Apricot Season

The Hour of Imagination

2009-09-07T05:57:00.003+02:00

About the news in the twenty four hours after the disappearance of YSR's helicopter; I read all the papers that morning and the piece wrote itself.

"... But most of all, an aviation accident provides a few breath-holding hours between the loss of contact and the proof of death, during which all speculation is valid, and the most awesome possible version of the story gets told.

In the present case, it went something like this: Naxals lie in wait in the Nagarjuna Sagar-Srisailam Reserve, a "Maoist hotbed" (IANS). With information about the CM's flight path, they mount an ambush from treetop positions along an elevated ridge. Taking down YSR would be the first in a series of critical strikes, which would include Sonia Gandhi and P Chidambaram. Alternatively, they will take YSR hostage (ET).

Unsteady in heavy rain and zero visibility, the ancient Bell 430 noses up to the ridge at a low speed. Using a tip from their copy of "Guerilla Air Defense: Anti-aircraft weapons and techniques for guerilla forces," the Maoists target the whizzing blades with light arms fire, which riccochets into the engine and the machinery of the helicopter (Mid-Day)..."

Continued at The Hoot...

The News in Blues

2009-09-06T12:07:00.009+02:00

Since the beta-release of the Hindu's new website, it's been widely observed* that every newspaper's website redesign seems engineered to make it look more or less like the Guardian. As far as I can tell, Tehelka was an early and less rigorous adopter; the HT website was more respectful of the source material (note how the titles are dichromatic); the Indian Express used a cloning machine; now the Hindu website, up since August 15, has also been grown from Guardian DNA.

There are a couple of design factors at work in this mimicry: layout and spacing, identical headline fonts (eerie: tab quickly between the Guardian, the Hindu, the HT and the IE home pages and it's like Being John Malkovich). I'm most curious about the colour palatte and, most basically, the minimal range of blue shades that apparently code for news in the digital era. According to the debut announcement of the Hindu 2.0, their new design expresses the "core values of independence, authenticity, and credibility" while also being contemporary.

Here's a game, a litmus-text for the most hardcore of (lefty) online news consumers. Can you match the newspaper / visual element to its adopted shade of blue?

A. Hindu 2.0 header
B. Hindu 2.0 headlines
C. indianexpress.com headlines
D. hindustantimes.com headlines
E. Tehelka headerF. Comment is Free headlines
G. Guardian.co.uk text
H. Guardian.co.uk header

For a bonus round, identify the newspaper website that employs these shades on the right (hint: its from a less parochial set).

(answers in Comments)

What I'm curious about is why the internet breeds colour conformity when the newspapers are so distinctive on the paper-page. Of course, you could find a hundred answers in neuroscience, developmental psychology and the sociology of colour: I'm more curious about what it says about the virtualization of the Indian newspaper (a more specific problem in sociology). Why didn't the Hindu feel it could carry forward the comforting powder-blue palette of the Hindu 1.0 (which I'll always fondly remember as Hinduonnet)? And doesn't the dull ochre field of the IE's Sunday header deserve a single pixel of online commemoration?

* To give credit, I received the observation first from Vivek Bharathan and then Gautam Bhan.

Lakshman Seth and the Sheriff of Nandigram

2009-06-02T10:24:00.000+03:00

Beauty is all about the details, and these beautiful election results keep parading out new details for our appreciation. What I'm currently delighted about is the voters of Tamluk in West Bengal despatching their Communist MP, Lakshman Seth.

Seth has been in the Lok Sabha since 1998, stashing away the crores and adding fortifications to his eerie headquarters in Haldia. People say he did a good job of developing the Haldia port. Sure enough, if the business of America is business, then the industriousness of Lakshman Seth is directed purely towards industrialization. How come? Seth is also Chairman of the Haldia Development Authority. He allegedly gets a cut out of every industrial operation on his turf (what we dissertation-writers call ‘rent-seeking’). There’s a theory that this is why Nandigram was chosen as the site for the Salim plant, and why the resistance was so bitterly punished when the siege fell...

Continued at Kafila...

Ferozious and the Fake Degrees

2009-05-01T09:21:00.002+03:00

An astonishing revelation about that whirling enigma, Firoz Varun Gandhi -- at the very peak of his national notoriety for giving vicious speeches during campaign rallies.

As he began his self-fashioning as the hero of suppressed Hindu rage, there was a lot of chatter in the Indian media about how this contradicted with his earlier image as an urbane, London-educated, poetry-minded young gentleman (when he was Feroze). His degrees from SOAS and LSE, which were mentioned in every biographical sketch that appeared in the media, were the real curiousities. To his sympathizers, they were evidence that his political views, although crudely expressed, were basically reasonable, because he was so well educated; to his detractors, they were signs of just how craven and insincere he was, as his political personality was so much at odds with his intellectual background.

This contradiction made me curious, too, so I was following the LSE-SOAS statement -- this one -- closely. In correspondence with faculty and with sources in Delhi, I noticed a lot of dissonance about his college education. Everyone seemed to only be aware of it from everyone else. Even the subjects of his degrees were described inconsistently. I probed further and eventually received separate messages from LSE and SOAS that he did not have the degrees he claimed at all. Soon after, we firmed up the facts and ran the story in the Indian Express.

Outlook asked me to write a piece on how I got the proof together.

Varun responded to the IE article with a letter in which he finessed the status of his distance-study degree and make it seem valid to call it "from" LSE, although not "of" LSE. The letter is eye-wash. The Director of External Relations at LSE explained in an email:

"Degrees earned under the University of London's external programme are not degrees 'from' or 'sponsored by' LSE, nor are they 'taught according to [LSE's] own internal standards' (all these phrases are used in the articles). LSE provides high-quality academic direction to the provision of those University of London external programmes for which LSE has been designated so-called Lead College, but they are not LSE degrees. The only way to earn an LSE degree - or any other LSE qualification - is by studying physically at LSE in London.

Any claim that the LSE External Study office has described a degree earned under the University of London's external programme as a degree 'from' LSE can only be a misunderstanding or mistake by the reporter concerned."

Obviously, this level of clarification seemed to satisfy the journalistic world, and a stream of reports began to mention -- increasingly as if it were something they'd known all along -- that FVG lied about his degrees (here is an especially good one in India Today).

About charging him with perjury. The office of the public prosecutor in Allahabad has examined the situation and explained their conclusion to me:

"Undoubtedly, the averments in the writ petition, supported by a duly sworn affidavit, insofar as they pertain to the petitioner's educational qualifications, appear to be unauthenticated, and, in view of the statements by the concerned University authorities, they seem to actually be untrue. If this is the case, the provisions of sections 191 I.P.C., and 195 of the Cr.P.C., are attracted, and the delinquent deponent is open to prosecution."

ie, his case invites charges of perjury but public prosecutors have other things to pursue. Very reasonable, although it is sad that prominent politicians face no legal penalty for lying in Court.

Cartoon credit: the brilliant Sandeep Adhwaryu.

No Parking

2009-02-01T18:03:00.006+02:00

An excerpt of this was published in Time Out Delhi:

The night is too beautiful for thoughts of bloody revenge. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to cool my head of visions of neighborhood terrorism: Vernas and Sonatas being lifted into the sky on burning blossoms of dynamite, Accords and Civics (how ironic will those names seem then!) crumpling and flaming after I send lit cigarettes into their petrol tanks, the musical crack and tinkle of a crowbar entering a S-Class headlight, saloons going kaboom and sedans going blam.

Stop. Slow down. I can't give in to vengeance fantasies. I'm not a violent person - in fact I'm from South India, and since moving to Delhi, I have smugly defined myself in opposition to its driving culture of belligerence and threat. Those days may be over. I am standing over the violated body of my car, upon whose blue bonnet someone has pressed a key, and scratched out a broad, loopy, spiralling silver design. The message is clear enough: "My spot."

The Parking Wars have reached New Friends Colony. I was getting used to the low-intensity conflict of tyre deflation: jogging downstairs to the car with fourty minutes to reach Munirka, okay, but I'll have to step on it... and there she sits, two inches closer to the ground, wearing the queasy expression of a whale on the wrong side of the tide. You shriek. The girls down the street drop their badminton racquets and run indoors. The chowkidar who personally deflated your tyres that morning comes up to offer his consolations. You suffer from your moral wound for a few hours. After this is repeated a few times, it feels like a form of civic interaction. In milder times, neighbours asked you to turn down your music in the middle of a party; now they vandalize your property, but at least it is reversible vandalism.

If, however, you're messing with my paint job, there's no reason to believe in limits. Cars have all sorts of easily-fractured limbs -- side-view mirrors, antennae, windshield wipers -- and soft, fat fenders just begging for punishment. The neighborhood really isn't what it used to be.

Car vandalism is only a skin over the deep changes that parking scarcity has brought about in neighbourly relations. Legally, the parking space in front of a house is public property. Signs that say, "No Parking Here By Order of Police" are usually fiction. But when residents began to dismiss the public status of parking space, the police had better things to do than argue with resident professors and bureaucrats (retd.), and they came along quietly.

This annexation of public property into private ownership has an interesting flipside -- now, not to guard the space in front of your house is an act of broad philanthropy. Not exactly the same as converting your ancestral home into a school for the disabled, but with a whiff of the same antique noblesse oblige. Many times I have pulled up in front of old Mr Sinhas' home, and felt propelled by ancient rites of charity to shuffle forward and touch his feet.

Naturally, it did not stop there. People who live opposite a playground or a derelict building decided that, in these cases, their parking rights applied to both sides of the road. The spaces across the street had to belong to someone, obviously, now that the very notion of public property had fled. It is probably a matter of time before this arrangement produces its logical outcome, and we lay claim to the road itself. Where else is the fourth family car going to go?

Another logical outcome has already come about, namely that neighbours hate each others' guts. An gunpowdered atmosphere of tension and apprehension hangs over some of Delhi's most charming localities. It is necessary to view the professor living next door as a man capable of the blackest of deeds, a man out to seize the precious land that belongs to you and to your children. When he brings over a letter dropped in the wrong box, you must force out a handshake, the way Rabin shook the hand of Arafat. You still remember the arrival of his new white Innova, bridal in its fat pink ribbon, a car so grossly massive that from your balcony, it seemed to stretch the road as it passed down it, like a walnut passing down the gullet of a goose. There's been no peace since that day.

Delhi's residents bring 250,000 new cars in pink ribbons onto its roads every year. Already the point of total, motionless saturation seems to be in the visible future. Our parking problem makes clear the final futility of building flyovers and underpasses: streamlining traffic will not expand the spatial carrying capacity of roads. Delhi residents who use personal transport - cars or motorcycles - are still in the minority of commuters, but the percentage will tip over 50% soon, and cars will make up the largest part. If you're the kind of person who comforts herself about the troubles of today by imagining the catastrophes of tomorrow, have a slice of that. Quite soon, Delhi could become a city where parking is much less of a hassle -- compared to moving.

Fight Over Terror

2008-12-02T03:46:00.025+02:00

I've said before that when it comes to the BJP, you may dislike their style, but you must compliment their timing; it is always impeccable. That was in September, when the BJP National Executive Committee was meeting in Bangalore. On Friday the 12th they had announced that terrorism would be their main campaign plank in the General Elections; this was carried in the papers on Saturday, just in time for the five bomb blasts that went off in Delhi on Saturday evening.

This week's on-the-beat response is harder to put down to serendipity: in the Delhi edition of the November 28th issue, printed while gunmen were still executing guests in the hallways of the Taj Mahal Hotel, the BJP had the lightening-quick reflexes to run an advertisement. Not in Bombay, where people were presumably aware of the brutal terror striking at will. Only in the edition in Delhi, where voters were sorting out their thoughts on whom to check off in the Assembly elections the next morning

In a press conference the previous day, Advani had said, "This is an hour for all sections of society to sink their differences so that the nation stands up as one body," before adding, sotto voce, "Against Sheila Dixit."

Myself, I'm not sure why the incumbent government should be spared our anger: as much as we'd like to think we're busy standing up as one body, we're not actually doing much more than expressing our sense of devastation to each other. "Weak Government. Unwilling and Incapable": I can't disagree. I anticipate a great difference in how the UPA fights terror, and how the BJP will: the UPA never convicts anyone, while the BJP will never convict anyone who is actually guilty. The window to this new horizon in non-anti-terrorism is the reinstatement of POTA; expect to hear much about how it will enable police to legally do things that fail to catch terrorists, instead of illegally doing things that fail to catch terrorists.

The BJP's bold, decisive action -- I mean taking out the advertisement -- will not go unrewarded; they will probably win Delhi, in which case I wish them luck with the Commonwealth Games (the Delhi Assembly elections' equivalent to inheriting the Iraq War during a recession). They will also having one solid crowbar of an advantage over the Congress, when it comes to fighting terrorists: the Anti-Terrorism Squad at least has one case ready to close, with enough evidence to convict key operatives, and the numbers for the rest are probably on someone's cellphone around the office on Ashoka Road.

The fact that the Party's top saffron had been lacerating the ATS chief until the day before he was killed (lacerating him, specifically, for his team's alleged use of POTA-endorsed methods) is one of those perplexities that we will never understand, and will be vaguely uncomfortable about forever. What happens to his investigation of Abhinav Bharat is anybody's guess, although if anybody is guessing, "Will it continue to be pursued at an appropriate priority until convinctions are obtained?", let me talk to you for a minute, over here in the corner.

As for the remainder of terrorist activity -- and don't tell me you've never wondered how much would remain -- if the BJP is seeking a credible reputation as willing and capable fighters of terrorism (rather than as the party that always seems to gain from it), they need to put a professional to work on their anti-terror portfolio, which currently contains (1) POTA, (2) ending the life of Afzal Guru, if it means Rajnath Singh has to personally kneel on his throat, (3) linking people, through six-degrees of invented association, to the murder of Haren Pandya, (4) advertising below the fold.

Trigger-Happy Times

2008-08-12T12:19:00.013+03:00

Congratulations, Abhinav Bindra. India has won its first Olympic gold medal in an individual event. Field hockey used to be the only Olympic sport in which India was a contender, but this year the national team failed to even qualify. In the six Olympics prior, the hockey team hadn’t made it as far as the semi-finals. Now, it seems, Indians are finally good at something again: short-range shooting.

Which brings me to the second item on the front page of the broadsheets: police shot at unarmed protest-marchers in Kashmir, killing five people, including a member of the Hurriyat Conference. Eight more protestors have been shot dead today.

Continued at Pass the Roti...

***

Outlook Traveller dispatched me to Paris for a week, to write about the city in the summer. I complained bitterly, but they insisted. The story - my first piece of travel writing, apart from Jaunpur - is the cover of their August issue.

The Dumbest Charade

2008-05-26T12:16:00.006+03:00

Strange times: for the last week, Delhi has pulled a blanket of cool, rainy weather over its head, and seems to have fallen into a snooze -- but Bangalore is scorching hot with news: a new shiny airport, a new Saffron government and plenty of new newspapers to cover it all.

Because I didn't feel obsolete enough, writing for the print media, the Deccan Chronicle's launch campaign in Bangalore is a straight bullet to the heart:

What it says in the far corner is: "Less words, more news." As the blogger I stole this photo from points out, since when does knocking all the vowels out of words result in less words? There must be an answer to that, but it is probably wordless, so we will never know. People have been saying for several years that the Indian newspaper editor is dead or gone into hiding: now it looks like he has been rooted out and is about to be publicly drawn-and-quartered.

As for me, like a dinosaur sinking meditatively into a tar pit, I'm still mired in the notion that solid news requires more words than it gets at present -- and vowels, as well -- and still banging out bottomless stories like this one about the panchayat polls in Nandigram, the cover of the May 24th Tehelka.

Tales from the Tar Pit

2008-04-17T02:37:00.012+02:00

"Only in India," GB remarked as we watched the howling Tibet protest, "Can you make a film that is located in South Africa, with no black people, with Indians behaving like the worst stereotypes of white people, and an impoverished little white boy catching an apple core tossed away by Anil Kapoor..."

The protesters erupted in a deafening roar.

"... and, without a hint of irony, call the film 'Race'."

* * *

I'm browsing Gregory Rabassa's memoir, "If This Be Treason," which I found as a gift for a friend. Rabassa translated One Hundred Years of Solitude into English, and according to the blurb, Marquez is supposed to have said that his translation was superior to the original in Spanish. Hearing this kind of thing is a delight to me, as someone who has only ever read novels in one language. I hate hearing that I'm only getting a dull facsimile, as though it is a natural rule for a text to become warped and dessicated as it is brought into another language. I can easily imagine a great translator doing the opposite of manhandling it.

And imagine if Rabassa had translated his translation back into Spanish -- what a magnificent book we would be left with!

* * *

My story on the failure to clean up the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal and the toxic contamination of nearby drinking water is the cover of the April 9th Tehelka.

The black-and-whites that accompanied the story (Which the not-easily-pleased S. described as, "elegiac, poignant, beautiful... but they should be words to describe a Proulx short story, not a hard-hitting, nasty-truth story,") are by Sohrab Hura. On his website here, a few of the most moving images that did not make it into the magazine.

Eyes in the Sky

2008-02-18T12:28:00.002+02:00

Northrop Grumman, the aeronautics and weapons manufacturer, takes out a full backpage advertisement in the Indian Express. "The launch of a new era in battlespace dominance," it says about its E2-D Hawkeye recon aircraft, which possesses "a new generation of radar systems, integrated communications and cutting edge tools". Alright - but are we supposed to rush out and buy one, to assemble on the living room floor?

I've never seen anything of this sort before: military manufacturers grabbing for eyeballs in the media. I'd understand if it were a newsletter for procurement agents and MoD senior bureaucrats, but I don't see how it profits NG to get the general public pepped up about 'battlespace dominance.'

It is, of course, hot news that India is among the "largest potential growth markets for defense products" - the unnerving phrase belongs to NG's President, John Brooks - and that hundreds of foreign arms manufacturers at this year's Defense Expo have been jostling for the honour of defending India's battlespace. "In for a billion, in for a trillion," as they say in the arms biz, and with India expressing interest in a private-public collaboration to develop ballistic missile defense, there is clearly much more juice in the can ($30 billion in the next five years, says the TOI). Moreover, NG has a competitive advantage in the homeland security sector, which is apparently expected to cost India $9.7 billion by 2016.

Still, we're not talking about consumer durables here - none of this seems to call for a public relations campaign by the Big Guns. I can't help thinking that NG's advertising isn't directed at sales at all, but at making friends with the newspapers. As Arindam Chaudhuri knows, nothing says quid pro quo like a full backpage ad.

* * *

The lingo of defense deals is full of brilliant artifice, beginning with the way arms manufacturers now righteously self-describe as "defense contractors" (because they provide products and services to militaries, different from providing weapons and weapons systems). My favourite is the MoD's use of "most capital intensive" - it makes "most expensive" sound like a good thing.

Notes from 2007

2008-01-16T06:43:00.000+02:00

I've found a digital version of Bhagya da Lakshmi to play in the morning. In my song library, "Purandaradasa" now appears between "Puff Daddy feat. Ginuwine" and "Pussycat Dolls."

* * *

Went to Benares; love visiting the capitals of world religions for how profane they make me feel. At the Kashi Visvanath temple, surplus priests press through the desperate crowds, splashing milk in the eye of anyone who looks like they might need to be relieved of the maya of a hundred rupee note. Manikarnika Ghat, where they burn the dead, is one of the most engrossing places I have ever been. I have never before felt warmly towards the idea of an electric crematorium.

* * *

I heard that, within fourty-eight hours of being nominated President of the PPP, Bilawal Zardari updates his name on his Facebook profile to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

* * *

Speaking of people at Oxford, I have applied to Oxford. The online application asks you to choose the languages you speak from a list - but there are only twenty-five listed. "Hindi" and "Kannada" are absent, as are all the other Indian languages. Fortunately, "American" was an option. I marked myself as Fluent.

Stick Your Neck Out

2008-01-09T19:19:00.001+02:00

Written for Outlook: It broke my heart to give a film this well-meaning just one star - and who am I to review movies anyway? But the only thing worse than a crap film is a crap film with good politics.

Bollywood rarely gives encouragement to social causes – hundreds of chronic injustices are ignored by India’s most powerful public medium and its most emulated public figures. So Rajkumar Santoshi, in Halla Bol, has decided to take cognizance of all of them in one go, while also taking a long, introspective look at his industry’s conspiracy of cheerful silence. But the road to movie hell is paved with good politics, and Halla Bol is so breathless with righteousness that it ends up not speaking to the audience at all.

Ashfaque Khan (Ajay Devgan) is an idealistic actor in a street-play troupe led by Sidhu (Pankaj Kapur). Sidhu despatches him to Bombay, where naturally he becomes Bollywood’s biggest star. He changes his name to Sameer Khan (which sounds an awful lot like Amir Khan, especially when shouted by an angry mob). Sameer’s success saps his idealism and he wretchedly turns his back on the good fight, until, one night at a club, he becomes witness to murder. Two papa-minister-hain-types shoot a young woman, who is basically Jessica Lall. Sameer must wrestle with his conscience about testifying in court. When he does, he faces the wrath of the minister (played with irritating hysteria by Darshan Jariwala) and in turn becomes the victim who nobody will help.

The central question of Halla Bol is why real celebrities never stick their necks out, or as Sidhu puts it, why they open their mouths as wide as they can to endorse a product, but dont move their lips for a social issue (Ajay Devagan being the perfect example). It’s a good question and the film asks it well. The film then ventures into the question of why, more generally, none of the rest of us do either. This is its downfall. Once Sameer’s luck fails, he gets dragged over every social issue from communal politics to the casting couch, past echoes of Zaheera Sheikh, of Fanaa, and random characters shouting about the Right to Information. This is like being spoon-fed a cold, bland porridge of boiled newspaper. For instance, Santoshi keeps plugging religious harmony in a story that has nothing to do with it, culminating in a farcical speech where Sameer chides Muslim leaders for exploiting minority politics even though their country’s President is Abdul Kalam.

After dwelling pointlessly on the Bollywood phase, the script has to rush through this politically correct wilderness, frequently losing itself on the way. The music and the dialogue fall flat. There are some powerful shock-moments, like the climactic scene when Sameer returns to the street-play format in a final bid for justice: gasping for coherence and poignancy, the movie turns back to Safdar Hashmi’s life. It uses his horrific end for a brief cinematic boost, then resumes its own haphazard style of convincing the audience to rise up. They did, and left.

Free Speeches

2008-01-07T13:44:00.001+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits

In this season, you press your ear to the ground and you can hear Delhi murmuring with cultural activity. Performances are being performed, lectures lectured, panels empanelled and, as surely as a glum evening follows a cocktail lunch, audiences are responding. The "audience interaction"…it is like watching a gymnast somersault into the air, arc confidently toward his landing, only to crunch horribly into the body of an audience-member who has stepped forward to share his views on Nadia Comanesci.

At least we know what to expect. The first hand up belongs to the Summarizer. He thanks the persons on stage, and repeats to them the points they just made in as many, if not more, words. The facilitator waves the mike over to the Speechifier. He clears his throat and intones, "As we all know, Mohandas Gandhi was the father of our nation…" Friend, we do all know. So stuff it.

The nervous facilitator dispatches the mike to her planted questioner in the third row, but it is intercepted halfway by the Debutante. The Debutante reads diligently from a piece of paper, which turns out to be his resume. Having established his credentials, he hands the mike to the Quick Fixer: "If you are such experts, what is the solution to it all?"

Then cometh the Holy Man. Last month, after a discussion on gender and literature, a messianic figure rose from the back row to proclaim that he was "post-gender": therefore the embodied solution to the problem we were still trying to describe (oddly, one never meets women who are post-gender.) Bloodied and defeated, the facilitator moans, "One last question" – and out leaps the most monstrous character of all, the Multi-part Questioner. By the time he's on the third sub-clause of his interrogation, I try to be on my third stiff drink.

The World in a Soup Tureen

2007-12-23T18:40:00.001+02:00

Written for Outlook Traveller: Wrote this one so that I could have the book afterward. It was my mother's Christmas present, a good one I think.

Writing about food can be difficult. The subject usually remains silent and motionless through an interview, and the innumerable, exquisite ways that it does express itself to the tastebuds are hard to translate into variations on the word "delicious." If you read Indian restaurant reviews you will have noticed. In this respect, writing about bad meals is lexically simpler than writing about good meals, although a compilation of writing on bad food would be hard to digest. Further adversities of the food writer: great chefs are brusque, patrons are stymied when asked to supply an opinion about their victuals (they end up saying, "delicious") and the most vibrant and precise account of the preparation of a dish is baffling to the many readers, who will not, in truth, know whether amuse bouche are animal, vegetable or mineral.

Great food writing, therefore, is always about the cultural life of food; a writer's skill with the larger cultural idiom is the secret in the sauce. All the more reason to entrust it to the New Yorker, a magazine that can legitimately claim a role in the evolution of the upscale epicurian idiom as it has come to exist. Even when it is describing foods that are foreign, working class, or in other ways exotic, each article in Secret Ingredients is like the world reflected concavely in a soup tureen: all the place-settings and context are drawn into the picture, with the steaming dish at the centre.

