Casanova and the good life

Relatively few words in the English language have their origins in some personage from history. One such is casanova, a word now used to describe a smooth-talking pursuer of women or a philanderer, which derives directly from the name of the eighteenth-century Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, one of the most legendary lovers of all time.

But while Casanova's name has entered our general vocabulary for good, this fact has also worked to the disadvantage of his memory, because it obscures his many wider achievements. As Tim Parks writes in his introduction to Casanova's book The Duel, Casanova was also 'an adventurer, man-about-many-towns, indefatigable name-dropper, crack shot, amateur theologian, skilled diplomat …and (what makes us aware of all these qualities) a fine writer.' This was a man who, during his lifetime, served in the army, worked undercover as a spy, was jailed after falling foul of the authorities, escaped jail and fled Italy, and for many years lived an itinerant life travelling all over Europe writing plays, translating other authors, and playing the violin. And of course there were the ladies.

The Duel, which has been recently published in a new translation by the Hesperus Press, provides ample evidence of just what a good writer Casanova was. The book is about a famous duel that Casanova was once forced to fight with a Polish count, but we need not concentrate on the particulars of that matter here. Casanova was in his fifties when he wrote the book, and his colourful and peripatetic life had endowed him with a rich stock of opinions on human nature.

For instance, Casanova says he believes a man is truly wise when, "happy with what he knows, and always willing to learn from those who have more experience than he, he will allow everyone to believe what he wants to, and he will not try to force the truth on those who are recalcitrant. […] Men are by nature such that they cannot bring themselves to learn anything from those who wish to force instruction on them." And we hear the dashing adventurer speaking in these lines: "'I cannot' is heard too often on the lips of mortals: it is very seldom on the lips of a man who really wishes to do something."

It would be foolish to speculate whether, if Casanova had lived in the twenty-first century instead of the eighteenth, he would have been a blogger. But, given what we know of his nature, it is certainly possible to surmise what his feelings would have been had he attended yesterday's Mumbai blogger meet (even if he would had to be content with coffee instead of wine):

Excellent food, good wine, and the good company of friends who are well chosen and above all well-disposed, compose a nourishment which raises a healthy man to the highest degree of perfection of which he is capable.[…] There is no man or woman who, after a choice meal, is not more attractive, more eloquent, more animated, more courteous, more judicious and more self-possessed, full of fine thoughts and unusual ideas which are capable of providing honourable and legitimate pleasures to this wretched human race, which, left to itself, is an inexhaustible fount of unhappiness, boredom, and troublesome disagreements.

And more provocatively he continues:

And so, just as bodily health comes from good food, there is no doubt that spiritual peace derives from it also, since that [spiritual peace] cannot have any other impulse than those it receives from physical impressions.

Would you agree with that, dear reader - that good food brings not just bodily but also spiritual peace?

After Casanova's death in 1798, just as his name passed into the English language and kept his memory alive for future generations, so he began to take birth again and again as a character in fiction - for instance in the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai's terrific novel Casanova in Bolzano, published in English translation only last year. I wrote an essay on Marai's Casanova for the San Francisco Chronicle, and it can be found here.

Amartya Sen's large India

In his new book The Argumentative Indian, a set of magisterial essays on the subject of India's diverse and many-sided past and the manner in which our understanding of that past influences the present that we now inhabit, Amartya Sen gives the sense of having distilled a lifetime's thought on the subject of India.

Amongst the best of Sen's essays is one called 'India: Large and Small', in which he engages with the claims made by the Hindutva movement - based on certain historical and cultural features of India's past and the overwhelming majority of Hindus among Indian citizens currently - that Hinduism is preeminent amongst the religions of India and is therefore central to any conception of 'Indianness'. Obeying the first rule of good debate, which is to engage with the viewpoint of the other party instead of dismissing it outright, Sen first tries to represent the positions of the Hindutva movement as fairly as possible. He does contrast the tolerance towards other religions and internal heterodoxy that has been a historical feature of Hinduism with the many untenable claims and the warlike approach of the present-day Hindutva lobby, but then note how skilfully he declines to validate - as a more earnest scholar might - the former at the expense of the latter:

It is not, however, particularly worthwhile to enter into a debate over whether the liberal, tolerant and receptive traditions within Hinduism may in any sense, be taken to be more authentic than the narrower and more combative interpretations that have been forcefully championed by present-day Hindu politics. It is sufficient to note here that there is a well-established capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism, which contrasts sharply with the narrow and bellicose versions that are currently on political offer, led particularly by parts of the Hindutva movement.

Sen then moves on to scrutinise the foundational axioms of Hindutva ideology one by one, offering alternate arguments of his own. Here he is on the viewpoint that India should be thought of as a pre-eminently Hindu country because the Hindu tradition is pre-eminent in India's past:

Certainly, the ancientness of the Hindu tradition cannot be disputed. However, other religions, too, have had a long history in India, which has been, for a very long time indeed, a multi-religious country, making room for many different faiths and beliefs. Aside from the obvious and prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a millennium (Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century), India was not a 'Hindu country' even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. Indeed, Chinese scholars regularly described India as 'the Buddhist kingdom'.
…And to this has to be added the early presence of Christians, Jews and Parsees from the first millennium CE, and the late - but vigorous - emergence of Sikhism in India as a universalist conviction that drew on both the Hindu and Islamic traditions but developed a new religious understanding. The high ground of history is certainly not comfortable for a Hindu sectarian outlook, which is one reason why there has been such a flurry of attempts by political fanatics to rewrite India's history.

After many such specific and patiently elaborated rejoinders to different aspects of Hindutva thought, Sen concludes:

Rabindranath Tagore thought that the 'idea of India' itself militates 'against the intense conciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others'. Through their attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism. In the confrontation between a large and a small idea, the broader understanding can certainly win. But the battle for the broad idea of India cannot be won unless those fighting for the larger conception know what they are fighting for. The reach of Indian traditions, including heterodoxy and the celebration of plurality and scepticism, requires a comprehensive cognition.

Many of the other essays in Sen's book attempt to provide this 'comprehensive cognition' of Indian traditions that will equip us adequately should we wish to defend the idea of a large India against the small. Here are two of them: 'Tagore and his India' and 'India Through Its Calendars' ("...the nature, form and usage of calendars in a particular society can teach us a great deal about its politics, culture and religion as well as its science and mathematics). And here is an essay by Sen on the issue of the writing and rewriting of history: 'History and the Enterprise of Knowledge'.

