Reading something that you wrote a long time ago can be either like meeting an old friend you always liked after a long time or like meeting an old lover. An unrestrained aha or a restrained awkwardness.

But both have something in common that time stands still for a second. That things have changed stare at you in the face. You notice new wrinkles near her eyes. He is on a fast forward to paunched middle agedness.

But you are surprised as to how much things have not actually changed. She still laughs the same, throwing her head back, and squinting her eyes and still talks of issues at her work as if there is some big conspiracy. His bad and mostly lewd jokes have gotten worse but you still can't resist laughing at them.

But whether it is aha on finding you agree more or an eek on finding you no longer do, what the reading of old and the meeting of old does is that both allows you to look back at you and how you were and how you are now.

And that is something precious in the daily shallowness of life which tends to seep in no matter what.

Here are four entries dating from years ago to now. Earliest ones are from the time when I didn't even have this blog and hence was sent in a group mail to my friends (and are frankly boring :-) ).

(lst_pst4) Sara Joseph's trilogy - Aalahayude Penmakkal, Matathy, Othappu

 Recently written.

Great art replenishes the soul. Half the joy of great art is the realization that you are in the process of enjoying one. My favorite genre of art, if it can be called that, is literature and the least favorite are the various moving picture variants. It is just a personal taste and can undoubtedly be a personal bias and a prejudice even.

  One, perhaps not enough acknowledged, fact about great art is that it is very rare. Still. There is a wrong assumption that due to the so called democratization of the tools, great art is now common.
 
  Not true.
 
  In fact, what democratization has done is that it has caused a deluge in the mediocre to good range and it is even tougher to find the 'great' ones from the bunch. Even some of the many hyped booker winners, while above average, and some even maybe closing on 'good, are not that special.
 
 I recently read a trilogy of books from Sara Joseph which undoubtedly is among the best literature I have read in a long, long time and would undoubtedly qualify as great.
 
 I should admit that though it was recommended highly to me, I was circumspect as I had found Ms.Joseph's 'social activism' pretty much all over the place, sort of reactionary and not well thought out. Sort of Arundhati Royish. Whatever that is, her literature is just great.
 
 They are written with such skill, such deft control over the language, with such humanity and with such deep understanding and empathy of the female psyche and soul that I don't think any man could have written that.
 
 Aalahayude Penmakkal, the most lyrical of the trio is the story of Annie, a six year old from Kokkanchira, a slum and a scavenger-colony on the outskirts of  Thrissur. The fears, the dreams, the hopes and the innocence of a six year old girl is expressed as beautifully as is the complex society with its adult inhabitants around her and in the same beautiful and original language, a dialect that Ms.Sara Joseph skillfully recreates.

 Matathy, the most sensitive of the trio, is the story of a young girl Susie who works as a maid in her aunt's house. It goes through the whole period in her life as she grows into a young woman. Her struggle to survive and her fierce determination to live a happy life in a world which doesn't care for her, which doesn't want her and which is openly abusive of her is written with such mastery and skill that would perhaps make this the most touching of the trio.

 Othappu, perhaps the most brooding one, is the story of Margaleetha. The content is scandal worthy and I am surprised why none of the super stupid organizations which abound in kerala have not asked for its banning. Margaleetha is the young nun who decides that the life she lives is a farce and that she can't pretend to like it like others seem to. She defrocks herself and shocks the society around her, her own family and even her lover who is not strong enough to take such a step. The struggles both within her and those she has to wage with the outside world bent on destroying her points at the costs and the integrity needed for non-conformism.

 Brilliant, wonderful.
 Highly recommended.

(lst_pst3) Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising

Written months ago. A wee bit rude frankly. Michael Moore-ish about Michael Moore. Anyway, not letting it lying around.

Micheal Moore is fat and ugly as is his new so-called documentary. Yes, that is a stupid ad-hominem attack, but stupid ad-hominem attacks should be morally justified on stupid people who survive on stupid ad-hominem attacks and double cheese burgers. Full disclosure - I loove double cheese burgers and I too tip the scale a bit nowadays.

