Isaignani Ilayaraja

If I ever finish writing my Ph.d. thesis anytime soon, I think one of the foremost people who should take credit for it should be Maestro Ilayaraja… But for his soulful music and melodies, I wouldn’t even share a room with an ELT textbook!

Rajapaksa-inspires India?

Sorry for this late-night, incoherent post, I had to get it off my chest. Many of the mainstream media reports on Lalgarh (with pictures if you please) use the same terminology that Rajapakse used when he started his genocidal war on the Tamils (”flushing out the militants”, “clearing operation”, “liberated zones”, “deployments of companies” (not the ones that sell stuff, but the ones which send your souls to hell), “security forces-militants face off”, and those many requests by the Army to the people to refuse to be allowed to use as “human shields(!)”, the promise of minimum damage, the wiping-out, the calls to lay down arms, the setting up of base camps).. Either it is my memory at this late hour, or are they really mouthing Sri Lanka. Doesn’t all this sound like a rerecording of the Fonseka-Rajapaksa statements? I am scared for the adivasi people and their homelands.

To get a clearer picture/history of the problem, read this fact-finding report by JNU students. I really believe that this is a classic case of “Then they came for me”..

Only the future ought to tell us who will be spared and who will be silenced. But, right now, looking at what’s happening, it does not look as though even the silent ones will be spared.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Reproduced from Tehelka.com

MEENA KANDASWAMY has an electric effect on rooms when she reads her poetry. The erotic content quite apart, the juxtaposition of her highly femme persona and the tartness of her observations always charges the atmosphere.

The late Kamala Das wrote the foreword to Touch, the collection of poetry Kandaswamy published at age 23. ‘Love and its politics inform my poetry. Caste atrocities happen most frequently because of intercaste love affairs.” A happy denizen of the Internet, 25-year-old Kandaswamy’s first short story The Suicide’s Inbox was the perverse unfolding of a correspondence between two women.

The daughter of a Tamil professor and a Maths professor at IIT, Meena has been always aware that even PhDs are not invincible armour. She chose to pursue a degree privately. “I knew I would not rest quietly if I had to suffer the usual caste slurs in college. Such a waste of time.”

Kandaswamy pins her dalit identity on the act of rebelling against any kind of oppression. She describes what it is like to live in a state with powerful dalit movements going back to the legendary Nandanar, who died claiming his right to worship Shiva: “Discrimination is sophisticated. Once a day — I’m not exaggerating — once a day someone will ask me whether I am vegetarian to figure out whether I am Brahmin.”

She avidly follows the media’s handling of dalit public figures. ‘People say dalits smell but when dalits stand for elections people say that suchand- such dalit’s perfume was expensive.” She has funny stories about the liberals left as well. “People exoticise our ‘sexual freedom’ as if dalits live in a nudist colony. I once met the editor of a left-leaning national newspaper. He told someone to verify if I was a dalit since I spoke English well.”

Kandaswamy says she wrestles daily with the biases of language in her writing, her PhD thesis and her rapacious translation of Tamil literature. She teaches English in a college. She blogs about local politics but is writing a novel set far from Tamil Nadu. Is this the life she dreamt of? “I dream of too many lives,” she replies.

NISHA SUSAN

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009

Two poems, and one review

For once, I will let my words do the talking

• Two of my poems (Straight Talk and Mrs.Sunshine)
• A review of Touch by Professor Jaydeep Sarangi

have appeared in MASCARA LITERARY REVIEW that’s published from Australia and edited by Boey Kim Cheng, Michelle Cahill and Adam Aitken.

Please stop over and read the review by Prof.Sarangi. It’s really the way I would love my poetry to be approached.(I can go on and on and on about the stuff I like in there, but then, I am not in a mood for spoilers)

Apart from the happiness of such a beautiful, beautiful review, I am also moved by the company that I find myself in. I have studied Keki Daruwallah’s poetry and short-stories at school. God! He is the *canon*. I can still reel off lines from his story, Love across the Salt Desert. I can smell the rainstorm building in the last lines of that short-story. And now, my poems appear alongside his, and I don’t know what to make of it, how to react really. And Michelle told me that he liked the review. I nearly swooned.

Sukrita Paul Kumar is another writer I am in awe of. She works among the homeless, and writes about a host of social issues through poetry. I always admire that.