But even if parts of the book are available here and there on the web, there's nothing like reading these beautiful essays in bed late into the night over several nights, as I did. And since Indian bloggers, as I remarked in another post recently, are almost by definition argumentative Indians, it makes sense to read this book as an exemplary demonstration of the ideal on which we all have our sights.

Mirza Abu Taleb goes to England

In Attia Hosain's book Sunlight on a Broken Column, about which I wrote a post earlier, there is a reference to "the sweet tongue of the true Lucknavi - delicate, flexible, rich in imagery, pointed with wit, polished with courtesy." The durability of the tradition Hosain was referring to is apparent from the Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb, an account given by an eighteenth-century Lucknavi nobleman of his visit - very rare in those days for an Indian - to England.

Abu Taleb was an unwilling adventurer: he left India in a pall of gloom and not on a sea of expectation. For some years he had been running back and forth between Lucknow and Calcutta in search of patronage, at which point he received an offer from a Scottish friend to journey with him to Europe. He writes:

After having considered his proposal for some time, I reflected that, as the journey was long and replete with danger, some accident might cause my death, by which I should be delivered from the anxieties of this world, and the ingratitude of mankind. I therefore accepted his friendly offer, and resolved to undertake the journey.

But as his ship set sail and his homeland fell back Abu Taleb's spirits soon rose, and he threw himself into the task of observing everything that was strange and significant about his journey. In fact, when he reached the Nicobar Islands, where the ship halted briefly and gave those on deck a chance to see the lives of the natives, Abu Taleb was so captivated that he began to think the thoughts that all of us think when we go on a pleasant vacation:

I was so captivated by the mildness of the climate, the beauty of the plains and rivulets, and with the kind of life and freedom which the men enjoyed, that I had nearly resolved to take up my abode among them.

When Abu Taleb finally reached England after several months at sea, he was very well-received there (curiously he does not make any report of having to face racism) and soon became known in social circles as 'the Persian prince'. While giving himself over to revelry and romance - he confesses somewhat coyly at one point that 'Cupid had planted one of his arrows in my bosom', and presents some atrocious verse in praise of English women ('Adorable creatures! Whose flowing tresses,/whether of flaxen or jetty hue,/Or auburn gay, delight my soul,/ and ravish all my senses') - Abu Taleb also made a close study of English government and society. He arrived in England in 1800, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and the implications of the extensive mechanisation of production did not escape him. He remarks:

In England, labour is much facilitated by the aid of mechanism; and by its assistance the price of commodities is much reduced: for if, in their great manufactories, they made use of horses, bullocks, or men, as in other countries, the prices of their goods would be enormous…. [T]he great wheels of [iron founderies] are worked by steam, in a very surprising manner. In these they cast cannon, beat out anchors and do all other large work, which could not be effected by manual labour, the sledge itself being more that any man could lift.

And he is similarly perceptive of the subject of print technology, one of the pillars of modernity:

Of the inventions of Europe, the utility of which may not appear at first sight to an Asiatic, the art of printing is the most admirable. By its aid, thousands of copies, of any scientific or religious book, may be circulated among the people in a very short time; and by it, the works of celebrated authors are handed down to posterity, free from the errors and imperfections of a manuscript. To this art the English are indebted to the humble but useful publication of newspapers, without which life would be irksome to them. These are read by all ranks of people, from the prince to the beggar.

Abu Taleb was not always complementary about England - he devotes an entire chapter to criticisms of the English way of life, and he wrote an essay pursuing the unusual line of argument that European women actually enjoyed less liberty than did Asian women. The book ends when Abu Taleb arrives on the west coast of India in 1803 after four and a half years away from home, and, being 'very anxious to see my family' (of whom there has been no mention since the first chapter), returns to home and hearth in Calcutta.

Abu Taleb's Travels is available in a new edition from Oxford University Press. This page features a forthcoming edition of another book by an Indian nobleman who travelled to England in the first half of the nineteenth century: the Autobiography of Lutfullah - A Mohamedan Gentleman and his Transactions with his Fellow-creatures. Here, courtesy Arun Simha, is a brief history of early Indian newspapers, which began to proliferate a few decades after Abu Taleb brought back reports of them, and the look of some of the mastheads of these newspapers (the Asiatic Mirror, the Oriental Star, and so on) can be seen here.

Robert Farrar Capon and food

One of the many benefits of being unemployed, dear reader, is the chance to savour lunch instead of wolfing down one's midday meal at one's desk. I don't care much for breakfast, but after the morning's work there's nothing like a good lunch, freshly cooked and then slowly eaten at the table. On some days I like frying some garlic bread in a little butter with some slowly browned sausages to go with it, or else a little pasta with cheese on top, or eggs fried till the sides are thin and crispy but the yolk still gooey, or else a piece of chicken with some fruit afterwards. On other days I head out to a restaurant for a more hearty lunch, usually either Noor Mohammadi for flavoursome nalli nihari, dal gosht, or bheja fry with tandoori rotis the size of a wall clock, or to Café Baghdadi in Colaba. If you'd like to join me for good food and conversation at an eating-house one day, you're most welcome.

One of my favourite books on food - not just a cookbook but a treatise on the place of food in our lives - is The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, now in a new edition as part of the Modern Library Food series. It is a charming and eccentric book, with a high conception of the beauty and relevance of matters gastronomical (food and cooking "sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity"), full of savoury asides (at the very beginning of the book there is a ten-page section on the beauty of chopping an onion, and towards an end there is an ode to the powers of baking soda) and pungent comments ("Nothing appalls me more than to hear people refer to the drinking of wine as if it were a forbidden and fascinating way of sneaking alcohol into one's system."). Although a priest, Capon sees nothing sinful or worldly about the love of good food; rather, he might be said to be in agreement of the nineteen-century philosopher of food Brillat-Savarin, who argued that "Gourmandism shows implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator who, when he ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encouragement of savour, and the reward of pleasure…gourmandism is the common bond that unites the nations of the world.”

Here is Capon on place of the three meals of an ordinary working day:

Breakfast is an unmerciful meal. Unless you live in a house full of larks, you know perfectly well that few people are fit company at that hour. Accordingly, a completely routine meal, unvaryin from day to day, is a blessing to everyone. [E]xcept for men who have already worked hard for hours, an ordinary weekday breakfast is no time for a feast. Almost as clearly as breakfast, lunch is a meal in via, on the run. To sit down as if the world were our oyster at 12.30 is to face the second half of our daily obedience pretending that the agony of the world is over already.…I have long been convinced that man needs sleep more than food in the middle of the day.It is only at night, in gremio familiae, […] that we can properly rejoice and eat like men.