It can be argued that there still exists one reason you should still watch his newest exercise in pomposity, Slacker Uprising. About 110 minutes into it, a breathtakingly pretty 67-year old woman - Joan Baez, sings the beautiful national anthem of Finland. Maan, Steve Jobs has incredible taste, not just in technology. Wink, wink.

Michael Moore calls himself a filmmaker. Hey, he's an Oscar winner dammit. But he completely lacks something any good artist should have - integrity and intelligence.

Okay, two things.

Slacker Uprising is a 'documentary' about a 'documentary'.  The documentary inside the doc is Fahrenheit 9/11 which he had made in 2004.

In Fahrenheit 9/11 there is a remarkable scene - Neo Con Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz is standing before a camera, ready to go on air. He suddenly realizes he can look a bit cooler. He produces a comb from somewhere, wets it by giving it a good slurpy lick and then combs what remains of his hair. Moore took this bit of video and made it a part of his film.

Yes, it was as grotesque as it sounds.

First of all, in Wolfowitz's defense, saliva is perhaps the only bodily fluid he could produce in such short notice. Even if he could produce any other fluid, perhaps saliva is also the cleaner one. But all of that is a hygiene issue that should be a concern only to Mr. Wolfowitz's wife.

Showing something like this (and this is just one grotesque example) is not just something which shows poor taste. By showing this Moore did a most despicable violation of artistic integrity.

If you are going to do a polemic and critique of someone's politics, it is NOT fair game to take an out of context and inconsequential thing like this and use it to pander and slander and mock and then expect to be taken seriously.

Moore carries on in the same vein in this documentary about that documentary. While the documentary lacked more in the integrity department/requirement the documentary about the documentary is shockingly lacking in intelligence.

The whole content of the document can be surmised as 'Michael Moore the great hero fights for the pussy democrats against the evil republicans. People love him, people loooooooooovvvvve him. And he is winning; he is changing the tide on George W. Bush, almost single-handedly. Did I say people love him... hey, he even declines to sign on the boobies of a chick who pleads with hero Michael to do it.

After an hour plus of the same thing the hero Michael fails but not unheroically. He managed to make the pussy Kerry win in all the 68 places he goes to and among the slackers who are his audience. Phew if not for him...

Well, there is a law of human nature which can be stated thus - you are 'liberal' about your girlfriend but you are conservative about your daughter ie you want your girlfriend to 'fool around' with you but the same you will later want to cut the balls off any guy who will fool around with your daughter. Michael Moore's politics or his intelligence is not sophisticated enough to understand something as nuanced as this.

For Moore, everything is a conspiracy against his 'team' who is always right. It is sad in its own way.

He should read Jefferson.

Anyway here is the short analysis.

Pretty women who can sing beautifully are good. Middle aged, ugly, pompous men are bad.
Or
not worth the bandwidth required to download it.

(lst_pst2) The 2005 British Elections

Before coming here, I never knew there was a major third party in Britain. The Liberal Democrats trace their roots to the Liberal Party which once held power in the latter part of 1800s. Their history is of challenging the crown and one of Keynesian economics.

In the 90s, after the young Tony Blair re-branded the old left wing 'Labour Party' to 'New Labour' and moved it to the center, the Liberal democrats were left without a political space as all their major policies were now Labour's. They themselves admit that they are left of old labour and right of new labour. But they have now come back strongly due to the strong anti-Iraq war sentiment. They got the highest number of seats that any third party had got from 1929.

The British economy is doing very well. And it is the fear of the public of not wanting to upset that apple cart that really put back Tony Blair to power. Blair is no longer as popular as he was, but remains a brilliant communicator and a great campaigner. In the last days of the campaign his only message was 'if you don't vote for me, you will get a Tory government'. That got the British frightened enough to go and vote for him.

The heir-apparent, Gordon Brown, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Finance Minister) is actually senior to Blair in the Party and is expected to carry the New Labour a little bit more leftward. In fact, he never uses the term 'new labour' and sticks with 'The Labour Party'.

