limmit

Metaphor

2006-07-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Metaphors make sense. I mean that literally, metaphors make sense. Imagine a page of even the most eloquent book with its text leached of metaphor and you will see a terrible, dry husk. The image that comes to my mind is of a small log after the fire has burnt itself out -- it has the shape of a log, but nothing of the essence; tap it and it will crumble into dust.

If you read language carefully, you see that one metaphor shades into another, almost without break; indeed, there are layers of metaphor in the most mediocre prose. We may read left to right in lines of little symbols, but what we keep in our heads is the gift of metaphor.

You can always tell a poor thinker by the quality of his metaphors. I work in social science publishing, so I see horrible new examples every single day. A writer who does not know the value of words cannot be a good writer, and he cannot be a good thinker. One thinks, after all, in reformulations of the familiar, with a vocabulary of known sites. If not, how would one think at all?

Among the several books I am reading at the moment is one called The Praise Singer, by Mary Renault (1978). It is a historical novel about travelling bards in the world of the ancient Greeks of the Ionian islands. The work of a bard in the ancient world, where few things were written down, was the safeguarding and employment of memory. Just one elderly bard and his disciple could commit to memory and find new ways to tell the history of a hundred years. Then remember the master's master and the disciple's disciple, and hundreds of bards of varying skill. I bet the ancient Greeks learnt about time in such ways. We nowadays have almost no conception of long durations of time. Instead we have the urge to periodise: the Sixties, the Eighties, the Renaissance, the Great Mughals, the Dark Ages.

To my mind, a beautifully-written story about ancient bards by a modern author is ripe ground for rooting around in. Reading this book, I better understand myself through a story about others understanding themselves through song-stories about others understanding themselves and the universe through act and consequence. And now I am writing about it...

Vir

2006-07-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Hindustan Times' Brunch section on Sundays is my favourite toilet reading. And that is because of Vir Sanghvi, the editorial boss of HT. In today's Brunch, for instance, 11 out of 24 pages were written by him. The first long article was on some hotelier who's extremely into his guests' sleep quality. I've never spent a night in a fancy hotel, and find it unlikely that I ever will. I really don't give a damn about hotels. But I enjoyed reading that piece.

Then there was another long piece about a wine tour of Burgundy, naturally by Vir Sanghvi himself. (I want his job.) Now, people, especially Indians, writing about wine can be terribly boring and uninformative. The train of unlikely adjectives regularly employed to explain a flavour often leaves me wondering how you could be drinking both tar and berries in the same cup -- Eeyuck. Like squashing grapes onto a gently steaming road in summer and then licking it.

But Sanghvi knows a bit about wine, and what he doesn't he doesn't pretend to. More than all the talk of wine is, of course, the almost unmanageable joy I feel at the thought that here are people (Frenchmen, to be sure) who make money making something beautiful, with a knowledge and practice that cannot really be studied. I think there is tremendous power in a land and occupation -- and product -- into which many, many centuries of work have sunk.

When I drink wine, I feel I am absorbing some of that power, some of that hard work and wisdom. It makes me older. It makes me pay attention.

Plug

2006-07-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

Zzeblog is a frightfully tasteless and quite provocative new offering. For example: 'Why Men Love to Play with Balls.' Regrettably, I am related to this man.

Read attentively.

-19 July 2006, 12.31 am-
Correction, there are two people writing Zzeblog: the aforementioned bee-brain Zzebrain and Fadereu, a name that sounds like it should belong to a Harry Potter centaur (but more Continental). Both are sober, respectable men.

Oh!

2006-07-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Oh! oh! oh! Italy won! Oh happy day. Night. This is the way a match should be -- hard-bitten and hard-fought, with spectacular goals at the very last minute. It was late and the house was still, so I did my tribal victory dance on tiptoe and howled in pleasure very quietly. I don't care if it's just a game and the players are a ridiculously enthusiastic, primitive sweating grimacing thundering herd. Hallelujah! Forza Italia! Whoof, am not used to being so unabashedly partisan.

And then I had to read for an hour before my heart rate settled to normal cynic levels. Which allowed me a threadbare four hours of lively sleep.