Capon's very name brings up the idea of food: 'capon' is another word for chicken or, specifically, a castrated rooster, which was considered a delicacy in Elizabethan England ("The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit", goes a line in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors).

And a contemporary historian of food, and defender of good eating against all those who would downgrade its importance, is the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who has written a book called Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. In this essay, Fernandez-Armesto makes a case not just for gourmandism, as Brillat-Savarin did, but for gluttony, arguing that gluttony is a gift of evolution. And in this essay, Fernandez-Armesto contends that "[t]he obesity pandemic has coincided with the decline of the meal."

Gogol's overcoat

The protagonist of "The Overcoat," one of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's best stories, is Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a clerk in a government department in St.Petersburg, very mild-mannered and self-effacing, never known to raise his voice, and always passed over when it comes to promotions - a nonentity in the social order who does not even have the consolation of the love and respect of people at home, being a bachelor. Akaky Akakievich's only pleasure lies in his work, and he is so absorbed by it that he pays little regard to his personal appearance, to conversation with his colleagues, or to the routine tasks of daily life. He always comes to work wearing a tattered old overcoat ("its collar diminished more and more each year, for it went to mend other parts") that is a source of great amusement to his colleagues.

There comes a time when Akaky Akakievich's coat finally gives up the ghost and just cannot be mended any more. When he hears from his tailor the price of a new overcoat, nearly half his month's salary, he grows nearly faint with worry, and wonders how he will save up the money for a new coat to protect him from the violent St.Petersburg winter. But then gradually he formulates a plan to skimp a little here, forgo something there, and in this manner, through all sorts of pains and sacrifices, to save up enough for the overcoat over the duration of a few months. All this has a salutary effect on Akaky Akakievich's nature. Gogol captures beautifully the significance that gradually gathers around this one material object in the impoverished life of a man not otherwise given to material desires, writing that Akaky Akakievich

was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From then on it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life's companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him - and this companion was none other than that same overcoat with its cotton-wool quilting, with its sturdy lining that knew no wear….In the course of each month, he stopped at least once to see [the tailor] Petrovich, to talk about the overcoat, where it was best to buy broadcloth, and of what color, and at what price, and he would return home somewhat preoccupied yet always pleased…

I shall not reveal any further details of the plot, except for this bit: when Akaky Akakievich finally gets his beautiful new overcoat and wears it proudly to work, his colleagues are so pleased for him that they decide to throw a party for him that night at the residence of one of the clerks in office. Walking that night to the venue of the party, Akaky Akakievich passes through a posh part of town and looks at the shops:

It was several years since he had gone out in the evening. He stopped curiously before a lighted shop window to look at a picture that portrayed some beautiful woman taking off her shoe and thus baring her whole leg, not a bad leg at all…

This passage is thought to mark one of the early appearances of advertising in literature. Writing about it in her biography of Charles Dickens, the novelist Jane Smiley remarks that it can be seen as the moment 'when literature enters the modern world', a world in which

[t]he tissue of relationships and obligations that mark traditional society give way to the casual meetings and commercial connections that mark modern society. [Akaky Akakievich] is struck by the picture of the woman's leg slipping into the stocking. He moves on, but he has just had a thoroughly modern moment - sex and graphics have combined to turn him into a potential customer.

And here is an essay by the novelist AS Byatt on a recent translation of Gogol's great novel Dead Souls.

Jahiz the bibliomaniac

Cyclone Book Tag, which recently hit the Indian blogosphere, seems to have demonstrated irrefutably that there is a marked relation between blogging - the passion for demonstrating to the world that one is capable of independent thought - and bibliomania, the passion for possessing and collecting books. (I think this passion to possess is what distinguishes a bibliomaniac from a bibliophile, who is merely a lover a books and may or may not be a collector.) As modern bibliomaniacs we must take note of an ancient one, the ninth-century Arab writer Jahiz, whose most famous work, the Kitab al-Hayawan ('Book of Animals') has some marvellous passages on the place of books in life.

Jahiz (776-868/69) was born and lived most of his life in the great cultural centre of Basra (in present-day Iraq and currently wracked by clashes between American troops and Iraqi insurgents), at a time when the Islamic world occupied a similar place among world civilizations that the West does today. A prolific writer on every kind of topic - here is the table of contents of one of his books, listing essays like 'This Life & the Life to Come' and 'Why Speech is Superior to Silence' - Jahiz writes of books in the Kitab al-Hayawan:

I know of no companion more prompt to hand, more rewarding, more helpful or less burdensome, and no tree that lives longer, bears more abundantly or yields more delicious fruit that is handier, easier to pick or more perfectly ripened at all times of the year, than a book.
…For all its smallness and lightness, a book is the medium through which men receive the Scriptures, and also government accounts. Silent when silence is called for, it is eloquent when asked to speak. It is a bedside companion that does not interrupt when you are busy but welcomes you when you have a mind to it, and does not demand forced politeness or compel you to avoid its company. It is a visitor whose visits may be rare, or frequent, or so continual that it follows you like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
…A book, if you consider, is something that prolongs your pleasure, sharpens your mind, loosens your tongue, lends agility to your fingers and emphasis to your words, gladdens your mind, fills your heart and enables you to win the respect of the lowly and the friendship of the mighty.…Form any kind of attachment with it, and you will be able to do without everything else; you will not be driven into bad company by boredom or loneliness.

Some readers may find this enchanting but a little too ornate, and they would not be wrong in this. As Robert Irwin says in his book Nights and Horses and the Desert (from which I quote the above passage), Jahiz was a master at the ancient art of rhetoric - the art of using language so as to persuade and influence others. Many of his works appear to be rhetorical demonstrations rather than the expressions of deeply felt convictions - if necessary, one feels, he might have been able to argue that books exercised a debilitating effect on human beings and were agents of corruption.

But Jahiz was so much in love with books - the story goes that he used to pay the owners of bookshops to be locked into their premises at night so that he could read in peace - that we may safely assume that in this case he was really speaking from his heart, even if his style is that of a rhetorician. In fact (to end this tale of bibliomania on an appropriate if somewhat morbid note) Jahiz not only lived by books but died by them as well: it is reported that he was killed at a ripe old age when a stack of books fell upon him.