So we open with an ethnography of the 'Beefsteak,' a gluttonous blue collar banquet tradition. Later we have a political history of vodka that will change the way you think about Party drinks; zen-like meditations on the ritual significance of tofu; and the personal autobiography of living with – and without – the bagel. Food makes for hearty allegory; the rituals of eating are perfect material for social satire.

Chronological scope is one of the most attractive things about the book. It is weighted towards the present, which is fair enough, although some of the most sparkling pieces are from the '20s and '30s, when epicurean culture rode a high before getting a dunking from World War rationing and scarcity. Within each section, the articles are ordered date-wise. You can pretend to see patterns in how the language sheds the amiable parochialism of the older pieces, becoming more and more taut and omniscient, until condensing in the shape of Adam Gopnik's brain in the mid-90s.

So, the full menu in eight courses: 'Dining Out' joins us at the public table, whether covered with cotton-silk or sawdust. Next, 'Eating In' provides inspiration to take up spatula (MFK Fisher tucks a recipe into her story of tripe and tribulation) and consolation about the results (Anthony Lane, on the trouble with elaborate cookbooks: "Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.")

Then follows "Fishing and Foraging." In "Local Delicacies," writers venture gingerly forth from their metropole to pay tribute to rival empires (Peter Hessler's exploration of Guangdong cuisine begins with a waitress asking, "Do you want a big rat or a small rat?"). "The Pour" wets the palate and does not suppress Calvin Trillin's scandalous investigation of whether anyone wearing a blindfold can really tell the difference between red and white wine. "Tastes Funny" goes for belly-laughs (Woody Allen's Dostoyevskyan dieter in Notes from the Overfed is brilliant parody); "Small Plates" assembles twelve short items to snack on; "Fiction" provides a sweet finish. A ladleful of cartoons – men in tuxes making unlikely requests of droll waiters – is dribbled across the whole thing.

The result is a well-fed volume containing your year's worth of food writing (rationed at an article a week, it will last that long), which makes reading about food as much of a temptation as eating it. What can I say? It's delicious.

Murder Will Out

2007-11-23T15:05:00.000+02:00

Hours before their new Gujarat-related expose had even been aired, Tehelka had cranked up the buzz within press circles to a vociferous, all-hands-on-deck ring. Immediately after the first cycle of the broadcast, though, it vanished, leaving only a disquieting hum in the ears.

Aatish and I had planned to respond jointly to the sting-op, but we ended up on opposite sides of town, and I banged out a post so that we would have something up as an short-term response. The following day, reviewing the scant, 'you go first' response of the mainstream press and the talking heads, I put up another post. The silence after the broadcast felt increasingly creepy, and this second post was compiled largely by drifting around the office of a news-magazine that would not, at the time, deign to respond to the erratic but powerful shots fired by the sting-op (Professional Jealousy was masquerading quite calmly through the halls as Self-Restraint and Disdain).

I had the advantage of scooping up the early pressroom impressions and flinging them at the internet while they were still hot. For this reason, my second post presaged what everyone in the press began to say soon afterwards. Also, Tehelka linked to it early on (between their links to NDTV and the Washington Post), prompting a surge of readers that had made my blog-editor quite pleased.

I also became an early participant in what Shoma Chaudhury rightly identified as an obsession with the motives of the messenger which guarantees the message is never read: "Duck the truth and look for some new depravity to explain it away: that’s become our habitual response as a people. We think it makes us worldly and knowing. We think it makes us sagacious. But in truth, it displays our fallen nature."

Both my posts are on Pass the Roti [1], [2].

Busyness as Usual

2007-11-21T18:34:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits

In a city packed with romantic buildings – stone tombs and zananas, centuries-old, each one thrumming with phantom echoes of love-songs, death-throes and emperors tumbling down stairs – the one building that always struck me as the most quixotic is not yet fifty years old. It stands, compact and upright, painted in a shade as glumly grey-green as any the CPWD ever mixed, and proclaims itself to all those who pause there as Productivity House.

As everybody knows, P-house is a long rectangular building lying north-to-south at the junction of Lodi Road and Bhisham Pitmah Marg. Its northern façade, facing Lodi Road, has an external stairway that zigzags from floor to floor. Every time I pass it I am disappointed to see no tiny figures breathlessly running up and down these stairs, hauling overflowing stacks of documents. I would even settle for the tableau, glimpsed through a window, of an employee bent ferociously over a keyboard. To lack any public display of productivity seems a wasted opportunity to pinch the consciences of unproductive Dilliwallas.

(There are more than a few, however you define them – Adam Smith's example of unproductive labour is the menial servant, for Marx it was the capital-owning class – either way, a lot Delhi is sitting on its ass).

What Productivity House does have is The Sign. Additionally, it has an electronic marquee at ground level, which scrolls out vaguely threatening messages like "Knowledge is Limited." But all eyes settle on the sign. After all, there is a reason why Productivity House announces itself with large capital letters set high upon its brow: quite apart from what goes on in there, its mere existence is a message, a gentle reproach, what scholars call an illocutionary speech-act. Its presence puts a similar weight on the soul as a large, centrally-located Morality House might do, except that productivity, much more than morality, is a sensitive subject in the present age.

In fact, it seems likely that a great many of City Limits' readers woke up this morning and swore to themselves and to God to be productive today – undoubtedly more than the number who promised to be honest, be punctual or be sober all combined. This being the case, I will resist the temptation to shout, "Get back to work!", and return to the subject of Productivity House.

"Utpadakta Bhavan" is actually headquarters of the National Productivity Council of India. The NPC's website introduces it as "a national level organization to promote productivity culture in India." Snort! Good luck with that, guys! Their ambition makes the NPC seem heroically futile; it makes the sign on their building seem as poignant as a wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command half sunk in the city's listless dust.

But hold on, poets and pessimists! According to the ILO's global productivity report, released in September, the average labour productivity in India is growing by 3.7% every year! That is higher than just about everyone except those goddamned Chinese (and a scattering of other slave-states to the East of us). So, without ever doing more than idling at the red light in front on it, we can happily presume that the workshops, best-practices awards, and consultancies performed inside Productivity House – as well as its grey, frowning sign – are themselves as productive as they preach.

Reading synonyms of "Airy" makes you feel good

2007-11-14T19:39:00.000+02:00

aerial, blowy, breezy, drafty, exposed, fluttering, fresh, gaseous, gusty, light, lofty, out-of-doors, pneumatic, soaring, spacious, towering, uncluttered, vaporous, ventilated, well-ventilated, windy

Midas Touchtone

2007-10-13T10:07:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits

I suppose it is fair that the national telephone numbering plan – which allocated area codes to districts and municipalities – gave the Capital City the honour of the 011 preface, and handed out diminishing honours to Bombay (022), Calcutta (033), Madras (044). I know a few Bangaloreans who'd prefer a higher rank than 080, particularly since we're on the phone with Americans so often, but these things are occasionally revised, and we're willing to be patient. As long 055 remains unclaimed.

But honours are thoroughly wasted on the people who receive them. On December 5th, 2002, MTNL notified a change in the numbering plan – turning Delhi's seven-digit phone numbers into eight digits by prefixing them with the number 2 – as was happening in other cities as well. Of course, everyone was so irritated and preoccupied with editing their cellphone entries that nobody noticed the opportunity, opening like a golden door in the sky, to acquire what might be the most prestigious and revered number in the history of numeracy.

There was 011, and then a 2. Notice that, the first pair notwithstanding, each of the latter two digits is the sum of the two digits before it. When you continue to add digits in this manner – 3, 5, 8 – you get what is called the Fibonacci Series.

Nerds throughout history have been dazzled by the Fibonacci Series, beginning with Pingala, the Sanskrit grammarian who related it to rhythmic mantras. It is the mathematical underpinning of the Golden Ratio, beloved of the Greeks, and used in the design of the Parthenon and the Pyramids of Giza (when any number in the Series is divided by the number before it, the quotient converges on the Ratio). It plays a startlingly visible role in the biological programming of pinecones, spiralling shells, sunflowers and the branching of trees. It has shaped the physical and cultural appearance of the planet in more ways than can be summarized. It even made a sheepish appearance in The Da Vinci Code. Everything it touches is gold: the Golden Ratio, the Golden Rectangle, and now, for one lucky MTNL subscriber only, the Golden Phone Number: 011 2358 1321.

It is now 2007 and, to my piercing disappointment, the voice that picks up on the Golden Phone Number still squawks, "This number does not exist." Over in Ludhiana, where people are less blasé about these things, BSNL is auctioning VIP mobile phone numbers for upto 40 lakhs. There's got to be someone in Delhi who feels romantically enough towards mathematics to shell out between Rs. 3000 and Rs 50,000 for an MTNL vanity number. At present, the landline of the Mathematical Sciences Foundation at St Stephens is so boring it would take Ramanujam all afternoon with a calculator to make something of it. A treasure lies unclaimed, and if nobody's having it, I'm sure I can find someone in Bangalore who would treat it well, at very least as a foolproof pick-up line: "My number's the Fibonacci series – what's yours?"

Fish, Flesh & Foul Writing

2007-09-18T18:52:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook Traveller: I no longer have this book in my possession, and I sometimes wonder if it deserved to be flung across the room more gently. But I remember at the time I was ready to torch it.

It is a challenge for any writer, however well-traveled and well-dined, to promise an odyssey through the diversity and abundance of Indian cuisine. When the book is written for non-Indians, however, and breaks every few sentences to explain what a dosa is, it is not likely to get very far into the odyssey at all. So it is with Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India - high tolerance of the word "legume" is advised.

So is a high tolerance for hyperbole. Banerji describes India the way you might expect of an especially humourless ambassador’s wife. Her writing is so overinfused with adjectives of scent and flavour you want to run out and check that it’s possible to find a sandwich and a glass of water. Banerji turns every scent "intoxicating", every red "ruby red", even if it’s no such shade at all. Surfeit comes before the first chapter is over.

If I had never eaten Indian, this kind of salesman’s enthusiasm would make me suspect that something was fundamentally wrong with the product. Then there are the verbs. Constant, sentence-by-sentence reminders that she is relishing, delighting and devouring give you the impression that she spent her entire time in India rolling her eyes and dragging her tongue up and down the streets in a delirium of sensory excess.

Partly, this is what is expected of the genre of food pornography. Partly, it is a way to cover up shallow research. In its Oriental caricature, Indian food has no real sociology; it only has folklore, which Banerji layers on like spice to cover up the bad taste of too little travel and diligence. She contrives to make every visit to a popular local eatery sound like the rediscovery of Khajuraho, simply because nobody has ever returned from them before with such florid tales.

In a chapter on Karnataka, she only visits Bangalore’s best known tiffin room and supermarket. While there, she alternates between writing as a native and a naif – sometimes full of secret understanding, other times quivering like a virgin at the excitement of trying "that odd Southern concoction," curd-rice. By the time she got to talking about locals in "sarongs" hawking the "last cereal grain I was expecting" – corn – I was swearing aloud. Banerji may be a prolific writer on Bengali food, but her effort to reach for cuisines across India is just bad table manners.

Ghosts of Alliances Past and Future

2007-09-15T13:39:00.000+02:00

Shinzo Abe’s sudden resignation was a good opportunity for me to post this editorial I wrote, and then forgot about, after his visit to India in August. Japan is the ideal case study of the tension between pacifist ideological commitments and militant strategic commitment, and the potential damage that tension can do to the guts of a country’s character.

* * *

Speaking to Indian parliamentarians on August 24th, Shinzo Abe recalled the warm meeting between Jawaharlal Nehru and Nobosuke Kishi, the Prime Ministers of India and Japan fifty years ago. Abe proposed that we should resume building the “arc of freedom” between Asia’s two most prominent democracies. Nostalgia about Mr Kishi, who was Mr Abe’s own grandfather, is a historical keystone in this vision of an Asian axis of democracy.

Kishi’s legacy is, in fact, monumental, but it has little to do with reinforcing the democratic tradition in Japan. Continued at Pass the Roti...

Crabs in a Barrel

2007-08-08T15:56:00.000+03:00

Secular observers of the state of Gujarat had largely given up hope of the BJP being unseated by the next election, or anytime in the near future. But in recent weeks, the base of the looming political idol that is Narendra Modi has sunk by several inches - an indication that it may be growing too heavy to be borne by the shfting sands of local politics.

A multi-pronged attack, from within the Sangh Parivar suggests - now that Vajpayee, Advani and Shekhawat are over the hill - that second-tier leaders have fixed scythes in their chariot-wheels anticipating the rath-race to the top.

Now they aim to cut Modi’s feet out from underneath him.

Continued at Pass the Roti...

Pay Me My Money Down

2007-08-06T18:08:00.000+03:00

The story I'm working on at the moment - the purpose of which is only incidentally to diminish the suffering of manual labourers and assembly-line workers who have lost their limbs or lives because of thoughtless industrial design and cruel output quotas - focusses on the scourge of CRI/RSI in the ITES-BPO sector. What are you, stupid? That means computer-related repetitive stress injuries in the information technology-enabled services and back-processing outsourcing sector. Theirs is a tragic tale, untold except by this noble bard, yours truly. Of course, you'll have to wait for the issue to get the scoop.

The justice-minded among you may feel that the trauma of a computer programmer who cannot type is unequal that of the bauxite miner who cannot walk. But Mr. & Ms. Wash-Your-White-Collar-Whiter do stand at a disadvantage in one respect - they are unprotected by the main instrument of occupational injury legislation, the Workman's Compensation Act of 1923, which I have been examining closely for several minutes.

I learned at my last job that any legislation becomes interesting if you look at it for long enough, and if you also happen to be sealed in a lawyer's basement for eight hour stretches with nothing to look at but other legislations. In the same respect, any story becomes interesting if you spend enough time prying apart the banalities from the technicalities and peering into its humane core. If your friends find it difficult to pay attention as you describe the view through this slender chink, as I have tried to do with the CRIRSIITESBPO story, it is because they lack a journalistic spirit of enquiry, or are numbed by their daily grindstone-nuzzling as stage actors, human rights lawyers and new media creativity managers.

CRIRSIITESBPO - which is anagrammatically pretty close to "CHRISTE, THIS BORES" - can and should be interesting. In fact, it holds a dread fascination for me as I research it, speaking to physicians on the phone and transcribing what they tell me. I grip the earpiece between my ear and shoulder, slouch into my chair with the broken back, and scrabble at the keyboard which I have to reach for inside a secretive crevice in my desk. As the conversation develops, and my wrists begin to throb, my lower back protests, my eyesight dulls and fuzzes, and before I know it, I am fast asleep. I then snort and doze through the rest of the conversation, while phrases like Reflexive Sympathetic Dystrophy and Myofascial Pain Syndrome assume a warlike personality and scamper up and down my body, whooping and laying waste to various bits of it. When I wake up, I am anxious and twitchy, and unable to understand any of what I've typed. My point is, as a result of all this CRI stuff, I've been looking at my PC with hot suspicion and antagonism, but I need its services to be done with the goddam story. It is like reading The Hot Zone in an infectious diseases ward at AIIMS.

I wish I knew more about the circumstances under which the Workmen's Compensation Act was drafted. Its primary aim seems to have been to protect maritime and shipyard workers of every possible description, not excluding lock-operators, the crew of jolly-boats (don't know what they do but it sounds like a good time) or of sea-going ships navigating under sails alone (in the event, presumably, that they get too agitated about sighting land and tumble out of the crow's nest). Pending further research, I will credit this to the English being a maritime sort of people. They probably thought the old salts deserved a bit of the Port-Out-Starboard-Home treatment, since occupational injuries reduce so many of them to peg-legs and hooks-instead-of-hands.

Seamen all get listed, so do railway employees. This kind of detail is necessary because Schedule 2 is the list of persons included in the definition of workmen, and thereby covered by the Act. All persons. It is not easy to list every element in a complex set (as opposed to just describing the set by criteria for inclusion, or even better, describing the absolute complement of the set by criteria for exclusion). I dont understand why legislations always seem to want to do this (I encountered the same problem with the Ministry-draft of the Assisted Reproductive Techniques Bill, which wanted to notify each and every technique clinics could use, rather than specifying clinical standards). When the elements are quick-changing, the list quickly becomes an anachronistic curiousity, which is the main thing that makes law interesting. Don't let lawyers tell you it is the legal first principles - tha is just a sign that a lot of Latin coming your way fast. A fortiori, it is funny lists and schedules.

According to Scheduled 2, among the persons subject to the provisions of Sec. 2(1)(n), are those employed:

1. In a lighthouse,
2. In the hunting of elephants,
3. In a circus,
4. In the manipulation of radium,
5. In bee-keeping,
6. In the handling of snakes for the purpose of extraction of venom,

And I would have them add an option,

7. In all of the above.

And finally, to my delight, the very last sub-clause reserves protection for those employed:

8. In any newspaper establishment as defined in the Working Journalists Act.

Something is definitely wrong with the abductor pollicis longus in my forearm. How much did you say I get?

Art Appreciation with the Bajrang Dal

2007-06-14T18:32:00.000+03:00

It should come as some relief that the Bajrang Dal in Bhopal has changed its views on the paramountcy of religious sentiment over free speech and artistic expression. BD members reportedly turned out in large numbers to appreciate Kailash Tiwari’s exhibit of his paintings, titled The Face of Terror, in Bhopal. In terms of technique, Tiwari’s art relies heavily on bold, solid colours and unorthodox use of perspective and proportions, common in the “Un”-school of painting. Thematically his message is multi-layered but strongly articulated: Muslim men are murderers, gang-rapists, arsonists, traitors, harem-keepers, cow-slaughterers, defilers of the flag, self-flagellants and perverts. Osama Bin Laden embodies these character flaws. In order to illustrate this, Tiwari likes painting him naked. Pubes included.

Continued at Pass the Roti.

The Right Comeback

2007-05-30T10:46:00.000+03:00

My chimeric article with Shruti Ravindran and RK Mishra on the case of Chandramohan and the limits to artistic use of erotic religious iconography stirred up a real froth on Outlook's web forum. My name appeared first in the magazine byline, and alone in the web version, so I've been the target of some very creative abuse from local wingnuts and smug NRIs - and much more that wasnt creative. To my disappointment, the website administrator pulled down the most sizzling samples, but the highlights include being called a "Macaulayian European wannbe desi darkie... drone," by Raj, who lives in New Jersey; a "left-oriented fat rat," and someone else asking if I would let him f*** my daughter in public.

There's nothing new about the berserk quality of the conversation - the design of the Rants & Raves section practically encourages people to forget their civility... and their point. What is spectacular about this thread is how quickly it rephrased the art vs censorship debate into the terms of Hindu vs Muslim communal prerogatives - even in situations like this one, where Muslims weren't remotely involved. I was suddenly reminded of the Hindu right's monomania for weighing "our" civil privileges against those of Muslims - a childish jealousy, a fight over who gets the bigger bite of the poisoned pedha.

* * *

One of my favourites: "Yesterday muslims in Old Hyderabad city near Mecca masjid have attacked hindu police but outlookindia and secular journalists will never speak against these muslim criminals and terrorists who attacks our hindu police." -- Chitralekha, Panipat

She's referring to the protest gathering that began after a bomb exploded in the Masjid. People who were on the scene claim that the crowd could have been dispersed without a lathi charge, but for reasons unexamined, the police fired live ammunition at chest-level and killed 11 people (twice the number killed by the bomb).

P16P

2007-04-30T15:37:00.000+03:00

This Sunday's HT, between making shamelessly solemn plugs for various other enterprises of the Birla Group (the new BITS business school, pg. 8; classes in Mandarin at Birla Vidya Niketan, pg. 5), found the time to interview someone truly outstanding.

"Because I'm a product of mixed cultures, I find that I'm more tolerant and flexible; I learnt very early on that nothing is black or white. I feel at home everywhere and yet nowhere. I hate being so easily misunderstood purely on the basis of how I look. But then, even in America, I get asked the very same questions I'm asked back in India."

(I'll take this down as soon as I'm asked)

Fairly said. There's nothing like hearing someone be level-headed and undramatic about their identity. A different person was quoted in the feature saying, "If I could somehow make my skin darker I would." Hindustan Levers, who had taken out a half-page advertisement on pg.9 for Fair & Lovely, was aghast. They complained to HT that advertising would be scaled back if the newspaper continued to publish ideas that are so damaging to the market and contrary to traditional Indian values. "The ugly fact of tanning," they quoted from the ad, "is that it is a sign of skin damage!" Melanin is no longer just ugly, it is pathological.

Mutton No Pyaaza

2007-04-06T10:55:00.001+02:00

Indian psephology, that is the study of elections, is a lame creature that leans heavily on two wobbly crutches: one is "anti-incumbency," which is both the name and full content of the theory, and the other is the onion. Unlike the vegetable itself, which is layer within succulent layer, the theory doesn't cut very deep, although it does make you feel like crying. "Everyone eats onions," an economist recently explained to BusinessWeek, "So you cannot afford for onion prices to go up." Not exactly the ISLM model, but even so he is right.

A month ago, onion prices leapt up and punched 25 rupees per kg., triggering a special alarm in the Opposition quarters in Delhi and Lahore; it has subsided since then, but MPs were already mid-performance for an irritated electorate. An onion crisis can be as emotive an issue as communal slaughter, but unlike communal slaughter, it weakens the government that is held responsible. Preliminary polls suggest that price rise will be a determining factor in UP, and the BJP is making hay while the sun shines, proclaiming its unique concern for the palate, if not the actual stomach, of the common man, and glibly forgetting its own past contretemps with the treacherous bulb. In 1998, the onion went up 600%, a fatal blow to two BJP state governments.

"Our development work was overshadowed by the onion factor," Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the resigning CM Rajasthan, had said with a shudder, "Pyaj hamare peeche pada hua tha." The Onion Came After Us; in the political imagination, this phrase is accompanied by the distant sound of howling wolves.

So onions are clearly more than just a bellwether of commodity inflation, but living in Bangalore I never understood why, and assumed that for North Indians they occupied some inscrutable symbolistic plinth, beside Salman Khan and college elections. I moved to Delhi but still I was blind until the recent March spike. North Indians, of course, are profligate consumers of onion - not because it is an ingredient in every dish, but because it is a dish, set alongside all others. Coffee is about the only thing you can order that won't come with a hefty wet baggie of sliced onion, and North Indians dont drink coffee.

My working-day lunch is usually channa and kulcha, or any of the variations on roti-sabzi you can get for ten rupees from pushcart vendors, with requisite side dish of pyaaz. This eating arrangement is the real site of the onion's political clout. Pyaaz is the lick of flame in these mouthfuls of starchy mush that are the daily lunch of millions of blueish-whiteish-collar workers in Delhi. Such men are the bone and muscle of Indian party membership, their sweaty shoulders underneath polyester shirts are the shiftless bedrock of the economy. In Delhi, at least, they are easily roused to anger but not easily to action: corruption is as banal as the afternoon heat, and the martial defense of deen or dharma is a seasonal obligation best left to the young. Roti kapda makaan are relatively secure, but pyaaz must be defended.

When onion prices go up, bad news is delivered daily by apologetic lunch vendors, and unlike other ingredient vegetables, an absent onion is visibly absent. There is no pamphlet or manifesto that you can set before a man that will twinge his spirit as much as rajma chaval accompanied by a bleak, bloodless radish. It becomes personal that such straits have come to pass; as though Kamal Nath had said, "Saley... let them eat achaar." It is a prod to the most sensitive spot on the belly of the dozing beast, Urban Middle Class Male, and when this great beast rears up, no man retains the saddle.

* * *

On the plus side, the weight that onion prices drop on the political seesaw could promote cross-border trade and promote good relations with Pakistan. In the year prior to March 2007, India exported more onions than ever before - 1.1 mn tonnes - mostly to Pakistan, which had a bad harvest. The last time onion prices rose in India, in 2005, it was Pakistan shipping the stuff our way. If domestic political stability becomes reliant on price-stabilizing trade, at least theoretically, politicians would be more interested in keeping bilateral relations healthy. But first we'd have to eat more onion.

Leaf Me Out

2007-04-04T11:12:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits: I don't like tea much, although I drink plenty of it at work. Compared to coffee, I find its taste thin and effete. Deluxe teas I find even more intolerable, so I have no idea why I offered to do this story. My saving grace was having Wa accompany me; between us we drank about 16 cups of tea that day, and it put me off the Darjeeling pretentious fish-piss for good. I'm afraid this ended up being audible in the tone of the piece - "the perfect cuppa," it seems. On the plus side, I now know my dosha: kapha. Which sounds like coffee.

Delhi drinks millions of glasses of sweet, oily slop every day, brewed to bitterness and sugared back out of it, from that abused child of the tea plant known as CTC chai. Meanwhile the best Indian tea leaves are shipped abroad, primarily to Japan. But a number of establishments are now promoting a return to recherche tea appreciation, and to celebrating the provenance and character of the leaf in your cup.

First among equals is Aap Ki Pasand (Daryganj, opposite Golcha Cinema). The proprietor Sanjay Kapoor is a sommelier in his own right and his product is no less subtle. The President’s Tea (Rs. 1000 / 100 gms) is Pasand’s premier Darjeeling first flush – the best tea in the world if you had to pick one - but if you like milk and sugar, I found the homelier Nilgiris tea (Rs 100/100 gms) makes the perfect cuppa. Pasand even produces a Chinese hybrid with a flavour like Chardonnay of the Chablis terroir. Premiers (Doctor’s Lane in Gol Market) is modelled closely on Pasand; both exist to sell their own brand of packaged tea, though you can visit for a complimentary tasting. Also, the clientele of both is largely East Asian; Delhi’s deluxe teashops are to Japanese what Pushkar hostels are to Hebrew.

