware

I am being uncharitable – it has been one of those days. At the same time, that’s exactly why I pick up books so that they can pick me up, make me fly. But instead of feeling the whoosh while zooming on a flying carpet, I feel, I am in a car manufacturing facility – everything has been assembled according to Mr. Ford and even molten sapphire comes in black.

The book ‘City of Brass’ is set in a world of djinns. The djinn tribes resonate with Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and ‘Indian’ (I want to say North Indian) ethos (oh, what I wouldn’t give for a book of fantasy set in the Sangam era). Now, if you take away that setting, the book’s characters feel like those you have met in Western books and that’s where I think the book doesn’t do its job well – who are these people, why are these people, what are their motivations, and why aren’t they stuffed with more substance than hot air?

Take Nahri – she reminded me of Kareena Kapoor from Agent Vinod. Bear with me. In Agent Vinod, Kareena Kapoor is a sheltered doctor in Pakistan, who is caught in a bombing incident and suspected to be terrorist, now on the run. Suddenly Agent Vinod tells her, go seduce evil Russian spy guy. And she pours herself into a red dress and offers temptation to the Russian spy guy. I sputtered. Look, if you are sheltered and shy, and haven’t had romantic entanglements, batting eyelids and pouting will look like Jamie Lee Curtis doing the dance in True Lies – you know she is trying to recall all the bedroom ‘moves’ in countless movies and aping it. You will laugh, no one will swoon.

And this is what the character development asks you to swallow in the first book – Nahri has grown up alone, and is now stuck with a brooding guy with a mysterious and dark past, and as they have adventures, there’s heat low in the belly (yes, that is the description), and then – go read ok?

The trilogy is a great example of getting the landscape right, but the humans a bit off. Everyone sounds like they are a character you met before – the wastrel heir, the serious second son, the evil King.

What was a relief is that the second (or is it the third) mocks the first book’s simplicity and conveniently pegs it in Nahri’s naivette – it feels more like the author’s. The author finds her voice a bit in the second book, and in the third, it is much better. Yet, there’s something missing overall.

And I think that’s a certain ethos. When I read a book of Sri Lankan short stories edited by Shyam Selvadurai, the voices, the stories, and the description felt organic – I have peeked at that uncle over his paunch, and I could strangle this aunty types.

I do understand that no one knows has had chai with djinns and discussed critical theory with ifrits – so they could speak American-ese (they say ‘fuck’. I thought at least curse differently, but no). But just using words such as fazr or ulema doesn’t feel complete.

Perhaps it is about whom this book is meant for. A character called Subhashini Sen is introduced and the other characters assume it is a guy. I rolled my eyes. And I think that’s revealing – it is slightly in the samosa is a savoury puffed pastry with potatoes genre (I can’t believe I did that to samosa).

What the book does well is plot – there’s a lot of how will she do that, secrets from the past, twists and turns, and enough suspense to make the predictable exciting. It felt like watching a movie – somehow I could even see the fade-out shot in the end. And that’s a skill – to paint pictures and imagery, especially with fantasy, as you have no real world markers, the metaphors and the descriptions are much needed.

Perhaps, as I said, perhaps I am being uncharitable. I don’t mean to dismiss the book by harping on the ‘oh the characters want to say Misr but sputter Missisipi’, but I guess, it mattered – there is a frustration – why couldn’t you get this right?

Grainy days

They spoke of ‘film grain’. What’s that I asked. They patiently explained. Apparently, black and white film is made of crystals, which promptly made me think of a black sky, encrusted with stars. Depending on the light that falls on it, and how it is developed, it gives a “grain to the shot” – isn’t that what the sky does? For awhile, I could not stop thinking about the word grain and grainy.

“. . .[N]o varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”

 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The crystals on the film and their temperament in capturing reality seems to have a certain consonance – reality is captured on something that changes, for, otherwise, a photograph is a lie – it talks of frozen moments. The ageing of the paper on which the photograph is printed on lets time seep in, and reminds me again and again that time keeps going on and on, whether there’s a pandemic or not.

I was talking to a friend in quarantine in Sri Lanka, as she has gone there, which is home, from Delhi. She spoke of spending days alone at home the past few months – It is Monday and then Friday. It is Monday and then Friday. Somehow, the ‘sameness’ as she called it, is disorienting – you lose sense of reality, because for me, reality is about time.

Material reality is a touchstone – you know time by watching things around. A digital photograph somewhere, for me, erases that sense of time. I think that’s why there’s so much of a deal made about antiques – one thing you cannot manufacture is ageing.

Someone once described the digital world as asynchronous – it lets you thumb your nose at time. The arrow of time or the linear nature of time is challenged by the discrete manner in which the web functions. For awhile, I was quite entranced by that notion, till I wasn’t. I continue to plug myself into the web and as the cocoon knits around me, I am conscious of tick-tocking – somehow, seeing the net in relation to myself breaks that asynchronicity.

Seeing things as relative, instead of seeing it by itself is something that takes time to adjust to.

For modern theorists of technology, hybridity is an ontological—not an emergent—property. They believe, to quote Callahan again, that “to be human is to be technological,” and that it has always been thus. As it turns out, this seemingly innocent assumption about the world can have serious implications for how we think about politics, morality, and law. It inspired Latour’s notion of “distributed agency”—in its crudest form, the idea that neither guns nor people kill people but rather a fleeting, one-off combination of the two. (The entity that shoots is a “gun-man.”) This is not meant to suggest that people no longer have to go to jail for murder. It is only to point out that, if we really want to explain a particular act of shooting, we need to account for factors like the material design of the gun, the marketing considerations of its manufacturers, the severity of anti-gun laws, and so on.

Evegeny Morozov (https://newrepublic.com/article/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna)

No, no, no philosophy of technology rabbit hole for now. For now, I want to talk about grainy days. I told them that grainy reminds me of the word ‘karkash’, and the music of Ashwini Bhide.

Notes from a long long time ago – the more I write, I seem to be writing the same ideas over and over again:

We heard her for the first time at there. My pal, the drummer was smitten. He kept nodding his head, as though he was conversing with her, and vehemently agreed with a point she had made. After she finished, he looked at me and said, “Man, her voice is like Bryan Adams’.” (I doubt if he apostrophised conversations, but I take liberty here in the reported dialogue.) 

He referred to that slight karkash in her voice — the otherwise smooth rendition had that almost-there, now-gone abrasiveness.

I have a special fondness for artists with that karkash in their voices. I seek it out and revel in that trailing moment when the note trembles and falls silent. Especially in the higher octaves, the agony of the artists’ pursuing those hard to reach frequencies is heightened when their human muscle shivers with the strain.

And when the same roughness seeps into lower octaves, it pulls it lower than the frequencies can ever hope to. There’s a shade of despair, a sigh mingling with song that makes the silence after the note pause a bit. This karkash is why I have developed an immense liking for old thathas singing — all that experience crackling and bursting with vocal emotion.

To me, the fallibility of the vocal chords salvages certain moments from achieving a synthetic perfection. That moment is unguarded, the interstice where the performer transcends and becomes an artist. That moment is vulnerable, for there the artist is unerringly human.