Or take Geoff Page for instance. Last year, in August he was in Chennai. At the University of Madras, and I translated ten of his poems into English. And this year, I find my name beside his, but in a wholly different context. I don’t know whom to thank for all this happening to me. But thank you to the whole universe in that case. Things can never get any lovelier. I return to poetry like the way in which people return to an old lover, seeking the shoulder to cry on. This time, the sobbing shoulder has given me reasons to smile.

Review of THE WATCHMAKER by NANAK SINGH

(First published in The New Sunday Express, June 6 2009)

The Watchmaker
Nanak Singh (Translated from the Punjabi original by Navdeep Suri)
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 192
Price: Rs. 250

First published in 1942, Nanak Singh’s Punjabi novel Pavitra Paapi (Saintly Sinner) subsequently won a Sahitya Akademi Award, and was also made into a Hindi film. Translated into English by the author’s grandson Navdeep Suri, The Watchmaker is a timeless classic of doomed and unconsummated love. Rendered in another tongue with enormous sensitivity, this novel retains the earthy metaphors of the Punjabi original.

Set in the cities of Amritsar and Rawalpindi in the 1930s, it traces the story of an ill-fated young man Kedar Nath. When he desperately joins work as a watchmaker under the parsimonious Attar Singh, little does he realize that another family has lost its only breadwinner. Panna Lal, grievously in debt, goes to work one day and learns that he has been sacked from his position as the shop’s accountant and Kedar, armed with the knowledge of repairing watches has been hired as the new replacement. Panna Lal walks away casting the last accusatory glance at Kedar.

When Panna Lal’s children come looking for him, Kedar is plagued by guilt. Afraid of saying the unpalatable truth, he invents the comfortable lie that Attar Singh has sent their father to Bombay on business. He visits their home, and on their advice, takes lodging nearby. Soon, he is exposed to the dire straits of their family: the increasing debts, the young mother Maya looking after four children, the marriage arrangements of the eldest daughter Veena that have been suspended for want of money and so on. Kedar starts shouldering all the responsibilities of running their family and repaying the various debts. In order to account for Panna Lal’s absence and to keep up a lie of such a magnitude, Kedar (writes and) reads a weekly letter (purportedly from Panna Lal) to the family and manages to satisfy them about his whereabouts.

It is not just a story of a young man playing good samaritan by weaving a litany of lies. Quite naturally, Kedar falls in love with the beautiful Veena, and is torn between pursuing his romantic interests and answering his gnawing conscience (which in true Indian fashion reminds him that he is like a brother to her, and that it is a sin to break such trust). The pleasure of watching Veena gives him the necessary emotional sustenance to bear the crushing poverty which he has called upon himself. With nothing but bitter black tea to sustain him, Kedar wrecks his health working hard to settle Panna Lal’s debts. He then convinces Maya to make all arrangements for Veena’s marriage to another man.

Veena sends for Kedar the night before her wedding and confronts him, however, it is too late for the lovers to change their entangled fate. Doomed in love, the young lovers seek their deaths in diverse ways.

Navdeep Suri’s translation preserves a poetic narrative style of an earlier era, a style that doesn’t show and tell, but only hints and implies. The unpretentious novel subtly questions societal norms and deals with the eternally hazy divisions that separate love and duty and sacrifice. In the end, it is also a story of a watchmaker whose Time has gone all wrong. This embattled love-story, replete with a tragic ending, has an universal appeal.

What love was worth. In the end.

When I die
Do not throw the meat and bones away
But pile them up
And let them tell
By their smell
What life was worth
On this earth
What love was worth
In the end.

(Kamala Das)

I wept. I wore black. I went wordless. I hadn’t spoken to her in a year, I heard news of her failing health, but I had not prepared myself to hearing this.

Specially not in this season of sorrow. When the number of the Tamils killed in a few days touches five-figure tolls, when every piece of news from down south is so distressing. This is not a time of courage. This is a time when I have stopped doing even the casual things. I am feeling broken within, and crushed. I run away from the regular things, from the routine. I have been chasing every escape route: silence, starvation, sleeplessness. It is not exactly consoling, but it is good enough to keep me from thinking too much. From taking things to heart.

All this helplessness was naturally pushing me towards writing, towards poetry. I was thinking a lot about Kamala Das in these past few days. And then this news comes, of her death, and I feel guilty. Perhaps this is pessimism.