For a less solemn retail experience, visit Craft House (Metropolitan Nikko Hotel), which carries several pure, flavoured and ayurvedic teas. Among the pure teas are India’s most luxurious varieties, including the Makaibari silver tip (Rs 2000/ 50 gms), a second flush that is only picked by women on full moon nights. Seriously. It produces a green-gold brew, so gentle on the tongue it is almost buttery. If you’re interested in ayurvedic teas, they will diagnose your dosha and prescribe a remedial concoction.

If your taste buds yearn to sail the Seven Seas, the Cha Bar at the Oxford Book Shop (Statesman House, Barakhamba Road) has a huge number of international teas to drink in situ. Their Moroccan Mint Tea (Rs 60) is "straight from the bustling streets of Casablanca," refreshing but very minty indeed. The South American Maté (Rs 60) of of the Guarani Indians (no relation) is credited with so many restorative properties it does just about everything but clip your toenails for you or taste nice.

Passion: My Cup of Tea (near PVR Saket and Priya) doesn’t really belong in this company, as it targets high schoolers waiting to get into a movie rather than fervent tea drinkers. Passion tries to appropriate the chain-coffeeshop model, along with its horrible lexicon, as with the "Frappatea." The only innovative item is the Kawha (Rs. 75), green tea flavoured with cardamon, saffron and almond, but still the taste equivalent of a bellyflop from the high board. Passion also sells packaged teas, but the ‘recipe’ on the back (which begins: "take fresh water from the tap and boil,") suggests that these are not for practiced drinkers.

Khwaja Ghar Aaye

2007-03-31T10:25:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits: There may be no shrine in the world like the Inayat Khan dargah: the grave-site in India of a Sufi saint with an entirely international following. Although Hazrat Inayat Khan was interred here in 1927, his following - primarily from Australia, the United States and Europe, but existent on every continent - only began to visit the dargah in the 70s, when travel to India became easier. As a result, his dargah is a beautiful but schizoid place, welcoming to the global faithful but exclusionary to the people right outside doors.

Many people in Delhi know the dargah of Inayat Khan, but within the lively and decrepit neighbourhood of Nizamuddin where it is located, a surprising number do not. They’ve all noticed the angrezis converging on a small wooden portal in a whitewashed wall, but their business inside is their own. Those who are aware of the dargah also know that qawwali is performed there every Friday, but it is for angrezi logon, and they’re not tempted to attend, for they have the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya for their own kind.

The local disinterest should not discourage qawwali enthusiasts from visiting. Eventually you will find the door beneath the Inayati coat of arms, and behind it a grassy courtyard. A feeling of blessed tranquility pools inside the high walls, besieged by the cram of honking humanity outside.

The qawwali begins after the maghreb, the evening prayer, around 7 pm this time of year. If you arrive early, you will have nothing to do but listen to the murshid sing gentle benedictions over the platter of naans to be distributed outside the dargah door. Otherwise it is a hushed still-life, with only a rare figure passing down a hall.

The qawwali is held in the mazaar, beside the grave. On a regular Friday, no more than fifteen people will seat themselves around the room to hear Mehraj Ahmed Nizami and his sons sing. As qawwals, their family could hardly claim a more distinguished geneaology: it begins with Saamat, a disciple of Amr Khusrau himself. Saamat was a deaf-mute until one day Hazrat Nizamuddin took a bubble of saliva from his own lips and put it to Saamat’s, gifting him with hearing and speech. Saamat pledged himself to Khusrau’s music until the apocalypse, and countless generations later, Mehraj Ahmed Nizami still sings the same words of praise. He has done so at the Inayati dargah for fourty years. A third generation after him is represented by Mizan, who looks born to sit at the head of the chorus, although he is only two and needs help making his hands connect in a clap.

When their voices break the envelope of silence over the dargah it is like a second miracle of sensory awakening. Even if your experience of the music is secular, the ambience, the acoustics and the intimacy of the room make it extraordinarily personal. Harmonies come into relief and the masterfully played dhol reverberates in your gut. Nizami abides by a traditional form, which he sings with relish and obvious joy, and the verses take on new character when he meets your eye.

Afterwards I spoke with a French researcher, a student of Nizami’s for twenty two years. "A qawwal needs a uniquely sophisticated mind," she told me, "The repertoire is huge and the meaning of the poetry is deep. He knows who he is singing for, and so how to insert the verses in a connecting thread – and in that lies the power of qawwali to really open people’s hearts."

What The Chinese Don't Say

2007-03-13T12:32:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook Traveller: This is the first book review I've written for publication. I was lucky that it related to my study of East Asia, and particularly on the One-Child policy, which Dr Tyrene White had written about with great acuity.

Xinran lived an extraordinary life – stolen from her parents during the Cultural Revolution and raised by the Red Guards, she became an influential radio commentator in the post-Deng era, then moved to Britain and became a novelist and columnist in the Guardian. But from the collection of those columns in What the Chinese Don't Eat, you'd never imagine it. These are utterly suburban observations of the cultural turmoil in modern China, and in immigrant Chinese life, like weekly emails from a kind but fragile aunt who wakes every morning to be surprised anew by the poverty of the poor and the mistreatment of women.

Each column is a mild-mannered anecdote, observative of human subjects, but shy of politics and uninformative about the bigger picture. In a typical chapter, Xinran meets a colleague who had "a beautiful traditional Chinese face" but now, with dyed hair and a nose job, is barely recognizably Chinese at all. But nose-jobs aren't a distinctively Chinese weakness and nobody, anywhere, needs to be made aware of them. One wonders whether the procedure Xinran meant to describe was blepharoplasty, the surgical modification of the upper eyelid to make single-lidded Chinese eyes look more Caucasian. It is the most common cosmetic surgery in China, and its popularity says a great deal more about new personal insecurities that are distinct to the swiftly-turning country.

Xinran's meandering is only tolerable because she writes with great compassion, and even with heartburn when describing women and daughters twisted away from each other by a superstitious patriarchy and the aloof force of the One-Child policy. But to write compassionately without even a stab at political criticism sounds naïve, and leaves the reader with nothing more than a hazy vision of wrongdoing, absent the people or policy regimes responsible for it. Here is Xinran at her most provoked, talking about immigrant cockle pickers in Britain who were trapped and perished at sea: "Yes, they may have been illegal, but they had basic human needs and should have basic human rights to protect them. Why didn't they?" You'd be right to guess that she does not answer that question.

Pan the Wok

2007-01-22T11:35:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits: The perverse idea - that writing a review is most fun when you're trashing something - is truest about food and restaurants. It is easy to catch amateur reviewers - like me - struggling with the scarcity of synonyms for 'delicious,' and ultimately trotting out the shame-face squad: Tasty! Delectable! Scrumptious! Yum! To which the reader says: Yuck.

Bad experiences inspire better prose, and to that extent, this was one of my favourite experiences reviewing a restaurant. I wasnt being vicious. The place brought down its shutters permanently a month later.

Its possible that when Its All Greek To Me vacated his upper-story location, they left behind the tables, and that was the reason why Mr Tandon opened China Xpress. The name of the new restaurant is doubly deceptive: there is nothing express about it, since one fretful gentleman acts as everything from maitre’de to busboy. In between appetizers you’ll have time to enjoy the forgotten Govinda music videos playing in your face, and smoking is allowed, so between courses you’ll have time for a cigarette or several.

There is also nothing particularly Chinese about it. The menu is largely Japanese or Indochinese, sometimes indigenized to the Delhi taste. The Thai Laksa Lemak soup brims with the warm tastes of coconut milk and lemon grass. The Miso Soup is light and true to the flavour of the bean, but the tofu floats around in it like an afterthought. The soups are worth stopping in for if soup is all you’re having.

Salmon and prawn tempura sushi arrive looking credible but are really just big mouthfuls of rice. This is what people who don’t like sushi think it tastes like. The satay is the best you’ll find at that price, and that’s clearly the accolade that China Xpress has its eyes on in general. But although Low prices are great, they don’t soften the blow when your sizzler arrives not sizzling or even so much as gently exhaling.

The other main courses are all Platters, which means you get your entrée with a dollop of kimchi (gaajar-pyaaz vala) and a spring roll (until the kitchen runs out of them). The Vegetable Almond Platter was true to its word and tasted like almonds chopped into a glum cauliflower broth. The entrée recommended by the house, the Sliced Lamb Chilly Platter, fails to make boiled rice taste much better than rice does on its own.

Lame entrées are mere disappointments. But it is a truly human and heart-breaking moment when the only other patrons at a Chinese restaurant leave in a huff because the kitchen has run out of noodles. I guess the old restaurant didn’t leave any behind.

Operation Deja Vu

2006-12-18T08:51:00.000+02:00

Two years ago I tore a ligament in my knee and they operated to graft in another one. The new ligament was a wonder of modern medical technology, until a month ago, when I tore it as well. I was put under the knife again so they could graft in ANOTHER one; the alternative would have been to have a knee that kept poppin' and droppin' like The Neptunes for the rest of my life.

The operation was painless but quite gruesome. I opted for an epidural anasthaetic, so I was conscious and able to supervise the procedure on a monitor attached to an arthroscope ("I'll have my scar a little bit to the left" kind of thing). Sometimes this was boring but cool, like Discovery Channel. But generally it was a bad idea, because it is just sickening to watch scalpels and electric drills being applied to your flesh. In particular there was some kind of soft white tissue that flew around in shreds and hopefully grows back. So I panicked and then napped.

Then I spent a pretty jolly week in hospital, peeing in a bottle, chatting with my mum, reading graphic novels sent to me by my future flatmate and shouting for a sweet, sweet sedative knock-out shot in my bottom at the shyest suggestion of discomfort or boredom.

Then I spent a week at home, sullen, burning with fever, unable to sleep for nights on end, obsessed with thoughts about the fragility of the human body and the frailty of its spirit and the unfairness of it all. At one point I nearly gave up.

Now I'm walking with the support of one crutch and my most-unfortunate-sick leave has blossomed into the best kind of Bangalore holiday, which if you are not familiar with it, means heavy duty relaxation induced by great company, bad theatre, good beer, filter coffee and weather so gentle you could forget a baby on the terrace all day and not hear a peep out of it. This city still has the ambience of a place where getting things done is strictly optional. Its really only tolerable if you have an excuse.

The knee has started to look and function like a human knee again. Earlier it looked like some sort of benthic marine mammal: hairless, pale, humped and blubbery, and generally ill-designed for the whole 'walking' plan. Still, I have been through all of this before and that experience bolsters me against nervousness. I will moonwalk again.

Never the Last Dance

2006-11-15T09:59:00.000+02:00

Written for Outlook City Limits: one of the most enjoyable culture pieces I've written, as Jonathan Hollander is an extraordinarily gracious man, and he permitted me enough time and proximity to get the deep dig, which is more fulfilling than anything. Jonathan is also notably attached to India without forming or peddling presumptuous ideas about it. He wrote me a get-well note later when he heard about my knee injury.

When I sent him a copy of the article, he told me, "It’s a clever piece and yet profound at the same time. Thank you for looking so deeply into my spiritual/artistic relationship with India. You are a terrific writer… The legal profession's loss is journalism's gain."

Jonathan Hollander stumbled upon India when he was 16. "I have a memory, as vivid today as it was then, of the great Bharatnatyam guru, Parvati Kumar – I actually thought his name was Guruji – giving a lesson in Bombay. I remember the feet of little girls stamping on white marble tiles, the green monsoon light, the bells around their ankles, the geometry of their movements, the combination of physically punishing discipline with a higher element of something like spirituality. I found it astonishing, and now I strive for that myself."

So began a love for India that grew ever more sincere and robust, enduring the usual trials with which this country tests new suitors. The first time he came back with his troupe, they all piggybacked off a Fulbright intended for Jonathan alone. "It was terrifying. We had no resources – we’d be travelling around in 2nd class non-a/c, arriving in cities where we knew nobody, in Vyzag, in Tirupati, just throwing ourselves into an abyss." There was always someone to rescue them, to make a performance happen, and that memory still infoms Jonathan’s grateful feelings towards India, even in these days of adulatory journalists and suites at the Taj Mansingh.

The Battery Dance Company has now done more work in India than any American dance company in history. They’ve visited seventeen cities, and Jonathan is forthright about Delhi not being his favourite. His early audiences seemed insincere. "Not there to see but to be seen…" he he muses, "But this will be our fourth performance here, so lets see." When I leave him, the tables have been turned, and I am left hoping with a weird fervency that the audience will not disappoint the dancers.

He makes it easy for us: the performance is entrancing. The dancers are almost flawless, but the choreography carries a slight suggestion of dissonance and free-form, like memories of dancing alone in their rooms as kids. The solo performances seem to speak of each dancer’s character and their diverse origins – as a Serbian asylee, or an immigrant from apartheid South Africa – the way wines speak of soil and climate. Heads in the audience dip and roll like coconuts in the surf.

Afterward, Jonathan is in the Green Room, trying not to talk with his mouth full of kabab. His opivion ov Devhi is (gulp) greatly improved. Really? I was still getting over the people in the row behind me who had brought popcorn and crunchmunchcrunched their way through the show; on top of the wretched speakers that threw a static wet blanket over Jonathan’s painstakingly arranged score. But his grace toward this country is buoyant. He points out that sponsors were not hard to find; that people sat packed in the aisles; that no cellphones rang. "India has always been ready to recognize an act of homage, and to respond with so much generosity and support." And I concede, that in those moments when the performace took flight, every salty-lipped one of us was carried away with it. So he is content, and will keep coming back.

Against Stillness: The American Highway Novel

2006-09-16T13:13:00.006+03:00

Written for Outlook Traveller.

If you were to go looking for America, what would that involve? A melancholy bus ride spent counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike, by one account. For the grittier explorer, maybe renting a Chevy convertible and, in a savage state of chemical derangement, jetting down Interstate 15 through the broiling Nevada desert. Hunter S Thompson, real motorhead's man, gives us a slightly hysterical distillation of the highway journey in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 'The only hope is to somehow get across three hundred miles of open road between here and Sanctuary. But, sweet Jesus, I am tired I'm scared. I'm crazy. This culture has beaten me down. What the fuck am I doing out here?'

Escape, Hunt. That's what you're doing out there in 1971, on the greatest roadworks in the world, gorged as a fruitbat on mescaline and speeding to boot. Twenty years ago, Jack Kerouac was out there saying 'escape' and 'America' also, although for his generation the highway seethed with hope and spiritual promise. Drunk on youth and whisky, Kerouac's characters chased across the continent on the heels of an immanent philosophy that would square with their madness for living. On the Road became many things, but while its other values may have wilted, it is fixed as the Great American Highway Novel. Hitchhiking Route 6, Kerouac's alter ego sings, 'I felt like an arrow that could shoot all the way out,' adding later, 'like the Prophet who had walked across the land to bring the dark word, and the only word I had was "Wow!"' He drew the highways like phrenological lines over the young skull of America.

Escape can also mean discarding your identity in the slipstream of limitless road and unmemorable motels; if, like Humbert Humbert, you're seeking wide-skied peace and quiet in which to defile your Lolita. Says Humbert, with relief, 'I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt of fourty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long black highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors.' Describing the countryside, Nabokov has the begrudging admiration of a European for the obvious grandeur of America. 'The mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream … and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway.'

Kerouac and Humbert chose an interesting time to set wheels to asphalt, because the Cold War would soon transform those highways into a network of high-speed roads with zero traffic stoppage, intended as infrastructure for evacuating cities in the event of a nuclear strike. Some years after this work began, John Steinbeck drove a loop around the country with his poodle, and published the account in 1966 as Travels with Charley. Steinbeck had already written a great portrait of the highway of the 1930s in the Grapes of Wrath, where the family Joad is subjected to the trials and the sublime spectacles of the hard road to California, suffering and dying and birthing along the way. 'When we get these thoroughfares across the whole country, as we will and must,' he now mused, rather crankily, in Travels, 'It will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.'

It has not quite come to that. It is true that you can drive from Boston down to Washington, DC without ever losing sight of a Wendy's or a discount jumbo mattress warehouse or any of the grimy franchises that repeat themselves down the Northeastern seaboard like a looping B movie. But America is too prepossessing to be obscured by twenty-foot-medians and concrete sidings. Stretched taut across the continent between the inflammations of the Northeastern I-95 and the I-405 of Southern California, there is still the endless highway to which you can escape, and feel the Great Spirit breathe hotly on your face, and see the junipers and the mountains and the rib cage of old Tom Joad, and know that you are at least looking for America.

Burning Down the Hiz

2006-08-05T17:15:00.000+03:00

I just got back from the protest that was meant to be outside the Israeli Embassy. It was a mild ol' protest, about one hundred and fifty lefties - journalists, academics, labour organizers and that sort - but the police still decided to notify a one-kilometer-radius around the Embassy under CRPC 144 (meaning the power to order persons to cease to do something dangerous to public interest). Ha ha, nice one. Half of these people, including myself until recently, must have had the word 'public interest' on their business cards, not to mention that they wouldn't be able to throw a brick ten feet.

So we ended up standing and yelling furiously in front of the premises of the Union Public Service Commission, who must have been wondering what they did wrong, while the cops watched sympathetically across a barricade. To add irony to absurdity, I was carrying a sign that said "The Buffer Zone is Criminal."

Got back and have been reading a little bit more about the bombings, now feeling a little nauseous, it is really just too much. Lebanon's Prime Minister has said more than 900 people have died as a result of Israeli bombing and that a third of the casualties are children under the age of 12.

Bungle in the Jungle

2006-08-05T13:27:00.000+03:00

Block this, sons'abitches.

http://openspaceindia.org/essays_35.htm

Honestly...

Respect My Authoritah

2006-05-19T15:50:00.000+03:00

I thought that the deadly important Kaavya Vishwanathan affair wasn't getting enough coverage in the press (ha, ha) and somebody ought to do something about it:

http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2006/05/14/stories/2006051400410400.htm

Puh! Going national all over yo' face!

* * *

On the minus side, in 24 hours I will be unemployed again. On a Saturday three weeks ago, when I was scheduled to quit, I had one foot literally out of the door and I waved to the Big Boss with a sort of bohemian flourish in the wrist and trilled "Goodbye! Forever!"

Before the other foot slipped out, though, his knuckles were wrapped around my collar and he grrrowled through his moustache, "You're not going anywhere until you find us a replacement." I mean, I know he loved my work, but honestly.

So I've spent three weeks trailing into work at noon, sitting in front of my computer haplessly, having no work and getting paid. Wait a minute ... it was amazing. Butenoughisenough. Yesterday, the bada sahib stormed downstairs yelling at people and when I mistakenly caught his eye, he bellowed at me that he doesnt respect my bloody moral posing. I sat in there in rapt terror that I hopefully made to look like righteous immovability. Yes sir, I held his eyes with my own, which were like Mangal Pandey's eyes, steelier than the the beef-greasy barrel of the trembling Enfields, like the roaring pupils of the Christian that caused the lions to recoil to the other side of the Coliseum. As soon as he left the room, I rose to my feet and thought very loud, "Enoughisenough, you crazy son of a bitch!" And since this post has now well muddied the distinction between history and fiction, lets say that I muttered to myself, "Freedom," because I did, a little later in the evening.

Now I have time - weeks, if I need it - to do important things I have been neglecting, but wanting to do, like making a list of nice things that begin with the letter L: Lepidoptera. Lozenge. Labia. Liberty. Limosine. Lebanon. Well, thats done. Now what.

* * *

Okay, at least this - some fresh air, some time at home, then a new chair in an unseen room, and a pen with a strong, dark column of ink, to write a new chapter.

Its Not Me, Its You

2006-04-19T14:16:00.000+02:00

StatCounter informs me that many people are still wandering through here. Way to take a hint, guys. This party is, to borrow the matchless melodrama of a late great budding poet who found himself in the same position, "inert. Finis. And that's that." (Like him, I will also come back to look for mournful messages in my comments, so don't be too cool and all, do shed a colon, dot dot dot, open parenthesis). Blogs, although addictive and cunning surrogates for real personality are, like cigarettes, bad for you and disastrous for literate society. They also give your babies cancer. Go read Moby Dick or something.

Line Hodiadhu

2006-03-06T17:24:00.000+02:00

I don't want to give the impression that my social life revolves around this Free Speech conference a fortnight ago, but that seems to be the case.

On the first day, VS and I skipped the movie because the Blank Noise meeting was at my place later that evening, and I needed to shove my clothes under the bed. I'd spent all day in the vicinity of Lawrence Liang, so I was quite tipsy on the idea that any restraints on speech or expression tend towards tyranny. We were swaggering up Kasturba Gandhi Marg looking for an auto, and a woman, slimly attractive in that Delhi-Delhi way, was walking past us, and I was hardly aware of it before a "KWAAAAWOO..." began to squeeze out of my throat. VS gave me an incredibly violent pout, though, and the catcall receded before it could make too much of a racket. Then VS took me by the arm and shepherded me home before I could damage my self-opinion any further.

There is absolutely no moral to this story, although I spent a while trying to derive one. The closest I got was
(1) damn, she was hot, I wish she'd looked at me, and
(2) don't be such a dick, Rags.

There is a deep-set paradox in trying to be an ally (and by an ally I mean the Swarthmore connotation, someone offering support and solidarity to the members of a group who face a kind of disadvantage that he or she does not), particularly in trying to be a straight male ally to women's fronts against sexism. The paradox is nothing complicated: in trying to combat sexism, you're trying to strip yourself of an archaic right that you're usually aware of still wanting. Some people, the pessimistic type, would say its an attempt to take arms against your biological hardwiring. I dont know about any of that, but I'm calling myself RAM until proven ROM (sorry, people who know what those mean).

Still, this paradox lends itself to a certain type of misbehaviour: the temptation to use progressive politics as a foil against examining your own attitude, or worse, to collect feminist cred without making much effort to put your own chauvinist impulses in order. Its quite likely that I'm as much a perpetrator as I am an ally. Do I just want everyone else to change? "Look," says Anand, in his prudent, politically-weathered manner, "I don't think it's hypocrisy if you put it that way. Obviously as men we're all mysogynist and there's no conquering our mysogyny once and for all. As I see it, thinking we've got the answer to mysogyny is accepting it, in a way. Remaining self-critical is the only way to be a male ally."

* * *

A good place to go to get it all in perspective is Cairo. Cairo is an extraordinarily woman-unfriendly place, although I dont know what the city is like to anyone behind a niqab. Probably quite uneventful. But anyway, Cairo is not like Riyadh is, by all reports, that honestly dystopian way. Gender relations on the streets of Cairo have the kind of passive-aggressive nature that overlies a deep schizophrenia.

I spent seven months there, okay? So I know everything about Cairo.

It starts with politics: colonialism, which is always self-explanatory. Then economics: a country, and a regime, that is heavily reliant on tourism, the second largest source of revenue after textiles. Then civic dynamics: gaggles of Italian tourists drifting through Islamic Cairo in tubetops and Daisy Dukes, while their guides pointedly feign laissez faire attitudes to clothing. A couple of reductivist steps down the ladder: a culture of street harassment like nothing I have ever seen.

Unless my memory is hyperbolizing to me, visiting the Khan el Khaleeli with girls could be overwhelming - hands, hands, everywhere, hands, incomprehensible voices, more hands - with a thoughtless rapidity that leaves you looking more like a baffled spectator than a heroic protector (another problematic point). Most frighteningly, a lot of those hands and comments belong to boys too young to know what they're reaching for, picked up like any bad habit from older brothers.

One afternoon, after class, a friend of mine walked home across the bridge and through Gezira. Our hostel was in the diplomatic area, so every street junction had a pair of bored national guardsmen fiddling with their rifles and kicking dust at each other. This afternoon she was wearing a long brown skirt, right down to her feet, and a loose collared shirt, I remember the outfit quite clearly. She passed a policeman who was tilting his head back, drinking water from a Baraka bottle. Then he straightened up, and spat a mouthful of water all over her.

She was exquisitely graceful under fire. She walked back to our hostel, calmly told us what had happened and retired to her room to be upset in peace. I went out with the receptionist and caught an officer, demanded to know what he was going to do about it. He winced and smiled and shrugged, this is ordinary stuff, ya basha, you indignant foreigners are such pests. We bullied him for a while. "Tell me what you want me to do," he offered, rhetorically.
"Scalp him!" I screamed, in English. Then in Arabic, the correct response, "You are his officer. Cannot him keep doing this. I said what happened. You do what is appropriate."
"Taaban!" he exclaimed, "Very good, sir. I will do that!" And, nodding to me, he stormed off vengeantly in the opposite direction.

* * *

My point is not to absolve India of its transgressions - of course not. I'm trying to situate harassing behaviour, very clearly, at an intersection of social determination, institutional sanction and individual choice. That helps me understand the three fronts on which it can be combatted, and it helps me understand my own position as both the subject and the object of that struggle. Each one of those fronts is a point of opportunity as well as of resistance, and they do not necessarily move in concert, which can disguise true progress as it occurs. The paradox I described earlier is the sight of these opportunities and resistances knocking against each other.

