Humour from Pakistan

For a change something funny coming out of Pakistan.

"Those who suffer, suffer alone"

An excerpt from The Book of Disquiet. A cautionary tale (or an ironic comment) about too much inwardness?

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Whether I like it or not, everything that isn't my soul is no more for me than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful. That's why I've always seen human events - the great collective tragedies of history or of what we make of history - as colourful friezes, with no soul in the figures that appear there. I've never thought twice about anything tragic that has happened in China. It's just scenery in the distance, even if painted with blood and disease.

With ironic sadness I remember a workers' demonstration, carried out with I don't know how much sincerity (for I find it hard to admit sincerity in collective endeavours, given that the individual, all by himself, is the only entity capable of feeling). It was teeming and rowdy group of animated idiots, who passed by my outsider's indifference shouting various things. I instantly felt disgusted. They weren't even sufficiently dirty. Those who truly suffer don't form a group or go around a mob. Those who suffer, suffer alone.

What a pathetic group! What a lack of humanity and true pain! They were real and therefore unbelievable. No one could ever use them for the scene of a novel or a descriptive backdrop. They went by like rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy.

Catching up with Bollywood

Ghajini

I went to see a hindi movie in theatre after a really long time. The last time was "Mangal Pandey" a couple of years back and it was a really traumatic experience. I saw Rang De Basanti and Taare Zameen Par both last year on DVD and regretted having missed them on big screen. I had some serious problems with the "political" content or the "message" of Rang De Basanti and how it went about delivering it but it was still heartwarming to see a mainstream Bollywood movie trying a little harder. I loved TZP too and was really glad that it became such a big commercial success and a general topic of discussion. I don't know how much was it able to change people's perspectives but if it made them think critically about how our schools and colleges behave as if they were factories and how dehumanizing competition can be for children, it still served its purpose.

Now coming to Ghajini, I actually rather liked it. One of my friends had warned me about it saying that Aamir Khan has moved into the Sunny Deol's "Haath nahi hathoda" territory so may be it was because I went with lower expectations and consciously tried not to think about those two earlier films. The romantic track was wonderful, very natural and spontaneous. It was nice to see a new actress getting so much screen space and opportunity to shine and she did a really good job. I liked the way the love story was cut short by tragedy just after the wonderful song "Kaise Mujhe...", it could have been even better if their mutual acceptance had remained in their hearts before the tragedy struck. But that's probably only me with my masochistic leanings.

It is still hard not to express disappointment over a nice opportunity wasted. The story about memory loss could have gained some depth if they had concentrated on how the awareness of passage of time is essential to grieving and moving on and how without it the wounds never heal, even the emotional closure that craving for justice and revenge provide may prove illusive. Then there is the idea of identity, how to form relationship with other people based on trust and how all this is linked to memory, and who knows even an allegory about the dangerous effects of "live for the moment" philosophy. I mean, I wasn't looking for a course in existential philosophy but these things do cross our minds when we sit alone and think. Memento also didn't veer into these territories so for me it was ultimately a shallow film, a clever puzzle yes but ultimately uninteresting and shallow.

I was trying not to think of Rang de Basanti all the while but that scene after the protest in which he breaks down is hard to forget. Specially when, as in this film, he just screams and growls and moves his hands randomly all around. I really hope he doesn't let all the success of Ghajini get into his head and treat it as just temporary distraction.

A Wedenesday

This took me completely by surprise. Extremely impressive and very cathartic after a terror-filled 2008. An excellently made thriller with a stirring and provocative "message" in the end, all the more disturbing because it comes straight from the heart. I can't think of a better film which captures the psyche of ordinary people after so many senseless terrorist attacks that India saw in 2008. It gets even more impressive when you realize that it is the work of a debutante director (Neeraj Pandey). I am really looking forward to whatever he does next.