What I shared with Kamala Das was an extremely special relationship. All through my angst-ridden teenage years she was my role model (she still is). I read her poems with all the pain and the power that I could muster. I loved her committment. I loved her flamboyance. Only much later, I realized that she could be an accesible person after all. Not just a name on books, a name in the papers. I was only twenty-one when I first wrote to her. I had struggled about six months to get her address.. Nothing happened, and I didn’t expect anything to. Then, I went to Kerala, and a friend of mine was her doctor. He promised to pass my poems to her. Kamala Das couldn’t read the script, the words because her eyes were failing her…. So, my doctor friend read the poems. At least some of them. The remaining were read to her by her assistant.  Then, much later, there came this courier from Kerala. In two pages, in thick black felt pen, she had written a foreword to my poems. I cried when I read those words. I had not expected so much love and so much appreciation and so many blessings. And on that letterhead, I noticed her phone number. I called her immediately. And when I first heard her voice, it was another revelation. I will honestly say that I have never heard a sweeter woman’s voice. It was all woman. And the first  thing she said, after I identified myself was, “You will win many, many awards. You will certainly become a great poet. Keep writing.” and I was in tears, and I didn’t know what to say with all this happiness. First she writes this mindblowing foreword (and she who hasn’t done that so far at alll) and then she continues saying these lovely things. I have never felt so blessed. Or so priveleged. And since I was tongue-tied, she kept talking. “People write such absurd trash these days, and they call it poetry.” and about her health “I was never a very healthy person, so I am used to this.” So much, so much more.

Our conversations continued for two years, until last summer. May be, after she moved to Pune, I couldn’t get to talk  as much as earlier. But, everytime we spoke, I promised to her that I will come and see her. And that was something I was putting off all my life. There was a lot of domestic drama that I had to negotiate (love-shove and stuff), there was this job I was into, there was this goddamn phd I was doing.  Convenient and stereotyped excuses for which I will never forgive myself. I still feel I should have somehow put all my preoccupations behind and met her just once. Even if we never spoke, we should have just come close to each other. She was the most special influence all my life, but I just let that be. I never ventured to go to where she lived. And I cry my heart out for that. She was not just my inspiration, my greatest influence, my icon; not just the woman who made my career as a poet. She motivated me even outside poetry. Her actions gave me the courage to rebel. The conviction that I need not conform. The integrity to stand up for what I thought was right, irrespective of how much the world was going to mock me, censure me, set me apart and set me aside.

I write this post because I am shattered on so many levels. Not just her death, but so much happening elsewhere. So much happening around me. To those who don’t know me personally, none of this will make sense. This is not a homage, even if it has ended up reading like one. My real homage to Kamala Das will come from my work. And I pray to her: give me the faith to be as fearless and fiery and flamboyant as you were. 

Translation as murder

As someone who has translated a dozen books, and who also holds a research degree in translation studies, I know a lot about the difficulties of translating. I know about equivalences, about cultural problems, about syntax troubles, the whole damn lot. What I learnt right now, is that someone can merely use your name, and the title of an article you published in an English newspaper and write up their own stuff.

I don’t read a lot of Tamil newspapers (at least the fringe, party-organ variety), so this slipped my eye. Until someone typed this whole stuff out and sent it to me.

Regular readers of this blog, will remember that I wrote this opinion piece for the Deccan Chronicle. It’s right there if you scroll down this blog. Now, this is a so-called translation that has been carried in the JANASAKTI, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of India.

Names that I have mentioned are missing. Facts that I mentioned are missing. My arguments are missing. I can understand the omissions. But they have added facts and names and arguments of their own. Why should this be done? Why should my words be subjected to so many twists and turns and glaring things that I never wrote of.

Anybody who can read English and Tamil will know that the Tamil version has nothing to do with the original. It is totally interpolated, taken out of context, and so much that I will never accept as my political views have been added. In that case, why did they have to do this my article? If they wanted to extend the case of the ADMK-Left combine, they have all the 6 pages of their daily newspaper to do that. Why claim that these points are “taken” from someone else’s piece?

I have seen several types of translation, but never before have I witnessed something that is so damaging. This is really murder in a sense, to attribute things I never said (or things that I will never say) to me.

I always, always respected the CPI, so it’s very difficult for me to come to terms with this.