Each front is one in which something can be seized - the editing of a popular magazine, a penal code, an autodriver's collar - and made to contemplate the simplicity of something better, and how that simplicity flies in the face of its resistance. I doubt that, in my lifetime, the streets around my home will become a place where no one feels uncomfortable, demeaned or violated because of their sex or sexuality. We'll never fix society, or the police or the judiciary, or people.

I'm pretty sure, though, that each of them has an unrealized capacity to want to be an agent of fairness while also being a beneficiary of unfairness. To seed the streets with that paradox - to make them a place where people enter with the desire to respect each other, even if they do have bad habits or wild hormones - that doesnt seem like as much of a fantasy. It seems quite doable, really. What a petite ambition. But what a place to be proud of.

* * *

Today is International Women's Day. I wrote this as part of the Blank Noise Project blogathon. Keep on keepin' on.

You think I dont know the word for 'appropriate' in Arabic, but its munasib, sucka.

Eve Teasing

2006-02-24T12:20:00.000+02:00

To recognize Women's Day, and as part of an effort to build a core constituency that is aware of the Blank Noise Project, we're organizing a blogathon for Tuesday, the 7th of March. Blank Noise is asking other bloggers to post about their experiences of sexual harassment - as a victim, perpetrator or bystander - at work, at home or in the public sphere. On International Women's Day, which is March 8th, it would be exciting to see the theme of harassment become audible on the Indian blogosphere.

If you will participate, email blurtblanknoise@gmail.com to let us know - then on March 7th, we'll link to all the participating bloggers from the Blank Noise homepage, and hopefully it will be an archive that will help us understand and stay angry about harassment. For the time being, it would be great if participants posted on their blogs in anticipation, to spread the word. Spread the word in other ways, too.

BNP's target audience isn't really the blogging community, but the Delhi arm of the campaign is a young one and this will be a good step, whether effective or symbolic, towards interventions closer to the street.

Blank Noise Project Blogathon 2006

Pecks & Pints

2006-02-15T08:15:00.000+02:00

Generally the path of least resistance for a straight, frustrated, unattached male on Valentine's day is to congregate with other frustrated, unattached males and drink rum on the rocks and bitch about how their buddies' girlfriends are lame. This year I decided to decided to take that principle ("I'm not getting any play tonight, so why bother trying?") to its logical extreme, and go to Pegs & Pints with VS.

Pegs & Pints, on Tuesdays nights, becomes the core reactor of the capital's LGBT scene. When a Tuesday corresponds with Valentine's Day, the scene is so close to meltdown that it makes TC's on Wednesday night look as polite and repressed as a puritan tea party. I left office at half past eight, showered and glared anxiously into my closet, trying to piece together an outfit that would underscore my heterosexuality. This is a difficult, and problematic, exercise: images skittered through my mind... myself in my military-camo kit in sophomore year; Shiva in his sharp corporate baller clothes; Dubya bouncing around the deck of the USS Lincoln in his bomber jacker. Concluded that I had no idea what such an outfit would look like and, in any case, if it did exist my wardrobe didn't have it.

VS and I arrived early so we could meet some of his friends and take breath before the storm - its a nice, intimate place. We drank voddies and sprites, and as I'd helped myself to the Boss's bar before I left, I was the first onto the dance floor. The DJ was laying down fun, Paces-style hiphop, which was like a mouthful of fresh breezer after three months of clunking around to Deep Purple and Lynyrd Skynyrd. At half past eleven, I looked up and the place was jampacked, and additionally, I appeared to have somebody else's hand in each one of my jeans pockets. A lot like Genderfuck*.

Over the course of the night, I was hit on by some pretty smooth characters, the last of whom was this astonishingly handsome guy about my age, slightly taller and in far better shape. I guess I'd made an impression on him, because he was very insistent, even after I gave him the firm dislodge-the-hands/dodge-the-kiss/say-you're-straight thing. But he had a pretty persuasive way about him, and with five drinks in me, I could feel my Kinsey Scale fluttering and threatening to climb. VS shooed him away though, and then stood guard over me and we watched the crowd.

* * *

It was much less class stratified than most places I go at night, which makes sense. Of course it was much more bow-chicka-bow-wowww, by a factor of about a million, but there was more even to that. VS mentioned how so many of the guys there spend all week looking forward to it, and I thought I could see how, in a sense, young gay men have to squeeze into a few hours each week the kind of sexual/emotional gratification heterosexual men demand and receive in surfeit every waking hour, on every TV channel and every public advertising space.

Every evening I leave office and I contemplate heading to any of a thousand joints where I could - well, hypothetically - easily meet women. When the DJ put on a slow-dance track that night, one couple near me held each other, swayed and had tears running down their faces. The word "heteronormative" legitimately belongs somewhere in this paragraph, but I wont belabour it. My point isn't that gay men and women have it tough in this society - I'll leave that breaking news to last-minute Op-Eds in the Indian Express - but that contemplating their situation brought into illumination how decadently easy I have it.

We left at around two, and headed to the 24 hour food court at Nizamuddin Station to have tea. The other two had us in splits with stories of jat boys and their reservations that ejaculating will make them "lose strength." Then, over chai and alu tikkis, they told me their experiences with the queer movement, which in this country only began to organize in the early nineties. I hadnt realized it was that recently, or the subtle, personal ways in which queer sexualities were ghettoized before they were able to build themselves a supportive community. Anyway, more on that when VS writes his book.

* * *

Hindustan Times finally did good by me, even if its just a pun. Accompanying an Op-Ed on Section 377** is a publicity still from Brokeback Mountain. The caption reads, "If Cowboys can do it, why can't Indians?"

Genderfuck: Swarthmore's annual Sager Symposium on queerness and gender culminated in a dance party called Genderfuck, where the idea was for everyone to defy conventional gender and sexual constraints by cross-dressing or wearing very little. The tagline was "boys in dress, girls in less," and it was always the wildest - for better and for worse - party of the year.
The Indian Penal Code was framed in 1860. Section 377 reads: "Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with [imprisonment for life], or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine." More proof that every single problem India has is the fault of the British.

Found Haiku

2006-02-11T12:00:00.000+02:00

Restricted area
Photographs prohibited
Prove identity

Oysters before Pigs

2006-02-06T14:03:00.000+02:00

Theres a lot of interesting work on the table right now. The draft of the Assisted Reproduction Bill, 2006, which seeks to regulate in vitro fertilization and maternal surrogacy, defines the gamete as follows: "2d. gamete means either oyster or sperm." Oyster?! There are a few things that would be euphemistically well-described as an oyster, but the female gamete is not one: I imagine the drafter being given a really confusing birds-and-bees talk over a seafood lunch.

Later on, thank god, the bill reverts to ovum. I didn't expect my developmental biology training to ever come in handy again, but now I am the only person in the office who doesnt think anaphase! and metaphase! are words from Star Trek. You did me good, Ms Arun.

* * *

More interesting is the submission that I'm trying to put together for the drafting committee of the new Police Act. The law that still governs the functioning of our police was written in 1861, soon after the Uprising, so the legislative mentality behind it is obviously less concerned with "how to protect human and civil rights and uphold the rule of law" than "how to keep the damned native in his place so I have somewhere to rest my feet." The police force's compliance with ruling political power is deeply designed into the law. For instance, it lays the basis for the present day arrangement in which the DG of the Po'po' can be discharged by the Chief Minister with no reasons given. That principle of obedience then continues down through the ranks, with the result that the police have become a force that always aggravates the abuse of elite power rather than neutralizing it. Oh, you've noticed? Needless to say, theres no oversight mechanism and the penalties for dereliction of duty etc. are weaker than you'd find at most convent schools.

The olde Act also authorizes police officers to arrest "any person who (on any road or in any open place or street)... wilfully and indecently exposes ... any deformity or disease" (so that we needn't have to look at lepers) or "commits nuisance by easing himself" (well, okay). In any case, the government has finally gotten its act together (n.p.i) and has announced - somewhat under its breath - that it is welcoming submissions from civil society. Who better to speak for the victims than me?

* * *

Reading the act, my mind scanned over the injustices that the police have committed against innocents over the last century and a half, and more urgently, against me over the last couple of years. My first encounter with the police was being spot-fined for riding triple on Leon's kinetic honda. Come on, we were going to a party, man! The next time was when I got into an ugly situation, rushing Anand and Dave McC to the airport in Bangalore, and a drunk goonda smashed my windshield -- with his open palm. For a moment, the thought passed my mind that I would get out of the car and beat him to a foul pulp. That thought was quickly replaced by the thoughts, not necessarily in this order, that

I was above common street brawling,
The police would deal with it fairly, and
This motherfucker must have iron sledgehammers for fists.

So the next morning I slicked my hair down and went to the police station to report. "He smashed my windshield," I explained in Kannada, "and I have his licence-plate number."

"Ha ha ha" the officer replied, "How come your Kannada is so bad?" I spent the next five minutes fictionalizing a childhood in Bombay to excuse my bad Kannada, then snapped out of it and demanded "But anyway, what are we going to do?!" What he did was dictate an FIR to me - in duplicate, changing the story completely - search around for a stamp, then ignore me for a little while and ultimately turn and inform me that this was the wrong police station in the wrong jurisdiction. I had been there about fourty five minutes.

I had to turn my head so he wouldnt see my face going purple and my lips trembling. I met the eyes of the guy in the jail cell who had been standing at the bars with his arms hanging out, staring malignantly at me since I walked into the station. Suddenly his eyes spoke a deep empathy and a lament for squandered justice. I nodded slowly. His eyes burned with solidarity.

"Ey, don't worry about him," the officer cut in, "That bastard is fully stoned."

* * *

My third encounter was in Cosmo Village, at the height of the Bangalore police's anti-pub crusade. At half past eleven, a band of constables rushed into the bar and filtered up to the top floor, shaking people by the shoulder and yelling at them to leave. This was, in the most limited sense of the word, legal, but as a rich male I didnt think I needed to have policemen telling me what was legal and where and when I could or could not drink. So when an officer came up to me and snorted something about getting out, I turned my nose right up to the sky and asked, "Well, can I finish my drink?"

Police-avaru was not having any of this. He grabbed me by my collar and pulled me to my feet, and with perfect coordination, his companion swung his lathi down across my ass. It was a masterful shot: two-handed, force distributed equally onto both cheeks. I yelped and stuck my hands over my butt, and demanded (some would say 'pleaded') "Yaake adibeku appa?! (Why'd you have to hit me, man?)" He replied, "Hoy! Maathadbekadre stationge banni! (hoy! if you want to talk, we'll talk in the police station!)" So I just left, backing away in the direction of the door, cursing under my breath. But seriously, it stung for half an hour.

* * *

The next time I was back in Cosmo Village, I was with a group of really attractive girls, so I was re-telling this story in hopes of either impressing or amusing them. At the end, I exclaimed, "So yeah, and he just cracked his lathi down on my ass!!!" and waited for a reaction. They didnt say anything, but if silence could speak, it would have said, oh, okay.

Then Aditi, in a now famous comment, asked, "Kyon, aise mara?" (indicating horizontal stroke), "Ya aise mara?" (indicating linear thrust). Everyone thought that was really funny.

* * *

Glossary of terms, by public demand:

Anaphase and metaphase are stages in cell division.
lathi means a bamboo truncheon.
'Aise mara ya aise mara?' means 'Hit you like this or hit you like this?' Get it? Its dirty.

Fatal Shot

2006-02-01T09:15:00.000+02:00

I finally have a date! Let me tell the whole story.

On Monday night, I celebrated the beginning of the work week by going out for a beer with B and others at the Mezz. The Mezz is a rock bar near office, and by rock they mean Rammstein and Whitesnake and all the other stuff I would have moved onto from the Black Album, had I not been nudged in a grungier direction. There, but for the grace of Eddie Vedder, would go I on a regular basis; but for the one evening, the beer was cheap, the company was good, the pool table was free and the DJ was friendly enough to throw in some of the Pixies.

After one Kingfisher I thought I would be a good boy, but somehow five minutes later I was licking salt off my hand, and an hour later we were each three shots closer to the happy worm. I played a game of pool between each shot as a metric of my drunkenness; in the first round, I beat the DJ, which wasn't shabby, but by the last round I was playing on my own and I still couldnt remember whether I was stripes or solids. Then this tubby guy in a glossy leather jacket came over, introduced himself as a pure-bred Haryanvi, explained he'd never played pool before but that he intended to trounce me. He had assumed I was Afghani and I didnt correct him. I gave him a large grin and said encouraging and good-humoured things, but inside I was steeling myself to kick his presumptuous fat ass back to Chandigarh.

He had only two balls left on the table when I potted the eight, which was a tremendous relief. We drank a celebratory beer straight from the bottle and hugged multiple times, and he made me promise to come back on Thursday, which is a date. I'm not sure his intentions towards me are honourable. I think in the course of the evening he will either try to touch me down there (Afghans have a pretty spicy reputation in this city) or to crack a pool cue on my spine (so do Haryanvis).

* * *

By that point, I was headed down the ol' slippery slope like Vinko Bogataj; the night moved to a friend's place and when B shook me awake to go to office I was still seeing the world through the bottom of a bottle of Old Monk. The hangover, which would set in a while later, was the worst I've had in my life. When we got to office, I sat down to watch my computer boot up, and having accomplished that, went into dark, cool library and slept on the couch for a shameless four hours. Awful. Never again. Have learned my lesson.

* * *

Lessons learned:
* If you're mixing drinks in a big way on a Monday night, your brain will thank you for eating something first.
* If some punkass North Indian tries to mess, deal with him before the Tequila comes around.
* There is an amazing couch in the library.

Säglichen Zeit

2006-01-31T14:15:00.000+02:00

On Sunday, I went to the enormous book fair at Pragati Maidan; I dont think I can do justice to the scale of the event. Pragati Maidan is huge and interesting on it own, although easier to describe: it looks like someone erected a jumble of cavernous ziggurats and Ayasofya-style temples on the basis of a child's architectural plan built with toothpicks and ice-cream sticks. Its a government project, so this may not be very far from the truth. Populate that with place with a thousand book stalls exhibiting everything from regional language fiction to radical German publishers to management textbooks. Then send in the consumers, who were mad eclectic, including women in full niqab, white rastas, guys who give me drunk hugs in TC's because they recognize my hat, and people who I would have foolishly assumed to not be literate enough to want to be there. Celebrity sightings: Najam Sethi and Neel Choudhury. I had just gotten an awful jarhead haircut so my confidence was at low ebb, and I was overwhelmed.

Fortunately, VS had already done an initial reconnaisance the day before, and led me to what he said was the only hall I'd be interested in, large mainstream English publishing houses. I thought about protesting but then I couldnt because after he left I snuck back to one of them to read Linda Goodman's Sun Signs (seriously, she knows me better than I do).

My feelings about writing are a bit conflicted, so it was quite a mindfuck to be in the middle of this churning ocean of words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords.

When you write 'words' together it looks you're writing 'sword'. Thats deep.

... but I mean, dizzied thoughts from being exposed to the full force and mass of the publishing industry. Why do we think we, as a species, need a rolling archive to document all our thoughts and actions? Is it arbitrary that human civilization even reached a point where literacy dominates our paradigm of the good life, on an equal standing with basic health? Who are the jobless buggers producing all this stuff? The answer to the last one is my father, most of my best friends and, at the moment, me.

* * *

I remember in eleventh standard, how Ms Arun - frustrated by the complacency of her pampered, ethically-braindead and incapable-of-understanding-the-Krebs-cycle students - just lost it one afternoon and declared her intention to run off to a village in sub-Saharan Africa and teach the deprived but hopeful and industrious children there. I was thinking, "Woddafuck is sub-saharan africa?" and it must have been obvious on my face, because she picked me out and charged, "What do you care about, Raghu? What do you even like?"

At the time, I spluttered back into consciousness and shouted, "I like lots of things! I like trees! I like fountains! I like lots of things, okay? I just dont like the Krebs Cycle!" But of course, it dawned on me as we bustled out of class, she was absolutely right, and I dont know how much progress I've made since then. It feels like cheating to answer that I love and care about a lot of things; that feels like a polygamous cop-out. What I did realize, recently - and the realization was frightening like a first kiss - was that I should have answered, words. Words may be the only thing I know I genuinely love (apart from my mudda) and cant imagine any slackening of my commitment to. Problem is, they often fail to justify themselves by criteria I hold to be important, and thats difficult.

* * *

Amid the copious bullshit you'd expect to find at such a place, I saw one thing that re-evoked its value to me. In the Rupa stall, a girl who must have been about twelve pushed through the crowd to reach a shelf full of kids books, the sort with happy and intelligent-looking farm animals on the covers. She called out, "Papa! Stories!"

Her father was a middle aged Sikh man who was flipping through the Mitrokhin Archives. He leaned over through the crowd and said "Huhh?"

Her eyes were glued to the bookshelf and she whispered from behind her smile, as though to remind him, "Stories."

For Jan 20th: The Joke of the Year

2006-01-24T09:00:00.000+02:00

I'm very happy: I finally have substantial work. B and I stayed in last night, prying at the new Food Safety and Standards Bill. The crud fell of it in large chunks, as one might expect from a Bill in which the general principles express the desire "to achieve an appropriate level of protection of human life and health ... proportionate and no more restrictive of trade than is required." The earlier Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, which this new bill will repeal, made no mention of protecting trade.

B's intuition tells him that it was written by someone in the pay of Coca-Cola, who are still squirming at the approach of their pesticide trial; there is a lot of evidence that suggests it (it is totally inadequate; yeh Bill maange a lot more). But what the hell... I thought Coke was keeping busy screwing over villagers in Plachimada. I thought they were my friends.

* * *

Dwai's birthday was the 21st, so we planned a 'do for the 20th night. He took care of the liquor and the music and I took care of the food. This mostly involved rolling out of bed on the morning of the 20th, calling Vijay Sai and whimpering, "Help... I need to feed sixty people tonight for cheap." Of course, VS calmly tugged on one of the threads of his incredible social network and, by seven p.m., we were carrying a huge despatch of unequalled kebabs and romali roti made by - get this - the official cooks of the Nizamuddin dargah in their nine hundred year-old kitchen.

Everyone was in awe of this little miracle, and naturally went on to give VS credit for every cool production that evening, including the mojitos he was supposed to be helping me make (since presumably Coke is the only product in the country containing pesticide residues, I went with the Mint Lime Rum Sugar Soda Classic Fabulous Baby). At one point, a beautiful young woman who had spent time in Cuba rested her hand on his arm and said something to the effect of, "You're amazing," and I only just managed to keep myself from shouting "No, look, it was me!" Okay, I didnt manage to, and she walked away looking alarmed.

Quite a party: I couldn't have asked for better. Tall drinks and good company on the balcony and then we danced. At some point I folded shut on the carpet and woke up at dawn, as cold as a cadaver. Neel was snuggled up on the bed with a sleeping bag, but he had thoughtfully covered me with the table cloth. I brushed my teeth and, for the third time that week, went straight to work from the scene of the crime. I felt like a badass. Sunlight was pouring into the city, and behind the noise of traffic there was birdsong. I strode.

* * *

fo0l on the hi1l: Well, we're 23 now, 23. Sounds like a good number.
blindboyfloyd: it's prime.

Report for Duty

2006-01-18T14:43:00.000+02:00

As my work clock ticks over nine hours, and I'm sitting here writing, the temptation to abandon this polite, diplomatic idiom gets strongerandstronger. Why describe the situation of civil liberties in Nepal as "a steadily growing concern" when you know the truth is closer to "the SHIT is HITTING the FAN!"

* * *

Alternatively, this s#!@ is bananas!

* * *

January 20th: On my birthday, my plans to slip out early and help organize the party were sourly interrupted by the announcement of a staff meeting. Boss slides the paper I've been writing for months back over to me. Its the sixth draft and he still thinks its "rubbish". He told me to please revert to a more polite and diplomatic idiom.

Unearthing Justice

2006-01-17T11:02:00.000+02:00

Today I'm reading some interesting laws. A debate on the semantics of the phrase "persecution for reason of ... membership of a particular social group," which is part of the 1951 Refugee Convention's definition of a legitimate refugee; and the application of this phrase to women unprotected by the state of Pakistan from domestic violence and public abuse: this is good shit. Reading the judgements really gave me back my faith in judicial diligence and care. Unfortunately they weren't our judges - all of this went on in the English Supreme Court.

* * *

Our local beaks have their own style of legal wisdom. Justice Pasayat obviously took a little bit too much poesy in his chai before he sat down to comment (nobly, to be fair to him) on Zahira Habibulla Sheikh v State of Gujarat. This is the famous judgement that described the Modi government as modern-day Neros, who looked elsewhere when Best Bakery and innocent children and helpless women were burning; wanton boys in whose hands law and justice had become flies. Pasayat was also not above borrowing from the literary flourish of others:

"The little drops of humanness which jointly make humanity a cherished desire of mankind had seemingly dried up... the still, staid music of humanity had become silent when it was forsaken by those who were responsible for the killings.

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the heaven above.

said Julia AF Cabney in 'Little Things.' If one even cursorily glances through the records of the case..."

Well, I cant fault the sentiment, your Honour, but personally I would have preferred the poetry of the phrase "Off with their heads." Still - imagine the moment, after reading aloud his judgement to the courtroom and the anxious nation, when he must have paused and thought, "Did I just..? Oh no."

My Castle

2006-01-16T07:03:00.000+02:00

I am a proud, lonely bird with a nest of his own, a large studio with a bathroom and small sitting room and a satisfyingly heavy key to it all that looks like it was carved right out of a mountainside. The new place is enormous - I invited Vijay Sai to help me unpack and as soon as he arrived, he began to give me grief for not searching out a more ascetic situation. First I was like, "Come on, man!" and then I was like, "Oh shit, man." VS's demands include that I cook my own meals, wash my own clothes, clean my own premises, sleep on a chattai, own no chairs, no air conditioning or electrical heating, no television or computer or any electronics other than for music, in fact to spurn electricity for candles, bathe in cold water and go out only once a week and spend the rest of the week writing intensively about observations from that one outing. VS has a convincing way about him, and for a while I lay in an overwhelmed swoon, equally dizzied by the attractions of the apartment and the romance of VS's visions of the minimal life. Then I got all pissed off and confused! And then we got high.

So now I'm going to defer the problem until after I discuss rent with my hosts (they insist they're not my landlord and lady) which will happen at some unspecified time in the week. The idea of talking money is making me quail, firstly, because I cant bargain, secondly, because I cant assert my rights, and thirdly, just because. Still, they're the loveliest couple and I think they're glad to have an apparently decent and intelligent young person around. Had dinner yesterday and dressed to accentuate these two virtues - black trousers and t shirt, FabIndia waistcoat. I made an excellent investment of time by tossing back a couple of Johnny Walkers with the man of the house, and we got quite disorderly, and as the evening went on he got more and more permissive. "Listen," he announced at one point, "Theres one thing I want to set straight: you're welcome to bring any of your friends back whenever you like, it makes no difference to us." Then he added, "As long as you introduce us to their mothers!" I was horrified for a second but then I noticed that he had the glintingest glint in his eye, and I blushed and promised to be gentlemanly, but inside I was in gleeful uproar. Score!

* * *

According to the Indian Express' birthday party reportage, Mayawati's favourite colour is strawberry pink, too. If that doesnt mark it as totally here and supremely now, I dont know what does.

And someone else is crowding in on my agenda to have Delhi renamed Indraprastha: the Agra Archaeological Society thinks it should be named Dehli instead... wait, what?

The Bomb

2006-01-14T08:28:00.000+02:00

Phoenix Rising's review of Butter and Mashed Banana puts it much better than I did, and with a photograph (warning: its a spoiler).

BAMB's next performances are at Prithvi Theatre (schedule) on 6pm and 9 pm on January 21st, 2006. Its part of the Juhu Hamara festival, which looks like fun - I sort of wish I was in Bombay, but then we have the Ishara Puppetry Festival running right now. Final Rehearsal is also a good watch, if PK can be trusted to still retain his old flair.

Mr. McCandlish’s sexual orientation

2006-01-12T11:22:00.001+02:00

My first encounter with the blogosphere: Dave's and my appearance on Eternity Road.

Mr Francis Porretto just crossed 100,000 hits (congratulations, Frank!) but I dont understand why everyone doesnt read him. I dont know who his loyal readership is, but they grace his column with comments that end, "but total annihilation of the Moslem world seems like our only viable option if we are to survive as free peoples!" (This is what happens when people read Huntington and snort crystal meth at the same time; its also the constituency he directly addresses as "Gentle Readers"). Anyway, it really lends context to the absurd sense of disappointment that liberal Yankees feel when the state refuses to legalize gay marriage. Frank Porretto's writing may not be much to look at, but his shrill Medieval worldview is obviously the path ahead of American political discourse, and from his webpage you can glimpse the dizzyingly wide panorama of conservative American blogging. I wouldnt recommend it, though. Its a frightening landscape.

I think I should add him to my Honour Roll on the left, and maybe he will reciprocate. The last time I left a comment at his blog, though, he blocked my ass from ever commenting again, which was a bit unsportsmanlike since the post was about me - but the man knows his mind.

