Graham Greene Wanted Tickets to “A Massacre in the Punjab”

Greene is my favourite author. I have really liked some of his books: The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, The Quiet American, Travels with My Aunt, The End of the Affair, The Other Man.

Greene was a complex character. Paul Theroux says:"...Greene was insecure, needy, insatiable, interested in variation and always willing to have a go...this compulsive sexuality seemed to shape the pattern of his life, his travel, his fictional subjects and his faith. Obsessive and easily bored, he was incapable of being sexually faithful to any woman. He reveled in being a wanderer, an eavesdropper, a stranger. His sexuality both depressed him and relieved his gloom. It damned him in his own faith, made him a sinner and filled him with remorse, made him say things such as ''I've been a bloody fool'' and ''I've betrayed very many people in my life'' and ''I wish I didn't have so much to be remorseful about.''..." (NYT, October 17, 2004)


India hardly figures in his books. On Jan 4 2009, I learnt why.

Pankaj Mishra has reviewed “GRAHAM GREENE/ A Life in Letters /By Edited by Richard Greene” (NYT Jan 4, 2009)Mishra writes:

“…In August 1947, a few months into an affair with Catherine Walston, the American wife of a Labor M.P., Greene planned a trip with her to India, which was then in the midst of a bloodbath set off by the British decision to divide the country along religious lines. “If we get to India,” he wrote to Walston, with whom he had recently taken a more sedate holiday in Ireland, “it will be odd — the exciting thing in exciting company. I have a feeling that even being in a massacre in the Punjab (I enclose a good account of one) won’t really be as exciting as sitting on a cliff watching for salmon.”

This assignation in the midst of mass murder didn’t come off. Richard Greene (no relation), the editor of this volume, gives no explanation. In any case, salmon-spotting was not Greene’s thing…

...“When we are young,” Fowler says in “The Quiet American,” “we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” This was certainly true of Greene, whose letters in later life show him becoming a first-class tourist to revolutions: “Now I’m off to Nicaragua (as the guest of the Sandinista government) to light a small fire under the fool Reagan.” Though covering a vast period of personal and public turmoil, “Graham Greene: A Life in Letters” traces, quite astonishingly, no refining of sensibility and intelligence. The increasingly exotic settings merely underscore how the mind of this most famous of Englishmen abroad was fundamentally never really broadened — and may have been narrowed — by travel.
”

If they were just dogs getting slaughtered in the ring, Greene wasn’t interested!


The New Yorker

TV Reporters to Wield Sword-Mikes

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, a media consultant, observed in Business Standard on December 30, 2008:

“…several Hindi films have been adding a television crew and a reporter to their stock of scenes. Often the reporter is a bimbo, asks silly questions and falls for whatever is fed to her. Don’t blame the films, they are just taking popular perception and adding it to the script, as they have for years.

If content is the heart of the news business, then media owners and editors need to start worrying about what they should be doing to fix the reputation of the people generating it. It took businessmen three decades to move out of the frame as villains. God knows how long journalists will take.”



Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker, 5 Jan 2009, Cartoon Caption Contest 175

My caption:

“We decided to make some changes after Mumbai attacks. New amphibious suit will enable our reporter to jostle her way in air, water or ground and shove this sword-mike into any face."

Samuel Huntington’s Crystal Ball

What does year 2009 hold for us?

The father of “The Clash of Civilizations” Samuel Huntington has just died more than fifteen years after he wrote it.

I have just finished reading William Dalrymple’s book “White Mughals” (2002).

I loved the tragic tale but don’t agree with the author's inference: “…As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa shows, East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have mingled in the past; and they will do so again.”

Mingling is fine but anything more I have my doubts. Dalrymple has not produced strong enough evidence in five hundred plus pages to convince me otherwise.

Fouad Ajami attacked Huntington’s “The clash” in 1993.

“… I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. “The things and ways that the West took to ‘the rest,’” I wrote, “have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.” I had questioned Huntington’s suggestion that civilizations could be found “whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.” Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey…”

Fifteen years later, Ajami would say: “…Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time.

…And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.”

In 2008 we certainly saw riches depreciating and Indo-Pak 'love' growing stale and in Samuel Huntington’s crystal ball our future contains more pain than that just coming from ulcerated tooth.