(If you can read Tamil please do check out this section and compare it with the original. This appeared in the Janasakti of 17 April 2009)

இலங்கைத் தமிழர் பிரச்சனை தமிழகத் தேர்தலை நிர்ணயிக்கும்

நடைபெற உள்ள நாடளுமன்றத் தேர்தலில் இலங்கைத் தமிழர் பிரச்சனை மய்யப் பிரச்சனியாயாக உர்வாகிவருகிறது. இதனாலேயே இந்திய அரசு இலங்கை அரசையும் எல்.டி. டி. ஈ. ஐயும் யுத்தத்தை நிறுத்தும்படி வலியுறுத்தியது என்று அமைச்சர் ப. சிதம்பரம் கூறினார்.

இந்திய வெளியுறவுத்துறைச் செயலர் சிவ சங்கரர் மேனன் இலங்கைத் தமிழ் தேசியக் கட்சி (டி. என். ஏ.) எம். பிக்களை சந்தித்துப் பேசியுள்ளனர். தி.மு.க – காங்கிரஸ் கட்சி கூட்டணி, மதிய, மாநில அரசுகளின் சாதனைகளைக் கூறி ஓட்டுக்களைக் கேட்டு வருகிறது. ஆனால், அ.இ.அ.தி.மு.க. இடதுசாரிக் கட்சியின் கூட்டணி, இலங்கைத் தமிழர் பிரச்சனைகளைப் பிரசாரத்தில் கொண்டு செல்ல உள்ளன.

இந்திய கம்யூனிஸ்ட் கட்சியின் தமிழ் மாநிலச் செயலாளர் தா. பாண்டியனும், பா.ம.க. தலைவர் டாக்டர் ராமதாசும் அ.தி.மு.க. பொதுச் செயலாளர் ஜெயலலிதாவும் இப்பிரச்சனை கலையும் தமிழரின் படுகொலையையும் பார்த்துக்கொண்டு மத்திய அரசு மௌனமாயிருப்பதையும், மாநில அரசு மதிய அரசினை வலியுருத்தாததையும் தேர்தல் பிரசாரத்தின் போது வலியுறுத்திப் பிரச்சாரம் செய்ய உள்ளனர். ம.தி.மு.க. பொதுச் செயலாளர் வைகோ வின் ரத்த ஆறு ஓடும் என்ற பேச்சு, தேர்தல் காலத்தைச் சூடேற்றியுள்ளது. இவை தி.மு.க. காங்கிரஸ் கூட்டணியைக் கலக்க முயற்சி செய்துள்ளது.

தமிழ் தேசியக் குழுக்கள் “இனி என்ன செய்யப்போகிறாய்?” என்ற தலைப்பிட்ட ஒளிப் பேழைகளை (சி.டி.க்கள்) தமிழக மக்களிடையே விநியோகித்து வருகின்றனர். பெரியார் திராவிடர் கழகம் இது குறித்து பிரச்சாரங்களைச் செய்துவருகிறது.

இலங்கை தமிழர் படுகொலைகள்தமிழர்கள் செத்து மடிவது, பிணக்குவியல் போன்றவை படங்கலாக்கப்பட்டு சி. டி. மூலம் வெளியிடப்பட்டுள்ளது. மன்மோகன் சிங்க், சோனியா காந்தி ஆகியோர் இலங்கை அதிபர் ராஜபக்சே வுடன் கைக்குளுகுவது போன்றவையும் அதில் படமாகப்பட்டுளது. இவர்களுக்க உங்கள் ஓட்டு? என மக்களிடம் கேள்வி கேட்கப் பட்டுள்ளது.

கடந்த 3 மாதங்களில் தமிழகத்தில் இப்ப்ரச்சனைக்காக 16 பேர் தீக்குளித்து மாண்டுள்ளன்னர். இலங்கைப் பிரச்னை மக்களிடையே ஏற்படுத்தியுள்ள எழுச்சியினால், அ.இ.அ.தி.மு.க. பொதுச் செயலாளர் ஜெயலலிதா உண்ணாவிரதம் மேற்கொண்டார். இதனாலேயே, மத்தியில் உள்ள காங்கிரஸ் அரசும், வன்னிப்பகுதிக்கு நிவாரணப் பொருட்களை அனுப்பியது. வன்னியில் கொள்ளப்படும் தமிழர்களின் எண்ணிக்கை தினந்தோறும் கூடிவருகிறது. இப்போரில் விடுதலைப் புலிகள் இயக்கத் தலைவர் பிரபாகரனுக்கு ஏதேனும் நேர்ந்தால் தி.மு.க.-காங்கிரஸ் கூட்டணிக்கு இத்தேர்தல் சவாலாக இருக்கும் என்பது மட்டுமல்ல, முழு தோல்வியை இக்கூட்டணி சந்திக்க நேரிடும். இத்தேர்தலின் வெற்றி தோல்வி இலங்கையில் மே 13 க்கு முன்பு நடக்கின்ற விளையுவகளைப் பொறுத்தே அமையும்.