* * *

Way on the other end of the spectrum, I found the blog of Rakesh Sharma. We met when Anand and I were doing minimal running-around for the Vikalp/Films for Freedom festival in the summer of '04, and I was covering the event in the Hindu (glory days of the press pass!). Final Solution still hadn't received its censor board certification and the Hindu Jagran Manch were threatening to 'intervene'; eventually, after some MLAs created a ruckus outside the cinema and a reporter was punched, the film festival had to retire ... in fact I dont know how much I should say without creating a legal liability.

After the subsequent private screening, Rakesh's discussion with the audience was interrupted by a call on his cellphone, which he took right there. He listened silently for a minute and then thanked the caller. Then he announced, in a controlled voice with just a hint of a smile somwhere inside his beard, "That was the censor board. The film has been banned." Thadaam! I really admired his carriage at that moment, surrounded by a hundred people trembling with indignation, to remain so level-headed. Personally, I was totally ready to charge outside and start setting fire to BTS buses.

A week afterAnupam Kher was booted out of the CBFC and the film did receive its certification, Anand and I invited him to Swarthmore to speak at a screening there. He is the most interesting guy: of course, he was the first Indian in space, but more interestingly, he apparently had a substantial hand in conceiving the camp Indi-chic that Channel [V] wore so well in its salad days.
At present, in a country where the supposed descendants of Mangal Pandey are suing the makers of the movie for depicting a national hero in a romance with a prostitute, I'm damn glad for anyone who will raise hell for our freedom of speech; and that applies on both side of The Pond, for my own or for Mr Porretto's.

Curious Beasts

2006-01-11T12:32:00.000+02:00

Is there a cubicle-dwelling Pokemon, and if not, where is the nearest patent office? My design for Cubiclo-san is not autobiographical, at all, but anyone who is reading this between nine am and five pm will probably feel a little bit indicted too.

I don't mean to complain - only, I'm sitting here on Eid al Adha when, two years ago, I was picking my way around puddles of blood in Alexandria and, last year, was happily recuperating from my ACL surgery by sitting on the sofa all day drinking nimbu pani, watching Guys and Dolls and day dreaming about getting drunk with Jean Simmons.

In terms of the saleability and kawaii-factor, Cubicloji's concept can hardly be beaten. Kawaii is the Japanese word for "cuteness," but its also the keyword for the most prevailing national aesthetic since paintings of Mt Fuji, and the paternoster of an entire industry that packages and sells cuteness to the sweet tune of millions of dollars. My understanding of East Asian politics - particularly via Patrick Smith and the gleefully subversive use of kawaii by Takashi Murakami - has me identifying the kawaii phenomenon with a generalized sense of infantility and retardation of national character, a secretly Self-marginalizing motion within a corporate (in both senses) millieu, which originates from the overarching and systemic civic/political impotence that was engineered by MacArthur and the Liberal Democratic Party, and the whole arrangement of their developmental state, after the US occupation.

Wait, what am I talking about? Anyway, kawaii favours characters that, apart from being cute, really look a little developmentally stunted, with large heads and almost vestigial limbs. Its hard to deny that they're meant demonstrate a submissiveness or powerlessness - for instance, most kawaii superstars, including Hello Kitty, dont have visible mouths - a trend which has (hopefully) reached its logical conclusion in Tare Panda, a creature so fantastically submissive that it lives prostrate and it cannot walk, it just rolls to wherever it is trying to reach. "At 2.75 km/h!" explains his fansite. This is my market for the loathsome, but no less submissive and feeble, guy above. And he's cute, right? Someone get me the number of Sanrio Inc. I plan to make millions!

* * *

King Kong was enjoyable and visually byoootiful, but too weird and too politically intricate for me to process while it went by. I think the rejected subtitle for that film must have been, "WHERE DA WHITE CHICKS AT?!" Obviously I'm also struggling with the bizarre depiction of the coal-black savages (was it ironic?) who are filled with primitive bloodlust and fury but then vanish at the sight of a white man's pistol. They don't come back: presumably they've already become alcoholics.

Easily mistaken with Kong, my old smoking buddy is also raising hell in New York City - way to go, still sticking it to the Man!

Moving Up in the World

2006-01-09T14:41:00.000+02:00

Happy New Year! Perhaps to reward my good minute-taking during the Urban Policy deliberations, the UNHCR has given me a raise of Rs 300 per mo. I am going to celebrate it - and eliminate it - by watching King Kong at Saket PVR. Graar!

That's Settled

2006-01-08T09:46:00.000+02:00

I have a flat. I have a flat! I have a flat, and its a flat, and its my flat!

Tee minus six days, and counting.

* * *

NSD Theatre Festival this week: The Noh production of Othello just floored me with its precision and its restrained intensity, and it put the taste for East Asian theatre traditions on my tongue - so I thought - but this evening's Korean production of Romeo & Juliet washed that out good.

Afterwards I went for pizza with Yash&Dish&Deepti and Neel at Pizza Express, about which I have to say: Ansal Place? What the fuck is going on there?

This building is an enormous circle, like a coliseum built from cement and glass-front boutiques, and one segment of the circle is cut out to make way for the entry, exit and a looming guard tower. Theres a word for this architectural layout: its called Panopticon. I mean, just crossing from Shopper's Stop to Pizza Express, my blood began to run cold. I kept glancing over my shoulder, thinking "Jesus, is someone watching me?" but of course you're not meant to know. Across the enclosed space, they project advertisements onto giant screens, but the picture is obscured by the smog and the sound distorted as it echoes around the vast atrium. Who could have designed this place? Either the builders of Garuda Mall on commission from Stalin, or else some Foucauldian corporate architect trying to make a very big point.

The rest of them came upon me with my mouth hanging open and my internal monologue wondering what they did to socialists that they caught in here. There was a kind of amphitheatre in the middle, but in that setting it looked less like a place to perform Medea than like somewhere to put a person on trial for heresy. I confided my discomfort to Yash.

"This place is fucking freaking me out," I told him, "Its fucking creepy."
"Yeah," he said, "There ought to be a booming voice saying 'Resistance is futile... You must consume.'"
And as the ad for Tata Indicom Prepaid boomed and squealed through the air above us, I could almost hear it. The guard tower was silent, but red lights stared everywhere from behind its darkened windows.

* * *

Inside Pizza Express it was warm and smelled like olive oil frying. They had faux-Expressionist art on the walls and even a reproduction of Anand's favourite Miró (by which I mean some local artist with real nerve seemed to have copied it off a postcard onto a 6x8 canvas). Of course, they were financing their debt to MoMA by charging fifty bucks for a Limca, so I didnt forget I was still in the belly of the beast.

And you are too. Love, Rags

Hold Your Head High

2006-01-06T09:04:00.000+02:00

Some poor bugger popped it with flair on the side of the road outside the office. In what was presumably a car accident, his brain had been ejected from his head intact, and was lying there on the ground - a brain - as though it was just working up the energy to pick up and leave.

After my stomach stopped heaving, my first thought was, should I call an ambulance? My second thought was, wow, first thought, you're dumb. Then my third thought was like, isnt it crazy that we're all happening inside a brain just like that one lying on the roadside? And my fourth thought was, I am going to wear a diving helmet for every waking moment of the rest of my life.

* * *

Much further down the line, I thought of a story told to me by the truly venerable Ed Fuller. It was one of many he told me to while away the afternoons when he was the research consultant at McCabe and I was earning double nerd points as the library's computer consultant. I dont remember how it came up, but his telling always haunted me with its romance and aphoristic quality.

Said Ed: "You know, the martyrdom legend of St Denis ... or Dionysius ... he was decapitated by the Romans who... eh eh! ... didnt take to kindly to his ministrations! He was beheaded on the hill now called Montmartre, for that very reason. The legend has it that after his head was chopped off, St Denis picked it up in his arms and carried it for several miles, indeed out of the city gates, before ... eh eh, expiring completely. Of course, there was much flutter at the miraculous journey, six miles or thereabouts, not to mention that he stopped to wash his ... head, at a font, and eventually came to rest before a group of believers who gave him a burial fit for, heh, a Christian.

So, a great stir, amidst which the most perceptive comment was from one elderly onlooker. "The distance was nothing," she said, "The miracle was his first step." "

* * *

Ed and I later excavated the official story - its a multiform legend, like anything of that vintage - and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes the punchline to Mme Du Deffand in a letter to Jean Le Rond d'Alembert in 1763, which, I have to say, is a little weaker for the story than 'an elderly onlooker.'

According to the Penguin Dictionary of Saints, the legend of St Denis himself may have been combined with other figures. You mean its not true?! But in testament to the amazing coolness of language, there is a word - "cephalophore" - for the class of martyrs alleged to have done the same head-carrying thing. "They seem to have been a hearty and headstrong lot back then," Ed concluded. No kidding - and I can barely even get my ass out of bed in the morning.

On the Picket Fence

2006-01-04T12:24:00.000+02:00

A combination of scholarly curiousity and honest lecherousness had me dropping sixty bucks on the debut issue of Maxim India. My roommate in Swarthmore used to have an extensive and well-ordered collection, from which I would steal to stock the bathroom library (but he could always tell - the juxtaposed spines of a year's worth of magazines form, to nobody's delight and astonishment, a picture of an undressed woman). I wanted to see how Maxim would cross its new multicultural aspirations with its classic frat-boy exoti-chauvinism: the only context in which India, or any developing country, might have been mentioned in the US edition was the grotesque or ridiculous; a masth elephant goring six mahouts, a naga sadhu with a skewered penis or any story in relation to which they could make fun of everyone being hungry.

Maxim India Issue 1 is entertaining, but too many of the articles are year-old reruns from the US edition, with clumsy tinkering to make the jokes about Ambani instead of Donald Trump, and fumbly fingered attempts to internalize Florida smarm, which is perhaps what their PR guy meant when he said "content will be adapted to suit Indian sensibilities." Example of the hotchpotch effect: in one borrowed article, they explain that one of the ingredients of bhang is "a butter called ghee." Come on.

* * *

I'll leave it to Sushma Swaraj to worry about whether India is ready for Maxim - I'm more interested in whether Maxim is ready for India. This obtuse article in the Guardian announces that Maxim India is both the sign and the agent of revolutionary cultural change in a society where "women in sleeveless tops are looked upon as loose and even married couples do not display any affection in public." Priyanka Chopra, the inaugural covergirl, advances said revolution by appearing in a tanktop instead of a "typical coy, sari-clad Bollywood pose." For some reason this constitutes a "cultural watershed" in spite of the fact, related in the next paragraph, that women in bikinis have been on the cover of Cosmo for years; in fact, I thought Chopra looked kind of demure compared to what I remember of Barsaat.

But Maxim's real challenge has nothing to do with clothes.

Priyanka Chopra was, in the end, a severely boring person, and the occasion of a Maxim interview doesnt mean she's showing any more skin or intellectual activity than she would in Stardust. Its hard to deploy that "fuck you!... please?" laddish humour against someone who, at 23, just got perm' to go to her first New Year's party, and whose end-goal in life is "a white house with a white picket fence" (just like in Uttar Pradesh, I assume). Forget the vulgar wit they're trying to mimic from the US edition - there was no humour in it, and no sexuality, at all. Her interview was so sentimental and insipid that, despite her long arcing midriff overleaf, it was a total turn off.

I dont blame her for being sexy while concealing any evidence of her own sexuality - maybe she's just a good bahu-type, but its more likely she's seen the writing on Khushboo's walls. Look - if getting young Indians to (un)dress liberally is a watershed (which it isnt), then getting them to speak liberally will be a damburst - and until Maxim accomplishes that, it is going to be chasing its own tale, rapping about a liberal/carnal millieu that only seems to exist within its own pages.

* * *

But last night at TC's, there was this amazing girl with a snarky smile, drinking beer and just hanging out in a t-shirt that had an icon of a cat superimposed on an icon of a dinner plate. It was captioned EAT PUSSY. They should have interviewed her.

Be It Ever So Un-humble

2006-01-03T08:33:00.000+02:00

As D'Lo's mum put it, Sweet home sweet! Even as our feverish city seems to disappear behind inflammations of Garuda Malls and Lashkar attacks, there remains a simple sweetness to Bangalore that pools in valleys and old corners.

Preliminary passage
I was home for a week between Christmas and New Year, and now that I'm back here, with fewer trees and fewer moustaches, and more beggars and wider roads and dust-haze and chapped lips that taste like a hint of drought, this whole place so precipitously North Indian you feel like if you lost your footing and started to slip you would fall right into the middle of a churning desert or a roaring Kurukshetra - well, now that I'm back, I'm damn glad I did my round of the Bangalore customs.

Pecos
On the 25th evening it was coffee at the Ranga Shankara cafeteria. It is still run by the old bunch of jokers, presiding over their kesari baath and coffee despite the management's constant plotting to replace them with someone more sophisticated. Then everyone packed off optimistically to watch Pavan Kumar's prodigal return. The next afternoon I went to Koshy's with Fizz for coffee and a chicken sandwich (with shredded lettuce piled up on the side for you to add as is your pleasure) but I didnt get my sandwich, because we were rushed over to Peco's for watery beer, chilli fried beef still juicy with coconut oil and an excellent Jethro Tull playlist.

* * *

Park
On the morning of New Year's Eve, my father threw me over his shoulder at 6 am to take a guided walk around Lal Bagh. The Park was already starting to fill with walkers rushing around in synchronized Adidas sweats and Sabarimala pilgrims in their blacks and blues, unhurried despite their long road. As soon as you're looking for metaphors you wish you could stop seeing them. This walk turned out to be very interesting - I hadn't known, for instance, that the unassuming rock under Kempegowda's tower is 3 billion years old, over half the age of this planet. I will find a way to treat it with more deference in the future. We concluded in a ruckus of clanging thalis and tiny men in dhotis and wow! ghee dosa at MTR.

Pool
That evening, Ajay and I decided to get a peaceful head-start on the partying, so we drove out to the Valley School with some friends and snuck over to Pig Rock Stream. Pig Rock is a brook that flows through the brush and into a secluded pool enclosed by sun-warmed rocks. Ajay remarked how nice it was - maybe he used the word 'reassuring' - that such a place still exists just a twenty minute drive from the Ring Road, which at that time of evening was like the circle of hell reserved for assholes. He was right; I could see Pleiades. He walked ahead through the dusk, stamping loudly in his chappals "to scare snakes" and, probably, attract the panther that has been making trouble around there. We drank a beer, I waded and we contemplated one of our friends' recent engagement (!!!) in a genial, wonderstruck silence.

Parents
Back in town, I spent a little while with my parents and family friends. We each had to read out a poem, so I read Don Maquis' Warty Bliggens the Toad, which has kept as much meaning for me over the years as anything. Then to Tara's terrace for a long night of caipirinhas (her contribution), mojitos (mine) and chicken lollipops around a struggling, smoky eucalyptus fire.

Party
As we plucked mint leaves from the stem downstairs, Tara's adorable 12-year old sister complained to me about having to spend the evening with us instead of a cooler "big party" outside town. I felt very retired as I tried - and failed, I bet - to explain to her that big-parties-outside-town would be a pain in the ass for many years yet. But to have some of your favourite people and a little fire and an unequalled batch of cold mojitos - in short, to be home - is the very best way I've ever found to bring in a new year. I mean, we were only alerted to the passing of midnight when the horizons went bright with fireworks.

* * *

Poem
Earlier that evening, when we were reading poems, a French friend introduced me to Rimbaud:

Sensation

On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass :
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing :
But endless love will mount in my soul ;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside - as if I were with a woman.

Maybe its Maybelline

2006-01-02T19:45:00.000+02:00

Remarking on this is about as original (and as constructive) as calling George Bush a fascist, but love it or hate it, its all about pink in 2006. We went to the Citrus champagne brunch on the 1st afternoon and I thought I was being pretty cool and flamboyant by rocking a wine-coloured shirt that might be described as a very sober pink. As soon as I got there, though, it was obvious that the enormity of the situation puts pink well out of my league.

Everyone was doing it - there were more hot pink halter tops than any society is allowed to own, but it wasn't just women - saggy-chested white hippies wore Kashmiri topis and magenta t-shirts that looked like they had been wrung dry; smooth-operating young businessmen wore goatees and bubble-gum pink shirts with creases so sharp you take someone's eye out. It was dominating, and as I watched the coolness leach out of my FabIndia short sleeve before my eyes, I wondered how we'd let it get so bad.

Scholars agree that the trend was set in motion by Tony Blair. Its obvious to me that he started wearing pink ties to hide his furious blushing when he talks about the scourge of (fingers) terrorism in Iraq. It is becoming a political tradition of some nuance now, as Maryann Sieghart noted in the Times, when at the Labour Party convention Gordon Brown ditched his blood-of-the-working-class red for a light pink tie to symbolize his newfound centrism, in contrast to Blair, who dissembled in very dark pink.

Then, before you could pronounce the word "fuchsia", it was on Gerhard Schroeder, and then the entire comic cast of the G8, as though to confirm that they really did only attend the summit to play golf. Richard Quest barked away at the world in a coral pink shirt and tie; even Larry King got in on the act although, thank god, the suspenders were beige. These are just my personal sightings.

Back home, Saif scored major points for tastelessness in his pink buniyan, and worst of all, the Hutch Dog appeared, licking itself with a bright pink tongue and looking disturbingly like a candy-sucking geriatric letch. "Now in Pink," the signs told us, but remained mute when the chorus went up "Hyaack! But why?!" I can just imagine the deranged boardroom meeting where the cool marketing personalities who have all the street cred and are down with the youth recommended this to a team of horrified but acquiescent Hutch execs with a powerpoint presentation titled "Pink is In with the Kidz!" I'm told that, in loyalty to its sponsor, the pink banner has already fallen across Prithvi Theatre, and that Ranga Shankara, so nicely but briefly sunset-orange after the 2005 Festival, is also on its way to looking like the inside of somebody's mouth.

* * *

I passed out that afternoon and woke up with my head throbbing like a 50 Cent video. Amma thinks it was a couple of dozen glasses of champagne too many, and she has a point, but that doesnt explain why pink smears were sliding across the darkness whenever I closed my eyes. Don't get me wrong - I'd be the first one in line if I thought Pink Season had any genuine trangressive potential - but if anything, this is just about another counterculture whose style will be appropriated by the facilely liberal while its message will continue to be ignored. Remember the time when Pink Tie meant "raising awareness about breast cancer?" No, neither do I.

Part II: To Spite Her Face

2005-12-28T18:43:00.000+02:00

My local mythologist, Fizz Shankar, has put a wild new spin on my phallic interpretation of what it means to cut off someone else's nose. As far as he's concerned, the original de-nosing of consequence was Lakshmana's dastardly attack on Shurpanaka, the rakshas sister of Ravana. In Fizz's telling: Rama and Lakshmana were doing something manly in the forest and Shurpanaka was most taken by the sight. "She wanted to fuck them," he explained, "but in the happy way." So Shurpanaka took on the form of a beautiful maiden, approached Rama and asked, "Hey handsome, want to get 'married' ?"

Rama puts on his dharma-face and answered that he is already married but, you know, his younger brother is single. Lakshmana protests that he is only his brother's servant, and she should surely be directing her attention at his master and future king. Shurpanaka gets pissed off - look, she's put on this ravishing appearance, and been honest about her desire, and these guys are suddenly acting all sanctimonious - and in her distraction she lets her disguise slip. R & L go "What the...! She's a rakshasi! Deceit!" and Lakshmana cuts off her nose and ears.

The rest is history. She runs back to her brother, the King of Lanka, and in time he will avenge her by abducting Sita, eventually precipitating great battle.

I'm sure I'm the three millionth person to observe this, but the story is excellent grist for the feminist mill, especially on the problem of outlawing female desire. We dont have to beat around the bush here - its still a strong factor in modern sexual relations. Men are still prone to a light-switch loss of interest when a woman is forthright about what she wants, and thats only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to honest desire being a liability for women. To take it a step further - maybe a step too far - our very concept of desire is shaped around the male (organ/will/social role), reducing feminine desire to passivity, nothingness waiting to be filled. I wish I could discuss that problem with the expertise it deserves, but I cant, I only notice its more commonplace expressions. Go read Luce Irigaray's blog.

But I want to try and draw these two threads together. If we were to take Shurpanaka's story as the most telling referrent for cutting off noses, then we understand the act as a response to the uncontrolled sexuality typical of the feminine Other. Rama and Lakshmana only understand an active sexuality as male, since Sita is the ultimate lost civilization of feminine desire, so their response to Shurpanaka's forwardness is a response to a man, not a woman. Of course Lakshmana cuts off her nose - he sees it fit to remind her that she is not a man, which, through a certain poststructuralist frame of reference, he does by recapitulating her natural state of castration. Put more simply, he shows her her place.

* * *

I may try to talk a big feminist game, but the champions of Hindu samskriti at hindunet know better. In their rendition of the story, the spurned Shurpanaka shouts "I will finish her!" and rushes at Sita in a rage. In order to keep Shurpanaka from starting an ugly catfight, Lakshmana "properly punished her and she ran away." We don't know what this proper punishment involved, but the business about cutting off her nose and ears is apocryphal. Way to set the record straight, Hindunet. Now tell us what really happened at the Gujarat riots.

I'm tempted to call this revisionism (among other less diplomatic names) but its probably not valid in the first place to argue over which is the real story. There are multiple Sanskrit recensions of the Ramayana even if you dont count the thousands of permutations the story takes in vernacular traditions. And in the implausible situation that we could identify a (chronologically) original text, theres the more important question of the value of originalism at all, versus engaging the diversity and heterodoxy of a shifting mythological tradition. I think what I really mean to say is, why cant we all just get along?

Harami Theatre

2005-12-27T08:27:00.000+02:00

After a reasonable showing at the Bangalore festival, Harami Theatre swept the Mumbai Thespo 7 Festival with 'Butter and Mashed Banana', winning Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor(s), Best Original Script, Best Direction and Best Play. The performance deserves it: I havent seen much "youth theatre," or English theatre whatsoever, in India that compares to its clarity and wit and simple engaging-ness.

Its not a play that makes too much effort to be politically relevant; I wonder whether it is just idly political, and relevance forces itself in. In the subtitle, Harami describes it as "a satirical political autobiographical tragic farcical love story." Thanks. Part of the reason the play is so successfully watchable is its soft irony, its playful bluster, how it puts on a long, mock-gravitas face (and ghungroos) but dodges any real charge of seriousness.

See, for anyone who's been reading the news for the last couple of months, it has felt like the fulfilling of prophecy - the persecution of Khushboo, Ramdoss' ban on smoking in films, the Pune High Court ruling against adult movies, Operation Majnu in Meerat, the Home Ministry's refusal to read down IPC 377, King Gyanendra's media ordinance, everyone looking up Sania Mirza's skirts - which have all gone down since BAMB's last performance at IIM. The result is a feeling that the weight of the questions of self-expression and freedom of speech comes from outside the play, and the play only contributes something - poetic form to outrage, maybe - but I dont want to think too hard about it. In any case, I think thats part of the formula for being provocative without being didactic.

Waydugo lads. Unfortunately Thespo didnt present an award for Worst Title, because the only viable competition would be Pavan Kumar's 'Honey Lets Break Up.'

* * *

The formula for killing a King:

Peanut Butter and Mashed Banana Sandwich
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 slices light bread
1 banana, mashed
2 tablespoons margarine, melted

Mix soft peanut butter and mashed banana together. Toast bread lightly. Spread peanut butter and mashed banana on toast. Place into melted margarine; brown on both sides. Feed to King, repeat.

Part I: Disguising Justice

2005-12-26T13:21:00.000+02:00

The family is back in Bangalore, and my sister has unearthed her childhood collection of Barbie dolls; she has twenty three, not counting the extended genus of Skippers, Kens and the baby that can be C-sectioned out of Pregnant Barbie. The shade of my pre-adolescent self feels a guilty stirring - for all the scholarship on the psychological damage that Barbies cause to young girls, why has no one spared a thought about what they do to the girls' little brothers?

The re-appearance of the Barbie family has reignited her old allegation that I sliced off Ken's nose when I was six. But I've been learning the art of deflection from the experts. "I have no knowledge of slicing off Ken's nose," I explained to her, "Although I do not authorize or condone torture, Ken may have been transported by extraordinary rendition to a co-operating actor who may have interrogated and brought him to justice using methods consistent with sovereign practice."
"You mean you got one of your stupid friends to do it?!"
"I cannot discuss that information."

* * *

Was someone expecting me not to be aggrieved against a man - wearing a white suit, no less - who was constantly surrounded by twenty-three ever-smiling, inflexible, latex ectomorphs? He even drove a slick pink Corvette around the floor. It is well-established that kids, for one reason or another, are chronically involved in Barbie-torture. It isnt difficult to imagine that girls love to hate their Barbies because of the classic self-esteem/exaggerated ideal problem. People with more deeply furrowed brows suggest that it's just too easy, in our misogynistic and porn-soaked culture, to see a nude female form as something to which violence is done. Barbies are the prototype of porn actresses, who are starved, surgically augmented and airbrushed to the point where they're hardly more real, in order to become the objects of male hypersexual domination.

