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.