குறிப்பு: டெக்கான் கிரானிக்கல் ஆங்கில நாளேட்டிற்கு, அண்ணா பல்கலைக்கழக ஆசிரியர் மீனா கந்தசாமி எழுதிய கட்டுரையிலிருந்து.

In Conversation With Rana Dasgupta

(First published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express on 26 April 2009. And I, as usual, was too caught up with too many things.. so I could not put it up.)

With an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo is about people who had to live through painful and pointless political projects, says Meena Kandasamy. This place is chaotic,” Rana Dasgupta complains even before we settle down to talk about his latest novel, Solo. At Chennai’s Landmark bookstore, where his publishers have spared him for half an hour, little children run around us, and some staff are sweeping the bookstore. His observation is sharp, but cloaked in that soft voice, it could be mistaken for a compliment.

This iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach pervades his writing. That is why, even though preservation of culture is an overarching theme in Solo, its dangers are accorded greater importance. “There is a difference between the attempts of an individual to find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people,” he says. “The protagonist in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category, and he’s forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project.”

Speaking of “corrective history”, Dasgupta says the times we are living in make sense only through history. “I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character, the 100-year-old Ulrich.”

In that sense, Solo is essentially an alternative history of what is called the Anglo-American century. “The 20th century is shown as the American century, but I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain.” Is that why the protagonist Ulrich takes shelter in daydreams, the only redeeming feature of his life? “No, to me Ulrich is like a novelist. On one level, Solo is an examination of how elements of life become mutated into fiction.”

I wonder why Solo was not set in India, given that Dasgupta has told a universal story. “Are you worried that a honest novel about India would face too much criticism?” I ask He pins down the emergence of such criticism to a “particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India that ridiculously claims that there is no poverty or violence in the country.”

That leads to the inevitable question, whether he will write a novel set in India. Dasgupta says he is keen to do so, but it will be non-fiction since the reality of this country is complete in itself. “The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is enough.”

He points out that he wrote about Bulgaria in Solo because he was bored with big countries that were full of arrogance and self-importance.

Likewise, he wrote about a doomed man’s life because he was bored by the success stories that surrounded him.

Now I understand why he writes about people outside the social system, such as the gypsies. He says he finds them fascinating since they refuse to allow an “identity” to be given to them from outside.

“I am like that,” he admits, “I refuse to be categorised.”

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.

In which I become a restless recluse

This isn’t news, but still. I have avoided email-internet-telephone-mobile like the plague and the only good news is that I have discovered “If you shun the world, the world shuns you.” On an average and extremely boring day, I get about 20 calls, today I got only 3 calls and all from Aircel regarding some free ringtones. Guess I have ceased to exist. I don’t know how else to manage my life. I need to get this PhD done in a couple of months. By end of June. So, there’s all the attendant reading that goes on. Next, I need to keep myself occupied and not worrying about who-wins-what in this elections. 

In the midst of this I have got to value papers. 170 answer-scripts. I feel sleepy already. 

The worst side-effect of reading on ELT is that I am getting drawn back into teaching, into the magic that you can create in classrooms. Really, the only time I have forgot all my preoccupations, all my worries, has been in the classroom, as a teacher. If only I had a teaching job where I didn’t have to sit at my workplace from 9 to 5, if only I could drop in, teach and get back home. I wouldn’t say it is a noble profession. It is a vulnerable position and I like that. It is like being a writer. You are vulnerable. That makes you strong, somehow. Not in a I-can-put-it-down-into-words sort of way. I have shared more secrets about myself with a class of eighty-nine than with a close friend for a decade. May be I did that for the ice-breaking, may be I did that to tell them that to write or to speak English you really didn’t need extremely priveleged backgrounds. There are so many things that I would not tell anyone for loss of face, but those things I could tell those teenagers. And for the first time in life, I also learned to listen to others PoV. Sometimes, when people take radically “wrong” stands, I simply shut off. But when the young ones are saying something I naturally listen. I want to give them a complete hearing. Then I accept the bits of it that I can relate to. Sigh!