After the French and Dutch electorate's snub to the changed EU constitutional vote, their leaders could not agree on the EU budget and the summit ended with the French calling the British names. The French seems to be living in another century. The politico-cultural attitude which thinks farm subsidies should make up 40% of the EU budget and in which a glamorous poet who has never fought an election can be made the goddamn prime minister does make it look like 'an assisted living facility with Turkish nurses' as Tom Friedman pointed out.

(lst_pst1) Lila by Robert Pirsig

(written long time ago - 19 Jun 2005 1 am as per text)

Lila is a sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig develops a complete and integrated philosophy-metaphysics in it - the Metaphysics of Quality. A book like this takes time to settle down. In my experience it is in the second and sometimes the third reading that I can say, I have learned and abstracted from such books. I am writing this after my first read itself. I think soon, I will tend to disagree with much if not most of this.

I am writing this just after seeing a movie 'All the President's Men' at 1 o'clock in the night of the 19th of June 2k5. The movie deals with the Watergate scandal. And something which has again caught on the public imagination as the 'Deep Throat' has revealed himself. The film stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the two young Washington Post reporters who unearthed the scam of the Republican committee for the Re-election of President Richard Nixon tapping the phones and spying on the Democrats.

Robert Redford is someone who appears in the book.

Redford, for the uninitiated is a Hollywood superstar who has made three generations of American women go weak in their knees. He is an Oscar winning director, a traditional supporter of the Democrats and a staunch environmentalist. (He had even threatened to emigrate from America if George W. Bush won his re-electing bid.- don't know what happened to that).

One of Redford's biggest hits was 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)'. Redford's plain speaking cowboy would obtain cult status. Pirsig 'uses' Redford to explain two things - the plain-speaking American male characteristic and 'celebrity-hood' in the modern society.

He says and with not little anthropological evidence that the American white frontier man's plain speaking characteristic is derived from the American Indian. The way that an American male views a European - 'all flair and no substance', is the same way that the American male is viewed by an American Indian. And the way that the American male is viewed by a European 'uncivilized' is the same that the American male views the Indian.

That celebrity business is another whole phenomenon that's related to Indian-European conflict of values. Pirsig says its a peculiarly American phenomenon to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them. At their feet and then at their throat. He thought the reason was that in America you're supposed to be socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian at the same time. It doesn't matter that these goals are contradictory.

(not quite) The last post

Seems eons ago that this blog became a part of my life, though it is not that old. I intended it to be a place where I could grok on stuff, to try to understand the world , to know what I really think and indeed whether I do think at all. It has always been about me and what I think and not any place to discuss or to engage.

It seems it has run the course.
In a lot of ways, time seems right to end it.

The next one will be the last post.

Thanks for reading and I hope reading me has helped you a wee bit.

teck.in and anandtranslated will be more active in the mean while.

My fav 10 among my own :-)

• Flip-flopping on anonymity
• On Sport ...and (a bit) on reality TV
• How I figured it all out yesterday
• Geometry of Death 
• Antara Mali, me, my Ape problem 
• Premature Optimization or watz your Dip 
• Before you push that button 
• An open letter to the South African cricket team 
• Shame... 
• The Taxi Drivers 

The myth and truth of a balanced life

Too much God in his country - On the religious radicalization of Kerala

 In his 'The Afghan', a so called 'thriller' intended as a beach-read for a post-9/11 western audience, Frederick Forsyth mentions the unnoticed radicalization of Muslim youth in a place called 'Kerala' in south India. Indeed, two 'terrorists' in the never ending and forever winding plot are two impoverished boys, gulf immigrants' from there.

One should indeed be happy that not many people seem to have read it in my homeland, else we would have been bombasted with essays as to how the thriller writer is yet another pawn in 'anti-islamic American imperialism' and a purveyor of 'neo-liberal globalization.' Most probably, they would have appeared in a Jamaat-e-Islami magazine (which, I also have to admit sometimes contains very well written stuff), but could also have appeared in more 'progressive' ones.