Unemployed at last!

"Unemployed at last!" So goes the first line of Tom Collins's Such Is Life, a classic of Australian literature, and that, my dear readers, exactly describes my condition right now. May was my last month at work for the magazine Wisden Asia Cricket, and from this month I'm going to a free man, and earn my living from writing.

I have a lot of things lined up in terms of work and writing, but I'd also like in my new life to greatly expand my range of experience - to meet new people, travel to new places, and learn a new skill or two. I expect that time, which is such a problem when one has a day job, will not be a constraint any more. In fact the new problem may be that of learning how to use all my time properly.

Conversation, the very motor of life, occupies a position of importance in my new scheme of things. So if you, dear reader, have any good stories to tell or anything that would interest me, please email me. for instance, I'd like very much to find out how a tea garden is run, or how it's like living on board a ship, or how the restaurant business works. I'm already looking forward to the next Mumbai blogger's meet.

And of course there'll be plenty more time for reading now, so I'll attempt to put up a post about a book or a writer every two to three days.

Unemployed at last!.

Book-tagged

I was book-tagged by my co-blogger Amit a few days ago, and here, dear reader, is a list of books for you. On my way I've also made a few variations to the template:

Total number of books I possess:

Probably between three and four thousand. As I was surveying my collection this morning in order to make an estimate of its size, I suddenly figured that some days, instead of going out to a bookshop to browse, I could just stay at home and leaf through my own collection, which includes - as it always should - hundreds of books that I haven't read and may not read for several years. I then proceeded to browse through my cupboards and came across several very interesting books that I'd forgotten all about.

Last book I bought

The Pursuit of Pleasure by the anthropologist Lionel Tiger (yes, what a name).

Last book I read

Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian, a book fizzing with ideas.

Five books I would not lend to a friend

Some of the books I prize most will already be familiar to you if you're been reading my posts over the last two months, so I shall disregard all of those and pick new ones.

The Odyssey by Homer
My Years with Apu by Satyajit Ray
Shakespeare on Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal


A book I want to possess

The Sarvadarsanasamgraha (Collection of All Philosophies) by the fourteenth-century author Madhava Acharya. This book is cited by Sen in The Argumentative Indian.

A book I couldn't finish

Ian McEwan's Atonement.

And these are the people I choose to book-tag:

My colleague Rahul Bhatia at Cricinfo
Bem
The Transparent Ironist

Chess with Jorge Luis Borges

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote prolifically across the realms of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism (and some of his work, such as the piece on Shakespeare cited below, is so complex and teasing that it is not easy to tell which genre it belongs to). Borges can sometimes be difficult and puzzling - he read vastly across the literature of different cultures, and his work is full of allusions and references to these works - but he also has a great gift for compressed, powerful expression, evoking an entire world of thought or feeling in a few beguiling lines of verse or a two-page short story (perhaps this is why he never felt the need to write a novel).

Consider the gorgeous adjectives with which he breathes life into chess pieces in this, the second part of his poem "Chess", and then the way in which the thought of the poem begins to slowly uncoil after the scene has been set by the relatively conventional opening stanza:

CHESS (II)

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
Straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn -
Over the checkered black and white terrain
They seek out and begin their armed campaign.

They do not know it is the player’s hand
That dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
Controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(The words are Omar’s) on another ground
Where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the players, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

It might be interesting to compare the idea of God in the last lines of this poem with that found in the passage from the Rig Veda I quoted in my previous post. The hymn from the Rig Veda speaks of the almighty, but instead of ascribing absolute omniscience to him it ends with the phrase 'only he knows - or perhaps he does not know'. Borges, moving from a different direction, suggests that both chess pieces and men are not aware that a higher power is controlling them, and leads step by step to the searching question 'what god beyond God'? And to this question one could legitimately give the answer: 'Only he knows - or perhaps he does not know'.

Chess makes a fleeting appearance once again in this beautiful Borges poem, "The Just", which moves, like a butterfly taking wing from flower to flower (or like God musing one morning about those things about human beings that please him the most), over those affairs of men that Borges considers most broad-spirited, large-hearted, true to the spirit in which life must be lived (and hence 'just').

THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of
Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(translated by Alastair Reid)

Borges's life contained a great tragedy: passionately fond of reading like most writers, he found in middle age that a congenital eye defect that ran in his father's side of the family was beginning to take his toll on his eyesight, and by his fifties he was almost completely blind. In 1955, the year he was appointed to the directorship of the National Library of Argentina, he noted God's splendid irony "in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness." But he kept his twinkling wit going well into old age. In this interview from 1971 with the New York Times writer Israel Shenker, Borges begins to talk about death and finishes with the observation: "Sometimes I think, 'Why on earth should I die, since I have never done it? Why should I start a new habit at my age?'"

More poems by Borges can be found here and here. His marvellous three-paragraph story about the life of Shakespeare, "Everything and Nothing", (the story begins "There was no one in him...") can be found here. And in this piece, also featuring Borges's poem among other things, the writer Steven Poole asks what is it that draws so many artists to chess.

The Rig Veda's deep questions

Which man or woman has not felt at some point in life, perhaps when contemplating the night sky full of stars or thinking about loved ones now dead, something of the the wonder and the puzzlement expressed in this passage, some three and a half thousand years old, from the Rig Veda:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of the universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it has formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know.

What is most fascinating about this passage (often referred to as 'the creation hymn') is the extent to which it takes its skepticism. First there is the thought, found in many ancient texts, that although mankind cannot fathom the mystery of creation, 'the one who looks down on it' surely must. But how can we know this? A settled picture of 'the highest heaven' rapidly dissolves, to be replaced by one of a creator himself in doubt - struggling like man to grasp the meaning of existence: 'Who really knows? Whence is this creation?'

This version of the creation hymn is from a translation of the Rig Veda by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, who writes in her introduction of how the hymns are meant 'to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind'. A selection of hymns from the Rig Veda can be found here.

Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

People who have travelled comparatively little but read quite a lot (and there is an essay waiting to be written on why, for some, readerly journeys are preferable to real ones) often derive their conception of the world's great cities from novels. Their image of London is from Dickens, they think of Naguib Mahfouz whenever they hear the mention of Cairo, and Chicago for them is the same Chicago that can be found in Saul Bellow's novels. In much the same way, when I think of Istanbul I picture it as it appears in the novels of Orhan Pamuk, one of the leading novelists of our time.