Artist: Alain, The New Yorker, 7 March 1936

Let Ajmal Amir Kasab Stay in the Hell of an Indian Jail

Debate is raging in India on the subject of terrorist Kasab’s entitlement to legal assistance.

If Nathuram Godse नथुराम गोडसे- the killer of Mahatma Gandhi- was entitled to a lawyer and a 'grand' speech (the speech that still motivates Hindu extremists), why not Kasab?

Ram Jethmalani has the most interesting take.

He says: “…If I had been a judge I would not sentence Kasab to death for a different reason. It is only by remaining in the hell of an Indian jail that he would realise that what the Mullahs told him is false.

Long stay in an Indian prison will detoxify him of all the superstitions and illusions instilled into him. Those who did it surely deserve a sentence of death if caught.”

This sounds like the Hindi film villain Ajit’s rationale on why someone should be thrown in the tank of liquid oxygen: Liquid will not let him live, oxygen will not let him die!

Hell indeed comes in many forms.


‘I never expected hell to be as bad as this.’


The Spectator

Nandan Nilekani: Samyukta Maharashtra Movement = “Rioting and Protests”

First it was Nana Patekar नाना पाटेकर equating Samyukta Maharashtra movement संयुक्त महाराष्ट्र चळवळ with Raj Thackeray’s recent activities.

Now, it is Nandan Nilekani who says:

“…Jawaharlal Nehru proposed that Bombay become a separate, bilingual area, but the rioting and protests that ensued forced him to back down, and the city became part of Maharashtra. Since then, Indian cities have been passive and subordinate to the state governments. The bulk of city taxes are collected by the state and central governments and administration is dominated by state-run agencies…”

(Times of India, December 13, 2008)

Instead of holding political leaders, top civil servants, and many private sector parties responsible for the decay of Mumbai, Mr. Nilekani finds faults with Samyukta Maharashtra movement, the movement that most think was responsible for the city becoming part of Maharashtra.

This is very unfortunate dumbing down of history. We are being trained for more and more simplification as the world becomes more and more complicated.

If historian Y D Phadke य दि फडके were to be alive-he has been dead for almost a year now- I would have recommended Mr. Nilekani a visit to him.


'Could you dumb it down?’



The Spectator

Prescribing Drugs to Win the Worm

Rema Nagarajan, Times of India, December 15, 2008:

“Are your drugs boosting your doc’s lifestyle?:

A platinum coupon if you prescribe drug `X' to 10 patients. A gold coupon if you prescribe brand `Y' to 25 patients. The more coupons you get, the greater your chances of winning. The prizes: cars, frost-free refrigerators, television sets, digital cameras and silver coins.

If you knew your doctor was a contestant for these prizes, how confident would you feel that what has been prescribed to you is what you need, not what improves his chances in the contest?…”




Artist: Harry Bliss, The New Yorker, December 22, 2008, Cartoon Caption Contest # 174

My caption:

“Oh it’s you – friendly medical rep…you followed me even here... OK, which unnecessary and expensive drugs do I have to prescribe to win that giant worm?”

What did Ministers carry from the Office after they were Fired?

In the wake of terrorist attacks on Mumbai, three ministers and zero civil servants have been fired.


Artist: Tom Cheney, The New Yorker, December 15 2008, Cartoon Caption Contest 173

My caption:

“I never thought I would need a trolley to carry the chits I received from my part chief advising me on diverse matters such as transfers of civil servants, manipulation of evidence, selective burning of files, snooping on his political opponents, collection of party funds, promotion of his children’s careers, protection of land mafia..."

Nanasaheb Peshwa (1720 – 1761) and Mumbai Attacks (2008)

(There are a number of entries on this blog on Shivaji, Panipat 1761, T S Shejwalkar. Nanasaheb Peshwe. You can search it to reach them.)

William Faulkner: “The past is not dead; it is not even past.”

If I were India’s navy chief, November 26, 2008 would be one of the saddest days in my life. Only on November 20, 2008, “Indian warship sinks Somali pirate vessel in the Gulf of Aden” was FT’s most ready story. Indian navy was darling of the international and local media.

Sea is a great leveler.