Swami Vivekanandan, who, in a cruel twist of fate, has turned into an icon for the hindutva movement, had once called Kerala an asylum, commenting on the practices of the caste system of his day. But the progressive movements that would sweep through the land at the beginning and during the middle of the last century, some linked with the national movement and some not, would change, improve and indeed make it a livable place.

All that is at stake now.

How do I know and who am I to say ? Err, nobody other than a citizen who keeps his eyes open and tries to be intellectually honest.

The signs are absolutely everywhere.

The Hindutva forces are fast acquiring acceptance in the mainstream discourse, despite their lack of electoral success and extremist Islam is rapidly finding acceptance among the impressionable, mostly poor Muslim youth.

Meanwhile the mainstream left is still debating grammar and treats dissent with its version of stalinism while the wimpy center aka the Congress is still waiting for instructions from the 'high command'.

While the Hindutva forces, esp. the RSS has always been there, electoral success too has always eluded them. What is new is that especially through 'cultural' organizations, they are suddenly a big part of the mainstream discourse in a much larger extend than before. The role played by the detestable godmen and godwomen also has contributed immensely to this growth.

But even more alarming is the radicalization of the Muslim youth and the militarization of Muslim politics. Muslim League, while definitely communal was never militant. It is being co-opted by agents of 'purer' and more militant Islam. Again, while Jamaat-e-Islami and even NDF to an extend, have been part of Kerala politics, what is new is their undeniable gaining of strength over Muslim League and their newfound electoral ambitions.

It is back to middle ages in the age of Youtube.

Speaking of Youtube videos, watch this video and shudder (its in Malayalam).... I am afraid, not feeling optimistic.

On the ethereal insensitivity of the rulers and on unparliamentariness of 'fucker'

(And don't get offended by the 'unparliamentary' title please. Read through, there is a case - if discussing on it is good enough for a state legislature, it is surely good enough for any blog.)


Law and Order is a state subject in India. So, if terrorism is to be handled as a 'criminal' and 'law and order' problem as a lot of unthinking people say, the buck stops with the Home Minister of the State. So, the man on whom the buck should stop at the first level is Mr.R.R. Patil, the (soon to be former) Home minister of Maharashtra. When asked too many times whether he is going to resign from his precious chair by a pretty but pesky journalist, Mr.Patil was so irritated that he had to say "Such things happen in big cities. You can't say it is a complete intelligence failure. No question of me resigning." What he actually meant was -
" Some guys came, killed people in this big city. You know, stuff happens. What the fuck should I do? "

For once, the Indian English News channels which on normal days make FOX News and MSNBC of US look like fucking documentary networks full of deep thinking scholars, did not have to manufacture anger from their audience.

The next day,someone belonging to the other end of the political spectrum, Mr.Muqhtar Abbas Naqvi, the Muslim face of the BJP and more noted for his carefully groomed beard than for his articulateness, sneered at women with lipstick and powder on their face staging demonstrations with lighted candles against politicians. What he actually meant was that the pompous westernised urban elite can kiss his fucking ass.( err, not that many votes, you know).

Then my communist Chief Minister, Comrade Achuthanandan, did not like the welcome he got at the martyr Major Sandeep's house. Then, giving a completely unnecessary interview and led by a stupid and dishonest  leading question, he thought he should 'get back' at the dead commando's father. "Were he not a martyr, even a dog, wouldn't have gone." and went on to comment on the lack of self-control of an old man who had just lost his only young son. What he meant was "I am Chief Minister. No one can be disrespectful to me. And what the hell, I din't kill him, did I? (also, I see a conspiracy here.)"

And we expected an introspective and wise polity looking at finding systemic and administrative solutions at a moment of pain and crisis.