Pamuk's novel My Name is Red, a luminous tale about a group of sixteenth-century Ottoman miniaturists and calligraphers whose conception of art is a religious one and who feel disturbed and threatened by the emerging Western school of portraiture, is a modern classic, containing hundreds of sentences so beautiful and evocative as to move, in Bellow's phrase to describe the effect of great books, 'wonder in the soul'. Also, each chapter of the novel is entrusted to a different narrator, so that the book itself becomes, like a fine Ottoman carpet, a weave of many perspectives, each adding to the effect of the other. Early in the novel a murder takes place, but we do not know who the murderer is. However, the culprit appears every once in a while to narrate a chapter from his point of view, all the while refusing to divulge his identity. In this passage below - note that it is only one long, winding sentence - the murderer follows Black, an artist who is competing with him for a woman's affections, around the city one night:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leather works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn't following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

What is wonderful about this sentence is the way it gives us a sense not only of an external world - that of various Istanbul scenes at night - but also at the same time through an internal world, that of the murderer. We note his fevered and extravagant imagination, which senses hidden presences in the most deserted places; we feel his intense vexation at his realisation (which the sentence delivers up in its final clause) that he is merely mimicking his antagonist, tailing the man he wishes to dominate and defeat. In a way, this sentence is a story all by itself.

Pamuk's most recent book is a work of non-fiction called Istanbul, in which he makes the case that the city of his birth is the most melancholy (the word for this in Turkish is 'hüzün') of all: "For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world." An excerpt from Istanbul can be found here. The first chapter of My Name is Red is available here, and an interview with Pamuk on the subject of the novel here.

And speaking of journeys that involve staying at home instead of travelling, here's Alain de Botton's introduction to Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth-century classic Journey Around My Bedroom, recently reissued by the Hesperus Press.

The Clay Sanskrit Library

Every culture has a story of how poetry came into being. In this month's New Criterion, Eric Ormsby writes of a one such story of origins found in the Ramayana:

Valmíki, a sage, is wandering in the forest when he sees “an inseparable pair of sweet-voiced krauñcha birds wandering about.” Just then a Nishada hunter, “filled with malice and intent on mischief,” fatally wounds the male of the pair. While the stricken bird writhes on the forest floor, his mate utters “a piteous cry” and the sage is filled with compassion. As he listens to the grieving bird, the sage says, “Since, Nishada, you killed one of this pair of krauñchas, distracted atthe height of passion, you shall not live for very long.” As he meditates on his own words, Valmíki realizes their true nature: “Fixed in metrical quarters, each with a like number of syllables, and fit for the accompaniment of stringed and percussion instruments, the utterance that I produced in this access of shoka, grief, shall be called shloka, poetry, and nothing else.” Thus was the Ramáyana, and indeed, poetry itself, created.

The occasion of Ormsby's long essay on Sanskrit literature is an ambitious new publishing venture, the Clay Sanskrit Library, which plans to bring out about a hundred English translations of Sanskrit classics over the next five years. Among the first batch of titles, released in February 2005, are three of the first four books of the Ramayana, Kalidasa's Shakuntala, and Much Ado About Religion, a satirical play by the ninth-century author Jayanta Bhatta.

I'd better get talking with some of my bookseller contacts about when these titles will be available in India.

The role of human nature in public policy

Don Herzog writes in the blog, Left2Right:

Today's quiz has just one question. All you have to do is fill in the blank and explain what "unnatural" means. Notice that your account of "unnatural" has to justify the crucial closing clause, "and therefore wrong." I'm happy to make it an open-book quiz, because you'll all fail anyway. Ready? Here goes.

_____________ is unnatural and therefore wrong.

I hasten to note that I am not any kind of skeptic about moral or political argument. My conviction that there is no sound way to fill in the blank here is a targeted skepticism. We have to get along without any appeals to what's natural or unnatural, I think, because those appeals are strictly speaking nonsensical.

That is right, of course. To derive an ought from an is, a moral prescription from a natural description, you’d be committing the naturalistic fallacy, and you’d end up with a non sequitur. So no matter how you fill in that blank, the sentence simply wouldn’t make sense. Herzog points to “gay marriage” and “anal sex” and “abortion” as examples of terms that are filled into that blank and presented as arguments by conservatives.

However, Herzog builds a straw man later in the post when he says:

Worse yet, with confusions piled on confusions, is trying to make just-so stories about evolutionary biology ground moral arguments. We're free to reject the morality of rape or promiscuity even if we think it would pay off in gene pool frequencies.

No evolutionary psychologist that I know of has tried to ground moral arguments in human nature, and Steven Pinker, in fact, constantly warns against drawing such conclusions. And of course we’re “free to reject the morality of rape or promiscuity”; whoever said otherwise?

While human nature should certainly not be the basis of morality, should it play a part in public policy? I believe it should. Instead of Herzog’s test statement, consider the following sentence:

_____________ is unnatural and therefore impractical.

Can the blank here be filled in for the sentence to make sense? I think so. One example: “communal sharing of property”.

Any political system that requires us to behave in a manner contrary to human nature is likely to fail. For example, EO Wilson once said of communism: “great idea, wrong species”. He thought it would have worked for ants, who are wired differently.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is the perfect system for humans because it mirrors the manner of our evolution perfectly. John Maynard Keynes once said of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species that it was “simply Ricardian economics couched in scientific language”, while Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels that it was “remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian struggle for existence.” Stephen Jay Gould described natural selection as “essentially Adam Smith's economics read into nature.” (These three quotes are from Matt Ridley's fine book, The Origins of Virtue.)

Thus, if public policy is to work, it must take into account human nature and recognise our limits. But that should not become an excuse for justifying immoral acts, such as, to use Herzog's example, rape. As Herzog writes, morality must be determined independent of human nature. Only then should we think of what is practical.

[Link via email from Sanjeev.]

The art of Joseph Mitchell

Yesterday, over at India Uncut, Amit and I made some remarks about a report in the Telegraph of Kolkata, and I made a brief reference to how journalism can sometimes aspire to the qualities of literature. In my opinion an example of such journalism is the work of the late New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), whose essays on the life of New York city, now collected in several books, shimmer with intelligence, grace, curiosity, and a close observation and a flair for detail that could be said to be novelistic.