* * *

On the male side of the equation, its much simpler and less troubling. Sexual competition for the attentions of Airhostess Barbie probably made it necessary, in the first flush of my infant sexuality, to diminish Ken. Ajay pointed out that the euphemistic treatment of the nose as the penis is old, old stuff. It reminded me of my favourite passage from Antony and Cleopatra. Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra's handmaidens who will commit suicide along with her, are disappointed that a Soothsayer predicts the same fortune for them both.

Soothsayer: Your fortunes are alike.
Iras: But how? but how? Give me particulars.
Sooth: I have said.
Iras: Am I not an inch of fortune better than she?
Charmian: Well, if you were but an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it?
Iras: Not in my husband’s nose!

Attagirl. Still, their final scene will transpire as a major case of chicks-before-dicks. Less than a century later, there's more good stuff in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - all credit to this awesome project by a team of literary critical analysts - where we find this gem of olde innuendo:

The dialogist affirmeth that a long nose is not without its domestic conveniences also, for that in a case of distress, -- and for want of a pair of bellows, it will do excellently well ad excitandum focum (to stir up the fire.)
Volume III, Chapter XXXVII

as well as what I announced to Ken after the coup de grace,

"You have little or no nose, Sir!"
"S'death!" cried (he), clapping his hand upon his nose, " 'tis not so small as that comes to; 'twas a full inch longer than my father's!"
Volume III, Chapter XXXII

* * *

But to return to the real cause and culprit of the problem, and how to deal with it, our friends in the Middle East are always a couple of steps ahead of us: Hijab Barbie, aka Razanne. According to its creator, the Razanne doll communicates to young girls that "it doesn't matter if you're tall or short, thin or fat, beautiful or not, the real beauty ... is what's in your soul." An admirable message - and again, as always, an answer that doesn't fail to raise a thousand new questions.

* * *

You can choose your nose (4)
- AK

Phat Ride

2005-12-24T08:17:00.000+02:00

I had a nice experience a little while ago. I was trying to get to Turquoise Cottage but it was late in the evening and there were no autos around. Fuming at the new indignity of being, firstly, a stag, and moreover, a stag without a car, I started off on foot. Half an hour later I was still creeping along the edge of Outer Ring Road, having only seen three rickshaws - all occupied - while every other vehicle in Delhi - they're all silver sedans - whuzzzzzhed past me. It was clear that I needed to reconsider my approach. Instead of waiting another ten minutes to wave frantically at the next auto and be ignored again, I walked into the road and imperiously stuck out my thumb.

Now, Delhi's reputation being what it is, I was rationally expecting
(1) to be run over and left for dead,
(2) to be abducted by criminals and beaten up,
(3) to be arrested by the police for solicitation and beaten up,
(4) to have someone walk upto me, shriek "bhenchodh!" in my face, break off my thumb, and eat it.

I was quite pleased when an auto pulled up and a man in the back stuck his head out and asked where I was going. I asked, "Um Aurobindo Marg? You know umm TCs?" and he told me, suddenly in the most amazing Hindi-Carribeo-Harlem patois, "Oh yeah, aw'right man, jus' jump in." He was heading to a different club, but in the same direction.

My knight in FUBU armour was DJ Tav, who usually rocks the house along with DJ Sherry at the Delhi Devils bar in South Ex. "Yo you shoul def'ly come check i'out," he told me, and I said I'd love to listen to hiphop at a bar for a change. He assured me it would be to'ally urban. "We like, spinnin the phattest mos recen tracks, like fiffy cennnt, Luda, Missy, Sho Paul ... like only the hoh'est sh't." And I was like, "Woah, cool, man, they're awesome, right??" trying my best to mimic his incredible accent but without much success. Still, he added me to the list of people who receive his daily SMS, informing us where and when DJ Tav & Sherry r gonna b in da HOUSE n raisin hte Rof.

He dropped me off just up the street from TCs, where they declined to let me in until I had spent half an hour shivering in the cold and apologizing for my pathetic stag-ness. But I was too chuffed about my ride for my spirits to fall. What a cool guy and a gentleman. In spite of everything I read in the newspapers, my opinion of Delhi is slightly redeemed because of it. The first moral of the story is to never underestimate the kindness of strangers. The second moral is that you may not have a car and you may not have a crew, but just being a man in this city means you can get away with hell.

Death Sentence

2005-12-23T08:05:00.000+02:00

"An opaque and uncontrolled Other excites exterminationist impulses."

I like this sentence - the words begin with every and only vowels. It sounds like a tongue twister for sociology grad students, but its just good writing from Bruce Cumings, reviewing the heightened paranoia of Jasper Becker's new book on North Korea in this month's LRB.

I Am Not What I Am

2005-12-22T15:32:00.000+02:00

The Facebook is a social networking website, like Friendster, which earned its notoriety stripes by originally making registration exclusive to students of the Ivy Leagues. The rest of us sneered and commented loudly on the democratic merits of Friendster (You are connected to Garibi by only 4 degrees of separation). But as with all elite preserves, as soon as the gates were nudged open a couple of degrees, we fell over ourselves to get on it. Now as the Facebook progressively admits more and more colleges, it keenly recapitulates the hierarchy of American educational institutions: the Ivies, the elite liberal arts colleges, the research universities, the good state schools, the other liberal arts colleges, and so on down the ladder to Charismatic community colleges in Oklahoma and the whole glut of the American academy. Everytime they open the gate a little wider, someone will rush in, as long as someone else is left out; by widening it slowly but consistently, they make sure the website is always flush with the traffic of happy arrivistes. This is the first pillar of Mark Zuckerberg's perversely brilliant strategy.

The entrepreneurial concept behind the Facebook, even more so than the similar sites that preceded it, is also brilliant: it made a captive audience of the most wealthy and profligate demographic in the country, and advertisers must pay dearly for access to the single demure bannerspace. This has kept the website relatively clean of the noisy, clamouring advertising that riddles the fading pages of Friendster like so many shrapnel wounds.

* * *

If college students are uniquely good for the Facebook, the reverse is also true: a forum for self-advertising like that was an urgent want. We love it for the same reason that a debutante at a party loves mirrors on the wall. You need to be able to admire yourself frequently and make necessary adjustments so that you look exactly like you want to be seen. No other demographic has the same combination of writing skill, preening intellectualism, sincere curiousity, minor erudition, obsessive self-examination, social libido, and coy vanity. It all comes together in the Profile. Within seconds of reading someone's Facebook profile, you can see the dark contours of the self-consciousness and doubt that guided the writer's hand, the layers and layers of convoluted anxiety. Is this too common? Is this too nerdy? Does this make me look mysterious? How can I make myself look more sincere? How can I make myself look more ironic? Does it look like I spent too long working on this? Above all the eternal refrain, will this impress girls?

Its great. I know I sound disparaging, but that post-high school mode of self-advertisement isnt about what jeans you're wearing but a much more sophisticated business, and a lot of it occurs in the domain of words. Theres also an element of self-fashioning to it: by thinking with enough excruciation about decisions you would otherwise never even consider - what the hell are my interests? And what sort of complacent ass has a favourite quote? - you construct your identity as you announce it. College students dont really have souls, but you have to pour something into it. Because its all textual, we have a sudden freedom; you dont need to have a nice ass. And to give credit where its due, people's efforts in Swarthmore at forming and advertising identity were creative, diverse, very committed and often genuinely cool as hell. Especially mine.

The community of Profiles, then, is an exciting place to move around in. You skip from one perfectly conceived person to another, a society of pure, fictive creatures; diverse but without mediocrity, no ugliness, everything celebrated; above all, a well-executed Nietzsche-lite style and artfulness. The personality of these personalities, gathered all together, speaks our zeitgeist as clearly as you might ever hope to hear it.

* * *

Sitting in front of a computer all day has forced me to maintain more of an involvement with my Facebook affairs than I expected to have as an alumnus. They recently added a new feature, allowing members to post photographs - not the portrait thats displayed on the Profile, but just to upload any old photographs for viewing. I was telling Anand that I expect this change to seriously damage the Facebook's core competency as described above, the fact that something different emerges about people because at present it is so textual. Even the conventional portrait area is usually used metaphorically, or at very least stylistically, with great intention. The photo albums just make everyone themselves again: faces next to other faces, breathing, sweating, halfway-smiles, usually taking tequila shots. Once again, you're constrained by how sinfully ugly you are.

And because anyone can load up any picture of you, and automatically link it to your Profile, it disrupts the careful self-presentation of the rest of your Profile. It disturbs the fine privacy of the process of self-fashioning: you really need to be undisturbed in your boudoir before your can Profile can step gracefully into the public gaze. Its such a compromise of control, I predict people are going to give up the game. They just wont read or write profiles with care and art - and fear - anymore. Since I'm an admirer of good honest dishonesty, I was lamenting the imminent deterioration of the Facebook into just a verbose Ophoto.

Anand disagreed, because he is always so contrary, and also because all the photos he'd put up were very particular and had significance; they were, in that sense, performative (But he is different, it would be difficult to represent him without metaphor). He thinks the disruption of control will have generally positive consequences. "There's a healthy tension between the photos and the self-made profile," he said, "that reflects some of the contradictions in selves and identities." He's interested in seeing that contradiction exposed, the extension between how we see ourselves and how others see us, which was already there in the textual form of friends' testimonies.

Maybe he's right and the photo albums wont interfere too much with the project of self-fashioning... I'm skeptical. Reality is too heavy.

Take Cover

2005-12-20T09:41:00.000+02:00

This year distinguished itself because, as far as I can tell, almost every polite conversation between strangers began with comments about the weather. Generally, talk about the weather doesn't deal in open-ended questions. Nice day today, right? Yes. But this year you only had to comment that it looked like rain, and within seconds you'd be hearing the story of someone heroically backstroking from Andheri to Colaba, or having personally warned Bush about the decrepitude of the Louisiana levees, or just dying.

This has had its advantages - for one thing, its easier to talk to girls in bars. Secondly, if I should ever encounter Thomas Friedman wandering down Brigade Road shouting hallelujahs, I could say, "Observe these pictures of Wipro headquarters seven feet-deep in sewage! Okay? Neoliberal havens surrounded by poverty are all very well, but when the push comes to shove they'll still be swimming in shit with everyone else! Sucka!"

* * *

Still, natural disasters can only fuel conversations for so long before it gets depressing and people want that discussion relegated to the inner folds of the Hindu and the Statesman, or wherever it is that they still write about the violence in Iraq.

I have the feeling that the new icebreaker of the season is Bangalore's imminent name change. I've already initiated several successful conversations with it.
"So, how about the name change?"
"God, really! Fucking chauvinists."
"Seriously, man. What the!"

The proposal is annoying for many reasons, which I'm sure will be enumerated for me several times during my week home. It is also interesting in terms of the study of names, and why we are attached to them and what we accomplish through manipulating them. If the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike thinks that the name-change will cause Bangalore to belong more significantly to the rest of the state, or make the gleaming halls of Infosys echo with channagideeras, I think they are mistaken. But if the capital city really will be more approachable to everyone else in the state, then maybe there is a good in it that I, personally, do not perceive or value.

Those of us who are objecting probably also need to examine why we're so distressed about the change. After all, law does not change names, it just changes spelling. Theres a sentiment that stirs beneath the rational, political arguments about the adequacy of the status quo and the dangers of linguistic nationalism and tubthumping - its our anxiety at the fact that our precarious culture, not fully Western but certainly not fully Kannadiga, just got pushed onto its back foot. Taking the names entirely on their own accoustic merits, Bengaluru is so soft and mellifluous, but Bangalore shakes off those drooping vowels and is crisper, more anglicized - it sounds like the city we want it to become for our comfort - and thats our linguistic chauvinism. Thats exactly the reason why a lot of us would rather call Bangalore our home, and call our home Bangalore.

So I am angry but I will try not to mouth off about it too often. I am, in the meanwhile, looking forward to the renaming of New Delhi as Indraprastha.

* * *

I found it curious that the original cover image of The World is Flat, by the commercial artist Ed Miracle, shows two galleons gently toppling over the edge of a flat world. Miracle first turned his painting into a series of posters with the subtitle "Told you so!", and it was on one of these posters that the image first caught Friedman's eye. Apparently it made him laugh, so some years later he chose it for the cover of the book. The book proposes - among many other failed metaphors - that global flattening makes the world a smaller place, that is, that that the periphery is gathered in towards the metropole. In itself, thats not an unattractive prospect, but its hardly well captured by the image of people vanishing over the precipice. TF's notoriously bad hand with metaphor is fumbling before you even open the book, and irony of the situation has only begun to accumulate.

A fortnight ago it was reported, in the news that only publishers read, that Ed Miracle is suing Friedman and his publisher for copyright violation. The publisher, FSG, purchased the permission to use the painting from the firm selling the poster - for a whopping $750 - come on, Tomtom, you may have infantile political views but we all know you weren't born yesterday. Nobody accepts $750 for the cover - and defining - image of a book with starting print run of 500,000. Friedman & Co are innocent until proven guilty, but it is obvious that they didnt look too hard at the terms. The irony is juicy. Friedman writes a book about globalization's winners being the countries who accept the restrictive regime of capitalist rules, with particular emphasis on intellectual property. Then he infringes copyright for the cover artwork.

Now thats a good metaphor.

False Dichotomy

2005-12-14T17:46:00.000+02:00

I have devised a way to separate the two kinds of people in the world, political scientists and economists. This is an important test, because in these presumptuous times, political scientists often think they're economists (and their people starve) and economists often think they are political scientists (and other people starve). The test is, fill in the blank: "______ and its Discontents." If you think "Globalization" you're an economist, and you may no longer make normative pronouncements about society. If you answer "Civilization" you may call yourself a political scientist and forget all those fiddling equations.

Like all other seemingly-ironclad dichotomies, though, this one is flawed. There are more than two kinds of people in the world, and this will express itself in the test. Freud used the phrase "and its Discontents" back in the 20s and everyone was like, "Cor. That sounds cool," but its just been one rocky downhill slide on the ass since then. A quick Google search yields, within twenty pages:

Nationalism and its Discontents
Time and its Discontents
Sovereignity and its Discontents
Capitalism and its Discontents
Privatization and its Discontents
Intellectual Property and its Discontents

Democracy and its Discontents
Periodization and its Discontents
Consciousness and its Discontents
Anti-capitalism and its Discontents
Public Space and its Discontents
Innovation and its Discontents

Human Rights and its Discontents (grammatically dubious, but even Zizek couldn't be deterred), and to continue,

Authoritarianism and its Discontents
Fundamentalism and its Discontents
PR and its Discontents
Business and its Discontents

Liberalism and its Discontents
Secularism and its Discontents
Marketing and its Discontents
Consumerism and its Discontents

Nihilism and its Discontents (no, you think?)
but also Idealism and its Discontents

Romanticism and its Discontents
Multiculturalism and its Discontents
Patriarchy and its Discontents
Islamic Feminism and its Discontents
Video Gaming and its Discontents
Virtuality and its Discontents
Desire and its Discontents
Mind and its Discontents
Symmetry and its Discontents
Science and its Discontents
Marriage and its Discontents
Anglicization and its Discontents
The State and its Discontents
Growth and its Discontents
Foreign Aid and its Discontents
Intellectualism and its Discontents
The University and its Discontents
Monotheism and its Discontents
Abortion and its Discontents
Evolution and its Discontents
Culture and its Discontents
Modernity and its Discontents
Representation and its Discontents
Civic Society and its Discontents

Formalism and its Discontents
Originalism and its Discontents
Feminism and its Discontents
Antropocentrism and its Discontents
Literature and its Discontents
Biotechnology and its Discontents
Beauty and its Discontents
Flesh and its Discontents
Art and its Discontents
Technology and its Discontents
Unionization and its Discontents
Sinicization and its Discontents
Deregulation and its Discontents
Inflation and its Discontents
War and its Discontents
Celebrity and its Discontents
Social Security and its Discontents
Multiplicity and its Discontents
Society and its Discontents
Tradition and its Discontents
Theory and its Discontents
Postmodernity and its Discontents
Activism and its Discontents
The Neighbourhood and its Discontents

Not to leave out the must-read,

Developmental Criminology and its Discontents

the provocatively titled,

Yellow and its Discontents

and the surely important,

Ikeaphobia and its Discontents.

Now I didnt make any of those up, although I wish I had. These findings of mine prove all sorts of things. One is that dichotomy is balls. The other is that academics are some lazy creatures. Each one of these insipid titles was something an actual writer came up with, after writing an entire book or article - pondered, for a moment, "Should I take the time to think up an original and expressive and pertinent title or should I just bung And Its Discontents onto the back of a fancified proper noun?"

It makes you want to scream, "The first one, you asshole!"

* * *

There are 10 kinds of people in the world
(5,3,4,6,3,5,3,4)

Good Party Trick

2005-12-14T16:37:00.000+02:00

Today the UNHCR called a meeting with its implementing partners (of which PILSARC is one) to discuss a revised global policy on urban refugees. I was excited to discover that I was far from the most clueless person there; in fact I was only a couple of acronyms away from really good form. Listen: I was even useful, which is a sweet fruit I rarely taste these days.

The HCR is the poor cousin of most UN agencies, particularly in India, where every government interprets their pleas on behalf of persecuted foreign nationals as a mischeivous scheme to abet terrorists, free-loaders and hypocritical white men in Geneva. The agency was thrown out of the country a few decades ago - which is ironic - and these days it has to keep its head down and fight for the scraps stuck between the UNDP's teeth.

Still, they put on a pretty fine show: the conference was in a penthouse room at the Habitat Centre with unnecessary notepads, a four-star buffet lunch and the whole werkz. Conferring in the penthouse had an unanticipated advantage. About halfway through the afternoon, an earthquake measuring 5.2 hit Uttaranchal, which I think is okay because they dont have houses there anyway. Back in Delhi, it couldn't be felt on the ground, although I don't doubt everyone will pretend that their dogs started barking or they noticed their jelly shaking or some such shit.

Upstairs, the tremors were amplified just enough to make us wobble in our chairs about as much as you would if you were jiggling your knee in distraction. Which I was doing, obviously, since I was in the middle of a meeting about the draft global policy on urban refugees. But then everyone else uttered a common noise, like "hwuuuuooooah?" and I noticed the water in my glass sloshing. No... really, I did.

A small amount of tectonic friction goes a long way to enliven a policy conference. For the next ten minutes nobody listened to the speaker and everyone felt like the word Golly! sounds.

Code

2005-12-03T09:39:00.000+02:00

I was channel surfing at Sonal's house and I came across Gattaca, which is a film I really appreciate. It had never occurred to me before that the only letters in the title are GATC, so the title is obviously referring to a nucleotide sequence. This led to a revelation on the subtle ways of Hollywood. A seven-nucleotide sequence itself must be common, with a probability as large as one in 16,384, but I wanted to find what coding sequence the writers must have been referring to. I went onto NCBS PubMed and did a nucleotide search for the sequence, which referred me to the sequence encoding cytochrome oxidase I (a mitochondrial protein) in the eponymous Lasioglossum gattaca (a species of eusocial sweat bee, apparently so called because of their attraction to salts in human perspiration) (1). It is difficult to find any information about the species gattaca, but the genus is very common all over the world (except Australia) and seems well-studied for insights on the evolution of social behavior.

So to unpack the metaphor, we need to examine the behaviour of related species. I will permit this leap because phylogenetic analysis of species with the lineage Lassioglossum, on the basis of three protein coding genes including cytochrome oxidase I, yields no significant incongruence among the genes. This study led to the conclusion that eusociality, which is the subject of the metaphor, has a single origin within Lassioglossum (2).

To proceed: the colonies of Lasioglossum malachurum, for example, exhibit classical eusocial colony structure. I hardly need point out the typical comparison of highly-regulated futuristic states to "hives." Within Lasioglossum colony structure, a single queen mated to a single male monopolizes oviposition; in this respect, worker 'fitness' is low. We can recall from the film that the 'invalids' who perform less expert tasks (the workers) do literally have inferior fitness in the medical sense; besides, their lack of genetic enhancement means they are deemed normatively "unfit."

Nevertheless, researchers have noted low rates of caste switching and oviposition of eggs by workers in the final brood (3)! It was calculated that workers do achieve greater fitness by laying and provisioning their own eggs than by attending to the queen's eggs, which suggests an active strategic interference by the queen. Similarly, the movie testifies to the reality of an invalid's potential to transcend social constructions of his or her genetic limitations, which constructions are maintained by, and in the interest of, the new valid elite. That is to say, Ethan Hawke can damn well lay eggs if he pleases, and no state or hive institution is going to hold him down. He, too, is attracted to human perspiration, in the sense that what validates an individual to him is neither its genes or its genetically-implied social fate, but rather the sweat, the exercise of pure will. Recall Columbia Picture's publicity tagline: there is no gene for the human spirit. Lassioglossum may be described as an obligately social organism, but "obligate" is strong language, and in the end, you cannot keep a good man (or female bee) down.

Sources:

(1) NCBI PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/viewer.fcgi?db=nucleotide&val=6492049), referring to "Phylogeny of the bee genus Lasioglossum (Hymenoptera: Halictidae) based on mitocondrial COI sequence data," Danforth BN. Syst. Entomol. 24 (4), 377-393 (1999).

(2) "Phylogeny of Eusocial Lasioglossum Reveals Multiple Losses of Eusociality within a Primitively Eusocial Clade of Bees (Hymenoptera: Halictidae)," Danforth B.N., Conway L.; Ji S. Systematic Biology, Volume 52, Number 1, 1 February 2003, pp. 23-36(14). Full text unavailable.

(3) "It's good to be queen: classically eusocial colony structure and low worker fitness in an obligately social sweat bee," Richards MH, French D, Paxton RJ. Mol Ecol. 2005 Nov;14(13):4123-33.

Rock

2005-12-02T13:15:00.000+02:00

I sat myself down to watch Lawrence of Arabia last night. It felt necessary - LoA is one of those films that Some Uncle will mention in passing, honestly expecting you to know who Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif were. When you reply that you've never watched it, his eyes widen in mild alarm and behind them you can read the mortal narrative scuttling by like a tickertape: "oh dear has it really been that long how old was i when it was filmed twenty one good grief where does the time go" and then he takes a big gulp of his vodka tonic, swallows it wrong and then there is a few minutes of coughing.

Anyway it seemed worthwhile to put a stop to all of that. The film is really something. At several points my eyes teared up from thinking about the poor man whose job it must have been to get sand out of the cameras. I've never seen desert rendered like that, in all of that vertiginous flatness and ferocious relief. It made my throat dry and my mouth taste like sand. It was filmed in the Wadi el Rum of Jordan, the very place from which Lawrence conducted his campaigns, and the same place that I tumbled about ninety years later, waxing mystical and feeling disdained by the rock. That rock! The film captured that well, too. There it was, gathered across the landscape like mineral stormclouds, formed on a scale which made the thundering cavalry battalion, and all those merely-human affairs, seem inconsequential.

Ever since I left the Wadi el Rum, I've struggled to put into words - somehow "capture" is arrogant in this context - that magnitude and presence. One difficulty is that our imagery is so anthropomorphic - for instance, if I were to try and say, "grandeur" - and too saddled with implications of human emotion and ambition; this language fails me when I'm trying to describe something that makes the human frame of reference shrink to vanishing. This rock is the tyrant ancestor of the soft, helpful stuff we call stone and use to build courthouses and decorate cactus gardens. The primordial being of this rock seems to deal a cold defeat to those clamouring, arrogant philosophical arguments about becoming; one from far outside the scope or discourse of any of those arguments, a counter-argument that does not speak in words. But I didnt mean to go on about the rock again.

* * *

What a cool film. Although LoA was filmed well before the era of political correctness, it manages a portrait of the Arabs that is (I guess) honest about vulgar group truths but still recognizes distinctive personality and humanity in each character; in fact it probably suceeds so well at the former because it accomplishes the latter. That is a straight-forward anthropological tone that has since been rightly abolished, but not without cost. It is also a reflection on nation-building, which rings truer now than ever - not least to Indians, who could be as much a tribal people as the Bedouin, only in a more multifactorial way.

The dialogue is structured around such pauses and unnerving cadence and semi-sequiturs that it comes together, oddly enough, as real (because nobody actually speaks with the precision we've come to expect on screen) and also culturally alien (because you cant shake the feeling that you're missing a beat).

* * *

Omar Sharif is hot. Peter O'Toole is superb. Lawrence is simultaneously a roaringly valiant commander and a bit of a precious piece, whose all-consuming pride, even at its wildest extreme, is still partly powder-room vanity; not badly done. His behaviour swings a wild arc, from timid playfulness to earth-trembling conceit, and then to a tired, helpless humility; he teeters out of one madness into another while never being too much more than human. All of this pivots on the fatal logic that swims below the surface of the movie, rising only to wink at you when King Faisal lightly remarks, "With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable." Wah, wah! Well said, my friend. Passion dashes itself against rock but is blown away just by the breeze; human spirit adopts so many performances and grand mannerisms, trying to preserve its values and its creations, to build cathedrals to itself; but the story of the hero always ends in his diminuition, spirit wearing thin, skin growing cold; should we be cool then, mannered, politic, impassive, closed eyes, pacifist, institutional, exhaled, trusting artifice, lying close to the ground, perfectly still, mimicing the rock, in the hope that we might last a few moments longer?