Plug

2006-06-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

This is a plug: A friend with an elegant written voice has started a blog. She is rather shy, so please pretend you've never heard of it, and if you do mention it to her, please hotly deny any acquaintance with me. Here is the link. It's a very new blog, so a bit short of content at the moment.

And another: The Adventures of the Late Late Barry the Booger and other tales. (A friend posts on it.) It is sometimes brilliant, but always unhinged. Definitely not good for the health of sane people.

Football

2006-06-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

Lacking both skill and sportsmanship (win or lose never mattered), I was a bored and unwilling participant in school sports like football and volleyball. On the field or court, my ironic detachment shadowed me everywhere and monopolised my attention. Everyone looked so amusingly single-minded and primitive, thundering around the field in a sweating and grimacing herd. It was all too serious.

So I was surprised to find that watching sports is so much fun. Cricket, tennis, football are enormously entertaining. On the other hand: basketball is too quick, and there's little to choose between the teams -- they're all American. Baseball seems a small and dull game after cricket; and American football is silly. (One can get tired of watching Americans on the TV.)

But this is about the football World Cup. I'm loving it. Who could witness Germany-Poland and not think of history? Or Italy-anybody and not think about hairstyles? It's the underdogs that get my cheers and fist-pumps, but the best footballers are awe-inspiring no matter their colours: there's magic in their feet and networks in their brains. While the heroes are getting on with it, all parts of the mind are fed -- the animal portions with steroidal floods, and the rational bit with a flood of metaphor.

I regret not being able to enjoy playing sports. But watching them allows me to taste their cleansing fury, and the controlled delirium of the body unleashed.

Anon.

2006-04-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

(In response to a comment on the previous post.)

Thanks for that -- strange and valuable to hear an anonymous voice speaking wise words. That last post on 'truth' in poetry was in fact giving me sleepless nights, because of some of the very things you have said. In the first place, poetry does not sit entirely apart from other forms of what one might call art in seeking to capture and hold into stillness a fleeting state; and perhaps, since that state is subjective, yet can be shared, rather than truth in poetry one ought to speak of fidelity, or honesty or clarity; but these are all words that should be used as sparingly as possible.

It's also true that what one can share through poetry is one's vulnerability rather than some 'item' of truth. I think of it as a conversation between old friends, where words may be the medium, but one can nevertheless 'imagine' himself or herself into the mind or 'state' of the other. Not only is the poet seeking to expose himself, travelling well beyond his natural borders in search of absolution or confirmation in some sense, but so is the reader. One has to feel one's way through a poem, often even a fairly straightforward one, testing the ground every step of the way... So I think that somewhere in this exercise, some kind of truth is arrived at. Both writer and reader reveal something that is essentially themselves, and yet alike.

Every time I write a poem, usually motivated by some moment of clarity fitting to my state of mind and experience at the time, I find myself disappointed by my inability to represent the insight with fidelity. Because it seems to me that no matter how simple the realisation, it shatters into complexity the moment you prod it -- and how to gather all that into a few words? But the end-product, the poem as it stands when I give up on it, begins to become truthful by its very existence. And later I, even as author, have to feel my way through it for echoes of what brought those particular images to the top of the mind, just as perhaps a reader might. Are there poets who do not think visually?

Tangentially, I find that the great restraint that the effort for clarity and fidelity places on the words I use makes for fewer and shorter words and shorter lines and fewer lines altogether. So in that some kind of aesthetic is born. I just find it interesting upon reflection, and a mark of my poverty as a 'poet', that I lack the delicacy and staying power to spiral into a topic rather than, in panic, rush for the core of it in an attempt to make the capture.

Truth

2006-03-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

In my poorly-informed understanding, poetry is an attempt to write truth. Truth on the subjects of poetry is not possible to write in steady prose, because the subjects of poetry are the things that happen within the mind -- things of motion and variability, sensual rather than factual meaning. One might say that a good novel has the same subjects; of course it is true, and a novel can be full of poetry. This is because poetry works by seeking epiphany -- bringing the writer's and reader's minds into a temporary, even fleeting, alignment. In fact it is a sharing of visions, of inhabiting other minds, made possible by the recognition by the reader of the truth in the words because of his or her own experience, imagined experience or sympathy.