Mitchell came to New York at the age of 21 in 1929, spent a few years working as a reporter for a number of newspapers, and then joined the New Yorker, itself one of the city’s great institutions, towards the end of the next decade. He wrote scores of pieces about the city for the magazine, but it is only late in his life that his best work has been republished in book form, and his posthumous reputation has been deservedly on the rise.

Mitchell took many years to perfect his style, but what resulted from his labours was something authentic and mightily impressive. Consider the perfect opening sentence of one of his most unusual essays, 'The Rats on the Waterfront' (1944), and the details that then trip off one by one:

In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.

And a little later:

As a rule, New York rats are nocturnal. They rove in the streets in many neighbourhoods, but only after the sun has set. They steal along as quietly as spooks in the shadows close to the building line, or in the gutters, peering this way and that, sniffing, quivering, conscious every moment of all that is
going on around them. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encounted most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one. When he does, it is a disquieting experience. […] Veteran exterminators say that even they are unable to be calm around rats. "I've been in this business thirty-one years and I must have seen fifty thousand rats, but I've never got accustomed to the look of them," one elderly exterminator said recently. "Every time I see one my heart sinks and my belly flutters." In alcoholic wards the rat is the animal that most frequently appears in the visual hallucinations of patients with delirium tremens. In these wards, in fact, the D.T.'s are often referred to as "seeing the rat."

This is work that leaves the mind teeming with possibilities. Could a long contemplative essay on these lines, full of details that require journalistic legwork but also speaking in a rich personal voice rather than the generic tone of most reportage, be done on the subject of the stray dogs of Mumbai city? Could one be done on the ice-cream sellers who stand all day in the sun, ubiquitous and unnoticed, on every nook and corner of our cities - what the volume of the trade is, what kinds of flavours are most popular, how demand goes up and down across seasons, and so on. Could one be done on the auto-rickshaw drivers of Delhi and their attitudes towards meters, containing the opinions, whether candid or defensive, of drivers themselves, of government sources, law enforcement agencies, and men who tweak meters for a living?

Here are some samples of Mitchell's work: chapter one of his book My Ears Are Bent, in which he describes his early years as a beat reporter, and some excerpts from two essays about skyscraper-building and the oyster trade.

And in this essay Russell Baker offers an assessment of Mitchell's achievement, arguing - and here again we see a reference to the porous boundaries of journalism and literature - that "through the middle third of the twentieth century he had created a tapestry of New York lives comparable to Charles Dickens's astonishing assortment of Victorian Londoners. To be sure, Dickens's most memorable people were fictional while Mitchell's had all actually lived and breathed, but just as Dickens's fictional Londoners seem more real than life, Mitchell's real New Yorkers seem born to live in novels."

Two Indian journalists whose essays I like very much are the late Behram Contractor ("Busybee"), whose pieces on Bombay's restaurants are classics of food writing and are full of his distinctive presence, and Sankarshan Thakur, who writes splendid essays on politics and politicians for the weekly Tehelka.

Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay's language of love

Some writers have a real feel for the conversations of lovers - playful, elliptical, given to flights of fancy. One of the protagonists of Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay's novel Waiting For Rain (first published in 1986 in the original Bengali, and recently translated into English) is Manju, a young woman who narrates every alternate chapter in the novel. Here is the beginning of one of those chapters, in which we find Manju in conversation with her fiancee Adri, who works in another city and comes to visit her every two weeks. The chapter begins with Adri speaking:

'Not like that. Turn around a bit more. Don't turn your face away so far. Relax your body.'
'You're too finicky. Is this better?'
'Yes, much better.'
'Then tell me,"You're so beautiful".'
'You're so beautiful.'
'Hee, hee. Not like that. Say it with more feeling.'
'Why should I? I'm not Adri.'
'You're not? Then who are you?'
'I'm a mysterious and enigmatic man.'
With a teasing smile on my face, I said, 'Oh, is that so?'
'That's so. Now dance. Remember, you have to dance with such frenzy that your clothes fall off, okay?'
'You're so demanding. I'll try.'
I spread my arms in the air, arched my body backward, and put my right foot in front of me.
'One…'
The silver bells on my feet jingled in rhythm.
'Two…three…one…two…three…'
I pirouetted once and stopped.
'You're doing great.'
'Liar.'
'Why?'
I said, 'That wasn't any good - you couldn't really have liked it.'
'But isn't that the proper way to dance, the way of the purist?'
I said, 'It may be so, but it's not the kind of dance where the clothes fall off. There has to be something radical. Here, let me show you. There's a kind of dance that's as elemental, as wild, as passionate as a thunderstorm - like the cosmic dance of Shiva.'
'Isn't that dance bound by rules, too?'
'No way. Shiva's dance was immense, apocalyptic - after all, he was dancing to mourn his dead wife, Sati. How dare anybody rein him in with the measured beat of a tabla?'
'Are you Shiva, then?'
'No, but I, too, have a crazed, demonic dance hidden within me. Do you want to see it?'
'Go ahead.'

This is charming, but the import of this scene changes when we realise a little later that there is no one in the room besides Manju - the conversation is a make-believe one. It is not then a scene of light flirtation as it initially appeared, but of yearning, a way of expending time that feels empty without Adri. Indeed, one could read this scene through Ibn Arabi's notion - which I first came across in the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red - that "love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst."

Adri does indeed appear a little later, weary from his journey and concerned because Manju has not written to him for days, and the lovers have a slight tiff. And the juxtaposition of the two scenes leads us to yet another insight: how radiant is love in the world of the imagination, when one can carry on a conversation from both sides, but how difficult it is to keep it up unbesmirched in real life, when there lies, waiting to be crossed, the gulf that separates even two spirits naturally attuned to each other.

Giovanni Verga's 'Rosso Malpelo'

The Italian writer Giovanni Verga (1840-1922 ) is not very well-known outside his own country, but he deserves to be. A couple of Verga's short stories are outstanding examples of just how much can be achieved with the form. His tales are mostly set in the harsh, barren landscapes of his native Sicily, and his characters belong to this world, know nothing else but its hardships and miseries, and have little or no possibility of escape even if they desire it. But that is not what is so special about Verga.