...And fuck, it doesn't end. The leader of the opposition has got a name which nicely rhymes with the word for 'Fucker' in Malayalam. So, the new allegation is that during the Legislature session discussion regarding his 'unparliamentary' remarks about a martyr's family, the Chief Minister called the leader of  the opposition an unparliamentary 'Fucker Chandy'. The Chief Minister has denied it, it seems but anyways, both the words (Oomban and Oommen) are so close together that right from the start it seems this is gonna be a controversy which can never end.

Reiterating - and we expected an introspective and wise polity looking at finding systemic and administrative solutions at a moment of pain and crisis.....

But on this, I should admit that I sort of disagree. I say if fucker is not parliamentary, it should be.
Sort of suits the moment.

To capture it all in a phrase

it took a Cricket writer

 ....killing with the blind rage that the sinister aged can so easily create in the idealistic young.

 

A jihad for critical thinking

" It cud have been me. I was planning to leave late frm office. If i had my landing at VT wud have coincided with the shootings.

The leopolds where the shootings happened, that was psychotic, i mean, most of us journos are regular at leo's and mondy's (next to it). "

Someone dear wrote that to me today. My near and dear are okay. But I still couldn't sleep much yesterday night. One of the worst things in life should be when you have that sinking, helpless and nervous feeling AND you can't do anything about it.

The problem with the discourse being exclusively focused on the macro policies, say GWOT, (in addition to the horrible acronyms that is) is that it indeed makes us, the common people, feel powerless, helpless, dependent. In addition, what any elected government in any open society can do will always have its limits.

The micro, the individual is important.

Perhaps more.

In fact, more.

And I thought of him - the other.

So, picture him for a second. A 17-21 year old middle class boy. Frustrated - dissatisfied with his life, frustrated emotionally, sexually, spiritually. It is quite easy as most of us were that boy once. For most, the frustration is sort of channeled at the hapless middle aged parents, sometimes the 'system'.


He is their target.

He is an easy target. He does not have any life experience. He does not have any perspective. He has seen very little of the world, of life. Enlisting him is exceptionally easy for any demagogue. Pretend he is respected, he is important, that he is part of something important, part of something historic. Promise him future salvation.

After he gets enlisted, almost always he is lost to us. He becomes the other. Most of the time there is no compromise. We, our agencies, our governments have to kill him. To pretend otherwise would be to lie too.

He is our target too. With our thoughts, our art, our work, being us, reaching out to him, we have to enlist him in our jihad - our jihad for critical thinking.

We have to teach him that philosophies, thought systems, 'faiths', religions are all for Man.

Man is not for them. Man is their standard.
That there is no higher standard.

We have to teach him that philosophies can be life affirming or death cultish. That nothing can remain unquestioned as any word of god.

We have to convince him. We have to enlist him.

To a man who once helped me imagine. Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity, and it has a brain as large as yours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot perform the activity you call imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. It cannot envision what you call the past and what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has made your species as great as it is. Nothing else. It is not your ape nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social groupings. It is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination. The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you—the ability to imagine.

From 'The Sphere'

I should have read that a hundred times. Thought whether it is true, whether it is false, what it means, what it implies. Yes, I was a kid then and for the teenager me, Michael Crichton was nothing less than a hero. I read, nah, devoured all his books. Even into my early twenties I would be first in line from my lending library to get hold of a new release from him.

He was someone who could transport you along with an Arab and the first Vikings that he meets on their battles with the last Neanderthals which existed on earth. He could make you passionate about something like the Chaos theory and some giant lizards. He could make you start to look at Africa and your ape cousins with new eyes. I can still quote that beginning sentence in Congo.

Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.

Hell, he even wrote a book which hare brains in both hollywood and bollywood could use to make another one of their grotesque movies. While his book had made you think about the technology industry, its manufacturing processes, the politics of sex and indeed of 'sexual harassment', after the movies you thought - yeah Priyanka Chopra is even hotter in a swimsuit and yeah Michael Douglas is even uglier with longer hair.