My first thought after hearing about the Mumbai attacks on the morning of 27th November: India’s vulnerability from the sea-borne invaders has changed little since medieval times

Robert D. Kaplan has put it well: “…the tragedy has caused the world to focus on India’s weaknesses — its lax security, its vulnerability to age-old maritime infiltration and, most of all, the constant threat of caste and tribal violence — that have been obscured by its economic success…” (NYT December 8, 2008)

Notice: “India's vulnerability to age-old maritime infiltration.” Exploiting that, Europeans entered, looted, and ruled India.

Since the dawn of 17th century, Shivaji शिवाजी was perhaps the only Indian ruler who understood the importance of an effective navy. But Peshwas- his successors- were not that wise

T S Shejwalkar त्र्यंबक शंकर शेजवलकर and his classic “Panipat 1761 पानिपत 1761” will continue to remain relevant –even prophetic- as long as volatile situation prevails in South Asia. After analysing contemporary actors of 18th century India and Afghanistan, he has blamed Mahatma Gandhi- for whom he had enormous respect- and J L Nehru for not learning from Panipat.

Shejwalkar has pilloried Nanasaheb Peshwe- who also was a principal actor in 1761- for destroying the Maratha navy created by Shivaji. Read scanned image- given below- of a passage from Shejwalkar’s essay: “Nanasaheb Peshwe नानासाहेब पेशवे” (1925).

("निवडक लेखसंग्रह" त्र्यंबक शंकर शेजवलकर; परिचय गं दे खानोलकर "Selected Articles” by Tryambak Shankar Shejwalkar 1977 introduction: G D Khanolkar)

Has modern Indian state learnt enough from Shivaji (1630-1680) when it comes to self-defense? Or is Shivaji there only to be abused for waging wars against fellow Indians?

Priyanka Chopra Wins 23rd Vodafone Pune International Marathon!

I was used to seeing a picture of the winner of a race- waving or showing victory sign- especially when it was splashed on the front page of a newspaper that was borne in one of the foremost regions of India when it comes to sports (Vijay Hazare to Veerdhaval Khade).

Therefore, looking at following picture in Marathi news daily Pudhari पुढारी, I concluded that Priyanka Chopra was the winner of 23rd Vodafone Pune International Marathon that was run on December 7, 2008.

After all in India, there is no limit to what cine-tv-stars, politicians in power and cricketers can achieve.

Reviewing Dietmar Rothermund's account of India for Spectator, WILLIAM LEITH says:

“…India’s media is heading for ad-backed celebrity hell faster, and more comprehensively, than ours (UK’s)…”



Pudhari December 8 2008

p.s. If you read Marathi, notice the sloppiness of the copy above Ms. Chopra. It does not even mention full names of the winners.

Why and when did we reach here?

Painless to the Criminal and Terrible to the Beholder?

Laxmibai Tilak’s लक्ष्मीबाई टिळक Smritichitre स्मृतिचित्रे (Memory-pictures) 1934 is one of the best books written in Marathi.

It opens with a devastating event for the family. In an act of John Company's terrorism, her mother’s father is hanged by the British after the revolt/war/mutiny of 1857. This drives her father crazy resulting into disastrous consequences for her family.

I wish I could get to read the story of Laxmibai’s grandfather. She says he enjoyed the trust of poor and was loved by the town’s (Jalalpur जलालपूर)
residents.

There is very little documentation of that period available, in easily accessible Marathi sources. The only exception is “Maza pravas” by Godse Bhataji माझा प्रवास, गोडसे भटजी.

GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT writes in his review of “THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 1781-1997” By Piers Brendon (NYT Books Update on November 23, 2008):

“…The growing realm in India was a corporate enterprise, literally so, run by “John Company,” as the East India Company was known, until what Indians no longer call the Indian Mutiny. This was put down with the most horrifying brutality by the British, raising not for the first time the question of who were the “savages” and who the civilized…”

I have always found darkest humour in following description of the event that took place much before 1857.

“Elphinstone did not hesitate to order the (Brahmin) ringleaders (of a plot to murder all the Europeans in Pune) to be blown from guns, observing that this method of execution ‘contains two valuable elements of capital punishment; it is painless to the criminal and terrible to the beholder’.” (Philip Mason. “Men Who Ruled India”)



'Due to staff cutbacks...'

The Spectator