Fashion

This was just a random choice, not something I expected to like and it was exactly what I expected it to be - shallow and dumb moralizing about the evils of modernity. I didn't think it was unfair. I am no fan of fashion industry. It is dehumanizing, exploitative and alienating (just like many other jobs such as, ummm, software programming?) but there is a difference between moralizing, using your received ideas and cliched opinions and criticising something on ethical grounds which requires thinking through your ethical principles and applying them to reality.

Singh is King

Inanity. Beyond any commentary.


Next up on my bollywood catch up (planning to see): Chak De India, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye, Jodhaa Akbar (?), No Smoking, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na (?)

Question marks are because I feel ambivalent about these films. First because of Aishwarya and second because of teenagers.

Self Help

Nice article on the growing menace of self-help books. I liked this comment about the "law of attraction", a very common motif in these books:

"This law posits, quite simply, that thoughts become things. If you ask the universe for what you want, focus on having it, behave as though it's already there and are open to having it then the universe will deliver, whether the object of your desires is a new dishwasher, clear skin, a baby or a million dollars. Guaranteed. Thousands of books now exist based on this simple principle, many of which have spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.

Offering structure and guidance in an increasingly secular society, these bibles can easily be regarded as merely repackaging the same inspiration historically provided by our languishing religions; to consider the Law of Attraction as merely a new, benign, more digestible name for prayer. But there is a crucial difference between the two - while prayer by its very definition acknowledges that ultimate control lies outside of the self (and atheists can equally substitute fate, destiny, gravity or particle physics for a deity in that construction), positive thinking and the Law of Attraction invest ultimate control in the individual, suggesting that by using thought, said individual can effect seismic shifts in their outer world, with nothing whatsoever attributed to social structures, cultural roles, interaction, genetics or dumb luck. The Law of Attraction posits that thoughts create reality, investing in the individual both extraordinary power and extraordinary responsibility. Egocentricity is central. Craving becomes having. Wanting becomes deserving. "

Female Gaze

Well, not really because the camera is still standing in for the male gaze but this is still a very interesting shot!

Still is from the 1970 french film Les Stances à Sophie. Photo copied from Glenn Kenny's blog.

I am curious about what the feminist film theorists have to say about the recent trend in bollywood movies of male actors shedding their clothes and the camera objectifying their bodies. (The contours of Aamir Khan's naked torso are on national news.) So is it the film makers acknowledging the existence of a female spectator finally?

Bigger Than Life

This is another film on my to-see list - Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life (or "Delirium of Madness" as the Spanish poster has it). Martin Scorsese heaps a lot of praise on this film in his documentary on the history of American cinema. Film Forum is screening it this week and they have put up a nice page full of quotes and links about the film, including one to the original new yorker article which inspired the story. Hope it gets available on the dvd soon.

Classic Film Posters

This site has a great collection of posters of classic films. Here is a selection of classic film noirs.

Poster above via Dave Kehr's blog. I am glad to see Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood" being selected for preservation. I saw it once on big screen and it was an unforgettable experience. Gripping and actually quite frightening. Surprisingly it is not very well known, even after the success of the recent films about Truman Capote.

2008 in Reading

I didn't read a lot of fiction this year. Nothing like last couple of years when I discovered Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo and others for the first time. (Last year's list here.) I spent more time reading non-fiction and even there, mostly essays and fragments, the most provocative and disturbing of which was "Modernity and the Holocaust" by Polish-British sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. After this I tried reading his other works on consumerism and modern societies and found similar provocative insights. Basically he explains how the scientific-technocratic-instrumentalist worldview which defines our modern world poses grave problems to an ethical life though he ultimately, like most philosophers, is better at diagnosis than at treatment. One of his essays is titled "Does Ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?" He is quite pessimistic about it. I have probably become oversensitive to the whole issue now. I just bristle when I see the language of science, technology or economics being applied in the domain of personal human affairs. I am looking forward to exploring more in this direction, specially the work of Jurgen Habermas.