As for the poet, he or she has to struggle to be truthful, to distil into arrangements of words and pauses a recognisable facsimile of a vision or insight. In this task, the poet is aided by the immense depth that all words have, the great range of their content accreted with time and usage.

Few things can beat the tremendous rush of grace that comes with a great line. I still thrill at the first few lines of Eliot's 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (after the Italian), even though I don't understand all of the poem. It's all about potential. And here is a line from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who was persecuted by Stalin, quoted by the wonderful (and often poetic) Michael Dirda of the Washington Post's Book World. Shorn of its context, but presumably about her suffering.

'That was when the ones who smiled/Were the dead, glad to be at rest.'

Edges

2005-11-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

Curves are sensual -- but so are edges. A well-off friend of mine has just finished building an enormous house in a pleasant suburb. One of the many bedrooms, described vaguely as a 'children's bedroom', has a built-in double bed, with stumpy posts marking the lower corners. These posts are square, stand about a foot above the level of the bedcover, and, near the top, open out in a decorative feature that looks like an upside-down pyramid. The base of this pyramid is the upper surface of this decorative feature. The four edges, and the four corners, were carefully prepared by the carpenters, and are rather sharp. They are at the perfect height for me to puncture my kidneys on.

Unnerving to see such edgy design in a bedroom. But also strangely compelling, because while my mind was rebelling at the thought of what this shapely chunk of wood could do to some careless grandkid, I was also wondering why nobody else had seen the danger, and whether I was being a sissy about home safety. While the mind was thus ticking over, I was running my hands along the edges, savouring the unfamiliar sensation of good wood, well finished -- to an edge.

Some weeks ago we had a vastu consultant in to scope out our flat for malign influences. He was aghast that our dining table had square legs and a rectangular top, with corners. No, no, one must avoid outward-facing corners in home furniture -- they bring bad luck. Everything should be gracefully (and safely) curved. Chop off that angular headboard. Avoid black. Do something about that dangling beam.

Sure, sharp features at toe level can cause eye-watering pain, but I find I like to have some edges around. Most objects around us, including many items of furniture, are made of materials that just aren't so great so put one's hands on. Polished granite kitchen counter? Cold. Plywood cabinet? Tacky. Laminate table surface? It had to be glued on. Plastic chair? Yuck. No fun to tickle their curves.

But even the nastiest of these materials can have a perfectly competent edge. It helps my concentration to trace lines on my palm with whatever edge is around (the edge of the keyboard tray on this computer table): a distant echo of the wonderful frisson of running one's thumb down the blade of a knife. It's a delicious cohabitation of extremes -- the location of one's full being in the mind, where the thinking is being done and, at the same time, in the body, the skin of the fingertips. It's like being high.

Unglish

2005-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

As an English-speaking Indian, I am cut off from the free and uninhibited exercise of language. I know the tourist's Hindi, which allows me to function in the local market and perhaps half-chat with a friend. I can cuss, but without salt and spit. Hindi writing is a closed world; the written language is not as louche as the spoken one. It may be that the memory of a short story by the great Munshi Premchand (read in high school, painfully, word by word) survives to keep the door to the presumed universe of Hindi literature open just a sliver. But what's the point of that?

I know the dilettante's Italian -- enough to read by, and enough to miss nearly every nuance sensible to the adept. I can speak Italian to exchange information, but not to enlighten.

French: I read a bit, produce a pungent accent, but can't say 'Rachel' well enough to please a girl named Rachel.

Spanish: Okay, I struggled semi-successfully through a lengthy passage in sixteenth-century Castilian -- on the strength of my dilettante Italian.

Farsi: Grammar's a cinch, but my vocabulary is khaile khaile kochik. Not a sentence goes by in which every word is an old friend.

Arabic: Forgot it at an impressionable age.

Marathi: Forgot it ditto. And I have family who speak nothing else!

Punjabi: Alas, none. Living in Delhi.

Telugu: Wokkati, rendu... I spent nine academic years in rural Andhra Pradesh. Admittedly, at boarding school.

Urdu: A purely mechanical conoscenza; I can read the words... But Mirza Ghalib is clothed, when he is clothed at all, in coarse literalness. Who can show me what the big deal is about zulfein?