Here is the first paragraph from the story 'Rosso Malpelo' (translated into English as 'Nasty Foxfur') which introduces its protagonist, an ill-behaved, fatherless boy who works in the mines, and sets the reader's mind ticking and puzzling straightaway:

He was called Nasty Foxfur because he had red hair. And he had red hair because he was a bad, malicious boy, who gave every promise of ending up a complete villain. And so all the men at the red sand-pit called him Foxfur. And even his mother, hearing him called that so often, had almost forgotten the name he was baptised by.

Our hearts immediately leap out in defence of Foxfur. What absurd leaps of logic and injustices are these? And why doesn't the narrator be a little more even-handed in his portrayal of the character? But Verga understands that the best way to portray the plight of the boy is to look at him through the eyes of the community, instead of standing outside the common perceptions of Foxfur.

The community has given up Foxfur, and treats him like a brute unworthy of any kindness or concern. And how does Foxfur respond? Consider again the perverse but entirely believable logic of this:

Knowing that he was Foxfur, he was prepared to be as bad as he could be, and if an accident occurred, or if a workman mislaid his tools, or a donkey broke a leg, or part of the gallery fell away, they always knew it was his doing. And in fact he took all the blows without complaining, just like the donkeys, which take them and arch their backs but go on doing things in their own way.

The confusions and doubts created by this paragraph give us a real sense of what it means to be in Foxfur's place. On the one hand we know that he is ready 'to be as bad as he could be,' to create trouble whenever he can as a gesture of retaliation. Yet we also see that whenever something goes wrong in the mines, the men naturally fall upon Foxfur as the cause of it: 'they always knew it was his doing'.. And the metaphor of the donkey - the story is full of animal metaphors, comparing Foxfur to a donkey, or to 'those ferocious buffaloes which have to be held by an iron ring through the nose,' or saying he bit 'like a mad dog' - illustrates Foxfur's sullen intransigence, which has proceeded to the point where he does not even disclaim responsibility for those things he has really not done. (He confesses to a friend once, a boy younger to him: "'What's the good? I'm Foxfur!'")

The story of sullen, baleful, loveless Foxfur (true to the logic of the story, which locates the blame for most things in him, we are told that 'his mother had never received a caress from him, and so she never gave him one') and his life in the mines is deeply poignant not only by virtue of its material, but by the way in which Verga tells it, with a strategic complicity with the community's view of Foxfur that disturbs us deeply and drags us into the story.

'Rosso Malpelo' can be found, along with another brilliant story called 'Jeli the Herdboy', in a recent edition of Verga's stories called Life in the Country, published by the Hesperus Press. A list of Verga's works can be found here.

In memory of Bellow

Saul Bellow, who passed away in the first week of April, was a giant of American letters. One of the best places to get a sense of his work is the New York Times special page on him, which features reviews of all his novels from the years in which they first came out (beginning 1944), interviews by Times writers with Bellow spread over several decades, and several pieces by Bellow himself, including How I Wrote Augie March's Story and The Civilized Barbarian Reader. If you're fond of Bellow, you could easily spend a whole day trawling through this archive.

Bellow loved literature, and was savage in his contempt for the tendentious meanings imputed to literary works by some kinds of intellectuals, making the sharp observation that 'they prefer meaning to feeling'. In this piece from the late fifties, Bellow warns against various kinds of 'deep reading' of literature that were becoming fashionable in the universities:

Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville’s Pequod in “Moby Dick” can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous. I recently had a new explanation of “Moby Dick” from [a] young man. “Once and for all,” he said. “That whale is everybody’s mother wallowing in
her watery bed. Ahab has the Oedipus complex and wants to slay the hell out of her.”

Attia Hosain's lost world

A not-so-very-well-known Indian novel that I have great regard for is Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column, first published in 1961. Hosain was born in Lucknow in 1913 into a prosperous landowning family in the old feudal order, received a liberal English education unusual for a girl of her time, was witness to the years of the independence movement, and left India with her family in 1947, just before independence, for England. In this new country she wrote a novel about the country she had left behind, India, and a world left behind in time, that of the feudal order broken up by the new political ideas of pre- and post-independence India and of a large family broken into two by partition.

Sunlight on a Broken Column is above all a novel of family life, of the nuances and complexities of three generations of men and women living in the same house in a time of disruption and change. The novel is narrated in the first person by Laila, an orphan who has been brought up in the great family home by her aunts, and who is a girl of fifteen, bookish and slightly introverted, when the novel begins. We quickly realise why the story of the family is best told by Laila: she is the only one who can sympathetically understand the troubles of people as far apart as the ailing Baba Jan, the aged patriarch now at the door of death, and the servant girl Nandi, who is humliated and expelled from the house for having an affair with the cleaner. In a world with many boundaries Laila is the only one capable of, and interested in, traversing these divides.

Hosain's great strength is her intimate knowledge of the world she is describing: she can nail down an entire way of life in one sentence. Of Baba Jan and the three friends, all members of the aristocracy, who come to visit him in the evenings, Laila says: "The four men loved the city to which they belonged, and they lived and behaved as if the city belonged to them." Of an aged female retainer who had taught her aunts Urdu, Persian and Arabic, she remarks: "She spoke the sweet tongue of the true Lucknavi - delicate, flexible, rich in imagery, pointed with wit, polished with courtesy." Hosain's burnished, finely tuned sentences often remind me of the work of Willa Cather, about whom I wrote in an earlier post.

Sunlight on a Broken Column is also structured with great intelligence. Hosain's management of time within the world of the novel - a span of about two decades - is very deft, and she reserves her greatest delicacy for the way in which Laila's love affair and subsequent marriage are treated. But I'll leave you to discover for yourself how she does this. This was the only novel Hosain wrote (she also published a collection of stories, Phoenix Fled), but it is as good a novel as any in Indian literature.

A long interview with Hosain can be found here. A biographical essay on Hosain by her niece, Muneeza Shamsie, is here. Hosain's great-niece is the Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie.

On not having children

I was at a party recently when a couple who are friends of mine were asked by someone when they planned to start a family. “We don’t want to have any children,” the girl replied. Everybody (except me and her worse half) looked at her as if she was mad. “How unnatural,” their faces said. “How can you not want children? There must be something wrong with you?”

One of them, trying his best to hide his astonishment, asked politely, “But why not?” At that moment I wished that I had a deep stentorian voice, so I could spellbind them by reciting this poem by Philip Larkin:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Not having kids is a personal choice, but too many people I come across react as if it’s a perversion, as if it’s wrong to not have children. They make a common error: assuming that just because something is a ‘natural’ craving, as wanting to have children is, to not fulfil that ‘natural’ desire is wrong. If it is natural, they think, it must be right; they derive a value from a fact, an "ought" from an "is", which some philosophers would call committing the naturalistic fallacy.