I also spent a lot of time this year struggling with Heidegger's philosophy though without much success. Still from whatever I read and understood, he had me convinced that the story of (so-called) human civilization was actually a story of decline and disaster and that we all have probably come to this earth a few thousand years too late. I didn't understand his ideas about the various modes of being, authenticity etc totally but they kept moving around in my head for most of the year. His essays on the origins of the work of art and on technology were also provocative and in fact startling (and it is true for his other writings as well) in the sense that it showed me the nature of the process of thinking itself rather than just the result of some thought. George Steiner's short monograph on Heidegger was specially brilliant.

The three best books of fiction I read this year were all from Latin America. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis was without any doubt the most entertaining book I read the whole year. Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a strange, evocative and densely layered ghost story which stayed with me for a long time. Senselessness by Carlos Moya was no less strange. It kept me thinking about what to really make of it.

The most disappointing book of the year for me was Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. I had wanted to read it for such a long time but found it tame and boring. A slog through and through, absolutely contrary to its reputation. I was also extremely annoyed by Cultural Amnesia, the essay collection by Clive James. Sartre was an idiot. Neruda was a fascist. Brecht was a moron. And on and on. It had me actually depressed realizing that just reading a lot and having an opinion on everything doesn't make you wise, interesting or open to different ways of looking at the world and yourself. A great lesson to learn, specially for bloggers.

Revolutionary Road

I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates these days. Initially I thought it was quite conventional and straightforward in style and the theme of ennui and quiet despair of suburban life pretty hackneyed but it really sucked me in, to the extent that I found it really unsettling, even terrifying. Most reviews of the movie talk about pressure of conformism in the America of the 50s but it is much more than that. It made me think of what the underground man says in Dostoevsky's novella, that for ordinary life in modern cities the consciousness of an insect would be more than enough, that one doesn't need the consciousness of a human being (he further says that he wants to be an insect). The tragedy of the Wheeler couple is that they have a human consciousness with all its romantic aspirations and intimations of potentialities but they lack the spiritual and moral strength to take action. I am quite eager to see how the movie turns out to be. I wish Fassbinder would have made a movie out of it, though many of his films did tackle the same subject.

There was an essay by James Wood in the new yorker about Yates and Revolutionary Road.

It's been longer than expected but I don't really feel like blogging anymore. Just waking up in the morning and getting on with normal life feels like an act of resistance these days and on top of that I have to sort out so many things. Hopefully it gets over soon...

Away...

Will be back in a few weeks. Or sooner.

To keep you company here are David Lynch (words), Angelo Badalamenti (music) and Julee Cruise (voice)



A brief note on Synecdoche New York which I saw today. The basic theme seems to be the melancholia of "being-toward-death" but otherwise it is too fragmented and too full of small and seemingly chaotic details. It definitely needs more than one viewing, extra careful and attentive ones at that. There are some funny moments, in that awkward and absurd way which made his earlier films distinctive, but which don't really work here. There is no mistaking the sincerity and seriousness of intent though. He shouldn't have too many hopes for Oscars though. It will definitely go over their heads.

Lev Shestov

I came across this website which collects the writings of Lev Shestov, a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher who also wrote books on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The basic motif of his thinking seems to be that accepting 2 plus 2 equals 4 is accepting a spiritual death. Well, almost! The website also contains lots of articles and essays written about him. This review by Emmanuel Levinas is a good short introduction and contains this nice summary of existentialist philosophy.

"In a world clarified and explained by reason, only the general counts: my destiny is nothing important, my pain is nothing exceptional, my despair is nothing unique; if I carry a sadness or a shame in the depth of my soul, that does not trouble the universal order. My speculation assigns to these things a place in the whole, and my only wisdom can only consist of my submitting to its laws. But before speculating, I exist. My existence goes on precisely in this pain, in this despair. Far from arranging themselves in a whole that would embrace them, that are all mine. They have their history, their truth, their weight, their own exigencies. I can drive them back, but I can never fully suppress them. Their voice tears my being in spite of my submission to universal necessity. My speculation, itself, is it wholly independent of them? Can it be legitimately abstracted from the human condition, for its destiny, for its death? Whatever the response that one gives to these questions, it is important to pose them, it is important to respect the internal meaning of the events that constitute our existence, before interpreting them through the universal order constructed by reason. This is the task of existential philosophy."