Wish I knew (in alphabetical order): Czech, French, Gaelic, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Ladakhi, Lakota, Latin, Marathi, Pashto, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Telugu, Turkish, Urdu, Welsh. Oh, Danish, after watching Babette's Feast. But why I wish I knew these languages, that's hard to figure out. (But not impossible, of course.)

And English. It is my first language -- my mother tongue, the vessel of what thoughts I have, the source of my livelihood and the engine of my imagination. These days, Indians have claimed it, parked their golden Sonatas and black Optras right on top of it, poked their flag into its balding crown. But that's no language, it's a happy muddle. You can't be subtle in Hinglish, unless you want to be subtly ridiculous.

Living in India, in my own land and history, breathing (when possible -- cough, cough, thhoo) my own air, surrounded by Bengalis, Mallus, Punjus, and other oo's, ee's, ites and wallas, I am a linguistic exile. The (real) English, Brits, Britishers or United Kingdomites speak and write (when they can do either) a language that is in their very hair roots. They get it genetically, from their grandparents. Americans speak American, with the speed of summer lightning (to borrow rudely from Henry Higgins). They are glib -- even too glib. But I'm an island. Not Simon & Garfunkel's rock, rather more like a muddy sandbank in a polluted river, into which many things have sunk, but few grown.

Carp

2005-09-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

Car ads are the bane of American TV. If it's an SUV, it's all about rough terrain and ghastly plushness. If it's not an SUV, it's either about price (for a cheap car like a Toyota) or about dishtun-tannun driving across what looks like a desert or salt flat, generating a cloud of dust to emphasise coolness and speed (this for a prestige model like an Infiniti). Eat my dust. Really very unsubtle and uninteresting.

While on Indian channels you have TV spots for ballpoint pens! Teacher tells students to use Add Gel pens for great exam performance! Culture shock! TV spots don't come cheap. Does this mean that ballpoint pens are making Indian corporates rich? Fascinating.

Frequently, American TV ads are about price: how cheaply you can have something. How much you can have. In a 30-second ad spot (say), there's not much time to be clever and memorable in describing the product's attributes and drill on about value for money. So mostly it's the money. D'you know -- even the cars in the ads are now all silver (if prestige) or beige (if economy). And black or red (if SUV). What happened to the bright colours: red, yellow, two-tone paint jobs? They are so out.

Which is why Indian TV ads are so much more entertaining. You have whole 'families' roped in to sell the brand of cooking masala which will give every dish its proper lurid hue. And you have the terrific Hutch phone ads -- network follows you everywhere like pug follows kid, a band of nicely-scrubbed kids plays a tune just for you on clarinets and saxes just like the tune of your choice announces that you have 1 New Message. The sepia tones, the Goan look, the small-town open faced kids -- clever.

(But Hutch, or Nokia?, has another ad for messages, with little envelopes hurrying around in a city, hopping into the skyscraper-phones with message beeps. That ad is completely without cultural content -- it could be anywhere, and was probably made for that reason. And therefore: boring.)

Amitabh Bachchan is a big reason for the charisma and watchability of TV ads these days, despite his two-tone hairpaint job. Why have a pen when you can have a Parker? Some American film actors do wonderfully in interviews or on talk shows -- I still remember with awe a conversation between George Clooney and the guy who used to do the BBC's Film '98 (or '97 or '99) -- but they're unconvincing when trying to sell you something on TV. Directly, I mean, not as lifestyle trendsetters. Can you imagine Robin Williams selling you a breakfast cereal? Or Uma Thurman, who eats by appointment only? Would Pierce Brosnan be able to sell you a ballpoint pen? (Now a $2,000 wristwatch, that's a different thing.) Tabu sells milk! That juvenile fellow with the hair... Shahid Kapoor, he sells anti-dandruff shampoo! Hooray! These guys are really working for our custom. I like it.

So, these days there's a new car out. A Hyundai, a Cabera or Salera or Calera, I really don't remember. In America Hyundai means Cheap, but Shiny. Here, MPs and businessmen want their Sonatas, preferably in gold. (For us real estate-minded Indians, it's all about how much road space your car occupies and the tone of your horn.)