This very fallacy was behind some of the controversies in science in the 70s and 80s. Those were the years when evolutionary biology reached a much wider audience through brilliant books such as Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and EO Wilson’s Sociobiology. Some of these gentlemen’s conclusions were misinterpreted and ridiculed by the political left, their descriptions attacked as if they were prescriptions. If they described the natural differences between men and women, for example, they were attacked as if they had prescribed unequal treatment for them. And so on.

One of the reasons that it was politically incorrect to ascribe anything at all to nature rather than nurture was that biology had been misapplied to justify some abominable politics in the early part of the century, most particularly eugenics. (There's a fine account of this in Matt Ridley's Genome.) Through the middle years of the century the left sanctified the belief – now accepted to be utterly mistaken – that genes play no part at all in who we are, that everything is down to our environment.

This became dogma, and when a wellspring of knowledge exploded because of the work of evolutionary biologists like William Hamilton, George Williams, Robert Trivers and others in the 60s and 70s, and was popularised by the work of people like Dawkins and Wilson, it was attacked for political reasons, even by fellow evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould, the Marxist in him overriding the scientist.

The right, meanwhile, had fears that nature could be used as an excuse to avoid resposibility. “I have a genetic predeliction towards alcoholism,” someone could say, “so you can’t blame me for it.” A promiscuous man could argue to his wife, “men have a natural tendency to sleep around, more so than women. I’ve been programmed this way, you can’t blame me for this.” What to say to arguments like this?

Just that they are fallacious, that no matter how we are “programmed”, we still have volition and free will, and are not slaves to our genes. As that great non-fiction writer, Steven Pinker, put it in How the Mind Works, while talking about his decision to (we come a full circle) not have any children: “By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.” We make our own choices.

If the subject interests you, you will not find a better book to read than Pinker’s The Blank Slate, an authoritative, exhaustive and lucid account of how the battles over nature and nurture have affected every area of our lives, and how the advances of the last three or four decades have shattered so many age-old myths, such as that of the blank slate, the ghost in the machine and the noble savage.

But if it’s poetry you prefer, and you enjoyed that beautiful poem I quoted earlier, you can read some more of Larkin’s poems here. I don’t understand most modern poets, with their dense images and obscure allusions, but Larkin I love. You can buy his collected poems here.

Waiting for Black Friday

The most exciting film I’ve seen in the last year is one that you, dear reader, have probably had no chance to see yet: Anurag Kashyap’s fictional reconstruction of the 1993 bomb blasts, Black Friday. The film was due to go on general release in January but was stayed by the Supreme Court and the High Court after some of the bomb blast accused, whose trial is still awaiting judgement, petitioned the court against its release. They argued that the release of the film, based on a book by S. Hussain Zaidi and promoted, following the title of Zaidi's book, as ‘The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts’, would prejudice the trial.

I will not comment here about the arguments for and against this decision, although I do agree that it was unwise for the film to have promoted itself as a 'true story' when there was no absolute need to, and when so much of the film so obviously delves in the realm of what we think of as 'the fictional'. What I'd like to comment on here is on the merits of the film as cinema, and as a vision of the city in which it is set, Mumbai, and of the image of man it proffers.

Briefly, Black Friday depicts the bomb blasts of 1993 as they were planned and executed, and the massive investigation that was launched in their aftermath, shifting continuously between a whole host of finely-etched characters of whom the main ones are Kay Kay Menon, playing a police inspector called Rakesh Maria, and Pawan Malhotra, whom I first saw in my childhood in the TV serial Nukkad, as Tiger Memon, the brain behind the blasts.

The great merit of the film is Kashyap's insight into character and his sympathy and understanding of human beings, who act from a variety of motives and, far from being simply bad or wicked, are sometimes simply confused or gullible or deluded by an impossible dream or unable to withstand the pressure of peers (this trait of Kashyap's work was seen memorably in the film Satya, which he co-wrote). Although the film deals with several very touchy issues, including Hindu-Muslim conflict and criminals against a system itself susceptible to corruption, each character of the many who appear before us is authentically a living, feeling human being rather than a mouthpiece who represents some community or some point of view. The police inspector, who is responsible for getting results, is seen at several stages to be suffering anguish at acts of torture, and the criminals on the run themselves go through self-doubt, guilt, and indecision.

In one of the film's most beautiful and impressive stretches, Kashyap follows one conspirator, Baadshah Khan, as he treks around the country trying to keep the police off his scent. Baadshah Khan is exasperated by his journeys, wishes only to go to his hometown and lie low, gets into a quarrel with his co-conspirators when he meets them, and at one stage runs out of money and sinks into deep despair. Finally he gives himself up to the police. Even though we know he is a criminal, we feel a deep sympathy with Badshah Khan's predicament, we feel his weariness in our bones. Although most of the film is shot on location in Mumbai - and Kashyap's intimate knowledge of the city and his feeling for place make for some of the most striking shot compositions I've seen - in the ten or fifteen minutes devoted to following Baadshah Khan on his travels he takes us on a virtual tour of India, and I remember watching this stretch in the darkened hall and thinking I would like it to go on forever. Baadshah Khan is played in the film by an outstanding actor, Aditya Srivastava, who also appeared in Satya, this time on the other side of the law as Inspector Khandilkar.

The acting is in fact uniformly high-class: Pawan Malhotra delivers the performance of a lifetime as Yakub Memon, and Vijay Maurya marvellously communicates menace and remoteness in his brief appearance as Dawood Ibrahim. As for the music, the band Indian Ocean have produced an incandescent soundtrack every bit as good as anything else in the film. Regardless of its current status, caught up in the real-life matter than stimulated its making, Black Friday has the immense revelatory power of great art and deserves to be seen as widely as possible.

Here are some related links. Kay Kay Menon dicusses the film and the role of Inspector Rakesh Maria here. Anurag Kashyap discusses the making of the film here, and the jinx surrounding him - his first film, Paanch, was held up by the censor board - here. And the Indian Express reporter Mohammed Wajihuddin makes, in my opinion, a baffling claim when he argues that the film is unworthy because it rehashes Bollywood stereotypes in its portrayal of Muslims.