I think teaching, like writing is extremely intimate. Except that, since English in an Engineering College is low-status/ low-priority, there’ s not much that a teacher can derive out of the job. I will stop right now. Otherwise, this shape-shifting soul of mine will start glorifying everything else she’s doing…

Genuineness IS NOT EQUAL TO Authenticity

And this is something I had to relearn from ELT. Soon, I think I will even be capable of telling apart midnight from 12.00 a.m. and so on. In the past 24 hours, I have slept for some 10 hours. And in he remaining time, read 4 books. Where I pick up such absolutely true, and mostly useless bits of information. Though, in some corner of my mind, I love critical theory, I love Friere and hooks and all. But that is not what my research is totally about. They are just a tiny part of it.

I think I need to read about 50 more books. In fact, not everything is a fresh reading, some of these titles have to be reread. And then, I have to reread about a 120 research papers. And all this just to write the two chapters: Review of Literature, and Background to the Study. After that, I can shut out all the external world, analyze just my research and be done with everything.

I wrote my 12000 word MPhil thesis in a week’s time. So, this shouldn’t be difficult in the end, but the process is such a damn pain. The list of unreplied emails is continuing to grow. But, the mails are mostly uninteresting. Somehow, the world seems to know that this woman is not someone who will write back immediately, and so it decides to remain silent. I really don’t know.

How am I battling with my two biggest distractions? Regarding elections, I decided not to vote. In spite of all the ToI campaigns. No one’s even visited our ward. Everyone I know is against the Congress and want that party to be shown the door because of what’s happening in Sri Lanka. India supplying radars and arms and training and what not. But, I can’t think of any other party as an alternative at the Central Government. The thought of BJP getting to rule India is like a nightmare, and asked to choose between these evils, I will go for the Congress. I hate the external affairs policy of the Congress with respect to Eelam, but then the BJP is no different on that stand. Which means, I have to judge the parties based on domestic issues. And here, Congress fares a little better. At least, no state-sponsored pogroms against minorities. Of course, in my constituency it is a straight fight between the DMK and the ADMK. And I will go with the DMK. Amma is another face of Hindutva, another face of casteism. Still, I don’t think I am going to go and vote. (Well I will not go on about this).

The next distraction is the cellphone. I put in the silent mode and put it out of sight. Every caller gets angry, but after a point of time, everyone gives up. I think, if I ever finish my Ph.D. I might have to do a lot of apologizing to all my friends. More later.

Piled Higher And Deeper (the first in the series of blogs where I rant about the process of writing my thesis)

Since I don’t have anywhere else to offload my angst, I shall torture this poor blog of mine. Ever since 2009 started, my dad has been *extremely* worried as to whether I will complete my PhD at all. Before I launch head-on into things, let me make some of the background clear. My dad is my “manager” of sorts–I know this sounds actress-y, but hell, this is the truth. I do most of what I want to do, but then, he decides what I should not do. (And believe me, his rules are really ruthless, sometimes. Never amenable to reason, or requests or anything). Doesn’t mean I love him any less (he’s my dad, no one else is devoting so much of time and affection on me). Most of the time, I sort of blame it on his background, his immaturity and his many (always unfounded) fears. Things are much more complicated. But, this post is not about my dad. I use him as a point of reference just to say: He’s never doubted my ABILITY to do something. He’s always sure his girl will do what she wants to (even when he’s downright discouraging). So, (and here’s where the story gets into focus) when he told me yesterday that he had serious doubts whether I will complete my PhD at all, I was lost.

Why do my parents who believe that I am capable of doing anything, have fears whether I will write a 300-page thesis? They have this fear that I will never be Dr.__ in my life (which both of them are) and that I would be left out. For sometime I kept fighting with them, saying stuff like trust me and so on. Now, I have stopped saying. Why? Because I have started having the same doubts.