The ad for this Cabera/Salera/Calera is an American-European ad. There's Albert Speer's 'cathedral of light' effect, what looks like European tunnel lighting passing over this shiny car surface, headlamps -- and then suddenly the regular prestige-segment desert sequence, with plenty of dust flying. Come on, yaar... Let's see a feature like a sliding roof (completely useless in India) made into a Karva Chauth must-have. (That's the Optra. Awful name.)

It's a harbinger of a deadly dull trend.

Way back about ten years ago when Delhi had its first, big, international auto fair, and I touched a Rolls for the first time, cars were exciting. Perhaps it was just post-adolescent car pangs, but I really breathed harder, dreaded and desired, at every turn inside the caverns of Pragati Maidan. I went several times, and always worshipped at the Rolls stand. In a very pure, non-acquisitive way, may I add, just for the love of beauty (and the related manly virtues of wealth and power) and unattainability. It was a fever of urgent need and fulfilment. Yikes.

We seemed to be on the threshold of a world of impromptu nobility -- the pleasure of observing a bright yellow Mercedes SLK, with the top down, while swaying in the bus on the way to college. Just like that.

The British newspapers, the regular broadsheets, have wonderful, slightly wonky weekly automobile sections. I used to read them all, as my mum got them from her office. Quite apart from realising that English can actually be found in newspapers, I was introduced to a whole new world of aesthetics. Whole sections on the Arts. Whole sections on real estate -- grand old houses for £2.5 million. (Barns! Conversions!)

Part of this whole squirming with pleasure at the beauty of 'items' was those weekly automobile sections. The thorough car reviews: I had no idea a car owner could be so fussy, find so many criteria by which to measure a model, set such high standards. The most niggling little things. Precisely how convenient the little finger hook was for pulling down a rear seat. Whether one's eighty-year-old granny could do it unassisted. And the antique cars, the tradition of unembarrassed devotion to authenticity. The fabulous articles by the families of four who drove from Nottingham to Tehran in their caravans. Ridiculous, improbable, terribly cool.

So, surrounded by Fiats, Ambassadors, Maruti 800s and Gypsies, all nice enough in their own way, I was absorbed in this mental world of the aesthetics and pleasure of automobile machinery with a history. People and the car. Civilisation and the car. Regardless of the doltish people who sat in the back seats of Mercedes' on Delhi's roads, some of whom are my own neighbours.

But then I went to America and realised that it's just another place -- a nice place in some ways, of course, especially as it contains so many of my friends -- and that cars are just cars. You pay more, you get more. You can't pay much, you still get a car. There was so little culture associated with the car -- culture in the sense of a reflective pleasure in the object along with its history. Certainly I didn't meet the right sort of people (although there was a cool woman graduate student colleague, skinny with greying hair, who had one beat-up old pickup truck and a Harley Davidson). But the object itself was so ubiquitous and so standardised that it had ceased to exist in the imagination of most people. So it died in mine.

Back in Delhi, it fades further every morning and evening on my way to and from work. I have a short commute, half an hour and only four traffic lights, but -- to drive in this city is to learn to hate your fellow citizens. It is to doubt the idea of citizenship altogether. I'm convinced that the way one drives reflects one's true nature. We Delhiites (no longer Dilliwale) are, by and large, a venal, greedy, cowardly, aggressive, slavish, mean-minded, shitty predictable lot. We deserve each other.

The only thing that saves me from total automobile disillusionment these days is the Car Stereo. Radio in the morning (for oldies, classic rock), and audio-cassettes on the way home: Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Italian pop, Phantom of the Opera, Simon and Garf... You can create your own space this way, and are in a better frame of mind to follow your Delhi driving maxim: Take No Panga.

Capture

2005-09-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Les Quatre Cents Coups. Absolutely wonderful. One really gets stuck to movies like that -- in which you recognise something of yourself, as is or as would be. There's Antonioni's La Notte, too, watching which I fell in love with Jeanne Moreau, in that scene where she walks out of the house and keeps walking, without direction, with nothing before her but the next step. It really shook my bones. I partook of that emptiness, resented it, and wanted to fill it.

Fellini's 8½: towards the end, when they're putting up that giant scaffolding. I couldn't write what it means to me without being embarrassingly trite; it may be just enough to say that the notion of a giant framework -- flimsy in itself and made of flimsy materials, but making a solid and substantial shape -- reaches the core of my clumsy, architectural heart.