Of course, Crichton was no George Orwell or Umberto Eco. He was a populist and unapologetically so. But he could make you interested. And that is indeed the first step. It is said that he would start the research on his book with an empty file and by the time that he was done with his book, it would have grown to an unmanageable bundle of scraps, book pieces, articles etc. His books sometimes did reflect that amateurism and sometimes you were left with the feeling that he did not go as deep as he should have, but then you realize, he is doing what he wants to do, and what he is great at. Now YOU go deep.

Slowly, I had come to think that I had outgrown him. And frankly, his later works were far from his best. The global warming piece was more of how much he hated lawyers. Even the biotechnology novel was below par. And then I came across his internet presence. It was my fault that I had come across it only recently. I had never put in his name to a search engine and of course, he never frequented the mass media which he thought were bad and also dead. It is sorta choking when you find that the ideas you know that you vaguely think have been expressed much more deeply and lucidly by one of your favorites - whether it is his piece on the death of mass media , the one on men's feelings or on how to fight with your woman intelligently, he was like Virender Sehwag was on Jason Krejza yesterday - audacious, unafraid and yeah, sometimes wrong.


To Michael Crichton.
In case both of us were wrong and now you are in 'heaven' and you are reading -

Thanks for your work sir. Highly appreciated.

My suggested Chricton reads to any of you who haven't. In order - Sphere, Congo,
Eaters of the Dead, Jurassic Park,
Disclosure, Rising Sun.

Essays -
How to fight (with your other half) ,
Men's hearts
Mediasaurus

On 'real change'

Republican democracy is just a few moments old in the wide sweep of history as a mode of human political organization. And if history is any guide, 'real change' within its framework is achieved only by men who are there around its start. If the nation state happen to be lucky, they get wise old men with a minute understanding of the history and culture of their lands and indeed, of the human condition to write the framework and set the trajectory. After that, the most that is achieved are nudges and corrections.

One good example, but on the other extreme, would be the sister state across the border. 'The Land of the Pure and Clean'. Designed to fail - and from the start.

Of course, that doesn't mean this American election was not important. But not in terms of the creation of the new possibilities but of prevention of sliding back to the bad.

Indeed, the new constitution which was written for the peoples of Mesopotamia a few years ago is more important politically and historically than this 'mother of all elections' for all our shared human history. This became the mother of all elections as it helps sell mass media all around the world.

Many a time, there arises instances when the unbelievably stupid and ill-informed get a shot at destroying all and of corrupting the idea itself. If the citizens of the new world had elected this ill-informed, scary nutcase who talks of tasks from God, someone who is associated with a religious cult which believes in 'faith healing', and someone who bans books she doesn't agree with, then they would have proven that they don't deserve their founders.

One of the biggest slaps in the face of the legacy of Thomas Jefferson would have been this woman occupying the chair which was once his.

Good riddance.

anandtranslated updated

Puritanism and male supremacy

Head counts and Democracy

On Sport ...and (a bit) on reality TV

something i wrote a long time ago.

Sport allows us to observe the naked soul of man. No pretenses, no facades, no excuses. Men trying to do stuff, competing, failing, succeeding, doubting,choking, panicking, scratching through, living up.

Sport ultimately is enriching to its participants. It forces the best of them to look inside themselves at a very young age. Of course, they may not like the answers, but it leaves them better equipped to handle reality.

It is an interesting exercise to compare sport to its mass media counterpart - the moving, talking picture and all its forms ranging from movies to reality television. Some of the more thoughtful of the thespians have remarked that making your living by pretending to be someone else is inherently dissatisfying and degrading to self.

While movies can be great art, reality television in almost all its forms is inherently vile. It promises to celebritize everyone with giving out two minutes of manufactured fame. Admittedly, there are exceptions, but on closer look, the ones which are good are similar to sport with the camera being a capturer of action, not the creator.

Again, not all sport does all that. Women's gymnastics seems to be nothing more than using children for misplaced national pride. The bat and ball games, though not popular as their ball only cousins, have more of the real life components interwoven into them than just pure athletic ability and hence are more human, more interesting.

----
Hoping for a great series.