There is also a very good article by Czeslaw Milosz:

"The "I" has to recognize that it is confronted with a world that follows its own laws, a world whose name is Necessity. This, according to Shestov, is precisely what lies at the foundations of traditional philosophy—first Greek, then every philosophy faithful to the Greeks. Only the necessary, the general, and the always valid will merit investigation and reflection. The contingent, the particular, and the momentary are spoilers of unity—a teaching that dates back to Anaximander. Later Greek thinkers exalted the all-embracing Oneness and represented individual existence as a crack in the perfectly smooth surface of the One, a flaw for which the individual had to pay with his death. From a Shestovian perspective, Greek science and morality both follow the same path. The sum of the angles in a triangle equals two right angles; the general, eternal truth reigns high above breeding and dying mortals just as eternal good does not change whether or not there is a living man to aspire to it."

Synecdoche Reviews

I really hope I get a chance to see "Synecdoche New York" before I leave but it seems unlikely. Most American reviewers are complaining about how glum and joyless it is (further adding to my excitement!). I don't know, it is like asking Woody Allen to keep doing the same "early funny ones" (as one of the characters says in his "Stardust Memories"). Kaufman's earlier films as screenwriter were funny and quirky but one couldn't but notice a deep seriousness of intent and engagement with Life, something very rare in mainstream Hollywood. Reading the reviews, even the critical ones, it seems he has only gone one step further. Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich were already five out of five stars masterpieces.

The best magnifying glass

"A shard in your own eye is the best magnifying glass."

-Adorno, Minima Moralia (full text here)

Nice thought even though in real life pain often becomes a smokescreen, hiding from us the truth rather than magnifying it.

In other news, I am dismayed by this new advertisement promoting atheism. I do think it is very important to counter all sorts of religious propaganda so this is definitely a good idea. What I don't like is the second line which smacks of smug and petty-bourgeois hedonism to me which I strongly disapprove of. It should rather have been "There is probably no God. Now read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and most of all START WORRYING!"

Literature in the Marketplace

The TLS has a review of a book by some right-wing nut who says that literary critics are unjustifiably hostile to market and commercialism and argues for something called "commodity aesthetics" (do words really mean nothing anymore?). The review itself is quite good and really worth reading.

"It is paradoxical for an advocate of the Western cultural tradition to laud market capitalism. For in the very brief period in which it has held earthly power, market capitalism has essentially destroyed that tradition – profaning everything sacred, evaporating everything solid, and directing its destructive might with particular intensity against the autonomous individual. It has instituted the rule of appearance over essence, of signs over things, of things over people, of dead labour over living labour. It exploits base appetites and fosters insatiable desires, giving rise to epidemic addiction and depression. There have been many societies in which large numbers of people dedicated their lives to the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market. But there have been no societies in which the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market was held to be an admirable way to spend one’s life. Our society is unique in having produced that philosophy. One of the reasons to read the literature of the past is to learn how anomalous our society is in its self-interested single-mindedness. "

A Death of One's Own

"[T]he desire to have one's own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one's own."

- Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I saw Paul Schrader's Mishima a few days back. I haven't read anything by Mishima yet but watching the film reminded me of this line from Rilke. I don't really like this morbid romanticization and fascination of death. A lot of suicide bombers are probably inspired by the same belief too - having a death of one's own. Ironically (and tragically) their religion makes it sure that they never live a life of their own.

I like the idea of Memento Mori. We should be mindful of our own end without which we won't have any perspective to life. But this idea that death is the realization of life and life gets meaning only in death - this I find hard to accept.