Inconsequentially, but quite naturally, one thing (in film, in the head) leads to another (in real life, in the head): so that one doesn't quite know what to make of one's own life, whether there's a shape in one's scaffolding (if you stand far enough to see the whole) or whether one is walking through a city that is familiar but whose bodies resist capture. Like driving a sieve through water. What is retained, and what of that is important? Only that which isn't forgotten? All of it?

Open to impression, closed to reality: infinitely vulnerable.

Rain

2005-04-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

It's been hot the past few days, and dusty. Today was also a hot day, and dusty. Tonight, right now, there is a cool breeze, a little, coy breeze, dithering about, and I have my window flung open to catch it. This means rain. This is the exquisite pleasure of Delhi weather -- anticipating change. It will rain, and be gray, cool and colours will come to life. The next day it will be hot again, and terribly muggy. Afa is what they call it in Italy.

It is hot; it will be hot again; it will stay hot for many days after. But in between, there will be one evening of rain. What more could one ask for?

Dust

2005-04-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

Flee fly flow phlegm is the grumble in every corner of my office these days. Tissues are brought to noses like clockwork. Most women blow quietly and guiltily, most men... Well, with men things happen in the throat rather than the nose, it seems. Unfortunately there's no part of my respiratory tract which doesn't grigger and fritch, so I snort, croak and wheeze. Much worse when people smoke in our enclosed room. Bad also when Delhi has its dust days -- the air goes brown and the car is hard to pick out against all the construction rubble by the end of the day. I almost expect to see camels swirling down with the dust.

Is it a worthwhile business proposition to collect dust and use it for insulation material? After all, there is, improbably, a material called 'rock wool', and it's used for insulation. There's big money in it. Delhi gets millions of tons of dust from Rajasthan every year -- free, like the air transport. Can money be made off something that nobody wants?

Idle

2005-04-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but I really enjoy watching American Idol. The music is execrable, the people by and large dull, but it's a reality show without the visceral awfulness. Unlike Fear Factor, which AXN shows at mealtimes. And even those travel shows -- um, the Great Race? -- where they put unsuspecting couples through the gruelling routine of a round-the-world race, stress race, and they end up exasperated with each other. Painful to watch.

Happily for my peace of mind, I don't have favourites in the Idol race. That Bo Bice is genuine cool. So's that blonde country-style singer girl Carrie. One of the women has a remarkably big hairstyle. One of the men comes on to his female fan base every second he's on the screen.

The best part of Idol, the only reason to watch the show at all, is the roadshow that starts each season, where the long-suffering 'judges' select from among a hundred thousand aspirants, and we get to see the 'most' ones (most ridiculous, most ugly, most deluded, most pathetic, most guaranteed tear-jerker, etc.) on TV for free. Yuck and yahoo.

Grotton

2005-03-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

Recipe for a successful shirt: Cotton, full sleeves, light, plain or discreetly funky, no stiff scrapey collar, no shimmer, no shine, no iridescence, no tags and toggles, cuffs that don't feel like handcuffs. Such a shirt can have a long happy life from brash youth to comfortable middle age and ultimately retirement as a duster-cloth. Useful and well-loved to the last wipe.

Problem: No such item available at any reasonable price. Here in my third-world country, a nice, normal cotton shirt costs from $20 to $100. That's for one shirt. In a first-world country, you can buy really nice shirts at $10 each.

This is the new consumerism of India: Many chain stores, small variety. The shelves have to be full and colourful; the stores have to give the illusion of size and comprehensiveness. Actual content (quality and depth of range) will come later. If everyone carries the same stuff, the populace will have to buy it.

I was sitting in a mall food court sipping a green apple mint juice (medium size, $1 -- fifty rupees) with my father (cuppa cardboard tea, $0.55, twenty-five rupees), and he said, this is all maya. Above us, some men were fixing the glass roof and watching all the oblivious eating. In a rich country, the trickery is not quite so obvious, as the illusion is nearly all-pervasive. It's harder to see around the edges.

Maya follows you everywhere in Delhi. It is a city where power is money, where business, political, media and NGO entrepreneurs take pride in the quality of their illusions. I don't insist that people in decades past were more innocent or more grounded, although I suspect that they were. But the eagerness, the inability to see anything but the illusion, among children and adults -- this is frightening. The making of children into shoppers, this is disastrous. Children are acquisitive by nature, but why should a dubious three-year-old be told by her parents that those shiny red slippers really suit her, they're very cool, others are wearing them, they look good on her?