I have tried my best to keep myself distraction free. I have quit surfing the net (other than for research), Orkut, Facebook, replying emails, calling up friends, everything that was taking my time. Even let go of a couple of opportunities (teaching at a writing workshop, reviewing books) since I didn’t want to get into other stuff and lose focus. But, I am disturbed because ever so often I check the news. I am worried about what’s happening in Sri Lanka, I am worried about how people here are reacting. And then, there’s the election fever. For the first time, I don’t want to vote. That doesn’t make me any less hungry for news though. May be I should pack my bags and go to my dad’s village and sit and write out this thesis, but it is not feasible. Which means, I have to sit in this grumpy merciless Chennai weather and write. And write something that’s not beautiful.

Of course, I do plan to make my thesis hard-hitting. But then, the rules of academia in my part of the world prevent me from making it a lovely read. So, I am writing what seems like unreadable prose, and I am just letting it stay. And do you know how I console myself: Yesterday I read that nobody other than a researcher in the same topic as yours is going to read beyond the first three pages of your thesis. Which is really amazing. I finish my thesis, then I start convincing the world that there are really better things to research!

(By the way, this long post should be enough of stress-shedding for a week. I don’t want to add blogging to the list of my distractions. And, I want to be done with all the writing by June-end and the revising by mid-July, so that I don’t have to continue teaching next year. One year and done. That’s the way I want my career as a lecturer to be.)

Teaching to Transgress

Read bell hooks’ pedagogical work Teaching to Transgress today. Really, I am so thrilled I came across this book at least at this stage in my teaching career. I’ve read Paulo Freire and Pennycook, I have read Ray Ritz and so much else on the classroom, its dynamics, teachers, students, attitudes and so on. But never have I read something that was not just approachable but also powerfully argued. Something that did not stop with theorizing, but moved into the realm of praxis. And a work which documented not just the enthusiasm, but also the resistance that engaged pedagogy has to face from students.

Teaching as the practice of freedom… her passion to create democracy and critical thinking… her idea that the classroom should be an exciting space, never boring.. her success with one set of students, and her failure with another… her life as a writer and as a professor… everything resonated with deep meaning for me. Although my experience in teaching is only two semesters old, I can understand much of what she says because I have also had those highs, and those heartbreaks. 

bell hooks is not new to me. I have been reading her work for the past 6-7 years, on and off. (Translated it means: whenever I get to lay my hands on her books). But somehow everything on pedagogy had slipped past me. Now, when I am working with my own thesis, and when I am in two minds about what career choice to make, I am so happy I came to bell hooks. 

(It’s bedtime, hence this extremely short post)

Some poetry news in an otherwise impossible world

What’s happening in the Vanni is becoming more atrocious by the day: we earlier mourned for the hundreds dead each day, now it is into the thousands. Reading any news simply sends me spiralling into depression. Wanted to sort of take stock of what is going on with my life. Blog posts here shall become fewer each progressing day, and here’s why

1. Come Oct ‘09 I will be finishing the third year in my Ph.D. I can’t do it any longer than that, and I already feel that three oh-so-precious years of my life have gone into something that I will not remember with much fondness later in life (If you cannot be happy about somethign when you are old, you better don’t do it: my motto so far). So, since the beginning of this year, I have been working damn hard at finishing off my degree and dissertation. Attended two workshops on ELT, presented papers at two national conferences, sent a paper for publication. Spent most of April preparing a 6-page, 250+-questions questionnaire for the Engineering students in the city. Have been getting it filled up FRANTICALLY. And students are a bit angry too, having to answer so many questions… That, I can understand. I plan to take off in May-June and sit and write my dissertation… And once this Ph.D. is done, I am thinking of giving up this job (my contract stipulates that I work till 2012, and that is dreary)…

2. Talking of job, things here are as messed up as they can be. Some inefficient people run the goddamn show and so I get the salary for March only on April 20. And this is a Government educational institution. A university in fact. (And did I forget to mention to that inefficient could also mean male-chauvinist). More on this later, and when I quit this job. 

3. Since most of this sounds like bad news, let me continue on that vein. My publisher’s decided not to go ahead with the anthology of urban poetry by Indian women (Sheher), and has asked me to look out for other publications. The recession’s hit him, he says. Now, if you have good suggestions about whom I can approach, please tell me. It should be a lovely book going by the quality of poems that have gone into it. Hope it gets a publisher!

4. My poem REVERENCE: NUISANCE has appeared in 3quarksdaily, a blog that is read by the likes of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. I nearly fainted from the surprise, and thanks to Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta for pointing it out to me in the first place. Go, read the poem on 3QD. It is one of my earliest poems, so please read with the eyes of a seventeen year old.