Am I still waiting to be told?

El Baradei

2005-10-09T10:23:00.000+02:00

That last post Will ever put down in Cairo was this reverential appraisal of Moh'd El Baradei, who gave a lecture on campus. "ElBaradei is exactly the sort of person that you want in the international civil service: he is dedicated, knowledgeable, passionate, and totally apolitical," said Will, "This is a man who seeks solutions to crushingly difficult problems, and does so in spite of the fact that his organization is deeply, deeply flawed." Thats the kind of guy Will is.

The next day I had a meeting with Dr Walid Kazziha, the other notable mind in Middle Eastern affairs (other than Will, I mean), who asked me with disarming politeness what I had thought of El Baradei. I said something about him being exactly the sort of person that you would want in the civil service, dedicated, knowledgeable, apolitical, and so on. Kazziha pooh-poohed me (I withered right on the vine) and pointed out that theres no way to be apolitical in the prevailing system, and that if you stomp around trying to discourage Iran from developing their nuclear capacity, theres a very clear outline to your politics, ie, the status quo of Pax Americana in the Middle East. This is the kind of guy Kazziha is.

I dont know which kind I am. I'm equally swayed by both the silver-tongued diplomats who whisper about stability and the fiery-eyed ideologues who clamour about justice. El Baradei won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, which seems to simultaneously confirm Will's approval of him but also underline the absurdity of such honours for a man who merely did his job very well. El Baradei is an international civil servant, when it comes to it, and he so he must love the system; and these days, it is not a pretty system. He isn't Le Duc Tho or Aung San Su Kyee; it is hard to love him or love the peace he advocates.

For April 17th: Dakhla

2004-05-04T01:20:00.000+03:00

Tom, Dawood and I went to Dakhla, the furthest outlying oasis in Egypt. It is a beastly 12 hour bus ride and as soon as the movie was over they began playing Quranic verses. There aren't any established bus routes out there, so everyone hitchhikes. Sometimes it works - the first day, we got picked up by a bulldozer, who let us briefly sit in the scoop! We were burbling like babies. Sometimes it doesnt, so the second day we ended up walking through the desert in the middle of the afternoon, but it was very nice anyway. We'd gone into the desert earlier that day to a hill full of old tombs, half-heartedly intending to see some old Roman stucco or something, but a sleepy fellah told us they were closed, then he stumped over to another tomb and told us to look at that one instead. So I stuck my head in and it was full of mummies.

For March 20th: Bahariya, and About Deserts

2004-05-03T23:02:00.000+03:00

Six hours West of Cairo, the desert is sudden conical hills almost entirely covered with small black rocks. Closer up, these black rocks are all cruel smooth surfaces, almost geometric. I kept expecting to come across Dante, striding through the rubble, being chased by wolves or she-lions or whatever. Its not pretty, but it is amazing. From the top of one of these hills, the desert looks like God's dirty ashtray.

Thats the Black Desert, part of the the Great Western Desert, which slopes hotly westward from the Nile to become the Sahara. The Great Western Desert was once under the ocean. Even now, the rocks are full of marine fossils. Anyway, while it was underwater, a volcano exploded and showered the benthic plain near Bahariya with tiny black igneous roses. Like the earth, applauding its own tectonic bullfighting, shouted `Ole!` and showered itself in roses, and then it swished its skirts around again, and everything was dry, with mystic chalk sculptures as far as they eye could see, and sand so fine and soft you would want to wash your baby in it.

That one is the White Desert. Eight and a half hours outside Cairo, the desert flattens out into a flat, horizon-to-horizon carpet of pristine, soft sand, swept into sweet grooves, and studded throughout with chalk monoliths that the wind has carved into this shape and that, here a chicken, the USS Enterprise, the Sphinx. Gorgeous! Takes a while to believe all of it. We spent the night out there, smoked pot, danced around a campfire.

I found a lot of salaam that weekend. I was riding in the rear of a jeep, listening to Bob Marley and sticking my feet out of the back to catch the sun and the cool breeze. So nice. On the horizon are these crazy grandiose limestone canyons, and then I realized why the architecture of ancient Egypt was all that. I can imagine a young Ramses II being nervously charioted past them, and him thinking "Fuck... mine's going to have to be big."

* * *

Desert doesn't look like what I expected it to look like. They say that the Rub Al Khali in Saudi Arabia is what defines our common image of the desert as soft yellow dunes, dunes, dunes. This sounds boring to me, like a landscape made of normal curves; normal, normal, normal. I would start seeing mirages just to relieve the soft yellow monotony. Don't be fooled. The desert is what God made when She was feeling lonely and wearing black eyeshadow and putting cigarettes out on her arm. The desert is wild, mystic, alien art.

Spring Break: Palestine

2004-04-25T17:40:00.000+02:00

We'd made the prelim decision to visit Ramallah before the killing of Sheik Yassin, and once we were in Israel, you can bet we weren't hearing great reviews of our idea. Will couldn't come, he was celebrating Shabbat with Ari and an Israeli family, which was a nice thing. We only decided to do it after some tense discussion and some positive reinforcement from chatting with Hashim, the chief organizer of the International Solidarity Movement in Jerusalem. This guy is so cool; an Al-Fatah vet who's been shot to pieces and turned, a little while ago, to hardline pacifism. He limps around the Faysal Youth Hostel forcing tea on people and bellowing "I love you!" to his devoted flock of foreign radical youth.

So we went, momentously, we crossed the border, and there we were, in the land of tanks and AKs and fiery-eyed boys with stones in their hands and socks pulled over their heads, legendary Palestine. OF course not. It was utterly normal, it was like any day in Cairo. Tch, really. I've been scolding myself since then, for letting the fickle lens of modern media lead me to believe that Ramallah would have intifadah inscribed across it in flaming letters. There was plenty to take note of, of course, fliers and graffiti and buildings here and there with holes blasted in their walls. And as Hashim pointed out, Ramallah is not Nablus - it is comparatively far from the camps, a prosperous city where 60% of the residents have foreign citizenships. The point is that here life was going on, as usual, a locus of apparent stability and normality that I had been led to believe didn't exist in the Occupied Territories. Coke cans celebrate 5 years of manufacture within the West Bank. My group, with our backpacks and our several white skins, looked as American and as touristic as we were, but were never less than welcome. Don't really know what to make of it, but I know I am severely skeptical now when I hear right-wing analyses of Palestine lacking the rational base to provide potential partners in dialogue.

A good bit: We visited Arafat's compound, which was blown to bits during the occupation of Ramallah. I was making small talk with one of the guards, and asked if I could meet Arafat, since Lisa had just taught me the Arabic word for "meet." He frowned and tut-tutted me, so we moved along. The old compound is quite a sight - the buildings are like the bottom of a jar of biscuits, all broken in pieces, crumbs everywhere. A corner of a mattress peeks out from under a slab of cement. Never seen a building destroyed by rockets and tanks so close up, not even in Beirut. It is chilling.

A van pulled in behind us, and out stepped a troop of women in business suits and name tags. We followed them to the gates of the new compound - turned out it was a delegation of International YWCA come to commiserate with Arafat. After they went in, I harassed at the windows until I found a sympathetic guard. I gave him the wink and suggested we were with the YWCA, so he let us into the guard room, told us to go with the ruse and waved us through. We had our bags and cameras taken away, and before I knew what was happening, we ended up at a seminar table with the delegates. We each had our own mike, bottle of water, bottle of juice, Reuters photographer.

Then Arafat came in. These days he is a short, pale, soggy old bugger, but was as pleasant as pie, and came around the table shaking hands. I shook hands, trying to hide the glaring fact that I was wearing a sweat-stained FabIndia shirt over cargo pants and sandals, and squeaked "It's an honour to meet you," he mumbled in response "Wa-aleykum salaam." He kissed the girls hands. He sat down, they made speeches to each other for half an hour. He handed out a lot of interesting information about the wall, about the IDF's destruction of Christian monuments, about Arab unity among Muslims and Christians. I avoided the alarmed stares of International YWCA and tried to come to grips with where I was. Truth be told, I kept expecting a heavy hand on my shoulder, or a cool circle of steel against the back of my neck. It was all good, though. When photograph time came, we snuck out.

We had lunch and visited a camp on the outskirts of town. It's been there so long, it is unremarkable, hardly a camp and the residents are not visibly poor. We were mobbed by kids who wanted to know where we were going, only we didn't know ourselves, which made me feel slightly uneasy, guilty about my political tourism. To make up for it, I had myself harangued by the owner of a local kahua, coffee shop, for fifteen minutes without pause for breath. I barely understood a word, although it was clear that Bush is deeply haraam. Lisa, the conversation pro, did not help me.

We left the OT as easy as we'd arrived. No bag checks, no pat downs. They didn't care that Emily lost her visa. White people - never leave home without 'em. Interestingly, it was considerably easier getting in and out of Palestine than it was getting into a bar in Jerusalem that night.

* * *

Oh yes: to wrap up what I can't help consolidating as the Muslim Experience, we visited the Dome of the Rock. Now this is real security, getting up here from the Jewish quarter. Very beautiful mosque. They won't let you in to see The Rock that is the foundation stone of the universe unless you are a Muslim. Thats a bit much! The guard asked me if I was, and I panicked and said 'no,' passing up a opportunity to show off my jazzy Surah recitation skillz.

For April 10th: Spring Break: Israel

2004-04-25T15:31:00.000+02:00

From Wadi Al Rum, two trucks and a car to Petra, two buses to Amman, then a taxi and a bus across the Jordan River to Jericho in the Occupied Territories, and got to Jerusalem on our last gasp. Ari, a friend of Will's from Brown who is studying at Jerusalem U., is a real doll and he took us under his wing, put us up a couple of nights in his friends' rooms. That evening we walked around the Orthodox quarter and bought fruit, and we barbecued that night. So nice to be back in an American-esque college atmosphere.

The Old City is wildly colourful composite of religions, as well as of states of war and peace. Tom pointed out one striking image to me: a Jewish father, pushing a stroller, but with a grim black M-16 slung across his back. Further from the Wall, the winding streets are a pageant; Orthodox Jews with the longest side-curls, wearing fur hats like giant hockey pucks and impeccable embroidered Hefner-esque black silk gowns; priests of various Christian denominations, barely visible amidst the conical hats and giant gold crucifixes and billowing muumuus; Muslim clerics with angular-cut beards and posh galabeyyas, turbans wrapped this way and that. I liked that. That one thing that unites the world's religions, apart from Love, would be the sartorial creativity of the pious. You've got to have the fear of God in you, to wear some of that stuff on a summer afternoon. Besides, I meant it with absolutely no disrespect, those silk gowns are pimped out.

That said, I'll tell you, we visited Jerusalem on pretty partisan terms. The first day there was the Jewish Day. We went to the bar mitzvah of a 4th degree friend of ours, right up against one of the walls of The Temple. We visited the Western Wall, on the way, and Ari took us in to put our hands on it. There is a powerful feeling around it, and I didn't know what to do, so I made a wish.

The ceremony was really lovely, very small and familial. One of the kids was developmentally disabled, and tumbled around making a bit of a nuisance of himself, but that just increased the feeling of love and family. The parents were very welcoming to us, and I was touched. And I got to wear a yamakah.

After this we went to the Holocaust Museum. As you can imagine, it is quite something. It was surprisingly easy-going and not so upsetting as I'd braced myself for. I think this is because it was very symbolic, very rendered and metaphorical, and for Jews, there are meanings written into those symbols that I couldn't see. They don't need the tragedy of the place to be evoked by facts and pictures. I had been expecting something more like the Hiroshima memorial, much more direct and ghastly. It's just as well, as the small literal, historical exhibits were too politicized for my liking. A very peaceful, contemplative place.

It's been long enough since Spring Break that I cant remember the sequence of events. Later, with Tom leading the way, we visited the 12 Stations of Christ - the locations of significant events on his walk between conviction and crucifixion. It winds through the grid of covered market lanes that makes up most of the old city. Even for me, there was a feeling of awe that I was walking the same path Jesus did. That said, it is a fairly common, non-sacrosanct path, all bakeries and blaring music and roving nutcases. One of these latter was a white British dude, charging up and down the path, stripped down to cK undies that flashed too much dick. He carried a large cross that said on it "Comedius Terrorchristus Willing to Give my Life for AllahFF." He was followed by a Roman legionnaire, a cameraman, and a horde of Arab children who flagellated him with their belts until they burned red stripes all over him.

I asked him what the deal was, but he didn't seem to know. He just complained about how hard the kids were hitting. Who the hell knows.

The Church of the Sepulcher is awesome, and we were lucky to see it on Good Friday. It had all the dripping Catholic baroque you'd expect, but it wasn't like the Vatican Basilica, all cool and silent. Fitting for the ground where Adam lies buried and Jesus was interred and resurrected, every square inch of the place has been sanctified crazy. It was a frenzy, a stampede of priests shouting instructions at each other, and believers fervently anointing themselves, trying to see every gilt artifact in the building, gold ornaments everywhere, candles everywhere, soot everywhere; smell of sweat, incense, fizzing electrics, scented oil. Mean to say, it reminded me of nothing as much as a South Indian temple.

It seemed to me that this is where new religion meets old religion, compared, in particular, to the pristine, ivory-walled, ice-cool Lutheran Church with the modernist stained-glass windows, where we attended Easter service.

Spring Break: Jordan

2004-04-14T00:13:00.000+02:00

I think Jordan was my favourite. We rushed straight from the airport to Petra. Back in a couple of centuries BCE, a tribe of Nabatean Arabs discovered a long, narrow canyon that had been cut through the centre of sandstone hill. The temptation to carve a city into such a thing is obvious. The Romans came by later and carved some more. Petra is fairly amazing to see, but there isnt much to tell about it, except I found a new hat under my seat in the bus, and I felt very Indy.

The next day we camped near Wadi Al Rum, in the desert that used to be T E Lawrence's digs back when he was cooking up trouble for the Ottomans. We drove around in an old flatbed truck, a real piece of history, taking time to climb rocks and tumble down sand dunes. I jumped out of the truck, because I suppose you can't go through life without once having jumped out of a moving vehicle, and I did, in fact, fall down hard.

Then it all sunk in. You know, in the course of this semester, I've seen a lot of very monumental things, very impressive things, things that made me go "Hmm, aaah, thats very big, thats very impressive" and nod my head earnestly. All of that was very cool, but none of it had an effect on me quite like the Wadi Al Rum had. The desert there is so dramatic, is built on such a staggering scale, that once it sinks in, it moves you personally. It is actually alien enough and severe enough that when you find yourself in the middle of it, you can't be an observer.

It hit me pretty hard. I think we're all thoroughly conditioned to this temperament of urban life; the fussiness, the saturation, the order, the synthetic, the myopia. When we're in the wilderness, we're wearing televisions over our heads, and are distanced and touristic. It is scenery; we're impressed or amused by it and then we go home. Thats me, anyway. It took this sort of Wilderness on Steroids to seriously dislocate me, and what I mean by that is, to challenge my imagination not just about where I was, but about where I'm used to being. Everytime I looked up at the horizon and located myself in the middle of that landscape, the idea of the city was pulled out from under my feet.

That was the feeling, best I can describe it, and it was hard to know what to do about it. All of a sudden, this very vast, gnarled planet was directly staring me down; I considered writing it away in poetry, or hiding in the tent and drinking tea with our bedouin hosts. Instead I took a walk, which was good, because I acculturated slightly to the silence and the emptiness and the feeling of being small. Well, I ended up getting totally naked, climbing the rocks and bathing in the soft warm sand, and it was great, sun and sand all over me, I felt like I matched. Its funny how you can feel self-conscious or stupid when you're effectively the only person in the world, but I did, for a few minutes. Then it felt primordial, it really felt good.

When an Arab Legion truck drove across the way I scurried back to my pants and to the camp. We ate chicken, played cards, looked at the fantastic stars.

Spring Break: Lebanon

2004-04-13T21:29:00.000+02:00

Friends and I took a few days off to get ourselves a nice two week spring break. We did a hectic tour of the Levant (Look it up, I didn't know what that meant either, until I got there).

First stop was Beirut, where we rented ourselves an apartment for a few nights, which was a real treat. Arriving in Beirut after a while in Cairo is culture shockish. It was razed to the ground, more or less, in the course of the 15 year civil war, and had to be rebuilt in the 1990s. A curious thing happens when a city gets to rebuild itself from scratch, with plenty of capital on hand: it turns into a splitting image of Western Europe. If you were walking down one of the spic-and-span promenades in the rebuilt areas, popping in and out of the burnished-steel-and-glass buildings to pick up Cinnabun or some D&G for the empty hangers, and you put your fingers in your ears to block out the Arabic, you could convince yourself you were in France. Hyper-france? Entire streets look like they were constructed specifically to make high-heeled boots go clickety-clack. Its all very glossy. And corporate. It looks like it was bought at Ikea. I found it alienating. I mean, it may or may not be anomalous, since Beirut has always leaned a little to the West, but it struck me as a hollow, prissy Maronite affectation, picking its toes out of the lively traditions of Arab urban chaos. The only place you can get sheesha has valet parking!

Enough of that. We rented a lush Nissan and I finally got to put my IDL to use. We drove up to Balbeck to see the spectacular Roman ruins there. Balbeck is the largest complex of Roman ruins in the world and its very dramatic, I could have spent all day watching the sun move across it. There was hardly anyone there, either, possibly because it is Hizbullah headquarters. The streetlight signs, the kind that would carry cellphone company ads anywhere else in the world, all carry pictures of Khomeini or martyrs. Its a little creepy at first, but the more I learn about Hizbullah, the more merit I see in them.

Next day we went to Byblos. Tom has many strengths, but navigation is not one of them, and we ended up in Tripoli, near the other end of the country. It was a lovely drive anyway, with the road hugging the jolly blue Mediterranean right through. The road home was a most interesting drive. It started to drizzle, and once we climbed into the mountains, the clouds were lit up orange by the streetlights and were so thick you couldn't see past the ass of the car in front of you. Driving in a thick wet orange soup, it was so much like the stage of a rock show, I kept expecting to run over Def Leppard.

Also sampled the famous Beirut nightlife, and it was a good time. At $20 for entrance and 3 drinks, its one of the biggest expenses I've had this semester. Its just as well Cairo's nightlife is so lame.

Dahab II: Bedouin

2004-03-15T02:32:00.000+02:00

Friday was two dives and a long late afternoon of shark steak and mango milkshakes and good company at Napoleon's on the beach. We took naps and watched as the sunset turned Saudi Arabia pink and orange across the water. Later in the evening we were driven into the desert in flatbed trucks that serve as taxis here. We had dinner around the fire of a bunch of rascally old drunks pretending to be Bedouin, and that was a good time.

The Bedouin living nearer to Dahab are terrifyingly corrupted by the lifestyle there. In the daytime, their daughters prowl around the beaches of Dahab pushing ugly bracelets on tourists. They scare the hell out of me. If you wave one away with Khalaas, imshi (enough, go away) they come back with shit like "Imshi imshi fuck you," and "Take or I break your camera!" or "I cut your leg and put in your mouth!" On the other hand, my friends were nicer, and bought a bracelet or so, and ended up braiding their hair as the girls braided the bracelets.

As for these guys, it seems like they just lie in waiting for tourists so they can cook them a sort of sad meal and promptly get drunk or stoned. They were hitting the bottles and the bong from the word go, and in less time than it takes to say "Wait, that was dinner?" they were bellowing and getting half way through jokes and behaving pathetically. Well...

But the desert sky is something I hadn't known existed. The moon was skulking yellowly over the canyons, and I've never seen the night sky so busy, so full and clear and deep, as if all of a sudden some god had decided to install a brand new one. The night was three dimensional, as if you could tell which stars were nearer and which further away, and it seemed almost like, if you passed your hand through the air, they might tinkle like windchimes. It was beautiful in a way that felt actually mystical to me, a feeling I'm usually resistant to, but is nice.

Dahab

2004-03-15T00:13:00.000+02:00

Fled Cairo after a hellish week to scuba dive in Dahab, a sun-baked little town on the Red Sea Coast of the Sinai, where reefs and reefers are the mainstays of the local entertainment and economy. The bus ride was nightmarish, on account of having to sleep on the floor, and having to get up 3 times to have my passport checked, as we passed through the separate administrations of Suez, Sinai and Sharm El Sheik, who I suppose don't trust each other very much.

But Dahab is paradise.

Its a very small town squeezed between the jagged rust desert and the lovely Red Sea. The lovely seaside promenade is basically the entire town, all restaurants and diving clubs and shops selling hippie junk. Everyone there is either wearing dreadlocks or an oxygen tank. Even the people working there love it, which expressed itself in pleasant ways, like the waiters bringing us chocolate cake on the house, or just joining us at sunset for a chat on the diwans they put out by the sea. Within hours of arriving you begin to feel at peace with the cosmos. Getting a meal takes hours with all the requisite incense, lounge music, chitchat with the staff, and drowsing in the sun. It is a cliche through and through, but it is paradise.

Diving is magical. When you're hanging out, breathing, 75 feet under the sea, watching neon purple~green~blue Parrotfish drift past, you have to keep reminding yourself, this is real, this is real. There is a huge, vivid, alien world right there in front of you, and no matter how much time you've spend watching the Discovery channel, it is hard to believe that you're on the same planet. When you look up, constellations of fish in all colours revolve around your bubbles, and when you look down or out to sea, the world vanishes into an impenetrable, spooky blue in which dark shapes move.

I mean, its not a calm experience, at least not for a rookie. Its very physically disorienting, because all of your senses are refracted and distorted, your responses are strange and slow, and pressure and dehydration keep giving you headaches and nosebleeds. Also, gloriously, movement is in six directions! During the first few dives, I was in a constant state of mild alarm at the thought that I was breathing out of a motherfucking tank - besides, although our instructors Ahmed and Hisham are ex-Navy Seals who really know their stuff, the whole unreal situation was not un-dangerous.

Good story: As it turned out, my body loves the O2, and it goes through 200 bars of air just like that. We were diving a reef called The Lighthouse when a friend had a panic attack and needed all of our Ahmed's attention. When the needle of my pressure gauge slipped into the red zone, 50 bars, I signalled to him that I was low on air, he acknowledged, so I moved away a little to play with a school of Red Sea Anemone fish.

It was cool: I wasn't very deep, and when I was 20 bars, I headed for the surface. The trick is that I didnt realize you have to surface at a beach, because the reef extends out from the coast only inches under the surface, and there's no way to go over it. You also can't skirt around it because in all that gear you don't have much control against the waves because you have to swim on your back and you weigh a lot more than you're used to.

It was choppy that day, and when I came up, I found myself about a hundred feet from the land, with the waves preparing to toss me into the side of the reef. This could have wrecked priceless corals that took hundreds of years to grow, as well as some pretty important bones and blood vessels that took 21. I kicked indignantly for a few seconds before it became obvious that the waves were not kidding. Then I went under again - nervous - looking for someone with whom I could share oxygen.

I was so intent on peering around in the blue to find my team that I barely realized when the air got all dense and heavy, and then - ohmygoodness! - then when I tried to inhale all I got was the whuk whuk noise of my respiratory system flapping drily against itself. Not a happy sound. I charged back toward the beach, and as soon as the bloody freaking endless reef turned back into that sweet sandy slope I popped out of the water like toast with a destiny. Except I didn't. I threw myself at the surface, ready to gasp and swing my head side-to-side so as to throw beads of water everywhere like on Baywatch, but it wouldn't let me through. This didn't process very well, so I kept pushing on the top of the damn sea to get out, but I couldn't get out! When I saw that having all logic on my side wasn't suceeding in getting me air, I went down again and, well, I had tried to surface under the sail of some dude's windsurf board.

I came up then, finally, and got myself full of good air and my face full of sun. My scuba buddy Chris appeared, too, in a weirdly timely manner. "Courage" he said, and pointed toward the land, "The mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." So we leaned back onto our tanks and flippered slowly home.

* * *

AUC

2004-03-07T14:43:00.000+02:00

I found the ideal metaphor for AUC culture today when I saw a girl at school wearing a Burberry hijab.

For March 5th: Bad News and Movies

2004-03-06T19:05:00.000+02:00

Bloody Tedd Goundie regretted to inform me that I won't be an RA. I was bereft. I had already been collecting materials for my hall theme. I decided that if I couldn't be an RA, I would just have to sit in front of the computer all day and watch MSN streaming video of tortured Avril Lavigne songs. Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated? Huh, Tedd? Honestly!

Fortunately my friends had made other plans. Throwing caution to the wind, we went to see biggest thing in Egyptian film-making, Keemu wa-Intheemu. Real Bollywood with a heavy dose of surrealism and obviously tiny budget. The movie abandoned all conventions of linear narrative. Experimental, I suppose. Disastrous, also. In any case, it is nice that local cinema exists, and it cheered me up no end.

For Feb 27th: Abu Sir

2004-02-28T17:00:00.000+02:00

Today, Tom and I visited Paul in Abu Sir, a poor suburbanized village south of Giza. It took us one taxi, one metro and two minibuses to reach there but that still doesn't describe the distance (figuratively) between Zamalek and Abu Sir. The income disparity is no worse than you could find in Bangalore, but it is different from any poor suburbs of Indian cities I know, because instead of being a disorganized migrant labour area, it still looks like a well-structured fellahin community and it retains a lot of agrarian flavour. It is as if Cairo slithered up and curled itself around the village, and people are still just realizing that there's a hungry urban economy on three sides of them.