A good illustration of this idea is in Heidegger. Below excerpt is from George Steiner's book on Heidegger ("rationalist quacks" made me chuckle!):

"The inalienability of death - the plain but overwhelming fact that each must die for himself, that death is one existential potentiality which no enslavement, no promise, no power of "theyness" can take away from individual man - is the fundamental truth of the meaning of being. Dasein is always a not-yet, an unripeness. To be is to be incomplete, unfulfilled. But at the same time, all authentic being is a being-toward-its-own-end. "Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes upon itself as soon as it is." And Heidegger quotes a medieval homily which instructs us that "as soon as man enters on life, he is at once old enough to die." The essence, the motion, the meaning of life are totally at one with being-toward-death, with the individual's "assumption" (Sartre's derivative, key term) of his own singular death. Thus "death is, in the widest sense, a phenomenon of life"; indeed, it may well be the identifying phenomenon, though it cannot itself "be lived" (a point on which Heidegger concurs explicitly with Wittgensein). The point to be stressed is at once existential and logical: the possibility of Dasein depends on and makes sense only in respect of the "impossibility of Dasein" which is death. The one cannot be without the other.

[...]

Holding before itself the constant and total possibility of death, the possibility inseparable from its thrownness into the world and process of individualization, Dasein "is in anxiety." Angst is the taking upon oneself of the nearness of nothingness, of the potential non-being of one's own being. "Being-toward-death is, in essense, anxiety," and those who would rob us of this anxiety - be they priests, physicians, mystics, or rationalist quacks - by transforming it into either fear or genteel indifference alienate us from life itself. Or, more exactly, they insulate us from a fundamental source of freedom. The passage, to which the entire death-and=freedom dialectic of Camus and Sartre is no more than a rhetorical footnote, is a famous one: Angst reveals to Dasein the possiblity of fulfilling itself "in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARD DEATH - a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the "they," and which is factual, certain of itself and anxious." We can see now that the very meaning of Dasein is "in time." Temporality is made concrete by the overwhelming truth that all being is being-toward-death. The taking upon oneself, through Angst, of this existential "terminality" is the absolute condition of human freedom."

Weltflucht

Weltflucht: nice word to know. Quite simple actually - it means flight from the world - but it is still nice to have it as one word. Somewhat similar in intent with the hindi word "Vanaprastha" which means departing to the forests before final sanyas (renunciation). My favourite word still remains Weltschmerz ("world pain" or pain of being in the world). Basically Weltschmerz leads to Weltflucht.

Actually I found it in this article which I got to by randomly searching something. Looks like some German philosopher has written a book called "Critique of Cynical Reason." Certainly a very interesting and relevant subject since cynicism is the default mode in which most of us operate in the world now.

Authenticity in Indian Writing

Amitava Kumar has an essay in Boston Review about debates surrounding the problems of thinking about authenticity in Indian Writing in English in the context of the recent booker win of Arvind Adiga's novel The White Tiger:

"Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India."

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Some more tangentially related thoughts...

I haven't read Adiga's novel and don't feel excited enough to read it either. In general Indian novels (specially those in English) are low on my reading priorities and further because I have only a finite amount of energy and time which I can devote to books I rarely get to them. One reason for putting those on low priority is my fear and distaste of any kind of parochiality or even "insularity" (to use a much discussed and debated concept recently, after the nobel committee chairman's comment). In my case this feeling is further compounded because I grew up in a provincial small town (that would be Patna in Bihar which both Adiga and Kumar talk about) and not in the "centres" like Delhi or Mumbai. This is not really a repudiation of my origins (which would be purely negative) but rather a positive longing to know about other ways of looking at things, the desire to enter the world of thoughts and ideas which are new and foreign. I had quoted Susan Sontag earlier saying that writing for her was a means of self-transcendence and not self-expression. I think of reading in the same terms too. I feel dismayed when people while reading look for experiences which exactly mirrors their own (expressed in commonly heard sentiment "I could relate to this or that"), this to me is a severely disabling way of reading. Reading itself should open pathways to new and uncharted territories of experiences, only then one can "grow" or change oneself by reading.