5. If I have a crush on any one of my poems, it’s this one. And it’s got me some good news too. MULLIGATAWNY DREAMS has been anthologized in the National Book Trust anthology Both Sides of the Sky. Edited by Eunice de Souza, this anthology has been released fairly recently. I haven’t yet seen the book/cover anywhere on the web, and if I receive it sometime soon, I will upload the covers. I am thrilled, because I am really the last person who believes that what I write will finds its way into state-sponsored anthologies… Just guess life is full of surprises. I am also smiling to myself all the time, thinking of the fact that I am in an anthology of Post-independence English poetry. That sounds like a great category, except that I am not entirely comfortable with a word like independence. It has eluded a great many of us, I think. 

6. Back to some non-poetry news. My article has been quoted extensively in Green Left Weekly’s take on the genocide of Tamils in the Vanni.  

Which takes us back to square one right. I am not a believer, but right now  I pray every minute. To some one, somewhere. I reall want this massacre to stop. The civilian death toll since Jan 2009 could have easily crossed the 5000-mark. How many more Tamils should die before the world decides to do something?

Opinion piece in today’s Deccan Chronicle

STATE PARTIES TO GAIN POLL MILEAGE FROM LANKAN ISSUE

WITH ELECTIONS in Tamil Nadu just a month away, the Central government seems to have realised that it can no longer keep up its pretence that the Lankan Tamils problem does not exist. Home minister P.Chidambaram said on Sunday that India had pressurised the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE for a ceasefire. Indian foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon is set to meet MPs of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) on April 15.

Apart from all this ‘tokenism’, the DMK-Congress combine plans to canvass by projecting Manmohan Singh’s candidature for the nation’s top post and highlighting the DMK government’s achievements. The importance that will be accorded to the Lankan Tamils problem therefore depends on the manner in which the opposition is going to handle its election campaign.

The pro-LTTE PMK banished the Eelam Tamil issue to the 38th point in its manifesto released last month in order to cozy up to its new ally Ms Jayalalithaa, but now, it is bending over backwards to highlight the issue. In a press meet Sunday, PMK chief Dr Ramadoss declared that the Eelam Tamils problem would be the primary focus of his party’s campaign. Vaiko’s fiery pro-LTTE rhetoric, as evidenced by his recent ‘bloodbath speech’, threatens to further hurt the DMK-Congress combine.

The AIADMK-led alliance may also gain from the propaganda of Tamil nationalist groups. Already, several thousand copies of the VCD, Ini enna seyya pogiraai (What are you going to do now?), allegedly released by the Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam, are doing the rounds in the southern districts. It contains disturbing visuals of death and destruction in the so-called No Fire Zone, along with clippings of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress Chairperson Sonia Gandhi shaking hands with Mahinda Rajapaksa. It ends with the rhetorical question: “Will you still vote for them?” Though the VCDs are not publicly distributed, this message is set to reach a vast majority of the voters.

Beginning with Dalit leader Thirumavalavan’s indefinite fast early this year, Eelam demonstrations in Tamil Nadu have peaked. A dozen self-immolations in the last three months have mobilized the students and youth towards the Lankan Tamil cause. Since young people form the largest slice of the voting populace, both the staunch critics of Tamil self-determination, AIADMK and Congress, have played down their opposition to Eelam, a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, keeping in mind the mood of the electorate. Sensing that the Lankan Tamils problem would emerge as a key electoral issue, Jayalalithaa staged a token fast. A while ago, unwilling to be isolated, Congressmen collected relief material for the affected civilians in Vanni. Likewise, Rahul Gandhi’s justification of the party’s tie-up with the pro-LTTE VCK of Thirumavalavan as ‘political strategy’ revealed the extent to which the Congress was willing to dilute its opposition to the Tigers to avoid becoming ‘unpopular’ at poll time. 

Congress politicians in Tamil Nadu have so far not been targets of Jarnail Singh-style protests, but as the daily civilian death toll in the Vanni reaches explosive proportions, they might perhaps have to be cautious on the campaign trail. Moreover, if LTTE chief Prabakaran were to be harmed in the war’s last phase, the DMK and the Congress would not only be embarrassed by the public hysteria, but they could also face a rout in the elections, should such tragedy strike closer to poll date, May 13.

Official link here.