Maybe I'm wrong to be surprised. The Nile Valley is surprisingly narrow and very clearly bounded. It is possible to walk in a more-or-less straight line for many kilometers with one foot on cultivated land and one foot in the Great Western Desert. We crossed a hundred meters into the desert and up a rocky swell, and could see across the entire green region to the canyons on the other side, bas, khalaas, and it wasn't even a clear day. What I mean is that its not possible for agrarian projects to be rolled outwards as cities expand, which must be what happens in India. So they end up with onion fields practically next door to the Metro Al-Ahram Mall, and poor communities that are effectively within the city but seem to have retained traditional village stability along with the traditional village economy.

One way or another, Paul has some balls to live that far from the cosmopolitan trappings of central Cairo, and I really admire that. His adoptive family was really kind and hospitable and happy to have us. They served us lunch, and it was the first time I've eaten Egyptian style, off shared plates, which is fun. A relief from fussy Brahmin ecchal hang-ups. Lunch was so generous that when we were done I didn't have the energy to get up and wash my hands. Instead we sunned on the terrace among the geese and ducks, and talked with Paul's two other friends who also work at Al Ahram Weekly, the English newspaper over here, and had good insights on censorship and politics. Played with the kids, who are delightful. Hasna', who is 8, is a sweetheart and she nicknamed all of us, hopefully randomly, as my name was baghbaghayn, Parrot.

Later he and the children showed us around the village, took us into the desert to see the runtish and unloved Abu Sir pyramids and, at a distance, the step pyramid of Sakara. It was funny to see the latter plonked out there in the sand as if it had been peeled off the label of a bottle of Sakara beer, which is becoming a familiar label. An ancient and majestic beer advertisement. Life reflecting art or something.

Then we went to their farm, where Baghbaghayn and Kofta, Thomas the Egyptian Kebab, were introduced to the extended family, and treated to more tea and hopeless attempts at conversation and a sunset among water buffaloes. Although Paul had reminded us to bring them halwa, sweets, I can still barely understand their generosity and hospitality towards us, and I wish I'd been more able to show how touched and grateful I was than by saying "shukran, shukran giddhan" over and over.

At one point I thought about the passage in GosT, where Arundathi Roy comments on the inexplicable kindness and compassion that poorer people show to the rich, when they find the latter at their doorsteps. Apart from being a very enjoyable and relaxing day, and food for thought, my experience of Cairo feels more complete for having seen this very different side of it. Will go back, insha'allah - the kids want to see us again, too.

For Feb 21st: Luxor II

2004-02-24T00:57:00.000+02:00

Visited the Temple of Karnak and had our breath taken over and over. As we were leaving, the muezzins began the noon call to prayer. From every direction, across the city, a hundred voices in a hundred pitches called out, Allah-u akbar, Allah-u akbar. Luxor is a low-lying city and you can hear every voice harmonizing. It was a chilling, other-worldly chorus that sounded even more tremendous and supernatural for the way it bounced around those ancient walls and pylons. Although I've been hearing it in Cairo for a whole month now, I was transfixed.

We were taken to lunch by the cook from the UC facility, who is still really fond of Emily. Just a wonderful, nice man. The restaurant we went to is owned by his sister, and only Emily had the sense of Egyptian culture to schedule 3 hours for lunch. We ate right on the edge of the Nile, which looked so cool and blue and clean that I dipped my hand and drank some. Since then, the others have been throwing me anxious looks like they're counting seconds till I drop to my knees and start to vomit. It was sweet and delicious. They say that once you have drunk from the Nile, you have to come back. I could certainly go back there. We had a long leisurely meal where we talked only in Arabic, and then I played pool with his youner brother who was waiting on us (schooled him). Worked on my command of Arabic trash talk. Rock.

That afternoon we hiked up the hills on the West Bank, into which the Valley of the Kings and the other tombs were dug. We climbed up at the old workers' village in Gurna and followed the edge of the cliff that Hatsepshut's Temble is built against. Terrific lunar landscape, chalk and limestone canyons, sunbaked and crumbly and precipitous. When you turn away from the sweeping view across the Nile, toward the bare bare hills, you get a taste of the terror of getting lost in the desert. We came down on the other side, trailing clouds of pure white dust, and rested at the gates of the massive, empty temple at sundown. It was honestly one of the most peaceful moments I can remember.

For Feb 20th: Luxor

2004-02-23T17:41:00.000+02:00

Long weekend because Sunday was the Islamic New Year, commemorating Mohammed's departure from Mecca to Medina, way back in the day. I celebrated by borrowing the wisdom of the Prophet and leaving town when the time was ripe, to visit Luxor where life is easy and the Nile is blue and everyone wants to sell you a hat.

Luxor is like a fuddled old man who has dropped his groceries in the rain and doesnt know where to begin picking them all up. It is doing a good job with reconstructing and preserving the local hotspots, but in the meanwhile a scattered jumble of Pharaonic glory lies around, unobserved and doing whatever history was doing before academic and governmental curatorship.

In the ancient temple city, the magnificent Temples of Karnak and Luxor were connected by a 3-km long promenade flanked, by my calculations, with 1200 Sphinxes. Then the mad modern city came along, and sat down too hard, erasing the road except for the 30-odd statues in front of the gates at either end. These days, if you are in the small streets behind the ferry dock, you come across a grassy vacant lot by a sewer, and in it there are little patches of flagstones and six or seven limestone plinths in a row. By my guess, the people who live in the nearby adobe huts have been washing their clothes on them for several decades, but they still retain a suggestion of a crouching shape and an upright head. In other nooks and crannies, also, they appear like dirty urban easter eggs waiting to surprise a meandering modern-day Howard Carter. Of course, it is possible to go right up to them, and climb onto them, and wonder about the sights they must have seen, the centuries that have washed over them, the sic transit gloria mundi. It feels very personal, and I'm almost glad of the neglect so that bits of history can continue to weather, and not be suspended, and just be real, dissolving into the dirt and the detergent of centuries like history does.

In the rubblescape outside the settlement of Gurna, the stone slabs that have been leaned against each other to make trashcans have hieroglyphs on them.

The University of Chicago has an Egyptology institute and some of the largest projects in Luxor. Apparently Elizabeth Peters visits there regularly. The father of Emily Dorman, one of my new friends, used to be the director. She spent many summers there when she was a kid, and it was her first time back in nine years. She obviously used to be the mischievous darling of everyone at the facility, and we were given the loveliest lunch and a tour of their projects and the big issues in archaeology - stone cancers and the terrible damage to most monuments on account of the Aswan Dam. The whole afternoon was tiptop and lent us a much more insightful view of the Temple of Luxor. The new director took us to his off-limits project, trying to reconstruct a collapsed wall in the back of the temple. It was a thousand-piece sandstone jigsaw puzzle. It made me want to be an archaeologist again. The last time was when I was 8.

Obviously we were avoiding tourguides. One guide we were following was talking in German, and when he indicated Ramses' proud and terrible erection, said with great seriousness "Und dieses ist seine ding-dong." My friends managed to hold down the trembling in their lips but I had to leave the room.

Weekend

2004-02-19T18:14:00.000+02:00

This little piggy went to market, This little piggy went home,
This little piggy got roast-beef, This little piggy got none,
But this little piggy went "wee-wee-wee
wee wee wee
weekend!!!"
all the way home.

Here the weekend is Friday and Saturday, which always feels strange. Classes are, so far, unnervingly easy - unnerving because the simplicity of the questions and ideas throws you. In my Comparative Politics of the Middle East class, my professor said something to imply that the Cold War began after the First World War. I spent ten minutes worrying about why I'd thought it was the Second.

Sometimes you have to deliberately set yourself back to get the questions. The same professor asked, last time, "What do we mean by culture?" and I could see Thomas Showalter's brows knit together in furious, critical consideration of what we mean by culture when, thank god, someone else answered "It means our religion and what we wear and eat." I guess thats a pretty good definition anyway.

My friend Will is reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree as one of the two textbooks for his graduate seminar on globalization. One of my final papers is five double-spaced pages; when this was announced I laughed to myself and thought about Emily and Ian's last semester. Of course this all sounds very arrogant, but if there is one privelege Swatties win for themselves, it a privelege to talk smack about reading and writing.

Leaving in a few hours to catch a train to Luxor, the Ibiza of Pharaonic architecture, where my friend Emily knows people in egyptological circles. I hope Egyptian trains are like Indian trains and I can dangle my feet.

For Feb 5th: Khan Al Khalili

2004-02-19T17:00:00.000+02:00

The Khan Al-Khalil is a mad, sprawling souk in the area oxymoronically named Islamic Cairo. The tourist lore has it that the Khan is a lunatic-house of sleeve-pulling and throat-cutting commerce, but it held no surprises for anyone who's taken a white friend to Colaba Causeway ("Yes, boss?" "You wanta Aar-mani sunglass?" "Yes, you wanta hash?") It was Idh, though, and many of the storefronts were closed.

I liked it. The thin roads are alight with lamplight glinting off of mercenary smiles, gold brocade and crystal replicas of the Sphnix. Now and then a monstrous tourbus would defy physics by turning onto the street, then rolling down inexorably, driving forward a churning mass of Egyptians at its front bumper. No one made any comment, but it infuriated me. Behind the smoked windows of their A/C luxury Jagganath, foreigners in straw hats stared and waved tentatively. Miskeen, most of them must have felt as mortified as they looked. Others were taking videos of the crushed, squawking pedestrians trying to save their ankles from a heavy rubber death. My friends and I flashed rude signs at the cameras, offended and, worst of all, knowing that we had probably looked the same in Alexandria.

I wanted to buy a keffiyeh, the Arab head-dress, having shrugged off the emerging political connotations of non-Arabs wearing them. The Khan being as much of a chintzy tourist-trap as it is, you can't spit a mish-mish seed without hitting a keffiyeh salesman. I pulled out a classic black-and-white and ya sahib picked and prodded it about my head for a couple of minutes. Stepping back, he held out his hands in admiration and declared that I looked "bizzabth, exactly like Arafat, exactly like Arafat."

Exactly like the ugliest man east of Michael Jackson. I told him I'd think about it.

For Feb 14th: Valentine's Day

2004-02-16T00:57:00.000+02:00

At 1 o'clock I woke up, surprised but pleased to find self in self's bed. Self seems to have broken 2 fingers, one of life's mysteries, hopefully just sprains. Splint from popsicle sticks and tape should do it.

I turned 21 a day before I left for Cairo, so this was the closest I've been to an American club (a cultural experience? indulge me). The Marines threw a fully full-on excellent party, and I cannot fault their generosity. It was like Absolut was going out of style. Many of that night's revelries were only revealed to me the night after, including things I might have liked to remember. Many of my new friends were very badly behaved. Also, Will claims that I was nearly punched by a marine. Marine A said to Marine B "Punch this guy in the face." I was saved from a hammering by Will's diplomacy. This is surely not possible. I think Will just wants to work up a sense of obligation so that I will finally pay him back all the money I've borrowed.

Feel like a derelict and a lout and a trouble-maker. Cool. But I did Arabic all day in penance. Bought a Quran so I can study the suras I am learning in my Islam class in the original Arabic. Although I read very slowly, they read very beautifully. The descriptions of heaven are very alluring; wine that doesn't give you a hangover; wide-eyed virgins, untouched by man or djinn, reclining on green cushions and carpets of the finest inlay. Yes, please!

I wonder about the politics of being a non-Muslim in possession of a Quran, and how much it is incumbent on me to treat it as scripture vs textbook. Also baffled about how I am meant to refrain from visualizing Muhammad in my imagination when reading his biography. At the Battle of Basr, 1000 Meccan infidels are shown whats what by 300 Muslims, lead by whom? My imagination insists on a face. Professor Lumbard explained that day-dreamy speculations dont matter ("I won't cut your head off," says he) as long as one keeps in mind that Muhammad is meant to be an ideal, a perfection that surpasses our imagination or experience. But he was just a man. In the meantime, a stream of semi-random visual associations flit across his face - Jesus, Osama, Prannoy Roy - and I feel a little disrespectful.

Al-Ahram

2004-02-13T20:46:00.000+02:00

Finally ran out of excuses to put off seeing the Pyramids, so we took the Metro out to say hullo to the monsters, up close and personal.

These days, the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx are right at the edge of Cairo's maniac sprawl, so that even such ancient and immovable things seem to be rearing back, trying to pull their toes out of the scramble of camel and human shit that is being left in every open tomb and behind every rock, trying to pull back towards the timeless p. & q. of the desert. Formations of plastic bags swoop around on the wind, harassing their tattered edges and swot-swotting themselves against the stones. They are like limbless giants swarmed by mosquitoes.

The Sphinx is especially pitiable as it has, in the common fate of non-humans, been put in a cage and subjected to silly modern degradations like the Sound & Light Show. Every day at sundown, a green light is shot into his face and he proclaims "For fourty-five hundred years I have been waiting ... for the 2010 World Cup in Cairo!" Somewhere behind the echo and the static hiss is the muffled noise of Khafre turning in his sarcophagus.

I don't mean to sound like there is no magic left. As we were picking through the Western cemetery, in which modern day man seems to have spent as much time taking a shit as excavating, a minor sand storm kicked up. Clouds of sand move across the plateau the same way rain runs across the surface of a lake. It felt like being shot in the back by a division of very, very small gattling guns. Sand got into hair eyes shoes nostrils, and seemed to scrub your cheeks like nature's very own exfoliation procedure.

For a few minutes, the Pyramids stood up. While humanity bowed its head and picked its ears behind its tourbus, the desert came back to hold them again. I found my own explanation for their design, then: they are perfectly meditative, and each great sloping blankness is like the face of a saint turned up to meet the sun. The Pyramids are a monument to resignation about immortal existence, about just being there forever. The amount of time and money the Pharaohs spent on organizing their immortalities must have led them into contemplation about what human life looks like stretched over eternity. Joy and sadness are just so much embroidery on the blank, endless limestone slate of existence, better left to turquoise and lapis lazuli paintings. Those peel to dust in only centuries.

I mean, If I were a Pharaoh expecting immortality, I might allow myself some odds and ends and microscopic vanities, I might get off on a golden deathmask or two, but I'd probably have the frightened humility to make the encasing story of immortality a nirvanic meditation, a blank blank space. In a memory vast enough to fit 4500 years, human life and human history must look like the Pyramids.

They stand there getting more and more ragged and less and less beautiful everyday, and eventually I suppose they won't be much more than limestone lumps for stray dogs to piss on. But I sort of hope they continue to stand there after mankind finds a way to cut its own throat, and that my friends and I and everyone else won't have constituted much more than just another minor sand storm, and whatever they do stand for will prevail and prove its point to the universe.

Tonight is the eve of Valentine's Day. I'm going to party with the US Marine Corps. Semper fidelis, baby. I hope I don't have to beat any of them up. Don't start none, won't be none.

Horse Riding

2004-02-11T22:40:00.000+02:00

The nicest thing I've done, so far, has been going horse riding in the desert in Giza. Hassan took a group of us to the swarming tourist bazaar near the entrance to the Pyramids (al-Haram). I've never seen such desperate entrepreneurship. Everyone with a half-dead camel or a donkey must come to Giza, where they fling themselves onto the bonnets of passing cars, crying out for the custom of frightened white people. Show you Byramid, show you Sbinx! The animals are wretched. Tried to keep myself from thinking about Black Beauty, which didn't work.

Hassan took us to a place that treats its horses better than most, but even so many of them had haunches you could hang a jacket on. I was given a healthy one - a real bucking bronco, in fact, because I'd been trying to impress girls and said I didnt need a 'quiet' one. He rode like someone had put a hot coal under his tail, snorting and high-stepping and belligerent.

The desert is fantastic. This close to the city, she is brown sandy gravel, dipping and rising, swells just shy of dunes. That afternoon was the warmest we'd had and the sky was big nude blue. The Pyramids pulled themselves up massively across the Southern horizon, just towering there like it was no big deal. They had the unconvincing complacency of bodybuilders flexing their muscles when girls walk by. They look as ancient as they are.

The trainers have an interesting trick of riding up from behind and cracking their whips on the ground, causing your horse to jump into a hysterical canter. Only a few of us had ridden before, but interestingly, nearly everyone managed to stay onboard, and most people enjoyed it. The deep-end school of equestrianism, I suppose.

I rode well. Hassan, who is a superb rider, swapped horses to let me try out his elegant black stallion, Sultan. Sultan is not one of the horses trained for tourists - then I didnt need any whip-cracking. He took off, let me take him away from the track, a little way further into the desert to where I couldn't see anything but sky and sand. He moved smooth, furiously and irresistably, like a thrown knife.

That feeling of breakneck freedom and precarious power was not like anything I've ever felt before. Neither was the next morning, when my muscles felt like they'd been wrapped in rusty iron.

A few friends and I went back on the night of the full moon. This time I did ask for a strong horse, and he was perfection, a tall, solid white stallion named Batal.

Riding by night is very different, very eerie and thickly atmospheric. On the way to the desert, you walk through back alleys which barely fit two horses abreast, past all locked doors and cemeteries. When we turned into the open desert, they sky was pale grey and the dunes were soft shades of murderous burgundy and pink fading into the descending mist. We rode blind, just running; somwhere on the threshhold of canter and gallop. Batal runs aggressive and purposefully like an avalanche or a battle-charge, but stops at a word. I could have gone for hours, but we reached the bluff we were headed for and let the horses rest. Below, Cairo spread out everywhere like a militant neon virus and right above it, the moon was small and yellow, as though deeply sad, or shrunken and diseased by the smoke and the light pollution that had it surrounded.

The trainer had a good time teasing me, trying to push me out of the saddle and making a clicking noise that made Batal high-step and jerk. I am in love with the horse. We went back and drank tea and smoked canteloupe shisha. When I took a shower that night my hair was full of sand.

For February 3rd: Idh

2004-02-11T21:55:00.000+02:00

We saw the Alexandrian catacombs, the theatre and the Fort of Qutbey. All three are brilliant. The theatre is acoustic magic. It was discovered by accident when digging the foundations of a building. Can't imagine what sorts of treasure I might be walking on at any point in time.

The streets of Alexandria ran red with blood from slaughtered animals. Every now and then we would have to step over the head of a cow that someone had left in the door of an alleyway. Children were dipping their hands in puddles where the blood pooled and stamping rust-red handprints all over the city's walls.

Many students were woozy and revolted, but it was really much too interesting and grisly to be either. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me that the least price we should have to pay as non-vegetarians is to engage the slaughter of animals on a level as personal as that. See the animals and have the blood literally on our hands, and then decide how we feel about it. It seems to make sense both ethically and ecologically.

Far more bizarre than being led down streets washed in blood was being taken to Alexandria's suburban supermall. The instant I walked in I felt like I was in Springfield. The abruptness and incongruity of that structure is hard to describe, but it is clear that the only reason it was in the suburbs was because they couldn't fit it in the palatial compound. It is also telling that we were given three times as long in there as were in the library.

I meandered around and wondered which aisle I might find Distinctive Local Culture in. There was none so I bought deodorant. As I am with everything here, I was very happy with my purchase. Then we went home to Cairo.

For February 1st: Alexandria

2004-02-11T21:45:00.000+02:00

After having the library rudely pulled across in front of our eyes, we went to our 5-star hotel, about which much rumpata rumpata rumpata had been made. It WAS a five star, after all, although mysteriously lacking a swimming pool, gym, spa or beach. In compensation, it apparently earned its stars for

(1) sharing a compound with Olde King Farukh's hideous palace,
(2) a dessert bouffet parachuted straight down from heaven,
(3) a reception desk with the same cosmic perspective on time as the Builders of Pyramids,
(4) a breath-taking view of the Mediterranean and
(5) curiously powerful in-bowl bidets.

(1) The hotel, the palace, a McDonalds and a complex of shopping centres were all enclosed in a walled compound. It was not clear whether the idea was to keep people out or (dum da dum!) to keep people in. The Saudi-like insularity of it felt claustrophobic and it only got worse when we were told that we'd need to apply for passes to exit the compound. I got the tiniest glimpse of why the idle life of luxury drives people nuts, why princesses make ropes of their bedsheets to escape out of windows.

It was like that old Frank Capra film, Lost Horizon; you got the feeling that if you so much as approached the compound wall, some preening Chinese fellow would appear from behind an improbably thin lamp post and sussurate "Oh no no! Sir cannot go outside to-day! Would sir like some tea?" or something.

I called it snooty insularity last time, but the insulation of snootiness is a better way to describe it. We had an orientation lecture that evening in the hotel conference room, where Ms Tomader Rifaat urged us to go forth and explore Egypt and get in touch with the distinctive local culture and all of that Lonely Planet talk. This does not jive with subsidizing our stay at a deliciously posh hotel, tucking us in two to a room, and then locking up behind us, while Alexandria seemed to sing loudly and and do somersaults at the gate.

Lessons: The thing about this program is that it DOES want us to interact with Egyptian culture, but only a carefully distilled and very elite Egyptian culture, viz, it wants us to interact with the culture of the AUC-going ruling class. Meanwhile, its secretly kind of horrified and nervous about us seeking out (maybe futilely) a more common sort of Egyptian culture - for instance, in warning the girls about lower class Egyptian romeos looking for citizenships, Tomader used the word "jobless scum." The American students, who are, I have to say, really well trained in the talk of democracy, nearly fainted away. They also recommended staying away from budget restaurants and hotels, and offered to do our bookings for us if we wanted to travel alone. So while warning Americans off of their biases about Egyptians, Tomader and the staff made it perfectly clear what their own biases were. In fact, the ISSO bought us a bag of pre-packaged premium-quality young Egyptians for the ride, 6 pleasant but distracted young alumni called the Friends of International, who tried to chat with us now and then but mostly didn't seem to know why they were there.

(2) This is not to say that I didn't have fun. I LOVED it. There are many worse things than being trapped in a 5-star for two days and two nights with a bunch of excited college kids. The food was very good, the rooms were zipzapzoom and being able to hang out in our rooms with girls was a relief from the already-irritating single sex restrictions here in the Zamalek dorm.

The first evening was strange. My new friends and I didn't know what to do, so we went on a wander and were picked up by a Friend of Internationals named Hassan (Tomader's son, in fact). He's nice but is a bit of a wildcard - a wicked guns-and-drugs type, but also generous and hospitable, which only makes you think that his hospitality is vaguely creepy and has hidden motivations. He led us around to appreciate the palace's monstrousness from each side, and then he twisted our arms into drinking beer with him at the hotel bar. Tomader had asked us not to drink for a variety of valid reasons (cultural consideration, school trip, the eve of Idh) but we shrugged them off because, after all, it WAS her son, and he was an official orientation guide. Moreover, he was a member of the host culture and could presumably be entrusted with decisions about cultural sensitivity. Even so, when Muhammad the waiter brought our drinks over at 1 am on Idh al-Adha, it felt very, very wrong, and I regretted it the next day, as my closer friends (who I will profile later) and I discussed it thoroughly over shisha at the local derelict discoteque.

Lessons: You cannot trust Egyptians to tell you how to behave in Egypt.

I was reminded of the stairs leading up to Elephanta, where you can hire coolies to carry you up on a sedan chair. Startled young Japanese executives rode them to the top of the hill, to the hand-clapping delight of their suit-booted Indian associates. At the time, I was disgusted, and I couldn't believe that the Japanese hadn't the sense to turn down something so painfully, degradingly colonial. I wasn't surprised at all, though, at the Indians' attitudes.

I guess that was the position we were in the night before. We assumed that if it was Hassan's idea, we couldn't be doing anything offensive or oppressive by making Muhammad scuttle around bringing us alcohol on Idh. That was simplistic of us. I am pretty sure we looked bad to him, and besides that, I do think that, as people who are in Egypt with an earnest desire to be respectful of our surroundings, we let ourselves down.

Egypt is clearly being pulled two ways by two teams with two extremely different visions of its national character or culture or destiny. Even more extremely different than in India. Though I have opinions, I didn't come to take sides, and can't rely blindly on anyone to tell us how to be neutral and respectful to both. Unfortunately, this includes the American University and the various people it has entrusted to help us operate here.

(4) The sea was so many shades of byootiful, gem-like blues you could hardly believe it was real. In our otherwise goose-stepping schedule, the second day was dedicated fully to enjoying the beach, so Emily and Will and Lisa and Tom and Corinne and I trooped out in the morning to do just that. Earlier, Lisa had woken me up from bed by pouring a bottle of iced water on my head. It was not unprovoked.

(5) That story starts with my poor roommate Will being an unhygienic American, and as such, having no experience of how to handle toilet business without toilet paper. Searching for the flush, he turned on the bidet in the back of the toilet bowl and was all kinds of surprised when a channel of water leapt out of the bowl and thundered 15 feet through the air into the bathroom door. Our bidet could shoot right out of the bathroom into the corridor.

"So what do you do with the most powerful bidet ever built? Obviously, you shoot people with it."

We shot people with it. The next morning, I was dimly woken by the sounds of quick pattering feet and iced water flying through the air. A second later, I was woken up much much more.

For the whole story, go to