About authenticity in Indian writing in English, I think Kumar mentions exactly what I find so boring and uninteresting in most such writings (including probably his own novel "Home Products" which I haven't read either). This is the definition of authenticity which he thinks is some kind of fidelity to the external world of facts and people's behavior. This is a shallow authenticity, it belongs not in art but in journalism. In fact it is not even authenticity at all, it is just another version of Heideggerian "idle talk" which journalists and op-ed experts are so good at peddling. (This is not to say that shallow reportage doesn't serve any purpose but we shouldn't confuse it with art). The authenticity that interests me is being authentic to your Self, to your way of thinking and feeling, to your way of looking at the world and your own self, in short to your own way of being itself. Truly remarkable novelists and artists take it one step further, they try to understand being from a historical and intellectual perspective and try to place it in a number of different contexts and think through these. This to my mind what makes something like "The Man Without Qualities" a sort of uber-modern novel. (If I am not mistaken Musil doesn't even mention a single street name or any such thing throughout the novel and yet it profoundly belongs to its place and time. This to me is real authenticity.)

Coming to another point which Kumar talked about in excerpt above - the so-called anxiety of expatriate Indian, this fear of losing touch with India, which means the fear of losing a part of your self, which gives rise to anxiety which then leads to fetishisation of naive realism. This is all okay but somehow I am not convinced that Indian-ness can be reduced to those naively captured details no matter how strong your "observational integrity" (as Kumar calls it) is. The very fact that the writer feels insecure about being perceived as inauthentic gives the game away. One could of course be self-aware about it and write about the same anxiety in fiction but I don't think these novels do that. There is a lack of self-awarenss and a lack of doubt which goes hand in hand with a devotion to a naive journalistic realism. Another irony is that these writers have left India because they were lured by academic and material success abroad but still feel guilty and are not ready to reconcile it with their new life. Just compare the musings of these so-called expatriate writers with someone like Nabokov who was in the same position in America and you will see the difference. I understand Nabokov is surely setting the bar ridiculously high but one can still see how a longing for lost home and lost past gives rise to this fetishisation of detail in Nabokov but since the longing and the pain are authentic, so is the writing. These sundry assistant professors and journalistic correspondents on the other hand should stick to writing reportage, rather than lamenting about losing touch with real India.

Free Market and Ethics?

A bunch of thinkers and experts give their opinions on whether "free market corrodes moral character."

Surprisingly none of them (of the ones I read) touch on what I would think is the main issue - the problem of alienation. Are human beings who participate in market really and truly autonomous moral agents? More often they merely follow the preset rules, exercising moral judgments often leads to inefficiencies which market can't tolerate. Of course the recent crisis has made the profoundly undemocratic (even anti-democratic) nature of financial markets pretty clear too but that is probably a separate issue.

Herbert Marcuse

This is an excellent video introduction to the ideas of philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse.

His book One-dimensional Man is also available here. I remember buying a copy a few years back with a nice cover featuring a lone and sad looking computer monitor, thinking it was some philosophy book about the alienation of computer programmers, which in a way it is, but never really read the book. Like most philosophers readability isn't really his strong point. The book is mainly a critique of "technological rationality", the dominant mode of thinking in advanced industrial societies, which he says has turned these societies into authoritarian and conformist. Rationality originally meant differentiating what is from what appears to be and in this way to get to the truth of being and reality but in the technological age rationality is about efficiency and how to get things to work, or in economics sense, how to maximize one's utility function. Further this thinking is standardized and existence of any other alternative is denied through propaganda. (Like, if you don't buy and spend money economy will crash etc.) Advertising, media and other organizations decide and manipulate discourse in such a way as to not leave any room for negation. The end result is that we are trapped in a prison and only have imaginary, trivial or inconsequential freedoms.