And this furious hunger for 'lifestyle' is not even leavened with intelligent cynicism and self-critical humour. Someone cool should be telling us that it's not cool to be nothing but cool. Plenty of people are thinking about the future of India -- economists, so-called defence analysts, so-called urban planners, of course politicians. Nobody cool is thinking about the future of Indians. Nobody knows, and nobody investigates, what it means to be Indian.

We have, or will soon have, most of the forms of a rich society. But not all of us, and not at the same time. Will somebody else be doing our thinking for us then?

Falcophilia

2005-03-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

Once you get into Rome, it's hard to get out. If it's not Suetonius wth his gossip, it's Julius Caesar with his Ides and et tu Brute; it is aqueducts and Asterix; Mark Antony and Liz Taylor; the Circus Maximus and Russell 'Maximus' Crowe; I, Claudius and Caligula's orgies. The fasces and the fascists and the American eagle, e pluribus unum and so forth. I was foolish enough to ask a professor once why exactly the Romans meant so much to early modern Europe. Quite a silly question if you have any idea at all of European history. Rome is about as cool as it gets, in the 15th century or the 8th or the 21st: the rich are appalling (the Satyricon), the poor are numerous, human beings are property, democracy is wedded to power and money and panem et circenses, the government mind encompassed interstate highways and absurd walls between civilised and barbarian, there are lobbies and mafias, odd sects and Christians, bad wine and novelty foods, limitless piped water and plumbing that kills slowly -- all signs of a superbly successful civilisation. It sounds so damn modern. All of us are Romans; we all live in different districts of Rome. This means that it is hard to know Rome as it 'really' was.

So when you're done with Suetonius, go read Lindsey Davis' detective novels/spy thrillers/romances, called the Falco series. They are set in Vespasian's Rome (AD 70s) and various provinces. Marcus Didius Falco, a delator (private informer), is the lowlife scum with dingy morals but honest heart, a quick mind, sharp tongue, and a great deal of experience in dealing with other lowlife scum, who is the narrator in these novels. Falco, as he is called, also has a girlfriend/partner who is a senator's daughter and is even more strong-willed and stubborn than her plebeian lover.

The story, exciting as it always is, is not all there is to these books. You cannot write a decent historical novel unless you are thoroughly familiar with life in your chosen period. (I keep wishing for a Latin translation of the spoken dialogues.) In this, I trust Lindsey Davis -- and, in addition to being a habitual doubter, I am a history student who is very prissy about 'it couldn't possibly have been that way, you worthless ulloo ka pattha'. Watching the History channel and all those crummy Nat Geo/Discovery 'reconstructions' gives me indigestion (apoplexy, even). I wish I could aspire to such mastery, so lightly worn. Then I, too, would write a historical novel, set in Mughal Delhi.

(But go see Davis' website and she comes across as a bit of a supercilious know-it-all. Authors [and professors] ought not to have websites named after themselves. It's just not decorous.)

I regret my local library has only a patchy sampling of the Falco books (there are fourteen thus far, I think). But because of Falco, I've gone back to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Robert Graves' Count Belisarius, and am wistfully thinking of my copies of Tacitus' Germania and Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, old Latin textbooks, Greek plays, etc., all sitting in someone's basement in a distant place.

Recognition

2005-03-12T22:57:00.000-08:00

From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (trans. Maxwell Staniforth):

'Fix your thought closely on what is being said, and let your mind enter fully into what is being done, and into what is doing it.'

Every once in a while, in exhaustion or in ecstasy, a truth like this will spit forth. It may come in words; it may come in an image; it may come as an intuition, a congruence; however it is dressed, it will come. Essentially, you know that you are both alone and not alone. That nothing you do is important, and that everything you do is critically important. That the instantaneous present is where the world is to be found, that the past is where the world is to be found, that the future is where the world is to be found; that the past, future and present actually coexist; that there is no then and now. You are your ancestors and descendants both. Pretty tame insights, yes, except when they fit mind and circumstance. Wisdom is a process of recognition.